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History is not an important activity in an everyday mode of existence in which it is what is actual which is of paramount concern. As we know from St Augustine what has been is not now (actual), and the future is not now (actual) and their reality is thereby diminished, thereby truncating our relation to our “Being-in-the-world”. The Aristotelian self we know is a constant entity that stays the same throughout a change and this is bult upon a real awareness of the self that we were in the past. Accused of a crime that has been committed some time ago assumes that it was me that committed that crime. Attempting to maintain that I am not guilty because a different person was responsible is obviously a possible defence in certain very specific circumstances but it can also be the defence of someone whose balance of mind has been disturbed. My past self is just as real as my present self and the future self I wish to be. History is an important part of our knowledge of the world. Heidegger elaborates upon this theme:
“In analysing the historicality of Dasein we shall try to show that this entity is not temporal because it “stands in history”, but that, on the contrary it exists historically and can so exist only because it is Temporal in the very basis of its Being.” (Page 428)
Dasein is, of course, embedded in a context of involvements relating to clocks and calendars and this has transformed the time of the world into a temporal continuum. The political environment of the world that is tending to become more global, is thereby transforming its geography into a spatial continuum with a particular temporal history and a particular temporal future. In a museum ready-to- hand items and equipment are exhibited in the mode of the present at hand. The world they once belonged to also lies in the past and may be a lost world if we do not know the context of involvements, or form of life, they were a part of.
Without the historizing power of Dasein these items would remain like pieces of rock from outer space. Certain more complex entities such as the ruins of ancient temples, however, have a world-historical value which require extensive studies if we are to understand their true place in the societies of the time, if we are to understand the Dasein that has been there. If the temple happens to be a work of art as well, with the depth of all great artworks, then the feeling of the temple’s beauty may turn into an experience of the sublime. Otherwise, they will forever have merely a present-at-hand form of existence.
The clock and the calendar are of course important items of equipment necessary for the construction of “world-time”. Every “now” can be measured and connects the past with the future via a present. In both cases, world-historical, and world-time, the sky plays an important role in the measurement of time. The truth of space, Heidegger claims, is given in relation to time which, as far as we know, has no beginning and no end, and which was the subject of Carazans dream journey into the darkness of space. Returning to the land of the waking, forced Carazan to change the way in which he viewed the world. These kinds of short tales remind us of course of the longer tales of their cousin, the myths. The journey of Carazan had an origin in images which lack a realistic connection to the will and the motor system of human psuché.
Dreams take the form they do because the motor system is asleep. Insofar as myths are dream-like, they too will defy the scope and limits of the human will. Mythical narratives for Heidegger do not possess the historical depth of a Dasein well embedded in the continuum of time with a good memory for world historical events and objects in world time. Whilst there were no competing accounts of the beginning of the universe based on exploring the totality of conditions in accordance with the categories of the understanding/judgement and the powers of sensibility, Myth was both authoritative and persuasive. Its “projections” appeared realistic. The only argument in its favour is that the discontent of modern man appears greater now than in the past, but that may also have to do with man’s great expectations of the future which are so easily dissolved into nothingness.
Modern Philosophers, like Ricoeur and Oshaughnessy, both in their different ways influenced by Heidegger’s thought, shy away from the Kantian and Aristotelian first principles approach not because they do not believe in principles but because these accounts presuppose the knowledge of the workings of many psychological and mental powers which they feel need to be accounted for before we can, like the Kantian judge of nature, formulate questions in a tribunal in which the nature of the evidence is determined by the nature of man and mans principles.
O Shaughnessy, the analytic Philosopher and Merleau-Ponty the Phenomenologist both wrote extensively about the powers of sensibility in general and the power of perception in particular. O Shaughnessy’s account, however, is more nuanced insofar as it concentrates upon the action embedded in a worldly environment, whereas Merleau-Ponty is more concerned to explore the sensitivities of the “lived body”. For Joseph Campbell one of the immediate powers of sensibility to emerge from this lived body was that of the imagination which provides us with the images of myth and a repertoire of emotion that putatively defines the nature of our Being-in-the-world. Aristotle found reliance on such a power alone insufficient for the purposes of knowledge of the totality of conditions for the existence of human psuche, and he began the long attempt to provide a perspicuous holistic account of humanity. If mythology gave us a picture of man in one dimension, Aristotle added another dimension, and three dimensional man began to emerge in outline with the Critical Philosophy of Kant, the Philosophical Psychology of Freud, Wittgenstein, O Shaughnessy and a number of other Philosophers who refuse to reduce man either to the materialistic substrate sought by science or the mystical spiritual account handed down to us by Mythology. The limitations of Consciousness for this task were made apparent by Merleau-Ponty in his work “The Phenomenology of Perception” in which he claimed that Consciousness was by necessity perspectival:
“and essentially incapable of the total synthesis of horizons which would enable us to be aware of something from all times and all places.”(Signs, Page XIII)
Reason, on this account forces us to reject the life-world and its essential characteristics. This, however, could not be further from the truth in the cases of Kant and Aristotle, who see the totality through the lenses of three major mental faculties and a repertoire of powers belonging to all three faculties culminating in the power of reason that is integrated in its function with many the other powers. The body’s vital psychological powers may well, as Freud pointed out, predate the powers concerned with concepts and abstract ideas, but this fact does not preclude their occurrence/role in an integrated repertoire of powers. A full account of man, then, might require a number of theoretical practical and productive sciences including metaphysical Philosophy. There is no doubt that in the mind of Joseph Campbell it is the harmony and the conflict of the organs of the body that is the source of what he regards as the transcendental imagination.
Perhaps Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language could also play a role in articulating the nature of the integration of our psychological and mental powers and this might in turn illuminate the power that mythology has to mobilise man’s spirit for life, civilisation building and cultural activity that meets both aesthetic and cognitive needs. Let us then begin by noting that for Merleau-Ponty Science is a second order expression of our activity in the life world (Phenomenology of Perception). The source of human powers for Merleau-Ponty lies in the lived body and insofar as the power of language is concerned the body is even the source of its fundamental constituting powers. R C McCleary the Translator of Merleau-Ponty’s work “Signs” claims the following in the preface to the work:
“My body teaches me to know the simultaneous presence of multiple perspectives because the body as perceived in self-awareness and the body as perceiving motor power are linked in “coexistence” or “compresence” as the visible and constituted and the invisible, constituting aspects of a single existential world. Suppose as Merleau-Ponty puts it that my left hand begins to touch my right while my right is touching it. Through the “sort of reflection effected in this carnal self-perception, the operating intentions of my body as perceiving motor power (the right hand constituting the left as a perceived thing) are suddenly “encroached upon by the constituting intentions of my left hand, which set about in turn to constitute my perceiving body. My body has become a “subject-object” or “perceiving thing”, an experience of premonition of a common world in which my self and others are embodied as reciprocally perceiving and perceived.” (Page xvii)
McCleary elaborates upon this theme by claiming that the “logos of the aesthetic world”:
“may literally be called the “mystery” of rationality.”(Page xix)
It is possible that this aesthetic relation we have to our bodies which mirror each other are one of the conditions among a number involved in the operation of our reasoning power. Another issue of importance to consider in relation to the lived body living in a lifeworld is the mystery of the power of language. For Merleau-Ponty we are clearly dealing with a kind of expressive action which is related to the meanings that are intended in the use of our language:
“in my dialogue with other speaking men, expression and communication are polarised about significative intentions which converge through reciprocal encroachments in spoken words. Since these signifying words are visible traces of corporeal intentions, they are always surrounded by a corona of latent significations.” (Pages xxi-xxii)
This for Merleau-Ponty is one condition for the role of the power of language in the formation of a Culture containing as it does the arts and the sciences which are the meta structure of the cultural lives of a community based on the latent meanings of the words of our language which the members of the community have learned.
The problem with focussing upon perception as a founding power of our culture is that men’s relations to one another get reduced, as was the case with Hegel, to the relation of mutual “recognition”. The Hegelian Spirit excludes certain intellectual powers rather than engaging with the more complex state of affairs, where a number of powers from different faculties are integrated with, and controlled by reasoning processes which, in Kantian Critical Philosophy result in human rights constituted by a moral law: a law which bestows the responsibility upon all men to treat all men including themselves as “ends-in-themselves”. With Kant’s reflections we are thrown back to Ancient Greece and Aristotle in particular, to define Justice as something that was both good-in-itself, and good-in-its-consequences. In Hylomorphic Philosophy Politics was intimately related to rhetoric which via enthymemes expressed the truth about The Good and attempted to persuade people of the difference between just and unjust causes. Mythology and the logos of the aesthetic world retreats in the face of such important concerns and man’s mind turns more toward a logos of power and the Philosophical Psychology that is needed to articulate the aporetic questions associated with such a burning issue. Mythology is almost silent in relation to this burning issue and its associated aporetic questions.
In Freudian terms we can perhaps say that Reason as a faculty of the mind is a vicissitude of instinct which incorporates a number of other faculties and powers, and further, that actualising its potential is one of the last but most important tasks of humanity. A part of this actualisation process includes differentiating false metaphysics, science, religion, and art from Truth. Many forms of religion and mysticism fall into the above categories and Kant saw it as his mission to combat these influences in the cultural sphere of life.
Language too is a vicissitude of Instinct, and instrument of reason, but being also a form of Action it links . the Continental Hermeneutics of Ricoeur to the Analytical Philosophy of O Shaughnessy. It is important to understand that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics has its roots in Hegelian and French/German Phenomenology but nevertheless contains an awareness and tolerance of the analytical tradition we do not find elsewhere. Heidegger’s account of Language also contains some analytical concerns and is rooted in a view which claims that the Cultural impetus arising from Ancient Greece including the work of Aristotle is rooted in what he refers to as a “forgetfulness of Being”, although we should recall in the context of this discussion that it was Aristotle who, in correcting Plato, claimed that “Being has many meanings”. Heidegger roots Language in Dasein, a form of human psyché and he claims that “meaning
“is an existential phenomenon already characterised, in which the formal framework of what can be disclosed in understanding and Articulated in interpretation becomes visible.” (Being and Time, Trans MacQuarrie and Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1978, P 199)
Heidegger does not in the sense embraced by Analytical Philosophers provide us with a theory of meaning but he does see an important relation to the action of assertion which he claims has three fundamental functions: to point something out, to predicate something of something and to communicate this in the spirit of Being-together-towards.(Page 197):
“That which is put forward in the assertion is something which can be passed along in “further re-telling…. But at the same time, what has been pointed out may become veiled again in this further retelling… Even hearsay is a Being-in-the-World, and a Being towards what is heard.” (Page 197-8)
This takes us right to the heart of the early function of mythology which of course relied on the function of language to present absent objects to others. The Early Wittgenstein we know formulated a “picture” theory of meaning to try to capture these aspects of assertion but this for Heidegger would have been an example of veiling the meaning of the assertion, and in these remarks we can see why there is a need for a perspicuous representation, or interpretation of the articulations of assertions: that is we can see why there is a need for a Kantian account of the scope and limitations of metaphysics to combat the hearsay of mysticism.
Behind the manifest meaning of the assertion “The hammer is heavy” Heidegger claims, there is a fore-having rooted in the readiness-to-hand of this tool, a fore-sight, and a fore-conception, all of which is pre-understood. In the predicative process of assertion, the ready-to-hand is transformed into something present-at-hand: the ready to hand is seen “as” something present at hand and something important is lost in the process as our Being toward the entity becomes connected to looking at It, or observation. Here there is an important shift in psychological attitude from the motor to the sensory, from action to observation. When acting to bring about something I intend to do, knowledge is involved, and this knowledge may have been partly constituted of former sensory encounters with the type of environment I am acting in, but the knowledge involved in acting is essentially non-observational as Anscombe pointed out in her work on “Intention”(Oxford, Blackwell, 1972).
Observation is in its essence interrogative, questioning the being it is confronted with, whereas in action we know both the orange we desire and what we need to do in order to get it. Scientific experimentation in which we manipulate, and measure variables is not categorical in this sense but is hypothetical and interrogative: seeking answers. This is one of the many reasons why it is absurd to judge myth from the point of view of this kind of science, which was not the science of Aristotle or Kant. Principle based science provides us with theories that have not emerged by putting questions to nature in the spirit of a student, but rather putting questions to nature in the spirit of a judge asking penetrating questions relating to the essences of the matters being theorised about.
Heidegger also discusses the complex ancient idea of Logos and maintains that this was interpreted as a present-at-hand phenomenon, and this may have veiled its relation to Being. Logos for Kant needs articulation in terms of the scope and limitations of Metaphysics as well as the scope and limits of Logic, and the relations of the faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason. Logos is more intimately related to thought than it is for Heidegger, who sees discourse or talk to be the primordial underlying substrate which is prior to any theories relating to language. Discourse is both spoken and heard and this is qualified by the claim that we do not hear “sensations” (sensory phenomena) but rather ready-to hand entities such as motor-cycles and waggons (sensory-motor phenomena) (Page 207):
“Because discourse is constitutive for the Being of the “there” (that is, for states of mind and understanding), while “Dasein” means “Being-in-the-world”, Dasein as discursive Beng-in, has already expressed itself. Dasein has language… Man shows himself as an entity that talks”. (Page 208)
For Heidegger, then, discourse is what he terms an existentiale. It is not to be confused, however with the idle talk, hearsay and gossiping of the “they” who do not care about questions relating to the nature of Being and its complexity. Heidegger discusses the definition of human psuché, namely animal rationale, which of course originates in the thought of Aristotle, but he does not consider Aristotle’s complete essence-specifying definition of man as a “rational animal capable of discourse”. Logos for Aristotle might also therefore be grounded in discourse which presumably also relates to his thesis of the many meanings of Being. Heidegger asks the question “What kind of Being does language possess?” and his answer relates to the State of Being of Dasein. The holistic aspect of this Being, Heidegger argues is Care, which relates to the basic state of mind of anxiety that is a distinctive way in which Dasein is disclosed:
“That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the World as such” (Page 230)
Existential anxiety then does not have a relation to any object or entity in the world partly because :
“Dasein is an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue” Page 236
With these reflections we are cast back to Ancient Greece and the Delphic proclamations relating to both man’s ruin and destruction and the challenge to “know thyself!” This is not a challenge to observe oneself but rather a challenge to lead a particular form of life, either the Socratic examined life or the Aristotelian contemplative life. The Ancient Greeks too, espoused a Philosophy of Care for the world and for oneself. The Will too is discussed:
“In the phenomenon of willing, the underlying totality of care shows through” (Page 239)
The first guidelines for the will unfortunately are made possible via the knowledge and values of the “they” which dims down the authentic possible relations to Being by reference to what is “actual”
What is actual rather than what is possible, becomes the touchstone of truth (Aletheia). Both having a conscience and death are important for the authentic potentiality for “being-a whole” (Page 277). Conscience is the call of care and death is the end (telos) of life. Now our own death will never become objectively accessible to us, but the death of others is a matter of concern and care as part of the process of “being-together-with-others”. The dead person, Heidegger argues is a present-at-hand form of Being, something lifeless, having lost its life. The dying person naturally is anxious about his own death because he knows that his death is the death of his own “possibilities”:
Dasein exists as thrown Being towards its end.”(Page 295)
The “they” communicate tranquillizing platitudes about death, aimed at avoiding the unpleasant anxiety associated with the possibility of non-existence: a fleeing in the face of death, the inevitable (Page 298). The “they” believe that death is an empirical certainty but not right now. In life our Being is in question and this ought to give rise to the kind of existential anxiety that seeks the truth about death. Everyone knows that death is coning, but exactly what is it that is coming and why? We need courage to stare unflinchingly into this abyss of nothingness. Is this what Kant is speaking about in his account of the experience of the sublime when, overwhelmed by the thought of the mighty force of Nature we think sublimely about our own fundamental moral nature? For the Greeks the attitudes of awe and wonder were associated with sublime experiences of the Gods, nature, and man’s repertoire of powers which gave him dignity. Heidegger referred to the “call of conscience” which must be heard authentically. In this all Dasein is summoned to its own self as part of discovering the issue of its Being, yet the call appears to come from beyond itself, and the call appears to carry an accusation of “guilt”. The Kantian experience of the sublime was clearly a more joyous affair, a celebration of one’s humanity rather than an anxious moment of one’s existence. Heidegger points out in relation to this guilty call of conscience, the significance of “being-responsible-for” (Page 327). This obviously is rooted in Care, but it can be argued by a Kantian that Care and being resolute (the object of Care), is a consequence of, and not a condition for, Freedom, or at least that they are equally important conditions. This negative characterisation of the psuché of human being or Dasein is elaborated upon in Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is “essentially Guilty”, i.e. Guilt belongs to the being of Dasein. Heidegger, it needs to be emphasised is an existentialist and Dasein’s existence is therefore a major issue:
“..while Dasein’s “Essence then the “I-hood” and Selfhood must be conceived existentially.” (Page 365)
Heidegger criticises the Kantian “I Think” by claiming that the “I” is conceived of as something present at hand and not in terms of “I think something”. Heidegger claims that Kant did not think of the “I” in terms of its “being-in-the-world”. This is however to be distinguished from an everyday understanding which perhaps is shaped by the world rather than by the essence of the Being of Dasein. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this analysis is the claim that projection in a “moment of vision” is primarily futural, hoping for an authentic future. Insofar as the understanding is concerned but given that every understanding also has its state of mind, which, Heidegger claims, is directed at the past, a certain tension is present in the form of our existence: anxiety, for example is a state of mind and must in some sense be related to our original state of being thrown into the world. In the present the form our activity takes in relation to the things of the world is a practical relation of their being ready to hand and connected to an extended context of equipment: a region of Being emerges.
The Books and chairs and tables in a library for example extend to the homes the books are taken to and the pen and paper used to take notes using the chairs, tables, pen and paper at home. When a book just sits untouched on the shelf it acquires a present-at-hand status and can only be looked at. If I am engaged in a task which is completed my natural response is to look around and look for what comes next. When that is the sensory function of psuché is disconnected from its motor function, our access to what is merely present at hand is a truncated form of experience. Heidegger argues that when the practical form of activity disappears a theoretical attitude “emerges” in which there is theoretical activity which attempts to investigate things-in themselves. Transforming what is present at hand into things in themselves is fraught with problems unless as Kant pointed out in his Prolegomena, there is a clear respect for the boundaries between the phenomenal and noumenal forms of existence, a clear respect for the scope and limits of pure reason and its relations to the faculties of understanding and reason.
“the genesis of that great family of living things” (Page 79)
Kant, is here referring to the Gaia principle:
“He can suppose that the womb of mother earth as it first emerged, like a huge animal from its chaotic state, gave birth to a creature whose form displayed less finality, and that these again bore others which adapted themselves more perfectly to their native surroundings and their relation to each other, until this womb, becoming rigid and ossified, restricted its birth t definite species, incapable of further modification, and the multiplicity of forms was fixed as it stood when the operation of that fruitful power had ceased.” (Page 79)
Kant then, in the context of this discussion, explores the hypothesis of generatio univocal, which:
“implies the generation of something organic from something else that is also organic, although within the class of organic beings, differing specifically from it. It would be as if we supposed that certain water animals transformed themselves by degrees into marsh animals, and from these after some generations into land animals. In the judgement of plain reason there is nothing a priori self-contradictory in this. But experience offers no example of it.” (Pages 79-80)
Kant then proceeds to discuss a possible assumption of genetic theory:
“where we find that the character thus altered is transmitted and taken up into the generative power, we can form no other possible estimate of it than that it is an occasional development of a purposive capacity originally present in the species with a view to the preservation of the race.”(Page 80)
Hume, the sceptical empiricist raises questions about teleological explanations, but the grounds of his objections are based on a belief in the power of perception and the activity of observation in investigations which are essentially explorative: investigations that are at the early stage of searching for basic terms and principles. It is not, however, clear that observations could ever leads us to the essential characteristics of organised beings. Kant believes, in the context of this discussion that one need not begin with a basic materialistic term such as “organic substance” but it would perhaps be more useful to begin by presupposing a “principle of primordial organisation” on earth, a formative impulse:
“standing, so to speak, under the higher guidance and direction of the above principle.” (Page 86)
Kant even includes the issue of the differentiation of the sexes in this discussion and rather than presupposing an androgynous whole which splits into two parts, proposes instead a holistic organising principle which is manifested in both sexes in all animals. This principle will be that which the sexes have in common and not that which differentiates them, e.g. related to the powers of discourse and rationality. Human psuché is a superior form for Kant because it alone can form a conception of its own ends with the aid of the powers of understanding and reason. Kant also points out, however, that man also possesses the power to bring about his own ruin and destruction, and this is to be seen in his individual acts of aggression and in his collective acts of war. Despite these problematic tendencies there is, Kant maintains, still hope for man who, is part of a “hidden plan” to bring about a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends through both instrumental and categorical imperatives grounded in the ideas of freedom and responsibility. These respective imperatives manifest themselves in two important tasks man has set himself to do, namely the instrumental task of building civilisations and the categorical task of building a Culture to further the purposes of the “hidden plan”. In the first of these tasks basic biological and psychological desires and needs are met relating to safety and security and love and belongingness. In the second task higher psychological desires and needs such as self-esteem and aesthetic and cognitive needs and desires emerge and are fulfilled. The Latter task requires the existence of a Culture which amongst other things ensures:
“the liberation of the will from the despotism of desires whereby, in our attachment to certain natural things, we are rendered incapable of exercising a choice of our own.” (Page 95)
Both civilisation and Culture are teleologically directed creations that has a particular history in which the mass of the population works in order for a smaller part of the masses to pursue cultural ends valued by all. The hope is that in the process of transmission of these culturally valuable works the masses will at least liberate themselves from the despotism of the lower needs and desires and light upon the importance of the idea of freedom and human rights for everybody. The Aristotelian principle of the Golden Mean is involved in this process, and it creates a large enlightened middle class that embodies the virtues of the poor and the rich. Kant sees that the arts and the sciences will play an important role in this process:
“Fine art and the sciences, if they do not make man morally better, yet, by conveying a pleasure that admits of universal communication and by introducing polish and refinement into society make him civilised. Thus, they do much to overcome the tyrannical propensities of sense and so prepare man for a sovereignty in which reason alone shall have sway. Meanwhile the evils visited upon us, now by nature, now by the truculent egoism of man, evoke the energies of the soul, and give it strength and courage to submit to no such force, and at the same time quicken in us a sense that in the depths of our nature there is an aptitude for higher ends.” (Page 97)
These energies of the soul raise further questions about the ultimate value of life which Kant elaborates upon in the following manner:
“The value of life for us, measured simply by what we enjoy (by the natural end of the sum of all our inclinations, that is, by happiness) is easy to decide. It is less than nothing. For who would enter life afresh under the same conditions….There remains then, nothing but the worth which we ourselves assign to our life by what we not alone do, but do with a view to an end so independent of nature, that the very existence of nature itself can only be an end subject to the condition so imposed.”(Pages 97-8)
The value of life, then, according to Kant rests partly in acknowledging man as a noumenal being possessed of the rational idea of freedom and the responsibilities associated with such freedom. Mans conception of himself, then, must be that of a being who in order to appreciate happiness must deem himself to be worthy of such happiness. Happiness without any attachment to worthiness and dignity is Kant argues the principle of self-love in disguise and as such cannot be universalised because, what makes one individual happy makes another sad and what makes an individual happy in one phase of his life may not make him happy in another phase.
Joseph Campbell argues that an understanding of Mythology is a necessary feature of our understanding of the nature of our own “Being-in-the-world”, and Kant touches upon this theme by referring to the Ancients and their creation of a pantheon of Gods with limited powers and purposes over a limited realm. These supernatural Beings were then imagined interacting with the beings in our earthly world in ways resembling the ways of the human psyché. Kant sometimes writes as if this idealist introduction of final causes was an attempt to concretise some aspects of the noumenal world that lies beyond human understanding and reason.
The problem that arises in relation to these concrete physical teleological accounts is that it encourages theoretical theological accounts of a Supremely Intelligent Being with theoretical powers. The Ancient Greeks grappled with this problem and their thinking reached a zenith in the writings of Plato and Aristotle who preferred to theorise about Humanity rather than these theoretical supernatural beings, preferring, that is to reason about justice and the state and a Form of the Good which was not divine but a form that was both Good-in-itself and Good-in-its-consequences. This humanistic approach meshes well with the following Kantian reflection:
“For all ends in the world are empirically conditioned and can contain nothing that is absolutely Good, but only what is good for this or that purpose regarded as contingent.” Page 106
It is in the light of this reflection that we ought to understand Kants objections to the so-called “happiness principle” which has been evoked by many Philosophers over millennia as an answer to the question of the final purposes of human psuché. The Good-in-itself for man is the actualising of his rational potential. He elaborates further upon this with the following argument:
“Without man, in other words, the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final end.” (Page 106)
It is interesting to note that one of the modernist visions of where man stands in relation to the task of bringing about the Kingdom of Ends is that of T S Eliots Waste-Land. This is what we have created thus far in our journey. In this waste land there is no positive eros lighting our way but only the darkness of the times symbolised by the warrior priests of the Northern Forests Campbell writes about. Our human powers have not been adequate to the task of building both civilisations and cultures and our Gods have left us to our own devices (Deus absconditis). There is an obvious absence of meaning and the Enlightenment idea of the good will has faded. In Kantian Critical Philosophy the Supreme Being is only clearly apprehended clearly with the actualisation of the Kingdom of ends one hundred thousand years in the future. The risk is that the Supreme Being, will be man himself, if it is only his work that has brought about the Good Kingdom. Such a state of affairs may be partly due to the Kantian rejection of the theoretical arguments for the existence of God. The formula Kant proposes for a belief in God is a practical moral formula where all the work is to be done by man and any happiness that accrues eventuates only because it is proportionate to the work of a good will that respects the freedom and rights of others.
In a section entitled “Method of Applying the Teleological Judgement” Kant takes up the issues of the status of theoretical proofs for the existence of God and dismisses all of them including the famous ontological proof. This returns us back to the arena of practical reason in which analogy and symbolism play foundational roles not in relation to the relatively abstract practical issue of justice but in the more concrete contexts of the family and its love of family members and the realm of the sacred. Freud, we know questioned whether we could love our enemies who are not gentle creatures and the question that arises in the context of this discussion whether it is possible to love an abstract Being whose nature we must infer from other moral considerations such as our worthiness as human beings. Freud may well have had doubts about whether such love was possible.
Scepticism in relation to mythology, religion, metaphysics, and even art became in fact scepticism relating to various human powers such as understanding and reason in favour of other powers such as perception, consciousness and the imagination. Indeed, the question arises whether a Philosophical Psychology that can account for the repertoire of human phenomena is even possible if the repertoire of our human powers is truncated in the ways it has been. One can argue of course that this sceptical approach to the above realms or “meanings” of Being is itself a result of a critical spirit concerned to demythologise our relation to Being. But Analysis of phenomena such as the Will and Consciousness does not have to truncate either our powers nor our relation to the world if it follows several Aristotelian and Kantian guidelines, amongst others the Aristotelian whole-part principle we discussed earlier. Brian O Shaugnessy in his work on both the Will and Consciousness has indeed provided us with accounts that meet these guidelines in the spirit of “Analytical Philosophy” whilst simultaneously acknowledging the more modern work of Freud and Wittgenstein in the arena of Philosophical Psychology. In his work on “The Will: a Dual Aspect Theory” we encounter an interesting discussion of the differences between, on the one hand, a mechanical account of my moving my arm to pick an orange which refers to the contraction of muscles innervated by nerves etc., and on the other, the voluntary act which “I” perform. These are of course not logically incompatible, i.e. there can be two different accounts of this “movement” but not two different accounts of this “action”. There can however perhaps be two different accounts of the muscle contraction that is efficiently caused by a particular region of the brain. The claim that I picked the orange assumes that the teleological object-related aspect has priority over the mechanical antecedent “causes”. The claim indeed might be an answer to the question “Why did you move your arm toward the tree?”. The claim “I picked the orange”, is of course related to the intention I had in moving my arm and hand toward the orange which as Anscombe maintained is an answer to a certain sense of a why-question. Aristotle would of course have referred to a telos or final cause embedded in the world of human psuché a rational world where language users inform each other of their intentions. A world in which what intentions an agent had who committed a crime, can nevertheless be deduced after the process of a trial “beyond a reasonable doubt”. The world of psuché for the Ancient Greeks was a world in which, after Aristotle, a matrix of concepts and principles formed to create what many have called a “Golden Age”. No one would refer to our modern age in such terms. Indeed, Kants Enlightenment Philosophy was much closer to Classical Greece than our modern age is, but Kant nevertheless viewed the life of his times as “melancholically haphazard”, a time in which man did not dare to use his reason and a time in which unmotivated wars drained the resources of entire nations. Indeed, the best he could say about his situation was that there might be a “hidden plan” for a Kingdom of ends one hundred thousand years in the future. Just as Paul Ricoeur claimed that the “meeting point” of both Analytical (e.g.,Wittgenstein) and Phenomenological Philosophy, and Hermeneutics was that of Language, O Shaughnessy sees Action to be close to “the nerve of the age”. O Shaughnessy is an interesting dialectical partner for Ricoeur because he also analyses the concept of “consciousness”, one of the major themes for phenomenology: an analysis that relies partly on the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Both Ricoeur and O Shaughnessy however would agree that science has little of interest to say about both Language and Consciousness, but it is O Shaughnessy who most obviously embodies the concerns of Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophical Psychology assisted by the work of the later Wittgenstein which prepared the philosophical landscape for the restoration of Ancient and Enlightenment concerns. The Kantian hidden plan of practical reason requires however that the burning issue of metaphysics (first Principles) be resolved to the satisfaction of theoretical reason at least insofar as providing us with the totality of conditions for the hidden plan is concerned. Kant outlines some of these conditions in the Prolegomena:
“In order that as a science metaphysics may be entitled to claim, not mere fallacious plausibility, but insight and conviction, a critique of reason must itself exhibit the whole stock of a priori concepts, their division according to their various sources(sensibility, understanding and reason), together with a complete table of them, the analysis of all these concepts, with all their consequences and especially the possibility of synthetic cognition a priori by means of the deduction of these concepts, the principles and bounds of their use, all in a complete system. Critique, therefore, and critique alone contains in itself the whole well-proved and well-tested plan, and even all the means required to establish metaphysics as a science; by other ways and means it is impossible.” Page 105)
Kant elaborates upon this by the following claim:
“reason has the sources of its knowledge in itself, not in objects, and their observation, by which its stock of knowledge could be further increased…All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.”
Kant classifies Fine Art into three categories, namely, speech, the formative arts, and the play of the sensations. This division has its origins in Hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy: we can see distinctions between both the appetites and the understanding /reason and we also encounter sensations and speech animated by the power of the imagination. We can also see the operation of key distinctions between thought and intuition, form and matter, sensibility and understanding/judgement. Kant takes up the contribution symbolism makes to works of genius, claiming that it indirectly involves the presentation of a concept. Symbolic representation occurred for Freud in the dream work where the manifest sensible content of the images on the dream screen relate to something instinctual. The dream, in other words is a compromise formation, a vicissitude of an instinct, in which the imagination and the emotions play key roles. The latent content, then, is the arché or principle guiding the production of the dream images. Symbolism as Paul Ricoeur points out occurs in three realms, the cosmic, the oneiric (dreams and myths) and the reflective in which “symbols are objects of interpretation because they are intended to refer to some underlying latent content which must be revealed (Aletheia). Kant is exploring this last realm in his discussion of sublime inscriptions on Temple statues but also in his discussion of the significance of Transcendental Analogy. This raises the possibility of the establishment of a school of hermeneutics based on Hylomorphic ad Critical Philosophy which acknowledges the roles of the emotions and the power of the imagination but also sees no dialectical opposition between these powers and the powers of understanding and reason. Such an approach would seek to reflect upon the sole of symbolic reasoning in myth and the arts in general but especially in relation to those ideas of reason for which there can be no sensible representation, e.g. The Supreme Being. Freud is an interesting figure in this debate because he has claimed that some aspects of religion are related to fantasy and “illusion”. The question that needs to be investigated here is whether this line of thinking applies to the Transcendental Analogy which sees a “symbolic” relation between the love of a father for his children and the love of God for humanity. For Freud our childish fears and wishes are fundamentally illusory, fundamentally pathological. We need that is to dare to use our rationality in relation to certain forms of anthropomorphising of the gods (a Kantian position).,
The Will, Kant argues, has formative power, a very different power to that of the motive mechanical power of machines. In the case of a circle drawn in the sand, this phenomenon is a consequence of the operation of the power of the will which we are unlikely to confuse with the forces of the wind or the water on a beach if we are confronted with such a circle. This circle is a product of human psuché, to be distinguished from a footprint of an animal in the sand. Kants Philosophical Psychology/Anthropology was largely rejected by the Psychologists of the 19th and 20th centuries, who sought to construct stimulus response theories related either to sensations or behaviour. Formative powers and processes presuppose teleological judgement which assumes a form of life-like causality analogous to the powers and processes operating in human action. The life flowing through the blade of grass or animal could never as such be observed but is rather in a sense assumed to exist in virtue of the category of living forms these living phenomena belong to. We are here in the territory of the discussion of the role of final causes in contexts of explanation/justification: one of the four causes forming Aristotle’s Theory of Change. Kant insists that the opposing assumption, namely that living phenomena be explained in terms of blind mechanistic efficient causes may well allow us to conduct empirical investigations based on observations and simple experimentation alone, but such investigations would not be able to provide us with the totality of conditions for these phenomena, would not, that is, provides us with the way in which the principle of the whole governs the parts of these phenomena. Nevertheless, Kant does not subscribe to the view that such a state of affairs proves the objective existence of the causality of final causes (Critique of Judgement Part II Page 41). We must, rather, Kant argues, use the idea of final cause subjectively presupposing both a life-principle and a first principle/idea of God (the intellectual cause of the world) conceived of in terms of a being whose reality we infer within the bounds of reason. With these presuppositions we might then be able to acquire insight into the essence of a blade of grass and other more complex forms of psuché. Principles relate to the possibility of things when they are conceptual and are in accord with the categories.
Kant has the following to say concerning the faculty of human understanding:
“Human understanding cannot avoid the necessity of drawing a distinction between the possibility and the actuality of things. The reason for this lies in our own selves and the nature of our cognitive faculties. For were it not that two entirely heterogeneous factors, understanding for conceptions and sensuous intuitions for the corresponding objects, are required for the exercise of these faculties, there would be no such distinction between the possible and the actual. This means that if our understanding were intuitive, it would have no objects but such as are actual. Conceptions which are merely directed toward the possibility of an object, and sensuous intuitions, which give us something and do not yet thereby let us cognise it as an object, would both cease to exist. Now the whole distinction which we draw between the merely possible rests upon the fact that possibility signifies the position of the representation of a thing in its immediate self-existence apart from this conception. Accordingly, the distinction of possible from actual things is one that is merely valid subjectively for human understanding. It arises from the fact that even if something does not exist, we may yet always give it a place in our thoughts, or if there is something of which we have no conception we may nevertheless imagine it as given.” (Page 56 )
This passage is interesting from many different points of view. It is the ground for the explanations we have been given for a categorical distinction between is-statements and ought-statements. When, for example human actions are viewed conceptually in a moral context giving rise to moral judgements, the idea of freedom and the categorical imperative are importantly involved. Perhaps it is important to note in the context of this discussion that one of the primary functions of language is to speak or write about objects in their absence, e.g. action outcomes that are intended but have yet to actualise. The later work of Wittgenstein explored the multifarious functions of language-games embedded in a matrix of forms of life and instincts. Aristotle, we know, linked the actualisation process to judgements about possibilities or to use his term, potentialities.
Paul Ricoeur claimed that we human forms of psuche engage in a world in which our desires are not transparent, indeed may even be intentionally disguised. This fact together with the fact that the way in which we use language too, may be a consequence of being bewitched by this language, makes it obvious that our actions sometimes require interpretation if we are to fully understand them. Here too, we can see a relation of manifest content to latent content similar to that which we encounter in Freudian psychoanalytic interpretations. The inscription of the statue located at the Temple of Isis suggests that, if God is identified with Logos or language, the name of God can only hint at what is designated by this idea of reason. Kant, urges us, in the name of Critical Philosophy to refrain from giving the noumenal entity of this metaphysical being any concrete characteristics simply because we have no intuitional contact with this form of Being.
Joseph Campbell, too urges us in the context of his criticisms of the universal pretensions of mythology to refrain from universalising the concrete characterisations of local gods and deities. He points to the manifold historical conflicts that have arisen when one community claims that their divinity is the only true divinity. For Campbell, of course it is the power of the imagination that needs to generate the universal mythology he is in search of—a mythology for our time, as he calls it. But whilst he seriously considers the Cinematic production of Star Wars as an aesthetic candidate presenting a modernist mythology, it is clear that this production may not meet the rational criteria of a number of scientific or artistic disciplines. Science fiction, of course can explore a number of human concerns meaningfully and the production “Star Wars” is about exploring the frontiers of Space, but this for the Enlightenment Philosopher Kant and the Ancient Greeks is not the final frontier. The final frontier for a human Being must be something requiring a number of self-reflective powers that are important for culture-creation. Our Philosophical journey, then, is an inner journey which views inner phenomena as related to a latent substrate capable of causing awe and wonder in us. We do not need to construct an elaborate space vehicle for such a journey: techné is replaced by the epistemé used by rational animals capable of discourse searching, not for experiences, but the conditions of all experience. Space and Time as a priori conditions are a part of the totality of conditions of experience but in knowledge contexts it is the categories of the understanding and the principles of reason which play decisive roles in our various knowledge related activities.
In this realm of the sciences, we encounter various theories, which analyse and synthesise concepts, propositions and arguments into a whole with logical characteristics. Philosophy of course is an important contributor to the Canon of the Sciences because of its critical view of materialistic and dualistic assumptions. Both Kant and Aristotle shared a concern for rejecting these types of assumptions which divide an object up into parts that cannot be reconciled and subsumed under first principles. Kant, we know, was particularly concerned to synthesise the respective positions of empiricism and rationalism in his Critical Philosophy which was inspired by both Hume and Rousseau. The Ancients view of Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Aristotle were also significant influences in Kants later Critical Philosophy.
Kant both sought to differentiate phenomena and principles from different regions of Being/Reality that Historically had been confused with one another or neglected for different reasons. He was more cautious about the status of Aristotle’s final causes in his explanatory references to cause and reason, believing, for example, that we cannot know for certain the reach of mechanical/efficient explanations because of the limitation of the scope of our faculties of understanding and reason. Kant was clear however that there was a place for teleological explanation in our, so long as we acknowledge the “Subjective” nature of tis kind of explanation/justification:
“We may apply to a thing which we have to estimate as a physical end, that is to an organised being, all the laws of mechanical generation known or yet to be discovered, we may even hope to make good progress in such researches, but we can never get rid of the appeal to a completely different source of generation for the possibility of a product of this kind, namely that of a causality by ends. It is utterly impossible for human reason, or for any finite reason resembling ours, however much it may surpass it in degree to hope to understand the generation of even a blade of grass from mere mechanical powers….it is absolutely impossible for us to obtain any explanation at the hand of nature itself to account for any synthesis displaying finality.” (Pages 66-67)
By “organised beings” Kant means psuché, forms of life, such as a blade of grass, animals and human forms of psuché which Aristotle defined in terms of “rational animal capable of discourse”, but he also continues to insist that the type of judgement we employ as a consequence of our investigations into the essences of such organised beings is a reflective type of judgement rather than the more typical kind of determinant judgement which is typical in the arena of mechanical processes and causes. Reflective judgements contain a priori principles and must therefore fall into the domain of what Kant refers to as “The Method of Critical Investigations”. This method is particularly important in relation to explanations/justifications of psychological phenomena in the realm of the study of human psuché. One Aristotelian principle in this realm recommends that when we divide an organised being into its parts in order to understand the essence of the whole being, those parts must be conceived of in terms of the a priori principle of the whole. This might in fact also be an underlying principle of Kantian Critical Philosophy which tasks reason with perspicuously representing the totality of conditions for phenomena. Amongst the totality of conditions for explanations/justifications pertaining to the human form of psuché will undoubtedly be found reference to the system of organs, limbs and functional parts of the body such as fingers toes, joints etc.
Joseph Campbell, to some extent, embraces Aristotelian Hylomorphism when he claims that the imagination, emotions and perhaps even consciousness itself originate in the conflict of these organs with one another. Perhaps one might elaborate upon this and suggest that Consciousness and feelings such as the feeling of pleasure may also originate from the “harmony” of the organs (including, of course, the brain). Beginning from the apriori idea of the whole of human psuché, given, for example, by Aristotle’s essence specifying definition: rational animal capable of discourse, the method employed in contexts of explanation/justification is that of a judicial tribunal where phenomena are interrogated by a theory composed of categorical judgements. Such an interrogation will take the form of questioning whether such phenomena can be subsumed under apriori laws or principles. Part of this context will contain large scale questions relating to:
“the genesis of that great family of living things” (Page 79)
The principle involved in Judgements of taste in relation to Art, on the other hand, is:
“The principle of nature’s formal finality for our cognitive faculties” (Kants Critique of Judgement, Trans Meredith, J.C., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973, Page 35)
The Critique of Judgement is also, however, concerned with teleological judgement which aims to provide us with the principle of the finality of nature, and this is especially relevant when we are dealing with psyche or life forms. Here the transcendental analogy that is operating is that of the operation of the changes we observe in Nature (living and inorganic)and these are construed as analogous to the changes we bring about as human agents. This is certainly more relevant to the life form changes we observe, than it is for the purely physical changes we observe in a nature consisting of a multiplicity of inorganic causes which, it can be argued, do not possess any principle of self-causation (e.g. self-preservation,) as is the case with life forms such as animals or even a blade of grass.
Life too has a multiplicity of causes and for Aristotle (who envisaged four different kinds of causes bringing about change) psyché was the focus of a number of different sciences including biological and philosophical investigations (which ranged over a number of different theoretical practical and productive sciences). Broadly speaking, however Metaphysics divided into two Great divisions, the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals. The Critique of Aesthetic and Teleological Judgement formed a bridge between these realms of the concepts of nature and the concepts related to freedom. Aesthetic Judgement, for example, prepares the sensible mind for moral feelings and it is this relationship which Kant refers to when he speaks of Beauty being the “symbol of morality”.
This position also connects with the Platonic claim that the pleasure we feel in the name of the Form of the Good is the highest of all the forms of human pleasure. We know that the sensible power of the imagination is in intimate communion with the pleasure-pain principle and the understanding, and also know that this general characterisation does not refer to the Freudian pathological fantasy-laden cases Freud dealt with in his consulting rooms. In the case of the judgement of taste we are dealing with a power that discriminates and estimates in a contemplative mood disconnected with any practical interests we may have in the object that is being judged. In this case it is the meaning of the representation that is significant. Kant elaborates upon this power in the following manner:
“Here the representation is referred to the Subject, and what is more to its feeling of life—under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.” (Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, Page 42).
The pleasure in The Good that Plato referred included objects connected to our interest (Page 46).
Joseph Campbell, one of the foremost commentators on the meaning of Mythological narratives and the meaning of life, has the following contribution to make about the meaning of our participation in the divine and our representations of the divine:
“The life of a mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in a realisation of transcendence, infinity and abundance…..Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one,of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being. And the second service, then is cosmological: of representing the universe and the whole spectacle of nature, both as known to the mind and as beheld by the eye, as an epiphany of such kind that when lightning flashes, or a setting sun ignites the sky, or a deer stands alerted, the exclamation”Ah!” may be uttered as a recognition of divinity.” (Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Pages XX-XXI)
Campbell, of course, refers more to Carl Jungs work on archetypes than to Freuds more Kantian, analytical approach. Both of these Psychologists claim to be Kantian, but it appears as if the work of Freud is more closely aligned with the Philosophical Anthropology/Psychology we find in Kant’s work. The Unconscious is important for both theorists but Freuds account of instincts and their vicissitudes and the detailed characterisation we are given of some of these vicissitudes (including that of consciousness and that of sublimation) indicate a complex tie not just to Kantian Critical Psychology but also to Aristotelian Hylomorphism. This indicates that Freuds theories were more Philosophical than Jungs. Campbell does not see the complex relationship that exists between Philosophy and Mythology. Mythology is about our relation to God, and this is portrayed differently in Occidental and Oriental Mythology. In the latter there is, as Campbell puts it, a dialectical relation between the Supreme Being and our human form of being. One in which the relation is simultaneously immanent and transcendent (Occidental Mythology, London, Souvenir Press, 1964, Page 3):
“Prayers and chants, images, temples, Gods, sages, definitions and cosmologies are but ferries to a shore of experience beyond the categories of thought, to be abandoned on arrival; for as the Indian Kena Upanishad states :” To know is not to know, not to know is to know” and the Chinese Tao Te Ching: “Those who know are still.”. “Thou art that”, declares the Vedic Sage.” (Page 3)
Occidental Mythology, on the other hand is concerned with articulating the relation between the Supreme Being and the human form of being, and there are two roads leading from early Occidental Mythology. One leading from a Religious perspective typified in the Book of Job: a perspective of the renunciation of the significance of human judgement. The second road is that leading from Athens, from which the Philosophical spirit was born: a humanistic spirit in which man dares to confront his idea of Supreme Beings and question their character, i.e. subject the gods to a humanistic tribunal that demands areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time).
Campbell prefers to travel the religious route. The Trial of Socrates was a turning point for the Western World because we saw how a narrow-minded religion was capable of judging individuals whose concern was with opening our minds and widening our perspectives. This type of injustice would repeat itself in the persecution of Aristotle and murdering of heretics later in the process of the establishment of Christianity. The road from Athens was the road that valued the Law, Justice(dike), areté, episteme, Art,and Human Freedom above dogma.
Kants view of aesthetics and Art begins with the claim that aesthetic judgement, insofar as it is related to natural objects, is not conceptually mediated but is related to a type of estimation and discrimination that is important to prepare the mind for moral feeling. Kant refers here to a “formal finality” that is not related to the perfection sought by art which corresponds to what Kant called “dependent Beauty”: a form which seeks to unite taste and ideas of reason via artistic “intentions”, e.g. a beautiful building, a beautiful garden or a beautiful person. Mythology, however, is more concerned with the Sublime than Beauty because the former may be related to representations of what Kant called “limitlessness” whilst at the same time manifesting a reference to an indeterminate concept of reason. There are interesting differences between these two forms of experience:
“For the beautiful is directly attended with a feeling of the furtherance of life, and is thus compatible with charms and a playful imagination. On the other hand, the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that only arises indirectly being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful, and so it is an emotion that seems to be no sport, but dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination.” (Page 91)
The Sublime is an experience intimately connected to awe and wonder, that feeling the Ancient Greeks and Kant related to the external heavens above and the moral law within. The objects of the experience of the sublime are formless, but they “quicken” in us an appreciation of our own moral power and agency. This movement from sensible experience to a moral attitude of mind requires a cultural familiarity with moral ideas and the practical idea of freedom. Kant also refers to sublime inscriptions to be found on statues at the Temple of Isis and in the Old Testament, e.g.:
“Thou shallt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth etc.” (Page 127)
Images of the kind referred to in the above Biblical quote are products of both the imagination and the emotions and they therefore do not meet the logical criteria of universal validity that we can find, for example, in aesthetic judgements or judgements of taste relating to art objects. Some religious scholars would claim that such images connected as they are to perception and emotion, cannot be related to Logos and responded to in the medium of speech and thought. This line of argumentation is reminiscent of that which one can encounter in Platonic writings where it is claimed that the Theory of Forms is the work of the understanding and reason. For Aristotle too, it is the case that the powers of rationality and wisdom are not located in the faculty of sensibility, but rather in the faculty of thought where we find the forms (arché): a faculty that is a higher faculty than that of the Spirit where our emotions and passions are located.
Kant continues his discussion of the nature of Art Objects:
“By right it is only production through freedom, i.e. through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action that should be termed art.” (Page 163)
It is, we would maintain, the intentionality of art objects that is part of the essence specifying definition of artistic activity, e.g., art objects are made with the intention of being responded to in particular ways involving particular human powers including the power of judgement and its relation to a universally valid form of the feeling of pleasure. Art objects are also obviously cultural objects insofar as they are “symbols of morality”. The production of these objects obviously occurs in accordance with principles of productive science, but their creation requires a power of genius which involves an ability to intentionally marshal aesthetic ideas in a concrete work in a concrete medium. In such works we are not presented with concepts but rather:
“The form of a presentation of a concept.” (Page 174)
The genius possesses a unique ability to make this form adequate to the aesthetic ideas that the work is expressive of:
“by an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e.concept, being adequate to it, and which language consequently can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible.” (Page 176)
In this process, it is argued, the power of the imagination remodels experiences partly for the purposes of entertainment, for the purposes of pleasure;
“Such representations of the imagination may be termed ideas. This is partly because they at least strain after something lying beyond the confines of experience and so seek to approximate to a presentation of rational concepts (i.e. intellectual ideas) thus giving to these concepts the semblance of an objective reality.” (Page 176)
This process is intuitive because no concept can be wholly adequate to the content of these intuitions. The artist-genius seeks that is seeks to express a sense of transcendence:
“The rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation, etc., Or again, as to things of which examples occur in experience, e.g. death, envy, and all the vices as also love, fame and the like, transgressing the limits of experience he attempts with the aid of the imagination which emulates the display of reason in its attainment of the maximum…; and it is in fact precisely in the poetic arts that the faculty of aesthetic ideas can show itself to full advantage.”(Pages 176-7)
Kant elaborates upon this with the thoughts that the imagination animates the mnd “with the idea of the super sensible”(Page 178). In relation to the idea of the super sensible in the form of the Supreme Being, we can refer again to Kants reference to the Temple of Isis inscription:
“I am all that is , and that was, and that shall be and no mortal hath raised the veil before my face.” (Page 179)
This judgemental inscription is of course a work of genius: a power of the imagination animating the mind with an idea of the super sensible.
The principle involved in Judgements of taste in relation to Art, on the other hand, is:
“The principle of nature’s formal finality for our cognitive faculties” (Kants Critique of Judgement, Trans Meredith, J.C., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973, Page 35)
The Critique of Judgement is also, however, concerned with teleological judgement which aims to provide us with the principle of the finality of nature, and this is especially relevant when we are dealing with psyche or life forms. Here the transcendental analogy that is operating is that of the operation of the changes we observe in Nature (living and inorganic)and these are analogous to the changes we bring about as human agents. This is certainly more relevant to the life form changes we observe, than for the purely physical changes we observe in a nature consisting of a multiplicity of inorganic causes which, it can be argued, do not possess any principle of self-causation (e.g. self-preservation) as is the case with life forms such as animals or even a blade of grass.
Life too has a multiplicity of causes and for Aristotle (who envisaged four different kinds of causes bringing about change) psyché was the focus of a number of different sciences including biological and philosophical investigations (which ranged over a number of different theoretical practical and productive sciences). Broadly speaking, however Metaphysics divided into two Great divisions, the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals. The Critique of Aesthetic and Teleological Judgement formed a bridge between these realms of the concepts of nature and the concepts related to freedom. Aesthetic Judgement, for example, prepares the sensible mind for moral feelings and it is this relationship which Kant refers to when he speaks of Beauty being the “symbol of morality”.
This position also connects with the Platonic claim that the pleasure we feel in the name of the Form of the Good is the highest of all the forms of human pleasure. We know that the sensible power of the imagination is in intimate communion with the pleasure-pain principle and the understanding and also know that this general characterisation does not refer to the Freudian pathological fantasy-laden cases Freud dealt with in his consulting rooms. In the case of the judgement of taste we are dealing with a power that discriminates and estimates in a contemplative mood disconnected with any practical interests we may have in the object that is being judged. In this case it is the meaning of the representation that is significant. Kant elaborates upon this power in the following manner:
“Here the representation is referred to the Subject, and what is more to its feeling of life—under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.” (Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, Page 42).
The pleasure in The Good that Plato referred included objects connected to our interest (Page 46).
Joseph Campbell, one of the foremost commentators on the meaning of Mythological narratives and the meaning of life, has the following contribution to make about the meaning of our participation in the divine and our representations of the divine:
“The life of a mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in a realisation of transcendence, infinity and abundance…..Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one,of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being. And the second service, then is cosmological: of representing the universe and the whole spectacle of nature, both as known to the mind and as beheld by the eye, as an epiphany of such kind that when lightning flashes, or a setting sun ignites the sky, or a deer stands alerted, the exclamation”Ah!” may be uttered as a recognition of divinity.” (Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Pages XX-XXI)
Campbell, of course, refers more to Carl Jungs work on archetypes than to Freuds more Kantian, analytical approach. Both of these Psychologists claim to be Kantian, but it appears as if the work of Freud is more closely aligned with the Philosophical Anthropology/Psychology we find in Kant’s work. The Unconscious is important for both theorists but Freuds account of instincts and their vicissitudes and the detailed characterisation we are given of some of these vicissitudes (including that of consciousness and that of sublimation) indicate a complex tie not just to Kantian Critical Psychology but also to Aristotelian Hylomorphism. This indicates that Freuds theories were more Philosophical than Jungs. Campbell does not see the complex relationship that exists between Philosophy and Mythology. Mythology is about our relation to God, and this is portrayed differently in Occidental and Oriental Mythology. In the latter there is, as Campbell puts it, a dialectical relation between the Supreme Being and our human form of being. One in which the relation is simultaneously immanent and transcendent (Occidental Mythology, London, Souvenir Press, 1964, Page 3):
“Prayers and chants, images, temples, Gods, sages, definitions and cosmologies are but ferries to a shore of experience beyond the categories of thought, to be abandoned on arrival; for as the Indian Kena Upanishad states :” To know is not to know, not to know is to know” and the Chinese Tao Te Ching: “Those who know are still.”. “Thou art that”, declares the Vedic Sage.” (Page 3)
Occidental Mythology, on the other hand is concerned with articulating the relation between the Supreme Being and the human form of being, and there are two roads leading from early Occidental Mythology. One leading from a Religious perspective typified in the Book of Job: a perspective of the renunciation of the significance of human judgement. The second road is that leading from Athens, from which the Philosophical spirit was born: a humanistic spirit in which man dares to confront his idea of Supreme Beings and question their character, i.e. subject the gods to a humanistic tribunal that demands areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time).
Campbell prefers to travel the religious route. The Trial of Socrates was a turning point for the Western World because we saw how a narrow-minded religion was capable of judging individuals whose concern was with opening our minds and widening our perspectives. This type of injustice would repeat itself in the persecution of Aristotle and murdering of heretics later in the process of the establishment of Christianity. The road from Athens was the road that valued the Law, Justice(dike), areté, episteme, Art,and Human Freedom above dogma.
Kants view of aesthetics and Art begins with the claim that aesthetic judgement, insofar as it is related to natural objects, is not conceptually mediated but is related to a type of estimation and discrimination that is important to prepare the mind for moral feeling. Kant refers here to a “formal finality” that is not related to the perfection sought by art which corresponds to what Kant called “dependent Beauty”: a form which seeks to unite taste and ideas of reason via artistic “intentions”, e.g. a beautiful building, a beautiful garden or a beautiful person. Mythology, however, is more concerned with the Sublime than Beauty because the former may be related to representations of what Kant called “limitlessness” whilst at the same time manifesting a reference to an indeterminate concept of reason. There are interesting differences between these two forms of experience:
“For the beautiful is directly attended with a feeling of the furtherance of life, and is thus compatible with charms and a playful imagination. On the other hand, the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that only arises indirectly being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful, and so it is an emotion that seems to be no sport, but dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination.” (Page 91)
The Sublime is an experience intimately connected to awe and wonder, that feeling the Ancient Greeks and Kant related to the external heavens above and the moral law within. The objects of the experience of the sublime are formless, but they “quicken” in us an appreciation of our own moral power and agency. This movement from sensible experience to a moral attitude of mind requires a cultural familiarity with moral ideas and the practical idea of freedom. Kant also refers to sublime inscriptions to be found on statues at the Temple of Isis and in the Old Testament, e.g.:
“Thou shallt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth etc.” (Page 127)
Images of the kind referred to in the above Biblical quote are products of both the imagination and the emotions and they therefore do not meet the logical criteria of universal validity that we can find, for example, in aesthetic judgements or judgements of taste relating to art objects. Some religious scholars would claim that such images connected as they are to perception and emotion, cannot be related to Logos and responded to in the medium of speech and thought. This line of argumentation is reminiscent of that which one can encounter in Platonic writings where it is claimed that the Theory of Forms is the work of the understanding and reason. For Aristotle too, it is the case that the powers of rationality and wisdom are not located in the faculty of sensibility, but rather in the faculty of thought where we find the forms (arché): a faculty that is a higher faculty than that of the Spirit where our emotions and passions are located.
Kant continues his discussion of the nature of Art Objects:
“By right it is only production through freedom, i.e. through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action that should be termed art.” (Page 163)
It is, we would maintain, the intentionality of art objects that is part of the essence specifying definition of artistic activity, e.g., art objects are made with the intention of being responded to in particular ways involving particular human powers including the power of judgement and its relation to a universally valid form of the feeling of pleasure. Art objects are also obviously cultural objects insofar as they are “symbols of morality”. The production of these objects obviously occurs in accordance with principles of productive science, but their creation requires a power of genius which involves an ability to intentionally marshal aesthetic ideas in a concrete work in a concrete medium. In such works we are not presented with concepts but rather:
“The form of a presentation of a concept.” (Page 174)
The genius possesses a unique ability to make this form adequate to the aesthetic ideas that the work is expressive of:
“by an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e.concept, being adequate to it, and which language consequently can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible.” (Page 176)
In this process, it is argued, the power of the imagination remodels experiences partly for the purposes of entertainment, for the purposes of pleasure;
“Such representations of the imagination may be termed ideas. This is partly because they at least strain after something lying beyond the confines of experience and so seek to approximate to a presentation of rational concepts (i.e. intellectual ideas) thus giving to these concepts the semblance of an objective reality.” (Page 176)
This process is intuitive because no concept can be wholly adequate to the content of these intuitions. The artist-genius seeks that is seeks to express a sense of transcendence:
“The rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation, etc., Or again, as to things of which examples occur in experience, e.g. death, envy, and all the vices as also love, fame and the like, transgressing the limits of experience he attempts with the aid of the imagination which emulates the display of reason in its attainment of the maximum…; and it is in fact precisely in the poetic arts that the faculty of aesthetic ideas can show itself to full advantage.”(Pages 176-7)
Kant elaborates upon this with the thoughts that the imagination animates the mnd “with the idea of the super sensible”(Page 178). In relation to the idea of the super sensible in the form of the Supreme Being, we can refer again to Kants reference to the Temple of Isis inscription:
“I am all that is , and that was, and that shall be and no mortal hath raised the veil before my face.” (Page 179)
This judgemental inscription is of course a work of genius: a power of the imagination animating the mind with an idea of the super sensible.
Mythology in many of its different forms may well have succumbed this illusion which involves the projection or imagination of supernatural form of life occurring after death. Mythology does not acknowledge the Kantian trinity of faculties which includes the categories of understanding/judgement and the ideas of reason, preferring instead to locate its “principles” in narratives produced by and for the imagination, simultaneously mobilising a repertoire of associated emotions. Dialectical reasoning is part of the constitution of such narratives in which we encounter heroes and villains, gods and devils in transactional relations to each other.
Joseph Campbell in his work embraces Kants Transcendental Analogy, claiming that this too is a product of imagination and can be used to embody aesthetic ideas related to God and his love for Humanity. Campbell also insists that Gods, monsters and devils are not objective external presences but are rather internal phantasms projected onto the external world. Considerable pathological “energy” lies behind such projections which may well be categorised by some psychologists as “psychotic”. Campbell proposes that Gods, monsters and devils are both out there in the external world and are also within us in his dialectical approach to mythological problems.
Campbell speaks of the hero’s journey which appears to be explorative, venturing out into an unfriendly hostile environment, and challenged by a number of lethal threats. Ricoeur speaks in this context of “imaginative variations”, and this may be true in those cases the moral of the mythological tales relates to the nature of the world and the nature of man. Courage for the Ancient Greek Mythologies was a manifestation of one of the virtues, and Achilles was perhaps the archetypal hero embodying this moral quality. Campbell in his account of heroes, however, fails to acknowledge another type of hero that emerged during era of Ancient Greece, namely the intellectual hero who devotes and even sacrifices their life to accomplish a mission, e.g. Socrates who was put to death for attempting to introduce foreign Gods into Athens, i.e. Philosophy (which Socrates argued was one of the children of the Gods). In accomplishing his mission Socrates manifested in his life the embodiment of both intellectual and moral virtues. He was regarded as the wisest man in Athens because he knew what he did not know. He was a different type of hero to Achilles who excelled in Spirit but not in Reason and Understanding.
Kant in his complex account of the powers of man referred to 4 functions of judgement and 12 types of judgement and these contributed to our categorical understanding of external and internal phenomena. These together with the principles of reasoning governing the ideas of God, the soul, and the duration of the world and its complete conditions, enabled logical thinking to replace the kind of dialectical reasoning we find in mythology about human psuché and its Being-in-the-World. Mythological accounts for Kant, would be fundamentally incomplete because they do not seem to take account of the true origins of concepts and ideas. What we find in Critical Philosophy, then is a principle guided account:
“The solution of this question is as follows. Pure Reason does not, in its ideas, point to particular objects that lie beyond the field of experience, but only requires completeness of the use of understanding in the complex of experience. But this completeness can be a completeness of principles only, not of intuitions and of objects. In order, however, to represent the ideas, reason conceives them after the fashion of the cognition of an object. The cognition, as far as these rules are concerned, are completely determined; but the object is only an idea invented for the purpose of bringing the cognition of understanding as close as possible to the completeness indicated by the idea.” Page 73
Principles (arché) are also central to the Aristotelian Hylomorphic account as presented in Aristotle’s work “Metaphysics” in which “first principles” are presented as important conditions for operation of Reason. Practical Reason is also intimately related to the categorical use of the understanding based upon the practical idea of freedom which is assumed in the formulations of the categorical imperative. Practical Reason as distinct from Theoretical Reason differentiates itself significantly in that it relates to the “noumenal self” and its first principle of freedom (the disposition to cause oneself to do something) which in turn relates to the Aristotelian “Form of The Good”: a form that was both good-in-itself ad good-in-its-consequences. The categorical imperative, in other words, rests upon this pure noumenal self as an absolute subject. The understanding can know nothing about the noumenal world because it is:
“the indication of the object of internal sense.” (Page 75)
The understanding functions via concepts which predicate something of a subject, but knowledge of an absolute subject is, in a sense empty of cognitive content. This is one of the critical arguments against the postulation of the immortal soul. Indeed, the proposition:’
“All men are mortal”
Must, on this reasoning be, a synthetic apriori truth. Men insofar as they are guided by practical reasoning are guided by imperatives containing the term “ought”, e.g.
“Promises ought to be kept.”
Ought statements have a different logical form to is-statements, which are made on the condition of reference to events that have already occurred, e.g. The air has expanded in the heat. Ought statements can occur in practical syllogisms that use the principle of noncontradiction to arrive at conclusions which follow from the preceding premises. The conclusion recommends a particular action that has been previously designated: an action that rests on a synthetic apriori principle such as “Promises ought to be kept”. This in turn rests upon a first principle that freedom is a self-causing form of agency engaging with the world.
This does not, Kant argues, preclude providing a perspicuous representation of the activities of the phenomenal self, provided via concepts of the understanding which do not rest on reference to an absolute noumenal subject about which, nothing can be said (conceptually). Both kinds of justifications using principles of freedom (self-causation) and causation, then, are permissible and accord both with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The Prolegomena presents the complex relation between the phenomenal and noumenal accounts in the following way:
“We have in us a faculty which not only stands in connection with its subjective determining grounds that are the natural causes of its actions and is so far the faculty of a being that itself belongs to appearances, but is also related to objective grounds that are only ideas so far as they can determine this faculty; this connection is expressed by ought . This faculty is called Reason, and, so far as we consider a being (man) entirely according to this objectively determinable reason, he cannot be considered a being of sense; but rather this property is that of a thing in itself, and we cannot comprehend the possibility of this property—I mean how the ought (which may never yet have taken place) should determine its activity and could become the cause of actions whose effect is an appearance in the sensible world….Now I may say without contradiction that all the actions of rational beings, so far as they are appearances (encountered in some experience), are subject to the necessity of nature; but the same actions, as regards merely the rational subject and its faculty of acting according to mere reason, are free. For what is required for the necessity of nature? Nothing more than the determinability of every event in the world of sense according to constant laws, i.e. a reference to cause in the appearance; in this process the thing in itself at its foundation and its causality remain unknown.”(Pages 85-6)
This would be the Kantian Justification for the claim that God is to be found both within the mind and without in the external world. Monsters and devils may on this account be found also both within and without, but the final explanation for their being may be different. Paul Ricoeurs discussion of the symbolism of Evil is informative in this context, because it appears to focus on the ultimate evil within the human psuché: an evil that must be confessed if it is not to destroy its owner. If, for example, I have murdered someone I may have become the monster or devil of mythological narratives. Christianity we know, postulated that men’s souls were flawed and prone to great evil and this state hinders his search for the love of God.
The Garden of Eden Myth presents us with a picture of man as a being that follows his desires blindly wherever they may lead and without considering his relation to God who alone knows the scope and limits of knowledge and life. Humankind was exiled from the Garden because man failed both to know and to love God above all else. Our exile has, however, it might be argued, not been completely fruitless, building as we have civilisations and institutions devoted to the Good such as the University, the Church, and the United Nations which we believe may help provide us with the good spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia). Freud points out that we are nevertheless discontent with our lives. Kant might have disputed this on the grounds that his “hidden plan” of a Kingdon of Ends coming in one hundred thousand years has not had time to evolve sufficiently.
Hannah Arendt called the 20th century “This terrible century”, and she was not alone in this judgement considering the events of two world wars, the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations, and a cold war and its continuing consequences. Kant would not have been unduly concerned about the events of one century when the plan he refers to appears to be operating on a more cosmic time plan. Such is the philosophical account of man’s destiny which sometimes appears to correlate with the content and message of mythological narratives and sometimes not. Insisting, however, as Myth does that the Categories of the Understanding/Judgement and the Principles and ideas of Reason play no role in our future Being-in-the-world would be questioned by both Aristotle and Kant. On these kinds of Philosophical accounts, the roles of the transcendental imagination and associated emotions alone are not sufficient to provide the explanations and justifications we search for in the realms of theoretical and practical reason. Modern tendencies to deify science and reject Aristotelian and Kantian Metaphysics are not helpful Cultural tendencies given the complexity of our civilisations and the human powers required to build and sustain them.
Kant points to the importance of Transcendental Analogy in the process of increasing our awareness of ourselves and our relation to the “realm of the sacred”. Kant insists that analogy at issue is not that between two things but rather that between two relations, i.e. a is to b as c is to X:
“The promotion of the welfare of children (=a) is to the love of parents(=b), so the welfare of the human species (=c) is t that unknown in God (=X) which we call love.” Page 98)
The role of the family and the importance of the love of parents for their children are obviously things that are both good-in-themselves and good-in-their-consequences. Freud spent much of the time with his patients discussing family relations and clearly saw the terrible consequences when parental love was absence or was substituted with parental abuse of their children. Freuds focus was clearly more “practical” than his theoretical colleagues who, in 1870, implemented the divorce between psychological and philosophical accounts of human psuché.
Kant produced another example of a Transcendental Analogy in a footnote on page 100:
“I may say that the causality of the Supreme Cause holds the same place with regard to the world that human reason does with regard to its works of art. Here the Nature of the Supreme Cause itself remains unknown to me; I only compare its effects (the order of the world), which I know,, and their conformity to reason to the effects of human reason, which I also know; and hence I term the former reason, without attributing to it on that account what I understand in man by this term, or attaching to it anything else known to me as its property.”(Page 100)
This is a significant reference to the role of the Work of Art in the conversion of civilisations into Cultures. Mythology has certainly played its role in the building of civilisations but perhaps it alone does not suffice to form Cultures which require a manifold of concentrated social forces, e.g. Religion within the bounds of Reason, Laws and legal institutions formed by great souled men (Phronima), Philosophy, Art, Universities and educational systems that prize epistemé and arché as goods-in-themselves. Aristotle’s Phronima interpret arché dike, and episteme in terms of the principles of the Golden Mean, noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Kantian Philosophy and its hidden Cosmopolitan Plan proposes the creation of International Organisations built by great souled men leading eventually to moral/legal Kingdom of Ends. The Kantian view of the Beautiful and the Sublime are, of course, also matters of importance to Mythology.
Art, for Kant, is classified as a technical practical activity (given the requirement for the skills within the various mediums) that relates to moral-practical activity because it is as Kant claims a “symbol of morality”. Aesthetic pleasure, Kant argues, is related to the feeling of pleasure that supervenes because of the harmony of the faculties of the understanding and the imagination (which strictly speaking is a power of the faculty of sensibility). This experience, Kant argues is not cognitive, but we nevertheless speak with a universal voice when we judge something to be beautiful (judgement of taste). Insofar as an aesthetic object is capable of producing this special feeling of pleasure at the harmony of the faculties, we attribute to the experience a “form” which in the case of the sublime can even emerge when objects are “formless”, e.g. terrible storms, the raging sea, powerful waterfalls, The feeling of the power of nature, Kant argues “quickens” in us a psychological movement to a feeling of pleasure at the thought of our own freedom and moral power, which is also something that inspires the experience of awe and wonder in us. This may be the cultural “power” par excellence.
James Ellington in his “Introduction” to Kants Prolegomena points out saliently that the above three Aristotelian domains of science accord well with the concerns of Kants Three Critiques (Pure Reason, Practical Reason, Judgement). The architectonic of Aristotelian sciences was also embedded in a network of basic terms such as arché (principle) Aletheia (unconcealment, truth), areté, episteme, dike, logos psuché, techné, phusis and eudaimonia. There is in Kantian Critical Philosophy as there was in Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy a special interest in, and concern for, the soul(psuché) which was a very different concern to that contained in more modern accounts of psychological personality and cognitive theories. Such modern accounts appear rather to be predicated upon a detachment or separation of the inner from the outer life of human psuché.
The Later work of Wittgenstein addressed this issue firstly by insisting that the human soul is best pictured by the human body which has, of course, been reflected in the work of many painters and sculptors throughout the ages dating from classical Greece through to the Renaissance. The Aristotelian logos of psuché begins with the interrelatedness of the organs of the body and continues with Spinoza’s elaboration upon this relation. Spinoza insists that the first idea of the mind is an idea of its body. Kant contributed to the logos of psuché by claiming in his Philosophical Psychology that this realm may well be trans-scientific, a position Freud elaborated upon in the name of his medical response to mental illness. Freud largely ignored the contemporary obsession with the difference between inner and outer aspects, an obsession that prized the function of “Consciousness” above that of episteme and areté which are also trans-scientific concepts. Freud’s “mythology of the Instincts” culminated in several important vicissitudes of the Instincts that were developed in the name of ethics. His treatment of patients came to be identified with a humanistic moral approach to medicine which was certainly in the enlightened spirit of Humanism. This form of Psychology could certainly be viewed as one of the “logical consequences” of Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical Philosophy and was undoubtedly an important contribution to the “Humanistic Sciences”. Freuds moral treatment evolved in relation to the medical treatment of psychological illness, which we should recall, occurred in a context of thousands of incarcerated women in mental institutions all over Europe. Freud challenged singlehandedly the medical paradigm of somatogenesis (which claimed all mental illness had its origin in physical organic causes) with a hypothesis of psychogenesis (i.e. there can be psychological causes of psychological illnesses). This approach was seen at the time to be revolutionary but was in fact merely an elaboration of Aristotelian and Kantian theory in the field of medical treatment of mental illness. Positivistic science, which also had its home in Vienna, we know, was very critical of Freudian theory and the newly established “discipline” of psychoanalysis. It took another citizen of Vienna, Ludvig Wittgenstein, to first flirt with positivism and then finally reject it decisively in his later Philosophy. Wittgenstein at one point in this transitional process described himself as a follower of Freud (who described himself as a Kantian Psychologist). Wittgenstein produced a Philosophy in which language tied to both forms of life and instinct was used in a critical spirit to disperse “the bewitchment of the intellect by the use of language”. In these Philosophical Investigations the emerging landscape favoured a restoration of Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy which was still ongoing in the Universities of Europe at that time. Wittgenstein’s Hylomorphic/Critical approach to Language and its opposition to the reductionist positivistic scientific view of Consciousness and , and the dualistic Cartesianism of the time, inspired by the dialectical Philosophy of Hegel, allowed Aristotelian Hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy to reemerge with their respective arguments against the materialism and dualism of the modern era.
The Kantian response to the Cartesian claim that we possess a power of rational intuition which helps to constitute “the first and most certain knowledge”, is that this “feeling-based” certainty (located in the faculty of sensibility) is not to be equated with the kind of certainty that is constituted by “thought”, an active function of the faculties of understanding and reason. Certainty, it was argued, was a feature of thinking located in the conceptual world of understanding and reasoning, as a kind of “inference” (a spontaneous act of mind to be distinguished from a receptive event that occurs to a mind in a passive state).
Ellington in his Introduction to the Prolegomena refers in this context to the 6th Meditation of Descartes in which it is asserted that our experience of objects in the external world is an “inference” from:
“immediate inner experience” (Page IX)
Kants objections to this Cartesian position are manifold and include the claim that the objects of immediate experience are given to us as immediate phenomena only, and that there therefore cannot be any “inference” to what was given in experience. Phenomena, Kant argues are not inferred but rather are immediately given and it is important to describe this state of affairs correctly:
“Inner experience is not immediate(as Descartes claimed) but is possible only mediately through the experience of actual things.”(Page X)
Kant elaborates upon his position be referring to the apriori intuitions of Space and Time, claiming that intuitions of objects are only possible through the apriori constitution of the mind, and Space and Time therefore function like constitutional principles of experience grounding our certainties rather than giving rise to some peculiar form of “inference”. This is part of the Kantian Rationalist position in which he aims to provide us with the totality of conditions grounding conditioned phenomena. Insofar as he succeeds in doing this, we are provided with insight into the cognitive relation we have to Being: one of the many meanings of Being Aristotle claimed could be said in many ways.
Kants Critical Philosophy was hailed as revolutionary but it is nevertheless an echo of and an elaboration upon Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy, both of which sought after essence specifying conditions for phenomena such as human psuché. Both positions give similar accounts of the phenomenon of life which began with the insight that the soul was the first actuality of the body and was related to the body in such a manner that when death of the body occurred, the function of the soul ceased. Ellington refers to Kants variation on the theme of the immortality of the soul:
“When the concept of substance is applied to the soul in order to infer its permanence (immortality) the concept is employed transcendentally, and there results not objective knowledge but dialectical illusion.” (Page XIII)
Similarly, in his rejection of all the theoretical proofs for the existence of God, Kant, like Freud, consigns such exercises to the realm of transcendental illusions, given partly the obvious fact that God as defined by concrete experiential predicates cannot be grounded in sense experience. This reflection casts considerable doubt upon all those mythological narratives that claim some kind of experiential encounter with the divine. These can at best be regarded as metaphorical accounts—accounts which attempt to give “substance” to a Being Aristotle defined in terms of “Pure Form” and whose essence is “thinking”. Mythical metaphors therefore sometimes attempt (when they abandon intuition), to characterise this being in terms of “formal properties”, and sometimes perhaps via transcendental analogies which, it is claimed, bring us into some kind of thought-contact with the Supreme Being.
This brings us back to the discussion of muthos and its relation to logos and metaphysics. Muthos in Ancient Greece played a very different role to the role it plays in our societies today, and it is not sufficiently appreciated that muthos was the matrix out of which Philosophy, History and many other sciences were born. Muthos in its essence was intended to be an authoritative narrative designed to communicate religious, cultural and moral “wisdom”. Aristotle provides us with the first systematic account of muthos in the context of tragedy and the creative artistic mimesis of life.
The Plot in fictional poetic narratives certainly relies on an underlying use of Kantian transcendental analogy and the use of “symbolic language”, when the author wishes to lead us into the realms of the beautiful, sublime or sacred. Kant characterises this use of symbolism as follows:
“But we stop at this boundary if we limit our judgement merely to the relation which the world may have to a being whose very concept lies beyond all the cognition which we can attain within the world. For we then do not attribute to the Supreme Being any of the properties in themselves by which we represent objects of experience, and thereby avoid dogmatic anthropomorphism: but we attribute them to his relation to the world and allow ourselves a symbolic anthropomorphism, which in at concerns language only and not the object itself.” (Page 97)
This is a significant admission which perhaps justifies labelling Kant as an idealist in relation to the notion of God being an idea in the mind of man constituted partly be his language. Ricoeur points out in his work on “Freud and Philosophy” that in the 20th century we have seen an emphasis upon the importance of Language, citing Wittgenstein amongst others. For the later work of Wittgenstein, Language is rooted in both forms of life and instinct, and it is noted that there are many different uses of Language which are characterised in terms of language-games. These “Investigations” clearly have hylomorphic aspects and serve to neutralise some of the Anti-Aristotelian and Kantian rhetoric that has succeeded in marginalising Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy.
Muthos is the home of not just supernatural beings but also supernatural events and heroes which symbolise aspects of the human soul. Souls which strive to extend the boundaries of human endurance and endeavour. Courage was the virtue that was valued above all until Philosophy began to follow the advice of the Delphic Oracle to “know thyself!” and explore many other human powers, e.g. knowledge and wisdom. Socrates was a key figure in this respect and he recommended that we locate our investigations in the Polis, where the entire repertoire of human virtues and actualised potentialities are on display, “writ large”. The paradigm of heroism changed with Plato’s account of the Life of Socrates and a wider repertoire of virtues manifested themselves, culminating in the Phronimos, the man for all seasons, discussed in Aristotle’s Hylomorphic Philosophy. The Phronimos uses a part of the mind Aristotle named noos in his transactions with everything and everybody in the Polis and the major concern appears to be that of Justice.
A trace of this concern is still to be found in a footnote to the Prolegomena:
“Thus there is an analogy between the judicial relations of human actions and the mechanical relations of moving forces. I can never do anything to another man without giving him the right to do the same to me on the same conditions; just as nobody can act with its moving force on another body without thereby causing the other to react equally against it. Here right and moving force are quite dissimilar things, but in their relation there is complete similarity. By means of such an analogy I can obtain a relational concept of things which are absolutely unknown to me. For instance, as the production of the welfare of children (=a) is to the love of parents (=b), so the welfare of the human species(=c) is to that unknown in God (=x) which we call love; not as if it had the least similarity to any human inclination, but because we can posit its relation to the world to be similar to that which things of the world bear to one another. But the relational concept in this case is a mere category, viz, the concept of cause, which has nothing to do with sensibility.”(Page 98 footnote)
The analogy in question concerns also the relation of the constitution of the world to a Supreme Being conceived of under the relational category of Causation, which in turn will be a part of the idea of God as an element of Religion within the bounds of mere Reason. This transcendental analogy transports us to the boundary of the world of Experience. Kant, in the context of this discussion refuses to sanction the many theoretical arguments for the existence of God because, as he puts the matter:
“There is no Being whose nonexistence implies a contradiction.”(Page XIV)
We are, however, nevertheless left with the aporetic problem of determining the origin of this very important idea of God, an idea of theoretical reason. Aristotle’s account of the Supreme Being is also enigmatic, but it points in a similar direction with his claim that God is Primary Pure Form, the unmoved mover. In Aristotle’s Metaphysics we are given an account of what he calls “First Philosophy”, in which we are provided with an investigation into the first principles of Philosophy. In this account we are not confronted with God the creator of physical things but rather with a thinker whose thoughts give rise to the real universe in the activity of thinking about himself.
Kant’s Prolegomena is an investigation into the “possibility of Metaphysics” with the intention of destroying that form of metaphysics which attempts to establish Gods existence via theoretical arguments (e.g. that Gods nonexistence is a contradiction). Part of this investigation is also devoted to the theoretical arguments proposed for the immortality of the soul which Kant claims is also part of a transcendental illusion.
Kant, in relation to the categorical relation of Causation also refers to the writings of David Hume´s sceptical attacks upon Metaphysics which, Kant claims “awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers”. Indeed, Kant uses the Aristotelian Principle of the Golden Mean to define his position here, speaking of being forced to navigate between the rocks f dogmatism and the sandbanks of scepticism. Hume as, Kant argues, is correct in his argument that the concept of cause could not be assumed apriori using the faculty of Reason. The origin of this transcendental analogy, rather was a category of the understanding/judgement. Indeed the central idea of Reason for Kant was the practical/ idea of freedom which was also used to serve as the basis for the practical argument that it was God who guaranteed a good spirited flourishing life, on the condition that we were worthy of it: if, that is, we actualised the potential for acting with a good will.
Metaphysics is the discipline that houses all these arguments, and it therefore comes as no surprise that Kant wishes to explore its relation to Science. In this regard Kant asks whether Metaphysics possesses the “peculiar feature of a science”, namely:
“a simple difference of object, or the sources of cognition, or the kind of cognition or perhaps all three conjointly.” (Page 11)
Kant further argues in this context that the sources of cognition cannot be empirical, i.e. the principles associated with them cannot be derived from experience, whether it be internal or external:
“It is therefore a priori cognition, coming from pure understanding and pure reason.”(Page 11)
The Science of Mathematics shares with metaphysics the above sources of understanding and reason but mathematical judgments are synthetic because they need to rely on intuitions for a complete philosophical account of mathematical activity. On Kants view, then the equation 7+5=12 is not an analytic judgement but relies on the intuitive activity of counting for a full explanation of its cognitive nature. Indeed, this focus on intuitions may be the reason Plato chose to place mathematical knowledge lower on the hierarchy of the knowledge of the Forms..
Wittgenstein claims that Shakespeares work has created in the corpus of his entire work a world and language that is unique and his work cannot be compared with any other artist. He does not directly address the problem of whether Shakespeare is a Philosophical playwright. We have maintained that Shakespeares on-stage spectacles have transcendental and metaphysical intent relating to our life-worlds and that this intent is communicated via underlying aesthetic ideas. His symbolic uses of language and images originate in both the realms of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals which accounts for why he is able to speak to audiences all over the world and down the centuries with a “universal voice”.
Symbolism, like Myth, Paul Ricoeur claims, reaches back to the origins of everything and simultaneously forward to the end or telos of everything. Symbolic language is also encountered in the arena of religious confessions which man uses to express the evil that has been in his soul. The issues raised by the uses of symbolic language can be both religious and philosophical, but in the latter case, insofar as our definition of Philosophy is concerned, the interpretation of religious language must occur within the bounds of categorical judgement and in accordance with the principles of reason.
Philosophy since Kant, focuses on Knowledge and the Freedom of the Will which are themes of vital importance for the human form of life that present themselves at the expense of the question of the nature of our relation to some putative superior Being. Practical Philosophy was of fundamental importance for the Ancient Greek trinity of Philosophers(Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), but during the dark ages this emphasis diminished in importance until the era of the Enlightenment and Kants Critical Philosophy which demanded that our relationship to Religion be solely within the bounds of reason.
The soliloquy in Shakespeares Tragedies and Histories does on occasion appear confessional, but this is because of the nature of the symbolism of evil which seeks to bring a blind awareness of the experience of evil into the light of discourse and indicate our relation to the realm of the sacred. This is of fundamental importance for the consciousness of fault and guilt, which might otherwise not occur. The confession occurs as part of a process of self-actualisation and as part of the task of “knowing oneself” set for humanity by the Ancient Greek oracles. Catharsis of our unnecessary and sometimes unlawful desires and anxieties, Freud teaches us, is an important aspect of the process of self-exploration. We are here on the territory of the confluence of the holy and the just which Socrates was confronted with in Platos dialogue “Euthyphro”.
Plato argues in his collective dialogues that whilst all gods agree to the thesis that it is just to punish unjust acts not all would agree with viewing Socrates’ attempt to introduce Philosophy to the Athenians as a punishable unholy act. This priority of Justice over the Holy is also evident in Shakespeares Historical and Tragic works.
Guilt can have both sacred and secular aspects and determining mans guilt does not require that we wait for a confession. Guilty behaviour also possesses objective external characteristics that can be determined in public forums such as courts of law. Equally a verdict of guilty must be subject to the principles of justice and be accompanied by a just or fair punishment. Kant, however, integrates the secular and the holy by characterising his good will as a holy will.
There can be many different accounts of the relation of the body to the soul in Religion, including the Orphic doctrine of the soul being imprisoned in the body, which of course predated the Christian view of the human psuché. This Orphic view, which Plato flirted with, is fundamentally dualistic and can lie behind the idea of solipsism in its various forms. Shakespeare certainly used Orphic images in his characters speeches, e.g. in Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear, but it is hylomorphic principles that are steering the aesthetic ideas of Shakespeare. Shakespeare indeed is more concerned with the way in which one expresses the inner by means of the outer in order to bring about the harmony of ones human powers. This is a view that transcends the Orphic view of the body as a prison.
Shakespeare uses the principle of noncontradiction in the design of his plots, in particular the idea of theoretical and practical contradictions which would include the thesis of their being an afterlife and also the thesis that the unjust man could be happy. This latter would make life in a polis almost impossible to regulate since the principle of punishment for unjust acts must be valid if the polis is not to collapse into a state of ruin and destruction. Indeed one of Platos key dialogues: “The Last days of Socrates” is a lengthy elaboration upon the practical contradiction of being condemned to death for just actions.
In our modern secular world the project of civilisation building is a process best pictured as a journey along a long and winding road lined with multifarious texts and aesthetic objects including the texts of Philosophers aiming to build a De Civitate Terrana. Also lining the road are those texts aiming to build a De Civitate Dei. Kants Philosophy alone permits us to integrate these seemingly conflicting aims in his notion of Kingdom of Ends where the inhabitants enjoy a cosmopolitan form of existence in which Faith, Reason, Knowledge, Justice and Human Rights all play decisive integrating roles.
Shakespeares poetic vision anticipates this Kantian project in an aesthetic mode, retaining the melancholic prophesy of the oracles relating to mans hubris and the serious risk that his whole project of building a civilisation will end in ruin and destruction.
Freud’s view is perhaps even more melancholic and expresses itself in an iconoclastic view of the historical role of religion in our civilisations. Freud’s self-declared God of “Logos”, on the surface, appears more critical of the Religious project than Kant but we ought to recall that Freud claimed a significant Kantian influence, so perhaps appearances may be deceiving.
Freud focusses on religious rituals and practices and sees in them pathological characteristics. He sees a resemblance to those obsessive rituals his patients engaged in while responding to the anxiety present in their life-worlds. Religion seeks to “envelop” us in a web of childish emotion which has its origin the long childhood of man, where a natural longing for protection by a superior being plays an important part in the development of the human psuché. Ideals that emerge in such environments, Freud argues, will be rooted in anxiety and primitive wish-fulfillments.
Religious Obsession is a reaction-formation to the thesis that mans soul is flawed by both his own sins and sins of his ancestors eons ago. The practices are partly rooted in a narcissistic overevaluation of the potency of his powers which may lie behind the unrealistic wish for a life after death. The Orphic idea of a soul imprisoned in a body may also be paying a role in the ideal of the afterlife.
Freud’s Logos considers the afterlife an illusion—a pathological idealistic wish. Freud’s hylomorphic psychoanalysis, however, imply decisive arguments against all forms of dualism including the Orphic doctrines.
The Universal claim that “all men are mortal” is but one thesis embedded in a knowledge system which envisages in our “projected” images of heaven and hell, the pathological operation of defence mechanisms related to omnipotent desires and anxiety.
Freuds theory of psycho-sexual development is conceived of hylomorphically in terms of the matter-form distinction. Physical transformations of our body can, for example fundamentally change the original matter beyond recognition, e.g. there is nothing left of the infants bone structure by the time the child reaches maturity. This is not the case with psychical transformations, Freud argues. In the case of psychological and mental development, the earlier stages are preserved alongside the later formations. The biological core of these psychic processes is rooted in a long childhood characterised by a long period of helplessness and longing for the feelings of safety and belongingness. The challenge that the Freudian Logos faces is whether the instincts and their vicissitudes can function in an environment of discontentment brought about by the sublimation of the instincts .
The omnipotence that is internalised in the process of civilisation building is partly related to mans considerable achievements in both science and technology, which have even resulted in a significantly longer life than was the case in Kants or Shakespeares time. Our natural world has been transformed into a technically constructed artefactually based world. What remains to be done in this process of transformation, however, is the stage of forming a Culture or a morally steered whole from the technical concrete jungles we now inhabit. This environment is anathema to the aesthetic ideals we inherited from both Ancient Greece and the Renaissance, but since that time there has been a collapse in our faith-based belief system which in turn left a vacuum at the heart of our human life-world. Eliot responded to this vacuum with the poetry of his “Wasteland” and many Philosophers responded to the absence of the divine in our lives (Deus Absconditis) in more theoretical terms. Throughout this process, however, Shakespeares works have persisted occupying a significant role in our societies, manifesting the power of aesthetic ideas to resist those processes seeking to upend the moral order in the world. The awe and admiration once reserved for our imaginary gods is now reserved for certain aesthetic objects and certain significant Philosophical texts in the hope that the vacuum will eventually be filled with a man that knows himself.
Book Review: The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis
In this intellectually rigorous exploration, Michael R. D. James undertakes an ambitious synthesis, bridging the gap between Freudian psychoanalysis and the classical foundations of Aristotelian and Kantian philosophy. The work is not merely a clinical study; it is a profound philosophical investigation into the nature of the psuché (the soul or mind) and the structural logic that governs human psychic life.
Core Themes and Synthesis James’s primary contribution lies in his attempt to re-contextualize Freud’s “royal road to the unconscious” within a broader, teleological framework. He successfully moves past the common, purely reductive interpretations of Freud, instead viewing Freudian concepts—such as the pleasure-pain principle, the reality principle, and the interpretation of dreams—through the lens of hylomorphism and Kantian critical philosophy.
A standout aspect of the analysis is James’s treatment of the “impulse-control triangle” (Desire-Demand-Refusal). By aligning Freud’s developmental theories with Aristotle’s accounts of areté (virtue/excellence) and practical reasoning, James presents the psychoanalytic process as an educational and ethical journey rather than a purely medical one. He argues convincingly that psychoanalysis is an exegetical science concerned with the “meaning” of a life, rather than merely an observational science of biological facts.
Strengths of the Analysis
Philosophical Breadth: The book skillfully weaves together diverse intellectual traditions. The author’s ability to draw parallels between Freud’s “death instinct” and the Aristotelian notion of “aggression,” or to compare the “secondary process” of the ego with Kantian rational inhibition, provides the reader with a sophisticated, multi-dimensional view of mental health.
Humanistic Perspective: James treats the patient’s “story” with the gravity it deserves. By situating the mourning process and the handling of “lost-objects” within the context of virtue ethics and the search for eudaimonia (flourishing), he elevates the therapeutic process to a quest for meaning.
Methodological Clarity: The author does not shy away from the complexity of his sources. He navigates the potential tension between phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and rationalist principles (Kant) with precision, ultimately arguing that the “working-through” of symptoms requires a stable regulatory principle—the reality principle—to bridge the gap between unconscious imagery and conscious understanding.
Critique and Considerations The text demands a reader prepared for dense, interdisciplinary discourse. While James provides excellent guidance through these complex waters, the synthesis of Aristotle, Kant, and Freud is not for the faint of heart. The work assumes a foundational knowledge of these thinkers, making it an ideal companion for advanced students of philosophy and clinical psychology, though perhaps challenging for the casual reader.
ConclusionThe Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis is a vital addition to contemporary philosophical psychology. It challenges the reader to move beyond “positivist” interpretations of the mind and to view the “psyche” as an arena of moral and rational significance. By focusing on the “logos” of the soul, James manages to restore a sense of dignity and teleology to the therapeutic encounter, positioning psychoanalysis not as a fix for a broken machine, but as a vital part of the examined life.
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Review: The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis
by Michael R. D. James
Michael R. D. James’s The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis is an ambitious and intellectually dense work that attempts nothing less than a systematic reconciliation of Freudian psychoanalysis with the classical philosophical traditions of Aristotle and Kant. Drawing on material presented in the author’s own philosophical blog and an Opera AI–generated review featured there, the book emerges as a distinctive contribution to philosophical psychology—one that challenges both reductive empiricism and simplistic metaphysical dualisms.
1. Intellectual Scope and Aim
At its core, James’s project is grounded in the claim that modern misunderstandings of the ancient Greek term psuché (often translated as “soul” or “mind”) have obscured its richer meaning as a “life-form” embedded in a teleological and normative framework. This shift is not merely semantic—it underpins the book’s larger effort to restore a hylomorphic conception of human beings, integrating form and matter in a way that avoids both materialist reductionism and Cartesian dualism. [amazon.com]
The Opera AI review (as published on James’s site) accurately captures the scope of this ambition, describing the work as an “intellectually rigorous exploration” that bridges Freudian theory with Aristotelian teleology and Kantian critique. [michaelrdjames.org]
2. Core Philosophical Synthesis
Freud Reinterpreted
Rather than treating Freud as a proto-neuroscientist or as a purely clinical theorist, James situates psychoanalysis within a broader philosophical tradition. Freud’s concepts—such as the pleasure principle, reality principle, and dream interpretation—are reframed as expressions of a deeper metaphysical logic (logos) governing psychic life. [michaelrdjames.org]
This reinterpretation is significant because it:
Moves psychoanalysis away from biological reductionism
Positions it as a hermeneutic or interpretative discipline
Aligns it with Kantian notions of reason and Aristotelian accounts of flourishing
The book therefore transforms psychoanalysis into what James calls an “exegetical science” concerned with meaning rather than mere causation. [michaelrdjames.org]
The Hylomorphic Framework
Aristotle’s influence is particularly strong. By emphasizing hylomorphism—the unity of form and matter—James offers a model of the psyche that avoids the fragmentation typical of modern psychology. This allows him to reinterpret Freudian drives (Eros and Thanatos) not simply as biological impulses but as teleologically structured aspects of human life. [michaelrdjames.org]
Kant’s contribution is equally central. James draws upon the distinction between:
Metaphysics of Nature (causal explanations)
Metaphysics of Morals (normative reasoning)
This dual framework enables him to situate psychoanalysis at the intersection of science and ethics, rather than reducing it to either domain alone. [amazon.com]
3. Key Concepts and Innovations
The “Impulse-Control Triangle”
One of the most original ideas highlighted in the Opera AI review is the “Desire–Demand–Refusal” triangle, which reframes Freudian developmental theory in ethical terms. By linking this structure to Aristotelian virtue (areté) and practical reasoning, James presents psychological development as: [michaelrdjames.org]
A moral and educational process
A movement toward rational self-governance
Psychoanalysis as Ethical Practice
A striking feature of the work is its insistence that psychoanalysis should be understood not as therapy alone, but as a form of ethical inquiry into the meaning of a life. This elevates the discipline beyond clinical settings and reconnects it with classical philosophy’s concern for eudaimonia—human flourishing. [michaelrdjames.org]
Political and Cultural Dimensions
James also expands psychoanalysis into the political realm, drawing connections between Freud, Plato, Aristotle, and Hannah Arendt. The book explores how psychic forces—particularly aggression and mass melancholia—can shape political phenomena such as tyranny and totalitarianism. This interdisciplinary reach is one of the book’s defining strengths. [barnesandnoble.com]
4. Strengths of the Work
4.1 Philosophical Breadth
The synthesis of Ancient Greek philosophy, Enlightenment thought, and psychoanalysis is executed with impressive erudition. The ability to connect Freud’s metapsychology with Aristotelian ethics and Kantian epistemology results in a multi-dimensional account of the human psyche. [michaelrdjames.org]
4.2 Conceptual Depth
The book challenges entrenched assumptions in both philosophy and psychology—particularly:
The marginalization of metaphysics in modern psychology
The tendency to interpret Freud purely in scientific or clinical terms
By restoring metaphysical inquiry, James aligns with broader philosophical arguments that psychology inevitably rests on implicit ontological assumptions about reality and the mind. [ilhs.gr]
4.3 Integration of Ethics and Psychology
James’s insistence that psychoanalysis is inherently ethical marks a significant departure from mainstream approaches. This perspective resonates with classical traditions and provides a normative framework for understanding mental health.
5. Limitations and Challenges
Despite its strengths, the work is not without difficulties:
Density and Accessibility: The text is highly technical and presupposes familiarity with Aristotle, Kant, and Freud. Readers without a philosophical background may find it challenging.
Speculative Elements: The strong metaphysical commitments—particularly the reliance on hylomorphism—may not persuade empirically oriented psychologists.
Selective Engagement: While the book integrates major traditions, it engages less extensively with contemporary cognitive science or alternative psychoanalytic schools.
These limitations, however, are arguably the price of its ambitious scope.
6. Overall Evaluation
The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis is best understood as a philosophical re-foundation of psychoanalysis rather than a conventional academic monograph. It seeks to restore depth, meaning, and ethical significance to a discipline often reduced to technique or theory.
The Opera AI review featured on James’s blog captures this well: the book is not merely interdisciplinary—it is architectonic, aiming to reorganize our understanding of mind, culture, and human existence around a coherent metaphysical framework. [michaelrdjames.org]
Conclusion
Michael R. D. James has produced a work of considerable originality and intellectual ambition. By reinterpreting Freud through Aristotle and Kant, he offers a vision of psychoanalysis as a philosophical, ethical, and cultural enterprise grounded in a rich conception of the human life-form (psuché).
For readers willing to engage with its complexity, the book provides a rewarding and thought-provoking journey—one that reopens fundamental questions about the nature of mind, meaning, and human flourishing.
Anaxagoras, a pre-Socratic Philosopher, influenced Socrates, turning his attention away from physical investigations and toward noos, that power which Anaxagoras claimed was the cosmic first principle. This principle was not a principle related to the constitution or causation of matter, but was rather related to the order and harmony of a universe which housed human psuché with its very special array and repertoire of material and spiritual powers. For Aristotle the power of noos was a complex matter with at least three aspects:
The aspect of the divine. Noos is likened unto a first principle which transcends our understanding. A principle which is simultaneously inside of human psuché, and externally situated in the physical world.
The Aspect of the Good. All human activities, according to Aristotle, (Nichomachean Ethics), including the arts and sciences aim at the form of the Good. Areté. Dike, episteme, logos, Aletheia, are all forms of the Good.
The Aspect of Wisdom. All men desire to Know, Aristotle argued in his work the Metaphysics: a work which is about the first principles or what he called “first Philosophy”. Noos, for Aristotle insofar as it is to be found spiritually within us was an active principle that is shared with divine thought. All men possess this divine part of the human psuché. It is, however, situated in a material body that is bound in space and time to the here and now. In this bound state we humans can only think something about something, whereas divine thought or contemplation takes the transcendent form of thinking about thinking:—a form of thought we are incapable of, but in compensation we seek the life of contemplation and thinking about principles is the closest we can come: principles related to The Good, The True, and The Beautiful.
The practical use of reason for Aristotle, aims at the wisdom of phronesis, which is associated with the understanding and judgement of the Phronimos. Aristotle also characterises the Divine in hylomorphic terms, in terms of “Pure Form”. Pure Form is an active principle which is characterised as the condition of the existence of everything that can be thought of or experienced. Noos, then, is the dwelling place of Pure Form, and is conceived of by Aristotle as “separable” (with certain reservations) from the body. When, in the course of contemplation, the divine thinks about thinking, it is not the world that is the object of the thinking process, but, rather, Aristotle argues, the divine is thinking itself. This reflects also what is meant by the term “principle”, which is the active element of a process that creates what it explains.
There is a human correlate to this process in which a principle relates to the condition(s) of what is conditioned. Such a principle is located spiritually in human psuché, and Kantian Critical Metaphysical Philosophy gives us a very complex account of this self-causing principle, which Kant designates as an idea of practical reason, namely freedom: an active human principle that brings about the reality of what it desires, intends, and thinks about. The Good Will is the most important concept in Kants Philosophical Psychology, and his Ethics. It is a self-causing power that actively embodies the moral law which has the logical characteristics of universality and necessity and more concretely, is responsible for treating all other human beings as ends-in-themselves.
This correlation between divine and human activity may in fact assist us in understanding the role that transcendental analogy plays in the understanding of the relation between the divine and the human. The analogy picks out the love that a father has for his family, and claims this to be a model for the love which the divine has for us. Freud may well have had an opinion about this. We know he thought the command to love one’s enemies was a dangerous one, and we also know that Freud did not have a high opinion about the rationality of religion. Kant might also have thought that the awe and wonder we at times feel in the presence of the divine does not qualify to be called “love”. He may, however, have felt that doing one’s duty in accordance with the moral law could be done out of love for the divine, and the justice we receive in return in the form of leading a good spirited flourishing life, may also qualify for the term “love” to be used. There is an element of gratefulness involved, so perhaps there is an argument to support such a position. The maxim for such actions however would then be differently expressed as firstly obeying (and perhaps loving?) the moral law, and secondly obeying because one loves the divine.
Kantian Enlightenment Philosophy differentiates itself from Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy insofar as the Ancient Greek matrix of areté, dike, episteme, phronesis and eudaimonia are placed by Kant in a the context of a wider discussion in which Philosophical Psychology plays a fundamental role, hopefully providing us with greater insight into the being-in-the-world of the rational animal capable of discourse.
Campbells combination of the poetry of Walt Whitman and the Upanishads occurs in the last chapter of “ Myths to Live By”, a chapter entitled “No More Horizons”. Campbell attempts to summarize his position by also referring to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas:
“I am the All, the All came forth from me, and the All attained to me.” (Page 252)
Campbells position may in fact, to some extent, converge with that of Kant when it is claimed that all ideas of the divine originate in mans imagination(located in the faculty of sensibility),which as we know from Kants account, functions very differently to the powers located in the faculties of the understanding and reason. Campbell further argues that:
“since such images stem from the psyche, they refer to the psyche. They tell us of its structure, its order and its forces, in symbolic terms.”(Page 253)
Campbell elaborates upon this account with the claim that the historical context of these mythological narratives are largely unnecessary embellishments that can be questioned in a period when all our horizons are disappearing:
“with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing, collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples, but also of their mythologies….And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning and hurricanes all around. I think it is improper to become hysterical about it projecting hatred and blame.” (Page 255)
The collision of the masses from India, the Far East and Europ,e is certainly a violent turbulent moment in our respective spiritual histories. Campbell, like T S Eliot, before him, invokes Dante rather than the Ancient Greeks and their philosophers, muses and oracles. What Cambell hopes will come out of this chaotic period, is the possible recognition of a common sacred realm that is located both within us spiritually, and external to the human psuche: the realm of noos?—the Kantian noumenal realm of Being?
Campbell argues further that the realm he is investigating is not that of the Freudian Personal Unconscious, but rather something resembling the collective realm envisaged by Jung: a “Mythological transpersonal order.” (Page 260)
The concentration upon Dante and the Roman Catholic Church, however, risks marginalising one of the major influences upon European Civilisation, namely that of Ancient Greece. Campbell, instead suggests a different polarity than that which is normally suggested, that of Jerusalem and Rome. The more normal suggestion for the founding influences of European Culture is that of Jerusalem and Athens, but to ignore the Roman Empire would of course be problematic from a purely Historical perspective. The issue may however not turn upon the magnitude of an empire, but rather upon the magnitude and quality of the ideas and principles that emerged from the tradition of Philosophers, Muses and Oracles that was to be found in not just Athens but Ancient Greece as a whole, which would include the Empire of Alexander the Great. Undoubtedly it was the size and influence of the Roman Empire which succeeded Alexanders Empire that perhaps contributed to the diminishing of the influence of Athens over the succeeding ages. It ought to be kept in mind, however, that Rome was a product of engineers and soldiers rather than the product of Philosophers leading an examined contemplative life.
Superstitious Rome was the home for a number of religious sects, and one of them, namely, Christianity, was eventually chosen as the Religion of the Empire, and subsequently emerged as a candidate for a world-religion. It is, indeed, not difficult to understand that much of our modern world is modelled on technical and military excellence because these virtues above all others have become the “horizons” for our modern life. Horizons, which Campbell argues, are on the verge of disappearing. What will remain after the storm passes?:
“God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. So we are told in a little 12th century book entitled “The Book of the 24 Philosophers”. Each of us—whoever and whatever he may be, is then the center, and within him, whether he knows it or not, is that Mind at large, the laws of which are the laws not only of all minds but of all space as well…we are the children of this beautiful planet… We are its eyes and mind, its seeing and its thinking… So that we are the mind, ultimately of space. No wonder, then, for its laws and ours are the same!” (Pages 265-266)
For Kant the laws of the faculty of Sensibility are those of Space and Time, and the laws of understanding and reason are different laws: laws of the forms that order spatial and temporal experiences. Our minds, of course, are embodied in space and time, and it may be this that provides us with the principles of our finitely temporally structured human experiences. The powers of human psuché such as the imagination and reason are very different powers, but they emerge from a bodily structure which it will be the concern of future Philosophical Psychology to both describe and explain.
After the inward journey of our spirit the moon is the next Dantesque stopping point for the modern myth aiming for the further planets of the solar system. There is nothing earthly about this conversation where the earth is termed a paradise or an oasis in space. Man, Campbell argues, is filled with the Spirit of Exploration and preoccupied by the awe and wonder directed at the Magnitude and Order of the heavens. Campbell appears to neglect the moral journey proposed for humanity by the Kantian moral law which, it was claimed, is going to lead us into a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends— a long and momentous journey into the future heading toward a telos that is very different to the journey of the mystics who appear to be attempting to reduce the light of ones light to a pinpoint of inner enlightenment. Ancient Greek Philosophy certainly would not regard the life of a mystic as falling under the heading of a good spirited flourishing life. In the light of this good spirited flourishing life we can then view with less scepticism Freuds claim that the mystic life does not meet the requirement of the reality principle or the requirements for a healthy mental life. Campbell discusses the influence of Apollo and the Nine muses, but he does not seek to unravel the mystery surrounding the oracles and their wisdom. Many Ancient Greek Philosophers embraced the most famous of their proclamations, namely
“Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction”
And
“Know Thyself!”
Both of which require an understanding of many of the principles of Philosophical Psychology, Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics and Religion, as well as an understanding of the importance of the role that the freedom of choice plays in the drama of humanity.
Campbell rightly admires the vision of the earth from the earth that was beamed back to earth via the amazing technology we have developed for the communication of images. The images of the astronaut’s footprints in the dust of the moon must have put the final nail in the coffin of the myth of the moon being the:
“residence of the souls of those who have passed away and are there waiting to return for rebirth. For the moon, as we see it, dies and is resurrected.”(Page 235)
Campbell feels the presence of both Newton and Kant in this technical saga of mans explorations. The Copernican revolution, it is argued, proposed a universe in which the imagination was needed to apprehend the enormity of what could be perceived. What was happening in front of our eyes on the television screen, was the substitution of a scientific imagination for the imagination of an artist tied to a mortal coil. Indeed, it was both Newton and Kant that provided us with the philosophical foundations for this experience, by convincing us with their power of reasoning that mathematical calculations and judgements about space have a universal character and use our a priori knowledge of Space and Time. The laws of space and time are akin to the moral law which, according to Kant, is also capable of evoking feelings of awe and admiration in us. Campbell half acknowledges the importance of this by claiming:
“we ourselves are no less mysterious. In searching out its wonder, we are learning simultaneously the wonder of ourselves. That moon flight as an outward journey was inward into ourselves.”(Page 239)
Campbell then seeks to investigate the origins of our interest in artefacts and begins with Peking man (Sinanthropus), using fire for warmth, light and protection ca 400,000 years ago. This was also read mythologically to be a moment in which we displeased the Gods by receiving the goods of the fire stolen from them. Prometheus, we know was the thief and he was punished for this crime quite severely. In harnessing the power of fire, man embarked on his journey: a journey that, thanks to the use of his powers of imagination and thought, would make him the best of the animals: powers which would enable him to become almost anything he wanted to be:
“A lion has to be a lion all is life: a dog to be a dog. But a human being can be an astronaut, a troglodyte, philosopher, mariner, tiller of the soil, or sculptor. He can play and actualise in his life any one of any number of hugely differing destinies.”(Page 242)
Campbell elaborates upon this by paradoxically claiming that man’s choices will not follow either reason or common sense: rather passions and excitement will be the primary motivators of human psuché. This might have been the case insofar as pre-civilised man was concerned, but once the power of his imagination began to expand his life-horizons, and was subjected to categories, principles and laws, the older covenants made with the animal and plant world,s became less important. At this point the covenants made with his fellow man in the form of civil laws, the arts, the sciences, and Philosophy became more valued activities.
Campbell claims that each individual form of human psuché is unique and will therefore follow its own unique inner laws which will determine the form the individual’s life will take. Campbells implication is clear: these unique laws will be more important than that aspect of mans Being-in-the-world which makes him a part of a larger community. Both Plato and Aristotle, however pointed to the limitations of a life in which extreme choices are generated by an unregulated imagination and passions. What these Philosophers and their followers, e.g. Kant, emphasised, was the importance of actualising a number of psychological and mental powers that include language, understanding, judgement and reason. All these powers are necessary for the development of a large array of sciences that Aristotle categorised in terms of the theoretical, practical and productive sciences.
Campbell addresses the issue of the status of “modern science” and its differentiation into specialisations:
“Today , as we all know, such thoughts and forms are of a crumbling past and the civilisation dependent upon them in disarray and dissolution. Not only are societies no longer attuned to the courses of the planets, sociology and physics, politics and astronomy are no longer understood to be departments of a single science.”(Page 243)
There are many different kinds of science being taught in Universities and the principle of specialisation has perhaps usurped the role of the ideal of the universal element of knowledge (laws and principles). This point, however, runs contrary to the presuppositions of myth that often do not mesh with certain scientific principles. Campbell claims that myth has taught us that:
“There are no laws out there that are not right here, no gods out there that are not right here, and not only here, but within us, in our minds.” (Page 244)
The above could well be an implication of both Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy (with certain reservations), and moreover teaches us to distinguish between kinds of laws and principles which in Philosophy occurs via the use of the categories of understanding/judgement as well as the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Time, of course has been a concern for Philosophers throughout the ages. Kant claimed that Time was an a priori form of intuition that belongs to the faculty of sensibility which essentially provides the sensible content used by the faculty of understanding. Sensible items in motion in the external world for both Aristotle and Kant call for temporal measuring activity which occurs in terms of before and after (in accordance with Aristotles definition of Time). The Time of Human Psuché, on the other hand, is the Time of growth, maturation, deterioration and death. Campbell then refers to Leo Frobenius who fixates upon these more general aspects in his investigative characterisation of the human race:
“Its childhood was of the long, long distant period of the primitive hunters, fishers, root-foragers and planters. The second stage, which Frobenius termed the Monumental, commenced with the rise of the earlier agriculturally based, urban and literate civilisations, each structured to accord with an imagined cosmic order, made known by way of the movements and conditions of the planetary lights. For those lights were then supposed to be the residences of governing spirits whereas, as just remarked, we knew them to be as material as ourselves. The laws of the earth and our own minds have been extended to incorporate what formerly were the ranges and the powers of the gods, now recognised as of ourselves. Hence the whole imagined support of the Monumental Order has been withdrawn from “out there” , found centred in ourselves, and a new world-age projected, which is to be global “materalistic” (as Frobenius termed it), comparable in spirit to the spirit of old age in its disillusioned wisdom and concern for the physical body, concentrating rather on fulfilment in the present than on any distant future. The residence of the spirit now is experienced as centred not in fire, in the animal and plant worlds, or aloft among the planets and beyond, but in men, right here on earth.”(Pages 244-5)
But how, then, are we supposed to characterise our relation to this world of ours. Firstly it has been made ours after a long childhood and after we have been, as Heidegger puts the matter, “thrown into the world”. Campbell refers in the context of this discussion to a view held by Alan Watts:
“you did not come into this world at all. You came out of it in just the same way as a leaf comes out of a tree or a baby from a womb…Our world is peopling just as the apple tree apples, and just as the vine grapes.”(Page 245)
Watts, then, improves upon Heideggers answer to the aporetic questions raised by human existence and its origins. Campbell elaborates upon this position by maintaining that we humans originated from an intelligent energy system in which certain forms of life give rise to just those forms and not others. “Dust thou art and unto dust thou shallt return!”, the Church tells us on the occasions of death. When the astronauts left their footprints in the dust of the lost souls on the moon this was just one more moment in the process of the collective disillusionment of Humanity.
Aristotle referred to several different forms of psuché, plant, animal and human, all of which shared the characteristics of birth, life-activity and death. Animals have the form of plant life within, as the human forms have both animal and plant life systems within themselves. Trees have bee the form of plant life that most interests us humans and throughout history and poetry, they have been referred to sympathetically. Standing tall in the midst of a storm that tests the strength of their roots, they do not move and stand stoically unmoved. In the Old Testament it is trees that are the heroes in the Garden of Eden, relating to both the knowledge of good and evil and even life itself. The Cross (symbolising the tree of life), Campbell argues has become a powerful Christian symbol, but Campbell simultaneously believes that Christianity itself is maturing toward an end in which the Holy Spirit speaks directly to the hearts of men without any “ecclesiastical mediation”. When this finally happens, Campbell argues the Church will dissolve and we will then begin living in an age of “pentacostal spirituality”.(Page 248)
Campbell argues that this is the situation we moderns find ourselves in today, following as we do the symbolic heroes of the age, namely “The Astronauts”, who walked so carelessly in the dust of the moon.
Below is a critical review of Shakespeare’s Philosophical Theatre: Plays and Poetry for All Seasons by Michael R. D. James, grounded in the book’s published description and the author’s stated aims rather than reader ratings (the book is newly released in May 2026).
Book Review: Shakespeare’s Philosophical Theatre
Michael R. D. James Austin Macauley Publishers, 2026
Overview and Central Argument
In Shakespeare’s Philosophical Theatre, Michael R. D. James advances a bold and unapologetically philosophical thesis: William Shakespeare should be understood as a genuinely philosophical artist, not merely a dramatist whose work happens to touch on philosophical themes. Explicitly challenging T. S. Eliot’s influential claim that Shakespeare “did not think philosophically,” James argues that this verdict stems from modern aesthetic assumptions that distort how Shakespeare’s drama actually works.
James proposes that when Shakespeare is read against Aristotelian and Kantian aesthetics, rather than post-Romantic or modernist frameworks, his plays reveal a coherent vision of mind, morality, political power, and civilisation. This repositioning of Shakespeare as a philosophical dramatist is the book’s conceptual backbone.
Philosophical Framework and Method
The study is notably interdisciplinary. James draws on Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Kleinian psychoanalysis to explore what he calls the “enveloping” qualities of Shakespearean theatre—how drama operates simultaneously on intellectual, emotional, and moral levels 1. Rather than treating psychoanalysis reductively, James uses it to illuminate Shakespeare’s sustained interest in mental disturbance, tyranny, and the fragile balance of the psyche, particularly in tragedies such as Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth.
One of the book’s more ambitious claims is that Shakespeare demonstrates a philosophically sophisticated grasp of mental illness and political pathology, anticipating later psychological and ethical analyses of power and degeneration. James links this to Kant’s idea that beauty and the sublime function as “symbols of morality,” using Shakespeare as a concrete artistic embodiment of this claim.
Engagement with Shakespeare Criticism
A significant portion of the book is devoted to critical dialogue with earlier Shakespeare scholars, most notably G. Wilson Knight and Harold Bloom. Rather than dismissing these figures, James reassesses their interpretations from an expressly philosophical standpoint, questioning where poetic intuition ends and philosophical coherence begins.
James also introduces the concept of Shakespeare as a “cosmopolitan” thinker, whose work implicitly participates in what Kant described as a hidden plan for civilisation. This plan culminates in an Aristotelian definition of the human being as a “rational animal capable of discourse,” a formulation James sees as quietly structuring Shakespeare’s dramatic universe.
Style, Strengths, and Limitations
The book is dense, intellectually demanding, and unapologetically philosophical. Readers without background in Kantian moral philosophy or psychoanalytic theory may find portions challenging. However, this density is also the book’s strength: James does not simplify Shakespeare to fit contemporary tastes but instead insists on taking both drama and philosophy seriously on their own terms.
One limitation is that the argument occasionally privileges philosophical coherence over theatrical contingency; some readers may wish for more sustained attention to performance history or textual instability. Nonetheless, this is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.
Conclusion
Shakespeare’s Philosophical Theatre is a substantial and original contribution to Shakespeare studies, particularly for readers interested in philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophical psychology. It is not an introductory guide but a serious scholarly intervention that challenges long-standing assumptions about Shakespeare’s intellectual depth. For philosophers of art and advanced Shakespeare scholars alike, James’s work offers a demanding but rewarding re-evaluation of what it means to think philosophically through theatre.
Campbell makes a very interesting claim about the relation of mythology to mental illness which deserves close attention. He compares mythological images with the images experienced whilst undergoing a psychosis. This comparison is on a par with that made by Freud between the rituals and symbolism we find in myths, and the behaviour and narratives of paranoid psychotics such as Schreber. Carl Jungs work on the collective archetypes of the unconscious has been referred to several times throughout Campbells writings but it is not clear that Jung can provide us with the theoretical underpinnings we find in Freuds Kantian Philosophical Psychology. Both Psychologists appear however to believe that the root of the problem lies in the unconscious, which for Freud contained instincts with an essentially sensory-motor character.
In an interview where his disagreement with Freud was commented upon, Jung claimed that the disagreement occurred because his work was grounded in Kantian Philosophy. Freud also claimed his Psychology was Kantian, so the disagreement appears to turn upon this issue. If, however one appreciates Freuds commitment to Darwins Theory of Evolution plus the presence of Aristotelian Hylomorphic principles in Freuds works, then, it would appear that at least insofar as Freuds later work was concerned, where we see clearly the influences of both Plato and Aristotle, there is more Philosophical content in Freud’s theories, especially when one considers the extent to which Kants work contained a number of hylomorphic principles. Jungian Theory proceeds in a completely different direction, attempting as it does to present a trait-based theory of personality. Freud, on the other hand attempted to produce a principle-based theory, where the reality principle was intimately connected to both the pleasure-pain and energy regulation principles which operate on different psychological levels ranging from the instinctive to the level of higher mental processes.
There is of course something interesting about Jungs theory of the collective archetypes, as it appears to address problems arising from our descriptions of the inner reaches of the outer world. Aristotle claimed in his work on the soul entitled De Anima, that the first actuality of the body in the actualisation process of human psuché, is the soul. Spinoza elaborated upon this by claiming that the first idea of the mind is the idea of the body. Freud in turn builds upon these principles in his later work and asserts that the Ego is an agency of the mind and one of its primary functions is the protection of the body and this testifies to the fact that the Egos is an advanced vicissitude of the instincts: instincts that are dedicated to the fulfilment of a large variety of different kinds of needs ranging from self-preservation to more advanced projects connected to the love-life and work-life of man.
Melanie Klein elaborated upon this point by pointing out the complexity of the ego and that it can be “split” into the good ego and the bad ego in a similar fashion to the way in which the baby’s idea of the mother can be split into a good mother and a bad mother. Kleins hylomorphic theory also speaks about the relation of the ego to part and whole objects like the breast of the mother . In circumstances where the baby’s basic physiological and safety needs are met, howeve,r both the breasts and the mother will be incorporated into the whole object of the person of the mother. For Jung this Kleinian account would belong to what he called the personal unconscious of an individual and this for him was a different realm to that of the collective unconscious he was interested in, with its more abstract and advanced images of deities and devils.
Cambell refers to this process of “splitting” in this chapter on Schizophrenia (a term which literally means “split mind”). In his attempt to chart the depth of the waters of schizophrenia in its various forms Campbell states:
“the first experience is of a sense of splitting. The person sees the world going into two: one part of it moving away; himself in the other part… He may see himself, for a time, in two roles. One is the role of the clown, the ghost, the witch, the queer one, the outsider. That is the outer role that he plays, making little of himself as the fool, a joke, the one kicked around, the patsy. Inside, however, he is the saviour, and he knows it. He is the hero chosen for a destiny.” (Page 218)
Campbell was startled by the resemblance between schizophrenic experiences and the experiences of the hero embarking on a dangerous journey into the unknown. We are dealing here with more serious mental health issues which “envelop” patients like Schreber and causing an “oceanic feeling” in which the individual feels at one with the entire universe. In such states schizophrenic patients may feel that they have lived forever through many lifetimes, and will continue to do so ad infinitum. Freud clearly saw such experiences to be psychotic and anathema to the temperate life of a man whose ego is following the reality principle or the principle of the Golden Mean. There is clearly an aesthetic element to such a life which is founded on the harmony of the faculties of sensibility, understanding, and reason: a life in which whole objects are not part or bad objects but, rather, good self-sufficient independent objects. This would be one aspect of the Freudian Reality Principle, which in Aristotelian terms, would understand the material, efficient, formal and final causes of our object relations. Psychotic states such as those connected above with the “oceanic feeling” function, for Freud, were related to two principles: the energy regulation principle (regulating primitive pleasures pains and anxieties) and the pleasure-pain principle relating to more complex experiences. Campbell has the following to say on this topic:
“Ineffable realisations are experienced; and, in fact, as we read about them, we can only be amazed. I have now read dozens of accounts; and they correspond, often amazingly, to the insights of the mystics and to the images of Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian and classical myth…. For example, a person who has never believed, or even heard of reincarnation will begin to feel that he has lived forever.”(Page 219)
Freuds case-study of Judge Schreber reveals a complex picture of the interplay of unconscious and conscious processes rooted in sexuality. The sexual organs, amongst all the organs of the body which, on the hylomorphic view, are important physical conditions of the human soul (psuché), are more connected to intense pleasurable and painful experiences. Images also supervene in relation to these experiences. Freuds interpretation of Schreber’s case referred to fixations and regressions to an early stage of libidinal development. Putative conscious experiences relating to beliefs that one loves somebody are shown instead to be disguised feelings of hate, and Freud explains the mechanisms responsible for such reversals. We should however, be aware that Freud claimed in relation to his interpretation of Schrebers symptoms, that he was dealing only with one type of paranoia. He was also careful to point out that his exposure as a consultant to these types of cases was limited because the authorities did not believe in favourable outcomes for such patients.
Indeed, the Schreber case, like that of Woodrow Wilson was based on the material from autobiographies and biographies. Campbell also spoke of different kinds of schizophrenia. He distinguishes between those psychoses in which the sufferer is passive and overwhelmed by the experience and the presence of high levels of anxiety, and those in which there is an active decision to bring about the psychotic experience through various techniques including meditation. In the former case the condition often requires some form of treatment in an institution because suicide attempts and violence towards others is a part of the symptom pattern.
Campbell also refers to a “literary” case reported by R D Laing. A case of a 38 year-old Royal Navy man by the name of Jessie Watkins who felt as if he had died, but also felt that he could see himself as a baby had hear himself cry. Both Schreber and Watkins felt themselves to be superior to God. Watkins, in particular, felt burdened by the work he was called on to do partly because God was a “madman”. Campbell refers to the work of Silverman and the distinction he draws between cases of paranoid schizophrenia and what he calls “essential schizophrenia which is related to shamanic psychotic crises. Silverman points out that in cases of paranoid schizophrenia one encounters hyperattention accompanied by an acute awareness of immanent threat and danger, resulting he argues, from an inability to confront the terrors of the inner world.
The shamanic psychotic experience, on the other hand, is more like that of the journey of a hero whose outcome ends positively when the inner and outer life have reached some kind of accord.Here too the shaman may experience an “oceanic feeling” in which he feels he and the universe are one. The paranoid schizophrenic, on the other hand is drowning in relation to his unconscious images, whereas the shaman and other so-called “essential schizophrenics” and mystics are swimming with their unconscious tide. The explanation for such a state of affairs, then, may depend upon future development s in the field of Philosophical Psychology and in the field of future scholarship into the powers of the human psuché.
Why do words matter to us? It is important to answer this question if we are to understand how myths have affected us throughout the ages. Is the effect of myths upon us easily described? Probably not, considering two important variables, namely, the long period over which they have existed and the simultaneous evolution of our human aesthetic and cognitive capacities. Theories of meaning have been proposed by various schools of modern Philosophy but these have been proposed in the light of unanswered questions relating to our aesthetic and cognitive powers: questions best answered by the arena of debate we term “Philosophical Psychology”. The words of the oracles obviously were revered by even the Philosophers of Ancient Greece, and this response of awe and admiration bears witness to this question of the effect of words upon the mind. Mythology itself does not provide us with an account of word-meaning or word-effect or the general role that the power of language plays in the lives of men.
We know through the theory and practice of psychoanalysis in its early phase, therapy proceeded via hypnosis—an abnormal state of consciousness which is still responsive to language. This state of affairs also reminds us of reports that oracles could sometimes deliver their proclamations in a trance-like state. Freud discussed the issue of hypnotism in therapy and pointed to the suggestive effect of his words on his patients. This suggestive effect we also know is used by professional hypnotists to get people they have hypnotised to perform certain actions.
Freud relatively early on in this process abandoned hypnosis in his therapy in favour of more technical methods of accessing what he called the unconscious mind, claiming that being in a conscious state of mind when accessing material from this realm was important for the cathartic process that was occurring. Many different powers from different faculties of mind (sensibility, understanding, reason) are involved in this cathartic process, including that of memory when we are dealing with traumatically induced neuroses. In such cases it is important that traumatised memories are converted into normal memories that are not abnormally affected by high anxiety levels. Dream interpretation and free association were important specialist techniques that were used to provide information relating to what in the unconscious mind was having a deleterious effect upon the life of the patient. In this process there is an attempt to restore the function of the cognitive powers of the patient, thus enabling a more efficacious relation to the reality of everyday life. The principle guiding this procedure was termed by Freud “The Reality Principle”. What we are witnessing in such circumstances is a self-actualisation process which all humans experience, partly because of their long childhoods—their long period of dependency upon parental care.
An interesting question to pose at this point in the discussion is whether mankind has always possessed its current array of powers in its current state or whether, as some Psychologists, like Julian Jaynes maintains, we are dealing with an evolving state of affairs in which there may well be significant changes occurring which could be termed “vicissitudes of Consciousness”. Freud, in the context of this discussion, we ought to recall, spoke of Consciousness itself in terms of a “vicissitude of the instincts”. Julian Jaynes makes an important contribution to this discussion when he attempts, on the basis of his brain research, and available literary and archaeological evidence, to claim that the emergence of Consciousness could be dated to ca 1200 BC. This entailed, in his view, that prior to Consciousness emerging, there was a state of mind which he described as “bicameral mind”, where language was in fact situated bilaterally in the brain, but perhaps undergoing transition: owing to the ability of some people to both read and write, they may have been transitioning faster than those who were illiterate. This reflection suggests that the power of language played an important role in this process. Julian Jaynes in his work “The Origins of Consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind”(Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1976), discusses an important mechanism of change operating in our usage of language, namely metaphor:
“For metaphor….is the very constitutive ground of language. I am using metaphor here in its most general sense: the use of one term to describe another because of some kind of similarity between them or between their relations to other things. There are thus always two terms in a metaphor, the thing to be described which I shall call the metaphrand, and the thing or relation used to elucidate it, which I shall call the metaphier…..It is by metaphor that language grows.”(Pages 48-9)
Jaynes notes further that the human body is an often used metaphier:
“The head of an army….the face of the clock…the eyes of needles, storms targets, flowers or potatoes….the arm of a chair or the sea.”(Page 49)
This account is in accord with Aristotles account of metaphor in which it is asserted that when we are dealing with the names of things, metaphor takes us into a realm of experience that is unnamed, thus creating a new usage of the term. Julian Jaynes also connects language to evolving levels of consciousness:
“Language, Jaynes argues, began as an expressive phenomenon partly connected to events of importance in the external world (e.g hunting, gathering etc.,). By a charted series of functions this developmental sequence eventually reaches the level of representative thought in which we find the names for animals, developing into a more complex stage in which names are given to individual people. At this stage it would be fair to say that we are definitely thinking something. As group life evolved we then find language evolving into more complex forms via the use of sentences with subject-predicate structures which illustrate the fully mental power of thinking something about something, which Heidegger called the veritative (truth-making) synthesis. This however is not the final level of the Mental, which is achieved only when the Principles of Logic and Truth Tables begin to constitute and regulate the field of sound argumentation—the field of rationality. (The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action, Volume 4, James, M,.R.,D., 2022)
This initial excursion into the interior mechanism of language-use and its evolution is meant to complement Campbell’s account of Mythologies of War and Peace especially when put into relation to the “power of suggestion” that is contained in mythological language. One thing that can be immediately noted in this context is that the power of words in the rhetoric associated with war, has been more effective in Ancient times than it is now. This is not to deny, however, that even in our modern era, two countries historically have sought to promote the solution of war to many diplomatic problems where rational discourse might have been used instead, namely the Soviet Union and the USA. This is not a new phenomenon and may lie behind the reason why Historians have adopted the practice of naming wars after the country or region that has been attacked, suggesting that morality is playing some kind of role in the discipline.
Campbell claims paradoxically in this chapter that wars are agents of the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection resulting in the telos of the “Survival of the Fittest”. Continuing on the theme of his reference to animals, Campbell notes Spenglers reference to man being a “beast or prey” that has triumphed over his vegetarian victims, because, it is claimed, of his superior intelligence.
Campbell claims that no primitive mythologies depict war as an evil but there are interesting ideas that may be related to why this is so, such as “there is no such thing as death”. Death appears, on these views, to be but a punctuation mark in an ongoing narrative where life is reborn again and again:
“the beast will return next season to yield its temporal body again.” (Page 171)
“Likewise, after episodes of battle special rituals are enacted to assuage and release to the land of spirits, the ghosts of those that have been slain.” (Page 171)
War mythologies are based on the assumption that some humans are subhuman monsters and it is heroic to slay such monsters. Campbell notes that there was no problem during such primitive times in persuading people to become warriors, and this might have been due to the suggestive power of the language of the myths in contexts where the recipients may or may not have full conscious control of the instincts. When, however, stronger egos developed, perhaps partly because of the evolution of language, there may well have developed simultaneously inhibitory mechanisms such as interrogative thought processes: “Should I do X?” and this eventually may have made the rhetorical persuasion process more difficult. Culture also plays an important role in the way in which consciousness chooses to categorise and see the world. The Ancient Greeks, for example, through their balanced view of the opposites friend-enemy, may well have been less inclined to war given their more nuanced view of the relation between what is holy and what is just. This, it can be argued, was the beginning of a secularisation process that began with the Socratic/Platonic attempt to provide us with a Philosophical theory of the relation of Justice to what is Holy. This process also appears to be associated with cosmopolitanism or globalisation, with the caveat that this latter may be more associated with military objectives than the commonwealth of ideas. Whether the plot of the world-play we are watching is a tragedy, in accordance with the oracular proclamation that “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction”, or whether we are instead watching the Kantian Enlightenment “play” in which it is claimed that the “plot” of the civilisational process is following a “hidden plan” where in the last scene of the last Act we find ourselves living in a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends, leading a good spirited flourishing life, remains to be seen. It is interesting to note, however, that the Ancient Greeks maintained a psychic distance to strangers which accorded them, a respectful status. Campbell also notes in the context of this discussion the “modern” national problem of persuading the youth to fight wars on behalf of their communities. Perhaps this might be one more sign that an increased conscious awareness and a more complex language has strengthened our egos with the determination to establish “Perpetual Peace” (A Kantian ideal)
Campbell points out that not all primitive peoples have been warriors. The settled village people of the tropics for example, may not exactly promote a culture of warfare but in their various rituals we nevertheless encounter a savage bloodthirstiness which testifies to a lack of respect for human life perhaps because of a fundamental belief in the process of organic life renewing itself from an inorganic non-living base. Campbell claims that this supports the idea that killing, (e.g. headhunting) actually enhances the process of the renewal of life (P 172). He also notes that:
“it is in fact exactly in those parts of the world that the most horrible and grotesque rituals of human sacrifice obtain even to this day…It is in these areas that the headhunt flourishes.” (Page 172)
Campbell also refers to the continuous practice of human sacrifices by the Aztecs.
A new order of human life began to emerge in the eighth millennium BC: a form of life where grain planting and harvesting communities arose in the Ancient Near East (P.173). Fertility rites were embedded in the mythology and religion of the times. The warrior culture during this period of 1-2000 years was marginalised until archaeological finds uncovered walls which presumably were for the purpose of defending these peaceful communities from marauding bands of animal herders invading from the East and the South. The Bible records the above period of invasions in the OT. The Iliad from approximately this era also is a work of war mythology. The OT we know is about a chosen race and a partisan wrathful God in sharp contrast to the polytheistic pantheon of bipartisan Gods we encounter in the Iliad. The OT texts contain brutal recommendations relating to how one should treat strangers occupying territory one wishes to conquer, ( Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Kings). The Arabs too, Campbell argues, produced a war mythology of their own and there is no trace of the ethical and political dimensions of the kind we encounter in Ancient Greece. Campbell notes also that both of these war mythologies are operating even today in the Near east: one of the many powder kegs of the modern world.
The Aryan Persians, on the other hand, engaged in conquests with the intent to govern the territory they conquered more benevolently, allowing the local populations to retain their religious belief systems as well as their own local rulers (Page 182) (cf Alexander the Great from Ancient Greece). The mythology of Zarathustrianism was also to influence Christianity with its presentation of a creation myth in which the powers of light/darkness, truth/illusion-deception, life/death compete with each other. This mythology also contains and important reference to freedom:
“every individual, of whatever race or tribe must through his own free will choose sides and align himself with the powers either of goodness or evil in this world. If the former he will contribute through his thoughts, words, and deeds to the restoration of the universe to perfection.” (Page 187)
So, on this account the good will restores goodness to the universe and everyone is free to choose whether to do this good or not. Evil might, on some interpretations, be purely the refusal or omission to engage in this work of restoration and the maintenance of institutions, structures and systems designed to propagate good in the universe. Persian Kings, on this view were expected to be the representatives and will of the “Lord of Light”. (Page 183)
“And so we find that in the great multiracial and multicultural empire of the Persians—which, in fact, was the first such Empire in the History of the World—there was a religiously authorised imperialistic impulse, to the end that, in the name of truth, goodness and the light, the Persian King of Kings should become the leader of mankind to the restitution of truth.” (Page 183)
The eschatological dimension of the above account points to a dramatic battle between opposing forces which would rage for 40 years before saviour or Messiah emerged. It was in this period-in waiting that Christianity emerged, and the assumption of Jesus was that this battle had already occurred, and he was the emergent saviour. Christianity was intended as a mythology religion of peace:
“But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven: for he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rains on the just and the unjust (Mathew 5: 43-45)
This, it was anticipated, would be a revolutionary mythology because it is also claimed:
“For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Mathew 10)
On this radical account one should also give away one’s possessions to the poor and follow the Master, for so it is written. This is an anti-family Philosophy and perhaps also anti-secular in that it promotes also an ascetic form of existence which attempts to shift concern from the eschatological dimension of the future to the task of living in the present and finding God in everyday life at least insofar as the Gnostic Gospel was concerned (which Campbell quotes from). Those that live by the sword, it is claimed, shall die by the sword. The theory of Christianity appeared to be one thing whilst its practice became another, perhaps because of the enduring influence of the OT. Crusades against the Arab infidel became eventually an important project for monarchs who claimed as a consequence a divine right to rule.
Another mythology of peace was that promoted by the Jains of India whose teacher Mahavira was a contemporary of Buddha. (Page 189) . One of the messages of this mythology was that all forms of life (down to the vegetative, e.g. grass) possessed an absolute value which must not be violated. Buddhism shared this life-philosophy but on this account there is also an attitude towards the ego or the self which maintains that it must be banished: yet, in a certain sense this is consistent with the view that ones own individual life lacks significance. It is not absolutely clear, perhaps because of this last caveat, whether Buddhism, for Campbell can be categorised as a Romantic mythology.
As we move eastward, however to Japan and China, Campbell has no hesitation in categorising these as both peaceful and Romantic. Yin and Yang reminds us of Zarathustrianism but “The Way of all things, the Tao” is a virtue-based approach which is more reminiscent of one of the concerns of Ancient Greek Philosophy. This eastern approach focuses, however on “Resoluteness” as well as the idea that taking up arms is one of the last resorts of a wise man. (Page 192). This, as a matter of fact, has not been an approach manifested in the rules of a long series of Chinese tyrants who obviously did not embrace the way of the Tao. Campbell notes, instead that from this period two Machiavellian war-mongering historical documents have replaced this way of the Tao. Campbell recalls in the context of this discussion that the Bhagavad Gita, too, addresses both the arts of government and war. In this text it is noted how important the treasury is to these arts and individual life:
“ A person who has no wealth is more dead than alive.” (Page 195)
A Machiavellian spirit haunts some of the pages of this work:
“A King seeking prosperity should not hesitate to kill his son, brother, father, friend.” (Page 196)
Power, on this account is of more importance than Right:
“Every work should be done completely… By killing its inhabitants, by destroying its roads, and burning and pulling down its houses, a King shall devastate his enemy´s realm.” (Page 196)
Such thoughts place such ideas in the realm of war mythology, and here too, we find the idea that the Self can never be slain, a different thesis to that of the no-Self view of Buddhism. Machiavelli again emerges when the Prince is discussed:
“The duty of Princes being to fight and to slay.”(Page 197)
Yet in both Buddhism and Hinduism we encounter the idea of a farther shore we are journeying toward: a shore which transcends the opposites of light and darkness, truth and illusion, war and peace. Buddha-consciousness is impersonal, selfless and guiltless.
After charting the history of war mythologies Campbell then interestingly maintains (in the spirit of Philosophy):
“But on the other hand, in the annals of world history accounts are to be found also of a diametrically opposite point of view to this, where the aim is to be quit of war and strife altogether in a state of perpetual peace.” (Page 198)
“Perpetual Peace is a Kantian term used in his writings on History: writings which include a recommendation for the establishment of the Cosmopolitan institution of the United Nations whose task it will be to regulate war-peace relations between nations. The actual institution of the United Nations also has the task of regulating the human rights of the citizens of all nations, something that was made possible via the Kantian account of Moral Law. The idea of Rights also emerged in Grotius’s thesis “The Rights of War and Peace”, a work which also discusses a “law of nations based on ethical , not jungle principles” (Page 199).
Returning to the issue of the power of mythological language to suggest Projects of War and Peace we ought obviously to note that it is far easier to appeal to the emotions associated with war, than the reasons associated with peace. Depicting strangers as enemies and diminishing their humanity, is far easier than appealing to principles of reason and the moral law. Metaphorical language plays a significant role in such a process, which is reaching into the realm of the unknown and unnamed. Both war and peace symbols however are relatively abstract, e.g. Janus or the olive branch. As mythology has evolved throughout the ages, Consciousness (beginning with the first idea of the body) has actualised the potential of language to integrate both the sensible and intellectual powers of man into an ego that is self-consciously related to both the Truth and the Good. The articulation of the form these stages take are beginning to emerge on the foundations laid by Aristotle, Kant, and Freud and their followers. Whether, however, we will ever be able to postulate historical dates for the different stages of this evolutionary actualisation process, is, however open to question.
The Western/Occidental concern with matter and form in our aesthetics may be present in some way in Oriental Art. Campbell claims that 4 types of subject matter are involved:
“Abstract qualities such as goodness, truth, beauty, and the like; next types of action and mood (the slaying of monsters, the winning of a lover, moods of melancholy, bliss, and so on): third, human types (Brahmins, mendicants, holy or wicked princes, merchants, servants, lovers, outcastes, criminals, etc) and, finally deities—all of which we know are abstract.”( Page 105)
Campbell claims further that there is no interest in the individual, or in unique unprecedented events in Oriental life and Oriental Art, but we do nevertheless see reference to types (forms?) of action and human beings in the above quote. This concern, however, does not amount to a theoretical or practical interest in human psuché and its psychological and mental vicissitudes, which include an interest in arete (doing the right thing at the right time in the right way) dike (justice), epistemé (knowledge) and arché (principles, laws).
The Ancient Greek concern for the importance of knowledge and Aristotle’s specific categorisation of knowledge into the theoretical, practical, and productive sciences may to some limited extent be mirrored in the Oriental sciences of Medicine, Astronomy, Mathematics etc. Ancient Greek science, however, thanks to the work of Aristotle is definitively more systematic, and also involves more complex links to the complex repertoire of powers and capacities of the human mind. Another important difference between Oriental and Western knowledge systems is the presence in the latter and the absence in the former of attention to forms of explanation related to principles such as noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Ancient Greek Philosophers reflected generally upon the status of all explanations relating to rules, principles and laws and these reflections have been documented as epistemological issues as well as issues within the spheres of Metaphysics and Philosophical Psychology. All these reflections occurred within the context of a basic term, namely, psuché which was a term covering all forms of life from that of a simple plant up to and including human psuché, which Aristotle defined in terms of a “rational animal capable of discourse”. All these life-forms were observed in the light of a categorical framework that was implemented in experimental/clinical contexts designed to chart the structure and function of both these organisms as a whole but also their parts, thus effectively founding the disciplines of Biology, Anatomy, and perhaps also Physiology. There is, however, no evidence that Aristotle ever dissected a human discourse for a number of possible reasons. Firstly, due to the pressure of religious belief which regarded the body as sacred and secondly owing to the belief that its form ought to remain intact for the burial when acts of remembrance would take place and the transition to a possible afterlife would begin (Aristotle may have remained sceptical to accounts of the afterlife for logical reasons).
The conceptual diversity and density of Aristotelian explanations (aitia) which we find represented in a multitude of sciences falling into three different categories (theoretical, practical, productive) make possible a nuanced perception of our environment as well as an account of the complex nature of our thoughts about the world and ourselves, and the complex relation between these two domains of reflection. Diagnosis in the case of the trans-scientific discipline of Occidental medicine is a systematic activity, relating as it does to hylomorphic explanations embedded in a complex matrix of episteme, areté, arché, logos, psuché, Aletheia, dunamis, and eudaimonia. Concepts are the tools of our faculties of understanding and reason, especially when combined into meaningful propositions. The subject matter of Medicine is constituted by both animal and human forms of life (psuché) and diagnosis attempts to assume proper or normal function of the forms as a whole and the proper or normal function of their parts (including organ systems).
Aesthetics falls into the category of the productive sciences which in turn relates to the ideas or basic terms of the beautiful and sublime as revealed by the powers of perception and imagination (faculty of sensibility), and to some extent involve the understanding and reason, especially if the objects of perception are works of art.
Campbell takes up the interesting fact that the praxis of portraiture has never been important in Oriental Art. He claims that the reason for this is that our Occidental Mythological Culture has placed an importance upon the individual that is considered dysfunctional in Oriental Mythological Culture. This issue highlights a significant Metaphysical problem. Is Campbells description of this East- West conflict the correct one? Buddhism certainly claims what is often referred to as a no-self doctrine which means that there is no substantial existential entity lying behind our references to an “I”. Kant has claimed that the “I think” is a transcendental condition of the experience of, for example, objects, and that one can think about the phenomenal self of experience and make empirical judgements about this empirical self, but it is not this empirical self that is the transcendental condition of our experience. The Buddhist doctrine of the no-self, however, seems to entail that there is no permanent self behind our experiences, since it is in a state of constant change. Aristotle pointed out that change in the world can only be explained if we assume a constant bearer of change that remains the same throughout the process. This was an assumption Kant embraced. For Both Aristotle and Kant there are a multitude of powers from different faculties that have helped to constitute this unity of apperception which is in turn a condition of apriori intuitions of space and time, and the categories of the understanding. The physical substrate of this “I” is according to Aristotle Human Psuché which is constituted by a complex organ system including the brain that has been described by brain researchers as the most complex object in the universe. The brain is also connected to other organs and a constellation of limbs, hands etc. An upright posture is also an important element of the Aristotelian essence specifying definition of human psuché, namely rational animal capable of discourse. Such a complex entity obviously requires a multitude of sciences to explain its Being-in-the-world.
Psychoanalysis, Freud claimed was a Kantian Psychology and it was certainly trans-scientific in its attempt to explain the clinical phenomenon of mental dysfunction, mental disease. Historically, attempts by one particular science to discredit the scientific credentials of this Freudian discipline seem, in the light of these considerations to be otiose.
Criticism of Western philosophical explanations of the “I” by Eastern Mythology may, then also be otiose. Criticism of the East by the Philosophical tradition that lies behind our system of Sciences has included horror at the practice of certain rituals such as that of widows casting themselves onto their husband’s funeral pyres: a horror which is expressed at the wasteful unnecessary loss of human life. This is not a judgement from an individual about another individual, but rather a general universal judgement about the value of a praxis in relation to human psuché as such which we also may extend to our preferred animals as well. We, Westerners believe generally, that it is irresponsible to throw the gift of life away in such tragic circumstances, especially if there are children who will now be asked to mourn not one, but both, beloved parents. We too, believe in obedience but not blind obedience to a deity blind to the value of human life. In this respect we owe our heritage to those Ancient Greek oracles who did not believe in casting the transcendental self aside even if “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction”, suggesting rather that human psuché engage systematically in the task of “Knowing thyself”, and knowing the world which is the setting of our lives.
We can see, given the above considerations that Occidental Aesthetics is differently grounded in a repertoire of human powers such as perception, imagination, understanding/judgement, and reason. Oriental Art seems to appeal to a more limited repertoire with imagination taking precedence. Perception, understanding and reason appear not to be constitutive of the Oriental experience which appeals to a world of hallucinations and dreams.
The Western portrait is a celebration of the importance of the idea of the human form of Being in a complex world much of which was his own making. Western artists know that the portrait for many appreciators is a learning experience teaching us the relation of a particular human form to a particular life the characterisation of which is going to have some universal and necessary characteristics. Kant, in his reflections upon Art in his Third Critique, claimed that the form of the human body was an ideal of our Western Art, and this belief was undoubtedly shared by the artists of Ancient Greece who believed in a healthy body-mind relationship.
Artistically designed buildings (architecture), Adrian Stokes argues, is the mother of all Art, and he takes up the example of Quattrocento Art in which the mass-effect of the stone is part of the total impression aimed at by the Architect. This very general characteristic of the material the artist uses, is abstracted from the purpose of the building which could be a Temple, a Tomb, a School, or a Palace. The form these buildings take is in accordance with a rational, very general idea of the Good. For Adrian Stokes, the Kleinian art critic, the idea of the good, whole object is a key concern of the artist. This idea of wholeness is Aristotelian and defines how we view the parts f the whole. The “whole person” for Aristotle was undoubtedly conceived of in terms of possessing both a healthy body and a healthy mind, and this in turn must be interpreted in the light of the Aristotelian dictum that the mind or the soul is the first actuality of the body composed of organs, limbs, hands, upright posture etc. The soul, then, becomes the home of a repertoire of psychological and mental powers which include perception, imagination, understanding, judgement, and reasoning. The multitude of sciences and arts falling into three categories are, then, the products of the human repertoire of powers.
Campbell points to the portrait productions of Titian and Rembrandt but he argues that it is the uniqueness of the individual that is the point of the portrait. This is not the whole story behind this genre of painting, which requires a much more complex form of explanation. We pointed earlier to the fact that the artist is providing an object which is intended to be the stimulus for an aesthetic lesson. Human character in relation to the ethical idea of The Good is certainly a part of the story and the lesson which will also include reference to the concepts of areté (doing the right thing in te right way at the right time, dike (justice)episteme, phronesis and eudaimonia: all in the name of the Form of the Good, an idea surpassing that of particular existents or particular individuals. Campbell, however, elaborates upon his simple characterisation of Occidental Art, claiming that in Oriental Life:
“the individual is expected not to innovate or invent, but to perfect himself in the knowledge and rendition of norms.” (Page 106)
This identification of the Western individual with the Ego is questionable. What is partly at stake here is what Campbell means by the terms “knowledge” and “norms” in the above quote. Oriental ideas of knowledge and norms are undoubtedly at odds with our Western beliefs in the importance of the ideas of human psuché and the Forms of The Good (norms?) This Western idea of human psuché is also connected to the Judgement “All men are mortal” and the principle lying behind it that life ends with death: on this position there is not another life after this, in other words the idea of an afterlife is a contradiction given the current state of our knowledge (which is considerable if we are reasoning against the background of the Western Canon of Philosophy and the Sciences). When the body gives up its life, the ghost of consciousness also ceases to exist. The afterlife on this account is a dreamlike hallucinatory idea which Campbell also insightfully extends to Oriental Buildings and Cities:
“I wonder if that may not be the reason why, in certain Oriental cities, one can feel, even today, that one is moving in a dream: the city is dreamlike because in its inception it was actually suggested by a dream, which then was rendered in stone.” (Page 107)
Adrian Stokes in his critical reflections upon Quattrocento Art, notes how the mass-effect of the stone appeals to our Western idea of a self sufficient independent object of perception which invites the imagination of the perceiver to live in the spirit of the Object, using not just the dreamlike function of the imagination, but also the powers of understanding and reason. Oriental art-objects have a completely different structure and tend to invite different responses tied to more instinctively grounded powers and their vicissitudes.
There follows a long exposition on the Art of Yoga and its discipline of awakening inner instinctive powers, which confirm the above remarks: it seems that we are dealing here with the powers of the body that produce dreamlike and hallucinatory experiences. Campbell in the context of this discussion begins to draw attention to a major disruption of the body-image which is connected to the transcendental experience of a “third eye”:
“Indian Art, that is to say, is an art concerned with the transcendence of our normal two-eyed experiences of life, meant to open this third eye, in the middle of the forehead, of the lotus of command, and to reveal to us thus, even while we are awake, a dream-like vision of Heaven and Hell become stone.” (Page 115)
Consciousness is a vicissitude of Instinct, according to Freud, and it is a power that is prominent in our Western Canon of Knowledge systems, but it is a very different vicissitude to that of the hallucination. Perhaps it is this third eye that is the source of hallucinations and dreams, but its mode of operation is not that of a normal eye whose function it is to organise the forms of space into a figure background structure that contains self-sufficient independent objects that can be explored using the motor system of the body. These objects in our environment can produce a variety of responses ranging from beautiful objects of nature, beauties of intentionally produced art objects and also instrumentally constituted objects that are useful as a means to other ends.
Campbell also refers to Japanese and Chinese Art which characterises the vastness of the universe in terms of:
“The world of ten thousand things” (Page 115)
The way in which the divine dwells in such a universe is indeed paradoxical, however:
“For even in a single hair”, as I have heard, there are a thousand golden lions.” (Page 115)
Campbell elaborates upon his account claiming that landscape painting is crafted in the spirit of Tao:
“And this way of Nature is the way in which all things come into being out of darkness into light, then pass out of light back into darkness, the two principles—light and dark—being in perpetual interaction and, in variously modulated combinations, constituting this whole world of ten thousand things.” (Page 116)
This Yin/Yang Principle is more related to the powers of perception and consciousness than is the case in Indian Art. Campbell uses this principle in his account of the Chinese Artistic process:
“So the artist with his brush, is manipulating tinctures of the very principles that underlie all nature. The artwork, thus brings forth and makes known the essence of the world itself, that essence being an interplay f these two, the yang and the yin, through no end of modulation.” (Page 117)
So, transposing this into the object world of Quattrocento Art, it appears as if the visual aspects of light/dark are more important in Chinese visual Art than the visual/tactile aspects of the mass-effects of the stone so important in Quattrocento architecture. Stone is an intersensory object with protective functions which transcend the purely visual phenomena of light/dark. Touch is a phenomenon that is intimately related to motor function and together with visual information is part of the intersensory unity of an object: it is part of what makes an object a self-sufficient independent object. Of course the Quattrocento architect will have considered the way in which the sunlight illuminates the building as well as the effect of darkness upon its interior but this will have been just one consideration among many.
Campbell continues his account by invoking 6 considerations the Chinese artist takes into account, beginning with the idea of rhythm. The artist upon painting bamboo it is argued will attempt to identify its rhythm, organic form, trueness to nature, colour, placement in a field, and style. If, it is argued, one paints without forcing the painting of the field, the bamboo will reveal itself in its nature.
Cambell attempts a comparison of Indian and Chinese art, claiming that the former uses the “soaring power” of the imagination and he contrasts this with the Chinese world we live in, the world of ten thousand things:
“artists of the Tao prefer to remain with nature, in harmony with its wonder.” (Page 121)
The basic attitude f the Japanese/Chinese artist is one of play:
“his approach to life is not of work but of play” (Page 123)
Adrian Stokes wrote an essay entitled “Life is a game that must be lost”, arguing that the restoration of lost objects of value is a key aspect of the artists activity. Perhaps this was in fact a response to the Chinese view of life as a game. Campbell concludes this essay with a Buddhist story where the appreciator of a painting magically finds himself participating in the painting, interacting with a pretty girl until he was whisked back into life and reality, noticing that his presence had changed the content of the painting. Testifying to what? The fact that life is magical? That both art and life are games? This tale would not have impressed the Ancient Greek artists who would see the continuity of life and art, but also see the implausibility of a tale that did not appreciate just how Art imitated life, and the importance of the production of a self-sufficient independent object that cannot be changed by magic. The issue of the integrity of the object is obviously manifest in portraits of nobles and royalty, and in such objects the Aristotelian poetic idea of character is clearly on display. What is less obvious, however, is the subtle role of the power of the imagination which not only provides us with images but also with a magical enveloping function which seeks to “identify or “make one” the work and the response to it.
Ritual is an important activity of the human “form of life”, an expression used by Wittgenstein in grounding his “Philosophical Investigations”. Aristotle does not use this specific expression, but it is nevertheless implied in the term “psuché”, the hylmorphic account of which would contain the idea of “form” as “principle”. For Campbell it is clear that the higher the form of life the more complex the “structure” of the organism will be. He opens this essay as follows:
“The function of ritual as I understand it is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth. In ancient times every social occasion was ritually structured and the sense of depth was rendered through the maintenance of a religious tone. Today, on the other hand, the religious tone is reserved for exceptional, very special “sacred” occasions. And yet even in the patterns of our secular life, ritual survives. It can be recognized, for example ,in the decorum of courts and regulations of military life, but also in the manners of people sitting down to table together. All life is structure. In the biosphere, the more elaborate the structure, the higher the life form.” (Page 44)
This is a hylomorphic account of ritual that probably would have been accepted by Kant, but university life is not mentioned in spite of its largely secular adherence to ceremonious rituals and its very influential role in the shaping of civilisation and culture in the Western World. Many university rituals have remained the same for centuries even if the influence f Universities has been in decline since the beginning of the 20th century. These rituals include examinations, the awarding of proof of achievement in graduation ceremonies reflecting the different structural levels of knowledge, and academic staff installations, e.g. Professorial “chairs”.
Campbell then proceeds to provide an account of the instincts, beginning at the base-level manifesting itself in simple forms of lif,e and simple behaviours such as nest-buidling, beehives, anthills etc., and moving up to human psuché where , it is argued stereotypical reflexes are no longer produced by innate releasing mechanisms. In human psuché, behaviour is converted into Action via the operation of multiple psychological and mental powers which give rise, firstly, to the vicissitude of the instincts we call consciousness and secondly, to those higher vicissitudes manifested in the higher mental powers such as understanding/judgement, and reasoning. The operation of Thinking in such higher organisms attempts to achieve not just a harmony of the faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason, but also the efficient use of the multiple powers we encounter in human psuché. Campbell then makes a very interesting claim relating to the long childhood of human psuché, which, it is argued, causes our instincts to mature more slowly, a process which allows the mechanism of “imprinting” to take place in relation to a complex environment/world possessing multifarious sources of influence:
“It acquires its human character, upright stature, ability to speak, and the vocabulary of its thinking under the influence of a specific culture, the features of which are engraved, as it were, upon its nerves; so that the constitutional patternings which in the biological world are biologically inherited are, in the human species matched largely by socially transmitted forms, imprinted during what have been long known as the “impressionable years”, and rituals have been everywhere the recognised means of such imprinting. Myths are the mental supports of rites; rites the physical enactments of myths.” (Page 45)
Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory has long been a source of the idea that society maintains its structure and innovates via the generation of firstly, the forms of reproduction, secondly, forms related to tools and implements, and thirdly, forms related to ideas communicated in educational processes involving teachers and pupils.
Much of the time spent in childhood and adolescence occurs in the context of a family, living in a home, and this together with the time spent in educational institutions are the major bearers of the development of mental capacities that function in accordance with what Freud and Campbell refer to as the reality principle or reality function: a function involving the inhibition or overriding of most instinctive affective and spiritual impulses. Campbell claims that this in turn is dependent upon the individual becoming a creative innovative “centre of the life process”( Page 47). He further claims that “Modern Occidental civilisations” have been the major source of innovation in the world but he points to 1914 suggesting that things may have changed at this point in History: a point in time when man begins to question and even reject much of what mythology and Religion had to offer mankind. He interestingly cites Rousseau as the source of this attitude that led to a general discontentment with our civilisations.
Rousseau, we ought to recall was a Counter-Enlightenment figure, a modern version of Diogenes sensing a discontentment in the darkest regions of Europe. Rousseau believed that men are born free, but everywhere in chains because they are enslaved by the authorities and institutions of a corrupt social order. He did not, however, personally believe in the power of family life to moderate the sexual impulse, placing 5 of his illegitimate children in an orphanage, effectively abandoning them. It is somewhat surprising to learn that the Enlightenment Philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was influenced by Rousseaus claim that man in his natural state was a noble creature, and it is even rumoured that Kant. a creature of habit, allowed his daily walk to be disrupted because he was reading the Work “Emile”. Kant, however, would certainly have questioned the prohibition relating to Emile reading the Bible. He might also have questioned Rousseaus contention that the tears of the baby teach the infant to manipulate others in the course of getting what was wanted.
Kant may have agreed, however, that with the crying of the baby we may be witnessing the first appearance of acts of the will. Manipulative tears, Rousseau argued, was one of the first signs of an attitude he termed “amour propre”, a fundamentally negative attitude that will assist in the corrupt enslavement of man. On the political front, Rousseau sees in the middle class, not the Aristotelian enlightened class, but rather a class that has embraced the corrupt values of the upper class. Plato and Aristotle both viewed oligarchy as a deficient form of government, embracing many of the excesses of the appetitive and spiritual parts of a persons character. Such an uncontrolled proliferation of desires would have been attributed to a passionate imagination which was unmoderated by reason.
Rousseau was the father of Romanticism, furthering the myth of the “noble-savage” whose passions, Kant argued, symbolised an illness of the mind, impermeable to mediating influences. For Plato, Aristotle and Kant it is mans unbridled passions that enslaves men in the chains of self-love. Freud’s accounts of the narcissistic personality is especially relevant here, and would invoke the impulsiveness of a personality functioning in accordance with the pleasure-pain principle rather than the reality principle.
Freudian Psychoanalysis in its later form was of course based on the Socratic principle that the polis or society is the human psuché writ large. Freud was convinced that the categories used to describe ad explain the activities and power of human psuché, could be used in the description and explanation /justification of the powers of the State. This was the reason he could write meaningfully about the History and State of the Society he was a part of. The myth of the “band of brothers” was a Freudian constructed conjectural narrative of the origins of society before the time of civilisation and its institutions. The narrative begins with the tyranny of a ruler-father who suppresses his sons and uses the available women to meet his narcissistic sexual needs. The sons band together and kill the father in order to escape his aggression, and gain access to the females of the group/tribe, but they almost immediately regret the act realising that whoever rules will in all likelihood be subjected to the same fate. They eventually reach an agreement on a law/taboo of murder, incest and cannibalism. This, for Freud is the moment in History when the light of Reason dawns, and a significant connection is made between what has happened in the past and the future of the tribe. This is also the triumph of Eros over Thanatos and the birth of a hope for a better future. The principle behind the taboo/law is the principle of equality: the beginning of the operation of the Kantian “hidden plan” in accordance with the operation of a “good will”.It is not clear where Freud stood on this issue of the hidden plan. He did claim to be a Kantian Psychologist and Vienna was a Cosmopolitan city, but he did not like Vienna, given the fact that he was a Jew in anti-Semitic times. Rousseau, however would not have endorsed Cosmopolitanism because for him when men come together corruption increases.
Campbell claims that the long period of dependency creates a large problem for the civilisational process because it is not easy to transcend this state and move to a state of independence:
“And with the extension of the period of dependency in our own civilisation into the middle or even late twenties, the challenge today is more threatening than ever, and our failures are increasingly apparent.”(Page 46)
Campbell likens this failure to a neurosis and warns of a “substitute dependency” upon the state and the social order, which has become the source of meeting the needs of human psuché for safety and belongingness. Such is the difficulty and pain of this process that it is referred to as a “second birth”, which results in a life led in accordance with the Reality Principle:
“We ask and are expecting, rather, that he should develop what Sigmund Freud called his “reality function” that faculty of the independently observant free thinking individual who can evaluate without preconception the possibilities of his environment and of himself within it, criticising and creating, not simply reproducing inherited patterns of thought and action, but becoming himself an innovating centre, an active, creative center of the life process.” (Page 47)
There is no mention of any qualification of this position related to the conservation of the knowledge and institutions we have established: no mention of the importance of History in this so-called civilising process. 1914, however is an interesting choice for the beginning of the decline of civilisation which Campbell characterises thus:
“life, freedom and force have not ben gained but lost.” (Page 49)
Campbell connects the loss of “form” in the arts to this moment in time, and claims that form was acknowledged in the smaller community of Athens but was already disappearing in the larger community of Rome. This process of the loss of form continues in large cities like New York, London and Paris where Campbell claims artists, instead of spending their time learning about their mediums and refining their work with continuous production, attend cocktail parties to promote themselves. What the Ancient Greeks may have claimed upon being confronted with “modern art”, is that a matrix of values have been lost in the search for “innovation”, values embodied in the terms, arché, areté, diké, epistemé, aletheia ,logos, phronesis, dunamis, and eudaimonia. The so-called “ready-mades” of modern art clearly rejected the history of working in a chosen medium, preferring instead to “innovate” by rejecting classical forms and creating instead a repertoire of emotions associated with the shock, surprise and indignation that their work generated. Campbell, in the context of this discussion complains, probably correctly, that James Joyce never received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Campbell cites Spenglers work “The Decline of the West” in relation to the decline of the influence of the hylomorphic notion of “form” (an important force in the shaping-process of our civilisations/cultures and individual characters). He notes that in spite of the goal of being great innovators we send a large proportion of our lives imitating what is occurring all around us. In the beginning of this process as primitive men, we imitated and were influenced by animals, the vegetative world, and finally the heavens above became the models for our communities. Worshipping the sun and the moon, for example, were a part of this civilising process. Myths and rituals played important roles in such a “forming process”, but these have largely been abandoned in modern times, except perhaps in the secular cases of the institutions of The Law and Universities. Part of this civilising process involved the demythologizing of the animal and vegetative worlds and the model of the heavens for the structure of our cities.(Frobenius). This resulted in man himself being placed at the centre of the universe. Unfortunately it was not the man described and justified by the ideas of Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, but rather the romantically inspired hero, troubadour and explorer who proclaims “I am who I am”: the face that Freud removed the veil from with his hylomorphic and critical theories.
Campbell appeals to the work of Joyce entitled “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” as part of this unveiling process, and we find Stephen Dedalus accusing Aristotle of failing to define the key emotions of pity and terror and providing us with the following definitions:
“Pity is the feeling that arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites us with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling that arrests the mind in the presence of whatever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.” (Page 59)
This secret cause, Campbell argues is related to our mortality, the death of which we are so certain. The fading influence of Art, of course, has led us further down the path of discontentment, the path where History and Tradition have been rejected for the romantic spirit of exploration. One could also mention here, as Arendt did, the failure of the Political forces to preserve the “forms” for posterity, or the failing influence of Education.
The rituals of Universities may have continued unchanged for centuries but they occur in a context of a theory of specialisation that has compromised the universality of knowledge and wisdom that is implied by their very names. The only institutions whose integrity has largely remained intact is that of the Law, but given the fact that the most militarily powerful country in the world, the USA, has historically refused to participate meaningfully in the process of the International Court of Justice and that the current President is an uneducated convicted felon, we may well be witnessing the death of that Ancient Greek institution which has carried us so far in the civilising process. If this is true then the words of the Oracle that:
Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”
The Delphic Podcasts Review of Campbells Essays Myths to Live By. 1. ”The Impact of Science”
In many respects Campbells view of science is a popular view, undervaluing the role of institutions such as schools, universities, and institutions related to the law: institutions based on ideas and principles that have in the course of a History beginning with the Ancient Greeks, contributed to the building of civilisations. Such institutions were strengthened during the Enlightenment period, especially in relation to the Philosophy of Kant, which defended Newtonian science, as well as the many meanings of Science. Given this state of affairs, it is also not surprising to find Campbell underestimating the role and power of the above institutions in the shaping process of cultural forces. Kants view of History, referred in the context of this discussion, to the “hidden plan for humanity”, namely a Kingdom of Ends, that lies one hundred thousand years in the future. International institutions such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice were in fact conceived of by Kant already toward the end of the 18th century.
Science has a history of being subjected to metaphysical criticism, beginning with Aristotles hylomorphism and its assumption of “The Many Meanings of Being”. This criticism is embedded in a Theory of Change which established Philosophy as a methodical, critical discipline, concerned with human thought, action, understanding, judgement and reason. The matrix of this concern was expressed in terms of four kinds of change, three media of change (space, time, and matter) three principles and four causes, all of which constituted a number of sciences, categorised into three domains of theoretical, practical and productive. This matrix also included basic constitutive concepts such as areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) epistemé (knowledge) diké (order, justice) arché ( principles) psuché (forms of life), logos, phronesis and eudaimonia (good spirited flourishing life). Aristotle’s Hylomorphism was built on foundations provided by both Socrates and Plato, and a number of pre-Socratic Philosophers. Socrates left no writings of his own, but Plato, his pupil, portrayed a reliable picture of Socrates’ Philosophical activity in the agora of Athens confronting those that thought they knew about important matters such as the nature of holiness.
Plato’s dialogues and lectures were also important insofar as they extended the Socratic method of elenchus with more theoretical applications of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Given the political concerns of both Socrates and Plato, the pre-Socratic figure of Solon, and the contemporary figure of Thucydides were also important influences upon Aristotle’s Political and ethical views. Solon was called upon, for example, during a period of crisis and chaos in Athens, to stabilise the polis in various ways, including a legislative agenda which proclaimed the importance of equality before the law as well as the participation of citizens in both the passing of laws and their enforcement and appeal procedures. Practical Reasoning and Sound Judgement were, in Solons view important elements of his reform program.
Thucydides, the Historian, outlined the threats to the polis if Practical Reason and Sound Judgement were compromised by careless and dangerous rhetoric which, in his view changed the meaning of the everyday expressions used in the polis. Such careless talk, it was argued, risked undermining the spirit of the law as well as the everyday trust for institutions of law, especially if the rhetoric of the day attempted to “make the worse argument seem the better” (in the spirit of Sophism). Thucydides was acutely aware of the possibility that dangerous rhetoric could invert or subvert the course of justice unless institutions possessed a sound understanding of the law and the practical reasoning and sound judgement that was needed to sustain its credibility. In many senses Socratic demonstrated these ideals of reasoning and judgement, and it is indeed ironic to note that the accusations levelled at Socrates by his indicters were accusations that were normally levelled at the Sophists of the era.
The Aristotelian Canon of the Practical Sciences included Ethics, Politics and household management, and their major focus was upon the Form of the Good rather than Knowledge, which is one of the primary concerns of the Theoretical Sciences (Physics, Maths, Theology/Metaphysics). The interesting outlier of the Sciences is the discipline of Rhetoric which, during the time of Aristotle, was closely allied to the Practical Science of Politics, but later degenerated into a mere technique (techné) of the Productive Sciences. Paradoxically, in spite of Socrates’ brilliant defence-speech during his trial, rhetoric became associated with attempts to “make the worse argument sound the better”. During Aristotle’s time the enthymemes of Rhetoric obviously aimed at the Truth in the name of the Good, probably because it was an activity, and all activities aimed at the Good against the background of the claim in the Metaphysics that all men desire to know.
Campbell, on the other hand is a dedicated follower of science but his view of this discipline is a very different view to that which we encounter in Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical accounts of the Metaphysics of science. It is even doubtful whether Campbells view is in accord with the way in which Science is taught in the University Systems of the World, which we know has its roots in Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. The Medieval Christian academic tradition did much to weaken the status of both Science and Philosophy in the Schools (until closed in the 6th century) and Universities. Campbell expresses his view n the following:
“Copernicus published his paper on the heliocentric universe (1543) and some years after that Galileos little telescope brought tangible confirmation of this Copernican view….today of course we have much larger telescopes….so that not only is the sun now well established at the centre of our planetary system but we know it to be but one of some two hundred billion suns in a galaxy of such blazing spheres: a galaxy shaped like a prodigious lens many hundreds of quintillion miles in diameter. And not only that! But our telescopes are now disclosing to us among those shining suns, certain other points of light that are themselves not suns but whole galaxies, each as large and great and inconceivable as our own—of which already many thousands upon thousands have been seen.” ( Myths to live by, New York, Viking Press, 1972, Page 7 )
Campbell elaborates upon this by claiming that our prescientific communities could never have imagined such a “revelation”. The Ancient Greeks and Kant both refer to experiences of awe and wonder, whilst surveying what could be seen with the naked eye of the “starry heavens above”. Anaximander, the Pre Socratic thinker, believed the heavens originated in the apeiron (the unlimited) implying that the heavens were finite in their magnitude but still sufficiently extensive to inspire the experience of awe and wonder.
We know that Socrates began his career investigating the nature of physical phenomena but turned away from such investigations upon reading a work by Anaxagoras, which claimed that the mind played a large part in our representations of the physical world, referring to a part of the mind, noos, which Aristotle would later identify as the divine part of our human minds. Kant, the Enlightenment Critical Philosopher, also referred to this experience of awe and wonder in relation to our idea of the moral law which may be located in the so called divine part of the mind striving for the dignity associated with a good will. The History of Philosophy is in fact littered with examples of Philosophers who initially were attracted to scientific investigations of the physical external world but then turned toward more humanistically based investigations: investigations involving noos, practical reasoning and sound judgement, e.g.
Kant whose early work attempted to reconcile Leibniz’s metaphysics with Newtonian Science, and whose elater work argued for a metaphysics of morals that provided us with the basis for a theory of human rights .
2. Wittgenstein whose early logical atomism inspired positivistic science made way for an Aristotelian based human science based in instinct, forms of life, and language-games.
3. Freud whose early neurologically based psychology brain psychology was literally burned by Freud and replaced by instincts (eros, Thanatos) and their psychological and mental vicissitudes embedded in human contexts of love and work: the civilisation building activities par excellence .
It appears as if Campell is not aware of the above key events in the History of Philosophy and the “pattern” they constitute: a pattern that has great respect for the various disciplines of the sciences (theoretical practical, and productive), but seeks to interrogate the necessary and sufficient conditions of these activities whilst simultaneously understanding the limitations involved in investigating phenomena in accordance with the categories of the understanding and principles of reason. Campbell also seems to have a perspectival view of the technology of science which is certainly not confined to the peaceful star-gazing telescopes, but includes weapons of mass destruction too. Indeed Campbell himself must have been aware of that moment in the History of Science where scientists actively collaborated with governments to produce an atomic bomb as part of the “final solution” to the Japanese problem.
Hannah Arendt referred to the 20th century as “this terrible century”, referring specifically not only to the holocaust but also to the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations of Japan. Indeed it is also relevant to point out that no one has been held accountable before the law for these actions, in spite of the existence of the International Court of Justice envisaged by Kant. The reason for this is partly because the US has refused to ratify the authority of this court. This state of affairs sets a terrible precedent for the future and the Kantian Project of the Rule of International Law.
War, for Philosophers is a highly questionable activity, which in most cases, has not been subjected to the criteria set forth in the Philosophical community by, for example, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Freud and Wittgenstein. Socrates claimed that we fear injustice more than death, implying that wars must be just wars which, in turn, implies that wars can never be just in that they cannot possibly meet the criteria of both being good in their consequences and good in themselves. Socrates also specified more specific criteria relating to the exercise f violence, e.g. that one must never respond to being wronged by doing something wrong oneself: a policy he applied in relation to the unjust Athenian death sentence which took his life. For Socrates obedience to the law, for example, was more important than life itself or victory in relation to any cause.
Plato elaborated further upon this position by referring to the parts of the soul and their life-functions of appetite and spirit, which can both produce disorder in the soul and the polis, if not regulated by the rational part of the soul and polis: an order which ensures harmony and eudaimonia (good spirited flourishing life). In Plato’s Republic the warriors are important representatives of the spirited part of the soul/polis but are nevertheless regulated by the Philosopher-rulers who know the Form of the Good and its relevance to eudaimonia. Aristotle would have accepted some of Plato’s points but probably not the recommendation that Philosophers ought to rule the polis (a position Plato himself seems to have abandoned by the time he wrote “The Laws” ). Indeed Aristotle would have complemented what Socrates and Plato postulated with the qualification that regulation must occur in terms of the Principle of the Golden Mean and War could only be justified if its particular goal was to bring about peace.
For Kant it is the moral law that grounds the more modern idea of human rights which can only be universally valid if there are institutions such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice to enforce them. This conforms with the intuition that a right can only exist if there is some authority standing ready to defend it. These authorities or international institutions must take responsibility for preventing wars between nations and penalising warmongers for violating human rights in warfare. These institutions were part of the Kantian “hidden plan”, and seem indeed to confirm the existence of such a plan for the fate of humanity: a plan that will end in a Kingdom of Ends in which everyone will treat everyone else as ends-in-themselves.
Wittgenstein who, as a young man, fought in the first world war in the trenches, believed that war was not only difficult to justify but difficult to talk about because the use of language and reason in the course of life-threatening situations is very limited. War, for Freud, is an expression of the instinct Thanatos, which emerges if other vicissitudes fail to provide the community with the moral strength to settle disputes rationally according to moral principles (the moral law, the golden mean?).
Freud used the Reality Principle and its opposition to the Pleasure Pain Principle to explain what is occurring in such a state of affairs where fear and desire for victory may neutralise more rational solutions to disputes. In this context he argued for strong legal, political and educational institutions if the aggression emerging from the death instinct was to be sufficiently regulated. The Desire for Peace, for Freud, was a Project of Eros, but Eros was “at war” with Thanatos and the outcome was always uncertain given mans inherent narcissism. Without strong institutions, however, man’s discontent can reach disruptive levels and destroy the harmony and cohesion of the community.
One possible reason for the marginalisation of the History of Philosophy, Mythology, Religion within the bounds of Reason, the activity of Art, the enthymemes of Politicians, and Psychology, is the sceptical response of science to these enterprises. Certainly, it cannot be denied that when we focus on the activities of sciences such as archaeology and physical anthropology, and their discovery of the sites of ancient civilisations and the bones of our human ancestors, we are provided with important information at a descriptive level which can contradict other descriptions from other more speculative sources. Such findings could never, however, call into question the principles of noncontradiction, sufficient reason or the Golden Mean. It is even doubtful whether any such findings could ever shed light on ideas such as the Kantian “hidden plan”.
Similarly brain research, even in its infancy during the time of Freud, was refuting the hypotheses of Charcot, who claimed that all mental illness was related to lesions in the brain, but it could never prove the negative that there is no area of the brain associated with the unconscious. Indeed, if images such as dream images are products of the unconscious, brain research proves that dream activity is associated with activity in various parts of the brain. This is something that Freud specifically claimed, namely, that his reflections on mental illness would be proved by future brain research. This has also been the case for other aspects of his theory which have been confirmed by the Nobel Prize winning researchers Gerald Edelman and Eric Candel.
The Physical Sciences of Nature are also undoubtedly of significance in relation to issues such as climate change where both the diagnosis of a complex problem and solutions for clean energy are of the utmost importance over the coming decades.
Campbell points to remarkable similarities in content in the Myths that emanate from very different regions of the world where there is no evidence of dispersion of ideas. He also takes up the burning issue of the discontentment of modern man claiming that when belief in Myth and Religion dissipates, we witness a distinct deterioration of and disruption in our Being-in-the-World. Campbell describes this in startling terms which reminds us somewhat of the picture of the Freudian battling Giants, Eros and Thanatos:
“With our old mythologically founded taboos unsettled by our own modern sciences, there is everywhere in the civilised world a rapidly rising incidence of vice and crime, mental disorders, suicides and dope addiction, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder, and despair. These are facts….they challenge too the modern educator with respect to his own faith and ultimate loyalty. Is the conscientious teacher—-concerned for the moral character as well as for the book learning of his student—to be loyal first to the supporting myths of our civilisation or to the “factualised “ truths of his science? Are the two, on every level at odds? Or is there not some point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again.?” (Page 11)
From the Philosophical perspective that believes in the “hidden plan”, the above is of course a false choice of the alternatives available. There is clearly a choice which embraces both factual truth and the validity of principles that are not illusory. The relation between these two aspects was given by Aristotle when he claimed the facts relate to the what-content of the claim and the principles relate to why the facts are as they are. Sciences of different kinds whether they relate to nature or to Psuché or to Psuché writ large in the polis, will manifest this relation in different ways. Whether lives will be put together again may well depend upon acknowledging these kinds of metaphysical matters with the help of the institutions of the polis. Some civilisations bear our Greek and Enlightenment heritage better than others, and in the context of such a discussion we ought to remind ourselves of the Freudian warning about the Soviet Union and the US where the rational part of our souls, according to Freud, are not “writ large”. It certainly seems as if for Freud Thanatos was winning the battle of the giants in these societies.
Campbells answer to his aporetic question relating to putting our lives together again is to find a modern myth by which we can live. He gives us two different kinds of answer to this question, the first of which is as follows:
“It is my considered belief that the best answer to this critical problem will come from the findings of Psychology, and specifically those findings having to do with the source and nature of myth. For since it has always been in myths that the moral orders of societies have been founded, the myths canonised as religion, and since the impact of science on myths results—apparently inevitably—in moral disequilibration, we must now ask whether it is not possible to write scientifically on such an understanding of the life supporting nature of myths.” Pages 11-12
We have discussed in other reviews, this relation to Jungian theory which possesses a more truncated view of our psychological and mental powers than that which can be found in Freudian theory. It is our contention, then, that Freudian theory would indeed be a better candidate insofar as the principles of Psychology and their relation to mythology was concerned. This position furthermore has the advantage of not firstly marginalising major accounts of the psuché, like those that we find in the works of Aristotle and Kant, and secondly, the History of Philosophy.
The second solution Campbell presents us with is the concrete example of the film “Star Wars”, which he presents as a candidate of a myth to live by in our modern world. This is a fantastic picture of the life of the universe containing alien species of all shapes and sizes and this is certainly a major feat of the power of the imagination, but it is not supported by any facts. Questionable transportations of the body through space involved in beaming personnel down from and up to the spaceship “Enterprise”, are also counterintuitive given the knowledge we have of the body and the possible rearrangement of its fundamental particles, not to mention the ease with which the ship can travel across galaxies at fantastic speeds. As with all imaginative negatives it is of course impossible to prove that these phenomena are not possible.
Science can of course be conceived of in positivist terms of:
“The world is the totality of facts and not of things” (Proposition 1, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922)
This view of course was bot historically abandoned by many positivists and by Wittgenstein himself.
Is not science conceived of metaphysically or hylomorphically cognisant of concrete investigations into the ancient sites of civilisations, the bones of fossils, brain research and the historical development of the structures and functions of the brain as it increased in size and diversified itself in terms of its functions? This must be the case. Moreover conceiving of science thus, preserves Religion within the bounds of Reason, even if the idea of freedom becomes increasingly important as does the Metaphysics of Morals.
Campbell discusses Frazer’s work “The Golden Bough” and the role of magic and superstition in the History of Myth. He cites the “principle” of the “effect resembling the cause” and cites the example of a rattle (resembling the sound of falling rain) used in a ritual designed to “cause” real rainfall in the real world. He sees the need for an explanation of such phenomena and turns to the work of Charcot and Freud to assist in the process of ridding humanity of its rituals, superstitious thoughts and feelings. Campell, however, does not discuss the Freudian position in any detail and rests his case for Psychology on the work of Jung:
“What is required, states Jung, therefore is a dialogue… a dialogue by way of symbolic forms put forth from the unconscious mind and recognised by the conscious in continuous interaction. And so what happens to the children of a society that has refused to allow any such interplay to develop, but clinging to its inherited dream as to a fixture of absolute truth, rejects the novelties of consciousness, of reason, science, and new facts?” (Page 15)
Campbell notes in the context of the above discussion that there is a risk of remaining hostage of archaic rituals, thoughts and feelings, thereby alienating oneself from the ever-changing demands of the modern world and modern consciousness. Campbell repeats here the mantra of the modern scientist on the theme of the “absolute truth”, implying that both Aristotle and Kant have failed to provide us with this chimera of “absolute truth” which may not be a dispute about the facts, but rather a contradiction in terms. Neither Philosopher would have claimed that they have provided us with the illusion of “the absolute”. Both would, however, have claimed that their work provides us with a number of important principles and laws, whose logical implications remain to be worked out.
Kant specifically claimed that it is the task of reason to discover the totality of conditions of phenomena and he also provided us with a hylomorphic/critical framework containing arguments against rationalism/empiricism/dualism from both the Ancient Greek era, the Enlightenment era and the Modern era beginning at the end of the 19th century. This Kantian position argues for a Religion within the bounds of Critical Reason and rejects all forms of superstitious ritual, thoughts and feelings.
Campbell ends this essay by appealing to an example of Hindu myth and a tale of a war between gods and anti-gods, the “churning” of the Milky Ocean, the Cosmic Serpent, a great cloud of poisonous smoke which is drunk by Shiva. Th churning continues and an elephant with 8 trunks, the moon and the sun emerge together with a magnificent horse. Campbell ends the essay by paradoxically claiming that this myth is a myth for the modern world but his reason for this claim remains obscure.
Campbell, in his interview entitled “The Road of Trials” (Pages 52-53) suggests that the things that cannot be talked about are easily misunderstood because they transcend the dialectical orientation of everyday language in which opposites are generated by the negation function of such language which is oriented to everyday circumstances. In such everyday circumstances it is the selfish “I” that is speaking about worldly experiences.
Campbell acknowledges that Psychology has an important role to play in the understanding of man, the rational anaimal capable of discourse, and, of course, his myths. In the context of this discussion Campbell articulate what he sees to be the fundamental difference between Jungain and Freudian Psychology. He obviously has a preference for Jungian archetypal patterns and its home in the collective unconscious which he claims is in contrast to the Freudian notion of a personal unconscious. Freud, in fact, speaks of both forms of the unconscious especially in the later phases of his work where he refers to the battle of the Giants, namely Eros and Thanatos fighting for the fate of our civlisation. Campbell claims that Jung aspouses a more biological universal form of the unconscious that is a function of the effect of our organs on our psychic activity, and this is a hylomorphic view of how the psychic representatives of the unconscious are formed, which Freud undoubtedly in some sense embraced. Freud, of course, also spoke of the personal impact of the traumas of childhood upon the psychological well being of the individual.
Eros and Thanatos are also represented in the artistic genres of Tragedy and Comedy which is a title of a chapter in Campbell’s “The Hero with a thousand faces”. Campbell refers to “amor fati” (the love of fate) which certainly recalls the Delphic proclamation: “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction”. This proclamation haunted Ancient Greek consciousness, especially in relation to its preoccupation with the powers of the mind and the task of harmonising the powers and their relation with the external world, which, we ought to recall was a central concern of Freudian Psychoanalysis. For Freud, the driving force of unconscious instincts could be both positive (eros) and negative (thanatos), and this together with the aganecy of the ego which was constituted by a precipitate of lost objects helped to create the impression Kant had of everyday life which he described in terms of being “Melancholically haphazard”.
Modernism which according to Arendt, stretches back to Descartes and Hobbes, stretches forward to what Arendt called “This terrible century” (20th century). During this centiry we saw the pendulum of values swing between good and evil, right and wrong, lawfulness and unlawfulness, and we saw moreover, how there was an inversion of these opposites where tyants for example took the right for the wrong and evil for what was good. Many historical events were produced by Arendt in evidence for her judgements on the origins of totalitarianism, but other Philosophers, e.g. Paul Ricoeur, also pointed to the disappearance of the discipline of rhetoric during this period. The event of the divorce between Psychology as a science and Philosophy in in 1870, also testified to the collapse of many traditional political and cultural structures and practices. Stanley Cavell, for example, points to the marginalisation of many aesthetic values during the beginning of the century when so-called modern art began challenging many historical beliefs and practices. Cavell speciifically also drew attention to the refusal to consider the history of the belief or practice of the activity one was engaging in or questioning. Heidegger too, entered the arena of the deabte over the presence of confusion over the translation of key Ancient Greek terms into Latin, claiming that the Latin translations of, for example, aletheia and phusis gave rise to a number of confusions. Wittgenstein, in the period under consideration, pointed to the prevalence of conceptual confusion in the discipline of Psycholgy. P M S Hacker a Wittgensteinian scholar, also pointed out a number of conceptual confusions in the field of neuroscience. Many of these problems can be traced back to a confusion over what can and what cannot be said about the Ancient Greek concept of psuché, the human form of life.
Modern Art of the early 20th century was enveloped by a vortex of controversy, with musical compositions containing no sound, in the name of music, weightless sculptures, in the name of sculpture , blank canvasses, in the name of painting. Wittgenstein claimed that in the classical music of Brahms he could hear the sound of engines. Our contention is that many of the above confusions arise not from local factual misunderstandings but from a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles and categories of thought that are appropriate to use in relation to the concept of psuché, rather than as Heidegger claimed a “forgetfulness of Being”, which, of course, is a more abstract and general characterisation of the problems under consideration. If one accepts this line of reasoning, then one see all the above problems, including the origins of totalitarianism, under the aspect of a systematic misunderstanding of a category of Being. Heidegger however, in his investigations of the human form of Being-in-the-world, highlights the confusions relating to death in everyday dscourse which he argues fails to confront the phenomenon of death meaningfully.
T S Eliot, one of Campbells favourite writers, postulates that our modern world has become a wasteland, which is represented in the mythical figure of the wounded, impotent, Grail King. All of the above indicates the nature of the value of the objects the Ego has been forced to abandon and mourn in a mood edging toward melancholia. What transpires, as a consequence, is a consciousness preoccupied with the events of the external world which evoke the power of the imagination more than the powers of understanding and reason: a state of mind that marginalises the realm of the sacred (Ricoeur) and the Metaphysics of Nature and Morals. What is also implied by the marginalisations of historically important domains of thought, is the following: when the attention of consciousness is constantly trained upon stimulating objects, the emotional and passionate states generated require a return to a state of homeostasis, which is this state edging toward melancholia. This is a passive state which Arendt captures in her characterisation of the masses “for whom nothing is possible anymore”.
God may either be dead, or merely deus absconditis, for the modern wastelanders, who see “fear in a handful of dust”. T S Eliot we know, in his later life, sought redemption in the Christian Faith. His poem “Four Quartets” is about Time and a Spiritual Journey that circles back upon itself, tofind itself back at the beginning of the journey, but wiser for the experience, possessing more knowledge of the world and oneself. Where we are currently on this journey was earlier characterised in terms of a “wasteland”, but this situation in the “Four Quartets” is nevertheless conceived of in more positive terms of a life which can understand how formless our lives in general has become.
The tragic pair of Pity and Fear are, of course, present in different ways in Eliot’s poetry but he does not embrace the conceptual framework of Ancient Greek thought, preferring the framework of Catholicism and its fixation upon the Grail King, sacraments, and visions of heaven and hell which Campbell believes is merely a local ethnographic perspectival vision of the realm of the sacred and the divine that he believes takes us no closer to the goal of providing humanity with a universally valid planetary myth or religion. Knowledge and Rationality does not play the central role it plays in Ancient Greek Philosophy which rests upon the ideas of areté, arché, diké logos, aletheia, psuché, phusis, phronesis and eudaimonia.
The Ancient Greek conception of techné presupposed epistemé, areté, logos, psuché and aletheia, but this conceptual framework has been abandoned by the modern world largely because our modern science has limited itself to the goal of the quantification of nature via the use of the method of observation in a context of exploration: a use which rejects many rational principles, e.g. the principle of sufficient reason. The spirit of Newtonain and Kantian science was one which embraced a set of first, rational principles that the scientist approached nature with, in the spirit of a judge who puts conceptual questions to nature and expects answers in accordance with those first principles. This modern spirit of science is so difficult to characterise because of its limited focus, and its increasing complexity. What can be said, is that it is certainly embedded in a technological network of Heideggerian instrumentalities that always seem to refer beyond themselves in the sense of being “for-the-sake-of”. For the Acient Greeks, techné was situated in the domain of the productive sciences which included sculpture, builders, carpentry and weaponry, but did not include medicine, mathematics and rhetoric, all of which had intimate relations to the rational basic ides of aletheia, eåistemé and logos.
Psychoanalysis would, then, on the above account, be a skill, a technique, and an intellectual discipline. Epistemé for the Ancient Greeks was certainly a higher intellectual power and a superior form of knowledge obeying intellectual rational principles. Knowledge does not belong in the same category of instrumentalities which are not ends-in-themselves but rather means to ends or, as Heidegger expressed the matter, that “for- the. sake-of”. Instrumentalities, in other words, are cause-effect relations and do not have a telos connected to the more categorical forms of arché that we find situated in the context of explanation/justification.
The Arts of Tragedy and Comedy, as practiced by Shakespeare, occurred over a century later than the “times of the troubadour”, and several centuries later than the age of chivalry, which initated for Campbell, the romantic form of individualism he believes is central to our Western identities. Shakespeare skillfully combined these themes with the themes of Ancient Greek tragedy and Philosophy, that were being reawakened during the Renaissance. God, during the time of Shakespeare, was still an important presence, but the star of Religion was waning in importance in the light of the Protestant Revolution. Many Renaissance artists, such as Michelangelo, remained intensely religious, but were becoming more courageous in their challenges to the authority of the Church insofar as the limitations imposed by the church upon what they may or may not represent was concerned.
Science, too, with the invention of the telescope, was making space for itself in our everyday life, which now knew we were actively exploring the heavens and the movement of the stars and planets. The space of infinity and the time of eternity, were now transforming the activity of observing the heavens with a discipline which would become the discipline of astronomy. We were challenging the magnitude of the physical universe and thereby becoming so much more than a handful of dust reminding us of the lost object of a life that was no more because its powers had been extinguished. The transcendental attitude was being restored, but at the same time narrative accounts relating to the the place of the heavens, where wandering souls were domiciled, became less plausible. The image of ghosts and one soul leaving a body and entering another, was, of course, an image of the imagination which was not connected to reality in the way in which the memory or consciousness was.
Heraclitus claimed that the logos of change was to understand that two phenomena such as the road leading up the hill and the road leading down the hill were to be thought of as in soem sense the same. Aristotle saw the principles of change to be manifested in kinds of change, principles, media and causes: e complex network of considerations which was in accordance with logos, epistemé, and aletheia, which three different domains of science could investigate. These domains of science of course concerned themselves with psuché in different ways given that they related to knowledge and skills of different kinds, and given that explanations and justifications. Such explanations and justifications occurred in relation to the many principles regulating all the changes in the natural world as well as the changes in the the world of psuché.
Campbell points out that the narratives of myth are about the changes the hero undergoes in the course of his/her heroic quest, and many of the events are dreamlike, because, presumably, the changes we are witnessing are being processed by the imagination and the emotions that are being evoked by outer changes. Dreams require interpretation because they too are products of inner psychic change in the medium of images which resemble in many respects the images of film that Stanley Cavell discussed in his work “The World Viewed:Reflections on the Ontology of Film”. The imges of film, in contrast to our dream images, are automated, and the objects photographed “participate” in “the photographic presence of themselves on film”: making them, in fact, more like memories than the images of dreams (which are inserted in a wish-fulfillment complex). The dreamlike quality of film is difficult to analyse, but they too, in some sense, relate to the imagination and passions of the creator of the plot of the film. This, added to the fact that there is a form of “technical intelligence”, involved in the automation process which relates to instrumental forms of reasoning connected to the instrumental notion of “for-the-sake-of”. The camera, moving over a landscape, from object to object is an imitation of sensory experience: an automated form of sensory experience which is very different to that form that occurs in relation to a human body (the human body, that is, possesses a sensori-motor unity based on a constellation of organs and limbs typical of the human form of life(psuché)). Cavell is suggesting here that the moving automated images and mechanically induced movement of the film camera, provide us with a sense of a Being-in-the-world which is not human. The lack of real depth in the movement of the photographic images also suggest the lack of the presence of many categories associated with the understanding of human movement, because as Brian O Shaughnessy suggests:
“concepts play a causal role in the genesis of visual depth experience.” (The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory”. Page 171)
Films imitate the depth of three dimensional space in two dimensional images, and everything viewed “participates” in the real forms of the world and this might partly explain the dreamlike quality of the film experience. There is no suggestion that Campbell believes that our modern art-form of film-making could be the basis for the Planetary mythology he is seeking.
We have questioned the metaphysical status Campbell attaches to the hero, equating as he does the hero with a God in his work “The Hero with a thousand faces”. Overcoming overwhleming forces and manifesting supernatural powers against terrifying monsters are certainly not as realistic as the Socratic responses to the overwhelming forces he was confronted with. Socrates of course was not a mythological figure and would have objected to be called a God in the way Buddha was. The Buddha narrative speaks of an unnantural birth and a figure who sits under a Bodi tree “fighting a dark army” led by Kama-Mara. There was not, for Socrates, as there was for Buddha, a King of the Serpents protecting him from various supernatural dangers.
Campbell also refers to Prometheus and his world-transcending deed of stealing fire from the Gods to give to humanity. There is here an allusion to the pre-history of humanity, and the importance of the role of fire in the early phases of the primitive hunting/gathering groups living in caves. The narrative surrounding Prometheus, however, was not a clinical historical account but rather a narrative driven by the passionate desires: a narrative that desired to metaphorically communicate the sacred meaning of certain events in man’s history. Campbell claims that Jungian archetypes were involved in the construction of the Pometheus narrative, in particular the archetype of the Hero:
“Whether the hero be ridiculous or sublime, Greek or barbarian, Gentile or Jew, his journey varies little in essential plan. Popular tales represent the heroic action as physical: the higher religions show the deed to be moral: neverthless there will be found astonishingly little variation in the morphology of the adventure, the character roles involved, the victories gained. If one or another of the basic elements of the archetypal pattern is omitted from a given fairy tale, legend, ritual, or myth, it is bound to be somehow or other implied–and the omission itself can speak volumes for the history and pathology of the example.” Page 30 “The Hero with the thousand faces “
Philosophical mythology would of course not be so concerned with physical world-historical deeds such as those attributed to Achilles , but more concerned with the moral deeds of world-philosophical characters such as Socrates, e.g. his activities in the agora and his relation to death as a consequence of his death sentence by the Athenian courts.
Philip Cousineau in his Introduction to Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” claims that Campbell’s search was for the Logos of the phenomena he investigated. The concern, that is, was what these phenomena had in common rather than what differentiated them from each other. The method used was described as comparative historical elucidation and it can be contrasted with the method of Wittgenstein, which sought essentially to differentiate between different phenomena. Cousineau reminds us of the proclamation we encounter in the Vedas, namely:
“Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names”
In this regard reference is often made to the collective archetypes of Jung, which are used to justify the denotation of many sacred narratives Campbell calls these sacred narratives or myths the “Masks of god” which partly constitute the “morphogenetic field” which we presume is identified with “The Truth” mentioned in relation to the Vedas above. The role of the hero is, we have agued in previous reviews of Campbell’s work, an ambiguous reference, which appears to exclude the quiet contemplative rational transformation Philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle appear to have undergone in their essentially intellectual journeys. These are the “modern” “pathfinders” in the modern morphogenetic field. We do find Socrates engaged in inner communication with his daemon in life-crisis situations, but Psychoanalysis would have no difficulty in explaining this communication as one between the ego and the superego, in a situation where a choice of life-defining alternative actions are being considered. The life defining experiences of saints, prophets and shamans are of course a much more dramatic affair.
Cousineau claimed that Campbell’s method involved the use of the hermeneutical method. Paul Ricoeur, the Philosopher, articulates well the concern of hermeneutics for “symbols”, claiming that symbols possess the semantic property of “double meaning”. Expressions with a so-called manifest meaning provoke thought to move to another deeper meaning in what Ricoeur calls the “realm of the sacred”, which we mortals seem able to comprehend only through a glass darkly. Kant speaks in his Third Critique of Judgment of a statue of Isis and an inscription that says “no mortal has ever lifted my veil”.
Aristotle refers to this realm in terms of the realm of Being and he further claims that “Being has many meanings” . This concerns not merely our relation to God, but also our relation to life (psuché), death and the mysteries of the external world. Campbell uses the word “metaphor” in its Ancient Greek meaning of “carrying beyond”: a meaning that transcends the more modern interpretation in terms of a shift from one semantic region to another. Reference is also made to the archetypes of the soul in the spirit of aletheia (unconcealment or revelation). We encounter this spirit in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas which articulates a framework for the “many meanings of Being”, by claiming that the Kingdom of God is both within us and out there in the world, here and now. Eastern Religion also articulates this transcendental feature of our experience in terms of “Thou art that!”.
Ambiguous references to the archetype of the hero and his journey do not, as we have claimed earlier, acknowledge the possibility that this appears to run contrary to his stated view that we ought to be wary of unnecessarily universalising particular perspectival narratives which express local ethnographic concerns. It is true that prior to the introduction of Philosophical Reasoning and its Categorical concern with Being and Principles (such as noncontradiction and sufficient Reason), the heros narrative was steered by an imaginative idea of the heros journey. But even if our physiology has stayed the same for 40,000 years as Campbell claimed, the organisation of the brain due to the introduction of writing and reading may well be responsible, as Julian Jaynes suggests, for the kind of self-consciousness that has evolved as a human vicissitude of the instincts. We can see clearly in Plato’s writings, the change of emphasis from the virtue of courage to the virtue of wisdom, and the increasing importance of various forms of knowledge insofar as leading the good spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia) was concerned. Achilles excelled in battle, but his courageous life, otherwise did not meet Socratic or Aristotelian criteria. It was Socrates and the mythical Philosophers, returning to the cave from which they originated, that became the new “ideal”, representing wisdom. Whether we can regard these figures as “heros” is not clear. With the advent of philosophers there is an important shift from the individual perspective to the perspective of the polis which, for Socrates, was the soul (psuché) writ large. Socrates was searching for the definition of justice but it was Aristotle who presented us with an essence specifying definition of Man, namely rational animal capable of discourse which transcended the old ideal of the courageous warrior, and perhaps the so called archetype of the hero dissipated with Aristotelian Rationalism and the telos of the contemplative life.
Socrates’ life was, however, in the old sense “heroic” because it ended the way it did for the reasons that it did, but it was not the battlefield but the agora which was the scene of his activities. Challenging those who thought they knew and who were trying to make the worse argument seem the better, of course, took both courage and wisdom. Socrates, like Jesus, knew the risks he was taking in attempting to persuade people to “know thyself!”. What happened to Socrates proved that the Athenian system was not quite equipped to handle appeals to “the child of the Gods”, namely Philosophy. Aristotle too, became persona non grata and was forced to flee from Athens. There is an argument for the position that the polis as a constitutional entity was not equipped to meet the demands for the “new ideals” the Philosophers were arguing for, namely justice, knowledge, and freedom. An interesting footnote to this discussion is the attempt of Alexander the Great, Aristotle’s pupil, to establish a Greek Empire, thereby helping to destabilise the existing system of polis/states. In the spirit of the Aristotelian principle of the Golden Mean, it is worth pointing out that during Kant’s time, neither cities nor empires, but nations became the entities with constitutions.
Campbell in the Preface to his 1949 edition of “The Hero with a thousand faces” refers to a Freudian critique of religion and mythology:
“The Truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognise them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels he has been deceived: and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups, and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We nave become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell the children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.” (Pages 44-45)
Freud’s point was, according to Campbell, that the ancient muses knew what they were talking about and which metaphors to use to carry their message further. We moderns, however, need to learn again the “grammar of the symbols”. Campbell adds:
“as a key to this mystery I know of no better modern tool than psychoanalysis.”(The Hero with a thousand faces” (Page xii)
Psychoanalysis, however, has a complex history with roots both in Aristotelian Hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy, but it is perhaps the latter that is especially relevant to this discussion, given the Freudian declaration that he was a “Kantian Psychologist”. Alongside these relevant facts, however, there is also the deliberate Freudian choice of terminology drawn from Platonic Philosophy, e.g. Eros, Thanatos, Ananke, logos, which clearly transcend the technical language Freud uses to characterise the treatment of his patients. The Freudian theory of the “psychic-apparatus” and its possession of psychological powers in relation to the external world, also manifests elements of Greek thinking that presupposed the Greek view of psuché embedded in a categorical framework of areté, dike, arché, epistemé, aletheia and eudaimonia. In this Philosophical/technical framework there is no clear role for narratives of heros and their quests. The heros quest for self- transformation often contains the occurrence of supernatural events in which tremendous forces are overcome by a superhuman will and determination, communicating perhaps the narcissistic message that “anything is “possible” for such men. The Aristotelian process of self- actualisation is not embedded in a narrative or a story, but is rather part of a philosophical account of the cultural development of a number of powers of human psuché, including the powers of discourse and rationality which are integrated with a number of other psychological/mental powers or functions that in turn have important relations to the external world.
It was Plato that initiated this transition from the form of the narrative to a more enlightened philosophical form of “Philosophical dialogues” featuring the “ very real character” of Socrates, whose mode of being was one of self-efacement rather than self-proclamation. His power of persuasion was considerable, because it was founded upon areté, arché, episteme dike, aletheia, logos, and eudaimonia. One can, if one so desires, read the episodes of the dialogues in terms of the adventures of Socrates, but that would be to miss the pedagogical point of the dialogues, which was to herald in the new era of the new ideals of principles and rationality, emphasising simultaneously the rejection of heros and the rejection of the strategy of making the worse argument seem the better.
The heroic narrative is at best an exercise of the imagination and emotion in the name of the good spirited flourishing life of the individual which, in an aesthetic context, carries the subjective message of exemplary universality and necessity articulated in Kant’s Third Critique. It is true that the trilogy of dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology and Phaedo, seemingly promote a narrative of the Socratic journey to his final destination in a death-cell. The message of these dialogues, however, is more complex. A man who has dedicated his life to justice is convicted for attempting to make citizens aware of the essence of Justice. Socrates at no point proclaimed himself to be a hero or a saviour, and he did not proclaim directly that Philosophy could save us from the Delphic prophecy of ruin and destruction. He nevertheless, over time, became a symbol for the necessity and transcendence of Philosophy.
Athens was the home of three of the greatest Philosophers in history, in relatively rapid succession, and their bond of connection was a sacred one: that of teacher-pupil. Plato incorporated the spirit of Socrates into his dialogues, and Aristotle incorporated the spirits of both Socrates and Plato into his writings. Campbells account of the heros journey has a very different structure, which it can be argued, was promoted into a cult of the hero by Thomas Carlysle, which in turn was transformed into the Hegelian idea of world historical individuals such as Napoleon . This underwent a further transformation into Nietzsches “Will to power”. Associated ideas of “Domination” and Colonisation” were political ideals that have been embraced by a number of modern tyrants since Napoleon. The Greek political heritage, however, probably lies closer to Schopenhauers “will to live” and Kant’s “good will”. Its epistemological heritage encourages a belief in “scientific” explanation/justification. Its artistic heritage includes a belief in the importance of Art and its associated ideals of the beautiful and sublime.
Campbell was undoubtedly a significant explorer of the breadth and depth of psuché via the linking of distant mythologies such as that of the Navaho and Hinduism. His arguments are sometimes hylomorphic and sometimes Kantian but they lack an important philosophical dimension which we have attempted to articulate. It is true as Campbell maintains that mans physiology has not altered for 40000 years but mans most important organ is his brain and the organisation of the functions of that organ may have changed during this period. Language, Julian Jaynes has argued was originally a bilateral function like all the other physiological functions of the brain. The science of physiology teaches us that an organ can lose one function and acquire another. In the case of the origins and history of the function of language, Jaynes has interesting theories to contribute:
“Language, Jaynes argues, began as an expressive phenomenon partly connected to events of importance in the external world /e.g. hunting, and gathering). By a charted series of functions, this developmental sequence eventually reaches the level or representative thought in which we find the names for animals developing into a more complex stage in which names are given to individual people. At this stage it would be fair to say that we are definitely thinking something. As group life evolved we then find language evolving into more complex forms via the use of sentences with subject-predicate structures which illustrate the fully mental power of thinking something about something which Heidegger called the veritative (truth-making) synthesis. This, however is not the final level of the Mental which is achieved only when the principles of Logic and Truth tables begin to constitute and regulate the field of sound argumentation—the field of rationality. These higher mental operations are undoubtedly inhabitants of the realm of the mental being essentially connected to the telos of self-conscious thought.” (James, M.R.,D., The World Explored, the World suffered: A Philosophical istory of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Volume four, Page 194)
This is a hylomorphic account of the development and integration of human psychological powers that are implied by the essence specifying definition of human psuché, namely rational animal capable of discourse. Whilst different languages spoken by different races of man with different histories compel us to attend to these differences, biological reflection focuses upon what we, who are different in certain respects, have in common. In simple primitive environments consciousness may not have possessed the same level of complexity, but mythical narratives certainly appealed to the powers of the imagination and sensibility, quickening in those who had the requisite capacities, an experience of transcendence. Primitive man certainly used myths to orient himself in his environment as well as to begin the attempt to know himself. Campbell claims in this context:
“The symbols of mythology are not manufactured: they cannot be ordered, invented or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.” (The Hero with a thousand faces, Page 2)
Many scientific disciplines contribute to our understanding of primitive man and his primitive form of life and Campbell invokes psychoanalysis amongst these. He refers to the long childhood of man, and the subsequent long period of dependence upon our care-givers. As the repertoire of human psychological and mental powers develop much can go awry to disturb this development, and identification of the causes of psychological or mental health problems are not always straightforward matters. One image which the Ancient Greeks use to provide us with an understanding of the human self actualisation process is that of the labyrinth, and psychoanalysis certainly provides us with one of the threads leading out of the cave and into the sunlight. Myth and Religion too provides us with such a thread as does Philosophy.
In an interview entitled “The Road of Trials” Campbell refers to James Joyce and the Arts as responsible for awakening in them the realisation of the universal meaning of the symbols we find in our Myths. In this context he also refers to Hinduism which already in the 9th century BC acknowledged that:
“all the deities are projections of psychological power, and they are within you and not out there. They’re out there also, in a certain way, in a mysterious way but the real place for them is in here (points to the heart).” (Pages 36-37)
James Joyce helped Campbell understand the Eastern texts and laid the foundation for the next phase of his journey, in which he discovered Freud, Jung, and Thomas Mann whilst studying Sanskrit. Yet it was another German Psychologist whom he met in 1981 who would play a large part in helping him to synthesise ideas from Myth, Art, Psychology and Literature, and relate these ideas to the fundamental problem of life, which is:
“to become transparent to transcendence: so that you realise that you are yourself a manifestation of this” (Campbells The Hero’s Journey, Page 51).
Campbell spent one hour with Karlfried Graf Durckheim from Freiburg and emerged from this meeting with a definition of myth as:
“a metaphor transparent to transcendence” (Page 51)
The Ancient Greek spirit of aletheia hovers over all these reflections because it is clear that we are in a world of symbolic language which carries us beyond the normal concerns of speech into the “realm of the sacred”, which is the realm of psuché (life) in which we feel at one with the Universe and especially with all forms of life. Schopenhauer, following Kant, highlighted this aspect of metaphysics when he pointed to the phenomenon of humans sacrificing their lives to save the lives of others, thereby transcending Spinoza’s principle of self preservation in which it is claimed all things strive to preserve themselves in existence.
The imagination, according to Aristotle, is Janus-faced: it can either be subject to the will and be categorised as an active categorical power, or it can be characterised as a passive process in which the schema imposed upon what is seen, remembered, and “thought” has its source in sensations or feelings, whose essential characteristic is that they “happen to one”. Imagination in this latter case is non-conceptual. In an article entitled “Aristotle on the Imagination” by Malcolm Schofield(“Articles on Aristotle”, ed. by Barnes J., Schofield, M., Scrabji, R., (London Duckworth, 2003), it is argued that the Greek equivalent to our word “imagination” is “phantasia”:
“But Aristotle’s own unitary explanation of dreams and such pathological phenomena, on the one hand, and the similarity between pathological and normal seeing of aspects, on the other, put us in a position in which we can now exhibit the unity in Aristotle’s conception of phantasia, while retaining our characterisation of it as imagination.” (P. 125)
We should in the context of this discussion recall that for Aristotle:
“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” (The Collected Works of Aristotle)
On this account dreams must aim at the good in spite of their tenuous connection to reality: they do not, that is, aim at the true. The dreamer believes that they are experiencing or seeing a man in a red shirt, and do not know that they are merely imagining that they are seeing a man in a red shirt. The absence of actual experience or actual perception in this situation means that memory must be playing a role in the production of these images, and the question then becomes: what is it that is activating the memory to produce such images. For Freud, dreams are wish-fulfilments in a double sense: they are disguised desires for something which requires the art of interpretation to make manifest, and they express the wish to continue sleeping. Two different types of “good” are being aimed at. In both cases the wish is located in the unconscious or preconscious systems of the psychic apparatus. For Freud, we should recall, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious system of our mind: memories were presented in disguised form on the dream screen in accordance with both the pleasure-pain principle and the energy regulation principle. Dreams such as the father’s dream of a child that has recently died, manifest the wish on the part of the father that the child was still alive. The memory that he is dead is overridden by other memories of the child alive, which are more in accord with the fathers desire that the child not be dead. The dream-memory of the child shouting out “father, father, cant you see that I am burning!” is a synthesis of the present near-waking experience of the body being burned by candles that have fallen over near the body, plus the memory of the event of the dying as a result of a burning fever. The dream is a phantasy: it never happened and what is wished for could never happen, now that the child is dead. Yet it is a real expression of a real wish projected onto the dream screen of a sleeping subject. It is most definitely a substantial clue in relation to the royal road of the subject’s state of mind. It is also part of the mourning process: a process that will for some time prevent the subject from fully engaging with his life-projects in accordance with the reality principle: the pleasure-pain principle(which uses feelings as regulators) rules on this royal road. The task for the father is to become fully conscious of his wish, and its role in the mourning process. Feelings are manifestations of what is happening to the body, and share with sensations, a non-active status. Bring them into a context of judgement as Kant did in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, and they can be subject to the activities of the imagination, the understanding and judgement. For Kant, the aesthetic judgement is concerned with the active communication of a feeling of the harmony of different powers of the mind, e.g. the imagination and the understanding. In such judgements there may even be a partial aim at the truth when, for example, one claims that the evening sunset is beautiful. Kant maintains that this is a cognitive claim on the grounds that we attempt, as Kant puts the matter, to speak with a “universal voice”. In this form of judgement, the understanding and its categories are involved in the organisation of the representations involved in this judgement. We know from his work on the Rhetoric and De Anima, that Aristotle believed Emotions can be connected to both our powers of understanding and judgement, and have therefore a claim to be cognitive (emotions have both objects and grounds for their occurrence). Anger, to take a typical Aristotelian example, connects judgement and thought via an awareness of an apparent injustice that has been done to the angry subject. Here Aristotle appeals to his hylomorphic account, and speaks of the matter of anger being the physiological response of the agitation of the blood around the heart: he also speaks of the form of the subjects anger being related to the subjects desire for retaliation or revenge. It is clear here that the subject’s judgement, in such circumstances, is only partially overcome and there is a complex relation to the pain involved in the situation. Fear, too, has a similar structure in which the matter are a number of complex physiological responses and the form is connected to the perception or thought of an evil that is related to imminent danger and the possible pain associated with this danger. Both anger and fear can be, as Aristotle claimed, praised or blamed for their positive or negative relation to the good. The angry man must believe that he has been insulted for the anger to be authentic, and the fearful man must believe in dangerous circumstances, if the fear is to be genuine. Fear and anger can be communicated in rhetorical speeches, which may also contain elements of deliberation or reasoning about the insult or danger, either diminishing its magnitude or fortifying a good spirited response to the events in question.
Modern positivist theories, we know, proposed an account of a special kind of meaning–emotional meaning–in response to the more ethical accounts of anger and fear. Such accounts focussed on the moment of persuasion involved in such circumstances, analysing the idea of the good into a feeling component and a subjective imperative component. Such an account was meant to be critical of Aristotelian accounts of ethics and emotions as well as Kantian accounts which attached great importance to the role of ethical law and principles in ethical judgements. For Aristotle, both Ethics and rhetoric involve practical reasoning in the process of praising and blaming the judgements and actions of the agents responsible for them. The grounds for such praise and blame lie in the realm of ought judgements and action—what we ought and ought not to have done. The practical reasoning used in such circumstances will, for example involve appeal to principles of judgement which claim that fear and anger can be appropriate if the circumstances and objects are appropriate. Aristotle’s account also refers to appetition, hunger, thirst and sexual desire which for both Plato and Aristotle were clearly linked to what both Freud and William James designated as the realm of instinct. Freud presupposes much of what Aristotle wrote in his account of the sexual instincts where sources, objects, and aims are all connected to the cathartic effect of a form of discourse that possessed the power to mitigate the undue influence of sexual desire in our lives. So, with respect to Freud’s account of the life instinct, we encounter a hylomorphic strategy which appeals to both form and matter. With respect to hunger and thirst for example a biological account of the physiological functions of the body suffice to explain such phenomena. Sexual instincts, on the other hand, require a more formal account to complement the bodily sources of the associated phenomena. Practical reasoning of the kind we encounter in relation to anger and fear plays an important role in the discourse we use to praise and blame agents for the appropriateness of their sexual activity(areté).
Aristotle’s work on poetic and epic tragedy speaks about the use of the emotions in dramatic works of art, in particular, the emotions of pity and fear. The cathartic process Aristotle describes is a process involving good objects that may be lost, good grounds, and associated goods such as areté and diké. All in accordance with the essence-specifying definition of tragedy:
“the imitation of an action that is serious and complete…..accomplishing through pity and fear the catharsis of such affections.”(The Complete Works of Aristotle. The revised Oxford Edition edited by Barnes J.,(Princetown, Princetown University Press, Vol 2, 1984(Poetics)
The actions concerned are concerned with what ought or ought not to be done or said, the moral quality of the actors, and the catharsis referred to is more of an educational and less of a medical-physical process. Medical catharsis involves the purging of pathological impurities related to states of health or disease of the body, whereas educational catharsis is concerned with the pathologies and the healing of the soul(psuché) in relation to areté and diké. There is, as Aristotle maintains, a kind of educational pleasure attached to this process in which one learns what the good is. Needless to say, we are concerned with the imagination and its universalisation in the process of appreciating dramatic works of art. There is an equivalent work of appreciation which helps us to understand the peculiar nature of those goods that are both good in their consequences and good in themselves. Knowledge(epistemé) of the Good is at issue in the mimetic context of an art work and the imagination therefore plays a decisive role in both the creation and the appreciation of works of art. Judgement, therefore, plays a more important role than reason in the realm of the productive sciences such as rhetoric and art.
In contexts of practical reason where we are directly concerned with action rather than imitative representations, understanding and reason play a larger constitutive role and teleological judgement and imagination a lesser role. The key idea involved in ethical forms of practical reasoning, is that of the freedom to choose ones action-alternatives. This is a direct consequence of the Kantian claim that forms of life are entities that are self-causing and can therefore negate any destructive desire that arises in their mental arena, e.g. refusing to take a drink if one is a recovering alcoholic. Sartre characterises this freedom in terms of Consciousness, and claims that the essence of consciousness is Negation. Freud, here, as in other matters, aligns himself more with Kant, and claims that the desire to take a drink as a result of the cravings of ones appetite-system arises as a so-called “primary process”, activity which can be neutralised by a secondary process reality-based operation of choosing not to imbibe. The secondary process is operating in these circumstances as an inhibitory power. In this process the representation of the drink thus becomes a lost object in the history of the individuals desire. The wounded desire that resulted in the choice not to take the drink is then required to submit to an attitude of resignation and acceptance of the wound to the self. This impulse-control triangle is for Freud related to the Greek idea of arête, which ensures that we do the right thing in the right way at the right time. Yet the whole process is haunted by feelings of mourning and melancholia, which hover like dark clouds over such kinds of action.
Paul Ricouer, in his work, “Freud and Philosophy: An essay in Interpretation”, is more inclined to place faith in the teleological aspect of action processes which he claims must supplement the so-called archeologically oriented account provided by Freud. This presupposes that Freud’s account did not contain a teleological element, which is a questionable presupposition, given Freud’s use of Platonic themes and ideas in his later work. Plato’s “Republic, we know, was an attempt to provide an account of the Good-in-itself and the Good-in-its-consequences, in relation to the ideas of areté and diké. Ricouer, in contrast, attempts to synthesise the teleological and archeological aspects he refers to with a theologically-laden eschatological meaning of justice (getting what one deserves). This places both the Socratic account of Justice (involving knowledge (epistemé) of how the laws work in the polis), and the Aristotelian account of justice (involving the virtues of a middle class who choose to rule in accordance with the principle or law of the golden mean), in a state of suspension. Behind the account given by Ricouer, lies a conviction that Psychology is not an observational science, but rather an exegetical science: a science involving language and what he regards as its relation to a dialectics of presence and absence.
The Psychoanalytical theory of Freud we know demanded a theory to guide the interpretation of dreams, symptoms, and pathological behaviour of his patients, who were providing Freud with a “story about their lives and its meaning”. This story reached back into the past and forwards out into an imagined future. Such a story could not possibly be conceived of as a collection of facts established by observational activity, but must rather be conceived of as a motivational history organised by the “types” constituted by case studies of individuals. The questions raised in this latter kind of “science” is less akin to establishing the facts (questio factii) of the case, and more concerned with what Kant would have called “questio juris”—an organisation of the facts in accordance with principles and laws that justify/explain the conditions of the possibility of the history of the patients failures and lost-objects. Psychoanalysis, then, in its theoretical aspect is concerned with the “production” of mental health, but also with areté and diké, with how the patient ought to be leading their life in order to achieve eudaimonia (a good-spirited flourishing life). The concept of “health” being presupposed, is a teleological concept that has both technological (techné) and practical ethical aspects, hence Freud’s claim that he was a Kantian Psychologist. The combination of principles of the productive sciences (techné) and the principles of ethics in psychoanalytical theory must also be part of the reason why Freud focussed on the ideas of “meaning” and “interpretation”.
Freud is sometimes characterised as an anti-phenomenological theorist, and if ones models of phenomenological theory emanate from Husserl or Heidegger, there may be some substance to this claim, but if one, instead, compares the Phenomenology of Merleau -Ponty to Freudian theory, the differences of the positions seem less striking. For Merleau-Ponty, the human body is not a set of causally related entities and processes, but rather a lived form of being-in-the-world (psuché), in which meanings relate to meanings in a way very different to the way in which material and efficient causation relate to their effects. For both Merleau-Ponty and Freud, sexuality is a form of life with global rather than “local” meaning, and is related to our freedom, which also has a global meaning. Freedom, however, has more “cultural” significance than sexuality, and there are therefore circumstances in which culture rightly demands of us that we sacrifice our sexual satisfactions for higher purposes. Freud in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents” claimed that this “giving up of sexual objects and satisfactions”, was not a straightforward sacrifice and may give rise to a form of discontentment with our civilisation. This inhibitory process is obviously connected to the work of the Ego and the defence mechanism of “sublimation”, which is, in fact, a vicissitude of instinct. What is being invoked here is the Freudian impulse-control-triangle of Desire-Demand-Refusal, and the melancholic image that emerges from this, is of the wounded self that needs to go in search of “treatment”, that hopefully results in the resignation and acceptance that comes with increased “wisdom and understanding (A process steered by the Reality Principle). This latter characterisation of the education of desire is, in fact, difficult to represent using phenomenological concepts and ideas, since there is no clear role for rational principles in this kind of account.
Consciousness is one of the central ideas of Phenomenological accounts. It is sometimes characterised in terms of its images (Heidegger’s Transcendental Imagination in his Kant-book), which appear to be regressive forms of perception. There is no obvious role for the rational principle of non-contradiction in phenomenological accounts, which claim to be searching for essential descriptions of phenomena in the dream-like world of images. There is also lacking, the space-time continuity that is present in our perception of the world. For Freud, the history of our desires could be recorded in our dream images which are in need of principles involved in self-knowledge, if the interpretative process of the meaning of these archeological representations is to be made manifest. Knowledge (epistemé) of the complex functioning of the psychic apparatus is at the very least a necessary condition of interpreting the meaning of these images. In his work “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud maintains that the dream-work is a regressive activity, but at the same time the work of interpretation of these images is the royal road for gaining insight into the patient’s state of mind. Returning to the Freudian triangle of demand-refusal-wounded ego, the demands of the life instinct begin the demand-process and the more materialistic these demands are, the more likely it is that anxiety will arise in relation to the stage of refusal: this anxiety can then haunt the ego. If the ego is strong enough to tolerate this anxiety, a stoical form of resignation/acceptance of the refusal will contribute to the formation of more realistic demands in conjunction with more realistic means to achieve such demands. If, for various developmental reasons, the ego is not sufficiently strong to tolerate the resultant anxiety connected with refusal, defence mechanisms (which are also vicissitudes of the instincts) such as repression, will seek to manage the pain and suffering in ways that may eventually compromise the functioning of the ego. In such cases these unconscious residues would need to re-emerge into consciousness, and be reported to the analyst who will attempt to restructure, and/or re-situate this experience in the preconscious system of the patient (with the aid of language and the memory system). This process of “working through” can occur in relation to dreams symptoms and pathological behaviour.
The Delphic Oracle suspected that the process of knowing oneself would not be an easy one, and Aristotle, Kant, and Freud would undoubtedly have agreed with such a judgement. This process of working-through requires the operation of the reality principle insofar as it regulates both the theoretical discourse connected with the treatment, and the practical activities/symptoms of the patient. With respect to the latter, the task of the therapist is to improve the life of the patient by strengthening the ego with a greater capacity to tolerate refusal and accept the patients “lost-objects” of desire. If the patient has been traumatised, and the ego is strengthened so that the patient no longer blindly and pathologically repeats an activity or “acts-out”, the consequence of good treatment will be to convert traumatic anxiety-laden images into normal memories that will fade in intensity with the passing of time. Memory of the traumatic episode ought, that is, to be recalled in the course of time with diminished levels of anxiety. During the course of this therapeutic process the patient will be subjected to a therapeutic technique that relates to the refusal phase of the Freudian triangle. The analyst, that is, will use the transference love that the patient feels for the analyst, for the purposes of overcoming the patient’s resistances to the treatment. The task of the analyst is partly to overcome the narcissism of the patient, which resists reality when the patient attempts to consolidate a defensive position via the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle. The instincts and their more positive vicissitudes, such as sublimation, need to be mobilised in a therapeutic process that aims at displacing narcissistic tendencies. If the ego remains narcissistic, lost objects of desire that are valued highly may not be merely mourned but may be subject to the self-destructive mood of melancholia which testifies to the presence of the death instinct. Aggression is the typical response of a narcissist to what is perceived as a universally hostile environment:
“One of the vicissitudes of the death instinct is aggression and it is this which is unleashed by the narcissist upon his environment if he is frustrated. If he desires an object and then loses that object, the memory system is not sufficiently structured for the work of mourning to occur, and the work of melancholia occurs. Here we can see the limited role of consciousness and the importance of the Metapsychology of the instincts and their vicissitudes.”( James, M.,R.,D., The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action, Lambert Academic Press, Mauritius, 2020, Page 203)
Campbell addresses the problem of beauty in the following manner:
“And with respect to the problem of beauty—is this beauty intended? Or is it something that is the natural expression of a beautiful spirit? Is the beauty of the birds song intentional? In what sense is it intentional? Or is it the expression of the bird, the beauty of the birds spirit you might say? I think that way very often about this art. To what degree was the intention of the artist what we would call “aesthetic” or to what degree expressive? And to what degree is the art something that they had simply learned to do that way? When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spiders nature. Its instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? How much of it is conscious and intentional? That is the big question. ” (page 100)
The art being referred to in the above quote is the art of the cave painting, painted during a time when humans did not live in settlements and during a time when death, or “passing through the dark gates” was probably experienced on a regular basis in a relatively small group struggling every day to meet their most basic needs. The “Either/Or” structure alluded to in the above quote appears to eliminate the possibility that both the premise “The bird song is intentional” and the premise “The bird song is expressive of its spirit.”, could both be true. There are of course difficulties with both premises. Animals are beings not capable of discourse and they therefore do not possess the capacity to see that one and the same act can fall under , for example, four different descriptions.
To take the example discussed by Elisabeth Anscombe in her work “Intention”, the bodily action of moving ones arm up and down is done with the intention of operating the pump, with the intention of pumping the water into the house, and with the intention of poisoning the inhabitants of the house. The first description is of the physical action performed by an agents body and it is a condition of the second and both are a condition of the third and so on. “Poisoning the inhabitants of the house” is then an answer to the questions “Why are you moving your arm up and down?, Why are you operating the pump?, Why are you pumping water into the house? The operating of the pump is the reason for moving the arm up and down, and the pumping of the water into the house is the reason for operating the pump and the poisoning of the inhabitants of the house is the reason for pumping the water into the house. Human Instrumental action is rational and dependent upon knowledge that a totality of conditions is necessary for a desired outcome.
Animals, not being capable of discourse (logos) cannot be said to understand that anything they do falls under a decription, but they are capable of purposive behaviour such as hunting, which may involve being in some sense instinctively aware of the conditions necessry for catching the prey. The bird song, similarly, may be one condition for attracting a mate and it would not be very difficult to assert that the bird in some sense is instinctively aware that there is a relation between what it is doing and the possible consequence of attracting a mate. Given these facts it would not be difficult to assert that both premises must be true. There is also no doubt that the bird in singing is naturally expressive of its spirit: the bird is, according to Spinoza, endeavouring to persist in its existence.
O Shaughnessy’s account of “Life” (psuché) in his work “The Will: A dual Aspect Theory”, contains a notion of the will which refers to the ideas of “an impulsive urge to act” and “striving” , and he cites Freud’s theory of the instincts and the ego against a background of firstly: that the first idea of the ego is the body, and secondly, that the sensations of pleasure are differently located throughout the different stages of development of a body that has a long childhood, a longe period of dependency upon its parents. O Shaughnessy’s essentially hylomorphic position thus links the expression of a bird song with the intention of attracting a mate.
Aristotle pointed out in his work “History of Animals” that bird songs as distinguished from shorter bird calls, are learned, and whilst it would be associated with the pleasure/pain of survival, it would nevertheless lack the logos of speech. The consequence of this claim is that human intentional action would be a more complex phenomenon that that of the simpler animals like birds. In accordance with Aristotel’s methodology of the biological investigation of forms of life, thie science of Biology is in agreement that there is a firm associative-relation between the expression of the song and the pleasurable activity of attracting a mate. This is in accordance with Anscombes criterion that an intentional action is one in which a certain sense of the question “Why?” has application. Given, however, O Shaughnessy’s claim that animals are tethered to their environment, and are not therefore as future oriented as human beings, (who can readily represent absent objects through their language), we would not expect to find an embedded sequence of conditions of the kind we find in Anscombes example of poisoning the inhabitants of a house, which is the end of the plot of a story containing relatively abstract objects located in the future.
With more complex animals than birds, however, the intentional action of hunting may well contain a large number of enveloped conditions causally related to each other and to the end of the sequence, which may end in success or failure. The articulation of these enveloped conditions would also, for example, be expressive of the “spirit” of the hunter, a big cat, for example.
The cave painting therefore, can be both viewed as an expression of the spirit of human psuché and an intentional action whose ultimate telos is not entirely clear as yet given the location of the phenomenon in the long distant past. One can of course investigate the cave paintings of contemporary primitive tribes but the time lapse between the two sets of phenomena makes it very difficult to arrive at any categorical claims.
When, however, we move to art objects produced by artists living in larger less primitive societies in which the needs being met are more complex, the nature of the “striving” also becomes more complex, especially given the presence of cultural activities such as story-telling and Philosophical argumentation about the “forms” of phenomena encountered in relation to both the Metaphysics of Man and the Metaphysics of Nature. Indeed, the primary point of the striving in such complex communities perhaps ceases to be survival, but rather the quality and the length of the life that is being lived. There is, however a discernible link between the experience of the cave painting and the paintings in the vault of the Sistine chapel. Campbell, in the context of this discussion sees fundamental similarities in relation to the cave painting and the interior of a modern cathedral which contains an array of intentional objects designed specifically for spiritual purposes.
Perhaps both phenomena invoke responses that are more akin to the experience of awe and wonder characteristic of the sublime, rather than the experience of pleasure associated with the experience of beauty. Campbell elaborates upon the experience one has in walking into a modern cathedral:
“a temple is a landscape of the soul. When you walk into a Cathedral, you move into a world of spiritual images. It is the mother womb of your spiritual life—mother church. All the forms around are significant of spiritual value. Now, in a Cathedral the imagery is in anthropomorphic form. God and Jesus and the Saints are all in human form. And in the caves the images are in animal form. But it is the same thing believe me. The form is secondary. The message is wht is important.”(Page 101)
Campbell argues that the cave-paintings were used to educate young hunters which is a plausible hypothesis, given the cirumstances. If so, the painting would have had an instrumental significance–serving an interest—which runs contrary to the Kantian account of the experience of beauty. This experience, Kant maintains, is not instrumental but rather associated with a categorical disinterested form of pleasure that is in turn related to the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and understanding. The fact that we know so little about the life of these primitive peoples does, however, suggest that we hesitate before categorising the experience of those associated with the cave paintings as “beautiful”.
Campbell is surely correct in his claim that our bodies are esentially the same as they were during the era of Cro-Magnin man, but we ought also to point out that the human form of life has significantly altered in this period of 40,000 years. During this period there has occurred the transition from the nomadic to the more settled form of life in larger communities with a greater diversity of purposes and aims. Survival needs were more easily met in these larger communities (longevity increases). The agenda of man then changes from mere survival to the quality of life, owing to the increase in the complexity of institutions (the law, education, etc) and the range of human powers which needed to be developed in relation to them.
These powers, for example, being capable of discourse and reasoning, were essence-defining powers for Aristotle and both contributed to creation of the sciences and the arts, which have proliferated significantly over the last 2500 years. We call this settled form of life “civilisation” and whilst it has had its critics over the centuries, it appears that it is the best means we as human forms of life have for achieving the quality of life the Ancient Greeks referred to via the term “eudaimonia” (good spirited flourishing life).
An Aristotelian self-actualisation process is needed not just for the development of what Freud would call a strong personal ego but also in order to avoid the extreme forms of life connected to striving after Wealth and Honour without due respect for the Principle of the Golden Mean. What Aristotle did not comment upon in his investigations of human Psuché, is the long childhood or period of dependency we humans experience. Campbell notes that that he is familiar with men who need psychoanalytical treatment to assist in breaking the chains of this dependency upon their fathers (Page 102)
It is not clear whether the phenomenon of discontentment with our civilisations has increased with the disappearance of the formative influences of religion, mythology and art, but Campbell does insist that we need, and are in search of a planetary mythology. He evaluates modern movies as one means of replacing initiation rituals for the youth into society, and notes that the stories or plots of the movies we encounter, are not created responsibly with a concern for the experience of Transcendence. He believes that the lack of effective initiation rituals has had the consequence that many male youths join gangs which have a problematic relation to the laws and morals of society. Females, he argues, are not affected as much because the biological changes to their body, for example, menstruation, are in themselves dramatic signals fo what their future role in society is going to be. Campbell elaborates upon this point:
“..the boy does not have a happening of this kind, so he has to be turned into a man and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself.” (Page 104)
Campbell also notes that in primitive societies ungovernable children who refused to participate cooperatively in relation to initiation rites, might be killed, and this partly reflected a different attitude to death than we moderns have, and partly an undeveloped respect for the dignity of each living human being as an end-in-themselves which has become our heritage from the Ancient Greeks. Campbell claims that it is the artist alone who attempts to shoulder the cultural burden of assuming the history and responsibility of mythology and the various rituals that were once so important to us. Campbell characterises the artist thus:
“There is an old romantic idea in German, das Vol dichtet, which says that the ideas and poetry of the traditional cultures come out of the folk. They do not. They come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted whose ears are open to the song of the universe. These people speak to the folk, and there is an answer from the folk, which is then received as an interaction.. But the first impulse in the shaping of a folk tradition comes from above, not from below.” (Page 107)
T S Eliot, one of Campbell’s favourite poets, was writing poetry whilst personally struggling as a Christian with this problem of the disappearance of rituals that included the disappearance of the awe and wonder connected with the experience of the sublime transcendence related to the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Man. Campbells idea of the song of the universe can be combined with Eliots idea of the dance being at the “still point of the turning world”, but neither of these ideas seem to address our metaphysical concerns. The “song” of the universe is obviously a metaphor, but it is interesting in that it links in an interesting fashion the Metaphysics of Man with the Metaphysics of Nature, which perhaps Eliots notion of “the dance” does not. The link the idea of the song establishes is with the idea of the “Music of the spheres”, and also with the idea of the sound “Aum” that we find in Eastern mysticism.
The fundamental form of Aristotelian “Prime matter” may well be energy as such, but sound waves are one manifestation of energy. Light waves are obviously another fundamental mode of energy which may be more closely related to the conditions of life as such, relating to the temperature conditions for the body and the sense data communicated to the organ of the eye. That sense data as such is essentially two- dimensional according to O Shaughnessy, and the interesting question that needs to be asked is how a three dimensional “model” of the world comes to manifest itself in our thoughts. The most obvious candidate is that this three dimensional understanding occurs in the sensory motor spehere via the use of a body-image which is mobilised in intentional action.
Music, defined as “sound pleasurably organised in time” is, no doubt, an interesting phenomenon in both primitive and civilised societies (even if not all primitive societies possessed musical instruments), especially in relation to dance, where the aim of the activity was to induce a changed state of consciousness that transcends our everyday states.
Campbell introduces an idea of elitism into the debate but fails to note that there are many different kinds of elitism. Some kinds would be frowned upon by the Ancient Philosophers, for example, the elite of the powerful, or the elite of the wealthy oligarchs whose major motivation was to benefit themselves or their particular group within society. The elites of the gifted or the educated, on the other hand, would appear to be more in line with the agenda of these Philosophers. Many Greek stories have as their theme the hubris of individuals who lead themselves and everyone around them onto paths of ruin and destruction. These Philosophers understood that not everyone was in tune with the “song of the universe” or “music of the spheres”. The possession and understanding of higher mental powers such as understanding, judgement and reasoning would seem to be necessary to fully accept the responsibility of continuing the heritage we have recieved from both mythology and religion and this requires an understanding of both Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical theorising. Given Campbells claim that a shaman or seer is a being who has undergone an overwhleming psychological experience perhaps Freudian theory is also relevant to this discussion:
“The shaman is a person, male or female who, in his late childhood or early youth has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. Its a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up and the shaman falls into it. The shaman experience has been described many, many times. It occurs all the way from Siberia right through the Americas down to Tierra del Fuego.”( Page 107)
We find ourselves once again on the territory of an earlier discussion relating to mystics and their ability to swim rather than sink into a psychosis-like mental state. The differentiation between the mental state of the mystic and the mentally ill patient would seem certainly to require Freudian theory for a full articulation. The difference would seem to reside in the extent to which the unconscious material which erupts into consciousness does so in a cathartic fashion, thus strengthening the individuals ability to experience the associated desires and fears in a spirit of areté (in the right way and at the right time).
The bushmen of the Khalahari are still to be found dancing all night around their women until the overwhelming psychological experience causes an individual to collapse at the peak of a frenzy. The individual concerned reports his experiences, and as a result is regarded as a shaman. Campbell notes that whipping a whole group into a frenzy often occurs in wartime situations immediately before battle.
It ought also to be noted in this context that such an overwhelming psychological experience is viewed negatively by both Christianity and Medicine. In the former case the suspicion is that the individual has been possessed by an evil spirit and in the latter case the individual is daignosed with a mental illness and sedated with medicine. Nietzsche, Campbell notes, warns us about not taking the phenomenon more seriously:
“Be careful in casting out the devils, you cast out the best thing thats in you.” (Page 110)
Julian Jaynes in his work on the Origins of Consciousness is also however hesitant about the medical response to frenzied hallucinatory behaviour, believing that what we are experiencing might be cathartic. If this were so, then we ought to see the patient taking possession of the state rather than the state overwhelming him. This, however, does not appear to occur if the hallucinatory frenzy is allowed to run its course. Perhaps some specific technique of embedding these experiences in a linguistic and cognitive framework is required if the experience is to become fully cathartic.
Campbell opens this chapter with a characterisation of Myth:
“like dreams they are the revelations of the deeper desires, hopes, fears, potentialities and conflicts of the human will moved by the organs of the body operating variously against each other and in concert.”
The mythological view of the world is in fact, to some extent in accordance with Kant’s critical Philosophy which also claims that both life forms and inorganic physical objects are metaphysically grounded in a realm beyond phenomenal space, time, and matter: a realm that can only be reached by the mind. A temple, for example, is more than a building for worship, it is, as Campbell puts it, a concretisation of the noumenal world: a bearer of many symbolic properties that relate to the transcendental realm of the sacred.
There are many interesting relations between the mythological view of the world and the aesthetic views of the beautiful and sublime which bring us into contact with a repertoire of emotions that relate either to the form or the formlessness of the object we are confronting/contemplating. In Kant’s account of the dynamically sublime from his third Critique, the human will plays an important role and insofar as the appreciation of beautiful works of art are intentionally produced objects, the will is obviously involved in this experience too. One of the aims of the artist is to induce a feeling of pleasure in the audience of the work: a feeling that Kant argues is based on the harmony of the operation of the faculties of the imaginations and the understanding.
The task the artist sets for his audience is also one of passing judgement upon the work as a whole. This involves the application of some universal idea to the particulars of the object created. A transcendental principle is involved in this transaction: a principle Kant describes in terms of the “form of finality of the object”. The aesthetic judgement is characterised by Kant as one in which we demand agreement, on the basis of the fact that the feeling of pleasure experienced, is grounded in the harmony of the faculties. Even in this pure form, the mind, Kant argues is also prepared for moral feeling because Beauty “is the symbol of morality”. The feelings related to the experience of the sublime on the other hand relates to ideas of practical reason that are connected to our moral agency.
Mythological views of death, on the other hand, relate more closely to ideas we find in the various religions. Freud, we know, in his later writings was influenced by Greek mythology and its view of Thanatos but Freud, the scientist also grounds the phenomenon of death in Science. In his work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud claims:
“The attributes of life were at some time evolved in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can frm no conception. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first drive came into being, the drive to return to the inanimate state.” ( Beyond the pleasure Principle in Metapsychological papers, P.38)
This is the beginning stage of Freuds so called “Mythology of the instincts”. Life emerged at some point in the history of the earth and just as its origin is a mystery, so is its end, because in the case of every living individual, the dead body no longer displays any signs of consciousness or life. Life as such will continue when these individuals die but only until that point at which their “time has come”, as we say. In human psuché the understanding and acknowledgment of these facts is part of the function of the Ego, which is carried out in accordance with the Reality Principle. It is the ego which is the dynamic agency responsible for the protection and preservation of the body and the self. As an agency it is situated topographically in all three zones of the unconscious, the preconscious and consciousness. The pleasure ego is the most primitive aspect of the undeveloped ego, which also has an intimate connection with the biological energy regulation principle that basically aims for the homeostasis of the body whilst still keeping some energy in reserve for some special or emergency actions. The Ego, that is, learns to postpone gratification, tolerating the painful tension involved in the postponement of desired actions. Freud appeals to Fechner’s connection of the feeling of pleasure to topographical consciousness:
“In so far as conscious impulses always have some relation to pleasure or unpleasure, pleasure and unpleasure too can be regarded as having a psycho-physical relation to conditions of stability and unstability….every psycho-physical motion rising above the threshold of consciousness is attended by pleasure in proportion, as beyond a certain limit,it approximates to complete stability, and is attended by unpleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it deviates from complete stability; while between the limits which may be described as qualitative thresholds of pleasure and unpleasure, there is a certain margin of aesthetic indifference.”( Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (226-7)
There is, then, in Freud’s work complex relations between the biological energy regulation principle and the psychological pleasure-unpleasure and reality principles. We should recall in the context of this discussion the theory of pleasure presented by Plato via Socrates in the dialogue “The Republic”. In this dialogue Plato argues for an important distinction between the pleasures of the body which are transitory and mixed with pain and the pleasures of the soul which are more aligned with the fulfilment of our more spiritual needs, e.g. our need for knowledge, reason and virtue. We note that neither in Plato’s view nor in Freud’s view are these accounts contaminated with a theory of Consciousness which insists that I cannot be mistaken about my experience of pleasure. There are, of course, affections of the body which cease before they are registered in consciousness, and the energy regulation principle will explain such phenomena adequately by reference to the telos of body/organ functioning, namely, homeostasis. Obviously homeostatic functioning of the organs is an important condition for both short term survival but also long term quality of life. There is a complex overlaying and integration of biological/psychological and mental powers which may make it difficult for the individual to categorically know what kind of pleasure that they are experiencing. Indeed Socrates in Plato’s Republic points to the relativity of pleasure/happiness when he notes that healthy people may not relate their happiness specifically to their health. If, however, they become ill they may well upon returning to a healthy state be happy about such a change in their state. If such an individual is, moreover, poverty stricken they may experience unpleasure until their toil and work takes them out of such a state. They might temporarily feel as if they could not feel happier until ,as was the case with the character Cephalus in the Republic, they have their money unjustly taken away by the state. The politicians responsible for taking the money of Cephalus may well temporarily feel pleasure until other politicians take their money away, or perhaps even conspire to have them murdered. Such a sequence of cases is of course the reason why Socrates and Aristotle recommended leading the examined/contemplative life, which according to both philosophers knows all the different kinds of pleasure and knows the pleasure of leading an examined/contemplative life is the most reliable and best. What we have described are Plato’s objective criteria for leading a life of virtue determined by the form of the Good. The subjective account of the wealthy mans transitory happiness and the politicians transitory happiness are based on subjective perceptions of pleasure. Plato even describes the life of the powerful ruling tyrant: a bloodthirsty life that ends in premature death because of the lack of understanding of the importance of the virtuous life. What gives the tyrant pleasure or makes him happy are giving in to the temptations of both unnecessary and unlawful desires.
Plato’s theoretical account of pleasure and pain maintains that they are not as common sense would have it, contraries. There is in fact a middle ground between these two types of experience. In other words, not all experience is either pleasurable or painful—some experiences are neutral. The reason we believe that the “neutral ground” belongs in the territory of these so-called contraries is that if either pleasure or pain are immediately adjacent to a neutral experience there is a tendency to give the neutral ground the name of what one has experienced immediately prior to the neutral experience. Alternatively, there is a tendency upon feeling relief from bodily pain to name the absence of pain as “Pleasing”.
Now whilst knowledge of the good must be related to desire, knowledge of the true need not be. For example, on thinking through the sequence of premises, “All men are mortal”, Socrates is a man”, “Socrates is mortal”, I know all these premises to be true irrespective of any feelings: I may have, e.g. regret at the death of Socrates. The interesting question to raise in this context is whether in knowing the truth that I am mortal, I can grasp this truth in a desire-free state. According to both Spinoza and Freud the desire to continue existing is one of the strongest of the animal desires. Yet we find Socrates in his death cell claiming that death is good . Is this because he lived the examined life as part of his his three score years and ten? The religious individuals acceptance of their death is perhaps not quite in the same spirit, believing as they do in a life after death which has no philosophical support. True acceptance of death would seem to entail being cleansed of all fear and desire, and this might not be true of religious individuals with false beliefs firstly, about their God being the only God and secondly, about a life after death.
Freud’s view of stability is certainly connected to the Greek idea of eudaimonia (the good spirited flourishing life) which requires the overlaying and integration of a number of different powers energised by eros or the life instinct. For Freud it is the secondary process of the mind which sublimates the primary process where the death instinct or Thanatos may be playing a larger role in the life of the individual. The primary process of the mind is the process in which the most primitive instinctive drives of the mind strive for uninhibited gratification. The secondary process seeks to postpone all such gratification in favour of less dangerous and more lasting , secure gratifications. Both Socrates and Aristotle agree that secondary process gratifications were part of the structure of leading the examined-contemplative life. Freud elaborates upon this theme:
“We know that the pleasure principle is proper to a primary method of working on the part of the mental apparatus, but that from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world, it is from the very outset inefficient and even highly dangerous….the pleasure principle long persists however as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts which are so hard to “educate”, and starting from these instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.” (P.278)
This entails, Freud argues, that two defences are used by the ego against the primary process pleasure principle, namely splitting and repression. In the former case those instincts that are difficult to educate are split off from consciousness and they are then repressed allowing the ego to compensate for this loss of energy by using another defence mechanism, namely sublimation to produce creations of works of art.
In a long section of this essay (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), Freud discusses what we know about life at the cellular level, and in so doing admits that we know as little about the origins of the sexual instinct as we know about the origins of life. After postulating and abandoning various hypotheses he finally settles upon what he calls a “mythological” account” that originates in both Plato’s symposium and the Indian Upanishads. In these latter writings Atman:
“felt no delight. Therefore a man that is lonely feels no delight. He wished for a second. He was so large as man and wife together. He then made his self fall into two and then arose husband and wife.” (ftnt. P.331)
Freud, however, remains hesitant and treats his final position on this issue as a speculative hypothesis, naming this position as his “Mythology of the Instincts”. On this final account sexuality’s function is to reconcile the two halves of split man, each desiring the other not romantically but out of biological/psychological necessity (Platonic love?). On this account hate belongs to that other. school of instincts, death, construed as “the destroyer of worlds” (Bhagavad Gita). After a protracted hylomorphic discussion which included Schopehauers claim that the purpose of life is death, Freud finally placed his hope in future Biological Science. If Schopenhauer is correct in his characterisation of the relation of these two different groups of instincts, then this kind of account would allow us to understand more fully that Socratic moment in the Phaedo where Socrates claims that whatever death is in its nature, it must be good. Perhaps such an interpretation would also allow a more complete understanding of the oracular proclamation that:
“Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction.”
The above interpretations perhaps would lead man to appreciate more fully the life he is currently leading as well as the reason why it is important to strive for the examined/contemplative life. Aristotelian hylomorphism, seems, then, to make even more sense in the context of a discussion in which life is portrayed as an irritation/excitation of inorganic matter that is temporarily displaced whist life continues to exist. Aristotle postulated the idea of prime matter, and whatever that is in its nature, we can, Aristotle argues, only know of it in some form (shape). Life for this hylomorphic view is an energetic organisation of matter, and death occurs either when this energy dissipates or the organs necessary for the distribution and transformation of energy are no longer able to maintain the minimum requirements of homeostasis.
A stone is formed matter as is a, a star and a galaxy. The kingdom of Minerals have their forms and functions as do the Kingdom of Plants and Animals. We, according to Aristotle have the potentiality to become both the worst and the best of animals, suggesting that the constellation of the powers of the human psuché may well be a mixed blessing. The question to raise here is whether the study of Mythology can lead to a greater understanding of the origins and telos of the three kingdoms proposed by Linnaeus.
Campbell claims that Mythology can release us from fixation upon false ideas which, if true, indicates an important kinship with both Ancient Greek and Enlightenment Philosophy. He initiates a discussion of Kantian Critical Philosophy, one of whose aims was certainly to neutralise the power of false claims by analysing the logical properties of judgements based on a trifold characterisation of the faculties of human psuché (sensibility, understanding and reason) Kant draws a major distinction between aposteriori judgements based upon experience, and apriori judgements which are known via the analysis of concepts. It is interesting in such a context to pose the question whether the judgement, “All men are mortal” is an example of an analytic or synthetic judgement (based on experience). The concept of mortality would appear to have a necessary relation to the concept of man because man belongs primarily to the kingdom of living things and the final cause or condition for the existence of living things is that they will inevitably die and return their inorganic elements to the earth. Freud pointed this out and claimed that this process was operating even during life in the form of a drive.
Kant’s idea of death is that it is the end of life and further that since life is the condition of all possible experience, including the experience of the soul as an object, death is the end of all experience.(Prolegomena P.76, §48). All men are mortal cannot, then, be known by experience because the species of man stretches far into the future beyond our current experience, and whether or not all men are going to die, cannot be verified at any present moment. This does not mean that this statement is either false or meaningless, but rather that it has to be supported by judgements relating to the totality of conditions constituting life and its ultimate end in death. It must therefore be a contradiction to claim that men are not mortal given all the facts that can be produced in support of this judgement., e.g. hylomorphic facts about the nature of cells, tissues organs, etc .The question that remains hanging in the air is whether All men are mortal is an analytic or synthetic a priori judgement since both are related in different ways to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Kant claims that Metaphysics rests upon a base of synthetic apriori judgements which connect concepts necessarily but not analytically, i.e. mortality may not be “contained ” in the concept of man, because it is science that classifies man as an entity within a much larger class of animals, and all living things. Now whilst the origin of life may be a mystery, its natural manifestations in accordance with principles governing such manifestations are not. It is therefore the task of the Aristotelian essence-specifying-definition of man to locate him in the animal kingdom, and at the same time to differentiate him from other members of this class, via his unique powers of discourse and rationality. All animals may be mortal, but not all animals can speak and reason. Knowledge of biology is the science we rely upon to provide us with the essence-specifying-definitions of all living things. The human psuché, on the other hand, requires not just the knowledge of Biology but knowledge of many disciplines if we are going to be able to understand the full range and limitations of its powers.
Mythology like many other disciplines , if it is to continue occupying an important role in our lives, must acknowledge the above biological, philosophical and psychological accounts of the being of human being which includes knowledge of life, death, space, time, and matter. Paul Ricoeur summarises the function of myth well in his work “Symbolism of Evil”:
“”Myths will be here taken to mean what the history of religions now finds in it: not a false explanation by means of images and fables, but a traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time, and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men today, and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world.. For us moderns a myth is only a myth because one no longer connects mythical places with our geographical space. This is why myth can no longer be an explanation… But in losing its explanatory pretensions the myth reveals its exploratory significance and its contribution to understanding which we shall later call its symbolic function–that is to say its power of discovering and revealing the bond between man and what he considers sacred.” (P.5)
One recalls in this context the insistence by many “scientists” that for example the City of Troy was a fabled location until in the 19th century when it was actually discovered to have existed. Nevertheless it can be argued that mythological thinking even of the literate societies has its limitations. In a review of Paul Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative, Vol 1 , the following is claimed:
“The limitations of myth may well have given birth to Philosophy, when it came to providing explanations demanded by aporetic questions, and raising issues relating to the infinite media of change, namely, space, time and matter. It no longer seemed efficacious to personify Time by the figure or image of Chronos, engaging in the curious activity of eating his children. and being castrated by the most powerful of his children. Such images just did not seem to respond appropriately to the awe and wonder of a newly awoken consciousness in the face of the sublimity of life in a world of such complexity. These images did not possess the required universality and necessity of the philosophical principle of sufficient reason.”(http://michaelrdjames.org)
Some commentators, however have been carried away by the desire to criticise the limitations of myth, e.g. Ernst Cassirer in his work “Language and Myth” (trans Langer, S. K., New York, Dover, 1946). Cassirer points to the Socratic complaint from the dialogue the Phaedrus.: e.g. to explain death by an image of a god-like wind whisking the soul away is to misunderstand the phenomenon of death. Neither Gods nor monsters, Socrates argued, meet the criteria of sufficient reason demanded by Philosophical explanation.
We know that Plato, too, was not averse to using allegories and analogies to explain enigmatic phenomena when philosophical arguments could not be provided. The Myth of the Cave obviously relied heavily on the analogous relations between the warmth and light of our sun and the form of the good (the virtuous life). We remember too that it was in the Republic that Socrates rebuked Homer for his poetic representation of the gods as deceitful, unjust, and prone to immoral behaviour. These gods for Socrates were not manifestations of the form of the Good proposed by Plato in his Theory of Forms, but many interpretations of the intentions of Homer are possible including the possibility that he favoured certain elements of the previous pantheon of impersonal deities/forces such as the demiurge, the erinyes/euminedes etc over the “new pantheon”. The last act of Socrates was a request to a friend to make a sacrifice to Asclepius, the god of medicine, presumably as thanks for the relatively painless experience of being poisoned to death. This indicates that some of the gods, especially those connected with knowledge and leading a good spirited flourishing life, were admired by Socrates. We also ought to recall in this context that the early career of Socrates was spent as a so called “natural Philosopher”, investigating the physical world and its elements. Socrates himself attributes to Anaximander’s claim that “All is mind (noos)”, the inspiration for the turn away from this kind of physical investigation and toward the investigation of the human psuché (its powers of virtue and vice). This Socratic turn at least mitigated the accusations directed at Socrates for being an atheist, a rumour that may have aided in his unpopularity with a large part of the jury that considered the accusation levelled against him of denying the value of the gods of the polis and corrupting the minds of the youth. Anaximander claimed, as we now that the moon is made of stone, and perhaps Socrates believed this proposition to be true whilst also believing in the demiurge and noos. As far as mythology was concerned Socrates was prepared to consider myths symbolically but he refrained from interpreting Orphic and other mythological images literally ,and as we have mentioned, objected to the Homeric images of the Greek gods behaving immorally. There was probably no clear distinction in the minds of the Ancient Greeks between Religion and Mythology as there is for the modern understanding, e.g. Freud.
Freud would in his later works produce a theory with implications for both mythology and religion, in which he cautioned against embracing pathologically originated images of figures related to, for example, the Oedipus Complex. We ought, however, in this context, to recall his positive references to Greek literature and Mythology(Oedipus Rex, Eros, Thanatos, Ananke). Freud was also familiar with Ancient Greek Philosophy which he actively referred to in his later work using his “God” logos to illuminate the many meanings of “Being” referred to by the terms, areté, arché, diké, phronesis, and eudaimonia. Part of the logos of the transcendent involved the use of allegory and analogy which Campbell uses Kantian Critical Philosophy to explain:
“A is to B what C is to X points to a resemblance not between two things but between two relationships between quite dissimilar things. The relation of A to B perfectly resembles that of C to X and what X represents is a quantity that is not only unknown but absolutely unknowable, which is to say metaphysical.”
Campbell then produces examples of two Kantian analogies in order to illustrate how we can via discourse and reasoning (logos) illuminate aspects of metaphysical “quantities” or entities:
“as the promotion of the happiness of children(A) is related to the parents love(B) so is the welfare of the human race (C) to that unknown which is God’s love(X)
“The causality of the Highest Cause (X) is precisely in respect to the world (C) what Human Reason (B) is in respect to the work of human art.(A)”
This form of reasoning by analogy to “reveal” something about the unknowable X, is the Kantian equivalent of the Platonic strategy of using allegory or analogy whenever logos or argumentation failed to “reveal” the full nature of what one was attempting to explain or justify. Aristotle’s Hylomorphic Metaphysics could situate God on his pure-matter—pure form continuum, characterising God as pure form but confounding his readers when he tried to attach concrete content to his characterisation: content such as God is thinking about thinking and in doing so is thinking about himself. We are, of course, finite beings and can only think something about something, a power which originates in our experience of the world. Thinking about thinking is clearly a higher power which we might expect of a being of infinite power. If Gods thinking were in any respect related to the world, he would have to be situated somewhere in that world, and that would immediately compromise the status of his infinitude. Indeed it is this relation of infinite Being to the temporal which myth attempts to “show” in its images, metaphors, allegories and analogies. Such images immediately bring with them “the affect” connected to awe and wonder which appears to be occur more readily once we are prepared to discard our own selfish desires and fears. Campbell points out that insofar as we can speak meaningfully about this highest or first cause, it can only be done in the metaphorical mode of “as if”. This is best done he argues via:
“a psychologically affective image transparent to transcendence”
Campbell further elaborates upon this position by claiming that the Lord’s Prayer which begins “Our father..” is a metaphorical invocation, given the fact that we know we are not addressing a parent of ours, any male parent, or indeed any specific human being. Therefore, Campbell argues, this prayer’s impact is primarily psychological, especially given the fact that it is not embedded in any network of concepts and judgements, but at best inheres in a system of parent-child sentiments. The prayer, of course, also contains a confession of our sins and a request for forgiveness which Freud may well have claimed has a cathartic value in relation to the fear we all feel for the consequences of our actions. The reference to “heaven” in the prayer is of course not a real location-designation, but rather a term which designates a metaphorically constituted “morphogenetic field”, to use Campbells expression.
Campbell insightfully hypothesises that there might have been a Lord’s Prayer that began “Our Mother:::”. We ought to recall in the context of this discussion that the Greek oracles were predominantly female. It would not stretch the powers of the imagination too far to conceive of a prayer to these oracles, who thought that everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction ,and every human, therefore, had a responsibility to “know thyself!”
Campbell also notes the fact that ferocious wars have been fought over what he calls “tribal literal interpretations of the meaning of their own locally conceived deities”. The local deity was taken to be a fact of universal significance which, if ignored, proved that we are dealing with fundamentally irrational beings. Whereas, what in fact was occurring, was combat over different metaphorical interpretations of one and the same transcendental X.
Aristotle’s “First Philosophy”, “Metaphysics”, was groundbreaking in that it provided us with the first panoramic view of the world that was based on pure reason and science but was also in accord with the knowledge we possessed of diké, arché, epistemé. As we have seen God was interpreted in terms of this Aristotelian hylomorphic framework, and the thought that men might fight over different secular philosophical interpretations of “being” would have caused amusement amongst the followers of Aristotle. For hylomorphism and critical Philosophy, claiming that the tentative characterisations of the transcendental X that is an in- itself is absolutely unknowable, are facts, would merely reveal that one did not know what epistemé, (knowledge or science), was. Unfortunately Europe in particular has been at various points in its history transformed into “killing fields” because of a lack of knowledge of political science and ethics. Secular wars such as we have witnessed seem to have been provoked for more secular reasons, relating to national boundaries and ideologies rather than whose God was the true God.
Campbell in explaining the contrast between metaphor ,allegory, and fact, points to “symbols”: e.g. the moon as the power of life and the sun as the transcendental eternal energy/light of knowledge and consciousness. The moon symbolises life because of the allegory with the life of a man waxing and waning until a new moon/life begins the process all over again. On the 15th night of the new moon, Campbell claims, when the moon is full, the waning process begins. The denotation of this symbolism is that of a life as measured by the Biblical, namely, three score years and ten, which reaches its zenith at 35 years before the life-waning processes begin to take effect. It is at this point in mans maturity that the light/energy of his consciousness/knowledge is at its peak, and identification with the transcendental X in our lives can occur. Once this occurs, Campbell argues we can regard a part of ourselves (noos?) as consubstantial with this transcendental X which does not belong to the space and time our bodies inhabit because this part of ourselves appears to be beyond death. Campbell sums up this discussion by referring to a key thought of the Upanishads:
“Thou art that!”
Metaphysical ends transcend death. but can also be represented in the “virgin births” so common in some mythologies. The divine being is anthropomorphised, and embodied, and thereby enabled to act in our space-time continuum whilst partaking of the realm of the sacred. Poetry can also be concerned with this transcendental X. The best Ancient Greek source we have in the field of aesthetics is of course the work of Aristotle. He begins with the position that “Being has many meanings” and goes on to analyse the meaning of tragic/poetical narratives. Three of the primary meanings of Being are connected to the ideas of reason, the good, the true, and the beautiful/sublime, and it is important to understand that we can study these ideas via the three kinds of sciences , theoretical science, practical science, and productive science. The narratives of tragedy may be literally true or only partly true as is the case with Shakespeares tragedy of Macbeth who was not a fictional character, being a real historical king, but many of his actions would have been characterised by Aristotle as mimesis Praxeus whilst at the same time embodying artistic intentions to relate to the transcendental X ‘s of ethics/politics and the beautiful/sublime. Aristotles views of the function of poetic/tragic narrative are summarised below:
“Aristotles poetics give us an account of the function of the narrative that ties the beginning, middle and end of the attempt to represent or imitate action into a composite whole. This composition or plot refuses a reduction into episodic point-like events, because the creator is concerned to connect events/actions in a universal manner. The theme of this universality is more concerned with areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) and diké (justice) than it is with the divine form of logos. The spectator of the drama learns from what he witnesses the possibilities related to a tragic reversal of fortune from the good to the bad. Involved in this learning process is a recognition that we all get what we deserve in the spirit of diké…… This change of focus from Homers Gods living on Olympus to an inner controlling voice was also linked to the Socratic account about Homer and the depiction of the Gods as engaging in unethical actions” (Essay 2 in Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Vol.1–Aristotle’s Poetics and Muthos (http://michaelrdjames.org)
Mythology, Philosophy and Art all deal with Time in different but related ways. Tragedy, Ricoeur argues in “Time and Narrative” attempts to articulate the relations between time as opaquely lived in our everyday life-worlds, and time as transfigured in the tragic mimesis.In the constructed time of the narrative whose telos is to reveal the true denotation of tragedy, we encounter the death we all owe to nature. The scientist, fixated upon the methodology and strategies of theoretical science mistakenly universalises this agenda to all the sciences, at best sees in tragedy an experimental laboratory in which hypotheses are being tested, and at worst sees a cauldron of “subjective” emotions. Such scientists cannot see the relation of our life-world to the transcendental X Kant highlights in his “Metaphysics of Morals” and “Prolegomena” (cited by Campbell):
“The peculiar features of a science may consist of a simple difference of object, or the sources of cognition, or the kind of cognition, or perhaps of all three conjointly. On these features therefore depends the idea of a possible science and its territory.” (Prolegomena to an future metaphysics that will be able to come forward as a science, Translated Ellington, J., W., (Indianapolis, Hacket Publishing, 1977)
The transcendental X’s of nature are different kinds of Object to the transcendental X’s of a human psuché engaged in the projects of the ethical life-world. In terms of Time, the Practical Scientist is not looking into the past for the causes of a present phenomenon in order to project the future, but is rather engaged in seeing how a future telos of a project is going to determine what is to be done in the present. Indeed, it might even be claimed that the theoretical scientist, in doing what he is doing, is atomising time in a similar fashion to St Augustine’s division of time into the past-present- and future. Aristotle, on the other hand presents us with a definition of time which whilst dividing time, preserves its holistic character:
“The measurement of motion in terms of before and after”
Time, on Aristotle’s account, measures objects of motion in a space-time continuum by dividing the time-continuum into before-now-after with a view to establishing principles of motion that are embedded in a network of causes and effects discoverable by observation in either natural or laboratory conditions. The concern of the practical and productive scientist (ethics and arts) does not measure out time in coffee-spoons but seeks its phenomenal meaning in, for example, tragedies and myths. The framework of cause and effect is used in Tragedy, Myth, and History, but in these contexts we are not concerned with observation-based measurements but rather with the validation of judgements relating to The Good which are in turn related to categorical-ends-in-themselves. In other words, the “objects” we are concerned with in such contexts are “ideal objects” and “ideal causes”connected to our actions and strivings.
One interesting feature of tragedies as we enter the modern world via the tragedies of Shakespeare is the concentration on “losing ones mind” or “losing the balance of ones mind”. Macbeth, first sees a dagger freely hanging in the air when the balance of his mind is disturbed and as the play progresses he loses more and more control until in the final sections he hallucinates Banquo’s ghost at a feast taunting him for his crimes. This, then, is a “modern” tragic concern, although Plato did alert us to this kind of phenomenon with his account of the fate of the tyrant in his dialogue “The Republic”. Both Macbeth and the Platonic tyrant bring about their own deaths by actions rooted in unnecessary and unlawful desires.
Mythology, Poetry, and Philosophy are all concerned with finding answers to aporetic questions formulated by Kant in relation to the 4 questions he claims defines the territory of Philosophy, namely, “What is man?”, What can I know?”, “What ought I to do?” ans “What can we hope for?”. All three questions are related to the Delphic concern with both
“Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction” and
“Know thyself!”
Some sceptically-inclined doomsday commentators claim that all hope is lost and that we are culturally experiencing, “the last days of terror”, before an apocalyptic end. In these last days it will appear that our entire value system has been upended. This of course is tragedy dramatically universalised, but it is not clear that these commentators do not have adequate grounds for their prognosis.
Kant’s Critical Philosophy claimed that we could in fact use both the concepts and principles of both theoretical and practical reasoning to characterise the History of man and his civilisations. We can, that is, attempt to describe ad explain all phenomena we encounter in terms of cause and effect using the methodology of observation, measurement and manipulation of variables in designed experiments. We can also, however, “interpret” the events or actions we witness as being regulated by categorical laws and principles, ending the process with a judgement on the value of what we have witnessed in relation to these principles and laws.
Morality and Law are twins from the same mother, diké. The moral consequences of a legal judgement that one is guilty of a crime are considerable. During such a process if we discover that the moral character of a witness is unworthy, they will not be counted on to tell the truth and their testimony can be ignored.
Conceiving of the world as a totality of facts as some theoretical scientists do and conceiving of any search after a transcendental X as irrelevant is an anti-metaphysical stance that has been very popular in certain scientific circles. Such scientists have come to regard all metaphysics as “idealism” and as anathema to the scientific project, categorising Kantian Critical Philosophy in these terms, thereby denying the dual-aspect account of explanation/justification we find in Kantian theory.
According to Kant History uses both types of reasoning in its descriptions and explanations of the facts that belong to a particular region of the world and a particular period. Yet it is criticism from this discipline that has so tarnished the reputation of traditional myths and legends, especially when it could not be immediately shown that Agamemnon or the City of Troy actually existed. There does not appear to be any obvious search for a transcendental X in historical texts, even if such an X is clearly referenced in both ethical and religious texts. We have previously argued in earlier essays (reviewing Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative”) that History is “trans-scientific”(concerned with at least two types of science) and also connected intimately with the major thesis of Aristotles “Metaphysics” which is:
“All men desire to know”
and the major thesis of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, namely:
“All human activity strives for the Good”
We know that in spite of the Aristotelian essence-specifying-definition of man being “rational animal capable of discourse”, rationality per se, was only a potentiality for man. History, therefore ,would have as its major theme the attempt of the human species to collectively become rational in a hylomorphic actualisation process. History up to this point therefore has been principally a history of our desires and fears, an important aspect of the project “know thyself!” set for man by the Delphic oracle. It is difficult sometimes to disentangle the mythical from the historical content of the Bible, which Campbell claims is charting the fall of man from the Grace of God . This is a complicated agenda:
“”Mythologically, the fall is related to the separation of Heaven and Earth where the consciousness of an eternal presence is represented as lost and the mind and spirit of mankind is trapped in the phenomenal realm.”
He refers to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas in which God claims that he is everywhere “spread upon the earth and man does not see it”. We dwell, Campbell claims, in two worlds simultaneously which are symbolised by the illuminated temporal moon and the eternally burning sun. This abyss between the world of the divine and man, was the reason, it is argued, that the Christian God sent his son to earth to save mankind–an embodied presence in the phenomenal realm that both originates from and returns to the realm of the transcendental X–the sacred eternal realm of forms.
In the Gnostic tradition the Kingdom of Heaven is not only all around you but also within. It is in this context that we ought to understand the Hindu proclamation “Thou art that!”. Campbell argues that “Man has closed himself up in his cave” and this takes us back to the famous Platonic “Myth of the Cave” where it is required that man find his way out to the sacred light and warmth of the sun which is an allegory of that transcendental X–The Form of the Good. Campbell, however prefers the allegory that originates from the Upanishads:
“”So the light of the moon( A) is to the light of the sun (B) as is moral life (C) to the lives of all around me are to that Atman -Brahma (X) which is absilutely beyond all name, form, relatin, and definition.”
This example uses the metaphysics of Nature to “picture” the moral relation and thereby subsuming the physical world of nature under the moral world of the spirit. There is no doubt that there are aspects of both worlds that awaken awe and wonder in man but here Kant’s approach whereby the awe and wonder is directed at the power of a great waterfall or storm at sea appears more convincing and illuminating especially if one believes the experience of the sublime is a key experience insofar as access to the transcendental X is concerned. One can also in the context of this discussion draw attention to the folowing Kantian example of the sublime:
Calling upon Kant only to set his reasoning on this topic aside requires explanation which I cannot provide. It would seem that Philosophy is more committed to a holistic understanding of the world as a systematic whole than religion is. Our Jewish Christian relation to the transcendental X of the Godhead is one of submission and anxiety whereas the Kantian relation to the transcendental X builds upon the moral confidence of an agent who is worthy of our moral respect at least insofar as the experience of the sublime is concerned. Perhaps Campbell feels that the Upanishads convey a message of moral confidence and respect. In this context Campbell discusses “The Way of Art” (the heading of chapter 3) and the relationship between the way of art and the way of the mystic who has no craft and who recommends a disavowal of the body:
“I spit out the body”
Whether this is a realistic attitude toward the body is of course questionable, given that the human body is the origin and home of human life and consciousness. We recall in this context, the Cartesian sceptical claim, that we can imagine the “I” without a body, but also that this modern form of dualism was well-refuted by the critical Philosophy of Kant which accepts the hylomorphic view of pusché and many hylomorphic principles. Freud, too, would have been highly sceptical of this mystical disavowal of the body and its accompanying implication that disembodied thought could be the source or origin of life and consciousness . The artist works through his body ,with physical media such as , language, paint , stone, sound, etc, thus mobilising the life force and feelings of the body in the name of the search for the beautiful which Kant claims is the symbol of morality. This physical process for Freud is a non-sexual form of substitute satisfaction which he terms “sublimation” (an important vicissitude of the instincts).
Both the artist and the mystic are, of course concerned with the transcendental X in their different ways, but Freud would certainly have claimed that the way of the artist was the healthiest form of life, and more likely to maintain a harmony and balance of the mind conducive to eudaimonia (the good spirited flourishing life). Recall too, that the first principle of psuché maintained that the soul (psuché) was the first actuality of the body with its constellation of organs and limbs. In the context of Indian Religion we ought also to bear in mind that in the spiritual exercises of the yogi, it is recommended that we discard the external world toward the end of the meditating process. Whether it is possible to separate desire and its representations completely from a body and the external world is a question that Campbell does not raise. This would seem to be an important aspect to consider given the title of the work indicates that Campbell is exploring the inner reaches of outer space.
We conclude with Kants view of the sublime in relation to both art and religion given to us in his Analytic of the Sublime, contained in the third Critique of Judgement:
“Perhaps there has never been a more sublime utterance, or a thought more sublimely expressed than the well known inscription upon the Temple of Isis(Mother Nature): “I am all that is, and that was and that shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil before my face” ( Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Translated Meredith, J., C., (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973), P.179
The inscription is on a statue of Isis located at the Temple. Plutarch’s Moralia characterises Isis thus:
“Moreover, many writers have held her to be the daughter of Hermes, and many others the daughter of Prometheus, because of the belief that Prometheus is the discoverer of wisdom and forethought, and Hermes the inventor of grammar and music. For this reason they call the first of the Muses at Hermopolis Isis as well as Justice: for she is wise, as I have said, and discloses the divine mysteries to those who truly and justly have the name of “bearers of the sacred vessels” and “wearers of the sacred robes.” (https://penelope.uchicago.edu/thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/moralia/isis_and_osiris*/a.html)
