Review of Ricoeur’s “History and Truth”: Part 5 “Work and the Word”

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Grave of Karl Marx, Highgate Cemetery
Grave of Karl Marx, Highgate Cemetery by nick macneill is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

Action lies at the heart of work and perhaps also the origin of Language. The first insights into the origins of language come down to us from Protagoras who claimed that the 4 roots of language are:

commanding

questioning

answering

wishing or requesting

These are activities that are intimately related to the following grammatical moods of language:

imperative

interrogative

indicative

conditional

subjunctive

Grammarians claim that the above moods or modes reflect a speakers view of the ontological character of the event/activity that is being referred to. Actions of various kinds are also a part of the account we are given by Julian Jaynes who investigated the origins of language in the light of his brain research and familiarity with Greek Culture, as well as with the more modern study of Physical and Social Anthropology. His interest extended to the origins of consciousness, and he claimed that primitive man was not conscious in the way that we are. He possessed a relatively complex language which, during times of stress, when questions arose that could not be answered, (or difficult to solve problems arose in work contexts), a voice from the right hemisphere of the brain emerged in response to the activity in the left and provided an answer or a solution. Jaynes called this the bicameral mind(a brain in which language was located bilaterally in both hemispheres). With the emergence of Consciousness ca 1200 BC, Language became centred in the left and we became left-dominant insofar as language was concerned. Bicameral man, then, was grammatically steered by interrogatives and imperatives when there could be no recourse to the other “categories”(in situations of stress, for example).

The interrogative and indicative moods in combination with each other, when developed to a sufficient degree of complexity, are important to our epistemological concerns. Plato and Aristotle were not, of course, bicameral men but possessed a highly complex critical form of self-consciousness. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, pointed out the importance of mans desire for knowledge, and he also referred to the important distinction between “what” questions(indicative of facts) and “why” questions(providing explanatory and justificatory answers). The life of contemplation which Aristotle recommended is largely composed of all of the above grammatical modes. Our ethical concerns are related to the imperatives connected to “The good”, the account of which, provides the necessary context of explanation/justification so important to us. The optative mode is also important in this context because it provides us with answers to “what” questions relating to what we ought to do, or what ought to occur. These grammatical “cases” serve also as demonstrations of the categorical difference that exists between is-statements expressive of the fact of the matter(the truth of the matter), and ought-statements, that rely on ones own activity/actions and the activity/actions of others in the process of transforming the hope that something occur into its actualisation in reality. It was perhaps partly such grammatical considerations that helped to convince Plato and Aristotle to philosophically distinguish the “True”(Metaphysics) from “The Good”(Nichomachean Ethics/Politics). This issue arose again during 20th century Analytical Philosophy when debates over the logical relations between is-and ought statements resulted in objections to attempting to derive ought-statements from is-statements as well as attempts to reduce ought statements to is-statements. Both Aristotle and Kant would align themselves with these objections to naturalistic fallacies as part of their argumentation against positivism and all forms of materialism.This categorical distinction, it ought to be pointed out, whilst expressive of the “many meanings of being” thesis, is not pluralistic in the anti-rational sense embraced by Ricoeur. Rational principles such as the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason prevail over all regions of discourse and are essential elements of our understanding and reason. Ought-arguments resulting in specific ought-conclusions follow the same logical principles of deduction as arguments cast in indicative modes.

Against the background of these considerations, simple technical work clearly situates itself both in the grammatical spheres of the imperative and optative/subjunctive cases. The more complex this work is, the more knowledge will be required to perform it, and this may in turn require, as part of the learning process, theoretical study of facts and the related explanations/justifications. The simpler the form of work, the more conceivable it is that the learning process can occur by imitating and doing alone.

Ricoeur appeals to the theory of Janet’s which claims that the first words of man, the finite being, can be characterised as a kind of “imperative cry” which detaches itself from action and assists in the initiation phase of activity. This cry, it is argued, emotionally connects the word to the work that awaits. Ricoeur characterises this linguistic expression as a “plan”(P.200) once it has become part of what he terms “praxis”–indicating a Marxist view of both word and work:

“..the spoken word is, in a sense, and an authentic sense, an annex of the enterprises of transforming the human milieu by the human agent. This fundamental possibility justifies a Marxist interpretation of culture in which work is seen as the power which reorganises the full scope of the human.”(P.200)

The anti-rationalist tendency of modernism does not of course permit recourse to the rationalist works of Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, and this in turn reduces the alternatives available, but choosing to rest ones case on an unholy alliance of Marxism with Christian Theology, as Ricoeur does, is surely problematic. Both Marxism and Christianity mutually shun each other for good reason. The rationalistic response to this unholy alliance would be to see in it just one more attempt to resurrect materialistic, dualistic perspectives that had been demolished twice in the history of Philosophy first by Aristotle and then by Kant. Marxists characterise religion as “opium for the masses” who cannot afford to buy real opium , and this was an interesting statement to make by the Philosopher who hoped that the mass-movements (which he was helping to create) would rise in revolution against their imagined repressors and take control of the means of production: all in the name of praxis which took the form of economic materialism. Jesus may well have stated that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven(De Civitate dei), but the Marxist materialistic societies would have seemed to Jesus to resemble Babylon(De Civitate Terrana), an earthly “work” or faithless creation by men possessing “lost souls”—men who would not fare well when the Last Day or Day of Judgement came. This dualistic view of the body and soul and the above tale of two cities would fall into the realm of mythology for both hylomorphic and critical Philosophers : a mythology which failed to recognise the role of rationality in our Cultures, a role responsible for our just laws and the freedom of our citizens.

Embedding Logos in such materialistic or dualistic contexts where language is either human praxis or the word of God, fails to understand its relation to Consciousness, thought, or truth functional normative rationality. For Kant, man is engaged in a normative project which is directed by the categorical imperative, which in turn has faith in principles that connect ones human “work” with a free flourishing life. Work, for Kant, is also driven by the hypothetical imperatives that focus on the means to ones ends, rather than on the ends-in-themselves. This civilisation-building work proceeds largely in accordance with “conditional” judgements such as “If you wish to live comfortably then you ought to find work”. In this context causality reigns, and the principles connecting the conditions with what is conditioned are causal. Culture-constituting categorical imperatives, on the other hand, focus on the unconditional grounds that possess rational connections to that which they make possible. We can see from this comparison that categorical unconditional judgments differ from hypothetical conditional judgements in a number of ways but perhaps the major distinguishing feature between the two forms of judgement relates to the faculty of origin for these judgements. Categorical judgments originate in the faculty of Reason and employ General Logic whereas hypothetical judgments originate in the faculty of the understanding which employs “special” logic. The latter insofar as it employs causal principles is calculating the most appropriate means to a given end. The former explains and justifies ends-in-themselves in terms of reasons and the deductive form of argumentation.

Language, according to Freud, was a means of bringing preconscious and unconscious “material” into the domain of consciousness, which Freud characterised as a vicissitude of Instinct. The way in which language is used will partly be determined by grammatical rules which will differ for each of the 5 cases referred to above(imperative, interrogative, indicative, conditional, subjunctive) which in their turn are related to the Protagorean activities of commanding, questioning, answering, wishing or requesting.

The use of language in religious activity will of course, differ, depending upon whether we are considering the Word of God using imperative and indicative language in the scriptures, or rather considering the parishioner praying(wishing- requesting) for guidance or salvation. This relation between God and the parishioner is reminiscent of the relation between an authority ruling unconditionally over its subjects, and those subjects which to some extent may be neither free nor autonomous, and may therefore be suffering the effects of an unjust undemocratic society (in the hope of a better form of existence upon the advent of Judgment Day). If the suffering continues with no end in sight it is just a matter of time before a Reformation or a more serious secular revolution dissolves the tenuous relation between God and the faithful. This, it needs to be pointed out, is not the relation either Aristotle or Kant possessed in relation to their religions. For both these philosophers, God was an idea, an arché or principle, explaining or justifying certain truths and norms.

The most interesting use of religious language Ricoeur points to in his work “The Symbolism of Evil”(Trans Buchanan, E., Boston, Beacon Press, 1963) is the confession made by a “guilty consciousness” of his sins. This is of interest to Ricoeur because it is an utterance of man about himself. The source of the utterance, Ricoeur claims, is the sympathetic imagination. The language involved in this activity is a mix of grammatical cases which express an emotional matrix of suffering, fear, anguish and the experienced unworthiness because the sacred bond between man and his God has been ruptured. This kind of “alienation” is a far more complex matter than that which concerns Marx, involving as it does, something more than economic “exploitation” in the external world but rather the peril of the soul in a sacred sublime form of life.

In the confession there is, of course, a possible wish or request to be put on the right path(the path of righteousness) and there are also indicative statements relating to the power of God in such matters. The secular view of prayer struggles to understand the meaning or point of the activity, and this might even place this view at odds with those philosophers who relate to their God as some form of principle. The relation of Aristotle and Kant to their Gods would appear to reject “worshipping” the sacred in any “confessional” form but there is nevertheless respect for what Wittgenstein would have called the religious “form of life”, which he sympathised with. Prayer can of course also be either an expression of suffering(similar to a cry of frustration) or even a reflective voice of consciousness that has the consequence of urging itself toward “The Good” in a life filled with problems. This latter form of prayer might take a philosophically reflective form and calmly, in an interrogative mood, pose questions about the meaning of life and expecting answers from the preconscious system of the mind–thus combining the indicative and interrogative modes of language at the expense of the wishing/requesting mode.

Ricoeur maintains that it is the imperative function of language that is the closest to the activity of work. According to him this function remains aloof from the process of living. He points out that imperatives initiate a “specific action” which is not aiming at the “production” of anything, but aims rather at influencing an outcome via the actualisation of an intention(thus making the thought involved with the intention true). Ricoeur refuses this last Kantian appeal to Truth and Knowledge and prefers to remain in his reflection at the level of “influence” in relation to the “meaning” of language. If we are to believe Frege, language is constituted of both sense and reference: applying this to the imperative form of language suggests that when we understand an imperative, part of that understanding transcends the sense of the words, and takes us to their reference. It might be that it is this dimension of reference and truth that differentiates an imperative from the wish/request mode, i.e. the wish/request form may involve removing the “natural” human authority that Aristotle pointed out in his ethics is related to the idea of “The Good”. Insofar as these words in imperative form make reference to Principles(e.g. Promises ought to be kept) they then become self-explanatory or self-justifying. Imperatives of this form thus range over what-questions and why-questions. There is, as Ricoeur emphasised, no technological or merely causal relation relation between words of this form and the result produced because, as Anscombe pointed out, an intention is specifically related to the why-question and a reason for acting rather than any cause. This form cannot be justified by the principles of the productive sciences, but rather require an appeal to the principles of the theoretical and the practical sciences. The spectre of Wittgenstein’s essence-specifying grammatical definitions arises in the context of this discussion, and we should recall his final justification at the end of the chain of what and why-questions, e.g. “This is what we do!”. Wittgensteins investigations into the uses of language and grammatical justifications are not empirical investigations but resemble more the kind of investigation we find in the Critical philosophy of Kant which Wittgenstein specifically acknowledged as an appropriate “method”. There is also an interesting similarity of the Wittgensteinian investigations, (into the concept of “forms of life”), to Aristotelian hylomorphic investigations into psuche.

Ricoeur mysteriously claims that it is the optative mode of language which is related to what he terms the fundamental act of evaluation. This view contrasts of course with the Kantian claim that it is the imperative “category” that constitutes evaluation in the ethical sphere of value. Our free lives pose many ethical problems for us, which Kant claims are best resolved by duty-steered imperatives that may constrain those “wishes which tempt us to favour our desires over the needs of others. He links self-questioning and the interrogative mode with the optative mode, and there is a suggestion of the influence of Heidegger and his definition of Dasein( a being for whom its very being is in question). Ricoeur claims that the question at issue is answered partly in the dialectic of the word of man in the realm of meaning, and partly in the work of man in the larger realm of Culture. In his earlier works, Ricoeur defined human existence in terms of the effort to exist and the desire to be. In this essay, “Work and the Word” Ricoeur returns to his Marxist analysis of work in terms of “alienation” and “objectification” thus stripping work of its cultural significance. Ricoeur claims that it is the task of Philosophy in Culture to offset “objectification” by a reflective questioning process.(P.213). This needs to be done if the discussion is to be lifted above the base-level of the “economics” of work, which is largely a reductive exercise in which the use of money, for example is regarded as a “fetish”. Ricoeur praises utilitarianism and technical education, and also the more disinterested role of the University in Culture, and concludes his investigation with the banal claim that both word and work are needed for the purposes of civilisation. For Kant, as we have noted above, it is the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason(general and special logic) and the categories of the understanding which include the categorical imperative that constitute Culture which Kant regarded as higher form of communal life than “civilisation”. The latter is, in Kant’s view driven by hypothetical imperatives which strive for homeostasis and happiness(which for Kant was the principle of self-love in disguise). The hypothetical imperatives of civilisation are of course important for the meeting of our needs for safety and security but only categorical imperatives and the principles related to them can sufficiently answer the aporetic questions raised in relation to the being of our humanity or explain the inner awe and wonder we feel when we think about the moral law within us. For Aristotle, the attachment to a dogma such as Marxism, would constitute a very limited realm of value that concerned itself only with the external world and ones basic desires. The values of the body and the soul, and their intimate relation, is bypassed in Marxist theory where men become mechanical parts in a materialistic system aiming at “production”, This, on a hylomorphic view, would constitute a very limited conception of “The Good” mentioned in the Nichomachean Ethics. Marxist theory, from the point of view of Hylomorphic political theory, appears to have omitted consideration of the most important synthesis of the thesis of oligarchic values and the antithesis of democratic values. Aristotle called this synthesis constitutional politics, and attributed it to the value-system of the middle class: a value system embracing the contexts of exploration and explanation/justification that we find in the cultural activities of the theoretical, practical, and productive sciences. Amongst such values we are likely to find the idea of freedom, the idea of justice, and the idea of the importance of knowledge which for both Aristotle and Kant could be defined in terms of justified true belief. These ideas constitute our Culture which certainly sees the word to be a part of the “work” of meaning and part of the “work” of investigating the many meanings of being.

Review of Ricoeurs “History and Truth, Part 4 The Truth, De civitate dei and De civitate terrana.

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statue of jesus christ on mount in evening
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The Renaissance, Ricoeur argues, was the moment in History when the pluri-vocal nature of truth revealed itself. He overlooked the work of Aristotle in this judgement. The period of the Renaissance can of course be conceived of narrowly or more widely, either as the era between the medieval period and the modern period that can be dated with the fall of Rome in 1527, or the work of Descartes over a century later(1637). Adrian Stokes, a psychoanalytically inspired art critic, wrote about Renaissance Art from the perspective of a genre he named “QuattroCento Art”: a genre he characterised in terms of forms that emanated from the building and walls of Mother of Architecture which could also “encase” sculptures and paintings. For Stokes, a key term for the effect of art was “emblematic”, a concept which captured the essence of a process that converted the subjective into something objective. In this process an expression resulted in an external material object produced with the intention of being responded to and in the spirit of a humanistic telos.

Renaissance art therefore did strive for a unity of the human world via its intentions and technically produced objects, and it did this as part of a wider project of restoring the classical values of Ancient Greece that had been temporarily occluded by the engineering/military spirit of the Roman World. For Stokes there was a kinship between the mass-effect of stone, the “blossoming” of wall emblems, the sublimated depressive anxiety of the naked Michelangelo figures guarding the Medici tomb, the look of alerted resignation on the face of the Michelangelo Delphic oracle in the Sistine chapel. This is the kinship of ideas but it is also expressive of the objective humanism that we can find in the hurly burly of the cosmopolitan Shakespeare plays. This “spirit” was repressed by Descartes’ essentially private meditations and discourses in front of a Northern fireside in a study far from the madding Shakespearean crowds: a study that was home to the mathematicians paper and pencil. In the work of Descartes, technical solutions to technical problems such as designing weapons for the battlefield displaced the concerns of epistemé, diké , arché (and the concerns of the great-souled men of Ancient Greece). In the Cartesian coordinate system life-forms moved mechanically in space and time but consciousness lived a life of its own in the Cartesian account of the Cogito: a life embedded in the mechanical brain. This “modern” variation on Platonic dualism has deliberately distanced itself from Aristotelian hylomorphism and its thesis of the continuity of human life-forms with animal forms of life: a continuity regulated by the principles of psuche. Descartes led the Renaissance revival of the classical spirit right back into the dark labyrinth of the dark ages, resting his final case on theology and the argument that only God can guarantee that our life is not a dream we will soon awaken from.

It is not clear what Ricoeur means with the phase “pluralistic nature of truth” but the resemblances of his phenomenological position to that of Descartes are clear. This together with a clearly articulated anti-rationalist sentiment, which rejects the first principles of Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy, leads one to the judgement that we are dealing with a “modern” theory of man that also rests its final arguments on theological grounds. According to Ricoeur, all attempts to search for the unity of Being is a temptation and an evil that ought to be avoided. This may be a reference to a view that medieval clerics and scholars have held, namely “God is one”, and this judgement often occurs in relation to a discussion of the holy trinity of God the father, God the son, and God the holy ghost. If this is the case then the judgement that this kind of attempt to unify different aspects of the divine must be something to avoid but it is not clear why.

The Kantian view of God is not essentially an epistemological or ontological view similar to the Cartesian view in which the idea theoretically guarantees that our experiences are real and not the figment of a dream. Rather, it is the practical/politically/ethically-rational idea of freedom that Kant focuses upon in order to support the hypothetical judgement “If you lead a worthy life then the life one leads will be a flourishing life.” Ricoeur would counter such reflections with the claim that rationality is only present in mans life in the form of a “wish for reason”, and he would further claim that this is a flawed response to the fundamental ambiguity of existence. This wish for reason is furthermore characterised as a lie, but Ricoeur never engages directly with the arguments of Kant and prefers to keep a respectable distance to Critical Philosophy insofar as the concepts of freedom and responsibility(and their connection) are concerned.

Kant’s view of Truth in his First Critique is essentially a formal account and insists upon acknowledging the impossibility of a general definition of Truth. He agrees that there must be a formal agreement of knowledge and its object but points out that objects concretely differ from one another and that consequently any definition will lack this important “material” component. This position also testifies to the hylomorphic character of Kantian reflections which demands a relation between form and matter that will be in accordance with the principles of explanation/justification (which one will find are implied by the definition of knowledge that both Kant and Aristotle accept, namely “Justified True Belief”). The two principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason together constitute the “arché of Kantian metaphysical reasoning. Insofar as we do concern ourselves with the content of our knowledge claims(its objects) the categories of the understanding would indeed appear to be pluralistic and partly constitutive of the ontological structure of the different objects we confront in reality. Here too, we find Kant using hylomorphic reasoning and designating the content of knowledge as its matter, which on hylomorphic theory, is organised by “forms” (justifying principles, laws). Truth therefore also has a “form” which relates to the principle of noncontradiction that Kant claims must be regarded as a negative criterion for Truth. The matter of knowledge, on the other hand, is firmly situated in a context of discovery/exploration whose purpose it is to acquire information. Logic, on this account, teaches us nothing about the content of knowledge. Rather it is the faculty of Sensibility, combining apriori and empirical intuitions, that constitutes the “material” awaiting possible conceptualisation in terms of the categories of the understanding. Kant, we know, insisted that intuitions without concepts are blind and concepts without intuitions are “empty”, thereby drawing attention to the importance of both these elements of experience. General logic cannot be used at this level without the risk of falling into what Kant called “dialectical illusion”(Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Trans Kemp Smith, N.,London, Macmillan, 1963, P.99). The categories of the understanding on the other hand, do concern themselves with what Kant termed “special logic” and the special principle of sufficient reason which is connected to the ontological structure of the categories. Kant also refers to the logic associated with this aspect of knowledge as “transcendental logic” which is specifically concerned with confining judgement within the scope and limits of experience. Here too, Kant warns us against generalising or using the categories outside these limits for fear of falling into illusion.

Whether or not one can regard the above Kantian view as a philosophical development of the Renaissance revelation of the pluralistic nature of truth remains an open question. One possible answer to this question consists in acknowledging the hylomorphic or Aristotelian influence in Kant’s work which carries with it a commitment both to the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief”(Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the statement that we all desire to know) as well as a metaphysical commitment to the many meanings of being. In the light of this answer, it could be argued that if Kant is a hylomorphic philosopher this would in its turn constitute an elaboration upon the Renaissance aim of restoring the classical humanistic spirit of Ancient Greece. The special innovation of Kant was to consolidate the “home” for philosophy as a subject , namely in a university system that was at the same time operating on a principle of specialisation(probably on the model of the guild system). One important point to make in this context is that in the works of Aristotle and Kant, Reason is not merely a “wish” but rather a faculty which together with the faculty of understanding performs a regulative function with respect to the desire in general and wishing in particular. Desire and wish in the case of both Aristotle and Kant interact with the imagination. Another important question to ask is related to the extent to which one philosophically conceives of the abiding influence of Ancient Greece in our Culture(with special reference to Plato and Aristotle). Aristotle we know had great respect for his teacher and this respect was probably to a large extent mutual. Historically, however, probably because of the role of the Church, and its preference for the body-soul dualism of Plato, it was Plato that dominated the intellectual discussion up to that point when Philosophy became established in universities during the period extending from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment philosophy of Kant. It should also be recalled that both Aristotle and Kant provided powerful arguments against the dualism and materialism of their times. Both philosophers were rationalists that rejected “dialectic” in its various forms. Neo-Kantians would for example recommend against falling into the temptation of the dialectic approaches firstly, of Hegel that led later to modern “Cartesian”phenomenology, and secondly, to the political philosophy of Marx. The Aristotelian and Kantian forms of rationalism both distinguish carefully between, firstly the metaphysics of ethics which concerned itself with action and its relation to “The Good”, and secondly, the metaphysics of nature which principally concerns itself with material change and the events bringing about such change. The being of the actor and his actions belonged namely in a different universe of discourse to the material being of changing substances which retain their ontological identity throughout change.

Ricoeur surprisingly claims in his essay entitled “Truth and falsehood”(P.167) that the best known truth-activity is to be found in the domain of empirical science: a realm in which mathematics plays a decisive role in the subjectivising of our perceptual experience. It was truth activity in this realm, Ricoeur argues, that brought about the dissolution of what he calls the “philosophico-theological synthesis”. The method of verification and its relation to the facts is what was regarded as significant for theory building in this realm of truth activity. The laboratory and its instruments, for example,(e.g. the Wilson cloud chamber) become in this activity, “cultural objects”, with a particular cultural “meaning”. Ricoeur invokes the idea of unity again in this discussion and claims that different sciences will specialise in different regions of being, and any attempt to find unity in a universal conception of “Science” is problematic. Nevertheless, it is science, and not reason and the understanding, which for Ricoeur, is the “touchstone of truth”(P.170). This “modern” conception of science, argues Ricoeur, calls into question the Greek conception of epistemé, and the discovery of atomic energy is mentioned in the context of this discussion. Science recategorises man in this “conquest” and man becomes just another “substance” in a category of “things”. This view returns us to those eras in our history when dualistic and materialistic presuppositions reemerge in the philosophical landscape: a view which will eventually lead to Hannah Arendt’s conception of humanity as being partly constituted by the “new men” for whom “everything is possible”. Scientific truth, for Ricoeur, has a “dialectical” character and is related to a “circle” of perceiving, knowing and acting(P.172). Somehow, in some obscure fashion, on this account, ethical choices begin to form in relation to the historical choices we have made over time as part of an endless questioning of the grounds of our ethical commitments and subsequent action. Part of this questioning occurs in aesthetic contexts when the artist uses “imagination” to both create something new, and to criticise life and perhaps the world as a whole. Ricoeur claims that if the artist is searching for unity, this unity is a lie and merely a wished-for entity that uses the authority of the artist “violently”. In true dialectical fashion, Ricoeur then also admits that the unity of Reason and Life, is a possibility as long as one does not attempt to tie them together too soon(P.176): this is a variation of a criticism Ricoeur makes of the ontological phenomenology of Heidegger, a philosopher he admires.

Ricoeur provides us with his own solution to the problem of unity by reference to those theological truths that are revelatory of a Person. This person is characterised in the truths of the scriptures and it is these truths that preachers attempt to communicate in their sermons. Of course we are reminded that the authority of theology is also “violent” in its essence. The above concentration on the particular(the particular life of a particular person) opposes the program of Philosophy whose view of unity is in terms of universal understanding. Ricoeur does insist, however, that the word of God is a “good” authority. What Ricoeur calls the “pathos” of authority does not however integrate easily with what he calls the “pathos” of freedom (which insofar as the theologian is concerned , it is claimed, is tinged with an anti-authoritative arrogance). Insofar as Kant’s critical philosophy aims at an “integral humanism”, it falls into the realm of the illusory. Yet we find here no mention of Kant’s Political Philosophy which Kant presents as a discipline with ethical foundations (which as a matter of fact he regards as a more encompassing discipline than theoretical theology insofar as our life is concerned). Ethics, for Kant, is founded upon capacities for judgement and choice that are based on a liberal conception of freedom, which amongst other things, is a freedom from the influence of a violent subjugating authority, and a freedom which in Enlightenment spirit “dares to use reason”. Ricoeur prefers to discuss Marxism, one of the sources of 20th century totalitarianism. He praises Marxism for being the philosophy of History par excellence, presumably because it embodied a rejection of the authority of a master class, the bourgeoisie, and also because it incorporated a defence of the subjugated class, the proletariat. Marx’s mapping of this historical relation between these two classes in terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis ignored the political philosophy of Kant, which in fact inherited the Aristotelian vision of the importance of a “middle class” that embraces the most important values of the oligarchs and democrats who were dividing the city with their disputes and conflicts during the times of Plato and Aristotle. Marxism we know arbitrarily sided with the proletariat class on predominantly economic grounds that did not take into consideration the idea of justice as conceived of by Aristotle or the idea of freedom as conceived of by Kant. Ricoeur then claims startlingly, on P.185, that only Marxism can provide us with what he terms a “rational politics”.

Unity for Ricoeur clearly has a theological eschatological character that does not have the resources to adequately conceptualise the middle ground of Aristotelian politics: a middle ground which embodies the abiding values of oligarchy and democracy and rejects the injustices, inequalities and failures of these classes to respect the categorical law of respecting and treating everyone as ends-in-themselves. One would have expected any eschatological hope for an “integrated history” to, at the very least, incorporate these class-transcendent values. Instead we are invited to interpret this eschatological hope in terms of a Judgement Day or Last Day which presumably will bring History to a close with a day of truth in the person of Jesus Christ. This account describes De civitate dei as a very different city to De civitate terrana, perhaps because it is Babylon rather than Athens that serves as the model of the earthly city. St Augustine’s tale is indeed a tale of the two cities of Babylon and Jerusalem, but perhaps the more interesting tale would be that which examines the relations between Athens and Jerusalem: between the many meanings of Being and the monotheistic total authority of Gd who presumably gave us the freedom to build our cities rather than while away our time in a Garden of Eden.

In a short essay aiming at clarifying the issue of “unity” (P.192) Ricoeur claims that our relation to unity is also related to wish fulfilment and that the Truth cannot both be one and plural at the same time. The Aristotelian principle of noncontradiction claims that “the same time” must be qualified by “and in the same respect”, which leaves the door open for the idea of the Truth having different aspects. Ricoeur further claims that there cannot be any “intuition” of this unity because our relation to the world is a relation to that which is the most concrete horizon of our existence and toward which we can have a multitude of different “attitudes”(P.192-3) It is the power of perception which explains the necessity for remaining at the concrete level of the experienced life-world which is the source of all my acts, attitudes, cultural expectations and commitments. This life-world is then transformed into the Word(Logos) which cannot grasp the elusiveness of a unity that is the horizon for everything experienced. The unity of the life world, according to Ricouer, is “too prior to be possessed and too lived to be known”(P.194). In living all his attitudes, man is forced to “suffer” the plurality of all his objects”(P.194). The preferred form of unity for Ricoeur, is what he calls “eschatological unity”. This unity for the Christian is, of course, tied up with his lived faith. In this unity the charity of Christ, which is the hidden meaning of all human experience, will reveal itself on the Last Judgement Day and the Truth will be revealed.

Review of Ricoeur’s “History and Truth”: Part Three Society and Imago Dei

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Wollaton Hall: pilasters and Aristotle
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Ricoeur refers to the biblical message “love thy neighbour” in his discussion of the modern world’s relation to this message from the Gospels. He claims that this message, emphasising the importance of the neighbour as it does, has disappeared and become abstracted into social institutions of various kinds(factories, military camps, prisons, concentration camps, etc( P.102). The idea of a neighbour as a consequence becomes marginalised, becoming a dream that we can awaken from once this world of ours falls into the state of ruin and destruction predicted by the Delphic Oracle. Ricoeur also uses the dramatic analogy of “committing suicide” in this discussion. It is interesting to note, however, that central constitutive cultural institutions such as schools, universities, and law-making governments, are regarded as repressive of positive social relations insofar as they trade in the traditional currency of Rationality rather than the crypto-currency of the power of the imagination. The image of society we are invited to form is that of a flawed creation heading for ruin and destruction.

Ricoeur calls “social man, “socius”, and connects him to the man of history, a man for whom the “love thy neighbour” message has been marginalised and who consequently does not cohabit well with his neighbour. This historical social being is a man of regret, dream, and myth, living in a state of chaos and needing the understanding of a friend. Suffering is a natural consequence of chaos and the neighbour is witness to this suffering. The neighbour stands outside the work context and is therefore untouched by Marxism and its conception of the “specialised” work process. The question to ask is whether “charity” is an abstraction in such a context, seemingly belonging to the private space of dwelling.

For Ricoeur, Evil resides in the objectification of social institutions and their divisiveness. It is further maintained that all forms of “progressivism” fail to understand such evil. Institutions of justice, in particular, Ricoeur argues, manifest:

” a foreign and cancerous passion, the passion of an abstract administration”(P.106)

This kind of description of institutions of justice is to say the very least, contentious, and implies that there is a “heart of corruption” present. Ricouer is here relying on the fact that periodic observations of such institutions may reveal such corruption, and that this then suffices for their universal condemnation. Institutions of Justice, however, are best defined by their telos or purpose which is to make just judgments and deliver just processes in a democratic environment of transparence and accountability. Individual instances of corruption ought not to to permit universal generalisation to the whole institution, its history and future.

Power relations, whether they be technocratic, ecclesiastic, political or military, are oligarchic rather than democratic. Such relations do not, Ricoeur argues, manifest those virtuous intentions which strive for the good of the individual and the community. Kant would, of course, argue that this is their purpose or telos, and what they ought to do, but Ricoeur does not, as we have seen, accept this form of ethical reasoning in the mode of the prescriptive. The categorical imperative of treating people as ends in themselves via the law: “So act that you can will that the maxim of your action become a universal law” is a problematic abstraction for Ricoeur. This form of reasoning is, of course, one of the foundation stones of democracy and requires considerable philosophical argumentation to defend: argumentation which must invoke the practical rational ideas of freedom, justice, and equality in the justification of duties and human rights. Periodic observations of the activities of our institutions can, of course, be the ground for making negative judgements about these activities, especially if these observations concern the corruption of the purpose or telos of these institutions, but the only way to measure the moral quality of these activities is via the above practical rational ideas which are situated logically and conceptually in the prescriptive ought-system of judgements.

The relation of man to his institutions, on the Kantian view, is “organic”, and this contrasts with the accusation of Ricoeur that our social forms of existence are “artificial”. This is not to deny that negative judgements can periodically be true especially when the focus is reversed from treating people as ends-in-themselves(phronesis) to treating them as a means to some bureaucratic institutional end(techné).

Ricoeurs solution to the problem of the alienated subjugated citizen in a chaotic society, is the initiation of charitable activity in relation to ones neighbour which as a matter of fact ought to be our natural instinctive response to the difficult task of living in a difficult sometimes dangerous world. Ricoeur’s reduction of the abstract “ethical” aspect of social activity to the more concrete descriptive level indicated in the message “love thy neighbour!”, fails to acknowledge the need for abstract judgments such as “promises ought to be kept” as families grow organically into villages, which in their turn organically grow into cities. Periodic observations record the disappointing facts that promises are made at institutional levels and then not, for different reasons actualised.If the reason for the failure to keep ones promise is related to dishonesty and promises were made solely for the purpose of acquiring power then this is clearly a case of treating people as means to an end, and the only rational response to such a state of affairs is not to abandon the imperative that promises ought to be kept, or indeed the goal of treating people as ends in themselves. The goal in such circumstances , rather, ought to be to judge this corruption in the light of the categorical imperative. Charitable acts towards ones neighbour and the keeping of promises are both categorical imperatives which actualise the intention of treating people as ends in themselves. Both imperatives may be regarded as “objectifications” but regarding objectifications as evil merely on account of their abstraction requires further argumentation which Ricoeur does not provide in this work.

Ricoeur notes the failure of the Greek city-states to survive as independent political entities, and the subsequent political need for larger entities such as nation-states. This organic development itself resulted in a need for international regulation of the kind envisaged by Kant(a United Nations regulating human rights). In such transformations, institutions are created which in turn need regulation by their communities if lapses from the central purpose(injustices) is not to lead such communities down the path toward ruin and destruction. In such circumstances it may be true to say, as Ricoeur does, that charity may be nothing more than an “alibi for justice”(P.108). This sets up a dialectical opposition between “socius”(the historical man) and the neighbour which, of course, is a part of the argumentation that is supposed to establish the truth of the claim that existence is fundamentally ambiguous. In this realm of ambiguity it is the power of the imagination, and not reason, or categorical understanding, that reigns. In such a realm, discourse fixates upon images, and one effect of this can be seen in the essay entitled “The image of God and the Epic of Man”(P.110). Ricoeur is, of course, aware of the limitations of conceptualising the image as an “imprint” and attempts to add an active dimension to this power by claiming that the image of God, for example, can be interpreted as the power of human creativity—thereby transferring the debate into the arena of the will and the power of thought. This creativity, Ricoeur argues, occurs in the midst of the chaos of evil which challenges our faith in the grace of God to “save” us. On the Christian account, Ricoeur points out, Jesus Christ is the rebirth of creation and the image of God is thereby given human form which enables a more concrete link to be made to the epical life of man.

“Our humanity is broken”, Ricoeur insists on page 113. This is the case because of the fundamental conflict between the private zones of the workings of individual consciousness when engaged in charitable acts towards ones neighbour, and the public zones of activity in economic, political and social life. Both zones are “mad”, Ricoeur claims, when related to the sane forms of moderation of our lives by meditation upon the image of God. In his further reflections upon this issue, Ricoeur turns to a consideration of the role of Language and invokes the biblical meaning of “logos”, which it is claimed is the name for God the creator. Creation is thus bound up somehow with language but it is not clear exactly how(P.113). Instead ,Ricoeur moves on to attempt to navigate a philosophical course between what he calls the dichotomy of the personal and the anonymous. Surprisingly, he turns to Kants work on Anthropology for an account of the “spheres of influence” that affect the reality and history of man.These spheres of possession, power and value, are situated respectively in the economic, political and cultural arenas of the activities of man. Ricoeur does not make this point, but we should recall in the context of this discussion, that Kant makes a clear distinction between that which assists in the processes of the civilising of man(possession, power) and that which constitutes his cultural being(e.g. that which makes him a worthy man and citizen of his society). Naturally there is a complex relation between these arenas of activity but, on the Kantian view, it is the activity in the Cultural arena that ought to regulate activity in the economic and political arenas. Ethical reasoning becomes the primary regulator of all significant human activity. This is similar to the Aristotelian account of ethical virtue in which areté and arché play important roles in all spheres of influence, e.g. doing the right thing in the right way at the the singular right time in accordance with appropriate prescriptive principles. Ricoeur argues that these “spheres of influence” help to avoid the dialectical confrontation that would otherwise occur between the private and public zones of activity referred to above. Ricoeur, given his opposition to Kantian abstract ethics, wishes instead to chart the “epic of the image of God” and ask how this focus can illuminate the significance of our three spheres of influence. Evil threatens the downfall of these three spheres especially via the uses of language for lying, gossiping, flattering, and tempting. These abuses together with the misunderstandings arising because of the scattering of various languages suffices for Ricoeur to maintain his sceptical stance toward the one singular message of Kant’s Anthropology, namely, that all is well in these spheres so long as ethical principles and laws regulate activity in them.

Ricoeur praises Marx for not being a moralist(P.115) and also praises Marx’s concept of “alienation”. Capital, Ricoeur claims, in agreement with Marx, “entails a certain destruction of humanity”(P.115), dehumanising man and turning him into a possession, a slave. In a world dominated by Capital, it is argued, speech and thought become fetishes.

Power, Ricoeur argues, is hierarchical in its essence and promotes inequality between men, and it is this phenomenon that History most concerns itself with. In the Bible, Ricoeur points out, we encounter the complaints of the prophets made against the mighty and powerful kings. Many of these kings were tyrants who had in various ways enslaved their people and turned them into cowards. This passion for power, Historians have noted, so often ends in madness and death. Ricoeur wishes to use theological anthropology to pick up the scattered pieces of man whether it be those that have been alienated or violently subjugated. Hegel is invoked via the idea of the struggle for recognition of the slave against his master, and situated in a culture that provides images of man via works, monuments and objects. For Hegel this process was fundamentally historical but for Ricoeur it is theological anthropology, and the striving after the grace of God that will help save man from himself and the evil that surrounds him. Such a vision assumes an authority that is created by God and it is admitted that:

“In spite of their violent nature, empires have been influential in advancing law, knowledge, culture, the well-being of man, and the arts. Mankind has not only survived, it has grown, it has survived and become more mature, more adult.”(P.121)

This of course, is roughly the vision of Kant but there is in Kant’s Anthropology less of an appeal to the image of God, and more of an appeal to mans nature as expressed in the formula “rational animal capable of discourse”. Kantian man believes in God as a guarantor of the summum bonum of a good-spirited flourishing life. Kantian man is also to a greater extent a political being, paying more attention to the practically rational idea of freedom than the theoretically rational idea of God. For Kant, Evil is wrought by the unsocial sociability of man, which so often results in antagonism toward his fellows and it is the failure to regulate this antagonism that generates evil. Regulatory mechanisms include discourse and the rational ideas of freedom justice and equality that permeates the declared intentions of our institutions. On P.125, Ricoeur partially acknowledges the gravitas of the Kantian account by acknowledging the importance of the construction of the City that will function in his account as a sign of the Kingdom of the imago dei. This acknowledgment apart, there is very little similarity in these two accounts given the central place of the power of the imagination in Ricoeurs anthropology. For Ricoeur, it is redemption and salvation that is the theological telos of the Kingdoms of the future. The role of sound judgement and sound reasoning in this vision is not clear. Neither is it clear how freedom and responsibility could possibly be justified in terms of a power of the imagination.

Review of Ricoeur’s “History and Truth:Part Two

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Ricoeur is clearly influenced by the linguistic structuralist position in his characterisation of subjectivity in terms of consciousness expressing the powers of perception and imagination in the arena of singularity and event -causation. He characterises such expression in terms of “meaning”. This issue is discussed in his essay “Objectivity and Subjectivity”, and Ricoeur admits that History involves knowledge of the traces of the past but simultaneously and curiously wishes to use the term “observation” in relation to the activity of the processing of historical documents. He also uses, in this context, the naturalistic term “working hypothesis”(P.23).Applied to the human and social sciences this involves the ordering of singular phenomena and the search for the “same” function in other similar events(P.24). “Types” of phenomena emerge in such a process, e.g. economic, political, cultural. The historical aspect of such a process involves the establishing of historical facts that Ricoeur characterises as the “integral past”(P.24). Kant is mentioned in relation to this “regulative idea” of the “integral past”, but Kantian rationalism is on the whole rejected on the grounds of unnecessary abstraction and sometimes the kind of concretisation of the discourse appears to be in favour of the kind of discourse one encounters in modern physics. In many respects this kind of commitment to “the science of human society” provides the strategy for historical understanding of historical facts. We know that trial and error and “working hypotheses” are common to both structural analyses of texts and the inductive work of physicists engaged in their work of exploration/discovery. Ricoeur refers in this discussion to the understanding of “wholes” organically, via the use of the imagination but not, however, connected to understanding and reason as we encounter them in the sciences of space, matter, and life.

History is conceived of, then, as an integral history of the actions of magnitude of past men as well as the values of “humanity” we share with all men as defined by the parameters of “sympathy”(P.30) Ricoeur separates understanding from judgement, by associating the former with “feeling and imagination” which, for him, constitutes what he calls a “good subjectivity”: a sign of a shift from “the logical” and towards the “ethical”(P.32). He associates what he calls the “history of self-consciousness” with this so called “ethical” perspective, and Husserl is invoked as a pivotal influence. We are invited then to replace the question “What is X?” with the question “What is the meaning of X?” Justification of the meaning of a phenomenon thus replaces justification via the objective cause of, or reason for, or conditions of, a phenomenon. The kind of meaning Ricoeur is in search of is that which can be attached to individual persons and singular works(P.36). History thus becomes the development of meaning irradiating from what he calls “irradiating centres”(P.39). Reference is also made here to the sudden appearance of centres of consciousness as events and structural forces are invoked, e.g. economic, social, political, and cultural. The reflective activity of the historian is thus subtly transformed into a subjective factor and connected with the curious claim:

“The object of history is the human subject itself”(P.40)

Clearly Ricoeur is not referring to the human subject in general, or human powers such as rationality and discourse in general, but prefers rather to refer to individual centres of consciousness engaged in involvement with singular works expressing economic, social, political or cultural “meanings”. Truth on this account is the personal task of individuals situated in contexts of exploration/discovery of the many meanings of Being( hoping ontologically to arrive at a terminus of true knowledge). Considerable ambiguity is implied in such a “subjective” account but, Ricoeur argues, this is merely the expression of “the ambiguous state of mankind”(P.56).

In an essay entitled “Note on the History of Philosophy and the Sociology of Knowledge”, Ricoeur maintains that there is a significant difference between a “Genuine History of Philosophy” and a “Scientific Sociology of Knowledge”. Such a science, he argues, has the purpose of investigating the economic, social and cultural conditions of thought in the spirit of theoretical hypothesis-formation. The History of social existence plays an important role in such a venture, and Marx is mentioned in the context of describing the working form of social existence that has essential connections to the economic realities constituting such an existence. In such theoretical excursions, both functional and meaningful relationships are described. The end result of such investigations is the ontological hope that empirical laws will emerge which govern the relation between dependent and independent variables. “Common types” such as the concept of “class” are appealed to, and this in turn appears to require an account of the relation between the singular social existence of an individual and the conceptualisation of an essence which goes beyond the category of “Quantity”. Ricoeur, in the context of this discussion, appeals to the idea of “logos” and the power of discourse, which, he claims, transcends the “realities” of “work”. Such an account:

“form the story of the thinker with respect to his own social motivation”(P.61)

The Hegelian concept of “irony” is referred to but the reflection appears to be unfinished, leaving the relation between logos and functional, meaningful relations we encounter in relation to social existence and the History of Philosophy, hanging in the air. It is unclear, that is, whether the spirit of Hegel is haunting these reflections or whether some more critical spirit is involved. In a later chapter entitled “The History of Philosophy and Historicity” Hegelian Philosophy is referred to as entailing a “systematic approach to the systematic method of the Historian”. Ricoeur explores the theme of understanding via Hegel’s account of Spinoza (who separated the philosophy of substance from “subjectivity”) and the paradoxical conclusion is drawn that it is this “separation” which explains the ethical aspect of Philosophy. Whilst this may be a correct interpretation of Spinoza’s Philosophy, it certainly overlooks the history of the term “substance” in Aristotle’s thought. Aristotle moved away from characterising “substance ” as a materialistic regulative idea toward a more abstract hylomorphic idea of substance as “form” or “principle”: this hylomorphic idea entailed no alienation of the “ethical” from the objectivity-constituting principles governing our understanding of social reality. The characterisation of this important realm of our existence in terms of “irony” is problematic in that it collapses and conflates a large number of distinctions recognised by both Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of the understanding and Social Existence.

Ricoeur accuses the Historian of not penetrating to the core of singular or individual existence because of an obsession with what he calls “typology”, e.g. class. The problem of providing an account of historical understanding is thus made more difficult because of the presence of the polarisation of the field of discourse by a false pair of alternatives, namely, Hegelian “systematic” philosophy, and Spinoza’s account of singular individual essence. As a consequence of the operation of these two dialectical opposites, Reason becomes a vicissitude of self-conscious reflection, and for all intents and purposes is “psychologically reduced” to the logos or meaning of consciousness. Focussing upon meaning enables Ricoeur to finally reject Hegelian Absolutism and side with the idea of self-consciousness as presented in the Philosophy of Spinoza. This, it turns out, requires a form of “projection” of oneself into another( in the process of forming contact with another) which assimilates the idea of a singular existence into the idea of a solipsistic form of conscious existence similar to that found in Spinoza’s reflections. In the context of such an account we would do well to recall that “projection” for Freud was a vicissitude of consciousness involving the imagination of a paranoidal form of consciousness that defensively protects itself by the falsification of reality.

Ricoeur obviously takes seriously the concept of “class” in History and Philosophy, claiming that the Cartesian form of rationalism emerged as a consequence of some kind of need of the French bourgeoisie. This form of sociological explanation relies upon a deterministic view of social and political reality that would be, by implication, rejected by Kantian ideas of freedom and creativity: ideas that invoke a form of self-consciousness requiring an agency that can uniquely cause itself to do things independently. In this context, Ricoeur acknowledges that reflective philosophical questioning on the many meanings of Being expresses a philosophical intention that is opposed to the kind of deterministic social causation referred to above. Ricoeur also claims that reference to “typologies” merely raise otiose questions. This may well be true insofar as the concept of “class” is concerned, but this point cannot be generalised to all ideas of “types” some of which are well embedded in the conceptual networks of our understanding and judgement. In defence of the concept of “class”, however, it ought to be pointed out that this concept has important implications for the description of a small range of social phenomena. Focussing on singular forms of existence also determines the kind of linear causality that may be appealed to in any explanation of changes in the forms of such existence. This form of material/efficient causality is , according to Aristotle’s hylomorphic account, a very limited form of explanation.

Ricoeur introduces the idea of “false-consciousness” in his account of the way in which written works are embedded in their “situation”. in some mysterious fashion the “work” in transcending its “situation” thereby “dissimulates”. It is not clear why Ricoeur wishes to maintain such a position but there is also reference to “irony” and also reference to Sartre’s aesthetic account of the relation of the artist to his work. The idea of “structural types” is also invoked in connection with Ricoeur’s claim that there are two aspects of historical understanding. He calls these “aspects” “models of the truth” and Pascal is called upon to testify to the “hypothesis” that the singular whole of one humanity is presupposed ante-predicatively by the historian and his understanding of his field of study. On the other hand, Ricoeur argues, man is plural and history must also be about the plurality of men and events. It is this dualism that is implied in different philosophical works and which motivates Ricouer’s ambiguous position which in turn results in the claim that Hegelian Phenomenology suppresses history in favour of the “forms of Spirit” that are nullified by Logic.(P.75)

“Lived History” is, then, on Ricoeur’s account, characterised in terms of “virtual structure” and “virtual event”. It is the interaction of this “thesis” and “antithesis” that then constitutes the synthesis of “The ambiguity of History”, a paradoxical conclusion given the fact that neither Truth in general, nor Historical knowledge in general can be “spiritually ambiguous”. On Ricoeurs account, both the “false consciousness” of Marx and the displaced consciousness of Hegel generate paradoxes which working Historians do not “live” or “experience”. In a chapter entitled “Christianity and the Meaning of History”, Ricoeur claims that a “false problem” confronts the philosopher, namely that concerning the opposition between secular materialistic views of “progress” and the Christian eschatological “mystery” of the world and life(with its implied “hope” for the “salvation of man”).

Ricoeur further argues that, in the realm of the works and tasks of man, and in the realm of knowledge, there are distinct possibilities of accumulation and progression. The history of techné and the history of moral reflection both accumulate and “progress” in their very different respective ways. The History of Socrates, for example, is the history of his decisions and acts as well as the events involving him. The historical account of the life of Socrates, however, is also a dramatic narrative that attributes an abstract value to the events of his life, his acts, and his decisions. Reversals of fortune in both directions are important in life narratives, e.g. the tragic reversal from good to bad fortune as a result of an act of magnitude that unleashes a chain of harmful events which end in impacting ones own life. Christian life-narratives highlight “reversals” of a more positive kind, e.g. the narrative of the reborn Christian who has been “saved” and who feels “safe” even in the face of harmful events threatening to impact ones life catastrophically.. Both of these alternatives differ significantly from the kind of incremental instrumental changes we encounter in the world of techné. Where does knowledge belong in this reflection: in the dramatic sphere of change or the less dramatic slower instrumental incremental sphere of techné? Technical knowledge obviously belongs in the latter sphere. Theoretical and Knowledge is a “form” the Greeks designated by the term epistemé, and this involves the understanding of principles that, once understood in the appropriate way, enable one to see the world in a new light– a dramatic change of historical significance for man. This kind of epistemological “event” obviously also involves a transformation of the personality of man– a rebirth involving seeing the world in a different way. This phenomenon, when it occurs in the moral context of action, transforms man into a different almost “holy” being and this can be, as it was in Kant’s reflections, connected with the Christian eschatological hope for the man who is “saved”. Such a man, it is assumed, can transcend his narcissistic desires and “sublimate” them by developing a desire to be worthy of the good-spirited, flourishing life.

Ricoeur conflates theoretical and practical knowledge(epistemé, diké) with technical knowledge and the form of incremental change associated with techné, and therefore misses an important dimension of mans personality. He speaks in this context of value and admits that it is difficult to show in detail how incremental technical progress could alone fulfil the destiny of man(P.85). He points to Adam’s flawed decision to break the vital bond with divine power, and this does not fit comfortably with the Enlightenment interpretation that Adam might be exercising his freedom to use “knowledge” to determine his future destiny. In the beginning of the Biblical narrative, the “reversal” for Adam gives rise to a connected “reversal” for Cain and Abel, when the former kills the latter, his brother. Ricoeur notes the lack of interest for epistemé in the Bible which chooses instead to focus on a future Dei civitate dei, in which man will dwell in this “perfect city”, loving his neighbours and his enemies– a city in which human relations and humanity(needs of the soul) is far more important than the instruments and equipment we need to meet the needs of the external world and the body which partly constitute our “civilisation”. Civilisations rise and fall, Ricoeur points out, but he is convinced man will endure cyclically, remaining one throughout a series of crises. It is this factor, Ricoeur argues, which enables History to study multiple civilisations. Yet it needs to be pointed out that History is not concerning itself specifically with narrating the dramatic reversals of events over time. History’s concern, rather, is to create a seemly “historical distance” in relation to these events and view them objectively through the lens of knowledge and “principles”. This kind of historical abstraction is overlooked by Ricoeur who refuses to see that the concrete can have an abstract aspect. He prefers instead to relate to those narratives that come as close as possible to “living” the events being reported.

There is, in Historical texts, a preference for the political term “citizen” in contrast to the more social term “class”, probably because the former is more categorical and universal: the term “citizen”, that is, relates to laws that cover all classes whether they are oligarchic or democratic. This more formal term also suffices to discuss the Aristotelian ideal of the “middle class” who follow laws respectfully in the interests of the unity of the city. “Class” is, of course, a more concrete phenomenon, as was claimed by Marx and his followers.

History is an epistemological project of man and therefore an important part of his education–especially from the perspective of the Delphic Oracle who predicted that everything created by man was destined for ruin and destruction. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle responded to this divine prophecy with the creation of the discipline of Philosophy: a discipline that strives to understand life from a timeless perspective, through the lens of a wisdom that uses knowledge in order to avoid the ruin and destruction of humanity. Epistemé is complemented with areté, diké, arche, and phronesis in the historical research process which formulates aporetic questions and provides answers which go well beyond “working hypotheses”. Ricoeur regards the above reflection as otiose because, in his view, it does not acknowledge sufficiently the importance of the singular existence of men and their works.

Ricoeur analyses the Christian faith in terms of the hope for salvation in a context of “mystery”, rather than knowledge. It is “mystery” Ricouer argues, that allows the Christian to transcend the essential ambiguity of life, men and their works. The Christian “lives” the ambiguity of secular history by interpreting and diagnosing it in terms of his faith in the sacred history or the significance of the “mystery” that has revealed itself to him/her. In a sense, therefore, the Christian lives in both of St Augustines cities(Dei civitate dei and Dei civitate terrana)

Ambiguity, Ricoeur argues,(P.94) is the last word for the Existentialist, but probably only the second last word for the Christian. The final word for the Christian is salvation, and it is this that separates the cities of Jerusalem and Athens(for whom wisdom or philosophical knowledge is the last word). Kant united these two cities in his resurrection of the ancient Greek commitments to episteme, arché, diké, areté, and phronesis and also united a possible commitment to the unity of faith and knowledge in the context of freedom and rationality that politically demanded a full understanding of the Delphic prophesy that man “know himself”. This theme was restored with Kantian Critical Philosophy, but for him there was nothing mysterious about the hope for a better world in the future, and that hope could well include the moral messages of Christianity.

The “hope” of Marxists influenced by the dialectical method of Hegel focussed upon techné and the expectations and demands of the proletariat for a richer materialistic future. This would be viewed by Christians and Kantians alike as the logical consequence of the denial of the importance of the spiritual and rational dimensions of mans life. Such a denial was only made possible by the assertion that the phenomena of man, his works, and his life are systematically ambiguous, and attempts to explain and justify these phenomena illusory.

Review of Ricoeur’s History and Truth: Part 1 Introduction and Prefaces.

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The Translator’s(Kelbley, C., A.,) Introduction to this work notes the role of Gabriel Marcel’s thought in relation to Ricouer’s reflections:

“Gabriel Marcel stated that we live in a world which seems founded on the refusal to reflect. On several occasions he insisted that the fate of Philosophy and civilisation are intimately related, implying that the philosopher does not have the privilege of abstaining from participation in the crises of his epoch. Surely, there is no need to underscore the role of existentialism and of phenomenology in the “persistent unyielding struggle against the spirit of abstraction”(Les Hommes contre l’humain(Paris, La Colombe, 1951)

Both of these movements, phenomenology and existentialism, are motivated by a desire to return to things themselves or existence itself. Such a desire appears to arise from the belief that abstract thought has no signifiant philosophical content and allows anything and everything to be thought in abstraction from what is actually happening in the world. The constraints of the the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason do not appear to suffice for the phenomenologists and existentialists to create the “special meaning” they seek in their reflections upon our “being-in-the-world”: whether it be the world we represent or the world we aim to change via our voluntary acts of will. Kant, in the name of the Enlightenment, felt the need to tear down the medieval metaphysical towers of reflection clouding the philosophical landscape and further urged that we, in our philosophical reasoning return to the Aristotelian notion of the metaphysics of “first principles”.

Hegel, in the course of “turning Kantian Philosophy on its head” rejected the above principles approach in favour of a dialectical method that regarded any principle as just another “thesis” waiting to be countered by an anthesis and thereby become part of a synthesis which as part of an ever growing circle would become a new and equally provisional thesis waiting for rejection and the beginning of another dialectical process. The effect of this Hegelian discussion was to refocus philosophical reflection on “Meanings” and “Interpretations of meanings” as well as the idea of “Spirit”. This latter idea referred to a succession of spiritual ideas which have the effect of expanding the “field of self-consciousness”. Spirit is divided by Hegel into the realms of Objective Spirit, which covers the domains of economic, social, moral, political and historical aspects of being, and Absolute Spirit, which covered the domains of art, philosophy, and religion. This account separates the arenas of the moral from the philosophical and this requires special explanation as does separating the political concern for justice from the “absolute” concern of Philosophy.

We argued in an earlier work : “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and action”( Lambert Academic Press, Mauritius, 2019-2022) that History is intimately related to the principles of truth and knowledge in a way that will not be overturned by a dialectical spirit of teleological meanings forging into the future. This relation to principles acknowledges the past above the future and also involves a moral metaphysical import that will be related to the journey of the ages toward a Kantian cosmopolitan “kingdom of ends” in which both freedom and rationality will play important founding roles. These ideas will, for Kant, be important founding ideas of the political/religious telos of our “Being-in-the-world”: a telos Kant equates with a “hidden plan” of progress. Both Art and Religion, in Hegel’s view merely symbolise the “Absolute”, whereas Philosophy is the final spiritual outcome of what Ricoeur calls the “work of civilisation”. It is of course difficult to fathom how philosophical reflection could be unrelated to the political and moral dimensions of our existence, in the sense of presenting us with the “first principles” of justice and freedom, and also in the sense of how these “principles ” could be unrelated to the “principles” of History, truth, and knowledge. The Aristotelian/Kantian methodology of approaching phenomena from the perspective of what explains/justifies them is rejected by both Hegel and Ricoeur in the name of “unmotivated rationalism”.

The Aristotelian/Kantian conception of the law/principle is an organic conception that applies not just to the phenomena associated with psuche, but also to phenomena such as the transformation of villages into cities. For Hegel this kind of teleological transformation is an “abstract” process that will only reveal its true nature at the end of this process of “actualisation”. In such circumstances when the “end” cannot be used to explain “why” one did what one did, the focus shifts to the means to the end, which literally, on Hegel’s account of the march of spirit, could lead anywhere and everywhere. For Hegel, the only “principles” that can be abstracted from such a theoretical account of agency and action are those that Arendt focussed upon as the means or concern of the “new men” of the modern age, namely “everything was possible”(for a few) and “nothing was possible”(for the masses). It was these “maxims” that enabled those in power to mobilise the masses in favour of the “Obsessions” of those in power with “violent” solutions to problems requiring more abstract and rational/contemplative solutions. The “alienation” of the masses allowed the philosophy of the “will to power” to emerge as the motivating factor for “popular” governments. Knowledge and rationality as characterised by ancient Greek and Kantian thinkers were marginalised in favour “phenomenological description”. In particular, the Kantian metaphysics of morals and its associated political character was reduced to dualistic or materialistic accounts of phenomena requiring action-related explanation or justification rather than event-related explanation or justification. Hegel speaks in terms of world-historical individuals and world-historical events embodying world-spirit, rather than in terms of the action related ends-in-themselves we find in the Kantian idea of the kingdom of ends.

The major theoretical tools of Aristotle and Kant are of course the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and these contrast starkly with the major theoretical tool of Hegelian dialectical logic which is Negation. For Aristotle, for example, it is not clear how the “organic” transformations from family-life to village-life to polis-life can be meaningfully conceptualised as movements of “negation”. Certainly a city is not a village and a village is not a family but this truth is limited in its meaning because a village is a collection of families and a city is a collection of villages and the relation of the family to the village and the village to the city is both an “organic” and a “practical” relation: a collection of families is a necessary condition of forming a village and a collection of villages is a necessary condition for the forming of a city. The fully formed entities of the village and the city are constituted of both necessary and sufficient conditions that are presented as part of the principle of sufficient reason. On page 156 of the work “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action”, Vol 2, the following claim is made:

“There is no doubt, for example, that, for Aristotle, Normative life is naturally and rationally tied to the successive actualisation of powers and capacities of the “rational animal capable of discourse” and also along this continuum of actualisation there will be biological, social, and political manifestations of animality, discourse and rationality.”

The powers involved are potentialities of “psuche”(defined in terms of the “rational animal capable of discourse”) and have little in common with either the theoretical power of negating a thesis in order to expand ones field of self-consciousness or the “recognition” of ones self as a consequence of the synthesis involved in a dialectical process of negation.

This of course is a position that has little in common with the individual understanding we have of individual objects that is so important for the account that Ricoeur favours. Abstraction in the form of universal reasoning, Ricoeur argues, removes us from this sphere of the understanding of individual existence. The life of an individual is always singular and cannot be captured in the general formulae of rationality and this is why the primary category of investigation is “meaning” and why the context of exploration/discovery always takes precedence over the context of explanation/justification.

Ricoeur poses the question, “How can the events of History be meaningful if one is to maintain an understanding of their singularity and unrepeatability because of the unique position they occupy in the continuum of events that follow one another in a linear sequence in which successive events provide the “meaning” for the events that have occurred previously.” For Ricoeur, there can be no “objective history” without subjectivity, no universality without singularity. Singular existence can occur without being conceptualised but this power presupposes that several or many individual things possess something in common that can be represented on more than one occasion. This power of understanding conceptually, however, is one of the primary powers of thinking that prepares the sensible powers of perception and imagination for the act of representation in concepts that in turn categorise intuitions with a view to synthesising these elements into truth-conditional representations/judgments. Ricoeur criticises this Kantian picture of understanding by claiming that the task of truth is connected to nothing more than an ontological hope which cannot possibly “know”that the end one arrives at is truly explanatory or justificatory. What is further needed, Ricoeur argues, to explain the singularity involved in existential experience, is ” an active participation in the mystery of my body”. This position connects to that presented by Merleau-Ponty, in his work “The Phenomenology of Perception” where it is clear that the body is locked into a perspective or point of view that cannot be transcended in signifying acts. Man, on this view, is a “flawed creature”. Meaning is achieved by a so-called, “creative interpretation” of this “broken unity” of man. In true Hegelian fashion Ricoeur regards the meaning of History as ambiguous, resting on a “feeling” of a hope which cannot be founded upon what he describes as the “violent” synthesis of the truth..

The above reflections do not amount to a critique of civilisation, a theme that appears to have disappeared from a Phenomenological radar system that has been designed to detect “singularities”. The reduction of self-consciousness to a singularity possessing singular powers waiting for the “end” of action to “dawn” belies the Aristotelian-Kantian “abstract” accounts in which a transcendent self-in-general is endowed with abstract rights and responsibilities. We will not turn to narratives for an account of such a transcendental self but rather to the kind of tribunal that we find in contexts of explanation/justification. In such contexts we encounter complex accounts of phenomena relating to individual powers embedded in three media of change(space, time, matter) four causes of change, and four kinds of change, all of which relate to three principles of change which in their turn rely on the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The kind of narrative that informs us of the dialectic of the master and the slave, ending in a moment of “recognition” in a context of conflict, is certainly a phenomenological exercise articulating a life-space concretely. The response of the later Wittgenstein to such a “phenomenological reduction” was to insist that the philosophical challenge was to provide an account that concerns itself with what he called “the possibilities of phenomena” rather than an account that concerns itself with their actuality or existence as brute facts. We can of course in concrete narratives “interpret” the intentions of actions but in so doing we should be careful to note that we are not finding linear causal connections between two concrete events, but rather we are giving a conceptual account of the relation between an intention and an action.

Ricoeurs conception of the self of self-consciousness shares some of the Hegelian animus but it does begin at an existential level and reduces the complex repertoire of mans powers to the effort to exist and the desire to be as manifested in the works of man. Ricoeur regards society as flawed and this fact manifests itself in the exploitation of work by society. In the preface to the first edition of “History and Truth”, Ricouer characterises his position as follows:

“I believe in the efficacy of reflection because I believe that mans greatness lies in the dialectic of work and the spoken word. Saying and doing, signifying and making are intermingled to such an extent that it is impossible to set up a lasting and deep opposition between “theoria” and “praxis”. The word is my kingdom and I am not ashamed of it. To be more precise, I am ashamed of it to the extent that my speaking shares in the guilt of an unjust society which exploits work..I believe in the efficacy of instructive speech: in teaching the history of Philosophy….As a listener to the Christian message, I believe that words may change the heart.”(P.5)

Ricoeur, too, like Hegel, raises the question of the objectivity of History and warns us of the danger of “global interpretation” of History. He also resembles Spinoza in his focus on the understanding of individual singular objects. There is an unmistakeable antipathy toward Reason and what Ricoeur calls its “presumed and pretended unity”(P.10) The conflation between theoria and praxis we encounter in the above quote fails to recognise the ontological distinction (recognised by both Aristotle and Kant) between The Good(in the arena of action) and The True(in the arena of events and their linear causation). The Phenomenological Reduction thereby brackets the world (that we categorically understand and reason about) and limits discourse to being about “things themselves” rather than the doing involved in the action of “making things true” and “making things better.”

A Book Review of Ricoeur’s “Memory, History and Forgetting”: Part 10 Epilogue–Difficulty of Forgiveness.

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One of the key questions posed in the final chapter of Ricoeur’s work is connected to the problem of the difficulty of the conceiving of the concept of forgiveness. In the previous chapter, we pointed to the fact that Arendt and the Aristotelian hylomorphic and Kantian Critical perspectives would have no problem accepting the psychoanalytically-oriented proposal of relating the concept of forgiveness to the concept of trauma, and the tendency of the compulsion to repeat connected with trauma. An international catastrophe such as the holocaust obviously left large numbers of dead in its wake, but it also left witnesses traumatised, and every public recollection of the event, is not always related to the “work of remembering” engaged in by Historians. Trauma, psychoanalytically conceived, is a compulsion to “act out” in response to the anxiety generated in the memory system by the traumatic event.

One public response to an international trauma is the reluctance to recall the event, but this act of forgetting is not always met with understanding by those that have been affected by the trauma, either directly or indirectly(being witnesses). In such circumstances, the desire not to recollect, may well be met with the war-cry–“Never Forget!”. War-cries, however, more often than not, are cries of pain for both relatives of victims and witnesses who view the act of forgetting with suspicion, believing that forgetting will result in a repetition of the causes of the trauma of the past. The concept of “forgiveness” is a complex concept, implying paradoxically, a “duty not to recollect”, and the motivation for this duty is exactly to avoid compulsively repeating the trauma in question. In such circumstances it is important to recognise the difference between the perpetration of a great crime, and the experiencing or witnessing of a great crime. The duty not to recollect cannot of course be directed at the Historian, who always has a duty to engage in the “work of remembering”, which includes the recording of the great crimes of History. The best concrete example of the response of a Historian to an international trauma involving a war-crime against humanity was the historical coverage of the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. The implication of this coverage was that we could never “forgive” Eichmann the individual, but nevertheless in her work of remembering and recording of the event of this trial, it remained essential that the record be correct. Her judgment of Eichmann was that he was someone who “could not think” about what he was dong, could not think reflectively about the rights and wrongs of his actions. This abstract “philosophical” characterisation of Eichmann, caused a storm of controversy amongst those who thought that Eichmann was a “monster”. These objectors probably did not consider the weight of this criticism by someone who believed that thinking was essential to being human. Arendt also argued for the death sentence for Eichmann thereby also alienating those who believed that Eichmann could be “forgiven” for his part in a war in which it was dangerous not to obey orders. The conclusion that can be drawn from Arendt’s involvement in this affair is partly that the singular action of a singular individual is not part of the extension of the concept of “forgiveness”, which actually is a maxim/principle or public/national action. The individual stands accused in the court, and all those witnesses who failed to intervene perhaps became traumatised by their failure to act: but the guilt that is felt in this latter case is more moral than legal and it is no less real for being so.

The psychoanalytical problem of being continually confronted by an aggressor from whom there is no escape, is the problem of being then forced to identify with the aggressor and the consequent refusal to recognise the evil of ones own actions. The slave of such an experience inevitably wishes to be the master of other slaves. “Forgiveness” in such circumstances may then merely consist in a refusal to allow this process of identification to take place, which in turn, might include the refusal to hate the aggressor and become traumatised in the process.

Some crimes, Ricoeur correctly suggests are so terrible that it is difficult to even conceive of an appropriate punishment and they may constitute :

” a de facto instance of the unforgivable”(P.473)

The legal presumption of innocent until proven guilty for individuals guilty of such terrible crimes stretches the understanding to breaking point. The Bible of course challenges us to love our enemies, a piece of advice Freud thought was dangerous. Our enemies seem neither to demand this love nor understand it, but the point is that one should live without expecting any return on our investment. Such a capacity, Ricoeur argues, is an extraordinary gift.

The Great trials for the war criminals of the 20th century were, of course important for the victims and their relatives and provided for them, if not closure, at least a cathartic moment of resolution. Hannah Arendt in a later work entitled “The Human Condition”(Chicago, Chicago University Press,1958, 237) relates the concept of forgiveness to the concept of promising even if the latter seems to suggest power and political treaties rather than religious belief and rituals. For Kant, promising has an important ethical function that is conditional upon the Truth in that it brought with it the expectation that the state of affairs promised would be actualised.

Ricouer claims in the context of this discussion that Arendt foresaw that “there is no politics of forgiveness”(P.488) but this judgment is questionable, especially in the light of her response to the Eichmann trial. Arendt’s reflections on the Eichmann case surely implied that the historical work of remembering be transformed into a rational judgment that was reliant on a rational understanding of ethics and the law. But this implication would not have been welcomed by Arendt, who was not by any stretch of the imagination a rationalist, explicitly rejecting Kantian rationalism in a work on Kant’s Political Philosophy.

In a discussion of Agency, Ricoeur draws a distinction between the “Who?” of agency and the “What?” of the action”. This distinction of course marginalises the “Why?” of the action, which is normally revealed in the reason for the action which, in terms of Kantian critical practical philosophy, is the major ontological identifier for the action. The agent is of course in some sense the “cause” of the action but that discussion limits us, insofar as the Kantian account is concerned, to the categories of the understanding of the action, and is consequently more related to the “What?” of action(a question that is posed theoretically rather than practically). Kant’s critical Philosophy, as we know, demands that we turn to practical reasoning for an account of promising and its universal and necessary characteristics. Ricoeur criticises Arendt for situating forgiveness in the framework of acting and its consequences, rather than the theoretical relation between the agent and the action. On such a theoretical account, guilt becomes internalised in the inner world of the agent, and the theoretical possibility of forgiveness then requires the separation of the agent from the act. The concept of power that emerges from such a theoretical discussion then brings with it the further consequence that, if the agent can be disconnected from his action theoretically, then there is also the possibility of not holding him/her responsible for what was done. Yet we clearly saw Arendt, the Historian, holding Eichmann responsible for his actions, and refusing to accept Eichmanns defence, where he attempted to disconnect himself from his responsibility. For Arendt, in this work, the agent, Eichmann was connected to his action by the potentiality for thinking which he failed to exercise.

It almost feels that we are back in the Garden of Eden with our frustrated creator who rejects the exercise of our power of freedom to choose the power of knowledge to organise our futures. If we are flawed, our freedom is part of that flaw, and our creator must bear some responsibility for such a state of affairs, if we are to continue to use the language of the myth. The Kantian interpretation of this myth involves celebrating this act of freedom, and this choice of knowledge, whilst rejecting the accusation of being flawed. For Kant there is no shadow of radical evil darkening the light of our existence. Ricoeur, in fact, surprisingly cites Kant in this discussion only to reject his “vocabulary” because it is too “theoretical”(P.493). Knowledge of the Good, for Kant, implied the unconditional absolute of a “good will”, and evil was thus conditional upon this unconditional. This “vocabulary” however, was “paradoxical” for Ricoeur, simply because the potentiality for rationality involved , for him, an unacceptable metaphysical commitment. Kant would not have accepted any theoretical attempt to detach this good will from the agent, simply because of the practical claim that the good will was an unconditional assumption, and the connection between this will and the action was conceptual/logical. Kant’s rationalism, moreover, embraced the ancient Greek idea of arché or principle as central to the context of explanation/justification that we find in our knowledge of the Good.

Ricoeur discusses the “Garden of Eden” myth using the vocabulary associated with “The Fall”-from innocence, which Kant by implication rejects in his remarks on “Religion within the bounds of mere Reason”, as well as in his remarks on Religion in his three Critiques. Ricoeur attempts to close the gap between the Fall and Judgement Day with the idea of the “grace” of God that is bestowed upon the faithful. This network of ideas makes it difficult to uphold the ideas of Humanism and Freedom espoused in Kantian Philosophy. Kant’s idea of faith lies beyond knowledge and is related to the categorical imperative which regulates the activity of the will in circumstances of responsibility and duty. The ought-system of concepts(regulating both instrumental and categorical forms of action) in the imperative mood(expressing in the latter form of action, a moral necessity), is not reducible to the preferred grammatical category of the optative mood(expressing a subjective wish) touted in Ricouer’s criticism of Kant(P.491).

Faith is, of course, related for to the question “What can we hope for?” Kantian hope, however, is not the same as wishing but rather related to the territory of responsibility and duty expressed by the categorical imperative as part of the answer to the question “What ought we to do?” We hope to be happy but we do what will make us worthy of happiness. Whether we will, in fact , become happy(lead a good spirited flourishing life) is a contingent matter, which can only be hoped for. Hope and faith are related, and faith in this case is not faith in the Freudian God, the father, but rather faith in the divine architect of the universe whose work we can only glimpse through a glass darkly via the theoretical and practical principles which we know. This idea of happiness is, for Kant, the “summum bonom” of knowledge, duty, and faith. For Ricoeur, who, throughout this work has been engaged in the tasks of phenomenology and hermeneutics, memories are “faithfully” related to the past and the language we use to express them(in the optative mood):

“Faithfulness to the past, is not a given, but a wish. Like all wishes it can be disappointed, even betrayed.”(P.494)

What is it that we wish for, then, on Ricoeur’s account? A happy memory is his answer. This of course raises the awkward question about the relation of a happy memory to the truth of History. Presumably a memory produced by the “work of remembering” in relation to the holocaust, is a happy memory, but there is an air of paradox hanging over this conceptualisation of the work of remembering related to the holocaust. This position, however, is qualified by the claim that it is:

“up to the recipients of the historical text to determine for themselves, and on the plane of public discussion, the balance between history and memory.”(P.499)

So, the responsibility for telling the truth about the dead of the past is, to some extent, placed on the reader, and not on the writer of the text, who, after al,l was the agent who had access to the archives. Wishes are figments of the imagination, so it is not surprising that Ricoeur turns to a description of a painting by Klee(Angelus Novus) to illustrate a view of history he finds interesting:

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he fixedly is contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of History.. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling up wreckage upon wreckage and hurling it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise: it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”(Benjamin, W., “theses in the Philosophy of History”. Illuminations, Trans. Zohn H., New yORK, schooner Books, 1969, 253-64)

Perusal of the actual painting, however, reveals that the above is a Rorscharchian interpretation, and requires much projection to arrive at the above description. Elisabeth Anscombe in her comments on Wittgensteins Tractatus, and its Picture Theory of meaning, remarked how a stick-man picture of a fencer does not have an unambiguous meaning. The diagram can both depict how one ought not to stand(in a defensive position) and how one ought to stand(in an attacking position). Pictures on such accounts are like Kantian intuitions and can be compounded into many different conceptual representations. The above is, of course, the reflective result of a certain form of anti-rationalism that wishes to emphasise an important role for the imagination in History.

Ricoeur then moves on to an attempted characterisation of the concept of a “happy forgetting”, the paradigm for which is “an amnesty”, which he claims is typical in those historical circumstances such as the founding of a society or community where violence is involved, e.g. the founding violence that occurred at the establishment of Athens. In such circumstances, Ricoeur argues, one cannot “be continually angry with oneself”(P.501) and the only reasonable solution appears to be an amnesty which legitimates forgetting and “sublimates” the anger. This is what Ricoeur calls a “happy forgetting”. He leaves any further evaluation of this “solution” open and claims that both the happy memory and the happy forgetting are best categorised grammatically in the optative mood, which of course is an anti-rationalist consequence of an anti-rationalist perspective.

A Book Review of Ricouer’s “Memory, History, and Forgetting: Part 9 Forgetting

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Is memory to be defined as the struggle against forgetfulness? If this is true then such a claim would take us into the Kantian moral territory defined by the judgement “It is a duty to remember”. The “dispersion” of events discussed in part 8 of this review raises the possibilities of restoration and preservation of these events, thus enabling them to “endure” over time. If such preservation did not occur both individuals and institutional actors would be condemned to an unending cycle of repetition, compelling them to repeat the mistakes of the past, placing such agents in a similar position to the obsessive-compulsive patients that frequent the premises of analysts because of their tendency to, time and again call down upon their heads misfortune after misfortune. Such individuals must be trained to “gather” the dispersed events of their lives in the spirit of areté.

William James in his account of Memory, asked how it is that the aged brain not only “forgets”, but does so systematically, beginning with certain kinds of concrete memory content. James wishes to lift the “cause” of the brain into the centre of the discussion. This tendency is still with us, and we continue to witness attempts to reduce memory to the facilitation of neuronal pathways that have previously been innervated in the course of experience. Much of this kind of discussion, however, removes us from our everyday understanding of memory and how it relates to experience.

Phenomenology, Ricoeur argues, regards the knowledge we have of what is happening in the brain, as irrelevant to the explanation of conscious experience, or the explanation of psychological states and processes in general. Pathological behaviour, can however, often be ascribed to brain dysfunction, and such forms of explanation may well reveal the material and efficient causation involved in the structures of psychological functions such as colour perception. In such pathological conditions, the gradual loss of colour-saturation in ones visual field, reveals that colours are not stored in neural pathways as individual entities. Ricoeur also points out in the context of this discussion that neuroscience as such makes little contribution to the tasks of describing or explaining the phenomena of life(psuche). From a hylomorphic perspective, the knowledge we have of neural networks whose major characteristic is that they are either firing or not, will not be associated with the knowledge we have of the intentionality of memory, namely that it is “about the past”.

We can, Ricoeur insists, be curious about the causal relation of these neural-traces to memory functioning, e.g. especially short-term memory and long-term memory, which appears to be located in different regions of the brain. This receives some support from Freudian early theorising about systems of neurones, which either were modified in the process of facilitation(psi-neurones), or remained unmodified as a result of activity(Phi neurones). This “activity”, for Freud, was regulated by the Energy Regulation Principle(ERP), whose task it was to regulate and conserve the energy necessary for what Freud called “special actions”. The phenomenology of Heidegger, however, regards the neural “trace” as a present-at-hand entity whose explanation does not come from the arenas of ready-to-hand entities or Dasein(Being-there).

Ricoeur cooperated with a neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeaux and attempted to insert the above neural present-at-hand entity into a larger dialectic of presence-absence:

“A trace must therefore be conceived at once as a present effect and as the sign of its absent cause. Now, in the trace, there is no otherness, no absence. Everything is positivity and presence.”(What Makes Us Think?Trans DeVevouse, M., B., Princetown, Princetown University Press, 2000, 150)

The authors continue this reflection by suggesting that the neural trace is related to different forms or principles of organisation. Hylomorphism would, however, agree with the claim that a complete explanation of any phenomenon must include both its material and efficient cause ,and that, therefore, the physical conditions of memory and forgetting have a necessary place in a theoretical account.

Freud once remarked that if we have fully experienced something, we may never really “forget” this experience, i.e. it will always possess the potential for re-occurence in a contemporary conscious experience. On the material cause-level this means that the psi neurones obviously play a large role in forgetting. It appears, on this account, as if the phi neurone system play little or no role in either remembering or forgetting. Ricoeur’s account may place the trace in some kind of organisational structure but it does not appear to characterise this structure as related to the Principles of brain and mental functioning, namely the ERP, PPP, and RP. The epistemological principles involved in the dialectic of presence and absence cannot possibly explain the multi-layered phenomena of remembering and forgetting. The spectre of dualism haunts Ricoeur’s discussion, especially when he discusses the difference between the neural/cortical trace, and what he calls the “psychic” trace. Forgetting, it is admitted, can depend upon cortical damage, if that damage, for example, impacts organisational structure. The two kinds of traces are connected, it is claimed, to different heterogenous kinds of knowledge. This form of dualism was, of course, the target of both Aristotelian hylomorphism and Kantian critical philosophy, which somewhat surprisingly has succumbed to neo-materialist and neo-dualistic arguments that take no account of the arguments that have been presented by either Aristotle or Kant.

Recognition is postulated as some kind of unifying general term linking presence and absence, and the imagination is called upon as the unifier of representations and also as a key element of recognition. Hegel’s account of the master-slave dialectic is not discussed, but obviously lies lurking in the background of this reflection. We recall that the dominating power of the master is tempered, during the course of the relation with the slave, and ends with the master recognising the value of the slave. Whether this results in the slaves freedom is not clear, however, on the account of many of those espousing the will-to-power solution to the problem of human relations. The moral/political question of the legitimacy of the masters power over the slave is also in doubt. The Ancient Greek ideas of diké and areté would question the legitimacy of the power of the master over the slave, as would the Kantian idea of people being free and ends-in-themselves. Indeed Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is probably the precursor to Nietzsche’s reflections on will to power and both are essentially the result of phenomenological investigations.

Ricoeur then appeals to Bergson’s distinction between habit-memory and recollection- memory and the claim is made that the former kind of memory is related to “acting out”: a voluntary non-conscious exercise of the motor system that is connected to recognition only when something does not go in accordance with the plan or the goal of the exercise. This distinction raises the issue of the distinction between conscious remembering, and the preconscious form of memory ,that is operating in any performance of instrumental habitual action. (There is a form of knowledge, namely techné, that is involved in this kind of activity). Ricoeur then discusses Bergson’s claim that the brain is not a “representing organ”, but rather an organ of action.(P.431).This discussion is then connected to recognition, and it is suggested that “recognition” is connected to what he calls a “mixture” of the two types of memory suggested by Bergson.Bergson also proposes an imaginative illustration of an inverted cone in which the base of the cone represents the totality of memories in our memory system, and the point of the cone represents the point of action where the lived body interacts with the world. The memories in the system, in some sense, are enduring entities that stand ready as a potential to be realised in appropriate circumstances.

The dualism of the world as will and the world as representation continues, however, to dog Ricoeurs reflections and many question marks hang in the air over the claims relating to “mixed memories”. Ricoeur’s interesting solution to the problem of the relation of memory to forgetting, is to suggest that Remembering is only possible on the condition of forgetting and not vice versa. He points to a reflection by Heidegger on the topic of forgetting where it was claimed that forgetting is related to repetition. Freud is also invoked:

“We recall Freud’s remark…the patient repeats instead of remembering….forgetting is itself termed a work to the extent that it is the work of a compulsion to repeat, which presents the traumatic event from becoming conscious. Here the first lesson of psychoanalysis is that the trauma remains even though it is inaccessible, unavailable. In its place arise phenomena of substitution, symptoms which mask the return of the repressed under various guises…”(P.445)

This Freudian reflection brings us back into the domain of Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical Philosophy and simultaneously jettisons the pointless reflective oscillations between dualistic and materialistic poles of discourse. The preconscious/unconscious memories in our memory system are now placed in a dynamic psychic context in which the primary expression of energy is via the motor system. According to this model of explanation the world of images is a secondary world, supervening when the motor system for various reasons remains unactivated or deactivated(as in dreaming).

The reason why the work of mourning at the loss of a loved object is so painfu,l is related to the indestructibility of memory. The Reality Principle(RP), however , over time, in the work of mourning, does not destroy our memories, but rather converts traumatic presentations into representations of the past: in this process the images connected with the lost object will be defused of both wishful and anxious affections. The result of this defusion process, is a memory of an experience which becomes more accessible to consciousness, and this, in turn, means that these experiences can then be incorporated in a narrative which gives a realistic account of oneself and ones life. The past is no longer presented in compulsive repetitions which disguise the content of the experience, but is rather represented in a process of remembering which is authentically resolute.

The work of mourning, we have already noted can be a polis- phenomenon, a national response to a national traumatic experience, as was the case with the holocaust, which was just as traumatic for those Germans who were not in favour of either the Nazi party or their wars of choice they began, as it was for the victims of the Nazis. The trauma of the past causes repetitions again and again, until the work of mourning is done, and the less obsessive work of remembering can take its place and genuine memories formed.

Ricoeur recalls the amnesty granted to the Thirty tyrants from Ancient Greece. The aim of the amnesty was reconciliation in the spirit of forgiveness, and to this end the past was not to be recalled: recollection was forbidden, presumably out of respect for all who were traumatised. This spirit of forgiveness is one of the key ideas of Christianity, and perhaps of Religion generally(e.g. Buddhism, Hinduism, etc). The poles of the work of remembering, and the work of forgiveness, appear at first sight to be a humanistic interpretation of the religiously inspired polarity of the works of sin and the work of forgiveness. The Myth of the Garden of Eden contains revelations of the religious view of man and his flawed existence: his hubris in the face of God or Being. The myth, however, would have been better formulated perhaps, if it did not emphasise the attraction of knowledge as the problematic component or sinful milestone on the journey toward Judgement day. It may well be true, as Heidegger suggests, that we have been forgetful of Being qua Being, but this could still be the case, and the Garden of Eden myth could be interpreted, in the light of this interpretation, as instead celebrating the importance of knowledge in achieving the potential of the rational animal capable of discourse. Judgement day, on this view, would be the success or failure of man to create a kingdom of ends here on earth: a kingdom based on the knowledge of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Instead in the religious form of the above myth, man stands accused of refusing to obey the commands of God, the father, who then paradoxically, becomes angry and frustrated with the hubris of his creation . Had the myth not referred to the fruit of the tree of knowledge(epistemé), but rather to the fruit of the tree of “techné”, the moral of the myth may have been more palatable for followers of Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger.

There is an ethical dualism in the Myth between the forces of Good and Evil, but not an epistemic dualism: i.e. the mere act of representing the eating of the apple is not as such sanctioned. In the garden, it is the act that is the problem, and not the representation or the desire. The myth, then, is an ethical myth about what it is right or wrong to do. The Knowledge of the Good as presented in Plato and Aristotle integrates areté and epistemé in an unproblematic way, which allows easy application to the political and religious arenas of discourse. For Kant, it is clear that his three fundamental philosophical questions: “What can we know?” “What ought we to do?” and “What can we hope for?”, are also seamlessly integrated with the domains of political and religious reflection. In this unity it is not the relation of representation to action that is the cause for concern, but rather the broader question of the knowledge of the truth. It is, for example, the belief in false idols related to active worship that will be the ruin of the hopes and desires of mankind.

Ricoeur suggests in an essay entitled “The Demythization of Accusation(Conflict of Interpretations, Trans Ihde, D., Evanston, Northern University Press, 1974), that as long as religion is characterised in terms of the accusation of man for being flawed, the idea of evil will remain problematic. Demystifying the idea of evil cannot be done, Ricoeur argues, “by means of the resources of Psychology”(P.348). For Kant, evil is an ethical issue demanding reflection on the will insofar as it is engaged in the project of bringing about the worthiness associated with the kingdom of ends. For Kant, myths and judgement days, and accusations belong in the sphere of the imagination of origins rather than reasoning about ends.

Ricoeur points out, for example, that insofar as judging consciousness is concerned there is a hidden power of resentment(anger, frustration) that is eventually revealed, and such an image tests to the limit, faith in an agency believed to be universally good. This raises the issue of forgiveness in catastrophic scenarios such as the holocaust . The trial of Eichmann, covered by Hannah Arendt, raised this issue globally and demanded a global “working through” or attempted sublimation of the trauma. The consequence of Arendt’s philosophical reflections on Evil, and Eichmanns deeds, was a furious controversy that raged over her claim that the “fault” of Eichmann amounted to an “inability to think”(which of course for her was a major criticism). For many of those who had been traumatised by this mans actions, the imagination had created a non-human monster, and Arendt’s abstract portrayal seemed not just an inaccurate understatement, but deeply offensive. There are, of course, crimes of magnitude which appear to the victims to be impossible to forgive, and the holocaust certainly fell into this category of historical event. Forgiveness, however, from psychoanalytical, hylomorphic, and critical perspectives is directed at the phenomenon of trauma and the compulsion to repeat unless the trauma is sublimated by knowledge of the truth which is not the same as an endless obsessive repetition. Perhaps Arendt’s cool criticism was an attempt to provide such a philosophical-historical account.

Eichmann was sentenced to death and Arendt agreed with this sentence, as would have Kant(and Jesus for that matter). For these Philosophers and prophets, it is simply the case that some crimes are so terrible that the perpetrators ought to have a stone placed around their necks and cast into the depths of the sea. The act. for example, of keeping Eichmann in prison would merely have activated repetitions of the trauma over and over again, it might be argued. This paradoxically is not an argument in favour of the death sentence for a particular category of crime because we all know how inadequate and ultimately irrational some legal processes can be. Knowing this and sentencing innocent humans to death is itself a great crime, and should be avoided. It is important to understand that we rational animals capable of discourse have not yet been able to create institutions that can do divine work.

A Review of Ricoeur’s “Memory , History and Forgetfulness”: Part 8 History and Time.

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Ricoeur opens this chapter with a reflection upon the question of Being, and wishes to connect his hermeneutical approach(theory of interpretation), with the Aristotelian claim that Being can be said in any ways. One of the ways, insofar as Ricoeur was concerned, was the way of Nietzsche, who reduced Being to will to power, detaching it from the substantive and principle-regulation aspects of Being. Neglecting these latter aspects, makes the role of knowledge problematic, and marks a shift away from Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory in which the aporetic questions associated with the question of Being qua Being are situated fairly and squarely in the context of explanation/justification which in turn is regulated by principles and laws.

Ricoeur does not flinch, given the controversies circulating around Heidegger, from claiming that Heidegger’s work “Being and Time” was one of the best works of the 20th century. We know that he does not agree completely with the Heideggerian method, but it is otherwise clear that the two philosophers share much more than that which divides them. This is clarified in Part 7 of this review when their similar views on Nietzsche were articulated. It is nevertheless the case that Heidegger’s complex account of “Being-in-the-world”, in the context of the three ontological categories of presence-at-hand, ready-to-hand, and Dasein, is reminiscent of Ancient Greek ontological concerns. The invoking of Care as the essence- specifying characteristic of Dasein, was a Heideggerian strategy that Ricoeur, interestingly chooses to situate in a Kantian context of ends-in-themselves. The second formulation of the Categorical Imperative urges us to act in a way that treats each and every human being as an end-in-themselves, rather than as instrumental means-to-ends. One of the logical implications of this ethical law is the political implication for the polis, which the Greeks thought of as the soul writ large—namely that all citizens of the city must be treated by the state as ends-in-themselves(and reciprocally the state ought to be treated by the citizens as an end in itself). Heidegger might not, however, have agreed with this Kantian interpretation, but linking the ethics of the will with the ontological structure of the world, as Ricoeur suggested, does move Heidegger’s account closer to the rational positions of Aristotle and Kant.

The Heideggerian form of phenomenological existentialism also outlines a framework for adopting a critical stance toward analytical Philosophy and logical positivism, positions which have ambiguous relations to Aristotelian and Kantian rationalism. It is also true to say, that Heidegger’s reflections shrink from the forms of rationalism we find in Aristotle and Kant. Heidegger, in fact, very specifically holds Aristotle responsible for derailing the aporetic investigations into the question of “Being-qua-being”. As is the case with many phenomenological and existentialist accounts, the basic metaphysical investigation into first principles is reoriented into an anthropological investigation. In his famous “Kant-book”, Heidegger accuses Kant of failing to explore the role of the transcendental imagination in his metaphysical investigations into Being. For Heidegger, it is clear that the power of the imagination is a superior power to the power of rationality especially when it comes to exploring the question of Being. To be fair to Heidegger, his characterisation of the imagination, would not be restricted to situating it in the faculty of Sensibility, and charting its relations to the faculty of the understanding, which is the Kantian strategy. Heidegger characterises the power of the imagination as both historical and significantly involved in a work of expectation embedded in what he calls ” a moment of vision”. We are, Heidegger argues, thrown into the world, and this is the beginning of an existence, which is oriented as much toward the future as it is to the repetition of what “has been”:

“Only an entity which, in its being is essentially futural, so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon its factical “there” by shattering itself against death–that is to say, only an entity which, as futural, is equiprimordially in the process of having-been, can, by handing down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take over its thrownness and be in the moment of vision for “its time”. Only authentic temporality which is at the same time finite makes possible something like fate, that is to say, authentic historicality.”(Being and Time, P.437)

Being and Time was written in 1926, 6 years after Freud introduced the Death instinct in a work entitled “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. Ricoeur is regarded as one of the foremost interpreters of Freudian texts, and his interpretation of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” refers hylomorphically to “the Reality Principle”(RP), which is a function of what Freud called the “secondary process” of mental functioning. The secondary process, on Freud’s account, regulates primary process functions such as pleasure and the pain of anxiety. In the Freudian context the imaginations role is as that part of the primary process that is involved in both wish-fulfillment and anxiety-related experiences. Both the Energy-regulation principle(ERP) whose telos is physiological homeostasis, and the pleasure-pain principle(PPP), whose significance is more “psychological”, are involved in primary process activity. Two “instincts”, Eros and Thanatos, are involved in constituting vicissitudes such as “Sublimation” and “Consciousness”, which in their turn can only be ultimately explained by “principles” in a context of explanation/justification. A complex vicissitude such as Consciousness contains, then, the history of the operation of instincts at both preconscious and unconscious levels, but more importantly such a vicissitude is regulated by all the Freudian principles, i.e. the energy regulation principle, the pleasure pain principle, and the reality principles are all “regulators”. For Kant, Consciousness is a complex operator that stretches over the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. Reason operates in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason in a context of explanation/justification. Both historical and political judgements are embedded in different sensible domains, and operate therefore in different conceptual frameworks. For Kant, judgement in general performs the operation of subsuming the sensible particulars under the general concepts of the understanding in theoretical, practical, and aesthetic/technical contexts. Obviously the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason regulate the categorical laws of morality and the instrumental laws of techné. Political judgements rely on both moral laws/principles and instrumental principles(cf. the principle of prudence).

For Freud, moral consciousness is a vicissitude of those instincts that are mobilised by what Freud refers to as “the original helplessness of human beings”, and the path from this original human condition to the moral law runs via the help we receive from other people who help us to eventually help ourselves. What we are encountering in these reflections is the regulation of the primary process by the secondary process, in accordance with the Reality Principle. This understanding of the role of other people, relates crucially to understanding the medium of language, which for Freud was principally the medium for the expression of thought. Thought activity, however, can be split off from reality testing, and to the extent that this occurs, is the extent to which it is the expression of primary mental processes. The major logical characteristics of primary process thought, is its immunity to contradiction(no doubt or degrees of uncertainty), implying the absence of rationality. Hallucinatory thought is obviously an example of this type of primary process activity. The role of the Ego and the Superego are agencies that relate respectively to the external and internal world, and they are relatively “free” agencies operating in a body in which causality is operating in accordance with the ERP and PPP. These agencies are operating on an actualisation schedule in which pleasure centres, for example, begin at certain zones of the body and finally envelop the body as a whole. Parallel to this psycho-sexual development, in accordance with the law of causality, and the presence of primary processes, is a purely psychological development that probably begins at the beginning of the phallic phase, in which the pleasure ego is transformed into the reality ego, and object love begins. Once-cathected, objects become difficult to “abandon” on this path toward reality, which is strewn with “lost” objects” and “mourning processes”. This is clearly the historical aspect of our psychological development in which it is the happiness that has been lost, that is mourned. During this phase, we also witness the formation of the superego begin its journey toward maturity, via forbidden and refused objects. As far as the ego is concerned, phantasy-laden wishes are transposed by a utilitarian instrumental principle which reality-tests all content. In this process the mystery of desire is transformed into an authentic resoluteness that can depose the “false idols” of desire.

In human history it is religion that has played the role of demystifying desire, and deposing illusions. It has sometimes seemed as if the fate of the species is inscribed into the constitution of religious thought. Heidegger, inspired by Socrates, describes very well the religious and philosophical responses to the impossibility of conceiving of the end of the species. Socrates, we know, met his personal fate resolutely and authentically, even if his response was complicated by an unjust accusation and trumped-up charges. Socrates’ fate is obviously linked to the fate of Jesus who, it must be said, did not meet his fate as resolutely as Socrates, despairing toward the end of the process at the thought of being abandoned by his father. Socrates, then, remains the paradigmatic model of stoic resoluteness in the face of our thrown-ness into the world. Freud’s description of this thrownness, was in terms of an “original helplessness”, and it was his mission to discover the psychological problems that could occur as a result of not addressing the problem of our original helplessness adequately. Bronowski in his work “ascent of Man” followed up on this problem with the claim that part of the problem was the “long childhood ” of man.

The enrichment of Freud’s explanatory framework by the concept of narcissism was also an important milestone on the road to articulating the complexity of our inner life, and its unwillingness to “abandon” earlier libidinally cathected objects. The route out from the “wonderland” of sexual fixation upon sexual objects, runs via the vicissitude of Sublimation, essentially a defence mechanism that is a non sexual form of substitute satisfaction, which requires that the ego cathect objects in the external world. This defence mechanisms sensitises the human psuche to the truth: i.e. creates a form of Being-in-the-world in which the truth no longer “wounds” the ego. Sublimation may end in “The Prudence Principle”, which the ego learns to use, not just in relation to the external world, but also in harmony with the Id and the Superego. Here we encounter one of the obstacles to the actualising of “authentic resoluteness” which can be found in the Stoic form of life: in this drama of the agencies, the superego criticises or attacks man for his addiction to pleasure and one possible result is the return to the hubris of a narcissism in which man believes he is “superior” to those around him. The Ego’s task in such circumstances, is to assimilate the superego into itself and its view of enduring the necessities of life, in accordance with an attitude of authentic resoluteness—-a very advanced form of the Reality Principle.

Death, for Freud, was not a purely destructive instinctive but also manifested itself in the maladies of the most difficult-to-treat group of patients, namely the obsessive-compulsives. These patients manifested the symptom of the compulsion to repeat reported in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. The instinctive response to high levels of anxiety was to restore an earlier state of things, i.e. retreat to an earlier phase of development in which pleasure was secured from the serendipitous flux of life-activities. One of the key discoveries of Freud that helped him to postulate the idea of the death instinct occurred in relation to the experience of the compulsion of many of his patients to repeat repressed material in therapy sessions. This material emerged not in the form of memories but rather in the form of “reliving the traumas of the past”. This was of course distressing for the patients, as was their seemingly unique capacity to repeat behaviour which again and again called misfortune down upon themselves.

Heidegger too, emphasises the importance of death in his articulation of his primary concept “Being-in-the-world”. Being free for-ones-own-death was the key characterisation of this form of human “being-there”(Dasein). Obsessive-compulsives were, then not able to exercise this freedom, which curiously acknowledged that the aim of life was death. For Freud, the creation of a new framework of concepts enabled him to explain the otherwise puzzling behaviour and symptoms of obsessive-compulsives. In this new framework the libido was replaced by a broader conception of the life instinct(Eros) which aimed at binding men together in larger and larger groups.

Shortly after “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” Freud writes “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” and in this work he juxtaposes Eros and Thanatos, not just in a social context but in a wider cultural context. The aggression of authority figures is analysed as part of the analysis of the bonding processes in larger groups such as the church and the army. These bonding processes are of course merely the bonding processes in a family writ large. Identification with the aggressor and the wish to be like the aggressive agent are part of these processes. The narcissism that led to the narcissistic behaviour is also incorporated into the identification-process and this is partly why Freud claims that the superego has connections with both Eros and Thanatos: the latter connection obviously accounts for the weakness of the Ego, that then tends to reproduce trauma not in the mode of memory but rather in the form of reliving it timelessly. In the work on Group Psychology, the otherwise silent death instinct is making itself heard in social-cultural contexts which would later manifest themselves on the world stage in Germany and Austria. The “masses” recovering from national trauma were seemingly hypnotised by a leader intent upon reliving rather than sublimating the trauma in question. The sadism and cruelty of a superego-figure that refused the control of normal values, was a sign of the times, and can be said to have been predicted by Freudian theory. This phenomenon would occur not just in Germany but also in Russia. What we were witnessing in the development of Freudian theory was a psychological explanation of the political phenomena that were taking shape before our eyes. Freud was responding to the challenge of the Delphic Oracle to “Know thyself!” and also providing us with the tools necessary to strengthen our egos with the knowledge required to defeat dictators and tyrants.

The question that ought to be raised here is : “How should such knowledge be incorporated into our historical awareness?” Those International leaders who deal with dictators and tyrants, and possess this knowledge, have strong egos. Stable states need such leaders. The course of the political journey toward a stable state was a practical journey in which it becomes clear that everyone is equal and free to live to face their own death amongst other things. Life is a difficult business, full of misfortune which befalls everyone; it requires character and virtue(areté) if the ideal end of a good spirited flourishing life(eudaimonia) is to be achieved. The life conceived of by the Ancient Greeks was a life free of debilitating trauma and guilt, experiences which weaken the ego to such an extent that lost libidinally cathected objects become masochistically projected upon the ego. The resultant melancholia manifests itself in self-destructive behaviour and hate of various kinds. A strong ego with strong healthy ties to the external world, stoically engages in love and work, which are the building blocks of our civilisations and cultures. It is, as we have claimed, Eros which seeks to unite us into larger and larger cohesive groups but it is primarily through work that we achieve this task: the kind of work that takes place in political and educational contexts.

For Freud, it appears as if it is the love and work involved in civilisation and culture building that takes precedence over the love and work we put into religion, and it is somewhat of a surprise to learn that, according to Freud, these creative efforts bring only discontentment. Freud claims his Psychology is Kantian, but there are significant differences between their respective positions. Kant, claims, for example, that happiness supervenes if one does ones duty and possesses a good will. Freud claims, in contrast, that the sacrifices civilisation expects in the realm of sexuality are too great to bear, and this leaves man with a sense of discontentment. Kant acknowledges mans narcissism and his aggressive tendencies, but believes that Cultural activity of various forms can assist in the process of sublimating both mans narcissism and his aggressive tendencies. The consequence of this process of sublimation is what he refers to as the “summum bonum” of happiness. Socrates demonstrated his good will by doing his duty with respect to his death sentence, in spite of being convicted unjustly. He met his fate stoically believing that death was a “Good”. Aristotle also believed that death was a good but, not being an Athenian, and not having had the benefit of living under Athenain law when he grew up, he refused to accept the unjust accusations and sentence of death that was the consequence of an anti-Macedonian indictment. He was not prepared to allow Athens to ” sin a second time against Philosophy”.

The superego is an agency whose existence is only possible in the context of a civilisation or culture in which there is deliberate intent to curb the aggression that is connected to the death instinct. The solution to the problem is twofold. Firstly there is the ego response of the formulating and obeying of laws in the name of external justice: these laws regulate the behaviour of the inhabitants of the polis. Secondly, there is the more important response of the setting up of an internal agency in the psyche which regulates all activity in the spirit of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Initially the work of installation of such an agency is part of the work of the family but educational institutions and social pressures also assist in the process. Freud claims that the institution of this watchful “garrison” is only the first stage of a process initially guided by the “principle of prudence”. The final stage of this process involves regarding doing what is right as an end-in-itself(not merely a means to happiness) and this is the mark of a strong healthy well integrated ego. Freud does not specifically claim that rationality plays an essential part in this process but the implication is clearly involved in his claim that his Psychology is Kantian.

According to Heidegger, anticipatory resoluteness is not an everyday phenomenon and requires a work of remembering and a work of expectation that is “connected” and not “dispersed” as is the case with the everyday understanding of ones birth and ones death. For the most part, Heidegger argues,(Being and Time, P.439) Dasein understands itself in terms of its circumspective concerns, and “what” it is concerned with in its environment. The “Why?” which relates to the reasons for the totality of connected facts in a life, is not necessarily “Understood” in circumspective concern, and is more a matter for the demands that “Care” introduce. Incorporating what is present-at-hand and what is ready-to-hand into the “moment of vision” that is constitutive of true historical understanding is a part of the prospect of self-knowledge and transforms the entities we encounter in the world into world-historical entities. Wittgenstein, for example, in his lectures on Culture, asked what would happen to a culture in which one no longer recognised the origin of ones dining table. A fundamental interest in the origins and the ends of things falls into the domain of Care and is obviously an important aspect of any serious philosophical view of History. Losing oneself in the “dispersion” that results in not connecting the “whats” with the “whys”, is, of course a, if not the, everyday occurrence. Being born at a particular point in time is one fact, ones death in the future is another, and these facts are “dispersed” and not “connected” in the everyday understanding of the “They”. Time in such a life is not something flowing like a river, but rather a multiplicity of “nows” that are present-at-hand. Even instrumental work, where one uses clocks and calendars, may not be relating to time authentically, and might even be a means of fleeing from ones death–a looking away from the telos of Being-in-the-world.

Ricoeur explicitly criticises the above account because it appears, on his view, firstly, to not sufficiently include phenomenological accounts of the role of the body, or secondly, relate to the being of act and power(P.345). This, Ricoeur argues, is in turn related to the Hegelian concept of Time as presented in his “Logic”. Ricoeur refers to Aristotle’s essence specifying characteristic of memory, namely that “memory is of the past” and he suggests a phenomenological strategic move that “brackets” the future: protention is not involved in the retention process it is claimed. Ricoeur does , however, point out that this account becomes problematic when one needs to consider the Historians relation to the future of the city. One solution he provides is to realise that the men being written about in History, lived before the Historian writes about them, and this fact might be an argument for abstracting from the future or “moment of vision” component, that Heidegger speaks about in terms of “being-toward-death. Given the fact that we are, by definition, dealing with actions and events of magnitude, there is both angst and projection of ends that are rationally conceived. Ricoeur however, rejects the above Heideggerian account, and sides with Adornos judgment that Heidegger uses the “jargon of authenticity” in a very technical theory. Ricoeur suggests that we , instead, reduce the experience of the past to the experience of a lived body(memories, traumatic “reminiscences”) and treat death “abstractly”as a “fact”(P.350). The “factual” approach to time may well result in a vulgar interpretation of the Aristotelian definition of time(the measurement of motion in terms of before and after), namely, that time is a discrete series of “nows” or “moments”. “Motion” of course is purely a physical phenomenon and whilst the motion of an event might be a coherent idea, the motion of an action is not. The conception of a “Moment of vision” is not easily attached to an event, but the action of understanding something or reasoning about something, seems more appropriately connected to this “moment of vision”. “Action” is also more appropriately conceived in terms of the idea of “work” in both the “work of remembering” and the “work of expectation”. It is the latter that is less likely to see death as an “event” and more likely to formulate the idea of death in a “Moment of vision”( or an attitude that Heidegger terms “authentic resoluteness”).We have argued that both the “work of remembering” and the “work of expectation” is involved in the resolute recollection of events we find in the texts of the Historian. It is the synthesis or connectedness of these “moments” that resists the phenomenon of “dispersion”. “Care” is obviously involved in this authentic recollection, which aims at the rational knowledge of the past demanded by the discipline of History in contexts of explanation/justification. Care, for Heidegger is concern for the possibilities of Being he calls Dasein(Being-there) When, in the moment of vision, we consider the possibility of the death of Dasein, the care we encounter in the Being-towards death, is the possibility of Being-a-whole or what Kant would have called an “end-in-itself”. The possibility referred to above implies a triumph over the dispersion of events in time. The response of “fleeing” from dispersion, or ones future death, is an inauthentic irrational response. We know from another work on Kant that Heidegger is not a rationalist, and it is the transcendental imagination that “explains” the activity being referred to above. Ricoeur fixates upon this aspect of Heideggers account and attempts to “reduce” the above possibility to some kind of biological death inscription in the lived body. In answer to the question “How is death inscribed in the body?”, one possibility is via the loss of a loved one. A mourning process obviously leaves its mark upon the body.

“Being and Time”, Ricoeur, maintains, ignores the problems of memory and forgetting(P.364) and he further claims that in the debate between the Philosopher and the Historian, reference ought to be made to the epistemological and dialectical relation of presence and absence. History, Ricoeur argues, is concerned with absence in the form of the dead of other times(P.364). This move, once again, invites the invocation of the notions of representations and mentalities into the arena of discussion connected with memory and forgetting. Death, then, is conceived of as the absent in History, and the past is then represented as the kingdom of the dead—the tomb of the dead. There is also a sense in which History, in the context of this kind of discussion, becomes the “missing present”. The narrative is of the lives of the dead and death becomes the “black sun” of such texts.

The Human sciences, as conceived of by Dilthey, are concerned with the interval between birth and death: an interval in which we encounter forms of life(P.370). Dilthey argues that the Psychology of his time did not have the conceptual resources to describe/explain the fullness of this life(e.g. Ebbinghaus). Heidegger is clearly influenced by the work of Dilthey, but according to Ricoeur, Heidegger does not confront the problem of the role of the Historian in the historical process, but prefers instead to focus upon the theoretical/scientific account of the problem of History(P.375). Heidegger does, however, succeed in opening up a space of “expectation” within the space of the work of remembering, thus enabling the dead people of the past to come to life—-become present in spite of their absence. Here there is clearly a place for the power of the imagination(in relation to memory).

The importance of live testimony is again an issue addressed by Ricoeur in terms of the “crisis of memory”. This issue became very important in relation to holocaust deniers in the 20th century, but it is interesting to note that the Jewish relation to their ancient texts was one of almost complete trust in spite of the absence of “live testimony”. There have been sceptical challenges to this trust, when the Gnostic Gospels were discovered, and as a consequence, doubts have arisen about the completeness of the accounts given in our traditional biblical texts, raising, in turn, questions about the completeness of the “work of remembering” that took place in the process of assembling our Bible. Many philosophers, including Spinoza and Kant recommended that we focus instead upon the work of expectation connected with the moral content of these ancient texts. This amounts to a deliberate choice to concern oneself with authentic resoluteness of the world as will, rather than with the world as representation. This means that the presence-absence dialectic and the fact that the characters such as Moses and Jesus are dead, is largely irrelevant. Whether Moses did all the things attributed to him becomes of peripheral concern, but the work he did in casting aside false idols and focussing upon a journey to the promised land is one of the timeless messages of the Bible, which, of course, is not purely historical. This is not a voice from the tomb but rather a mature voice from the wilderness we all find ourselves a part of. This is the voice of expectation.

A Review of Ricoeur’s “Memory, History, and Forgetfulness”: Part 7 The Historical Condition.

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A curious reference to Nietzsche, opens Ricoeur’s reflections on the relation between epistemology and ontology in History. The Philosophy of Nietzsche was characterised by Heidegger as the “Philosophy of life”, whose aim it was to combat the influence of abstract thought, especially insofar as areté(virtue) was concerned(Nietzsche, Heidegger, M, Trans. Krell D. F. San Francisco, Harper and Row, Vol 1 The Will to Power as Art, 1979, P.5). For Nietzsche, the target of his remarks, is his view of historical culture: an aesthetic view of life that focuses specifically upon fluctuating processes, rather than the substantive epistemological and ontological aspects of of memory.

Ricoeur(in sympathy with Nietzsche) wishes to highlight in his reflections, what he calls “the excess of history” that is “harmful to life”. Nietzsche uses his perspective to criticise modernity, and the role of the modern human being in modern life He points to the harmful characteristics of History, when it is conceived of scientifically. The past, Nietzsche claims ought not to have power over the present. He means by this evocative statement that, for those who possess the will to build the future, it is only those who presently are in power that have the right to sit in judgement upon the past. This sounds initially like a variation of the argument of Thrasymachus against Socrates in book 1 of the Republic, in which an attempt was made to justify the actions of those in power by the argument–“What people in power do, by definition is right”. Socrates’ counterargument, was that without knowledge of what one is doing, one would never know whether what one was doing was in ones interest or not. Nietzsche, however, wishes to use this argument to give a licence to those in power to forget the past. This is the “pharmakon”(remedy, poison) that will prevent historical culture from suffocating life. The question to raise here, is whether Plato and Socrates are representatives of the scientific historical culture which, according to Nietzsche, is “suffocating life”. Ricoeur sides to some extent with Nietzsche, against those who claim the important role of knowledge in organising life, on the grounds of an objection to what he sees to be an “absolutist” view of epistemology and rationalism. He claims that there is a dogmatic refusal to embrace any sceptical objection to the position described by scientific history. Ricoeur claims, that we need the assistance of critical hermeneutics to navigate a middle course between the rocks of dogmatism and shallows of scepticism. This middle course is founded on a rejection of rationalism.

It is not clear, however, how Ricour’s account (with its anti-rationalistic commitments), relates to Heidegger’s view, that the “will to power” is connected to “eternal recurrence”. This connection, for Heidegger, is the key to understanding Nietzsche’s Philosophy. Nietzsche claims that Western History is the history of nihilism, and presumably the claim rests on the “observation” that the laws and principles inherited from Ancient Greece and Christianity, have lost their hold on the lives of modern men. Nihilism is, Nietzsche continues, a naked force of History, which may lead to the destruction of man. This “observation” is then further supported with a form of dialectical reasoning in which it is claimed that “truth is error and error is truth—a form of argumentation that Heidegger characterises as a “reversal”. In this “reversal” Nietzsche argues, a new order of values will emerge, based on the “will to power”.

Dialectical reason aims at identifying and using polarities, and one such “polarity” that Ricoeur “constructs”, is related to the difference between historical and judicial judgements. He invokes the idea of singularity in general, and the singularity of the great war crimes of the 20th century, in particular. Ricoeur locates this reflection in a concept of History which:

“includes, in addition to its renewed temporal meaning, a new anthropological meaning: history is the history of humanity, and in this worldwide sense, the world history of peoples: Humanity becomes both the total object and the unique subject of history, at the same time as history becomes a collective singular.”(P.300)

Ricoeur goes on to link this chain of ideas to to the idea of “human plurality” suggested by Hannah Arendt, which, Ricoeur claims, raises the question of whether it is even possible for history to be written from a cosmopolitan point of view. The Aristotelian idea of “significant difference” suggests itself here. Surely we can conceptually reflect upon whether the idea of a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends requires that the “significant differences” between people can be reduced or neutralised?

We have, both in earlier parts of this review, and in other earlier publications( A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action, Vols 1-4, Lambert Academic Press), argued in favour of a rational Cosmopolitan perspective. Such a perspective would sceptically doubt Nietzsche’s “observation” and dialectical reasoning(truth is error, error truth), and claim that this position risks violating the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The Cosmopolitan perspective would, moreover, maintain that these principles hold in relation to all forms of discourse related to our lives, especially insofar as willed actions are concerned. Testimony, and the passing and implementation of laws must obey these laws/principles, and it is not clear how Ricoeur sees the relevance of Nietsche’s “observation” and reasoning in relation to these key legal activities.

Moreover, he sees that in spite of Nietzsche’s complaints about the shortcomings of “modernity”, he might well fall into the category of “new men” proposed by Arendt in her work “Origins of Totalitarianism”( New York, Harvest Book, 1968). For these “new men” Arendt argued, “everything is possible”, including presumably violating the principles/laws of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Arendt might, given her later work on “the Human Condition”, view Nietsche’s claim that nihilism is a naked force in history, favourably and, to some limited extent ,agree with this position. Her emphasis upon what she terms “vita activa” (to be distinguished from vita contemplativa) is an emphasis upon a “force” which may well resemble in certain respects the will to power that Nietzsche wishes to promote. Both of these ideas certainly emphasise “flux”and “becoming”, rather than the stability of laws and principles, in contexts of explanation/justification. Cosmopolitanism in the eyes of such anti-rationalists would be regarded as a utopian pipe-dream. Rationalism, of the forms envisaged by Aristotle and Kant, and anti-rationalism in its various forms, both refer to the will, but in the former case the reference is to a part of our psuche which is regulated both by our discourse and our reason whereas in the latter case reference is to a naked force in the stream of becoming. Nietzsche wishes to relate both will and being to power, and Heidegger to a limited extent in his work on Nietzsche agrees with this from a more ontological and metaphysical point of view. Typically, Nietzsche modifies his account of the will in his work Zarathustra, where he bluntly claims that there is no such thing as will, and that will is only a word(XII, 267).

Ricoeur, in his discussion of the ideas of progress and cosmopolitanism, refers to what he calls “an apriori superiority of the future”(P.302), and in so doing opposes the two processes of historicisation and relativisation. The former is clearly connected to the Hegelian “idea”, rather than the Kantian “kingdom of ends”. This latter idea is also associated with the Christian eschatological “topos” of “salvation history”: a “topos” that relies on a schema of “Promise” and its “realisation”. Ricoeur then concedes that Nietzschean relativity risks self-destructing on the principle of “self-reference”, but he also insists that the “grand narratives” of, for example, Christianity have also lost credibility(P.313). Alongside of these grand narratives, there are also sceptical doubts voiced over History itself and The Law.

Indeed a crucial test of the position Ricoeur is attempting to outline, is the intelligibility of a discussion he undertakes on the relation between the roles of the Historian and the Judge.(P.314). Ricoeur’s discussion begins with a contentious characterisation that the aim of the Historian is to produce truth, and this is to be contrasted with the role of the Judge whose concern is with Justice(as if these were mutually exclusive alternatives).There are many problems with the formulation of such a position, but the first is the presence of the most obvious uncomfortable fact, namely, that the legal process requires that testimony be true, and this fact is just as important for the judgement of the judge as it is for the judgement of the Historian. There is also the equally obvious fact that there is a logical relation of the law to the judgement running through the middle premises relating to the evidence in the trial. Such a logical relation requires the truth of the premises including the truth of the major premise that expresses the law in relation to the charge brought by the prosecution against the defendant. Ricoeur wishes to characterise this judgement-complex in terms of the grammatical category of the third person, and he wishes to use grammatical distinctions in his attempt to sharply distinguish between the Legal and the Historical contexts of explanation/justification. This impartial third person or third party “point of view”, is then also accused of being “perspectival”(P.314). There is, Ricoeur argues, a “structural difference” between a court tribunal and the historiographical critique emanating from the “framework of the archives”(P.316). Testimony is characterised as a “linguistic structure”, and the dubious example of witchcraft trials is used to cast doubt upon respect for the law and legal institutions, which every polis/nations demands of its citizens. Here Ricoeur also cites the less dubious examples of modern “treason” and “terrorism” trials, which are better used to illustrate what happens to a justice system when the political and legal systems are not independent of one another. This failure to ensure independence is hardly the task of the judges in the legal system.

Ricoeur acknowledges the historical aspect of the trial in which events are reconstructed via testimony and documents, and adds that whereas judges are compelled to come to a judgement in every particular case, this is not the case for the Historian. Nevertheless one recalls the great war crimes trials of the 20th century, where there is a clear integration of the interests of Law and History. One interesting question to pose in relation to this reflection is whether a Historian can question a judgement in a great war crimes trial without invoking judicial forms of argumentation. One can also wonder whether a Legal judgment could raise a question about the historical authenticity of what happened in a particular place at a particular time. The two kinds of judgement appear to mesh in a way that is not explained by Ricoeur’s account. We should also point out that any verdict, recorded in any trial, would inevitably become a part of the archives a Historian must consult in his/her research. It would seem that there is no reason to doubt that there is a similar relation between the major premises of the Historian and his concluding judgements as there is between the Charge and the judgment in a legal trial. Both processes rely on the principles/laws of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Ricoeur asks whether historical argumentation could be used to assist in the formulation of the sentences of great war criminals. This problem cannot find a resolution in Ricoeur’s account because:

“the historical reality, because it is human, is ambiguous and inexhaustible.”(P.334)

This argumentation, however appears to rest upon an unwarranted conflation of the fictional narrative with the historical narrative. We know that the fictional narrative does not aim at appropriating the past in the name of the truth. Even if it did perform such a function, it is difficult to see how, on Ricouer’s account, that aim could find its target, given the underlying claims that life is in flux, and subject to dialectical forces attempting to make sense of “an incoherent world”(P.335). The art of interpreting documents is similarly dogged with uncertainty because, it must allow the interventions of a free subjectivity which cannot be captured in the ambiguous narrative that attempts to report such events.

When the archive meets the living testimony of living witnesses, this, argues Ricoeur, brings the present into tension with the past. He discusses the problem in terms of the distinction between what he calls the self of research and the self of pathos. He attempts to circumvent the problems associated with the idea of subjectivity, by referring to what he calls a “good subjectivity, but it is not clear that this term is coherent unless one accepts the questionable bipolarity of the subjectivity-objectivity distinction, especially when inserted in a grammatical context of first-person/third-person. Understanding, on Ricoeur’s view, then, is a matter of interpretation of a complex of language acts(P.337), and this characterisation ensures the relevance of the role of hermeneutics in any philosophical investigation of these matters. Such a strategy also marginalises the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason which, in turn, shifts the focus from the self of research, to a linguistic soul of the solipsistic kind that we encountered in the early work of Wittgenstein(who claimed that the limits of ones language is the limit of ones world). Ricoeur’s grammatical investigations, however, are very different to those we find in the later philosophical investigations of Wittgenstein. Wittgensteins war cry “Dont ask for the meaning, ask for the use!” initially looked like a demand that one confine oneself to describing the use of any aporetic term, but the issue is in fact more complex involving appeals to “forms of life” and principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.

Ricoeur, in his discussion of the content of historical archives, talks in terms of chaos, citing Collingwood, “Everything in the world is potential evidence for any subject whatever”(P.337), and also takes up the issue of “discordant” testimony that might be placed in the archives(P.338), thereby raising the issue of trust, not just in the documents, but also in institutions that provide these documents. Historians, of course have been trained to distinguish between the documents provided by the mass media, and documents provided by legal and political institutions. No historian, for example, would place more trust in the newspaper reporting of a trial, than in the official records from the court, unless there were special reasons to doubt the motives/competence of the Judge/jury. In such circumstances we are dealing with the motivations of subjects rather than the objective characteristics of events.

Ricoeur invokes the polysemy of words and the poetic interpretations of texts, as part of his attempt to conflate historical text with other forms of text such as poetry. In this latter kind of text it is part of the skill of the poet to deliberately use the ambiguity of words to create intended effects. What we see occurring in such texts is clearly part of the purpose of the text.

In a discussion of naming, the death of Philip II as an event is discussed, and the suggestion is that this raises the issue of historical representation. Again “poetics” is invoked in what, on the face of it, seems to be incontestably a political matter. The de-legitimation of the institution of the monarchy is , on Riceour’s view, both a poetic and a political matter. The “interpretation” of the event is thus tied to the idea of a “surplus of meaning” of the words used to report events this point also relies on the conflation of different uses of language. Words, Ricoeur argues, are more than “tools of classification”(P.342). Here he refers to what he calls “founding narratives” and an anti-mimetic substitute discourse that appeals to the masses.(P.342.) Of course, prior to the criticism of poetic characterisations of the Gods that the ancient greeks complained about, there probably was a problem with the separation of the poetic from other forms of discourse, but this has changed over the course of 3000 years, and what we have now might not be language-games but certainly different uses of language which find articulate expression in the different regions of the sciences–be they theoretical, practical, or productive.

Review of Ricouer’s “Memory, History, and Forgetfulness”:Part 6 Representation and History.

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The world of action and testimony are the conditions for the production of transcribed documents that find their way into our archives, as part of the “work of remembering”. Ricoeur delineates three phases of this process, culminating in the representative function of the Historical text. The created text is, then, subjected to peer-criticism and comment and must be defended on many levels, including that of the sources reaching back beyond archives, i.e. to the world of action and testimony. The historians representation is the result of the “work of remembering”, that is part of our human being-in-the-world or our human existence, which Ricoeur defines in terms of our effort to exist and desire to be. For Ricoeur, then, this representation is situated in a context of interpretation, but it is not clear whether this context is dialectical, i.e. subject to the conflict of interpretations. There is an attempt to link the term of “representation” to rhetoric and its intent to “persuade” rather than the more obvious strategy of connecting the historical narrative to the evidence of action and testimony.

The historical narrative is constituted by very different principles to those which constitute fictional narratives. The “work of remembering” is not the major task of fictional narratives. The latter form of narrative is rather constituted by a work of imagination, in a context of emotion and feelings of pleasure and pain. Ricoeur, in the context of this discussion refers to the “image of absence” as a common denominator linking the historical to the fictional narrative, at the same time acknowledging the aporetic problem of “entanglement”(P.238), but he does not subscribe to the above “rational” appeal to “faculties” or “powers” of the mind. Hylomorphic accounts would regard such faculties and powers in terms of material/efficient conditions.

Ricoeur discusses the work of Braudel and the Annales School of History and makes the following claim:

“To be sure, no one ignores the fact that before becoming an object of historical knowledge, the event is the object of some narrative.”(P.239)

There are strong arguments for this position, but it can disguise the importance of focussing upon action and testimony that are important components of the events being written about by Historians. Traditionally, action-oriented historical narratives can be associated with “individual-based”, “psychological” “descriptions”. In such descriptions the “work of remembering” focuses upon the singularity of the event, rather than its “conceptualisation” in universal terms. Such a move away from, in particular, the ethical universality of actions and testimony, move the context of discourse from a context of explanation/justification, toward a context of exploration/discovery, where observational knowledge plays a more important role in the discussion of “causation”. The move away from singularity, and towards conceptual universality, is a move that is in line with the political dimension of History: a dimension that is related more to rational ethical concerns, than the more emotional rhetorical concerns connected with fictional narratives. Neither the Aristotelian hylomorphic matrix, nor the Kantian Critical matrix, are referenced in Ricoeur’s discussion. Inserting the fundamentals of action/testimony/event into the above ethically and metaphysically oriented matrices would not, for example necessitate regarding events as singular, unrepeateable and individual entities, but rather conceptualise such entities in practical imperative-related discourse where we attempt to answer the question, “Ought this event to have occurred(whether the event concerned be a peace treaty or a war). By no stretch of the imagination can this form of rational-conceptual history be characterised as “serial-history” (in which the narrative designates a series of “point-like” events). Events, of course, follow upon each other in time, but their relations are more complex, and cannot be captured in a simple matrix of space-time-causation. Narrating, that is, in relation to a field of episodic events, is a very different matter to narrating over a field of forms of life “living” in a complex environment like a “world”, in which action, testimony understanding, judgement, and reason play decisive roles in determining what is happening. Historical narratives are also restricted to a “work of remembering” in contrast to the “working through”(catharsis) that occurs in a fictional “work of imagination”.

Ricoeur points out that we do encounter historical narratives that might seem to be conflicting with each other. The scope of this “field of possibilities” includes clearly false narratives “constructed” by agents, with a specific anti-democratic agendas in powerful institutional positions, as well as narratives that are basically the same, but are “nuanced”, emphasising one aspect of the past at the expense of others. Narratives generally possess a temporal structure with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it is nevertheless the significant actions/testimony/events which determine how these events are to be conceptualised. Ricoeur refers to what he calls “period-designators” such as “The Renaissance”, and agrees that these cannot be “reduced” to events. This is partly because this designator is a telos of earlier beginnings that relate to the birth of Western Civilisation. This rebirth also refers to the the end of an earlier beginning.

Hylomorphic theory favours regarding the relation between a Principle, and that which it regulates, as the key explanatory/justificatory elements of any deliberation upon the relation of “The Renaissance”, and events such as the intensification of scientific, artistic and political activity. We have previously argued that events “happen” whereas actions seem to belong to a different ontological category of “something that is done for a reason”. One “interpretation” of the concept of “that which happens” is the substantive interpretation that can end in an ontological dualism presented by Sartre in terms of “being-in-itself” and “being-for-itself”. Heidegger’s metaphysical response to such a substantive interpretation (which builds upon an operation of negation) was the formation of the existential principle “Being-in-the-world”, which, if interpreted in terms of Kantian ontology, ranges over both events that happen, events that happen to me, and events or states of affairs that I bring about via my actions. Events that happen when viewed through the perspective of History, or the “work of remembering”, are states of affairs that are best conceptualised in terms of the aim at “facts” or “The Truth”. So, events that happen are remembered not as isolated facts or even as a totality of facts, but rather as states of affairs regulated by maxims, principles, and laws: states of affairs that ought to have happened or ought not to have happened. Clearly the types of maxims, principles and laws take the form of imperatives that are embraced in the spirit of areté(agents doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Ricouer for obvious reasons would not be happy about either the Heideggerian or Greek positions for the following reasons:

“Shall we say it is life, presumed to have the form of a history that confers the force of truth on this narrative? But life is not a history and only wears this form insofar as we confer it upon it. How, then, can we still claim that we found this form in life, our own life, and, by extension those of others, of institutions, groups, societies, nations?…The result is that it is no longer possible to take refuge in the idea of “universal history as lived”(P.242)

We can see how this way of thinking discourages appeals to Kantian ideas of universal history, and its appeal to a free will and a nature that has endowed man with Reason to regulate that will. The teleological aspect of this account is unmistakeable as is its grounding in the powers man both possesses and uses in the course of a life. For Kant, this teleological account aligns perfectly with Aristotle and is expressed well in his 8th Proposition from “ideas of a Universal History”(Kant’s Political Writings, Ed., Reiss, H, Cambridge, CUP, 1970,):

“The history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realisation of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an internally–and for this purpose also externally– perfect political constitution as the only possible state with which all natural capacities of mankind can be developed completely.”(P.50)

In the above quote, Kant is clearly arguing for an important connection of the “work of remembering” with bringing about future states of affairs, i.e. with a “work of expectation” in relation to both the telos of human nature and the resultant political kingdom of ends in which citizens are all treated as ends in themselves. This dimension of teleological argument has largely been lost in modern Philosophies of History. This teleological aspect was, of course, clearly represented in Ancient Greek ideas such as areté and eudaimonia(the good spirited flourishing life). For Kant ,”good-spirited” means “ethical” which, in turn, is very technically defined in terms of a good will regulated by universal law and practical reason. This kind of account is clearly not merely a history of events and states of affairs, but rather a history of agents living in a world of actions and testimony structured by expectations of what ought and what ought not to occur. This, to be clear, is not in accordance with the perspective Ricouer is inviting us to consider, namely a perspective which wishes to situate historical texts in a work of remembering confined by narrow epistemological concerns requiring some form of dialectical “interpretation”. Rational “absolutes” are rejected in favour of the power of the imagination that tie threads of narratives together in some kind of emplotment. In one sense, the focus upon the plot of the narrative, requires a focus, not just on events that happen in the sphere of influence of a “character”, but rather in a matrix of actions and testimony performed in a spirit of areté. Events are located in a spatio-temporal framework that must admit of explanations/justifications in terms of cause-effect and must also be subject to a process of investigation in contexts of exploration /discovery in order to determine material/efficient causality. The switch, however, to the context of explanation/justification requires focus upon actions and testimonies of magnitude issuing from characters, institutions, cities, and nations of significance. Practical metaphysics becomes, then, more important than theoretical metaphysics and its tendency to focus upon God and souls. The idea of representation has to be situated in this practical matrix: such a matrix is not defined by the rules of rhetoric but rather by the principles of politics and the laws of ethics.

Ricoeur leads us through the debate that led to narratives being analysed by structuralist theorists, and points to the importance of distinguishing historical from fictional narratives. “Events”, and not actions, become the fundamental unit lying at the core of the metaphysical heart of History. If we succumb to the temptation of paring away the ethical content of historical statements and judgements, we may well find ourselves speechless in the face of events of magnitude such as Auschwitz etc. Such events will then become opaque, and testimony will disappear as part of the effect of consigning to silence judgments relating to these events. This, of course, is not a typically human response to such events which appear to cry out for ethical and legal judgements, not to mention everyday rhetorical outrage at the lack of respect for humanity and human rights. What such reflections reveal is, firstly, that there are two different meanings of the phrase “work of remembering: one in which the historian “makes history” by the structuring of historical texts in contexts of discovery. Secondly, when the text created is then subject to review and criticism this is also a part of the work of remembering that situates itself squarely in contexts of explanation/justification.

Ricoeur takes up the interesting relation that exists between the representation of power and the power of representation. Power can be animated by an image of the absolute which, for example, attached to monarchs who were deemed to embody some form of “divine right”. This, argues, Ricoeur, is reminiscent of the eucharistic imaginative exercise connected to the presence-absence of Christ’s body that is somehow manifested in the ceremonial presence of bread. Ricoeur refers to this as the “eucharistic motif”(P.264). This kind of discourse is embedded in a rhetoric of praise, which is, in turn, a manifestation of the power of the imagination in relation to the representation of power. History is one academic attempt to neutralise the power of the imagination in favour of the more “objective” powers of understanding and reason. The representation of power thus becomes sublimated to the representation of justice, thus signifying a move towards the truth and the knowledge required to, for example, pass laws. In this shift there is a transition from “right obeying might” to the democratic ideal of “might obeying right” which places freedom, equality and human rights at the centre of political discourse. The role of the imagination is then characterised as an “arrogant force”(P.269) that encourages a negative view of categorical reason but perhaps results in the application of the Ancient Greek/Aristotelian idea of the Golden Mean being used in the search for areté.

From the point of view of view of desire and imagination, man can then be represented as dispossessed of power(P.271). Indeed, one act of representation, the portrait, is an aesthetic object which psychically distances itself from action and testimony, and situates itself far from the madding crowd of world-activity in general. History shifts attention from the aesthetic portrait of the individual manifesting power to the narrative of more abstract entities such as the nation-state and areté. The state, the Greeks assumed, ought to be free and self determined. It is a social manifestation of the ethical soul writ large–in contemporary terms what we are confronting here is the democratic soul of a people.

The ethical principle of “Promises ought to be kept” lies at the heart of our practical understanding and reasoning. The fact that “promises are not kept”, and result in a betrayal of our trust, is an event in the imagination, and does not affect the rational idea of what nevertheless ought to have occurred. The Principle “Promises ought to be kept” is, of course, a representation of how things ought to be in a context of explanation/justification, and not an invitation to embark upon an investigation in a context of exploration/discovery. Non-historical narratives describe “what is actually happening” in the hypothetical context of fiction. Such narratives can also be conceptualised “ethically”. The intention of an author might, for example, be to show what happens if promises are not kept. Perhaps historical narratives also have the function of “showing” what happens in circumstances where the “promises” are of magnitude, e.g. important treaties..

Ranke claimed(P.279) that History should not judge, but only “show” events–a kind of “picture theory” of Historical meaning that might be relevant in a context of exploration/discovery, but is only a necessary condition of judgements belonging in contexts of explanation/justification. Ricoeur ends his account by admitting that epistemological accounts of historical events has limitations, and perhaps the wider question to raise here concerns the ontology of historical being which is also a question about time: a question about the nature of the past.

Review of Ricoeur’s “Memory, History, and Forgetfulness”. Part 5 Explanation/Understanding.

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Aristotle’s view of explanation and understanding is provided in his hylomorphic theory of change in which he refers to 3 media of change(space, time, matter), 4 kinds of change(Substantial, Qualitative, Quantitative, and Locomotion), 3 principles of change, 4 causes (accounts) and three different branches of science to consult for both the understanding of scientific phenomena and their explanation(Practical sciences, theoretical sciences, and productive sciences). Kant largely embraces the above matrix, and elaborates upon it by providing us with a number of categories of understanding/judgment, which can be found in the different branches of science. Kant condenses a cloud of metaphysical speculation on the nature of the soul into the “drops” or faculties of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason, and much effort is expended in characterising the relation between the a priori intuitions of space and time(Sensibility), the Categories of the Understanding, and the Principles of Reason. Kant’s major task in his mature work, as we know, was to disperse the clouds of Metaphysics that had formed as a result of the triumph of Platonism over Aristotelianism in the writings of scholars. Aristotle’s works, we also know, as a result were translated into Latin very late (1200’s), and when they were, the translation itself was problematic, according to Heidegger. Certain key words of the Greek language did not retain their philosophical meaning, e.g. aletheia, psuche, physis, and eudaimonia. The “new meanings” of these words then helped to form the storm clouds of scholastic metaphysics that Kant felt the need to disperse in his Three Critiques. Other key terms such as areté, arché, diké, and phronimos were also problematically translated, because their “explanatory/justificatory” meanings were distorted. Areté, for example, is trans-categorical term extending over the domain of character(virtue) and action(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Kant’s strategy was to decentre prevailing theoretical considerations about the nature of God, in favour of practical considerations relating to freedom and the will. For Kant, it was clear that the world of willed phenomena was constitutive of the domain of History:

“Whatever conception of the freedom of the will one may form in terms of metaphysics, the will’s manifestations in the world of phenomena, i.e, human actions, are determined in accordance with natural laws, as is every other natural event. History is concerned with giving an account of these phenomena, no matter how deeply concealed their causes may be, and it allows us to hope that, if it examines the free exercise of the human will on a large scale, it will be able to discover a regular progression among freely willed actions. In the same way we may hope that what strikes us in the actions of individuals as confused and fortuitous may be recognised in the history of the entire species as a steadily advancing but slow development of mans original capacities.”(Kant’s Political Writings, Trans. Nisbet, H., B., Cambridge, CUP, 1970, P.41)

Kant is not generally recognised to be a major political/historical philosopher, but the above quote, taken from an essay entitled “Idea for a Universal History”, together with another essay from the same collection, entitled “Perpetual Peace”, are major contributions to both Political Philosophy and the Philosophy of History. The idea of the United Nations was floated in the former essay, but the complex idea of Human Rights incorporating ideas of freedom and legal equality needed, in addition to the above reflections, the kind of extended ethical argumentation one finds in “Metaphysics of Morals”. All the above works, including the second Critique and the Groundwork, were clearly recommending that man emancipate himself from his self-incurred immaturity via the founding activity of reconstituting political institutions on rational grounds and principles. A spirit of criticism was directed at authoritarian dogma. This spirit also avoided descending in a sceptical spiral that would deny the importance of ideas of reasons and practical a priori principles. Such a spirit required that man impose these practical a priori principles upon himself, e.g. as expressed by the various formulations of the categorical imperative. This, in turn, suggests that both politics and law require ethical argumentation and reference to necessary and sufficient conditions that are discussed in both of these practical sciences. Necessary and sufficient conditions are, of course, important in contexts of explanation/understanding/justification.

The idea of freedom, according to Hans Reiss’s “Introduction” to “Kant’s Political Writings”, requires of a government that they refrain from regulating the speech and thought of individual citizens, as well as refrain from regulating individual rights to acquire things in the external world. In the latter case everyone must respect both the freedom and right to possessions of other individuals. These factors stand or fall together. In totalitarian regimes, freedom of speech is severely limited and corruption is rife in both the economic and legal systems. Politically connected Elites dogmatically control many of the institutions in the above systems. Reiss:

“But mans inner life must not be subject to coercion. Because we cannot know for certain anything about another persons inner life, it ought not to be the task of political action or legislation to change or in any way to condition another persons thought…all individuals have this right of acquiring possessions. It is the expression of their freedom.”(P.22)

Kant clearly sees the realm of freedom to be that which it is the task of human rights to regulate. His vision is not dissimilar to the Ancient Greek view that one ought to lead ones life in accordance with principles connected to areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), diké(justice) and phronesis. The categorical imperative incorporates aspects of these ideas of reason, especially the practically oriented second formulation which demands that we so act as to treat other people as ends-in-themselves. Kant elaborates upon the Greek position by forming the technical concept of The Will: a concept that is definitely a consequence of reflection upon the different formulations of the categorical imperative which all prioritise acting in accordance with ones duty over acting in accordance with sensibly-based personal appetites and desires. Citizens, on Kant’s view, are active agents, acting collectively, with a general universal will. The outcome of a long period of activity, will, on Kant’s view result in the establishment of a Cosmopolitan kingdom of ends composed of Cosmopolitan citizens respecting each others freedom. To be clear, what is being discussed here is not a Hegelian “final solution” of a spiritual end that disregards Kantian categories in favour of a dialectical march of opposites to some kind of absolute terminus.

Reiss points to the role of Teleology in Kant’s view of History:

“When Kant talks of plans of nature in history he does not mean that there is an actual legislator or mind called nature which has consciously made a plan to be carried out in history, but merely that if we wish to understand history as (according to him) we have to, we must resort to an Idea such as that nature has a purpose in history. This idea cannot be proved or disproved by a scientific enquiry, but without it, we cannot understand history at all”.(P.36)

This is part of the Kantian account of explanation/understanding. Two important implications of this account are:

  1. A rational idea is a condition of the possibility for understanding history, and
  2. This rational idea is an idea in the mind of man that cannot be demonstrated or “proved”.

The “mind” referred to above, however, is not a mind constituted of personal individual memories and private events. Rather, we are here dealing with a form of consciousness, possessing active power emanating from different regions of consciousness(sensibility, understanding/judgement, and reason).

Ricouer’s view of explanation/understanding in History is convoluted, but it is clear, that he is sceptical of certain aspects of both the hylomorphic and critical accounts. He begins his investigation, not with the material condition of testimony that is incorporated into documentation, nor with the historical text that is the telos of the historical “work of remembering” engaged in by historians. Of course, there is a sense in which documentation “explains” testimony because the latter is a necessary condition of the former. If, however, one is concerned with characterising the whole historical process in , for example, hylomorphic terms, then the form, principle, or telos of the “work of remembering” that is involved in testimony suggests that this latter is an important element in determining the final “form” of the historical text.

Ricoeur, has, in other works(Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning,Fort Worth, Texan Christian University Press, 1976), pointed out that writing “explodes” the dialogical situation in which speech acts are directed at specific audiences present at these acts. Writing, Ricoeur insists, may be addressed to an audience that has yet to be born. Nevertheless, the implication of such “distanciation” is that there is a responsibility placed upon the author to anticipate the responses of “any audience” by incorporating in his text a response to their responses. This can be characterised as a “work of expectation” that ought to complement any “work of remembering”, which might be incorporated in the text. The historical text differentiates itself from other kinds of text by the fact that it is meant to be about long spans of time, and must also be valid for long periods of time. The problem with conceptualising long periods of time is that of deciding which categories to use for this task. Historians have tended to favour using the category of “fact” rather than “action” because statistical techniques are more relevant to the former. This approach also opens up the realm of probability theory in possible “explanations” of the phenomena one is dealing with. Bayes´s theorem, that the probability of an event is related to the information about that event, construes this information in terms of facts rather than actions, and thus excludes the use of practical reasoning in favour of a mathematical form of mathematical reasoning. Involved in this decision we can detect a scepticism with reference to the “work of expectation”, relating to anticipating actions that occur in contexts of exploration/discovery. Such work focuses upon the “unknown consequences” of action, rather than the constitutive logical characterisation of action, where the consequences of action are logically or conceptually related to the reasons that are given for that action in contexts of explanation/justification.

History is concerned with action in a context of a long temporal span and therefore with long term consequences. Its task must include explaining in general terms why the action has occurred, and this in turn requires a focus on both cause and consequence in relation to the category of actuality rather than the category of hypothetical possibility (which classifies the action as a Y rather than an X). In this work the logical identity of the action must be established before there can be investigations into its causality and consequences. Attempts at establishing “what” has been done occurs in an inductive context of exploration/discovery.

The Historian does not consult the documents in an archive in order to identify actions of magnitude and significance. Rather the concern ought to be for providing the evidence for already identified actions and the “Why”(the reasons for and the causes of the action). The action recorded is rarely an ongoing event like swimming. We are rather dealing with past actions whose consequences have largely occurred, e.g. expressed in the following terms in the above non-historical example,”The swimmer swam to the nearby island”. Here the logical identity of the action is not at issue, but is rather “named” or “rigidly designated” in the above expression which is an answer to the question “Why was the swimmer swimming?” This is consistent with the Kantian quote above in which reference is made to the idea of “purpose” or telos in History insofar as this relates to actions/events of magnitude/significance and the free exercise of the human will.

Ricoeur claims that G. E. R. Lloyd´s work “Demystifying Mentalities”( New York, CUP,1990) attempts to replace the expression “the plurality of mentalities” with another expression, namely, “styles of enquiry”. This latter expression has more of a descriptive intent than the former and belongs not in contexts of explanation/justification but rather in contexts of exploration/discovery.

Freud’s relation to History is also discussed, and this is particularly interesting and relevant, given the clear relationship there is between the activities that occur in the dialogical relation of the analyst/analysand in the psychoanalytical situation, and the equally clear relationship there is to the more structured institutional relation of judge to legal tribunal. Both proceedings involve a “work of remembering” at the level firstly, of the individual, and secondly, at an institutional level where documents are created, archived, and accessed. Involved in such activity, especially insofar as early historical documents were concerned, is a phenomenon Freud wished to categorise as “collective repression”. Freud suggests this pathological phenomenon might have occurred in relation to the records concerning the assassination of Moses. The biblical “story”, merely has Moses dying before entry into the Promised Land, and this may be a half truth necessitated by a wish fulfilment related to an admired father figure.

Ricoeur refers to Norbert Elias and his work “The Civilising process”(Trans Jephcott, E., Malden, Mass, Blackwell, 2000) as a text of importance insofar as the history of the term “representation” is concerned. There is, it is claimed, an interesting point of differentiation between a feudal state, e.g. the “Ancien regime”, and the civilising process going on in the liberation from such “feudal forces” which, as we know result in States monopolising the financing of of a society(taxation), as well as the right to coerce in the name of the law. Elias focuses upon the relation of interdependence that exists between the political organisation of a society, and its changing sensibilities and behaviour patterns. In this discussion there is no reference to the Aristotelian political vision of the political task of the creation of a large middle class, situated between the Platonic “democrats”(disgruntled sons of oligarchs) and the “feudal” oligarchs. Such a middle class will be formed, Aristotle argues, by the principle of the Golden Mean, which navigates a course (through the realm of behaviour patterns and sensibilities) between bipolar extremes. The Golden Mean is the virtue-forming principle, and part of this process of course involves widespread public education which in both its content and its form will be related to the forming of both intellectual and moral virtues. This, for Aristotle is part of his “civilising process”, or actualisation process, that is working toward the telos of installing the power of rationality(intellectual and moral) in mankind. Elias does not reason in the above hylomorphic terms, but instead refers to the more “modern” expressions of “psychic economy” and “historical psychology”(P.208), connecting these to a process he calls “rationalisation”. Rationalisation, it is argued is a process that regulates both emotions and social settings. This, Ricoeur claims, is”more than what the history of ideas calls reason”(P.208) Ricoeur maintains that this process is involved in the forming of “habits”, and the implication is clearly that this process is not “rational” in the sense Aristotle used the term but is rather “non-rational”. For Aristotle the process of the Golden Mean was essentially a “rational” process implying the operation of consciousness. Aristotle’s account of non-rational habit formation is involved in the conscious operation of reason after non-rational habits such as cowardice in the face of the enemy are formed. There is some form of conscious evaluation of this irrational habit and a new type of response to the enemy is formed: e.g. rushing unintelligently into battle. This habit is equally irrational and is a far cry from the demands of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Conscious evaluation then uses the principle of the Golden mean and navigates a course somewhere in between the extremes. In the future these “bad habits” will perhaps still be present in the memory system and might require the operation of consciousness to select the new “rational” habit. The installation of the “virtuous” habit is certainly neither irrational nor rational, but rather the epitome of what Aristotle calls “rational”. It is not “rationalising” . In talking about his civilising process Elias has the following to say:

“But it is by no means impossible that we can make out of it(civilisation) something more “reasonable”, something that functions in terms of needs and purposes”(P.367, Civilising Process)

Reference to “purpose” in the above is interesting, because it demands a recognition of action, and a relation to the formal and final “causes” that help to form a teleological explanation/justification. Now it is the case that History and its work of remembering requires a truth orientation to objects in the past. The Historian may, of course, in their final reflections on their material, in the course of the preparations for the production of a historical text, refer to the “civilising process”, or what Aristotle would call the “actualisation process”. The language of the Historian becomes more teleological and in accordance with the practical rational principles (noncontradiction and sufficient reason) at all levels of reflection.

Ricoeur, as part of his hermeneutical approach which he once described in terms of being the “long road” to the understanding of Being that Heidegger he argued approached directly, wishes to focus upon a “rationalising process” rather than the rational outcome of the process. As part of one of his themes “The Conflict of Interpretations” Ricoeur quotes Pascal:

“Diversity….a town or a landscape from afar off is a town or a landscape but as one approaches it becomes houses, trees, tiles, leaves, grass, ants legs, and so on ad infinitum.”(Pascal, Pénsés(Trans Krailshaimer, A., J., Baltimore, Penguin, 1966, 48,65).

A Historian, it is argued chooses the scale of reflection to be used, e.g. economical, geographical, institutional, or social, on the ground of “mentalities” associated with these alternatives. This in turn makes possible and interplay between these levels as well as a dialectical discussion. Here we are not talking about seeing the same thing under different aspects, but rather, “different things”(P.211). Such attention to detail permits a change of priorities and allows the Historian to focus upon events relating to “the subordinate class”. This focus upgrades these events to events of magnitude/significance that suffice therefore to be plucked from the archives, and manifested in historical texts, e.g. the burning of a miller at the stake. In this refocussing, the life and worldview of the subordinate class becomes an issue of importance. Ricoeur believes that focussing upon the events of “village life” is “beginning at the bottom”.

Ricoeur arrives at the conclusion that this concept of “mentality” is too vague to perform the historical work of remembering. He suggests that we, instead focus upon the concept of “representation”, enriched by the phenomenological reflections of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty(P.217). The idea of “collective representation” emerges, and focus shifts from worldviews to social bonding. Unfortunately, in this discussion, the notion of “justification” is relativised, and the perspective of “scale” is used. The criteria of workable justifications, it is argued, differs from city to city. In this process of reflection, the normative element of justification, expressed in terms of ought premises and conclusions, is reduced to factual premises that form the basis for a “successful agreement”, which is then imitatively repeated via rationalising habit-formations. This “pattern” of behaviour is not in any sense categorical, but rather part of a dialectical process that leads to a “non-rational” result. In the context of this discussion Ricoeur prefers to refer to what he calls “the category of uncertainty”(P.226) which he then attempts to attach to the categorical idea of “trustworthiness”. Reference is also made to “the rules of the social game” and its “strategic logic”(P.226)

Representation is then unsurprisingly placed in a dialectical context in relation to the “political field”(P.227) and given “many meanings”. The discussion rotates back to the “faithfulness” of memory which preceded “the truth of history”(P.229). This essentially epistemological focus on “the moment of representation” thus neutralises both Aristotelian and Kantian rationalism which prioritises the world of will over the world of representation in practical contexts. The theoretical “form” of the village is not merely subsumed theoretically under the “form” of the city but is practical “matter” “formed” by the practical rational principle of the law-governed city.

Review of Ricoeur’s “Memory, History, Forgetfulness”: Part 4 History, Documentation and Testimony

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Part 4

St Augustine’s reflections on Time are both interesting and problematic, from many different perspectives. He claims that we know what time is until we are asked the question “What is Time?”, whereupon we struggle to come up with an answer to this admittedly aporetic question. St Augustine claims that we have difficulty explaining what time is. It is not clear whether he intends to include the answer Aristotle gave to this question when he claims that our answers to this question are inadequate. Aristotle, as we know, provided us with the following definition of time: “The measurement of motion in terms of before and after”. St Augustine does not engage with this definition directly, so it is difficult to know what his position is. He did point out that Aristotle both thought that time is different from motion but related to it. The relation that Aristotle was thinking of was probably related to the category of “Quantity”. Apparently “The Categories” is the only work St Augustine mentions and this leaves us wondering about his view of the metaphysical aspects of Aristotle’s definition.

St Augustine argues that in order for us to measure or quantify change or motion, that change or motion must be something extended in space, and also in some sense present to us. He appears, however, not to adopt the implication of Aristotle’s definition that what is changing or moving must be something external to one. He appears to phenomenologically “bracket” this “externality, and instead describes this extension as an extension in the mind, implying that the presence is a presentness to the mind. St Augustine then argues that the past can only be made present to the mind via the power of memory whereas the future is made present to the mind via the power of expectation. One observation one can make about these reflections, is that there is no attempt at a definition of Time, but only an attempt to describe what is happening to the mind. Some commentators have taken St Augustine to be engaged in the phenomenological venture of describing the functions of Consciousness. It ought to be pointed out, however, that this idea of the present, is first and foremost a theological idea, that is related to the “eternal presence” of God for whom there can therefore be no past and future dimensions of time.Furthermore St Augustine does not aspire to producing an argument for the certainty of the existence of the human being, but rather characterises the consciousness of oneself in terms of doubt. We know it was doubt that set in motion the attempt to put the question, “What is time?” The Aristotelian response to this question, however, was not to describe what is happening in the mind but rather to say what time ontologically must be by referring to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason in an argument. For Aristotle, furthermore, there must be something enduring and real in any change from something to its contrary. This something has two aspects, an external and an internal aspect. The internal aspect of this change is the subject that is of interest for the Delphic oracle and the prophecy “Know thyself!” , but the external aspect of this self is best given in Aristotle’s essence-specifying definition of the human self, namely, “rational animal capable of discourse”. Knowing what this self is, is of course, the most difficult of aporetic questions. “Enduring”, for Aristotle, does not mean eternally present but it does guarantee some form of finite existence which is related to the Greek notion of “psuche”. Human life in the Augustinian system differentiated itself from animal life in virtue of the fact that God breathed life into the human form. This divine breath sufficed to place us higher up on the chain of creation than animals, for St Augustine. Whereas for Aristotle, the fact that we were beings for whom our being was in question(cf Heidegger) sufficed for us to occupy one of the highest places on a chain of Being. Confronted by our own awe and wonder at the brute existence of the world, we sought not merely to describe and narrate but to explain, justify, and acquire knowledge as a result of our attempts to answer aporetic questions.

Having been created by the breath of God , for Augustine, sufficed for our doubt to be converted into hope for salvation in the conversion process that transformed us into citizens of the city of God rather than earthly citizens of de civitate terrana(Babylon).

Augustine, according to Wittgenstein, was mistaken in his characterisation of Language. Augustine resorts to description rather than explanation/justification and describes the way in which language learners learn to name objects, thereby suggesting that the naming function was the key element of language. Kant, on the other hand, puts the key moment of the learning of language, at that moment in time when the child ceases to refer to itself in the third person (e.g. Karl) and begins to use the word “I”. This moment for Kant is the dawn of thinking over a community of impulsive feelings. For Aristotle, perhaps the key moment is not just thinking but rather thinking something about something(what Heidegger called the veritative or truth-making synthesis). Naming carries no indication of time on the Aristotelian theory, and therefore must lack the complexity of a fully-fledged language. Augustine relates language to memory in his example of someone discoursing, and being aware of what has just been said, what is being said now, and what is shortly going to be said. This is, once again, a descriptive account of what the self is conscious of at any moment of any discourse, but what it fails to take account of, is the very important aspect of the reason why the speaker is saying what they are saying, e.g. perhaps because they believe in freedom of speech or justice on grounds they could defend if required to. It is clear on the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of memory, that whilst there is a work of remembering operating here, there is also an implied work of reason preventing contradictions and preventing insufficient reasons from dominating the discourse. Obviously the tense-structure of language would also be a relevant aspect to describe if that was my purpose, and if I am in my discourse talking about the past, i.e. making historical judgments, then this would be an example of thinking about the past on Aristotles account. We can see in such complex circumstances how inadequate the Augustinian naming function of language is.

Aristotle, in his work “De Interpretatione”, maintained, as we have previously suggested that it is only with the verb that time is indicated in language–whether it be past, present, or future. The subject is that which is firstly indicated and this can be represented either by names or descriptions. Attaching a verb to the subject when we attempt to say something about this subject(in relation to this subject) is both indicative of time and truth on the condition we are dealing with a reporting use of language as is the case with historical statements. The Categories of Judgment(Quantity, Quality, Relation), Kant has argued, are even related to Aesthetic Judgments such as “This rose is beautiful”, even though these judgments are “subjective” and grounded upon the feelings of life and pleasure. It is this categorical structure that enables us to speak with a so-called “universal voice” in this matter, demanding a certain form of sensibility in relation to the rose. In these kinds of claim, the powers of understanding and the imagination are connected to the power of judgment. There is ,therefore, on both Aristotelian and Kantian accounts, no reason to believe that so-called “structures” have any priority over the categories involved in historical judgments, which are obviously objective statements about the past.

Aristotle focuses upon the past in his account of “recollection”. Augustine, on the other hand, focuses on the present in reflections upon time and its relation to memory. Aristotle shows no sigs of intellectual paralysis in the face of the question “What is time?”, because his reasoning is in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Furthermore, Aristotle embraces a metaphysical theory of change in which it is clear that the “past” in some sense “causes”(explains) the recollection, together with the intention or will to recall something. If this “something” is of importance to a community or a polis, it is extremely likely that the testimony of the relevant actors who witness events of great magnitude will be documented, and that this documentation will be preserved and stored in archives as part of the “work of remembering” or “recollection”-process. This archive would then, in the future, be placed at the disposal of historians. Fortunately for us these historians do not suffer from Augustinian doubts about Time. They not only know what time is, but they would explain it in much the same way in which Aristotle did.

Ricoeur raises the question of whether the writing of history is a remedy or poison. If like Theuth you do not equate recollection with “the work of remembering”, but rather with being “reminded” of something, then writing is clearly a poison rather than a remedy because this something that one is reminded of, may not be real. This may well have been a fair question to raise in relation to the writing down of myths, but when it came to the more disciplined work of remembering that occurs where reference is made to the testimony that is contained in archives, there surely cannot be any serious doubt about the fact that historians are writing about something real. Here we should also recall that we are not dealing here with a solipsistic historian sitting in his lonely study writing, with doubts about the truth of what he is communicating, but rather a community of historians, critically reviewing each other, writing knowingly about events that are real. In such a community the work of each is reviewed and criticised by all others(in terms of the truth-value of the judgments).

In a chapter entitled “The Documentary Phase” Ricoeur makes a very interesting claim that prior to the work that is archived lies another work , a work of testimony, done by living witnesses to the events of magnitude and significance so important to the existence and maintenance of the polis. Ricoeur’s reflections do not follow this particular path, but given the fact that historical events have both good and bad legal and political consequences, it is our assertion that the best “tribunal” for the evaluation of such consequences would be one in which practical reasoning is used. The kind of political reasoning we are referring to would be that of the “great-souled” statesman, the phronimos. The reasoning we would expect in legal tribunals, on the other hand, centres around a thesis about someones possible guilt, being confronted with an antithesis about possible innocence. In the course of such proceedings both physical evidence and testimony play a decisive role. The demand of the testimony is that it be true on pain of being subject to severe sanctions for contempt for the process. One can claim that the essence of such legal testimony is historical, in that it claims that an event or series of events significant for the outcome of the case , either did or did not occur. The transcendental presupposition behind the truth of this testimony is ” I was there!”(P.148).

Historians, engaging in discussing the truth content of a peers work, are interested in passing judgment upon that work in accordance with multiple criteria which include evaluating the truth-value of the judgments contained in a context of explanation/justification typical of all sciences concerned with the advancement of knowledge. Important in this process, of course, is the place or site of the action or event. In this context, Ricoeur points to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflection upon the lived body in order to make sense of “my-place” in relation to the action or event. “Places of habitation” in a city(P.150) are also important elements of historical accounts as is the “geography of the city”. Ricouer refers favourably to to a view expressed by Braudel in his work “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the Age of Philip II” (trans. Reynolds, S., New York, Harper and Row(two vols)1972-3):

“Any civilisation is at bottom space worked by men and history.”

Ekonomos or Economics will be an important aspect in this civilisation-building work. Historical time will of course transcend lived-time in political contexts. Historical time will also refer to the time of the foundation of the civilisation being written about. Such dating, of course, presupposes a calendar-system that in its turn bears some relation to cosmic time( the movement or change of position of heavenly bodies(rotational or orbital)) This lived-time, historical-time and cosmic-time framework, helps to inscribe events in a continuum. The lived-time of witnesses is positioned in this framework and helps to create the content we find in our archives. The finitude of a human life stands out against this potentially infinite continuum as a “brief” instant of time, a brief candle that seemingly burns and extinguishes in an instant. The Being-toward-death so important in Heidegger’s “Being and Time” pales in comparison to temporal and spatial magnitude of historical events and action that affect the future and perhaps the fate of everyone, whether they have been born yet or not. Now whilst death finds a limited place in the historical archives as does love in the register of marriages, these finite aspects of lived-time are left to the poets and writers who hope to survive in our libraries after their death.

Ricoeur takes up the notions of cyclical time as represented in the days, weeks, months and years of the calendar, and the notion of linear time represented by the non-calendar time of centuries and millennia (P.156). Cosmic history of course transcends calendars and clocks, and even the presence of witnesses. In the light of such long time-periods which the Greeks felt might stretch back into infinity along an infinite continuum, we can understand that the longer the period of human history extends, the more it will tend to transcend even the fundamental element of event/action and become more concerned with longer speculative units, e.g. Hegelian chronosophies of progress versus philosophies of regression.

Ricoeur poses the fundamental question as to whether a history without direction, or continuity, is possible and he refers to Pomian’s suggestion that “structure” replace “periods” as an organising form(P.157). Such a suggestion would have the consequence of collecting periods into larger units such as “ages” which, Ricoeur argues, can cause problems if there are rival categorisations of these “ages”. What is clear is that “Structuralism”, as a linguistic theory, does not engage directly with either Aristotelian or Kantian categories, perhaps because these latter do not have a linguistic origin but rather are existential and logical/conceptual. The “naming” of “ages” or “periods”, is of course a complex matter, but a clue to an Aristotelian or Kantian view of a historical classificatory system that preserves intuitions of both direction and continuity is given in the naming of firstly, the era of Ancient Greece as a “Golden Age” and secondly the naming of that intense period that followed the “Dark ages” as “The Renaissance”(Rebirth of the Golden Age) These two “periods” are thus related to each other(continuity) and provide direction. Structuralism, as we know, in other contexts was a speculative theory that resulted in a reduction of historical phenomena to category-neutral events, which could then be inserted in an algebraic/logical combinatory matrix(P.160). Ricoeur, to his credit, raises some doubts about this methodological approach, and points to his own theory of action as an example of a critical response to structuralism.

Testimony is viewed by Ricoeur as an action/event. He raises doubt about this fundamental aspect of the historical process by referring to an experiment in which subjects were asked to reconstruct or reconstitute a film sequence they had witnessed. The results, it was concluded, raised serious questions about the trustworthiness of Testimony. Ricoeur raises the issue of whether these laboratory conditions were a fair reflection of the normal circumstances in which testimony is given, with some justification. If we take as our paradigm of testimony, what occurs in a legal tribunal, we can see that in such circumstances the focus is not solely on what happened, but also on its relation to the law: at the end of this process a judgment will be made as to whether a law had been broken or not. The focus of the experiment on “the what” without any involvement of “the why” may have been a confounding variable in the above experiment.

Historical writings, on the view of Kant, ought to concern themselves both with the truth and the direction and continuity of History. This involves concern with deeds of magnitude evaluated, firstly, by the practical idea of freedom, and secondly, the several formulations of the categorical imperative. Also important in this discussion is the way in which the historical plot “unfolds” in the historical narrative. Ricouer, however, leaves a question hanging in the air over the issue of the integrity of the “archives”: the question namely as to whether they are the remedy to a malady, or a poison. The myth of Phaedrus is invoked in relation to the claim that documents in an archive are “orphaned”, and need support from their authors who, as a matter of fact, may even be dead. In many cases, of course, the authors represented institutions of the polis and, in such circumstances, living confirmation of ones archived testimony is replaced by trust in these institutions, as judged of course by the historians working with the documents emanating from these institutions.

It is, theoretically possible that there occur an event/action of significant magnitude and all the witnesses may be killed, thus preventing the production of any documentation. Nevertheless the death of all the witnesses would raise questions by the communities they were part of, and probably launch investigations into the causes of these deaths.

Ricoeur takes up the issue of fraudulent documents placed in archives, but these documents, when compared with other documentation in the same archives as well as other archives, often violate the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and stand out like flashing warning signs. Documents have been falsified in various places at various times in History, and have been discovered by either comparison with other documents or the testimony of living witnesses. For many, these unlikely possibilities suffice for them to classify History as a “Conjectural Science”(P.174). We have ourselves witnessed the testimony of living witnesses to the holocaust, and such testimony “tests” the veracity of the archived information all over the world. No one believes that a holocaust survivor with a number tatooed on their arm which is sequential to other numbers tatooed on other survivors arms, is un untrustworthy source of information. Questioning whether they have a photographic memory of the terrible events that occurred in the camps(as the above scientific experiment suggests) is not a rational response to their suffering. Were they to appear at a trial, as they did at the trial of Eichmann, their testimony would suffice to be archived as “truth”, given the judgment that was handed down against Eichmann. Paradoxically Eichmanns defence at this trial was covered by Arendt in her book on Eichmann in Jerusalem, and she noted after reading all the trial material that the defendant was not capable of “thinking”, as she put the matter. This angered many Jews and confused many academics who perhaps did not appreciate the subtlety of Arendt’s criticism. She pointed out that, when questioned, Eichmann often mechanically and robotically repeated clichés from a very limited verbal repertoire, giving the impression that he was delivering memorised phrases and responses. She also pointed to the judgment of many commentators, that Eichmann appeared ludicrously ridiculous” on the stand. We discussed the phenomenon of memorisation previously, and pointed out the fundamental difference between this phenomenon, and the “work of remembering” that is required by a process of questioning in a trial where ones life may be at stake. Memorisation, Ricoeur noted earlier, belongs in a matrix of authority relations, so it was not at all surprising to witness Eichmanns defence, which claimed that, in signing the orders for the transport of 1.5 million Jews, he was merely folllowing orders, which he found no reason to question.

In an interesting epistemological discussion of the relation of a fact to an event, Ricoeur claimed the following:

“A fact is not an event, itself given to the conscious life of a witness, but the contents of a statement meant to represent it.”(P.178-9)

So, what is true of a fact may not be true of an event. Wittgenstein’s attempted “final solution” to all the problems of Philosophy in his work “Tractatus” insisted that:

1.1 The World is the totality of facts. Not of things.

Wittgenstein then further insisted that so-called atomic facts are related to atomic states of affairs. This suggested that everyday facts were complexes and could be divided up in much the same way as objects could, e.g. a broom, composed of the “parts” of a brush and a handle. Events such as swimming are presumably, at least theoretically, divisible into an agent and an action, but facts are categorically different on Ricoeur’s account: being “contents” of representational statements, i.e. they have a propositional character. He continues outlining the distinction:

“..it is as the ultimate referent that the event figures in historical discourse. And it is to preserve this status of the reference of historical discourse that I distinguish the fact as “something said”, the “what” of historical discourse from the events as “what one talks about”, the “subject of…” that makes up historical discourse.”(P.179)

The above accords with the idea that the fact is predicated by “That….”, e.g. in a context of saying/believing/knowing, something about something. The ultimate meaning of a historical event may well be “something that happens”, but that in turn must also in some sense be related to actions in which actors/cities/nations/civilisations are attempting to “make something of themselves”, in accordance with arché, diké, epistemé, areté and phronesis. Ricoeur does not venture down this path of reflection, in spite of his earlier proclamation concerning the importance of action theory. An event is clearly, logically, not something that is “done” , but seemingly, rather, falls into the category of “what happens”, or “what takes place”, e.g. a pubic event. In Law, a fact is the truth about an event. This characterisation would conform to Aristotelian theory and the view that the role of the fact is to say something about something.

In Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus, we are told that the world is all that is the case and one interpretation of this leaves us with the OED definition of a fact as “a thing that is the case”. Reports in archives mostly contain facts and not just information that has to be “interpreted”. This implies that much of the work of the historian involves explaining and justifying the facts in documents , rather than “Interpreting information”.

Ricoeur interestingly raises the possibility of a conflict of interpretations of events, especially if living witnesses who were “present” at an event, contradict accounts of the event given in the archives. Such an occurrence is certainly a possibility, but an unlikely possibility, when we are dealing with events of magnitude that have many consequences for many people over long periods of time, e.g. the holocaust. Ricoeur, curiously, refers to this as a crisis of testimony: a crisis of belief and trustworthiness. For Ricoeur, testimony may be flawed and he hopes that situating representation in a context of explanation will save its “reputation”. The fact of the matter, however, is that the so called “reputation” of testimony is constituted by its occurrence in a context of explanation/justification, and it is exactly this feature that guarantees its validity.

Review of Ricoeur’s “Memory, History, Forgetfulness”: Part 3 of Chapter Three “Personal Memory, Collective Memory”

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Chapter three.

Moving from the question of what the work of remembering is, to the question “Whose memory?” and to the answer “mine”, obviously is going to result in a solipsistic end to an otherwise interesting explorative journey. Ricoeur points to Charles Taylor’s expression, “a school of inwardness”, in the context of this discussion, and Augustine is evoked as one of the sources of this school of thinking, which Ricoeur claims reaches its apex with Husserl’s Phenomenology. We have argued in our 4 volume work, “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action”, that the analytical school of Philosophy as characterised by the Logical Atomism of both Russell and the early Wittgenstein, also represented ” a school of inwardness”, which fortunately was significantly questioned by the later work of Wittgenstein. This aspect of the school can also be traced back to John Locke. Wittgenstein’s criticism of of his own earlier solipsism was reminiscent of Heidegger’s criticism of Husserl’s phenomenological positions.

The task Ricoeur sets himself is, to restore the concept and power of memory in the architectonic of Reality, in such a fashion that it no longer became connected with solipsism and the resultant objective-subjective debate. Ricoeur points out that St Augustine rejects the Aristotelian explanations of the origin of time and the basis of cosmic changes, and he also highlights the dilemma involved in the dualistic problem of reconciling the time of the soul with the time of the world in the account Augustine provides us with. Ricoeur does not refer to the role of Descartes in the journey of thought from Augustine to Husserl, but it is clear that the dualistic reflections we encounter in Descartes’ Meditations and Reflections provided an excellent sceptical environment for the school of inwardness. Ricoeur does, however, discuss Descartes’ notion of “substance” and what he believes is the consequent triumph of a grammatical based form of certainty over sceptical doubt. In the context of this discussion Ricoeur surprisingly connects two claims:

  1. That Husserl is one of the philosophers of consciousness par excellence, and
  2. That it is Locke, rather than Decartes that is behind the idea of linking the ideas of self and consciousness.

Locke’s epistemological twist of the dualistic threads of two kinds of substance serves as a basis for identifying consciousness with memory. Locke also, paradoxically claims that one of the prime motivators of man is not the pleasure-pain “principle” but rather the raw “feelings” of pleasure and pain. These feelings are, of course, important elements of consciousness but, as we have pointed out in previous works, feelings are not ontologically the right kind of entity to become constitutive elements of the categorically-directed process of thinking. Thought is necessarily about reality and directed at Truth and the validating activities of explanation/justification in tribunals of reason.

Memory is of course intentional and about the past and it is, on hylomorphic theory, the material our higher faculties use to generate both experience and also the basic terms of the sciences in contexts of exploration/discovery. Memory is also intimately related to Language and the meaning of the terms we use in our judgements and propositions. In both of these cases, however, we are dealing with general(collective?) or universal memory and not the kind of memory(e-g. particular memories) Locke was referring to, when he was discussing and attempting to define the identity of an individual person. Kant had Locke and Hume in mind as well as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz when he engaged with the task of synthesising the respective positions of empiricism and rationalism. Kant, pointedly, in his remarks on Education, maintained that training the memory in isolation from other cognitive faculties such as judgement and reason was a meaningless exercise, and should not be one of the major goals of education. Kant, too, would have agreed with the argumentation that memory and the introspective stream of consciousness were necessary foundations for the “school of inwardness”.

Locke was a follower of the more empirically biased science of Boyle, the atomist, who concerned himself with mathematically calculating formulae for the phenomenon of the expansion of gases, rather than the Newtonian project of formulating the natural and “philosophical” laws of thermodynamics and motion. The “atoms” of Locke’s system are the “objects” of experience and the simple ideas, together with the “feelings of pleasure and pain which all obey so called “laws” of association. These laws, which included physical relational characteristics, were part of Locke’s general explanation of thought. These “mechanistic” laws would be later used by the behaviourists to “associate” stimuli and responses. Involved in this “school” of Psychology was, to begin with, an outright denial of the existence of consciousness and subsequently a denial of its relevance as a means of explaining experiential phenomena. Behaviourism, it is important to note, was a reaction to the “school of inwardness” founded by the thought of Augustine, Descartes, Locke, and, later by Hume, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein. The methodological “Golden Mean” Principle, that had earlier been used by Aristotle to avoid dualisms in all its forms was systematically involved in the “modern” movements between schools of inwardness and outwardness, was ignored.

“Modernism” has been characterised in many different ways throughout the ages but in this context perhaps the most relevant characterisation is that by the American Philosopher Stanley Cavell who claimed that the essential characteristic of the “modern” was its questionable relation to its own history. Descartes, Hobbes, etc , we know, made it an important part of their philosophical mission to deny the methods and theories of Aristotle without, it has to be said, demonstrating any systematic understanding of the thought of Aristotle.

Augustine, of course, is interestingly included as an important influence upon the development of these “modern” movements and he too, like Descartes, was a dualist in many different respects. We can, indeed clearly recognise the presence of Augustine in the early theory of meaning presented in Wittgensteins Tractatus. This is also confirmed by Wittgenstein himself in his later work “Philosophical Investigations”, in which he specifically admitted to being held hostage by a picture of the functioning of language which he attributed to Augustine.The importance of Wittgenstein’s later work in the context of this debate, is that it was very concerned to redraw the boundaries between the “inner” and the “outer”. In doing this he also played an important part in creating the logical space for the reemergence of Kantian critical theory, and Aristotelian Hylomorphic theory. In his later work he completely abandoned logical atomism in favour of a view of language rooted in the Greek concept of psuche(form of life).

Locke, unlike Hume, was convinced that morality was an objective matter, whose validity could be rationally demonstrated, and this undoubtedly influenced Kant who, we know, elevated practical reasoning to Platonic and Aristotelian heights. All three thinkers were significant political theorists. Locke is also considered a significant political theorist. His social contract, however, is grounded upon an idea the other three theorists would not share, namely that the social contract ought to create the conditions necessary for citizens to engage in “the pursuit of happiness”. This pursuit, for Locke, was related to what he termed “commodious living” and the regulation of our rights in relation to owning property: ideas which later Marxists found so odious. The Greeks regarded the art(techné) of earning money ,as a secondary concern for areté, because it ought to be restricted to the domain of the household and its local instrumental imperatives. Aristotle’s conception of the primary categorical imperatives, on the other hand, associated with areté, involved prioritising epistemé and ethical and political values in their relation to eudaimonia(the good-spirited flourishing life)

According to Ricoeur, Locke “invented” consciousness. We are not sure exactly what Ricoeur means by this remark, but it needs to be pointed out that Locke’s “consciousness” is an integral part of a network of atomistic and reductionistic assumptions. If we bear this fact in mind, there are aspects to Locke’s thought which, it can be argued, reflect hylomorphic concerns, e.g. that something(e.g. a self) is what endures over a process of change, e.g. Socrates becomes musical or tanned. Locke prefers the terminology of “person” and thereby evokes the Latin idea of “persona”, which, as we know makes reference to a mask whose actual function it is to conceal ones identity: thus making identity the key issue in the attempt to specify, via a definition, the essence of being human. This is an epistemological shift that attempts to avoid the metaphysical implications of the aporetic question “What is a human being?”Locke thus manages to convert important characteristics of being human into something “hidden”, e.g. in ones memories. The image of a private inner theatre staging the events of a stream of consciousness which involve memories which I “possess” thus is an important supporting image for the school of inwardness. In such a context the important task of delineating the scope and limits of consciousness as a mental power or principle becomes marginalised.

Ricoeur quotes Locke in an attempt to complement the account which equates memory with consciousness:

“concern for happiness is the unavoidable concomitant of consciousness”(Locke, J., Second Treatise of Government, Chicago, Henry Reginery, 1955, 26)

It might be the case that there is a tighter relation than “concomitance” between the pursuit of happiness and consciousness, especially if we construe “happiness”, not as a feeling in a stream of consciousness occurring on a private stage, but instead take happiness to be eudaimonia (the pursuit of a good spirited flourishing life). In this excursion into the outer realms of the technical world of the instrumental imperative, it is also clear that we need , if we wish to engage with the problem of power and the abuse of power in the activity of war, to move away from talk of consciousness and toward talk of persons. It should also, however be reiterated that in such a context the idea of the identity of the self is also problematic, i.e. Napoleon being Napoleon in virtue of the fact that he possesses Napoleon’s memories, says very little about the character of Napoleon or the ethical significance of his use/abuse of power ,which resulted in a trail of devastation across Europe. Here it would seem we need rather to raise the issue of his character in a context of a tribunal of practical reasoning.

Ricoeur then compares Husserl and Augustine in relation to the attempted transfiguration of consciousness into the prejudicial “realm ” of intersubjectivity. For Husserl, the consciousness of time is, of course, “internal”. The phenomenological reduction was used to “bracket” “world-time” which Husserl argues, common sense mistakenly sees as something “external”. Experienced time is thus conceived of as independent of that time Newton conceived of as “absolute” and “flowing”, externally in relation to us, (as manifested by the cosmic events of the movements of the heavenly bodies). If such an absolute objective idea of time is inconceivable, its polar opposite, the idea of an “absolute subjectivity”(P.111) makes perfect sense for Ricoeur in phenomenloogical accounts of consciousness which once again raise the problems of negation, absence, etc. We are also faced once again with the problem of explaining the presence and importance of other persons who, on the view of the school of inwardness, may “possess” a completely unique “stream of consciousness” “flowing” across the “Internal” theatre of their minds. Wittgenstein’s “solution” to the problem of moving from his earlier postulated solipsistic “I” to a more communal “We” was to move closer to critical and hylomorphic approaches to these problems.

In conclusion, phenomenological theories do not seem to possess the necessary resources to describe and explain the relation of the “Who?” question to the “What?” question. Truth is obviously the major issue in the latter case. This is not to deny that there is a “Who” involved in thinking something about something, as well as the “that” or “what” component of the thought. The “person” obviously does not “possess” these thoughts in the same way in which he might be said to possess his memories. It is clear, however, that in the context of this discussion the major question is not “Who is maintaining this claim?” but rather “Why is this claim being made?”

Review of Paul Ricoeur’s “Memory, History, and Forgetting”: Part 2 “The Exercise of Memory”

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Chapter Two: The Exercise of Memory.

The shift in focus from the epistemological to the “pragmatic” aspect of memory is fundamental if one is to fully understand Ricoeur’s references to the Greek distinction between that which happens to a patient(pathos), and the active power or exercise of memory that forms a part of the actualising process which aims at actualising the potentialities among a hierarchy of cognitive “powers” or functions.

He refers to the Aristotelian distinction between “Mneme” and “Anamnesis”, clearly characterising the latter term as an active search by an agency of psuche. He called this active process “recollection”, and Freud was also clearly referring to this process when he talked about the “work of remembering”. For Aristotle the process was crowned by an act of “recognition” that was associated with “aletheia” (unconcealment). Freud’s patients obviously were unable to achieve this act of recognition associated with the work of remembering, and as a consequence they needed the assistance of an “interpretation” before any unconcealment occurred.

As far as Kant was concerned the recurrence of “mneme” in a psuche was a matter for Physical Anthropology to describe and explain, and such an “event” ” happened to” a patient, and was not connected to the active voluntary choices of that agent. This latter activity was best explained and justified by “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”. For Kant, the investigation of this free voluntary activity, was far more important than any passive process involving the reproductive imagination (a process constituted of a stream of images that was probably produced by a non-conscious principle that had no cognitive relation to either the past or future but rather “happened in the space of present consciousness”). This aspect of the role of fantasy in the life of his patients was described by Freud as “timeless”.

Memories are of the past, and it is this relation to this a priori intuitive spect of Time that is an important component of the “work of remembering” that successfully results in the “recognition of recollection”. Further, recollection is the recollection of “something”, e.g. either of what happened or what one did in a voluntary medium of thought directed at an object which has its source in the past. Reason and rationality are not directly involved in the faithful memories that are unconcealed in the “work of remembering”. In this respect the power of memory is a very different power to the power of judgement which is connected to a “work of understanding”, involving the categories of the understanding and “correctness” rather than “faithfulness”. Judgement, according to Kant is the power of discovering something particular subsumed under a universal, e.g. Jack ought to pay the money he had promised to pay back to Jill. The power of judgement, then, is concerned with particular truths and particular actions which are in their turn related logically and conceptually to universal propositions of Reason, e.g. “Promises ought to be kept”. These universal propositions of reason are necessarily true and good in virtue of being intimately constituted by principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Their validity is also connected to the relation of the terms in these propositions and also partly a result of their relation to essence-specifying reasons which directly answer questions such as “Why should we keep promises we have unconditionally made?”

In comparison to Reason, the power of memory is obviously a very different kind of power of the sensible faculty of the mind in that it is temporally oriented toward the past(rather than the future of keeping a promise). The orientation of a mind concerned with the maxim/principle “Promises ought to be kept”, concerned as it is, with both the future and the past, is not, as such, related to intuitions, but rather to the categories of Action and Possibility/Necessity. Memories, for both Aristotle and Kant, help us to structure and organise experience by abstracting basic terms of Science. To that extent this power is largely a sensory-based classificatory power.

Memory is linked to truth partly via its systematic use in the Science of History. This use will result in a non-fictional narrative that is constructed from official documents located in physical archives, and referring to a particular period of time (and related to events/actions of a significant magnitude important to a city-state). The narrative can begin with the founding of a city-state but can probably never end with an act of destruction unless this involves the territory being uninhabitable as was probably the case with Atlantis and catastrophic natural disasters. In the middle of this continuum are events/actions of significant magnitude that contribute to the growth and development of a city construed in terms of the form of psuche( a living organism). There are also “Physical” historical traces, (e.g. ancient Temples and Cities) in the world, that we preserve as protected objects and living museums. They no longer serve what Heidegger would call a “ready-to-hand” or instrumental function, but rather serve as a sign of a former form of life, which because of the nature of what Heidegger calls our “historicality”, we are necessarily interested in. This kind of desire to preserve the existence of significant objects from the past is perhaps one of the signs that we are not a mere civilisation concerning ourselves only with the maintenance needs of the society but also acknowledge a temporal continuity which, the longer it stretches into the past, the more this awareness confirms an important cultural identity. The mere preservation of records in an archive, as we realised with the Nazi’s, who were meticulous record keepers, does not suffice for the exercise of what Heidegger called in his work “Being and Time” as “historicality”, an important dimension of our Dasein and Being-in-the-world. Perhaps it is this wider conception of the relation of Being and Time that should be the focus of an investigation into the exercise of memory.

Ricoeur argues that what can be legitimately be used, can also be abused, and in this contexts refers to those acts of memorisation which, at the dawn of our oral-based culture were the bearer of cultural values. This oral tradition limited itself to the evocation of significant events or facts. Remembering is not necessarily the same as this form of memorisation:

“With remembering, the emphasis is placed on the return to awakened consciousness of an event recognised as having occurred before the moment when consciousness declares having experienced, perceived, learned it. The temporal mark of the before thus constitutes the distinctive feature of remembering under the double form of simple evocation and of recognition that concludes the process of recall.” (P.58)

Memorisation, on the other hand, is more related to passive experiences of habit in a psychological economics that belongs to the lower faculty of sensibility, a region of the mind regulated by the energy regulation and pleasure pain principles. Energy regulation is more of a biological than a pure psychological concern, and would fall into the realm of what Kant called “Physical Anthropology”, the realm of “what events happen to man” rather than what actions man performs. The pleasure-pain principle, on the other hand, is one focus of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view. Habits are largely pleasurable ready-to-hand pursuits, in that it is only when they are disrupted that consciousness emerges to solve the problem present-at-hand. The recitation of things learned by heart, is one example of the use of memory. At the dawn of civilisation, when cities and civilisations were being created, the oral transmission of significant experience was one of the means used to keep in touch with the past. Memorisation of authoritative texts was the preferred use of this form of memorisation, enabling significant thought to be transmitted across generations. This is, at best, a civilising function of memory, and whilst this use of memory is a necessary condition of civilisation it is not a broad enough cognitive power for the necessary and sufficient conditions (constitution) of a Culture which Kant defined in terms of epistemé (the work of knowing) rather than techné(memorisation). Kant also claimed that happiness(the principle of self-love in disguise) is not quite the same concept as eudaimonia(the good-spirited flourishing life) because, in a culture, man dares to use his freedom and reason to make something of himself, using his theoretical and practical reason and his Judgement(Aesthetic and Teleological). Using the principles of reason is a form of recollection of what we know in order to produce new knowledge, and it is this, rather than memorisation that is going to be the most important characteristic of the cultural soul. This, we ought to point out, has been a subject of debate in the Philosophy of Education of the 1970’s in which R S Peters made the same point as Kant: principles of reasoning trumps habits (in which one attempts to memorise facts). Given that reason is a form of recollection of what we know, it must, therefore, also require a good memory as a necessary condition: a good memory in the sense of the ability to understand and work with principles, concepts and propositions toward systematic ends. On this argument, the power of reasoning is a related kind of power to the power of memory in which it is ideas rather than (verbal)images which are “ordered” temporally in accordance with an architectonic method regulated by principles(noncontradiction, sufficient reason). This latter power of reason is not directly steered by the ordering of “traces” of former activity which sometimes gave rise to the accusation that the ancient bards were “possessed” by these traces, i.e. it seemed as if this activity happened to them, rather than being spontaneously and self-consciously produced by a free will.

Ricouer, in the context of this discussion, takes up the importance of the notion of “enlightened forgetting” which is operating, and helps to prevent the prevalence of memorisation in our present steam of consciousness. Memorisation relies on memory-mechanisms such as association and causality, both of which operate at the level of sensibility in general, and the imagination in particular. The use of memorisation can also be “abusive” when it is used to manipulate audiences. Indeed much of our modern propaganda uses the “mechanism” of association and repetition rather than principles of understanding and logical reasoning to establish relations of the elements being ordered in the discourse. In such exercises of the reproductive imagination there is also no use of the categories of the understanding, and the intention of telling the truth, which involves saying something about something. Here we can see that one of the key defining issues involved in this analysis of memorisation is the instrumental thinking of techné versus the categorical thinking of epistemé.

Traumatic memories are blocked from emerging into consciousness in accordance with the pleasure-pain principle which, as such, tends to disrupt present streams of consciousness with high levels of anxiety and suffering, but also with phantisy-laden wish-fulfillment. Resistances to the work of remembering are, on Freudian theory, mechanistically installed in the psuche, and require a certain amount of energy to maintain and regulate. When such traumatic memories do emerge ,because resistances become weakened, the result of such a state of affairs in the short term is not a cognitive act, but rather a pure behavioural “reflex”, which mechanistically “acts out” the traumatic content(compulsively).This causal mechanism needs to be connected to a “work of remembering” in a transference process in order for the analyst to catch a glimpse of what is troubling the patient. In this “working through” process, these traumatic repetitions are associated with the power of language which will assist in “converting” these repetitions into genuine memories as part of the work of remembering. If the trauma is embedded in a mourning process( a more natural form of “working through”) which, because it contains elements that diminish the patients self-regard (to such an extent that the patient begins to suffer from the depression involved with melancholia), results in the patient converting his own critical responses to the lost object, into substantial and destructive criticisms of his own personality. This actualisation of melancholia is a pathological phenomenon that is described by Freud in terms of a weak ego, which manifests the characteristic of narcissism in the attempt of this ego to deal with the demands of the id, superego, and external world. In this pathological condition, there is a retreat into the world of phantasy and imagination, and a consequent attenuation of concern for the real past and the real future. This pathological condition involves repetition of of traces of experiences that are essentially iconic phantasies obeying energy regulation and pleasure-pain principles. Such a “complex” lacks the appropriate temporal structure which it is the task of language and the categories to organise. There can therefore be no “form of reality” in these representations, even if certain images must bear reality content.

The trace of experience of the traumatically lost object involved in the work of mourning, involves a reorganisation of energy and pleasure/pain which itself is anxiety-filled and painful. If this work of mourning can be attached to the work of remembering via the medium of language, the suffering dissipates, but if, on the other hand, this work is demanded of a weak narcissistic ego, there is a risk of the evocation of self-destructive fantasies(suicidal ideation) which in certain specific circumstances may result in the reflexive behaviour of “acting out” ( attempted suicide). Ricoeur correctly points out that in Ancient Greece, melancholia was associated with mood disorder. The poetic/cosmological connection of moods to the diminishing of energy/life during the season of autumn is intimately linked to the idea of psuche and the growth and development of our particularly human form of life(Eros-Thanatos). Here we are dealing with temperament rather than character: biological rather than fully fledged psychological conditions, physical anthropology rather than anthropology from a pragmatic point of view.Melancholics, Aristotle claimed, with Empedocles, Socrates and Plato in mind, are troubled in spirit. As we move toward the era of the Renaissance and characters such as Michelangelo, the melancholic character becomes romantically associated with genius. This train of thought was then interrupted interestingly by Freud, who de-romanticised the idea of a melancholic in both a hylomorphic and critical spirit, and traced the fateful state instead to mechanisms of self destruction(Thanatos). Freud also managed to transpose or transfigure this pathological state onto the soul writ large, i.e. at the level of civilisation where the aggression behind the activity of war was described and analysed in largely Kantian terms. Here, Freud argues, we encounter phenomena more reminiscent of “acting out” than “remembering”( the constitutional work of historical processes). The sovereignty of the state-principle that emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia, ran counter to the Kantian Enlightenment Spirit of Cosmopolitanism: a spirit guided by rational principles applied to political realities on the world stage. Ricoeur postulates the notion of the “happy memory” as a possible outcome of the work of remembering.

Cosmopolitanism, for Kant, was not an obsessive vision or a form of “acting out”, but rather a result of Duty and the Moral Law, both of which embodied logical principles applied to life and events on the world stage, in contexts of explanation/justification. Freud, we know was a follower of Kantian Philosophy, and undoubtedly would have regarded Kant’s view of bringing about a better and brighter future as part of the reality principle and its regulation of the work of the superego. He might, however, have been more sceptical of Kant’s argument, when it extends to the soul writ large, namely the city-state. He was well aware of the role of ought-premises in Kant’s arguments and might not have shared the conviction that rational principles would in the long term future triumph over the historical processes he saw actualising during 1929, the time of the writing of “Civilisation and its Discontents”. It was very clear to Freud that Discontentment was the theme of his Age and the light of the Enlightenment was waning. The idea that Freud, perhaps did not fully appreciate, was the practical idea of freedom which Kant saw to be operating in historical processes. Perhaps one hundred thousand years of the operation of narcissistic historical processes could never in the eagle eye gaze of Freud ever lead to the “happy memory”?

In the context of the above discussion Ricoeur points to what he calls the “heritage of founding violence”(P.82), i.e. that record of real and symbolic wounds stored in the collective archives of states. Attempts to repress the truth or meaning of these records testifies to the tension the Greeks and all like minded great-souled thinkers after them, experienced in the recorded failures of the historical process, to result in the just exercise of political power. Power and Justice remain, even today, as a nexus or a knot that needs to be disentangled if the thread of history is to reach the Cosmopolitan future promised and hoped for by Kant.

It was John Locke that specifically connected memory to personal identity, thus transforming the essentially Greek question “What is a human being?” to the more modern “Who is the human being?”. Aristotle’s answer to the former question, as we know, was “rational animal capable of discourse”. He gives this answer in a context of a declaration that man can be both the best and the worst of animals. Transposing or transfiguring Aristotle’s question into the Lockean question of the identity of the human being was an epistemological strategy to avoid metaphysical discussion of the aporetic issues involved in this debate. Philosophical Psychology was thus colonised by the empirical theorists and perhaps created difficulties for integrating the result of such an essentially epistemological discussion with wider ethical and historical/political contexts. Focus turned from the faculty of reason to the faculty of sensibility, and the work of imagination/memory. We can of course see the importance of imagination in the earlier mythical narratives of Achilles, Agamemnon, etc presented by Homer. But these ancient “heroes” were very different kinds of men to the more complex heroes of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle , who no longer merely lived passionate “spirited” lives but were also seeking to live “good spirited lives in which reason ruled. The works of these latter “great-souled men” testify to their character and are far more important than any narrative containing facts and events belonging to their “histories”. These works contain a commitment to rational imperatives such as “Ask of everything what it is in its nature”, and reference is not made to great events, but rather to great theories, great arguments and great principles (such as the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason) embedded in a tribunal constituting a context of explanation/justification.

Epistemology prizes facts and contexts of discovery/exploration, over arguments and contexts of explanation/justification, and this creates real problems in applying the results of epistemological investigations to the wider contexts of ethics and politics which require knowledge of values and knowledge of how to reason about these values. In this context Ricoeur quotes Tzvetan Todorov (Paris, Éditions Arlea, 1995):

“The work of the historian, like every work on the past, never consists solely in establishing the facts but also in choosing certain among them as being more salient and more significant than others, then placing in relation to one another; now this work of selecting and combining is necessarily guided by the search, not for the truth but for the good.”(P.50)

What is obscure in the above position is, however, the question of how to account for those complex attempts to characterise arguments containing truths about the good, e.g. in Aristotelian and Kantian argumentation in ethical and political contexts. What is interesting about the above essentially modern attempt to widen the scope of the “epistemological reductions”, suggested by the English empiricists, is that it is reminiscent of the Platonic notion of prioritising the good over the true. In this endeavour we can see a vague intention to return to a rational form of argumentation, even if difficulties are then going to occur over the characterisation of what is meant by the fact-value distinction or the fact-normative distinction. Ricoeur does not engage with this debate in this work, but he does disengage himself from empirical views of History by maintaining that memory has a duty. We know that propositions about duties are best expressed in terms of ought-premises, e.g. “Wars ought not to occur”(even if they do). It is important in the context of such debates not to fall into the dualistic trap of romanticising peace and demonising war. Rather we need to reason about the event or the threat of the event in terms of universal moral laws(categorical imperatives). Such reasoning begins with “Wars ought not to occur” and ends with particular “truths” such as “The second World War ought to have been avoided” via of course the premise of “Wars can be avoided”. Other Kantian premises relating to the consequential destruction of resources that could be otherwise used, e.g. for education, could also occur in this tribunal-like reasoning process.

One is reminded here of Arendt’s categorisation of the twentieth century as “This terrible century”. This is what empiricists and some analytical philosophers would call a value-judgement and this is a harmless enough classification, unless it is claimed that because it is a value-judgement, it cannot be true, and is thereby not an objective judgement. The rationalist viewpoint of history and the work of the historian, is that this work must be partly conducted in the spirit of a judge, and partly in the spirit of a scientist searching for the truth of the documents that are assembled in the archives of the city-state. The historian must therefore to some extent be concerned with the restoration of archaic “objects” in the name of what Ricoeur calls “the happy memory”. This of course is not the memory of an individual but rather of a state striving for the virtue of justice. This, as Ricoeur points out, is something that goes far beyond the limits of phenomenology or epistemology. What perhaps is needed is perhaps a return not just to rationalism of the kind practiced by Plato, but a more refined form of rationalism that can be found in Critical and Hylomorphic Philosophy.

Volume four of A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action

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empty hallway
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Ariadne’s Thread connected as it is to a temporal span of time containing a beginning, a middle, and an end which terminates with emergence from the darkness into the light is a wonderful image of a Globalisation process and its progress to the Shakespearean and Kantian end of Cosmopolitanism. Time is an ancient concern and we need Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy to provide a framework for its philosophical characterisation. Aristotles 3 media of change(space, time, and matter), 4 kinds of change, 3 principles of change, four causes of change and three kinds of Science describing and explaining change, is taken up and elaborated upon by Kant during a time when we thought we might be emerging from the labyrinth and catching a glimpse of a better world and our true natures. The Enlightenment promise of the light at the end of the journey through the darkness, aided by the “spirit” of Hegel failed to deliver what was promised. “New men” appeared in the world we call “modern” and created an “Age of Discontentment” that carried us into the “terrible 20th century”.

Review of Paul Ricoeur’s “Memory, History, Forgetting”: Part one Memory and Imagination

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“Memory, History, Forgetting” is one of Ricoeur’s best works weaving together a large number of historical and Philosophical threads into a royal garment fit for a Philosopher-King. The threads are of two kinds: powerful images and revelatory symbols. These threads stretch back to the Cave of Ariadne and Greek Consciousness but more importantly, in my opinion, they stretch forward to an ideal Aristotelian/Kantian future in which it is suggested all things will be well and all manner of things will be well.

Ricoeur presents us with one of the most powerful images symbolising History : that of Walter Benjamin’s account of Klee’s work “Angelus Novus”:

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise: it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”(Benjamin, W., “Theses on History”, Illuminations, 253-64. Transl by Zohan, H., Edited by Arendt, H., New York Schocken books, 1969.)

Calling Angelus Novus “a painting” is, of course, stretching the classical concept to breaking point. What we see is, rather, an expressionistic experiment that is attempting to create images on a canvass by a technical process that is not a painting process. We see above Benjamin’s Rorschach-like interpretation of the image, which appears to involve a considerable amount of projection going far beyond the data on the canvas, but which nevertheless appeals to all who live in the Age of Discontentment. Benjamins interpretation is accepted under the warrant of poetic licence, and his words become a symbol of modernism from the 1920’s, along with T S Eliot’s “Waste land” and Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” which the author claimed was a work containing the “final solution” for the problems of Philosophy.

Eliot in his poem about our unreal cities containing inhabitants whose “nerves are bad tonight” contains no angels, only departed nymphs, rats, the bones of the dead and the dry sound of thunder communicating divine messages. Perhaps Tiresias is Eliot’s Angelus Novus waiting in the underworld for travellers seeking directions. Tiresias needed no wings in his domain. The wreckage of History was of course growing in volume in the eyes of Benjamin. Even Benjamin, the lover and friend of Arendt, would soon be dead bones littering the waste land of the Juggernaut of War. He would supposedly commit suicide as the Nazis were closing in after his Marxist illusions had been shattered by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the terrorism of Stalin.

Wittgensteins Tractatus shattered the Aristotelian and Kantian critical solutions to the problems generated by the “Human Condition” into “logical atoms” which did not allow meaningful discourse on ethics, religion and the human condition in general. This was the era of atom bombs that would be used on defenceless civilian populations in the name of a “final solution” to the Japanese Problem.

Benjamins characterisation of Angelus Novus is a worthy image of history, for us, who live in the Age of Discontentment. Klee’s “angel-image” looks to be a relative of Janus, the Roman God of war, who appeared to be expecting the world to end with a bang and not a whimper: the kind of image suggesting fear in a handful of dust–all that was left of the “patient aetherised upon a table”. TS Eliot, before the dropping of the atomic bombs, went in search of what Ricoeur would call “happy memory” in his work “Four Quartets”. Transporting us from the Inferno to the Paradiso without stopping for a visit to Purgatoria, the Storm of the future carried Eliot to a peaceful Rose-Garden–the resting place for angels in 1941. It would be only 4 years to the dropping of the atomic bombs which blew this vision into dust. A purgation by fire:

“Ash on an old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.”

The spatio-temporal continuum, paradoxically, is the idea of time that perhaps serves as the best framework in which to answer Kant’s question “What can we hope for?”. The alternative cyclical Heraclitean view of time in which the road to the future is the same as the road to the past reminds one of the Freudian idea of the “compulsion to repeat” that best explains the road from the first world war to the dropping of the atomic bombs. The Logos of this journey is well captured in the final proposition of Wittgensteins Tractatus:

“Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must consign to silence”.

This was the final proposition of the final solution to the problems of Philosophy. On this view the propositions of ethics and religion lack meaning. This work clearly manifests what Heidegger would later refer to as a forgetfulness of being, refusing to contemplate the essential relations between logos and aletheia, which also were consigned to silence. It is certainly ironic that Philosophy, after the presentation of the final solution(in England) would be overshadowed by the Poetry of Eliot until, i.e., Wittgenstein attempted to repair the damage done by correcting his earlier views with later work that would never be published in his lifetime. We know Eliot studied the Philosophy of Bradley at Harvard and this was perhaps the closest he came to confronting directly the Critical Philosophy of Kant. Otherwise it was Dante rather than Greek literature that inspired his poetry.

Critical and hylomorphic Philosophy had their own solutions to the problem of solipsism expressed in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Wittgenstein’s later work continued the earlier concern with language and its meaning, but as part of the criticism of his earlier solipsism, grounded language in the Aristotelian idea of forms of life. Language now becomes less a question of “naming” and more a transactional “game”. Saying that one is in pain is now no longer a private affair occurring on the stage of ones own private theatre, it becomes more of a signal to someone to sympathise. This is in line with the Aristotelian essence-specifying definition of human being e.g. rational animal capable of discourse. Sympathy is an important telos for those life forms in pain that can speak:- much more important than a logical/theoretical account of the logical atoms of language. The world, in the later work, is no longer defined in its essence as a totality of facts: forms of life and language-games now become the central focus. Science and logical space are marginalised in favour of Social Science seen from a pragmatic transactional point of view. This was, however, sufficient to open up a life-space for the humanities and Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy could once again breathe freely and speak about ethics, politics, and religion:

“How could human behaviour be described?Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly burly of human actions, the background against we see any action(Zettel 567)

568.Seeing life as a weave, this pattern(pretence, say)is not always complete and is varied in a multiplicity of ways. But we, in our conceptual world, keep on seeing the same, recurring with variations. This is how our concepts take it. For concepts are not for use on a single occasion.(Zettel)

Wittgenstein was himself conscious of the fragmented nature of his later work, complaining about its structure by describing it as an “album of sketches” but he was not prepared to involve himself in the metaphysical disputes involved with ethical, political, and religious theorising. His use of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, however, was in many respects very similar to the way in which both Aristotle and Kant used these principles. He acknowledges that his method, for example, has much in common with the method of Kant. There is, however, no metaphysical discussion of the nature of Being or Time, but his idea of language involved the recognition of the differences between the reporting and imperative functions which in turn would have permitted discourse on ethical, political and religious matters. He would not , however as the above quotes from Zettel indicate, look for any meaning or essence, beyond what the grammar of our terms provided us with. In this work he also provides us with an album of sketches related to the terms “imagination” and “remembering”. Here he points out that images are subject to the will and do not tell us anything about the external world. He also claims that when you say to someone that you are imagining something you are sending them a signal(Zettel 108e). For Wittgenstein, images are neither pictures nor hallucinations. The words “I remember us having dinner together” do not, he argues, describe or report the memory but are an expression or transcription of the memory. Here we should remember that, for Wittgenstein, language is merely a sophisticated extension of our instinctive life–a vicissitude of instinct. It is here however, that, accusations of relativity emerge. Where someone is certain someone else is not, he claims, and this is why our concepts are open ended. Nevertheless the hurly burly of action contains patterns which justify the use of certain concepts, i.e. forms of life are decisive in contexts of explanation and justification.

Ricoeur criticises the Cartesian account of memory and imagination, claiming that on this account, there is a difference between the “I” that remembers and the “I” that imagines. The suggestion of Decartes’ followers and some empiricists was that the “I” that remembers is “affected” by memory, rather than actively involved in the evocation of “memories”. This marginalisation of the function of memory was then counteracted or convoluted by a perspective that bore some relation to Aristotle’s hylomorphic view of remembering, namely, that imagination concerned itself with both phantasy and the fictional, the unreal, in contrast to the real of what is remembered. Ricoeur does not wholly commit himself to this position but does focus on what he calls Aristotle’s lodestar, namely:

“All memory is of the past”(Parva naturalia: On memory and recollection)

The above amounts to an essence-specifying definition of the function of memory and will serve as one foundation of Ricoeur’s account which stretches over the terrain of phenomenology, hermeneutics and eschatology. The Platonic problem of the presence of the absence of something, implying a past which is no longer present, is demystified by the idea of a conscious picture-image. The memory-image is characterised as necessarily pictorial, and this then leaves us with the problem of phenomenologically distinguishing the functions of remembering and imagining. Ricoeur discusses Plato’s account from the Theaetetus at length, and in this discussion it is obvious that Plato is concerned to give a “substantial” account in which the technological art of mimesis has a role to play. The idea, however, of the soul receiving an imprint from its experiences would have been a difficult one to assimilate in Aristotle’s hylomorphic account. This idea connects up to the Platonic idea of a craftsman(demiourgos)at work in relation to our souls: a work which produces a substantial “thing” or entity with certain substantial qualities. Aristotles account of the soul in his later work, however, no longer appears to be an immaterial substance but rather to be a principle working in the course of an actualisation process to actualise the human powers of discourse and rationality. The Platonic discussion clearly has both materialistic and dualistic elements construing the soul as some kind of immaterial substance connected in some way to the substrate of a body via the relation of “participation”. The idea of a physical “trace” in relation to the activity of the soul involved in “remembering” is left like a question-mark hanging in the air. Later Descartes would locate the “trace” in the pineal gland of the brain thus clearing the way for neuroscientists to speak with authority about neurones and protein networks being facilitated in the memory process.

The Kantian and Aristotelian idea of the self causing itself to do something, e.g. causing itself to choose to go to the agora, is lost in this materialistic jungle of processes and traces. Aristotle, in his reflection on memory in the work cited above, speaks specifically of the memory of the past in the soul distinguishing itself from the presence of future expectation and present sensations/perceptions. We differ from the animals, Aristotle argues, because we “perceive time” and he means by this that we sensibly distinguish a now from before and after. He distinguishes between those humans with retentive memories and those humans who recall things easily. He also distinguishes remembering from imagining by referring to the relation of the image recalled to something else that has been experienced in the past. Hallucinatory images are not so related to the past or the future (where the image is of what one intends to do). There is no stable relation to the perception of time when someone is hallucinating, and to that extent this experience constitutes a dream-like sensory landscape. Such images can dissipate as quickly as they are formed, e.g Macbeth’s dagger. They do not endure ,and are in a state of Heraclitean flux, largely beyond the control of the subject. In Aristotle’s terms, such images fail to form memories, i.e. imprint themselves on the material substrate of the soul. A memory-image, then, is very like a photo of which we exclaim “That is him!”. Here we are not dealing with a generic image of a human being. Similarly, expectations may be related to images of the future which, in Wittgenstein’s language, are pictures of what we wish to bring about in the future. If the will is engaged with this image, the reality principle is involved in the experience, if not, and the future is merely wished for as part of a wish fulfilment, it is the pleasure-pain principle that is operative.

Some animals possess memory but animals do not possess the power of recollection. Recollection, Aristotle argues is a kind of inference resulting from a process of investigation. Only rational animals capable of discourse who have the power of deliberation have this power of recollection. The investigation is a kind of search for an image imprinted in a corporeal substrate. Those of melancholic disposition, Aristotle claims, may have difficulty with exercising the power of recollection. Presumably, in such cases energy regulation difficulties make the recollection process difficult for melancholics because the power is conditional upon the capacity to maintain the investigative deliberative process until the “inference” is made. In such souls there may well be a flow of insubstantial images that are directed neither at the past nor at the future: such images are part of the operation of the pleasure-pain principle that underlie fantasy-laden mental activity.

The problem of the will “searching” for a material/mental trace is resolved in Aristotle’s hylomorphism by appealing to the material and efficient conditions or causes(aitia) postulated in explanations that belong in contexts of exploration/discovery. Remembering, or memory, Ricoeur maintains, also relates to formal and final causes(telos) that belong in contexts of explanation/justification. Ricoeur refers to the telos in terms of what he calls “the happy memory” associated with the contentment associated with a formal “inference”.

The “wreckage” confronting Angelus Novus is clearly a symbol of the unhappy memories associated with History and this “work” of art may be as close as one can get to representing the relation of a divine being to History. The “strangeness” of this work may be partially a result of the attempt to represent History as it figures in the world of an infinite being. Only finite beings such as rational animals capable of discourse possess the powers of remembering and recollection. One of the important conditions for the existence of the phenomenon of the “happy memory” is that of the memory being “faithful to the past”. The role of testimony in the authentication of historical accounts is also referred to in Ricoeur’s account. It is the feature of the faithfulness of testimony to the past which Ricoeur connects to the duty we all possess not to forget terrible crimes against humanity. Such faithfulness thus connects to truth (aletheia) which in turn correctly presupposes both the enduring of entities in the stream of experience and the beginning and end of the existence of such entities.

Ricoeur criticises some of the work of Husserl for being committed to the “metaphysics of the present”: a target that Heidegger also aimed at. What is clear is that the Husserlian account of the Lebenswelt and time-consciousness does not fit comfortably with either the Aristotelian or Kantian analyses of sensible memory. Kant, as we have indicated in our previous work(A Philosophical History….vol 4) distinguishes clearly between physical anthropology and pragmatic anthropology. This distinction is of an ontological nature insofar as Psychological reflection is concerned. Kant characterises this distinction in terms of that which happens to man, and that which man makes of himself. The former belongs in the domain of observation by a spectator . The latter requires transcendental accounts that explain and justify, rather than explore and discover. Kant in his work “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”, like Aristotle, places memory and productive imagination in relation to the will but he places the reproductive imagination into a category of “unfaithful” images:images that are not revelatory of anything external to themselves. The degree to which these unfaithful images “play with” the human being is the extent to which that human being’s mind is deranged(either temporarily or permanently). Kant is here presupposing the “faithful” operation of inner intuition or Time which knows the “now” in relation to the before and after.

Historical memory is, of course, related as much to Space as it is to the faithful representation of time. Facts of history are essentially related to Places, and ones knowledge of them. These facts, however, also relate to the actions of significantly located actors, to their decisions, their speeches, their deeds, and and the consequences of all these activities. We are again confronted with that difficult dialectic of events and actions we discussed in Volume 4 of our work “A Philosophical History of Psychology…”. Events appear to be that which necessarily happens to us, whilst actions are, on the other hand, that which the agent does—each of these alternatives fall on different sides of Kant’s ontological distinction. Observation obviously plays an important role in relation to the consequences of actions and also therefore plays an important role in the conversion of actions into events, but there is nevertheless a residue of meaning that is not quite captured in such transcription. This transcription, Ricoeur argues does not quite know what to do with witnesses and their verbal testimony in relation to recorded events that have become historical under the 30 year rule. Presumably they can be recorded and be referred to in 30 years time, but this does appear to limit somewhat attempts to historically justify the occurrence of “terrible” events such as crimes against humanity. There is no doubt that that we see the testimony of victims as a moral explanation and moral “evidence”, but in the end the historian must refer back to faithful documents in archives rather than the truth of the statements being made in the public domain now. This is one reason why legal prosecution of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity are so important . Such trials produce “faithful” documents for the archives. There are certain things which mankind has a duty not to forget.

Where events and actions occur they are as important in History as the date at which they occurred, because such knowledge also plays a role in the search for further evidence if it is needed. The “fictional” character of myth may be connected to this lack of connection with Place, relying as it sometimes does on a belief expressed by “Once upon a time”. Such displaced narratives fail to become “faithful” documents, and become curiosities. Homers account of the deeds of Agamemnon and Achilles long remained a curiosity until archeology uncovered evidence that the places referred to in Homers narratives, actually existed. Achilles was a real hero of his time and Agamemnon was a real and powerful King that are now part of our Historical space-time continuum.

Ricoeur discusses Aristotle’s Poetics in relation to Historical memory. He argues that History is related to recollection and involves attaching “pure memory” to images: a process that involves the establishment of the faithful images in a present, thus converting the image into an operation resembling perception.(P52) Fiction, Ricoeur argues, is a narrative that occurs in accordance with some kind of contract between the writer of a text and a reader which involves a de-realisation of the images therein: an agreement that suspends belief in the reality of the verbal expression of these “images”. Ricoeur elaborates upon this point in relation to Bergsons account imagination and remembering:

“At one end: “To imagine is not to remember. No doubt a recollection as it becomes actual, tends to live in an image: but the converse is not true, and the image, pure and simple, will not be referred to the past unless, it was in the past that I sought it, thus following the continuing progress which brought it from darkness into light”(P.52)

Fiction is thus distinguishable from History but it does not, Ricoeur argues, fall into the same category as hallucination. In hallucination there is no intention, as Aristotle put the matter, of “placing before the eyes”–a process that makes absent things visible. Kant will claim in relation to hallucination that the image “happens” to the subject and it will endure just so long as a cognitive activity does not replace it, e.g. Macbeth’s dagger. Hallucinatory daggers owe their existence to seismic events occurring in a stratum of the mind over which we have no direct control. Macbeth’s reaction: “Is this a dagger I see before me?” is a question that begins a cognitive process that sets off in search of the reality of the dagger. The vision of the dagger, for Kant, is an event of the reproductive imagination steered by the energy regulation principle, whilst the motor response of attempting to grab the dagger, is a voluntary willed action steered by the reality principle. The surprise involved at the failure to complete the action involves also the pleasure-pain principle which ends in the judgement: “There is no dagger before me!”

This first chapter has been Ricoeur’s response to the epistemological dilemmas occurring in relation to imagining and remembering. The following chapters will widen his concern into pragmatic and eschatological issues.

A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action–Vol 4 (The Legacy of the Kantian First Critique)

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Objects exist and we can sense them, think about them, and the relation between them, and reason about them. The relation, however, between an objects existence and the activities of sensing them, thinking about them and reasoning about them, is a complex one that Kant believes neither common sense nor the rationalism and empiricism of his day can fathom. The ancient Greeks did not speak about reality in these terms. It has been noted, too, that the Latinisation of Greek Culture and Greek Philosophy transformed the term “hypokeimonon” into subjektum. This together with the translation of “ousia (primary being) into substantia set the stage for an epistemological interpretation of the being that underlies all appearance and all knowledge of it. Kant’s Copernican Revolution is an attempt to restore our relation to Being and give an account of that which remains the same throughout change: the enduring subject. This account takes the form of a metaphysical/transcendental inquiry in which the existence of reality is neither assumed by the subject nor constituted by the subject characterised by Kant in terms of the faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason. This is clearly neither a realist nor an idealist position and perhaps is best construed as an elaboration upon Aristotelian hylomorphism.

The First Critique is a paradoxical work in that it provides us with a very technical abstract account of experience (concepts and intuitions), but it nevertheless is very concerned to limit metaphysical speculation by principles of experience. Kant criticises all principles that transcend any possible experience, especially principles purporting to be rational. Experience is, of course, broadly defined, and includes not just what happens to us but also what we do, e.g. thinking. Insofar as we are dealing with the latter notion of experience, Kant focuses upon my understanding of reality in terms of the “I think”. In the course of the examination of the first person case of thinking the focus is upon not my sensory encounters with reality but rather my understanding of what is encountered–an understanding that is concerned with objects that:

“render intelligible the objective validity of its a priori concepts”(Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Trans, Kemp Smith, N., London, Macmillan, 1929, P.12)

In this form of examination there is also a rejection of reference to examples which appeal to the faculty of Sensibility and a verdict in favour of conceptual clarity and distinctness. Concepts are a form of general principle and determine, therefore, the way in which an object is thought about. Logic is an important tool in Kant’s investigation and is applicable in both theoretical and practical forms of reasoning. The telos of these forms of reasoning is either epistemé (knowledge) or making something ( the object of the thought) actual. Galileo, Torricelli and Stahl are cited as examples of scientists who refused to be led by natures leading strings, and instead forced nature to answer questions formulated in a tribunal of reason. The tools of judges in such a tribunal are both logical reasoning and the experiment. The procedure of the tribunal ought to provide a guideline for metaphysical reflection (The Queen of the Sciences):

“Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts have, on this assumption ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.”(P.22)

This is the famous “Copernican Revolution” initiated by Kant, and the difference between his Critical Philosophy and Aristotle’s hylomorphic Philosophy may be seen in Kant’s focus upon the idea of an object. This focus was a reflection of the epistemological discussions of his era– a discussion which , prior to Kant, disregarded the earlier integration of epistemological and metaphysical issues we encounter in Aristotle. Kant’s “destruction” of the metaphysical projects of his times aimed at a better integration of these two perspectives. Kant’s “revolution” also required a division of the mind into the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason, and this in turn also encouraged a focus upon objects and what we can know of them via observation and experiment as well as what we can know of them via a priori knowledge. Objects. concepts, and principles are a reflection, then, of the activity of the above faculties but the focus upon the object is also an important consequence of Kant’s emphasis upon the importance of the principles of experience in his Philosophy. A priori knowledge was another important emphasis and also necessary to give an exhaustive account of scientific activity and theory in terms of the principle of sufficient reason. Kant criticises the metaphysical tendency to abandon all contact with experience and insists upon the role of the understanding and transcendental structures of the mind in determining what is possible, actual and necessary in experience. Critical thinking, then uses the principles of noncontradiction in the following manner:

“For what necessarily forces us to transcend the limits of experience and of all appearances is the unconditioned which reason by necessity and by right demands in things as required to complete the series of conditions. If, then, on the supposition that our empirical knowledge conforms to objects as things in themselves, we find that the unconditioned cannot be thought without contradiction and that when, on the other hand, we suppose that our representations of things as they are given to us, does not conform to these things as they are in themselves, but that these objects as appearances, conform to our mode of representation, the contradiction vanishes…..(P.22)

This mode of representation can be intuitive or conceptual dependent upon the faculty of mind involved and dependent upon the nature of the experience. The above makes it clear why sensibility or intuition as such is not co-extensive with what is real (in-itself). Kant will later claim that sensibility plays an important role in what we regard as “empirically real”. Kant further insists that things-in-themselves, as a consequence, cannot be known but that we can, however, think about them and reflect upon them.

The discussion of Practical Reasoning also confirms the above conclusion of theoretical thinking but its focus is upon action and the will that motivates it:

“there is no contradiction in supposing that one and the same will is, in the appearance, that is, in its visible acts, necessarily subject to the law of nature, and so far not free, while yet as belonging to a thing-in-itself, it is not subject to that law, and is therefore free.”(P.28)

So, we cannot know that we are free but are able to think this idea of practical reason, and it is critical for Kant’s ethical theory that this be so, because otherwise there would be no metaphysics of morals: merely a theory representing the determining causes of action. We must, Kant insists, ask not for the law-like causes of action, but rather for the reasons for action. Kant’s theory has distinct advantages over analytical theories which flatly reject the Aristotelian postulate that all human activities aim at the good, and probably also the Aristotelian claim that we praise people for the good that they do and blame them for the harm they cause by not doing what they ought to do. Unless, as Kant claims, freedom of choice trumped being caused to do these same things, praise and blame would be meaningless. There would be no general attitude in which people expected other people to do what they ought to do. On analytical views where the world is defined as the totality of facts, everything that is done is merely a fact, and there would be little point in praising anyone for anything–we do not praise reality for being what it is and not something else. Perhaps our regret or joy would then focus on the cause or causal chain that brought the event of the action about (and the associated “sensations”). For many analytical philosophers, the cause and the effect are neither logically nor conceptually connected and this leaves us in contexts of explanation with the refuge of many empiricists, the so-called “law of association”. Many attempts to construct psychological theories from such unlikely elements have been attempted, including the theory of the pragmatist, (and enemy of metaphysics), William James. Paradoxically, however, James’ definition of Psychology might have been found acceptable by the targets of his attacks (e.g. Aristotle and Kant):

“The Science of Mental Life, both its phenomena and conditions.”(Principles of Psychology, James, W, New York, Dover Publications, 1890, P.1)

James’ pragmatism is, however, grounded in materialism as is evident in his interpretation of the conditions of mental life:

“The experiences of the body thus are one of the conditions of the faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small amount of reflection on the facts shows that one part of the body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are directly concerned.”(P.4)

One of the major laws of brain functions is of course the “law of association”. Given James’ admission that the boundary-line of the mental is obscure, and also his claim that:

“a certain amount of brain physiology may be presupposed as included in Psychology”( P.5)

we can but wonder whether the stage is not being prepared for another act in the drama or dance of the materialists and the dualists. James, however, mysteriously defines association in the following way:

“Association, so far as the word stands for an effect between things thought of—it is things, not ideas, which are associated in the mind….And so far as association stands for a cause, it is between processes in the brain–it is these which by being associated in certain ways, determine what successive objects shall be thought.”( P.554)

The only “things” in the brain, however, are neurones, and these are either connected with each other or not in various networks. We should recall that Psychological theory concerns itself with learning and one physiological definition of learning is:

“The facilitation of neuronal pathways such that, as a result, a type of experience is present that was not present before.”

James takes the example of a child reaching for the attractive stimulus of the light of a candle and as a consequence burning his fingers. The motor activity and the consequent sensation of pain (response) are associated in a network that now prevents the completion of the reflexive reaction to the light. A question that might arise here, given James’ earlier reflection is: “Is pain a thing?” It surely is an experience, but it is an experience that is undergone and the question then becomes whether the reflex operation of reaching for the candle is an experience? John Dewey in his work “Art as Experience”(Dewey, J., New York, Capricorn Books, 1958) defined experience both in terms of what is undergone, and in terms of what is done. The OED in its turn, defines experience as “practical contact with facts and events”, and this suggests that both sensory and motor events can be elements of experience. Yet in terms of the above quote by James, we still remain sceptical about the claim that a pain can be a thing. It certainly can be a fact, but it is not a fact that I observe in the normal case of my experience of pain. I can observe “things” and order them in causal networks. The act of reaching, and the feeling of pain, however, are not “things”, but the one event certainly causes the other, and the child would not have been transformed by the experience unless the events occurred in the context of a principle that prevented the effect of pain upon the next encounter with the exciting stimulus. Surely, one can insist, it is this kind of principle that we ought to be reflecting upon in a work entitled “Principles of Psychology”.

For Kant, pain is certainly something that we undergo and it is part of the activity of the faculty of sensibility which ought to be accounted for under the heading of “Physical Anthropology”. It is, however, “Pragmatic Anthropology”, Kant insists, that concerns itself with what we do and the principles behind what we do. In Kant’s view the ontological distinction between what we do and what we undergo is a key distinction that ought to be observed, and these ought also to be the concern of different disciplines. In Modern Philosophical Psychology, as we have seen, in our previous reflections on the History of Psychology, the sensation emerged as the postulated fundamental element of psychic life and consciousness. We argued that this was probably the result of materialist tendencies wishing to “atomise” and wishing to reduce the psychic whole to more comprehensible elements.

Merleau-Ponty, (MP) in a work entitled “Phenomenology of Perception.”(Trans Smith, C., London, Routledge, 1962) comments on the tendency to focus upon sensation:

“if we try to seize sensation within the perspective of the bodily phenomena which pave the way to it, we find not a psychic individual, a function of certain known variables, but a formation already bound up with a larger whole, already endowed with a meaning distinguishable only in degree from the more complex perceptions.”(P.10)

The brain, MP argues, is not a collection of contents (“things”) or facts, Rather its structures are ordered in terms of psychological functions or principles. The system of sensations of colour, for example, belong to a more comprehensive life-structure such that:

“The destruction of sight, whatever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colours are affected in the first pace, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified being reduced to four and soon to two colours: finally a monochrome grey stage is reached, although the pathological colour is never identifiable with any normal one.Thus in central as in peripheral lesions the loss of nervous substance results not merely in a deficiency of certain qualities but in the change to a less differentiated and more primitive structure. Conversely, normal functioning must be understood as a process of integration in which the text of the external world is not so much copied as composed”(P.10)

MP goes on to claim that physiological events obey biological and psychological laws. He does not however name these laws in the way Freud does. Freud regards the state of homeostasis the brain strives for, a result of the operation of the Energy Regulation Principle(ERP). This is the most primitive brain function for Freud. The next level up in the hierarchy concerns the psychological functioning of the entire organism and this occurs under the auspices of the Pleasure-pain Principle(PPP). It is at this level that the faculty of sensibility becomes the focus of attention for the Psychologist. Finally we arrive at the Reality Principle(RP) which governs the most complex aspects of mental functioning for human forms of life. This is the Kantian realm of the understanding/reason which for Freud is the field of operation for the agencies of the ego and superego. James does not directly appeal to any of these principles or laws but rather to the law of association between things, and the causal relations between them, thus succumbing to the reductionist strategies of the materialistically minded empiricists that MP, Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein rejected so convincingly. James does, however mitigate his empiricism with an interesting definition of the Mental:

“The pursuance of future ends and the choice of the means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon.”(P.8)

Here James is concerning himself not with the conditions, but with the phenomena to be studied and it is in this arena that he is at his best. In the above quote there is allusion to the Greek idea of telos, and by implication, an appeal to areté, since he goes on to evoke the idea of “intelligence” to explain what is meant by the above definition. This, however, if anything, is a narrowing (from a Kantian point of view) of what initially looked like a practical concern, to a theoretical concern, and it might be related to the earlier discussion of the laws of association in which “ideas” were replaced by “objects”. Of course there is no conceivable representation of an “association-relation” between ideas unless one “mechanises” what is essentially a logical or thought-relation. Perhaps such a concentration upon the condition of the possibility of experiencing an object is useful in the scientific process of exploration/discovery, but given the hypothetical nature of such activity, it would be problematic to characterise what is going on here as determined by a law or a principle. Such activity might assist us in the discovery of a law or principle but cannot itself be characterised as such. Moreover the unity of the “I think” we find in Kantian Critical Philosophy is missing from the account James provides us with. James, for example, claims that there is no unity of the self because we are constituted of a number of different selves and different kinds of self. This is empiricism at its most extreme. Once the unity of something that remains the same throughout myriad changes is compromised, the chances of producing a unified theory of Psychological Principles is diminished significantly. The pluralistic pragmatism James espouses is anti-metaphysical, and this is one explanation behind the move to give concrete and materialistic accounts of the conditions of phenomena. James’ discussion of the phenomenon of the “spiritual” self becomes puzzling and appears dualistic. We should recall that when the dualist Descartes was forced to answer mind-body relation questions he retreated to the materialist explanation of “brain activity”.

The Kantian metaphysical/transcendental investigation into the conditions of experience rests upon a priori knowledge in the form of intuitive representations (space and time) and the form of of the categorical framework of conceptualisation. James was familiar with this account and rejected it, but his grounds for doing so were unclear. In his work on Pragmatism we encounter an objection to metaphysics that, on inspection, turns out to be not a criticism of the Kantian account, but rather a criticism relating to a conceptual dispute over whether to say someone is circumambulating a squirrel when the squirrel is adjusting its position out of sight as we are circumambulating the tree in order to catch sight of it. This does not resemble the metaphysical disputes we usually encounter in criticisms of the major metaphysical systems of Aristotle and Kant. In his work on Pragmatism there is a reference to G K Chesterton, and James praises him for his claim that the most important thing about a man is his view of the universe. It is a pity that James did not pay attention to Chesterton’s fence-principle, which urges those who wish to tear down a fence to first ask themselves why the fence was built where it stands. James, however, is not alone in systematically ignoring metaphysical and transcendental logic in his Psychological and Philosophical investigations. Indeed it is almost a defining feature of our modern era that thinkers embrace some form of this anti-metaphysical attitude. Phenomenological thinkers, e.g. Husserl, believed, that one should abstract from the categories of the understanding and the principles of reason in order to “represent things as they are in themselves.” Many modern thinkers, would also object to the claim in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, that:

“We are in possession of certain modes of a priori knowledge, and even the common understanding is never without them.”(P.43)

The notion of cause, is an example of a priori knowledge that we impose upon representations as a category when we conceptualise experience. This category also contains, Kant argues, a relation to the modality of the necessary: a relationship Hume (the believer in the law of association) denied. Hume claimed, that we become acquainted with the idea of cause through the repeated association of causes and effects. Kant rejects this on the grounds that the mechanism of association could never produce the modality of necessity that is attached to causal judgements. Such judgements, Kant argues, cannot be negated without violation of the principle of noncontradiction and these judgements are further characterised by Kant as synthetic a priori judgements which he claims forms the nucleus of metaphysical investigations:

“Metaphysics, even if we look upon it as having hitherto failed in all its endeavours, is yet, owing to the nature of human reason, a quite indispensable science, and ought to contain a priori synthetic knowledge. For its business is not merely to analyse concepts which we make for ourselves a priori of things and thereby to clarify them analytically, but to extend our a priori knowledge. And for this purpose we must employ principles which add to the given concept something that was not contained in it… This metaphysics consists at least in intention, entirely of a priori synthetic propositions.”(P.54-5)

Kant then takes up a discussion relating to how such synthetic a priori judgements are possible. He points out that Hume did not realise that the propositions of Mathematics are synthetic a priori (e.g. the shortest distance between two points is a straight line). Had he realised this fact, Kant continues, he might have realised the importance of metaphysics for philosophical investigations. He would, that is, have realised the importance of the faculty of reasoning and its use of the principles of a priori knowledge. Kant also defines the transcendental in terms of reason:

“I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects insofar as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori.”(P.59)

The principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason are, then, the substantial core of transcendental knowledge. The role of experience in this context has two aspects and depends upon whether the part of the mind involved in the experience is the faculty of sensibility or the faculty of understanding. If it is the former:

“In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed. But intuition takes place only so far as the object is given to us. This again is only possible to man at least, in so far as the mind is affected in a certain way.”(P.65)

Kant also claims, in hylomorphic spirit, that sensation is the matter, and that which is responsible for ordering all representations into a unity is a “form”(principle). Sensibility, for Kant, has both an inner and an outer aspect. Outer sense enables us to represent objects outside of us in space (a form of outer intuition). Inner sense, on the other hand, is ordered in Time and this is an a priori form(principle) which underlies all kinds of representation. The key Aristotelian notion of change, for Kant, is only possible via the a priori inner intuition of Time.

MP argues that Time is:

“the most general characteristic of psychic facts.”(P.476)

and even though we are aware of the fact that events occur in time, they nevertheless, according to both Kant and MP presuppose Time as a necessary condition of experience. Moreover:

“The events are shapes cut out by a finite observer for the spatio-temporal totality of the objective world.”(P.477)

This also applies to the activity of observation. The Kantian ship, for example, steaming down the river, cannot be divided up into events in proximity to each other. Neither can this experience be reduced to a series of “Nows” juxtaposed and tied together by some form of causality. The subject that “constitutes” time in the Kantian sense does so, MP argues, not by projection of memories into the future but via a network of intentions operating continuously throughout a “lived” process centred in the present. MP characterises the role of Time in experience in terms of the “Logos of the Aesthetic world”(P.498).

Aristotle, on the other hand, defines Time as “the measure of motion in terms of before and after”. The advantage of such a definition is that it places man in an active role as a measurer existing continuously, not in a series of juxtaposed “nows”, but as something that endures through change and moreover measures this change in terms of before and after–making the “now” a nothing–a mere point or boundary between these aspects of change. In terms of Aristotle’s categories, Time is a Quantity that is related to any enduring entity capable of initiating any change witnessed . This entity is also something that itself is capable of changing. As something capable of changing, e.g. acquiring a sun tan, material and efficient causes/explanations will be appropriately appealed to. If we are dealing only with the “logos of the Aesthetic world” as MP maintains and Kant suggests in his claim that no judgements of the understanding are involved in intuitive representations, then Mathematics in its use of number may be a science dedicated to the measurement of the aesthetic world and “counting” may be an activity that primarily involves the faculty of sensibility.

Thought about objects, for Kant, is a function of the faculty of understanding which uses concepts that provide us with a power to know objects. In the context of knowledge both sensibility and understanding are equally important, and the role of reason is that of an organiser of the categories of the understanding/judgement in knowledge systems, e.g. the sciences. Logic is the science that we use to explain/justify our claims at many different levels of thought:

“Logic again, can be treated in a twofold manner either as the logic of the general or as the logic of the special employment of the understanding. The former contains the absolutely necessary rules of thought without which there can be no employment whatever of the understanding. It therefore treats of understanding without any regard to the difference in the objects to which the understanding may be directed. The logic of the special employment of the understanding contains the rules of correct thinking as regards certain kinds of objects.” (P.93)

The general employment of logic uses the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason (pure a priori principles). Mathematics and the Natural Sciences are examples of knowledge systems that focus on different objects. Number, for example, focuses upon Time, and its relation to change-in-general, and Natural Science investigates the efficient and material causes of the physical changes we see in the natural world: a world that contains inorganic stars ( df= gravitationally bound balls of hydrogen and helium made self fluorescent by internal nuclear fusion) and organic life forms(psuche). Similarly different kinds of objects will be focussed upon in the practical and productive sciences as defined by Aristotle. Psychology is specifically mentioned by Kant in this discussion:

“General logic is called applied when it is directed to the rules of the employment of the understanding under the subjective empirical conditions dealt with by Psychology.”(P.94)

Psychology as a discipline also makes an appearance in contexts of practical reasoning where we are dealing with both pure and applied ethics. Pure ethics relates to the constitution of the moral law by the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Applied ethics, on the other hand, is concerned with the limitations placed upon moral action by feelings, inclinations and passions. The activities of praising and blaming moral agents for their possession or lack of possession of the virtues is the empirical aspect of moral understanding. Insofar as rational demonstration or justification of an action is concerned this can only occur in deliberations in which principles relate to the moral law: it cannot occur in relation to the pluralistic sphere of the many and various virtues. In this context Kantian ethical theory is an elaboration upon and improvement of Aristotles pluralistic virtue theory.

The role of transcendental logic in Kant’s Critical Philosophy is partly as a regulator of the categories, and relates to the non empirical a priori origin of knowledge, its scope and validity. Insofar as experiential judgements are concerned, the role of transcendental logic relates to both the categories of the understanding and the principles of reason. In a discussion on the Nature of Truth, Kant adopts a position similar to that of Aristotle when he claims that a general definition of Truth cannot be given because truth claims carry specific reference to specific objects. Kant agrees, however, that we can “nominally” say that Truth is the agreement of knowledge with its object, but given the different realms of knowledge no universal formula is possible, and insofar as we attempt to apply the principle of sufficient reason, this is also limited to specific realms and their differing objects. Logic, insofar as it relates to the categories of the understanding, however, provides us with both universal and necessary rules, and here we use logic in its “special use”: a use which includes an understanding of the a priori elements of Space and Time. Kant calls the abuse of logic its dialectical use and he refers to this as “the logic of illusion”(P.99). The role of the concept in this system is clearly defined:

“concepts rest on functions. By “function” I mean the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representation.”(P.105)

Concepts are then used in judgements which have the structure of thinking something about something (a representation of a representation). Concepts are not in immediate relation to objects in the way intuitions are. They are, rather, that which we use to think about intuitive representations and they can also form conceptual and logical relations with each other in accordance with categories and principles. Pure concepts abstract from the content of judgement and form 12 logical kinds in accordance with 4 groups of categories. The most important question to ask in this context is “With what right is the concept used?” In other words, what is the justification for the use of the concept in the judgement. Kant calls this a quaestio juris, and distinguishes this type of question from one in which the answer expected is factual.

Consciousness as a phenomenon does make an appearance in Kant’s first Critique in the context of the deduction of the concepts of understanding:

“Intuitions are nothing to us, and do not in the least concern us if they cannot be taken up into consciousness, in which they may participate either directly or indirectly. In this way alone is any knowledge possible. We are conscious a priori of the complete identity of the self in respect of all representations which can ever belong to our knowledge, as being a necessary condition of the possibility of all representations.”(P.141-2)

This is Kant’s version of the more general Aristotelian principle of change whereby something endures throughout the change: if this change is to be understood and explained. Kant goes on to say that it is appearance of reality combined with this consciousness that produces Perception.(P.143). He further claims in a footnote:

“Psychologists have hitherto failed to realise that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.”.

It is the imagination that synthesises representations into the form of an image, which is the schema of the concept. In this context Kant speaks of the role of association not as a law but as a power of the faculty of Sensibility. This power rests upon the power of the mind to both synthesise and connect representations in an “abiding and unchanging I”(P.146). Once this power is exercised, a further power of the understanding in the form of the use of the categories is, then, also needed to provide the unity in experience required for knowledge. It is this combination of powers that allows us to view nature as law-governed. The activity of connecting or combining concepts, however, is not a matter for the sensible power of the imagination, but is rather an “affair of the understanding”(P.154), There is a difficulty which Kant acknowledges concerning the nature of the relation between the I that is conscious of itself (intuits itself) and the I that thinks (combines and connects concepts in thought). Kant points out that there is no difficulty in representing oneself as an object of intuition and inner perception. The “I” that thinks, on the other hand, is not a representation of an appearance but rather a representation of my existence. This is the region in which the difficult realm of knowledge of myself dwells. Kant is, in the context of this discussion, pointing to a distinction between the “phenomenal” self that “appears” in intuitions and an existential self which is not the same as the “noumenal” self and is the focus of activity in ethical action and reflection. All three notions of the self (phenomenal self, existential self, noumenal self) are aspects of the self-in-general that the Delphic Oracle had in mind when she challenged humanity with the imperative “Know Thyself!”. Kant insists that we cannot know ourselves except through the categories, judgements and intuitions of myself and my powers. The role of Judgement in the triumvirate of the higher faculties of knowledge (understanding, judgement and reason), is to decide whether something does or does not accord with a category and will therefore use special rather than general logic in an investigation that is in accord with the principle of sufficient reason. This opens up a space for the use of transcendental logic which will focus both on the category involved and an example that correctly exemplifies the category. The role of reason in this triumvirate is to be:

“the faculty of principles”(P.301)

The Principles of Logic, for example enable us to generate knowledge from a special principle, e.g. “All men are mortal”. The reasoning process in this case is familiar:

All men are mortal

Socrates is a man

Therefore Socrates is mortal.

Both the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason are at work in the operation of the above deduction. But the ultimate task of reason is to provide us with the totality of conditions for phenomena and also to focus on what is unconditioned. Kant gives us a very illuminating example of the use of reason by Plato to illustrate both the scope and limits of reason:

“Plato made use of the expression “idea” in such a way as quite evidently to have meant by it something which not only can never be borrowed from the senses but far surpasses even the concepts of understanding (with which Aristotle occupied himself), inasmuch as in experience nothing is ever to be met with that is coincident with it. For Plato, ideas are archetypes of the things themselves, and not, in the manner of the categories, merely keys to possible experiences. In his view they have issued from the highest reason.”(P.310)

Kant continues:

“Plato found the chief instance of his ideas in the field of the practical, that is, in what rests upon freedom which in its turn rests upon modes of knowledge that are a peculiar product of reason.Whoever would derive the concepts of virtue from experience and make (as many have actually done) what at best can only serve as an example in an imperfect kind of exposition, into a pattern from which to derive knowledge, would make of virtue something which changes according to time and circumstance…On the contrary as we are all aware, if anyone is held up as a pattern of virtue, the true original with which we compare the alleged pattern and by which alone we judge of its value is to be found only in our minds.”(P.311)

Sensibility, and Human Nature in general, which Kant elsewhere characterises as prone to antagonism because of a desire to rule himself as he wishes and obey the rule of others only when he wishes, is an obstacle in the way of the achievement of the archetypal idea of virtue (areté). At the level of judgement, virtue or areté is characterised in action-terms as “doing the right thing in the right way at the right time” but at the level of reason, virtue is characterised in terms of the three formulations of the Categorical Imperative. Kant, as is the case with Aristotle, extends his account of practical reasoning from the realm of ethics to that of Politics:

“A constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent with that of all others—I do not speak of the greatest happiness for this will follow of itself–at any rate a necessary idea, which must be taken as fundamental not only in first projecting a constitution but in all its laws”(P.312)

This projected perfect state of affairs of course does not, strictly speaking, exist, and will not do so, Kant argues, for another 100,000 years. One of the obstacles in the way of the actualisation of this perfect state of affairs is mans nature: man is a being, Kant argues, in need of a Master in his current pre-rational state, but there is ambivalence in his attitude toward living in a society because he also desires to live as an individual free of all ties, deciding for himself in accordance with his own selfish idea of “The Good”(The Good-for-himself). In this “primitive” state there still exists a moral disposition urging him toward good deeds but this disposition will not be transformed into an absolutely good will until the moral law becomes a dominating force in this species defined by Aristotle as “rational animal capable of discourse”. Until man becomes more rational, wars will continue to plunge us back into primitive states of nature. Eventually, however, a combination of catastrophic experiences and rationality will allow a moral disposition to mature into the good will required by the Categorical Imperative. This in turn will have consequences for the societies man dwells in and a so-called “kingdom of ends” will supervene in which the laws will be fully rational: man will treat man as an end-in-itself, and maxims of action be willed to be universal laws. Societies, that is, will transcend earlier stages of civilisation and culture. This is “the hidden plan” (Kant’s Political Writings, Ed. Reiss, H., Cambridge, CUP, 1970 “Idea for a Universal History”, P.50) of nature that is operative in human history. The Enlightenment in general, and Kant’s work in particular raised the idea of freedom to a central place in the march of History in accordance with this “hidden plan” and this has been a central theme of the 4 volumes of this work. The Globalisation process and its end-state, Cosmopolitanism, where all races and notions are integrated, perhaps not geographically, but morally, may well have been submerged by the tsunami of totalitarianism in the 20th century. One century, however, in a span of 100,000 years is merely a temporary setback for “the hidden plan”. Three generations of the 20th century experienced two world wars and a cold war before a light appeared at the end of the 20th century tunnel and the journey toward Cosmopolitanism continued ( very tentatively). The idea of the end of Cosmopolitanism is largely the result of the work of three thinkers, e.g. Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, but many other thinkers have contributed toward the idea of the archetype of the ideal society. All three thinkers, for example, consistently criticise the empirical tendency to deduce what ought to be done in the name of morality from the experience of what is done. One cannot jump in logic from an is-judgement to an ought- judgement without presuming a major ought-premise which manifests a principle relating to an archetypal idea or action in ethics or politics. All three thinkers also see Education as a necessary condition of moral and political action, and all three thinkers see the Law as something freely constituted by the rational activity of man. Laws must meet the criteria of justice demanded by Glaucon in the opening books of the Republic, namely that justice be both what is good in itself and what is good in its consequences. Other virtues such as wisdom, honesty, self control, magnanimity etc also need to meet Glaucons criteria.

In practical reasoning we see reason relating not to the objects of sensibility but to concepts and the categories of the understanding and judgement. Kant argues in this context that the metaphysics of critical philosophy ought to deal not only with freedom but also with immortality of the soul and God, as well as the complex of relations that exist between these ideas.

Psychology again emerges as a theme of the first Critique in relation to the concept/judgement “I think” which Kant connects to the understanding and conscious thought. Kant categorises this kind of reflection as “Rational Psychology”. Thinking something about something whether that be as banal as “Socrates is a man” or thinking the “I” as (an immaterial) substance is attributed to what Kant terms “personality”( rather than “intelligence”). Personality is the bearer of both lower psychological and higher mental powers (cf O Shaughnessy’s ontology). The cogito argument is the starting point for rational psychology which, for Kant, but not for Descartes, extends into a categorical framework for all thought. The first consequence of this Kantian account is the proposition claiming that the I is an absolute subject, substance, or principle of thought. This substance or principle is furthermore that which endures throughout processes of change. There can be no trace of sensibility or intuition in the characterisation of this thinking I, and as a consequence:

“We do not have and cannot have any knowledge whatsoever of any such subject. Consciousness is, indeed, that which alone makes all representations to be thoughts, and in it, therefore as the transcendental subject, all our perceptions must be found; but beyond this logical meaning of the “I”, we have no knowledge of the subject in itself, which as substratum underlies this “I” as it does all thought.(P.334)

Beyond reference to the categories there is nothing more to say about the “I” and the form of consciousness Kant is speaking about here is:

“Self consciousness in general is therefore the representation of that which is the condition of all unity and is unconditional.”(P.365)

Rational Psychology, therefore, will contain no empirical predicates asserted of the soul, and will in no sense be doctrinal, but merely serve as a discipline assisting us in avoiding the rocks of materialism and the sandbanks of dualism. Personality theory is here being theoretically presented as a theory of the soul, and no reference is intended to the body or the nature of the relation between the body and the soul. In this sense it conforms to the requirements of transcendental reflection, and is only substantial in the sense of being a principle. A principle can only have an abstract timeless relation to what it constitutes or regulates. If, then, the soul is a principle and is timeless, this is the respect in which it is immortal. In this case “immortal” merely means “not mortal” in the categorical sense of not belonging to the category of mortal things. Rational psychology, then obviously deals with the intelligible world to the exclusion of the ever-changing fluxions of the sensible world in which boats steam downstream and befores are transformed into afters by the time constituting intelligible subject or personality. Even as a sensible being occupying the sensible world, this sensible “I” legislates by ordering world-phenomena into a spatio-temporal framework. Kant’s Copernican revolution thus reaches down into the depths of the “logos of the aesthetic world”. Even at the level of the act of apperception that unites representations into a timeless concept there is an I functioning as a principle. The “I think” that legislates for the intelligible world of thought, however, is closer to the noumenal supersensible that lies at the source of our moral personality. We see this I at work in the world via the medium of action embedded in a framework of “Reason-Action-Consequence”(RAC). In such contexts the I-principle formulates maxims which are constituted by the categorical imperative: the action and consequences that follow upon this rational law are logically and conceptually linked.

Modern Psychological Theory systematically ignored the moral aspect of personality presented in Kant’s “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”. The term “pragmatic” connoted for Kant two ontological aspects: a concern for what man makes of himself via his actions and deeds, and a concern for what nature makes of man. In the former case we are dealing with a telos of uniting the citizens of the world into a cosmopolitan unity.

Eysenck’s personality theory is a good example of a theoretical account of the human being based on biological descriptions and explanations of what nature makes of man. References to genetics, the sympathetic nervous system and testosterone occur in a spirit of materialism and atomism. The personality traits that Eysenck delineates in his matrix are all innately determined and peripherally influenced by environmental factors. The human and moral dimension of a man making something of himself, e.g. doing his duty, telling the truth, and becoming a citizen of the world, are not directly the concern of Eysenck’s theory. What we are presented with is, rather, a trait theory that is built upon the obscure foundations of materialistic and atomistic energy regulation principles and pleasure-pain principles. The moral personality is atomised into a number of traits whose relation to the “I” is obscure and whose relation to each other is largely determined by a position in a matrix.

Freudian trait theory may be rooted in Biology (oral, anal, phallic, genital) but these characteristics were embedded in a developmental hylomorphic actualisation process in accordance with Principles (ERP,PPP,RP) which are operating in humanistic contexts such as a children identifying with parents and authority figures. There is, therefore, no inherent difficult for Freudian theory to engage in criticism of civilisation. In such contexts Freud does not refer to the sympathetic nervous system or testosterone, but rather to aggression and wars and the moral depravity associated with such phenomena. Freud’s theory has both Hylomorphic and Critical aspects, whereas trait theory of the kind one encounters in the writings of Eysenck and Jung would be consigned by Kant to be theories explaining what nature makes of man, i.e. theories that belong to what he termed “Physiological Anthropology”. For Kant all attempts to root moral character in a matrix of temperaments rooted in biological functions would be misdirected.

We know today what Kant merely suspected, namely that the formation of hypotheses in the context of exploration/discovery and the truth value of these hypotheses are dependent upon probability theory which in turn builds upon Bayes’ theorem (The probability of an event is determined by the information we have about that event). The problem with investigations rooted in contexts of exploration/discovery is that we do not know whether we have arrived at the terminus of complete information . Determining whether an event is probable at a high level of significance is not possible in such circumstances. We may, that is, think we have complete information about the functioning of the sympathetic nervous system or testosterone in character formation, but this must remain an open question as long as we isolate such biological “parts” from the biological/psychological whole. The relation, that is, between the parts of a person may not be relevant to the formal and final relations constituting a holistic phenomenon such as the character of a person. The probability of the event of the withdrawing of a white ball from a bag of 10 black and 10 white balls is easily determined, because the information about the variables of this system is complete: this is a so-called closed system. The material composition of the ball and the relation between any possible “parts”, e.g. its atoms, is irrelevant to this calculation. Returning to the Psychological theory of Eysenck, defining the axes of the matrix in terms of neuroticism and stability, and characterising these ultimately in terms of the arousal of the sympathetic nervous system may be useful in terms of clarifying a possible material necessary condition but this is only a part of the whole story of a persons character (and probably not the most important part–many including Socrates would have thought it to be irrelevant). In this realm of reflection we are seeking reasons (formal and final causes) and not causes. As far as Kant was concerned reflections upon the physiological characteristics connected with temperament are a concern for physiological anthropology.

Jung’s theory is similarly biological and is related to a matrix of two types of orientations toward the world (extraversion, introversion) and 4 psychological functions (thinking feeling intuition, sensation). Jung once claimed in a film documentary that the reason his theory was so different to Freudian theory lay in the fact that he was very much influenced by Kantian theory which he claims Freudian theory was not. The above matrix and its psychological functions are reminiscent of some of the concerns we find in Kantian Anthropology and they have also proved useful in the construction of personality assessment tools such as the Myers-Briggs Personality Index. Many aspects of Jung’s theory, however, appeal to genetic mechanisms for their final justification and are therefore problematic. Jung’s theory of the archetypes of the unconscious mind, for example, are supposed to be innate and transmitted by genetic mechanism– a position that genetic scientists themselves disavow. This is of course merely another form of materialistic atomism, a position that fails to acknowledge the Kantian view of Human nature. The moral implications of Jung’s theory are obscure and it appears that this was a deliberate strategy on the part of Jung.

The Freudian superego, we know, is a result of an environmental actualisation process of identification with authority figures, and Freud would have rejected any suggestion that genetic mechanisms had any relevant direct explanatory connection to the character of a person, We know Freud claimed that his Psychology was Kantian, and there is much that speaks for this characterisation, especially if one agrees with the thesis that Kantian Critical Philosophy is intimately aligned with Aristotelian Hylomorphic theory. If this is the case, then the view that Freud was a strict determinist is problematic. Indeed it is difficult to believe that Freud would not have subscribed to the following Kantian reflection on human freedom:

“But any beginning of action presupposes a state of the not yet acting cause; and a dynamical beginning of the action, if it is also a first beginning, presupposes a state which has no causal connection with the preceding state of the cause, that is to say, it nowise follows from it. Transcendental freedom thus stands opposed to the law of causality… It is not to be met with in any experience.”(P.410)

Kant cites the example of a man rising from his chair and claims that, when this is a spontaneous action, it is due to a self-originating source that generates the action spontaneously. Pragmatic Psychology rests upon the foundation of freedom and the forms of psychological explanation/justification that are provided in the name of this kind of Psychology are formal and final. The desire to arise from my chair, that is, has no prior material or efficient cause (e.g. the arousal of the sympathetic nervous system or the increase in testosterone) . Rather, it arises from an “I” that thinks and exists. It also ought to be pointed out that Kant does believe that there is a role for research into the role of biological factors, insofar as the body is concerned. Such research, however, would be a matter for physiological anthropology and not of interest for pragmatic anthropology.

In the act of arising from the chair, viewed intelligibly, there would be a reason and an action and the reason would incorporate Aristotelian efficient, formal and final causes. This same action, however, according to Kant, has an empirical character and could be categorised by the understanding in terms of a chain of causes appearing in the sensible world. My non-observational knowledge of what I am doing, however, has less to do with the observational knowledge of the above gained by acts of perception and more to do with an apperception and the I that thinks and exists. A clue that we are in the intelligible realm of reasons and actions is indicated by the way in which we use the concept of ought in our reasoning about our actions. In arising from my chair I might have done so “in order to” or because I ought to take the dog for a walk. This would in turn determine the consequence of fetching the leash for the dog. Looking upon this action with observational intentions it would not of course make sense for any observer to negate this “reason” by claiming that I ought not to take the dog for a walk. Such observations of mans behaviour and explanation in terms of causation in the sensible world of appearances are, for Kant, at the level of the understanding rather than reason. Things are as they are in such a context of exploration/discovery and there is no logical space for the unconditioned condition of all voluntary acts, namely freedom. How these two forms of explanation/justification interface can be seen clearly in the following passage:

“Let us take a voluntary action, for example, a malicious lie by which a certain confusion has been caused in society. First of all, we endeavour to discover the motives to which it has been due, and then, secondly, in the light of these, we proceed to determine how far the action and its consequences can be imputed to the offender. As regards the first question, we trace the empirical character of the action to its sources, finding these in defective education, bad company, in part also in the viciousness of a natural disposition insensitive to shame, in levity and thoughtlessness, not neglecting to take into account also the occasional causes that may have intervened. We proceed in this inquiry just as we should in ascertaining for a given natural effect the series of its determining causes. But although we believe that the action is thus determined we none the less blame the agent, not indeed on account of his unhappy disposition, not on account of the circumstances that have influenced him, nor even on account of his previous life…..Our blame is based on the law of reason whereby we regard reason as a cause that irrespective of all the above mentioned empirical conditions could have determined and ought to have determined the agent to act otherwise.”(P.471)

In other words , the agent was free to act otherwise. For Kant all the virtues are ideas of reason with practical power that ultimately resides in our freedom to choose what ought to be done. Ideals, for Kant have less practical power but function as archetypes, e.g. the idea of the statesman as a “phronimos”, a great-souled man, is an example to be imitated. The Phronimos might even approach divine status and be thought of as a God. We are clearly dealing here with a transcendental idea. Trying to prove the existence of this idea or ideal may be, for Kant futile, because it is the telos that is important–what will exist in the future– not what has existed in the past. We should rather, insists Kant, attempt to show how this idea or ideal can be thought. On the Aristotelian account we are entitled to ask how the idea or ideal came to be , i.e under what conditions.

Now whether or not the ideal or idea of God exists, I can nevertheless think of God and the power of divine agency. This thought, however, is probably more remote than the thought of my own existence and powers, which Kant pointed out can in fact supervene in the experience of the sublime. Kant insists that the existence of God cannot be concluded from the mere having of the idea of God as some ontological arguments would claim. This idea cannot be constitutive and can only be regulative:

“which directs us to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated from an all sufficient necessary cause.”‘(P.517)

Conceiving of the cause not as a materialistic form of substance but as a substantial principle, as both Kant and Aristotle did, serves to refocus the entire debate and allows Kant to reason his way to a being/principle that will ensure that a good will and good action will result in good consequences for all, namely a good spirited flourishing life. Aristotles conception of a “pure form” or principle is somewhat more abstract and theoretical and tends to identify God with all forms of pure contemplative thought. For Kant, however, the freedom of man was the most important of the three ideas of reason (God, immortality of the soul, freedom) and practical reasoning was the most important aspect of his philosophical contribution to the Enlightenment:

“By the “practical” I mean everything that is possible through freedom. When, however, the conditions of the exercise of the free will are empirical, reason can have no other than a regulative employment in regard to it, and can serve only to effect unity in its empirical laws.Thus, for instance, in the precepts of prudence, the whole business of reason consists in uniting all the ends which are prescribed to us by our desires in the one single end, happiness, and in co-ordinating the means for attaining it. In this field, therefore, reason can supply none but pragmatic laws of free action, for the attainment of these ends which are commended to us by the senses; it cannot yield us laws that are pure and determined completely a priori. Laws of this latter type, pure practical laws, whose end is given through reason completely a priori, and which are prescribed to us not in an empirically conditioned but in an abstract manner, would be products of pure reason. Such are the moral laws; and these alone, therefore, belong to the practical employment of reason.”(P632)

As we have noted previously this form of reasoning is then used as a platform to argue for the importance of the idea of God on moral grounds. The question “Is there a God?” and “Is there a future life?” are, then, answered in relation to the questions that define the scope and limits of theoretical and practical reason, namely “What can I know?” “What ought I to do?” “What can I hope for?” and “What is a human being?” In the answers Kant gives us to these questions the idea of happiness is a secondary idea related to the moral issue of whether one is worthy of happiness. In a world designed by a wise architect or author there will be a logical relation between what one is worthy of, and a good spirited flourishing life.

The role of Psychology in such an architectonic system must therefore be that of a science that is connected to Ethics and Politics and the world views embedded in these practical sciences. Physiological Psychology is clearly situated in a context of exploration/discovery where the focus of the investigations is what nature has made of man. We have suggested that there is always a question mark hanging in the air over such investigations: questions relating to whether we have collected all the necessary evidence relating to the conditions of the phenomena being investigated. Questions which, if answered completely, are in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason.

A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action. Volume 4 : The modern legacy of Kant’s Third Critique.

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Kant’s First Critique is a work that explores and explains the boundaries of the mind as a whole by delineating the structures and functions of parts of the whole Kant names the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding and Reason. There is no doubt that Kant largely subscribes to the hylomorphic definition of being human as being a rational animal capable of discourse. Kant, however, obviously advances the thought of Aristotelian metaphysics by claiming that there are two realms of metaphysics: a metaphysics of nature and a metaphysics of morals. Copernican revolutions aside the major contribution of Kant’s Critical Philosophy to the enlightenment was his emphasis upon practical rationality and the idea of freedom at the expense of theoretical explanation and its seemingly endless generation of hypotheses in search of the truth. There was, however, more to come from Kant on the topic of the nature of our minds in his third Critique on the power of Judgement.

This work built upon the threefold divisions of the mind by a threefold division of of our cognitive powers: understanding, judgement and reason. Kant thus provided a much needed convolution in the landscape of our theoretical characterisation of human capacities and powers. It is these powers that tear us away from a merely sensible contact with our environment: a process that in the case of conceptualisation begins with the act of the unity of apperception, or act of thinking something about something. Heidegger called the act of thinking or saying something about something, the veritative (truth-making) synthesis. The conditions for such synthetic truths are thus provided for us: conditions which enable us to use concepts or “principles” or “forms” as a consequence of the “act” of thinking. The act of conceptualisation occurs in the context of the a priori categories of the understanding which produce categorical judgements ( e.g. S is P) and not hypothetical judgements (e.g. Is S, P? or Assume that S is P). The latter may of course occur in the context of exploration in which concepts or principles are “formed”. The truth-making synthesis results in judgements such as “Men are mortal”. There is no experiential verification of this judgement which of course would involve surveying ones environment to find an immortal man( an impossible feat because the Methuselah we discover may die tomorrow). The function of the understanding is purely categorical (knowing what life is) and conceptual (knowing what a man is). This judgement is also a candidate for what Aristotle called an essence-specifying definition. The “form” or principle of psuche (life) determines how we conceive of the human form of life, providing at the same time a matrix for a number of other related judgements– a matrix that also forms the context for another essence-specifying definition of man, namely rational animal capable of discourse. Psuche would, of course, be the element that ties all the elements in this latter definition together.

In the aesthetic judgement, however, we still encounter the ” S is P” form of judgement, but in this case the something that is thought about is not related to the world nor is it conceptual. It is rather, a claim about the universal judging self and the harmonious play of two cognitive faculties: the imagination and the understanding. The aesthetic object that is the occasion of this judgement, e.g. a particular rose, is initially intuited by the faculty of sensibility but the manifold of representations is not categorised and conceptualised : it rather retains its particularity and uniqueness. Instead ,the understanding engages with the life form of the rose and an awareness of the interactions of the imagination and the understanding forms in the mind of the appreciator of the rose along with a feeling of pleasure. There is, however, a categorical element to the judgement “This rose is beautiful” because we spontaneously claim that the rose is beautiful with a so-called “universal voice”. The pleasure involved is not one related to the physical experience of a sensation, but rather the kind of pleasure related to the learning of something. This pleasure is also disinterested. Practical desires and interests are excluded and this to some extent accounts for the reflective form the judgement takes. In reflecting upon this power or capacity for Judgement, Kant is in search of an a priori principle that can account for the structure and function of both aesthetic and teleological judgements. In this respect Kant’s investigation is a transcendental one. In the case of the aesthetic judgement the principle of the finality of nature suggests itself:

“Now this transcendental concept of a finality of nature is neither a concept of nature nor of freedom, since it attributes nothing at all to the Object, i.e. to nature but only represents the unique mode in which we must proceed in our reflection upon objects of nature with a view to getting a thoroughly interconnected whole of experience and so is a subjective principle, i.e. a maxim of judgement”(Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Trans. Meredith J C , Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973, P.23)

Involved in this process is an interaction of the cognitive faculties of the imagination and understanding which, in turn, is related to the supervening of a disinterested pleasure. The Aesthetic object that occasions this activity , e.g. the beautiful rose, of course has to have the appropriate “form” to cause the subsequent stream of events that eventually lead to the judgement “This rose is beautiful”.

The Critique of Teleological Judgement, on the other hand, argues Kant, is not capable of generating a constitutive principle and is, in contrast to aesthetic judgement, not a reflective judgement but a determinant judgement that attempts to use the cognitive faculties of understanding and reason to estimate the real finality of the object of attention in Nature. Here the aporetic question of the relation of reality to the categories of the understanding is encountered once again and standard realist and idealist(Berkeley) positions are rejected on the grounds of violating the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. We are here witnessing the use of transcendental logic, but no principle emerges from the discussion. Rather this adventure of criticism focuses upon what Aristotle would have called the final cause or telos of Nature. Kant insists that this telos or end of Nature is neither in us (as is the case with the aesthetic judgement) nor is it really in the Object (because all we can know about the object is related to the categories). In the spirit of Aristotle, Kant asks whether we are dealing with a special kind of causality or order of nature (Critique of Judgement, P.4). Though it is not clear whether we can “project” real ends onto nature, Kant argues, we can:

“…picture to ourselves the possibility of the object on the analogy of a causality of this kind–a causality such as we experience within ourselves–and so regard nature as possessed of a capacity of its own for acting technically: whereas if we did not ascribe such a mode of operation to nature its causality would have to be regarded as blind mechanism. But this is a different thing from crediting nature with causes acting designedly.”(P.5)

It is important to note that Kant insists upon a difference between an estimate of reality in accordance with a principle of judgement and a determination by an idea of reason that derives effects from their causes. No principle emerges from this transcendental investigation into the relation of teleological judgement to nature–merely an analogous causality to that which we experience within ourselves, which of course neither acts technically nor blindly. Is this a form of “projection” or not?

In the Third Moment of the Critique of the power of Aesthetic Judgement, Kant elaborates upon the notion of purposiveness which he claims can be characterised in the following manner:

“the causality of a concept with regard to its object.”(Critique of Judgement, P.61)

He uses the term “imagine” in the above reflection. The reference to the work of the imagination allows us then to claim, not finality in the object (i.e. that they have “real” ends), but rather merely to estimate a finality of form in the object. We, who are familiar with 20th century aesthetics, are accustomed to discussions in which “form” or “significant form” is defining for analysing the formative arts such as painting, sculpture, architecture etc. This 20th century discussion was distinctly hylomorphic and referred to the organisation of the material medium the artist is working with. In some cases one also was claiming that involved in the creative process a causality was operating that was analogous to that at work in the harmonious play of the faculties (sensibility, understanding). What we see at work in the work of creation of an art object is the organisation of the material of the medium in an attempt to imitate reality. This aspect is a central feature of the design or composition of the work of art. This technical work however is not represented as such and it is rather the intentions of the artist relating to the point of the work that are perceived in the object (given of course that one has the requisite knowledge of the medium and its possibilities).

The beauty of the work of art, however, Kant argues , is different from the free beauty of the rose. He terms the beauty of a work of art a “dependent beauty” and he includes in this characterisation the beauty of animals and the human body. Both of these life forms, he argues are concept-dependent beauties and thereby carry an interest with them in any activity of aesthetic appreciation associated with them. The idea or form of The Good is the motivating force for the artists intentions insofar as their “works” are concerned. If a human being is represented in a painting or a sculpture, then, there must be some kind of reference to mans moral virtue. In the Giorgione Painting “Tempesta”, for example, the man standing in the foreground against the background of a brewing storm appears at peace with his surroundings and with himself:

Giorgione’s “Tempesta”

The causality involved in Teleological Judgement is illustrated in the idea or ideal of works of art which ought to be viewed, not in terms of any technical or “mechanical” causation, but rather in terms of a causation which is ideal or final. The contrast between technical/mechanical and final/ideal causes is characterised in the following manner by Kant:

“Thus a house is certainly the cause of the money that is received as rent, but yet, conversely, the representation of this possible income was the cause of the building of the house.”(Critique of Judgement, Part II P.20)

A house is an object nested in a network of instrumentalities but may also be viewed purely aesthetically in terms, for example of the mass-effect of its stone or the “blossoming ” of carved features on its walls. In this latter case we view all the parts of houses appreciated aesthetically as constituting a unity of the whole: a unity that is:

“being reciprocally cause and effect of their form” (P.21)

In these cases the formal and final causes of the whole are the primary organisers of the more technical and mechanical material and efficient causes. This kind of transcendental reflection is also important, Kant argues, in Political Philosophy in which the parts (the citizens, their character, and territory) are the material cause of the “form” of the organised state which they partially “constitute”. “Constitution” is an important political form for Aristotle which he conceived of in terms of “organic” form, thus linking the matrix of concepts linked with psuche to the estimation of political activity.

Kant’s discussion of teleological judgement and the necessity of teleological explanation to fully characterise the essence of a blade of grass rejects material and efficient “mechanical” explanation in his transcendental investigation. Involved in this rejection is appeal to the principle of sufficient reason and the matrix of concepts associated with psuche. The principle involved is, Kant insists, a reflective and not a constitutive principle, and this is a crucial difference between the forms of aesthetic and teleological judgement. Nevertheless, Kant argues, we are in need of this reflective principle in natural science but rational limitations ought also to be observed when using teleological explanations in the natural sciences. For example, introducing the idea of God from Theology will only destroy the integrity of both the natural sciences and Theology. Material and efficient causes, can, never be invoked in relation to the idea of God which is best characterised in terms of formal causation/explanation. This kind of confusion or transference of ideas from one domain of epistemé to another may have been responsible for the confusion that led to characterising God as the physical creator of the universe when the more neutral principle- related ideas of “architect” or “designer” would have been more appropriate. We have earlier in this work pointed to the fact that the Ancient Greeks did not succumb to this confusion and left the actual physical process of creation to the Demiurge. Nevertheless, the extent to which natural science ignores the importance of teleological explanation is the extent to which:

“…the nexus does not touch the constitution of things, but turns wholly on the combination of our conceptions.”(Part II, P.34)

Modern science has several times manifested the tendency to regard reasoning in terms of final or teleological causation, as a contradiction of the results achieved in “mechanical” explanation. The Scientist relies on a form of perception he calls observation, to ground his reasoning, and this appears to conflict with the more philosophical account of perception presented by Wittgenstein in his later work, where it was claimed that an ambiguous figure can be seen both as a duck and a rabbit depending upon the organising activity of the eye. If Wittgenstein’s account is correct then, observation may not be the royal road to understanding the essence of things because it requires some kind of organising principle itself: an organising principle that must be “formal”. Kant also takes up this discussion in relation to our manipulation of objects and events, and insists that there is no contradiction between the following claims:

“All production of material things and their forms must be estimated as possible on mere mechanical laws.

“Some products of material nature cannot be estimated as possible on mere mechanical laws(that is, for estimating them quite a different law of causality is required, namely, that of final causes)”(P.37)

Kant´s explanation for this is:

“For if I say I must estimate the possibility of all events in material nature….This assertion is only intended to indicate that I ought at all times to reflect upon these things according to the principle of the simple mechanism of nature, and consequently push my investigation with it as far as I can, because, unless I make it the basis of research there can be no knowledge of nature in the true sense of the term at all. Now this does not stand in the way of the second maxim when a proper occasion for its employment presents itself–that is to say, in the case of some natural forms…..we may, in our reflections upon them, follow the trail of a principle which is radically different from explanation by the mechanism of nature, namely the principle of final causes”( Part II P.38)

This, roughly speaking, is the position Aristotle adopts. Kant’s account is more elaborate and more complex, and rests on a conviction that explanations relating to the noumenal world of things in themselves, refer to a supersensible realm beyond what we can know. We can, however, think of this realm without knowing anything about its constitution. In the context of this debate it is worth recalling Christopher Shields’ essence-specifying definition of a star, namely:

“A star is a gravitationally bound ball of hydrogen and helium made self luminous by internal nuclear fusion.”(P, 98)

A number of materialistic scientific concepts are combined in this definition and we can be forgiven for believing that once we have studied the theories these concepts are embedded in, we must be coming close to knowing what a star is in itself. No one can deny that many misunderstandings may be avoided if one understands the above definition, but the suspicion remains, however, that if stars are the remnants of a cosmic explosion, they may yet be a part of a whole we only partially understand. Was, the universe a form of matter and energy at the inception of this explosion? What was the state of this universe before this explosion? These are questions that can be reflected upon in the spirit of Aristotelian and Kantian principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason

Returning to the earlier discussion relating to whether we can be said to “project” ideal causality onto the world, we find Kant claiming the following:

“For strictly speaking, we do not observe the ends in nature as designed. We only read this conception into the facts as a guide to judgement in its reflection upon the products of nature. Hence these ends are not given us by the object.”(Part II P.53)

So we cannot say categorically, Kant continues, that “There is a God”– we can only represent the world we experience as the product of a divine architect, i.e. of a God. There is, therefore, no alternative but to think about objects exceeding the capacity of our understanding in terms of the:

“subjective conditions necessarily attaching to our human nature in the exercise of its faculties.” Part II P.58)

Such reflections cannot just assume the idea of an unconditioned original foundation of nature. Instead we read into nature a form of finality: a matter of judgement, not of understanding. The problem with the linking together of mechanical and teleological explanation, is partly the problem of finding a common source for both. Kant claims that this source is the supersensible substrate of reality. Being part of the noumenal realm of Being, we cannot form a conception of this source, though perhaps we can in some sense indicate or show what we are reflecting upon.

Kant asks the question “What branch of knowledge does Teleology belong to?”, and rejects the alternatives of natural science and theology in favour of claiming that teleology is better characterised as the “method of critique” used by the faculty of judgement. This method, Kant argues further, proceeds according to a priori principles. This continues to be a philosophy of limitation which is well expressed in the following:

“For the mode of representation based on final causes is only a subjective condition of the exercise of our reason in cases where it is not seeking to know the proper estimate of the form of objects arranged merely as phenomena, but is bent rather on referring these phenomena, principles, to their sensible substrate, for the purpose of recognising the possibility of certain laws of their unity, which are incapable of being figured by the mind otherwise than by means of ends( of which reason also possesses examples of the supersensuous type) (Part II P.91-2)

Kant refuses to regard man as the peak of creation in the light of his frailty in the face of the mega-forces of nature and also because we harbour destructive tendencies that are more than capable of bringing the species to ruin and destruction. The only characterisation of man’s telos that Kant is prepared to endorse is his freedom in his choice of ends, especially those cases in which the free action conceived of is aiming at “The Good”. Kant also distinguishes between civilisation and its instrumental works (means to ends) and Culture and its categorical works (focussing upon ends-in-themselves). What is highlighted in this discussion is the critical distinction between good works of skill (techné) and good works of knowledge (epistemé). The latter rely on an absolute of “the good will” which:

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

There are in these reflections an echo of a distinct concern of Socrates who never directly endorsed the “fevered” city of Plato’s Republic. He never produced arguments to abandon the picture of the healthy city he painted in the early books of The Republic: a city obeying one principle–the principle of specialisation (a city without warriors or philosophers). In the “fevered city” we encounter desires out of control, and privileged individuals oppressing others less fortunate than themselves, chaining them to a form of existence that is undignified. Kant’s solution to this problem is not to conceive of a city ruled by philosophers telling “noble lies”, but rather to conceive of a culture whose constitution contains laws which prevent the infringement of the freedoms of any individual. This, Kant continues to argue, can only occur if we develop a system of states that is cosmopolitan– a system which prevents one state infringing upon the freedom of another state. Without such a system “war is an inevitable outcome”(P.96).

Kant further argues that the role of the arts and sciences in such a culture is to prepare man for the adventure of freedom. The utilitarian pseudo-argument that mans telos or final end is happiness is dismissed many times throughout all three Critiques. The Critique of the Power of Judgement uses the following argument:

“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 s less than nothing. For who would enter life afresh under the same conditions? Who would even do so according to a new self-developed plan (which should, however, follow the course of nature) if it also were merely directed to enjoyment? We have shown above what value life receives from what it involves when lived according to the end with which nature is occupied in us, and which consists in what we do, not merely what we enjoy, we being, however, in that case always but a means to an undetermined end. 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.(Part II ftnt P-97-8)

The implication of this argument is that everything in nature is conditioned by the supersensible substrate, including our internal thinking nature. Man, that is, has a supersensible noumenal aspect that is manifested in his freedom and moral action, and this is well illustrated in Kant’s “parable of the waterfall” (a discussion of mans relation to “the Sublime”). Confronted by “dunamis” or the power of a mighty waterfall, mans first response is awe and wonder in the face of this force of nature but this, however, is quickly displaced by a positive estimation of his own power of freedom to act as a moral agent. This for Kant is the sublime unconditioned noumenon that lies at the heart of all conditioned phenomena. Happiness, Kant points out, is variable, and cannot therefore be the true end of human existence: it appears to vary within the same individual at different times of his life. If I am ill, my health makes me happy, but if I am healthy but poor, wealth appears to make me happy until fear of losing my fortune forces me to pursue power to preserve my fortune. This fear, however, is then replaced with the fear of losing my power. Happiness also appears to vary between different individuals: what makes Bentham happy does not appear to make Kant happy. Nevertheless, Kant maintains, happiness is part of the summum bonum of life, but only if it is a supervening consequence of a good will and moral activity. It is in relation to these kinds of reflections that man forms an idea of an architect or author of the world: an idea which ensures that the good-in-itself is necessarily related to good consequences (eudaimonia–a good spirited flourishing life). These ideas embedded in these reflections are regarded by Kant as subjectively practical but emanating from our reason as they do, they are nevertheless important and necessary and resemble principles that can regulate our existence. These ideas are also practically real and transcendentally possible and related to the principle of sufficient reason. This matrix of ideas and principles then forms the conviction that becomes part of our faith in a transcendental Being. Transcendent objects of thought are apriori and also:

“mere matters of faith”(Part II P.142)

This true reflective form of faith differs from the kind of faith that is built upon historical narratives and personalities. It is also in this region that the philosophical distinction between facts and values lie. Faith is:

“the moral attitude of reason, in its assurance of the truth of what is beyond the reach of theoretical knowledge.”(P.145)

This is probably what Plato had in mind when he placed the idea or form of the Good above that of The Truth in the metaphysical reasoning he presented in The Republic. Kant elaborates upon this thought in terms of freedom, and claims that faith has its foundations in the practical reality and transcendental possibility of freedom. Christianity appears to lean very heavily on historical narrative and personalities but Kant has a great respect for this religion which also places emphasis upon mans moral life:

“But this is not the only case in which this wonderful religion has in the great simplicity of its statement enriched philosophy with far more definite and purer conceptions of morality than morality itself could have previously supplied. But once these conceptions are found, they are freely approved by reason, which adopts them as conceptions which it could quite well have arrived at itself and which it might and ought to have introduced.”(P.146)

Faith also relates to the idea of the soul, but there are great difficulties in the representation of this supersensible, noumenal aspect of ourselves which historically became characterised as “immortal” because it clearly is a representation that must be disconnected from the time-conditions of experience. This, however, does not entail that the soul is substantially timeless, unless by “substantially” one means “in principle”. One can claim that the soul is, in principle, timeless because its time conditions appear to be the same as the time conditions of ideas which must necessarily exist as long as there are humans thinking these ideas. Ideas, however, do not appear to possess the practical reality that actions do, and it is for this reason that Kant proposes that freedom proves its own objective reality:

“of the three ideas of pure reason, God freedom and immortality, that of freedom is the one and only one conception of the supersensible which(owing to the causality implied in it) proves its objective reality in nature by its possible affect there. By this means it makes possible the connection of the two other ideas with nature and the connection of all three to form a religion.”(P.149)

The surprising inclusion of freedom as an important component of religion has startling consequences when it comes to interpreting the historical narratives of the Bible. We discussed the parable of “The Garden of Eden” earlier in this work, and questioned the ecclesiastical interpretation which claimed that this was a story about “The Fall” of man from the Grace of God–a narrative about the disobedience of man partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. On a Kantian interpretation, this story is obviously an anxious moment in mans history, because it is a moment in which instinct was left behind as an organiser of mans life, and a choice had to be made as to whether one ought to place ones faith in knowledge. This was clearly a moment of freedom, of emancipation, and characterising it as a fall from the Grace of God merely testifies to the primitive idea of God man must have had at this time. God is undoubtedly an important part of the supersensible noumenal substrate, and as such is going to present difficulties in the attempt to represent this form of Being. To recognise our duties as divine commands is testimony to the fact that whilst we are potentially rational beings, we are not as yet (as a species) actually so. Hence the command structure of the categorical imperative and ought matrix of concepts that lie at the foundation of our moral intentions and actions. Nevertheless it is still reasonable to pose the question “What is it that we have an obligation towards?”. There appear to be three possible answers to such a question:

  1. Being
  2. Ourselves
  3. to the potentiality of the species

All three answers may be correct if elaborated upon in a Kantian spirit. Conceiving of God as a Prime mover as Aristotle does is criticised by Kant on the grounds of it requiring a definite conception of a form of Being in relation to the Category of Causality. This, for Kant, is a confusion of different aspects of the thinking process. Aristotle also, we know, used the term “Primary Form” in the sense of “Primary Principle” to represent God and this formulation of the power of the divine appears to be more in line with Kantian thinking.

Kant proposes using the term “intelligence” to characterise the being of God and his “activity” and there is a clear risk of anthropomorphising the principle that is being referred to : confusing an idea of reason with something that appears to be connected (at least in the modern mind) with the categories of understanding. Hughes in his work on the Critique of the power of judgement equates intelligence with:

“the teleological cause of the object”(P.49)

If however purposiveness is also implied in this telos, then there is a risk of it being reduced to concrete purposes and this will confound any thinking which sees intelligence to be a manifestation of a principle (e.g. areté). Any principle equated with the “intelligence” of God would, of course be far beyond the reach of human understanding and reason. Our understanding is limited to representing this Being in terms of formal and final causes and presumably material and efficient causes or any form of “mechanical” characterisation would be otiose (using the principle of sufficient reason as the logical standard)

The presence of “analogous thinking” in any characterisation of the telos of living beings is elaborated upon by Kant in his claim that living organisms are both cause and effect of themselves: they cause, i.e. both their own activity and the reproduction of their kinds. The difference between the telos of living organisms and the teleological explanation of the divine principle is that in the former case the principle is likened unto a plan or goal of action, whereas in the latter case, there can be no conceivable separation between a plan and its outcome i.e. no separation between God’s contemplation of a change and that change coming about: everything is actual and the potential dissipates and this is the explanation of our earlier point that God, the principle, is not subject to experiential time-conditions. Both Aristotle and Kant believe that the telos or natural purpose of the living organism is internal to that organism. Such organisms are actualising their potentials under sequential time conditions. Taking the example of a rose, the principle of the telos of roses is internalised, but the question is whether this is related to the aesthetic idea of the form of finality of the rose that we find beautiful. These two aspects are clearly different since in the aesthetic appreciation of the rose we are not exploring the properties of the rose with a view to classifying it as such. We may however be appreciating the psuche of the rose. Now whilst life itself cannot be said to have a telos, different forms of life clearly do. The activity of the harmony of the faculties occurs only in relation to objects manifesting themselves aesthetically and this is clearly happening when we appreciate the life form of the rose.

Does nature as a whole have a purpose? Well, life forms would have natural purposes on Kant’s account and together would constitute a “system of purposes”. The question that arises is how to characterise Gods role in this system of purposes. Is the principle internalised in the system or does it stand at the boundary of the system as the physical eye does to the visual field? Kant’s challenge is a reflective one and not directed at understanding what by definition lies outside. There can then, be no definition of God and we are then challenged to follow Plato’s example when he could no longer give an account in terms of the principle of sufficient reason. Plato’s response to this state of affairs is to present us with analogies or allegories, and this is what we must do in our attempts to represent the God-principle. We ought that is to look at both nature as a system of purposes and the role of God in this system in terms of metaphor or analogy. The Being of God ,for example, can be represented as if it were an architect or supersensible intelligence. This amounts to claiming that the God-principle is a regulative idea in our minds. This complex form of existence of the God-idea or God-principle clearly is a contributory factor involved in the difficulty of maintaining a large community in which this principle or idea is revered.

Modernist conceptions of the world are bipolar—whatever exists must be subject to observation or manipulation, and if ideas can neither be observed nor manipulated in such a relatively primitive sensory-motor system, such ideas have no form of existence. We can, on this account, only have knowledge of what exists. Thoughts are parsed in this sensory motor system as particular items that could vary depending upon which private chamber of consciousness they reside in. They might have a particular psychological relation to the chamber they inhabit but they have the quality of sensations which can only privately “felt”.

For many the acid test of teleology is in the experiencing of life forms and the above account seemingly makes it impossible to see the manifestation of these life forms in their activity. This may to some extent be so in the case of being a human form of life and also in our attempts to “read” the behaviour of other animal life forms: analogous thinking may be required to understand some aspects of what we are experiencing. We humans, from hylomorphic and critical perspectives, stand in the middle of a continuum of life forms. We certainly need to apply analogous thinking to activity connected to the God-principle or God-idea especially when it concerns trying to understand the role of such a principle or idea in natures system of purposes. It could be argued that in some respect we “participate” in the “form” of the divine via the actualisation of our potentiality for rationality in a similar way to the way in which we “participate” in the “form” of animality in the context of attempting to understand the behaviour of non human animal forms of life. Our attempts to understand pure matter and pure form as presented in the Aristotelian system are also problematic because in the former case our sensory-motor and thought systems may well “disguise” the true nature of what we are experiencing, and in the latter case we are encountering a form that is not physically embodied. The brain (the most complex object in the universe), for example, according to Gerald Edelstam in his work “Bright Air brilliant fire” is “merely” organised carbon, hydrogen oxygen nitrogen sulphur phosphate and a few trace metals. It is, Edelstam argues, the organisation of this material that makes a brain a brain.

That we are dealing with analogous thinking is manifested in Kant’s first Critique when it is claimed that insofar as our search for, and reliance upon knowledge, is concerned, we are organising our experience rationally for the purpose of acquiring empirical knowledge via observation and conceptualisation. “Construction” is involved in this activity of processing by two different cognitive faculties and as we pointed out above this might “disguise the true nature of “things-in-themselves”–the supersensible substrate. How can we, then, even think such a possibility? We do, Kant argues have some limited kind of contact with this noumenal realm in our moral activity–contact with people as ends-in-themselves and contact via thought with a future kingdom of ends which better manifests these ends-in-themselves. Given the structure of our sensory motor activity and limitations of conceptualisation activity, we have no choice, Kant argues, but to use analogous thinking in reflections about nature in itself and the God principle in itself. Conceiving of this principle as a primary form or an intelligent architect ought, then, to be conceived of analogously or metaphorically because we are dealing with a non material non observational a priori “principle”. Being a principle entails that God’s “thinking activity” is “deductive” “moving” from wholes to parts instantaneously. Whether one wishes to call this strategy related to analogy “projection” or not depends to a large extent on what one understands by this term. The form of existence of this divine form of intelligence is both beyond our knowledge and to some extent beyond our capacity to think something about this form. This is why many thinkers, in an attempt to explain exactly what it is they have faith in, end up throwing up their hands in despair and proclaiming “God must exist!” Kant’s explanation also arrives at this conclusion via an account that stretches over a number of works including one specifically aiming at the presentation of theological difficulties with the problem of the existence of God(Religion within the bounds of reason alone).

The ” new men”, Descartes and Hobbes, regarded life-forms as “mechanical” and Descartes barbaric experiments on unaesthetised animals indicate a form of disrespect for life forms we have not encountered by Philosophers before. Such examples also testify to the extent to which mechanical explanations with the aid of mathematics fail to meet the requirements of the principle of sufficient reason. We should recall in the context of this discussion Kant’s claim that mechanical explanations fail even to meet this requirement insofar as explaining the existence of a blade of grass is concerned.

Aesthetic reflection places us at a psychic distance from scientific investigation in general and mechanical explanation in particular, partly because it is disinterested and partly because of its refusal to think in terms of possibilities and necessities (categories of the understanding). In many respects aesthetic judgement manifests an interesting combination of two of the major cognitive faculties in its representing activity. The particular is perceived and the imagination is engaged in a search for a universal that is not categorical. In this process we intuit(sense) the form of finality of nature, e.g. we do not perceive the rose as a botanist might but rather see it as a life form striving to preserve itself in its form of existence. Involved in this process of reflection is also the seeing of the rose as being the manifestation of the “work” of a divine intelligence. This form of speculative reflection leads us back(via a different route) to God seen under the aspect of the beautiful(as compared with the aspects of the Truth and The Good). Reflective judgement thus bears some relation to moral judgement which provoked Kant to claim that beauty is the symbol of morality and furthermore prepares the mind for ethical understanding. The life-form of the human being is the most interesting aspect of one form of aesthetic judgement perhaps because of this intimate connection with our moral natures. In this respect humans are not simple beauties such as flowers but nevertheless “partake” of the form of the beautiful. In judging that a human being is beautiful we are estimating this part of nature as if it were a work of art. We cannot, however look at all nature in this way because we are well aware of the devastating impact of forces of nature on human civilisations: tsunamis, earthquakes, and massive volcanic activity regularly cause widespread ruin and destruction in relation to humans and everything created by humans. We spontaneously and naturally judge such events to be in some sense “evil” exactly because of the fact that we “project” the good onto works of nature and in an act of further reflection attribute these good works to the divine artist. We do not normally attribute natural catastrophes and disasters to anything divine, however.

One of Freud’s thoughts in the context of this discussion orbits around the idea of religion being a “delusion”: he claims namely that religion is the unhealthy projection of psychotic minds. In earlier discussions of this claim we suggested that it was not absolutely clear what the target of the Freudian attack was. The fact that Freud claimed his Psychology was Kantian would suggest that Freud would not place the Kantian interpretation of nature as art or the work of the divine artist, in the same category. Freud may, that is, have been talking about “patients” and their religious tendencies to “Project” their anxieties and wish fulfillments into a being that in the end is a substitute for the father they wish they had. These patients appear to dwell permanently in the realm of an imagination plagued by anxieties and desires they cannot control. It almost seems impossible for them to move reflectively toward the realms of understanding and reason and do the work of interpretation needed for genuine religious understanding.

Kant’s characterisation of the divine principle or law-giver is in terms of omniscience, being all-good, all-powerful, all knowing, absolutely just, absolutely wise, eternal, and One. This might be how Aristotle conceived of Primary Form. There may however be other aspects of the divine form that escapes us. Spinoza, we know, conceived of God in terms of a substance possessing an infinite number of dimensions. We humans, Spinoza claims only know of God under two aspects: namely thought and extension.

On Kant’s gravestone there is a quote relating to the two things that evoke awe and wonder in the human mind: the starry sky above and the moral law within. Scientists, when conducting their experiments are not reflecting aesthetically upon the parts of the world they are concerned with, and furthermore they would not know what to do with the result of an experiment with humans which resulted if the subjects responded with awe and wonder at the experiment. Kant, however much respect he had for science and the manipulation and measurement of dependent and independent variables was Philosophically less interested in the confirmation or verification of imagined hypotheses and more interested in investigating aspects of being that generate awe and wonder. In his transcendental investigations into human and divine existence, judgement obviously played an important role whether it be aesthetic or teleological.

A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Volume 4 The legacy of Aristotle today: Ethics, Politics, Theology, Aesthetics.

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The Enlightenment is an era in which the hylomorphic Philosophy of Aristotle transforms itself into a broader metaphysical view in which it is claimed that the practical reasoning governing our conduct is regulated by both principles and a moral law. One aspect of this transformation was a more formal reorganisation of the Aristotelian ideas of arché and psuche, in relation to the arts and sciences involved in leading the good spirited flourishing life( eudaimonia). In this reorganisation perhaps the biological determinants of psuche fell away in favour of the more psychologically oriented determinants. We maintain, however, that the essence-specifying definition of Aristotle, namely rational animal capable of discourse, is embraced by Kant, and this can be seen in the later elaboration upon Kantian Philosophy by Freud’s Philosophical Psychology. This aspect is best manifested in Kant´s work “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”. Kant’s reorganisation emphasises also the primacy of practical reasoning and a system of concepts orbiting around the theme of agency and the categorical activity of Action. Action for Kant, retains the quality of bringing about good in an environment of a world “worlding”, and subjecting oneself to events that happen: events calling upon the agent for action. In this arena of reasoning the account we are given, or the “logos” of the phenomena we encounter, refers to world-building instrumental actions that transmit the “forms” of children, artefacts(houses etc) and important ideas in the community. For Kant, as for Aristotle, Action and all forms of activity aim at goods-in-themselves such as health, courage, justice, and wisdom, (in the spirit of areté, arché, diké, eros, and eudaimonia). Kant’s Political Philosophy can also be seen to be a sophisticated elaboration upon the hylomorphic naturalism of Aristotelianism : one which, coming as it does millennia after the fall of city states to the empire-builders, proposes a view of a cosmopolitan fully global “kingdom” of ends lying one hundred thousand years in the future (a kingdom that will be based on universal human rights which could not exist without acceptance of the categorical imperative of a moral law). In this account Kant embraces the necessity of mans social/political nature, a necessity that requires “good” laws and public education to realise human potential to the full. Kant also shares with Aristotle an appreciation of the value of religion. There is perhaps a shift away from the centrality of the theoretical idea of God, toward the practical idea of the freedom but there is nevertheless a firm commitment to an idea of the divine and the sacred that sees man’s rationality as limited in form compared to the thought of eternal unchanging Being whose primary form surpasses our limited understanding. The good will, for Kant, is the will guided by the forms or principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and he often refers to this absolute in terms of the “holy will”. Man may be composed of the material of “crooked timber” (his animality) but he has sublime potential whch can be realised in actualisation processes that occur with the assistance of principles: processes that aim at the ultimate good of a kingdom of ends.

The focus upon the practical idea of Freedom was undoubtedly a Kantian contribution which to some extent revised hylomorphic ethical and political philosophy. The idea that “everything created by man was destined for ruin and destruction” was a reference by the oracle, not just to the crooked timber of humanity, but also to the way in which the potential to become a good being, with a good will, living in a good community was being stifled by the ways in which we were choosing to organise these communities. The Aristotelian focus upon justice needed to be complemented by an idea of freedom that respected universal human rights and this in turn required the political creation of an international institution whose responsibility it was to protect these human rights internationally(The United Nations).

Centuries of discussion of the idea of “I think therefore I am” enabled the construction of a very abstract and theoretical idea of consciousness and this discussion was certainly on Kant’s mind when he was formulating his critical Philosophy. Criticism of the Philosophies of the “new men”, e.g. Descartes and Hobbes, with arguments resembling those used by Aristotle to criticise the dualism and materialism of his time was a priority of the Kantian agenda. The Kantian “architectonic” of the canon of sciences resting upon a metaphysical and logical foundation, was also reminiscent of the Aristotelian project. Kant, however, does not seek to authenticate the proliferation of university subjects of his time and probably was suspicious of both the principle of specialisation that reflected the guild structure of the towns and cities of the time and the instrumental/pragmatic spirit in which many subjects were taught. The new men had certainly succeeded in launching a search for what was new and different at the expense of “first principles”. The Enlightenment spirit of “sapere aude” was, with the advent of Hegelian Philosophy, being diluted by a spirit in which some felt that everything was possible, and many felt that nothing was possible anymore. The real realm of possibility was obscured by the self obsessed fantasy constructions of a manic-depressive mentality.

The Spirit of the Enlightenment, up to the point of Hegel’s appearance, rivalled the Spirit of the Golden Age of Greece. Hegel, it can be argued constructed a form of idealism in which the retinal image of Culture was turned upside down and the world was seen through a pair of Stratton spectacles darkly—North became South in the name of dialectical logic. It would not be, however, until the World was ravaged by two World Wars in the twentieth century, that an attempt was made to remove the spectacles and see real possibilities again. In the interim, Freudian Psychology would chart the contours of insanity in the spirit of Kantian Psychology, and in a way that acknowledged mans instinctive endowment in hylomorphic terms. After the second world war an old Kantian “possibility” was realised with the creation of the United Nations and the war against totalitarianism was fought on the terrain of human rights. The metaphysics of Morality had condensed from a cloud of potentiality into the actuality of a global organisation. The metaphysics of Politics also began to return to the Aristotelian idea of the “Politics of the golden mean” and public education began the task of educating the “classical” middle class of men. Both freedom and justice were important ideas in the restoration of what had been lost. Restoration was also on the agenda of the later Wittgenstein when he retreated from his earlier position of reductive logical atomism, and began using Aristotelian phrases such as “forms of life” in the context of a Philosophy of Action that was neither behaviourist nor pragmatic, but shared some of the commitments of hylomorphic and critical rationalism. The unique focus of Wittgenstein was however on the medium of communication, namely language, but it nevertheless succeeded in providing the philosophical community with arguments against logical atomism, logical positivism, non hylomorphic forms of naturalism, instrumentalism, pragmatism, phenomenalism, existentialism etc. This reshaped the philosophical landscape sufficiently for both hylomorphism and critical Philosophy to reemerge as significant historical landmarks. Wittgenstein insisted that Language had a rational structure and thereby avoided the relativism associated with a blunt “language creates the world” formula. For Wittgenstein grammatical investigations were essence specifying activities and therefore presupposed the rational principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason shared by both Aristotle and Kant. Language–for Wittgenstein–was an activity embedded in a form of life and had the teleological function of aiming at the good. Whether the concept of “language-games” embedded in these forms of life was a useful one or not remains to be fully evaluated. A game is minimally constituted of moves (e.g. Kn to QB4), rules, and principles(Protect your queen) but somehow the seriousness of the world appears to be missing in such an idea. Both life and the issue of the quality of life are serious matters and reducing them to conventional regulation by rules would not be taken seriously by either Aristotle and Kant. Neither Philosopher would for example consider viewing the laws regulating life and the quality of ones life in a society as arbitrarily conventional. The idea of the rule governed game does however have the advantage of closing down the number of real possibilities that can occur in the course of the development of sequence of events. The number of possible “moves” of possible “agents” is circumscribed and because it is so, is amenable to mathematical calculation using Bayes’ theorem (the probability of an event occurring is determined by the information we have relating to that event). If the field of variables to be calculated is indeterminate or “open”, no value can be calculated. The idea of a game(being a closed field of variables) therefore, is one way of introducing mathematics into the arena of the social sciences, but it is important to note that the introduction of this concept is at best hypothetical (if human activity is regulated by rules, then we can determine its value). Both Plato and Aristotle would regard the introduction of mathematics into the field of human action as problematic on the grounds that mathematics manipulates abstract images of things rather than those things themselves. Games and images. for serious philosophers concerned with Being qua being and first principles, do not engage with the seriousness of life and its catastrophes and calamities each of which is capable of bringing the ruin and destruction of all our hopes and desires. It is this latter aspect of life that is the concern of Ethics and the categorical forms of language that govern this region of our existence. Kant went in search of an absolute in the arena of ethics and found it in the form of the idea of the good will. To use a Wittgensteinian metaphor to describe this hylomorphic “move”, one could claim that a cloud of practical Philosophy was condensed into a drop of Philosophical Psychology. One needs, however, to detach the idea of a game from this reflection and insert the idea of a good will into a hylomorphic framework of first principles, thought, self-knowledge, and self-sufficiency for it to become completely intelligible. The essence- specifying definition of man as a rational animal capable of discourse also needs to be part of the apparatus of explanation/justification. Practical reasoning and first principles govern the “moves” that can be made in the ought-system of concepts we encounter in the arena of the explanation/justification of actions that aim at both the good in itself, and the good in its consequences. Universality and necessity are important features of reasoning in this system of concepts.

Needless to say, the introduction of a Cartesian inspired idea of consciousness into such a context of explanation/justification is merely going to destabilise the system. Kant in his willingness to divide the whole of the mind into the parts of Sensibility , Understanding, and Reason, does however invite a non Cartesian idea of Consciousness into the arena—an invitation that would later be accepted by Freud when he constructed a topography of forms of Consciousness differentiated into the agencies of the ego, id and superego. The three principles of Energy-Regulation, Pleasure-Pain and Reality could well have come from Freud’s reading of Aristotle earlier in his career. These are not first principles but rather domain-regulating principles that presume a self actualising process over a long childhood of living among the discontents of civilisation. Hughlings Jackson was also an influence on the Freudian neurological account of higher centres interacting with lower centres. The language centres of the brain and Language as an activity of the mind obviously stretches over the domains of sensibility and understanding and perhaps over the domain of reason too. It plays an important role in the Freudian system by being the medium through which preconscious and unconscious items are brought into the “light” of consciousness which itself, according to Freud, has an instinctive base and is in fact a vicissitude of instinct. Language for Freud engages with both sensibility and thought in its various forms and becomes not just the medium of disclosure of difficult to access thoughts and feelings, but is also connected in a complex way to the memory system which is used in the process of “the talking cure”. The compulsion to repeat traumatic events over and over again, for example, is partly caused by the inability to “remember” these events in the normal way ( which enables the thought of the event to fade in intensity over time).

For Kant the idea of a form of life stretches from the animal/instinctive to the rational animal capable of discourse, and to the divine will that is not limited by the lifetime of physical organ systems that can fail with trauma or age. This continuum testifies to the inherent tragedy of the human condition that can lose the gift that makes it what it is. The form of life of the divine is unchanging for both Aristotle and Kant.

The Gods of course were the subject of Homeric concern and Homer was on Plato’s mind when he considered excluding artists from his ideal Republic. Homer we know portrayed divine beings as quarrelling, deceptive beings, using humanity as a means to their selfish ends. This called into question one of the essence-specifying features of divine beings, namely, that they ought to be necessarily good. Aristotle too would have objected to the contamination of the idea of the divine with human qualities. Kant speaks of the divine life in terms of the holy will but does not attribute physical action to this form of life and thereby shares with the Greeks the idea that even conceiving of the divine as acting to create the universe is inconceivable and requires an intermediate form of life , e.g. the demiurge.

Aesthetic creations of artists are activities, therefore, that ought to aim at the good in the spirit of areté and this is one way in which “forms” are communicated in the polis. The other two types of forms that assist in the building of civilised communities are the reproduction of children for these communities and the transmission of “good” ideas in the name of education. These latter ideas are the most important and in this respect insofar as artists take upon themselves this role they ought to respect the integrity of these ideas. In aesthetic contexts, for Kant, we communicate ideas of reason using categories of judgement. The best forms of art will strive to produce objects that help to explain the mysteries of human life and existence, thus promoting a self understanding that is part of the Delphic project for rational animals capable of discourse, namely to “know themselves”. These objects are presented as goods-in-themselves in a context that requires a certain amount of psychic distancing from the everyday instrumental concerns of life. They also require a culture in which understanding of the media of artistic communication is an important part of the process of building a civilisation. Art, in the Aristotelian architectonic of his scientific curriculum is a productive science which nevertheless has necessary connections with Truth and the theoretical sciences as well as “the Good” that is aimed at by the practical sciences. It was the work of Aristotle that suggested the definition of Philosophy as the systematic understanding of the world as a systematic whole. Kant continued this tradition by claiming that reason seeks for the totality of conditions for anything that happens or requires explanation or justification.

There are differences between the projects of Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy but we have argued in this work that the differences lie on a continuum at least insofar as basic principles and worldview are concerned. In the 20th century a contrary view emerged in relation to the Ethics of the above two systems. Let us examine this further by referring to a relatively recent work by Gerard J Hughes entitled “Aristotle on Ethics”(London, Routledge, 2001). Hughes confirms the connection we are proposing in his outline of the topic, structure and aim of Aristotle’s ethics:

“What do we aim at in life?What is it that would make living worthwhile? A worthwhile life must surely involve developing our specifically human characteristics to the full.How could we find out what those are?Upon reflection we can see that what is most characteristically human about ourselves is the way in which thought colours all our lives–not just intellectual pursuits, but also our feelings and emotions, our choices and relationships. So we start by considering the was which thought influences those traits of character which contribute to living a worthwhile fulfilled life…We need to think about choice and responsibility in more detail.”(P.11)

The conditions for understanding the meaning of these reflections are embedded in the Greek language: in the meaning of the words, areté, diké, arché. epistemé, eros, ananke, and eudaimonia. Responsibility and choice presuppose freedom as well as the right view of akrasia (weakness of the will) which, according to Aristotle, is a failure of rationality. The Nichomachean Ethics is crystal clear in its position that all activities aim at the good and the specific relation to epistemé insofar as ethical activities are concerned is that if we know the good we will do it. Akrasia, then, as a phenomenon, is characterised as a kind of confusion caused by the cognitive system being overwhelmed by intense desires , emotions etc, in a similar way in which the functions of the body are overwhelmed by the overconsumption of alcohol. This confusion can neutralise the activation of the knowledge we have of the premises constituting the reasons for the action concerned —so the knowledge lays dormant in the system because other systems relating to the sensible part of the mind are using all available energy for their purposes.

Ethics and Politics are both Practical sciences and aim at the good, not theoretically, but with the aim of becoming Good, i.e. to possess in Kantian terms a good will. Kant. like Aristotle, views this matter in terms of the principles of logic regulating premises, e.g.

Promises ought to be kept

Jack promised Jill he would pay the money back he borrowed from her

Therfore

Jack ought to pay Jill the money he owes her

The above argument mirrors the typical form of an ought argument that refers to the virtues of Promising and honesty. We see in this argument the integration of truthfulness and areté (doing the right thing at the right time in the right way). The ought major premise is a necessary warrant for the formulation of the intention to do a particular action. Promises, we know are not merely ethically important, they are of central importance to the process of ruling in civilisation-building political activity. Promising is the arché of Politics, and is intimately related to the demand placed upon the shoulders of politicians to take responsibility. The Greeks were the first to begin the understanding of these virtues in the context of Political Power. Dunamis is one Greek term for power and this concept is closely related to the hylomorphic ideas involved with the actualising of potential. It is also itself an idea that responds to Glaucon’s challenge in the Republic to prove that Justice (diké) is both good in itself and good in its consequences. Power in the Greek philosophical mind was related to the sacred and the divine and thereby possessed both a civic aspect as well as a divine aspect. Dunamus was therefore a characteristic of the divine being, and therefore something sublime and mysterious. Using the power of the law to bring Socrates to justice, for many intellectuals of the time, was a sacrilegious act because the power that brought people together was a divine power and it was clear at least to them that Socrates was aiming at the good in his philosophical activities in the agora. The Latin term religio contains an interesting reference to binding things together that might otherwise fall apart or fragment. The idea of diké, (Justice), on the other hand, contains the meaning of separating things that do not belong together–perhaps we can conceive of this as the drawing of a line between those possessing a good will (Socrates) and those that are weak willed (his accusers). Justice also carries with it a consequentialist idea relating to its recipients deserving what they get out of life, and here we can see the importance of the role of the system relying on agents of justice acting with a good will. That was not the case with the accusers of Socrates and a miscarriage was the inevitable result. Socrates was accused of bringing new Gods into the polis and corrupting the minds of the youth. The accusers of Socrates were, then, not just guilty of abusing a legal system but they were also defiling what was sacred.

The next great era of Cultural restoration after the Golden Age of Ancient Greece began with the Renaissance and culminated in the Enlightenment. In these centuries there was an intensification of all forms of human activity but particularly in the arenas of Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics, and Theology. Politics was becoming more and more important than Theology, and Aesthetics was also threatening to displace Ethics at the level of individual action. The science of physics was also growing in importance. Generally in cognitive terms there was a move away from justification in terms of the principles of reason and understanding, and toward explanation in terms of the principles of judgement. The Kantian response to this state of affairs was to shift the focus of Philosophy from Theoretical rationality to Practical rationality, to crush pseudo-metaphysical projects, and to initiate reflection into several central issues in the arena of Philosophical Psychology. In doing so he retained the relation of the Sublime to both Ethics and Theology. The practical idea of Freedom replaced the theoretical idea of God as the central metaphysical concern, and became a central focus of both cultural and political activity. Hegel, of course, was to destroy this web of relations with an idea of Spirit embedded in a form of dialectical reasoning best suited to contexts of exploration/discovery rather than contexts of explanation/justification. For Hegel, the development of mans Sensibilities became more important than the development of his intellectual powers of understanding and reason. Hegel’s criticism of Kant led eventually to a Romantic idea of man as sufficient unto himself, as long as he follows his instincts, emotions and passions. It was this “spirit” that was instrumental in forming the idea of heroic men for whom “everything was possible”, even if the vast mass of men were beginning to feel “nothing was possible anymore”. Kant’s Critical Philosophy along with its underlying hylomorphic commitments was submerged in this new form of populism that appeared to be able to create mass movements that would later play a catastrophic role in the political events of the 20th century where both fascism and communism found soil in which to flourish. The Aristotelian idea that Politics ought to concern itself with noble and just actions was washed away by waves of selfish pity and fear. The Aesthetic object and its descriptions of of the sensible activity of man (his feelings, emotions, passions) occupied the public stage and distracted attention from more complex explanations and justifications of world-events. The world lost its depth, and inner exploration and discovery supplanted external objective concerns. The relation between areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) and eudaimonia (leading the good spirited flourishing life)was ruptured. One curious consequence of this state of affairs and the intellectual reaction to it was the elevation of a mathematical form of arché (axioms) above forms of explanations/justifications such as the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. This, some observers have noted, may have been an inheritance of the Cartesian conception of the external world in terms of a system of coordinates( by a system of thought that confirmed the existence of man in the bare terms of the Cogito argument). God “saved” the whole Cartesian system from collapsing by guaranteeing that life was not a dream that we might at any moment awake from. At the beginning of the 20th century this commitment to mathematical forms of reasoning focussed upon German idealism as the source of fundamental confusions about the nature of reality. For some obscure reason both Kant’s Critical Philosophy and Hegel’s historical actualisation of world spirit were placed inside the same pair of brackets. The Kantian arguments against materialism and dualism of the Cartesian kind were disregarded and these oppositions unsurprisingly emerged in new forms. The idea of Consciousness also emerged as an organising principle of experience and the imagination was appealed to as an important power of thought. Heidegger’s reflections on this era of our history pointed to what he called a “forgetfulness of Being” but it nevertheless criticised Kantian appeals to Ancient rational principles and claimed that Kant had missed an opportunity to rest his whole critical philosophy upon the foundation of transcendental imagination. This forgetfulness included the forgetfulness of of the objective rational quality of the good but Heidegger failed to acknowledge this aspect of modernism: a forgetfulness that rejected the Aristotelian argument for the good-in-itself:

“If there is some point to everything we do, something we want for its own sake and which explains why we do everything else, then obviously this has to be the good, the best of all. And there has to be some such point otherwise everything would be chosen for the sake of something else and we would have an infinite regress, with the result that it would be futile and pointless to want anything at all.”(1, 2, 1094a 18-22)

On this account the good spirited flourishing life would also include the qualification that nothing was lacking in such a life and this contributed to making this the most worthwhile of all forms of life: a life that is deserved only by those who have led virtuous lives. Only organisms possessing the powers of discourse and rationality could lead such lives and whilst the power of the imagination might be important for the purposes of correctly conceiving of what is possible and what is not, it is nevertheless the case that the principles of rationality are of greater importance for determining the correctness of ones conceptions.

Aristotle’s requirement that men ought to lead lives of contemplation is partly shared by Kant, but it is not clear whether Kant shares the Aristotelian characterisation of the importance of “theoria” and its connection to thought and the activity of God. It is clear however that our theoretical understanding of this Primary Being that is the manifestation of Pure Form or Pure Principle is limited, and we have more access to this pure form via our practical activities that aim at the good in the realm of the noumenal.

Areté is connected to ethical action or “deeds” in accordance with the following Aristotelian formula:

” So a virtue is a habitual disposition connected with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, a mean which is determined by reason, by which the person of practical wisdom would determine it.”(11, 6, 1106b 36-1107a2)

The above disposition is not connected to the disposition to feel sensations occurring in the sensible part of the mind, because, as Aristotle maintains, no one is praised or blamed for having feelings. Agents are praised or blamed for their choices and their choices build upon the reasons the agents have for doing whatever they have chosen to do. One can praise or blame the agent’s reasons and we can also blame him/her for his/her character. The reference to the golden mean in the above quote is meant to highlight the processes involved in the acquisition of our habits–processes that occur primarily in the context of exploration/discovery. The reasons an agent gives in contexts of explanation/discovery differ significantly from the reasons given in a context of exploration/discovery that occurs largely in the mode of the hypothetical. Sufficient explanation or justification is praised and insufficient explanation/justification is blamed. Self-sufficient justification is of course a key to leading a worthwhile flourishing life. Habits can also have a technical character(techné) in which case we are praised or blamed for a skill we possess as measured by the quality of the objects created by those skills. This contrasts with the ethical case in which it is the reasoning leading to the intention or action that is praised or blamed and there is also an epistemic element related to our knowledge or lack of knowledge of what is good-in-itself. If we build good houses we are called a builder and this instrumental power is praised. The form of praise a man receives for his good will and good character however is a different form of praise and is more desirable because in our scale of values epistemé is more valuable than techné because the former is good in itself and good in its consequences whereas the latter has merely an instrumental value—good in its consequences.

Emotions such as carelessness or cowardice in the course of a battle are what they are, but the praise-blame system will introduce a willingness to transform ones responses into a more rational response. Areté is the key idea to apply here, and a part of its application to the behaviour of soldiers in battle is not just doing the right thing at the right time in the right way, but also perhaps having the right feelings at the right time and both of these can be shaped by discourse and rationality. The man whose character has been shaped by practical reasoning over a long period of time, is called a phronimos, a great-souled man, a virtuous man. He has become the master of the golden mean. The relation of emotions to knowledge is a complex matter involving objects we are concerned with, and ways of of being aware of the world that are regulated by the lower order principles of energy regulation, and pleasure-pain. We know that in emotional states, the world can take on the “colouring” of the emotion. In my anger, I am as likely to lash out at substitute objects as I am at the real cause/object of my anger. In such a state my perception is of a world that is hostile to my agency and intentions. Sartre calls this a magical transformation of the world, but a supplementary account comes from the work of the Later Wittgenstein which showed us how perception in the form of seeing something as something ( a triangle as “half a square” or as having “fallen over”) appears to be half sensibility and half thought. In such an experience, Wittgenstein implies that I can become conscious of myself as organising my experience, especially in those cases where I first see one aspect of the thing and then another. Seeing the triangle as half a square is of course less of a magical transformation than seeing it as having “fallen over”. The emotions, then, might also fall on a continuum of perception and thought and be subject to regulation by different principles. Courage, for example would be a more complex entity than anger and this might explain why we praise agents manifesting the former and blame agents for manifesting the latter. More thought obviously appears to be involved in the former “virtue”(areté). As we ascend the hierarchy of virtues to the wisdom of a phronimos, or ruler of a Republic, the principles involved become more abstract and require more complex explanations that may rely on the kind of knowledge we find in the architectonic of theoretical, practical, and productive sciences. These explanations/justifications will also rest upon “First Philosophy” and the higher order principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.

Wittgenstein once claimed in one of his earlier “Notebooks” that the world of the happy man is a different world to that of the unhappy man. Happiness is of course a precipitate of the good spirited flourishing life, and both Socrates and Aristotle bear witness to the way in which leading examined and contemplative lives are different forms of life to lives that lack these properties. The question “Why?” plays an important role in such lives, as does the accompanying forms of consciousness of awe and wonder at a world and a soul that appears to be susceptible to endless exploration. It is of course not difficult to think of the happy man leading a good spirited flourishing life as someone who systematically deliberates about the Good-in-itself , Good consequences, and Good means to ends. This kind of deliberation occurs naturally in the context of explanation /justification and begins with the arché of first principles, e.g Promises ought to be kept, and ends in a particular verdict/telos of a particular action that ought to be performed. The “attitude” involved in such a deliberation is that of a Kantian judge putting questions in a tribunal whose purpose it is to reason its way to a grounded judgement. The phronimos deliberates in this fashion, in the spirit of areté, proceeding from the arché to the telos.

Perusal of the Greek language used in Athenian courts reveals the use of the terms “hekon” and “hekousion” which Hughes translates as “willingly”. This is the fundamental condition required for holding someone responsible for their actions. Modern philosophical discussions of willed actions involves reference to “intention” which is technically defined (in Anscombe’s work on “Intention”) in terms of the agent seeing his action as falling under a particular description, e.g. “shooting a deer moving in the wood”. If, as a matter of fact, it turns out that I shot my father, it is the task of the tribunal to determine whether the shooting of my father occurred intentionally or not. The presumption is that an investigation will be able to reveal the relevant facts necessary to make such a determination. What I did immediately after ,during, and before, the act may contain decisive evidence, as may what knowledge I had, e.g. did I know my father was in this region of the wood. If I could not have known he was, there the tribunal must find me not guilty of murder, but may well find me guilty of some other criminal act relating to negligence, perhaps because sufficient precautions were not taken before the act of shooting occurred.

For Aristotle, Eros and Philia are the “bonding” conditions that shape families, villages and cities. Kant prefers the term “respect” for the attitude involved in treating people as ends in themselves, whether they be familiar figures or strangers that visit the agora. This respect even for strangers carries with it the expectation that these strangers will both understand and respect the laws of the city. The absolute of the good will that we encounter in the Kantian ethical system we can also encounter in Aristotelian philia toward strangers. Aristotle himself was a stranger in Athens as a young man. Philia is also Aristotles term for friendship and there are three forms of friendship: relations of utility, relations of pleasure, and relations involving the good-in-itself. In relations of utility the parties involved seek mutual utilitarian benefits. In relations of pleasurable transient interaction, the utilitarian relation to the external world is to some extent suspended, e.g. in the case of the meeting with strangers and people one knows in a symposium where the collected company enjoys discourse and feasting together. In the case of the deepest forms of friendship where two people care for each other as ends in themselves, there is in this latter case, as there may not be in the former, a preparedness to sacrifice ones own goods for the person who is ones friend. Here we are clearly dealing with the goods for the soul that are necessary to lead a good spirited flourishing life(eudaimonia).

The difference between Politics and Ethics insofar as Aristotle is concerned is partly due to the fact that political theory is a more abstract reflective elaboration upon ethical principles in the public context of justification we encounter in the arenas of justice. Aristotle’s “justifications” did not extend to arguing for the justification of the existence of the city-state, perhaps because for him it is the mark of an educated man to know when to require a justification and when one is not required because of the self-evident certainty of the issue. For Aristotle it is self evident that the idea of a state is both good-in-itself and good in its consequences as long as the laws governing that state are rationally constituted and respected, i.e they are just laws. Part of the essence of being human involves living in organised communities in which the laws can facilitate actualising processes that will provide one with a reasonable quality of life. We have a need not merely to live (survive) but to live well and this manifests itself in a commitment to public education (communication of knowledge of “the sciences”).

To argue as Hobbes does that the law is mere words unless these words are defended by swords, is to reject Aristotle’s political (hylomorphic) naturalism. The basis for such a rejection is usually based on the claim that the laws of a city are mere artificial conventions necessary to prevent internecine strife in a community. Aristotle’s political views rest on a view of human nature and cultural development that is historically constituted of structures building upon structures, in organic fashion. The family might well survive in a benign environment, if the family was large enough, but, as Hobbes claimed, life in a state of nature would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Families that unite into a village will experience advantages that are both utilitarian and pleasurable but still lacking some of the goods of the external world and most of the goods for the soul that can be provided by a well functioning polis. The family and the village are social structures that are assimilated by the polis. These structures are transformed into a unit of self-sufficiency that provides a quality of life that only knowledge of the Good can bring with it. Our modern obsession with the private individual alone in his chamber of consciousness would have seemed a regressive concern for Aristotle.

Aristotle was very familiar with the political problems of his time partly via the works of Plato and partly via the research of his own school into a large number of constitutions of city-states (158). He develops as a consequence a schema of good and deviant states based on an idea of The Good that rejects “noble lies” and other questionable Platonic practices outlined in “The Republic”. Here “The Good” is characterised as “Aristos”(“the best”)(Shields Aristotle, P 365) and this conception combines the best elements of oligarchy and democracy into a so-called “aristocracy” in which an emerging educated middle class will unite the polis into a self-sufficient unit where peace reigns. It is this form of constitution, Aristotle argues, that will most likely provide the conditions necessary for its citizens to lead a good spirited flourishing life, a virtuous life.

Such a constitution would include respect for techné and allow a free cultural space for rhetoric and poetry. In these activities, which aim at the good, there will be a reliance upon areté, arché and epistemé. The telos of rhetoric, Aristotle argues, is political persuasion via enthymemes and related rational instruments. Rhetoric was of course used (abused?) by the accusers of Socrates to end the philosophers life, but Aristotle would not have regarded this use of pseudo-arguments as legitimate rhetoric. For him the measure of rhetoric was Truth, and this measure was discarded by the accusers of Socrates who were using rhetorical devices for their own utilitarian (technical) ends. This testifies to the weakness of all technical activities–namely, that they can always be detached from the knowledge of the good in itself, and used for evil purposes (consequences). So far as rhetoric is guided by the truth and the good, however, it is rationally constituted and will contain principles that may even be “first principles”.

Poetry for Aristotle, is connected to learning even if there s an element of “imitation” involved. The production of poetry is for the purposes of learning via the imitation of reality. Actors dress up in clothes, imitating real kings and strut about a stage amidst scenery imitative of castles or cities. The words they utter are also imitative of characters they are attempting to portray. This, for Aristotle, is a natural form of learning something about something, e.g. that flatterers are not to be trusted, that kings are not gods etc. Learning such things brings us a non-utilitarian form of pleasure connected to epistemé and the knowledge of the good. We are, in the above examples, clearly learning about the essences of things in practical contexts, especially if the creator of the production is a genius, a great souled writer like Shakespeare. The spirit of tragedy contains necessary references to Thanatos, suffering, and Ananke, all of which are capable of evoking powerful emotions in man, e.g. pity at undeserved suffering and fear of ruin and destruction at the hands of processes we do not fully understand. The question “Why?” looms in tragedies as it does in most other processes of change initiated by humans and if the semblance of an answer suggests itself in the work of the great souled artist this purifies the minds of the audience leaving them in a musing contemplative state. Presumably in such lessons we also learn something about the self that is thrown into the midst of events of considerable magnitude. Even if the tragic work is historical it is not facts as such that are important but rather universal “possibilities” that are suggested in the prophecy of the Greek oracle: “everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. Learning that flatterers are not to be trusted or kings are not gods, then, is a matter of learning about the universal possibilities of tragedy.

Christopher Shields in his work on Aristotle points out in a chapter dedicated to the legacy of Aristotle that his works were not distributed for several hundred years after his death, and when they became available again, the Neo-Platonists dominated the means of production with their commentaries. When all philosophical schools were closed by order of the Emperor in the 6th century AD, Aristotle’s works were again “lost”, until Aquinas discovered a translation. Aquinas’ interest was largely religiously inspired and his interest at best could be described as perspectival. Shields insightfully comments upon Aristotle’s legacy in the following :

“Often enough the views rejected as Aristotelian in the early Modern period are not recognisable as such to anyone with a primary familiarity with Aristotle’s texts.”(P.401)

This is certainly true of the writings of the “new men” e.g. Descartes and Hobbes, and their rationalist and empiricist followers, who failed to understand the Aristotelian arguments against dualism and materialism. Shields notes that hylomorphism today is viewed as an interesting alternative to the extremes of reductive materialism and Cartesian dualism that continue to flourish in our universities (P.402). There is, however, no acknowledgement of either Hylomorphic or Critical theory in spite of the fact that these positions have been the most effective critics of the above extremes. There is also no acknowledgement of the relation of Aristotelian to Kantian metaphysics. Instead Shields focuses upon postulated differences between the ethical theories of these two philosophies. Elisabeth Anscombe and her followers are cited as lying behind this state of affairs. We believe, however, that the story of the relationship between these two philosophies is more complex and that the reason for this postulated opposition between the two ethical theories, the so called deontological and teleological opposition, rests upon misinterpretations of Aristotelian and Kantian metaphysics.

A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Vol 4: (Aristotle’s Legacy– Metaphysics, (Politis, Shields, Heidegger))

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Aristotle’s work “Metaphysics” relates his earlier reflections on ousia (primary unchanging substance) to investigations in the realm of special ontology (the realm of the world of change) and relates both of these aspects to the investigation of “First Philosophy” into “to on he(i)”(general ontology). This latter investigation begins with the strategic aporetic advice, “Ask of everything what it is in its nature”.

The importance of essence-specifying definitions in Aristotles reflections are self-evident and these can be seen to serve as a bridge between special and general ontology. It is important however, to recall that we are only defining “substance” in terms of hylomorphic criteria (forms organising material) and not attempting a definition of material per se.

This becomes more apparent if the “substance” at issue is psuche (living beIngs, life) rather than the matter of the body (its tissues, bones, limbs and organs). There is no doubt that on hylomorphic theory the matter of the body underlies the organising form of the soul and this matter can be a partial cause of , for example, sensations of pain and other feelings. Moving to higher mental processes such as thinking and thought, however, requires a more complex approach and requires, reverting to Kantian language, for example, reference to an “I” that is a self causing agent (self sufficient in the sense of being able to cause itself to think or do things). In terms of the Aristotelian idea of psuche we are also dealing with living beings that are self causing beings. For Aristotle, asking of the soul what it is in its nature, requires the use of the hylomorphic matrix of 3 media of change(space, time, matter)4 kinds of change, three principles, four causes, as well as the mastering of three different realms of science.. The soul, Aristotle argues, is the essence of the body and its primary activity is thought: this thought activity aims at knowledge as a positive state which is able to pose questions relating to the nature of things and beings. In relation to this point, Aristotle in De Anima has the following to say:

“If thinking is akin to perceiving, it would consist in being somehow affected by the object of thought or in something else of this sort. It is necessary, therefore, that it be unaffected, yet capable of receiving a form: that it be this sort of object in potentiality but not that: and that it be such that just as the perceptual faculty is to the objects of perception, so reason will be to the objects of thought.”( De Anima 429a13-18)

Hylomorphism was partly developed as a theory to deal with the aporetic problem of characterising and explaining the life of living beings in terms of their essence. The essence-specifying definition of the human form of psuche, namely, the rational animal capable of discourse, is the result of reasoning in a hylomorphic categorical framework (special ontology) embedded in the general ontological framework of “to on he(i)”. There are 4 categories of change in the realm of thought and this realm is connected to three types of “form-communication” in the world, the most important of which is, education of a student by a teacher (the other two types of form-communication being sexual reproduction and the transmission of skills to materials or apprentices). This accords well with the Aristotelian claim earlier in De Anima that whilst change in what O Shaughnessy called the “psychological” realm of sensation, perception and feeling(which has to do with one state of mind being removed and being replaced with another(privation)), change in the “mental” realm, where thought occurs, takes place in accordance with a context of explanation/understanding which moves toward understanding the essence of things. In Plato’s Republic we are given one of the first accounts of the pleasure-pain principle in the “psychological” realm. Plato claims that pleasure in its more primitive form results from the relief that occurs with the fading away of pain or suffering but, he maintains, the pleasure of learning is not so constituted, and is essentially related to the understanding of thought and the forms. In such a journey up the psychological hierarchy of emotions, we encounter the form of truth on the way to the terminus of the knowledge of The Good. In the case of the more primitive form of pleasure we appear to be involved with a dialectic of opposites succeeding one another, and in the latter more complex form, we encounter a categorical end to a categorical process. This primitive form of pleasure-pain is obviously connected to the dialectic of wish fulfillments and anxieties Freud’s patients were experiencing. It was in this context that Freud introduced Thanatos, the death instinct, as an explanation of why the Reality Principle was not functioning in the lives of these patients. He encountered among other things an interruption of understanding by a repetition emanating from a past trauma: a repetition that appeared to be immune from the normal processes of forgetfulness.

The Metaphysics of Aristotle begins with pointing out that all rational animals capable of discourse desire to know(Met 980a1). This desire operates at both the psychological and the mental levels (using O Shaughnessy’s special ontology). At the higher level of the mental it is involved in the contemplation of knowledge. Contemplation is not purely theoretical for Aristotle, being unequivocally related to the practical idea of eudaimonia which we suggest is best translated in such contexts , not as happiness, but rather as the good spirited flourishing life. For Aristotle contemplation is concerned with the essence of being(onta).

Christopher Shields in his work on Aristotle refers to Anaxagoras who is mentioned several times in the Metaphysics. Anaxagoras and his claim that “All is mind” was responsible for the “Socratic turn” away from investigations of the physical world. Shields formulates the Aristotelian argument for the position that the mind is essentially a potentiality and actualises itself in thought. Shields extracts 4 premises from the argument presented in De Anima:

1. Mind thinks all things(DA429a18)

2.Hence, mind is unmixed(DA429a18)

3. Hence, the nature of mind is nothing other than to be something potential(DA429a 21-22)

4. Hence, mind is none of the things existing in actuality before it thinks(429a22-24)

(Shields, C., Routledge, London, 2007, P.307)

Metaphysics concerns itself with the many meanings of Being : with potentiality being an important aspect to consider in contexts of explanation/understanding. Politis, in his work “Aristotle and the Metaphysics”, claims that 15 aporetic questions delineate this realm of Being qua Being, and many “First principles” emerge in this exercise of “First Philosophy”. With the consideration of these first principles in this contemplative activity we have reached ground zero in the context of explanation/understanding. In most of the sciences the adventure begins with knowledge of a few categories of being and continues via sense perception (in a context of exploration/discovery). The next phase of the process generates basic general terms and moves to the next level of generalisation which may or may not be principles. In the science of metaphysics on the other hand we begin with puzzles generated by the contemplation of principles and use the first principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason to untie the knots in our thinking about Being. Aporetic questions are posed and answered in the wake of mental activity occurring in the spirit of puzzlement and concern, and best expressed in the question “WHY?”. When we are contemplating at the level of first principles it is, of course, the case that there may be more than one possible answer to our question and the subsequent discussion may appear dialectical (thesis-antithesis). The answers given to our question at this level of reflection ought not to be the doxa (opinions) of the many, unless these opinions have been subjected to the contemplation of the issues involved via the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. This becomes obvious when we peruse the 15 aporia from Metaphysics Book 3.

In previous volumes of this work we have characterised the Aristotelian architectonic in terms of the three “categories” of the sciences: Theoretical science(Theology, Maths, Physics, Biology), Practical Science(Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Economics, and Grammar), Productive science( Mimetic arts, crafts, medicine, psychoanalysis). Logic, in the form of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, are presupposed in all of these sciences and from the above list it is also apparent that sciences from different “categories” can be linked together: Psychoanalysis, for example can occur in the name of Medicine and Psychology. A number of the aporia in Book 3 aim at answering the question whether it is the task of Metaphysics (First Philosophy) to investigate all of the different kinds of explanations of things. The answer we have given to this question in the course of this work is that the task of First Philosophy is to investigate the changeless realm of forms in the three media of change(space, time, matter), the 4 kinds of change, three principles of change, and 4 causes of change. These investigations occur in the architectonic of sciences referred to above. First principles and logic will serve as the arché of the architectonic. The question we posed in the beginning of this chapter, namely, “Ask of everything what it is in its nature?” appears therefore to be the overarching question originating from the investigation into First Principles and will permeate the activity of all the sciences. The Theoretical sciences are concerned with substance in its various forms, e.g. in physics and biology and perhaps theoretically oriented psychology (situated in a context of events and causes). Practical sciences differentiate themselves from the Theoretical sciences via the concern with human actions in both categorical and instrumental circumstances: actions conducted in the spirit of areté and epistemé. Productive sciences are concerned with things produced in the spirit of techné for individual, family, and communal purposes. All these sciences are human activities and are covered by the opening words of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics which claim that all activities aim at the good. This aligns Aristotle with Platonistic Metaphysics which also subsumed the form of the True under the form of the Good.

The beginning of Metaphysics Book 3 states that whilst it is important to refer to the history of the discussion of an aporetic question, the problem one is addressing is not necessarily in the thinking ( conceived as being logically disconnected from its object) but rather, as Aristotle, puts it, the problem is that of untying the “knots in the object”. Seen from the perspective of our modern conception of thought where there is no necessary connection of thought to its object, this appears to be a puzzling claim. We are here reminded of the discussion by Heidegger of the aporetic question “Why are there essents rather than nothing?” Heidegger is attempting in his reflections to untie the knots in the discussions of those that might affirm that we cannot know that there are essents. His aim is to demonstrate that modern man suffers from the malady of “forgetfulness of Being”. Heidegger claims that his question is the widest and deepest of all questions attempting as it does to embrace even our relation to nothingness. We are inquiring into something extraordinary: into a foundation made of first principles. Heidegger also addresses the concerns of the theoretical science of physics. He claims that physics is about the physical changes in the realm of things: including things that emerge in the course of change and linger on. Heidegger uses the term “power”(P 15) in the context of this actualisation process of emergence, and Aristotle is singled out. Unfortunately one of the results of this discussion is that Metaphysics and Philosophy are not sciences at all and it is also claimed that logic is somehow a secondary discipline of thinking. Thought for Heidegger has the primary characteristic of aletheia –revealing (undisclosing) essences which are present. It is not at all clear how the sciences can be held together by mere aletheia and Heidegger adds the complaint that all that unites the scientific disciplines is the technical organisation(techné) of the universities which have assisted in transforming mans “spirited existence” into “intelligence”. Even Language according to Heidegger has lost its moorings to what is essential in Life—language is no longer a safe harbour for the understanding of Being. It can no longer show the fullness of the permanence of being and its fundamental relation to, and difference from, processes of Becoming. Works of Language such as Oedipus Rex were works of unconcealment (aletheia)revealing the form of Dasein (Being there) we find manifested in many works of tragic drama. The journey of Oedipus terminates in the downfall of a great king. Both Greek Philosophy and Greek Poetry, Heidegger argues, are therefore ontologically significant and reveal Being qua Being in their different ways. Our forgetfullness of the aporetic questions connected with asking of Being what it is in its nature, is partly due , Heidegger argues, to the Latinisation of the Greek language and the Romanisation of Greek Culture in which thought, for example, is construed in terms of “intelligere”, allowing a form of intellectualism to emerge that is more in the spirit of techné than epistemé. In the same spirit Logos becomes logic and in that translation process lost its relation to the world. The task of untying the knots in the objects of thought became an impossible endeavour. The foundations were being laid for the theoretical distinction between subject and object, with Being situated on the side of the object, and thought situated on the side of the Subject. Heidegger argues against this state of affairs and refers to a fragment of Parmenides in which it is claimed:

“Thinking and Being are the same”(fragment 5, P.136 Intro to Metaphysics).

This, for Heidegger carries the true meaning of Logos. Unfortunately, in the context of this discussion, Heidegger claims(without textual evidence) that the process of concealing the true meaning of Logos began with Aristotle and his linkage of logos to the notion of truth as correctness. This interpretation of Aristotle, we have argued previously in this work, probably emerged when Aristotles works were translated into Latin by translators with a clerical interest in the use of his works. Aletheia was suddenly related to the struggle against the false or “pseudos”. Determining something as something in this process became the intellectual adventure of avoiding claiming something that might conceivably be false or misleading: aletheia became a technical issue. In this process values such as arché, diké, areté, and epistemé became factual matters to be determined by a subject grasping a dualistic correspondence of a thought to reality. Much was lost in this parsing of Greek Culture and this loss was exacerbated by the fact that the activity of Philosophy never found an institutional home until Kant appeared on the University and Philosophical stage during the Enlightenment era (Philosophy schools were closed in 5 AD). The guild system that dominated social institutions in the 18th century unfortunately contributed to what Heidegger characterised as the loose technical organisation of the universities. Latin had become the “academic language” and the guild principle of specialisation dominated these institutions. The principle of specialisation operating in Universities assisted in the marginalisation of the Aristotelian-Kantian tradition.

Aristotle’s Ontological architectonic of disciplines, on the other hand, provided us with criteria by which to distinguish groups of disciplines but it ought also to be pointed out that the proliferation of disciplines in universities is still today more in accordance with the principle of specialisation than philosophical principles. Aristotle , for example clearly distinguishes the science of nature(Physics) from the practical and productive sciences, at Metaphysics 1064:

“There is a science of nature, and evidently it must be different both from the practical and from productive science. For in the case of productive science the principle of production is in the producer and not in the product, and is either an art or some other capacity. And similarly in practical science the movement is not in the thing done, but rather in the doers. But the science of the natural philosopher deals with the things that have in themselves a principle of movement. It is clear from these facts, then, that natural science must be neither practical nor productive, but theoretical…And since each of the sciences must somehow know the “what” and use this as a principe, we must not fail to observe how the natural philosopher should define things and how he must state the formula of the substance–“

The theoretical formula of the substance we designate as human psuche, then, for Aristotle is “rational animal capable of discourse”. This is the formula that Aristotle believes will help untie the knots in objects related to psuche (forms of life) which modern science has, in the case of the human form of life, demoted to the realm of “the subjective”. Many commentators have failed to appreciate the scope and depth of this formula or essence- specifying definition, claiming, for example, that it lacks reference to the law of causality. The definition, however, is clearly teleological, instantiating or actualising the potentiality or form of the substance we designate as human psuche. The definition also designates the archeological origins of man by pointing to his animal nature, claiming that the powers of the human being are developments and modifications of animal instincts. Principles become paramount in the explanation and understanding of the substance of human psuche and its powers of language and rationality. Here rationality is manifested in all three domains of the theoretical, practical and productive. Both discourse and rationality are civilisation building capacities and powers. Every science, Aristotle argues, seek principles and causes in the realm of the 4 kinds of change.

Accidental happenings or phenomena have no cause or principle attached to them. Whilst there is no doubt that such phenomena exist there is no attempt on the part of any science to explain them. This applies also to superstitious correlations of happenings such as the act of the witch doctor piercing the head of a doll and the headache of the man in the next village. Accidental correlations can never occur necessarily.

Empirical Movement(behaviour) is the focus of behaviourist theory and this, together with other naturalistic theories of human activity is categorical and can be studied by the sciences, but Aristotle points out that substances as such cannot move: movement is confined to the categories of quality, quantity, and place. Subjects such as agents and patients are hylomorphic entities and phenomena connected to them are to be subsumed under the categories of activity and passivity. What “changes” in agents and patients is not their nature (rational animals capable of discourse) but rather their qualities, the place they are in, or their size, (e.g. they become musical by learning to play an instrument or sing, they move from Stagira to Athens, they become taller as they reach adolescence) The logical consequence of this argument is that if human nature could be changed by this form of activity we would no longer be dealing with human psuche. For Aristotle something must endure in a change occurring in accordance with his three principles: that from which a thing changes, that toward which a thing changes, and that which endures throughout the change. The death of a human being is an interesting topic to discuss in this context because of the Socratic witticism in his death cell. He is asked what should be done with him after his death and he replies to his friends, saying that they can do what they wish with his body, because they will not find him after the event of his death. What is meant by this is elaborated upon by Aristotle in the Metaphysics:

“But we must examine whether any form also survives afterwards. For in some cases this may be so: e.g. the soul may be of this sort–not all soul but the reason: for doubtless it is impossible that all soul should survive.”( Meta–1070a 24-28)

Aristotle goes on to claim that the ideas of the soul would disappear with the parts of the soul that do not survive, but rationality as a power, principle, or form, would not. We know that Socrates clearly believed that the essence of his soul was connected to his rationality–this was his substance and this in turn was the reason for his commitment to leading the examined life. This form of life, according to Aristotle is the prime mover of humanity. Desire will obviously die with the event of death and this may be why Eros, in Greek mythology, is portrayed not as a God but as a bare footed figure padding around the city, searching for what alludes him.

Psuche, then, is embedded in the larger Aristotelian matrix of matter, form, privation moving causes, and the eternal unmovable substance. In this matrix neither movement nor time can come into being–both are also eternal and unchanging–when regarded as principles–but they also can be conceived as the matter of experience waiting to be formed. They are not however to be identified with physical substances but rather with the processes of change in which these substances are embedded. They are categorical in the sense that they are what endure throughout change–not particular movements measured mathematically nor particular times measured by our clocks and calendars but rather movement as such and time as such (the absolute time of Newton?)

The soul we know moves itself, as do the heavens. For the soul the “starting point” is thought and this is partly why it is important to untie the knots in the object by leading the examined/contemplative life that is connected to the kind of pleasure that is not the consequence of privation (relief from pain). The principles are “that for the sake of which”. (Aristotle argues at Metaphysics 1072b1 2021) that thought thinks itself because it is the same as the object, and when it is active it possesses this object. Aristotle sometimes identifies this kind of thought with the divine and God–a being that is eternal, most good.

We humans tend to thunk of movement not as substance but in terms of change of place and quantitatively, which are minor categories of Being (which we ought to recall has many meanings). God is identified with primary being and primary movement. He is the unmoved mover and this is the closest Aristotle comes to a formula for the divine. The divine embraces the self movement of the soul as well as that of the heavens. God is such that his/her perfection demands that he/she is both thinking of the movement of the heavens or rational human psuche activity in divine time (one day= a billion human years?) and simultaneously thinking of him/her self. This contemplative activity ensures that eternal primary change is never a change for the worse but always a change for the better participating in the One, complete Good.

Non accidental movement and time as conceived by rational animals capable of discourse are ordered in terms of principles. The Kantian image which best illustrates this, is that of the ship steaming downstream. The Good order we witness here is that in which the before and after organise both the nows and the movement. Everything related to the primary first principle of God will be so ordered including life forms, since God is , according to Aristotle, alive. All things connected by principles manifest themselves as rational and divine and have some relation to divine time. The wisdom of this divine matrix is manifested in the forms which are primary and there is nothing, Aristotle argues(1076b120-21) which is contrary to the forms that constitute Primary Being. Primary Being orders the forms into One. There is only one ruler of the universe.

In Book 13 Aristotle raises the question f the nature of Mathematics. Plato in his Republic had already demoted Mathematics to an intermediate level of Being between the forms and sensible things. Aristotle continues in this vein and asks how it could be possible that anything such as the heavens, which are moved, could exist apart from our sensible experience of them and he also wonders how a line or a plane could be animate. Such mathematical objects appear to be wholly constituted by a formula, e.g. a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, but they nevertheless, Aristotle argues, do not exist separately from the sensible realm as “substances”. This is part of the argument that “existence” has many senses:

“It is true to say without qualification that the objects of mathematics exist and with the character ascribed to them by the mathematician…if its subjects happen to be sensible, though it does not treat them qua sensible, the mathematical sciences will not for that reason be sciences of sensibles, nor, on the other hand, of other things separate from the sensibles.”(1078a2 2-4)

Given the obvious fact that mathematics manifests order to a high degree we can therefore without difficulty attribute both the good and the beautiful to mathematical thinking. The order of the sensible world, on the other hand, according to Heraclitus, is in a state of flux, and the things in that world are many. In such circumstances non sensible ideas claim a degree of universality which gets expressed in definitions of these sensible things–such definitions aim at the unity of One Substance, and the definition provides us with knowledge of this substance. This knowledge also manifests its relation to the good because it is self sufficient and a good-in-itself. Both of these qualities are important characteristics of the examined contemplative life. All forms which share in this unity are therefore, on Plato’s theory, subsumed under the idea or form of the Good. Mathematics is clearly an activity of calculation and can be applied to the real concrete world of sensible particulars on the condition we make certain quantitative and relational assumptions and are prepared to deal with quantitative and relational abstractions of things (images). The formulae for these images function like principles. Mathematics therefore manifest both categorical and hypothetical aspects(e.g. Let x= 10)

Principles(non sensible things)”exist”, according to Aristotle, in a certain sense of “exist”. When principles are referred to in essence-specifying definitions, they “really” occur in contexts of explanation/understanding which in turn refer to particular things we have discovered in our inductive explorations in contexts of discovery. Both of these contexts are important for science in general but insofar as the scientific account of particulars like Socrates are concerned, the starting point is the definition, rational animal capable of discourse, but inductive investigations will reveal that he was born in Athens, annoyed some people in the agora, and died in Athens. This is the study of Socrates as “aestheta” and many other knowledge claims embodying principles emanating from different sciences, and even different kinds of science(theoretical, practical, productive)can also be made. In this context, a starting point for Aristotle, is not something that belongs in the context of discovery/explanation but rather something that belongs in a context of explanation/understanding. It is used to organise activity in the context of exploration/discovery. His starting point is more motivated by a quaestio juris than a quaestio facti. Inductive investigations hope that generalisations will emerge that go beyond the data. A merely inductive generalisation resulting from the observation of the death of Socrates: one which did not go beyond the data, however, might conclude with the generalisation “The state ought to put Philosophers to death”. Such a generalisation would be the result of an empirical assumption about the world that it is merely a totality of facts. Principles relating to the quaestio juris–how we ought to conceive of cases– are excluded. in such contexts of explanation. In these contexts it is the principle that is the starting point and the outcomes are the judgements– guilty-not guilty –and this is the telos of such justice-related activities. From the point of view of the quaestio juris one does not need an investigation into whether people murder other people–one already knows that fact. The law is normative, and there is no interest in the verification of such facts. One of the primary functions of the fact is to describe and not to prescribe. The different sciences use both quaestio facti and questio juris (prescriptive principles, in Wittgenstein’s language:”norms of representation”)to provide us with the answer to questions relating to what things are, where they have come from, and how these things are knowable. Prescribing takes the form of “Ask of everything what it is in its nature” in the context of explanation/understanding and it is certainly a more difficult endeavour in the case of Mathematics which appears to be primarily concerned with shapes and numbers. Different sciences: e.g. Biology( which concerns itself with living beings), e.g. Philosophical Psychology (which concerns itself with rational animals capable of discourse), and e.g. Metaphysics (which concerns itself with the whole realm of Being) will use the above prescription in various ways. Metaphysics will also ask the ontological questions relating to what something is and why it is so, as well as the epistemological question of how a rational animal capable of discourse is capable of knowledge. We should recall here that the Metaphysics opens with the epistemological claim that all human beings desire to know.

Aristotle’s idea of form differs from that of Plato, partly because of his rejection of the substantive dualism involved but also because Aristotles logical principles apply, according to Politis, to both things, and our statements or thought about things. In the context of this discussion, Politis in his work “Aristotle and the Metaphysics”, points to an important pseudo-distinction insisted upon by the “new men” of our modern age (e.g. Russell) between statements/thoughts about things and the things themselves. More accurately it is claimed in the name of Logic ( the discipline of which was the creation of Aristotle) and its principles that the principle of noncontradiction(PNC) is a principle about the thought or statements about things rather than about those things themselves. Russells philosophical program went in many different directions during his writing career but his idea of the separation of logic and metaphysics remained relatively constant over a long period of time. It can be argued that apart from sharing the widespread phobia for idealism common to the academics of the period, Russell also focussed upon a narrow sense of ” exist”, that we encounter in both his theory of descriptions and in his wider program of logical atomism. Metaphysics was anathema to Russell who appreciated neither Hylomorphic nor Kantian Critical Metaphysics. Politis formulates Aristotle’s metaphysical commitment to PNC in the following way:

“Evidently Aristotle thinks that PNC is true both with regard to statements and with regard to things. But he appears to be especially interested in the question of whether PNC is true with regard to things.”( P.123)

This is a wider and deeper conception of “existence” than anything we can find in Russell or the work of the early Wittgenstein. It could also be argued that one of the major differences in the different conceptions is that both Russell and Wittgenstein situate “existence” in a context of exploration/discovery, whereas Aristotle situates “existence” in a context of explanation/understanding in which PNC and the Principle of Sufficient Reason(PSR) are determining explanatory factors. Rationality is, of course present in both types of context but in different forms. The role of logic, for example, in the context of exploration/discovery is limited and confined with the logic of the relation of concepts rather than the logic of the relation of statements. All deductive argument is regulated by PNC and PSR. PNC, Aristotle argues, although necessary for scientific demonstration cannot itself be demonstrated by outside principles. His argument is basically a humanistic one appealing to the education of those that know what can and what cannot be demonstrated.

Politis’s discussion is important because it draws attention to a possible important difference between the views of Aristotle and Kant on this issue . He argues that Kant believes PNC to be a transcendental Principle but he does not provide textual argument or any other argument for the claim outlined below:

“Why cannot PNC be both a transcendental and a metaphysical principle?In a sense it can.That is to say, in so far as PNC, in its metaphysical formulation, is true simply about things, it is a metaphysical principle: and insofar as PNC is a necessary condition for the possibility of thought and language about things, it can in a loose sense be called a transcendental principle. The question, however, is whether PNC is true of things because it is a necessary condition for the possibility of thought and language about things.”(P.136)

One of the issues involved is the question of the type of idealism we may attribute to Kant. In the Prolegomenon it is clear that we are not dealing with the empirical idealism of Descartes or the mystical idealism of Berkeley:

“My idealism concerns not the existence of things since it never came into my head to doubt this: but it concerns the sensuous representations of things, to which space and time especially belong. Regarding space and time and consequently, regarding all appearances in general, I have only shown that they are neither things(but are mere modes of representation) nor are they determinations belonging to things in themselves.. But the word “transcendental”, which for me never means a reference of our cognition to things, but only to our faculty of cognition, was meant to obviate this misconception…Yet..I now retract it and desire this idealism to be called “critical”. (Prolegomenon 293)

The “loose” sense of “transcendental” referred to by Politis is not that employed by Kant in his work “Philosophy of Material Nature”(trans Ellington J. Indianapolis, Hacker Publishing)1985. Ellington in his introduction to the above work claims :

“Metaphysical and transcendental principles require a priori philosophical justifications showing how it is that principles which in their origin owe nothing to experience are nevertheless applicable to experience. For example, according to the transcendental principle of efficient causation, all things change in conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect.”(PXV)

Another use of the term “transcendental” occurs later on in Ellingtons Introduction:

“The transcendental concept of substance is one of an unchanging subject to which changing predicates belong: this is the most general vision that we can have of a phenomenal object(PXV)

The Metaphysics of material nature requires the principle of the application of transcendental concepts to matter. We can see that neither of these uses of the notion of “transcendental” by Kant as reported by Ellington resembles Politis’s “loose” sense of “transcendental”. There is, in other words, nothing to prevent us from situating both Aristotle and Kant in the same philosophical territory insofar as their views of the relations between the metaphysical and the transcendental are concerned.

It is certainly true to claim, as Politis does, that if PNC is not valid, then one necessary consequence of this is that we would not be able to talk or think about things, but we should also add that the reason for this is that , for Aristotle, there is a logical relation between thought and object in contexts of explanation/understanding.

Rationality in the context of movement and action by animals capable of discourse is the subject of study by the practical sciences. Here too the logical relation of thought and object appears present according to Politis’s interpretation:

“Such animals, we are asked to recall, are directly moved by their own rational thought and desire, when they deliberate and come to recognise that something is good and worth pursuing. As Aristotle points out here:”reason(nous) is moved by the object that is rationally thought of(to noéson)”(1072a30). But while the thought and desire of an animal changes when the animal moves as a result of its thought and desire, the object of the thought and desire, i.e., what is recognised as good and worth pursuing need not change. For example, if I can reason that a certain kind of exercise is necessary in order to secure health, which I recognise to be a good thing and worth pursuing, then (supposing that I am sufficiently rational) my desires will change and they will cause me to change. But the object that I recognise to be good and worth pursuing, health, does not change, and it does not need to change in order to cause me to pursue it.”(P.277)

The “objects” of health, courage, justice, and wisdom are goods, both in themselves and in their consequences, and the above is Aristotle’s answer to Glaucon’s challenge to Socrates in the Republic. Socrates was urged to prove that Justice was both good in itself and good in its consequences. Both in Plato’s view and on Aristotle’s view the objects of knowledge are also Good. Perusing the pages of De Anima one might also want to insist that psuche is a good object in itself. Being alive is, of course connected to being healthy and the telos of eudaimonia (a good spirited flourishing life). Psuche, then, is both cause and principle of the forms of life we know about. Christopher Shield argues cogently for the souls being the telos or final cause of the body(P.276) and also for the essential unity and self sufficiency of the soul in the following argument(P.281):

  1. A body is a unified entity, composed of several parts.
  2. If it is unified, then it has a principle of unity.
  3. If that principle of unity cannot be the body itself, then it must be the soul.
  4. Hence the principle of unity for the body is the soul.
  5. The soul itself either has parts or is simple.
  6. If the soul has parts, then since it s a unity, it too has a principle of unity.
  7. The soul either contains its own principle of unity(by being essentially a unity) or is unified in virtue of some external principle of unity.
  8. There is no plausible external principle of unity for the soul.
  9. Hence the soul contains its own principle of unity(by being essentially a unity)
  10. If the soul is essentially a unity, the soul is a metaphysical simple.
  11. Hence the soul is a metaphysical principle.

The soul is a metaphysical simple presumably because it is self sufficient (e.g self moving) and thereby essentially connected to “The Good”. Aristotle’s argument is directed both at the substantial dualism of Plato and the materialistic theories of his times which even then were seeking to eliminate metaphysical principles of the soul. The form and matter (soul and body)of a rational animal capable of discourse are one and the same in the same way in which a piece of wax and its shape cannot be separated. It is now easier to understand the hylomorphic characterisation of thought as something which is moving toward fulfilment in knowledge and action. Thinking and thought are both potentialities and become actualised when activated. Their form of existence when not activated is potentiality: actuality is their telos in the mode of contemplation that is situated fairly and squarely in a context of explanation/understanding. Shields does well to remind us, however, of the Delphic oracles complex challenge passed down to humanity, namely to know ourselves. This may be the aporetic problem par excellence and require a lifetime of contemplation of all the theoretical sciences including their metaphysical and logical aspects, all the practical sciences and perhaps some of the productive sciences.

A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Vol 4– O Shaughnessy Part two(The Physical metaphysics of Consciousness)

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When Psychology separated itself off from Philosophy in 1870 the major articles of divorce concerned methodology and the scope and limits of Psychological Theory. In Germany the focus was on structuralism and the search for basic structures, but in the USA William James embraced the opposing position of Functionalism based on a concept of “pure experience” and what he called “The pragmatic method”. Wundt, the Structuralist, settled for the definition of Psychology as “The Science of Consciousness” whilst James was moving away from the experimental method of Science and the structuralist substantive idea of Consciousness. Pragmatism and “Radical Empiricism” were the tools James was using in his attempt to establish “experience” as the foundation stone of all psychological theorising. His definition of Psychology was: “The Science of Mental Life, its phenomena and conditions”. This definition, given a broad conception of Science might have been one which both hylomorphic(Aristotelian) and critical(Kantian) Philosophers alike may have accepted as a starting point for their anthropological reflections. James was also very aware of the research that was occurring on the Continent of Europe and he was eager to tie the threads of many theories together under the heading of “Principles of Psychology”. His empiricism was radical because it refused to rest upon a theory of Humean and Lockean ideas and impressions being connected together by the “mechanism” of association, preferring instead to search for the conditions of a functional phenomenon such as memory. Radical Empiricism also dismisses spiritual reifications of the soul that regard the soul as a substance manifesting the presence of various faculties such as Memory. One of the conditions of the function of memory results in the claim that, firstly, the senses must be affected in some way and in turn affect the functioning of the brain. This reminds us of the Freudian Scientific Project in which one system of neurones (phi-system) are not changed in the process of their innervation and another system of neurones(psi-system) in which the neurones are chemically changed in the process of innervation(e.g. in memory). The latter system is connected with the preconscious memory system that records the effects of learning in the neurone system. The Psychologist, James argues, in the spirit of the early Freud, must be a nerve physiologist. James also notes in this context that when mental states are conditioned by bodily processes, the investigation of this must lead back to the body and its activity, perhaps to the phenomenon of voluntary deliberate action. The mechanical explanation of the movement of inorganic objects such as iron filings toward a strong magnet differs from explanations for living movement which are, James suggests, more complex. Romeo, James argues, is an example of a living organism that possesses a mental life. When in the course of this short life he chooses to overcome all obstacles in the way of his love for Juliet, he is exercising a freedom and intelligence that cannot be found in the determinate relation between the iron filings and magnet. James then proposes a criterion for the identification of organisms possessing a mental life:

“The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment.”

(Principles of Psychology, Volume one, New York, Dover Publications, 1890, P.8)

Mechanical motions of course have no purpose in the sense of possessing the ability to choose between alternative ends or alternative means. A magnet cannot choose not to attract the iron filings. Whether this is due to the absence of agency or the absence of the right kind of principle or both is, of course a matter for conjecture. It is doubtful whether the magnet would ever feature in a Shakespeare tragedy as Romeo does. Romeo’s powers quite simply obey principles that we expect of an intelligent rational living being. His experiences are composed of doings and undergoings and they are organised in an architectonic of plot and character determined by Actions and their Reasons rather than substances(magnets and iron filings) and their transformations and changes.

James claims that Consciousness is necessary for the learning of intelligent performances which can then subsequently become pre-conscious and wait for activation by Conscious choice. He uses the example of an experiment on a hemisphere-less frog to illustrate the difference between spontaneous selection of ends and means and mechanical movement. He then links the hemispheres of the brain to the “representations of muscles at different levels in a hierarchically organised nervous system. In this system the spinal cord is involved in reflexive defensive activity and the hemispheres are the arena for bundles of sensory-motor representations. There is no direct reference to principles organising either the reflexive or the spontaneous activity but the description of the various functions of the nervous system certainly imply the operation of both constitutive and regulative principles.

Agency is not an idea or category that one can easily attribute to the brain, but it certainly is significant in the attribution of understanding, reasoning, and rationality to the doings and undergoings of a human being. Attempting to locate these “spontaneous” powers in a physical location such as a brain, risks committing to what P.M.S. Hacker called “the mereological fallacy”: claiming that what is true of the whole is also true of the part of the whole.

James does, however, specifically claim that the hemispheres of the brain are the physical location for consciousness–a different kind of claim that ought to be seriously considered. In his discussion of the issue “Does Consciousness exist?” (Essays in Radical Empiricism, (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1966). James questions the wisdom of characterising consciousness as a substantial entity and recommends instead that we characterise it as a “function”. Instead, we should regard what he calls “pure experience” as the substance of knowing and thinking. This “substance” when taken in the context of one set of associates will provide us with the thing known, and when taken in another set of associates, provides us with the consciousness of the knower. To illustrate his thesis James uses the analogy of paint separated from a painting-lying ready for purchase in a paint shop. This paint when purchased and applied to the canvas in relation to other paint is used to represent objects two dimensionally: when thus used the spiritual function of the painting is created(P.9) This is reminiscent of hylomorphic accounts of art and whilst James continues to appeal to “pure experience” as the substance involved in this activity there is paradoxically no appeal to “Principles” in this account. A surprising omission given the fact that James was the author the of the work “Principles of Psychology”. An incipient dualism emerges, however, in the following:

“If the reader will take his own experiences he will see what I mean. Let him begin with perceptual experience, the “presentation” so called of a physical object, his actual field of vision, the room he sits in with the book he is reading as its centre: and let him for the present treat this complex object in the common sense way as being “really” what it sees to be, a collection of physical things cut out from an environing world of other physical things with which these physical things have actual or potential relations.Now at the same time it is just these self same things which his mind, as we say, perceives: and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’s time downwards has just been one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a persons mind. The puzzle of how one identical room can be on two lines. It can, if it be situated at their intersection.”(Essays P.11-12)

The two lines referred to above represent the personal biography of the reader of the book in the room and the physical history of the house of which the room is a part. James points out the obvious fact that the conscious experience of the book cannot, as such, catch fire but the actual book can, if the house catches fire and burns down. The personal biography of the reader will include memory of the meanings of the words once learned and other books that have been read. The house, the room and the physical book do not possess the power of memory, or the powers of understanding and reason and these physical objects are not conscious of anything. There certainly seems to be no reason to object to the “common sense” view of the physical world as composed of parts that can be divided up in various ways–ways which in turn do not deny the possibility of the conception of a universe as a continuum of mass and energy. All that is needed to sustain such a conception is the scientific assumption that the physical world is a spatio-temporal continuum. Such a conception allows us to characterise doings or actions arranged temporally into the unity of an action. This unity refers to principles behind the formulation of the maxims of such actions. In the above case the difference between reading the book in the present and the conceptualisation of an action stretching into the future of the temporal continuum, manifests the difference between the world “seen and felt”, and the world thought about in the absence of the thing being thought about. The “knowing” involved in these two alternative scenarios takes a different form. In the former case what we are dealing with is primarily a description of an event in terms of “is-concepts and judgements”, and in the latter case the maxims contain principles that are normative and belong in the “ought-system” of concepts. The world seen and felt and the world thought of both constitute, under different aspects, the spatio-temporal continuum of a world whose primary components are percepts, concepts and principles. Indeed James specifically claims in his essay “Does Consciousness exist?” that there is no difference in the degree of certainty involved in an object presently perceived, or an object conceived of in the remembered past or the anticipated future.There is, he mysteriously adds, no transformation of “an object known into a mental state.”(P.19)

James criticises the Kantian notion of an “I think” that accompanies all my representations on what appear to be Cartesian grounds, claiming that Kant is attempting to substantialise thought. He does not, however, discuss the role of the Categories or Principles of reason(noncontradiction, sufficient reason) in the organisation of acts of apperception. The Kantian architectonic regards thinking as an Act–something that is done–not an event occurring in the privacy of an individuals mind. Consciousness is involved in the act of apperception that takes the form of discriminating and selecting what should and what should not be subsumed under the concept being formed with the assistance of the Categories of the Understanding and the Principles of Reason. The Aristotelian perspective also disappears in James’ radical empiricist approach, especially when appeal is made to the structures and functions of the brain which he regards as the fundamental condition for the functions of life, consciousness, and mentality(the ontological levels proposed by O Shaughnessy).

Sensations, James maintains, are related to the functions of the lower centres of the brain whilst perception, memory, and thought appear to be connected to the higher centres and the hemispheres. The motor system located in the frontal lobe hemispheres is represented at all levels of the nervous system. Appetites, and the activity associated with them when connected with desires , memory and our belief system, are all situated in the higher centres of the nervous system. Abstract ends and complex means-end solutions are also situated in the memory-belief systems of rational animals capable of discourse. Even within the scope of this genus, James articulates a hierarchy of human life forms stretching from the tramp living from hour to hour, the bohemian living from day to day, the bachelor building his lonely individual life, the father building for the next generation , and the patriot who builds for whole communities and coming generations.(Principles, P.23). The role, however, of concepts, categories and principles in this hierarchy of forms is unclear. There is much talk of “currents”, “loop-lines”, “discharge”, “stimulus” and “response” , “groupings of sensory-motor elements” in relation to ideas, and memory, and belief systems. The proposed “model” for action initiated by the hemispheres is a reflex model illustrated by the example of a child whose fingers are burned by an attractive candle flame and who subsequently learns to retract his fingers the next time they reach for the flame. The grasping reflex is then inhibited by a sensory memory of the pain and a motor memory of retracting the fingers: both memories are located in the hemispheres.

James also provides us with an empirical account of language with Aristotelian elements:

“Take, for example, the “faculty” of language. It involves in reality a host of distinct powers. We must first have images of concrete things and ideas of abstract qualities and relations: we must first have the memory of words and then the capacity so to associate each idea or image with a particular word, that, when the word is heard, the idea shall henceforth enter our mind. We must conversely, as soon as the idea arises in the mind, associate it with a mental image of the word, and by means of this image we must innervate our articulatory apparatus so as to reproduce the word as physical sound. To read or write a language other elements still must be introduced. But it is plain that the faculty of spoken language alone is so complicated as to call into play almost all the elementary powers which the mind possesses, memory, imagination, association, judgement, and volition.”(P.28-9)

Many of these elements, e.g. association, memory, imagination are the typical array of powers promoted by empirical theorists, and the powers of understanding and reason are conspicuous by their absence from this account. The principles constituting and regulating this linguistic activity are also absent from the account. On this empirical view, ideas are copies of impressions related via the “mechanism” of association. The “Process” of discrimination so important for the act of conceptualisation is also not mentioned. The mimetic aspect of language is referred to, but not its expressive aspect as encountered in contexts of interrogation(“Lo!”) or prescription(“So act…!”). It is clear that the mechanism of association arises in connection with an obsession over the naming process and the possible “association” of the parts of brain involved in this process. The claim that a correlate of this process and mechanism both occur at the higher levels of consciousness and mentality is surely however a fallacy of some kind( the fallacy of projecting lower functions onto higher functions?)

Empiricism dogmatically views language in the light of the above obsession with the naming process: logical atomism then becomes the strategy for justifying the dogma. The Wittgensteinian “turn” from a logical approach to meaning to a more pragmatic approach in which the use of a word becomes crucial in determining its meaning, then becomes a crucial landmark in the history of modern Philosophy. Wittgenstein, we know read both Freud and William James with considerable interest. The use of a word is more easily connected to agency, action, and the good reasons given for activity in this domain. The reasons we give for holding a belief are more related to truth and knowledge. A rule in the later Philosophy of Wittgenstein can appear to be a regulative “mechanism” for discourse and can appear to be a mere “fact”, but the fact of the matter is that when we emphasise the normative aspect of rules we then see rules as signposts that we “ought” to follow. We then place rule following in the grammatical category of imperatives rather than descriptives. There is also a distinction between types of rule ranging from the “mere” mechanical level of exercising a simple skill (The King can only move one square at a time) to the more abstract and complex strategic level(do not leave your Queen exposed). James largely ignores the expressive function of language and its normative role in our communal language related activities.

In drawing the distinction between the higher and the lower centres James wonders whether the lower centres can possess a primitive form of consciousness. He discusses hypnosis and its implications:

“If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.”(Principles P.67)

This implies a higher thinking capacity located in the hemispheres: one in which knowing is occurring whether it be the knowing that the King can only move one square at a time or knowing that is it dangerous to allow ones Queen to become exposed to attack. Both of these knowledge items are learned in a state of consciousness that occurs at a higher level compared to the kind of learning that is occurring when the child learns to inhibit a grasping reflex. Yet we should, in this context, not forget that James’ criterion for mentality is pragmatic and related to the pursuance of ends and means and “intelligent action” (P.79).

Consciousness, for James, as it is for O Shaughnessy(OS), is a power intimately related to Attention, a power that is exercised in the act of apperception. Attention is a voluntary self-initiated activity and James outlines a scenario in which a sequence of acts or what he calls “nervous events”(P.114) are consciously chosen! What actually happens is a consciously chosen beginning of the sequence which then continues subconsciously until the end is reached and consciousness emerges again. The start and the end of the process are, according to James conducted at a high ideational level. Should anything go wrong in the subconscious section of the sequence, consciousness will emerge and the ideational level will once again regulate what is to be done next, either abandoning the project as a whole or making smaller regulatory adjustments. This suggests that habits(on Freudian theory) occur principally at the preconscious level and there is a transactional relation with the system of Consciousness(Cs).

In a section entitled “The ethical implications of the law of habit”, James points out that habit:

“dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or early choice.”(P.121)

A prophecy of doom if there ever was one, and a suitable fate for a creature that did not possess ideas of what he was doing and the will or freedom to choose to do something different. The message of the importance of rationally based Freedom was of course an Enlightenment message, but by the time we reach the 20th century this message has been submerged by the instrumentally and technologically minded “new men” for whom literally “everything was possible”. The categorical ethical end of the prescriptive normative idea of “The Good” had been all but lost, and pragmatism and utilitarianism were embraced by many scientists in the spirit of “modernism”. The Aristotelian rational end of virtue and the importance of character for the normative task of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) had also been marginalised by the time of the Enlightenment, and Kant’s attempt to restore categorical ethics in the arena of Philosophy only lasted up to time when Hegelian and Marxist Philosophy presented itself. Fortunately for us, the above Prophecy of doom is not a categorical prophecy but merely a hypothetical judgement which presupposes that we continually fail to exercise our powers of understanding and rationality. What is important to note here is that philosophical discussion since Aristotle’s hylomorphic shift from epistemological substance to metaphysical principle has preferred to focus on the former position which obscures the fact that ideas are not merely related to true beliefs but also to normatively structured good beliefs about good actions. Different principles regulate beliefs directed at the Truth and beliefs directed at The Good. Consciousness plays an equally important role in the learning process involved in the acquisition of concepts and truth-related beliefs, as it does in the learning process connected with actions. In the latter case we are not dealing with habits alone but also with a realm of explanations and justifications that are related to the imperative that has been handed down to us from the Greek oracles, namely “Know thyself!”. Both Aristotle and Kant believed that this form of knowledge transcended the scope of any one science and stretches over the domains of theoretical, practical and productive science. The task of Philosophy is then, to coordinate the judgements emanating from these different sciences and arrive at the essence of the self-principle.

James attempted to suggest that Habit plays the part of a principle in ethical life and the following maxim could well have been used as a formula for becoming one of the “new men” of the age, Arendt complained about:

“Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.”(P.124)

The evaluative, reflective and critical tribunal of areté has disappeared and the question as to whether the habits are good is not even raised. This question of course in turn requires an answer to the ethical question that can be raised in relation to the action concerned about the ethical value of the action: whether, that is, the action is Right. Keeping the flame of will and effort alive appeared to be more important to James than the Kantian absolute of the “good will” or the Aristotelian absolute of “the virtuous man”.

Consciousness is, at all levels, for James an agent of selection driven by its interests and instincts. Ends and means are selected. For James it appears that thinking about an end must always involve conscious ideation unless we are dealing with the subconscious thinking that occurs in a habit. The man who has formed the habit of punching people who disagree with him is of course consciously surprised when he is arrested and tried for his crime. Hopefully the tribunal will install an equivalent tribunal in the judgement system of the defendant: one which will question the wisdom of responding violently in contexts of disagreement. The defendant obviously has a long road to travel on the journey of knowing himself. What has to happen on this journey is that the responses initiated from the lower parts of the nervous system need to be regulated by the higher centres(the hemisphere, according to James). Ideational centres need to prevent impulses from colonising the motor system for violent purposes. The impulse needs to be inhibited and the question needs to be raised as to whether the violent response ought to occur. Here one imagines the language centres and the power of language needs to be engaged in this process. If, however, the impulsive response has become an ingrained habit, the question arises as to whether this impulsive complex has been split off from the self of the hemispheres. The will needs to be regulated by the belief/knowledge system and maxims need to be formulated that are rationally justified.

The brain is composed of lobes and the cortex of the occipital lobes is the site of things seen, whilst the temporal lobes is the site of things heard but Consciousness itself, James argues:

“is itself an integral thing not made of parts, “corresponds” to the entire activity of the brain, whatever that might be at the moment.”(P.177)

So, whilst the object thought of, e.g. the room in the house I am reading in, obviously is a complex made of parts and this is also the case for the brain related activity , it is not the case for the thought. The distinctions between consciousness and its objects and thought and its objects are both important for James, because he argues that “The Psychological Fallacy” is a form of reasoning that confuses what is true of the object with what us true of consciousness or thought. We should add that many Philosophers and Scientists are also guilty of this form of fallacious reasoning. James elaborates upon this point:

“If to have feelings and thoughts in their immediacy were enough, babies in the cradle would be psychologists and infallible ones. But the psychologist must not only have his mental states in their absolute veritableness, he must report them, and write about them, name, them, classify and compare them and trace their relation to other things. Whilst alive they are their own property: it is only post mortem that they become his prey….No subjective state whilst present, is its own object: its object is always something else.”(P.189-90)

So the Psychologist must distinguish between the mental state and the act of talking about that state. This is obvious in our understanding the difference between an act of anger(punching someone) and the act of saying “I am angry with you”! In the process of naming the mental state, James reflects, a common mistake is to assume that the thought must have the same ontological and epistemological structure as the objects that are thought of. He admits that the relation of thought to its object is ultimately a mysterious matter and though we can know of the existence of this relation we can say very little about it. The only “universal conscious fact”(P.226) we can know about thoughts and feelings, argues James, is related to the necessary presence of a personal self, i.e. an “I”. It is the same I that thinks , feels, remembers, forgets, acts, judges understands, reasons etc. It is what endures in the change from feeling to thought. It is the stream of consciousness that carries all these activities to their telos or end, and although a stream theoretically could be measured in terms of a large number of coffee spoons of water, the stream re-composed in this form of measuring would have little to do with the entity of the stream flowing toward the river which in turn is flowing toward the sea. A more natural division of this stream would be in terms of its origin, extension and end.

According to James, Reasoning is also a selective agency and denotes the power of the mind to analyse and synthesise the totality of conditions of phenomena reasoned about and reason ones way to logical consequences.(P.287). Practical reasoning is a selection centre for whether one ought or ought not to perform a particular means-related action, whether or not one ought to pursue a particular end. James also refers to the way in which the human race as a whole selects means and ends and thereby regulates agreements and disagreements in relation to these. No specific mention is made of principles in this process but one presumes they will be playing an important role.

There is, however, no doubt about the fact that James does not embrace the Kantian Copernican Revolution insofar as knowledge and the synthesising activity of the “I” is concerned. James would claim that the reality of pure experience and the pragmatic method will suffice to ground our knowledge, and further that there is no need to refer to a Reality underlying appearance that no-one can know anything about. On Kantian assumptions we can think about the realm of the noumenal and to that extent we can have faith in its existence as the ground for the phenomena we experience. Kant however rejects any claim that reason can know anything about this underlying condition and he would reject any attempt to project what can be known about the objects of experience onto this noumenal realm. James and Kant would appear to be in agreement with this kind of attack on metaphysics. Otherwise James espouses an empirical approach to investigating the role of the self in our lives. Four forms of self are postulated: a material self, a social self, a spiritual self and what he calls a pure ego. This latter entity(the pure ego) resembles accounts of the transcendent self we find in Kant and others. It also resembles the metaphysical enduring self of Aristotle. If we ignore the radical empiricism and its methodology there is much in James that is suggestive of hylomorphic theory but the absence of a resting point or terminus of reasoning in “First Principles” is conspicuous by its absence.

The idea of “selection” James uses, might however be a psychological consequence of hylomorphic and critical thought. Selection is also operative at the level of the lower psychological processes:

“Attention, implying a degree of reactive spontaneity would seem to break through the circle of pure receptivity which constitutes experience”(P.402)

Interest and desire are present in the above in the form of choosing what I attend to. James does also agree with the Kantian distinction between objects of Sensibility and objects which are more abstract and intellectual. In the latter category of objects, interests and ends are more remote and distant, more abstract and ideal.

Attention, according to James has its effects in perception, conception, discrimination and memory. The act of conception for James has an ideal categorical character that tears us away from concrete reality. A white piece of paper burned black by a fire has changed but the concept of “white” and ” black” have not changed and remain the same(P.462). Indeed these concepts provide us with a kind of standard to be used to navigate through processes of change involving coloured phenomena: a standard that is not merely a matter of “convention” and cannot easily be abandoned. On this account we can extrapolate that the role of these concepts is to assist the voluntary operation of attention in the organising of the sensory manifold. James, however, also claims that concepts form an essentially discontinuous system that is “petrified” and “rigid”(P.468). Nevertheless it is clear on the Jamesian account that the purpose of the concept in this process of conceptualisation is to transform the perceived world into the world conceived. There are, however, on James’ account no categories or principles binding the elements of the conceptual world into a whole (cf Kant): a whole that normally manifest the ideals of “The Truth” and “The Good”.

The relation of James’ work to the work of O Shaughnessy is interesting in several respects. Firstly, both are in a certain sense physicalists although James is a radical empiricist and OS is clearly more inclined to embrace the ideal of the a priori that we find in many rationalist positions. Secondly, both thinkers wrote voluminously about The Will and Consciousness from their similar, though differing, perspectives. Thirdly, both thinkers agree that Consciousness is not to be analysed in terms of the category of “Substance”. Fourthly, both thinkers appear hesitant to adopt any position that resemble hylomorphic or critical metaphysical positions. OS appears to be more willing to speak of consciousness in relation to a priori concepts and he also is more willing to explore the truth orientation of this aspect of our psyche. OS also shares with James the belief that consciousness is intimately and necessarily connected to the having of experiences. Experience in the architectonic of OS’s ontological system is at the level of the psychological, above that of “life, and below that of the “mental”. OS also points out that beliefs, intentions and memories are not “experienced”. Experience for OS has objective reality and whilst we know that we are experiencing something, when we do so, it is unanalysable. It can however be situated in a classification matrix which defines it as belonging to the genus of what is necessary and psychological. James associated experience with the stream of consciousness which itself is in a constant state of change and flux. OS claims that experience is occurently, and continually, renewed.(Consciousness and the World,P.43)

OS also notes the important bond between experience and temporality. Experience picks out the present as a “now” and a passage of time as a continuity of nows(P51). This is in accordance with the Aristotelian definition of time which is “the measurement of motion in terms of before and after”. This definition refers to an activity, the doing of something, as distinct from the bare paying of attention to motion occurring, which of course is also a “possible experience”.

OS discusses animality in this context and a distinction is drawn between animal intention and action and its human form. The former is undoubtedly directed toward the future and suggests an animal can have expectations although perhaps not expectations it can think about. OS claims that the animal possesses no power or capacity to think about the future but it is capable of a mental posture or attitude toward an experienceable future. OS notes the important fact that in the context of explanation, human beings use future phenomena to explain present phenomena. For us, one phase of time logically relates to another. This fact is important for the account of intentional action which occurs, according to OS at the level of mentality where thinking connects a “now” to a matrix of past-present, and future: for this form of human mentality the past and the future meet in the present(P.55). Time is both psychologically and mentally structured in intentional action and this structure is manifested in the ethical schema of “Reason-Action-Consequence”: a schema that also stretches across the past-present-future continuum. This schema might be implied by the Heraclitean reference to a “Logos” of change.

The Kantian ship steaming downstream is Kant’s image of the relation of consciousness and Time and the seamless continuity of before, now, and after appears to be captured in this one image. This continuity, however is also manifested at a practical level by the above schema of Reason-Action-Consequence in which perhaps the presence of consciousness is more obvious than it is in the ship steaming downstream. In the case of the R-A-C schema it is obvious that agents engaged in action, experience the passage of time. In the act of speaking, for example, there is a consciousness of what has been said, what is being said now and what will be said. The agent involved in such action “inhabits” time. OS points out that time is not a principle or form of consciousness because two sensations of pain located in different bodies are, of course, psychological phenomena but they are not temporally related in one consciousness. Experience and Consciousness in the writings of Freud are regulated by the ERP(Energy regulation principle) which regulates life sustaining functions and the PPP(Pleasure-Pain Principle) which regulates what OS refers to as the psychological level of psuche. The higher the form of life, the more complex are the pleasures and pains experienced. The “man of experience” is of course acquainted with Ananke, and as a consequence approaches the world and his life with more than a hint of resignation as old-age approaches. This testifies to the important role of the Reality Principle(RP) in the organisation of his experience. It was in the spirit of the RP that Socrates defined his own death as a necessary good, whether it would take the form of a dreamless sleep or an after-life form of existence. Socrates was the rational man of experience par excellence–a fact well illustrated by his philosophical activities in the agora.

OS claims that in terms of experience Time is a more important dimension of existence than lived-in space:

“time is closer to our essential nature than is space.”(P.66)

The life of an organism obviously proceeds essentially in time, and the notion of process assumes an importance at the same level as state. Processes are the very stuff of experience and consciousness, but states of consciousness are also important milestones. There does not, however, appear to be any important use for the term “states of experience”. An animal that is asleep is obviously not conscious but if it is capable of dreaming it is surely experiencing its dreaming.

In his analysis of whether the term “state of consciousness” possesses a real or an a priori determinable essence OS claims that Consciousness is a basic fundamental state and all other states are privative or derivative(P.73) The arguments for this position are four-fold:

  1. There are no necessary and sufficient conditions for states of consciousness.
  2. States explain the properties of these states.
  3. There are techniques for causing a loss of consciousness and to assist someone in an unconscious state to regain consciousness.
  4. Properties form syndromes or constellation.

OS also maintains that sleep and comatose state-conditions are states of consciousness and the question then arises as to whether these too can be classified as “psychological” states. Sleep appears to meet the conditions necessary but a question mark hangs over the latter condition. Beings in a comatose state are certainly alive and if they are human they still possess potentialities that can be actualised in a waking state. The term “state of consciousness” helps us to remember that though Consciousness may perform the important function of opening a window onto the world it is not as such directed at objects in the way perception is. This fact may force us to look for its origins not in any psychological state but rather in the brain(P.80). This is a non-psychological cause and the principle involved in the regulation of cerebral states can only be the ERP. We also need to rely on explanation of mechanical kinds to describe such activity. This may help us to distinguish consciousness from experience, although it will still remain true to say that the stream of consciousness is something experienced. Consciousness, regarded from a hylomorphic perspective, is constituted both by its material substrate operating in accordance with material/mechanical principles and by a set of psychological powers that also have their origin in a body composed of a constellation of organs and limbs that in turn form the physical substrate of the human form of life. There is also the Critical view of Consciousness which consists in assembling the necessary and sufficient conditions of its phenomena in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. It does appear as if OS is using some form of the critical approach in his attempts to sketch the outlines of Consciousness. Kant, however, also emphasises the use of practical reason and its contexts of justification. The Kantian architectonic would, of course, require charting the role of consciousness in relation to both types of reasoning.

The Consciousness we have of the fact that the lightning has struck the tree is a more complex matter than the bare intuition of the phenomenon of the lightning striking the tree, but the former could not occur without the latter, thus affirming the Kantian axiom that concepts without intuitions are empty. Conceptualisation in both Kantian and Aristotelian theory is an important element of all higher forms of consciousness in which Sensibility and Understanding are preparing true beliefs of the kind “The lightning struck the tree”. True beliefs also are integrated into a larger scale thinking process that possess the aims of explanation and justification. With this larger scale venture we are definitively placed in the ontological realm of the mental.

Practical reason orbits around the actions of man rather than his beliefs, and in this respect is closer to the reality it is constituting and regulating. Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics argued that every activity aims at the good and this ought to suffice to place all discourse and all forms of reasoning about action high on the list of the defining features of human life. Willing, as OS points out, can be both bodily(intimately related to the body-image) and mental. The goods of animal strivings involve only the bodily will and their body-image and consequently a psychological lower form of consciousness. Animal consciousness is not self-determined in the way human consciousness is and the mere fact that we have consciousness in common as life forms does not in any way guarantee that the forms of consciousness are the same. The behaviourists have perhaps discovered this fact but continue to either claim that consciousness does not exist, or alternatively, that it has no role in the explanation of the highest life forms.

OS claims that there is a mutually supporting circle of powers helping to constitute consciousness and actualise it in accordance with the life-form that has generated it. These powers are situated in an architectonic ontological matrix of life-consciousness–mentality. Perception and Action lie at the input- output thresholds of this matrix, at the thresholds leading in from, and out to, Reality. On Freud’s hylomorphic/critical account of Consciousness there is an important link to external reality but there are also links to the Preconscious and Unconscious systems that form the context of id, ego, and superego activity. These systems and agencies have a developmental history and telos best described in hylomorphic terms. The Reality Principle largely determines the actualisation of the powers of understanding and rationality and also crucially determines a state of self-consciousness that is based on the knowledge of the activity and the power of ones mind.

Aristotle widens the scope of concern we moderns have in relation to reality by relating knowledge to desire and making the universal claim that we all necessarily desire to know. He embedded this desire in an attitude of awe and wonder in the face of the world: an attitude that can only be dispelled by asking and attempting seriously to answer questions posed in contexts of explanation/justification(Why-questions). Accompanying this awe and wonder at the external world is an awareness of a power of self consciousness.

OS paradoxically approves of both the Freudian and Cartesian accounts of self consciousness. He wishes to combine knowing the nature of my existence through “thinking”, and an understanding of the self , that ranges from an understanding of the body regulated by the ERP and the PPP, to an understanding of the human psuche via the activities of the agencies of the Ego and Superego. For Freud we know these things because we are aware of truths about our selves under various aspects. OS shares the Freudian conviction that the mental health of the subject is crucial for actualising the potentiality for the above kind of self awareness. The Reality Principle plays an important role in the constitution and regulation of the kind of self understanding required for “knowing oneself”.

OS illustrates the truths that an animal knows ,e.g. a dog knows it is about to be fed, but the dog is not aware of the higher order fact that it is True that it is about to be fed. The reason for this state of affairs, OS argues, is that the animal is unable to compare the “thought” “I am about to be fed” with the reality that makes it true. It is a familiar psychological observation that animals are tied to their environment in a way that we humans are not. Our thought is capable of psychically distancing itself from reality and this is evident in its activity of linking concepts in veritative(truth-making) syntheses e.g. Categorical judgements distinguishing what is possible from what us actual. The psychical space created by categorical judgements is formed in a voluntary self-constituted logically structured(with principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason) space. From this perspective knowing hypotheticals such as not-P might be false but is in fact true is a part of our belief systems. OS in fact appeals in the context of this discussion to Kantian Categories of Judgement. Self-consciousness or self awareness is conditional(i.e. related to necessary and sufficient conditions). They are therefore potentialities that can fail to be actualised. The predominance of this kind of awareness, OS argues, reveals a Cartesian bias in the account of the so-called “state of consciousness”– a bias that claims we need to be conscious of the present specific contents of inner consciousness but no such condition applies to the contents of outer reality.

OS does in fact specifically discuss psychotic states of mind and points to the way in which the products of the imagination tend to invade the experience of reality, creating a dream-like state in which, according to Freud, the ERP and the PPP distort both the spatial and temporal aspects of Consciousness. The problem with states of mind in which this invasion occurs is that the psychotic does not know that his experience is being partly determined by his imagination. This condition is similar to that of the dreamer who believes he is perceiving something rather than knowing that he is imagining what he is experiencing. The psychotic giving a speech to cows in a field does not, OS claims, “know what he is doing”. He elaborates upon this by claiming that of course the psychotic knows that he is speaking but what he does not know is that he is addressing imaginary beings(the seraphim). It is this kind of “occurrent delusion” that if presented as a defence in a court of law can excuse the man prosecuted for a crime. Insanity alone is not a sufficient defence. What the schizophrenic experiencing an occurrent delusion lacks, which other insane people do not, is the possibility of distancing themselves in thought from their actions and reasoning about whether they are right or wrong. There is, in such cases, a significant failure of insight or self-knowledge linked to a failure to choose freely for oneself what ought to be done. Even if there do exist veridical beliefs in the belief system of the psychotic suffering from an occurrent delusion, e.g. “I am speaking here and now”, these are tied to fantastically delusional beliefs of being divine(“I am the alpha and omega”). The total experiential product suffices to destroy the texture of reality otherwise sustained by belief systems whose task it is to cognitively represent the world as it is and as it can be. The belief system of the normal person evolves and transforms itself in accordance with the powers of perception and reasoning but this natural evolution and transformation is not available to the psychotic partly because his anxiety saturated memory system is compelled to repeat the same trauma over and over again without significant variation. Even experiencing himself speaking is so structured that it does not form a normal memory in the psychotics memory system. A normal memory over the course of time can dissipate large amounts of anxiety and allow the traumatic core of the memory to embed itself in contexts of many different kinds of associates. It is learning that is largely responsible for the transformation of the normal persons belief system and pleasure supervenes as a consequence: in sharp contrast to the painful state of mind of the psychotic. It is the former state of consciousness that is best equipped to produce knowledge. In such states the concern is not merely for the truth(what is happening, has happened) but also with explanation/justification(why it happened or ought not to have happened). It is this structure that enables actions and beliefs to be justified/explained in terms of their reasons.

OS appeals to Cartesianism in this work but he might equally have appealed to the role of thought in Kantian Critical Philosophy and its architectonic of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. Needless to say the Kantian account of thought is far more complex than that which we encounter in Cartesian accounts. The scope of the Kantian architectonic certainly can sustain a discussion of dreams without an appeal to God and it can also provide many of the concepts required to correctly characterise a difference between normal and psychotic states of consciousness. It can also provide us with a justification of scientific explanation across the domain of the three kinds of science Freud refers to in his account of mental health. Cartesianism contributed to the epistemologisation of Philosophical thinking in a way that Kantian Critical Philosophy did not. Descartes’ obsession with mathematical forms of reasoning also contributed toward the acceptance of mechanical forms of explanation for the phenomena of life-forms, preferring to dismiss important categorical distinctions that we inherited from the more biologically oriented Aristotelian accounts of psuche. For Descartes, as we have indicated before, the cries of unaesthetised animals were merely sounds or vibrations of the air(manifestations of energy). For OS on the other hand, the consciousness of these suffering animals and the suffering of human beings were indistinguishable and any attempt to harm animals would certainly have met with a Pythagorean response by OS(the yelp of a dog kicked was the cry of a kindred spirit). For Descartes it was clearly the case that the exactitude of the measurements of physics and the axiomatic certainty of physical laws made more of an impression on Descartes’ thinking than did Aristotle’s De Anima.

Experience, for OS, is inextricably linked to the concepts of “process” and “event” and this once again raises our earlier question as to whether the concept of “event”(that which happens) suffices to characterise agency and action in a context of explanation/justification. This in turn raises the further question as to whether the concept of “event” could contribute anything positive to ethical discourse in the wider sense envisaged by Aristotle who rested his system on areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Surely, many would argue an event just happens and is what it is: it cannot make sense to claim that it ought not to have occurred. An event just does not seem to possess the right form of universality(of the ought) to be of any use in ethical or religious discussions or indeed any form of discourse involving values. House-building is one activity but does it make sense to say that it is one event? Housebuilding causes the existence of its product: the house, but if we introduce the concept of event it seems that the category of cause and effect is implied, especially if we are called upon to describe or explain the phenomenon as it appears to us. What was clearly one logical activity suddenly becomes two, namely the process of the building and the finished product.

John Dewey in his work “Art as Experience” characterised experience in terms of undergoing and doing, without addressing the essential ontological distinction between the two as noticed by Kant: the distinction between what happens to one and what one does. It certainly, at the very least, appears to strain the requirements of grammar to claim that events are something that is done. The safer option here would appear to be to align experience with doing and situate it in a matrix of power, agency, possibility, potentiality and purpose. It is, of course undeniable that physical processes/events underlie experience and this materialist connection might account for the appearance of compatibility between the normal language of experience and the language of events. The language of processes/events serve thus to focus on the material and efficient explanations of the phenomena concerned rather than on the more relevant final and formal explanations that are of central importance in hylomorphic theory. It is these latter forms of “cause” that are more relevant to determine the essence of the actions we engage in.

OS partly rests his argument in favour of the reduction of experience to events upon the position which claims that mental processes must transform themselves into mental states–the processes of forgetting, for example, result in a state of forgetfulness. OS admits that this transformation takes place “out of sight”(P.178) but he also adds that he agrees that forgetfulness cannot be an experience because experience as per his definition cannot be a state composed of states. Similarly the states of belief and intention are non experiential. His argument for this is the following: I can go to sleep with the intention of buying a house and wake up believing that it is not a good idea to buy a house(P.178). A non-experiential process has occurred in the interim he claims–a process outside of the realm of consciousness. The question to raise here is whether the description “I have changed my mind” is a relevant thing to say about this phenomenon. If the answer is that it is, then a further question arises as to whether, in changing my mind, this is something that has happened to me or something that I have done. If experience is best defined as Dewey claimed, a matter of both undergoing and doing, then perhaps we can say of the case under discussion that we are dealing with an activity that was outside the scope of consciousness. This approach, however raises other problems which may require an architectonic as complex as that of Freud’s theories to resolve. The agency of the Ego, we know has conscious, preconscious and unconscious dimensions. The conscious ego is, for Freud the primary vehicle of our contact with reality but the preconscious system uses our knowledge and the meaning of words as part of its contribution to our transactions with reality. This account does not sit comfortably with the Cartesian account of experience as something that is somehow “infallibly known”(P.181). For both Descartes and OS there can be no category of phenomena that can be termed “unconscious experiences” because by stipulation all experience occurs within the confines of the “stream of consciousness”. OS notes in passing that Freud never postulated the existence of unconscious emotions, but what are we to say about those learning processes that occur in the run-up to the formation of a belief, e.g. after the learning process involved in building house– I now believe that I can build a house? On one account all that is required is the conscious idea of the house and the will to engage in the building process. This in its turn requires that I have insight into my own intentions. Is this insight a more stable phenomenon than my belief that it is raining? This latter may in the end require meteorological knowledge if I am called upon to justify the truth of my belief– I felt a drop but did it fall or was it hanging in the air? Might it be the case that once self actualisation processes have mobilised the necessary and sufficient conditions for insight, that this inner self-knowledge is more stable? Knowing that it is raining does not make me a meteorologist but knowing how to build a house does make me a builder, knowing how to do mathematics does make me a mathematician and knowing oneself might similarly make one a wise person or a philosopher. Is the difference then between a builder and a wise man a matter of the difference between inner(insight) and outer knowledge? Are these different aspects of experience or does insight transcend experience?

In a section entitled “Principles of Insight”(P.189) OS launches an investigation into Insight in terms of aims and principles. What emerges from this discussion is the importance of self knowledge for the form of consciousness we encounter in the human life form(the rational animal capable of discourse).OS also highlights the importance of thinking for the constitution of the condition of consciousness(P.200). The quote that follows touches upon our earlier discussion of the logical difficulties involved in identifying active experience with the analytically motivated reductionist concept of “event”:

“One interesting fact about the conscious is that their experiential life is active in character. I do not just mean that it is eventful, I mean that it is actively or intentionally or willingfully eventful”.(P.200)

In the context of this discussion OS claims that the stream of consciousness contains essentially active phenomena. The focus upon a substance like phenomenon such as a stream and focusing upon its contents, however, does make it easier to look at the contents of the stream as something that happens to it. Kant in his First Critique did speak of the possibility of characterising human activity in terms of cause-effect and events, as well as in terms of self-initiated activity : different forms of reasoning, e.g. theoretical and practical are however involved and the question then is raised as to whether theoretical reasoning necessarily falls upon the ontological psychological category of “that which happens to man” rather than “what man makes of himself”.

Desire of course, becomes more complex as the experience of the animal form of life concerned becomes more complex. Powers build upon powers and the integrated result forms a self-conscious form of consciousness that is capable of even accepting the extinction of its own life. Complex attitudes such as this emerge from an actualisation process in which the first actuality of the human form of psuche is the actualisation of the power of discourse in terms of its systematic exercise. The next level of the actualisation process results in the systematic exercise of the power of reason in both its theoretical and practical forms. OS points to the importance of the ontological condition of being active in the achievement of the condition of Consciousness and he argues insightfully that there is an interdependence between the executive and cognitive functions of life forms. He further maintains that the linguistic power of the self conscious form of consciousness is dependent upon this interdependence rather than vice versa.

OS emphasises that activity per se is not sufficient to generate what he calls the “charmed circle” of mutually supporting powers that actualise in a human form of psuche. Activity can take two forms it is argued, firstly the explorative activity of attention and perception in the construction of objects in relation to a spatio-temporal continuum. Secondly, the internal activity of synthesising past-present and future in the context of action. These different forms of activity have different aims, namely The Truth and The Good and different metaphysical conditions underlie these different forms. Different kinds of knowledge are involved in the performance of what can be regarded as a determinate theoretical task as compared with the practical tasks that manifest choice and freedom. Observation is obviously involved in theoretical explorative, object-constructing activity and non-observational forms of awareness are involved in idea-guided bodily movement: the body-image will also be involved in this latter kind of activity aiming teleologically at its purpose with the assistance of both maxims and principles.

OS refers to the mental will and its connection with the power of reasoning activated by an agent. The action produced as a consequence originates internally but is consummated externally when a desired/intended state of affairs is brought about. Wittgenstein in his later thought claimed that an inner process always stands in need of outer criteria and the bond between these is obviously in one sense causal and in another primarily logical and conceptual. On both the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts less emphasis is placed on the exchange between inner and outer events/processes and more attention is paid to principles capable of operating as major premises in practical argumentation: principles which form a foundation for the reasoning which concludes that a particular action ought to be done. As far as OS is concerned the bond between the will and reason is mysterious and this is perhaps tied to an assumption that inner mental events need to be related to outer behavioural events. There is, however, we are suggesting, an alternative interpretation of Wittgensteins thought and that involves seeing the behaviour as manifesting or revealing something logically connected with it. There is, in such circumstances no call for invoking a possible material/efficient causal explanation. The roll of thought events in this context are called into question. Thought in the form of a principle that is self constituted may be a more reasonable characterisation of such a state of affairs. If Kant was correct in his claim that “every event must have a cause” is an a priori truth, then applying this in practical contexts where action is involved appears to be a dubious invitation to divide a logical whole into material entities and relations. Accepting such an invitation then neutralises the operation of the principle of sufficient reason.

Refusing to accept such an invitation, however, allows us to regard thought as agent constituted entities that aim at the True: these entities can then be seen as parts of a belief system that as a whole aims at “The Truth”. Obviously false beliefs can be a part of this system but there is a question as to whether deluded beliefs such as

“I am Napoleon”

can be a part of the system. Such a belief ruptures our ideas about life, death, History and individuality and also seriously threatens our relation to Reality.

OS in a section entitled “Perception and Truth” discusses the role of Perception in Consciousness from what is clearly an analytical point of view. He discusses the distinction between the waking state and the state of being asleep and the role of consciousness in both . He admits that there is a persistence of the stream of consciousness in sleep that manifests itself in dreaming activity. This latter state however has a questionable relation to reality in that the dreamer believes falsely that he is engaging in actions. This is a misapprehension, what is “experienced” is a product of the imagination(e.g. wishes engaging with the memory system). In the waking state the stream of consciousness assists in generating our waking experiences via the use of the will and the “mechanism” of attention.

OS raises the classical analytical question of whether we are aware of facts or of things. He claims that noticing that the tree was struck by lightning does not only engage the attention but is a more complex cognitive “event” that has the “aim” of forming a belief. The attention appears to be operating at the psychological level of the human psuche but beliefs that aim at truth appear definitely to be operating at the higher level of “the mental”. The true belief that the lightning struck the tree is, of course, logically related to the psychological activity of noticing. The memory in its cognitive mode also needs to be engaged for the activity to become a “mental” activity. The pure noticing of the lightning strike is of course also a possible “experience” but engaging with the conceptual system certainly appears to take the activity out of the realm of Sensibility and move it into the realm of the Understanding. Claiming that in the simpler case of noticing, that we “notice” facts is confusing one kind of apprehension with another. In the course of this discussion OS once again claims that perception is an “event”. Whether this way of describing the matter is compatible with the involvement of the will is a question we raised earlier. Critical Philosophy refers to the role of the transcendental imagination operating intermediately between intuition and understanding to form what Kant calls schema-images of concepts as part of the preparation for thinking conceptually about a phenomenon. The imagination uses non conceptual rules for the formation of these schema-images.

OS deals with the imagination in a section entitled “The Imagination” and he invokes a diverse number of contexts in order to illustrate the wide scope of the exercise and products of imaginative activity. There are three different modes of exercising the imagination:

  1. Imagination that as is engaged in by the construction of a fictional narrative by an author
  2. Imaginative perception employed when we engage with representations such as photographs or film
  3. Perceptual imaginings, e.g. hallucinations or mental imagery.

OS is conducting an analytical investigation, an analytical exploration into the activities of the imagination in an attempt to see what they may or may not have in common. The goal is a definition that does not have to meet the requirements of providing the necessary and sufficient conditions of what is being investigated. The “defining marks” of the phenomena being investigated appears to be satisfactory outcome although OS does acknowledge the difference between relational(causal) and constitutive(essence specifying) properties.

Propositional imagining is probably the most interesting sub-species of the genus being investigated, containing as it does the widest literary and philosophical implications for our cultural lives. Imagining is also a sub species of thinking, OS maintains (p.344). There is, in OS’s account, however, no opposition of the kind we encounter in the writings of the positivists and atomists, namely, that between objective thinking and subjective imagining. Indeed, OS even allows for the possibility that dream beliefs can be accidentally true and claims further that dreams have a “robust relation to reality”(P.345) given the fact that the memory system assists in providing the content. If, for example, I dream that I am in Paris the dream scene is provided by the memory system and knowledge that it is I and not someone else that believes they are in Paris. Of course one can have this dream and wake up in Bogna Regis and it then becomes clear that I was not in Paris but merely imagined that I was, but it is still however true that it was I and not someone else that dreamed I was in Paris : and I know this in some sense.

Fiction has a structure that is partly constituted by the imagination and the product we are confronted with may be a product of both our knowledge about the world and our knowledge about ourselves(about the self and its transcendental features). The “experiences reported in fictional narrative are of course in some sense “unreal” and “imagined” but they are tied together by an aesthetic idea that unifies and guides the content in a way analogous to the way in which principles and laws govern content in the Theoretical and Practical Sciences. The Productive Sciences in general communicate ideas that relate conceptually and logically to their products, but poetry and theatre aim not at knowledge about external reality or action but at the worthiness of the Agent behind the actions via a plot construction that meets the criteria of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Productive science is thereby more intimately linked to ethics and Practical science than it is to the Theoretical sciences. The plot of tragedy clearly has ethical intentions via the medium of aesthetic ideas. Imagining someone murdering his King and then as a consequence losing his mind by degrees over a period of time may well be an aesthetic way of thinking about Justice(diké) and Ananke. It is a way of consciously imagining that justice is an end in itself both good in itself and good in its consequences.

Imaginative seeing for OS is imagining a landscape via the photograph of it. Here the imagining is occurring without the use of concepts. It is to be distinguished from visual imaging which manifests itself in the form of hallucinations, dream perception and mental imagery. After conducting his survey of the forms of imagination and their products OS arrives at the insight that the best that can be achieved is not a constitutive essence specifying definition of the phenomenon but rather only its defining marks which indicate that imagining of all forms are “imitations” of reality that can have different causes and different purposes. The “normal” relation to reality in this mode of “thinking” is short circuited and a form of thinking that is only analogous to The True emerges, constituted by practical and productive ideas of the Good. If, as in the case of dreams, the mental powers required for narration are inoperative, we then find ourselves confronting a phenomenon where even space and time can be ruptured in dream scenes that appear to defy logic. Any plot requires at least an intact time structure of a beginning a middle and an end and is thereby a more complex imaginative creation than the dream.

Perception is on some theories regarded under the ontological aspect of “What happens to us rather than under the aspect of “What we do”. If, as Kant claims, the ontological distinction between what happens to us and what we do is an absolute distinction then it becomes problematic to claim that we can will our perceptions and perceive our willings. But surely we must be aware of our willings. Even in the extreme case of having lost a limb and trying to move that limb, I must be aware of having tried to move that limb. But could it not also be the case that in looking at a landscape I am non observationally aware of moving my eyes(as part of the awareness of my body-image). Is this what we mean by self-knowledge at the level of perception? According to OS self knowledge is part of our rational condition(P.409). This a condition in which the relationship between the potentiality for rationality and its actuality is a complex matter. The degree of self consciousness associated with the actualisation of the rational powers will probably correspond to the extent to which the rational condition has been actualised in the individual concerned, which in turn is conditional upon the extent to which powers have been integrated with other powers in the developmental process, e.g. the power of perception and the power of action. Attempting to characterise the relation of experience to both of these powers without recognising the ontological divide within the stream of consciousness merely seems to confuse matters. John Dewey in his work “Art as Experience is aware that the ontological divide can only be unified against the biological background of the interaction of a living creature with its environing conditions. Dewey chooses to use the term “Art” solely in relation to the doing of something or making of an art object. He uses the term “aesthetic” to describe the experience of appreciation. Art, for Dewey is emotional, to do with a self:

“concerned in the movement of events toward an issue that is desired or disliked.”(P.42)

(Art as Experience, New York, Capricorn Books, 1958)

Dewey refuses to connect experience with object-events and instead insists that we are dealing with a more complex phenomenon of “events with meaning”, For Dewey it is the power of the imagination in an emotive mode that creates “meaning”. Part of this meaning is related to the way in which knowledge is both used and transformed in the work of art. For Dewey, a bare awareness of events, would be an insufficient characterisation of the kind of knowledge that is meaningfully employed. Emotion, for Dewey, in a work of art, functions in very much the same way as the aesthetic idea does in Kant’s aesthetic theory. In Kant we are not dealing with nature divided into events and causes but rather with a nature that in contrast to its causal relations has its finalities(nature as a final end). For both Kant and Dewey, the aesthetic idea of feeling is not an empirical sensation-like entity but more like a complex feeling of life. The perception of the landscape for Dewey might, that is, be construed as an event with meaning generated by a similar event with meaning, namely the willed movement of the eyes. In modern Psychology the role of the eyes is a life function that is even involved in the generation of dream images(REM). Both the landscape and the dream become then, events with meaning in the “feeling of life”. Both events, however, are different because they incorporate forms of awareness that are different–in the case of the landscape we are dealing with an observational form of awareness but in the case of the dream the awareness obviously has to be of a different kind. Dewey claimed that the Kantian “feeling of life” involved in aesthetic situations ought to be characterised as the “sense of moving tendencies” that is generated by the imagination operating in an emotional context–a sense rooted in the biological relation one has to ones environment, culminating in an object that is constituted not causally but in terms of being a final end of nature in itself created not by another separably identifiable event but created by an agent with an intention to create a sense of contentment. This is the structure, then, that gives rise to the aesthetic judgement made in the spirit of universality and necessity.

OS in his discussion of visual perception notes the importance of the fact of depth perception. In perception of a landscape the eyes can focus on an object lying further away and the landscape can form around this new figure. Depth perception is a universal characteristic of perception and is partly responsible for the objectivity of perception. If we were to attempt to translate this transformation of the first perception of the landscape into the second perception of a landscape further away, into the language of event or object, it is not certain that the above mentioned objectivity and universality can be maintained. In the end even Dewey’s concept of an object as an event with meaning fails to provide us with the means to correctly characterise visual experience and the peculiar kinds of knowledge involved(e.g. spatial intuition).

The Being of seeing, according to OS, cannot be related to causal conditions but must rather be related to constitutive non causal conditions. Seeing is, as Kant envisaged, not full blown knowledge in itself because in its raw form it is a mere power with a particular essence. In its raw form it is exercised in acts of attention, e.g. in focussing upon parts of a landscape. What happens after this initial moment in time is dependent upon whether other powers, e.g. the understanding or language become involved or not. Causal conditions such as the invisible light beams which play a crucial role in making the visibility of objects possible, obviously belong to the material and efficient conditions for the formation of visual phenomena. Were the sun to explode and light eventually to disappear from our solar system this might well as a matter of fact cause the extinction of many life forms. Those life forms that survive(not perhaps for very long) would possess sensory motor fields in which sound waves would replace light beams. Memories of light would persist and be an important part of the cultural heritage and perhaps if we were ingenious enough to replace the biological life enhancing effects of light, life would persist under the conditions of artificial light. OS points out that we do not need to engage in explorations to find the source of light as we do with sounds that present themselves more ambiguously. OS argues in his analysis of sound that there can be no “sound representative” account of the perception of sound(P.447). Sound obviously travels more slowly and may in special cases have ceased at its origin when it reaches its destination but this does not hinder us from perceiving the direction the sound emanated from. This is also true of light over great distances(e.g. light years): the arrival of light from a star that has gone out of existence is intelligible on a Kantian account and on the accounts given by science. Light is obviously a more complex medium than sound bringing with it the shape of the object and immediately causing colour under the right conditions. Sound may also, in particular circumstances bring with it some indication of the texture of the surface it emanated from to the discriminating listener. The fact that the appearance in my telescope of the orange light originating in a position in space many light years away is exactly the same whether the source of the light exists or not indicates that our contact with objects is primarily epistemological. This fact also testifies to the importance of sense perception in the generation of knowledge about what really exists. The articulation of the phenomenon of light would also suggest that we can objectify the light beam into an orange cylindrical form, into an object whose meaning is of course partially dependent upon the nature of light but also dependent upon the form of its source. If all of this is true, Moore’s proof of the existence of the external world: “Here is one hand”, “Here is another hand” does not fully meet the requirements of an unambiguous proof: is Moore referring to the hand that is part of the body-image and whose movement has its source in the motor system of the brain, or its sense-data or both?

There is no doubting the importance of the scientific investigation of phenomena under the condition that it refrains from reductionism, respects more modest metaphysical presuppositions, and understands the categorical framework and the operation of principles involved in the investigation of all forms of phenomena: i.e. physical phenomena and organic phenomena such as the movement of a hand might well require different methods of investigation, different categorical assumptions and determination by different laws even if the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason apply across the whole range of phenomena. The differences between the material and efficient conditions of auditory and visual phenomena for example ought to be left to the scientist to investigate. There is of course an obvious phenomenological difference between seeing and hearing that ought also to be investigated. Sounds, phenomenologically, are more diffuse than sights and do not press on the attention in the same way: they do not spontaneously build “fields” in the form of landscapes although a concert may be an artificially constructed exception to this rule.

What the above scientific excursion into the sensory world may reveal is that there is in fact a case for sense-data in the analysis of sensory phenomena. This claim cannot obviously rest on a commitment to atomistic theories of the so-called psychological primitive of sensation that we have argued against throughout these volumes. Attention, for example, is as vital to the psychological equation constituting sensory-motor forms of life, as is voluntary movement. Sense -data obviously fall on the retina and the orange form I saw through the telescope after having been processed by the rods and cones of the eye generate an image on the retina. OS provides us with the following account:

“..assume that the retinal area under consideration is sufficiently central to permit full perceptual colour differentiation. Then given these background considerations,(a quotum) light of colour C1 at point P1 on the retina is in such a conscious being a causally sufficient condition of colour C1 being present at a corresponding point P1′ in the visual field. Now let us make one more innocuous assumption. Let us assume that the C1 light at point P1, effects the appearance of C1 in the visual field through locally generating some chemical (x). Why not? It must do it in some way. Accordingly (x) at P1 must in the assumed standing conditions be a causally sufficient condition of colour C1 at point P1′ in the visual field…It is in my view already weighty argument in favour of the view that when in normal vision C1 light impinges at P1 on the retina, it causes a visual sensation of colour C1 at P1′ in the visual field.”(P 467-8)

It is important to note that in the above account of what occurs prior to the visual sensation, reference is made to physical conditions(light, chemical(x)) and this reference is on OS’s account non-psychological. The visual sensation of orange, on the other hand ,is psychological in accordance with OS’s ontological architectonic. This separation of ontological domains correlates very well with the Aristotelian separation between material/efficient conditions and formal/final conditions. The consciousness of orange that ensues after the physical chemical transaction is of course available as an individual phenomenon to no one else but the possessor of the body that is affected and generates the chemical but the sensation as such only becomes conscious under psychological conditions. With this kind of reflection we leave the realm of physical events and causation behind and enter into the domain of the psychological. The sensation, OS argues is the only psychological item that can become the material object of attention(P.534).

The role of language as a mediator in the production of knowledge is also dealt with in OS’s account. He proposes an evolutionary account of knowledge in which there is an initial stage where language( in a hypothetical mood) singles out for linguistic attention items in the physical world without necessarily knowing very much about their essences. He cites as evidence the first namings of metals and diseases. This, it could be argued, given the above abstruse account of visual perception, might be true of the phenomenon of perception, although if one for example examines the ancient greek words for auditory phenomena much of the essence of the phenomena appears to be captured by Greek vocabulary. The scientific account however is even more complex and provides us with the following chain of phenomena: the transitivity of attention travels down a chain extending form the psychological(non-mental) part of the mind to the lighting of the landscape to the snow on the surface of the mountainside situated in space. This analysis also suggests a characterisation of the phenomenon of perception into the perceptual “given”( a visual field composed of two dimensional points) ordered in accordance with colour values. Such a visual field (under a certain description) will contain no shapes or structures of any kind(P.546). So, it is not sensations but these two dimensional colour points that are the atoms of the system OS describes. Analysis as a philosophical method is required because, contrary to the claims of some realists we never perceive material object particulars directly but only via mediator items, i.e. we only perceive some particular X in virtue of seeing something else, a Y, which is not identical with the X. For example:

“I see Mt Blanc through seeing its south side, its south side through seeing its south surface, its south surface through seeing a patch of snow thereon.”(P.549)

Yet the seeing of X and the seeing of Y is in some sense conceptually related . There are multiple descriptions of the particular of Mt Blanc and each description will relate to a different Y mediator. The two dimensional colour valued point system never as such becomes a phenomenon of experience that can be singled out by the attention. It is in fact the mediators that live epistemologically closer to the perceiver. The first item in the chain of mediators will provide a description that is not a matter of interpretation, e.g. the two dimensional pointillist visual field.

But what then is a material object, e.g. a mountain? Is it the matter of the mountain that is its essence? We know that the matter must be formed(organised) before any essence can be attributed to it. Matter in itself and without form is mysterious and its inner constitution is not given to us in any way. For OS the material object necessarily has an inside, sides, surfaces, a shape, and parts. We may not be able to perceive the inside of an object depending upon the disposition of the surfaces. The inner density of an object is such that it can have many aspects and perception alone cannot reveal these aspects. It might well be that it is through Perception that Consciousness opens a window out onto the garden of the real but it is a surface based phenomenon and cannot plumb the depths of the matter of an object.

Perception, especially visual perception as a power, takes us on a journey outside of our bodies. The power of attention is a part of this journey and seeks a two-dimensional colour value resting place for the eyes and mobilises other powers to impose a structure on this field, constructing, for example, shapes in space initially independently of any activity of conceptualisation that emanates from the understanding. The question to pose here however, is whether the understanding may be involved in the non-observational awareness the agent has of his own bodily position in space and across time. Bodily awareness uses the media of proprioception and touch. Touch as we know has been appealed to historically as the sense that finally verifies the presence of a seen or heard phenomenon but it too is a surface based phenomenon. We know that Macbeth reaches for the dagger and the absence of contact with the object suffices to remove his hallucination–so much for Moores proof –but it may be improved if the hands could simultaneously touch each other. Kant would of course claim that any such “proof” is impossible and in Socratic spirit would claim that we ought to know what we cannot in principle know and reserve the request for proof to the domain of what can be known.

Proprioception must be related in some way to body-image but as we have seen there are problems with conceptualising this idea of a body-image. OS argues that it is possession of a body-image that enables us to experience two qualitatively identical pains simultaneously in two different hands. He concludes:

“the possession of a body-image must on a number of counts be rated as part of the very foundation of absolutely every form of perception and thus ultimately of consciousness itself.”(P.626)

A conclusion that would not look out of place in the phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty(Phenomenology of Perception) which of course is a tribute to the depth of OS’s account. The lived conscious body is certainly the hylomorphic foundation of everything animal and human and the condition of eudaimonia (living a flourishing life). Piaget once proposed a stage theory in which sensory-motor schemata are formed as a preliminary to the operation of thought at both concrete and abstract levels, but this account contained no specific reference to the body-image or proprioception. For Aristotle, the organ and limb system of the animal would be the basis of all perceptual powers but proprioception and body-image are nowhere directly invoked in the way OS envisages. We know OS appears to prefer the Freudian stage model in the creation of his idea of body-image. To the extent that Freud’s reflections rest on hylomorphic grounds this may allow appeals to Aristotelian metaphysics in the justification of OS’s account.

Some theorists have claimed that we have an immediate perceptive knowledge of limb presence and posture(an awareness that does not extend generally to the organs of the body but does extend to the movement of the eyes). It is interesting to note that this awareness of limb posture does not in any way interfere with our visual attendings. Attending to the path of a ball in the context of intending to catch the ball and moving the hand into the correct position is a coordinated integrated undertaking. The attention function of these two different systems do not compete with each other. OS poses the interesting question as to whether, as a result of the above considerations, we have to rule out the possibility that we are conscious, via an act of perception, of the position and posture of our bodies. OS argues that this is not the case and that there is no contradiction involved in the idea of the non observational form of awareness we have of our body position and posture. He wonders whether proprioception is a sixth sense given his argument that proprioception cannot be reduced to touch. From an earlier work on the Will we recall that proprioception does not involve any introspective involution of visual attention upon the limb engaged in an action: this form of attention, we saw served to destroy the structure of the action. These different types of attention cannot be coordinated and integrated. OS argues in his later work that the coordination of attention is best illustrated in the example of playing a stroke in tennis. Here he argues most of our attention is focussed upon the speed and direction of the ball but there is also some left over for the proprioceptive awareness of the moving arm: an awareness that would be registered in the short-term memory system of the tennis player. What we encounter here is a unity of the elements of looking, proprioceptive awareness, and the striking of the ball.

OS distinguishes between an experience related short-term body-image associated with a kind of primitive self he terms “i” and a long term body image that is associated with an “I” or a more complex self that has innate characteristics(presumably of a hylomorphic kind). It is not clear, however, whether this I is “psychological non mental” or “psychological mental” insofar as his architectonic is concerned. OS appears to rest his case(as William James did) on focusing upon the cerebral cause rather than at the level of what he termed the “psychological”. The isolation of the brain from the other organs such as the eyes and disregard of the fact that the brain does not in fact belong to the body-image leaves this question hanging in the air. Psuche is the root of our word psychological. The moorings to the Kantian “I think” also seemed to have been loosened. on OS’s account. Kant’s account of the unity of apperception and the will placed our human form of consciousness at a different level to the consciousness of animals(who also have brains). The dawning of a psychical distance between oneself and the environment was attributed by Kant to the “I think” actualising in a developmental process. The implication of this reflection is that affective impulses on their way to the motor system are hindered by a will in the spirit of “I ought not to..” and thus appears to allow the space for an “I” that possesses a long term body image. We are not provided with any reflections relating to ethical actions and judgements in OS’s essentially analytic presentation.

The brain, argues the brain researcher Edelman, is the most complex object in the universe. Surely, it can be argued that this could be the site of the “I” considering its relation to the limbs, thought and language. Language centres have been mapped in the brain and we can see the trace of ancient reptile and mammal brains in our brain suggesting once again the hierarchy of levels of activity Hughlings Jackson proposed. These “lower structures” might have brought some innate knowledge with them. Chomsky suggested that the language centres of the brain also were related to innate knowledge , e.g. universal grammar. He was fascinated by the phenomenon that we appear to be able to produce completely unique sentences that we have never heard before. He raised the question of whether one could have learned to structure sentences into subject-predicate without some kind of predisposition toward extracting rules and algorithms from the stream of discourse we are exposed to early on in life. The form of the sentence in which I think something about something, e.g. “Athens behaved unjustly toward Socrates” has a categorical structure that we do not find in the naming of something: this structure expresses a thought about something when we are thinking conceptually. The name Athens is either used correctly or not and whilst it may summarise a manifold of representations it does not express any truth about Athens. We know that theoretical rationality as expressed in arguments rests upon the truth of the components of those arguments, namely propositions. We also know that practical rationality as expressed by Aristotle in the act of the implementation of laws also rests upon certain truths, e.g. “All activity aims at the Good”(Opening of Nichomachean Ethics). For Kant the categorical structure of judgements follow the principles of logic(noncontradiction, sufficient reason) and these are a priori(independent of experience). How these categories relate to Language is however not clear. Wittgenstein claimed he was engaging in grammatical investigations and he used logical principles in these investigations as well as categories such as potentiality and actuality. The Wittgensteinian “turn” however involved emphasis upon practical forms of life in which language is embedded, and in this respect it became obvious that Aristotelian Categories such as “Having”, “Acting” and “Being Affected” became more relevant when determining the meaning of practical judgements. The relevance of the “I” in relation to such categories emerges as an important element. Truth is perhaps converted to truthfulness in the context of first person avowals and the issue of self-knowledge is raised. Human beings as agents that “have” or possess powers and that can have the status of being potential or actualised becomes one important focus of Wittgensteinian Philosophy. Kant, we know found Aristotle’s categories to be essentially rhapsodic and spent much time revising them with his “tables of judgement”. There is in fact a partial acknowledgement of the importance of Kantian Philosophy in Wittgenstein’s claim that his method had much in common with the method employed in Critical Philosophy. Theoretically, the role of language in relation to thought and the “I”, perhaps in the light of our current knowledge, is not clear, and perhaps the best articulation of our present knowledge was given above by James:

“But it is plain that the faculty of spoken language alone is so complicated as to call into play almost all the elementary powers which the mind possesses, memory, imagination, association, judgement, and volition.”

Its essential relations to rationality also ought to be mentioned. Language was certainly the medium of thought for those ancient Greeks who claimed that thinking was essentially speaking to oneself.

In his work “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view” Kant reiterates his view that animals do not possess an “I” that thinks. We know that on OS’s account animals have a body-image but the questions then arises as to whether they only possess a short term body image which is connected to a more primitive “i”. This would mean that the animal “i” is more instinctive. From Freud we learned that the instincts express the body to the mind and one of the first tasks of the Ego, we know was to protect the body. Animal instincts have sources. objects and aims but a question arises as to whether the aims of their instincts can be changed or whether they are immutable. There is also the question of the death instinct which could aim at the extinction of the life that sustains all activity and builds civilisations: is this a contradiction that complex beings such as humans “suffer” from or do they “will” to destroy what is Good. Is this a characteristic of the “I” that thinks?

A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action:Vol 4 –O Shaughnessy The Will– A dual aspect theory.

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O Shaughnessy is an analytical Philosopher with broad ranging interests in the realm of non-analytical and continental Philosophy: a realm that includes the thoughts of Freud, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Sartre, Spinoza, Kant, the later Wittgenstein, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Aristotle and Aquinas. This broad ranging interest, however, is grounded in Analytical Philosophy and we shall attempt in this chapter to situate O Shaughnessy’s thought in relation to Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy and Kantian Critical Philosophy.

O Shaughnessy however does not, as many Analytical Philosophers of the past have done, conflate the activities of Science and Philosophy, although there are ontological commitments that align these two concerns in ways unacceptable to both Aristotle and Kant. There is certainly no attempt to seek refuge in mathematical logic and logical atomism in order to justify his alignment of the above elements. Indeed, his concern is with how a particular resolution of the mind-body problem will impact upon the problem of the relation of physical action to the Will. In his characterisation of these issues we find surprising and refreshing references to the Freudian Project:

“The prevailing metaphysical conceptions of human nature in nineteenth century European thought tended on the whole to involve the assumption that the mind, no less than the body is a natural and indeed living phenomenon. This was, for example, an unquestioned tenet for Freud who charted the development of the mind of the entire human species as one might the growth of a particular plant.”(P. XXII)

The presence and influence of the Greek/Aristotelian notion of psuche is unmistakeable in the above reflection. O Shaughnessy continues his Freudian reflections by elaborating upon the relation between mental activities such as “internalisation” and the bodily function of feeding. Melanie Klein and her Freudian theory of object relations in relation to the Platonic theme of “The Good”is also taken up in the context of this discussion.

The picture of the mind as containing action-driving forces that are essentially impulsive and that perhaps need regulation is part of O Shaughnessy’s brilliant analysis of the mind body problem and the relation one has to ones own body. These problems were thrown down like a gauntlet by Descartes in his anti-Aristotelian reflections on Thought and Existence.

On this account, the will appears to be both operating on its own and being used by its owner in a complex operation that aims at a world partly constituted by a priori forms. The will, O Shaughnessy argues is an “ego-affirmative phenomenon”(P. XXII), using once again the language of Freud against the background of Aristotelian hylomorphic Philosophy. It is important to note in this context, however, that both Aristotle and Freud would have been more committed to a principled approach which in Freud’s theory took the form of three principles: the energy regulation principle(ERP), the pleasure-pain principle(PPP), and the reality principle(RP). This latter principle demanded a relation to the world and oneself which constitutes the human form of Being-in-the-world.

One of the responses to Cartesian bi-polarism (dualism) was a naturalisation of the mind and the emergence of the organ of the brain as the domain where different kinds of substance interact. One of the problems that flowed from Cartesian idealism was a mechanical view of life forms that transformed the “phenomenon of life” into something “technical”(techné). This disturbed the Aristotelian continuum of being, a continuum that moved from inorganic forms, to plant-life, to animal forms of life and thereupon to the rational animal capable of discourse. Mechanical principles and biological/psychological principles were being conflated in the Cartesian account. We ought to recall in this context that the mind-body problem did not naturally emerge as an aporetic problem for either Aristotle or Kant because neither philosopher made the mistake of viewing the mind as a kind of substance. For both Aristotle’s later work and for Kant, the mind is constituted by concepts and principles(noncontradiction, sufficient reason). There is no ontological one- sided commitment to the world seen through the eyes of a causal network of events, processes and resultant states. Such a world would be an impersonal world without human agency, human desires, human beliefs, human intentions, and the freedom of the will. There is no attempt in the work of either of these philosophers to reduce complex powers and phenomena to simpler events, processes or states.

O Shaughnessy claims that the obsession with the mind-body problem has tended to overshadow other important philosophical questions such as “What is the epistemological relation of a person to his body?” The relation , it is asserted, is not an observational form of awareness but is an awareness or consciousness of some non-observational kind. We know Freud regarded Consciousness as a vicissitude of Instinct and this relation might provide food for thought for how to account for the relation between desire and the will: could the will be a vicissitude of more primitive desires? We have in earlier chapters pointed to the importance of Hughlings Jackson in the work of Freud, especially his reworking of a higher lower hierarchical system of neurones into higher and lower regions of the human psyche. Instead of beginning at the materialistic end of the life-continuum Freud began at the level of the representations of the instincts, e.g the life instincts(Eros) and worked his way up from feeding to the higher mental processes of learning and acquiring knowledge. Later in his career he also boldly suggested an important role for the death instinct(Thanatos) in the affairs of human beings: thus aligning himself with the ruin and destruction prophecies of ancient Greek oracles. The knowledge of the consequences of the workings of these instincts, we know from Aristotle, would be assembled in the canon of sciences contained under the broad headings of Theoretical Science, Practical Science, and Productive Science. The genius of Freud’s Psychology is that it extends over the boundaries of all three sciences, thereby illustrating the complexity of the challenge of the Delphic oracle to “Know thyself”. The emphasis of both Aristotle and Kant on Metaphysics and Practical Science, and the importance of the telos of the flourishing life (eudaimonia), that is to say, the freedom of the agent to act in accordance with areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time)—points to the growing significance of Action and Will in any account of human nature. O Shaughnessy argues that this focus necessarily takes us into a realm of meaning and the Philosophy of language, and this accounts for the Wittgensteinian ring to many of his arguments, especially those related to privacy and the picture of the mind as an “inner theatre” of events, processes and end-states. This Wittgensteinian approach seems to encourage using the language of “events” and “processes” in the mental realm. This in turn licences philosophical investigations into the relation between bodily action and the role of the inner theatre. Given their commitment to the principles of Reason and the concepts of the understanding neither hylomorphic nor critical Philosophy would sanction referring to a mind constituted of concepts and principles in terms of concrete inner events. The concept of “event” for them would belong to discourse grounded in methodical observation. For Kant it would be possible to conceptualise the observation of physical action in terms of events and subsequently launch a search for the material and efficient causes of these events, but this would constitute a theoretical account of something whose essence is best represented in a priori terms of Agency , faculties or “powers” of the mind and “ends-in-themselves”. Without such a categorical framework, Kant would argue, the appearances of life would not make any practical sense.

O Shaughnessy prefers an empirical idea of freedom to the a priori term Kant uses. We are free, O Shaughnessy argues, in agreement with Wittgenstein, to unite any intuition with any other intuition to form a concept and this then does not commit us to anything other than an investigation into the use of the linguistic term. Wittgenstein however omits the Kantian restriction of the Categories which limit this freedom by the boundary of a categorical mistake which would definitely result in the confusion of the categories of theoretical reasoning with practical reasoning. O Shaughnessy discusses the Sartrean notion of character determining our choices in action contexts, and argues somewhat in the spirit of Wittgenstein that the development of character is as open-ended as the choice to change the use or meaning of a word. No personal history, O Shaughnessy argues, guarantees a particular future or character-outcome. Neither Aristotle nor Kant would agree with this position. The starting point of any investigation of humanity must, O Shaughnessy argues, use the royal road of physical bodily action. Action for both Aristotle and Kant was the central focus of the practical sciences but both would insist that the forming of good habits of action were necessary for the formation of a virtuous character. O Shaughnessy wishes to attempt to establish that there are what he calls de re necessities attached to action which Philosophy attempts to articulate, but it is not clear that the logical necessities he is out to elucidate fall into the domain of practical reasoning which may be more concerned with justification than explanation, at least insofar as Kant is concerned.

O Shaughnessy voices regret over the passing of what he called the Absolutes of the dogmatic idealists(does he place Kant in this category?) in favour of the sceptical nihilists inspired by the followers of Hume, but he does not mention the Kantian contribution toward the retention of the truths of dogmatism and scepticism in the formulation of his Critical Philosophy. Instead he congratulates Wittgenstein for introducing the theme of a language-using form of life into a discussion that was rehearsing ancient philosophical dilemmas. We should recall in this context that Wittgenstein’s later position was meant to correct his earlier commitment to both a logical atomism and a sceptical solipsism that postulated a solipsistic act of projection of meaning into dead signs. The animal form of life with its obsession in relation to survival certainly highlights the importance of bodily action in a world where only the fittest of the species survive. This is a very different scenario to the universe of discourse where beliefs are exchanged under the condition of truthfulness and perhaps also discussed rationally in terms of their worth.

O Shaughnessy presents us with a view of the psychical apparatus reminiscent of that which we find in Chapter 7 of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”. The model presented is an input-output schema modified by precipitates of analytical Philosophy of mind-discussions. Sensation, Perception, and Knowledge feed into Desire, Intention and the output “mechanism” of bodily action. Environmental stimuli and responses lie outside the “model” of the psychic apparatus and form part of the schema. The model is a model of the activity of any life form(psuche):

“Significantly, the direction of psychological causality in this diagram is anti-clockwise, from inner to outer, from awareness to bodily action. One great half of this primaevally bare and simple mind seeks to perpetuate the other half which proceeds to transform the environment–which in turn repercusses within. Thus the rudimentary of the knowing half must be to generate events in the willing half which utilise the cognitive contents of the knowing half, for all that is known in this primitive context is either acted on or else treated with the practical response of indifference.”(P. XXXV)

The above schema is to be applied to all animal forms of life and when applied to the human form of life all that is needed is a more complex relation of the elements. Knowledge, we assume will be subject to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason and Reasons for Actions will play a decisive role in determining the ontological nature of action whether it be, for example an instrumental act of survival(feeding, fighting) or a categorical act aimed at living a flourishing life. O Shaughnessy argues in this context that the will takes as its first target the part of the body that will be used to bring about the action and change in the environment the agent desires. If the action is the instrumental action of building a house, the idea of the completed house will of course determine the large number of acts necessary to bring the house into existence. Beavers and bees engage in this kind of instrumental action but human dwellings are not done instinctively but by consciously using technical knowledge(techné): a product of a complex belief system and a complex set of intentions situated in a matrix of rationality steered by a form of consciousness that can begin with an idea and end with a house. Apart from the talk of “events” in the mind(and fixations upon material and efficient causes) both Aristotle and Kant would not see much to quarrel with in O Shaughnessy’s schema except perhaps the possible absence of “forms” and principles. Otherwise the schema could also be seen as a defence of behaviourism and its insistence that experimentation upon animals is sufficient to provide adequate evidence for the functioning of human mental activity. The primary task of O Shaughnessy’s schema is to represent the role of the Will in our transactions with the World. Given this qualification Freud would probably have viewed this schema positively in spite of its emphasis on the dualistic division of the mind into sensory and motor compartments. Instrumental action is the primary focus of the schema. The role of discourse and rationality are not immediately clear but their presence is presumably implied in the elements of Knowledge and Desire. We are, as Aristotle rightly claimed, social/political animals and this implies knowing and desiring in a communal context: the context of a polis. The schema also leaves a possible space for contemplation and the examination of ones beliefs, desires, intentions, and actions. In this space the validity of ones reasons can be subjected to a principled examination.

O Shaughnessy claims that it is the function of Consciousness to generate intentional bodily action and the more primitive the form of Consciousness the less likely it is that one can adopt the above form of reflection required for civilisation-building and culture constituting activities. O Shaughnessy asks what the function of such a complex psuche could be and gives himself an Aristotelian answer:

“What is the function of the mind in a developed animal like man?…for what does awareness do for life in the rational? Or have we by now managed to transcend the primitive good of our ancestors?Are our final concerns now something else?Such as death? Heaven? The Good Life? Nothing at all?…..Rather as the Freudian libido retains its primal objects even as the resources of symbolism enable it to be deflected in ever widening circles of sublimation outwards into the world, so it seems to me that the developmentally original function of consciousness must be retained as it ramifies into wider horizons.”(XXXVI)

The interesting reference to sublimation raises questions of the psychological activities required for widening the circle of activity dedicated to the furtherance of life: activities that appear to require building civilisations and creating cultures. Sublimation was defined by Freud as a non-sexual form of substitute satisfaction. This defence-mechanism obviously refers to the Pleasure-Pain principle but it also takes us beyond its scope into the realm of Reality and the Reality Principle: a realm that includes the Aristotelian practical principle of areté and its importance in the construction of a flourishing life. Given the complexities of living in a civilisation/culture it is difficult to conceive of Knowledge and Rationality not playing significant roles in the achievement of the human summum bonum. O Shaughnessy points in the context of this discussion to the importance of the roles of intentional action and Consciousness in the generation and integration of the powers necessary to to do what we ought to do in the spirit of areté. He also insists on the importance of physical action that could in principle be observed as an event in the creation of cultural works such as Shakespeares King Lear: without a quill moving physically across a parchment, he argues, we would never have had access to the play. This of course was a necessary material/efficient condition of the existence of the work but we also require reference to the weight of Shakespeare’s knowledge and life experience to appreciate the full cultural significance of the work of Shakespeare. What we encounter in this context of explanation/justification is the presence of different kinds of explanation/causality in the search for the totality of conditions demanded by the principle of sufficient reason.

O Shaughnessy’s concentration upon physical bodily action in the context of the presence of other conscious minds does, however, reveal the fact that my actions have a natural function of expression in a natural organic manner in those cases when my body becomes the organ of expression of my desires and intention. It is this expressive function that otherwise ought to close the sceptical abyss which is opened up by atomising this expressive action into an inner and outer event.

The way in which the Other Consciousness is introduced into the Psychological Theory of Freud is via the agency of the Superego: a critical social agency internalised as a judging function. Maxims, intentions, desires, and actions are submitted to critical standards embodying principles that have helped to build our civilisations and create our cultures. O Shaughnessy argues that it is the concept of another person that is responsible for forming the vicissitude of Consciousness we refer to as Self-Consciousness. He claims this concept is innate but the empirical existence of others is required if this form of Consciousness is to be actualised. Language is obviously also an important power that also requires this innate concept and its empirical conditions that are to be found in the community of language users. Language for Freud was Janus faced with one aspect turned toward the sensory world which it names and describes and the other toward the world of thought which it expresses. There is the I that speaks, and the I that thinks, and the soundest approach to describing and explaining this state of affairs is to refuse to atomise the self into compartments but rather regard the expressive self as logically identical with the thinking self that expresses thoughts in a public realm of discourse–thus realising the social and political intentions of a rational animal capable of discourse. O Shaughnessy’s view is that Self Consciousness is a secondary phenomenon, the primary phenomenon being a vital expressive animal interacting with a demanding environment.

Heidegger’s contribution to this debate was to question the above prioritising and to regard Being-with-others and ones own Dasein as equi-primordial phenomena:

“Being-with is such that the disclosedness of the Dasein-with of others belongs to it; this means that because Dasein’s being is Being-with, its understanding of Being already implies the understanding of others. That understanding, like any understanding is not an acquaintance derived from knowledge about them but a primordially existential kind of Being which, more than anything else makes such knowledge and acquaintance possible. Knowing oneself is grounded in Being-with, which understands primordially”(Being and Time, trans Macquarrie J and Robison E, Oxford, Blackwell, 1978, P.160-1)

This Being-with is characterised by a fundamental ontological attitude of solicitude, and this attitude is part of the structure of Dasein for whom Being as such, and in particular its own Being is an issue. This raises the question of our Being-in-the-world as a whole and the question of Being in general. Solicitude is an attitude related to Dasein’s basic state of mind and Anxiety–an anxiety that can take the form of fleeing from oneself. The public “They”, the empirical others, encourage this way of Being and also encourage a fleeing in the face of ones own death. The origin of Anxiety lies in the fact of our having being thrown into the world, but amid the chaos there exists the possibility of authentic ways of Being, disclosing itself for Dasein, e.g. the holistic existential characteristic of Care for the world in all its forms, including the instrumental ready-to hand, and the solicitude the other person demands of us. “Being-in-the-world”, Heidegger argues “is essentially Care”(P.193). No attempt shall be made, he continues, to reduce Being-in-the-world to special acts or drives and this might be a rejection of both Freudian Psychology and the Psychology of Behaviourism. Willing, Heidegger argues, is essentially teleological, implying a disclosedness of “that for the sake of which” and a disclosure of something to concern oneself with. Underlying this state of affairs, however is the ontologically prior necessity of Care. This Care is ultimately a Care for all Being or Reality. It is, however, difficult to care for Reality independently of the judgments that one makes of its nature. If, as Freud argues, our relation to Reality is ultimately one of acceptance against a background of discontentment, the question arises as to whether this can be construed in terms of caring for Reality. Indeed it may be that the combination of the state of mind of Anxiety and the Ontological way of Being-in-the-word we characterise as Care may in fact be best characterised by the Freudian attitude of resignation. The wisdom of the prophesy of the Greek Oracle that “everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction” is also raised as a counterpoint to the philosophical point that categorises man as a rational animal capable of discourse. In the light of the History that was flowering around both Freud and Heidegger one may well ask what the best response to this prophesy was–the Heideggerian Romantic idea of Care, or Freuds attitude of resignation in the face of Ananke. Both this idea and this attitude seem important and not necessarily mutually exclusive. The Ancient Greeks Cared about their Cities and protected them from ruin and destruction by passing laws in the spirit of areté, arché, and diké. If metaphysics is the study of first principles of Being then this search for first principles was certainly present in the search for and the passing of laws worthy of praise by the oracles. The virtue of the past, instantiated by war heroes like Achilles, had been courage and was being replaced by a broader virtue of wisdom thus facilitating a transformation of the bestowal of dignity upon the wise men of the city rather than its warriors.

Heidegger, in his Opening remarks in his work “Being and Time” claimed that we moderns have become forgetful of the question that Being raises for us and we no longer are struck by awe and wonder at questions such as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Heidegger refers us back to Aristotle:

“Aristotle himself knew the unity of this transcendental universal as a unity of analogy in contrast to the multiplicity of the higher generic concepts applicable to things.”(P.22)

This universalising of the concept emptied the idea of Being of all content and resulted in a turning away from first principles. For Aristotle aporetic questions about the unity of Being and its many meanings evoked awe and wonder in a realm of contemplation that evades us moderns. We find in Aristotle no reference to anxiety, and the concept makes but a brief appearance in Kant’s account of the Sublime when, in the face of an overwhelming physical force of Nature(a powerful waterfall) we experience a momentary powerlessness, only for an awareness of the power of our freedom and worth to immediately emerge and produce a state of mind of awe and wonder. Neither Aristotle nor Kant saw Anxiety to be of primary significance in our philosophical investigations. Heidegger also sees the absence of anxiety and the presence of awe and wonder emerge in considering the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” In this adventure of reflection Man’s Being(Dasein) is raised and defined as having a necessary relation to Being as such. Heidegger concludes:

“Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being”(P.32)

He continues by claiming that man understands his existence:

“in terms of a possibility of itself; to be itself or not itself.”(P.33)

In other words Man’s Being is an issue perhaps because our modern understanding of Being is vague. This issue includes our comportment toward entities that exist in different ways to the mode of existence of Dasein. Deficient modes of comportment towards Being can, Heidegger argues be detected in the opinions and behaviour of the masses, for example, over the issue of our death or ceasing to exist. Death is an issue that is avoided, distorted, or denied by “They”. Obviously there is a sense in which we cannot “care” about death because it is something that happens to us and is largely beyond our control. In Kant’s Anthropological ontology this would place any concern for death outside the scope of the will. Perhaps it was this feature that contaminated the contentment man tended to feel in the use of his knowledge and reasoning. Both of these elements of mans nature must have led to the realisation that all life forms cease ultimately to exist. Freudian resignation appears then to have no serious alternative unless it is the Kantian alternative that is offered to us in his account of the Sublime in which our response to being overwhelmed by the power of nature is to respond not with the passive attitude of resignation but rather with a positive thought activity invoking a positive evaluation of mans moral worth.

Temporality or Time is an issue of fundamental importance for Dasein or the human form of Being-in-the-world. The method Heidegger uses to investigate these matters is the phenomenological method which he characterises as a method which reveals “things themselves”. We should remind ourselves in this context that the Greek word for “phenomenon” designates a verb–“to show itself” that in turn relates to another important Greek term, namely “aletheia” which is a name for our access to Being in the mode of comportment Heidegger calls “unconcealment”–a noun or substantive which according to Aristotle is a part of speech that contains no indication of time. Time, for Aristotle was by its nature a relational intuition that is a consequence of the measurement of motion in terms of before and after. This “measurement” does not necessarily have to be connected to number but can be spatially presented in perception as it is in Kant’s example of a boat steaming down a river. In this perception the motion of the boat is tied together by the unity of before and after. This is “shown” to us in the “phenomenon”. The influence of Temporality in thought however may be more important than its influence in the synthesis of perceptions. In thought we can use reasoning to organise a Heraclitean matrix of change in accordance with a Parmenidean strategic vision of truth in relation to “The One”. In volume one of this work we characterised the role of the truth and mans forgetfulness of Being in the following terms:

“Our understanding of man quite rightly may, in the end, be more Parmenidean than Heraclitean because Parmenides is the first philosopher to write about “The One” in terms of the goddess Aletheia. Aletheia, according to the continental Philosopher Heidegger is the greek term for truth that he translates as “unconcealment” and he contrasts it to the Greek term for “The False” which is “Psuedo”. Pseudo is in turn translated by the Latin “falsum” which carries the meaning of “bringing to a fall”. Heidegger, in his essay on Parmenides points to the fact that this “bringing to a fall” is in the realm of the essence of “domination”. of overseeing. “Verum” in Latin has no connotation of bringing out of unconcealment and simply dogmatically means “to be not false” and thereby leading us once again into the domain of domination, the domain of the imperial dogmatic command.”(Volume one “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action, (Mauritius, Lambert Academic Press, 2019), P. 115-116

This is amongst other things a historical look at the process of our modern forgetfulness of Being and alludes to the notion of historicality which Heidegger regards as an essential aspect of Dasein. This vision is not an attempt to characterise Tradition as we conceive it in modern consciousness because historicality is part of what is concealed for us in our forgetfulness of Being. “Pseudos” in Greek is dissembling, which lets something appear differently to its real nature. The ethical/anthropomorphic connotation of the term is unmistakeable and stands in sharp contrast to the Latin inversion of the original meaning of aletheia in favour of the more politicised connotation of “bringing to a fall”. Heidegger maintains that the Greek term for “phenomenon” contains the connotation of “semblance” and this has little to do with our modern interpretation of the term as “appearance”. “Appearing”, Heidegger argues in this context is precisely that which does not show itself but dissembles. So, for Heidegger phenomena are never “appearances”(Being and Time P.53). Rather Phenomenology for Heidegger, is connected to both historicality and Logos whose primordial function is : “to let something be seen by pointing it out”(P.56). Logos also, on this account, has an important role in leading to the “things themselves” via ones discourse and its primordial relation to aletheia. Phenomenology, for Heidegger thus becomes the royal road to the ontological understanding of the Being of beings and Being itself. Heidegger’s Phenomenology emphasises the Aristotelian power of discourse in the process of clarifying the vague understanding we moderns have of the Being of Dasein:

“The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the primordial signification of this word, where it designates this business of interpreting…..this hermeneutics also becomes a “hermeneutic” in the sense of working out the conditions on which the possibility of any ontological investigation depends….Then so far as this hermeneutic works out Daseins historicality ontologically as the ontical condition for the possibility of historiology, it contains the roots of what can be called “hermeneutic” only in a derivative sense: the methodology of those human sciences which are historiological in character.”(P.62)

The Kantian telos of transcendental knowledge is one of the aims of phenomenological aletheia which he then paradoxically characterises in Latin as “veritas transcendentalis”. Philosophy is for Heidegger:

“universal phenomenological ontology”(P.62)

O Shaughnessy’s account of the Will has its transcendental dimensions and can be construed as in some respects Aristotelian but it is not in agreement with Heidegger’s concerns especially insofar as the equi-primordiality of Being-with-Others is concerned. One would hesitate to characterise O Shaughnessy’s reflections as phenomenological or hermeneutic but there does seem to be similarities to Kantian transcendental reflections upon the nature of Time and its relation to intentional action:

“First it is because any intentional project whatsoever is a cognitively synthesising force: it unites as one acts the multiple changing cognitions acquired during action. The commitment across time, both past and future which is internal to intentional action, guarantees the retention in memory of the fruits of the cognitive synthesising capacities put to use during the course of action: it guarantees to the agent a knowledge of his experienced active past. After all a self conscious being cannot be engaged in intentional action if he harbours absolutely no knowledge of his immediate active past.” (Consciousness and the World(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000) P.204-5.

The Kantian ontological distinction between the active, what one does, and the passive, what happens to one, is very relevant to understanding the perceptual intuition of time and the active measuring of what is happening. Time can be said to “measure” in the sense of synthesising intuitions into a perceptual unity in the case of the ship steaming down the river. Yet the transcendental commitments of Kant are very different to the commitments of twentieth century Phenomenologists. Merleau-Ponty falls into this latter category. He, unlike Kant, regards Science as a second-order expression of the life-world. His phenomenological “reduction” reduces Science to a form of body-world experience. Kant, on the other hand, defines science in terms of matter in motion conceived of in a matrix of event, substance and material and efficient causation. James Ellington’s essay “The Unity of Kant’s Philosophy”, contained in “Immanuel Kant:Philosophy of Nature, trans Elington J, (Indianapolis, Hacket Publishing, 1985) provides us with insight into Kant’s approach to phenomenology:

“In phenomenology matter is regarded as movable insofar as it can be an object of experience. Here the concern is with the relations matter has to the mind that knows it. Now the fundamental determination of a something that is to be an object of the external senses must be motion, for thereby only can these senses be affected…..Accordingly , the discussions in phenomenology centre primarily on motion itself. We have seen that representations can be regarded as merely the contents of a consciousness or as referring beyond themselves to the objects which they purport to represent. The representation of motion is given to us merely as an appearance, i.e. as an undetermined object of an external empirical intuition.”(P.211)

Kant’s account refers to appearance that might or might not become determined by the concepts of the understanding. If, in the process of thinking the “I” thinks something(conceptually) about something(the appearance) there is what Heidegger called a veritative(truth-making) synthesis and, to take the above example, the predicate of motion is asserted of this change of relation in space. Both matter and space are involved in this account. The intuition of time is obviously also involved as it is in the experience of the Kantian ship steaming downstream, but in this case whether sensibility links up to the understanding and whether the truth is aimed at, depends upon whether the “I” that thinks, thinks something about something in terms of the Categories of the Understanding.

The above is clearly a very different account of phenomenology than that which we encounter in the 20th century. these reflections do not aim at the “things themselves” in the noumenal realm because by Kant’s definition this realm lies beyond determination by the Categories of the Understanding. Yet it also ought to be pointed out that Kant’s account is well synchronised with both Aristotles hylomorphic theory of change and the Greek terms for phenomena. Kant’s account is also partly synchronised with Newton’s Natural Philosophy (Kant has hylomorphic criticisms of the Newtonian account.)

Heidegger locates the positive view of Science we find in Kant in Aristotle’s claim that the care for seeing is essential to mans being. The care for thinking and its fate may be more embedded in the temporality of Historical thought and this is to be distinguished from the care for seeing located in the realm of space and matter. This “seeing” however for Kant is logically connected to that noumenal something that “appears” for the senses. Heidegger calls this “care for seeing” pure “beholding”(P.215). Logos and its operation in discourse “points out” what is seen in this “pure beholding” in an act that must have more ontological significance than the act of ostensive definition we find in the writings of analytic philosophers and logical positivists.

Merleau-Ponty is one of the spokesmen for the phenomenologists that deny the above Kantian metaphysical account of phenomenology. The Phenomenal Field for Merleau-Ponty(MP) is a field of meaning(a field O Shaughnessy also appeals to): a field in which the thing experienced is not to be reduced to a bundle of dead properties or variables. The Phenomenal field for MP is rather constituted by an active act of perception which changes the significance of what is seen, e.g. the child burned by the flame of the candle that attracted his hand is now repulsed by the same flame. The world, for MP, is not a spectacle to be passively observed by a pure observer with his notebook and ones own body living in the life-world is not a bundle of causal “mechanisms” surrounded by a bundle of variables signifying a network of general properties. Rather, the living body, for MP, is the location for a centre of expression:

“But this reciprocal relationship of expression which presents the human body as the outward manifestation of a certain manner of Being-in-the-world, had, for mechanistic physiology, to be resolved into a series of causal relations.”(Phenomenology of Perception, trans Smith, C., (London, Routledge, 1962) P.64-5.

Mechanistic physiology reduced perception to sensation observed by a pure observer and the mechanism of connection for these sensations was “association”. This violated the integrity of the phenomenal field as far as MP was concerned. This atomisation resulted in

“..the living body becoming an exterior without an interior and subjectivity becoming an interior without an exterior, an impartial spectator. The naturalism of science and the spiritualism of the universal constituting subject, to which reflection in science led, had this in common, that they levelled out experience: in face of the constituting I , the empirical selves are objects.”(P.64-5)

Empirical perceivers and thinkers became objects to be incorporated into the scientific matter-oriented matrix. The phenomenological response to this was to criticise Science without distinguishing between the metaphysically grounded science of Kant(and Aristotle) and the modern mathematically inspired methodological pursuit that relied on hypothetical theories or “models”. For MP, Kant was a dogmatic rationalist and is regarded as “worldly” because he refuses to banish science from the human life-world in favour of a phenomenological reduction that attempts to situate meaning at the level of lived experience. Heidegger, in spite of his criticisms of Kant is more Kantian, acknowledging the role of transcendental a priori logic which concerns itself with, as Kant defines the matter, with the mode of our knowledge of objects insofar as that mode is a priori.

On the other hand, Heidegger regrets the fact that Kant did not explore the question of the meaning of Being in general and its a priori conditions. This criticism is against the background of Heidegger’s rejection of the metaphysical distinction between noumena and phenomena. Given that Heidegger thinks that the central issue involved in the issue of the meaning of being is that of Time( which is intimately connected to Care) he must believe that the Kantian account of time is inadequate. Somehow Kant’s account belongs to a project Heidegger calls “Destroying the History of Ontology” because he shrank from investigating the transcendental imagination which Kant had himself dubbed “an art hidden in the depths of the human soul”. Kant is accused by Heidegger of aligning himself with Descartes and thereby assisting in the shrouding of the relation between time and the “I think”(P.45). Interpretation and criticism of Kant by empiricists, rationalists and phenomenologists alike have failed to appreciate the extent to which Kant’s Critical Philosophy is an attempt to restore Aristotelian hylomorphic thinking in the arena of philosophical reflection. This together with the “domination”(“bringing to a fall”) of modern Science over all areas of thought and investigation relating to the humanities and the human sciences, has led to the submergence of Kant’s Critical Philosophy beneath the advancing waters of Modernism. The perpetuation of interest in Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy was left in Post-Kantian times to a university system formed on the principle of specialisation that we found determined the Guild system of The Enlightenment.

The question to pose in the light of this phenomenological diversion is whether O Shaughnessy’s essentially Analytical account of the Will and Consciousness contains Hylomorphic and Critical elements. The surprising reference to Freud certainly suggests that some principles from Aristotle and Kant are being used in contexts of explanation/justification.

O Shaughnessy points out, for example:

“that Freud believed that consciousness developed out of , and was as such an agency for the expression of that part of the mind that is entirely inhabited by psychic forces that are closely akin to “will” in its broadest sense”. P. XLV

The Subject for O Shaughnessy is no passive observer or spectator but rather a subject in charge of the contents of his own mind and this in a similar way to the way in which a playwright assembles the words of the play he is engaged in writing. One of the aims of Freudian therapy was to put the patient back in charge of his experiences. Insofar as consciousness is related to this wakeful active state of mind, it is, O Shaughnessy argues, connected to the non-psychological cause of the lived-body and this is clearly a hylomorphic position. On this position, man is an instinctive animal that is unconsciously attracted to a world that he Cares for. O Shaughnessy’s unique elaboration upon hylomorphic/critical accounts of human activity involves focussing on the Will and intentional bodily action. The focus on action brings the sense of touch to the forefront of the phenomenal field(cf Berkeley’s theory of vision). The desire and care for the world obviously also echoes Jonathan Lear’s view of the work of Aristotle as containing the essential feature of a “desire to understand”. We are rational animals capable of discourse and in the process of the actualisation of our potentialities to become social/political beings, the tie between knowledge and intentional action becomes less easy to discern. We need, however to remind ourselves that it is man, the person, that is the bearer of the will and not his mind–man, that combination of form and matter(lived body)

O Shaughnessy signals his Kantian view of Action by maintaining that it is not as many rationalists and empiricists would maintain, a mode of causation, although action does instantiate causation in the physical external world. Action proceeds from the depths of a soul that “moves” a lived body. This movement is “spiritual” and instantaneously responsive to the Agents intentions, judgement, understanding, and reason. This is an expressive movement that is happening in one actively but is not happening to one passively via a play of causes that give rise to “events”. Intentional action is poised on the threshold of a part of the mind that contains the principles of action and a lived body that can be immediately activated by a will operating in accordance with these principles. In simple animals, intentional action operates in relation to a will moved by instinct and impulses and a system of powers that constitute the form of the animal concerned. In such simple animals there is no ability or “psychic space” to delay the action in order to “think about alternatives”–only more complex animals capable of discourse and rationality have this power. That is, there may not be an “I” that thinks but rather a form of consciousness that is bound to stimuli in its environment. Consequently animals are less capable of the phenomenon of “Work”: a phenomenon that expresses complex desires connected to more complex forms of life manifesting the temporal property of historicality.

Sometimes we may have difficulty in separating the Aristotelian and Kantian aspects of O Shaughnessy’s work from his more materialistic and dualistic concerns. The ideas of the will and freedom are not of course naturally connected in dualistic positions and this is probably due to the “royal” category of “substance” determining events via mechanisms of causation. On such accounts deciding to move ones foot and the actual movement appear as two “events” and the relation between these events of course becomes problematic. We see this problem surfacing in O Shaughnessy’s work when, in discussing this relation he refers to a “magical force”(P. xlv). Kantian Critical Philosophy would refuse to embed the phenomenon of action in a matrix of categories containing substance, causation, and event and insist that the correct context for the phenomenon of action is a network of concepts containing power, agency and freedom.

That there are a priori limits to the will could well have been a Kantian position but we find this claim in O Shaughnessy. It is, he claims, a fact that there are actions which it is logically impossible to will, e.g. the relation between the chemical interactions that is occurring in an arm. I cannot be conscious of these chemical interactions but this does not entail that such processes are not to be counted among the material and efficient conditions of any action such as raising my arm. There are other further Kantian elements in O Shaughnessy’s reflective process. Firstly, in Kant’s “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”, Kant draws attention to an ontological distinction that O Shaughnessy appears to accept in some key elements of his account, namely, that between what a man does and what happens to a man. Secondly, whilst there are reservations, O Shaughnessy appears to accept the metaphysical distinction between causality and the freedom of the self-initiation of the will. An involuntary raising of the arm due to cramp, connected to certain chemical processes in my shoulder and arm is an event that happens to a man. The voluntary raising of an arm/hand in a lecture is an intentional voluntary action that is self- initiated and freely chosen by the agent. Sensations receive the status of “passive” in O Shaughnessy’s account and are also among the phenomena that cannot logically be willed. The sensation of pain, for example, is given an “Inactive” will-value yet it is a psychological phenomenon of significance. The arguments for this position refer back to origins. Pain has its origins in the physical lived body– a psychological but non-mental realm of our lives. Intentional bodily actions, on the other hand, have origins in the realm of the mental which is a vicissitude of the realm of the psychological. This reflection is perhaps an elaboration on the Wittgensteinian grammatical observation that I cannot be said to know that I am in pain. I must however know that I am raising my arm/hand to ask a question. The above distinction helps in constituting an ontological identity for Action,

So, on the ontological schema O Shaughnessy provides us with, some psychological events can be actions and some are not and it may prove useful to raise a Kantian caveat here. According to Kant one can conceptualise actions both as events that happen and as willed mental activity. In the former case we are dealing with an observer/spectator relation to the phenomenon and a cognitive attitude that is interrogative. In the latter we “live” or inhabit the phenomenon and “know” what we are doing non-observationally. I do not, for example “notice” that I am raising my arm/hand in the lecture. This caveat clearly questions the wisdom of speaking as O Shaughnessy does of “events of the mind”. Aristotelian hylomorphic Philosophy also would question this description given Aristotle’s later characterisation of “form” as “principle”. The principle may well originate in the mind for Aristotle but it would be misleading to characterise this as an “event”. The mind is not an inner theatre with events occurring on a mental stage, but rather something which springs into existence(self-initiated) when we think. Reasons are then provided for this activity and these reasons will contain reference to principles. For example, if someone hallucinates that they are an angel of God delivering a speech to the inhabitants of earth(whilst addressing a group of cows) it is difficult to conceive of this in terms of a will-active phenomenon, and the conception of this phenomenon happening in and to the agent appears a more rational ontological characterisation. The reasons given for doing what one is doing are in Kantian terms “maxims” and maxims embody principles which in themselves have different ontological values. The pleasure-pain principle behind the experience of pains and hallucinations, for example, are explanatory principles relating to what Aristotle referred to as material and efficient causes and what analytical philosophers refer to as “events”. Confining explanation to the psychological realm regulated and constituted by the pleasure pain principle risks limiting the scope of the reality principle and its use in constituting and regulating instrumental and categorical ethical action. The scope of the rational idea of freedom also risks being limited in its use. The Kantian approach to this discussion is to distinguish “behaviour” which, as an event, appears as physical motion, from “action” which is constituted by maxims that are formed rationally and in accordance with the knowledge of the agent. O Shaughnessy sees in the mind a division of import that can be construed hylomorphically or dualistically:

“It corresponds to a major divide running through the phenomena in the mind, comparable in significance to the great divide that marks off these phenomena that owe their existence to the faculty of reason(beliefs, desires, actions, etc) from those that cannot(dreams, emotions, sense impressions, etc) “(P.19)

The above quote also aligns well with the Kantian architectonic of sensibility, understanding and reason and the implied metaphysical distinction between phenomena and noumena. There is a significant difference between regarding the above phenomena as events or as acts of mind. The schema O Shaughnessy presents, divides belief and desire, and both are unwillable yet both have an interesting relation to Reason which has no obvious place on the diagram. Irrational beliefs and desires are also an integral part of the psychology of the human individual. Belief in the epistemological mode, when it is self consciously believed by self conscious believers, occurs under the aspect of Truth, but it is nevertheless on O Shaughnessy’s account of the will-value of mental phenomena, essentially inactive. One of the aporetic questions one encounters in hylomorphic and critical Philosophy is the question of the relation between The Good and the True. The truth, it is said colloquially, will set you free and both “forms”, “ideas”, or “principles” are what Kant would call “ends-in-themselves, but the exact nature of their relation remains to be investigated. The logical validity of practical arguments have of course been investigated and for Kant the primacy of practical reasoning has been clearly established, whilst for Aristotle there is at least a relation of equi-primoridiality between the two forms of reasoning. Plato, in his “Republic” also testified to the primacy of the form of the “The Good” and in his architectonic of ideas truth plays an important but subordinate role to “the sun” of his system. O Shaughnessy(OS), position thus resembles the Platonic position in that it is claimed that willing is a primary phenomenon and consciousness a secondary phenomenon.

An important logical limit of will is placed upon its terminus in the lived body. We know some parts of the body, e.g. limbs and their tendon and muscle systems are movable by the will but once the work of moving bodily targets is done, OS argues, the wills work is done. Control of movements that fail to achieve their purpose, e.g. trying to turn the television on with a remote control whose batteries are dead, are not under the control of the will. Nevertheless orders such as “turn the television on!” make sense, because actions can in principle make statements relating to the television being turned on, true. The action, that is, can make statements true. There is no doubt that there is an intimate relation between Truth and The Good. The power of language also makes itself felt in the context of discussions relating to the will and OS’s account is not afraid to use the Kantian tools of a priori ideas of the mind regulating our Being-in-the-world:

“Like a vine on a trellis our very minds are moulded by a conceptual edifice that is structured out of Time, Action, Consciousness, and Reality…what is innate is the particular endowment, what is experienced is language and the items of the world, and what takes place when these concepts are acquired is the product of the interaction of these factors.”

Freud’s acceptance of the description of psychoanalysis as a “talking cure” may well be related to the power of language to contribute to the process of setting his patients free of their maladies. We know that Wittgenstein at one point in his career regarded himself as a disciple of Freud and this may be related to the important role that language plays in forming thoughts in the mind. Curing patients and preventing philosophers from talking nonsense obviously have something in common with each other.

So, even if it is true that the will terminates in certain target areas of the body, action itself shall not be restricted to bodily movements, and whilst the language of action may not be philosophically transparent, it is clear that it is intentional and extends out into the World, allowing one human to order another to turn the television on. The relation between external and internal factors constitute the inner and outer face of the phenomenon of action and this must also partially determine the active use of associated linguistic terms. Both these dual aspects are present in the linguistic demarcation of intentional actions. Actions, OS argues, can be both mental and physical. A number of factors coalesce in this linguistic demarcation process, e.g. inner factors such as desire, intention, non-observational knowing, and the selective process involved in determining the choice of the region of the body to use in the intended action.

OS discusses so-called volitionist theories of the will which refuse to extend the scope of action beyond the movements of the lived body. He claims this theory to be a false metaphysical theory because it fails to demarcate the proper scope of the a priori concept of action. Such volitionist theories, OS argues, end up by falsely construing physical actions as mental events which stand in some kind of magical relation to their objects. The mind, on such theories, instead of being occupied by maxims and principles is transformed into a private theatre housing concrete events that come and go. This is the picture that has become embedded in the minds of the “new men” of our modern age: amongst these new men we find scientifically inspired philosophers who have, since the Enlightenment, deliberately jettisoned the metaphysical reflections of Aristotle and Kant.

Now whilst the role of knowledge in action is obviously connected to knowing, for example, that I am raising my arm/hand to ask a question, it is not so obvious to find a role for sensation in this phenomenon. Do I, for example, know that I am raising my arm/hand because I sense a sensation in the limb? That would place my relation to my action in a category resembling the category of events that have happened to me and if the Kantian account of action is correct, jeopardise the agency involved in this activity. OS locates sensation in this activity by claiming that were it to be the case that the limb were anaesthetised I would not be able to raise it even if all the knowledge conditions were present. So, on OS’s account, the sensation in my limb is some sort of condition for the power of agency involved in arm-raising. This sensation-based awareness of my limb is, then part of the mechanism involved in the raising of the arm. One of the material conditions for the operation of this mechanism relates to the material constitution of the limb, the fact that my arm is composed of bone, tissue, nerves, tendons and muscles connected to a nervous system. Now if we were dealing with a mere bodily movement of the arm caused by a reflex, that in turn was caused by the cramping of muscles in the limb, it is quite clear that because we are dealing with a non psychological causal event, it would not make sense to request a reason embodying desires, beliefs and intentions. It would, in such circumstances, not be grammatically correct to say “I raised my arm”. The “I mentioned here is not the cognitive “I think” but rather the “I ” of the personality–the person or the agent. One of the conditions of my saying I raised my arm is the non-observationally based knowledge referred to earlier. The aforementioned “mechanism”, of course, has to be “on-call” and subject to initiation by the “I” of personality. OS points out that were my arm to cramp and raise reflexively there would be an element of surprise attached to this event(P.115): no such surprise ought to occur when the movement is self-initiated and flows from knowledge I possess. The purpose of the action of raising my arm is obviously the reason for the action, and this reason is to be distinguished from material and efficient conditions and causes, and this reason will also be connected to the formal and final forms of explanation referred to by Aristotle. The sensations experienced in this process are then connected to the mobilising of the limb by the “I” of the personality.

Action for OS has a dual aspect, an interior aspect connected to the psychological conditions that we find related to the “I” and connected to first person reports of actions, and an exterior aspect connected to third person observation based reports. Either aspect may serve as a corrective to the other but it does appear to be more difficult to be mistaken about the first person report, e.g. “I thought I raised my arm but was mistaken” would be a very puzzling thing to say and require abnormal circumstances involving perhaps the loss of a limb and the fantastic postulation of “phantom” “actions”. Contrariwise someone who upon being truthfully told that I had raised my arm/hand was met with a sceptical retort “But could it not have been a muscle spasm?” would respond with incredulity to such a retort. This is testimony in favour of the priority of the psychological conditions which are admittedly not completely inviolable. This however should not encourage volitionist accounts in which the whole activity is divided into two kinds of event, one interior event and one exterior event. Both of these aspects are synthesised in an action, and although it is not certain OS would agree to describing this in Aristotelian terms, namely, of form organising matter, this nevertheless appears to be the best way of avoiding the atomisation of the action into two events. Plato’s metaphysical dualism was a far better theory than the epistemological dualism of Descartes, but both would be the target of neo-hylomorphic theory: a theory in which, in the case of action, it is a principle and not a ghostly event that is organising the movement. In hylomorphism the mechanism is mobilised not by a ghostly pilot governing a floating machine but rather by a principle “governing”(in the political sense) a living body.

Spinoza claimed in his Ethics, that the first idea of the mind is an idea of the body and this is also registered in Freud’s claim that the first task of the agency of the Ego is to protect the body. OS refers in similar vein to an epistemological relation to the body: a state of affairs that enables the will to utilise the power of the body for its purposes. Involved in this relation is a non-observational form of awareness of the parts of the body that are potentially utilisable. On this view these parts are “present” from a first person point of view. Undoubtedly it is also the case that from a third person point of view the matrix of substance, event, causation can become a relevant perspective, but the question remains as to whether this is the perspective one ought to use in describing and explaining/justifying the maxims that lie behind willing an action. According to Kant it is these maxims that provide us with the essential aspect of the action. Willing is perhaps better conceived in terms of an actualisation of the potentiality of the principle embedded in the maxim. The action from this perspective is a self initiated phenomenon located within the confines of the lived body-image. We relate to the world via this image and the action that flows from its activated parts. OS claims that the Freudian Ego provides an interesting framework of theories of body-image. The Freudian account begins with an oral centre which then spreads in accordance with the ERP and PPP to the entire body via other regions. For Freud it is the Ego that is the nucleus of the will, an ego whose sensory-motor idea of the body can be instinctive, connected to memory and associated knowledge centres. The Principles that constitute this ego are the ERP, the PPP, and the RP. The ID is one of the more primitive agencies of the Freudian account being the locus of both the life instincts and the death instincts that play their part in the unleashing of aggression. Death is the end of life but it is never present to the dead person. Dying by its very nature is painful and this is the best evidence for the truth of the Aristotelian claim that all human activity aims at the good–when activity is no longer possible the anticipated end of all activity can only be painful.

OS warns us in his later work, “Consciousness and the World, of the danger of unnecessarily splitting the mind up into psychological forces that never reach the realm of representation(the forces of the id) (P.170-171). The risk one takes with embracing wholly and completely Freudian and Schopenhaurean theory is that man can be characterised as a non rational being. In Freud’s case this is less likely given his claim that his Psychology is essentially Kantian. The Freudian Reality Principle must at the very least operate in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason but it is also a fundamentally practical principle regulating mans action normatively with the aid of laws and looking forward in time to the flourishing life and the flourishing city. One may be worried about the ultimate unity of the mind as characterised by Freudian theory but given the fact that the “parts” of the mind are defined(in accordance with Aristotelian recommendations) holistically and not atomistically, the unity of the Freudian mind is guaranteed by the hierarchy and interrelation of the three principles(ERP, PPP, RP) and the interaction of the agencies of the id, ego and the superego in their relations to the external world. These principles are tied irrevocably to the phases of actualisation of the human psuche: phases in which first consciousness, and then higher mental processes, arise as a consequence of the actualisation of powers rooted in the system of organs that constitute the human lived body. In these phases we encounter psychological processes such as identification and sublimation and these appear to be invaluable additions to Aristotelian and Kantian theory. The organ limb system of the human form of life begins with zones of activity and the production of pleasure in relation to certain kinds of object. As these zones of pleasure expand and are integrated with each other, powers emerge that allow a wide range of substitute satisfactions related to a wide range of objects. These powers and objects form constellations in various psycho-sexual stages. The instincts involved in these stages can even change their aims. The “defence-mechanism” of sublimation uses the power of the life instinct to change the aim of the instinct and construct objects necessary for a flourishing life. This change of aim is fundamental–from aiming to survive /reproduce, to a quality of life that sustains more abstract forms of satisfaction and contentment and also abstract attitudes such as resignation because one is discontent with ones civilisation. This more abstract aim and attitude contribute to the attempt to construct a cultural environment worthy of a rational animal capable of discourse. A strong Ego sublimates its more primitive impulses, redirecting the energy connected with them instead of denying or repressing it. One of the purposes of the Freudian RP is to regulate sensory impulses so that the motor system is not used detrimentally. In practical reason thought sublimates these impulses with the idea of the Good. For Freud , the motor system (in practical contexts) is the telos of thought processes. The telos of the sensory system on the other hand is feeling which , according to Spinoza informs the experiencer of whether the body is faring well(pleasure) or ill(pain). When the body expresses to the mind that it is not faring well we experience anxiety which is a disintegrating force for the mind whose aim is unity and harmony. It is this force that motivates a possible battery of defence mechanisms which reduces the activity of thought and inhibits the wise use of the motor system.

OS distinguishes between a short term body images and a long term body image: between an “i ” interacting with the environment and changing with the changing circumstances and a more permanently constituted “I” . This latter I is not however an “I think” but rather an “I intuit” or “I represent”. The latter, intuitive I, however is a material and efficient condition of the “I think”.

The body-image is, for OS the “iron in the soul” that enables the will to remain rooted in earthly limits. Here there is no desire to soar out into the external world magically. This body image is the target for the will: it is pre-attentional, pre-conceptual, and intuitively constituted: it is “felt”. The logical space of thought, on the other hand, has its origins in a thinking process in which one weighs up whether or not to act in accordance with impulsive urges. This, when developed at the conceptual level, provides us with a type of discourse reminiscent of Hamlet’s soliliquy: a conversation that occurs at the doors of the motor system which is itself keyed into the body-image. The question to raise here is whether the categorisation of the above state of affairs ought to be in terms of event and causation–or whether, rather, this is indeed a logical space constituted of a pure potential of activity activated by activity from other realms of the mind. OS, however, might conceivably consider this an unnecessary ontological elevation to a metaphysical realm: a realm too far to be defended by his dual aspect theory. It is undeniably the case that we consider our acts as part of the realm of action but the question remains as to how we ought always to categorise these acts : whether it is nobler to classify them in terms of actuality: in terms of facts and the truth, or whether actions conceived of in this logical space of thought is best characterised in terms of ought premises and the categories of potentiality and possibility and the telos of the good.

OS claims that the act is formed in thought but he also claims that when we act, the phenomenon of action is like that of a substance leaking from one world into another! His account of a man making a chair in the presence of a physicalist noting the movement of material from one location to another, might be able to invoke physical laws to explain the motion of the material, but such a form of explanation will never be able to provide us with the ontological principles that determine the chair to be the kind of artefact that it is. Such principles will be instrumental in character and these are also expressed in terms of ought-premises in an argument culminating in a concrete particularistic ought -conclusion relating to the commitment to do the action in question. The forming of the intention to make the chair will eventually involve choosing to do the first action in a chain of actions that will lead to the construction of the chair. Involved in this choice will be reference to that part of the body image that will be mobilised in this first action, e.g. chopping, sawing, or buying the wood. A series of directing imperatives will result from a series of ought judgements designed to transform the potential idea of the chair to its actuality. Amongst this series one might find: “buy the wood” “Cut the wood” “Make the chair stable”, “Make the chair comfortable”. Different kinds of principles will be involved in the performing of these different kinds of actions. Whether the description given by OS relating to the leaking of one substance from one world into another is appropriate for this situation is a matter for conjecture. The body is the vehicle for change in the above instrumental act. It is also the vehicle for the actualising of the knowledge of the chair-maker.

OS also uses the image of the intervention of one realm into another in relation to an action which carries the possible interpretation of being designed or created. For Aristotle the idea of dividing the whole of the creation of chaos into events of different types to be connected by a linear mechanical idea of causation, would, to say the least be a questionable strategy. For an observer that has absolutely no knowledge of what is happening in an environment, perhaps atomising the chaos into events until it becomes clear what is happening is a possible strategy, but if in this process one atomises actions into events one might never get clear about what one is doing, .e.g. , if one is making a chair out of the chaos of wood-pile. Such is not the world of the chair-maker who is engaged in the world via a series of maxims directing acts which form a different kind of entity to events. These acts can, for the observer be condensed into “events” via hypothetical judgements but they can also be a chair-series which is linked to knowledge driven activities aiming at making a good chair in the spirit of areté. In this latter case the observer “participates” in the situation in a different way involving the sharing of knowledge. Perception is, of course, involved in this process of chair-making but it is not of the observational interrogative kind (Lo! What have we here!) but is rather of the circumspective kind referred to by Heidegger, and to be found in the realm of the ready-to-hand (to be related by “In-order-to” judgements). Observation for Heidegger is a different kind of concern. It is not situated in our life-world in the same way, but is a more theoretical kind of activity. The world of work(chair-making), on the other hand, for Heidegger, is a practical world in which the context of equipment and material form a practical whole. The chair is produced “in order to” provide equipment for different kinds of activity. Observation is not “work” in this sense even if it is done in the name of theoretical science in the spirit of exploration/discovery. For Heidegger the chair belongs in a context which he defines “ontologico–categorically”(P.101 Being and Time). For Heidegger “work” is not a series of events but a series of phenomena: the chair only presents a theoretical problem for its user if it can no longer be used, perhaps because it has been broken. In such circumstances the chair presents itself for interrogation of a theoretical kind(Can it be fixed?). We are not “absorbed” in this activity in the same way in which we are when we are involved in the world of equipment. The state of affairs in which we atomistically confront the broken chair is a world containing the event “The chair is broken” and this is not the life-world that interests the phenomenologist. Now whilst the Heideggerian reflection above suffices to distinguish a change in the world as an event from a change in the world that involves a process of work, or a product of such a process, is not sufficient to distinguish a technological instrumental work of labour(making a chair) from the more disinterested process of producing and appreciating a work of fine art. This latter form of “work” rather is not “rule-governed” in the same way but rather is a free work of genius involving faculties and powers of mind striving for a mental harmony. The beauty of art, in other words, pleases neither via sensation or concept, Kant claims:

“Now art has always got a definite intention of producing something. Were this “something”, however, to be mere sensation(something merely subjective), intended to be accompanied by pleasure, then such a product would, in our estimation of it, only please through the agency of the senses. On the other hand were the intention one directed to the production of a definite object, then, supposing, this were attained by art, the object would only please by means of the concept. But in both cases the art would please not in the mere estimate of it, i.e not as fine art, but rather as mechanical art.”(P.167)

Kant goes on to suggest that in order to avoid these possible responses, the talent of the artist ought to include the ability to disguise the intentionality of the work, and present it as something natural.. The requirement of originality or uniqueness is thus important in the production of fine art. Kant then makes a fascinating observation relating to Science and the ability of scientists to imitate the Genius of Newton. This is not the case, however, with fine artists of genius who most of the time are unable to say exactly how they produced their finest art. Their genius is free and cannot be imitated in a process of labour. We lesser mortals require Taste to form an estimate of the value of the work of the genius. We do not, for example, necessarily need to understand the final end of the work but satisfy ourselves with its formal cause. This, from the point of view of the genius is a soulless form of appreciation. The presence of soul in the process of appreciation is evidenced by understanding all the causes of the work(material, efficient, formal and final, in a holistic act of appreciation. Soul, Kant argues:

“..in an aesthetical sense signifies the animating principle in the mind”(P.175 C of Aesth Jud)

In such contexts we are dealing with aesthetic ideas freely presented and not deterministic rule-governed concepts. Aesthetic ideas, Kant goes on to argue, are the counterpart of rational ideas–and are related to our freedom. The imagination obviously plays a key role in this process of estimation in which we arrive at the experience of the Beautiful via a free play of representations of the imagination.

The equation of the “genius ” of Newton with the technological ability of a craftsman, suggests the predominance of an instrumental form of rationality and its hypothetical form of necessity. Kant also points to the importance of freedom in a cultural life-world context, aligning this aspect of Culture more closely with ethical goods than with the “scientific truth”: a position that Plato articulates in the Republic.

OS does not consider intentional aesthetic action in his account of willing. Clearly the play of the imagination in the selection of representations is better characterised as an act of selection rather than as an observer-constituted “happening” or “event”. Events are more difficult to characterise as expressions of an agent, and are more likely to demand evaluation in terms of the categories of substance and causation(material and efficient causation). Acts, on the other hand are the natural form of expression of an agent. Such acts fall more naturally under the notion of self-initiation. This concept of self-initiation, if inserted in to a substance-causation matrix, is more likely to result in the kind of speculation that gives rise to strange supernatural phenomena such as spontaneous generation. A car that bursts into fire is of course not an event that has been spontaneously generated. Looking at the car as an agent in the context of such an event rather than at some prior underlying cause is a pointless investigation. Similarly , characterising the act of willing as an event rather than an activity of an agent seems also to invite confusion.

In volume one of his work on Willing OS has been resting his analysis upon a notion of sensory-motor integration that he has not explained or justified. In volume two, however, we provided with a brilliant hylomorphic analysis of the foundational state of his reasoning. He begins by claiming that our ascription of visual powers to one another requires a behavioural foundation and vice versa:

“The concepts of physical action and perception naturally require one another.”(vol 2 , P.4)

This move of referring to the mutual implication of items inhering in a circle of fundamentally necessary items is a phenomenological tactic used with great effect in Merleau-Ponty’s work “Phenomenology of Perception”. In another earlier work, Merleau-Ponty provided us with a fascinating account of a moving light in a dark room attracting our attention. He claims that what we have here is a holistic phenomenon gifted with both intention and meaning that is incorrectly analysed by science into two kinds of event–an inner and an outer event–the light is both in us and also a vibrating outer phenomenon–the latter causing the former which is degraded into a “subjective” effect. For the scientist the real effects of this vibratory movement occurs on the surface of the retina and then subsequently in the nerves leading away from the eye and toward the brain. What the scientist presents us with here is, instead of the phenomenon of the movement of light as experienced, a classical reflex classified in terms of the hybrid category of action-reaction. In this matrix the experiencing organism is passive, and the account we are given is of something happening to the organism. In this form of description the light ceases to be an entity invested with intention, human value, and meaning. The “figure” of the moving light against the background of the darkness of the room is the form of phenomenon that engages with the living organism by attracting its attention and dragging this attention along with it. There is no “event” of attention merely “happening” but rather the activation of a perceptual element of the stream of consciousness of an agent: a form of life that expresses its interest in the light by actively following its path across the wall of the dark room. This power of seeing or sight is a fundamental power of an agent that is a free self initiating entity causing itself to act in an act of expression whose form is not decomposable into events that are mere responses happening in a particular segment of the spatio-temporal matrix.

OS’s analysis also displays psychoanalytical characteristics. He analyses the actualisation of the potentiality of “seeing something” in the new born infant.. An infant, it is argued, can see and his visual field is:

“more or less continuously inhabited by visual sensations(without necessarily implying that they engage his attention)”(P.6)

But, we might wonder, would the infant necessarily follow the moving light in the darkness. OS doubts that this is possible because all we know about infants is that they can see but not necessarily see something(e.g. as being closer to or further off than something else). On this account the visual sensations the infant experiences have not got formal objects, i.e these sensations do not mean anything to the infant until he develops the capacity to see “something”. Indeed until the infant begins to show in his actions that he sees something, e.g. by reaching for it–it is doubtful that his visual field is even three dimensional. For OS we can only say that the infant sees the world three dimensionally when he can act in relation to the object that he sees. Depth perception is only possible for this who have sufficiently structured visual fields:something that is possible only when a certain level of integration of sensory-motor powers has been achieved. Both of these powers in turn are connected to an awareness of space as something that is not merely external to me, but is organised in a form that can be explored by other senses such as touch. Space itself is not constructed bit by bit in such an exploration but is taken to be an apriori given for all life forms. This space cannot be said to be a purely visual phenomenon because an animal that was totally paralysed and enable to act in the world or actively touch the world would not be able to know very much about this world. OS also argues that a being without any sensation of touch but could move, would be inconceivable. The possession of the powers of sensation and the ability to move without any capacity to organise ones perceptions and actions in time would also, OS argues, be inconceivable for any life form. Here the Aristotelian principles that connect the before and after of the action-sequence are the following: that from which a thing is changing, that toward which something is changing, and that which endures as the same throughout the change. These are three central principles of hylomorphism and suffice to explain and justify the role of before and after in the constitution of objects in an environment of development and change.

Freud’s use of these principles is in relation to the bodily ego that emerges with the help of the integration of the sensory-motor activities of the human life-form. OS claims, for instance, that the infants “kickings” are meaningless until they can be integrated into his bodily ego–a structure that is of central importance for intentional action and willing. Consciousness also has its role in the actualisation of the sensory-motor powers. Consciousness, is, namely, a state in which sense experiences and instrumental intentions give rise to instrumental actions that emerge from some region of the body-image. All of these phenomena are interdependent and ultimately constitute the defining conditions for the activities of a rational animal capable of discourse:


” a tightly meshed grid of psychological concepts of type “see”, “want”, “pursue” etc(p.15)

Perception and action, on this account, are a priori conditions in animal life, but this in itself does not justify using the third person form of perception(observation) to define type conditions of action. For OS is very clear on his position that the type of awareness involved in action is non-observational. Furthermore the idea of agency and powers(e.g. action, perception, language etc) assume epistemological attitudes that are non explorative and non interrogative and not part of any context of discovery which seeks to arrive at knowledge of what is happening. Rather we are dealing here with contexts of explanation/justification in which knowledge of the principles and ends of action are assumed. In thus kind of activity and possessing the appropriate epistemological attitude we use principles to change nature and do not wait for events in nature to happen and help us form principles.

OS then provides a proof of how the process of involuting ones attention onto ones action destroys the inner structure of the action(the intention and meaning). The normal role of action, OS argues, is circumspect. Circumspection engages with a dynamic ready-to-hand world in a different way to that which occurs when we are observing the world. In the latter case the world is a static world of present-at-hand events. OS uses the example of watching ones hand while throwing a ball at a target. The moving hand is thus transformed from a dynamic instrument dynamically connected to a target to a passive entity to be explored with an interrogative attitude.In the ethical mode of the imperative mood the dynamical world containing the dynamically moving hand is both intentional and laden with meaning. This world is a world of action governed by imperatives, e.g. “The road up the hill is the road leading to the Professors house” and the same road(according to logos) leading down the hill is the road leading to the policeman’s house. OS uses the example of the imperative “Pick me!” guiding the hand toward the orange. The world of the observer, on the other hand , is a world that is being questioned rather than being forced to respond to a knowing intervention. The world of the observer is a world in which we are wondering where this road up leads and where this road down leads. If, OS argues in the midst of the action of reaching for the orange, I begin to observe my hand in motion, the unity of the world collapses into two present at hand objects–the hand and the orange(no longer tied together by an intention). The knowledge that I was going to pick the orange dissipates and the meaning of the movement becomes unclear until the attitude of exploration dissipates in confusion and the intention is renewed, thus renewing the unity of the hand and the orange.

As an observer watching someone else act, I wonder if his hand is moving toward the orange hanging on the tree. The hand and the orange remain unconnected categorically but there may well be a postulated hypothetical connection awaiting confirmation at the terminus of the movement. This is not the dynamical categorical world in which the agent is imposing a form upon the world motivated by the knowledge of what he wants to do. In the case of observing someone else I do not even know whether they want the orange. In this case I impose a number of hypotheticals on the world and await their verification/falsification. OS asks whether in the case of involuting my attention upon my own hand in an interrogative manner, I have lost the will to act, or whether I have merely lost my orientation toward the object. Obviously I still want the orange so neither of these are true. It is rather, OS insists, that I am in this case trying to do two things at once and the diffIculty is that I am one person and not two and the different attitudes demand the agent to engage totally in accordance with them. I cannot both circumspectively act, and observe hypothetically at the same time, OS argues. The hypothetical and categorical attitudes are logically distinct in that they both require the active presence of the personality–both attitudes give rise to different intentions. If one does try to do both of these things at the same time the result OS argues is a dispersal of the self. On Aristotelian principles, observing ones actions then becomes impossible, because there is no one enduring self throughout the change from active agency to the more passive activity of observation.

The major problem with a reliance upon first person reports of intentions, beliefs, desires etc is the Freudian problem. Under certain circumstances, perhaps because of a certain causal history, the mind may not be conscious of these intentions, desires or beliefs. If this is the case we are forced to rely on third person hypothetical reports which are embedded in a matrix of substance, causation and event and the method of observation in contexts of exploration/discovery. In so doing we marginalise the third person attitudes connected to “reading” or “interpreting” (not substances interacting causing and being caused by events but rather changes involving agents, actions, beliefs and desires embedded in a life-world). Here, the reading and interpreting will involve an explorative hypothetical attitude and a “logic of probability”. An enduring agent is the Aristotelian necessary condition of understanding the change that is occurring in this human life-world. Kant in his account of ethical action guided by the categorical imperative adds another a priori element that demands practical action toward each other in the sprit of treating each other as ends-in-themselves—in the spirit of respect.

A problem occurs however in the interpretation of particular action situations in which it is difficult to conceptualise the action I am witnessing. In such a context of exploration we need to use powers of observation and the testing of hypotheses to establish the intentions, desires and beliefs of the agent. Yet even in such cases I am a priori aware that the agent is attempting to make something true and establish some form of the good in the world, even if it is egocentrically connected to his own life-world. Sometimes, in circumstances where the agent does not have full control of his intentions, desires, and beliefs, the “motives” of the agent may only become apparent via the use if special Freudian techniques, e.g. free association, analysis of transference relations, Freudian slips, or the interpretation of dreams, symptoms etc. OS claims that in such circumstances the Cartesian thesis of consciousness being transparent to itself does not hold.

One of OS’s theoretical goals is to integrate the Cartesian and Freudian theories into one account. Freud, OS argues, has definitely proved that in certain circumstances there is no privileged access to ones own mental world that is “infallibly guaranteed”(Vol 2 P.75) OS categorises 4 types of mental phenomena( forgettings, motives, pains, and mental images) and on the basis of this claims that a limited form of Cartesianism must be true. Forgettings dwell in the Freudian unconscious and motives too can be forgotten(as can beliefs, desires and intentions). Pains can both elude consciousness and be brought into consciousness. Bodily sensations obviously cause conscious knowledge of themselves under certain conditions, e.g sanity, and wakefulness.. The marginalisation of pain from conscious awareness also obviously requires special conditions. All of these facts enable us to construe sensations as a type of phenomenon that definitely falls into the Cartesian category of translucence. This reasoning also applies to some tryings but here too there are qualifying conditions, e.g. wakefulness. Now trying to open a door is not an interior event in the mind given that it is occurring in the space in the vicinity of my arms and hands, and thus(when successful) has universal and sufficient and necessary psychological truth- conditions. It is, OS argues, however unlikely that we will ever be able to provide a full list of these truth conditions given the differences that exist between individuals, species and forms of life in general. These conditions can however be condensed into the following formula:

“the immediate active event effect of a desire to act. It is the will moving in a certain direction.”(P.115)

This applies over a whole range of types of action including basic act striving, instrumental strivings and sub intentional basic act strivings(e.g. seemingly idle tongue movement).

OS continues to insist, however, that we can without confusion identify an act with an event(P.127). The argument OS provides for this position appears to be “grammatical”. He claims that acts are often singled out by event terms, e.g. swimming, lifting, murder, rape, etc(P.128) but it is still not clear that we can perform an event of swimming or that an event can be linked to the power of agency. Events appear to be more akin to states of affairs than the active bringing about of change in the world. Can an event support a moral property such as “wicked”? Surely moral principles apply only to actings, e.g. “So act…”)?

OS claims that:

“All action necessarily have metal causes.(P.133)

But is a reason for doing X, a cause? The Greek word for cause us aitia which is often translated as “explanation”. Explanation, however, can take 4 different forms for Aristotle, the primary form of which is “the principle” constituting the phenomenon. The issue being discussed here, of course, is that of the ontological status of events and actions and perhaps also that of the ontological status of events and mental activity. The discussion becomes more convoluted when OS claims that physical action is “the most primitive manifestation of consciousness”(P.134) along with three other items, namely perception, desire, and belief. Now these three latter items are clearly psychological, which in OS’s mind raises the question as whether in dealing with physical action we are dealing with something that belongs to the category of the psychological. OS maintains that we can see the above quartet of terms at play in the phenomenon of a crab moving along the sand on a beach. We see, he argues, the crab striving and giving expression to desire. OS has no hesitation in attributing consciousness to this form of life. Could we then argue that the crab possesses a primitive ego? OS does not say. Perhaps Aristotle may have agreed to the use of the term consciousness for such a form of life(Psuche)? Certainly Descartes’s denial of the pain and suffering of animals on the ground of them being mere “mechanisms” is questionable. The crab when kicked does not if course squeal like the dog kicked in the presence of Pythagoras, so it does not give “voice” to its suffering, but perhaps its struggles suffice to convince us that it does not want the pain we are inflicting upon it–it wills to carry on expressing its desires.

The counterargument to the claim that actions are psychological, involves reducing action to the same category of biological events as digestion and this for OS is inconceivable. For Aristotle there us a hierarchy of life-forms which are embedded in one another. The functions constitutive of these life-forms are nutrition, reproduction, sensation(including the feeling of pleasure and pain), movement, memory, imagination, and reason. When all of these functions are present in one life-form the result is also expressed in terms of a particular constellation of limbs and organs. The human form of life is obviously the most complex life-form because it integrates all of the above functions into one unity. There is therefore a hierarchy of functions such that “soul” is the actualised potentiality or first actuality of the living body. The exercise of “soul” is a further actualisation of a potentiality or a second level actuality. So a man who is asleep possesses a soul but is not actualising its potentiality. In the state of sleep the human psuche most resembles the lowest plant-like form of psuche. The distinguishing potentialities and actualities that differentiate man from all other life forms are the power of discourse and the power of rationality. These are connected to the power of thought which contains intellectual principles. Thought, according to Plato and Aristotle is entirely independent of any physical substrate such as a physical body and it only comes into existence in actual thinking activity. It is in thought that we grasp the essence of what we are thinking about. Mind, on such an account, is independent of any material substance. The soul, however, according to Aristotle, is intimately connected to both particular memories and particular images from the imagination. This us, for example, evidenced by geometrical images which are used in our reasoning about shapes in space. Geometrical reasoning seeks to establish relationships between images. For Aristotle too, then, reason when conceptualising is blind without the presence of intuition.

For Freud, the interpenetration of practical powers was connected to three principles which are recognisably Aristotelian: ERP, PPP, RP. The Reality Principle(RP) covers both the first principles of nature and the first principles of morality. There is, however, in spite of the integration and interpenetration of these powers a recognisable hierarchy that ends in the rational ideals of Truth and The Good. Reducing the rational ideal of The Good(an a priori of action, according to Aristotle) to a biological event like digestion is as OS claims, inconceivable, but it does nevertheless seem easier to conceptualise digestion as an event. It is less easy to conceptualise thinking in this way, as an event that self- initiates because thinking is nothing until there us an act of thinking. Does the crab scuttling across the sand think? Does it have a will? It is not capable of discourse or reason and might this suffice to differentiate the crab from the human life-form? Is the behaviour we observe sufficient for an attribution of consciousness? The crab is certainly alive and functioning in accordance with the ERP and PPP but does it possess the psychical power to act for the ideal of the Good? Can it make something true by acting? More exploration of these questions is required. When the crab remains still for a long period, is it awake or asleep? Aristotle had this discussion in relation to fish and decided that when it was dark and the fish remained still for a long period of time the fish were probably asleep. Many of Aristotle’s critics jested at this judgement and asked what grounds there were for saying such a thing. Subsequent evidence from fishermen proved him correct. So perhaps if a crab sleeps during the night and comes back to consciousness when it is light we can attribute consciousness to the crab? Other questions also arise in the light of this discussion, e.g. if there are forms of life, are there forms of consciousness? Certainly possessing the power of thought could suffice to make perception, desire, intention, and action more complex powers but is the difference we discover one of degree or a difference in kind? If the crab lacks thought, how far down the hierarchy of powers must we descend before we arrive at the highest power of it’s being? Does a crab remember its hunts and when it gets old does it forget them? Aristotle clearly conceived of a chain of being that included a complex continuum of life forms. If a crab can “remember” things does this occur as a content of its stream of consciousness? If so, is this content best conceived of as an event, or as an act? Sensations, we know would seem to be the most likely occupants of such a stream. For us humans, on the other hand, we can be at one end of the continuum when we sleep and at the other end when we philosophise about the human psuche. The question that remains hanging in the air, however, is “How ought we to characterise action?”: as involving mental activity, (perception, intention, belief and desire) and physical movement linked into the unity of an action? Or as something primarily mental and psychological?

OS wishes to demarcate the psychological in terms of a lower realm of mentality containing sensations and sub intentional activity and a higher realm that he designates as “mental”: a realm that contains thoughts, listenings etc.(P.148). I can notice sensations occurring in the lower of realm of mentality but not in the higher realm, i.e. I cannot notice my thoughts and mental images.

Perhaps the key issue to raise in any attempt to establish the ontological status of action is related to the idea of the body which we have in our minds. Mental activity such as tryings to remember, and forgettings, are obviously in the realm of the mental( a higher realm than the psychological non-mental realm). Bodily action may then be placed in the psychological non-mental realm. If, as OS claims, all physical tryings are actions and if we have the same kind of epistemological relation(of knowing) to them, then perhaps there is no doubt that physical actions are psychological non mental activities. This realm of the psychological is not physically confined to the substrate of the brain but can be extended to the limbs of the body and its outer skin and tissue covering. The organs of the body, however, do not fall into the realm of the psychological but must rather be construed as material and efficient causes of “the psychological”. They will therefore play a role in sub-intentional and intentional limb and tongue movements. Reflexive arm raise due to muscle spasms fall within the scope of the ERP but outside the scope of the will. As a consequence of such spasms the connection of pain with the spasm must however be some kind of necessary connection. OS argues that the mental realm is independent of causal laws relating events. On this account phenomena such as belief are holistically related to the contents of the mind(P.217). This, however, creates difficulties in accounting for Freudian phenomena such as hysteria in which a patient can in fact lose sensation in his limbs or alternatively feel pains where there are none. OS makes the following Freudian claim:

“The hysterical symptom is a disturbance of that part of the ego-function that relates to the sub mental(psychological non mental) part of the mind. This is so even though the trouble lies, not in the “frontier post”(of the body) itself but in the sector of the mental that links the “frontier post” with the Mental receptor centre that is geared specifically to the frontier…..for hysterical symptoms are the fruits of attacks on the thinking ego-function.”(P.219)

Examination of the paralysed limbs or painful area reveals no physical ailment. OS’s theory, then, is that hysteria is a mental non psychological dysfunction. This is a good illustration of OS’s thesis that the “mind has a body”(P.222) and this fact in turn illustrates how the past evolutionary history of homo sapiens has left its traces in the system of the human mind.

In a section entitled, “The Evolutionary History of the Self-Conscious Mind” OS charts the developmental of that part of the mind he calls the “Mental”. First, he claims, there was a physical universe out of which life emerged. OS is a physicalist and life for him is a matter of brute fact for him an organisation of the materials of this physical universe(e.g. carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur phosphate and a few trace metals). The next momentous ontological differentiation occurred in later forms of life when the brain differentiated itself from the rest of the lived body and perhaps changed its function. This in turn led to the self conscious form of life:

“and with it the coming into being of rational general modal concept dependent truth sensitive thought, i.e. f anything really worthy if the title thought”(P. 231)

We are not informed of the roles of discourse and language in this actualisation-process. For this we may need to turn to Psychologists like Julian Jaynes. Language, he 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 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. These higher mental operations are undoubtedly inhabitants of the realm of the mental being essentially connected to the telos of self-conscious thought.

When such a form of thought begins to operate in practical reasoning about the maxim of actions and an ought system of concepts and principles begin to be formed, we are then dealing with another form of higher mental process. The Greek/Socratic idea of defining thinking in terms of “talking to oneself” belongs in this arena of higher mental activities. In the case of the Kantian ideal of the universalisable maxim we are obviously dealing with “arguing with oneself” in the initial actualising processes of embracing the moral law, e.g. “Promises ought to be kept, I promised Jill I would pay back the money I owed her, Therefore I ought to pay Jill..”

In the above example “Promises ought to be kept” is a universalised maxim that holds necessarily of all promises made . It is of course a generally known fact that not everyone who makes a promise with good intentions fulfils the promise made. It is not however, a universal fact. Just because it is a fact does not prevent anyone from adopting a critical position in relation to this fact, and arriving at the universalisable maxim “Promises ought to be kept.”. OS, however, continues to insist upon using the terminology of “event” and “cause” to determine the essence of the realm of “the psychological” but it is not clear whether appeal to material and efficient causation is enough to satisfy the logical demands the principle of sufficient reason makes upon the argumentation we encounter in such investigations. Whether we, in fact , on every particular occasion, reason in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason is, of course, irrelevant. Anyone that fails to do so is still subject to the criticism that one ought to organise ones life and arguments rationally.

The question of Mental Causality is in fact taken up at the end of volume two of OS’s work on the Will. OS gives us a description of what he calls the causal sequence involved in action:

“A particular act-desire springs up in a man. Whereupon he begins to wonder whether to perform the act . He engages in a procedure of trying to decide whether to do so, which necessitates reaching a decision on some matter of fact. Then the instant in which resolution of his factual uncertainty occurs, is the instance in which a certain intention takes up residence in his mind. Now the instance in which he judges the time ripe for the expression of that intention, is the instant in which both the intention and the act-desire begin expressing themselves: and their expression consists in a striving. Finally, the process of striving is one that in the body tends naturally to lead to the occurrence of the willed event. Then most of these phenomena stand in a causal, and for the most part mental causal, relation to one another.”(P.289)

The argument above us curiously circular. He claims that all that is required of the connection between phenomena in the mind is that they not be mediated causally by non-mental events or states. This he claims, is in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason. Yet this is clearly not a sufficient reason for the application of the category of actuality to an area of reality defined by the category of potentiality. OS goes on to claim that the relation between phenomena in the mind possess “certain peculiarities”(P.291). Now it is true that we experience mental phenomena as they occur in time in terms of before and after, but do we also experience a causal relation? Hume’s argument certainly appears more appropriate here than it does in the case of one billiard ball causing another to move into the pocket of the table. Aristotelian argument explains this mental phenomena relation in terms of formal and final causes in the context of the category of potentiality. The reason we give for our actions in both instrumental and ethical cases is given in the form of ought-premises in an argument structure, but the whole experience may well need all 4 types of Aristotelian explanation if the principle of sufficient reason is applied. In such a case the sole appeal to the material and efficient explanations or conditions will not provide us with a complete explanation for the relation between the agent and his reasons for acting. In such an explanation we might find ourselves talking about an actuality that is an actualising of a potentiality. The future state of affairs contained in the formulation of the intention also supports this account. Beliefs are also held for reasons, and these can also be characterised in terms of a syllogism that presents the concluding belief as a justified true belief. I can, that us, have a good reason for believing that every event has “a cause” but the reason for believing that not every action, desire, and intention are events, may lie, not in the realm of theoretical reason, but rather practical reason as defined by Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy. This issue, namely, concerns the principle of sufficient reason related to both the ideals of “The Truth” and “The Good”.

OS defines action in terms of striving for an act fulfilment and this, on Hylomorphic and Critical accounts places any such definition in the arena of the actualisation of a potentiality, that OS describes in terms of expressing a desire, an intention, and a decision. He then claims that that striving is an expression of act-desire and this he further claims is a psychic force. Now, no one will deny that desire is a power we possess, a potential that under certain circumstances can be actualised, but perhaps the only reason for using the term “force” may be connected with the categorical requirements of the matrix of actuality, substance, causation, and event. If we focus upon the moment of making up ones mind as to whether to do X or not, the question arises of whether it may be preferable to use the matrix of potentiality, agency, power, action/activity.

OS claims that Will takes a back seat in the process of the forming of cognitive attitudes(ratiocinative activity) such as the forming of a belief. It can be argued that this is an act for which one is required to take responsibility and thus is further strengthened by the claim of practical reasoning that universalised ought premises are not statements of universal fact but rather statements of law: normative, prescriptive statements. OS refers to the process of actualising the potential practical rationality of the agent as “cognitive crystallisation”, again using a physical inorganic process to model psychic processes. This in turn invites mechanistic descriptions/explanations. We are, of course, not denying that where the issue is a physical one and the intention is to view a series of phenomena under the aspect of “The True”, reference to material and efficient explanations is necessary. The same phenomena, however, can be thought of under the aspect of “The Good”, i.e. is crystallisation a “good” thing. What we must not do, however, us to confuse the one aspect with the other. OS discusses the case of a juror deciding whether to cast the vote of guilty on the base of evidence produced in the course of a trial. He claims that the making up of the jurors mind on the basis of the facts and the deciding to vote guilty are identical enterprises.(P.300) Are they? We raise a doubt here because it seems as if even if it is difficult to separate these two aspects of this enterprise, the mere fact that the separation makes sense, indicates that there is a difference to be considered here. Aristotle would claim in relation to this case that two different powers or functions of the mind are involved: firstly, calculating whether evidence falls under the law in an act of conceptualisation of the evidence, and secondly, whether the juror is doing the right thing in voting guilty. This latter feature of the activity may involve knowledge of oneself and ones prejudices against the defendant. OS softens his position somewhat by referring to the two different aspects as “milestones” along the same road, because the completion of the calculation as to whether the defendant is guilty is the onset of an intention-state(P.301). The whole discussion becomes murkier when OS then claims that we ought to characterise deciding to do X as an activity. Deciding is a process. Processes have beginnings and endings where the end comes after the beginning in time. If there is one thing remaining the same at the beginning and at the end throughout the changing process, it is the presence ,namely, of the agent that is engaging in the process of deciding what is the argument against conceptualising this as an activity of the agent concerned. In the concrete case of the juror presented by OS it is difficult not to understand that what is at stake in this decision-process is the dignity and worth of both the juror and the defendant(even if he is guilty–he is still potentially rational). The moment of the forming of the intention after the completion of the process of deciding what to do, e.g. vote “Guilty”, is a mental “phenomenon” that is preparing to make an entrance into the physical world in the form of an action. This action will of course actualise the intention practically, and also make it true that one juror voted “guilty”. OS asks the aporetic question “What is an intention?”(P.305) and considers three alternatives: an un-analysable psychological entity, an analysable psychological entity, or a mere combination of psychological entities. OS asks in relation to these alternatives whether intention, for example, ought to be analysed into the components of belief and desire or whether these two entities are merely combinations in the complex of intention—the belief sorting under one heading and the desire sorting under another. Again, it is not clear whether this kind of substantive analysis is situated in the appropriate conceptual system. Is the forming of an intention by an agent a substantial event?— a qualitative transformation of a thought process, or is it rather the result of an actualisation of a potential connected to a number of powers of a rational animal capable of discourse? P.M.S. Hacker in his work “Human Nature:A Categorical Framework” would not necessarily agree to the above form of analysis because Agency and Powers for him are situated in a framework of potentiality best explained in terms of hylomorphic powers:

“To say that a human being moved his limb is to subsume behaviour under the category of action. It earmarks behaviour as being of a kind that is in general under voluntary control, as something of a kind which a sentient agent can choose to do or not to do ad hence indicates the propriety of asking whether there is an intentionalist explanation of the deed. The attribution of the movement to the agent is not causal.”(P.158)

Action, for Hacker, require teleological explanations situated in a web of ought judgements. He appeals to two-way powers in the account he gives. There is no doubt that the statement “his arm rose” is a statement about an event because the implication present is that he did not intentionally or voluntarily raise his arm. An action is not being referred to in this statement–rather it is something which happened that was not under his control–not within his power. The powers referred to in this example are not substantial, causal, functional forces, but rather related to purposes requiring teleological forms of explanation. Hacker clearly relates purposes and teleology:

“Only living beings and things related in various ways to living beings have a purpose. Teleology is accordingly at home in the sciences of life, a study of living beings and their forms of life, and in the study of man ad his works.”(P.169)

Both discourse and rationality as it occurs in discourse and the arena of judgement are, of course, primary purposes for the rational animal capable of discourse, in spite of the fact that the instinctive/reflexive behaviour of the animal part of our nature can also be actualised on occasions when rationality and the power of discourse fail to regulate or sublimate these tendencies. The goods involved with these primary purposes differ, of course, from the more biological “goods” of nutrition and reproduction. The telos of human nature involves so much more and reaches into the realms of both the psychological and the mental as conceived by OS. Rationality in the works of man requires cultivation in the soil of a Culture where knowledge of ones world and ones self are important and dignified achievements. The summum bonum of a life according to both Aristotle and Kant is connected to knowledge and the ideal of Reason that makes one worthy of the happiness one hopes will follow from leading a flourishing life. Asking of events, what they are good for, is likely to confuse many issues, simply because whilst Kant might agree that conceptualising actions as events is theoretically possible, the consequences of such an activity would never satisfy the completeness demanded by the principle of sufficient reason:

“As regards the absolute totality of the ground if explanation of a series of these causes, such totality need suggest no difficulty in respect of natural existents; since these existences are nothing but appearances, we need never look to them for any kind of completeness in the synthesis of the series of conditions.”(Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans Kemp Smith N, London, Macmillan, 1963, A 773, B801)

Kant goes on to argue that practical reason insofar as the idea of the freedom of the will is concerned does not seek for the laws of nature determining that which happens(events) but rather it:

“provides laws which are imperatives, that is, objective laws of freedom, which tell us what ought to happen–although perhaps it never does happen–therein differing from laws of nature which relate only to that which happens.”(A802, B830)

For Kant, then, there is a clear logical distinction to be drawn between the uses of reason that respectively answer the questions, “What can I know?” and “What ought I to do?”. Kant furthermore states that in relation to this latter question and the follow-up question “What can I hope for?”, knowledge is attributable to us. All hoping is directed at happiness, Kant argues, and is connected in turn to a law of morality that determines the dignity and worth of the agent concerned. This position refers back to the ancient Socratic account that demanded of justice that we ought to get what we deserve in our lives. Kant aligns himself with this position unequivocally. The formulation of maxims during ones life, whilst aiming at happiness, can only hope for thus consequence on the grounds of having done ones duty when it was required.

Paul Ricoeur using a hermenutic/phenomenological approach, defines human existence in terms of a desire to be and an effort to exist, and here too, we encounter a refusal to reduce mental phenomena to mental events. In a work entitled “Memory, History, Forgetting”(trans Blamey, K., and Pellauer, D.,Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004) Ricoeur analyses mental phenomena into the act(the noesis) and the intentional correlate(the noema)(P.3). Ricoeur points out that the Greeks had two words for memory correlated with firstly, passively remembering something(mneme) and secondly actively recalling, recollecting(anamnesis). In this latter case a necessary question relating to an agent(Who?) must be answered. This follows the Kantian line in the conceptualisation of action in the light of practical reasoning. The key question for Kant related to whether the agent involved is a worthy man, an end-in-himself.

For Aristotle aitia, or “cause” was a formal kind of explanation that responded to the question as to why something is as it is. Sometimes the cause of the change being explained is a physical mover or a substance–but even in such situations the context is one of explanation/justification and not a more concrete context of exploration/discovery. When, on the other hand, the question “Why?” is directed at human activity, what is being asked for, is instead “that for the sake of which” the activity in question occurred. It is also clear insofar as Aristotle is concerned that one and the same phenomenon will have several different complementary explanations. If a mental event is categorically a state of mind then Hacker would claim that neither belief nor desire are states and he would also maintain that neither of these items could be identified with brain states.

OS persists on his physicalist course when he insists that the intending of something “causes” the belief in that something. Certainly there is a sense in which the intending of X entails the belief in this X. The defence of his causal claim appeals to the Cartesian cogito and OS states that were it not for the state of mind I am in here and now I would not here and now know that I exist. The appeal is to facts such as that the state of consciousness I find myself in here and now, could in fact be removed by the blow of a hammer to the head.

When Freud spoke of Consciousness as a Vicissitude of Instinct he is, of course, not implying that consciousness is a particular concrete event but is rather attempting to provide us with part of an essence-specifying definition. The question also arises in this context as to whether Descartes was attempting to give an account of consciousness as experienced here and now at a particular moment or whether he was attempting to characterise it in more universal terms. It would appear that Descartes must be committed to the proposition “everything that thinks knows that it exists”. Kant too, in his account of the “I think” is not referring to a particular “I” but rather the universal act of apperception which is a power all rational animals capable of discourse possess: a power moreover that will play an important role in actualising the potentiality of rationality in such a being.

Now nothing that has been said contains an objection to the relation of mutual entailment that OS insists holds between action, intention, desire, and belief. What has been claimed is that this logical relation requires a practical architectonic of concepts and principles that orbit about the basic term “Action”. The premises of arguments generated in this architectonic are, of course, ought-premises(in the major premise and the conclusion). Later in Volume two of his work on the Will OS specifically denies that intention is an event and claims that it is a state which endures and is directed towards performing a particular act–although he also later maintains that this “enduring intention can be replaced by another intention”(P.310). What is missing from the above architectonic account is the necessary attribution of the intention to an agent: for surely if one intention can evolve into another that is not logically or conceptually connected, the only enduring thing in this process of change must be the agent. The language of causation is still present on P.318 when OS maintains that it is the agents reasons that cause him to intend to do X. It is also clear from the above reasoning that OS reifies the intention into a substantialised supervising agency and in this context he once again declares the intention to be a higher order mental state that is caused by its reasons. For OS it is this agency, rather than the “person”(Hacker) that is endowed with the power of reason to cause action(P.320). Hacker would claim this reasoning to be an example of what he called the mereological fallacy–the fallacy of attributing to a part a property that is only true of the whole.

OS, in some respects, shares the concerns of Ricoeur’s account of existence, defined in terms of the desire to be and the effort to exist:

“Therefore both the “active) genus of which intentional action is a species and the very forces (of desire) which bring them into being, on the final analysis owe their being to the item they encompass and engender, viz, intentional action…it is only because such a life-enhancing phenomenon as intentional action came to be that desire and will came to be, i.e. “selection” reveals their roles in nature.”(P.323)

OS goes on to argue that the having of needs and the organisms response to these needs is a primary phenomenon and will and desire are the psychic representations of these life-fulfilling needs. He also argues that the use of knowledge is what lifted will and desire out of the matrix of primitive need and elaborated need as a higher order phenomenon. Consciousness also played a role standing as it does at the threshold of higher order psychological phenomena. In his “causal” discussion of these phenomena OS resorts to the idea of statistical significance. This discussion is only possible on the condition of events becoming once again the focus of the discussion: intention, it s argued is a statistically given power” , whatever that is.

At the end of Volume two OS presents himself less as a physicalist and more as a dualist in his discussion of the mind-body problem and its relation to two levels of being. This context permits the mind-body relation to become a causal relation(P.332). Two domains are tied together via a nomic bond that somehow forms an entailment relation.

OS discusses the phenomenon of “paralysis of the will” and claims that we have no reason for believing in the phenomenon but we do know that anxiety can have curious effects on the Will. He speaks of anxiety affecting both the will and the spirit of a man. Anxiety causes us to abandon projects(P.338) but it does not directly effect the will. It affects the will via affecting desire(a chain reaction). Self determination is also discussed in relation to agency and OS insists that desire cannot alone play a role in this state of affairs since desires happen to one–one suffers from ones appetites and primitive passions. This is the reason why desire is characterised as both an event and a force. Desires can however be what Freud called ego-enhancing(P.345) but it is on OS’s account part of a causal event chain running from one end of a continuum to another across several domains.

Longer Review of Manfred Kuehn’s “Kant: A Biography”(To be included in Volume 4 of “A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action.”

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The legacy of Kant is manifold because both dogmatism and skepticism have been, and are, present as general attitudes in many areas of philosophical discourse. Aristotle in his attempt to synthesise the dogmatic and skeptical influences of his time proposed a contemplative attitude of mind which experienced change, attempted to understand it, and then reasoned about it with a view to knowing oneself and the world that surrounds one. Kant’s Critical Philosophy is designed to embrace and elaborate upon hylomorphism in ways that would partly aim at the restoration of an Aristotelian spirit in the arena of Philosophical debate. This Aristotelian renaissance was also intended to capture the spirit of intellectual and moral “progress” in accordance with a “hidden plan”, that Kant claimed was present in thousands of years of development leading up to the Enlightenment. The Modern Age is traditionally defined by the demarcations of Hobbes and Descartes: demarcations that involved both a general sceptical attitude toward Aristotelian Philosophy and a dogmatic belief in the substance-oriented science of the day. Kant would attempt to synthesise the ideas of substance and form into a principle-based Critical Philosophy that contained a virtue based moral Philosophy resembling Aristotelian virtue ethics. The Greek terms areté, arché, diké, phronesis were embodied in the Kantian approach which also incorporated Newtonian Physics and Christian Ethics (all men are brothers and thereby equal). The Enlightenment approach to Freedom, paradoxically surpassed the negative view of man being “evil” (in comparison with the goodness of God), with a positive view that we can view the species through its potential to be rational and thereby call man (as a species) “good”. This was also a positive enhancement of the ancient Greek prophecy that “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. If, in accordance with Enlightenment attitudes man “Dare to be Wise!”/”Sapere Aude!”, the eventual outcome (weighed in terms of one hundred thousand years) could be expected to be Good (resulting in a Kingdom upon earth, a perfectly just cosmopolitan society). Even the eagle eyes of Freud may have missed this aspect of Kant’s Critical Philosophy if we judge him on the basis of his work “Civilisation and its Discontents”. Perhaps it is just too much to ask of man to fix his eyes/mind upon a point one hundred thousand years in the future. At issue in the difference between the Freudian and the Kantian views may be the difference Kant drew between a Civilisation and a Culture. Activities guided by the instrumental goods of instrumental imperatives where the concentration of the mind is upon the means to an end rather than the inherent value of the end, constitute the realm of civilising activities. In this instrumental realm the bringing about of an end is viewed as a consequence for which one is responsible, and the ruling category is the causality between events which in turn can be analytically separated. Activities that are categorically constituted, on the other hand, are unconditionally done in the spirit of being “good-in-themselves”, and are responsible for the cultural advancement of man. Civilising activities are examples of rule-following behaviour that is important for the maintenance of order in society, and the provision of everything that meets what Maslow calls the Maintenance needs that are necessary for survival and safety of human forms of life. Maslow’s growth needs are obviously also connected to higher values that no longer are merely instrumental for the physical activity of the building of cities, but rather are connected to the ideas and rational methodologies constituting the ideals of “Culture”. For Kant these two types of activity, the instrumental and the categorical, can dwell together in harmony side by side, as long as there is no “colonisation” of the one domain by the other: no dogmatic idealism denying the role of experience or sceptical realism denying the role of rationality. For Aristotle all activity is guided by the idea of its good, and this, can either be the instrumental activity of building a house serving the goods of the body and its relation to the external world, or the activity that is done unconditionally because of its intrinsic value in the spirit of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time)–in service of the goods for the soul. It is of course also an ultimate good for the soul that both civilisation building/maintaining activities, and cultural constitutional unconditional activities, are in harmony with one another and the citizens living in the community. One of the differences between the Platonic and Aristotelian Political positions is that the latter believed in the rule of the Golden mean in the realm of all activity in the polis. Political activity came into existence for the preservation of life but its continued existence was tied to the provision of the conditions necessary for leading the good life, and ultimately the good spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia). The mechanisms for the actualisation of the complex ideal of the city-state that Aristotle presents is connected to the developmental phases of social activity from firstly, the family unit to, secondly, the unit of the village, and finally, to the terminus of the city-state (callipolis). The growth through these different phases of social activity is “organic”. The process, that is, resembles the phases of the growth and development of living organisms, but also perhaps resembles the evolution of one animal form of life into another. Teleological forms of explanation, therefore, are important in such contexts of explanation/justification. Aristotle believes that the 4 “causes” or “kinds of explanation”(together with the principles of change, the 4 kinds of change, and the three media of change) build some kind of unified totality of conditions that alone can satisfy the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The materialistic concentration upon explanations that seek conceptually independent causes which are the “movers” of change, transform necessity into random contingency. In such a context, attempts at unification into a totality of conditions consequently appear arbitrary and contingent. The so called “formal cause” when combined solely with the material and efficient causes takes the form of a mechanical deterministic principle that forces life forms into confining strait jackets and limits both description and explanation of the telos of organs and organisms. (Telos ought rather to focus upon what the organs and organisms are good-for).

The structures of civilisations and cultures require the totality of conditions referred to in a 4-fold schema of explanation, building as they do primarily upon action and production. This implies that it is primarily the practical and productive sciences that provide us with the knowledge we require to build civilisations and actualise Cultures.

The successful interaction and integration of hypothetical and categorical imperatives is, of course, essential for the organic development of society toward the Kantian end of a Kingdom of Ends built upon morality and human rights. The “replacement” of categorical cultural attitudes by the more technical (techné) hypothetical civilisation building attitudes is problematic, and raises once again the spectre of the Ancient Greek Prophecy claiming “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. The condition for the actualisation of such a prophecy is, however, that the social activity of man is “colonised” by instrumental forms of activity which focus continually upon means without seriously evaluating ends.

Kant is very clear over the importance of categorical attitudes in the “Progress” of society towards its telos. He is also very clear over the importance of the categorical structure of theoretical science for civilisation building. What he would have thought about the technological “achievements” of putting a man on the moon and the invention of atomic bombs is, however, unclear, but the suspicion is he would have reasoned in a similar manner about these events as Arendt did–seeing in them something ultimately regressive given the importance attributed to them.

Kuehn’s biography underscores the importance of Kantian teleological explanation in his search for the totality of conditions for phenomena. The Cartesian “revolution” aimed at regarding animal life-forms, for example, as subject to mechanical description and explanation, and also viewed the human psuche dualistically, ( as a kind of substance that could interact with material substance via mechanical processes in the brain). On this view matter was “inert” and Kant characterised this Cartesian “picture” in terms of a “dead force”. Kant in his early work entitled “True Estimation of Living forces”, sides with Leibniz who, Kuehn argues, appeals to Aristotelian concepts of “form” or “entelechy”. There is, on this view, a force locked up in a body that constitutes its inertia to change : a force that is expressed in the impenetrability of the object, a phenomenon related to the force of attraction. Kant’s argumentation for this characterisation centred around the mathematical calculations relating to experiments doubling the speed but having to more than double the force to achieve this result. This asymmetry pointed to a limitation of mechanical calculation of momentum (speed times weight of the the object). Kant concludes that the force of attraction belongs essentially to all matter. This force , Kant argues also has to be complemented by a counter-force of repulsion of external matter/objects (the possible original form of an energy regulation principle). It is this latter that explains why matter does not contract into one point of unfathomable density. What is important to note in Kant’s early account is the fact that these forces are not “dead” or inert, but rather are “active”, and the original creators of free motion. This, argues Kant, is a rejection of the Cartesian idea of dead matter being tossed about by mechanical forces. There is, an established harmony regulating these two forces (ERP). This regulation principle probably sufficed for Kant to “locate” the soul in the body and to conceive of the combination of soul and body to move other things. The “soul” for Kant is clearly a hylomorphic unity and “mechanical” explanation emanating from a Cartesian matrix of space-time brain causation which connects disparate contingent “events” will, on Kant’s view, fail to pass the tests of the principle of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The ontological assumption is that in the realm of action–a realm in which movement is freely self initiated–the categories of agency and the “forces” of “Powers” are more relevant than the categories of substance and causation. Kant’s early work suggested that matter or substance has power which he described as “living force” but later work throws these remarks into a different context which is closer to Aristotle than it is to Leibniz and Newton . The title of the early work referred to above , “True Estimation….” indicates the hypothetical nature of his reflections upon the events of the physical external world. The same uncertainty that plagued the reflections of the early Socrates hovered over the mind of the youthful Kant and this lack of certainty may have been the cause of his so-called “Copernican Revolution”, in which he sought for categorical certainty no longer in the arena of ever changing experience, but rather in a categorical form of reflection involving structures and powers of the mind. The choice of Kant to write his first major work in German rather than the traditional Latin of the Academics testifies to his independence as a thinker. The fact that he wrote in German might also be due to the fact, as M Kuehn points out (Kant: A Biography(Cambridge, CUP, 2001), that Kant’s genius, at this point in time was not appreciated in the academic world of Königsberg.

In his earlier work Kant also investigated the relationship between matter and space. The first basic term of this early system was that of Prime Matter which was regarded as the consequence of the Being of God. This Prime Matter extended throughout the universe possessing the potentiality of both attraction and repulsion, causing the actuality of moving matter and the consequences of collision and rotation. These were the elements of the planetary systems. God stands to some extent outside this chain of events given the fact that Kant did not believe that God gave Prime Matter a shove–the potentiality for movement was in the system from the beginning. Kant also shared the Aristotelian assumption that the universe was an infinite complex of material, space, and time which could be the source of awe and wonder but whose origins were not as easily investigated as were the origins(the natural history) of life-forms. Kant clearly did not share the Socratic concern that physical investigations into origins might blind the soul, but he did share the Socratic conviction that such investigations into origins were more speculative than, for example, investigations into the origins of the Idea of the Good. Whilst conducting both types of investigation did not lead Kant to turn his back upon speculative metaphysics, they did contribute to the important phenomenal-noumenal distinction that permeates Kantian Critical Philosophy.

In his Metaphysics lectures of 1765 we encounter the following remarks about Space which :

“must be the first actus of the divine all-presence of God, through which the things come into connection(nexus).The status post mortem is very probable, the entire world would equal nothing without rational beings.”(P.132 in Kuehn)

We see here an early Aristotelian move, but this kind of metaphysical thinking, according to Kuehn, drove Kant’s friend Herder toward reading poetry or Rousseau. Kant himself in his later work also followed Rousseau at least insofar as Education of the Young were concerned (Emile). In his early work, Kant distinguished between rational logic and the real reasons we look to in the course of causal investigations. In these latter reasons we find even the early Kant locating these reasons in the activity of our minds. The issue of God’s existence was also an early concern, but theological investigations gave way to ethical investigations into “The Good” and its rational conditions. Agency became the central focus, and character was conceptualised as a good form of agency to be tested by the Greek idea of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). Character was principally concerned with what was good in itself and what was good for the soul. The dignity of man and his freedom to choose his destiny was placed at the centre of Kant’s reflections, but not in abstraction from the polis and the Ancient Greek prophecy relating to the potentiality for life in society to descend into war, chaos, ruin and destruction. Kant, like Aristotle, was pessimistic about the young under 40 understanding the responsibility that accompanies freedom and the potentiality for rationality. He embedded the Christian concept of rebirth or conversion in his account of an actualisation process that is moving toward the telos of rationality. The lynchpin in this process of man becoming, amongst other things the “political animal” is the duty to tell the truth expressed in Kant’s later work: “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View”:

“That someone has a character can only be proved by his having adopted as his highest maxim the principle to be truthful in his inner confession to himself as well as in his dealings with anyone else”( Anthropology 7, 294f)

Kant believed the age of 40 to be the beginning of this process of the dawning of a new form of consciousness which may also be connected to the psychological fact that, according to him, this is the point at which our memory, the building block of cognitive processes, begins to wane, allowing us to expand our knowledge but not, allowing us to learn anything new.

The key element of character are our maxims or the general policies that we have learned from significant others or influential books. A maxim is a principle of practical reason that guides both civilisation-building and culture-constituting activities, but it can also, for Kant, be related to happiness which is the principle of self-love in disguise. Such a principle is reflective and examines ones desires in a reflective spirit. The will is involved in such reflective processes which principally are directed toward civilisation-building and culture- constituting activities. Such activities require a strong will and character, that, in their turn, require self-knowledge–the most difficult of all knowledge to acquire, but nevertheless something demanded by the oracles in the name of eudaimonia. For Kant it is the intention and the maxim that are critical for determining whether the will is worthy of praise, for it is these elements that constitute the essence of ethical activity. Kantian reflection in this area, as in all other areas, was partially formed by English empiricism and its criticised limitations in the field of ethics. Hutcheson, for example, spoke of the moral sentiment and Kuehn quotes Mendelssohn in this context–moral sentiments are

“phenomena which are related to rational principles in the same way in which colours are related to the angles and refraction of light. Apparently they are of completely different nature, yet they are basically one and the same.”( Kuehn, P. 184)

We should recall the great respect that Kant had for Mendelssohn and the fact that both thinkers entered an essay competition announced by the Berlin Academy of Science:

“Whether metaphysical truths in general and in particular the first principles of Theologiae naturalis are capable of the same clear proof as geometrical truths, and if they are not capable of same said proof, then what is the real nature of their certainty, to what sort of degree can one bring their certainty and whether this degree is sufficient for complete conviction.”

Mendelssohn’s essay won the competition narrowly, probably because the judges were predisposed toward the metaphysical approach taken which was also presumably more mathematically inclined than Kant’s contribution. Mendelssohn’s work might also have been less inclined toward the hylomorphic view of human nature Kant favoured. One of the philosophical issues of the time was that which involved a search for a unified theory of sensation and reason. For Kant the starting point of any answer to this question was Hutcheson’s theory of moral sense, and initially Kant placed both elements on a continuum, but even in 1763 Kant did not believe that moral judgements were based on feelings, even if these may have been some kind of material base for the more formal judgements. Kuehn reports that Kant’s thinking underwent a change insofar as the continuity thesis was concerned in 1770, when he claimed that the faculties concerned with reason and sensation (sensibility) were separate entities.

In an essay entitled “Concerning the Ultimate Foundation of the Differentiation of Directions in Space”, it is clear that for Kant, Space is a fundamental concept which is not a consequence of external sensation but rather a concept which makes the experience of space possible. It is not an idea of reason or even what he would later refer to as a category of the understanding. The bipolar account of this time did not include the faculty of the understanding and its categories but referred instead to sensibility and intelligence. The former was defined accurately in the above essay as :

“The receptivity of the subject through which it is possible that its representative state be affected in a certain manner by the presence of an object”

Intelligence was more controversially defined as:

“The faculty of the subject through which it is able to represent things which cannot by their own nature come before the senses of the subject.”

The account appears somewhat dualistic, presupposing a mundus sensibilis and a mundus intelligibilis, both of whom exhibit forms of object peculiar to themselves. Kant points here, in defence of the above separation, to the ancients, who apparently distinguished between phenomena and noumena in relation to these two different kinds of object. Space and time begin to be identified with subject-centred yet a priori conditions of experience.

Wolff embraced the continuity thesis which in Kant’s view prevented him from producing an intellectually based moral Philosophy based on Pure practical reason. Kant thus situated himself in the camp of the “ancients” and Wolff in the camp of the “moderns”. Kant’s Project was clearly to establish ethics in an intelligible world in which actions have a rational form and essence. Principles ruled in this world (the forerunners of the categories of judgement/understanding?) e.g. possibility, necessity, actuality, agency community, causality. Moral perfection was constructed from these a priori elements and the concept of a good will moved to the centre of a metaphysical system aiming at explanation and justification of noumena. This account is a clear rejection of Hutcheson, and all empirical accounts relying on the theoretical notion of abstraction from experience. Practical reasoning takes precedence, and will in fact move to becoming the central pivot of Critical Philosophy. This coincides with the move toward acknowledging synthetic a priori judgments as the founding elements of the sciences. Wolffian Metaphysics is replaced with transcendental forms of inquiry that resemble the investigations of the ancients and those modern concerns that lean more towards mathematical reasoning and the methodology of science, are dismissed. Kantian investigations are explorations of the powers of the rational animal capable of discourse–powers of sensibility, understanding and rationality.

Kant drew the boundaries of the limits of the understanding and reason with the help of the Categories which were a priori notions that organise our experience. Kant argued for instance, that viewing God in terms of the category of causality became problematic, given the necessary relation of these categories to space and time. Principles such as the axioms of intuition, the anticipations of perception, the analogies of experience and the Postulates of Empirical Thought have no room for the rational/theoretical idea of a God. We know something holds the world together as a systematic whole, but our powers are limited to knowing just that: they can reach no further into the realm of things in themselves at least insofar as theoretical reflection is concerned. We can have a negative conception of this realm and know that it cannot have spatial/temporal characteristics or perceptual/experiential characteristics, but it is at this point that our theoretical understanding of the matter ends. Theoretically, according to Kant, we cannot know ourselves as we are in ourselves because we are an animal form of life confined to the power of discourse in our philosophical investigations into the nature of space, time, causation, and reality. When we discourse about ourselves, the subject of our discourse is the self as it appears phenomenally and conditionally in the matrix of sensibility and in accordance with the categories of the understanding. The self that is doing the discoursing or the thinking, the “I think”, appears to be a second self that is independent of experience and this is the self the Oracles and Philosophers of Ancient Greece were urging us to explore. Theoretical investigations, however, are problematic, because thought does not appear to have the power to think about itself and this non-empirical self therefore cannot “find” itself. This , however, is not a recital that is doomed to end in negation. Another form of causality, that of freedom, allows us access to both God and our noumenal selves.

Kant lined up the theoretical arguments claiming to prove the existence of God and demolished them all, but then in his discussion of the human journey to moral perfection allowed space for faith and hope in relation to both God and our moral futures.

Kuehn points out that the first reviews of the “Critique of Pure Reason” viewed it as belonging to the British tradition of idealism and scepticism: a product of the Philosophy of Berkeley and Hume. Hamann’s criticism was particularly interesting, because it was to foreshadow the work of the later Wittgenstein, which was also attempting to respond to the threat of continental idealism and scepticism. Hamann claimed that we are misled by the language we use and that we should inquire more systematically into the functions of language rather than inquire into the use of pure reason. Kant, in a later work entitled “Prolegomena”, protested at the false characterisations of his work and criticised both Berkeley and Hume, but his phenomena/noumena distinction was still regarded with suspicion. This distinction in its turn required the use of transcendental logic applying a priori principles and laws to nature, and this too was sceptically received. This illustrated not just the limitations of pure theoretical reason, but also the scope and depth of pure practical reason where communities of rational animals capable of discourse were free to form and combine concepts in ways that would serve a diverse set of purposes. Moreover it was in the practical sphere that the strategy of stepping outside these categorical and conceptual systems would be subject to philosophical criticism via the Socratic methodology of elenchus, or the Aristotelian methodology of logic determined by the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. This form of criticism would not, however, destroy the object of faith, namely God, and would reject all attempts at anthropomorphising the idea. Hume’s scepticism, in Kant’s view, risked rejecting too much and thereby failing to realise the fundamental limitations of experience. Philosophical aporetic questions often transcended the boundary of experience and revealed an ideal realm of thought constituted by principles of reason. Morality and Religion occupied a realm that the events, substances, and causality of science did not regulate or constitute. The function of transcendental logic in this realm was not just the negative function of transcending experience, but also the positive function of providing us with the conditions necessary to both conceptualise experience and organise it into bodies of knowledge. Science was for Kant hylomorphic: every science had both a material aspect and a formal aspect in which principles organise the subject-matter. The forms of Synthetic a priori judgements constitute the foundations of the different sciences.

The categorical imperative, for example, constituted the fundamental form of justification of both the maxims of actions and those actions themselves.: making the actions both good in themselves and good in their consequences, because they were deeds flowing from a good will. Such Synthetic a priori judgements reach into the realm of noumena and all that can be claimed insofar as our understanding of such judgements are concerned, is that they are used as justifications but cannot themselves be fully comprehended in their intention. This means that the ultimate conditions of the possibility of morality cannot be fully understood. What we do understand is the brute fact of our freedom where it is clear to us that we are free to give ourselves laws because we are a law unto ourselves so long as these laws are valid for every rational being in an ideal intellectual realm constituted of noumena.

Kuehn, in discussing Kant’s first moral work “Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals” claims that this work and the following works on Practical Reason are “one of the greatest achievements of the history of Philosophy”(P. 287). We can concur with this judgement with a clear conscience because it respects the intellectual integrity of the other sciences of mundus intelligibilis. History too is respected as a universal discipline with Cosmopolitan intentions, and its use of teleological explanation is praised as a necessary justification for the Progress of humanity through historical ages. Transcendental logic is the tool Kant uses to situate freedom and the categorical imperative at the centre of these processes of the actualisation of the telos of the “kingdom of ends”. Historiography merely charts the sequence of events throughout the ages, but Transcendental History transforms this mechanical recording process into a narrative of significance that confirms Aristotle’s hylomorphic claim that all activities aim at the good. Kant claims:

“If it examines the free exercise of the human will on a large scale it will be able to discover the regular progression among freely willed actions”(Kant’s Political Writings, Ideas for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan point of view”, Reiss, P.41)

Kant is clearly in search for a principle that guides us toward the cosmopolitan kingdom of ends. The account we are given obviously assumes that it is nature itself which ensures that all that is good ends well for humanity–even if the journey is a long and tortuous one. The journey, requires good and just government–an Aristotelian requirement. Such a journey obviously requires the courage to think freely for oneself–to dare to be wise!(“Sapere Aude!”)

Kant also theorises about Conjectural History and the beginning of the human race. A state of nature in which human nature was guided by instinct and could be described as “happy”. In such a state the imagination begins to construct a myriad of objects of luxury and the famous “fevered city ” from Plato’s Republic becomes a reality. In Christian History this stage of transformation of our life was identified with “a fall” from from the Grace of God. From a moral point of view, however, the “choice” to feed ones appetites in accordance with the demands of the imagination is the beginning of the good works of man which will require the acquisition of large bodies of knowledge if his journey, as a species, to a good end, is to be not just a possibility but a real actuality. Freud promoted an oracular vision of the discontents of Civilisation and pointed to the state of affairs in which man must of necessity be discontent with the active and free powers that are governing the course of the world as a whole. Kant thinks that this form of discontentment is absolutely necessary for man if, as a species, he wishes to transcend this state of discontentment. He believes that such a problematic state of affairs has been brought about by a misuse of mans rational powers which must be corrected. One of the sources of discontent may well have been an irrational belief in the existence of an anthropomorphised God, the craftsman. Situating Freedom at the centre of his theory and deriving a faith in a Good being from such a source is, for Kant, the kind of correction needed in our use of reason. God is undoubtedly a supersensible Being, and therefore lies beyond the reach of human knowledge, but not beyond the reach of human faith and hope. If this thesis can be maintained, virtually all of religion remains justified on the condition that God is not anthropomorphised. The nature of the presence of evil in the world is still an issue which needs accounting for. Kant’s solution is to postulate that man is conscious of the moral law but chooses to make himself an exception to it. The evil man thus freely chooses a deviation from the Good. Kant clearly does not view the universe as the battleground for two dualistic Manichean powers. Evil is a subordinate principle in Kant’s system. Man is by nature Good and his activities aim at the good, unless….something causes man to deviate and then man subsequently chooses to follow this deviant path.The decision to follow the correct path for Kant, was a duty, and such a duty was far easier to understand than any obscure principle of happiness. Kant and Kantians throughout history have argued for the simplicity of doing something to increase ones worth rather than to make one happy because it is in fact very difficult to decide what will make one happy. We all know that what makes one man happy will not necessarily make another man happy unless it is because these two men know that they are worthy of being happy. In the context of this discussion the Greek principle of areté (doing the right thing at the right time in the right way) is the principle one ought to follow in doing ones duty.

The Kantian system is almost unique (among modern works) in that its teleological justification of action is both a religious and a political state rolled into one: the kingdom of ends is both a just and a holy state of affairs. The civil law and the holy law meet under the umbrella of the categorical imperative and in the arena of practical reason in which major premises of practical arguments are in the mode of “ought-statements”, e.g. “Promises ought to be kept”, “One ought to tell the truth”. Governments are bound by teleological justifications and they ought to keep promises and tell the truth to the people they govern. Failing to do so however does not, according to Kant ever justify revolution. Kuehn points out that Kant only approved of the French “Revolution” because it was not technically a revolution:

“Legally Louis 16th had in effect abdicated when he called the Estates-General. So, legally, the French Revolution was not a Revolution”(P.375)

Otherwise governmental activity is to be regarded in the light of the perspective of the good. The breaking of key promises and lying might well compromise this fundamental attitude of the governed toward their governors but otherwise in most circumstances, we assume a good will and good intentions. Kant was in favour of anyone freely criticising their government but on general grounds he felt that violence was an irrational form of response in human affairs, and becomes even more irrational and irresponsible when turned upon those who are trying to serve the people. Kant himself wished that those that governed were better educated, but he was probably more Aristotelian in his politics than Plato and would not have recommended that Philosophers rule the Republic. Government is only ultimately justified by the consent of the ruled and the idea of an inalienable human right is systematically addressed in terms of the idea of freedom:

“For right consists merely in limiting everybody else’s freedom to the point where it can coexist with my freedom according to universal law, and the public law in a community is no more than a state of actual legislation in accordance with this principle and combined with power.”(Kant, Practical Reason, On the Old Saw, P.60)

Human Rights would be fundamental in the Kingdom of Ends which would regulate interaction between states by a League of Nations or United Nations. It is important to note however, how the statement of rights above is an elaboration (in the form of an essence- specifying definition of a political concept of duty) upon the categorical imperative, an elaboration that uses the foundational idea of freedom in a way that explains or justifies the categorical imperative, thus taking us to the very outer boundary of what can be thought. The reference to power is an interesting one and raises the question as to whether such an exercise of coercion would be necessary in a kingdom of ends which, to avoid the tyranny of the instrumental imperative, ought to rest upon the categorical unconditioned duties connected to virtue. Obeying the law just because it is the law and not knowing why, i.e. not knowing why the state needs regulative laws which ought to be constitutive of ethical action in the minds of citizens, is heterogeneous, and compromises the autonomy of the free choice to do what is right and good. The definition does, however, articulate the close relationship between the duties of virtue and the political duties connected to rights. The Kingdom of Ends for Kant is more like a moral entity in which virtue reigns and one cannot help but wonder whether the State will wither away when the potential rationality of the human species becomes an actuality.

Kant’s relation to Religion is both positive and critical. Miracles and supernatural events are not to be believed or used to trick people into believing and hoping for a moral Kingdom on earth some time in the future. The Bible for Kant, as it was for Spinoza, must be interpreted in terms of practical reason. The dialectical progress of metaphysics from dogmatism to scepticism to the criticism of pure reason must be reflected in this “modern” interpretation of the Bible, which aims not just at the worthiness of ones character, but also at a cosmopolitan world in which cosmopolitan law will replace nationalistic laws: cosmopolitan law that constitutes and regulates the human rights of citizens of the world. Obviously in such a world inner moral legislation will be more important and prevalent than external juridicial legislation and the good will, moreover must have a “holy” religious dimension. For Kant, the laws we find in the Bible, are those that logically specify our duties and build character via a conception of the worthiness of being human. The “transgressions” of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, for example, will, in the science of Anthropology, be a narrative that highlights the move away from animal instinct into the world of the human, where the search for the knowledge we need to lead our lives begins with an act of freedom. The rational animal capable of discourse that is the subject of investigation, in Kant’s Anthropological investigations, is a knowledge bearing creature for whom the Socratic ideal of wisdom (knowing what one does not know and what one could never know) is acknowledged as the model of Oracles.

There will be moments that are difficult to interpret such as God’s presence in the Garden of Eden, and those too ought eventually to be interpreted anthropologically without anthropomorphising a mode of Being that does not occupy the space-time matrix. This hermeneutical exercise will, Kant insists, need to be in accordance with a metaphysics that has engaged in a critique of pure reason and all putative so called “proofs” of the existence of God.

The details of our political development on the way to a Kingdom of ends is given in Kant’s work “Perpetual peace” from 1795. Direct democracy is regarded as a despotic system. Kant’s preference is for a Republic in which representatives (presumably with political knowledge and political skills) ensure and uphold a constitutional system in which the executive and legislative branches of government are separate from each other and possess genuine independence. Such government would protect property as part of human rights. It is rightful that one ought to be able to enjoy the fruits of ones work and that what is yours is yours and what is mine is mine. Ones possessions, rightfully and deservedly gained are protected under the infringement of freedom principle articulated above. Obviously under such a principle a person, being an end-in-themselves–cannot be owned or used without their consent. We do not “own” our children Kant argues, they are bearers of rights toward which parents have duties which are not reciprocated. Even in marriage the ideal of the person as an end in themselves means that one does not own the partner but rather consents to giving the partner rights over oneself. For Kant it is the Promise that is the central issue of this commitment. Talk of contracts both here and with respect to the relation the citizen has to the government must be placed in this ethical context: a context in which the notion of quid pro quo is a subordinate notion to that of rights and promises. Any allegiance to any government must be predicated upon the reciprocation of duties that build upon a moral foundation of treating people as ends in themselves, and a legal foundation of rights and freedom. The Enlightenment “revolution” was a repeat of the Socratic attempt to introduce a new set of values that replaced the stronger with the wiser. The Enlightenment twist that Kant added was that of the political wisdom of a phronimos who envisaged a peaceful cosmopolitan world ruled by moral values and human rights: a community of peaceful nations on earth. Forcefully occupying the lands that were being newly discovered was problematic for Kant and an enterprise filled with bad faith.

Education was of central concern to all the Enlightenment thinkers of importance. Kant believed in a method he described as catechism, by which the teacher does not dogmatically preach his subject or engage in a dialectical dialogue where the discoursing parties are contesting to win an argument. Rather the teacher engages the pupils in a form of discourse involving the kind of questioning Socrates engaged in with Meno, the boy-slave who then “recollected” a principle of geometry. This form of education is particularly important in moral education and this must precede any form of religious education. Religious education shall, when it occurs later in the educational process, not attempt to neutralise a fundamentally autonomous attitude with something more heterogeneous such as an attitude that emphasises duties to God. The question of what sort of moral relation we have to God may, Kant argues, be beyond the scope of our understanding and reason. The duties we have to man on the other hand are clear and comprehensible and easily understood by everyone.

A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Volume 4(P M S Hacker: Human Nature: The Categorical Framework)

Visits: 1755

Hacker’s work “Human Nature:The Categorical Framework” is an attempt to widen the perspective of his earlier grammatical investigations into that area of Philosophy Aristotle described as “First Philosophy”. The first part of the title “Human Nature” obviously reaches back to the Hylomorphic conception of man as a “rational animal capable of discourse”: a definition implying a synthesis of living matter and organising principles. The second part of the title “The Categorical Framework” echoes one of the major concerns of Kantian Critical Philosophy, namely the crucial role of the Categories in contexts of description and explanation. The combination of these two concerns flags this work as belonging in both the Classical and the Enlightenment genre of Philosophical Projects. Whatever its ultimate intention it assists in the cultural task of reestablishing hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy on the stage of “Modern” Thought.

Hacker wishes this work to be in the name of establishing a “Philosophical Anthropology”(P.10). Part of his concern is to construct the above discipline with the aid of a grammatically established framework. The major categories of the investigation are “Substance, Causality, Agency, and Power”. There is a greater degree of commitment in this work firstly to metaphysics and secondly to a limited version of rationalism. Non-empirical investigations into language-use in everyday and theoretical contexts is the chosen methodology. The aim is both to describe and explain but there is an interesting classical reference to the Socratic insistence that we philosophers are only midwives in a process of recollection or recall of what we already know. The focus of these investigations are highlighted in the following:

“we are interested in the concepts of agency, mind, body, person, consciousness, self consciousness, and so forth.”(P.16)

Hacker also clearly wishes to distinguish between the above form of philosophical investigations and scientific investigations, between the forms of rationally and empirically-based knowledge. This Project of Philosophical Anthropology surprisingly, however, pays scant attention to Kant’s “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View”, claiming that there are only two great paradigms for this discipline, namely the Platonic dualistic paradigm and the Aristotelian biologically/logically inspired hylomorphic paradigm. Psuche is rightly identified with the principle of life and levels of principle (correlating with forms of life) are not specifically named, but are implied by the following:

“What is distinctive about the human soul is that it incorporates not only the vegetative powers of growth, nutrition, and reproduction, and the sensitive powers of perception, desire and motion, but also the uniquely human rational faculties of the will and intellect. The soul is not an entity attached to the body but is characterised in Aristotle’s jargon as the “form of the living body”(Human Nature: The Categorical Framework, Oxford, Blackwell, 2007, P.23)

The above quote delineates the physical/anthropological grounds for a hierarchical differentiation of different “principles” in a complex life-form such as the human being. These principles are of course present in Aristotle but not named as such. They are: the Energy Regulation Principle(ERP) which constitutes and regulates all physiological activity of tissues, organs, and limbs, the Pleasure-Pain Principle(PPP) which regulates the behaviour of attraction and repulsion to objects of experience, and the Reality Principle which regulates all behaviour, cognition, emotion, and consciousness in a person. A person, according to Hacker, is the moral/legal vicissitude of the biological/psychological human being. The Powers of a man are obviously related to more than one principle. Desire, in the form of appetite relates to both the ERP and the PPP. The power of reasoning relates principally to the RP but is regulative of Desire.

How these powers relate to the will and its striving activity finds articulation to a great degree in Freud’s later work. The agency of the Ego, for example, whose primary areas of concern in life are to Love and to Work operates over the biological/psychological domain of protecting the body from damage and danger(ERP, PPP) up to the more intellectual concern with the moral law and the more strategic “work” of integrating the superego into the Ego. The agency of an integrated ego for Freud is the key to a healthy person-ality. Its concern is not merely with the demands of the superego but also the demands of the id and the external world. The ego,then, strives to work in accordance with the RP in relation to both our belief and actions systems: the ancient concerns of the Truth and the Good are the overarching concerns of these systems that are committed to Civilisation via the activities of discourse and Reason. Surprisingly there is no reference to Freud in this work of Hacker’s.

Hacker pays much attention to the way in which the Cartesian concept of res cogitans redefined thought and marginalised the biological aspects of mans existence, and he points to the empirical commitment to materialism as manifested in the reflections of Hobbes, La Mettre, D´Holbach and Diderot(P.25). The Kantian synthesis of Cartesian Rationalism and Empiricism is, however, completely bypassed in this description of the historical development of “Modern” Philosophy. He attributes to Wittgenstein the successful refutation of Cartesianism overlooking the fact that Kant had previously directed decisive critical arguments at the Cartesian position. These Kantian arguments against both materialism and dualism have largely been overlooked by British Philosophers because of the suspicion that Kant was a “German idealist”. This is a curious omission especially given the title of Hackers work, “The Categorical Framework” and Wittgenstein’s praise for the Kantian approach to metaphysical problems.

Hacker begins his “investigations” into the category of Substance by pointing out the central importance of “purpose”. He argues that Science demands a determinate unambiguous system which is not necessary for the classification systems we use in everyday discourse. For example, in the case of ordinary everyday discourse it may not matter if we have no clear and distinct criteria for distinguishing “trees” from “shrubs”. This lack of clarity would not be acceptable in many scientific areas. Hacker wishes to claim that rigorous classification of particular substances is necessary for the later activity of explanation and this might be true but it neglects to take into consideration explanations of the kind “All life forms are mortal” which require an understanding of the relation of concepts to each other, rather than a relation of a concept to a particular. Insofar as ordinary everyday discourse is concerned there is clearly a sense in which the concepts of “trees” and “shrubs” are generalisations for use on more than one occasion, but the presence of a small middle ground of uncertainty does not prevent the concepts from having a purpose and representing significant sectors of this form of life. In such usage, however, it is important to note that usage is more concerned with description than explanation. Hacker approves the Aristotelian account of Substance and points to the various distortions of this Category of Existence(logical category) by Descartes(largely in the name of Science). In this discussion of Substance we are also provided with some insight into why the Kantian account is neglected. It is clear in Hackers reflections on this issue that the extent to which Critical Philosophy is committed to Aristotle’s hylomorphic account is underestimated. This oversight might be connected to a belief that Substance is best conceived of in terms of “particulars”(a position adopted in Aristotle’s early work on the Categories). The focus upon what is termed “special ontology” of the later work(“Metaphysics”) was marginalised on the above interpretation of Aristotle. On this latter account “substance” is one kind of Being and Being is the major area of concern for an account of “General Ontology” that regards “Substance” as related to “Prime Matter”(about which nothing can be known except that it remains what it is throughout a process of change). Prime Matter lies on a continuum which reaches through “forms” to the Pure Form of God which is one terminus of explanation/justification. “Substance” , for both Aristotle and Kant, then, is a theoretical category to be distinguished from other categories such as “Agency” and “Power”, both of which are practically oriented categories, carrying their own “meanings of Being” and related to rationality in very different ways. A reason why a being is as it is, is a very different kind of reason for a form of life that is in the midst of a process of becoming what it can be by means of the use of its agency and powers. It also needs to be pointed out that there is no great difference between the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of substance, especially if one bears in mind the distinction between special and general ontology. Substances interact very differently if they are animate living substances with powers of life and consciousness. This interaction can of course be characterised in terms of an ontology of event subsumed under the category of causation but this kind of explanation does not answer all the aporetic questions that can be raised about this kind of interaction.

Hacker points to the interesting fact that the Greek “aiton” was translated into the Latin “causa” which he claims is connected with “guilt”, “blame” and “accusation”. This may be an interesting translation of the use of “aiton” that is related to the interrogative “Why did you do X?” in a context where it is obvious that the questioner was clear over what was being done but did not approve of what was being done. There are many meanings of “aiton” that are not connected to contexts of guilt, blame, and accusation. For Aristotle this term could also designate the material and efficient explanations(aitia) of what is happening and why. Asking, for example, why the tree burned upon being struck by lightning is, according to Aristotle, requesting a material explanation of what happened, e.g. “The tree burned because it was made of wood”. Similarly, upon encountering a burning tree(if one had not witnessed the lightning strike), posing the question “Why?” expects the answer “Because it was struck by lightning”: this is an efficient cause/explanation. This leaves one wondering how the Latin translation of “aiton” dealt with such meanings. The complexity of translation from Greek to Latin was compounded by , firstly, the Scientific rejection of Aristotelian metaphysics by Descartes and Hobbes, and secondly, the Humean account of “causation”, (specifically directed at the rejection of the rationalist position which enabled seeing the cause-effect relation in terms of one global necessary change). The Humean account of “causation” encouraged regarding causal change as an interaction between two contingently related events which are logically independent of each other. Hume as we know accused rationalists of “projecting” necessity into what are essentially contingent relations in reality: a state of affairs that he diagnosed as a consequence of expectations that are contingently associated in the mind. He appears otherwise to have argued in his Treatise that if there was a necessary connection between these two events it would lie beyond our powers to discover such a connection. Hacker points out that this account was rejected by Kant, who, like Aristotle, appreciated that the relation of global necessity was not projected but rather categorically “thought” in our judgements about events that are related in accordance with our categorical judgements. For Kant, as for Aristotle, the Categories were powers the understanding possessed to organise reality and these categories were appealed to in particular in contexts of explanation/justification. These categories were “independent of experience” and were regarded as a priori forms of thought by Kant. The Kantian idea of the thing-in-itself or noumenal reality was “ideal” in the sense of not being empirically determined by experience. It was also part of a polarised continuum between Prime Matter and Primary Form that bracketed what was empirically real in our experience. The so-called formal and final causes/explanations are tied logically to the ends of rationality(nexus finalis) whereas efficient cause/explanation are tied to real events in nature(nexus effectivus). In the former nexus the parts of the whole are reciprocally cause and effect of their “form”. When power and agency are situated in this realm of ideal ends the context changes from a context of exploration/discovery to a context of explanation/justification.

In Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory the tissues, organs and limbs of an animal are part of a nexus finalis and it is this structure that constitutes them as parts of a being that is a self organising entity. One can atomise the parts of a whole if one wishes to, and investigate their properties in order to accumulate facts that may or may not be relevant to the concept of the whole organism we possess, e.g. the properties of the tissues of human beings provide us with facts about rational animals capable of discourse but such facts about tissue composition, relating to the ERP, will have little to do with the rationality and discourse elements of the above essence- specifying definition: these latter elements are principally constituted and regulated by the PPP and the RP. According to Kant in his “Analytic of Teleological Judgement”:

“Organisms, are, therefore, the only beings in nature that, considered in their separate existence and apart from any relation to other things, cannot be thought possible except as ends of nature. It is they, then, that first afford objective reality to the conception of an end that is the end of nature and not a practical end….they supply natural science with the basis for a teleology…”(P.24)

(Kant’s Critique of Judgement, trans Meredith J. C., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973)

A better defence of hylomorphic Philosophy would be difficult to find. Kant goes on to claim that the above teleological principle cannot rest on empirical grounds of observation and experimentation. He presents us with a dialectical exchange over the power of reason in relation to the empirical mechanisms of external nature. In his introduction to the solution of the above antinomy,Kant writes:

“We are wholly unable to prove the impossibility of the production of organised natural products in accordance with the simple mechanism of nature. For we cannot see into the first and inner ground of the infinite multiplicity of the particular laws of nature, which, being only known empirically are, for us contingent, and so we are absolutely incapable of reaching the intrinsic and all sufficient principle of the possibility of a nature–a principle which lies in the super-sensible…”(P.39)

Kant underlines the above argument by claiming that natural laws and mechanical explanations would never suffice to explain the origins of a simple blade of grass. Reasoning about this state of affairs leads us to the threshold of the super-sensible realm of noumena which our human minds cannot comprehend fully, neither by intuition nor by the categories of the understanding, nor by the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The world as a totality refuses to show its origin and essence to human beings. Appealing thus to a single category, namely causation, as science does in such discussions is therefore otiose. Kant does not in any way intend to diminish the importance or underestimate the value of mechanical explanation via material and efficient forms of explanation. Indeed he uses this form of reasoning to provide us with a pre-Darwinian hypothetical theory of evolution:

“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 pain reason there is nothing a priori self contradictory in this. But experience offers no example of it.”(P.79)

In this context Kant also refers to the role of teleological explanation in this reasoning process. The origin of the above processes is mother earth:

“Yet for all that he is obliged eventually to attribute to this universal mother an organisation suitably constituted with a view to all these forms of life, for unless he does so, the possibility of the final form of the products of the animal and plant kingdoms is quite unthinkable.”(P.79)

What is the nature of this attribution? It is clearly not a matter of Humean “projection” given the presence of rational argumentation throughout this section of the Third Critique. Projection is a power of the imagination. The psycho-physiological power of the imagination is discussed by Kant in a section on dream activity:

“For when all the muscular forces of the body are relaxed dreams serve the purpose of internally stimulating the vital organs by means of the imagination and the great activity which it exerts–an activity that in this state generally rises to psycho-physical agitation….Hence, I would suggest that without this internal stimulating force and fatiguing unrest that makes us complain of our dreams, which in fact are probably curative, sleep, even in a sound state of health, would amount to a complete extinction of life.”(P.29)

This is a Freudian reflection: a reference to the life instinct and the wish to sleep Freud thought so important in his theory of dreams. Imagination, is, of course, an inner power regulated by the ERP and PPP and this distinguishes the imagination from reason which is a two way power related to the RP–a power which is directed outward and conscious of itself.

For Kant, man as the only being possessing understanding and rationality, is therefore entitled to be regarded as the “lord” of Nature. These powers enable man to willfully set ends for himself and employ nature as a means to such self determined ends. The ultimate end of such activity is Culture(P.94). Part of the essence of cultural activity involves the Greek idea of liberating man from his unnecessary desires. Cultural processes of this kind for Kant, however, requires postulation of a cosmopolitan totality in which nation-states submit to a discipline of international law and order: a state of affairs in which war is prohibited and diplomatic activity strives for a “perpetual peace”. The capacities for discourse and rationality obviously play an important role in the establishment of the rule of phronesis that is the aim of the phronimos. In a Culture the civilising activities of skill regulated by areté as well as esoteric activities aiming at the goods for the soul together help to constitute that Culture.

Kant also points to the tension that exists between lower level ERP and PPP activities relating to the survival of the species and the more “cultural” activities involved in actualising the potential of rationality in humanity(P.97). Such an actualising process uses discourse as a medium and in this medium we can speak sometimes with a universal voice about our desires and feelings of pleasure and pain. Kant elaborates upon the tension between life and Culture:

“The value of life for us, measured simply by what we enjoy(by the natural end of the sum of all inclinations, that is, by happiness), is easy to decide. It is less than nothing. For who would enter life afresh under such conditions? Who would even do so according to a new self-devised plan(which should, however, follow the course of nature; if it also were merely directed to enjoyment?….There remains then nothing but the worth which we ourselves assign to our life by what we not alone do, but do with an end so independent of nature that the very existence of nature itself can only be an end to the condition so imposed. “(P.97-8)

These are, the three constitutive phases, to which are attached three regulative mechanisms articulated in the above reflection: life, the enjoyment of life, and the contentment associated with leading a worthwhile life. There is also the suggestion of the presence of a theoretical attitude involving the comprehension of Nature as an end-in-itself. This attitude is tied to a super-sensible principle that in turn is connected to an attitude man has toward himself(as noumenon):

“Now we have in the world beings of one kind whose causality is teleological, or directed to ends, and which at the same time are beings of such a character that the law according to which they have to determine ends for themselves is represented by them themselves as unconditioned and not dependent on any thing in nature, but as necessary in itself. The being of this kind is man, but regarded as noumenon.”(P.99)

The chain of beings existing in nature as inorganic states of affairs stretches past organic forms of life of various kinds up to the terminus of man for Kant. Kantian metaphysics to some extent regards God as a Deus absconditis in relation to this natural chain but the divine being is omnipresent as a factor in our ethical reasoning about the good flourishing life. “One gets what one deserves” is an ancient Socratic reference to the consequences of diké(justice), and this element is present in the Kantian account in the form of a purely ethical judgement rather than as a religious fear of Judgement Day.

Hacker’s position on the issue of man the noumenon, is ambiguous. His view of teleology is clearly Aristotelian with a Wittgensteinian twist, maintaining that discourse and thought manifests a concern for what things are for, and does so in a way that gives them the status of what is real. In this discussion Hacker criticises the above Kantian account of the teleology of Nature on the grounds of maintaining that it forms part of a Design argument. Hacker claims that the Darwinian appeal to mechanism of nature undermines teleological explanation and thereby any appeal to an architect of Nature. This is a puzzling claim given the earlier “theory” of evolution presented by Kant and also the following:

“if the name of natural history, now that it has one been adapted, is to continue to be used for the description of nature, we may give the name archeology of nature, as contrasted with art, to that which the former literally indicates, namely an account of the bygone or ancient state of the earth–a matter on which, though we do not hope for any certainty we have good grounds for conjecture. Fossil remains would be objects for the archeology of nature, just as rudely cut stones, and things of that kind would be for the archeology of art. For as work is actually being done in this department, under the name of a theory of the earth, steadily though, as we might expect, slowly this name would not be given to a merely imaginary study of nature, but to one to which nature itself invites us.”(P.90 ftnt)

We can see from the above reasoning that there is no rush to an argument from Design for God or a creator. In fact there is an open-mindedness on this question that is quite unusual for a pre- Darwinian thinker:-

“But now it is an open question, and for our reason must always remain an open question , how much a mechanism of nature contributes as means to each final design in nature.”(P.73)

If Kant is a hylomorphic Philosopher as we maintain, then, the essence or nature of a thing is best explained or justified by reference to the notions of “form” or “principle”. Primary Form, or God obviously lies beyond the full comprehension of human understanding and reason, and for Kant this part of the noumenal ream must be the most difficult to access via theoretical reasoning and its categories of judgement/understanding. Resting at non-primary forms or principles is , however, possible for us who use the categories and principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Hacker points out that contrary to popular opinion, Darwin did not eliminate teleological explanations of nature (P.193). He also points out, however, that Darwin did intend to eliminate all forms of design explanations. Given what we know biographically about Darwin’s life and times and his initial reluctance to publish his work during his lifetime for fear of religious repercussions we may remain sceptical about this claim by Hacker. Darwin described himself in 1836 as a “orthodox Christian”. Also, towards the end of his life we find him saying:

“It seems to me absurd to doubt that man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist.”

This would have been a fair description of Kant’s relation to both Natural History and God. We should pause to mention in this context, however, that the ancient Greeks also felt uncomfortable with postulating natural creative powers on the part of the gods, allocating all such materialistic activity to the demiurge whose powers are clearly inferior to those of the superior beings of the gods. Hacker, would appear, therefore to be unnecessarily exaggerating the differences between the accounts of Kant and Darwin. Hacker also problematically rejects using the term “cause” for teleological explanation. He states the following position:

“Citing it(efficient causation) explains not by identifying a cause, but by pointing to an end.”(P.197)

Hacker is here clearly succumbing to the temptation to reduce Greek terms to their (problematic) Latin translations. Different kinds of explanation are, for Aristotle, different kinds of cause. All the different kinds of cause are answers to the question “Why?”. “Why did the tree burn?”–“Because of the lightning strike on the tree”. “Why are you cutting the tree down?”–“Because I wish to use the wood for my fence”. Both of these responses to “Why” questions are “Reasons for” the phenomena that need to be explained. The relation between the fact and the reason is logical or rational. The question “Why?” also appeals to the understanding and the capacity to categorise phenomena in a context of processes of actualisation. In the case of material and efficient forms of explanation there may be an ontological commitment to “Events” in order to explain changes in the world but universalisation of these forms of explanation is limited. Event designations also presume a framework of something remaining constant throughout the process of change and appeal to principles therefore seems necessary. In contexts of human action it is human agents with a battery of intellectual and moral powers and dispositions that bring about various kinds of change. Conceiving of change in such a framework entails that one cannot logically separate the product of an agents power(e.g. a completely built house) from the process of producing the object(the building process). From this point of view the building of the house and the house are one and the same in logic(Logos). When we are considering an agents moral dispositions we are talking about a different kind of non-instrumental, categorical power but the logic remains the same with the reservation that building houses may be civilisation-building activities, whereas on the other hand, doing what one ought to do because it is ones duty aims at a state of future social existence that is “Cultural”, e.g. A Kingdom of Ends lying one hundred thousand years in the future. Of course, we are not slaves being dragged about by such an idealistic vision but rather feel a sense of worth in making our small contribution to this “Cultural Project”. This project is, for Kant, the telos of mankind:

“Have we any ground capable of satisfying reason, speculative or practical, to justify our attributing a final end to the supreme cause that acts according to ends?….such a final end could be nothing but man as subject to moral laws, maybe taken a priori as a matter of certainty; whereas we are unable to cognise a priori what are the ends of nature in the physical order and above all it is impossible to see that a nature could not exist apart from such ends. “( Critique of Teleological Judgement, P.112)

This supreme cause is not necessarily a creator or a designer(craftsman) but rather the supreme condition of all that is conditioned. In other words, for Kant, the supreme being is a Moral legislator and not a craftsman like the demiurge. This is as close as Kant comes to a proof for the existence of Deus–a moral proof that appeals to the principle that man is subject to moral law. This kind of proof is not the concern of theology. There is, in Kant , continual and consistent references to man striving for moral perfection and we see this also in his account of the Sublime. Standing in the presence of a powerful waterfall, Kant argues, we are at first overwhelmed by the magnitude or power of this natural phenomenon only to recover from this experience via the power of thought that involutes the awe and wonder we experience onto ourselves–onto our moral nature. This tendency is also present in our experience of the beauty of nature:

“in all probability it was this moral interest that first aroused attentiveness to beauty and the ends of nature.”(P. 129)

For Kant, it is the practical use of reason that is the royal road to the super-sensible realm of noumena and God. From a theoretical point of view we must content ourselves with not knowledge but faith in the existence of Deus. From a practical reasoning point of view the rational idea of Freedom transcends the theoretical ideas of God and the immortality of the soul. These two theoretical ideas form the focal points of the “science” of Theology.

For Hacker the practical use of reason is a power that a person possesses to actualise the potentiality that defines the human form of life. In this context Hacker discusses the categorical judgements of the potential, the actual, and the necessary. His discussion is very Aristotelian but it does not recognise the important distinction Aristotle draws between capacities(lower level dispositions) and dispositions. Aristotle tends to use the term disposition to designate virtue-related activities. Hacker discusses the concept of disposition in relation to the major ontological difference that exists between organic and inorganic beings:

“It is striking that, unlike distinctively human dispositions, an inanimate substance may, and most commonly does, possess natural dispositions which are never actualised. Obviously not every poisonous substance(thing, or partition or specific quantity of stuff) poisons anything, not every brittle substance breaks, and not every soluble thing dissolves.”(P.94-5)

Hacker goes on to claim that insofar as human potentialities are concerned it is the case that, human dispositions are theoretically achievable and practically actualised, e.g. the capacity for discourse is necessarily actualised in the human form of life as is theoretical and practical reasoning. An animal’s prime concern is life(to survive). We do not know what capacities and dispositions are important for the gods given the fact that we do not think as they do. The telos or disposition for rationality, although a distant goal, contains the idea or form of the Good, which (according to Aristotle’s work the Nichomachean Ethics) the human form of life strives for. In the context of this discussion Hacker makes the important point that many human powers are so-called two-way powers. These powers are tied to the Freedom to choose to discourse or to reason and thereby to actualise an essential human potentiality(P.95)

Rivers may flow and watches may tick but these activities are not actions or deeds. The active powers of inanimate substances are not self-initiated. The kinds of explanation we encounter in relation to the powers or capacities of inorganic forms usually fall into the classes of material and efficient causes. Watches that tick on until they stop are obviously to some extent dependent for their most important function on human beings to wind them up, unplug them, or change/charge their batteries. Watches have been designed by human beings to perform the functions they do. As a consequence of this “human” connection we say of them that they “tell the time”. The appeal to a designer of the whole universe may well be a category-mistake that involves the imposing of this craftsman analogue upon more natural organic and inorganic processes. This kind of attribution, indeed appears to be a case of “Projection”. The attribution of the form of the good upon all human activity that we find in Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, would not appear to be an imaginative projection but rather a rational attribution of a super-sensible form to organic forms of life of a human kind. This super-sensible form is superior to that of the form of a demiurge which embodies a subordinate instrumental principle.

Hacker, in his discussion, does not refer to the Kantian categories of the potential, the actual, and the necessary, nor does he invoke super-sensible rational principles but prefers instead to characterise these matters in terms of grammatical investigations into what we say and do. Hacker points to the obvious fact that we cannot see the powers of a thing when they are not being actualised and he also refers to three kinds of confusion that he attributes to this fact: scepticism about the existence of powers, reduction of powers to their actualisation, and the reification of these powers(P.99). The first two confusions are encountered on a regular basis in the work of scientists in the fields of Anthropology/Psychology and Ethics: the scientific obsession with observation, measurement and observable causal transmission contribute to these confusions. In the above realms of concern we often encounter this viewing of the relation between a power and its actualisation as a causal relation between two kinds of substance rather than that of the relation between a principle and its application.

Hacker also refers to the confusion caused in reducing a power(principle, conceptual entity)to its vehicle(body, brain etc). This is confounded by an unfounded agency attribution, e.g. the brain becomes the agency behind the power. Hacker calls this confusion the mereological fallacy. According to Hacker two way powers belong to every capacity that is subject to voluntary control of an agent.

O Shaughnessy in his work “Consciousness and the World” discusses one form of these two-way powers, namely Perception:

“For Perception is the epistemological bridge conducting us to the phenomenal occupants of the World(with the sole exception of our self and mind). It is the “royal road” to physical reality, indeed to the World in its ultimate ontological form. …If Physicalism is true, then a self conscious being is a part of physical reality which epistemologically is in touch with a special part of physical reality, namely its own mind…then only in perception does consciousness make epistemological contact with Reality in its true or ultimate(i.e. physical) form”(P.7)

Hacker claims that Perception as a power has both voluntary and involuntary aspects. Seeing, feeling, and hearing “happen to one” in accordance with the Kantian ontological schema and this category of activity is not subject to the control of the will. Observing, looking, scrutinising, gazing, peeking, watching, listening etc, on the other hand are ontologically on Kant’s schema what we make of ourselves and our world using a repertoire of two-way-powers amongst which are to be found understanding and reason: these powers are paramount in forming the relations to the goods of the external world, the goods of the body, and the goods of our soul. One can of course regard Perception epistemologically, describing its activities and explaining its mechanisms in isolation from these powers. If this “analytical” procedure is followed the relation of perception to thought will in such a case be purely theoretical and object-directed. The side of the mountain, its shape, and surface radiate light to the eye and in such a mechanical process a number of processes relating to the colours perceived “happen”. Of course, the presence of the mountain announces itself and as a consequence many practical tasks may suggest themselves to consciousness thereby activating the will and desires rooted in our practical understanding of what is possible and necessary.

Hacker criticises the Cartesian strategy of extending the concept of thought to sensible forms of experience that include sensations, perception(seeing a mountain) and mental images. Now whilst there is an interesting relation between sensibility and understanding and sensibility and the will, it may be important in our theorising about these relations to emphasise the differences between these faculties of the human mind. The Neo-Cartesian “picture” of the mind was the consequence of what remained when both Descartes and Hobbes dismantled the metaphysical structures of Aristotle in preparation for the advance of the Juggernaut of Science and Economics that would flatten the Philosophical landscape. The Greeks would probably have referred to the prophecy of their oracles to describe what happened in the name of “Modern Philosophy” and in doing so would undoubtedly have taken up the differences between techné and epistemé, between Thanatos and Eros, between diké and Ananke.

The English term “Consciousness” with its emphasis upon sensible forms replaced the concern with intellectual forms and intellectual objects. We argued in previous volumes that Kant attempted to stop the Juggernaut in its tracks only to be subsequently marginalised by Hegelian and Marxist Philosophy on the one hand, and materialism, pragmatism, and existentialism/phenomenology, on the other. One of the consequences of of Neo-Cartesianism and its conflation of the sensible and the intellectual was the claim that one can look into ones own mind in the spirit of an explorer and discover its contents. Some called this process introspection. This concept was the direct result: not appreciating the differences between perceptual and intellectual forms, between experiences and the principles that constitute and regulate experience. Introspection was then tied to the issue of Self Knowledge and Hacker makes the salient point that it was not the intention of the Ancient Greek Philosophers to use any inner monitoring process to grasp the meaning or objects embedded in the stream of conscious states and events. Understanding and Reason(Categories and Principles) are obviously involved in all intellectual work. It is also important to remember that this intellectual work takes two forms that are manifested in two different realms of metaphysics: the metaphysics of nature and the metaphysics of morals. Sensibility obviously plays some limited role in both these domains. In the work of coming to know oneself(self-knowledge), the conceptualisation of sensible intuitions will be important, as will the categorisation of these intuitions. The process will also involve principles that constitute and regulate these concepts and categories. Intellectual work of the above kind is undertaken methodically in the activities of elenchus, dialectical reasoning, and transcendental and metaphysical reasoning of the kinds we encounter in the works of Aristotle and Kant. Hacker criticises introspection from a grammatical perspective:

“There is no such thing as my seeing that I see something or perceiving that I hear, smell, taste or fell. I can no more look into my own mind than I can look into another’s, and we often have more insight into the mind of another than into my own. The perceptual metaphor bound up with “introspection” is misleading….We confuse the ability to say how things are with us with the ability to see how things are with us.”(P.246)

Saying is not seeing but is rather a case of acting, giving expression to something that needs to be said. In saying how I feel or think about things I manifest or show my feelings or thoughts in relation to others. Such utterances are then grounds or conditions for any conceptualisation or judgement made about the expression. For Hacker the concept of introspection was a consequence of Cartesianism and its rejection of Aristotle’s more coherent Philosophy of mind:-

“The Cartesian mind is an aberration. It was offered as a more correct representation of human nature and the principles that guide explanations of human thought, feeling, and action than the Aristotelian notions it displaced. In fact, it is not. And it has foisted on us a wholly inadequate framework for the representations of human nature.”(P.247)

It is possibly true that the domain of reflection we currently refer to as “Philosophy of Mind was born in the Cartesian matrix of description and explanation which proceeds from a materialistic interpretation of substance. Out of this matrix Consciousness, introspection and an immaterial concept of substance emerged. The mind became an agency which flies in the face of common sense (which insists that only a person can be an agent that is responsible for its deeds). Hacker is in no doubt that the Aristotelian hylomorphic matrix is a better context for discussing the concept of mind: a context in which the life form we call human gives rise and expression to a number of powers, abilities and dispositions that actualise in the course of such a life. Hacker puts the matter succinctly when he claims that psuche(life) is not merely a part of our life(P.254).

Consciousness is obviously a vicissitude of life and thereby must be a power that we humans and perhaps some animals possess. Thought is a higher level vicissitude of both life and consciousness and there may be a sense in which one interpretation of the Cartesian argument “Cogito ergo sum” is defendable as part of both Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of Thought. This interpretation requires regarding the “I think” in the formal way in which Kant suggested in his accounts of firstly ,the unity of apperception and secondly in his account of how thought dawns upon a young child learning the language of the “I”. This, Kant argues in his “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View”, prepares the child for further vicissitudes of life and Consciousness: prepares the child for exercising the capacity for discourse and the disposition to reason in various ways about his world and himself. Hacker appears to appreciate the Kantian position relating to the characterisation of the role of thought and the formal role of the self in the higher forms of the thinking process. He does not however, appreciate the Kantian distinction between the empirical and the noumenal self, which he claims may violate the principle of noncontradiction. The noumenal self is both unknowable in a theoretical sense but can be accessed in the context of thought in relation to the moral law. On the Kantian account noumenal reality cannot be known ,but can be theoretically thought in the sense of “thought without contradiction”. The question arises of course as to why Kant wishes to draw this distinction between knowledge and thought. God is also an issue in this discussion: as an idea of theoretical reason God cannot be known but can be thought without contradiction in both contexts of theoretical and practical reasoning. Kant refers to the commitment relating to this form of thought in terms of “faith”: one cannot know that God exists but can have faith that God exists. Similarly there would appear to be less difficulty in accepting the idea of faith in the existence of a noumenal self striving to actualise the moral law. Hackers reluctance to engage in these kind of metaphysical discussions may be partly explained by the tendency of many British Philosophers of the time to place Kant and Hegel in the same category of “German idealism”. Hegel, we ought to recall in this context described his own philosophical endeavour in terms of “turning Kantian Philosophy on its head”. There is a fundamental difference between these two Philosophers. Hegel could never be recognised as a Critical Philosopher given his commitment to the constitutive role of dialectical reasoning about aporetic questions which require resolution by the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.

Descartes was a mathematician attracted by the scientific possibility of reducing the world to a totality of variables and causal relations. It is not therefore surprising that in Cartesian reflections upon the life of the body there is no understanding of the concept of psuche as presented in Aristotelian Hylomorphism. Descartes’ “experiments” upon live animals–dissecting them without anaesthetics– testifies to a practical lack of moral concern with animal life forms. A live body, for Descartes, merely moves because there is a mechanism responsible for such movement. His youthful experience of the animated statues of the Royal Gardens in Paris may have contributed to a belief in telekinesis as the prime mover of live movement. The idea that life “moves itself” would have been problematic for the Cartesian theoretical matrix. The causal mechanism of telekinesis was of course connected to the brain on this account–that part of the brain where mind and the physical world meet, namely, the pineal gland. The body, of course cannot think but it is sensitive, responding to and expressing sensations of various kinds. And yet there must be some sense in which this bundle of live processes and states can give rise to the vicissitudes of consciousness and thought, and the brain plays no small role in both the attribution of sensibility and thought to the person or agent who feels and thinks. The relation of the person to his feelings and thoughts may require different accounts. I have my feelings and thoughts but the first is a power of the body and the second is a vicissitude of a power of the body.

Is language, then, a power of the body or vicissitude of such a power, namely thought. It seems to stand at the threshold. We do speak of the language centres of the brain and we also know that without a certain level of actualisation of the power of language in discourse connected to the learning of language(Helen Keller) there is no “I” that thinks. The mind-body problem appears as an aporetic problem unless it is embedded in a hylomorphic or critical matrix of Principles and Concepts.

Phenomenology, we know was inspired by Cartesianism and to that extent it can prove to be a useful partner in the mind-body discussion, especially if it retreats to the lived body in a Lebenswelt. The phenomenology of Husserl and Sartre were more clearly identifiable as Cartesian positions but Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand deferred more to Heidegger than to his teacher Husserl. There were Cartesian elements in Merleau-Ponty’s(MP) seminal work “Phenomenology of Perception” but there was also in MP’s earlier work an acknowledgement of the importance of an Aristotelian structure of an ascending/descending hierarchy of principles of ontological forms. John Wild in his introduction to MP’s “The Structure of Behaviour” makes the following assessment of the work:

“The French thinker is just as clear as Heidegger that the world in which we exist cannot be reduced to the objective variables and functional relationships which physical science reveals. The life-world has a meaningful structure of its own which must be approached in a very different way if it is not to be radically reduced and distorted. But the perspective of physical and biological sciences also reveal distinctive orders and structures which the philosopher needs to understand. In a way that reminds us of Scheler, M-P shows, without accepting any traces of vitalism, how a higher order is founded on a lower and in a sense contains it, but at the same time takes it over and integrates it into new structures which cannot be explained by those that are taken over.”(P.XIII)

The tension hinted at in the above reflection is that of the seeming contradiction between the characteristics of the body as observed and the body as lived in its “Being-in-the-world”. Before the catharsis of the work of the later Wittgenstein there was a tendency to characterise mans life in terms of Hegelian Spirit, in terms of a vital psychism that appeared to have only mystical and dialectical defences. The argument of M-P is that this realm of the life-world needs to be characterised in terms of meaning that refers to a basic level of experience of which science is the “second-order expression”(Phenomenology of Perception). This is part of the famed “Phenomenological Reduction” and it has more in common with Cartesianism than Aristotelian Hylomorphism. The Phenomenological rejection of Kant ‘s transcendental and metaphysical Philosophy prevented investigation into transcendental and metaphysical ideas and principles that formed the conditions of experience. Phenomenology, we have been told, seeks to describe and not to explain and to that extent the essences it reflects upon need to be more concrete than the abstractions of principles and laws. There is, for example, nothing in the phenomenological method that can adequately characterise the moral law or ideas such as freedom. Phenomenology ties this latter idea to the concrete choices an individual makes. It cannot conceive of a noumenal “I” moved by an idea of freedom in the realm of Reason.

In Kant we find an acceptance not just of the abstract rational idea of freedom but also an acceptance of the order and structures of Science. Kant criticises the mathematical assumptions of Newton’s laws but accepts the attempt to organise experience from a transcendental/metaphysical perspective. In his Preface to “Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science”(Kant’s Philosophy of Nature, trans Ellington J., W., Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 1985), Kant makes his Aristotelian position clear:

“Every doctrine, if it is to be a system, i.e. whole of cognition ordered according to principles, is called science.”(467-468)

Natural Science properly so called presupposes metaphysics of Nature: for laws, i.e. principles of the necessity of what belongs to the existence of a thing, are occupied with a concept which does not admit of construction because existence cannot be presented in any a priori intuition.”(469-70)

This last paragraph aims to dismiss the mathematical attitude in the process of the formation of principles or laws. Kant does not, however deny the importance of Mathematics in the measuring of what is observed and in characterising the functional relationships uncovered in physical investigations. When it comes to the investigation of the thinking being and his capacities, dispositions and powers he does however, deny the role of Mathematics:

“But the empirical doctrine of the soul must always remain even further removed than chemistry from the rank of what may be called a natural science proper. This is because Mathematics is inapplicable to the phenomena of the internal sense and their laws, unless one might want to take into consideration merely the law of continuity in the flow of the senses internal changes”(471)

Aristotle expressed this law of continuity in the form of three principles in his hylomorphic system: that from which a thing changes, that toward which a thing changes, and that which is preserved throughout the change. These principles may of course lie among the totality of conditions necessary for mathematical activity but they are in and of themselves not mathematical.

In Wittgenstein’s later methodology and Hacker’s elaboration upon this aspect, the concept of meaning obviously plays an important role simply because of the presupposition that something has to make sense in order for it to be either true or false. Grammatical investigations in this context aim at mapping the boundaries of sense for our various forms of discourse. In these Philosophical Investigations there is no trace of any Hegelian influence as there is in M-P’s work where the influence of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Mind” and its dialectical Philosophy of the ambiguous is clearly present. Perception without the presence of Conception to organise what one sees was also ambiguous for the later Wittgenstein. We can experience something and then conceptualise what we have experienced in various ways, e.g. see something as either a duck or a rabbit. This is a variation of the Kantian war-cry that intuitions without concepts are blind. Neither Kant nor Wittgenstein would agree with putting the world as conceived by science in brackets in the explorative search for descriptions of basic forms of experience. For both Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy, experience is organised by concepts, categories and principles and the commitment of reason to provide the totality of conditions of “conditioned” experience.

In the opening to his work “The Structure of Behaviour”, M-P describes a luminous spot moving along a wall in a dark room, dragging the attention of the perceiver with it. This, he claims, cannot be correctly described by science because it will decompose the experience into elements that will then be coordinated in a matrix of functional relationships. This system of external relations will forever overlook the internal intention and meaning which are constitutive of this experience. Wittgenstein’s later work was also fascinated by the first person experience of a person, but in Kantian spirit he claims that in simple kinds of experience such as pain, this intention and meaning is “something” about which nothing can be said. It is not a “substantial” thing but it is not a “nothing” either. Some forms of science would characterise the experience of the moving spot or the pain as a reflex, a response “caused” by a stimulus but it would consistently refuse first person references to an intention and meaning. M-P goes on to argue that in the subsequent cleavage of argument a rift appears between what is subjective and what is objective, and he further claims that this is not a useful distinction. M-P might be right in this judgement but all his fascinating work on the phenomenon of Perception leads us to the same terminus Wittgenstein arrived at, namely that without situation in a conceptual framework the “experience” never takes us beyond what may be claimed is the “Philosophy of the Ambiguous”(Alphonso De Waelhens–Foreword to the second edition of “The Structure of Behaviour”(trans Fisher A.,L., Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1963). For the Neo-Kantian Philosopher M-P’s reflections would be explorative excursions into the Sensible Mind insofar as this part of the mind was incorporated by the Vicissitude of Consciousness.

Sensibility for Kant is a power a person possesses. Hacker concludes his work “Human Nature:The Categorical Framework” with an important reference to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals:

“The concept of a person is central to our thought about ourselves, our nature and our moral and legal relations… “A person” , Kant wrote, “is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. Moral personality is therefore nothing other than the freedom of a rational being under moral laws.” “Whereas”, he added, “psychological personality is merely the ability to be conscious of ones identity in different conditions of ones existence”. Self-Consciousness and awareness of ones diachronic identity, in his view, are pre-conditions of being a person, but they are not sufficient conditions.”(P.285)

Hacker praises this approach and notes that the Latin origin of the word(persona) means “mask”. The theatricalisation of life we moderns have experienced in relation to discussions about Consciousness and Thought marked a shift from reflecting upon mans virtuous ethical nature: a shift to man in the process of becoming something, playing different “roles” in society. In Volume One we referred to Boethius who refused to associate the notion of a person with this role playing persona. Boethius insisted upon regarding man as an individual substance possessing a rational nature. The reference to “substance” was perhaps unfortunate given its association with scholastic misinterpretations of the texts of Aristotle. Hacker refers to grammatical confusions that aided and abetted the subjectivization of the concept of “person”. Hacker notes that third-person ascriptions of psychological predicates are done on the basis of observation in accordance with communally established behavioural criteria. First-person ascriptions, he also noted, are criterionless. What arises from this process of subjectivisation is the “picture” of a mind as an inner theatre which the subject has privileged and private access to. This, according to Hacker exacerbates the confusions abounding in relation to this popular “picture”. Descartes, then, further compounded this confusion by claiming that there can only be mechanical-like causal connections between the inner and outer mind and body elements of a person. It would not be long before the body was conceptualised as being nothing but a bundle of mechanisms and processes no different to those of a watch. The only difference being the presence of a control centre such as the brain. The use of the word “I” rapidly became ambiguous(it was termed a “shifter” by linguists) referring sometimes to a body and sometimes to a mind. Materialists reacted in their characteristic manner by retreating form subjectivism to the fortress of “neurones in the brain”, a temptation that we saw even the great Freud succumbed to, in his earlier reflections.

Hacker notes in his chapter on “The Person” that these incoherences were:

“brilliantly criticized but not satisfactorily remedied by Kant.”(P.301)

There is no trace however of an acknowledgment that part of what Kant was attempting to do was to revive hylomorphism and its view of forms of life and deny the modern concept of a person propagated by the “new men” of civilisation. The concept of psuche is critical to any theoretical determination of the concept of a person. Neither Aristotle nor Kant, however believed theoretical reasoning to be of primary importance in Hylomorphic or Critical Philosophy. The critical consideration for both philosophers was to characterise the human form of life in its practical dealings. The actualisation of this process of becoming something led to a virtuous rational flourishing life in accordance with the Platonic ideas of Justice and The Good. In the contexts of such concerns theoretical rehearsals of brains in vats and brain transplants is modern(not Shakespearean) theatre, and they have an air of wild science-fiction confabulations that literally astound the critical faculties of understanding and reason.

Hacker ends his account with a list of descriptive characteristics of human beings that appear to have both Aristotelian and Kantian sources:

“Human beings are living organisms of a given type.We are language-using, culture creating, self conscious creatures that have a mind and a body….Being self moving creatures with cognitive and volitional two way powers we can voluntarily act, take action, and engage in activities…Being rational we can reason and act for reasons. So we have intentions , plans and projects that we pursue. Having a language our cognitive powers endow us with the ability to retain the complex forms of knowledge that we can and do acquire. So we possess an autobiography–we can tell the tale of our life as we remember it.”(P.311)

Hacker concludes by pointing out that the concept of a person is not a substance concept as is the concept of a human being. He adds:

“To be a person is not to be a certain kind of animal of one kind or another with certain kinds of abilities. The nature of a person is rooted in animality, but transformed by possession of intellect and will.”(P.313)

Wittgensteinian grammatical investigations have led us to the above significant description of the rational animal capable of discourse. The metaphysics implied by this description has both Aristotelian and Kantian aspects but perhaps it would never have been presented without the presence on the philosophical scene of the enigmatic mercurial man from Vienna, Ludvig Wittgenstein.

A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Volume 4(P.M.S. Hacker –Wittgenstein, Consciousness, and Metaphysics

Visits: 2003

Wittgenstein was an enigmatic figure. Mercurial brilliance combined with a Viennese pessimism that rivalled Freud’s, confounded his Teachers and fellow- students at the contemplative centre of Excellence at Cambridge. In notes taken by some of his students(Some notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein”(Acta Philosophica Fennica 28 ed J Hintikka(North Hill, Amsterdam , 1976) Wittgenstein is reputed to have claimed:

“My type of thinking is not wanted in the present age. I have to swim so strongly against the tide. Perhaps in a hundred years people will really want what I am writing” (P.25).

An Insightful comment. We have, in these volumes claimed that the work of Wittgenstein marks a departure from the thread woven by the “new men”(Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith etc): a departure that aligns itself with the thread of tradition leading from Aristotle to Kant and on to a Cosmopolitan future thousands of years in the future. This image of swimming against the tide of contemporary Philosophy may in fact provide Wittgenstein’s answer to the question we posed concerning why he and his followers refrained from engaging more directly with the rationalism of Hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy. That the starting point for Wittgenstein represented in his earlier Philosophy was a form of mathematical intuitionism may also provide part of an answer to our question. We ought to recall that he came to England to study Engineering and his fascination with Mathematics brought him to Cambridge to study with one of the the authors of Principia Mathematica.

We know also that Wittgenstein was struggling to put his later thoughts into writing . Hacker claimed that the mastering the form of the Philosophical essay or paper did not come easy to him:

“to be forced to think sequentially is torture for him”(An Analytical Commentary to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Vol 1, Baker, G., P, Hacker, P.,M.,S(Oxford, Blackwell, 1980).

So, Wittgenstein instead relies on a numbering system and continual editing and re-editing of remarks he probably made whilst lecturing, to present the intuited connections between his thoughts. In his early work Wittgenstein believed that how Language relates to the world cannot be represented in Language and that therefore the limits of my language are the limits of my world. In his early work he also appears to believe that Mathematics does provide us with truths about the world and his theory of meaning in the Tractatus is primarily referential and directed at Reality conceived of as a totality of facts. On this view (which he later characterised in terms of the Augustinian view of language) he believed that to grasp the meaning of a sentence was equivalent to grasping what the sentence describes. This dominating thought marginalised all other forms of discourse: interrogative, imperative, expressive, etc. Augustines. view, Wittgenstein argued, was connected with a Philosophical Psychology that viewed the mind as an immaterial medium in which inner events occur. Learning a language according to Augustine was a matter of learning how to associate words with objects so that words then struck a note on the keyboard of the imagination. “Correlation” of words with objects becomes then the central feature of learning a language. This might have been an implication of Wittgenstein’s early view of the solipsistic linguistic soul that mysteriously “injects” meaning into language. For the later Wittgenstein these “objects” become a part of language: become “linguistic samples” that are used in a language-game. They have now become a part of language because they have become part of the process of communication: part of the telos of language.

The Aristotelian concept of “form of life” that we find in Wittgenstein’s later writings, Hacker argues, may originate from Spengler who claimed that language cannot be reduced to “utterances” or “events” but is rather embedded in a culture or human form of life. Involved in such a view is the claim that words and concepts no longer “mirror” or “picture” our life but rather stand in the middle of it as part of the hurly burly of human activity– human activity that includes people expressing their pain, asking each other questions and commanding each other to do things. Many different forms of language occur in such a form of life. This reflection of Spengler’s influenced Wittgenstein to transform inner mental acts and activities into more publicly accessible human intercourse. In Wittgenstein’s later work it is this concept of “form of life” that plays an important role in the justification of psychological and linguistic activity. The idea of “picture” is also jettisoned on the grounds that a picture of a boxer standing, for example, has not clear meaning until we know its intended use and context, e.g. this is how you ought to stand in attack mode, or, this is how you ought not to stand in defence mode. We now find Wittgenstein, in his later work turning toward psychological explanations and explanations of language-meaning that refer to the natural history of being human rather than solipsistic psychological/atomistic judgements embedded in commitments to science and positivism. Hacker refers to Wittgenstein’s comment §199 in his “Philosophical Investigations”:

“To understand a sentence is to understand a language”

Language is now regarded sub specie humanitatis in terms of a pattern of activities that constitute complex forms of life that have a particular natural history and the general telos of communication. The limitations of condensing the use of a name into a mere relation to the external world now becomes obvious to everyone. The idea steering Wittgenstein’s thought at this point is that the meaning of a word is best accessed by “recalling” its use. So a fictional name such as “Gandalf” has meaning, but not in relation to anything in our natural history, because the name has never been allocated to a living human being. It suffices however to differentiate Gandalf from real people like Napoleon that no longer exist but also from other fictional characters such as Bilbo.

Does this new conception of Language have an essence specifying definition? Wittgenstein specifically says (and this point is endorsed by Hacker), that every explanation of something does not require an essence-specifying definition of that thing. In several places, Wittgenstein also points to the difficulty of providing a synoptic view (“uno solo ochiata”) of what otherwise looks like a motley collection of language games. He speaks of the similarity between these “activities” in terms of a “family resemblance”. This however does not mean that we cannot explain/justify these language-games/forms of life. The final justification–the final answer to the final “Why?” question is, “This is what we do!”. At this point, as he puts it, our spade is turned, and there is no further explanation/justification. Language-games may all differ but speaking a language is a fundamental power involving many other powers which we all possess and these are rooted as much in our natural history as in our human nature. The question that needs to be put once again is whether these Wittgensteinian reflections by Hacker are consistent with Aristotelian and Kantian Rationalism. In Hackers later work “Human Nature: A Categorical Framework”, the title makes it clear that there will be, as far as he is concerned, a positive answer to this question. We wish at this point to explore the extent to which Wittgenstein is engaged in the same kind of project as Aristotle and Kant in the domains of Philosophical Psychology, Epistemology, and Metaphysics.

The Tractatus is clearly at odds with much of what Kant stands for in the name of Science and Metaphysics, even if parts of it were inspired by Schopenhauer. In this work we are presented with a solipsistic, metaphysical self that injects meaning into language. This is clearly a position that Kant would have raised doubts about in the name of what he regards as clearly delimited boundaries of pure reason, and what can and cannot be thought. Wittgenstein claims in the context of this discussion that “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”(5.6). This is one of the grounds for his claim that logic does not describe the world but rather “shows” the scaffolding of the world: a scaffolding about which nothing can be said. In other words, language is a means of representation and its nature is such that we cannot meaningfully represent this state of affairs in language. Both the World and the “I” are mystical elements of the account we find in Tractatus. Phenomenally there is no “I” because it stands at the boundary of the world in much the same way in which one will not find the presence of the eye in the visual field. Similarly, that the world exists is mystical but we do know somehow that it is the totality of facts or states of affairs. Both of these abstract and mystical positions were to be abandoned in the later work. We pointed in volume 2, Chapter 17, P.239, that the Copernican Revolution in Wittgenstein’s shift from the earlier to his later position may have been partly caused by a lecture given by Brouwer(the so called father of mathematical intuitionism). In this lecture Brouwer spoke about the primacy of the will in Schopenhaurean terms. The importance of the role of action in the activity of calculation with numbers and counting was argued to lie at the source of mathematical intuition. For Wittgenstein, there subsequently dawned a new understanding in which justifications, even in Mathematics, must occur not sub specie aeternitatis but rather sub specie humanitatis. This may have been the key step in a process which would move Wittgenstein closer to Kantian Critical Philosophy. This move toward action also brought with it a re-conception of the role of human judgement in human arenas of activity. The focus is now upon “good judgement” about what we do when we follow grammatical rules: intuition becomes a secondary phenomenon in such an account.

We pointed earlier to Hackers mistaken view of Kantian synthetic a priori judgement. For Kant it was obvious that different objects and different principles required characterisation in terms of the special rules of the understanding (to be distinguished from the more general rules of logic). Practically oriented judgements for Kant are attended by different “categories of judgement” relating to “Agency” and “Community”. Aristotle too would have distinguished between theoretical judgments relating to substance and practical judgments relating to “Having”, “Acting” and “Being affected”.

Wittgenstein’s new method also rips us out of the context of exploration/discovery and we then find ourselves in a context of explanation/justification in which Socratic recollection is the methodological animus that replaces analysis into simples. The new method rests upon the Platonic/Aristotelian ground of action and good judgement, and agreements in judgments. Actions and Judgements are “recalled” and not discovered. In a murder trial, for instance, we do not discover a murder but rather recall the judgement that murder is wrong and also recall the accusation of the accused by the state prosecution at every phase of the trial. “Murder is wrong” would in Wittgenstein’s terms be a “norm of representation” in this context: a rule of the proceedings which we need to remind ourselves of. Many have pointed to the “conventional” nature of court proceedings and also Wittgensteinian Philosophy. There is a claim in Wittgenstein that in dealing with grammatical remarks we are dealing with “conventions”, but this needs to be viewed in the light of the following interesting claim in the work “Remarks on the foundations of Mathematics”:

“Conventions which are not causal, but stricter, harder, more rigid, are always conventions in grammar.”(P.88)

So, the “conventional” law against murder is “harder” and more logical than the law of gravity which is a causal law. Similarly, turning to Psychology, the “Principles” ERP and PPP have causal aspects and must therefore be regarded as less logical and rigid than the Reality Principle(RP). The Reality Principle, for Freud, certainly imposes the kind of necessity upon the judgements and actions of humans, resembling the kind of necessity Kant claims the categorical imperative imposes upon us. The categorical imperative is the moral law that regulates Socrates and his “knowledge” that murdering others is wrong. We know, Kant argues, both rationally and non observationally, that murder is wrong, and because we know this we are duty bound by this knowledge–bound by a rigid logical necessity. Calling this phenomenon “conventional” is acceptable if the term preserves the force of the universality and necessity of Socratic elenchus and Aristotelian logic. For all Philosophers committed to the power of ethical argumentation, practical contradictions such as using ones life to take another life unlawfully, devalues ones worth to such an extent in other peoples eyes that it is to be avoided at all costs: the ultimate price for murdering someone is of course ruin and destruction for oneself. Treating people as ends in themselves in the Kantian system is more than a recommendation(which some claim is the mark of a “convention”) and is part of the long civilising process that leads finally to a kingdom of ends. The term “Conventional” has the meaning since Hume of being less of a justification for a judgment or action than the term “Natural” which was a term associated with “law”. In Wittgenstein’s eyes it achieves more of the status of a bond, e.g. “The Geneva Convention” may not be a law, but it carries the full force of a categorical imperative in the chaotic conditions of War.

Hacker, in his early work, “Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein” points to the Kantian synthetic apriori truth, “Every event must have a cause” and claims that this is not a truth about the world but rather a “rule” or norm of Newtonian Physics and its systematic description/explanation of Nature. Kant is well aware that Physics is a discipline on the frontiers of exploration and discovery of the physical universe and that the “law” of cause an effect is an indispensable tool for these “explorers”. Once found, the cause itself can then be subjected once again to this law, and the search continues up until that point when we arrive at the terminus of possible observation and then we can either postulate an uncertainty principle, or a “First Cause”(that actually contradicts the law of causation). This gives the whole enterprise of science an air of uncertainty and this has led many into different forms of retreat ranging from firstly, science is not after “The Truth” but only particular truths, or secondly, scientific theory provides us with “models” which we can jettison as soon as a better model presents itself. Kant would not subscribe to such scepticism given his commitment to a Metaphysics of Material Nature in which he outlines the general conditions under which the categories can be applied to material nature. This endeavour has both quantitative and relational aspects. The latter law “every event must have a cause” reworks any sequence of subjective impressions into an objective order in accordance with Aristotelian “efficient and material causes” : a process involving a priori forms of intuition. For Kant there are three kinds of laws operating in his architectonic conception of science: firstly, those arising from generalisations accumulated in experimental situations, e.g. rocks when thrown describe a curvilinear parabolic path back to earth. Experience generates these kinds of laws which requires the assistance of mathematics for complete description and explanation. The application of mathematics requires, as far as Newton was concerned, the ideal postulation of a constant, e.g. every object continues in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by some outside force. This is obviously an ideal intuition required by mathematics if it is to be applicable.

In the two other kinds of laws neither ideal postulation of “constants”(uniform motion, uniform state of rest, straight line) nor experience based experimentation are present. The “transcendental law of efficient causation” according to Kant is formulated thus:

“All things change in conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect”

This is neither an idealisation nor a generalisation grounded in experimentation. Here the unity of apperception(“I think”) plays an important role. This in its turn is also a different law to the Metaphysical law that “All change must have a cause”(including the “Internal” cause” of desire that propels a lion towards its prey.) The Kantian architectonic is obviously more systematic than the architectonic of science we find in Aristotle and it is therefore simpler to compare Wittgenstein’s position to the Aristotelian position. The atomistic/analytical conception of “cause” is that logically, the cause, is distinct from the effect: we are dealing with two distinct events here. This is a very different kind of answer to the question “Why?” compared to that question we ask in relation to an agent when we ask him why he believes or judges “Murder is wrong”. In this latter case, the judgement and the justification belong logically(in the context of practical reason) together in one argument that uses the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. On Wittgenstein’s account we could point out that we all agree with such good judgement because we “know”(non-observationally) what is right and what is wrong. If, for example, a murderer stood up in court and sincerely claimed “Murder is right”(not this particular murder but murder in general) he will probably be subjected to a psychological investigation before sentencing. He is not merely saying something false but rather something nonsensical. There may well have been investigations prior to the trial and even events during the trial that are designed to explore the possibility that the murderer is innocent of the charge. Everyone accused is presumed innocent until found guilty in a due process. Such investigations will be in accordance with the judgement every event must have a cause. These are physical, forensic investigations that are exploratory requiring either physical or observational evidence. The question we pose is the following: which of these two types of investigation is best conceived of as “psychological”? Kant would argue that both types of investigation could be conducted in relation to human activity of the kind we find in the courtroom proceedings. He called one type of investigation “Physical Anthropology”. This deals with “events” that happen to man and this kind of investigation occurs best in the conceptual framework of substance and efficient causation where the focus is on a physical rather than a conceptual connection. The second type of investigation occurs best in a framework of Agency, Action, and Aristotelian final and formal “causes”(aitia= explanations). Kant calls this second type of investigation “Pragmatic Anthropology” and describes it in terms of what man makes of himself and his world. There is a metaphysical difference between these two kinds of investigation that related firstly to the ontological difference between “events” and “actions” and secondly to the differences between material/ efficient causation and formal/final causation. In the latter we are dealing with the idea of reason Kant refers to as Freedom and in the former we study how the categories of the understanding organise experience. There is, that is, in the one case of Physical Anthropology a reliance on the method of observation that assists us in transforming the matter of appearance into experience where concepts are formed in the realm of the unity of apperception(“I think”). Examples of concepts that are formed in this kind of of investigation are given in Kant’s work “Metaphysical foundations of natural science”. Motion, for example, is “explicated” in the following terms:

“matter is the movable insofar as it can as such be an object of experience”(P118)(Philosophy of Material Nature, trans Ellington J., W.,(Indianapolis, Hacket Publishing, 1985)

Theoretical Ideas of reason are also involved in the formation of the concept of absolute space that is required to makes sense of motion that occurs in a straight line: this motion occurs in accordance with the forces determining the position and composition of matter in the universe, namely the forces of attraction and repulsion. Material and efficient causation are the forms of explanation/justification used in relation to events that “happen” in experiences whose knowledge is then determined by observations. When one moves to the realm of the “pragmatic” and what man makes of himself we move not just into the realm of agency which causes itself to act by desire and freedom but also into a realm in which cause and effect(action and consequences) are conceptually linked. Both Hacker and Wittgenstein seek explanations and justifications in this categorical realm where the end of a flourishing life(eudaimonia) is a fundamental constitutive factor of much that is “happening”.

It is not a simple matter to claim that Psychology/Anthropology should have both Physical and Pragmatic aims. This is clearly recommended by Kant and we can also see the outlines of this ontological distinction in the work of Freud. What happens to one in ones childhood and infancy can have serious consequences for the actualisation of ones potentiality to become fully human: thereby possessing the powers necessary to makes something of oneself and ones world. Freud’s case studies are adequate testimony to this fact. To lead ones life fully and consistently in accordance with the Reality principle is no easy task and requires a large number of enabling conditions that Freud is referring to in his theorising. We know that Freud was one of the few Psychologists Wittgenstein spent time reading, speaking at certain times of being a disciple of Freud. Like some disciples he was of course critical of the master. In particular he presented a criticism of Freud’s “determinism” which is not wholly clear. Freud certainly appealed to Principles but these were not characterisable in terms of material and efficient causation requiring the collection of experimental evidence. We should recall in the context of this discussion Freud’s destruction of his “Scientific Project”. The ERP and probably the PPP were certainly principles regulating the activity of children and the patientsFreud treated, and one can without contradiction say that in many cases we are dealing with what “happened” to these patients(Physical Anthropology). The psychoanalytical proceedings, however, like the above court proceedings were largely governed by the Reality Principle and the failure of the agent to make this principle constitutive of the kind of life they “choose” to lead. Psychoanalysis, then, has theoretical, practical and productive elements. Therapy is designed to install(techné) the Reality Principle in the lives of his patients. Is this determinism, given the emphasis in psychoanalysis of the maxim “the truth will set you free”? Freud’s idea of “causation” was undoubtedly tied to the Greek concept of aitia, which also means “explanation” and there is no doubt that Freud was not manipulating the will of his patients but rather strengthening it for a future, better, hopefully flourishing life. In this endeavour everything had meaning including “dreams” which he defined as wish fulfillments following both the ERP (the wish to continue sleeping) and the PPP(the desire to experience pleasure and avoid experiencing pain and anxiety). Wittgenstein complains about this “explanation” or explication of dreams but his criticism, again, is not wholly clear. There are transitional states between waking and sleeping when experiences in the form of images occur, and for some of these it would be difficult to explicate these in terms of the Pleasure-Pain Principle, but I can see no objection to regard these as types of “dream”. These images may be caused by the wish to sleep that is largely regulated by the ERP.

Many different kinds of dream are recorded in Freud’s “Interpretation of dreams”. Those that he describes in the transitional states between sleeping and waking appear to resemble hallucinations caused perhaps by the very specific wish to carry on sleeping when there is an active attempt by a part of the system to awaken. Waking upon missing a step whilst descending steps is an example that may be thought to be caused by the impulse to awaken, but an alternative “interpretation” would refer to to the creation of the image as part of the wish to sleep. These latter kinds of dreams are not usually associated with REM dreams which usually occur in the steady state of a sleep that is not deep but neither is it in the dynamic state of awakening. Freud’s thoughts in this work, it needs to be said, stands on the cusp of his “turn” toward the more philosophical kind of theorising that we find in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. What is clear is that whether we are experiencing images falling asleep, or we are in the process of experiencing images whilst awakening, the best description of this activity is that this experience and process is “happening to us”. In spite of the putative counterexamples of lucid dreaming these activities are not subject to our will. The Category of “Wish” for Freud is therefore Psychologically regulated by the ERP and PPP. I “have” my dreams in a similar way to the way in which I “have” my pains (sensations are by definition not will-active phenomena(to use a concept of O’Shaughnessy)). Images are constituted of sensations. Even in the case of my saying to myself “I am going to wake up now” and then doing so, there is still room for doubting the description of what is happening here if I claim that I have willed myself to wake. The wish to stay asleep for a moment longer may well have given rise to the “image” of my saying these words. The dream scene does not occur in a spatio-temporal continuum where the world and my expectations mesh harmoniously. On the contrary my expectations seem to change randomly as do my surroundings but there are probably ERP and PPP explanations behind these changes. Wittgenstein complains about the Freudian insistence that there must always be some explanation to the “changes” he is witnessing. We also find Wittgenstein complaining in the notes taken by his students entitled “Conversations on Freud”, that he doubts the veracity of the claim that anxiety is a repetition of the birth trauma. He re-describes this position as an appeal “to something that happened long ago”. Birth is an “event” that “happens to us”. In a psychologically oriented organism where the death instinct(a phenomenon connected with a compulsion to repeat) can be represented in a memory system which according to Freud never forgets anything(at least if an experience is registered by the psi neuronal system and a physical/chemical change occurs), it surely is not unreasonable to attribute the more traumatic forms of anxiety to this origin. There may be objections to this explication that Wittgenstein has in mind but he does not present them, and it must therefore be said of this objection that, as it stands, it is at the very least incomplete. There are Aristotelian considerations to bear in mind too: the “trace” of other earlier animal forms are to be found in the physiological development of our bodies in the womb. The life and death instincts obviously reside in this physiological matrix, and any explication of such a “hidden” process must necessarily be speculative.

In Freud’s works we are dealing with a cross-over of three forms of Aristotelian science: Productive(therapy), Practical and Theoretical, and a cross-over of two different kinds of Kantian “Anthropology”(Physical and Pragmatic). The discipline of Psychology as it presented itself after its grand divorce from Philosophy in 1870 has suffered from “conceptual confusion” for most of its history, if Wittgenstein is to be believed. We have in these volumes mapped out the development of its key concepts. Freud may be an exception to this criticism, if Wittgenstein’s criticisms are incorrect or incomplete. Freud did not, however, succumb to the demons of materialism or dualism in his later waves of theorising.

Wittgenstein shares with Kant the conviction that Reason cannot be the only court of appeal for all contexts of explanation/justification. He sees, that is, a logical space for a special use of understanding/judgement which can be accessed by grammatical investigations. Concepts for Wittgenstein, and for Hacker, are explicated in terms of the rules for the use of the word expressing that concept. There are remarks on ethics in Wittgenstein but there is no specific commitment to separating the metaphysics of morals from the metaphysics of material nature, as there is in Kant. We know that for Wittgenstein the worth of a person was an important issue which he dealt with both religiously and privately. This stands in contrast to the major metaphysical Philosophers, Plato, Aristotle and Kant where religious reflection was specifically integrated into their metaphysical positions. There are indications that Wittgenstein believed that grammatical investigations alone would not be able to give a perspicuous representation of what religious people have faith in, and in this respect his position resembles the Kantian position which maintained that belief in God is not an epistemological matter but rather a matter of having faith in the theoretical ideas of God and the soul. There is a feeling that even in Wittgenstein’s later work that what he could not speak about he would consign to silence.

In his lectures on Religious Belief recorded in the notes of his students Wittgenstein says:

“These controversies look quite different from any normal controversies. Reasons look entirely different from normal reasons…..the point is that if there were evidence this would in fact destroy the whole business.” (P.56)

He goes on in these lectures to object to the anthropomorphisation of the idea of God when we are being taught the use of the word “God”. He insists however that this concept is understood by those who can consistently answer questions put to them in different ways. He, like Kant, also dismisses supernatural phenomena produced in evidence for the existence of God. It becomes clear in these conversations that the “form of life” of a “religious” man like himself, is the decisive “ground” for his belief system. Religious people who lead their lives “as if” there is going to be a day of Judgement is, Wittgenstein argues, sufficient reason to believe in the validity of their belief system. Neither Wittgenstein nor Kant would agree to the counterargument that there is any contradiction in organising ones life in this fashion.Such a form of life, for Wittgenstein, was a consequence of human natural history. In this form of life, a certain form of anxiety is a result of the death instinct receiving representation in such a natural history( which in its turn gives rise to a seeking after safety and comfort). The repetition of both this anxiety and the response to it , namely, believing in God, might then also involve believing in the power and efficacy of the life instinct, and it is this element of our psychic apparatus that gives us the hope to transcend all compulsions to repeat old traumas. Freud is an interesting author to refer to in this debate because he is regarded himself by others as an atheist in spite of indications in his work to the contrary. He describes himself as a Kantian Psychologist, for example. Freud certainly saw in mass religious movements something pathological and delusional in particular when it came to the blind acceptance of authoritative influences. He “interpreted” this behaviour in terms of an infantile longing for a father figure: a desire for safety and comfort. Saying, however, that religious belief/judgement/action falls into the category of “wish-fulfilment” does not necessarily carry the same critical weight. Freud claims that religion promises a happiness it cannot deliver, but both Aristotle and Kant realised that there is another dimension to the hope for happiness than an actual flourishing life. There is, namely, the knowledge that ones form of life is such, that one is worthy of happiness on ethical grounds(areté, duty). Wish-fulfilment need not necessarily be tied to the form of anxiety connected to early trauma. For Wittgenstein, as we noted, the connection between early trauma and late delusional activity was too speculative. He clearly believed that the source of this form of pathological activity does not necessarily have to lie so far back in ones history.

Elisabeth Anscombe was herself a Catholic who pointed to the relation between the collapse of religious authority and the collapse in the belief of the importance of virtue and duty. Kant, whilst not being an atheist, in his writings regarded God as a theoretical idea of reason, and there is the suggestion that this idea is more fragile as a source of Good than the practical idea of Freedom. Indeed we find in Kant a withdrawal from the idea that the source of our idea of the Good is in the theoretical idea of God. This might be that even if this idea is the source of the Good-in-itself this lies outside the bounds of knowledge. What appears to lie within the bounds of our practical knowledge is the practical wish/hope that God will provide us with a flourishing life if we are worthy of it. Indeed the primary argument for the existence of God presented by Kant is that enlightenment believers believe in the humanistic ideal that if the good-in-itself is present in their lives in the form of good judgement and good deeds, good consequences will follow(eudaimonia–a flourishing life). There is in, other words, in Kant a necessary(logical) conceptual(grammatical?) connection between the happiness of a flourishing life and the life of virtue and duty.

There is also in Kant an account of a hypothetical form of practical thinking that produces a hypothetical idea of God as a possible cause of my safety and comfort. Here the categorical thought that God is a good in itself , is absent, and the principle of self love is the putative “good-in-itself” that such religious believers embrace. Extreme forms of this self-love(narcissism) may indeed the consequence or “effect” of early trauma. The principle of self-love, for Kant is not a good- for- the -soul. Such a narcissistic imperative for Freud is a causal determinant of the form of life one leads and here one can certainly use the Kantian psychological ontological description of “something happening” to the agent, rather than the description of an agent freely choosing their destiny.

Wittgenstein may share much of the Kantian animus insofar as his account of religion is concerned and we should add that he denied being a religious man but claimed that he could see everything from a religious point of view. Secondly, he found Tolstoys, work “What I believe”, to be a very interesting and satisfying account of the role of religious writings in a religious life. Thirdly, the dedication chosen for his work “Philosophical Remarks” reads “To the Glory of God”. So, in conclusion for Wittgenstein, and perhaps also for Hacker, Religion was not a soft “conventional” choice that has been made in the natural history of human being or a pathological deviation in mans actualisation process. Religion is rather a grammatical choice taught to me by my elders in a categorical spirit of “The Good”– a choice that will help me to determine the goods for my soul, the goods for my body, and the goods of the external world. If Religion is conventional, it is so in the way in which concepts are conventional. Rules must be followed in the use of concepts. It is grammar that tells us the essence of things/objects: tells us, that is, the category of the object conceptualised. This in, Hackers view is one of the seminal achievements of the later Philosophy of Wittgenstein. The special rules of the understanding that Kant refers to, is, according to Wittgenstein , to be investigated grammatically in accordance with his Critique of Language. In his earlier work Wittgenstein claimed that logic “showed” us the scaffolding of the world. In his later he is more cautious and we are provided with an “album” of grammatical sketches which condense clouds of Philosophy into drops of grammar but leaves the answers to many aporetic questions open, especially in the arenas of ethics and religion.

Wittgenstein argues that we are taught the meaning of the word “good” via explanations relating to why something is good–explanations given to us by our elders. Wittgenstein insists that we cannot give an essence-specifying definition of “the good” because there are a “family” of meanings involved. In this respect this idea resembles the idea of “language” where the terminus of his account rests with the family resemblance of language games. This point was illustrated in his analysis of the name of Moses. Russell’s analysis had claimed that one description or a conjunction of descriptions will give us the “meaning” of a name. Wittgenstein questioned this account and claimed that concepts and names are not determinate in this way and even the name of Moses is constituted of a family of meanings. Saying that “Moses does not exist” for Wittgenstein can have many different meanings. This does not however, entail that all terms possessing this kind of indeterminacy have no meaning. The meaning of the terms “God” and “good” are given in the explanation of these meanings and these are the same explanations we were taught when we were taught the meanings of these words.

Hacker in several places in his various works, points to the importance of not arbitrarily imposing one grammatical form upon another, e.g. not imposing the form of the thing named upon the “I”. Believing that “I” is a name generates conceptual confusion in the hands of what he calls “rational psychologists”(An Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Baker G., P., and Hacker P., M., S.,(Oxford, Blackwell, 1980, P.228). This is the kind of “metaphysics” Wittgenstein aims to dismantle with his grammatical investigations. Hacker in this work points out that Wittgenstein maintains that:

“We are concerned here with the Kantian solution of the problems of Philosophy.”(P.231)

This suggests that these two Philosophers to some extent share a Weltanschauung. The consequence of the conceptual confusion of these “rational psychologists” is the creation of a “picture” of the mind as an inner theatre where performances occur, where scenes are displayed. This is one aspect of the substantialisation of the so called “immaterial substance” Descartes conceived of. On such accounts knowledge, understanding and imagining are inner activities rather than publicly manifested powers, abilities, and dispositions. Many other mental phenomena also become “contaminated” with such a view of the mind. Curiously, in spite of their considerable differences and disagreements both Émpiricists and Cartesian Rationalists embrace the above “picture”, assisted by both Science and some forms of Analytical Philosophy.

“Pain” is a state of consciousness that comes and goes, the first person account of which is learned by replacing ones groans and pain behaviour with the utterance “I am in pain!”. Here no name is being used to pick out an actor in the inner theatre. When this model is not just generalised to sensations but also to the will and action we are in danger of misunderstanding completely the roles of various mental powers, capacities, and dispositions in the human form of life. In his Notebooks 89 Wittgenstein had correctly pointed out that the will is not a phenomenon. Hacker clarifies this on P.308 of his work:

“For an experience is a phenomenon, which an act of will–following a rule, doing thus and so for the reasons such and such–is something we do–not something we observe.”

Here we note the full force of the Wittgensteinian “turn” from the solipsist of the Tractatus touting an account of intuition requiring a linguistic soul injecting meaning into propositions, toward the Cultural Philosopher carefully distinguishing between many meanings of Being(Aristotle), and many categories of Being(Kant). If the mind was a private theatre of parading phenomena that are “observed” or “introspected”, there could not, on Wittgenstein’s account, be the agreement in the judgements we publicly manifest. To demonstrate this we have Wittgenstein’s private language argument which claimed that if everyone possessed a beetle in a matchbox in the way in which we possessed “phenomena in our minds” there would be no means of determining whether everyone had the same beetle in their matchbox or a different one. This of course is a standard objection to the solipsistic position. Some modern Philosophers have thought of this beetle as Consciousness. Hacker reflects on this problem in the following way:

“For are living beings, animals and human beings, not physical objects? And how can a mere physical object be conscious(Cf., PI §283)? I experience my own consciousness one is inclined to say, but how can I transfer this experience to objects outside myself? How can physical bodies in a physical world have something as alien to physical phenomena as consciousness?And if one thinks as many philosophers and psychologists do, that it is the brain that is conscious this exacerbates the mystery. For how can mere matter inside the skull be conscious?”(P.234-5)

Hackers proposed solution to the problem:

“The first step toward clarity is to remind ourselves that it is only of a living human being and what resembles(behaves like) a living human being that one say that it is conscious or unconscious(PI §281). We do not attribute consciousness or lack of consciousness to stones, tress or machines–not because they are insufficiently complex in structure or physical constitution but because they are not living creatures that behave like us in circumstances in which we attribute consciousness to each other.”(P.235)

The above are clearly grammatical investigations into the term Consciousness”. The above is also an explanation of what Consciousness means. Hacker also refers to the remark below from Wittgenstein’s “Zettel”:

“Consciousness in another’s face. Look into someone else’s face, and see the consciousness in it”( §220)

Wittgenstein continues this line of reasoning with:

“Grief one would like to say, is personified in the face. This belongs to the concept of emotion.”(§225).

In other words there are public criteria for the attribution of consciousness to other beings. There is no “inferring” from behaviour to Consciousness–the connection however is conceptual. The facial expression is not a symptom but rather part of the context of exploration/discovery. These remarks demonstrate a wider emphasis upon the concept of Action. It is, in other words, what people say and do in particular circumstances that is important for the ascription of psychological predicates. These activities do not logically entail the judgement made about them, but they are nevertheless logical criteria. Behaviour is also a logical criterion for that most private of events, namely being in pain, which is of course not an action but rather something that happens to one. Saying that one is in pain on the basis of observing the behaviour of pain or hearing the words “I am in pain” is as certain as 2 times 2 equals 4(PI P.224), Wittgenstein argues.

Consciousness is, however, intentional. It is about the world whether that access occurs via perception or conception. It is surely correct to argue with Kant that it is representational. Intuitive representations, however, are different to conceptual representations which are more complex and fall into the categories of understanding/judgement. Wittgenstein’s account looks suspiciously pragmatic but it would be wrong to regard it as a pure behavioural account. It does leave one wondering whether it was correct to abandon the epistemological quest to examine the relation of Consciousness to the world in favour of a more active conception of Consciousness that is engaged in saying and doing things.

O Shaughnessy is of the opinion that the relation that Consciousness has to Reality could not occur without the presence of some form of knowledge in the mind. For him, as is the case with Freud, Consciousness is a vicissitude of human life systems– a vicissitude that is not a singularity but rather evolved into existence via the various processes of evolution(natural selection, sexual selection). The higher ontological state of Mentality, in its turn, is a vicissitude of self-conscious being. For O Shaughnessy (cf Freud) the final end of consciousness is motor activity but this presupposes knowledge of the good of the activity. Plato, we know in the Republic, regarded knowledge of the Good as the most important form of knowledge. O Shaughnessy claims, however, that this knowledge rests naturally upon an orientation in the world that is fundamentally of an epistemological nature. His argument is as follows:

“The property of intentionality, of being directed or “about___” which characterises mental phenomena generally, characterises the experiences that are analytically necessitated by the state consciousness. This property carries the implication that a conscious subject must know something of the World in which he finds himself. How could a person have experiences with determinate content if he knows nothing of the world towards which they are directed. A self consciously conscious subject–more, anything that is the bearer of a self conscious type of mind–must be acquainted with certain general properties of the world; for example, with the character of the overall framework, the rules of individuation and explanation that prevail in the World.”(P.6).

This quote has a Kantian atmosphere about it that we shall explore in a later chapter. We shall also explain in the next chapter the extent to which P M S Hacker subscribes to the above characterisation of Consciousness.

A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Volume 4(P.M.S. Hacker The Boundaries of Sense, Human Nature and Neuroscience.)

Visits: 1909

Hacker’s Wittgensteinian approach undoubtedly contains both Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical elements. His work entitled “Human Nature: A Categorical Framework” is an account that aims to produce a perspicuous representation of the aporetic problem of Human Nature in the spirit of “Philosophical Anthropology”. In this work Hacker clearly demarcates the arena of concern connected to scientific investigation from the arena of concern connected to Philosophical inquiry and reflection. This latter activity obviously critically involves a perspicuous representation of the concepts we use to characterise/explain/justify ourselves and our activities.

Concepts when combined in propositions/judgements that have an explanatory/justificatory function are categorical and to that extent they are not merely recommending that we see a particular phenomenon “in a certain light”, but demand that conditions for making these judgments are intimately tied to essence specifying concepts. Categorical judgements can be universal or particular. Universal categorical judgements would be classified as Principles in Aristotelian Hylomorphic theory, irrespective of whether they were theoretical statements made in the spirit of justified true belief or whether they were practical judgments made in the spirit of the Good and the Just. The Goods of the soul (rather than the goods of the external world and the goods of the body) were obviously intimately related to Truth and Justice.

There is, of course, a fundamental difference between the statements “This rod is one yard long” and “All rods have a length”. In the former we may need to justify the particular truth with particular activities, and in the latter the justification becomes in the words of Hacker and Wittgenstein, a grammatical justification (Kant would have called such a universal truth synthetic a priori). What is clear is the difference between the two forms of explanation/justification. In the case of the Universal judgement “All rods have length” there would be no trip to Greenwich or reference to Greenwich, neither would there be any observation or manipulation of elements of my environment, or description of the results of such activity. Hacker argues that “All rods have a length” cannot be descriptive of any possibility because the contradiction of this proposition is not a description of a possibility. Hacker’s position here is that “All rods have a length” is a “norm of representation”(Human nature: A Categorical Framework, Oxford, Blackwell, 2007). A norm of representation for Hacker characterises the concepts of “rod” and “length” in relation to each other and embedded in categories of substance and quantity. The rod is a kind of substance that can be both observed and manipulated(measured) mathematically. The constitutive concepts we use to characterise human nature, on the other hand, belong in a different matrix of categories which include substance, causation, powers, and agency. Out of these categories emerges the rationalism that governs our thought about agents and their powers. This kind of thinking will, according to Aristotle, be governed not by rules but principles.

It was Wittgenstein that opened up the logical space for Neo-Aristotelian and Neo-Kantian reflections by stating that many disciplines, including Psychology, suffer from Conceptual Confusion. The origin of this claim was probably to be found in Wittgenstein’s early work on “The Picture Theory of Meaning”, to be found in his “Tractatus”. This theory, according to Hacker in his book entitled “Insight and Illusion”(1989) was inspired by Hertz’s investigation into the logical nature of scientific explanation. Hertz in his work “Principles of Mechanics” provided a “Picture Theory” of his own which claimed that the point or telos of science was to anticipate events or happenings in nature, the data of such science was the knowledge of past events, the method was theory construction and the mode of reasoning to be used was deductive. The theory is composed of pictorial conceptions that must match the facts or states of affairs they picture. Any theory that meets these criteria will be best able to detect conceptual confusions(contradictions). Frege also probably contributed to Wittgenstein’s position with his claim that ordinary language with its subject-predicate structure was disguising the correct logical form of judgement which was a truth functional form composed of the truth value of arguments.

The final abandonment of this “Picture Theory” came when Wittgenstein realised that facts are not spatio- temporal occupants of the world standing and waiting to be described/explained. Instead what needs to be described, he now argues, is the use of language with understanding. Understanding here is not a psychological process but rather a power to use language in accordance with grammatical rules in a grammatical framework. Conceiving of an ability as a psychological process or state was one of the conceptual confusions that led Psychology astray.

The divorce settlement between Philosophy and Psychology in 1870, left Psychology with a questionable definition, namely “The Science of Consciousness”. which, when subjected to confirmation by the experiments of Wundt resulted in a schism between the activity of science and the concept of Consciousness. This schism was caused by paradoxical results from a series of experiments involving sensation/perception. Gestalt Psychologists, such as W Köhler attempted to explain away the resultant confusion by claiming that Psychology was a “Young Science” and to be compared with the state of affairs which once prevailed in the early years of the development of modern Physics. The methodology of Physics required that qualitative observations be “translated” into quantitative measurements and manipulations of “variables”. This kind of procedure was embraced by the behaviourists that made it a part of their mission to diminish the integrity of the direct qualitative experience of the subject(an experience that included expectations and reactions to “demands”). Köhler experimented with apes but he soon found that adherence to the strict methodology and language of science prevented him from adequately describing the behaviour of his apes: he seemed to be forced to go beyond the data given in order to make senses of the behaviour. In these descriptions we find psychological terms such as “want” and “believe”. Later research by neurophysiologists would suggest the complete elimination of all so called “subjective” terms from generalisations, demanding only “pure” quantitative and causal terminology linked with the Energy Regulation Principle(ERP) and the “reaction” of neurones in the brain to stimuli. More careful researchers, influenced by Gestalt theory adhered to a weaker position in which analysis included reference not to causality but to “correlations” between neural activity and so called “subjective” experience. Yet even if it was the case that “subjective” experience was not always “eliminated” in a “reduction”, the generalisations connected with this research certainly focussed upon patterns of neural firings in the sensory motor systems(in accordance with both the ERP and the PPP(Pleasure-Pain Principle). The philosophical aspect of the intentionality of the experience was not investigated. The final justification rested on the activity of the neurones in the material substrate of the brain : patterns or groupings of perceptual stimuli were then “connected” either by causality or correlation to firing patterns of neurones. The prevailing assumption was that theoretical science ought to provide us with the paradigm of investigation and explanation even in the analysis of practical action-related contexts. This was of course prejudicial to both the logic of practical reasoning and the aims of the architectonic of practical science as conceived by both Aristotle and Kant.

Hacker and Baker in an early work entitled “Language, Sense and Nonsense”( Oxford, Blackwell, 1984) pointed to the above “prejudice” and its consequences:

“The crucial question to be faced is whether law, morals and etiquette, games, logic, mathematics, and (the case that concerns us) language are an appropriate subject matter for theory- building and theoretical explanation of the form involved in physics. Certainly rules and normative phenomena associated with them give rise to a multitude of questions, puzzles, and difficulties. Observing unfamiliar normative behaviour immediately generates questions that seek for an interpretation of the behaviour. The observer strives to understand the meaning of what he sees and hears.”(P.308)

Normative behaviour is by definition behaviour that is not explorative(trying, that is, to discover the rule of the behaviour in the spirit of the hypothetical). It is rather categorical behaviour/action that knows its own justification. When I restrain myself from doing something I know to be wrong I know unconditionally that it is wrong(My restraint is not hypothetical–designed to find something out, or waiting for something). This knowledge in a court room is the test of sanity, e.g. knowing that murder and robbery is wrong. This kind of categorical awareness of arché is practical and not theoretical. The discussion above, however fails to recognise this Aristotelian/Kantian distinction between the theoretical and the practical. “Observing unfamiliar normative behaviour” is therefore a curious formulation and may be confusing theoretical behaviour with practical behaviour. We called attention in earlier volumes to the fact that observation of an activity is driven by an interrogative attitude directed at the external world. Anthropologists studying primitive societies approach the objects of their study with this attitude. We, on the other hand, who have grown up and live in our familiar societies approach behaviour with a more reflective attitude, e.g. “Ought X to be doing A”. Here we are reflecting upon the goods of the soul indirectly ,and directly upon the worth of the agent engaged in doing A. In this kind of reflection the principles of morality are not being “discovered” but are a condition of asking a higher level practical question of justification. Here the “meaning” of the question can be articulated firstly, in terms of the maxim of X’s action, and then subsequently(upon being asked for a further justification) reference to a higher principle/justification. Using one of Elisabeth Anscombe’s examples: if one is male and married and sexually tempted by a choir boy the maxim of such an agents action is hypothetically driven by the principle of self love which can be expressed thus, “Whenever my sexual desires for an object arise I am strongly attracted to that object”. Agents functioning in accordance with the PPP, have no qualms about acting out in accordance with such a principle which Kant would claim is the principle of self love in disguise( Freud might claim the agent has narcissistic tendencies in such a context). The reason, insofar as Kant is concerned, for this maxim failing to fall into the class of ethical-categorical statements is that is cannot be universalised in accordance with the formula of the categorical imperative. There is, that is no avoiding the fact that the choir boy is being used as means to a selfish/narcissistic end.

The tendency of some Philosophers to view the rules of language in the same way as Kant views the moral law of course raises the question as to whether there may be some kind of category-mistake occurring here–a mistake similar to that referred to by Stanley Cavell in his work “The Claim of Reason:Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy”(Oxford, OUP, 1979) when he differentiated clearly between rule of chess that allows the move Kn to QB4, and a principle that justifies the move, e.g. the principle of controlling the centre of the chess board thus limiting the options of ones opponent. Both the rule and the principle are normative but the meaning of “normative” is distinct in these two cases. Rules, of course, specify what ought to be done under the hypothetical “If you want to play the game”. Principles, on the other hand, specify what ought to be done in a categorical spirit. Principles also demonstrate that they dwell in another realm of meaning in that they presume both the knowledge of the basic rules of chess and the more abstract knowledge of chess-strategy. The primacy of the importance of knowledge of the principles of chess is demonstrated in the intention with which we put the “Why?” question in this context, e.g. “Why did you move your Knight?”. Answering such an inquiry with “I am following the rules of chess will show that I have misunderstood the nature of the inquiry. A similar point can made in relation to the rules of language. In this context Why-questions relating to assertions are often best answered by justification in terms of principles or categories:

E.g. Why did you claim that we are different to animals?

Answer A: Because animals do not engage in discourse in the agora

Answer B: Because we argue with each other in the discourse using our knowledge of principles.

In such a context focussing upon the rule for the use of the term “animal” will not take us into the higher reflective realm of explanation/justification. The linguist focuses on this lower level of activity in the spirit of “modern science”. Baker and Hacker comment on this state of affairs in the following way:

“But the linguists “grammatical theory” is a calculus of rules. Its applications produces theorems not hypotheses and it neither has nor could not have(until it becomes a theory of performance) any room for factual initial conditions. To this, it will, of course be replied that the grammatical theory predicts that a given sequences is grammatical, and this is confirmed or confuted(just as in physics!) by experience, vix, the grammatical intuitions of the speaker. But this is wrong. The grammar entails that a sequence is according to its rules, licit or grammatical.”(P.314)

The authors then elaborate upon this claim of the theoretical linguist:

“His investigations, he contends, go deeper than those of the psychologist. He outstrips the Philosopher in conceptual clarification.”(P.314)

The above, the authors claim critically, is a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing(P.315).

What this discussion illuminates is a commitment to a reductionist program which reduces linguistic phenomena to various pragmatic conditions. Reductionism, in many respects fails to appreciate the fact that “causation” in the form of explanation/justification runs in two directions: bottom-up from social to moral and top down from the so called formal and final causes(forms of explanation) to lower-level material and efficient causes. In Psychology the lower level explanations are genetic and biological and the higher levels that are often “eliminated” by the lower level explanations are perhaps what is of most interest in psychological investigations. On Aristotle’s view a higher level explanation/justification is embodied in the definition of a person as a rational animal capable of discourse. We suggested in volume 2 of this work that Freud combines the principles of ERP, PPP, AND RP in an architectonic structure ranging from the lower levels of the biological(ERP, PPP) to the higher psychological levels that regulate our belief and action systems. Knowledge is obviously important to rational animals capable of discourse and there can be knowledge of many different kinds of thing at different levels of abstraction, e.g. the rules of chess v the principles of chess. A good game of chess is more likely to be related to principles than to rules. Given the kind of architectonic account that seeks in Kantian fashion to unify the totality of conditions of our Being-in-the-world into one system of epistemé, appeal to the theoretical, practical, and productive sciences is obviously important. Given the above assumptions one can be forgiven for seeing in reductionism, some form of category mistake (a kind of irrationality).

Hacker prefers the term “conceptual confusion” and points to Wittgenstein’s claim that the attempt to “reduce” arithmetic to logic illustrated the kind of conceptual confusion we encounter in a variety of disciplines with “psychological” concerns. Given the shifts in meaning of the term “psychological”, and given Kantian consent to two kinds of inquiry into the phenomena of psuche, the program of reductionism appears problematic. One kind of inquiry is based upon the synthetic a priori truth “Every event has a cause” and one kind of inquiry is based upon the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Kant’s complex architectonic is the foundation of all disciplines, not of the Mathematical Logic of Russell and Frege, but of the philosophical logic of Aristotle and the above two Aristotelian principles. It is, in fact these two principles that make sense of the top down movement in mathematics from concepts to intuitions. For Kant it is the categories that allow us to construct a table of of principles or rules for the objective employment of the categories:

E.g. All intuitions are extensive magnitudes(synthesis of space and time)(P.197)

Experience is only possible through the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions(P.201)

That which agrees with the formal conditions of experience is possible, actual and necessary.(P.239)

From Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Reason, Translated Kemp Smith N., London, Macmillan Press, 1929).

The above is part of the Kantian matrix that subsumes rules under categories. Given this matrix it is difficult, if not impossible, in philosophical investigation, to detach concepts from their categorical framework and talk merely of conceptual confusions as Wittgenstein does. Hacker, on the other hand, especially in his later work(e.g. Human Nature: A Categorical Framework) is sensitive to the importance of the categories of understanding/judgement.These Kantian categories and tables of principles/rules must also be subject to the metaphysical principles of logic, namely the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. This Kantian framework or matrix in turn helps to constitute the context for the division of the mind into the faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason. This division obeys the Platonic imperative that “parts” or faculties must retain relations to the characteristics of the “whole” which in this case is the person. In Kant’s case the metaphysical principles apply throughout the architectonic structure all the way to the bottom which is composed of the functions of sensibility where sensation and perception occur relative to the categorical and metaphysical aspects of the architectonic.

The Aristotelian architectonic or matrix of 3 media of change, 4 kinds of change, 3 principles of change, and 4 causes of change embedded in the reflective structures of his three branches of science, namely theoretical(including metaphysics and therefore the discipline of logic), practical and productive, is compatible(from a Kantian point of view) with the Kantian architectonic/matrix. The latter however differs to the extent it is an elaboration(in Aristotelian spirit) of the Aristotelian position.

Hacker is an important representative of the late-Wittgensteinian position which helped to criticise dualism , materialism, pragmatism, naturalism, logical atomism and positivism thus creating the logical space once again for Neo-Aristotelian and Neo-Kantian positions to re-emerge in the stream of philosophical debate. Ancient and Enlightenment commitments to the kind of rationalism that forms an important relation to experience, and various principles of organising experience, were reaffirmed. Hacker was part of the Wittgensteinian “turn” away from a narrower conception of science with commitments to reductionism, materialism and dualism, and toward a more social/humanistic broader conception more in line with the views of Neo-Aristotelians and Neo-Kantians. There were significant differences between the concerns of the later Wittgensteinians and these Neo-Aristotelians and Neo-Kantians. The focus of concern for the Wittgensteinians was on the critique of language and its grammatical structure: a structure that is more concerned with the sense of language rather than its truth function even if the former was an important condition of the latter. This characteristic was behind the insistence that this search was not a theoretical exploration aiming at a theoretical discovery: grammar, Wittgenstein insisted is not a theory about anything.

The pendulum of reaction to Hegelian dogmatism had obviously swung too far when it embraced forms of anti-rationalism and extreme scepticism in relation to the programs of Aristotelian and Kantian metaphysics.

In a work entitled “Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience” written together with M R Bennett, a neuroscientist, the conceptual confusions associated with neuroscience are examined by Hacker and Bennett. The focus in this work is upon the theoretical temptations of materialistic and dualistic arguments and positions. In a Foreword, authored by Dennis Noble, this issue is addressed:

“The central appeal of this book is to throw off the remaining legacy of the Cartesian confusions, first expressed as a duality of mind and body, but lately expressed as a duality of brain and body. The authors show that, although the first required belief in a non-material substance, while the latter is wholly materialistic, many of the conceptual problems are the same.”(Philosophical Problems of Neuroscience, Bennet, M., R.,Bennet, Hacker P.M.,S.,(Oxford, Blackwell, P. XIV)

The authors define the task of neuroscience in the following way:

“to explain the neural conditions that make perceptual, cognitive, cogitative, affective, and volitional functions possible”(P. 1)

So-called “conceptual questions” do not fall into this empirical domain where the investigations are primarily situated in a context of exploration/discovery in which the intention is to collect data and move to a more abstract level of generalisation. Concepts are generalisations and assume a fixed meaning and relatively determinate content which introduces a commitment to explanation and justification. When the focus is on individual concepts and their relations, categories form part of the matrix for the inquiry. When Principles are the focus of attention, the principles of logic(noncontradiction, sufficient reason) are the points of reference leading us from premises to conclusions. The authors claim that conceptual questions concern our “forms of representation”(P.2). This appears to be an acceptable characterisation if the inquiry is explorative, but it ought to be pointed out that the move to the level of generalisation requires the involvement of categories of understanding/judgement. It is important also to note here that at this level the inquiry is not purely rooted in phenomena(moving from the solution of a problem to a new problem). Inductive inquiry assumes the use of concepts whose structure and content is clearly and distinctly understood. The authors, in this connection, refer to the brain research of Adrian, Eccles, and Penfield, which they characterise as brilliant, but riddled with conceptual confusion. The central confusion, it is argued is over the following characterisation of human nature which the above researchers fail to grasp:

“Human beings possess a wide range of psychological powers which are exercised in the circumstances of life when we perceive, think, reason and , feel emotions, want things, form plans and make decisions. The possession and exercise of such powers define us as the kind of animals we are. We may inquire into the neural conditions and concomitants for their possession and exercise….But its discoveries in no way affect the conceptual truth that these powers and their exercise in perception , thought and feeling, are attributes of human beings, not of their parts—in particular not of their brains. A human being is a psycho-physical entity, an animal that can perceive, act intentionally, reason and feel emotions , a language-using animal that is not merely conscious but also self-conscious–not a brain embedded in the skull of a body”(P.3)

Aristotle’s essence-specifying definition of a human being is “rational animal capable of discourse”. This is embedded in an architectonic/matrix of the media of change(space, time, matter), kinds of change, principles of change, causes of change, all monitored and reflected upon by the productive sciences, practical sciences and theoretical sciences. This matrix is then at the conceptual level expressed by the Greek concepts of areté, epistemé, arché, techné and phronesis. The element of consciousness is, of course, of more concern for modern science than it was for either Aristotle or Kant. Given the Kantian imperative of reason to search for the totality of conditions of everything conditioned, the above largely descriptive list of characteristics of being human would appear to be acceptable to a Kantian Philosopher.

Thinking in its fully actualised mode is thinking about something. Both what is being thought about and how it is being thought about must be possible, actual, and necessary for Kant. It is in this fully actualised mode that we encounter so-called conceptual judgements that in theoretical contexts aim at Truth and in practical contexts aim at “The Good”. Both forms of reasoning are logical and can therefore embed themselves in sound argument structures. This means that in the case of practical judgements the premises have to be True even if the primary purpose of the reasoning is to determine what action ought to be done.

The reductionist strategy of modern Science(dictated by its methodological obsession) is committed to the appeal to material and efficient conditions(causes/explanations). This approach changes the subject of thought and begins to speak instead of these underlying material and efficient causes by “eliminating” or “explaining away” the explanandum. Colour may well be materially and efficiently electro-magnetic radiation and stars similarly may be essentially defined in terms of “Gravitationally bound body of helium and hydrogen made self fluorescent by the process of nuclear fusion.” Yet it is not the material conditions of colour or the efficient causation that helps to produce light that is at issue when we stand in awe and wonder looking at the night sky or a sunset. What underlies these phenomena is not the object of attention.

In the descriptive quote above relating to human nature we notice a lack of reference to Principles although there is a clear intention to present the essence of being human. These Principles have emerged from Aristotelian, Kantian, and Freudian investigations. We should recall, in the context of the discussion of Hacker and Bennett’s work, that Freud was one of the early brain researchers, and in his Unpublished “Scientific Project” he discussed three categories of neurones in the brain: Phi, psi, and Omega neurone systems. He related these categories in various ways to the Psychological functions of perception, memory and consciousness. Freud, as we know, ended up burning this work as part of his “Socratic turn” away from the external world and toward the world of thought as characterised by Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Freud made his mistakes(and admitted to them) during a period of 50 years of writing but he cannot be accused as he was by Cartesians of contradicting the idea of Consciousness. From the point of view of an Aristotelian and Kantian account of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason there was no contradiction(if one excludes Freuds earlier “reductionist” writings). There is in Freud no reduction of Consciousness to the Unconscious but rather a teleological/formal explanation of Consciousness as a vicissitude of Instinct (in Aristotelian terms Consciousness might be regarded as an actualisation of the human potential of the human life instinct). The “Categories” of the potential, the actual and the necessary is the framework for Freudian reflections upon the nature of Consciousness, The Pre-Conscious, and the Unconscious as topographical systems. The Category of “Agency” is then superimposed upon this topographical structure via the “systems” of the Id, Ego and Superego. This Architectonic/Matrix is then constituted and regulated by the ERP, PPP, and RP. This architectonic is also by its nature intersubjective and objectively related to the structures and systems of Civilisation and its Cultural activities. Freud names two of his categories of Instincts, Eros(the life instincts) and Thanatos(death instincts) and this testifies to the Greek spirit of his reflections. Ananke appears in this spirit and there are clear references to the Delphic prophecies that “All things created by man are destined to ruin and destruction” and “Know thyself”. Freud was hoping of course that his own work would do something to mitigate the pessimism of this message and hinder the descent of humanity into the abyss of destruction and perhaps it did partly succeed in this by restoring both an Ancient and Enlightenment Spirit in our Culture. Kant’s Critical Philosophy was relatively quickly neutralised in its influence by Hegelian Philosophy. Freud’s Philosophical Psychology was also destined for negation by the modern spirit of Science inherited from the Cartesians committed to mind/body dualism and English Empiricists committed to an anti-rationalist program. These “Modern Scientists” or “new men” as we have called them in earlier volumes viewed the world through the lens of variables to be observed in order to be manipulated in a largely technological spirit(techné).

Hacker and Baker identify a long list of conceptual errors in Psychology, that are taken to be facts by neuroscientists, e.g. that perception involves harbouring an image in ones “mind”, that memory is always of the past, that memories can be stored like substances in the brain in the form of neural connections, that inquiries into the instinctual realms of sex, hunger, and thirst are inquiries into typical emotions.

Much is made of the idea of a perspicuous representation by Hacker and Bennett and the controlling image of this idea appears to be that of “uno solo ochiata”–grasping a view of the world vaguely characterisable as a “picture” or “world-view”. These are terms taken from the later writings of Wittgenstein and they are static image-like terms that perhaps are more “mathematical” than dynamic, to use a Kantian distinction drawn from his third critique. These terms certainly sit uncomfortably with the more dynamic Aristotelian idea of “form of life” that Wittgenstein also embraces. A picture can of course be synoptic and like Giorgione’s “Tempesta” capture the essence of mans rationality in an image, i.e. by showing how man is calmly situated in a busy and threatening environment. Language for Wittgenstein, Hacker and Bennet is a medium for change–the principles/rules are grammatical and there are kinds of use, e.g. interrogative, descriptive, and imperative. Language also has moods and tenses but perhaps the most important feature of its essence, insofar as its relation to reality is concerned, is to represent the world in its absence. Its dynamism is a vicissitude of both sensory-motor, and thought operations. A word is a stand-in for reality in the realms of discourse and thought. Discourse brings distant places and spaces, the past, and the future into the agora. If there are language games being played in the agora they are perhaps less important than the rational world view the visitors to the agora expect of each other. Games can be won or lost but there is a feeling that much more is at stake than personal wins and losses in the dialectical interplay of thesis-antithesis in such discourse. Socratic elenchus was designed to restructure this dialectic via the rational use of an early form of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Winning and losing debates(techné) subsequently took second place to areté measured by arché, diké and phronesis .

One of the most important definitions of psuche claims that life is the first actuality of a natural living body that has organs. The Latin translation “anima” does not quite capture the full Greek intentions of this term and renders it more substantial and confined to the modality of actuality. Life, in the light of this translation, became substantialised in the form of ones breath or ones blood which in the one case when it ceased marked the end of life and in the other also marked the end of life when enough of the substance of life-blood was shed. Here the senses were sufficient to establish death with the minimum of knowledge. For the Greeks, life was a vicissitude rather than an actuality and the controlling framework of thought was developmental in accordance with the modalities of possibility and necessity. Forms and principles entered into this dynamic scene and their task was primarily to explain or justify changes such as the end of life. Logic was paramount in this process—something had to remain the same throughout the change if it was to form the subject term of our discourse. The Latinisation of Greek transformed this something into an actual substance, materialising it in a way not intended by the Greeks. For the Ancient Greek Philosophers the most important aspect of this something was not its matter but rather the principle organising that matter. The powers a being possesses were for them obviously important to the essence of this being–the power of life–the power of discourse, and the power of reason. These are the powers of a human form of life, a form of life that is organised hierarchically with the lower powers being related in complex ways to the higher powers by principles(ERP, PPP, RP).The ERP rests on the functions of the organs and the limbs which in turn both partly constitutes and is subject to regulation by the PPP which in its turn partly constitutes and is regulated by the RP. The highest level of existence for Aristotle was that of contemplation– a state in which the Reality Principle (RP) demands rationality of all the vicissitudes of ones life: an aim mirrored in more abstract and complex manner by the organised discourse of all the sciences(Productive Science, Practical Science, Theoretical Science). It is worth remembering in the context of this discussion the Freudian early reliance on the hierarchy of brain functions proposed by Hughlings Jackson in relation to his studies on Aphasia. The Freudian “turn” of course, involved a turning away from studying the neural substrate and toward studying the conditions necessary for the human being to be mentally healthy. The Psychic apparatus presented in the famous Chapter 7 of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” retains clearly the trace of the influence of Hughlings Jackson but at the same time it also points the way forward to the Freudian “turn” where principles rather than substance will dominate both concept formation and theoretical and practical justifications. In Freud’s last wave of theorising nothing is “reduced” to anything else, nothing is “eliminated” and what we now find is the presence of principles in a hylomorphic and critical framework. Recall here Freud’s own claim that his Psychology was Kantian. Freud was throughout his career combatting Cartesianism and its commitment to Consciousness via a certainty grounded in scepticism. This scepticism, we need to remind ourselves, urged us to meditate far from the madding crowd of the agora and in the process think away our own physical bodies. Descartes approached Aristotelian Philosophy in the same spirit of scepticism and accused him of dogmatic rationalism without fully understanding the complexity of the hylomorphic framework. The Cartesian form of certainty that emerged was certainly a dogmatic form of rationalism that a Freudian might become suspicious of, considering the facts relating to Descartes own earlier mental problems: we know that Descartes suffered at least one mental breakdown in his youth. The removal of the body from the realm of the Cogito left Descartes with a form of dualism which in the opinion of many was inferior to the form of dualism we encounter in Plato. Both were rationalists but it is not unreasonable to assume that Platonic Rationalism was more sympathetic to hylomorphism than Cartesian rationalism was.

Hacker and Bennet in their discussion of Aristotle discuss the nervous system in relation to the Aristotelian idea of sensus communis. Aristotle we know had no idea of the exact function of nerves in the brain. Hacker and Bennet note the functions of temporality and the ways in which imagination and memory organise time and images into a unity(P.18).

There is also reference to Cicero’s account of the lost works of Aristotle in which the mind is regarded as a fifth element of the universe(complementing earth, air, water, and fire). This fifth element had the function of thinking and is also in a state of eternal motion. The Greek term “endelecheia” is referred to in this context and its meaning is contested amongst critics but it in all probability refers to the power of nous, the active intellectual aspect of psuche. Hacker and Bennett claim that the term is the same as the term “entelecheia” which connects the general term energeia to the developmental and actualisation processes.

With Descartes (the combination of scepticism and an epistemology resting upon God for its justification), thought and thinking was transformed into consciousness. Unfortunately the dominant category Descartes used in his reasoning about consciousness was that of substance. The Primary premise of Cartesian reasoning begins with the axiomatic claim that the substance of the mind is immaterial. Thinking, is, of course, an activity rather than anything substantial. Activities are logically linked to agents–there cannot be dancing in the street without anyone dancing in the street. The “I” on the Cartesian position is an immaterial substance and eventually forced Descartes into defending his position by agreeing that thought(immaterial substance) and extension(material substance) interact in the material matrix of the brain. An alternative way of conceptualising the “I think” is in terms of “I can” where the “I” at the source of the activity is a “lived body”(Merleau-Ponty”). This “lived body” or “form of life” for Freud was best characterised as a vicissitude, or a function(William James) or an operator(Julian Jaynes).

It is, of course a person who thinks and not a brain or a body and to deny this fact is to commit what Hacker has referred in several different works as the Mereological Fallacy. This fallacy involves attributing a predicate true of the whole to a part of the whole, e.g. a predicate true of a person is used to claim that the same predicate is true of his brain or his body. Hacker and Bennet then draw up a long list of authors who have used this form of fallacious argumentation. The list includes names such as Sperry, Crick, Edelman, D Marr, J.Z. Young, Le Doux, C. Blakemore, Helmholtz, and Damasio. Many of these authors claim in various ways that neurones have knowledge or intelligence(P.69)

Sensation is obviously a form of consciousness that has a close connection to the body. Wittgenstein, in his later work, focuses upon pain and the language game associated with it. To say “I am in pain”, he argues, is not a descriptive claim as many have maintained but rather an expression of the speakers pain(sometimes in the form of an exclamation). This expression is learned perhaps as a substitution for the primitive cry of pain. In both cases I am directly conscious of the pain. In the case of reporting someone else’s pain I am not in the same non-observational way aware of his pain but rather in a sense observing his suffering and in so doing I take his expressive behaviour to be a call for attention and appropriate forms of social activity that aim at alleviating the suffering. Wittgenstein argues that I cannot be said to know that I am in pain because I “notice” or “observe” the pain in myself. Rather, as he puts it ” I have my pain”(a form of non observational awareness). It is also important to note that I am not here naming my pain in expressing it. Naming requires criteria and such criteria are necessary of course when it comes to the third person use of pain. Saying “I am in pain” becomes for the observer, a criterion for saying “He is in pain”. Similarly, in the case of “I intend to have a shower”, is a criterion for saying “He intends to have a shower”. Here the idea of moves in a language game certainly appears as an illuminating way in which to avoid conceptual confusion involved in assimilating the third person use of a psychological predicate to the first person use. But a sceptic may interject, “What if he is not telling the truth?”. Wittgenstein does not explicitly say this but playing such a language game assumes truthfulness. As a language user playing this kind of language game, I also am aware that particular agents( not everyone) are, for certain particular reasons, not to be trusted, and in such cases it is best to see what they do before believing that they are in fact in pain. This however is a convolution of the language game and not a central defining feature. We learn that sometimes there can be “mitigating circumstances”. If someone is known to be a pathological liar it is only prudent to not believe what one hears but rather see what he does.

Intention is of course future directed and the primitive expression of this language game is founded upon the expression “I am going to…” (have a shower). The game ends when the agent expressing the intention does what he intends to do. There are in these games no appeal to inner observation or introspection no search for a sensation, no search for a characteristic experience of pain, or intending or wanting. There is merely activity in accordance with an underlying maxim of “I can”(express my pain, intentions, wants). The responder also responds in the spirit of “I can”, e.g. by sympathising, helping, etc. Activity is the dominant category and the concepts of areté and entelecheia embedded in a hylomorphic or critical framework are part of the matrix the above forms of life.

Many philosophers of mind have fixated upon the term “mind” and substantiated it in various problematic ways. Hacker consistently points out that the agent of activity is the person, the “I”, and if we wish to use the term “mind” as a synoptic means of referring to the intellectual and moral powers of the person there is no problem with doing this as long as one does not fall down the rabbit hole of attempting to solve the pseudo-problem of the relation of an immaterial substance of mind with the material substance of body.. Persons have brains, minds cannot have brains, and brains cannot have two “selves” interacting(corresponding to the neuronal interaction of the right and left hand sides of the brain). Indeed there is every reason to doubt that there is such a thing as a self which is an inner owner of experiences. The person owns his experiences and the inner-outer polarisation may not be the most appropriate conceptual representation of the relation of a person to his experiences. The Kantian “I think” has no such problematic implication. Kant with this expression is indicating the ability one possesses to conceptualise ones experiences: an ability that is, according to Hacker, an expression of a two way power plus the ability to use personal pronouns and other person-referring expressions. Saying “I am in pain” after having learned to use the concepts of “I” and “pain” is a ground for other persons or “I’s” to say of me “He is in pain” . The “I” Hacker claims, is an essential condition of the whole language game. Hacker appears here to be in agreement with the Kantian more schematic account of the child learning to use the word “I”:

“The first person pronoun is one piece in a complex game in which the other personal pronouns and person referring expressions are other essential pieces. Like the king in chess it is the pivotal piece for each player, but without the other pieces one cannot play the game.”( Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, P.348)

Self-Consciousness is thus not a state but rather connected to an ability to think of oneself. The mastery of all first personal pronouns and psychological predicates in the first person case are learned together with criteria related to the observation of other persons: criteria are necessary to master third person usage of psychological predicates. This means that the usage of first person predicates are criterionless. We recall that Kant’s schematic account of this phenomenon referred to a stage of using language where the child uses its name to express its wants etc: “Karl wants ice-cream”. For Kant the advent of the usages of “I” “You”, “Me”, “He”, “She” etc transforms the consciousness of the child to a self consciousness that involves the ability to take a reflective step back and psychically distance oneself from ones actions and beliefs. This reflective step back is also a step into the territory of the context of explanation/justification. One can, for example, after a period of learning, ask of ones own beliefs “Are they True?”: and also ask of ones actions “Are they Just?” . Self-Consciousness, then, is a complex vicissitude of Consciousness. The space of self consciousness, according to Hacker and Bennett is created partly by a disposition to say that “I am in pain” and thereby the disposition to think that one is in pain. This space is the space in which the activities of explanation and justification arise. Reasons are asked for and given and understood in the demand for Truth and Justice. It is in this space, for example, that one can become conscious of ones motive for doing something(an important aspect of “knowing oneself”). Such knowledge is vitally important for knowing ones efficacy and worth as an agent and this knowledge is an important aspect of the operation of the Reality Principle in ones life. Ones knowledge of oneself may not of course necessarily be shared by others and this is part of ones Stoical appreciation of the role of Ananke in human affairs.. The Goods of the Soul are known by the phronimos who knows himself and these far outweigh the goods of the body and the goods of the external world: an attitude well reflected in the Christian warning that one may gain the whole world but lose ones soul in the process.

Hacker and Bennett correctly point to the importance of the role of language(discourse) in the actualisation process of becoming self.conscious. They also point to the unfortunate tendency of many thinkers to focus on the theory of language rather than the practice or mastery of language. Psychological concepts are of course not merely theoretical technical concepts but rather concepts that stretch over the domains of all three sciences(productive, practical, and theoretical). Rules are practical activity-related entities. When, for example, I am uncertain of someones motive in doing something this is not only a theoretical uncertainty even though I am in a sense in search for the Truth–my search is also related to the practical sphere of activity and action. The authors in making this point maintain correctly that “Science is not the measure of all things”(P.374). In purely theoretical scientific investigations if a term fails to to explain what it intends to explain it can be jettisoned. If the term concerned was a central term of the theory, indeed the whole theory may be jettisoned. This cannot happen with psychological concepts, according to Hacker and Bennett because they are partly constitutive of the human life forms they characterise. Suffering, intending, and wanting do not merely reveal what we are experiencing but play a role in our becoming or being the kind of form of life we are.

Hacker and Bennett claim to be writing under the banner of of analytical Philosophy and this is a reasonable claim given the omnipresence of the Philosophy of the later Wittgenstein(a reformed analytical philosopher?). The boundaries of sense rather than the division of the world into referential facts is the new North Star. Clarification of concepts alleviate the effects of the virus of conceptual confusion. Not just the use of language but its mastery(areté), becomes an important part of the new methodology. Hacker and Bennett agree that there are different forms of analytical Philosophy but they fail to engage with our principal question in this work which is “What roles can hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy play in the future of Philosophy?” There are aspects of both forms of philosophising in Hackers largely Wittgensteinian account but the question of its relation to both rationalism and Metaphysics remains unanswered.

Hacker in his work “Insight and Illusion” supports the view that there is a “family resemblance” between the Kantian and the later Wittgensteinian positions when he says:

“Both Kant and Wittgenstein shared a conception of philosophy as concerned with the bounds of sense… both sort to curb the metaphysical pretensions of Philosophy”.

This however merely forces us to once again question why there is a failure to engage with forms of rationalism and metaphysics we find in Aristotle’s and Kant’s works.