Philosophy of Education – Page 8 – "The world explored, the world suffered" Philosophy Blog:-Lectures, Journals, Book Reviews, and Discussion forums(MichaelRDJames)

September 19, 2018November 18, 2018

“Sapiens, A brief history of humankind”(Yuval Noah Harari) Critique and Commentary from a Philosophical Perspective(Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein) Part Ten: Intelligent Design

A genetically engineered fluorescent green rabbit and a mouse with an ear on its back are cited as examples of the presence of intelligent design as a principle of life forms. Evolution, it is argued, as a biological limit and explanation comes to an end in the twenty-first century. This so-called principle of intelligent design is of course “scientific” intelligent design which raises the obvious question as to whether this is in accordance with the philosophical concept of intelligence.

William James argues in his work “The Principles of Psychology” that the concept of intelligence is a descriptor of the “way” an intelligent life form does something or solves problems. His citation illustrates the principle of the freedom humans possesses in choosing how to act. A magnet attracts iron filings but if you insert a cardboard strip in between the magnet and the strip the filings will never reach its goal. On the other hand, if Romeo is attracted by Juliet but her family places a fence between his goal and himself, he will find a way to eliminate the obstacle of the fence and find a way to his goal, Juliet. Intelligence, then, does not refer to any particular goal but rather to the way in which we achieve that goal that will include thinking critically about how to solve the problem. The iron filings when it reaches the magnet without any intervening obstacle is not intelligent.
In the light of these reflections, one can wonder whether the use of the word “intelligent” in this principle of intelligent design is an appropriate term to use in relation to the insertion of genes into organisms that do not naturally possess these genes. If rabbits needed to be found in the dark or mice were hard of hearing then, of course, these feats of “engineering” would be motivated and may deserve the term “intelligent”. Indeed it seems difficult to even say whether there was any point to the “goal” that was achieved considering that no natural processes were involved. On the contrary, these experiments appeared to require the disruption of natural processes. Of course, these “experiments” are revealing of the practical reasoning capacities(or lack thereof) of the scientist. The whole process positively reeks of the lack of intelligence of earlier “experiments” such as the splitting the atom which managed to produce a weapon that could destroy humankind in a world war(One must admire the consistency of Science: if the universe began with a Big Bang human life might as well end with a little bang). There is, as has been pointed out on a number of occasions, nothing in the scientist’s assumptions or methodology that will enable him to evaluate whether just because something can be done, it ought to be done or ought not to be done. The author has on a number of occasions used the term “imagination” in relation to nations, human rights etc which are intelligent “creations” of moral and political agents respecting the processes of cultural evolution from families to villages to city-states to nations. For Aristotle, this process(up to the level of the city-state) was both organic and intelligent. It is exactly because science lacks the “tools” and concepts to describe the process of cultural evolution that Freud was forced to resort to mythology and its “Intelligent ” theory of what is important to mankind. Since the ancient Greeks it has been observed that as soon as one divides a whole into its parts, its parts inevitably become opposites that somehow need to be reconciled again. The “Intelligence” of the early Greek thinkers is revealed in the thoughts of those who had succumbed(as Socrates finally did) to the axiom of Anaxagoras that “All is mind” and everything that is not mind are finite things shaped from an infinite medium of substances and opposition processes(hot and cold, wet and dry). This could be sustained theoretically because of a logic of the values of the finite in its relation to the infinite. Human minds are the principle of the carving of the manifold of finite things and processes out of the infinite mass of possible matter, energy, and experience. Here you will find no “imagination” of singularities such as the big bang where no laws of nature were operating because there was no time in which they could operate. For the Greeks and their way of thinking there may have been a Big Bang but something caused it and there was a time before the Big Bang when the conditions for the Big Bang were assembling themselves. The medium for this scenario was the infinite One, about which nothing could be said or thought. This idea can be found in some religions and mythologies. Freud’s use of the Platonic opposites of Eros(the creative force of life) and Thanatos(the destructive force of life) in an arena where the outcome will be determined by this infinite One or Ananke was an attempt to inject the philosophical spirit into his barren scientific hypotheses relating to the well being of his mentally ill patients. Nothing is said in this work by Harari of the miserable record of Science in the arena of mental illness. It took Freud and a number of other humanistically inclined therapists to clean this particular mess up. Even after the theorizing of Freud, it is still a question as to whether the “scientists” dispensing their medicines today know what the goal is for those who are mentally ill. Remember this work “Sapiens” has maintained that ideas about the meaning of life are “delusions”. Women, of course, made up the largest number of victims of “science” and its barren venture into the realm of mental illness during Freud’s era.

In this final section of the book, there are experiments suggested that bear the quality of schizophrenic hallucinations: the resurrection of Neanderthal man, the end of Sapiens when the final singularity of our lives arrives at that point when all the concepts that make our lifeworld meaningful have become irrelevant:

“Anything happening beyond that point is meaningless to us”

The author here is imagining the scientific success of the creation of a race of Gods(another “experiment”?).

The problem with believing that almost everything of value is imagined is that almost anything can be imagined and value disappears in this process. Whatever criticisms one wishes to bring to bear on the process of mythical thinking it manages to preserve a world of value. The Freudian picture of the battle between the life-creating forces and the aggressive destructive forces is an apt one to apply to the history of science, and by history, I do not mean the virus the author takes it to be but rather that philosophically based intelligent narrative of the existence and value of things. One can imagine something good and under the influence of the dialectical logic of the opposites imagine the bad is an opposite that can never be related to any object that is good. Something that is good cannot be bad at the same time in the world of the imagination. These are two different things. And yet the mature ethical outlook of those leading flourishing lives is that there can be wholes that are both good and bad in different respects. Indeed these opposites are united in the wholes that are the source of different kinds of good once the explanation for what is imagined bad has been given. Psychoanalysis is the domain for this philosophical discussion of the holistic attitudes housing the practical reasoning concerning the good and the imagination of opposites that seem to demand the functioning of different instincts: the life instinct controlling what is good and the death instinct manifesting death and destruction. Object relations theory operates in accordance with this logic of the wholes, the parts, and the meaningful life and replaces the role of myth in the task of the explanation of value.

September 18, 2018November 30, 2019

“Sapiens, A brief history of humankind”(Yuval Noah Harari) Critique and Commentary from a Philosophical Perspective(Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein) Part Nine: The Meaning of life

Harari argues that The Industrial Revolution was an era in which large-scale experimentation and social engineering led to a radically different form of life to that we experienced during the Agricultural revolution. Precise timetables and schedules were substituted for a form of life determined by the natural movement of heavenly bodies, growth cycles and the weather conditions. As a consequence, there were few timepieces or scientific concern for the precise measurement of things in this ancient world.

The Industrialised society’s experiments in social engineering dominated by scientific methodology and scientific materialistic assumptions decoupled from both religious ethical theories and the ethical theories of philosophy that led to the concept of human rights eventually resulted in the bizarre totalitarian “experiments of Hitler and Stalin. Harari refers in this context to an experiment relating to human mentality but it is not clear, however, what he means. Is the suggestion being made that the Industrial Revolution changed our mentality? If so, Science, which was a precursor and one of the theoretical conditions of the industrial revolution must have been a contributor to this change. Does Harari mean that we shifted to a state of discontentment because of the new disenchanted world we were forced to live in?

In practical terms, prior to the Industrial Revolution, the institution of personal and social care was the family which was a multi-faceted institution.

What the family could not deliver was left to the local community. Did this produce a general mentality or was it the case that there was merely a generalized attitude toward the family that caused Aristotle, for example, to characterize the family as the fundamental political unit of the society? According to Aristotle the family is not sufficient insofar as the needs of the individual is concerned and for him, the meeting of these needs motivated the association of families into villages. Even villages cannot meet the complex needs of the human individual and this in its turn necessitates association into a city-state which can meet even man’s more luxurious needs. For Aristotle, it is the city that best provides the conditions necessary for Eudaimonia, the flourishing life.

Psychoanalysis was the psychological theory that truly examined the development of the emotions and personality in the context of the family but it also extended its theorizing to examining “civilization and its discontents” ending in a question as to whether all the work involved in building a civilization is worth the effort. Freud’s analysis reached back into ancient Greek philosophy for its overarching powers or capacities of Eros, Thanatos, and Ananke. These three mythical “figures” shape the battlefield of civilization and the mentality of the individuals who are subject to fate as a consequence of the psychological powers of the life instinct and the death instinct(manifested partly in aggression). Freud’s theory, as we know moved from resting uneasily on quantitative considerations relating to energy distribution and the experience of pleasure and pain to the realm of meaning which better characterized analytical discourse. He refused to acknowledge that the world should be purified of its myths, although of course, he led one of the battles against religion in the name of “scientific psychology”. Later on in this work, Harari is going to speak of delusions. In the light of the hallucinatory wish-fulfillment connotations of this term “delusion” in psychoanalytical theory, we will return to Psychoanalysis when considering Harari’s claim. We will also return to Psychoanalytical theory when we consider the role of art(compared with science) in the shaping of our civilization.

The collapse of the institutions of the family and the local community was motivated by Harari in terms of its inadequacies and the fact that there were no alternatives available. These inadequacies were addressed by the market and the nation-state which produced alternative forms of care and protection from the business world and the government. Families did not always and immediately appreciate this transformation of their traditional ways of living.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, in 1781 Immanuel Kant wrote his first major work, “The Critique of Pure Reason” that pointed to the displacement of the idea of God with the idea of Freedom. This is, of course, a more positive observation in relation to the change of “mentality” of individuals: mentality here probably refers less to states of consciousness or moods of the individual and more to the individual’s attitudes. On Kant’s theories, this social change was a positive phenomenon although he was already pointing out the inadequacies of the nation-state in relation to human rights and war. Just over one century, well into the era of the Industrial Revolution, Freud begins to address the issue of the mental health of citizens of nation-states just at the time when they were embracing an “expansion at any price” business and marketing policy. His work “Civilisation and its Discontents” was a kind of judgment on the mentality of modern man living in his relatively modern industrialized nation-states. Freud’s individual cases however very often exposed the shortcomings of the family and it was partly his work that contributed to the later movements that consequently thought in terms of the right a child has to a non-oppressive or non-brutal upbringing. Thanks to Freud’s work children too could free themselves from oppression and repression. But Harari claims that the project of social re-engineering did not proceed smoothly for many reasons. Perhaps one of the major reasons was the inevitable restriction upon an individual’s freedom which such a project appeared to demand.

Insofar as states and markets interfere with the human rights of the individual there should be no doubt that this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. The medium of the market is finance and those who have finances to invest are obviously favoured over those that do not but this is not a matter of human rights or justice as long as the state has provided everyone with equal opportunity in the form of education etc. States have signed the universal declaration of human rights and are subject to sanction if their citizen’s rights are systematically violated. Some people may feel alienated by not being able to be active investors or by being unjustly treated but in the former case where the middle class capable of active participation in the investment market is growing and where there are more and more opportunities for education, this is clearly an improving situation. These are clear examples of the progress we are making. Feeling alienated in such a context may be a signal for one to contact one’s therapist for a diagnosis. Harari argues that this alienation is the result of millions of years of living in families and communities: a result of evolution. We have become alienated individuals, he claims. He does not see what Kant already saw in the American and French revolutions that the individual is being freed from his chains. He further argues that the market is putting chains on our ideas of romance and sex and here again he underestimates the power of freedom and knowledge to recognize and criticize the kind of stereotyping that occurs in the advertising world. There are dangers for the youth of the day but educational systems are well aware of this problem and tailor their messages accordingly.

Imagined communities, Harari argues are communities of people who do not know each other but imagine they do. He gives as examples kingdoms, empires and churches. But he also claims that the nation and limited liability companies are imagined communities in which we imagine a common past, common interests, and a common future. He gives them the ontological status of intersubjective realities.

These realities have been brought about partly by historical processes and physical factors that have nothing to do with the power of my imagination, for example, living in the same geographical territory for a long period of time under a government that both in one sense stays the same and in another sense changes. It is not even clear that we imagine in any sense the people we do not know. Is that even possible?

Many examples of the progress of our existence are discussed including the reduction in human violence both in a state context and in a community context. States no longer invade each other after the second world war(with a few exceptions) partly because of what the author calls Pax Atomica: the guarantee of mutually assured destruction if the countries in question possess atomic weapons of mass destruction. This is, it is argued, “real peace and not just the absence of war”

The question that naturally emerges next is “Are we happy?” The author admits that this is not a question historians discuss. Perhaps not. But insofar as there are ethical assumptions operating in history is there not therefore indirectly a concern with happiness? The difficulty of answering this question is related to its ambiguity, i.e. related to the fact that happiness is a term that means many different things. Harari to some extent acknowledges this and asks whether scientific research could contradict these different interpretations. He admits that there are few studies looking at the long-term history of happiness and also that both scholars and laypersons only have a vague idea of what happiness is. It is not the case, he insists, in contradiction to the philosophical view of Kant that we are happier than our medieval ancestors. He even at one point claims that as man’s power has increased his world has grown more mechanical and colder.

Counterarguments to this position are presented and we finally arrive at the crux of the matter which is that humankind ought to use their powers and capabilities ethically.

The ethical factor will contest the primacy of happiness related as it is to desire rather than reason which determines how we use our capacities and powers. The discussion of happiness as the product of material factors such as health, diet, and wealth is rightly seeing that happiness is the consequence of a kind of activity of man but is wrongly identifying that activity in materialistic terms. It is as, the Greeks and their followers and Kant and his followers claim, a product of rational/ethical activity. What it is that determines whether or not one is going to lead a flourishing life is the worthiness of the agent experiencing the happiness or flourishing life.

The worth of the agent will not be determined by the power of his imagination as Harari insists, but rather the power of his practical reasoning in the sphere of ethical action.

The idea of a person’s worth is not a subjective inner state but rather an objective universal matter to be determined by either virtue theory or Kantian deontological ethics. The definition provided that “happiness is “subjective well-being.” is subjectivizing an entire area of philosophy, namely, practical reasoning.
Having defined the flourishing life as something subjective we are then asked to attempt to “measure” this subjective well being by questionnaires which reveal that money brings happiness but only to a point: that family and community have more impact on our happiness than money or even our health. Apparently, the freedom which we value, according to these studies, is working against us because we may freely choose our spouses but they, in turn, may use their freedom to leave us. The outcome of this long and meandering discussion is that questionnaires do not reveal causation but can only speak about the correlation of variables. The cause of happiness it is argued is chemical and the consequence of this theorizing is that the physical objects or events in the world causing our emotional and cognitive responses become irrelevant to the characterization of mental states which are about these objects or events.

This is, to cut a long story short according to Wittgensteinian analytical philosophy, a confusion of the object of our state with its cause. It is true that, in a sense, the brain structures and chemistry are, to switch to an Aristotelian objection, material causes of our states but these do not enter into the consciousness of these states, a consciousness that is rather directed towards its teleological objects such as the money it has won or the person one loves. So, for Aristotle, the confusion is between the different types of explanation or “causes” that can be used in relation to the phenomenon to be explained.

The author returns to a more philosophical account when he cites some research which seems to suggest that happiness is not related to desire or pleasure but rather that there may be cognitive and ethical components to happiness which of course will relate to external objects and events:

In the ensuing discussion, however, it is suggested that any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is delusional!

Psychoanalysis is the “science”(in the Kantian sense) of the states and processes of our mind and provides us with our best account of delusional states and processes. In this account, it is very clear that the delusional states of mind which schizophrenics, for example, experience, are primitive dysfunctional affairs in which there is an inadequate relation to reality. Suggesting that all ideas of a flourishing life or the meaning of life are delusional is a popular use of the term that undermines its more objective meaning. Of course one of the “mechanisms” of the schizophrenic’s delusional state of mind is the “imagination” that other people, for example, are listening to their thoughts. Given that for this author human rights, money, the nation-state etc are figments of the imagination the whole account risks falling into a kind of psychological reductionism that serious psychologists such as Freud manage to avoid.

Ascribing the term “delusional” to the meaning ordinary agents attach to their lives and the faculty of imagination as the source of important ideas and realities such as human rights and nation-states aims of course at inverting the image of reality in our visual systems: a state of affairs that no doubt will have the effect of creating a “strange” impression of our world. Worse still, we know from the result of experiments on image-inversion that the subjects concerned learn to live with the strange feeling that the world is upside down and in so doing the inversion inverts itself and everything “feels” normal. Such is the logic of feeling and the logic of imagination

September 14, 2018November 1, 2019

“Sapiens, A brief history of humankind”(Yuval Noah Harari) Critique and Commentary from a Philosophical Perspective(Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein) Part Eight: The creed of greed in a disenchanted world.

Max Weber claims that the Enlightenment creed of reason has failed to replace traditional religious world-views that once gave meaning and unity to life. All it has managed to do, Weber argues, is free us of our superstitions, prejudices, and errors and create what he describes as ” a disenchanted world”: a world in which we solipsistically and selfishly pursue materialistic goals that have freed themselves of more universal value perspectives.
Thomas McCarthy the translator of Jurgen Habermas’ work “The Theory of Communicative Action” claims has the following to say about the Enlightenment in his Introduction to Habermas’s work:

“The Enlightenment’s belief in progress rested on an idea of reason modeled after Newtonian physics which, with its reliable method and secure growth was thought to provide a paradigm for knowledge in general. The impact of the advance of science on society as a whole was not envisioned in the first instance as an expansion of productive forces and a refinement of administrative techniques but in terms of its effect on the cultural context of life. In particular the belief –for us today, rather implausible–that progress in science was necessarily accompanied by progress in morality, was based not only on an assimilation of the logics of theoretical and practical questions but also on the historical experience of the powerful reverberations of early modern science in the spheres of religion, morals and politics. The cultural rationalization emanating from the diffusion of scientific knowledge and its emancipatory effect on traditional habits of thought–the progressive eradication of inherited “superstitions, prejudices, errors”–formed the centre of an encompassing rationalization of social life, which included a transformation of political and economic structures as well.”

Habermas’ response to this modern “disenchanted” state of affairs was to–as he saw it–shift the centre of gravity of theory from the explorations of the powers of consciousness to an exploration of the powers of action and language or communicative action. Communicative action aims at a consensus as a result of mutual understanding in our common lifeworld. The problem is that there are also steering media in a society which attempt to coordinate actions. Habermas characterizes this state of affairs in the following manner:

“the transfer of action coordination from language over to steering media means an uncoupling of interaction from lifeworld contexts. Media such as money and power attach to empirical ties: they encode a purposive-rational attitude toward calculable amounts of value and make it possible to exert generalised strategic influence on the decisions of other participants while bypassing processes of consensus-oriented communication. Inasmuch as they do not merely simplify linguistic communication but replace it with a symbolic generalization of rewards and punishments, the lifeworld contexts in which processes of reaching understanding are always embedded are devalued in favour of media steered interactions: the lifeworld is no longer needed for the coordination of action.”(Volume two of “The Theory of Communicative Action”, p183)

Money and Power are steering mechanisms of the systems of economics and Politics. Habermas is continuing a long tradition of philosophical criticism of these instrumental tools of money and power stretching from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and their followers to Kant, the Enlightenment Philosopher and his followers to those modern Philosophers attempting to build upon the structures that have been constructed by the aforementioned thinkers. Habermas’ only contribution to engaging with this tradition is via a modernist Philosophers criticism of Kant that falsely equates Kantian theoretical philosophy with a Cartesian or empirical epistemology of consciousness. This in spite of the fact that Kantian theoretical philosophy clearly criticized both the epistemological rationalism of Cartesianism and the empirical epistemological tradition of Hobbes, Hume et al. Kant’s metaphysics transcended any and all epistemological approaches with its logical insistence on the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason. Metaphysical and Transcendental logic are the real accomplishments of this Enlightenment Philosopher. The Metaphysics of action have an Aristotelian hylomorphic structure that has not been addressed by either of the above epistemologically oriented traditions of Philosophy. Habermas’ criticism is however not primarily philosophical but more in the tradition of social science: Systems theory, Weber and Talcott Parsons being important reference points. A systems environment colonizes the lifeworld and turns it into an almost technological/instrumental arena. Insofar as there is a cultural “system” functioning in accordance with the “mechanism” of a trust in knowledge such a decoupling of lifeworld and system cannot occur because here, it is argued, use has to be made of the “resources of consensus formation in language”. Habermas does not argue this but it is almost as if language itself is a systematic “steering mechanism” rather than something organically embedded in a lifeworld with diverse functions amongst which are of course its rational use. The idea of rationality being a value in itself is regarded in modernist and postmodernist discourse as contentious from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In practical perspectives, Habermas seeks to replace this idea of logical rationality with an idea of strategic rationality that necessarily gives rationality both an instrumental and causal structure This violates a crucial Kantian distinction between instrumental and categorical reasoning. The tactic that seems to be operating here is a reduction of the categorical to the instrumental on the grounds that the categorical does not really exist: it only possesses a subjective form. Such a logical move would not of course have been possible if the Cartesian and Hobbesian “counter-revolutions” had not created a fictitious “Inner world” inaccessible to observation or any public means of access.

“Communicative action” might be a perfect technical disguise for the rhetoric used in ideological exchanges where the aim is “systematic” persuasion. In the light of such a claim, the most reliable perspective on the role that science plays in this unholy alliance between money, power, and science comes from Hannah Arendt’s work “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in which she has the following to say on this topic:

“Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all the others:the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races….free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views. The tremendous power of persuasion inherent in the main ideologies of our times is not accidental. Persuasion is not possible without appeal to either experiences or desires, in other words to immediate political needs. Plausibility in these matters comes neither from scientific facts, as the various brands of Darwinists would like us to believe, nor from historical laws as the historians pretend, in their efforts to discover the law according to which civilizations rise and fall. Every full fledged ideology has been created, continued and improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine…Their scientific aspect is secondary and arises from the desire to provide watertight arguments, and second because their persuasive power also got hold of the scientists, who no longer were interested in the result of their research but left their laboratories and hurried off to preach to the multitude their new interpretations of life and world….The blame is not to be laid on any science as such, but rather on certain scientists who were no less hypnotised by ideologies than their fellow citizens.”(p159)

Could it be that the very attitude that Harari praises: the hypothetical attitude that, in professing its own ignorance and refusing the certainty of the moral law, made the scientist more susceptible to the arguments of these times? Can we be certain that murder is wrong when it is so commonplace in the animal kingdom, wars and primitive societies? Perhaps our system of moral convictions constitute only a hypothetical theory awaiting further evidence that might prove its falsity? Perhaps life is a struggle for survival, red in tooth and claw? The Philosophy of Science of Aristotle and Kant would reject this hypothetical observation-based relativism, but as we all “know” science to its own satisfaction, has conclusively “disproved” the validity of these theories via the empirical revolution and its economic and technological benefits(are these part of the system of rewards and punishments Habermas referred to in his discussion of the steering media?). Habermas’response to our modern dilemma is to stir and shake a cocktail of empiricism, social science and speech theory with a twist of systems theory.

Harari is in agreement: Money and power steer us blindly unless we are persuaded by the communicative action of influential ideologists. Arendt describes the period immediately after the end of the first world war as a period after a devastating explosion that had destroyed the world as we knew it. There was no longer anything to be certain of except perhaps that we can’t be certain of anything ever again. This was the perfect environment for the steering media of money and power to “colonize” what was left of our lifeworld. Hannah Arendt points out how Imperialism was preparing for the advent of totalitarianism in the three decades prior to the first war from 1884 to 1914. Amongst these preparations was the challenge of the bourgeoisie to the nation-state and its inability to provide a framework for the further growth of the capitalist economy. The ensuing struggle for power was indecisive. The nation-state with its institutions resisted “the “brutality and megalomania of imperialist aspirations”(Cecil Rhodes’s desire to colonize even the planets). The bourgeoisie pointed to the obvious fact that trade and economics had already involved every nation in world politics. In the resultant “communicative action” there was no quiet and reflective weighing of philosophical ideas of justice and morality but only a restless desire to get what one wanted whatever the cost.

Harari points to the creed of growth and places a positive spin on what Arendt has described and explained in her philosophical and historical reflections. He claims that money has been necessary for both the activities of imperial rule and science.

Money has certainly never been essential in Philosophical activity. The paradigmatic attitude of Philosophy toward this “steering mechanism” is to acknowledge its existence in the lifeworld but firmly limit its influence in accordance with the more important virtues that structure our life in society. Socrates pointed out, for example, that the medical doctor’s primary concern is the good of his patient and payment for his work is only a secondary concern. This “institution of care” begun in ancient Greece is still with us today. No doctor will refuse to treat someone whose life is in danger at a road accident or in an airplane. The doctor is a breed of ethical scientist. He may be ignorant of many things including what to do about viruses but he is not ignorant about what needs to be done when his patient’s lives are in danger. The nation-state obviously supports such ethical institutions. To the extent that the nation-state was seduced by the businessman’s persuasive arguments the concept of “expansion” became political despite the fact that conquest and empire building had very few political arguments in their favour. There were political parties and movements, however, that were more than ready to push this concept to its limits.

“Growth” is an economic reality argues Harari. From 1500 up until today, the total production of goods and services have expanded from 250 billion dollars to 60 trillion dollars. The economic pie has increased in size, and credit, Harari argues is the main driver of economic expansion. The modern scientist with his prejudice in favour of induction and its role in the growth of knowledge through the accumulation of observations also believed in “growth” and quantitative progress. The bank giving its businesses credit and the scientist both trust in this growth and progress principle. The bank has a revolutionary theory of mankind which Harari traces back to 1776(the era of the Enlightenment). Adam Smith is called upon to testify in favour of a selfish urge to increase one’s wealth and so serve the wealth of nations.

I am not sure that Smith is claiming everything Harari says he is claiming here but let us comment on Harari’s commentary. Now interrupting one’s holiday to attend medically to someone having a fit on an airplane is disrupting one’s holiday and may give rise to the urge not to help the patient. But this urge is not to be indulged but rather denied if the doctor is to do the right thing here. A community of doctors giving in to their private urges at the expense of the lives of their patients would not be a lifeworld most of us would wish to be a part of.
The above argument is very typical of our modern period. Take something morally questionable like greed or egoism and reverse its polarity(because we can never be certain of anything can we? We must admit our ignorance must we not?) and then find some argument that will appeal to the personal desires of the present majority and persuade them that the very negation of what they thought to be true is really true. It is of such stuff that our modern revolutions are made of. The logical conclusion of this kind of thinking is that this greed can result in devastating consequences for the finances of the world as was the case of the Lehman brothers crash in 2007 for which no one was held legally responsible: this state of affairs prompted an economic criminal emerging from prison just after the crash to say “I see greed has become legal while I have been away”.

Capitalism colonized our lifeworlds and what was left of Ancient Greek institutions and ideas: it also colonized the Enlightenment Philosophy of Kant that provided a counterargument to Smith’s revolutionary thesis. All of these things were submerged in a mainstream popular movement that Harari describes well as not just an economic theory but an ethical theory where all ethical values such as justice, freedom, and happiness depend upon the growth of the wealth of nations.

Now whilst the characterization of Adam Smith is questionable, this description of a theory of how capitalism functions and how this theory has colonized the arena of our ethical beliefs and convictions is certainly accurate. Not only has this “new ethics” colonized our everyday lifeworlds it has also brought about significant historical events. Harari describes brilliantly how “companies” using this “new ethics” contributed to the building of empires with mercenary armies and engaged in the disgusting practice of buying and selling human beings in the service of the supreme good of economic growth as characterized by economic theory. Toward the end of the chapter the author raises a controversial issue of whether the idea of economic growth might not be an illusion.

Capitalists respond in two ways to this. Firstly, the capitalists have now created a world that only capitalists can run. Communism, the only serious alternative has failed miserably to demonstrate that it can run societies. These kinds of society, Harari argues, “are worse in every way”. Secondly, we need to trust the Capitalist a little longer. Soon everyone will be satisfied with their slice of the pie in spite of past sins of the slave trade and the exploitation of the European proletariat.

Weber talked about our disenchanted world and the above image of a larger slice of the pie is an excellent example. Compare the above image from the bakery with Socrates great speeches about justice and virtue, or with Kant’s writings about the awe and wonder we experience in the presence of the starry heavens without and the moral law within. These great moments in our intellectual history do now seem to be part of a lost world which we are mourning for in silence against the background of the promise for a little more pie from the bakery.

September 12, 2018November 30, 2019

“Sapiens, A brief history of humankind”(Yuval Noah Harari) Critique and Commentary from a Philosophical Perspective(Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein) Part Seven.

The section entitled “the Marriage of Science and Empire” raises immediate normative issues for the philosopher searching for an analysis of the anomalies of the modernism and post-modernism eras of our History. This work certainly falls into one of these two categories. Having said this it must be added that this is one of the most interesting chapters of the book and it provides a great deal of empirical explanation relating to the material and efficient causes of the phenomena of these periods.

The author begins by pointing out that British exploratory expeditions beginning with Captain Cook’s in 1768, were in the habit of transporting scientists of various kinds to conduct both inductive scientific investigations in new and strange environments and to verify more deductively structured theories which predict the existence of events, objects etc that have not yet been observed. Harari does not in this discussion make the traditional philosophical distinction between Science in the context of Discovery and Science in the context of Explanation. Indeed his talk in the last chapter of “new knowledge” appears to highlight the observational activity of the scientist at the expense of the theoretical activities of thought and reason.

Harari reports how the causes of diseases like scurvy that had been responsible for the deaths of large numbers of sailors were discovered on the voyages of exploration. Experiments on different groups of sailors were conducted by Lind in 1747 and these proved the efficacy of citrus fruits, an old folk remedy. Cook apparently saw some kind of relation of citrus fruits to sauerkraut and took both these foodstuffs on his voyage and did not lose a single sailor to the disease. According to Harari, this event was of historical significance for the British control of the oceans of the world and the transportation of armies that would help build the Empire. This expedition laid the foundation for the conquest of Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, events that had devastating consequences for the indigenous peoples of these areas. Harari refers to the comfortable alliance of Science and empire building with more than just a hint of normative criticism.

The justification of Normative criticism, of course, requires the kind ethical theory that science cannot provide. It is clear from the above that the scientists of the time were on a blind search for the facts even if observationalism was the guiding “philosophy”. There are historians(Hannah Arendt) who seek to minimize the normative criticism of this period of History by claiming that the British Empire was acquired in a state of absent-mindedness in which the intentions were good. Harari partially acknowledges this in his remark that whilst the evil deeds could fill an encyclopedia, the achievements of the era could fill another encyclopedia. So in the end, even he agrees that using his infrastructure of Science and his normative free view of history we can justify neither the blame nor the praise that has been leveled at the British of this period. The words from the work of the earlier Wittgenstein that “The world is the totality of facts” naturally emerge here in spite of the fact that they were written in 1922. Wittgenstein finally abandoned this position and one of the reasons for his change of mind, was the consequence that the philosophical importance of value judgments diminished in its sigificance. His earlier work was a part of the “scientific revolution” against the work of Aristotle which he then needed to retract in his later work in order to justify normative discourse. By this time(1951) the global centre of power had shifted towards Europe and was already shifting westwards towards the “New World”, the USA. Harari asks the salient question “Why Europe?”, and in partial answer to this question, the author cites military-industrial-scientific factors that matured faster in Europe.

Science for the philosopher is more than technological innovation in the context of discovery( observation and experiment), but we should reiterate this is not the position of the author of this work who believes that the link between science and technology is a defining feature(In contrast to a more classical view which would view the link as incidental). Industrialization obviously occurred much faster in Europe than elsewhere and the economic and political consequences were significant. The author talks of the development of railroads, the steam engine, and machine guns as examples of the first wave of the revolution and refers to the lack of culturally and politically developed institutions of non-Western countries as the reason for their lack of progress in this area.

Values finally appear as an important factor in the attempt to answer this question of “Why Europe?” Ethical values, for example, are implied in the working of the judicial apparatus. Observation-experiment and the manipulation of variables are largely irrelevant to the context of justification in the realm of law. It would be absurd to claim that the system is searching for “new knowledge”, new laws and new experiences. Values emerge but immediately subside into obscurity and Harari points to European capitalist and scientific behaviour underlying key technological innovation, regarding this as the legacy of European Imperialism. It is noted that between 1500 and 1950 the Far East and the Muslim world did not produce “minds as intelligent and curious as those of Europe”, “did not produce anything that comes even close to Newtonian physics or Darwinian biology.”

What is not mentioned, is the context of these scientific works, a context, namely, of the agenda of justification of theories that we inherited from the Greek philosophers. These theories emerged as a consequence of a critical spirit just as important as the spirit of curiosity and exploration seeking new experiences. It has been claimed by philosophers, for example, that Oxford University has never ceased to teach Aristotle since its inception when Aristotle was the major thinker dominating the university syllabus. The work of Darwin obviously surfed on the wave of Hobbesian anti-Aristotelianism in spite of the respect that Darwin had for the biological works of Aristotle. Darwin was probably aware of Aristotle’s ethical and political works and famously manifested his modern ambivalence to some of these ideas by refusing to defend his work from ecclesiastical attack, leaving that task to Thomas Huxley. The same ambivalence was probably behind his initial reluctance to publish his work during his lifetime. Darwin was not an Imperialist, he did not want to conquer the world with his ideas. The mentality of conquerors shared the mindset of the technological innovators. Both conquerors and innovators, argues the author, admit their ignorance but not in a Socratic manner where one knows what one does not know, but nevertheless knows for example that the kind of instrumental reasoning manifested by conquerors and tyrannical rulers is not the kind of reasoning that will reveal the essence of justice or the good. Rulers who rule instrumentally in their own interest do not possess the kind of normative knowledge needed to justify just actions. Instrumental reasoning is not only used by imperialists, but it is also the mindset of technological innovators, Heidegger, for example, has argued. Technological reasoning for Heidegger will never reveal the real concern of our curiosity which seeks a metaphysical understanding of the nature of being in general and our own being in particular: a variation on an old Aristotelian theme. It is possible that the continuity of this kind of metaphysical curiosity is that which accounts for the power of scientific and Historical Explanation. Given the ethical orientation of the metaphysics of action this historical continuity of variations on a theme is also responsible for the stability of our political and legal systems that the author claims lie behind the way in which our European societies functioned. Historical knowledge is also informed by this metaphysical spirit in which categorical assumptions and explanations provide the framework for the having of new experiences and discovery of new events and knowledge that has always been a part of the British and European mentality. It is this spirit which it is necessary to understand if one is to correctly interpret the following observations:

“When the Muslims conquered India, they did not bring along archeologists to systematically study Indian history, anthropologists to study Indian cultures, geologists to study Indian soils, or zoologists to study Indian fauna. When the British conquered India, they did all of these things. On 10th April 1802, the Great Survey of India was launched. It lasted 60 years. With the help of tens of thousands of native labourers, scholars, and guides, the British carefully mapped the whole of India, marking borders, measuring distances, and even calculating for the first time the height of Mount Everest and the other Himalayan peaks. The British explored the military resources of Indian provinces and the location of their gold mines, but they also took the trouble to collect information about rare Indian spiders, to catalogue colourful butterflies, to trace the ancient origins of extinct Indian languages, and to dig up forgotten ruins.”(p332)

It was, for example, a British officer named Rawlinson that eventually managed to decipher the Sumerian cuneiform script by using a knowledge of Modern Persian to understand the ancient Persian the script was using. Rawlinson is described as a modern European Imperialist and one wonders whether this is a fair description of this feat of interpretation that enabled us to understand “the bustle of Sumerian bazaars, the proclamations of Assyrian kings, the arguments of Babylonian bureaucrats”. In education one, as a result of the influence of Ancient Greek philosophy, is accustomed to acknowledging a distinction between understanding something per se and understanding something in order to make something else, i.e. understanding the structure of the atom in order to construct a bomb. This is a very different attitude to seeking understanding just for the sake of understanding itself in the way Pythagoras did in relation to his mathematical investigations. The Imperialist and the technologist uses knowledge instrumentally, the educated man like Rawlinson seeks knowledge as a value in itself. Harari also in the same spirit, tells the story of William Jones the linguist who discovered the relation of Sanskrit to many other languages instrumentally(imperialistically?) using a comparative methodology imitated by many other linguists later

William Jones was undoubtedly an educated man and one wonders why one would wish to focus on the obvious fact that “Knowledge of Linguistics was necessary to understand ancient languages” and interpret this in terms of instrumental necessity rather than logical necessity. Of course, the Europeans knew their empires very well, in the same way as they understood their own countries very well as educated people are wont to do. So what makes this an act of Imperialism? This superior knowledge, according to the author brought obvious practical advantages. Normative judgments of blame involving the term “imperialism” require an attribution of evil intentions. The educated man concerns himself with knowledge of principles that have a value in themselves. What is the evidence for assuming that such neutral or good intentions were not in play in the desire to understand the origins of Sanskrit? Of course one can observe the misuse of this research which came afterward (in the Nazi misappropriation of this research in their “biological” thesis of the superiority of the Aryans). Does just this fact of the observation that one thing came after the other mean that the original intentions of the research were evil? There is some kind of causation linking these two events but it is not an ethical link in which evil intentions generate evil consequences and good intentions generate good consequences. One cannot reason back from an evil consequence to an evil intention without asking oneself exactly how the intention should be correctly described and whether the relation to the consequence is an ethical relation. One thing following another in time in accordance with one’s observations is not sufficient to logically and ethically unite these two events into one ethical activity. What is at issue here is a scientific view of ethics which claims that what makes an action ethical is its consequences. This challenges the traditional “old” view, a more philosophical Aristotelian and Kantian account in which the reason given by the agent of the action in the form of his/her intention is what ontologically defines the action, is what gives the action its ontological identity. Both of these philosophers have produced decisive arguments against consequentialism. Even Aquinas in the spirit of Aristotle acknowledges the complexity of human reality when he claims that if consequences are linked in terms of the one coming after the other then it is conceivable that one consequence of an action could be good and the one following it could be bad which is exactly the case with the Sanskrit example. The scientist will, of course, (indoctrinated by a materialistic theory of mind), dogmatically claim that intentions cannot be observed because they are “in”someone’s mind. The mind, however, is not a spatial container although it is often analogically characterized as such. It is, according to Aristotle, the form of the mind that is embodied in actions and speech and observers can certainly observe actions. In simple actions like the hailing of a taxi across the road by the raising of my arm, it is clear that this is intentional and this might be occurring whilst the person hailing the taxi is thinking anxiously about a speech he/she is about to give.

The question to ask here is whether the Imperialists actually had Imperialist intentions, whether they actually intended the exploitation and oppression of conquered populations. Inhabiting a sparsely inhabited continent like Australia that had no organized government to defend its borders is not clearly an ethical matter. Kant has claimed in his moral writings that the earth belongs to no one. Marking the boundary of one’s territory clearly signals one’s intentions to inhabit and work the area and to the extent that indigenous peoples who did this were removed from the area they inhabited this is clearly only illegal if there is a government to pass laws to that effect. We are dealing here with what Thomas Hobbes called a “state of nature” in which life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short up until that point when men form governments to regulate their lives together. For some political philosophers, it is at this point that human rights are established. This has been the verdict of history too. There were large numbers of stateless people in the world prior to the second world war and there were no governments or a united nations organization prepared to defend their rights. All the countries that are members of the UN have signed documents which state the conditions under which they have responsibility for the human rights of people in their territory and in external territories(asylum rights). They have made promises in their applications to be a member of this organization and whilst they are members they have a duty to honour their commitments. This line of reasoning is behind the position in Political Philosophy which reasons that a right only exists if someone(a government, the United Nations) has a duty to protect it. This political position assumes a Kantian ethical position in which intentions play a decisive role in contradistinction to consequences.

The author produces a number of examples of new rulers in India who it is claimed were concerned only with enriching themselves. It is not clear from the text whether the author believed that this was encouraged or sanctioned by the British government and it is in this context that he claims that whether we believe imperialism was good or evil it actually created the powerful world we live in including the scientific theories or ideologies we use to assess it.

It is not clear what the author means by ideologies but one suspects that they are not connected to what he would regard as the “old” knowledge of the good which comes from the Philosophies of Aristotle and Kant that eventually gave rise to the objective idea of human rights so important in the world today.

It is, however, admitted that science can be used for “sinister ends” the right to rule over non-Europeans on the grounds of
a “proof” of their superiority as a race.

What did this so-called “proof” look like, one wonders? Philosophically, it is quite clear that the relative concepts of “superior and inferior” are constructs of what Philosophers call the “naturalistic fallacy”. The so-called “proof” moves from the acknowledgment of a number of facts(so-called is-statements) to an ought statement, namely that a particular group of people “ought to rule”. This realm of value judgments is a realm that science and its concern with observation and collecting the totality of facts is something that as Wittgenstein claimed “must be passed over in silence” because the assumptions do not allow anything to be said. The problem is that scientists want to use their assumptions in an area they cannot be used in, and consequently end up producing “proofs” of the above kind that incidentally proved very useful for Hitler and Stalin. Wittgenstein in his early work at least had the academic honesty to stay silent on the issue of values and he realized in his later work that he needed to abandon his “scientific” assumptions if he was to say anything meaningful in this area of Philosophy. Hitler and Wittgenstein apparently attended the same Gymnasium school. The Postmodernist form of this “scientism” is the contention that human rights are a figment of our imagination and science and culture are viruses that care nothing for their hosts.

“Culture” or the created word “culturism” is also discussed in the above context and it is claimed that perhaps superiority should be characterized in terms of cultural history rather than races.

So according to this, we should pass over in silence all comparative judgments based on our knowledge of what is good and what is not. We shall not, for example, think it is meritorious to have learned to build railroads before the Indians and then use this meritorious skill to improve the infrastructure of India (exactly because their culture did not possess this instrumental and scientific knowledge). We should not have used the skills we historically acquired in order to map out the area of India for the purposes of government, law, and defense.

This, of course, does not necessitate historicism as Marx’s theory did but “culturism” does remind one of the Marxist view of the historically determined fate of the proletariat that only historical laws could rectify. The cultural difference between classes is blamed for many of the ills of society. This is a position which is at least as divisive for a society as racism. What this brought to our attention is the fact that looking blindly for differences rather than for what humans have in common leads to divisions that cannot be reconciled without conflict. Elevating this thinking to the cultural/national level results in the same deterministic difficulties that can only be escaped by reference to the importance of the Kantian idea of Freedom. More controversially, such an idea perhaps presages a globalist community that has a duty to validate the idea of the equality among nations, thus actualizing the idea of the universality of human rights which may be part of the globalization project. Hannah Arendt claimed that Imperialism and its ambiguous spirit of “Expansion” was not sufficiently controlled and formed by the nation-state and that one of the results was the totalitarianism we saw in the 20th century. If this is true then the will to extend one’s activities beyond national borders may have positive as well as negative consequences.

If there were a study of the “science of imperialism” it might reveal that there are assumptions that are shared by both forms of activity. We have however argued that an ethical evaluation of so-called Imperial activity might reveal either ambiguous intentions or even good intentions that do not justify the normative criticisms of these forms of activity that we are accustomed to. Global intentions to dominate the world might have more in common with the scientific intention to “master” the physical world then we realized.

September 10, 2018January 1, 2020

“Sapiens, A brief history of humankind”(Yuval Noah Harari) Critique and Commentary from a Philosophical Perspective(Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein) Part Six “Uno Sola Ochiata”

On several occasions in this work, it has been suggested that the infrastructure of history and biology has been unable to provide adequate accounts of the complex holistic phenomena that are being discussed. This chapter at the beginning of a section entitled the Scientific Revolution, “The Discovery of Ignorance” interestingly focuses its attention on a negative, namely ignorance of what we know, rather than the positive of knowledge. This is a tactic of many relativists and postmodernists. Knowledge for the Greeks was defined as “justified true belief” and the telos or the endgame of knowledge was “holistic”, an attempt, that is to say, to perceive the world in the realm of thought, “uno sola ochiata”, at one glance. The impression of this work “Sapiens” is of a series of fragments which one approaches linearly and consecutively and if the aim of the work is to present humankind uno sola ochiata then the work has singularly failed in this task.

The term “uno sola ochiata” comes from a work by Adrian Stokes entitled “Art and Science”. The expression arises as part of a larger discussion of the relation of these two branches of our knowledge in the 1500’s(the date the author of “Sapiens” sets as the beginning of the Scientific Revolution). The historical time period is that of the Renaissance, the rebirth of man’s holistic consciousness of the project of understanding and knowledge. Interestingly the historians who named this period like those that named the period of the “Enlightenment” did not share the flair for the dramatic of those historians who see revolutions under every stone of history. The Renaissance, according to Adrian Stokes, a reputable art historian, involved an intensification of all forms of cultural and exploratory activity that had been discontinued under the auspicious bureaucratic eye of a church that had refused to explore the physical and human world with what we moderns would call an open mind. Religious dualistic justifications had been called into question in Aristotle’s work and religious authorities refused to translate Aristotle from the Greek until Aquinas could “domesticate” the Aristotelian ideas to the satisfaction of church authorities. This process of domestication, however, was not to the satisfaction of serious Aristotelian scholars for whom the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief” required an intensification of all forms of human activity if it was to be understood completely and holistically. The Renaissance, then, could be seen as the rebirth of an Aristotelian attitude toward the past, the present and the future: it was a Proto-Enlightenment period. Aristotle had no difficulty integrating Art and Science, Religion and Philosophy, Rhetoric and Politics, Physics and Metaphysics in his Philosophy. His thought processes surveyed the world, uno sola ochiata.

Let me illustrate this point with a dispute between the painter Giorgione and a group of sculptors who claimed that the art of sculpture was superior to the art of painting:

“The phrase(uno sola ochiata) occurs in a story Vasari tells about Giorgione and some sculptors on the subject of the Colleoni statue(at the time of its unveiling?). The sculptors claimed their art to be superior because a statue could show all aspects to anyone walking around it. Giorgione replied that painting was superior in just this respect because all the positions could be apparent in a painting for one glance, for una sola ochiata, instantaneously, without perambulation. And he proved it by a picture he then painted a nude in a turning position. Clear water before the nude, polished armor to one side and on the other a mirror, reflected more aspects.”(Volume 2 “the Critical Writings of Adrain Stokes”, P. 202)

Such an attitude toward revealing the aspectual multi-dimensionality of physical objects in a physical world was also presented in architecture, in the Tempio at Rimini, for example, and in another painting of the Three ages of man by Giorgione that represented the same man as a boy, a man, and an old man on the same canvas. What Giorgione and the Quattro Cento artists were drawing attention to here was an attitude which in thought was promised and made possible by Aristotle’s Philosophy. It was this attitude that was being reborn in a world teeming with fragments and contradictions needing integration into understandable Humanistic wholes. Northrop Frye in his theorizing about the act of reading texts suggests a thought-equivalent of una soal ochiata when all the events of the narrative read are present in the mind of the reader completing his reading. Is this a kind of pre-conceptual understanding of what Art is about?

Harari opens with a story of the life of a Spanish peasant who falls asleep in 1000 AD and awakes again 500 years later and he claims that the world would be totally unfamiliar to such an imagined man. This might be true but only if we assume that he was unaffected by the desire to understand his world. Had, instead Aristotle fallen asleep in the Lyceum and awoke in a modern school building where the pupils were surfing on their computers and mobile phones while the teacher was talking about a biological problem related to evolutionary theory, the outcome of this fantasy would have been clear. The former Spanish peasant may have felt forever estranged in his relatively similar situation whereas I would wish to maintain that it would not be very long before Aristotle understood pretty much everything that was going on around him. It would not take him very long to take in the whole of the Modern Greek culture uno sola ochiata(once he had mastered modern Greek), exactly because he knows what knowledge is and what ignorance is and because there is an Aristotelian core operating in the continuity of History. He would look at the laws, talk to the politicians and University Professors, spend all his days at the library catching up with Science, History, Philosophy, and Literature.
The Literary landmark of the so-called Scientific Revolution was according to Harari, Newton’s “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” which claimed that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics. The events of physical nature were quantified in accordance with what Kant, a follower of Newton, would call metaphysical and transcendental principles, thus justifying the term “philosophy” in what otherwise was essentially a scientific Tractatus that inspired many attempts to apply these essentially physical principles to areas of investigation requiring more Aristotelian formal and teleological kinds of explanation. There was a universalism expressed in this work but it was not necessarily a scientific or mathematical universalism. Newton’s “Principles” focussed on only two out of the four kinds of Aristotelian explanation(material and efficient “causation”)

Two other technological landmarks are discussed. The landing of a space vessel on the surface of the moon might have sent an anticipatory subjective shiver down the spine of the capitalist Cecil Rhodes who wished that man could colonize the planets in the spirit of capitalism and colonization, but it objectively, was a clear signal that almost anything was possible to achieve in the sphere of technological innovation. If this was not sufficiently self-evident we are taken to the concluding moments of the Manhattan Project and the testing of the atomic bomb that provoked Robert Oppenheimer to utter the words from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”. Words which were to haunt the scientific community long after the dropping of two atomic bombs on the civilian population of two Japanese cities soon after. The universal message of science-driven technological innovation was that man had entered the gates of the subatomic world within the world we all live in and there was nothing which he could not master. The power of life was dwarfed by the power of the splitting of an atom and the political decision to drop the bomb on civilian populations. The share price of life fell on stock-market of knowledge. In a sense, Harari is right to claim as he does that capitalism is a contributory factor in the unholy alliance of science with technology against more humanistic forces and capitalism is also simultaneously an expression for globalization processes. These scientific-economic instrumental anti-humanistic sentiments were used very skillfully by totalitarian leaders and President Truman, and Harari’s description of viruses aptly characterizes these utilitarian sentiments. Heidegger pointed to the essentially instrumental nature of technological activity and the relation of this instrumentalism to a scientific materialist linear principle of causality. This is a complex attitude that uses the scientific strategy of resolution-composition which divides up wholes into partsScience also uses an experimental method that mirrors this structure mathematically by isolating variables and dividing them up into dependent and independent variables in the search for the magic relation of causality. In the humanistic field of education, it is not unusual to hear the complaint that the results of the experimentation in this area seldom prove causation and one has to instead settle for basing one’s judgments on correlation. In a field demanding holistic solutions to holistic problems, this is obviously less than satisfactory. This state of affairs , of course, fits in with the claim that the scientific community is collectively aware of its ignorance and is, therefore, a much more credible alternative in epistemological pursuits to, for example, dogmatic religion. A distinction between old and new knowledge is made which disregards the philosophical definition of knowledge as justified true belief. The defense of this position claims that the hoi polloi believed it to be true that the world was flat and thought that they could justify this fact with their observations: because of this incongruence with reality what they thought to be knowledge was not knowledge at all. According to the philosophers, the conflict being referred to here is one between the false belief relating to the flatness of the world and the knowledge that the world has the shape revealed by the observations of astronauts orbiting the earth. Science is not dogmatic it is claimed by Harari but it nevertheless dogmatically ignores the philosophical definition of knowledge on the grounds that it is searching for “new knowledge”, much as man was searching for “new experiences” by flying to the moon.
So much is almost admitted when Harari claims on P.283 that isolated observations do not constitute knowledge without being integrated into theories.

The difference, Harari claims, between the old religious theories and modern scientific theories is that the former use stories to formulate their theories and the latter (Newton) used mathematics. The philosophical character of Newtons theories seems to have escaped the attention of the author. He is not immune, however to the subsequent philosophical debates that limited these theories to certain kinds of motion and change in the physical world. Acknowledging this with reference to more complex aspects of reality (the human sciences) he points to the use of statistics which as we claimed above might work in the instrumental world of economics where measuring the quantities and movement of money are important(in the world of the calculation of widows pensions for example). This approach, however, clearly does not work in the categorical holistic field of education where the variable of homework is so intimately intertwined with a great number of other variables that it is impossible to make categorical causal judgments regarding its role in relation to the academic results of pupils. There seems, that is, no way to divide the continuum of education up into logically quantitative yet discontinuous events.

The best argument provided for the usefulness of statistics is that it is part of basic university requirements in a number of subjects, including psychology. At the same time, the argument is made that most people find modern science “difficult to digest” because of its mathematical language. This language often, it is argued, contradicts common sense. We should not worry too much about this because the author claims “knowledge is power” and even if Presidents and Generals do not understand the scientific theories one can find in nuclear physics, they understand the destructive capacity of nuclear and hydrogen bombs.

So, we can disregard the categorical philosophical definition of knowledge in favour of the thesis that “knowledge is power”. This “tool” theory of knowledge stemmed from Francis Bacon’s “revolutionary” idea of linking science and technology. Wars use science: QED. The author claims that so-called “old knowledge” cannot prove its positions and that is correct on his terms if instrumentalism is the standard of proof of “new knowledge”. A more nuanced philosophical discussion such as that conducted by Jurgen Habermas in his work “The theory of Communicative Action” would, however, point to a confusion in the identification of knowledge with power. Both, he would claim are steering mechanisms of human activity and judgments but power is an instrumental tool used by the political system whereas knowledge is not just a tool but also a telos or aim of the cultural system of society.

The author, Harari, quotes Jesus as saying that “the poor will always be with us” and points to the latest findings from the sciences of agronomy, economics, medicine, and psychology to confirm the claim that poverty can be eliminated. It may be that Jesus did not intend the above remark as a prediction but rather a rhetorical strategy to reorient a disciple’s critical attitude toward a woman who was intending to do a good deed in giving alms to a poor man. The philosophical “science” of hermeneutics would be better able to resolve the exact meaning intended by the above biblical words that would seem to me require a less dogmatic interpretation. Even if the authors interpretation can be sustained, which I believe it cannot be, erecting a straw man to represent “old knowledge” rather than engaging with the theories of the iron men of philosophy(Aristotle, Kant etc) is a puzzling strategy for a work that is attempting to give us an account of the world-building activities of humankind. There is, that is to say, an Oz-like atmosphere over much of what is said in this chapter.

The chapter concludes with the problem of death and the so-called “Gilgamesh Project”. An ancient Sumerian myth claims that Gilgamesh suffered from hubris and was determined not to die but was eventually forced to recognize the truth that when the gods created man they created a being that must necessarily die. Upon learning this Gilgamesh is forced to accept his mortality. The “new knowledge” we have of the success of science in the treatment of disease and investigation of genetics, the author argues, does not entail this acceptance. The author points to the accomplishment of genetic engineers in expanding the life-length of worms and the emerging domain of nanotechnology and its relevance for medicine. The suggestion is made that humans are no longer to be defined in terms of their mortality but perhaps in terms of their a-mortality, i.e. their future life length determined only by accidents that cannot be predicted.

It is difficult to know exactly what to say about this kind of speculation filled with hypotheticals. No one would question the usefulness of not dying prematurely. We all understand the wisdom of the Biblical words which suggests that one should be “full of years” before we die, and the extent to which science can help to prevent a premature death would to most people be a valuable contribution to their lives. A question that arises for those who are full of years is whether these individuals would wish to have their lives extended indefinitely. The universal generalization “All men are mortal” that is being discussed here may refer to the fact that those individuals who are full of years and do not wish for life to be unnaturally extended are obeying a normative universal that men who are full of years know that they ought to die. The life instinct is, of course, a biological instinct but even an instincts power may fade over long periods of time and transform a wish to live. into a wish to die. If this is the case then the wish for immortality is merely a young man’s dream powered by a life instinct that will after a long period of time lose its motive force.
Perhaps as there is more and more to experience in the world the term “full of years” may change its meaning from four score years and ten to 8 score years and ten but this would still be in accord with the universal generalization “All men are mortal”, which is knowledge of the most ancient kind.

September 8, 2018January 1, 2020

“Sapiens, A brief history of humankind”(Yuval Noah Harari) Critique and Commentary from a Philosophical Perspective(Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein) Part five

The Chapter entitled “The Secret of Success” makes an interesting claim that the move toward the telos of globalization is due to historical processes or forces. Three mechanisms are postulated: commercial, imperial and religious. All three contributed to the process of globalization that proceeded in accordance with historical dynamics.

Harari raises the issue of determinism in his subsequent discussion of how and why it was that Christianity took over the Roman Empire and claims that whilst historians seem to have no difficulty describing how this process occurred they have more difficulty explaining why it occurred. He claimed that to explain how something occurs involves accounting for a series of events that lead from one point in a series to another but it is not clear exactly what he has in mind here because the explanation “Why? he is evoking is meant to account for why this particular sequence rather than some other occurred. In Aristotle, there is a reference for example to material and efficient causes that might explain how a system of organs results in a particular form of animal life. The question “Why?” a particular form of life engaged in a particular form of life would be answered in Aristotelian terms by reference to formal and final causes that refer to the animal’s essence and telos. Aristotle would have objected therefore to any attempt to reduce any religion to the different material and efficient causes that helped to bring it about if the question being asked was a why question. It is not clear that Harari is embracing this position when he insists that some historians would have objected to such a “reduction”.

The above explanation of the difference between describing how something happens and explaining why it happens does not clarify the issues raised relating to what philosophers refer to as the logical status of “future contingent” statements. Describing is obviously something one does in accordance with the principles of judgment that are operating at a conceptual level and where the correctness of one’s judgments are determined by the correct use of the criteria for the concepts one is using in one’s description. These criteria will inevitably use various categories of being that may or may not include causation linking events together in a narrative-like structure that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This narrative structure will largely be composed of what one takes to be the facts. We can see how history has an important descriptive role in our knowledge of the past. Explanation, however, is at another logical level. It presupposes “something described” and gives a “reason” for the fact or facts as presented. Here a logical structure supplants a narrative structure and we do indeed find reference to explanatory theories in many historical texts. Justification will not be at the conceptual level composing individual judgments (did these happenings meet the criteria for a revolution?) but rather at the level of the relation between judgments. The role of “causation” here will not be solely restricted to what Aristotle refers to as the material and efficient causes but will include the more complex formal and final cause that arise in logical structures where justifications are not merely at the conceptual level but at the level of combinations of claims that produce an argument for a conclusion. The claim that Christianity took over the Roman Empire is a descriptive judgment. Asking the question of why it succeeded is a reasonable question to ask but it is probably not a question we can answer definitively as yet. We may need first to establish its role in the bringing about of globalization, for example. But we are, if Kant is right, only at the beginning of the process of globalization and whilst its ethical essence was clear to him (but not for the author of the work “Sapiens”), and whilst Kant regarded the end of this process as necessary, many historians regard the end of this process as a future contingent and adopt an unfinished narrative attitude towards Kant’s historical claim that we are part of a process of globalization. What for Kant was a future necessity is for historians a future contingent except perhaps for that small tribe of historians who believe that some states of the world are predictable, and not chaotic. Plato, Aristotle, and Kant all believed that logical explanation transcended a fact retrieving narrative but that narrative would not, to take a philosophical/historical example, ever reveal that man is not essentially a potentially rational animal. This, for the philosophers, is a future necessity and transcends the workings of the imagination so important for this author. Philosophically one cannot imagine a human being that did not possess a rational potential. One can, of course, imagine a man that is factually not rational: an insane cannibal for example, but the explanation for why this man is an insane cannibal will presuppose what he lacks, namely rationality. The explanation will presuppose a potential that did not actualize for a number of reasons. Without this presupposition, we are left with chaotic narratives of such phenomena.

The issue being raised is determinism and Aristotle rejected determinism insofar as future contingents were concerned but he did not reject determinism for his theoretical explanations. Human beings are necessarily rational animals capable of (non-post modernistic) discourse. Four different kinds of explanation will fully explain why anything with an essence has that essence it has. A human being rationally discussing with himself or others the reasons for a future action or a future judgment and carrying out that action or making that judgment is a “causal” sequence. These are not examples of a material cause related to a material effect. One of the forms of explanation(or “causes”) relates to a human action that according to Aristotle is to a large extent “determined” by the final cause or intention of the action (and to some extent by material and efficient and formal causes). Voluntary action is “chosen”. Emperor Constantine could have chosen a number of religious cults as the religion which would unify the Roman Empire but he chose Christianity, Harari, argues. One can wonder whether Constantine’s choice was “rational” because his choice helped to convert Christianity into a so-called “universal” religion. Did he fully understand what he was doing? We no longer have access to his thoughts but we do have access to documents recording his actions and thoughts. If those documents contain direct or indirect proclamations of the future importance of Christianity, it would be a valid historical judgment to claim that it was his intention to create a universal religion. In such a case the choice was fully voluntary and the intention of the action explains why it was performed. Could we say before the choice that the factors to determine the action were present in the mind of Constantine and that the outcome of his action was already determined before it happened? Constantine is not available to answer any questions that might arise concerning his intentions as recorded in the documentation relating to this choice so it is conceivable that there was something in this situation that would speak against the judgment that Constantine had the intention to convert Christianity into a so-called “universal” religion. In the end, the evidence may be incomplete and the status of the judgment has to be regarded as “hypothetical”: i.e. it is “possible” that his intention was to create a “Holy Roman Empire” but we do not know. To the extent that determinism decrees that only material and efficient causes are the ” real” causes of change, is the extent to which Aristotle would disagree with such forms of determinism. The bones and muscles pushing the quill belonging to Constantine that signs decrees relating to the institutionalization of Christianity are material causes of such an action but they are of no particular interest for the historian. In this form of material reductionism, the cause-effect relation requires two separately perceptually identifiable events that can be related. Intentions as reasons for doing x are not known observationally. Such intentions are, as Anscombe pointed out, known non-observationally. Aristotle, Kant, and many modern followers would, therefore, argue that for every fact there is a justification or explanation that is in a sense a “cause”. Future contingents such as whether or not there will be a nuclear war are literally situated in a field of thousands of variables all of which may not be known or knowable at a particular time. Categorically saying either there will be a war or there will not( cf Aristotle’s example there either will or will not be a sea battle tomorrow) is assuming first that we can have complete knowledge of all the variables and also that we can have knowledge of the very large set of consequences that follow from such extensive knowledge. There is moreover more than a reasonable doubt about whether this is the way our minds naturally work (computer programs begin by defining the field of variables that will define the scope and limits of the program).
There is a strange passage in the book which claims that the more knowledge one has the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way rather than another because, it is argued, the future is a fog. Insofar as future contingents are concerned the future is a fog but this does not suffice to destroy the deterministic position that one can in principle explain why there was not a nuclear war when it has become a fact that a war was avoided (The Cuban Missile Crisis). The people at the time might not understand the reasons why there was not a war but it does seem somewhat paradoxical to insist that after the work of historians has been done we will still find ourselves in the middle of a fog. And yet this is the position of the author: History is chaotic and as in chaos theory a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon jungle may suffice to create a hurricane somewhere far away.

This is classic post-modernistic thinking. Aristotle in our position today would gesticulate towards the tens of thousands of history books we possess and challenge us to find the four kinds of explanations if we wish to cease to live in a fog about our past. There are satisfactory descriptions of the facts in these books and satisfactory explanations and justifications of these facts. We should bear in mind that Hobbes and Descartes were the originators of the modernist rejection of Aristotle. Post Modernism needs to reject not only Aristotle but Kant and his Enlightenment position as well. Rejecting Aristotle for scientific reasons is just about understandable if not justifiable but rejecting both Aristotle and Kant for “chaos theory” is not coherent. History is, in chaos theory, a so-called “level two” system which reacts to predictions about itself, in contrast to a level one system like the weather which will not be affected by any weather predictions. The prediction in chaos two systems helps to falsify the “rationally” based prediction. An example relating to the cost of oil is used where a price is predicted but this then affects the predicted levels of purchasing that actually determines the price. Because everyone, it is argued will rush to buy oil and the price will rise. Buying oil is a future contingent and not a future necessity so it is difficult to immediately see the relevance of this example to history being a level two chaotic system: If that is, History does include future necessities such as the prediction of globalization, then no present or future contingents will affect such a state of affairs.

Harari, to support his chaotic suggestion of levels of chaos points to what “people” living in Constantine’s time(the hoi polloi?) would do in the face of the suggestion that an esoteric Eastern sect religion was about to become the official Roman Religion. They would, he claims, laugh such an oracle out of the room. The Greeks which are conspicuously absent in this entire account of the history of mankind let the oracles operate in temples and the hoi polloi would laugh at them at their peril(35,000 visitors a day journeyed to Delphi from all parts of the Mediterranean). Postmodernists are modern populists and anyone (the people) saying just anything seems sufficient to count as an argument against the best-argued positions exactly because the people referred to above do not understand what a good argument or good history is and their opinion is as good as anyone else’s.

This ethical relativism is confirmed in what follows, shortly after a claim stating that we do not study History to make predictions but rather to understand that something other than what happened could have happened. It is stated categorically and in no uncertain terms that the good is defined differently by different cultures thus making any objective standard relating to the good impossible.

The assumption is that the yardsticks provided by Aristotle and Kant and the generations of Aristotelians and Kantians over thousands, or hundreds of years have obviously been proven to be inadequate by theorists who believe for no good reason that both the future and the past are foggy.

Relativism is often accompanied by theories indifferent to the concerns of Humanism, and we see this unholy alliance in this work too when it is then maintained that there is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humanity. The kind of “proof” being talked about here, however, is not clear and may be applicable to so-called future contingent statements but to so-called “future-necessity” statements

Anti-humanistic theories take many forms but this one uniquely compares our cultures to viruses living parasitically upon host bodies, caring nothing for them and sometimes even killing them. Relativism allows anyone to say anything so one cannot say anything about this except perhaps to agree with Aristotle that such descriptions and claims become like the meaningless noise of grasshoppers in the trees.

This chapter concludes with a discussion of memetic theory, postmodernist theories of discourse and game theory and these are called upon to prove that

“the dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well being.”

Auspiciously, the author then illustrates this argument by referring to the Scientific Revolution that began around 1500. History and the scientific revolution, it is argued cares not for human happiness and well being, both proceed blindly on an uncaring path, indifferent to the fate of the human species. They are viruses. Aristotle would have agreed with this verdict insofar as modern science and chaos theory is concerned but would have contested this point of view insofar as history was concerned. He would have claimed that the essential function of history was to understand the past and use this understanding to philosophically attempt to understand the future.

September 6, 2018December 31, 2019

“Sapiens, A brief history of humankind”(Yuval Noah Harari) Critique and Commentary from a Philosophical Perspective(Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein) Part four

In a section entitled “The Law of Religion” Harari argues from a definition of religion which is as follows:

“…a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order”

In defense of this definition, it is claimed that religion sews dissension and discord and yet simultaneously has been a unifier of civilizations. Society is hierarchically organized it is claimed in accordance with the power of imagination and this has succeeded in providing religion with an absolute superhuman legitimacy which in turn has also attached to some of its laws.

The Kantian Philosophy of the Enlightenment situated religion squarely in the matrix of an ethical based humanism founded on the concept of freedom and this Kantian account, in contrast to Harari’s work, fully explains why religion has been a great unifier of humankind in spite of its factual errors and sometimes faulty assumptions about the nature of the physical world. “Religio” means binding together and the way in which this binding occurs has been the theme of philosophical Psychology since its inception in the metaphysical system of Aristotle, the first philosophical biologist, and the first systematic unifier of the areas of science, ethics, politics, religion, aesthetics, and philosophical psychology. Aristotle’s philosophical psychology discusses a range of psychological powers and in this discussion, the nature of the imagination is clearly distinguished from the powers of language and reasoning that are operating in the arena of norms and values. Aristotle firmly relates the rational activity of lawmaking to the stability of our social orders and he claims that the extent to which the laws do not create the desired stability is a failure of rationality that may be related to a failure to eliminate imagined equalities or inequalities.

The presence of the term “superhuman” used by Harari above is loaded with reactionary anti-religious assumptions. It is not a term we will find embedded in myths or religious documents that are our only access to early man’s beliefs and consciousness of fault. Paul Ricoeur in his work on “The Symbolism of evil” explores the latter dimension philosophically. Whatever one scientifically believes about myths, it remains the case that they are the objectification in a discourse of anguish associated with fault and the awe associated with beliefs that are embedded in man’s relation to what he once considered sacred. The language we find in myths is not a factual structure in which the meaning of the terms is related directly to physical states of affairs. It is rather a language of value in which a manifest meaning is related to a latent meaning of man’s relation to the sacred. We encounter here a structure of double meaning requiring acts of interpretation for the purposes of clarification. Myths and religious documents are not merely records of what man believed but rather also expressions in the imperative mode of discourse relating to what we ought to believe or how we ought to act. This imperative mode is nevertheless universal, that is, it relates to all men in a real relation to the sacred object whether it be a God, gods, or a desired state of understanding. Ricoeur’s work is of particular interest here because of the claim of the author of “Sapiens” that Humanism is a modern religion. If we use Ricoeur’s work as a guide in this matter we will clearly see that Philosophical Humanism follows Kant’s and Aristotle’s lead in retaining a place for the divine, the sacred, or holy in ethical and political reflections. This move acknowledges there is a rational core in religious discourse that cannot be attributed to the fragile acts of the imagination. Ricoeur’s work testifies to the fact that this rational core has survived the bureaucratization of religion, romanticism, and scientism’s attempts to reduce everything non-material to the “Subjective”, and the more general post-modernist onslaught on practical rationality. The ideas of the sacred and Freedom are not figments of the imagination but real holistic ideas that bind communities together into holistic entities by pointing to what man ought to do in the realm of norms and values. This indicates that philosophical humanism has a very different conception of norms and values to the definition in this work which risks dehumanizing the human and subjectivizing the role of the rational in what Ricoeur refers to as the human beings desire to be and effort to exist. Reference to the superhuman order is the work of an imagination that has dismissed the value of practical rationality we find in the works of Aristotle, Kant, and Ricoeur.

An interesting historical analysis of religion begins with an account of animism as the dominant belief system of hunters/gatherers. In this section of his narrative entitled “Silencing the lambs,” it is claimed that rules anthropomorphized animals trees and even physical nature. Spirits were conjured up to explain strange taboos or the sacred status of “white-tailed foxes”, for example. To an external critic, it would seem that these beliefs and practices were indeed powered by the imagination but the author is silent on its role in animistic religions.

Animism is, of course, a very old, not to say an ancient form of religion that was not sufficiently substantial to have universal ambitions. It is not clear either how this earlier form of religion relates in Harari’s account to the forms of organized religion containing universal ethical norms and values.

Harari dates the Cognitive Revolution to 70,000 years ago and claims that it was at this point that fictive language emerged. This is not in accordance with current prevailing linguistic and psychological/anthropological theories. Julian Jaynes in an article entitled “The Evolution of Language in the Late Pleistocene” published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Science” offers an interpretation based on current evidence and brain research that suggests insofar as language is concerned, fictive language comes relatively late in its evolution. First, come the stages of modifiers, then the stage of imperatives. The first sentence with a noun and predicate modifier probably occurred between 25000 and 15000 BC. Jaynes argues:

“this period corresponds, I suggest, to the invention of pottery, pendants, ornaments and barbed harpoons and spearheads, the last two tremendously important in spreading the human species into more difficult climates.”

There is another serious question as to whether the cognitive operation of following rules is possible before the later stages of the evolution of language: this may have only been possible at the so-called “age of names” sometime between 10000 and 8000 BC. It is this age of names during the Agricultural Revolution that is conditionally necessary for narratives to begin and this would seem to be necessary for an awareness of fictive language to be possible. What level of awareness is required for the establishment or following of rules? Rules in Wittgenstein are connected with the mastery of techniques and rational agreements. Could Hunters and gatherers before 10000 and 8000 BC be said to be “Masters” of any technique? One wonders here whether Harari is projecting relatively advanced mental states onto relatively primitive behavioural patterns. Prior to the systematic functioning of language, the medium of cultural transmission, according to Jaynes is the imitation of someone else’s behaviour. This cannot be construed as following a rule which requires a level of consciousness beyond that required to follow a command by someone or imitate their behaviour.
The use of the linguistic shifter “I” comes even later than the age of names and signifies an even higher level of consciousness in which first-person avowals become possible, a use of language that may be necessary for the operation of following a rule. The avowal “Now I understand” may be necessary if one is to be able to follow a rule and this cognitive level may also be necessary for the understanding of fictive language.

Animism began to weaken during the agricultural revolution, Harari argues and animated rocks, springs, ghosts, and demons gave way to a polytheistic collection of gods. We can see a difference in the conceptualization of life forms in the above example. Animals and natural phenomena are “mastered” during the agricultural revolution and the result is a consciousness of the difference between the kinds of existence of physical phenomena and animal forms of life. Polytheism then develops into a stage on the way to monotheism where there is an acknowledgment of one unified power superior to these gods(Fate, Moira, or Ananke?).
It would be pointless to ask such a power for a victory in a local war because it has no concern with the human desire to be or human efforts to maintain themselves in existence. Kingdoms and Empires may rise and fall in the purview of this power. Such events are ephemeral and whilst undoubtedly events of significance such significance might not be what we think it is because of the span of infinite time. It is this span of the timeless that is th concern of God or the gods.

Local and regional gods waned in importance possibly because of the cognitive awareness of the inefficacy of “deals” with the god of war. The humanist will see this as a natural progression in an awareness of one’s own active responsibility. If one wishes to win a war, acquire knowledge of how wars are won and prepare accordingly. This is not Harari’s position who praises polytheism for its open-mindedness, refusal to persecute non-believers. and refusal to participate in the missionary practice of “the conversion of the native”.

Harari rightly points out that monotheists saw other monotheists as heretical or as infidels and responded very often in violent terms but does not explore the possibility that there were a number of reasons for this states of affairs. He points out that polytheism also gave birth to dualistic religions that divide the empire of the world into two: the good and the evil, but he does not explore how this dualism infected monotheism to the extent that this battleground of the good and evil was fought by “us vs them”. He points out how difficult it was for monotheists to accommodate the assumption of dualism. The God of monotheism was a god of order and order cannot be produced on a battleground that seeks to divide up the empire of the world into two camps. The monotheist Aristotle believed in was a God of order who was necessarily good and conceived of the fight between good and evil as an activity which was in some sense “aiming at the good”. There cannot be a battle therefore between what is good and what is evil, there can only be a battle between what is “good” and what is “evil”. This is the message of humanism but for Harari Religious humanism would be a kind of contradiction which it clearly is not.

Harari points to the phenomenon of the emergence of religions during the first millennium BC that was characterized by a disregard of gods: Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Epicureanism. He also recalled that for some religions gods were “subject to” natural laws. For the humanist like Aristotle it is not the case that his idea of the divine was subject to the natural laws(the laws of physics?) It is, however, not out of the question that for Aristotle there is a conceptual identity between laws of change and the divine.

There is a very interesting discussion of Buddhism in which the central figure is as Harari says “not a god but a human being” who sought explanations behind the various forms of human suffering. Buddha pointed to the restless, suffering spirit of man: a spirit that apparently can never be satisfied with material things that all vanish “like smoke” at the point of death.

The restless mind seeks to escape suffering and can do so this work argues only be putting an end to one’s craving or by training the mind to stoically accept reality as it is, accept i.e. Fate, Moira, and Ananke. It is not clear what exactly is meant here in the above account of Buddhism. If it is the case that the desire for enlightenment is motivating all our activity and our restless activity then is this also a fire that must be put out? If so, this position entailing as it does rebirth whilst the fire continues to burn, as we know is the motivator of the reincarnation thesis and this Harari says nothing about in his evaluation of this “religion”.

The most startling claim in the book is contained in a section entitled “The Worship of Man”. Harari in this section argues that theist religions have lost their importance in this age of secularisation (during the last 300 years) but a number of other “religions(?)” such as liberalism, communism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism (which he calls “natural law religions”) have arisen during this “modern age” that has borne witness to the bloodiest wars in history.

Humanism is not on this list but it might be implied by liberalism. If so, we are being asked to regard Humanism, Capitalism, Communism, and Nazism as “religions”. This is the clearest consequence of the failure of this work to include a consideration of philosophical ethics in its reflections upon the history of mankind. It is clear that the idea of “the good” and the “Sacred” are being bracketed in the production of the above incredible members of the category of “religions”. The question is whether any restless activity craving change of any kind does not qualify for membership of the above very tenuously constructed class. The problem arises because of the separation of the idea of god and the good from so-called “laws of nature. The failure to recognize the conceptual connections between these notions which have been discussed by Philosophers for over 2000 years merely exacerbates the problem. Harari does not care much for the cognitive structure of language that stops one using just any term for any phenomenon one wishes to name and in that respect, his work falls clearly into the niche of postmodernist writings. In a section entitled “The Worship of Man,” it is argued that it makes no difference whether you wish to categorize communism as an ideology or a religion.

There are no clear boundaries between these concepts, he claims, but he does not motivate the abandonment of a number of long traditions of inquiry that would insist on the difference between a political system and a religion, between a system of monetary distribution(capitalism) and a religion. This conceptual ambivalence is puzzling: it is not as if Harari is advocating for the importance of religion.

Finally, Harari claims that humanists believe that humans are the most important thing in the world and the supreme good. This may or may not be an acceptable account depending upon whether the limitations of human rationality that all humanists share an awareness of, is included in the account. More contentiously Harari divides humanism into liberal humanism, social humanism(Communism?) and evolutionary humanism(Nazism).
Totalitarianism was characterized by Hannah Arendt as an ideology which inverts the good into evil and vice versa. Hitler and Stalin were mass murderers and placing them in the same humanistic category as philosophical humanists such as Aristotle, Kant, and Ricoeur is an example of both postmodernist and totalitarian thinking. From a postmodernist viewpoint, this would be a fine revisionist view of history, philosophy, and language.

September 4, 2018January 31, 2020

“Sapiens, A brief history of humankind”(Yuval Noah Harari) Critique and Commentary from a Philosophical Perspective(Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein) Part three

The title of this book is ” a brief history of mankind” but there are major historical omissions that probably relate to:
a)a limited view of the role of Philosophy in our History and
b)a limited view of philosophical politics.
The Ancient Greek contribution to ethical and political universalism is mysteriously conspicuous by its absence in this account as is the Kantian account of the universalism and objectivity of the moral law that turned out to be the moral argument for universal human rights. In a chapter entitled “The Arrow of history” Harari claims that during the first millennium BC the universal thought emerged that the entire world could be ruled by a set of laws. We became aware that the world is a “we” that is no longer divided into an “us and a them”. Three universal orders emerged in this era: the economic, political, and religious. Merchants, conquerors, and priests saw the world alternately as potential customers, potential citizens, and potential believers. If this is correct this is a singularly interesting observation which would prove that this era was the birth time of globalisation.

Aristotle is reputed to have claimed, in the name of political philosophy, (which does not aim at military conquest but rather emphasizes the role of knowledge of truth and the good in the flourishing life), that the Greeks “armed” with their political philosophy could rule the world. It is not clear whether Alexander the Great was attempting to instantiate this Aristotelian belief but Jonathan Lear in his work on Aristotle focuses not on belief but rather on the desire we all universally possess to understand our world. Lear argues that this is the telos of rational human activity. If he is correct, it is a short step to propose that this might be the basis of all human and political activity everywhere. Knowledge and understanding of the truth and the good are not the primary concern of merchants or conquerors but they are the concern of prophets even if the approach of the prophet very often clashes with philosophical ideas of justice. We are all familiar with the Platonic dialogue “Euthyphro”in which Socrates contested an action done in the name of the “holy”, arguing that it was “unjust”. There is, in the desire to understand, a concern with abstract knowledge that we will not find in the activities of merchants working in their markets or conquerors building their Empires. Socrates began a tradition in Philosophical reasoning that attempts to achieve an understanding of the truth and the good in all areas of activity. He also emphasized the perception and understanding of differences between, for example, fact and fiction, myth and religion, the wealthy life vs the examined life. This spirit was again embraced fully by Kant in his Enlightenment Philosophy in which knowledge of human nature, ethics, and political philosophy are central concerns in the formation of the idea of the Cosmopolitan citizen. The interesting question to ask is why Harari in a work on mankind chooses to ignore such an important part of the history of mankind. It might even be the case that the philosophical view of universalism is the most important mechanism driving the world in its global or cosmopolitan direction. The kingdom of ends for Kant was neither a market nor an empire nor a purely religious phenomenon, although we find that in Kant’s kingdom there is room for a belief in God grounded not in mythology but in ethical understanding and reasoning.

In a section entitled “The New Global Empire” there is some historical comment on nation-states but not as much as one would have expected. It is correctly pointed out that mankind has spent most of its time living in Empires. The nation-state is a relatively recent phenomenon and Harari also rightly takes the position that the signs are that we are heading in the direction of a new global empire. Nationalism exploded in our faces during the last century, a century that Hannah Arendt described as “this terrible century”. She also argued that nationalism, capital, and military expansionism contributed to the emergence of a new form of totalitarian government based on class and race that set the world on fire. There is no mention of this aspect that religious prophets and philosophers may claim to have foreseen. Arendt quotes the story of Cecil Rhodes expressing a wish to colonize the planets as an illustration of the excesses that drives capital searching for investment and men searching for their fortunes. This aspect of capitalisms insatiable desire for greater and greater accumulation is not mentioned in Harari’s sweeping historical account. The argument presented for the new global empire is, however, occasionally philosophical with a biological twist as is instantiated by his claims in a Chapter entitled “Imperial Visions”. Harari argues here that nationalism is losing ground in the twentieth century and a universal idea of mankind including the imaginative construction of universal human rights has emerged. The existence of over 200 nation-states attempting to agree on issues of global warming and other issues of international concern will eventually result in global consensus, it is argued.

Philosophers would in this context refer to global understanding and the importance of knowledge of the truth and the good in naming the underlying mechanisms of the global transformation we are witnessing. These are the tools of the progress we are now seeing after the terrible twentieth century and its economic and political excesses. After excess comes the inevitable return to the golden mean, Aristotle would argue. Kant specifically claimed that this progress away from excesses was not toward a world government because such a government would inevitably be tyrannical and be forced to tyrannize minorities. We know he prophetically suggested an organization such as the United Nations where countries would participate voluntarily and cooperate for the common good. Such an organization is indeed an embodiment of the global understanding of the importance of peace in the world and vitally important if Progress is to continue unhindered. But we should also bear in mind that this march of progress is a slow affair and we should not expect the instantiation of the ethical and political notion of a perpetual peace in the world in the next one hundred thousand years. The golden mean is even in historical terms a long way beyond the historical horizon and unfortunately, in Harari’s work, we get no indication of the time scale for the emergence of the new global empire or the reasons why states feel obliged to conform to global standards.

September 2, 2018January 31, 2020

“Sapiens, A brief history of humankind”(Yuval Noah Harari)Critique and Commentary from a Philosophical Perspective(Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein) Part two

Yuval Noah Harari has much to say in his chapter “Building Pyramids” by way of comparing the acts of imagination that lay behind the building of the pyramids and the acts of imagination that he claims constitute our idea of Human Rights. He claims that we human beings alone and no other species of animal have naturally endowed human rights. He contrasts the human rights we construct by imagination with natural physical orders ruled by the law of gravitation and points out the relation between imagination and mythology and the need to safeguard via violence and coercion our imagined constructions with armies and the institutions of law.

Harari does admittedly qualify this extreme Hobbesian position by saying that belief in the objects of the imagination is also needed for the establishment of order. Once again we see the distorted results of a bi-polar characterization of the world in terms of myths and facts. What is needed to correctly describe the above state of affairs is a whole universe of discourse with large numbers of interconnected concepts possessing logical relations to each other and an Aristotelian/Kantian Philosophical psychology that will recognize imagination to be a power that principally is connected to our powers of perception and emotion. Imagination can also be connected to two powers that radically transform its function: namely, the powers of language (discourse) and reason. This latter system of concepts and human powers are behind why we believe in both gravity and human rights. There are , however, it could be argued, many more reasons to believe in the existence of human rights than the existence of gravity and whilst there is absolutely no reason to doubt the existence of the latter as a law, there may be philosophical reasons to doubt one or more of its underlying assumptions: the claim that space is curved for example for some philosophers may contain a contradiction forced upon us by a belief that space has real mathematical Euclidean properties. Is this latter belief a result of the mathematical imagination? Could it be a myth? If so the bipolar division of our experience of the world into imaginative myths and real facts is otiose. What is puzzling is the fact that Harari in his determination to avoid using philosophy in the infrastructure of his argument is providing old discredited philosophical pictures of our social and political realities. Hobbes we know was passionately anti- Aristotelian for no good reason. He also talked about violence and coercion as means the state can use to bring about order in society. The Aristotelian/Kantian picture of a man being a rational animal capable of discourse bringing about the order in society by educational processes using argument and logic is systematically undermined in this work, firstly, by the simplistic distinctions of the imagined and the real and secondly, by bipolar accounts of belief and knowledge.

Echoes of the Hobbesian picture of a middle-class businessman seeking to lead what he called a commodious life are present also in the claims that meeting the immediate biological needs of humans is a simple matter and excess money can then be spent on holidays, elections, the stock market and pyramids. This is, of course, a very different conception of life than that we find in the thoughts of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Aristotle was the first biologist and embedded his biological theory in a philosophical theory of immense scope and complexity that included four different kinds of explanations for all physical, social, and political change in the world. This theory was built upon a view of man as attempting to fulfil his potential as a rational animal by the systematic and rational use of discourse aimed at shaping minds. Aristotle would have seriously criticized the need-based commodious life of the Hobbesi an middle-class businessman that Harari provides a sketch of above. Bi-polar explanations may satisfy such a Hobbesian man or the man Harari claims wishes to please his wife by building a pyramid for her. It is important to note however that such bi-polar explanations are not exactly educational, i.e. they do not shape minds. Arguments and explanations shape minds in the Aristotelian universe where the ideal is the middle-class man whose mind is shaped by educational argument and discourse: for example, by the middle class man who leads an examined life that might include taking a holiday to

a)further ones knowledge of the different forms such an examined life might take and b)to communicate one’s knowledge of the world and one’s culture.

For Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the life of the wealthy man failed to actualise the potential of such a man to lead a flourishing life and whilst they may have agreed that imagination played a large role in their life they would have pointed to failures on the part of such men to submit their beliefs to a tribunal of rational, critical, scrutiny. Such a scrutiny may reveal a belief in myths such as that making money can shape one’s mind or that the gods are smiling upon such activity, but such myths cannot be compared to the reasons someone influenced by philosophical reasoning may give for their belief in the importance of knowledge and human rights. The distinctions between what is a good reason to believe in something and a myth, completely disappear in this part of Harari’s work. The distinction between the CEO OF Peugeot who faces the tribunal of his shareholders every quarter with his power point presentation and the leader of a political party who faces with his arguments the tribunal of critical discussion of his/her ideas every day also disappears in this bi-polar conceptual environment.

Justice and human rights are inextricably linked so it is no surprise to find Harari in his chapter entitled ” There is no Justice in History” claiming that justice is an imagined order that historically has been neither neutral nor fair. The problem with this reasoning is that this simplistic infrastructure of history plus biology does not enable one to make historically and philosophically established distinctions between social and political structures. Harari points out that Hammurabi’s code was hierarchical, in particular in those parts of the code where the law specifically refers to the social classes of the superiors, the commoners, and the slaves. He also points to the American Constitution which although saying that all men are equal was accompanied by continuing hierarchical social practices of owning slaves. A modern political analysis would philosophically establish that the intention of the constitution was clearly egalitarian and its role was to signal to the social system that discrimination and oppression ought not to occur on the grounds of colour creed or wealth: a wealthy white Christian ought to stand before the law and ought to be viewed in the eyes and principles of the law in exactly the same terms as a poor black Muslim. This may not always work in practice because judges and juries are people who allow their prejudices to cloud their understanding of the law. This fat however, does not permit the degradation of the reasoned body of doctrine we call the law into a figment of the imagination. The problem here does not lie with the law or our concept of the law but with the individuals and social processes enforcing the law. Equating this body of doctrine with myth is confusing individual and social practices with political ideals. Laws do not work immediately on individuals and social practices, rather, they work at the pace of history which is a quicker pace than evolution but at a slower pace than many critics imagine or wish for. The American civil war was fought over the Enlightenment idea of the dignity of all men that had been argued for Philosophically somewhat later (in the 1780’s and 1790’s by Kant using the idea of a moral law.) The American civil war did not immediately enforce the Kantian moral law that was based on the teleological assumption that all men are ends in themselves and were, therefore, to be valued equally and respected equally. This moral law amounted to saying that they ought to be valued and respected which does not actually logically entail that they are. It does not, either, on the other hand, logically warrant the claim that there is no ground for engaging in the desired behaviour. The moral law is one of the foundations of our modern legal systems in Europe where wealthy white Christians and poor black Muslims stand accused and are expected to be subjected to the same neutral regard and assumption of innocence. Notice that I am not denying that social practices involved in the implementation of the law sometimes disobey the moral law or the intention of the laws of the land. But also notice we do not, as a consequence of our disappointment, change the law because it, as a matter of fact, is not universally applied in all cases. We attempt to correct the social processes causing deviations from its universal application, and we continue to do so sometimes with social and sometimes with political processes. Martin Luther King used social processes to force an alteration of laws that were in fact not in accordance with the moral law or the US Constitution and he used a combination of moral and religious argumentation to do so. So, one civil war and one civil rights movement have undoubtedly improved a social situation that is still dysfunctional. What we are witnessing here is the slow rate of change of social processes in accordance with the Kantian and philosophical idea of “progress”. Kant wisely spoke of a future state of affairs as the kingdom of ends” and claimed that such a kingdom would take one hundred thousand years to establish. What is occurring here is a process of change that is not evolutionary(taking millions of years) or historical(taking hundreds of years) but something in between. Such processes bear witness to the fact that the rationality of the species of homo sapiens will take a long time to fully actualize. That it was however a telos guiding our activities was never, however, doubted by Kant or by Aristotle. In the light of such considerations the title of this chapter “There is no Justice in History” is paradoxical or at the very least unnecessarily ambiguous.

Social processes may well contain contradictory activities but it is difficult to fathom how the political ideas of equality and liberty are contradictory. Firstly it is important to note that equality does not mean “equal with respect to every characteristic”: something “equal in every characteristic” to something else would be identical with that thing and the two hypothetically postulated things would, in fact, be one. The idea of equality is related to a social and a legal context. In the social context it refers to equality of opportunity and in the legal context, it refers to equality in relation to the way in which the law treats two individuals of differing characteristics(the wealthy white Christian and the poor black Muslim). Harari claims that the laws of physics are non-contradictory which is not the case with our imaginative constructions. The beliefs in the fundamental values of equality and freedom imagined values that contradict each other because one cannot guarantee each individual the freedom they wish for without compromising the value of equality.

Kant did not see any contradiction once one recognizes the necessary distinctions between the absolute values of freedom and equality embodied by a moral law that respects the absolute value of the dignity of man in contrast with the relative values of a French aristocracy defending its class related privileges. Richer than..or poorer than… are obvious relative values and can best use the quantitative instruments of the mathematician and scientist to measure the differences. No such instrument can be used to measure the dignity of man which is a concept that does not behave like a variable looking for a value. The dignity of man is an ethical idea, an idea that cannot be quantified. Harari is in the above quote confusing a state of affairs with a conceptualization of a state of affairs. The concept of liberty is not the concept of every man doing what he wishes to do. It includes, as Kant pointed out, a limiting condition related to equality, namely that we can do what we wish to do as long as what we wish to do does not encroach upon another mans liberty. There is no contradiction in such a linkage between the concepts. Such a linkage is conceptual and the very foundation of our very rational ideas of governmental authority and human rights. That there are states of affairs in which men wish for no governmental authority to be exercised over their lives is a fact but that does not make the concept of government authority a myth.

August 31, 2018January 31, 2020

“Sapiens, A brief history of humankind”(Yuval Noah Harari) Critique and Commentary from a Philosophical Perspective(Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein) Part one

This is an enthralling and interesting book taking us on a journey across enormous spans of time with a minimum of infrastructure of History and Biology. The timeline given at the beginning of the work sketches both the enormous scope of this work as well as indicating its enormous limitations.
13.5 billion years ago, Dr Yuval Noah Harari claims, matter and energy “appeared” together with atoms and molecules. Earth it is claimed formed 4.5 billion years ago with the first organisms appearing 3.8 billion years ago. 2.5 million years ago saw the emergence of the genus “Homo” with “Homo Sapiens developing around 200,000 years ago in East Africa. All of these are scientific claims and one presumes that these are facts in spite of philosophical concerns about the grounds for saying that matter and energy appeared at these dates. Is this a description of what the scientist imagines must be the case because of a host of facts or is there some calculation which would tell us the time of the emergence of matter and energy from some primeval source? If there is a “proof” that the universe began to exist at some point in time and everything “exploded into existence then Philosophers would be able to free themselves of the antonymy of the claims that the universe has always existed versus its coming into existence ex nihilo without a cause that itself must have had a cause. It is not as if it is possible to believe the one or the other because even if there is a scientific proof or calculation it is made on the assumption of a kind of causality that appears to be contradictory. Imagining this ex nihilo form of causality is indeed a feat of scientific imagination which the philosopher believes may not be cognitively possible. Indeed it may be the case that the Philosopher is more inclined to believe that nothing significant can be said about the beginning of the universe exactly because it is logically possible that the universe has always existed in some form or another and the dramatic event imagined by the scientist is merely a change for which there is a cause. Aristotle would of course probably have insisted that some kind of unknowable cause or telos could well be operating along with other kinds of cause(material, efficient, formal) With events as vast as the size of the infinite universe it is of course almost impossible to estimate or guess what such a telos might be. It becomes easier with the emergence of life where one can survey the possible telos of the end of all life because of the ability of the logical imagination to conceive of a world without life and a world where life forms begin to exist. Life, this great biological concept, according to Aristotle must be conceived partly teleologically because its essence or formal cause must include the end of the condition that allowed it to come into being. There are of course also the material and efficient causes of life which are the concern of the scientist to chart (without the use of any ex nihilo concept of “cause”)

Dr. Harari places several “revolutions” on his timeline, the first of which is “The Cognitive Revolution”( 70,000 years ago) that he associates mysteriously with the emergence of the language of fiction and which he claims “kick-started” history. Two of the characteristics of the use of language are its capacity to claim what is true as well as the capacity to claim things that are false or fictional. Harari puts a premium, for some reason, on the latter rather than the former power, in spite of the fact that the former might have been the “original intention”, namely to say something or proclaim something that is the case. Both powers are dependent upon one another but it does seem somewhat perverse to emphasize a secondary power at the expense of the primary power. If Julian Jaynes is right and the original source of language is exclamational, a shout of warning, there has to be something which the shout is about(a present danger) if we are to make sense of this otherwise instrumental form of communication. Jaynes claims in his work “The Origins of Consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” that “narratisation arose as a codification of reports of past events but that it required a number of previous stages of the language. Julian Jaynes speaks of exclamational shouts and possible modifier functions of language(40,000 bc) to indicate the nearness or distance of the tiger and the development of this form of langauge to nouns(25,000-15000 bc)and the commanding of actions. Names for people, argues Jaynes came late around 10,000-8000 bc. This is probably the key to narratization because it does seem to be a logical requirement that one has a name for a thing before the thing can be imagined in its absence. Jaynes points to the Natufians at Eynan and the burial practices dating from 9000 bc in towns (of about 200 people) in contrast with their ancestors who were hunters living in caves. This is around the time of the second revolution, the so called Agricultural revolution in which wild species of wheat were domesticated and cultivated. But Jaynes insists that no narratization was as yet possible because that required a more complex cognitive skill of forming in ones mind an analogue self in which they could “see” themselves in relation to others. This required, in Jaynes’s view, an advanced form of mental development in which individuals could begin to plan their futures, a skill involving an analogue I that could do action x or action y. Jaynes thinks that this is the moment of the advent of consciousness which he dates very late , certainly after the 1470 bc earthquake and eruption of Santorini. The guiding influence of this period Jaynes argues, are the hallucinated “voices” of God operating in the context of a rigid hierarchical structure that often collapsed when unusual events demanded unusual actions requiring perhaps a more methodical and reasoned form of consciousness.It is only at this point a long time after 70,000 years ago that we can indeed begin to think of a cognitive revolution involving narratization and an intentional historical record. Dating the Cognitive revolution from 70,000 years ago when it probably occurred well after the start of the Agricultural revolution is therefore probably misleading. A command and control form of language with a putative source in the procession or pantheon of Gods was probably occurring for most of this period when there was no linguistic condition for the truth or falsity of these utterances. The procession of dead kings or Gods(the memory of a dead king, according to Jaynes) begins to become a more historically structured phenomenon after writing was invented but this was an event a long time after 70,000 years ago, the so called beginning of the revolution. The word “revolution” is an interesting one in this context. One can wonder whether it is a purely cognitive matter as T S Eliot suggested when he claimed that at the end of all our explorations we will return back to the beginning and know the place for the first time. Or we can move back in time to that age of intellectual exploration par excellence and reason with Kant that revolution has to do with the kind of change that is “progressive”. History, for Kant, in other words is “teleological” and aiming for a better future. It is not as Harari appears to suggest a bare record of the facts moving toward a holistic totality of facts. History is a value-laden cognitive adventure that has its roots in the ancient Greek ideas of what is good and what is Just: the formal and final causes of Aristotle. This brings us to a major limitation of this work. There is on this timeline nothing from the ancient Greek world that launched our investigations into reasoning and consciousness, the basic elements of any so-called “Cognitive revolution”: basic elements of the so-called “intelligent design” of our societies and world order. The date 70,000 probably refers to the migration of Sapiens from Africa due to what Harari refers to as new ways of thinking and communicating(caused by genetic mutations affecting the functions of the brain) that enabled them to 1. displace the Neanderthals from their place of supremacy in the Middle East and Europe and 2. cross the sea to Australia and 3. to invent boats, lamps, bows, arrows, and needles and 4. speak a new type of language . There is a strange discussion of Peugot and the Stadel lion found in the Stadel cave located in Germany dating from 32000 years ago. The figure is of a lion-man and this is evidence as far as Harari is concerned of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that really do not exist. This object seems to symbolise the presence of what Harari refers to as the “fictional” narrative language referred to earlier. These new linguistic skills, it is claimed, enabled Sapiens to gossip for hours on end(the “gossip theory”)and enabled the organisational group to increase in size to ca 150 individuals. This theory plus the exclamation theory are valid accounts, Harari concludes from a discussion that makes absolutely no reference to Philosophy of language or linguistics. Fiction, Harari argues enables man to imagine things that do not exist collectively. It enables us to transcend the limitations of the gossip theory. The traditional philosophical view that the sizes of the group increased due to the teleological needs of the individual and group and paradoxically, the rule of just laws is not even mentioned in this account. Somehow Harari, the scientist and historian who should be guided by facts and objective values and needs resorts for his explanations instead to Mythology and Religion. These two ares of human activity are in contradistinction to philosophers who believe that religious thought transcends mythology with its proclamatory functions of language embodying judgments of what the community values.Paradoxically, Peugot enters this discussion because, as Harari curiously claims: “Modern businesspeople and lawyers are in fact powerful sorcerers”. The fact that the average life span of a company is 30 years may support the sorcerer theory but the inclusion of lawyers in this category is an astounding view of the nature of the validity of law in the process of holding communities together since the time of the Code of Hammurabi. Apparently some lawyers have taken to calling joint stock companies “legal fictions” on the grounds that they are not physical objects but have legal rights. This is not the controlled use of language that we expect from legal thinkers and we are not far from asserting that because we cannot “see, hear touch, measure a human right” it too must be a fiction. If one is working with a primitive non-philosophical theory of language one should not be surprised at such paradoxical conclusions. If something is not a fact, it must be a fiction is the “logic” of this discourse. What other logical alternatives are there? Well, there are literally thousands and it is extremely puzzling to be confronted by an either /or theory of bipolar extremes for such a complex area of discourse. Aristotle would not have made such a logical mess of describing non physical states of affairs.He would not have thought of Athens as an imagined entity without reality.

Harari uses History as a part of the infrastructure he needs in order to move beyond the limiting confines of Biology when it comes to discussing the issue of the forces and powers that enable large communities to exist as unities. Again, paradoxically, given the total absence of Philosophy in this discussion, it is argued that it is the ability of Homo Sapiens to play games that enable them to transcend their biological limitations. Aristotle formulated a hylomorphic theory that enables the species to integrate the biological life of the body firstly with the imagination of the emotional spirit and secondly the truth-functional and rational essence of our cognitive nature. This is a more panoramic view of the arena of mans existence which does not constrain us to speak either in terms of facts or in terms of fictions/games.

Our actions historically evolve in terms of our cognitive powers that for Aristotle include perception, memory, language, emotion, imagination, and reason. Imagining on its own as a mental function can certainly weave a fabric of fantasy around a carved man-lion and tempt us into believing that the people who made this object are much like us. According to Jaynes’ more philosophically based theory, the people who carved this object were not conscious and were not aware of the difference between reality and fiction. If they could speak to us we probably would not be able to understand them.

Harari also mentions evolutionary psychology in his attempts to “get inside the heads” of our ancestors in order to understand our present-day social and psychological characteristics.

Wittgenstein is a philosopher one can use to try to understand why we should not try to get into someone else’s head if one wishes to understand them. The final justification for him is what we(groups of humans) do in the forms of life we lead. Writing was invented around 3000 bc and at the same time, we see the emergence of the first Egyptian kingdom and the Great Akkadian empire comprising more than one million subjects. Are these two facts merely accidentally related or is there some kind of causal relation between them? Could it be that proclamations of laws in writing (rather than something going on in individuals heads like imagining entities that do not exist) are necessary conditions for the existence of real kingdoms and empires? Is it really tenable to argue that the myths people believed in, played a larger role in the maintenance of kingdoms and empires than the laws that regulated peoples judgments of each other? If Jaynes is correct in his assumption that gods are just dead past kings then are not their judgments just as real as the present day kings who apply their judgments in their legal systems?

Harari uses the example of the Code of Hammurabi in order to illustrate human cooperation in groups. The code was dated from around 1776 bc and used as a model for all legal codes in coming generations. It was used to regulate the largest city on earth at the time, Babylon. Reference was made to previous gods who laid down the framework for the code:

“to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent from oppressing the weak”

There is no need to describe these beings as imagined entities that do not exist, just because they are previous dead kings. This code is very hierarchical and places monetary values on the lives of women and slaves. Jaynes referred to the instability of hierarchical theocracies that often collapsed when reality became too difficult to deal with. According to Harari, these proclamations are associated with imagined entities and cannot, therefore, possess any different status to the Proclamations we find in a document such asThe American Constitution) created during 1776 AD in which it is claimed that all men are created equal in the eyes of God. Men have evolved, argues Harari, therefore they cannot have been created. The document is therefore fictional. The problem with Harari’s bi-polar one-dimensional theory of human cooperation is that one cannot see the law of progress operating between the two codes, especially in terms of the idea of the good and justice. The American Declaration of Independence sufficed to hold millions of citizens together for hundreds of years. Harari basically objects to the Constitution on biological and scientific grounds. One cannot measure happiness, he argues, only pleasure, and we, therefore, cannot regard this as anything more than something inside someone’s head. Aristotle had no difficulty in characterizing conceptually what happiness was and laid down the axiom that in order to be happy a rational language using animal must use his power of rationality. Man, according to philosophical thinking, is not yet collectively happy, but that is because rationality is in the process of installing itself in the species. It is in thoughts such as these that we see the integration of Philosophy, Biology, History, Psychology, Epistemology, Physics and Metaphysics: something we cannot see in the very limited infrastructure of Biology, evolutionary psychology, and History that Harari attempts to use in his attempts to characterise Aristotle’s “rational animal”

August 28, 2018November 23, 2018

Tenth Issue of Journal “The World Explored, the World Suffered.”

August 20, 2018

Fifth Centrepiece lecture by Jude Sutton from the work “The World Explored, the World Suffered: The Exeter lectures.”

Sophia and Robert sat waiting for their Philosophy lecture to begin. The notice board had announced the fact that today’s lecture entitled “Epistemology” would be a double lecture to compensate for the previous cancellation. There were two minutes remaining but no one in the class expected the lecture to begin on time and Jude’s entrance as a consequence passed almost unnoticed. The lecture began exactly on time:
“Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge is one of the traditional divisions of Philosophy along with Metaphysics, Ethics, Political Philosophy, and Logic. It has been the area of Philosophy most susceptible to influence from Science. It may be too soon to tell, but this century may go down in history as being the Third Major Revolution in the History of Philosophy: the first two revolutions having been initiated by Aristotle and Kant respectively. It is always notoriously difficult to point to exactly when a revolution began, and by the way, as revolutions go this one compared with the other two is a minor affair, but I would suggest that, when Bertrand Russell tried to reduce Mathematics to Logic and then subsequently Logicians went on to use Logic to dismantle much of what had been previously established in Metaphysics and Ethics, this was the firing of the first shot by rebel troops across the bows of traditional philosophy. Prior to this of course Science had been surreptitiously undermining the above key areas of thinking and this state of affairs culminated in the establishment of the school of the Logical Positivists. Science allied itself with Logic and Epistemology in the positivist school, and proceeded to colonise every area of knowledge: dismantling religion, politics, and aesthetics on the way. The resultant philosophical landscape was as open and barren as a desert, with cultural sand-atoms lying juxtaposed ad infinitum in all directions and being shifted only by the winds of scientific and logical methodologies. Almost everything erected by the architects of Aristotle and Kant and their followers had been levelled and all that could be heard in the desert was the wind of the talk of the existence and quantities of X. An American logician by the name of Willard van Orman Quine, inspired by logic and the scientific project claimed: “To be is to be the value of a variable”. In such terminology one can detect the presence of the wraith of a Philosopher who distrusts European metaphysics. Philosophy then responded with the work of Wittgenstein who, in his earlier work spoke for the opposition, but was stopped in his tracks by the collective tonnage of argument from the traditional philosophers. The later Wittgenstein subsequently began restoring the landscape of traditional Philosophy from his base at Trinity College Cambridge where I met him. His restoration of archaic concepts and arguments from the ancient Greeks and the Enlightenment period, occurred in his posthumous works. This restoration work was performed of course with the tools from Wittgenstein’s toolbox.
In last week’s lecture we talked of certainty and the difficulty of specifying the criteria that provide the truth conditions of the physical world. Descartes in response to scientific and mathematical methodologies felt the philosophical landscape being eroded and began to dig the grave of metaphysics by locating certainty epistemologically in an “I”, which thinks. “Cogito ergo sum”, he famously argued: “I think therefore I am. Perhaps he too, like at least one of the pre-Socratics who were responding to the natural philosophers of their time, thought that everything of importance was located in the mind. But like Plato, a fellow traveler, Descartes was a mathematician who surpassed his predecessor by resting his case on methodology. He rested his case on what some commentators have referred to as a skeptical methodology that may be a contradiction, if a methodology’s primary purpose is to coordinate facts and principles systematically. In connection with this point we should also note that a certain kind of mathematician seems to believe only in those ideas he has constructed himself. He “knows” 7+5=12 because he knows the rule for the construction of seven, he also knows the rule for the use of “the plus operation” which requires moving sequentially in the system of numbers, five times. The answer “twelve” then presents itself for inspection like the time on the face of a clock. In this constructed world there is no room for mistakes. Everything works with the precision of the military. We should not forget that Descartes was also a military man who would sometimes search for wars to fight in. The man who could die the next moment, ladies and gentlemen, has no use for ethics or metaphysics. Everything is a variable with a possibly varying value. Logically, a variable is a quantity. What else is a desert, ladies and gentlemen, than a quantity of sand? The desert traditionally is the place to look for God. For Descartes, only God could assure us that our calculations and thought-experiments were not the doings of an evil-demon intent upon imprisoning us in a bubble of false certainty. On Descartes’ right shoulder sat a priest in clerical robes calling out in a desert for God. On his left shoulder sat a philosopher in Grecian robes calling for justice and wisdom, trying to navigate away from the desert of atoms and numbers to a human world. But Descartes never made it out of the desert and settled firstly, for a lone thinker thinking about his landscape, and secondly, for the importance of his own thinking. Descartes’ “Cogito” argument, ladies and gentlemen, was the result of this cocktail of Religion, Mathematics, Science, Psychology and Philosophy. “I think therefore I am” is an epistemological argument, an argument in the theory of knowledge. The argument is solipsistic, a lone predator in a philosophical wilderness and because of this it is unable to acknowledge any of the ethical truths of Socrates, Plato or Aristotle.”
Mark Cavendish, raised his hand and asked:
“But surely there is a great deal of truth in the solipsistic system of Descartes. Take the 30 people sitting here with their thoughts. For all we know everyone is interpreting what you are saying in their individual ways and everyone will take their own truths from this class”
“Well”, “Jude answered, “If that were true, teachers would be redundant: at best our words would be stimuli to be responded to. A collective of solipsists does not a class or a society or a course in philosophy make. We are all sitting here for a collective reason or purpose. The words I utter have a collective reason or purpose because of their content and context. I am, however, inclined to agree with you that there is an individual, psychological component that probably relates to the way in which we understand the content. But there is a very important ethical element in this collective image and that refers to the products of reason that relate to how we ought to live and perhaps also, to how we ought to think. Aristotle made significant philosophical contributions to both of these aspects of our collective image of the teaching situation via his writings on Logic and Ethics.”
A Mathematics major raised his hand tentatively and asked:
“I do not quite understand your objection to the Mathematical claim that reality contains quantities best measured by our number system.
“It’s a long story, but one of my objections would consist in questioning whether we can, in fact, reduce the qualities we are experiencing in reality to quantities. I am sure some of you have come across the following example in the literature for this course: It is claimed by scientific reductionists that “Red is 690 Angström units”. The “is” in that formulation functions logically more like the “is” of identity than the “is” of predication simply because the units must logically be quantities and the quantities involved here seem to be quantities of angstrom units rather than the quality of red. Put more simply, I do not believe that scientific or mathematical characterisation or quantification of qualities are in any sense, essence specifying. The only sensible way to analyse the statement “Red is 690 Angström units”, in my opinion, is to regard it as a “hypothetical”, for example, “If color is measurable in a particular measuring system then red may be 690 Angström units..”. However in retreating to the realm of the quantitatively possible or the hypothetical, we lose the relation to the categorical truth that Aristotle maintained it was the task of science to demonstrate. According to Aristotle, Science should tell us categorically what kind of thing is in the universe. Imaginative hypotheticals belong to the realm of the possibly true and the possibly false.”
The student continued:
“Let’s confine ourselves to Mathematics and the Pythagorean claim that reality is mathematical. Surely there is nothing hypothetical about that claim”
“Good point. The Pythagoreans claim that the qualitative experiences we have of the harmony of harp strings is describable by the relation between numbers and there is also as you say a categorical claim to the effect that reality is mathematical. I pluck the strings of the harp and the sound waves emitted are then measured by a scientist in the vicinity of the vibrations. He also notes, or knows, that the sound waves are an effect of the vibration of the strings. These are the first links in a chain of phenomena which are required if we are to be permitted to speak categorically about the qualitative harmony of the qualitative notes heard by a listener in the vicinity of the vibrations. Of course the listener may have been listening to a novice learning to play the harp and the sound/notes may not have a harmonic quality at all: but even in this case there is no motivation to reduce the experience to its quantitative measurable characteristics. Why? The scientist is actually measuring waves of vibration and in doing so could conceivably ignore the sound as heard by any listener. If this makes sense then the two are not identical. Sound is received and processed by our perceptual system that can of course operate quantitatively. We complain, for example, that the sound is too loud or too low. Notwithstanding this observation, the primary purpose or telos of our perceptual system, is to detect change in general but also to discriminate, to detect differences between entities. We hear, for example, that one note is different to another, that these notes are harmonic and those are not. In arguing about the differences between the quantitative and the qualitative we refer to what Aristotle called categories of being. For him, Being had many meanings of which the meaning “substantial being”, was at one point in his work the most important. The quantitative and the qualitative are two aspects of being or reality. The quantitative aspect of reality is certainly the concern of the physical or natural scientist. The mathematician, for example, may concern himself with the structure of space and time that may well be infinite if Pythagoras is right about our number and geometrical systems being a reflection of reality and its infinite structure. Another aspect of reality is qualitative: this aspect is concerned with the way in which our perceptual system organises physical phenomena into a system of differences, using perceptual difference as the criterion: red is different to blue which is different to yellow, which is different to green and each is different to every other. This is just one chapter of a long story. So, to cut this long story short I will just say that in answer to your question I would admit that space and time is probably best described quantitatively using the tools of the mathematician. I might be prepared to concede that matter is also potentially infinite in a number of respects and is best described and explained using the instruments of the scientist. But this admission does not rule out that space and time can and perhaps should be investigated qualitatively—in terms of our experience of them. Here the long stories of the great novelists might contribute to this kind of investigation. The lived space and time of the body and its body image might, to take another example, be usefully investigated by phenomenological psychologists such as Merleau-Ponty. Finally, the lived space and time of a consciousness oriented towards the memory of its past and towards the future of its projects might be usefully investigated by existential psychologists such as Sartre and Heidegger.
In short I agree with Aristotle that there are many different kinds of explanation as to why reality is as it is. Some explanations will have a quantitative character and some will have a qualitative character. As a matter of fact, one might believe, as many philosophers have done, that the qualitative explanations may be more philosophically interesting.
Robert put up his hand and asked:
“Have you given us a complete argument for the existence of qualities and how is this relevant to the relation between epistemology and metaphysics?”
“Upon being confronted by something which is aqua-marine blue a philosopher might ask “What is aqua-marine blue?” and receive the obvious answer that it is a shade of a colour. The philosopher may then ask: “What is colour?” and receive the answer “A quality”. The answers up to this point may be within the scope and limits of our knowledge. The further question: “What is a quality?” and its answer: “A quality is a quality of something real” may take us into the realm of metaphysics, the realm which Heidegger designates as the study of being qua being. So, in answer to your question the answer “A quality” may be an epistemological terminus of the questioning. In other words that something is a quality is an epistemological justification for it being a colour. An epistemologist may not be able to justify that colours exist but he can justify that red or aqua marine are colours. The interesting question here is whether it makes sense to ask whether qualities exist. I will leave this open.
The Mathematics major raised his hand again:
“Ok I understand it is difficult to state categorically what the relation of Mathematics to reality is, but it seems to me that Mathematics is a system of knowledge that has its own methods of justification for the truth of its claims, if we exclude for the moment the ultimate justifications for mathematical truth. Surely there is not much doubt that 7+5=12 is true”
“Yes I take your point but let me in the name of leaving that question open, challenge you with a question on an epistemological level: Would you want to claim, for example, that “7+5=12 is true” has a more secure justification than the statement, “Michelangelo’s sculpture “Times of the Day” is a beautiful work of art”
“Well disputes about 7+5=12 don’t break out amongst mathematicians as they seem to do among art critics or the general population”
“Good point. You are appealing to the principle of inter-subjective agreement amongst mathematicians who are in agreement over the methods they use to solve even more difficult problems than that raised by the issue of what the sum of 7 plus 5 amounts to. Thus far we are in agreement. With respect to the judgment about whether an art object is beautiful or not, I think we are in the realm of whether a technical activity has uniquely created a universal feeling that one can speak with a universal inter-subjective voice about. This realm requires an understanding of the Greek terms techné and arête as well as how the ideas of the good or the excellent organises perception and action. Art as distinct from craft is curious in that it is a deliberated-upon series of action which does not call for action on the part of the spectator: the call is for a suspension of any commitment to action, an activation of perception and thought which in turn should “quicken”(to use Kant’s term) in the appreciator a general attitude about our lives. This attitude is referred to in Wittgenstein’s earlier work by the term sub specie aeternitatis, a term that means looking at the world in wonder and seeing it under the aspect of the timeless. Kant in his work the “Critique of Judgment” described this attitude in terms of a boundless happy outlook on life. Now perhaps a mathematician may wish to claim that 7+5=12 is a timeless truth, a truth for all time. What the mathematician means by this is that nothing can happen in the world to change a 7 into a 6 or into an 8: similarly nothing could happen in the application of the operation +5 so that instead of landing on 12 when applied to 7 it lands on 11 or 13 instead. The happenings in the world are irrelevant to numbers once they have been inserted into a framework of calculation. A temperature may change from 15 degrees centigrade to 20 degrees centigrade but the number 15 cannot change into the number 20, unless it is inserted into an equation: e.g. 15+5=20. But even in this case it does seem somewhat odd to insist that the number 15 has changed into the number 20. Numbers are differentials, discrete entities, and it would seem therefore to be more natural to insist that the number 15 retains its identity even after undergoing the operation of the addition of 5. To illustrate this, imagine I am given the task of counting the cows in two towns. I discover 15 cows in Plymouth and 5 cows in Exeter. In the report I write that there are a total of 20 cows in the two towns but surely somewhere in the report I refer to the 15 cows in Plymouth and the 5 cows in Exeter. Here it seems that the number of objects engages with the concept of identity but I nevertheless think it is an open question whether the identity of the number, the 15 cows from Plymouth, is part of the space time continuum, or whether it is part of the thought quantifying the space time continuum. Many philosophers in relation to this question would side with the critical idealists against the Pythagorean realists, the latter rather than the former “
Robert raised his hand again:
“But is it merely the agreement of a community of mathematicians which justifies the truth of 7+5=12? Surely the mere existence of an activity or group of activities cannot make something true? Is it not rather the Scientist who is the true follower of Pythagoras? If a scientist claims that All Swans are white and reality throws up a non-white swan, the claim has to be abandoned. Reality is the standard by which he measures his truth claims.”
“And yet Plato, dedicated follower of Pythagoras that he was, seeks his standard not in the fluctuating ever changing stream of reality but rather in the forms the mind uses to understand reality. But I take your point, because perhaps it is Aristotle who is the true follower of Pythagoras and because Plato could not philosophically explain how the forms came to be in the mind. His pupil Aristotle took the plunge and insisted that the forms are out there in the ever-fluctuating river of reality. He saw the order in these processes of fluctuating change, an order he claimed was produced by the essence of things: essences that make things what they are. This order is tracked by our thought enabling the concepts we use to classify and categorise events in the world to be combined in what Heidegger called a veritative or truth making synthesis. Reality gives rise to classification and categorisation that in turn gives rise to the truth of our statements. Aristotle saw that the problem with Plato’s forms was the fact that they disguised the different metaphysical weights different forms possessed. The two statements “Heraclitus is pale” and “Heraclitus is human” have basically the same metaphysical status for Plato. There is this metaphysical form of paleness and Heraclitus is a part of this form or participates in it. He participates in the form of Humanity in similar fashion. Aristotle saw that these two statements have very different logical implications. Heraclitus spends a day on the beach and is tanned as a result and everyone complements him on his healthy tan. No one regrets the loss of his paleness. On the other hand, were Heraclitus to lose his humanity everyone who knew him would regret this loss. Confronted by the non-human remnant of Heraclitus, there may even be a reluctance to use his name to call him. Whatever we are now confronted with would belong to some other category of reality than human substance. We know that Heraclitus himself thought that he had lost his humanity and had become a divine being. Aristotle’s world is constituted of a manifold of essences and in this account reality is quite clearly the standard bearer of our knowledge of the physical world. My objection to your claim that modern scientists are the true followers of Pythagoras is simply that I wonder whether Pythagoras would subscribe to the reductionism we see in modern science. The categories of substance, quality, action, time and place are ruthlessly reduced to the categories of quantity and relation. Pythagoras made no statements about the humanity of harp players. He was concerned to describe and explain the physical vibrations of the harp strings and the relation of these vibrations to the experienced harmony of sounds produced.
Sophia raised her hand
“Can you give us a concrete example of how the combinations of terms belonging to different categories can generate Truth?”
Take the two expressions “Parmenides” and “is swimming”. Hopefully we all agree that these two expressions refer to different kinds of things in reality—firstly, what Aristotle called human substance and second, the action of a living creature possessing a body with arms and legs. Combine these two terms into one and you get “Parmenides is swimming”: this is a proposition that claims something to be true of or in reality. This can be demonstrated by asking what makes this statement true. Clearly Parmenides walking up a hill will not make the statement true and the observation that Heraclitus is swimming in the river will also not make the statement true: only certain very specific events occurring in combination in reality will suffice to make the statement true. Parmenides, that particular form of human substance possessing arms and legs that he uses to swim across the river is what is needed. In other words reality needs to manifest firstly the criteria for the existence of this particular form of human substance we call Parmenides and secondly the criteria for that activity or action we call swimming.
Robert raised his hand:
“How would you characterise human substance? Does it take the place of Platonic forms in Aristotle’s system?”
“In a sense, yes. All other categories depend upon substance for their existence. You cannot, for example have swimming without some human or animal-like substance doing the swimming. The substance that Parmenides possesses is not shareable amongst a number of things but this substance is a bearer of properties that are shareable. Parmenides may, for example weigh more than 65 kilograms and this may be true of many other human substances. If we see him walking up the hill after his swim we may ask the question “What is it?” and there are two possible answers: “Parmenides” or “a human being”. The latter answer refers to what Aristotle would refer to as the formal cause of “Parmenides”.
The Mathematics major raised his hand:
“What kind of substance is number, then?”
“Mathematicians speak of the cardinal and ordinal aspects of the number system and some have defined its cardinal aspect in quantitative terms and some have defined the ordinal aspect of the number system in relational terms. The philosopher when confronted with these two aspects, of course begins to wonder whether one aspect is the primary aspect and the other secondary. One route we can use to investigate this matter would be to ask the questions “Quantities of what?” “Relations between what?” The answer some mathematicians have been inclined to give in both cases is “Units”. The quantities are quantities of ones and relations are relations with respect to a sequence of ones. Quantities seem then to be generated by an operation or rule n plus one. This rule can be seen to be ruling the idiosyncratic fluctuations of the stream of events in reality by measuring it in terms of the same plus the same. Thus, imposing a unitary measure on the before’s and after’s in relation to time. We should notice here the relation of the terms “unit” and “unitary”. It was an ancient dream of Parmenides and perhaps of some philosophers coming after him to gather all difference and plurality in the world into the “One”, the “unitary”. Condense everything into one point. Now we can imagine the entrance of Pythagoras and his reflections into the debate on the relations between a starting point and a resting point: an operation, which generates an actual straight line from two potential mathematical points. And from lines we can generate triangles and even circles and every imaginable and conceivable shape except perhaps square circles. So what we have is a continuous space made up of points lacking extension and a time made up of mathematical units each following upon one another, capable of measuring vast extents of past and future time, maybe even up to infinity. This space can of course be divided up into discrete parcels with both concepts and numbers and the continuous motion of certain physical processes is clear evidence that time is continuous. Some mathematicians believe of course, that the structures of space and time have been “discovered”. Perhaps it has been easier to explore their discreteness rather than their continuous nature. And if everything that happens, must happen in space and time, then it is small step to take, to claim that what has been discovered is the structure of the world, is a structure which has been constructed by points and numbers out of given continua. The claim is that everything in space and time is measurable and the question then becomes, are things determinable in their existence only because they are measurable, or are the forms of things more than the quantities and relations that can be predicable of them. To return to one of the examples discussed earlier we can now ask: does the sound of the harp require not just the form that organises vibrations in the air when strings are plucked, but also the form of a perceptual apparatus that can experience sounds: sounds which are not just experienced as too loud or too low but also harmonious: as organised in time in accordance with qualitative rules which state, for example, that the three sounds I am now hearing build a harmonious theme together and are therefore more than just noises occurring in the world.”
A music major raised his hand and asked:
“But where is the substance? Are you saying it is the human musician that chooses to create three sounds. Is substance the human intention to produce a harmonious constellation?”
“Excellent answer to your own question. The human musical agent familiar with the art he has been trained in, that is, the musician, has been trained to realise or actualise the musical forms he has learned, perhaps as a consequence of a lifetime of striving to produce melodious or harmonious themes pleasant to the ear and congruent with that attitude of mind Kant described as a boundless outlook onto a happy future. On the basis of this training the artist intends to produce pleasure with his creations. Aristotle, in similar vein, might have claimed that the pleasure which supervenes upon the hearing of the musicians melodious or harmonious creations is partly caused by the appreciator learning how sound can be organised in time and is partly constitutive of eudaimonia or the flourishing life.
“But”, the music major continued, “Not everyone appreciates good music”.
“Agreed. I don think we can suggest that 7+5=12 is good mathematics. It is just mathematics. But I am sure a mathematics teacher might put a comment on a student assignment: “ a good answer”, “ a good proof” etc. In doing this he is probably expressing an attitude towards the skill the pupil is demonstrating. What we need to bear in mind here, however, is that the comment by the teacher is designed to initiate the pupil into the form of life of mathematics. I think I have been unclear here and you have as a consequence shifted amongst the meanings of good. The harmonious three notes from the harp is good music in a different sense from the sense of “good” you are referring to. But since my lack of clarity has caused this, let me stipulate that we are talking about a good piece of music in your sense. Could we then reasonably say that there could be disagreement in attitude toward the music? So, let us take an example of Mozart’s music. Surely one could imagine different attitudes to the music, one listener, finding it boring, another finding the music wonderful. I don’t think that any appreciator would be able to argue coherently that Mozart’s music is not good in the sense you mean. I do not deny that it is possible for someone to personally not like the piece in question. But such a response in the above circumstances must be a personal response and by definition fails to meet the criteria of the general disinterested attitude great composers expect from their audience. This disinterested attitude entails that one abstract from one’s personal likes and dislikes and apply established norms and standards to the art works one encounters. One may also be speaking comparatively and believe other music is more interesting. But even this would probably be a personal comparison and not meet the criteria of the general disinterested attitude that constitutes good taste. There may be radical disagreement over the work of a composer who does not set out with the intentions to create in their audience this general disinterested attitude but instead is perhaps aiming to arouse a nationalistic sentiment. In this case, one could imagine a critic criticising the music for not possessing a genuine artistic intention. We are now in the realm of aesthetic judgments, which are judgments about artistic action or activity. Music is interesting in that it can be performed. This fact introduces an interesting aspect of Art, namely, that a great violinist of the day can imitate Mozart. Shakespeare’s plays are also imitations of great tragedies from which we can learn much about reality. Perhaps someone might want to say that we can learn more from history than we can from Shakespeare’s plays and I would question this by pointing out that the narratives of art explore the continuum of everyday life more than narrative history does. History we should bear in mind dissects the continuum into discrete events and focuses on events of magnitude which politicians for example must pay attention to. However, the everyday continuum is the medium in which most people live their lives and it is partly the responsibility of Art to present events which everyman can learn something from. It should also be pointed out that we could learn theoretically by coming to understand something and we can learn practically by appreciating for example that good actions have good consequences and tragic actions have tragic consequences. This is the practical and ethical logic which inhabits much of our literary and performing arts.”
An Arts student asked:
“But is all art attempting to imitate reality in order to learn something from it. Is there not art which has a purely cathartic intention—purifying the emotions of the tribe, so to speak”
Interesting question. Which takes us into the realms of Psychology and the emotions. There is a psychological theory, which is not defended by academics but maintains that the mere experiencing of an emotion is beneficial for mental health. Let’s take a crude example. Say someone insults me. It is better, it is argued, for me to demonstrate my anger in response to the insult than to bottle it up, either going home and then beating up my wife or not expressing the anger at all and dropping dead of a heart attack at 50. This is called popular comparative psychology and it certainly does not meet the criteria of more academic philosophical psychology which believes that emotions can and should be tempered by reason, i.e. it is better to view the insult with the right attitude: either disdain or indifference if it is unmotivated, and either embarrassment or of purely cognitive interest if it is motivated. But in response to this it might be claimed that if one is going to teach a temperamental child to control their emotions, art may be able to play a role here. Seeing King Lear trying to call forth love from his three daughters by the bribe of a kingdom and the tragic consequences of such an act might be a useful learning episode in a man’s ethical development. Everything depends here on what is meant by “cathartic”. The mere repetition or feeling of an emotion produces no desirable effect unless it occurs in some kind of reflective or intellectual context enabling the experiencer to create a psychological distance to the feeling. Indeed habitually expressing anger at insults, for example, may merely serve to habituate the behavior which, in accordance with practical and ethical logic and over long periods of time lead to misfortune”
Robert raised his hand:
“You referred to ethical development and you have argued previously that ethics is objective and its objectivity is connected to concepts embedded in what you called the ought-system of concepts. But surely our aesthetic judgments must be subjective, a matter of feeling or emotion!”
“Yes, thank you Robert for your point. I have been using a large brush to represent emotion when much finer strokes are needed. Firstly let me say that emotions, though subjective are cognitive, that is they are purposive if I am acting, and they manifest an attitude both when I am acting and perceiving something emotionally. The putative insult, if it is not childish, may have mature intent, to call into question my character or my agency in the world. Now above I claimed that I could respond with indifference or embarrassment. I may be indifferent because I do not feel that I need to demonstrate my integrity or agency but suppose I become angry and demonstratively strike the table in my anger as a challenge to the person behind the insult. I might even shout out “Who do you think you are?” Now one can imagine an argument ensuing in which the insulter motivates his insult, and indifference or embarrassment supervene on my part. If, that is, the argument calls attention to something I had not realised about one of my actions which was the focus of the insult, e.g. “Did you not realise that when you said what you did about Mathematics it offended her because she was a Mathematician”. What we have here is a subjective exchange about people’s feelings but I would maintain that it is nevertheless cognitive. The cognitive lesson I learned was the following: theoretical objections to the assumptions of Mathematics could be regarded as offensive in the opinion of individual Mathematicians. That is, I learned a lesson in practical logic, namely, that one ought not to say what I had said. Your question has shifted us nicely onto the grounds of “Action” and “Judgment”. “Action”, as we have seen was one of the categories of Aristotle and “The Critique of Judgment” was the title of one of the works of Kant. Now neither Kant nor Aristotle specifically set about classifying kinds of actions but both philosophers operatively referred to kinds of actions in their various theories. Aristotle’s virtue theory, for example, discussed the Greek term arête that is variously translated as virtue or excellence, in an attempt to characterise “the good” as definitive of what action is striving to achieve. He also talked about eudaimonia or the flourishing life. This term “action” in relation to the flourishing life introduces a possible philosophical problem into the discussion, namely that “action” is a psychological term, which cannot be objectively characterised. This mistake is also sometimes connected to a mistaken psychological view of logic that believes that logic is descriptive of how we do reason and not prescriptive of how we ought to reason. We find certain popular philosophers reasoning that “If logic prescribes laws of thought and there is evidence that there are people who do not reason logically, then the laws do not hold universally” After all, it is argued if stones in a normal gravitational field failed to obey the law of gravity we would abandon the law. What has been argued in previous lectures is that someone committing a murder does not suffice to overturn the law relating to murder. Here as in logic, the law determines how we ought to judge the action. Now the point of this in the context of the Arts is that of course not everyone appreciates good music but they ought to, and even though this is a subjective matter we judge them correctly to be insensitive, meaning that they ought to have a feeling they do not have. Furthermore we believe that sensitivity of this kind probably leads to flourishing lives. Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment relies on a theory of mind he defends in earlier works. This theory maintains that sensory experiences of the world can be ordered by the rule-governed concepts of our faculty of understanding and it is this dualistic interaction that underwrites our knowledge claims. In aesthetic contexts, however the sensory manifold is ordered by a general emotion or attitude which emerges from the activity of understanding, and functions subjectively or self- reflectively as exemplary and universal. In answer to the earlier question relating to the inter-subjective nature of mathematical agreement, I agree it is easier to arrive at agreement in relation to a conceptual rule governed activity such as mathematics than it is in relation to an intuitively organised activity such as art but nevertheless the exemplary universality of our thought in the aesthetic case surely demands agreement even if in fact that agreement is more difficult than agreement over objective rules. Furthermore there are notorious disagreements amongst mathematicians when they discuss their theories. Mathematicians are not, for example in agreement over whether non Euclidean geometry is dependent upon certain truths of Euclidean geometry. This disagreement looks purely theoretical but brought down to earth will affect the relation of the theory to space. One can wonder in the light of non- Euclidean assumptions whether the statement “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line” is necessarily true. I see by the clock on the wall that we have overrun by 20 minutes so we will stop at this point. Some of what I have alluded to today will be relevant to next week’s lecture on “Science and the Theory of Knowledge”

August 13, 2018August 13, 2018

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August 5, 2018August 30, 2019

Introduction to Philosophy Course: Aristotle Part 4: Ethics(Phronimos, logos, areté, eudaimonia, akrasia)

Jonathan Lear in his work “Aristotle: the desire to understand” claims that Freedom is the value that defines the constitution of our human nature to such an extent that lacking an understanding of our freedom is tantamount to not understanding ourselves.

Now we could be forgiven for believing that the above remarks are about the ethics of Kant but they are rather meant to articulate what Lear thinks is an important implication of Aristotle’s ethics. Lear does however throughout his work on Aristotle articulate support for the claim that Aristotelian ethics is an ethics of freedom. In the course of this “comparison”, however, a surprise is in store. Lear claims in the context of this discussion that the moral agent somehow detaches itself (frees itself?)from its desires and he thereby sides with Hegel’s criticism of Kantian ethics.

Hegel claimed that he would stand the philosophy of Kant on its head and in attempting to do so may well have turned the worlds of Aristotle, Kant, and the common man upside down. Hegel’s dialectical logic replaced the Metaphysical Logic of Aristotle and the Transcendental Logic of Kant. Hegel’s inversion of bottom and top via his dialectical logic remind one of the psychological subjects of Stratton, wearing glasses which invert their retinal images and seeing the landscape upside down on the first day. On the second day, these subjects felt that their bodies were upside down until finally after a number of days acting under these strange circumstances everything returned to normal again. Wearing the glasses of Hegel to view the Philosophy of Kant can indeed make the world of Kant seem a strange world itself in need of conversion. It is to say the very least rather surprising to find Lear subscribing to this Hegelian position, succumbing to this Hegelian deconstruction. We need in such a context, to remind ourselves of the texts of Kant which disprove the detachment thesis. Firstly, in the Critique of Judgment Kant clearly claims the existence of an intimate relation between practical reason and desire:

“In the same way reason which contains constitutive, a priori principles solely in respect of the faculty of desire gets its holding assigned to it by the critique of Practical Reason.”(Preface)

Lear in his Hegelian criticism, is apparently failing to register Kant’s claim that there are two kinds of concepts, theoretical and practical which generate separate and different principles of the possibility of their objects. Concepts of nature and concepts of freedom have a reflectively different structure. The application of concepts of nature to an acting will generates what Kant calls technically-practical principles in which it is legitimate to conceive of a kind of separation or detachment of the subject and his/her action. Such technically-practical principles regulate an agents skills in accordance with the law of cause and effect and this places such concepts and principles clearly in the realm of theoretical philosophy far from the realm of desire. Kant defines desire in the following terms:

” a faculty which by means of its representations is the cause of the actuality of the objects of those representations.”

This clearly relates desire to practical reason and to the bringing about of states of affairs by means of principles in the practical world. Kant, in this discussion, is careful to distinguish between empirical cases in which ones desire for a particular object precedes the practical principle and transcendental cases in which the determining ground of choice is the practical principle. An example of the latter would be in the case where the principle “Promises ought to be kept” determines my choice of what I must do and transmits my desire down a chain of action related reflections. There is no space for any detachment or separation of the agent from his action in such circumstances. In cases of a desire for a material object which is not being directed by a principle, the desire could arise and be abandoned in favour of another desire and in such circumstances, one might say that the agent had a detachable relation to the object of the desire and the desire. This possibility on Kant’s view is a result of what he refers to as a lower faculty of desire which he contrasts with a higher faculty in which “promises ought to be kept” is a principle which one cannot abandon as a practical agent. The former lower faculty of desire argues Kant is concerned with pleasure related to the object desired and its agreeableness. The Latter is concerned with what Aristotle would call the good in itself which in its turn is a concern with our well being and worthiness to be happy. For Kant, this is a key condition for an ethical position and this may indicate a key difference between his position and the finality of the happiness condition which Aristotle proposes.

It is, therefore, puzzling to find Lear asking how a self-conscious being on the Kantian account could make decisions at all as if the Kantian self-consciousness resembled the Cartesian self-consciousness reflecting theoretically upon its own desires. Hegel, we know, did not appreciate the relation of Kantian ethical theory to the ethical theory of Aristotle’s in which we see both adopting the vantage point of reflecting upon the relation of practical reason to its object rather than reflecting on the relation of a state of mind to its object.

One may wish to contradict this account by insisting that Aristotle’s theory of virtue specifically argues that virtue is a state(lexis) rather than a capacity(dunamis) or a feeling(pathos). The question, however, is how would Aristotle wish to characterize the state of the soul. He would not for example countenance this state as a state of consciousness and he would not want to countenance this state being characterized as many modern philosophy of mind theorists do as something “private”(feelings are private and particular). Rather, the “state” Aristotle is referring to here is a state of the soul which for him is differentiated in terms of different principles, defining different kinds or essences. Indeed, the word “disposition” might be a more appropriate term. For these purposes, a practical disposition would be construed in terms of a law-like principle that has been sculpted by the processes of training, education and habituation in accordance with social and cultural processes such as that of the “Golden Mean”.

Practical dispositions are given their initial characterization in the opening remarks of the Nichomachean Ethics:

“Every art and every enquiry, every action, and choice seems to aim at some good: whence the good has rightly been defined as that at which all things aim.”

For Aristotle, we should recall, the good has many meanings depending upon whether it is aiming in discourse at peoples character, their actions, the place or time they live in etc. But all have in common the essence of the good for man or eudaimonia, which for Kant was a part of his ethical religious idea of the summum bonum. It is especially difficult given this rather strong resemblance in their positions to imagine the ethical Kantian agent being detached from his own happiness or flourishing life. There is moreover a hylomorphic element to Kant’s theorizing which is unmistakeable. In much of his reasoning, there is a specific reference to matter and form and if we analyze the two formulations of the categorical imperative it would be difficult not to see the formal aspect of the ethical law in the first formulation and the material aspect in the second formulation. Were there to be only one formulation, namely, the first, one might be able to argue more forcefully for if not the detachment thesis Lear proposes, perhaps an accusation of formalism or “emptiness”. The first formulation asks us to “will” that the maxim of one’s action be regarded as a universal law and if there is no such universal law then the logical consequence is surely at the very least “emptiness” and more seriously perhaps the impossibility of ethical action. The second formulation, however, fills the first formulation with content by insisting that we should act so that we treat everyone including ourselves as ends in themselves. This latter formulation is moreover, reminiscent of the kind of respect embedded in the Aristotelian account of friendship in the Nichomachean Ethics. Aristotle speaks here of a kind of fellowship existing between individuals or citizens of a polis which is similar to the affection that siblings have for one another. In Aristotle, the good is in man’s character from the beginning in the form of a capacity to be developed by nurturing and education into a disposition. Just as we learn to be builders by building, and teachers by teaching doctors by doctoring, we learn to be brace by doing brave acts in encouraging circumstances. This is the route by which states of character are formed. In this process of forming a good disposition pleasures and pains need to be organized because, as Aristotle claims, “the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain” are the main sources of vicious action. Feelings are originally also capacities and are part of the material that needs to be formed by the nurturing of a virtuous disposition so that one feels the right feeling in the right circumstances at the right time.

It is obvious from the above account that virtue cannot itself be merely a feeling because as Aristotle rightly argues we do not praise or blame men for the feelings they are having, because this is something passive, something that is happening to them, within the privacy of their own bodies. The ethical attitude is an active attitude inextricably tied up with human activity, with action, and with choice. Such activity is formed by a method shaped by an aim to hit a target or achieve an end. The difference between the generous man, the spendthrift and the miser is one of an active attitude towards men and money.

We can only choose to act, Aristotle argues if the action is of the kind, voluntary. Actions caused by external factors(compulsions) or ignorance are for him involuntary actions and cannot be freely chosen: such actions can therefore neither be praised nor blamed, i.e the agent cannot be held fully responsible for them. The notion of choice, however, is not related to the end of the flourishing life because this latter is a rational wish of Eros and is not itself chosen but rather succumbed to in the manner an educational process is succumbed to. Deliberation chooses the means to accomplish the flourishing life. For a holistic view of the process of deliberation stretching from the moment of succumbing to the moment of making the good occur see Sir David Ross’s account in “Aristotle”:

Ross situates choice in the matrix of desire, deliberation perception and Art:

“Desire I desire A
Deliberation B is the means to A
C is the means to B
N is the means to M

Perception N is something I can do here and now
Choice I choose N
Art I do N “

Ross does not do this but one can describe this process of deliberation in terms of areté which is a term Aristotle uses for both one’s moral character and ones skill in thinking and acting. Translating this term as virtue becomes clearer when it is used in the context of “the virtuous life” which when coupled to the term eudaimonia or the flourishing life embraces both the intellectual virtues and the moral/ethical virtues which include phronesis, courage, and temperance.
The character of a virtuous man is, then, a set of dispositions(formed capacities) which organize one’s desires and feelings in relation to the final end of eudaimonia or the flourishing life which in its turn is also the actualization of the potential of the rational animal capable of discourse.
The Phronimos, the man possessing practical wisdom which he demonstrates with his correct reasoning, reasoning in the right way, or orthos logos, is the man whose psuche or soul best integrates the rational and the irrational parts of the soul. Aristotle indicates the consequences of falling short in the aim of fulfilling one’s potential, namely forms of life which are neither excellent(areté) nor flourishing(eudaimonia. He illustrates this claim by pointing to the life of pleasure pursued by non rational animals, the life of honour pursued by men of ambition and the life of the Phronimos who, one assumes, fulfils his potential most completely because of the Platonic argument that he is the being who has experienced all the three forms of pleasure associated with these different life forms and as a consequence knows which pleasure is the best.Plato would have argued that the pleasure experienced by the Phronimos is pure(more intellectual) and unrelated to pain which by definition is a condition caused by a body striving for homeostasis. The lives of the hedonist, the wealthy man, the ambitious man are all pain avoidance related and therefore dependent on either external or internal causal factors. None of these forms of life meet the criteria of the self-sufficient flourishing life. The great-souled, Phronimos, on the other hand, is self-sufficient because he reasons in the right way about the world of conduct and feelings(the feelings of pleasure and pain, fear and anger).

It is also important not to lose sight of the systematic connections of the above account with Aristotle’s claims about psuche and human nature. Because humans are animals and organisms they necessarily possess an ergon(inbuilt function)as well as a telos which is dependent upon material and efficient causes. The human, however, distinguishes itself from other forms of life through a unique capacity and its potential: rationality. Rationality is a term we attribute to humankind for its disposition to reason well and excellently. Reason is on this account a capacity and rationality a disposition(the well-developed capacity of reasoning excellently).

One can wonder, as G E Moore did, whether including the natural, biological material and efficient causes of being a human in the definition of “moral value” condemns Aristotle’s account to commit the naturalistic fallacy, i.e. the fallacy of defining moral value in terms of natural capacities. We have argued above that moral virtue is dispositional and dispositions are formal and developed capacities. If this distinction is observed, there is no fallacy, no contradiction: capacities, we have argued, are actualized into dispositions given the appropriate conditions for the actualization process to occur. That is to say, there is no logical equivalence between the natural capacities of a human organism and its moral dispositions which are, as has been argued, constituted of the exercise of natural capacities excellently.

Aristotle characterizes all forms of activity and art as striving for the good and areté so it is important to point out that even if one possesses the capacity to build a house and do it well this activity of an artisan is not a form of moral excellence but rather a form of aesthetic excellence.

There is a further major difference between moral and aesthetic virtue or excellence which is connected to the distinction Aristotle recognizes between acting(praxis) and producing(poesis). This is noted by G J Hughes in his Routledge guidebook: “Aristotle on Ethics”:

“Health is indeed the product of the art of medicine just as a house is the product of architecture or a statue of sculpture. But eudaimonia is not the product of the actions of a good person. Fulfillment in life is not something over and above someone’s actions which those actions produce. Fulfillment consists in doing what one does just because one sees those actions as noble and worthwhile…. living is not a process one undertakes for the sake of something else which is produced as a result. The point of the good life just is the living of it.”

Hughes continues by pointing out that this puts Aristotle in the deontological camp in our modern ethical debates. He cannot be a consequentialist, argues Hughes, because:

“Aristotle has nothing comparable to Bentham’s definition of action as a “mere bodily movement” from which it would indeed follow that the value of an action must depend on the consequences that action produces, as Bentham says. Instead, Aristotle defines an action in terms of how the agent describes or sees their behaviour at the time and draws no particular line between action and its consequences”

The implications of this are devastating for the utilitarian position which finds itself at odds with two of the most important ethical positions. For Aristotle, the agent must adopt a first-person perspective to what they are doing and not a third person observationalist perspective which in the absence of the declaration of intention by the agent of the action might well see “mere bodily movement”. Confusion is endemic in this area of debate. We can see one kind of confusion in the utilitarian camp where the theoretical obsession with a reductive-compositive method together with an observationalist/experimental interpretation of that method postulates “atoms” of pure movement which can then be inserted into a theoretical framework of linear causes and effects. The movement “causes” a state of affairs which is logically different from its cause, thus dividing what was a unitary action into two elements which can only be composed into a unity at the expense of the holistic account of deliberative practical reasoning we find in Aristotelian ethics.

Confusions between praxis and poesis may even assist in this attempt to subject this domain to the theoretical framework of scientific reasoning. It is, of course, easier to dissolve a skill(needed for the production of an object) into movement and the product produced at the end of the activity because here quite clearly the observer can, for example, see the builder building and the “consequence”, the completed, produced house. Aristotle would immediately criticize this theoretical attempt for failing to appreciate the role of intention in identifying the activity, in correctly describing the activity. This for him could only occur from the first person point of view. The builder sees what he is doing from the point of view of the idea or form of the house he has in mind and this for him logically determine how one can describe such building activity. All art aims at the good, Aristotle declared but there is a difference between the good house being built which is largely an aesthetic matter and leading a good flourishing life which is a broader, ethical/political good. We need also to recall that we are in the realm of forms for Aristotle, forms which are subject to his metaphysical theory of change. Forms for Aristotle were hierarchically structured with sexual reproduction of living forms at the lower end of the scale being followed by the production of artifacts and finally by the learning and teaching of the forms. The production of artifacts as we pointed out involves practical knowledge but not a choice and a stable character. Here it seems we are clearly dealing with an activity or work but not fully fledged action(Arendt distinguished in her work between labour, work, and action) An organized soul is required to perform the actions which aim at a flourishing life: only work-activity is required to produce the objects of techné.

So, knowledge is involved in firstly, the action as a result of practical reasoning and secondly, in the deliberative calculation of the work activity behind the creation of objects of techné. We need to enquire into the different kinds of knowledge one can encounter in the different kinds of science one can encounter as part of the flourishing life. Aristotle distinguishes between three different kinds of science: the theoretical, practical and productive sciences. In relation to theoretical science, he claims, in the spirit of knowledge being justified true belief, that essence specifying definitions or principles are the justifications we find in the theoretical sphere of scientific activity. These both provide a form of logical necessity not to be found in the other two sciences, which are both aiming at something for which, as yet, there is no essence specifying definitions but there are principles. Theoretical sciences aim at the truth and use logical demonstration that moves from first principles or essence specifying definitions to logically related conclusions. Practical sciences may be related to the truth and logic or “analytics” as Aristotle called logic, but the primary aim of these sciences is the good. Because of areas of commonality, we find in this area that particular conclusive judgments follow from universal and particular premises. Similarly, in the practical sciences “justification” will also involve the elements of Aristotle’s metaphysical theory of change in which reference will be made to 4 kinds of change, three principles and 4 “causes” but here agents, powers and actions will be the focus of attention.

In the “Posterior Analytics” Aristotle gives us an account of the acquisition of knowledge which is common for all the sciences:

The above is a fine account of how the desire to understand involves powers building upon powers and integrating into the unified disposition of mind that we believe generates knowledge. This process, surely is common to all the sciences. It accounts for how we differentiate animals from each other, of how we differentiate men from each other and also finally how we differentiate objects and actions from each other. The above account does not mention the powers of language and reason but these will certainly be involved in the generation of knowledge. The 4 causes or explanations of the theory of change will also be involved in our judgments of the good man striving to actualize his potential to live the flourishing life. They will also be involved in scientific judgments in relation to the good action which as we have been told plays an important role in the above actualization process. The desire to understand oneself and know oneself will also probably be a part of this journey of awe and wonder. Aristotle’s idea of the flourishing life is one where both the moral and intellectual virtues form a unity in which knowledge whilst not being perhaps a seamless robe is at least one coat of many colours.
The idea of the goodwill in this account include both knowledge and understanding of oneself and the world one lives in.
Aristotle did engage in the discussion of one aporetic issue which directly highlights the ways in which theoretical and practical knowledge are integrated with ethical action. Socrates argued that if a man knows the good, i.e. really knows and understands the universal idea of the good, then he will necessarily always do the good in his actions. On the face of it the opening sentences of the Nichomachean Ethics, claiming as they do that all art, activity, and inquiry aim at the good suggests that Aristotle too must accept this Socratic analysis. Awareness of the phenomenon of the man claiming to know the good and then not doing it, however, pushed Aristotle into giving a more nuanced account of this so-called phenomenon of akrasia or incontinence. For Aristotle, it was necessary for him to acknowledge this phenomenon and give it an acceptable explanation. Now if it was the case that all men as agents aim at the good, it is difficult to understand how an agent can perform an incontinent action where that is defined as an action that is intentional and performed against a background of the knowledge that a preferable alternative action is available to the agent. If we are imagining a rational agent wholly constituted of their beliefs, desires, values, and actions then we have to bear in mind that the relation between intentions beliefs and desires is a complex one and difficulties abound as soon as one evokes the terminology of Analytical Philosophy

Socrates was criticized by Lear because he wanted to characterize akrasia in terms of states of the soul but the above characterisation in terms of beliefs, desires and intentions, seems to be a similar attempt, using states of mind and the terminology of Analytical Philosophy. Aristotle’s account of akrasia is actually better characterized in terms of his own terminology of the powers of perception, memory, language, knowledge, and reason in an organized soul: . On this account, akrasia is not possible. If there is an alternative action for which there are good reasons. It must be the case in an organized soul that all things considered and understood this must be the action one chooses to perform(not being aware of what one is doing and being drunk with passion are excluded as possibilities). This suggests that the phenomenon of incontinence must be explained by there either being a lack of knowledge or ignorance of how to act.
The power of judgment will also necessarily play a part in the deliberative process which leads to action. Aristotle’s practical syllogism differentiates the reasons why any one of the premises could be blocked. The power of judgment can also of course be shut down by strong passions and a different pricniple of action would in such cases be operating.

The virtuous soul, of course, is a well-organized soul and will not allow its powers to be compromised in the above ways. The soul on its way to virtuous organisation may, however, be like an actor on a stage and be going through the motions of knowing, i.e. exercising deficient powers of knowledge by believing that he ought to be doing some alternative better action but because of the confusion in his soul is not able to settle on the completely articulated reason for what ought to be done. We should also remember, considering the fact that we are dealing with practical reasoning and rationality that the soul will not acquire what he calls the logos by merely hearing something and assenting to it: language is not a sufficient power to install the kind of knowledge being referred to. The apprentice knower, that is, must imitate his betters in an environment of ethical guidance and the journey from being an apprentice to being a virtuous man is one in which one is learning about oneself and the world. The possibility, of course, exists in such circumstances that someone may be right in one’s judgments about the world but wrong in one’s judgments about oneself, i.e. incontinence will be on display in such a case.

July 28, 2018November 23, 2018

Issue number 9 of Philosophical/Educational Journal of Lectures

July 26, 2018

Fourth Centrepiece Lecture by Jude Sutton taken from “The World Explored, the World Suffered:The Exeter Lectures”: Epistemology

Jude was 10 minutes late to the lesson. Another anxiety attack. He would not have made it if he had not drunk his last two barley wines. Sucking on a spearmint tablet he entered the class.
He threw his pen on my desk again and wrote on the board “The pen is on the table”

“If I say I know the pen is on the table and you Browne ask me on what grounds I know it I might say “On the grounds of seeing the pen on the table, feeling the table and the pen, hearing the pen when it dropped to the table, perhaps smelling the pen if it has a distinctive smell”. In other words, I know, by means of the senses. Now these grounds can be challenged. We know, do we not, that our senses have deceived us in the past and we have been quite surprised to learn that either what we thought to be there was not, for example the seeing of the mirage of water after a long waterless sojourn in the desert: or vice versa, for example, I was certain my gloves were not in the drawer but found out later they were. Further, that what we thought to be an x turned out to be a y, for example I thought I saw a round tower on the horizon but upon approaching it I see it really is square. What sometimes can deceive me can always deceive me. Hark unto the voice of the skeptic ladies and gentlemen for his voice is very convincing. Last night I dreamt that the wind was blowing me toward a cliff and there was nothing I could do about it. I woke up and realized it was only a dream or a nightmare. At the moment I think I am standing and lecturing before this class. I am certain of it as certain as I was of being blown toward the cliff in my nightmare last night. Could it not be the case ladies and gentlemen that I am only dreaming that I am standing in front of you and giving a lecture. The real me, the dreaming me, is back in another location preparing to wake up from this dream. So if I can not trust my senses and I can not be certain about whether what I see is part of a dream, how can I with certainty say I know the pen is on the table? But, on the other hand, surely we know that the pen is on the table. If we don’t know this how could we be said to know anything?” Logically we represent this state of affairs like this.”
He wrote on the board
“Knowledge of P = being able to apply the criteria for P being P
We can infer P from the premises fully specifying the criteria for P
Which means the criteria for P = P”
“But”, Jude continued, “Surely this cannot be so. Surely my knowledge of the pen being on the table amounts to more than the story told about the relation my sensory experiences have with this state of affairs.”
Mark Cavendish, a science major, put up his hand and responded
“ We need to think about the way in which we conceptualize the state of affairs, that is, the language we use to state the fact. There are not two things to be related here, merely two aspects of the same complex phenomenon.”
Jude stopped himself from continuing the lecture and asked
“And how would you describe this complex phenomenon”
“Not in terms of its truth conditions. This may be an infinite set or a very large uninteresting set. Language has a more important communicative function”.
“Are you saying that the communicative function of language has nothing to do with its truth function?”
“No, but I might be saying that if a hammer when it hammers is expressing its true function or its essential function, then this is what makes the thing we are talking about a hammer This would seem to be of greater significance than the fact that all the sensory criteria for this particular act of hammering have been met and are expressed in a theoretical characterization of this fact.”
Jude smiled his little private smile of recognition before his tone hardened:
“You are characterizing the world as a totality of functions or processes which take place in the continuum of time. If I were to take an example of hammering to illustrate my point it would not be a particular occurring in a continuum of change. It would be a timeless truth, which is made true by general criteria relating to the concept of hammering. The question I am asking is :”What is the relation of these criteria to the concept?”
Mark Cavendish, hesitated, unsure that he had understood everything that had been said. He looked at Robert questioningly for help.
Robert responded:
“Hammering may not be the best example to take in order to see the difference between the two positions. Imagine instead that you see a birdhouse I have recently built and you add this new fact to your arsenal of knowledge. Whilst it is being built it seems that the only reference point outside of the hammering and other activities occurring to bring the event of a completed birdhouse about, would be in the mind of the builder. His idea of a completed birdhouse would seem to be, at the time of having the idea, free of the physical space-time continuum. That is, anybody anywhere and at any time could build a completed birdhouse using this idea. Amongst other things what seems to be needed are general ideas of the function a birdhouse performs, and general ideas of what building are, before any such activity can take place. Although, by taking such a practical example, we may have wondered away from the original example which seemed to be about characterizing physical states of the world such as the pen being on the table. Dr. Sutton is asking, what the relation of criteria, is to the truth of this idea but I think Mark’s point very relevant anyway. The pen being on the table may not be fully and completely characterized by any set of purely physical criteria, even if we include physical laws, if that is what Dr. Sutton meant when he said that the pen on the table may involve more than my sensory experiences of this state of affairs.”
Cavendish nodded in enthusiastic agreement and Jude had now completely lost the thread of his lecture but something stirred within as he registered the student’s enthusiasm.
“Let us turn away from the abstract account of the criteria for P and away from the state of the physical world which contains Roberts birdhouse but towards an example which I believe can point us in the right direction insofar as ascertaining the grounds for knowledge claims is concerned. Let us imagine that I am in pain and that everybody can see the symptoms of the toothache I am suffering from. Let us further consider this example in the light of the question “What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a pain to be a pain? Gather ye symptoms as ye may, they do not seem to add up to the necessary and sufficient symptoms for a pain to be a pain. That is, it always seems possible that an agent could fully be manifesting all of these symptoms and there be no pain—he might for example be acting a part in a play. Or, alternatively, the agent is in pain but he is in unfriendly circumstances and is using his Spartan training not to display any of his symptoms. He is in pain but only he seems to know it. But have I not in this admission that he knows he is in pain given the game away to Descartes and his followers who might at this point say in the most skeptical of voices “Only the person experiencing the pain can know that they are in pain”. Caught in these skeptical pincers one may want to try to deny that the agent “knows” he is in pain. It is too intense for him to know anything, someone may want to maintain: He is in pain, and this means that the experience is not an epistemological state, not a position in which one can know anything. Well, I think the agent does know he is in pain, and claiming that he is not, is only going to change the example we are talking about. Let us give the Cartesian his due: the agent knows he is in pain in spite of the fact that I believe the Cartesian could not give us a good philosophical account of what kind of being possesses a state of mind in which he is both in pain and knows that he is. The Cartesian argument Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, is supported by an argument which is meant to refute the skeptic, namely the argument that one cannot doubt that one is thinking because in order to doubt that one is thinking one would have to be thinking. This is a good argument but not an account of the state of mind of a being that can acknowledge this to be a good argument. And anyway it is at best only an account of how I know myself to be in pain. It is not an account of how I know some other sentient being to be in pain. And since I do not share in his conscious state, his conscious state, by logic, therefore, could not be attributed to me. We can rule out that I am conscious of his pain in the way he is. Well, then, how do I know? By observation, by using my senses and the application of criteria to ones observations, is one possible position. But this is only going to lead us back to the position previously referred to: we might settle for a large set of symptoms and find that they will not suffice and then we will add others and they will not suffice and eventually we will throw up our hands in dismay and agree that no theoretical set of symptoms will ever amount to the pain itself. I am told that Socrates left his studies of the physical world because of this kind of problem after having read the work of a pre-Socratic philosopher who claimed that the foundation of everything was Mind. The attempt to ground knowledge on the nature of matter will always fail philosophically because we will, in Kant’s words never arrive at its nature however complex the set of symptoms for it are. Aristotle claims matter is infinitely mysterious and we can only know its forms –the result of its apprehension by the mind: or in other words, the way in which we conceptualize it. Some ancient philosophers thought that the problem resided in the fact that all we could know of matter are its mathematical properties and since these are provably infinite, when considering it in its quantitative dimension, there can never be a complete set of symptoms for its state. Be that as it may, I think it suffices from the point of view of logic to merely point out that all that needs to be the case is that some given physical phenomenon is alternatively conceptualisable, say as a wave, or as a particle:- and if this is the case we clearly have a logical problem unless we rest with the idea that alternatively conceptualizing this phenomenon is a matter of characterizing different forms or ideas of matter.
A Mathematics major raised their hand and asked:
“Can you elaborate on the proof, that the number of mathematical properties of any material thing will be necessarily infinite?”
“Yes, There are a number of paradoxes, most of which are attributed to Zeno, in which it is maintained that objects in space are totalities or collections of potential points. Take any two points AB on their surface and calculate the number of potential points between AB and it will be an infinite number. These paradoxes even point to the difficulty of quantifying motion once the variable of time is added into the equation”.
The Mathematics major nodded, satisfied with the answer
Jude continued:
“Is there, then, no way out of this labyrinth except the ancient resort to forms in the mind?
Wittgenstein discusses this issue in his Investigations and arrives at the position that the forms in the mind have been put there by some objective process. We were not born with them. We may have been born with Aristotelian powers but not Platonic forms, and even Aristotle made fun of the theory of forms in spite of his abiding respect for his teacher.
In learning language, we fall and hurt ourselves as children, and are in pain. Our linguistic mentors then teach us to say that “We are in pain” and we move from the world of instinct, where animals are in pain and other animals sympathetically lick their wounds, to a kind of intellectual game in which I say “I am in pain” and other members of the community commiserate and offer me their sympathies, helping me over the pain. When I am initiated into this new form of life of talking about pain rather than the bare experiencing of it we are led into the human arena of caring for one another and the forms of life that are associated with this. If there is a principle behind all this it is the principle of Care—a very practical principle, which I would like to connect to the previous ethics lecture but for the moment I will restrict myself to the point brought up earlier about the language we use. It is a language relating to Humanity and Society not persons in abstraction from their relation to each other in communities…”

July 9, 2018July 10, 2018

The European Qualification Framework(EQF) and the Global Educational Reform Movement(GERM).

The Council of Europe has a long history of facilitating International cooperation since its inception in 1948. The history of international cooperation via business and trade goes back to The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
In recent times beginning in 2008 the Council of Europe has suggested a framework of educational levels(called EQF) ranging from 1-8 which are intended to be used for the purposes of evaluating educational qualifications internationally and thus facilitating the free movement of people between different sovereign nations

The Global Educational Reform Movement is a modern educational movement partially initiated by so called “progressive” pedagogues in the USA. This movement has swept the globe and produced devastating consequences for educational systems around the world. It is important to note however, that the movement actually has a very long academic history which goes all the way back to Hobbes and Descartes who heralded the beginning of the modern scientific and political age by dismissing the works of Aristotle: works which had actually been the foundation of all progress in Europe. Many philosophers throughout the ages have argued that the reason why Scientists have pursued their subjects so systematically is due to the systematic and universal approach to the subject. If this is so one must be wondering how two Philosophers of the modern age can have succeeded in dismantling Aristotle’s thousand year influence. Unfortunately, during the Middle Ages in the course of translation by Religious authorities who controlled the flow of ideas in the world. the work of Aristotle was falsely represented for reasons we do not yet fully understand. This was followed by a time when academic scientists with one eye on the treatment of Galileo sought to free themselves of the chains that were confining their scientific theorising about the structure and origins of the universe. The feeling was that we needed to reinvent the wheel of knowledge in a space free from Religious intervention. The Scientist wanted to be left alone to pursue his observations and formulate his theories in order to provide us with explanations of the origins and structure of the universe. This picture of the lone scientist completely disregarding the history of his subject and setting off into the desert and mountains of the universe with his instruments was the image which actually inspired the American revolution in Education that in turn suggested the child should adopt this a-historical backwoodsman mentality in the classroom. The teacher’s role should be as an advisor and guide and learn about the child’s mind via this uniquely revolutionary approach to education. We know now that this was a disaster and a number of generations of pupils instead of experiencing a truly progressive historical educational system based on the Philosophy of Aristotle with its amendments and improvements by Kant and the work of the later Wittgenstein, have been forced to participate in a romantically inspired adventure which has to my surprise not yet ended. It is my suspicion that, of all places, the Council of Europe are still more influenced by the limited perspectives of Hobbes and Descartes than they are by the systematic theorising of Aristotle Kant and Wittgenstein.

First we should point out that it is thanks to the work of Aristotle that we have the framework of the differences between theoretical, practical and technological science. It is thanks to Aristotle that we have the divisions between the sciences we have today, e.g. the physical,the biological, the psychological, the theological. It is thanks to Aristotle that academics do not believe the “stories” about ethics we get from theoretical scientists in which it is claimed that theories about ethical behaviour are not as objective as their theories about natural events and processes. This latter point is not an expression of a position in an academic quarrel but rather is an expression of the fact that our educational systems maintained their strong ethical focus for so long. For Aristotle, Education aims at the philosophical: it aims at universal knowledge which flows from the structure of the human mind which he examined in a way which to this day dwarfs all other examinations. The range of complexity of his theory is still being written about by scholars today. It took great minds like Kant and Wittgenstein to accept his framework and make improvements upon it. All three philosophers were highly critical of the scientifically inspired “framework” that developed as a consequence of the “modernisation of Philosophy and knowledge by Hobbes and Descartes. A framework which would eventually lead to the GERM.

The Council of Europe were undoubtedly influenced by Descartes lonely meditative figure reflecting on himself and by the materialist Hobbes and his vision of the good life which was the bourgeoisie businessman’s life dedicated to commodious living and occupied with a hedonistic calculation of the value of human life. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would have scoffed at this simplistic vision of the complexity of man as would have Kant and Wittgenstein. They would have suggested that if one followed such a vision one would end up with a society of the kind we currently see in the USA–the businessman’s paradise. If this is true, is this not a fascinating thought that the Council of Europe shares its values with a USA that largely ignores the ICJ and the UN and spreads the GERM everywhere it can.

So, in the light of the above considerations let us examine one of the latest products of the Council its EQF “instrument of evaluation”. There are eight levels in the EQF system. Level 4 is the level of gymnasium education, level 5 is a level between Gymnasium and University and there we see an amazing anti- Aristotelian thought, namely that as education advances it “specialises” into ONE area and as we progress toward doctoral studies at level eight we are dealing with a part of a subject. The very title-name of Ph.d is Aristotelian: it refers to a doctor of Philosophy and philosophy in Ancient Greece was the most universal of all the subjects. It was the subject which examined the mind which sought to understand everything about the universe,and not just the internal organs of the coffin worm which could be the topic of a science Ph.d. Aristotle that is, was using philosophical and first principle thinking when he identified all the domains of study which would later become the subjects we are studying. So for Aristotle the doctoral level of study should not be specialising but universalising. This is not reflected in the criteria we see for level 8.

Now the GERM has also all but destroyed our once excellent European University systems. It has definitely destroyed the University system in Sweden. When I was attending Universities in England in the 1970’s the GERM was just beginning to make its presence felt and I can honestly say I was given the original Aristotelian education at two Universities in England. Arriving with these qualifications in Sweden in 1979 I was forced to “alter” my Aristotelian, Kantian and Wittgensteinian attitude in order to obtain a Swedish doctorate. That is, I was forced to write a worse doctorate than the one I would have otherwise written.
I am sure the Swedish University system is even as we speak requiring the same behaviour of students who come into the system with a genuine philosophical background and the difference is that they today are now able to point to two Council of Europe decisions and the EQF evaluation instrument in support. The dreams of Hobbes and Descartes of men and institutions created in the image of their Philosophies have come true. Sciences proliferate in accordance with the spirit of specialisation like the mythical thousand heads of the monster of the ancient Greek imagination. In the last 50 years the Humanities subjects in the spirit of philosophy have constantly diminished in stature and teaching hours at University level. These are the concrete consequences of the GERM with the added support of the EQF instrument and an ever increasing population of scientists at these “Universities”. How long before we call them by the more appropriate name: “Specialities.”?

I am a product of the English A level system and have been teaching in the Swedish Social Sciences/Economics and Natural Science programs as well as the International Baccalaureate Programme. All four programs would be placed in the current EQF system at the EQF 4 level. One program (the A level system) was a pre-GERM system and has with one qualification which we will not discuss here have a claim to be a higher level educational system than level 4.

On the basis of an Aristotelian/Kantian/Wittgensteinian framework where knowledge does not proceed in a specialising direction but rather a philosophical holistic universal direction one might conceive that the above 4 programs should be placed at three different levels ranging from 4 for the Swedish programs to low 5 for the IB AND 6 for the Olde English A level system before it was contaminated by the GERM. IB is currently placed at 5 because at its inception it had truly Philosophical intentions and should have been placed at a 6 in my new proposed system but with the expansion of the system in America and other non English speaking countries, the GERM system has managed to affect the quality of education produced and a current realistic estimate would be that the Ib system should be on the boundary between a 4 and a 5.

Let us note here that that the argument being put forward is not that science is not an important subject in the gamut of subjects we learn and teach. It is rather that, according to Aristotle, Science had characteristics which would firstly, explain its differentiation into different parts in accordance with the segments of physical reality it seeks to describe and explain and secondly would explain the universal nature of the subject where universal principles organise these descriptions and explanations. Science,in other words proceeds universally in accordance with the principle of non contradiction and other universal principles outlined by the Philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein. Proceeding in the direction of universalisation at University level might also have resulted in more research into the relations between the biological, psychological and theological “universal” sciences.

The IB deserves a place above normal gymnasium systems for three reasons. Firstly because of its attempt to incorporate its philosophy of education in a course given to the students called the Theory of Knowledge course. Secondly because of its inclusion of the subject of Philosophy amongst the range of options it offers in its humanities section. Thirdly because of the essay based approach which is assessed in terms of criteria which are intending to evaluate not specialist understanding of concepts but universal understanding of principles and systems of concepts.

The problem with this suggestion of a new scale and the new criterion of universalisation rather than specialisation is the problem of how we are going to find differentiating criteria for the higher levels. Again I would suggest turning to the ancient Greeks and the hierarchy of understanding that is involved in study over a period of time: the young man(bachelour) studying for three years at the Academy or the Lyceum is obviously learning how to make judgments on the material he is presented with in accordance with principles. The more mature man(master) who has studied somewhat longer has mastered the concepts and principles and is not merely capable of making judgments in accordance with the principles but can make judgments on the principles, i.e. can make critical judgments. The doctoral level is a more mature position,and involves the application of a critical approach for the benefit of the subject and its relation to all other subjects and the society one is part of as well as other societies. This would be a hierarchical escalation on an evaluative scale in accordance with the principle of universalisation rather than specialisation.

All the reasons for this approach can not be given in a short lecture of this nature and would require amongst other things also studying the work of Philosophers working with the same or a similar theory of knowledge. It would also require the study of the History of Psychology/Social Science and the History of Education as well as the History of the subjects of a school and university curriculum.

Let me in conclusion appeal to the study of two Psychologists whose work has been in the spirit of Aristotle, i.e. in the spirit of a holistic understanding of man, namely Maslow and Freud. Maslow’s work we know appeals to the businessman who is frantically searching for a theory which he can apply to his fickle customers or unreliable business partners but it is in fact an academic theory inspired by Aristotle’s theories. Maslow is trying to describe and explain what it is that motivates man and why. We are animals, as Aristotle pointed out, and as such we are motivated by physiological needs(which include the sexual) and safety needs: a place in a territory we have defended where we feel safe.
As animals capable of discourse and reason we also experience the need for a kind of love which animals do not possess. According to Maslow once we receive the required amount of love which occurs over a long period of time over a long childhood, a need at the next level of the motivational hierarchy emerges namely the need to feel self esteem and receive respect or esteem from others in ones environment. In Maslow’s earlier theory it was enough to fulfil needs at this level in order to become self actualised, i.e. reach ones full Aristotelian potential of being the fully functional rational animal. In order to test his theory he applied the criteria of his theory to his university students and discovered to his surprise that they fulfilled the criteria for esteem but not for self actualisation. Maslow asked himself why this was the case and realised that his theory was missing a dimension which is very relevant to my thesis, namely experience in the attempts to answer three universal questions that have come down to us from Greek Philosophy in general and Aristotle in particular, namely What is true? What is the Good?, and What is beauty?.
These are the universal questions one attempts to answer at University and one supposes that Maslow may also have reasoned in the light of the GERM that there was no guarantee that these questions receive satisfactory answers at many Universities.So Maslow believed in universalisation rather than specialisation in his motivational theory.

Sigmund Freud was a brain researcher of significance at Vienna University before he founded the universal psychoanalytical movement which lay completely outside the University system.His earliest theories attempted to use purely scientific concepts and principles in order to explain why people were not mentally healthy and he failed monumentally to such an extent that he even attempted to hide this embarrassing fact from future generations by burning his “Project for a Scientific Psychology”. As he progressed in his theorising, it is not difficult to see how he used definitions and concepts which were Aristotelian in order to develop a framework from which to treat his patients. Toward the end of his career he even turned to Plato for the concepts of Eros, Thanatos and Ananke when he sought to explain mans futile attempts to embrace the rationality principle of Aristotle in the wider context of life in so called civilised societies. This is an escalation from specialisation toward the universal.

My last argument is that the very word “university” means “universal” and all education aims at universal knowledge if we all are to understand the world in all its forms. It is without question useful to specialise and understand the functioning of the internal organs of the coffin worm at the extreme ends of this universal-specialisation spectrum but it is a finer thing to wish to understand the mind of man and the universal principles that determine the shape and form of the infinite starry universe above and all around us.

July 5, 2018

The Ask Me Anything Feed : Completed Session

AMA feed

July 4, 2018

The curse on the Gentlemen’s Game

I am the bearer of bad news in these times of good news from the football arena because I am a subscriber to the theory that rugby is a hooligans game played by gentlemen and football is a gentlemen’s game played by hooligans. The game against Columbia proved this theory correct –7 yellow cards before the referee saw no point in continuing the warning process. Anyway, my major point for those looking forward to the next victory for England is that they probably will not win because of a curse. The football gods placed a curse upon England called Dr Arnolds curse: they cursed the country and the school which dared to blaspheme and pick up the ball and run with it. One pupil at rugby school, a gentleman, picked up the football and was running away with it presumably out of concern for his fellow gentlemen and other gentlemen tried to stop this rude interruption by tackling him . Apparently he was quite difficult to catch and thus was born the game of rugby. The football gods from that time on have cursed the country which gave birth to this game where you try to stand up when you are tackled and respect the referees decision. At least hopefully we can look forward to a more gentlemanly performance in the Sweden/England game but apart from predicting a win for Sweden I also predict there will be at least one incident where one wonders whether the person tackled should be given a free kick or an oscar.

June 28, 2018November 23, 2018

Eighth Issue of Journal “The World Explored, the World Suffered”: Kant, Freud, and Aristotle

June 27, 2018March 29, 2019

The Conceptual Foundations of International Politics: Commentary and Critique of the Columbia University lecture series at cosmolearning.org/courses/conceptual-foundations-of-international-politics-311/ Lecture Four: Rashad Khalidi

Lecture 4

Rashad Khalidi

This 4th lecture in the lecture series is entitled “Cold War in the Middle East”. It begins by referring to President Bush Senior’s overwhelming use of force in Kuwait and the consequent increased presence of US forces in the Middle East. Bush Junior, in 2001, followed in his father’s footsteps by using overwhelming force to invade and dismantle the state of Iraq. These events raise the following question for Khalidi:

“Is the US an Empire?”

This question relates to the concept of “The New World Order” which we raised in the last lecture. When President Bush senior used the above words he was apparently thinking about the Primacy of America but when Kissinger used these words in his work “Diplomacy” he was referring to a new Balance of Power situation involving 6 major countries, namely the US, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and India. In relation to the question “Is the US an Empire?” we need to look no further Kissinger’s work “World Order” and the following words:

“No truly global “world order” has ever existed”.

Kissinger is no stranger to the concept of overwhelming force. He refers in the first chapter of the above work to President Truman and the Atomic attacks on the Japanese and the fact that this was a moment Truman was proud of because it brought his enemies back into “the community of nations”.

This suggests that the US only uses overwhelming forced conditionally and instrumentally in order to restore order amongst the community of nations which in its turn suggests that the US possesses no absolute Imperial intentions. This may be true but this fact does not, however, suffice to give the US the right to bear the title of “the beacon for the world” as Kissinger suggests in his earlier work, “Diplomacy”.

Khalidi in his argumentation points to the British Historian Nial Ferguson’s analysis that the US is de Facto an Empire because of the following considerations:
1. The US has always had a global mission
2. The power of mobilizing the armed forces remains with the President and has not been devolved back to the people as is the case with other warring countries.
3. There are US fleets on all the seas.
4. There are US bases on all continents
5. Weapons manufacture has remained at high levels of production.

Ferguson argues that the US should wake up to its role in the world and take its responsibility, though exactly what this means is not clear in this lecture.

Paradoxically, Khalidi maintains, the principal threat to the US is not coming from any of the other big 5 nations but rather from the challenge to American power by Iran in the Middle East. Recent events in the relation between Iran and the US now appear to suggest that the US is responding to this threat more unilaterally than it has done in the past. Sanctions and a possible threat of overwhelming force are attempting to cause Iran to adopt a posture of submission. This latest policy from the Trump administration is a distinct departure from the earlier “community of nations” approach sanctioned by the UN.

Khalidi points to lessons that should have been learned in SE Asia: that military power may not be “capable of determining the outcome of conflicts always and everywhere”, thereby suggesting, without specifically saying so, that the current system of International Relations is the Westphalian balance-of-power-amongst- nation-states-system. This is Kissinger’s position and neither position is sensitive to one of the underlying mechanisms of globalization: a globalization process that is moving us away from the Westphalian system toward Cosmopolitanism via the intermediate stage of the European Union and other regional states, defense and economic organizations.

Khalidi, points out quite correctly that the amount of money spent on weapons and war(under the current Westphalian system) could be used for education. Universal education of the individual is one of the mechanisms we need to move us toward Cosmopolitanism. In this context consider Kant’s account of the role of the education of the individual in the journey from a natural antagonism toward one’s fellow man:

“The means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, insofar as this antagonism becomes, in the long run, the cause of a law-governed social order…..All man’s talents are now gradually developed, his taste cultivated, and by a continued process of enlightenment, a beginning is made toward establishing a way of thinking which can with time transform the primitive natural capacity for moral discrimination into definite practical principle: and thus a pathologically enforced social union is transformed into a moral whole.”(Fourth proposition from essay “Idea for a Universal History” in “Kant’s Political Writings, p45)

One can wonder what Kant is referring to here when he talks of a “pathologically enforced social union”. He is certainly referring to social unions that are not in accordance with practical principles of the kind he is talking about in his moral and political works. He is probably also talking about the “commonwealths” of his time where antagonism is projected onto outside enemies and we thus as a consequence, find ourselves locked into a cycle of war and preparation for war which seems never-ending. But even this process has, according to the hopeful Kant, a positive telos or purpose:

“Wars, tense and unremitting military preparations, and the resultant distress which every state must feel within itself, even in the midst of peace..these are the means by which nature drives nations to make initially imperfect attempts, but finally after many devastations, upheavals, and even complete inner exhaustion of their powers, to take the step which reason could have suggested to them even without so many sad experiences—that of abandoning a lawless state of savagery and entering a federation of peoples in which every state, even the smallest, could expect to derive its security and rights not from its own power or its own legal judgment, but solely from this great federation, from a united power and law-governed decisions of a united will.”(ibid p47)

Today we find ourselves not quite in the Westphalian-balance of power political situation thanks to Kant’s foresight. The UN exists. It is a Kantian institution created for the purpose of regulating international disagreements. This lecture series has in earlier lectures expressed skepticism with respect to the efficacy of the UN in the arena of international disagreement. Kissinger has also expressed his skepticism. This state of affairs may actually have its explanation in an earlier proposition of Kant’s which points out that man needs a master but does not want a master. This dialectic of authority and subject which man wrongly conceives of along the lines of master and slave is a dialectic that is currently playing itself out on the world stage. Kant’s account is tied up with his transcendental account of the relation between the future subject of the coming kingdom of ends and the future justice system. There is no dialectical relation between these two fundamental elements but rather a relation in transcendental logic which states that the subject and the legislator of the legal system are in a relation of identity: these are the laws that the subject would have created were he in the legislators position and the legislator, in turn, regards himself as a subject which must obey these laws. This is a relation of identity. Justice in such a kingdom of ends requires knowledge both on the part of the subject and the legislator and this in our contemporary societies is not something which is yet actualized. One reason for this state of affairs is that our educational systems are not yet cosmopolitan, they are rather, in Kant’s words, pathologically national. What we need are Cosmopolitan educational systems financed by the money which otherwise would have been spent on war and preparation for war. The situation looks hopeless but it is not so for the eagle-eyed Kant whose gaze spans hundreds of thousands of years. He sees that in our contemporary situation, for every war that occurs the germ of enlightenment survives. He detects in the manifold of political phenomena that there is a plan of nature which will eventually realize the cosmopolitan goal. He can see a state of affairs in which wars cease and cosmopolitan educational systems can actualize the moral whole.

In this context, Kant has the following to say on p49:

“We are cultivated to a high degree by art and science. We are civilized to the point of excess in all kinds of social courtesies and proprieties. But we are still a long way from the point where we could consider ourselves morally mature. For while the idea of morality is indeed present in the culture, an application of this idea which only extends to the semblances of morality, as in love of honour and outward propriety, amounts merely to civilization. But as long as states apply all their resources to their vain and violent schemes of expansion, thus incessantly obstructing the slow and laborious efforts of their citizens to cultivate their minds, and even deprive them of all support in their efforts, no progress in this direction can be expected. For a long internal process of careful work on the part of each commonwealth is necessary for the education of its citizens.”

This position is in accordance with the positions of both Plato and Aristotle who tie the character or personality of the individual to the kind of state he inhabits. So, the question of whether the US is an Empire or not is largely irrelevant in the Cosmopolitan process. The Paradox of the US as the beacon of all political value and as the commonwealth using overwhelming force on other commonwealths is a modern paradox which we all live with and prevents us from regarding the US as the saviour of the New World Order. Paradoxically for the Americans we Europeans believe that the beacon of all political value is the much older Kantian beacon shining through the fog and mists of time into the future. Whether or not this beacon will light the way into the future will also depend on whether the European Project can live up to its Kantian hopes and provide commonwealths of peace and prosperity via cosmopolitan educational institutions.

June 26, 2018June 26, 2018

Ask Me Anything Philosophy Blogger

I will be answering questions on the AMA feed tomorrow , 28th June 2018, in the areas of Political Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy of Education and Ancient Greek Philosophy.

https://authorsama.amafeed.com/user/54068AMA Site-link

June 25, 2018

The Third Centrepiece Lecture on the Philosophy of Education(Jude Sutton) from “The World Explored, the World Suffered: The Exeter Lectures ( The Ethics of Language)

Jude Sutton turned up 5 minutes late to the lecture on a windy March afternoon. The lecture room was diagonally opposite his offices and he was obviously not having an easy time making headway against the winds sweeping off the moors. His long coat flailed in the wind and whipped his legs. His hair was completely disheveled upon arrival in the lecture-room. Even his cigarette had gone out and he seemed to have come without matches. He took a long time to decide what to do with the residue of his home -made cigarette. At last the moment for decision came and he crumpled up the cigarette and put it in his coat pocket. Jude Sutton was suffering. He had almost decided not to come to the lecture. Without a cigarette to distract his nervous system it would not be long before his hands would begin shaking with anxiety. It would not be long before his headache made it impossible to talk without it seeming as if his voice was coming from somewhere far away in the distance. He steeled himself for the opening of the lecture:

“What is our relation to the world as a whole? Surely it cannot be what the scientist claims it to be, a relation to physically measurable events related by causal mechanisms obeying laws we cannot formulate accurately. Surely it cannot be, as the idealist would like us to believe ,a matter of mental states and processes obeying laws of thought we cannot formulate, all relating back to the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am”? How have we been led to this impasse? Is it because of what we will take up in our next week’s lecture, namely the influence of epistemology? Or is the problem instead the influence of the so- called theory of knowledge, upon the three central metaphysical issues in Philosophy: 1. of the existence of the world, 2.The nature of our souls, and 3. The being or processes we call God.
Surely our relation to the world is not merely a knowing relation, which always puts us at a kind of psychical distance to reality. Yet we surely know something about the world. What about our relation to our own souls or even more interestingly given our topic today of Ethics, our relation to other souls. Is the mere concept of knowing sufficient to characterise this relation?. This relation to other souls, which is the concern of all ethical theory?
The major enemy of Philosophy or the major disease it suffers from is skepticism that has the mission not just of questioning everything we claim to know, but, in the course of that questioning mission, skepticism dismantles our world, reduces it to primeval dust. And when we are standing there with dust in our hands the skeptic says nihilstically “ See! it was all clouds of thought, castles in the air”. True, philosophers know you can never reduce a cloud to dust, and the forms of the castle and the house are just as real as the primeval dust the skeptic wants everything reduced to. Philosophy has learned from many skeptical attacks in its history that the existence of the world is not a problem of knowledge. The claim to know places us too far away from the core of the problem. The other major disease that Philosophy has suffered from historically is dogmatism. Sometimes one disease is a cure for another but not very often. Dogmatism is the tool of the tyrant and skepticism the tool of his tyrannical subject and the discourse in such a kingdom can only reduce the truth to dust. At funerals we hear “Man, dust thou are, and to dust shalt thou return.” The intention was to humble us but instead the dust blinded us, filled up our ears and mouth, caused deafness and struck us dumb. What we are, could never be returned or reduced to primeval stardust. This is the source of the ancient idea of the immortality of the soul, itself, related to the Platonic forms which exist sub specie aeternitatis: timelessly. In that handful of dust is our human relations, the relation of one soul to another or the relation of a soul to his community. Skeptics are clever. In dismantling the relation we have to each other they will pretend to believe in the certainty of our private consciousness or sentience, which no one by definition could ever publicly define. They will ask what it is we actually know about other people and we will be forced to answer that what we know of others is based on the behavior we see. I infer, on the grounds of their possessing bodies, which seem the same as mine, that their behavior is connected to their consciousness or sentience in the same way as mine. This is the so- called famous argument from analogy. Other people possess consciousness or sentience by analogy. I can never see anyone’s pain only infer it. And here the skeptic makes his match- winning move. Surely he argues, someone can be behaving as if they are in pain and not be in pain at all. That’s how much we know! And surely, he again argues, someone can be in an enormous amount of pain but, being the true Spartan they are, they show the world nothing of the pain. That is how much we know, the skeptic claims, triumphantly.

Well, Ladies and gentlemen we should not be overly impressed with these snippets of philosophical drama. All the argument shows is that the existence of the world and other souls are not to be characterised in epistemological terms. They are not, in other words, problems of knowledge. We do know of the existence of others, and the criteria of us knowing what we do know, is how they behave, what they say etc. Of course the metaphysical status of this physical and linguistic behavior is a critical philosophical problem and it is part of how we know that someone is in pain.
And someone being in pain, the suffering soul, ladies and gentlemen is one of the key phenomena that ethics needs to deal with.
But before we take up this issue let us talk about language. We obviously see something as something when we see certain physical movements of a man’s face and the sound he emits as a wince of pain. Where does this ability come from? One suggestion is that we see something as something because we are language- users, and it is a major function of language in virtue of its possessing a subject predicate structure, to say something about something. This translates eventually into thought and in virtue of this linguistic capacity we can think something about something. The capacity also transforms our animal like perception into the more human form in which see something as something, for example, I see those physical movements and that sound as a wince of pain. And here we have the later Philosophy of Wittgenstein overturning the earlier, and producing what has been referred to as the Wittgensteinian Copernican revolution. All Philosophical problems , Wittgenstein now argues, can be resolved by investigating the philosophical or as he calls it grammatical structure of our language.
Language does not disguise thought, it manifests thought:-If we would only disengage the skeptical and dogmatic voices within us for a moment and understand what there is to understand. When these skeptical and dogmatic voices within us take over, we are bewitched by the language we use and we can even believe things that are impossible to believe, that is, there can even be contradictions dwelling in our belief systems, which become impossible to detect. Wittgenstein urges us in our “Philosophical Investigations” to ask, “Under what circumstances or in what particular cases do we say that someone has winced in pain, or someone loves someone?” His idea here is that we make conceptual judgments for which there are criteria. We make judgments in the same way as does a dance-judge or an ice skating-judge. In their minds is the idea or form of the perfect dance or perfect ice skating program. In our minds we don’t quantify but judge in virtue of the quality of truth. “What is this physical movement I see before me, how shall I conceptualise it?” The sixty four thousand dollar question is “Where do the criteria for our judgments come from?”. I am afraid I only have a thirty-two thousand dollar answer but it is what we have thus far in the middle of a work in progress, The criteria of judgment come from the agreement over what counts as what, in our language. This linguistic agreement is a work in progress that has been formed of tens of thousands of generations of speakers influenced in every generation by the best minds. If we cannot value or have respect for that, then there is not much we can respect. This language we speak has been over these generations interwoven with forms of life that have transformed our animal existence into human being. We learn our language at our mothers knee and when we see everything we see in our modern concrete jungles there is a thread longer than Ariadne’s flowing back all the way to the cave paintings, fire, the first tools and the dusty paths we walked along in bare feet, eons ago. Agreements over what is to count as what form the structure of how we think about the world. This is the starting point of the Wittgenstein’s revolution.
And so we arrive at the criteria for what is ethically good.
Here is an ethical judgment: “Murder is wrong”. How are we to analyse such a statement philosophically. Aristotle thought there are many meanings of Good two of which were “the good action” and “ the good person”. I am going to concern myself with these during the rest of the lecture.
Charles Stevenson in his work “Ethics and Language” claims that there are two kinds of disagreements that people generally have when talking about the good, Disagreement in belief and disagreement in attitude. Disagreement in belief occurs when verification procedures of the facts can resolve the disagreement. Disagreement in attitude occurs when we agree about the facts but one finds the set of facts good and the other does not. According to Stevenson we can do nothing about the latter. No rational procedure will change attitudes.
I want to maintain, ladies and gentlemen that in analysing “Murder is wrong” on Stevenson’s analysis it turns out that if we submit this to the first pattern of his analysis we must analyse the judgment into “I disapprove of murder (an attitude) and you should do so as well(an imperative). On his second pattern of analysis he would claim that we are on the level of principle and that the analysis of “Murder is wrong” should refer to the principle that murder creates a considerable amount of unhappiness in the society in which we live. This amounts to, what we call in philosophy, a non-cognitive analysis of the moral judgment since disagreements in attitude have no logical relation to facts. Well I am sure, ladies and gentlemen, that disagreements in attitude have a conceptual and therefore logical connection to facts. “Murder is wrong” not just because I disapprove of it and urge you to do so, but for good philosophical reasons, and our individual happiness is only marginally involved in the point of the language game we play with ethics. Stevenson is wrong in insisting that a disagreement in attitude occurs when we agree about the facts. True, we might agree that A killed B on the basis of medical criteria relating to the occurrence of the event of death. But some would doubt that we agree with the murderer over the judgment “Murder is wrong” especially in those cases where the murder is premeditated. Aristotle claims that we all aim in our actions at the good. In an instrumental sense the murderer sees his action as the achievement of an instrumentally structured goal. But, for the sake of a complete argument, were this the only structure by which to judge the value of the action of murder we would as a practical consequence be living in a state of nature and living the kind of life Hobbes described as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. A war of all against all.The difference in the judging procedures in these two cases is that in the first case, we are concerned with the difference between the instrumental value of the achievements of my life-goals and the happiness of my life and in the second case with the categorical value-judgment of the same action. These, when submitted to the practical reasoning process of Kant’s categorical imperative would arrive at the logical consequence that “One ought not to murder”, because the universal law justifies the “Murder is wrong” judgment. I am saying ladies and gentlemen that when we say that “murder is wrong” this is amongst other things a first move in a language game in which we place a responsibility on the hearer to approve, to adopt the correct attitude. We are not inviting our interlocutor to a debate about the concept of murder.
Now it is important to realise the difference between an ethical judgment about what is good in the world of action, and an aesthetic judgment about what is good in the world of fashion and taste, in which the winds of change blow our taste first in one direction and then in another. In the language game of aesthetic judgment we concern ourselves with things such as strawberries and raspberries and how things appear rather than what they are in themselves. Any imperative or ought –judgment in the aesthetic language-game does not relate to our obligations to do something but rather to our desires for pleasure and happiness. Ethical obligations, on the other hand, do not arise from how the world appears to us to be, but rather from how it ought to be for everyone.
The agreement relating to the judgment “Murder is wrong” is mandatory. What that means is that if you do not agree, you are compromising your rationality in the whole sphere of moral value judgment. The advertisement of such a phenomenon of disagreement in a world filled with the noise of advertisements is interpreted by people who understand the workings of practical reason as being indicative of the aimless wanderings of a stranger in the polis of good ethical action. Perhaps, it might be surmised, such a stranger is confusing what is aesthetic with what is ethical. Such a stranger is confusing the appearance with what is real.
But all of this is somewhat obscure unless some account is given of the criteria I have been talking about. What are they? Well, ladies and gentlemen I believe that they are Kantian .The first criterion is conceptual universality, i.e. if something is to be conceptualised as murder it is necessarily wrong. The attitude of disapproval is written into it. Killing, in self defence when no other alternative is available is not, some would claim, murder, although Dr. Glynn Samuels our resident Welsh genius would certainly disagree. For him you should allow yourself to be murdered under the Christian value system whose only real commandment, according to Leo Tolstoy, is “Do not resist evil”.
The second criterion is connected with how we ought to universally treat people. According to Kant we ought to treat everyone as ends-in -themselves—as dignified bearers of ultimate values with a right to everything humans have rights to. The third criterion is connected to the fate of our society. According to Kant there is a kind of law of historical progress operating and we will eventually reach a point in the development of society, which he calls the kingdom of ends, in which everyone who has reached the age of consent or the state of mind of a knowing, consenting being, will fulfil their obligations to each other. In such a society there may not even be any widespread need for legal and justice systems given the fact that all relations and actions in that society would be regulated by Kant’s moral law. This of course would be to the liking of Dr. Samuels and his source of inspiration Mr. Tolstoy.
But it is not only obligation or duty, which is the key idea in Kantian ethics. The practical idea of freedom defines the difference between the theoreticians belief in the spatiotemporal world of deterministic causation and the practical philosophers faith in the freedom from causal determination of the ethical agent when acting ethically: Aristotle’s good person and good action in other words. The ethical subject and the ethical action are striving not to be happy but, rather, to be deemed worthy, on the basis of their actions, of happiness. There are basically four kinds of action in the Kantian practical system and the ethical is the highest and most complex . The second most complex kind of action are instrumental actions which are structured in accordance with the principle of prudence: a principle which aims to strive for the individuals good and the individuals happiness. The next kind of action in Kant’s hierarchy are customary or traditional actions which rely on the wisdom of generations and finally there are expressive actions which are normally positive emotional responses but can even be completely detrimental to the agents well being, even if they are, as Aristotle put it, “aimed” at the agents good. And here again we must cast out the skeptical voice in us which tries to suggest that theoretical knowledge is the standard by which to measure whether a reason is good or not, whether a judgment is good or not, whether a person is good or not. Kant talks of faith in this context: faith in the good processes of the world, promoting and sustaining the good ethical actions of the good agent judging wisely. Here, for Kant, the belief in the Good and the belief in freedom are fundamentally practical concerns. These ideas of the Good and Freedom, according to Kant take us deeply into the world as it ought to be in itself: allow us to glimpse the kingdom of ends which is what some will maintain is the aim of all religion. In this line of reasoning we can see a Kantian modification of Christ’s claim that “The truth will set you free”. It is the truth of the above ideas, which above all will set you free. We may not all be sinners but we all certainly live our lives with an inadequate idea of the structure of the world and inadequate ideas of the structure of our souls”
A mature English major, raised his hand and said:
“The lesson ended some time ago we only have 15 minutes for lunch.”
“Yes doesn’t time fly when one is having fun. Next Fridays unit in the series “Philosophy of Education” will be “Epistemology”—Theory of Knowledge for you non Greek speakers. In this unit we will ask how we know facts such as “The pen is on the table” and “How could I know that you were all hungry?”
Jude Sutton ended the lecture angry at himself for not completing the lecture. One or two students immediately rushed to the canteen next door but I, and a number of others stayed to ask follow up questions. Amongst these, I was surprised to see Sophia, who must have come in after me and sat at the back of the lecture room outside my line of sight
“What implications do these ideas have for the legal institutions of society?” asked the friend I had seen Sophia together with in the library.
“It is a perennial philosophical question whether these institutions of justice are themselves fundamentally just. They are all designed to punish the bad man and the bad action. If one goes back to Socrates’s discussions of justice in the Republic he argues that punishing a bad man will not produce the good, it will only make him worse and that will be worse for everybody. But the Kantian position recognises “the evil” in man, if I can put these words in quotation marks for the moment: that is, these words recognise mans disposition not to look at the world with a good will. Kant also recognises that the work of convincing man to approach the world through his judgments and actions with a good will cannot be done via the traditional biblical means of revelation of the miraculous and a pseudo-inference to an all powerful super-sensible being at the source. So Kant views punishment as, not in the spirit of an “eye for an eye”, but rather in the spirit of depriving the agent of his freedom and waiting for that fundamental condition of approaching the world with a good will to occur, namely seeing the world as a place where the good produces the benefits of a good life and seeing ones actions to be part of the processes which lead to such a good life. So, to answer your question the statues of justice should not just have a sword and scales in their hands, they should try to find some way of carrying a book, perhaps under their arms, and my suggestion for the book concerned would be Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”. Some humanists believe that the sword should be removed from the hand of the statue of justice but this would be to override an important Kantian intuition about justice, namely that the consequences of murdering someone is that evidence becomes public that a human being has lost his humanity and every murderer must symbolically live with the consequences of that. This of course does not necessarily mean that all murderers should be put to death as useless animals who no one wishes to own are, but it does raise the interesting question of what we should do with murderers.”
Sophia stepped forward, her long golden Swedish hair decorating her shoulders:
“We are sorry but we joined the course late. We were doing Sociology of Education but thought that this elective might be more useful to organize our thoughts about education. I am sorry if I am asking questions you have probably answered earlier in the course but today you talked about the existence of the world and its reality. What do you mean? Is this a silly question?
Jude Sutton gave a little smile and answered:
“Not at all my dear, your question cuts right to the heart of the course which began by asking about the nature of the world. We are , according to Aristotle, the rational animal, and it is our reason that enables us to understand a world rather than live in a segment of it: in an environment. There are other regions of our mind, which help to build up this awareness. Firstly there are our innate intuitions of space and time, which are involved in the perception of the things in the world as we build up our experiences Secondly there is our understanding of the world when we begin to organize these experiences into a coherent whole with for example, the principle of causality and other categorical principles. But Reason is the crowning moment for our minds. It allows us to believe that we can systematically understand the world as systematic whole. When all our principles of experience are laid out in plain sight we still do not have an adequate idea of the world—one that allows the smooth operation of language and logic. Reason makes reasonable assumptions, which may be the consequences of inferences from different regions of the mind. One of these assumptions is a presupposition of reality as a given continually changing infinite continuum out of which the world emerges, as a space for all possible human experience and awareness. In order for this to make sense there is a presupposition of an infinite original being which is just the name of existence as a whole. This grounds the possibility of the experience and awareness of everything, both the possible and the actual. This is why the world cannot merely be the totality of things, because the principles of the experience of objects will never enable us to understand important regions of the world: for example the human regions of the world. Considering man as a network trapped in a deterministic network of causes transforms him into an object and denies the fundamental law of his subjectivity, namely his freedom. But freedom is a recent idea of Reason. The practical idea of reason that took us from our animal existence to our divine humanity was the theoretical idea of God. The reasoning went something like this. The things in the world are different. This difference is a function of the fact that they are not some other thing: things are as they are as a result of the negations attaching to them. The negation is only possible if there is an understanding of a whole of things and their negations. This whole is then conceived to be an original being from which all things are derived. One can immediately see that this is not an objective necessity but is a necessity that arises as a consequence of our thought processes about the world. It is then a natural extension of theoretical reasoning to connect this to causality and regard this being as the first cause of all contingent things which owe their existence and essence to him, if we wish now to anthropomorphize this being- Thus was God born. I have no problem with believing in the Philosopher’s God . For the philosopher the idea of God would have made more sense if God was characterized as the whole from which all processes of change flow”

May 30, 2018November 23, 2018

Seventh Issue of Philosophical /Educational Journal:”The World Explored, the World Suffered”–Aristotle, Kant, Darwin, James

May 29, 2018June 11, 2018

Second Centrepiece lecture on Philosophy of Education(Jude Sutton): Aristotle, Kant and the project of Humanity

Jude Sutton appeared almost on time for the lesson and the lesson began with the words:
“Education is a noun but the key to the whole problem as to what education is, lies in the primary verb form ”educe” which, according to the “Cambridge” English Dictionary means to bring out, to lead, develop from latent or potential existence, a process of inference of principle from the matter which it explains.
This ladies and gentlemen is a very different idea to that we have discussed earlier, namely, the world being the totality of facts. In the idea or form of education the Aristotelian notion is of a world being a totality of facts and explanations or justifications, where these explanations and justifications in many areas of discourse have a fact- determining role.”

The Science major raised his hand and asked.” I don’t quite understand. Surely a fact is a fact independently of what anyone thinks about it”

“I am inclined to agree, a wolf can kill 3 sheep in 7 days independently of whether there is anyone to see these events or talk about them, but that is only part of the story of what makes a statement to that effect true. The wolf has become a linguistic entity as soon as he became a bearer of the name “wolf”… but this is all too theoretical to be of immediate relevance for us. If for no other reason than the fact that the concept of Education is not close to the physical events occurring in the world and not close to the thoughts that furnish one’s mind but is rather an umbrella term for a group of action-related processes whose telos or function will only become clear when we have sketched the logical geography of the associated concepts in this terrain.
Let me give you an example of the way in which principles determine reality in the practical sphere of ethics. No one, I hope will question the importance of ethics for Education. In theoretical contexts if I claim that “water boils at 100 degrees centigrade” and someone discovers that it does not at great heights above sea level, then my statement is not a principle, and must be rejected on the grounds of lacking support in reality.
But take the ethical principle “Murder is wrong” and imagine you are standing in a bus queue and two people begin quarrelling bitterly with each other. One pulls out a gun and shoots the other. We have witnessed what is called a murder and we are bearers of the attitude towards this event expressed in the words “Murder is wrong” Now note that the argument for murder being wrong is not to be found in reality as is the case with the wolf eating 3 sheep in 7 days. That is, the argument is not to be found in the fact that the murder occurred in front of my eyes whilst I was standing in a bus queue.
It is to be found in what philosophers call principles in the ought system of concepts, one of which is “Murder is wrong”. This principle is fact-determining. The principle itself also has the function of justifying the attitude we take to the event and all explanation and justification ends there. So, at least in the world of how things ought to be, in the world of value, this is the end of the process of justification. Once we have reached the rock bottom of the justification process we can but appeal to our fundamental attitudes and to what we do and this is why the Greek philosophers and Kant placed their bets on practical philosophy in their search for solutions to metaphysical problems
But I digress, yet only ever so slightly, for the answer to the question “ What is education?” resides in how we characterize what we do and the attitudes underlying what we do”
The drama student raised her hand and asked
“But does that not make what we do, relative, and not in accordance with, the universality principle. After all the murderer thinks what he did is right. That is his attitude toward what he has done”
“True, but since this is not how he ought to think, this is not an argument against the principle. How we ought to think, of course, is as much of a logical matter as is how we do in fact think, and this may be why the world is not just the totality of facts. The younger Wittgenstein was wrong and he has admitted as much and written a work entitled “Philosophical Investigations” in which we shall find the beginnings of the answers to some of the questions that will be thrown up in this course. Education is the name for a family of activities conducted in accordance with criteria for a value system which ought to be universally true, but are not, because we are not ethically mature beings. Yet ethics is there bubbling under the surface of everyday relations and legal systems. It is there ready to erupt when the time is right. It erupts daily in these systems but it has not resulted in what I would like to call the ethical attitude because we , unlike Socrates, do not understand what we do not know. We do not fully understand ourselves. The claim of the later Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle is that we will only reach full understanding when, after analysis of all the relevant concepts and possible judgments we will stand in a strategic part of the educational terrain and see everything stretched out before us.
The Greeks felt that education was the universal key to unlock all doors: the doors of moral virtue, good government, the soul, and the world. Kant felt that the educational project was necessary for the perfection of mans human nature, a project that might take one hundred thousand years. According to him, man can only become truly what he is destined to be when the project is nearing completion..
The major problem about education in particular and values in general is that , as Wittgenstein wrote, values are not to be found in the world, they lie at the origins of it and also in the attitudes men bring to bear upon the world via their actions and judgments. When it comes to certain kinds of events, it has been argued, men seem to create the world they live in.

“But”, the questioner persisted, “Surely attitudes differ. You like strawberries and I like raspberries. What citizen A does in Polis P is different to what a citizen B does in Polis Q”
“True, on both counts. There are different kinds of actions and different kinds of judgments. Liking Strawberries and Raspberries are a matter of judgments of taste. And citizen P may drive a certain kind of car to work and citizen Q a different kind of car. These latter two examples are examples of what philosophers call instrumentalities: actions whose essence is to be instrumental to achieving a goal, such as going to work. The goal in itself may also be an instrumentality and be part of achieving another goal further on in time, such as saving to buy a house. But at some time in the acting process we come upon value, the origin and terminus of the process of practical reasoning: the categorical reason for doing what we do–and these reasons reveal our attitude toward the world in general. Such attitudes usually relate to what Plato and Aristotle called “The Form of the Good”. To return to our example from the realm of ethics, “Murder is wrong”. This is, according to Kant, a moral law which can be universalized(that is, everyone ought to believe it and act in accordance with it) and has to do with a fundamental attitude towards people and the kind of society it is necessary to build if we are to complete “The Human Project”
“But people clearly do not universally believe in it or act in accordance with it. The prisons are filled with murderers”, the mature English major asserted.

“And the point is to understand why they are there, sitting in their prisons, thinking about their deeds. In murdering someone, the agent gives up their humanity, according to Kant, and this suffices as an argument for him to give murderers the death penalty. But actually putting murderers in prison might be sufficiently Kantian, even for Kant, because in prison we lose what he regards as part of the essence of humanity, namely ones freedom. Kantian philosophy permeates the legal system: Murderers are found guilty of murder in legal processes because we all have powerful minds, part of the structure of which is to choose between right and wrong, or even more basically: the man in the bus queue in front of me could have chosen not to pull out his gun and shoot his antagonist. We all possess this ability to distance ourselves from our own acts. In modern brain research parlance: the frontal lobes inhibit instinctive action and bring reasoning to bear upon what we may, deep in our animal souls, wish to do. However it is important to question the principle of justice our system of law is in fact operating with. Leo Tolstoy thought it was a primitive quid pro quo system based on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and his Kingdom of the utopian future contains no legal system. Christian Morality takes care of everything. In this we hear the strains of an old Socratic song from the early books of Republic.
We digress, yet ever so slightly, since education is fundamentally concerned with the project of Humanity, and if the preceding argument is correct, Education is fundamentally in its nature, a process obeying the laws of the categorical imperative, to use Kants language. And with that I think we can rest our case for today.” Since we have pointed out the similarities between the language we use for education and ethical language we shall during the next lecture take up the issue of ethics and language.”

May 29, 2018August 26, 2019

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY COURSE: Aristotle Part one: The Metaphysics of Nature.

Aristotle’s contribution to establishing a philosophical method was extensive and profound. Philosophy up to and including Plato included the discovery of elenchus and dialectic methods both of which were essentially designed for a face to face debating approach that often took place in the presence of an audience expecting areté(excellence)

Aristotle, in contrast to most of his predecessors, viewed the historical development of Philosophy more systematically perhaps exactly because of the methods he had discovered. Where Plato in his central work, “The Republic” resorted to allegory and myth at crucial moments in his theorising, Aristotle used Categories of existence and logical argumentation. This resulted in the substitution of the dialectical interaction of different thinkers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides by a more theoretical panoramic view of all the thinkers of the Greek age, including the so-called “natural philosophers”. The result of this historical-methodological approach was of course firstly, the “invention” or “discovery” of logic and, secondly, the emergence of hylomorphic theory from the metaphysical investigations into being qua being(the first principles of Philosophy). With these developments a panoramic view of the landscape of thought was made possible.
Given that metaphysics begins with the asking of aporetic questions the definition of which refers to the phenomenon of there being apparently equally strong arguments for both the thesis and the antithesis of the issue, there appears to be a need for an overarching theoretical framework in which elements of both answers can be accommodated without contradiction. Indeed one is given the impression that the canvas Aristotle was using was considerably larger than that used by previous philosophers. In Raphael’s painting “The School of Athens”, Plato is pointing upwards toward the ethereal heavens and Aristotle is pointing straight ahead, perhaps at future audiences and the demand for more systematic systems of representation. He was of course hoping that his works influence including as it did the practice of incorporating the insights of previous systems of thought into present ones would not diminish over time.

Descartes and Hobbes were both anti-Aristotelian theorists and the result of their works was to return us to a dialectically inspired resurrection of materialism and dualism. These modern philosophers and many modern philosohers philosophising in their spirit failed to understand that hylomorphic theory transcended these alternatives with a systematic world view.

Aristotle embraces Heraclitus to a much greater extent than Plato did in his work and as a consequence we will find in Aristotle a more satisfactory explanation of the material aspect of reality, partly because matter is a part of the medium of change in Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory. Matter was conceived as infinite by the materialists of the Greek age which included the early Socrates in their number. Aristotle conceived of matter as infinite because it appeared to him that the number of forms matter could take was unlimited. One arrived at the fundamental elements of reality, i.e. an ontological understanding of what there was by dividing the infinite continuum up either into abstract “atoms” or more concrete elements such as earth, water, air and fire. In Aristotle’s view, early materialism did not provide a sufficiently complex explanation for the desire to understand the world which he claimed all human beings possess. At best we are given a view of what might exist, e.g. atoms, elements etc, without any principle for their existence. This form of principled existence or explanation of existence refers to the question “Why?” and this question transports us very quickly into the realm of the aporetical which Descartes and Hobbes were so keen to abandon in favour of a methodology of investigation. For Descartes this method was purely rational and was based on the givennes of thought or consciousness in the activity of thinking: his method was purely rational. Hobbes on the other hand was intellectually skeptical of the world of thought and its wild and wonderful ontological structure. For him observation as part of a method of resolution and composition eliminated the wild flying creations of the intellectual imagination and allowed the philosopher like the scientist to slow the pace of investigation down to a pedestrian earthly speed. Wholes were carefully resolved into their parts and parts were composed into wholes. This method when applied to the human sciences then also gave birth to the resolution of holistic human activities into two kinds of events which were logically independent of one another—cause and effect. Given that human activities are logical composites of the actions of agents and the objects they produce this of course places an enormous obstacle in the path of the task if explaining human activities. When the above method reigns the domain of explanation , the question “Why?” tends to focus on the cause of the activity in accordance with a principle of causation which states that “every event has a cause.” This principle literally means that one cannot rest in ones explanatory task with another event because that in turn must have a cause and it says nothing about resting ones explanation on a foundation which is not of the kind: event. With this principal we are literally on the path to an infinite regress which will logically prevent the kind of explanation needed if for no other reason than the fact that the direction of the explanation is archeological, proceeding backwards in time. Aristotle was one of the first to point out that explanation of human activity which aims at the good is teleological, aiming in the opposite direction, namely forwards in time. This kind of explanation starts with the aim of bringing something, a holistic state of affairs, about and will only be resolved into sub goals if there is a logical relation between these sub activities and the overall aim of the holistic activity. There cannot be a cause-effect relation as envisaged by analytical philosophy of the kind practised by Hobbes and Hume simply because a cause is logically independent of its effect and Aristotle’s explanations had a lohical structure that demanded logical dependence of its elements. From a modern perspective, Sciences like Physics and non-organic chemistry have great use for this method of resolution –composition without too much distortion of the phenomena being studied. It is, to take an example, more easy to see how dead rabbits decompose into particles but , staying at the level of particles it is much more difficult to use them to account for how these particles help to teleologically keep live rabbits alive. These particles at the very least need to be composed into organs or the dandelions the rabbit eats. This example illustrates that decomposition into parts actively discourages teleological thinking. Aristotle’s starting points for the rabbit were its teleological ends of growth, survival, and reproduction, and these “ends” are used to conceive of the parts of the rabbit, namely, its organs and limbs. The same modus operandi is used for conceiving of the why’s and wherefores relating to human beings. For Aristotle, a particular form of life requires a particular constellation of organs and limbs functioning teleologically to keep the animal growing, alive and reproducing. Aristotle also recognises the principle of rabbithood in his comparisons of the form of the life the rabbit leads and the form of life the human being leads. The rabbit, Aristotle notes moves itself in accordance with this principle of rabbithood which rests not inside the rabbit but “in” the rabbits activity. For Aristotle all life forms are, to use Ricoeur’s terminology “ desiring, striving, and working to be, to survive”. Organisms are in a sense causa sui(the (logical)cause of their (continued) existence). This causa sui-principle is not in any sense the end point of the explanation Aristotle requires. He believes we also need to provide a categorical framework other than material and efficient causation in order to “describe” the forms of life we encounter in the world. Aristotle’s “forms of life” are defined by the characteristic features of the activities engaged in by these “forms of life”. Plants, for example, are characterised(described and explained) by their growth and reproduction: animals by growth, reproduction, perception and purposeful movement and human beings by all these “characteristics plus talking, remembering and reasoning. One sees very clearly here how life forms are defined by not just their organ systems but also by characteristic powers, each building upon the other teleologically until the form of life the animal is destined for is actualised in accordance with an actualising process determined by its telos or end. This life form is determined by factors internal to the organism and not caused to come into existence by some outside agent as a table is caused to come into existence by the craft of the table maker. The parents of the organism pass the art of living on to their offspring by the creation of an internal principle which in turn will from the inside create the form of life typical of the organism. Matter does not drop out of the account completely. It is potential and it actualises its potential by being formed by some principle, e.g. the matter of living beings is formed into flesh bone and organs. This system of matter produces a system of powers that in term generates the form of life typical of the organism. These two systems together suffice to place living beings in a categorical framework. It is important to note here, however, that the telos or end of the actualisation process is the key to describing and explaining the function of the “parts” or the “elements” of the living being. This telos, before it is actualised is potentially present as part of the principle of the organism. What the organism is and what it strives and works to become define the nature of the being that it is. For Aristotle, this essence or form can be captured by an essence or form specifying definition. The categorical framework outlined above supersedes but does not eliminate the earlier division of the material world into earth, water, air, and fire, each of which, according to Aristotle,also possesses an essence or a form partly defined by what it can become or its telos, which in the case of these 4 elements is determined by the final resting place(T S Eliot, the death of earth, water, air and fire?). The earth is at the centre of the system of elements and is the source of all life which also requires water and air and the sun to thrive in accordance with the form of life determined by the system of organs and the powers generated thereby. When the organism dies its parts are returned to the earth, its resting place. Death, on this account is defined in terms of the lack of a principle of change in the organism: the organism now “possesses” in an empty sense, organs and limbs that lack the power of movement or change.
Life, in relation to the long term tendency of the physical elements to return to their source and place of rest, is paradoxical because it is composed both of “that for the sake of which” the process of growth occurs, and the principle or form determining this process.
Thus, forms or principles are, for Aristotle, the constituents of the universe: constituents which allow us to understand the truths of materialism, and the truths of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Plato.
When the principle or form is imposed externally upon matter as is the case with Art by the craftsman painting a painting or building a building it appears as if form and matter can be separated. If the art concerned is the art of building it almost seems as if the material of the bricks and wood is waiting around at the building site for the builder to shape into the form of a house. Several weeks later the material is standing high above the earth in the form of a house. In cases of living forms, however, the principle and the matter are , so speak, “intertwined” and inseparable and give rise to powers which the whole organism manifests. Matter, in itself, is therefore only understood in terms of its principle of organisation. The organs and limbs of flesh and bone are not the pure or prime matter of a human form. The organs and limbs themselves dwell in a hierarchy that rest on the elemental matter of earth water and heat. The powers of the organism in their turn rest on the formed matter of the organs and limbs.
Jonathan Lear in his work: “Aristotle:the desire to understand” has the following to say on the topic of the actual presence of powers in the living being:

“However, if this power is not a functional state of material structure, how can its presence be observed? Are natural powers beyond the realm of empirical inquiry? No, they are not: but it takes some care to spell out the conditions under which they can be observed. Obviously, powers are not immediate items of sensory perception. Nor can they be seen under a microscope. If an intelligent scientist were permitted to observe only one immature natural organism in his life, having been kept in ignorance of the general facts of generation and destruction, then there would be no way he could detect the presence of a power in the organism.. The first dawning of the idea that a power is present could only occur in retrospect. From the perspective of the fully developed organism we realise that there was a force present in the immature organism which directed its growth and activity toward this mature state. However, although the original idea of the presence of power is necessarily backward looking, this does not imply that powers are unobservable.”(p22)

Aristotelian teleological explanation has often been misinterpreted by the inductive scientist using the methodology of resolution and composition. Such scientists set about dividing the whole into its parts and then attempt on the basis of the observation of the actions and reactions of the parts and their relations, to re-compose the whole. A power could never emerge with this inductive method especially if this method is accompanied by a resolution of the whole into two logically independent events of the cause and effect kind. Sometimes we hear from the scientist the complaint that teleological final causes are using an impossible mechanism of “backward causation” and that this violates the logic of causal explanation.

The way to short circuit such objections is to situate teleology in its holistic context of form, potentiality and power. Lear has this to contribute in his discussion of the connection of these three terms:

“In Aristotle’s world form as a potentiality or power does help to explain the growth, development and mature functions of living organisms. And there are empirical tests for the presence of form. Were there no structure in an immature organism or regularity in the processes of development there would, in Aristotle’s eyes be no basis for the attribution of a power, regardless of the outcome.”(p24)

The power which differentiates man from other organisms, according to Lear is the power of asking the question Why? in the search for understanding of the world and oneself. This obviously builds upon other powers of talking, remembering, thinking and reasoning and the question is rewarded with answers provided by a naturally ordered and regulated world. This is the question that for Aristotle reaches into the cave of our ignorance, like the sunlight, and the world in turn provides an explanation in terms of the form, principle, or primary cause of whatever it was that provoked the question. In our desire to be and effort to exist(to use Ricoeur’s terminology) we are all engaged on this search for understanding, argues Aristotle. This Why question can be answered in 4 different ways, Aristotle claims, and the suggestion is that all 4 kinds of answer are required if our explanation is to be adequate or complete: i.e. all 4 kinds of answer are needed for the explanation to meet the conditions required by the principle of sufficient reason as understood by Kant. Three of the types of non materialistic explanation, the efficient, formal and final causes(aitiai) are different ways of giving the same answer: they are, that is, in Aristotle’s terms different aspects of the formal component of hylomorphic theory. These three types of explanation do not, however, meet the conditions of the principle of sufficient reason. An explanation of nature incorporating the truths of materialism is also required for a complete explanation. Many later philosophers such as Hobbes and Hume were interpreting the central idea of “cause” physically and materially and they were convinced that the other explanations were either fictional creatures of the imagination or alternatively could be reduced to a physical idea of linear causation.
Jonathan Lear interestingly discusses the Aristotelian complex idea of cause(aitiai) or explanation in relation to the Humean linear concept of the two event account. He argues that it is the scientific obsession with observation which in its turn generated the dualistic approach that took, for example, the unitary event of a builder building a house and resolved this unity into a cause and an effect which are merely contingently and not logically connected. Lear points out that Hume claimed we cannot observe the transition from the cause to the effect.
Lear claims that:

“What is at issue is a disgrace, not only about causes but about what constitutes an event. It is important to realise that events are not unproblematically given. It is easy for us to overlook that because we think we can locate any space-time point and call what is going on there an event. But Aristotle had no such matrix to isolate and identify events. He did not have a watch, and when he specified the place of an object it was not in terms of its location in a unique all-encompassing field. The place of an object was characterised in terms of the boundary of the body which contained it. The way Aristotle chose to identify events was via the actualising of potentialities: the potentialities of substances to cause and suffer change…..while for Hume causation must be understood in terms of a relation between two events for Aristotle there is only one event—a change…and causation must be understood as a relation of things to that event.”(p31)

Lear’s otherwise excellent work on Aristotle is somewhat incomplete in terms of the simplicity of the account of Aristotelian thought in relation to place and space, i.e it is not clear that Aristotle did not make the assumption that reality could be characterised mathematically). A mathematical point, after all is not anything actual: it is something potential. It only appears in reality or becomes actual if something concrete or abstract happens at that point, e.g. one begins at that point to perhaps represent motion in a straight line until that motion or represented motion comes to rest at another resting point which is actualised as the motion or represented motion comes to an end.

Space is also represented in the above example. Matter may be represented if one imagines a physical body or particle in motion. Space, Time and Matter were, for Aristotle, essential media for the experience or representation of reality and these media for change played a very important role in his conceiving of reality as an infinite continuum. Returning to our example of the line defined as the shortest distance between two points, we know that there are potentially an infinite number of stopping points between the starting and stopping points on the line. We can clearly see the role of the concept of potentiality in this context. Indeed, one might even wish to argue that the Aristotelian matrix was far more complex than our modern space-time-causation matrix given that it can embrace human reality in the form of a builder building a house starting from the point at which a pile of bricks and wood is located and ending with a completed house occupied by a family living a flourishing life. Dividing this reality up by using our modern matrix of space-time-causation where we end up with two events such as the building activity of the builder and the product of a house rather than one Aristotelian event of change uses the resolution-composition method of science unnecessarily to create insoluble ontological and metaphysical problems. Hume, as we know , was a victim of this mode of observational thought and apart from the above mistakes arrived at the paradoxical result of cause being a conventional idea—simply on the grounds that he thought that causation could not be observed. He did not believe, that is, that we can observe a builder building a house until its completion.
Aristotle’s view is that his Causation, space-time matrix of reality is part of of a larger matrix of kinds of change and principles provided by his metaphysical presentation of “First Philosophy”. First philosophy is here understood as the first principles of any kind of change in the universe. We mentioned above that the power or capacity of a rational animal capable of discourse—a human being—begins in awe in the face of the existence of the world and its ever changing nature. We see and conceive of what is there and we spontaneously seek to understand the why. This desire to understand the why entails all of the following components:4 kinds of change, three principles of change and four causes/explanations(aitiai) being provided to the searcher for understanding of the changing reality.

There has been much ado about the latter component of the above account, namely the 4 aitiai or kinds of “explanations”. The Scientific matrix and method, for example conceives of matter, not as potential to be formed, but rather as “events observed” in accordance with the cause-effect rule. This conception insists that teleological explanation is incoherent: it cannot be observable when the builder is in the process of building the house. Science, in other words, cannot conceive of potentiality because potentiality is not actual and real—because it has resolved the one event of change into the two events of cause and effect which are, according to Hume connected because of the regularity of the world and the “conventional” way in which we characterise the world. Science sees these events in terms of observation and any reasoning about unobservables(such as the thought of the house “in” the mind of the builder cannot be observed )therefore does not exist. What is being imagined here is that the metaphorical “in” is a spatial characterisation. There is nothing “in” the mind of the builder: rather there is a principle related to the builders powers operating in the movement of the materials from one location to another. The scientist who is committed to denying the Aristotelian account just does not know how to characterise the holistic event of “the builder building a house”.
Descartes, Hobbes and Hume managed to turn our Aristotelian ideas of the world upside down in the name of a matrix of dogmatism and skepticism directed at common sense and its judgments about reality. Christopher Shields in his work on Aristotle illustrated excellently how down to earth Aristotle’s “explanatory framework” is:

“Suppose that we are walking deep in the woods in the high mountains one day and come to notice an object gleaming in the distance. When it catches our eye our curiosity is piqued: indeed Aristotle thinks so much is almost involuntary. When we come across an unexplained phenomenon or a novel state of affairs, it is natural—it is due to our nature as human beings—that we wonder and fall immediately into explanation seeking mode. What we see glistens as we approach it, and we wish to now what it is. Why do we wish to know this? We simply do: so much is unreflective , even automatic. As we come closer, we ascertain that what is shining is something metal. Upon somewhat closer inspection, from a short distance, we can see that it is bronze. So now we have our explanation: what we have before us is polished bronze. Still, if we find a bit of bronze in the high mountains we are apt to wonder further about it, beyond being so much bronze. We will want to know in addition what it is that is made of bronze…..as we approach closer we ascertain that it has a definite shape, the shape of a human being: it is a statue..We also know further, if we know anything about statues at all that the bronze was at some point in its past deliberately shaped or cast by a sculptor. We infer, that is, though we have not witnessed the event that the shape was put into the bronze by the conscious agency of a human being. We know this because we know that bronze does not spontaneously collect itself into statues… So now we know what it is: a statue, a lump of bronze moulded into human shape by the activity of a sculptor. Still we may be perplexed. Why is there a statue here high in the mountains where it is unlikely to be seen? Upon closer inspection we see that it is a statue of a man wearing fire fighting gear: and we read, finally a plaque at its base: “Placed in honour of the fire-fighters who lost their lives in the service of their fellows on this spot, in the Red Ridge Blaze of 23 August 1937”. So now we know what it is: a statue, a lump of bronze moulded into human shape by the actions of a sculptor placed to honour the fallen fire fighters who died in service.”

There would seem to be little to object to in the above description of the natural course a natural investigation into the identity of a temporarily concealed object might take. There is, however, nothing aporetic about this investigation or this object. This is nevertheless one form of aletheia, a simple form but a form of the search that aims to uncover the truth. Were the questions to concern objects or events or actions which do not carry their meanings on their surfaces: for example, an investigation into ones own being, which in Heidegger’s own words should result in the characterisation of us as beings for whom our very being is in question, the question would most certainly fall into the category of aporetic questions and the answers we uncover would not be as obvious as they were in the above investigation. In the case of an investigation into our human nature the search for aletheia would be difficult and filled with philosophical debate and dispute, but it would remain the case, however, that the Aristotelian hylomorphic theory of change would be the best guide to lead us out of the cave of our own ignorance.
The answers produced in response to questions concerning the being of human beings via the use of the scientific method of resolution-composition and its space-time linear causation method has now had several hundred years to produce a theory to rival Aristotle’s. The best it has achieved is either a kind of Quinean dualism of observation sentences and theoretical sentences based on a crude behaviouristic account of stimulus meanings, or alternatively, the more sophisticated dualism of Wilfred Sellars in which he, in the spirit of Plato, distinguishes between the Scientific image of the world and the Manifest Image of the world which he attributes to Aristotle.

If the world as the totality of facts is a position the scientist and analytical philosopher could take, we may legitimately ask for the Aristotelian response to this proposition. For Aristotle his response is his entire hylomorphic theory but one key element of that would contain the claim that the world is constituted of potentially evolving forms which use three “mechanisms” of transmission. Jonathan Lear summarises these mechanisms in the following manner:

“There are at least three ways in which forms are transmitted in the natural world: by sexual reproduction, by the creation of artefacts, and by teaching . The creation of artefacts remains a paradigm. The craftsman has his art or techné in his soul: that is, the form which he will later impose on external matter first resides in his soul. We have already seen that form can exist at varying levels of potentiality and actuality. The form of an artefact, as it resides in a craftsman’s soul, is a potentiality or power. It is in virtue of this power in his soul that we can say that he is a craftsman. The full actuality of the craftsman’s art is his actually making an artefact. Thus the builder building is actually the form of the house in action…this activity is occurring in the house being built. In short, the primary principle of change is the form in action. When Aristotle cites the builder building or the teacher teaching as the actual cause of change it is not because he is trying to focus on an antecedent causal event—i.e. on what for us would be the efficient cause. It is because he is trying to cite the primary principle of change: the form in its highest level of actualisation. Aristotle identifies the agent of change with that which determines the form: “The change will always introduce a form, in which when it moves, will be the principle and cause of the change: for instance an an actual man makes what is potentially a man into a man”.. If we are being more precise we must think of the cause as being the form itself—thus man builds because he is a builder and a builder builds in virtue of his art of building. This last cause is prior….the art of building at its highest level of activity is the builder building. This is occurring in the house being built.. As Aristotle says: “architecture is in the building it makes” “(pp33-34)

The above quote in Wilfred Sellars’ terms would be an account of the Manifest Image of the world. A world view in which potentiality requires a forward looking future oriented teleological perspective as opposed to an archeological antecedent event. If the Manifest view of the world looks backward in time it looks for an agent possessing powers and capacities. The teacher teaching in his classroom, for example, is expressing the power or form of teaching which was sometime in the past transmitted to him via an organisation of forms that were passed to his teachers. In his teaching he passes on the forms of geometry and number on to his pupils until these forms dwell in their souls to such an extent that we can call his pupils geometers and mathematicians. A scientific observer who claims that causation must be actually observable might have great difficulty in attributing the names of “geometer and mathematician” to these students talking about politics in the agora. It might only become obvious if one of these students begins to teach a slave boy the intricacies of the Pythagorean theorem. The form of geometry would then be actualised in this activity of a teacher teaching. In these processes of acquiring knowledge building houses or reproducing there is a striving or aiming for an end or telos which is a primary structure of the Aristotelian world. Attempting to investigate such phenomena by trying to observe actual material or functional structures(his brain for example) of the agent or his actions or by trying to see how one structure “moves” another as a bone moves a muscle will never allow us to explain how striving is determined by the end it is striving toward. The method of resolution-composition requires a movement backward in time to search for causes. But even if one lands at the brain as a cause, this starting point for Aristotle would be a form which is a result of a teleological biological process(Aristotle did not in fact understand the actual function of the brain but this would not have affected his point). Brain matter, organs, bone and flesh were for him already “formed matter” which themselves require the kind of explanation he is providing. There is no infinite regress in Aristotle’s theory although there is reflection upon the nature of the infinite and its place in his space-time, matter-causation matrix.
Matter, for example, is infinitely continuous, argues Aristotle

“The infinite presents itself first in the continuous”(Physics 3, 1, 200b 17-18)

Space, time and matter are all continuous. Aristotle’s notion of the infinite is however, complex. Space, for example is not infinite in extent but it is infinitely divisible. The same is true for matter. Time, on the other hand, has no beginning and no end as well as being infinitely divisible. The infinite is formless and is a pure un-actualised potentiality. Pure form and potentiality for Aristotle is God who is not actually anything but pure potential to be anything that has happened, is happening and will happen. Aristotle’s thought is difficult interpret here but he appears to regard God as the ultimate principle or law of all change. God operates in the realm of thought which for Aristotle is also a power or a potential we possess. Our thought, however is located in time and God’s thought on the other hand, is a -temporal , eternal, and not at all similar to the temporality of human consciousness Thought in a great souled being like God will differ considerably to human thought. God.s relation to reality as we conceive it is also problematical. It sometimes seems as if he is reality and this reality is for him included in the realm of thought . If this is correct then Gods thinking about himself is what produces change in the world but this thinking is infinitely continuous, without beginning and without end and not part of what we experience to be actualising processes. If he has a relation to time it must be that he is a condition for the existence of time. His thinking is not in “nows” as is the case with human beings but rather is a condition of the eternal movement of the heavenly bodies which we choose as a standard of measurement by which to measure time.

Newton’s distinction between absolute time which flows on continuously and of itself and the relative time created by human mind’s measuring the eternal flow may well have its roots in Aristotelian reflections. We cannot, however, on Aristotelian grounds, make absolute time intelligible because it is at the end of the Aristotelian spectrum extending from pure matter at one end to pure form on the other.

Jonathan Lear has an excellent account of how our human relative time is generated:

“It is only when we have perceived a before and an after in change that we say that time has elapsed. It is that perception that enables us to number it. But the number of change or motion is just what time is. But is that number itself objective? Usually when Aristotle talks about numbering, he is concerned with te enumeration of discrete items of a certain sort. It is a plurality of discrete things which are numerable. This would suggest that Aristotle had in mind that one picks out a certain unit of time—say the passing of a day as marked by the heavenly movement—and then pronounces a “Now”. The number of days will be measured by the pronouncement of the nows. It is change, then, as well as our recognition of it that grounds our recognition of a before and after and the interval which the distinct nows mark. This recognition—the making of distinct nows—itself recognises the reality of time and is also a realisation of time itself. For time is nothing other than a number or measure of change.”

Time is related to the soul and is “in” everything including the earth the sea and the heavens. Aristotle argues that were there no one to count there would not be anything to count, thus suggesting that without souls there would not be time but given the considerations raised above it is I believe clear that Lear is correct in his observation that:

“the reality of time is partially constructed by the soul’s measuring activities.”(p79)

Time is not change Aristotle insists because presumably change is more fundamental such that without it time would cease to exist. Heraclitus, it seems was closer to the truth(aletheia) than Parmenides. Aletheia or logos may be true of the ideas that are involved in change since truth or logos is revealed over time. This however leaves us with a notion of pure change and how to characterise it: the aporetic question par excellence.

May 18, 2018June 11, 2018

The First Centrepiece Lecture in Philosophy of Education from the work “The World Explored, the World Suffered:The Exeter lectures”

I remember the strangeness of the thought “The world is all that is the case” when I first heard these words in a Philosophy of Education class, in the nineteen seventies, in England. I had applied to and been accepted at a reputable teacher training college in Exeter after completing my education in a Grammar school and working as an insurance clerk for just over a year.
The lecturer, Jude Sutton, paused upon saying these words and waited expectantly, almost dramatically, for a few seconds before heaving a sigh of abandonment and continuing the lecture.
“The world is the totality of facts and not of things” (Wittgenstein)” was then written on the board, and the lecturer rounded upon us like an animal defending its territory and waited expectantly, again without result, before saying:
“Perhaps people of your generation believe that the world is made of sugar, spice, all things nice, slugs snails puppy dog tails. Or perhaps you all believe the world is made of many things, ships, shoes, ceiling wax, cabbages and kings.”
One of the students attending the lecture felt the need to ease the tension and responded by calling out
“Everyone knows that knowledge can only be composed of facts—facts are what the world is made of. Facts are the atoms of the world”
The lecturer paused to consider what was said and finally responded:

“And what if everyone in the world believing such a thing is confused and what if confusion causes great world catastrophes such as world wars and the young logical atomist Dr. Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Vienna, from the same school Mr. Adolf Hitler attended, was just wrong”
He paused and then continued
“And what would a fact, or this so called atom of the world, look like?”
The student felt the need to defend himself but did not know how, and responded in a less confident voice
“A fact is a fact”
“ Let me ask you all, these questions. Does this world you are thinking about change? If it does, is change one fact or many facts? Does the whole world change when something changes in it or does it remain the same and only parts of it change? Is all change of one kind, or are there different kinds of change? Surely if a change is to occur there must at the very least be something that changes. We talk about the atoms of the world as if they are responsible for the formation of these things and perhaps everything that happens everywhere. But what if there are processes of change occurring, within these indivisibles, which are partly responsible for their behavior when they do whatever they do. And if this is so, does this not commit us to thinking that these so-called indivisibles are in fact divisible. And if this is so, does not the process of dividing up the world seem an infinite one that could never be completed. What, ladies and gentlemen, if the world is infinitely divisible and is therefore infinitely conceptualisable or what if the world is alternately conceptualisable as a particle or a wave and facts depend on the structure of the minds of the humans thinking about them. Or what if facts are formed by many generations of thinkers discussing them?”
I raised my hand to ask a question:
Could one not say that the structures of our minds are explanatory facts which psychologists will discover one day, and could one not say that sociologists or anthropologists will discover the facts of social explanations that explain other facts we claim to know.? I think I agree with Dr. Wittgenstein.
The lecturer, Dr. Jude Sutton, looked inquisitively at me before answering:
Well, let me firstly inform you that Dr. Wittgenstein did not in his later work agree with himself but even in his early work from which I am quoting, namely, the “Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus”, he tried to acknowledge the importance of the mind, the self, and the importance of aesthetic, social, ethical and religious values..”
I raised my hand again to follow up my question, Jude Sutton’s expression changed from an expression of curiosity to an expression of mild amusement:
“What do you mean that he tried to acknowledge?
“I mean that he said that the Self is outside the world and that all other values flowing from the self such as aesthetic, social, ethical and religious values are also outside the world..”
“Surely a value is just another fact reflected in what we say and what we do?”
“That would entail that there two different classes of facts: one for the truthful account of events that occur in the world, and one for the kind of event that incorporates actions and persons who live very concretely in our world and not outside it”
The class looked confused and began to fidget impatiently. Jude smiled and continued:
These ideas are the most difficult and important you will ever encounter during your very privileged and sheltered lives. The kinds of questions I am raising are philosophical questions, what the Greeks called aporetic questions.”
He wrote a-poria on the board and continued:
“A-poria in Greek means “difficult journey”. Dr. Wittgenstein left Vienna and its culture of looking for the facts and made his difficult journey to England, to Manchester University, to study the dynamics of the aeroplane. Perhaps he was thinking that a birds-eye view of the world would reveal the nature of the world. Perhaps he was not thinking at all, some would say. Whilst at Manchester he became interested in the tools he was using to solve concrete engineering problems relating to air-flight. He moved to Trinity College Cambridge to study Logic and Mathematics under Bertrand Russell who was convinced that Logic would solve all the problems of Philosophy. Wittgenstein, under Russell, left the world of concrete problems and became genuinely puzzled by how ideas of the facts, of what is true, seemed to form an idea of the world as a whole, the totality as he called it, and he wanted to investigate this phenomenon. Let me give you an analogy of what he meant when he said the self is outside the world. When we wake up in the morning and open our eyes, a visual field appears. Now to a consistent thinker who has decided for his definition of the world as a totality of facts, and has decided that the truth of the facts are determined by scientific observation, that is, by someone using their visual fields to discover the facts, an obvious problem arises. A scientist is bound by a scientific oath, to use the scientific method of observation to look for the causes of phenomena and the cause of our visual fields are obviously our eyes, which lie outside our visual fields. So unless the scientist is prepared to give up his commitment to observation as the means that he uses to acquire and verify his knowledge, we have an aporetic problem, a logical problem. Some would say the scientist is faced with a contradiction in his reasoning. This problem occurs also at a higher level than that of the analogy of the visual field. If one says that it is a fact that the self and its consciousness lies behind our explorations of the world and our suffering in the world, then I should be able to observe this self and verify this fact. Yet this appears to not be logically possible. Even the Buddhists realized that you would be using your self to find your self and that the suffering self would no longer be suffering if it was exploring the world. You can see that these problems are not easy to solve. “
A student studying History raised their hands:
“But I don’t understand your references to Hitler and the War.”
“That was partly to arouse your desire to explore these issues but it was a serious suggestion relating to the terrible events that have occurred this century: the events of two world wars, the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations and a cold war in which there is a serious threat of a nuclear holocaust between two non philosophical superpowers. I don’t mean to imply that Mr. Hitler was bright enough to formulate a theoretical definition of the world. I mean merely to suggest that he came from an Austrian and a European culture that had influenced the world with its blind faith in science. The assumption that the world is the totality of facts may lie behind everything we have suffered so far this century.”
“Surely the causes are more specific and diverse. Hitler was not sane”, the student responded.
“Perhaps it is a fact that Hitler was insane. Even if that is a truth determined by Psychology on the basis of available historical evidence, this still does not explain the facts, as we know them. Were all of the Germans carrying out the orders to murder the Jews, insane? I don’t believe that we are dealing with the matter of mass insanity and anyone who maintains that understands neither Psychology nor Philosophy. Let me take a concrete example. Eichmann was tried and hanged 14 years ago in Jerusalem. He lied but not compulsively. When confronted with evidence proving that he lied, he acknowledged the truth. Psychologists at his trial noted flat affect in his voice and lack of remorse for what he had done but he was not diagnosed as insane. Hanna Arendt attended his trial and read the 3500 pages documenting his testimony and wrote a book in which she definitely stated that Eichmann was neither insane nor evil. In her judgment, Eichmann had never been taught to think about value. He went to the same school as Hitler and no doubt left with the assumption that the world is merely the totality of facts. For him the world did not contain ultimate values such as “Murder is wrong” and according to Arendt, he did not know how to talk about what he had done. She referred to this phenomenon as the “banality of evil” which angered many Jews at the time.
I raised my hand:
“If Wittgenstein claimed that the self was the source of value and value lay outside the world did he not acknowledge the importance of value?”
“Good reasoning. Wittgenstein had said and believed to the end of his life that an investigation of language is necessary to answer aporetic questions. In the “Tractatus” however, he located the importance of language in the self and claimed that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. He claimed that values could not be talked about but only shown in our language. This appears solipsistic and suggests that our values are not inter-subjective, not objective. It was only in his later posthumous work, ”Philosophical Investigations”, that he realized that the self existed in a public and historical world and that language was public and historical. That is, he understood finally that we could talk objectively about values and claim with justification that “Murder is wrong”.
Jude paused and noted with satisfaction the interest he had aroused and left the lecture room abruptly. The group gradually dispersed leaving me looking transfixed at what had been written on the blackboard: “The world is all that is the case”
I remember feeling that this lecture was different from all the others we had experienced. It felt as if the lecturer had reversed the polarity of the world within the lecture-room and everyone was strangely looking for where north was instead of using it to fly off into their own private worlds. The atmosphere was loaded with anticipation and every thought was like a sudden bolt of lightning striking and splitting our world apart in the name of something ineffable, something which could not be talked about but which everyone mysteriously knew or thought they knew. This experience felt like an awakening, like stepping off from a rolling, swaying ship onto the rough hard ground of real, solid earth.

May 17, 2018July 9, 2019

The “Regime” of the Global Callipolis and its relation to Justice(Commentary and Critique of Prof Smith’s Yale lecture series on”Political Science”): Lecture 25: A defense of Politics?

Professor Smith began this lecture series with the thesis that Political Philosophy is about “Regimes” and he then proceeded to support his position via lengthy accounts of the Political Philosophies of Plato and Aristotle both of whom would have denied his thesis. Both Philosophers would have maintained that Political Philosophy is about “The Good”, “Epistémé and self-understanding”. Aristotle may have added that knowledge of the good requires an adventure of reflection into the realm of the divine and the holy. Smith appears to regard the political realm as having more to do with technai, a realm in which straightforward questions are posed which have straightforward solutions. This, of course, is a different world to the metaphysical realm that Aristotle is referring to when he argues that the philosopher’s task is to pose aporetic questions. In the realm of technai, practical reasoning takes the form of firstly, calculating particular means to achieve particular given ends and secondly it uses judgment to determine something general about the particular.

The faculties of understanding and reason, on the other hand, are used in reasoning about the good, in general, and formal terms. These faculties do not function in the straightforward manner in which the faculty of judgment does.

In the use of judgment, the mind submits to the world like a student of nature in contrast to the use of understanding and reason where the mind is more actively thinking like a judge, reflectively, about the laws that will be imposed upon the world. When a political judge or a statesman considers the phenomena of reality as he must do when people act either in accordance with or in contravention of the law he does not waver for a moment in the cases of contravention of the law and consider the abandonment of the law as would a student of nature exploring the world tentatively with his tentative concepts. The political judge or statesman is not a student, he is not building a theory but rather using a conceptual system to make judgments from the point of view of a political theory: If all promises ought to be kept and Jack promised Jill to pay the money back that was lent to him, then Jack ought to pay the money back. The “ought” in these statements is categorical and signifies the necessity that follows from the objective and universal law that “All promises ought to be kept”. A student confronted with the phenomenon of Jack breaking his promise might be led to the conclusion that the law is illegitimate or false because it is not universal but this would be to misunderstand the peculiar universality and necessity of the ought in the sphere of “the good” and ethics. The field of human conduct is manifold and varied but when it is concerned with answering the Kantian question “What ought I to do?” in the sense Kant intended, we will find that both the political and moral realm has a law like structure. The political judge on the grounds of this structure will steadfastly question the transgressor Jack with a view to obtaining a full understanding of the situation. Once that understanding is reached, i.e. once it is clear that Jack never intended to keep the promise he made, the judge then uses his knowledge of the law to judge that Jack’s intention and reasoning is flawed and that he ought to pay the money back in accordance with the law (that all promises ought to be kept). The judge or statesman(who is in the business of making and keeping promises) will not be impressed with the argument “But people do not always keep their promises”. His response to this argument will be simply to insist that he knows that it might be the case that people sometimes do not keep their promises but that it nevertheless ought not to be the case.: they ought to keep promises. The law here, in other words, is a standard that is being used much like the standard metre bar in Paris. The bar itself cannot be said to be one metre long since it is that which we use to determine the length of a metre. Similarly, we cannot ask sensibly whether the law which itself is used to determine what is right and wrong is right or wrong in itself. We can, however, as Kant did point out the logical consequences of abandoning the law which in practical terms would mean abandoning the institution of promising in our communities.

Life in a community is living in a field of desires. Both Kant and Aristotle in their different ways believed that desires need to be shaped and organized in accordance with the telos of “the ought” and in accordance with the principles and value of areté(virtue):i.e. doing the right thing in the right way at the right time. This requires a stable organized soul which Aristotle characterizes in terms of “character” Wisdom is a virtue requiring the understanding of oneself and one’s world. Wisdom is manifested in the wise man being able to reason both theoretically and practically about the nature of man and the nature of his community. In Aristotle’s terms, the wise man will reason well about the good, the true, the beautiful, prime matter and prime form(the Philosophers god). Included in his practical reasoning will be reasoning about the laws of the city. The wise man’s reasoning will precede the judgments he makes and deductively supports the judgments that have been made. Aristotle also distinguishes between substantive justice and procedural or formal justice. Substantive justice requires a general understanding of metaphysics, epistémé and ethics and procedural justice will fall into the realm of technai(particular cases must be handled in accordance with the rule: similar cases have to be treated similarly). For Aristotle, Political Philosophy is substantially ethical and contains the wise law-like statements of the statesman and the judge but it is also technical, i.e. composed of particular judgments which follow from both the law like structures and the particular facts of the particular cases that are being judged. When one is in the realm of the law one is, in Aristotle’s eyes, in the realm of the divine or the sacred. One must take the law seriously and respect its wisdom. Furthermore if one organizes the field of one’s desires in accordance with the principles of areté, one can look forward personally to a flourishing life. This is a judgment about a particular life based on the law-like structure of the virtues in one’s soul.

Kant, we are told by Hannah Arendt, did not produce a political Philosophy. This is a curious statement to make given the following facts:
1.) that our system of human rights is probably based on Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative and
2. The United Nations was suggested by Kant in one of his essays on Political Philosophy.
Arendt wishes to make the case that we should look to Kant’s remarks on Judgment if we are to apply Kantian ideas to the realm of the political. For Arendt, the understanding and the kind of practical reasoning being used in ethics and the formulation and defense of the categorical imperative are irrelevant to the particularities one encounters in the political realm. This means that Judgment cannot command categorically what one ought and ought not to do. It can, in Kantian terms only ask and hope for an agreement by speaking in a universal voice as one does in our judgments of beauty. The grounds of our judgment then become obscurely the non-conceptual common sensibility(the feelings and emotions) we share with all humans. That is instead of beginning in our reasoning with an ought statement, we begin with an is-statement about common feelings and sensibility and then somehow mysteriously jump to the ought conclusions that are required by political judgments, ignoring logical restraints associated with the naturalistic fallacy. The categorical nature of the understanding is implied by the phrase “Categorical Imperative” and reasoning that about ends in itself rather than means to ends is also what Kant thinks of as “categorical”.
Professor Smith also fixes upon this notion of particularity and transports us into the realm of judgment and away from the law-like structure of the political and ethical realms. Sensibility unregulated by understanding and reason will for both Kant and Aristotle stay forever mired in the swamp of particulars. Although in judgment we are saying something about something the subject of the judgment is always a particular. Looking at man as a particular and excluding understanding and reason will only result in an individual story where individual desires or facts reign. Using such judgments results in a history of particular events which we may find interesting or even beautiful but which we can only tentatively judge with our “universal” voices. The generality is not achieved by recasting our actor’s role in a society for society too can be thought about in the particular, as being a polis situated in a particular place and at a particular time. We begin to think categorically only when the major premise of the argument begins “All Societies are…” or just in case Kant is right in his claim that no society is completely free and completely just the argument rather should begin “All societies ought….”
Smith is cognisant of the fact that Political science or Philosophy is in a considerable state of disarray but he mistakenly thinks that Aristotle and Kant have contributed to the chaotic situation he experiences in the Universities. He refers to Aristotle but fails to pursue Aristotle’s categorical path where the laws of reason shape and organize mans desires. He refers to Kant but fails to pursue the hylomorphic quality of Kant’s theorizing. An individual Man, for Kant, is only potentially rational. Rationality will eventually actualize in the species because man’s desires are so unorganized that they need a master to organize them. Man understands what is right, he understands the virtues and admires them but his self-interested desires are always working to avoid the law-like structure of our political and ethical communities by making an exception of himself. This is why he needs a master. He lives in the field of desires or sensibility where pleasure reigns. Most men, as a matter of fact, argues Kant, have their own self-interest firmly fixed before their eyes. The laws of ethics and the laws of politicians are aimed at regulating the consequences of this pursuit of self-interest. Looking at this situation in one way provokes the description that justice is merely the regulation or distribution of pleasures and pains(benefits and burdens) and that is a correct description from a third person point of view which avoids the first person question of the role of self-understanding in this process: the role, that is of mans awareness of what he ought to do and what he ought to be. It is in the spirit of this self-understanding that Kant claims that a society in which sensibility is unregulated by either understanding or reason gives rise to the judgment that life in such a society is “melancholically haphazard”.
Arendt and Smith are almost on the same page. Both seem to criticize Aristotle for placing bios theoretikos above bios politikos, of placing the contemplative life of the eternal and universal above the political life of the sensible and particular. Arendt, in the context of this debate presents the following quote from Pascal(talking about Plato and Aristotle) in her “Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy”:

“They were honest men, like others, laughing with their friends, and when they wanted to divert themselves they wrote, “The Laws” or “The Politics” to amuse themselves. That part of their life was the least philosophic and the least serious. The most philosophic was to live simply and quietly. If they wrote on politics it was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum: if they presented the appearance of speaking of great matters it was because they knew that the madmen to whom they were speaking thought they were kings or emperors.”

This may not exactly capture the spirit in which both authors wrote about politics but it does point us to the reason why Kant referred to life in society as “melancholically haphazard”. What was there to be melancholic about? We know that Plato thought that the final separation of the soul from the body was the moment of death and that the only response to such a state of affairs was to do Philosophy until the inevitable happened. This touches upon the great issue of the value of life. Kant raises 4 questions by way of defining Philosophy thus uniquely defining Philosophy by the questions it asks but all 4 questions raise the Platonic question of the value of life. The 4 questions are “What can I know?, What ought I to do? , What can I hope for?, and What is man?” His answers to two of these questions that one ought to do what is right and if one does so one can hope for a flourishing life raise the question that Aristotle sought to answer, namely “What is the flourishing life?” Aristotle’s answer was the contemplative life but he must have had in mind the answer of the Delphic oracle to this same question which referred to “taking on the colour of the dead”. Smith avoids according religion a prominent position in his reflections on bios politikos and thus avoids Aristotle’s answer to the question of the value of a flourishing life. He does, however, in his 25th and final lecture return to Aristotle’s Ethics and asks whether “patriotism” might be a virtue located on a continuum of excess and deficiency the one pole of which would be nationalism and the other pole Kantian Cosmopolitanism: a strange ending given the almost complete absence of Kantian reflections in the rest of his lectures. Smith points out that an important consequence of Cosmopolitanism is that there is no significant difference between human beings because their humanity is the primary normative characteristic of their being. He goes on to suggest:

“This is the Cosmopolitan ethics of humanity which could only hold true of a confederation of Republics overseen or ruled by international law– a league of nations.”

Smith Pursues his Aristotelian discussion of whether patriotism could be a virtue with Carl Smitt’s reflections from “The Concept of the Political” in which it is claimed that bios politikos is the antagonistic life a dangerous animal leads. This antagonistic life is founded upon a Plemarchean theory of justice which claims that one ought to do good to one’s friends inside the polis and harm to one’s enemies outside the polis. Smith comments upon this in the following manner:

“The political life contains the most intense and extreme antagonism. Friend and enemy are the inescapable categories through which we experience the political: Athens versus Sparta. All attempts to rights, free trade etc are attempts to avoid the above fact.”

Smith points out that the “Friend-enemy” schema would be self-contradictory because if it also operated on the domestic front we would be dealing with a divided city. He then goes on to criticize the Kantian position:

“Kant confuses politics with morality. Kant wishes to transcend the sovereign state with known international rules of justice. If Schmitt believed man to be the dangerous animal Kant believed him to be the rule-following animal. Kant’s desire to transcend the state with a kind of international future is both naive and anti-political. If Hobbes was right when he said that covenants without a sword are but words, then on Kant’s view the question becomes, who would enforce these international norms of force. Kant’s conception of global justice is a wish for a world without states…International bodies like the UN have been notoriously ineffective in curbing and restraining the aggressive behaviour of states and International courts of justice have been highly selective in what they choose to condemn”

It is true that Kant deliberately and systematically relates ethics to politics and demands that the latter conform to the norms of the former. Statesmen have to keep treaties. Countries have to honour treaties. Kant would in this context certainly have disagreed with Hobbes on the question of combining covenants with the sword. Violence may be one of the terminal points of instrumental reasoning because this system of reasoning has no moral principle which it can use to judge the morality of the chains of ethically and logically unrelated events which defy the double effect principle. Given the fact that the dignity of man is what provoked Kant’s ethical reflections in the first place and also the fact that freedom and autonomy are central concerns of his theory as is the categorical nature of the ought system of concepts he would have firmly maintained that one ought not to coerce agents to keep their promises. If self-understanding is a part of the ethical adventure then words are the “swords” that one uses in the discourse with oneself over the Socratic issue of whether one can live oneself or not. International organizations such as the UN are Kantian to the core. They expect states to impose norms of justice upon themselves and the Hobbesian sword is sometimes used when all other alternatives are exhausted but the more likely route of persuasion will be sanctions enforced by the world community which send the message “If we cannot live with you how will you live with yourself”. Kant did not necessarily believe as Marx did that the state would necessarily wither away. If he did his concept of a league of nations would have been self-contradictory. States would not be dissolved by a world government because he believed such a government would be necessarily tyrannical. His concept of a kingdom of ends is Aristotelian in the sense that it is a construction of bios theoretikos and the Philosophers conception of God must be included in the summum bonum of a flourishing life. Smith is a secular political Philosopher. He follows Aristotle but only so far and he refuses to follow Kant at all. The kingdom of ends is a humanistic idea and Hobbes’ position is about as far as one can get from Humanism. Kant may have believed that when our ethical and humanistic cares and commitments are no longer operative(in a state of nature or a state of war) politics and legislation can step in to try and regulate matters. Kant was well aware of the fact that the unsocial sociability and antagonism between men can be difficult to regulate with moral laws. Smith’s remarks on the efficacy of the UN flies in the face of the facts. The UN is an incredibly complex structure of organizations and many of these organizations are contributing to world peace and stability on a daily basis by doing work which typically produces long-term results. Popular media likes to focus on the security council and the failures to reach agreements and this often dramatizes conflicts unnecessarily. If the UN is Kantian to the core than we should realize that the media presents the news of the day, politicians think in terms of the duration of government between elections, historians think in terms of centuries, oracles probably thought in terms of millennia, Philosophers like Aristotle and Kant, however, think in terms of hundreds of thousands of years. The kingdom of ends is one hundred thousand years away which conceivably could imply that although progress is being made in straightening out the crooked timber of humanity that progress will be necessarily slow.

Smith attempts to extract the truth from his dialectical opposites and claims somewhat surprisingly that America is the embodiment of the Aristotelian golden mean principle:

“Although neither extreme view is complete in itself the question is how can they be combined? These two are very much combined already in the American regime. America is the first truly modern nation– a nation founded upon the principles of modern philosophy….Our founding documents are dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

And yet relatively shortly after the founding of this Golden State it was torn apart in a civil war exactly over this issue of equality of master and slave. A war which by the way did not end the subjugation of one race by another. Smith is here committing the naturalistic fallacy, at least as far as his argument relating to Cosmopolitanism is concerned. Kant appeals to Cosmopolitanism as a teleological concept and claims nothing more than that it is the long-term goal that man ought to strive for. There is, he argues, progress toward the fulfillment of this goal but there are no guarantees that we will arrive at the terminus of our striving.

Smith, as part of a discussion of the issue of the universal versus the particular in Politics, appeals to History and the struggle for power:

“it concerns the political uses of power or the two great ends to which power can be put: freedom and empire. Political philosophy is reduced to political history. Both presuppose one another and are in some relation to the universal and particular. The Political Philosopher examines the underlying principles of the regime and the political historian examines the way these principles have been applied in practice. Where the philosopher is concerned with the best regime–that which is best according to underlying principles, the historian is concerned with what is best for a particular people at a particular time and place, Athens, France, America.”

It is not certain that Aristotle or Kant would have appreciated the above account of the distinction between the universal and the particular in relation to Philosophy and History. Certainly, Aristotle in his work on Poetry contrasted History and Poetry in terms of the particular and the universal but he would certainly have appreciated the historians search for the material and efficient causes of the particular events studied and surely some true generalizations could be the result of such investigations. But the question to be asked here is “Are historians relativistic in their judgments about what is best?” This sounds more like poetry. Aristotle would not have subscribed to any view which attempted to relativize the idea of the best.
For Kant, the historian must be concerned with historical truth and this, in turn, must have some relation to the notion of progress and the postulated telos of Cosmopolitanism, an end state which may or may not be reached and in relation to which the state may or may not “wither away”. The events of history would be susceptible to both causal and teleological explanations and these explanations would not be subject to the criteria of identity one applies to judgments about particular events or particular cases. Indeed for Kant, such judgments would require more general universal premises relating to underlying principles, if they were to generate the kind of knowledge we expect from history.

Professor Smith concludes his lecture series by asking where the teachers of these underlying principles are to be found. Not in most Universities, he claims because the respect for tradition has been lost:

“Modern Professors of History often appear to teach everything but proper respect for tradition. In my own field, civic education has been replaced by game theory– a theory that regards politics as a market place where individual preferences are formed and utilities are maximized. Rather than teaching us to be citizens, the new political science teaches us to be rational actors who exercise preferences. By reducing all politics to choice and all choice to preference the new political science is forced to accord legitimacy to every preference, however vile, base or indecent it may be.”

Smith acutely touches upon a major issue in education: the colonization of the humanities by firstly science and then the science of economics. His complaint is somewhat puzzling in the light of the fact that game theory would seem to be a logical consequence of the rejection of the relation of ethics to politics that Kant proposes. It would also seem to be a logical consequence of the modernism that the very modern USA embraces.

April 29, 2018March 29, 2019

The “Regime” of the Global Callipolis and its relation to Justice(Commentary and Critique of Prof Smith’s Yale lecture series on”Political Science”): Lectures 18,19 and 20: Rousseau

“The Newton of the Moral Universe”, “The product of the ancien regime” and “The man from Geneva” are all phrases Professor Smith uses to describe our next Political Scientist: Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau is a figure of the Enlightenment and even in that era, he must be regarded as the most incandescent of the thinkers after Immanuel Kant. Kant, we know, was significantly influenced by the writings of Rousseau. Prior to reading Rousseau Kant was focussing principally on Theoretical Philosophy and the modification of Cartesian rationalism and subsequent to that a defense of Rationalism against Hume who he saluted with the words “Hume awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers”. Kant’s Categorical imperative is probably a formalistic characterization of Rousseau’s position which was attempting to criticize the earlier positions of Aristotle Hobbes and Locke. Man, argues Rousseau is not a rational animal as Aristotle would have us believe but rather a sensitive compassionate animal who cares about his fellows in a state of nature to an extent difficult to fathom upon observing his behaviour in contemporary society. Already we can perhaps suspect Rousseau of resembling Diogenes, sensing in the dark recesses of European society a discontentment which Rousseau both describes and explains brilliantly. The theories of Hobbes and Locke did not, he argued, improve our understanding of the fact that “Man was born free but everywhere in chains” simply because these philosophers failed to appreciate the complexity of what they referred to as “the state of nature”. The following is Professor Smiths introduction:

“What did he believe? Was he a revolutionary? He believed that people in their collective capacity are the only legitimate source of sovereignty and “Man is born free but everywhere in chains”. Did his writings, then, seek to release us from the bonds of society as it appears to do in the second discourse “On Inequality”. His writings provide the base for romantic individualism: a celebration of the simplicity of peasant life and rural life. He helps to bring to completion the intellectual movement we know as the Enlightenment whilst at the same time being its severest critic. He defended the savage against civilized man and took the side of the poor against the elite. The Second Discourse is a conjectural history, a philosophical reconstruction of history but not of what has actually happened in the past: it is a history of what had to have happened for humans to have achieved their current condition.”

This introduction(brilliant that it is) does not quite, in my opinion, capture the full historical significance of Rousseau’s work for the History of Philosophy in general and Political Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology and Ethics in particular. Kant was not particularly impressed with romantic and poetic images of savage and oppressed man or the plight of any class in the “battle for civilization”. He did, however, see and appreciate the extent to which Rousseau’s speculations, descriptions, and explanations would fit into his metaphysical and epistemological claims about man and his relation to Reality. The very terms “”romantic” and “conjectural” belie the power of philosophy to, as Kant puts it, in his “Conjectural Beginnings of human history”, “fill in the gaps in the record” For Kant part of the record is contained in the Bible, the book Rousseau would not let Emile read as part of his early adult education
firstly because of the fear of attachment to other men’s opinions, fear of dependence upon other opinions, and secondly because such works excite the imagination unnecessarily in terms of desires, hopes, and fears. The only book Emile is allowed to read is Robinson Crusoe which seems to be approved of by Rousseau because as Alan Bloom points out in his introduction to his translation:

“Robinson Crusoe is a solitary man in a state of nature, outside of civil society and unaffected by the deeds and opinions of men. His sole concern is his preservation and comfort. All his strength and reason are dedicated to these ends, and utility is his guiding principle, the principle that organizes all his knowledge. The world he sees contains neither gods nor heroes: there are no conventions. Neither the memory of Eden nor the hope of salvation affects his judgment… Robinson Crusoe is a kind of bible of the new sciences of nature and reveals man’s true original condition.”

Rousseau’s work Emile impressed Kant enormously but it does sometimes remind one of the lonely soul of Descartes “Meditations” and the citizens of Hobbesian and Lockean societies striving to lead instrumental lives of comfortable self-preservation. Aristotle, another so-called authority disliked by Rousseau, begins his political inquiries with the formation of the family and points to its lack of self-sufficiency. The starting point of the Kantian account is the Biblical first family (Adam Eve, Cain and Abel) who are clearly capable of discourse and thought which they had to acquire. Kant gives an account of how this process of civilization begins in the comparison of foodstuffs which prior to the functioning of the thought process is done instinctively. This comparison, Kant claims, is “beyond the bounds of instinctual knowledge”. He notes, interestingly, that these processes of thought and reasoning are aided by the imagination which also has the power, according to Kant and the Greek philosophers, to create “artificial and unnecessary desires” which in their turn generate a sense of luxuriousness that absolutely alienates our natural powers. In discussing the powers of the imagination Kant discusses the Socratic/Platonic/Freudian theme of sexuality. For instinct, sexuality is a periodic phenomenon which disappears as quickly as it appears. Reason and imagination struggle to achieve mastery over the impulse and the transition from animal desire to human love were made possible by a moderation of the sexual impulse via the discipline of refusal which in its turn enhanced the value of love, the binding force of a family. This in its turn, according to Kant:

“enables man to prepare himself for distant aims according to his role as a human being. But at the same time, it is also the most inexhaustible source of cares and troubles, caused by the uncertainty of the future–cares and troubles of which animals are altogether free. Man, compelled to support himself, his wife and future children, foresaw the ever-increasing hardships of labour. Woman foresaw the troubles to which nature had subjected her sex and those additional ones to which a man, being stronger than her, would subject her…..Both foresaw with fear…death”(Conjectural beginnings..Kant p58)

Once this point is reached, Kant argues, instead of appreciating the power of reason the family begins to fear it as the cause of all ills and a decision is made to live in the present and vicariously through the lives of one’s children. Yet, in the course of life made even more difficult by the absence of reason many artificial and unnecessary desires arise, occupying the mind to the extent that even death is forgotten in the process:

“mans departure from that paradise which his reason represents as the first abode of his species was nothing but the transition from an uncultured, merely animal condition to the state of humanity, from bondage to instinct to rational control–in a word from the tutelage of nature to the state of freedom.”(Conjectural beginnings… Kant p59)

Kant’s complete account of the transition of the species from being slaves of nature(“in chains”) to being masters of our destiny is meant to take place in a series of complex stages over extremely long periods of time(100,000 years) but it is clear that during this process the common good will be constituted as a concern of the human species and thus of all individuals belonging to the human species. This is a different more optimistic account than the one we find in Rousseau who has a more pessimistic analysis of the human condition and its Discontents. For Rousseau man led the life of a noble savage or a solitary Robinson Crusoe in the state of nature which in his view was transformed the moment men began to gaze at each other and gather around huts and trees for the company. The gaze must have been experienced as a questioning of one’s moral value and resulted in many different forms of artificial strivings motivated by the imagination in order to gain recognition. Included in this “work of the imagination” is the transformation of natural judgment into artificial and mythical interpretations of the world:

“the one who sang or danced the best, the most handsome, the strongest, the most adroit and the most eloquent became the most highly regarded and this was the first step toward inequality and at the same time toward vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt on the one hand and shame and envy on the other.”(Second Discourse “On Inequality”-Rousseau)

This does not necessarily contradict the Kantian account which also bears the traces of the collective memory of the Philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and the rejection of the picture of a man living a solitary life in a state of nature as a starting point for political or educational beginnings. Yet the trace of Rousseau’s Emile is present in the Kantian reflections of the moral individual on the quality of the maxims of his actions involved in all ethical decision making. The atom of the ethical system is the individual using his freedom to decide what to do. This atom joins with the rest of the moral universe however when he reasons, not in accordance with instrumental hypothetical imperatives but in universalistic non-relativistic categorical terms in which humanity and knowledge about humanity are treated as ends in themselves. Kant’s individual is not the instrumental Robinson seeking a safe comfortable Hobbesian haven for himself. He is part of an ideal network of moral agents and thinkers striving for the common good and doing what they ought to do without coming together in the Agora to discuss the matter. This reminds one of the moments in Emile when he is lost and hungry in the woods and uses the science of astronomy to find his way home. This for Rousseau was what science was for, an instrument for a comfortable life. For the Greeks, all knowledge was an end in itself and they honoured this status with the creation of schools like the Academy and the Lyceum which lay symbolically in grounds far from the madding discontented crowd. Although one does have to admit that the hypothetical structure of our modern empirical, anti-Aristotelian natural science does lend itself to Rousseau’s account. Aristotle’s categorical characterization of the kinds, principles, and causes of change is a stark contrast to the more tentative hypotheses of our modern community of scientists doing their science in the scientific Agora as part of the search for fame and recognition in the spirit of “amour-propre”. The picture of an independent thinker like Socrates and Aristotle refusing to be influenced by the madding crowd and being guided by reason alone is a picture that Kant certainly would have appreciated as part of the larger vision of the examined or contemplative life but it is not certain that this was Rousseau’s vision in the education of Emile. Certainly, Socrates’ communion with his daemon and his deference to the gods of the community would prevent Rousseau using him as an exemplary figure to be studied. Kant, as we know, was also religious and found a place for religion in his critical philosophy: a religion that did not instill a fear of dying and thereby mobilize the imagination into the realm of unnecessary and superstitious belief about the after-life or pursuit of power and riches “so as to forestall death’s assaults”(Bloom, Introduction to Rousseau’s Emile). Death as imagined perverts the natural formation of consciousness. This is Rousseau’s clear and distinct message in Emile’s education which is to allow his natural courage in the face of death not to be tainted by opinions to the contrary: opinions that carry unnatural and illusory images of death. Bloom puts the matter succinctly:

“The simple lesson is that man must rely on himself and recognize and accept necessity….Although fear of death makes it difficult to accept necessity, amour-propre is what makes it difficult to recognize necessity. This is the murky passion that accounts for the “interesting” relationships men have with one another, and it is the keystone of Rousseau’s psychological teaching.”(p10).

In this context, Rousseau discusses the meaning of a baby’s tears of discomfort and cries/screams of help in response to some pressing need which normally immediately bring an adult who relieves the discomfort by meeting the need causing the condition. The baby can learn from this Rousseau argues that his will can instrumentally bring about the satisfaction of his desires by the use of others as a mean to his ends. This is the moment when such children lose their independence and become dependent on their ability to manipulate others to do their bidding. Here a desire to control others is born, emotions connected to the use of power emerge. Bloom describes the matter in the following terms:

“His concern with his physical needs is transformed into a passion to control the will of adults. His tears become commands and frequently no longer are related to real needs but only to testing his power. He cannot stop it from raining by crying but he can make an adult change his mind. he becomes aware of will, and he knows that wills, as opposed to necessity, are subject to command, that they are changing. He quickly learns that for his life, control over men is more useful than adaptation to things…Every wish that is not fulfilled could, in his imagination, be fulfilled if the adult only willed it that way. His experience of his own will teaches him that others’ wills are selfish and plastic. He, therefore, seeks power over men rather than for the use of things. He becomes a skillful psychologist, able to manipulate others….the child learns to see the intention to do wrong in that which opposes him. He becomes an avenger….His natural and healthy self-love and self-esteem (amour de soi) give way to a self-love relative to other men’s opinions of him: henceforth he can esteem himself only if others esteem him. Ultimately he makes the impossible demand that others care for him more than they care for themselves. The most interesting of psychological phenomena is this doubling or dividing of self-love: it is one of the distinctively few human phenomena(no animal can be insulted): and from it flow anger, pride, vanity, resentment, revenge, jealousy, indignation, competition, slavishness, humility, capriciousness, rebelliousness and almost all the other passions that give the poets their themes. In these first seeds of amour-propre, as seen in tears, one can recognize the source of the human problem.”(Blooms Introduction to Emile p11).

The tears being referred to above are instrumental crocodile tears. Rousseau is venturing into the sphere of Anthropology or what today we might call Philosophical Psychology. The moment referred to above precedes the institution of property which according to Hobbes and Locke it is the duty of government to protect and keep safe. Smith comments on these points in the following manner:

“For Rousseau just as important as the idea of property is the attitude and beliefs shaped by the inequalities produced by wealth and power. Rousseau, like Plato, finds his voice when discussing the complexities of the human soul. He talks about a disposition toward inequality which is untranslatable and he called “amour-propre”. It is related to a whole range of psychological characteristics such as pride, vanity, conceit egocentrism–and it only arises in a society as the true cause of all our discontent. Rousseau distinguishes it from other dispositions, e.g. amour de soi-meme, which is a sort of self-love, a natural sentiment which moves all animals to be vigilant in the cause of their own preservation and which is directed in many by reason, modified by pity and can produce humanity and virtue, but “amour-propre” is a very different kind of sentiment that is relative, artificial and born in society. It leads an individual to value himself more than anyone else and inspires in men all the evil they cause one another and which is the true source of honour (the desire to be esteemed and recognized by others). For Hobbes, this sentiment of vanity, pride, and glory is natural to us, it is a natural desire to dominate. For Rousseau it comes about after the state of nature… how could pride have arisen in a state of nature which is defined by Hobbes as solitary?”

Smith goes on to point out that Rousseau can see the positive aspect of this passion of amour-propre, namely, “the desire to be accorded some kind of recognition or respect by those around us”. This aspect, he reminds us “is at the root of our sense of justice”. The problem with this passion is that it is a law unto itself because if this esteem is not given voluntarily it is seen as contempt. Smith refers in this context interestingly to the international controversy over the cartoon of Mohammad drawn by a Danish artist and claims that the passion of amour-propre lay at the root of the cartoons lack of respect for and recognition of the Islamic Religion. Smith claims the protestors had a point. We in the West claimed that the cartoon was not a political act on the grounds of the way in which we separate politics from religion. We do not require of our governments any protection for the practice of any particular religion nor do we require that governments ensure that any particular religious view is respected. Smith concludes this discussion almost prophetically with:

“Amour propre is the desire to be esteemed and to have your values and points of view esteemed by those around you: it is, in fact, a violent and uncontrollable passion..So much of its civilization and discontent grows out of this passion.”

Rousseau, however, might have shared some of the animus if not the particular motivation of the Islamic protest. According to him, amour-propre plays a role in the establishment of all governments and inequalities are instituted. The relation between people and their government are as a rule, flawed relationships. Smith summarizes his Rousseau’s position excellently:

“Rather than bringing peace as Hobbes and Locke claimed the establishment of government had the effect of establishing existing inequalities. For Rousseau, there is something deeply troubling and deeply shocking about the fact that men who were once free and equal are so easily led to consent to the inequalities of property and to rule by the stronger. For Rousseau, the Hobbesian Social Contract is a kind of swindle. The establishment of government is also a kind of swindle that the rich and powerful use to control the poor and the dispossessed: rather than instituting justice this compact merely legitimizes past usurpations. Government is a con game that the rich play on the poor. Political power simply helps to legitimate economic inequality. The government may operate on the basis of consent but the consent that is granted rests on falsehood and lies. How else can one explain why the rich have lives that are so much freer and so much easier, much more open to enjoyment than the poor. This is Rousseau’s critique. The establishment of government is the last link in the chain of Rousseau’s Conjectural history–the last but the most powerful links in the chains that bind us.

Governments, Smith continues, have created and favoured a middle class, bourgeoises, that are not quite the phenomenon envisaged by Aristotle: namely a golden mean class using knowledge and reason to avoid the extremes of firstly,a wealthy life wallowing in the luxury of unnecessary desires and secondly, the life of poverty wallowing in the cesspools of lack of dignity. The Governments envisaged by Hobbes and Locke have been called “liberal” and have favoured the wealthy, seeking to distribute that wealth more broadly to a middle class with the values of the upper class. This kind of economic focus by governments would have been frowned upon by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For them, government by necessity would have to concern itself with areté:–doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. Economics, for these philosophers, was a secondary art that ought to be confined to the running of households and the private sphere of a citizens existence. Kant shared this vision to some extent. In his work the “Anthropology” he discussed the passions and their detrimental effects on our lives:

“Desire is the self-determination of a subject’s power through the representation of something in the future as an effect of this representation. Habitual sensible desire is called inclination. Desiring without power to produce the object is wish…Inclination that can be conquered only with difficulty or not at all by the subject’s reason is called passion..To be subject to affects and passions is probably always an illness of the mind because both shut out the sovereignty of reason.”(Kant’s Anthropology p 149)

Kant continues in the same vein on page 166:

“passions are cancerous sores for practical reason, and for the most part they are incurable because the sick person does not want to be cured and flees from the dominion of principles, by which alone a cure could occur.”

Kant is not, however, in complete agreement with Rousseau in relation to the industriousness of the middle class. Ambition can be an inclination determined by reason and the need for social intercourse in which there is a mutual striving for recognition and esteem. It is only passionate ambitions that becomes hated by others and which in turn leads to the mutual avoidance of each others company. Passions enslave man in chains and are antithetical to freedom according to Kant and in this respect, Kant and Rousseau agree. All desires are not necessarily passionate as we can see from Kant’s definition above. The relation between desire and passion is illustrated in the following quote:

“The desire to be in a state and relation with ones fellow human beings such that each can have the share that justice allows him is certainly no passion but only a determining ground of free choice through pure practical reason. But excitability of this desire through mere self-love is just for one’s own advantage and not for the purpose of legislation for everyone: it is the sensible impulse of hatred, hatred not of injustice but rather against him who is unjust to us. Since this relation is based on an idea, although admittedly the idea is applied selfishly it transforms the desire for justice against the offender into the passion for retaliation which is often violent to the point of madness, leading a man to expose himself to ruin if only his enemy does not escape it, and (in blood vengeance) making the hatred hereditary between tribes…”

Kant, in the above quote, is drawing an interesting distinction between power and its object. One cannot hate injustice it seems because hatred is logically or grammatically an object relation term and injustice must be defined in terms of a principle of justice. Hatred seems to be an appropriate logical consequence of the way in which people’s gazes operate when amour-propre is the motivating power of relations between people(Rousseau). Hatred, according to Kant, is impermeable to reason. Freud in his Conjectural speculations upon the beginnings of Civilization also deals with the issue of hatred. The band of brothers is, on this account, ruled by a tyrannical father who uses everyone in the extended family as a means to his own ends, attributing no esteem or respect to them. The brothers unite in their hatred and kill the father and consequently are forced to face up to the meaning of their action which is: anyone assuming the father’s mantle of authority can expect the same fate as their father. This for Freud is the moment in which the light of reason dawns and a connection is made between what is done, and the past and the future of the tribe. In this new dawn, the band of brothers agrees that principles or laws are needed to regulate the activities of the tribe. In this instance, Eros wins a major battle against Thanatos and an important milestone of civilization is established–the rule of law. That particular moment comes a little later in Kant’s Conjectural speculations, when Cain kills his brother, Abel, probably in a fit of “amour-propre”

Smith wonders what solutions Rousseau has to the problems caused by the inequalities that have been in their turn caused by amour-propre and the installation of a property protecting government. Smith points t the following:

“The General Will concept is the concept Rousseau thinks will be important in the answering of the problem of inequality in society…The General Will is the foundation of all legislative authority and he means by this that literally, all standards of justice have their origins in the will or free agency. It is this liberation of the will from all transcendent sources or standards, whether found in nature, custom or revelation, or any other source that is of importance. It is the liberation of the will from all such sources which is the true centre of gravity of Rousseau’s philosophy. His world is a world that emphasizes the privacy and primacy of the will, the moral point of view(Kant). Given Rousseau’s liberation conception of human nature his description of the actual mechanisms involved, the Social Contract, comes as something of a surprise.”

Everyone, according to Rousseau must embrace the following aims: protection of the property and persons of the society and protection of the right of every person to “obey only themselves”. There seems, however, to be at the very least a tension if not a fully fledged contradiction in this conception of the Social Contract. Rousseau, however, is envisaging a Hobbesian like sovereign at the root of the conception. Smith summarizes this as follows:

“The General Will is not the sum total of all individual wills but is more like the general interest of the rational will of the community. Since we all contribute to the shaping of this general will when we obey its laws, we obey ourselves. This is a new kind of freedom which brings about a transformation of human nature….it is a new kind of freedom to do what the law commands.”

The above position is reflected in the third form of Kant’s Categorical Imperative which claims that the kingdom of ends is a kingdom in which the citizen-subject identifies with the legislator and treats the law as an end in itself. We are now in the sphere of the Aristotelian “common good”. The law does not need to be liked but given the fact that it is partly shaped by the activities and debates of the citizens, it has to be respected. If the processes involved are somehow at fault then it is, of course, possible for the citizen body to change then. What is being imagined here is the Aristotelian ideal of the many debating an issue by bringing many different perspectives to bear upon the process of the formation of the law. The process is a synthetic one and will involve extracting the truth from many theses and antitheses presented in the debate. A process, that is, that is designed to produce the good, the whole good and nothing but the good.

In this context, Rousseau argues, perhaps paradoxically, that:

“we need to return to Rome and Sparta to find models of citizenship where the spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion to the common good were important.”

Sparta was also paradoxically a model that Plato referred to and although it was not a divided regime as was the case with oligarchies and democracies, the military code of honour certainly would have reminded Plato of “amour-propre” as it would have reminded Kant of the rule of the passions over the sovereignty of reason. The Spartans, after all, were haters of philosophy.

Prof Smith concludes the lecture with a section entitled “Legacies”. He includes amongst these the influence Rousseau’s work had on the French Revolution, the fact that he was approached to assist in the formations of the constitutions of Poland and Corsica, the influence on Jefferson in the USA, the influence on de Tocqueville, the influence on the kibbutz movement in Israel. He ends with the following:

“Kant was taught by Rousseau to respect the rights and dignity of man. Kant called him “The Newton of the Moral Universe”. Kant’s entire moral philosophy is a kind of deepened and radicalized Rousseauism where the General Will is transmitted into the rational will of the categorical imperative.”

The sense in which Kant’s philosophy is deeper is probably the sense in which Kant continued in the tracks of Aristotelian philosophy and was prepared to investigate the benefits that religious discourse has had for mankind, even if the concept of God the creator and cause of the universe is not in itself responsible for the cultural progress of mankind toward a kingdom of ends. For according to Kant, all that is required for this cultural and moral journey is freedom which is an idea of reason.

Professor Smith could also have mentioned under the heading “Legacies”, Rousseau’s influence on our educational systems everywhere in the world but perhaps the jury is still out in relation to this issue. Opinion is divided about this vision of a lonely Robinson being educated by a tutor supposedly unaffected by the more destructive social passions.

April 25, 2018November 23, 2018

Sixth Issue of Philosophical/Educational Journal “The World Explored, the World Suffered.” Philosophy of Language

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