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April 18, 2018September 1, 2019

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY COURSE: Plato part one

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Even if it was the case that for many hundreds of years Aristotle was referred to as “The Philosopher” and the “Master of those that know”, his teacher was Plato and his alma mater was the Academy. We do not know enough to be certain but a fair conjecture would be that Socrates did not have a navigational star or mentor in his philosophically formative years as a young thinker. We do witness in the Symposium Socrates being given a lesson in methodical argumentation(philosophy?) by Diotima and in these early moments of Philosophy it may have occurred to Socrates that a reliable method of questioning and argumentation are necessary prerequisites to leading the examined life. It is of course a tribute to the love of demonstrating excellence in the public realm of the ancient Greeks that we are able to today to bear witness (via preserved texts that have survived millennia) to the importance of discussion and debate in the life of the polis. Gilbert Ryle in his work “Plato’s Progress” suggests that Plato might have composed his elenctic and dialectical dialogues for competitions attached to the Olympic games. If so there must have been relatively large audiences which is another tribute to the Greek mind and culture that was the womb of such activity.

We have been made aware via the works of Plato and Aristotle that there is a body of knowledge which it is important to communicate and learn as part of being a citizen in a polis. For Plato this was a body which can be written down as well as performed in arenas reserved for such purposes. Plato, more than Socrates, perhaps was concerned with the search for a theory which could explain the mysteries and puzzles brought to the attention of the public via such forums. Philosophy seemed to Plato to be the natural home or theatre for the kind of investigation we are presented with. Out of this womb of Greek Culture and the theatre of theoretical investigation the Aristotelian quintuplets of metaphysics, ethics epistemology, aesthetics and political Philosophy would eventually be born. As we know Socrates thought of himself as some kind of midwife in the process of bringing philosophical offspring into the world. His method of elenchus was probably modeled on a public method of competitive argument called dialectic, which was a form of a verbal duel between two people. A questioner asks an answerer what Ryle terms “conceptual” “ what” questions and the answer is only allowed to respond in the affirmative or the negative in the name of defending a thesis which is the theme of the interrogation. The questioners task is to entice from his opponent an answer that is not compatible with the thesis the answerer is defending. An audience judges the competition. It is not to difficult to see how such an action could be the source of many of the aporetic philosophical problems both Plato and Aristotle attempt in their various ways to provide solutions for. If this is true there might have been two sources of the dynamics of Greek Philosophy: dialectic(eristic and elenchus) and the recorded thoughts of the great thinkers.
Ryle’s “Plato’s Progress” has this to say on the relation of this rhetorical activity to such issues as they are taken up in Aristotle’s work “The Topics”:

“The Topics is a training manual for a special pattern of disputation governed by strict rules which takes the following shape. Two persons agree to have a battle. One is to be the questioner, the other answerer. The questioner can, with certain qualifications only ask questions:and the answerer can, with certain qualifications only answer “Yes” or “no”. So the questioner’s questions have to be properly constructed for “yes” or “no” answers. This automatically rules out a lot of types of questions, like factual questions, arithmetical questions, and technical questions. Roughly, it only leaves conceptual questions whatever these may be. The answerer begins by undertaking to uphold a certain “thesis”, for example, that justice is in the interests of the stronger, or that knowledge is sense perception. The questioner has to try to extract from the answerer by a series of questions an answer or conjunction of answers inconsistent with the original thesis and so drive him into an “elenchus”. The questioner has won the duel if he succeeds in getting the answerer to contradict his original thesis, or else in forcing him to resign, or in reducing him to silence, to an infinite regress, to mere abusiveness, to pointless yammering or to outrageous paradox. The answerer has won if he succeeds in keeping his wicket up until the close of play. The answerer is allowed to object to the question on the score that it is two or more questions in one or that it is metaphorical or ambiguous. The duel is fought out before an audience…The exercise is to have a time limit.”

The above form of dueling is one form upon which the Socratic method of elenchus may have been modeled. During pre-Socratic times and during the time of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the above form of elenctic interaction went under the name of “eristic”. Now it is important to note that the above form of elenchus differed from the Socratic method in one very important respect. The aim of the Socratic method was primarily pedagogical, i.e primarily aimed at getting his interlocutors to acknowledge some truth about justice or themselves or both. Whereas the dueling parties engaged in eristic are primarily seeking victory and prestige, via the winning of a competition. In spite of this fundamental difference, we should recognize that eristic presupposed considerable powers of reasoning. Yet it should also be remembered that the Sophists used this form of dialectic for financial gain, thus turning something essentially pedagogical into a solipsistic (narcissistic?) secondary art form. Socratic elenchus whilst not aiming at victory over one’s interlocutor did, unfortunately, have the secondary effect of humiliating ones opponent, largely owing to the fact that Socrates refrained from exposing his own assumptions and knowledge in the light of the discussion. He has some idea of what justice is but is reluctant to expose it to his interlocutors. Plato may be registering his concern over this fact in the Republic when he allows Socrates the lecturer(was this a part of Socrates’ repertoire or was this a literary creation by Plato?) to expound on the theory of forms, the allegory of the cave and the waves of change that need to sweep over a polis if it to avoid ruin and destruction. This, after 4 displays of elenchus in relation to Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus and Glaucon. In the lecture that follows everything is laid open to the eyes including hidden assumptions, noble lies, and even justifications for infanticide. Ryle points out as so many other commentators have, that the conception of Philosophy Plato has changes in significance between the early and the late dialogues. In the work of the Republic, we may be witnessing the dialogue in which the shift actually occurred.
Indeed it may also be necessary to point out that the shift from eristic to the Socratic method in itself may also signify a shift in the conception of the nature of Philosophy.
A dialectic of the Socratic kind, i.e. the Socratic method, was aiming at the truth and knowledge and taking a position in the battle of pro and contra reasons in relation to a thesis. This was clearly a development of eristic. We should also note, however, that Socrates himself was accused of trickery(a common complaint in dialectical “duels” and even in modern debating) in his argumentation by at least two interlocutors(Euthyphro and Thrasymachus) and we find him characterising what he is doing as “barren of offspring”, as “maieutic”, in spite of the fact that his method distinguished itself from that of eristic, and that it was in search of a quarry best characterised in terms of a definition. Socrates’ elenctic method was in that sense both teleologically and formally rigorous. It was probably the case that behind the formulation of Socrates’ questions there was an awareness of structured assumptions and their logical consequences. The dialogue of Plato’s Republic clearly adds a dimension to this Socratic rigor and underlying structure(The theory of Forms). The method, assumptions, explorations and subsequent definitions were now in the lecture of Socrates forming themselves into a theory of a world of things, artifacts, souls, cities, and Gods. Socrates in the later books of the Republic is exploring the world in a different manner which commentators identify with the Philosophy of Plato. The world was now being subjected to a questioning that demanded answers that would fit into some kind of system. Dialectic becomes logic and demands systematic reflection of a Parmenidean rather than Heraclitean kind: reflection upon that which endures through change, reflection upon that which is the principle that determines what a thing is in its nature and also ultimately a principle that determines what the soul is in its nature. These changes also signify an increased concern with the general ideas of Truth and The Good.
The major theme of Ryle’s book “Plato’s Progress” suggests that Plato’s progressive path led from eristic and dialectic where the emphasis is upon negatively defending a thesis by not abandoning it in the face of counterargument if you are an answerer, or aiming to destroy a thesis or force a defender to resign if you are a questioner, to the formulation of an aporetic question which demanded systematic resolution via theoretical justifications. In this phase, we also see in the later dialogues of Plato a concern with the history of a problem, something we have not encountered before.

Also in this work, Ryle fascinatingly suggests a hypothesis that Plato was sued for defamation of character by a group of the leading figures criticized in his dialogues. The suit, Ryle claims, cost Plato his fortune and resulted in some kind of ban on Plato teaching eristic dueling and dialectic to students under 30 years of age. We can note that in the Republic Plato still believed dialectic to be important as a prelude to understanding the ideas of justice and the good and the true and this becomes part of the training of potential rulers when they are over the age of 30. Plato may well have abandoned the theory of forms in his late thought but retained the view that the true and the good were timeless standards by which to evaluate thought, action, and forms of life. From some points of view, it is a credit to Plato that he positions the Good as the highest standard of evaluation in Philosophy thus indicating the important role of practical reasoning. A move which would much later on be repeated by Kant.

Socrates’ progress moved in a line leading from investigating the physical world in a “What is this in its nature” frame of mind, sifting through physical phenomenon as numerous as the grains of sand in a desert. He went in search of answers that would fall into the category of Causality and in the spirit of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras. The latter influence led to a change in the direction of his investigations. “All is mind” was the new assumption and Socratic investigations began to search for parts of the mind (soul) and meaningful forms of life. This journey required developing the method of elenchus. This method led to the form of life Socrates characterized as “the examined life” which in the mind of Socrates was infinitely superior in terms of the criterion of self-sufficiency to the wealthy or powerful forms of life so attractive to everyone. For Socrates, these latter forms of life were filled with Heraclitean flux, change and reversals of fortune because of an unhealthy dependence on ever-changing elements of life which we all know is going to end. The examination of forms of life and the question of the meaning of life raises the question of death. In the dialogues of Crito and Phaedrus, we find Socrates sitting in his cell awaiting death by execution. He reasons that however one regards death it must be a good and therefore nothing to be afraid of. This in itself suffices to praise Plato’s emphasis upon the standard of the good which ought to be used to evaluate all forms of life and even death. The event of Socrates’ execution thus might have provided Plato with the inspiration to formulate a theory of forms in which the form of the good is the supreme form. Another key Philosophical relationship, that with Aristotle, perhaps beginning from a joint sojourn in Syracuse may have subsequently led Plato to abandon the theoretical forms in favor of practical laws. Plato’s work “The Laws” is not an elenctic dialogue but rather a lecture and constitutes Plato’s second attempt to create a Callipolis. Plato speculates about a small hypothetical city called Magnesia run by a Nocturnal Council that has responsibility for the cities laws. This council of wise men, paradoxically, contains no philosophers but only officials trained in maths astronomy, theology and law. Many of the Republic’s “constructions” and “social restrictions” are present. Families and marriage are encouraged but procreation of children is determined in accordance with some mysterious eugenic standard and excommunication is the penalty for adultery.The recommended relation of citizens to God is also set out in the Laws which is a school text licensed by a powerful Minister of Education who sits on the Nocturnal Council. This text has the purpose of reinforcing the belief in God and his goodness. Heresy and impiety are illegal. The interesting question here is whether Socrates would have been permitted to live in Magnesia and live his examined life subjecting other citizens to bouts of elenchus. Socrates is no longer the prime mover in Plato’s later dialogues/lectures. At approximately the same time as he was composing the Laws which he was rewriting until his death, Plato was engaged in a project of religious and scientific significance—the composition of a work called “Timaeus”. This dialogue sees Socrates as the witness to a lecture on the history of the universe. Here the Demiurge of Anaxagoras organizes the initial indescribable chaos into an order containing the good and the beautiful. There are recognizable Aristotelian aspects in the 4 elements and prime matter, with life emerging at a certain stage of the creative process from prime matter. There are also non-Aristotelian elements such as an atomism in which differently shaped atoms explain the different elements. Space is somehow involved in the transformation of the elements into more complex forms. This narrative includes an account of our bodily organs and bodily functions such as perception, in a manner very reminiscent of Aristotle. We also encounter in this dialogue/lecture a listing of diseases of body and mind evoking the spectre of Freud especially given the fact that we know it was the work of Plato which was the inspiration for the final phase of Freudian theorizing about a stoical mind located on the terrain of the battle between Eros and Thanatos. The impression we are given is that Plato is moving away from his earlier Socratic commitments,and the later theory of forms, in an entirely new direction which reminds us of Aristotle. There appears to be a form of hylomorphism emerging to reconcile the world of ideas with the physical world and the soul with the body. Anthony Kenny in his work “Ancient Philosophy (Vol 1 of his New History of Western Philosophy) points out that Plato’s work the “Timaeus” became Plato’s most influential work up to the period of the Renaissance:

“Plato’s teleological account of the forming of the world by a divinity was not too difficult for medieval thinkers to assimilate to the creation story of Genesis. This dialogue was a set text in the early days of the University of Paris and 300 years later Raphael in his “School of Athens” gave Plato in the centre of the fresco only the Timaeus to hold”

In this Fresco we find Plato pointing upward to the heavens and Aristotle pointing ahead of him. Was Aristotle pointing to the natural and social world or was he pointing to the viewers of the future? One can wonder. There have been many interpretations of this constellation of Philosophers from the school of Athens. The predictions of things to come is also found in Plato’s dialogue /lecture “Parmenides” in which the central character Parmenides produces a very Aristotelian criticism of the theory of the forms in the course of a dialogue with Socrates. In this dialogue it very much looks as if the master of elenchus is being given a dose of his own medicine. At the close of the dialogue, Parmenides, probably seeing in the position of Socrates more than just a trace of Heraclitean thought compliments Socrates upon his powers of argumentation, at the same time suggesting a more thorough training whilst Socrates is still young. Parmenides suggests that Socrates should not attempt to rest with premature conceptions of justice beauty and goodness in case the truth about these standards is lost because this will have the consequence that the multitude will cease to believe in the existence of these ideas.
Perhaps, Plato might argue, Parmenides should have been at the centre of Raphaels fresco pointing forward to the future.

April 17, 2018September 1, 2019

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY COURSE: Socrates part two

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The philosophicial triumvirate of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle presented itself in Athens at roughly speaking the same historical period and this in itself is a remarkable fact of History. Exploring the relationship between the thoughts of these great thinkers presents an awesome task but it is not a task that is, even two thousand years later, nearing completion. In contrast to that other triumvirate of Philosophers: Kant, Hegel, and Marx who never shared that almost holy relation of teacher-pupil we seem with our three ancient Greek philosophers to be wandering the same territory, the same Callipolis. Yet they occupy distinctively different regions of this territory. Aristotelians obviously feel that Aristotle is the key to the understanding of the other two and it is not certain that the other two philosophers would disagree with this position. We certainly feel that important contributions to understanding could be made if philosophical investigations focused upon firstly,the connections there were between the respective positions of Socrates and Aristotle and secondly the difference that both positions manifest in relation to the different positions Plato adopted throughout his long career. The first section of this part of the Introduction took up the matter of the identity of the historical Socrates and we argued for the traditional view. The view namely that Socrates is most accurately portrayed in the earlier dialogues and especially those connected with his trial and death. This is the Socrates whose thoughts we will be comparing with the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle
The Demiurge, for Socrates, is the power that will ensure that ”The Good” exists and prevails in the world. This power seems to have a Heraclitean ancestry: it seems, that is, to be a monolithic transformation of the Erinyes, Diké Moira and Lightning. The Demiurge is not conceived along the lines of a physical power or capacity: it is a religious power and perhaps one might argue that the belief that Socrates had in this power was not fully consistent with a belief in the Platonic Theory of Forms. If this is correct, then a paradox presents itself. Both Socrates and Aristotle had similar views relating to the Demiurge and a monotheistic God that is mysteriously connected to thought. If this is true then they would appear to, in a certain sense be more religious than Plato. Another paradox given the facts that Socrates was indicted for religious offenses and Aristotle was threatened with an indictment on the same grounds. Plato seems to have escaped suspicion in spite of the fact that his Theory of Forms was more of a threat to the gods of the state than the practice of elenchus in the marketplace or the goings on in the Lyceum.
The Early books of the Republic have Socrates constructing a healthy city without philosophers or warriors or the theory of forms. What comes subsequently is a defense of the “fevered” city which requires warriors, Philosophers and their theories of the Forms. It Is at his point we believe that the literary Socrates Is born. Socrates becomes less the philosopher working in the interrogative mode and more the philosopher working in the lecturer/assertoric mode of discourse.

Given these conditions, it could be argued that Socrates was not fully committed to Plato’s Theory of Forms as an explanation or account of ”The Good” as he understood it. For Socrates ”the good” must be ”out there” in the visible chaotic, ever-changing Heraclitean Anaxogorean infinite external world: a world organized by something cosmic resembling the way in which a mind works.

This essay is arguing for the position that we need to take pre-Socratic and Aristotelian positions into account when interpreting the thought of Socrates. Plato was the teacher of Aristotle and from what we can see in the early dialogues we know he respected the integrity of his teacher, Socrates’ views. These facts suggest that Aristotle was probably in contact with the views of Socrates via his teacher Plato and this, in turn, might suggest more of a resemblance between the underlying assumptions of Socrates and Plato than is normally suggested. If this is the case then the idea of a Demiurge or a God as a divine thinking being whose thought is present in the movement of every atom, movement, and action in the universe would seem to be present in different forms in the thoughts of both philosophers.

There has been much discussion relating to the historical Socrates and the Platonic “constructed” Socrates lecturing Plato’s brothers on the Theory of Forms. We have argued that it is possible to separate the historical from the literary Socrates on the basis of the available evidence. There is also, we would add a considerable amount of evidence for the above position. Surely, some kind of “triangulation” is possible given the existence of the writings of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle?
Let us begin with the account of Socrates’ thought which we find in Aristotle who claims that Socrates provided us with inductive arguments and general definitions. Initially, this seems to be a very short review of the figure that by the time of Aristotle’s writings must have achieved the status of a very important thinker. If, however one pays attention to the resemblances in the thinking of these two figures in relation to “the divine mind” and their parallel positions in ethics on the nature of the Good, the review may seem less dismissive and more a case of abbreviation as a consequence of familiarity with the position that is being reviewed. In the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle has the following to say:

“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice is thought to aim at some good: and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. But a certain difference is found among ends: some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is of the nature of the products to be better than the activities.”

Socrates and Aristotle on this account would not immediately agree with resorting to the theory of forms in determining the significance of ethical judgments. Both appear to be committed to the “practical” nature of the ethical, i.e. they believe that practical wisdom is concerned with what we ought to do in order to achieve a state of eudaimonia: the good flourishing life. In such a state every art, inquiry, and action aim at the good and use practical reason to do so. Practical wisdom for both of these Philosophers is related to being excellent at a particular kind of thinking which is aiming at or intending a good flourishing life. Both Socrates and Aristotle have argued that there is an unconditional form of practical reasoning that is not identical with the kind of thinking involved in those productive activities where reason is being used to give rise to an intention that is instrumentally aiming at objects which relate atomistically and perhaps accumulatively to the idea of the instrumental good.(e.g. good health, safe house in a safe neighborhood, good marriage etc). This unconditional kind of practical reasoning aims at the flourishing life via a way or form of action which is logically and not in our modern sense “causally” related to the self-sufficient life. The intentions involved in this categorical form of action will be “good” in the sense of being what we ought to do non-instrumentally and unconditionally to achieve this moral aim. The agent understands this activity in a particular way which is not theoretical. In this context doing what is required to be done is understood as logically necessary for living the good life. In this context the means are not causally related to the end but rather, the moral worth of the end must also attach logically to the means one uses to achieve this end. But what is the connection of this good life to the divine mind thinking about itself or the Socratic Demiurge? It is not clear, for example, whether we can do more than aim at the good. We are rational animals capable of discourse for Aristotle and both our animal nature and our need to debate the good in the agora separates us significantly from the picture of the divine mind we get from Socrates and Aristotle. But why argue that we even aim at the good given the fact that we are animals red in tooth and claw? Once we have learned what is good and having been habituated to the good we will do the good according to both Socrates and Aristotle, i.e. once we can holistically understand the ultimate value of a self-sufficient flourishing life where means and ends are logically related. Aristotle, as we know complained that Socrates did not in his account sufficiently acknowledge the phenomenon of akrasia: i.e. the weakness of the will which leads an agent who believes a course of action is good to do something else instead. But in spite of this complaint both philosophers agree that if one knows the good as instantiated by a number of general and particular premises, one will do this good. If the phenomenon of akrasia occurs, Aristotle claims, it is because the agent does not understand the full meaning of at least one premise or, alternatively the full implication of the argumentatively structured premises. The passions cannot, as Socrates pointed out, drag knowledge and reason about like a slave.
The implication of the above is that both Socrates and Aristotle shared the conviction that practical reason and the ideas we have of what we should or ought to do are the steering mechanisms of moral action. As we have argued the Platonic Socrates emerges after the early uses of elenchus against the claims and general definitions of Cephalus, Polemarchus and Thrasymachus. When the Platonic Socrates then turns to engage with Plato’s brother’s Glaucon, elenchus is replaced by a lecturing explorer who will in the later books surprise everyone not just with a definition of justice but a complete theory of justice and the practical consequences of leading an unjust life. We are suddenly transported to the Academy and are reminded of Plato lecturing to his students. The parts of the soul argument is obviously a foundation stone for the Theory of forms and it is uncertain to what extent, if any, Socrates would have embraced this form of argumentation. The argument claims that the reason why one person can both want to drink a glass of water because they are thirsty and not want to drink because the water might be poisoned is that there are different parts of the soul desiring different things on different grounds. If the soul were one indivisible whole, it is argued, then to want to drink and to want not to drink would look like a contradiction. On the Aristotelian characterization of the law of noncontradiction, however, the assertion of these contraries might not be contradictory because the law states that one can claim contraries to be true at different times and in different respects. Aristotle did claim that the soul could have parts but he only talked about its rational and irrational “parts” and it might be the case that he meant “aspects” and not parts in the Socratic sense. He consequently would have thought that one and the same person could both want to drink and want not to drink at different times and on different grounds. So, if we are right to insist on the close relation of the Socratic and Aristotelian positions it might be that Plato is the odd man out in this triumvirate of Philosophers and the parts of the soul argument was taken from the Platonic political handbook. The argument, i.e, may have been needed for the construction of Plato’s hypothetical Callipolis. This Platonic “fevered” city looks very different to the Socratic healthy city of craftsmen doing the work they are best suited for and minding their own business. In the healthy city, commerce and areté appear to be the engines generating the energy necessary for the meeting of the needs of the citizens. The healthy city is a small city without soldiers or Philosophers. One assumes there will be laws but these will probably be in place to ensure the working of the so-called principle of specialization. One presumes there will be rulers who have the interests of the city as a whole at heart. Socrates uses the principle of specialization to justify the role of the captain on a ship and refers to the captain’s holistic vision or knowledge of the ships telos to justify his position of authority. There is nothing to suggest that this analogy is a Platonic invention although one can see how the analogy could be used to justify the role of the Philosopher in Plato’s Callipolis.

We have seen, however, the consequences that Socrates was forced to endure in the course of leading a philosophical examined life. Perhaps Plato viewed the failure of Socrates to convince his fellow Athenians of the importance of such a life as a failure of practical reason. Could this be the explanation for the intensive theoretical training of the Philosopher-rulers? The rulers were to be trained in mathematics and dialectic but it is never made clear how these skills will benefit the city as a whole. Plato feels the need to abolish wealth and the family from the lives of the warriors and philosopher rulers suggesting that spirit and reason in itself were not sufficient for the self-control that was needed in these areas of existence. When these suggestions are made by the Platonic Socrates, Glaucon and Adeimantus ask for more detail about such waves of change in the city and the type of justification forthcoming from Socrates appears to become more and more mythological and at times as fantastic as a science fiction narrative. To get the populace to cooperate in this bold endeavor noble lies about their past and their memories of the past are to be told. As if the argument of the parts of the soul was not sufficiently materialistic we are then told that the souls will contain the metals of either gold silver or the base metals. Analogies and allegories abound and elenchus all but disappears as the theory of forms appear to support an otherwise hypnotic account of the perfect Republic. The Socratic narrator of these books of the Republic is a very different figure to the character we find arguing with his accusers in the Apology.
Looking to the writings of Xenophon for the literary creation of Plato will serve no useful purpose but Xenephons account does to some extent support the picture of Socrates we have from the early dialogues.

What we are suggesting is nothing more than an avenue of research where more is made of the connection of Socrates’ views to the views of the pre-Socratic Philosophers: Heraclitus, Anaximander etc on the one hand and the resemblance of many of the Socratic and Aristotelian positions on the other.
A further argument for the above opening up of an avenue of research comes from the borderlands between the ethical and religious. Prof T J Saunders in his work “Early Socratic Dialogues” points to what he calls “Socrates’ Teleological view of the world”. Saunders claims that this account views man as having a telos or function which describes the world as “ a rationally ordered structure in which man has a function to fit in with the whole”.
We should recall in this context Aristotle’s claim to have discovered the role of teleological explanation as a genuine mode of explanation amongst the modes of explanations at our disposal. If our claim that the resemblance of these two philosophers has been underestimated in the past has credence than we could see Socrates’ teleological view as an inspirational predecessor of Aristotle’s “final cause” discussion. It is clear that Socrates is at the very least “operationally” using teleological explanation when in his use of elenchus he confronts a position A with a position B which leads demonstratively to a contradiction in relation to some premise constituting position A. The Euthyphro contains an example of this strategy. It is clear in this dialogue that Socrates is using the above holistic perspective to convince Euthyphro that his indictment of his father in the name of piety may not be just and if justice and piety have some kind of conceptual relation it may turn out that the gods or at least some of them might not agree with what Euthyphro is doing. In the minds of these gods, justice and religion are holistically connected.

Whatever the differences, and there are many, between Socrates, the first generation philosopher , and Aristotle, the third generation philosopher of the triumvirate, the resemblances in a number of key areas of discussion suffice for us to believe that the short review Aristotle gives of Socratic philosophy is not dismissive but rather a consequence of the fact that they agreed upon so much of importance.
Both agree, to take a further example, on the importance of the terms areté and eudaimonia. Prof T J Saunders claims that the best translation of the Greek term areté is excellence. Both Philosophers agree that the man whose actions can be described with the term areté is the man who has a particular kind of knowledge. He is the man “who is excellently equipped to fulfill his function and be happy”. Such a man will weave his way toward his goal through the crowds in the marketplace where many lead the lives of pleasure, luxury, and power. Areté enabled Socrates to go resolutely to his death in the face of being shouted down at his trial by crowds who could not see the holistic connections between justice, religion and the philosophical examined life.

Perhaps we can also mention in this context the contrast between those who live life in accordance with the Freudian pleasure-pain principle manically seeking pleasure and manically avoiding pain. Freud sought inspiration at the end of his theorizing in the pages of Plato but it is not clear whether it was the historical or the literary Platonic Socrates that most interested him. The Pleasure –pain principle and its elder brother, the reality principle certainly make an appearance in the last books of the Republic after the introduction of the allegories and the theory of forms. These books may see the reappearance of the historical Socrates, especially when it is a question of the arguments relating to the pleasures of the wealthy man and the powerful tyrant where the implication is that such lives are really being blindly directed by a maniacal striving after the pleasure that accrues from the absence or avoidance of pain. The man of excellence, on the other hand, who strives after leading the examined life is resolute in the face of pain: he “knows” that nothing can harm a just man and that there is, therefore, no reason to fear the actions of an unjust man—even if the consequences are death. In this sequence of reasoning, we do not encounter the tripartite soul—merely the rational and irrational processes at play in a man’s life.

Aristotle, of course, thought the contemplative life was the good and therefore what we should aim for. He also thought the soul was a principle somehow related to thought. But how would he have characterized thought? In terms of thinking about something or in the more complex terms of thinking something about something. Surely the latter. How could one think something unconnected to anything else? Yet surely this brings us back to the question of how can one think something about something. Hannah Arendt refers to thinking as talking to oneself. Socrates called his voice his daemon. When he was transfixed in what looked to be thought he was “in communication” with his “daemon”:

Here is how Socrates refers to his daemon in the Apology:

“You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and this is what stands in the way of my being a politician.”

Could this voice, Oracle or sign not speak or signify? Could one be forbidden to do something without being told in language that one ought not to do this something? Aristotle also might have conceived of the divine mind as talking to itself when it was thinking of itself. And since the divine mind is essentially itself thinking we arrive at the meta-level of this discourse about this divine mind that it is thinking about thinking. If God is talking to himself what would such a language look like?

Aristotle claims at the beginning of the metaphysics that all men by nature desire to know. What was it that Socrates failed to know in claiming that he knows that he does not know? Was he referring to this meta-level of divine thinking that Aristotle outlined? Was this why his sign could not positively command? Was this why he could stand transfixed in thought for hours, attempting to interpret the sign? Was he listening to some divine conversation?

April 16, 2018September 1, 2019

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY COURSE: Socrates part one

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In an article entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Socratic Problem” written by Louis-André Dorion in the “Cambridge Companion to Socrates” there is the suggestion that there is a contradiction between the assertion that the soul is divided into parts and the assertion that akrasia is a real phenomenon: the phenomenonon namely manifested in a person saying that they knew that what they were doing was wrong but they were forced to do it anyway. The contradiction is assumed to arise because akrasia places in question the idea of one unified active agent striving to obtain the good. If this is true then it would seem impossible for an agent to know the good and not do what they know to be good.
Now Socrates is supposed to have argued that the phenomenon of akrasia is incoherent, although given the current confusion of the identity of the historical Socrates with the identity of the Platonic literary creation of the Socrates of the dialogues, we might well wonder whether we can talk about Socrates at all anymore. Perhaps one should instead describe Socrates by saying “There is an x such that x exists and x insisted the phenomenon of akrasia is incoherent”? But should we succumb to the suggestion that Historians of Philosophy have not known what they have been talking about when they discussed the views of the Philosopher Socrates? Now if any if these comentators/historians had insisted that Socrates had argued that the soul is divisible into three parts, then it is acceptable to question such an attribution. We do know that these words were uttered by Socrates in the dialogue entitled “The Republic” but the suspicion of many philosophers is that by this stage of the proceedings of the Republic, Socrates had become the mouthpiece for the coming theory of forms which most commentators believe we have no reason to attribute to the historical Socrates. Knowing the historical Socrates as we do there is also, it has been argued, every reason to doubt whether the very practically minded historical Socrates could espouse any advanced theory about the reality or existence of everything. The limits of his theoretical speculation on one account seem to have Socrates searching for general definitions of general concepts. Many commentators point to Aristotle to support this picture of the Historical Socrates but I will provide evidence in part 2 of this section to suggest that though it is correct to believe that it was Plato and not Socrates who wanted to divide the soul, Socrates was at least as wide-ranging in his speculations about the world as Aristotle was, at least in relation to ethical, political and religious matters.

Now whilst we believe “The Republic” to be a key document in this discussion relating to the identity of the Historical Socrates” we also believe there is less reason to doubt the veracity of the dialogue entitled “The Apology” than many have claimed. If one believes that Plato respected the identity of his mentor in the Republic as we believe he did then there is also every reason to believe that this was also the case in “The Apology” which is probably the most historical of all of the dialogues given that it was tied very tightly to a historical event important to Athens and to the whole Ancient world. There are many claims in this dialogue made by Socrates in his defence of himself and Philosophy which were made exactly because they were common knowledge in Athens. The Delphic Oracle’s prophesy “that no man is wiser than Socrates” if incorrectly reported by Socrates at his trial would have sealed the philosopher’s fate and would have resulted in an overwhelming vote to convict and probably further ensured a rapid dwindling of interest in the exploits of a “boaster”. The reports of what Socrates did subsequent to receiving the news of the oracle’s prophecy was also public knowledge and this would certainly seem in the average mind to be explained by Socrates´relatively humble interpretation of the meaning of the prophecy(that he should try to find someone wiser than he himself). Engaging in such a practical response to the prophecy also testifies to the practical intent of Socrates’ philosophical questioning and his development of the method of elenchus.

Plato’s division of the soul into parts, on the other hand, was both theoretical and mathematical and strangely atomistic given the dualist and idealist nature of some of his assumptions. Aristotle would have opposed this materialistic or mathematical division of the soul into its parts and was more inclined to think in terms of the rational and non-rational aspects of the whole person that he assumed to be the true subject of philosophical examination. Aristotle also clearly distinguished practical reasoning from theoretical reasoning, practical science from theoretical science and ethics from epistemology. All of these were distinguished from each other by the kind of principles which guided the reasoning and investigative processes conducted in their name. Indeed Aristotle’s conception of the soul was that of a substance or form which in his thought system was something more akin to a principle and could not, therefore, be something which could be divided either mathematically or materialistically into parts. Aristotle suggests that in ethics the agent is capable of rational and irrational action in the name of a principle guiding reasoning in the ought system of concepts but he would definitely not agree with substantification of the principle and insisting that the rational action can in some sense like a charioteer control the irrational forces dwelling in a persons body. This would be for him the worst kind of metaphysics and psychology. We do find Aristotle picking a quarrel with Socrates over the phenomenon of akrasia: the phenomenon of an agent knowing that X is the good/right thing to do in circumstances C but mysteriously choosing not to do X. Aquinas, for example, was supposed to have known that it was wrong to steal pears from a strangers pear trees but did so anyway. How do we correctly describe and explain this phenomenon? Aristotle claims that Socrates failed to acknowledge the phenomenon of someone having knowledge but failing to use that knowledge, i.e. failing to allow that knowledge free play in the arena of the action to be considered. What we are witnessing in this phenomenon, according to Aristotle is not full-blown practical knowledge which must issue in action in a unified agent but rather a belief which may be held theoretically: a belief such as “yes it is wrong to steal pears generally but these circumstances are particular to me and to my action and suffice for me to regard this as an exception to the rule,” i.e. the rule was not to be used in these circumstances. But surely it might be argued that some ought premise must be behind the stealing of the pears and that these premises must be true: “one ought in certain circumstances to feel the thrill of doing forbidden things”. One can clearly see here the presence of feeling in this arena of action and the absence of practical reasoning. There is a kind of technical reasoning involved of carrying out the task of stealing efficiently which in its turn involves a kind of selection from differing acts of efficiently stealing the pears but this is not practical reasoning in Aristotle’s sense of the phrase. The contrite thief in these circumstances typically argues without contradiction that he knew that one ought not to steal the pears but because he needed to experience this thrill of doing what is forbidden he ignored what he ought to have done morally in favour of the ought of his appetites, in favour of the pleasures and pains of the situation.

Yet for Aristotle obeying the ought premise related to one’s feelings in this context is a clear breach of rationality in relation to the unity of agency required to lead the examined or flourishing life. We can also recognise this form of reasoning in Socrates’ discussion of the issue of akrasia.
Part of the problem of correctly understanding this situation occurs when we divide the agent into a rational part and an irrational part and imagine a conflict in the form of that which occurs between a master and a slave or an angel and a devil. There is for Aristotle one agent for whom the knowledge of it being wrong to steal pears is present in the knowledge/belief system but is not used and there is another different phenomenon of another different agent for whom the knowledge is both present and active. These agents could only be the same person if some kind of actualising process occurred in the first agent a process that allowed the latent knowledge to become active at some later time in the agent’s arena of action.

It is interesting to note in this discussion the difference between the teacher Socrates and his pupil Plato with respect to the historical conditions necessary for the production of ethical and otherwise instrumental involvements which in their turn are necessary to lead the examined life in the context of a city or totality of life involvements. Socrates in the early books of the Republic outlines the process of the emergence of the principle of specialisation critical to the final account of justice. The emerging of the simple community in the course of Socrates’ account is on the foundation of the condition that everyone in the community works with the craft or work-activity which best suits their ability and refrains from any activity which interferes with the activity of others engaging in their respective specialisations. Socrates describes this as his healthy city and is clearly reluctant to go on to describe justice in what he calls the “fevered” city which requires a military and philosophical presence to ensure the provision of conditions to lead the examined life. Plato in depicting Socrates in the early books of the Republic in this manner is clearly respecting the integrity of his teacher and yet two things from the earlier dialogues are clearly missing from this account: firstly, the presence of Socrates famous “voice of conscience” operating in the individual soul and secondly, the presence of rulers passing just laws to regulate irrational activities in the city. In the “healthy city” of Socrates, one’s conscience would be the principle or the law which ensured for example that one would keep one’s promises or not steal the pears from our neighbors’ pear tree. We would not do what we ought not to do because of our practical principle based knowledge. The laws would regulate the activities of those agents who did not know what was wrong and what was right.

How would Socrates describe the situation in which there was no corrective voice telling us that for example we ought not to murder the neighbour that has wronged us? Socrates’ favoured image is an image of someone thinking about doing or not doing something, a thinking which is, to use Aristotelian language, not actualized. What we have here is an image of living in a divided house which cannot easily house contradictory values. It would be, to take an extreme case, like living together in the same house as a murderer which in Socrates’ view would be sufficient punishment for him to say that irrespective of what the law and its punishment system says about this phenomenon, that one should never respond to evil with evil. One would have to live with a value that one did not respect. In this connection we find the otherwise reticent Socrates giving the moral advice, “Resist not evil”. This is obviously a recommendation on the individual level to abandon the commonly accepted lex talionis principle which in itself has two different inconsistent formulations. In the first formulation one claims an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and here we can easily see how such a principle can escalate to a murder for a murder. Socrates is clearly against this formulation or definition. The second formulation would insist that a just punishment must be proportionate to the crime committed and there might be a sense in which Socrates might accept this when one considers his remark that we should in our lives get what we deserve. It is, however, doubtful whether Socrates would have, in the name of the advice “resist not evil”, agree that a state had the right to murder a murderer, much less murder someone for doing philosophy in the marketplace. In spite of this fact we see Socrates prepared to accept his fate at the hands of the laws of Athens. Given the facts that Athens had provided the legal framework for his birth, upbringing and education it would not be giving Athens what it deserved if Socrates had conspired to escape the sentence of death. Had he escaped he would have continued to live in a divided house and this would in his view have been to refute the Delphic prophecy that he was the wisest man in Athens: Living with himself in such a divided state of value would be a refutation of the oracle’s challenge to each man to “know thyself”. This reminds one of a prophecy from the Bible hundreds of years after the death of Socrates, namely that the truth will set one free. It is sometimes claimed that the ancient Greeks did not realize the importance of the idea of freedom in their philosophizing and their discussions of justice. It certainly is true that the idea of freedom is seldom mentioned in Socratic discussions but insofar as the idea of “choice” is definitely referred to many times in Aristotelian discussions this seems to be a questionable judgment in relation to Aristotle’s discussions of justice. It is even questionable in relation to Socratic discussions of ethics and justice. It would seem to be more accurate to claim that the idea of freedom was not thematized but was operational in Socratic discussions of justice and ethics. In this context it would be appropriate to say that one is free to choose what one ought to do and also to choose one what ought not to do by choosing to live the examined life. This picture is somewhat clouded by the biographical information that we have of Socrates seeking assistance from his daimon when it came to making difficult decisions. Here we have an image of a man submitting to the power of the Demiurge to lead him in the right direction. He would not have needed this voice to advise him what to do in the case of murder where it is doubtful whether the thought of murdering Thrasymachus would have even occurred to him but he certainly seemed to need the help of the demiurge in the decision of what to do in relation to his indictment. We as moderns celebrate our freedom from the demiurge but struggle for example to correctly characterise the state of mind of mass murderers like Hitler, Eichman and the Nazis, and Stalin and his henchmen.

The philosopher we usually immediately think of in relation to the search for essence specifying definitions is, of course, Aristotle but a cursory examination of the method of elenchus should also lead our thoughts to Socrates. There are always moments of the method which can be characterised as the search for the nature of something. It is almost as if the moral of the method of elenchus is the normative imperative: “Ask of everything what it is in its nature.”. Socrates’ interlocutor is asked to give a general definition which inevitably fails to specify the essence of the matter that is being discussed, whether it be piety or poetic inspiration or courage or justice. Socrates points out a contradiction: sometimes it is something which follows from the negation of an assumption that Socrates’ interlocutor is making. There is much in this method that reminds us of Aristotles general search for essence specifying definitions and it is a relatively easy matter to pick out the differences between the first generation Philosopher Socrates and his third generation critic, Aristotle but the difference is not in our opinion sufficient to deny a thread of continuity that connects these two philosophers. If this thread is as thick as we believe it is then this should in its turn suffice to establish with more clarity the contours of the figure of the Historical Socrates.

April 15, 2018June 5, 2019

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY COURSE: The Pre-Socratics, part two Heidegger and Fink

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Introduction to Philosophy: The Pre-Socratics Part Two

Fragments at an archeological excavation are attended to by being placed in the midst of a circle of instruments and encircled by a group of concerned viewers.
Such has not been the case with the fragments of ancient texts from the Early Greek Philosophers which are often found embedded in other authors texts hundreds of years after their production. Martin Heidegger’s “Early Greek Thinking” gives one the impression that the 4 fragments he discusses is examined by a certain kind of philosophy using certain kinds of instruments designed to force this kind of fragment to give up its meaning to concerned interpreters. Heidegger in Delphic Oracle fashion points out that the process of translating a fragment requires a certain amount of self-translation before the meaning of the fragment is revealed. We moderns, it is claimed, think in terms of having the right attitude toward whatever object we confront or are confronted with, and this does not seem to Heidegger to capture the spirit of the meaning of the fragments which seem to have orbited in a different universe of discourse to ours: one in which one has sought to talk about an all-inclusive reality or being which is the source of all existence and thought about existence.
For Heidegger, we moderns appear to have forgotten something or at the very least appeared to have been transformed into beings for whom our very being is an issue. Only religious thinking appears to have retained this sense of man having fallen from a greater understanding and this not via texts composed of argument and evidence but rather via texts composed of myths, legends, and prophecies. On this view, we once lived in a paradise and engaged in actions which compromised our being in that world and that in turn set us in search of a lost and promised land, set us off on a journey along a road we are still wandering today.
The oldest of the fragments that Heidegger discusses is a fragment of
Anaximander which reads:

“But where beings have their origins, there also their passing away occurs: for they pay recompense and penalty to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of time.”

Readers of the Republic will surely detect an echo of the ancient prophecy Socrates referred to, namely that everything which comes into existence is fated or destined for ruin and destruction. A prophecy which appears to reflect upon the ultimate beginning and end of all things.
An understanding of Language is, of course, an important key for translating the words the Greeks used for Being or reality. But the problem with this requirement is that the Greeks used a language which inhered in a mind, context or landscape of thought which are largely lost to us. Aristotle was one of the key bearers of this tradition of thought and therefore a standard by which to measure the fragments of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. Heidegger questions this traditional assumption, however, on the grounds that Aristotle takes the essence of substance, being or reality for granted in his system of categories.
Aristotle assumes, that is, that the continuum of reality is divided or categorized in the way depicted by his system of categories. Aristotle, Heidegger claims, looks at being through the lens of the proposition which fixes upon what is present and seen as an end in itself rather than as a process of unconcealment: a process in which being presences and thinking originates because thinking in accordance with the process of unconcealment is the thinking of Being. When thinking is not in accordance with this process of unconcealment there is a falling away from reality, as is the case in our modern thinking, according to Heidegger. This is nothing less than a tragedy, a tragedy with far-reaching consequences. Perhaps this tragedy was already foreseen in the fragment of Anaximander cited above. This also cannot but remind the Theologian and Christian of the falling away from the Grace of God and simultaneously give us pause for thought, considering that the theoretical characterization of “the fall” is usually regarded as a product of myth.
Heidegger’s view is that this falling away is a tragedy and who can but mourn the passing away of a value that one does not fully understand. In the fragment of Anaximander there appears to be a vision of a state of disorder prevailing when beings come into existence, and a restoration of order when they pass away.
This appears a reversal of everyday attitudes toward the passing away of valued existences. Fallen man apparently dwells imperfectly in a realm of objectless anxiety—anxious about his own and everyone’s death: events of which he cannot have a complete conception. This is part of the mystery of the prophecy of the oracle that everything which has come into being shall pass away and be transformed into the stuff of the universe from which it arose. Heidegger has an image in relation to Anaximander of someone journeying on a woodpath in the middle of a wood and the path suddenly comes to an abrupt end. What disorder! we exclaim and for Anaximander, this may not be man’s justice but it is cosmic justice. Cosmic justice appears then to be an almost divine matter/energy regulation principle searching for cosmic equilibrium: a principle for which the death of man is a part of the chain of necessity, whether or not man knows himself in accordance with the more anthropomorphic challenge of the prophecy of the oracle.

Heidegger also discusses a number of fragments from Heraclitus’ literary remains but the one which is in accord with the anthropological prophecy is the fragment which Diels translates as :
Eugen Fink discuss the fragment above in relation to fragment 64 which Diels
translates as :
“Lightning steers the universe”
which on the face of it appears as a cosmic prophecy. Heidegger and Fink attempt in their discussion to combine these notions with a number of other ideas such as Logos but initially, they seek a cosmological description/explanation which attempts to provide us with a Heraclitean holistic understanding of being. Lightning is, of course, not to be identified with an event of lightning in the universe but rather it manifests the light of the universe by virtue of which all things appear. Steering is again not an activity in the universe like the steering of a ship but is rather connected to lightning illuminating the outline and surfaces of things and a holistic “logical”(Logos) connection to thought is also indicated. Thought enlightens and steers through wisdom and rationality—an effortless steering very different to the hard work of the helmsman who is steering a vessel over the waves into the wind in order not to founder on the rocks. It is uncertain whether these fragments would suffice to build a theory of meaning but Snell translates fragment B50 as follows:
“When you have listened not to me but to the meaning, it is wise within the same meaning to say “One is All””.

Heidegger goes on to ask in chapter 2 of “Early Greek Thinking” whether there is an origin of meaning or reason as Logos. In this context he discusses the Greek “legen” which he claims means “bringing together” and “saying and talking”. This latter leads on to an interpretation of the Greek term “lesen” which adds to the above meanings the meaning of laying or putting things together and this cannot fail to arouse images of the classroom in which the teacher gathers things together in order to lay them before the pupil. One might also wish to insist that lessons are events in the world in which saying and talking articulate the essence of what is being talked about or said.
Heidegger is in these texts exploring the very origin of words and the origin of the term Aletheia emerges very early and is interpreted as meaning “to bring into unconcealment”. The pupil hears the lesson when he understands the meaning of the sounds that are being articulated and he tarries or dwells or belongs in the realm of Being that is being talked about. This hearing is determined by Logos. Heraclitus, Heidegger argues is claiming that Logos and proper hearing are the same for us mortals and this hearing is simultaneously Legen. Logos non-instrumentally belongs to a realm of discourse which includes Aletheia and the idea of oneness implied by both these terms. These latter two terms and Logos appear to me to be more philosophically significant than the “binding together” of legein which is susceptible to an instrumental interpretation. The oneness being talked about appears to be “logical”—that which unites opposites and reveals simultaneously. This logical characterization
seems to be very appropriately described in the fragment of Heraclitus which refers to “The road up and the road down are the same”. The road is the One that reveals its different aspects of being traversable in opposite directions. “Legen” as saying and talking needs to be linked in some way to the matter of what is being talked about or said or named, e.g. the road.
This is part of Heidegger’s journey back to the origin of Thought, Language, and Western Thinking and his position is that the thinking of the Being of beings is unique to the Western world. Words here appear to be like the lightning: they steer, illuminate and reveal Being. According to Heidegger “The Fall” away from the understanding of Being occurred sometime after the establishment of this origin. In the course of this transition, language and the lightning of being shifted in its function from expressing oneness and the All, to the instrumental expression where something expresses something else. The arena for all cosmological and anthropomorphic thinking became the arena for the thinker to use language instrumentally to express thought.
During the Pre-Socratic era, the thought of Heraclitus was eclipsed very quickly by the thought of Parmenides and as we all know Parmenides was Plato’s choice of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Socrates, his pupil, was perhaps closer to Anaximander and Heraclitus. He began his life as a philosopher by investigating cosmological issues and in the beginning, he was probably more inspired by the prophecy that all created things are doomed to destruction and ruin, doomed to return to the stuff from which they emerged. As news of Socrates’ wisdom spread even to the oracle at Delphi it seems that a shift was occurring toward the oracular challenge or prophecy to “know thyself”, perhaps as a response to understanding the cosmological and anthropomorphic implications of the judgment “All men are mortal”. In this seismic shift from the cosmological to the anthropomorphic, one detects a shift from thinking about the Being of beings to thinking about the relation of thinking to Being.
Heidegger in chapter 3 of “Early Greek Thinking” discusses exactly this issue in relation to fragment 8 of Parmenides in which it is startlingly claimed that Thinking and Being are the same. For us modern mortals this takes us back to Shields’ claim in part one of this chapter, namely that it is possible to think nothing. If it is really possible to think nothing, one of the primary premises of the Parmenidean argument is overturned. Parmenides was adamant that one cannot think nothing: that without the something that one is thinking about, there can be no thinking. In modern analytical language thought and its object is logically related. Heidegger’s treatment of this issue is consistent with his earlier work. He rehearses the position that separates the elements of the whole—the thought and the object(that which one is thinking about). We have the thought of the cat present at hand and the thought of the cat lounging on the living room mat also present at hand(presented theoretically). In the spirit of this reflection Heidegger
writes:
“Seafaring, temple building, conversation at social gatherings, every kind of human activity belongs among beings and is therefore identical with Being”(Early Greek Thinking p80).
This, Heidegger argues, cannot be what Parmenides means. Objects present at hand are part of the whole and at best can only symbolize the One and the All, e.g. through the activity of philosophy, religion, and poetry. Thought in such a context loses its universal steering character when reduced to beings present at hand. The relation “representation” is then called upon to resolve the problem of the relation between the divided elements thought and its object.
Epistemology is then, in turn, called upon to transform what was essentially a metaphysical and logical investigation of reality into a pursuit to know objects present at hand. “Being is being represented”(EGT p82). Thus is born the idealism of modern philosophy which culminated in the Philosophy of Hegel, a philosophy that was determined to stand the philosophy of Kant on it’s head. For Hegel, it appeared that the road up could be represented as the road down in the stream of thought which had curiously become somehow identical with the Being of beings that were being thought about. Kant, following Aristotle, rejected this Platonic consequence of “a thinker in relation to his thought” that in its turn was in some relation to some part of reality. The idea of thinker thought and object that in itself is a condensation of the relation between things present at hand dominated what Heidegger called the process of presencing in which Being and beings is revealed. Logos, as we saw is related to the hearing of the pupil. Heidegger interprets Parmenides’ opening statement that Thinking and Being are the same in terms of them belonging together but probably not in terms of the modern theory of logical identity which links two terms in virtue of the fact that the predicates of A must be identical with the predicates of B for A to be the same as B: but is this the same meaning of “same” as we find in Parmenides? Logos is also concerned with the saying of Being. It is not just concerned with the object, with what is said. Saying here is concerned with bringing something into view, as lightning does when it illuminates or reveals.
Saying is also concerned therefore with aletheia. Parmenides claims that “Aletheia is a goddess” disclosing all in a natural light. Moira, on the other hand, is the destiny and governing principle of the presencing of All. Both aletheia and Moira are involved in the so-called “appropriating event” where thought is the thought of the Being of beings.
Time is never far from the thoughts of Heidegger given the title of his first major work “Being and Time”. In experience, time is the great discloser of the meaning of events. Fragment 114 is translated by Diels in the following way:
“If one wants to talk with understanding, one must strengthen oneself with what is common to all,like a city with the law, and even more strongly.”
Fragment 100 complements this thought with reference to the clock of the world, the sun, or Helos. We should not, it is argued, think of helos as a measuring instrument of the time of the world but rather that which makes the seasons possible and which brings everything into being. The “fallen” form of thinking presents time as a line and as a bare succession which somehow manages to abstract the content of time from the sequence. Such abstraction of time is impossible with the seasons which are defined by their content and not by their succession one upon the other. Time is the bringer of things:
“We have seen that the hours and times are not to be taken as a stream of time or as a temporal relation that, subjected to metric leveling down, is measurable and calculable”.

“Helos and times are not to be taken as the empty form in contrast to the content of time, but as filled time which begets and produces each thing in its own time—but rather the times of the day and the seasons. Helos brings forth growth”(EGT)

“A time of” and “a time for” reflect descriptive time and
explanatory/justificatory time. “For” differs from “of” in containing a suggestion of an explanation for, or a justification of the time content. A “time to” on the other hand seems definitively more anthropological and action-oriented and related to the way in which Moira , the goddess of fate and meaning who steers the lightning that reveals what conceals in the darkness of a clearing and uses cosmological and anthropological scales to dispense justice to the satisfaction of Dike, the Erinyes and the guardians at the boundaries of the north, south, east and west. The expressions we find in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible are in this anthropological spirit: in particular the expression that

“There is a time for every purpose under heaven”.

This is clearly related to the Delphic oracles prophecy or challenge to “Know thyself” in response to the forlorn cries of humans from the wilderness of their existence: cries of “What shall we do?” which are calmly and stoically answered by the words of Ecclesiastes. What follows from this prophecy is a picture of existence in which anthropomorphic choices reveal the importance of freedom for the being for whom his being is in question. For the Heidegger who wrote, “Being and Time” human beings dwell in the realm of what he calls the “ready-to-hand” where each instrument and action is embedded in a whole, in a context of involvements which is practically complete: a context of meaning. The teacher teaching in her classroom, the builder building a house, the husband making love to his wife are all activities for the transmission of what Aristotle calls “forms”(or principles). These forms or principles are world-forming and fall under the prophecy or challenge of “Know thyself”. It should be pointed out, however, that this challenge is not a challenge to know myself as an individual but rather a challenge to know my place as a human being in the above context of involvements. It is a challenge to know the forms or principles that drive the world forming process. It is a challenge to understand the world forming moods or attitudes of Ecclesiastes when it is claimed, for example, that there is a time to rejoice(cf the Kantian boundless outlook onto the world) and a time to mourn(cf the Kantian melancholic haphazardness of everyday life).
Emerging from these reflections on the fall of man, the telos of man over the two thousand years since the Pre-Socratics, is a picture of the being for whom his being is in question. What emerges is a portrait revealed by Aristotle, Kant, Freud, Heidegger, and possibly Wittgenstein amongst others. A portrait that is revealed in a dark clearing by a flash of lightning. A portrait that appears to be awaiting a figure like Diogenes to pass by with a steadily burning lantern or awaiting a Platonic sun to rise and gather everything into being and mark out the boundaries of a time-space in the eastern morning, the western evening, the northern bear and the southern boundary stone laid by Zeus. The Platonic sun is a time allotting time according to Heidegger and creates the dimensions of time of having been, being now and coming to be which in turn structures our cosmic understanding of the darkness and lightning and the Ecclesiastical anthropomorphic time for every purpose under heaven. A heaven arching over Dike, the Erinyes, Moira and the guardians in waiting.
Returning to the modern world, Heidegger and Fink together ask the world exploring the question “Where is the time that is being referred to when someone says the time is 12 o clock”. With this question “where?” we seem to find ourselves at the boundaries of what can be said of time perhaps partly because it is being said in time. The question stands unanswered and we wait for an answer to descend upon us from the realm of meaning created by Helos, the Platonic sun.

April 1, 2018June 11, 2018

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 10 and 11 Machiavelli

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Machiavelli followed in the footsteps of Thrasymachus who was perhaps the first recorded Political realist to actually claim that when the stronger rule a city-state in their interest, such a political state is a just state. Plato immediately constructs a city of Logos, an ideal city, as an antidote to what both he and Socrates regarded as the poisonous argument that refers to the fact that in almost all of the regimes of the time the rule of the stronger was the status quo, implying that what is the case ought to be the case. Yet history has shown that only Aristotle and later Kant had the theoretical resources to undermine this argument with complex positions constituted of an understanding of the conceptual nature of ought, i.e. they realized that concepts are related to the possibilities of phenomena and therefore have a more complex relation to what is the case than either Thrasymachus or Machiavelli realized.

Machiavelli is a complex character, represented in the popular mind as the devil but perhaps represented in his own mind as an unarmed political philosopher and prophet, conjuring up in his imagination the times to come in Italy. He would not have qualified as an Aristotelian great-souled man partly because of his poverty and financial dependence upon others. He aspired to higher things every evening when he would dress in special clothes to read about ancient courts and statesmen, imagining himself discoursing with them about their times and the times to come.

Smith has this to say by way of introduction to his major work:

“The Prince is a deceptive book–especially from a man whose name has become synonymous with deception. We might think we already know what he knows. This is false. Machiavelli claims to have discovered new modes and a new order of things, a new world which will require the displacement of the one he writes in. The dominant form of organisation had been the Christian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, that succession to the older Roman Empire. Both of these Empires aspired to a kind of universality which was given good expression in Dante’s De Monarchia, a work about monarchy that sets out a model of a Universal Christian rule under a Christian ruler. Machiavelli rejected this and harked back to the model of a small autonomous republican state. Hr challenges his readers to go the effectual truth of things and claims that many before him have imagined Republics that are far from the truth. “He who thinks what should be instead of what is, learns his ruin rather than his preservation” Not for him any Platonic cities of speech or Augustinian cities of God. Here we have the essence of his political realism–in his appeal from the ought to the is.”

Machiavelli argues that the Republic requires a Prince who will dare to create their own authority. The Prince will be a prophet and a man of war. He will be “an armed prophet” Smith continues:

“It was the armed prophets that prospered and the unarmed prophets that were ruined. Politics, on this view, grows out the barrel of a gun.”

Both Thrasymachus and Machiavelli use consequentialist arguments for the justification of force in the state reminding us of the demand Glaucon made upon Socrates in the Republic to prove that justice was both a good in itself and something good in its consequences. Earlier in the dialogue, Socrates had dismissed an argument from Polemachus to the effect that Justice is doing good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies. Harming one’s enemies Socrates argued would have the consequences of making a bad man worse, thus dismissing violence as just action in any circumstances. Socrates also produced arguments in other dialogues in relation to the internal consequences of perhaps harming or even murdering an enemy: one would be forced to live oneself and might not be able to do so.

Machiavelli notwithstanding the arguments above is clearly a consequentialist:

“Children are brought up to believe that one should not do wrong even if good consequences follow. But virtue in its Latin root means manly self-assertion and in a man’s world calculated acts of cruelty achieves one’s end.”(Smith)

The end of a strong rule even if it requires violence, justifies the means. The Prince will be seeking to go to war because war brings with it prosperity. Machiavelli refers to Cesare Borgia and the ruthless execution of his cruel lieutenant to gratify and confuse the hoi polloi. The Prince will get his hands dirty and Machiavelli’s book is a deliberate attempt to teach the Prince not to be good:

“The Prince should cultivate the appearance of being religious, of being merciful, of being faithful and honest. The appearance of Religion is good whilst its practice is harmful.” (Smith)

Machiavelli says little about the ethical content of Religion which in itself had produced at least one decisive argument against consequentialism. Aquinas argued that Consequences rarely occur in isolation: consequences have consequences and it is perfectly conceivable that one consequence in the chain is good and the next evil. This would make the act behind the consequences both good and evil. This double effect, as Aquinas pointed out, is contradictory. An example of such an argument in the political context might be that of a Prince
attempting to kill the Nobles of a Principality and survivors return to depose the Prince.

The Prince, Machiavelli, argues shall pay more heed to the people of the Republic than the Nobles whom he shall murder if they stand in his way. But heeding the people does not mean that one is the tool of their expression, rather it means that one should manipulate and deceive them too in order to keep their faith. This is an ambivalent message considering the fact that the people will obviously be less likely to trust Princes after reading Machiavelli’s work. This could be another example of double effect theory. Indeed Kenny in his New History of Western Philosophy refers to how a Prince should utterly destroy any city in which the populace had been accustomed for a long period to living freely in order to counteract memories of living freely with the terror of terrible consequences. Without the understanding of such possible consequences, the Prince would be merely inviting rebellion and revolution.

Smith ends lecture 11 by asking:

“What did Machiavelli achieve?Did he found his new world, his new political continent? He preached that one must use religion and not be used by it and men have to learn how to use their passions. Politics, he argued, must be worldly and autonomous and not guided by any transcendental moral code. He introduced a new kind of populism, he was a proto-democrat who sought to create a new kind of Republic. When he imagines this new kind of Republic he imagines a city at war, armed with expansive ambitions–feeding on conquest–an imperialistic republic–the USA? Has the USA become Machiavelli’s republic?”

This is a surprizing claim but there is one thread of argument which might support such a position. American pragmatism and instrumentalism do appear to support consequentialism in the ethical and political spheres of philosophical discourse. Another thread, perhaps connected to the first relates to the GERM(Global Educational Reform Movement) which interestingly in the name of freedom as a reaction to authoritarian teaching allows young children to explore the domain of knowledge unfettered by the conceptual understanding their teachers may bring to the process in order to school their students understanding. The consequences of this kind of teaching were apparently unacceptable because all the parts of the mind should be free from the reign of the other parts. The understanding limited the operation of the imagination and emotions and this was somehow an unnatural unwanted consequence. Progressive education was consequentialist through and through attempting to speculate on the internal consequences of a traditional Machiavellian educational system. We in Europe have experienced the consequences of this consequentialist educational system and they have not been good.

Machiavelli’s thought might have played a part in the growing criticism of the universal intentions of Religion which conceived of the world as united in one city of God or Holy Roman Empire. As we know the wars in the 1600’s played a significant role in the Treaty of Westphalia which sought a guarantee for the nation-state’s sovereignty from such universalist intentions. Religious universalism was merely an antithetical response on one level to the military universalism of the kind begun by Alexander the Great and continued by the Romans. But the question is whether an abandonment of the idea of a united world is not fundamentally a result of the consequentialist arguments that have been skeptically undermining the cosmopolitan intentions of ethics and political Philosophy that people intuitively embrace on the grounds that a world divided against itself will always produce war. Did the consequences of Westphalia take three hundred years to play themselves out, in the two world wars of the last century the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations and a cold war which almost ended in nuclear disaster? Did the treaty of Westphalia unleash a wave of consequences which we almost failed to control? The Philosophy of Kant was both non-consequentialist and cosmopolitanism, identifying war as the natural and inevitable consequence of a world that cannot live under a common commitment to law and human rights. According to Kant, if humanity does not destroy itself it will continue on its hundred thousand year-long journey to the promised cosmopolitan world in which human rights and the law would be more important than power and deception. The Kantian argument then demands that we register with approval everything that takes us further along the road of progress. We may not have any great-souled cities or nations but perhaps a prior condition to these cities or nations existing is the building of an international educational system with cosmopolitan intentions. Plato once thought that we are destined for ruin and destruction unless philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers. Aristotle thought that the virtues must be embodied in a large middle class for a city to prosper and education was, of course, one of the instrumental means to achieve such a city-state. Certainly a reflective and critical knowledge of ourselves, ethical Philosophy and Political Philosophy would inevitably have to be a part of that education but unti it is we may have to satisfy ourselves with mass-demonstrations aagainstwars and weapons of mass desruction.

March 19, 2018June 11, 2018

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 two, three and part of four.

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Professor Smith claims that the best introductory text to the study of Political Philosophy is Plato’s Apology. His introduction to this lecture is:

“Socrates is the founder of Political Philosophy because he engages in justifications of the good life as well as illustrating the vulnerability of the political philosopher in the state. When he is tried for impiety and the corruption of the youth of Athens–philosophy is put on trial. The work suggests a necessary and inevitable conflict between the freedom of the inquiring mind and the requirements of political life. Socrates is a central historical symbol for political resistance to political power. Some people try to defend Socrates on the grounds of freedom of speech but it is important to know that this is not the grounds on which he defended himself. He is rather defending the examined life, which for him alone is worth living. His quest is a quest for self-perfection, not an argument for free speech. He is quarreling with his accusers over who has the right to educate the citizen. This is a dialogue about education.”

We know there were probably many reasons why Socrates was convicted by a 500 man jury. Many were worried about the implications of Socratic “education” for religion and its power of uniting the relatively large community of Athens(ca 200,000 people). The poets like Aristophanes were concerned that Philosophy would replace Poetry as the mediator between religion and the people. The poets also promoted an image of the hero as a warrior inspired by the gods. Socrates was propagating the image of a new kind of hero and a new kind of life: a hero which uses the verbal weapon of elenchus and a form of life which is devoted to questioning everything including the status quo of the fragile democracy of Athens. Socrates was even questioning the Delphic oracles implied claim that he was the wisest man in Athens. Professor Smith also refers to a probable political bias of the jury. The war with Sparta had been lost in 404 BC and the thirty tyrants backed by Sparta began ruling. Amongst the tyrants were associates and pupils of Socrates, the most infamous of which was Alcibiades, the man responsible for the disastrous Sicilian expedition and the man who was later to defect to Sparta. Plato’s Symposium testifies to the close relation between Socrates and Alcibiades.

In lecture three Professor Smith points out a number of paradoxes generated by the case study of Socrates. The examined life, he argues appears to encourage citizens to examine the state of their own soul rather than the institutions and laws of the society. Are these activities compatible? The paradox seems inevitably to lead to tension, especially if one is, as Socrates was, placed in a position of civic responsibility and ordered to assist in the arrest of the Athenian generals who had left bodies of dead Athenian warriors in the sea. Socrates refused on the grounds that the circumstances were not conducive to the carrying out of this responsibility and in an act of civic defiance he refused the order from the 30 tyrants. This was obviously a result of a private examination of his own soul’s integrity. Socrates here appears to be asserting his individual rights in acts of civil disobedience. Professor Smith also points correctly to the Crito dialogue and the Socratic arguments there in favour of obeying the law and refusing invitations to escape an unjust verdict in a system that should know better. Smith suggests that there is a seeming contradiction in this position:

“What we are witnessing here is the clash of two irreconcilable moral codes. His reason frees him from the dangerous influence of the state. But his political life as a citizen requires that he respect the laws and the deepest beliefs and institutions of the society. Why does Socrates choose to stay and drink the hemlock. Why not escape to Crete?”

Professor Smith leaves this question hanging in the air but he was more careful than commentators normally are in his reporting of the Delphic oracle’s utterance in a consultation over who the wisest man in Athens was. He points out that the oracle answered the question with a question,namely, “Is there any man wiser than Socrates?”, practically inviting an investigation into the matter, especially given the Delphic imperative to “know thyself”. Another dialogue the Phaedo might provide more information relating to the putative contradiction Smith referred to above. Could the endgame of dying with dignity have been on Socrates’ mind in the conversation with Crito. Socrates had spent some time consulting his inner “sign” over this matter. socrates had showed us how to live. Was it now time to show us how to die?

The Socratic sign within suggests that we move forward to the role of the moral law within and Kant’s emphasis upon the goodwill of the individual. From this perspective, there is certainly no paradox or contradiction. The society is not yet ready to provide the conditions necessary for justice to reign universally, This Kant can clearly see. Even though one might wish to argue that it ought to be able to administer itself justly. This would seem to imply that acts of civil disobedience directed at the law and the deepest beliefs of the society should be avoided, the possible exception being a state of affairs in which the laws make leading an examined Socratic life difficult or impossible. Aristotle would also consent to the exception. He felt that states should not interfere with peoples choices: objecting to the Republic and its forcing Philosophers to force the citizens to lead a life in accordance with the idea of the common good.

Lecture 4 turns to a consideration of Plato’s dialogue without consideration of the question of the “problem of Socrates”, i.e. the problem of how we are to distinguish the historical Socrates from the literary figure which Plato sometimes uses to convey his post-Socratic theories. Professor Smith claims that:

“Every work of political philosophy is a response in one way or another to Plato’s Republic. It is important to approach this work with the right questions given that this Republic is ruled by Philosopher-kings. What is the Republic about? Justice? Moral Psychology? The right ordering of the human soul? The power of poetry and myth to shape souls and societies? Metaphysics? Education? It is about all of these things.”

Again there is an ancient oracular prophecy operating in the background of the consciousness of Plato the former poet, namely that cities will see no end to destruction and ruin until philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers.

Smith refers in this lecture to Popper’s work “The Open Society and its enemies” and the extraordinary claim that Plato was a fascist. He points out in defense of Popper that in Plato we do not find a separation of powers. The governmental structures are not separated from the civil powers of the judiciary, for example. But Smith defends Plato in an interesting discussion of Plato’s Academy and the fact that it was the model for the first University system:

“We are all heirs of Plato. The institutional and educational requirements of Plato’s Academy share many characteristics of universities today. In Plato’s Callipolis and in Yale today, men and women are selected at a relatively early age because of their capacities for leadership, courage, self-discipline, and responsibility. They leave their parents and sleep together, exercise together, study together. the best go on to further study. If Plato is a fascist then so are we.”

A passionate defense of the spirited examined life. Smith perhaps omits to mention the really academic heritage of the Academy which is related to what these students actually do in their lecture halls. They listen to lectures containing elenchus and various forms of argument. They acquire knowledge of the past for use in the present and future. They are exposed to metaphors and allegories and myths and the major thoughts of thinkers of the past about their present and their futures. They learn to exercise their critical powers and judgment about almost everything under the Platonic sun including Plato’s Republic.

February 27, 2018September 29, 2019

Volume 4 of Educational Journal: “The World Explored, the World Suffered”:Philosophical Psychology, Aristotle and the “Problem of Socrates”

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February 8, 2018June 11, 2018

The First Centrepiece lecture on Philosophical Psychology and its role in the Philosophy of Education: from the work, “The World Explored, the World Suffered:The Exeter lectures”

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The seminar room was packed. Robert and Sophia sat in the front row with their notebooks at the ready. Glynn and Jude sat at the rear. Harry drew a deep breath and exhaled before beginning:
“Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the first seminar in the series of the elective “Psychology and Education”. There will be 3 lectures in total.
The title of this course, requires an introduction because it is not obvious what “Psychology” actually is, i.e. it is not obvious what the term means. What is clear, is that many of the thoughts I will be talking about have their origin in other universes of discourse. That said, let’s begin at the beginning and note firstly, that the word “Psuche” in Greek is the etymological root of “Psyche”, which does not exclusively mean “mind” as some commentators have stipulated. The Greek expression has a broader meaning which is going to be important in characterizing the central question or questions the subject is concerned with. Psuche means life. You may wonder, ladies and gentlemen what is meant by life, i.e. what the Greeks were thinking about when they used the expression. The Greek classical narrator, Homer, apparently used the expression to refer to what was lacking in bodies strewn lifelessly on a battlefield. This has been misinterpreted over the ages in two directions. Firstly certain very concrete interpreters thought that it meant “breath”: the dead soldiers were no longer breathing. This was obviously in a sense incorrect, yet life surely cannot be the name of a simple biological phenomenon involving an exchange of gases necessary for activity: surely it must in some sense refer to the activity of living itself in a broader sense. Secondly, some more abstract interpreters thought that “psuche” must refer to some spiritual substance that was no longer present in the bodies of the soldiers, namely, their souls. These interpreters were of course armed with a particular theory about reality as a whole which divides it into two entities, a physical entity like the body which breathes, senses, and moves, and a mental entity which in some curious fashion is able to have experiences even when separated from a physical body. One needs to be in some sense conscious if experience is to be possible, it was argued, and thus was born the idea that Psuche meant something like “consciousness”.
In this respect “Anthropology” would have been a more apt name for the subject matter of Psychology. The term, Psuche, interpreted as “Life” or “Consciousness”, appears to be unable to convey the whole of what we are studying, namely, the human being living a human life. “Anthropos” in Greek means “human” and “Logos” means “study” or “systematic investigation”. If we move forward ca 2000 years, a tradition of studying man in a holistic spirit as man-in-society grew up in the German academic literature culminating in a work entitled “Anthropology” by Immanuel Kant. Kant’s work, followed one of the major currents of the stream of Enlightenment thought, and not only studied the human in his human Aristotelian context—his society— but also studied the human being as the proper holistic object of study in the light of the humanistic conviction that the subject of God cannot be studied other than as an idea in man’s mind. God as a theoretical idea had, on Kant’s account, become a hypothetical projection of man’s thinking processes and reasoning. And on this latter issue of man’s thinking processes, and the investigation of the human being, here is a quote, in illustration, from Kant’s preface to the work in question:
“All cultural progress, by which the human being advances his education, has the goal of applying this acquired knowledge and skill for the worlds use. but the most important object in the world to which he can apply them is the human being: because the human being is his own final end…..A doctrine of knowledge of the human being, systematically formulated(anthropology), can exist either in a physiological or in a pragmatic point of view.—Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being: pragmatic knowledge is the investigation of what he as a free acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself.”
During the Middle Ages and even during the Enlightenment, the idea of the Homeric/Platonic soul as capable of surviving to have experiences after the death of its host body had miraculously disentangled itself from the Aristotelian arguments proving such a conception to be impossible. But another current of the stream of Enlightenment thought, namely science, was operating beneath the surface of academic events and although the assumptions which enabled science to achieve its successes were primarily Aristotelian, it had distanced itself from Aristotle’s metaphysics in general which regarded matter and the material world as infinite and his conceptions of formal and final cause in particular. For Science, the universe could be divided up and reduced to either its material components, whatever they turned out to be, or it could be divided up into all of the possible physical facts, some of which would include reference to the causes of facts. On this latter conception, science collects facts for the book of nature like the zoologist collects butterflies. That is to say, science measures the quantities of things which it assumes is the only way of investigating an infinite homogeneous continuum. Blue is reduced to a certain number on the nanometer scale and red is characterized in terms of another number on the scale: the qualitative difference between red and blue is subordinated to a quantitative frequency of light. These operations of dividing and quantifying which were promising great technological consequences were already, prior to the Enlightenment, serving to diminish the value of humanistic studies which, following Aristotle, were striving to understand the essence of phenomena rather than their causes. So whilst Kant was in the process of undermining the theological-metaphysical God, he was doing so in an environment that would succeed not only in undermining Aristotle’s metaphysics but also the Kantian transcendental metaphysics itself. Both of these are needed to academically understand the essence of Humanity. The non-Kantian, Cartesian idea of consciousness, for obscure reasons which remain to be investigated, prevailed as the major influence and concept requiring explanation. In 1870, some 70 years after Kant’s lectures on Anthropology were published, science launched a major attack on the city-state of Philosophy and in the ensuing battle colonized a suburb of the Humanities which it gave the name “Psychology”. There would no longer be transcendental metaphysical discussions of the human being: man was to be investigated with the empirical method of experimentation and observation: the true road to knowledge. Wundt in Germany defined this new subject as “the science of consciousness” and proceeded, in accordance with the principle of reduction, to reduce all conscious phenomena to the elements of sensation and feeling. Wundt failed, however, to conduct successful experiments demonstrating the usefulness of his definition of psychology. These experiments also failed to justify the concepts of “sensation” and “feeling” in theories about “consciousness”. Science analyzed the resultant chaos it had created and determined that the problem was that no one had ever, or ever would be able to, observe consciousness: and that what was needed was a more tangible, less metaphysical, less transcendental entity which could be observed.
Thus was born the next definition of Psychology: the science of behavior, and the school of behaviorism which was to dominate discussion for decades to come emerged at the beginning of the 1900’s. The subject matter of Anthropology and the possibility of the birth of the subject called Anthropology had been successfully blocked by these developments. These are the reasons that I could not call this course “Anthropology and Education”: no one would have understood why it was not called “Psychology”. The reason I am able to call the course “Psychology and Education” is simply that most people have a general idea of the general intentions of education as a practical activity and expect that such an activity must incorporate knowledge of how human beings learn and develop through such an activity. They believe that there must therefore be a subsidiary study of the conditions and consequences surrounding the learner’s role in this process. I certainly believe that these are two of the essential questions psychologists should be seeking to provide answers to, namely the questions of learning and development. There are, however, other broader questions which Kant’s Anthropology highlighted that as a matter of fact may be more holistically relevant than anything this so-called discipline of “Psychology” has been able to produce. This is not to deny that there have been “psychologists” if you prefer this term to “anthropologists”, whose reflections have proceeded in the spirit of Aristotle and Kant, and I will refer to these figures in the course of the lectures. Basically, Kant believed that satisfactory answers had to be given to 4 fundamental questions if one was to philosophically understand the world: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for?. What is a human being? The answers, of course, had to be logically consistent with each other. Kant comments in his work, “Anthropology”, on Descartes’ reflections concerning our mental faculty of memory. Descartes, according to Kant, speculates on the causes of the phenomenon, rather than the phenomenon itself, wandering about the traces of memory in the brain. Kant admits in this speculative process that in reflecting in this way Descartes has ceased to become the one who remembers. He has, rather, become one who observes a remembering process and all that can be observed in this respect are the cranial nerves and fibers involved:- the phenomenon of remembering has disappeared. Kant quite rightly claims as Aristotle would have, that this kind of speculation is a waste of time. And yet it is this scientific endeavor that has come to dominate our speculations about memory even today. There is a lesson for us all here: do not underestimate the power of science, for it has the power to persist in any area of investigation in spite of providing explanations of something different to that which it should be explaining.
We appear to be hypnotized by the magic of science, ladies and gentlemen. The phenomenon investigated disappears by a sleight of hand, too fast for our eyes to follow, and hey presto!, something else takes its place. Of course, we reason, this something has to be identical with the phenomenon we started off requiring an explanation for, because this is what we have been told. Magicians can also be hypnotists, ladies and gentlemen. This method of characterizing everything we experience from a third person or observationalist perspective, is a methodological demand that is especially problematic when it comes to characterizing human activity, especially in the case of the relation of my own first-person perspective to my action. If I am doing something, my attention is usually directed outwards toward what I wish to accomplish. If I want to neutrally “observe” what I am doing, that involves involuting my attention onto the action itself as if I am a third person trying to work out what is being done, i.e. the role of the observer is usually the role of the questioner who is trying to find something out. When I am reaching for a piece of fruit I am not normally in the situation of waiting to see why my arm is moving toward the fruit bowl, rather I know from the first person perspective what it is I am going to do: changing perspective in mid-action is guaranteed to destroy the intentional fabric of the action and if such a change of perspective occurs I will no longer know what I am doing. Furthermore, considerations of measuring the speed of movement of the arm or measuring anything else in this situation will be irrelevant to what I am doing. When science gets involved in psychological phenomena such as memory or action the result is usually comedy, tragedy, or magic. How should the psychologist investigate memory then? According to Kant the investigation should be from a pragmatic point of view. But what does that mean? It may mean asking what role memory plays in the life of a person. Consider the war veteran home from a traumatic term of service at the front, having witnessed the most horrific events. We can ask what role memory is going to play in this state of affairs. Were it to be just a question of leaving traces in the brain, a matter of creating protein templates, memories would just physically form and that would be the end of the matter. The templates would just be a totality of facts about the war and the subject would be a walking part of history sharing his memories at dinner parties, pubs etc. But the mind is normatively structured, ladies and gentlemen. People ought not to experience such terror. The mind is structured for the good: what is not good or evil will probably create a terror-filled mind, an unbalanced mind. The psychologist treating such a patient will not be surprised to learn that the patient does not sleep or eat, that cars backfiring in the street place him back at the war-front in a state of terror. Now such a patient may find that his lust for life has been lost and for most of the time he sits passively like an observer, waiting for things to happen to him, instead of actively living a good and flourishing life. Freud treated such patients, ladies and gentlemen, with a theory that scientists have been lining up for generations to call “unscientific”. Well, if his theory is not scientific then all I can say is “Good!”, because if it was scientific the patient might have been left observing his life go by for the rest of his time. After all, is this not the attitude the scientist wishes people to adapt to everything they experience! All I can say is that what we need is an account containing Principles of Anthropology which can explain how memories which are normally constructive of flourishing lives can play a destructive role in a life. What I am raising here is the question which Anthropology requires an answer to, namely “Why do people do what they do?” As we have seen above this question carries with it a need for an explanation as to why the traumatized war veteran cannot any longer strive for what is good in life and needs help to extricate himself from the passive attitude which leaves him terrorized. The war veteran may not of course be conscious of what is wrong with him. In talks with his psychologist he may invoke a list of symptoms: unable to sleep because of nightmares, nausea, unspecific anxiety, irrational responses to cars backfiring and loud noises, depression. He has “observed” all of these “facts” but he cannot say what is wrong with him. If he is a self-conscious being as I have claimed we all are, should he not be aware of what is wrong with him? This is the kind of question that troubles the “unscientific” psychologist like Freud to such an extent that he spent 50 years trying to find adequate explanations which will fully explain the different forms of mental illness. I am not saying that Freud was right about everything in the field of mental illness or indeed that his theories of man in society cannot be improved upon. Freud was an archeologist rather than a believer in teleology as far as man was concerned. In exploring the theoretical idea of society he takes us back to the mythical band of brothers who, in a Hobbesian state of nature, kill their father who they experience as a tyrant. As the understanding of what they have done sinks in, and the prospect that anyone assuming authority for the community possibly awaits the same fate becomes clear for all concerned—the brothers form a pact and regulating social existence by law seems the obvious response to the dilemmas and paradoxes of living in a state of nature. Such a narrative contains within it a conflict view of man’s relation to the civilization he has created. His instincts are regulated by both Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instinct, and both of these need to be regulated by forces of civilization which seemed to resemble the defense mechanism of repression. And in a famous work with a marvelous title, “Civilization and its Discontents”, Freud asks whether all the effort involved in civilization-building is worth it. He wonders whether, given the fact that we all appear to be enslaved to hedonism, and demand hedonistic satisfaction from cultural activities, a flourishing life is at all possible. Apparently at the age of 75 when most men are fully occupied with the task of staying alive he was still reflecting on the organization of civilization and predicted that from his perspective the future outcome of this organization, might be one which the individual will reject rationally. According to Freud, the psychological mechanisms we see operating in the arena of culture are repression, frustration, sublimation and rational rejection. The kind of life that was possible in such circumstances was one that submitted to the cultural equivalent of the reality principle—Ananke—The life of resigning oneself to a state of affairs one was powerless to change through rational rejection. Rejection is transformed into a smoldering acceptance as Eros, the life instinct, ebbs away and we grow older less than gracefully. There is no comfort of an ethical or religious form of life. For Freud the latter form of life was infected with defense mechanisms which manifested itself in obsessive rituals, childish wish fulfillments and anxieties. The former lifestyle according to Freud was initially going to be subjugated to an authoritarian and sometimes cruel superego (which itself is the result of a defense mechanism Freud refers to as identification) until the point at which the ego could take non-defensive control of the whole structure of the mind including the primary processes of the id. Returning to the theme of self- consciousness it appears on this account that becoming self- conscious is not something which appears out of the blue of existence one fine day, but rather requires considerable effort and work as well as perhaps a non-hedonic form of love which loves a person for themselves. I accused Freud of being more of an archeologist than a follower of the teleological view of the human spirit, but there is a latent negative teleology in the possibility of a strong ego that resigns itself to a civilization that might not be worth the effort. In this work, man is not merely a hedonist in relation to the life instinct, Eros. He is a wolf in relation to the death instinct, Thanatos. The vision of the Stoic bearing life’s miseries with a stiff upper lip looms large. The ego, Freud claims is the repository of lost objects which have been invested with value and as such the ego needs a mourning process before equilibrium once again reigns in what Freud calls the “psychical apparatus” (which includes our neuronal system) before mental life and the life instinct can resume its work and its loving. In the psychoanalytic literature there is this wonderful image of a triangle where the life instinct narcissistically and hedonistically makes its demands on reality. Reality being what it is, with its lack of concern for humanity, and being resistant to change, frustrates the demand, and the final closing of the triangle involves a wounding of desire, and of course a wounding of the ego, or in James’s language, a wounding of Romeo We are all the wounded soldiers of civilization, ladies and gentlemen. We will not find in Freud the flourishing life of Aristotle, the Kingdom of ends of Kant or the life after death of popular Christianity. We will only find a city of Romeo’s in mourning. We can, of course, wonder about the parts of the person such as the id, ego, and superego and we can wonder about the role of sexuality in the development of the individual. At the same time it should be emphasized that Freud had read Kant and he claimed that Freudian psychology is the psychology Kant would have wrote if he had concerned himself with the subject. Was this a reasonable claim, ladies and gentlemen? I think the claim is partly justified when one bears in mind that, in Kant, we find the mind of a person divided into firstly, its receptive capacity where a small number of the conceivably infinite continuum of possible sensations from the external world are actually experienced as a manifold, and secondly the mind manifests its spontaneous or productive capacity where a rule is provided to organize the manifold. The mind, that is, is divided into receptive sensibility and the active conceptual activity of the understanding, which both contribute to forming the cognitive function of the mind. Abstract concepts and concrete sense impressions combine to form our judgments that are truth claims. Apart from referring to the reality principle Freud did not discuss in any detail the conscious cognitive function of the mind but in his discussion of the affective and practical functions of the mind he did provide an important distinction between primary and secondary processes which we will refer to later in the course. One should also not forget the considerable role that the developmental psychology of Piaget played, in our attempt to understand the person and the persons relation to the society. For Piaget, there were fundamentally three stages of moral development, egocentric, transcendental and autonomous morality. Egocentric stage behavior blindly makes its demands and strives in accordance with a hedonistically or narcissistically oriented judgment system. Transcendental stage behavior refers to the judgments of authorities and the tendency to think of such authorities as externally compelling the individual to conform to external norms. Finally, autonomous stage moral behavior is individually based on an internal awareness of rules that will bring rewards to the individual. Here there is an interesting distinction between conventional morality where there is no role to criticize the rules, and autonomous morality where criticism is built into the structure of the mind. Let me conclude by returning to Kant’s anthropology and his stages of development. There is firstly a stage of development where the child is principally passive and learning what to do is primarily imitative. The second stage occurs when the child begins to experience itself as a centre of control for its own activity and a rudimentary form of egoistic self -consciousness is formed. In a third stage the child learns to abstract from the differences between authority and the individual and abstract from the differences between different individuals in order to develop a morality where everyone is equal and free to pursue their own route to a flourishing life.
Now education, ladies, and gentlemen, is concerned with the optimum development of the individual in a learning environment, and it is concerned with getting the individual to share the vision of what constitutes a flourishing life. It bears an ancient message from the gods and Philosophy: that only knowledge will be adequate to the task of developing a rational self- consciousness and a society all can flourish in. I would like to end with a reflection on Plato who is said to have begun systematic psychological reflection. For Plato, philosophical knowledge was needed to run the perfect Republic which would then in its turn form the philosophical citizen who would lead the most flourishing life the Greeks could imagine. Failure to run Plato’s Kallipolis in accordance with philosophical knowledge would result in society spiraling downward via a number of political forms containing correlating psychological character-types to the worst form of tyranny in which the tyrant will meet a tragic end and the society would end up tragically consuming itself. Here we see a fascinating suggestion that our psychological profiles will be determined by what kind of society they inhabit which in its turn will be formed by the quality of philosophical knowledge involved in the decisions and laws of the society. The whole system is teleological and normative ladies and gentlemen and perhaps you can now see why I believe that Psychology, insofar as it willed its detachment in the name of science from a Philosophy which examines all things in accordance with their essential nature, cannot deal holistically with the phenomena of self -consciousness, the flourishing life and the flourishing society. In the next lesson, I wish to deal with the kind of phenomenon that Psychology might be able to investigate, namely the origins of self- consciousness. Civilization has been “evolving culturally”, as we say, for a considerable amount of time since the mythical band of brothers brought the law into man’s hearts, formed cities and defensive protective walls around these cities. Surely one would claim, that it must have been at this moment that consciousness was formed. I attended a seminar some years ago in Washington on the work of a psychologist who claims to believe that the event of the forming of self- consciousness into a unity is a relatively recent phenomenon. Prior to this event, we lived in societies, not in discontentment because that presupposes the knowledge of self- conscious beings who are fully aware of the conditions of their existence: we lived, rather, in conditions of subservience ladies and gentlemen because we were not fully aware of an alternative form of life. We were similar to children, captives of the Kantian transcendental stage of moral development. We were not fully self- conscious. We were aware of what we could lose if we did not obey the law but we did not see its relation to our very limited form of life. Julian Jaynes, ladies, and gentlemen claims, as William James, another American psychologist before him, that the core of the person lies in his brain and the seat of his consciousness lies in the cortex region of his brain. He has been impressed in particular by the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain seem to be performing two very different psychological functions. He has further been impressed by the fact that language may have had a command-control function prior to its being used to autonomously narrate stories about self- conscious individuals. In this “transcendental” state, moments of anxiety caused by problems we do not have the psychological resources to solve enslaves individuals in the lower strata of society who are controlled by hallucinated voices of either individuals higher up in society or the internalized voices of dead individuals we called gods or God. Our consciousness, at a particular point in our history, was bi-cameral he claimed, split into a commander and a follower. I will follow this suggestion up in more detail during the next lecture.”

January 29, 2018September 29, 2019

The third Issue of the Journal “The World Explored, the World Suffered” (February 2018)

Visits: 1167

Philosophical/Educational Journal. “The World Explored,the World Suffered”. Contents:
1. Religious contemplation of the human condition surrounded by a sea of infinite suffering, Freud, Bach and Wittgenstein.
2, First lecture from “The Birmingham lectures” by Harry Middleton: The Philosophy of Man: The History of Psychology
3. Introduction to Philosophy: The Historical Socrates.

January 15, 2018June 11, 2018

The Third Centrepiece lecture from “The World Explored, the World Suffered: the Exeter lectures”

Visits: 1132

“And at the end of all our explorations we shall arrive at the beginning and know the place for the first time”

“Let us start at the end of the Philosophical journey, ladies, and gentlemen, with what some doomsday prophets would say is the end of Philosophy: the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Some have called him the greatest of the philosophers of this century and he might have been prepared to wear this particular crown of thorns in his earlier work where his logical atomism relegated all value, all aesthetic, ethical and religious value from the world constituted of facts. In his later work, however, he has been humbled and offers us some pictures of a part of a landscape that he admits he will not be able to form into a complete philosophy. So let us begin. At the beginning of the Second World War, just after the death of Freud, Wittgenstein has this to say:

“Why is the soul moved by idle thoughts—since they are after all idle? Well, it is just moved by them (How can the wind move a tree, since it is after all just wind? Well, it does move it and do not forget it.)”

This is the philosophical idea of psychogenesis that Freud believed played a role in mental illness. Freud was one of the few Psychologists Wittgenstein would study, perhaps because both believed that surrounding the heart of our understanding was madness, the cure for which was therapy. And what greater madness can there be than war, ladies and gentlemen. War, for both these philosophers was the product of idle thoughts not engaging with the everyday life-world of the context of involvements, and the everyday understanding of language. War, is the product of a childish resistance that refuses to engage with others. Wittgenstein believed that no distress can be greater than that which a single person can suffer:

“one human being can be in infinite distress and require infinite help”.

This is why he was inclined toward the religious. Religion promised the possibility of infinite help if one kept ones part of the bargain and believed and opened ones heart to God in one’s distress and remorse. This may seem to some to be the result of a childish form of love but the child does approach others with an open heart, something that adults seem not to be capable of. Perhaps adults cut themselves off from each other because opening our hearts and minds will not reveal very attractive content. Perhaps we suffer from a form of blindness and cannot see another’s soul, perhaps there is no means of talking about the relation another person has to his soul. It is not easy to see what relation each soul has to its life as a whole or to its own death. When someone dies we do not see the anxiety, depression and remorse the individual felt characterized their life: we are conciliatory and round off the edges of his life in sympathy because we understand how difficult it is to live and understand ourselves. We need to understand that our motives are not always transparent and that sometimes we may believe that our motives for doing X are virtuous but after internal exploration we may well discover they are born from cowardice or indifference or greed. We need this childish open-hearted honesty if our narcissism is to be destroyed, for only then can religion, like the sea, seep into every nook and cranny of our personality. Wittgenstein did not subscribe to the mental illness model subscribed to by Freud and would have preferred a more neutral personality-change model. And no model can have more detrimental effects on an education system run by the state, than that of the mental disease model. The state has historically handled mental illness poorly. First by incarcerating thousands of women in state institutions, with no treatment at all in the late eighteen hundreds, and then by placing its faith in science and incarcerating patients indefinitely in institutions, administering medicines designed to remove the more uncomfortable symptoms such as hallucinations: and finally in desperation when that clearly failed, releasing schizophrenic patients to a fate of homelessness on the streets. But what model does run our current state-run educational systems? All the above measures seemed to aim at reducing suffering. This is, according to Wittgenstein, the aim of education too, which is, to reduce the capacity for suffering. Here is something he wrote in 1948:

“Nowadays a school counts as good if the children have a Good time. And formerly that was not the yardstick. And parents would like children to become the way they themselves are (only more so) and yet they give them an education which is quite different from their own suffering really is out of date.”

You may recognize the medical “Hippocratic” model of reducing suffering at the root of all state run activity. In this regard Wittgenstein points to the industry of Bach, one of my favorite composers, and points out the “logical” or “grammatical” relation of industry to humility and suffering. Bach could really listen to music with the ear of an exploring sufferer and produce it for the hands of suffering explorers too. I personally cannot hear what I hear in Bach in very much of our popular music. Bach in his music is like the tightrope walker who is so high up in our cultural heaven supported by almost nothing but a little thread which seems impossible to walk upon: and yet he is up there moving across the space of our cultural sky. It’s almost as if he has wings. This is why Bach’s music is religious music, ladies and gentlemen. When one reads the Bible one gets the same feeling from the way the language is used. It is used like music, coming from writers who suffer infinitely, moving across the heavens with the greatest of ease, as graceful and as purposeful as an angel: the words of Solomon, the words of Ecclesiastes may sometimes land to the sound of softly flapping angels wings, but mostly these words are like the swifts flying on their secret missions.
And in 1949, a few years before his death, Wittgenstein points out that If Christianity is the truth about being in the world then all the philosophy about it is false. One year prior to his death he also remarks that if Gods essence is said to guarantee his existence, then this indicates that God’s existence, the philosophical question par excellence, is not the issue. What then is the issue? Suffering and how to live heroically yet humbly in the shadow of religion is Wittgenstein’s tentative answer. He claims that life led in the right way, with the right upbringing and experiences of suffering, can lead you to a belief in God or force the concept of God upon your thinking.
I wish now to speak less anecdotally and more theoretically about Wittgenstein’s view of religious language and the religious form of life. I will draw here upon the ideas of our colleague, Donald Hudson’s work.
Learning a language, in general, is learning to play a language –game in which action and language occur in intimate relations with each other. We need to be trained in order to understand the rules and the point of the game in much the same way as we are trained to play chess. Language games have two important logical characteristics: firstly they are part of an activity or form of life, and, secondly, what is done in the language –game always rests on a tacit presupposition On the first point Hudson engages in a thought experiment and asks us to imagine a lion-like form of life in which the lions talk as human beings yet carry on behaving exactly as lions. Imagine, Hudson, asks, a lion exclaiming “Goodness! It is already 3 o clock” but continuing to lounge about and sleep as lions are liable to do. These words would be a prelude to urgent action for a human being but, Hudson argues, we would not understand these lazy lions even if they could speak. The words, isolated from action as they are here, lose all their meaning. Hudson then gives an example of a tacit presupposition in the language game of science in its talk about the moon. The moon is spoken of as a continuous existent and yet our experiences of it are discontinuous: it is tacitly presupposed that our discontinuous experiences of the moon are sufficiently valid grounds for claiming the continuous existence of the moon. Now in discussing religious beliefs, we should not expect the religious man to reason about his beliefs in the same way as the scientist does about his theories. A man believing in the Last Judgment may act every day against the background of the fear or promise of such an event. Is this not then reasonable? Does not the practical belief seem to be stronger than any hypothetical scientific belief? The scientist has his world-view and expects that every event has an explanatory cause in a systematically uniform world in which moons continuously exist. But surely, we would want to claim, a worldview such as the Christian one cannot amount to explaining merely what individuals do in their daily lives. It surely must be able to understand and explain global phenomena such as mass starvation. No Christian would accept the explanation that mass starvation occurs because God does not care whether his creation starves or has food. Now perhaps not every Christian would be able to immediately understand or be able to explain this phenomenon, but we would certainly expect understanding and an explanation of the phenomenon of world starvation from a Christian theologian. The type of explanation we would expect would be something along the following lines: mass starvation is due to human selfishness which is a consequence of God creating man with reason, a free will and a sense of what is good, all of which can then be used to persuade men or let them persuade each other to do something about the phenomenon in question.
Finally, on this issue of the existence and essence of God, let me turn briefly to Kant and his work “Religion within the bounds of mere Reason. According to this work:

“The nature and intrinsic limits of thought and human knowledge preclude any demonstration of the existence of God.”

And further:

“non-existence cannot be demonstrated either.”

It is for the above reasons, ladies and gentlemen that knowledge about, or of God, is not possible and that we are left with faith guided by moral, practical reason. This faith assists us in moving toward what Kant called the summum bonum or the highest possible good in the world. This involves striving for the perfection of our own character and experiencing happiness in direct proportion to the goodness of that character.
It is important to point out that Kant is not here merely making epistemological points but is also hinting at a metaphysical framework. Mathematics and Science are only on a sound theoretical footing as long as they do not claim to be true of Being or reality as such: as long, as they claim to be discovering the truth of what appears to the observer possessing theoretical knowledge. Kant’s argument, is that all our experience is structured by basic forms of sensibility and/or categories of thought. Neither space nor time characterize reality as it is in itself, but characterize the receptivity of the sensible faculty of our minds. Furthermore, objects as they are experienced must, in accordance with scientific assumptions, be subject to causal determinism, i.e. no one can experience any change in the world which does not have a physical observable cause. That is how the world must be organized for the scientific observer. If determinism is a universal principle, however, we are immediately going to have a problem characterizing the free will of moral agents, which are not causally determined entities. The resultant paradox of both being in accordance with and not being in accordance with the theoretical demand of determinism is resolved by Kant’s distinction between the self as a phenomenon obeying deterministic causal laws and the self as a noumenon which is free from determinism. Similarly we do not experience God as a phenomenon to be experienced but only as a noumenon free from determinism. God has not been caused by anything, he is his own cause: he is the explanation of himself. The thematic question of religious belief is “What can I hope for?” thereby situating religious phenomena squarely in the field of aspiration, in the field of what ought to be striven for: a good will , a hope for salvation. This is not necessarily the same thing as the theological doctrine of Original Sin which is a highly theoretical claim about the human condition and certainly not compatible with the idea of a free agent with individual responsibility striving for the good, striving for what it ought to do. But what then of what Kant calls radical evil. How can he account for this phenomenon? Firstly he tends to speculate about this matter in terms of the will rather than behavior. An action with good intentions might conceivably have what is regarded as evil empirical consequences, but unqualified goodness is demanded of the will which is capable of noumenal deeds: capable namely of adopting principles of action which are in accordance with the categorical imperative. Such noumenal deeds can be corrupted and a deviant will is thus possible. It is important not to underestimate this possible corruption. We speak of people as good even if we experience deviations from the good, as illustrated above by our speeches at their funerals. The dead person may have felt acutely remorseful and guilty at the memory of their deviation from the good, he may indeed have felt his life as a miserable failure because of a few deviations and yet we, with our knowledge of the human condition round off these embarrassing edges and call the dead person a good man. What we are engaging upon here is nothing less than what Kant would have called “ a deduction” of the idea of a justification of a human being who is guilty of deviations but has through hard work with his character transformed his will into one that would please God. This hard work is enormously demanding and leads to a complete transformation or rebirth of the person. Kant says the following:

“The distance between the goodness which we ought to effect in ourselves and the evil from which we start is infinite, and, so far as the deed is concerned—i.e. the conformity of the conduct of one’s life to the holiness of the law—it is not attainable in any time”

For Kant it is progress along this infinite continuum which counts as good. There is no alternative for Kant given the fact that deeds in the noumenal sphere of our existence escape cognition. But strictly speaking the progress of the will, no matter how far it has come, in its infinite work toward the absolute good, may yet regard its work as a failure. The role of God enters here in the form of his good will and grace: if man has done everything he can, then God imputes righteousness gracefully to us. But what about our empirical societies, is there hope that they too will progress infinitely toward the ideal of a kingdom of ends? Indeed, is not the empirical state of affairs the following: that the growing awareness of cross-cultural and ecological awareness has left us with a lack of conviction in the supposed work for progress: that the individual in such circumstances will feel that there is no hope of producing good consequences in these circumstances. Kant would respond in two ways to this state of affairs: firstly he would insist that moral action is not instrumental, is not a means to an end but rather it is an end in itself: secondly, and relatedly, he would insist that this is not a knowledge issue to be calculated in terms of means and ends but rather a matter of faith that one’s action will constitute progress toward the good.
Finally Kant discusses whether the above very complex metaphysical reasoning could serve as the foundation of an actual ethical community of the form we find in a church. Kant realizes that some form of public experiential condition is needed. There is needed, he argues, some form of historical faith in authority or leadership grounded in actual historical conditions laid down, for example, in the Bible, ecclesiastical literature and historical practices. The historical account of the journey of the Jews and the life of Jesus Christ are obviously important in this respect.
In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, the world explored is the world suffered actively in the mode of an active faith, reasoning about the world as a whole. There is of course a melancholic air to both exploration and suffering which will always be the case until this untethered buoy with its tolling bell finds a safe harbor and safe shelter: the finite promised waters in a sublime infinite sea of suffering.”

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January 8, 2018June 11, 2018

The First Review of The World Explored, the World Suffered: The Exeter lectures

Visits: 1273

Top customer reviews
Ravana’s hammer
5.0 out of 5 stars Very worthwhile reading
January 7, 2018
Format: Paperback

I just finished this book, and I find myself feeling “post-partum”. It is a deep, philosophical meditation on human existence, and is not a “light read”. Prior knowledge of Philosophy, while not required, is helpful. What is required is the desire to grapple with the philosophical questions. The author synthesizes the thinking of Wittgenstein, Kant and Aristotle into a beautiful and quietly melancholic view of the world in the context of a story of people whose lives exemplify that view, and require that view. He moves between clear expositions of the basic questions in Western Philosophy, questions of purpose and meaning in life, the nature of aesthetic judgement and its relationship to truth, the nature of tragedy, to the struggles of individuals living out those very questions. What comes across clearly and unobtrusively in this work, is that the author knows these struggles. It was written from the heart, as much as from the mind.

January 5, 2018November 11, 2019

Volume 2 of the Journal “The World Explored, the World Suffered”

Visits: 931

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January 3, 2018June 11, 2018

The Second Exeter centrepiece lecture by Glynn Samuels from the book “The World Explored, the World Suffered:The Exeter lectures”

Visits: 1981

Glynn opened his notes: “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Today is the second of three lectures entitled “The World Explored,the World Suffered”. We talked about the restlessness of the human soul during the last lecture. Today we are going to ask the question: “What forms can this restlessness take if it seeks to express itself cathartically in Science, Art, Philosophy, and Religion? Firstly some remarks about “the World”. Science has altered its character over history, ladies and gentlemen. During Pre-Socratic times Science and Philosophy were united, both were born of “wonder in the face of existence or being”. Modern science and perhaps much of modern philosophy have lost this spirit of exploration and both are skeptical in relation to this very basic characteristic of what Heidegger called our being-in-the world. Modernism doubts everything and needs to obsessively consult the external world piecemeal for the establishment of every idea and, as a consequence, is thereby thrown into the attitude of trying to construct the world from a pack of theoretical constructs. Are the cards arranged like this?” is the question each scientific age now asks itself and the truth about Being-in-the-world is lost. Wonder is replaced with observation and manipulation. The truth about Being-in-the-world and the truth about the questions of Being is lost. We are lost. We look at the cards and accept the hand we have been dealt, instead of asking, why these cards? Why this kind of card? Why this kind of idea? Our restlessness is transformed into an anxiety-laden activity where we shuffle the cards every generation and are stimulated at the new combination. Heidegger claims we are “thrown” into this world, dealt a hand by a mysterious dealer, ladies and gentlemen, and that our theoretical representations and dealings with the world are inauthentic. At the same time we dwell in the world we live in most intimately in our practical dealings with it. In our dealings with things, we manipulate and use what is “ready-to-hand”. In our concern we thrust aside our theoretically interpretative tendencies that conceal our concerns. We call these entities with which we are concerned “things” and perhaps thereby take a theoretical leap into the unknown. The scientist is a magician, ladies and gentlemen, and one has to be skilled to detect his sleights of hand, especially when he is shuffling his self- constructed cards. Notice how this leap away from Being or reality is a leap away from the fundamental reason for our pre-Socratic wonder in the face of the world. It is a leap away from value, ladies and gentlemen. Let us ask ourselves, “What keeps the craftsman at his task?” A theoretical representation of the house he is building? Is this his concern? Surely he thinks more broadly and more deeply. Does his activity not stretch along a series of interconnected thoughts about the form of life of being human or being-in-the-world? Does it not stretch away from the bare material house along a chain of practical operators we designate linguistically in terms of the expression “in-order-to”? This chain formally refers something to something else along the chain until we come to rest perhaps in “Eudaimonia” if we are Aristotelians, or in the attitude of “a boundless happy outlook onto the world”, if we are Kantians like Dr. Sutton. The builder, ladies and gentlemen does not see the structure he is building as something merely geometrical with its 4 rectangular walls. What, for example, has the hammer the builder is building with, got to do with the rectangularity of the walls? The hammer’s nature is to be, as Heidegger puts it, ready-to-hand. The hammer needs to be used to reveal its nature and if it is thought about, it is done so, circumspectly, in relation to an action structure it is embedded within. If it is looked at, observed theoretically, then this is a different kind of concern which will have a different purpose altogether. The scientist may observe for example that the shaft of the hammer is made of wood as is the house, and think of the biological, chemical or physical properties of wood. For the true craftsman, however the wood may set into motion a process of thought ending in a forest of trees stirring his wonder: The woods for him may be a sublime place to be visited with appropriate clothes and a transcendental attitude: a place to be explored with the senses. When houses are mass produced, the hammers’ value is diminished as is perhaps the “value” of the house. We are not, of course, talking of economic value, which quantifies away the quality and substance of things possessing real transcendental value. The magnificent work “The peasant’s shoes” by van Gogh is a sensory presentation of the truth of this matter. The work of art reveals to an observer, the world of the peasant and the world of work which perhaps Socrates imagined in his healthy city: the city without luxury, without soldiers, without Philosophers. Work and a natural philosophical and religious attitude was all that was required. These attitudes connected its things and activities teleologically, into a system of ends Heidegger would have called a “world” or “being-in-the-world”. All these things and activities do not stand out and present themselves for observation unless something goes wrong. If the hammer does not work or the walls of the house fall down, then these things emerge from this world of activity and present themselves for inspection or observation. The condition of the builder building his house, of course is that the hammer and the walls do not present themselves in the above way and interrupt the activity. Notice how the world is divided, ladies and gentlemen. It is not divided theoretically or mathematically where one begins by imagining a theoretical “substance” or “thing” that can be divided, shaped and moved, remaining constant throughout all of these types of change. The world is a network or totality of equipment where each element has a means-ends or instrumental relation to the beings that use the equipment. The hammer when used is primordially understood in a way described by Gilbert Ryle as “knowing how” which, is contrasted to “knowing that” but is also contrasted to the observational mode of encountering hammers that do not work and walls that fall down. We are not conscious of using the hammer but we are pre-consciously aware of what we are doing. The world of Descartes, the mathematician and Philosopher, ladies and gentlemen is a theoretical world to be explored mathematically and scientifically. His physical world is a theoretical world of res extensa where literally any division, and shape, or any type of movement measurable or observable within the confines of science and mathematics is possible. In this curious world of the mathematician, the infinite can be capable of infinite change. For the practical man this theoretical world will be an image of a world, the mere shadow of the real practical world of equipment. This is, then, not a human world, ladies and gentlemen, nor can it be a religious world, even if for Descartes God guaranteed the truth in a system which had , on these assumptions, to remain forever hypothetical. Only God could know the truth in this system ladies and gentlemen. Only God could guarantee that we are not all dreaming and being deceived by an evil demon. Let me just say that there are theoretical ideas of God such as we find in Aristotle that are based on res cogitans rather than res extensa but let me also say that Aristotle was no dualist and you will find no reference to evil demons in his work. Descartes’ philosophy, ladies and gentlemen announced the coming of the modern secular scientific and technological age. Kant, in attempting to correct Descartes, wound the clock back to the Greeks (and here I do not completely agree with Heidegger’s view of Kant) but to no avail, because Kant’s ethical and religious worldview was nevertheless rapidly overwhelmed by “modernism” and “individualism”. For Descartes it is the quantitative modifications of the physical world which are the primary fundamental phenomena upon which everything and every quality of a thing is built, including the hammer, the house, the peasants shoes, the sublime woods, and even ultimately the thinker, ladies and gentlemen, whose brain, according to Descartes, becomes the meeting point of res extensa and res cogitans. “Value” in such a secular, scientific world, ladies and gentlemen, has to have a special “stamp” imposed upon it by the subjects experiencing it. The woods are not sublime in the view of the scientist but are regarded as so by the person so absorbed, and this attitude is no more generally valid than the attitude of the horseman, riding through the woods whose thoughts are elsewhere on the road ahead and the house at the end of the road, or indeed, to take another example, the attitude of the driver of the machine that cuts down trees in accordance with a quantitative schedule written down on his order sheet: an order sheet which in its turn was written by a supervisor who did not think about the trees as such but only of the amount of capital they would generate for the company. Hail be to king Oeconomous! Whereas, ladies and gentlemen, I want to say that there is a very great difference in value between the absorbed contemplator, contemplating the sublimity of the woods, the machine-driver cutting down trees and the horseman riding for home. This analysis is not complete, however until we ask the question “Who is thus absorbed, in these activities of contemplating the woods, destroying the woods or riding for home?” Shall we be modern and give the answer: “the Cartesian substantial consciousness?” We can, I hope, immediately reject this Cartesian theoretically constituted consciousness in favour of practically constituted “existence”, in favor of a practical “I”. The builder builds a house for a practical “I” to live in. The hammer belongs to a very practical carpenter. But these beings enjoy a different mode of Being or Reality to the network of means and ends that they both help to constitute and are part of. The theoretical “I” stands apart from Others, is separate from Others, in a solipsistic world of its own. In Heidegger’s “Being-in-the-world-together”, on the other hand, I and the Others stand equally and practically together constituting a practical network. Others may present themselves as different when they appear in a landscape but as soon as they pick up a hammer, go into a house, ride through the woods, stand amazed at the sublimity of the woods, go into a church, sit enthralled at what is being said in the house of God: as soon as these things happen, the Others become my brothers and sisters and I adopt an attitude of humanistic solicitude toward them. But it must be emphasized, ladies and gentlemen, that I am concerned about Others in a way I could never be concerned about a hammer or a house. This latter type of concern, or attitude of solicitude can become corrupted by the forms of life we lead: for example, the horseman nearly knocks his brother down in his furious ride to reach the house. Here he sees his brother as something that gets in his way, an obstacle to overcome. He has devalued his brother: not shown his forbearance for his brother. Our Being-with-one –another in the world ought to be a being- for- the- sake- of- one-another. This Being-with- one-another can be compromised by our theoretical attitudes that separate us into individuals with our own cogito, our own interests, desires, and needs. Once this happens we need to travel a road of self-knowledge in order to re-discover this primordial attitude of Being-with-one-another which came so natural to the Greeks and the Christians. One of the deficient modes of being- together- with- one -another occurs when we see all people around us as a means to our ends. This narcissistic or “Individual” me which cannot grasp what I have in common with my brothers can be theoretically characterized by Psychology as an individual “I” defined by a set or properties one of which may be narcissism. Such a theory, however, can never bring the individuals back into the practical network of value that unites them. Society is not a totality of individuals, united by a set of theoretical properties but a brotherhood of brothers or a siblinghood of siblings or a fellowship of friends united by a set of practical concerns about goals, duties and rights. We are thrown into this burdensome world, ladies and gentlemen, and this is reflected in our states of mind or moods that become defining for how we see the world. We need to master our moods, ladies and gentlemen because, according to Heidegger, there is a basic fundamental mood that reveals the world as it is for us. We need to master our moods because there are bad states of mind or bad moods which will disguise from us the nature of the world and neutralize the value of work, walks in the sublime woods, and other people. According to Heidegger it is only when our senses belong to an entity whose kind of Being is Being-in-the-world possessing a state of mind or mood which cares for the world, that things can reveal themselves to us in the world as something to be valued. A good mood is not a dominating state of mind, ladies and gentlemen, it submits itself to the world: a bad mood, ladies and gentlemen, seeks to dominate the world, perhaps as the modern scientist seeks to dominate the physical domain: a bad mood can sometimes seek to destroy our woods or “inadvertently” in a more complex context, provide the weapons of mass destruction. Between moods that submit themselves to the world and world-destroying moods, there are moods of contemplation in which we impose the categories of substance and its properties, action and its properties, upon the passing show. Twentieth-century fashions looked to logic to replace epistemological approaches to philosophical problems. The logic of grammatical subjects and predicates, the logic of theories of types and descriptions provided context independent statements which theories would attempt to give an account of. This state of affairs was meant to attempt to solve the problem of the existence of the world that needed to be inferred from sense data in the mind or logical theories. According to Heidegger the world is not a hypothesis or an assumption. Being–in-the-world is our original situation from which everything else follows. Equipment networks for Heidegger are the background against which everything else stands out. The work of the later Wittgenstein moves in this direction when it refers to language-games embedded in forms of life. Here the forms of life form the background of the world. Psychology relegates moods to secondary phenomena subservient to representation and willing. Phenomenological research tries to restore moods and emotion back to the practical phenomena they were in the Philosophy of Aristotle. In the Phenomenology of Scheler, for example, , actions can have their own “sight” and their own “interest”. Phenomenology is a philosophy born at the beginning of the century, conceived by the spiritual “father” of Heidegger, Edmund Husserl. It maintains in its reflections upon language, that underlying our interpretations of things is a context of “involvements” which provide the cognitive content of these interpretations. Everything has “meaning” and this meaning can be disclosed. In the statement “The hammer is too heavy” we do not discover “meanings” but rather we discover an entity like the hammer and its relation to the ready-to-hand context in which it is involved. The predicate “too heavy” then is a narrowing or focusing of attention that characterizes this specific hammer. Thirdly, this statement communicates this state of affairs to others and the state of affairs is shared with others who may have no direct involvement in the state of affairs. This statement can then be passed along in an unending chain of communication. Interpretation in itself does not need to be linguistic or theoretical but can be purely practical as when a carpenter tries to use a hammer which is too heavy, lays it aside for another which is lighter. But of course talking about things is a mode of being together. In language we communicate our understanding of the possibilities of things that we project upon them, and we can also communicate our state of mind or mood. But just as primary, ladies and gentlemen, is the fact that in language or discourse we listen-to, we are open-to, ideas and other people. Indeed our very being- in- the- world is constituted in and through the activity of listening to others. Man shows himself to be the being that listens before he reasons ladies and gentlemen. Hence, Aristotle’s definition of “rational animal capable of discourse” replaces the earlier simpler definition of “rational animal”. It is in listening-to, or reading, that all true explorations of the world and our place in it begin. We listen or read in order to explore, and to know that we are not alone. Language is therefore not a repository of words to be used ladies and gentlemen, but rather something we use with solicitude, with care: the same attitude we reserve for human beings. That we speak and listen are not properties of a theoretical Psychological “I”, but rather constitutive aspects of our human nature or being-in-the-world with others. But, ladies and gentlemen, here comes the reason why we have to read and to listen very carefully. We are thrown into a world where the meanings of things are either not apparent or where things said are only half meant or not meant at all. This is a world in which one could get lost, ladies and gentlemen. A world in which interpretation might lead into a labyrinth of meaninglessness: in this labyrinth we will find the scientist, the psychologist, and the social scientist, down in the Platonic cave, hunting for they know not what, hunting for nothingness in the dark. But in this world one can hear if one listens carefully, and one can understand if one reads about the essential characteristics of the world which makes this world of ours, a real world. The chalk I have in my hand has perceptual characteristics: grayish, white, relatively solid, a thing with a definite shape. These seem to be the mathematical/scientific properties of the chalk: but, for the practical understanding this piece of chalk has an essence, namely a piece of material that can be used up after writing on a blackboard. After it is used up it has no theoretical properties at all. Does it not exist, therefore, because it does not possess the above theoretical properties or does it not exist because it has been practically used up in the act of writing on the blackboard? The essence of the chalk seems to reside more in the practical act than in these theoretical properties: the chalk is used up in practical acts situated in our life-world of which this lecture hall is a part. And yet these acts are a something rather than a nothing: they have being or reality. The chalk is a thing in a context of involvements that include the student reading its traces and understanding what was written, perhaps even after the chalk that was used to leave its traces itself has disappeared and all its theoretical properties are nothing. Heidegger writes about the darkening of the world bearing down upon us and perhaps it will reach into this institution when chalk writing on a blackboard will no longer be understood. Here I am thinking of the mathematical logic of Professor Russell. Attempting to reduce all objects and acts to their logical theoretical form is an important mistake, if one can call it a mistake at all. It is not of the order of misunderstanding the use of something like a hammer but more like not being able to relate to other human beings spiritually: as beings which have intrinsic value. Now, no one can accuse religion of not being able to relate to human beings spiritually. The language of religion is spiritual: it does not settle for the facts or express facts in isolation, but rather relates to something of value underlying the facts. It is not a fact that religion preaches the brotherhood of man but rather a statement that expresses the nature of our relation to man as a relation of solicitude and care: a statement which is true yet value-laden. It is an expression of an ontological mood. So, for a modern man, Christ dying on the cross is a fact but for a Christian this event expresses symbolically the essence of man’s life, or the mood of life in general. The picture of this event is perhaps the most terrible, horrible event that the mind could conjure up: this event of the good man, dying in such a cruel way. Be not mistaken, ladies and gentlemen, this is not one man dying because of a betrayal for thirty pieces of silver. This event symbolizes all of mankind on the cross. This is the symbol of the darkening of the world after which came quite naturally the dark ages. The Renaissance supposedly designated the awakening of the spiritual in man until Descartes came along to put a nail into God’s coffin with his mathematical individualism and radical skepticism. Then came the Enlightenment, but it is an open question as to whether Kant put another nail into Gods coffin. I don’t believe he did cause problems for religion, but will not fully give my reasons for thinking so during this lecture. The language of religion, ladies and gentlemen, is not Latin, it is Hebrew. Latin translations of Hebrew and Greek, as we know have been problematic. The word that we know in English as “substance”, is the Latin translation of “Being” or reality. The word the Greeks used was paraousia that designates the presence of an essence or a homestead standing and revealing its essence. We have, through unfortunate Latin translations misinterpreted the Greek term phusus that refers to the spontaneous unfolding of something essential which lingers. Physics, as a consequence of Latin mistranslations, has fallen under the spell of the Latin translation substance that is more easily interpreted as something material endowed with mathematical characteristics. The essent, for the physicist is self- evidently given, a datum that can be discovered by an observer equipped with scientific instruments and mathematical theories and concepts. The essence becomes an object to be observed, or to be acted upon with measuring instruments. The essence of man and language have disappeared into this labyrinth of confusion and perhaps all we have left is the historical event of the death of Jesus to talk about. Perhaps all that is left to do is to explore and suffer the significance of this event. An event, instead of a world, is all we have to speak about in the house of God: in the house of a Deus absconditus. In this house we show we care about metaphysical matters. Sitting and waiting for mass to begin, the metaphysical anxiety we feel in the face of our death is transposed into a Stoic calm. The storm that is coming over the horizon is on our minds when we talk collectively about death. Out in the street we talk idly about death as if it were an accidental event and try to forget about it as quickly as possible. The storm of another person’s death is an event like any other that will pass away in history. Neighbors congregate around a dying friend and predict he will soon be well: they administer tranquillizers. In our everyday talk about death we anxiously pretend that there is no cause for anxiety. But then we find ourselves in church ladies and gentlemen where the truth is up there on the altar for all to see. No tranquillizers for Jesus. The claim that he suffered for us means that his death was not a mere historical event but an event of solicitude and care. We should “know” that we are going to die, disintegrate into the nothingness of dust: we should as Heidegger claims: “find ourselves face to face with the “nothing”, of the possible impossibility of our existence”. If we do, we become free to meet this impossibility we will never experience, resolutely, with the stoical spirit of a Socrates or a Jesus. We will of course need a clear conscience if we are to accomplish such a feat of anticipating resolutely what is to come. Aristotle, ladies and gentlemen as you know, spoke of every activity and inquiry as aiming at the good. For him the world was not a merely totality of things or events or facts about things and events: it was a totality of involvements with natural things and human beings that manifested value in the form of friendship, concern, solicitude, and care. For Aristotle we also have a relation to God when we contemplate the good, the true and the beautiful and for Kant we have commitments to both humans and God. One cannot help but recognize that the values referred to are in the realm of the possible and the realm of the “ought”, and that one can in fact be bored with existence or tired of existence or wish to destroy existence without these facts being a basis to abandon what we ought to be committed to and care for. This terrible modern century with two world wars and the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations and the threat of nuclear holocaust is only 75 years old. One wonders what is in store. One wonders what on earth is coming next. If ever a talking cure was needed it was needed in this terrible century. If ever there was a humanistic voice needed in the wilderness of our modern times it is now, during this century. The voice began to whisper its concern about humanity during the end of the last century, paradoxically in the name of science, and in defense of the immoral treatment of mentally ill patients. And as the patients confessed in the consulting rooms of this humanist named Freud, it became apparent that science did not have the resources to do the work of diagnosing the causes of complex mental phenomena. Freud, after flirting with scientific materialism turned his attention to Plato and mythology in order to interpret the phenomena he encountered in his consulting rooms. We may wonder how Jesus knew his life was not going to end well after having raised his voice in the name of humanity and brotherhood. He was tagged “the King of the Jews” and given a crown of thorns. Freud was never openly tagged in this way but to the scientist he presented a challenge to the throne of science by abandoning materialism and physical causation. He transformed the current dogma of somatogenesis (mental illness has a physical cause in the brain) by a critical doctrine of psychogenesis (mental illness has its origins in our minds ). He was never openly tagged but was made to wear his crown of thorns. Now I am not a fan of Dr. Freud because of his attacks on visible religion but I can see how he might have thought that the confessions of someone who can listen and understand could take the place of a religion grown weary of listening to unimaginative, almost ritualistic prayers, of a religious institution wearily offering unimaginative ritualistic formulas in response to the anxiety of modern man. I can see how Freud might have thought that religion embraced a set of beliefs that were driven by fantasy or wish rather than the reality of how the world ought to be. Freud was a great emblem of this terrible century, being both a sufferer and a deep explorer of the human condition. The time of the prophets may be long gone but it is ironic is it not that he and Einstein were asked to diagnose the causes of war on the eve of the war to end all wars. The language, of religion, ladies and gentlemen is not a factual language, nor a language of observation, cause and effect. It is the language of poetry combined with the language of myth: neither language is well understood, although we incorrectly believe we understand the language of poetry more than we do the language of myth. Myths may be the only clue to pre-history that we have and it may be defining of myths that we cannot connect the events narrated with either the time of our history or the geographical space of our world as we define it today. Religious texts, ladies and gentlemen, explore the relation between man and what he considers sacred: between man and that which threatens this sacred bond, namely, evil. The confession a man makes of his faults is symbolic and is in need of the kind of interpretation that is required to understand the language of religious texts. The confession is not simply an emotional exclamation of pain, ladies and gentlemen, it is rather a cry for righteousness and justice: a cry from an emotional complex of anxiety and fear which is being operated upon by an ought-system of concepts emanating from the conscience of man. Freud called one part of the mind the superego in recognition of the fact that it assists the ego in its work of transforming the id and its cauldron of appetites into a life force capable of creating an Aristotelian flourishing life. Psychoanalysis ladies and gentlemen, is the secular inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. It aims to transform our childish narcissism into a deep thought about, and love of the world, which will make a Temple of our societies. So, in place of the God that has absconded from our secular cities, we have analytical interpretations of our cries for help. In Heidegger’s terms, the cry is analogous to the cry in the wilderness where the appeal is to be returned to civilization, to the context of involvements with people and things. The call of conscience is a call to be able to experience fully what one ought to be able to experience: work and love, which by the way happen to be the two criteria for a healthy ego that has successfully transformed the cauldron of emotion of the id into a life force This healthy ego also has successfully transformed the commanding cruel captain of the superego into the gentle man of peace, no longer aggressively accusing its host. It would seem that man enters into the ethical world through fear and not love, if Freud the prophet is to be believed. Once having returned from the desert to his context of involvements, love makes an appearance on the condition that the spirit did not die from the terror of the desert. It is the spirit on the verge of dying which cries out “How long O Lord must I endure?” “Hast thou abandoned me?” Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen, the spirit of man is an enigma because much of its history completely escapes narration. But the narrative of the sea ladies and gentlemen, is the sea as it threatens or purifies and baptizes in accordance with its moods. Indeed the sea is narrative of the natural order and this is not as pressing a matter as the narrative of man confessing his faults. And if science has anything to do with the construction of this narrative of the sea there will be no reference to its role as elemental purifier. The scientist will do with the waters of the sea as he does with the desert: he will measure the depths, calculate the winds and look to the moon to explain the motion of the waves: he will count the sands of the desert, measure the heights of the dunes and look to the winds and the sun to explain all shape and motion. This world of science is a world in which everything follows the laws and nothing breaks the laws, on pain of the law not being a law. In the ethical world of the suffering man, suffering is a symptom of having broken some commandment or law that governs the flourishing life. Ancient man carried this symbolism into the natural order and explained the flood in terms of broken divine commandments or laws. The threatening or purifying flood was predicted and it was a vengeful phenomenon. The sufferer did not love God enough, it was claimed. The secular Plato might well have said “If you do not love the world and knowledge of the world enough you will be punished and suffer.” The unjust or evil man must suffer: that must be the logic of the ethical world and everyone seems able to intuitively understand this. But not everyone understands that we need more than knowledge to understand the terrible event of a just man dying on the cross with his crown of thorns. He has done nothing to deserve his fate in the ethical order of things. So why has the ethical system abandoned him thus? It is because his death is his sacrifice on behalf of all sufferers. He is the savior and our salvation. There just is no other reasonable interpretation of this event. And where was Deus absconditus, while Jesus was saving the world? Robert raised his hand “Heidegger’s major work was called “Being and Time”. If I have understood what has been said in previous lectures on Kant, time is an internal structure of our minds. This surely cannot be Heidegger’s position given what has been said in your lecture today. Can you say something more about time?” “It is the mood which prevails in our practical network of involvements. Things matter and have significance in this mood. A mood is not something inside an individual but rather the name for the spirit in which things get done. This for Heidegger expresses the significance of past for us. We are assimilated by this spirit or mood that is most definitely outside of us. As a result of this assimilation I then presently articulate the world by focusing on an element such as a pen and begin writing an essay which in its turn articulates the world by showing how it has been divided up and put together again both in action and in discourse or language. This in its turn is embedded in a network of possibilities. The essay makes me think in a new way about something and explores the possibilities of the world. This is the future tense of Heidegger’s project.” “So time is measured more realistically in the act of writing an essay than in the orbit of the earth around the sun or the earth spinning on its axis-“ “Yes, being-in-the-world, is in one sense a better measure of time than staring at the movements of large bodies in linear or angular motion. In another sense however it is good to know when the light is going to disappear so I can make my way home in the light, or when in the year I can sow the seeds for the wheat crop. The calculations made in relation to the motions of these large bodies then become significant for the beginning and endings of activities but perhaps the activities themselves are actually, when totally absorbing, approaching a feeling of timelessness, expressed in our saying afterwards “Is that the time? Where did the time go?” This in turn, suggests that time becomes more important the more conscious we become of it, especially when things do not go as planned or intended. Our time is up I see. Thank you for your time ladies and gentlemen.

December 17, 2017January 18, 2018

The World Explored. the World Suffered: A new journal/magazine

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The World Explored, the World Suffered: Journal

November 30, 2017January 18, 2018

Youtube Interview Transcript

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Interviewer: Michael R D James has recently published a book entitled “The World Explored, the World Suffered: The Exeter lectures”.(November 2017) It is the first volume of a Trilogy which aims at introducing the reader into the world of Academic Philosophy via the medium of a fictional setting of human drama and tragedy.

Can I begin this interview by asking this question. A large number of Philosophers thoughts are taken up in the book but Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein seem to figure more prominently than the others.Why?

Michael: Yes I think that is a correct observation although there are extensive references to Socrates, Plato, Schopenhauer, Arendt, and Ricoeur. The reasons Aristotle Kant and Wittgenstein are central figures is to do with the training I have received at the three different universities that I have studied at, and a current conviction that these are the most important figures in philosophy. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are interesting figures in themselves but they occupy a central role in the book only because of the character of Glynn Samuels.

Interviewer: The cover of the book depicts Plato as the central figure appearing out of the mists of the milky way and Aristotle and Socrates as his wingmen so to say. Why is this?

Michael: I think the Swedish expression “Vintergatan”, “the Wintry street” is, by the way, far more poetic than our English expression “the milky way”. In answer, to your question, however, the Greek world and Greek consciousness I hope, permeate all of the lectures in the work and Plato is in the popular mind the symbol for that world and that consciousness. I believe actually that Aristotle was the better Philosopher although Plato was the more popular figure because he embedded his Philosophy in the art form of the dialogue, which I believe used to be one of the areas of competition in the Olympic games. Having said that Aristotle was taught by Plato and could only see as far as he could, philosophically speaking because he stood on his teachers shoulders.

Interviewer: You have chosen unusually to embed Philosophical lectures in the form of a fictional drama. Why?

Michael: Because as the Delphic Oracle prophesied, knowledge of the self is so difficult to acquire. We, humans, appear to be moving toward a difficult to discern goal or telos and there are at least two aspects to this process: knowledge of the world and knowledge of our role in creating everything that is human about this world. The story of this development is a complex one but trying to explore this complexity without some kind of narrative structure would seem to me to be a formula for isolating Philosophy in an ivory tower on an academic campus far removed from the hustle and bustle of life.

Interviewer: I would like to ask about the Political Philosophy lecture which is one of a series given by Jude Sutton as part of his Philosophy of Education course. Does this lecture connect in any way to the what I presume is an underlying theme of the importance of International Education?

Michael: Yes indeed it does and you are right to suggest that the importance of International Education is an underlying theme of the work. Jude Sutton gives voice to a political position that I would characterize as Humanistic Liberalism: a position that is bound up with Kantian Ethics and Political Philosophy. The Kantian idea of a Kingdom of ends requires a cosmopolitan regime and a view of human rights that is transnational or international..

Interviewer: Harry Middleton is the third lecturer giving a series of lectures in your work, He is what one might call a Philosophical Psychologist in the Continental tradition of Philosophy but he also takes up William James and Freud in his lectures. He seems to be something of a hybrid.

Michael: Freud and William James according to secondary sources were the only Psychologists Wittgenstein is reputed to have read with interest. Yes, Harry is more of a hybrid character than Glynn Samuels who also in many peoples eyes walks a theoretical tightrope. Both of these lecturers manifest the spirit of the search for integrated knowledge which Alec Petersson, the first Director of the Internationa Baccalaureate program was engaged in. His agenda was partly to obtain a unified theory of knowledge, whether it be to use the language of the 1970’s a coat of many colours or a seamless robe.

Interviewer: You mentioned a tightrope in your last answer. Let me read you a section from your work “the World Explored, the World Suffered”: Glynn Samuels in his lecture on Wittgenstein, Religion and Philosophy of Education has this to say:

“Wittgenstein points to the industry of Bach, one of my favourite composers and points out the relation of industry to humility and suffering. Bach could really listen to music with the ear of an exploring sufferer and produce it for the hands of suffering explorers too. I personally cannot hear what I hear in Bach in very much of our popular music. Bach and his music are like the tightrope walker who is so high up in our cultural heaven supported by almost nothing but a little thread which seems impossible to walk upon: and yet he is up there moving across the space of our cultural sky. It is almost as if he has wings. This is why Bach’s music is religious music, ladies and gentlemen…the words of Solomon, the words of Ecclesiastes may sometimes land in our minds to the sound of softly flapping wings, but mostly these words are like the swifts flying tangentially on their secret mission.”

So, Religion and Education do not sit comfortably together in our modern secularized societies. How do you think the character of Glynn contributes to your message of finding common ground between these two areas of discourse?

Michael: The above passage comes immediately after a quote from Wittgenstein one year before he died. Wittgenstein in that quote is regetting that the schools of the time(1949) seemed to be more concerned with the children having a good time and pretending that suffering was out of date. Remember that all the “Greats”, Aristotle Kant and Wittgenstein were sympathetic to religion and appreciated its good intentions. For me and for Glynn, the Religion of the Philosopher must find its way into education and education needs to search for a way to address practical religious questions more actively.

Interviewer: Can I ask you to name the fictional authors that have influenced you and can you also say something about their influence.

Michael: Lawrence Durrell is the author I have read and re-read the most during the past 10 years. His Alexandrian Quartet is a masterpiece and allows the reader to “live” in Alexandria in a way that leaves memories about the place and people as if you had actually lived and worked in the city itself. The people and events are seen through the eyes of 4 characters and a process of “triangulation or “quadrification” occurs which gives one a very real impression of the people and the time they live in. Shakespeare has also been a regular source of inspiration because of his effortless unification of prose, poetry and theatre, as has been Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Laurens van der Post, and V S Naipaul. Given my admiration for Shakespeare T S Eliots poetry has haunted me since I studied him at school. Other poets like Dylan Thomas and Robert Frost, W B Yeats have also occupied me periodically. But Lawrence Durrell has always been the star in the sky of literature that I have tried to follow.

Interviewer: The first chapter of the work is about ships, the sea, deeply tethered bouys, and you say on the first page that you “began to look upon the sea as a teacher, with respect”. You speak also of a calm sea as a dreaming sea and “the rising of the tide of the level of your consciousness”. The sea then makes its appearance in many metaphors and images throughout the work. Why?

Michael: You tell me. The sea feels like a part of me. Powerful waves and tidal changes of considerable magnitude are the norm in Cape Town. High tide in Cape Town would probably feel like a tsunami to someone not used to such sound and fury. At every high tide I almost expected the sea to turn the streets of Sea Point into canals. I think I had pictures in my mind of Venice before actually knowing that the city existed.

Interviewer: Is that why Venice is connected to suffering?

Michael: Perhaps.

Interviewer: What is the significance of the title “The World Explored, the World Suffered”. For you, these seem to be tied almost logically together rather than be the names for separate independent activities.

Michael: Yes that observation is correct. The fate of Socrates alone ties these two activities irrevocably together but Aristotle that explorer of the human spirit par excellence also had to flee Athens and died within a year of escaping. Kant, the philosopher that never left Königsberg, speaks several times about the melancholic haphazardness of everyday life. Freud’s mood is even darker than this as is Schopenhauer’s. I think the title reflects the response of many philosophers to our secularized world. The character of Glynn Samuels appears to the character Sophia to be the most stable probably because he builds religious walls around his life and prepares for the secular siege with the wisdom of all ages and the wisdom of all kinds of text.

Interviewer: The final lecture that Jude Sutton gives is the one he enjoys the most: the lecture on Aesthetics. He talks about the creation of a film of the “terrible events of this century” and he compares this anxiety laden venture with Giorgione’ss Quattro Cento landscape entitled “The Tempesta” where a storm is looming in the background of figures who are pursuing their everyday lives without concern for what is coming on the horizon. Sutton refers to Adrian Stokes and his hope that psychoanalysis will help us understand the good object in general and the beautiful and the sublime in particular. Love emerges as a theme of the lectures for perhaps the first time. Can you say something about this observation?

Michael: Yes, the quotation you refer to comes from Stokes’s essay on Michelangelo, perhaps the greatest of the Italian explorers and sufferers. The quote connects love to the oceanic feeling, the feeling of being at one with everything in contrast and connection to the feeling of the singularity of people and things. Stokes suggests that both Art and love stimulate these attitudes in us. In visual art, this is accomplished via the medium of space in which we are simultaneously enveloped but by an art object that singularly stands out like a rock in the sea. Jude Sutton goes on to discuss the work of Shakespeare and categorizes him as a Quattrocento writer embracing the suffering of man in a medium of a Stoic calm in the face of the storm. Stokes is a disciple of Melanie Klein’s but I can detect in this lecture the present of Freud and his principle of Ananke, or neccesity, looming over the hustle and bustle of life. I suppose my message is that love requires a considerable amount of Stoicism and if Art is like love than this means that our greatest artists should be at least Freudian Stoics if not Kantian Stoics.

Interviewer: Looking at your author page on Amazon and reading the first chapter of your book suggests that this novel is autobiographical. Is it?

Michael: Yes, there are some biographical events which lie behind some of the content but the work is a work of fiction. The drama and tragedy are not the focus but the medium for the message.

Interviewer: And what would you say is the message of the first book of the trilogy?

Michael: That life is a difficult business for most of us partly because of our divided human nature and partly because of the difficulty humans have in befriending one another in a philosophical spirit of fellowship. Our institutions seem to need a spirit of fellowship if they are to function as they should. Educational institutions try forlornly to address both the question of our questionable natures and our relation to our neighbours and other citizens but the attempt is not very impressive when one considers that it is more than two thousand years after the beginnings we were provided with by the Academy and the Lyceum.The spirit of fellowship, for example seems to me to be very rare in this world of ours but one encounters it occasionally.

Interviewer: Your characters mention several times throughout The World Explored that we read in order to know that we are not alone. Is this significant for the message of your trilogy?

Michael:Yes, we read, write and listen to music produced by exploring sufferers to know that we are not alone. There is something almost sublime in reading the words of the Great Philosophers. It a bit like a timeless eavesdropping at their study doors in Athens, Königsberg or Cambridge.

END

November 21, 2017June 11, 2018

The World Explored, the World Suffered: The Exeter lectures. The Centrepiece Lecture

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The World Explored, the World Suffered: The Exeter lectures is the first part of a trilogy and is a work of philosophical/ educational fiction(Published in November 2017). Its fictional component is composed of a middle-aged Romeo-Juliet drama which ends with two deaths in Venice and a youthful adventure that takes Robert, the narrator from trauma in South Africa to a teacher training institute in England where he discovers Philosophy and befriends an alcoholic lecturer who had once studied under Wittgenstein.
The educational component is composed of a series of lectures on the philosophy of religion, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, ethics, the philosophy of natural science, human science and mathematics, philosophical psychology, political science, philosophy of education. Three different lecturers deliver a series of lectures, the educational intention of which is to introduce the reader to the world of Philosophy and the world of Education seen through the eyes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant,Hegel, Marx, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Freud, William James, Wittgenstein Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau- Ponty, Arendt, Quine, Cavell, Paul Ricoeur, Brian O Shaughnessy, R. S. Peters, Paul Hirst, Peter Winch, Hudson, Adrian Stokes, T S Eliot, Julian Jaynes.
The book attempts to take the reader on a philosophical journey from curiosity to commitment and it is hoped that the trilogy will serve as a general introduction to Philosophy for all who are curious about the eternal Philosophical questions such as “What is the nature of Reality?” “Is God merely an idea in our minds?” “Is the soul a function of the body?” What is Justice?” “What is ethics?” “What is the role of Education in the life of the individual and society?”How should we characterize the feeling of the sublime?” “How shall we characterize the feeling of the beautiful?” “What properties do great works of Art possess?” What is the philosophical role of Psychoanalysis?” “How shall we philosophically characterize the role of language in our understanding of the world?” “What is the meaning of life?”

Life, for the central character and philosophical explorer of the book, Jude Sutton, was ebbing to its conclusion prematurely and his best friend Glynn Samuels, a religious Welsh follower of Heidegger, Freud and T S Eliot could do nothing but play the part of the spectator of a Greek, Shakespearean tragedy, watching the spectacle unfold to its inevitable conclusion. He could do nothing but express his admiration for his friend and his suffering at his friend’s misfortune in his lectures.

Below is the central lecture given by Glynn Samuels, the lecture has the same title as the book:

“Ladies and Gentlemen! How does man relate to the world? What is he that he is capable of posing a further question for every answer he gives himself? Why is the mind of man so restless? Thanks to science we know why the sea is restless. Indeed the behavior of all the other elements, earth, air, and fire have been captured in our observations and equations. Science in this very restless century has explored the outer regions of the heavens and the inner structures of the smallest particles in the Universe: particles that are invisible to the human eye. However, in a series of operations reminiscent of the unpacking of a sequence of embedded Russian dolls, it looks to me as if an inevitable limit has been encountered even for the eye equipped with various forms of microscopes and telescopes. If this is true, does this signal that we have come to a resting point in Science especially insofar as the exploration of the Natural physical world is concerned? Are we detecting a winding down of the activity that occupied the geniuses of Einstein and Bohr? Have the microscopes been packed and moved off to other kinds of laboratories for the study of other kinds of things? Will we now be eagerly awaiting the results from clinical laboratories whose experiments save lives? The Frontiers of Science may have been moved to Chemistry, Biology, Medicine and the Human Genome, but the methodology is the same. Penetrate the phenomenon, reduce it to its smallest components and measure these in a myriad of ways. What will the result of all this activity be, ladies and gentlemen? Will we find a gene that explains my tendency to eat porridge in the mornings or will I read a book one day that tells me that it has now been established that mankind uses all his genes in his choice and eating of porridge? Dr. Sutton in his lecture last year attempted to map out the transformations in our intellectual landscape brought about by Science. He reviewed the developments of science in this century and arrived at the conclusion that though we have only completed 70 years of the cycle, this century may well come to be known by historians as “the century of terror”, counting amongst its “happenings” two world wars and the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations. He asked the thought-provoking question: “on whom should we place our bets for the future: Einstein or Wittgenstein? I believe in that lecture he gave very cogent and persuasive arguments for believing that the processes of philosophical thinking are more to be trusted than the processes of scientific “thinking”. A colleague of Einstein once wondered what would have happened if Einstein had used his talents and genius to study the question “What is life?” as if he was to science what Christ was to Christianity. A famous psychologist who met Einstein at Princeton University thought there were contradictions in Einstein’s theories. There certainly appeared to be un- Christ-like practical contradictions in Einstein’s personal life. I am skeptical about the reasoning of Einstein’s colleague, ladies, and gentlemen because he was placing his faith in the science of Biology to investigate the gift of life. Biological investigations, I wish to maintain, need to be conducted holistically and philosophically, within an Aristotelian framework of Change: kinds of change, principles of change and causes of change. The concepts of matter and form, potentiality and actuality, the actualizing process, genus and species need to lift the level of reflection above the so-called “material causes” relating to why we choose to eat porridge in the morning. The question of the meaning of life, ladies and gentlemen, is a philosophical question, but it also a religious question. Even the great Einstein believed in Spinoza’s God: the God who ordered the world harmoniously in terms of principles and adequate ideas that man could theoretically understand. We heard in last year’s lecture that Wittgenstein too believed in God and the religious attitude, perhaps because he believed that no other attitude could bring peace to his restless soul. The sign of a great man, ladies and gentlemen may not be in the work that is immediately published, but rather in what happens to the entire history of thought once the published ideas have been assimilated, in our culture. Will these ideas still permit a judgment of the culture, a judgment urging necessary change? Dr. Sutton showed us how he himself through the work of Wittgenstein could understand Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and all British Philosophy in greater depth. He demonstrated that philosophical texts are not atoms or particles in the cultural world but something more akin to living, breathing beings working together to build and maintain our culture in accordance with holistic principles. Man is a curious being, ladies, and gentlemen: he has intuition, intuition for the connection of things and the relation of parts to a whole. He is, as Professor Heidegger so perceptively maintained: a being for whom his very being is an issue. Heidegger also believed that the philosophical issue of the nature of his own existence was being addressed by the poets and their writings. The poets’ words, ladies, and gentlemen are drawn up very carefully, and with great effort, from the well of suffering- not only the well of their own suffering but also the very deep well of the suffering of the world. To fully understand the cathartic effect of the poet’s words we may need to recall Dr. Sutton’s lecture which referred to the Copernican Revolution of the work of the later Wittgenstein which in his words “shed the philosophical light of the sun on the role of language in our understanding of the world and each other.” T. S. Eliot had the following to say about some cathartic uses of language: “…..Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden Under the tension, slip, slide, perish Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place Will not stay still. Shrieking voices Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering Always assail them. The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation The crying shadow in the funeral dance The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.” You may guess to whom these shrieking voices belong. Partly, to the manipulators of our diminishing dolls whose language has been atomized to the point at which one no longer cares for humanity in the way the religious man, the poet or the philosopher care. Consequences are not arguments, ladies and gentlemen. The consequences of medical science are indeed valuable but it is important to note that they are the result of the deep cultural process, which, in spite of the scientific method, inhabits the habitats of the universities. In relation to this deep cultural process we intuit the purpose of engaging in the search for knowledge for the sake of knowledge. We do not seek knowledge because it pays or gives us something. Restless eyes look for payment, for reward. These are not the eyes searching through the pages of books fighting the good fight that Eliot referred to in East Coker of the Four Quartets: “The fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again.” There is hostility in restless eyes searching for a reward. An ancient religion and these restless explorers par excellence may have played a role in the Crucifixion of Christ. The restless eyes and minds of this century, ladies and gentlemen are engaged on the project of culturally crucifying religion and everything spiritual. We are, as Aristotle said, ladies and gentlemen, social beings, we absorb language and attitudes: like impressionable children. There is no longer any “easy commerce of the old and the new” to quote Eliot again. We have learned from Wittgenstein’s Philosophy that two of the essential characteristics of language are its Communication and Truth functions. Heidegger, in an essay entitled “The Work of Art” talks about how artworks can be revelatory of the world we are attempting to understand. The poet is conceived as an artist using words in a world revelatory manner. He is searching for the moods of the restless sea, the moods of the restless world. The world of Eliot was measured by a time older than chronometers, the time of a tolling bell of an untethered sea buoy responding to the swell of an infinitely restless sea. Who of you believe that this phenomenon can be caught in the torn nets of science being sewn together by the wives of old mariners who have missed the morning watch whilst the mariners themselves are searching the sea for what is inside of themselves or nowhere. Religion is world revelatory, ladies and gentlemen, it shows itself both in the commerce of the world and in the explanations and justifications of the most important aspects of this commerce. The world is laden with hidden values that reveal themselves, if and only if, one learns to look in the right way and with the right attitude. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is revealed or brought from concealment. Heidegger uses the term aletheia for this process. Truth begins with the Transcendental Aesthetic of the poet in his rendering of the spirit of place in the rhythms of time. It flourishes further in a Transcendental Logic of the categories of existence revealed in language. In the sea of meaning out of which the island of truth arises we find castaway life forms living in flux. Religious truth, ladies and gentlemen interprets life holistically. It can see a handful of dust particles without fear and trembling. It can calmly survey the end of the world of things. It can ask coolly and clinically “Is this handful of dust a part of the corpse we buried so long ago?” The religious eye is not afraid to dwell in the pages of old manuscripts and is not afraid to lift its eyes to the heavens and celebrate the divine in the human. It is not afraid to embrace humanity as a whole. In the beginning this embrace was carefree but time has taught us a lesson: that Care is tinged with the mourning for aged lost friends and relatives, ancient forms of life and forms of thought. Or if one wishes to change the key of this sung lament from Heidegger to Freud, the ego has a heart of darkness within, a heart composed of the memories of lost objects of the past. No one can live during this period, during this century, and not feel transformative processes shaping our world into something we know not what. Aristotle believed that every human process aimed at the good but this terrible century has allowed the skeptic to flourish. Where will it all end? In Eliot’s rose garden or in Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, or perhaps in Eliot’s waste land, where the cultural attitude will be shared by a few lost souls whose eyes will never dare to meet lest shared sorrow about lost values releases an infinite flood of tears, making life impossible. In the agony of such existence what comfort can there be other than in Religion, Philosophy, Music and Poetry?”

There are two more lectures in his series of three lectures on the themes of exploring and suffering. These lectures complement the exploratory lectures of Jude Sutton who is sublimating his suffering with alcohol and what it allows to rise to the surface from the depths of his losses.

The book is available at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

If you wish to peruse the lectures which figure in the following two volumes of the trilogy, you can do so via my blog situated at:

http://www.michaelrdjames.org

My author page is at :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B077JVNXCV and at

http:/www.amazon.com/author/mrdj

Michael R D James

October 5, 2017October 8, 2018

Immanuel Kant and the History of Psychology(Brett and Peters)

Visits: 25879

Kant’s Philosophy divides neatly into the two realms of the natural world and the ethical world and although the discipline of Psychology was only to officially announce its declaration of unilateral independence in 1870, the move toward separation may have begun with the Kantian Copernican revolution and the thinkers that reflected upon Kant’s Philosophy. Kant leveled such devastating criticism against metaphysics that of the three ideas of reason: God, Freedom, and the Soul, only Freedom survived his onslaught. The idea of God becomes dependent upon the idea of Freedom and the Soul disappears in favour of the concept of self-consciousness whose essential nature is defined by an act of the “I think”. But immediately that is said one has to also recognize that Kant believes that there are two kinds of selves operating in the arena of philosophical reflection, firstly, a noumenal self which is presupposed by experience but which can only be known in a segment of that experience: namely, moral action. Secondly, in Kant’s theoretical writings the natural sciences are then linked to the phenomenal self which post Kantian epistemologists and scientists attempted to study as part of their reflections on the nature of this divided subject.There are two levels of description involved in this latter theoretical project, namely empirical description and mathematical description which rely on the observational method of science and the logical method of mathematics.

In his earlier work, Kant was a rationalist and believed in the soul until encountering the work of Hume who astutely pointed out that whenever we reflect upon our experience we never encounter a self or a soul but only a phenomenon, for example, someone experiencing something or someone doing something. This self, Kant argued, can be studied empirically by psychology, or what he called Anthropology, under the heading of “what man makes of himself”. Some critics have accused Kant of constructing a Psychology without a soul but that does not seem to be a just accusation. Kant is merely claiming that the soul is an idea in consciousness which can never be given in experience because this idea is equivalent either to the substratum or the totality of experience. Kant was with this complex move the first philosopher to systematically recognize the limits of metaphysical thinking.

Psychology, or Anthropology, as Kant would prefer to call it is wholly empirical but it could never be a science Kant argued because mental phenomena are in the flux of time and therefore incapable of measurement. Given the Copernican revolution and the conviction that knowledge is not solely the product of ideas which arise out of experience but is rather a structure regulated by the minds own activities, we can see how self-consciousness is a holistic idea with its own essential unity. The mind of the self is, Kant, argued made up of a receptive component which receives sensations from the outer world but even here there is a structuring activity of the mind present in the form of space and time which are a priori “forms of intuition” as Kant called them. The actual contents of the mind are as Aristotle would have argued, complex products of formed experience: there is no pure experience of pure matter coming from the outside proceeding inwards. Whatever comes from the external world will be shaped at the very least by the structuring features of space and time. Space and time were not acts of reason but rather capacities of the receptive part of the mind which Kant calls Sensibility. The mind is in fact divided into three “regions” sometimes called “faculties”(but not as far as I can remember, by Kant): Sensibility being the psychological part of the mind most connected to the body and through the body the external world, Understanding operates as a further shaping agency of the mind and is defined as a system of categories which assist in the forming of logical judgments that firstly, relate principally to the totality of experience and secondarily to the substrate(space and time and sensation). These categories are products of a thinking consciousness(“I think”) and “are the necessary and only forms of all thinking”. This region of the mind is that which generates the truth function capacity of the mind and is still related to experience but in ways which are convoluted and partly psychological (via the shaping operation of Sensibility). It is this truth-functional region of the mind which has a necessary connection to sensibility by placing it under its sovereignty: to such an extent that when I see lightning strike a tree at a particular place and a particular time I inevitably think “It is true that the tree is being struck by lightning”. Notice that this is not a necessary logical truth of the kind “Every time trees are struck by lightning we think that it is a fact that they are struck by lightning.” Obviously, the sensible/psychological part of the mind can dominate this environmental transaction by producing a fearful trembling or a fearful emotional response, which of course is a less rational response and that at first might seem as if it damages the universal case for seeing the world under the aspect of the true. Yet it does not do so for truth is a normative concept which basically amounts to claiming that one ought to see this under the aspect of the truth or to take another essence specifying example, “one ought to tell the truth when you promise to do so at a trial”. The concepts of promise and truth are logically intertwined. What does normative mean in this context? Only that we ought to view the scene under the aspect of the truth which obviously does not imply that I am doing so or will do so. The fearful emotional response might even have a representational content–a picture of an angry God, and if this is so this testifies to the presence of the synthesis of the imagination operating upon the content of sensory experiences. The imagination is named so because it works in the realm of images. Truth from the perspective of theoretical reason is, according to Kant the concern of natural science in its attempt to explain events in the natural world. The categories are thought to be a set of synthetic apriori judgments which constitute science. There are quantitative judgments that connect events and things in terms of mathematical unity plurality and totality or number which is connected in not easily expressible relations to time and space. There are dynamic judgments or ways of thinking that relate to the existence of objects, their reality, negation, and the limitation of a reality combined with the possible criticism of a negation. Relational and modality judgments more clearly than the other categories of thought take us into the realm of metaphysics and this confirms Kant’s commitment to the belief that metaphysics is a science but it also covers the principle of causation which is so important for organizing judgments of experience and scientific theory. Nature is defined as “the whole object of possible experiences”.Judgments of experience are objective and deal with the necessary and categorical connection between things and events in contradistinction to judgments of perception where the connections are subjectively yet logically contained in the thinking subject. The difference between objective and subjective being the difference between the perceptions and intuitions organized by the concepts of the understanding or not. “The room is warm” “I was frightened by the lightning” would be examples of subjective judgments of perception. There is here no expectation “that I or any other person shall always find it as I do now”. These judgments do not intend an objective reference but only the connection of two sensations in me. In the judgment of experience, I connect my perceptions or intuitions in consciousness in a general categorical way such that the connection is valid in general for any being using their consciousness in this manner. Perception becomes experience by the subsumption of that perception under a concept of the understanding and by the concept is meant the category which determines the form of judging that is to be used by the judging consciousness to determine or understand the “form of the perception or intuition. These concepts of the understanding are then transformed in the thinking process into judgments and there is a table of 12 of these ranging from singular, particular subjective judgments up to the categorical and apodeictic. Now here is the important conclusion that should be drawn from this discussion of natural science: Anthropology or Psychology can never become a Science because a science must be mathematical. Mathematics belongs principally in the domain of the category of the quantitative which requires a quantitative standard that could operate on the material it is applied to. Kant is clear that the part of consciousness which belongs to the realm of thought is not the kind of material that can be measured quantitatively or ordered in mathematical relations. Thought functions in the domain of reality,

Now here is the important conclusion that should be drawn from this discussion of natural science: Anthropology or Psychology can never become a Science because a science must be mathematical. Mathematics belongs principally in the domain of the category of the quantitative which requires a quantitative standard that could operate on the material it is applied to. Kant is clear that the part of consciousness which belongs to the realm of thought is not the kind of material that can be measured quantitatively or ordered in mathematical relations. Thought functions in the domain of reality, negation and limitation, (thinking something about something). It can have conditions and so the category of causal conditions may certainly be relevant in explaining how particular thoughts or kinds of thought come to be but this relates more to the substrate of thought than to outlining the totality of relevant conditions. The “I think” implies that I think something but it probably also implies some notion of self-consciousness which raises the thinking above that of the psychological realm of sensibility and its organizer, imagination. Thinking, that is, occurs at the fully mental realm of understanding and reason. Psychological states of consciousness are continuous and can be objectified by breaking the continuity into discrete units but self-consciousness is intentional and has a logical relation to the truth. O’Shaughnessy has the following to say on this important point:

“Self awareness necessitates awareness of truth. Thus, a child who regularly makes the sound “hungry” as a way of getting food, only thereby manifests self-consciousness and knowledge of the fact of its hunger, when it knows the sense of “I am hungry”, which consists in knowing it is true that he is hungry. Indeed, for any thinking language user to know any proposition is true, is for it to know that “P” is true. Self-consciousness requires that all knowledge, including that of the inner world, be for the self-conscious creature under the aspect of truth.”(Consciousness and the world)

O Shaughnessy continues to make another important point, namely that self-consciousness is only one, though perhaps the most fundamental of a circle of properties which constitute consciousness.

This dovetails neatly with the claim that Kant makes in the Anthropology, namely that when the child learns to use the word “I” correctly there is a dawning of a new kind of awareness of the world.

Now the criticism that Brett levels at Kant is the following: Kant’s outlook was limited to the operations of reason. This is not an appropriate criticism given the fact that Kant sees three different aspects of the mind namely sensibility, understanding and reason and as can be seen from the argument above the categories are clearly functions of an understanding consciousness. Brett further goes on to argue that Kant thought that the higher powers of reason are the sole organizers of conscious life. Kant stands accused of ignoring the lower operations of consciousness, the sensible/imaginative psychological operations of the mind, but it is clear that this too is not a valid argument. Kant quite specifically argued in his work “Anthropology” that the senses are not in any way an inferior form of consciousness but on the contrary are analogous to the people in a state who are ruled by a government who can affect the people but that in turn the government can be affected by the collective will of the people. In the second book of the Anthropology Kant discusses feelings which are in one sense inhibitors of reason(high levels of anxiety can, we all know, inhibit the learning process), but in another sense the feelings of pleasure and pain can be united by the understanding to the ideas of good and evil and so “produce a quickening of the will”. This is quite aside from the positive contribution of aesthetic forms of consciousness to the leading of a flourishing life with a happy outlook onto a boundless future. Indeed the psychological sensible aspect of consciousness becomes even more manifest when Kant takes up the way in which consciousness practically reasons about the ethical decisions that are taken in life. For it is here that the self as noumenon, as a metaphysical thing in itself is revealed as bearer of the form of consciousness most defining of our human nature, namely the ethical form of consciousness which he then contrasts with what he regards as the empirical theories of Psychology which one could as well retrieve from the pages of novelists such as Fielding. This historically served as a challenge to future psychologists who were preparing the ground for a science of behavior which would become a source of knowledge about man. It was clear to Kant that moral action was sustained by a particular kind of reason for acting that should be characterized in terms of the universality and necessity of the maxims or principles one had for one’s action. These cannot be of the kind: “Whenever lightning strikes trees I am frightened ” because according to Kant that would fall under the heading of something that happens to man rather than the heading of what man intentionally and self consciously does. Intermediate between emotional responses and moral action fall instrumental actions on principles of happiness and practical reasoning, e.g. “Accumulating money makes me happy therefore I will take every opportunity to accumulate as much money as possible by any means possible”. This according to Kant is the principle of self-love in disguise and if it involves using people as a means to an end without according them the dignity one owes to them, then it is clearly neither universal nor necessary but a product of the sensible region of the mind responding in accordance with the category of causation to cause events which result in the accumulation of money. That is, this behaviour quite rightly falls into the domain of the scientific, in virtue of the means-ends relation being cause-effect relations, and may be quantifiable. One should in this context of the quantification of action, however, remember ancient Greek warnings to the effect that feeding one’s desires merely creates a desire for more and this hardly seems a mathematical relation.

Indeed the psychological sensible aspect of consciousness becomes even more manifest when Kant takes up the way in which consciousness practically reasons about the ethical decisions that are taken in life. For it is here that the self as noumenon, as a metaphysical thing in itself is revealed as bearer of the form of consciousness most defining of our human nature, namely the ethical form of consciousness which he then contrasts with what he regards as the empirical theories of Psychology that one could as well retrieve from the pages of novelists such as Fielding. This historically served as a challenge to future psychologists who were preparing the ground for a science of behavior which would become a source of knowledge about man. It was clear to Kant that moral action was sustained by a particular kind of reason for acting that should be characterized in terms of the universality and necessity of the maxims or principles one had for one’s action. These cannot be of the kind: “Whenever lightning strikes trees I am frightened ” because according to Kant that would fall under the heading of something that happens to man rather than the heading of what man intentionally and self consciously does. Intermediate between emotional responses and moral action fall instrumental actions in accordance with principles of happiness and practical reasoning, e.g. “Accumulating money makes me happy therefore I will take every opportunity to accumulate as much money as possible by any means possible”. This according to Kant is the principle of self-love in disguise and if it involves using people as a means to an end without according them the dignity one owes to them, then it is clearly neither universal nor necessary but a product of the sensible region of the mind responding in accordance with the category of causation to cause events which result in the accumulation of money. That is, this behaviour quite rightly falls into the domain of the scientific, in virtue of the means-ends relation being cause-effect relations, and may as a consequence be quantifiable. One should in this context of the quantification of action, however, remember ancient Greek warnings to the effect that feeding one’s desires merely creates a desire for more and this hardly seems a mathematical relation.

Moral action reveals the self as a thing itself with causa sui properties, i.e. the self-causes itself to think and act morally and this occurs in the realm of the noumenal and in the realm of what some analytic philosophers would call the ought-system of concepts. What one does is what one ought to do and what one actively does not do one does because that is what one ought to do. It is in this context that one demonstrates ones freedom from being externally caused to do what one does in contrast to internally and freely choosing to do what one ought to do or ought not to do. The good will is the free will. The good is what one ought to do. I ought not to accumulate money using people in an undignified manner to achieve the end of accumulating capital. This is the maxim of my not doing what my desire tempts me or causes me to consider doing. According to Brett this falls in the realm of the prescriptive in contrast to the realm of descriptive whose task is to describe what I, in fact, do, perhaps in accordance with the principle of causation. In this latter case, the reality of what it is possible to do falls on a continuum of possible action and encourages talk of efficiency and the causal framework which accompanies it. Here it might be possible to measure degrees of efficiency in a similar way to hitting the outer ring of a target with one’s bow and arrow The rings of a target seem to measure the efficiency of an attempt to hit the bullseye. Emotional responses can also be measured scientifically when the issue is a standard which the body is measured by, e.g. one’s pulse rate: the lightning hits the tree and my pulse rate goes up to 150. The object of the emotion can also be related to this. Lightning sends my pulse up to 150 whereas watching an exciting rugby match only increases my pulse to 120. We need both a constant variable and a comparison object if knowledge is to be generated in such a context. But there is no continuum of experience from the first person perspective in deciding whether or not to steal someone’s money, ergo there can be nothing mathematical ergo, according to Kant, this realm of the mental cannot be the object of science. Now the normal scientific response to this is to claim that only the descriptive third-person perspective is objective and everything from the first person perspective–the perspective of the “I” is subjective. In a sense this is true but in a sense this response ignores the logic of the condition and unconditioned. The self is both the condition and in itself unconditioned(being causa sui, cause of itself) of self-consciousness. This logical requirement is the metaphysical basis of freedom. This is reflected in the Kantian rejection of the appeal to descriptive concepts in the relativisation of morality in which, for example, it is claimed that because Jack broke his promise to Jill to pay the money he owed her, this is sufficient grounds to question the universality and necessity of the moral duty that we ought to keep our promises. This type of reasoning confuses the realm of descriptive discourse with the realm of prescriptive discourse. “Promises ought to be kept” is the norm or prescription by which to measure how to judge what happens when Jack fails to keep his promise just as when someone murders someone at a bus stop we do not claim that this jeopardises the universality and necessity of the law “We ought not to murder”. Of course as Kant maintained we can characterise one and the same action from both the point of view of practical reasoning and the principle of freedom(the first person perspective) and the view of theoretical reasoning, namely the principle of causality or determinism, the descriptive (the third person perspective) but it is important to realise that this is merely the expression of the old Delphic prophecy that it is difficult if not impossible to know oneself.

September 7, 2017September 30, 2019

PISA and the limitations of measuring the abstract operations of the mind

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Pisa is an international school assessment system run by the OECD, an organization whose primary interest is the economic development of countries. It is administered to 15-year-olds in the areas of Maths Science and reading skills. Many countries believe this to be a significant measuring instrument of how well one’s whole school system is performing, including, incorrectly in my opinion, at Gymnasium level. Swedens performance until recently has been deteriorating in relation to other countries but in other international tests in the area of the social sciences, Sweden has maintained its relatively high ranking. This raises two questions. Why the difference in performance in the social sciences? Are the assessments in the PISA tests valid indicators of levels of knowledge or are they more focussed on a collection of high-level skills? I ask this latter question because of Germany’s experience of also falling in the rankings of PISA and receiving criticism as a result which demanded the restructuring of their school system. Germany refused this analysis and mysteriously rose in the rankings a few years later. What happened? Well, apparently they taught their students how to take the PISA tests. A process which did not take very long and produced the desired results. This confirms my conviction that PISA is assessing high-level skills and not abstract knowledge. I do not for one moment deny that there are problems with the educational systems all over the world because of the global educational reform movement(GERM) but PISA is a distraction, forcing us to talk about the symptoms and not the cause of the problems. In my opinion Finland’s educational system has been the least affected by GERM(but, they may be showing signs of infection in their latest school reform package). Conversations with Finnish people about why Finland do so well in the PISA tests emphasize the principle that the system is very good at detecting weak pupils very early and providing them with very qualified assistance. Also pupils with high levels of abstract knowledge, as a matter of fact, find it easier to perform well on concrete high-level skills so, this might be the case with both German and Finnish students. I find it very interesting that PISA does not attempt to test in the humanistic/social sciences areas because it is in these domains that one can most clearly see the difference between high-level concrete skills and abstract knowledge. It is also interesting that the test is administered to 15 year olds and not to older Gymnasium students where of course this distinction between abstract and concrete operations is more evident. PISA has responded to the criticisms of their reading tests as being too- skills oriented, too concrete, with a document that promises more complex scenario based texts for the 2018 tests which will be testing comprehension of more general themes. We will see if they manage to test abstract logical skills in this humanistic area. I believe this argument above supports my general thesis that what is problematic in the Swedish gymnasium is a lack of the development of abstract operations in the humanities subjects This would explain the experience of university lecturers in the humanities who are asked by the students for more and more help with their assignments.

But why the difference in performance in the non-Pisa tests for the Swedish “grundskola” pupils? I am investigating this but one possible avenue of exploration is that the high-level concrete skills of these non-PISA tests are more suited to the kind of high-level concrete skills which are taught in the Swedish Grundskol.

February 12, 2017June 12, 2018

When Humanistic voices fall silent(Philosophy of Education)

Visits: 732

Recent changes to the Swedish Gymnasium School Curriculum indicate that politicians are succumbing to a number of different non-educational agendas to change what is taught and the way it is taught in schools. In the last two rounds of changes we saw the disappearance of Philosophy from 2 of the national curricula for the Gymnasium school.

We have also seen a very determined commitment via legislation to the introduce “scientific” research into schools. This determination is matched by a curious ambiguity as to exactly what constitutes “scientific” research. John Hattie’s work is mentioned in several contexts in the communications of Skolverket(The Swedish National School Authority) and if this kind of approach to education is what is meant we may be witnessing a paradigm shift of significant seismic proportions in the Swedish schools’ system.

This is all the more interesting in that there is another even more radical paradigm shift occurring in the Finnish Educational system. The Finnish authorities are experimenting with thematic or what they call “phenomenon” teaching. According to Siv Saarukka, a Finnish expert in this field, the Finnish authorities have been very influenced by a work, “The Fifth Discipline” written by a “popular” expert in the management of learning organisations, Peter Senge. This is an amazing revelation from a country that is very near the top of the Pisa(OECD-inspired) world school system rankings. This surprise ranks with that of the management consultancy report commissioned in England around 2000 in which the language used in the report to talk about teachers was no longer humanistic as it had traditionally been for well over a century. The language rather was associated with a psychology of business which drew upon the practices of the business world that revolved around business processes, products and productivity. The final estimate of the damage caused to the English educational system from this report by the consultancy firm (HayMcBer), has yet to be estimated. We do know that the report cost the British taxpayer 4 million pounds. “The Fifth Discipline” is a book written very much in the spirit of Hay/McBer’s report and is as completely devoid of the rigour of academic and philosophical argument as is all “popular” literature of this kind.

Perhaps, in their favour, the Swedish authorities can be admired for resisting the temptation toward populism which is currently causing problems on a global scale. Science is at least an academic pursuit, it might be argued. Let us try to put this Swedish strategy into some kind of context. In the 1920’s,1930’s, and 40’s in England Europe and the USA, Science spawned the Philosophical movement we call “logical positivism”. Logical positivism suddenly disappeared after the war as a movement although, to this day there is no doubt the odd positivist tucked away in some academic corridor or other. Logical positivism was very quickly construed by even its supporters as an anti-humanistic movement and English positivists like A J Ayer admitted that the position was untenable under considerable academic pressure.

After the second world war, there were also a number of commentators who felt that it was largely the absence of a sufficiently strong humanistic influence in educational programs which allowed global totalitarian forces to be unleashed earlier in the century. This discussion led to an academic revival of Humanistic Liberalism in English Universities in the 1960’s and 1970’s which began to talk in earnest about Education. Teaching certificates were supplemented with B.ed degrees and many such degrees had Humanistic Philosophy of Education components which viewed Science, Scientific Psychology, and Psycho-metrics as of peripheral concern to educators. During this discussion, out of which the International Baccalaureate program was born, it was acknowledged that the heavy emphasis on Scientific subjects in Europe at the expense of the Humanistic subjects in the German and Russian educational curricula were responsible firstly, for the absence of humanistic attitudes in many of the more disturbing events of the second world war and secondly, perhaps the absence of humanistic attitudes also played a part in the intransigence of the parties involved in the cold war and the threat of a nuclear holocaust. In the light of this, it is also, to say the least, not surprizing to find Sweden wishing to combat populism by trying to make schools more academic but it is surprizing to find Sweden wishing to follow the route that Germany and Russia once followed in the dark days of the last century. It is not being maintained that Science is not an important part of our lives. What is being maintained is that(according to Richard Pring in his essay “Education as a moral practice”) there are two narratives that define the dialogue that is taking place in the classroom between the teacher and the pupils. The one dialogue is the historical one that has taken place in all subjects, including the sciences, where voices firstly, join each other in a historical chorus over time and in agreement over important issues and secondly, where voices engage in scholarly yet friendly criticism of important ideas which might be mistaken. The second dialogue is that between the teacher as the representative of these historical voices and the pupils who are deciding whether or not to enter into the cultural arena in which voices of all ages have talked about almost everything it is possible to imagine. The pupil, of course, must be met on common ground but the moral message of this second narrative is to initiate the pupil into the “Holy”(R S Peters) cultural arena where it is realized how fragile our civilization is: how it might rest upon this kind of educational dialogue. When humanistic voices fall silent, ways of life are lost and tigers and lions enter the arena. To think that Science alone can hinder the fragmentation or atomization of our society is dangerously naive. Experimentation has its place in those fields which can be neatly divided into variables which can be measured. But how do we measure a desire to kill Jews? In the same way I suppose as you measure anything else. The Nazi’s were famous for strictly measuring and keeping meticulous records of their measurements. Is this anything else than distasteful, even if historians will be able to, in their turn, use this documentation for a narrative which very few of us will read with pleasure. Since I have mentioned business and its “populist” character let me consider an epistemological rather than an ethical objection to Science rampaging over our educational field. There is a famous business experiment done in a factory in which management consultants were let loose in an environment where productivity was very low. After much analysis and observation it was decided that the lighting was too bright and should be reduced. Expectations ran high in the experimental group and the productivity miraculously increased. A triumph for science and business! Alas it was not too long before productivity went down again and the gurus were called back in. After analysis and observations it was decided that the lighting was too bright and it was reduced. Productivity increased! Is this an argument that light is not an independent variable? Mayo tended to explain the result in terms of human association and human variables which are notoriously difficult to manipulate and measure. Experienced humanistic teachers will point to how the two above mentioned pedagogical narratives naturally produce an expectation that the subjects or pupils will curiously follow and appreciate the respective dialogues. I use the term “naturally” because were the teacher to instrumentally use this fact about pupils expectations causally to produce a calculated effect, this will be humanistically an example of doing the right thing for the wrong “reason”.

The National School Authority also talk of “established practice” as another possible means by which to achieve the sought-for academic environment. No one really knows what this means. If it means what I have referred to above as humanistic practice then it is about time that the National Schools authority came out and clarified the confusion over this issue. It would also greatly enhance the strength of the humanistic voice if Philosophy was returned to its rightful place in every curriculum.

Category: Philosophy of Education

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