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 15,16 and 17: Locke

Locke is regarded as one of the founding fathers of America in virtue of the fact that Jefferson incorporated his ideas into the American constitution: “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is a modification of Locke’s claim that man has a natural right to life, liberty and the possession of his estate(property). The basis of this latter claim is a belief in natural law theory that regards man as a product of divine workmanship in possession of a body which no one can own(because it belongs to God?). Even the products of the body, mans work, cannot be owned by anyone other than himself but they can perhaps be sold and rented with his consent. Smith argues that Locke combines Christian ideas with those of Stoicism. But it is the ownership of our body which generates the rights to it and its work and this is an idea that may actually be taken from some other source. Value, Locke argues, is generated by our work. The value of an apple is largely constituted of the labour involved in growing the tree and nurturing it and then finally picking the apple and whatever is done with the apple before it is bought and eaten. Professor Smith elaborates upon this point:

“The Natural Law dictates a right to private property and it is to secure this right that governments are ultimately established..”The World was created in order to be cultivated and improved.”(Locke) “God gave the world to man in common…for our convenience”(Locke). He gave it for the use of the industrious and the rational and not to the fanciful and covetous, or the quarrelsome and contentious” Locke seems to be suggesting that the state will be a commercial state or Republic. Plato and Aristotle in many ways considered commerce to be of subordinate importance in the life of the citizen. Plato would have instituted a kind of communism for a part of the populace, the guardians of the Callipolis. Economics was always subordinate to the Polity. Locke turns this doctrine on its head.”

I don’t know when and why the apple became the Biblical symbol of knowledge but Plato’s Republic is an ode to the hypothetical state that is built on the foundations of knowledge. The Greeks of this time and we may suppose Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle among them considered the earning of money to be a secondary art necessary for the maintenance of the private household(oikonomous). The Primary art was connected to areté and the doing of the right thing at the right time in the right way and this was the standard man was measured against in the public realm. He could be a pauper and wander the streets barefoot but if he fought bravely in defense of his polis and did philosophy in the marketplace he was subjected to the standards of the primary art and judged thereafter(Socrates). One’s life might be at stake but that was why a man needed to know himself if he was to end his life prematurely in dignity. Attending to one’s body for no other reason than it is one’s body would have struck these philosophers as narcissistic. Claiming that the origin of value lies in our bodies would have been considered egotistical. It was this vision of life in the Greek state that Locke was attempting to overturn.
One wonders whether what we are reading here is Hobbesian, whether what we are witnessing with these two Philosophers was the logical consequence of the Reformation and the proposal of a Protestant work ethic as a central concern of the emerging middle class(the bourgeoisie). Hobbes and Locke arrived at their respective positions from radically different starting points, Hobbes from a scientific perspective which would regard the body as a mere machine running on the fuel of pride and fear, and Locke from a religious natural law perspective in which ones body is one’s temple because it housed God and was created by him. This was what Jefferson presumably was thinking of too when he claimed that we were all created by God with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is a poorly kept secret that natural law theory cannot generate an acceptable idea of the common good logically located in the domain of ought judgments: the good is what we ought to bring about(in the right way, at the right time). The domain of the good is the domain of prescriptive judgments. Natural law theory focuses on how things are and makes an inexplicable leap into the domain of the prescriptive via an action which it can only characterize descriptively. Yet it is action characterized prescriptively that should be the major premise of an argument which has an ought as a conclusion.

The major puzzle with Locke’s position is how he begins his reasoning in the realm of natural law and religion and ends in the domain of the polis, in the domain of the government which is the institution whose reasoning always begins with an ought major premise: for example, the people ought to know, the people ought to be free, the people ought to be treated equally. Smith articulates this transitional step elegantly in terms of the idea of the origin of value:

“For him, the world belongs to the industrious and the rational who through their labour and work increase the plenty for all. It is but a short step from Locke to Adam Smith(a century later). There are no natural limits on property acquisition. The introduction of money makes capital accumulation not merely possible but a kind of moral duty. By enrichening ourselves we unintentionally work for the benefit of others. Labour, not human nature becomes the source of all value.”

There seem to be two sides to the fence of commerce. On the one side is the working man renting out his body and skills, and on the other, there is the man of commerce from the middle class who owns the capital and the means of production and it is clear from Smiths next quote which side of the fence Locke is on:

“Commerce softens manners and makes us less warlike, it does not require us to spill blood or risk life–it is a thoroughly middle-class pursuit. The task of government is to protect not just the right to property but the right to acquire and build upon the property we already own.”

Smith portrays Locke as a libertarian who demands the government serves an almost entrepreneurial role. Without government, given the fact that man is this property acquiring animal, there is no property, and nature is available for all to do with what they will. In such circumstances, disputes arise and the government’s role is to set up an apparatus whose purpose it is to resolve such disputes:

“The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealth is the protection of their property.”(Locke Two Treatises of Government)

For Locke, it is not the war of all against all in the state of nature that leads to the social contract with the government. It is rather the state of affairs of the restlessness of the human spirit and the haphazardness of social events where expectations are continually flouted, that demands an organizing agency. The contract is between the middle class and the government as if the upper and working class had disappeared into thin air or had been absorbed by the middle class. Given Arendt’s analysis of the Origins of Totalitarianism and her reference to mass movements emerging from the organization of mobs, one can wonder whether this idea of classes absorbing other classes was truly the beginning of the dismantling of the idea of an authority which would use knowledge and phronesis to rule. The social contract did not seem to have any paragraph pertaining to the right to education or the right to be led by educated leaders. Arendt pointed to the risks of a tyrannical rule when the political party system representing the interests of various classes collapses and a mass movement takes its place. Locke is traditionally regarded as in favour of a commercially founded meritocracy that largely governs itself, looking to government for legislation to regulate commerce and crime and provide a peaceful environment for business activity. He either uses or abuses(depending upon one’s view) an Aristotelian assumption relating to the advantages of “the many” in the process of decision making of all kinds. A feast in which many contribute is superior to the feast arranged by one cook argues Aristotle at a time when a 500 citizen jury had relatively recently sentenced Socrates to death and was waiting in the wings to try any other Philosopher who dared to challenge the comfortable relationship between the state and the gods. Could Aristotle see through current events to a time when there would be supporting procedures and practices which would minimize miscarriages of justice? Could he see through current events to a time when philosophical argumentation integrated into educational systems would produce a middle class that would via the Lockean mechanism of the consent of the majority ensure stable and enduring government? Without these Aristotelian institutions and assumptions, Lockean consent of the majority could just as well refer to the mass movements of the 20th century which helped produce two world wars, the use of weapons of mass destruction and a cold war in one “terrible century”(Arendt)

Professor Smith discusses this issue in relation to Lincoln on the slave issue:

“Lincoln felt that the doctrine of consent did not constitute a blank cheque, rather it implied a set of moral limits or restraints on what a people might consent to. Consent was inconsistent with slavery because no one can rule another without that others consent (Informed consent or rational consent?) We have seen throughout history popular majorities choose by will, whim, and arbitrary passion and we do not approve. There must be moral restraints on what majorities can consent to–otherwise what is to prevent a majority from acting despotically?”

Locke’s notion of consent is obviously tied up with his conception of the social contract and this raises the question of how this consent arose, or, in other words, at which point in a citizens life is consent to the current regime given? Being born in a country is not sufficient, according to Locke, to create the consent and subsequent allegiance to the regime of the country one is born into. Smith argues the following:

“It is only when the child reaches the age of discretion, 18, or 21, that they are obligated to choose through some sign or mark of agreement to accept the authority of government. Locke, however, is not altogether clear about how such a sign or mark is to be given. One suspects that from what he is saying that he is referring to some sort of oath or pledge of allegiance so that once you have given your promise, word, or agreement, you are perpetually and indispensably obligated to that state.”

Locke does not commit himself to the above concrete manifestation of consent. Instead, he maintains that a concept of “tacit consent” is operating, a concept similar to but different from that embraced by Socrates in the dialogue”Crito”. For Socrates protection under the law suffices to owe allegiance to the law. For Locke, if you enjoy the protection of the law for a sustained period of time and your property is secure this is tacit agreement and is sufficient to constitute the social contract between yourself and the state. There is still, however, some ambiguity as to exactly when this moment of constitution arrives.

In line with empirical skepticism, Locke affirms the risk of being devoured by the Hobbesian Lion of the sovereign who will inevitably become licentious because he is not subject to the law and this requires an organization of the government in terms of a principle of a separation of the executive and legislative powers. This measure introduces a failsafe mechanism into the system of government, i.e. provides insurance against tyrannical rule. The executive power is there, argues Locke, merely to carry out the will of the legislative authority. Smith points out a strength in the Lockean account insofar as the occurrence of special emergency circumstances require swift action which the legislative authority with all its emphasis on “due process” is incapable of. In such circumstances, the executive branch of the government through so-called prerogative powers can suspend for example habeas corpus and even take the country to war. The people, in turn, can deem these actions to be a breach of the contract and begin a revolution as an “appeal to heaven”, which presumably means as part of an appeal to the divine legislative system which governs natural law.

Smith points out that many commentators including Louis Hartz

“have complained of America’s irrational Lockeanism, its closed commitment to Lockean principles. Why has there not been any socialism in the USA, no Labour or workers party?—because of the commitment to Locke Hartz argued.”

In the same spirit Smith refers to Rawls’ book “A Theory of Justice” in which Rawls opposes the Lockean Body/property principle with a principle derived from the Kantian moral law:

“Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of the society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.”

This juxtaposition of Locke and Kant and of the different foundations of our human rights are a fascinating conclusion to this lecture. Smith summarizes Locke’s position in the following way:

“A person has an identity–a Moral Personality by the fact that we alone are responsible for making ourselves through our own actions. We are literally the products of our own making. We create ourselves through our own actions and our most characteristic activity is our work. Locke’s fundamental doctrine is that the world is the product of our own free activity.. not nature, but the self, the individual is the source of all value for Locke–the “I”, the “me” which is the unique source of rights.”

The above seems to be a curious combination of the Protestant work ethic and existentialism which we know from the work of Sartre had great difficulty in producing an ethical Philosophy. The individual being referred to, however, is not the lonely existential I trying to make sense of its own existence but rather the I that is not subject to any idea of the truth or the good, the I that regulates its possessions with contracts. Locke’s idea of the middle-class man is indeed a far cry from the Aristotelian conception of the middle-class man driven by areté and the common good. Both Locke and Aristotle support meritocracies but the differences between them could not be greater. The major difference being that the Lockean system would be implemented in the coming centuries and the Aristotelian system would have to stand in the wings of the world theatre waiting its turn to manifest its virtues.

Smith asks us to compare the Lockean position to Rawls who is counter-arguing that we are not in possession of our talents and abilities or the advantages and disadvantages which create my fortune, but rather we are the recipients of these characteristics as part of an arbitrary haphazard process, an unjust lottery in which the fortunate prosper and the unfortunate are left helpless. Smith summarizes this well:

“No one has the moral right to interfere with the products of our labour, which may also include what we do with our endowments such as our intelligence. Rawls, on the other hand, claims that our endowments are never our own, to begin with:they are part of a common or collective possession to be shared by society as a whole: your capacities for hard work, ambition, intelligence, and good luck do not really belong to you, they result from upbringing and genetics and are not yours or mine in any strong sense–they are a collective possession that can or should be distributed to society as a whole”

This has concrete consequences for government which must be structured for the least advantaged in this “genetic lottery of society” The structure would involve a hypothetical thought experiment in which no one would know the result of this lottery as far as they were concerned but would be called upon to organize society in accordance with the principle of benefitting the least advantaged of the society:

“according to this theory, redistributing our common assets does not involve the sanctity of the individual because the fruits of our labour were never really ours, to begin with. Unlike Locke, whose theory of self-ownership provides a justification–Rawls maintains we never owned ourselves and that we are always part of a larger social weave, a social collective.”

Modern European government is rights-based government and part of the expression of this is the attitude toward the least advantaged workers in terms of ensuring political representation for their interests in the party system. There is also a concern for those who do not have work and the state steps in to help the helpless who have lost their jobs. There is consensus on this Rawlsian position. It is clear that these ideas have been more influential in Europe but not necessarily because of Rawls’ book. The route to the European position may have been connected to the Greek emphasis on a philosophical education and Kant’s, moral law which for the European mind appears to be the ultimate foundation for any system of rights. Rawls claims that his position is Kantian but this should be taken with a pinch of salt. It is Kantian in its denial of the self-ownership thesis but it still has an emphasis on the contract and a form of instrumental reasoning which is not the basis of the Kantian Categorical Imperative.

PS: According to Locke we “possess” our bodies. This obviously flies in the face of Aristotelian theory, common sense and Phenomenological Philosophy. Merleau-Ponty claims in his work “The Phenomenology of Perception” that the body does not have the unity of a physical object. It resembles more the unity of a work of art which can only be interpreted in terms of the phenomenological concept of meaning. The body is that which creates my relation to physical objects through an “Eros or a Libido which breathes life into an original world, gives sexual value or meaning to external stimuli and outlines for each subject the use he shall make of his objective body.”(Phenomenology of Perception p180) This use for Merleau-Ponty is “lived” and it breathes life into the world enabling us to engage with and represent objects which we can possess. The body is not to be found among such “possessions”. Linguistic philosophers would also object to the use of this term. One can lose a possession. Does it make sense to say that one can lose ones body? Only if one is a dualist and believe that the soul possesses the body and can lose its relation to the body at death. If there is possession there must be an owner separable from the possession. We do not find this dualism in the Philosophy of Aristotle which Locke was so keen to turn upside down. It is indeed paradoxical that in his attempt to correct Hobbes and his mechanistic view of the body Locke should fall back into the Catholic position of Descartes in his use of this concept of “possession”. Phenomenology was also reacting to the causal analyses of science and was inspired by Descartes but it fixated on the concepts of meaning and intentionality in order to resolve the philosophical problem of the relation that I have to my body. Yet it has to be said that even the Phenomenological solutions to this problem are less convincing than the original solutions provided by Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory.

April 18, 2018September 1, 2019

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY COURSE: Plato part one

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

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

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

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 14, 2018April 10, 2019

INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY COURSE: Pre- Socratic Philosophy part one

Philosophy is a profound symbolic and logical activity with a particular history, areas of exploration, and a methodology. All three of these components are necessary to take into consideration if one is to portray accurately philosophical activity for curious bystanders or peripatetic spectators. Two ancient prophecies probably from oracles are important navigational tools if one is to understand the depth of what we read, especially in the cases of Heraclitus, Anaximander, and Parmenides where we are dealing with fragments of whole works. The first is the prophecy cited by Socrates in the Republic which claims that everything created is destined to fall into ruin and decay and be destroyed. The second is the prophesy or commandment from the Delphic oracle to “Know thyself”. This latter commandment must be understood to be broader than a piece of epistemological advice: it must be understood against the background of the first prophecy, i.e. as a matter of life and death and it also needs to be understood against the background of Aristotle’s epistemological remark that this is the knowledge most difficult to attain.

The First philosopher, Thales, was what one might now call a natural philosopher, concerned with the starry sky above him and predominantly driven by the poetic classification system of all the elements of the world, namely earth, air, water, and fire. He was principally concerned to discover which element was more fundamental than the rest. We do not quite understand his choice of water over fire(energy) but we can see certainly the importance of water to life, and perhaps we have always been able to understand this particular relation. This is the first “materialist” explanation but without any detailed account of the role of physical processes such as heat and cold, wet and dry which later allowed Aristotle to formulate the first meteorological system. Although it has to be mentioned that Thales was able to predict the weather many months in advance. There is a famous story of him predicting favorable weather for the olive trees, buying up all the olive presses and making a considerable amount of money to make a point to the community he lived in. This action of Thales is also in itself interesting because it suggests that a state of tension existed between the exploring spirit of the first philosopher and his religiously inspired community where lightning striking trees was best explained in terms of the anger of the Gods. This dualistic bipolarity of the natural and the supernatural world was probably to persist not just in the communities of Ancient Greece but also in the minds of all the philosophers up to and including Aristotle.

It is, however, firstly in the thoughts of Anaximander Heraclitus and Parmenides that we begin to feel we are dwelling in the city-state of philosophy. For it is in the fragments that we have of their works that we first begin to sense that these thinkers are not just concerned with the physical world but rather with the world as a whole in a critical spirit which methodologically avoided supernatural references to the mythical Gods: concerned with what Heidegger would call our relation to Being.

Anaximander is a transitional figure, seemingly perpetuating the materialistic spirit of investigation: investigating eclipses and meteorological events and at the same time introducing the speculative idea of “Apeiron” or the infinite into his reflections on existence. Some commentators wonder whether this was a nod in the direction of the divine immortal gods but some like Christopher Shields in his work, “Classical Philosophy” points to the possibility that Anaximander was reflecting upon the infinity of space and time. Our world has its origins in the Apeiron Shields claims on behalf of Anaximander.

Heraclitus is famous for his claim that “Everything is changing all the time”. We cannot, he insists, step into the same river twice because if the river is constituted of the water that is flowing by(which is a questionable premise) we will certainly be wading in different water the second time we enter the river. With this almost oracular proclamation the agenda of philosophical explanation is changed and from then on the second prophesy from the Delphic oracle moved into the central arena of philosophical thought and joined the materialist prophesy that all created things are doomed to destruction. “Change” becomes the focus of thought: what needs to be explained. The world is viewed through the lens of the image of the water of a river: it is something that is constantly and forever changing. Shields points to a distinction that Heraclitus draws between synchronic change such as that which occurs in relation to the waters of the river or a pile of pebbles A. Remove one pebble from the pile and replace it with another and this, Heraclitus would claim is an example of diachronic change or flux, whereby we are forced to say that we are now dealing with a different pile B of pebbles. Synchronic change or flux is demonstrated in two examples in which Heraclitus begins to play with the thought that contradiction can actually be used philosophically to demonstrate our relation to reality or Being. The first example is that “the road up and the road down is one and the same”. Here we have opposites which might seem contradictory but are not in virtue of the fact that a road is traversable in both directions: the road is the hidden uniter of these seeming opposites. It is here, however, that the fragmentariness of the fragments becomes a problem. How shall we interpret these claims?- We will suggest that Heraclitus should be interpreted as meaning that the essential activity of a human being is their thought and it is in the thought of the thinker that the road is one and it is only because of this fundamental fact that we are able to understand that walking up and down the road are one and the same. This is a clear move toward the prophecy of the Delphic oracle and the primacy of thought. The principle of contradiction regulates thought first and only by implication the object of the thought(which is doomed to decay and destruction. But Heraclitus is also famed for his discussions of Aletheia and a fragment which claims that Aletheia reveals what is hidden. This fragment should be viewed together with the fragment which claims that what is hidden is the logos of the one rather than the many.

Parmenides is an interesting thinker from many different perspectives but we are going to concentrate on his critical relation to Heraclitus whose aphoristic style of proclamations must have irritated the Philosopher who was possibly one of the first to believe that proclamations must be replaced by demonstrations or arguments that something is the way it is and not in some other way. Parmenides’ argument is complex but on the assumption that we are in the realm of thought and that we must think something, Parmenides argues that this something must be the bearer of change if it is to be thought about at all. Change is an illusion. Plato used this fragment as the guiding light for the construction of his theory of forms or ideas. Aristotle also referred to this fragment in his Metaphysics and transformed it into a principle of all metaphysical reflection whilst at the same time acknowledging the fragment of Heraclitus relating to change by insisting that of course change is real and it is so because we perceive change in the bird hopping from one branch of the tree to another. But Aristotle would have agreed that change without any reference to some enduring thing that is changing cannot be thought about. It is after all the bird that is hopping and not a nothing. The Delphic oracle’s prophecy was almost fully actualized in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The counterargument to this position is one that Heraclitus may have embraced in order to save his position from the Aristotelian attack. It is contained in Shields’ argument that it is, in fact, possible to think nothing. This is a complex argument which cannot be resolved here but suffice it to say that the assumption of this work will be in this respect at least, Aristotelian through and through. The next Philosopher to be considered in this unit will be that towering figure of Socrates which followed upon the Parmendiean demand that one demonstrate the validity of one’s thinking in arguments. We will discuss Socrates the next but one issue of the journal.

April 9, 2018January 28, 2019

The “Regime” of the Global Callipolis and its relation to Justice(Commentary and Critique of Prof Smith’s Yale lecture series on”Political Science”): Lecture 12, 13 and 14 :Hobbes

Hobbes and Aristotle: Lectures 12, 13, 14(Prof Smith)

Hobbes was a product of his troubled times in more senses than one, forced to flee England to Paris where he would write his greatest work Leviathan.

Prof Smith introduces Hobbes with the following historical information:

“The modern system of European states was just beginning to emerge. In 1648 the Treaty of Westphalia brought an end to more than a century of religious war ignited by the Protestant Reformation. The treaty ratified two doctrines: firstly, individual states would henceforth become the highest level of sovereign authority, putting an end once and for all to the universalist claims of the Holy Roman Empire. Secondly, the head of each state would have the right to determine the religion of the state, thus putting an end to the claims of a single universalist church. In 1651 Leviathan was published.

This introduction deserves discussion from the point of view of the Kantian Enlightenment because it was in Kant’s work that universalism in the form of Cosmopolitanism was restored along with a renewed respect for Religious universalist ethics that aimed to create a brotherhood of all mankind transcending the so-called sovereignty of nation states. Kant pointed clearly and distinctly to the failure of the nation state to achieve a peaceful coexistence of nations. Wars would continue he predicted until international cooperation and law was an acknowledged regulator of interstate activity. Apparently, Napoleon’s troops visited the site of Kant’s grave shortly after he died but as to the reason why we can but speculate. And so wars continued into the 20th century where we witnessed two world wars, the use of weapons of mass destruction twice on civilian populations, and a cold war which with its threat of mass destruction brought the world to the brink of annihilation. Given this look at these events through the Kantian telescope, one can but wonder whether there is a case for embracing a Kantian Cosmopolitanism: a Kantian kingdom of ends transcending any kind of temporary peace that any nation-state can promise its citizens. Such a kingdom is, of course, reminiscent of Aristotle´s proposal of a kingdom of friendship among citizens in a unit of political organization much smaller than the state. Aristotle possibly saw this as a model for cooperation between city-states but the model was obviously going to fail once city-states with cultures very different to one’s own were encountered. What grounds could there be for regarding the citizens of such states as siblings which one trusts? One of Aristotle’s pupils, Alexander the Great, attempted to solve the problem of warring city-states with the idea of an Empire of city-states but the idea failed probably because of the absence of universalist ethics transcending the instrumentalism of military occupation. Alexanders Project would certainly be more sympathetically appreciated by a Hobbesian political philosopher interested in analyzing the Alexandrian phenomenon into the components of security and power, although Hobbes may have been dumbfounded by an absolute sovereign who insisted on dressing in the same way as the inhabitants of the parts of his Empire he is visiting.

What evidence is there for the Kantian Cosmopolitan view of the world? In a lecture given by Edward Luck we are provided with some very interesting data for the thesis that International Organizations(our “homeless institutions”) have proliferated in the 20th century and further, there is considerable evidence in spite of spectacular failures, that they are doing the moral and legal work they were intended for. Hobbes is often placed firmly in the realist camp of political science which believes that power and security of the individual state will always trump the liberal and constructivist internationalist viewpoints which prioritise morality and idealism. Luck points to the activity of the International Organizations, including the United Nations Security Council, and the facts are overwhelmingly against the realist/materialist thesis that these organizations do not function:

“There has been progress. The number of wars between states is down strikingly since the end of the cold war. The number of wars within states are also down. The number of refugees is significantly down. The number of internally placed are down. Economic trends suggest that growth rates are going up in the developing countries: infant mortality is down and life expectancy is up. The number of people in poverty is significantly down.”

Luck also points to the obvious violations of the Hobbesian sovereignty principle:

“The UN clearly is violating sovereignty yet there are very few complaints about this. Why? Some commentators refer to the sovereignty gap—the gap between what the citizens of a state require and what the state is able to provide for the citizens under its own steam.”

The European Union Peace project which includes the four freedoms of freedom of movement for goods, capital, services, and labour is another unit of political organization that transcends the sovereignty of the nation-states. It began as a trading union and soon grew into a Kantian peace project. Whatever the fate or destiny of the European project it is at least testimony to the thesis of universalism albeit of a limited European variety. It has also in recent times become fashionable to look upon the European colossus as a Leviathan or artificial artifactual construction of the children of pride yet out of step with the Hobbesian view of the sovereignty of nation-states and the Hobbesian view of human nature.
We are, Hobbes maintained, creatures dominated not by good intentions as Aristotle proposed but rather by two passions that dominate our existence; fear and pride. Smith has this to say on the topic:

“It is not reason but our passions that is the dominant force of our psychology. Two main passions dominate human nature: pride and fear. How then do we tame these passions…Part of the educational function of the Leviathan is to get us to see the dangers of pride and the advantages of peace. Fear, when properly directed leads to peace and to civil society. It is because of fear that we reason. The first and fundamental law of nature is to seek peace and preserve it. In order to achieve it we have an obligation to lay down our arms under the condition that others do so too Hobbes has 19 laws which he claims constitute a framework for the establishment of society. These laws raise a moral problem as to their moral status. They are not physical laws but rather rules forbidding anyone to do anything that is life- destroying. If, for example, these laws are meant to be moral laws or rules then presumably we have the freedom to either obey or disobey them…These laws are not descriptive, describing how people behave but prescriptive of how people ought to behave.”

The closing words of the above quote focus on the major problem with Hobbes’ theory very clearly. His view of human nature is given in descriptive language, characterizing it in terms of the necessary psychological laws of the passions. Yet at the same time, he seems to be aware that one can only build the optimal society(which presumably does not yet exist) with a set of prescriptions which will then need to have some close logical relation to the psychological descriptions that were presented. With Hobbes, we are hearing an old siren song sung by Thrasymachus and Glaucon in the early books of the Republic: a song about the problem of the logical relation between descriptions and prescriptions. It must be a form of psychological reasoning that in Hobbes’ view will lead to theories of how people will predictably behave when being subjected to the pride and fear. It looks very much as if Hobbesian men will be egoists as David Philips(Houston Univ) claims in his lectures on Ethics. The descriptive theory relating to these men Philips refers to as “Psychological egoism”. Psychological egoism claims that men as a matter of fact and a matter of human nature put their own interests and desires first. Philips also, in this context, refers to the theory of ethical egoism in his discussion of Hobbes. The implication is that ethical egoism is the theory that Hobbes(and Thrasymachus and Glaucon) subscribes to, namely that “Men ought to be selfish”. In all three cases(Hobbes, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon) it appears as if the argument for ethical egoism is psychological egoism. This argument suggests that we can deduce or otherwise derive an ought from an is-statement, or alternatively, reduce an ought- statement to an is -statement. A Kantian or Wittgensteinian investigation into this problem in accordance with either the methods of critical philosophy or the method of grammatical investigations would very quickly reveal the fact that the above arguments in defense of Hobbes are confused.

Putting the above discussion aside for the moment let us ask how Hobbes imagines that his 19 laws will work to lift people out of a state of nature in which there is a war of all against all, preventing men from engaging in the long-term projects that build societies or civilizations. Why would anyone, according to the Hobbesian theory, do anything for anyone else?. Why to take David Philips’ example, would a New York fireman enter a burning tower of offices to save his fellow man? The mechanism which supposedly motivates the fireman to perform a life-threatening action is the social contract. In this contract, Hobbes argues, man has traded away some of his liberty for security to a sovereign power who would employ firemen to risk their lives in burning high rise tower blocks. But the theory does not support this. These individuals have given up their freedom for security which is egoistic, a theory that entails a selfish guarding of one’s own life. Why under these terms of the contract would anyone risk their lives for other egoists? A Hobbesian theory has no coherent answer to this.

The motivation that Hobbes does give for a man to abandon a state of nature for a more peaceful form of existence is basically consequentialist. The consequences of living in a state of nature, Hobbes argues, are that there is no society building activity:
“ no condition for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain, no agriculture of the earth, no sea trade, no commodious building, no knowledge of the face of the earth: no account of time: no arts: no letters, no society: and which is worst of all, continual fear of violent death, and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short.”(Leviathan, 84)

Hobbes was an empiricist and in that spirit some commentators of asked whether there was ever a time when man lived in a Hobbesian state of nature. Hobbes does not point to any period of history to justify his hypothetical state of nature but merely refers to his present time. He asks us to reflect upon the facts that:

“when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied: when going to sleep he locks his doors: when even in his house he locks his chest: and this when he knows there be laws and public offices.”(Leviathan 84)

Hobbes’s materialism may have been nurtured at the bosom of Cartesian rationalism. Together with Bacon, Hobbes is considered one of the fathers of English Empiricism. Both thinkers shared with Descartes a contempt for Aristotelian thought and both would have been highly suspicious of Cartesian rationally based metaphysics. Both Hobbes and Descartes stand at the gateway to the modern world in their wish to discard the chains of the past. Kenny reports in his History of Western Philosophy that neither were learned men and both possessed modest libraries. Now given the fact that Hobbes regarded Descartes’ philosophy of mind as fanciful metaphysics it may have come as a surprise for him to learn that later commentators of his work have regarded the sovereign of the Leviathan as a metaphysical construction. Hobbes’ sovereign is both the source of the law and subject to the law and the very idea of social contract binding rulers and ruled was also regarded by David Hume as metaphysical.
Smith has this to say about the concept of the Sovereign:

“The Sovereign is not a person but an office, an artificial person brought into being by the social contract. It is the creation of the people and the consent of the governed. Hobbes’ sovereign is more equivalent to a modern executive authority. The state is not the possession of the sovereign, rather the sovereign is authorized to secure for the people the limited ends of peace and security. The power of the sovereign for Hobbes is unlimited and yet it is the creation of the people it represents. Hobbes is neutral to the question of what form the sovereign should take. Among the sovereigns powers are control of the laws concerning property, the rights concerning peace and war(foreign policy), the rules of justice concerning life and death(criminal law), what books and ideas should be made public(censorship)…..the sovereign can never act unjustly.”

What, one wonders, would Aristotle have made of this theory with its absence of the virtues of courage and beneficence. What did Kant think of this reduction of a man’s freedom to the status of a bargaining chip in a commercial business relationship which reduces reason to the calculation of consequences? Perhaps when Kant referred to man’s dignity as being “beyond any price”, these words may have been a response to Hobbes. We know that Locke and Hume were more of an inspiration to Kant than Hobbes. Locke certainly believed in the social contract but not in a Hobbesian state of nature where all are fighting with all. Locke’s state of nature was a pastoral affair with men engaging in long-term projects but requiring a legal system to resolve disputes. These disputes were resolved in an atmosphere of evidence and reason far from the madding crowd where passions are sovereign.

Perhaps we should pause at this point to consider the hiatus both Hobbes and Descartes wished to create between their philosophies and the philosophy of Aristotle. In this context we need to note that Aristotle was not the Philosopher of choice by religious authorities until Aquinas came on the scene and parsed away(from a religious perspective) the less palatable aspects of Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory. Subsequent to this event the madding crowd demanded Reformation of the Church and when the reformation came it came in the spirit of modernism, inspiring a Counter-Reformation which merely served to emphasize the already deepening divide that in its turn created an almost perfect environment for religious warfare. The conflicts lasted until 1648 when a war-weary group of statesmen met in Westphalia to end this modern chain of religious consequences: a chain of consequences reaching back to the universalist intentions of a Holy Roman Empire which in its turn had its militaristic universalist origins in the Roman Empire.

This chain of events should have sufficed for the abandonment of any form of universalist intention altogether but this did not happen in spite of the fact that divisive war creating forces did not disappear with the treaty of Westphalia. On the contrary, divisive forces remained operative in the new nation-state system both between states and within states. Plato and Aristotle had attempted to use a non-consequentialist form of rationality to address the latter question but neither had an answer to the former question of war between states.

The theoretical world mirrored the practical, and the empiricists and the rationalists divided the theoretical world accordingly. This state of affairs would continue for over one hundred years until Kant produced his brilliant critical synthesis of these antithetical positions. In practical terms, Kant restored faith in an ethical universalism that would be a consequence of rationality becoming a universal standard for the human species at least to the extent that wars would no longer be fought and regulatory bodies would be handling international affairs in accordance with laws which would meet both legal and moral criteria. In other words with this synthesis, a solution to the problem of universalism was produced. Man as a species was simply progressing toward a state of existence in which less money would be spent on wars and more on education to begin our long journey of progress toward a goal we may never reach because of the possibility that whatever form of life one imagines improvements can always be conceived: a journey that Kant imagines will be at least one hundred thousand years long. For Kant, this process would be steered by two imperatives and one attitude: the ethical categorical imperative and world-building knowledge imperatives which would include instrumental and technical imperatives and a philosophical view of education.

Both Kant and Aristotle recognize the resultant pluralism of forms of life if people are granted the freedom to live as they wish. Aristotle’s ethics bears other resemblances to the ethics of Kant. Both positions realize the necessity of integrating ethics with theories of human nature and politics. For Aristotle too, man is not always rational but ought to be, and according to him, the chances increase if he lives in a city-state of the right kind. Men may not be universally rational but they can recognize rational processes when they participate in them. Participation in such processes in fact assists in the bringing about of phronesis and Sophia in the populace who are well able to recognize the virtues of self-control, courage, honesty, and beneficence. All realize that the rational man ought to possess these virtues and if they do they will lead flourishing lives(contrary to the observations of Thrasymachus and Glaucon that just men do not lead good lives). According to Aristotle, participation in state building activities will also emphasize the virtues which will include trusting in the judgment and ability of one’s fellow citizens as one does in the relation to ones siblings. The city will be a kind of extended family in which the Eros of sibling affection will be counteracted by the natural sibling rivalry there is between citizens of an optimal constitutional state. Aristotle’s focus is on the potential rationality of the citizen of a state committed not to honour and pride but rather to the phronesis involved in doing and saying the right thing at the right time in the right way. Rationality will, of course, be actualized in these rational processes which of course take place against the background of egoism, fear, and pride. The constitutional state will hopefully also be actualized and it ought to distribute the benefits and burdens of goods services, privilege, and power in the spirit of formal justice where similar people will be treated similarly before the laws and judgments made by the state. That is, the law will also recognize the fact of pluralism and argue against for example paying someone less because they are of non-Grecian origin or because they are a woman.

Hobbes does not engage with many of the above issues unless of course one regards his declaration of materialism to be in itself a self-evident argument against prescriptivism of the above kinds or unless perhaps he regards the deduction of ethical egoism from psychological egoism to be equally self-evident. Psychological egoism is a natural theoretical position for a materialist committed to the causal explanation of perception, behaviour and the passions/emotions, i.e. those aspects of human existence best regarded by what Bentham would later call the two sovereign masters of man: pleasure and pain.
As we have seen, thought and rationality, as described and explained by Descartes, is not easily integrated into the Hobbesian account. Indeed the very search for a non-materialistic first principle of Philosophy by Descartes would have seemed too Aristotelian for Hobbes to even contemplate committing himself to. Indeed one wonders why Descartes himself did not recognize that his Cogito argument might have seemed to an Aristotelian to be an acceptable attempt to characterize the form of the human being. Aristotle’s definition of man as being the rational animal capable of discourse clearly implies thought processes and thought states. Hobbes’ was an early form of scientific materialism and it was not yet evident to anyone that the natural progression(or regression) of such theory would be backward in time toward our animal ancestors and Darwin’s theory of evolution in this respect is a very logical result of a backward-looking materialistically caused search for the origins of man. Teleology, in the eyes of these researchers, is simply illogical. Backward linear causation from an effect to a cause was logically impossible. It was not clear to these researchers that it might have been illogical to divide a holistic process into artificial atomistic parts. Aristotle’s examples of human activity provide the counterargument against the above unnatural atomisation of a process. For Aristotle, the builder building a house or the teacher teaching a student was one holistic event not naturally divisible and best explained by 4 different kinds of aitiai (cause/explanation). To temporally dissect this whole into the parts of linear causes and effects is to take two of the forms of explanation needed for a complete explanation to be irrelevant to what the builder or teacher is doing. If, for example, the builder is surrounded by a pile of bricks and he is asked what he is doing his reply “building a house” will contain a reference to both the formal and final causes/grounds of the change we are witnessing. The bricks and his motor activities are of course the material and efficient grounds and without them, there would, of course, be no house. The house for Hobbes would be a shelter for fearful and proud beings but if their sovereign desired to take their house this would be perfectly acceptable for Hobbes. The insistence that a house is essentially a shelter from the elements for a man and his family and a location for the activities of thought (rational thinking and rational discourse) would be nothing that follows from Hobbes’ theory.

It is sometimes argued that Aristotle does not pay enough attention to man’s world building activities but this is not fair comment. The form of the house that the builder has built is a part of the Aristotelian theory of forms that is contained in his all-embracing hylomorphic theory in which the generation of new substances or new entities takes place in three ways:
1.Sexual reproduction generates beings with a)nutritional and reproductive capacities(plants) b)with additional perceptual and locomotive powers(animals) and c) powers of discourse and powers of rationality(human beings)
2. Artefactual reproduction generates equipment which requires ideas and understanding of the equipment´s form and purpose
3.Reproduction of ideas is generated in the teaching/learning environment where a non-instrumental study of ideas as cultural forms of equipment takes place.
Our world, according to Aristotle is composed of the above three kinds of forms. Where does the state fit in here? Is it merely an idea? Does it fit into forms 1 and 2 or both? Perhaps it fits into all three categories of forms given Aristotle’s insistence upon the fact that the state is organically generated. Individuals form families and families form villages and villages form city-states in search of self-sufficiency. The city will be a place in which nutrition, growth, reproduction, perception locomotion, rational discourse, and rational thinking can all take place naturally and unhindered. The closer the city organizes itself in accordance with the constitutional blueprint provided by Aristotle the more flourishing it will become.

Hobbes objects to all this and is not clear why. For Hobbes the state is some kind of artefact created by the work of man out of the chaos of his passions with the help of an instrumental calculating egoistic reasoning process. There is in Hobbes no eros desiring an understanding of the world we live in, no telos directing the process in accordance with a metaphysical idea of the good.

It was left to Kant to clean up the mess left by the anti-Aristotelians but the anti-Kantians who were either supreme rationalists like Hegel or materialists like Marx managed to swamp the hylomorphism of Kant and prepare the world for the 20th century(what Arendt called “this terrible century”).

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

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 29, 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 9:Aristotle

One advantage of studying Aristotle is that everything appears to hang systematically together in the same web of relations. Everything he says seems to follow logically from his metaphysical theory of change. Aristotle’s ethics defines even today the domain of ethics: its focus is the virtues of the great-souled man living his flourishing life in the great-souled city. One cannot, for example, escape the importance of the fact that ethics ought to be defined by the answers to three interrelated questions:
What is it to lead the flourishing, meaningful life?
What is it to be a great-souled man?
What constitutes a good action?
Answering each question completely ought also to provide the answers to the other questions. Such is the nature of a logical relation. In particular, Aristotle’s ethics and political philosophy have a very close relation to each other because Aristotle has accepted an old Socratic assumption of the isomorphism of the soul and the city. The difference between the Socratic and Aristotelian positions is that the soul for Aristotle is not some kind of spiritual substance occupying a realm of its own but more like a form or organizing principle which will help us understand the holistic entity of a person. There is a therefore greater justification for using the same language of virtue and vice for the characterization of the activity of the person and the charaterization of the activity of the city.
Of one thing one can be sure, Aristotle’s view of the soul and the flourishing life in a flourishing city was not a theoretical product of his theory of change. Any theory of Aristotle’s would have been preceded by intense practical activities of observation, experimentation hypothesizing and research. Aristotle’s Callipolis and Plato’s Callipolis have therefore different origins and motivations. Aristotle is reputed to have collected the constitutions of 150 different city-states. After a period of intensive research, we find him saying very different things to Plato who postulated 5 kinds of state: the Callipolis, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. Aristotle, in contrast, used the idea of areté and a belief in collective wisdom and the common good to postulate six kinds of state, three of which were virtuous regimes(the constitutional, aristocracy and monarchy and three of which were corrupt(vice-ridden) regimes(democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny). Aristotles subsequent analysis included the claim that democracy(not tyranny) and oligarchy were extreme forms of regimes because they were tied to two of the most important classes that historically constituted city-states. Neither of these classes had ever succeeded in creating a just regime or serving the common good of the city because whenever the one class reigned the other actively and bitterly opposed this rule and caused division in the city. In Aristotle’s time, it was also the case that there were a class of people who had tired of these extremes and wished for a moderate rule in which justice and knowledge of the common good were the norms for the rulers. Aristotle called this class who had knowledge of the virtues the middle class. He further stated that only when the middle class becomes sufficiently numerous and influential will they be able to neutralize the faction between the oligarchs and the Democrats. The question that immediately arises is what form of life would this middle-class desire. We know the class must be knowledgeable and that elements of the democratic life and elements of the oligarchic life would contribute to their lifestyle and we know because of his criticisms of Plato’s Republic that there will not be one homogeneous form of life but that the city contains ” a multitude of forms of life”. We know that this class will favour a liberal education and will be represented by great-souled men who are statesmen.
Smith has this to say on the topic of the telos of the city:

“The aim of the city is not the production of wealth as was the case with the Phoenicians. One American President has claimed that the business of the USA is business. Aristotle would have disagreed: the business of the city is rather activities for the sake of noble acts performed well”

Noble acts performed excellently characterize the great-souled city and this will also be the focus of the liberal education preferred by the middle class who will fill their lives with both studying the thoughts of noble men about noble acts and studying what noble men think of each other. This is very much along the lines of a popular conception of Gods consorting and discoursing with other gods. The young men of the middle class will largely imitate these noble men in their lives until they can live as virtuously as the noble men themselves. They will lead contemplative lives of peace and leisure aiming to be statesmen or Philosophers far from the madding crowd which we must suppose will be composed of oligarchs and Democrats demanding riches and unbridled freedom. Smith summarizes Aristotle excellently:

“In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle gives us a list of the characteristics of the great-souled man: a lofty detachment to pettiness, slow to act unless the matter is important, not obligated to others, speaks his mind without fear or favour, may hurt others but is not deliberately cruel, will possess beautiful and useless things, walks slowly for to rush is undignified, is tall and speaks with a deep voice.”

Smith continues and asks:
“Is this a picture of a statesman?”

Or is this a picture of a gentleman, or are they one and the same? Smith continues:

“This gentleman/statesman possesses a certain kind of knowledge: a practical understanding and capacity for judgment necessary for the administration of affairs. Phronesis.Someone possessing phronesis is a Phronomos. This kind of ability is not the same as that which is demonstrated in abstract and speculative feats of reason. Insight and discrimination is a different kind of intelligence to that manifesting theoretical ability.”

This cannot but remind us of the reason why Aristotle claimed that we cannot demand certainty in the realm of politics and ethics.
But it also reminds us of Kantian Philosophy in which there is the suggestion that ethics is objective and universal and requires the use of practical reason in accordance with a supersensible principle, whereas the phronomos or statesman in dealing with particular situations requiring particular actions needs to use not reason but judgment which at best only aspires to universality via wise words spoken in a universal voice expecting agreement but without possessing fully constitutive grounds to fall back upon if justifications are demanded. The phronomos proposes a judgment which has a different status to the determinative universality of the moral law. The judgment serves as a guide to our reflection upon our attempts to achieve the flourishing meaningful life via a multitude of empirical laws. Such judgments allow us to think about our life in holistic terms, in terms of what Kant calls ideal causes which are teleological and ideal, echoing Aristotles 4 causes in his theory of change:

“In so far as the causal connection is thought merely by means of understanding it is a nexus constituting a series, namely of causes and effects, that is invariably progressive. The things that as effects presuppose others as their causes cannot themselves, in turn, be also causes of the latter…On the other hand, however, we are also able to think a causal connection according to a rational concept, that of ends, which, if regarded as a series, would involve regressive as well as progressive dependency. It would be one in which the thing, that for the moment is designated as effect deserves none the less, if we take the series regressively, to be called the cause of the thing of which it was said to be the effect…Thus a house is certainly the cause of the money that is received as rent, but yet conversely, the representation of this possible income was the cause of building the house. A causal nexus of this kind is termed that of final causes….The concept of a thing as intrinsically a physical end is, therefore, not a constitutive conception either of understanding or of reason, but yet it may be used by the reflective judgment as a regulative conception for guiding our investigation of objects of this kind.”(Kant’s Critique of Judgement pp20–24)

Kant goes on to point out that it is the teleology of organisms that provide full objective reality to the idea of an end. But Kant also reminds us that to find the telos of the existence of nature we require a knowledge of the final end of nature which lies beyond our understanding in a principle of a supersensible kind that transcends nature itself(the unconditional condition). So our concepts and laws of judgment in this respect are not constitutive but regulative.
The phronomos is a practical man and action is fundamentally teleological in that it is what it is in virtue of its telos, in virtue of that which it is aiming to bring about in accordance with its representation (intention). He is a man who knows that the will operates in the realm of practical concepts some of which bring about the existence of the state of affairs represented. Hence there is connected to such concepts an ought condition(ought to be actualized) He is a Kantian man who knows that there are concepts operating in accordance with the understandings concept of progressive causation which helps us to regulate our understanding of nature as a realm of phenomena. He also knows there is a realm of concepts connected with the will and the law of freedom which pulls the will out of the realm of phenomena and progressive causation and places it in a realm of the ought system of concepts in which the self is a causa sui which brings about what it ought to. It is in this realm of concepts that the phronomos is most at home for it is in this realm that everything is created: our artifacts our education, our laws, our friendships our even more objectively our obligations and duties. It is from this realm that our great-souled city is created, or ought to be created. That it might never have existed is not an argument against the reality of its concept. The phronomos knows that there are conceptual grounds for this city’s existence and that is a good enough argument for him. He will never commit the naturalistic fallacy and move from the fact that it has never existed to the conclusion that it ought not to exist.

Returning to the argument of Smith: he asks the following question:

“Does Aristotle have a political science?…Political Science today is part of the social sciences each of which examines a particular set of actions and interactions. What, then, does Political Science study? The core of this branch of study is the regime. It is the science which discusses the ordering principle which makes all the other social sciences possible. It is a master Science which determines the rank of all the others. The Science of the Sciences….What is the purpose of Political Science? To gain more knowledge?Of what? For What? Of wars revolutions and elections. It involves the gathering of data and the organizing of information. But what is this knowledge for? It seeks knowledge for the sake of praxis and action and for the sake of the Good:”All human activity and action aims at the Good”(Aristotle). All political action aims at preservation or change and implies a standard of better or worse which in turn implies a standard of the Good. And it is this knowledge which serves the regime, which preserves and improves the regime. This knowledge helps us to keep the ship of state afloat and helps us to navigate to port. Unfortunately Political Science today regards this craft as subjective.”

I am not convinced that this is a decisive criterion of differentiation for the different areas of the social sciences, namely that “each of which examines a particular set of actions and interactions”. That seems to need a more sustained argument which includes the presentation of the history of these different areas of inquiry. Is Philosophy a social science on this criterion? If it is on what grounds do we differentiate ethics and political Philosophy? These two areas of inquiry must be different on Smiths terms because ethics is not about regimes. Is political Philosophy merely the application of ethical ideas to regimes?

According to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the Phronomos when he speaks with a universal voice is grounding his reflections upon a subjective principle of the harmony of the cognitive faculties. If this is so then Political Philosophy is subjective. If so does it them deserve the status of a science? Is it not as Kant suggested more of an art form?

March 27, 2018November 29, 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 8:Aristotle

In the opening book of the Republic elenchus was used to dismiss a number of definitions of justice and Thrasymachus at one point challenges Socrates to provide his own definition without referring to the notion of the common good. Socrates’ response to this was to first, theoretically construct a healthy city, and then go on to justify the goodness of a fevered city. The practical idea of the common good falls away as a focus and a theoretical idea of the good is used by the Philosophers to rule the fevered city. Socrates probably regards the healthy city as the natural organic product of natural processes and the fevered city as some kind of arbitrary human artifice that requires knowledge of a special kind if it is to be preserved. In this context, Socrates refers to a prophecy(of his own?of Plato’s? by an oracle?) that “everything created by man is doomed to ruin and destruction unless philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers”. Now Plato never made a conscious effort to collect a large number of constitutions as did Aristotle and yet Plato submits for our attention a system of 5 different kinds of regime subjected to this prophecy. The rulers make mistakes and the consequences take on a life of their own resulting in the downward spiraling journey to ruin and destruction. The journey begins with the perfectly constructed Callipolis which actually contains lies, deception, and even infanticide. Yet it is a theoretical eugenic miscalculation which takes it down to the next level of a timocracy which in its turn then degenerates into an oligarchy and then down into the regimes ruled by unnecessary desires(democracy) and finally unlawful desires(tyranny). There is much talk about the happiness of the city as a whole but the practical idea of the common good which structures Aristotle’s system is not clearly articulated. The logical consequences of this exercise are that only one kind of city is wholly good and that it the one ruled by Philosophers. It is not clear as some commentators have claimed whether only one form of life is permitted since the productive classes are largely left to their own devices. Life for the auxiliaries and the philosopher-rulers certainly appears to be monotonously uniform and Spartan with communal meals and sleeping together in barracks: minimal contact with money and minimal contact with the opposite sex. No such restrictions apply to the members of the productive classes. For Aristotle however, there is no need for a theoretical proof-like reference to a theoretical idea of the good emanating from a Parmenidean world in which all change and even motion is an illusion. Aristotle’s starting point is his theory of change. A regime that endures through change can be of 6 different kinds according to Aristotle depending upon whether or not it is ruled by the one, the few or the many in accordance with the common good or alternatively merely in the interests of the rulers. He classifies these as follows: the well-ordered forms = monarchy, aristocracy or constitutional(polity): the corrupt forms =tyranny, oligarchy or democracy. In accordance with his doctrine of the golden mean Aristotle points out that the constitutional form of a regime is the mean between the extremes of oligarchy and democracy. A constitutional regime contains a commitment to excellence typical of an oligarchy but also contains a commitment to democratic decision procedures or processes which manifest greater wisdom. The strength of democracies, Aristotle argues is:

“The multitude has many hands and many feet and many senses which become like a single human being with an even greater character and mind.”

The many are also less corruptible than the few or the one both of whom can more easily be bribed. Smith asks whether Aristotle is favouring democratic rule but then points out that he also favours rule by the one excellently wise man who acts in all things according to the principle of his own wise will. Smith asks whether this is support for figures like Alexander the Great whom Aristotle once tutored as a young man. It should also be added to Smiths account that Aristotle can also see that the rule of a few wise men may possibly lead to rule in the spirit of the common good.

The major difference between the Platonic and Aristotelian account resides in the contrast between Platonic Dualism and Aristotelian hylomorphism in which Aristotle incorporates a respect for the infinite possible forms of the material and physical world. The forms which he largely views as an aspect of our experience of matter resembles the essence of the thing: it is what is specified by an essence along with its material, it is in other words, the essence specifying definition of a thing. Just as a wall is not a pile of bricks lying in the yard, so the city is not to be identified materially with a group of people occupying the same physical territory. Neither can a city be defined by its walls, nor as a military alliance or an area in which trade occurs. The matter which is formed is rather at a higher level of abstraction. Smith claims the following:

“The citizen body is held together by friendship–a kind of political friendship which does not require us to give up our identities as some kinds of love and friendship do. This friendship may be rivalrous and competitive in a way similar to sibling rivalry. Siblings, according to Aristotle, are the best of friends competing for the attention, esteem, and recognition of the city. The city is a surrogate parent held together not by a series of rational transactions governed by economic game theory but rather the city is held together by bonds of loyalty similar to those that hold together the members of a team or a club.”

This fascinating image of Aristotle’s obviously looks forward to Freud’s band of brothers murdering their tyrannical father and then regretting their action after a deliberation upon the contradictory logical consequences. No one can rule safely in a realm of violence without laws forbidding violence

The form of the regime, however is defined by a set of institutions or formal structures determining how power is shared and distributed amongst citizens.
Smith comments upon this aspect in the following way:

“Political relations are for the sake of noble actions because the city exists not for the preservation of life but for the production of the good life. Citizens share in participating in decision-making processes and in taking important office. A citizen shares in the preservation of the law and the shaping of the law.”

This passage also looks forward to Kant and his matter-form theory of the categorical imperative. The first formulation of the categorical imperative runs: “So act that you can will that the maxim of your action can become a universal law”. This is Kant’s formal characterization. The second formulation of the categorical imperative is his material characterization. It runs: So act that you can treat humanity never merely as a means but also as an end-in-itself.” We can see both these aspects of the common good in Aristotle’s formal and material accounts above. The difference between the two philosophers is illustrated in Kant’s justification for the third formulation of the categorical imperative which refers to the free subject’s relation to the law. The subject in a kingdom of ends is not a passive submitter or Stoical accepter of legislation but is rather simultaneously the sovereign or legislator of the laws. His rationality is such that he recognizes the rationality of the common good in the laws that hold the city together. This third formulation is a synthesis of the thesis and antithesis of matter and form. This is an instance where Kant’s ethical philosophy transcends that of Aristotle’s at the same time as it accepts many of the fundamental tenets of Aristotle’s metaphysical theory of change.
Kant’s theory also transcends that of Aristotle’s in another fundamental respect. A theory of the regime needs to specify a fundamental political attitude rooted in empirical reality which can bind large groups together. Love and friendship are obviously limited in that they are both more or less intense emotions that can easily transform themselves to opposite more neutral or hostile emotions if the object of the emotion is perceived as significantly different to the object loved. That is, even if German Jews are in everything except their origin and religion the same as the Germans, these differences are deemed relevant to the inhuman treatment that was meted out to them during the Nazi regime. This would, of course, have been unacceptable from the point of view of Aristotelian political and ethical philosophy which would have claimed that the differences were not relevant and the treatment ought therefore not to have been so hostile. But was it not Freud who pointed out how difficult it was to love one’s neighbour in view of the nature of this emotion and its tendency to form an exclusive bubble of fantasy around the parties to the experience?:– a bubble which had little to do with the reality principle. The reality principle for Freud requires a more stable attitude to sustain the relationships between larger groups of men that are required in our modern regimes.

Kant’s attitude of respect sustains the moral law. We both respect people and their differences and respect the law that enables large populations to dwell together in harmony. Respect is present of course in the categorical form of friendship that Aristotle referred to and if we transform this term into “fellowship” perhaps we retain the best of both the Kantian and Aristotelian accounts.

The logical consequences of this regime sustaining attitude of fellowship is not just related to how large a regime can be but rather to the question of whether Kant’s vision of a future Cosmopolitan world is possible: a vision of a kingdom of ends in which all men are fellows and treat each other as ends in themselves. Plato probably did not have any such vision in mind when he was constructing the Republic but opinion is divided as to whether Aristotle did not believe his hylomorphic theory of the regime could become a universal world regime ruled by Aristotelian Greek principles. Was it purely accidental that Alexander launched his world empire project relatively shortly after his tutorials with Aristotle? There is some evidence in Aristotle’s work “The Politics” that Smith refers to:

“Aristotle also discusses the golden mean in relation to regions of the world. He claims, for example, that nations of the North are filled with spirit but lacking in deliberative qualities and that Asian nations are deliberative but lacking in spirit. Only Greeks, he argues excel in the use of both of these qualities. This makes them candidates for ruling the rest of the world. Aristotle claims that under the right circumstances the Greeks could exercise some kind of universal rule.”

It is not clear what Aristotle means here. We should recall that when Alexander conquered the territories which were to become part of his Empire, he would go to extreme lengths to respect the customs of the different peoples he was ruling, dressing as they would dress, to take just one example. Yet one could not imagine Kant’s kingdom of ends being ruled by Greeks, Germans, Russians or any other nationality. Kant seems to be imagining a world in which national differences are no longer relevant and perhaps Aristotle was also imagining this though not in his work on the Politics. Smith has this to say on this topic:

“Politics, Aristotle argues deals with the less than best circumstances. A perfect regime may be wished for but most regimes will be mixtures of oligarchies and democracies.”

Aristotle is silent on the question of what the best or perfect regime would look like. Perhaps it would also be a regime in which even national differences are irrelevant.

March 26, 2018October 30, 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 7:Aristotle

Wittgenstein is not mentioned in this lecture but for someone trained in the school of Wittgenstein the school of the Lyceum is a necessary education if one is to avoid using Wittgenstein’s earlier and later Philosophy dogmatically and skeptically. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is indeed a dogmatic document carrying with it the logician’s conviction that the solutions to Philosophy have all been provided in this 10,000-word work. Wittgenstein’s later work cannot, against this background seem to commentators to be anything but a skeptical reaction to his earlier commitment to a scientific brand of logical atomism. Wittgenstein, however, acknowledged the faults of his earlier work without violating the Aristotelian norm of the golden mean and flying off to another extreme, that of skepticism. Wittgenstein’s later work I am maintaining had a distinctly Aristotelian quality about it. Here I am thinking in particular about his remarks on language-games and forms of life as well his remarks concerning the final court of appeal or justification for a concept or a practice. “This is what we do” he claims is the termination of all justification. Our justifications come to an end in what we do. He also suggests in his examination of language games that some kind of termination point is reached in “This is what we say”:–This is how language is used.
Wittgenstein was part of the movement to establish a central concern for language in Analytical Philosophy which largely inherited its assumptions from previous empirical philosophers whose task was to overturn Aristotle and make a fresh start. This “new beginning” very quickly condensed the cloud of empirical Philosophy into a drop of truth conditions. The meaning of language being logically connected to truth conditions, of course, dismantled broader concerns for the diverse uses of language which would have included the way in which the word “good” is used in both ethical and political science contexts to praise whatever is being referred to in connection with the term. Wittgenstein’s language-games and the concept of forms of life retreated from this position back to something very similar to an Aristotelian position in which language comes to be examined by practical rather than theoretical reasoning.

Professor Smith in this lecture is engaging with the question of our political regimes and whether they are artificial or natural constructions. Aristotle sees a city as naturally constituted through a series of developmental stages of human association: the family, the tribe, the village, up to the telos of the city-state. What is driving this evolution to a higher and more complex form of life is a striving toward independence, a striving toward what Aristotle calls self-sufficiency.Basically what we are seeing here is an argument for the Socratic position in the Republic that there is a fundamental isomorphism between the soul and the city. The soul in its evolution toward its telos learns what it needs to know in previous lives and moves through a number of stages in its actualization process. Aristotle does claim that knowledge of the soul is the most important knowledge we can acquire but he also claims more broadly that the natural essence of the regime is the more holistic concept of human nature. Smith has this to say on the issue:

“In the Politics Aristotle talks about the naturalness of the city and man being a political animal. Every polis exists by nature. This is connected to the fact that man alone is driven by Logos–by speech and reason in contrast to animals who are merely endowed with sounds to indicate their pleasure and pains. Logos enables man to have a perception of the good and the bad, the just and the unjust. It is speech and reason that help to create the family and the city. He offers two accounts of the polis. Firstly, that in terms of the natural organic growth from families to tribes to villages to the city-polis which is in his eyes the most developed form of human association. Secondly, there is a teleological account in which the city provides the conditions necessary to achieve and perfect the telos of man. Participation in the life of the city is necessary for the achievement of our excellence (areté).”

We become what we become partly because we are what we are. Just as the animal organ system is determinative of the form of life the animal will lead so it is with us human beings. Our organ system results in speech and reason and a more complex form of life in which it is not sufficient, as it is in the case of animals, to preserve one’s life in accordance with survival mechanisms. The complexity of our capacities which build upon each other and are integrated with each other results in a form of life in which survival and preservation are important but only because they are necessary conditions of a natural striving which human beings possess to lead the good life, the flourishing life. In the course of the use of these capacities, truth becomes an important aspect of speech because truthfulness is important for the political animal leading his political life. Here the truth function of language will obviously be integrated with the communicative and expressive forms of language we encounter in political discussions. The life of a city-state, then, for Aristotle is not an arbitrary conventional construction brought about by the linear causal mechanisms of science but rather a matter of Logos, a matter of logic. There is a logical relation between Logos and the political form of life expressed thus by Smith:

“Man is a political animal because of Logos–his speech and reason. These capacities provide us with a freedom not possessed by animals. He is not making a causal claim to the effect that Logos causes the political life. Logos, for example also entails the power to know which includes the ability to recognize by sight the inhabitants of our polis. We share a common language of the just and the unjust. Logos also entails the power of love–we love those with whom we are intimately related. Love does not occur as the result of a calculation. Rather it is the case that affection sympathy and friendship are the grounds of our political life. It is these which make us fully human.”

There is no problem (as there may be for the traditional truth-conditions theorist position)for Aristotle insofar as the meaning of political discourse is concerned.Both hypothetical and categorical imperatives will have a prescriptive meaning which will be logically analyzable in the same way in which we can logically analyze descriptive statements. For Aristotle there will be no fundamental difference between the syllogisms “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal” and “Promises ought to be kept, Jack promised Jill he would pay the money he owed her as promised, therefore he ought to pay the money back.”

The reference to the Heraclitean terms Logos and Love may signify that Aristotle regards Parmenides(Plato’s choice) as an extreme and Heraclitus as a position to use in order to navigate between two conflicting extremes. Another sign in support of this position is the fact that Aristotle’s Metaphysics sees as one of its major tasks to provide a theory of change which of course is also some kind of acknowledgment of the Parmenidean objection that there must be something which endures through change. In the political discourse that which we praise and that which we blame will give us the keys to what is just and what is unjust. Here we are clearly in the realm of not just what is true and false but also in the realm of what it is that we prescribe in our communications with each other as inhabitants of a naturally developed polis. We praise friendships of all kinds, but one kind more than others. There are friendships of pleasure which relate to a basic form of pleasure which is transitory, comes and goes in relation to change in one’s situation or changes in one’s momentary whims appetites and desires. There are also friendships of utility or convenience which probably last somewhat longer but only as long as the “friend” is useful to us. Both are subject to hypothetical imperatives and the rules for the use of the language we use in these situations. And then there is “true” friendship, categorical friendship, which appears to obey the rules of the Kantian categorical imperative(the second formulation relating to treating humanity as an end in itself).In this form we treat the person as an end in themselves.

Smith does go on to argue that Aristotle believes that only a small city-state can house the kind of trust involved in the political form of friendships required for the polis to fulfill its political functions. He asks specifically and rhetorically :

“Does this mean that the city can never be a universal cosmopolitan state?”

The implied answer is in the negative. He goes on to confirm this position:

“It appears that Aristotle’s polis must be small enough to be governed by a common language, common memories, and common customs. This may imply a criticism of our modern societies, this may be a suggestion that our cities and nations are not healthy.”

I am not sure that Aristotle would not believe that a form of rule in accordance with the principles of his Politics could not be universalized into a cosmopolitan form of life. A cosmopolitan state with a world government is something Kant certainly felt would inevitably be tyrannical. Much of what we read about the formal conditions of the regime lead us to sense a similarity between these two positions. We should also remember that both Aristotle and Kant used the concepts of matter and form and that Aristotle is referring above to the purely material conditions for the regime to exist as a regime. Amongst the formal conditions, we find reflections on the structure of institutions and classes of the regime. Amongst these reflections we find references to the size of the middle class. Aristotle sees the middle class as embodying the virtues or excellences required for the correct rule of the regime and as far as I know there is no reference to the maximum size of the regime or whether the requisite trust would be able to exist between the classes if they were too large. Modern political science has been tracking this particular claim by Aristotle and there is a sense that the aim of Politics should be Aristotelian, that is many commentators have observed that the political process aims at pulling the parties of the extreme right and left into the middle. That this is an observation of importance has clearly resulted in a strategy amongst a number of contemporary politicians to court what they call the middle-class vote. Perhaps if the material condition of trust between larger human associations cannot exist, this may be an underlying flaw in such strategies. Whichever of these alternatives is the case, it would seem as if an Aristotelian political analysis is still very relevant to the contemporary political scene. My view is that the categorical form of friendship demands a form of love which Kant calls respect and there is certainly no recognition by Kant that this is limited so small associations. Kant clearly thinks that respect for the moral law and each other could build a cosmopolitan world in approximately one hundred thousand years time.

There is a suggestion that Aristotle’s position is an elitist one in virtue of some of his remarks about slavery. My reading of Aristotle’s position is that the only legitimate form of slavery in conditions of peace is what he called “natural slavery”, a form of slavery in which the human is not sufficiently rational to take care of themselves. I do not believe that Aristotle is arguing that some people are more stupid than others but rather that some peoples rationality is so compromised(brain damage severe psychological trauma etc), that if they were left to themselves they would be unable to take care of themselves. They would wander around the countryside homeless until they died of exhaustion, the cold, disease etc. Taking care of these people in your home(as the Greeks did) would basically be an act of charity even if they were expected to contribute with their labour to the upkeep of the property and the family. There were no mental institutions during this time. The Greeks were just beginning to think that hearing voices was a sign that all was not well with those who reported such phenomena.There is another suggested form of legitimate slavery Aristotle refers to which would not have fallen into this category and that is the slaves that are taken in a just war. If another city attacks your city without any provocation and you defeat them in battle, the price that must be paid, it is argued, is that those soldiers who are captured alive should become slaves perhaps until some kind of debt has been discharged. In a state of war normal political and ethical rules are suspended(You may kill the enemy): that the slave is allowed to keep his life seems also in such circumstances to be a charitable act, a sign that hostilities are now over. I do not think any of the arguments presented against Aristotle fall into the category of elitism. Smith refers to Yale and its selection of a small percentage of the population for leadership positions as “Aristotelian” which I think is a mistake if the above reasoning is correct. Aristotle is a believer in excellence and it seems to me that Yale University would not obviously contradict his belief. In this context we ought to point out that he does not exclude the rule of the many from being excellent. Indeed he firmly believes that the multi-limbed, multi-voiced, multi senses of the many provide a surer ground that all aspects of the problem of ruling will be respected.

March 22, 2018October 30, 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 four, five and six

Professor Smith discusses the Republic in this lecture. I wish to complement that discussion by concentrating the focus on some elements of the work which he did not take up, combining these elements with those elements he considered seen through a slightly different set of concerns which involves my complaint that the course was not sufficiently Kantian. One of my concerns below is also the distinction between a Socrates who, even in the Republic had his own idea of the healthy city and thereby differentiated his view from Plato’s which he goes on to present.

The dialogue of the Republic begins with Socrates using the tools of elenchus in search of a definition of justice which he probably only sees through the lens of his method darkly. Polemarchus is a spirited man unlike his father, Cephalus, who is a man driven by appetite. Polemarchus is driven by a Homeric paradigm of a courageous warrior when he claims that justice is doing good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies and Socrates has a battery of arguments to counteract this definition, the most important of which from the point of view of the development of the dialogue is that justice must in some sense be related to knowledge and anyone applying Polemarchus’s definition must first know who their friends and enemies are. Failure to do so will result in the opposite effect, namely doing harm to one’s friends and good to one’s enemies.Socrates also points out that common sense seems to suggest that doing harm to a bad man will only make him worse. Thrasymachus also has his arguments demolished by elenchus when he, also in a Homeric spirit, suggests that the strong ruling to their own advantage is just. The argument he offers in support of his definition amazes Socrates. What Socrates would regard as unjust, namely a small group of people ruling to their advantage is defined as just by Thrasymachus. It seems to Socrates as if an inversion of the good and bad is involved in this definition. The argument used to defend the definition is an empirical/observational one, namely, a large number of different regimes actually are ruled by a small group of strong men who pass laws systematically to their own advantage. The argument seems to be a form of functionalism/consequentialism. The system is widespread because it works.

A Kantian objection to this would point out the confusion between descriptive and normative categories of argument. A modern analytical objection would complain about the naturalistic fallacy of deriving a final normative ought statement from a series of is-statements. Glaucon, himself a declared consequentialist(he believes that people obey laws because of the consequences involved if they do not) is not satisfied with the elenctic refutation and demands that Socrates proves that justice is both good in itself and good in its consequences. Socrates obtains approval for his strategy that the soul and the city are in some sense isomorphic with one another and begins to build a city from the elements of what is needed for its survival and preservation, in the process providing the principle of justice which he argues is the principle of specialization: everyone doing the work he is best able to do and refraining from interfering in the work of others. The city Socrates constructs is very small and very simple containing simple souls, no luxuries, no warriors and no philosophers. Glaucon refuses to admit that this “healthy city” of Socrates is the final destination in the search for justice. He is a spirited man and Socrates has built a city which requires sublimation of his ambition and war-like nature. He calls the city a city for pigs and demands in the name of the isomorphism of city and soul that a city be constructed in which spirited souls find a home. Socrates agrees to continue the search for justice in this fevered city which attempts to accommodate competition and war. Haunting the account is, of course, the failure of Socrates to tame the spirit of his interlocutors who have long relied on spirit to control itself with its myths, legends, and stories of spirited heroes. The philosophical hero like Socrates will not easily supplant Achilles and Odysseus in the mind of the hoi polloi.The hero devalues life in favour of love of fame and honour and is prepared to sacrifice himself in the cauldron of activities that precipitate all kinds of secondary emotions such as anger. It is clear when reason is excluded from its mediating role in this situation that the soul is at war with itself. The appetite for life is cast aside and in this cauldron we are treated to the activity of a Leontes, feasting his eyes upon the dead corpses. This is an activity taken from the great war between Thanatos and Eros. How could justice possibly emerge from such a war?

The idea of the harmony of the parts of the soul requires that the parts each perform their specific function. Spirit tyrannizes and dominates unless its desires are tamed by reason. It appears that three major waves are required if we are to make the transition to Plato’s Republic in which each class will perform its proper function. Firstly, the guardians must not own anything and refrain from handling gold. Secondly, they will not be able to form normal families. Thirdly guardians will be selected and given a very specific education. Professor Smith points out that there are definite problems with the soul-city isomorphic thesis when it comes to organizing the city:

“But, one may ask, is the structure of the city identical to the structure of the soul? Another objection to this model is that whilst each of us is composed of three parts we are confined to one part of the hierarchy in the city. Plato argues that one part naturally dominates the others and this part will want fulfillment in a particular kind of work. The implication of this is that the majority will not have just souls if that is defined as the soul controlled by reason. Only a minority of philosopher-rulers will function harmoniously in accordance with reason.”

In spite of all his caveats and objections including perhaps those of Socrates to the fevered city, Professor Smith ends his lecture by stating:

“I am not convinced that the idea of the philosopher kings is an impossible one.”

Another form of this brand of idealism, Kants Stoical duty-based theory, would argue that the soul should not be divided Platonically into Reason, Spirit, and Appetites, on the grounds that if the soul is a non-material principle it does not make sense to talk of parts or divisions. The soul disappears as a theoretical entity and Kant talks more holistically in terms of the person or the man who is metaphysically constituted of what happens to him and what he causes to happen in accordance with certain categories of the understanding and ideas of reason. The person becomes more like a university for Kant with a number of faculties performing different functions. The Sensibility, the Understanding, and Reason(Theoretical and Practical) constitute these faculties of the person and this, of course, is a very theoretical abstract picture of the whole of man. Perhaps judgment is also another faculty of the Stoic man which is used for life in the polis and perhaps the harmony of these faculties constitutes the areté of this great-souled man as perhaps Aristotle might call him. For Kant political judgment must fall into the realm of the hypothetical imperative, the world of prudential reasoning where here perhaps we can only expect to see really statesmanlike behaviour in a kingdom of ends where the rule of law is isomorphic with the moral law of our minds. Here Kant and Aristotle may agree that Politics aims at the good in a very uncertain manner and certainty therefore cannot be demanded in the same way it can in other domains. One essential difference between Plato and Aristotle and Kant is that the two former philosophers believe in monarchy as a form of government whereas Kant favours the Republic form of government and specifically criticises Kings for the money that was spent on wars instead of education and indirectly he,as we know, also criticised an Emperor for forbidding him to write about Religion.

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.

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.

March 18, 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 one

Professor Smith’s Yale lecture-series/course “An Introduction to Political Science” begins thus:

“It is important to note that although the empirical imagination may imagine an infinite number of possible regimes, the actual political field does not present us with an infinite variety of different forms–the field is structured and ordered into a few regime types. A corollary to this insight is that regime is always a particular structure and stands in opposition to other regime types. That is, the very structure of politics entails the possibility of conflict, tension, and war. The regime seems then to need to be partisan and consequently may need to install loyalties and passions. These passionate attachments even take place within government structures where different partners contest for power. Henry Adams claimed that Politics is simply the organization of hatreds. He did not also say, yet it is true, that Politics is also an attempt to direct these hatreds and animosities to the common good. One wonders whether it is possible for such a process to end in friendship, in fellowship? Can we replace conflict with harmony? This gives rise to a major political theme which is echoed in the question: “Is it possible to transcend regimes and organize ourselves around international law and justice?” This cannot be ruled out. But such a world would no longer be a political world.”

This is an excellent opening of an excellent course which I can recommend to anyone interested in deepening their knowledge of Politics.

(https://cosmolearning.org/video-lectures/introduction-what-is-political-philosophy/).

There are suggestions that obliquely evoke thoughts of the Socratic healthy city which would not require politicians or Philosophers to regulate a community built upon the virtue or excellence of work and specialization. One supposes that apart from the passion for what one has chosen to work with, this healthy regime is relatively passion free. Plato’s Republic is certainly a passionate fevered regime being partly run by the auxiliaries. Their concern for the beauty of a well-ordered state is erotic and passionate but the idea of the form of the good is meant to suggest a non partisan universal idea which can unify the perfect city or Callipolis into a regime which to the extent that it is being run in accordance with this idea of the Good must be a kind of universal city: i.e. the logical consequence would appear to be that a cosmopolitan world must be organized in terms of this universal idea. There is also the suggestion of Aristotelian ethics and its transformation of the spirit of Platonic Eros into a rational community of souls freely choosing the life of a fellowship in a kingdom in which each treats the other as fellows and ends in themselves. Those symbols of war, the auxiliaries have disappeared from the more important political structures. Yet the connection to our human personalities are unmistakably present in Smiths conceptual reflections upon what a regime is:

“A regime is more than a set of formal structures, institutions. It consists of the entire way of life of a people: the moral, religious, habitual, customary and sentimental. The regime constitutes an ethos, a distinctive character that nurtures distinctive human types. Every regime shapes a character type with distinctive traits and qualities. So the study of politics is the study of distinctive natural character types that constitute a citizen body….The regime describes the character and tone of the society and focuses on what the society finds praiseworthy. One cannot understand a regime unless one understands what its people praise.”

This quote evokes the position of Plato in the Republic which argues that justice in the soul is mirrored by justice in the city and that the way in which the parts of the soul and the city interact with each other will constitute a human character type and the ethos of the city. It also evokes the pluralistic vision of Aristotle which sees a multiplicity of kinds of state established for the sake of the common good. For Aristotle, these kinds of state or regimes are the natural outgrowth of those natural processes which gather men together in communities,e.g. families, villages, cities. This is an approach which suggests that the history of the development of the regime will be important for understanding its present and final form. It is also the case here that the empirical imagination could very well imagine an infinite array of species but here too the history of the development of different species has managed to actualize only a finite number(though perhaps a very large finite number).Species which fail to survive are extinguished but have probably played their part in the creation of the new species which do manage the mammoth task of survival. No animal, however, leads a flourishing life unaided by humans for whom the idea of this flourishing life is a real possibility. In the same vein, families have been extinguished and even villages and perhaps the occasional city and state have also failed the survival test. Survival or security then is a ground for praise of a grudging kind. For the task of the city according to Aristotle is not merely to guarantee life but rather to promise the good life. The idea of the common good, then, obviously implies not just a secure life as such but a life filled with eros, esteem, the cognitive and aesthetic values. But if this idea of the common good is indeed universally praiseworthy then it can perhaps create in the imagination an idea of a world which is truly cosmopolitan in which pluralistic differences abound (but only such differences as can be united in one common cosmopolitan regime). There is nothing in Aristotle to directly suggest this line of thinking but it does seem to be a logical consequence of his idea of a regime, the common good and the fellowship of men.

Professor Smith makes a very important observation in lecture one concerning the fact that the different regimes will in virtue of their differences be in conflict with one another. Now there is certainly a psychological reason to believe that this is inevitable, namely that differences that are perceived as small in accordance with the idea of the common good can be perceived as great when eros and amour propre are not regulated by reason and its manifestation in practical premises and practical conclusions which are acted upon.Eros unleashed can be envious and jealous and become hypnotized and subjugated by the twin of Thanatos, thus unleashing the hate that could kill 6 million European Jews who were as European as any German. Freud explored this complex alliance of eros and amour propre in his work “Group Psychology and the Ego”
Professor Smith also claims:
“It is as Aristotle and Plato believed, an aristocratic regime in which the few best rule..”

Aristotle in the Politics certainly believes that one form of ruling in accordance with the common good could be a constellation of a few aristocrats but he also specifically talked about two other equally excellent alternatives, namely the monarch ruling in the name of the common good and the many ruling in accordance with the same principle.

If personality is defined in terms of its differences, then different regimes will produce different kinds of human character, different kinds of personality. Kant, however, does not define personality in such terms. He rather defines it in terms of the characteristic that we all ought to possess if we are to live in a kingdom of ends where the fellowship of men is such that everyone treats everyone with respect, as an end in themselves. The question raised by Professor Smith’s introduction is the interesting one of whether we can, in fact, call a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends a regime. I do not, however, believe that it matters whether we can or cannot call such a world a regime. I see no difficulty with calling a cosmopolitan state of affairs a “regime”.
Professor Smith appears to agree and says:

“Whatever is the case, a regime will always favour a certain kind of human being, with a certain set of character traits: the common man found in democracies or the man with acquired taste and money in aristocracies, or perhaps even the warrior or the priest one finds in theocracies.”

So, if the cosmopolitan state of affairs is a “regime”, what kind of character will we find dwelling in such a kingdom? Here we come to my first major complaint about the lecture series: it does not pay enough attention to Kantian political Philosophy, especially in relation to the magnificent “Greek introduction” we are treated to in lecture one.It would have been very interesting to experience the presence of Kant in the political Philosophy out of which Kant’s ethical and political reflections emerge. Stoicism emerged spontaneously and naturally from Greek Philosophy and there does seem to be a clear connection to Kantian ethics and the work on “Anthropology” in which it is clearly suggested that there is an important distinction to be made between what the world makes of man and the ethical process of what man can make of his world. Kant’s claim is that it will take one hundred thousand years for the kingdom of ends to emerge (because reason is needed to meaningfully change the world). Such a use of reason is not actualised fully in the individual but only in the species over a long period of time. The lack of the presence of reason in the individual character will leave the emphasis involved in changes caused by world-events on what the world makes of man rather than on the freedom man has to change the world in accordance with the practical laws of reason.The Stoic is patient, however, and is in the game of life until its end, until it is finally lost. The emphasis in this character-type is on duty but if most events fall in the category of what happens to man then duty will for the Stoic tend to be heterogeneous and relate to some external authority rather than one’s own reason or the moral law within me.
Professor Smith ends his opening quote with the claim that were political organisations to centre on international law and justice such a regime would no longer be political. I think this is a correct diagnosis. What would this reveal? Only what we and Kant already knew, namely, that politics is grounded upon an ethical imperative and this in its turn would justify almost every student demonstration since 1968 that has taken place in an ethical spirit.

Professor Smith ends his lecture in a thought-provoking quote echoing Freud’s “Civilisation and its Discontents”:

“The good human being will have something philosophical about him/her and may feel fully at home only in the best regime. But the best regime lacks actuality–it does not exist! This fact makes it difficult for the philosopher to be a good citizen of any actual regime. He could only be loyal to what is best. This raises a question of loyalty and friendship. This tension between the best and the actual makes political philosophy possible.In the best regime philosophy would be redundant–it would wither away. This is why it is a potentially disturbing activity–because it may transform you! The ancients had a word for the political quest and the quest for knowledge–Eros. The best regime must be driven by Eros. This may be the highest tribute one can pay to love.”

Freud would have pointed to Thanatos and his twin Hypnos and perhaps suggested that Stoicism is the only rational attitude for the hundred thousand year wait for a Global “regime”.

March 16, 2018June 11, 2018

The Second Centrepiece lecture on Philosophical Psychology from “The World Explored the World Suffered:The Exeter Lectures”(Jaynes, Freud, Aristotle, Kant)

Harry was at the lectern surveying his notes and talking to Glynn beside him as Jude closed the door behind himself. He waved to Harry and Glynn and sat down. Glynn went to take his seat. Harry began:
“During the last lecture I argued, some would claim paradoxically, that “Psychology”, as a subject changed its orientation when it declared itself to be a science. It performed a number of scientific reductions on the notion of “consciousness” in order to perform its experiments, and failed to arrive at results the scientific community could accept as scientific. The definition of Psychology was as a consequence changed to “the science of behavior” and, whilst that appeared to solve the terminological problem, it was quickly discovered that experiments with human self- conscious beings were not able to control all the variables necessary in order to reach results that could be reliably repeated. Experiments with animals were subsequently preferred because it appeared easier to control the necessary variables: but the conclusions often required inferential leaps if and when they were to be applied to human beings. Such leaps could not integrate with the philosophical knowledge of man acquired via “anthropology”. These conclusions often also conflicted with the broader experiential knowledge we have acquired about the social and political life of man. One of the obfuscating conditions most difficult to neutralize was the presence of what came to be referred to as “expectancy effects”. Participants in experiments were responding to the manipulation of variables with different expectations or, alternatively, responding to the experiment by assuming that what was demanded was a particular type of response. Psychologists called these “demand characteristics”. Furthermore the type of inquiry best suited to the experimental method was the type of inquiry relating to our expectations of what will happen in the light of our knowledge of the way in which causes produce effects, e.g. “people are unhappy when promises to them are broken”. This latter judgment is a causal empirical generalization that can be tested by making people promises, not keeping them, and then observing the results. There are, however, two immediate problems with this kind of experiment. Firstly it is unethical to make people promises and not keep them, even in circumstances where one might want to argue that the ensuing knowledge acquired from the experiment justified the unethical behavior of the experimenter. Secondly, how on earth would the experimenter operationally define the variable of happiness? The philosophical literature is densely packed with the problems of defining what happiness is. What makes one person happy is anathema to another, and what makes one and the same person happy, changes with time and circumstance. What this brings to our attention is the fact that where an attitude or our interests are concerned, these may not be quantitatively or experimentally measurable. Where what is at issue are ought-concepts such as “wrong”, “good”, “sacred” there may be a wish for universal agreement but such agreement may not be possible, which roughly means that any such variable cannot be operationally defined in an experiment searching for causal relations between variables. And the logical consequence of this is that, if we are interested in the causal relations between two variables, the possible values of these variables have to be logically determined before they can be manipulated. What has philosophy to say about such a state of affairs? The major problem in the philosophy of action is to connect the particular case of an action with the universal to which it belongs. This is a conceptual matter and not a causal problem, yet all psychologists have to face it because they are observing actions not just moving bodies.
I, therefore, suggested in my first lecture that we orientate our inquiry around the subject of “anthropology”.
More than 3000 years ago Agamemnon had a dream, whilst aware that he was still in his bed, that the time had come to begin the Trojan War and he set about the task. The Gods had told him what to do. This is what we read in Homer’s Iliad. Achilles also responds to the voices of various Gods in dealing with the difficult decision of how to behave in relation to his king, Agamemnon, who had stolen his mistress. This is not Myth. The Trojan War was an actual war and the characters of Agamemnon and Achilles were real. But how are our modern minds meant to interpret these words? Agamemnon and Achilles appear to us to be schizophrenic. How could a great king and a great warrior have suffered from what today we would have called a mental illness?
Julian Jaynes is the source of the above ideas which in turn are a consequence of his following a research path leading from the theory of evolution to tribal societies and the beginnings of language ca. 100,000 years ago. The path continues onto the establishment of theocratic hierarchically structured civilizations ca. 10,000 years ago where there is clearly a communication problem to be solved when groups of people move from ca. thirty to thousands and when the stress of this civilization produced the hallucination of voices in novel situations where it was not clear what ought to be done. Jaynes called this kind of mind the bicameral mind and it was “the norm” up to ca. 1000 BC when suddenly we find Homer writing about Odysseus living around this time who, when faced with stressful novel problems to solve, sits down like you and I would, and thinks about a plan or strategy which will subsequently be enacted, Homer’s writing is the first unequivocal evidence of this transition because although writing appeared around 3000 BC much of it is in languages(hieroglyphics or cuneiform) or signs we have great difficulty in interpreting. But what can have caused the development of the conscious mind of Odysseus who could plan to deceive his enemies? Part of the explanation can be attributed to the invention of writing that appeared to many, to be a better form of social control and communication. This innovation together with a catastrophic eruption of the island of Santorini, around 1470 BC that sent a 700- foot tsunami inundating and destroying many communities around the Aegean, placed great strain on the bicameral mind. Waves of refugees also inundated surviving communities and strained hierarchical structures that were best suited to a status quo that did not change very much. The refugees may have been the first to be forced to think consciously, needing perhaps to sit and plan strategies. The large communities that were disrupted probably resembled the Neolith site that was discovered in Turkey in which houses were designed so that 4-5 rooms clustered around a god’s room in which idols and statues of stone were found. The men of these communities, Jaynes argues, used these idols and images as stimuli to summon the voices that would tell them what to do. The Mesopotamian communities were typical of this form of bicameral community. Individuals heard a voice coming from further up in the hierarchy, perhaps from the king, which commanded or chided in a very similar way to the way schizophrenics voices operate today. If the king happened to die, a statue or symbol could be produced which could serve as a visual stimulus for the voice to appear. In this way dead kings became gods
The Bible, of course, is another source of this transition from the bicameral mind to consciousness. One of the earliest books of the Old Testament is about Amos who transmits the words of God like a medium, ”The Lord saith….”. Moving to one of the later books such as Ecclesiastes brings us into a world where self- conscious beings steer themselves and reflect on the purposes of life and time. Why the change? Jaynes hypothesizes that the voices produced by the right side of the brain were disappearing as a mechanism for coping with novel stressful situations. The voice of Yahweh was not being heard any longer: God had disappeared. Stone carvings have been found testifying to this: the throne that God sat upon is empty. The Psalms are further evidence of men crying out for guidance from a Deus absconditus. The book of Moses also testifies to the problem of finding one’s way to the Promised Land with only images and voices. There is only one possible human creation that could take the place of a hallucinated voice and that is the law that is written down in the name of some authority and we see the transition in action in the book of Moses. He comes down from the Mount with the law written on stone tablets.
Further evidence is that one can find no record in early writings of the kind of dream that conscious men experience. Agamemnon’s “dream” is a hallucinated voice that acts hypnotically upon him whilst he is still lying in his bed. Also, further evidence comes in the form of the examination of Plato’s texts. In the earlier dialogues, someone spiritually possessed by these voices is still a divine matter to be in awe of. By the time we get to the more mature Platonic writings, the “Laws” such people need to be taken care of. The behavior of the community in response to mental illness is anticipated here. Indeed Socrates is also portrayed as standing transfixed on a spot for long periods of time, having “visitations” from his so-called “daemon”
Sophia raised her hand:
“But, surely consciousness is necessary for learning something. It is difficult to imagine large relatively sophisticated communities being run “unconsciously”, if that is the right word. The people you are describing seem almost like robots”
“Yes, there is something difficult to understand here but fundamentally Jaynes’s idea is that we do not need consciousness to learn to form concepts, or to do any of the quite complex things we have learned to do such as driving a car or playing the piano. Indeed if in playing the piano a car backfiring distracts me from the task to the extent that I briefly become a conscious observer of what I am doing, it is difficult to get back into what Freud would have called the pre-conscious flow of the activity. I mention Freud here because Freud was not a fan of consciousness. For him, all knowledge emanates from the pre-conscious mind. Language is also a product of the pre-conscious mind. The reason we are under the “illusion” that we are continuously conscious is that when we are performing these pre-conscious activities we are by definition not conscious of what we are doing. Yet somehow consciousness jumps over these gaps in its operation and presupposes some kind of continuity. Some of the greatest discoveries of science have occurred through preconscious processing of a question where the answer suddenly announces itself to consciousness, perhaps whilst we are shaving or cooking. I think if we came across a purely bicameral man we would describe their behavior in the way you do, as robotic. Our present-day encounters with schizophrenics would not quite be the same thing because they alternate between consciousness and bicameral states.”
Robert raised his hand:
“But what about ancient burial sites? What about the 30,000-year-old cave paintings? Are these cultural monuments not signs of consciousness?”
“We have to be careful not to over-interpret what is happening in these cases. Insofar as the burial sites are concerned, I can see no difficulty in a human grieving for someone who is no longer present using an object, like a gravestone to represent the lost object. A gravestone may have been a late substitute for a statue of the person from which it was easier to hallucinate a voice. Freud, upon discovering the death instinct thought he saw its presence in an infant standing in his cot and throwing a cotton reel attached to some cotton over the side of his cot whilst uttering “Gone!” and drawing it slowly back into the cot whilst saying “There”. According to Freud, this little piece of theatre represented past episodes when the infant’s beloved mother would leave him and return after an extended period of absence. According to some theories, the cave paintings point in the other direction of time, namely the future, perhaps to the future hunt, and perhaps the idea here is that the painting is a kind of plan. One imagines that the artist is consciously or even pre consciously narrating something relating to the hunt that he is trying to represent. Neither Jaynes nor I think that language had yet reached the stage of narration that would have required a kind of mind-space typical of consciousness. If anything the cave paintings are the expression of a kind of pre-conscious practical wish. They might be the precursors of narrative language.”
A female science major raised her hand:
“The evidence provided thus far seems to me to be neither scientifically nor philosophically adequate to the task of explaining what consciousness is or for that matter what it is not.”
“Yes, you are correct in that observation. Thanks for navigating us back onto our course. As I mentioned in the first lecture, Jaynes is a Psychologist who believes that the prevailing mood of the subject of Psychology should be biological. He would, I suppose, regard all the evidence as in some fashion pointing in the direction he describes, but his biological account would begin with the theory of evolution and end with the functions of the brain. He points out that brain size has definitely not changed in the last 100,000 years. In this context, he refers, however, to the two hemispheres of the brain and the anomaly that every major function of the brain is bi-laterally represented in both hemispheres, except for language which for him is intimately related to consciousness and appears to be only located in the left hemisphere. Appearances are however deceptive because a number of experiments have proven that the right hemisphere can, when the left is anesthetized, understand simple language. His account of why this state of affairs exists refers to the differing functions of the left and right hemispheres. The left is the more “analytical” part of the brain that deals with the parts of wholes. Classificatory frameworks are synthetic sets of propositions that have logical relations to each other and probably require some contribution from the holistically oriented right side of the brain when the individual uses the framework to make a left hemisphere-judgment such as “Some water dwellers are mammals.”. Perhaps involved in this activity of the left hemisphere is also the phenomenon of a self, encountering objects observationally in a psychically distanced space. The right hemisphere is more synthetic and synthesizes parts into wholes, notes into a melody, parts of a face into a whole face, an individual act into a narrative, a civil act into the holistic network of laws, or more theoretically a number of propositions into a valid sound argument. Perhaps Jaynes might even say, as others following him have, that the right hemisphere uses holistic judgments to organize facts into theories, or organizes separate activities into a holistic practical context. The cultural evolution of the functions of the brain resulted in the right side of the brain operating as some kind of holistic enveloping function which was coded into language, and, at appropriate times when the individual was confronted by some novel, stressful stimulus requiring action to be taken. In these situations hallucinatory voices from the right hemisphere would deliver “advice/commandments” to the left, relating to what ought to be done in the circumstances. The subject might have been hypnotically “enveloped” by the voice and in turn, hypnotically act in a state of what can be described as pre-conscious awareness. The physiological stressor might have been the build-up of waste products in the blood as a consequence of cortisol release over a period of time. The liver for some reason(probably to do with high-stress levels) was unable to process the amounts of cortisol present in the blood. The coded message from the right hemisphere was, according to this theory, transmitted over the anterior commissure connecting the two temporal lobes, and was experienced as “spoken” by the right hemisphere and “heard” by the left hemisphere: a left hemisphere which at this stage in time had not developed the level of consciousness which we experience today as a consequence of its very advanced linguistic functioning in a culture dominated by the written word. Apparently, research has suggested that when the right hemisphere is electrically stimulated auditory hallucinations are experienced. There is also evidence suggesting that when the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres is cut the hemispheres can function like two different individuals.
Perhaps I should end by pointing out that bi-cameral individuals were not very complex. They could not put together a narrative over large segments of reality or even a narrative of their own life stretching from childhood to the end of life. Time-consciousness was very rudimentary. The emotions of shame and fear, for example, were very transitory affairs for the bicameral mind: they would disappear as quickly as they appeared. The conscious mind, on the other hand, because it has a narrative tendency will stretch these experiences over time and experience the same event many times, perhaps even over a lifetime. Shame in such minds gets transformed into guilt. If this is correct we can see exactly the attraction of a religion that will try to envelop or encapsulate these experiences into a grand narrative where these effects can be neutralized by appealing to ideas like forgiveness and salvation. The really interesting anthropological question here is whether psychoanalysis is a symptom of the dawn of a more advanced form of consciousness that refuses to be deceived by grand narratives and is concerned with only one narrative, that of my life: or is psychoanalysis the herald of a more advanced type of thinking which will eventually systematically understand the world?
A history major raised their hand:
“Are you saying that consciousness is basically historical?”
“Yes, in the sense in which history is a narrative, consciousness is a means of organizing a myriad of events into a meaningful structure. There is another perhaps more important sense of history in which we see events causing the creation of new historical structures such as a church and these in turn create unique historical events, such as its reformation. Consciousness has been “caused” in the Aristotelian sense by physical factors in the brain, cultural factors such as certain complex uses of language, and social activities. This in turn creates the capacity of thinking about reality under the aspect of what is true: powers of language building upon physiological powers and powers of thought building upon powers of language: powers building upon powers, capacities building upon capacities,”
Sophia raised her hand:
“A conclusion that can be drawn from the lectures we have attended thus far is that, in terms of History, we are children. This theory seems to fit in with Kant’s idea that we begin to be aware,in a different kind of way when we use the first person pronoun “I”. Can this be empirically tested in any way?”
“Good observation. Jaynes believes that consciousness is learned and that language plays a large role in this learning process. He also believes interestingly that the process begins at about two and a half years and concludes at approximately five to six years. The Freudians amongst us will recognize this to be the phallic phase in which the Oedipus complex works itself out and results in the construction of the superego, which is our moral guide. The Freudian superego is the consequence of internalizing the values of someone we have identified with: of someone we strive to be like. But, to return to your question, we live in a verbal environment with mental words and physical behavior. The child is learning concepts partly by learning the rules of words in language games. The accumulation of the rules creates a language that is more and more complex. The child also uses some kind of projective imagination to creatively use words in new unique contexts. The mother encourages the use of words before the rules are internalized but actually helps in the installation of rules by asking, for example “What should we do today?”, “Do you remember what we did last year for your birthday?” The mother is tagging or conceptualizing events in the time domain that includes clocks and calendars. She is sewing the seeds of consciousness with all these joint activities. Language becomes a retention device, for example, “the funny man next door” can act as a formula and help to form what the psychologists refer to as “episodic memory”, a type of memory the bicameral man did not possess. Kant talks about self-consciousness, a very different concept. Self -consciousness or consciousness of self is a complex cultural object that is the most important part of a person. We become aware of it in answer to the question “Who am I? an extremely abstract, reflective question. The self in technical philosophical language is the object of consciousness, it has a personal history which we infer from two sources, what other people say about us and the conclusion we draw when we reflect upon our own behaviour”
Robert raised his hand
“Consciousness seems to be a complex power, something similar to a function or mathematical operation. Was that not what you were suggesting earlier?”
“Yes, good point. Consciousness is complex. Jaynes calls it “the analogue I”. It is as Robert claims very much like a function. Here is an example. Imagine you are taking an examination and the girl across the aisle interrupts the activity by becoming the object of a short romantic fantasy. The invigilator comes up behind the student, coughs politely, and the student becomes conscious that he has been daydreaming and he must resume answering examination questions if he is to pass. Here the operator is operating twice—firstly, in fantasizing and in becoming conscious of fantasizing. Secondly, the operator is functioning to prevent my mind being taken over by what Freud would call wish fulfillment activity, or primary process activity, where images play freely in a truth-free zone. Returning to the examination is re-engaging with pre-conscious secondary process activity if we are to use Freudian language to describe these phenomena. Having said that, this seems to be a very technical definition of consciousness. A more common sense definition could be given by asking 12 people to tell you what they had been thinking of during the previous minute at the strike of a clock. These people would be introspecting according to Jaynes and their reports will be the typical material of consciousness. The notion of an “analogue I” is also meant to point to the importance of metaphor and analogy in language which according to Jaynes played such an important role in the beginnings of science in attempting to conceptualize matter and motion. Consciousness is not located in any real space but we do imagine it, or “feel” it to be located just behind our eyes. It is the analogue of the real world built up with metaphors or analogues of our behavior and activity in the physical world. This analogue world, however, is more like a world of operators bound up with our wills and decisions. Consider some of the metaphors we use to describe the processes of consciousness: we “see” the answers to questions, approach problems from different “perspectives”: we use spatial metaphors something is “on” my mind, or “burdening” my mind, or at the “back” of my mind. A metaphor for Jaynes is more than x merely being like y: it is a function in which important characteristics of y can then be projected upon x, and by doing so change its nature or function. The consequence of this reflection on consciousness being an analogue is that consciousness must have developed historically later than language and perhaps as a consequence of language. The only evidence we have which could settle this matter is writing which was invented in 3000 BC. This is what Jaynes uses to prove his cultural evolution thesis. His references to brain research are always complementary and never constitutive of what he is striving to demonstrate. His evidence stretches to the examination of thousands of cuneiform tablets where it becomes obvious that everything: cities, buildings, monuments, even people belonged to the Gods who often existed only in idol form. All early civilizations were theocracies without exception. It is important to point out in this context that a primitive tribe living in the jungle does not meet the criteria for a civilization or a theocracy. The bi-cameral age as Jaynes calls it began around 9000 BC, its breakdown occurred during the last centuries of the second millennium BC. In Greece at the time of Solon ca. 600 BC, consciousness emerges. In the Middle East, the prophet, Amos, around 800 BC, is clearly bicameral and Ecclesiastes a few hundred years later, with his conscious reflection upon the purposes of man and time, is clearly not.
Let me conclude with some observations about how important the cultural evolution of language is for this whole theory. Language learning begins with naming, which, as we have learned from Wittgenstein, requires some pre-linguistic stage setting. Responding differently to different objects in the environment results in these objects in their turn becoming discriminable foundations for perhaps more complex behavioural responses. Perceiving an object and naming it trains our attention and concentration. Speechless children like Helen Keller, prior to becoming language users, have great difficulty in focusing attention upon things and concentrating upon what is being said. Not only did Helen Keller’s behavioural repertoire increase in complexity but her memory began also to function, once her language capacities were sufficiently stimulated. Furthermore, comparison of the meanings of words become possible, an important skill needed in writing. Surely no one can deny that the quality of Helen Keller’s life dramatically improved once language learning was underway. The scope and depth of Jaynes’ account is far-reaching, ladies and gentlemen, and extends even to speculation upon how “incidental” early hominid signaling was transformed into intentional signaling, which in its turn then produced a system of differentiated signifiers.
I will not explore Jaynes’ ideas any further but strongly recommend reading the stencils related to his work in the course material.

February 17, 2018February 17, 2018

Philosophy, Tea, Spinoza and Kant

https://lnkd.in/dDc-ySA

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”

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.”

February 2, 2018June 11, 2018

First Editorial Review of “The World Explored, the World Suffered”

“A demanding, but ultimately rewarding, read. The World Explored, The World Suffered is successful in exploring the intricacies of debating philosophy. As such, it is more entertaining, and so potentially more useful, than reading a purely dry textbook. The book does what it set out to do: educate the reader within a fictional framework. It’s a laudable goal, and one that is firmly accomplished by the end of the book.” Self-Publishing Review”

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”

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.

November 9, 2017December 10, 2024

Twentieth Century Psychology: The History of Psychology(Brett and Peters)

This is the final essay in a series of essays on Brett and R S Peters’ work “The History of Psychology”. In the opening essay on the Philosophy of Man Peters pointed out how throughout the ages there has been a tendency to focus on the data or the subject matter of a collection of different kinds of inquiries occurring in the name of religion medicine and philosophy. This subject matter, of course, very quickly proliferates and demands ordering if the impression is not to be one of total confusion.

In 1870 Psychology unilaterally declared its independence from Philosophy and Religion and decided to focus on the scientific method as a means of uniting a chaotic field of data or subject matter. This move incorporated a commitment to observation and a resultant suspension of the “psychological” practical attitudes involved in calls to action and the evaluation of action that was the concern of Aristotle’s practical science. Psychology reduced the circumference of the circle of its concerns to a theoretical reasoning that committed itself to what Brett called “observationalism” and introspection(a psychological mechanism which turned observation inwards).

The twentieth century, it is maintained, was largely obsessed by observationalist assumptions and reactions to observationalism such as behaviourism. Initially upon the declaration of independence, the definition of Psychology accepted by many leading researchers was “The science of consciousness” but it was then discovered that consciousness could not be observed and could not, therefore, fit into the theoretical scientific framework of being manipulated or measured as an experimental variable. The “scientific” response to this was to redefine Psychology as the “science of behaviour” and this move merely further reduced the circumference of the investigative circle and much that was of interest in the Philosophy of man was ignored.

The Medical model also played its part in the development of Psychology through the reciprocal influences of Psychiatry and Freudian Psychology under the heading of technologies of cure, which, sometimes steered and sometimes were steered by theoretical views of diagnoses. The concept of development played its part in influencing the direction of Psychology by both focusing on animal research and child development. Simultaneously the social sciences with its tendency to highlight the role of the social environment in the development of the individual also contributed to a rich mixture of ingredients. One of the responses of the behaviourists to the introspective musings of subjects in “experimental” situations was to discard what people were saying and concentrate instead upon what was being done: behaviour. At the same time the medical model, operating in what Brett called the technological therapeutic mode was emphasizing a moral treatment of patients that demanded that the Doctor listen to his patients both for the purposes of diagnosis and for the purposes of treatment. This ethical focus was probably a consequence of the need of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis to view humans holistically if the practical problem of restoring man to health was to be solved. Freud’s initial training was in the Physiology of the brain. This was complemented with a medical training because, as a Jew, he could not look forward to a well-paid research position at Vienna University. Both of these largely theoretical educations proved to be inadequate to solve the kind of problem Freud was faced with in private practice. He was forced to resort creatively and experimentally to various “technologies” such as hypnotism in order to address the complex symptoms of his patients. But Freud was also a man of culture and we know he was familiar with the writings of Kant and this perhaps prevented him from engaging in the various forms of quackery that was a sign of the times. Paradoxically it was probably Platonic, Aristotelian and Kantian Metaphysics and Transcendental Philosophy that turned this Physician into a leading figure on the world stage in the 20th century. Popularly, he became famous for his idea of “the unconscious” but this was probably only one of a number of innovative concepts he formed in his 50 years of theorizing. Ernest Jones, Brett points out, thought very highly of the Freudian distinction between the primary and secondary process of the mind working in accordance with different principles: the pleasure-pain principle and the reality principle respectively. Freud’s background in Physiology and Biology led him to formulate a theoretical idea of “instinct” and this together, in turn, with his philosophical interests enabled him to construct a complex hylomorphic concept of instinct as constituted of the elements of “aim”, “object” and “source”. This complexity was of course not appreciated when criticism of his thesis of the sexual etiology of neurosis became almost universally accepted. The more superficial ideas of an organism being merely a bundle of instincts gained much traction at the beginning of the 20th century. In his seminal work, “The Interpretation of Dreams” Freud published the results of his adventures of reflection into the realm of wish-fulfillment which reads very differently to his other more technical works where we are clearly in the realm of action. The Interpretation of dreams is almost like a hermeneutic work of interpretation operating on a mythical world, except for the famous chapter 7 on the psychical apparatus that brings us back into the real world of action. In Kantian terms dreams are phenomena that happen to us and are distinct from the things we choose to do, and there is no obvious route for Kant from the realm of fantasy to the realm of the real world. Freud claimed that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious but what many of his critics fail to see is that the road leads in the other direction to the world of reality and action, and Freud’s work actually allows us to journey on that road connecting these two different “cities” of the mind. Our minds begin their life dwelling in the city of the primary process ruled by solipsistic wish fulfillment and anxiety and life in this city is obviously problematic. The contrast of the solid city built of choices and real actions leading to real consequences is stark. These are Brett’s words:

“However, whatever the right sort of description for such goings on which Freud called the primary processes, Freud saw clearly that they require a different sort of description from that which we give for processes explaining actions or performances. For we explain these in terms of the ends which people have in mind and their information about means to ends, which falls under rules of efficiency and appropriateness. To act or to perform a person must have a grasp of causal connection, of time, of external reality, and of logical contradictions. Such standards are the product of ages of convention, adaptation, and conscious experimentation. This inherited wisdom is handed on from generation to generation, as what Freud called the secondary processes begin to develop out of the autistic amalgam of the child’s mind. A wish, to be transformed into a reason for acting, has to have logical and causal connections, together with standards of social correctness, imposed upon it, to that what is wished for, the objective, can be connected with acts that lead up to it. It is interesting to note that Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics distinguished “wish” from “choice” roughly along these lines.”(R. S. Peters)

The analogy of two different cities obviously breaks down with the concept of the unconscious which actually is a concept on the boundary of the physical and the psychological. Ricoeur noted that this part of Freud’s theory is more physiological and relates to the “energetics” and physical mechanisms of the body such as the leaving of memory traces by ideas that pass in and out of consciousness. Freud discovered that not all of these traces give rise to memories that can be retrieved in the way memories normally are. Some of these traces are of ideas that at one time passed through consciousness and require special techniques or circumstances before they are able to “surface” once again in the realm of consciousness: techniques such as hypnosis or free association, and circumstances such as dreaming or narcosis. Why one might ask do these “ideas” not naturally “surface” in consciousness under the appropriate circumstances? Freud’s answer is that something or some force is preventing this natural process from occurring. There is, in other words, a repressing force operating in the mind distorting its natural function. Freud also acknowledged tendencies of the id that are not conscious and have not been formed by the egos defence mechanisms. Examples of traces that are prevented from expressing themselves in consciousness are “the traces left by experiences in early childhood–especially those involving wishes of which we feel ashamed”. In his later theorizing, Freud introduces “agents” into his topographical model. The Ego, for example, is the outer face of the id that negotiates as best it can with three masters: firstly it meets the demands of the external world instrumentally finding the best means to the ends which meet these demands, secondly it meets the demands of the id, sometimes defensively, thirdly it meets the demands of the superego and its demands that certain standards of behaviour and judgment be maintained.. This latter agency of the super-ego is obviously an introjection of mechanisms of society that regard “norms” as necessary for the ordering of relations between men in society. Here we are obviously dealing with the attitudes I referred to in the beginning of this essay. The final third wave of Freud’s theorizing provided us with a picture of the workings of a “silent” instinct that wreaks havoc in society: the death instinct that manifests itself defensively as aggression and this was for Freud the final piece of the puzzle depicting the contours of human nature. A number of patients with sadistic-masochistic tendencies were flying beneath the radar of Freudian theory and until Thanatos entered the arena of theoretical explanation these patients were paradoxes for Freudian theory. The superego obviously contained more than a little of this aggression as well as containing the influences of our closest relatives and friends as well as the influence of social institutions. Many everyday transactions in the social world are in Freudian theory, given technical labels that refer to a network of descriptive and explanatory concepts. The theory proposed that conflicts in early childhood can centre around organs and operations of the body and that the failure to resolve such conflicts might result in personality distortions which have been famously described in personality type theory.

R S Peters spends much time on describing and commenting on Freudian theory and feels it necessary to say the following in conclusion:

“If any justification is necessary for spending so much time on presenting Freud’s theory as a whole it is to be found in its overwhelming importance and influence in twentieth century Psychology. It combines the purposivism of other theories with the stress on the unity or wholeness of the personality, which purposive theories have often neglected. It has been illustrated by more empirical material than any other theory and is richer in causal genetic hypotheses. In fact, there are enough speculative hypotheses in Freud to keep a generation of psychologists going in the endeavor to state them precisely and to test them. The stress on “the unconscious” and the importance given to early childhood experiences was revolutionary when we consider the theories in the field at the end of the 19th century. The only respects in which Freud was a child of the 19th century were his Darwinian approach, his vague metaphysical leanings derived from Schopenhauer, and his conception of “ideas” as dynamic mental entities which he inherited from Herbart.”(R. S. Peters)

Interest in the development of the child and personality types gave rise in the twentieth century to an industry of attempts to “measure” the abilities and personality of children and adults. Educationalists became interested in intelligence testing. Testing and experimentation also continued in earnest with different animals. Psychometrics became a part of many Psychology and Teacher training courses at Universities and Colleges. Everyone became technically interested in the “instruments” of Psychology and the conceptual aspect of psychological investigations was marginalized. Statistical studies aiming at proving causal relationships between variables soon gave way to studies using probability theory to calculate correlations between variables, especially in those studies in which a conceptual understanding of the variables and their contexts were lacking.

The Social Sciences also played an influential role in mobilizing researchers. Marx’s Economic theories lent themselves well to a theory of value which continued a tradition begun by Hobbes and Hume, a tradition that attempted to separate value from the realm of objectivity in favor a psychological fallback position which attempted explanations of social phenomena in terms of the invariable psychological(subjective) characteristics of individuals. Hobbes, for example had attempted to “deduce mans social and political behaviour from basic psychological postulates about self-preservation which were themselves presumed to be deducible from physical postulates about matter in motion”. Hobbes wonders whether life can be anything more than the mechanical movement of springs and gears. This value-phobia inhabited even the thinking of those social scientists who rejected the psychological approach and like Marx regarded the concepts of class, nation and the collective to be far more useful for social analysis than the needs and wants of individuals. The Philosophical notion of a prescriptive set of concepts possessing objectivity and truth and subject to the laws of logic was a thin crescent moon in the starry heaven of academic ideas. Peters points to a publication by Charles Cooley entitled “Human Nature and the Social Order” which he claims was very influential in America, the home of social psychology:

“Its main theme was that human personality is a social product and that most of our beliefs and attitudes are socially acquired. The “social order” thus determines the individual personality. Kantian objections were conspicuous by their absence in this zone of debate.”

Peters points out insightfully that this discussion only had one direction in which to go and that was toward a description of human automata. This environment also made it difficult for Freudian ideas to persist and Freud bashing became a favourite pass-time of many American academics. Even Malinowski’s serious objections to the Freudian Oedipus complex was, in fact, overshadowed by a general lack of interest in Freud’s theories. The condition of the existence of his theories depended upon insisting upon a link with social anthropology.

The overall impression of Peters is that during the 20th century there emerged a proliferation of “schools” of Psychology all operating on either different assumptions or with different methods or with different concepts and that this has in no small measure contributed to what many philosophers regard as the “conceptual confusion” in the subject.

October 27, 2017December 10, 2024

Darwin and William James “The Inroads of Physiology and Biology”: The History of Psychology(Brett and Peters):

“The influence of biology proved to be the most far-reaching of all influences coming into psychology from outside the philosophical, religious and medical traditions from which psychology, in the main has developed. But its full influence did not make itself felt until the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century when men who had been trained in Darwinian Biology started to study man in the same sort of way as they studied animals and to use the same sort of explanatory hypotheses for human behaviour. There was, however, a transitional period before the rise of various schools of psychology in the 20th century when the biological outlook exerted a correcting rather than a radical influence on the old tradition of “idea” psychology.. The systematisers, Ward, Stout and James, for instance, though strongly influenced by biology were what we would now call “philosophical psychologists”. They were interested primarily in traditional topics like the relationship between perception and conception, the self, and self-consciousness, the association of ideas etc…..stress on conation, on plasticity and adaptability, and on function was beginning to replace the old interest in cognition, faculties, and structure. But Psychology remained predominantly introspective. The mind rather than behaviour remained the centre of interest: the difference was that a more biological account was given of mental processes.”(Brett and Peters)

The latter half of the 18th century was a period of intense activity in the sciences including some interesting research on the brain in which memory, for example, was explained as “the persistence of impressions on the brain substance”. Cartesian dualism surprisingly dominated psychological discussion and the physiological “vis nervosa” was distinguished from the soul or psychic force. In Germany the notion of “Lebenskraft” was influential and the concept of development was the focus of much theorizing. The Sciences were beginning to assemble themselves into a series of ascending steps beginning with physics reaching through chemistry, physiology, biology, to psychology. Functionalism supplemented the materialism of the day and was interwoven with the activity of the will. Bichat, for example in the spirit of functionalism defined life as “the complex of functions which resist death”. The dualism was almost Platonic: man was a divided being composed of natural forces functioning mechanically, and the spontaneous force of a conscious will. Hughlings Jackson’s reflections advanced the scientific position that the real “organ of the mind” is the body and claimed that the nervous system of the body is representative of three levels of evolution: impressions and movements (sensori-motor), these representations are then re-presented in a larger integrated context: finally at the highest level there is re-re-presentation in terms of thought and volition. Even in this case we encounter the assumption of dualism and consciousness is assumed to be a mere effect or accompaniment of the neural processes we are dealing with. Towards the end of the 19th century, the issue of feelings becomes controversial and two debates occurred, relating firstly, to lower feelings and their connection to sensation and, secondly, to the relation of higher feelings to moral and aesthetic ideas. The former in a dualistic context claims that the increase or decrease of intensity of sensation produces differences that are felt and this leads inevitably to a theory of unconscious “feelings”. Hartmann disagreed with this and asserted categorically that feelings can only exist in consciousness. He concedes also that all feeling is to placed on a pleasure-pain continuum. All qualitative differences of feeling are actually differences in accompanying sensations or ideas that can shift in levels of awareness. A key shift in emphasis occurred when Horwicz in his work “Analysis of Thought” claimed that Feeling is “always accompanied by an impulse to act”—-“sensation is always incipient movement”. the mental space that is thus created allows a possible choice of movement to be represented in the light of an anticipation of represented consequences. This thinking process comes to an end when the agent inclines himself to one action. Thinking, on this view, is a stream of representations controlled by feeling and a striving toward action. Horwicz realizes that abstract and scientific thinking is compromised in this position and claims that even the search for the causes of a sensation is related to the positive feeling of pleasure and the driving force of desire to experience pleasure. Kant, in contrast, had attempted to unify practical consciousness by reference to the will and reason in relation to an ethical standpoint. Horwicz attempts the same task by the use of feeling: a new basis, but arguably a basis manifesting the most inner and private of phenomena accessible, one presumes only to introspection. Darwin’s writings had obviously tuned the European mind into the theme of the emotions and the so-called “peripheral theory” of Lange and Sergi began to emerge and was developed and elaborated upon by the American Physiologist William James. These thinkers focussed on the order of events in an emotion and claimed that the idea of a bear, for example, is not the cause of emotions “as a match might be said to cause a fire: but along with the “idea” there is a total organic reaction which makes the “idea” itself a uniquely personal event, and wields it into that concrete psycho-physical process called experience”. Brett argues that this position is in harmony with Kant’s insistence on allowing the subjective to be part of, for example, his transcendental deduction and also allowing it to play such a prominent role in the critique of judgment:

“..for Kant leads the modern school of thinkers who insist on a) giving to feeling an independent position and b) regarding it as the subjective complement of the objective processes(sensation, ideation)”(Brett and Peters)

In England Spencer had been propagating for Psychology to be treated as a natural science and then partially deserted that position with his “two aspect” theory that retained an inductive approach to the phenomena of Psychology. Among the consequences were strange terminological inventions such as “cerebration” which were used for processes of thinking. In this context consider Dr Irelands famous quote:

“Cerebration!–what a name for thought! When the liver secretes bile one does not say that it hepatates, or when a man breathes we do not say that he pulmonates”

The above of course is an example of a technical or technological relation to language which was to cause problems at many different levels for the discipline of psychology during the next century.

With Spencer, the life of the mind was divided: into inner and outer activities. Darwin’s work was in the spirit of Aristotle and introduced the spirit of deduction into an atmosphere of induction, an atmosphere where all the energy of researchers was devoted to the collection of facts without any thought concerning the problem of how these facts should be ordered. Darwin’s theory of change regarded Nature as infinitely and ceaselessly productive, a process in which every change was an experiment directed by the processes of random variation and selection. It became clear now that there should be a general biological treatment of mental functions and the lives of animals and children were especially relevant to such investigations. His view of emotions also had great effect: replacing the focus on consciousness with a focus on habit. Consciousness came to be regarded as a consequence of the process of evolution. Darwin’s position implied a rejection of dualism in favour of Aristotle with a twist of Spencer, namely :

“The cooperation of the physical and psychic factors which this theory employs is explained by giving to the body a capacity for producing certain movements, and to the intelligence a power of selecting, and so finally establishing some modes of action in preference to others.”(Brett and Peters)

It was clear that Darwin’s theories would provide more insight into the study of life and also that a platform was provided for the union of physiological, biological and psychological viewpoints. But the fruits of this union had to wait for the works of Bain and Ward. It is at this point that we first begin to see the beginning of a new attitude to the problems of the theory of mind in particular and philosophical psychology in general. Spencer had talked about induction and association-ism but Ward sought for a deeper method and a deeper unity. Ward argued that the phenomena of psychology are not specifically inner as opposed to outer but are rather :

“certain distinct characteristics of conscious individual life. These characteristics must be assigned to a subject or an Ego. A sequence of “states” has no inner unity and could not know itself: there is an agent as well as an action, and in addition to knowing, feeling and doing we must admit that which knows, feels, and does.

This agent is equivalent to the total state and processes of consciousness and further:

“Every distinguishable element of the mental life is, therefore, a phase of its activity: it is no more separated from its phenomena than the moon is separated from its phases: the subject is the knowing, feeling and doing in their own living unity.”

Wards Psychology is one in which the material of presentations is largely given but the life of consciousness involves attention in relation to these presentations plus a voluntary direction of attention onto “motor presentations from which result changes in the field of consciousness” Again in this we can see the trace of Kant the scientist. There is a large primitive mass of undifferentiated intuitions out of which we differentiate sensible and conceptual entities, all of which constitute the antecedents of knowledge. The matter is form-ed (hylomorphism) and here we hear echoes of Aristotle. But it is the activism of the German school which is mostly the driving force of Ward’s theorizing: the active organizing subject is responsible for the unity of experience:

“they are not transcendental principles of mind regarded universally, but organic principles of individual conscious existence. Time and space are the first of these organizing principles: unity, identity, resemblance, difference comes next: the higher intellectual categories come later (substance, cause etc)”

Ward thus rejected association-ism and the building up of the whole out of the synthetic activity of combining parts. According to Ward only ideas are capable of association. his treatment of emotional and conative action is in terms of firstly, natural selection and secondly in terms of human purposive selection which also takes effect at a very early age was an advance in thinking. Purposive movement differs from reflex movement in that the former are “selected, purposive, and capable of reinforcing the emotion as a whole”. Feeling is retained as an important element of the theory and purposive movement as is the case with all intellectual activity is actually steered by desire and feeling. Ward also prefigured James and Freud in insisting that, “life and growth belong to the mind as truly as they belong to the body.

Stout takes Ward’s theory further into the territory of consciousness. Consciousness, for Stout, has three fundamental modes of functioning: thinking feeling and willing. His characterization of these modes, however, is not functional and is more reminiscent of the characterization of different attitudes:

“the matter given to consciousness is the sum of presentations: to each presentation there is a possible reaction in one of three ways. If the presentation is referred to an object, and regarded only as significant, we are said to think: if we find ourselves in an attitude of liking or disliking, we have the volitional or conative mode: from this arises pleasure or pain (the third mode)… In reality, then, only two modes are fundamental: we either think or will…Thought and will are operations by which the creature strives to regain its lost equilibrium.”

This last thought concerning the equilibrium of the organism recalls the early work oF Freud who suggested an energy regulation principle and a pleasure-pain principle was involved in this work of balancing the consciousness of the individual. “Thought is the creatures way of satisfying its needs”(Brett and Peters).

James carried on in this spirit and introduced the term “stream of consciousness” against the background of a solid physiological and almost positivistic orientation toward “the study of the phenomena and conditions of mental activity”(James’s definition of Psychology). He believed that experience could not throw light upon itself and was committed to Lotze’s teachings about the difference between knowing something and knowing about something:

“In a certain way, one only knows vision by seeing: but sciences are not immediate experiences, and a chapter on vision must describe the eye and its functions simply because the greater knowledge toward which men strive is attained by this particular circumnavigation…..To say that physiology throws no light on mental processes is very true: the fundamental error is in asking physiology to explain something which has previously been made inaccessible, instead of taking all the facts as capable in some degree of being explained by all others.”

James then also explains the psychologist’s fallacy that in essence amounts to believing that if one has an idea of a year that one also has an idea of its 365 days. Of course, the object “year” has 365 days but the “idea” of a year does not. James and Freud, it is reputed, were the only two psychologists Wittgenstein studied carefully. This example reminds me of Wittgenstein’s discussion of a painting of a kettle with steam coming out of the spout. Wittgenstein asks whether it makes sense to claim that there is water boiling in the kettle. Here too the distinction between object and idea is being debated.

James weaves introspection into his otherwise “scientific” account but there are elements of mysticism and there is also a nod in the direction of Freud:

“I cannot but think that the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, first made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least, there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field with its visual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. I call this the most important step forward because, unlike the other advances which psychology has made, this discovery has revealed to us an entirely unsuspected peculiarity in the constitution of human nature.”

With these reflections, I bring the 19th century to a close and will move on to a discussion of 20th-century Psychology. Bretts work came out in 1921 but Peters who abridged the three volumes wrote a chapter on 20th-century Psychology. This chapter will be the subject of the next thread.

October 23, 2017December 10, 2024

The Disappearance/Reappearance of the first person and Transcendental Logic in Philosophy and the Philosophy of Education

The Disappearance/Reappearance of the first person and Transcendental Logic in Philosophy and the Philosophy of Education

Cogito ergo sum: “I think therefore I am” was the result of the Cartesian search for the first principle of Philosophy and although Kant picked up on the premise of that “argument” if such it be (i.e. “I think”), Philosophy and therefore philosophy of education after Kant’s influence waned, focussed more on the conclusion: the existence of the subject. This in spite of the fact that the most convincing argument Descartes produced for his first principle was an “epistemological” argument namely that If I should try to doubt that I am thinking I cannot do so without thinking. Now I am not sure that this is an epistemological argument because the intuition of thinking seems to be an after effect of the thinking (admittedly a closely connected after effect). Thinking rather appears to me to be a transcendental condition of the experience or intuition.

What I wish to begin to explore in this article is whether this transcendental condition is related to the grammatical structure of the first person. Wittgenstein counselled us to ask how we learn a word if philosophical disputes arise connected with the concept the word expresses but he does not talk about the conditions under which we learn the word “I” as far as I can remember. Kant, however, does take this issue up in his work “Anthropology”. Kant, the transcendentalist, points out that children before they learn the use of the word “I” call themselves the name that other people call them, that is, they use their name in (perhaps accidental)accordance with the rules of a proper name which are probably connected to criteria of uniqueness such as Born in Demo Alopece, Athens in 470/69 BC into the family…etc. At some point probably around 2-3 years the child feels a unity of consciousness within itself which needs characterization by the first person pronoun “I”. Logicians have probably misleadingly called “I ” a “shifter” because of their obsession with the idea of ostensive definition and the role of such definition in naming. “Socrates” would be, according to Kripke, a rigid designator referring necessarily to that object given by the criteria specified by a set of definite descriptions: the man born in…the man born at the time….. The term “I ” cannot designate rigidly in the way in which a name can, therefore the term “shifter”. By the time logicians are thinking in this way, the transcendental “I think” or the grammatical form of the first person has disappeared from mainstream Philosophical discourse. In my previous essays on the Post Kantian history of Psychology, I mentioned some of the factors responsible for this transformation of the philosophical landscape since Kant. Ludvig Wittgenstein initially a leading thinker in the kind of logical thinking instantiated by Kripke et al, relatively quickly joined the critics of his own earlier work and began to realize that Philosophical logic had replaced transcendental logic for no good reason. In his later work, we find Wittgenstein arguing for a concern for language that is no longer analytical but more anthropological and communal. Behind Wittgenstein’s “we say” is “we think” and many of his discussions with himself in his work “Philosophical Investigations” are in accordance with the ancient Socratic definition of thinking as “talking or discoursing with oneself”. Wittgenstein’s style therefore reaches back to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and further on in History to the more systematic transcendental treatment by Kant. Wittgenstein’s dialogical approach was very effective in providing convincing arguments against behaviourism, functionalism, pragmatism, materialism, naturalism, scientism, logical atomism, logical positivism, consequentialism and instrumentalism: all of which had shifted into the vacuum created by the displacement of transcendental logic and the grammatical case of the first person. This looks a very abstract point but this is only so as long as one does not see the connection between transcendental logic and metaphysical and ethical investigations that deal with reality and the value of reality respectively.

My first contact with Wittgenstein’s thought was via a Philosophy of Education course at Exeter University in England during the 1970’s given by a lecturer who had substantial contact with Wittgenstein’s Philosophy in Cambridge both directly with the master and with the initial inner circle. Philosophy of education became as a consequence of the influence of Wittgenstein’s thought a fermented keg of discussion confined to 5 Universities of which Exeter was one. The ingredients of this fermentation were Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian and Wittgensteinian and the key thinkers spreading ideas in Philosophy of Education were R. S. Peters, Paul Hirst, and Richard Pring. This latter figure is particularly interesting because he has been relatively active until recently in the field of education. His work “Philosophy of Educational Research” is a work that is highly recommended to those who are interested in the topic we are attempting to discuss in this article in particular for its consistency with the ideas of the 1970’s in England. If we are right in our reasoning, this period of the 1960’s/70’s in England may have been the beginning of the restoration of Hylomorphism, Transcendental Logic and also the beginning of a broadly Humanistic revival of spirit in Europe.

But let us begin at almost the beginning, with Aristotle. In an earlier article on political identity we discussed the criteria of personal identity and referred to the central concept of continuity as a logical concept derived from Aristotle’s theory of change. Four elements were involved: continuity of the body (the actual material of our body is changing and dying), continuity of memories in our memory system (we have forgotten many early memories but some of the memories we have probably had some relation to other memories which in their turn were related to other memories which in their turn might have been related to the early memories we have forgotten), continuity of the social system(social structures are disappearing and appearing in accordance with some kind of continuity principle) we are embedded in, and continuity of the political system we have perhaps created in our lifetime with our political judgments decisions and opinions. Memories are individual memories and are memories of other individuals. Social institutions are composed of individuals and their memories de facto and in virtuo in the form of the books of a library: history is embodied in monuments and buildings and street names etc. Similarly with political institutions, there are living individuals writing books for libraries and reading books from libraries: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Kant’s Political Philosophy. In this latter context individuals form new political parties, change the direction of a party etc. The political element incorporates formally (logically) the social as material that, in its turn, formally incorporates memories of individuals, and individuals bodies as material. This logical connection of elements is only possible with the kind of matter-form formula which we encounter in Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory: form and telos provides both the organizing principle and the end toward which the underlying material substance is actualizing. We can also see in this matter-form formula the logical relation of wholes to parts which is mentioned in Aristotles “Prior Analytics”.

There does not seem to be any difficulty in holistically characterizing what a person is in this kind of context and most commentators see the advantage of the hylomorphic view over the kind of view which suggests that the person is a complete collection of facts. Facts are facts because they inhere in different categories. How are we to differentiate them if not by a theory of the categories? Categories are ways of thinking about reality. Now there has been sufficient controversy about such issues to concede that the categories, at best, allow us to glimpse reality as if through a glass darkly. Kant helped to tidy the discussion up by claiming that categories determine kinds of judgment, which direct our relation to reality in different ways. For Wittgenstein, Judgment, of course suggested something we do, i.e. conceptual judgments emerged from forms of life which embed language games as justifications of what we do. Different forms of life justify different judgments. This initially looks like a formula for relativism but this is not the case because Wittgenstein is not comparing judgments at the same level, i.e he is not claiming that a categorical form of life and thinking gives rise to categorical judgments in one community can be compared and contrasted with a categorical form of life and thinking giving rise to a different categorical judgment in another community. He is rather claiming that if one community for example believes that happiness is the end for which ethical action aims and another community aims at duty as the good this is not a contradiction but a choice of a categorical view of the good over an instrumental view. On another level, Wittgenstein points to categories of language to distinguish between kinds of judgment. The language game with pain in “I am in pain” is categorical because it does not make sense to doubt that I am in pain(cf Descartes, it does not make sense to doubt that I think) but there is between these two language games of “I am in pain” and “I think” a fundamental difference. In the former case we are in the Kantian realm of Sensibility,(The Wittgensteinian realm of sensation) in the realm of events that happen to me, and in the latter we are in the realm of activity, the realm of what is done. In the former case I learn the expression in connection with primitive behaviour such as falling and skinning my knee: my teachers teach me to say “I am in pain” and this replaces my screaming in pain. In the latter case there is also undoubtedly some behavioural base which will be substituted by the words “I think”, perhaps the behaviour in question might be that of an exclamation upon being struck by a thought, e.g. thinking of something I just exclaim that something. The major difference between the two cases is that in the former the question as to why one is in pain, reference will be made to a cause whereas in the latter case the question as to why one is thinking something or doing any activity, reference will be made to a reason (and of course depending on the type of activity the reason may be an instrumental one, “because it makes me happy” or a categorical one, “because everyone ought to do what I am doing if one is to treat people as ends in themselves”). In the case of the reason for thinking something we might in fact be reasoning in a series of premises culminating in a conclusion.

These are first person cases of different kinds and different language games will be embedded in different patterns of activity or forms of life. Even second person responses to our first person avowals will differ accordingly. In the pain case there will be sympathetic reactions and in the thinking case there will be more cognitive reactions and perhaps even a long discussion, i.e. in the thinking case the discussion with oneself will be replaced by discussion with any possible second person and both will be testing their understanding of each other in terms of the truth of the statements, the reasoning being used and the conclusions drawn. A major difference between the sensation case and the thinking case is that in the former one can engage in observing the course of ones pain but in the latter that is not a possibility because pain is a phenomenon and thinking is not: “although there are phenomena of thinking, thinking is not a phenomenon.”(Wittgenstein). What is the role of language in this context? Wittgenstein often refers to the first person plural case “We say…… and Stanley Cavell in his “Claim of Reason” asks the provocative question “and what gives anyone the right to speak for or on behalf of others”. He might well also have asked “What gives anyone the right to “think” on behalf of others”: or what gives anyone the right to claim something is true and expect acceptance of the truth of what is said. This is the normative aspect of our discourse with each other and with ourselves when we are thinking: the truth is what ought to be accepted and understood. Cavell points out we certainly are not appealing to empirical research or the process of voting or counting hands. There are phenomena of talking but talking is not a phenomenon, Cavell seems to be arguing. Grammatical remarks are first person collective remarks and they transcend experience. Connections can also be made to the idea of the self being transcendental, being. that is, as Aristotle would characterise the soul, a principle of experience and activity.

October 15, 2017December 10, 2024

Post Kantian Philosophical Psychology, Herbart,Schopenhauer, Fechner and the History of Psychology(R S Peters and Brett)

Post Kantian Philosophical Psychology, Herbart, Schopenhauer, Fechner and the History of Psychology(R S Peters and Brett)

“Kant rightly declared that the mind must be regarded as a structure regulated by principles which are ultimately its own activities. Before Kant’s time the psychologist was not unlike a physiologist who tried to explain digestion, without any reference to the organism, as a process by which various foods introduced into the stomach analysed themselves and distributed themselves conscientiously to their appropriate places in the organism. It was Kant who first saw that such a procedure was wrong and that we must start from the mind to explain the ideas, not from ideas to explain the mind”(Brett)

“Psychologists have, in most cases recognized this merit in Kant, and all the modern work founded on the conception of the unity of consciousness is indebted to Kant. But for the rest Kant belongs to the logicians rather than the psychologists, and his theory is more important for discussions of validity than for the study of the mental structure.”(Brett’s History of Psychology)

The Copernican Revolution of Kant further means that the receptive faculty of the mind, which receives sensations, has no meaning apart from the formative activity of the higher spontaneous thinking centres. Brett goes on to point out that perhaps Kant failed to take into account the fact that a sensation which is related to another sensation might modify that sensation: “after a great heat a moderate warmth seems chilly, and so through all the senses: there is a kind of self arrangement which is not the work of the mind”

Brett accuses Kant of being the propagator of the view that the higher regions of the mind or thinking processes alone organize conscious life but quickly admits that the Categories of the understanding, according to Kant, are the “indispensable preliminary activities of consciousness”. These categories obviously play the role that forms do in Aristotelian hylomorphism and Brett poses the question many critics of Aristotelian hylomorphism have posed over the centuries: the question of the importance of Psychology. Martin Heidegger in his work on Kant, suggested that Kant missed an opportunity to found his critical work on the psychological idea of the imagination and one should remember the following: that the above criticism of the importance of the psychological predates Heidegger.

Herbart was one of the first post Kantians to attempt to restore the idea of the soul to the world of phenomena: the soul for Herbart was “a multitude of independent ideas and activities”(Brett). Herbart’s point of departure is mathematics and the natural sciences and his aim, according to Brett is to “reduce consciousness to simple elements, and their combinations” This attempt to restore the idea of the soul, ultimately leads to the position of abandoning the idea of the soul altogether although this was not the case with respect to Herbart’s reflections. The most interesting feature of Herbart’s account is his emphasis on the soul being the agent manifest in all its activities and not the place where events just “happen”. Brett claims that it is with Herbart that Psychology becomes empirical. I am not sure that this is an entirely appropriate analysis. As long as the agent is not defined as an object seen from the perspective of the third person there would seem to be a retention of some of the spirit of Kant’s position. The abandonment of reasoning for the empirical scientific method, however, was certainly not in accordance with the Kantian Copernican revolution. Indeed Brett’s description of Herbart’s account of the relation between consciousness and its ideas cannot fail to remind one of what is later to come in the name of phenomenology:

“Phenomena are in perpetual flux: in other words, the most obvious thing about consciousness is its perpetual tendency to change: even though we try to retain one presentation, it slowly dwindles in our grasp. This general fact gives Herbart his starting point. By an idea we mean the outstanding point, the summit or peak on the surface of an ever heaving-consciousness. If we imagine a light shining on a sea of rising and falling waves, the analogy may assist us to grasp Herbart’s conception of “arches” and “summits”. Every single idea travels, as it were, on the path of a semi-circle, from a point below the level of consciousness upward to its zenith: it then goes down again and gives place to another. This process continually goes on: it is the business of psychology to find its laws.”(Brett)

The problem with Herbart’s active conception of the soul is that “the only active quality ascribed to the soul is the tendency to preserve itself”. And with this thought, Herbart’s reflections move away from phenomenology and back to the basics of science: consciousness and the expenditure of energy of the organism. This energy regulation principle, already present by implication in Aristotle’s reflections on the soul was to be later used in Freud’s Scientific Project. Freud, of course, abandoned this attempt to reduce the qualitative to the quantitative in his later theorizing.

Herbart interestingly also claimed:

“to have provided a psychology especially applicable to education. It was the interest in mental growth and in the union of right thinking with the right feeling that led Herbart to understand how closely the qualities of character depend on the complete fusion of knowing and feeling in one indivisible state of mind, evolving into the kind of clearness which is only attainable through self-expressing actions.”

The essential feature of mental growth is characterized in terms of apperception. or the Kantian “I think” or the “I will” but the “I” of consciousness is still characterized in terms of scientific Psychology. He applied these ideas to ethics but neglected the Kantian concepts of reason and freedom believing along with Plato that the temper of the community determines the temperament and character of the individual.

Schopenhauer is the post Kantian who converts the self into the will and defines it in terms the Psychologist will find difficult to accept:

“As some had declared the “Thing-in-itself” to be the organism, Schopenhauer declares it to be the vitality resident in the organism”. His view is thus biological, where it is not merely metaphysical: when he proclaims his own originality he is justified if we think only of modern tendencies, but in everything but its language and its excesses this view is a restatement of Aristotle’s doctrine of the fundamental conation, persisting through all the scale of organic life, variously combined with and modified by corresponding degrees of conscious realization”(Brett)

Schopenhauer restored the will to modern thought but the whole trend of his analysis Brett argues is toward “the fundamental impulses of animal nature”, although there are moments in his account when Schopenhauer stands where Kant stood. Herbart’s influence was to prevail over Schopenhauer’s forlorn attempt to restore Kantian Psychology.

Fechner’s interest turned more to physics and aesthetics than mathematics and he actually wrote some valuable works on electricity. But there are also elements of mysticism in Fechner:

“lying in bed on the morning of the 22nd of October 1850, he saw the vision of a unified world of thought, spirit and matter linked together by the mystery of numbers. So it was, perhaps, that Pythagoras saw the quality of sound transformed into measurement!”

And yet there is something of the spirit of the age in Fechner’s vision. He tries to unite the psychical and the physical and with him Brett argues:

“The centre of controversy shifts to the question, How much of the inner life actually enters into this sphere of measurement and quantity.”(Brett)

By the time this question was raised, Kant’s voice has been lost and there is only a very faint echo of the answer to this question “Hardly anything at all” This is not to deny that mental states do not have physical equivalents but the key question becomes “Are the limits of our knowledge of this relation confined to correlation?” But correlation between what and what? How can there be a correlation between a principle and that which it is a principle of? This post takes us to the psychology of the 20th century that will be the subject of the next thread.

October 5, 2017December 10, 2024

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

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 him-self”. 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 that 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 that 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 that 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 that belongs to the realm of thinking, 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 behaviour, 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 behaviour, 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 23, 2017November 23, 2021

“The End of All Things”: Religion, Psychoanalysis and Philosophical Psychology( of Conclusion of Volume 4 of ” A Philosophical History of Psychology…”)

The Philosophy of Religion in the 20th century managed two major offensives against what many have regarded as the global force of secularism, and one or both of these offensives may turn out to be the decisive territorial gain for religion ensuring its position in the globalising processes leading to Cosmopolitanism. The Philosophers behind these offensives were Wittgenstein and Ricoeur. They both represent the challenges of Hermeneutics and Philosophical Psychology to the secularisation process. They also, I would argue, manifest the presence of philosophical cosmopolitan imperatives in the multi-dimensional globalisation process.

Popular commentators on the subject of the decline of the authority of Religion have claimed, perhaps prematurely, that God is dead (although no one has actually seen his body). The postulated first cause of all things, it is argued, is no longer efficacious in the world of mobile phones, television sets, computers, driverless cars, robots cutting the lawn, robots hoovering the house, internet diagnoses of physical and mental diseases etc. The major causes involved in what was hopefully an accidental death are:

1. The claim of Kant that God was just an idea in the mind.

2 The claim of Darwin that man who was supposed to be made in the image of God in fact evolved from the animal kingdom in accordance with the mechanisms of random variation, natural and sexual selection.

3. The claim of Freud that religious belief may have neurotic and psychotic characteristics, i.e. that the idea of God in man’s mind is not an idea one finds in a healthy mind.

4 Economical systems that seemed to have done more for the poverty of billions of people than divine assistance could ever manage (Perhaps God died from an extended period of inactivity?).

It might also be of interest to point out that in the secular process, the human being seems to have disappeared or receded into the background in relation to the jungle of equipment functioning in accordance with the law of economic/technological efficiency. If a robot/computer can replace a doctor and a psychiatrist and win chess games against chess masters, then what hope is there for priests, teachers, philosophers and the rest of us ordinary mortals? Well, as was suggested above, there is hope, and it comes from Philosophy in general and Philosophical Psychology in particular.

Let us, however, examine more closely the so-called causes of God’s “accidental death”. Firstly let us remember that Kant was a religious man who he did not attend Church regularly. Indeed, although his ethical system was logically autonomous in relation to religious authority, this system still needed God, (the idea in man’s minds) to produce the good consequences of a good or flourishing life which otherwise might not follow from pure and good intentions. The philosophical conclusion of Kant’s argument is that both God and “the good” might be logically related ideas in man’s mind, indeed, they may even be identical. This idea of the good being necessary for man to lead a meaningful flourishing life goes, of course, all the way back to Plato and Aristotle.

Darwin’s ideas initially threw the religious world into a state of ferment for a time but theologians soon realised that all that was needed to survive the Darwinian storm was to claim that Evolution is a process proceeding in accordance with divine laws of creation. God’s invisible hand was steering the process and the mechanism of random variation was not a real mechanism, but an illusion of mans fragile and ethically flawed mind. The embarrassing facts of the creation scene in the Bible needed re-interpretation, and some scholars began to argue that one should not interpret everything in the Bible literally. Reading the creation scene metaphorically and symbolically could allow space for the existence of mechanisms of natural and sexual selection functioning in accordance with the expression of God’s will.

Freud’s ideas, similarly, if one reads his texts closely may lead one to the conviction that when Freud claimed that a belief in God had the hallucinatory qualities of a schizophrenic delusion, he may have been talking about the way in which some people or even most people relate to God. Blindly rattling off one’s prayers or performing religious rites do remind one of the obsessive compulsive’s repetitious attacks on the world, but these repetitions also remind one of the healthy actings out of children who are trying to control the environment that is causing them anxiety.

Worshipping an invisible figure in public can seem strange, and Freud explains it partly in terms of the defence mechanism of displacement caused by excessive anxiety: a mechanism which substitutes a real ambiguous punishing/forgiving father figure with an equally ambiguous invisible father who promises relief from one’s suffering, if one plays the game of religion. The second part of his explanation involves returning to the origin of the religious belief system as communicated to believers in civilisation. Primitive wishes in response to a primitive feeling of helplessness provide the temporary relief we need from the burden of existence in fragile civilisations. Freud may well himself have been ambivalent toward even mature attitudes involving religious conviction, as some commentators have claimed, but I am sceptical of this description for a number of reasons, amongst which are the following: he claimed to be writing the Psychology Kant would have written if he had interested himself sufficiently in psychological or anthropological matters. Freud did not definitely say that man would never be guided by his reason and place his hope and faith in some reasonable future. This might, however, be because he was reluctant to present himself as a prophet, for fear that mans destructive instincts may, as a matter of fact, overshadow his constructive instincts (Freud, died in 1939 at a time when the existence of civilisation was threatened ideologically). He may have suspected that the time might come when civilisation would be threatened by the power of weapons of mass destruction)

Perhaps if Freud had lived in another time and another place, England or France, for example, we may have seen him launching the offensive against a wave of economic/technological or secular globalisation (his comments in his work “The Future of an Illusion” and his remarks on the USA certainly suggest he would have been one of the ideologues at the forefront of demonstrations against the way in which market economics has dominated all other globalisation processes). He certainly attempted to transform psychoanalysis into a global movement in the name of science and philosophical psychology.

Paul Ricoeur, after Freud’s death, wrote both about the confession of evil in the religious context and the confessions one could witness in the psychoanalyst’s clinic. One implication of Ricoeur’s work is that there appears to be a “symbolic function” of language which takes us far beyond the purview of the scientist in his pursuit of a certain kind of explanation. He, like Wittgenstein, believed that the route to the understanding of what Aristotle called being qua being, needed to proceed more circuitously to its destination via language. In the context of this discussion, many commentators have commented upon the “confessional” nature of Wittgenstein’s posthumous work, the “Philosophical Investigations”.

In Ricoeur’s work “the Symbolism of Evil” it is claimed that the confession of evil is of interest for the philosopher because it is an utterance man makes about himself. A confession is an act of religious consciousness, but as yet is not Philosophy until it becomes an object of reflection. Myth, for Ricoeur, is not, as is the case with Freud, an expression of a primitive helpless mind filled with fantasy-laden wishes. Myth too, has a symbolic function, which is expressive of the power of discovery and revelation in the realm of Being. It reveals the bond between man and what he considers sacred. and important. Ricoeur claims that “Evil is the crisis of this bond”. The experience of sin, according to Ricoeur, is the ground upon which the feeling of guilt occurs but:

“The experience of which the penitent makes a confession is a blind experience, still embedded in the matrix of emotion, fear, anguish. It is this emotional note that gives rise to objectification in discourse: the confession expresses, pushes to the outside, the emotion which without it would be shut up within itself, as an impression in the soul. Language is the light of the emotions.”

A myth is obviously partly a traditional response to suffering, and contains elements of a lamentation about that suffering, but it is also a language with a complex relation to being, the self, time, and imagery. That is why it has a non-confessional narrative structure. A confession of ones suffering, occurring in the realm of the symbolic, does not necessarily have to be embedded in a narrative structure. Yet it has, Ricoeur claims, a cosmic and ethical/psychological significance. Both myths and confessions require philosophical interpretation and hermeneutics, according to Ricoeur. Both constitute reflective instruments required for this work of interpretation. In a paper given at a conference on “Hermeneutics and Tradition”, Ricoeur points out that time is lived, and used, in two different ways. Tradition transmits symbols, and myths and hermeneutics interpret myth and symbols. Interpretation, he argues keeps a tradition alive: “Every tradition lives by the grace of interpretation”. Ricoeur then points out that these two temporalities intersect in a third profound temporality which constitutes the elusive field of “Meaning”. Symbols live in this sphere of the relation of a physical literal meaning to a figurative, spiritual ontological existential meaning. A symbol always says more than it says, and therefore is in constant need of interpretation. According to Ricoeur, the study of the time of symbols would be a much more important philosophical pursuit than, for example, the interpretation of myths. He points out in support of his thesis that a myth can never exhaust the semantic constitution of the symbol. Insofar as the symbolism of evil is concerned Ricoeur has the following to say:

“The symbols embraced by the avowal of evil appeared to me to fall into three signifying levels: the primary symbolic level of stain, sin, and guilt, the mythical level of the great narratives of the fall or the exile, and the level of mythical dogmatisms of Gnosticism and original sin…….It appeared to me…that the store of the meaning of primary symbols was richer than that of mythical symbols and even more so than that of rationalising mythologies.”

Much more can be said about the relation of the confession of the patient seeking a cure in relation to the confession of the religious man seeking salvation, but let me now turn to Wittgenstein’s arguments and their claim to restore the lost object of religious discourse to the house of Deus absconditus in our robotic secularised cities. Firstly, the language of religion is not a factual language, nor is it a a language of observation, or a language of cause, and effect. It is a language game, and as such, according to Wittgenstein, it is embedded in a form of life in which the participants operate with tacit presuppositions: not the tacit presuppositions of a science in which, for example, it is assumed that the heavenly bodies which are only subject to infrequent observation nevertheless enjoy a continuous real existence, but rather the tacit presuppositions relating to the activities of a soul. Wittgenstein adds the following reflection to the claim that the human body is a good “image” of the human soul for example:

“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 thought played a role in mental illness. Freud was one of the few psychologists Wittgenstein studied: perhaps both thinkers believed that surrounding the heart of our understanding was a kind of madness or soul blindness, the cure for which was therapy. But Wittgenstein probably did not subscribe to psychoanalysis as the sole route to understanding the human condition, for he turned to a higher power for his succour, namely Christianity. One year before his death we find Wittgenstein reflecting upon God and suffering, and suggesting that if Christianity is the truth about the human condition, then all the philosophy about it is false. He rejects the concentration on the argument that Gods essence guarantees his existence and claims that if one leads one’s life in the right way a belief in God will naturally condense from the cloud of suffering that surrounds man. Donald Hudson, a religious philosopher, and commentator on Wittgenstein’s work, points out that we should not expect the religious man to reason about his beliefs in the religious language-game in the same way in which the scientist reasons 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 reasonable asks Hudson? Does not this practical belief system seem to be stronger than any hypothetical belief system any scientist can produce? The scientist has his set of commitments and expects that every event which occurs has an explanatory cause in a systematically uniform world-view in which moons and suns continuously exist. The scientist is building a system of knowledge which does not know what to do with transcendental truths. Wittgenstein realised this from his earlier work but let us conclude with a quote from Kant’s “Religion within the bounds of mere Reason.”:

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

And further on:

“non-existence cannot be demonstrated either”

How then are we to interpret the avowals of the suffering souls of the Psalms or the suffering patients in secularised psychiatric waiting rooms? Surely their cries are not just facts being stated, not just the effects of causes, or the consequences of observations? Surely the realm of Hope and Faith that Kant referred to is the home of their language games? Surely their cries are symbolic? Surely these cries are relating to how the soul believes the world ought to be. This is the Kantian view of God, an idea that is necessarily connected to human moral activity: an idea that has its home in practical and not theoretical reason and as such it must establish a relation to both the moral law and freedom. On the Aristotelian view, God is pure Primary Form, a first principle that does not create infinite matter which has existed eternally but rather organises it, not in the way a builder building a house does, but rather the way in which an architect designs a house or an author composes a literary work. The ancient Greeks appear to understand this position and left the mechanical work of creation to the Demiurge. They also understood suffering and received some comfort from their ideal view of the Gods which served as terms of comparison. For them, the initiators of civilisation, the fear of the oracles prophecy was always on their minds: “Everything created by man is doomed to ruin and destruction”. The only response to such a prophecy was to conceive the Gods in the spirit of arché, areté, diké, and epistemé and hope for “eudaimonia (a good spirited flourishing life).

September 12, 2017November 19, 2021

Aristotle and the History of Psychology(Brett)(Philosophical Psychology)

The History of Psychology, according to Professor Brett, is the history of a number of traditional inquiries amongst which are included The Rationalist tradition which includes both Plato and Aristotle, The Religious and ethical tradition, The Observationalist tradition, and the Medical Tradition. Brett also discusses the emergence of the theme of self-consciousness(Kant and Neo Kantians), what he calls the theme of the gateway of method, and theme of the reinterpretation of authority followed by the theme of the challenge to authority. This is a broad spectrum of concerns and can explain the controversies that arise whenever someone suggests a “reduction” of Psychology to one or two of these traditions/themes.

Aristotle is regarded as a Rationalist but Brett does not observe what has subsequently been noted by Aristotelian scholars, namely, that his thought would have something to contribute to each of the traditions, and the themes mentioned above. This essay attempts to show the breadth of Aristotle’s interests and indicate how these interests correlate with the breadth of concerns of the above traditions/themes. The theme concerning authority is particularly significant given the fact that Aristotle was regarded as “The Philosopher” for centuries and a “reinterpretation” of his work was needed by the religious authorities before a challenge to his authority could be mounted.

Brett is also eager to point out Aristotle’s deficiencies as a scientist even after pointing out that he differed markedly with Plato in his approach to reality by extolling the virtues of observation, methodological classification, and experimentation. Apparently, Aristotle’s fondness for definition was supposed to be a residue from the Platonic theory of forms, according to Brett, but what he then continues to say about Aristotle’s hylomorphism does not quite amount to devaluing a commitment to definition.

Since matter, space and time must be infinite for Aristotle and the infinite can neither have a beginning nor an end, any chunk of finite matter must have a principle of organisation which forms it into the kind of thing it is. Now there has been a great deal of philosophical discussion relating to whether there are natural kinds or not and Aristotle has been accused of adhering to the position that these natural kinds just occur in nature without any further explanation. This is not the case because we know he believes that the infinite is formed into these natural kinds by a principle which is constitutive of the essence of that thing. The essences of things Aristotle believed shall be given in a thing’s essence -specifying definition.

The theoretical framework of Aristotle also includes:

a)4 kinds of change that occur in the world,

b)three principles of change which ensure that we can make sense of the fact that something retains its identity throughout a process of change as long as that change does not destroy the identity of the thing in question, and

c) four different kinds of explanations of the change that occurs to the environment whether it be global change or the local change of the behaviour of a thing in the environment.

Amongst the 4 kinds of changes that were referred to, Substantial and Qualitative change were obviously more philosophically significant than Quantitative or Relational change. This was Aristotle’s objection to the Pythagorean claim that the real qualities of things such as the sound of harp strings were to be related to the underlying mathematical lengths of the strings. The latter mathematical relations, i.e. according to Pythagoras, explained the former qualities of the sounds that we qualitatively identify and appreciate.

This claim was certainly true of the harp strings but according to Aristotle, this state of affairs could not necessarily be generalised to all substances and qualities. The harp’s creation brought a substance into being in accordance with all the teleological qualities that a Harp requires. The quantitative knowledge relating to the length of the strings is, of course, part of the process of making the harp and in Aristotle’s terms part of the efficient and material causes of the harp. The separation of quantitative changes from qualitative and substantial changes was a revolution in thinking which began with Plato and actually upset the Pythagorean attempt to universalise the ideal of mathematical thinking in nature. Modern quantum theory disregards the Aristotelian revolution when it insists that events in the sub atomic universe are to be explained by a mathematical formula which works but no one knows why it works.

The idea in the mind of the maker of the harp is , for Aristotle, not a quantity but a form, one of the three forms which are communicated in his composite world of matter and form, the other two forms being 1. the biological form of reproducing the species to create another individual related to me and 2. the forms of knowledge that are communicated from teacher to learner: these last forms will probably include the form of the good, the form of justice and the form of beauty.

Finally, Aristotle’s definition of human nature as a rational animal was revised in a later work to “man is a rational animal capable of discourse”, and part of what Aristotle means here by “rational” are: 1. the theoretical knowledge of the world. and 2. the ability to plan one’s life by imposing some kind of life-formula upon my desires and wishes as well as 3. the ability to regulate communal desires and wishes via one’s understanding of the role of laws in the construction of the communal flourishing life. These plans and formulae are continually subjected to a critical reflection process which will determine whether they are right and wrong, whether they have achieved their purposes. The composite of a man includes his animal nature and the relation of this aspect to man’s rational nature requires an understanding of Aristotle’s view of the soul.

This is the complex theoretical framework which he used for both biological and political science research in his Lyceum. There was no discipline of psychology at that time but there was much talk about the concept of the soul or psuche (as distinguished from the physical animal-like body). Brett refers to Aristotle’s definition of human nature(rational animal capable of discourse) as not being “scientific” because it embodies no causal reference. Brett is using “causal” in some narrow linear scientific sense which works best when applied to the physical world of a billiard ball reacting with another billiard ball. For Aristotle “cause” means “explanation”(“aitia”) and both rational and animal have a complex conceptual relation with each other which is reminiscent of the relation of the soul (psuche) to the body. But there are largely 4 assumptions about the soul which are being used in Aristotle’s reference to the 4 kinds of change, three principles and 4 causes and these are:

“Soul” is co-extensive with “life”. This is what the term “soul” means
The soul is the actualisation of a body furnished with organs.
The movements of such a physical body are to be explained in terms of its soul. The soul is a form or a principle and is not the sort of thing therefore that can be moved
There are levels of soul which form a hierarchy where the lower form is a necessary condition of the higher and the higher transforms the lower. The levels are the vegetative, which correspond to plant life, the animal level corresponding to animal life and the human corresponding to human life which incorporates and transforms both these lower “levels” of soul.

So life is the first power or capacity of the physical body, and power builds upon power: language, for example, builds upon the powers of memory and experience (in which we come to know or to see man as a man), and is in turn built upon by the power of rationality which eventually learns to think theoretically and systematically about the world (if all the conditions of this actuality are met along the way). Reason has also a practical dimension referred to above when we impose plans or formulae upon our individual desires and wishes (efficient causes of action) and we understand and pass laws which regulate our societies. These latter two capacities are intimately linked to the ethical concepts of right and wrong: standards of correctness which add an achievement or areté -aspect to action

The soul moves the body but cannot itself be moved therefore it is nothing physical but rather it is able to move the body because thought in the form of intention or reason can move the body. But thought has an end built into itself and is experienced as a coming to rest rather than a movement. We come to rest in the very performance of the activity. So the form of transmitting thoughts from learner to teacher is not like that the relation between the builder building a house and the house that is built. In this example the house is an external end to the activity. In thought, on the contrary, the end is logically internal to the activity. The “telos” of the learner learning is logically tied to the activity of the teacher. teaching.

“Seeing” and “remembering” are also so called achievement “verbs”. When we speak of them we speak of a standard that has been attained and are not making reports about movements in our soul (mind) or body. Similarly with action: action is not a movement because movements just happen without being right or wrong: that is, action is not a term of the same logical type as movement. Action also internally and logically contains its end. It has been planned and thought about. This is why the end of an action is necessary to explain the movement one makes in trying to achieve that end. These ends are also further evaluated in terms of whether they are right or not. The plans, formulas or maxims are regarded as intelligent or not either in relation to the circumstances or to other higher purposes such as the meaning of ones life.

Seeing and remembering can also be components of knowledge and both Plato and Aristotle are in agreement that our desire to understand the world is best manifested in the knowledge we have of the world. The process of acquiring knowledge, however, is multilayered and multi-faceted. The best account of this process can be found in Jonathan Lear’s work on Aristotle entitled “Aristotle: the desire to understand”:

“Man is not born with knowledge but he is born with the capacity to acquire it. But the world must cooperate with him if he is to exercise that capacity. Man starts life with the ability to discriminate among sensory phenomena, an ability he shares with other animals. His soul retains a record of its sensory encounters. Through repeated encounters with items in the world, our sensory discriminations develop into memory and then into what Aristotle calls “experience”. Experience Aristotle characterizes as “the whole universal that has come to rest in the soul.” From repeated perception of particular men, we form the concept of a man, and the knowledge that this thing which we see is a man is experience. If the universal, or concept, were not somehow already embedded in the particular, we could not make the transition from bare sensory discrimination to knowledge of the individual… Because the universal is embedded in particulars, a persons first explorations among particulars will lead him toward a grasp of the embodied universal. Having acquired experience, or knowledge of individuals, we are able to formulate more abstract forms of knowledge, the arts and sciences(technai and epistemai). Each stage of cognitive development is grounded in the previous stage…..”

September 2, 2017November 19, 2021

Kissinger, the New World Order and Isolationism: Kant, the Old World Order and Globalization.

“By the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century. Wilsonianism seemed triumphant . The communist ideological and Soviet geopolitical challenges had been overcome simultaneously. The objective of moral opposition to communism had merged with the geopolitical task of resisting Soviet expansionism.”(Kissinger 1994)

“”The absence of both an overriding ideological or strategic threat frees nations to pursue policies based increasingly on their national interest. In an international system characterized by perhaps 5 or 6 major powers and a multiplicity of smaller states order will have to emerge much as it did in past centuries from a reconciliation and balancing of competing national interests.” (Kissinger 1994)

“Both Bush and Clinton spoke of the new world order as if it were just around the corner. In fact it is still in a period of gestation and its final form will not be visible until well into the next century- Part extension of the past, part unprecedented, the new world order like those which it succeeds will emerge as an answer to three questions: “What are the basic units of the international order. What are their means of interacting? What are the goals on behalf of which they interact?”(Kissinger 1994)

I believe Kissinger’s book on Diplomacy to be one of the best works written on the subject because it implicitly acknowledges a political and ethical philosophy which is conspicuous by its absence in many other similar works. Kissinger is correct in his formulation of his three questions but he pays scant attention to perhaps “the two political events of the twentieth century” which may answer his question concerning the basic unit of international order, namely the formation of the United Nations and the European Peace Project. He points out how the US was a polyglot formation of many different European nationalities and that the Soviet Union was an empire containing many Eastern nationalities. He does not emphasise this point but these seem to the Kantian political philosopher to be precursors to both the United Nations and the European project in the sense of their manifesting a disbelief in the unit of the nation state(See my earlier post on the Pathological nation state)

Kissinger goes on to point out that:

” No previous international order has contained major centres of power distributed around the entire globe. Nor had statesmen ever been obliged to conduct diplomacy in an environment where events can be experienced instantaneously and simultaneously by leaders and their publics-“(Kissinger 1994)

Kissinger then asks the Aristotelian and Kantian question: “on what principle shall the new world order be organised.” His answer is unfortunately narrow and suburban::

“..can Wilsonian concepts like “enlarging democracy” serve as the principle guides to American foreign policy and as replacement for the cold war strategy of containment? Clearly these concepts have been neither an unqualified success nor an unqualified failure. Some of the finest acts of 20th century diplomacy had their roots in the idealism of Woodrow Wilson: the Marshall plan, the brave commitment to containing communism, defense of the freedom of Western Europe and even the ill fated League of Nations and its latest incarnation, the United Nations”(Kissinger 1994)

It is clear from these quotes that Kissinger does not place any faith in any unit of international order which does not naturally grow out of the historical units of the nation state. He points to Americas victory in the cold war but simultaneously reflects on the fact that their power to influence has decreased and regretfully and nostalgically reminisces on Wilson’s desire for universal collective security. Kant had pointed out at the end of the 18th century that this would not be possible without an organisation like the UN.

“In the absence of a potentially dominating power, the principal nations do not view threats to the peace in the same way: nor are they willing to run the same risks in overcoming those threats they do not recognise”(Kissinger 1994)

Clearly Kissinger sees the UN project to be flawed, partly perhaps because of its reluctance to globally engage its military for its values in the way in which the US has. America will, Kissinger predicts. be the greatest and most powerful nation well into the 21st century but it will be a nation with peers and become a nation like others but it is moving into uncharted waters and History cannot be its guidebook. Wilsonianism he is convinced is no longer relevant.

“Curbing the power of the central government has been the central concern of Western political theorists, whereas in most other societies, political theory has sought to buttress the authority of the state. Nowhere else has there been an insistence on expanding personal freedom…The society, and in a sense, the nation, preceded the state without having to be created by it. In such a setting political parties represents variants of an underlying consensus, today’-s minority is potentially tomorrows majority. In most other parts of the world the state has preceded the nation. It was and often remains the principal element in forming it. Political parties, where they exist, reflect fixed, usually communal identities: minorities and majorities tend to be permanent. In such societies the political process is about domination, not alternation in office, which takes place, if at all by coups rather than constitutional procedures.”(Kissinger 1994)

Kissinger goes on to say that our Western democracies presuppose a consensus on values. In America the single most important value is freedom to live as one wishes. This is not the European Kantian idea of freedom which recognises necessary limitations imposed by the pluralistic life styles of modern communities and pursuing happiness collectively and ethically rather than as a collection of psychologically motivated individuals. Kantian reflection on the universal values required for our collective projects arrived at a universal ethical theory which then gave rise to the conviction that human rights were universal. This way of thinking has always been ambiguously regarded in the US especially in those historical instances where it is clear that leaders have very often put American interests first and human rights second. It remains to be seen what will happen if Kissinger’s prediction actualises itself : if, that is America finds itself in a world of equally powerful peers.

Russia’s domination has been limited by two factors: the anticommunism which is prevalent throughout Russia but also anti-imperialism which is present especially in the new non Soviet republics. What is going on in this region of this world is very different to what is going on in the West. Russia never had an autonomous church, it missed the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Age of Discovery, and modern market economics. Experiments in the introduction of market economics has usually resulted in failure and a wish for the good old days of communism, allowing the communist party on occasion to achieve 90 % of the vote(1995). The major problem for the new world post Wilsonian order, according to Kissinger, is the integration of Russia into the international community.. But he does not mention the difficulties that putting America first has caused in the world. He does not mention how this is related to the individual putting themselves first. Or how this compromises the universal and collective project of ethical values which involves so much more than the often materialistic concerns of the individual. Previously Wilsonianism, the bearer of the Kantian humanistic world view that the ethics of the individual and the politics of the state were isomorphic, had sustained the hope of cosmopolitanism but subsequent isolationism brought with it a disbelief in universal ethical aims

Kissinger notes the tendency for leaders of the US to come from the South and the West, regions of America with the least emotional and personal contact with Europe. President Trump is of course from New York but he carries on the post modern attitude of political detachment from the concern of Europe for its security and development. He carries on along the path of individualism and the individuals uncertain psychological relation to his community.

Peruse these words written in 1994:

“In the years ahead all the traditional Atlantic relationships will change. Europe will not feel the previous need for American protection and will pursue its economic self interest much more aggressively: America will not be willing to sacrifice as much for European security and will be tempted by isolationism in various guises. In due course Germany will insist on the political influence to which its military and economic power entitle it and will not be so emotionally dependent on American military and French political support.”(Kissinger 1994)

The future of the European Project, which incidentally Kissinger does not believe in, the United Nations, which he also believes to be flawed, and the deeper processes of Globalisation in accordance with Ethical universal values which lay masked behind Woodrow Wilson’s largely academic view of politics, is uncertain in the wake of the rising tide of isolationism and populism which appears to have the power once again to submerge the accomplishments of the Enlightenment and Greek Political Philosophers.

But Kissinger believes that the 21st century will be marked by a seeming contradiction between fragmentation and Globalisation:

“On the level of the relations among states the new order will be more like the European system of the 18th and 19th centuries than the rigid patterns of the cold war. It will contain at least 6 major powers–the US, Europe, China, Japan, Russia and possibly India–as well as a multiplicity of medium sized and smaller countries. At the same time international relations have become truly global for the first time. Communications are instantaneous, the world economy operates on all continents simultaneously. A whole set of issues has surfaced that can only be dealt with on a worldwide basis…”(Kissinger 1994)

Yet nowhere can we read in his work about the possibility that the academic political vision of Wilson, imitating poorly the Enlightenment ethical and political messages of Kant, might contain the recipe for the success of either the UN or European peace projects.

August 24, 2017November 17, 2021

Shakespeare and Globalization: the fragile unity of history, poetry, and politics

Alan Bloom in his excellent work “Shakespeare’s Politics” regrets the passing of the time when university lecturers could count on students who were familiar with a canon of great works that they held up as a standard by which to shape their lives:

“The role once played by the Bible and Shakespeare in the education of the English speaking peoples is now largely played by popular journalism or the works of ephemeral authors. This does not mean that the classic authors are no longer read: they are perhaps read more..than ever before. But they do not move: they do not seem to speak to the situation of the modern young.”

Bloom puts this fact down to the lack of a common understanding of principles. By way of emphasising the modern lack of understanding of principles, he points also to how figures like Marlborough claimed to have formed their understanding of English history from Shakespeare as a counterpoint to the modern confusion expressed by the quote below:

“the result is not only a vulgarisation of the role of life but an atomisation of society, for a civilised people are held together by its common understanding of what is virtuous and vicious, noble and base.”

Bloom wishes to make Shakespeare the theme of philosophical reflection and the source of inspiration for the search for the solution to moral and political problems. Shakespeare could write in the way in which he did because, Bloom argues, he wrote before the University was atomised: before Poetry was separated from Philosophy, Psychology from Philosophy, Politics from Philosophy, Philosophy from History etc. Philosophy once moved city states but no longer does so whilst poetry and popular songs can move nations. The imitators seem to have supplanted the originals.

Shakespeare, Bloom claims, moved the English into an understanding of the political framework of their lives which affected everything then, as it does now. Moreover, Shakespeare’s cosmopolitanism anticipates Kant’s Political Philosophy which is very aware of the history of politics .

Shakespeare was dismissed as a Philosophical poet by T S Eliot because he failed to fit the mould of Dante or Lucretius, and neither of these latter writers could be regarded as Philosophers. But Eliot’s poetry, as brilliant and unique as it was, requires a dogmatic Catholic Philosophy for its structure, so perhaps this is not the best standard by which to measure the greatness of Shakespeare’s poetry. For this is the nub of the problem: to evaluate the quality of Shakespeare’s work.

Wittgenstein is puzzled by Shakespeare and asks himself in his work on “Culture and Value” whether Shakespeare is more a creator of language than a poet. He suggests that because of this uniqueness Shakespeare should be regarded more as a natural phenomenon than a literary phenomenon (as Eliot was). He also says that Shakespeare is like a dream where both language and world are created. This impression is, I suppose, a result of the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are intended to be re-created in the dream space of the theatre. We sit in the dark, awake and hear Richard the seconds monologue after the losing of his kingdom:

“Of comfort let no man speak. let us talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs. Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Let us choose executors and talk of wills. And yet not so–for what can we bequeath. Save our deposed bodies to the ground. Our lands, our lives, and all, are Bolingbroke’s. And nothing can we call our own but death….. For Gods sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories about the death of kings. How some have been deposed, some slain in war. Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed. Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed: All murdered–For within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king keeps Death his court…. How can you say to me– I am a king?”

The language and the world fit seamlessly together, like a panoramic landscape. Here Shakespeare is like the linguistic alchemist conjuring up images of loss and discontinuity which fit together into a picture of a universe of sadness.Shakespeare is also the monarchist whose views of kings and government may still reside in the minds of Englishman today reverberating in their bones whenever there is news of the Royal Family. He was not a supporter of Republics as his plays on The Merchant of Venice and Othello testify. Both are situated in the prosperous Republican city-state of Venice. Things did not go well for the Jew and the Moor living as they did in a universe of sadness created by a political misunderstanding of the social forces that operate beneath the surfaces of important events. And yet in the middle of this universe of sadness, out of the tearful mist, Venice appears in all its grandeur and we dream that we are there. We follow the Jew and the Moor to their fates. And in Venice, there appear the bearers of strange customs and traditions from other lands. Images within images. These strangers were real men with real characters and real burdens to bear and demanded, therefore, the cosmopolitan sympathy we feel for all men. Was it living in a Republic which was responsible for their fates? We know Venice went the way of Athens and the city states of Greece. The Renaissance witnessed a resurgence of Republicanism once the memory of the fate of the Roman Republic faded sufficiently to seem sufficiently unreal. Venice was striving to be a modern Republic. Yet, Aristotle had claimed in his “Politics” that as long as a Community was constitutionally sound and virtuously run in accordance with a principle of justice which ensured the common good, it did not matter whether the ruler was a monarch or a group of citizens. There was a proviso however which might be problematic. The monarch would have to be as wise as the wisest philosopher because of the complexity of the task of ruling men.Aristotle was a believer in pluralism and manifold forms of life thriving in the state. This in itself would seem to require some system where representatives for these forms of life could bring their knowledge to bear on the task of government.

Political reality for Aristotle appeared to be multi-perspectival and require an understanding of a number of perspectives if lawmaking was not to disadvantage one group at the expense of another. So although there is a remote possibility that one man could have the wisdom to rule in such circumstances it was highly unlikely. Richard the second’s fate may be a testament to this fact. The problem with Republics is that they seem to be founded on an act of violence which is often not only murderous but breaks up the continuity of everyday life. Some lawmakers believe continuity to be the very condition of life, hence the great respect for common law in England. Shakespeare appears to side with this belief in the common law of England. Now, Kant became very excited when he heard of the French Revolution and Kant was also influenced by Aristotle and the Stoics which must be one of the ethical positions most loved by the Englishman who sees in the monarchy the continuity of all political life, remaining the same as governments come and go. But the French revolution did not start or end well and Napoleonic troops were in Königsberg very soon after the demise of Kant. I am not at all sure though, that Kant would have been against a symbolic presence of a monarchy without any lawmaking responsibility.

The Merchant of Venice brings in another dimension of religion, of , as Bloom put it “other-worldliness” into the Shakespearean wheel of fire. The Judaic God appears to be an extreme God to the Christian, vengeful, judgmental and not appearing to understand the creatures he created very well at all. So the presence of a Jew in the Republic is just as much of a test of the breadth of the pluralistic spirit of Venice as was the presence of a Moor. Neither are parasites on the society and both appear to be performing functions necessary for the prosperity and security of Venice. Bloom believes this test of tolerance was not directly addressed by ancient political thought but I think he must be forgetting Aristotle’s arguments for respecting pluralism. Shylock, of course, represents one of the most puzzling aspects of Globalisation, namely the commercial trading spirit which in a sense appears to frown upon veering from the middle path into extreme forms of life. Venices prosperity was due to this commercial spirit. It is also fascinating, and a testament to Shakespeares almost infallible ability to pierce to the very heart of all mysteries that he should choose to make the law the centre of the dispute between Shylock and Antonia, his Christian adversary. The Old Testament talks about 10 commandments or laws and the new testament only two, which presumably will imply at least the ten found in the old testament and many more laws. The old testament thunders its laws out from Mount Sinai that “Thou Shalt Not” and the new testament meekly suggests that love is enough: love God above all and love thy neighbour as yourself. Which of course Shylock does not obey in his dealings with Antonio who also is not entirely blameless in the affair. The New Testament claims to capture the spirit of the law and the moral of the tale seems to be that Christianity was not just new, but better than its older parent. Shylocks respect for the law is admirable but it turns out to be a dogmatic respect. What is fascinating with Shakespeare’s choice of these two themes of the Jew and the Moor is that if one looks some hundreds of years into the future to our recent “terrible century”(the 20th century) we will see that Antisemitism and Racism were elements of Hitlers totalitarianism. Thankfully, Hitlers attempt to found a thousand year Republic only lasted 12 years. What message emerges from the fate of the Jew and the Moor apart from the fact that commercial Republics require more than an antipathy toward monarchy and a commercial spirit. The Merchant of Venice and Othello are both tragedies, not mere historical accounts, which means that Shakespeare’s poetic intent must have been to attempt to cause an awareness of our common humanity which of course did not seem to be present in Venice. Such awareness has obviously to preceded institutions which will guarantee the equality of men. Indeed, it must be maintained, not mere awareness but a form of philosophical awareness is required before institution building can begin. This was provided by Kant’s moral and political philosophy which provided a secure ethical foundation for equality and human rights. Kant’s vision even extended to a suggestion of a United Nations to ensure the implementation of human rights. In Othello, of course, the theme is love. Not Christian love but the love of a more secular and unstable kind. We should remember in connection with the theme of love that it is a Christian concept with global intent. Christianity has always maintained that love is all you need for globalisation, all you need to turn all our relations to each other into a brotherhood of man. More is needed of course, but it is nevertheless a good beginning. Some say that the presence of Iago in the play “Othello” is the presence of the devil. He is a materialist, loves money and uses deception to achieve his aims. If all citizens were like him, a government would, of course, be impossible. Only more sophisticated deception can outperform deception. This brings us back full circle to the claim that all politicians must trust(love) their citizens, i.e. brings us back to the need for politicians to be humanistic liberals.

August 23, 2017June 12, 2018

Our Philosophical knowledge of man and the History of Psychology(Brett and Peters)

Professor R S Peters published an abridgement of the three volumes of Professor Brett’s “History of Psychology” in 1953(revised in 1961). The original volumes were published between 1912 and 1921. The subject matter of Psychology has historically been very differentiated and that differentiation does not appear to be organised in any obvious way. This fact has led some commentators to question whether there is any specific subject matter which Psychology is about. Many 20th century Philosophers have complained about the conceptual confusion inherent in the theories and claims of Psychology and pointed to specific regions of confusion. So when a History of Psychology is written by a philosopher and an abridgement attempted by another philosopher it certainly deserves attention. Peters tried to impose a philosophical framework on Brett’s work. Many myths are exposed on this journey of abridgement and some of these are the construction of scientific superstition. The myth of privileged “data” accumulating under different headings and science cautiously making generalisations about this “data” makes a very large assumption that one can approach nature with a mind like an empty wax tablet upon which nature can impress its form. Peters points out in his abridgement that no one individual can “begin” acquiring knowledge. We all are part of a long tradition:

“The very language we speak incorporates in a condensed form all kinds of assumptions about things, people, and situations. We take things for granted that our ancestors discovered by trial and error: we can neither avoid nor dispense with our social inheritance which is handed down in the form of countless traditional skills and assumptions.”(Peters, 1961)

The above quote quite categorically adopts the view that at some point we began our epistemological journey with assumptions that are very general, We do not “construct” them from particulars. We take our assumptions with us in our dealing with things, people and situations and learn to differentiate between them and to particularise them. Apart from this we also have interests in and attitudes towards our world and these assist in generating expectations and assumptions which in turn provoke the asking of questions when frustrated. There is no such thing Peters, argues as a presupposition-less inquiry. With all this in mind, one can maintain that subject matter is not the key differentiator of Psychology from other areas of inquiry. What is more adequate to this task would be to differentiate one tradition from another by constructing their respectively different traditions of inquiry: that is from establishing their history. So Peters claims:

“What we call psychology is just an amalgam of different questions about human beings which have grown out of a variety of different traditions of inquiry.”

Three major traditions are of interest and probable sources of psychological inquiry: religious investigations, medical investigations and philosophical investigations into the nature of man. In all three types of inquiry, the investigations take into account what people say about their own actions and feelings. Peters introduces an interesting philosophical distinction between three types of questions: questions of theory, questions of policy and technological questions.

So generally, if we wish to talk in terms of disciplines these are characterized in terms of the way these disciplines go about answering questions. This way includes the integration of expectations, attitudes, and interests in relation to the aspects of reality these disciplines are concerned with. Peters then draws an interesting distinction between two of these three elements and claims there is a clear and logical distinction between two types of statements: statements which involve expectations and statements which involve our interests and attitudes:

“If a person says that iron expands when it is heated he is describing what he expects to observe but if he says that swords ought to be beaten into pruning hooks he is expressing an attitude towards the use of iron, or prescribing a course of action. Descriptions are answers to questions of theory: prescriptions are answers to questions of policy.”

Prescriptions are related to “interests, attitudes, and demands”:

“They cannot be confirmed or falsified simply by lookings at things or situations. The man who says that peace is better than war cannot be refuted by being made to look at swords as well as pruning hooks or by being taken from his husbandry to watch a battle. The wrongness of killing people is not revealed to us by simply watching a battle. People can agree on their expectations of and assumptions about things people and situations, yet they can at the same time differ radically in their attitudes to, interests in and demands of them. And if they disagree with such questions of policy there is no agreed procedure for settling the dispute.”

Technological questions are questions about the means one should employ to achieve a particular end. An engineer builds a bridge to meet certain specifications. He creates the required states of affairs in accordance with general assumptions about temperature, expansion and material stresses and a description of initial particular conditions. Questions related to health and happiness are technological questions, questions about the means to achieve a particular end.

These three types of questions succinctly demarcate Philosophically the arena of psychological questioning. Since 1870 and the secession of Psychology from Philosophy these three types of inquiry have been favoured: the scientific the technological and the prescriptive. The philosophical or self consciously reflective dimension of psychology diminished in importance. That dimension in which so called “second order” questioning occurs which wishes to examine our assumptions and which require a reflective level of self-consciousness of one’s own activity and a reflective awareness of how we use language in these areas of inquiry:

“If a moral philosopher attempts, like a moralist to recommend a way of life or a new conception of society, he does so in a second order manner by redefining words like”justice”, “good” and “natural” or by concentrating on certain procedures for deciding on “rightness” or “wrongness” like looking at the consequences of actions or paying attention only to peoples motives.”(Peters 1961)

Philosophical concerns were once vitally important to psychological investigation and the history of psychology. Many of the mental concepts philosophers have reflected upon such as “reason”, “will” “desire” “conscience” have subsequently been converted into first order concepts by the anxious desire of the scientist to convert the thinking about activity into the activity itself. As a consequence, many scientists dismiss these concepts because they seem to suggest a first order activity of introspection(internal as distinct from external observation) thus confounding the entire reflective process which was not observational but connected to establishing a logical justification for the assumptions involved in the activity. Sever this philosophical dimension from psychological questioning and we will very quickly produce the conceptual confusion Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty and many other analytical philosophers have pointed to.

But what would be an example of a psychological investigation which took into consideration a reflective philosophical approach? Toward the end of the 18th century, Kant actually produced a text book for a discipline which he termed “Anthropology”. This work was designed to facilitate the political task of preparing the citizen for a cosmopolitan existence. Philosophy, for Kant, was a cosmopolitan affair which could be characterised by 4 fundamental questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? and What is a human being? This last question is the concern of Anthropology specifically but there will be a relation to the first three questions too. The Anthropology claims that investigations into human nature can take two forms: either physiological(what nature makes of man) or pragmatic(what man as a free acting being makes of himself or can and should make of himself). Physical anthropology is scientific and based on observation or introspection. Kant is rightly suspicious of this latter line of investigation because of the difficulties of the fact that the very act of observing changes the behavior that is observed(presumably introspection also changes the activity it is relating to). If this is correct it is an amazing indictment of the experimental psychology project that was to be launched in the next century almost a hundred years later. The freedom of the will is not a variable that can be controlled or manipulated. It is incredibly difficult if not impossible to grasp the essence of human nature. But almost paradoxically Kant does think that we can profitably pursue the line of investigation suggested by pragmatic philosophy, namely, the question of what man can or should make of himself.

August 19, 2017November 17, 2021

The understanding of Globalisation and History: Aristotle, Kant and “Modern Times”.

Globalization and History would seem to be necessarily intimate companions for Humanistic Liberalism. Yet this is only the case if one understands both of these terms philosophically. Globalization interpreted economically in terms of the management of a country’s resources in the spirit of the management of a household where benefits and burdens are distributed, will fail to provide any principle of significance explaining important changes in our macro-political environments. The reason for this state of affairs is not always obvious. Some commentators claim, on the contrary, that economics is about the principles behind the distribution of money in a context of exchange, which has nothing to do with the household but rather with all types of interested parties transacting in an economic region defined as narrowly as a city-state or as broadly as an economic union of countries. These principles of exchange can either materialise the medium of money or turn it into a scientific variable. Both of these possibilities detach the exchange from its ultimate telos or end, which according to Aristotle and Plato would be the thriving of a self-sufficient community. In this process of detachment from fundamental intentions we see the technique of reduction in operation: the reduction of the teleological causes and essence-specifying or formal causes to what Aristotle called the material and efficient causes. Final causes of actions are, as suggested above, related to intentions, relate to what one wants to do or ought to do, or both, and these provide the value of the action or the good we attach to it. Material and efficient causes are naturalistic and both reduce a holistic activity to some of its conditions.

Globalisation is a philosophical and holistic value-laden idea and only history will help to reveal its import. The history of Aristotelian metaphysics since its inception has involved the attempt of the modern mind to rid itself of the Aristotelian value-laden view of the world. Part of this endeavour relates to the attempt to theoretically characterise the activities of man, financial and otherwise, in terms of the mechanics of science and the calculations of mathematics. This theoretical position tempted many to side with European modernists such as Hobbes and Descartes who both intensively opposed Aristotle’s holistic theory of change. The mark of the modern mind, it was argued is to err on the side of scepticism when it comes to evaluating metaphysical reflections on the world in general and human action in particular. These modernists both attempted to bracket our understanding of the hylomorphic theory of Aristotle. There were defenders of Aristotle then, as there are today but they were overwhelmed by the energy and vigour of the youthful scientists, all of whom were eager to replace the conceptual understanding we have of the world with a toolbox of pragmatic techniques and a pocket book of theoretical/mathematical calculations. Were these phenomena the cause or the consequence of the abandonment of the Ancient Greek view of the world? A view of the world which could plainly see how ethics, politics, history, poetry, religion, tragedy, science and mathematics all could be characterised satisfactorily in accordance with a metaphysical theory of change. It must have seemed extremely unlikely during the time of Aristotle that the Humanities disciplines would be “colonised” by mathematics and science. Paradoxically, it might be the case that the primary target for modernist skeptical philosophy after the Middle Ages was not Aristotle but rather that bearer of authority par excellence: Religion. As we emerged from the Middle Ages Religion was itself in the throes of responding to internal protest of its own which in England, in particular, was to result in the dissolution of the Monasteries and a revolution of the social and political life of the country. Prior to these events, Aristotle was the philosophical authority and that his philosophy should have been enveloped in a tsunami of anti-dogmatism is, of course, a testament to both the fragility of Philosophy and the human mind. The Emperor Justinian had, in the 5th century AD closed all non-religious schools thus depriving philosophy of any institutional medium for the preservation and development of philosophical thought. Platonic thought still thrived under the auspices of the Church because it found space for an ancient mythical conception of the afterlife. Plato’s work was translated into Latin by a translation industry largely run by the Church. Insofar as Aristotle was concerned, Church authorities could not find anything but a non-religious mystery behind a concept of the soul or mind which seemed to require dependence upon a body for its existence. Without any institution committed to the preservation of Aristotle’s texts, many works were lost until Thomas of Aquinas found a means of rehabilitating “The Philosopher” to the church through the construal of the essence of human nature in terms of its ability to love and serve God. Considering the obvious fact that the Aristotelian God and the God of the theologians were obviously very different beings this was an amazing feat of hermeneutics, aiming as it did at some kind of synthesis. Aristotle indeed had left space for God in his surviving lectures as a thinking being whose acts of creation became very much more mysterious in comparison to the God who created the world in 6 days by acts that sometimes look all too human. The divine aspect of our minds, presumably implanted in us or transmitted to us during the moment of creation, of course, explain how it is possible for us to have a conception of a perfect being but it does not explain Aristotle’s presentation of the human as an autonomous being leading a life largely independent of his putative creator. Such a being possess a capacity of his own for the creation and understanding of his world via a tradition of philosophising which stretches from Heraclitus and Parmenides to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and further forward to the Stoics. All this was “neutralized” when Aquinas clipped Aristotle’s wings with his synthetic hermeneutics in order for these otherwise dangerous ideas to become domiciled under the eaves of the church. Aristotle’s ideas became institutionalised as the power of the Church was growing in Europe. But another “global” process had survived amazingly outside of any medieval protective institutions and that was connected to the “naturalistic” ideas of the pre-Socratic philosopher’s materialistic search for the elements and constituents of the physical world. These ideas were to find a “home” in the theorising of Heraclitus and his very compelling idea that the physical world was continually and forever changing. Parmenides was possibly the first to oppose this position and insist upon the idea that something must remain the same to bear change if one was to have any understanding of that change whatsoever. The world was one and unchanging, according to Parmenides. Plato reinforced Parmenides’ position with his own and produced a theory of forms or ideas which would explain both permanence and change. Aristotle saw logical problems with the Platonic account and his dividing the world up into the dualistic alternatives of what is to be explained and that which did the explaining. But perhaps the key cultural event happened prior to Plato and contributed to the death of Socrates, namely the loss of the war with Sparta which signalled to the world that Athens with its unique political, legal and cultural characteristics, was not a possible unifying agent among the disparate city states of Greece. Indeed, one could argue that Alexander, Aristotle’s pupil, was more influenced by Sparta than his teacher’s global-cultural message when he embarked on his empire building adventure. We do see, however, in the aftermath of conquest how Alexander demonstrated the influence of his teacher in the respect he showed for the traditions and cultures of the peoples he conquered. This respect testified to the importance placed on virtue rather than the honour and power based value system so characteristic of Sparta. As we know both Aristotle and Alexander came from Macedonia. Alexander’s military solution to the problem of providing global unity for a number of disparate world elements was, of course, a far cry from the rational model of rhetoric and argument which was so specific to the Platonic and Aristotelian academic institutions which sought after an intellectual unity of disparate ideas and even disciplines. The word university, of course, originates from the Latin but the meaning applies to something global if we are thinking in terms of action or something holistic if we are thinking in terms of knowledge and belief systems. The term “university” could well have applied to Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, both of which had lectures for the public and more specialist based lectures for the purposes of the advancement of knowledge through research. The first Italian, French and English institutions were, it is claimed modelled on clerical and monastical institutions but it is interesting to see that right from the beginning the works of Aristotle were important, presumably because of their systematic and global intent. If the Academy and the Lyceum were the wombs of modern universities, it is fascinating to follow the differentiation of disciplines and wonder whether this differentiation process was the beginning of a process which sought to focus on differences rather than systematic unity. This unity was provided by the philosophical method of argument and counterargument in search of necessarily valid assumptions and logical consequences. This was the method which aimed at the systematic understanding of the world as a systematic whole which we see in the works of Aristotle. As mentioned earlier the sciences, themselves were the result of the differentiation process mentioned earlier, but these disciplines very early were focussing not on organising the results but on collecting information or data which could serve as evidence for any generalisations made for the purposes of theorising. This method of observation and experimentation was perfectly in accordance with Aristotelian research into the constitution and function of living organisms. However, during the 1500’s an interesting Platonic twist to this tale occurred: the mathematical measurement of the physical world began to become an important part of scientific method. In religious terms Galileo was the figurehead of this movement. His measurements and calculations amazed the secular world but probably shocked the clerical authorities who had only relatively recently in their view clipped the wings of Aristotelian philosophy. Even looked upon from an Aristotelian point of view this development must have been of concern because the thinking God of Aristotle was now in the process of being replaced by the primary physical reality of the “natural philosophers”. Another Platonic twist in this philosophers tale came of course with the philosophy of Descartes who believed in the dismantling of the Aristotelian system in favour of a mathematically based search for a first philosophical truth which he was convinced he had found in his Cogito ergo sum “argument”. The search, as was the case with Plato, ended in a dualism of the mind and the body which Aristotle had contested already back in the time of Plato. Prior to this event, there were secular protests against the authority of the church in Europe in 1517(The Reformation), resulting in the dissolution of the monasteries in England in 1536 which brought in its wake the curious consequence of the banning of the teaching of scholastic philosophy in English Universities. Somehow, curiously enough, both Aristotle’s natural writings and his holistic metaphysical hylomorphism had receded into the background of debate in favour of the search for conceptual distinctions in the spirit of a rationalism Aristotle would have argued against. Perhaps it was this secular blow which emboldened Descartes and Hobbes later in the 1600’s to share the task of dismantling Aristotle’s philosophical system. But even during this time Philosophy and Science had not finally parted ways. Indeed, we should remember that Newtons “Principia” was sub-titled “natural philosophy”. But it was probably around this time that Science began to authoritatively declare that those parts of philosophy not relevant to the investigation of the natural world should be deemed to be “non-scientific”. This created a division between natural kinds of explanation and humanistic kinds of explanation, or perhaps it just manifested the Platonic dualism between the natural physical world and the world of ideas which had been lurking in the shadows of the Church for some time. Aristotle’s view that there was only one world in which there were 3 media of change(space, time, matter),4 kinds of change, 3 principles and four kinds or types of explanation was at this point lost, at least insofar as the institutions of the Universities were concerned. Pursuing Science as Newton did merely encouraged dualistic positions which neatly divided our holistic world into firstly, a world of things and relations, points and lines and secondly, a realm of ideas about these physical and abstractly intuited entities. This dualism passed into common sense which had already been primed by the ideas of God and the afterlife. In this process, “philosophical” support and not merely mythical authentication had been provided for a worldview Aristotle would have thought indefensible. Newton-inspired Hume to do for the mind what Newtons natural philosophy had done for the physical world but Hume could only arrive at conventional habitual thought processes to explain even such important physical principles as the principle of causation. He could not even authenticate that relatively holistic idea of the self that unifies the perceptions and ideas of the mind. Here we are witnessing the logical consequences of the fragmentation of the Aristotelian worldview. Hume was an important landmark in the process of the materialisation of the mind and his exhortations to commit all metaphysical works to the flames laid the foundations for an empirical reduction to physically observable, measurable, and calculable atomistic evidence of everything to do with holistic entities such as the mind and the self. This regressive process was miraculously arrested by Kant, a philosopher of the late enlightenment. Kant restored a non-physicalist non-materialistic theory of the mind by talking in terms of a theatre of the faculties of mind: the sensibility, understanding, and reason, in which experience was both constituted and regulated. He subjected the metaphysics of scholastic philosophy to severe criticism but insisted that Hume was wrong in his estimation of the role of metaphysics in philosophy. He maintained that both the study of physical nature and morals had metaphysical dimensions which transcended the physically experienced, observed and measurable world. The most interesting question to pose here is whether Kant’s theories are Aristotelian in spirit, or whether it is a re-emergence of a more Platonic form of rationalism. The argument against this latter interpretation is given in the second and third critiques where action and feelings respectively are examined philosophically. Action, Kant is arguing, basically is a mental entity embedded in rational structures of belief and desires which have purposes that aim at the true and the good. For Plato action would be an event occurring in the physical world and would not have any rational connection to the idea of the good. Kant arrested the regressive process temporarily until Hegel systematically misunderstood him and Marx in his turn systematically misunderstood Hegel, thus providing the modern conditions necessary to unleash the idealistic and materialistic forces which would almost destroy the womb of all culture: Europe. There was a moment in the culture of Europe which also attempted to arrest the regressive forces leading us into what Arendt would call “this terrible century” and it was paradoxically not directly philosophical. I am referring to the work of that genius Shakespeare which seems so seamlessly to continue the heritage of the classical world of the Greeks. I will examine this in my next lecture.