Category: Philosophical Psychology

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The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James: CoPilot, Athens, Sparta, “Know thyself” and the Oracles

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The Delphic Podcasts: The Political Mirror and  Know thyself  — Why  the Oracle failed failing Sparta

The following is a summary of an argument I had with my AI servant Co Pilot. I began by asking about the Peloponnesian war and what the Oracles thought about the possible outcome. The following is the answer I received:

“Historically, the Oracle was seen as a partisan for the Spartan cause. According to the historian Thucydides, when the Spartans consulted the Pythia at the beginning of the war, she reportedly declared that if they fought with all their might, they would be victorious, and that the god (Apollo) would help them, “whether called or uncalled.” This response was widely interpreted as divine support for the Peloponnesian League, which served as a powerful propaganda tool and morale booster for the Spartans as they prepared to engage the Athenians.

However, the nature of these oracular responses is often debated by historians and philosophers alike. They were frequently ambiguous, allowing for multiple interpretations that could accommodate shifting political tides.”

The ambiguity of this response is very interesting but it is definitely inclined to a political rather than a moral evaluation of the Oracles  role in Ancient Greek Culture.  The AI answer to my next question confirmed this view. I asked:

“If the oracle thought Socrates to be the wisest man in Athens and saw ruin and destruction in human projects such as war why would the oracles have supported Sparta who on all accounts did not know what they did not know.”

Copilot gave the following answer:

“A good way to think about this is that the Oracle at Delphi was not a simple moral judge of who was “right” in a war. In Greek religion and politics, oracles often gave ambiguous, strategic, and politically usable responses rather than clear ethical endorsements. So even if Delphi was associated with wisdom, moderation, and the limits of human knowledge, that does not mean it consistently “supported” the morally best side.

Why Sparta could still receive oracular support

Sparta had a long-standing reputation for being favored by Apollo and for embodying a kind of austere, disciplined order that many Greeks associated with traditional piety. The Spartans were also deeply respectful of religious institutions and ritual forms, which mattered a great deal in the Greek world. From that perspective, Delphi’s responses could be understood less as approval of Sparta’s justice and more as recognition of Sparta’s religious legitimacy, civic discipline, and political role. Wisdom at Delphi is not the same as moral endorsement”

An unambiguous  pragmatic populistic response if ever there was one. I naturally challenged this and was met with a change in Copilots heart and an admission that the Oracle may well have been manipulating the Spartans. I then asked for a 1500 word summary for my Delphic Podcasts and was provided with the following:

 Welcome to this episode of The Delphic Podcasts. Today, we are peering into one of the most enduring paradoxes of the ancient world. We often look back at the Peloponnesian War—that great, tragic collision between Athens and Sparta—and we try to map out the moral landscape. We look for the “good” side and the “bad” side. History, however, rarely offers such clean binaries. But there is a specific, sharper question we must ask: If the Delphic Oracle is the ultimate arbiter of wisdom, and if that wisdom is centered on the command “Know Thyself,” why did the Oracle seemingly throw its weight behind Sparta?

To answer this, we have to move beyond the traditional historian’s view. We have to look at the nature of the Oracle not as a political consultant, but as a mirror. My argument today is that the Oracle did not “support” Sparta in the way Sparta believed. The Oracle provided a diagnostic reflection of a civilization that was fundamentally incapable of the self-knowledge required for true, sustainable morality. In doing so, the Oracle was not validating Spartan virtue; it was observing a trajectory toward destruction.

Part I: The Spartan Delusion of Support

When we look at the historical record, Sparta was deeply, almost obsessively, religious. They were a state that claimed the favor of Apollo. When they consulted the Pythia, they wanted a weapon—a divine endorsement that would act as a moral shield for their imperial ambitions. Thucydides tells us that the god promised to help them, “whether called or uncalled.”

Sparta interpreted this as a mandate. They viewed their martial discipline, their rigid hierarchy, and their external focus as an act of piety. But here is the critical philosophical error: Sparta assumed that divine favor was synonymous with moral righteousness. They believed that because they were “chosen” by tradition and ritual, they were exempt from the necessity of critical self-examination.

This is the very essence of the “human project” gone wrong. Whenever a state, a group, or an individual believes they possess divine certainty, they cease to look inward. They externalize the struggle. They define the “Other” as the enemy, and they justify the destruction of that enemy through the lens of divine necessity. Sparta was the ultimate expression of this externalized morality—a morality that relied on the suppression of the individual soul in favor of the stability of the state.

Part II: The Socratic Turn — The Birth of Secularization

Now, contrast this with the Socratic position, which sits at the very heart of the secularizing movement we have inherited. The Oracle declared Socrates the wisest man in Athens. Why? Because Socrates understood that he did not know. He possessed the wisdom of ignorance.

This is the “Socratic Morality” that has fundamentally shifted the course of Western thought. By internalizing the command to “Know Thyself,” Socrates effectively moved the locus of morality from the temple to the individual. He argued that the moral life is not found in the fulfillment of state ritual or the adherence to traditional dogma; it is found in the relentless, painful, and necessary interrogation of one’s own motives and biases.

This was the beginning of true secularization. It did not mean the death of the divine, but it meant the death of blind obedience. If the oracle’s wisdom is “Know Thyself,” then any system—like the Spartan state—that demands the erasure of the self in service to the collective is, by definition, anti-Delphic.

Part III: War as the Failure of Self-Knowledge

The tragedy of the Peloponnesian War is that it was a machine powered by a lack of self-knowledge. When a civilization engages in a total war—a war that consumes its resources, its youth, and its soul—it is almost always because the leadership has lost the ability to ask: What am I doing, and why?

Human projects, when unattached to self-knowledge, are inherently destructive. They grow in scale and intensity until they consume the very people who created them. Sparta, in its martial rigidity, was a closed system. It could not question its own existence. It could only expand or contract. It could not reflect.

If we apply the Socratic standard, Sparta was not a “wise” state; it was a “sleepwalking” state. The Oracle’s support, then, takes on a much darker, diagnostic quality. The Oracle was not saying, “Sparta, you are right.” The Oracle was saying, “Sparta, this is what you are.” Like a physician telling a patient their symptoms, the Oracle was confirming the path Sparta had already chosen—a path of absolute, unwavering, externalized power that leads inevitably to the breakdown of the state itself.

Part IV: The Triumph of Socratic Morality over the Martial Ethos

We often lament the decline of the ancient world, but we must acknowledge the triumph that occurred within that decline. The Socratic shift—the belief that the unexamined life is not worth living—is the only defense we have against the hubris of empire.

The Spartan model, which many throughout history have romanticized for its order and discipline, represents the ultimate “Other” to Socratic morality. It is a model where the state is everything, and the soul is nothing. Socratic morality, conversely, asserts that the state is only as healthy as the souls of its citizens.

By championing Socrates, the Oracle (whether intentionally or through the ironic weight of its own wisdom) favored the trajectory that would eventually allow humanity to break free from the cycle of state-mandated violence. The “support” for Sparta was a temporary concession to history; the “support” for Socrates was a gift to the future.

Conclusion: The Lesson for Our Time

As we close this episode, we must reflect on the contemporary weight of this argument. In our own time, we see the same tension. We see societies that demand our loyalty to the external—to the party, to the nation, to the ideology—without asking us to examine the condition of our own souls.

The lesson of the Oracle is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a warning to be heeded. When we create projects—political, technological, or intellectual—without the foundation of self-knowledge, we are merely building better machines for our own destruction.

Socrates reminds us that the only true revolution is the one that happens within the individual. The move toward secularization was not a rejection of the moral order; it was a reclaiming of the moral order from the hands of the state and the institution, and a placing of it back into the heart of the individual.

Sparta fought for the glory of the state and ended in ruin. Socrates fought for the truth of the soul and, in doing so, achieved a form of immortality that no empire could ever grant. The Oracle knew this. The Oracle, in its infinite, ambiguous wisdom, did not side with the sword. It sided with the question. And that, my friends, is the only path forward.

If only I could believe that Copilot actually meant what it said. The above demonstrates that AI is capable of contradicting itself without any realisation that the lack of seriousness of such contradictory responses.

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The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James. Critique of Campbells view of Myth: Season 16 Episode 10

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In Freudian terms we can perhaps say that Reason as a faculty of the mind is a vicissitude of instinct which incorporates a number of other faculties and powers, and further, that actualising its potential is one of the last but most important tasks of humanity. A part of this actualisation process includes differentiating false metaphysics, science, religion, and art from Truth. Many forms of religion and mysticism fall into the above categories and Kant saw  it as his mission to combat these influences in the cultural sphere of life.

Language too is a vicissitude of Instinct, and instrument of reason, but being also a form of Action it links . the Continental Hermeneutics of Ricoeur to the Analytical Philosophy of O Shaughnessy. It is important to understand that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics has its roots in Hegelian and French/German Phenomenology but nevertheless contains an awareness and tolerance of the analytical tradition we do not find elsewhere. Heidegger’s account of Language also contains some analytical concerns and is rooted in a view which claims that the Cultural impetus arising from Ancient Greece including the work of Aristotle is rooted in what he refers to as a “forgetfulness of Being”, although we should recall in the context of this discussion that it was Aristotle who, in correcting Plato, claimed that “Being has many meanings”. Heidegger roots Language in Dasein, a form of human psyché and he claims that “meaning

“is an existential phenomenon already characterised, in which the formal framework of what can be disclosed in understanding and Articulated in interpretation becomes visible.”  (Being and Time, Trans MacQuarrie and Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1978, P 199)

Heidegger does not in the sense embraced by Analytical Philosophers provide us with a theory of meaning but he does see an important relation to the action of assertion which he claims has three fundamental functions: to point something out, to predicate something of something and to communicate this in the spirit of Being-together-towards.(Page 197):

“That which is put forward in the assertion is something which can be passed along in “further re-telling…. But at the same time, what has been pointed out may become veiled again in this further retelling… Even hearsay is a Being-in-the-World, and a Being towards what is heard.” (Page 197-8)

This takes us right to the heart of the early function of mythology which of course relied on the function of language to present absent objects to others. The Early Wittgenstein we know formulated a “picture” theory of meaning to try to capture these aspects of assertion but this for Heidegger would have been an example of veiling the meaning of the assertion, and in these remarks we can see why there is a need for  a perspicuous representation, or  interpretation of the articulations of assertions: that is we can see why there is a need for a Kantian account of the scope and limitations of metaphysics to combat the  hearsay of mysticism.

Behind the manifest meaning of the assertion “The hammer is heavy” Heidegger claims, there is a fore-having rooted in the readiness-to-hand of this tool, a fore-sight, and a fore-conception, all of which is pre-understood. In the predicative process of assertion, the ready-to-hand is transformed into something present-at-hand: the ready to hand is seen “as” something present at hand and something important is lost in the process as our Being toward the entity becomes connected to looking at It, or observation. Here there is an important shift in psychological attitude from the motor to the sensory, from action to observation. When acting to bring about something I intend to do, knowledge is involved, and this knowledge may have been partly constituted of  former sensory encounters with the type of environment I am acting in, but the knowledge involved in acting is essentially non-observational as Anscombe pointed out in her work on “Intention”(Oxford, Blackwell, 1972).

Observation is in its essence interrogative, questioning the being it is confronted with, whereas in action we know both the orange we desire and what we need to do in order to get it. Scientific experimentation in which we manipulate, and measure variables is not categorical in this sense but is hypothetical and interrogative: seeking answers. This is one of the many reasons why it is absurd to judge myth from the point of view of this kind of science, which was not the science of Aristotle or Kant. Principle based science provides us with theories that have not emerged by putting questions to nature in the spirit of a student, but rather putting questions to nature in the spirit of a judge asking penetrating questions relating to the essences of the matters being theorised about.

Heidegger also discusses the complex ancient idea of Logos and maintains that this was interpreted as a present-at-hand phenomenon, and this may have veiled its relation to Being.  Logos for Kant needs articulation in terms of the scope and limitations of Metaphysics as well as the scope and limits of Logic, and the relations of the faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason. Logos is more intimately related to thought than it is for Heidegger, who sees discourse or talk to be the primordial underlying substrate which is prior to any theories relating to language. Discourse is both spoken and heard and this is qualified by the claim that we do not hear “sensations” (sensory phenomena) but rather ready-to hand entities such as motor-cycles and waggons (sensory-motor phenomena) (Page 207):

“Because discourse is constitutive for the Being of the “there” (that is, for states of mind and understanding), while “Dasein” means “Being-in-the-world”, Dasein as discursive Beng-in, has already expressed itself. Dasein has language… Man shows himself as an entity that talks”. (Page 208)

For Heidegger, then, discourse is what he terms an existentiale. It is not to be confused, however with the idle talk, hearsay and gossiping of the “they” who do not care about questions relating to the nature of  Being and its complexity. Heidegger discusses the definition of human psuché, namely animal rationale, which of course originates in the thought of Aristotle, but he does not consider Aristotle’s complete essence-specifying definition of man as a “rational animal capable of discourse”. Logos for Aristotle might also therefore be grounded in discourse which presumably also relates to his thesis of the many meanings of Being.  Heidegger asks the question “What kind of Being does language possess?” and his answer relates to the State of Being of Dasein. The holistic aspect of this Being, Heidegger argues is Care, which relates to the basic state of mind of anxiety that is a distinctive way in which Dasein is disclosed:

“That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the World as such” (Page 230)

Existential anxiety then does not have a relation to any object or entity in the world partly because :

“Dasein is an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue” Page 236

With these reflections we are cast back to Ancient Greece and the Delphic proclamations relating to both man’s ruin and destruction and the challenge to “know thyself!” This is not a challenge to observe oneself but rather a challenge to lead a particular form of life, either the Socratic examined life or the Aristotelian contemplative life. The Ancient Greeks too, espoused a Philosophy of Care for the world and for oneself.  The Will too is discussed:

“In the phenomenon of willing, the underlying totality of care shows through” (Page 239)

The first guidelines for the will unfortunately are made possible via the knowledge and values of the “they” which dims down the authentic possible relations to Being by reference to what is “actual”

What is actual rather than what is possible, becomes the touchstone of truth (Aletheia). Both having a conscience and death are important for the authentic potentiality for “being-a whole” (Page 277). Conscience is the call of care and death is the end (telos) of life. Now our own death will never become objectively accessible to us, but the death of others is a matter of concern and care as part of the process of “being-together-with-others”. The dead person, Heidegger argues is a present-at-hand form of Being, something lifeless, having lost its life. The dying person naturally is anxious about his own death because he knows that his death is the death of his own “possibilities”:

Dasein exists as thrown Being towards its end.”(Page 295)

The “they” communicate tranquillizing platitudes about death, aimed at avoiding the unpleasant anxiety associated with the possibility of non-existence: a fleeing in the face of death, the inevitable (Page 298). The “they” believe that death is an empirical certainty but not right now.  In life our Being is in question and this ought to give rise to the kind of existential anxiety that seeks the truth about death. Everyone knows that death is coning, but exactly what is it that is coming and why? We need courage to stare unflinchingly into this abyss of nothingness. Is this what Kant is speaking about in his account of the experience of the sublime when, overwhelmed by the thought of the mighty force of Nature we think sublimely about our own fundamental moral nature? For the Greeks the attitudes of awe and wonder were associated with sublime experiences of the Gods, nature, and man’s repertoire of powers which gave him dignity. Heidegger referred to the “call of conscience” which must be heard authentically. In this all Dasein is summoned to its own self as part of discovering the issue of its Being, yet the call appears to come from beyond itself, and the call appears to carry an accusation of “guilt”.  The Kantian experience of the sublime was clearly a more joyous affair, a celebration of one’s humanity rather than an anxious moment of one’s existence. Heidegger points out in relation to this guilty call of conscience, the significance of “being-responsible-for” (Page 327). This obviously is rooted in Care, but it can be argued by a Kantian that Care and being resolute (the object of Care), is a consequence of, and not a condition for, Freedom, or at least that they are equally important conditions. This negative characterisation of the psuché of human being or Dasein is elaborated upon in Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is “essentially Guilty”, i.e. Guilt belongs to the being of Dasein. Heidegger, it needs to be emphasised is an existentialist and Dasein’s existence is therefore a major issue:

“..while Dasein’s “Essence then the “I-hood” and Selfhood must be conceived existentially.” (Page 365)

Heidegger criticises the Kantian “I Think” by claiming that the “I” is conceived of as something present at hand and not in terms of “I think something”. Heidegger claims that Kant did not think of the “I” in terms of its “being-in-the-world”. This is however to be distinguished from an everyday understanding which perhaps is shaped by the world rather than by the essence of the Being of Dasein. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this analysis is the claim that projection in a “moment of vision” is primarily futural, hoping for an authentic future. Insofar as the understanding is concerned but given that every understanding also has its state of mind, which, Heidegger claims, is directed at the past, a certain tension is present in the form of our existence: anxiety, for example is a state of mind and must in some sense be related to our original state of being thrown into the world. In the present the form our activity takes in relation to the things of the world is a practical relation of their being ready to hand and connected to an extended context of equipment: a region of Being emerges.

The Books and chairs and tables in a library for example extend to the homes the books are taken to and the pen and paper used to take notes using the chairs, tables, pen and paper at home. When a book just sits untouched on the shelf it acquires a present-at-hand status and can only be looked at. If I am engaged in a task which is completed my natural response is to look around and look for what comes next. When that is the sensory function of psuché is disconnected from its motor function, our access to what is merely present at hand is a truncated form of experience. Heidegger argues that when the practical form of activity disappears a theoretical attitude “emerges” in which there is theoretical activity which attempts to investigate things-in themselves. Transforming what is present at hand into things in themselves is fraught with problems unless as Kant pointed out in his Prolegomena, there is a clear respect for  the boundaries between the phenomenal and noumenal forms of existence, a clear respect for the scope and limits of pure reason and its relations to the faculties of understanding and reason.

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“Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre: Plays and Poetry for all seasons”, Summary of Chapter 5 featured in “The Delphic Podcasts” by Michael R D James Season 15 Episode 6

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Rhetoric is a from of discourse that is used to great effect (hylomorphically) in Shakespeares plays and while style is important in all speeches of magnitude there is no doubt that Shakespeare shares the Greek passion for appreciating the power of the argument in a rhetorical speech. For Both Shakespeare and the Ancient Greek philosophers, Rhetoric has three important constituents: a theory of style, a theory of composition and a theory of argumentation, as well as specific rational criteria relating to what counts as a a good argument. By the time we arrive at the period of the Renaissance Rhetoric had established itself as an important aspect of both theatre and political speeches given by monarchs, Princes and men of importance. Indeed the Renaissance may well have been the Golden Era for the discipline of Rhetoric because, as Paul Ricoeur pointed out in his work, “The Role of Metaphor”, the discipline began to lose its connection to rationality at the end of the 19th century, eventually being reduced to a stylistic ornamental feature of discourse. This decline is reminiscent of what happened to Psychology at approximately the same time when it abandoned its ties to Philosophy in favour of a purely theoretical endeavour attempting to apply a scientific methodology to, firstly, consciousness and, secondly, to physical behaviour. This severed its status as a discipline transcending all three genre of the sciences (theoretical, practical, and productive).

The method of elenchus of Socrates was certainly rhetorical in the classical sense of the term, following carefully the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason in accordance with a central focus upon the Form of the Good, which is primarily the concern of the Practical and Productive Sciences. The waning influence of Kant in the early 1800’s probably contributed to the marginalisation of Philosophy in relation to both the disciplines of Rhetoric and Psychology, and it might also have hastened the process of secularisation and the withdrawal of respect for institutions such as The Church and Political Authorities. The work of Freud attempted briefly to reawaken a number of themes of Philosophical Psychology with the implication the discipline of Psychology was Trans-scientific and demanded the integration of thought spanning different disciplines from the theoretical, practical and productive sciences. Freud identified a deep sense of Discontentment with his civilisation-building attempts, and returned to an an ancient theme from Plato that, what was in the human psuché, could be more clearly seen writ large in the civilisations he had created.

G J Herder’s work on Shakespeare captured a hint of the suggestion that our Western Civilisation was in decline in his testament to “this great creator of History” whose “soul was growing older every day”:

“The customs and categories of the age wither and fall like autumnal leaves.”

Wittgensteins later Philosophy was definitively anti-Hegelian, recognising the contribution of Freudian Psychoanalysis and pointing to the conceptual confusion of many science based Psychological theories. His analysis of the importance of “seeing something as something” was an attempt to give an account of the power of perception to organise the world: a capacity that might be related to the power of metaphor to “redescribe reality”. Totalitarian tyrants had earlier in the century used the power of language to redescribe reality in their use of normative moral language, and given the magnitude of this upending of the moral order and lack of commitment to the Truth, this resulted in a de-stabilisation of Western Civilisation. Hannah Arendt charted carefully the events leading up the emergence of fascist and communist tyrants and situated this phenomenon in a wider context where the “new men of a new age” manifested a restless desire to reject many traditions of the past.

We recall the speech of John of Gaunt in Richard II where he likened the state of England to a patient lying on a death-bed, and also the subsequent speech of Richard relating to the “death of Kings”. One interpretation of Arendts work on the “Origins of Totalitarianism” is that the new men of the age felt a growing sense of desperation and as a consequence proceeded to replace ancient traditions and ideas with something new in an attempt to fill the political, moral, aesthetic and religious vacuums that were appearing all over the Western World.

Stanley Cavell, the Harvard Aesthetics Philosopher pointed to a growing sense of discontentment with Modern Art and diagnosed this state of affairs in the following terms:

“The essential fact of the modern lies in the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that the relation has become problematic.”

Cavell points out that History will not disappear until it is perfectly acknowledged. In this respect this phenomenon resembles the Freudian phenomenon of the “Return of the Repressed” in which the residues of a past trauma continue returning to consciousness until an adequate memory of the trauma is formed.

One of the historical changes we have witnessed in our modern regression is the phenomenon of an organised loneliness, where we no longer live in hope for a better future, but rather attempt merely to survive the onset of this continued sense of desperation. This is all very tragic but our modern tragedies do not resemble the Ancient Greek accounts of classical tragedies where once the scene has been put before our eyes, an appropriate redescription of reality suggests itself, and the pedagogical lessons to be learned become obvious. It is almost as our civilisation is on its death-bed and we are waiting for our last breath and the last extinction of the last light.

Heidegger, in the name of the lost meaning of the Ancient Greek term, aletheia, points to the role of technology usurping the spirit of the human with its instrumentalised colonisation of our life-worlds. We have argued in previous works for the redescription of our “Modern Age” in terms of “The Age of Discontentment”, and noted that it indeed difficult to seek to rehabilitate the classical emotion of awe and wonder and the experience of the sublime when we appear to have become enslaved by our unnecessary desires and fears.

Kant claims that Poetry holds the first rank among the Arts and if this is the case then it is more likely that we might encounter experiences of the sublime in this arena of activity. The Rhetorical Poetry of Shakespeare in our modern world, then, raises an interesting question with its transcendental spectacles of events of magnitude in the past and characters with gravitas: the question, namely, posed by Herder of the soul of Shakespearean art “aging”. Perhaps the Socratic tragedy will never age because of its explicit confrontation with the powers of Evil such as the Sophistry Socrates combatted where debaters used rhetoric to make the worse argument seem the better. This message is implicit in many of Shakespeares plays but perhaps in the end Philosophical ideas are more potent antidotes to Sophistry than aesthetic ideas. The Merchant of Venice is an interesting play to consider in this context, because Shylock is a Sophist from the past encountering Portia, the figure pointing to our futures, rejecting the rhetoric seeking its pound of flesh and an upending of the system of justice. It does seem however that the Platonic Tragedy of the trial and last days of Socrates has not aged whilst it is not yet clear whether or not Shakespeares soul will age on the road to the Kantian Kingdom of Ends.

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The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells “Hero” writings, Season 8 Episode 3

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ancient greek temple
Photo by jimmy teoh on Pexels.com

Creation myths often speak of a first created Being that is androgynous , e.g. Adam, Eros, Hermophrodite, Awanawilona,(Pueblo divinity), Tiresias, Tai, Yuan, etc. The genders of male and female are construed as opposites and this in turn demands a dialectical form of description/argumentation because, when apprehended as opposites, it appears as if one opposition term is the negation of the other.

Campbell contrasts the Buddhist position related to Peace in the World with the World Redeemer of Christianity, namely Jesus, and he also notes that Christianity is associated with a partisanship in which the laws of De Civitate Dei appear to apply to a chosen group of people, and this has the military consequence that holy wars are permitted against all the non-chosen “barbarians”. He supports his argumentation by noting that Christian Nation States have a history of “colonial barbarity” and “internecine strife”(Page 134). Marching under the flag of the cross, Campbell argues, is not, however in accordance with the democratic symbol of the cross which is perhaps connected to the wider theme that “All Men are Brothers”. Campbell, proclaims in the context of thisdiscussion that it is to the Eastern Religions we must turn for an account of the experience of the “Transcendental Everlasting”:

“Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lives within them but that they, and all things, really are the Everlastng, dwell in the groves of the wish fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord. These are the immortals. The Taoist landscape paintngs of China and Japan depict supremely the heavenliness of this terrestrial state.” (Page 142)

Given that the transcendental quality of Being is in a sense beyond thought and beyond speech, it is difficult to contest the picture we have been provided with above. The Philosopher Spinoza is usually referred to as the Philosopher of the Infinite. Much of his work has a hylomorphic character, but he refers not to the infinity of forms but rather to the infinity of modes of God or Substance. God or Substance, for Spinoza, is only accessible by human forms of psuché via the modes of thought and extension, two modes of a possible infinite number of modes. The mode of thought, for Spinoza, is primarily composed of the idea of the object of the body which is also part of the mode of extension, which in its turn is part of the idea of psuché. On this theme, Spinoza claims in his work “Spinozas ethics” in a section entitled “Nature and Origin of the Mind”:

“The idea which constitutes the formal being of the human mind is the idea of the body, which is composed of many individuals, each composed of many parts……Therefore the idea of the human body is composed of the many ideas of the component parts.”(Translated Boyle, A.,London, Aldine Press, 1910. Page 53)

It is clear that the ideas of the mind are not enclosed within their own domain but rather reach out to the external world, and in this process perception is an important power of the body/mind:

“All modes in which any body is affected follow from the nature of the body affected, and at the same time from the nature of the affecting body. Wherefore the idea of them must involve necessarily the nature of each body. Therefore the idea of each mode in which the human body is affected by an external body involves the nature of the human body and that of the external body….Hence it follows in the first place that the human mind can perceive the nature of many bodies at the same time as the nature of its own body. It follows in the second place that the ideas which we have of external bodies indicate rather the disposition of our body than the nature of its own body.” (Page 53)

Kant would subscribe to much of the content in the above quotes and this may not be surprising given that both Philosophers espouse forms of rationalism similar to that of Aristotle. Spinoza believes his Work “Ethics” possesses a mathematical/geometrical structure of arguments which constitute “proofs”. This, of course, is in contrast to the methodologies of both Aristotle and Kant who both wrote in normal academic prose. Spinoza, in this work, also provides us with accounts of the powers of imagination and memory, which both Aristotle and Kant would largely ascribe to. Imagination, Spinoza argues:

“Again, to retain the usual phraseology, the modification of the human body, the ideas of which represent to us external bodies, as if they were present, we shall call the images of things, although they do not recall the figures of things, and when the mind regards bodies in this manner we say it imagines them…And here, so that I may begin to point out where lies error, I would have you note that the imaginations of the mind, regarded in themselves, contain no error, or that the mind does not err from that which it imagines, but only insofar as it is considered as wanting the idea, which cuts off the existence of those things which it imagines, as present to itself. For, if the mind while it imagined things not existing as present to itself, knew at the same time that these things did not in truth exist, it would attribute this power of imagination to an advantage of its nature, not a defect, more especally if this faculty of imagining depends on its own nature alone, that is,if the mind’s faculty of imagining be free.” (Page 55)

Spinoza characterises memory in the following terms:

“If the human body has once been affected at the same time by two or more bodies, when the mind remembers any one of them it will straightway remember the others…..For it is nothing else than a certain concatenation of ideas invoking the nature of things which are outside the human body, and this takes place in the mind according to the order and concatenation of the modifications of the human body.” Pages 55-56)

Spinoza then adds the following remark:

“the mind and the body, are one and the same individual.”

This is an important claim given the historical Cartesian penchant for opposing thought and extension as two different substances, a position modern science largely accepted and adopted in relation to giving an account of psuché. Cartesian dialectical reflection is also involved in the conflict of religions where the central idea appears to be that your God is not my God, not the real God. Indeed, for Spinozas understanding real oppositions such as male and female require adequate ideas for both forms of human psuché which we perceive clearly and distnctly in relation to their logos. Spinoza elaborates upon this theme in the following manner:

“I say expressly that the mind has no adequate, but only confused knowledge of itself, of its body, and of external bodies, when it perceives a thing in the common order of nature, that is, whenever it is determied externally, that is, by fortuitous circumstances, to contemplate this or that, and not when it is determined internally, that is by the fact that it regards many things at once, to understand their agreements, differences, and oppositions , one to another. For whenever it is disposed in this or any other way from within , then it regards things clearly and distinctly.” (Page 62)

The Philosophical conception of science embraced by both Aristotle and Kant includes that of theory which “regrds many things at once” in relation to their “agreements, differences and oppositions”. Philosophical science, in other words, provides us with adequate ideas of the genre and species of psuché, to take one example from one domain of science.

Insofar as psuché is concerned, Spinoza argues that that our idea of this is “very inadequate”:

“We have only a very inadequate kowledge of the duration of our body.The duration of our body does not depend on its essence, nor even on the absolute nature of God; but it is determined for existng and acting in a certain determined ratio by other causes, and these by others, and so on to infinity. Therefore the duration of our body depends on the common order of nature, and the disposition of things. But there is in God an adeqaute knowledge of the reason why things are disposed in any particular way, insofar as he has ideas of all things and not insofar as he has only knowledge of the human body. Wherefore the knowledge of the duration of our body is very inadequate in God insofar as he is considered as constituting only the nature of the human mind, that is, this knowledge is very inadequate in our mind.” (Pages 62-63)

This, of course, is an issue touched upon by the Kantian notion of noumenal reality which includes not only the inadequate idea we have of the external world but also the inadequate idea we have of our bodies as well. Kant, of course, beieves that we can have an adequate idea of the freedom of our mental powers to influence our wills and our actions. Spinoza, disagrees claiming that:

“men are mistaken in thinking themselves free.”(Page 64)

Spinoza believes this proposition, on the grounds that the primary idea of the mind is the inadequate idea of the body which is subject to a large number of causes stretching back to infinity. Spinoza goes on to claim that those that say that:

“human actions depend on the will” (Page 64)

do not understand exactly what they are saying. The question to raise in the context of this discussion is: given the fact that God constitutes our mind and our minds therefore possess a divine element or divine ideas, does this mean that freedom, if it exists, is god-given or not? Kant, we know, argues that freedom is causa sui—cause of itself– and this may imply that this is the divine element of ur constitution and the reason why we needed to be commanded in the Garden of Eden by God not to eat from the tree of the kowledge of good and evil and perhaps it is also why we need to be commanded to love our neighbours and God above all. If, however, this is the case, then our lack of knowledge of the causes that produced a constitution possessing the ideas of God and freedom is irrelevant

Some religions such as Buddhism claim that our life is a journey with a beginning and end on a noble pathway. Buddhism has been construed as an Enlightened religion because of its view of the importance of knowledge of the external world and the mind. The external physical world is conceived of in terms of what is described as the “sermon of the inanimate” which the Philosopher Thales expressed in his proclamation that “all things are full of Gods”. Campbell claimes to see this spirit in the Taoist Tea ceremonies. He also refers in this context to the myths of the Apaches and some African mythologies which proclaim that the rocks, fire, and water, are all alive like the plants. This may be a category mistake insofar as thought is concerned for both hylomorphic and critical Philosophy.

The issue of gods and goddesses, the divine opposites, is an important issue for Campbell who claims in this context that:

“For in the language of the divine pictures, the world of time is the great mother-womb. The life therein, begotten by the father, is compounded of her darkness and his light. We are conceived in her and dwell removed from the father, but when we pass from the womb of time at death (which is our birth to eternity) we are given into his hands. The wise realise, even within this womb, that they have come from and are returning to the father:while the very wise know that she and he are in substance one.”(Page 144)

Campbell continues:

“The union of the two is productive of the world, in which all things are at once temporal and eternal, created in the image of this self-knowing, male, female, God.”(Page 145)

We are created in the image of God and this theme of the opposites occupies Campbells attention at the level of the “opposites” of the male thunderbolt symbol and the female symbol of the bell which provides us with the melancholic sound of eternity. The bell summons us to take the noble path to the end, with the understanding that upon reaching the end we know it to be the beginning: opposites become one, including those most puzzling opposites of good and evil. It is at this point thatCampbell cites from the Upanishads whose claim is that when the hero takes the noble path to Brahman all opposites unite, including good and evil into one God, one Substance.

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The Delphic podcasts Review of Campbells “Hero” writings, Season 8, Episode 1

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Philip Cousineau in his Introduction to Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” claims that Campbell’s search was for the Logos of the phenomena he investigated. The concern, that is, was what these phenomena had in common rather than what differentiated them from each other. The method used was described as comparative historical elucidation and it can be contrasted with the method of Wittgenstein, which sought essentially to differentiate between different phenomena. Cousineau reminds us of the proclamation we encounter in the Vedas, namely:

“Truth is one, the sages speak of it  by many names”

In this regard reference is often made to the collective archetypes of Jung, which are used to justify the denotation of many sacred narratives Campbell calls these sacred narratives or myths the “Masks of god” which partly constitute the “morphogenetic field” which we presume is identified with  “The Truth” mentioned in relation to the Vedas above. The role of the hero is, we have agued in previous reviews of Campbell’s work, an ambiguous reference, which appears to exclude the quiet contemplative rational transformation Philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle appear to have undergone in their essentially intellectual journeys. These are the “modern” “pathfinders” in the modern morphogenetic field. We do find Socrates engaged in inner communication with his daemon in life-crisis situations, but Psychoanalysis would have no difficulty in explaining this communication as one between the ego and the superego, in a situation where a choice of life-defining alternative actions are being considered. The life defining experiences of saints, prophets and shamans are of course a much more dramatic affair.

Cousineau claimed that Campbell’s method involved the use of  the hermeneutical method. Paul Ricoeur, the Philosopher, articulates well the concern of hermeneutics for “symbols”, claiming that symbols possess the semantic property of “double meaning”. Expressions with a so-called manifest meaning provoke thought to move to another deeper meaning in what Ricoeur calls the “realm of the sacred”, which we mortals seem able to comprehend only through a glass darkly. Kant speaks in his Third Critique of Judgment of a statue of Isis and an inscription that says “no mortal has ever lifted my veil”.

Aristotle refers to this realm in terms of the realm of Being and he further claims that “Being has many meanings” . This concerns not merely our relation to God, but also our relation to life (psuché), death and the mysteries of the external world.  Campbell uses the word “metaphor” in its Ancient Greek meaning of “carrying beyond”: a meaning that transcends the more modern interpretation in terms of a shift from one semantic region to another. Reference is also made to the archetypes of the soul in the spirit of aletheia (unconcealment or revelation). We encounter this spirit in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas which articulates  a framework for the “many meanings of Being”, by claiming that the Kingdom of God is both within us and out there in the world, here and now. Eastern Religion also articulates this transcendental feature of our experience in terms of “Thou art that!”.

Ambiguous references to the archetype of the  hero and his journey do not, as we have claimed earlier, acknowledge  the possibility that this appears to run contrary to his stated view that we ought to be wary of unnecessarily universalising particular perspectival narratives which express local ethnographic concerns. It is true that prior to the introduction of Philosophical Reasoning and its Categorical concern with Being and Principles (such as noncontradiction and sufficient Reason), the heros narrative was steered by an imaginative idea of the heros journey. But even if our physiology has stayed the same for 40,000 years as Campbell claimed, the organisation of the brain due to the introduction of writing and reading may well be responsible, as Julian Jaynes suggests, for the kind of self-consciousness that has evolved as a human vicissitude of the instincts. We can see clearly in Plato’s writings, the change of emphasis from the virtue of courage to the virtue of wisdom, and the increasing importance of various forms of knowledge insofar as leading the good spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia) was concerned. Achilles excelled in battle, but his courageous life, otherwise did not meet Socratic or Aristotelian criteria. It was Socrates and the mythical Philosophers, returning to the cave from which they originated, that became the new “ideal”, representing wisdom. Whether we can regard these figures as “heros” is not clear. With the advent of philosophers there is an important shift from the individual perspective to the perspective of the polis which, for Socrates, was the soul (psuché) writ large. Socrates was searching for the definition of justice  but it was Aristotle who presented us with an essence specifying definition of Man, namely rational animal capable of discourse which  transcended the old ideal of the courageous warrior, and perhaps the so called archetype of the hero dissipated with Aristotelian  Rationalism and the telos of the contemplative life.

Socrates’ life was, however, in the old sense “heroic” because it ended the way it did for the reasons that it did, but it was not the battlefield but the agora which was the scene of his activities. Challenging those who thought they knew and who were trying to make the worse argument seem the better, of course, took both courage and wisdom. Socrates, like Jesus, knew the risks he was taking in attempting to persuade people to “know thyself!”. What happened to Socrates proved that the Athenian system was not quite equipped to handle appeals to “the child of the Gods”, namely Philosophy. Aristotle too, became persona non grata and was forced to flee from Athens. There is an argument for the position that the polis as a constitutional entity was not equipped to meet the demands for the “new ideals” the Philosophers  were arguing for, namely justice, knowledge, and freedom. An interesting footnote to this discussion is the attempt of Alexander the Great, Aristotle’s pupil, to establish a Greek Empire, thereby helping to destabilise the existing system of  polis/states. In the spirit of the Aristotelian principle of the Golden Mean, it is worth pointing out that  during Kant’s time, neither cities nor empires, but nations became the entities with constitutions.

Campbell in the Preface to his 1949 edition of “The Hero with a thousand faces” refers to a Freudian critique of religion and mythology:

“The Truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognise them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here too, we are telling the truth  in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels he has been deceived: and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups, and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We nave become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell the children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.” (Pages 44-45)

Freud’s point was, according to Campbell, that the ancient muses knew what they were talking about and which metaphors to use to carry their message further. We moderns, however, need to  learn again the “grammar of the symbols”. Campbell adds:

“as a key to this mystery I know of no better modern tool than psychoanalysis.”(The Hero with a thousand faces” (Page xii)

Psychoanalysis, however, has a complex history with roots both in Aristotelian Hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy, but it is perhaps the latter that is especially relevant to this discussion, given the Freudian declaration that he was a “Kantian Psychologist”. Alongside these relevant facts, however, there is also the deliberate Freudian choice of terminology drawn from Platonic Philosophy, e.g. Eros, Thanatos, Ananke, logos, which clearly transcend the technical language Freud uses to characterise the treatment of his patients. The Freudian theory of the “psychic-apparatus” and its possession of psychological powers in relation to the external world, also manifests elements of Greek thinking that presupposed the Greek view of psuché embedded in a categorical framework of areté, dike, arché, epistemé, aletheia and eudaimonia. In this Philosophical/technical framework there is no clear role for narratives of heros and their quests. The heros quest for self- transformation  often contains the occurrence of supernatural events in which tremendous forces are overcome by a superhuman will and determination, communicating perhaps the narcissistic message that “anything is “possible” for such men. The Aristotelian process of self- actualisation is not embedded in a narrative or a story, but is rather part of a philosophical account of the cultural development of a number of powers of human psuché, including the powers of discourse and rationality which are integrated with a number of other psychological/mental powers or functions that in turn have important relations to the external world.

It was Plato that initiated this transition from the form of the narrative to a more enlightened philosophical form of  “Philosophical dialogues” featuring the “ very real character” of Socrates, whose mode of being was one of self-efacement rather than self-proclamation. His power of persuasion was considerable,  because it was founded upon areté, arché, episteme dike, aletheia, logos, and eudaimonia. One can, if one so desires, read the episodes of the dialogues in terms of the adventures of Socrates, but that would be to miss the pedagogical point of the dialogues, which was to herald in the new era of the new ideals of  principles and rationality, emphasising  simultaneously the rejection of  heros and the rejection of the strategy of making the worse argument seem the better.

The heroic narrative is at best an exercise of the imagination and emotion in the name of the good spirited flourishing life of the individual which, in an aesthetic context, carries the subjective message of exemplary universality and necessity articulated in Kant’s Third Critique. It is true that the trilogy of dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology and Phaedo, seemingly promote a narrative of  the Socratic journey to his final destination in a death-cell. The message of these dialogues, however, is more complex. A man who has dedicated his life to justice is convicted for attempting to make citizens aware of the essence of Justice. Socrates at no point proclaimed himself to be a hero or a saviour, and he did not proclaim directly that Philosophy could save us from the Delphic prophecy of ruin and destruction. He nevertheless, over time, became a symbol for  the necessity and transcendence of Philosophy.

Athens was the home of three of the greatest Philosophers in history, in relatively rapid succession, and their bond of connection was a sacred one: that of  teacher-pupil. Plato incorporated the spirit of Socrates into his dialogues, and Aristotle incorporated the spirits of both Socrates and Plato into his writings. Campbells account of the heros journey has a very different structure, which it can be argued, was promoted into a cult of the hero by Thomas Carlysle, which in turn was transformed into the Hegelian idea of world historical individuals such as Napoleon . This underwent a further transformation into  Nietzsches “Will to power”. Associated ideas of “Domination” and Colonisation” were  political ideals that have been embraced by a number of modern tyrants since Napoleon. The Greek political heritage, however, probably lies closer to Schopenhauers “will to live” and Kant’s “good will”. Its epistemological heritage encourages a belief in “scientific” explanation/justification. Its artistic heritage includes a belief in the importance of Art and its associated ideals of the beautiful and sublime.

Campbell was undoubtedly a significant explorer of the breadth and depth of  psuché via the linking of distant mythologies such as that of the Navaho and Hinduism. His arguments are sometimes hylomorphic and sometimes Kantian but they lack an important philosophical dimension which we have attempted to articulate. It is true as Campbell maintains that mans physiology has not altered for 40000 years but mans most important organ is his brain and the organisation of the functions of that organ may have changed during this period. Language, Julian Jaynes has argued was originally a bilateral function like all the other physiological functions of the brain. The science of physiology teaches us that an organ can lose one function and acquire another. In the case of the origins and history of the function of language, Jaynes has interesting theories to contribute:

“Language, Jaynes argues, began as an expressive phenomenon partly connected to events of importance in the external world /e.g. hunting,  and gathering). By a charted series of functions, this developmental sequence eventually reaches the level or representative thought in which we find the names for animals developing into a more complex  stage in which names are given to individual people. At this stage it would be fair to say that we are definitely thinking something. As group life evolved we then find language evolving into more complex forms via the use of sentences with subject-predicate structures which illustrate the fully mental power of thinking something about something which Heidegger called the veritative (truth-making) synthesis. This, however is not the final level of the Mental which is achieved only when the principles of Logic  and Truth tables begin to constitute and regulate the field of sound argumentation—the field of rationality. These higher mental operations are undoubtedly inhabitants of the realm of the mental being essentially connected to the telos of self-conscious thought.” (James, M.R.,D., The World Explored, the World suffered: A Philosophical istory of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Volume four, Page 194)

This is a hylomorphic  account of the development and integration of human psychological powers that are implied by the essence specifying definition of human psuché, namely rational animal capable of discourse. Whilst different languages spoken by different races of man with different histories compel us to attend  to these differences, biological reflection focuses upon what we, who are different in certain respects, have in common. In simple primitive environments  consciousness  may not have possessed the same level of complexity, but mythical narratives certainly appealed to the powers of the imagination and sensibility, quickening in those who had the requisite capacities, an experience of transcendence. Primitive man certainly used myths to orient himself in his environment as well as to begin the attempt to know himself. Campbell claims in this context:

“The symbols of mythology are not manufactured: they cannot be ordered, invented or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.” (The Hero with a thousand faces, Page 2)

Many scientific disciplines contribute to our understanding of primitive man and his primitive form of life and Campbell invokes psychoanalysis amongst these. He refers to the long childhood of man, and the subsequent long period of dependence upon our care-givers. As the repertoire of human psychological and mental powers develop much can go awry to disturb this development, and identification of the causes of psychological or mental health problems are not always straightforward matters. One image which the Ancient Greeks use to provide us with an understanding of the human self actualisation process is that of the labyrinth, and psychoanalysis certainly provides us with one of the threads leading out of the cave and into the sunlight. Myth and Religion too provides us with such a thread as does Philosophy.

In an interview entitled “The Road of Trials” Campbell refers to James Joyce and the Arts  as responsible for awakening in them the realisation of the universal  meaning of the symbols we find in our Myths. In this context he also refers to Hinduism which already in the 9th century BC acknowledged that:

“all the deities are projections of psychological power, and they are within you and not  out there. They’re out there also, in a certain way, in a mysterious way but the real place for them is in here (points to the heart).” (Pages 36-37)

James Joyce helped Campbell understand the Eastern texts and laid the foundation for the next phase of his journey, in which he discovered Freud, Jung, and Thomas Mann whilst studying Sanskrit. Yet it was another German Psychologist whom he met in 1981 who would play a large part in helping him to synthesise ideas from Myth, Art, Psychology and Literature, and relate these ideas to the fundamental problem of life, which is:

“to become transparent to transcendence: so that you realise that you are yourself a manifestation of this” (Campbells The Hero’s Journey, Page 51).

Campbell spent one hour with Karlfried Graf Durckheim from Freiburg and emerged from this meeting with a definition of myth as:

“a metaphor transparent to transcendence” (Page 51)

The Ancient Greek spirit of aletheia hovers over all these reflections because it is clear that we are in a world of symbolic language which carries us beyond  the normal concerns of speech into the “realm of the sacred”, which is the realm of psuché (life) in which we feel at one with the Universe and especially with all forms of  life. Schopenhauer, following Kant, highlighted this aspect of metaphysics when he pointed to the phenomenon of humans sacrificing their lives to save the lives of others, thereby transcending Spinoza’s principle of self preservation in which it is claimed all things strive to preserve themselves in existence.