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History and Psychology share many of the same problems relating to the validity of the judgements and theories associated with these disciplines. In my earlier work “The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action”, Volume one, the Roman image of Janus was used to illustrate the dialectical structure of many judgements and theories. One face and one pair of eyes look backward in time with what one imagines to be a sense of melancholy over all the past lost loved objects of desire, stretched out in the history of the species of man. A second face and pair of eyes looks forward into the future with what one imagines to be a sense of anxious expectation over what the passing of time might bring with it.
Janus is a Roman symbol associated with war and it is, therefore, not surprising that instinctive aggression, rather than understanding and reason, is suggested in interpreting the meaning of this Roman symbol. We know Freud possessed a Janus figurine which was displayed in his consulting rooms, along with many other figurines from different cultures. These figures, for Freud, probably also appealed to the art of interpretation in the process of inquiring into their meaning. This same art was used in relation to his patients, who, perhaps like Janus, manifested the symptoms of melancholy, anxiety and aggression. Freud, in interpreting these symptoms, used a categorical framework which stretched over a number of different sciences (theoretical, practical and productive), and he employed a number of technical concepts especially designed to both interpret and ameliorate these symptoms. Part of the strategy used, involved the Freudian learning-triangle of— wished-for fulfilment of a desire/wish, refusal of fulfilment, and consequential wounding of the desiring/wishing ego. If we are to take Freud’s claim that he was producing a form of Kantian Psychology seriously, then we ought to assume that the Philosophical Psychology underlying his patients treatment implies the practical ethical absolute of Kantian ethical theory, namely a good will.
O Shaughnessy (OS) in his work “The Will: a Dual Aspect Theory”, makes an important contribution to this discussion in relation to restoring the Will to a central position in the field of modern Philosophical Psychology. He points to logic and principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason to explore the scope and limits of this concept of the will, and thereby illuminates the relation of the external world to psuché (life). In elaborating upon this relation, OS adheres to the important Kantian-ontological distinction that was undoubtedly involved in the Freudian learning triangle (demand/desire- refusal-wounded ego), namely, that between what the world makes of man, and what man makes of himself through his behaviour and actions. It is clear that Pain is the driving force of the learning-process that is occurring in such contexts. The ego being referred to is, firstly, that which accords with Spinoza’s analysis of the mind-body relation, where the first idea of the mind is the idea of the body, and the task of this Freudian ego is to protect the body. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly from a psychological viewpoint, the ego is a precipitate of lost objects, which is ,of course, another aspect of the inhibition-responses of the agent concerned. This triangle and framework accords well with the Kantian diagnosis of our social-political relationships with each other, a diagnosis he describes in terms of the melancholic haphazardness of social/political events. This, if it is to be understood in the right way, needs to be further embedded in the hylomorphic framework of material efficient, formal and final causes, principles of change, media of change(space, time, matter), and kinds of change.
Aristotle claims in his work “Metaphysics” that we all desire to know, and he claims further in his work “Nichomachean Ethics”, that these claims, in turn, need to be embedded in the framework of ancient Greek oracular prophecies, which may also account for the prevalence of these very human dispositions of melancholia, anxiety and aggression. Three of the most famous recorded pronouncements are namely, that “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”, “Nothing too much”, and “Know thyself!”. These “proclamations” are also haunting Aristotle’s search after first principles.
It is clear that Freud’s Kantian Psychology presupposes both large parts of this hylomorphic framework as well as the spirit of these oracular proclamations. We know that during his last phase of writings, Freud turned specifically to the work of Plato for part of his “Mythology of the instincts”. He accepted that, at certain points in the theorising process, argumentation in terms of principles needed to be supplemented by stipulations which support the work of the principles, and for this purpose, he chose the mythological figures of Eros, Thanatos, and Ananke, partly to account for the role of death and aggression in his otherwise very technical accounts of Instincts and their Vicissitudes. Indeed the philosophical problems related to an obsessive concern with the idea of Consciousness inherited from the Cartesian tradition, is also addressed in the later revisions to Freuds theories, and we are in the context of this discussion, reminded of the Aristotelian essence-specifying definition of man, namely “rational animal capable of discourse”.
Consciousness, for Freud, is a vicissitude of an instinct, together with repression and other defence mechanisms such as Identification and Sublimation (the civilisation-building vicissitude). The Kantian judgement relating to the melancholic haphazardness of our social and political relations is also implied in Freud’s claim that man is fundamentally dissatisfied with his civilisation owing to the instinctual sacrifices that need to be made in order to create and maintain the level of civilisation/culture necessary to provide citizens of the polis with a flourishing life (eudaimonia). This Greek term also implies good-spirited and this accords well with the one absolute in the Kantian ethical system, namely, a good will.
In the previous chapter, Freud’s contribution to the biography of Thomas Woodrow Wilson was discussed. The work left us with an impression of the importance of the historic context of the exercise of power of an important character on the American political stage. History and Psychology interact in interesting ways that relate fundamentally to the Kantian ontology of what man makes of himself, and what the world makes of man. If, hypothetically, we could suspend the operation of the will of man, reducing the life instinct to a pinpoint of light in the darkness, the complex needs and desires of such a psuché, leave one with the impression that there is nothing in this psuché to counteract the feeling of being overwhelmed by the magnitude and power of the external world.
In his analysis of judgements relating to the sublime, Kant discusses the example of an observer of a powerful waterfall. The observers senses are at first overwhelmed by the raging waterfall. In the subsequent moments of this experience, Kant notes that another faculty of our minds is mobilised in response, and in this moment, we both understand and appreciate our power as a moral agent. On Freud’s account, what we are witnessing, is an ego initially succumbing to the exigencies of the external world, and subsequently being strengthened by the knowledge of the possible operations of the superego in accordance with the Greek idea of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). In this scenario, what we are partly seeing is the power of human freedom in a powerful deterministic world, containing causal forces, that will eventually bring about the extinction of all life-forms. The fact that rationality is merely a potentiality, and not fully actualised in the species, also highlights the importance of the oracular proclamation that “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction. Kant, the Enlightenment rationalist, also takes this aspect of human existence into account, and makes a proclamation of his own, namely, that rationality will only be actualised in the species of man, over a period of one hundred thousand years. This is indeed a long period of suffering for the discontented ego to mourn its lost objects of desire. Both the causal powers of the external world, and the powers of his fellow man, threaten the destruction of the polis, and call into question the work that make mans social and political life possible: hence the feeling of melancholic haphazardness.
Hannah Arendt’s conception of the “new men” of the modern era, for whom it was important to mobilise the instincts and emotions of the masses for their own selfish purposes, aptly fits the behaviour of Woodrow Wilson in the aftermath of the first World War, as well as Harry Trumans decision to drop two atomic bombs on the civilians of two Japanese cities. In both cases, we are confronted with an imagination that ran wild at the expense of common sense and rationality. We have dubbed our “modern era” as the “age of discontentment”, because it began with Cartesian and Hobbesian discontentment over the rationalist philosophy of Aristotle, and continued with a Hegelian inspired discontentment with critical Kantian Philosophy. This means that, in the light of Kant’s proposed one hundred thousand-year journey for the species of man, we are witnessing a period of regression rather than progression.
We ought to recall that, for the Freud that wrote the Interpretation of Dreams, psychic regression occurred in the dream context, when the energy of a part of the brain was used to create the images of the dream, rather than for the purposes of external sensory or motor activity. We might, that is, in a dream, believe that we are swimming, but that is a mistaken belief, because no external sensory or motor activity is occurring. Similarly, in a dream, when we believe we are seeing a figure approaching in a blue shirt, this is not a genuine case of seeing, but rather the work of the imagination. We firmly believe we are seeing in the dream context, yet it is nevertheless true that what we are seeing, or think we are doing, is not real. It is nevertheless significant in that, what is happening, may well be related to the wish-fulfilment structure of the dream: a structure regulated by the pleasure-pain principle and the energy regulation principle ( governing the wish to continue sleeping). On this view, because in the dream scenario, the faculty of sensibility does not involve the cognitive process of synthesising representations for the purposes of knowing the truth, it is the sensible power of the imagination that is at work using the medium of images.
Insofar as the identity of the discipline of Psychology was concerned, one of the central moments of the 19th century came in 1870, when a group of prominent Scientific Psychologists coined a definition of Psychology which in fact redefined the direction that the subject would take in the future: a direction that appeared to focus on the term psyche (psuché) and construe this term very differently from earlier more philosophical characterisations such as those we find in both Aristotle and Kant. The first wave of theorists, were in fact structuralists, who defined Psychology as the “Science of Consciousness”, and who also attempted an empirical-atomist experimental approach to the role of sensations and feelings in our experience. William James opposed this approach and wrote a work entitled “The Principles of Psychology”, which was classified as a “functionalist” approach to the phenomena and conditions of mental life. He did not however, conceive of “principles”, Philosophically, or in the way that Freud would have, but he did define mental life in practical rather than theoretical terms:
“The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of mentality in a phenomenon.” (Principles of Psychology, Volume 1, P 8)
Furthermore, we see in this definition of mentality, a clear distinction between the Socratic/Ancient Greek ideas of the good-in-itself, and the good-in-its-consequences, and we should also recall that in this connection, important ideas like justice involved both of these Goods. A phenomenon has its conditions, some of which may fall into the categories of material and efficient causation, especially when we are dealing with phenomena related to sensibility. When, on the other hand, we consider higher mental states and processes related to action and knowledge-states and processes, formal and final causes in relation to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, shift more into focus. James, however, was somewhat ambivalent in relation to these Aristotelian and Kantian principles, and preferred a more down to earth Philosophy of pragmatism which eschewed all forms of theoretical rationalism.
Aristotelian and Kantian “conditions” of phenomena involve both the above rationalist principles of psuché, which must be discussed in terms of a wider definition of life that includes both plant and animal forms of life. Such discussion must take into consideration both archeological and teleological “conditions”. When these conditions relate to actualising a self that is aiming at rationality via discourse, we need to embed such a discussion in a complex mental framework, which includes instincts and the faculty of sensibility in general. What is also needed is reference to the categories of understanding/judgement and the principles of reason.
William James’ pragmatic Philosophy was a child of its time , focussing upon the notion of Consciousness. It was, however, also heeding classical concerns relating to the importance of the will, and the Greek conceptions of areté and arché. James discusses Humes interest in the role of habit but, unlike Hume, views this practical phenomenon through the framework of consciousness. The contribution of mental life to the formation of habits, for James, requires the operation of the power of consciousness. The already formed habit probably only requires the presence of consciousness to, firstly, begin the action, and secondly, monitor what happens if something goes wrong with the action, and thirdly, at the end of the process when one is viewing the result. For Freud, the level of sub-consciousness involved in the habitual action would partly correspond to his notion of the preconscious part of our minds, which is used non-observationally by the motor system to perform learned habitual actions in accordance with areté.
Areté, in such contexts, where we are concerned with the construction and use of artefacts such as library-chairs, is connected to techné, that, in turn, uses that form of instrumental/causal reasoning which has been so important for civilisation-building activities of all kinds. This kind of action does not fall into the category of actions whose telos is connected to diké (justice), where the issue for psuché is the outcome (Ananke) of the battle of the giants, Eros and Thanatos, and possibly, the ruin and destruction of the polis. We discuss the learning of skills and habitual performance in volume 1 of “The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psycholgy, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action”:
“Both sensory and motor ideas combine to form objects of the mind. A skill, for example, is represented by James in the brain as a sequence of muscular contractions of which there is a sensation for each contraction. These sensational impressions exist below the level of conscious ideation which otherwise is usually present at the beginning of the activity ( e.g. seeing the piano) and at the end when one becomes aware of the completion of the activity (of playing the piano). According to James, it is a different matter when we are learning a skill where much work is then done at the conscious level of ideation: we test each sensation by consciously comparing, choosing, rejecting, etc. Even moving on to the next component in the sequence of the learning process is a conscious act. There is no thematic concept of consciousness in Hume although he does speak of the importance of forming habits, which, on James’ account can only be achieved through the active conscious awareness of what is right and what is wrong. This allows James to use the concept of a will that can consciously envision the activity it is about to undertake before the fact. It is this consciousness of the whole activity that then subsequently, when the activity has begun, enables us to know exactly where we are in the chain of events constituting the activity. If, for example, I am interrupted in the act of saying something, I remember what I have said and what I am about to say in virtue of this initial conscious awareness of the whole.”( The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action(Volume one), James, M.,R., D., Mauritius, Lambert Academic Press, 2019, P. 312-3)
The “divorce” of Psychology and Philosophy occurred immediately prior to James’ work. In the lead up to this series of events, Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s works was decisive, and used the authority of Berlin University to neutralise the Critical Philosophy that had previously been sponsored by the University of Königsberg. Kant had successfully restored the hylomorphic ideas of matter and form which had previously been successful in combatting the materialism and dualism of Aristotle’s time. Hegel’s dialectical-based Phenomenology allowed these alternatives to reemerge in the name of an idea of “Spirit”, that used dialectical reasoning in a context of exploration/discovery which, paradoxically, regarded the logical-rational principles operating in contexts of explanation/justification, as metaphysical (the dreams of spirit-seers). It was Hegel’s expressed intention to turn Kant’s work upside down, and thereby undermine his centring of Practical Reason around the Greek ideas of psuché, arché (principle), areté, diké, epistemé, phronesis, and eudaimonia. Greek practical reasoning had, during the dark ages, been marginalised on the grounds of Christian criticism. Pelagus, for example, proposed the idea of a free will which St Augustine felt compelled to combat in the name of the Christian Church and an idea of a God who was the ultimate cause in a deterministic causal-system. It was, however, Aquinas who felt the gravitas of Aristotelian argumentation, and allowed scholars to once again entertain the possibility of hylomorphic accounts of psuché. Aquinas, however, also felt that Pelagus was a threat, and in his re-interpretation of Aristotle’s work marginalised the importance of both Aristotle’s Metaphysics (that all men desire to know), and Aristotle’s Ethics (that all human activities, including the arts and the sciences, aim at the Good.) Man, for both Augustine and Aquinas was a flawed being because of his problematic relation to both God and the Word of God–the biblical form of Logos– (which meant something different to the ancient Greeks).
Just as Sensibility does not judge in relation to the truth, so it does not judge in relation to the Good. Instinctive desires are either satisfied or not. If the more primitive desires are requited, a state of homeostasis is established in the organisms body, if not, the organism finds itself in a state of disequilibrium, and might even die if the deficiency is serious. There is, in this situation, an intricate relation between the Energy Regulation Principle and the Pleasure Pain Principle, but instincts are blind insofar as the “understanding” of the Good is concerned. This is not to deny that at the level of sensibility and instinct, there is a primitive kind of “intelligence”, insofar as meeting the needs of survival are concerned. The medium that this intelligence operates in, however, is the medium of “feeling”, and images, and involves the faculty of the imagination more than the faculty of the understanding.
Aristotle investigated the life-instinct (Eros) in a categorical framework, at least as complicated as that of Freud’s, and without thematising the concept of consciousness. Knowing, for Aristotle, could be applied over a whole range of phenomena stretching from the bare awareness involved in the activity of seeing, to the knowing involved in logical reasoning in a complex argument such as:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore: Socrates is mortal.
The above form of reasoning presupposes a faculty of understanding operating at a conceptual level, as well as the principles of reasoning (noncontradiction and sufficient reason). It is at this level that we are confronted with the epistemologcal problems of truth and knowledge, and the ethical problem of the good in both theoretical and practical contexts. Form and matter play decisive roles in such an argument. Conceptual forms differ from sensible forms in the way in which the higher mental processes of the understanding differs from the lower level operation of the imagination.
The Unconscious, Freud claims, does not operate in accordance with the principle of noncontradiction, which, in the domain of the practical, involves the operation of the will in the decision to do X or not do X (where x is an action). Negation, in the arena of action insofar as it is at the level of consciousness, must involve conceptualisation (at least insofar as the rational animal capable of discourse is concerned) and this involves a level of organisation of representations that is above and beyond the the scope of the faculty of Sensibility in general, and the imagination in particular. According to Kant, the manifold of representations are ordered under a concept belonging to a system of categories, which, in turn, imply the operation of the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Language is used conceptually, with understanding, when it is used to name a manifold of representations, or alternatively, predicate something of a named manifold. Language can also be used to signify an emotional state, as is the case when someone shouts out the name of a long absent friend encountered at an airport, or alternatively, where one fearfully shouts at a bear to “Get away!” In these latter cases, Sensibility is expressing itself through, or via, the medium of language, which can also be used to express thoughts given the propensity of language to picture a state of affairs in its absence.
According to Julian Jaynes, however, language probably began as some kind of warning cry, before the establishment of civilisations, whilst man lived in a state of nature. With the advent of naming objects, the faculties of understanding and reason began to form, and with the advent of naming people and remembering them in their absence (perhaps after their death), memory became an important mental function, and an important complement to the language-functions that signify or symbolise what ought to be the case in the future. This complex of mental operations then, constituted a teleological orientation, which in turn forms the basis for the creation and implementation of laws for a possible polis.
Language functions, then, stretch from the simple primitive expressions of the sensible faculty, to the sublime logic of the ethical syllogism that illuminates the essence of that cultural act of promising, e.g.:
Promises ought to be kept
Jack promised Jill he would pay the money back he is borrowing
Therefore Jack ought to pay the money back to Jill
This is the Kantian region of Logos which far surpasses the naming function of language. In the above syllogism something declarative is being said about promising in general, and an individual promise in particular. What we also see in the above form of reasoning, is a complicated use of both the imperative and declarative voices of language. The major premise, “Promises ought to be kept”, has the force of a principle (arché), and both the Kantian faculties of understanding and reason are involved, in the formation of the principle, and its subsequent application. The “voices” of language referred to, are obviously related to thought, as conceived from an ancient Greek point of view (Socrates: thinking is talking to oneself). For Freud, the “voices” of melancholy and aggression connect to his triangle of desire, which has its roots deep in the faculty of sensibility. Now, whilst it is undoubtedly the case that the expressions of emotion and instinct have no categorical intent, it is also true that such expressions serve important individual and social purposes. Let it not be forgotten that in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents”, Freud pictured the fate lying in wait for our societies, in terms of the battle between Eros and Thanatos–the creative and destructive instincts and their vicissitudes. Kant’s critical Philosophy may well have approved of this kind of proclamation, given his view of man’s hundred thousand year view of the journey toward a Kingdom of Ends This journey, he argued was made more complex by the fact that man is in need of a master, but because of his self-love, he rejects the authority of all who seek to be his master. These aspects of Kant’s theory explain his judgement relating to the melancholic haphazardness of social and political life. Freud’s explanation of melancholy and aggression, is, in terms of his triangle of desire, in which the demands motivated by mans self-love or narcissism, are often refused, and result in a wounded ego, which, in turn, gives rise to melancholic or aggressive responses. This hundred thousand year journey toward a better life is also overshadowed by the words of the ancient Greek oracle: “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”.
Science, for Freud, who was living in the era of positivism and its obsession with the experimental method (which rejected what it took to be the dogmatic attitude of Philosophy), was analysed by Freud as a deflection from the telos of life. Such a position was a marked contrast to the position of those Scientific Psychologists intent upon blazing a trail for Psychology in the name of the experimental method based on observation and the manipulation and measurement of variables. The context for this kind of scientific activity was obviously a context of exploration/discovery, and the voice of such scientific inquiry was the interrogative voice.
O Shaughnessy(OS), in his analysis of will and action, points out how the interrogative attitude in relation to an orange one is reaching for, actually disrupts the categorical structure of the action relating to an object that is being viewed by the agent as a response, not to a question, but rather to an order, namely “Pick me!”This is a very different kind of context to that of the scientific experiment which is largely conducted in the spirit of the interrogative, “What do we have here?”
The declarative, imperative, and interrogative “voices” of language are vicissitudes of instincts, and these “voices” would be of fundamental importance for the description and justification of the forms of life language-games are embedded in, as far as Wittgenstein was concerned. For Wittgenstein, confusing language games with each other, leads to the creation of philosophical problems which then require grammatical investigations for their solution. The Wittgensteinian maxim, “Dont ask for the meaning, ask for the use!”, is an imperative directed at those who viewed meaning as a theoretical rather than a practical problem, and it was a recommendation for the nature of the inquiry to be changed from that of a student of nature interrogating the phenomena in the external world, to that of a judge using the law to categorically judge whether something is in accordance with a principle or not. In other words, the judge is situated in a context of explanation/justification, and his judgements are in the imperative voice, e.g. “The law is very clear in these circumstances and it ought to be obeyed!”.
In Wittgenstein’s later work, he abandons his earlier commitment to what has been called “logical atomism”, and “logical solipsism”, in favour of a more holistic view of both language and man. He recommends that we focus on describing various practices embedded in forms of life, rather than firstly, on a conception of the world being a totality of facts, and, secondly, on an idea of the self lying at the boundary of the world. The search, however, is for essences, and the method employed is that of a grammatical investigation designed to provide us with the rules of representation, which, it is claimed, are already known, and the context is clearly a context of explanation/justification. Wittgenstein approved of Kant’s anti-metaphysical project, and might have considered his own later work as an elaboration upon the Kantian critical project. He also considered himself a follower of Freud, and in spite of some criticisms of Freud’s work, we can assume that he approved of Freud’s reflections upon the role of instincts and their vicissitudes in relation to the forms of life discussed in the work “Civilisation and its Discontents”. Freud and Wittgenstein certainly heeded Kant’s warning about the dangers of dogmatism, scepticism and indifference, and the consequential relapse into the theoretical morass created in the process of the reemergence of a dialectical opposition between materialistic and dualistic theories. The post-Kantian situation reminds one of the state of affairs that resulted when Aristotle’s hylomorphic criticisms of both materialism and dualism collapsed upon the onslaught of the “new men”, Descartes and Hobbes.
We have argued that Aristotle would have seen Kantian, Freudian, and Wittgensteinian investigations, as variations upon hylomorphic themes embedded in a framework of psuché, areté, diké, arché, techné, epistemé, eros, thanatos, ananke and eudaimonia. Socratic and oracular proclamations such as “Nothing too much!”, “Know thyself!” and “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”, also formed part of the background for Hylomorphic investigations. The “Principles”, for example, that emerged from such investigations sufficed to justify the knowledge (epistemé) we find in the different domains of science articulated in Aristotelian theory ( theoretical, practical, and productive).
Given this background, the call by William James for “Principles of Psychology”, was a positive contribution to the state of affairs created by the “structuralist psychologists”, working to undermine the philosophical commitment to philosophically inspired principles in any area of investigation. The starting point for these structuralists, namely that of Consciousness, rather than psuché, also contributed to the state of affairs that Wittgenstein eventually described a few decades later as “conceptual confusion”. James attempted to transcend the dialectical opposition of the materialistic and dualistic theories of his time, e.g. the science of behaviour versus the science of consciousness. This state of affairs had begun with the dialectical opposition between Hobbesian materialism and Cartesian dualism, and this polarity was temporarily neutralised by Kantian critical Philosophy, but this too was undermined by another member of the College of the “new men”, namely Hegel, who created a platform for subsequent phenomenologists and existentialists: a platform that began by turning Kant’s work upside down, and ended by turning the world upside down (with the help of modern technological science, almost destroyed Civilisation). The Kantian response to these initiatives of the new men was one of melancholy. The Freudian response was one of “discontent”at positivist science, and the Hegelian dialectical “spirit” that would soon transform itself into the will to power in the context of individual and political action. It would be this notion of the will to power that would provide the new men of the 20th century with the justification for the most horrendous political activities, including the persecution of the Jews, recalcitrant anti-communist farmers, political opponents etc. The maxim “The Truth will set you free”, is without doubt not a maxim the new men of politics would embrace, and there is also reasonable doubt about whether the new men of science did not embrace a form of relativism that would reject the above maxim as well as eschew the principled philosophical approaches of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and the later Wittgenstein.
Freud’s Psychology is founded upon what he called his “Mythology of the instincts and their vicissitudes”. This, in the modern hylomorphic terms proposed by P M S Hacker( Human Nature: The Categorical Framework), is an account of human powers, capacities and their vicissitudes. The power of language is, of course, a power Freud appreciated, and used, in accordance with the principles of practical( areté) and productive science( techné). In doing so, he made use of the declarative voice/power of language, when he explained and justified the need for his cathartic treatment: when, that is, he transformed the emotions and passions of sensibility into the understanding associated with concepts and principles. He did not initiate grammatical investigations, but he was certainly using language for teleological purposes. In some circumstances we can imagine the analysand confessing a secret anxiously, or wishing manically for something impossible, and the language involved in such circumstances would be rooted in the faculty of sensibility aided and abetted by the power of an imagination unfettered by the demands of what Freud called the Reality Principle.
The relationship between the analyst and the analysand has a transactional aspect, and this might suggest that a language-game for two persons is being played: a language-game whose purpose is to set the slave in this relationship free, by maneuvering the subject into understanding the truth about themselves (using the Reality Principle). Freud, in his reflections, refocuses the light of Psychology in relation to the problems of Life (psuché), in a unique fashion, which acknowledges the relation of life to death in general, but, in particular, to life as “A game that must be lost” (Adrian Stokes, Collected Papers, Tamworth, UK, Carcanet Press, 1973). Life, if it is a game, is certainly a very serious game, that is only sometimes taken seriously. It has the most serious of outcomes which defines its essence, namely death–the nonexistence of life. It is also, however, the essence of life to strive or will its future continuous existence. Some Greek oracle, sometime, may well have said or thought, “All life-forms, in spite of Eros, will come to an end and degenerate into an inorganic form of existence”.
Freud’s Psychology captured the above spirit adequately only toward the end of his writings, when he turned more specifically to the Greeks for the inspiration to deal with his most difficult cases. It was also this later elaboration upon his earlier positions which enabled him to reflect upon and analyse the behaviour of Groups and Societies. This, of course, resulted in the depressing world-view that we encounter in “Civilisation and its Discontents”. Wittgenstein’s concession to Kantian and Freudian melancholy, manifested itself in his view of the decline of Western Civilisation, which he pointed to in several cultural remarks, e.g. he thought he could hear the sound of engines in early 20th century classical music. So, Kant, Freud, and Wittgenstein, all shared a pessimistic world-view grounded in a philosophical psychology that transcended the “scientific” Psychology of their times. Freud, conscious of the colonising attempt of positivistic science, and its contempt for all forms of knowledge not arrived at by an observationally-based scientific inductive method, referred to his “mythology of the instincts” in reaction to this state of affairs. We tend to forget the ethical implications of Freud’s theories, because we choose to ignore the historical facts of the time, namely that mentally ill patients were on the whole treated immorally and incarcerated in institutions which had no idea of how to treat them. Freud’s “moral treatment” respected the human dignity of his patients, and provided them with hope for a better future.
Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Wittgenstein, can, then, lay claim to being Philosophers of Life”, and it can moreover be argued, that insofar as practical reason is concerned, all of these thinkers are rationalists, who also embrace empiricism in their descriptions of the sensible powers of the human form of life. Insofar as sensation or feeling is the subject of of the practical aesthetic judgement, we can compare the empiricist account relating to the judgement of taste in relation to wine discussed by Hume, with the aesthetic judgement of the beautiful and sublime discussed by Kant. For Kant, Humes account of taste is not an account of the reflective form of judgement which involves the faculty or power of the understanding, but is rather a more primitive form of judgement that relies solely upon the naming function of language and its relation to the faculty of sensibility. In relation to this form of judgement we can turn to the principles regulating the sensible faculty that we find in Merleau-Ponty’s work “The Phenomenology of Perception”. In this work, Merleau-Ponty refers to the “laws of association”, that unite the words for sensations with the named sensations. One who, upon detecting a taste of iron in the wine, will associate this with the word “iron”. Now whilst this may be an adequate account for the empiricist, it is not so for Merleau-Ponty, who claims that we have a lived relation to sensation, which in its turn suggests that the relation of the sensation to the judgement “There is a taste of iron in the wine”, is not merely causal in the Humean sense. Rather, there is, in these circumstances, some form of “lived identity” between the non-reflective judgement of taste and the sensation. This discussion bears to some extent upon the discussion of sexual sensations in “The Phenomenology of Perception”. For Freud, sexual sensations are an important part of the experiences of life, and the individuals personality. On Freud’s account, the bodily sources of these sensations are important material and efficient causes of the sexual experience, and this is also partly confirmed by Merleau-Ponty who sees that sexuality is an important expression of the life of the phenomenological subject. The Later Freudian account of sexuality, points out that the sexual relation to another person can be purely instinctual, but it can also be overlaid by vicissitudes of those instincts that are related to what we call “love”—an important task of the ego. Merleau-Ponty, in the spirit of phenomenology, replaces the scientific notion of “cause” with that of “meaning” or “operative reason”. Such “meanings” are manifested in the syntheses of perceptions which Merleau-Ponty is careful to distinguish from the syntheses involved in judgements acts or predications:
“I cannot put perception into the same category as the syntheses represented by judgements, acts or predications.”( Merleau-Ponty, M trans Smith C, London, Routledge, P.XI)
Merleau-Ponty claims in the above work, that the perception of a black pen must be separated from the work involved in a perceptual judgement such as “This pen is black”, and this may, to some extent, be the case in the sense that Kant, for example, drew a sharp distinction between the activity of thinking something, e.g. either “pen” or “black, and the more complex activity of thinking something about something, e.g., “This pen is black”. This latter complex judgement is a truth-making or veritative synthesis, which include the simpler syntheses of those representations constituting “pen” or “black”. In these latter simple syntheses, the realm of “thinking something”, names rigidly designate what they are names of, and this is indicated by the phrase “This pen”. Such Concepts, which are rigid designators of particulars, however, have a different logical structure to those that are occupying the role of predicating something of something: these latter concepts are intending to designate the “many”, and to that extent, may be regarded as more “abstract” but this may not be a useful way of making the distinction between these types of concepts. Many things in the world are black, but only one thing is designated by the rigid designation of “this pen”. Psychologically speaking, there can also be “this sensation of the blackness of this pen”, and both the sensation and the blackness form, what Merleau-Ponty called the “lived unity” of the perceptual activity of a “lived body”, which is the home of many different kinds of meanings. This recalls Freud’s remarks that the human body is a naturally occurring experiment, operating in a field of natural causes. Merleau-Ponty, however, is inclined to reject the term “cause” on the grounds of its modern scientific definition, and this ignores the Aristotelian claim that there are four different kinds of “causes” (aitia) or “forms of explanation”. “Modern” scientific concepts of causation often restrict themselves to material and efficient causation, embraced by Hume as paradigms of causation, and tend to question whether, in some cases, final causes can, in any sense exist. The validity of Formal causes as explanations is also typically questioned on the grounds of appealing to categories or principles that might not always be accepted. For Merleau-Ponty, there is a fundamental difference between what can be lived through, and what can be thought. For Kant, on the other hand, the truth-making synthesis that constitutes the judgement “This pen is black”, is necessarily related to the categories of the understanding and the principles of reasoning (noncontradiction, sufficient reason), which are called into question by both Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology generally. “Operative reason” or “operative intentionality”, are the syntheses that constitute what the phenomenologists refer to as the ante-predicative world: a world formed by a non-thinking kind of consciousness, that does not operate in accordance with the laws of association but rather relates intentionally to reality via the medium of “meaning”. There is no space in this kind of account for a mechanism of association in relation to the elements of stimulus and response, favoured by behaviourist “explanations” of experience. Embracing a science of behaviour in response to the inadequacies of a science of consciousness that focussed upon sensations and feelings, brought with it new and different problems, related to all attempts at materialistic reductions of “life” to something observable. Freud avoided both of these sets of problems by defining consciousness as a vicissitude of instinct, and regarding consciousness as one power amongst others, that all need to be integrated, if adequate responses to the exigencies of the external world are to be possible.
The Freudian therapeutic method of free association was a method operating at the level of “names” which belongs to the more simple realm of “thinking something”, which, as we pointed out above, needs to be distinguished from the more complex realm of thinking something about something. This latter form of thinking is essentially a form of thinking in which concepts are related to concepts. The therapist, equipped with psychoanalytical theory, interpreted the patients associations in terms of their meaning, and the principles operating in human forms of life, e.g. energy regulation principle, pleasure-pain principle, and reality principle. This is a more complex idea of meaning than that which is used in phenomenology, and draws upon many different kinds of knowledge from different arenas of science.
Merleau-Ponty, in his later work, moved closer to incorporating a view of language which could be integrated into his framework of a transcendent body operating in a transcendental framework of “Self-Others-World”, where the world was conceived primarily in terms of the ante-predicative “meanings” referred to earlier. This was also intended to steer away from the confusions engendered by conceiving of psuché in terms of a sensation-based science of consciousness or a science of behaviour. This was also the intention of both William James and Freud, but James chose to directly give an account of the power of consciousness, which he conceived of in terms of a stream that could contain both thoughts and things. In an essay entitled “Does Consciousness exist?” James accused Kant of substituting the traditional account of the soul, with what he called a transcendental ego which, he claimed, confused the subject-object distinction. Presumably if James had lived to witness the role of the strong ego in Freud’s later works, he would have accused Freud of the same confusion. If, however, psuché is translated as “life”, it is not clear that there is any confusion present in this account, since in both Kant and Freud the ego ( the “I think” for Kant, and the agency that operates in accordance with the reality principle for Freud), is simply a unifying agency organising the many different aspects of ones life in accordance with various principles (e.g. the pleasure-pain principle, ad the reality principle).
Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to combatting the materialist and empiricist reductions of forms of experience to events or “simples”(e.g. sensations), involves referring to the complex relation that exists between the physical realm of nature and the psychological realm. He does this via the analysis of the perception of simple colours:
“Some Physiologists, Merleau-Ponty argues have begun to see that there is a complex relation between the physical and the psychological. In the case of certain kinds of physical insults to certain parts of the brain responsible for colour vision, we do not see, as a consequence any disappearance of “content”: we see rather a disappearance of “form”. This is reminiscent of Aristotle who reminded us that it was the essence or form or principle of the eye to see–he knew that a major insult to the eye would remove the principle of seeing thus confirming the importance of the matter the body is composed of. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty points out in the case of injuries to certain parts of the brain and sensory conductors what we discover is not just the disappearance of some colour, as in some forms of colour blindness: what occurs is rather a loss of differentiation in the perception of all colours. First, it is the saturation of all colours that is affected and the intensity of the colour is diminished. Thereafter the colour spectrum is reduced to four colours, and finally a monochrome grey is all that can be seen.”(The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action, Vol 2, James, M.R.,D., Mauritius, LAP, 2020, p 333-4)
There can be, therefore, no simple causal relationship between colours and the physical-organic systems responsible for their existence. In Sartrean language , the colours of the spectrum that can be perceived is, insofar as psuché is concerned, something that is pour soi (“for-itself”). Colours, Merleau-Ponty also argues, are linked to attitudes of the body. Green, for example, is associated with rest, and red associated with action. This testifies to the importance of the sensory-motor unity that helps to constitute our experience. The sensory component also possesses an “active” capacity which is, for example, manifested in the switching of attention from one part of the visual field to another through the slightest movement of the eyes. Otherwise, it can also be maintained that sensations are events that happen to the body.
From the point of view of the Psychology of Piaget, the “I” or” ego”, is a structure that emerges after a long period of assimilation and accommodation of the sensory-motor schemas to the exigencies of the external world. Eventually the “centrism” of these sensory-motor encounters are de-centred, and we begin to see the external world from a point of view other than ones own. Motor schemas, once assimilated, create for the body-image (postulated by Merleau-Ponty) the possibilities of complex action, and involved in this is obviously a sensory component of the representation of the action to be performed, which includes both the necessary parts of the body involved over a period of time, as well as the elements of the external world that need to be manipulated.
Merleau-Ponty, also charts how a patient named Schneider, who has sustained brain damage to the occipital parts of his brain, is no longer able to mobilise his action systems non-observationally, as normal people can. Schneider is forced to use observation to supplement what is left of his normal intentional power. If, for example, he is asked to touch his nose, he does not do so spontaneously and naturally as we do. Merleau-Ponty denies that what is being affected here is an “I think” principle, but rather, he argues, a principle he designates as an “I can”- power of consciousness. The differences between these two principles is summed up in the following:
“Sensibility functions theoretically in terms of forms of intuitions of space and time which are, for Kant, principles of structuring the world, e.g. “seeing” the ship sailing down the river in terms of before and after in relation to its changing positions in relation to the river. These are not thoughts governed by the categories of the understanding, but rather sensible relations to the world. One can truly say that insofar as sensibility is concerned we “inhabit” space and time and we are not representing to ourselves in this context that we are “in” space and time, which incidentally is perfectly possible at the level of understanding and judgement when we are generating knowledge statements. For Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, the sensory motor functions of a body-image are, for some mysterious reason, more fundamental than the representational or symbolic functions. All of these functions contribute in their various ways to the organisation of the world.”(The World…. P.336-7)
Both Phenomenology and Existentialism embed their accounts of Philosophical Psychology in Epistemological and instrumental contexts, and eschew the categorical forms of judgement related to causation as well as the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, thereby leaving a vacuum, insofar as the relation of Ethics to Philosophical Psychology is concerned. Sartre, the existentialist, for example, has an account of freedom that situates this power in the individual psyche, and does not acknowledge this power’s relation to ideas of reason, or the categorical imperative. This kind of account creates an enormous obstacle to the formulation of an ethical theory with universal intentions. Behind both phenomenological and existential positions lie assumptions which reject both the categorical forms of judgement and understanding that relate to the Truth, and these assumptions also reject categorical forms of the Good.
Freud’s position in relation to the above discussion, is somewhat ambivalent, but two considerations are important to bear in mind. The rationalism of Plato, Aristotle and Kant, is evident in his embrace of the principles behind the actualisation of the processes of psycho-sexual development. Freud is clearly committed to the formation and maturation of the superego in accordance with a categorical reality principle. Part of this actualisation process, involves the organisation of the psuché by a reality principle that decentres from a self-centred pleasure-pain principle. In the context of this discussion, it is difficult to conceive of the key idea of Consciousness embraced by pragmatists, existentialists and phenomenologists alike, as categorically structured ,and this may be one reason why Freud rejected all Philosophies of Consciousness and pointed out that his Psychology was Kantian. Merleau-Ponty was critical of any commitment to the idea of Consciousness which was not rooted in the lived body, but he too was opposed to the categories and principles we find in the Kantian account, or, indeed, any rationalist position which assumed an all-constituting power that imputes meaning to everything.
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the importance of sexuality for the human psuché, correlates well with Freud’s position. There is, however, a paradoxical denial of the role of the importance of the sexual organs in this kind of experience, and this opposes the general Aristotelian account of psuché, in which the organs play an essential role in the form of life we are considering. This form of Sensibility certainly overshadows the account of the role of colour in relation to the “attitudes” of the body. Science, for Merleau-Ponty, needs to be “interpreted” in terms of meaning and intentionality, before it can find a home in his phenomenological account. An example of this is his interpretation of the important experiment of Stratton:
“in which an image of the world projected upon the eye is inverted, thus creating the sense in his subjects that the world is upside down. Initially nothing is recognisable, not even faces which completely lose their familiarity when seen upside down. Eventually, as the subjects were forced to engage with this world by finding their way about and doing things (whilst the image remains inverted), the world returns back to its normal state of orientation. Is this, then, the confirmation that Merleau-Ponty seeks to prove, namely that the use of the body is transcendental? Merleau-Ponty claims that in the initial phase of the image no mere conceptualisation of the world or intellectual attempts to merely identify things in the world would have the same effect of returning orientation to normal. Merely thinking about the visual field would not, he argues, produce a correction of the orientation belonging in the visual field.” The World….P.341)
Merleau- Ponty continues in his work “the Phenomenology of Perception”, to explore the more enigmatic forms of consciousness. He discusses, for example, how the schizophrenics perception and understanding of reality, is ruptured, and how this is manifested in the judgement of the Schizophrenic that he finds the claim “There is a bird singing in the garden”, puzzling, because the “fact” of the bird, and the “fact” of its singing are not, for him, connected. It appears as if the unified world of the judgement has fragmented into its parts:
“Here it appears from a Kantian point of view that the structure of thinking something about something has collapsed into the simpler power of merely thinking something. This thinking moreover does not respond or connect to either logic or what Wittgenstein would call the grammar of language and seems rather to be conducted in the medium of projected images. Merleau-Ponty’s diagnosis is that the inter-sensory unity of the bird singing has fallen apart. He sticks at this description and refuses to think hylomorphically about this phenomenon, which would entail accepting a “causal” account of powers building upon powers.”(The World….P.342)
Focussing on a part of the whole, when the issue is to account for the essence of the whole, or an important holistic property of the whole, is an example of what P.M.S. Hacker calls the “mereological fallacy” (Human Nature: A Categorical Framework). If there is any sense to the claim that the world is constituted of the totality of facts about it, this must surely refer to the truth shared by these facts. Facts, such as “The bird is singing in the garden”, may require further explanation that goes beyond the state of affairs the fact is referring to. The bird is expressing an important aspect of its existence by singing, and this leads us into the territory of an essence-specifying definition of the type of bird that “sings” its existence. The question “Why is the bird singing in the garden?”, demands, that is, an epistemological explanation of the kind we might find in the area of knowledge Aristotle called Biology. The rupture that we find in the experience of the Schizophrenic, stretches beyond his witnessing this state of affairs, and affects his knowledge of the world. He does not, that is, believe the fact that the bird is singing in the garden, and this violates the definition of knowledge that Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein all share, namely, justified true belief. Belief is the minimum necessary conditions for knowledge, but it is not sufficient, and this answer fails to accord with the principle of sufficient reason. Without the power of belief, the Schizophrenic can have no power of knowledge. The Schizophrenic is no less disoriented in his world, than are the subjects of Stratton’s retinal-image inversion experience.
Freud’s case study of the Paranoid Schizophrenic Schreber, reports that Schreber believed his body was being diluted in the universe of galaxies and solar systems . Freud points to the sensible role of a non-conceptual form of image-laden fantasy in the creation of such a strange belief. A complex combination of the energy regulation and pleasure-pain principles appears to have been responsible for such a fragmentation of the body-image.
For Merleau-Ponty, Aristotelian and Kantian approaches to the conceptually based faculties of the understanding, judgement and reason, are all attempts to use what he called “mental chemistry” to explain the essence of phenomena which require more sensibly based explanations. Merleau-Ponty conceives of Consciousness as a “General Project”, that does not know what it is doing when it is hallucinating. This general project is further conceived of as being thrown into the world: being a general “One” inserted into a project-filled world:
“constituted of the thoughts and intentions of transcendent bodies.” (The World P. 343)
Consciousness inheres in this transcendent body in a way which evades the modern theories of Science. It is unclear, however, whether, any or all combinations of the transcendent body, Consciousness and the “One”, can give us an account of the human being which is not essentially solipsistic. Freud’s use of the term “Instinct” is both biological and psychological, but his elaborations upon the ultimate telos of the life and death instincts, are in terms of whether they are civilisation building or civilisation destroying powers. Freud witnessed, during the first world war, and in the period leading up to the beginning of the second world war, the role of the new men, not just in science, but also insofar as they occupied powerful political positions. He characterises war as the work of Thanatos, and insofar as he was influenced by Plato, he must have seen the battle between Eros and Thanatos to be resulting in a dismantling of many of the achievements of civilisation and culture. His view of the US and USSR, (two of the most powerful political forces in the world at the time), was not positive, and was probably a source of some of his discontentment with civilisation. In this context, it is a remarkable fact that both Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologist, and Sartre, the existentialist, philosophising amid the rubble left in Europe after the second world war, had difficulties providing us with an ethical philosophy: both settled for the political philosophy of Marxism which Hannah Arendt eventually rejected on the grounds of its lack of respect for that key ethical idea of reason, namely freedom. The leaders of Marxist societies were often led by the new men, who did not hesitate to mobilise the emotions and passions of the masses for their dubious political ends.
Ancient Greece has been heralded as a Golden Age, but there is no doubt that the oracles of the age could see the tools of destruction being fashioned in their Culture. Eros and Apollo and the Philosophically defended idea of the Good did not suffice to allay the fears of the oracles that civilisation was destined for ruin and destruction. The advent of Aristotles hylomorphic reflections certainly provided the framework of areté, diké, arché, epistemé and phronesis with philosophical arguments of significance: arguments that provided us with the ideal of that great-souled man–the phronimos. Unfortunately Christianity overshadowed this heritage, and marginalised everything “pagan” through the power of the ecclesiastical authorities, which controlled the translation and interpretation of important Greek texts. St Augustine and Aquinas were the authorities responsible for the introduction of those Platonic and Aristotelian ideas that were deemed compatible with the metaphysics of Christianity. St Augustine believed that the human form of life was composed of a body and a soul, and believed that man was flawed by “original sin” which we saw in the account of Adams exile from the Garden of Eden. In this (mythological?) account, the role of epistemé is negative, and is, in fact, the reason for mans will to disobey God. Predestination and resurrection were certainly not concerns of Plato, who found the solution to avoiding the ruin and destruction in our cities, rule of these cities by Philosopher-rulers. For St Augustine, De Civitate Dei had no political significance, and Philosophy played no role in its future and its ultimate fate on Judgement day. There is no doubt that Augustine was a dualist, and that he was a Roman inspired by Romans. His tale of the two cities, De Civitatis Dei and De Civitate Terrana, his tale of two substances (body-soul, his tale of good vs evil, all testify for this thesis.
Aquinas came into contact with Aristotle during the period when Universities were revising their liberal arts programmes in the light of Aristotelian ideas which were growing in influence and during a time when the influence of secularism was also growing. Aristotelian science was also being increasingly studied, after being overshadowed by the idealism of Platonism and the neo-Platonists. Aquinas lived in an age of synthesis which followed the dialectical spirit of the 12th century. Yet we should not forget that Aquinas was a religious man, and his principle intention was to install faith in a superior position to reason, which, for example, could never in his estimation, prove the existence of God with its arguments.
One of the primary differences between Greek religious belief and Christian belief was the fact that the Greeks were polytheistic and the Christians monotheistic. One way of elaborating upon this difference was in terms of Aristotles view of the many meanings of Being, and this contrasted with the monotheistic paternalistic commitment of the New Testament and its suggestion that we are all God’s children as well as sharing a brotherly relation to each other. For Freud this band of brothers living in a state of nature, had a sinister history in which the tyrannical father is murdered, but the story ends positively, when the brothers agree to install laws to govern their community. It is difficult to find a symbol for the Roman period but perhaps the figure of Janus is a possible sign of the times:
“Nothing of the spirit of Eros can be found in relation to this dark being. Janus guarded the territory of tyrants who succeeded one another under his nervous gaze. He was born in the darkness of Roman Times, surviving in the darkness of our times and looked nervously forward to the dark times to come. The image is that of a split psuché…. one pair of eyes turned toward the past and one pair of eyes turned to the future. Could we imagine what the content of the visual field might be? Janus was in the process of transformation into the Leviathan, a monstrous form of psuché whose gaze into the future will be at the battlefields over which monstrous machines and weapons of destruction will roam in a landscape of dead bodies. From the machines high up in the sky, the gaze might have picked out the falling atomic bomb on its way to vaporising innocent civilians, blowing them to pieces.” (The World…Vol.3 P 2-3)
Janus has been related to Time, History, War, and thresholds or gateways, and we know that the Ancient Greeks preferred, at least insofar as Time and War were concerned to picture Time, in terms of a river flowing from the mountains flowing to the sea, and picture War via Ares, the most hated God on Olympus (Ares was not worshipped the way Mars was by the Romans). Both Mars and Janus were protectors of Rome in different ways. Mars, too, was Janus-faced being also the God of agriculture. Janus’ duality, however, was more ambiguous and open to interpretation.
War began as an organic human activity fought with the help of weapons fashioned specifically for the destruction of life, but in Ancient Greek times it was areté related to Courage which was the primary focus for them insofar as war was concerned. As we “progressed” toward Roman times, the Greek values were becoming more and more “instrumental”, and less and less “organic” and holistic. The Romans, it is important to recall in this context, were both military men and engineers and they marched in and out of Rome under the gaze of Janus.
The first “new men” of Philosophy, Hobbes and Descartes, were both living in dangerous times, and were forced to flee their respective countries. Descartes, as a young man, suffered a nervous breakdown and travelled around Europe as a mercenary soldier using his mathematical skills to design the machinery of war. Hobbes, the materialist, on the other hand, used his mathematical skills to attempt a proof relating to the squaring of the circle, but it is Hobbes who is referred to by many contemporary political-war theorists. We know both of these “new men” rejected the hylomorphism of Aristotle for different reasons. Hobbes believed, for example, that life (psuché) was nothing but the material motion of limbs. He argues, in this context, that the heart is but a spring, the nerves so many strings and the joints so many wheels. What we are witnessing in such an account is the inversion of the Aristotelian view of life, in favour of an artifactual/mechanical view. We also ought to recall that Descartes did not care about the screams of the animals he was dissecting without any anaesthetic. For him, animals were nothing more than mere “machines”. Descartes, we also know was a dualist who, when asked how the two substances of the body and mind interact, chose to answer this question scientifically, and he referred to the pineal gland in the brain (a materialist solution!). This was a very different kind of dualism to that we encounter in Plato, where a fundamental distinction is drawn between the forms and the external physical world which merely “imitates” the forms. Aristotle criticised this Platonic account, and insisted upon the importance of the external world in our experiences, but he retained the idea of “forms” as “principles”(arché) in his investigations into the many meanings of being.
Descartes and Hobbes thus restored the dialectical opposites of materialism and dualism to the philosophical arena. Kant’s critical Philosophy aimed to reconcile rationalism and empiricism in an account that reminds one of hylomorphic theory. Kant provides us with a trinity of mind-functions which assisted in the restoration of the ancient Greek view of psuché. He successfully used the university(Königsberg) as a platform for the dissemination of his ideas but Hegel(the master of dialectical reasoning) used the same institution(Berlin) to overturn Kant’s platform in the name of phenomenology, thereby once again unleashing more modern and lethal forms of materialism and dualism in our Western Culture.
This was the background to the schism that occurred between Psychology and Philosophy in 1870. What we immediately encountered after the schism was attempts on the part of materialistically- inspired scientists and dualistic phenomenologists, to transform the way we describe and explain psuché. Freud’s theories attempted to respond to this state of affairs by opposing both the positivistic view of science and the phenomenological/existential view of Consciousness. We know that Wittgenstein was very impressed with the Freudian account, and referred to himself at one point as a “disciple” or follower. The Wittgensteinian concept of “forms of life” was, however, echoing Aristotelian hylomorphic concerns, which also focussed on the importance of relation to various “principles”(arché), e.g. the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
It is also worth mentioning the phenomenology/existentialism of Heidegger in this context, because it was he who, remarkably suggested, that modern thinking had ruptured its relation to Being. He referred to the Latin translation of certain key philosophical terms such as aletheia, and other scholars have also raised a number of questions about the translation of other key terms such as areté, diké, epistemé and eudaimonia. Unfortunately the Heideggerian claim that Kantian Reason should be abandoned in favour of transcendental imagination, was a far more problematic psychological view of Being and the powers a human form of life possesses.
Freud’s connection to Aristotle was a complicated affair, but we know he was influenced by the Aristotelian Philosopher, Brentano, who desired a rebirth of Philosophy in the ancient spirit that sought to understand the many meanings of Being. This concern of Brentano, was, however, difficult to reconcile with his interest in establishing a school of Psychology from an empirical point of view. Such a venture had more to do with one of the new men, the empiricist David Hume, then the hylomorphism of Aristotle. Freud’s return to Plato was certainly, however, a return to the ancient spirit of philosophising, and signalled a rejection of the empirical, which Aristotle would have supported under the condition that principles of Psychology remain an important focus. Freud’s later work was driven by two primary intentions, firstly, a need for a more complex technical framework to treat his more difficult patients, and secondly, a desire to apply psychoanalytical theory to cultural issues. Amongst his interests were, firstly, to provide an explanation for the means the new men used in order to so successfully mobilise mass opinion in sometimes insane directions, and secondly, to provide an explanation of the role of the death instinct in the destructive activity of War.
Freud begins his cultural reflections with the band of brothers living in a state of nature, prior to the creation of civilisation. The brothers murder their tyrannical father, and regret the loss and the difficulty of replacing a leader with another one when there is a serious risk of that leader being murdered. The laws agreed upon then allow the state of nature to be transformed into a more civilised state in which the rule of law and justice regulates the more important aspects of human interaction. This is an “organic” holistic view of the state which differentiates itself from the modern views of the new men who regarded the state as a created artefact to be fashioned and changed at will in accordance with ever changing views of what is important. In Freud’s view the civilised state evolves from a state of nature, and continues to evolve until all the potentialities of the human form of life are actualised: unless of course Thanatos wins the battle with Eros and we are taken down the road leading to destruction. On this journey man has to make many sacrifices because his instinctual life is based on a pleasure pain principle which is essentially narcissistic. Freud speculates alarmingly on whether the effort and sacrifices we make, are worth while. Julian Jaynes, like Freud, is also concerned with the evolution and actualisation of our mental powers, including the power of language, and he, like William James, refers to structures and functions of the brain for a material explanation for the evolution of Consciousness:
“The transition from the primitive group of 40 individuals to larger social entities is obviously a significant change as is the sudden explosion of the diversity of tools, weapons and artefacts (ca 40,000 BC). In connection with these changes, Jaynes postulates a similar radical shift in the function of Language: he relates this ultimately to the increase in the size of the frontal lobes in the brain….Jaynes’ account of the evolution of language is the work of a master. The process moves from expressive modifiers , to life nouns, to peoples names, and finally to the written texts of Homer and the Bible.”(Vol 3 P.9-10)
Around 1200 BC, Jaynes argues, our minds were constituted of two chambers, corresponding to the activities of the two hemispheres of the brain, and language was bilateral, like all other sensory motor functions, i.e. located in both hemispheres. Activity in the language centres of the right hemisphere, played important roles in the process of deciding what to do, especially in stressful situations, where the solutions to the problems one was presented with, were not obvious. With the advent of writing at ca 3000 BC the shift toward language being located solely in the left hemisphere began. In the texts of both Homer and the Bible, which span several hundred years, we can encounter bicameral men like Agamemnon and Amos, who were steered by the voices of the Gods (located in the right hemisphere). We can also, at the end of this bicameral period, encounter men like Odysseus and Ecclesiastes, who consciously reflect upon the problems confronting them, seeking solutions in terms of either the knowledge they themselves possess, or alternatively in the knowledge the community possesses:
“By the time we get to Ecclesiastes, life has become a more reflective conscious affair involving the collection of ones thoughts and calm judgement relating to a time for every purpose under heaven. Jaynes also refers to images of empty thrones and a long period of mourning for Deus Absconditis. The political effects of this new form of conscious functioning are also apparent in the new forms of government that were emerging during this time. It is, however, only as late as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle that these new political forms are classified in terms of the idea of The Good, This classification was embedded in a complex framework of ideas, e.g. areté, arché, diké, epistemé and phronesis.”(Vol 3 P.10)
The moment of mourning for the absent voices is paradoxically repeated in Heidegger’s more abstract modern complaint about our forgetfulness of Being. Given this possible account, it does not come as a surprise to learn that, for Freud, the belief in God may well be pathological: a substituted displaced belief in something that is a figment of our imaginations. The “being” involved in relation to these voices is, of course, not a real being but is rather, a something about which not very much can be said, unless we have recourse to psychoanalytical explanations: explanations that relate to the sensible functions of a mind operating in accordance with defence mechanisms. A mourning process, over a being that is not real, cannot possibly have the same effects as the mourning process in relation to a real loved being. Indeed, if such a mourning process was occurring in the course of a therapy, the interpretation, when it was given , would involve suggesting to the patient, that the being that is mourned is not real, and may only be a substitute authority figure that has arisen as a consequence of a wounded ego. If this interpretation is true, then one consequence, is that the process of identification with God must be a weaker form of identification, compared to that process which occurs in relation to an existing father or existing parents.
Transactions with the divine initially occurred via what is said about God in holy texts. The claim that God loves man in the New Testament, may not, therefore, have any basis in reality, if one considers that the attributes of absolute divine power and knowledge, do not accord well with the fact of the presence of evil in the world. Here, we seem to be confronted with something that is destructive, and beyond the power of God to control. We know Freud questioned the Christian maxim of loving ones enemies, claiming this to be dangerous advice. Indeed, he even questioned whether it is feasible to suggest that we universally love neighbours who may be seeking to use us for their own ends. In other words, the brotherly-fatherly love of the New Testament, is very different in spirit to that of Eros, which occurs in the framework of free voluntary choice: that is, in the context of a will subject to areté, diké, epistemé, arché, and eudaimonia. On the Greek and Freudian account, man strives to know himself, to know his world in general, but in particular to know and do what is in accordance with the form of The Good: something that is both good in its consequences and good-in-itself. Freud is obviously more comfortable with a civilisation where Eros and Thanatos are doing battle for the fate of that civilisation, than he is with that Roman choice of the Christian religion, or indeed any religion which is not based on knowledge of oneself and the world one lives in.