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Even if it was the case that for many hundreds of years Aristotle was referred to as “The Philosopher” and the “Master of those that know”, his teacher was Plato and his alma mater was the Academy. We do not know enough to be certain, but a fair conjecture would be that Socrates did not have a navigational star or mentor in his philosophically formative years as a young thinker. We do witness in the Symposium, Socrates being given a lesson in methodical argumentation (Philosophy?) by Diotima and in these early moments of Philosophy it may have occurred to Socrates that a reliable method of questioning and argumentation are necessary prerequisites to leading the examined life. It is of course a tribute to the love of demonstrating excellence in the public realm of the ancient Greeks that we are able to today bear witness (via preserved texts that have survived millennia) to the importance of discussion and debate in the life of the polis. Gilbert Ryle in his work “Plato’s Progress” 1 suggests that Plato might have composed his elenctic and dialectical dialogues for competitions attached to the Olympic Games. If so there must have been relatively large audiences which is another tribute to the Greek mind and culture that was the womb of such activity.
We have been made aware via the works of Plato and Aristotle that there is a body of knowledge which it is important to communicate and learn as part of being a citizen in a polis. For Plato this was a body which can be written down as well as performed in arenas reserved for such purposes. Plato, more than Socrates, perhaps was concerned with the search for a theory which could explain the mysteries and puzzles brought to the attention of the public via such forums. Philosophy seemed to Plato to be the natural home or theatre for the kind of investigation we are presented with. Out of this womb of Greek Culture and the theatre of theoretical investigation, the Aristotelian quintuplets of metaphysics, ethics epistemology, aesthetics and political Philosophy would eventually be born. As we know Socrates thought of himself as some kind of midwife in the process of bringing philosophical offspring into the world. His method of elenchus was probably modelled on a public method of competitive argument called dialectic, which was a form of a verbal duel between two people. A questioner asks an opponent what Ryle terms “conceptual” questions and the answerer is only allowed to respond in the affirmative or the negative in the name of defending a thesis which is the theme of the interrogation. The questioners’ task is to entice from his opponent an answer that is not compatible with the thesis the answerer is defending. An audience judges the competition. It is not too difficult to see how such an action could be the source of many of the aporetic philosophical problems both Plato and Aristotle attempt in their various ways to provide solutions for. If this is true there might have been two sources of the dynamics of Greek Philosophy: dialectic (eristic and elenchus) and the recorded thoughts of the great thinkers. Ryle’s “Plato’s Progress” has this to say on the relation of this rhetorical activity that is referenced in Aristotle’s work “The Topics”:
“The Topics is a training manual for a special pattern of disputation governed by strict rules which takes the following shape. Two persons agree to have a battle. One is to be the questioner, the other answerer. The questioner can, with certain qualifications only ask questions: and the answerer can, with certain qualifications only answer “Yes” or “no”. So the questioner’s questions have to be properly constructed for “yes” or “no” answers. This automatically rules out a lot of types of questions, like factual questions, arithmetical questions, and technical questions. Roughly, it only leaves conceptual questions whatever these may be. The answerer begins by undertaking to uphold a certain “thesis”, for example, that justice is in the interests of the stronger, or that knowledge is sense perception. The questioner has to try to extract from the answerer by a series of questions an answer or conjunction of answers inconsistent with the original thesis and so drive him into an “elenchus”. The questioner has won the duel if he succeeds in getting the answerer to contradict his original thesis, or else in forcing him to resign, or in reducing him to silence, to an infinite regress, to mere abusiveness, to pointless yammering or to outrageous paradox. The answerer has won if he succeeds in keeping his wicket up until the close of play. The answerer is allowed to object to the question on the score that it is two or more questions in one or that it is metaphorical or ambiguous. The duel is fought out before an audience…The exercise is to have a time limit.” (P.104-105)
The above form of duelling is one form upon which the Socratic method of elenchus may have been modelled. During pre-Socratic times and during the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle the above form of elenctic interaction went under the name of “eristic”. Now it is important to note that the above form of elenchus differed from the Socratic method in one very important respect. The aim of the Socratic method was primarily pedagogical, i.e primarily aimed at getting his interlocutors to understand and acknowledge some truth about justice or themselves or both. Whereas the duelling parties engaged in eristic are primarily seeking victory and prestige, via the winning of a competition. In spite of this fundamental difference, we should recognise that eristic presupposed considerable powers of reasoning. Yet it should also be remembered that the Sophists used this form of dialectic for financial gain, thus turning something essentially pedagogical into a solipsistic (narcissistic?) secondary art form. Socratic elenchus whilst not aiming at victory over one’s interlocutor did, unfortunately, have the secondary effect of humiliating ones opponent, largely owing to the fact of the existence of eristic and the fact that Socrates refrained from exposing his own assumptions and knowledge in the light of the discussion. He has some idea of what justice is but is reluctant to expose it to his interlocutors. Plato may be registering his concern over this fact in the Republic when he allows Socrates the lecturer (was this a part of Socrates’ repertoire or was this a literary creation by Plato?) to expound on the theory of forms, the allegory of the cave and the waves of change that need to sweep over a polis if it to avoid ruin and destruction. This, after 4 displays of elenchus in relation to Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus and Glaucon. In the lecture that follows everything is laid open to the eyes including hidden assumptions, noble lies, and even justifications for infanticide.
Ryle points out as so many other commentators have, that the conception of Philosophy Plato has, changes in significance between the early and the late dialogues. In the work of the Republic, we may be witnessing the dialogue in which the shift actually occurred. Indeed it may also be necessary to point out that the shift from eristic to the Socratic method in itself may also signify a shift in the conception of the nature of Philosophy. A dialectic of the Socratic kind, i.e. the Socratic method, was aiming at the truth and knowledge and taking a position in the battle of pro and contra reasons in relation to a thesis. This was clearly a development of eristic. We should also note, however, that Socrates himself was accused of trickery (a common complaint in dialectical “duels” and even in modern debating) in his argumentation by at least two interlocutors (Euthyphro and Thrasymachus) and we find him characterising what he is doing as “barren of offspring”, as “maieutic”, in spite of the fact that his method distinguished itself from that of eristic, and that it was in search of a quarry best characterised in terms of a definition. Socrates’ elenctic method was in that sense both teleologically and formally rigorous. It was probably the case that behind the formulation of Socrates’ questions there was an awareness of structured assumptions and their logical consequences. The dialogue of Plato’s Republic clearly adds a dimension to this Socratic rigor and underlying structure (The theory of Forms). The method, assumptions, explorations and subsequent definitions were now in the lecture of Socrates forming themselves into a theory of a world of things, artifacts, souls, cities, and Gods. Socrates in the later books of the Republic is exploring the world in a different manner which commentators identify with the Philosophy of Plato. The world was now being subjected to a questioning that demanded answers that would fit into some kind of system. Dialectic becomes logic and demands systematic reflection of a Parmenidean rather than Heraclitean kind: reflection upon that which endures through change, reflection upon that which is the principle that determines what a thing is in its nature and also ultimately a principle that determines what the soul is in its nature. These changes also signify an increased concern with the general ideas of Truth and The Good. The major theme of Ryle’s book “Plato’s Progress” suggests that Plato’s progressive path led from eristic and dialectic where the emphasis is upon negatively defending a thesis (by not abandoning it in the face of counterargument if you are a defender). The aim of this activity was to destroy a thesis, or force a defender to resign if you are a questioner. Thereafter we are led to the formulation of an aporetic question which demanded systematic resolution via theoretical justifications. In this phase, we also see in the later dialogues of Plato a concern with the history of a problem, something we have not encountered before.
Also in this work, Ryle fascinatingly suggests a hypothesis that Plato was sued for defamation of character by a group of the leading figures that were criticised in his dialogues. The suit, Ryle claims, cost Plato his fortune and resulted in some kind of ban on Plato teaching eristic duelling and dialectic to students under 30 years of age. We can note that in the Republic, Plato still believed dialectic to be important as a prelude to understanding the ideas of justice and the good and the true, and this becomes part of the training of potential rulers when they are over the age of 30. Plato may well have abandoned the theory of forms in his later thought, but he retained the view that the true and the good were timeless standards by which to evaluate thought, action, and forms of life. From some points of view, it is a credit to Plato that he positions the Good as the highest standard of evaluation in Philosophy, thus indicating the important role of practical reasoning. A move which would much later on be repeated by Kant.
Socrates’ progress moved from investigating the physical world in a “What is this in its nature?” frame of mind, sifting through physical phenomena as numerous as the grains of sand in a desert. He went in search of answers that would fall into the category of Causality and in the spirit of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras. The latter influence led to a change in the direction of his investigations. “All is mind” was the new assumption and Socratic investigations began to search for aspects of the mind (soul) and meaningful forms of life. This journey required developing the method of elenchus. This method led to the form of life Socrates characterised as “the examined life” which in the mind of Socrates was infinitely superior (in terms of the criterion of self-sufficiency), to the wealthy or powerful forms of life so attractive to everyone. For Socrates, these latter forms of life were filled with Heraclitean flux, change, and reversals of fortune because of an unhealthy dependence on ever-changing elements of life which we all know is going to end. The examination of forms of life and the question of the meaning of life raises the question of death. In the dialogues of Crito and Phaedrus, we find Socrates sitting in his cell awaiting death by execution. He reasons that however one regards death it must be a good, and therefore nothing to be afraid of. This reasoning is in turn connected with the conviction of Socrates that nothing bad can happen to a good man who has led the examined life. This in itself suffices to praise Plato’s emphasis upon the standard of the good which ought to be used to evaluate all forms of life and even death. The event of Socrates’ execution thus might have provided Plato with the inspiration to formulate a theory of forms in which the form of the good is the supreme form. Another key Philosophical relationship, that with Aristotle, perhaps beginning from a joint sojourn in Syracuse, may have subsequently led Plato to abandon the theoretical forms in favor of practical laws. Plato’s work “The Laws” is not an elenctic dialogue, but rather a lecture and constitutes Plato’s second attempt to create a Callipolis. Plato speculates about a small hypothetical city called Magnesia run by a Nocturnal Council that has responsibility for the cities laws.
This council of wise men, paradoxically, contains no philosophers but only officials trained in maths astronomy, theology and law. Many of the Republic’s “constructions” and “social restrictions” are present. Families and marriage are encouraged but procreation of children is determined in accordance with some mysterious eugenic standard and excommunication is the penalty for adultery.
The recommended relation of citizens to God is also set out in the Laws which is a school text licensed by a powerful Minister of Education who sits on the Nocturnal Council. This text has the purpose of reinforcing the belief in God and his goodness. Heresy and impiety are illegal. The interesting question to pose here, is whether Socrates would have been permitted to live in Magnesia and live his examined life subjecting other citizens to bouts of elenchus. Socrates is no longer the prime mover in Plato’s later dialogues/lectures. At approximately the same time as he was composing the Laws which he was rewriting until his death, Plato was engaged in a project of religious and scientific significance— the composition of a work called “Timaeus”. This dialogue sees Socrates as the witness to a lecture on the history of the universe. Here the Demiurge of Anaxagoras organises the initial indescribable chaos into an order containing the good and the beautiful. There are recognisable Aristotelian aspects in the 4 elements and prime matter, with life emerging at a certain stage of the creative process from prime matter. There are also non-Aristotelian elements such as an atomism in which differently shaped atoms explain the different elements. Space is somehow involved in the transformation of the elements into more complex forms. This narrative includes an account of our bodily organs and bodily functions such as perception, in a manner very reminiscent of Aristotle. We also encounter in this dialogue/lecture a listing of diseases of body and mind evoking the spectre of Freud especially given the fact that we know it was the work of Plato which was the inspiration for the final phase of Freudian theorising about a stoical mind located on the terrain of the battle between Eros and Thanatos.
The impression we are given is that Plato is moving away from his earlier Socratic commitments, and the later theory of forms, in an entirely new direction which reminds us of Aristotle. There appears to be a form of hylomorphism emerging to reconcile the world of ideas with the physical world and the soul with the body. Anthony Kenny in his work “Ancient Philosophy (Vol 1 of his New History of Western Philosophy)2 points out that Plato’s work, the “Timaeus”, became Plato’s most influential work up to the period of the Renaissance:
“Plato’s teleological account of the forming of the world by a divinity was not too difficult for medieval thinkers to assimilate to the creation story of Genesis. This dialogue was a set text in the early days of the University of Paris and 300 years later Raphael in his “School of Athens” gave Plato in the centre of the fresco only the Timaeus to hold”(P.64)
In this Fresco we find Plato pointing upward to the heavens and Aristotle pointing ahead of him. Was Aristotle pointing to the natural and social world or was he pointing to the viewers of the future? One can wonder. There have been many interpretations of this constellation of Philosophers from the school of Athens. The predictions of things to come is also found in Plato’s dialogue /lecture “Parmenides” in which the central character Parmenides produces a very Aristotelian criticism of the theory of the forms in the course of a dialogue with Socrates. In this dialogue it very much looks as if the master of elenchus is being given a dose of his own medicine. At the close of the dialogue, Parmenides, probably seeing in the position of Socrates more than just a trace of Heraclitean thought compliments Socrates upon his powers of argumentation, at the same time suggesting a more thorough training whilst Socrates is still young. Parmenides suggests that Socrates should not attempt to rest with premature conceptions of justice, beauty and goodness in case the truth about these standards is lost because this will have the consequence that the multitude will cease to believe in the existence of these ideas. Perhaps, Plato might argue, Parmenides should have been at the centre of Raphaels fresco pointing forward to the future.
As we move forward into the future and into our modern era we find Brett in his work “The History of Psychology” claiming that Plato continued the epistemological tradition of the Sophists and Socrates and also adding that Plato ended up in a position that the Sophists and Socrates would not be sympathetic with. It is, however, misleading to place the Sophists and Socrates inside the same pair of brackets simply because there is clearly a natural and spontaneous antagonism between the assumptions of these two positions. It can also be argued that Platonic Philosophy is a natural and logical continuation of the development of Socratic philosophy and a prototype for his pupil Aristotle’s Metaphysically based hylomorphic theory. Furthermore, Plato’s work is indebted to Parmenides, a fact that is underestimated in many classical and modern accounts including A Kenny’s “A New History of Western Philosophy”:
“But while the (Platonic) realm of the Ideas is unchanging, it is not uniform or homogeneous like Parmenides’ Being: Being is undifferentiated and single, whereas there are many different Ideas that can occur in some kind of relation to each other. They appear to be hierarchically ordered under the Idea of the Good, which appears to trump any notion of Being(Republic 6, 509b). No doubt the other Ideas owe it to the Idea of the Good that they are ideas at all.”(p207)
The passage in the Republic that is referred to above(6,509b) follows:
“Therefore, say, that not only being known is present in the things known as a consequence of the good, but also existence and being are in them besides as a result of it, although the good is not being but is still beyond being, exceeding it in dignity and power.”
Parmenides Idea of “The One” would actually have been a better comparison point for Kenny. Plato has not replaced “The One” with “The Good” but probably believed that they are in some sense logically identical in the way that Christians later came to identify God and “The Good”. The One, according to Parmenides includes both Being and not Being in very much the same way in which the Idea of the Good includes the idea of the not Good.
This area of reflection is right at the heart of the philosophical endeavour and it is not surprising therefore that instead of arguments for his position Plato produces three allegories amongst which is the allegory of the Sun in book 6 of the Republic where Socrates is arguing the following:
“Therefore, say that what provides the truth to the things known and provides the power to the one who knows is the Idea of the Good. And as the source of knowledge and truth you can understand it to be a thing known: but as far as these two are–knowledge and truth—if you believe that it is something different from them and still fewer than they, your belief will be right. As for knowledge and truth, just as in the other region it is right to hold light and sight sunlike, but to believe them to be the sun is not right: so, too, in this case, to hold these two to be like the good is right, but to believe that either of them is the good is not right”(Republic 6 508e)
This passage is highly suggestive of two facts that run contrary to the claims of Brett and Kenny, namely that Plato is very much concerned with Metaphysics and Ethics and their relation to epistemology. The line of development of the philosophy of the Sophists, therefore can not be seen to run through either Socrates or Plato. This is reinforced by appreciating the next link in this chain of continuation, namely the Philosophy of Aristotle that is equally antagonistic to the ethical relativism and “scientific” pragmatism of the Sophists. In the Philosophy of Aristotle, we also fail to find any commitment to subjective individualism of the kind one encounters in Sophist philosophising.
At least two other dialogues testify both to the metaphysical commitments of Plato and to his proto-Aristotelian positions in Politics and Science. In “The Laws” for example, Socrates has been replaced by an anonymous Athenian as the leading protagonist, and Philosophers have also disappeared from the government of the ideal Callipolis of Magnesia. Laws are no longer Parmenidean unchanging entities and even the best of them are open to reform. The Metaphysics of change has caused several waves of change that appears to have swept the Republic into the sea. Education is now the foundation of the political system and this can be seen even in the demand for pedagogical explanations of the laws as well as in the need to prevent impiety which sanctifies not only a proto-monotheistic Aristotelian God but also the human race.
We referred earlier to the second of these two dialogues, namely, “The Timaeus”, which is a late work of Plato’s that deals, in metaphysical spirit, with the history of the Universe and life forms. In the beginning, was chaos until the soul was infused into this “living chaos”. Life was, it is argued, present in some form in the chaos. It is clear that Aristotle’s matter/form distinction is anticipated in this work. Form and principle for Aristotle are synonymous and although it is the case that Aristotle’s work the “Metaphysics” opens with the claim “All men desire to know” much of this work is devoted to the answering of so-called aporetic questions, an activity which despite the claim that Being has many meanings, clearly is in search of the first principles of Philosophy.
Aristotle was also a significant figure in biology. The Timaeus provides a description of the body that must have clearly interested and Inspired Aristotle. Plato’s account is that the organism is embedded in a process of creation that is driven by a final end or telos. It is, for example, claimed that this creation process:
“divided the veins about the head and interlaced them about each other in order that they might form an additional link between the head and the body, and that the sensations from both sides might be diffused throughout the body.”
Plato is here, rather surprisingly, given his earlier arguments against materialism, providng us with a material account of the body. He goes on to speak of Perception in terms of the motion involved in both the objects and the processes of activating the organs of the subject. Plato also surprisingly embarks on a discussion of the desire for nutrition as a fundamental activity of the composite body-soul. The soul part of this complex apparently has two creators: the rational part of the soul is the result of the creation of God and the lower irrational part(also divided into two parts) the creation of the demiurge. Thus is created a hierarchy of soul functions that we also find in Aristotle’s reflections. Desires arising anywhere in the hierarchy can in principle affect any other part of the hierarchy. The soul, too, begins its life in chaos, and spends its time attempting to establish a state of equilibrium: a state that is always unstable because of a fundamental dependence upon the ever-changing Heraclitean external world. Out of this initial chaos at birth, sensation emerges as the organs in general(including the brain) and the organs of perception, in particular, establish relations with each other and with the external world. The sentient parts of the organism are obviously a key to the successful relationship with the external world. Sensations of pleasure and pain are caused when the “motions” a particular organ is subjected to, suits its form of receptivity function: pain arises when the organ is “irritated” by the external stimulus. These thoughts display a dual aspect approach to the person: firstly the organism is viewed as an object surrounded by an external world in flux and secondly, the organism is under the aspect of a causa sui of motions and activities in the world. Brett has this to say on this topic:
“From one point of view man is an organism in contact with the world around him, and he must, therefore, be studied as an object among objects, from another he is the centre of a world which may or may not have its objective counterpart, a world of ideas which must in some degree be subjective. In discussing perceptions we take up the cognitive aspect of man’s life and all that we should now call subjective, in a sense hardly appreciated by Plato.”
Brett is espousing a modern scientific notion of subjectivity(not unrelated to the kind of view one finds in Hegel) that is not in accordance with what Parmenides and modern followers of Aristotle and Kant would call “The Way of the Truth”, which must include the truths or knowledge we possess of man and his perception of, and reasoning about, the world.
R. S. Peters in his edited version of Brett’s work, “The History of Psychology” discusses the scientific error of confusing thought about an activity with that activity itself, thus preferring a description of the activity to an explanation for the activity. In the context of this debate, sensations are certainly something caused to happen in relation to the body of a man, but under another aspect when a man perceives(pays attention to these sensations) he does so in accordance with ideas that partially determine the object of his perception. This latter perspective is clearly expressed in a number of Plato’s works: the physical oak tree that one may perceive “participates” in the idea or principle of the oak tree(i.e. what it is that makes the oak tree the oak tree that it is). Scientific objectivity assumes a beginning of knowledge in particulars and charts an ascent into the realm of generalisation, whereas Plato’s view is clearly that: whatever the nature of the origins of knowledge, the general cognitive attitude associated with knowledge is that which understands particulars in terms of general ideas or “forms” or principles. A principle is a generalisation and belongs to the category of the universal: a principle is categorically related to its particulars. This is to be contrasted with scientific hypothetical generalisations that for example relate particular causes to particular effects. The major problem at issue, of course, is how to characterise the category of universal ideas. This issue is often mistakenly described in terms of causation, i.e. in terms of how it is that we come to acquire these ideas and Plato clearly ventured into this territory in his work, the Timaeus.
Aristotle’s attitude toward these two aspects of investigation(man, the object, man the agent) is more complex and more transparent. Aristotle via his theory of change characterised four different kinds of explanations, two of which are concerned with man the object and two of which concerned with man the agent. Aristotle in his discussion of this “how” question related to the acquisition of knowledge couched his account in terms of the soul and its power to abstract from the differences between particulars that are experienced, thus focussing on the active agent rather than the passive object of this learning process.
Metaphysics is a holistic study and encourages the division of wholes into parts only if the parts retain important characteristics of the whole(in the way that characterising man as a swarm of atoms does not). It is this relation of the parts to the whole that permits logical investigations to arrive at knowledge that cannot be reasonably doubted. If the soul is a principle the question that naturally arises is whether a principle can have parts that have characteristics of the whole. Both Plato and Aristotle believe this to be the case and are in agreement that there are logical arguments for dividing the soul into parts. The Republic contains an argument by Socrates to the effect that, if the soul did not have parts, the fact that a soul could both want to drink some water because it is thirsty, and at the same time not want to drink the water because it might be poisoned, would be a contradiction. It is not, in fact, a contradiction because the soul does have at least two parts. This same reasoning can be applied to generate a soul composed of three parts: Reason, Spirit, and Appetite. This form of logical reasoning is, moreover, not academically isolated from the world of experience. We can all see, Plato argues, forms of human life in which one of these parts dominate. In the wealthy man’s life, we can see the presence of the virtue of temperance or the vice of superfluity. In the spirited man’s life, we can see the presence of courage and ambition. In the life of the reasoning man, we can detect the presence of the virtue of wisdom. Plato’s allegory of the cave and the allegory of the divided line illustrate these forms of life by using a cognitive scale of imagination, belief, hypothetical mathematical knowledge, and categorical philosophical knowledge. Science, Plato would argue, in defence of himself (against the accusation of resorting to the subjective )that the subjective belongs to a lower form of life than the philosophical-metaphysical knowledge required by the examined life led by the wise man. Science, in response, can always re-describe the abstract categorical in its own concrete hypothetical terms, and this is certainly happening when it comes to the interpretation of certain key judgments relating to the soul. One such judgment is the claim that the soul is immortal. We pointed out earlier the debt that Socrates owed to Anaxagoras and the categorical metaphysical claim that “All is mind”. Many commentators have difficulty in understanding, for example, what is meant by “soul” or “mind” as these terms occur in the reflections on immortality by Socrates in Plato’s Apology and the dialogue of the Phaedo. Kenny in his “New History of Western Philosophy” has the following to say on this issue:
“Socrates in Plato’s Apology appears to be agnostic about the possibility of an afterlife. Is death, he wonders, a dreamless sleep or is it a journey to another world to meet the glorious dead?…. The Platonic Socrates of the Phaedo, however, is a most articulate protagonist of the thesis that the soul not only survives death but is better off after death.”(P. 214)
In interpreting the passages in these dialogues Kenny unnecessarily concretises or reifies the soul instead of examining the possibility that a better interpretation of psuché is to regard it as a principle. The Timaeus characterises the soul in terms of a hierarchy of functions all interconnected. The lower parts of the hierarchy are obviously connected to bodily desires and appetites and these are supposedly regulated by the principle or rule of temperance. Kenny, also, arguably, insufficiently appreciates the use of allegory or metaphorical language in the characterisation of the whole and the relation of these parts to the whole and to each other. He claims, for example, in response to this quote from the Phaedo:
“Thought is best when the mind is gathered into itself, and none of these things trouble it–neither sounds nor sights nor pain, nor again any pleasure–when it takes leave of the body and has as little as possible to do with it.”
Kenny also makes the following claim:
“So philosophers in pursuit of truth keep their souls detached from their bodies. But death is the separation of the soul from the body: hence a true philosopher has throughout his life been craving for death.”(65C)
One can no more separate a principle explaining the behaviour of a human being from the body producing that behaviour, than you can separate the law of gravitation from falling or orbiting bodies: or if you believe you can separate the principle from the matter, than this merely calls for a metaphysical theory explaining the nature of this separation. Of course, it is the case that one can argue that Plato owes us more of an explanation for the relation of this principle to our human activities of perceiving, imagining, believing, knowing, reasoning, etc. One can, in this context, perhaps better appreciate Aristotle’s replacement of Platonic allegory with theoretical explanations and justifications.
The words “another world” occurred in an earlier discussion and the question we need to ask in this context is: “if this is a metaphysical expression what is its meaning?”. One response to this is to deny that the statement is metaphysical. When Socrates died there is a sense in which he continues to survive in at least two non-metaphysical respects. He is, in a sense present now in this discussion and perhaps will be present forever in discussions in the future. His physical ancestors might also be with us. This world we now live in might for Socrates have been the other world Socrates was metaphorically referring to. It is also the case that it is not at all difficult to imagine Socrates in the company of Homer, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, etc. as well as all the great philosophers that succeeded him. Of course, there is no sense in which Socrates is actually here with us and that is because we believe that he is dead and also that death is the end of that body which was sustained by the principle of Socrates. We still, however, have access to the principle of Socrates via our thought about the person and our reflections on his philosophy. That he is not actually or concretely here and now present means that what is meant by his reflections is that he is imagining himself to be dead and imagining “another world”, a very reasonable metaphor in the circumstances.
In the dialogue Phaedo, two interlocutors, Simius and Cebes felt that the Greeks of their time would reject the idea that the soul could survive the body. In the light of the above reflections, the cognitive attitude of these Greeks is probably founded upon the belief that the absence of activity in the current perceptible world entails the absence of the principle responsible for that activity. It does not entail that this principle can survive in some concrete form in the discourse of others about Socrates. Claiming, as some do, that because Socrates was “imagining” another world and that this was, therefore, “subjective” is not a helpful characterisation of the cognitive attitude involved in this context.
For Plato, there are intermediate soul functions between the passive receptive functions associated with sensations and the more advanced functions that actively think about these affections. These intermediate functions include mental powers such as memory, mental association, emotion, and imagination. Emotions apparently are caused by violent motions or stimuli. Stimulation of sensation to the extent that the organ is well adapted to the stimulus produces a state of equilibrium or pleasure, and these are the states we generally want to experience. These are referred to as “complete states”. They are recorded in memory, which produces ideas/desires for the purposes of recollection or repetition. These can be simple ideas such as the idea of water when we are thirsty or more complex ideas such as that of “warm drink”. These states are obviously connected to cognitive states and attitudes because we know what we want. Brett has this to say on the issue:
“The body never has knowledge, however indispensable an instrument it might be to the attainment of knowledge in some cases: and therefore naturally the body is not the seat of desires or emotions. The soul, when affected by desire is in a condition essentially painful: for desire is consciousness of incompleteness. But there is no desire totally devoid of pleasure, for desire is a tendency to greater perfection, and that in itself, is pleasant.”
Needing or wanting may have its roots in the body but the consequent conscious desire is that which satisfies this corporeal need or want. The object that satisfies this desire, namely, involves conscious reflection on a former experience. The mind recalls this object by means of an idea. In the “Way of Opinion,” there are false opinions that attempt to unite ideas that ought not to be united. Correct opinion unites ideas correctly but the result is not understood as part of the system of ideas it actually belongs to. It is this latter understanding that is involved in the “Way of the Truth”. In this hierarchy of functions, then, sensation and feeling(emotion) are obviously not at the level of knowledge in relation to the Way of the Truth because knowledge involves a systematic relation of ideas to each other. It is this systematic relation of ideas that is the foundation for the logical truth-making relations established by the highest of the soul functions, namely Reason. The wise man, it should be emphasised, is the man who has perfected a large number of powers in the hierarchy of powers, and this can be seen by those who know such things in the contemplative and examined form of life he leads. The wise man grasps and understands the ends of life that are embedded in a human nature that generates the goods of the virtues at various levels of the hierarchy of the soul’s powers. This final integration of the parts of the soul is expressed in the Greek term areté(virtue) which is the mark of the wise man who does the right thing at the right time in the right way. The wise man knows that his time will come to an end: he knows that is, that in accordance with an ancient prophecy which has been confirmed by everything he knows, he will die. He furthermore knows and has reasoned his way to the conviction that there will be no further life after death. Death is a final end for all living things. He knows he can imagine another world but it will not be filled with bodiless spirits. The world he imagines will be filled with living things that will die and his presence will be metaphorical, something like a presence, but not a living breathing presence: it will be an imagined presence based on reasoning. When his religious friends tell him that he can expect another life after this one he knows that they are not actively using their imagination, their imagination is rather being used by a primitive desire or wish not to die. He knows they are fantasising.
This is a form of consciousness or cognition of death which the wise men of Greece possessed and this attitude contributed to the term Aristotle wishes to use of these figures, namely the great-souled men. The men whose souls were so filled with Eros that they were not afraid of Thanatos
Paul Ricoeur in his work “Freud and Philosophy; An Essay on Interpretation”, comments on the importance of Language in any investigation of Freudian ideas
in the following way:
“It seems to me that there is an area today where all philosophical investigations cut across one another—the use of language. Language is the common meeting ground of Wittgenstein’s investigations, the English linguistic philosophy, the phenomenology that stems from Husserl, Heidegger’s investigations, the works of the Bultmannian school and of the other schools ofNew Testament Exegesis: the works of comparative history of religion and of anthropology concerning myth, ritual and belief—and finally psychoanalysis. Today we are in search of a comprehensive philosophy of language to account for the multiple functions of the human act of signifying and for their interrelationships. How can language be put to such diverse uses as mathematics and myth, physics and art…? We have at our disposal a symbolic logic, an exegetical science, an anthropology and a psychoanalysis and, perhaps for the first time we are able to encompass in a single question the problem of the unification of human discourse.”(P.3)
Ricoeur goes on to suggest that “psychoanalysis is a leading participant in any general discussion about language” and reminds us that Freud’s writings after the publication of “The Interpretation of Dreams” had serious cultural intent, ranging over art, morality, and religion. Ricoeur highlights dreams in the context of a claim that “as a man of desires I go forth in disguise”, and it is this statement that we are going to explore in relation to the mythical figure of Eros which occurs both in Plato’s and Freud’s writings. A dream is a work of desire. The language of desire is also partly a work of desire and both works require interpretation. This commonality of structure is important when we are confronted with the hermeneutical problems of the meaning of a dream and the meaning of a text such as Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”.Freud was clearly influenced by Plato in his final phase of theorising in which he refers to the formation of culture in terms of the “battle of the giants”, Eros andThanatos, and one wonders what the exact source of his inspiration was. Was it the sustained exploration of Justice and The Good in the Republic, or was it the speeches given in honour of “Eros” in the work entitled “The Symposium”?The reports that dreamers gave in Freud’s clinic, use a primitive language of desire with a complex structure of double meaning (Ricoeur’s term) which we also find in mythology—the realm in which Eros and Thanatos dwell. Mythology, according to Ricoeur, is intending in its narrative to present a theory of the beginning and end of our world. The Great Narratives of beginnings and ends, argues Ricoeur, deal with manifestation and revelation: they deal with what some Greek thinkers would call Aletheia(unconcealment). What is being made manifest is the realm of what man considered sacred, the realm of the divine which man, without the help of such texts, merely glimpses through a glass darkly. Ricoeur calls the above functions of language, the “symbolic function”, and he calls the field of “work” in which symbols emerge, “the hermeneutic field”. The work of the interpretation of symbolic language is both a work of understanding and a desire for understanding, and it is these two aspects of language I wish to concentrate upon as the key to understanding the language we use concerning the mythical figures of Eros and Thanatos.
In “The Symposium” one of the speakers asserts that Eros is a God. Socrates conjures up a conversation he peviously had with Diotima, in which he had proposed the thesis that Eros must be a God. Paradoxically, Diotima uses elenchus on Socrates to demonstrate (“make manifest”) that a God has to be beautiful and All Good. (lacking in nothing) In her demonstration she points to what we know about Eros, namely that he is in mythology a barefooted figure (like Socrates) padding about the city in search of what is divine or sacred: ergo he cannot be an embodiment of the all good and the beautiful which all hold to be divine and sacred. Indeed his origins seem far too anthropomorphic, having being conceived as he was at a party to honour Aphrodite by parents one of whom was drunk and the other extremely poor (Resource and Poverty). This is a dream-like scenario.
Myths and dreams resemble each other for Freud but there are differences. Dreams, for Freud, are regulated by the Pleasure Principle, i.e. the language we use to report them bear with it the symbolic structure of double meaning and dissimulation: dreams go forth in disguise(which is why they require “interpretation”). They stand in contrast with our desire to understand, which for Freud is the typical work of the Ego. The work of the ego is in turn, in accordance with the reality principle which is responsible for the education of our desire — responsible, in the language of mythology, for the fact that when we talk about Eros we represent him as understanding the beautiful and the Good. Understanding the reality principle is also connected to the sacred activity of Eros communing on occasion with the Gods.
Readers of Freud’s later writings will be familiar with his suggested topographical triangle of desire. We desire or wish for something outside of the circle of our necessary desires, and the world, or reality, refuses the demand, resulting in a subsequent wounding of the ego which one would expect to lead to a modification of the desire (as falling within the circle of the necessary desires of the body). Yet humans, being what they are, and being subject to the law of tragedy (tragic beginnings in the form of the drunken relation of Eros’ mother and father have tragic consequences), the necessary modification of desire in accordance with the reality principle will probably not occur. Ananke is the symbolic figure of the Reality principle for Freud, and also symbolises the fact that human beings will probably never understand the divine or sacred structure of reality. Ananke signifies that the Ego will be subjected to a tormented lifetime of “wounding” in the attempt to strive after the impossible states of affairs that are wished for.
The above discussion seems to many philosophers to fall outside their scope of interest. Logic, they argue is univocal: it can only have one meaning if the principle of non-contradiction is going to have any meaning at all. Was it not Aristotle after all who proposed this principle of logic? Mythology and Freud’s philosophy does not obey the requirement that language has one definite sense requiring logical analysis. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus demanded that every proposition have a determinate sense and logical analysis will help us to understand that sense. As we know he was forced to abandon his earlier position as he looked closer and closer at how we in fact use language. Aristotle also in his Metaphysics clearly restricted the role of the logical discipline he invented by declaring categorically that “Being can be said in many ways”.
Freud and Plato, seen through the telescope of Kant’s Philosophy, can be construed as attempting to answer the 4 major domain-defining philosophical questions, “What ought we to do?”, “What can we know?” “What can we hope for?” and “What is a man?”(3) . The answers they give are: “We ought to act rationally”, “We do not know as much as we think we do (we are not as rational as we think we are)”. Given these two answers, the answer to the third question can only be “Do not hope for too much (do not desire too much)”. Which of course is unsurprisingly enough in line with at least two Greek oracle proclamations: “Nothing too much” and “Know thyself”. This latter proclamation and the animus of Aristotle’s philosophy probably also lay behind the fourth Kantian question “What is man?”. Aristotle’s answer to this fourth question (rational animal capable of discourse) still stands illuminated as a beacon for Philosophy today, given the fact that all 4 of these domain defining questions have fallen into the darkness of neglect. The Aristotelian beacon has highlighted the “capable of discourse” component of late and language (the medium of discourse) is seen by many as leading us back to the road of Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy, and thereby to a discourse about Eros and Thanatos in a Platonic and Freudian spirit.
The Great Myths are, of course, forms of discourse with a “logical” structure which Freud (and perhaps Jung) understood philosophically. They were regarded as rich hermeneutic fields requiring understanding not merely in terms of whether the events signified therein did or did not occur (did Eros’s father get drunk and have sex with Eros’s mother?) but rather in terms of their more universalistic cosmological and humanistic intentions. The language of these myths, in talking about events, are using these events to carry a deeper signification about, for example, the nature of infinite reality and finite man. Symbolic discourse was also for Heraclitus believed to be the dwelling place for the Gods and a domain he wished to inhabit and believed he was inhabiting toward the end of his days. Perhaps he was the first to believe that he was the son of the Gods, surveying eternal and infinite change from the vantage point of Logos.
One of the great hermeneutical sins is to concentrate on the textual object of the discourse (the events) and survey this object independently of the intentions behind the text. In other words, the sin amounts to misunderstanding the function of mythical language which is revelatory of the nature of man and the nature of the world he dwells in. In the language of Aristotle, mythical language moves in the orbit of the spheres of the theory of formal and final causes. Such theory strives to answer the question: “Given mans nature, what is his telos?” (Can he dwell with the Gods like Heraclitus?). I write “Given mans nature”, but our answer to question two must surely force us to admit that only a God can know mans nature and telos. We can only strive or will to know with the help of our theories (for example, Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory of change).
But what, then, are the grounds for claiming that our myths contain “theories”? Well, readers and interpreters of myth will be able to identify assumptions (of, for example, an infinite reality whether it be infinitely continuous or infinitely discrete). Readers and interpreters can also identify the logical consequences of these assumptions. If, for example, reality is an infinite continuum we might be able to dwell like Heraclitus in the realm of the Gods. If not, then we are truly tragic creatures who will need to live forever with their wounded egos continually bruised by the discrete difference between what we wish for and what is possible for us to experience. There are, in myths, also embryonic arguments. Heraclitus is a good guide to follow into this labyrinth. He clearly uses the principle of non-contradiction when comparing a pair of opposites to generate an identity, e.g. “the road up and the road down is the same”.
Myths are filled with seeming contradictions, if we do not interpret the symbols hermeneutically. If we use the correct “theory” many of the proclamations we encounter are both significant and meaningful. Resource, Eros’s father and Poverty, Eros’s mother, appear to be opposites at seemingly irreconcilable poles of the spectrum of practical reasoning, and yet they are united at the celebration for Aphrodite, even if it did take some alcohol to facilitate the process. The text of myth, when interpreted by Greek “theory” calls for thought and interpretation in the spirit of aletheia (un-concealment), the spirit of manifesting or disclosing what is not openly manifesting itself. Symbols are not epistemic entities but entities which have both rational and cultural significance. They stretch over the domains of Metaphysics, Ethics, Epistemology, Political Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Philosophical Psychology: those domains Kant tried to characterise in terms of his 4 questions: “What ought I do?”, “What can I know?”, “What can I hope for?” and “What is a man?”
Paul Ricoeur also explores the function of symbolic language in his work “The Symbolism of Evil”4 . When we avow the evil we ourselves or others have done this is not done in terms of what he calls “direct discourse”. Symbolic terms, such as “stain” or “spot” are taken from the realm of everyday experience but they are put to different uses in which the everyday experience refers further in a chain of referral to another more universal experience of the subject’s situation in the realm of the sacred or the divine. Ricoeur points out that this is demonstrated by the fact that engaging in the action of spot or stain removal will not solve the existential problem of our relation to evil. Symbols, Ricoeur points out, are constituents of literary mythical texts. Some of these myths also contain a reference to poetic experiences of the beautiful and the sublime which range over the domains of the finite (beautiful objects are finitely formed) and the infinite (powers of nature like the power of the sea and powerful waterfalls).
Poetry places itself squarely in the language of desire in virtue of the fact that its medium is the language of images. Poetry, Ricoeur maintains, places the imagination at the stage of the expression process where language is at the point of emerging to express desire. Images of the boundless space of the universe, the expansive waters of the oceans whose magnitude is beyond our comprehension, and the immense power of huge volumes of water rushing over a precipice in a waterfall may even be beyond the power of language to express, and may therefore force a reflective return of the mind attempting to understand such phenomena in relation to its situation in the realm of the infinite. It is patently obvious that we are, here transcending the polarised logic of modern epistemology and logic which require that Being can only be said in one way with a univocal meaning. Aristotle, as we pointed out earlier, questioned this, and opened the horizon of Philosophy up to extend far beyond what we can perceive and know. This is, as Kant was able to prove, not merely a rationalistic objection to the empirical worshipping of the idols of perception and method, it is a wider metaphysical iconoclastic project exploring with Socratic and Aristotelian humility the domains of the 4 Kantian questions referred to above.
According to the testimony in “The Symposium” Socrates was loved by many. He was not a physically attractive man, so the desire to be in his presence, or be his friend, must have transcended the physical. According to Pausania’s speech in this work, love can be both, common love for the body or the divine love responding to the character of someone’s mind. The body is a transient phenomenon and will decay with age or illness in front of our eyes, over a relatively short period of time, but the mind of a good man like Socrates will remain and endure in the realm of eternal things. Such a mind is typically the mind that reflects and reasons about its own beliefs and also over doing the right thing at the right time and in the right way. This is the virtuous mind of Greek philosophy. In Freudian terms, this discussion reminds one of the distinctions between the pleasure-pain principle and the reality principle, the former of which appears to be more concerned with the love of oneself than the love of others. The Reality Principle is that which the ego uses to situate itself in the world. It is what is operating in the triangle of desire we referred to above when the wounded ego engages in a reflective work involving a mourning process for the lost object of desire. It is difficult not to see Eros involved in this work. The ego seems to be Eros in the abstract, not a God, but a kind of spirit trying to give expression to Eros even to the extent of negotiating with Thanatos whose unnecessary desires aim at the destruction and ruin of everything that has been created and preserved. The Ego appears to be the Freudian embodiment of the virtuous mind reflecting upon its beliefs and desires and striving to do the right thing at the right time in the right way, trying, that is, to develop realistic expectations of the workings of an external world under the sovereign Ananke.
The above also reminds us of the Stoic man and the Christian who, as a result of many wounds at the hands of the external world has lowered the level of their expectations to a pinpoint of light in the infinite darkness of the universe of space. Can one love the world in such a state of mind? Dare one take the risk of a love so great that the loss of the object would be simply the end, the death, of the lover? Kant has an interesting choice of words for his philosophical response to the nature of the external world we dwell in: a choice of words which registers the level of his expectations and hopes. He talks about “the melancholic haphazardness” of the events of the social-world. He imagines Eros padding melancholically about our cities, perhaps with a lantern during the dark nights, trying to find an honest virtuous mind. This is the image that inspired Freud to answer the Kantian question “What is a man?” with a theory that Plato would have gladly embraced. Such an image also supports Aristotelian hylomorphic theory with its elements of Instinct, biological homeostasis mechanisms, and a teleological development process of capacities building upon capacities, powers building upon and integrating with other powers.
The strong ego is the best we can hope for in our human condition, Freud argues, but even this will not be enough to bring contentment. Man will still be in a state of discontentment with the so-called civilisation of the madding crowd and its precarious attempts to build societies that are humanly habitable. Freud is, of course, remembering that the societies with the greatest of human intentions put both Socrates and Jesus to death. So not only the Eros of the Symposium but also the Socrates of the Apology are Plato’s images of what the world does to virtuous men in return for what these virtuous men have done for the world. Speaking about the concept of justice in such circumstances seems a hollow almost irrelevant appeal. The tragedies being referred to belong in the realm of the sacred and the divine.
In his speech to Eros in the Symposium Socrates searches for truth and knowledge of the good. He picks up an important thread in Agathon’s speech which insisted upon making a distinction between the character of Eros and the effects or consequences of such character. Agathon has been guilty of deifying Eros, attributing to Eros the perfect qualities of beauty and goodness. Socrates uses elenchus on Agathon, to force him to agree that Eros or love, is the name of a particular kind of relation to an object and that the name better describes the activity of the agent than that of the object loved or desired. This fits in well with Freud’s intuition of the dangers of loving because of the dangers of losing the object of ones love. The loved object can be entirely passive in a process that aims at reciprocity, aims, that is, at requiring the fulfilment of two sets of expectations over a long period of time, perhaps over a lifetime. Diotima instructs Socrates that true love transcends a series of stages moving through the love of beautiful bodies, love of beautiful minds, love of beautiful laws to run cities, moving finally to the end or telos of wisdom. We sense the movement toward the sacred, toward the dwelling place of the Gods, glimpsed by Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, and Kant.
On his journey, the lover strives after an understanding of the beautiful and the good which they attempt to possess forever. Yet because we know that all men are mortal, and that we are men, we know we cannot transcend our natures, and instead we strive for substitute satisfactions (in Freudian language). We strive to live vicariously through the children and the works we reproduce. The medium for this is sexual desire or desire generally (Eros). Diotima, in the process of giving Socrates a dose of his own elenctic medicine notices how in the matter of sexual activity all animals become sick with an excitement so powerful that it prepares even the weakest of animals for the fight with stronger opponents in defence of their children or their work. Diotima wisely also points to those people who love honour as being “sick with excitement” and who are consequently prepared to risk everything, even their children for the immortality of being famous and the remembrance this involves: a remembrance they may never experience. The father of Eros, Resource, was Invention, and Diotima refers to men who are pregnant with forms in their mind that help to create the artifactual world we inhabit She also refers to the spiritual/cultural/political world designed and created by men who are loved like Solon and Socrates: men who have devoted their lives to produce beauty and goodness in their love of their cities. Presumably, the Platonic ego will be one in which these three types of forms(children, works, and ideas) are actualised and instantiated in the ever-changing, Heraclitean, infinite, visible world. The objects of these forms were referred to by Adrian Stokes as “good objects”5 and he pointed to the importance for everybody to experience such “good objects” as part of the task of strengthening their egos. Freud’s theory of the sexual aetiology of the neuroses was controversial during 19th century Vienna. Many commentators have argued over the centuries that Freud was projecting this sexual aetiology into his theory. We do not want to blindly defend Freud against every attack, but let us ask, in the light of the above reading of “The Symposium”, and the Platonic origins of the idea of Eros, whether Freud may have been reasoning in the spirit of Diotima, Socrates, Plato, and even Aristotle about these matters. Freud probably experienced this “sickness of excitement” in his patient’s reminiscences and their accompanying current judgments. His cool and technical language may, in fact, disguise the desires that were being talked about: the pleasure-pain principle creates an epistemological distance here that may be misleading. It seems we just have to characterise both pleasure and pain in terms of their objects and causes, and this places the behaviour of the patients in the wrong category of substance and its attributes. What we need is a principle that can be characterised in terms of the categories of powers and agency: Eros is an agent with certain powers. Freud’s Ego is an abstract characterisation of Eros in relation to other agencies and powers, but like Eros is but a messenger of the Gods padding about our cities anonymously, fundamentally discontented, trying to bear the losses of a lifetime.
The “sickness of excitement” that Diotima speaks about in her “Freudian” language possessed both obsessive and addictive characteristics which by necessity centre all the agent’s activity narcissistically upon the self. She also refers to the narcissistic and addictive components of our sickly longings after the trappings of power. Freud would have been thinking about these characteristics when he was reading Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The “sickness of excitement “involved in both sexuality and the desire for power are for both Freud and Diotima, like siblings in the same family
There are, for both Plato and Freud connections between sexual and tyrannical behaviour: both share the telos of an unrealistic striving for immortality in terms of compromise formations, in the one case the formation centres around bodily likeness, and in the other the formation centres around the remembrance involved in the reports of the exercise of power on the pages of history books.
Thanatos, son of Nyx, the goddess of night, and brother to Hypnos, was, for Freud, hidden in the dark and mute, only emerging into Freudian theory when it became clear that there was something else above and beyond the pleasure principle, operating in the mind of his most difficult patients. Freud’s use of hypnosis as an initial attempt to confront the powers and agents operating in his patient’s minds must have originated in his love of the classics. Here we have a Heraclitean clash of opposites requiring a Logos. Freud suspected the presence of the so-called death instinct very early on in his theorising. As his thoughts matured he searched for this Logos in both the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle. Remember he had been working in the field of Biology in his early days. The use of hypnosis proved not to be sufficiently erotic, connected as it was to a reduction in the field of consciousness—almost the exact opposite of the expansion of the field of consciousness Freud was searching for. As early as “The Interpretation of Dreams” Freud clearly saw the connection of language to becoming conscious as did his patients, one of which referred to Psychoanalysis as “the talking cure”. Freud also very quickly saw the limitations in relying on a language based association under hypnosis, where the analyst was the tyrant ordering the patient to get better whilst he was at his mercy in a diminished state of consciousness. He retained a language of desire which was designed to strengthen the patient’s Ego with resources such as dream interpretation, free association, and techniques connecting to rejecting the desires involved in the transference neurosis: the state in which the patient seeks a master to hate.
This hate is attributed to Thanatos and Freud expands the sphere of influence of Thanatos into the regions of violence and destruction, probably as a consequence of the discovery of the self-destructive behaviour of some of his patients. Thanatos is like his mother, like night, the inhibitor of constructive and creative activity: he is like an eternal night without any sun, destructive of life and consequently of Eros. Freud also connects Thanatos to Ares, the God of War and highlights the active destructiveness of violent action on the world stage. Culture, argues Freud, is the battlefield upon which Eros and Thanatos and Ares and Ananke do battle for the possession of the world. Ricoeur argues that the symbols of myths require something more than the theories of Freud if their existential implication is to be revealed and understood.
He locates consciousness in the practical sphere of our activities and begins a quarrel with Kant over what is required in this task of becoming conscious, which is set for man as part of the answer to the question “What is a man?” Ricoeur is thinking about the philosophy of Kant when he says:
“reflection is not so much a justification of science and duty as a re-appropriation of our effort to exist: epistemology is only part of that broader task: we have to recover the act of existing, the positing of self in all the density of its works” (Freud and Philosophy P.45).
For Plato, the work of living in a city-state and the duty and responsibility of doing the right thing at the right time in the right way is the fundamental work that a citizen must engage in, on pain of suffering and discontentment with the very condition of his existence. This work is fundamental because the city-state is the arena for all the forms that are reproduced through man’s work and desire: children, artifacts, truth, the good, and justice. Both terms: “work” and “desire” are important components of Ricoeur’s definition of Reflection which is:
“the appropriation of our effort to exist and desire to be through the works which best witness to this effort and desire”(Freud and Philosophy p 46)
There is, in Ricoeur’s accusation of Kant, a suspicion that Kant is responding epistemologically to both the empiricists and Descartes when he offers his reflections on the question “What is a man? Ricoeur appears here to be basing his claim upon the three critiques and not on the works on politics, history, anthropology, and religion that Kant has also written. Ricoeur’s claims certainly seem to be appropriate to the Cartesian project where the argument is solely epistemological and theoretical: I know that I think. Ricoeur comments upon this project in the following way:
“But this first reference of reflection to the positing of the self, as existing and thinking, does not sufficiently characterise reflection. In particular, we do not understand why reflection requires a work of deciphering, and exegesis and a science of exegesis or hermeneutics, and still less why this deciphering must be either a psychoanalysis or a phenomenology of the sacred. This point cannot be understood as long as reflection is seen as a return to the so called evidence of immediate consciousness. We have to introduce the second trait of reflection, which may be stated thus: reflection is not intuition, or, in positive terms, reflection is the effort to recapture the Ego of the Ego Cogito in the mirror of its objects, its works, its acts. But why must the positing of the Ego be recaptured through its acts? Precisely because it is given neither in a psychological evidence, nor in an intellectual intuition, nor in a mystical vision. The first truth—I am, I think—remains as abstract and as empty as it is invincible: it has to be “mediated” by ideas, actions, works, institutions and monuments that objectify it.”(Freud and Philosophy, P.43)
Kant stands on the other side of the divide between the will and the “objects” of the will. His claim is metaphysical, and man in his philosophy is revealed by reflection not just upon the epistemological question “What can I know?” but on all 4 questions which embrace not just metaphysics but ethics and political Philosophy as well. Being, as Aristotle maintained, is revealed in language in many ways. Interestingly, in the above quote from Ricoeur, we also find an implicit criticism of the kind of psychology that hitches its wagon to the donkey of evidence.
Notes
1 Ryle, G., Plato’s Progress ,(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1966)
2 Kenny, A., A New History of Western Philosophy , Vol. 1,(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004)
3. Ricoeur, P., Freud and Philosophy: an essay in interpretation , translated by Savage, D.(New Haven and London, Yale University Press)
4. Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus , translated by Ogdon, C.K.,(New York, Cosimo Classics, 1922)
5. Kant, I. Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view , translated by Louden, R.B. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)
6. Ricoeur, P. The Symbolism of Evil , translated by Buchanan, E(Boston, Beacon Press, 1967)
7. Stokes, A., ”Greek Culture and the Ego” in The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Vol. 3 (London, Thames and Hudson,1978).