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If Spinoza was the God-intoxicated Philosopher then Leibniz was by comparison also divinely inspired by a divine understanding that provided us with a picture of the divine library of God containing our world book that, according to Leibniz, was the best book in the library. Kant may not have shared this sentiment because, as he claimed, we might be living in an age of Enlightenment but are not as yet living in Enlightened times. By this, he meant that whilst there were signs of progress it was uncertain as to whether we would reach the telos of Culture which he described in terms of a “Kingdom of Ends” lying one hundred thousand years in the future.
Before being awoken from his dogmatic rationalist slumbers by Hume and Rousseau, Kant was much influenced by Leibniz and Newton. He was also affected by the tension created by the demands of religious faith and the more sceptical natural scientists in an Enlightenment Prussia. These scientists were not impressed by the anti-clerical revolution of the French “philosophes”. Indeed, Rousseau, it could be argued, belonged essentially to the Counter-Enlightenment movement. The Counter Enlightenment was a historical movement, which, in the eyes of a Prussian society, drew inspiration from the Pietist protest against Protestantism. Kant’s contemporaries, Hamann, Herder, and Jacobi all aligned themselves with the Counter-Enlightenment and thus against the spirit of the rationalist component of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: a Philosophy that attempted to integrate Natural Science, Religious Faith, Ethics, Politics, Philosophical Psychology, and Aesthetics. Even in his earlier work, Kant was convinced that the Leibniz-Newton conflict could be averted, by distinguishing between different principles and different spheres of the application of these principles. As his work progressed and matured, however, there was a decisive shift away from the more theoretical metaphysical commitments of Leibniz and a shift towards a critical approach.This Critical approach took as its data, categories of judgments and experience, in the context of a tripartite structure of a mind constituted by Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. This approach was also committed to a logical method that used the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and sufficient reason.
Spheres of application for principles also evolved eventually into a belief that metaphysics and transcendental philosophy were important in both theoretical and practical arenas of activity. Critical Philosophy, however, distanced itself from theoretical proofs of the existence of God but embraced a practical argument that used the practical reasoning of ethics as a basis or reason for believing in God’s existence. In Kant’s mature work we encounter a philosophical theory worthy of the Aristotelian and Enlightenment idea of integrating as many intellectual realms of activity into a whole as possible. Kant is known for a number of theoretical innovations as well as an admiration for the a priori elements of Newtonian Physics and Euclidean Geometry, but we should not forget the inscription on his grave that refers to both the starry heavens above and the moral law within. We should not forget, that is, his contribution to metaphysically grounded ethics. Both of these aspects of human existence produced in him experiences of awe and admiration, but his accomplishment was to theoretically show how it was possible to believe in the physical laws of nature and the moral laws of ethics that embraced both the ideas of Freedom and God.
If anyone deserved the title “The Newton of the Moral Universe” it was Kant. He refused to diminish the importance of the status of Natural Science (as the theories of Berkeley and Leibniz appeared to demand). He also refused to embrace the scepticism of Hume who questioned not just the relevance of metaphysics but also that of Philosophy in general. Many commentators claim it was the battle with the giant of scepticism that produced a philosophical theory which divided our discourse up into empirical, transcendental, and metaphysical propositions–thus restoring the status of much of science and most of Philosophy. This division enabled Kant to insist that Laws need not necessarily be derived from observation of the world, but they were nevertheless necessarily applicable to that world. In this context, Kant invokes a vital distinction between the world as it presents itself to beings possessed of the powers of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason, and a world in itself, which may have a form beyond our comprehension, and about which we can know and say nothing. According to Kant, the closest we come to understanding this so-called “noumenal world”, is via a holistic understanding of ourselves as beings that freely follow the moral law within.
Understanding this aspect of our self requires some kind of understanding of transcendental philosophy and its metaphysical assumptions. Part of this understanding will involve an awareness that the world of appearances is riddled with a contingency which is connected to the kind of sensory apparatus we possess: a sensory apparatus that for example synthesises light rays into objects of visual perception but is unable to synthesise x-ray waves (or any other kind of wave about which we have no knowledge). This transcendental philosophy will also involve awareness that the powers of perception we do possess are a condition of what can be done with our powers of understanding and reason.Kant, in his later hylomorphic phase, believed in both the matter and the form of experience. Form, he argued, was investigated by the metaphysics of scientific and moral laws. Two a priori forms of sensibility were, for example, Space and Time. Kant argued that these forms were not a consequence of experience, but rather forms of sensibility that are used to help organise what we experience, or, in other words, space and time were what he referred to as a priori conditions of our experience. These conditions were for him modes of experience and in this claim Kant disagreed with the Newtonian ideas of absolute Space and Time in themselves, which, according to Newton, existed independently of any experience of them. Kant’s reasoning in relation to this point was that we could neither imagine nor think of the “form” of the in-itself, because our thought and imagination are formed partly by a human configuration of sensory powers that created the “forms” of Space and Time. This in turn created the “form” of our experience. Kant is here in this discussion drawing the limits of our understanding and reasoning and any metaphysics that fails to register these limits are merely, in his opinion, the dreams of spirit seers.
In response to the question of what we can know about the nature of the above forms of Space and Time, Kant responds by claiming that geometry reveals to us the a priori form of Space, and Arithmetic reveals to us the a priori form of Time. Mathematics, then helps us to investigate these modes of our experience. There is also, in the work of Kant, reference to those forms of thought, understanding, and reason that have both transcendental and metaphysical aspects. The Newtonian law of conservation of matter and energy, which states that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, is an example of a metaphysical assumption, whilst “every event must have a cause”, is an example of a transcendental assumption about the form our understanding must take if we are to make justified true claims about the physical world, The law claiming that energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, of course, immediately places a question mark over the traditional religious idea of a God that has created the universe. Such an idea of a creative God is, for Kant, an idea of a spirit seer as is the idea of a soul that can disengage from a physical body in accordance with “spiritual” laws. In spite of this, Kant believed both in God and souls insofar as both are embedded in our ethical relations to each other, and the world as a whole. For him, it is a matter of transcendental fact that we human beings possess moral convictions that emanate from a moral power that is expressed in a system of concepts we use for forming our moral intentions and our moral judgments, (concepts such as good, bad, right, wrong, ought, etc.). These concepts form the conditions for our moral discourse and the moral assumptions we make when we “judge” that someone could have acted differently to the way in which they did in fact act. Without such conditions, Kant argues, all moral and legal evaluation of our actions are impossible. Such evaluation also assumes a free will, or freedom to choose. This discourse, Kant points out is not similar to our scientific discourse about the phenomenal world we all observe and move in. Moral discourse runs deeper, Kant argues: it is about the noumenal world, and because of this state of affairs, we distinguish fundamentally between the status of the philosophical questions “What can we know?” and “What ought we to do?” With respect to this latter question, we are thrown immediately into the realm of metaphysics and when we further seek to justify our moral evaluations in terms of a just and good God we move into the realm of faith and the third philosophical question, “What can we hope for?” All three questions require the regulation of Reason and its Principles of identity, non-contradiction, and sufficient reason. The principle of non-contradiction, Kant argues is, in fact, two principles, one of which relates to things that are, and the other relates to things that are not, and these principles probably follow from the principles of identity and sufficient reason.
The moral law within us is regulated by an imperative form because we are dealing with the fundamental moral question of “What ought we to do?”It, like all forms of discourse, is formulated in terms of the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and sufficient reason. The moral law claims that we should only act on that maxim of action that we can will to become a universal law of nature. This claim means that such a law is universally agreed, adopted, and ought to be acted upon by everyone. The logical implication here is that if one possesses and understands the concepts, and has used them in the formulation of an intention to do the right thing, the good thing, or the thing one ought to do, a fitting moral action must follow as a matter of rationality. This, of course, is a process and, as such, much can go wrong, but even if it does, it will remain forever true that the action conceived of, is the one that ought to have been done. This, of course, assumes that after having made a promise, one’s commitment to treating oneself and others as ends in themselves demands that I do everything in my power to keep my promise.Doing anything else will fail to honour what Kant calls the “dignity of man”
Manfred Keuhn, in his work “Kant: A Biography”(1), charted the history of the Categorical Imperative from what he called Kant’s “Socratic Turn”. In this history Rousseau convinced the great philosopher that “natural man” possessed a moral sensibility that was a part of everyone’s nature. This aspect of our nature,Rousseau argued, was clouded by the customary habits and norms we form when we gather together in groups. Kant gradually, however, began to feel that this postulated hidden nature of man was not described entirely correctly by Rousseau, and he turned instead to English thinkers such as Hutcheson and Reid to characterise what he would later call the “unsocial sociability” of man. This property of man manifested itself in particular in his antagonism toward his fellows when his own self-love overrides his own innate benevolent sensibility. Hutcheson, for example, embraced a variation of the Pleasure-Pain Principle that was not instrumentally oriented or utilitarian. He also pointed out that benevolence could be associated with pain for the morally inclined individual. It is clear for Hutcheson that moral worth (a key concept in Kant’s ethics) was to be measured in terms of the benevolence directed at others. A variation of the Reality Principle is also involved in Hutcheson’s account in the form of an insistence on our ability to adopt the perspective of a spectator with respect to our own actions, evaluating them, as it was maintained, disinterestedly. Our moral affections, it is claimed, can be reflected upon. These moral affections are “determinations of our nature”, according to Hutcheson, but he also somewhat paradoxically conceptualises them as “obligations”, and it becomes unclear whether he means to use the term to name an affective-motivational force or rather something closer to Kant’s idea of a rational norm governing our action.
Given the fact that Hutcheson was particularly critical of rationalism, the likelihood is that he was referring to a naturally motivating force and distinguished it from other motivational forces such as anger , perhaps because this latter motive lacked, in his estimation, an articulate intention. Like many sentimentalists of this time, Hutcheson rested his case on happiness, a principle that Kant critically regarded as the principle of self-love in disguise. Hutcheson believed that we are benevolent towards others because we realise that our own happiness rests on their happiness. Freud’s reality principle was differently constituted, resting rather, not upon happiness, but on the Kantian notion of the dignity of man which was achieved against the background of conflict and experienced suffering.
Kant, in this early phase of his development was beginning to manifest an eclectic tendency that would later develop into the theoretical cosmopolitanism of his later critical philosophy where Ancient Greek, German, English, Swiss, French and Dutch influences were firmly integrated into one philosophical outlook. In this later phase Kant abandons the idea of moral sensibility as the motivating force of action, in favour of a more reflective position that focuses on the maxim of an action, arrived at rationally, and with understanding. In his work “Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view”(2) Kant writes:
“What is decisive in practical matters is not whether we have done a good action at one time (or another), but rather it is the maxim.”
Our moral worth, that is, is directly connected to the rational worth of the maxim, i.e. its universality and necessity. So we see here that there is a sense in which Rousseau’s “natural man” was supplanted by a man that is obligated to create his own character by rational reflection upon his maxims: a rational, non-observational form of reflection that involved universality and necessity. It is worth noting that, at this late stagein his work, Kant would not have subscribed to any view that claimed morality to be rooted in sympathy: an emotion which he regarded as “blind”, meaning without conceptual or cognitive import. Insofar as there is a general “emotion” required by moral judgment and moral action, it must be generally applicable to all of humanity and whatever we call that feeling it must be related to a work of the imagination that is in principle related to concepts (as is the case with aesthetic judgment). In such judgments, what is particular is subsumable under what is general, and in the moral case these judgments are maxims, or “reasons for acting”. Ethical reasons will not meet the criteria for a narcissistically formed self-love, but rather will demand a criterion of self-worth related to the more neutral attitude of respect and the logical requirements of universality and necessity.
In this later phase of development, Kant was returning to a thesis of the Ancients, in particular returning to Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory, in which all understanding was the understanding of forms or principles that organised matter in successive actualisation phases. The initial phase, insofar as moral judgment is concerned, related to something that was to be the case, or something that needed to be done rather than something that was, or was to be felt. Moral Philosophy, at this point for Kant, was a philosophy of the noumenal world, of the mundus intelligibilis. No motiva sensualis was involved in the consideration of “reasons for action”– and as with the ancients, all morality is based on ideas and principles. The metaphysics of morals would then constitute the knowledge we have of ourselves and would provide the rational justification or groundwork for a virtuous character or will.
In conclusion, as we approach Kant’s more mature work written late in his life, beginning with the “Critique of Pure Reason”, at age 57, we encounter the strategies of Plato and Aristotle being put to the use of integrating the cognitive faculties or powers of the mind into one systematic whole. Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason all possessed their “forms” or “principles”, that together contributed to shaping the overall power of the mind Kant had been seeking to correctly describe and explain during his long philosophical career. The first Critique took 12 years to complete, and was a testament to the difficulty of the task set by David Hume: the task, namely of steering an Aristotelian middle course between the rocks of dogmatism and the sandbanks of Scepticism This task involved the construction of a power of understanding and judgment to mediate between the powers of sensation and reason. It also required charting a course between the methods of “observation” and “logic”. The strategy was clearly Aristotelian, but the result was something new and unique, something purely Kantian, and worthy of that period of History we call “The Enlightenment”, when men for the second time in philosophical history dared to use their reason.
The reference Kant makes to “pure reason” is a concession to the skepticism of Hume, but at the same time, it is an insistence that, in spite of the steadily mounting empirical attacks on rationalism in the name of a “book of nature” view of science, rationalism in the spirit of Aristotle was alive and well and capable of supporting not just the science of nature but the entire canon of Aristotelian theoretical, practical and productive sciences. Freud sometimes is construed as being anti-rational by some of his critics, but some of his critics also accuse him of being unscientific and perhaps the key to opening the casket of Freud’s underlying position is to see how neither of these criticisms are valid. Freud is both a rationalist in the sprit of Aristotelian hylomorphism and a scientist in the spirit of Kant. His focus is essentially on the practical matter of living ones life well, and the medical matter of therapeutic interventions for the good health of the soul.
For Kant the journey of the soul was a matter of the journey on the road to Damascus (Via Dolarosa). The principles involved included the principle of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, and the progress along this road depended upon the goods related to the body, goods related to the external world, and lastly, and most significantly, goods relating to the soul. We need to bear in mind also, Spinoza’s claim that the first idea of the mind is the idea of the body, as well as the Freudian claim that the primary function of the ego is to protect the body. The relation of the body to one aspect of the external world, i.e. sexual partners, argues forcefully for the Freudian focus upon sexuality, in the stages of the development of the personality: Freud’s “stages” on life’s way include abandoning earlier archaic practices in favour of new institutional practices that have more realistic aims and objectives. This process of abandonment is a painful affair, and is attended with the risk of interference from various defence mechanisms such as repression, denial, displacement, splitting, etc which tend to weaken the ego and its attempt to view the world stoically through the lens of Ananke. Such a developmental account must of course presuppose a commitment to hylomorphism and its actualisation processes. These processes determine the way in which the human form of life interacts with the world in terms of its “possibilities”, transforming not just the objects of the instincts, but also the aims of the instincts, widening the horizon for the battle of the giants, Eros and Thanatos.
Consciousness, we know is a vicissitude of the instincts and we know that for both Aristotle and Freud the dream was a kind of thinking in which the body is derealised by the play of images on the dream screen. This may mean that the first idea of the body in the soul may well be an image/hallucination that has its source in the external world. Such images are, of course, not, in a certain sense ” real”, and this may be tied up with the fact that during sleep, both the motor and the sensory systems of the body are immobilised and the body seeks a displaced form of instant substitute gratification in the dream. Freud does, however, call such an image hallucinatory, and, as such, it is both a primary process activity, and an illusory regressive activity. Dream activity may well be the zero-level of thought-activity–an almost pure psychic phenomenon blossoming or “occurring” in a psychic locality. The location may well be an important consideration when it comes to determining whether it makes any sense to speak of “events” and their physical(material/efficient) causality. Freud took a clear and distinct stand on this issue by designating the dream as a wish-fulfilment, and this must be true in at least one sense, that of ensuring the individual concerned continues to sleep instead of waking prematurely. This wish to continue sleeping is certainly not at the level of consciousness, but for Aristotle it is a type of thinking that carries on during dream activity.
For Kant and his trinity of mental faculties, sensibility, understanding and reason, the dream is an activity of sensibility, which Kant regards as an unconscious form of poetry, involving the imagination in a condition in which the body-image is inactive and as a consequence the dream is not structured in terms of the continuous space-time of waking experience. The imagination may, however, be activated by unconscious concepts( whose source is in the understanding), so the scenes we experience are to some extent organised and not the mere wild play of random images. To the extent that the images we experience may never have occurred in previous experience as they are presented, is the extent to which we are in the realm of illusion and fantasy. The people we dream of, for example, could not possibly have memories of their role in our dreams. If one is hungry in one’s dream, one does not know it to be true that one is hungry, and to that extent our dreams lack veracity. It may be the case, however, that one was hungry when one went to bed and this is obviously the source of the dream of eating roast beef.
Reason has no obvious role in this function of sensibility in which the concept regresses back to its image-origin, instead of occupying the subject or predicate position in an assertion This may be because reason appears to operate at the level of thinking something about something, which is a more complex level than that of merely thinking something– which is the domain of conceptual thinking occupying the subject position of an assertion. The sensible functions involved in dreaming are regulated by the primary process of thought and the pleasure-pain principle. Reason is, then, a secondary process operation.
Modern Post analytical philosophy championed by Russell and Frege used a mathematical form of logic to solve the aporetic questions that arose in a context which the early Wittgenstein defined. For Wittgenstein and the other mathematical logicians the world was defined as “The totality of facts”, and it was clear that natural science regulated by mathematical thinking was the focus of many different associated movements such as logical positivism. Frege and Russell attempted, unsuccessfully and in their different ways, contra Kant, to reduce mathematics to logic. For Kant, Mathematics was attempting to quantify space and time and used constructed concepts in its operations.
Reason, for Kant, is the search for the totality of conditions of cognitive Judgments, something that could never be achieved for synthetic judgments, (judgments of experience or mathematical judgments). Insofar as experience is concerned, Kant has the following to say in his Prolegomena (P.92):(3)
“For experience never satisfies reason fully, but in answering questions, refers us further and further back and leaves us dissatisfied with regard to their complete solution.” And further (P. 96)(4):
“The sensible world is nothing but a chain of appearances connected according to universal laws: it has, therefore, no subsistence by itself: it is not the thing in itself, and consequently must point to that which cannot be cognised merely as appearances but as things in themselves. In the cognition of them alone can reason hope to satisfy its desire for completeness in proceeding from the conditioned to its conditions.”
The search for the totality of conditions referred to above, however, is predicated upon the inquirer possessing three fundamental powers of mind, namely, Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. Reason has an important relation to the formation of a totality of forms of categorical judgments, i.e. the categories of the understanding:
“But Pure Reason is a sphere so separate and self-contained that we cannot touch a part without affecting all the rest. We can, therefore, do nothing without first determining the positions of each part and its relation to the rest. For inasmuch as our judgment cannot be corrected by anything outside of pure reason, so the validity and use of every part depends upon the relation in which it stands to all the rest within the domain of reason, just as in the structure of an organised body the end of each member can only be deduced from the full conception of the whole.” (P.8)(5)
Philosophical knowledge, then, Kant continues, considers the quality of particular existence insofar as it participates in the universal in contrast to mathematical knowledge that “constructs” the universal in the particular in accordance with quantitative considerations. Mathematics constructs definitions from mathematical elements: a straight line, for example, is defined in terms of two points and the relation between them (the shortest distance). The mathematician then proceeds immediately to drawing a particular straight line in illustration of the principle (with the aid of an instrument: a ruler). The straight line can then be used in the construction of figures such as triangles. Straight lines of particular lengths are used to construct a particular triangle with a particular area that can be measured. It is as a consequence true, that triangular spaces have a different quality to circular spaces but it must be recognised that this difference in quality is constructed in a way that the quality of the redness of rose can never be.
It is also true that were we to be endowed with the sensible apparatus capable of giving us x-ray access to the inside of objects like roses, we may never have been aware of the quality of colour. This fact, however, is not a sufficient basis from which to argue that the qualities of colours such as the redness of a rose are “constructed” upon the foundation of a mathematical primary underlying reality of a certain quantity (of, for example, Angstrom units). Kant insists that mathematical construction is not a more reliable system of representation of the noumenal reality we know so little about (we can, however, according to Kant know that noumena are not mathematical, not spatial, not temporal). For Kant, the mathematician works in the world of the particular as organised by his mathematical notations. Kant also points out that, given the fact that the philosopher is working solely in the arena of concepts and judgments, he has not the means of advancing our knowledge of the definition of a straight line except by categorising the form of the judgment involved in characterising the possible mathematical activity, e.g. The definition of a straight line as the shortest distance between two points is characterised by Kant as a “synthetic a priori judgment”.
It is metaphysical and transcendental logic that allows the philosopher to theorise about the way in which we relate to the continuum of noumenal reality (by dividing it up with our philosophical concepts and judgments). This system of dividing reality up is very different from the mathematical method of division that fundamentally relies on quantitatively constructed concepts and a pure intuition that relates immediately to reality via the faculty of Sensibility. The constructed concept here functions rather like a schema of subsumption that allows a limited number of mathematical operations and calculations to occur.
The mathematical “logic” we encounter here is not at the same level as the relation of universal concepts we encounter in the transcendental or metaphysical logic that the philosopher uses in the analysis of the structure of a judgment in which we say something about something. Kant points out in this context that:
“It would, therefore, be quite futile for me to philosophise upon the triangle, that is, to think about it discursively. I should not be able to advance a single step beyond the mere definition, which was what I had to begin with. There is indeed a transcendental synthesis (framed) from concepts alone, a synthesis with which the philosopher is alone competent to deal: but it relates only to a thing in general, as defining the conditions under which the perception of it can belong to possible experience. But in mathematical problems, there is no question of this, nor indeed of existence at all, but only of the properties of the objects in themselves (that is to say), solely insofar as the properties are connected with the concept of the objects.”(Critique of Pure Reason A 718-9)(6)
Involved in this claim is Kant’s subsequent denial that the philosophical and mathematical methods overlap or have elements in common. The philosopher,Kant argues, cannot work with constructed definitions, axioms, and related demonstrations. In this context, Kant also points out that definitions of empirical concepts such as gold and water (where the extension of these concepts are not exactly circumscribed and forever open to modification by further empirical investigation) are problematic. Mathematical concepts, on the other hand, are circumscribable and refer to an object via the constructed definition.
Kant points out that Mathematicians are in agreement and disputes about their concepts do not occur. But there are disputes over whether, for example, a particular system of concepts such as Euclidean geometry is consistent with the system of concepts we find in non-Euclidean Geometry. When they do not agree, however, it does not appear to be a tribunal of mathematical reason that can settle the issue as to which system, for example, best represents reality. Both systems are constructed and in the eyes of the philosopher, it might appear as if both systems are equally legitimate methods of dividing up the continuum of noumenal reality. Indeed the discovery that both systems have been “constructed” could only have been discovered in the tribunal of philosophical reasoning where matters such as this are settled. One could imagine, for example, evidence being submitted by Einstein (that space is “curved”) as part of the case for the legitimation of non-Euclidean geometry. For the Philosopher, however, this is a metaphysical judgment even if it is supported by a theory of gravitation where it is claimed that gravitational force “bends” Space and bends the light that otherwise travels in straight lines that are best measured by the Euclidean system of geometry. One of the verdicts of the tribunal of philosophical reason, in this case, might be that it is only the Space around objects exerting a large enough gravitational force, that requires the concepts and operations of non-Euclidean geometry. This, however, in the end, fails to justify the use of the universal concept of “Space” in the judgment “Space is curved”. The Newtonian universe is certainly modified by Einstein’s theories, but light still travels in straight lines unless caused to do otherwise by powerful gravitational fields: the Newtonian laws of motion thus stand and survive the case for the prosecution in the Philosophical tribunal of Reason. The tribunal of philosophical reasoning, however, is more at home with defending its concepts and laws against general philosophical positions such as dogmatism and scepticism: it is, that is, more at home when handing down judgments on the importance of the idea of Freedom in a rational human life led in a rational society:
“Thus freedom will carry with it the right to submit openly for discussion the thoughts and doubts with which we find ourselves unable to deal and to do so without being decried as troublesome and dangerous citizens. This is one of the original rights of human reason which recognises no other judge than that universal human reason in which everyone has his say. And since all improvement on which our state is capable must be obtained from this source, such a right is sacred and must not be curtailed.”(A752)(7)
Kant is referring here, amongst other things, to the importance of the logical form of practical reason as distinguished from its empirical form that we encounter in our practical prudential judgments and actions where:
“…the whole business of reason consists in uniting all the ends which are prescribed to us by our desires in the one single end, happiness, and in coordinating the means for attaining it. In this field therefore reason can supply none but pragmatic laws of free action, for the attainment of those ends which are commended to us by the senses: it cannot yield us laws that are pure and determined completely a priori and which are prescribed to us, not in an empirically conditioned but in an absolute manner would be products of pure reason. Such are the moral laws, and these alone, therefore, belong to the practical employment of reason and allow of a canon.” (A 800)(8)
“The Canon of Pure Reason” is the title of an important section of the First Critique: a section that provides us with the metaphysics and transcendental philosophy which in turn enable us to answer the question “What ought I to do?”
(In the light of the theoretical knowledge we have of God, the immortality of the soul and our freedom). In this connection Kant also provides us with the beginnings of a Philosophical Psychology needed to further his critical projects:
“A will which can be determined independently of sensuous impulses and therefore through motives which are represented only by reason is entitled free will and everything that is bound up with this will, whether as ground or as consequence is entitled practical….. we have the power to overcome the impressions of our faculty of sensuous desire, by calling up representations of what, in a more indirect manner is useful or injurious. But these considerations as to what is desirable in respect of our whole state, that is, as to what is good and useful are based on reason. Reason, therefore provides laws which are imperative, that is, objective laws of freedom which tell us what ought to happen although perhaps it never does happen–therein differing from the laws of nature which relate only to that which happens.”(A802)(9)
With the above transcendental justification and reference to the will, (the central concept of Philosophical psychology-of the kind we encounter in Freud’s Metapsychology), the First Critique delimits and defines the scope and boundaries of the ought-system of concepts that will provide the framework for Kant’s Moral, Religious, and Political Philosophy. Pure Reason, for Kant, can be both theoretical and practical, but morality is a priori practical and only connected to the concept of happiness via the condition that we are ultimately worthy of such happiness. Kant calls the world in which rational agents and judges live, a moral world, a kingdom of ends, in which each member of the kingdom treats other members as ends-in-themselves. Such members will enjoy happiness thanks to a divine guarantee by an intelligent God that distributes happiness to those worthy of it. This, then, provides the answer to the question Kant poses “What can we hope for?” The kingdom of ends hypothesised by Kant is a systematic unity of ends (or totality of conditions) that is also in accordance with universal laws of nature.
Kant discusses the concept of Truth and claims (paradoxically, according to some commentators), that there are three degrees of holding something to be true: opining, believing and knowing:
“Opining is such holding of a judgment as is consciously insufficient, not only objectively, but also subjectively. If our holding of the judgment be only subjectively sufficient, we have what is termed believing. Lastly, when the holding of a thing to be true is sufficient both subjectively and objectively, it is knowledge”(A822)(10)
Opinion is, “merely a play of the imagination without the least relation to truth”. When we venture upon a moral action, on the other hand, Kant argues, we must know its validity (its universality and necessity). In relation to the more speculative theoretical issues of whether there is a God, or another life in another world, there is only moral certainty resting upon a moral attitude (given the fact that God belongs to the noumenal world we know so little about and that his existence can neither be proved nor disproved). Knowledge appears also to divide into fields or disciplines, and these can be assembled arbitrarily, rhapsodically or architectonically (in accordance with the demands of pure practical reason).
There is, however, in Kant’s overall strategy an awareness of the presence of the ancients who, beginning with Socrates, favoured pure practical reason over theoretical reasoning. Here Kant probably has in mind the philosophical career of Socrates who upon reading Anaxagoras and realising “All is mind”, then turned his back on all forms of physical investigations in favour of the pursuit of the knowledge of the Good that we find portrayed as the foundation stone of the education of the Philosophers of Plato’s Republic. Kant is also familiar with the metaphysical system of Aristotle in which the theoretical and the practical dwell comfortably together in one system of Philosophy. Kant’s contribution to this debate is to identify two realms of metaphysics and two kinds of objects:
“The legislation of human reason (philosophy) has two objects, nature, and freedom, and therefore contains not only the law of nature but also the moral law, presenting them at first in two distinct systems but ultimately in one philosophical system. The philosophy of nature deals with all that is, the philosophy of morals with that which ought to be”(A840)(11)
This gives rise to the “division” between the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals. The former contains the principles that ground our theoretical knowledge of the world, and the latter, the a priori principles that govern our actions. Kant warns about the confusion of these two modes of knowledge and also claims that these modes can be combined. He also warns us about confusing what is in our cognitive power with what is not, namely the confusion of the a posteriori and the a priori. it is, in Kant’s view, only the a priori forms of knowledge that can form the elements of pure science. In this debate, Kant refers to those sciences that proceed from concepts to intuitions and he also refers to Mathematics that proceeds from the construction of concepts to a priori intuitions.
James Ellington in his essay “The Unity of Kant’s Philosophy of Nature”(12) claims that Kant was not entirely clear about the workings of his architectonics. There is, however, no doubt concerning his clarity over the two modes of knowledge and what has been called Metaphysica Generalis, in which only principles and systems of concepts are discussed, and the system of Metaphysica Specialis in which rational physiology, rational cosmology, and rational theology are component disciplines. Rational physiology is further divided into two parts: physica rationalis and psychological rationalis. The term “rational” in these contexts refers to a priori elements, which means that empirical psychology will find no place in this structure, but given that it is applied philosophy, it will figure as a part of the metaphysical system in which we find explanations of psychological phenomena.
In the last chapter 4 of “The Transcendental Doctrine of Method” entitled “The History of Pure Reason” Kant notes that in the infancy of Philosophy men began by reflecting upon that point at which most mature philosophers would like to end their reflections, namely with the idea of God and another better life in a better world and:
“That there could be no better ground or dependable way of pleasing the invisible power that governs the world, and so of being happy in another world at least, then by living the good life. Accordingly, theology and morals were the two motives or rather the two points of reference in all those abstract enquiries of reason to which men come to devote themselves. It was chiefly, however, the former that step by step committed the purely speculative reason to those labours which afterwards became so renowned under the name of metaphysics.”(A 852)13
This magnifies the importance of the so-called “Socratic turn” away from investigating the metaphysics of nature toward investigating the metaphysics of morals. It also testifies to the greatness of the tradition of Aristotelian Philosophy that pursued both forms of metaphysics to their fundamental grounds. Kantian philosophy continued this tradition but gives Aristotelian metaphysics a “Kantian turn” by pleading for the primacy of practical metaphysics over theoretical metaphysics, at least insofar as we finite rational beings capable of discourse are concerned. Kant, like Aristotle, recognises an animal element of sensibility but follows the ancients in insisting that the fundamental purpose of rationality is to largely regulate the domain of the powers of psuche.
In this “History” chapter Kant divides the object of “all our knowledge through Reason” into two; sensualism and intellectualism. The former is illustrated with the thought of Epicurus who maintains that:
“reality is to be found solely in the objects of the senses” and all else is fiction. The
intellectual school, on the other hand, declared that in the senses there is nothing but illusion, and that only the understanding knows what is true. The former position did not indeed deny reality to the concepts of the understanding, but this reality for them was “merely” logical whereas for others it was mystical. The former sensualists admitted intellectual concepts but admitted the reality of sensible objects only. Sensualists required that true objects should be purely intelligible and maintained that it is by means of the pure understanding that we experience intuitions unaccompanied by the senses– the senses in their view serving only to confuse the understanding”(A853).(14)
Kant also refers to the origin of the modes of knowledge through pure reason and mentions in this connection Aristotle’s “Empiricist” position in which it is maintained that all modes of knowledge are derived from experience. Plato, in this discussion, is referred to as a noologist (part of the mystical school). In Kant’s view, neither of these schools managed to correctly chart the boundaries or the limits of experience. Calling Aristotle an empiricist is, however, problematic given his remarks on the importance of the desire to understand and the role of principles in all processes of understanding. It is not absolutely clear that the intellectual forms of the mind are all tied as tightly to experience as Kant appears to imagine.
In the course of discussing the naturalistic (common sense) method, and the scientific method, Kant claims that common sense is sceptical about the use of mathematical and scientific instruments, and yet presumes to be able to establish the existence of sublime metaphysical truths with its limited means. Kant, then, concludes the First Critique by claiming that the scientific method per se can be either dogmatically used, as it was by Wolff, or sceptically used, as it was by Hume, but that the only viable Parmenidean road to the truth lies via the critical use of the scientific method.
The concept of the will is a concept of philosophical psychology which we do not find discussed in any detail in the writings of Freud. Kantian Philosophy, reasoning about the good will during the period of Enlightenment, was experiencing a brief respite in the surge of modernism introduced by Descartes and Hobbes: a period in which politics and economics had not yet managed to permeate the consciousness of the general public.
By the time we get to the period of Freud’s Austria, political parties and nation states were being dissolved and destabilised (according to Arendt in “Origins of Totalitarianism)(15), and the masses were being mobilised by populistic rhetoric into thinking, alternatively ,that “everything was possible”, or “nothing was possible”. The so-called “new men” that emerged in Europe, the US, and the Soviet Union were, consciously or unconsciously, marshalling various globalisation forces for various purposes. It is difficult to know exactly what Freud thought about these political, economic and military projects, but we do know that he experienced first hand the rise of Hitler and in his work, “Civilisation and its Discontents(1929)” wrote disparagingly about both the USA and the Soviet Union. Freud further posed the question as to whether all the energy we expend upon building up our civilisations, was worth the effort. Given the year of this work, this judgement perhaps can be justified, especially when we consider the Freudian use of the Platonic concepts of the life and death instincts, Eros and Thanatos, battling for the fate of civilisation.
Plato’s Republic was a theoretical construction partly responding to Oracular prophecies relating to knowledge of oneself, and partly relating to the role this lack of knowledge may play in the fate of our civilisations. The Republic also, was partly a response to the perceived injustices inflicted upon the governed by governments that failed to understand the importance of the concepts of justice(diké) and virtue(areté). Socrates is the leader of the philosophical dialogue which is essentially searching for the elusive combination of the good-in-itself and the good-in-its-consequences, and the focus here is primarily political, forewarning us of the dangers of tyrants whose lust after power resembles a mental illness. There is very little trace of this kind of reflection in Freud’s writings. There is, however, one article entitled “Group Psychology and the analysis of the Ego” which begins with an admission that individual and social psychology are inseparable elements. This has an Aristotelian ring to it, which is highlighted in the hylomorphic essence-specifying definition of the human form of life, namely the rational animal capable of discourse. The implication of this definition is that man is essentially a social animal and given the Aristotelian claim that every human art, scientific inquiry, action and pursuit aims at the good, the form of the Good thus becomes the major social issue in which the question of whether man is the best or worst of animals is resolved. Freud, we know, grounded his psychoanalytical psychology on the foundation of instincts. Yet in the introduction to the above work, Freud specifically denies that there is a primitive social or herd instinct, and claims that membership or participation in different kinds of group give rise to different mental phenomena. The “group” par excellence for Freud, however, is that of the family, and this too echoes the Aristotelian position. For Aristotle the criterion for moving beyond the social group of the family into the village work-place is that of “self-sufficiency”. The next most important social grouping, next to the family, is that of the village which also has its limitations insofar as fulfilling our potential for being the best of animals is concerned. A purpose which, for Aristotle, involves striving to fulfil the potential of becoming the rational animal. It is, however, the polis which is of sufficient size and structure to meet the demands of its inhabitants for overall self-sufficiency. The full essence-specifying definition of the human form of life is “rational animal capable of discourse” and it is discourse rather than rationality that Freud focuses his attention upon. Discourse manifests itself in one-on-one therapy in the form of the “talking cure”, but it also manifests itself in social groups. Freud, in a Chapter entitled “Le Bon’s description of the group mind” begins as follows:
“If a psychology, concerned with exploring the predispositions, the instinctual impulses, the motives and the aims of an individual man, down to his actions and his relations with those who are nearest to him, had completely achieved its task, and had cleared up the whole of these matters with their interconnections, it would then suddenly find itself confronted by a new task which would lie before it unachieved. It would be obliged to explain the surprising fact that under a certain condition this individual whom it had come to understand, thought felt and acted in quite a different way from what would have been expected. And this condition is his insertion into a collection of people which has acquired the characteristic of a “psychological group”. What, then, is a group? How does it acquire the capacity for exercising such a decisive influence over the mental life of the individual? And what is the nature of the mental change which it forces upon the individual? It is the task of theoretical group psychology to answer these three questions.” The Penguin Freud Library: Vol 12, London, Penguin, 1991) P.98)(16)
Freud quotes Le Bon’s thesis that there are certain mental phenomena that can only be encountered in groups and this justifies attributing the description “collective mind” to these original characteristics. Le Bon uses an Aristotelian biological analogy:
“The psychological group is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.” (Trans, 1920, 29)
Freud elaborates upon this theme by claiming that there must be something responsible for the unification process and result, but he speaks of a “bond” rather than a principle, thereby aligning the investigation with inductive natural/medical science, rather than the Philosophical form of Psychology we associate with both Aristotle and Kant . The Freudian contribution to this discussion relates, of course, to his major discovery that the conscious mind, even when it is engaged in its most rational activities, is being influenced by a deep underlying unconscious substrate, that undoubtedly relates to man’s instincts. Many of the characteristics associated with our species over its relatively long history has been “handed down over generations”. Put such an individual in the context of a crowd or masses of people, and new characteristics will emerge which are probably the result of instincts that are normally restrained by the Ego being no longer regulated in the normal manner, because a feeling of invincible power arises when individuals are subsumed into large collectives which have no individual responsibility for their actions. This feeling of power arises presumably firstly, because there is no physical body for the ego to concern itself with, and secondly because the law, connected as it is with rational mechanisms, rather than with emotional mechanisms, has little influence in an environment in which emotional discourse is more easily produced and acted upon. In such a non-rational environment “techné”, or the instrumental use of scientific/military technology is not embedded in the ethical form of discourse which in its turn focuses upon individual responsibility and freedom to choose. The ethics of utilitarianism or consequentialism reigns, and the dimension of the categorical good-in-itself that is inevitably involved in the work of the superego is marginalised.
This is the environment in which Arendt’s “new men” emerged. We should remember that Descartes put his mathematical knowledge to use in military contexts, travelling as a mercenary to the different battle scenarios of the 30 year war(He designed military machines). Hobbes, (who believed in the possibility of squaring the circle), perhaps the first of the new men in England, also wrote pamphlets on the English civil war urging support for the royalists against the parliamentarians. Kant we know wrote philosophically both on the irrationality and terrible consequences of war and established a Philosophical commitment to “Perpetual Peace” which was completely disregarded by the time we arrive at Freud’s writings in the 1920’s (during the aftermath of the first world war and on the doorstep of the second world war). This was the period in which mass-political movements were being manipulated by the tyrants Plato warned us about in his Republic, and we know one such tyrant, Hitler, would in turn cause an aged Freud to flee to London to die in 1939.
Hitler was a master of contagious/suggestive rhetoric and mobilised the masses of Germany and Austria to rise against the rest of Europe. The Academics, in the various European Universities, were powerless to stop the popularistic waves of change initiated by Hitler and Stalin. Freud notes in his essay, that the rhetorician in such circumstances eventually takes control of his audience in a way similar to the way in which a hypnotist takes control of the consciousness of his subject. The acts that take place as a result of such suggestion are not performed in a fully conscious state, and are steered instinctively.
In such a condition the discourse is not rationally structured and uses instead images which do not know the boundaries of possibility and improbability. This is the Freudian psychological description of the thought processes of Arendt’s new men, for whom “everything was possible” especially for those who believe themselves to be omnipotent and omniscient. The world of the imaginary is more extensive than the world of the real. Freud points out that group psychology can have positive aspects too, in that it can, if steered by reason, rise ethically above what the individual is capable of, but the problem is that it can just as easily fall to depths where terrible actions can be considered and even perpetrated. Indeed the discourse fired by the illusory images of the imagination will always be more easily embraced by “the madding crowd”, which does not have the patience for the reality testing of the ideas that suggest certain courses of action.
Collectives embracing the rule of law manifest clearly the possibility of the unselfish devotion of a collective to ethical norms, but this institution is the first target of tyrants who attempt to dismantle the credibility of legal and political institutions. The am of the tryrant is nothing less that revolution, and there are no qualms over the use of violence in such revolution. One of the conditions for the formation of such a revolutionary collective is that the crowd must be formed by, in some sense, “like-minded” individuals sharing an interest in common.
Freud also quotes McDougall who claims a group:
“is excessively emotional, impulsive, violent, fickle, inconsistent, irresolute and extreme in action, displaying only the coarser emotions and the less refined sentiments :extremely suggestible, careless in deliberation, hasty in judgement, incapable of any but the simpler and imperfect forms of reasoning; easily swayed and led, lacking in self-consciousness, devoid of self-respect and of sense of responsibility, and apt to be carried away by the consciousness of its own force, so that it tends to produce all the manifestations we have learned to expect of any responsible and absolute power. Hence its behaviour is like that of an unruly child or an untutored passionate savage in a strange situation, rather, than like that of its average member: and in the worst cases t is like that of a wild beast, rather than like that of human beings.”(McDougall, The Group Mind, 1920a)(17)
Freud begins his analysis of the group by reference to an exercise in ordinary language Philosophy, when he discusses the meaning of the word love, and its use for the many different forms of love we find in the human form of life, e.g. sexual love, self-love, love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general and finally love for concrete objects and abstract ideas. He coins the term “libido” and relates these ideas to Plato’s “Eros”:
“the power that holds everything together in the world” (P.120)(18).
Freud uses the term “libido” to oppose the unilateral thesis that it is the herd instinct which explains all the puzzling regressive behaviour of the group. Freud accepts the existence and the influence of this instinct which explains phenomena such as separation-anxiety but fails to account for the family of phenomena associated with group behaviour, in particular it fails to address the primary phenomenon associated with group behaviour, namely the lack of individual freedom of the members of the group. This in conjunction with the phenomenon of panic of the group is best understood via an understanding of the libidinal ties of member of the group to their leader and to each other. He analyses the institutional groups of the army and the church in the following way:
“It is to be noticed that in these two artificial groups each individual is bound by libidinal ties on the one hand to the leader(Christ, the Commander-in-Chief) and on the other to the members of the group…..we shall venture even now upon a mild reproach against earlier writers for not having sufficiently appreciated the importance of the leader in the psychology of the group.”(P.124-5)(19)
Panic occurs in different forms in both groups but for the same reasons, namely because the libidinal ties in the group for some reason are relaxed. This phenomenon can, for example, be clearly seen when a leader is killed in battle but it can also be seen when a fundamental idea important to the group is questioned, e.g. the doubting of the truth of the proposition that Jesus was resurrected, which Freud claims resulted in an increase in crime in Europe until the counter-claim was disproved.
Freud then moves on to consider the possibility that members of a group may pledge allegiance to an abstract idea rather than a concrete leader, but even in such a case there will be what Freud calls a “secondary leader”. The love that exists in groups has no sexual component, and demands an abandonment of the narcissistic self love for the aims of altruism. Freud then turns to the question of the psychological mechanism responsible for the libidinal tie with the leader of the group. Given his initial claim that our personality is formed within the family constellation, it is therefore not surprising to learn that it is the defence-mechanism of identification which forms the core of our social relations in the loosely formed groups of our work place and the more tightly knit groups such as the army and the church. This is a more primitive mechanism than sympathy which presupposes some kind of identification with the object that engages our sympathetic responses. But it is also a more sophisticated mechanism given its role in the formation of the superego which is operating in accordance with a primitive wish to be like the father/mother/leader that is initially the object of ones desire, and then subsequently becomes something more fundamental that is introjected in the course of the imitation-process. What we are exploring are obviously in a sense causal mechanisms which are not manifest in the phenomenon we seek to explain, but relate instead to the phenomenon in some systematic way as a “condition” of the phenomenon occurring. The context at issue here is an “archeological” rather than a teleological matter, which is undoubtedly deeply embedded in a hylomorphic theory of change that includes kinds of change, media of change, principles of change as well as “causes”of change. Freud is clearly exploring the terrain the Delphic oracle would have characterised as “self-knowledge”: the most difficult of all forms of knowledge. Involved in this identification process, according to Freud is the loss of the object that has been introjected.
Freud has, in many different ways, sought to distance himself from the Christian ideal of love which requires that one love ones neighbour and ones enemies. Freud’s grounds relate to a healthy concern for reality, and the absence of a sufficiently strong common interest for a “group-feeling” to emerge. Similarly, one can imagine Freud adopting a more Kantian approach to the Garden of Eden myth, and rejecting this story as carrying the message that the human is a necessarily flawed being whose desire for knowledge was going to lead to his downfall. The oracles of Greece, we know, believed that self-knowledge was necessary if one was to control ones desires(“Nothing too much”) and to avoid the sword of Ananke hanging over the artifactual creations of humankind (Everything created by man was destined for ruin and destruction). The “Nothing too much” formula was the motivation for Aristotle’s “golden mean principle”, and can also be applied to love or eros. We know from Freud that should one identify with an object that one loved, the loss of that object for a weak ego, might result in attempts to destroy oneself. The pain and suffering for the wounded ego becomes too much and acts of attempted self destruction might follow.
The “Good” strong ego functions in accordance with the reality principle, and given the complex nature of human existence, this requires knowledge to regulate the belief and action systems of the human form of life. For Kant, the Garden of Eden myth is a celebration of the liberating force of knowledge(symbolised by the apple from the tree of knowledge), and freedom, rather than a stain on the soul of a disobedient servant of God.
Freud, is a follower of Darwin, who had great respect for the work of Aristotle, and who produced a theory of natural evolution of species that is fully in accord with the Aristotelian hylomorphic theory of change:
“In 1912 I took up a conjecture of Darwin’s to the effect that the primitive form of human society was that of a horde ruled over despotically by a powerful male. I attempted to show that the fortunes of this horde have left indestructible traces upon the history of human descent; and especially , that the development of totemism, which comprises in itself the beginnings of religion, morality, and social organisation, is connected with the killing f the chief by violence and the transformation of the paternal horde into a community of brothers.” (p.154)(20)
This is the scenario Freud describes in his attempt to account for the emergence of the law against murder that will ensure that one of the brothers can in fact safely agree to lead the horde. The challenge for the leader of the horde to love all of the horde equally was, on Freud’s theory of love, impossible, and the inevitable result was the violence directed at him. Such a form of unconditional love may perhaps be only possible in smaller units such as the family. With the introduction of the law, however, the brothers can rightly expect equal treatment under the law and they can also reasonably believe that the law will also apply to the leader and protect the members of the group from legal persecution. Freud also points out that the hypnotic power of the leader is related to his power as a leader or father of the group. This effect is perhaps diminished, with the introduction of the law, and is replaced by a more neutral “respect for the law”. It is interesting to note, in the context of this discussion, that lady justice is blind, and possesses a sword which is a residue of the threat of the violence of the father. The blindfold is a symbol of the impartial aim of the law, and this, in turn, indicates that the physical appearance of the brothers inevitably brings with it the issue of who can in fact be loved and who cannot.
Aristotle solved the problem of describing the need for an eros laden attitude toward all members/citizens of the polis by using the term philia in relation to the idea of the good and the end of eudaimonia(a good spirited flourishing life(of the community)). Citizens are “friends” in Aristotle’s eyes, but it is not certain that one can be friends with all citizens of the polis (e.g. Socrates and his accusers), and perhaps a more neutral technical term such as philia is more appropriate. For Kant the more appropriate term to be used to describe these forms of relations is “respect”, a term that is aimed at describing a more abstract attitude, that covers both persons and a moral law which demands that we treat all persons as ends-in-themselves. For Freud, however, the modern individual is a member of many different groups each of which contribute to the totality of his/her personality.
What we have experienced in the reflections of Freud, is a combination of a method that reduces a phenomenon to a fundamental condition, a collection of fundamental conditions, and an attempted composition of these conditions into a totality, which often does not have a name. This was not the ancient Greek methodology of the Philosophers, whose sight was fixated upon the more rationally constituted holistic state which Freud was using as the true north pointer for his theorising. This did not however, prevent him from using this reductive-compositive method of inductive science to identify the archeological aspect of his personality-theory. This choice reflects an anti-rational attitude which was not shared by Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, but was perhaps inevitable given the decision of Psychologists in Europe and the US in 1870 to separate the discipline from the holistic Philosophical Psychology that we find in the writings of Plato, Aristotle and Kant. These latter philosophers were searching, not for isolated conditions of phenomena, but for the “totality of conditions” that made the phenomenon in question possible, as Kant put the matter. In this kind of investigation (located in a context of explanation/justification), both Aristotle’s Theory of Change and Kant’s Critical Philosophy play a decisive role. The Greeks could not separate their accounts of philosophical psychology from the political philosophy and ethics of the time, and the same was true of Kantian Critical Philosophy. Modern Psychology and Philosophy were not aiming at the whole, for which there was no name except for “Being”, and its many meanings. Martin Heidegger attempted to introduce a more holistic perspective into his Philosophical Psychology via the terms “Being-there”(Dasein) and “Being-in-the-world”, but it became clear in his writings on Kant that he rested his account, not on the foundation of Reason, but on Transcendental Imagination. We need therefore to return to Kant’s ethical and political writings in order to get a clearer view of the whole that has no name but is connected to both knowledge(epistemé) and ethical/political action(areté, diké).
Kant, in his work “Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals”,(21) continues his project of articulating the scope and limits of the domain of metaphysics via a search for, and a discovery of, a fundamental formal principle of morality. He also gives an account of the transcendental philosophy involved in the three formulations of the categorical imperative (the prime example of synthetic a priori judgments in the realm of morality). In this work, Kant refers to the ancient division of Philosophical disciplines into physics, ethics, and logic but it is not clear here as to whom among the Ancients he is talking about. Aristotle’s division of the sciences into the theoretical, practical and productive ,does not quite support such a division. Depending upon one’s view, Kant can be construed as improving upon the role of Aristotelian Metaphysics in this debate, by claiming that every science has both a formal part, in which the principles of the science are the focus, and a material part in which the empirical content of the science is contained. Insofar as moral science is concerned the formulations of the categorical imperative, and the transcendental philosophy of the will associated with it, are the focus of the Groundwork. The account of the Empirical aspect of Morality is then left to a later work entitled “Anthropology: from a Pragmatic Point of View”. The Kantian system of Morality is built upon the transcendental element of the good will that is part of the nature of a human rational agent. Finer and finer moral distinctions are articulated, beginning with that between doing an action in accordance with the categorical imperative and doing an action constituted by the categorical imperative. Kant illustrates this distinction by giving an example of a shopkeeper who refrains from short-changing strangers and children he serves in his shop because, in the long run, such actions would not be good for business. Such an action, Kant argues, may be instrumentally good but he argues that it is not categorically good and this can easily be proved by appealing to those circumstances where the shopkeeper merely changed their mind about what is good for business and adopted a policy of short-changing children and strangers in his shop (perhaps because his shop was the only shop in the village). One can imagine thereupon, general outrage at this phenomenon of not being universally honest with one’s customers. This outrage would be founded on an understanding of the universal law of the categorical imperative, and this might even eventually result in competitors setting up businesses with more honest business practices–thus proving the power(good consequences) of the ought system of concepts in moral contexts. There are a number of problems with instrumental imperatives relating to the so-called long term good for a business, and one problem, is that the “long term good” being referred to here, is more often than not founded on a selfish principle, a principle-based on self-love, as Kant puts it.
Happiness is often a long-term aim, and is connected to instrumental reasoning of this sort. Of course, such a principle can be used, instead of the more universal categorical imperative, and insofar as Reason is being used here, it is solely for the purposes of examining whether the means to the end of happiness is causally efficacious. In the instrumental case, the end in itself is not examined in any critical objective spirit: a spirit that would question whether the agent of the action deserved the happiness involved. The worth of the action is directly connected to the categorical goodness of the will defined in terms of the three formulations of the categorical imperative and the logical characteristics of such judgment, namely universality, and necessity. Insofar as universality and necessity are the logical characteristics of such ought-oriented judgments, they are objective, but descending to the account of the empirical content of such judgments, we can find Kant speaking in terms of an opposition between the subjective and the objective: the subjective being where the subject is not involved or committed to the so-called “object of the action”. In instrumental cases of action, furthermore, the “measure” of the rationality of the action is not in terms of the maxim of the action (which may be regarded as “subjective”) but rather in terms of its causal consequences (such as happiness), thus opening up a logical gap between cause and effect (that must be logically independent of each other). The maxims involved in such instrumental reasoning can, therefore, not be universalised in the way that the maxims constituted by the categorical imperative can be. For Kant, such instrumentally oriented maxims might be “Objective”, in the sense of “causally determined”, but they are not objective in the logical sense of being universally valid for all acting agents. Maxims that are universalisable and necessary, are the product of the absolute in Kant’s system, the absolute of a good will that is a priori and is related to experience in the logical sense of being its “organiser” or “principle”. In other words, the “good will” here denotes a way of acting (given that experience can involve a doing as well as a suffering). According to Kant, our everyday knowledge of the categorical imperative is not universal, and perhaps not even widespread. Indeed he even considers the logical possibility that no pure moral action has ever been performed. Kuehn, one of the biographers of Kant, has the following comment to make in relation to this issue: (22))
“Kant, in other words, does not intend to deal with the everyday situations or ordinary moral agents. He deals, rather, with an ideal of pure reason that is entirely a priori. This ideal, which he calls the categorical imperative, is not given in “experience”. It is an a priori synthetic practical proposition whose very possibility is difficult to “see”. Indeed Kant ends his book by emphasising that “we do not comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative”. We only “comprehend its incomprehensibility” and this “is all that can be fairly required of a philosophy that strives in its principles to the very boundary of human
reason.”(Manfred Kuehn, “Kant: A Biography” P. 285-6)
Kant’s Political Philosophy, which is largely a political application of his moral Philosophy, conceives of a state of humankind one hundred thousand years in the future, a state that he calls a “Kingdom of Ends”. This teleological end-state in which reason is fully installed in the minds of the species of man is constituted by the categorical imperative. The length of time that this process will take testifies to the “incomprehensibility” of the categorical imperative, and also indicates the power of how things are over how things ought to be. The link between these two logical realms is that of the will and its domain of operation (the domain of action). Here Kant is not referring to a notion of the General Will, but rather to the individual will and its freedom to choose what it ought to do, to make true what was not true before. If the will is good and the maxims are therefore good in the sense of being universal and necessary, then we are, according to Kant, in the realm of the morally good. We are the only authority that can be held responsible for the maxims we choose to embrace as the maxims of our actions. Kant is invoking the idea of Freedom, which, he elaborates upon in his Groundwork:(23)
“We must presuppose it if we want to think of a being as rational and endowed with consciousness of his causality with respect to actions, that is, with a will, and so we find that…we must assign to every being endowed with reason and will this property of determining himself to action under the idea of freedom.”(Kant’s Practical Philosophy P. 96)
This remark, when taken in the context of Political Philosophy, and in the context of the further contention in the Groundwork that we cannot embrace the universality of the moral law for everyone if we are prone to make exceptions of ourselves, suggests the importance of the concept of equality. Equality is an important principle of justice and is constituted by the moral law: the law which many would argue is the source of the concept of equality that is operating in our legal systems. We are, according to Kant’s moral reasoning, free to choose both the maxim of our action, and also whether to perform the action in question under the condition of equality.
Many Political Philosophers will readily recognise the importance of the combination of these two ideas of freedom and equality insofar as the formation of the concept of Human Rights is concerned. This is the same concept we encounter in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It should also be recognised in this context that Kant conceived of the founding of such an institution of a United Nations in the late eighteenth century in order to solve the political problem of international conflict and war. It is clear to all discerning commentators, that Kant’s Political Philosophy is entwined with his Ethics and Philosophical Psychology, two of the realms of consideration involved in our putative progress toward a distant kingdom of ends. The nature of man, Kant argues in this context, is to be antagonistic toward his fellow man because of an inherent ambivalent disposition toward being simultaneously social and unsociable. Humankind, it is argued, needs a master, but does not wish to be mastered by any other human being. The laws of the polis are predicated upon the above conditions, and the telos of a possible kingdom of ends is built into the very structure of laws. When the kingdom of ends approaches, it is argued, moral judgments will no longer be imperatives in the sense they are today. The need for laws might wither away as imperatives become generally or universally actualised, and perhaps History (of moral development) comes to an end. Of course, significant events will continue to occur internationally. Kant, in an essay entitled “What is Enlightenment?”, adds an “Anthropological” account of man’s role in what he called the Age of Enlightenment (to be distinguished from an enlightened age in which the Kingdom of Ends has been established). He discusses our collective characteristics in no uncertain terms:
“It is because of laziness and cowardice that so great a part of humankind, after nature has long since emancipated them from other people’s direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remain minors for life, and that it becomes so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all.”(Practical Philosophy P.17)(24)
This combination of the descriptive thesis of the “crooked timber of humanity”, and the moral challenge daring humanity to use their reason provides, then, the educational message Kant wishes to proclaim on behalf of the progress of mankind during the Age of Enlightenment. Freedom, of course, is the key component in freeing ourselves from this so-called “self-incurred minority”:
“For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but Freedom, namely freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. But I hear from all sides the cry: Do not argue! The officer says Do not argue but drill! The tax official: Do not argue but pay! The clergyman: Do not argue but believe!…The public use of one’s reason must always be free and it alone can bring about enlightenment among human beings.” (PR P.18)(25)
Kant is arguing here, not for civil disobedience in matters of tax, religion and military matters, but rather for a climate of debate about all matters of concern for men living in society. One should pay one’s taxes, believe, and march, when required, but all such activities can be accompanied by healthy discussions about the reasons for obedience. Kant, we recall, was himself subject to an injunction to cease using his reason publicly in matters of religion, by his Emperor no less. He obeyed Emperor Fredrik whilst he was still alive, but continued his critical religious discussion in Enlightenment spirit after Fredrik’s death. In continuing writing on religious matters, Kant was merely embracing his own vision for the Age of Enlightenment. Kant was, of course, well aware of the tendency for Governments, since the writings of Hobbes, to treat its citizens like cogs in a huge machine, and not accord them the dignity they deserved in matters of morality and freedom. This was one of the reasons why Kant urged us to dare to use our reason and overcome our natural laziness and cowardice. Freedom, for Kant, then, is the idea of reason that turns the giant wheel of the progress of civilisation. This challenge to use one’s reason also echoes once again the thesis of the Groundwork that it is not the consequences of one’s actions one should be calculating when one is acting morally, but rather the “principle of the will”(PR P 55). Consequences are what the lazy and cowardly man fears the most and relates to desires and inclinations that in turn can steer us away from doing what is experienced painfully as our duty. Dutiful action, in a context of reasoned debate, then, is the highest unconditioned good that can be found in the arena of moral action. The mind, for many scientifically inclined Philosophers such as Hobbes, resembles a machine that works in accordance with laws, but for Kant moral consciousness is constituted by the moral law, because man is a being who has the capacity to act constitutively in the name of these laws. Reason, in such contexts, derives particular actions from the moral law because it can represent these laws in thought. However, it is because we are also so constituted by our desires and inclinations steering us toward our own comfort and happiness that the moral law takes the form of an imperative–the form of an ought-statement. The mind of a moral agent represents an objective principle as that which ought to be instantiated via the performing of a particular action.
Kant represents well the complex constitution of the human mind in terms of three systems of cognition that can all relate to action, namely Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. When Reason and Understanding are operative, the law constitutes grounds for acting that are universally valid for every rational being.Principles of action, according to the Groundwork, can both also be what Kant calls rules of skill or counsels of prudence, and in both cases the ought statements relate to the means to achieve some end that can in fact be morally wrong or even evil as is the case of the poisoner who behaves like a doctor in administering a substance (to kill his enemy rather than cure a patient), or the case of the poisoner who “prudently ” murders his parents in order to inherit their fortune and lead a comfortable happy life. In both cases, it is the inclinations of the faculty of Sensibility that steers the outcome (consequences) and are thereby the “conditions” of the action. In the case of actions steered by the faculties of the Understanding, Reason, and the categorical imperative, the grounds of the action are not “conditioned” by the “causes” of the “inclinations” but rather the grounds of the action are “constituted” by what is unconditioned and necessary. This reasoning process overrides sensible inclinations, as in the case of the subject who considers poisoning someone but abandons the course of action because it is categorically wrong (not constituted by the categorical imperative).
Imperatives of skills such as the building of a house are “world-building” skills and when they are not in contradiction with the moral law, they shape the world we live in positively. The proposition expressing the relation of means to ends (adding a house to an existing village or city) is, according to Kant, an analytic proposition that has the hypothetical form of “If I will the effect, I must will the action to bring the effect about”. It is obvious that there is nothing necessary about the antecedent. In this proposition the necessity lies in the relation of the means to the end, i.e. I might change my mind about willing the effect or the end and in such circumstances willing the means becomes otiose. Prudential propositions concerning prudential actions, on the other hand, are directed to one’s personal happiness and are designated as synthetic judgments in Kant’s system. Here the end of happiness is so indeterminate, i.e. we do not very often have accurate knowledge of what it is that would make us happy because what we think we know seems to vary with the circumstances. If I am ill, I believe I will be happy when my health returns. Becoming healthy I realise how poor I am, and believe that if I become rich I will be happy. When I become rich I become aware of the possibility of losing all my money and enter the political arena in an attempt to avoid this possible consequence of political decisions (cf. Cephalus in the Republic). Becoming politically powerful merely makes me aware of the possibility of losing power and the dangers this brings with it in unstable political systems. This sequence of events demonstrates the relativity of the concept of happiness that can only be universally valid under the categorical unconditioned imperative that contributes to making us worthy of being happy. One of the cases of the categorical imperative discussed in the Groundwork is “one ought not to promise anything deceitfully”. This statement is not to be analysed hypothetically, e.g. “one ought not to make lying promises lest if this comes to light one lose one’s credibility”. Kant clearly distinguishes here between different kinds of judgments guiding the will: synthetic judgments of prudential counsel, analytic judgments of rules of skill and the synthetic a priori judgments of the categorical imperative e.g. “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”. It is this formulation that helps to define our duties in the realm of action. Kant further distinguishes two kinds of duties. Firstly, there are duties, the defiance of which, constitute fully-fledged practical contradictions and secondly, there are duties the defiance of which can be thought without contradiction but which make the world an unnecessarily difficult place in which to live. The Moral Law rests on a philosophical foundation: a foundation of absolute worth which Kant also conceives of in terms of an end-in-itself in a second formulation of the categorical imperative that can also be found in the Groundwork. Kant, in this context, insists that the rational human being:
“exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used by this or that will at its
discretion: instead he must in all his actions, whether directed to himself or also to other rational beings, always be regarded at the same time as an end”(PR P.79)(26)
Associated with this idea of an end is a telos or teleological terminating point of a civilisation in which all humans have evolved into moral beings daring to use their reason in relation to both beliefs and actions. This terminating point Kant
calls the Kingdom of Ends:
“By a kingdom of ends, I understand a systematic union of various rational beings through common laws. Now laws determine ends in terms of their universal validity if we abstract from the personal differences of rational beings as well as from all the content of their private ends we shall be able to think of a whole of all ends in systematic connection, in that is, a kingdom of ends which is possible in accordance with the above principles.”(PR P.83)(27)
A rational being becomes then a citizen of this kingdom and both aids in the creation of these laws as well as himself being subject to its laws, i.e. he is both citizen and sovereign in this ideal kingdom. Partly because of this dual characteristic the law is deemed worthy of respect, but also perhaps because the will is a law unto itself and the source of the dignity of a rational human being. This property of the will being a law unto itself, a causa sui, is equated by Kant with practical reason and related intimately to the practical freedom of the individual. Kant returns to one of the themes of the Enlightenment and contrasts this autonomy or freedom with what he terms heteronomy, or acting in accordance with the principle of self-love and the subjective prudential interests that constitute such self-love. Heteronomy is in turn connected with the world of sense in which I can have an interest in being well when sick, rich when poor, in being politically active to protect one’s fortune, being anxious about losing one’s power, etc. etc. The world of sense is, in more senses than one, a Heraclitean world, forever changing. The world of understanding and reason, on the other hand, is a world of stability in which a deceitful promise is always and forever wrong and evil. We are, Kant insists, denizens of the world of sense and citizens of the world of understanding in virtue of being a possessor of the power of Reason, an active power, in contrast to the passive receptive capacity of Sensibility. Intelligent beings inhabit the intellectual world of the Understanding. This is one of the reasons why the rational human being conceives of practical law in terms of an imperative expressed in ought premises in a practical syllogism:
“The human being who in this way regards himself as an intelligence, thereby puts himself in a different order of things and in a relation to determining grounds of an altogether different kind when he thinks of himself as an intelligence endowed with a will, and consequently with causality, that when he perceives himself as a phenomenon in the world of sense(as he also really is) and subjects his causality to external determination in accordance with laws of nature. Now he soon becomes aware that both can take place at the same time, and indeed must do so. For that a thing in appearance(belonging to the world of sense)is subject to certain laws from which as a thing or being in itself it is independent contains not the least contradiction: that he must represent and think of himself in this two-fold way, however, rests as regards the first on consciousness of himself as an object affected through the senses and as regards the second a consciousness of himself as an intelligence that is as independent of sensible impressions in the use of reason(hence as belonging to the world of understanding)” (PR P.103)(28)
It is via the practical law of action then, that the self as noumenon becomes conscious of itself as an end in itself, or as a potential citizen of a Kingdom of ends. This self cannot be cognised completely, but rather stands as Kant puts it at the end of his work “Groundwork”, at the very boundary of human reason and at the boundary of what Kant calls an archetypal world. The only other super-sensible being in Kant’s Philosophy is that of God who governs the natural world with laws of nature in a deterministic system that cannot be conceived by
us because:
“it is impossible through metaphysics to proceed by sure inferences from knowledge of this world to the concept of God and to the proof of his existence, for this reason: that in order to say that this world was possible only through a God(as we must think this concept) we would have to cognise this world as the most perfect whole possible and, in order to do so, cognise all possible worlds as well(so as to be able to compare them with this one), and would therefore have to be omniscient. Finally, however, it is absolutely impossible to cognise the existence of this being from mere concepts, because every existential proposition, that is, every proposition that says of a being of which I frame a concept, that it exists–is a synthetic proposition, that is one by which I go beyond that concept and say more about it than was thought in the concept, namely, that to this concept in the understanding there corresponds an object outside the understanding which it is absolutely impossible to elicit by any reference.”(PR P. 252)(29)
What is lacking here is “a precisely determined concept of this original being”(PR P.252)(30). It is, Kant argues, via the practical concept of the highest good as given by the moral law that we can determine the properties of a supreme being who is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and externally existing. The idea of God, in other words, for Kant, is not something that could fill his mind with awe and admiration:
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and the more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense and extends the connection in which I stand into an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds, and systems of systems, and moreover into the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their duration. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality,, and presents me in a world which has true infinity, but which can be discovered only by the understanding, and I cognise that my connection with that world(and thereby with all these visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent as in the first case, but universal and necessary. The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an actual creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force(one knows not how) must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came. the second, on the contrary infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as this may be inferred from the purposive determination of my existence by this law, a determination not restricted to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaching into the infinite.”(PR P.269) (31)
Our explanations of the scope and limits of our life begin with an immediate consciousness of my existence that involves the starry heavens without and the moral law within me. In the case of the universe outside of me, I am somehow sensibly aware of unbounded space and time that in turn quickens in me a feeling of my finite animal life on this speck of a planet. In the case of the latter, I become aware of infinity via the power of understanding that any active consciousness possesses, and that transcends the sensible world of space and time. The idea of God is conspicuous by its absence in the above conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason. The idea of God has been clearly replaced by Enlightenment man, finite in his matter but embracing the infinite in the forms of his moral/practical understanding and the idea of freedom. There is a suggestion here not merely of a matter-form (hylomorphic) relation, but also of a theoretical understanding of man in which the powers of Sensibility, space and time, are built upon and transformed by the powers of the understanding and reason. If this is a correct interpretation, then Kant is here demonstrating an Aristotelian commitment to the philosophical psychology that is required to support his moral theory. The concepts of the goodwill and the moral law are indeed innovations, but they fit neatly into the incomplete moral puzzle left by the ethical speculations of Aristotle: speculations on arête (virtue), and eudaimonia (flourishing life). Kant’s theory leaves no space for a theoretical view of God’s existence but he believes that we can practically hope for a just God to reward the life led responsibly: the life constituted by the moral law. Enlightenment man, then, understands his physical place in the universe but transcends this finitude with an understanding and reason that can bring about the comprehension of infinitude .
In the Third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, this view of Enlightenment man is reiterated in a context of witnessing the power of a mighty waterfall. The first moment of such an experience makes man aware of his finitude and puniness in the face of such sublime physical power. The second moment is a moment of transcendence in which man becomes aware of himself as a moral power in an intellectual universe, a power that transcends any physical power. The intellectual world supervenes in the second moment and the sensible world shrinks into the background of one’s consciousness of one’s own existence. In this account, we see no space for an idea of God, but it is nonetheless clear that Kant is not arguing that God is any sense dead, or non-existent. Kant was not a God-intoxicated philosopher like Spinoza or Leibniz, but neither was he an atheist. Kant clearly argues that our moral dispositions give rise to a faith in God’s existence, a faith that springs from a Hope for a flourishing life as a consequence of leading a worthy moral life. The future Kingdom of Ends may sometimes look to be a very secular vision but it also has a theological dimension that realises our hopes in terms of the sacred and the holy.
Enlightenment man has Enlightenment duties and these are systematically outlined in Kant’s last work “The Metaphysics of Morals”. The moral revolution of Kant’s duty-based ethics reveals clearly the limitations of Aristotelian virtue theory. Aristotle’s theory does not link Philosophical Psychology to ethical theory in the way in which Kant does. This poses difficulties in relation to the questions as to how and why the law binds man to the Good, as well as difficulties relating to the Rights of Man that emerge when the systems of Law and Morality converge. The Metaphysics of Morals is in two parts: the metaphysical a priori principles of the doctrine of Right, and the metaphysical a priori principles of the doctrine of Virtue. In an early section entitled “On the Relation of the Faculties of the Human Mind to Moral Laws”, Kant presents his views on the kind of Philosophical Psychology that is required to sustain a moral theory:
“the faculty of desire is the faculty to be, by means of one’s representations, the cause of the objects of these representations. The faculty of a being to act in accordance with its representations is called life”(PR P.373)32
Insofar as we take pleasure in a representation, this pleasure is nothing cognitive but simply a relation to a subject in the form of a feeling. Not being cognitive capacities, pleasure and displeasure cannot have explanations beyond what forms of consciousness are involved in certain circumstances. The connection of desire to pleasure ,forms what Kant calls an interest. Desire is also related to understanding and consciousness in the following ways:
“The faculty of desire in accordance with concepts, insofar as the ground determining it to action lies within itself and not in its object, is called a faculty to do or refrain from doing what one pleases. Insofar as it is joined with one’s consciousness of the ability to bring about its object by one’s action it is called choice: if it is not joined with this consciousness it is called a wish. The faculty of desire, whose inner determining ground, hence even what pleases it, lies within the subject’s reason is called the will. The will is, therefore, the faculty of desire considered not so much in relation to action (as choice is) but rather in relation to the ground determining choice to action. The will itself, strictly speaking, has no determining ground: insofar as it can determine choice, it is instead practical reason itself.. That choice which can be determined by pure reason is called free choice. That which can be determined only by inclination (sensible impulse stimulus) would be animal choice…. Freedom of choice is thus independence from being determined by sensible impulses: this is the negative concept of freedom. the positive concept of freedom is that of the ability of pure reason to be of itself practical. But this is not possible except by the subjection of the maxim of every action to the condition of its qualifying as universal law… And since the maxims of human beings, being based on subjective causes, do not of themselves conform with those objective principles, reason can prescribe this law only as an imperative that commands or prohibits absolutely.”(PR P. 374-5)33
The above is a sketch of the Philosophical psychology involved in action and its relation to the laws of freedom, and these remarks also serve to assist us in distinguishing juridical laws regulating external action from internal ethical laws that are the determining ground of action. In the case of juridical law, freedom is involved in the external use of choice, whereas, ethical law is determined by an internal law of freedom, and its relation to the will (and laws of reason). For humans, whose choices are intellectually determined by the categorical imperative, such choices transform contingent action into necessary action: action we must do or are obligated or duty bound to do. In such circumstances, certain actions then become permitted or forbidden. Now moral feelings of pleasure/displeasure may be involved in moral action, but these are subjective and merely affect the mind. Feelings in themselves cannot authorise moral action because they are not “active” in the correct ontological sense: the kind of activity that constitutes moral action is marked by Kant via his use of the word “deed”, which is a consequence of the freedom and responsibility of the agent or person who then has these deeds imputed to him/her as a moral personality. This imputation involves judgments of rightness or wrongness as determined by the moral law and its demands:
“Laws proceed from the will, maxims from choice. In man, the latter is a free choice: the will which is directed to nothing beyond the law itself, cannot be called free or unfree, since it is not directed to actions but immediately to giving laws for the maxims of actions (and is, therefore, practical reason itself). Only choice is therefore called free.”(PR P.380)34
External laws, then, clearly involve the call of duty but, being external, they further require the incentive of the moral law for the legal contract between the Law and the citizen body to be not just a social contract, but a moral contract that will lead to a Kingdom of Ends in which all citizens can lead a flourishing life. It is in this context that Rights emerge, because Rights are predicated upon the condition that my fellow citizens have duties to respect my rights as I have a duty to respect theirs. Duty, therefore, is the unconditional ground of all Right. This is partly also why there exists an asymmetrical relation between law and morality which expresses itself in the primacy of morality, making it the regulator of law but not vice versa: laws can be corrected on moral grounds but moral laws cannot be corrected on legal grounds. This is why in the Kingdom of Ends in which the idea of duty may be an incentive in everyone’s choice of actions, legal systems would shrink proportionately in accordance with the prevalence of this form of moral awareness. Given that, according to Kant, we are one hundred thousand years away from this pure cosmopolitan state of society, we meanwhile require both moral imperatives and coercion of the law for pathological lawbreakers in order for society to “flourish”. We, therefore, have an external duty to both obey and respect laws of the land–an obligation Socrates clearly on behalf of Philosophy agreed to in his refusal to accept an invitation to escape from prison. Kant defines “The Universal Principle of Right” in the following way:
“Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxims the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with moral law.”(PR P. 387)(35)
So, the concept of a Right is connected to duty but also to regulating practical relations between the members of a citizen body. The form of this regulation must, however, not reside in feelings or the imaginative activity of wishing, because such a form of consciousness without the power to bring about what is intended, or the use of the powers of understanding and reason, does not take into consideration the freedom of others to lead a flourishing rational life. Whoever disregards the freedom of anyone else to lead a flourishing life, wrongs this person because they too have a right to such a life. The source of such judgments lies not in any empirical reference to an external law, but rather in a normative reference to understanding, reason, and the choices a man makes in accordance with a pure practical reason that is both universal and necessary. Should a moral agent choose not to do what one ought to do (as defined by the categorical imperative), and in so doing infringe upon the freedom of others, then, Kant argues, the legal concept of right justifies coercion. Kant discusses both private rights of ownership and public Rights in this context, both of which involve enforceability by the State via coercion. In the latter case he refers to a general united will that is constituted by three governmental institutions: the sovereign legislative authority of the people, the executive ruling authority, and the judicial authority in the form of a judge and fair legal processes. Kant has the following to say:
“These are like the three propositions in a practical syllogism: the major premise, which contains the law of that will: the minor premise which contains the command to behave in accordance with the law, that is, the principle of subsumption under the law: and the conclusion which contains the verdict (sentence), what is laid down as right in the case at hand.”(PR P.457)(36)
It is in this context that Kant then introduces the next major element of his theory of rights, namely, equality. No one can be superior to the general will and demand that others be bound by it, but not oneself. Power resides in the three founding institutions of the state or commonwealth, none of which can be identified with one superior person or one superior group of persons. Kant refers interestingly in this context to the role of the people in the legal process, a role in which representatives of the people form a jury of peers that decides upon the guilt or innocence of a defendant that has been accused of breaking the law and wronging either an individual, group of individuals or even the State as a whole. This image of a tribunal that decides in accordance with due process is an interesting image that occurs in all three Critiques in various forms. It is via these institutions of Right that the State manifests its freedom or “preserves itself in accordance with laws of freedom”(PR P. 461). Citizens who find themselves in such a Commonwealth may not be happy because, Kant argues, happiness may come more easily in a state of nature or even in a despotic state:
“By the well being of a state is understood instead that condition in which its constitution conforms most fully to principles of right: it is that condition which reason, by a categorical imperative, makes it obligatory for me to strive after.”(PR P.461)(37)
The General Will of the people is, according to Kant, sovereign and has no duties to the people but only rights which the people are obligated to fulfil. The organ of the people–a ruler or government might, therefore, breach the moral law with relative impunity, i.e. the people will have no right to displace him, but only the right to complain about breaches. Any attempt to attack the person or the life of the ruler ought, argues Kant, to bring the death sentence because the attack is nothing less than an attack on the fatherland–an act of high treason. Rulers have rights to impose taxes on the people but only, Kant insists, for the purposes of their own preservation. The poor have a right to be supported by the wealthy, Kant also argues. Kant claims the following in relation to the rights of nations with respect to each other:
“Now morally practical reason pronounces in us its irresistible veto:-there is to be no war, neither war between you and me in a state of nature, nor war between us as states, which, though they are internally in a lawful condition, are still externally (in relation to one another) in a lawless condition: for war is not the way in which everyone should seek his rights. So the question is no longer whether perpetual peace is something real. Instead one must act as if it is something real, though perhaps it is not: we must work toward establishing perpetual peace and put an end to the heinous waging of war.”(PR P. 491)(38).
The second part of the Metaphysics of Morals discusses the doctrine of virtue and begins by maintaining that inner freedom is the condition of the possibility of virtue. Here, Kant clearly envisages a homo noumenon, playing the role of a master over a homo phenomenon conceived of as a cauldron of slavish sensible affects and passions. Homo noumenon uses reason to govern the unruly homo phenomenon. There is no logical space for external mastery in the realm of the duties of virtue, as there is for the duties of right. The imperative of the former duties of virtue is quite simply the duty to “know thyself!”. This knowledge involves, amongst other things, knowing that, because one is a homo phenomenon, and therefore guilty of much wrongdoing in the course of one’s life, the wronged in turn will wish for vengeance in the same way in which we, being wronged ,will wish for vengeance from those who have wronged us. To avoid seeking vengeance upon oneself for one’s wrongdoings, Kant argues it is better to form a duty to forgive others. The spirit of this attitude is not one of meek toleration but rather that of a knowledge-driven attitude that sees the whole spectrum of human behaviour both systematically and in the spirit of humanism. Such an attitude obviously gives rise, in turn, to a general attitude or duty to respect others as ends-in-themselves. This also entails that I have a duty to respect even the most vicious of men and the undoubted humanity that must be part of their moral personality. Having dealt with this more shadowy aspect of man’s personality Kant moves on to consider friendship in a way similar to the way in which Aristotle did:
“Friendship(considered in its perfection) is the union of two persons through equal mutual love and respect–It is easy to see that this is an ideal of each participating and sharing sympathetically in the others well being through the morally good will that unites them, and even though it does not produce the complete happiness of life, the adoption of this ideal in their disposition toward each other makes them deserving of happiness: hence human beings have a duty of friendship”(PR P P. 584-5)(39)
Kant interestingly and perhaps somewhat paradoxically applies the physical concepts of attraction and repulsion to human social relations and requires an ideal balance of love and respect if the ideal of friendship is to be realised or actualised. Presumably because of the difficulty in establishing this ideal balance, Kant modifies the above claim to a duty to “strive for” friendship. Kant evokes Aristotle’s words in this context, “My dear friends, there is no such thing as a friend”.
As an example of the difficulties that can occur in this process of striving, Kant discusses how, for example, pointing out perceived faults in a potential friend may be construed as a lack of respect and result in offence or insult. The love talked about in friendship cannot be mere affect because that is something that goes up in smoke after a while, Kant argues. This striving after friendship occurs in a social context and requires, therefore, a balance between revealing one’s judgments about others and keeping them to oneself.
There are also external tokens of this process of striving for friendship in social contexts, and they can take the forms of affability, sociability, courtesy, hospitality, and gentleness. These “tokens” assist in bringing us nearer to “true” friendship. Kant ends the Metaphysics of Morals with a discourse on the so-called methods of ethics in which he claims correctly that virtues are not innate but must be acquired during one’s life. This is manifested in the strength of a man’s resolution to, for example, disregard powerful passions and inclinations. Methods of teaching ethics include appealing dogmatically to memory (catechism) and appeal to reason (via dialogues). In dialogue form, the Socratic method will obviously present itself as a possible pedagogical instrument. Virtue can also be cultivated, Kant argues, by the example of the behaviour of others setting up a standard to imitate. In this section, Kant concludes by asking whether religion as a discipline, belongs to philosophical morals or not, given the relation of practical reason to the theoretical idea of God (that lies beyond the scope of the philosophical perspective because of the absence of proof of existence or nonexistence). Claiming then, that we have duties toward such a being appears therefore paradoxical. Insofar as the historical teachings of the revelations are concerned, however, these appear to fall within the boundaries of “mere reason”, as Kant puts it, and these teachings may well harmonise with the results or the telos of the operation of practical reason. The relation of our will to the “will of God” is also, Christians claim, a matter of love and respect, but here in fact the relation between the two entities is not that of mutual love and respect, but rather a transcendental affair taking us far beyond the realm of ethics into the realm of the holy.
In this realm of the holy the relation to an “absent being”, or to use Julian Jaynes’ term, “Deus absconditis” might seem as if this fact inevitably places us in the realm of the imagination but it would probably be more correct to claim with Aristotle that the entity with which we are forming a relation is that of “pure form”, where the term “form” refers to a principle rather than an actuality which in the case of God, as far as we are concerned seems as if it must be necessarily absent. None of this however precludes a rationalist approach to the existence of this holy being: an approach that requires Reason operating in relation to the higher mental processes of the human form of life. The Platonic “form of the Good” is the highest “form”, and this form is related to justice (diké), knowledge (epistemé) virtue(areté), and perhaps technical knowledge related to skill (techné). Aristotle believes that a certain use of thought and reasoning is divine and without object in the normal sense of the term. To the question, what is God thinking about, the Metaphysics gives the answer that God is self-absorbed and thinking about him/her self. God, it appears, knows him/ herself and is certain of his/her existence in a way we can never be. We, according to Kant, can only have faith in the existence of God: hope that he exists and that the Kingdom of ends is coming closer. It is this form of the Good that God is most concerned to bring about and make actual in an actualising process guided by forms(principles). Given the fact that, according to Aristotle, we are political animals ,the kingdom of ends must have a political cosmopolitan aspect which we must assist in bringing about as an object with the mass operation of good wills. It is, however, Religion which is primarily the concern of Kant given its important central role in Enlightenment societies.
Kant begins his work “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” by referring to two opposing world visions of human development:
“All allow that the world began with something good: with the Golden Age, with life in Paradise, or an even happier life in communion with heavenly beings. But then they make this happiness disappear like a dream and they spitefully hasten the decline into evil (moral evil, with which the physical always went hand in hand) in an accelerating fall so that now (this “now, is, however, as old as history) we live in the final age: the Last Day and the destruction of the world are knocking on the door and in certain regions of India the Judge and Destroyer of the world Rutra (otherwise known as Shiva or Shiwa) already is worshipped as the God now holding power, after Vishnu, the Sustainer of the World, grown weary of the office he had received from Brahman the Creator, resigned it centuries ago (“Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (RBR P.45)(40)
The second vision is a more modern Enlightenment vision which maintains that civilisation is moving from a worse condition to a better condition, at least insofar as moral growth is concerned. Neither view appears to be simply based on experience, which it appears, could be organised by either of the above visions. World views relating to our experience of life is not easily organised in terms of propositions. That is, it is not clear that what Paul Ricoeur called theodicy (Philosophical theology), can reconcile the truth of three propositions: “God is all-powerful”, “God is absolutely good”, “Evil exists”. In his work “Figuring the Sacred”, Ricoeur points out that only two of the above propositions can be true and logically compatible or logically coherent. Ricoeur also believes, as Kant did not, that the solution to the problem is to move away from epistemological and metaphysical considerations and toward a phenomenological/existential approach to the experience of evil. Kant might also have regarded the above three propositions as problematically combined, but in placing his investigation at the level of judgment (and the grounds or conditions of judgments), he does not allow himself to slide into a sceptical experience-based account.
Kant’s strategy is to move these judgments into the realm of Practical Reason and the arena of self-knowledge as characterised by his Philosophical Psychology. This strategy results in an inquiry that focuses more on the meaning of these judgments than their problematic truth-value.
Similarly, the above two paradoxically opposed world-visions outlined by Kant are not to be analysed theoretically, but rather practically, and in terms of a critical acknowledgment of the limitations of our knowledge of a noumenal God. This approach prevents categorical judgments about the power of God’s goodness or the relation of evil to such Being. The displacement of these judgments into the realm of practical reason secularises a perspective that presents an individual striving to actualise the moral law globally (in accordance with the idea of freedom), in a very secular Kingdom of Ends. God is, however, not completely displaced but retains his place in the minds of Enlightenment man as an idea of reason: God as an idea is part of the system of judgments that answer the Enlightenment question “What can I hope for?”.
The achievements of Newtonian science in the minds of many working in the scientific community brought us a more coherent understanding of the physical universe, and also, in Kant’s view ,took us to the boundary-gates of understanding noumenal reality insofar as the physical world of physical motions and forces are concerned: took us, that is, to the limits of understanding the law-governed causally structured universe. Indeed, it might be the case that our modern view of science, that largely is a result of the technological applications of Newtonian science, originated in Enlightenment expectations. This modern view characterised by Hannah Arendt in terms of a modern attitude expressed in terms of the words “Everything is possible and nothing is impossible”(no recognition of limits or boundaries of any kind), would certainly not have been shared by Kant, who would have been sceptical of such a dogmatic attitude given his critical method of exploring the limitations of our reasoning and understanding about physical reality.
Kant might have taken us to the limits of our understanding insofar as our theoretical understanding of physical reality is concerned, but he also insisted that there was much that needed to be understood about practical reality in order to bring about an ordered state of our individual and communal lives. There was also much that needed to be done to bring about this order: a process that he envisaged might take one hundred thousand years.
Involved in this practical understanding and reasoning process was, of course, the necessary exploration of the phenomenon of evil. If we are correct in our assumption that Kant largely accepted a hylomorphic view of the essence and development of human nature and the human condition, then one consequence of such a position is that what he called radical evil is not a matter of an innate physical disposition, but a matter, rather, of a choice to do evil as a consequence of a failure of practical reasoning: a failure of our choosing to do what we have the power to do. After noting that experience can be used to support the thesis that man, by nature, is predisposed to both good and evil, Kant rejects appeals to human nature, insofar as it is determined by physical natural laws, and adopts instead an approach that appeals to philosophical psychology and moral law:
“let it be noted that by “the nature of a human being” one only understands here the subjective ground–whatever it may be–of the exercise of the human being’s freedom in general (under objective moral laws) antecedent to every deed that falls within the scope of the senses. But this subjective ground must, in turn, itself always be a deed of freedom…. Hence the ground of evil cannot lie in any object determining the power of choice through inclination, not in any natural impulses, but only in a rule that the power of choice itself produces for the exercise of its freedom i.e. in a maxim. One cannot, however, go on asking what, in a human being might be the subjective ground of the adoption of this maxim rather than its opposite. For if this ground were ultimately no longer itself a maxim, but merely a natural impulse, the entire exercise of freedom could be traced back to a determination through natural causes– and this would contradict freedom. Whenever we, therefore, say, “The human being is by nature good” or “He is by nature evil”, this only means that he holds within himself a first ground (to us inscrutable) for the adoption of good or evil (unlawful) maxims and that he holds this ground qua human universally–in such a way, therefore, that by his maxims he expresses at the same time, the character of his species”(RBR P.46-7)(41)
This inscrutable ground for Kant (cf. Aristotle) lies in the agent’s freedom to choose. Insofar as this is innate it is only as a ground antecedent to choice in accordance with maxims. One can neither praise nor blame nature for a choice of maxims that are formed under the auspices of reason and understanding. One can, as Aristotle does, however, define human nature in terms of its powers of discourse and rationality, but this is a hylomorphic explanation and not a pure species “description”. Indeed the hylomorphic definition is equally descriptive and prescriptive.
Both discourse and rationality will be involved in the process of relating the incentive of the moral law to its maxims. This is the source of all moral praise and blame and also the reason why the disjunctive hypothetical to the effect that “The human being is by nature either morally good or morally evil” is not definitive of man’s nature, and merely refers to the experiential judgment that both possibilities, insofar as they refer to particular maxims and actions, are instantiated in the empirical world and can be experienced as such under the concepts of good and evil. These concepts, however, apply to maxims and actions, and not universally to the nature of an agent, who in the empirical world of particulars is capable of doing evil one moment and good the next.
In a section entitled “Concerning the original predisposition to good in human nature” Kant, in hylomorphic spirit, refers to three themes which in certain respects resemble the hylomorphic definition of man by Aristotle: i.e. a rational animal capable of discourse:
“The predisposition to the animality of the human being, as a living being To the humanity in him, as a living, and at the same time rational being To his personality, as a rational and at the same time responsible being” (42)
Happiness, according to Kant, (the principle of self-love in disguise), is involved at the first level of the three themes outlined above. It is involved in the self-preservation of the species, and also with the instinct for communing with other human beings. Associated with this self-love are the vices of savagery, gluttony, lust, and lawlessness. Rationality appears at the second level of our predispositions in which one begins to calculate rationally in terms of a means-ends calculus that is comparative. The vice associated with this is, Kant claims, associated with the fact that the wish for equality is so easily transposed into a desire for superiority, thereby giving rise to inclinations of rivalry and jealousy.
The third level of predispositions refers to a moral personality where respect for the moral law is predicated upon a power of choice that is the source for our praise for the cultivation of such a personality. Given the universality and necessity associated with the moral law, this personality is not grounded in the power of our sensibility and its relations to particulars, but rather on our intellectual powers of understanding and reason. This form of rationality is neither comparative nor instrumental, but rather absolute and categorical. In the section entitled “Concerning the propensity to evil in human nature” Kant
makes it clear that although there are three different levels of this propensity:
“moral evil is only possible as the determination of free power of choice and this power for its part can be judged good or evil only on the basis of its maxims, must reside in the subjective ground of the possibility of the deviation of the maxims from the moral law.” (RBR P.53)(43)
Moral corruption, for Kant, then, is merely the
“propensity of the power of choice to maxims that subordinate the incentives of the moral law to others (not moral ones)…… it reverses the ethical order as regards the incentives of a free power of choice: and although with this reversal there can still be legally good actions yet the minds attitude is thereby corrupted at its root (so far as the moral disposition is concerned) and hence the human being is designated as evil”(RBR P.54)44
Kant does not, however, characterise his position in the terms we encounter in modern Philosophical Psychology, and therefore prefers to speak not of action in relation to the will and its maxims, but rather of deeds. Actions can be reduced to particular behaviour, materially considered ,whereas deeds have a dimension of meaning that is more formal:
“The propensity to evil is a deed in the first meaning, and at the same time the formal ground of every deed contrary to law according to the second meaning (i.e. of a deed) that resists the law materially and is then called vice, and the first indebtedness remains even though the second may be repeatedly avoided (because of incentives that are not part of the law). The former is an intelligible deed, cognizable through reason alone, apart from any temporal condition: the latter is sensible, empirical, given in time” (RBR P.55)45
But what then, does it mean when one judges that “the human being is by nature evil”? Well, the judgment cannot be in terms of the materialistic concept of behaviour but must rather be on formal grounds:
“In view of what has been said above, the statement “The human being is evil” cannot mean anything else than that he is conscious of the moral law and yet has incorporated into his maxim the (occasional) deviation from it.” (RBR P.55)(46)
The quality of evil in the human being is not then derivable from the concept of the human being and is therefore not a necessary judgment:
“but rather that, according to the cognition we have of the human being through experience, he cannot be judged otherwise, in other words, we may presuppose evil as subjectively necessary in every human being, even the best. Now since this propensity must itself be considered morally evil, hence not a natural predisposition but something that a human being can be held accountable for, and consequently must consist in maxims of the power of choice contrary to the law, and yet because of freedom, such maxims must be viewed as accidental…..so we call this ground a natural propensity to evil…. we can even further call it a radical innate evil in human nature (not any the less brought upon us by ourselves) ” RBR P.56)(47)
We bring evil upon ourselves and suffer the consequences, and to the extent that our lamentations do not recognise our own responsibility, they are inauthentically projecting upon the world a fault that lies un-cognised within us. The fault line appears to run between a selfish love of oneself and a selfless appreciation of the universal and necessary worth of one’s deeds that benefit others.
Animal life and human life in a state of nature, obeys the call of sensibility, and therefore cannot be praised or blamed for the presence or absence of a moral personality. Human life in a Hobbesian state of nature is therefore not yet sufficiently conscious of its moral personality to be a subject of moral evaluation. Rousseau’s ideal picture of the noble savage, living freely and independent of the vices civilisation generates, does not, in Kant’s view, sufficiently acknowledge the vices of a state of nature, namely savagery, gluttony, lust and lawlessness.
Rousseau also, in his process of comparison, devalues the virtues of civilisation and culture: he devalues, in other words, the worth of a moral personality. There is, for Kant, no freedom in a state of nature, if that is defined in terms of the ground of a moral personality, which in turn brings with it the discourse of praise and blame in accordance with the idea of responsibility. Perhaps as man emerges from the state of nature, as one can interpret to be the case when Adam and Eve were symbolically on the verge of being banished from the Garden of Eden, one’s cognitive response to such a state of affairs is limited to a feeling of shame at ones failure to obey some external law laid down by some external being. This would appear to be a consciousness of an instrumental kind that is only partially aware of one’s own desires and self-love. Shame is rooted in the sensibilities of our body, and in the Bible, this takes the form of an awareness of being naked to the possible gaze of another, rather than being ashamed at the failure to obey God’s external law (a more intellectual form of awareness).
The Garden of Eden allegory can be interpreted in accordance with the vision of a world progressing toward a future better Kingdom of Ends that is physically instantiated in the physical world– a secular world inhabited by free individuals freely exercising their responsibility and leading happy lives because deeds of moral worth constitute not just flourishing lives but just and ordered societies.
Kant’s Kingdom of Ends contains Socratic elements of areté (virtue) and diké (justice), and Kant would see in the deed of the eating of the apple from the tree of knowledge, the declaration of a conscious human being that he/she is free to use knowledge to determine the future of their life, and such knowledge might also relate positively to the future of the species–an epistemological turn of metaphysical significance. For the Biblical view of the man possessing the flaw of “original sin”, there can be no possible positive significance in this act of man disobeying his God. In such a view the resulting judgment of the described state of affairs could only be a “Fall”. The telos of such a fall could, then, only result in the judgment of a God who will weigh mans sins on the scales of Holy Biblical Goodness on Judgment Day. For Kant, this allegory probably captures what he called the “glory of the world”. There is no “Guilt” in this allegory because no moral personality has yet been formed for man to sufficiently judge the words of his own deeds in terms of the standards of Good arrived at by a secular understanding and secular reasoning power.
The issue of the origin of evil is discussed in terms of the theoretical idea of the relation of an origin or cause to its effect. Such a discussion requires the postulation of particular events in relation to other particular events: this type of causal relation has dubious noumenal status. Reason, insofar as it seeks for the unconditioned and a totality of conditions, requires a discussion in terms of the being of the items under consideration: beings subjected to a law of causality. It is in such discussions that one attempts to end the possible infinite sequence of events generated by a law that states: “Every event must have a cause”. Kant also postulates a cause that causes itself in the sphere of practical reason under the law of freedom, and further postulates a (human) being that causes itself to constitute its deeds by constructing maxims that are universal and necessary.
Acts may be theoretically construed as events, but deeds defy this kind of theoretical determination and therefore fall under the practical law of freedom rather than the theoretical law of causality. Kant claims the following:
“If an affect is referred to a cause which is, however, bound to it according to the laws of freedom, as is the case with moral evil, then the determination of the power of choice to the production of this effect is thought as bound to its determining ground not in time but merely in the representation of reason: it cannot be derived from some preceding state or other, as must always occur, on the other hand, whenever the evil action is referred to its natural cause as event in the world. To look for the temporal origin of free actions as free (as though they were natural effects) is therefore a contradiction: and hence also a contradiction to look for the temporal origin of the moral constitution of the human being, so far as this constitution is considered as contingent, for constitution here means the ground of the exercise of freedom which(just like the determining ground of the free power of choice in general) must be sought in the representations of reason alone.” (RBR P.61-2)48
Kant also points out in a footnote the temptation to use cause-effect reasoning in order to characterise deeds as events (instead of as a representation of reason), and therefore launch the inquirer into a search for a beginning in time(an intuition of sensibility). In terms of the individual, this results in a discussion of what Kant calls “Physiological Psychology”, a discussion that assumes a causal principle in relation to evil being innate or inherited, whether it can be a kind of inherited disease (medicine), inherited guilt (law) or inherited sin(theology).
Psychology at this point in time was not yet taught as an independent subject at Universities, but one can perhaps see an attempted synthesis of a number of the various themes above, in the work of Freud the doctor, philosopher, and psychoanalyst. The presence of inherited “disease” accords with the medical model: “guilt” accords with the psychoanalytical model that postulates trauma which can also be transmitted down the generational chain. Wittgenstein pointed out in relation to Freud, who had claimed his work was Kantian, that Freud’s theoretical explanations sometimes are purely archaeological–i.e. pointing backward in time to events that happened long ago. At the same time in the practical task of therapy, Freud assumes the consciousness of the power of our free choice over our actions and the caused traumas of the past: he assumes, that is, the power of reason to free us from our past. Psychoanalytical therapy, in this respect, aims not at a “cure” in the medical sense, but rather a more philosophically oriented “talking cure”: a discourse that brings to consciousness anxiety-laden or wish laden latencies. Freud would argue that his theories have primarily therapeutic intentions, and therefore contain both archaeological and teleological elements: archaeological events and teleological deeds–things that happen to us (in our childhood, for example) and things we do (in the name of practical reasoning). There is no trace of inherited sin in either of the Freudian accounts because the history of conscious understanding and reasoning, insofar as our species is concerned, is shrouded perhaps irrevocably in the mists of the past. Whatever happened might have happened long ago, and at the dawn of consciousness. Understanding and reason i.e. might have been accompanied by an awareness of one’s own powers but that awareness as an event might not have left any unambiguously interpretable trace. It is then left to a hylomorphic reasoning process to make theoretical assumptions of a continuum of processes and states from animal-hood to manhood.
Mythology aims via a special use of symbolic language to speculate upon the origins of manhood and evil with its own very special set of sometimes contradictory assumptions, and whilst these speculations are fascinating, and have helped to awaken us from a slumbering state of consciousness, they have no doubt benefited from the critical Philosophy of Kant, and its sketch for a theory of theoretical and practical reason. Kant’s theories may not answer questions relating to the dawn of self-consciousness (and consciousness of the world), but they certainly provided the basis for the completion of the task set by the Delphic Oracle to “know ourselves”. Kant clearly articulates his position on the role of free action in relation to evil:
“Every evil action must be so considered, whenever we seek its natural origin as if the human being had fallen into it directly from the state of innocence. For whatever his previous behaviour may have been, whatever the natural causes influencing him, whether they are inside or outside him, his action is yet free and not determined through any of these causes: hence the action can and must always be judged as an original exercise of his power of choice. He should have refrained from it, whatever his temporal circumstances and entanglements: for through no cause in the world can he cease to be a free agent.”(RBR P. 62-3)49
From the mythological and divine point of view, Adam and Eve’s choice to eat the apple of knowledge was a momentous decision or choice. Mythology could have interpreted this action as either an event or a deed. Interpreting the action as an event, means interpreting it either from the point of view of a God who is the first cause of everything, (all knowing, all powerful and all good), or from the point of man, the being who is but a speck of an event in an infinite chain of events in a sublimely massive universe. The Bible chose a materialistic interpretation and described Adam’s action as an “evil”, “sinful” action that would “contaminate” the actions of the species of man until God decided to sit in judgment of all mankind at a particular point in time.
A more philosophical interpretation might, in the spirit of Kant, look upon the idea of God (all powerful, all knowing and all good) as something in the mind of the animal that dares to use his reason, knowledge, and understanding, in accordance with another idea of reason, namely freedom. This, in accordance with the Kantian idea of progress, produces the consequence of building better and better civilisations until we reach the point of the secular telos of this process: a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends. We need to remind ourselves, in the context of this discussion of Kant’s view of Enlightenment man, and man’s then-current condition, of being a lazy coward not daring to use his intellectual capacities. We should also remind ourselves of the judgment that the process of actualisation of the above Kingdom could take as long as one hundred thousand years. This is an important aspect of Kant’s thought because it introduces a note of scepticism into an otherwise idealist utopian scenario. Even in such a sceptical account, we should note that all reference to suffering and lamentation has fallen away, in spite of the recognition of the flawed form of man’s existence.
The core of Biblical mythology, it should also be noted, is the idea of an external law given by a divine lawmaker, a law which man fails to fully understand in the attempt to lead a flourishing life. It is this state of affairs that leads man instead, to a life of suffering. Freud, that student and master of human suffering, studied primitive man and in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents”, arrived at a speculative account of the origins of civilisation where a band of brothers commits an act of parricide when they murder their tyrannical father. The consequences of the transmission of the “logic of action” (murdering one’s father) down the generations will, on Freud’s reasoning, apart from other negative consequences, result in the demise of all authority figures and thus cause difficulties for the progress of civilisation toward its telos (the Kingdom of Ends). In response to this envisaged outcome, man begins to install external laws prohibiting murder and other evils that stand in the way of the progress of civilisation.
In this account, God is not yet dead simply because he is not yet, so to say, alive, owing to the fact that the idea of God has not yet been installed in the mind of a man emerging from a state of nature. Once the idea of God is active, and combined with the idea of external law, we are on the way to creating the idea of the original sinfulness of man. Freud, perusing the world around him in 1929, asks himself whether all the work we put into civilisation is worth the effort, and suggests a negative answer: an oracular judgment given the fact that his words were written on the eve of the Second World War and in the light of the atrocities that would follow.
Kant retains the idea of God in his system because he sees that Job’s lamentations over the condition of his life are symbolic of the human condition as such. Enlightenment man could well identify with a character that did everything he ought to do, but still led a life of fear and trembling because of uncontrollable external events, and the uncontrollable consequences of his own deeds. Job, of course, hoped for a flourishing life, but experiences the opposite. His faith in God, and in himself, and the hope for a better life is tested but this state of affairs is characterised in terms of faith in an external agency, process, or being. This, in Kant’s system, is testimony to the power of the internal activities of reason in the mind of a being that is a speck of existence upon an earthly speck situated in an infinite universe. For Kant, being a speck of existence in an infinite continuum of space and time is a moment in man’s consciousness or understanding of himself and his condition. This is no cause for lamentation for Kant, because freedom, the most important idea of reason, immediately celebrates the achievements of man in his intellectual arena of activity: activity that inevitably will lead to contentment on Kant’s account.
This can lead one to embrace the speculative hypothesis that man is in essence good, and only evil if tempted away from that which expresses his essence: “For how can an evil tree bear good fruit?” (RBR P.66)(50) The germ of good cannot be self-love, which is the source of evil, but is rather constituted by what Kant calls the “holiness of maxims”, that urge us to do our duty. Man finds himself on this road to the Kingdom of Ends where his condition gradually moves from the worse to the better, the further along the road he journeys. Kant evokes the importance of moral education on this journey where the aim is the transformation of the mind of man and an establishment of a good character from latent predispositions. Yet it is both these latent predispositions, and the actualisation of a moral personality that is the source of the sublime awe and admiration Kant feels about this realm of man’s being.
At the close of his essay “Religion within the boundaries of Mere Reason” Kant surveys all religions and characterises them in terms of firstly, moral religions that appeal to the work of practical reason and secondly, cults that appeal to the imagination and the “actions” of wishing for the goodness of man and flourishing life. Christianity is, for Kant, an example of a moral religion:
“According to moral religion, however, (and, of all the public religions so far known, the Christian alone is of this type) it is a fundamental principle that, to become a better human being everyone must do as much as it is in his powers to do: and only then, if a human being has not buried his innate talent(Luke 19: 12-16), if he has made use of the original predisposition to the good in order to become a better human being, can he hope that what does not lie in his power will be made good by cooperation from above.”(RBR P.71)51
This leaves man in a strange situation: standing at the boundaries of our understanding, knowledge, and reason, standing, i.e. at the limits of our freedom. In such a situation we are left with faith and hope in something that is uncertain. We do not, i.e. have knowledge of what God has done, is doing, or can do, but we do not lament as long as our deeds are worthy of God’s assistance.
Religion appeals to supernatural events and deeds in the form of miracles that perform the function of the revelation of God’s intentions and purposes: this aspect of man’s activity lies outside the boundaries of Reason. Here Kant entertains a therapeutic diagnosis of what he must regard as the excesses of religious speculation:
“Reason, conscious of its impotence to satisfy its moral needs, extends itself to extravagant ideas which might make up for this lack, though it is not suited to this enlarged domain. Reason does not contest the possibility or actuality of the objects of these ideas: it just cannot incorporate them into its maxims of thought and action…. for it is impossible to make these effects theoretically cognizable (that they are effects of grace and not immanent nature) because our use of the concept of cause and effect cannot be extended beyond the objects of experience, and hence beyond nature.”(RBR P.72)52
The prototype of the ideal holy human being has obviously never existed in reality but it is presented as an idea in the form of the Son of God, a principle of goodness. A human can only appear deficient in relation to this idea (that is an idea of reason rather than imagination) in virtue of the fact that the idea of Jesus, involves reasoning being concretely symbolised as a journey along a road of progressive goodness (an apriori idea). This is a different form of cognition to the projection of one form of existence upon another as occurs in the case when children project the form of a dragon onto dark thunder clouds flashing with lightning. The adult projection of the idea of an angry God upon this natural phenomenon is merely a more conceptual form of a fantasy embedded in basically sensible and emotional experience.
The Christian Theologian embraces a theory of change that primarily focuses upon a radical change of attitude towards the world, an attitude that involves a completely different way of seeing the world. This change, as Kant sees it, can be portrayed as deeds guided by the a priori idea of goodness or holiness or, alternatively, as events in an infinite chain of causes and effects extending temporally into the future. The moral personality behind the deeds of a person, for example, on the road to Damascus, is not necessarily filled with holiness but rather with fear and trembling tempered with hope for a good journey. A hope that contains a future that is boundlessly happy. Here too, Kant’s characterisation is Aristotelian, and navigates a course between the rocks of scepticism and the sandbanks of dogmatism. Indeed the Aristotelian concept of Eudaimonia (good spiritedness) is a fine representation of the state of soul, a representation that those who undertake journeys of moral improvement can hope for. The further along the road the good-spirited traveller journeys the more his character is shaped by the good deeds he does, and the greater his expectations of contentment with his condition can be. We ought to know that we are dust and that it is unto dust we shall return and that our hopes will finally one day be dashed into pieces: hence the fear and trembling at the fate we all must suffer. We can lament over our fate as even Jesus did on the cross when he complained about his father abandoning him. Lamentation appears to be the natural state of consciousness of hylomorphic man. Change or conversion lies on the roads to Damascus or Via Dolorosa. For the materialist, death is a passing away into nothingness, and in spite of all his misconceptions and reductions, this necessary truth is incontestable and may even be too much for humankind to bear without feeling abandoned.
The road we travel on is dusty and filled with temptations to betray the principle of Good or holiness: the Kingdom of Evil is to be found not beneath the earth in hell but upon the earth, (a place which will gladly assist in tempting man away from his mission). The traveller lifts his eyes unto the hills and heavens because it is from this source that the cathartic rain comes to purify and enliven the earth, reminding one of Paradise. Nothing appears as miraculous as this process. Miracles, however, lie beyond the gates of Reason and in such a region, if we are to believe the Bible, God can command a father to kill his son as a test of his faith. The Kantian, who believes in the autonomy and primacy of morality will see little good in such a deed and will also question “miracles” such as the virgin birth and an actual resurrection on both grounds of causality and reason.
On experiential grounds, it seems inevitable that the evil principle and the principle of good confront each other in some kind of spiritual opposition. The man on his long journey to Damascus or the Via Dolorosa hopes that the Good will triumph and that all will be well. In the secular ethical sphere, it is the public laws of the land and the virtue of its citizens that symbolise the principle of the Good. This sphere can be embedded in a political community. For Kant, it is this secular ethical sphere that constitutes a kingdom in which external coercion forces one to follow the laws of the land and the moral law. In this sphere, the individual chooses his good maxims freely and thereby contributes to the creation of this Kingdom. The interesting political consequence of such a state of affairs is that although it begins with an individual on his journey to Damascus or the Via Dolorosa, it ends with a Cosmopolitan world in which Politics withers away. A Kingdom of Ends is in no need of change and is thereby a-temporal or “timeless”. This intuitively makes sense if freedom is the North Star of the system, because it makes no sense in the Kantian world for man to live in the Kingdom of ends for “instrumental political reasons”. This Kingdom is created from the bottom, from individuals doing the right thing in the right way at the right time (areté):
“The citizen of the political community, therefore, remains, so far as the latter’s lawgiving authority is concerned, totally free: he may wish to enter with his fellow citizens into an ethical union over and above the political one, or rather remain in a natural state of this sort. Only insofar as an ethical community must rest on public laws and have a constitution based on them, must those who freely commit themselves to enter into this state, not (indeed) allow the political power to command them how to order(or not to order) such a constitution internally, but allow limitations, namely the condition that nothing be included in this constitution which contradicts the duty of its members as citizens of the state–even though, if the ethical bond is of a genuine sort, this condition need not cause anxiety.”(RBR P.107)53
The state of nature prior to the rule of law, Kant argues, is an antagonistic state, as is a judicial system in which laws regulate through coercion the evil of our deeds. There is in Kant a sense of continuity between, a tripartite division of communities into firstly, a state of nature, secondly, a civilised state ruled coercively by external laws that are in turn suggestive of moral laws, and thirdly, a cultural/ethical state constituted by the moral law. This is a developmental continuum from a human condition constituted by intuitive behaviour, to a civilised state conditioned by external law and individuals using their reason instrumentally to improve the material conditions of their existence, and ending in a cultural form of life constituted by the moral law where individuals live in a world that is either Cosmopolitan or striving toward Cosmopolitanism. Kant points out in this context that men living in a coercive civilisation can easily succumb to temptation and become instruments of the Kingdom of Evil and in this state there is:
“a public feuding between the principles of virtue and a state of inner immorality which the natural being ought to endeavour to leave behind as soon as possible”(RBR P.108)54
Kant also argues that there are higher levels of duty relating to one’s species that impose themselves upon the individual living in a Cultural form of life because the human race has a duty to progress from a civilised state to a cultural state embodying the principles of the highest good. Such a duty is embedded in a secular vision (as distinct from the clerical vision involving the lifestyle of a Son of God) of a higher moral being which resembles ,but is not identical to, the Stoic vision of the wise man, This Stoic figure, however, is, in a sense. a man of God in Kant’s world and may even feel himself to have obligations to the church as an organisation, not as a worshipper perhaps, but as a respecter of its moral universalistic intentions.
Religion for Kant is the universal institution of all faiths and Christianity is represented in this system as one faith among many. Faith is the foundation of the Church and faith can, for Kant, take two forms: rational and revealed faith. Revealed faith appears to require a command system of laws and:
“Whoever therefore gives precedence to the observance of statutory laws, requiring a revelation as necessary to religion, not indeed merely as a means to the moral disposition but as the objective condition for becoming well pleasing to God directly, and whoever places the striving for a good life-conduct behind the historical faith(whereas the latter, as something which can be well-pleasing to God conditionally ought to be directed to the former, which also pleases God absolutely) whoever does this transforms the service of God into mere fetishism.”(RBR P.173)55
External divine statutes, rules of faith and ritual observances constitute revealed faith and transforms genuine religion into an artificial pursuit that robs a man of his freedom, placing him under a slavish yoke of faith. Here praying, if by that we mean a mere declaration of wishes to a being who has no need of information concerning our wishes, is a superstitious delusion that provides no service to God. Praying and church going, on the Kantian account merely contributes superficially to the edification of the worshipper:
“because they hope that that moral edifice will rise up of itself, like the walls of Thebes, to the music of sighs and ardent wishes.”(RBR P.189 ftnt.)56
Presumably Kant’s judgment upon the content of sermons will depend on whether they aim at superstitious revelation or words that will fortify ones moral personality against the temptations of the sensible external world: the sermons content will depend, that is, upon whether the priest aims at edifying an endless curiosity about the mystery of God or whether he is aiming to strengthen the moral personality.
The churchgoer brings his experience of the world into his church. His soul might be in a wretched and miserable state and seek a partner in lamentation over his lot. He may be asking “Why?” or “Why me?” Insofar as he may receive answers to these questions they may be fundamentally grounded in the myths of the Bible. Catharsis, if it occurs, occurs by immolating his desires in the language of the service: a language that is the language of confession and avowal. Answers will not necessarily be rational and in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason, but rather aim at conceptualising the experience the worshipper brings to the language of the service. The work will be done by the imagination and understanding of the worshipper, perhaps as a preparation for theological reasoning where the worshipper’s experience has been stabilised by conceptualisation and related processes of judgment. In this process, the “Why me?” question, uttered in the name of self-concern or self-love, falls by the wayside and the “Why?” question requires abstract and universal answers, relating to one’s freedom and responsibility. The primacy of the moral law emerges as the organising principle of a discourse that has left the “logic” of the faith in revelation behind. This story about the Son of God and his life here on earth becomes ,in Paul Ricoeur’s sense of the term, “symbolic”, referring to a semi-rational vision of the origin and the end of the cosmos and the origin and end of evil. Insofar as the end of evil is concerned, the individual’s task becomes one of moral conversion on the roads to Damascus or the Via Dolorosa. The question as to the task of the species becomes then, perhaps, the practically slow process of the construction of a Kingdom of Ends–a very secular end to a process that begins in the early ancient mists of religion and philosophy.
Prophecies relating to the future made in the present hang like questions in the air until sufficient time elapses to prove their worth. The oracular prophecies, e.g. “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”, “Nothing too much”, and the decisive importance of “Knowing thyself” have stood the test of millennia and still stand as significant challenges on the road to the Kingdom of Ends. Freud in his work “the Future of an Illusion” warns us about the pitfalls of predicting the future and he has the following to say about the “journey” of civilisation toward a culture:
Human civilisation, by which I mean all those respects in which human life has raised itself above its animal status and differs from the life of the beasts—and I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilisation– presents, as we know, two aspects to the observer. It includes on the one hand all the knowledge and capacity that men have acquired in order to control the forces of nature and extract its wealth for the satisfaction of human beings, and, on the other hand, all the regulations necessary in order to adjust the relations of men to one another and especially the distribution of the available wealth.The two trends of civilisation are not independent of each other, firstly, because the mutual relations of men are profoundly influenced by the amount of instinctual satisfaction which the existing wealth makes possible: secondly, because an individual man can himself come to function as wealth in relation to another one, in so far as the other person makes use of his capacity for work, or chooses him as a sexual object: and thirdly, moreover, because every individual is virtually an enemy of civilisation, though civilisation is supposed to be an object of universal human interest. It is remarkable that, little as men are able to exist in isolation, they should nevertheless feel as a heavy burden the sacrifices which civilisation expects of them in order to make a communal life possible. Thus civilisation has to be defended against the individual, and its regulations, institutions, commands are directed to that task.”(Freud Future of an Illusion, 1927, P.184)(57)
This is indeed post enlightenment pessimism where hope for the future, it seems, has attenuated to a pinpoint of light. Kant we know distinguished clearly between civilisation and culture, reserving for the latter, the task of promoting the moral worth of the individual. Freud focuses instead on the Hobbesian transition-stage between firstly, a stage of nature where all are at war against all, and secondly, the commodious living of the kind of civilisation envisaged by Hobbes. Freud’s view of the individual and his civilisation, post-enlightenment in character though it might be, is not post-modernist because the modernism we find in the above is rooted in the systematic attempt Freud made throughout his writings to meet the oracular challenge of “Know thyself!”.
Hobbes in his political philosophy was more interested in Power than the Goods we find in our ideas of justice and virtue and he thus, along with Descartes, certainly qualifies for the title as the first of the “new men” of the modern era that Arendt referred to in her work “Origins of Totalitarianism”. Both Hobbes and Descartes wished to overturn the teachings of Aristotle, and their forms of materialism and dualism were amongst the targets of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. The materialism of Hobbes’ “motions of the mind” caused by sense and the imagination seems, at first sight, however, to have been resurrected in Freud’s account but this is only one dimension of Freud’s multi-dimensional account. Freud, in spite of calling himself a Kantian Psychologist, does not appeal to Kantian concepts and ideas, preferring instead to look for inspiration from Platonic and Greek sources: the concepts, Eros, Thanatos, Ananke and Logos are the major ideas of his latest system. Eros and Thanatos are the giants battling for the fate (Ananke) of civilisation and Logos is the “God-principle” which can not deliver the salvation and/or consolation promised by religious theorising. The attitude recommended by Freud is that of stoical resignation to the inevitable discontentment that arises when the God-principle is best pictured as a “Deus absconditis”. There is, however, no contradiction, in hoping for the telos of a Kantian end-in-itself that lies one hundred thousand years in the future. Freud might, however, contest the advice that we can hope for this end, given the triumphs of Thanatos over Eros during what Arendt called the “terrible century”. He did not live to experience the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis and the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations by the USA, but given the tenor of his reflections he probably would not have been surprised by these developments within 6 years of his death. He might, however, have been nonplussed at the role scientists played in both of these catastrophes. In such catastrophic contexts religious dogma was alternatively described as a psychosis or neurosis in Freud’s writings. Kantian religious ethics, however, appears to escape just these kinds of criticism but might still be susceptible to the accusation that hoping for happiness in the kinds of contexts we find ourselves surrounded by, is, to say the least otiose. The following is Freud’s view of the task of civilisation:
“One thus gets the impression that civilisation is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilisation itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed……. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the source of dissatisfaction with civilisation by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be the golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realised. It seems rather that every civilisation must be built up on coercion and renunciation of instinct: it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. On has, I think, to reckon that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behaviour in human society.”(P.185)58
The above is a pessimistic analysis of mass-society which has a distinctively Hobbesian tone. Freud goes on to claim that control of the majority by the minority is necessary because of the laziness and aggression of most men. Kant, in his essay “Perpetual Peace”, pointed to the “melancholic haphazardness” of everyday social activity, and also claimed that man with his desire for individual happiness needed a master to guide him in the civilisation-building process, but that he nevertheless did not want anyone “mastering” him. In the work— “The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action, Vol 3. James, M., R.,D., it is maintained that:
The Kantian move from a state of nature ruled by the voice of God/Instinct resulted in a civilisation that, according to Freud is characterised by universal discontent in spite of the hard work of generations of civilisation builders, some of whom have achieved the status of enduring voices or gods because of their influential activities and judgements. Ordinary men, according to the voices taking us out of the state of nature, “fell” from Grace in choosing to embark upon the path of civilisation building rather than remaining in a state of status quo following the calls of nature. Some forms of discontentment obviously were in accordance with this religious form of disappointment with man, but some forms of discontentment takes the Freudian form of wondering whether all the work is worth the effort. Some forms of discontentment take the more optimistic Kantian form which acknowledges that the end to the cultural journey is 100,000 years in the future and although normal life manifests the features of what Kant called “melancholic haphazardness”, there is a way of life that looks to this distant future with hope in the heart. For Kant, we are in the beginning of a process of perfecting our powers of rationality, and perhaps we ought to reckon with erratic attempts to solve the aporetic problem of the pursuit of the flourishing life. We can see in Kant’s work a classical Greek conflict between the nature of man, and the moral demands of areté and diké. Only a civil constitution of sufficient moral complexity can resolve this conflict: a constitution that presumably includes an enlightened upbringing as well as enlightened educational and political systems. None of these conditions have managed to permanently establish themselves. (P.216-7)(59)
The Aristotelian perspective of the transition from a state of nature to civilisation, includes seeing how villages emerge from our previously nomadic existence. A concern for justice and law obviously replace the belief that nomads had in one God to guide them on their endless journeys. Villages needed to grow into cities before the level of self sufficiency required political rather than religious reflections upon the conditions of existence for the polis. It is interesting to note that, in one of the earliest reflections upon the conditions of existence of the polis, namely Plato’s Republic, Socrates drew an important distinction between a healthy small city and a “fevered” larger city where a desire for luxury encourages a lack of regulation of our appetites and compromises our ability to do the right thing at the right time in the right way (areté). Socrates was obviously being to some extent naive in his argument and ignoring what for Aristotle was a necessary movement toward the self sufficiency large numbers of people demanded in their attempts to build civilisations and a philosophically motivated culture. Luxuries stimulate the sense and imagination that Hobbes embraced in his concept of “commodious living” and probably the far sighted oracles of Greece saw this problem coming in their Challenge to Humanity, “Nothing too much”. The risks our civilisation runs with the marginalisation of reason in favour of sense and imagination, are many, including that of an overworked imagination concerning itself unnecessarily with imagined enemies, and their imagined intentions , as well as the unnecessary expenditure of wars and constant preparations for wars when there is peace.
Freud’s reflections upon life in a state of nature took us back to the nomadic horde where violence and sexuality were unregulated by any concern for law and order. In such a totem-taboo society, acts of parricide eventually led to the establishment of rules that were necessary for the leader to perform his duties for the group. Work and love were necessary to lift us out of this primitive form of existence, and luxuries emerged as a transitional form of reward for reality-based activities. For Freud, the emergence of Consciousness as a vicissitude of instinct, was necessary for a movement away from imagination based images, toward a reality-based thought that obeyed the reality principle or what he referred to as his “God”, Logos.
The agency of the Ego is obviously important in such a shift away from the rule of the imagination which wishes for immediate gratification rather than the roundabout route of the reality principle that requires delays in gratification perhaps for even long periods of time. It is to the Ego and Superego that Freud looks to regulate mans aggressive tendencies. We should recall, however, that it is the defence mechanism of identification that is responsible for the installation of the superego, and it is not love, but fear for the loss of love, that initiates the desire to be like the figure that one identifies with. Fear has a complex relation to the imagination which is not necessarily regulated by reality and perhaps this can be neutralised by the love the Ego has for the figure identified with. Freud, however, is well aware of the power and cruelty of the superego that desires to “master” the Ego. It is Logos and Ananke that provide us with the Freudian world-view that will seek to understand and motivate the work we need to do on the battlefield where Eros and Thanatos are locked in struggle. For Kant, on the other hand, it is respect for the moral law, and the willingness to do what we ought to do in the spirit of doing ones duty, that is the only effective regulator of the passions and the appetites. It is this allegiance to ones dignity that will ensure that we are not just engaging upon civilisation-building activities, but also culture-creating deeds.
Freud might, in this context ,point to another defence mechanism that needs to be involved if we are to postpone the selfish satisfactions that have accompanied our pre-cultural commitments . Sublimation is a defence mechanism which uses a non-sexual form of substitute satisfaction and is particularly prominent in aesthetic contexts where artists are working in an arena where the telos is not a kingdom of ends, but rather a universal form of pleasure that arises from the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and the understanding. Sublimation is also a complex psychological phenomenon suggesting as it does a link to the ethical phenomena of shame and modesty which are essentially reaction-formations concerned with the narcissistic projection of something ideal.
Whether this is the core of the Kantian commitment to the dignity of the moral agent is an issue which may not be resolved by Freudian fundamental archeological concerns. This Kantian commitment to dignity is a teleological concern and teleological judgements relating to what man ought to do, obviously have a different logical structure to archeological judgements relating to the human nature of man. Much depends upon what exactly Freud means to include in his idea of Logos. If normative concerns related to action and the deeds of man, are a part of his account of the meaning of Logos, then practical knowledge must be included in this sphere of meaning. The dignity of man, in this case, must be a substitute satisfaction available to the Ego: a form of consequential intellectual pleasure that only attaches to the good-in-itself as a part of the good-spirited flourishing life that the ego strives after and hopes for. This, for many, may be a part of the positive aspect of sublimation which has little to do with defence mechanisms and everything to do with the healthy psuché or form of life. The Greeks distinguished between the goods of the external world, the goods for the body, and the goods for the soul . Psuché concerns both the goods for the body and the goods for the soul, or in Kant’s terminology, the goods for the faculty of sensibility and the goods for the understanding and reason. For Kant the distinction between the good-in-its consequences and the good-in-itself is very much connected to the consequences of a well functioning body and the good in itself of the moral worth of the soul.
Kant’s account of the Sublime is an account of our relation to the magnitude and might of Nature. In the latter case the threat of the might of nature, whether it be in the form of bold overhanging rocks, a tempestuous sea, or a mighty waterfall, appears to our sensible nature as fearful even if we are not directly in danger from these objects of nature. Even the prospect of dangerous circumstances is sufficient to cause pain, and this usually results in the energy regulation principle (the regulation of the instincts) attempting to restore a state of homeostasis, and conserve energy for what Freud called “special action”. This is accompanied by the complex desire of the soul for a kind of understanding of this situation, which recognises the power of the human psuché or form of life. It is at this point that the good-in-itself for the soul appears in the form of an appreciation of the moral power we possess, and its independence of the power of nature. This response is symbolic because it rises above the dominion of nature, and its causes and effects(consequences). The dominion of the soul, in other words, is the dominion of the moral good-in-itself for the soul. It is important to note that the pure consequential thinking related to feeling safe (because even though the circumstances are dangerous there is no immediate causal danger), is not at issue in this form of thoughtful deliberative response, which is detached from means-ends calculative thinking.
The religious response, which sees the presence of a mighty God in the rocks, sea or waterfall, is also a form of causal/consequential thinking that would leave the experiencer in a state of fear that is not surpassed by the above response of contentment with oneself as a worthwhile moral agent living in a moral world with dignity. Indeed instrumental calculative means-ends thinking and reasoning, may be civilisation building activities, but these are to do with the goods in the external world and not the goods for the soul. An aesthetic response to such forces of nature, too, would be inappropriate given the presence of dangerous circumstances: a feeling of pleasure arising from the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and understanding, in such dangerous circumstances, would be more ridiculous than sublime. Kant has fixed upon the only cultural response possible in these circumstances, and the question that remains is, whether Freud would have accepted this meaning of logos in relation to the “mechanism” of sublimation.
Now whilst his relation to Kant is in a sense clear insofar as the arena of Philosophical Psychology is concerned, given that he claimed to be a Kantian Psychologist, it is, on the other hand, a little less clear what his relation to ancient Greek Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics consisted in. What we know is that the Platonic ideas of Eros, Thanatos and Ananke are used to articulate the relation of the instincts to an appropriate world-view shorn of religious commitment. The question remains: What is Freud’s relation to the categorical ideas of areté, diké, etc?: doing the right thing in the right way at the right time in relation to an idea of justice which is connected to the telos of getting what one deserves, are both related to the Greek idea of arché, which means “principle”. These latter ideas might also be a part of the Freudian framework of “logos”. If both the Kantian and the Greek view of ethics is a part of the “logos” of Freud, (part, that is of the ideas of the strong ego and the integrated superego and ego), then the idea of the “mechanism” of sublimation has a teleological structure connected to its archeological instinctual characterisation. This synthesis of the archeological and the teleological also evokes the Aristotelian theory of change which could be used to determine the “logic” of “sublimation”. The suggestion therefore is, that the Freudian “logos” is best conceived of firstly, hylomorphically and, secondly, in accordance with the Kantian critical framework which includes many hylomorphic themes .
Let us look more closely into the Kantian critical position insofar as it links to thinking and the activities of the ego and the instincts. This requires, of course forming an understanding of the relation of Transcendental Psychology to Transcendental Philosophy.
Kant begins his work “Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view” with a discussion of consciousness of one’s self:
“The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this, he is a person and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person–i.e. through rank and dignity an entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes. This holds even when he cannot yet say “I” because he still has it in thoughts, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of “I”. For this faculty (namely to think) is understanding. But it is noteworthy that the child who can already speak fairly fluently nevertheless first begins to talk by means of “I” fairly late (perhaps a year later) in the meantime speaking of himself in the third person (Karl wants to walk, to eat etc.). When he starts to speak by means of the “I” a light seems to dawn on him, as it were, and from that day on he never again returns to his former way of speaking. Before he merely felt himself now he thinks himself. The explanation of this phenomenon might be rather difficult for an anthropologist.”(Anthropology P. 15)(60)
Indeed it might be more or less difficult for the anthropologist to talk about thinking at all, but especially difficult if his methodology of detection /description/explanation of the phenomenon he is observing is confined to third person language which as Hume suggested finds it impossible to “find” the self that needs description or explanation.
As we know Hume’s work awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, where his theorising was orbiting in a universe that included the sun of reason and the moon of sensibility. The faculty of the understanding in the university of the mind, which embraces the self and causality, was clearly missing in Kant’s universe as it was in Hume’s account, which also claimed that we not only cannot observe a self, we cannot observe and describe “causality”, because all we “see” are two independent events juxtaposed in time. Hume was, of course merely the medium for the transmission of an empirical philosophy that could not see the Cartesian rational wood for the trees. Empiricists could not see that there was a form of “logic” concerned with universality and necessity, a form that required categories of judgment if this transcendental logic was to reach into the world we sensibly experience. This “logic” also required, as Kant pointed out in his First Critique that the “I think” must accompany all our representations, and this includes representations of the sensory world in terms of the categories of judgments.
Kant then found the initial division of the university of the mind into the faculties of sensibility, imagination, and reason, to be inadequate to resolve the philosophical disputes of his time, especially those between the empiricists and the rationalists: thus his introduction of the understanding with its categories of judgments. Rationalists like Descartes, who tried to account for all mental activity in terms of the imagination (he tried to imagine away his body!) and secondly a form of logic (mathematical?) was also a target for Kant’s Critical Philosophy. The Empiricist response to Descartes was well characterised by the Analytical Philosopher R. S. Peters in his essay “Observationalism in Psychology”:
“They put a salutory stress on observation as opposed to a deduction from axioms and substituted for Descartes simple natures, sensory atoms collected by simply looking at Nature. They maintained not only that scientific laws were descriptions of invariable sequences of these sensory atoms but that things also, including ourselves and others, were clusters of such sense-data built up as a matter of psychological fact, by correlating such atomic sense data. Hume’s isolated and incorrigible impressions served a singular epistemological function. Locke and Hume established a tradition both of psychology and philosophy and the psychological tradition was strongly influenced by their philosophical views about the correct way of obtaining knowledge.”(Psychology and Ethical Development R S Peters P.28)(61)
Ideally one might have hoped that Kant’s Critical Philosophy would have put both Philosophy and Psychology on the track already beaten out by Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory. This did not happen. Instead, a Heraclitean/Hegelian dialectic was used to beat out a new path that would form our modern world into a flux of materialistically and dualistically constituted phenomena. On this path, there is located the event of Psychology breaking its philosophical moorings, in order to reconcile the scientific method with the so-called “subject-matter” of consciousness. In the opening quote from Kant and in the following passages of his Anthropology, we find Kant speaking of consciousness hylomorphically as a form of mental activity. When it, was discovered by the early Psychologists, in the late nineteenth century, that the experimental method could not say anything meaningful about the concept of consciousness, in spite of the definition of Psychology as the science of consciousness, there was an opportunity to return to the Kantian idea of consciousness being a “form” or a principle of mental activity. Instead, what happened was an alliance of a methodological obsession with the scientific materialists, and a new subject matter was sought for and found, namely behaviour. Behaviour, it was argued, could be observed and described/explained from a third-person point of view, and for a second time in philosophical history(Hume’s failure to “observe” the self, being the first) the self was analytically removed from Philosophy and Philosophical Psychology. Support for this removal came from a scientific method that had developed since the time of Francis Bacon, characterised thus by R S Peters:
“The inductive account of scientific method which is an alternative way of stating observationalism, postulated the careful and meticulous collection of data by “pupils of Nature”, the cautious generalisation which must not go beyond the data, and the “interpretation” which emerged when a judicious man like Francis Bacon surveyed the tables of classified data. This picture of the scientists in action combined with the Kantian aphorism that a discipline is as scientific as it contains mathematics led to the tacit acceptance of the view that the scientist proceeds by observing events in Nature, measuring them, noticing correlations or laws between sets of measurements, and finally relating laws under theories.”(P. 28)(62)
So here we have three leading navigational stars guiding scientific activity: observation, subject matter, and measurement. Kant would not have objected to these guidelines per se, if they were accompanied by an appropriate attitude that was not that of a student of nature obsessing over a method and measurements that are being made. These guidelines, he might have argued, could occur in another context of a determined judge armed with his a priori concepts and principles, putting his questions to Nature and demanding answers that were informative, before making a final judgment. It is interesting to note that behind this putatively “objective” characterisation of the scientist as a student of Nature, there is a psychological profile that may be prejudicial to the outcome of the investigative process. Putting this investigative process into the context of a legal tribunal and the law, widens the scope of how investigations proceed. The judge in the tribunal is waiting to be presented with evidence of the breach of the law. He is not a student waiting for the evidence to inform him what the law is. The law is the apriori principle in this process. He puts questions to the witnesses and to legal counsel when the law requires more information. This is Kant’s context: a context of discovery (questio factii) guided by a context of justification (questio Juris). (63)
In the Empirical idea of the appropriate context, we see that the context of discovery is primary and the context of explanation/justification virtually non-existent, hence the priority of sense and imagination over understanding and reason. The difference between these two types of context and types of theory could not be greater and resembles the difference between categorical and hypothetical forms of judgment. One might also add in parenthesis here that the type of Science proposed by Bacon’s inductive method is more suitable for the kind of Science Bell, the physicist, conducted in relation to his theory of gases than it was for the type of science we find in Newton’s Principia. The very title of Newton’s work, “Principles” is itself suggestive of its philosophical priorities (he called his investigations “Natural Philosophy”). Newton’s law of the conservation of matter and energy are not a result of the observation of matter and energy in reality but rather possessed a transcendental a priori character.
Kant continues his characterisation of the “I” in the “Anthropology” in an Aristotelian hylomorphic spirit, by referring to its occurrence in child development. He points to the fact that when the child begins to think from the first-person point of view, there is a risk of egoism which must be transcended by what he calls pluralism, if the child is to proceed with his life in a spirit of understanding and reason, insofar as his fellow humans are concerned:
“The opposite of egoism can only be pluralism, that is the way of thinking that is not concerned with oneself as the whole world, but rather regards and conducts oneself as a mere citizen of the world. This much belongs to anthropology.”(A P. 18)64
Here, two important points emerge. Firstly Kant immediately locates theory in an ethical context of justification. Secondly, he is suggesting that the source of objectivity, universality, and necessity resides in this “I” that appears to be both a theoretical and a practical entity. This flies in the face of both empiricism and rationalism, and the tendency of both positions to see in the difference between the theoretical and practical, a fundamentally divided mind: a knowing mind and a desiring mind. The above quote also, in referring to oneself as a citizen of the world, is clearly suggesting that practical reasoning and understanding are going to be important components in both ethics and political philosophy.
Kant then continues his reflections, by characterising the theoretical aspect of the “I think” that accompanies all our representations. He invokes the role of voluntary consciousness and characterises this power or capacity in two ways. Firstly, I can pay attention to my representations in order to allow the imagination, or what he calls the act of apperception, to connect the representation we are focusing upon with other representations. Secondly, I also possess the power to abstract in relation to the representation I am paying attention to, and thereby prevent connection with certain other representations. It is this latter power that is responsible for the universality of a concept insofar as Aristotle is concerned: in this theory, the concept abstracts from the differences between objects and events in the world that fall under the concept’s extension. It does this in accordance with the knowledge that an organiser of representations has of the form or principle of the object or event designated by the concept. The concept is thus acquired through the discriminatory power of perception in conjunction with the comparative and selective power of the memory of a number of associated representations that have in turn been connected perhaps by the role of imagination in the multi-layered sequence of cognitive activities leading up to the act of apperception in which the “I” thinks about the manifold conceptually. Kant illustrates this process in his First Critique by referring to the concept of body:
“The concept of body, for instance as the unity of the manifold which is thought through it, serves as a rule in our knowledge of outer appearances. But it can be a rule for intuitions only insofar as it represents in any given appearance the necessary reproduction of their manifold, and thereby signifies unity in our consciousness of them. The concept of body, in the perception of something outside us, necessitates the representation of extension, and thereby with Representation of impenetrability, shape, etc.” (Critique of Pure Reason A106)(65)
Here we are taken on an excursion into the theoretical hinterland of transcendental Philosophy and, by implication, transcendental psychology, for which there are two different deductions, one objective and one subjective. In the subjective deduction from the first edition of the work, the powers of the subject are characterised in terms of three syntheses: a synthesis of apprehension, a synthesis of reproduction attributed to the imagination, and a synthesis of recognition in a concept attributed to the understanding. The transcendental act of apperception of the “I think” is not a part of the subjective deduction, but it is clearly a part of the process of understanding that arrives at a conceptualisation of the object. The objective deduction concentrates upon the transcendental conditions of experience, in particular on the notions of an objective necessary unity of the “I think” or self-consciousness, that is related to the logical or categorical forms of judgment that aim at knowledge or justified true belief. This reference to the categories of judgment ensures that our concepts truly conceptualise something, namely an external object or event in the external world. The subjective deduction, it has to be said, sometimes reminds one of what philosophers today call the context of discovery, namely, a bottom-up approach toward knowledge in which an account of the process by which we acquire knowledge is, of course, important. The objective deduction, on the other hand, reminds us of the context of explanation/justification in which the attitude of a sober determined judge of nature replaces that of a curious hypothetically minded student of nature that cites the workings of an actualisation process in which powers build upon powers.
The effect of the two deductions on the reader is prodigious and contributes to a context of justification in which we are made aware of the fact that the conceptual form of self-consciousness is related universally and necessarily to the conviction that we are dealing with an objective world where objects and events really exist in the form in which we are experiencing them (i.e. are empirically real). Reality, of course, is also noumenal, and thereby not characterisable or transcendentally ideal, as Kant puts it, but he adds that we can only think such a reality, not know that it exists: there is, in other words, no proof or possible demonstration of noumenal reality.
The opening reference to consciousness in the Anthropology is undoubtedly a part of the subjective deduction of the categories of judgment, but it is important nevertheless, to note that there is, firstly, an imaginative component that connects representations which resemble each other in some respect, as well as secondly, an understanding component which can and does abstain from this connection of resemblance, in favour of a rule of a concept that abstracts from the differences between objects and events, and the representations of them we experience in space and time. The rule of the concept, then, represents what these objects and events have in common, i.e. resemblance supervenes after the work and not before, as Hume claimed in his theory of the association of impressions. It is important to note that the rule is like a principle or a law in that it assists in the process of picking out objects or events that can then be subsumed under the law or principle: the concept behaves judiciously and not hypothetically because the process simultaneously justifies or explains the process of subsumption.
In the objective deduction, Kant speaks of the figurative synthesis of the imagination and an intellectual synthesis of the understanding. We discussed in the previous essay, the aesthetic judgment in which judgments of free beauty are made at a pre-conceptual stage. The final explanation or justification of such judgments is, as we noted, subjective, based on a feeling of the harmony of the free play of the faculties of the imagination and the understanding. This judgment expresses what one feels rather than what one thinks in the context of explanation/justification. This is why we are disinterested i.e. not interested in the existence of the object: intellectual interest is always in the context of the truth that is necessarily related to the existence of objects and events. When, in the case of an aesthetic judgment, we speak with a universal voice about our feeling, we are not claiming to share knowledge of a truth but rather hoping that all subjects use their common sense or an imaginative power we all hold in common.
The shift from deliberating about the “I” as a theoretical entity to deliberation about it as a practical entity occurs almost seamlessly in the Anthropology when Kant states the following:
“To be able to abstract from a representation, even when the senses force it on a person, is a far greater faculty than that of paying attention to a representation, because it demonstrates a freedom of the faculty of thought and the authority of the mind in having the object of ones representations under ones control….In this respect, the faculty of abstraction is much more difficult than that of attention, but also more important when it concerns sense representations.”(Anthropology P. 20)66
This is an excellent transition into practical transcendental psychology and there are in this discussion clear connections to our earlier discussions on observation, when Kant discusses the mental condition of melancholia that he connects with the obsessional concern of observing oneself. Sufferers from melancholia, Kant argues, speak as if they are listening to themselves and seem to want to present outwardly an illusion of their personality. Naturally, the representations of such mentally unstable people arouse the suspicions of those around them, who come to believe that they are witnessing an intention to deceive. Kant comments further:
“This eavesdropping on oneself is either already a disease of the mind (melancholy) or leads to one and to the madhouse.”(A P. 22)67
Kant also explains why this obsession is unhealthy. There is not a stable “something” to think about–representations come and go in Heraclitean fashion, and the river of our representations runs on and on without any organising activity of an “I think”. The “I think” not only fixes attention on a particular representation (thinks something) but proceeds further in accordance with the category of judgments to seek the truth by thinking something about something, in an operation Heidegger referred to as a veritative synthesis. It appears from this that Kant was well ahead of his time in suggesting that serious mental disease (psychosis) is to be philosophically characterised in terms of deficiency of the conceptual power of the understanding.
Freud claimed that his Psychoanalytical theory was Kantian, and it might have been partly this ontological characterisation of mental disease that he was thinking about when he proclaimed an alliance with Kant. Certainly the Freudian triumvirate of principles: the energy regulation principle (regulating the energy levels of neuronal and organic systems), the pleasure-pain principle (regulating desires) and the reality principle (regulating our relation to the external physical world and society), is an echo of Aristotelian hylomorphic thought, but it also contains substantial elements of Kantian thinking. Kant, for example, speaks about “obscure” representations that are not conscious and this clearly anticipates the Freudian ideas of the preconscious and unconscious mind.
Kant, however, believes that the study of such representations do not belong to the study of what he calls, “pragmatic anthropology” which is defined in terms of the investigation of what man as a free-acting being makes of himself (or should make of himself). Obscure representations fall, rather into the domain of physiological anthropology that is defined in scientific terms of what nature makes of man. Such scientific investigations can be observation-based or purely speculative. Kant points out that observations are limited, because the observer must know how to let nature run its course before making any judgment. Speculative physiological anthropology is, according to Kant, merely a waste of time.
Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, which Freud himself burned, probably falls in the categories of both observation-based and speculative Psychology. In his more mature reflections, however, Freud taught us about the death instinct, and how man fashions the weapons of his own destruction in his own mind by failing to conceptualise his world adequately. There is a reliance instead on a form of imagining that connected representations in terms of what he called the principle of the primary process. Imagining is, of course, “thinking” in the popular sense of the term, especially when it is in immediate proximity to the operation of a will that, for example, is intent on killing itself, but it is not so for Kant, who would probably classify this form of pathological activity of the imagination as an obscure form of representation. (The law, as we know, used to classify the death of those who commit suicide in terms of the description “whilst the balance of the mind was disturbed”). Clear and distinct representation is what brings order into a disordered world, viewed from the perspective of the categories and concepts of the understanding.
There are of course levels of understanding ranging from the judgments of common sense, where rules are applied judiciously to cases, to the judgments of the man of science, like Freud, who understands the nature and origins of the rules (their universality and necessity) and their a priori nature. “Primary process “thinking””, in Kant’s ontological scheme would fall into the class of things and events that happen to man, and this is the reason why “thinking” is placed in quotation marks. This form of activity belongs more to the faculty of sensibility when it is following the pleasure-pain principle than to the faculties of understanding and reason that follow what Freud calls the “Reality Principle”.
Freud’s characterisation of the death instinct operating in melancholia, (a condition he found so difficult to treat because patients suffering from this malady were so intent upon self-destruction), refers to instinctive primary process mental activity which is the psychical representation of an endosomatic continuously flowing source of stimulation that can be analysed into:
an impetus (a relation to energy regulation) an aim (to abolish the source of the stimulus that is disturbing the equilibrium of the organism) an object (that through which the aim is actually achieved) a source (the somatic activity responsible for the stimulation)68
If we are dealing with a balanced mind, instinct may be modified by firstly, the perception of the environment, secondly, the development of speech (e.g. the acquisition and use of the “I”) and thirdly, learning processes that teach the agent to postpone the motor discharge of the stimulation, thus exchanging a certain ambiguous pleasure of the moment for a more lasting long term pleasure in the future. What we witness in such a process is the installation in the mind of the Reality Principle (Freud’s term) that, for Kant, would be partly accounted for by the accompanying of all representations by the “I think”. This mental activity for Freud would be involved in the formation of the mental agency he refers to as the “ego”, whose first task and priority is to protect the body from harm. It is this agency of the mind that is lacking in the melancholic when his seemingly bottomless unhappiness causes him to want to end his life, in what Kant would regard as an unethical act (on the grounds that it is a practical contradiction to use one’s life to end one’s life).
We can see in the above characterisation of the formation of the ego, the role of mourning which will always be involved when we are dealing with the loss of an object of our desires. The giving up of the uncertain ambiguous pleasure of the moment is not just a momentary mechanical automatic switch from one mode of operation to another, but rather a long drawn out work of de-cathecting one type of object and cathecting or investing energy in another type of object. It is this type of mental work that it is so difficult to persuade the melancholic to engage in, because there is in Kantian language no “I”, or “ego”, to do the work concerned. We should recall in the context of this discussion that melancholia (depression) is a serious mental disorder characterised by psychiatry as a psychosis. Other forms of mental illness where there is an “I”, but it is not fully formed, are easier to treat, and are called neuroses by psychiatrists. Here, rather, the ego is supposed enslaved by the imagination and its pleasures and pains. The pleasures and pains of a developed ego are organised in accordance with time conditions where memories of traumatic events will fade naturally with the passing of time: such fading memories will not flood consciousness every time they are remembered.
Kant did not dive into the depths of the logic of the emotions and attempt to identify regions of the mind such as the unconscious, as Freud did, but it should also be remembered that Freud’s work in this area was a response to the needs of his mentally ill patients. Avoidance of anxiety for Freud was also the mark of certain representations that had difficulty in emerging into the system of consciousness.
Much of Freud’s later work was devoted to mapping the so-called “defence mechanisms” of the mind that continue to prevent emotionally charged representations from “surfacing” in consciousness. This was in itself an important discovery because a major condition of learning is that when one is learning, what one is learning about must in some sense be present to consciousness.
Instincts, for Freud, express the body to the mind, and sexuality is obviously an important activity of the body, considering its special relation to both reproduction and the biological/psychological pleasure associated with it. Sexuality and imagination are also intimately related, and in Freud’s theory are associated with the primary process (of imaging). The “agent” of this process is probably not correctly termed an “I” or a self, but is perhaps better characterised as a narcissistic centre of mental activity in which distinctions between subject and object are characteristically blurred. Here, the centre of activity is the sole source of pleasure which, if denied, can result in the centre treating itself as an object and even destroying itself in an ultimate act of hatred. There are also obvious connections between narcissism and sexuality, but a full explanation of this relationship requires a hylomorphic approach to the development of sexuality, the ego, and its partner, the superego. In the process of this development the libido–“that force by which the sexual instinct is represented in the mind”– must be part of a larger life-force which will assist in transforming libido, from an auto-erotic force connected to an organ of pleasure, into a love for objects devoid of the hate and aggression typical of those suffering from narcissistic personality disorders. In Freud’s theories, the libido can be “sublimated” during phases or stages where pleasure locations shift from different regions of the body to the mind as a whole that Freud prefers to characterise in terms of his “agencies”, the ego and the superego. We mentioned that the first task of the ego was to protect the body, but it’s higher more conscious functions (requiring learning and knowledge) are to love and to work in ways which are “pluralistic”, to use Kant’s expression from the Anthropology, or “anaclitic” to use Freud’s term. This process of moving from organ pleasure to object choice purged of all narcissistic influence is hylomorphic. The moving of pleasure from region to region of the body and finally into the mind of the subject is guided by the pleasure-pain principle or what Aristotle would call “form”. The preparedness to give up this “form” of organising pleasure indicates that this “form” of the pleasure-pain principle becomes “Matter”, which is, in its turn, “formed” by a new principle, the Reality Principle that is important for the activities of loving and working and which involves being prepared to postpone pleasure perhaps for an indefinite period of time. Obviously, in characterising this actualisation process, the explanations we use to explain the operation of these principles must be complex and hylomorphic, i.e ultimately a complete explanation of the process will require the 4 different kinds of explanation Aristotle referred to in his theory of change. These explanations will include a reference to a teleological form of explanation that refers to an idealistic end to this process of development. It is, however, fascinating to note that the idealistic teleological terminus point for the powers of the mind, are for both Kant and Freud, moral or ethical. Kant’s Anthropological reflections are clearly aimed not at a modern lonely solipsistic individual loving and working for his own selfish ends but rather at what Kant recognises to be a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. It is not certain that Freud would have shared this very politically-oriented vision but he definitely agrees with Kant over the vision of man dutifully loving and working in a form of civilisation he may well be discontented with (because it is not cosmopolitan?)
The Freudian superego is, given our qualifications relating to “Logos” above, Kantian to its core and can also be seen to be sharing also a commitment to hylomorphism that is apparent in the actualising process of the formation of the superego in accordance with a reality principle committed not just to the truth but also to “The Good”, an ancient Platonic theme. That the superego should emerge from “sexuality” broadly defined is also a Platonic theme and conjures up a picture of a barefooted Eros padding about the streets of Athens searching for appropriate forms of knowledge to improve his life. Eros is dogged by Thanatos and also must submit to the demands of Ananke, and this Platonic allegory is a part of Freud’s more mythological characterisation of a theory otherwise composed of extremely technical language. Kant’s commitment to what causes awe and admiration in himself is inscribed upon his gravestone in Königsberg: “the starry heavens above and the moral law within”. These are more Aristotelian than Platonic, more sublime than mythological.
Morality, for Kant, as it was for Aristotle is not merely a matter of arriving at a life-goal but also included the way in which one journeyed toward that goal in one’s life. The Greek term Areté that means both virtue and excellence denotes doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. This is a critical test of “Good” character and will result in a state of Eudaimonia which is also one of those interesting words that both characterises the way in which one does something (good spirited) but also the telos of such activity(the flourishing life). Kant and Aristotle would have both agreed upon the fact that we choose the way we lead our lives, and to the extent that the end result lies in our power, the end result as well. Both would have also agreed that human finitude is such that whether or not one would achieve the end result (a flourishing life), may depend upon whether we are in fact rewarded for the efforts we make. This latter is, for both Philosophers, up to the divine forces or principles governing the universe, divine forces which we hope will provide us with a flourishing life (if we are worthy of one). Freud shows no obvious signs of agreeing with either Kant or Aristotle on this issue, and appears to rest his case with the more myth-influenced Plato. We, like Eros, can live, love and work with every fibre of our being to create our civilisation but, for Freud, at the end of this process we might have to live with the thought that all our efforts were not worth the result (reminding us of the ancient prophecy quoted in the Republic that everything created by man is doomed to destruction). We may, that is, have to resign ourselves to our fates (Ananke) and live in a state of discontentment.
Kant recognises this sentiment when he refers to everyday life as a life of melancholic haphazardness but he transcends this cynical position and offers us some hope on the condition that we are worthy of the life of complete happiness. It is certainly the case that much of Freudian theory relating to the instincts falls into the Kantian domain of physiological anthropology because as Kant maintains in his Anthropology:
“in regard to the state of its representations, my mind is either active and exhibits a faculty or it is passive and consists in receptivity. A cognition contains both joined together, and the possibility of having such a cognition bears the name of cognitive faculty–from the most distinguished part of the faculty, namely the activity of the mind in combining or separating representations from one another. Representations in regard to which the mind behaves passively and by means of which the subject is therefore affected (whether it affects itself or is affected by an object) belong to the sensuous faculty. But ideas that comprise a sheer activity (thinking) belong to the intellectual cognitive faculty. The former is called the lower, the latter the higher cognitive faculty. The lower cognitive faculty has the character of passivity of the inner sense of sensations: the higher, of the spontaneity of apperception, that is, of pure consciousness of the activity that constitutes thinking. It belongs to logic (a system of rules of the understanding) as the former belongs to psychology(a sum of all inner perception under laws of nature) and establishes inner experience.”(A P. 29-30)69
The difference here in Freudian terms is perhaps that between the organisation of representations jointly by the energy regulation and pleasure pain principles governing the lower cognitive faculty, an organisation that does not appear to involve higher-level consciousness, and representations organised by the reality principle. This latter principle governs the active higher cognitive faculty, a faculty that does involve higher-level consciousness and also actively follows the laws of logic and the rules of the understanding.
In Aristotelian terms, the lower sensuous cognitive faculty is the material the mind uses in its representations and which accounts for the passivity of the representation. Kant, in this context, notes the following negative feature:
“Sensibility, on the other hand, is in bad repute. Many evil things are said about it: e.g. 1. that it confuses the power of representation, 2. that it monopolizes the conversation and is like an autocrat when it should be merely the servant of the understanding, 3. that it even deceives us.”(A P.34)(70)
Kant then rejects these common criticisms aided ,perhaps by Platonic ideas.He appeals to Aristotelian hylomorphic theory, claiming that one may grasp a manifold but not yet have ordered it in accordance with the rules of the understanding. The senses, Kant argues, provide an abundance of material that can be combined or separated in various ways in accordance with various principles. Sensibility, Kant argues, cannot be confused or deceived because there is no function of judgment associated with it. Illusion and delusion require a judgment of the understanding to provide a rule with respect to which one is confused or deceived: rules provide a standard of comparison with reality. Kant then goes on to note interestingly that, of the 5 senses that constitute sensibility, two are pleasure related (smell and taste), and the other three senses appear to have some higher function that relates in some way to reality (providing the material for judgment?). He also notes that we can think of sensibility in terms of the presence of an object (sense perception) but also in terms of the absence of the object (which occurs when we imagine something). Insofar as we are concerned with inner sense we are dealing not with what man makes of himself but rather with what he undergoes when he is affected by the play of his imagination, as the melancholic is when he imagines himself as worthless or the paranoid schizophrenic when he imagines his life is in danger from the FBI. Kant also notes that no organ is associated with inner sense. Kant differentiates in this discussion between what is anthropological and what he regards as merely psychological. The former, as we have pointed out deals with the issues of what man makes of himself in terms of his moral choices that will lead him to become a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, whereas the latter is based on a questionable assumption of a substantial soul that we seemingly (an illusion?) perceive as something within ourselves, something that can reveal itself to some kind of mental investigation or mysterious process of introspection. This search for inner sensations, Kant argues, can only lead to mental instability. This psychological attitude toward the mind could only lead, Kant insists, to retiring into oneself and this state of affairs can only be remedied by a renewed commitment to the external world via the cognitively oriented senses and the application of the laws and rules of the understanding to the material gleaned by these senses–rules and laws that relate both to the external world with its starry heavens and its cities, countries and empires that are such a source of discontentment to their citizens. To lose one’s way in such a world is, in Kant’s words, to lose ones Tramontano (to lose one’s relation to the navigational guide of the North Star). The melancholic has obviously lost his way in the world and is buffeted to death by his own imaginings. In this context, Kant points out that the almost universal fear of death that is natural to all human beings, is a mass illusion, simply because the thought of one’s death is impossible, principally because when one is dead one cannot be conscious that one is dead. This is an interesting argument for the necessary connection between thinking and consciousness.
Kant discusses dreams in relation to the imagination and sees in dreams the activation of the vital force of life whilst we are sleeping. He points to the lack of continuity between one nights dreams and the next, claiming that this together with the absence of the presence of bodily movements based on choice convinces us that the dream world is not real. Kant claims that the power of imagination is:
“richer and more fruitful in its presentation than sense when a passion appears on the scene the power of imagination is more enlivened through the absence of an object than by its presence.”(A P.73)71
Memory, Kant claims, is distinguishable from imagination in that it is a reproductive power of the imagination that is able to reproduce its representations voluntarily. Memory is necessary for the ordering of experience, Freud notes, and this is actually confirmed by the biological development of the hippocampus: the power of memory is not actualised until around the age that the “I think” is actualised, that is to say around one and a half to three years old. Once the memory is developed, Kant would probably agree that its continuity is essential, (along with the continuity of the functioning of the body) for the identity of a personal, enduring self, that stays the same through a series of experiences. In Freud’s theory, certain memories are repressed if sufficient amounts of anxiety become associated with them (and/or the ego is not sufficiently developed to bear the anxiety involved). Memory in itself then, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of the power we possess of anticipating the future, a power necessary for another power, that of practical reasoning:
“Every desire contains a (doubtful or certain) foresight of what is possible through it. Recalling the past (remembering) occurs only with the intention of making foresight of the future possible by means of it; generally speaking, we look about us from the standpoint of the present in order to decide something or to be prepared for something.”(A P. 79)72
There are obvious limits to this form of anticipation when it takes the form of a prophecy of the fate of a person or a people, because obviously, the memory of the prophecy together with a knowledge of the causes operating to bring the fact prophesied about, must be, for Kant, subject to the law of freedom which obviously can alter any prophecy by altering the causes that are bringing certain effects about.
For Kant, the higher cognitive faculty is composed of correct understanding (rules), practiced judgment and thorough or complete reasoning (embracing the totality of conditions, i.e. necessary and sufficient conditions). Kant personifies these three cognitive operations in terms of the domestic or civil servant who merely needs to understand his orders in order to obey them, an officer who has to understand more abstractly which principle to apply in particular cases, and the general that needs to make judgments on all possible hypothetical cases and may even have to construct new principles for totally new situations. Kant summarises his position in the following terms:
“Now if understanding is the faculty of rules, and the power of judgment the faculty of discovering the particular insofar as it is an instance of these rules, then reason is the faculty of deriving the particular from the universal, and thus of representing it according to principles, and as necessary… The human being needs reason for every moral (consequently also religious) judgment, and cannot rest on statutes and established customs. Ideas are concepts of reason to which no object given in experience can be adequate. They are neither intuitions (like those of space and time) nor feelings (such as the doctrine of happiness looks for), both of which belong to sensibility. Ideas are, rather, concepts of a perfection that we always approach but never completely attain.”(A P. 93-4)73
Kant then specifically discusses the weaknesses and illnesses of the soul in relation to its cognitive faculty and fixates upon the psychic conditions of melancholia and what he calls mental derangement. In melancholia: In the case of mental derangement there is:
“an arbitrary course in the patient’s thoughts which has its own (subjective) rule but which runs contrary to the (objective) rule that is in agreement with laws of experience.”(A P. 96)74
Kant refers here to “delirious raving” and “delirium”. It appears also as if he believes that derangement is a more serious condition than melancholia, thus confirming the Aristotelian notion of a continuum of points or stages or phases on a line of development stretching teleologically toward the potential of perfect rationality in accordance with the idea of Reason. In modern psychoanalysis this concept of a continuum correlates with what Melanie Klein would call a difference between the paranoid-schizoid position (derangement) and the depressive position (melancholia). In the former case, the ego and its objects are split in terms of the good and the bad (part-objects), and in the latter case, where the ego has lost its most valued object and identifies with the loss of that object in terms of its relation to its own life.
Underlying the above talk of objects is the operation of the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principles. This operation is in accordance with an account of pleasure and pain that we can in fact find in the Anthropology, in a chapter entitled “On the Feeling of Pleasure and Displeasure”. The risks with such a project is that of descending into the depths of describing the material substrate of these operations: a risk Freud took only to abandon and finally appeal to Platonic mythology at the end of 50 years of writing about these principles.
Kant’s characterisation begins with a classification of pleasures into, firstly, sensuous pleasures and, secondly, intellectual pleasures. These are further divided into two classes: sensuous pleasures are organic (e.g. the enjoyment of good wine) and reflective (aesthetic judgments of taste) and intellectual pleasures are divided into those that are representable by concepts and those that are representable through ideas. The following quote elucidates the feeling of sensuous pleasure and there is a clear reference to energy regulation:
“One can also explain these feelings by means of the effect that the sensation produces on our state of mind. What directly (through sense) urges me to leave my state (to go out of it) is disagreeable to me–it causes me pain: just as what drives me to maintain my state (to remain in it) is agreeable to me, I enjoy it. But we are led along irresistibly in the stream of time and in the change of sensations connected with it. Now even if leaving one point of time and entering another is one and the same act (of change), there is still a temporal sequence in our thought and in the consciousness of this change, in conformity with the relation of cause and effect.–So, the question arises, whether it is the consciousness of leaving the present state, or the prospect of entering a future state, that awakens in us the sensations of enjoyment? In the first case the enjoyment is nothing else then the ending of a pain and something negative, in the second it would be presentiment of something agreeable, therefore an increase in the state of pleasure, consequently something positive. But we can already guess beforehand that only he first will happen: for time drags us from the present to the future (not the reverse) and the cause of our agreeable feeling can only be that we are first compelled to leave the present, without any certainty into which other state we will enter, knowing only that it is definitely another one. Enjoyment is the feeling of the promotion of life: pain is that of a hindrance of life. But (animal) life, as physicians also have already noted, is a continuous play of the antagonism of both. Therefore pain must always precede any enjoyment: pain is always first. For what else but a quick death from joy would follow from a continuous promotion of the vital force, which cannot be raised above a certain degree anyway? Also, no enjoyment can immediately follow another: rather, because one and another pain must appear. Small inhibition of the vital force with advancements in it constitute the state of health that we erroneously consider to be a continuously felt well-being..Pain is the incentive of activity and in this, above all, we feel our life, without pain lifelessness would set in.”(A P. 126)75
This is a very concrete, descriptive account of the consciousness of pleasure and pain. Note the role of causation and the surprising claim that pain is the great initiator of activity. This corresponds with the Freudian claim that pain is the great educator of mankind as well as the Aristotelian claim that learning associated with pain (pity and fear) in works of art has a cathartic function, restoring the equilibrium of the appreciators of tragedy. The Aristotelian theory of change also suggests itself and there is no reason, in our view, why the above could not function as the energetics of our experience of change. If reality is a potential continuum for Aristotle, then experienced pleasure and pain are possible actualised points on any continuum of life.
Paul Ricoeur, in his work “Freud and Philosophy: an essay in Interpretation” points out that Freud’s theory is composed of an energetics of the psychical apparatus and a hermeneutics that follows from an interpretation of the symptoms of mentally ill patients. The energy regulation principle (ERP) and a network of concepts including “psychical apparatus”, “cathexis”, “anticathexis”, “quantity”, “excitation”, “storing”, “emptying” “homeostasis”, and “tension” all testify to a materialistic substrate of mental functioning which Freud uses in certain kinds of explanation for certain kinds of phenomena. Freud refers to the ERP as the principle of constancy that he characterises in terms of the tendency of a system to maintain levels of energy as low as possible. The system, however, cannot eliminate all energy because the psychical apparatus:
“must learn to tolerate a state of quantity sufficient to meet the demands of specific action.”(Freud’s unpublished Project P. 358)
In the “Project”, Freud refers to a particular system of neurones whose task it is to transform what he calls “Quantity (a seemingly un-measurable form of energy) into consciousness and its “qualities”. In this “Project”, we can also find an echo of Kant’s account of the mechanics of the operation of pleasure and pain:
“Since we have certain knowledge of a trend in psychical life towards avoiding unpleasure. In that case, unpleasure would coincide with a rise in the level of quantity”(Project P. 358)
What requires more elaboration in the above account is the role of the external world in relation to the demand for specific action: An external world which consciousness experiences qualitatively. In the process of avoidance of unpleasure, or, in other words, in this learning process, consciousness is the key factor. The ERP or constancy principle’s function is to assist in testing reality for its qualities, and to inhibit certain primary psychical processes (such as hallucinatory wishing) from accessing the motor system. Energy is obviously “directed” in this process of inhibition with help from the ego. The suggestion from Freud, is that language plays the role of a secondary sensory source that expresses what Freud referred to as “thought-reality”. We are here in the realm of what he called the operation of the “secondary process”: the most secure form of thought process. This process is obviously closely linked to language or indications of speech. Freud claims interestingly, in this discussion that theoretical thought does not give rise to un-pleasure as is the case with the biological realities steered by the ERP and the pleasure-pain principle (when hallucination and perception are confused).
The ERP and its relation to both primary and secondary processes have a key role in the formation of memory and its availability to consciousness in processes of reality testing and learning. High levels of anxiety (forms of unpleasure) will obviously prevent the formation of natural memories that emerge in reality testing and learning situations. High levels of anxiety appear to initiate secondary inhibitions that absorb some of the energy at the disposal of the ego and the “I think”. In this context, we should recall that Freud in his first therapy–attempts, thought it sufficient to revive the “traumatic memory” in a state of semi-consciousness (via hypnosis) in order for symptoms to disappear. This obviously was a necessary first stage in his cathartic process but it proved to be insufficient to integrate the anxiety-laden “image” into more abstract language-governed thought processes where displeasure is neutralised. The use of hypnosis in this cathartic process was, of course, not helpful because it placed the subject in a superficial state of sleep where the language of the therapist was being used suggestively, and the language of the subject was being used automatically. This method was obviously only partly effective and pushed Freud toward the development of techniques that demanded that the subject be fully conscious. The new techniques that were developed were: free association, recounting of dream memories, symptom interpretation, together with the transference relation to the therapist and they were all designed to embed old primary process images in secondary process “thought reality”.
Underlying the above practical innovations was obviously a theory of how the mechanisms of pleasure and pain were operating in relation to the continuum of biological and thought processes. Energy regulation involving the transference and displacement of psychical energies, were obviously important aspects of pleasure and pain regulation. Dreams, for example, may, if the theory is correct, be transformations of waking linguistic indications of thought into images that resemble hallucinations. Dream images also condense and displace representations, and dream interpretation requires an understanding of the underlying mechanisms in the work of the dream. Freud treats dreams as symbols that require special interpretation. The path of this interpretation is laid down by the therapist who follows the dreamer’s conscious free associations to each of the image-elements of the dream. Somatic excitations during sleep, residues of the day in the dream, and the wish to sleep also need to be considered in the dream interpretation process. It is, for example, the powerful biological energy-regulating wish to sleep that converts external stimuli into images and creates the effect of hallucination and de-realisation of the body.
This hylomorphic view of the mind results in the iceberg model of the mind where consciousness is the tip, and the substance (the preconscious and the unconscious) resides beneath the surface of consciousness. The unconscious is clearly the most primitive aspect of the whole system, but it is the reservoir of energy for the rest of the system, containing not just the death instinct of the melancholic but also the life instinct of the human race. Consciousness is, in fact, a vicissitude of these preconscious and unconscious aspects of our mind. In other words, the Freudian mental apparatus contains Aristotelian “forms”. Hylomorphic theory permitted Aristotle to claim, for example, that “a dream is thinking that persists in the state of sleep”. Freud would have agreed with this claim and this was the reason he concentrated much of his therapeutic efforts on the interpretation of the dream. He situated the biological wish to sleep and the residues of the day in the subconscious systems together with latent instinctive wishes that energised the dream formation. These latter were clearly situated in the unconscious system that, for Freud, operated on laws or principles, which were free of logic and time conditions. It is this unconscious element in the dream that gave the images contained therein their hallucinatory quality: their quality of being unreal. Here the psychical apparatus is operating on the substrate of the ERP but also seemingly in a different dimension.
Memories, when reality-tested by motility with the assistance of language, become more real and find a natural home in the preconscious system where Freud also locates the meaning of words and all forms of knowledge. In Chapter 7 of his work “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud provides a diagram of the psychical apparatus with memory close to the perceptual end of the apparatus, and the preconscious system closer to the opposite motor end of the apparatus.Just behind the preconscious system, Freud places the unconscious system. The diagram seems incomplete. Where, for example, should one place the Kantian faculties of the understanding and reason? Since perception is the bearer of consciousness perhaps the Kantian faculties should be placed between perception and memory. Language also needs to be placed somewhere on the continuum of this apparatus. Since meanings of words are located in the preconscious system, perhaps language belongs within the preconscious system which we should recall is the faculty of thought-reality for Freud and also turns unpleasure or pain away from its activity.
The key element of the above diagram of the psychic apparatus is clearly, for Freud’s purposes, the unconscious system that contains the instincts and the life force needed for the actualising of the potential of humankind. One of the major tasks of the psychical apparatus as a whole is to develop a strong ego that is connected with what Freud regards as the task of “becoming conscious”. Consciousness is, therefore a task for Freud. On an Aristotelian reading of Freud’s life force, it appears to possess a telos, a potential that may never be realised. Paul Ricoeur claims that the instincts are “The Kantian transcendental X” of the Freudian system of thought. We referred earlier to the source, aims, and objects of instincts. The sources of instincts obviously fall in the domain of biology to investigate, and aims and objects appear to be the proper domain of investigation for Psychology (as conceived by Freud). From the point of view of Freudian energetics, Instincts are the source of the distribution of energy between the ego and its objects. They are also the reservoir of indestructible desires. If all this is in the name of transcendental psychology, then we need to return to Kant to see exactly how the two accounts can complement each other.
The closest Kant comes to this kind of psychology is in his remarks on mental illness and the mechanics of pleasure and pain but there are also some indications in book 3 of his Anthropology that might assist in this matter. In the section entitled “on the Faculty of Desire” Kant has the following to say:
“Desire (appetitio) is the self-determination of subjects power through the representation of something in the future as an effect of the representation. Habitual sensible desire is called inclination. Desiring without exercising power to produce the object is wish. Wish can be directed towards objects that the subject himself feels incapable of producing, and then it is an empty(idle) wish. Inclination that can be conquered only with difficulty or not at all by the subject’s reason is passion. On the other hand, the feeling of pleasure or displeasure in the subjects present state that does not let him rise to reflection (the representation by means of reason as to whether he should give himself up to it or refuse it) is affect. To be subject to affects or passions is probably always an illness of the mind because both affect and passion shut out the sovereignty of reason. Both are also equally vehement in degree, but as concerns their quality they are essentially different from each other, with regard both to the method of prevention and to that of the cure that the physician of souls would have to apply.”(A P. 149- 150)76
The above reference to a physician of the soul is suggestive of the possibility that in the society of Kant’s time there were people prepared to fill such a role: the Enlightenment’s forerunners to our modern-day psychoanalysts and psychologists. So even though Kant’s classifications and descriptions take us no further into the Freudian depths of the mind, the above quote clearly takes us to the mouth of the Freudian cave, points, that is, to the darkness within, and invites the thinker inside in accordance with the suggestions of Plato’s Republic where those of us enjoying the Platonic sun have an obligation to return to the depths of the cave and help the prisoners therein to their freedom.
But what, then, is Transcendental Psychology? It clearly has Aristotelian, Kantian and Freudian elements. It is, as we have seen with Kant’s account, a philosophical appeal to faculties and powers of the mind and related psychological processes. Answering this question, however, is fraught with difficulty because, many scientists and philosophers throughout the ages have been critical of transcendental and metaphysical theorising. The term “psychologism”, for example, has been a common accusation by Philosophers of Kant’s work: Less friendly terms have been used of Freud’s work by scientists working in the positivistic tradition of investigation. Patricia Kitcher in her work “Kant’s Transcendental Psychology” asks the question “What is Transcendental Psychology?” and in the process of defending Kant’s work has the following to say:
“Powerful currents within and without Kant scholarship have combined to keep transcendental psychology out of the mainstream, beyond the pale of serious philosophical discussion.”(P. 5)77
One must agree with this judgment and perhaps add to this the fact of the reception that Freud’s work received at the hands of both Science and Empirically oriented Analytical Philosophy. One of the criticisms of Kant that Kitcher refers to is the fallacy of attempting to found normative principles on factual premises:
“what might be called “strong” psychologism in logic: the attempt to establish the validity of logical principles by appeal to facts of human psychology”(P. 9)16 There is, as she puts it no evidence of this problem in Kant but paradoxically accuses Kant of what she calls “weak psychologism” which she defines thus: “The view that psychological facts may be important to philosophical normative claims, even though they cannot establish such claims.”(P.9)78
Given Kant’s definition of reason in terms of the search for the totality of conditions of any state of affairs, it is difficult to appreciate the point Kitcher is making here. Kant in his logic operates with not just the principle of noncontradiction but also a principle of sufficient reason (which includes reference to necessary and sufficient conditions). In this sense, Kant’s subjective deduction relating to faculties of the mind and their associated psychological processes may certainly be amongst the necessary conditions establishing, for example, the categories of the understanding that operate in accordance with both the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason. This is Kant’s view of logic and it suffices to establish a relationship between psychological processes and logical claims.
Kitcher goes on to claim, correctly, that twentieth-century psychology has been a force of opposition against transcendental psychology, but she does not attribute this to the philosophical movements of logical atomism and logical positivism that were flourishing at the time. Instead, she points out that:
“Finally the ideology of twentieth-century psychology has had highly negative implications for the status of transcendental psychology. Assuming that introspection was the only way to study mental processes J. B. Watson and other behaviourists convinced their colleagues that they could write psychology and “never use the terms “consciousness”, “mental state” “mind” “content” “imagery” and the like.” (Kitcher P. 10)79
The roles of methodology and observation were discussed earlier in relation to the shift in the definition of psychology from the science of consciousness to the science of behaviour. The effect was to undermine the principled approach to Psychology that was begun by Aristotle and continued by Kant and Freud, an approach that did not, as was falsely claimed, rest on a mystical operation of introspection that “revealed” psychological phenomena. In the wake of this scientific movement everything apriorí (independent of experience) was regarded as actually innate rather than potentially actualisable(Aristotle), and the resultant concept of mind was described and explained in mechanical terms such as “systems”, “modules”, “processes” “input”, “output” etc.
Kitcher ends her account by claiming that psychologists have now realised that they cannot explain human behaviour without appealing to cognitive processes. She is, however, referring here to modern cognitive psychology (rather than that of Piaget’s hylomorphically inspired psychology). Her view retains the right to regard the mind as a machine, a computer, thus undermining the fundamental feature of the Aristotelian, Kantian, and Freudian concept of mind as organic and alive.
In a section entitled “Kant against Psychology” Kitcher points out that Kant criticises any appeal to empirical psychology in transcendental or metaphysical contexts. Her approach is a more subtle form of the criticism we find in Brett’s History of Psychology, where it is claimed that Kant is to be held responsible for an empirical obsession with measurement in psychological experiments because, he claimed, that all serious science must have mathematics associated with its methodology. Brett has this to say:
“Kant’s second contribution to the German tradition of psychology was his contention that science is characterised by mathematical as well as an empirical description. His celebrated fusion of the empirical standpoint of Hume with the rationalist standpoint of Wolff involved the aphorism that an empirical inquiry is as scientific as it contains mathematics. This was an extrapolation of Newtonian practice and as a methodological prescription, it had a profound effect on successive psychologists. It introduced the craze for measurement in psychology and reinforced the yearning for scientific respectability amongst psychologists which had started with Hume’s treatise.”(Peters P. 533)80
Brett also fails to appreciate the complete account of Kantian science which would refer to an empirical level of measurement that is connected to transcendental and metaphysical principles and laws: an account that acknowledges the role of observation and measurement in investigations into what he termed the phenomenal self that can be postulated as a substance and observed in a causal framework. This account, however, does not suffice in Kant’s view to bring us into contact with the transcendental noumenal self that thinks. Brett believes this approach to be contradictory because he believes two selves are being evoked, and one of these selves (the noumenal metaphysical self) is not a possible object of study. Kant would also deny that the noumenal self is a possible object of study, on the grounds that the “I think” is the ground of the possibility of studying objects using understanding and reason, and cannot, therefore, study itself as an object. For Kant, the phenomenal self and the noumenal self are two different ways of characterising the self, and even if mathematics might be used in observations of the self, it could not study thought because thought was not accessible empirically. Brett refers to Kant’s remarks on the relation of science and mathematics as a prejudice:
“The combination of observationalism with the Kantian prejudice about mathematics encouraged the view that science progresses by the accumulation of measurements, the noticing of laws or correlations between the sets of measurements, and the final relating of laws under theories. Psychologists, increasingly self-conscious about the status of their studies thought that respectable scientific theories would emerge only if enough mathematics was used in making the initial observations.”(P. 534)81
It is difficult to fathom exactly what Brett meant by the Kantian prejudice in favour of mathematics. Mathematics measures substances in space (geometry) and in time (number). Kant clearly says that neither the self nor the soul is substance, echoing the Aristotelian claim that they are “forms” or “principles”. One cannot measure principles, but a principle may well help to determine the consciousness that contains “qualities” of reality that may then be quantified and turned into measurements (red for example, is ca. 690-angstrom units). If the “I think” entails that I must be thinking something about something on the condition that I am thinking conceptually, then concepts must express the qualities of the something that we find in the subject position of the thought or judgment. There is no substance here to be measured, and Kant criticised rationalist psychology for using this assumption. Brett after the above criticism, surprisingly confirms the Kantian objection to substance in the following quote:
“Kant saw that it was not possible to speak of a soul which entered into a relationship with a system of pre-existing things. That consciousness which Descartes put in the forefront of his speculations is not for Kant a function of the soul: on the contrary, the new attitude is clearly defined by the assertion that the soul, in this sense, is in the consciousness, it is an idea. Hume had perhaps taught Kant that reflection never is withdrawing of the soul into itself, nor is it a power by which the soul observes itself.”(P. 537-8)82
This acknowledgment does not, however, quite fit with the criticism above. It has to be said that if the characterisation of Kant’s position by Brett is correct, then it almost looks as if Kant shares the Freudian view that the task of a person is to “become conscious”, to actualise the potential within, to use Aristotelian language. Brett continues his theme of a “psychology without a soul” in the following interesting quote:
“Here, then, is the real beginning of “psychology without a soul”. In distinction from many who have used that phrase, Kant did not propose to deny the reality of the soul in the same way in which it had been asserted: his treatment of Rational Psychology is not dogmatic but critical. The first result was a clear conception of the limits of psychology: in place of the previous inaccurate use of terms we are given clear distinctions. The science of the soul is called Pneumatology: the study of man as part of nature is called Anthropology: under Anthropology in general comes the specific department called Psychology.”(538)83
This is not the clearest characterisation of Kant’s Anthropology and Brett’s reference to “we are given clear distinctions”, whilst correct, is inadequately so, because we are only given clear distinctions in virtue of their relation to clear principles. It is, in particular, not clear from the above that the Anthropology (from a pragmatic point of view) is not a theoretical empirical inquiry. What is clear is that Psychology is best conceived as a practical inquiry presupposing a priori principles. In becoming conscious (Freud) or becoming rational (Aristotle,) man uses his freedom to make something of himself. Brett does not acknowledge this aspect of Kant’s argument. He continues to believe falsely that the Anthropology is primarily epistemological rather than ethical, and therefore claims that everything appears to be “inner”. Principles are neither inner nor outer, and Kant’s Anthropology is a search for the principles of transcendental psychology in the spirit of transcendental philosophy. Recall again Kant’s definition of Anthropology, namely, “what man makes of himself”. The reference to the ethical law of freedom is unmistakable and freedom is as manifest in outer behaviour as it is in the inner mental activity of choosing to act in one way rather than another.
Brett notes the presence of the will in the third book of the Anthropology and remarks on how the feeling of pleasure and pain are sublimated by the ideas of good and evil that he claims come from the understanding and reason. All the above misconceptions then lead Brett to claim:
“Kant takes psychology to be of little value, it is for him wholly empirical and consists of an elementary doctrine of faculties amplified by the inclusion of such descriptive matter as might have been culled from novels or improving stories”(P. 541)84
The only comment one can make about such a gross misreading is to perhaps point out that fictional works acknowledge the presence of the moral life and its relevance to Psychology to a much greater extent than anything Brett has to say on this topic.
Brett then equally paradoxically claims that Kant’s ideas herald the science of behaviour. The grounds are not entirely clear but have something to do with the role of sensation in Kant’s theories. Brett claims that sensationalism is correct, provided that it is critical, (whatever that means) and claims that it is difficult to fathom what Kant means with his idea of sensation. It is, however, no more difficult to fathom what Kant meant , than it is to understand Aristotle’s view. All that is needed is an understanding of the hylomorphic theory where form once actualised can become matter for the next stage of the actualisation process of a life form. Sensation is one form taken by consciousness when the nervous system of a life form is activated, and it can take a simple form without any attachment to an object, when, for example, I am feeling cold (I am not feeling cold at anything). Sensation can also take a more complex form if we are talking about the feeling of anger when, as Aristotle points out, it takes as its object some insult. It can take yet another even more complex form when it is the feeling caused by an object of free beauty, when the faculties of the understanding and the imagination are “felt” in their free play. Brett surprisingly acknowledges this Aristotelian influence on Kant in the following remark:
“Kant rightly declared that the mind must be regarded as a structure regulated by principles which are ultimately its own activities.”(P. 544)85
The reference to principles is certainly both Kantian and Aristotelian, but the implication that principles and activities are somehow identical is, to say the very least, paradoxical. The principles are, of course, principles in transcendental logic, and denote not activities themselves, but the conditions of activities. Brett does not believe in the categories of understanding, meaning that he does not believe they can be established either logically or psychologically. Kant’s work on the categories, as we know, relates to the different logical forms of judgment that are used to generate true statements. We also know this was the part of the First critique that he spent most of his time on. Brett follows up with the criticism that Kant is confusing psychology with logic: a position that Kitcher in her work, dismissed.
In 1921 it might have seemed like “good news” that science was not going to bear the burden that philosophy bore earlier, and Psychology at that point in time was barely 50 years old. Nothing much of theoretical significance has happened in the name of scientific psychology almost one hundred years later. Brett was one of the bearers of the good news but is now one of the targets of those philosophers who have been influenced by the work of Aristotle, Kant and Freud. We can even, somewhat paradoxically, add another philosopher to that list, namely, Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s earlier work was in logical atomism and he also flirted for a short period with logical positivism. In his more mature position, Wittgenstein claimed that Psychology as a discipline was rife with conceptual confusion. It is interesting to note in this context the respective dates of publication of Wittgenstein’s earlier work (“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”) and Brett’s History of Psychology were 1922 and 1921 respectively. By 1950 Wittgenstein had reversed his position and both Logical atomism and Logical positivism as movements had been overshadowed. Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” used the key terms “object “and picture”: terms favoured by the empirical psychology of the time.
At the end of this work, Wittgenstein was forced to admit, after defining the world as the totality of facts, that the sense of the world mysteriously lay outside the world, and also that all forms of value lie outside the world. Ethics, aesthetics, and religion found themselves in the realm of what cannot meaningfully be said, because the only meaningful propositions were those of natural science. Kant would, of course, have substantially criticised the picture theory of meaning contained in the Tractatus, which built upon the “fact” that we form pictures to ourselves of those facts. These pictures were a work of construction by an imagination faculty not connected to an active will that seeks to understand and reason about its representations (a will that also, according to the Tractatus lies outside the world). So, even in his early work, we see in Wittgenstein a forced acknowledgment of transcendence, but we also find very little transcendental psychology, except perhaps in his claim that the world of a happy man is a different world to that of the unhappy man.
Wittgenstein retreated in his later work from Science and his mystical form of transcendence, and moved toward a position that regarded forms of life (Aristotle) and language-games as primary concepts. Yet, even after eschewing science he was still in search of a “method” in Philosophy and claimed that one had been found in his grammatical investigations. These investigations offered us a kind of transcendence in that they provided us with the essences of things in some a priori fashion. This is not exactly the transcendental method of Kant where it is claimed that transcendental knowledge is not concerned so much with objects of experience as with the manner of knowing these objects, (a manner that requires the acknowledgment of representations that have an a priori character.) So while Wittgenstein seeks the a priori principle and origins of our judgments and activities in language and forms of life, Kant continues to place his faith and hope in reason, and uses legal deductions that prove the right to use concepts involved in different kinds of knowledge claims. A priori concepts, it is true, do not derive from sensations and Kant specifically implies this. But nevertheless, the psychological and scientific response to Kant’s claims in this area is to project upon him a position that he does not adopt, namely that a priori concepts are “innate”, in spite of the extensive written evidence to the contrary, especially that contained in the so-called Eberhard controversy:
“The Critique admits absolutely no divinely implanted or “innate” representations… there must, however, be a ground in the subject which makes it possible for these representations to originate in this and no other manner…This ground is at least innate.”
It is, in other words, the power that has the potential to be exercised or used which is part of the “form” of the organism, part of its life-form. This form, then, includes the potentiality for cognitive tasks of consciousness that involve the use of the categories of judgments/understanding and the ideas of reason. We are here in the realm of what Kant called synthetic a priori propositions that cannot be proved by formal logic. The predicate-concept is clearly not contained in the subject concept in these judgments. The proof required for synthetic a priori propositions, is a transcendental proof: the proof proves that the negation of a synthetic a priori proposition is a kind of contradiction thus proving the universality and necessity of the proposition. Kitcher summarises this well by saying:
“transcendental investigations of the sources of knowledge–transcendental psychology–disclose universal and necessary features of human cognition.”(P. 19)86
She continues, however, by pointing out that Kant had no understanding of the twentieth-century discipline of computer science, suggesting that his philosophy somehow supports such a discipline. A computer is not a life form, it merely imitates life forms in a manner that is neither transcendental nor ethical in that it possesses no freedom to choose to attend to this rather than that. For Kant, the matter constituting something of substance is very relevant to its function, especially if this something is a life form. A computer, for Kant, may be able to imitate conscious function, but is not conscious in the way we are. Our organs, for example, are in possession of the kind of chemistry, biology, and physiology that a computer does not possess. It is the system of our organs (including a brain), on the hylomorphic view, that constitutes our human form of consciousness. For Wittgenstein too, (for whom the concept of the form of life was important), we would be witnessing a conceptual confusion if one believed that Kant’s philosophy could not explain or justify the cognitive tasking of a computer. Kant would certainly agree, if provided with knowledge of computers, as would many philosophers, that artificial intelligence does not resemble real human intelligence in any significant respect. The computer may be able, in accordance with the Turing test, produce the same results as a human Chinese translator, but it remains an incontestable fact that the computer does not understand Chinese, and the reason for this state of affairs lies in the different material embodiment of the cognitive function we are witnessing.
- Kuehn, M., Kant: A Biography, (Cambridge, CUP,2001)
- Kant, I, Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, translated by Louden, R., B.,(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006)
- Kant, I., Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Translated by Carus, P.,
Revised by Ellington, W., J.,(Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company,1977). - Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Kant, I., Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Kemp
Smith. N.,(London, Macmillan, 1929) - Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Kant, I., Philosophy of Material Nature, The Paul Carus Translation extensive revised by Ellington , J., W.,(Indianaopolis, Hackett Publishing,1985)
- Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason
- Ibid.
- Arendt, H, Origins of totalitarianism
- Penguin Library of Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents.
- Macdougall The Group Mind
- Penguin Freud Library Group Psychology and the analysis of the Ego
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Kant, I., Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals.
- Kuehn, M., Kant: A Biography , (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001)
- Kant, I., The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy , Translated by Gregor J., M., and Wood, A.(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1996)
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid
- . Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Kant, I., Religion within the boundaries of mere Reason , Translated and edited by Wood, A., and Di Giovanni, G., (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1998).
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Penguin Freud Library, Future of an Illusion.
- Ibid.
- James, M., R.,D., The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History…
- Kant, I., Anthropology From A Pragmatic Point of View, Trans., Louden, B., R., (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006)
- Peters, R. S. Brett’s History of Psychology, Edited and Abridged by R S Peters, (Masachussetts, Masachusetts Institute of Technology, 1953)
- Ibid.
- Kant. I, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Translated by Kemp Smith, N.,(London, Macmillan, 1929)
- Kant, Anthropology
- Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reeason
- Kant, I., Anthropology
- Ibid.
- Penguin library of Freud, Instincts and their Vicissitudes.
- Kant, I., Anthropology
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Kitcher, P, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology,(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990)
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Bretts “History of Psychology”
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- ibid.
- Ibid.
- Kitcher, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology