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Two-faced and four eyed Janus was the way in which the Romans chose to portray the guardian of History. However one chooses to conceive of this strange Roman symbol it should be recalled that Janus was at the very least a Shakespearean gatekeeper or watchman guarding the interests of the Romans. It is possible therefore to regard this figure as simultaneously gazing at activities occurring inside the city wall and watching the landscape outside, scanning for friends or enemies. The Greeks had no equivalent symbol but this does not testify to the poverty of their gallery of symbolic figures but rather to the rationality of their categories of thinking about reality. For the Greeks the presence of two faces and four eyes may have signified the nervous animated gaze of a superstitious obsessive compulsive image of the Roman Spirit.
It is possible to interpret Janus as a symbol of History, given the difficulty of portraying an essentially temporal process that defies the imagination because of its lack of spatial characteristics. The closest the Greeks came to a portrayal of historical processes was the myth of Ariadne’s thread, that insofar as it has a beginning, a middle and an end that stretches over different regions of space, can be conceived allegorically as a process in time that has a beginning, a duration and an end. The story of the thread journeying from the darkest recesses of the dark labyrinth of the Minotaur to the light at the entrance of the labyrinth carries the symbolic significance of the importance of the light of knowledge and the freedom of man. Ariadne was the GrandDaughter of Zeus who inflicted a Freudian injury upon his father Kronos (Time) whose crime might have been the crime of all fathers, namely, allowing our children to die when the thread of their life comes to an end. Tracing Ariadne’s thread back to its origin not to a labyrinth but rather to a grandfather who defeated the Titans and was born of the union of the earth and the sky, suggests we have reached the limits of our imagination: a limit that has already been tested by some ancient myths. The tale of Ariadne is obviously in Ricoeur’s terms symbolic, and refers both to our experience of Time and contains a symbolic (rather than a philosophical) response to the question “What can we Hope for?” Kant’s Philosophical response to this question was to postulate a distant “Kingdom of ends” one hundred thousand years in the future. If every mile was a year we would need to imagine a thread one hundred thousand miles in length. And yet it is not the length of the thread that has philosophical significance but rather its continuity. At the end of the thread, it is proposed, we will find ourselves in the light where cosmopolitan citizens of the world dwell.
In Volume one of this work we proposed the thesis that in 1870 there was a parting of the ways between Philosophy and Psychology. The thread of continuity was divided. This was not just a sign of the times but also a sign of the triumph of Dialectical Logic over the Hylomorphic Sciences of Aristotle (Theoretical, Practical, and Productive) and the Critical Sciences of Kant(Pure Reason, Practical Reason and Judgement). The dividing process of the thread began with the Philosophies of Descartes and Hobbes in which the Aristotelian content of the thread was sceptically challenged. The figure of Janus, representing dialectical logic, presided over this process of division of the thread. We interpreted the meaning of the two pairs of eyes of Janus in volume one as being directed toward the past of our History and the future of Philosophy, but it has to be said given the fact that Hegel lay in the field of the future, it was an inevitable consequence that division of all kinds occurred including the dividing of the ways of Scientific Psychology and Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy. Psychology attached itself to the metaphysics of materialism and dualism and deserted the metaphysics of Hylomorphism and Critical transcendental Philosophy . Subsequent to the divorce proceedings in 1870 we have witnessed the construction of a web of eclectic theories blowing in the wind. The thread of Psychology has been used to construct an academic web of ideas that are suggestive of anxiety rather than the awe and wonder we find at the centre of Aristotelian and Kantian theorising.
In volume one of this work we attempted to trace the history of the continuity of the thread before the construction of the above convoluted web of ideas. The seeds of discontent were of course also present in Greek thinking but we find in this era the presence of oracular Ariadne-like figures such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle that succeeded in sublimating this discontentment with theories of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Our modern web of psychological ideas seems neither to provide us with a narrative of our historical journey nor a philosophical answer to the philosophical question “What can we hope for?”
In Volume one we also provided the reader with an Introduction to Greek Philosophy course in order to provide a categorical framework for the reflections that followed. These reflections included the views of Spinoza, Kant, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Arendt, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. These philosophers in their respective convoluted ways produced a response to the developing situation in which academic spiders were being bred for their specific modern academic task in the darkness of the labyrinth. The problem we focussed upon was the following: Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were located in the bowels of the labyrinth. The qualities of the thread that would lead seekers after the light toward their goal were the ideas of arché, areté, epistemé, techné, diké, phronesis, and eudaimonia. A refusal to succumb to the assumptions of materialism and dualism also assisted in the journey outward. This refusal was manifested most clearly in Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory. Political conditions did not favour the journey toward the ideal Republic that the Greek philosophers were reflecting upon. Whether the route lay via Alexander’s vision of a Greek Empire which would cause the collapse of the city state system or whether the route lay instead via a more philosophical vision of a political system that released the potential of rationality in man was a serious question with no clear answer. On the political journey of the thread, the Greek city state system collapsed and the Greeks were defeated by the Romans who had their own idea of Empire and world-rule. The fall of Corinth in 146 BC was the last cataclysmic event of a chain of events that began with the Macedonian wars in 214 BC. The Political and philosophical consequences of these events were not apparent to many at the time. Suffice it to say that these events too, put the goal of the journey of the thread in question.
Volume Two begins with an Introduction to the topics under discussion, an introduction constituted of seven chapters outlining the Philosophy of Kant and stretching into the 20th century. Kant’s Philosophy is a landmark in the process of the continuity of Aristotelian Hylomorphism. It is regarded as a landmark because it attempted to restore many of the central assumptions of Hylomorphism at the same time as attempting to address obvious weaknesses. Kant began his philosophical career as a traditional rationalist. Living as he did in the exciting time of the enlightenment in the Cosmopolitan port of Königsberg he experienced an atmosphere of open-mindedness that permitted the development of his Critical Philosophy. The process of his maturity was a lengthy one that finally actualised in the form of his Critical Philosophy when Kant was in his late fifties. This Critical Philosophy had many aims but one of its primary purposes was to bring some order into the arena of debate between rationalists and empiricists, whilst at the same time rejecting central assumptions of dualism and materialism. One of the major issues of epistemological concern was that of accounting for the relation of universal thought to the experience of the particular. There were also ethical and religious concerns that were supported by a hylomorphic Philosophical Psychology that built upon a desire to understand the world rather than a desire to explore the world of particular existences. Kantian ideas of God and the soul were, for example, embedded in an ethical framework of thought: a realm of what we call the ought system of concepts which needs to be articulated in terms of the Greek notions of arché, areté, epistemé, diké, techné, phronesis, and eudaimonia. In all instances the tribunal of reason relatesin some fashion to particular experiences for particular purposes in contexts of exploration (or the gathering of evidence), but the proceedings in the Kantian tribunal are primarily dedicated to the context of universal explanation/justification.
Mathematics is often regarded as the Queen of universal explanation/justification. The question to raise in relation to Mathematics, however, is whether the central mathematical activity of constructing the universal in the particular via definitions focuses on only particularised aspects of reality (e.g. quantitative and relational dimensions). There are “qualities” in mathematics such as the quality of a circular space which are never intuited passively but are rather the result of a process of construction. This is a Kantian position that is reflected also in Aristotelian Philosophy.
The above reflection on the nature of Mathematics is significant because there are mathematical logicians who claim that mathematical logic is the navigational star for philosophical investigations. This position seeks to dismantle the more traditional beliefs in Aristotelian metaphysical Logic or Kantian Transcendental Logic. For both Aristotle and Kant, the continuum of a noumenal reality about which nothing can be said but which can be divided up in accordance with various principles can obviously be divided up in quantitative and relational terms but such a procedure would never, for example, suffice to characterise the principle of the life form of a rose with all its causes and effects. Mathematics is simply unable to engage with the empirical reality of a rose or indeed with any form of life. It is claimed that Mathematicians agree upon their concepts and procedures and we therefore do not witness tribunals set up to examine whether or not the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. We do, however witness disputes over whether the system of Euclidean concepts is consistent with the system of Non-Euclidean geometry. The way in which these disputes are resolved may include a philosophical interest in which system best represents the intuitions we have of space.
The realm of application for Mathematics includes both Science and our experience of physical phenomena such as the transmission of light. Light travels in straight lines except when caused not to do so by the pull of objects with considerable gravitational mass. Light travels through the medium of space and space itself was deemed to be curved by Einstein. Non Euclidean Geometry is obviously needed to describe the quantitative and relational aspects of such phenomena. The axioms of the system belong clearly in a context of explanation/justification.
Mathematics is vital in the area of techné (technology) where material and efficient causation is operating but it has limited application in the realm of human action where formal and final causation(aitiai=explanations) are essential in defining the phenomena that raise different kinds of questions. This is especially the case in the realm of ethical action where the reasons why one wills to do something are essential for explaining why the action was done. In this realm the form of the phenomena are more important than the material( the energy of the light) and whatever causes the material to change. There is however a material aspect to ethical striving, namely an empirical attitude to ones striving for an end that we call happiness: the true nature of such happiness is, however, obscure to us. This aspect may be well characterised by Paul Ricoeur’s formulation “the desire to be”. Characterisation of action in the realm in which we cause ourselves to make something of ourselves( an important aspect of Philosophical Psychology) necessitates, in our opinion, the use of the categorical concepts of actuality/potentiality, matter/form in both the context of exploration and the context of explanation/justification. According to Kant, Anthropology concerns itself with what man makes of his world and himself and here too there is a clear distinction between contexts of exploration and contexts of explanation/justification. These contexts manifest themselves at the empirical level where man is presumably is engaged in the task of striving for the goods of the body and the external world in accordance with the principle of prudence. The goods of the soul can also be involved in this striving insofar as Kant is concerned, if the striving involves the desire to be worthy of the flourishing life. Here Kant is clearly demarcating the realm of the empirical (the phenomenal world) and the realm of the noumenal world. This is done in Kant via an important distinction between instrumental and categorical imperatives in the system of ought-concepts and principles. Reason has an important role:
“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)
Philosophical Psychology concerns itself with with the will and the practical form of reason that organises the ought-system of concepts and its constituting principles/laws: Philosophical Psychology, that is must contribute an answer to the question “What can I hope for?”. The ontological question “What can make of himself and his world?” is also a major concern for Philosophical Psychology. This question is also connected to the question “What is man?” and in the context of this discussion Kant’s position appears somewhat surprising in that he claims that the potential we have to be free must be weighed against the crooked timber of humanity that is manifested in a tendency toward laziness and cowardice. Man, with the calculating part of his mind has reckoned with the fact that the free life is not necessarily correlated with the comfortable life he desires. The free life, that is, entails a critical attitude toward all authorities whether they be religious, governmental or military, all of which have the tendency to either treat their subjects as lazy, cowardly individuals or alternatively treat the people they are concerned with as cogs in a huge machine. One of the key virtues of the free man, as was the case with the Greeks, was the virtue of courage.
Kant’s hylomorphic commitments become very apparent in his discussions of psuche or life:
“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)Practical Reason
The connection between desire and mans life-world is just as important for Kant as it is for Aristotle. Kant is also interested in the origins and the ends of life from not just a biological perspective but also in the context of religion. In his work on “Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason” Kant discusses mythology and the theme of the beginning and the end of humanity. The beginning is, according to our mythology, the product of divine creation, and must therefore be good. This beginning is often thought of in terms of a “Golden Age” which degenerates further and further into evil until a Day of judgment arrives:
“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)
Kant’s response to this pessimistic view is not a vision but rather an argument in which we are moving from a worse human condition to a better condition. He does not that is respond with an imaginative construction but he instead reasons about action in terms of an actualising of a potential that resides in the crooked timber of humanity. For Kant the operative assumption here is teleological, it is the end that is good and not its beginning. Man is steered by his discourse and reason on a course that aims at the goods of the world(the goods of the body, the external world and the soul) and the source of his action is a good will that wills in accordance with a principle that is not to be regarded as any kind of substance.
Phenomenologists question the Kantian approach to both epistemological and metaphysical issues. In terms of the question of evil they maintain a position that diminishes the importance of the knowledge of evil and focus instead on the lived experience of evil in mans life-world. There is considerable scepticism on the part of the Phenomenologist insofar as reasoning about judgments in this arena of discussion is concerned. There would, for example, be considerable resistance to the rational process involved in analysing the logical relations between the following three propositions:”God is all powerful”, “God is absolutely good”, “Evil exists”. Ricoeur in particular would oppose this kind of propositional analysis on the grounds that it was too abstract and too formal. Kant’s approach to this discussion is not traditionally theological. Indeed his analysis of the logical relations between the above three propositions results rather surprisingly in a secular Republic that respects “the holy” or “the sacred”, but is equally concerned with human rights, freedom, equality and ethical relations between individuals living in what he called a “Kingdom of Ends”. Such a Kingdom is, however, one hundred thousand years in the future, such is the crooked timber of humanity. The man living in this kingdom is a cosmopolitan citizen of the world free to criticise all authority that does not reason in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Kant is clearly a rationalist but a rationalist who believes that Evil is only empirically real. This is the aspect of his position that endears him to the humanists of the Enlightenment period. The will cannot on Kant’s account be transcendentally evil because the absolute in this Kantian rational system of concepts is the absolute of the good will. Kant also, like Aristotle who believed that the universe has no beginning and no end, refused to speculate about the creation of the universe though he did speculate about the design of the universe. This speculation was not in terms of visions of the beginning and ends of things but rather referred to principles that organise both the world and our experience of the world. One phenomenological response to this state of affairs(in the shadow of Hegel’s dark opinions about the Philosophy of Kant) was to reflect upon our experiences of good and evil and attempt to synthesise a concept of the good from the dialogical conflict of interpretations of our life-world experiences. Kant’s response to this would have been in the form of the judgment : “Man is empirically evil and transcendentally good”. Areté (doing the right thing in the right ay at the right time) is of course an important concept to bear in mind in this discussion. Kant’s hylomorphism forces him to consider the animal origins of man and the principles governing this animals form: principles determining his efforts to exist and desire to be where the instrumental imperative is to survive. Causality plays a fundamental role in this process until the dawning of self consciousness (the “I think”) introduces the power of freely choosing in accordance with areté. At the zenith of this power lies obviously the decision to lead a life of a particular kind–the examined life. This decision transcends instrumental strivings after happiness or the flourishing life with a desire to be worthy of the valuable life one leads. It is not certain that one can find space for this kind of examined life in phenomenological systems such as Ricoeur’s, in which the act of reflection studies the traces of mans actions. Such study reveals, according to Ricouer, the quality of his existence in terms of his empirical efforts to exist and desires to be.
Kant introduces the notion of a “deed” into his discourse on reality. This notion is intended to create a psychical distance to the more materialistic and empirical interpretations of mans actions, focussing upon the subject and his free choice rather than upon man as an object situated in a causal web of events. This focus is part of the context of explanation/justification in which Kant rejects the logical consequences of man, the object, tossed about in a causal world. He does this by logical argumentation and the use of the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason in a practical reasoning context. Man would not be a being that could be held responsible for his actions/deeds unless free-will existed is the truncated form of Kant’s argument here.
On Kant’s account it does not make sense to claim that “The human being is essentially evil”(Religion Within the bounds of Mere Reason, P.55) because evil is merely the power that man possesses to make himself an exception to the law that he understands is good. Animals, cannot be regarded as evil simply because they possess no moral personality (a result of a number of powers they do not possess) for which they can be praised or blamed. The myth of Adam Eve can be interpreted as a story about man living in a state of nature, and on one reading of the myth we see two objects, Adam and Eve, classified as “sinful” by the divine Subject of Genesis. These beings were clearly capable of discourse (but so was the serpent!) and also capable of making themselves an exception to the law of Eden owned by the Subject of Genesis. The temptation offered by the serpent was indeed powerful. On one reading the attraction was that of being able to acquire the knowledge of good and evil. On an Aristotelian account what we are witnessing here is an actualising process in the Garden of Eden, a process that resulted in a decision by Adam and Eve to become knowledge bearing subjects instead of causally manipulated objects in a state of nature. For the Philosopher (especially for Kant) the moral lesson to be learned from this myth is that of the value of freedom and knowledge. The moral of this myth for the theologians is of course very different, referring as it does to a “Fall” from the state of grace into a state of sin. For Philosophy on the other hand we are dealing with an “elevation” in mans status from a blind follower to a free “knower” and master of his world. Kant would have affirmed the latter interpretation and would have dismissed all involvement of supernatural causes or events deemed to lie outside the scope of Reason.
Kant is, despite Arendt’s claim to the contrary, a Political Philosopher par excellence. The arguments for this position are manifold. Firstly the concept of Human Rights was a logical consequence of the ethical Philosophy to be found in his works, “The Critique of Practical Reason”, The Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals” and “The Metaphysics of Morals”. This Philosophy was not just a product of the Enlightenment but rather burned incandescently in an already darkening environment in which the dignity of the moral personality was being questioned by the materialists and mathematically inclined dualists. Secondly the concept of the United Nations is a Kantian idea from the late 1700s: an institution designed to limit the extent to which sovereign states can exercise their sovereignty in declarations of war. The condition for the existence of a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of ends was obviously perpetual peace and the redirection of expenditure from war to education of the citizens This education would begin with giving the citizens what Kant called an “orbus pictus” and end with encouraging them to lead examined lives.
We can only speculate on what Aristotle would have made of the idea of a “citizen of the world”. We should bear in mind he was the tutor of Alexander the Great and what ambitions that young man had. The politicians of Athens of the time could no doubt be overheard in the agora proposing that Greece should rule the world. Whether Alexander was listening to them or whether he drew some Kantian conclusion from Aristotle’s thoughts is something to think about. Aristotle was one of the first proposers of Public education and, like Kant, acknowledged the role of the divine in his contemplative form of life. In the realm of practical action is where we see the most startling similarities, between Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy, a fact that often passes unnoticed by many commentators. There are of course differences that require explanations we do not as yet have. Aristotle, for example, in his discussion of incontinence, pointed to the importance of practical knowledge and practical reasoning in the performance of all kinds of action. He discusses the following syllogism:
Everything sweet ought to be tasted
This fruit is sweet
Therefore This fruit ought to be tasted
The above syllogism contains both descriptive and explanatory elements in the process of reasoning about whether to eat a piece of fruit. The experiential aspects of the above process of reasoning are obviously less important than the more formal aspects. Several features are important to note. Firstly, we have, in the major premise, an action, and the judgment has an imperative form(ought). In the context of action this imperative form in this universal mode suggests that we are dealing with a principle: a principle in the universe of discourse related to prudential action. The minor premise in the above argument is a particular judgment where epistemé is involved in the statement of a particular fact(assuming the fruit is sweet). The conclusion again is in the imperative form and carries the weight of a principle applied to reality. The conclusion, that is “counsels” that in the light of the principle and a fact ,a particular action ought to be done. Logic is clearly involved in the above reasoning: firstly in the form of the law/principle of identity(something is what it is and not something else). Secondly logic is involved in the form of the law/principle of noncontradiction (something cannot be something and something else at the same time or in the same respect). Thirdly, logic is involved in the form of the principle of sufficient reason (the criteria for something being something must be both necessary and sufficient).
It should also be pointed out that the normative character of the above reasoning in the ought system of concepts would in general be accepted in the arena of the regulation of thought by logic, i.e. logic is normative in the sense of being a regulator of how people ought to think and therefore belongs clearly in the imperative domain of discourse. The message of logic is simple: one ought to think and operate in discourse in accordance with the above principles. These principles must obviously also be applicable to our thought about action: the reasons for our action and the description of our action. Aristotle called the above form of reasoning “deliberation” or “proairesis”. Jonathan Lear, in his work “Aristotle:the Desire to Understand” characterises this kind of reasoning in the following way:
“A deliberation begins with a wish for a certain end. The wish itself is both a desire and a piece of consciousness. The wish motivates a deliberation in which the agent reasons back from the desired goal to the steps necessary to achieve it. The deliberation is both conscious reasoning and a manifestation of the desire for the end. It is also a transmitter of desire for the wished-for goal to the means. The last step in the deliberation is a deliberated decision to act in a certain way. The decision is at once a desire and a state of consciousness. Indeed it is essentially a self-conscious state: for the awareness that I have decided to act in a certain way constitutes the deliberated decision. This entire process is at once a manifestation of practical mind and a manifestation of desire.. Thus Aristotle can speak of desiring mind. Practical wisdom is just what the desiring mind of a virtuous person exhibits: he wishes for the best goals and reasons well how to achieve them.”(P. 174)
In this quote we encounter an interesting descriptive reference to consciousness which although relevant to Kant would not be his primary focus. Kant would be more concerned with analysing ethical action in the context of explanation/justification. In Kant’s discussions we are more likely to encounter the question of whether or not the maxim of the action we are considering can be universalisable. It is in the ethical realm that the principle of noncontradiction is especially important. Consider the following “deliberation”:
Promises ought to be kept
Jack promised Jill he would do X
Therefore Jack ought to do X
The major premise in the above syllogism is a universal justification of the particular promise Jack made to Jill. Failing to honour Jill as an end in herself in this context and reneging on his promise would for Kant be a violation of the practical version of the principle of noncontradiction. It is so because such a practical contradiction has serious implications for both the institution of promising and the institutional practice of truthfulness in discourse. The interesting difference between these two examples of “deliberation” is that in the former case(of the desire to eat some fruit) we could well imagine the deliberation to occur in a context of exploration where the agent of the action although being counselled that he ought to taste the fruit, might do so with a questioning attitude because the grapes might turn out be sour (just as the fox predicted). The latter ethical form of deliberation is clearly situated in the context of explanation/justification and in all such contexts the conclusion of such deliberations carry with them the weight of the ´values of institutions such as promising and truthfulness rather than the concern for pleasurable sensations: not to mention the weight of prohibition and punishment that is a measure of the value of the institutions for the human form of life.
Popular discussions of ethics are prone to emphasise the difference between the virtue ethics of Aristotle and the deontological ethics of Kant. There are differences but these can be explained and even justified in spite of the fact that serious consideration of their respective ethical positions will reveal many essential similarities. This alone suffices, in our opinion to motivate the thesis that Kant is essentially a hylomorphic Philosopher. Kant would in hylomorphic spirit, agree with the Aristotelian idea of the many meanings of the word “Good”. In relation to the deliberation relating to tasting sweet fruit Aristotle would have pointed out that there are three categories of good:the goods of the body, the goods of the external world, and the goods of the soul. He would also have drawn attention to the fruit not falling into the category of the goods of the soul and pointed to the contrast with the deliberation over keeping a promise. For Kant, eating fruit is in the domain of the instrumental imperative and keeping promises in the domain of the categorical imperative. The instrumental imperative reigns over the calculating part of the mind that concerns means to ends and the categorical imperative is connected to the part of the mind that contemplates ends in themselves in the form of people or the Kingdom of Ends.
There are interesting implications relating to the process of contemplation that is involved in deliberating on the goods for the soul such as the making and keeping of promises. Such promises transform the external world into a good place and insofar as the deliberation involves phronesis and epistemé (as is the case in the deliberation over making and keeping promises) the person who deliberates and acts in accordance with their deliberations consistently is hylomorphically characterised as a Phronimos. This is a similar state of affairs to the theoretical case of the man who has the knowledge (epistemé) of geometry: we call people with knowledge of geometrical principles “Geometers”. Presumably the man with the knowledge of the principles of all the sciences (theoretical, practical, productive) is to be regarded as a great souled man. It is not clear, however, whether Aristotle would have demanded that a Philosopher be such a great-souled man. The soul of a Phronimos would be in harmony which means that his powers would be well adapted to bringing about the goods for bodies, the goods for the external world and the goods for the soul. On Aristotle’s view such a man would lead a flourishing life but on Kant’s view all that could be said is that such a great-souled man is worthy of leading a flourishing life.
Hannah Arendt accuses Kant of confusing the principles of bios politikos with the principles of bios theoretikos. There are a number of counterarguments against this position but suffice it here to refer to the characterisation of Kants political position by Höffe who points to an essay entitled “Perpetual Peace”. Höffe claims that this essay of Kant’s contributes substantially to both our understanding of human rights and the law. Our arguments support this position through pointing out the close relation between Kant’s ethical position and his final vision of a political/legal Kingdom of ends. It can also be argued in further defence of Kant, that Höffe omits to appreciate Kant’s contribution to the understanding of international law via the arguments produced for the installation of the institution of the United Nations.
Kant’s Philosophy of Aesthetic Judgment is clearly situated in a context of explanation/justification rather than an empirical phenomenological context of exploration. This can be confirmed by attending to the structure of Kant’s account in which the discussions resemble less an aesthetically constructed narrative and resemble more the arguments we could encounter in a legal tribunal. The deductions that are an essential part of the Critique of Judgment are deliberative, designed to prove that someone has the right to use a particular concept or a particular judgment. The kind of investigation we encounter in this work is philosophical. It does not, that is seek to uncover evidence but rather to see if the evidence under consideration is, or is not, in accordance with a known principle or law. Kant would call this kind of procedure a transcendental/metaphysical investigation. The precise domain of concern in the Third Critique is the realm of reflective judgment which in fact is a type of judgment that is closely aligned to particular judgments based on particular experiences. Hannah Arendt and a number of Philosophers following Hegel, including Schopenhauer, and a number of phenomenologists, refer to this kind of reflective judgment as a model of explanation/justification. The arguments in the following chapters question whether a dialectical approach to logic will suffice to justify the universality and necessity required to organise particular experiences and judgments into a system of knowledge.
Pragmatists(Dewey) and Existentialists(Heidegger, Arendt) have united in criticising the above formal deductive approach to Aesthetics that we find in Kant. It is argued by these critics that the role of empirical experience and emotion is not sufficiently considered in the above transcendental/metaphysical investigations. The faculty of the imagination is often evoked as the mechanism responsible for organising these experiences and emotions. Kant demonstrates how the imagination can harmonise with reason in the case of the construction of mathematical definitions and concepts: he also demonstrates how the imagination can harmonise with the understanding (the schemata of the categories of judgment) in the case of description of the powers involved in Judgment that use concepts( in accordance with the categories) rather than constructing them. The attraction of the role of the faculty of Sensibility as a whole is also a focus of concern for critics of Kant from many different schools of Philosophy. A non-hylomorphic concept of “life” appears to emerge in contrast to that found in the Critique of Judgment where Kant argues that the feeling of life:
“forms the basis of a quite separate faculty of discriminating and estimating, but contributes nothing to knowledge.”(P.42)
The characteristic of not contributing to knowledge indicates that the faculty is discriminating intuitively without the presence of concepts. Kant also in this section refers to “the feeling of life” in aesthetics, a feeling that he claims possesses a “disinterested” quality in which we somehow abstract from the normal interest we have in objects and instead focus on the meaning of our aesthetic representations. Aesthetic feelings are not, then like the pleasant sensation(feeling) we get when we eat sweet fruit where there is clearly an interest in the cause of the feeling. The feeling in aesthetic contexts is however, connected to the faculty of the understanding and its categories of thought: deliberation is involved because although we are not focused in the mode of material desire on the object we are representing, we do desire to understand our representations and the understanding makes itself felt through a process of non-conceptual universalisation. In this process we demand that anyone experiencing the object that gives rise to the representations ought to also experience the meaning of these representations, on pain of being accused of lacking feeling or being insensitive. When in such contexts we insist that the rose or the landscape is beautiful, this aesthetic judgment refers only to what Kant called the form of finality of the object, i.e. its suitability for being conceptualised without actually being so. The feeling, involved here then, is not a feeling causally connected to the object of our representations but is rather attached to the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and understanding that are involved in this process. The form of the imagination involved in the enjoyment of a piece of fruit or a glass of wine is designated by Kant as the “reproductive imagination”, a form that obeys the principles or laws of association where the end of the experience, namely a temporary pleasure of the body is the point of the whole context. Aesthetic pleasure is not of this kind and is more connected to the goods of the soul. The form of imagination that is involved in this experience is designated by Kant as the “productive imagination” obeying principles related to the categories of the understanding. The form of finality of a work of art requires, according to Kant, the productive imagination of an artist who needs to be a genius to create objects that give rise to representations whose meanings possess the property that Kant designates with the words “purposiveness without purpose”. These geniuses work with aesthetic ideas that Kant characterises in the following way:
“In a word, the aesthetic idea is a representation of the imagination, annexed to a given concept with which, in the free employment of imagination, such a multiplicity of partial representations are bound up, that no expression indicating a definite concept can be found for it–one which on that account allows a concept to be supplemented in thought by much that is indefinable in words and the feeling of which quickens the cognitive faculties, and with language, as a mere thing of the letter, binds up the spirit(soul) also. The mental process whose union in a certain relation constitutes genius are imagination and understanding….. genius, properly consists in the happy relation, which science cannot teach nor industry learn, enabling one to find ideas for a given concept, and besides to hit upon the expression for them–the expression by means of which the subjective mental condition induced by the ideas as the concomitant of a concept may be communicated to others.”(S 49 P. 179)
The artistic genius certainly in the societies of the 20th century in the civilised world may have been regarded as a great-souled man in spite of not meeting all the Aristotelian criteria. Genius is required for the work of art to meet the demands of areté. But genius is also interestingly manifesting what Kant refers to as the “super-sensible substrate of the mind” . The condition of such manifestation is of course that all three faculties of mind, namely sensibility, understanding, and reason are in harmony with one another. Insofar as the appreciator of such works of art are concerned, we find them making aesthetic judgments that possess special qualities. The appreciator “speaks with a universal voice” and although this is a subjective judgment and does not apply to external objects in the world, it nevertheless, as was claimed above, refers to a super-sensible principle operating in our minds. It is in the context of discovery that we seek the universal qualities of objects(essences), or alternatively seek to establish the facts and the causes of the facts . The universal voice of the appreciator of the work of the artistic genius is the voice that echoes in the tribunal: it is a judgment and it is authoritative occurring as it does in a context of explanation/justification. At this moment of the judgment the facts are no longer relevant. The point of the judgement is to apply principles to the collected “facts”, or in this case, collected “representations”. The aesthetic judgment, apart from being subjective, resembles in many respects the moral judgment (which also has a relation to the super-sensible substrate of the mind) insofar as it claims to be in possession of principles(organising representations rather than as in the ethical case, actions). Both judgments are operating in the realm of the ought system of concepts and principles and therefore are transcendentally ideal.
In the course of the creation of the artistic genius there will of course be contexts of exploration in which either dialectical logic will be operating in his choices and rejections, or alternatively some variation of the Aristotelian process of a search for the Golden Mean will be steering the actualisation of the artists potential.
The indeterminacy of aesthetic ideas is a characterisation that touches upon not only the super-sensible substrate of the mind but also the super-sensible substrate of the phenomenal world, namely the noumenal world. Adrian Stokes, the art critic, illustrates this well in his remarks on the work of the painter, Cezanne (Stokes, A.,The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Vol. 2, London, Thames and Hudson, 1978, P. 259-65). Stokes fixates upon Cezanne’s own conviction that with the use of colour and the reproduction of planes and surfaces Nature as it is in itself can be represented. Cezanne expressed this by the gesture of the interlocking of the ten fingers of his two hands and saying:
“They(colours, lines, planes, surfaces) become objects, rocks, trees, without my thinking about it. They take on value. They acquire value….My canvas joins hands…it is full”( Stokes Critical Writings, P 26)
Here we are perhaps seeing idealism in action: a form of mathematical idealism. Idealism obviously transcends experience. It is not clear, however, that Cezanne has accurately characterised the reason why his representations might be in contact with nature as it is in itself(the super-sensible substrate). For this we might need to visit the remarks of Stokes on the defining characteristics of QuattroCento Art, namely its ability in works of architecture to create a sense of “the mass-effect” of the stone. The mass of an object is obviously a scientific conception but it is one which QuattroCento artists clearly exploit in their works of genius. Here we cannot be talking about the meaning of the representations(as might be the case with Cezanne) but must be talking about the stone itself. It might therefore be true that Cezanne’s work does have a quattroCento character: that is his colours, lines, planes and surfaces might be reproducing(imitating) the mass effect of the mountain he is painting.
Humanism is for Kant an obligation in the Age of Enlightenment. Kant himself in this age needed to be taught to respect the dignity of man but this was undoubtedly the centrepiece theme of all three Critiques. Morality and Fine Art are both celebrations of the humanity of man. Fine Art we saw in the reflections above put the truth to work as illustrated in the mass-effect of QuattroCento stone. The Greek idea of Aletheia (as explicated by Heidegger) obviously suggests itself in this context. The Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of this idea will however be significantly different given Heidegger’s insistence that it is the transcendental imagination that creates what he calls “the veritative (truth-making) synthesis. This aspect of Heidegger’s work obviously severs itself from the accounts of both Kant and Aristotle.
There is an interesting connection between Morality and Fine Art that Kant refers to in his claim that “beauty is the symbol of morality”. This connects with an interesting observation made by Wittgenstein in his work. Wittgenstein pointed to the relation that obviously exists between the language we use to describe aesthetic objects and the ethical terms we use to characterise the dignity of man. In both cases, as we pointed out, we are dealing with the normative use of language: what Austin called its performative function which in turn suggests the analogy with the builder who uses his hands normatively(in accordance with the principles of building) when he builds a house. Areté is involved in all of these normative processes and this questions the claim of some Wittgensteinians that man is merely a rule following animal. Stanley Cavell pointed out in his work “Must We Mean What We Say?(Cambridge, CUP, 1969), there is a fundamental difference between merely playing a game of chess according to the rules and the way a Chess Master plays the game in the spirit of areté. Language for Wittgenstein is embedded in Aristotelian forms of life and although the favoured way of thinking about Language is in terms of language games, much of what he says also allows us to view Language as both a tool and a medium for the expression of judgments that are made with understanding and judgements that are rational. Wittgenstein also interestingly draws attention to the first person use of language which is regarded as equally signifiant as its third person usages ( connected to reporting the results of our methodical exploration of the world). We express ourselves in language and when we do so we use what we know(epistemé) and when challenged we can say(with first person authority) what we meant, and why we meant what we said as a form of explanation/justification of what was said. The question of fraudulence can arise in such subjective contexts but it is important to correctly describe what is occurring when someone fraudulently claims to have meant something he could not have meant. The fraudulence of this kind of first person expression could not have existed were it not for the fact that the primary function of language in the first person is to be truthful. In such situations the answer to why the person behind the fraudulent expression is doing what they are doing, will refer to the personal gain or advantage that attaches to their “performance”. This issue of the important distinction between first person usage of language and third person usage is taken up in Kant’s “Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view”. Kant discusses the usage of the “I think”. Contrary to the popular view of many empirically oriented analytic Philosophers the first person usage is not to be characterised as a subjective expression in contrast to an objective third person observationally based report. Kant maintains that when a child first begins to use the expression “I think” it is a manifestation of a significant advance in that child’s mental development, compared to his earlier third person forms of self expression(Karl wants to eat, Karl wants to go out, etc., ) On Kant’s account therefore first person usage is an advanced form of language-use compared with that of third person reporting. In fact, Kant argues, the “I think” accompanies all of my representations and it unifies all my representations into some form of either intuitive unity or conceptual unity. It is this universal intent of the “I think” that gives it philosophical significance and caused Kant to characterise this event in the process of the child’s actualisation process as a new form of consciousness. In the conceptual form of the unity of representations, the concept abstracts from the differences between the representations and focuses upon what they all have in common. The unity thus produced is both related to the objective world and universally necessary. This act of abstraction is also an expression of the practical aspect of the freedom of the agent. Subjectivising this moment as Hume, for example is prone to do when he claims that no self can be found to observationally correspond to this “I”, is merely part of an attempt to reduce all meaningful language to truth-functional third person observationally based reports. It is ironic that that this form of language should lead to a sensory search for a self that in both Kant and Aristotle is not a substance or at thing but rather an intangible principle. The observational concern with the self differs radically from the transcendental conceptual concern we find in Kant where the emphasis is upon an act of freedom in which man constitutes himself in very much the same way in which a principle is, in a sense, self-constituting.
Freud characterises the “I think” as a vicissitude of the instincts: a vicissitude that is part of the task of an Ego that has been forced to abandon its narcissistic concern with itself and pay attention to other aspects of its life-instinct that are concerned more with the external world and the tribunal presided over by the superego. The abandonment of self love appears to be connected with avoidance of personal ruin and destruction. In this system Consciousness is a task of the life instinct or Eros. Eros is an expression of the transcendental X of the instincts which of course includes the very mysterious death instinct(Thanatos). Freud’s approach reminds us very much of the Kantian approach which Professor Brett expresses in the following way :
“the mind must be regarded as a structure regulated by principles which are ultimately its own activities”(Brett’s History of Psychology, P. 544)
This in turns reminds us of the role of “principles” in Aristotelian Philosophy. Attempts to impose a materialistic view of substance onto activities of the mind inevitably results in either a materialist theory of the mind or alternatively the reaction to this which is a dualist view of the mind. Focussing upon Consciousness in such circumstances is problematic. Kant rejects both materialism and dualism but does focus upon Consciousness as something that that is a stage of the actualising process, something that emerges as different powers build upon and are integrated with other powers until some kind of homoestasis or harmony of the mind is achieved.
Hegel, however, failed to appreciate the hylomorphic content of Kant’s position and attempted to displace Consciousness both from Critical theory and from its general role in the process of understanding and reasoning. This project , it must be said was suggested by Descartes and has fascinated modern man well into the twentieth century. Part of Hegel’s criticism involved attacking the idea that Reality is to be construed from the point if view of principles (because, in his view, it is not clear how these principles constitute themselves). Reality is better understood, Hegel argues, in terms of the teleological march of Spirit in which meanings succeed each other and reveal the meaning of the previous meaning. Consciousness is thereby displaced in favour of the nebulous notion of “Spirit”. Involved in this succession of meanings is the transition from individual psychology to more “objective” spheres that reveal themselves when, for example, in the struggle between masters and slaves, a recognition of value emerges. In this struggle we are confronted with an unhappy consciousness that is destined to participate in more objective spheres of meaning.
The context of explanation in the arena of Philosophical Psychology cannot be restricted to a succession of spheres of meaning where the only mechanism available to explain the changes that are occurring is the very abstract “mechanism” of negation. Hegel promised to turn the Philosophy of Kant upside down: a promise that was fulfilled. Kant’s “Anthropology” referred to an ontological distinction between firstly, what man makes of himself and his world and secondly, what happens to man. With respect to this last category of action one can wonder whether spheres of meaning mysteriously transforming man could only be counted as a part of this latter ontological category. It is not clear, however, whether Hegel would have either accepted this ontological distinction, much less been committed to it.
Wittgenstein’s later work has its Hegelian moments, if one disregards its hylomorphic characteristics. Wittgenstein, it is clear from his remarks on the will and the emotions, is committed to the above Kantian ontological distinction. Insofar as the emotions are concerned the remarks in his later work also share much of the animus of Aristotle. The emotions are an area of discourse where very different kinds of explanation can be relevant, ranging from the causal that is clearly operative in the ontological realm of things that happen to man to the conceptual that is operative in the realm of what man makes of himself. In the fear we feel of the face at the window during a storm, the form of explanations for what is happening here are clearly causal in the Humean sense. There are here two events linked by a causal mechanism: the face at the window causes the draining of the blood from the face and the trembling of the hands. These are indisputably events that happen to my body, as is the event of my dropping my cup of coffee. If someone asks me why I dropped my cup of coffee, my answer will not be conceptually related to something I intended to do. I will, that is , not claim that this is something I did or willed.
Hegel’s view of History is paradoxical in the sense that it appears to reject the reality of an archeological investigation into causes as a form of explanation of an effect we are presently confronted with. This may not be the major task of history but it certainly is what common sense expects of historical explanation, whatever the view that History has of itself. An example of the “archaeological” approach to History is given by Elisabeth Anscombe’s example of Henry Eighth’s Act of Supremacy, separating the Church of England from the Rome. She cites the cause of this as being King Henry’s longing for an heir to the English throne. This “political” act does not meet the criteria for an ethical act which includes the necessity of universalising the maxim of Henry’s action. Henry’s action was done in the spirit of self-love, and not in a Kantian ethical spirit where the aim was treating all who would be affected by the action as ends-in-themselves. The end aimed at, namely, was the act of divorce from someone Henry had made promises to. Thomas more’s refusal to participate in the King’s scheme, however was a categorial action that met Kantian ethical criteria: this refusal caused no immediate effect in the external world. In Kant’s terms the refusal was a “deed”. Here we have in Hegelian terms two “World-historical” figures engaged in different kinds if action. Hegel could, of course ,claim that the fate of Thomas More and the subsequent condemnation of his King’s action is a kind of negation of tyranny that could well be accounted for in the dialectical movement of World-Spirit.
World Spirit, according to Hegel is also expressed in artistic activity. Here too there is a modernist inversion of the theory of Art presented by Kant: a theory that began by dividing Fine art into different forms that express aesthetic ideas in different ways. Kant suggests that we use the model of discourse in order to classify artistic activity. Art is a form of communication as is Language whose Logos is connected to the communication of thought, intuition, and sensation. Implied in this classification system is commitment to the cognitive powers of judgement, understanding and reason, all of which are connected to discourse. The arts of speech such as Rhetoric and Poetry, in other words, are the highest forms of Fine Art. Architecture and Sculpture are connected to presentations of the imagination that concern themselves with sensuous truth (Critique of Judgement, P.186). Painting concerns itself with what Kant calls sensuous semblance.
There is, in Hegel, no direct appeal to the rule of experience as there is in another Kantian critic, Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer we find an emphasis, firstly, upon a psychological mechanism of the imagination, secondly on the form of the aesthetic experience, and thirdly an underlying suggestion of a religious view of suffering and death. Schopenhauer’s account is more closely aligned with Hegel than it is with the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason that we find in the works of Aristotle and Kant. Schopenhauer was, we know critical of Hegel, but without any commitment to Aristotelian and Kantian rationalism, his criticism lacked the possible power of Aristotelian or Kantian criticism.
Schopenhauer claims that the power of the imagination is such that we can imagine the non-existence of our world. Such a proposition would, for both Aristotle and Kant, be a violation of both the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason. Even the great Hegel would have balked at endowing the imagination with such power. Hegel may have turned the world upside down with his thoughts but he would have rejected the idea of imagining this world to be non-existent.
Schopenhauer attempts to unite all his forms of experience into one General Will. According to one commentator, Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer is influenced by both Hinduism and Buddhism in his philosophical response to suffering and death. Meditation is the Eastern religious response to suffering and death. Referring to this activity, Magee argues that we are “taken out of ourselves” in a “timeless experience”. We contrast this experience with an aesthetic experience on Pages 158-9:
“Let us try to apply the above claims to a QuattroCento work of art in which we experience the “mass-effect” of the stone of a building we find beautiful. Now such an experience is clearly spatial even if there is an “air” of the timeless, an “air” of time coming to rest in this singular object that has clearly been created with the intention of being responded to (meaning that the category of judgment Kant calls “Community” is very relevant here—a category in which agents relate to patients). To say in this situation that patients (the appreciators) have been taken out of themselves, is highly problematic. How would we characterize such a state of affairs in terms of the fundamental Kantian ontological differences of that which someone does and that which happens to someone? If the appreciator becomes the agent in taking themselves out of themselves how is this done given what O Shaughnessy claims are the logical limits of a will? A Wittgensteinian grammatical test to determine whether the will is involved in something that happens is the so-called imperative test. Can you order someone to take themselves out of themselves? Even if a Buddhist monk responds to this by a meditation process in which he is “at one” with his slow breathing body and thought has been shrunk to a pinpoint of activity, it is not clear that this description even applies here. Does he not intend to continue meditating? He must be doing something, simply because the process is rigorously controlled and takes years to perfect. The aesthetic experience is clearly much more complex than Magee’s description of it indicates. A master can order his pupil to meditate but this process requires self-control and it appears perverse to insist that we are being taken out of ourselves. This must fall into the category of events that O Shaughnessy claimed: “it is logically impossible that they should be willed”(Volume 1, P. 1). It seems, that is, that if such an event as “He has been taken out of himself” can occur it must necessarily be something that happens to a man and not something he actively does, If it is something that happens to a man we will then need to explain the agency involved. One possible “agency” is a God, but, reference to a God, in this context, would be rejected by Schopenhauer.”
We argue, namely that “both intention and desire are necessary for the operation of the will”(P. 159). It surely cannot be denied that works of art are intentionally(willfully) created with the purpose of being responded to: and even if the creative process over many years of actualisation may be described in terms of the Freudian defence mechanism of Sublimation (a mechanism that has the effect of transforming the desires and intentions of the artist), there is also sense in which we may say that the artist is transforming himself(making something of himself). Here there is no other agent involved in this process other than the artist himself in a context of Aristotelian principles of change.
Adrian Stokes elaborates upon the above Freudian theme with Kleinian concepts. We characterise this elaboration upon page 160:
“Stokes interestingly agrees (perhaps congruently with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics) that there is a mystical element in the work of art that seeks to unite everything into one in an experience reminiscent of breastfeeding where the whole experience is “oceanic”. We are meant by the artist to feel at one with the world in the way in which we may feel at the deepest points of sleep, when, like Socrates, we have truly accepted death, or perhaps in deep meditative states. This oceanic feeling is related to what Stokes calls the manic trend in art and he claims it is present in the work of Michelangelo. Counteracting this manic aspect is the self-sufficiency or independence of the object we are contemplating. Here space is critical in the experience (contrary to Schopenhauer’s characterization of aesthetic experience). Space, Stokes claims, is the matrix of order and distinctiveness for separated objects. A mother, in Klein’s theory, is a separate independent object, for the mother may spatially disappear (go her own way at any point in time), perhaps never to return. This is the source of the Freudian reality principle that seeks to sublimate manic and depressive tendencies. We can see this aspect of the work of Art in Michelangelo’s “Times of the day” where each of the times of the day asserts their presence with a suggestion of a realistic sublimation of the manic-sexual which was also on display for all to see in the Classical nudes. The oceanic and rhythmic world of flesh has come under the control of the work and thought of the artist. In other works of art we can see this oneness in, for example, the block of stone that is then carved by a work process into the singularity of an unfinished Slave or Giant. This particular work we refer to, is unfinished and leaves us with an impression that the figure is bursting out of the stone thus testifying to the presence of both of the above aspects of a work of art. Michelangelo is the action artist par excellence.”
Stokes extends his reflections by referring to the work of Michelangelo. An interesting elaboration considering the resemblance of the personalities of these two geniuses. Michelangelo’s life was led in an atmosphere of mourning and melancholia, the dominant mood in Schopenhauer’s life. There is the suggestion above in relation to the discussion of meditation that the time condition of the whole experience was removed. The question that hangs in the air with this characterisation is whether the time condition is merely being pathologically denied in an elaborate exercise of self-deception. Michelangelo does not in any way attempt to deny the time conditions of life but instead places this condition before our eyes in his work “Times of the Day”. He demands of us that we bring our intuitions of time to bear in our attempt to understand the full meaning of this work. Tragedy is in the air around this work (standing as it does at the entrance to the tomb of the De Medici’s) but there is here a demand that the appreciator understand the meaning of the work, engage that is, in a work of understanding of his own that seeks to replicate that of the artists. Such work requires the presence (not the absence) of not just the intuition of time but also many of the powers of Consciousness. Perhaps in a spatial work such as this sculpture, the work of understanding requires more reflection than would be the case in the work involved in interpreting a Greek tragic play filled with Aristotelian pity and fear. The reason for this might be connected to the therapeutic/cathartic function of language. If this is correct then the Kantian decision to base a classification system of Fine Art on the basis of the presence or absence of language may have more to it than immediately meets the eye. What meets the ear in the form of a narrative in a Greek tragedy may, however, engage more interestingly with the intuition of time in a learning process that is spread over time, a process that has the structure of a beginning, a middle, and an end (the structure of a life), using the medium of actions on a stage representing actions of considerable magnitude in the real world. There are aesthetic ideas relating to the noumenal world in play in both these mediums. We know that Schopenhauer referred in very theoretical terms to the noumenal world, and Bryan Magee tries to explain away many of the tensions we encounter in the work of Schopenhauer by appealing to Platonic theory. In Plato’s theory of forms, the particular “participates” in the universal in a timeless fashion. Aristotle criticised this theory and claimed that the forms were “part of the world” and not situated in some timeless zone of spiritual entities. Being part of the world does not of course mean subsistence as some form of essence or substance, but rather part of the world in the way in which the law of gravitation is part of the world. The Platonic idea of the soul obviously also suggested a form of dualism of body and soul that Aristotle would not have found rational or understandable.
Freudian theory has been evoked several times earlier. We suggest that the most fruitful approach to the Freudian account is to relate this theory to the principles of the three Aristotelian Sciences. Freud prefers to refer to his Psychology as Kantian. If Kant was a hylomorphic Philosopher, as we argue in this work, then there must be some connection between Freud and Aristotle. We can sense the importance of epistemé and a concern for principle in Freud’s texts, but we also are given a sense of the importance of techné in the concern for his patients. Freud was an explorer of the depths of the human mind but he also ought to be famous for the “moral” treatment of his patients. This moral treatment suggests the importance of the practical and productive sciences for an understanding of what was happening in therapy where rule number one was openness and truthfulness–saying whatever comes to mind during the therapy session. Consent to this “principle” was vitally important for a wider understanding of concurrent and historical symptoms. Allied to this rule was the tribunal of the “interpretation” of the material which, at the appropriate moment was presented respectfully to patients who may in their turn behave in an insulting manner in the grip of anxiety attacks(the Rat man). It is in this tribunal that the principles of all three Aristotelian Sciences are integrated.
Criticism of Freud usually takes the form of accusing him of being “Unscientific”. We should bear in mind that Freud was one of the leading scientists of his time and initially attempted to explain and justify his therapy in terms of the physical systems of the brain. Freud, like Socrates, came to the point in his theorising when he could not give adequate explanations for the phenomena he was confronted with in his consulting room. Freud as a consequence, embraced Hylomorphic and Platonic ideas in order to satisfy himself that the tribunal of interpretation was guided by principles. One of the more important “moments” of this Freudian “turn” was that of Consciousness and the activity of exclusion of anxiety-laden experiences from Consciousness: both of which were vicissitudes of our Instincts. Instinct in its turn was defined in terms of its source in the body, its aim and its objects as well as in terms of the Energy regulation and Pleasure Pain Principles.
Freud’s relation to Phenomenology is also discussed in one of our chapters on Freud. Merleau-Ponty in a work entitled “The Structure of Behaviour” discusses a phenomenological idea of the operation of the primary process of repression in the mind:
“Development should be considered not as the fixation of a given force on outside objects which are also given, but as a progressive and discontinuous structuration of behaviour. Normal structuration is one which reorganises conduct in depth in such a way that infantile attitudes no longer have a place or meaning in the new attitude: it would result in perfectly integrated behaviour, each moment of which would be internally linked with the whole. One will say that there is repression when integration has been achieved only in appearance and leaves certain relatively isolated systems subsisting in behaviour which the subject refuses both to transform and to assume.”(P. 177)
Dreams also played an important part in the interpretation-process in which manifest content was related to underlying latent content that appear to be the anxiety-laden wish-fulfilment psychological equivalent of aesthetic ideas in the artistic process. The presence of the context of explanation/justification is to be found in the famous chapter seven of Freud’s work “The interpretation of Dreams”, where the epistemé of the psychical apparatus is discussed systematically. Freud announces in this work that the psychical apparatus has no anatomical location. This “apparatus” is then described in hylomorphic terms where he describes the role of different powers. Page 169-70 contains the following discussion :
“Consciousness is clearly an important structuring agency in the process of actualising the potential powers at our disposal and Freud’s account is, in our opinion, far more interesting than his account of the unconscious. Firstly it is important to point to the outline Freud gave of the psychic apparatus in his “interpretation of Dreams. There are two “ends” to the apparatus, Firstly, the perceptual end that is juxtaposed both to the stimuli of the external world that stimulate it into activity, and memory systems (short term and long term) which preserve and record the activity but also associates memories with each other (different principles of association will be stored in different memory systems). Secondly, the motor end of the psychic apparatus re-engages with the external world. The natural direction of the flow of energy in the apparatus is from the perceptual end to the motor end. Juxtaposed to the motor end is the preconscious system that possesses what Ricoeur calls a critical function and immediately behind the preconscious system (that contains our knowledge which includes the knowledge of the meanings of our words) lies the unconscious system.”
The following are Freud’s words from “The Interpretation of Dreams”:
“It is the Pcpt (perceptual) system, which is without the capacity to retain modifications and is thus without memory, that provides our consciousness with the whole multiplicity of sensory qualities. On the other hand, our memories–not excepting those which are most deeply stamped on our minds are in themselves unconscious. They can be made conscious: but there can be no doubt that they can produce all their effects while in an unconscious condition. What we describe as our ” character” is based on the memory traces of our impressions and moreover the impressions which have had the greatest effect on us–those of our earliest youth–are precisely the ones which scarcely ever become conscious.” P. 688-9)
In this account Thought becomes a secondary process that arises as a more refined and efficacious response to the haphazard nature of our wishes and the recalcitrance of Reality to these wishes. Freud talks in terms of a hyper-cathexis of the neuronal systems associated with the secondary process of self conscious thought. This thought process is obviously very much integrated with both the use of language and reasoning. The unpleasure involved in the Freudian triangle of agency-demand, refusal of demand, can have two possible outcomes, according to the Freudian ontology of mental health: either a wounded ego or an acceptance of the refusal. Consistent acceptance of refusal without exclusion from Consciousness contributes in the actualisation process to a new regime, a new form of organisation of our powers(to use Aristotelian language) or a “new dawn”(to use a Kantian expression). Anxiety associated with this actualisation process works by disrupting the balance of the mind, either by the primary process disrupting secondary process function(thought), or by uncontrollable eruption into the field of Consciousness in the form of hallucinations or impulsive behaviour. This is a fascinating advance in our knowledge of the role of Consciousness as a dynamic surface phenomenon. This dynamic view also regards the preconscious and unconscious systems of our minds as dynamic phenomena:
“This takes us to what Freud calls his “mythology” namely the instincts and their vicissitudes. The instincts have aims that originate in the biology of the individual but these aims can change. Two of the most important vicissitudes are connected to the aims of becoming conscious and exclusion from consciousness. These vicissitudes will be regulated by the three Freudian principles. That is to say that the instincts or Desire are defined teleologically in terms of their aims that will paradoxically, in the case of the death instinct, include the ending of all conscious, preconscious and unconscious activity. The objects of instinct are obviously variable: they are the means the instinct uses to achieve its aim. The Freudian notion of instinct is clearly not a biological concept obeying only the energy regulation principle. Instinct is rather the basic building block of Freud’s Psychology. Freud referred to his theory of the instincts as his mythology but we are claiming that the basis has a claim to be called “Philosophical”. The ego itself is a product of instinctive activity or Desire and its choice of objects relates directly to the instincts and their vicissitudes. The ego can also be determined by the preconscious system and its “knowledge”(memories etc.). Insofar as the ego functions in accordance with the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle, it is narcissistic (what Freud would describe as a weak ego) and all object choice in this state will be narcissistic. Instincts, therefore, underlie these subject-object exchanges. The strong ego judges in accordance with the reality principle (in accordance with the Kantian categories). Judgment of this kind is a displacement of narcissism but not necessarily a displacement of the instinct of becoming conscious. The displacement of narcissism will obviously be part of the setting up of the agency of the superego. Here the “principles” involved will be first, the pleasure-pain principle regulating the narcissism of the agent and secondly, the reality principle regulating the economics of pain as a consequence of the loss of a loved object (the narcissistic “I”). The “mechanisms” involved are the work of mourning, or the masochistic work of melancholia depending upon whether the reality principle successfully “structures” the ego. In the work of mourning, it is the object that is the focus of attention, or rather the memories of the object must be contextualised in the light of the “knowledge” that the object no longer exists (whatever the imaginatively based wish fulfilment process desires). In melancholia, the work occurs against the background of a lack of structure (characteristic of narcissism) and the death instinct enters the equation of the work via the masochistic feelings directed toward the agent. Here there is no measurement of the wished-for object against the tribunal of reality that has judged the object not to exist. One of the vicissitudes of the death instinct is aggression and it is this that is unleashed by the narcissist upon his environment if he is frustrated. If he desires an object and then loses that object, the memory system is not sufficiently structured for the work of mourning to occur, and the work of melancholia occurs. Here we can see the limited role of consciousness and the importance of the metapsychology of the Instincts and their vicissitudes. Consciousness, of course, is to some extent involved because it is only in virtue of what is not conscious becoming conscious that we come to know what is in the preconscious and unconscious systems. It is the work of becoming conscious which turns what are presentations of the body into psychic presentations. Here Spinoza emerges in Freud’s reflections, namely the claim that the first idea of the mind is the idea of the body. Freud embellishes this by claiming that the instincts re-present the body to the mind. The system of the unconscious contains these instincts which are basically wishful impulses that coexist together with no logical relation to each other, i.e. one wishful impulse cannot negate another or be related to any of the other categories of judgment or indeed have any relation to Time, both of which are constituents of the preconscious and conscious systems. We only know of these unconscious desires through their psychic representatives, insofar, that is, as they become conscious. When these desires appear in consciousness they are symbols of latent processes. It is this fact that demands of psychoanalysts that they do not reflect scientifically and merely search for a cause, but rather use Delphic self-knowledge in the context of Freudian explanations and justifications to “interpret” these “symbols” of consciousness. Freudian explanations and justifications are regulated by Aristotelian “principles” and conform to Kantian judgments of the understanding. The psychoanalyst, that is, works in a philosophical context of meaning and only incidentally in the realm of observation and causality. “
The tribunal of the Reality Principle is obviously operating in the outcome of the work that is occurring in the Freudian triangle. The above quote from page 171 of Volume Two demonstrates two important features of Freud’s thinking: the reliance on Aristotelian hylomorphic and Kantian Critical assumptions. For both Aristotle and Kant, Consciousness is not a centrally important phenomenon. It dos not have the “substance” some Philosophers and many Psychologists have attributed to it. The “agencies” of the Ego, Id, and Superego are formed in accordance with the above assumptions and are of central importance in Freudian theory. These agencies are merely names for the function of different psychical processes in relation to each other and the external world. The presence of the superego and the external world in Freud’s account are an insurance against the whole system becoming solipsistic.
William James’ view of the emotions is discussed in relation to Freud’s account. James insists on a physiological basis that focuses upon the brain and causal processes. Freud must have smiled to himself upon reading “Principles of Psychology”, recognising in these writings an image of his earlier commitments that he abandoned in his “turn”. The difference between these two accounts of the emotions resides in Freud’s focus upon the levels of organisation of life and the intentionality of mental “acts”.
Wittgenstein began his career, as did Socrates and Freud, fascinated with the prospect of naturalistic explanations of the world. His “final solution” to the problems of Philosophy in his Tractatus merely added to existing Philosophical confusion and he too soon “turned” toward a more humanistic approach to the contexts of exploration/explanation/justification. He retained his belief that Language played a central role in both the confusions and the illuminations of Philosophical investigations. (Page 212-213):
“It is hardly surprising therefore that what was perceived to be a move on the part of Wittgenstein from the natural sciences (early work) toward the social sciences (later work) was regarded as a puzzling move for many analytical philosophers who felt that the “conventions” that governed society had nothing to do with the necessities associated with logical truths. The reasons for this shift are probably manifold but primary among them must be his changing view of the nature of language. Wittgenstein no longer believed that language had the “logical” structure he had earlier attributed to it: a structure of representation whose primary task was the formulation of scientific theories. Something equivalent to a dawning upon him of the Aristotelian pluralistic vision of the many meanings of being produced a seismic shift in his thinking that he now expressed by saying “I will show you differences”. The pragmatism of James’s writings may have contributed to this shift in regarding language as embedded in forms of life that were largely, practically oriented. James defined the largely theoretical notion of “intelligence” in practical terms, i.e. as the human power or capacity to select the “means” to achieve ends. We also know that Wittgenstein read Freud carefully and must have become aware that Freud’s “Reality Principle” was a principle of practical reasoning that carried the weight of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy behind it. For Freud, language was the medium or the tool of his therapy and given Wittgenstein’s negative view of the Scientifically inclined Philosophy of his time, he began to see language for what it was, a medium of communication of everything from screams of terror to synthetic a priori or grammatical judgments.”
As a consequence of this “turn”, there is a recognition of different forms of conscious awareness as well as a concern with the ontology of action. These concerns are combined in firstly, an investigation of the observational form of consciousness involved in the context of explanation (a form that is guided by an exploratory questioning attitude) and secondly, an investigation of the non-observational form of intentional consciousness whose essential properties include a knowing attitude, a knowing what I am doing and why:
Husserl, we point out, was influenced by Descartes and we raise the question as to whether he was not a candidate for the society of “new men” that was forming in opposition to both the Philosophy of Aristotle and later, during Husserl’s time, the Philosophy of Kant. These new men were forming the “new world order”. We maintain that underlying the drift of events there is an understanding of an arché that is an important component of the contexts of explanation/justification we use to provide answers to constantly recurring aporetic questions. Husserl has also another claim to membership of this society of “new men”, quite apart from the theoretical scepticism and solipsism we encounter in his theoretical reflections. In his practical reflections upon the drift of events in the new order that was forming before everone´s eyes, we find Husserl maintaining in an essay that this drift of events was “historically successful”. He was ,of course, forced in 1935 to reverse this judgment. Paul Ricoeur in his commentary on the work of Husserl claimed that Husserl “disontologised” our experiences but the power of Ricoeur’s criticism is mitigated by the fact that he shares much with Husserl, including a conviction that the Cartesian Cogito reveals the first truth or foundation of all Philosophical inquiry. Ricoeur’s position is more convoluted than Husserl’s because Ricoeur believes that the cogito argument signifies both being and an act. The Kantian “I think” certainly encompasses both of these aspects but because of its hylomorphic and rationalistic commitments this would not have been(either for Husserl or for Ricoeur) an acceptable interpretation of the philosophical meaning of the cogito argument.
Were Aristotle and Kant to have witnessed the phenomenon of Phenomenology they would probably have concurred in the diagnosis that it was intended to be the therapy for the sick man of Europe whilst at the same time displaying some of the symptoms of the illness, some of the animus of the “Crisis of the European Sciences.”. The sick man did not look sick to many observers appearing as all new men did , to be men of “infinite tasks”. Observers did not notice the symptom of the pathological desire to reduce everything universal to particular forms of experience, thus rejecting all hylomorphic and critical thinking.
Heidegger was a pupil of Husserl and his contribution to the evolution of modernism in the new world order was to introduce Existentialism into the phenomenological arena of debate. Heidegger however shared a concern with the phenomenologists an obsessive concern with the “act of objectification” at the expense of the role of categorical conceptualisation in this process. There is a concern with Being in Heidegger’s account: a concern that is typical of his form of Existentialism which is also critical of the European Sciences:
“Heidegger argues insightfully that significant progress in the sciences will not be made by the discovery of new facts but perhaps only by recasting the foundations of the science in question, which in Kant’s view would involve rethinking the basic concepts (the principles) and their field of operation. The general nature of these concepts will not be connected to the particularities of their use but rather to their relation to the ontological constitution of the beings they are related to. They will that is, in Heidegger’s language be related to the being of those beings. In the Philosophy of Kant or Aristotle, this will no longer be an act of objectification but rather a logical and metaphysical act. Heidegger, however, believes that an ontological act of objectification is involved. For Heidegger, the role of Philosophy is more concretely characterised as the understanding of the complexity of a human existence that already understands being pre-ontologically. In such a study one cannot, Heidegger acknowledges, regard beings instrumentally as one can in the sciences where it is possible as he puts it “to sneak away from being”(P. 27). In science, that is, one can sneak away from Philosophy and this is partly due to the constitution of Dasein whose essence lies in the freedom to choose.”
Sartre continues on the existentialist path whilst retaining many of the assumptions of Phenomenology. This latter is confirmed by in a dialogical ontological distinction between Being, and that which is not Being. In this process Consciousness is connected with negation and nothingness. Sartre’s investigations continue into forms of Consciousness that include the Imagination:(page 290)
The imagination too, is a form of consciousness directed upon an object that may not be real. I expect Pierre to be in the café. This expectation is not composed of the representation of Pierre but rather contains Pierre in what Aquinas terms the first intention. It is Pierre I wish to see, greet, and converse with not his representation. Sartre goes on to argue that the notion of “representation” is a parasitic notion because it is in fact connected fundamentally to its object. Sartre denies however that the power of the imagination is connected to the power of representation. Instead he maintains that the power of imagination generates “meaning”. The winged horse for example may not exist in our instrumentally/categorically constituted worlds but the image nevertheless has meaning because as Spinoza claimed it is “asserted” hypothetically. Sartre would probably deny this and insist that when I posit the presence of Pierre in the café I am about to visit what I grasp is a nothingness which has meaning in a similar way to the way in which the winged horse has a hypothetical meaning. A negative act is then at the root of the imaginative form of consciousness. This negative act is an important element in being-for-itself because all action presupposes not merely a power to perceive the world as it is but also as it is not.”
Merleau-Ponty is a Phenomenologist who also believes that Science is a flawed activity(contra Kant and Aristotle) but paradoxically shares a Greek concern for the importance of “psuche” which he interprets in terms of a lived body that has a transcendental use. This use cannot, Merleau-Ponty argues, be reduced to a meeting of a number of causal agencies operating in a Physico-mathematical framework of investigation.
Ricoeur shares many of Merleau-Ponty’s concerns including a refusal to find an account of particular experience that satisfies the full range of possibilities provided by the context of explanation/justification subscribed to by the Philosophies of Aristotle and Kant. Instead there is a focus on remaining in the presence of objects that appear to need some kind of interpretation (preferably aesthetic) before they give up their meaning to an exploring form of Consciousness that does not possess the potentiality to reason about objects, events or agents.
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