Views: 780
The relation of Consciousness to Life is a modern enigma which has been obscured by the focus of modern thinkers upon the representational function of consciousness rather than on its relation to Will and Action. When I perceive the waters of a waterfall rapidly flowing over a precipitous cliff-face, I am , of course, in normal circumstances conscious of what I am seeing. What I am perceiving, however, may or may not be committed to memory. If I am asked in relative close proximity to the experience I ought nevertheless to be able to describe what I have witnessed, namely a spectacle in the external world that as presented did not involve my agency . The “I” that is called upon here is capable of representing sensory experience. In this process there will of course be no space for the evaluation of this experience as long as I place no evaluation in my account. Any interested third party, inquiring into what I had experienced, would be given a conceptual account of an essentially sensory experience (assuming we are no longer in the presence of the spectacle). The context of my description is a context of inquiry, and what is said is not intended as an explanation or justification of what had been experienced.
On the other hand, had it been the case that in an attempt to use the power of my imagination to grasp the significance of this scene, my imagination failed to provide a relevant concept which I could subsume this phenomenon under, this experience of the extreme power of the waterfall, may change in character from a purely sensory encounter to one in which the spectacle presents itself as sublime. If this happened I would feel a transformation of my mind from being essentially receptive of the sensory event confronting me, to being active, and according to Kant my activity would take the form of me valuing my freedom and moral agency, i.e. valuing a power nature cannot possibly have.
This consciousness of myself would then not just involve the sensory power of perception but also the sensory power of the imagination and the powers of understanding and reason. The experience of the sublime, then, arises as a kind of compensatory mechanism because the idea of our moral agency (the knowledge of good and evil) has such importance for us. The transcendental X of this experience of the sublime is the noumenal self which is to be contrasted with the phenomenal self when it is having purely sensory experiences.
The consciousness we have of ourselves is not a form of consciousness other life-forms can share. Kant refers to this in his work “Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view”:
“The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raised him above all other living beings on this earth, Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person–i.e. through rank and dignity an entirely different being from things such as irrational animals with which one can do as one likes. This holds even when he cannot yet say “I”, because he still has it in his thoughts, just as all languages must think it when they speak in the first person, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of “I”. For this faculty (namely to think) is understanding. But it is noteworthy that the child who can already speak fairly fluently nevertheless first begins to talk by means of “I” fairly late (perhaps a year later): in the meantime speaking of himself in the third person (Karl wants to eat, walk, etc). When he starts to speak by means of “I”, a light seems to dawn on him, as it were, and from that day on he never again returns to his former way of speaking.—Before he merely felt himself; now he thinks himself.” (P.15, trans Louden, R.B., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, P.15)
Self- knowledge, as defined by the oracles of Ancient Greece is a burdensome task for those whose love of self knows no bounds, those whose self love prevents the kind of abstraction involved in moral reflection upon action. Self knowledge would also involve knowledge of how to use the powers at the disposal of the human form of psuché (in the right way at the right time (areté)). Perhaps the most important powers at the disposal of the human form of psuché, is the power of making something worthwhile of himself: the power of moral agency. The most important idea behind this power is of course the idea of freedom which does not appear to be a major concern of Oriental Mythology. In our Occidental tradition, which values Philosophy, we find the important secular movement from the theoretical idea of God to the practical idea of freedom. Yet it is also important to point out in this discussion that Kant did not diminish the importance of this idea of God located as it is in a realm of the sacred. This fact places Kant clearly in the camp of the Humanist Philosophers which include both Plato and Aristotle who also manifested a commitment to the Metaphysics of morals.
Campbell situates the Kantian transcendental X in a wider Eastern Mythological contexts: a context which is trying to explain and justify immortality and reincarnation:
“There is the immortality of the one that dies and comes back to life. That is the world of the fathers: in many cultures the ancestors are supposed to live on the moon. The other immortality is that of the one who has gone through the Golden Sun door and will never return: he has left his body as a burned out ash on this side of the Sun: his Soul has passed beyond. The idea of the reincarnating principle is that of two orders: first the reincarnating principle that puts on bodies and puts them off as the moon puts on and puts off its light body; and the other is that principle of sheer light that never dies, the light that is incarnate and immanent in all. Now one of the aims of all of the high Culture religions on the Oriental side of the line is to realise ones own identity with that solar light.”(P.44)
Campbell elaborates upon this metaphor of light with a metaphor he used in a teaching context: Looking up at the lights on the ceiling of the lecture hall he saw the multiple lights generating the light in the hall. There are two phenomena here, he argues, the light of the lecture hall and the light of the individual bulbs. If one bulb should go out because of a fault in the bulb there may not be a noticeable perceptible difference in the light of the hall and that individual bulb, of course can be replaced without disrupting any proceedings. Campbell draws the comparison between the individual bulbs and their light and the heads of the students in his audience possessing consciousness. This, he claims, is a different idea to the transcendental idea of consciousness which is more similar to the light of the lecture hall which in turn of course is like the light of the sun which Plato saw to symbolise the form of the Good that is transcendent. This latter form of light, it is argued was never born and will never die (P.45). On this mythological account the transcendent is manifesting itself in the phenomenal world and is manifested by what is in the phenomenal world. This, of course, resembles the Kantian account of the phenomenal and noumenal self which are of course not two different selves as Schopenhauer thought, but rather two different aspects of one and the same “I”.
Campbell points out in a chapter entitled “The Ever Burning Sacrifice” how, in different cultures, the invading Aryans from the North settled in the areas they conquered and became integrated with the conquered peoples. They created a hierarchy in society where the warriors and the priests were above the merchants and peasants. We can see this phenomenon clearly in Ancient Greece. The priests were superior to the warriors and became the example to be followed if one wished to become a noble and fulfilled human being. They built their alters everywhere, sacrificing to the gods, simultaneously demonstrating their power to bring the gods to them for a common meal. The emotions associated with such events are obscure but perhaps they gave rise to experiences of the sublime.
In India, the energy associated with sacrifice was called Brahman(P.52). As we move forward in time to the 8th century BC we can encounter in India the first so-called forest philosophers and it is perhaps with them that the first humanistic orientations in mythology appear. With these first Eastern Philosophers the idea of Brahman, the energy of the sacrifice, gets transformed into the energy of all life. The great texts of this period, the Upanishads, investigate Brahman and conclude that Brahman lives in the sun, the sacrifice, and in all things. This dilution, Campbell argues threatened the sacredness of the sacrifices and we can see in Ancient Greece for example, Philosophers like Plato separating themselves from religion and the priests, yet attempting to maintain the sacredness of the sun and the forms. Indeed with the exception of the reverence for the oracles, the priests are conspicuous by their absence. Plato’s perfect Republic we know was run by Philosophers and warriors and this was the beginning of a process in which the sacrifice was to diminish in importance in relation to living the good life: a life of contemplation. This may have been the beginning of a process of secularisation which would eventually wipe the realm of the sacred off the face of the earth.
The Indian Yogis and the Ancient Greek Philosophers are in many respects antithetical figures. Campbell points to one such contrast, claiming that the Indian priests to a certain extent renounced the world whereas the Ancient Greeks embraced the world in spite of the oracles proclamatory warning that “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. There is, however a strain of world-renunciation in Plato’s Republic where we note a retreat away from the physical external world in favour of a spiritual world of forms. This perhaps to some extent disappeared in Plato’s later work “The Laws”, but we see with Aristotle a return to the physical external world and a Philosophy of psuché (form of life)that embraced the life of contemplation, God represented as a primary form responsible for all change in the world. Neither Plato and Aristotle shared the Indian reverence for sacrifice but did, via Dionysius, recognise the eternal circle of life.
Maurice Bowra in his work “The Greek Experience” (Weidenfeld and N Nicolson , London 1957):
“The peculiar nature of man determined the Greek notion of pleasure. They had no ascetic or puritanical hostility to it; in some respects they regarded it as a supreme good. But at the same time they felt it must be kept in its place and not allowed to upset the harmony of either the individual or the city. They felt too that the strongest pleasures are suitable mainly for the young, and that in due course a man passes beyond them to others which are less exciting. This distinction follows the general distinction which the Greeks made between men and the gods. If the gods enjoy power and freedom, men have responsibility, and through their use of it attain their own dignity, which is different. from anything available to the gods. The advantage of this system is that it combines a natural taste for enjoyment with a real respect for proved capacities in action and in thought. Paradoxically, it may mean that in what seems to be his more human side, man is closer to the gods than in what wins honour and respect. But it also means that goodness and happiness are brought together in a balanced harmony: for the Greeks believed that if a man is good he is happy, but also that if he is happy he is good.”
The above testifies to a “balance of mind” that involves engaging with the world through achievements in action and in thought that would survive thousands of years and found empires of the future. It is a very different frame of mind to that which we encounter in the Old Testament where, to say the least the relation between Yahweh and men is strained over the issue of the knowledge of good and evil. Man is condemned to mortality because he wishes knowledge of good and evil. Sacrifice of animals was still an important part of life in the narratives of the Old Testament, but once Jesus had been sacrificed for the fall of man, sacrifice was seen to be barbaric. Prayer, however, was an important activity for both praising of God and the forgiveness of sins which would be judged by an all powerful and all-knowing God. The Greeks were more occupied with how to attain knowledge and virtue (areté) than how to avoid sin. The Christian reverence for the realm of the sacred was very different to the respect for this realm we find in Ancient Greece. In Ancient Greece we see a reluctance to see the world from the bubble of ever present temptation and sin: a world in which one waits for judgement day, and the release of the soul from the prison of the body. The Greeks, we know, saw the body, soul, and well governed city to be amongst the beautiful things of this world, perhaps reserving the experience of the sublime for extraordinary feats of thought , rhetoric or Philosophy, and encounters with symbols of the infinite.
The Upansihads reverse the attitude of refusing to engage with the world manifested by the Dravidian Yogis. Siva and Buddha insist on more engagement. The Buddha, for example was not a Brahmin but was certainly promoting the emergent idea of an enlightened consciousness/life. Buddha in this respect resembles a forest Philosopher who believed in life being the medium for the emergence of Brahma within. Buddhist ideas resemble Socratic ideas but there is no evidence of diffusion, and so the resemblance between the positions of Socrates ad Buddha must be considered as examples of the parallel development of ideas. There are, however, considerable differences in their respective commitments given the fact that Socrates used the method of elenchus and the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason to earn the praise of the oracle that claimed he was, “The wisest man in Athens”. It is clear from the differences between the thought of Socrates and Buddha just who was the priest and who was the Philosopher. The priestly view of life as an ever-burning sacrifice or series of reincarnations was very different to the philosophical view of life arguing for the importance of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), epistemé,(knowledge of oneself and ones world) arché(principles and las), and diké(justice).
The Ancient Greeks saw their temples as a sacred space for citizens and oracles but almost equally important for them was the important life-space of the polis: a space that they believed ought to be respected. The Humanism implied by the above account is obvious. Whilst the thoughts and teachings of Buddha may well have inspired many political leaders there is no specific engagement with the problems facing political communities as there was with the thought and activities of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. There is nothing, for example resembling Aristotles Constitutional theory where an enlightened middle class emerges to save the state from division and subsequent ruin and destruction. There is nothing in the teachings of Buddha resembling speculations about ideal states such as Plato’s Magnesia: a state in which Just laws were important, and a nocturnal council of enlightened political leaders provided education for the citizens. There is in Buddha, however, the concept of an enlightened soul (who would cease to reincarnate). Buddhism, however looks upon the self or the ego as a a problem standing in the way of self-enlightenment . There is the famous parable of a man who wakes up in the morning realising he has lost his head who begins to look about him for its location. This of course is Buddhist irony and the message is that one cannot use the self to look for the self, implying perhaps that there can be no such thing as self-knowledge or at least that this form of knowledge is not as important as the Greek oracles claimed. Buddhas parable may however also be interpreted to mean that one cannot objectively observe oneself and this is especially true if one is engaged in an action which requires a particular circumspective type of awareness. It is this kind of awareness which is responsible for the detection of errors in a sequence of action Whilst one cannot engage in the act of observing whilst I am engaged in any particular act of building, I can nevertheless see the result of my work and know that it was I that brought this result about. Humans posses the power of action and they also possess a power of knowing what one has chosen to do because they have the power of freedom either to choose to do the action or alternatively to choose not to do the action. Consciousness is, of course, involved in this choice and whilst this has been historically an important concept in the problems facing Philosophical Psychology, it is a complex concept which requires philosophical analysis. Indeed, the concept of psuché (forms of life), given the Aristotelian analysis of it, may be a more appropriate concept to use in relation to the problems associated with self-knowledge. This is the route the later Wittgenstein took with his concepts of forms of life and instinct.
For both Kant and the later Wittgenstein the self is something that is very much to be found in this world, interacting with it physically via its actions, interacting with it socially via the uses of language embedded in our variegated forms of life and less directly via thought which leads to both speech-acts and actions. The issue of Consciousness surfaces once again in this kind of discussion, and we need to determine where it fits into the schema of the powers of our human minds. Freud, we have agued is a Kantian psychologist who questioned the Cartesian and phenomenological notion of consciousness. For Freud Consciousness is not the primary function of mind , but merely a vicissitude of the instincts. For both Kant and Freud the “I” that thinks must be an I that also has its preconscious and unconscious aspects which are important for a complete knowledge of the form of existence of this “I”.
Campbell joins this debate by pointing out that for the Indians a flower turning its face toward the sun is a manifestation of consciousness. For the Greeks, however this phenomenon is more a manifestation of psuché (life). For us moderns Consciousness in a sense can be associated with Campbells light analogy. If a bulb gets broken, he argues, the light goes out. Similarly with consciousness it disappears in sleep, after a severe blow to the head, and also when we are dead. Our modern suggestion, beginning perhaps with William James, is that Consciousness is tied to the material substrate of the brain, the most important organ for the human psuché. Upon awakening from a coma or sleep, I may well be conscious, but perhaps not thinking anything, merely orientating myself once again in relation to my surroundings, perhaps in the case of the coma wondering where I am. Is there an “I” at work here? Probably not. If Kant is correct, then the “I” emerges only when this “I” begins to think something about something which in turn would seem to suggest that the Cartesian Cogito argument(I think therefore I am) may still be a good argument. This, however, suggests that consciousness is not identical with this “I” even if it may indeed be an important necessary condition for the occurrence of thinking. On this account consciousness seems to be a sensory event belonging to the faculty of sensibility. Consciousness is however quickly transformed if I try to remember where I am or even who I am. Memory would then seem to be an active form of thinking that requires an “I” to function in the human psuché.
Wittgenstein in his later work discussed a phenomenon which he argued was half perception, half thought, namely seeing something as something, e.g. seeing a face in the clouds and this may be a kind of ground-zero-thinking with a minimum involvement of the “I”. If this is so ,this phenomenon helps us to understand the scope and limits of the function or power of Consciousness. For our Ancient Greek Philosophers, however, it was psuché in all its forms which was the most important idea in need of investigation, especially the human form of psuché which Aristotle defined as “rational animal capable of discourse”.This kind of account ,of course, stands in stark contrast with the mysterious art of the Indian Yogi whose intention it is to stop all spontaneous activity of the mind. In regressing to this state, it is argued:
“The notion is that you, yourself are identical with that form of forms, Brahman” (P.60)
In this state it is encouraged that you visualise yourself with a serpent coiled at the base of your spine: a serpent you shall try to mobilise through control of posture and breathing and perhaps also making the sound of “aum”, all of which supposedly encourage the serpent to move up the spine and into the meditators head, thereby fully awakening our human psuché. Once the serpent passes the level of the throat, the yoga master may pass into a trance. This is a kind of zero-level of the psuché, resembles as Campbell points out on Page 63, the experience of some psychotics:
“The yoga is somehow experiencing a psychotic break-up but is not drowning in this subconscious sea that swamps the ordinary psychotic….The psychotic is drowning in these waters while the yoga is swimming.”
During its journey which begins at the genitalia, sexual pleasure is felt in the mode of imagining and the journey progresses to its next bodily station which is the navel–“the city of the shining jewel” in which one:
“wants to consume and gain power for oneself over everything, one is driven by a will to power.”
Both of these experiences of sexual pleasure and power are of course primary regions of the human psuché. The next stage of the serpents ascent is at the heart:
“It is at the level of the heart that one comes first into relationship to the higher principle of the power of art and the spirit, which are not those of the empirical outside environment.” (P.66)
This spiritual journey requires assistance from the voicebox in the vicinity of the throat via uttering the sound “aum” which Campbell claims symbolises the energy of the divine sound produced in some mysterious way which does not involve contact between two different things (which would seem to be necessary for physical sounds in our physical world):
“Aum is God.. Aum is God as sound….this is the sound aspect of the form that we are going to find when we meet god. It is the sound of God, the sound of the Lord of the World, out of whose thoughts, out of whose being, out of whose energy, substance the world is a precipitation. Aum is the word of words, that original Logos we find in the Bible..in the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was God”(P.69)
The effect of the sound is supposed to remove attention from the lower drives and focus ones attention on the next spiritual level. As the serpent ascends further upwards, the world is excluded and at the third eye, heaven is reached. The journey cleanses us of all worldly things and finally of the world itself. The Kantian pantheon of powers is a result of another kind of discipline that attempts to acquire as much knowledge of the external world and the powers of psuché as is possible. The powers of human psuché follow from the form of the human body which includes its constellation of organs, limbs, limb extensions etc. These powers obey various principles that also organise their interaction and integration with each other.
Freud refers to three of these principles, namely the energy regulation principle, the pleasure-pain principle and the reality principle. The Energy Regulation Principle is related to our instinctive and biological needs such as breathing, sexual activity and eating. The Pleasure-Pain Principle will regulate higher activities such as Love and Belongingness and will interact with both the Energy Regulation Principle to produce the lower forms of pleasure and the Reality Principle to produce higher forms of pleasure connected to Art, Morality, and Spirituality in its various forms.
There is nothing in the Philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, or Wittgenstein that speaks for the putting off of our bodies and taking on of another body of different form. Persons, for these philosophers are particular people with particular life spans beginning and ending at specific times. For Kant and Wittgenstein who were in some sense religious in our Western sense of the term, God is not a being detached from the world, but rather is in the world and related to it in various ways, manifesting power in various forms, urging us, for example to lead better more fulfilling lives. When the light of our individual consciousness is extinguished, there is not darkness because that is the presence of something, rather there is a nothingness–a pure absence of light and darkness. The state has no relation to life. There is no form remaining which can be transmitted into, for example, the body of a swan. These philosophers see our world as composed of principles(forms) which regulate our life with things events and actions. This is a world of constant change that is determined by these principles.
The Bhagavad Gita is a religious text much of whose content rings no bells in our Western memory systems but there is one event which certainly would have rung a bell for the later Freud occupied with the power of the death instinct over mans life. This is the event of “black time”which according to the text :
“is a tremendous monstrous divinity with many mouths with great tusks in these mouths. Arjuna sees both armies flying into these mouths and smashing like grapes and the blood pouring down from the maws like spilled wine…..I am Kala. I am black time, who am here for the end of the world and am licking up mankind.” (P.87)
That the end of time will be because of War, is, of course, a general position of many mythologies, including perhaps the oracles of ancient Greece. We moderns, more than at any time in History have looked into the jaws of black night during our World Wars and have miraculously lived to tell the tale, but with the advent of the “new men” who were responsible not just for these wars but for the creation of terrible weapons of mass destruction, we dare not breathe a sigh of relief. Our hope for the future resides in the Enlightenment Philosophy of Kant who postulated the existence of a “hidden plan” that is guiding the journey of mankind to a better place, a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends. It was of course another ex-citizen of Königsberg, Hannah Arendt, who alerted us to the origins of totalitarianism and the new me who yearn for the power to destroy any hope for a better future. Indeed at a critical point during the second world war, whilst black night was roaming the world and weapons of mass destruction were being tested, one of these men, Robert Oppenheimer, turned to the Bhagavad Gita for the words to describe what was happening:
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”
Campbell in a chapter entitled “World Soul” claims:
“When we look at the contemporary Western Conception of the individual, of the self, it is predicated around the psychology of Sigmund Freud, Joseph Adler, and Carl Jung.” (P.88)
This remark is the manifestation of a prejudice in favour of Psychology at the expense of its mother Philosophy. Both parties had relatively recently separated in 1870, and gone their separate ways. This prejudice in favour of the fathers of Psychology who as a matter of fact also fundamentally disagreed with each other, was, of course, a phenomenon of modernism which Stanley Cavell claimed arose because we can no longer see the connection between what we are doing and the historical conditions for what we are doing.
Freud, one of the three fathers indeed produced a philosophical psychology that manifested the wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant but did so in circumstances in which his work soon became obscured by the “New science” of positivism that committed itself intensely to the elimination of all metaphysics whether it be in the domain of Nature or Morals. The agenda of these new men was to ignore the history of thought in many regions of our knowledge in favour of a methodology of observation, measurement, and the manipulation of variables in experimental contexts. Oracles and proclamations to “know thyself” became historical relics. Whether the aim of these “new scientists” was to neutralise the influence of spirit seers and Eastern Yogis is not clear but the effect on Philosophy was considerable, calling into question much of the work of Aristotle, Kant and their followers throughout the ages.
Other factors also contributed to the severing of the thread of knowledge stretching from the Ancient Greeks to Modern Times. The Latin translations of Greek texts took a considerable amount of time and when this did occur there were problems with the meaning of a number of particular key terms such as phronesis, areté, arché, psuché, aletheia, eudaimonia etc. Many generations of scholars have occupied themselves with these problematic translations but most of the problems have now, after hundreds of years, been solved .
The History of Psychology, we know, initially centred upon both a modernist view of science and a modernist view of Consciousness, both of which very quickly revealed their limitations. The response to these limitations were unfortunately led by theoretical scientists who attempted to rescue the subject from the ensuing chaos by insisting that focus should shift to what in fact can be observed in psychological investigations, namely behaviour. This of course opened a door for the argument, characteristic of our technological age, that there is no observable difference between human and machine intelligence. Wittgenstein helped to temper this debate by claiming that what observation is, my reside in the eye of the beholder, because it involves seeing something as something. Seeing a contraction of the face as a wince or a pattern of movement as a manifestation of grief appears for example to go beyond the information given on a behaviourist account which involved reducing the world to a manifold of stimuli and responses. Behavioural movements per se are amenable to a number of competing descriptions, depending upon the origins of these movements, the physiological symptoms manifested, and the circumstances of the behaviour, but it is interesting to note that there is even a reluctance to speak of the behaviour of a machine because of the connection of this term to a physiological base which the machine does not possess. This debate obviously is related to Consciousness and its necessary ties to a particular physiological base and an energy regulation principle that is regulating life functions. A certain kind of chemistry is associated with life functions which a machine clearly does not possess.
The new men of science used a sceptical methodology to undermine everything metaphysical in the domains of both Nature and Morality. Stanley Cavell in his work “The Claim of Reason illustrates the operation of this scepticism in a recital:
“Request for Bssis: How for example do we know another person is angry?
Basis: From his behaviour…,the way he acts…
Ground for Doubt: But mightn’t he do these things, act that way and not be angry? And how do you know but that he is feeling something entirely different, or nothing at all?
Conclusion: I dont know…
Moral: I never can know. Behaviour is not identical with feelings and thoughts themselves
This recital takes us back once again to the initial attempts of the structuralists (Wundt) to order our sensations and feelings into some kind of psychological system. For Kant their project would have been misguided but Kant would have found the attempt to order behaviour into some kind of psychological system equally frivolous, since behaviour is controlled by the will and the will is both linked to the instincts (sensibility), understanding and reason. What these two schools of Psychology provide us with are at best accounts of how our sensory-motor system works at a relatively low level of psychic functioning. Behaviourism emerged agains the background of the theorising of the three “fathers” of psychology Campbell points to. It was therefore natural for Freud to become a target of the different schools of psychology (structuralism, functionalism, behaviourism).
The sceptical rehearsal of Cavell’s above devolves into another recital in which an automated human being with all the human organs, limbs, tissues etc presents itself for evaluation on the question as to whether this manufactured being can be said to have a human soul. If as Wittgenstein claimed the human body is the best picture of the soul then there would seem to be an argument for an affirmative answer to the above question. What this rehearsal lacks is reference to the important variable of the origin of the human body which includes having parents, growing in a human womb, being born into a completely different environment, and leading a life of dependency upon others during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Even if this automated being has been programmed with a history of similar experiences, the origin of the programme is different to a human origin. It is, then, not just the bare presentation of a human body that demands we treat this manifestation as a human soul: there must be a physiological, psychological and social history present too. We can of course be misled as the automaton presents itself and responds to our questions relating to its origin with a pack of lies. Upon discovering the truth eventually we would not continue to relate to this being in the same way. We ought also to point out that this imaginative projection of a human automaton with a human brain organs and tissues may never in fact be technically possible. The later Wittgenstein is not a behaviourist because he must have included their theories in his judgement that modern psychology suffers from conceptual confusion. His grammatical investigations, on the contrary are an important tool in discovering what a person is because our language bewitches us and leads us into confusing one category of thing with another.
The sensible correlate of conceptual confusion is the world of illusion that the Indians called Maya, which is the veil that needs to be lifted before we can have access to Brahman (which Campbell equates with the Kantian noumena world) or Ding-an-sich (P.90).
Our Western roots in Ancient Greece were to flourish via Christianity, the religion chosen by the Military minded Romans and this in turn would give rise to individualism —a fruit that perhaps belongs more to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil than to the tree of life. Campbell cites Carl Jung and an actualisation process Jung refereed to as individuation. We live in societies, argues Jung, that demands we play a part , take on many roles as Shakespeare indicated. Individuation involves seeing these parts to be masks veiling the individual behind them. Jung, for Campbell, expresses in his Psychology the wisdom of Occidental mythology which is very different to Eastern Mythology where the the individual actually identifies with the part or the role that is being enacted. This ability to take on another form is typical of Eastern mythology and even becomes important in life after death when one may take on even an animal form in the next life. In such circumstances it is not necessary to worry about judgement day in the presence of God because the soul has a specific weight as a result of the life it has led: a weight that automatically determines what one is going to become. This is a system in which the ego is no longer merely regulated by other agencies (Freud) but is actually effaced because it is regarded as essentially unnecessary in processes that endure over long cycles of time..
The major difference, then, between Oriental Mythology/Religion and our Occidental Mythologies/Philosophies is that the former focuses upon God and the fruits of the tree of life and the latter upon Man and the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the Occidental tradition we also notice a major shift from the Mythological/Religious to the Philosophical/Secular. Kant, of course, was the major philosopher leading this shifting emphasis from the theoretical idea of God to the practical idea of freedom. Involved in this shifting emphasis was also a focus upon the beautiful and the sublime which of course were major concerns of Ancient Greek Philosophy.
The effacement of the ego, the thesis of reincarnation and the formlessness of the soul belong of course together, and are to be contrasted with our Western religious commitments to resurrection and the retained identity of ones soul . Whether one reincarnates or not, on the Eastern account, appears to depend upon the extent to which we can master our desires and fears, and by that is meant possessing the capacity to desire nothing and fear nothing. On this account this is not a matter of controlling or regulating the self, but rather of removing this “noise of the I” from the world. Only then, on the Buddhist account, will we rid ourselves of participating in the unending cycles of sorrow.(P.152). The fire or light of life is only finally extinguished for Hinduism when the individual dismisses the body and ceases all activity. Buddhism differs in that one can burn oneself or ones body out, but continue in an enlightened state doing ones duty, but in doing so one is like a tree acting just as the world acts without desire or fear.. There is no need, Campbell claims for the Buddhist to withdraw completely from the world and kill oneself:
“This idea is the basic Buddha idea, and it broke the grip of this literal yoga of killing yourself….when a person has purged himself of ego, he is like a string that has been burnt lying on the ground; it looks like string still but if you blow on it , it wisps away—it isn’t there. And so it is with a person who has quenched his commitment to ego and has pulled back. He is, as it were, in the centre, and life moves through him in a rolling process. This is the basic ideal, I would say, for the individual living in the world, whether in Buddhism, or Taoism or Hinduism.”(P.156)
Campbell further distinguishes between Hinduism and Buddhism by pointing out that whilst Buddhism is a creeded religion, initiated by a chosen figure or prophet, Hinduism is an ancient ethnic religion that one is born into, and whose laws one obeys blindly and without choice. Hinduism is split into castes, but the ultimate untouchables are those who have chosen creeded religions from across the seas, e.g. Christianity. The laws of the creeded religions come from the prophets who have a very special relation to God , but who are in a certain sense inferior beings. Whereas in the case of Hinduism the brahman who participates in rituals that can summon the gods are regarded as more powerful and therefore even superior to the gods. Hindu laws, however, have their origin not with the Brahmans, but issue direct from the universe. In Judaism and Hinduism, for example,the laws come from God even if in the former case Moses was the divine messenger. The religion of Ancient Greece as practiced around the time of the Great Philosophers, appears, however, to fall into a very different category given the fact that the laws are chosen by a great-souled human, a phronimos:
“It is from the Greeks that we get the idea that the human intelligence is competent to determine prudent, noble appropriate aims for human life and to contrive laws by which those aims may be achieved….This is not the traditional view either in the bible or in the Hindu tradition. The traditional view is that the law comes from the universe–or from the creator of the universe in the biblical tradition–and is imposed upon man. It is mans function to adjust himself to that law and then live by it, not to criticise it.”(P.163)
This suggests that we are dealing with essentially different types of mentality: the traditional form of religion the creedal form of religion and the Ancient Greek form of religion/philosophy. These different mentalities believe in the laws of the universe, laws that come from prophets, and laws that come from rational men who are great souled beings. It is these great souled beings that, in accordance with a Greek cultural-value framework—arché, areté, diké, epistemé eros, eudaimonia— best understands that knowledge and reason are the most reliable guides for that form of psuché we call human and whose essence specifying definition is “rational animal capable of discourse”. We are, according to Aristotle capable of being both the best of the animals and the worst of the animals, but we also possess a rational faculty (noos) that enables us to relate to the gods and the realm of the sacred. Reincarnation is not an important theme for the phronimos or Greek law-maker: it plays little or no part in the laws of the city, although respect for the chosen gods of the polis is also important for its stability.
Criticism of the gods is not permitted although it would seem that poets like Homer were given a poetic licence which allowed them to portray the gods anthropomorphically. Divine law, on the other hand, cannot be criticised, and in traditional religions is much more important than the laws instituted by man. Solon’s laws, for example, could be subjected to scrutiny and criticism by his peers. This criticism was offered with varying degrees of severity, the very worst criticism being that a law was unjust. This, according to St Augustine implied that unjust laws were not laws at all.
In our Western Christian religion we have a complex religious system composed of a respect for the traditional laws and commandments found in the Old Testament which form the foundation for the Christian law/commandment to “Love thy neighbour”. This commandment would appear to be more universal in scope than the OT commandment not to covet my neighbours wife and goods. Christianity however is anti-caste and anti-privilege, and favours the poor over the rich insofar as entering the kingdom of heaven is concerned, presumably because a rich mans ego is driven by selfish desires and paranoid fears that corrupt his soul.
Obeying the laws of the universe unreservedly as happens in the Hindu religion involves silencing the “noise of the I” in favour of the stillness of spirit sought after by the yogi. The Christian system, on the contrary, is equally critical of selfish desires and paranoid fears, but suggests that the individual take responsibility for their thoughts, actions and life on pain of censure from the community they live in which includes their families. We can see clearly the differences between these two systems in the practices of arranged marriages and the fate of the widow who must cast herself on her dead husbands funeral pyre. These for us Western rational animals capable of discourse would be irrational acts.
The Hindu system also has its duties connected with the role of the family head for example. When those duties are deemed to have been fulfilled the father is called upon to abandon all worldly things and seek a guru in a forest to teach him the discipline of yoga. In extreme cases the brahmin or guru can urge their pupil to bury themselves in the ground with just the nose above ground for several months. This is part of the process of abandoning of the body:
“You must shatter the life in yourself so that there is nothing there.”(P.176)
This theme that life is somehow something illusory is a part of Buddhism, the religion of enlightenment. Whilst the primary symbol for life is light, the end for which one is striving, after many reincarnations, is the extinction of the light. The Knowledge that is acquired on this journey of Enlightenment is that suffering and sorrow are to be found everywhere:
“The beautiful surface of things” (P.180)
Behind this veil resides a sense of evil, horror and ruthlessness. The Buddha withdraws from this spectacle when he sits under the Bodhi tree, preparing to teach the ways leading to Buddhism. The favoured image is that of the ferryboat that takes you from a wind-swept shore to a windless shore where nothing is in flux. There is no need of a Buddhist church because life is their church, and there is no need of any texts. This is a religion in which enlightenment can also occur via an athletic form of meditation in action: one can, for example, be a samurai dedicated to killing ones enemies without fear of breaking any divine laws or commandments.