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Life and Death, Eros and Thanatos, Desire and Fear, the Body and the soul. These are the dialectical opposites that have to be reconciled in any account of the human psuché. Freud, in his theorising discovered relatively late on in his process, the relevance of the death instinct, and its vicissitude aggression to the diagnosis of his patient’s maladies. For many rationalist Philosophers, the life(psuché) instinct ,must be a primary form of being-there-in-the world and any essence-specifying definition of life, must refer to the fundamental telos of this power, namely that it must come to an end in that state we call Death. The Proposition that “All life is mortal” must, that is, connect the concepts of life and death inextricably. The phenomenon of death is mysterious, and as such demands a complex form of explanation which does not deny the essential nature of Life.
Paul Ricoeur in his work on Freud and Philosophy (An Essay in Interpretation, trans by Savage, D., New Haven, Yale University Press, 1970) claims that we, the human form of psuché, are creatures possessed of desires, which are both disguised and revealed in different ways and in different situations. These desires belong to a cycle of life which in its turn expresses an ancient theme of mythology and Philosophy, namely the mystery of the infinite and its relation to Being.
Campbell in his essay refers to the mythical cycle of the movement of the zodiac constellation: a movement which apparently takes 432,000 years to complete. These constellations never cease moving of course and will continue their motion forever, or at least for very long periods of time. The journey of the constellations reach a point without resting, and continue on their journey. Were this to be the journey of a life form, one may well reach a point on a cyclical journey which one recognises to be a beginning, and recognise it to be such, perhaps also, as T S Eliot claims, “knowing” it for the first time”.
432,000 years ago is a period in which homo sapiens did not exist but earlier hominid forms did. It is not surprising that the Greek astronomers observed celestial phenomena with the awe and wonder normally reserved for the divinities of their mythological narratives. For some reason unknown to us the Ancients regarded this number of 432,000 as something with mystical, magical, occult powers, and we find even the Philosopher Plato talking about this magic number in his work “The Republic”. This connection of zodiac animal shapes and forms to numbers, remind us of course both of the animals we find in the darkness of primitive caves, and the Platonic journey out of the dark cave of our ignorance into the enlightening sunlight, where other forms begin to attract our attention, and numbers are used to measure out our life in coffee spoons. The Republic, of course, sought to overthrow the world of superstition in favour of a knowledge-based world, where the form of the Good was the primary principle of human existence. Yet even here, in this work, we find “noble lies”, and reliance on allegories to explain the mysteries connected to the human form of psuché.
Another later rationalist, Spinoza, speculating about the problem of Being qua Being, which revealed itself to his understanding as something infinite in form, eternal and self-causing, claimed that everything in the universe is striving to maintain itself in existence. The smallest speck of dust floating in a shaft of sunlight is striving to find its resting place as are all objects under the sun. Spinoza argues that Philosophy is capable of enabling us to view the world sub specie aeternitatis, in spite of our propensity to view the world as a series of beginnings and endings in which entities come into existence and go out of existence. He argues that is, that the idea of Being as a whole, can be both revealed and disguised in our everyday dealings with the world. The matter of psuché accumulates in one location, and life supervenes at the beginning of a psychic journey, where along the way, various capacities and powers form, and perhaps build upon other capacities and powers, in accordance with hylomorphic forms or principles. In the course of this actualisation process on the road to the end of the journey, a curious phenomenon occurs. We encounter individuals who wish for nothing more than to rewrap this gift of life and return it to its material source . This phenomenon appears to call into question the claim made by Spinoza that all entities strive to maintain themselves in their current state of existence, perhaps in the human form even transcending it. Appearances we have learned from the Philosophers, can be deceptive.
Paul Ricoeur claims that as a man possessed by desire we often go forth in disguise, and this may be what the Greek oracles had in mind when they proclaimed that acquiring self-knowledge was the most desirable of all philosophical quests. Life undoubtedly, is a good-in-itself, and also something that is good in its consequences, if Aristotle is indeed correct in saying that all of mans activity aims at the good. If the end of life is good, and life is a good in itself, then death as a consequence of life must also be a good as Socrates proclaimed from his death-cell. This is a departure from the position that death is only in very special circumstances a good outcome. One of the logical consequences of life being a good-in-itself, is the Kantian argument that using life to take a life is a practical contradiction, and this applies especially to oneself. If this position is correct, then the desire to commit suicide cannot as such be possible, and must be another disguised desire.
Joseph Campbell touches upon this issue and refers to Schopenhauer’s essay “on the Foundations of Morality” where the enigmatic phenomenon of men who jeopardise their own existence to save the lives of others. is discussed : a phenomenon which appears on the face of it to question Spinoza’s claim that all entities strive to maintain themselves in their existence. Campbell, in relation to this discussion cites a personal experience in Hawaii where someone attempting to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff, is rescued by two passing police officers, one of whom were, in the process almost pulled off the cliff. This type of phenomenon, Campbell argues, is a symbolic phenomenon of metaphysical importance, because it reveals or shows that men possess unconscious knowledge that all living human beings share an essence which is more important than our distinctness or separateness from one another. Campbell also refers to Kant in this discussion:
“But this of course is an idea that was already implicit for Schopenhauer and in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, part 1”, in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” where it is shown that the “forms of sensibility”, time and space, condition all of our perceptions, and that it is within this field of time and space and what Nietzsche then termed principium individuationis, the principle of individuation, is experienced. Whence it follows that whatever may underlie or be antecedent to our experiences within this field must be unity, a “principle of unity”, or, perhaps, indeed, something even more mysterious than unity, beyond all our categories of thinking whatsoever—-categories such as unity and multiplicity being but forms, finally of our thinking. Underlying this field of multiplicity, then, there is mystery. And this is the mystery of our Being, the mystery of the Being of the universe, the mystery of the Being of all things.”
Campbell then continues this discussion by referring to the Kapha Upanishad, which claims that the True Self, that belongs to our human psuché, does not show itself except to those with “subtle intellect”. Perhaps Campbell would have included both Spinoza and Kant in this category of subtle intellects. The realm of Being referred to above, does not, Campbell continues, permit of the dialectic of opposites such as good and evil, life and death, etc. This realm of Being qua Being is not that of the Heraclitean dialectical realm of strife, but rather a more peaceful region of silence, where the opposites of motion and rest do not form part of the field of thought. Rather, under the aspect of Thought, it is Truth that is one and eternal. For Spinoza, Substance is identified with what he calls infinite substance which itself contains an infinite number of attributes. We finite human beings only know of this divine substance through the attributes of thought and extension. Under the attribute of extension we know of God via space, time and matter in space and time which we also know are infinite. Aristotle’s basic metaphysical and hylomorphic term of prime form is also an attempt to explain the meaning of infinite substance for us human finite forms of Being. Given the fact that all human experience is temporal, this of course produces a problem for understanding the infinity of Being or Substance. This prejudices our inquiry into Being in favour of investigating phenomenal motion and matter in space and time, the traditional sphere of concern for materialists. Prime form ,of course, is intimately connected with the divine form of thought that thinks itself, it is eternal and causes itself to exist.
Jung and Freud differ fundamentally in their different interpretations of dreams. Freud whilst being convinced that dreams provided him with a royal road to the unconscious, nevertheless was practically concerned with the problem of helping his patients return to the path of living, and the task of leading a flourishing life. For Jung, it appears that the issue of dreams was more metaphysical, and connected with mythological and religious concerns in relation to the unconscious and its determinative role in the life of man. It is remarkable to note that in spite of their considerable differences in viewing the basic terms of psychoanalysis, both Psychologists claimed that they were influenced by Kant. The dream of oneself, a 75 year old man as a 25 year old university student reveals the timeless character of the unconscious. The past of the dreamer is once again made present not in the form of a memory, but in the form of a current ongoing experience. If the dream was one involving the student looking for the location of a scheduled lecture, the different interpretations of Jung and Freud must surely suggest that there are fundamental differences of principle between the two, which in turn suggests that perhaps we should examine their claims to be influenced by Kant more carefully. Freud would be able to interpret the above dream in terms of the historical (reaching back to infancy) personal desires and fears of the patient. Jung on the other hand would generalise the interpretation and appeal to the desires and fears of mankind. Jung that is, appears to believe that dreams reach into the future and can be sketches of a solution to serious life-problems. Freud would probably not deny that such dreams are possible in the life of those with “subtle intellects”.
The Ancient Greek Philosophers were concerned with the power of discourse and rationality to overcome and transform those desires and fears that stand in the way of humans achieving the good spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia). Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were, of course, more concerned with the ethical and political problems associated with eudaimonia, than its psychological or anthropological aspects . For these thinkers, and for Spinoza, epistemé, arché, areté and techné all played a part in the processes of striving to lead a good spirited flourishing life. Indeed, Spinoza, for example, specifically says that it is a lack of adequate ideas about our life-worlds that hinders man from achieving what he strives for. One of these critical ideas is the idea of the scope and limits of the powers of our bodies, which Spinoza claims is the first idea in our minds.
Adequate ideas are of course, for Kant, constituted of both an understanding of the categories of thought and appropriate principles. The body is the bearer of our passions and emotions, and Spinoza produces excellent accounts of the principles underlying our understanding of these kinds of states and processes found in human psuché. Insofar as man is striving, not just to maintain himself in existence, but for perfection, he is steered by the pleasure-pain principle and the reality principle, if we are to use Freudian terms. Pleasure, for Spinoza, occurs when man attains a greater degree of perfection, and pain when man is diminished in his perfection. Man therefore lives for those things that contribute to his desire for perfection and hates those things which significantly diminish his perfection. Spinoza argues that it is the essence of being human to desire this perfection of being human, which of course will not be divine, but rather resemble the divine state of perfection. He also argues that given the fact that love is intimately connected to seeking a higher state of perfection, and given the fact that there can be no higher state of perfection than that which is divine, we humans can certainly love God, but God can neither love nor hate us because his perfection is not alterable. So when the Bible claims that God so loved mankind that he sent his son down to save us from ourselves, the term “love” must have a metaphorical sense. For Spinoza, then, having adequate ideas of God, and adequate ideas of our own bodies and minds, are all necessary to lead the good spirited flourishing life referred to earlier. Acting in accordance with inadequate ideas, he also argues, is typical of emotions where perceptions and imagination play a large role in our understanding of what we are doing. The tools of our understanding and reason are more likely to bring about agreement with our fellows than are actions motivated by the passions, it is argued.
Aristotle touches upon the role of the emotions in his work on Tragedy, in particular the emotions of pity and fear, which as we all know occur in particular circumstances have particular bodily symptoms and characteristic behaviour. Aristotle attributes to the tragic poets, the task of the catharsis of these emotions, which amounts to ensuring that we feel both pity and fear in the right way at the right time. Art, we know, is not just driven by reason but also uses pleasure and pain in order to envelop its audience in its project by deliberately evoking these emotions, and guiding them in accordance with adequate rational aesthetic and rational(ethical) ideas. Art, it is maintained, imitates life, but insofar as it does use adequate ideas of the emotions, and rational desires of man, it performs an important function in our lives–namely that of contributing to a better understanding of our human essence or our human nature.
Reason enables us, Spinoza argues, to view the world and ourselves under an aspect of eternity (sub specie aeternitatis) thus transcending the constraints of space, time and matter. This is a similar position to that we find in both the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of the divine which Ricoeur characterises as the “realm of the sacred”. In the case of Aristotle we glimpse the perfection of God eternally thinking via a use of a part of the human mind he called noos, which reveals the divine primary form only through a glass darkly. Gods thinking, we have stated, is a thinking about thinking, and this is to be distinguished from our human form of thought which, because it is situated in space and time, can only think something about something. In this latter form of thought, a particular located in space and time is conceptualised in accordance with certain categories of thought and principles of reason.
An example of the above form of thinking is captured in the proposition “All men are mortal”, which we regard as a conceptual truth: a truth whose contradiction does not make any sense. Aristotles emotions of pity and fear are certainly tied up with the lack of understanding of death and the theme of death has been a concern of the poets, priests, and philosophers throughout the ages. According to Christianity a proper catharsis of the emotions of pity and fear would require for example loving both our neighbour and enemies, on the grounds that we all participate equally in being a human form of life (psuché).
This brings us back to our example of the dust particle floating in a shaft of light. Spinoza believes that the particle is striving to maintain itself in its existence but this particle differs in one essential respect from any life form associated with psuché, namely it is inert, not capable of causing itself to do what it is doing. The explanation of its behaviour will reside in a summation of external causes. Forms of life are, on the contrary, self determining, and to a greater degree less determined by external causes. We are dealing here with items from two different kingdoms of Being namely the mineral kingdom whose primary characteristics is its inertness, and the animal kingdom whose motions are determined by internal self causing desires and beliefs. There is, however, a relation between these two kingdoms which is suggested by the Biblical lamentation that we are dust, and to dust ,we will return.
Philosophers have argued that I cannot doubt the fact that I am going to die, and because I believe all men are mortal, I cannot doubt that other humans will also die, someday. This might explain why I care deeply about the loss of human life, and perhaps also care about the loss of the love of others close to me. This care about loss, for Freud, could take the forms of both mourning and melancholia, and it is significant that in Freud’s theorising, he sought for a particular mechanism to explain why in the case of mourning over the loss of a life through the act of suicide, we care so deeply that someone took their own life in defiance of Spinozas reference to the essential human desire to preserve its own form of existence. Kant too, embraced this thesis when he claimed that it is a practical contradiction to use ones life to take that same life: thus placing life clearly in the category of things that are good-in-themselves. Life, then, in both mythological and philosophical contexts has a defined position in the realm of the sacred in a way in which the dust particle floating in a shaft of sunlight does not, even if it too might become the focus of awe and wonder if we see that it too might be connected to life in the way the Bible suggests. An interesting footnote to add here, is that pollen, so essential to the maintenance of the existence of plant-life, can not be seen in a shaft of light and might need a microscope to detect its presence. This reminds us of the limitations of our sensory perception, which, in turn, reminds us of our finitude. Pollen, of course, insofar as it affects humans with allergies might not, as far as they are concerned, evoke the feelings of awe and wonder that might otherwise be associated with it. There is though the Indian myth of the “Pollen-Path” that must have evoked feelings of awe and wonder for those who know this story.
It might be argued that given our reliance on food that is grown, the plant kingdom is of greater interest for us than the occupants of the world of minerals. The primary phenomenon that excites our interest in all kingdoms, is change or motion in the context of space and time, and Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory of change referring as it does to 4 kinds of change, three media of change(space time matter), 3 principles of change and 4 causes of change, forms an essential framework for explaining why change occurs in the form that it does. This framework is then utilised in three different kinds of science (theoretical, practical, productive) to form theories about the domains these sciences are concerned with. Aristotles hylomorphic theory, that is, provides us with a categorical framework which is regulated by the principles of logic, e.g. noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Campbell’s references to both Spinoza and Kant are interesting and significant, but he omits consideration of Kant’s Third critique, “The Critique of Judgement”, in his discussions. In the Introduction to the section entitled “Critique of Teleological Judgement” Kant claims:
“The Possibility of a living matter is quite inconceivable.The very conception of it involves self-contradiction, since, lifelessness, inertia, constitutes the essential characteristic of matter”. (Page 46)
If, Spinozas position is categorised as hylozoism which still remains an open question given the convolutions and nuances of Spinozas theory , such a position would be rejected categorically by Kant, and possibly by Aristotle too, in his later reflections, on grounds similar to those assumed by Linnaeus. The Ancient Greek term psuché, it has been argued in an earlier work, is categorically distinct from the inert world of matter and artifacts.
Kant’s teleological reflections elaborate in more detail upon Spinozas account of infinite Substance, which, for Kant, was one way of referring to God, or the underlying principle of change and motion in the universe . The connection of the scientific concept of substance to matter in space and time, however, might confuse the issue, and this requires that we must specifically designate the substance talked about by Aristotle Spinoza and Kant as a technical philosophical concept. The idea of God for Aristotle, Spinoza ,Kant and mythology, has no connection with scientific concerns of any kind ,even if we know that Spinoza was one of Einsteins favourite Philosophers. Campbells suggestion that there is an affinity between the Kantian idea of God, and some mythological ideas is certainly valid. Campbell might well have referred to the following passage in Kant to support his argument:
“We cannot conceive or render intelligible to ourselves the finality which must be introduced as the basis even of our knowledge of the intrinsic possibility of many material things, except by representing it, and, in general, the world, as the product of an intelligent cause–in short, of a God” (Page 53)
Kant claims further that the above kind of reasoning is also necessary for the conceptualisation of living forms, because:
“It is, I mean, quite certain that we can never get a sufficient knowledge of organised beings and their inner possibility, much less get an explanation of them, by looking merely to mechanical principles of nature. Indeed, so certain is it, that we may confidently assert that it is absurd for men even to entertain any thought of so doing or to hope that another Newton may some day arise to make intelligible to us, even the genesis of but a blade of grass from natural laws that no designer has ordered. Such insight we must absolutely deny to mankind.”(Page 54)
An adequate idea of God, then, lies beyond the scope of human knowledge, but it can nevertheless be thought and regulated by the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The idea, therefore, is not objectively valid, but nevertheless can be attributed to all judging subjects who possess the powers of sensibility, understanding and reason. There can never be, according to Kant, any sensible presentation of God, and as a consequence, no conclusive proof of his existence, but because we are thinking, speaking beings, we can think and judge that it is God who guarantees the validity of moral judgements relating to the character and future of mankind. God that is, according to Kant, guarantees that virtuous behaviour will be its own reward, even if in many other respects we might find our life wanting. In a very special sense, then, the kinds of judgements we make about God are Subjective, in the aesthetic sense. Nevertheless we speak with a universal voice about God, and we can motivate what we say with moral arguments. In theoretical contexts Kant also relates noumenal reality to God as an idea of pure reason. Noumenal reality is defines as :
“the non-sensible something containing the ultimate ground of the world of sense” (P.139)
The objects connected with these ideas of God, the immortality of the soul are, Kant argues matters of faith (Page 143), which is characterised in the following way:
“Faith as habitus,not as actus, is the moral attitude of reason in its assurance of the truth of what is beyond the reach of theoretical knowledge. It is the steadfast principle of the mind, therefore, according to which the truth of what must necessarily be presupposed as the condition of the supreme final end being possible is assumed as true in consideration of the fact that we are under an obligation to pursue that end.”(Pages 145-6)
If we shift our focus to the practical, bearing in mind that in theoretical contexts concerned with the truth, God is an idea of the mind which we must have faith in given the arguments. This is a shift away from the abstract truth of the matter, and towards the form of the good, and in this practical realm, freedom is the primary practical idea of reason which Kant claims has objective reality:
“Freedom is the one and only conception of the supersensible which (owing to the causality implied in it) proves its objective reality in nature by its possible effect there. By this means it makes possible the connection of the two other ideas with nature, and the connection of all three to form a religion.” (P.149)
This is the reasoning that makes freedom the primary focus for Kant’s answer to the questions “What can we hope for?” and “What is a human being?”, and this is why Kant is the metaphysical philosopher par excellence of the Enlightenment. God is not abolished from his supersensible reflections, but, rathe,r is an idea that is used to justify the free exercise of our duties along with the categorical imperative in its various formulations. The personal end of a good spirited flourishing life is, then, further connected to a teleological cosmopolitan kingdom of ends, which may or may actualise over the period of the next one hundred thousand years.
The theoretical idea of the immortality of the soul is, of course, a major concern for mythology and religion ,and therefore for Campbell in his reflections. It is in this context that he considers the very profane and secular act of committing suicide, that Kant regarded as a practical misuse of our freedom— a practical contradiction which he expressed in terms of the ought-judgement–man ought not to use his life to take his life. If, in dying, we merely passed into another form of after-life which is better than this one, why, it could be asked, would religions that believe in the after-life, prohibit suicide? It could, of course, be argued that life is so precious that only God with his divine judgement could adequately decide whether that life should be ended. This makes sense, and gives theological weight to the verdict of an inquest, that John Doe committed suicide whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed. A more Freudian reading, however, may refer to a weakened ego submitting to the influence of a superego, turning aggression inward in accordance with the death instinct. The pain and suffering of John Doe obviously, in this case ,distorted the operation of the reality principle which normally acts in accordance with the desire to continue living, because living, as Aristotle testifies, is an absolute good or end-in-itself. This, in turn, entails that if we understand psuché, in Spinozas terms, and have an adequate idea of what life is, we must realise that death is an absolute and final end to any particular life, partly because a mind without an idea of a living body is no longer a mind. A corpse is a dead body, it is not alive. It is, that is, logically impossible (the logic of practical reason) that death– real death–not false alarms where the heart may stop and someone helps to start is beating again—but real alarms for those witnessing the event, and perhaps for whom the psychological loss will mean considerable suffering during a period of mourning: it is logically possible that death is a Good. The ambiguous descriptions of experiencing the occult “other side” could never be validated, because the experienced did not in any sense know what it was they were experiencing. There is a discussion in psychology relating to out of body experiences, and many text books on the subject do not commit themselves to a position because they do not have adequate ideas of the power of the body. There are, it is maintained in this context, recorded testimonies of people experiencing what they call the “other side” whilst being operated upon when their heart stops. It seems something of them floats upwards to watch proceedings they even seem to be able to relatively accurately describe in spite of being under anaesthetic. We know under anaesthetic that there are levels of unconsciousness and we know that at certain levels of unconsciousness we dream, and we also know some dreams relate rather specifically to what is actually going on in the body. Given these facts it is not out of the question that some kind of bodily awareness of what is happening is being transformed on the dream screen into realistic images. Freud testifies to the existence of these types of dreams in his “interpretation of Dreams”:
“The psyche attains in sleep a much more profound and wide-ranging sensory consciousness of its bodily nature than it does when awake, and cannot but receive and be affected by impressions of certain stimuli that originates in parts of the body, and in changes there, which it was unware of when awake.” (Strumpell 1877)
Aristotle, Freud points out, claims that certain illnesses can be foretold in dreams that relate to sensations connected to these illnesses that have as yet not supervened in the patient. Campbell, we noted in an earlier essay, subscribes to the hylomorphic thesis that the sensations and impressions relating to organs can connect to the imagination.
In his story about the two heroic police officers, Campbell noted that the man who was saved was, paradoxically, grateful to the two officers for saving his life, and this would seem to support our position thus far. Life is sacred and must have some sort of absolute value in our humanly populated world. The man who is dead, is the man for whom the ultimate and final event that can happen to a man has happened, namely the event of death. This event practically means that the memory system has recorded its last memory, consciousness has made its last appearance, and no exercises of any other psychological powers can occur. The dead body, the corpse, can of course be observed by others but it will no longer move unless it is being moved by some force outside it. We cannot sensibly say that the soul has been freed or liberated or has gone to heaven. Indeed the Socratic description of death being a dreamless sleep is apt as a metaphorical characterisation of this event of death that happens to everyone and is characterised well by the judgement:
“All men are mortal”
What implications does the above have for the Freudian account of suicide? Those that attempt the deed of committing suicide half-heartedly or in desperation to flee from a life of misery, suffering and pain might be doing what they are doing “blindly”. That is, they may not know what they are doing. They may unconsciously be hoping for some care and attention, or even physical help to stop the process they have begun. All of these alternatives would seem to be covered by the description “committed suicide whilst the balance of the mind was disturbed”. We can also normally engage in actions “blindly”. There are many issues at play here, but given the fact that this is in fact a legal verdict, and as such rests upon an adequate understanding of the psychological factors involved, we can accept such a description as accurate, and to be clearly distinguished from a verdict of “Death by misadventure”, where the victim is trying to climb a cliff without adequate knowledge of climbing techniques. Anyway in a possible Freudian account of the act, reference would be made to the wounding of a weak ego by trauma or loss such that the suffering involved overwhelms the operation of the reality principle and a cruel superego used to hating and ruled by the death instinct instead of unleashing aggression outward, paranoically, turns the aggression inward and either punishes the possessor or in the worst case scenario murders the person concerned. There are many psychological mechanisms involved in such a state of affairs and Freud can account for most of them. The expression “Balance of the mind” therefore, is one which also indicates that the victim was not freely acting but instead was a victim of a number of causal mechanisms which blinded” him to reality.
Campbell in this essay also points to the influence of mythology and religion upon past generations who found themselves in circumstances different to ours and were perhaps not as “free.” as we are. Such individuals perhaps did not perhaps possess the knowledge of psuché that we have now. This period that Campbell speaks about was not as long ago as one might imagine. Even during the time of Socrates we still find the Philosopher sacrificing a cock in gratitude for a painless administration of poison. Animal life was not respected as much as it is today by the man in the street. Recall Pythagoras’ account of passers by kicking a dog, and his reprimand that the “animals have souls too”: they too, for him, were psuché, (forms of life). One does not have to go too far back in time to encounter the practice of human sacrifice to the gods, indicating a disrespect for even the human form of life. Did these primitive civilisations not then feel what we feel, and flinch at using the life principle to take a life? Campbell argues that such sacrificial rituals might have inherited an attitude toward life from Mother earth religions where:
“The first fact of life is that life consumes life, eats life: and the image of the oroberic serpent biting its own tail is a representation of this mystery. But another mystery of the serpent is indicated when it sheds its skin and is born again. So that along with the idea of death as the precondition of life comes this other idea of an involved power in life within this phenomenal field of time and space which puts on bodies and puts them off(as we read in the Bhagavad Gita) as a man puts off and puts on clothing.”
The image of the serpent being born again when he has not died, but only shed his skin is somewhat strained if it is to serve as an argument for life taking the same body after it has died. Only the skin has died, the snakes body remains alive and the same. A better image would be an image of the actual death of the snake in the vicinity of its reproduced offspring. Even this image only records the comings and goings of life as such. There is no image of, or argument for, an afterlife in these remarks. Such a religion also suggests the possibility of the phenomenal realm opening out into a timeless realm of the noumenal or supersensible. It leaves understanding of this timeless zone to those subtle and superior intellects who can for example see what is happening in dreams and understand their latent meaning.
As human life transformed itself from a nomadic form of existence to the earliest form of the city. states we find for example in Mesopotamia (Ur, Uruk, Lagesh, Nippur, Shuruppak etc), that the organisation of the city introduced initially a hierarchy of professional functions, e.g. priests (with superior subtle intellects?)politicians, traders, farmers, warriors etc. It was no accident that it was during this phase of mans history that writing and mathematics emerged to assist in the process of the organisation of the city-states. We also encounter the phenomenon of star gazing and the noticing of the ever so slightly changing positions of the constellations in the sky. Observing and measuring what was observed, appeared to be a favourite past-time of some of occupants of the city. This activity eventually generated a mathematical tool based on the number 60, capable of measuring circular motions. Buddha argued that at this time in the East the ego was “witnessing”, whatever this meant exactly, ones thoughts, feelings and the activities of the body.
This ego according to Buddha could not be directly witnessed and lay as Wittgenstein claimed in his early work at the boundary of the world, and not in the world like the heavenly constellations. This transcendental ego, it was suggested, lay in a supersensible realm but was no “god” in the normal sense of the word. Other religions suggested other conceptions of Gods, but the Western tradition probably began with Zorastrianism which expressed itself in the Philosophy of Heraclitus and in favour of a dialectical field of opposites that saw opposites to be separated without any possible category of unification, e.g. light and dark, good and evil. In our Western tradition also, the deities were many, usually instantiating different kinds of power and possessing different names. Some deities were associated with Good, and some with Evil and the devil, which possessed the power to possess good souls and make them do evil things. The Bible, for example contains the record of the struggle between such deities, e.g. biblical kings sacrificing to more primitive nature-gods. The Greeks mitigated this Heraclitean dialectical play of opposition forces by trying to domesticate the more evil forces such as Poseidon with his trident ruling the underwater world: by, that is, allowing him to live in divine and sacred spaces. At the same time as men were recording the motions of the constellations in the heavens, there were Greek figures like Anaxogoras who suddenly claimed that this sacred space of the heavens was inhabited by planets and , stars. He claimed further that the moon was made of the same kind of material as the earth , the sun was made of red hot metal, and the other stars were fiery rocks (Source AI summary and Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy).
This view probably contributed to his expulsion from Athens on religious grounds.The light of the moon was as a consequence of this picture, claimed to be the reflected light of the sun. and he was the first to correctly explain how eclipses occur.This was one of the first excursions of science into the sacred space of religion and mythology. Anaxagoras we know was in Athens at the time of Socrates and his work could be bought for one drachma. He was not, as some claim, a pure materialist because he claimed that the intellectual force of noos produced order in the universe . Euripides interpreted this to mean that noos was inside of all ensouled entities including humans. Noos produced order within us too. Anaxagoras, we know was instrumental in influencing Socrates to abandon his earlier materialistic physical investigations and begin looking both for a method of explanation and the philosophical explanation for noos.
Plato too is actually ambiguous in his mythology both claiming that mathematics was very important knowledge for the building of the ideal city-state but at the same time using an allegorical argument for the form of the good (which was related to noos), namely the role of the sun in everyones lives. As we mentioned earlier Plato in his republic was also fascinated by what he called this magic number of 432,000—the time it took for the constellations of the zodiac to rotate back to the same position. In his dialogues about Socrates, Plato emphasised the wisdom of his teacher as demonstrated by his use of elenchus in the agora on those experts on various subjects who thought they knew what they clearly did not. These dialogues were one of the first competitors to mythology and the allegories contained therein. Argument rather than allegory was the tool of the Philosophers that came after Plato, especially Aristotle who more or less invented both Logic and Biology as areas of study. Something being “like” something else, was a mere rhetorical device insofar as Aristotle was concerned.
The Delphic challenge to “know thyself! ” also became an important concern for Socrates, Plato and Aristotle who all sought in their various ways to formulate a theory of the human form of psuché. Aristotle was perhaps the most successful in this quest, arriving as he did at the essence specifying definition: rational animal capable of discourse, a definition related to both his knowledge in biology and his use of logic. The definition does not proclaim that all men are actually rational, only that this is the highest potential for man if he be fortunate enough to develop a subtle and superior intellect. Kant would later elaborate upon Aristotles hylomorphism and whilst the argumentative principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason were an important part of his methodology, what he said about Being and its many meanings and psuché, allows mythology a place in his conceptual framework.
The Greek contribution to synthesising Western and Eastern mythological ideas was one seeking harmony rather than opposition, seeking a way to reveal the mysteries of the universe, and the self, in a spirit of logos and aletheia which respected the infinite complexity of Being and the finitude of human knowledge. The Greek view of Science was perhaps best represented by the writings of Aristotle who certainly used observation and mathematics in those realms that required them, in accordance with his hylomorphic theory. A position that clearly proclaimed that the realms of the supersenible and sacred lay beyond the capacity of the human understanding.
Campbell refers to how the spirit of pure observation and measurement (disconnected from their wise use in the three different kinds of sciences constituting the Aristotelian architectonic) transformed very rapidly into a hard concern for hard facts and he refers to Darwin with the words:
“The hero was swept right off the earth”
American Behaviourism emerged shortly after Darwins ideas and very soon after that we find the early Wittgenstein proclaiming in the name of science that “The world is the totality of facts”. This form of logical atomism favoured a dividing up of the life-world into stimuli and responses, a world in which it was claimed either that consciousness did not exist, or at best was not relevant to psychological investigation, which must concern itself only with what can be observed and measured. This also laid the foundations for the equation of the psychology of man with a theory of machine functioning. This state of affairs coincided with Arendt’s reflections upon what was occurring in Europe soon after the publication of Darwins ideas. European political parties were losing their authority and this created a space for uneducated charlatans and madmen in which they could claim power and shape the world according to their twisted conceptions of good and evil–conceptions which denied the values embodied in our inherited traditions and educational systems. Whether this can be described as sweeping heroes off the map of the world is questionable, because our earlier thinkers found themselves in an environment where they were constantly responding to the demands for the justification of what was being done, and this is not the context for heroes. Campbell claimed that when these heroes were swept away the world was one devoid of live and positive transformative power. In Campbells eyes the two policemen saving the man from attempting to end his life were certainly heroes in such dramatic circumstances. Lives, however, are also changed and saved by discourse and the use of rationality in everyday less dramatic circumstances. Campbell argued too that the resultant state of affairs favoured a reemergence of what he called the “immanence of the occult”. If one cannot save the world with knowledge and reason then perhaps all that remains is magic.
During the early 1900’s two Giants of psychology(Freud and Jung) emerged in different parts of Europe to challenge behaviourism and the Philosophy of logical positivism lying behind it , and these two figures had very different relations to the occult. Carl Jung, for Campbell, may perhaps have been a heroic figure. This is indeed an interesting comparison because as we know, the first time that these two figures met ,they apparently talked uninterruptedly for thirteen hours about psychological and philosophical issues. Freud ,the founder and leader of an International Psychoanalytic movement that had spread rapidly around the world in fact later, appointed Jung as its President . Soon after this, however there was a falling out and the issue that separated these two men was the issue of the role of the occult in psychological theory—should it be regarded as an actual phenomenon indicating the presence of a spirit world or was it rather as Freud thought a phenomenon which demanded explanations either in terms of illusory sensory stimuli or in more complex cases , a product of unbalanced minds? This was a particularly interesting conflict, because both figures claimed to be influenced by Kant. Kant as we know wrote an essay entitled “Dreams of a Spirit seer” in which he made it clear that Critical Philosophy ,whilst acknowledging the realm of the noumenal or supersensible, cannot validate the descriptions of events that spirit seers give us. Using a form of elenchus and rational argumentation, Kant does not question that men may think they see and hear spirits from another realm of existence, but these phenomena permit of alternative descriptions and explanation, which are more in accord with what it is possible for us to know (as outlined in Kants Critical Philosophy). The mystery of the supersensible realm, argues Kant, must be carefully explored using what we know about the nature of the world and the nature of our minds. Mysticism, he argues, does not possess the conceptual framework or authority necessary to give us a reliable and valid account of “mysterious phenomena”. Freud of course was put in a difficult position when Jungs interest in paranormal phenomena became known to him and he wrote thus in one of his letters to Jung in 1911:
“I am aware that you are driven with innermost inclination to the study of the occult and I am sure you will return home richly laden. I cannot argue with that, it is always right to go where your impulses lead–You will be accused of mysticism, but the reputation you won with “Dementia” will hold up for quite some time against that. Just dont stay in the tropical colonies too long, you must remain at home” 12th May 1911
It is clear that the Freudian theorising on the nature of psuché includes a reference to the idea of a supersensible realm but we should recall in this context that the project Kant was engaged upon involved creating a new sense of the metaphysical that was not mystical but instead allowed a logical space for the great truths of mythology to persist with Philosophical support and in accordance with a tradition of rationalism stretching back to Plato and Aristotle. Seances and a belief in a spiritual after life is inconsistent with this tradition and its understanding of the scope and limits of the basic term psuché, which itself contains reference to the transcendental and metaphysical in its human form. On such an account the concept of the after-life may at best be metaphorical and at worst an example of what Freud referred to as projection to reduce anxiety or fulfill a fantasy laden wish.
The above letter was written before Freud’s later wave of theorising which was more rooted in the ideas of Plato, Aristotle and Kant so it is possible that Freud’s earlier responses to Jung’s mysticism was not as diplomatic as the written response. Freud was familiar with the work of Kant and would have read “Dreams of a spirit seer”, Kants criticism of the mystic, Swedenborg. Metaphysical spiritualism was certainly one of the targets of Kant’s critical Philosophy as was hylozoism and materialism of various forms.
Both Jung’s “collective unconscious” and Freuds “unconscious” were sceptical of the prevailing psychology of consciousness which was attempting to confront head-on the materialism of behaviourism. Freud, we ought to recall in this context was a reductionist, and committed neuroscientific materialist, when he wrote the work “Project for a Scientific Psychology”. In this work, which he later burned, for fear of tarnishing his reputation, he postulated three types of neurone and the energy regulation and pleasure pain principles which he would later retain in a larger framework of ideas. Jung does in his Psychology attempt to use certain Kantian terms such as intuition and thought, but his concern was not to provide an essence specifying definition of human psuché, but rather to map the differences in personality between people. For Jung, personality was mostly conceived to be determined by inherited predispositions to be found in the collective unconscious of mankind. These dispositions determined both the behaviour and thought of man. Jung also referred to two attitudes, extraversion and introversion, and two kinds of states of mind concerned with ones balance of mind, namely stability and neuroticism as well as 4 psychological functions, sensing ,feeling, intuition ,and thinking. These latter functions were then used to determine 16 psychological personality types. This is an impressive framework dedicated to the mapping of differences between men, and to that extent one may feel that Jung’s work has made a contribution to the discipline of Psychology. To some extent his work complements the work of Freud. Yet at the same time, it must be noted that there is a major difference between these two Psychologists insofar as the importance of religion is concerned. Freud must be regarded as concerned with criticising primarily Western religion and Jung perhaps promoted archetypes of many world religions.
Laurens van der Post’s book (“Jung and the story of our time”(London, Penguin, 1976) claims:
“..this ancient Greek world seemed a more naturally religious world than the Christian world in which the Reformation was about to explode. Even at the greatest period of Greek history and its point of loftiest achievement in arts, science, philosophy, politics and affairs of religion, the gods themselves did not hesitate to come down from Olympus and participate in some shape, in the heat and dust of the battle to live out the meaning that invested life on earth. Indeed the fact that the Gods themselves were housed in their native Olympus seemed to be significant proof of the close and intimate connection of Greece with its religious experiences. It was also significant that Greece’s decline started with the relegation of its gods to the planets and outer space.” (P.31)
It is clear from van der Post’s account that the Ancient Greeks lived in a religious space and time, and everyone during the day in the agora or dreaming in their homes during the night, were in some sense in the company of their gods. He also notes that the period of the Renaissance was a period in which an attempt was made to revive this passion for living by using all the powers at the disposal of ones personality. He expressed admiration for the Elisabethan Renaissance and its primary spokesman Shakespeare whom he claimed possessed an unparallelled gift for expression (P.33). This extraverted spirit of the time, however, was soon to turn to its negation in introversion, and seek to remedy the diminishing role of religion by a psychological mechanism which projected its aggression outward, thus creating the ideal atmosphere for wars that became increasingly barbaric as the technology for the instigation of death became more and more lethal. In this context it is worthwhile recording that Descartes, one of the “new men”, was a mercenary in the 30 year war , and also a designer of “war machines”.
We should also point out that it was to Freud that Einstein, (commissioned by the League of nations )turned for a psychological analysis of war in 1933. Freud by this time would have been able not to just list the psychological conditions necessary for the rise of mad tyrants and their success in persuading the masses to sanction their mad violent projects, but also refer to the kind of psychological effects that wars have upon their participants. Amongst these conditions however, Freud did not refer to the after effects of the ongoing process of secularisation and the collapse of the authority of religion.
Revolutions can be at least as brutal as war and van der Post has no doubt that the French Revolution was associated with the deposing of religion and the crowning of reason amidst the atrocities committed:
“After all one cannot overlook the symbolic importance of the fact that when the French revolution. was perpetrating its greatest inhumanities against helpless men and women, it officially deposed God and in his place actually crowned a goddess of reason in Notre Dame in Paris. “(P.37)
Rousseau is the enigmatic counter enlightenment figure that stands opposed both to the authority of religion and reason. We should recall however that Rousseau played an important part in Kant’s Enlightened Critical Philosophy by convincing Kant to abandon his Wolffian rationalism and adopt a more nuanced approach which took into account the dignity of man. In his work on Emile which Kant avidly read we find a pupil who does not read the Bible but rather “Robinson Crusoe”. We also find Rousseau affectionately embracing his fictional ideal pupil and leaving his own children to an orphanage. Van der Post points to Rousseau’s claim that civilisation is no longer progressing and also to the fact that Rousseau’s Philosophising does little to mitigate the suffering soul of modern man, but he attributes much to the inefficacy of religion to affect the spirit of man positively.
The decline in the respect for the dignity of man for Kant resides in the fact that man does not dare to use his reason in accordance with its scope and limits. The Enlightenment followed the Renaissance which followed a long period of Roman domination in which the Roman military and engineering spirit curiously settled upon the sect of Christianity as its chosen religion. The narrative of the life of Jesus was of course addressing the problem of mans failure to use his reason by suggesting that man instead love his neighbour and enemies as ends-in-themselves, but the narrative contained certain fantasy-laden supernatural events which raised questions about the validity of the account, given the previous heritage of the power of logos and argumentation from the Greeks.
Part of the dispute between Jung and Freud centred upon the role of sexuality in personality development–a thesis Jung contested. Freud never abandoned his sexual stages but he did widen the scope of meaning of eros, to include all life affirmative thinking and activity. Darwin had been the inspiration for much of Freuds so-called mythology of the instincts which included the sexual instincts under the broader category of the life instincts. Freud and other Darwinians were largely responding to the fact that evolution had for some reason ensured that humans spend a long time being dependent upon their parents, thus creating the need for institutions such as the family to last for long periods of time. This, however was not the only reason for the insistence upon the importance of sexuality. Freuds clinical experience with his neurotic patients regularly encountered sexual fantasies of certain kinds. Much time was spent analysing and interpreting these fantasies. So, Freud in fact responded positively to Jung’s criticism by expanding the scope of the meaning of eros to include civilisation building activities.
The Kantian emphasis upon the will and its relation to treating humanity as an end in itself was to be transposed to a lower psychological level by Freud, into the instincts and their vicissitudes, and Freud specifically claimed that he had charted the path of only some of the instincts. What he meant is not entirely clear, but we should remember that Schopenhauer had written a work entitled “The World as Will and Representation”, and in it he referred to the phenomenon of the will operating according to a principle of mercy (operative in the case of the heroic policemen). Is this something separate to what Kant meant by the good will or is it the case that the good will is in fact partly a vicissitude of this principle? The good will obviously has a sensible aspect and this might be a part of that aspect, i.e. there is nothing in Kant to prevent us from postulating that he adopted the hylomorphic thesis that psychological powers built upon other powers as well as integrating themselves with other powers. Freud referred to his Psychology as Kantian, and he also referred to the Hughlings Jackson neural thesis that lower parts of of the brain can be integrated into the higher parts. In this case the categorical imperative which urges mankind to treat his fellows as end-in-themselves could be construed as a higher level vicissitude of the principle of mercy.
Campbell discusses this principle in another essay in this collection in relation to the work of Thomas Mann. It has to be said that there is a tendency in Campbells presentation of Freud’s ideas to fail to see that in relation to the Freudian dictum “Where id was there ego shall be”, it is the energy of the id that is used for the purposes of the ego and the superego, and all three systems are integrated with each other and not as separate as some commentators claim.
Van der Post comments upon the “loneliness” of modern man and claims that this was a symptom of his times. For the Greeks, what man had in common, was related to psuché and its attendant capacities and powers, but for Kant it was the good will that was the driving force in man. This is not to say that man in fact universally possessed a good will, but rather possessed a consciousness of the imperative that he ought to treat his fellow man ends-in-themselves. The imperative to think rationally is also a demand made in the form of an “ought-to”: man ought not to contradict himself, but, as we all know, this demand does not hinder him from doing so, thereby contributing to the presence of confusion in the world. This could be clearly seen in the case of the tyrants of the time, who inverted good and evil and made the worst argument appear the better.
Freud’s work became over time, less materialistic and more Platonic and Kantian whilst at the same time being rooted in the hylomorphism that was presence in his medical training from Vienna University. Insofar as Freud could be regarded as concerned with mans spirituality, this was not in the form of the imagination and fantasy but rather in the form of the way in which eros and logos produce order and good in the world. Of course Thanatos and uncontrolled desires and fears were also striving to use the energy of the id for more narcissistic purposes, and the domination of such forces may partly account for the loneliness of modern man van der Post referred to. Previously one of the functions of myth was to bring men together via narratives that clarified mans relation to the realm of the sacred, and all that was required for such stories were an understanding of certain categories of judgement and an active imagination. As the world became more complex it was inevitable that Reason and argumentation would be needed to give man an understanding of his relation to this world in which the sacred appeared to become more and more marginalised, and this too might have contributed to mans feeling of loneliness.
Paul Ricouer’s work on Freud and The Symbolism of Evil in particular provide us with critical insight into the power and limitations of mythical thinking. He points out that myths contain symbols of evil which call for philosophical interpretation: a form of interpretation analogous to Freudian psychoanalytical interpretations of dreams and pathological symptoms. Symbols, myths, symptoms and dreams, then, all possess a latent-manifest structure, a complex form of double meaning in which the latent meaning is in some sense disguised/revealed by the manifest unless submitted to the logos of an interpretation procedure which relies on Aristotelian hylomorphic and Kantian critical theory. According to Ricouer both myths and symbols when correctly interpreted reveal the relation of man to the realm of the sacred.
Van der Post’s diagnosis of the loneliness of modern man may be connected to the phenomenon articulated by Julian Jaynes in his work on the Origins of Consciousness, namely “Deus Absconditis”: the phenomenon of the absent god that has left man alone to his fate. For Jaynes several engravings of an empty throne being approached by a king symbolise the advance of the secularisation process and its affect upon religion. Freud may well have had this phenomenon in mind when he referred to science and gardening as “displacement activities”: vain attempts to fill the void that has been left in the life of modern man. We ought to recall in this context the remark of the once scientifically inclined Wittgenstein, that science sends him to sleep. For him this modern world has nothing of the attraction of the bustling agoras of ancient Greece, the teeming Elisabethan London streets conversing about the latest play of Shakespeare, or the cosmopolitan Königsberg with its drawing room gatherings during the time of Kant. Things have undoubtedly changed whilst we have been occupied with making the worst argument seem the better. The Kleinian Renaissance art-critic, Adrian Stokes, in an essay entitled Greek Culture and the Ego had this to say about the Golden Age of Ancient Greece:
“The truest wisdom lay in a properly balanced personality in which neither side triumphed at the expense of the other. What this meant can be seen from the place given to eros, which means in the first place passionate love, but extends its meaning far beyond physical desire to many forms of intellectual and spiritual passion. For Parmenides it is the child of necessity and the force which makes men live and thrive–for Democritus it is the desire for beautiful things: for Euripides it is the inspiring spirit of the arts: for Pericles it is what devoted citizens feel for their city; for Socrates it is the pursuit of noble ends in thought and action….If the complete force of mans nature works as a single power, he is a full man, and no Greek of the great days that this was the right and natural way to behave.”(Collected Works of Adrian Stokes Vol 3, London, Thames and Hudson, 1978, P.84)
Eros, insofar as Plato and Aristotle are concerned is probably all of the above , Eros being, according to the Symposium, a mediator between man and the Gods. Divine eros for Aristotle was of course connected to his metaphysical characterisation of God who was engaged in thinking about himself as well as producing all movement and motion in the universe.
Adrian Stokes embraces most of the above account of Eros and also Melanie Klein’s analyses of the instincts of man and their relation to good and bad, part and whole objects. She agrees that during infancy there is a tendency for the infant to be “enveloped” by objects such as the mother. When the “I” is subsequently formed more and more by the lost objects of the ego, there is more and more respect for the independence and self sufficiency of these objects. Stokes picks up this reasoning in his analysis of a certain kind of Renaissance art object which he designates as Quattrocento Art. Such art objects, he argues are whole objects in virtue of their independence and self sufficiency. They are, he argues, a restorative response to the depressive anxiety generated by past lost valuable objects. Such art enables us to become less dependent upon external objects. The internal objects of the mind are also more integrated with each other, and this in turn enables a more harmonious relation to the external world as such. Strong personalities (neither for Klein nor Stokes) do not view being alone as a problem exactly because their dependence upon external objects is minimal. This relation to the external world and its “modernity” which encourages a more narcissistic relation to objects, enables these individuals with strong personalities( possessing superior subtle intellects?) to correctly diagnose the condition of modern man and see the loneliness of the modern world as related to depression and the mania related to narcissism. Such individuals may like Kant see the whole as “melancholically haphazard” and restrict their participation in society to a minimum.
Jung too, according to Anthony Storr in his work noted that Jung was concerned too with the attribution of pathological symptoms and behaviour to what he called the “spirit of the times”. Freud took a more nuanced approach and attributed the discontent to be universally found in modern society, to a system that is ill-adapted to mans legitimate desires and fears, and further traced this phenomenon to its source in mans long childhood. The Pleasure Pain principle was not, in our modern era, in his view, regulated by the Reality principle of the Aristotelian golden mean and our children thus had more difficulty growing up with balanced personalities and appropriate behavioural patterns.
Freud may have regarded excursions into the realms of the para-normal as symptoms of the modern malady, a turning away from the melancholically haphazard external world, toward a more satisfying inner world, where there were mechanisms operating that one could control. Projecting “spirits” into the external world was for Freud a sign of a serious lack of psychic harmony, and may be a sign of an unstable unbalanced mind. The phenomenon of “possession” so fascinating for the people of Jung’s time became a source of fascination for Jung who became interested in the phenomenon of multiple personality. Jung was less inclined to see such a disturbance of normal behaviour, and more inclined to view this phenomenon as introverted. Whether possession, for example, was detrimental for mental health would depend for him on which of the unconscious archetypes were responsible for what we were experiencing.
Anthony Storr claims that Freud was obsessed by the body and that therefore Jung’s fascination with the spiritual world came as a welcome relief. This overlooks the Philosophical view of the human body (psuché) that we find in Aristotle and Spinoza which cannot be accused of being materialistic. Aristotles hylomorphic view was that the psuché is constituted by a constellation of organs and a configuration of limbs and posture that enables a particular form of life to form as a result of the power of these organs and limbs, which includes the power of the brain, eyes, ears, speech, bipedal activity, etc., and the influence of the sexual organs on the life choices man makes. The capacity for discourse and rational thinking and argumentation are obviously higher level activities and are therefore part of the essence specifying definition: rational animal capable of discourse.
Freud largely embraces this hylomorphic view of psuché as he does Kant’s philosophical and critical view of the powers of the mind and especially the importance of epistemé insofar as knowledge of the self is concerned. Mere self consciousness would not be sufficient for Kant to characterise the spiritual life of man. The Kantian faculty of sensibility—the home of sensuous imagination, the instincts and the apriori intuitions of space and time are clearly more biological than spiritual, but no one can surely deny that the faculties of the understanding/judgement and reason were not spiritual. These faculties were possibly not spiritual in the sense Jung intended, but given Kant’s criticism of “spirit seers” such a criticism cannot be taken seriously without first confronting Kant’s arguments from that article.
Spinoza claimed that the first idea of the mind is the idea of the body. This for us characterises well the intimate relation the mind has to the body. We also find in Spinoza’s writings reference to the more general phenomenon of change in the universe when it is claimed that all entities of whatever kind strive to maintain themselves in their existence. If we refuse to interpret Spinoza’s reflections as pertaining to hylozoism and consider only life forms as a specific category of Being, then we can see in his work Pre- Darwinian ideas that also appear to be in line with some ideas we find in Aristotle’s hylomorphism. Indeed Spinoza’s reflections appear also to support and predate the Freudian so-called “mythology of the instincts”. Freud also in some of his later writings addresses the higher psychological functions when he reflects upon the operation of the ego as a precipitate of lost objects. He also refers to higher psychological functions in his Group Psychology and the Ego, but there is no acknowledgment of the positive power of religion to structure our psychological capacities and powers: an acknowledgement moreover which is undoubtedly present in both Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical Philosophy.
Bearing in mind this omission, which leaves readers with the impression that Religion has no positive psychological value, the later theorising of Freud can be seen as an interesting elaboration upon Kantian ideas relating to the faculty of sensibility , the transcendental ego and the realm of the noumenal. Kant in His Anthropology elaborates in more detail upon this idea of the “I”:
” the sum total of pragmatic anthropology in respect to the vocation of the human being and the characteristic of his formation is the following. The human being is destined by his reason to live in a society with human beings and in it to cultivate himself and moralise himself by means of the arts and sciences. No matter how great his animal tendency may be to give himself passively to the impulses of comfort and good living, which he calls happiness, he is still destined to make himself worthy of humanity by actively struggling with the obstacles that cling to him because of the crudity of his nature.”(Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view Ed and Trans by Louden R B, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, P.15)
We can see from the above quote where the inspiration for the agency of the superego came from, and we can also see how powerful the instincts are in this process of actualising our higher capacities and powers. Against the background of the above reflections it is difficult to see exactly why Jung wished to claim in an interview about his relation to Freud that he was influenced by Kant. If the influence ran as deep as he claimed then there would not have been this deep disagreement over the role of the instincts, eros, and the superego in the process of personality development.
On the issue of Jungs commitment to the occult and the paranormal which Freud characterised as the “black mud and rising tide of occultism”, it is difficult not to see in this commitment a lack of focus on the role the reality principle and the external world play in any account of the human psuché. Campbell, however, it must be admitted, is not committed to any form of occultism, and much of what he has claimed would have been well received by both Kant and Freud (except perhaps his view of Jung’s work).
We know Wittgenstein was a follower of Freud and according to the American Philosopher of Aesthetics, Stanley Cavell, Wittgenstein was concerned to put the soul back into the body. Freud, witnessing the rise of American behaviourism, was equally concerned with this task but he was equally concerned not to claim for the spirit or mind more territory than it actually occupied in the phenomenal realm. He was, it ought to be recalled particularly concerned with the Cartesian obsession with Consciousness which Freud believed was merely the tip of the iceberg of the mind.
Kant, Freud and Wittgenstein would not have sanctioned the view of the afterlife we encounter in occultism, nor would they have sanctioned a belief in ghosts, poltergeists and possession by the devil and their grounds would have been the grounds of Logos and Reason–the grounds of understanding and rationality.