6th Issue Editorial 24th April 2018 Michael R D James

http://michaelrdjames.org/
Journal site: https://www.aletheiaeducation.eu

The first lecture is entitled “Third Centrepiece lecture on Philosophical

Psychology” and it is given by the fictitious lecturer Harry Middleton, a
character from a recently published philosophical/educational novel “The World
Explored, the World Suffered: The Exeter lectures.”

The lecture opens with the claim that the body and the soul possess a unity
which is difficult to articulate. Part of the story of that unity will inevitably
involve the concept of consiousness which is related to the external world in a
complex way. Middleton takes up the issue of the origin of negation in relation
to a situation in which Sartre is looking for his friend in a café and sees “that he
is not there”. The power of negating a reality is for Sartre part of the very
definition of consciousness. “Only a conscious being can know that Pierre is not
in the café” is the conclusion drawn and this is then used to motivate the claim
that without the absence of events in the present time History would not exist,
i.e. History is related to negation and consciousness. Merleau-Ponty a
phenomenologist and a contemporary of the existentialist Sartre contested what
he thought to be Sartre’s dualism and replaced it with a monism which centred
itself upon a conception of a lived body as an agent with various powers.
Included among these powers is the power of language which also relates to
absence and negation in complex ways which Merleau-Ponty discusses. This
body is not, however, a scientific entity, a meeting point of various causal
powers, but rather resembles a synthetic unity for which the term “meaning”
would be the most appropriate description. There is a prior question to ask of the
scientist intent upon collecting all the facts and that is “What is the meaning of
these facts?” The language also has a meaning which can be investigated
phenomenologically, not as a set of ideas representing reality but rather as a
power which is manifested in a set of gestures which together via their
differences constitute what is called the linguistic field:

“Language forms a field of action or gestures endowed with a certain style

around me as a consequence of the linguistic powers of the body. The Word is
an instrumentality in a field of instrumentalities.”

The expression “I am conscious” for Merleau-Ponty is a claim for which there is

no meaningful negation. It is, in Kantian language a proposition from
Transcendental Logic. The criticism of this phenomenological account may turn
on whether Merleau-Ponty intends his term “the body” to be identical with that
of the person. This is an important criticism because only people and not bodies
can be said to understand a proposition of Transcendental logic.
The second lecture is entitled “Post Kantianism and the History of Psychology”
and it is taken from the second volume of the trilogy series “The World
Explored, the World Suffered”. The short little lecture is inspired by the volume
“History of Psychology written by Professor Brett and edited by R S Peters. It
opens with a retrospective look at Kant’s achievement in the field of
Psychology:

“Kant rightly declared that the mind must be regarded as a structure regulated by
principles which are ultimately its own activities. Before Kant's time, the
psychologist was not unlike the physiologist who tried to explain digestion
without any reference to the organism, as a process by which various foods
introduced into the stomach analyzed themselves and distributed themselves
conscientiously to their appropriate places in the organism. It was Kant who first
saw that such a procedure was wrong and that we must start from the mind to
explain the ideas not from ideas to explain the mind.”(History of psychology,
Brett)

Kant was, then responsible for convincing psychologists that consciousness was
a unity, an active thinking unity possessing the powers of reason and action:

“Brett accuses Kant of being the propagator of the view that the higher regions
of the mind or thinking processes alone organize conscious life but quickly
admits that the Categories of the understanding, according to Kant, are the
indispensable “preliminary activities of consciousness”.These categories
obviously play the role that the forms did in Aristotle’s hylomorphism”

The lecture then moves on to discuss Herbart the first of the post-Kantians.
Herbart was a mathematician and scientist determined to bring the empirical
attitude back into the field of psychology. His aim was to “reduce consciousness
to simple elements and their combinations”. Herbart maintains, however, the
Kantian position that the soul is not the place where things just happen but
rather the place where things are done. He departs markedly from the Kantian
account when he claims that the soul is the meeting point and unifier of our
knowledge and feelings.

Schopenhauer is the next historical figure discussed and Brett claims that the
idea of the will presented is unacceptable to psychologists because of its
biological and metaphysical connotations. He concedes that the concept does
remind one of the Aristotelian idea of conation :
“persisting through the scale of organic life variously combined with and
modified by corresponding degrees of conscious realization.”
The lecturer is not at all sure as to why Fechner is included in this group of
influences since Fechner was not sure whether mathematics and quantification
could measure the inner life but insisted that this mathematical approach to
psychological phenomena was the future road the subject should take.

The third and final lecture is part of the “Introduction to Philosophy Course” and
is entitled Plato, part two: the logos and grammar of “Eros”. The lecture is taken
from a forthcoming work to be published at the end of 2019.

Language, Paul Ricoeur argues, is the meeting point of many investigations in

the fields of Philosophy, Psychology and the Exegetical Sciences and
Psychoanalysis is a leading participant in this debate. Ricoeur points to the
varying uses of language and calls upon the Metaphysics of Aristotle to testify
to the fact that “Being is said in many ways”. The symbolic use of language,
argues Ricoeur is a use that is tied to his definition of reflection which is defined
as
“the appropriation of our desire to be, and effort to exist through the works
which best witness to this effort and desire”(Freud and Philosophy).

Symbolic language is connected to the use of language to express desire. There

are two fundamental modes of symbolic language, one which allows me as a
man who goes forth in disguise to dissimulate about what I desire and one in
which my language manifests or reveals a dimension of reality men regard as
sacred or divine. The Great myths, Ricoeur argues contain reference to this
realm of the sacred and discuss the beginnings and the end of our world. Eros
and Thanatos are characters in one of these narratives. Plato’s work “The
Symposium” is a dialogue in which a number of speeches are dedicated to Eros
in the belief that Eros is a God. Socrates in his speech to Eros refers to a
conversation with Diotima in which she used elenchus on him to prove that Eros
could not be a God because he was padding about cities searching for the
perfections of beauty and the good. Since the mother of Eros was poverty, he
bore a sense of loss in his character that made him a tragic figure but since his
father was Resource he was also capable of a world-creating work in which he
was opposed by Thanatos son of Nyx, the goddess of Night and brother to
Hypnos. Freud uses Plato’s interpretation of the myths containing the characters
of Eros and Thanatos in his reflections upon the healthy and diseased souls he
encountered in 19th century Vienna. The figure of the Ego is formed partly by
the compromises between love and hate and between the search for peace and
wholeness versus the resort to violence and hatred in ones dealing with other
people. All of culture, Freud argues, is formed by this battle of the giants for the
possession of the world and our egos. Freud refers to a triangle of desire in
which the ego is formed: we desire something desirable and perhaps
unnecessary and the world responds with a refusal to fulfill that desire and a
consequent wounding of the ego is the result. The ego dominated by Eros will
be strengthened with a determination to confine itself to necessary desires whilst
still retaining a scar of its wounds. The weak ego will continue to strive after
what is unnecessary and will be on the road to self-destruction. Thanatos rules
such an ego. Freud believed that myth contained symbols manifesting the
mental structure of man's mind and therefore the clue to understanding the
Psychology of man. For Plato and Freud, myths contained theories with
assumptions, arguments and logical consequences if one interpreted them
correctly. Dreams and myths resemble each other and the interpretation of
dreams was, therefore, one of the major therapeutic techniques used in his clinic.
But it was not until the final phase of his theorizing and his return to the field of
Philosophy(Certainly Plato and perhaps Aristotle too) that he felt he could help
his most difficult patients: those with the inexplicable desire to murder
themselves in the spirit of Thanatos.