Editorial: 18th Issue May 1st 2019

Blog: http://michaelrdjames.org/

Journal site https://www.aletheiaeducation.eu/

https://joom.ag/DKOa

The first lecture is entitled “ A Critique of The Conceptual Foundations of

International Politics: Lecture Five”. The lecturer Lisa Andersson outlines a
view of the nation state and citizenship:

"The current structure of the modern world would seem to demand that we identify ourselves
with a nation and not a region of the nation. Nationalism in the last 150 years has been a
powerful provider of identities and provided vehicles for political action. The only other
powerful identity provider has been that of "class": "Workers of the world unite, you have
nothing to lose but your chains."...The beginning of the modern system of states began with
the treaty of Westphalia. It is after this that you begin to encounter nationalism. Here we have,
it is argued, an identity with substance, that celebrates the variety of different kinds of people
in the world, speaking a particular language, enjoying a particular history and traditions...We
identify with other people who share this language, history, and culture. Viewed in this way
Nationalism was a way to assert value."

Anderson evokes a psychological mechanism of identification to explain our

relation to the nation state seemingly unaware that except for the parent-child
relation this is largely a pathological phenomenon. The response to this position
is Freudian:

Notice in the above quote the reliance on the idea of a psychological mechanism of
identification. Freud was one of the first psychologists to examine this idea systematically in a
paper entitled "Group Psychology and the analysis of the Ego". We should bear in mind also
here that Freud claimed that his Psychological reflections were Kantian. In this paper Freud
points to pathological psychological mechanisms at work in groups that gather together in
public in an attempt to express their collective power to act in the name of some cause under
the leadership of a narcissistic leader whose rhetoric is essentially emotional and instinctive
and not in accordance with the dictates and inhibitions of our conscious personality as is the
case when it is operating in accordance with the demands of ethics and the superego. The
infantilism of the group naturally submits to the leader, it is argued, in much the same fashion
as the small child submits to his father, except in this case the positive aspect of this relation
in which the father consciously and ethically relates to his child and the world, in general, is
foregone.

Thinking about the phenomena of nationalism and the nation state it is argued
would be better accomplished by using not psychologial mechanisms of
identification and imagination but rather the more philosophical and ethical
ideas of freedom and duty.

The second lecture is a critique of Lectures 21,22,23,24 of Professor Smiths

Yale Series of Lectures on Political Regimes. These concern the Political
Philosophy of de Toqueville The lecture postulates that the struggles of the so
called ancien regime revolving around power and authority have given rise to
more modern struggles between freedom and equality. De Toquevill did not
believe that Locke’s mechanism of the separation of powers would suffice to
balance these competing tendencies when as he put it “the people have become
the king”:

Professor Smith then claims that "The problem of politics" is the problem of how to control
the sovereignty of the people". There would seem to me to be at least one good reason to
reject this formulation and that reason lies in the Political Philosophy of Kant, in particular in
Kant's idea that the teleological structure of politics lays in an idea of the final end of politics
residing in the idea of a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends. Sovereignty, that is, for Kant, is
merely a stage in the developmental process of our political activity and its terminating point
in a political unit transcending the sovereign state. The nation-state was born in Westphalia in
1648. Could it be that what Kant was witnessing and reasoning about was a transitional
organic form destined for transformation? Hannah Arendt, after all, in her seminal work "The
Origins of Totalitarianism" claimed that the nation-state proved its failure as a political unit in
the 20th century with the rise of totalitarianism. Was this a phenomenon that Tocqueville was
also fearing. He writes: "I do not like democracy and am severe toward it." and "In the future,
all the world will be like America". What exactly was it that concerned de Tocqueville?

One of the forces of democratization for de Toqueville is a historical process

which appears to be working for the equality of social conditions which seems
to be a required criterion for a fully functioning democracy. The problem,
however, appears to be that de Toqueville identifies democracy with the USA
and believes that for better or worse this is the navigational star the rest of the
word is using to plot its future course.

De Tocqueville claims that the Americans do not have a taste for Philosophy and in this spirit,
one wonders why Smith does not wish to return to the original form of democracy which was
ruled by the many and poor in Ancient Greece who were revolting and reacting against ...?
What exactly? The rich ruling in their interest? Or were they reacting against the lack of the
equality of social conditions? Was this what was meant by the Socratic and Aristotelian
references to the common good? The difference between this ancient form of democracy and
its more modern counterpart would presumably be the putative absence of unnecessary
desires in the latter form of rule. This absence would on philosophical theory be replaced by
areté, the virtue or excellence of doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. Plato
we know objected vehemently to the rule of the many with unnecessary desires but Aristotle
could see the many ruled in the spirit of the common good and areté and indeed thought it to
be the best alternative of three possibilities: rule by the one, the few and the many. So the
combination of the common good and areté seems to have been the philosophical foundation
of our modern democracies and sovereignty seems to, on this account, have been an
accidental inessential characteristic of the political unit. The question that then arises is
whether social conditions aiming at equality were a cause or consequence of the several
interacting processes that were in the process of forming our modern democracies. From the
philosophical point of view, one wonders whether doing the right things at the right time in
the right way requires social conditions or helps to produce the social conditions of equality

Democracy for de Toqueville may make us gentler toward each other but it
might be that we have become too soft. Here are two illustrative quotes from
“Democracy in Amertica”:

"But..my ability to feel your pain does not require me to do much about it.
Compassion turns out to be an easy virtue, implies a caring without judgment"

Secondly,

"the democratic soul is a restless anxious soul and "always seems to be a work
in progress tied to the desire for material well being(happiness). Democracy
means a middle-class way of life made up of people constantly in pursuit of
some absent object of their own desires.”

The Hobbesian and Lockean echoes are unmistakable.

The third lecture is an Introduction to Philosophical Psychology. Aristotle Part

Two is the focus of attention. The lecture begins wuth a discussion of
metaphysical and transcendental logic:

In a sense, Metaphysical Logic was metaphorically placing a curse on both the houses of
dualism and materialism in order to stem the reproduction of theories from these sources.
However, as we know Platonic dualism defied the metaphorical curse and was one of the
motivating assumptions of Old and New Testament Religions and we also know that
materialism was one of the motivating assumptions of the rise of modern science which
Descartes, Hobbes, and Hume were embracing in their anti-Aristotelian theorizing. As a
direct consequence metaphysical logic dwindled in importance as the drama of dialectical
interaction between Religion and Science played itself out at the beginning of our modern era.
PNC was demoted from a Metaphysical principle to a transcendental principle of logic
governing thought and language. Dualism was of course as old as the hills and Orphic, pre-
Judaic, Judaic and Christian theories of the soul characterized it as a special kind of substance
that breathes life into a material body embedded in a space-time-causation matrix.
Materialism saved its breath for several centuries before finally claiming in the spirit of
dialectical interaction that a non-physical, nonextended entity cannot have a causal effect in
the physical matrix of the material world---this substance can move nothing in the material
world because it shares none of its properties. The soul cannot be causa sui, materialists
argued, by definition, because it cannot be observed either by itself or by others in its putative
causing itself to do things.

The soul viewed hylomorphically places it in relation to a matrix of forms of

life:

The soul is an actuality of matter (there can be levels of actuality) and living beings can
be regarded as “substance” par excellence by Aristotle. His matrix of different life forms
were established in terms of the kind of power that belongs to a particular form. In De
Anima 15b 8-14 Aristotle maintains unsurprisingly that the soul is the moving, formal
and final cause of the body. He also maintains that a particular constellation of organs
were what give rise to particular forms of life. He does not claim that these organs
“cause” in any modern sense the form of life—it is rather the case that these forms of life
“spontaneously” cause themselves to do what they do, i.e. exercise the powers typical of
their particular life form. Aristotle, as we pointed out in part one speaks of a matrix of
life forms which form a hierarchy from the simplest to the most complex form: from the
simplest form of vegetation to the most complex life form of God. This matrix is
constituted by the differentiation of powers but the most interesting observation
Aristotle makes is that the more complex life forms incorporate the simpler forms and
presumably in so doing transforms their functions into more complex activities.

At the level of the human being, the next most complex form of life we are
provided with three characteriations by Aristotle:

1. The first characterisation is in terms of an essence specifying definition: a rational
animal capable of discourse. This is clearly a kind of summary of the most important
powers a human possesses.
2. The second characterisation is in terms of a careful account of how we acquire
knowledge through the uses of the powers of perception, memory and reasoning which
also appear to be related to powers of language and imagination.
3. The third characterisation is in terms of mans ability to reason both theoretically and
practically.
There does not appear to be any conflict between the three characterisations. Hughlings
Jackson, a theorist who influenced Freudian theory, claimed that areas of the brain have
the above kind of hylomorphic hierarchical structure. Freud used these hylomorphic
ideas when he suggested his three principles of “psychic” functioning:--the energy
regulation principle, the pleasure-pain principle, and the reality principle. Each of the
higher principles “colonises” some of the territory of the lower principles thus
transforming the human activities associated with them. Eating a meal, for example,
primarily an energy regulation activity, is transformed into a civilised activity aiming at
the pleasures of sitting down for a period of time with ones family. This is a clear
example of the transformation of an instinctive/biological activity into a social event
which may involve other powers of the mind such as engaging in discourse and
reasoning at the dinner table. Freud claims that one function of language and discourse
is to bring “psychic” material into the field of consciousness(where all our powers
appear to be integrated). Indeed, his later therapeutic techniques appear to be
presupposing the hylomorphic principle of powers building upon powers with the
intent of integrating all powers in the mind. Freud is ambivalent on the question of
whether consciousness itself is a power or an inherent function of the brain probably
partly because of the fact that he was fighting for hylomorphism against the
predominating Cartesian model of consciousness. Freud obviously also benefitted from
the work of Kant. He is reputed to have said that his was the Psychology that Kant would
have written had he concerned himself with this subject that had broken its moorings
from Philosophy in 1870.

P M S Hacker concludes the lecture with a meditation upon the will and
two-way powers integrated into a complex sufficient to explain many of the
Aristotelian and Kantian theories in this area.