Editorial for April Issue 30th March

By Michael James: Blog http://michaelrdjames.org/

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

The Second Centrepiece lecture in Philosophical Psychology is given by Harry

Middleton, one of the main characters from the work “The World Explored, the
World Suffered:The Exeter lectures”.

In this lecture Harry repeats the reasons for his doubts about the project of
scientific Psychology as a prelude to referring to the work of the brain
researcher Julian Jaynes who produced a theory of early men possessing what
he calls bicameral minds that did not function as our self conscious minds do.
Homer and the Bible are called upon to give testimony to the transitional phase
from the bicameral mind to self consciousness. Agamemnons “dream” in which
he was told to begin the Trojan War, the self conscious Odysseus planning and
deceiving his way throughout his long journey, the voices that Amos hears and
the self reflective deliberative prose of Ecclesiastes philosophizing about time
and human activity are called upon as evidence for Jaynes’ hypothesis. The
nature of consciousness is discussed and a world in which we learn to live with
“deus absconditus”, a god that has abandoned us, is presented. The lecture
concludes with a short Aristotelian/Wittgensteinian discussion on the role of
language.

The second lecture is a lecture from a forthcoming work: “the World Explored,
the World Suffered: The Birmingham lectures”. One of the courses the main
character of the work Robert attends is a course in Philosophical Psychology
which examines the History of Psychology. The lecture published here is “Kant
and the History of Psychology”. Many of the themes in this lecture correlate
well with the themes of the first lecture. Kant has the following to say on the
question of Scientific Psychology:

“Psychology, or Anthropology, as Kant would prefer to call it is wholly empirical but

it could never be a science Kant argued because mental phenomena are in the flux
of time and therefore incapable of measurement. Given the Copernican revolution
and the conviction that knowledge is not solely the product of ideas which arise out
of experience but is rather a structure regulated by the minds own activities, we can
see how self-consciousness is a holistic idea with its own essential unity.”

Kant’s “parts of the mind” are Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason and these
together with Judgment which harmonizes these parts in different ways
constitute the Kantian framework for his Philosophy. The lecturer has this to say
on the differences and the relations between sensibility and understanding:
“Sensibility being the psychological part of the mind most connected to the body
and through the body the external world, Understanding operates as a further
shaping agency of the mind and is defined as a system of categories which assist in
the forming of logical judgments that firstly, relate principally to the totality of
experience and secondarily to the substrate(space and time and sensation). These
categories are products of a thinking consciousness(“I think”) and “are the
necessary and only forms of all thinking”. This region of the mind is that which
generates the truth function capacity of the mind and is still related to experience
but in ways which are convoluted and partly psychological (via the shaping
operation of Sensibility). It is this truth-functional region of the mind which has a
necessary connection to sensibility by placing it under its sovereignty: to such an
extent that when I see lightning strike a tree at a particular place and a particular
time I inevitably think “It is true that the tree is being struck by lightning”. Notice that
this is not a necessary logical truth of the kind “Every time trees are struck by
lightning we think that it is a fact that they are struck by lightning.” Obviously, the
sensible/psychological part of the mind can dominate this environmental transaction
by producing a fearful trembling or a fearful emotional response, which of course is
a less rational response and that at first might seem as if it damages the universal
case for seeing the world under the aspect of the true. Yet it does not do so for truth
is a normative concept which basically amounts to claiming that one ought to see
this under the aspect of the truth or to take another essence specifying example,
“one ought to tell the truth when you promise to do so at a trial”. The concepts of
promise and truth are logically intertwined. What does normative mean in this
context? Only that we ought to view the scene under the aspect of the truth which
obviously does not imply that I am doing so or will do so. The fearful emotional
response might even have a representational content–a picture of an angry God,
and if this is so this testifies to the presence of the synthesis of the imagination
operating upon the content of sensory experiences”

What is striking about this passage especially in relation to the first lecture , is the
normative or prescriptive dimension of self consciousness in its relation to facts and
the truth. The reference to the action of promising also brings practical reasoning
into the picture. The lecturer again returns to the theme of why Psychology cannot
be a science:

“Now here is the important conclusion that should be drawn from this discussion of
natural science: Anthropology or Psychology can never become a Science because
a science must be mathematical. Mathematics belongs principally in the domain of
the category of the quantitative which requires a quantitative standard that could
operate on the material it is applied to. Kant is clear that the part of consciousness
which belongs to the realm of thought is not the kind of material that can be
measured quantitatively or ordered in mathematical relations. Thought functions in
the domain of reality, negation and limitation, (thinking something about something).
It can have conditions and so the category of causal conditions may certainly be
relevant in explaining how particular thoughts or kinds of thought come to be but
this relates more to the substrate of thought than to outlining the totality of relevant
conditions. The “I think” implies that I think something but it probably also implies
some notion of self-consciousness which raises the thinking above that of the
psychological realm of sensibility and its organizer, imagination. Thinking, that is,
occurs at the fully mental realm of understanding and reason. Psychological states
of consciousness are continuous and can be objectified by breaking the continuity
into discrete units but self-consciousness is intentional and has a logical relation to
the truth.”

The lecturer then takes up a common criticism of Kant in both the Analytical
and Continental Traditions of Philosophy, namely that he has chosen to ignore
parts of the mind not connected with the operations of Reason:

“Kant stands accused of ignoring the lower operations of consciousness, the

sensible/imaginative psychological operations of the mind, but it is clear that this too
is not a valid argument. Kant quite specifically argued in his work
“Anthropology” that the senses are not in any way an inferior form of
consciousness but on the contrary are analogous to the people in a state who are
ruled by a government who can affect the people but that in turn the government
can be affected by the collective will of the people. In the second book of the
Anthropology Kant discusses feelings which are in one sense inhibitors
of reason(high levels of anxiety can, we all know, inhibit the learning process), but
in another sense the feelings of pleasure and pain can be united by the
understanding to the ideas of good and evil and so “produce a quickening of the
will”. This is quite aside from the positive contribution of aesthetic forms of
consciousness to the leading of a flourishing life with a happy outlook onto a
boundless future. Indeed the psychological sensible aspect of consciousness
becomes even more manifest when Kant takes up the way in which consciousness
practically reasons about the ethical decisions that are taken in life. For it is here that
the self as noumenon, as a metaphysical thing in itself is revealed as bearer of the
form of consciousness most defining of our human nature, namely the ethical form
of consciousness which he then contrasts with what he regards as the empirical
theories of Psychology which one could as well retrieve from the pages of novelists
such as Fielding. This historically served as a challenge to future psychologists who
were preparing the ground for a science of behavior which would become a source
of knowledge about man. It was clear to Kant that moral action was sustained by a
particular kind of reason for acting that should be characterized in terms of the
universality and necessity of the maxims or principles one had for one’s action.
These cannot be of the kind: “Whenever lightning strikes trees I am frightened ”
because according to Kant that would fall under the heading of something that
happens to man rather than the heading of what man intentionally and self
consciously does.”

The third part of the journal contains a section from my Forthcoming work:
Introduction to Philosophy: The World Explored, the World Suffered”. The
essay featured is part one of two parts on the Philosophy of Plato.

The picture that the above work wishes to communicate about the work of Plato
is that of a philosopher that goes through three phases of Philosophizing.
During his first phase is under the influence of Socrates and the elenctic method
which of course serves his philosohical inclinations well and also helps him to
retain his literary ambitions. During the second phase Plato matures into a
philosopher in his own right, presenting arguments which he hopes will hang
together as a systematic theoretical account of gods, men and the world. He is
still using allegories and mythology and the prophecy of oracles but his intent
is clearly to educate rather than entertain or mobilize sympathy for the plight of
Philosophy after the execution of Socrates. In the third phase we see Plato
falling under the influence of the logically structured mind of Aristotle who
conducts observations of and experiments with animals and gathers constitutions
from the city states of the world to construct a vision of a Callipolis that men
have been striving for thousands of years to actualize. Plato’s Callipolis may
have captured our imaginations but Aristotle’s Callipolis captured our
understanding and reason.