Editorial: 19th Issue June 1st 2019

Blog: http://michaelrdjames.org/

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

https://joom.ag/F6ie

The first lecture is entitled “ A Critique of The Conceptual Foundations of
International Politics: Lecture Seven”. The lecturer Edward Luck outlines a
view of the importance and success of international insitutions.

"The number of wars between states are down strikingly since the end of the cold war. The
number of wars within states are also strikingly down. The number of war casualties is down.
The number of refugees is significantly down. The number of internally displaced peoples are
down. Economic trends suggest that growth rates are going up in developing countries. Infant
mortality is down and life expectancy is up. The number of people in poverty is
down considerably."
Luck asks whether the UN is equipped to deal with the large range of issues that
demand its attention and he also points out that not all states comply with UN
resolutions. He notes with skepticism the complex bureaucratic structure of the
UN and the presence of 28 subcommittees but does not in this context refer to
the results of the work of these committees. Indeed he poses the question
whether these subcommittees are an intended distraction from the issue of the
lack of influence of the Security Council.

Luck then notes that a number of the articles of the UN Charter challenge a
states sovereignty :

There is a sovereignty gap Luck argues because the nation states cannot meet
the demands of their citizens.

The lecture is complemented by the Philosophical Psychology of Kant and the

Ethics of Aristotle. Antagonism and the struggle of men who need masters but
who do not wish for them is integrated with the trust of friendship:

Kant in his work "Universal History" proposes in his 9 propositions a

philosophical psychology and picture of human nature which provides us with a
picture of the political man that may perhaps explain to some degree this
hostility. Kant's intention is also to explain the more vicious kind of hostility
that lies behind acts of war, He claims firstly that much good is achieved by the
antagonism which arises when men encounter each other in the world of tasks to
be done: this, he claims is a world in which there are disagreements. The
consequences of such antagonism are often good he argues. He goes so far as to
say that even the consequences of war which are not to be wished for might
produce in their wake a redrawing of the boundaries of states which are for the
benefit of all concerned. He claims secondly that man is a being who needs a
master but does not wish to have one, preferring to resolve all issues pertaining
to his affairs himself. In his moral writings, Kant takes up this characteristic
again when he points out that man may even agree in general with the law but in
special circumstances wishes to exempt himself from the reach of that law.
There are in other words tendencies toward antagonism and egoism. Throughout
history, we have seen these tendencies play out on the world stage. The UN is
the master men need but do not want. Men support it with their money and
signatures to documents but they wish to exempt themselves from the reach of
its sanctions. This is clearly demonstrated by Luck's lecture.
Aristotle speaks in his work on Politics of man as the social animal possessing
the capacities of trust and love. The city-state, Aristotle argues is held together
by bonds of trust and friendship. Man is presented here also as a political animal
with the capacity of Logos(speech and reason), a capacity which provides us
with freedom not possessed by animals. A capacity which also suggests the role
of knowledge in political activities as well as the earlier referred to the role of
political friendship. Such political friendship is not a romantic idea but rather
refers to the kind of relationship we find between siblings who we know can be
antagonistic toward one another yet be the best of friends. Sibling-love is the
kind of love that citizens should have for one another, argues, Aristotle, a love
which competes for the attention, recognition, and esteem of the city-
state/surrogate parent.

This Aristotelian image of our relation to authority is a far cry from the above
modern image of a spider weaving a trap for an innocent fly. There is, in Luck's
image a clear substitution of an unfriendly antagonism for the friendly sibling
antagonism of Aristotle. Perhaps this difference of mood is one of the markers
which distinguish our modern times from the Golden Age of Greek civilization.

Charting the course of this change of mood is no easy task. The spider lives in a
state of nature where there is a war of all against all. The philosopher who
describes this state best is Hobbes. Man emerges from a state of nature with two
passions which need to be tamed if civilization is to be established: pride and
fear of death. These two passions rule our attempts to live communally together
in civilizations in the best of times and the worst of times. Laws are the means
the sovereign of the state uses to tame these passions. The picture is of a restless
spirit which rests only in death. Hobbes was together with Descartes a hostile
critic of Aristotle. He was a political realist who scoffed at the idealism of life in
a state that prized knowledge and recommended the examined life. For Hobbes
life was a business and if man possessed reason it was for the purposes of
calculating his advantages and the economic value of life. Man should live a
commodious life. These ideas are the source of the image of the spider which is
sometimes also used as an image of the modern academic. Hobbes's philosophy
was also aimed at dismantling Aristotle's influence in the university system. he
recommended that his works should replace those of Aristotle. Descartes
philosophical meditations were also aimed at the dismantling of our trust in all
authorities in general but Aristotle's influence in particular and together these
two philosophers sought to transform Universities into "modern" institutions
where Aristotle's ideas were no longer taught. Scholars were forced to become
"specialists" plotting and spinning their ideas in their study-dens, critically
trusting nothing and no one in a landscape in which the sciences proliferated and
the humanities, the truly universal branch of knowledge became imprisoned in a
web of specialties

The second lecture is a critique of the last lecture , lecture number 25, of
Professor Smiths Yale Series of Lectures on Political Regimes. These concern
the Political Philosophy Smith. The concentration is on the political judgment of
the statesman and its immersion in the web of particularities that often surround
such judgment. The argument against this is the following:
“The faculties of understanding and reason, on the other hand, are used in reasoning about
the good, in general, and formal terms. These faculties do not function in the straightforward
manner in which the faculty of judgment does.In the use of judgment, the mind submits to the
world like a student of nature in contrast to the use of understanding and reason where the
mind is more actively thinking like a judge, reflectively, about the laws that will be imposed
upon the world. When a political judge or a statesman considers the phenomena of reality as
he must do when people act either in accordance with or in contravention of the law he does
not waver for a moment in the cases of contravention of the law and consider the
abandonment of the law as would a student of nature exploring the world tentatively with his
tentative concepts. The political judge or statesman is not a student, he is not building a
theory but rather using a conceptual system to make judgments from the point of view of a
political theory: If all promises ought to be kept and Jack promised Jill to pay the money back
that was lent to him, then Jack ought to pay the money back. The "ought" in these statements
is categorical and signifies the necessity that follows from the objective and universal law that
"All promises ought to be kept". A student confronted with the phenomenon of Jack breaking
his promise might be led to the conclusion that the law is illegitimate or false because it is not
universal but this would be to misunderstand the peculiar universality and necessity of the
ought in the sphere of "the good" and ethics. The field of human conduct is manifold and
varied but when it is concerned with answering the Kantian question "What ought I to do?" in
the sense Kant intended, we will find that both the political and moral realm has a law like
structure. The political judge on the grounds of this structure will steadfastly question the
transgressor Jack with a view to obtaining a full understanding of the situation. Once that
understanding is reached, i.e. once it is clear that Jack never intended to keep the promise he
made, the judge then uses his knowledge of the law to judge that Jack's intention and
reasoning is flawed and that he ought to pay the money back in accordance with the law (that
all promises ought to be kept). The judge or statesman(who is in the business of making and
keeping promises) will not be impressed with the argument "But people do not always keep
their promises". His response to this argument will be simply to insist that he knows that it
might be the case that people sometimes do not keep their promises but that it nevertheless
ought not to be the case.: they ought to keep promises. The law here, in other words, is a
standard that is being used much like the standard metre bar in Paris. The bar itself cannot be
said to be one metre long since it is that which we use to determine the length of a metre.
Similarly, we cannot ask sensibly whether the law which itself is used to determine what is
right and wrong is right or wrong in itself. We can, however, as Kant did point out the logical
consequences of abandoning the law which in practical terms would mean abandoning the
institution of promising in our communities.”

Hannah Arendt and Smith share the same animus in this area:
“Professor Smith also fixes upon this notion of particularity and transports us into the realm
of judgment and away from the law-like structure of the political and ethical realms.
Sensibility unregulated by understanding and reason will for both Kant and Aristotle stay
forever mired in the swamp of particulars. Although in judgment we are saying something
about something the subject of the judgment is always a particular. Looking at man as a
particular and excluding understanding and reason will only result in an individual story
where individual desires or facts reign. Using such judgments results in a history of particular
events which we may find interesting or even beautiful but which we can only tentatively
judge with our "universal" voices. The generality is not achieved by recasting our actor's role
in a society for society too can be thought about in the particular, as being a polis situated in a
particular place and at a particular time. We begin to think categorically only when the major
premise of the argument begins "All Societies are..." or just in case Kant is right in his claim
that no society is completely free and completely just the argument rather should begin "All
societies ought...."
Smith is cognisant of the fact that Political science or Philosophy is in a considerable state of
disarray but he mistakenly thinks that Aristotle and Kant have contributed to the chaotic
situation he experiences in the Universities. He refers to Aristotle but fails to pursue
Aristotle's categorical path where the laws of reason shape and organize mans desires. He
refers to Kant but fails to pursue the hylomorphic quality of Kant's theorizing. An individual
Man, for Kant, is only potentially rational. Rationality will eventually actualize in the species
because man's desires are so unorganized that they need a master to organize them. Man
understands what is right, he understands the virtues and admires them but his self-interested
desires are always working to avoid the law-like structure of our political and ethical
communities by making an exception of himself. This is why he needs a master. He lives in
the field of desires or sensibility where pleasure reigns. Most men, as a matter of fact, argues
Kant, have their own self-interest firmly fixed before their eyes. The laws of ethics and the
laws of politicians are aimed at regulating the consequences of this pursuit of self-interest.
Looking at this situation in one way provokes the description that justice is merely the
regulation or distribution of pleasures and pains(benefits and burdens) and that is a correct
description from a third person point of view which avoids the first person question of the
role of self-understanding in this process: the role, that is of mans awareness of what he ought
to do and what he ought to be. It is in the spirit of this self-understanding that Kant claims that
a society in which sensibility is unregulated by either understanding or reason gives rise to the
judgment that life in such a society is "melancholically haphazard".”

Self understanding is also accomplished via historical knowledge and its

principles:
“It is not certain that Aristotle or Kant would have appreciated the above account of the
distinction between the universal and the particular in relation to Philosophy and History.
Certainly, Aristotle in his work on Poetry contrasted History and Poetry in terms of the
particular and the universal but he would certainly have appreciated the historians search for
the material and efficient causes of the particular events studied and surely some true
generalizations could be the result of such investigations. But the question to be asked here is
"Are historians relativistic in their judgments about what is best?" This sounds more like
poetry. Aristotle would not have subscribed to any view which attempted to relativize the idea
of the best.
For Kant, the historian must be concerned with historical truth and this, in turn, must have
some relation to the notion of progress and the postulated telos of Cosmopolitanism, an end
state which may or may not be reached and in relation to which the state may or may not
"wither away". The events of history would be susceptible to both causal and teleological
explanations and these explanations would not be subject to the criteria of identity one applies
to judgments about particular events or particular cases. Indeed for Kant, such judgments
would require more general universal premises relating to underlying principles, if they were
to generate the kind of knowledge we expect from history.

Professor Smith concludes his lecture series by asking where the teachers of
these underlying principles are to be found. Not in most Universities, he claims
because the respect for tradition has been lost:
"Modern Professors of History often appear to teach everything but proper respect for
tradition. In my own field, civic education has been replaced by game theory-- a theory that
regards politics as a market place where individual preferences are formed and utilities are
maximized. Rather than teaching us to be citizens, the new political science teaches us to be
rational actors who exercise preferences. By reducing all politics to choice and all choice to
preference the new political science is forced to accord legitimacy to every preference,
however vile, base or indecent it may be."

Smith acutely touches upon a major issue in education: the colonization of the humanities by
firstly science and then the science of economics. His complaint is somewhat puzzling in the
light of the fact that game theory would seem to be a logical consequence of the rejection of
the relation of ethics to politics that Kant proposes. It would also seem to be a logical
consequence of the modernism that the very modern USA embraces.”

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

Three is the focus of attention. The lecture begins wuth a discussion of Action
and Philosophical Psychology:

Action and Agency are form-creators for Aristotle because they issue from a form of life
which can build a world around itself. As a rational animal capable of discourse I go forth in a
world of physical events such as a storm at sea. After throwing the cargo overboard I can but
sit and wait for the consequences to play themselves out on this watery stage. As a rational
animal capable of discourse I am of course a form of life that can act but one whose actions
have consequences I cannot control. The sun was shining and the weather was fine when I
embarked on this sea voyage. The possibility of a storm at sea was a piece of knowledge I had
but it was not active at the time of the choice. I am now trapped in this situation and if I was
an ancient Greek, the "action" of praying to the gods would follow the action of throwing the
cargo overboard. Is it irrational to begin to pray or is prayer an assertion of agency as such
when natural events play with our lives? For Aristotle, the world-creating forms occur in the
media of change(space, time and matter) and they find their explanation in a theoretical
matrix of 4 kinds of change three principles and 4 causes. The material and efficient causes of
the storm are forms situated in the infinite continuum of the media of change: the forms of
water(the high seas) the forms of air(high winds) the forms of fire( the lightning issuing from
the heavens) and the wooden earth-like form of the ship being tossed about and being
prepared to rest finally in peace on the earth at the bottom of the sea. In such a situation can
we talk about praying in terms of rationality? Well, I had the knowledge that this fateful
outcome was a possibility and did not use this knowledge. For Aristotle, this was a failure of
deliberation and therefore of rationality. So all that is left of the definition of such a being is
his animality expressed in his fear and apprehension and his attempt to communicate via
prayer with the "agency" expressed in the storm. For those who found themselves in such
situations and prayed and survived to tell their story, it might seem as if some divine agent
had now a reason to save the souls on the ship. Aristotle would not have sanctioned such an
explanation. He would have pointed to all those skeletons lying on the floor of the sea-bed,
resting, who undoubtedly prayed and who lost their souls in storms at sea. Aristotle's theory
of action, agency, and powers would not permit the world of the human to become confused
with the physical forms of the infinite continuum. That is one can rationally say that I should
have considered the possibility of the ruin of my hopes in a storm at sea and ought not to have
decided to board the ship but one cannot rationally say that the Storm ought not to have sunk
the ship and extinguished the life of all the souls on board. For Aristotle, there is a categorical
distinction to be observed here, a logical boundary that one only crosses on pain of the loss of
one's rationality. This does not necessarily mean that Aristotle would have thought that it was
irrational to pray as the ship's mast was broken by the tempestuous winds. Indeed he would
have thought that we are active world creating forms and a structured form of discourse was,
of course, preferable to quivering and weeping or rushing around like the ship's dog howling
at the wind. We are forms of life embedded in a world of physical forms and some forms of
action are appropriate and some forms of behaviour not: or in other words, when we are
dealing with free voluntary choices there are actions which ought to be chosen and actions
which ought not to be chosen. The oughts here are rational and can be formulated in value-
laden premises and conclusions with logical relations to each other, thus forming rational
valid arguments for action. We are clearly exploring the foothills of ethics and morality or as
Jonathan Lear so clearly put it in his work "Aristotle: the desire to understand", we are
exploring the "Mind in action".
Lear believes that understanding Aristotle's philosophical theories of Psychology are a
necessary pre-requisite to understanding both his ethics and his politics. So the man on board
the ship is acting and the ship's dog is just behaving. Why the difference? The difference lies,
Aristotle argues in our ability to think and create higher level desires which as a consequence
creates a region of the soul which is rational and a region which is irrational. But we need to
consider how the human higher form of desire is integrated with our knowledge if we are to
fully understand the complexity of the human form of life. The desiring part of the human
soul is the acting part because man is capable of acting rationally and behaving irrationally,
i.e. he is capable of both reasoning that he ought not to drink water which might be poisoned,
but he is also capable of drinking the same water. It is perhaps the existence of these parts of
the soul which generates all those desires which we express in value-laden ought statements.
The dog's soul is perhaps a seamless unity. Indeed one can wonder whether dogs have minds
in the sense of a mental space in which Aristotelian deliberations can take place.
Deliberations are rationally structured but are also value or desire laden:

Deliberations in the sphere of action are embedded in a context of reasons and

consequences:

Reason, action, and consequence are concepts in complex relations with each other.
Insofar as in Aristotle forms constitute the world, the forms interacting in the matrix of
space-time-material and causation must contribute to the creation or "forming" of this
world. In a previous essay I pointed to the three different kinds of forms that constitute
this world: the forms produced by and in relation to sexual reproduction, secondly, the
forms produced by work of man in the building and construction of his artefacts, homes
and cities, and thirdly,the forms produced by teachers in the process of communicating
knowledge. Reason, action, and consequence are of course related to human activities
insofar as they are knowledge driven. Such activities aim at the good they desire and
analyze what is needed in order to bring about the changes in the world they desire.
Such human agents have reasons for their actions in the same way as the archer has a
reason for his action. The archer who hits the centre of the bulls-eye is like the geometer
arriving a the point at which his whole reconstruction is to begin. We are in awe of his
performance: the object of the action and the intention are in such cases in full almost
divine congruence. The consequence is a logical consequence as is the recovery of the
patient with the cold after the doctor restores the homeostasis of the body with the
warm blankets. Many of our actions, however, do not achieve the desired result on the
part of the agent but this is no reason to doubt the logical relation in thought between
the object and the intention. Human desire is generated in the human body. The desire
to understand or contemplation may be an activity that involves no bodily activity
although it is difficult to even here to conceive of this activity taking place without
correlative brain activity. It seems that only God the divine can think without a
correlative underlying physical activity generating the thought. The mind-body problem
obviously surfaces at this point in Aristotle's philosophical psychology.

The Lecture concludes with a discussion of Perception, memory, and

imagination and their role in action and especially the actions of unhealthy
souls.