The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely rational explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of Cartesian dualism with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’ do not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘essences’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily dismissed all pervious philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The problem, claimed Nietzsche, is that earlier versions of the ‘will to power’ disguise the fact that all allege truths were arbitrarily created in and are expression or manifestations of individual ‘will’.
In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and mater is more absolute and total than had previously been imagined. Based on the assumptions that there are no real or necessary correspondences between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, he declared that we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language’. The prison as he conceived it, however, it was also a ‘space’ where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature’ and articulate a new massage of individual existence founded on will.
“Those who fail to enact their existence in this space,” says Nietzsche, “are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialist ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd.” Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said, not only exalted natural phenomena and favours reductionistic examinations of phenomena at the expense of mind. It also seeks to educe mind to a mere material substance, and thereby to displace or subsume the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic description that disallows any basis for the free exercise of individual will.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and his radical empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulful mechanistic inverse proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Though a curious course of events, attempts by Edmund Husserl, a philosopher trained in higher math and physics, to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of human consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche. Husserl, of course, was a principal founder of ‘phenomenology’ and from Franz Brentano (1838-1917) inherited the view that the central problem in understanding thought is that of explaining the way in which an intentional direction, or content, can belong to the mental phenomenon that exhibits it. Mental phenomena are founded in sensory data, but whereas for Brentano there is no sharp distinction between ‘intuitions’ and concepts, Husserl reinstates that this way of thinking is that the content is immanent, existing within the mental act, and anything external drops out as secondary or irrelevant to the intrinsic nature of the mental state. The problem is nonetheless of reconciling the subjective or psychological nature of mental life with its objective and logical content preoccupied Husserl from this time onwards. Husserl eventually abandoned his attempt to keep both a subjective and a naturalistic approach to knowledge together, abandoning the naturalism in favour of a kind of ‘transcendentalism’ idealism’.
`Nietzsche, in an effort to subvert the epistemological authority of scientific knowledge, sought to legitimatize a division between mind and world much starker than that originally envisioned by Descartes. What is not as widely known, however, is that Nietzsche and other seminal figures in the history of philosophical postmodernism were very much aware of an epistemological crisis in scientific thought than arose much earlier that, that occasioned by wave-particle dualism in quantum physics. This crisis resulted from attempts during the last three decades of the nineteenth century to develop a logically - consistent definition of number and arithmetic that would serve to reinforce the classical view of correspondence between mathematical theory and physical reality. As it turned out, these efforts resulted in paradoxes of a recursion and -reference that threatened to undermine both the efficacy of this correspondence and the privileged character of scientific knowledge.
Nietzsche appealed to this crisis in an effort to reinforce his assumption that, the absence of ontology, all knowledge (including scientific knowledge) was grounded only in human consciousness. As the crisis continued, a philosopher trained in higher mathematics and physics, Edmund Husserl, attempted to preserve the classical view of correspondence between mathematical theory and physical reality by deriving the foundation of logic and number from consciousness in ways that would preserve -consistency and rigour. Even so, this effort to ground mathematical physics in human consciousness, or in human subjective reality, was no trivial matter. It represented a direct link between these early challenges and the efficacy of classical epistemology and the tradition in philosophical thought that culminated in philosophical postmodernism. Nietzsche’s emotionally charged decence of intellectual freedom and his radical empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought.
`Friedrich Nietzsche is openly pessimistic about the possibility of knowledge. ‘We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’: We know (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species: and even what is called ‘utility’ is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we will not perish some day’ (The Gay Science).
This position is very radical, Nietzsche does not simply deny that knowledge, construed as the adequate representation of the world by the intellect, exists. He also refuses the pragmatist identification of knowledge and truth with usefulness: he writes that we think we know what we think is useful, and that we can be quite wrong about the latter.
Nietzsche’s view, his ‘Perspectivism’, depends on his claim that there is no sensible conception of a world independent of human interpretation and to which interpretations would correspond if hey were to constitute knowledge. He sums up this highly controversial position in The Will to Power: ‘Facts are precisely what there is not. Only interpretation’.
It is often claimed that Perspectivism is -undermining. If the thesis that all views are interpretations is true then, it is argued there is at least one view that is not an interpretation. If, on the other hand, the thesis is it an interpretation, then there is no reason to believe that it is true, and it follows again that nit every view is an interpretation.
Yet this refutation assumes that if a view, like Perspectivism, is an interpretation it is wrong. This is not the case. To call any view, including Perspectivism, an interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views, and that is not a sufficient refutation. To show the Perspectivism is literally false producing another view superior to it on specific epistemological grounds is necessary.
Perspectivism does not deny that particular views can be true. Like some versions of cotemporary anti-realism, its attributional approach for ‘truth in relation to facts’ specified internally those approaches themselves. But it refuses to envisage a single independent set of facts, To be accounted for by all theories. Thus Nietzsche grants the truth of specific scientific theories does, however, deny that a scientific interpretation can possibly be ‘the only justifiable interpretation of the world’ (The Gay Science): Neither the facts that science addresses nor the methods it employs are privileged. Scientific theories serve the purposes for which hey have been devised, but these have no priority over the many other purposes of human life. The existence of many purposes and needs relative to which the value of theories is established-another crucial element of Perspectivism is sometimes thought to imply a reason relative, according to which no standards for evaluating purposes and theories can be devised. This is correct only in that Nietzsche denies the existence of single set of standards for determining epistemic value, but holds that specific views can be compared with and evaluated in relation to one another the ability to use criteria acceptable in particular circumstances does not presuppose the existence of criteria applicable in all. Agreement is therefore not always possible, since individuals may sometimes differ over the most fundamental issues dividing them.
Still, Nietzsche would not be troubled by this fact, which his opponents too also have to confront only he would argue, to suppress it by insisting on the hope that all disagreements are in particular eliminable even if our practice falls woefully short of the ideal. Nietzsche abandons that ideal. He considers irresoluble disagreement and essential part of human life.
Knowledge for Nietzsche finds its point reference by the idea of the ‘given’ basis beyond which its conferring material and of a rational defensible theory of confirmation and inference. That it is based on desire and bodily needs more than social refinement’s Perspectives are to be judged not from their relation to the absolute but on the basis of their effects in a specific era. The possibility of any truth beyond such a local, pragmatic one becomes a problem in Nietzsche, since either a noumenal realm or a historical synthesis exists to provide an absolute criterion of adjudication for competing truth claims: what gets called truths are simply beliefs that have been for so long that we have forgotten their genealogy? In these Nietzsche reverses the Enlightenment dictum that truth is the way to liberation by suggesting that trying classes in as far as they are considered absolute for debate and conceptual progress and cause as opposed to any ambient behaviour toward the ease of which backwardness and unnecessary misery. Nietzsche moves back and forth without revolution between the positing of trans-histories; truth claims, such as his claim about the will to power, and a kind of epistemic nihilism that calls into question not only the possibility of truth but the need and desire of it as well. However, perhaps what is most important, Nietzsche introduces the notion that truth is a kind of human practice, in a game whose rules are contingent rather than necessary it. The evaluation of truth claims should be based of their strategic efforts, not their ability to represent a reality conceived of as separately autonomous than that of human influence, for Nietzsche the view that all truth is truth from or within a particular perspective. The perspective may be a general human pin of view, set by such things as the nature of our sensory apparatus, or it may be thought to be bound by culture, history, language, class or gender. Since there may be many perspectives, there are also different families of truth. The term is frequently applied to Nietzsche’s philosophy.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, the deconstructionist’s Jacques Lacan, Roland Bathes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, this direct linkage among the nineteenth-century crises about epistemological foundations of physics and the origins of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form.
Of Sartre’s main philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, Sartre examines the relationships between Being For-it (consciousness) and Being In-it (the non-conscious world). He rejects central tenets of the rationalalist and empiricist traditions, calling the view that the mind or is a thing or substance. ‘Descartes’s substantialist illusion’, and claiming also that consciousness dos not contain ideas or representations . . . are idolist invented by the psychologists. Sartre also attacks idealism in the forms associated with Berkeley and Kant, and concludes that his account of the relationship between consciousness and the world is neither realist nor idealist.
Sartre also discusses Being For-others, which comprises the aspects of experience about interactions with other minds. His views are subtle: Roughly, he holds that one’s awareness of others is constituted by feelings of shame, pride, and so on.
Sartre’s rejection of ideas, and the denial of idealism, appear to commit him to direct realism in the theory of perception. This is neither inconsistent with his claim as been non-realist nor idealist, since by ‘realist’ he means views that allow for the mutual independence or in-principle separability of mind and world. Against this Sartre emphasizes, after Heidegger, that perceptual experience has an active dimension, in hat it is a way of interacting and dealing with the world, than a way of merely contemplating it (‘activity, as spontaneous, unreflecting consciousness, constitutes a certain existential stratum in the world’). Consequently, he holds that experience is richer, and open to more aspects of the world, than empiricist writers customarily claim:
When In run after a streetcar . . . there is consciousness of-the-streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken, etc., . . . In am then plunged into the world of objects, it is they that constitute the unity of my consciousness, it is they that present themselves with values, with attractive nd repellent qualities . . .
Relatedly, he insists that In experience material things as having certain potentialities -for-me (’nothingness’). In see doors and bottles as openable, bicycles as ridable (these matters are linked ultimately to the doctrine of extreme existentialist freedom). Similarly, if my friend is not where In expect to meet her, then In experience her absence ‘as a real event’.
These Phenomenological claims are striking and compelling, but Sartre pays insufficient attention to such things as illusions and hallucinations, which are normally cited as problems for direct realists. In his discussion of mental imagery, however, he describes the act of imaging as a ‘transformation’ of ‘psychic material’. This connects with his views that even a physical image such as a photograph of a tree does not figure as an object of consciousness when it is experienced as a tree-representation (than as a piece of coloured cards). Nonetheless, the fact remains that the photograph continues to contribute to the character of the experience. Given this, seeing how Sartre avoids positing a mental analogue of a photograph for episodes of mental imaging is hard, and harder still to reconcile this with his rejection of visual representations. If ones image is regarded as debased and the awareness of awakening is formally received as a differential coefficient of perceptual knowledge, but this merely rises once more the issue of perceptual illusion and hallucination, and the problems of reconciling them are dialectally the formalization built upon realism.
Much of Western religion and philosophical thought since the seventeenth century has sought to obviate this prospect with an appeal to ontology or to some conception of God or Being. Yet we continue to struggle, as philosophical postmodernism attests, with the terrible prospect by Nietzsche-we are locked in a prison house of our individual subjective realities in a universe that is as alien to our thought as it is to our desires. This universe may seem comprehensible and knowable in scientific terms, and science does seek in some sense, as Koyré puts it, to ‘find a place for everything.’ Nonetheless, the ghost of Descartes lingers in the widespread conviction that science does not provide a ‘place for man’ or for all that we know as distinctly human in subjective reality.
Nonetheless, after The Gay Science (1882) began the crucial exploration of -mastery. The relations between reason and power, and the revelation of the unconscious striving after power that provide the actual energy for the apparent -denial of the ascetic and the martyred were during this period that Nietzsche’s failed relationship with Lou Salome resulted in the emotional crisis from which Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883-5, translates as, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and signals a recovery. This work is frequently regarded as Nietzsche’s masterpiece. It was followed by Jenseits von Gut and Böse, 1887 translates as, Beyond Good and Evil, and Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887 and translates to, The Genealogy of Moral.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85), Friedrich Nietzsche introduced in eloquent poetic prose the concepts of the death of God, the superman, and the will to power. Vigorously attacking Christianity and democracy as moralities for the ‘weak herd’, he argued for the ‘natural aristocracy’ of the superman who, driven by the ‘will to power’, celebrates life on earth rather than sanctifying it for some heavenly reward. Such a heroic man of merit has the courage to ‘live dangerously’ and thus rise above the masses, developing his natural capacity for the creative use of passion.
Also known as radical theology, this movement flourished in the mid 1960s. As a theological movement it never attracted a large following, did not find a unified expression, and passed off the scene as quickly and dramatically as it had arisen. There is even disagreement as to whom its major representatives were. Some identify two, and others three or four. Although small, the movement attracted attention because it was a spectacular symptom of the bankruptcy of modern Theology and because it was a journalistic phenomenon. The very statement "God is dead" was tailor-made for journalistic exploitation. The representatives of the movement effectively used periodical articles, paperback books, and the electronic media. This movement gave expression to an idea that had been incipient in Western philosophy and theology for some time, the suggestion that the reality of a transcendent God at best could not be known and at worst did not exist at all. Philosopher Kant and theologian Ritschl denied that one could have a theoretical knowledge of the being of God. Hume and the empiricist for all practical purposes restricted knowledge and reality to the material world as perceived by the five senses. Since God was not empirically verifiable, the biblical world view was said to be mythological and unacceptable to the modern mind. Such atheistic existentialist philosophers as Nietzsche despaired even of the search of God; it was he who coined the phrase "God is dead" almost a century before the death of God theologians.
Mid-twentieth century theologians not associated with the movement also contributed to the climate of opinion out of which death of God theologies emerged. Rudolf Bultmann regarded all elements of the supernaturalistic, theistic world view as mythological and proposed that Scripture be demythologized so that it could speak its message to the modern person.
Paul Tillich, an avowed anti supernaturalist, said that the only nonsymbiotic statement that could be made about God was that he was being it. He is beyond essence and existence; therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him. It is more appropriate to say God does not exist. At best Tillich was a pantheist, but his thought borders on atheism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (whether rightly understood or not) also contributed to the climate of opinion with some fragmentary but tantalizing statements preserved in Letters and Papers from Prison. He wrote of the world and man ‘coming of age’, of ‘religionless Christianity’, of the ‘world without God’, and of getting rid of the ‘God of the gaps’ and getting along just as well as before. It is not always certain what Bonhoeffer meant, but if nothing else, he provided a vocabulary that later radical theologians could exploit.
It is clear, then, that as startling as the idea of the death of God was when proclaimed in the mid 1960s, it did not represent as radically a departure from recent philosophical and theological ideas and vocabulary as might superficially appears.
Just what was death of God Theology? The answers are as varied as those who proclaimed God's demise. Since Nietzsche, theologians had occasionally used "God is dead" to express the fact that for an increasing number of people in the modern age God seems to be unreal. Nonetheless, the idea of God's death began to have special prominence in 1957 when Gabriel Vahanian published a book entitled God is Dead. Vahanian did not offer a systematic expression of death of God theology. Instead, he analysed those historical elements that contributed to the masses of people accepting atheism not so much as a theory but as a way of life. Vahanian him did not believe that God was dead. Still, he urged that there be a form of Christianity that would recognize the contemporary loss of God and exert its influence through what was left. Other proponents of the death of God had the same assessment of God's status in contemporary culture, but were to draw different conclusions.
Thomas J. Altizer believed that God had really died. Nonetheless, Altizer often spoke in exaggerated and dialectic language, occasionally with heavy overtones of Oriental mysticism. Sometimes knowing exactly what Altizer meant when he spoke in dialectical opposites is difficult such as "God is dead, thank God" Apparently the real meaning of Altizer's belief that God had died is to be found in his belief in God's immanence. To say that God has died is to say that he has ceased to exist as a transcendent, supernatural being. Alternately, he has become fully immanent in the world. The result is an essential identity between the human and the divine. God died in Christ in this sense, and the process has continued time and again since then. Altizer claims the church tried to give God life again and put him back in heaven by its doctrines of resurrection and ascension. However, the traditional doctrines about God and Christ must be repudiated because man has discovered after nineteen centuries that God does not exist. Christians must even now will the death of God by which the transcendent become immanent.
For William Hamilton the death of God describes the event many have experienced over the last two hundred years. They no longer accept the reality of God or the meaningfulness of language about him. Non theistic explanations have been substituted for theistic ones. This trend is irreversible, and everyone must come to terms with the historical-cultural -death of God. God's death must be affirmed and the secular world embraced as normative intellectually and good ethically. Doubtless, Hamilton was optimistic about the world, because he was optimistic about what humanity could do and was doing to solve its problems.
Paul van Buren is usually associated with death of God theology, although he him disavowed this connection. Yet, his disavowal seems hollow in the light of his book The Secular Meaning of the Gospel and his article "Christian Education Post Mortem Dei." In the former he accepts empiricism and the position of Bultmann that the world view of the Bible is mythological and untenable to modern people. In the latter he proposes an approach to Christian education that does not assume the existence of God but does assume ‘the death of God’ and that ‘God is gone’. Van Buren was concerned with the linguistic aspects of God's existence and death. He accepted the premise of empirical analytic philosophy that real knowledge and meaning can be conveyed only by language that is empirically verifiable. This is the fundamental principle of modern secularists and is the only viable option in this age. If only empirically verifiable language is meaningful, by that very fact all language that refers to or assumes the reality of God is meaningless, since one cannot verify God's existence by any of the five senses. Theism, belief in God, is not only intellectually untenable, it is meaningless. In, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel van Buren seeks to reinterpret the Christian faith without reference to God. One searches the book in vain for even one clue, that van Buren is anything but a secularist trying to translate Christian ethical values into that language game. There is a decided shift in van Buren's later book Discerning the Way, however.
In retrospect, there was clearly no single death of God Theology, only death of God theologies. Their real significance was that modern theology, by giving up the essential elements of Christian belief in God, had logically led to what was really antitheologies. When the death of God theologies passed off the scene, the commitment to secularism remained and manifested it in other forms of secular theology in the late 1960s and the 1970s.
Nietzsche is unchallenged as the most insightful and powerful critic of the moral climate of the 19th century (and of what of it remains in ours). His exploration of unconscious motivation anticipated Freud. He is notorious for stressing the ‘will to power’ that is the basis of human nature, the ‘resentment’ that comes when it is denied its basis in action, and the corruptions of human nature encouraged by religion, such as Christianity, that feed on such resentment. Yet the powerful human being who escape all this, the Ubermensch, is not the ‘blood beast’ of later fascism: It is a human being who has mastered passion, risen above the senseless flux, and given creative style to his or her character. Nietzsche’s free spirits recognize themselves by their joyful attitude to eternal return. He frequently presents the creative artist rather than the warlord as his best exemplar of the type, but the disquieting fact remains that he seems to leave him no words to condemn any uncaged beast of prey whose best to find their style by exerting repulsive power find their style by exerting repulsive power over others. This problem is no t helped by Nietzsche’s frequently expressed misogyny, although in such matters the interpretation of his many-layered and ironic writings is no always straightforward. Similarly y, such Anti-Semitism as has been found in his work is balanced by an equally vehement denunciation of anti-Semitism, and an equal or greater dislike of the German character of his time.
Nietzsche’s current influence derives not only from his celebration of will, but more deeply from his scepticism about the notions of truth and act. In particular, he anticipated any of the central tenets of postmodernism: an aesthetic attitude toward the world that sees it as a ‘text’; the denial of facts; the denial of essences; the celebration of the plurality of interpretation and of the fragmented, as well as the downgrading of reason and the politicization of discourse. All awaited rediscoveries in the late 20th century. Nietzsche also has the incomparable advantage over his followers of being a wonderful stylist, and his Perspectivism is echoed in the shifting array of literary devices-humour, irony, exaggeration, aphorisms, verse, dialogue, parody-with that he explores human life and history.
Yet, it is nonetheless, that we have seen, the origins of the present division that can be traced to the emergence of classical physics and the stark Cartesian division between mind and the bodily world is two separate substances, the is as it happened associated with a particular body, but is -subsisting, and capable of independent existence, yet Cartesian duality, much as the ‘ego’ that we are tempted to imagine as a simple unique thing that makes up our essential identity, but, seemingly sanctioned by this physics. The tragedy of the Western mind, well represented in the work of a host of writers, artists, and intellectual, is that the Cartesian division was perceived as uncontrovertibly real.
Beginning with Nietzsche, those who wished to free the realm of the mental from the oppressive implications of the mechanistic world-view sought to undermine the alleged privileged character of the knowledge called physicians with an attack on its epistemological authority. After Husserl tried and failed to save the classical view of correspondence by grounding the logic of mathematical systems in human consciousness, this not only resulted in a view of human consciousness that became characteristically postmodern. It also represents a direct link with the epistemological crisis about the foundations of logic and number in the late nineteenth century that foreshadowed the epistemological crisis occasioned by quantum physics beginning in the 1920's. This, as a result in disparate views on the existence of oncology and the character of scientific knowledge that fuelled the conflict between the two.
If there were world enough and time enough, the conflict between each that both could be viewed as an interesting artifact in the richly diverse coordinative systems of higher education. Nevertheless, as the ecological crisis teaches us, the ‘old enough’ capable of sustaining the growing number of our life firms and the ‘time enough’ that remains to reduce and reverse the damage we are inflicting on this world ae rapidly diminishing. Therefore, put an end to the absurd ‘betweeness’ and go on with the business of coordinate human knowledge in the interest of human survival in a new age of enlightenment that could be far more humane and much more enlightened than any has gone before.
It now, which it is, nonetheless, that there are significant advances in our understanding to a purposive mind. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary approach to cognition that draws primarily on ideas from cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and logic. Some philosophers may be cognitive scientists, and others concern themselves with the philosophy of cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Since inauguration of cognitive science these disciplines have attracted much attention from certain philosophers of mind. This has changed the character of philosophy of mind, and there are areas where philosophical work on the nature of mind is continuous with scientific work. Yet, the problems that make up this field concern the ways of ‘thinking’ and ‘mental properties’ are those that these problems are standardly and traditionally regarded within philosophy of mind than those that emerge from the recent developments in cognitive science. The cognitive aspect is what has to be understood is to know what would make the sentence true or false. It is frequently identified with the truth cognition of the sentence. Justly as the scientific study of precesses of awareness, thought, and mental organization, often by means of computer modelling or artificial intelligence research. Contradicted by the evidence, it only has to do with is structure and the way it functioned, that is just because a theory does not mean that the scientific community currently accredits it. Generally, there are many theories, though technically scientific, have been rejected because the scientific evidence is strangely against it. The historical enquiry into the evolution of -consciousness, developing from elementary sense experience too fully rational, free, thought processes capable of yielding knowledge the presented term, is associated with the work and school of Husserl. Following Brentano, Husserl realized that intentionality was the distinctive mark of consciousness, and saw in it a concept capable of overcoming traditional mind-body dualism. The stud y of consciousness, therefore, maintains two sides: a conscious experience can be regarded as an element in a stream of consciousness, but also as a representative of one aspect or ‘profile’ of an object. In spite of Husserl’s rejection of dualism, his belief that there is a subject-matter lingering back, behind and yet remaining after each era of time, or bracketing of the content of experience, associates him with the priority accorded to elementary experiences in the parallel doctrine of phenomenalism, and phenomenology has partly suffered from the eclipse of that approach to problems of experience and reality. However, later phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty do full justice to the world-involving nature of Phenomenological theories are empirical generalizations of data experience, or manifest in experience. More generally, the phenomenal aspects of things are the aspects that show themselves, than the theoretical aspects that are inferred or posited in order to account for them. They merely described the recurring process of nature and do not refer to their cause or that, in the words of J.S. Mill, ‘objects are the permanent possibilities of sensation’. To inhabit a world of independent, external objects are, on this view, to be the subject of actual and possible orderly experiences. Espoused by Russell, the view issued in a programme of translating talk about physical objects and their locations into talking about possible experience. The attempt is widely supposed to have failed, and the priority the approach gives to experience has been much criticized. It is more common in contemporary philosophy to see experience as it a construct from the actual way of the world, than the other way round.
Phenomenological theories are also called ‘scientific laws’ ‘physical laws’ and ‘natural laws.’ Newton’s third law is one example, saying that, every action ha an equal and opposite reaction. ‘Explanatory theories’ attempt to explain the observations rather than generalized them. Whereas laws are descriptions of empirical regularities, explanatory theories are conceptual constrictions to explain why the data exit, for example, atomic theory explains why we see certain observations, the same could be said with DNA and relativity, Explanatory theories are particularly helpful in such cases where the entities (like atoms, DNA . . .) cannot be directly observed.
What is knowledge? How does knowledge get to have the content it has? The problem of defining knowledge in terms of true belief plus some favoured relation between the believer and the facts begun with Plato, in that knowledge is true belief plus logos, as it is what enables us to apprehend the principle and firms, i.e., an aspect of our own reasoning.
What makes a belief justified for what measures of belief is knowledge? According to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that to know that such and such is the case. None less, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These arguments are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief or facsimile, are mutually incompatible (the incompatibility thesis) or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so that each may exist without the other, but the two may also coexist (the separability thesis). The incompatibility thesis that hinged on the equation of knowledge with certainty. The assumption that we believe in the truth of claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that belief always involves uncertainty, while knowledge never does, believing something rules out the possibility of knowledge knowing it. Again, given to no reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence, to suggest otherwise, that we cease to believe things about which we are completely confident is bizarre.
A.D. Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozley’s version that deals with psychological certainty than belief per se, is that knowledge can exist without confidence about the item known, although knowledge might also be accompanied by confidence as well. Woozley says, ‘what In can do, where what In can do may include answering questions.’ On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people that correct responses on examinations if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley has given to acknowledge that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. Saying it would be peculiar, ‘In know it is correct.’ But this tension; still ‘In know is correct.’ Woozley explains, using a distinction between condition under which are justified in making a claim (such as a claim to know something) and conditioned under which the claim we make is true. While ‘In know such and such’ might be true even if In answered whether such and such holds, nonetheless claiming that ‘In know that such should be inappropriate for me and such unless In was sure of the truth of my claim.’
Colin Redford (1966) extends Woozley’s defence of the separability thesis. In Redford’s view, not only in knowledge compatible with the lacking of certainty, it is also compatible with a complete lack of belief. He argues by example, in this one example, Jean had forgotten that he learned some English history years prior and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as, ‘When did the Battle of Hastings occur?’ since he forgot that the battle of Hastings took place in 1066 in history, he considers his correct response to be no more than guesses. Thus when he says that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hasting took place in 1066.
Those who agree with Radford’s defence of the separation thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be directed through introspection. That Jean lacks’ beliefs out English history are plausible on this Cartesian picture since Jean does not find him with the belief out of which the English history when with any beliefs about English history when he seeks them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting the Cartesian view of belief. One could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious. For example, (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are disposed to behave (and has not Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?) Since Jean gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviourist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.
Once, again, but the jargon is attributable to different attitudinal values. AS, D. M. Armstrong (1973) makes a different task against Radford. Jean does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radford that points, which in fact, Armstrong suggests that Jean believe that 1066 is not the actual date that did occur of the Battle of Hastings. For Armstrong parallels the belief of such and such is just possible bu t no more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. However, Armstrong insists Jean also believe that the Battle did occur in 1066. After all, had Jean been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1066, and had he forgotten being ‘taught’ this and subsequently ‘guessed’ that it took place in 10690, we would surely describe the situation as one in which Jean’ false belief about te Battle became a memory trace that was causally responsible or his guess. Thus while Jean consciously believes that the Battle did not occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to the claim that knowledge entails belief.
Suppose that Jean’s memory had been sufficiently powerful to produce the relevant belief. As Radford says, Jan has every reason to suppose that his response is mere guesswork, and so he has every reason to consider his belief false. His belief would be an irrational one, and hence one about whose truth Jean would be ignorant.
The attempt to understand the conceptual representation that is involved in religious belief, existence, necessity, fate, creation, sun, justice, Mercy, Redemption, God. Until the 20th century the history of western philosophy is closely intertwined with attempts to make sense of aspect of pagan, Jewish or Christian religion, while in other tradition such as Hinduism, Buddhism or Taoism, there is even less distinction between religious and philosophical enquiry. The classic problem of conceiving an appropriate object of religious belief is that of understanding whether any term can be predicated of it: Does it make to any sense of talking about its creating to things, willing events, or being one thing or many? The via negativa of Theology is to claim that God can only be known by denying ordinary terms of any application (or them); Another influential suggestion is that ordinary term only apply metaphorically, sand that there is in hope of cashing the metaphors. Once a description of a Supreme Being is hit upon, there remains the problem of providing any reason for supposing that anything answering to the description exists. The medieval period was the high-water mark-for purported proof of the existence of God, such as the Five-Ays of Aquinas, or the ontological argument of such proofs have fallen out of general favour since the 18th century, although theories still sway many people and some philosophers.
Generally speaking, even religious philosophers (or perhaps, they especially) have been wary of popular manifestations of religion. Kant, him a friend of religious faith, nevertheless distinguishes various perversions: Theosophy (using transcendental conceptions that confuses reason), demonology (indulging an anthropomorphic, mode of representing the Supreme Being), theurgy (a fanatical delusion that feeling can be communicated from such a being, or that we can exert an influence on it), and idolatry, or a superstition’s delusion the one can make one acceptable to his Supreme Being by order by means than that of having the moral law at heart (Critique of judgement) these warm conversational tendencies have, however, been increasingly important in modern Theology.
Since Feuerbach there has been a growing tendency for philosophy of religion either to concentrate upon the social and anthropological dimension of religious belief, or to treat a manifestation of various explicable psychological urges. Another reaction is retreat into a celebration of purely subjective existential commitments. Still, the ontological arguments continue to attach attention. Modern anti-fundamentalists trends in epistemology are not entirely hostile to cognitive claims based on religious experience.
Still, the problem f reconciling the subjective or psychological nature of mental life with its objective and logical content preoccupied from of which is next of the problem was elephantine Logische untersuchungen (trans. as Logical Investigations, 1070). To keep a subjective and a naturalistic approach to knowledge together. Abandoning the naturalism in favour of a kind of transcendental idealism. The precise nature of his change is disguised by a penchant for new and impenetrable terminology, but the ‘bracketing’ of eternal questions for which are to a great extent acknowledged implications of a solipistic, disembodied Cartesian ego is its starting-point, with it thought of as inessential that the thinking subject is ether embodied or surrounded by others. However by the time of Cartesian Meditations (trans. as, 1960, fist published in French as Méditations Carthusianness, 1931), a shift in priorities has begun, with the embodied individual, surrounded by others, than the disembodied Cartesian ego now returned to a fundamental position. The extent to which the desirable shift undermines the programme of phenomenology that is closely identical with Husserl’s earlier approach remains unclear, until later phenomenologists such as Merleau -Ponty has worked fruitfully from the later standpoint.
Pythagoras established and was the central figure in school of philosophy, religion, and mathematics: He was apparently viewed by his followers as semi-divine. For his followers the regular solids (symmetrical three-dimensional forms in which all sides are the same regular polygon) with ordinary language. The language of mathematical and geometric forms seem closed, precise and pure. Providing one understood the axioms and notations, and the meaning conveyed was invariant from one mind to another. The Pythagoreans following which was the language empowering the mind to leap beyond the confusion of sense experience into the realm of immutable and eternal essences. This mystical insight made Pythagoras the figure from antiquity must revered by the creators of classical physics, and it continues to have great appeal for contemporary physicists as they struggle with the epistemological of the quantum mechanical description of nature.
Pythagoras (570 Bc) was the son of Mn esarchus of Samos ut, emigrated (531 Bc) to Croton in southern Italy. Here he founded a religious society, but were forces into exile and died at Metapomtum. Membership of the society entailed -disciplined, silence and the observance of his taboos, especially against eating flesh and beans. Pythagoras taught the doctrine of metempsychosis or the cycle of reincarnation, and remained as to remember their former existence. The soul, which as its own divinity and may have existed as an animal or plant, can, however gain release by a religious dedication to study, after which it may rejoin the universal world-soul. Pythagoras is usually, but doubtfully, accredited with having discovered the basis of acoustics, the numerical ratios underlying the musical scale, thereby intimating the arithmetical interpretation of nature. This tremendous success inspired the view that the whole of the cosmos should be explicable in terms of harmonia or number. The view represents a magnificent brake from the Milesian attempt to ground physics on a conception shared by all things, and to concentrate instead on form, meaning that physical nature receives an approachable foundation in different geometric breaks. The view is vulgarized in the doctrine usually attributed to Pythagoras, that all things are number. However, the association of abstract qualitites with numbers, but reached remarkable heights, with occult attachments for instance, between justice and the number four, and mystical significance, especially of the number ten, cosmologically Pythagoras explained the origin of the universe in mathematical terms, as the imposition of limits on the limitless by a kind of injection of a unit. Followers of Pythagoras included Philolaus, the earliest cosmosologist known to have understood that the earth is a moving planet. It is also likely that the Pythagoreans discovered the irrationality of the square root of two.
The Pythagoreans considered numbers to be among te building blocks of the universe. In fact, one of the most central of the beliefs of Pythagoras mathematical, his inner circle, was that reality was mathematical in nature. This made numbers valuable tools, and over time even the knowledge of a number’s name came to be associated with power. If you could name something you had a degree of control over it, and to have power over the numbers was to have power over nature.
One, for example, stood for the mind, emphasizing its Oneness. Two was opinion, taking a step away from the singularity of mind. Three was wholeness (whole needs a beginning, a middle and its ending to be more than a one-dimensional point), and four represented the stable squareness of justice. Five was marriage-being the sum of three and two, the first odd (male) and even (female) numbers. (Three was the first odd number because the number one was considered by the Greeks to be so special that it could not form part of an ordinary grouping of numbers).
It should be noted that Murray wrote his book in 1964 when communism was still perceived by many as the world’s greatest threat. Had he written it a few years later he may have decided to call his atheist of communist world Revolution something else. Evidently, what he is truly talking about is any philosophy that suggests human beings can create a utopian world completely on their own. Nowadays we might refer to this as the atheist of the techno-revolution, or the atheist of humanism-which, again, values our expectation that our own inventiveness will save us.
The second kind of atheist, the atheist of the Theatre, refers to the sort of person who simply tries to exist in a godless world. The atheist of the Theatre is a tragic character who wants the best for the world but feels helpless to do much about it and is ultimately reduced to a mere spectator. "His mind is full of darkness," writes Murray, "it is oppressed with a sense of the finitude and fragility of existence; it shivers before the un-predictabilities of history."10 Unlike the atheist of the Revolution who links freedom with freedom from poverty, the atheist of the Theatre wants freedom from the angst of a purposeless and uncertain existence. Such a person can only accomplish this through -invention or -determination. This, however, cannot be accomplished so long as God lives. If God is present, then God is the inventor of the human being who has no choice but to adhere to a predetermined nature and destiny. So, in order for the atheist of the Theatre to gain the freedom to chart one’s own destiny, God must be dismissed.
As different as these two types may appear, Murray suggests they share several characteristics in common. Firstly, they both take the presence of evil as evidence of God’s nonexistence. Secondly, they both accept the death of God, that is, belief in God is irrelevant. Thirdly, atheism is a postulate they feel obliged to express. This is to say that not only do they not believe in God, but they feel such a belief is somehow harmful, primarily because it is detrimental to freedom.
Of course, the deaths of God pundits have not been met without plenty of criticism. Nonetheless, they simply respond by claiming their critics choose to avoid the modern condition by clinging to archaic and meaningless fantasies. As Thomas Ogletree has written concerning The Death of God Controversy, "The refusal of God’s death amounted to a nostalgic desire to avoid the present moment by a flight into a past that is no more. The notion of God’s death has become so prominent and argument that there have been several Deaths of God theologians who have attempted to abstract positive meaning from Christianity while accepting the death of God philosophy. Ogletree’s book introduces us to three such theologians, William Hamilton, Paul Van Buren and Thomas J.J. Altizer.
For Hamilton, the death of God implies that God can no longer be thought of as a "need-fulfiller and problem-solver." He rejects the idea that God is a kind of candy dispenser or "cosmic bellhop," ever ready to attend to humanity’s needs. Unlike those Christians who cling to their idea of God, even in the wake of divine irrelevance, by rejecting contemporary society and holding to tradition, Hamilton seems to have found a way to have his cake and eat it too. For Hamilton, the Christian’s task is to find God by returning to society and becoming active in the alleviation of human suffering. This is not entirely different from the idea expounded by Paul Van Buren who wrote, ". . . . If In understand the nature and development of Christianity, In would want to argue that what Christianity is basically about is a certain form of life-patterns of human existence, norms of human attitudes, and dispositions and moral behaviour."14 For these two theologians there are something in Christianity that presents a viable, even necessary, way of living even in the wake of God’s death.
Thomas Altizer takes the matter as step further by insinuating that God must die in order for Jesus to live. The modern problem of God might best be illustrated in the argument that only God is or only the world is-the sacred or the profane, pantheism vs. materialism. The modern atheist chooses the world, the material, the profane. "If there is one clear portal to the twentieth century," writes Altizer, "it is a passage through the death of God, the collapse of any meaning or reality lying beyond the newly discovered radical immanence of modern man, immanently dissolving even the memory or the shadow of transcendence."15 The loss of transcendence, however, is not understood by Altizer as the loss of the sacred but as the redemption of the profane. God is not killed by modern humanity, but sacrifices God- to humanity by entering into the profane world via the Christ, God made flesh. Although those who cling to Christian tradition will likely consider such a radical notion as heresy, it seems somehow comforting to think that God might somehow dwell among us, in our very suffering and profanity.
So far In have spoken as if the death of God is to be taken for granted, as if it is an undeniable fact of the modern condition. This, however, is a presupposition In am not entirely sure of. Just this week In spent several days in Washington, D.C. and had the opportunity to hear all of Kentucky’s State Representatives and U.S. Senator Jim Bunning address a large group of their constituents. Without fail, each one of them had something to say about God, mostly in reference to George W. Bush and his intention to go to war with Iraq. Congressman Ken Lucas, the only Democrat among Kentucky’s Washington delegation, asked the group to pray for Mr. Bush and concluded by saying "the Almighty is with him." Congressman Ernie Fletcher, who hopes to become the next Kentucky Governor, spoke of a presentation he attended during the Gideon Bible Society as presented by Mr. Bush in which its one-billionth printed Bible. Mr. Bush responded by assuring those present that the "Will of God" is his top priority. Representative Ann Northup referred to him as a "deeply spiritual man," and Harold Rogers publicly thanked God that Mr. Bush was in office at the time of 911. In regard to war with Iraq, Representative Ron Lewis quoted Abraham Lincoln’s reference to the Civil War by saying "the question is not whether or not God is on our side, but whether or not we are on God’s side." Finally, U.S. Senator Jim Bunning boasted about a Senate resolution supporting the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, thanked God for George W. Bush, and concluded by warning the audience that in light of pressing problems "we must keep our faith in God or we won’t survive as a people or as a nation."
Perhaps you will agree, it doesn’t sound like those who represent the people of at least one State in the Nation are atheists. The fact is that the people of the United States remain highly religious, especially compared with the rest of the Western world. According to an article in The Economist entitled The Fight for God, 47% of the people in the United States regularly attend church services, as compared with only 20% in Western Europe and 14% in Eastern Europe. What is more, is that only 2% of the population in the United States actually claims to be atheists?
Yet these statistics do not necessarily mean all of this talk about the death of God has been for not, but they serve as a framework for reinterpreting the meaning of God’s death. In would suggest that even though the idea of God lives on, the experience of God having died. In this sense the death of God may have begun much earlier than with the rise of science and technology. It was during the Patristic age of the early Church Fathers that the problem became purely ontological, that is, asking the question "What is God?" Rather than "Is God with us?" This arose over the controversy concerning Jesus’ divinity. Is he human or God? If he is God, what then is God? Tertullian tried to solve the problem with a biological and an anthropomorphic answer, claiming the Father and the Son are both part of a single organism and share the same mind and will. Origen claimed the Son (Logos) emanates from the Father in a diminished capacity. Arius taught that there was a time "when he was not," which is to say Jesus, although a perfect creature is nonetheless a creation of God. All of this became heresy after the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, after it was determined that the Father and the Son are of the same substance (homoousios), relying heavily upon Athenasius of Alexandria’s credo that the Son is like the Father in every way except for the name Father. The Nicene Creed ushered in the age of Christian scholasticism that gave birth to thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine, but it also dramatically altered the nature of the Problem of God.
Before this event the Problem of God had always been about the living God and whether or not such is God who dwells with us, rather than the distant and abstract God of theological debate. The Problem of God, which is a uniquely western theological term, is rooted deep within the Judeo/Christian tradition, beginning with the Biblical story of Moses’ encounter with the burning bush. When Moses asks God’s name, God replies, "ehyeh ser ehyeh" In am who In am. Murray understands this to mean God is present with the people.
Ancient people did not think abstractly about God. Nor did they wonder why evil and suffering were in the world. They took the existence of both for granted. What they wanted to know was whether or not God would be with them in the midst of their struggles. In Exodus, for instance, the Israelites are reported to have asked, "Is the Lord among us or not?" Murray breaks the Old Testament Problem of God into four questions, the Existential question, Is God here with us now? The Functional question, How will this God who is with us save us? The Noetic question, How is this God who is present to be known? The Onomastic question, How is this God who is present among us to be named? After Jesus came on the scene, these questions remained essentially the same, but were answered through the lens of the Christ.
This sort of question implies a desire to have intimate knowledge of the Divine. They are questions about how we ought to conduct our lives rather than about abstract thoughts and concepts. If there is any value to having a belief in God today, perhaps these sort of question ought to be at the heart of such belief, less we remain as those who would contribute to the pain and suffering of others by making war and poverty while paying intellectual lip service to an abstract notion of God. Perhaps, furthermore, the Problem of God is not a problem that is to be solved or ought to be solved. Early theologians celebrated the fact that God cannot be truly known. As Thomas Aquinas said, "One thing that remains completely unknown in this life, namely, what God is."19 Augustine said similarly, "If you have comprehended, what you have comprehended is not God." Or as Cryil of Jerusalem said, "In the things of God the confession of no knowledge is great knowledge." "It is by this ignorance, as long as life lasts, that we are best united with God," wrote Aquinas, "This is the darkness in which God dwells."
So the Problem of God remains today very much the same as it has throughout history. Even in our limited understanding and modern disbelief in the relevance of God, we want to know, in the midst of the turmoil, suffering and evil we face today, is it possible that God is with us? Or are we left alone to deal these problems completely on our own? Are we creatures of purpose and destiny, or must we choose our own way? Do we need God? In their book The Invisible Landscape, Terrence and Dennis McKenna write; Western humans have lost their sense of unity with the cosmos and with the transcendent mystery within themselves. Modern science has given us a picture of human beings as accidental products of random evolutionary processes in a universe that is it without purpose or meaning. This alienation of modern humans from the numinous ground of their beings has engendered the existentialist ethic and the contemporary preoccupation with the immediate historical situation. Humans are regarded as leading a wholly profane existence within a wholly profane time, which is within history; the reality of the sacred is denied or reduced to the level of psychology.
In the end it would seem the Problem of God is ultimately the Problem of Humanity, for it is our suffering that draws us toward the idea of God, and repels us from it.
Friedrich Nietzsche had very different opinions concerning the man known to history as Jesus Christ and his legacy, and the religion called Christianity. As a well-known philosopher of contemporary times, Nietzsche's reputation with Christianity is severely ambiguous, as a result of a "long customary" association with the Nazi Party of Germany, which, as one critic points out, is "like linking St. Francis with the Inquisition in which the order he founded played a major role." Still, despite much misunderstanding and prejudice, Nietzsche's influence on the world remains consistently strong, as "few thinkers of any age equal his influence." Nietzsche's philosophy is rooted in his own interpretation of the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the history of Christianity, as he considered him the first philosopher of the "irrevocable anti-Christian era" from which all Christian and secular systems associated with Christianity would henceforth bow. Nietzsche, however, does not see this new era in the history of the world as essentially negative; he believes that he is the first of 'the new way'; and "things will be different," positively. Furthermore, one must understand Nietzsche's position on Jesus and Christianity, the most crucial part of his philosophical system, as separate issues, to appreciate completely and comprehend the rest.
To this end, Nietzsche is clear that he has different attitudes about Jesus and Christianity. This distinction is "no less than the distinction between life and death, the great 'Yes' and the decadent 'No.'" Furthermore, there is a "severance" between Jesus and the Christian tradition. This is clearly a result, according to Nietzsche, of the greediness and short-sightedness of St. Paul, who lock up Christianity so much that the religion has little in common with the ideas and teachings that its founder represented. As a consequence, Western society has gone backwards, Nietzsche writes, "everything is visibly becoming Judiazed, Christianized, moblike (what does the words matter)."
Nietzsche considers him "the atheist," whose challenges against Christianity all Christians must now face and consider. Although he admits that he is "an opponent of Christianity de riguer," Nietzsche has a distinct respect for the man Jesus. While Nietzsche does not go so far as to embrace all of the ideas and teachings of Jesus, he clearly draws a clear dichotomy between Jesus and Nazareth and "the Christ of the creeds"Cand what Nietzsche is most concerned with is the historical Jesus. The end of Nietzsche's analysis of Jesus and Christianity is a request for the reassessment of Western culture's values, especially religious values, which call for the eventual expulsion of Christianity as he knew it.
In short, Nietzsche respects and admires Jesus of Nazareth, "but denies that he has any meaning for our age" Nietzsche believes the Jewish contention that Jesus is not the Messiah and that the Messiah has not yet appeared in history. Even so, Nietzsche reveres Jesus as no other character in history, particularly because he came to know Jesus as the very opposite of Christianity. Nietzsche writes as a philologist, "The word 'Christianity' is already a misunderstanding reality there has only been one Christian, and he died on the Cross." While leaving such an impact on the world is admirable (and a good characteristic of a Übermensch), Nietzsche "could know Jesus as the greatest and truest revolutionary in history," despite the sour legacy he left.
Despite all of this hostility, Nietzsche looked upon the symbol of the crucified Christ as “the most sublime of all symbols." Nonetheless, Jesus remains the only Christian in whom will ever have lived, yet he was crucified by mortals. The Christians were making their professed faith a weird comedy. The cross, to Nietzsche, is a "ghastly paradox" that revolves around the idea of "God of the cross." This concept is absurd to Nietzsche, who wonders how it is logical that the "mystery of an unimaginable and ultimate cruelty and -crucifixion of God for the salvation of man?" Furthermore, Nietzsche comments:
God him sacrifices him for the guilt of humankind, God him makes payment to him, God as the only being who can redeem man from what has become unredeemable for man him, the creditor sacrifices him for his debtor, out of love (one can credit that?) Out of love for his debtor-Nietzsche sees this entire concept of a crucified god as utterly ridiculous and ironic for a god to do so "out of love." While "Christianity's -sacrificing God make’s infinite its adherents' guilt and debt," Nietzsche observes, "Jesus had done away with the concept of 'guilt.'" Yet, to Nietzsche, Jesus, like him, had come "too early" and died "too young . . . not 'at the right time.'" They were both revolutionaries who were rebelling against the old ways.
Clearly, Nietzsche is interested in a historical assemblage of Jesus, who, nonetheless, left no writings, as Nietzsche had to go to the next best source, the Gospels, which he despised. Nietzsche writes that the Bible is "the greatest audacity and 'sin against the spirit' that literary Europe has on its conscience." As a result, while Jesus preached and taught about freedom, Nietzsche believed that "it was immediately transformed by those who preached it (and especially by Paul) to assert their own power."
Nietzsche is convinced that Jesus him would deny "everything that today is called Christian." Critic William Hubben argues that Jesus was literally an anarchist, who "attacked the Jewish hierarchy, the 'just' and supreme rulers," and died for these sins, absolutely not for the sins of others. Nietzsche recognized that Jesus had supposedly expelled the world from the concepts of guilt and sin, wondering, "[h]ow could he have died for the sins of others?" Furthermore, while some Christians viewed Jesus as a completely divine judge of 'the quick and the dead,' Nietzsche viewed Jesus as anything but a judge: "Jesus opposed those who judged others, and wanted to destroy the morality existing in his age" (emphasis added). Nonetheless, one can be assured that Nietzsche "reveres the life and death of Jesus." However, it is not in the same way that a traditional "Christian" reveres Jesus; as critic Walter Kaufmann writes, “instead of interpreting it [Jesus' life] as a promise of another world and another life, and instead of conceding the divinity of Jesus, Nietzsche insists: Ecce Homo! Man can live and die in a grand style, working out his own salvation instead of relying on the sacrifice of another." Nietzsche, then, does not 'believe in Jesus' in the creedal tradition, but respects him as a worthy opponent.
More specifically, Nietzsche views Jesus as his only true opponent. He closes, in the last line of his autobiographical Ecce Homo, "Have In been understood? -Dionysus verses the Crucified." In interpret this line as Nietzsche recognizing that Jesus is the highest of competitors to Nietzsche's own "Dionysian ideal for man." This statement is also meant as an ironic contrast; That is, a contrast between "the tragic life verses life under the cross": The roller-coaster, "dangerous" life of the Übermensch (as exemplified by Goethe) verses weakness.
In the sum, Nietzsche's interpretation of the life of Jesus, while suspicious, contrasts his feelings surrounding Christianity; Recognizing a major difference between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the creeds. To this end, the events surrounding Jesus' death, rather than his resurrection becomes pivotal, as Nietzsche writes, "Jesus him could not have desired anything by his death but publicly to offer the sternest test, the proof of his teaching . . . But his disciples were far from forgiving his death." Thus, after Jesus' death, his followers asked, "Who killed him? Who was his natural enemy? This came like a flash of lightning," and their answer was, "Judaism," the ruling class. The offspring of this, Christianity, for Nietzsche became "another in a line of failed attempts to understand the teachings of the great creators and transformers of life"; in other words, the creedal, pre-modern Jesus has no relevance to a contemporary, post-modern society.
Nietzsche has an obvious dislike of Christianity because of its unfaithfulness to the teachings of its supposed founder, Jesus of Nazareth, the flawed morality of Christians, and the warped concept of the Christian God. Nietzsche calls Christianity "the religion of pity," as it represents weakness in every form of which he can think. Furthermore, churches has little influence legitimate justification for influence in the lives of humans today, as Nietzsche asks, "does the church today still have any necessary role to play? Does it still have the right to exist? Or could one do without it? Quaeritur." To this interrogative, Nietzsche answers that the "future of humanity is. Placed in jeopardy" by institutional Christianity, which "destroys the instincts out of which affirmative institutions develop." In other words, Christianity hinders the progress of humanity. What is more, Christian morality is hell-bent on defining the world as "ugly and bad," and has therefore made the world "ugly and bad." To make things worse, "Christianity has created a fictitious world," where nothing is dared to be questioned, and as a result, the world will break down-this way "must vanish" (emphasis added). To Nietzsche, Christianity is little more than an opiate, that is, as mentioned earlier, a weak religion of the herd.
It was stated above that Nietzsche believes that the only Christian died on the cross, and this is 'Christianity' in its purest sense. However, as far as Christians today know, understand, and define Christianity, Nietzsche says that there have never been any Christians: "The 'Christian' that which has been called a Christian for two millennia, is merely a psychological -misunderstanding." Nietzsche blames the 'corruption' of Christianity on the "first Christians," who created the very same institution that Jesus was rebelling against, Judaism, when they founded Christianity and the worst of these "first Christians," was Paul, as Nietzsche writes: "The life, the example, the teaching, the death, the meaning and the right of the entire Gospel nothing was left once this hate-obsessed false-coiner had grasped what alone he could make use of. Not the reality, not the historical truth!" In fact, Nietzsche argues, it was Paul who condemned Christianity to its present stagnant state by making "this indecency of an interpretation," that is, “'If Christ is not resurrected from the dead our faith is vain.'All at once the Evangel became the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the impudent doctrine of personal immortality."
Since the evolution of the Greek polis in the fourth century BC, man has attempted to live in a civilized society. Society was developed due to the common needs of commerce, and safety of the people in a relatively small geographic area. To create order out of an ancient, chaotic, tribal system, the constraints of laws were needed, and a government to enforce them. Common virtues, ethics, and morals emerged with the establishment of the Greek city-state. This made communication between the people easier and devised a valuation of what was "right" and "wrong." These valuations endured for centuries with little question, until the late nineteenth century.
Friedrick Nietzsche challenged all ideas that had not only come before him, but also those which proliferated during his own period. He "deconstructed" society and its "noble lies" in an attempt to show us that man "is something to be overcome." He attempted to debase all of society by proving values, ethics, and the like are errors of humanity. If you destroy the order of society by destroying everything it values, can any society still exist, or better yet, could the destroyer still exist within society? Would Nietzsche be comfortable in any society? To what extent can we use the hammer and still remain a part of society? These are my "question marks." In order to answer these questions, first it is necessary to determine what Nietzsche found so base in herd morality.
Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, morality ranks "human drives and actions, [and] always express(es) the needs of a community and herd: whatever profits it." Instead of man creating his own valuations of "good" and "evil," the "herd" gives them to him, denying man of his individuality. Therefore, man becomes a "function of the herd." The word "individual" becomes a profanity, and individualism is punished with exile; "freedom of thought counted as discontentment itself."
When individualism became discontentment, guilt and conscience were created. Anytime an action damaged the "herd," it "created pangs of conscience for the individual." This overabundance of guilt destroyed man's pride and condemned him to become a "camel." The camel bears the load of his master throughout his existence, and stores his own guilt in his humps. He takes away his master's load, and anytime he drops a portion of that load, his hump stores more guilt. Herd morality does this to the individual. It forces the individual to take the burden of existence from the creators of the morality and feel guilt when they do not maintain the burden.
"The spirit of revenge: my friends that up to now, has been mankind's chief concern, and where there was suffering there was always supposed to be punishment." Nietzsche uses Socrates as primary proof of revenge, resentment, and ressentiment in morality. The poor, ordinary, construction worker received word from the Delphic oracle that "none is smarter than Socrates." Using dialectic as his method, he proceeded to question the men of Athens; "the dialectician lays on his opponent the burden of proving that he is not an idiot. He infuriates and at the same time paralyses" according to Nietzsche. Socrates used dialectic to enact his revenge on the nobility of declining Athens, and prove himself worthy of nobility. The same nobles he resented, he desired to become. He took his resentment inward and expressed it as revenge-ressentiment-and subsequently applied this universally as a virtue. Thousands of years later people are still using his methods. Why should one person's idiosyncratic virtue be applied to everyone? Zarathustra also speaks of the revenge in morality.
In the first discourse of Zarathustra, he tells the town of the Motley Cow, "fire of love and fire of anger glow in the name of all virtues." This is not love of man, or even humanity, that Nietzsche is speaking of. Rather, it is obedience and rule that are the "fire of love." The "fire of anger" is the resentment of the "good" against what has been done to them in the past. They have suffered therefore, everyone must, since "they knew no other way of loving their God than by nailing men to the cross." This suffering, due to resentment, is passed down the generations as tradition.
All herd morality is based in tradition. The "strength of our knowledge" doesn't lie in truth, but tradition and old mouldy volumes. Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (one of my favourite lines) "even mold ennobles." The older a morality, virtue, or value is, the more revered it becomes. People accept postulates without proof. Why? Because it is tradition, "We have done this for generations. Therefore, it is the Truth. How can so many generations be wrong?" This attitude, based out of laziness, causes sleep.
People want the easiest road in life. So, rather than question preconceived beliefs, they simply believe for the sake of believing-they Sleep. Zarathustra speaks of the herd, "they are modest even in virtue-for they want ease." Either they go through motions and, rather than believe strongly in anything, believe "modest(ly)," or they are the martyrs, who take the burdens from everyone, "[and] go along, heavy and creaking, like carts carrying stones downhill."
Herd morality's most common basis is religion. Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "God is a supposition: but I want your supposing to be grounded by conceivability." He goes on to say, "unfortunately, how weary I am of all the unattainable that is supposed to be reality." When belief in an "unattainable supposition" is the basis of a morality, isn't the morality also then unattainable, and based in supposition? And if this is true, then there is no "true" morality, and the Truth itself is then concealed from the masses.
The concealment of truth is the worst enemy of man. All of morality is based on lies. Nietzsche writes in the autobiographical Ecce Homo, "the lie of the ideal has been the curse of reality, by means of it, man's most basic instincts have become mendacious and false." Values that are "antagonistic" to the nature of man, the Dionysian nature, have been denied and labelled "evil." This "evil" of man is the "Truth." Nietzsche writes, "men have given themselves all their good and evil. Truly, they did not take it, they did not find it, it did not descend to them as a voice from heaven." "Evil" is not evil, rather a variation of good, there is no such thing as evil, it is a category created by man to provide a purpose to his existence-to be "good." Zarathustra states, "man first implanted values into things to maintain himself-he created a meaning of things, a human meaning." We created the values of the world, and in so doing gave it our own interpretation. We created the world in our own image. These lies have been fabricated to seal the truth of existence; existence is chaos.
Nietzsche saw that the noble lies of herd morality were set in stone, along with the error they were based upon. The error of these lies resulted in the destruction of individualism and freedom of man. This in turn, indicated the need for destruction of the stone tablets of herd morality. When men destroy these base values, transvaluations can follow. As Nietzsche says through Zarathustra, "he who has to be creator, always has to destroy." For the transvaluations to take place, Nietzsche needed to define how we should destroy and create and what type of values should be created.
To understand how the destruction should take place, Nietzsche speaks of his "hammer [which] rages fiercely against its prison." The "lion" destroys herd morality with his "hammer." The "hammer" is pure Dionysian-pure nihilism. However, an overflow of Dionysian intoxication will annihilate everything; a balance is required. Nietzsche adds the reason and wisdom of Apollo to create this balance. This reason and wisdom allows man to destroy the right moral enemies and create the right values. In this way, reason and will destroy together. Once we destroy all of man's enemies, there is one more thing to be destroyed. Zarathustra tells his disciples, "you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame." We must sacrifice ourselves because we are only prophets of the "child," or "Ubermensch," and are still in some ways decadents ourselves.
In Zarathustra's third discourse, Nietzsche gives man guidelines for the type of new values he should create. Zarathustra tells his followers, " 'This is now my way: where is yours?' Thus I answered those who asked me 'the way.' For the way-does not exist!" Nietzsche wants no "parasites" or "disciples." These take the new table of values and make them universal, everyone is able to understand them and they become popular. Nietzsche wants man to create and "place above" himself his own values. In this way the values stay individual, but Nietzsche does provide, what appears to be, a general outline of the type of values we should create
"Do not spare your neighbours! Man is something that must be overcome!" Nietzsche is attacking the common Christian virtue: "love thy neighbour as thyself." This virtue is a show of the weak "will to power." He wants us to overcome this stale virtue and "destroy" even our neighbour. This is not to be taken literally as a killing, or mauling of our neighbour. Rather, he wants us to destroy our neighbour's values and in this sense we destroy him, showing him that man is something to be overcome
Nietzsche wants us to always "consider what [we] can give in return." We cannot desire anything for free, therefore we must fight and work for our morality. When people work hard for anything, they usually keep it close to them, and thus value it more than anything else. He expects us to do the opposite, "everything is in flux . . . [do not] firmly fix" your values and tables. We are still overcoming, and life itself is constantly overcoming, do not write your values in stone.
I will not deceive even myself," this affirmation of the will to truth is at the heart of Nietzsche's new morality. If we deceive ourselves, it is easy to fall back into the role of the "camel" and its herd morality. If we do not deceive ourselves, we shatter the "good" and the "just." They need our belief to survive, without our belief, they can't justify their existence. This is why "they hate the creator most," he destroys all that is "holy" to them.
We need to realize we will never become the"Ubermensch." We can only be prophets of his coming. As with all prophets, we must die to make way for the saviour, or as Nietzsche puts it , the "child." Unlike the "old-idol priests," who preserve their existence, Nietzsche wants us to die at the right time to prepare for the coming of the "child." The prophet can't enter the promised land, he must "go under," that is six feet under, to prepare for the coming of the "Ubermensch."
In order to create new values, the past has to be redeemed. To redeem it, a transformation of every "'It was,' until the will says: 'But I willed it thus! So shall I will it.'" is necessary? We have to "make amends to [our] children for being the children of [our] fathers”; and become yea-sayers, saying yes to all that has happened and will happen. This is Nietzsche's way of redeeming man of his facility. If we can't redeem our facility, everything we create becomes tainted by it, and reeks of the herd. The transformation releives the guilt of what has passed and transforms it into an act of the will; causing man to love life as it is, was, and will be-amor fati. Nietzsche's doctrines of eternal return and amor fati combine to redeem man's past and future, but are also the most apparently contradictory doctrines of his philosophy.
Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra, "all things recur eternally and we ourselves with them, and that we have existed an infinite number of times before and all things with us." It is necessary to keep in mind that this is not reincarnation; "I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life in the greatest things and the smallest." The "Ubermensch" becomes an impossibility-Nietzsche's own noble life due to his doctrine of eternal return. If we return eternally, our lives are already created and there is no transvaluations. How can we create new values when our lives have already been mapped out? There is no original thought just like there is no original text. As Stanley Rosen says, we are who we are "under the illusion that we have been transformed into something 'beautiful and new.'" We cannot avoid our fate, nor change it, the decision we make at every step has already been made countless times.
These doctrines devaluate the entire world, and all Being within it. Nothing is greater than another because the fate of Being is already decided. Therefore, if Nietzsche wants man to create, man has to assign his own value to the world. Man is free to create out of the chaos. The valuation becomes our own perspective, but at the same time we also create a new noble lie because the world is, in itself, worthless. Therefore, if man creates his own value in the world, why does Nietzsche assign guidelines for the creation of these values? Assigning guidelines only creates a new herd morality. Denying man of his freedom and individuality, the same things Nietzsche fought against (or so it seems) he creates. Nietzsche is attempting to relay two separate messages in one philosophy. This explains the apparent contradiction. He is trying to relay a message to the new noblemen, the strong willed, to create their own system of values, including a new noble lie. At the same time, he is attempting to speed up the decadence of the Enlightenment by preaching deconstruction. Rosen calls these different teachings Nietzsche's esoteric, or higher, and exoteric, or lower public, teachings.
The exoteric truth, the speeding up of decadence, is a "return to the cruel creativity of the Renaissance city-state or to the polis of Homeric Greece." This exoteric truth is a type of horizontal heroism, in other words, not transcendental experience, but experience for the masses. This speeds up the deconstruction of decadence, in turn making the new nobility's mission much easier.
The esoteric, or higher teaching of Nietzsche is "nature is . . . chaos, there is no eternal impediment . . . to the will to power." The will to power is defined in nature as a "natural order of rank." This rank is the expression of power as chaos, which we misperceive in order to make life "livable"- our noble lies. Yes, rank, Nietzsche created a ranking of values to replace the old ranking of the herd. Nietzsche even admits:
Its plosophy aims at an ordering of rank: not an individualistic morality. The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd-but not reach out beyond it: the leaders of the herd require a fundamentally different valuation for their own actions.
It is only the new nobility who can "triumph over the truth precisely because [they] know that Being is chaos." As we can now see, Nietzsche did not want the populous to transvaluate values, he wanted them to accelerate the degeneration of society. He desired a new nobility of "gods, but no God" to perform the transvaluation. These two requirements help to explain the superficial contradictions in Nietzsche's philosophy
An evaluation of Nietzsche's own life will show how he applied these philosophical differences to himself. The first thing we need to remember is, Nietzsche is a Zarathustra, not the Ubermensch, the Ubermensch was his noble lie. In his autobiographical work, Ecce Homo, he writes, "Zarathustra himself as a type, came to me-perhaps I should rather say-invaded me." As I have explained before, the Ubermensch is a becoming, but Zarathustra does not become the Ubermensch, he is the prophet, destroyer, and must die before the coming of the "child."
Nietzsche writes, "social intercourse is no small trial to my patience." He needed and enjoyed his solitude, just as Zarathustra. He had an "incontestable lack of sufficient companionship," and his "loathing of mankind . . . was always [his] greatest danger," but he needed this companionship. He wrote in 1882, following a loss of his relationships with his mother, sister, sometime girlfriend Lou Salome, and friend Paul Roe: attempts "to return 'to people' was resulting in my losing the few I still, in any sense, possessed." In his later years, Nietzsche was the ultimate "loner." He had little contact with anyone, and when he finally went mad in 1888, he was committed to a sanitarium.
Before the madness finally took total control of him, he destroyed the last few relationships he had. His delusions of grandeur had become intense. On a visit to Turin in 1888, he wrote "here in Turin I exercise a perfect fascination." Hayman writes in his biography of Nietzsche: "he thought people were reacting to him preferentially and lovingly." These delusions of grandeur caused Nietzsche to be "peremptory with friends and acquaintances." He identified himself as "the foremost mind of the period." When a fellow scholar wrote a concrete agreement against his position in The Problem of Wagner, he replied, "On questions of decadence, I am the highest court of appeal there is on earth." Finally, in a letter to his sister Elizabeth, he signed himself, "your brother, now quite a great person."
These delusions of grandeur not only destroyed any relationships he may have had, but destroyed any possibility of life within society. Nietzsche believed himself the only person of the new nobility in the age of decadence. This caused his madness.
To answer the questions I have raised regarding Nietzsche's existence in society, I have to first define society. A society is a group of people organized for some common purpose. Wherever people gather for a common purpose, they form a society. This society purports common values and judgements which are not necessarily the judgements of any other society. Society only exists as the herd, therefore there is no individual morality, but only herd morality. Even if new values are created, the powerful, or strong will to power, only create a new herd morality with new noble lies.
Nietzsche destroyed the common values of the society he lived in during the late nineteenth century, but this does not necessarily mean he can't exist in a society. He was unable to live in the society of decadence, but surely Nietzsche could live in a society based upon his noble lie, the Ubermensch. A noble lie bounded by conceivability, and ruled by "gods," his new nobility. Since he could not create his noble lie and new nobility in a period of decadence, he sacrificed himself for the coming of his children, the Ubermenschen. Since Nietzsche conceived a new society, he is not a pure nihilist, nor is he a sociopath, he is only sociopathic to what he considers a decadent society, not one he would create.
There is no creating out of the self, since the world itself has no inherent value, only inherent activity. All values based on our creation of value are illusions-our own noble lies. These are only our perception and interpretation of reality, certainly not reality, because reality is composed of infinite interpretations. We have only one. We create out of chaotic activity within the world and within ourselves. This is the only form of creation and therefore, assignment of value available to man. Therefore, each man has a different ranking of value, and society in the common sense of the word, can't exist. Due to the infinite interpretations of value. The only common thread available is man's freedom to create.
We are still a part of the Enlightenment that Nietzsche was attacking over a hundred years ago. The difference today is we know more, and are more willing to purport it, because of philosophers like Nietzsche. We scream what only others whisper. God is dead, but we have created new gods for ourselves, and these are not ourselves as Nietzsche would have wanted it. Our new gods are consumerism, money, power-all new forms of horizontal heroism. We buy clothes off a rack to look "cool”; the more money you make the better person you are; and everyone wants to control someone else, whether it is at work or in a relationship: "the omnipresence of power
Today's society does however realize the problems Nietzsche was speaking of regarding society and its herd morality. White and Hellerich, two postmodern philosophers, write in their essay "Nietzsche at the Altar: Situating the Devotee”: "This is to be a history of immanent activity not transcendent verities . . . the self-writing of a new generation of Ubermenschen and Ubermadchen." We know that actions are inherent in our being; far more valuable than espousing higher truths, "transcendent verities." Which can not even be truths because there is no universal truth because of the infinite interpretations of Truth. We become our own gods by creating our own truths. We realize the "hammer" must still be used. Deconstruction is still a common philosophy. Generation X (though I hate to use this label) has deconstructed the old herd morality to some extent, though not necessarily in the fashion which Nietzsche would have desired. Portrayed in everything from art and music to the Internet. As we close in on the twenty-first century, we are still in an age of decadence. Nietzsche's Ubermensch was and still is an unattainable possibility for society. We are still decadent
Immortalities, provincializede unending existence of the soul after physical death. The doctrine of immortality is common to many religions; in different cultures, however, it takes various forms, ranging from ultimate extinction of the soul to its final survival and the resurrection of the body. In Hinduism, the ultimate personal goal is considered absorption into the “universal spirit.” Buddhist doctrine promises nirvana, the state of complete bliss achieved through total extinction of the personality. In the religion of ancient Egypt, entrance to immortal life was dependent on the results of divine examination of the merits of an individual's life. Early Greek religion promised a shadowy continuation of life on earth in an underground region known as Hades. In Christianity and Islam, as well as in Judaism, the immortality promised is primarily of the spirit. The former two religions both differ from Judaism in holding that after the resurrection of the body and a general judgment of the entire human race, the body is to be reunited with the spirit to experience either reward or punishment. In Jewish eschatology, the resurrection of the soul will take place at the advent of the Messiah, although the reunion of body and spirit will endure only for the messianic age, when the spirit will return to heaven.
Christianity has become, in turn, exactly what Jesus had rebelled against. In the Gay Science Nietzsche asks "And the Christians? Did they become Jews in this respect? Did they perhaps succeed?" The answer is 'yes,' as Nietzsche observes that "Christianity did aim to 'Judaize' the world."
All that happened has happened, came within the accordance with James Mark's reading of Nietzsche, as a result of Paul and the other "first Christians'" "need for . . . power" over others, forming a priestly caste, like the Jewish priestly caste before them, that has the "authority to pronounce that forgiveness, and thereby control the herd that feels the need of it." Nietzsche even goes so far to hint that Christianity was invented by the "first Christians" in revenge, by "their ignorance of superiority over ressentiment. For Nietzsche, this is the beginning of the downfall of Christianity: All the sick and sickly instinctively strive after a herd organization as a means of shaking off their dull displeasure and feeling of weakness. Moreover, Nietzsche blames the corruption of all churches, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant alike, on their institutionalization, as he observes that Christians are an unphilosophical race, that demands its [Christianity's] discipline to become 'moralized and comparatively humanized’. Further, Nietzsche asks, that if this is true, "How could God have permitted that?" Answering, [F]or this question the deranged reason of the little community [of early Christianity] found a downright terrifyingly absurd answer: God gave his Son for the forgiveness of sins, as a sacrifice. All at once it was over with the Gospel. Nietzsche responds, "what atrocious paganism.”
Next Nietzsche's most structured problem with Christianity is the ethical system that it promotes. Nietzsche's words show no mercy to Christianity, writing "In Christianity neither morality nor religions come into contact with reality at any point.” Even worse, he ranks liquor with Christianity as "the European narcotics." Nietzsche observes that Christians are "the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal." Following this, Nietzsche's psychology was broken into existential categories, like Aquinas and Kierkegaard before him, which ranked the beast of burden as the lowest form of human being, one who 'follows the crowd' and lives life according to the status quo, that is, a waste this is the Christian to Nietzsche. For example, the Christian has become, as a result of this institutionalized Christianity, "a soldier, a judge, and a patriot who knows nothing against non-resistance to evil"; in other words, the life Christians live, "under the cross," is fake, counterfeit, and gilded; that is, the way of life against which Jesus rebelled. Christian morality, then, is a twisting of "Jesus' teachings into a doctrine of morality."
What Nietzsche finds most unsettling about Christian ethics is its concern for denying the pleasures of life. "A Christian's thinking is perverted," Nietzsche critic William Hubben writes, “even when he humbles him, he does so only to be exalted," citing Luke 18:14 . . . “for everyone that exalts on him shall be abased. He that humbles him shall be exalted." Concluding that Christians' "only great delight is the mean and petty pleasure of condemning others." Further, critic John Evans states that Nietzsche was "disturbed" that "out of ressentiment and revenge, the early Christians sought power to perverse concepts of life denial and 'sin.'" Nietzsche's writings support these claims, writing on sexuality, the highest of pleasures: "Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it but degenerated into a vice." Again, "[I]t was only Christianity, with its ressentiment against life in its foundations, which made sexuality something impure: it threw the filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of life." According to Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche interpreted all Christian morality into the statement, "suffering is supposed to lead to a holy existence," and he could not accept this way of living. Furthermore, Nietzsche observed that only "martyrdom and the ascetic's slow destruction of his body were permitted" by Christianity as acceptable forms of suicide. In the end, Nietzsche gives up all hope of finding any good (qualities of the Übermensch) in Christianity, which has "waged war to the death against this higher type of man" and teaches "men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful." To Nietzsche, then, the institution of Christianity was "a radical betrayal of the life view that Jesus had espoused." Jesus, as a man, had "attempted to go 'beyond good and evil," however, his ideas were corrupted following his death.
Nietzsche will perhaps be remembered most of all for his philosophy of God, and more specifically, the Christian God. To Nietzsche, the Christian God like Christianity-is the God of the sick and the weak. Still, Nietzsche distinguishes the God of Christianity as the opposite of the God of Jesus, so far as to say that there cannot be any true God found in Christianity. To the Christian God, man is "God's monkey," whom God in his long eternities created for a pastime. As a result, Nietzsche concludes that "the Christian concept of God . . . is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on this earth." Nietzsche was obsessed, above all, with this area of philosophy, like "no other in history, and his obsession was entered on the death of God."
The "death of God" motif that was popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre in the twentieth century "harks back to Nietzsche, who first coined the expression." The following is Nietzsche's famous story of the "madman": Have you not heard of that madman that lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly? : "In seek God! In seek God!" -As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter . . . The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Where is God?" he cried; "In will tell you. We have killed him as you and me. All of us are his murderers, but how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? . . . Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him.
This, according to Nietzsche, is a message for the future, concluding "In have come too early, my time is not yet." Nietzsche puts this message into the voice of a madman, "whose message falls on deaf ears," as what he has to say is too shocking and comical for the crowd ('herd') to take seriously, but the madman has the last laugh, according to Nietzsche, as the madman is correct in what he has to say. Does this mean that God has literally died? Philosophers and theologians answer this question in many different ways, often dodging the answer. Critic John Mark answers, "it is really something that has happened to man; God has died because we no longer accept him." Existentialist Karl Jaspers wrote that "Nietzsche does not say 'There is no God,' or 'In do not believe in God,' but 'God is dead.' Many academic scholars, believe that Nietzsche was an atheist, who says that the idea of the Christian God, like Zeus and other Gods before, has died, in that humanity must find something more stable to rest and reassess its values upon. Episcopalian Bishop John Spong interprets Nietzsche's declaration that ‘God is dead’ as a sign that the Christian religion needs to declare their traditional theistic God dead or ‘unemployed’. Theologian Thomas Altizer answers that in the false Pauline ‘Christianity’ that Nietzsche has exposed, its centre, Jesus "is a dead and empty Christ who is the embodiment of the determining nothingness"; refusing to allow the living Jesus to arise as the nihilist that he was two millennia ago. Another theologian, Don Cupitt, writes that the death of God means that the characteristics of the God that has relevance to some post-modern society that shares characteristics of a human corpse and the dead's affect on human life. What is more, Zen monk and Buddhist theologian Nhat Hanh answers that the death of God is the essential ‘death of every concept we may have of God in order to experience God as a living reality directly’. While these possible interpretations may have been what the ‘death of God’ meant to Nietzsche, theologian Paul Tillich has gone so far as to call Nietzsche "the most candid of the Christian humanists." Their indirect effectuality seems less than are to what is seemingly unambiguously discontinued, as they are a comprehensive answer to be offered from neither theology nor philosophy.
In do not wish to baptize Nietzsche, least of mention, is that, In conclude that while Nietzsche's personal theological convictions are moot and many have debated what Nietzsche's statement "God is dead" means for Christians in the twentieth century, his opinions on Jesus of Nazareth and the Christian religion remain clear. The salient notion is that Nietzsche's treatment of the theistic Christian God is as an absurdity, the enemy of what the philosopher believes to be 'the good life.
In conclusion, Nietzsche clearly has pronounced separate judgements upon the man Jesus of Nazareth and the religion that is believed to be loosely based on Jesus' life, Christianity. To Nietzsche, Jesus was a great man worthy of respect, perhaps evens a Übermensch; Christianity, however, is corrupt insofar as the fathers of the church institutionalized the teachings of Jesus in an act of hostility toward the Jews. Furthermore, Nietzsche believes that Christianity has become the very establishment against which Jesus rebelled in Judaism: an already corrupt, stagnant, static, hierarchical religion. Finally, it cannot be deciphered whether Nietzsche accepted a god or not. If there is a God to Nietzsche, it would be above morality, would not impose ethics upon humans, would not judge on the basis of its own sacrifice, and would not deny human nature into -denial that is, the opposite of the Christian God. Nietzsche simply foresees him as the one who is replacing Jesus in a manner of successive revelation, predicting correctly that he, like Jesus, is a madman who has "come too early," who has and will continue to be misinterpreted and institutionalized incorrectly.
Once, again, have you not heard of that madman that lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, then running to the marketplace, and cried incessantly? "In seek God! In seek God." As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? Asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? Asked another, or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.
"Where is God?" He cried; "In will tell you. We have killed him -you and In. All of us are his murderers, but how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives, who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us-for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners. They, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "In have come too early," he said then; "My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder requires time; The light of the stars requires time; Deeds, are though done, but it still requires time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most-distant stars and yet they have done it themselves."
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem as antiquatedly set. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepultures of God?" (The Gay Science 1882, 1887).
In his book, The Antichrist, Nietzsche sets out to denounce and illegitimize not only Christianity it as a belief and a practice, but also the ethical-moral value system which modern western civilization has inherited from it. This book can be considered a further development of some of his ideas concerning Christianity that can be found in Beyond Good and Evil and in The Genealogy of Morals, particularly the idea that the present morality is an inversion of true, noble morality. An understanding of the main ideas in the latter works is therefore quite helpful in understanding and fully appreciating the ideas set forth in The Antichrist. One of the most important of these ideas is that Christianity has made people nihilistic and weak by regarding pity and related sentiments as the highest virtues. Here, just as in the Genealogy, Nietzsche traces the origin of these values to the ancient Jews who lived under Roman occupation, but here he puts them in terms of a reversal of their conception of God. He argues that the Jewish God was once one that embodied the noble virtues of a proud, powerful person, but when they became subjugated by the Romans, their God began to embody the "virtues" (more like sentiments) of an oppressed, resentful people, until it became something entirely alien to what it formerly had been.
Further in the book, after Nietzsche devotes a few passages to contrasting Buddhism with Christianity, he paints a picture of the Jesus of history as actually having lived a type of "Buddhistic" existence, and lambastes Paul particularly for turning this historically correct Jesus, for, Jesus, the "Nazarene," into Jesus the "Christ." Also, Nietzsche argues that the Christian moral and metaphysical principles he considers so decadent has infiltrated our philosophy, so much that philosophers unwittingly work to defend these principles even when God is removed from the hypothesis. The purpose of this paper is to expound and assess some of these important reproaches that Nietzsche raises against Christianity, in order to glean from them those elements that can be considered to have lasting significance. It should also be noted that The Antichrist is predominantly aphoristic work, so this paper will not attempt to tie these ideas of Nietzsche's together into a coherent system. To do so, in my opinion, would not do Nietzsche justice. Instead these ideas will be presented and examined as they appear in the work -ne by one and loosely associated.
Nietzsche begins by criticizing Christianity for denouncing and regarding as evil those basic instincts of human beings that are life-preserving and strength-promoting. In their place, Christianity maintains and advocates value which Nietzsche sees as life-negating or nihilistic, of which the most important is pity. Nietzsche writes: Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions that heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.
Pity, according to Nietzsche, is nothing less than the multiplication of suffering, in that it allows us to suffer along with those for whom we feel pity. It depresses us, sapping us of our strength and will to power. It is interesting to note that the German word for pity it, Mitleid, literally means "suffering with" (leid = pain, suffering + mit = with). So to feel pity for someone is simply to suffer along with them, as Nietzsche sees it. It also promotes the preservation of those whom nature has selected for destruction, or in other words, those who Nietzsche calls "failures." This preservation of failures, he argues, makes the overall picture of life look decadent, in that it becomes filled with weak and retrograde individuals. Pity, then, has a twofold effect for Nietzsche, since it both multiplies suffering and leads to the preservation of those who would cause us this suffering as the objects of our pity. Ultimately, pity is nihilism put into practice, according to Nietzsche, since it makes life simply seem more miserable and decadent and therefore more worthy of negation it. Nietzsche does not really develop this conception of pity any farther. As it stands, it seems to be explicitly problematic. Does his conception of pity mean to include compassion and sympathy as well? Can these words be used interchangeably? The German word for compassion is Mitleid as well, so it is possible that Nietzsche is using them interchangeably. The German word for sympathy, however, is Mitgefhl, which means "feeling with." Perhaps Nietzsche is confusing pity with compassion and sympathy. Pity would seem to have a more negative connotation, in that it is a suffering-with that does not achieve anything; a waste of emotional energy toward those who are beyond help, in other words. Sympathy and compassion, as In understand the terms, seem to lean more toward having an understanding (a "feeling-with") of what someone is suffering through and being in a position to help that person. In take Nietzsche to be using (maybe misusing) these terms interchangeably, however, since he uses the word sympathy (Mitgefühl) in other works in very similar contexts.
To Nietzsche, the Christian conception of God is one of the most decadent and contradictory of any type that has ever been conceived, he writes: The Christian conception of God-God as god of the sick, God as a spider, Godas spirit-is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever acquired on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types. God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God-the formula for every slander against "this world," for every lie about the "beyond" God-the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness means more than nothingness it and therefore is pronounced metaphysically. Nietzsche is interested in showing how the God of Israel, that is, the God of the Old Testament, was at the time a God of a very proud and powerful Jewish people. This is a sustaining conception of God, than the Christian one, according to Nietzsche, in that it was the Jew's own God-for them only. This God was conceived of as a being to whom some proud people could give thanks for their power and. Assuredness, and it was a manifestation of the Jews' own -proclaimed virtues. The ancient Jews ascribed both the good and the bad to their God, and in that respect it was consistent with nature, both helping and harming. When the Jews found themselves oppressed by Rome during the occupation of Palestine, however, with their freedom, power, and pride stripped from them, their God required a change that was reflective of their predicament. Instead of having a God that embodied the noble virtues of some proud and powerful people, as it once did, the God of the Jews developed into one that embodied the sentiments of an oppressed, resentful, and ineffective group.
It became a God of people who were trying to preserve themselves at any cost, even if that cost were the inversion of their own noble values. They transformed their God into a God of the weak, the poor, and the oppressed, making a virtue out of the necessity of their own condition. Want of revenge on their enemies, by any and the only means possible for them psychologically prompted the Jews to elevate their type of God to the point at which it became a God for everyone. That is to say, that their God became the one, true God, to whom everyone was held accountably. It also became a God that was all good, incapable of doing anything harmful, while the God of their enemies and oppressors became evil-in effect, the Devil. This is a very unhealthy type of God, according to Nietzsche, in that it "degenerates step by step into a mere symbol, a staff for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he becomes the God of the poor, the sinners, and the sick better than anyone else, and the attribute ‘Saviour’ or ‘Redeemer’ remains in the end as the one essential attribute of divinity . . . .”
A God such as this can thus have an appeal to any group of people who are in a state of subjugation. Yet unlike the pagan Gods of strong, proud people, this type of God, as Nietzsche points out, remains in the state in which it was conceived (a God of the sick and weak), despite how strong a following it receives. It receives such a strong following because those who are from the ghettos, slums, and hospitals of the world, are the masses (There was no middle class in ancient Palestine; there were only the more elite subjugator and the subjugated masses). The God for ‘everyone’, is overwhelming among those who live in conditions of powerlessness and misery, in that it allows them to deny their present existence in favour of a better one that is to come, in an appeal to "redemption" in a world beyond. Therefore, this God-type becomes a life-denying one, in that it represents a denial of "this" life, as opposed to the healthy yes-saying, life-affirming, consistent-with-nature God of the ancient Jews. This particular type of God is therefore one that is ultimately nihilistic, involving the denial and rejection of the world and everything in it as sinful and decadent. Nature, flesh, and instinct thus become ever more devalued until they reach a point at which nature is seen as a cesspool, the flesh is mortified, and instincts are put in terms of evil "temptations." The concept of God continues to "deteriorate," as Nietzsche terms it, until what ultimately remains are a conception of God as "pure spirit," or in other words, as something to be aware among the integrally immaterial and non-corporeal, just as this is held up as an ideal form of existence. Nietzsche simply thinks of this idea of pure spirit as pure "nothingness," in that it is merely an absurd, contradictory-to-nature postulation. To him, it ultimately represents nihilism and nothing less.
These claims of Nietzsche's are difficult to argue against, because Nietzsche does not really use much in the way of an argument here to arrive at these claims. One is to concur of what has already confronted the reading scribes of his Genealogy of Morals in order to understand better what is going on in these passages. The Genealogy actually does have a sustained argument for claims that are intimately related to the ones above that are found in The Antichrist. This argument deals with how the slave class (Jews), out of hatred and resentment, got their revenge on the noble class (Romans) by shaming them into accepting the slave class' morality. This is one of Nietzsche's most important claims, and it is essential to an understanding of The Antichrist. Nietzsche argues for this claim in the Genealogy by giving an account of the origins of the words ‘good' and ‘bad' and ‘good' and ‘evil'. In their etymological senses, the terms "moral" and "ethical" mean literally "common" and "ordinary." The etymological origin of the word "good," according to Nietzsche, reveals that it once meant "privileged," "aristocratic," "with a soul of high order," etc., and that "bad" originally meant "common," "low," and "plebeian." Even the German word schlecht, which means "badly," is akin to schlicht, which means "plain" or "simple." Furthermore, the word’s schlechthin und schlechtweg literally means "simply" or "downright." This was the language of the aristocratic upper classes in classical times, whom Nietzsche calls the noble, or master class. The word "bad" was used by the master class, without any moral or ethical connotations, simply to refer and to differentiate them from common people, whom Nietzsche refers to as the slave class. The master class calls them "good," due to their apparently superior social standing, or in other words, "good" was simply a term for those things that they were, fierce, proud, brave, and noble. The lower class, or the slave class, on the other hand, developed their own moral language, which is that of the language of "good" and "evil." The anger and hatred that the slave class had for the master class had no outlet, or in other words their anger was impotent, due to their physical and political powerlessness. Nietzsche calls this the anger of ressentiment. The only way the slave class could get their revenge on the master class was to accept nothing less than a complete revaluation of the master class' values. The Jews, who epitomized the "priestly" way of life, according to Nietzsche, were the ones who began what he calls the "slave revolt in morality," which inverted the "aristocratic value equation (good=powerful=beautiful =happy=beloved of God)," to make a good out of their own station in life, and an evil out of the station of their enemies -he objects of their impotent anger and revenge. The slave class accomplished this effect by turning "good" and "bad" into terms which not only made reference to one's political station in life, but also pointed to one's soul and depth as a person.
Thus, the language of "good" and "bad," which was originally used for the purpose of amorally denoting one's station in life, was reevaluated into the language of "good" and "evil," in which what is "good" is common, ordinary, poor, and familiar, and what is "evil" is damnable, unfamiliar, cruel, godless, accursed, and unblessed. In effect, the master class, over the last two thousand years, has been "poisoned" and shamed by the slave class and its language of "good" and "evil" into accepting the inversion of their own noble values, and thus the morality of the slave class, namely that which is "common," "ordinary," and "familiar," is the one that prevails today. From the above argument, understanding how Nietzsche claims that the subjugated Jews transformed their once yes-saying God into the nay-saying God of ressentiment and hatred is easier. This argument seems to ring true in many ways, but it is nevertheless based on the psychological presupposition that human beings are always seeking power and mastery over others, or in other words, that they are always exerting their "will to power," as Nietzsche calls it. In this way, Nietzsche sees the Jews as cunningly having found a way to regain power over their oppressors psychologically by shaming them with the use of the language of good and evil. This assessment goes for what is to follow below as well.
As he demonstrates, Nietzsche is careful not to confuse Buddhism with Christianity in his criticisms. Though he believes that both religions are nihilistic and decadent, he regards Buddhism as a far healthier and more realistic approach. In contrast to the Christian, who is always trying to avoid sin, the Buddhist's main goal is to reduce suffering it. The latter does not fall into the same trap as Christianity does, according to Nietzsche, do not carry any moral presuppositions. It has long abandoned them, seeing them as mere deceptions. The Buddhist is therefore not engaged in the practice of moralizing and making judgments about others. A Buddhist achieves this reduction of suffering by living a passive, non-combatanting lifestyle. He does not become angry or resentful, no matter what transgressions someone has assertively enacted against him. Neither does he worry about him nor others. He takes measures that will help him to avoid exciting his senses, while the Christian, on the other hand, does just the opposite through living an ascetic lifestyle and maintaining an emotionally charged relationship with his God through prayer. The Buddhist, in his avoidance of suffering, simply aims to maintain its steady state of peace, calm, and mildness in his lifestyle and temperament. It is a very important point that in pursuing this aim, the Buddhist actually succeeds, whereas the Christian does not succeed in removing sin, and is thus always in a state of wanting "redemption" and "forgiveness," never attaining the "grace" of God that he so desires. The Buddhist is therefore able to achieve a sort of peace and tranquillity on earth.
This idea is vital, in that it relates directly with Nietzsche's conception of the historical Jesus. Nietzsche paints a picture of the Jesus of history for being a true evangel, which means that he did not subscribe to the concepts of guilt, punishment, and reward. He did not engage in faith, but only in actions, and these actions prescribed a way of life that Nietzsche sees as Buddhistic. The evangel does not get angry, does not pass judgment, and does neither he feel any hatred nor resentment for his enemies. He rejected the whole idea of sin and repentance, and believed that this evangelical way of life was divine in it, closing the gap between man and God so much that it is God, according to Nietzsche. Therefore, he saw prayer, faith, and redemption as farcical, instead believing that the "kingdom of heaven" is a state of mind that can be experienced on earth by living this type of peaceful, judgment-suspending existence, free from worry, guilt, and anger. Nietzsche argues that this was the life of Jesus and nothing more, and this way of life was the "glad tidings" which he brought. Nietzsche writes: The "bringer of glad tidings" died as he had lived, as he had taught-not to "redeem men" but to show how one must live. This practice is his legacy to humanity: his behaviour before the judges, before the catch poles, before the accusers and all kinds of slander and scorn-his behaviour on the cross. He does not resist, he does not defend his right, he takes no step that might ward off the worst; on the contrary, he provokes it. He begs, he suffers, he loves with those, in those, who do him evil. Not to resist, not to be angry, not to hold responsible-but to resist not even the evil one-to love him.
This conception of Jesus is entirely alien to the one that the church has given us. For the creation and dissemination of this misconception, Nietzsche blames Paul. He also blames Jesus' immediate followers as well. Once Jesus had been executed, according to Nietzsche, his followers could not come to grips with the shock of his sudden loss. Filled with a want of revenge, they wanted to know who killed him and why. They determined that the rulers of the existing Jewish order had killed him because his doctrine went against that order. Not wanting his death to have been in vain, they saw him as a rebel against the Jewish status quo in the same way that they saw themselves as such. In this way, argues Nietzsche, his followers completely misunderstood him. The truly "evangelic" thing to do, he says, would have been to forgive his death instead, or to die in the like manner without judgment or need of vindication. However, Jesus' followers, resentful about his loss, wanted vengeance upon those of the existing Jewish order. The way that they accomplished this vengeance is the same as the way in which the Jews exacted their revenge on their Roman oppressors. They considered Jesus to be the Messiah of whom they were foretold by Jewish scripture, and in this way they elevated him to divine status--as the Son of God (since he referred to him metaphorically as a "child of God"). Faced with the question of how God could allow Jesus' death to occur, they came up with the idea that God had sent down his own Son as a sacrifice for their sins, as a sacrifice of the guiltless for the sins of the guilty, even though Jesus him refused to engage in feeling guilt. They then used the figure of Jesus and their misunderstanding of his doctrine of the "kingdom of God" for making judgments against their enemies in the existing Jewish order, just as the Jews had turned their God into something universal for the purpose of passing judgment on the Romans: On the other hand, the frenzied veneration of these totally unhinged souls no longer endured the evangelic conception of everybody's equal right to be a child of God, as Jesus had taught: it was their revenge to elevate Jesus extravagantly, to sever him from themselves-precisely as the Jews had formerly, out of revenge against their enemies, severed their God from themselves and elevated him. The one God and the one Son of God-both products of resentment.
The figure of Paul, according to Nietzsche, exacerbated this misunderstanding of Jesus' teachings even further. In fact, that is an understatement. In this immortalized figure of crucified Jesus, Paul, with his "priestly" instincts, saw a way to gain power by forming "herds," as Nietzsche puts it. He completely rewrote the history of Jesus' life and Christianity for his own purposes, adding the doctrines of the resurrection, the immaculate conception, and the idea of personal as a reward. Nietzsche attributes Paul's efforts to the hatred and ressentiment of the priestly class, and refers to Paul as the "dysangelist," or in other words, the "bringer of ill tidings." After Paul, the life of Jesus had been turned into something completely alien and antithetical to what it actually was. Again, this theory of Nietzsche's rests on the assumption that humans are in essence motivated by a will to power. Historical evidence concerning the historical Jesus is quite lacking in Nietzsche's account; in that, it relies on a psychological profile of those who participated in this historical scene. However, this psychological analysis seems to present a scenario that is at least conceivable--especially more so than the idea of an immaculate conception and resurrection. In think Nietzsche takes the Buddhistic element of Jesus too far, however. He provides too specifically an account of Jesus' lifestyle and philosophical persuasions without any evidence. It is still quite possible that Jesus could have simply been a more noteworthy rebel against the Romans and the Jewish status quo. More historical evidence would seem to be in order, but Nietzsche's account remains very compelling without it. Its profound significance lies in the fact that in it, Nietzsche has the courage and honesty to show us what, in his and every non-Christian's eyes, is far more likely to have been the case.
Nietzsche is also concerned with how deeply these decadent Christian values have ingrained themselves in our social practices and presuppositions. He especially laments how it has infiltrated the study of philosophy, particularly German philosophy. As Nietzsche argues, he sees modern philosophy as having "theologians' blood in its veins," saying whom we consider our antithesis is necessary: it is the theologians and whatever has theologians' blood in its veins-and that includes our whole philosophy.
Nietzsche argues that Christianity has poisoned philosophy with this nihilistic rejection of the body in favour of pure spirit. He compares the idealist philosopher with the priest, in that the former reduces everything in the world to idea, so that the physical world does not really exist. Figures such as Georg Hegel have done exactly this sort of thing, and Nietzsche is especially critical of German philosophy, both for its idealists’ tendencies and its conception of morality-both of which can be traced to this theologian's instinct. Nietzsche blames Germany's heavy Protestant tradition for the corruption of philosophy, and he criticizes Kant especially for being the latest, "greatest" philosopher to continue this corruption. Kant denies that the physical world can be apprehended directly (the world of noemenon) by the senses, and in this respect he is not a strict idealist, save a phenomenalist. What is meant by this is that all we can perceive are phenomenon, which appear to us as ideas, and the physical (noemenal) world is something that we can never directly observe. Kant's system does not deny that the physical world exists, but it denies that it exists as we know it, and that is enough for Nietzsche to criticize him. One can understand, however, how Nietzsche sees the theologian's blood running through Kant's veins, in that Kant sees the physical world as mere phenomenon -phantom reality. Nietzsche also criticizes Kant for finding a way to maintain a theoretical justification for morality-the Christian morality-while removing God from the picture, namely the Categorical Imperative. Nietzsche rejects this system as one that turns people into automatons. He claims that a virtue must be one of the people's own inventions, not an abstract "duty" in-it, which must be followed universally for its own sake. If the people do not follow its own virtues and do its own duty, he argues, it will perish. What Nietzsche seems to be getting at is that people simply do what they need to do to thrive and preserve themselves, and as explained earlier, different people find themselves having to adapt to different circumstances, such as the Jews did under Roman occupation. Their virtues and duties had to change according to their situation. This is what Kant means when he says that "Kant's categorical imperative endangered life it!"8 Nietzsche then goes on to denounce Kant's deontologicalism it: An action demanded by the instinct of life is proved to be right by the pleasure that accompanies it; yet this nihilist with his Christian dogmatic entrails considered pleasure an objection. What could destroy us more quickly than working, thinking, and feeling without any inner necessity, without any deeply personal choice, without pleasure-as an automaton of "duty?” This is the very recipe for decadence, even for idiocy. Kant became an idiot, and this man was contemporary of Goethe! This catastrophic spider was considered the German philosopher-he still is.
Kant, in this way, also goes against nature with his system of morality, according to Nietzsche. It is simply a Christian God's "Thou shalt" disguised by a secular, theoretical philosophy, or as Nietzsche would see it, it is borne of the theologian's instinct. Any philosophy student can see where Nietzsche gets these ideas from, and in most respects, he seems to be right about this. However, not all of the nihilistic elements of philosophy have their roots in Christianity. Western philosophy has a fundamental inheritance from Plato, who also, as Nietzsche is surely aware, rejects the physical world. He does this not because he thinks of it as sinful, but because he thinks it is ultimately only shadows of reality. Instead, Plato favours the world of the Forms, in which the Forms are paradigms of all objects and concepts that can be found in the physical, sensory world in which we presently live. Plato favours this other world because the physical world is in a constant state of flux, he argues. Since we cannot have knowledge of something that is always changing, as he claims, there can be no real knowledge of anything in the physical world. Knowledge then, for Plato, can only be possible in this other world through contemplation of the Forms, since these Forms are unchanging. Therefore, western post-Socratic philosophy began with a rejection of the physical world, and this rejection also constitutes a large, if not major source of the nihilism in western philosophy about which Nietzsche so often complains.
To refute of which is the claim that Plato and Nietzsche are at opposite poles regarding the treatment of the non-rational elements of the soul, and argue that, instead, they share a complex and psychologically rich view of the role of reason toward the appetites and the emotions. My argument makes use of the Freudian distinction between sublimation, i.e., the re-channelling of certain undesirable appetitive and emotional forces toward more beneficial ends, and repression. In show that both Plato and Nietzsche argue in favour of sublimation and against repression of the non-rational elements of the soul.
Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is often seen as the antitheses of Plato’s for at least the following reason: Plato’s concept of psychic harmony, i.e., the state that it is best for the soul to be in, is said to involve repression of the non-rational elements of the soul (the thumos and the appetitive part) by reason. This repression, in Nietzschean terms, can be classified as a form of asceticism, and Nietzsche is seen as rejecting all forms of asceticism. In will argue in the following sections that this interpretation relies on a misunderstanding of both Plato and Nietzsche, in that it is neither true that Plato believes repression to be reason’s main way of controlling the non-rational parts of the soul, nor that Nietzsche rejects all forms of rational control over one’s character. In this section, however, In want to highlight these passages in which Plato and Nietzsche say things that could be misinterpreted in the way In have outlined, i.e., what lesser truths would make one believe that the interpretation as a whole is correct.
It would be false to claim that Plato cannot, and has not been interpreted as claiming that reason should repress the appetites. Annas, in her Companion to Plato’s Republic writes the following: [. . . .] Reason as Plato conceives it will decide for the whole soul in a way that does not take the ends of the other parts as given but may involve suppressing or restraining them
The end of the rational part, according to Plato, is to decide on behalf of the whole soul what is good for it, and make sure that it pursues only those ends. In the metaphor of the soul in which the rational part is a little man, the thumos a lion, and the appetitive part a many-headed beast, Plato tells us that "all our actions and words should tend to give the man within us complete domination over the entire man, and make him take charge of the many-headed beast." We may read this as meaning that the rational part should repress the appetitive part, and curb the thumos so that it only acts as reason would have it act. However, as In will argue, in this mis-reading, all we should in fact read in Plato’s proposal, is that reason should control the appetites and the thumos, but control them by means other than repression.
Nietzsche supposed the rejection of asceticism, and all forms of control over the elements of one’s character, can be deduced from many passages. At this point as we occupy of a particular surface in space and time, whose manifesting inclinations of force fields and atomizations are combining quality standards whose presence is awaiting to the future, however, what seems more important and, perhaps, relevantly significant are the contributions that follow: At which time In abhor all those moralities that say ‘do not do this! Renounce! Overcome your: Those who command man first of all and above all to gain control of him thus afflict him with a particular disease; Namely, a constant irritability in the face of natural stirring and inclinations - as it were, a kind of itching. People like St. Paul have an evil eye for the passions: all they know of the passions is what is dirty, disfiguring, and heartbreaking; hence their idealistic tendencies aim at the annihilation of the passions, and they find perfect purity in the divine.
These passages contrive to give us the following impression of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy, i.e., that Nietzsche stands up for the passions, and other natural stirrings and inclinations against moralists who want to annihilate them, overcome, renounce, or control them. If we add this up to the above interpretation of Plato, then concluding that Plato is just the kind of philosopher Nietzsche is naturals’ outcry denounces -and in fact there are many passages in which Nietzsche does denounce Plato, sometimes just for this reason.
That this interpretation of Nietzsche as rejecting control of the non-rational parts of the soul is misleading, in that although it is true that Nietzsche rejects repression as a means of controlling those parts, he does not reject all forms of control, quite the contrary. Together with my argument in that Plato does not believe the appetitive part should be repressed, this will refute the claim that Nietzsche and Plato’s treatment of the non-rational parts of the soul are opposed, or significantly different. A need to introduce certain concepts that are useful in ascertaining the proper meaning of Plato and Nietzsche’s claims regarding the control of the soul by reason.
The preceding section highlighted the sources of the interpretations of Nietzsche and Plato’s positions on the treatment of the irrational parts of the soul as opposite. Plato, it has been said, believes that we should repress these elements or else enlist some of them on the side of reason to repress the others. Nietzsche on the other hand is said to have believed that all parts of our character are of equal value, and hence that we should get rid of nothing, but on the contrary, let all our ‘instincts’ rule us. This is an oversimplified view, but it expresses best the common belief among philosophers that Plato and Nietzsche held radically different views regarding the role of reason and of the non-rational elements of the soul. In believe this view is mistaken: Not just in its exaggerated form, but in any form that contains the claim that Plato and Nietzsche disagreed significantly as to whether and how we should gain rational control over the non-rational elements of our souls.
The concept we need most here is that of sublimation (sublimieren in German - a concept that, incidentally, was introduced by Goethe before its meaning was developed more fully by Freud). It means the redirection of forces impinged upon impulses under which are highly objective, that is, if one were taken anthelmintically, than inexpediently, in that to another spells of one, and to society. In order to understand sublimation, however, we need to spell out two more Freudian concepts, of ‘impulse’ and ‘repression’. An impulse (Trieb: Usually erroneously translated as ‘instinct’) is a force, or pressure the goal of which is (sexual) satisfaction of some kind or other (e.g., oral) which it attains by discharging it on some object. The force is the driving aspect of the impulse, ‘the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work that it represents’.
Freud was interested in two types of impulsive behaviours, repression, and sublimation. Both exist as a means of dealing with problematic impulses, i.e., impulses that we cannot live within society, that we are ashamed of, that would be disapproved of by others, that threatens our relationships with others. Repression presupposes two of the simplest: to repress an impulse is to prevent it from achieving its aim, i.e., satisfaction. The impulse is driven back, shut out, rejected, in no particular direction. As Freud argued, this -denial is far from being the most effective manner of dealing with violent unwanted impulse. In that, if we do not look atop to whatever one is to push them, then one will not know from where they are likely to come back. They will come back, just as the heads on the multi-headed monster of the Republic keep growing back with different shapes, as pathological symptoms.
The second mechanism for dealing with troublesome impulses is sublimation. When an impulse is sublimated, it is not prevented from reaching its satisfaction, but it is made to reach via a different route from that which it would naturally follow, i.e., by settling for its satisfaction on a different object. In Freud’s words: [Sublimation] enables excessively strong excitations arising from particular sources of sexuality to find an outlet and use in other fields, so that a considerable increase in psychological efficiency results from a disposition that is it perilous. Here we have one of the origins of artistic creativity - and, according to the completeness or incompleteness of the sublimation, a characterological analysis of a highly gifted individual. Freud saw sublimation as society’s means of achieving impulsive renunciation without appealing to repression. Still, more important, he saw it as the individual’s means of achieving rational control over the dark forces of her unconscious mind. Sublimation is the work of the ego, the rational , and what it achieves is ‘a defusion of the instincts, and a liberation of the aggressive instincts in the superego’. Freud thought sublimation was preferable to repression because it brings about greater rational control.
Much more could be said about Freud’s work on the human soul, and in particular, on his concept of sublimation. However, In shall now leave Freud to return to Plato and Nietzsche, and show how his concepts of sublimation and repression can be used to understand these two philosophers’ moral psychologies not as opposed, but on the contrary, both arguing along similar and very plausible lines.
Let us turn again to the metaphor of the tripartite soul as the joining of a multi-headed beast, a lion, and a little man. In suggested in that reading Plato’s claim that we should aim to achieve was wrong ‘complete dominion’ of reason over the soul as a claim that reason should repress the other parts. Reading the passage in its entirety can vindicate this suggestion in part simply. At 589ab Plato writes, And on the other hand, he who says that justice is the more profitable affirms that all our actions and words should tend to give the man within us complete dominion over the entire man and make him take charge of the many-headed beast -like a farmer who cherishes and adapts in the cultivated plants but checks the growth of the wild - and he will make an ally of the lion’s nature, and caring for all the beasts alike will at first make friends, in and of one another and to him, and so foster their growth.
This passage is ambiguous, but what should stand out, as well as the claim that reason must dominate the soul, is to mention that one should care for one’s appetitive part, and foster its growth. This is surely not consistent with the claim that one should repress it. However, Plato’s meaning is unclear, and in order to make sense of the metaphor of the farmer, we need to look at Plato’s other recommendations as to how reason should manifest its dominion. The clearest, In believe, is to be found in Plato’s portrait of the reasonable man at. Nevertheless, when, In suppose, a man’s condition is healthy and sober, and he goes to sleep after arousing his rational part and entertaining it with fair words and thoughts, and attaining to clear -consciousness, while he has neither starved nor indulged to repletion his appetitive part, so that it may be lulled to sleep and not disturb the better part by its pleasure or pain . . .
The reasonable man -, i.e., the man whose soul is governed by the rational part, in other words, the just man - as he is portrayed in Book Nine of the Republic, does not indulge nor starve his appetitive part. This is why his sleep, unlike the tyrant’s, is undisturbed by violent dreams. If reason is not in control and if the appetites are not lulled to sleep, then the ‘terrible, fierce and lawless broods of desires’ which exists ‘in every one of us, even in some reputed most respectable’ will reveal themselves in our sleep as ‘lawless’ dreams.
This very Freudian analysis tells us the following, appetites, which are not controlled by reason, are likely to come back and disturb us in our sleep as violent dreams. Still, the control that reasons must exert is not repression: we have to make sure that the lawless appetites are neither indulged nor starved, and what is repression but the starving of impulses, i.e., preventing them from ever being satisfied? Repression, or starvation of the appetites, Plato tells us, is as much the cause of tyrannical behaviour patterns as indulging appetites. The ‘lawless pleasures and appetites’ should not be repressed, but ‘controlled by the laws and the better desires in alliance with reason.
That the rational control Plato proposes is not a repressive kind is one thing, but what else is it, and do we have grounds for supposing that it is a kind of sublimation? In following, it would not be far fetched to propose that he does believe we should sublimate the appetites that need to be controlled.
Does Plato use the vocabulary of sublimation when he defines psychic harmony? Surely he does in the case of the thumos. The emotions that are so unruly in children ('for they are from their enactable birth cradles -full of rage and high spirits', are brought to 'marshal themselves on the side of reason, and this through 'the blending of music and gymnastics that will render them concordant, intensifying and fostering the one [reason] with fair words and teachings, and relaxing and sobering and making gently the other by harmony and rhythm' The idea that the appetites should be sublimated is present elsewhere in the Republic "But, again, we surely are aware that when in a man the desires incline strongly to any-one thing, they are weakened for other things. It is as if the stream had been diverted into another channel. So when a man's desires have been taught to flow in the channel of learning and all that sort of thing, they will be concerned, In presume, with the pleasures of the soul in it, and will be indifferent to those of which the body is the instrument if the man is true and not a sham philosopher."
Plato seems to accept the following: the lawless appetites should be controlled and prevented from ruling the soul, but at the same time, they should not be repressed, i.e., extinguished. Their motivational force should be redirected so that it assists the whole soul in its pursuit of the Good. More precisely, it seems that Plato is arguing that bodily impulses can be sublimated through philosophy, i.e., that sexual desires, for instance, will be replaced, to a degree at least, by desires to acquire philosophical knowledge.
We can conclude this section by answering the initial challenge as follows. It is not the case that Psychic harmony involves the repression of a whole genus of desires: Plato makes it clear that the appetites of the reasonable man must neither be starved nor over-indulged. He believes control is necessary, but preferably, a creative type of control, i.e., not one that seeks to extinguish appetitive or emotional drives, but one that sublimates them, transforms them into drives of a similar but more beneficial nature.
Having argued that Plato does not believe that unruly impulses should be repressed, but instead advocate a kind of control that we can properly refer to as sublimation in the Freudian sense of that term, but we must now turn to the claim that Nietzsche rejects all kinds of control of the non-rational elements of the soul as forms of asceticism, and therefore repression. In shall argue that Nietzsche, like Plato, believes that a kind of control like sublimation is both necessary and beneficial
There is no question that Nietzsche rejects repression as unhealthy - as verily does Plato - nor that he claims that philosophers in general, and Plato and Socrates in particular favour a certain kind of asceticism. However, it does not follow that Nietzsche does not believe some control of the desires is necessary. Although sublimation is incompatible with repression - an impulse cannot be redirected in other channels if it is repressed (a criminal cannot be rehabilitated if he is executed) - it can be seen as some kind of control, and is thus quite compatible with the pursuit of psychic harmony as described by Plato. In particular, one passage from Daybreak shows how close the two philosophers really are regarding the treatment of appetites, which threaten psychic health: one already stands before the irrefutable insight that there exists no essential difference between criminals and the insane [ . . . ] One should place before him quite clearly the possibility and the means of becoming cured (the extinction, transformation, sublimations of this [tyrannical] drive)
That Nietzsche mentions extinction along with sublimation or transformation, does not mean that he sees repression as a good general policy any more than Plato does. Here he is talking about the tyrannical drive of the criminal. Had that drive not been allowed to become tyrannical, (and that this kind of prevention need not appeal to repression but may be achieved through sublimation) it would not need to be extinguished.
Nietzsche also believes that sublimation is the explanation for the existence of asceticism. Cruel impulses are sublimated through ressentiment and bad conscience and give birth to ascetic impulses. Desires to murder, arson, rape and torture are replaced by desires for -castigation. Civilization seeks to prevent the gratification of the cruel instincts (for obvious reasons), and by introducing the ideas of responsibility for one's actions and guilt, helps to turn these instincts against themselves, i.e., transform desires to hurt others into desires to hurt one.
There be of three containing comments on the Genealogy as pertaining to Nietzsche’s concerns with the origins of morality and culturally sublimated expressions of drives as well as Federn’s comment that Nietzsche ‘was the first to discover the significance of abreaction, of repression, of flight into illness, of the instincts - and some comments speculating on Nietzsche’s personality a relevant psychodynamic.
Of the Genealogy, ‘guilt, bad conscience and the like, explores, among other things, how at a critical juncture in the development of civilization an morality, drives that had been more freely expressed were constrained and turned inward. This led to the development of the ‘base conscience’ an the ‘entire inner word’ [which] originally thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended it, acquire depth, breadth, and height. In, What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideas’ were to explore of how bad conscience or quilt is appropriated by the ascetic priest, in the service of comforting, and thus ensuring the obedience of the vulnerable ‘herd’. The ascetic priest exercising his own will to power (such as by imposing his interpretations on the minds of others) provides meaning and justification in for what would otherwise be meaningless suffering. He provides comfort of sorts with a realm of existence that is divine , holy, pure, and true. Nonetheless, the will to power may have had certain cosmological and mythic dimensions for Nietzsche, but the concept is also rooted in psychology.
In addition to Nietzsche writing specifically of the sublimation of the secular drive, the will to power and its vicissitude drives, particularly in the form of appropriation and incorporation. As Staten points out, this notion of the primitive will to power is similar to Freud’s idea in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego according to which ‘identification [is] the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person . . . It behaves like a derivation of the first oral phase for a prize is assimilated by eating. It would appear that Nietzsche goes a step further than Freud in one of his notes when he writes: ‘Nourishment - is only derivative, the original phenomenon is, to desire to incorporate everything.’ Nietzschean will to power never take place without a pleasurable excitation that there is no reason not to call erotic.
Nietzsche condemns those moralities that condemn life,’the morality that would un man’. And we can note that his highest affirmation includes ‘a yes-saying. . . . even to quilt, whereby there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between the growing capacity to say, ‘Yes, thus shall In will it’ it would do above all else, to create beyond it. The will In a creator, and all it was is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident - until the creative will says to it: ‘But thus In shall will it, the creative says to it, ‘But thus In will, thus shall In will it.
In saying ‘yes’ to eternal recurrence as related to Nietzsche’s idea of becoming who one is. It is a saying ‘yes’ to what one is and has stilled: It is to identify one with all of one’s actions, to see hat everting one does (what one become) is what one is. In the ideal case it is also to fit all this into a coherent whole and to want to be everything that one is: It is to give style to one’s character, to be, in becoming, least of mention, one cannot accomplish the Nietzschean redemption without knowing and choosing who one is: To decide that some past event was a benefit presupposes and commits me to certain views as to who In am, what my dominant desires and goals are now. Still to point out, that affirming eternal decree involves an affirmation of life, of the intrinsic whole of life in opposition to the ascetic ideal, in that ‘Nietzsche’s ideals to love the whole process enough that one is willing to relive eternally been those parts of it that one does not and cannot live. That the ‘reason for wishing most fervently the repetition of each’, is that one.
While Nietzsche is quite willing, as in his psychological explorations, to draw distinction between ‘deeper’ realities in relation to ‘surface’ appearances, he also argue that on a fundamental level one cannot draw a distinction between a merely apparent world and a perspective-free true factual world. The ‘deeper’ realities he discovered cannot be regarded as facts-in-themselves or anything else of the kind that would be free of embeddedness in human schemes, practices, theories, and interpretations. Of perspectival seeing and knowing.
Although Nietzsche calls into question the absolute value of truth, vales the illusion (the truthful illusions) of art that a stimulant to life, values. Masks, veils and even the creative lie, he also answers the call of truth. Truth calls to us tempts us to unveil her. If we have integrity we will say ‘Yes’ to the hardest service, surrounding much that we held dear, inclining our wishes ‘not to see . . . [what]. one does’. When the unveiling takes place we come upon not truth (or woman) in-it but an appearance which is reality by way of a particular perspective. One might regard this situation as, among other possibilities, and opportunity for creative play of the interpretive capacities, for the creating and destroying of play, for a creative sublimation of the will to power. But none of this regarded as truth. What it does involve, in the words of Linda Alcoff, is that for Nietzsche ‘neither a noumenal realm nor a historical synthesis exists to provide an absolute criterion of adjudication for competing truth claims and perhaps what is most important, Nietzsche introduces the notion that truth is a kind of human practice, Alcoff also suggests that ‘perspectives are to be judged not on their relation to the absolute but on the basis of their effects in specific area. For Alcoff, this entails ‘local pragmatic’ truths even though Nietzsche does posit trans-historical truth claims such as his claim regarding the will to power. Nietzsche is concerned with what corresponds to or fits the facts, but such fact are not established without as human contribution, without interpretation. Of course for those for whom the term ‘fact’ should entail before the ‘factum brutum’ there may be an objection to their use of such terms as ‘fact’, ‘reality’, etc., in such a context.
Justifiably for Nietzsche’s bad conscience offers relief n from as deeper, truer guilt or fear of abandonment but from the hopelessness, helplessness, depression, etc., that would exist in the face of the inability to direct one’s instincts, one ‘s will to power, one’s freedom, outward into an upon the world. But also recall the passage in which Nietzsche suggests that ‘this man of the bad conscience . . . apprehend in ‘God’ the ultimate antithesis o of hoi own ineluctable animal instincts, and he reinterprets these instincts themselves as a form of guilt before God (his hostility, rebellion, insurrection against the Lord, the father, the primal ancestor and origin of the world.) For Nietzsche this bad conscience is not rooted or ground in a primal rebellious and hostile deed, rather, it is grounded in splitting off from the ineluctable animal instinct as guilt before or sin against the father upon who is projected the antithesis of such instincts. This can occur when more spontaneous instinctual expression is blocked in the is substituted for the object of instinctual gratification, particularly aggression. As the aggression turned against the as the object upon which to discharge this drive, this bad can be potentially freed and made good by participating in the power of, the being of, God who is the idealized antithesis of such instincts.
(When God acts aggressively, it is with the believer’s good conscience.) And Freud follows Nietzsche when he states that, ‘the believer has a share in he greatest of his god’. He also follows Nietzsche and others who emphasize the spiritual or physiological sickness that accompanies the achievements of civilization with its foundations in repression and guilt. For both thinkers, guilt, however painful, can provide relief from something more painful, whether a greater quilt or depression.
The relevant concept in Nietzsche’s reflections on control of the non-rational elements of the soul has to ‘- overcoming’ or ‘giving style’ to one’s character. This is discussed at length in Gay Science of which this is an extract: One thing is needful: . . . .to ‘give style’ to one’s character, a great and rare art! It is practised - by these who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. The weak characters without power over them hate the constraint of style [and] are always out to form or interpret themselves and their environment as free nature - wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, astonishing. [. . . .] For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with him, whether it is by means of this or that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with him is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.
One way of interpreting this passage is to understand it to mean that one must come to accept all of one’s defects and not attempt to eliminate or control them. Something like this can be suggested by the following comment by Staten: His stance toward him is the antithesis of, says, St. Augustine’s; Instead of judging, condemning, and paring away at his impulses, Nietzsche says he has simply tried to arrange them so that they might all coexist. ‘Contrary capacities’ dwell in him, he says, and he has tried to ‘mix nothing’, to ‘reconcile nothing’.
However, Staten's analysis is vague. Granted, Nietzsche does not think, so-called weaknesses should be repressed. We discussed his arguments against repression of instincts earlier in this section, and argued that they were not in fact incompatible with Plato’s views on rational control of the soul. Both Nietzsche and Plato, we saw, advocate some form of control of the impulses that does not involve 'paring away' at them, but insofar as possible, involves their redirection toward an object more suited to the well-being of the soul or character as a whole, i.e., some form of sublimation of the instincts. Does what Nietzsche say at contradicting these arguments in any way? What he suggests we actually do with the undesirable instincts is this: Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. Unfortunately thee will not of any attempt to explain what each of the transformations described in this passage actually amounts to - unfortunately, but the passage is vague and metaphorical beyond interpretation. What matters here, is that Nietzsche proposes several ways of dealing with undesirable instincts, and that whatever these ways are, they do not amount to leaving them untouched. Maybe Nietzsche does not pair away at his instincts (although the phrase 'the ugly that could not be removed' may suggest that he in fact does.) Yet he does judge them, i.e., he has to decide whether they must be concealed, or transformed, or saved up. There is no suggestion that any instinct is as good as another and that all will hold a place of honour in the character to which style has been given. To 'style' is to constrain and control, and one cannot give style to one's character and thereby render it tolerable to behold, if one is not able to control one's instincts. As Nietzsche writes later on in that passage, 'the weak characters without power over them hate the constraint of style'. Weakness is equated with lack of - control, and not, as the quotation from Staten may suggest, with control of one's instincts.
Nietzsche does not reject moral theories that demand that we control our desires. What he does reject is repression as an extinction. On the contrary, he seems to believe that an ideal life would involve sublimation - a form of control - of the appetites for the benefit of the pursuit of one's ideal. It follows from these conclusions that there is in fact no significant difference between Nietzsche and Plato's moral psychology regarding the control of the appetites: Neither is in favour of repression, both advocate a certain creative control involving sublimation.
As far as defending opposite theories about how we should control the non-rational elements of the soul, Plato and Nietzsche in fact hold very similar views. Their views can be explained by referring to certain Freudian concepts, sublimation and repression. According to Freud, impulses lend themselves too more than one kind of control. They can either be repressed, i.e., prevented from attaining satisfaction, or sublimated, i.e., their force can be redirected toward a more beneficial object. The first kind of control is rejected by both Plato and Nietzsche (at least as a general policy) as ineffective and unhealthy. Plato sees repression as one of the paths to tyrannical behaviour patterns (those impulses, which are repressed come back at night as violent dreams). Nietzsche views it as one of the worst manifestations of asceticism, one that prevents the ‘one thing needful’, giving style, i.e., the integration of all of one’s character traits, and makes us ‘continually ready for revenge, bad and gloomy’.
The second means of controlling impulses, sublimation, is one that we found to hold an important place in both Plato and Nietzsche’s moral psychologies. Both believe that potentially harmful instincts can be redirected Nietzsche higher goals, and contribute to the perfection of the character. We saw that Plato used the vocabulary of sublimation in the Republic, where he talks of the appetitive impulses being redirected toward a love of learning. Nietzsche had written of sublimation, an he specifically wrote of the sublimation of sexual dives in the Genealogy. Freud’s use the term as here duffers somewhat from his later and more Nietzschean usage such as in Three Essays o the Theory of Sexuality. But a Kaufmann notes ‘the word is older than Freud or Nietzsche. . . . it was Nietzsche who first gave it the specific connotation it has today.’‘. Kaufmann regards the concept of sublimation as one of the most important concept in Nietzsche’s entire philosophy. Nietzsche, we saw, actually uses the term sublimation when he describes the kind of control one must impose on one’s character in order to give style to it.
When two philosophers who are among the more concerned with the question how we should live turn out to hold very similar moral psychologies, then the concepts they use are probably concepts that should hold an important place in any moral psychology. That these concepts are affirming Freudian non-objections. Freud him was deeply concerned with the problem of how best we could live our lives, and how we could deal with the dark forces of our unconscious. These forces are recognised by Plato (even the most respectable of us, he says are subject to them) also through Nietzsche. Should not a central concern of moral philosophy be how best to deal with them, how best to control them rationally? If so, then it seems that we need a moral psychology that explains what role these dark impulses play in the human soul, and how reason might control them. This, In have argued, is exactly what Plato and Nietzsche attempt to do.
One hundred years ago Thus Speak Zarathustra appeared. The most celebrated work of Nietzsche, it has been read and cited by even moderately educated people. The German philosopher has a stormy reputation due to his tirades against Christianity and his aristocratic rejection of conventional moral views. Nietzsche provokes all kinds of reactions. Each reader may have his own Nietzsche, drawing from him a cherished opinion to be worn as a coloured badge with the hope of shocking ordinary folk. In fact in the last one hundred years, everything and anything has been said about Nietzsche.
This absence of professionalism and this facile subjectivism have produced occasionally disastrous consequences. From the beginning Nietzsche's thought has defied systematic construction. Even now the most memorable characteristics of his pioneering work are his ferocious fulminations, his deconstruction, and the acrid stench left by those who have raided his texts. One cannot hope to say finally what Nietzsche really meant. Still, finding a unifying thread may be possible. This requires ignoring abusively and merely subjectivist interpretations while highlighting those of true value. The renewed interest in Nietzsche's works has produced a vast and expanding body of relevant literature, as much as it is pivotal.
In June 1981 Rudolf Augstein, editor of Der Spiegel, stated without qualification that Hitler was the man of action who put Nietzsche's thought into practice. The journalist took for proof the falsifications of some of Nietzsche's manuscripts by his sister Elisabeth Nietzsche-Forster, who had shaken Hitler's hand in the twilight of her life. This argument is perhaps a bit thin in view of the many other writings that his sister did not doctor.
Augstein is concerned not just about Nietzsche's revival by a young generation of German philosophers but also by the progressive abandonment among German intellectuals of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School for Social Research. For Germans educated in the wake of "de-Nazification," the Frankfurt School's attack on bourgeois values, though often couched in arcane phrases, represented an effort to come to terms with the German past. Nonetheless, Frankfurt's total rejection of all thought that affirms a given fact has led to an impasse. Negativity cannot be an end in it; no one can progress intellectually or artistically through a permanent process of negation.
For Jurgen Habermas, the last important representative of the Frankfurt School, the Real is bad in that it does not include from the start all the Good existing in ideal form. Confronted by the imperfect Real, one feels compelled to maximize the Good, to moralize ad extremum in order to minimize the force of evilly encrusted in a real world marked by incompleteness. Imperfect reality must call forth a redeeming revolution. However, this revolution runs the risk of affirming and shaping another categorical class of settings that are imperfectly real things. Habermas rejects great global revolutions that initiate new eras. Instead he prefers sporadic micro-revolutions that inaugurate ages of permanent corrections, small injections of the Good into the sociopolitical tissue inevitably tainted by the Bad. Nonetheless, the world of political philosophy cannot rest content with this constant tinkering, but this dogged adherence to reform without limitation, as this social engineering without substance. The suspicions of Nazism weighing heavily on Nietzscheism and the impossibility of keeping philosophy at the level of permanent negation make it necessary to reject the obsession with the proto-Nazi Nietzsche and the Frankfurt School's negative attitude toward any given.
Nietzsche has had his share of Nazi interpreters. Philosophers who fellow-travelled with the Nazis often made kind references to his thought. Yet recent scholarship shows that Nietzsche found not only Nazi admirers but also socialist and leftist ones. In Nietzsche in German Politics and Society 1890-1918 (1983), the British Professor R. Hinton Thomas demonstrates the close relationship between Nietzsche and German socialism. Thomas deals with Nietzsche's impact in Imperial Germany on social democratic circles, on anarchists and feminists, and on the youth’s movement. This produced, on balance more resolute enemies of the Third Reich than Nazi cadres. Thomas shows that Nietzsche helped shape a libertarian ideology during the rise of the German social democratic movement. At the urging of August Bebel, the famed German socialist, the infant Social Democratic Party in 1875 adopted the Gotha Program, which sought to achieve redistributionist aims through legal means. In 1878 the government enacted anti-socialist laws, which curbed the party's activities. In 1890, with the Erfurt Program, the party took on a harder revolutionary cast in conformity with Marxist doctrine. Social democracy subsequently oscillated between strict legalism, also known as "revisionism" or "reformism" because it accepted a liberal capitalist society, and a rhetorical commitment to revolution accompanied by demands for far-reaching changes.
According to Thomas, this second tendency remained a minority position but incorporated Nietzschean elements. A faction of the party, led by Bruno Wille, ridiculed the powerlessness of reformist social democrats. This group, which called it Die Jungen (The Youths), appealed to grass-roots democracy, spoke of the need for more communication within the party, and ended up rejecting its rigid parent. Wille and his friends mocked the conformism of party functionaries, great and small, and the "cage" constituting organized social democracy. The party's stifling constraints subdued the will and thwarted individual self-actualization. Die Jungen exalted "voluntarism," or the exercise of will, which they associated with true socialism. This emphasis on will left little place for the deterministic materialism of Marxism, which the group described as an "enslaving" system.
Kurt Eisner, the leader of the revolutionary socialist Bavarian Republic, devoted his first book in 1919 to the philosophy of Nietzsche. Though he criticized the "megalomania" that he found in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he also praised its aristocratic ideals. The aristocratic values found in Nietzsche, he said, had to be put at the service of the people, not treated as ends in themselves. Gustav Landauer (1870-1919), another founder of the Bavarian "Red Republic," emphasized Nietzschean voluntarism in his training of political revolutionaries. Landauer's original anarchistic individualism became more communitarian and populist during the course of his political career, approaching the folkish, nationalist thinking of his enemies. Landauer died in the streets of Munich fighting the soldiers of the Freikorp, a group of paramilitary adventurers who were classified as "rightist" but who shared very much of Landauer's outlook.
Contrary to a later persistent misconception, Nietzsche aroused suspicion on the nationalist Right at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Thomas, this was because Nietzsche mocked many things German, (which offended the pan-Germanists), was generally contemptuous of politics, had no enthusiasm for nationalism, and fell out with the composer Richard Wagner, a fervent and anti-Semitic German nationalist.
Nietzsche's vitalist concepts and naturalist vocabulary may account for his early support on the European Left and for his later popularity on the non-Christian Right. Nietzsche's emphases on will and his affirmation of an ethic of creativity have had diverse appeal. In his concise work, Helmut Pfotenhauer assesses Nietzsche's legacy from the point of view of physiology, a term with a naturalistic connotation. This word appears frequently in Nietzsche's work in the phrase Kunst als Physiologie, art as physiology.
The great French writer Balzac, who coined the phrase "physiology of marriage," said about this neologism: "Physiology was formerly the science dealing with the mechanism of the coccyx, the progress of the fetus, or the life of the tapeworm. Today physiology is the art of speaking and writing incorrectly about anything." In the nineteenth century the term physiology was associated with a type of popular literature such as the garrulous serials in daily newspapers. Physiology was intended to classify the main features of daily life. Thus there was a physiology of the stroller or of the English tourist pacing up and down Paris boulevards. In that sense physiology has some limited relationship to the zoological classifications of Buffon or Linnaeas. In his Comedie humaine, Balzac draws a parallel between the animal world and human society. "Political zoology" is used by various nineteenth-century writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Edgar Allen Poe. Nietzsche was aware of the literary and scientific usage of physiology. He noted that the physiological style was invading universities and that the vocabulary of his time was embellished with terms drawn from biology. One wonders why Nietzsche resorted to the term physiology when he believed that it was often used carelessly.
In Pfotenhauer's view, Nietzsche had no intention of giving respectability to the pseudoscientific or pseudo-aesthetic excesses of the "physiologists" of his day. His intention, as interpreted by Pfotenhauer, was to challenge an established form of aesthetics. He constructed the expression "physiology of the art," insofar as the arts were conventionally approached as mere objects of contemplation. From Nietzsche's perspective, artistic productivity is an expression of our nature and ultimately of Nature itself. Through art, Nature becomes more active within us.
By using the term physiology Nietzsche was making a didactic point. He celebrated the exuberance of vital forces, while frowning on any attempt to neutralize the vital processes by giving a value to the average. In other words, Nietzsche rejected those sciences that limited their investigations to the averages, excluding the singular and exceptional. Nietzsche though that Charles Darwin, by limiting himself to broad classes in his biology, favoured the generic without focussing on the exceptional individual. Nietzsche saw physiology as a tool to do for the individual confronting existential questions what Darwin had accomplished as a classifier of entire phyla and species. He attempted to analyse clinically the struggle of superior individuals for self-fulfilment in a world without inherent metaphysical meaning.
"God is dead" is an aphorism identified with Nietzsche. Nietzsche believed that, together with God, all important ontological and metaphysical systems had died. Only the innocence of human destiny remained, and he did not want it to be frozen in some "superior unity of being." Recognizing the reign of destiny, he thought, involved certain risks. In the river of changing life, creative geniuses run the risk of drowning, of being only fragmentary and contingent moments. How can anyone gladly say "yes" to life without an assurance that his achievements will be preserved, not simply yielded to the natural rhythms of destiny? Perhaps the query of Silene to King Midas is well-established. "Is this fleeting life worth being lived? Would it not have been better had we not been born?" Would it not be ideal to die as quickly as possible?
These questions pick up the theme of Arthur Schopenhauer, the famous philosopher of pessimism. The hatred of life that flowed from Schopenhauer's pessimism was unsatisfactory to Nietzsche. He believed that in an age of spiritual confusion the first necessity was to affirm life itself. This is the meaning of "the transvaluations of all values" as understood by Pfotenhauer. Nietzsche's teachings about the will were intended to accomplish the task of reconstructing values. The creative exercise of will was both an object of knowledge and an attitude of the knowing subject. The vital processes were to be perceived from the point of view of constant creativity.
Though the abundance of creative energy, man can assume divine characteristics. The one who embraces his own destiny without any resentment or hesitation turns himself into an embodiment of that destiny. Life should express itself in all its mobility and fluctuation, immobilizing or freezing it into a system was an assault on creativity. The destiny that Nietzsche urged his readers to embrace was to be a source of creative growth. The philosopher was a "full-scale artist" who organized the world in the face of chaos and spiritual decline. Nietzsche's use of physiology was an attempt to endow vital processes with an appropriate language. Physiology expressed the intended balance between Nature and mere rationality.
Myth, for Nietzsche, had no ethnological point of reference. It was, says Pfotenhauer, the "science of the concrete" and the expression of the tragedy resulting from the confrontation between man's physical fragility (Hinfalligkeit) and his heroic possibilities. Resorting to myth was not a lapse into folk superstition, as the rationalists believed it to be. It was moderately an attempt to see man's place within Nature.
Pfotenhauer systematically explored the content of Nietzsche's library, finding "vitalist" arguments drawn from popular treatments of science. The themes that riveted Nietzsche's attention were: Adaptation, the increase of potential within the same living species, references to vital forces, corrective eugenics, and spontaneous generation. Nietzsche's ideas were drawn from the scientific or parascientific speculations of his time and from literary, cultural, and artistic tracts. He criticized the imitative classicism of some French authors and praised the profuse style of the Baroque. In the philosopher's eyes, the creativity of genius and rich personalities had more value than mere elegant conversation. Uncertainty, associated with the ceaseless production of life, meant more to him than the search for certainty, which always implied a static perfection. On the basis of this passion for spiritual adventure he founded a "new hierarchization of values." The man who internalized the search for spiritual adventure anticipated the "superman," about whom so much has been said. Pfotenhauer's Nietzsche is made to represent the position that the creative man allies himself with the power of vital impulse against stagnant ideas, accepting destiny's countless differences and despising limitations. Nietzschean man does not react with anguish in the face of fated change.
Nietzsche had no desire to inaugurate a worry-free era. Instead, he responded to the symptoms of a declining Christian culture by criticizing society from the standpoint of creative and heroic fatalism. This criticism, which refuses to accept the world as it is, claims to be formative and affirmative: it represents a will to create new forms of existence. Nietzsche substituted an innovative criticism affirming destiny for an older classical view based on fixed concepts. Nietzsche's criticism does not include an irrational return to a historic and unformed existence. Nietzsche, as presented by Pfotenhauer, constructs his own physiology of man's nature as a creative being.
To begin with, there are some obvious general parallels between Nietzsche and Sartre that few commentators would wish to dispute. Both are vehement atheists who resolutely face up to the fact that the cosmos has no inherent meaning or purpose. Unlike several other thinkers, they do not even try to replace the dead God of Christian theology with talk of Absolute Spirit or Being. In one of only two brief references to Nietzsche in Being and Nothingness, Sartre upholds his rejection of "the illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene”; That is, the notion that there is a Platonic true world of noumenal being which stand behind becoming and reduces phenomena to the status of mere illusion or appearance. Both thinkers also insist that it be human beings who create moral values and attempt to give meaning to life. Sartre speaks ironically of the "serious" men who think that values have an absolute objective existence, while Nietzsche regards people who passively accept the values they have been taught as sheep-like members of the herd.
When we attempt a deeper explanation of the ultimate source of values, the relationship between Sartre and Nietzsche becomes more problematic. Nietzsche says that out of a nation (or people’s) tablet of good and evil speaks "the voice of their will to power.” For Sartre, the values that we adopt or posits are part of our fundamental project, which is to achieve justified being and become in-itself-for-itself. It appears, therefore, that both thinkers regard man as an essentially Faustian striver, and that grouping Sartre with Nietzsche as a proponent of would not be unfair "will to power.” Clearly, Sartre would object to such a Nietzschean characterization of his existential psychoanalysis. In Being and Nothingness he rejects all theories that attempt to explain individual behaviour in terms of general substantive drives, and he is particularly critical of such notions as the libido and the will to power. Sartre insists that these are not psycho-biological entities, but original projects like any other that the individual can negate through his or her freedom. He denies that striving for power is a general characteristic of human beings, denies the existence of any opaque and permanent will-entity within consciousness, and even denies that human beings have any fixed nature or essence.
However, Sartre's criticisms of the will to power are only applicable to popular misunderstandings of Nietzsche's thought. Like the for-itself, Nietzsche's "will" should not be regarded as a substantive entity. Although it is derived from the metaphysical theories of Schopenhauer and is sometimes spoken of in ways that invite ontologizing, Nietzsche's conception of the will is predominantly adjectival and phenomenological. Its status is similar to that of Sartre's for-itself, which should not be considered a metaphysical entity even though it is a remote descendent of the "thinking substance" of Descartes. Thus, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche criticizes the unjustified metaphysical assumptions that are bound up with the Cartesian "In think" and the Schopenhauerian "In will" he says that "willing seems to me to be above all something complicated, something that is a unity only as a word.” Although there are passages in the writings of both Sartre and Nietzsche that can be interpreted metaphysically if taken out of context, regarding is better "nothingness" and "will" as alternate adjectival descriptions of our being.
Although Nietzsche's use of the word "power" invites misunderstanding, he clearly uses the term in a broad sense and has a sophisticated conception of power. Nietzsche is not claiming that everyone really wants political power or dominion over other people. Nietzsche describes philosophy as "the most spiritual will to power," and regards the artist as a higher embodiment of the will to power than either the politician or the conqueror. Through his theory Nietzsche can account for a wide variety of human behaviour without being reductionist. Thus, a follower may subordinate himself to a leader or group to feel empowered, and even the perverse or negative behaviour of the ascetic priest or embittered moralist can be accounted for in terms of the will to power.
Nietzsche speaks of "power" in reaction to the 19th century moral theorists who insisted that men strive for utility or pleasure. The connotations of "power" are broader and richer, suggesting that a human being is more than a calculative "economic man" whose desires could be satisfied with the utopian comforts of a Brave New World. Nietzsche's meaning could also be brought out by speaking of a will toward a self-realization, (one of his favourite mottoes was "Become what you are!") or, by thinking of "power" as a psychic energy or potentiality whose possession "empowers" us to aspire, strive, and create.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre presents himself as the discoverer of the full scope of human freedom, contrasting his seemingly open and indeterminate conception of human possibilities with a psychological and philosophical tradition that limits human nature by positing "opaque" drives and goals and insisting on their universality. Such an image of Sartre is widely held, although his insistence that consciousness strives to become in-itself-for-it gives his view of man of the greater determinatives, than a cursory glance at some of his philosophical rhetoric and literary works would suggest. For this reason, Sartre can profitably be related to other theorists who argue that man is motivated by a unitary force or strives for a single goal.
When evaluating such theories, the really essential distinction is between those that are open, inclusive and empirically indeterminate, and those that are narrow and reductionist. This could be illustrated by comparing the narrow utilitarianism of Bentham to Mill's broader development of the theory, or by contrasting Freud and Jung's conception of the libido. While Freud was resolutely reductionist and insisted that "the name of libido be properly reserved for the instinctual forces of sexual life," Jung broadened the term to refer to all manifestations of instinctual psychic energy. Thus, Sartre appears revolutionary when he contrasts him with Freud although he cannot legitimately claim that his view of man is more open or less reductionist than that of Nietzsche. Most likely, Sartre and many of his commentators would take issue with the above conclusion, and from a certain perspective their criticisms are justified. Unlike Nietzsche, Sartre is intent on upholding man's absolute freedom, rejecting the influence of instinct, denying the existence of unconscious psychic forces, and portraying consciousness as a nothingness that has no essence. In comparison even with other non-reductionist views of man, then, it would seem that the radical nature of Sartre's thought is unmatched.
However, in a more fundamental respect Sartre's ontology limits human possibilities by: (1) declaring that consciousness is a lack that is doomed to strive for fulfilment and justification vainly, and by (2) accepting important parts of the Platonic view of becoming as ontologically given rather than merely as aspects of his own original project. It is in this way that Sartre's philosophy becomes shipwrecked on reefs that Nietzsche manages to avoid.
For Sartre, "the for-it is defined ontologically as a lack of being," and "freedom is really synonymous with lack.” 6 Along with Plato he equates desire with a lack of being, but in contrast with Hegel he arrives at the pessimistic conclusion that "human reality therefore is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state.” In other words, the human condition is basically Sisyphean, for man is condemned to strive to fill his inner emptiness but is incapable of achieving justified being. This desire to become in-self-for-it, which Sartre also refers to as the project of being God, is said to define man and come "close to being the same as a human `nature' or an `essence'".8 Sartre tries to reconcile this universal project with freedom by claiming that our wish to be in-it-for-itself determines only the meaning of human desire but does not constitute it empirically. However such freedom is tainted, for no matter what we do empirically we can . . . neither avoid futile striving nor achieve an authentic sense of satisfaction, plenitude, joy, or fulfilment.
In Part Four of Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes how consciousness endeavours to create for its lack of being by striving to acquire and acknowledge the world. With the apparent reductionistic vehemence, he explains a variety of human behaviour in terms of the insatiable desire to consume, acquire, dominate, violate, and destroy. Sartre says that knowledge and discovery are appropriative enjoyments, and he characterizes the scientist as a sort of intellectual peeping Tom who wants to strip away the veils of nature and deflower her with his Look. Similarly, He says that the artist wants to produce substantive being that exists through him, and that the skier seeks to possess the field of snow and conquer the slope. Thus art, science, and play are all activities of appropriation, which either wholly or in part seek to possess the absolute being of the in-itself. Destruction is also an appropriative function. Sartre says that "a gift is a primitive form of destruction," describes giving as "a keen, brief enjoyment, almost sexual," and declares that "to give is to enslave.” He even interprets smoking as "the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world.”
Aside from the sweeping and one-sided nature of Sartre's claims, the most striking aspect of this section is the negativity of its account of human beings. Not only are we condemned to dissatisfaction, but some of our noblest endeavours are unmasked as pointless appropriation and destruction. One is reminded not of Nietzsche's will to power, but of Heidegger's scathing criticism of the "will to power" (interpreted popularly) as the underlying metaphysics of our era that embodies all that is most despicable about modernity. For Heidegger, it is such an insatiable will that occurs of an embodied quest to subjugate nature, mechanize the world, and enjoy ever-increasing material progress.
However, while Sartre speaks of consciousness as nothingness or a lack - a sort of black hole in being which can never be filled - Nietzsche associates’ man's being with positivity and plenitude. His preferred metaphor for the human essence be the will -an active image that allows striving and creativity to be reconciled with plenitude. It enables him to see activity and desire as a positive aspect of our nature, rather than a comparatively desperate attempt to fill the hole at the heart of our being. For Nietzsche, all that proceeds from weakness, sickness, inferiority, or lack is considered reactive and resentful, while that which proceeds from health, strength, or plenitude is characterized in positive terms. For instance, at the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra he likens Zarathustra to a full cup wanting to overflow and to the sun that gives its light out of plenitude and superabundance. Later, he contrasts the generosity of the gift-giving virtue with the all-too-poor and hungry selfishness of the sick, which greedily "sizes up those who have much to eat" and always "sneaks around the table of those who give.”
An even sharper contrast can be drawn between Nietzsche and Sartre's attitudes toward Platonism. While both reject the transcendent realm of perfect forms, Sartre fails to realize that a denial of the truth-value of Platonic metaphysics without a corresponding rejection of Platonic aspirations and attitudes can only lead to pessimism and resentment against being. The inadequacy and incompleteness of Sartre's break with Platonism can be brought out by examining it in terms of William James conception of the common nucleus of religion. James says that the religious attitude fundamentally involves (1) "an uneasiness" or, the "sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand," and (2) "its solution.” Sartre vehemently rejects all religious and metaphysical "solutions," but he accepts the notion that there is ‘an essential wrongness’ or, lack in being. Not only does he regard consciousness as a lack, but in Nausea, Sartre condemns the wrongness of nature and other people in terms that are both Platonic and resentful
Just as Plato admired the mathematical orderliness of music and looked down upon nature as a fluctuating and imperfect copy of the forms, the central contrast of Nausea is between the sharp, precise, inflexible order of a jazz song, and the lack of order and purpose of a chestnut tree. Roquentin enjoys virtually his only moments of joy in the novel while listening to the jazz, but experiences his deepest nausea while sitting beneath the tree. He regards its root as a "black, knotty mass, entirely beastly," speaks of the abundance of nature as "dismal, ailing, embarrassed at itself," and asks "what good are so many duplications of trees?".Nothing could be a more striking blasphemy against nature. Trees are one of the most venerable and life-giving of all organic beings, providing us with oxygen and shade. Many ancient peoples regarded trees as sacred, and enlightenment (from the insight of the Buddha to Newton's discovery of gravitation) is often pictured as coming while sitting under a tree. Roquentin too, experiences a sort of negative epiphany while he is beneath the chestnut tree. He concludes that "every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance".18 In contrast to the pointlessness of the tree and other existing organic beings, Sartre says that a perfect circle is not absurd because "it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities.” In such a Platonic spirit, he reflects:
If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenities were concerned. In another world, circles, bars of music keep their pure and rigid lines.
In Nausea, Sartre reveals a contempt for human beings that surpasses his contempt for nature and even rivals the misanthropy of Schopenhauer. He particularly despises the organic, biological aspect of our nature. He speaks of living creatures as "flabby masses which move spontaneously," and seems to have a particular aversion for fleshy, overweight people. He mocks at "the fat, pale crowd," describes a bourgeois worthy in the Bouville gallery as "defenceless, bloated, slobbering, vaguely obscene," and recalls a "terrible heat wave that turned men into pools of melting fat.” Sartre also feels that people are somehow diminished while eating. Roquentin is glad when the Self-Taught Man is served his dinner for "his soul leaves his eyes, and he docilely begins to eat.” Hugo thinks that Olga offers him food because "it keeps the other person at a distance," and "when a man is eating, he seems harmless.” Sartre also takes a negative view of sensuality. Roquentin says of young lovers in a café that they make him a little sick, and his account of sex with the patronne includes the fact that "she disgusts me a little" and that his arm went to sleep while playing "distractedly with her sex under the cover.” Perhaps his attitude toward sensuality is most uncharitably manifested when he thinks of a woman that he once show had been dining, remembering her as, a "fat, hot, sensual, absurd, with red ears," and imagines her now somewhere - in the midst of smells? - this soft throat rubbing up luxuriously against smooth stuffs, nestling in lace, and the woman picturing her bosom under her blouse, thinking "My titties, my lovely fruits."
Throughout Nausea the narrator's attitude toward people is uncharitable, judgemental, and resentful. Like the tolerably hostile Other of Being and Nothingness, Roquentin transcends and objectifies other people with his Look. He sits in cafes observing and passing judgement on people, and seems particularly to enjoy dehumanizing others by focussing on their unattractive physical features. He sees one fellow as a moustache beneath "enormous nostrils that could pump air for a whole family and that eat up half his face," while another person is described as "a young man with a face like a dog.” He treats the Self-Taught Man (whom Sartre uses to caricature humanism) coldly and condescendingly and does not even deem him worthy of a proper name. His attitude toward the eminent bourgeois portrayed in the Bouville gallery is an almost classic example of ressentiment. While looking at their portraits, he felt that their "judgement went through (him) like a sword and questioned (his) very right to exist" Like Hugo in Dirty Hands, he senses the emptiness of his own existence and feels inadequate and abnormal before the Look of purposeful and self-confident others who unreflectively feel that they have a right to exist. However, he manages to transcend their looks by concentrating on their bodily weaknesses and all-too-human faults. Thus, he overcomes one dead worthy by focussing on his "thin mouth of a dead snake" and pale, round, flabby checks, and he puts a reactionary politician in his place by recalling that the man was only five feet tall, had a squeaking voice, was accused of putting rubber lifts in his shoes, and had a wife who looked like a horse. Roquentin hates the bourgeois, but for him virtually all the people of Bouville are bourgeois:
Idiots. Thinking that In am going to see they are thick is repugnant to me, self-satisfied faces. They make laws, they write popular novels, they get married, they are fools enough to have children. Although Sartre is more insightful than the unreflective and self-satisfied "normal" people whom he judges so uncharitably, he seems unaware that his own thought fails to escape the ancient reefs of Platonism and metaphysical pessimism. Even the upbeat ending of Nausea is comparatively tentative and half-hearted, and does not question or overturn any of the ontological views expressed earlier in the book.
On the other hand, although Nietzsche shares many of the same philosophical premises as Sartre, his view of life and nature is much less bleak because he thoroughly rejects the Platonic world-view and all metaphysical forms of pessimism. First, throughout his writings Nietzsche vehemently opposes the Platonic prejudice that puts being above becoming, idealizes rationality and purpose, and despises the disorderly flux of nature and the organic and animalistic aspects of the body. He admires Heraclitus rather than Parmenides, denies that there is any "eternal spider or spider web of reason," and declares "over all things stand the heaven Accident, the heaven Innocence, the heaven Chance, the heaven Prankishness.” Unlike Sartre, he had a high regard for the vital, superabundant, and non-rational aspect of nature, and loved music for its ability to express emotional depths and Dionysian ecstasy rather than as an embodiment of reason, order, or precision.
In response to Schopenhauer and several religious traditions, Nietzsche refutes metaphysical pessimism. He denies that life or nature is essentially lacking or evil, or that any negative evaluation of being as a whole could possess truth-value. This is in keeping with his sceptical position, which denies that the thing-in-itself is knowable and insists that all philosophical systems reflect the subjectivity of their author and are "a kind of involuntary and incognizant memoir.” If Nietzsche were to speak in the language of Being and Nothingness, he would insist that the desire to achieve the complete and justified being of the in-itself-for-itself be simply Sartre's original project, not an ontological given that condemns every person to unhappy consciousness.
One of the central themes of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the overcoming of pessimism and despair through the will. Zarathustra says that "my will always comes to me as my liberator and joy-bringer. Willing discharges, that which is the true teaching of will and liberty.” At the end of `The Tomb Song,' he turns to his will to overcome despair, referring it as something invulnerable and unburiable that can redeem his youth and shatter tombs. Although the will to power is often associated with striving for the overman (not to mention those who wrongly link it with domination and conquest), it is also essential to such Nietzschean themes as amor fati, eternal recurrence, and the affirmation of life. In order to affirm his existence, Zarathustra says that he must redeem the past by transforming "the will's ill will against time, as it was" into a creative "But thus In will it; Thus shall In will it" It is out of such reflections that the project of embracing eternal recurrence emerges.
In keeping with his desire to affirm life, Nietzsche's attitude toward other people is more charitable and less negative than that of Roquentin and many of Sartre's other literary heroes. Admittedly, Nietzsche makes many nasty remarks about historical figures, but these are often balanced by corresponding positive observations, and most of his polemical fury is directed against ideas, dogmas, and institutions rather than individuals. For instance, Zarathustra says of priests that "though they are my enemies, pass by them silently with sleeping swords. Among them too there are heroes.” While some of his comments on the rabble are comparable to Sartre's comments on the bourgeois, Zarathustra also criticizes his "ape" who sits outside a great city and vengefully denounces its inhabitants, for "where one can no longer love, there must be, at least of One by which should pass.”
God is dead. The terror with which this event - and he did call it an event - filled Nietzsche is hardly understood any more. Yet to that latecomer in a long line of theologians and believers it meant the disapperance of meaning from the sentiment of life. This, as Nietzsche feared, pointed the way to nihilism. “A nihilist,” he wrote, “is a person who says of the world as it is, that it better were not, and, with regard to the world as it should be, that it does not and cannot exist.” And it does not exist because God is no more. Therefore, there cannot be any belief in a beyond, an ineffable life beyond the grave, not even in the possibility of that “godless” peace of Buddha and Schopenhauer that is indistinguishable from the peace of God and attainable only through the overcoming of all worldly desires and aspirations.
Nihilism, Nietzsche believes, is the fate of all religious traditions if along the road their fundamental assumptions are lost. This, according to him, is so with Judaism because of its all-persuasive “Thou shalt not” that, in the long run, can be accepted and obeyed only within a rigorously disciplined community of the faithful; and it is so with Christianity, not only because it was, to a large extent, heir to the Jewish moralism but, at the same time, tended to judge the whole domain of the natural to be a conspiracy against the divine spirit. For the Christian, the Here and Now with its deceptive promises of happiness - all of which promise, when it comes to it, an inevitable loss, and with its illusions of achievement, all of which conceal for a while the imminence of failure - is nothing but the testing ground for the soul to prove that it deserves the bliss of the Beyond. Nietzsche, like many before him, is philosophically outraged by this doctrine that conceives of Eternity as, at some point, taking over from Time, projecting it into endlessness, and of Time for being an outsider to the Eternity and, after the death of God, forever an exile from it. Everything, therefore, exists only for a while in its individual articulation and then never more. From this void, the black hole, there arises Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. It is to cure time of its mortal disease, its terminal destructiveness.
Of those modern thinkers who resolutely face the fact that God is dead and the universe contains no inherent meaning or purpose, and Sartre and Nietzsche follow among the most important. However, although they begin from nearly similar premises, Sartre is both less radical and less life-affirming of a thinker than Nietzsche. It is particularly ironic that he puts so much emphasis on freedom, and yet refuses to grant consciousness the power to overcome its insatiable yearning to be in-itself-for-itself, and fails to question his own Platonic prejudices against nature and becoming. Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a ‘social physics’ that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in.
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with contextual representation of our understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’, did not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘existence’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, . . . as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche’s earlier versions to the ‘will to truth’, disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of ‘will’.
In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined. Based on the assumption that there is no really necessary correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, he deuced that we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language’. The prison as he concluded it, was also a ‘space’ where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature’ and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on ‘will’.
Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, Nietzsche says, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialists’ ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. “Science,” he said, “is not exclusive to natural phenomenons and favoured reductionistic examination of phenomena at the expense of mind? It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow and basis for the free exercise of individual will.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of Phenomenology, wherefor to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.
Husserl and Martin Heidegger, were both influential figures of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.
The mechanistic paradigm of the late nineteenth century was the one Einstein came to know when he studied physics. Most physicists believed that it represented an eternal truth, but Einstein was open to fresh ideas. Inspired by Mach’s critical mind, he demolished the Newtonian ideas of space and time and replaced them with new, “relativistic” notions.
In quantum field theory, potential vibrations at each point in the four fields are capable of manifesting themselves in their complemtarity, their expression as individual particles. And the interactions of the fields result from the exchange of quanta that are carriers of the fields. The carriers of the field, known as messenger quanta, are the ‘coloured’ gluons for the strong-binding-force, of which the photon for electromagnetism, the intermediate boson for the weak force, and the graviton or gravitation. If we could re-create the energies present in the fist trillionths of trillionths of a second in the life of the universe, these four fields would, according to quantum field theory, become one fundamental field.
The movement toward a unified theory has evolved progressively from super-symmetry to super-gravity to string theory. In string theory the one-dimensional trajectories of particles, illustrated in the Feynman lectures, seem as if, in at all were possible, are replaced by the two-dimensional orbits of a string. In addition to introducing the extra dimension, represented by a smaller diameter of the string, string theory also features another mall but non-zero constant, with which is analogous to Planck’s quantum of action. Since the value of the constant is quite small, it can be generally ignored but at extremely small dimensions. But since the constant, like Planck’s constant is not zero, this results in departures from ordinary quantum field theory in very small dimensions.
Part of what makes string theory attractive is that it eliminates, or ‘transforms away’, the inherent infinities found in the quantum theory of gravity. And if the predictions of this theory are proven valid in repeatable experiments under controlled conditions, it could allow gravity to be unified with the other three fundamental interactions. But even if string theory leads to this grand unification, it will not alter our understanding of ave-particle duality. While the success of the theory would reinforce our view of the universe as a unified dynamic process, it applies to very small dimensions, and therefore, does not alter our view of wave-particle duality.
While the formalism of quantum physics predicts that correlations between particles over space-like inseparability, of which are possible, it can say nothing about what this strange new relationship between parts (quanta) and the whole (cosmos) cause to result outside this formalism. This does not, however, prevent us from considering the implications in philosophical terms. As the philosopher of science Errol Harris noted in thinking about the special character of wholeness in modern physics, a unity without internal content is a blank or empty set and is not recognizable as a whole. A collection of merely externally related parts does not constitute a whole in that the parts will not be “mutually adaptive and complementary to one-another.”
Wholeness requires a complementary relationship between unity and difference and is governed by a principle of organization determining the interrelationship between parts. This organizing principle must be universal to a genuine whole and implicit in all parts constituting the whole, even the whole is exemplified only in its parts. This principle of order, Harris continued, “is nothing really in and of itself. It is the way he parts are organized, and another constituent additional to those that constitute the totality.”
In a genuine whole, the relationship between the constituent parts must be “internal or immanent” in the parts, as opposed to a more spurious whole in which parts appear to disclose wholeness dur to relationships that are external to the arts. The collection of parts that would allegedly constitute the whole in classical physics is an example of a spurious whole. Parts continue a genuine whole when the universal principle of order is inside the parts and hereby adjusts each to all so that they interlock and become mutually complementary. This not only describes the character of the whole revealed in both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. It is also consistent with the manner in which we have begun to understand the relations between parts and whole in modern biology.
Modern physics also reveals, claimed Harris, complementary relationship between the differences between parts that constitute and the universal ordering principle that are immanent in each part. While the whole cannot be finally disclosed in the analysis of the parts, the study of the differences between parts provides insights into the dynamic structure of the whole present in each part. The part can never, however, be finally isolated from the web of relationships that discloses the interconnections with the whole, and any attempt to do so results in ambiguity.
Much of the ambiguity in attempts to explain the character of wholes in both physics and biology derives from the assumption that order exists between or outside parts. Yet order in complementary relationships between difference and sameness in any physical event is never external to that event, and the cognations are immanent in the event. From this perspective, the addition of non-locality to this picture of the distributive constitution in dynamic function of wholeness is not surprising. The relationships between part, as quantum event apparent in observation or measurement, and the undissectable whole, calculate on in but are not described by the instantaneous correlations between measurements in space-like separate regions, is another extension of the part-whole complementarity in modern physics.
If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complex and complicating regularities of which ae lawfully emergent in property of systems, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that evinces progressive order in complementary relations to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts (quanta), one can then argue that in operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground from all emergent plexuities. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in te human brain (well protected between the cranium walls) and since this brain, like all physical phenomena, can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is unreasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.
Nevertheless, since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies, quite laterally, beyond all human representation or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe be a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptual representation of design, meaning, purpose, intent, or plan associated with mytho-religious or cultural heritage. However, if one does not accept this view of the universe, there is noting in the scientific description of nature that can be used to refute this position. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as foundation of religious experiences, but can be dismissed, undermined, or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.
While we have consistently tried to distinguish between scientific knowledge and philosophical speculation based on this of what is obtainable, let us be quite clear on one point - there is no empirically valid causal linkage between the former and the latter. Those who wish to dismiss the speculative base on which is obviously free to do as done. However, there is another conclusion to be drawn, in that is firmly grounded in scientific theory and experiment there is no basis in the scientific descriptions of nature for believing in the radical Cartesian division between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics. Clearly, his radical separation between mind and world was a macro-level illusion fostered by limited awareness of the actual character of physical reality nd by mathematical idealizations extended beyond the realms of their applicability.
Nevertheless, the philosophical implications might prove in themselves as a criterial motive in debative consideration to how our proposed new understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physical reality might affect the manner in which we deal with some major real-world problems. This will issue to demonstrate why a timely resolution of these problems is critically dependent on a renewed dialogue between members of the cultures of human-social scientists and scientist-engineers. We will also argue that the resolution of these problems could be dependent on a renewed dialogue between science and religion.
As many scholars have demonstrated, the classical paradigm in physics has greatly influenced and conditioned our understanding and management of human systems in economic and political realities. Virtually all models of these realities treat human systems as if they consist of atomized units or parts that interact with one another in terms of laws or forces external to or between the parts. These systems are also viewed as hermetic or closed and, thus, its discreteness, separateness and distinction.
Consider, for example, how the classical paradigm influenced or thinking about economic reality. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the founders of classical economics -figures like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus conceived of the economy as a closed system in which intersections between parts (consumer, produces, distributors, etc.) are controlled by forces external to the parts (supply and demand). The central legitimating principle of free market economics, formulated by Adam Smith, is that lawful or law-like forces external to the individual units function as an invisible hand. This invisible hand, said Smith, frees the units to pursue their best interests, moves the economy forward, and in general legislates the behaviour of parts in the best vantages of the whole. (The resemblance between the invisible hand and Newton’s universal law of gravity and between the relations of parts and wholes in classical economics and classical physics should be transparent.)
After roughly 1830, economists shifted the focus to the properties of the invisible hand in the interactions between parts using mathematical models. Within these models, the behaviour of parts in the economy is assumed to be analogous to the awful interactions between pats in classical mechanics. It is, therefore, not surprising that differential calculus was employed to represent economic change in a virtual world in terms of small or marginal shifts in consumption or production. The assumption was that the mathematical description of marginal shifts in the complex web of exchanges between parts (atomized units and quantities) and whole (closed economy) could reveal the lawful, or law-like, machinations of the closed economic system.
These models later became one of the fundamentals for microeconomics. Microeconomics seek to describe interactions between parts in exact quantifiable measures - such as marginal cost, marginal revenue, marginal utility, and growth of total revenue as indexed against individual units of output. In analogy with classical mechanics, the quantities are viewed as initial conditions that can serve to explain subsequent interactions between parts in the closed system in something like deterministic terms. The combination of classical macro-analysis with micro-analysis resulted in what Thorstein Veblen in 1900 termed neoclassical economics - the model for understanding economic reality that is widely used today.
Beginning in the 1939s, the challenge became to subsume the understanding of the interactions between parts in closed economic systems with more sophisticated mathematical models using devices like linear programming, game theory, and new statistical techniques. In spite of the growing mathematical sophistication, these models are based on the same assumptions from classical physics featured in previous neoclassical economic theory - with one exception. They also appeal to the assumption that systems exist in equilibrium or in perturbations from equilibria, and they seek to describe the state of the closed economic system in these terms.
One could argue that the fact that our economic models are assumptions from classical mechanics is not a problem by appealing to the two-domain distinction between micro-level macro-level processes expatiated upon earlier. Since classical mechanic serves us well in our dealings with macro-level phenomena in situations where the speed of light is so large and the quantum of action is so small as to be safely ignored for practical purposes, economic theories based on assumptions from classical mechanics should serve us well in dealing with the macro-level behaviour of economic systems.
The obvious problem, . . . acceded peripherally, . . . nature is relucent to operate in accordance with these assumptions, in that the biosphere, the interaction between parts be intimately related to the whole, no collection of arts is isolated from the whole, and the ability of the whole to regulate the relative abundance of atmospheric gases suggests that the whole of the biota appear to display emergent properties that are more than the sum of its parts. What the current ecological crisis reveal in the abstract virtual world of neoclassical economic theory. The real economies are all human activities associated with the production, distribution, and exchange of tangible goods and commodities and the consumption and use of natural resources, such as arable land and water. Although expanding economic systems in the real economy are obviously embedded in a web of relationships with the entire biosphere, our measure of healthy economic systems disguises this fact very nicely. Consider, for example, the healthy economic system written in 1996 by Frederick Hu, head of the competitive research team for the World Economic Forum - short of military conquest, economic growth is the only viable means for a country to sustain increases in natural living standards . . . An economy is internationally competitive if it performs strongly in three general areas: Abundant productive ideas from capital, labour, infrastructure and technology, optimal economic policies such as low taxes, little interference, free trade and sound market institutions. Such as the rule of law and protection of property rights.
The prescription for medium-term growth of economies in countries like Russia, Brazil, and China may seem utterly pragmatic and quite sound. But the virtual economy described is a closed and hermetically sealed system in which the invisible hand of economic forces allegedly results in a health growth economy if impediments to its operation are removed or minimized. It is, of course, often trued that such prescriptions can have the desired results in terms of increases in living standards, and Russia, Brazil and China are seeking to implement them in various ways.
In the real economy, however, these systems are clearly not closed or hermetically sealed: Russia uses carbon-based fuels in production facilities that produce large amounts of carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to global warming: Brazil is in the process of destroying a rain forest that is critical to species diversity and the maintenance of a relative abundance of atmospheric gases that regulate Earth temperature, and China is seeking to build a first-world economy based on highly polluting old-world industrial plants that burn soft coal. Not to forget, . . . the virtual economic systems that the world now seems to regard as the best example of the benefits that can be derived form the workings of the invisible hand, that of the United States, operates in the real economy as one of the primary contributors to the ecological crisis.
In “Consilience,” Edward O. Wilson makes to comment, the case that effective and timely solutions to the problem threatening human survival is critically dependent on something like a global revolution in ethical thought and behaviour. But his view of the basis for this revolution is quite different from our own. Wilson claimed that since the foundations for moral reasoning evolved in what he termed ‘gene-culture’ evolution, the rules of ethical behaviour re emergent aspects of our genetic inheritance. Based on the assumptions that the behaviour of contemporary hunter-gatherers resembles that of our hunter-gatherers forebears in the Palaeolithic Era, he drew on accounts of Bushman hunter-gatherers living in the centre Kalahari in an effort to demonstrate that ethical behaviour is associated with instincts like bonding, cooperation, and altruism.
Wilson argued that these instincts evolved in our hunter-gatherer accessorial descendabilities, whereby genetic mutation and the ethical behaviour associated with these genetically based instincts provided a survival advantage. He then claimed that since these genes were passed on to subsequent generations of our descendable characteristics, which eventually became pervasive in the human genome, the ethical dimension of human nature has a genetic foundation. When we fully understand the “innate epigenetic rules of moral reasoning,” it seems probable that the rules will probably turn out to be an ensemble of many algorithms whose interlocking activities guide the mind across a landscape of nuances moods and choices.
Any reasonable attempt to lay a firm foundation beneath the quagmire of human ethics in all of its myriad and often contradictory formulations is admirable, and Wilson’s attempt is more admirable than most. In our view, however, there is little or no prospect that it will prove successful for a number of reasons. Wile te probability for us to discover some linkage between genes and behaviour, seems that the lightened path of human ethical behaviour and ranging advantages of this behaviour is far too complex, not o mention, inconsistently been reduced to a given set classification of “epigenetic ruled of moral reasoning.”
Also, moral codes and recoding may derive in part from instincts that confer a survival advantage, but when we are the examine to these codes, it also seems clear that they are primarily cultural products. This explains why ethical systems are constructed in a bewildering variety of ways in different cultural contexts and why they often sanction or legitimate quite different thoughts and behaviours. Let us not forget that rules f ethical behaviours are quite malleable and have been used sacredly to legitimate human activities such as slavery, colonial conquest, genocide and terrorism. As Cardinal Newman cryptically put it, “Oh how we hate one another for the love of God.”
According to Wilson, the “human mind evolved to believe in the gods” and people “need a sacred narrative” to his view are merely human constructs and, therefore, there is no basis for dialogue between the world views of science and religion. “Science for its part, will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition and in time uncover the bedrock of the moral and religiously sentient. The result of the competition between the two world views, is believed, as In, will be the secularization of the human epic and of religion itself.
Wilson obviously has a right to his opinions, and many will agree with him for their own good reasons, but what is most interesting about his thoughtful attempted is to posit a more universal basis for human ethics in that it s based on classical assumptions about the character of both physical and biological realities. While Wilson does not argue that human’s behaviour is genetically determined in the strict sense, however, he does allege that there is a causal linkage between genes and behaviour that largely condition this behaviour, he appears to be a firm believer in classical assumption that reductionism can uncover the lawful essences that principally govern the physical aspects that were attributed to reality, including those associated with the alleged “epigenetic rules of moral reasoning.”
Once, again, Wilson’s view is apparently nothing that cannot be reduced to scientific understandings or fully disclosed in scientific terms, and this apparency of hope for the future of humanity is that the triumph of scientific thought and method will allow us to achieve the Enlightenments ideal of disclosing the lawful regularities that govern or regulate all aspects of human experience. Hence, science will uncover the “bedrock of moral and religious sentiment, and the entire human epic will be mapped in the secular space of scientific formalism.” The intent is not to denigrate Wilson’s attentive efforts to posit a more universal basis for the human condition, but is to demonstrate that any attempt to understand or improve upon the behaviour based on appeals to outmoded classical assumptions is unrealistic and outmoded. If the human mind did, in fact, evolve in something like deterministic fashion in gene-culture evolution - and if there were, in fact, innate mechanisms in mind that are both lawful and benevolent. Wilson’s program for uncovering these mechanisms could have merit. But for all the reasons that have been posited, classical determinism cannot explain the human condition and its evolutionary principle that govern in their functional dynamics, as Darwinian evolution should be modified to acclimatize the complementary relationships between cultural and biological principles that governing evaluations do indeed have in them a strong, and firm grip upon genetical mutations that have attributively been the distribution in the contribution of human interactions with themselves in the finding to self-realizations and undivided wholeness.
Freud’s use of the word “superman” or “overman”in and of itself might indicate only a superficial familiarity with a popular term associated with Nietzsche. However, as Holmes has pointed out, Freud is discussing the holy, or saintly , and its relation to repression and the giving up of freedom of instinctual expression, central concerns of the third essay of on the Genealogy of Morals, ‘What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals.’
Nietzsche writes of the anti-nature of the ascetic ideal, how it relates to a disgust with oneself, its continuing destructive effect upon the health of Europeans, and how it relates to the realm of ‘subterranean revenge’ and ressentiment. In addition, Nietzsche writes of the repression of instincts (though not specifically on impulses toward sexual perversions) and of their being turned inward against the self. Continuing, he wrote on the ‘instinct for freedom forcibly made latent . . . this instinct for freedom pushed back and repressed. In closing, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material: Zarathustra also speaks of most sacred, now he must find allusion caprice, even in the most sacred, that freedom from his love may become his prey. The formulation as it pertains to sexual perversions and incest certainly does not derive from Nietzsche (although, along different lines incest was an important factor in Nietzsche’s understanding of Oedipus), the relating freedom was very possibly influenced by Nietzsche, particularly in light of Freud’s reference as the ‘holy’; as well as to the ‘overman’. As these of issues re explored in the Antichrist which had been published just two years earlier.
Nietzsche had written of sublimation, and he specifically wrote of sublimation of sexual drives in the Genealogy. Freud’s use of the term as differing somewhat from his later and more Nietzschean usage such as in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, but as Kaufmann notes, while ‘the word is older than either Freud or Nietzsche . . . it was Nietzsche who first gave it the specific connotation it has today’. Kaufmann regards the concept of sublimation as the most important concepts in Nietzsche’s entire philosophy.
Of course it is difficult to determine whether or not Freud may have been recently reading Nietzsche or was consciously or unconsciously drawing on information he had come across some years earlier. It is also possible that Freud had recently of some time earlier, registered a limited resource of the Genealogy or other works. At a later time in his life Freud claimed he could not read more than a few passage s of Nietzsche due to being overwhelmed by the wealth of ideas. This claim might be supported by the fact that Freud demonstrates only a limited understanding of certain of Nietzsche’s concepts. For example, his reference to the ‘overman’, such in showing a lack of understanding of the self-overcoming and sublimation, not simply freely gratified primitive instincts. Later in life, Freud demonstrates a similar misunderstanding in his equation the overman with the tyrannical father of the primal horde. Perhaps Freud confused the overman with he ‘master’ whose morality is contrasted with that of ‘slave ‘ morality in the Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil. The conquering master more freely gratifies instinct and affirms himself, his world and has values as good. The conquered slave, unable to express himself freely, creates negating, resentful, vengeful morality glorifying his own crippled. Alienated condition, and her crates a division not between goof (noble) and bad (Contemptible), but between good (undangerous) and evil (wicked and powerful - dangerous ness).
Much of what Rycroft writes is similar to, implicit in, or at least compatible with what we have seen of Nietzsche’s theoretical addresses as to say, as other materia that has been placed on the table fr consideration. Rycroft specifically states that h takes up ‘a position much nearer Groddeck’s [on the nature of the, “it” or, id] than Freud’s. He doesn’t mention that Freud was ware of Groddeck’s concept of the “it” and understood the term to be derived from Nietzsche. However, beyond ‘the process itself; as a consequence of grammatical habit - that the activity, ‘thinking’, requires an agent.
The self, as in its manifesting in constructing dreams, ma y be an aspect of our psychic live tat knows things that our waking “In” or ego may not know and may not wish to know, and a relationship ma y be developed between these aspects of our psychic lives in which the latter opens itself creatively to the communications of he former. Zarathustra states: ‘Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage - whose name is self. In your body he dwells, he is your body’. Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s self cannot be understood as a replacement for an all-knowing God to whom the “I” or ego appeals for its wisdom, commandments, guidance and the like. To open oneself to another aspect of oneself that is wiser (an unknown sage) in the sense that new information can be derived from it, does not necessarily entail that this ‘wiser’ component of one’s psychic life has God-like knowledge and commandments which if one (one’s “I-nesses”) deciphers and opens correctly to will set one on the straight path. It is true though that when Nietzsche writes of the self as ‘a mighty ruler an unknown sage ‘ he does open himself to such an interpretation and even to the possibility that this ‘ruler’ is unreachable, unapproachable for the “I.” (Nietzsche/Zarathustra redeeming the body) and after “On the Despisers of he Body, makes it clear, that there are aspects of our psychic selves that interpret the body, that mediate its directives, ideally in ways that do not deny the body but aid in the body doing ‘what it would do above all else, to create beyond itself’.
Also the idea of a fully formed, even if the unconscious, ‘mighty ruler’ and ‘unknown sage ‘ as a true self beneath an only apparent surface is at odds with Nietzsche ‘s idea that there is no one true, stable, enduring self in and of itself, to be found once of the veil in appearance is removed. And even early in his career Nietzsche wrote sarcastically of ‘that cleverly discovered well of inspiration, the unconscious’. There is, though, a tension in Nietzsche between the notion of bodily-based drive is pressing for discharge (which can, among other things, (sublimated) and a more organized bodily-based self which may be ‘an unknown sage’ and in relation to which the “I-ness” may open to potential communications in the manner for which there is no such conception of self for which Freud and the dream is not produced with the intention of being understood.
Nietzsche explored the ideas of psychic energy and drives pressing for discharge. His discussion on sublimation typically implies an understanding of drives in just such a sense as does his idea that dreams provide for discharge of drives. Nonetheless, he did not relegate all that is derived from instinct and the body to this realm. While for Nietzsche there is no stable, enduring true self awaiting discovery and liberation, the body and the self (in the broadest sense of the term, including what is unconscious and may be at work in dreams as Rycroft describes it) may offer up potential communication and direct to the “I” or ego. However, at times Nietzsche describes the “I” or ego as having very little, if any, idea as to how it is being by the “it.”
Nietzsche, like Freud, describe of two types of mental possesses, on which ‘binds’ [man’s] life to reason its concepts, such of an order as not to be swept away by the current and to lose himself, the other, pertaining to the worlds of myth, art and the dream, ‘constantly showing the desire to shape the existing world of the wide-wake person to be variegatedly irregular and disinterested, incoherent, exciting and eternally new, as is the world of dreams’. Art may function as a ’middle sphere’ and ‘middle faculty’ (transitional sphere and faculty) between a more primitive ‘metaphor-world’ of impressions and the forms of uniform abstract concepts.
Again, Nietzsche, like Freud attempts to account for the function of consciousness in light of the new under stranding of conscious mental functioning. Nietzsche distinguishes between himself and ‘older philosophers’ who do not appreciate the significance of unconscious mental functioning, while Freud distinguishes the unconscious of philosophers and the unconscious of psychoanalysis. What is missing is the acknowledgement of Nietzsche as philosopher and psychologist whose idea as on unconscious mental functioning have very strong affinities with psychoanalysis, as Freud himself will mention on a number of other occasions. Neither here nor in his letters to Fliess which he mentions Lipps, nor in his later paper in which Lipp (the ‘German philosopher’) is acknowledged again, is Nietzsche mentioned when it comes to acknowledging in a specific and detailed manner as important forerunner of psychoanalysis. Although Freud will state on a number of occasions that Nietzsche’s insight are close to psychoanalysis, very rarely will he state any details regarding the similarities. He mentions a friend calling his attention to the notion of the criminal from a sense of guilt, a patient calling his attention to the pride-memory aphorism, Nietzsche’s idea in dreams we cannot enter the realm of the psyche of primitive man, etc. there is never any derailed statement on just what Nietzsche anticipated pertinently to psychoanalysis. This is so even after Freud has been taking Nietzsche with him on vacation.
Equally important, the classical assumption that the only privileged or valid knowledge is scientific is one of the primary sources of the stark division between the two cultures of humanistic and scientists-engineers, in this view, Wilson is quite correct in assuming that a timely end to the two culture war and a renewer dialogue between members of those cultures is now critically important to human survival. It is also clear, however, those dreams of reason based on the classical paradigm will only serve to perpetuate the two-culture war. Since these dreams are also remnants of an old scientific world-view that no longer applies in theory in fact, to the actual character of physical reality, as reality is a probable service to frustrate the solution for which in found of a real world problem.
However, there is a renewed basis for dialogue between the two cultures, it is believed as quite different from that described by Wilson. Since classical epistemology has been displaced, or is the process of being displaced, by the new epistemology of science, the truths of science can no longer be viewed as transcendent ad absolute in the classical sense. The universe more closely resembles a giant organism than a giant machine, and it also displays emergent properties that serve to perpetuate the existence of the whole in both physics and biology that cannot be explained in terms of unrestricted determinism, simple causality, first causes, linear movements and initial conditions. Perhaps the first and most important precondition for renewed dialogue between the two cultural conflicting realizations as Einstein explicated upon its topic as, that a human being is a “part of the whole.’ It is this spared awareness that allows for the freedom, or existential choice of self-decision of determining our free-will and the power to differentiate direct parts to free ourselves of the “optical allusion”of our present conception of self as a ‘partially limited in space and time’ and to widen ‘our circle of compassion to embrace al living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty’. Yet, one cannot, of course, merely reason oneself into an acceptance of this view, nonetheless, the inherent perceptions of the world are reason that the capacity for what Einstein termed ‘cosmic religious feelings’. Perhaps, our enabling capability for that which is within us to have the obtainable ability to enabling of our experience of self-realization, that of its realness is to sense its proven existence of a sense of elementarily leaving to some sorted conquering sense of universal consciousness, in so given to arise the existence of the universe, which really makes an essential difference to the existence or its penetrative spark of awakening indebtednesses of reciprocality?
Those who have this capacity will hopefully be able to communicate their enhanced scientific understanding of the relations among all aspects, and in part that is our self and the whole that are the universe in ordinary language wit enormous emotional appeal. The task lies before the poets of this renewing reality have nicely been described by Jonas Salk, which “man has come to the threshold of a state of consciousness, regarding his nature and his relationship to the Cosmos, in terms that reflects ‘reality’. By using the processes of Nature and metaphor, to describe the forces by which it operates upon and within Man, we come as close to describing reality as we can within the limits of our comprehension. Men will be very uneven in their capacity or such understanding, which, naturally, differs for different ages and cultures, and develops and changes over the course of time. For these reasons it will always be necessary to use metaphorical and mythical provisions as comprehensive guides to living. In this way. Man’s afforded efforts by the imagination and intellect can be playing the vital roles embarking upon the survival and his endurable evolution.
It is time, if not, only, to be concluded from evidence in its suggestive conditional relation, for which the religious imagination and the religious experience to engage upon the complementarity of truths science, as fitting that silence with meaning, as having to antiquate a continual emphasis, least of mention, that does not mean that those who do not believe in the existence of God or Being, should refrain in any sense from assessing the impletions of the new truths of science. Understanding these implications does not necessitate any ontology, and is in no way diminished by the lack of any ontology. And one is free to recognize a basis for a dialogue between science and religion for the same reason that one is free to deny that this basis exists - there is nothing in our current scientific world view that can prove the existence of God or Being and nothing that legitimate any anthropomorphic conceptions of the nature of God or Being.
The present time is clearly a time of a major paradigm shift, but consider the last great paradigm shift, the one that resulted in the Newtonian framework. This previous paradigm shift was profoundly problematic for the human spirit, it led to the conviction that we are strangers, freaks of nature, conscious beings in a universe that is almost entirely unconscious, and that, since the universe its strictly deterministic, even the free will we feel in regard to the movements of our bodies is an allusion. Yet it was probably necessary for the Western mind to go through the acceptance of such a paradigm.
In the final analysis there will be philosophers unprepared to accept that, if a given cognitive capacity is psychologically real, then there must be an explanation of how it is possible for an individual in the course of human development to acquire that cognitive capacity, or anything like it, can have a role to play in philosophical accounts of concepts and conceptual abilities. The most obvious basis for such a view would be a Frégean distrust of “psychology” that leads to a rigid division of labour between philosophy and psychology. The operative thought is that the task of a philosophical theory of concepts is to explain what a given concept is or what a given conceptual ability consist in. This, it is frequently maintained, is something that can be done in complete independence of explaining how such a concept or ability might be acquired. The underlying distinction is one between philosophical questions centring around concept possession and psychological questions centring around concept possibilities for an individual to acquire that ability, then it cannot be psychologically real. Nevertheless, this distinction is, however, strictly one does adhere to the distinction, it provides no support for a rejection of any given cognitive capacity for which is psychologically real. The neo-Frégean distinction is directly against the view that facts about how concepts are acquired have a role to play in explaining and individualizing concepts. But this view does not have to be disputed by a supporter as such, nonetheless, all that the supporter is to commit is that the principle that no satisfactory account of what a concept is should make it impossible to provide explanation of how that concept can be acquired. That is, that this principle has nothing to say about the further question of whether the psychological explanation has a role to play in a constitutive explanation of the concept, and hence is not in conflict with the neo-Frégean distinction.
A full account of the structure of consciousness, will need to illustrate those higher, conceptual forms of consciousness to which little attention on such an account will take and about how it might emerge from given points of value, is the thought that an explanation of everything that is distinctive about consciousness will emerge out of an account of what it is for a subject to be capable of thinking about himself. But, to a proper understanding of the complex phenomenon of consciousness. There are no facts about linguistic mastery that will determine or explain what might be termed the cognitive dynamics that are individual processes that have found their way forward for a theory of consciousness, it sees, to chart the characteristic features individualizing the various distinct conceptual forms of consciousness in a way that will provide a taxonomy of unconsciousness and they, to show how these manifest the Characterological functions can enhance the condition of manifesting services, whereby, its continuous condition may that it be the determinate levels of content. What is hoped is now clear is that these forms of higher forms of consciousness emerge from a rich foundation of non-conceptual representations of thought, which can only expose and clarify their conviction that these forms of conscious thought hold the key, not just to an eventful account of how mastery of the conscious paradigms, but to a proper understanding of the plexuity of self-consciousness might that it be and/or the overall conjecture of consciousness that stands alone as to an everlasting vanquishment into the abyssal of an ever-unchangeless state of unconsciousness, as are for the hiddden and underlying portals of both the primivity and instinctualities as placed of a particulkar point in space and time, as these latent inscriptions grip of holding among 'us' that even our presence makes available their inclining inclination. Research in neuroscience has shown that language processing is a staggeringly complex phenomenon that places incredible demands on memory and learning. Language functions extend, for example, into all major lobes of the neocortex: Auditory input is associated with the temporal area; tactile input is associated with the parietal area, and attention, working memory, and planning are associated with the frontal cortex of the left or dominant hemisphere. The left prefrontal region is associated with verb and noun production tasks and in the retrieval of words representing action. Broca’s area, adjacent to the mouth-tongue region of motor cortex, is associated with vocalization in word formation, and Wernicke’s area, adjacent to the auditory cortex, is associated with sound analysis in the sequencing of words.
Lower brain regions, like the cerebellum, have also evolved in our species to assist in language processing. Until recently, the cerebellum was thought to be exclusively involved with automatic or preprogrammed movements such as throwing a ball, jumping over a high hurdle or playing well-practiced noted on a musical instrument. Imaging studies in neuroscience indicate, however, that the cerebellum is activated during speaking, and most activated when the subject is making difficult word associations. It is now thought that the cerebellum plays a role in associations by providing access to fairly automatic word sequences and by augmenting rapid shifts in attention.
The midbrain and brain stem, situated on top of the spinal cord, coordinate input and output systems in the head and play a crucial role in communication functions. Vocalization has a special associations with the midbrain, which coordinates the interaction of the oral and respiratory tracks necessary to make speech sounds. Since this vocalization requires synchronous activity among oral, vocal, and respiratory muscles, these functions probably connect to a central site. This site appears to be the central gray area of the brain. The central gray area links the reticular nuclei and brain stem motor nuclei to comprise a distributed network for sound production. And while human speech is dependent on structures in the cerebral cortex as well as on rapid movement of the oral and vocal muscles, this is not true for vocalisation in other mammals.
Most experts agree that our ancestries became capable of fully articulated speech based on complex grammar and syntax between two hundred thousand and some hundred thousand years ago. The mechanisms in the human brain that allowed for this great achievement clearly evolved, however, over great spans of time. In biology textbooks, the list of prior adaptations that enhanced the ability of our ancestors to use language normally includes the following: an increase in intelligence, significant alterations of oral and auditory abilities, the separation or localization of functions to the two sides of the brain, and the evolution of some sort of innate or hard-wired grammar. But when we look at how our ability to use language could have actually evolved over the entire course of hominid evolution, the process seems more basic and more counterintuitive than we had previously imagined.
Although we share some aspects of vocalization with our primate cousins, the mechanisms of human vocalization are quite different and have evolved over great spans of time. Incremental increases in hominid brain size over the last 2.5 million years enhanced cortical control over the larynx, which originally evolved to prevent food and other particles from entering the windpipe or trachea; this eventually contributed to the use of vocal symbolization. Humans have more voluntary motor control over sound produced in the larynx than any other vocal species, and this control is associated with higher brain systems involved in skeletal muscle control as opposed to just visceral control. As a result, humans have direct cortical motor control over phonation and oral movement while chimps do not.
The larynx in modern humans is positioned in a comparatively low position to the throat and significantly increases the range and flexibility of sound production. The low position of the larynx allows greater changes in the volume to the resonant chamber formed by the mouth and pharynx and makes it easier to shift sounds to the mouth and away from the nasal cavity. The dramatic result is that sounds that comprise vowel components of speech become much more variable, including extremes in resonance combinations such as the “ee” sound in “tree” and the “aw” sound in “flaw.” Equally important, the repositioning of the larynx dramatically increases the ability of the mouth and tongue to modify vocal sounds. This shift in the larynx also makes it more likely that food and water passing over the larynx will enter the trachea, and this explains why humans are more inclined to experience choking. Yet this disadvantage, which could have caused the shift to e selected against, was clearly out-weighed by the advantage of being able to produce all the sounds used in modern language systems.
Some have argued that this removal of constraints on vocalization suggest that spoken language based on complex symbol systems emerged quite sudddenly in modern humans only about one hundred thousand years ago. It is, however, far more likely that language use began with very primitive symbolic systems amd evolved over time to increasingly complex systems. The first symbolic systems were not full-blown language systems, and they were probably not as flexible and complex as the vocal calls and gestural displays of modern primates. It is also probable that the first users of primitive symbolic systems coordinated most of their social comminations with call and display behaviours like those of modern apes and monkeys.
Critically important to the evolution of enhanced language skills is that behavioural adaptions tend to precede and condition biological changes. This represents a reversal of the usual course of evolution where biological change precedes behavioural adaption. When th first hominids began to use stone tools, they probably did si in a very haphazard fashion by drawing on their flexible ape-like learning abilities. But the use of this technology over time opened a new ecological niche where selective pressures occasioned new adaptions. A tool use became more indispensable for obtaining food and organized social behaviours, mutations that enhanced the use of tools probably functioned as a principal source of selection for both bodied and brains.
The fist stone choppers appear in the fossil remnant fragments remaining about 2.5 million years ago, and they appear to have been fabricated with a few sharp blows of stone on stone. It is reasonable to assume that these primitive tools, which were hand-held and probably used to cut flesh and to chip bone to expose the marrow, were created by Homo habilis - the first large-brained hominid. Stone making is obviously a skill passed on from one generation to the next by learning as opposed to a physical trait passed on genetically. After these tools became critical to survival, this introduced selection for learning abilities that did not exist for other species. Although the early tool maskers may have had brains roughly comparable to those of modern apes, they were already in the process of being adapted for symbol learning.
The first symbolic representations were probably associated with social adaptations that were quite fragile, and any support that could reinforce these adaptions I the interest of survival would have been favoured by evolution. The expansion of the forebrain in Homo habilis, particularly the prefrontal cortex, was on of the core adaptations. This adaption was enhanced over time by increased connectivity to brain regions involved in language processing.
It is easy to imagine why incremental improvements in symbolic representations provided a selective advantage. Symbolic communication probably enhanced cooperation in the relationship of mothers to infants, allowed forgoing techniques to be more easily learned, served as the basis for better coordinating scavenging and hunting activities, and generally improved the prospect of attracting a mate. As the list of domains in which symbolic communication was introduced became longer over time, this probably resulted in new selective pressures that served to make this communication more elaborate. After more functions became dependent on this communication, those who failed in symbol learning or could only use symbols awkwardly were less likely to pass on their genes to subsequent generations.
The crude language of the earliest users of symbols must have been replete with gestures and nonsymbiotic vocalizations, and spoken language probably became a reactively independent and closed system only after the emergence of hominids to use symbolic communication evolved, symbolic forms progressively took over functions served by non-vocal symbolic forms. This is reflected in modern languages. The structure of syntax in these languages often reveals its origins in pointing gestures, in the manipulation and exchange of objects, and in more primitive constructions of spatial and temporal relationships. And we still use nonverbal vocalizations and gestures to complement meaning in spoken language.
While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, the most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. And Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured preadaptive changes required for symbolic communication. But as this communication resulted in increasingly more complex behaviours, social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageous within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.
Since this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species, this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.
If the emergent reality in this mental realm cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained in terms of, the sum of its parts, it seems reasonable to conclude that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths is proceeding by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the actual experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. And no scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how complete, ca account for the actualized experience of a thought or feeling as an emergent aspect of global brain function.
If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the actual experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness, conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. And while one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
Even so, we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality appears to be associated with the emergence of new wholes that ae greater than the orbital parts, and the entire biosphere appears to be of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. If, however, the emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems as marked by the appearance of a new profound complementary relationship between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. But it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the elf-organizing properties of biological life.
Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allowed us to construct symbolic universes based on complex language system that is particularly relevant for our purposes concerns consciousness of self. Consciousness of self as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this self and the other selves. Self, as it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a self-referential character in a mental realm separately distinct from the material realm. It was, the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his famous dualism in an effort to understand the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.
Based on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, it seems clear that our real or actualized self is not imprisoned in our minds. It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, derives its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the “otherness” of selves and world is an illusion that disguises of its own actualization such to find the totality of its relations between the part that is of its own characterized self as related to the temporality of being whole that is biological reality. It can be viewed, of a proper definition of this whole must not only include the evolution of the larger undissectible whole of the cosmos and the unbroken evolution of all life from the first self-replication molecule that was the ancestor of DNA. It should also include the complex interactions between all the parts in biological reality that resulted in emergent self-regulating properties in the whole that sustained the existence of the parts.
Based on complications and complex systems in ordinary language conditioned the development of descriptions of physical reality and the metaphysical concerns that loom largely in the history of mathematics and that the dialogue between the mega-narratives or frame tales of religion and science was a critical factor in the minds of those who contributed to the first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Allowing to the better understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality as marked by the result in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.
In whatever way, no assumptions are to be taken for granted, and no thoughtful conclusion should be lightly dismissed as fallacious in studying the phenomenon of consciousness. Becoming more even, so that of exercising intellectual humanness and caution must try to move ahead to reach some positive conclusion on the topic.
Our consciousness evinces a striking unity, its taken measure in concert with consciousness can take more than one form even when we are conscious, its conscious state of representation is an immediate distribution of contentual contributions of awakening internal representational states of several provinces. If to any given direction we can assemble of these affairs in that our relations are the assemblage of variously existing avenues.
I am aware not only of ‘A' and, the separate entity of 'B' and, again, as separately to 'C', even so, a unity exists in them as they are representations that abide of themselves as of 'A-and-B-and-C', each of which appears of an abounding to some successive set-order as consequentially an equivalent of any regional grade of ordering. Equivalent to which must bestow the gross effectuality to only appear of periodicity, insofar as to be awarded in each respective range of heir spatial regionality. Simply in that no partially associated direction is as yet conceptually given to those spaces or regional recognition. The evincing peculiarity of assorted extension over which time deems of its owing necessity to arises within each in their own but owing constitutional states of consiousness. We are regionally met within the depths of internal opuses that lay existent to latencies of regained and simultaneous of each other. Justly forwarded in the betterment of all who are equitably contributive of having been associated through non-specified paradigms as they are affiliated by some, the assemblages gathered open-hearted of neuronal excitation, by this in themselves are the directorial senses which has of laying their existent nerve channelling transmittance, which are they that their assembling the form ‘A’. In the same manner the wilfully attempt in across to some forming of instinctuality in gathering both sodium and ionized particularities are those in an excitable state, whereby to each score is to address the unifying order of latent primivities. As these schematical leaps across the synapse are to fulfil their calls by some dissassociated quantification. If only to reflexive instincts they leap cross successfully and bind of a new beginning as to journey as attached within the neuronal transmitter. Travelling through by a continuous length to succumb by their temporal existence which at some point are met by the causal infractions that they remain of a nourishing production. These qualifying aspects are not only that they are readily adjoined by some newly charged excitability, but are so charged withing their particulated point as built through self-referential engagements. In this case, the neuronal encounter travels its journey to an end point of ‘B’. Each having to some affiliation of filamentous infiltration, that of some stimulated set-charged fibril excitations do occur.
By journeys end, their ways have been met by directional impulse that holds to them of constituent components, each in turn are awaiting an awakening state as distributively structured by conscousness, or for which their contributive continuity grants of their leap across the synapse, justly as for reasons that for each composite cell is a subroutine, whereas, each in these potentially vanquishable states are mind-set actualisations as brought the totality of spatially temporal exercisers. Only through one and another that they are the attributive and unstretching of the constitution, as we can depict of particle objects. Yet, the contentually representations that find of these are their determinant representation of firmly grounded and steadfast responsiveness that for reasons unseen that each is stationed of some purposive state of consciousness. The contemporary world of epistemological phenomenons has been called to name by the endeavouring "unity of consciousness."
Of these implications in human terms is a view that finds of the relationship between mind and world as applicably to challenge by conviction the imparting transformation. That, even so, through its first formalized distinction had become to insurmountable moments that appear in a realm separate and distinct from nature. It essentially disallows the prospect that the physical reality described by physical theory can have any other meaning, then to imply, for their own purposes, to fully recognize and understand is that the descriptions of physical reality are effectually to resolve or eliminate all aggravated dilemmas.
Numerous writers, along with a few well-known new-age gurus, have played fast and loose with implications of some new but informal understanding to ground the mental in some vague sense of cosmic consciousness. However, these new age nuances are ever so erroneously placed in the new-age section of a commercial bookstore and purchased by those interested in new-age literature, they will be quite disappointed.
Our frame reference work is mostly to incorporate in an abounding set-class affiliation between mind and world, by that lay to some defining features and fundamental preoccupations, for which there is certainly nothing new in the suggestion that contemporary scientific world-view legitimates an alternate conception of the relationship between mind and world. Basically, the essential point of attention is that one of “consciousness” and remains in a certain state of our study.
But at the end of this sometimes arduous journey lay to conclusions that should make the trip very worthwhile. Initiatory comments offer resistance in contemporaneous physics or biology for believing I the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have rather aptly described as “the disease of the Western mind.” in addition, let us consider the legacy in Western intellectual life of the stark division between mind and world sanctioned by René Descartes.
Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, on the grounds that he made epistemological questions the primary and central questions of the discipline. But this is misleading for several reasons. Un the first, Descartes conception of philosophy was very different from our own. The term “philosophy” in the seventeenth century was far more comprehensive than it is today, and embraced the whole of what we nowadays call natural science, including cosmology and physics, as well as subjects like anatomy, optics and medicine. Descartes reputation as a philosopher in his own time was based as much as anything on his contributions in these scientific areas. Secondly, even in those Cartesian writings that are philosophical in the modern academic sense, th e epistemological concerns are rather different from the conceptual and linguistic inquires that characterize present-day theory of knowledge. Descartes saw the need to base his scientific system on secure metaphysical foundations: By “metaphysics” he meant inquires into God and the soul and in general all th first things to be discovered by philosophizing. Yet, he was quick tyo realize that there was nothing in this view that provided untold benefits between heaven and earth and united the universe in a shared and communicable frame of knowledge, it presented us with a view of physical reality that was totally alien from the world of everyday life. Even so, there was nothing in this view of nature that could explain or provide a foundation for the mental, or for all that of direct experience as distinctly human, with no ups, downs or any which ways of direction.
Following these fundamental inquires that include questions about knowledge and certainty, but even here, Descartes is not primarily concerned with the criteria for knowledge claims, or with definitions of the epistemic concepts involved, as his aim is to provide a unified framework for understanding the universe. And with this, Descartes was convinced that the immaterial essences that gave form and structure to this universe were coded in geometrical and mathematical ideas, and this insight led him to invented algebraic geometry.
A scientific understanding to these ideas could be derived, said Descartes, with the aid of precise deduction, and he also claimed that the contours of physical reality could be laid out in three-dimensional coordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modeling became the most powerful tools of modern science. And the dream that the entire physical world could be known and mastered through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and guiding principle of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanisms in the absence of any concerns about its spiritual dimension or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile, or eliminate Descartes’s stark division between mind and matter became perhaps the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
As in the view of the relationship between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics and formalized by Descartes becam e a central preoccupation in Western intellectual life. And the tragedy of the Western mind is that we have lived since the seventeenth century with the prospect that the inner world of human consciousness and the outer world of physical reality are separated by an abyss or a void that cannot be bridged or in agreement with reconciliation.
In classical physics, external reality consisted of inert and inanimate matte moving in accordance with wholly deterministic natural laws, and collections of discrete atomized parts constituted wholes. Classical physics was also premised, however, a dualistic conception of reality as consisting of abstract disembodied ideas existing in a domain separate from and superior to sensible objects and movements. The notion that the material world experienced by the senses was inferior to the immaterial world experienced by mind or spirit has been blamed for frustrating the progress of physics up to at least the time of Galileo. But in one very important respect, it also made the first scientific revolution possible. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler. And Newton firmly believed that the immaterial geometrical and mathematical ideas that inform physical reality had a prior existence in the mind of God and that doing physics was a form of communion with these ideas.
The tragedy of the Western mind is a direct consequence of the stark Cartesian division between mind and world. We discover the “certain principles of physical reality,” said Descartes, “not by the prejudices of the senses, but by the light of reason, and which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth.” Since the real, or that which actually exists external to ourselves, was in his view only that which could be represented in the quantitative terms of mathematics, Descartes concluded that all qualitative aspects of reality could be traced to the deceitfulness of the senses.
Given that Descartes distrusted the information from the senses to the point of doubting the perceived results of repeatable scientific experiments, how did he conclude that our knowledge of the mathematical ideas residing only in mind or I human subjectivity was accurate, much less the absolute truth? He did so by making a leap of faith - God constructed the world, said Descartes, in accordance with the mathematical ideas that our minds are capable of uncovering in their pristine essence. The truths of classical physics as Descartes viewed them were quite literally “revealed” truths, and it ws this seventeenth-century metaphysical presupposition that became in the history of science what is termed as the “hidden ontology of classical epistemology.” Descartes lingers in the widespread conviction that science does not provide a “place for man” or for all that we know as distinctly human in subjective reality.
The historical notion in the unity of consciousness has had an interesting history in philosophy and psychology. Taking Descartes to be the first major philosopher of the modern period, the unity of consciousness was central to the study of the mind for the whole of the modern period until the 20th century. The notion figured centrally in the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Kant, Brennan, James, and, in most of the major precursors of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology. It played a particularly important role in Kant's work.
A couple of examples will illustrate the role that the notion of the unity of consciousness played in this long literature. Consider a classical argument for dualism (the view that the mind is not the body, indeed is not made out of matter at all). It starts like this: When I consider the mind, which is to say of myself, insofar as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.
Descartes then asserts that if the mind is not made up of parts, it cannot consist of matter, presumably because, as he saw it, anything material has parts. He then goes on to say that this would be enough to prove dualism by itself, had he not already proved it elsewhere. Notice where it is that I cannot distinguish any parts. It is in the unified consciousness that I have of myself.
Here is another, more elaborate argument based on unified consciousness. The conclusion will be that any system of components could never achieve unified consciousness acting in concert. William James' well-known version of the argument starts as follows: Take a sentence of a dozen words, take twelve men, and to each word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.
James generalizes this observation to all conscious states. To get dualism out of this, we need to add a premise: that if the mind were made out of matter, conscious states would have to be distributed over some group of components in some relevant way. Nevertheless, this thought experiment is meant to show, conscious states cannot be so distributed. Therefore, the conscious mind is not made out of matter. Calling the argument that James is using here the Unity Argument. Clearly, the idea that our consciousness of, here, the parts of a sentence are unified is at the centre of the Unity Argument. Like the first, this argument goes all the way back to Descartes. Versions of it can be found in thinkers otherwise as different from one another as Leibniz, Reid, and James. The Unity Argument continued to be influential into the 20th century. That the argument was considered a powerful reason for concluding that the mind is not the body is illustrated in a backhanded way by Kant's treatment of it (as he found it in Descartes and Leibniz, not James, of course).
Kant did not think that we could demonstrate anything about the nature of the mind, including whether nor is it made out of matter. To make the case for this view, he had to show that all existing arguments that the mind is not material do not work and he set out to do just this in the chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason on the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (1781) (paralogisms are faulty inferences about the nature of the mind). The Unity Argument is the target of a major part of that chapter; if one is going to show that we cannot know what the mind is like, we must dispose of the Unity Argument, which purports to show that the mind is not made out of matter. Kant's argument that the Unity Argument does not support dualism is simple. He urges that the idea of unified consciousness being achieved by something that has no parts or components is no less mysterious than its being achieved by a system of components acting together. Remarkably enough, though no philosopher has ever met this challenge of Kant's and no account exists of what an immaterial mind not made out of parts might be like, philosophers continued to rely on the Unity Argument until well into the 20th century. It may be a bit difficult for us to capture this now but the idea any system of components, and for an even stronger reason might not realize that merge with consciousness, that each system of material components, had a strong intuitive appeal for a long time.
The notion that consciousness agrees to unification and was in addition central to one of Kant's own famous arguments, his ‘transcendental deduction of the categories’. In this argument, boiled down to its essentials, Kant claims that to tie various objects of experience together into a single unified conscious representation of the world, something that he simply assumed that we could do, we could probably apply certain concepts to the items in question. In particular we have to apply concepts from each of four fundamental categories of concept: Quantitative, qualitative, relational, and what he called ‘modal’ concepts. Modal concept’s concern of whether an item might exist, does exist, or must exist. Thus, the four kinds of concept are concepts for how many units, what features, what relations to other objects, and what existence status is represented in an experience.
It was relational conceptual representation that most interested Kant and of relational concepts, he thought the concept of cause-and-effect to be by far the most important. Kant wanted to show that natural science (which for him meant primarily physics) was genuine knowledge (he thought that Hume's sceptical treatment of cause and effect relations challenged this status). He believed that if he could prove that we must tie items in our experience together causally if we are to have a unified awareness of them, he would have put physics back on "the secure path of a science.” The details of his argument have exercised philosophers for more than two hundred years. We will not go into them here, but the argument illustrates how central the notion of the unity of consciousness was in Kant's thinking about the mind and its relation to the world.
Although the unity of consciousness had been at the centre of pre-20th century research on the mind, early in the 20th century the notion almost disappeared. Logical atomism in philosophy and behaviourism in psychology were both unsympathetic to the notion. Logical atomism focussed on the atomic elements of cognition (sense data, simple propositional judgments, etc.), rather than on how these elements are tied together to form a mind. Behaviourism urged that we focus on behaviour, the mind being alternatively myth or something otherwise that we cannot and do not need of studying the mysteriousness of science, from which brings meaning and purpose to humanity. This attitude extended to consciousness, of course. The philosopher Daniel Dennett summarizes the attitude prevalent at the time this way: Consciousness may be the last bastion of occult properties, epiphenomena, immeasurable subjective states - in short, the one area of mind best left to the philosophers. Let them make fools of themselves trying to corral the quicksilver of ‘phenomenology’ into a respectable theory.
The unity of consciousness next became an object of serious attention in analytic philosophy only as late as the 1960s. In the years since, new work has appeared regularly. The accumulated literature is still not massive but the unity of consciousness has again become an object of serious study. Before we examine the more recent work, we need to explicate the notion in more detail than we have done so far and introduce some empirical findings. Both are required to understand recent work on the issue.
To expand on our earlier notion of the unity of consciousness, we need to introduce a pair of distinctions. Current works on consciousness labours under a huge, confusing terminology. Different theorists talk about excess consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, simple consciousness, creature consciousness, states consciousness, monitoring consciousness, awareness as equated with consciousness, awareness distinguished from consciousness, higher orders thought, higher orders experience, qualia, the felt qualities of representations, consciousness as displaced perception, . . . and on and on and on. We can ignore most of this profusion but we do need two distinctions: between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects, and between consciousness of representations and consciousness of self.
Consciousness of objects is closely related to sentience and to being awake. It is (at least) being in somewhat of a distinct informational and behavioural intention where its responsive state is for one's condition as played within the immediateness of environmental surroundings. It is the ability, for example, to process and act responsively to information about food, friends, foes, and other items of relevance. One finds consciousness of objects in creatures much less complex than human beings. It is what we (at any rate first and primarily) have in mind when we say of some person or animal as it is coming out of a general anaesthesia, ‘It is regaining consciousness’. Consciousness of objects is not just any form of informational access to the world. It is knowing about, being conscious of, things in the world. We will return to this point in a moment.
We are conscious of our representations when we are conscious, not (just) of some object, but of our representations: ‘I am seeing [as opposed to touching, smelling, tasting] and seeing clearly [as opposed too dimly].’ Consciousness of our own representations it is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but it is not just any form of such informational access. It is knowing about, being conscious of, one's own psychological states. In Nagel's famous phrase (1974), when we are conscious of our representations, it is ‘like something’ to have them. If, that which seems likely, there are forms of consciousness that do not involve consciousness of objects, they might consist in consciousness of representations, though some theorists would insist that this kind of consciousness is not of representations either (via representations, perhaps, but not of them).
The distinction just drawn between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects may seem similar to Block's (1995) well-known distinction between P- [phenomenal] and A- [access] consciousness. Here is his definition of ‘A-consciousness’: "A state is A-conscious if it is poised for direct control of thought and action." He tells us that he cannot define ‘P-consciousness’ in any "remotely noncircular way" but will use it to refer to what he calls "experiential properties,” what it is like to have certain states. Our consciousness of objects may appear to be like Block's A-consciousness. It is not. It is a form of P-consciousness. Consciousness of an object is - how else can we put it? - consciousness of the object. Even if consciousness just is informational excess of a certain kind (something that Block would deny), it is not all form of informational access and we are talking about conscious access here. Recall the idea that it is like something to have a conscious state. Other closely related ideas are that in a conscious state, something appears to one, that conscious states have a ‘felt quality’. A term for all this is phenomenology: conscious states have a phenomenology. (Thus some philosophers speak of phenomenal consciousness here.) We could now state the point we are trying to make this way. If I am conscious of an object, then it is like something to have that object as the content of a representation.
(Some theorists would insist that this last statement be qualified. While such a representation of an object may provide everything that a representation has to have for its contents to be like something to me, they would urge, something more is needed. Different theorists would add different elements. For some, I would have to be aware, not just of the object, but of my representation of it. For others, I would have directorial implications that infer of the certain attentive considerations to its way or something other than is elsewhere. We cannot go into this controversy here. Here we are merely making the point that consciousness of objects is more than Block's A-consciousness.)
Consciousness of self involves, not just consciousness of states that it is like something to have, but consciousness of the thing that has them, i.e., of oneself. It is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but again it is more than that. It is knowing about, being conscious of, oneself, indeed of itself as oneself. Consciousness of oneself in this way is often called consciousness of oneself as the subject of experience. Consciousness of oneself as oneself seems to require an indexical ability and by preference to a special indexical ability at that, not just an ability to pick out something out but to pick something out as oneself. Human beings have such self-referential indexical ability. Whether any other creatures have, it is controversial. The leading nonhuman candidate would be chimpanzees and other primates whom they have taught enough language to use first-person pronouns.
The literature on consciousness sometimes fails to distinguish consciousness of objects, consciousness of one's own representations, and consciousness of self, or treat one three, usually consciousness of one's own representations, as actualized of its owing totality in consciousness. (Conscious states do not have objects, yet is not consciousness of a representation either. We cannot pursue that complication here.) The term ‘conscious’ and cognates are ambiguous in everyday English. We speak of someone regaining consciousness - where we mean simple consciousness of the world. Yet we also say things like, ‘She wasn't conscious of what motivated her to say that’ - where we do not mean that she lacked either consciousness of the world or consciousness of self but rather than she was not conscious of certain things about herself, specifically, certain of her own representational states. To understand the unity of consciousness, making these distinctions is important. The reason is this: the unity of consciousness takes a different form in consciousness of self than it takes in either consciousness of one's own representations or consciousness of objects.
So what is unified consciousness? As we said, the predominant form of the unity of consciousness is being aware of several things at the same time. Intuitively, this is the notion of several representations being aspects of a single encompassing conscious state. A more informative idea can be gleaned from the way philosophers have written about unified consciousness. As emerges from what they have said, the central feature of unified consciousness is taken to be something like this Unity of consciousness: A group of representational relations related to each other that to be conscious of any of them is to be conscious of others of them and of the group of them as a single group.
Call this notion (X). Now, unified consciousness of some sort can be found in all three of the kinds of consciousness we delineated. (It can be found in a fourth, too, as we will see in a moment.) We can have unified consciousness of: Objectively represented to us; the representations themselves; and oneself, the thing having the representations. In the first case, the represented objects would appear as aspects of a single encompassing conscious states. In the second case, the representations themselves would thus appear. In the third case, one is aware of oneself as a single, unified subject. Does (X) fit all three (or all four, including the fourth yet to be introduced)? It does not. At most, it fits the first two. Let us see how this unfolds.
. . . Unified consciousness of objects is the consciousness that one has of the world around one (including one's own body) as aspects of a single world, of the various items in it as linked to other items in it. What makes it unified can be illustrated by an example. Suppose that I am aware of the computer screen in front of me and of the car sitting in my driveway. If awareness of these two items is not unified, I will lack the ability to compare the two. If I cannot bring the car as I am aware of it to the state in which I am aware of the computer screen, I could not answer questions such as, Is the car the same colour as the WordPerfect icon? Or even, As I am experiencing them, is the car to the left or to the right of the computer screen? We can compare represented items in these ways only if we are aware of both items together, as parts of the same field or state or act of conscious. That is what unified consciousness doe for us. (X) fits this kind of unified consciousness well. There are a couple of disorders of consciousness in which this unity seems to break down or be missing. We will examine them shortly.
Unified consciousness of one's own representations is the consciousness that we have of our representations, consciousness of our own psychological states. The representations by which we are conscious of the world are particularly important but, if those theorists who maintain that there are forms of consciousness that does not have objects are right, they are not the only ones. What makes consciousness of our representations unified? We are aware of many representations together, so that they appear as aspects of a single state of consciousness. As with unified consciousness of the world, here to we can compare items of which we have unified consciousness. For example, we can compare what it is like to see an object to what it is like to touch the same object. Thus, (X) fits this kind of unified consciousness well, too.
When one has unified consciousness of self, one is aware of oneself not just as the subject but, in Kant's words, the ‘single common subject’ of many representations and the single common agent of various acts of deliberation and action.
This is one of the two forms of unified consciousness that (X) does not fit. When one is aware of oneself as the common subject of experiences, the common agent of actions, one is not aware of several objects. Some think that when one is aware of oneself as subject, one is not aware of oneself as an object at all. Kant believed this. Whatever the merits of this view, when one is clearly aware of oneself as the single common subject of many representations, one is not aware of several things. As an alternative, one is aware of, and knows that one is aware of, the same thing - via many representations. Call this kind of unified consciousness (Y). Although (Y) is different from (X), we still have the core idea: Unified consciousness consists in tying what is contained in several representations, here most representations of oneself, together so that they are all part of a single field or state or act of consciousness.
Unified consciousness of self has been argued to have some very special properties. In particular, there is a small but important literature on the idea that the reference to oneself as oneself by which one achieves awareness of oneself as subject involves no ‘identification.’ Generalizing the notion a bit, some claim that reference to self does not proceed by way of attribution of properties or features to oneself at all. One argument for this view is that one is or could be aware of oneself as the subject of each of one's conscious experiences. If so, awareness of self is not what Bennett call ‘experience-dividing’ - statements expressing it have "no direct implications of the form ‘I shall experience C rather than D.’" If this is so, the linguistic activities using first person pronouns by which we call ourselves subject and the representational states that result have to have some unusual properties.
Finally, we need to distinguish a fourth site of unified consciousness. Let us call it unity of focus. Unity of focus is our ability to pay unified attention to objects, one's representations, and one's own self. It is different from the other sorts of unified consciousness. In the other three situations, consciousness ranges over many alternate objects or many instances of consciousness of an object (in unified consciousness of one’s self). Unity of focus picks out one such item (or a small numbers of them). Wundt captures what I have in mind well in his distinction between the field of consciousness and the focus of consciousness. The consciousness of a single item on which one is focussing is unified because one is aware of many aspects of the item in one state or act of consciousness (especially relational aspects, e.g., any dangers it poses, how it relates to one's goals, etc.) and one is aware of many different considerations with respect to it in one state or act of consciousness (goals, how well one is achieving them with respect to this object, etc.). (X) does not fit this kind of unified consciousness any better than it fit unified consciousness of self? Here to we are not, or need not be, aware of most items. Instead, one is integrating most properties of an item, especially properties that involve relationships to oneself, and integrating most of one's abilities and applying them to the item, and so on. Call this form of unified consciousness (Z). One way to think of the relationship of (Z) (unified focus) to (X) and (Y) is this. (Z) occurs within (X) and (Y) - within unified consciousness of world and self.
Though this has often been overlooked, all forms of unified consciousness come in both simultaneous and across-time versions. That is to say, the unity can consist in links of certain kinds among phenomena occurring at the same time (synchronically) and it can consist in links of certain kinds among phenomena occurring at different times (diachronically). In its synchronic form, it consists in such things as our ability to compare items to one of another, for example, to see if an item fits into another item. Diachronically, it consists in a certain crucial form of memory, namely, our ability to retain a representation of an earlier object in the right way and for long enough to bring it as recalled into current consciousness of currently represented objects in the same as we do with simultaneously represented objects. Though this process across time has always been called the unity of consciousness, sometimes even to the exclusion of the synchronic unity just delineated, another good name for it would be continuity of consciousness. Note that this process of relating earlier to current items in consciousness is more than, and perhaps different from, the learning of new skills and associations. Even severe amnesiacs can do the latter.
That consciousness can be unified across time and at a given time points up just how central unity of consciousness is to cognition. Without the ability to retain representations of earlier objects and unite them with current represented objects, most complex cognition would simply be impossible. The only bits of language that one could probably understand, for example, would be single words; the simplest of sentences is an entity spread over time. Now, unification in consciousness might not be the only way to unite earlier cognitive states (earlier thoughts, earlier experiences) with current ones but it is a central way and the one best known to us. The unity of consciousness is central to cognition.
By noting that (X), (Y) and (Z) are not the only kinds of mental unity. Our remarks about (Z), specifically about what can be integrated in focal attention, might already have suggested as much. There is unity in the exercise of our cognitive capacities, unity that consists of integration of motivating factors, perceptions, beliefs, etc., and there is unity in the outputs, unity that consists of integration of behaviour.
Human beings bring a strikingly wide range of factors to bear on a cognitive task such as seeking to characterize something or trying to decide what to do about something. For example, we can bring to bear of what we want, and what we believe, and also of our attitudinal values for which we can of our own self, situation, and context; enter from each of our various senses: Its continuing causality in the information about the situation, other people, others' beliefs, desires, attitudes, etc.; the resources of however many languages we have possession in the availabilities for us; many-sided kinds of memory; bodily sensations; our various and very diverse problem-solving skills; and so on. Not only can we bring all these elements to bear, we can integrate them in a way that is highly structured and ingeniously appropriate to our goals and the situation(s) before us. This form of mental unity could appropriately be called unity of cognition. Unity of consciousness often goes with unity of cognition because one of our means of unifying cognition with respect to some object or situation is to focus on it consciously. However, there is at least some measure of unified cognition in many situations of which we are not conscious, as is testified by our ability to balance, control our posture, manoeuver around obstacles while our consciousness is entirely absorbed with something else, and so on.
At the other end of the cognitive process, we find an equally interesting form of unity, what we might call unity of behaviour, our ability to coordinate our limbs, eyes, bodily attitude, etc. The precision and complexity of the behavioural coordination we can achieve would be difficult to exaggerate. Think of a concert pianist performing a complicated work.
One of the most interesting ways to study psychological phenomena is to see what happens when they or related phenomena break down. Phenomena that look simple and seamless when functioning smoothly often turn out to have all sorts of structure when they begin to malfunction. Like other psychological phenomena, we would expect unified consciousness to be open to being damaged, distorted, etc., too. If the unity of consciousness is as important to cognitive functioning as we have been suggesting, such damage or distortion should create serious problems for the people to whom it happens. The unity of consciousness is damaged and distorted in both naturally-occurring and experimental situations. Some of these situations are indeed very serious for those undergoing them.
In fact, unified consciousness can break down in what look to be two distinct ways. There are situations in which saying that one unified conscious being has split into two unified conscious beings without the unity itself being destroyed is natural or even significantly damaged, and situations in which always we have one being with one instance of consciousness. However, the unity itself may be damaged or even destroyed. In the former cases, there is reason to think that a single instance of unified consciousness has become two (or something like two). In the latter cases, unity of consciousness has been compromised in some way but nothing suggests that anything has split.
First, situations in which we are inclined to say that something has split. Some such description seems natural in at least three different kinds of situations.
One is ‘brain bisection’ operation (commissurotomies), specifically certain results of them. In these operations, the corpus callosum is cut to stop the spread of epileptic seizures from one hemisphere to the other. The corpus callosum is a large strand of about 200,000,000 neurons running from one hemisphere to the other. When present, it is the chief channel of communication between the hemispheres. These operations, done mainly in the 1960s, were a last-ditch efforts to control certain kinds of severe epilepsy by stopping seizures in one lobe of the cerebral cortex from spreading to the other lobe. Under certain laboratory conditions, two ‘centres of consciousness’ seem to appear in patients who have had this operation. Here is a couple of examples of the kinds of behaviour that prompt such an assessment.
The human retina is split vertically so that the left half the retina is primarily hooked up to the left hemisphere of the brain and the right half the retina is hooded up to the right hemisphere of the brain. Now suppose that we flash the word TAXABLE on a screen in front of a brain bisected patient so that the letters TAX hit one side of the retina, the letters ABLE the other and we put measures in place to ensure that the information hitting each retina stays in one lobe and is not fed to the other. If such a patient is asked what word is being shown, the mouth will say TAX while the hand control condition by the hemisphere that does not control the mouth (usually the left hand) will write ABLE. Or, if the hemisphere that controls a hand is asked to do arithmetic in a way that does not penetrate to the hemisphere that controls the mouth and the hands are shielded from the eyes, the mouth will insist that it is not doing arithmetic, has not even thought of arithmetic today, etc., - while the appropriate hand is busily doing arithmetic! Notice that since the two ‘centres’ coexist and are active at the same time, whatever breach of unified consciousness there is in these cases is a breach of synchronically unified consciousness. These operations have received a huge amount of attention from philosophers in the past few decades and we will return to them.
Another phenomenon where we may find something like a split without diminished or destroyed unity is hemi-neglect, the strange phenomenon of losing all sense of one side of one's body or sometimes a part of one side of the body. Whatever it is exactly that is going on in hemi-neglect, unified consciousness remains. It is just that its ‘range’ has been bizarrely circumscribed. It ranges over only half the body (in the most common situation), not seamlessly over the whole body. Where we expect proprioception and perception of the whole body, in these patients they are of (usually) only one-half of the body.
A third candidate phenomenon is what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder, now, more neutrally, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Everything about this phenomenon is controversial, including whether there is any real multiplicity of consciousness at all, but one common way of describing what is going on in at least some central cases is to say that the units (whether we call them persons, personalities, sides of a single personality, or whatever) ‘take turns’, usually with pronounced changes in personality. When one is active, the other(s) usually is(are) not. If this is an accurate description, then here to we have a breach in unity of some kind in which unity is nevertheless not destroyed. Notice that whereas in brain bisection cases the breach, whatever it is like, is synchronic (at a time), here it is diachronic (across time), different unified ‘package’ of consciousness taking turns. The breach consists primarily in some pattern of reciprocal (or sometimes one way) amnesia - some pattern of each ‘package’ not remembering having the experiences or doing the things had or done when another ‘package’ was in charge.
By contrast to brain bisection and DID cases, there are phenomena in which unified consciousness does not seem to split and does seem to be damaged or even destroyed altogether. In brain bisection and dissociative identity cases, the most that is happening is that unified consciousness is splitting into two or more proportionally intact units - two or more at a time or two or more across time. It is a matter of controversy whether even that is happening, especially in DID cases, but we clearly do not have more than that. In particular, the unity itself does not disappear; while it may split, we could say, it does not shatter. There are at least three kinds of case in which unity does appear to shatter.
One is some particularly severe forms of schizophrenia. Here the victim seems to lose the ability to form an integrated, interrelated representation of his or her world and his or her self altogether. The person speaks in ‘word salads’ that never get anywhere, indeed sometimes never become complete sentences. The person is unable to put together integrated plans of actions even at the level necessary to obtain sustenance, tend to bodily needs, or escape painful irritants. So on. Here, saying that unity of consciousness has shattered seems correct than split. The behaviour of these people seems to express no more than what we might call experience-fragments, each lasting a tiny length of time and unconnected to any others. In particular, except for the (usually semantically irrelevant) associations that lead these people from each entry to the next in the word salads they create, to be aware of one of these states is not to be aware of any others - or so to evidentiary proposition.
In schizophrenia of this sort, the shattering of unified consciousness is part of a general breakdown or deformation of mental functioning: affect, desire, belief, even memory all suffer massive distortions. In another kind of case, the normal unity of consciousness seems to be just as absent but there does not seem to be general disturbance of the mind. This is what some researchers call dysexecutive syndrome. What characterizes the breakdown in the unity of consciousness here is that subjects are unable to consider two things together, even things that are directly related to one another. For example, such people cannot figure out whether a piece of a puzzle fits into a certain place even when the piece and the puzzle are both clearly visibly and the piece obviously fits. They cannot crack an egg into a pan. So on.
A disorder presenting similar symptoms is simultagnosia or Balint's syndrome (Balint was an earlier 20th century German neurologist). In this disorder, which is fortunately rare, patients see only one object located at one ‘place’ in the visual field at a time. Outside of a few ‘degrees of arc’ in the visual field, these patients say they see nothing and seem to be receiving no information (Hardcastle, in progress). In both dysexecutive disorder and simultagnosia (if we have two different phenomena here), subjects seem not to be aware of even two items in a single conscious state.
We can pin down what is missing in each case a bit more precisely. Recall the distinction between being conscious of individual objects and having unified consciousness of a number of objects at the same time introduced at the beginning of this article. Broadly speaking, we can think of the two phenomena isolated by this distinction as two stages. First, the mind ties together various sensory inputs into representations of objects. In contemporary cognitive research, this activity has come to be called binding (Hardcastle 1998 is a good review). Then, the mind ties these represented objects together to achieve unified consciousness of a number of them at the same time. (The first theorist to separate these two stages was Kant, in his doctrine of synthesis.) The first stage continues to be available to dysexecutive and simultagnosia patients: they continue to be aware of individual objects, events, etc. The damage seems to be to the second stage: it is the tying of objects together in consciousness that is impaired or missing altogether. The distinction can be made this way: these people can achieve some (Z), unity of focus with respect to individual objects, but little or no unified consciousness of any of the three kinds over a number of objects.
The same distinction can also help make clear what is going on in the severe forms of schizophrenia just discussed. Like dysexecutive syndrome and simultagnosia patients, severe schizophrenics lack the ability to tie represented objects together, but they also seem to lack the ability to form unified representations of individual objects. In a different jargon, these people seem to lack even the capacity for object constancy. Thus their cognitive impairment is much more severe than that experienced by dysexecutive syndrome and simultagnosia patients.
With the exception of brain bisection patients, who do not evidence distortion of consciousness outside of specially contrived laboratory situations, the split or breach occurs naturally in all the patients just discussed. Indeed, they are a central class of the so-called ‘experiments of nature’ that are the subject-matter of contemporary neuropsychology. Since all the patients in whom these problems occur naturally are severely disadvantaged by their situation, this is further evidence that the ability to unify the contents of consciousness is central to proper cognitive functioning.
Is there anything common to the six situations of breakdown in unified consciousness just sketched? How do they relate to (X), (Y) or (Z)?
In brain bisection cases, the key evidence for a duality of some kind is that there are situations in which whatever is aware of some items being represented in the body in question is not aware of other items being represented in that same body at the same time. We looked at two examples of the phenomenon connection with the word TAXABLE and the doing of arithmetic. With respect to these represented items, there is a significant and systematically extendable situation in which to be aware of some of these items is not to be aware of others of them. This seems to be what motivates the judgment in us that these patients’ evidence a split in unified consciousness. If so, brain bisection cases are a straightforward case of a failure to meet the conditions for (X). However, they are more than that. Because the ‘centres of consciousness’ created in the lab do not communicate with one another except in the way that any mind can communicate with any other mind, there is also a breakdown in (Y). One subject of experience aware of itself as the single common subject of its experience seems to become two (in some measure at least).
In DID cases, and a central feature of the case is some pattern of amnesia. Again, this is a situation in which being conscious of some represented objects goes with not being conscious of others in a systematic way. The main difference is that the breach is at a time in brain bisection cases, across time in DID cases. So again the breakdown in unity consists in a failure to meet the conditions for (X). However, DID being diachronic, there is also a breakdown in (Y) across time - though there is continuity across time within each personality, there seems to be little or no continuity, conscious continuity at any rate, from one to another.
The same pattern is evident in the cases of severe schizophrenia, dysexecutive disorder and simultagnosia that we considered. In all three cases, consciousness of some items goes with lack of consciousness of others. In these cases, to be aware of a given item is precisely not to be aware of other relevant items. However, in the severe schizophrenia cases we considered, there is also a failure to meet the conditions of (Z).
Hemi-neglect is a bit different. Here we do not have two or more ‘packages’ of consciousness and we do not have individual conscious states that are not unified with other conscious states. (Not so far as we know - for there to be conscious states not unified with the states on which the patient can report, there would have to be consciousness of what is going on in the side neglected by the subject with whom we can communicate and there is no evidence for this.) Here none of the conditions for (X), (Y) or (Z) fail to be met - but that may be because hemi-neglect is not a split or a breakdown in unified consciousness in the first place. It may be simply a shrinking of the range of phenomena over which otherwise intact unified consciousness extends.
It is interesting that none of the breakdown cases we have considered evidence damage to or destruction of the unity in (Y). We have seen cases in which unified consciousness it might split at a time (brain bisection cases) or over time (DID cases) but not cases in which the unity itself is significantly damaged or destroyed. Nor is our sample unrepresentative; the cases we have considered are the most widely discussed cases in the literature. There do not seem to be many cases in which saying that is plausible (Y), awareness of oneself as a single common subject, has been damaged or destroyed.
After a long hiatus, serious work on the unity of consciousness began in recent philosophy with two books on Kant, P. F. Strawson (1966) and Jonathan Bennett (1966). Both of them had an influence far beyond the bounds of Kant scholarship. Central to these works is an exploration of the relationship between unified consciousness, especially unified consciousness of self, and our ability to form an integrated, coherent representation of the world, a linkage that the authors took to be central to Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories. Whatever the merits of the claim for a sceptical judgment, their work set off a long line of writings on the supposed link. Quite recently the approach prompted a debate about unity and objectivity among Michael Lockwood, Susan Hurley and Anthony Marcel in Peacocke (1994).
Another issue that led philosophers back to the unity of consciousness, perhaps the next historically, was the neuropsychological results of brain bisection operations that we explored earlier. Starting with Thomas Nagel (1971) and continuing in the work of Charles Marks (1981), Derek Parfit (1971 and 1984), Lockwood (1989), Hurley (1998) and many others, these operations have been a major theme in work on the unity of consciousness since the 1970s. Much ink has been spilled on the question of what exactly is going on in the phenomenology of brain bisection patients. Nagel goes so far as to claim that there is no whole number of ‘centres of consciousness’ in these patients: there is too much unity to say "two,” yet too much splitting to say "one.”
Some recent work by Jocelyne Sergent (1990) might seem to support this conclusion. She found, for example, that when a sign ‘6’ was sent to one hemisphere of the brain in these subjects and a sign ‘7’ was sent to the other in such a way that crossover of information from one hemisphere to the other was extremely unlikely, they could say that the six is a smaller number than the seven but could not say whether the signs were the same or different. It is not certain that Sergent's work does support Nagel's conclusions. First, Sergent's claims are controversial - not, but all researchers have been able to replicate them. Second, even if the data are good, the interpretation of them is far from straightforward. In particular, they seem to be consistent with there being a clear answer to any precise ‘one or two?’ question that we could ask. (’Unified consciousness of the two signs with respect to numerical size?’ Yes. ‘Unified consciousness of the visible structure of the signs?’ No). If so, the fact that there is obviously mixed evidence, some pointing to the conclusion ‘one’, some pointing to the conclusion ‘two’, supports the view expressed by Nagel that there may be no whole number of subjects that these patients are.
Much of the work since Nagel has focussed on the same issue of the kind of split that the laboratory manipulation of brain bisection patients induces. Some attention has also been paid to the implications of these splits. For example, could one hemisphere commit a crime in such a way that the other could not justifiably be held responsible for it? Or, if such splitting occurred regularly and was regularly followed by merging with ‘halves’ from other splits, what would the implications are for our traditional notion of what philosophers call ‘personal identity’, namely, being or remaining one and the same thing. (Here we are talking about identity in the philosopher's sense of being or remaining one thing, not in the sense of the term that psychologists use when they talk of such things as ‘identity crises’.)
Parfit has made perhaps the largest contributions to the issue of the implications of brain bisection cases for personal identity. Phenomena relevant to identity in things others than persons can be a matter of degree. This is well illustrated by the famous ship of Theseus example. Suppose that over the years, a certain ship in Theseus was rebuilt, boards by board, until every single board in it has been replaced. Is the ship at the end of the process the ship that started the process or not? Now suppose that we take all those rotten, replaced boards and reassemble them into a ship? Is this ship the original ship of Theseus or not? Many philosophers have been certain that such questions cannot arise for persons; identity in persons is completely clear and unambiguous, not something that could be a matter of degree as related phenomena obviously can be with other objects is a well-known example. As Parfit argues, the possibility of persons (or at any rate minds) splitting and fusing puts real pressure on such intuitions about our specialness; perhaps the continuity of persons can be as partial and tangled as the continuity of other middle-sized objects.
Lockwood's exploration of brain bisections cases go off in a different direction, two different directions in fact (we will examine the second below). Like Nagel, Marks, and Parfit, Lockwood has written on the extent to which what he calls ‘co-consciousness’ can split. (’Co-consciousness’ is the term that many philosophers now use for the unity of consciousness; roughly, two conscious states are said to be co-conscious when they are related to one another as conscious states are related to one another in unified consciousness.) He also explores the possibility of psychological states that are not determinately in any of the available ‘centres of consciousness’ and the implications of this possibility for the idea of the specious present, the idea that we are directly and immediately aware of a certain tiny spread of time, not just the current infinitesimal moment of time. He concludes that the determinateness of psychological states being in an available ‘centre of consciousness’ and the notion that psychological states spread over at least a small amount of time in the specious might present stand or fall together.
Some philosophers interested in pathologies of unified consciousness examine more than brain bisection cases. In what is perhaps the most complex work on the unity of consciousness to date, Hurley examines most of the kinds of breakdown phenomena that we introduced earlier. She starts with an intuitive notion of co-consciousness that she does not formally define. She then explores the implications of a wide range of ‘experiments of nature’ and laboratory experiments for the presence or absence of co-consciousness across the psychological states of a person. For example, she considers acallosal patients (people born without a corpus callosum). When present, the corpus callosum is the chief channel of communication between the hemispheres. When it is cut, generating what looks like is possible two centres of consciousness, two internally co-conscious systems that are not co-consciousness with one another. Hurley argues that in patients in whom it never existed, things are not so clear. Even though the channels of communication in these patients are often in part external (behavioural cuing activity, etc.), the result may still be a single co-conscious system. That is to say, the neurological and behavioural basis of unified consciousness may be very different in different people.
Hurley also considers research by Trewarthen in which a patient is conscious of some object seen by, say, the right hemisphere until her left hand, which is controlled by the right hemisphere, reaches for it. Somehow the act of reaching for it seems to obliterate the consciousness of it. Very strange - how can something pop into and disappear from unified consciousness in this way? This leads her to consider the notion of partial unity. Could two centres of consciousness, A and B, though not co-conscious with one another, nonetheless both be co-conscious with some third thing, e.g., the volitional system B (the system of intentions, desires, etc.?). If so, ‘co-conscious’ is not a transitive relationship - A could be co-conscious with B and C could be co-conscious with B without A being co-conscious with C. This is puzzling enough. Even more puzzling would be the question of how activation of the system B with which both A and C are co-conscious could result in either A or C ceasing to be conscious of an object aimed at by B.
Hurley's response to Trewarthen's cases (and Sergent's cases that we examined in the previous section) is to accept that intention can obliterate consciousness and then distinguish times. At any given time in Trewarthen's cases, the situation with respect to unity is clear. That the picture does not conform to our usual expectations for diachronic singularity or transitivity then becomes simply an artefact of the cases, not a problem. It is not made clear how this reconciles Sergent's evidence with unity. One strategy would be the one we considered earlier: make the questions more precise. For precise questions, there seems to be a coherent answer about unity for every phenomenon Sergent describes.
Hurley also considers what she calls Marcel's case. Here subjects are asked to report the appearance of some item in consciousness in three ways at the same time - say, by blinking, pushing a button, and saying, ‘I see it’. Remarkably, any of these acts can be done without the other two. The question is, What does this imply for unified consciousness? In a case in which the subject pushes the button but neither blinks nor says anything, for example, is the hand-controller aware of the object while the blink-controller and the speech-controller are not? How could the conscious system become fragmented in such a way?
Hurley's suggestion is: they can't. What induces the appearance of incoherence about unity is the short time scale. Suppose that it takes some time to achieve unified consciousness, perhaps because some complex feedback processes are involved. If that were the case, then we do not have a stable unity situation in Marcel's case. The subjects are not given enough time to achieve unified consciousness of any kind.
There is a great deal more to Hurley's work. She urges, for example, that there a normative dimension to unified consciousness -- conscious states have to cohere for unified consciousness to result. Systems in the brain have to achieve her calls ‘dynamic singularity’ - being a single system - for unified consciousness to result.
A third issue that got philosophers working on the unity of consciousness again is binding. Here the connection is more distant because binding as usually understood is not unified consciousness as we have been discussing it. Recall the two stages of cognition laid out earlier. First, the mind ties together various sensory inputs into representations of objects. Then the mind ties these represented objects to one other to achieve unified consciousness of a number of them at the same time. It is the first stage that is usually called binding. The representations that result at this stage need not be conscious in any of the ways delineating earlier -- many perfectly good representations affect behaviour and even enter memory without ever becoming conscious. Representations resulting from the second stage need not be conscious, either, but when they are, we have at least some of the kinds of unified consciousness delineated.
In the past few decades, philosophers have also worked on how unified consciousness relates to the brain. Lockwood, for example, thinks that relating consciousness to matter will involve more issues on the side of matter than most philosophers think. (We mentioned that his work goes off in two new directions. This is the second one.) Quantum mechanics teach us that the way in which observation links to physical reality is a subtle and complex matter. Lockwood urges that our conceptions will have to be adjusted on the side of matter as much as on the side of mind if we are to understand consciousness as a physical phenomenon and physical phenomena as open to conscious observation. If it is the case not only that our understanding of consciousness is affected by how we think it might be implemented in matter but also that processes of matter are or can be affected by our (conscious) observation of them, then our picture of consciousness stands as ready to affect our picture of matter as vice-versa.
The Churchlands, Paul M. and Patricia S. and Daniel Dennett (1991) has radical views of the underlying architecture of unified consciousness. The Churchlands see unity itself much as other philosophers do. They do argue that the term ‘consciousness’ covers a range of different phenomena that need to be distinguished from one another but the important point here is that they urge that the architecture of the underlying processes probably consist not of transformations of symbolically encoded objects of representations, as most philosophers have believed, but of vector transformations in what are called phase spaces. Dennett articulates an even more radical view, encompassing both unity and underlying architecture. For him, unified consciousness is simply a temporary ‘virtual captain’, a small group of related information-parcels that happens to gain temporary dominance in a struggle for control of such cognitive activities as self-monitoring and self-reporting in the vast array of microcircuits of the brain. We take these transient phenomena to be more than they are because each of them is the ‘me’ of the moment; the temporary coalition of conscious states winning at the moment is what I am, is the self. Radical implementation, narrowed range and transitoriness notwithstanding, when unified consciousness is achieved, these philosophers tend to see it in the way we have presented it.
Dennett's and the Churchlands' views fit naturally with a dynamic systems view of the underlying neural implementation. The dynamic systems view is the view that unified consciousness is a result of certain self-organizing activities in the brain. Dennett thinks that given the nature of the brain, a vast assembly of neurons receiving electrochemical signals from other neurons and passing such signals to yet other neurons, cognition could not take any form other than something like a pandemonium of competing bits of content, the ones that win the competition being the ones that are conscious. The Churchlands don't tend to agree with Dennett about this. They see consciousness as a state of the brain, the ‘wet-ware’, not a result of information processing, of ‘software’. They also advocate a different picture of the underlying neurological process. As we said, they think that transformations of complex vectors in a multi dimensional phase space are the crucial processes, not competition among bits of content. However, they agree that it is very unlikely that the processes that subserve unified consciousness are sentence-like or language-like at all. It is too early to say whether these radically novel pictures of what the system that implements unified consciousness is like will hold any important implications for what unified consciousness is or when it is present.
Hurley is also interested in the relationship of unified consciousness to brain physiology. Saying it of her that she resists certain standard ways of linking them would be truer, however, than to say that she herself links them. In particular, while she clearly thinks that physiological phenomena have all sorts of implications and give rise to all sorts of questions about the unity of consciousness, she strongly resists any simplistic patterns of connection. Many researchers have been attracted by some variant of what she calls the isomorphism hypothesis. This is the idea that changes in consciousness will parallel changes in brain structure or function. She wants to insist, to the contrary, that often two instances of the same change in consciousness will go with very different changes in the brain. We saw an example in the last section. In most of us, unified consciousness is closely linked to an intact, functioning corpus callosum. However, in acallosal people, there may be the same unity but achieved by mechanisms such as cuing activity external to the body that are utterly different from communication though a corpus callosum. Going the opposite way, different changes in consciousness can go with the same changes to structure and function in the brain.
Two philosophers have gone off in directions different from any of the above, Stephen White (1991) and Christopher Hill (1991). White's main interest is not the unity of consciousness as such but what one might call the unified locus of responsibility - what it is that ties something together to make it a single agent of actions, i.e., something to which attributions of responsibility can appropriately be made. He argues that unity of consciousness is one of the things that go into becoming unified as such an agent but not the only thing. Focussed coherent plans, a continuing single conception of the good, with reason of a good autobiographical memory, certain future states of persons mattering to us in a special way (mattering to us because we take them to be future states of ourselves, one would say if it were not blatantly circular), a certain continuing kind and degree of rationality, certain social norms and practices, and so forth. In his picture of moral responsibility, unbroken unity of consciousness at and over time is only a small part of the story.
Hill's fundamental claim is that a number of different relationships between psychological states have a claim to be considered unity relationships, including: being owned by the same subject, being [phenomenally] next to (and other relationships that state in the field of consciousness appear to have to one another), both being the object of a single other conscious state, and jointly having the appropriate sorts of effects (functions). An interesting question, one that Hill does not consider, is whether all these relations are what interests us when we talk about the unity of consciousness or only some of them (and if only some of them, which ones). Hill also examines scepticism about the idea that clearly bounded individual conscious states exist. Since we have been assuming throughout that such states do exist, it is perhaps fortunate that Hill argues that we could safely do so.
In some circles, the idea that consciousness has a special kind of unity has fallen into disfavour. Nagel (1971), Donald Davidson (1982), and Dennett (1991) have all urged that the mind's unity has been greatly overstated in the history of philosophy. The mind, they say, works mostly out of the sight and the control of consciousness. Moreover, even states and acts of ours that are conscious can fail to cohere. We act against what we know perfectly well to be our own most desired course of action, for example, or do things while telling ourselves that we must avoid doing them. There is an approach to the small incoherencies of everyday life that does not requires us to question whether consciousness is unified in this way, the Freudian approach (e.g., Freud 1916/17). This approach accepts that the unity of consciousness exists much as it presents itself but argues that the range of material over which it extends is much smaller than philosophers once thought. This latter approach has some appeal. If something is out of sight and/or control, it is out of the sight or control of what? The answer would seem to be, the unified conscious mind. If so, the only necessary difference among the pre-twentieth centuries visions of unified consciousness as ranging over everything in the mind and our current vision of unified consciousness is that the range of psychological phenomena over which unified consciousness ranges has shrunk.
A final historical note. At the beginning of the 21st century, work on the unity of consciousness continues apace. For example, a major conference was recently devoted to the unity of consciousness, the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Conference held in Brussels in 2000 (ASSC5) Encyclopaedias of philosophy (such as this one) and of cognitive science are commissioning articles on the topic. Psychologists are taking up the issue. Bernard Baars (1988, 1997) notion of the global workspace is an example. Another example is work on the role of unified consciousness in precise control of attention. However, the topic is not yet at the centre of consciousness studies. One illustration of this is that it can still be missing entirely in anthologies of current work on consciousness.
With a different issue, philosophers used to think that the unity of consciousness has huge implications for the nature of the mind, indeed entails that the mind could not be made out of matter. We also saw that the prospects for this inference are not good. What about the nature of consciousness? Does the unity of consciousness have any implications for this issue?
There are currently at least three major camps on the nature of consciousness. One camp sees the ‘felt quality’ of representations as something unique, in particular as quite different from the power of representations to change other representations and shape belief and action. On this picture, representations could function much as they do without it being like anything to have them. They would merely not be conscious. If so, consciousness may not play any important cognitive role at all, its unity included (Jackson 1986; Chalmers 1996). A second camp holds, to the contrary, that consciousness is simply a special kind of representation (Rosenthal 1991; Dretske 1995; Tye 1995). A third holds that what we label ‘consciousness’ are really something else. On this view, consciousness will in the end be ‘analysed away’ - the term is too coarse-grained and presents things in too unquantifiable a way to have any use in a mature science of the mind.
The unity of consciousness obviously has strong implications for the truth or falsity of any of these views. If it is as central and undeniable as many have suggested (we saw some of the arguments earlier), its existence may cut against the third, eliminativist position a bit. With respect to the other two positions, the unity of consciousness seems neutral.
Whatever its implications for other issues, the unity of consciousness seems to be a real feature of the human mind, indeed central to it. If so, any complete picture of the mind will have to provide an account of it. Even those who hold that the extent to which consciousness is unified has been overrated owe us an account of what has been overrated.
To say one has an experience that is conscious (in the phenomenal sense) is to say that one is in a state of its seeming to one some way. In another formulation, to say experience is conscious is to say that there is something it's like for one to have it. Feeling pain and sensing colours are common illustrations of phenomenally conscious states. Consciousness has also been taken to consist in the monitoring of one's own states of mind (e.g., by forming thoughts about them, or by somehow "sensing" them), or else in the accessibility of information to one's capacities for rational control or self-report. Intentionality has to do with the directedness or aboutness of mental states -- the fact that, for example, one's thinking is of or about something. Intentionality includes, and is sometimes taken to be equivalent to, what is called ‘mental representation.
It can seem that consciousness and intentionality pervade mental life -perhaps, but one or both somehow constitute what it is to have a mind. But achieving an articulate general understanding of either consciousness or intentionality presents, an enormous challenge, part of which lies in figuring out how the two are related. Is one in some sense derived from or dependent on the other? Or are they perhaps quite independent and separate aspects of mind?
One understanding frequent among philosophers, consciousness is a certain feature shared by sense-experience and imagery, perhaps belonging also to a broad range of other mental phenomena (e.g., episodic thought, memory, and emotion). It is the feature that consists in its seeming some way to one to have experiences. To put it another way: conscious states are states of its seeming somehow to a subject.
For example, it seems to you some way to see red, and seems to you (some other way) to hear a crash, to visualize a triangle, and to suffer pain. The sense of ‘seems’ relevant here may be brought out by noting that, in the last example, we might just as well speak of the way it feels to be in pain. And - some will want to say - in the same sense, it seems to you some way to think through the answer to a math problem, or to recall where you parked the car, or to feel anger, shame, or elation. (Note however, that it is not simply to be assumed that saying it seems some way to you to have an experience is equivalent to saying that the experience itself seems or appears some way to you - that it is an - object of appearance. The point is just that the way something sounds to you, the way something looks to you, etc., all constitute ‘ways of seeming.’) States that are conscious in this sense are said to have some phenomenal character or other - their phenomenal character being the specific way it seems to one to have a given experience. Sometimes this is called the ‘qualitative’ or ‘subjective’ character of experience.
Another oft-used means for trying to get at the relevant notion of consciousness, preferable to some, is to say that there is, in a certain sense, always ‘something it is like’ to be in a given conscious state - something it's like for one who is in that state. Relating the two locutions, we might say: there is something it is like for you to see red, to feel pain, etc., and the way it seems to you to have one of these experiences is what it is like for you to have it. The phenomenal character of an experience then, is what someone would inquire about by asking, e.g., ‘What is it like to experience orgasm?’ - and it is what we speak of when we say that we know what that is like, even if we cannot convey this to one who doesn't know. And, if we want to speak of persons, or other creatures (as distinct from their states) being conscious, we will say that they are conscious just if there is something it is like for them to be the creatures they are -- for example, something it is like to be a bat.
The examples of conscious states given comprise a various lot. But some sense of their putative unity as instances of consciousness might be gained by contrasting them with what we are inclined to exclude, or can at least conceive of excluding, from their company. Much of what goes on, but we would ordinarily believe is not (or at any rate, we may well suppose is not) conscious in the sense at issue. The leaf's fall from a tree branch, we may suppose, is not a conscious state of the leaf - a state of its seeming somehow to the leaf. Nor, for that matter, is a person's fall off a branch a conscious state of that person - rather, it is the feeling of falling that is conscious, if anything is. Dreaming of falling would also be a conscious experience in this sense. But, while we can in some way be said to sense the position of our limbs even while dreamlessly asleep, we may still suppose that this proprioception (though perhaps in some sense a mental or cognitive affair) is not conscious - we may suppose that it does not then seem (or feel) any way to us sleepers to sense our limbs, as ordinarily it does when we are awake.
The way of seeming’ or ‘what it's like’ conception of consciousness I have just invoked is sometimes marked by the term ‘phenomenal consciousness.’ But this qualifier ‘phenomenal’ suggests that there are other kinds of consciousness (or perhaps, other senses of ‘consciousness’). Indeed there are, at least, other ways of introducing notions of consciousness. And these may appear to pick out features or senses altogether distinct from that just presented. For example, it is said that some (but not all) that goes on in the mind is ‘accessible to consciousness.’ Of course this by itself does not so much specifies a sense of ‘conscious’ as put one in use. (One will want to ask: And just what is this ‘consciousness’ that has ‘access’ to some mental goings-on but not others, and what could ‘access’ mean here, anyway?) However, some have evidently thought that, rather than speak of consciousness as what has access, we should understand consciousness as itself a certain kind of susceptibility to access. For example, Daniel Dennett (1969) once theorized that one's conscious states are just those whose contents are available to one's direct verbal report - or, at least, to the ‘speech centre’ responsible for generating such reports. And Ned Block (1995) has proposed that, on one understanding of ‘conscious,’ (to be found at work in many ‘cognitive’ theories of consciousness) a conscious state is just a ‘representation poised for free use in reasoning and other direct ‘rational’ control of action and speech.’ Block labels consciousness in this sense ‘excess consciousness.’
Block would insist that we should distinguish phenomenal consciousness from ‘access consciousness,’ and he argues that a mental representation's being poised for use in reasoning and rational control of action is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the state's being phenomenally conscious. Similarly he distinguishes phenomenal consciousness from what he calls ‘reflexive consciousness’ - where this has to do with one's capacity to represent one's mind's to oneself - to have, for example, thoughts about one's own thoughts, feelings, or desires. Such a conception of consciousness finds some support in a tendency to say that conscious states of mind are those one is ‘conscious of’ or ‘aware of’ being in, and to interpret this ‘of’ to indicate some kind of reflexivity is involved - wherein one represents one's own mental representations. On one prominent variant of this conception, consciousness is taken to be a kind of scanning or perceiving of one's own psychological states or processes - an ‘inner sense.’
Block's threefold division of phenomenal, access, and reflexive consciousness need not be taken to reflect clear and coherent distinctions already contained in our pre-theoretical use of the term ‘conscious.’ Block himself seems to think that (on the contrary) our initial, ordinary use of ‘conscious’ is too confused even to count as ambiguous. Thus in articulating an interpretation, or set of interpretations, of the term adequate to frame theoretical issues, we cannot simply describe how it is currently employed - we must assign it a more definite and coherent meaning than extant in common usage.
Whether or not this is correct, getting a solid ground here is not easy, and a number of theorists of consciousness would balk at proceeding on the basis of Block's proposed threefold distinction. Sometimes the difficulty may be merely terminological. John Searle, for example, would recognize phenomenal consciousness, but deny Block's other two candidates are proper senses of ‘conscious’ at all. The reality of some sort of access and reflexivity is apparently not at issue - just whether either captures a sense of ‘conscious’ (perhaps confusedly) woven into our use of the term. However, in contrast to both Block and Searle, there are also those who raise doubt that there is a properly phenomenal sense we can apply, distinct from both of the other two, for us to pick out with any term. This is not just a dispute about words, but about what there is for us to talk about with them.
The substantive issues here are very much bound up with differences over the proper way to conceive of the relationship between consciousness and intentionality. If there are distinct senses in which states of mind could correctly said to be ‘conscious’ (answering perhaps to something like Block's three-fold distinction), then there will be distinct questions we can pose about the relation between consciousness and intentionality. But if one of Block's alleged senses is somehow fatally confused, or if he is wrong to distinguish it from the others, or if it is the sense of no term we can with warrant apply to ourselves or our states, then there will be no separate question in which it figures we should try to answer. Thus, trying to work out a reasoned view about what we are (or should be) talking about when we talk about consciousness is an unavoidable and non-trivial part of trying to understand the relation between consciousness and intentionality.
To clarify further the disputes about consciousness and their links to questions about its relation to intentionality, we need to get an initial grasp of the relevant way the terms ‘intentionality’ and ‘intentional’ are used in philosophy of mind.
Previously, some indication of why it is difficult to get a theory of consciousness started. While the term ‘conscious’ is not esoteric, its use is not easily characterized or rendered consistent in a manner providing some uncontentious framework for theoretical discussion. Where the term ‘intentional’ is concerned, we also face initially confusing and contentious usage. But here the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the relevant use of cognate terms is simply not that found in common speech (as when we speak of doing something ‘intentionally’). Though ‘intentionality,’ in the sense here at issue, does seem to attach to some real and fundamental (maybe even defining) aspect of mental phenomena, the relevant use of the term is tangled up with some rather involved philosophical history.
One way of explaining what is meant by ‘intentionality’ in the (more obscure) philosophical sense is this: it is that aspect of mental states or events that consists in their being of or about things, as pertains to the questions, ‘What are you thinking of?’ And, what are you thinking about?’ Intentionality is the aboutness or directedness of mind (or states of mind) to things, objects, states of affairs, events. So if you are thinking about San Francisco, or about the increased cost of living there, or about your meeting someone there at Union Square - your mind, your thinking, is directed toward San Francisco, or the increased cost of living, or the meeting in Union Square. To think at all is to think of or about something in this sense. This ‘directedness’ conception of intentionality plays a prominent role in the influential philosophical writings of Franz Brentano and those whose views developed in response to his.
But what kind of ‘aboutness’ or ‘of-ness’ or ‘directedness’ is this, and to what sorts of things does it apply? How do the relevant ‘intentionality-marking’ senses of these words (‘about,’ ‘of,’ ‘directed’) differ from? : the sense in which the cat is wandering ‘about’ the room; the sense in which someone is a person ‘of’ high integrity; the sense in which the river's course is ‘directed’ toward the fields?
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