Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas 3031264045, 9783031264047

Table of contents :
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: The Battle Between the Gods and the Giants: The Idealists and the Materialists
Chapter 2: Historical and Conceptual Background: The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments
Chapter 3: Can Senseless Matter Alone Think?
Chart of Ethical Principles and Criteria
Chapter 4: Is Perception or Self-Consciousness Primary? To Which First Principle Does Personal Identity Belong?
Chapter 5: The Role Freedom, Spontaneity, and Genius Assume Within Ethical, Epistemic, and Aesthetic Contexts Versus Scientific Determinism
Chapter 6: Time-Consciousness, Subjective Idealism, and Personal Identity
Chapter 7: The Philosophical Application of the Concepts of Freedom, Spontaneity, and Genius in Various Contexts
Chapter 8: On the Distinction Between the Ought and the Is, Values and Facts, and Ethics and Science
Chapter 9: Narcissism, Loneliness, and the Problem of Evil
Chapter 10: Déjà Vu and the Problem of Evil: A Case Study of Political Narcissism and Sadism
Postscript
Aftermath
Afterword
Chapter 11: Are the Environmental and Existential Conditions of Mankind Improving or Deteriorating?
Chapter 12: Is the History of Our Universe and Mankind Cyclical or Linear?
Appendix
Name Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas Ben Lazare Mijuskovic

Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas

Ben Lazare Mijuskovic

Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas

Ben Lazare Mijuskovic Carlsbad, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-26404-7    ISBN 978-3-031-26405-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To all the readers who value ethical humanism

Contents

1 The  Battle Between the Gods and the Giants: The Idealists and the Materialists  1 2 Historical  and Conceptual Background: The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments 17 3 Can Senseless Matter Alone Think? 33 4 Is  Perception or Self-Consciousness Primary? To Which First Principle Does Personal Identity Belong? 41 5 The  Role Freedom, Spontaneity, and Genius Assume Within Ethical, Epistemic, and Aesthetic Contexts Versus Scientific Determinism 67 6 Time-Consciousness,  Subjective Idealism, and Personal Identity 99 7 The  Philosophical Application of the Concepts of Freedom, Spontaneity, and Genius in Various Contexts119 8 On  the Distinction Between the Ought and the Is, Values and Facts, and Ethics and Science127

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Contents

9 Narcissism, Loneliness, and the Problem of Evil139 10 Déjà Vu and the Problem of Evil: A Case Study of Political Narcissism and Sadism177 11 Are  the Environmental and Existential Conditions of Mankind Improving or Deteriorating?201 12 Is  the History of Our Universe and Mankind Cyclical or Linear?205 Appendix209 Name Index213 Subject Index217

About the Author

Ben Lazare Mijuskovic  was born in Budapest in 1937. His father, Max, from Montenegro, was attached to the Yugoslavian Embassy. His mother, Ines, was from Croatia. In 1939, Hitler and the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia and in 1940 the Mijuskovic family was transferred to the Embassy in Tel Aviv where Ben’s father was recruited by British Intelligence as a cryptographer to decipher Italian communiques concerning Yugoslavia. Early in 1941, Ben’s father, along with his mother and the author, was transferred to Cairo where Ben’s father immediately joined the British Eighth Army as an officer, first under general Claude Auchinleck and then Bernard Montgomery engaged in desert warfare against Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and his elite Panzer divisions and Afrika Korps. As the war was closing, Ben’s father was transferred to the Embassy in Ankara, and shortly after reassigned to the Yugoslavian Embassy in Washington, D.C. As the war ended it was clear that Yugoslavia’s government allegiance became communistic, and in 1947, the Yugoslavian Embassy tried to transfer Ben’s father to Bucharest, which was behind the Iron Curtain. Ben’s father applied for political asylum to the US, and the family was awarded Displaced Persons status. The author’s undergraduate work was done at the University of Chicago and his PhD in philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. In 1980, Ben and his wife, Ruth, visited Montenegro for the first time at the invitation of the President, Filip Vujanovic. It was during the visit that the author learned

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the stunning news that during the war the Croatians were Nazi collaborators and operated the cruelest concentration camp in the entire Nazi system, Jasenovac. In the author’s current writing, the author shares his thoughts and concerns about political narcissism in the US with its tendency to evil.

List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5

Neuroscientific paradigm of the brain 133 Ethical principles chart 135 Photograph of author as child on beach in Makarska, Croatia 184 Photograph of author as child with paternal grandmother in Belgrade185 Photograph of author as child at Budapest zoo 186 Photograph of author’s father as young soldier on horseback 187 Photograph of author as child on camel with parents in Egypt 188

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CHAPTER 1

The Battle Between the Gods and the Giants: The Idealists and the Materialists

This chapter philosophically pits the idealists, dualists, rationalists, phenomenologists, existentialists, and the coherence theory of truth and advocates against the materialists, mechanists, empiricists, phenomenalists, linguists, and analysts, and the correspondence theory of truth proponents against each other endlessly. The first group includes Plato against Democritus; Plotinus against Epicurus; Augustine and Aquinas against Skeptics and Atheists; Ficino against Valla; Boehme against Bacon; Descartes against Hobbes; Leibniz against Locke; Kant against Hume; Hegel against Marx; Sartre against Ayer; and Copleston against Russell. This chapter is intended to be a primer, a compendium to the manifold principles of Kant’s reflexive self-consciousness; Schopenhauer’s irrational Will; Husserl’s transcendent intentionality; and Freud’s dynamic narcissism. In pursuing these interdisciplinary and thematic goals, the purpose of this introductory chapter is to challenge the current contemporary psychological dominance of the behavioral and the neurological sciences by highlighting both their theoretical paucity and their “mechanical” inadequacies via their “causal explanations.” Is human consciousness free or determined? In Plato’s dialogue, the Sophist, he presciently anticipates the perennial philosophical battle between the Gods against the Giants, between the metaphysical idealists, dualists, rationalists, advocates for ethical freedom, epistemic spontaneity, aesthetic genius and the phenomenologists, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_1

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existentialists, and the coherence theory of truth advocates against the metaphysical materialists, mechanists, determinists, empiricists, phenomenalists, behaviorists, cognitive behaviorists, neuroscientists, and the correspondence theory of truth proponents and it all begins with Plato. Stranger: What we shall see is something like a Battle of Gods and Giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality. Theaetetus: How so? Str: One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands; for they lay upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word. Theaet: The people you describe are certainly a formidable crew. I have met quite a number of them before now. Str: Yes, and accordingly their adversaries are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless [Universal] Forms. In the clash of argument, they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to be true reality they call not real being, but rather a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps. Theaet: True.1

Historically the controversy pits Plato against Democritus; Plotinus against Epicurus; Augustine and Aquinas against Skeptics and Atheists; Ficino against Valla; Jacob Boehme against Francis Bacon; Descartes against Hobbes; Leibniz against Locke; Kant against Hume; Hegel against Marx; Sartre against Ryle; Copleston against Russell, and so on. But first, it is helpful to distinguish the various metamethods of studying philosophical issues. For example, academic scholars differentiate various disciplines in terms of their methodological concentrations. The History of Philosophy focuses on a specific historical period and its representative movements. For instance, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz represent rationalism, while Hobbes, Locke, and Hume exemplify the turn to empiricism. By contrast, Intellectual History concentrates on a particular timeframe or century and what transpires within its mixtures of culture,

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religion, politics, science, philosophy, literature, wars, and so on. By contrast, the History of Ideas methodology pursues both critical key concepts and arguments, as they meaningfully persist throughout the ages. But the advantage of the History of Ideas studies is that they concentrate on certain universal themes that demand respect because they perpetually command our attention by their continual relevance and resilience regarding our common humanity and its heritage since time immemorial. They assume an almost biblical status virtually requiring hermeneutic treatments. In the 1930s, the History of Ideas became a “stand alone” discipline, as it was initially designed to accommodate what A.  O. Lovejoy defines as “unit ideas,” ideas that exemplify a life and a history of their own. For example, the abstract concept or “idea” of God in Western thought would not qualify because the God of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Spinoza are conceptually very different. By contrast, I intend to address the conceptions of loneliness and intimacy, freedom and necessity, and good and evil not simply as “unit ideas” but also as conceptually implicative and intertwined, as synthesized relations, along with their persistent influence on our thought, as when first conceived and still prevailing today. Accordingly, the dueling controversy occupying our attention throughout the present text concerns the role that human consciousness plays in supporting the principles of ethical freedom, epistemic spontaneity, aesthetic genius, and inspiration, along with the emotional and affective dynamics of the ego, as they challenge the causal determinism of the empirical sciences. While in Roman mythology, the two faces of Janus, one youthful and the other aged, are facing in different directions, the past and the future, Plato’s dual perennial visages uncompromisingly face each other without pause. And they never age. Accordingly, for our purpose, we will address the philosophical, psychological, sociological, and political theories undergirding these clashing universal principles by concentrating on the fundamental reality that all human beings fear loneliness and seek to secure intimacy with others of their kind. And it is worth noticing from the start that the concept of intimacy and love is meaningless if loneliness and the theme of human isolation did not first exist. As Kant intrinsically relates causes to effects, loneliness and intimacy are similarly a priori synthetically and mutually implicative. Each conception is utterly meaningless alone. Consequently, our interest will focus on the ways in which both these themes are expressed, related, and addressed ever since the seventh and sixth centuries BC and until our present age in Western thought.

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There is a captivating myth in Plato’s dialogue, the Symposium, recounted by Aristophanes, the comedic poet, in his speech defining the universal meaning, the essence of Love. According to the ancient dramatist, originally the human race appeared quite differently than it does now. Our bodies consisted of two sets of legs, two sets of arms, two faces with each facing in different directions, and two sexual organs: female-female; male-­ male; and a hermaphroditic version of a female-male. These early humans were rounded, rolly-polly creatures and very powerful, troublesome, mischievous, and aggressive beings, who did nothing all day long except roll around and foment endless difficulties and havoc on all that surrounded them. Finally, Zeus had enough of their antics and became sufficiently impatient that he decided to disempower them by severing them in half. “So, you see, gentleman,” as Aristophanes continues, “how far back we can trace our innate love for one another and how this love is always trying to reintegrate with our former nature, to make two into one and to bridge the gulf between one human being and another together.”2 Thus, the myth proposes a universal truth, that all human beings are innately lonely and that each psyche seeks to secure his or her own singular stamp of intimacy by reuniting with their original other half. Interestingly, the legend also aroused Freud’s interest, and in his discussion of the legend, he suggests that its true significance consists in its deeper instinctual grounding, in its dynamic energy. Whereas for Aristophanes, the animating motivational principle consists in pursuing the attainment of the original psychological intimacy, a desire for a bi-personal reunion, for Freud it essentially represents an evolutionary internal dynamic, actively fueled by an impulse verging toward a biological—even a chemical—reunification through our innate “sexual instincts.” Shall we follow the hint given by the poet philosopher, and venture upon the hypothesis that living substance at the time of its coming to life was torn apart into small particles, which ever since have endeavoured to reunite through the sexual instincts? That these [dynamic] instincts, in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter persisted, gradually succeeded, as they developed through the kingdom of protista [i.e., unicellular organisms] in overcoming the difficulties put in the way of that endeavor by an environment charged with dangerous stimuli—stimuli which compelled them to form a protective layer? That these splintered fragments of living substance in this way attained a multicellular condition and finally transferred the instinct for reuniting in the most highly

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concentrated form, to the germ-cells? But here, I think the movement has come for breaking off.3 The critical issue consists in accounting for both the dynamic separation of the self and its reunification, as the impetus, as the driving force in going forward “arises” from within the “living substance,” rather than from without. We recall that Freud began his career as a neurologist. Freud’s initial principle, later to be considerably emended along psychic lines, but still remaining within the confines of the ego, is essentially empirical, whereas my emphasis, following Aristophanes’ clue, begins with the innate human desire for intimacy, a yearning for an entwining principle, a dual desiderative-cognitive reunification with our other self, as fueled by the motivating principle that each of us feels empty and meaningless without our other half-self. Accordingly, Freud’s psychological grounding is fundamentally empirical, even instinctual, while by contrast mine seeks to combine both (a) the soul’s affective longing desires and (b) its reflexive thoughts in seeking an intimate reunification with our other self. In short, I propose not to replace but rather to add first Freud’s dynamic instinct-oriented sexual principle; second to combine it and unify it with the affective fear of loneliness; and third through its desire to cognitively secure its intimacy with our other self.4 Loneliness and intimacy intrinsically display a synthetically fused alliance between our emotive and cognitive faculties. In pursuing this multifaceted research over the years, I realized that I had implicitly assumed two rather different—but not antithetical—premises. First, I assumed that human loneliness, as an emotion, was primary and then I proceeded to address how it was related to the activities of self-­ consciousness to acts of self-awareness (“Loneliness: An Interdisciplinary Approach,” Psychiatry: A Journal for Interpersonal Processes, 1977, and Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature, 1979). For example, I was aware that when very young infants are subjected to severe emotional neglect and abandonment, they are vulnerable to developmental retardation and early deaths, as diagnosed by Rene Spitz, a psychoanalyst, who was armed with such diagnostic terms as “hospitalism,” “marasmus,” and “anaclitic depression.”5 In the second instance, I assumed that the cognitive—as opposed to the emotional—activities of self-consciousness were primary and then I sought to demonstrate how loneliness was its ensuing developmental outcome in “The Simplicity Argument versus A Materialist Theory of Mind,” Philosophy Today, 1976, and Contingent Immaterialism: Meaning, Freedom, Time and Mind, 1984. But, of course, the reality is

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that both are essential constitutive—not causal—primal activities, both the affective feeling and the cognitive meaning states are simultaneously resounding at once; they are innately, intrinsically related, welded, fused, mutually co-active, supportive, and complementary to each other and therefore both are required. Once more they are connected a priori synthetically to use Kant’s terminology. What is maddingly problematic, however, is the specific fashion, the manner by and in which these relational activities are interlocked. More specifically, how are they mutually spontaneously and dynamically tethered and supportive? One of the difficulties in addressing and describing physical objects, as opposed to conceptual thoughts, is that the former metaphorically display a “sedentary concreteness,” whereas the latter express a “temporal fluidity.” We shall have to learn how that is even possible. But beyond that, I was convinced that the current empirical, scientific, and essentially psychological approaches to loneliness and intimacy, with their adumbrated behavioral, neuroscientific, and sociological principles, are woefully and naively unidimensional and rather what is required is a revolutionary dualistic, subjectivist, and existential approach to unraveling the theoretical foundations of loneliness and intimacy. Consequently, I sought to challenge both the principles of reductive behaviorism, along with its structural stimulus-response mechanisms, and the neuroscientific electrical synaptic interactions in the brain, as causally explaining—but not inwardly constituting—loneliness and intimacy. In short, I am convinced that both the behavioral and the neuroscientific explanations are reductively one-sided. They are not even half the story. After the biological drives to secure air, water, nourishment—and before sex—are met, the fear of loneliness and the drive to secure intimacy are the dual driving forces animating all that we feel, think, say, and do. As opposed to the empirically oriented behavioral, cognitive behavioral, and neuroscientific approaches, which collectively maintain that the causes of loneliness are externally conditioned and determined by familial, environmental, cultural, situational circumstances, and even chemical imbalances in the brain, by contrast, I sought to gain insight and understanding into the plight of loneliness and intimacy by turning to the philosophically oriented principles and paradigms of consciousness, as primarily proposed by Kant’s reflexive self-consciousness (Critique of Pure Reason) and Husserl’s transcendent intentionality (Cartesian Meditations). In addition, more in relation to the problem of evil, I needed Schopenhauer’s irretrievable subconscious irrational Will (The World as Will and

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Representation) but also Freud’s dynamic retrievable unconscious (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) serving as the cohesive foundations, especially as related to narcissism and sadism. Indeed, Freud’s theoretical constructs directly contributed to discovering the deeply underlying sources of the ego’s narcissistic desires, as they powerfully tend to prevail over everything else and often with tragic and sadistic consequences. Although the dominant goal is for each of us to secure intimacy with our “other half,” quite frequently our over-riding narcissistic desires impel us to put our own self-­ interest before and above everyone else’s goals, which often leads to disastrous results. This internal conflict, this dynamic energy playing out between the Id and the Ego, is deeply rooted in Freudian theoretical constructs. As we proceed, we will need to delve more deeply into the Freudian dynamics of the ego’s narcissistic relation to loneliness and especially to the hostility and cruelty it generates. But beyond—and even beneath— these psychic excavations, there is an even deeper level than Leibniz’s and Freud’s retrievable unconscious, namely, a Schopenhauerian and Jungian irretrievable subconscious that we will be forced to treat as best we can. And, as we shall learn, whereas both Kant and Schopenhauer posit a noumenal reality, Kant limits himself to postulating the existence of God, the freedom of the will, and the immortality of the soul on the grounds of faith for ethical purposes (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxx), whereas Schopenhauer assumes a subterranean reality of unknowable qualitas occulta, causa sui, or causa sui generis as indirectly undergirding both our “knowledge” of the phenomenal world and “indirectly” responsible in “accounting” for all the abounding human evil and suffering in this world! Theories regarding human loneliness and intimacy must begin with a grounding conception of an indubitable “selfhood,” with the establishment of a stable criterion for our unique “personal identity,” one securely anchored in the temporal unity of a permanent self. By contrast, as we shall see, the empirical principles brought forth by David Hume, A.  J. Ayer, Gilbert Ryle, D. M. Armstrong, and a host of others we will treat, all collectively deny the substantial reality of the self and consequently its status as a unique self-standing substance. But unless the self is real, loneliness and intimacy are meaningless. Thus, part of the difficulty before us is not only to posit and defend the reality of the self, but it is equally important, collectively, to defend the varying but basically shared consonant immaterial and active conceptions of Plato’s psyche, Augustine’s soul, Descartes’ cogito, Leibniz’s Monad, Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, Schopenhauer’s elusive subject, Brentano’s intentionality, Husserl’s

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monadic cogito, Freud’s ego, and Sartre’s “for-itself,” as all together mutually and “idealistically” connected. Further, all this should be accomplished independently of any religious and/or other worldly implications. In the context of the History of Ideas, the issue that transpires before us and that lies before us concerns and requires the establishment of a unique and dual existence of the self as a separate substance from the world. But the ensuing status of our personal immortality or our enduring existence in an afterlife is well beyond our grasp, as it lies in a completely transcending and unknowable realm, which can only be approached and sustained by the intimacy of faith. As early as Pyrrho of Elis (ca., 360-270 B. C.), who skeptically challenges the referential reality of his own sensations in relation to an independently existing external world, and who also presumably questions the substantial existence of his own “self,” as testified by the confirmation of the legend that his friends were constrained to accompany him on his walks in order to prevent him from traversing before the paths of horses because he doubted their existence, myriads of subsequent philosophers have skeptically followed suit by questioning the substantiality of the self, generally on the basis of allegedly “scientific,” that is, materialist and empirical grounds, while restricting their research to fleeting sensory evidence alone and thus by simply and perfunctorily putting aside the required contributing aspects of reflexive self-consciousness and transcending intentionality. Material atoms and their resulting distinct allegedly “mental” sensations are both disunified and mechanically lack any semblance of “purposiveness.” Interestingly, both Plato and Freud posit the tripartite complexity of the human psyche or ego. In the Republic, Plato describes the soul as consisting of a triad of active “elements,” the appetitive, the desiderative, and the rational “faculties” of the soul. In turn, these become politically distinguished into three interlocking classes of citizens: the productive artisans, farmers, and merchants; the spirited element of the protective guardians of the polis, the soldiers; and the reigning wisdom of the ruling class of philosopher queens and kings; in brief, “the soul writ large in the city-state.” This will further interest us because it preveniently announces an important political dimension to our discussion. Similarly, in Plato’s Phaedrus, the ruling equestrian metaphor of the soul describes the psyche’s internal struggle, as the charioteer grapples with his two horses, one unruly and the other manageable and pliable. Correspondingly, Freud distinguishes and functionally separates the constitutive elements of the ego into three

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parts: the instinctual Id; the rational Ego; and the over-controlling Superego. But for both Plato and Freud, the soul can be described dynamically as a war against its self. Freud, of course, is a psychological determinist but his dynamic principle and paradigm of the ego nevertheless testifies to an embedded but active source of self-generating complexity. But most critically, it is a self at war not only with the external world, other selves, but also with its own self as well. Much simpler are the psychological principles of egoism expressed by Thrasymachus (Plato, Republic, I, 338) and the sociological and political “social contract” theory of accommodation presented by Glaucon (II, 357 ff.). Glaucon opens with one of the earliest statements of the Social Contact theory. The essence of this is that all the customary rules of religion and moral conduct imposed on the individual by social sanctions have their origin in human intelligence and will always rest on tacit consent. They are neither laws of nature nor divine enactments, but conventions which man who made them can alter them. It is assumed that, if all these artificial restraints were removed, the natural man would be left only with purely egoistic instincts and desires in which he would indulge.6

According to Glaucon, man’s innate self-indulgent narcissistic motivation is to injure others with impunity, while his worst fear is to suffer injury at the hands of others without the recourse of retaliation. And thus, we form a purely conventional contract “promising” not to harm others if they do likewise. The fact that the contract is artificial signals that unlike intimacy it is not natural and innate, “it goes against the grain” of our human nature. In short, a “promise” without a moral intent is meaningless. Meanwhile, during the seventeenth century’s “modern period,” the essentially crude psychological principle of egoism continued to be expressed in La Rochefoucauld’s amour propre in his Maximes, as well as in Hobbes’ principle of self-interest as prevailing in all our human conduct in the Leviathan (Chapter XIII), which subsequently became extended and codified into the social contract theories of Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Fichte, Kant, and Hegel.7 I mention these personal and political “accommodations” because it will become increasingly obvious as we proceed that both the manifest and the latent dimensions of our embedded evil in human nature will be uncovered while its impact will readily be traced in personal, domestic, social, and political intercourse and actions.

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Consequently, these egoistic and narcissistic tendencies will have to be controlled by artificial and externally enforced laws. All too frequently our own internal ethical restraints are found to be inadequate against society’s conventional strictures and insufficient in guarding against our own individual uncontrollable desires. Meanwhile, as we confront the deeper issues of loneliness and intimacy, we discover two sets of problems. First, we find that the current empirical and behavioral approaches to loneliness and intimacy are all speculatively superficial, as they plunge no deeper than the reductive theories of our contemporary behavioral stimulus-response advocates with their Pavlovian “causal” paradigm as promoted by the early and inadequate psychological theories of Hull, Thorndike, Harlow, Skinner, Barlow, Guthrie, et al., with their “scientific” positing of a threefold exclusively material interaction between (1) the quantitative assemblage of bodily parts; (2) triggered by external sensory stimuli; and thus (3) resulting in the ensuing causal responses, which completely fail to account for the human—as opposed to the animal—creation of motivational values.8 What distinguishes mankind from the “lower order” of animals is the ability to create values, ex nihilo, so to speak. Both the bodily behavioral and the neuronal/synaptic joining relation of stimuli-brain are antiseptically neutral and sterile, that is, they are merely descriptive, that is, non-normative and therefore both fail to account for human values, which are essentially qualitative meanings as opposed to quantitative factors. In short, the empirical sciences, along with their mathematical and statistical tools, completely disregard the values of intimacy and loneliness, as well as the distinction between good and evil. While confronted by all these essentially reductive physical, biological, and neuronal paradigms of “consciousness,” with their crude mechanisms of bodily behaviors and cerebral electrical synapses, which reduce the thinking mind to the immediacies of our sensory perceptions and feelings alone, merely to causal stimulus-response interactions, all of which only leaves us to wondering in how “to account for” or “to make sense of” all our obvious manifestations of human consciousness, of meanings, conceptions, judgments, intentions, and values can possibly come into existence? How does a collection of sensations and feelings create the values of good and evil. Or are they doomed to meaninglessness? Simply on the basis of our neuroscientific model as promoted by our presently reigning group of theorists, who posit a neuronal cluster of minute cells and mechanisms in the brain, put into motion by “electrical

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synapses,” we remain incapable of deciphering by means of an electroencephalograph which groups of neuronal cells “represent” or “belong” to our humanly self-conscious meanings, judgments, intentions, and values. Neuroscience as a scientific discipline is incapable of identifying and/or distinguishing the mediacy of relational neurons from the immediacy of the sensory ones. And can the neuroscientist identify a colony of “good” neurons from a cluster of “evil” ones in the brain? Frequently the brain paradigm is analogized to a computer, which of course is externally programmed by an independent source to the computer, a “programmer.” But in any case, the dividing line between reflexive self-consciousness versus overt external behaviors, whether bodily or cerebral, both inevitably lead to the underlying principle of scientific determinism. But the critical flaw is that none of these presumably psychological constructs, whether in terms of behaviorism, neuroscience, or artificial intelligence, are capable of adequately explaining how the realities of ethical freedom, epistemic spontaneity, and artistic genius are produced. Overt descriptions are not tantamount to intellectual insights. In sum, behaviorism and the neurosciences remain locked into a relatively unsophisticated scientific paradigm, which mechanically reduces all physical reality, including the substantiality of the “person,” to matter plus motion, and further as merely tantamount to the movements of bodily parts, neuronal cells, and electrical synapses. Human cognition, however, requires both immediate sensations and mediate relations for cognitive consciousness to exist, for meanings and judgments to flourish. Sensations alone cannot speak for themselves. And there is neither a method nor an instrument nor a tool in the neurological arsenal capable of distinguishing sensory neurons from relational ones. Both behaviorism and the neurosciences remain causally structured, deterministic, and sterile. Both are designed to causally explain and “translate” their findings into quantitative measurements and analytic predictions. In short, matter and motion alone cannot be transformed into meanings, judgments, and values, as we shall see. But the corresponding problem that looms before us is that both (a) Hume’s phenomenalist and empiricist reduction of the “self” to a bundle of simple, that is, distinct mental impressions and less vivacious ideas and (b) the neuroscientist’s reduction of the brain to a bundle of single, that is, distinct neurons defy and preclude any possible passive principle of unification. What is it that relationally unifies Hume’s distinct impressions and the neuroscientist’s distinct neurons to each other in creating meanings and judgments, let alone the essence of our personal identities, as

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grounded in the temporality and the unity of self-consciousness, as our thoughts require to be constitutively—but not causally—a priori synthetically related and as they emanate, originate, or arise from within the psyche, soul, cogito, monad, self, mind, or ego? Time-consciousness and the unity of self-consciousness must universally, necessarily, a priori self-initiate from within the self, while by contrast, cellular neurons and electrical sparks alone cannot produce a relation nor a meaning nor a judgment nor a value. The causal connection between cause and effect is a relation but it is the active mind that temporally unifies the time-conscious flow. Without the active mind and its relational powers, the immediacy of sensory consciousness is merely the ticking of a clock that no one hears. Metaphorically in neuroscientific terms, the brain serves as a “box,” as a “container” holding the single distinct neurons, the single “sensory marbles” together, but it is incapable in accounting for, or in explaining how, the immanent temporality; the reflexive unity of consciousness; or the differentiation between the qualitative versus the quantitative features of consciousness; or the difference between sensory and relational neurons can come about and develop. Both Hume’s impressions and the neuroscientist’s neurons are singularly loose, disunified, inactive, unconnected, and thus external physical stimuli cannot produce relations, meanings, judgments, or values. Neither in behaviorism nor in the neurosciences is there a conceivable external principle capable of producing a comprehensive and a coherent system in accounting for the myriad acts of reflexive and intentional consciousness. Neither Hume’s phenomenalism nor his simple impressions and his less vivid simple ideas, his “atomistic psychology,” nor the neuroscientific paradigm of cellular amalgamations of homogeneous neurons can account for reflexive cognitions as opposed to sensory perceptions. For example, both a mollusk and a human body are equipped with sentient responsive neuronal cells, but the human mind transcends the stimulus by connecting, unifying, and essentially relating the sentient-touch-­ causal-relation-to-the felt-object; the human mind relationally connects-the-subject-to-the-object, whereas the mollusk merely reacts. In human self-consciousness, there is always a necessary dual reciprocal, mutual connection between the self and its object, whether the object is external to the mind and physical (dualism) or whether the “object” is conceptually indigenous within the mind (subjective idealism).

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If we shift our discussion from the brain to a social context, from a personal to a political context, if we project our difficulties forward to the previously discussed “social contract theory” of human association, we will find that sociological constructs are equally incapable of addressing the beneficial interpersonal relationship necessary to quell the immanent desperation of loneliness, as we discover that sociological interactions and interventions are correspondingly incapable of addressing the current global pandemic of loneliness engulfing the world. The difficulty is that the social contract paradigm of human association is atomistic, while both empathy and intimacy require organicity. Empathy requires mutually shared feelings, meanings, and affection. For example, imagine a young couple grieving the death of their infant. Or an older couple learning that one of them has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Intimacy, however, is deeper, more intense, more stable, more prolonged. It requires mutually shared trust, respect, and values; constant fidelity toward each other; support for other’s decisions; and the compatibility of different goals. These are all synthetic a priori qualitative and shared values.9 Thus, the antidote to loneliness, with its pervasive sense of feeling personally rejected is rather to be solved by the unifying qualitative forces of empathy and the intimacy of shared values with one another. By contrast, impersonal social relations, as opposed to intimate personal relations, are always mired in the shifting sands of emotional transiency, always fraught with opposing “conflicts of interest,” which are problematically prevalent throughout all our religious, ethnic, nationalist, and political contexts and associations. Meanwhile, the reigning group of behavioral psychologists, neuroscientists, political, and social contract theorists all collectively tend to view mankind as superficially related, externally rather than intimately, while what is obligatorily necessary is to gain insight and understanding into the intricacies of human loneliness an intimacy as forged from within, from the inside, and as commensurate with the self’s internal requirements and resources, as it desperately reaches outwardly for reciprocating contacts and intimacy. The social contract theory is fundamentally an empirical paradigm. As such, it is descriptive, external, causal, explanatory, deterministic, and therefore “scientific.” But it lacks the internal aspects of connection, of Kant’s spontaneous reflexive self-consciousness and

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Husserl’s transcendent intentionality, along with their twin virtues of being actively formed, framed, and armed from within consciousness, from the resources of the subjective mind. In short, both sociology and politics, as “sciences,” are grounded in the haphazard superficiality of impersonal social associations rather than from within by an internal constitutive unicity of feelings and relations between two feeling and cognitive subjects. In concluding the chapter, let me endorse another supporting meta-­ perspective on the History of Ideas discipline as a helpful way to look at the scope of our enterprise by appealing to Wilhelm Dilthey’s triadic formulation of metaphysical being, which is ensconced within his threefold philosophical worldviews (Weltanschauung), his historical and conceptual configurations of (1) metaphysical materialism, as contrasted with the dual principles of both (2) a subjective and (3) an objective idealism. In the methodology of philosophical types, Dilthey delineates three fundamental ways of treating the world [and mankind]. The first is naturalism which comprehends the world as logically unified in a system of causeeffect relations [i.e., the empirical sciences, e. g., sociology, behavioral psychology, and neuroscience]. The second that of subjective idealism, or the philosophy of freedom, comprehends the world unified only through the imposition of an order upon it through the moral striving of the human will [e. g., Kant]. The third that of objective idealism springs from the intuition of an underlying cosmic harmony in which apparent contradictions and conflicts are reconciled [e. g., Hegel].10 I quote this passage for two reasons. First, it lends support to my contention that there is a limited and finite set of metaphysical “first principles” that are capable of describing both reality-in-itself as well as for subsuming the whole of mankind. But it is only the second option, the subjective viability of the self-conscious subject to create existential human values, qualitative values, that is alone capable of ushering in the confluence between intimacy and loneliness and the antithesis between good and evil.

Notes 1. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist of Plato, translated by F. M. Cornford with a running commentary (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 246A–246C; cf., pages 228–232. 2. Plato: The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), Symposium, 189d ff.

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3. Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1961), 51–52. Interestingly, the Introduction is written by Gregory Zilboorg, more anon. 4. Cf., Mijuskovic, Ben Lazare, Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2015, 3rd ed.); Contingent Immaterialism: Meaning, Freedom, Time, and Mind (Amsterdam: Gruner, 1984), Chapter VIII; “Loneliness: An Interdisciplinary Approach,” Psychiatry: A Journal for Interpersonal Processes, 40:2 (1977); reprinted in The Anatomy of Loneliness, edited by Joseph Hartog, Ralph Audi, and Yehudi Cohen (New York: International Universities Press, 1980), 65–94. Feeling Lonesome: The Philosophy and Psychology of Loneliness (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger ABC/Clio, 2015), 185–191; Chapter 2, “Cognitive and Motivational Roots of Universal Loneliness,” in Addressing Loneliness: Coping, Prevention, and Clinical Interventions, edited by Ami Sha’ked and Ami Rokach (New York: Routledge, 2015); 20–33; Consciousness and Loneliness: Theoria and Praxis (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Metaphysical Dualism, Subjective Idealism, and Existential Loneliness: Matter and Mind (New York: Routledge, 2021); 63, 258–259, 397, 411, 419, 439–440; and The Philosophical Roots of Loneliness and Intimacy: Political Narcissism and the Problem of Evil (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). 5. Psychology and Life, edited by Floyd L. Ruch (Chicago: Scott Foresman and Co., 1953), including “Grief: A Peril in Infancy,” a film, 134–136; cf., Rene Spitz, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (1955), 10 ff.; Erik Ericson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963), 80; and Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New York: Basic Books, 1975) 43–48 and passim. 6. The Republic of Plato, translated with a running commentary by F. M. Cornford (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 41. 7. Gough, J.  W., The Social Contract: A Critical Study of Its Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 2–4 and passim; and cf., John Hallowell, Main Currents in Modern Political Thought (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), on Hobbes, cf., 72 ff.; on Locke, 102 ff.; on Rousseau, 172 ff.; and on Kant, 248, ff. 8. Bugelski, B. R., The Psychology of Learning Applied to Teaching (New York: Bobbs Merill, 1964), 37–50, 68, 97, 113, 119. 9. Mijuskovic, Ben, “Loneliness and Intimacy,” Journal of Couples Therapy, 1:3–4 (1991), 39–48; reprinted in Intimate Autonomy: Autonomous Intimacy, edited by Barbara Jo Brothers (Philadelphia: Haworth Press, 1991), 39–48; and cf., “The Role of Empathy as a Path to Intimacy,” in

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Paedagogia Christiana: Being Alone Together in Education, edited by Julian Stern (Torun: Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika, 2020), 11–24. 10. The Search for Being: Essays from Kiekegaard to Sartre on the Problem of Existence, translated and edited by Jean T.  Wilde and William Kimmel (New York: Noonday Press, 1962), 285.

CHAPTER 2

Historical and Conceptual Background: The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments

According to the metaphysical principle of materialism of Leucippus and Democritus, all that exist are the voids of space and the atomistic movements of physical particles, thus reducing all reality to matter plus motion and accordingly to the causal and determinism of sciences and there is no true self. By contrast, Plato argues that the psyche or soul is both immaterial and active from which it conceptually follows that (1) the soul is a substance, a personal identity; (2) a reflexive unity of self-consciousness; (3) a temporal identity; (4) a subjective ideality; and (5) presumably it is intrinsically immortal. However, Kant seeks to reject these purely rationalist and “dogmatic” arguments in both his Paralogism versions of 1781 and 1787 in order to pave the way for his own transcendental philosophy—as opposed to a purely rationalist principle—which can only succeed if he discredits the soul as a noumenal entity as proposed from Plato through Augustine, Descartes, and Leibniz. Two events were pivotal in connecting my study of human consciousness to loneliness. First, in 1972, I was hired by the philosophy department at Southern Illinois University and in 1974 my doctoral dissertation was published. In this early study, I began tracing a Platonic argument for the immortality of the soul offered in the Phaedo. Plato’s dual assumed premises are that the soul is both “simple,” that is, immaterial, unextended, and active. While matter and physical objects consist of compounds, of separate material parts amassed together, the human psyche is itself © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_2

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immaterial, unextended, “partless,” and hence simple, that is, indivisible, and therefore it follows that the soul cannot be destroyed. It is both a singular substance and immortal by its very nature (Phaedo, 78b). It also follows that our subjective sensations are passively, receptively “given to consciousness,” simply delivered to consciousness when we open our eyes and extend our hand, without any conscious effort. Again, by contrast, matter is extended, a composite substance, and philosophically defined as “inert,” as inactive. Its “activity,” its motion is rather predicated by Leucippus and Democritus as due to the perceptually observed physical movement of atomistically coalesced objects “falling” through space. A human byproduct of this movement is that humans experience these presumably independent motions as resulting in causal events against the background of an external time factor. But the appearance of time is produced by the perception of the movement of physical objects traveling in space. Whereas Plato’s soul is immaterial and “simple,” that is, unextended, Democritus’ atoms are physically indivisible and eternal. Basically, Greek atomism reduces all reality to matter plus motion and all human cognition to physical sensations, to our perceptions, as caused by the interactions and collisions of atoms striking our five senses thus producing deceptive images and subjective feelings, that is, appearances to form. The metaphysical principle of the Presocratic naturalist philosophers thus reduces the basic four “elements” of reality, namely, air, water, earth, and fire, to a non-qualitative atomic homogeneity, as the only existing substance: matter. The atomic theory of Democritus (ca. 460–367 BC) sought to anchor the distinction between appearance and reality. All atoms were spatially extended, internally homogeneous, qualityless, rigid and indivisible…If there were many atoms of the same kind it, was not because nature came in varying distinguishable qualitative species but because given a finite number of possible quantitative variations of an infinite number of atoms, “chance” must run to duplications. The permanent actuality of the atoms was postulated to avoid deriving being from non-being.1 This is a critical distinction: quantities are physical; qualities are mental. For the Greek atomists, the only realties are the voids of space, the atoms, and the motions of the atoms. Further, the theological possibility of a creation ex nihilo by God is inconceivable. The cosmos is eternal and so are the atoms. Further, the distinction between the categories of Quality versus Quantity is one of the most important differences in the entirety of all philosophical thinking, one which I shall emphasize throughout the

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text. There are few such notable conceptual distinctions in philosophy that are as critically important and as far reaching as the difference between the categories of Quantity and Quality, but for science all reality is reduced to material and measurable quantities alone and quality is eliminated. In addition, the atoms are homogenous (above). By contrast, qualities are intrinsically heterogeneous, but the contrary implication in materialism is that all five of our sensory human experiences, sight, touch, smell, taste, and sound, are reducible to the sole homogeneous nature of matter and thus also to the uniformity of the movement of the atoms thus leading to determinism. What may by distortion appear to the human mind as varieties of colors, sounds, and touches are in reality homogeneously and physically identical and thus quantitatively neutral. Similarly, for modern science, all 97 chemicals are homogeneously formed from the same material element, the indivisible atoms. But by contrast, the seeming differences between mind and matter, good and evil, courage and cowardice, beauty and plainness, but above all quality and quantity are all merely conceptually heterogeneous distinctions and accordingly eliminated by science. Again, the reductive principle of science is that all reality is reducible to matter plus motion. This is the ruling first principle of the scientific outlook. However, for the opposing Platonic tradition, the “internal acts” of our human thoughts are reflexively self-conscious, thoughts are, so to speak, “self-aware,” while our bodily sensations are “given” to us as passive, as “self-unaware”; they are all relegated and restricted to our passive sensations. Thus, the idealist, Platonic, and Neoplatonic metaphysical premise, the opposing principle to materialism, as expressed in the context of the History of Ideas discipline, is grounded in the immaterial and active nature of the human soul, as it proliferates into five very different arguments and conclusions: (1) the reality of the soul as an independent substance; (2) the reflexive unity of self-consciousness; (3) the temporal continuity of a unique personal identity; (4) the epistemic premise grounding both subjective and objective idealisms; and (5) the immortality of the soul.2 Significantly, these five schematic arguments will resurface in Kant’s two very different edition versions in the Paralogism sections of the Critique of Pure Reason, with the first four fallacies of pure reason, reason as totally unaided by sensory intuitions and images, as they appear in the first edition Paralogism section in 1781, and, six years later, all four previous arguments are dropped and only the fifth, defending the immortality of the soul argument, appears in the second edition of 1787. In following Kant’s

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unexplained editorial shift, I shall go on to connect the first edition Second Paralogism regarding the unity of self-consciousness (Critique, A 352) and the Third Paralogism, concerning the temporality of consciousness (Critique, A 362), and their problematic conflicts with Kant’s two edition Deductions, again the first in 1781, emphasizing the immanency of time-­ consciousness (Critique, A 97–104), and the second in 1787, addressing the unity of self-consciousness (Critique, B 131–132), as both seek to transcendentally ground the ultimate criterion for our personal identity. The critical issue before us is that Kant offers two very different premises in the Analytic. In the first A edition, it is time-consciousness, which is the controlling premise, while in the second B edition, it is the unity of self-­ consciousness, which serves as the dominant principle. In sum, quite curiously, in the first set of Paralogisms, he offers four criticisms against the doctrines of “rational psychology” on the subject of the soul, but six years later he scraps all four and only discusses the immortality of the soul argument. The first question then is why the abrupt and unexplained change? I dwell on this issue because the section on the Paralogisms in the A edition is closely related to the five arguments in my Achilles chapters. But more importantly, in the first edition Paralogisms, Kant needs to discredit the entire metaphysical dualist and rationalist arguments for personal identity from Plato, through Augustine, Descartes, and Leibniz, before he can defend his own argument supporting the transcendental unity of apperception. In addition, it is important to note that both in the 1781 and the 1787 Paralogism versions, the arguments are collectively directed against metaphysical materialism. The second question is why he also completely rewrote the two Deduction sections. We will address these issues in a later chapter. I mention them now because they form the prelude for all that follows. My second transforming theoretical interest regarding the issue of personal identity began during my attendance at Yale as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the academic year, 1975–1976, when I became fascinated by the novels of Thomas Wolfe. From early childhood on, I realized I was different from other children. I was an only child but all my experiences during my initial “formative” eight years of life, from 1937 to 1945, consisted in being shuffled, shuttled, and bounced around with my parents because of the Second World War, as we moved from one environment to another, one culture to another, and one language to another, while sporadically visiting my mother’s family in Croatia and my father’s family in Montenegro. I was born in 1937. My father was a diplomat, but both my parents and I

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were relocated first in 1939 from the Yugoslavian Embassy in Budapest to Tel Aviv, then in 1940 to Cairo, then later in 1944 briefly to Ankara, and finally in 1945 to Washington. Looking back, I can only imagine what these constant relocations and transitions produced in me except a continual sense of disorientation and perplexity in relation to my international surroundings and radically varying environments. Basically, by constantly having to re-adapt and re-adjust to social and cultural forces, various foreign languages, and the inherent limitations beyond my control, while in retrospect, I suppose, I became chronically self-aware of my feelings of loneliness and a desire for companionship, so much so that I continually created consoling imaginary friends as a compensation. At Yale, relieved from my teaching duties for a year, I remember going to the reference desk at Sterling Library and asking the librarian if she could assist me in recommending some studies on loneliness and she searched her computer and suggested an article published by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.3 Armed with her stimulating, and as it turned out, her interdisciplinary vision, I spent the full year at Yale researching the topic of loneliness, but loneliness as a self-contained subject matter in its “own right,” and by immersing myself in the novels of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River, You Can’t Go Home Again, and The Web and the Rock and I was captivated by Wolfe’s expressions of his solitary life.4 One passage in particular struck a philosophical chord in me, as it anticipates a singularly insightful discussion on Wolfe’s reflections concerning the temporal nature of human time, subjective time, and his distinction between two very different “modes” of time-awareness: an external time of clocks and calendars, the time movements of rivers and trains, time as measured by the perceived movement of objects travelling through space while producing the appearance of “real” events in time, but also to Wolfe’s subjective allusion of an “inner flowing form” of temporality, a deeply submerged time-consciousness, a “dark time,” a lonely time, the time of William James, Henri Bergson, and Kant5. With James Joyce before him and William Faulkner after him, Wolfe develops his own literary form of narrative expression along with a highly personal and intimate “flowing stream of consciousness,” as it exemplifies the undeniable dominance of subjective temporality within human consciousness.6 Time the form of internal sense, and space the form of the external sense [Kant?]. Within a definite limited interval of duration [Bergson?] known as the specious present [William James?] there is a direct [i.e., immediate] perception of temporal relations [Bergson?]. After an event

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has passed beyond the [sensory] specious present it can only enter consciousness by reproductive memory [Kant’s The Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination, Critique, A 100?]. Temporal experience divided into three qualitatively distinct intervals: the remembered past, the perceived specious present and the anticipated future [Kant?]—By means of the tripartite division we are able to inject our present selves into the temporal stream of our own experience…Thus time has its roots in experience and yet appears to be a dimension in which experiences and their contents are to be arranged.7 Internal time-consciousness is qualitative and subjective, while scientific time is quantitative, objective, mathematically measurable, and abstractly expressed. The novel as an “instrument” of intimate self-expression is a relatively recent invention. Although interestingly, Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese eleventh-century noblewoman’s autobiographical novel, The Tale of Genji, is credited with being the first novelist. The story is replete with expressions of isolation and boredom, the latter serving as loneliness in its minor form. As Montaigne, Pascal, and Schopenhauer have unanimously remarked, boredom is often a subtle but especially chronic form of loneliness. Indeed, Schopenhauer remarks that prisoners in the penitentiary system in Philadelphia in the nineteenth century frequently committed suicide in its wake. Often Cervantes’ Don Quixote, although written in the third-person narrative, but because it concentrates on the knight-errant’s subjective thoughts and fantasies, and Defoe’s “diary” of Robinson Crusoe (Fromm-Reichmann), which is spun through a first-person narrative, are both cited as prime examples of melancholic expressions of loneliness. And in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the adoption of the novel’s lonely narrative stream is especially well suited for the transmission of his flowing “stream of consciousness” style, as climaxed in his concluding final chapter’s interminable monologue, which spans a 40-page uninterrupted, unpunctuated, and greatly expansive final sentence in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses. But it is Wolfe who displays the most insistent concentration on the internal narrative form of consciousness as continuously stringed together by his agonized speculations on how subjective time and lonely time can be “conceptualized,” and yet, in the same moment, verbally expressed, even symbolized, as it comes to the fore in his narrations. For Wolfe, the challenging paradox of language fascinated him, as the self feels and thinks all alone within its own sphere of loneliness, and yet, in the same moment, it yearns to reach outwardly to others through the abstractions of language.

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To be confronted by the desiderative dilemma of communicating intimate feelings and thoughts to an other being but limited by the medium of restrictive abstract concepts is to fully realize the futility of words, the separation of the self from any adequate communication with an other self. Imagine what it would be like if our only language were mathematics. How could we express our feelings? Mathematical equations are so abstractly “objective,” while one’s feelings and thoughts are so subjectively hidden and “intimate.” We are each of us prison pent. The divide between the imprisonment of solipsism and the inadequacies of language cannot be intimately overcome or shared. No philosopher has ever seriously defended solipsism, not even Max Stirner, but each of us has often felt the sense of our solitary confinement from the world of others. Thoughts and words are different “entities,” actually they are conflicting creations. Thoughts by nature tend to meander vaguely, to wander aimlessly, but often, all too often, they are poignantly felt as opposed to meant. By contrast, words are defined, restricted, particular, and concrete, but meaningfully incomplete, truncated, and not spreading and flowing beyond themselves; they persistently remain blunted, brittle, and constrained entities. But while experiencing bouts of deep loneliness, by feeling it, sensing it, thinking it, meaning it within my self, and then trying to verbalize it, to communicate it to you, and trying to tell you in words both how I feel and what it means to me, I realize how miserably I have failed. Such efforts always get lost in translation. The reason for this dissonance is that human consciousness expresses a variety of spanning awarenesses, from a multiplicity of aspects and levels of awareness, from the subconscious, the unconscious, the conscious, the sensory, the emotive, the relational, the reflexively self-conscious, and the transcendently intentional. All these modes and aspects of feeling, thinking, and expression defy the stunted behavioral and neuroscientific paradigms of communication, of brain-to-brain “interaction.” Contemporary linguistic theorists and analytic philosophers have tried to replace consciousness with language (Moore et  al.). But the original initiator of this philosophical movement is Thomas Hobbes, and we can only helplessly witness how convoluted the effort became for him. [Hobbes] wanted to stress both that there was a close connexion between thought and language in that the latter in some way was a sign of the former and that human speech differed from animal signs because of its [nominalistic] arbitrariness. On the one hand, he attempted a causal theory of language; yet on the other hand he insisted on its arbitrariness,

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on ‘the decision of men.’ It is hard to see how these two approaches can be made consistent with each other…In Hobbes’ view every man has his own private world of phantasms [i.e., sensory images], and words are signs of these phantasms of [appearing] things. We start with our own private marks by means of which our conceptions become associated with noises that are uttered—a kind of private system of mnemonics…But human languages come about through decision and the signs employed are arbitrary, ‘namely those we make choice of at our own pleasure.8 The nominalist theses of William of Ockham, Hobbes, and Locke are all theoretically bankrupt. Our contemporary linguists and analytic theorists have failed to progress beyond their progenitors. Words and sensations, words and feelings, words and meanings are strangers to one another. But even a newborn infant and an animal can experience loneliness without verbalizing it. But Wolfe also offers a strong psychological and motivational theory concerning loneliness. Once more, we emphasize that loneliness is both a feeling and a meaning and above all, as we shall learn, a value to be contended with and against. He saw each individual in the world as living in a compartment in isolation from his fellows unable to communicate adequately with them. This tragedy of loneliness is at the heart of Eugene Gant’s experience and makes Look Homeward, Angel a book which can appropriately bear the subtitle “A Story of the Buried Life”. (Holman, ibid., pages 25, 37 ff.) According to Wolfe, each human being is buried alone under various covers of groping passions and reflexive thoughts, cradled within an interior domain into which no other self can enter or successfully penetrate with consistency. But one of his most striking philosophical and psychological insights regarding the human heart and loneliness is conveyed by his indelible universal conviction that all of us are both lonely and angry. To be sure, loneliness is sadness, but this dominant theme of anger will significantly gain momentum and traction as we proceed. [It] is not that I think my knowledge of loneliness is different in kind from that of other men. Quite the contrary. The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people—not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul, as evidenced by the innumerable strident words of abuse,

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hatred, contempt, distrust, and scorn that forever grates upon our ears as the manswarm passes us in the streets—we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.9 But it is this primarily psychological, emotional, and cognitive connection, which forces us to draw an intrinsic relation between our loneliness and our anger, it is the recognition that initially we are each of us angry both at others and even at our own selves at being, for being lonely; it is as Erich Fromm uttered, we feel both guilty and ashamed in The Art of Loving; first at others and then at our self but the pendulum of anger swings both ways, to and fro, both to the other and to the self. But it is to Wolfe’s concluding invocation concerning our “strident words of abuse, hatred, contempt, distrust, and scorn” (above) that first alerts each of us in recognizing the tendency of blaming others for our loneliness. Pointless to “prove” but not to blame. The anger is self-sufficient in-itself. Generally, we tend to regard loneliness in others as sadness, as “depression,” but the dynamic of loneliness is first and foremost fraught with an underlying hostility. Wolfe’s anger draws an explicit and powerful connection, as it holds a necessary, but often totally unrecognized relation between loneliness and anger. In a later chapter, we shall turn to Gregory Zilboorg’s psychoanalytic version concerning this powerful Freudian and interestingly Wolffian dynamic. In sum, then, there is the dramatic, paradoxical, and mesmerizing existential truth, namely, that universally all human beings are lonely, and yet each one of us is alone, completely, singularly alone that captured my allegiance to Wolfe, as it piqued my fascination. How can each of us feel and think “the loneliness” and yet, all together, we all share the same fate and within the same moment when we singly feel the desperate yearning for intimacy? But then from where, from how, and from whence does the dual countervailing desire to give and to receive empathy and intimacy derive? As suggested, the novel form is relatively late in coming to fruition. Preceding the modern novel, however, there are the shared ancient myths, chronicles, sagas, legends, and minstrel songs, essentially both first- and third-person narrative melancholic expressions describing the plight of heroes and their isolative tales of loneliness, as depicted in the Epic of Gilgamesh on the death of Enkidu, in Homer’s Iliad on Achilles’ loss of Patroclus, in the Odyssey and Ulysses’ ceaseless yearning for home, and in the twelfth-century tale of Tristan and Iseult’s unrequited love. But it is neither philosophy nor psychology that does justice to the theme of

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loneliness but rather it is the narrative form of the novel’s expressions that most poignantly describes the innermost woes of our solitary journeys throughout life. And quite significantly, it is the novel form that takes on an increasingly powerful traction after Descartes’ trumpet call heralding his isolated cogito. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1709) is the incarnation of the Cartesian self. In 1977, the journal Psychiatry published my article on loneliness, which was followed by a lengthier study. In the article, I was careful to point out that the meaning of loneliness has a meaningful opposite, namely, a sense of belonging to and with an other responding self or creature through a sense of an ameliorating intimacy.10 And when we reflect, we realize that the meaning of loneliness and the meaning of love are intrinsically related or, in Kantian terms, universally, necessarily, a priori, and synthetically related just as are the concepts of cause and effect, self and object, loneliness and intimacy, and good and evil are all mutually implicative. The feeling of negativity and the sense of loss and emptiness, the emptiness of loneliness is meaningless without the positivity of intimacy. All these qualitatively interrelated reciprocal feelings and meanings testify to the overarching systematization, the comprehensive adherences, and the relational coherences of human knowledge, as we shall unfold. As mentioned, my first study assumed the feeling, the reality of enforced isolation, as a grounding premise, an Aristotelian first principle pertaining to human psychology. But my second study was an attempt to approach the roots of loneliness by starting with its cognitive factors germinating in self-consciousness in general.11 But again, the critical point is that I realized, as I went along, that during my transition from my first premise, the feeling of loneliness, to the second, the cognition of loneliness, I had in effect completed a salutary turn. I needed both the affective, the emotional anger and the sadness, and the fear that surrounds and pervades the sense of loneliness, but I also additionally required the meaning, the absorbing reflexive isolation nestled within the cognitive features of temporality as well as in the isolated unity of self-consciousness. In short, one cannot know, cannot experience loneliness without transcendentally (Kant) and intentionally (Husserl) acknowledging and recognizing both the temporality and the unity of the self as well as the despair. I had unwittingly fused and confused the dual contributing “aspects” of the relationship between loneliness and consciousness to each other, as if they stood separate and apart. In short, first I had mistakenly only concentrated on the premise that man feels lonely and only secondly moved on to the equally

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important principle of self-consciousness without realizing that the two realities are mutually complementary, intertwined, inseparable, and reciprocally self-sustaining. It is this internal dualistic dynamic that remains unaccounted for by the sciences of behaviorism and the current neurosciences. Meanwhile, as matters turned out, my employment paths had forked into two very different directions but, as I went on to experience and fortunately learn, quite shareable and compatible professions, both as a social worker and a mental health therapist (1965–2015), as well as a philosophy and humanities university professor (1968–2018). In the first capacity, I worked in public social service environments and settings, in offices and out in the field administering to both children and adult protective units, a children’s Head Start program, multiple in-patient psychiatric hospitals for children, adolescents, and adults, mental health clinics, in-patient psychiatric hospitals, and a state hospital for the developmentally delayed during the day. And in the evening, I taught evening classes in philosophy and the humanities. In the first capacity, I conducted psychiatric assessments concentrating on the patient’s symptoms in determining their diagnoses, as, for example, for a variety of disorders, including anxiety disorders (DSM, 300.-- ff.) and depressive disorders (DSM, 296.-- ff.), as well as psychotic disorders. Axis I assessments are determined by the patient’s set of defining symptoms, as delineated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and then the planned intervention follows with the clinician developing an appropriate “cognitive behavioral” therapeutic program, which literally consists in a written contract between the therapist and the relatively passive patient. The very term “patient”—as opposed to the term “subject”—denotes that a process, a procedure, will be implemented; it will be done to the patient. Generally, it involves some brief clinical counseling and quite often it includes psychiatric medications. These are disorders for which the patient voluntarily seeks relief through clinical interventions and medicinal treatments. And, as it turned out for me, in these specific therapeutic protocols, in which I was employed as a clinician, basically it favored two approaches. First the strict regimen of a contractual “cognitive behavioral” approach—a formal written contract of do’s and don’ts—between the passive patient and the active therapist, which was often amplified by the use of psychiatric medications. At the time, and even at this current time, this doctrinal approach disregards the opposing tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis, which continues to concentrate on the subject’s repressed unconscious drives by delving

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into the subject’s internal ruminations while, at the same time, the treatment is coupled with intensive weekly “talk therapy” sessions. It is client oriented rather than society oriented. In the first modality, the behavioral, it is assumed that the patient is suffering from something “external,” something that is unpleasantly happening to him or her and that it can be remedied by altering their behavior and social contacts. But under the umbrella of the second psychoanalytic paradigm, the subject actively participates in exploring the contributary dynamics of his or her repressed disorder and by promoting the theme that the subject is actively responsible for what is happening to them and further and uppermost that they have the key to their own solution and escape from distress. As it turned out, all the clinics and hospitals I went on to serve favored and focused on the behavioral contracts between the therapist and the passively malleable patient. For example, the client was directed to follow through on drug and alcohol abstention, seek weekly employment, stop abusing their children, and so on. Strict compliance to the written contract was required. But this favored empirical paradigm was antiseptically neutral and merely descriptive in both its expressions and its expectations, as it was strictly and behaviorally adhered to while the second element of therapeutic compliance was centered on the patient’s psychiatric medication treatment. Again, in the clinics I served, the therapy sessions were limited to six after which the patient was referred to an independent psychiatric clinic for meds. The dissonance between the behavioral and the psychoanalytic paradigm became highly illuminating and instructive for me. The first essentially ignored the philosophical features of the unique quality of the person, the “personal identity” feature, while the second deeply explored it. In short, I felt that the therapeutic behavioral contracts I brokered with the clients were woefully insufficient in terms of adequately gaining insight and understanding into how and why the “patient” viewed themselves, as well as the world at large, in such negative thoughts and terms? But beyond that, I also very much wanted to know exactly how and why my subjects evaluated their fellow humans, whether in general terms of optimism or pessimism, whether in terms of altruism or egoism. I believed that what was prominently missing was the ethical dimension or perspective. I thought it was important to discover, to know how and why they valued or disvalued their own selves and their fellow man as well as their surrounding political world at large. Far different were the diagnosed Axis II Personality Disorder subjects, with their more enduring and permanent traits and, by distinction from

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the Axis I patients, these subjects were satisfied with their own behaviors, but unfortunately for society at large they exhibited serious and sometimes quite violent and dangerous antisocial and pathological tendencies in their behaviors toward others. These psychological character and personality disorders are completely at ease with themselves and do not seek any improvement whether they display Narcissistic Disorders (DSM, 301.81), Antisocial Disorders (DSM, 301.7), or Paranoid Disorders (301.0). These engrained pathological tendencies can be very significantly unpleasant to others and often seriously dangerous as well. The subject’s long-standing personality aberrations are permanent, intractable, and often, all too often they dynamically “act out” in dangerous and tragic behaviors, in “acting out” assaults as exemplified through their personal, domestic, social, and political roles resulting in destructive and cruel behaviors. If we were to apply an ethical—as opposed to a psychiatric standard—to these engrained tendencies, the element of evil could readily be applied. However, what is important and helpful in dealing with Axis II diagnoses is that the personality disorders allow for a considerable degree of predictability on how a narcissistic and sadistic individual will behave in various settings, whether domestically, socially, or politically. For example, for two years I worked as a public Child Protective Services social worker and when children were removed from the father’s custody and left with the mother, the disenfranchised parent often retaliated with threats of violence against the offending family. In other critical situations of psychic deprivation, of unremitting loneliness, both teenagers and young men violently retaliated by homicidally attacking a former school by killing children and with wild abandon, as I have documented elsewhere. Currently and tragically, this dysfunctional dynamic is manifesting itself in political situations, as it is playing out in Vladimir Putin’s threats of nuclear retaliation, as he seeks to destroy Ukraine and its people. And should his designs fail to materialize, he is prepared to destroy everything in his power. We will return to this topic in Chapter XI, “Narcissism, Loneliness and the Problem of Evil.” By a stark contrast, my complementary and concurrently running alternate vocation, the teaching of philosophy and the humanities, obviously focused not on evaluating mental diagnoses and personality disorders, but rather on developing the student’s insight and understanding into their own philosophical and psychological outlooks on reality, on the general nature of mankind, as well as on their own subjective creation of their singular human values and by exploring their own intellectual orientation,

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their “attitudes” toward the world in general, the “whys” of their pessimism or optimism, their ethical and aesthetic values, and so on. The result was that I functioned and served in two very different universes at the same time but within two very different but complementary disciplinary contexts, one quasi-scientific and the other chock-full of the freedom of open discussions. And as both these services coalesced and played out in my experiences over a span of four decades, my dual theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches ended up in encouraging me to seek and interweave the two disciplines as mutually supporting each other. What initially appeared to be an either/or professional situation turned out to be a both/and advantage. As previously mentioned, each human being either wittingly or unwittingly confronts an existential Diltheyan worldview choice within themselves concerning what constitutes reality, the nature of man, as well as one’s unique identity as it turns either toward an interest in developing either a scientific outlook or an ethical value system, but not both. They are antithetical pursuits and goals. Values are unique to the individual person. They are “created,” “gleaned,” “harvested”—but not caused—by and through the individual’s lifelong “lived experiences” (Dewey). These “higher” and “deeper” studies and investigations basically tend to promote an interdisciplinary approach and equally important they can lend themselves toward interactive participations in both mental health settings, such as “group therapy,” and in classroom sessions.12

Notes 1. Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1973), III, 187b, italics mine. In short, not from a theistic or divine Being creating it ex nihilo. 2. Mijuskovic, Ben Lazare, The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments: The Simplicity, Unity, and Identity of Thought and Soul from the Cambridge Platonists to Kant: A Study in the History of an Argument (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, International Archives of the History of Ideas Series, 13, 1974); cf., The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology, edited by Thomas Lennon and Robert Stainton (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2008); unfortunately, the study is restricted to only discussing my chapter on the unity of consciousness alone; and cf., Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, “The Simplicity Argument: A Study in the History of an Argument,” Philotheos, Volume 9 (2009).

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3. Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda, “Loneliness,” Psychiatry: A Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes, 22:1 (1959), 1–15. 4. Nowell, Elizabeth, Thomas Wolfe, A Biography (Garden City, New  York: Doubleday and Company, 1960), and Loneliness at the Core: Studies in Thomas Wolfe, edited by C. Hugh Holman (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1975). 5. Mijuskovic, Ben, “Loneliness and Time-Consciousness,” Philosophy Today, 22:4 (1978); Loneliness and Consciousness: Theoria and Praxis (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2018); on Bergson, 233, 234–235, 241–242, 355, on Kant, 99–100, 125, 146, 212–213, 259, 344, 353–354, 359, 380, 388, 432; The Philosophical Roots of Loneliness and Intimacy: Political Narcissism and the Problem of Evil (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Chapter 1, “Time-Consciousness, Personal Identity, and Loneliness”; and cf., Holman, opus cit. 27–30, 54–55, 69–70, 112. 6. Interestingly, Faulkner began as a poet, and poetry provides the same capacity to emulate the continuous unpunctuated temporal flow of consciousness, as, for example, in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. Cf., also Faulkner, William, New Orleans Sketches (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2002), xvi ff. 7. Wolfe, Of Time and the River, Chapter LXXV; Holman, opus cit., 27–30, 52, 69–70, 112. We shall treat Kant’s discussion of a triadic subjective time-­ consciousness in a later chapter at some length and hopefully at some depth. 8. Peters, Richard, Hobbes (Baltimore: Peregrin Books, 1967), 116; cf., Martinich, A.  P., Hobbes Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers), 174–175. 9. Wolfe, Thomas, The Hills Beyond (New York: Signet, 1968), 146. Wolfe along with Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad are the three great master novelists of loneliness. 10. Mijuskovic, Ben, “Loneliness: An Interdisciplinary Approach,” Psychiatry: A Journal for Interpersonal Processes, 40:2 (1977); reprinted in The Anatomy of Loneliness, edited by Joseph Hartog, Ralph Audi, and Yehudi Cohen (New York: International Universities Press, 1980); and followed by Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 1979; 3rd edition 2012). 11. Mijuskovic Ben, “The Simplicity Argument versus a Materialist Theory of Mind,” Philosophy Today, 20:4 (1976); and Contingent Immaterialism: Meaning, Freedom, Time, and Mind (Amsterdam: Gruner, 1984), passim. 12. Mijuskovic, Ben, Chapter 7, “Some Reflections on Philosophical Counseling and Psychotherapy,” in Essays on Philosophical Counseling, edited by Ran Lahav and Maria da Venza Tillmanns (Latham, MD: University Press of America, 1995); Chapter 4, “Theories of Consciousness,

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Therapy, and Loneliness,” in Philosophy, Counseling, and Psychotherapy, edited by Elliot Cohen and Samuel Zinaich (New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013); and “Further Reflections on Philosophical Counseling,” Zeitschrift fuer Philosophische Praxis, 2:1 (1996). There was a past time many years ago when the vogue was to offer mental health “therapy” by offering open philosophical discussions, both to individuals and groups. I am sorry the movement seems to have failed. But the fact is that many crises are cognitively grounded, and the issues are philosophical, literary, and humanistic. For example, consider Augustine’s Confessions, his spiritual anxiety is addressed philosophically not psychologically; he is fully conscious of all the relevant opposing issues. The battle between freedom and necessity and good and evil is not a psychological issue or dilemma. Humans survived and flourished without psychological interventions for 2000 years. In any case, fortunately, I learned a great deal through my twin vocations.

CHAPTER 3

Can Senseless Matter Alone Think?

Hume in both A Treatise of Human Nature and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding argues “we must separate the question concerning the substance of the mind from that considering the cause of its thought; and that confining our selves to the latter question we may certainly conclude that matter may be, and actually is, the cause of thought and perception.” Hume’s perceptions are impressions and ideas, but he is not a dualist in the Cartesian sense because he denies that the self is a substance rather claiming that the “self is merely a bundle of loose and fleeting successive impressions following each other with inconceivable rapidity.” But when he invokes a temporal succession, he has lost the argument because there must be a self to unite the perceptions to each other. The critical issue in this chapter concerns the metaphysical origin of human consciousness: is it material, ideal, or both? Precisely because it is a meta-question, it cannot be solved empirically because science itself assumes, without epistemic justification, that sensory experience is the sole criterion of truth. Look and touch: there is nothing else! But I believe we can prevail by agreeing with Hume, himself an empiricist, as he develops his own arguments against materialism, and even strict empiricism, as a “science” producing an abundance of conflicting possibilities and probabilities and even epistemic “chances.” Any [material] thing may produce any thing. Creation, annihilation, motion, reason, volition, all these may arise from one another, or from any other object we can imagine. Nor will this appear strange, if we compare two principles explain’d above, that the constant conjunction of objects determines their causation, and that properly speaking, no objects are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_3

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contrary to each other, but existence and non-existence. Where objects are not contrary, nothing hinders them from having their constant conjunctions, on which the notion of cause and effect totally depends.1 Further: [T]o consider the matter a priori, any thing may produce any thing, and that we shall never discover a reason why any object may or may not be the cause of any other, however great, or however little resemblance may be betwixt them. (Hume, Treatise, 247)

And: [W]e must separate the question concerning the substance of the mind from that concerning the cause of its thought; and that confining our self to the latter question, we find by the comparing of their ideas, that thought and motion are different from each other, and by experience, that they are constantly united; which being all the circumstances, that enter into the idea of cause and effect, when apply’d to the operations of matter, we may certainly conclude that, motion may be, and actually is, the cause of [immaterial, unextended] thought and perception. (Hume, Treatise, 248)

Hume’s reasoning in these disclosures is influenced by both Malebranche’s theistic and dualistic principles that it is God who is the direct, miraculous, and “occasional cause” of the actual—and not merely apparent—interaction between human bodies and the individual mind. But Hume simply replaces Malebranche’s “solution” to the mind-body dichotomy by replacing God with Nature.2 Historically speaking, generally in Western philosophy, material nature is conceived both as extended and inert, inactive by the idealists, dualists, and rationalists and Hume agrees. Hume’s argument is further amplified in the Enquiries, in which he argues that regarding “matters of fact”: The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if so conformable to reality. That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation, that it will arise…All reasonings concerning ­matters of fact seem to be founded on the relation of Cause and Effect. By means of which alone we can go beyond the evidence of our memories and senses…I shall venture to affirm as a general proposition, which admits of no

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exception, that the knowledge of this relation, is not in any instance attained by reasoning a priori; but arises entirely from experience [and the associative powers the imagination], when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other (italics mine).3

But to “go beyond the evidence of our memories and senses” is a mediate relation, an inference. Both Hume’s impressions and his less vivid ideas are immediate. Nevertheless, he endows the imagination with a “reasoning” activity. The suffusing force is the imagination, which produces the principle of the “association of ideas” and then proceeds to construct and to patch together our experiences of the external world, as well as the “sentiments,” the “feeling states” of our “self.” Hume’s point is that we cannot predict the spontaneities of nature versus their necessity. Hume is a determinist, a “necessitarian.” “T’is their constant union of [bodies] alone, with which we are acquainted; and ‘tis from the constant union their necessity arises” (Treatise, 400). And no more can we pretend to rationally understand the partnership and the alliance between matter and mind or predict causal sequences by reason alone. It follows that we can confidently declare, as a contingent and conditional metaphysical principle, that there are both phenomenal and mental appearances of physical objects, as well as singular human consciousnesses. And he concludes with his qualified dualistic principle. This maxim is that an object [as a mental perception] may exist, and yet be nowhere: and I assert, that this is not only possible, but that the greatest part of beings [i.e., human consciousnesses consisting of impressions and ideas] do and must exist after this manner. An object may be said to be no where, when its parts are not so situated with respect to each other, as to form any [physically extended material and Epicurean] figure or quantity; nor the whole with any respect to other bodies so to answer to our notions of contiguity or distance. Now this is evidently the case with our [mental] perceptions and [the appearance of material] objects except those of [visual] sight and [tactile] feeling. A moral reflection cannot be plac’d on the right or the left hand of a passion, nor can a smell or sound be either of a circular or square figure. These [mental] objects and perceptions so far from requiring any particular place, are absolutely incompatible with it, and even the imagination cannot ascribe it to them (Hume, Treatise, 235–236).

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However, Hume is not a metaphysical dualist in the traditional Cartesian fashion because he denies the reality of a continuous and identical self in his discussion Of personal identity in the Treatise.4 Correspondingly, citing my Achilles of Rationalist Arguments, Noam Chomsky endorses a similar interpretation of a twofold dualistic and bifurcated reality. In Hume’s judgment, Newton’s greatest achievement was that while he “seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of the universe, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical [i.e., materialist] philosophy, and thereby restored nature’s ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.” On different grounds, others reached similar conclusions. Locke, for example, had observed, that motion had effects “which we can in no way conceive motion to be able to produce”—as Newton had in fact demonstrated shortly before. Since we remain in “incurable ignorance of what we desire to know” about matter and its effects, Locke concluded, no “science of bodies is within our reach” and we can only appeal to “the arbitrary determination of that All-wise Agent who has made them to be, and to operate as they do, in a way wholly above our weak understanding to conceive.”…[Further] Descartes claimed to have explained the phenomena of the material world in mechanistic terms, while demonstrating that mechanical philosophy is not all-encompassing, not reaching to the domain of mind—again pretty much in accordance with the common-­ sense dualistic interpretation of oneself and the world around us.5 Accordingly, Hume simply replaces God with the uncertainties of Nature, as well as with the arbitrary, contingent, and inexplicable alliance between matter and perception, as coupled with the doctrine of Epicurean “chance” (Treatise, page 125–126). Just so, historically, The Epicureans accordingly modified the [atomic] theory by claiming the atoms to have the power of occasional spontaneous motion, which they referred to as the capacity to swerve. Ordinarily, an atom would change its direction only by being driven from its path by impact with another atom, but occasionally, they maintained, an atom alters its path spontaneously without any cause for this change at all. This enabled the Epicureans to maintain that there is an element of contingency and uncertainty in nature and that not everything is determined by physical laws and that men can

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therefore be intelligibly thought of as free to some extent or, in modern terms, as having free will.6

In a later chapter, we shall see that the physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, appeals to the same argument. But basically, Hume was impressed by the Epicurean philosophy, metaphysically, irreligiously, as well as ethically as discussed in the Enquiries. For the Epicureans, the highest ethical value was friendship to which value Hume concurred. Thus, as far as Hume is concerned, human consciousness can also be expressed in ethical contexts as well, in feelings of sympathy in relation to others. Indeed, as we shall later learn, Hume is a “moral sense” theorist, as he contends that “every human creature resembles ourselves,” and accordingly sympathy is the shared “source of pity.” Thus, Hume grounds his ethical principle through our empirical impressions of a felt sympathy with others of our kind; it is what “produces our sentiments of morals” (Treatise, Index, 703–706). Generally, Hume is categorized as a “soft determinist” or a “compatibilist.” A human action is determined if the cause is external to the person. By contrast, it is “free” if the motivation is internal, based on our feeling, on our sentiment; it is ethically affective because its origin lies within each person’s consciousness. Accordingly, Hume’s ethical principle and his criterion can be classified under category 5 in the following chart, as Hume grounds his ethical principle and his criterion in empiricism, in a personal sentiment, in an empirical “feeling general to all mankind.” The following chart offers an exhaustive and comprehensive matrix of ethical principles and criteria in Western philosophy by distinguishing and defining Relativism, Subjectivism, and Skepticism (the Is) as well as Absolutism, Objectivism, and Certainty (the Ought), whereas Skepticism subsumes three opposing forms: Scientific-Descriptive, Normative Ethical, and Metaethical (linguistic) relativisms. By distinction, Absolutism subsumes Rationalism, both Intuitive and Demonstrative; Empiricism subsumes both the immediately sensory and the mediacies of utilitarian consequences; Fideism (faith); and, finally, Existentialism follow suit. I mention these distinctions and options because ethical spontaneity existentially offers a plethora of principles to Western thought while spanning a very wide range of possibilities for selecting a favorite ethical criterion as applicable to one’s own self. Which is to say nothing about the expansive possibilities of choices available within the ethical universes of African and Asian cultures. In what follows, I shall argue that each of these ethical

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principles and criteria are in the last analysis dependent on our own singularly personal acts of existential spontaneity, and therefore, they always remain vulnerable both to constant change and/or reconfirmations.7

Chart of Ethical Principles and Criteria Accordingly, I would contend that the free existential choice of selecting a ruling ethical principle for one’s self is always offered through a plethora of uniquely subjective and personal choices and as such it will always remain as a decision that can be freely confirmed, changed, or altogether denied. By contrast, the overriding single principle of scientific empiricism and determinism, for both the systems promoting the behavioral and the neuropsychological sciences, there is no choice, everything is ruled by necessity and the only “option” is predetermined by external causes, by our familial, environmental, and cultural surroundings. In short, for behavioral psychology, the neurological sciences, and the sociological sciences, so-called ethical values are simply non-operational.

Notes 1. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 173; cf., Ben Mijuskovic, “The Simplicity Argument versus a Materialist Theory of Consciousness,” Philosophy Today, 20:4 (1976), 292–305; and Contingent Immaterialism: Meaning, Freedom, Time, and Mind (Amsterdam: B. R. Gruner Publishing Co. 1984), 97–98. 2. Hume retired and studied for two years at La Fleche in France, where the philosophy of Malebranche was heavily promoted; cf., Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of Its Origins and Its Central Doctrines (London: Macmillan & Co. 1964), 89 and note; cf., Charles Hendel, Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume (New York: Bobbs-­ Merrill, 1963), 173–174; Hendel was a student of Kemp Smith; cf., John Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Nature (Archon Books, 1967), 6, 26–28, 32 ff., 45 ff., 93, 100 ff., 137 ff., 158 ff.; and cf., Vario Perrinetti, “Hume at La Fleche: Scepticism and the French Connection,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 56:1 (2018); on Hume’s references to Malebranche see Treatise, 158 note and 249 note. 3. Hume, David, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 25–26; once more it is the imagination and not reason that convinces us of causal interactions and accordingly even the “existence” of the external

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world. On the reference to Malebranche, cf., Treatise, footnotes on pages 158 and 259. 4. Cummins, Phillip, “Hume as a Dualist and Anti-Dualist,” Hume Studies, 21:1 (1995). 5. Chomsky, Noam, “The Mysteries of Nature: How Well Hidden?” The Journal of Philosophy, CVI:4 (2009), 167–168. The author cites my study, The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments, regarding my discussion of Locke’s controversy with Bishop Edward Stillingfleet, “whether God could have created thinking matter” and “whether senseless matter can think” (Locke, Essay, Book IV, Chapter III, 6). Chomsky also cites the Achilles in his New Horizons in the Study of Mind and Language (2000); in the Chomsky Notebooks (2007); and in “What Kind of Animals Are We?” (2013). 6. Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), II, 364. Hume was impressed by Epicureanism and metaphysical materialism, which includes a doctrine of chance and, ethically, which emphasizes human friendship. Cf., Hendel, opus cit., 33 ff., 261, 321, 332; McNabb, D. G. C., David Hume: His Theory of Knowledge and Morality (Hamden, Connecticut, 1966), 157–158. 7. Cf., Mijuskovic, Ben, “Ethical Principles, Criteria, and the Meaning of Life,” Journal of Thought, 40:4 (2005). As Pascal, Fichte, and William James asserted, first principles are matters of the heart and not the head. Cf. Mijuskovic, Ben Lazare, Consciousness and Loneliness: Theoria and Praxis (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2018), 240–241.

CHAPTER 4

Is Perception or Self-Consciousness Primary? To Which First Principle Does Personal Identity Belong?

Using Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, as the standard bearer for the empiricist’s theory of personal identity, in this chapter the author shows that Locke’s conception of reflection is fatally flawed. Reflections are observational, they concentrate on objects that are “other than themselves”; sensations do not “see” themselves; they are both passive and linear and they are immediate, as opposed to relational, that is, mediate. By contrast, from Plato to Augustine through Descartes and Leibniz, reflexions are self-referential, circular, they are active in the respect that the active subject is a priori synthetically related to a conceptual “object” within self-consciousness. Worse yet, “Locke regards the mind as a substance but a substance which is immaterial. He accepts the dualism, ‘the two parts of nature,’ active immaterial substance and passive material substance. At the same time, he is most uneasy in his mind about the conception of substance itself as both material and immaterial. It is a fundamental point with him that the universe cannot be explained in terms of either matter alone or mind alone. Of the two perhaps the mind is more indispensable, for mind is the active, productive principle. Matter produces nothing.” This leaves his empirical conception of “personal identity” completely bankrupt. This chapter addresses the critical issue concerning our judgments regarding both the substantial reality of self-consciousness and the ontological status of the external material world in conceptual distinction from © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_4

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the self. As early as the Greek atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, with their metaphysical materialism and epistemic empiricism, both sought to ground their cognitive data as arising from our sensations, as resulting from the collision of our bodily senses with the mobility of the colliding atoms. Democritus points to motion as a primitive property of the atoms. The motion itself is not caused by an external force, it is an inherent property of the atoms. Like the atoms themselves, their motion is eternal and incorruptible.1 But I am not sure about this. It is not that the atoms have an “inherent property,” it is rather that they have an empty space to move into as they “fall” within the voids of space. Gravitational forces were as yet unknown at the time. But in any case, as the combinations of atoms collide with our five senses, it results in perceptions, in highly variable physical interactions ending in dubitable appearances and even our seemingly legitimate sensory knowledge becomes highly suspect and at best only offers opinions (Epicurus, Fragment 125). Although later atomists attempt to endow the atoms with qualitative features, for example, air, fire, water, and earth, nevertheless the opposing tradition of metaphysical dualism was inclined and indeed determined to “define” the monistic atoms as both (1) “inert” and (2) “qualityless,” and therefore only capable of expressing quantitative features resulting in predictive causal collisions and thus ending in “objective” and presumably “scientific” mathematical measurements. This in turn resulted in the Platonic counter-doctrine of metaphysical dualism, which distinguishes the empirical principle of interpreting sensations as passively “given” to consciousness, and therefore as mere appearances, while the Platonic psyche is endowed with truly “inherent” immaterial activities truly inherent within consciousness. According to the Democritean principle, all that exists, all reality reduces to the movements of material objects passing throughout the interminable voids of space. Time then is conceived, defined as the motion of material objects traveling through space. Matter may seem to express an “inherent property” of motion but for the metaphysical dualists and later subjective idealists, the motion is an accidental, not an essential property, as opposed to an inherent feature, as defined in the above quotation. It is merely a contingent predication made possible by the movement of physical objects. If the universe were completely and materially full, then nothing could move, the possibility of motion itself would be inconceivable. It

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is only on the condition that space is “relatively” empty that it allows for the atoms to move through the unending interspatial voids of space. I emphasize this relation because science not only presupposes that both matter and motion represent ultimate reality, but science also reduces all human perception to appearances, to matter plus motion as well. But the two “realities” are not co-equal. Matter ontologically and conceptually presupposes space; space comes first and extended moving objects intervene next. Thus, going forward on the issue of the relation between appearance and reality we can assert the following principle. The atomistic way of thinking of the cause and ground of the perceived world, it is easiest for us to accept since it fits in well with the early forms of atomism in modern physics. (Dictionary, ibid., 94a; italics mine) In short, the origin of science and its roots begin and continue with the physical motions of atomic particles. Notice also the implication of a universal determinism. As far as contemporary science is concerned nothing has changed since then. But basically, the attribution of assigning human sensory responses to our sensations, as caused by matter in motion, results in distorting our cognitive apprehensions by turning “realties” into the distortions of merely subjective appearances, as opposed to empirical scientific “facts,” thus leading to epistemic skepticism and relativism. Essentially, it ends in reducing both nature and human consciousness to matter plus motion as the only realities whether in its application to the world or in the person. But as far as contemporary science is concerned, nothing has changed since the time of the ancient atomists. By contrast, Plato challenges the reductive principle of matter and motion with an active principle of reflexive self-consciousness in his Theaetetus and Sophist dialogues. In confronting the principle of metaphysical materialism, he offers both a metaphysical and an epistemic dualism. 189E. Socrates: And do you accept my description of the process of thinking? Theaetetus: How do you describe it? Socr: As a [reflexive, i.e., active self-conscious] discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. You must take this explanation…I have a notion that when the mind is thinking it is simply [reflexively] talking to itself, asking questions, and answering them and saying Yes or No. When it reaches

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a decision—which may come slowly or in a sudden flash—when doubt is over and the two voices affirm the same thing, then we call that its ‘judgment.’ So, I should describe thinking as [a temporal] discourse, and judgment as a [concluding] statement pronounced, not aloud to someone else, but silently to one’s self. (Theaetetus, 189E-190) But notice the implication of a temporal process as the mind follows its own train of thought. Again: Stranger:

And next, what of thinking, and judgment, and appearing? Is it now not clear that all these things occur in our minds? Both as false and as true? Theaetetus: How so? Str: You will see more easily if you begin by letting me give you an account of their nature and how each differs from the other. Theaet: Let me have it. Str: Thinking and discourse are the same thing, except what we call thinking is precisely the [temporal] inward dialogue carried on by the mind with its self without spoken sound. Theaet: Certainly. Str: Whereas the stream [of temporal thought] which flows from the mind through the lips is called discourse (italics mine). Theaet: True. Str: And further there is a thing which we know occurs in discourse. Theaet: Namely? Str: Assertion and denial. Theaet: Yes. Str: Then when this occurs in the mind in the course of silent thinking, can you call it anything but judgment? Theaet: No. Str: And suppose judgment [dualistically] occurs, not independently, but by means of perception [between the

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self and its object], the only right name for such a state of mind is [subjective] ‘appearing.’ Theaet: Yes. Str: Well then, since we have seen that there is true and false statement, and of these mental processes we have found thinking to be a [reflexive] dialogue of the mind with its self, and judgment to be the conclusion of thinking, and what we mean by it ‘appears’ to be a blend of [subjective] perception and judgement, it follows that these also, being of the same [immaterial] nature as statement, must be, and on some occasions, false. Theaet: Of course. Str: You see, then, that we have discovered the nature of false judgement and false statement sooner than we expected just now when we feared there would be no end to the task we were setting ourselves in the search for them. (Sophist, 263D-264B; italics mine)2 But significantly, we notice the strong allusions to the Platonic temporal “stream” and “flow” of thought. This important thematic principle we will continue to pursue throughout the text. From the very beginning temporal consciousness assumes a guiding first principle. In another passage Plato offers the metaphor of the soul’s memory as a piece of wax upon which experience writes (Tht., 194B). When the wax is smooth and clear, the imprints are strong. But when it is muddy and impure, the imprints are indistinct. In this latter case, “the soul cannot actively assign things to their several imprints” (195A.). This means that for Plato, unlike Democritus, there is an active judgmental choice, an involved selection, an assertion, in a judgment on truth. It follows that the search for truth is not merely “given” as a sensation as in empiricism, rather it must be earned. 197D. Socr:

Theaet:

Just a while ago, we imagined a sort of waxen block in our minds, so now let us suppose that every mind contains an aviary stocked with birds of every sort, some in flocks apart from the rest, some in small groups, and some solitary, flying in every direction among them all. Be it so. What follows?

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Socr:

Theaet:

When we are babies we must suppose this reception empty, and take these birds as pieces of knowledge. Whenever a person acquires any piece of knowledge and shuts it up in his enclosure, we must say he has learnt or discovered the thing of which this is the knowledge, and that is what knowing means. Be it so.

It follows that for Democritus there is only one reality, a collection of material objects spatially situated in a homogeneous, quantitative world, a world in which sentient human bodies move about. By contrast for Plato, there is a dualistic distinction between an active psyche, a self that employs spontaneous powers to affirm or deny what is true or false, a psyche that exhibits a rational, inferential capacity for making judgments. In sum, both Democritus and Plato exhibit the opposing and alternating principles between the Gods and the Giants, between the Idealists and the Materialists. Second, the substitution of the Stranger for Socrates indicates that the Sophist is a later dialogue and considerably older than the Theaetetus but clearly it represents the same constant refrain and epistemic theme, the distinction between passive and active minds. Plato’s psyche is both immaterial, that is, simple, unextended but active while the material atoms of Democritus are inanimate, non-conscious, and by definition inert material substances. They “fall” and move unaided through no internal agency of their own, as Galileo later proved in his experiment at the Tower of Pisa. Third, in materialism, the reductive “relation” between matter, causality, and sensations further dictates that all secondary, subjective, and sentient “realities” are causally determined. It follows that there is no human freedom or spontaneity; everything is determined. Fourth, physical time as quantitatively grounded in external changing events is radically different from human time, which is qualitatively internal, self-­ conscious time. For Plato, the immaterial psyche is active; the mind-self “dialogues” within its self; it is reflexively self-conscious. As Plato describes the activity of the soul, our thoughts temporally “stream” and “flow.” The experience of internal time-consciousness originates and arises from within the soul rather than from external material motions. As Plato describes the activity of the soul, our thoughts temporally “stream” and “flow” forth. This is an essential feature of our again inherent actively synthesizing temporal “nature” through which our reflexive essence of human self-­ consciousness expresses its self, along with its intrinsic unity. Fifth,

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sensations are momentary, disunified, fleeting, and discontinuous presences, but thought is continuous and unified. Platonic consciousness unifies both its own sensations and its thoughts. By contrast, empirical sensations are defined as “simple,” they remain distinct entities, that is, intrinsically disunified impressions. The psyche manifests a principle of spontaneous cognition as well as an intentional purposiveness, or as Plato declares, the psyche desires to judge, it struggles to decide, to conclude between truth and falsity, and to rest ultimately in an achieved “final cause,” in a determination of truth. It teleologically seeks knowledge. Tucked into the intrinsic conceptualization of the faculty of reason, there dwells a purposive intent, a transcending “intentionality.” That is why the ancient Greeks defined man as the rational animal. Higher order animals do not aspire for knowledge “for its own sake” or in reaching for a “final cause” beyond which it is futile to strive. For Plato, rational thinking searches for the self-sufficient “final” Good, while for Aristotle, rational thinking and judging are exemplified in the 264 forms of syllogistic thinking, as active inferential thoughts seek to reach their final contemplative truth (Metaphysics, 1075a). Similarly, Brentano’s conception of the phenomenological intentionality of human consciousness has more than a seed of Aristotelian commitment within it, as it also strives toward the attainment of a contemplative final rest.3 Having established the methodological grounding for our History of Ideas perspective, it now prompt us to move forward from the fifth-­ century BC, from the metaphysical materialism and the epistemic determinism of Leucippus and Democritus, toward their historically anticipated path forward and thus to our presumably “modern,” Galilean distinction between primary objective judgments of quantitative factors and the secondary subjective judgments of quality; we have reached a dualistic form of epistemic judgment, as either grounded in external facts, basically in the features material objects in motion and their physical measurements, or in secondary subjective judgments grounded in continuously varying sensations. The first set of judgments are based on the presumptions of physical “science,” in our commonly shared statements with others of our kind while providing us with determinable “factual,” “objective,” “primary” judgments based on quantitative measurements resulting in causal predictions regarding the material interactions between objects moving in space, while by contrast the second set of judgments pertain to the motions impinging on our sensory organs thus causing the perceptual aberrations, the semblances of “subjective,” “secondary” perceptual human

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experiences but only in so far as they are perceived, as observed, as appearances in human consciousness. Empirical science is reduced to a single reality, to a uniform principle of causal sequences. The resulting atomistic collisions of minute particles, as they strike and impinge on our five senses, thus physically cause judgments of “subjective” and “secondary” appearances, as relating to our varying sensations, thus pre-empting by 2000 years Galileo’s founding of modern science. Accordingly, ever since Leucippus and Democritus, the Greek atomists essentially distinguished “objective,” factual judgments from “subjective” perceptual ones. Nothing has changed since then for the empirical sciences. We distinguish between relative and absolute qualities, between subjective and absolute truth. Our analysis has struck deeper roots. It has discovered at least a subjective element in the so called objective or primary qualities [actually mathematically measurable quantities] of things, and, on the other hand, it has left us no shadow of a doubt that the infinite production of the infinite varieties of subjective impressions [actually mental qualities] is not an anarchical process but is indissolubly bound by strict [deterministic] laws of causation. The discovery that the subjective element in the objective qualities [i.e., the material quantities] of things will later occupy us at a later period, when we reach the Cyrenaic philosophers [of Aristippus], of whom Berkeley and Hume were the intellectual heirs, and we shall see that Democritus, no less than his modern successors, Thomas Hobbes [with his phantasms] or John Locke [with his sensations], was familiar with the second of these discoveries. Nay, even the indefeasible validity of the law of causation as taught by Leucippus admitted no exception whatsoever (italics mine).4 Conclusion: Both the motions of external objects in space and the motions of our sensation in our brains are ruled by the laws of causality and determinism. According to science, there is no freedom or choice in human endeavors. All science is deterministic, the causal principle applies not only to objects in space but also to our “mental” sensations as well. What this means is that both objective and subjective judgments are controlled by the supervening law of causality from which it follows that there is neither chance in nature nor freedom in our thoughts nor thus in human affairs. What Professor Gomperz is indicating is that not only are material collisions of objects causally determinable and predictable but also our human sensations, feelings, and “thoughts”. But the problem in the quotation is Professor Gomperz’s ambiguous use of the terms “quantity” and “quality.” Quantities are physically measurable, qualities are not. Locke’s

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sensations and Hume’s impressions and ideas are qualitative, they are mental, not quantitative, they are not measurable, not quantifiable, not extended. But as we shall discover, there are actually three possible human realities and a corresponding set of matching judgments: (1) primary objectively quantifiable judgments and therefore factual, scientific judgments regarding causal interactions; (b) secondary, subjective judgments concerning highly variable judgments of sensations and feelings, which are predictable as well (Gomperz); and (c) tertiary qualitative judgments of value, which are spontaneously created. This third aspect of consciousness is precisely what is denied in the quotation above, but as we will show there is strong evidence for an additional creative sphere of “tertiary realities” and accordingly for a spectrum of human values ranging widely and expansively from unlimited spans of ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic judgments of value. Now as we philosophically move on from the metaphysical age to the epistemological period initiated by Descartes and project our technical terms forward, the pivotal question becomes whether Hobbes, Locke, and Hume’s a posteriori empirical, phenomenal, observational, and perceptual judgments (above) or Kant’s transcendental categories of a priori synthetic reflexive judgments will prevail? And, if the latter, can we conclude there is a substantial self? Obviously, if there is no real self, then both human loneliness and intimacy are meaningless and so are the ethical values of good and evil. Only if the psyche, soul, cogito, Monad, or the unity of apperception are reflexively self-conscious can loneliness and intimacy exist and persist and can we judge between good and evil. But our current issue is complicated because epistemically there are several possible forms of judgments in Western thought capable in distinguishing the relational possibilities holding between human consciousness and the external world, as they include a variety of cognitive judgmental possibilities: (1) Platonic dualistic judgments separating soul and body, which hold a persuasive sway throughout Christianity and on until Descartes, when the theory stumbles both metaphysically and epistemically because the mind and its opposing material objects share no predicate, attribute, or accident in common; (2) a posteriori empirical judgments participating in a shared realm based on factual contingencies holding between a perceiving subject and a realm of physical objects (Democritus to Locke and following into science); (3) idealist non-empirical a priori rational judgments, holding both between the thinking subject and its conceptual “object” as immersed and confined within a self-conscious

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monadic soul (Leibniz); (4) circular, constitutive a priori synthetic reflexive judgments, in which transcendent noumenal entities, of things-in-­ themselves, are forced to conform to the transcendental innate causally structured categories of the mind, that is, “I am self-aware that I am conceiving a conceptual “object” distinct from my self but within my self” (Kant); (5) a metaphysical irrational Will, which deceives the self into believing that the world is causally ordered as it stands apart from the subject (Schopenhauer); and (6) a phenomenological transcendent consciousness that actively, intentionally projects eidetic meanings beyond its sphere of consciousness (Brentano, Husserl). Again, by contrast, metaphysical materialism grounds, epistemically posits first space, then matter, and then motion. Theoretically for science there are no qualitative distinctions, only material homogeneous quantitative substances along with their compatible homogeneously sentient brains composed of cellular neurons activated by electrical synapses. Human brains share in the same quantitative external material environment, both are homogeneously the same. For science, there is only one reality consisting of substantive quantities: matter. Material substances, by definition, can only exhibit quantitative measurements. Our animated brains are merely part and parcel to the environment. The molecular composition of the brain and a stone may be quantitatively tighter, heavier, more compact, and chemically different, but not qualitatively. Both remain reducible to a homogeneous atomic composition, as argued by Henri Bergson in Time and Free Will.5 Whereas by contrast, active self-conscious reflexions require either (a) a metaphysical distinction between a thinking subject and an assumed independent external physical object/world (metaphysical dualism) or (b) a distinction between a thinking subject and its conceptual “object” within its self, as relationally, mutually interdependent on each other (subjective idealism), as, for example, in Leibniz’s Monadology and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at A 107–110. Additionally, the ensuing difference between a sensation and a thought constitutes a qualitative difference; they mean different things just as the relation between a cause and its effect are intrinsically related, inseparable but conceptually mean different acts and/or entities. Matter and motion alone cannot create meanings, relations, judgments, nor values. The problem with materialism, however, is that the neurological brain and the external world both consist of and present with the same quantitatively neutral atomicity, the same identical extended material

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composition; the “two” elements, world and brain, are merely different quantitative amalgamations and configurations but not different qualitative entities. Brain and environment both exist as the same “sort” of entity. Consequently, all efforts in assigning different functions to our cerebral components, both (1) a sensing and a perceiving, and (2) a self-conscious thinking role will fail. For science, both are reducible to quantitative material atomistic and biological components. The result follows that the empiricism of Locke and the phenomenalism of Hume will display an insurmountable philosophical problem in its confrontation with the immaterial activity of the self-conscious, reflexive, and intentional self. The philosophical distinction between Quality and Quantity is a distinction first anticipated by Leibniz in the Monadology and then highlighted in Kant’s first Critique distinction between the Axioms of Intuition and the Anticipations of Perception (A 161=B 201-A 176=B 218) and as it is subsequently followed by Hegel’s categories distinguishing the Determinateness of Quality from the Magnitude of Quantity in his Science of Logic (1812–1816, 1831). As we theoretically proceed, it will be with a strengthening interest in the Platonic and the converging Neoplatonic paradigm of self-­ consciousness, as we follow along by treading the same metaphysically dualist and subjective idealist paths of Plotinus, Augustine, Ficino, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Husserl, while we challenge Professor Gomperz’s reductive gateways of materialism and empiricism and his accompanying assertion that the causal results of minute atomic particles moving in space and colliding with our bodies, and our sensory organs, and our brains are alone sufficient to evoke passive sensations and feelings. The false claim of materialism is that our sensory perceptions are alone adequate and capable of producing both our primary and objective quantitative judgments concerning matter and motion, as well as our allegedly secondary and subjective “qualitative” appearances. Rather I wish to contend that the crudely reductive tenets of both behavioral psychology and our currently dominant neurosciences are woefully inadequate in accounting for our subjective reflexive self-­ consciousnesses (Kant), our transcendent intentionalities (Husserl), as well as for our creation of judgments of human values. Instead, it is far more philosophically persuasive to liberate the internal acts of the mind from our bodily motions and point them toward the province where the metaphysical structures of dualism, subjective idealism, and existential choices prevail.

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At this theoretical junction, we can surmise that the Battle between Materialism and Idealism, the latter which pits the reflexivity of self-consciousness against our contemporary behavioral champions with their impersonal bodily parts, their passive perceptions, and along with our neuroscientific adherents with their neuronal brains both fail to do justice to our identities as unique human beings. Their appeals to our empirical perceptions and more technically to our observational reflections—but not to our self-conscious reflexions—both fail. But let us first go back to the modern “scientific” beginning by drawing on Locke’s model of “insensible minute particles” bombarding our five senses and transmitted to our brains from without thus resulting in producing our sensations. Think of it this way, a passive reflection is like looking into a pool of water and observing “your” face, but the face observed does not actively reflexively “view” you, or “perceive” you back, or “respond,” while again by contrast reflexion is both circularly and temporally constituted from within the soul (subjective idealism). You circularly, reflexively think of your face, know your face, and judge it to be your face. You are not only aware but you are self-aware of yourself, and most importantly who you are, you are both reflexively and intentionally aware of your unique identity. Reflection is passively observational, while reflexion is actively circular, temporal, and unified. So now we are prepared to address the epistemic age, the post-­Cartesian “modern period,” as indicated by Professor Gomperz’s historical references regarding Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. But first, we need to consider how these two opposing principles and paradigms of self-consciousness versus perception are cognitively related or connected to an assumed “external” reality. This is the issue of Pyrrhonian skepticism; the possibility, or the impossibility, of establishing a relational connection between an independently appearing existing external world, as distinguished from our subjective spheres of self-consciousness and intentionality. Precisely, what is the relation between subjective sensory appearances and external reality? What now ensues are Montaigne’s dual challenges to the inherent limitations of our empirical perceptions. The first consideration that I offer on the subject of the senses is that I have my doubts whether man is provided with all the senses of nature. I see many animals that live a complete and perfect life, some without sight, others without hearing, who knows whether we too do not still lack one, two, three, or many other senses? For if any one is lacking, our reason cannot discover its absence…We have formed truth by the consultation and

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concurrence of our five senses; but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or ten senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence.6 The further related difficulty also follows. Our conception is not itself applied to foreign objects but is conceived through the [secondary] mediation of the senses, and our senses do not comprehend [i.e., to comprehend is a mediate/relational act while to apprehend is a passive/immediate sensory contact with] the foreign object but only their own impressions. And thus the conception and the semblance we form is not of the object, but only of the impression and effect made on the senses, which impression and the object are different things. Wherefore whoever judges by appearances judges by something other than the object. And as for saying that the impressions of the senses covey to the soul the quality of the foreign objects by resemblance, how can the soul and understanding make sure of this resemblance, having of itself no [direct] communication with foreign objects. Just as a man who does not know Socrates, seeing his portrait cannot say that it resembles him. (page 454; italics mine) And armed with these cautions, we shall now turn to examining Locke’s empirical theory, the doctrine that all our knowledge is dependent on sense experience, as he ushers in his epistemic discussion by first defining his conception of an idea. Throughout our following discussion, keep in mind that Locke is the premier spokesman for our empirical sciences. Both perception and empiricism stand or fall together with Locke. Whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought or understanding, that I call idea; and the power to produce [i.e., physically cause] any idea in our mind [qua physical or mental?] I call quality [physical or mental?] of the subject [i.e., the physical object] wherein that power is. Thus a snowball having the [causal] power to produce in us the ideas of white, cold, and round, the [causal] power to produce those ideas in us as they [really?] are in the snowball [?] I call qualities; and as they are [mental] sensations or perceptions in our understandings, I call them ideas, which ideas, which I speak of sometimes as in the things themselves (?), I would be understood to mean those qualities [i.e., as physical forces] in the objects which produce [i.e., cause] them in us.7 In effect, the sensations are appearing as extended[?] “patches” of mental colors and sounds, but what is it that unifies them for me, for the subject? Sensations are passive; relations are active. They spontaneously spring

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from me—not the environment. The passive empirical principle of “the association of ideas” alone is unable to meaningfully account for cognitive relations. Sensations and relations are entirely different epistemic mental realities, the first is passive, immediate, and direct, while the second is active, mediate, and indirect. Think of it this way. When you see a blue color, it is a sensation. But when you mean a blue color, it is a relation among other shades of blue as well as an accompanying spectrum of other colors, red, yellow, and so on. No color can cognitively, meaningfully exist absolutely alone. A blue consciousness alone is an epistemic inconceivability. When experiments in non-sensory deprivation are administered, the mind ceases to think distinctly and coherently.8 It becomes a meaningless “mind.” When the mind actively thinks—but not passively perceives images— about its own self, it is a subjective, reflexive act; it actively involves the mind to turn circularly on its self, within its self. But when it perceives an “immediate object,” an image, a sensation, which is not its self, it is observationally and passively “reflective.” Perception is observational, it observes an entity other than itself. But reflexion is self-“observational.” Theoretically, presumably a neuroscientist should be able to use an electroencephalograph and then both photograph the movement of a cluster of brain cells and identify and distinguish the particular sensory image(s) observed, entertained by the subject while also distinguishing a sensation from a relational thought. But could s/he? The images projected by an encephalograph are not thoughts. Can an encephalograph differentiate a cluster of neurons as being “red” from being “blue” or a cluster of neurons causing a “sensation” instead of a “relation”? What and how does the meaning of “freedom” in cellular and neuronal terms look like; how does it neuronally look as different, as distinguishable from an uncaused sensory image? Could two neuroscientific researchers communicate with each other with only using their encephalographs? But let us now turn to Locke’s empiricism. Consciousness is the perception of what [observationally] passes in a man’s own mind. Can another man perceive that I am conscious of anything when I perceive it not myself? No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience. (Essay, II, I, 19) Here Locke seems to be testing his foot in a subjectively solipsistic pool of water. But we recall that Plato’s paradigm of the thinking soul is reflexively self-conscious; it recognizes that its thoughts and judgments circularly

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revolve within its self, as it ponders what may be true or false. By contrast, Locke’s principle is linear; self>>>object; it is observational; it is concentrating “outwardly” on something essentially different, some perceived object, on some perception other-than the mind itself, presumably external to the mind and composed of insensible atomic particles striking and stimulating the senses and causing physical sensory responses, for example, sensations of sight and touch. For Locke, there is no conceivable possibility for an act of “reflexive perception” to occur. Perceptions do not reflexively “see” themselves; they perceive other-than-themselves, for example, the snowball but not the mind itself reflexively seeing/thinking/conceiving of the snowball, as it reciprocally, circularly sees/thinks its own self as seeing the snowball. The term reflexive/perception is self-contradictory. Only human consciousness and other higher order animals have the power of double-vision. Animals can self-consciously both feel and mean the reality of loneliness. But in sum, there is no conceivable, no available method in empiricism of distinguishing the reflexive self from its perception. In empiricism, there are only perceptions and no self. Thus, following Locke we begin with his paradigm of the mind as a passive receptor, but certainly not an active one; it is a blank writing tablet; the brain as a metaphor is a tabula rasa upon which external material objects metaphorically “write,” “impress,” and “cause” their motions to appear and their sensations to be recorded, as the brain impersonally “composes” its variable shifting appearances, its “associations of ideas.” But ‘I’ have no way of knowing that they are my experiences. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, devoid of all characters, without any idea: How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials [i.e., images] of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from experience. (Essay, II, I, 2; cf., Aristotle, De Anima, 430a for an interesting comparison with Locke’s tabula rasa.) The critical problem with empiricism is that frequently there is a deceptively facile shifting transition from physical sensations to mental ideas. However, first we must ascertain whether the “mind” is mental or physical or both, and second whether it is reducible or identical to the brain? For example, in his discussion in Chapter IX, Of Perception, Locke states: “3. Fire may burn our bodies with no other effect than it does a billet, unless the motion be continued to the brain and there is the sense of heat, or idea of pain, be produced in the mind: wherein consists actual perception.” This

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careless admixture of taxonomy—physical fire, sensory pain, idea, perception, mind, brain—all confusingly lead the reader into wondering what is the real or assumed underlying relation between the mind and the brain? In Locke, “experience” is a slippery term dramatically highlighted when quite unexpectedly Locke declares during his controversy with Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, that God could have created “thinking matter” (Essay, IV, III, 6).9 And we notice other passages in which Locke is quite loose with his conception of ideas and how indefinite and variable the shifting term becomes, as he confesses. I must here in the entrance [to my book] beg pardon of my reader for the frequent use of the word idea, which he will find in the following treatise. It being the term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the [immediate] object [!] of the understanding when a man thinks. I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm [Hobbes?], notion, species [universal essence, Cambridge Platonists?] or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking [i.e., perceiving?] and I could not avoid frequently using it. (Locke, Essay, I, I, 6; italics mine) Quite clearly, however, the word active “thinking” should be substituted by the perceptual term observing. But a concrete example is not an abstract definition, a particular image is not a universal essence, that is, it is simply a flat, uni-directional reflection. This apologetic admission demonstrates the loose casualness permeating Locke’s entire cognitive arsenal and therefore his unstable empiricism in general. But to continue. First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible [material] objects, do convey [i.e., cause] into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect [i.e., cause] them. And thus we come to those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible [secondary, subjective] qualities; which when I say the senses convey [i.e., cause] into the mind, what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most [but not all?] of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses and derived [i.e., caused, conveyed] by them to the [faculty of the] understanding, I call SENSATION. (I, I, 3, italics his) “This great source of most of the ideas…”? What can be another source of ideas? Reason, faith, mysticism? Notice too that the perceptions are “distinct.” There is no principle to unify them to or with other “distinct” perceptions. There is no attempt to account for the unifying acts of relating the sensations either to each other or to constitutively unifying the sensations in relation to the self. The

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principle of the “association of ideas” is passive, simply given, and non-­ relational. For Locke, everything, all the sensations are simply passively, accidentally given, contingently versus universally and necessarily a priori unified; they are thrown together willy nilly, as they passively congregate before the “mind” and presumably the brain. Empiricism appeals to a physical causal accounting for the contingent “association of ideas principle” by “projecting” it from the external world “into” or “before” the brain, whereas subjective idealism (e.g., Leibniz) recruits an “active, formational, constitutive subjectconceptual-“object” =internal relation” within self-consciousness. In subjective idealism, the critical cognitive acts and structures required to fulfill the conception of a meaning—as opposed to a mere sensation—are fully accomplished within self-consciousness, as we shall see in Leibniz, the antidote to Locke and the anticipation of Kant. But as Locke continues. Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas is the perception of the [active?] operations of our own minds [brains?] within us, as it is employed about our ideas it has got; which operations, when the soul comes to reflect [i.e., perceive] on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from [external] things from without [dualism assumed!]. And such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings [sic] of our own minds; which we being [perceptively?] conscious of [as actings?] and observing [but not reflexively, self-consciously?] in our selves, do from these receive [passively or actively?] into our understanding as distinct [i.e., separate, disconnected] ideas as we do from bodies affecting [i.e., causing] our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself (?); and though it be not sense [?], as having nothing to do with external objects [?], yet it is very like it and might properly enough be called internal [mental?] sense. But as I call the other sensation, so I call this REFLECTION, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by [observationally] reflecting [but not reflexively] on its own operations within itself. (II, I, 4; italics his) But notice how suddenly perceiving, which is intrinsically passive, that is, observational is now equated and lumped in with a number of mediate—but not immediately sensory “activities.” Basically, what Locke provides with one hand, he takes away with the other. The tabula rasa metaphor can only accommodate our passive sensations, our perceptions, while by contrast “the [active] operations of our own minds” are illicitly defined, described as activities. Now suddenly and inexplicably

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perceptions share and are credited with the activities, with the same attributes and powers, as “thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings as of our own minds.” But “thinking, doubting, believing,” and so on, are not sensations nor feelings. If it is solely experience which “furnisheth” the mind (or brain?) with its given contents, from whence its “actings”? In short, Locke is confusing the immediacy of passive sensations with the relational mediacy of our active relational thoughts. But to continue. Next, the thing to be considered is how bodies produce [i.e., cause] ideas in us; and that is manifested by [physical] impulse, the only way in which we can conceive them to operate in. (II, VIII, 11) For Locke, we can thus conclude: From whence I think it is easy to draw this observation: that the ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances [physically, mentally?] of them, and their patterns do really [appear to?] exist in the bodies themselves; but the ideas [causally] produced] in us by these secondary qualities have no resemblance of them at all [? Why not?]. There is nothing like our ideas existing in the bodies themselves. They are, in the bodies we denominate, from them, only a [causal] power to produce those sensations in us; and what is sweet, blue, or warm in idea is but the certain [atomic particles causing the Democritean and Epicurean] quantities of bulk, figure, and motion of the insensible parts in the bodies themselves, which we call so. (II, viii, 15; italics mine)

Again, we need to remember Professor Gomperz’s ambiguous distinction, his division between primary quantities and secondary “qualities,” that is, actually quantities and Montaigne’s admonitions (above). Locke’s muddled descriptions—definitions? principles?—demonstrate how imprecise and different are Locke’s inadequate empirical terms as poised against his cognitive expressions, as well as his imprecise observational reflections as opposed to true reflexions. Ironically, for Locke, who serves as the classical standard bearer of empiricism, as it turns out, he is in truth a metaphysical dualist. Locke regards the mind as a substance which is immaterial. He accepts the usual dualism, the two parts of nature, active immaterial substance and passive material substance…It is a fundamental point with him that the universe cannot be explained in terms of either matter alone or mind

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alone. The one cannot be reduced to the other. Of the two, perhaps, mind is the more indispensable, for mind is the active, productive principle. Matter produces nothing. In particular, to think of it as producing thought, Locke agrees with Cudworth, is to think an absurdity.10 Locke is fervently religious; he is a Christian. God is active, immaterial, and spiritual. Essentially, Locke is pulled into two diverse but drastically opposed directions. Through the influence of Pierre Gassendi, he is impressed by the Greek atomism of Democritus and Epicurus and the paradigm of insensible material particles, that is, atoms striking our sensory organs and continuing on to our brains (Essay, pages 31 and 34), but he still wishes to hang on to the mentalist notion of the immaterial nature of the mind and its ideas. In sum: [Locke] expressly includes within the connotation of the term idea, first phantasms [Hobbes], that is to say, sense-data, memories, and images, secondly, notions, to cover the more abstract concepts; and, lastly, species whether sensible or intelligible…One criticism which has rightly been directed at Locke in this connexion is that he has included far too much within the connotation of this one term. Sense data, images, concepts, abstract ideas differ from each other greatly, and to call them by the same name is to invite confusion. (ibid., pages 99–100)

In fact, Locke was in a self-imposed political exile for 20 years as he continually traveled and tried to work on the Essay. Following Locke, David Hume presents his own mentalist version of empiricism, his “atomistic psychology,” and phenomenalism, namely, the thesis that human consciousness, including the notion of a “personal identity,” is essentially an imaginary construction of mental images, as he promotes the currently reigning thesis that consciousness is reducible to a contingent, haphazard construction of passively “given” sense data, which are in turn undergirded by the “principle of the association of ideas” and the consequent radical reduction of personal identity to a “bundle of [discrete] sense impressions.” In effect, Hume rejects the metaphysical notion of a “self” as an immaterial independent substance, as distinct from his fleeting mental “impressions” and “ideas.” According to Hume, the conception of existence itself signifies nothing beyond a greater or lesser degree of force and vivacity first attaching to his sense impressions and then to his less vivid ideas. Both are merely patched together, compounded

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constructions, and disunified aggregates of contingent associations of simple, that is, unextended mental impressions.11 In Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, in the section titled Of Personal Identity, he interprets the status of the “self” as reducible to a fortuitous group of simple, that is, discrete, immaterial and unextended, non-spatial, simple impressions, reducible to points, to minima visibilia (sensations of sight) and minima tangibilia (tactile sensations of touch) (Laing, 112 ff.). Even space and time are interpreted as phenomenal, mental, and, in a word, ideal entities.12 Interestingly, both Hume and Locke, as empiricists, make it a point of controversy that during sound sleep and “swoons,” the mind ceases to think. Actually, Locke even speculates about a pauper waking up with the identical memory of a prince. Would he then assume the identity of the prince. By contrast, the Cambridge Platonists and Leibniz attribute and predicate both a continuous flow of self-conscious thoughts and unconscious mental activities to the mind, as requirements in preserving the constitutive features and elements needed for both personal identity and the immortality of the soul. I point out this difference because as we proceed the unconscious will become increasingly relevant in our discussions regarding Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, Jung, and especially concerning the existence of evil.13 Now I am not concerned about its use in respect to the immortality of the soul argument, but the consideration that we cease to think when we sleep puts into question the entire psychoanalytic principle of the unconscious. To anticipate, for Freud, the unconscious, and more specifically in terms of leading to his therapeutic “interpretation of dreams” is one of the key portals to our deepest sense of a secretive personal identity. This is a critical difference between the empirical sciences, which collectively reject the activities of the unconscious, and thus the assumptive premise supporting Freud’s entire psychoanalytic theory. Simply stated, the issue is whether there are deeper levels of cognition below our empirical sensory cognitions. But even beyond that, as we shall discover and examine, there will be a much more profound realm of unfathomable depths prevailing in Schopenhauer and Jung’s irretrievable subconscious as opposed to Feud’s retrievable unconscious. But to return to Hume’s Treatise, in the section titled Of Personal Identity, he interprets the reality of the “self” as reducible to simple, that is, immaterial, spatially unextended, and discontinuous impressions.

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There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we [immediately] feel [not think] its existence and its [temporal?] continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. (Treatise, Of personal identity, 251) Hume’s nomenclature in this passage should serve as a reminder that these assertions originally began with the issues we anticipated in The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments, with the alleged simplicity, unity, identity, and ideality of thought and soul, as well as its relation to a Platonic immortality. Some scholars have also more aptly dubbed the Cambridge men as Plotinians, with which characterization I would heartily concur. In any event, Hume’s response follows. But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different [i.e., distinct] perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several [distinct] perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of positions and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.14 Notice that in this passage, the metaphor of a “bundle” denotes a distinctness, a separation of disunified contents, that is, single impressions. There is no mediating, relational unity of self-consciousness. But further, most critically the mind is aware of a temporal succession, a “perpetual flux and movement.” But a temporal succession is only conceivable if an underlying substantial self is present to hold, bind, and unify the distinct impressions reflexively to each other. Next, there is the confusing statement that “the mind is a kind theatre, a stage where several perceptions successively make their appearance.” But the metaphor that the mind is “like” a theater seems perplexing. The mind should represent the audience, and the theater is the perceived, observed stage with its players performing. Consequently, Hume is arguing against himself when he describes the mind as a kind of theater. But the shifting images of the players on the stage represent its empirical and observational view, its perceptual view; but

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again, perceptions are not reflexive, they are reflective, watched, and observed. Thus, the issue remains, who is watching the stage? Hume’s admission of succession neglects to realize that the metaphorical parade of perceptual impressions displays a temporal, a fleeting series of images on a stage which can only occur if there is a spectator, a stable self-reflexive viewer of the changing performances. All change is temporal, successive. Assuming then that in viewing, in perceiving the stage, as it provides for the fleeting images, then the question arises who is the audience? Dualistically, the stage and the performers are one thing and the audience yet quite an other. The latter can only serve as a self who is perceiving, watching the stage. But the locus of the temporal succession can only belong to the audience, not to the stage; in the metaphor, the audience alone is self-conscious of both its self and its perceived object. The audience must serve as the self-reflexive subject viewing the actors’ successive movements, as separate representations from its self. Consequently, Hume’s reference to “successive perceptions” is the critical flaw in his argument, in his denial of a personal identity. It is the audience which is aware of temporal succession. Hume is thus admitting to the mind’s constitutive temporal structure, to the universal necessity of a temporal self-consciousness, and hence to the necessity of a unifying, underlying, substantial self in continuously holding together, in binding, in unifying the instantaneous but successive connections as related to each other. Moreover, we recall Kant’s premise that a priori, universally, and necessarily, a self-conscious subject requires a unified relation to a conceptual object (Critique, A 107–110), which is immanently time-structured within consciousness (A 97–104). But this is Kant’s answer not only to Hume but to all psychological behaviorists, as well as to our current neuroscientists. For example, consider a mollusk and whether there is a functional epistemic, that is, a self-conscious relation between its stimulus and the immediate—but not mediately reflexive—sensory response. In the case of the mollusk, it is a behavioral response but not a reflexive one. In the mollusk, both the stimulus and the response are identical because they are one and the same, they are immediately merely biological and sensorially one; they are not causally related; they are not temporally structured; and therefore, they cannot be cognitively expressed. In the mollusk, there is no mediacy, no temporal relation. To be sure, there is the immediate stimulus/response by the mollusk to the touch, but it is identical, immediate, as opposed to being causal, relational. The mollusk does not reflexively think “Something just happened to me.” But without that relation, there is no

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self? And that is because the immediate stimulus/response alone cannot constitute a reflexive self? When we consider the mollusk, it immediately, directly, instinctively “senses,” that is, it “responds,” but not acts, to a sensory stimulation, but it is not reflexively self-conscious. “It” does not think and realize that there is an independent object threateningly “existing” separately in relation to “its” fully enclosed sentience. By the same token, a newborn infant can react immediately to a pain, but “it” cannot “know” that it is “her,” “his,” or even “its” pain? Our experience of seeing the infant’s reaction is our reflexive act, but not the child’s. Nevertheless, Hume’s principle and paradigm for the evasive “self,” his “atomistic psychology” and denial of personal identity is uncritically followed by both British and American analytic and linguistic thinkers. For we have solved Hume’s problem by defining personal identify in terms of bodily identity, and bodily identity is to be defined in terms of resemblance and continuity of sense-contents. And this procedure is justified by the fact that it is permissible, in our language, to speak of a man as surviving a complete loss of memory, or a complete change of character, but it is self-contradictory to speak of a man as surviving the annihilation of his body. For that which is supposed to survive by those who look forward to a “life after death” is not the empirical self, but a metaphysical entity—the soul. And this metaphysical entity, concerning which no genuine hypothesis can be formulated, has no logical connection whatsoever with the self. It must, however, be remarked, that, although we have vindicated Hume’s contention that it is necessary to give a phenomenalist account of the nature of the self, our actual definition of the self is not a mere restatement of his. For we do not hold, as he apparently did, that the self is a [disunified] aggregate of sense-experiences, which we make about material things are nonsensical, but that Locke’s analysis of the concept of a material thing is false. And just as I must define material things and my own self in terms of their empirical manifestations, so I must define other people in terms of their empirical manifestations—that is in terms of the behaviour of their bodies, and ultimately in terms of sense-contents.15 But contra Ayer, resemblance means a comparison between two entities and so the problem is that resemblance is an intrinsic relation, it exhibits either a reciprocity between two comparable “sense contents” (above) or an active subject coupled with a conceptual object (Kant). However, a sensory image alone, a single impression (Hume) or Ayer’s single “sense contents” alone cannot perform such an epistemic relation. A Humean

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single sensation, an impression is immediate; but the relation of an epistemic resemblance requires two (or more) separate but intrinsically coupled entities; it requires at the minimum of two “things” or entities that temporally last over some expanse of time at least. The difference then between a sensation and a relation is that the first is immediate and the second is mediate and both are required to complete the synthesizing temporality and unity of reflexive self-consciousness. Thus, in terms of empirically demonstrating our “personal identities,” the same criticism that applies to Hume’s admission of a temporal succession of impressions also applies to A.  J. Ayer’s admission to the “continuity of sense-contents,” which are equal to Hume’s impressions. But without an active synthesizing substantial, enduring, and underlying self, both successive continuity and unity, whether pertaining to Hume’s “impressions” or to Ayer’s “sense contents,” are meaningless. Both Ayer’s reductivist resolution of the “self” to an immediate, discontinuous, interrupted series of “sense contents,” which will be destined to be supplanted by the current neuroscientific paradigm of the brain as a “bundle of distinct sensory neurons,” will essentially be analogous to a computer and will fare no better than Hume’s simple impressions and Ayer’s momentary sense contents. But with all these empirical absurdities, contradictions, and inconsistencies, I would hope the reader will reconsider the issue of a real self, a truly personal identity. In sum, we recall that Plato’s epistemic paradigm of the thinking soul is reflexively self-conscious; it is a flow, a stream; the psyche continually, temporally cognizes and re-cognizes that both its thoughts and its judgments circularly revolve within its self, as it searches and ponders what is true or false. By contrast, Locke’s cognitive principle is linear; it is observational. Its perceived object is presumed as external to the sentient mind, as the “insensible particles of matter” strike the senses and cause perceptual responses (Locke, Essay, II, VIII, 13). Again, there is no such act as a “reflexive perception.” That is a contradiction in terms. Perceptions do not see, view, or think of their self; they “perceive” sensory objects other-­ than-­their self. In the case of the mollusk, the “perception” is single-fold, its sensation is tactile but not epistemic, not cognitive; it is merely immediately sensory. In reflexive self-consciousness, however, the conceptual“object” must be twofold.

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Notes 1. Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), I, 126b. 2. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist of Plato, translated by F.  M. Cornford (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), “Battle of the Gods and Giants. Idealists and Materialists,” with a running commentary by Cornford, 228–232; “Plato never mentions Leucippus and Democritus by name or describes their doctrine in precise terms; but the inference that he had never heard of atomism is entirely incredible” (page 231). Legend also mentions that Plato sought to burn all of Democritus’ works as atheistic. 3. Brentano, Franz, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, translated by Antos Rancurello, D.  B. Terrell, and Linda McAllister (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 4–5, 79–80, 88–89: “there is no act of thinking without an object that is thought”; 142–143; it is to be noted that Brentano was very supportive of issues related to the immortality of the soul, 14–17, 25–26, and I would suggest that Aristotle’s principle of “final causes,” as intrinsically teleological and purposive, that is, intentional, is also ultimately grounded in Brentano’s later conception of an “immanent objectivity” (page 88) and to his famous phrase, “intentional in-existence,” passim. And, as we shall continue to learn, human consciousness promises to be impressively teleological, intentional. In sum, “there is no act of thinking without an object that is thought,” 142–143. Brentano, we remember was a Catholic priest. 4. Gomperz, Theodor, Greek Thinkers: A History of Ancient Philosophy, translated by Laurie Magnus (Cardiff: Printed by William Lewis, 1969), I, 320–321. 5. Cf., Mijuskovic, Ben Lazare, Consciousness and Loneliness: Theoria and Praxis: Matter and Mind (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2018), commentary on Henri Bergson’s Time and Freewill, 171–179, 171–173, 172–179, 183–187, 189, 233–241, and passim. 6. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford, 1968), 444 and 446. Cf., Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Erasmus to Descartes (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964). Popkin was my dissertation director and his writings defined the entire history of Western thought in regard to the entire influence of skepticism. 7. Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dutton), 1967 (II, VIII, 8, italics mine). Most notably, throughout the two volumes of the Essay, although Locke refers to the brain, he neglects to puzzle about, let alone to explain how, the relation between his ideas and the brain function (I, VIII, 11).

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8. Mijuskovic, Ben Lazare, Feeling Lonesome: The Philosophy and Psychology of Loneliness (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger: ABC/Clio, 2015), 142–143, which discusses Admiral Richard Byrd’s solitary Arctic polar expedition in Alone and his consequent inability to think coherently, as he desperately tries to use language and talk out loud to himself as if he were “two” to prevent losing his mental faculties. Similarly, when scientific sensory deprivation experiments are conducted, unless the self can orient in relation to objects, when, for example, the body is submerged in water, in its own body temperature, it becomes seriously disoriented. Basically, consciousness is reduced to the “sameness” of a single sensation. The mind becomes a blue consciousness. Cf., John Cunningham Lilly, The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and Tank Isolation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977). 9. Cf., Yolton, John, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 8, 10–11, 36 ff., 116–117, 124–125, 132 ff.; and cf., opus cit., Consciousness and Loneliness, Mijuskovic, 51–52. 10. Aaron, Richard, John Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 142–143; cf., 145, 147. Ralph Cudworth is an English Platonist and a Plotinian. 11. John Passmore, Hume’s Intentions (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 84–104, 105–131; B.  M. Laing, Hume (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 225–226, 235; and John Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Nature (New York: Archon Books, 1967), 25 ff., 169 ff. 12. Mijuskovic, Ben, “Hume on Space (and Time),” Journal of the History of Philosophy, XV:4 (1977); reprinted in David Hume: Critical Assessments, edited by Stanley Tweyman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1994). The painter, Georges Seurat, a pointillist, in his painting La Grande Jatte, covers the entire canvas with single dots. 13. Mijuskovic, Ben “The Simplicity Argument and the Unconscious: Plotinus, Cudworth, Leibniz, and Kant,” Philosophy and Theology, 20:1–2 (2008–09). 14. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 252–253 (italics his). 15. Ayer, A.  J., Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover, 1936), 127–128, and cf., A. J. Ayer, Hume (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980), 51–52 and passim.

CHAPTER 5

The Role Freedom, Spontaneity, and Genius Assume Within Ethical, Epistemic, and Aesthetic Contexts Versus Scientific Determinism

In the History of Ideas discipline, the relation between freedom and ethics begins with Zarathustra and becomes transmitted through Plotinus to the Christianity of Augustine where it becomes enmeshed with the “problem of evil.” There is both a “natural evil,” pain and suffering, plagues, and floods and droughts, and an ethical, “human evil” wrought by man’s free will. And the question arises if God is in any way responsible for either or both these evils? But in Plato and Aristotle there is no evil but there is goodness through knowledge in Plato and virtue in Aristotle achieved through the training of voluntary choices. Just so epistemic spontaneity rules in the domain of knowledge, as Aristotle recruits the acts of dynamis (potentiality), energeia (actuality), and entelecheia (completion). This conception of spontaneity is picked up by Leibniz’s conception of his “windowless Monad,” since according to him nothing can enter the Monad from without and nothing can escape from within, it follows that the Monad can only spontaneously act from within. In his turn Kant subscribes via Leibniz’s spontaneity for his transcendental theory of immanent time-consciousness and the reflexive unity of self-consciousness. Dutifully, Fichte follows suit. Plato aesthetically summons spontaneity in the Ion for accounting for the rhapsode’s artistic genius in interpreting the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_5

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Homeric myths. Both Kant in the Critique of Judgement and Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representations appeal to the principle of spontaneity in their aesthetic as well. As in the preceding chapter, I wish to begin with a History of Ideas perspective by offering a parallel general comment, which is similar in its universality to the one I put forward in quoting Professor Gomperz’s distinction between primary and secondary entities, between objective material and subjective sensory judgments. But now I need to address the distinction between freedom and necessity, the good and the evil, the true and the false, and the beautiful and the unattractive by developing how various dualist and subjective idealist thinkers sought to instill acts of freedom, spontaneity, and genius and inspiration into their ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic contexts, while in the same moment supporting their versions of the coherence theory of truth and defending their qualitative judgments of value. Aristotle distinguishes the principles of the various empirical sciences. Ethics deals with the practical, with voluntary human decisions and actions; the productive arts are concerned with the making of useful and beautiful objects; and theoretical knowledge is engaged with purely contemplative thoughts. But our current concern will be on how the originating acts of freedom, spontaneity, and genius fare against the causal inflexibility and determinism of scientific predictions. In short, the chapter seeks to pit values against science. As we began our previous discussion with Professor Gomperz’s declarative insight into the ancient controversy between materialism and determinism, as put forth against the defenders of metaphysical dualism and subjective idealism, we shall now once again turn to an ancient theological principle as it summarizes “The revelation of Ahura Mazda: That man is free to choose good or evil,” as it orients us to the critical issue of human freedom, its force, and its implications. Zarathustra receives the revelation of the new religion directly from Ahura Mazda. By accepting it, he imitates the primordial act of the Lord— the choice of Good. The essence of the Zoroastrian reform consists in an imitatio dei. Man is called to follow the example of Ahura Mazda, but he is free in this choice. He does not feel that he is the slave or servant of God…Ahura Mazda holds the first place. He is good and holy. He created the world by thought, which is equivalent to a creatio ex nihilo. Zarathustra declares that he “recognized” Ahura Mazda “by thought,” as the first and the last, that is as the beginning and the end. Good and Evil, the holy one

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and the destroying demon, both proceed from Ahura Mazda; but since Angra Mainyu freely chose his mode of being and his maleficent vocation, the Wise Lord cannot be considered responsible for the appearance of Evil. On the other hand, Ahura Mazda in his omniscience, knew from the beginning what choice the Destroying Spirit would make and nevertheless did not prevent it; this may mean that either God transcends all kinds of contradictions or that the existence of evil constitutes the preliminary condition for human freedom.1 First, we notice that when Zarathustra “receives the revelation, he recognizes Ahura Mazda by thought.” The term “faith” is not even mentioned. However, in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, by contrast, the article on “Faith” connects it to the dominant theme of Platonic love, which will later be adopted by Augustine as the key element in man’s devotion to the Christian God. The idea of eros is derived largely from the philosophy of Plato, for whom it meant a love of man for the divine, a desire by which man seeks a contemplation which will be wholly satisfying (Symposium, 210A–E). The contemplation of possession of the Good, according to Plato, is attained by a difficult ascent above the transient things of the world. Eros then is an appetite for the Good, which is sought not for its own sake but in order to satisfy a spiritual desire. Since this yearning is basically the extension of one’s own being, it may in this sense be called egocentric.2 Clearly, the last sentence directs our concentration to the activity of reflexive self-consciousness. But I’m not sure about the reference to Plato. In contrast to the Persian philosopher, none of the ancient Greeks, neither the Pre-Socratics, Plato, nor Aristotle supported the creation of the world and of man “out of nothing”; nor the “freedom of the will”; nor the doctrine of “faith.” In the Divided Line passage in the Republic, the highest state of mind, the ethical, is called intelligence or rational intuition (noesis). Nevertheless, the passage on Zarathustra introduces us to the issues of wisdom and ignorance, goodness and evil, and in general the issues of values along with their ultimate origins. Thus, going forward the quotation from Professor Eliade nevertheless suggests four pregnant fideistic implications. First, both God and man are accorded the privilege of applying the power of an uncaused freedom as the base for their moral concerns. Second, despite God’s attributes of omniscience and omnipotence, nevertheless Ahura Mazda allows for the existence of evil in the world. God freely “elects” not to prevent it. Third,

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perhaps “evil” is merely an “appearance,” an argumentative premise allowing for the power of the Lord to escape its attribution in the form of a “permission” of allowing evil to exist, but only as an “appearance.” And it also serves as a “device,” a “strategy,” which is later summoned by both Plotinus and Augustine, who readily avail themselves of the “excuse” thereby avoiding any imputation of permitting evil to the divine Being. And fourth, it allows mankind to believe through faith alone that man can emotionally believe—as opposed to cognitively know—that God’s omnipotence is so great and profound that He can create various “appearing” contradictions, as, for instance, by creating space, matter, time, and men’s souls “from nothing,” ex nihilo, and by “allowing” man’s evil nature without being responsible for it. And later, in Christian thought, by endorsing Tertullian’s faith in the incarnation of Christ: “I believe because it is absurd,” that is, contradictory, as well as in Augustine and Anselm’s commitments to the overriding principle of faith over human knowledge: “I believe so that I may understand,” and beyond that there is even Kierkegaard’s paradox of faith, that Abraham will both sacrifice Isaac and God will save him in Fear and Trembling. And yet, we notice an inherent logical strain between two distinct principles of freedom: human versus theological freedom. According to the Christian doctrine, each of us is ethically free to “will,” to “create” good or evil, and each is responsible for her or his choice. But by contrast, the Deity, conceived as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, is not responsible either for (1) mankind’s volitional acts of evil or (2) for all the prevailing human suffering manifested throughout the realm of nature with its endless pestilences and human disasters. There is both an expressed ethical evil attributed to mankind and also a natural “evil,” that is, human misery, pain, and suffering in the world, but all the while the Lord remains guiltless. I think it is fair to say that the dilemma remains unresolved. Traditionally, there are two classic arguments for the existence of God, the ontological argument, namely, that from the very definition, the conception of God as a perfect Being, He must exist, he cannot not exist (Anselm, Descartes), and the cosmological argument, namely, from the premise that everything that contingently exists must have a first cause, it follows that God is the first cause of the world and man (Aquinas, Descartes). In addition, there remains the pressing logical difficulty in denying that evil “in-itself” is not real, that it is merely a negation, the absence of goodness, just as darkness is merely the absence of light but nothing “in-itself,”

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an unreal semblance, an “appearance” (Plotinus, Augustine). And further, the avoidant contention that “the ways of God are not the ways of man” (Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth). These assertions imply that some other source must be sought and found for man’s inclination to freely create evil and for God’s permission to allow for both the existence of human evil and for natural evil to prevail in the form of physical pain and human suffering in the world to exist. But as the above quotation stands, as early as Zarathustra’s declaration, mankind displays an innate desire to secure an ultimate knowledge of reality, as it summons into service the inherent absolute power of freedom in seeking, pursuing, and attaining truth and salvation. Accordingly, in the Zoroastrian revelations of Ahura Mazda, humans are deemed free to choose Good or Evil. Further, there is an implicit assumption that Evil, in some significant sense, is an existing permanent “substance” that can be added to or subtracted from by mankind’s innate freedom to pursue either goodness or evil. By individuals simply willing to commit either acts of vice or virtue, mankind contributes toward increasing or decreasing the amount of the substance of evil existing in the world; qualitatively there is either more or less evil created in the world simply by the human power to will freely. But as Professor Gomperz’s earlier quotation distinguished primary quantities as objective, referentially material, extended, and measurable, in a word as scientific, while by contrast fleeting secondary qualities are manifestly subjective in their display of varying feelings and sensations, but now I wish to contend that the conceptions, the meanings of good and evil are created by humans; they are existential, personal, intimate, tertiary qualities; that mankind alone, within the animal kingdom, is the only creature responsible for creating the values of both good and evil, truth and ignorance, and beauty and plainness. Lower order animals are impotent in recognizing both the dualisms of reflexive self-conscious and intentional values as well as the difference between good and evil. Nevertheless, in the more expanded role of politics, the Persian paradigm favored a theocracy, a system governed by a powerful religious sentiment and an absolute commitment to the Lord. Politically, for the Persians, theocracy logically arose as following directly from the believer’s devotion to Ahura Mazda. But by contrast, Neither Plato nor Aristotle philosophized about man’s freedom or his responsibility for evil in the world in the light of problems that are raised by

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a conception of the world as a [natural, inflexible, determined] mechanism governed by inviolable laws. (Dictionary, II, 237; on Dualism in Zoroaster, cf., II, 39 ff.; and on Evil, cf., II, 162 ff.)

In the above citation, it is posited that the ancient Greeks accepted the entire natural and human “world as a mechanism governed by inviolable laws.” Freedom of the will did not come into play. But if both man and world are strictly controlled by a mechanism “governed by inviolable laws,” if all human activity is determined, then it follows that evil cannot exist and neither can goodness. The clear implication is that the Presocratic Greeks, along with Plato and Aristotle, regard the universe as a naturally deterministic system. This also means that regarding the Hellenic conception of evil, the acknowledgment of its very existence is questionable in ancient Greek thought. And yet, there is the singular exception in a Greek myth alluding to the overall wickedness of mankind, which became so pronounced that at a certain point Zeus asked Poseidon to flood the entire earth until it left Deucalion and Pyrrha as the only survivors. But in their ensuing dreadful loneliness, Zeus was moved toward pity until he instructed them to throw stones behind their backs, and accordingly the human race was resurrected anew.3 But also hidden in the mythical background, there lurks an element of the Greek hybris “of thoughts too great for man,” rivaling the power of the gods, of a narcissistic pride expressed in Oedipus’ pityless search for the murderer of Laius until in the end he realizes the truth and beyond Apollo’s punishment he exacts his own penalty by blinding himself.4 Nevertheless, our initial and guiding questions continue: where, when, and how in Western thought does the conception of the creation of goodness and evil begin along with its inherited trailing and cumbersome complexities, the ambiguous entrapments of its acts, its ensuing ethical judgments, its unique imputations of a personal moral responsibility, and its systematic elaborations and transformations verging toward inflexible and universal rules of ethical conduct ranging from the biblical Ten Commandments to the complexities of Kant’s threefold categorical imperative? Whereas Zarathustra begins with the freedom of the will, we shall instead first begin with the conception of spontaneity by citing the biological theory of “spontaneous generation,” the conceivability “that life is derived from any source other than an already existing genetically related

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parent organism,” which is a possibility discussed in Aristotle’s De generatione animalum, who rather prefers to assume an “equivocal” stance on the issue (Dictionary, IV, article on “Spontaneous Generation,” 307 ff.). But putting aside biological considerations, let us return to our investigation as primarily relevant to human consciousness. Thus, peremptorily setting aside the issue of organic and “scientific” biological spontaneity, it will be more fruitful if we start by pursuing the suggestive hint which Plato provides in his dialogue, the Ion, when he praises the rhapsode’s inspirational aesthetic genius, as he creatively interprets the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer to his audiences. As early as the Ion, it is remarked that the poetic interpreter “is inspired and guided by genius and often it is said to be unconscious or spontaneous, a gift of nature, and that genius is akin to madness is a popular aphorism even in modern time.”5 As purely qualitative acts, these cannot be causally explained nor as resulting in predictable reactions. Aesthetic qualities are created sui generis, while quantitative factors move deliberately and mechanically, in short causally. In the realm of art, creations arise suddenly and unpredictably. Even the painter, sculptor, and dramatist cannot anticipate his next brush stroke, or the next sculpted strike of the chisel, or the next verbal expressions. Thus, our continuing task will be to explore and ferret out the myriad possibilities of spontaneous acts, as expressed in various contexts, including the mimetic arts of the poet, the moral freedom of the ethicist, the epistemic declarative truths of the philosopher, and even the delusions of the maniacally afflicted, with the latter as harbored within Schopenhauer’s subconscious and subterranean depths of human consciousness. As Professor Eliade proceeds in discussing Plato’s notion of freedom, we discover surprisingly that it is not pertinent either to an ethical or to a religious context, but rather it is essentially a political issue. But critically, within its natural soil, this ancient political connection will inevitably lead us in the end to apply it to the sporadic evils incumbent and rampant within both the First and Second World Wars and more currently as relevant to the invasion of Russia into Ukraine in early 2022. But it all begins in Plato’s time with the growing political upheaval in Athens introduced by the Sophists in their capacity as ethical relativists and epistemic skeptics. According to Protagoras, “[Individual] man is the measure of all things; of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not” (Plato’s Protagoras). In Athens, the role of the Sophists, as professional teachers, was to educate the sons of the wealthy in the highly malleable arts of rhetoric and politics by instructing them on how to make the

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stronger argument appear the weaker and the weaker argument seem the stronger. The goal was not to promote virtue but rather to use the power of argument to gain political power. Politically, at one point in his life, Plato was invited to Syracuse by Dionysius II to teach the art of virtuous statesmanship according to the principles he outlined in the Republic.6 However, The fact is all the more significant because Plato’s most tenacious vocation was not religious but political. Plato aspired to build the ideal city, organized in accordance with the laws of justice and harmony, a city in which the inhabitant was to perform a definite and specific function. For some time, Athens and the other Greek city states had been undermined by a series of political, religious, and moral crises that threatened the very foundations of the social edifice. Socrates had identified the prime source of the disintegration in the relativism of the Sophists and the spread of skepticism. By denying the existence of an absolute and immutable principle, the Sophists had implicitly denied the possibility of objective knowledge. (Eliade, Volume 2, Section 183)

Importantly, it should be repeated that both metaphysical materialism and epistemic relativism are inherently valueless. It is theoretically impossible to formulate ethical, that is, qualitative principles and criteria regarding moral obligations, if one presupposes psychological determinism. For example, Freud’s concern is to liberate mankind from its sexual inhibitions, it is basically to enlighten humanity, to relieve and free us from our confining repressions and thus to make humans happier. By contrast, for Plato, the interplay between psychology and politics, wisdom and ignorance, as we shall see, will become critically relevant to the throes of the current civil war engulfing the US. Plato sought to accomplish three things. First, he conceptually bifurcated the world into two substances: a realm of material, extended, and inert physical objects; second, he posited an immaterial realm of universal and eternal Forms, Ideas, and especially Values, as the ultimate “conceptual objects” of our desires, as the guiding goals for human knowledge and virtue; and third he invested the subjective sphere of the soul with an innate activity of self-consciousness, which allowed him to argue that the immaterial psyche could cognitively strive to ascend toward virtue by securing an entrance into the eternal realm of the Forms, since both shared in an immaterial essence, with the first realm eternally serene while the

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second sphere actively sought epistemic unification with the upper realm. The principal difference being that the sphere of the psyche was active while the realm of the Forms was immutable. But these two poles left him with a seemingly insoluble dualistic problem, namely, how to reconcile and unify the lower, the natural realm of physical existence, with the higher existence of an unchanging reality, a problem which eventually derailed Descartes. (In the present text, we addressed this issue in the third chapter, “Can Senseless Matter Alone Think?”) Originally Homeric mythology symbolically paired certain gods and goddesses with ruling both the realms of nature, as well as the spheres of our human passions and thoughts. In terms of governance, Zeus is armed with his lightning rods, he is the god of the firmament and the heavens; Poseidon is the ruler of the ocean, seas, rivers, and streams; Hades is the master of the Underworld; Thanatos is King of the dead, while by contrast, Ares is the god of warlike passions, Aphrodite of lust and love, and Hera of the hearth and home. But there is no god or goddess of evil and certainly no transcendent universal Form of Evil in Plato. In fact, he even puzzles about how a judge without having knowledge of evil could evaluate it. For Plato, the consequence is that his humane conception of rationalism, in strident opposition to the skeptic’s and relativist’s reduction of consciousness to mere sensations and feelings, offers an alternative path in securing an ethical way forward. For Plato, there is neither the possibility for mankind to pursue evil for “its own sake” nor to conceive it as an intrinsic goal or as an absolute value. But as we shall learn when we inspect human nature more deeply there are individuals who are narcissistically sadistic and who will value evil in-itself. For Plato, the belief that goodness is a matter of knowledge can more certainly than any other be attributed to the historical Socrates. He wished to reduce all excellence to some kind of knowledge and was profoundly convinced that ‘no man does wrong on purpose’ because no man is willingly ignorant…The Socratic doctrine is expressed by two formulae: ‘goodness is knowledge,’ and its corollary ‘no man sins on purpose’; closely allied with these is the advice of Apollo at Delphi: know thyself.7 Simply put, for Plato “goodness” is a product of thought and knowledge to be earned and learned, whereas for the Christian soul it is a matter of the heart and not the head, a matter of good intentions. But in either case, both good and evil are created human values, goals, just as the value of pursuing wealth and avoiding poverty, peace instead of war, and so on. For Plato, however, virtue depends on acquiring a universal “knowledge

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of the Good,” while wrongdoing indicates an “ignorance of the Good.” But the conception of committing “free” acts of evil is completely lacking in the Greek mind. From whence, then, the continual resilience of evil in our ethical discussions? However, there is a qualification in the myth of Er, at the close of the Republic, Plato who believes in reincarnation, suggests that the newly arriving souls in Hades are accorded an element of “pure” freedom after drawing lots for choosing their next life in accordance with what they had learned during their recently departed sojourn. But still, it is based on knowledge and not a free will. In a related passage, the three judges of the Dead, Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, are given the responsibility of deciding which souls will pass on to the higher realms of the Elysium fields, or if instead they will be forced to depart toward the lower nether regions of Tartarus (Republic, Book X). But in any case, there is no imputation that mankind possesses a purely abstract free will and/or the desire to impart evil for its own sake on their fellows, as there is in the ethical strictures of Zoroaster and later in Christianity. Indeed, as an example of evil we can cite Augustine’s malicious destruction of a pear orchard in his youth, pure evil for its own sake as he acknowledges (Confessions, Book 2, Chapter 4). Plato seeks to present a comprehensive and coherent theory “accounting” for both the cosmos and man. In short, Plato is an early adherent to the coherence theory of truth. The universe is eternal, and it consists in ascending levels of realities, as man strives to reach the higher realms of knowledge and thus achieve an intellectual liberation. In the Divided Line passage in the Republic, Plato offers a schematic paradigm for the various levels of ascending cognitive certainties (VI. 509–D-511 B). In the cave, fleeting images, shadows, echoes, dreams, and sensory appearances abound and occupy the soul in producing the lowest level of thought, opinion (doxa); as we leave the cave and rise to the second level of the natural world and the light of day, we encounter physical objects and achieve belief (pistis); the third stage serves as a “bridge” allowing us to “negotiate” between the visible and the invisible, between the sensory and conceptual thus facilitating us to rise to the higher level of conceptualized and more abstract truths, mathematical equations and geometric diagrams providing us with discursive, that is, relational cognitions, and the mediating judgments of the faculty of the understanding (dianoia); the fourth stage intuitively secures the universal Forms, pure essences, absolute meanings, for example, the cardinal virtues of Justice, Temperance,

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Courage, and Wisdom (episteme); and the fifth and final pinnacle of knowledge secures us within a fully comprehensive and coherent overarching system of absolute knowledge, the wholeness of reality, and the highest goal of human endeavor and aspiration, the Good. But Evil is nowhere to be found or met with on the path of the soul’s Platonic journey; it is not a “substance,” neither in terms of an existing substantial reality nor in terms of man’s volitions, as it is in Manicheanism and later in Christianity. But critically, the five levels of reality, higher and lower, better and lesser are all distinguishable and variable as qualities: shadows and echoes; physical objects; mathematical and geometric equations; intellectual truths; and an all-encompassing system of knowledge. But certainly not as empirical or scientific quantities to be objectively measured. Science denies the sphere of quality. But the human soul yearns to dualistically attest to two very different realities: an external realm of natural quantities outside the cave, but it is only when it can aspire to seek the qualitative aspects of conceptual knowledge, intuitive principles, and rise to the attainment of a coherent and comprehensive system of graduated internal relations that the importance of aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic values is finally attained. The coherence theory of truth posits a doctrine of “internal relations” and “degrees of truth” in opposition to the factual certainty of separated particular and limited “truths.” Facts are singularly “true” and disconnected. They do not “imply” other facts. They are intrinsically non-relational. Rather differently from Plato, Aristotle distinguishes human knowledge into three separate arts: (a) the productive; (b) the practical, that is, the moral; and (c) the theoretical, and their ultimate teleological and their valuative purposes are, respectively, (a) the making of useful or beautiful objects; (b) the establishment of virtuous conduct taught by training and learning on how to achieve successful voluntary ethical choices; and (c) lastly by pursuing purely contemplative or theoretical knowledge for its own sake. But importantly, the second sphere, the moral choices are clearly the result of valuative deliberations and therefore free, as they are dependent upon particular circumstances and situations, as opposed to the ideality of the inflexible guidance of the Platonic universal Forms. Aristotle’s ethical judgments are predicated upon considerations designed to apply in individual cases, to choose the mean between two vices as, for example, by opting for courageous acts striking the median between foolhardiness and cowardice. The novice undergoes an empirical training geared toward developing virtuous habits. We become virtuous by doing good acts, by moral training. Originally, human nature in-itself is neither good nor bad.

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But in conflicting ethical issues, the criterion is indeterminate, variable and differing in each individual but importantly voluntary; the decision fluctuates according to the circumstances and the character of the person. The voluntary is defined as an “open” choice between two extremes. Unlike for Plato and later Christianity, there is no independent, preexisting, absolute, no universal principle, and there is also no absolute standard or religious criterion. For Aristotle, however, the criterion is the mean, but the mean fluctuates according to the determination of each individual’s capabilities, and thus the optional choices available on what should or should not be done varies according to the situation and the circumstances. The choice is embedded in the psyche’s varying personal abilities, as well as on the exigent circumstances under consideration. In terms of courage, we naturally anticipate more physical bravery from a soldier than from an old man. Thus, for Aristotle, we can conclude that the notion of evil “in-­ itself” is non-existent. Virtue, well-being, and happiness depend on voluntary human choices, on finding the mean between two extremes, not too much and not too little and thus practical wisdom is a matter of training and balance. Aristotle’s doctrine of the priority of actuality [i.e., on its accomplished existence, its finality, its entelecheia] leads him to deny the existence of any intention to an evil principle in the world. That which is potential [i.e., dynamic, as opposed to actual] is as much superior to bad actuality as it is inferior to the good. If that which is eternal can have no element of potentiality, a forteriori it can have no element of evil. “There is no evil apart from particular things.” Evil, in other words, is not a necessary feature of the universe but a by-product of the world process, something that causally emerges in the course of the endeavour of individual things to reach such perfection as is open to them, and thus to approximate as nearly as they can to the divine [contemplative] life.8 This is important because it indicates that for Aristotle evil is not a human product nor a goal. It is simply a failure to actualize some possible desired outcome, but the issue is not moral “goodness” or “evil” but rather merely a practical/ethical issue of success or failure, the result of good or poor pragmatic choices and management. For Aristotle, any conception of “good” and “evil” in the mode of Zarathustra or later Augustine’s conception of sin simply does not exist. Thus, equally important for Aristotle’s ethical system, human virtues and vices intrinsically involve a qualitative criterion to be achieved between the values of success and failure; the acts and the choices are determined by the criterion

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achieved by attaining the goal of its rational “final cause.” This once again involves qualitative—not quantitative—judgments, evaluations; the final purpose is the guiding principle. Thus, although the ancient Greek lexicon is devoid of Zarathustrian and Christian notions and terminologies indicating “sinfulness” and “evil,” there are, however, clearly successful and unsuccessful results and laudable human choices and conduct. Both Plato and Aristotle are concerned with man’s happiness within a social, indeed a political context, within the city-state. Their virtues are political, social, rather than individual. The polis, the city-state is organic, not atomistic. For both, a good man can only exist if the polis is good. Socrates is an ethical anomaly. His values emanate singularly, directly, and solely from the self and are valued irrespectively of what others may or may think and do. Indeed, one might dare call him the first existentialist. To Plato’s credit in the Republic, he foresees the political shortcomings and the dangers of both tyranny and oligarchy, but he values the potential wisdom and virtues of the philosopher queens and kings, and he even promotes a forward eugenic path of procreation for them. But again, Aristotle is more sanguine. Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of [human] nature, and that man is by nature a political animal…The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing…But he who is unable to live in society or who has no need because he is self-sufficient for himself must be either a beast or a god. (Politics, 1253a) Further, Aristotle distinguishes six forms of human organization and association spanning the spectrum from virtue to vice. First, the best form is the rule of one, Monarchy; second the few, Aristocracy; and third the many, Democracy. And these are contrasted against first the worst, the rule of one, Tyranny; second the rule of few, Oligarchy; and third the rule of many, Anarchy. But my point remains that it is individuals, each alone, who can create and choose positive ethical values independently of religious, ethnic, nationalistic, and political prejudices. Currently, the US is mired in a civil war and has been ever since its earliest inception, as it has been steeped and plagued by an unabated political atmosphere of slavery, racism, prejudice, and bigotry but which is now rapidly heading toward a dangerous expansion into a genuine form of human evil. Given that fact, I find it difficult to designate and honor America as the world’s oldest living democracy, as it continues to be

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steeped in a political battle between a true Democracy against a false Tyranny. Importantly, however Alexis de Tocqueville prudently warns concerning the latter in his Democracy in America of the intrinsic dangers in such a political union.9 In the context of our panoramic History of Ideas political perspective, as it centers on the continual Battle between the Gods and the Giants, there is now in the US a looming conflict between good and evil, an increasingly dangerous political warfare playing out in terms of qualitative distinctions, between virtue and vice, good and evil, and basically democracy and tyranny. Science by denying the reality of human values altogether, by interpreting “evil” as simply reducible to subjective sensations and feelings, and thus merely to superficial pleasures and pains, science eliminates evil, by its very factual indifference, it endorses evil by the very denial of its existence, by its in-absentia stance; it “allows” for evil to exist. By focusing on the neutrality of empirical “causes” rather than its intentional, purposeful acts, it not only excuses evil but knowingly or unknowingly promotes it. Equally alarming today in Russia, North Korea, China, Hungary, Italy Turkey, and now unfortunately the US, tyranny looms before us and the danger is increasing exponentially in terms of violence and human misery. All these extreme nationalistic and xenophobic attempts seek to evade social loneliness by politically manufacturing the illusion of a false “national intimacy,” by promoting long-standing irrelevant customs, racial prejudices, long dormant allusions to superficial customs, promoting ethnic “purity,” one-sided religious compliance, inordinate nationalistic pride, fear of immigrants, and so on. As a parenthetical note, and very curiously, in early “scientific” terms, there is a conception of a form of human freedom in materialism. During the period of Greek atomism in Rome, both Epicurus and Lucretius posited an uncaused, random, and unpredictable “swerve” to the movements of the atoms by anticipating Heisenberg’s “principle of uncertainty,” as conceptually operating within the field of quantum mechanics as based on Zeno’s paradox that an arrow in flight cannot be assigned both a location and a velocity in the same moment, nor consequently a predicted direction or terminus to the motions of the atoms. Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations were all regarded as a possible resolution of the long-standing conflict between determinism and the doctrine of free will. “If the atom has indeterminacy, surely the human mind [brain?] will have an equal indeterminacy, for we can scarcely accept a

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theory which makes out the mind to be more mechanistic than the atom. The Epicurean-Lucretian theory of the ‘minute swerving’ of the elements enjoyed an unexpected revival in the twentieth century…In a lecture delivered in 1932, Schrodinger compared it with Heisenberg’ formula of uncertainty.” This possibility was later ethically endorsed by the positivist stance of Erwin Schrodinger, as he transformed it into an applied “indeterminacy” and into an ethical free will issuing from the brain.10 However, the problem for such a theory, in terms of applying it as an ethical value, is that the subject himself or herself could not know what he or she will do next thus negating any possibility of moral responsibility and just as obviously it is intrinsically “valueless” precisely because the agent would not know what s/he might do next. But the critical problem for the defenders of science is that if, ontologically or metaphysically, the only existing substance is matter—plus motion—then both cognitive self-conscious acts and ethical values are inconceivable. The spectrum of qualitative judgments spanning values from goodness to evil and from intimacy to loneliness all disappear. As meanings, as values, these are all human creations. The neuronal brain merely passively reacts to external stimuli, but it cannot pronounce on judgments concerning qualitative values. Purely abstract, that is, so-called scientific cognitions ultimately reduce to mathematical and statistical measurements, as prevailing in our current sciences, in behavioral psychology, the neurosciences, the biosciences, and sociology, as all four are equally committed to the determinism of science. Science is inflexible, but values are creatively free, spontaneous, voluntary, and dynamic. Our current behavioral and neuroscientific theories are impotent in terms of accounting for any conceivable advancement beyond Professor Gomperz’s definitional restrictions, his two factually oriented judgments, his inflexible distinction between physical primary, objective quantitative judgments and secondary subjective quantitative degrees, but both remain strictly determined by external forces. Empiricism is qualitatively impotent; it reduces all “ethical values” to Professor Gomperz’s subjective secondary sensations and feelings, which are in turn further reduced to the immediate feelings of pleasure and pain. The critical problem with neuroscientific reductionism is that it is impossible by scientifically using an encephalograph to microscopically match and identify clusters of neurons to a specific color (e.g., red instead of blue); or a specific feeling (e.g., loneliness instead of intimacy); or a

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meaning (e.g., a triangle instead of a circle); or a value (e.g., good instead of evil); and on ad infinitum. Fortunately, against these alleged scientific maneuvers, we can conclude that existential freedom continues to exist and will continue to hold throughout our infinitely creative varieties of ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic value judgments. The most influential philosopher in the Western tradition is undoubtedly Plato and precisely because of his dedication to the dialectical method, which exposes both the opposing sides of philosophical controversies, both the metaphysical principles and systems of materialism against idealism. As Whitehead praised, the sum of Western philosophy essentially consists of footnotes to the thought of Plato. Similarly, for Hegel, it is his dialectical method that seeks to implement and encompasses a coherent and comprehensive system within the expansive boundaries of his objective idealism. It was Plato who grasped in all its truth Socrates’ great principle that ultimate reality lies in consciousness, since, according to him the absolute is in thought, and all reality is Thought…it is the thought which embraces in an absolute unity reality as well as thinking, the Notion and its reality in the movement of science [i.e., his Science of Logic], as the Idea of a scientific whole.11 But Hegel’s developmental dialectic seeks unity, not opposition. His historical “scientific” path is his “march of thought” with its painstaking unfolding offered in the Science of Logic. Thought evolves seamlessly, as it seeps and issues forth developmentally through the progressive categories of qualitative Consciousness until it merges almost unnoticed into the scientific categories of quantitative Measurement. The critical conceptual and historical movement is from the consciousness of Quality fusing into the empirical sciences of Quantity, from Qualitative Determinateness merging into Quantitative Magnitude. This is Hegel’s solution to the “problem of Cartesian dualism.” And his dedication to the Logic is confirmed by his continued interest in reworking its graduated categories throughout the multiple and subsequent revisions of the Logic from 1812 to 1816 and finally ending in 1831, the year he died.12 By contrast, Kant’s structuring categories are relational but remain static and repetitious: cause-effect-cause-effect-and so on, and they do not “develop,” whereas Hegel’s are triadically developmental and evolutionary, as Quality merges from Parmenidean Being into an opposing Democritean Nothingness and then passes into a Heraclitean temporal flux of Becoming. Every philosophical position generates its opposite, its position and opposition, which then synthesizes into the next higher

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categories before developing into a deeper position and opposition. Truth systematically grows and becomes richer, coherent, and comprehensive. Interestingly, due to our History of Ideas perspective, we can now actually pinpoint the earliest instantiation of an epistemic spontaneity. According to Hegel in his Lectures to his students, the concept of spontaneity appears quite early on, as it assumes an initiating role in self-­ consciousness. Aristotle distinguishes no less than three intrinsically connective epistemic acts and therefore three stages of a developmental consciousness: dynamis (potentiality); energeia (actuality); and entelecheia (its intentional final completion), the latter thus exemplifying its triadic self-fulfillment, its final teleological cause. But it is spontaneity, which initiates the entirety of the process. To proceed, there are two leading forms, which Aristotle characterizes as that of potentiality (dynamis) and that of actuality (energeia), the latter still more closely characterized as entelechy (entelecheia), which has an end in itself, and is the realization of this end. These are determinations which occur repeatedly in Aristotle. The expression dynamis is with Aristotle the beginning, the implicit, the objective; also the abstract universal, the idea, the matter that can take on all forms, without being itself the form-giving principle. But with an empty abstraction such as the [Kantian] thing-in-­ itself Aristotle has nothing to do. It is first energy, or more correctly subjectivity. When, on the other hand, we speak of Being, activity is not yet posited. Being is only implicit, only potentiality, without infinite form. To Aristotle the main fact about Substance is that it is not matter merely, although in ordinary life this is what is generally taken to be the substantial. All that is contains matter, it is true, all change demands a substratum to be affected by it; but because matter itself is only potentially, and not actuality—matter cannot truly exist without the [conceptualizing] activity of form…With Aristotle, dynamis does not therefore mean force but rather potentiality which is pure spontaneous activity. (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, II, 138–139)13 Returning now to our political framework, we recall that for the Persians, theocracy arises naturally from their commitment to the divinity of Ahura Mazda, but for Plato and Aristotle, it is human reason which functions within ethical and political contexts, in both its acts, manifestations, and its accomplished decisions. As a reflexive self-conscious act, it rather single-mindedly points toward a specific purpose to be attained, toward an end to be achieved, an intentional final cause that best serves the benefit of the Greek polis. Political thought truly begins with the

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Greeks. Its origin arises from within the calm and clear humanism and rationalism of the Greek mind rather than from the projection of a transcending theological idealism. Accordingly, both Plato and Aristotle define man as essentially rational. Augustine agrees, but he also significantly adds the attribution of the freedom of faith based on our free will, which he denotes as a liberum arbitrium, a transcending principle beyond reason, endowing humans with the capacity to choose faith over skepticism and relativism, and even more notably against reason, as well as good over evil by endorsing man’s innate capacity to avow free acts in realities transcending human reason. But while such acquiescence is unanimously prevalent in Christianity, it is inconceivable for the Greek soul and for their humanistic system of values. Political thought begins with the Greeks. Its origin is connected with the calm and clear rationalism of the Greek mind. Instead of projecting themselves into the sphere of religion, like the peoples of India and Judea, instead of taking this world on trust and seeing it by faith, the Greeks took their stand in the realm of thought, and daring to wonder about things visible, they attempted to conceive of the universe in the light of reason. It is a natural instinct to acquiesce in the order of things presented in experience…But such acquiescence natural in all ages to the religious mind was impossible to the Greeks…It is the precedent condition of all political thought, that the antithesis of the individual and the State should be realized, as it is the task of every political thinker to abolish the antithesis whose force he has realized. Without the realization of this antithesis none of the problems of political science—problems touching the basis of the State’s authority and the source of its laws—can have any meaning: without its reconciliation, none of these problems can have their solution. It is in this way that the Sophists, who seized and enforced their antithesis, are the precursors and conditions of Plato and Aristotle, by whom it is abolished.14 And we can add ever after as well. But beyond—or perhaps below?—the judgments of reason and the affirmations of faith lies the ultimate question: What moves reason and/or faith. Reason is one thing and faith another, but what ultimately inclines and animates mankind both to act and to judge? Clearly it is the assumption that man alone is privileged and able not only to freely create values but also to choose between them, not only between good and evil, but between all other values as well. No other animal species has that ability. The essence of man is to create values. Following them is only secondary.

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Moving forward, I think it is historically accurate to claim that within Western thought, it is first Augustine, who essentially defines the boundaries of free will in relation to the problem of evil (Confessions, Book 7, Chapter 3). Originally, Augustine espoused the dualism of the Manichean religion, as it manifests two conflicting eternal, co-equal forces of Goodness and Evil metaphorically consisting of a dualistic vision of Lightness and Darkness in turn metaphorically corresponding to Spirit and Matter. Accordingly, mankind has the free option in choosing between good and evil, lightness and darkness. But Augustine also adopts a deeper study of Platonism and especially of Neoplatonism, as he seeks to his advantage the adoption of a hierarchical epistemic ladder arising from matter to truth and from body to soul and spirit and thus ultimately arising to a reality absolving the Deity from any complicity in man’s evil nature. The metaphor or the symbolism of Good and Evil, as corresponding to Lightness and Darkness, allows him to argue that evil is nothing “in itself,” just as darkness is really only the absence of light, and that therefore evil is Non-­ Being (Plotinus, Enneads, Eighth Tractate, The Nature and Source of Evil). Secondly, and (and frankly) quite inconsistently, Augustine argues that evil surely exists in mankind and that the source of evil is embedded in matter and especially in its connection to concupiscence, in the corruptive aspects of the bodily nature of man, in the sins of the flesh, with all its lusts and desires, and as it is transmitted intergenerationally through the Fall of Adam. And thus often in pondering and recognizing the enormity of human evil in others, we are frightened and overwhelmed by the possibilities for our own evil while the Confession in Catholicism provides us with the possibility of absolution. But going forward, it is illuminating to study the source of existential evil in Dostoyevsky, who is very religious, imbued with Eastern Orthodoxy, and familiar with Augustine’s reflections on evil.15 There are several critical passages in the Brothers Karamazov that directly address the issue of man’s evil, as for example, in the exchange between Ivan, the atheistic brother, and Alyosha, the religious brother, as Ivan recounts a story he has heard.

“By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow,” Ivan went on, seeming not to hear his brother’s words, “told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general uprising by the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and

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children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till the morning, and in the morning, they hang them all—all sorts of things you can’t imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took pleasure in torturing children too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mother’s eyes. Doing it before the mother’s eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They’ve planned a diversion; they pet the baby, laugh and make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby’s face. The baby laughs with glee, holds its little hands out to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby’s face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn’t it. By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say.”16 Even God cannot compensate for the suffering of an innocent child; any effort at compensation is tragically inadequate and unfair. There is also another description in the novel of an incident in which a boy had thrown a rock at an unruly dog, with the result that the owner found a singular way to punish the boy for his transgression. The general orders: the child is stripped naked. He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry…’Make him run,’ commands the general. ‘Run, run’ shout the dog-boys. The boy runs…’At him!’ yells the general and he sets the whole dog pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him and tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes! In another passage, Smerdyakov prompts the young Ilyusha to tender a starving dog a loaf of bread in which he had stuck a sharp pin. But these cruel exchanges also raise the critical issue regarding the existential relation between human freedom and happiness since the pursuit of ethical goodness is a difficult and often painful path to follow. The theme of religious forgiveness also powerfully surfaces in Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor passage in the Brothers, as it revives a theme, which had originally transpired during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. As the scene unfolds, “when fires were lighted every day to the glory of God, and ‘in the splendid auto da fe’ the wicked heretics were burned.” “As the Grand Inquisitor surveys the public scene before him, he realizes that He has

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returned and as He comes nearer, He is immediately recognized by the populace: ‘It is He—it is He!’ They all repeat.” And as He moves forward, an imploring mother of a dead child lying in a coffin beseeches Him for help and with a whisper He raises the child. On his part, the Grand Inquisitor is displeased and summons his guards to take and bring Him to him. And his question is, “Why have you come? All has already been accomplished. Men do not want freedom they only want happiness and forgiveness” (294 ff.). The Grand Inquisitor has the power to adjudicate the imposition of values upon mankind; to provide absolution; to judge between sinful guilt, the burden of repentance, and earthly happiness. But the bulk of men, by nature weak, undeserving, and self-craving, only desire happiness. And thus, the Grand Inquisitor elects to satisfy and affirm the weakest and worst elements in man’s nature; he assumes the guilt of men upon himself. For Dostoyevsky, Roman Catholicism, with its confessions, and the power of absolution given to the priest, underscoring the infallibility of papal forgiveness, effectively undermines the genuine act of free repentance given to the sinner. For Dostoevsky, the atonement, the reparation, the punishment must be paid and suffered in full. The freedom of assuming guilt for what one has done must be acknowledged and suffered alone and under the weight of an absolute loneliness. Each of us must bear the weight of our sins alone assuming on the grounds of faith that God exists. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, a philosophy student, persuades himself that if God does not exist, then everything is permissible. Following this reasoning, in the act of robbing an old misrely pawnbroker and her impaired sister, he murders both. His crime is uncovered, and his sentence is a long imprisonment. But because of his free repentance and the acknowledgment of his guilt, his suffering, and his religious redemption, his faith and love are restored. But the possibility remains that if God does not exist, then everything is permissible. It is an illuminating and troublesome possibility suggestively given throughout the passages in the text, as we are left to consider William Barrett’s existential interpretation of Dostoyevsky while compelling us at the same time both to consider and evaluate both the good and the evil, the rational and the demonic in the heart and the nature of man. Dostoevsky was face to face with the demoniacal in human nature; perhaps man is not the rational but the demoniacal animal. A rationalist who loses sight of the demoniacal cannot understand human beings.17 But to continue with Augustine.

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Manicheanism appealed to Augustine because its dualism [of body and soul and man and God] allowed him to explain the origin and the apparently unlimited power of Evil. After some time, he rejected Manicheanism, but the problem of Evil always troubled him…All that God has created is real, participates in being, and is therefore good. Evil is not a substance, for it contains not the least trace of good. This is a desperate effort to save the unity, omnipotence, and goodness of God while dissociating him from the existence of evil in the world. In Augustine, the anti-Manichean polemic contributed to a hardening of his conception of the total fall of man; certain traces of pessimism and Manichean materialism reappears in his theology of grace. It lies in the conception that only by the “grace of God” can we be freed of our original sin.18 Thus, the abolishment for the guilt and the eternal punishment for the sins of mankind is left to the sole absolute freedom of God to pardon “by his grace” and the evil committed by man is extinguished. The distinction between Light and Darkness vanishes, bodily lusts become impotent, and the disobedience of Adam is neutralized. Thus, man stands naked and alone garbed in the forgiveness of the Lord. But overall, for Augustine in the end he repeats that man alone is responsible for his sins since he possesses the capacity to do good and avoid evil. And for many years Augustine was engaged in a protracted argument with Pelagius, who in opposition held that man is not born in sin but rather he is endowed with an absolutely free will. The reason why Pelagius did not accept the idea that original sin is universally bequeathed and shared by the descendants of Adam, it is because Augustine’s argument is self-contradictory. “If sin is innate, it is not voluntary; and if it is voluntary, then it is not innate” (Eliade, ibid., III, 46–48). These are genuinely serious and eternal questions, real dilemmas, whether one is religious or not. What is the nature of man? How many different varieties of souls and accompanying consciousnesses do we own and attest to? What ethical values do we espouse? If so, on what grounds? The questions and options cry out for a decision, for a justification, for affirming values in one direction rather than another, or for negating values altogether. These questions are essentially what William James describes as existential issues predicated and aimed at each mind alone demanding a decision within the self because the options, the choices are alive rather than dead; forced rather than avoidable; and momentous rather than trivial (William James, “The Will to Believe”). In sum, Augustine’s ethical principle appears (inconsistently to me at least as)

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grounded in the love of God, in His forgiving grace and beneficence, in blind faith. However, this suggestive back and forth is defended by Fredrick Copleston in the following terms. The will, however, is free, and the free will is subject to moral obligation. The Greek philosophers had a conception of happiness as the end of conduct, and one cannot say that they had no idea of obligation; but owing to his clearer notion of God and of divine creation, Augustine was able to give to moral obligation a firmer metaphysical base than the Greeks had been able to give it.19 But I would disagree. As argued, for both Plato and Aristotle, reason was sufficient and faith unnecessary. But in either case, both the ancient Greeks and the Christians were free to existentially choose their values but on radically opposed principles, either on epistemic or affective principles, either on reason or faith but not both. Augustine by following Neoplatonism sought to remove any implication that God by any fashion, means, or arguments can be made either complicitly or implicitly responsible for the existence of human evil. Perhaps then in the end, Plato’s epistemic and value-laden hierarchical structure in the Divided Line allows the Saint to invoke a transcendent reality in allowing that evil is “nothing in-itself,” thus the appearance of evil is relegated to the spectral aspects inside the cave thus forever absolving the Divinity from any implications of responsibility for the existence of human evil. It is Augustine, who shows acquaintance with each of the six Enneads and quotes Plotinus by name five times and speaks of him in the following terms. ‘The utterance of Plato, the most pure and bright in all philosophy, scattering the clouds of error, has shone forth most of all in Plotinus, the Platonic philosopher who has been deemed so like his master that one might think them contemporaries, if the length of time between them did not compel us to say that in Plotinus Plato lived again…Augustine, at this early period of his career, was an enthusiastic admirer of Plotinus.20 Further, deeper, and more expansive. Plotinianism…may be considered as the true forerunner of the idealistic doctrines which pose sprit as a concrete and substantial reality, admitting itself through itself independently of things. Such are the philosophies of St. Augustine, Descartes, and Hegel. Although they differ widely, they all owe allegiance directly or indirectly to Plotinus…In the passages in which Plotinus refers, the evidence of thought which thinks itself and which knows itself only as thought, we sense for the first time in the

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history of philosophical doctrines the preoccupations which are to give birth to the metaphysics of Descartes.21 But as we shall learn to consider and conceive, both the nature of man and the existence of evil will read quite differently throughout Schopenhauer’s discussions of Augustine in his twin voluminous tomes. And in the end, I would argue whether God exists or not; whether man is evil or not; or even whether goodness and evil can be meaningfully construed as value judgments; it all depends uniquely on one’s own existential choice. It is man alone who has the capacity to create evil or deny it as a value. Both empirical psychology and the current neurosciences deny human freedom and the values of good and evil. But the existential choice always remains within one’s own power to affirm or to deny. Albert Camus is an existential atheist. In The Plague, he confronts us with an absolutely free choice, as either condoning the agonized suffering of a (presumably) innocent child (although of course no one is innocent for Augustine), as foreordained by God’s will, or by turning against God’s commandment. The story recounts how one day, significantly, “in 1940,” in the town of Oran on the Algerian coast (presumably symbolizing the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War), a peculiar phenomenon unfolds, as sightings of thousands of rats begin appearing out of the sewers and dying and soon it becomes apparent that the townspeople are also dying in large numbers and that a deadly plague is rampant. Father Paneloux, an Augustinian priest, gives a sermon, which essentially proposes that although he does not know the reason for the deadly visitation, it must be that in some special regard the villagers have sinned and in ethical terms deserve their punishment. God’s ways are not the ways of man (Alexander Pope, John Milton, William Wordsworth, John Calvin). God’s knowledge is inscrutable. As the plague intensifies, one of the central characters, Dr. Rieux, develops an antidote that it is hoped will help. It is first administered to a young boy who has developed the early progressive symptoms of the disease. As it tragically turns out, however, the serum only intensifies and prolongs the agonizing death of the child. Later in a second sermon, as the populace continues to suffer deaths, the priest sets aside the consideration that God’s reason infinitely transcends that of man and instead he asks that each churchgoer, that each of us, freely wills the tragedy of the child’s suffering, thus acceding to Augustine’s theological principle for whom reason and will are completely distinct faculties. Thus, he asks that each of us must put aside for the moment whether we intellectually understand why this evil is occurring. We must “bracket” any

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possible divine transcending reason for this visitation and instead simply will that it happens. This is what is required; it is in this case an existential religious choice.22 But the question is complex as it addresses the complexity of what precisely is “human consciousness” with its acts of both willing and cognition. It is not a simple binomial decision; it is not an either/or factor but rather both as it operates differently in the various modes of consciousness scrutinized and elaborated by the various philosophers we have visited. I have sought to accentuate as best I could the complex positions, descriptions, and expressions of consciousness as expressed in Western thought alone, in its philosophical and psychological theories by illuminating the manifold perspectives, by testifying to at least the complexities of its four dominant theories of consciousness; reflexive self-consciousness, transcendent intentionality; a metaphysical subconscious irrational will; and a dynamic ego. But now we are now in a position to follow our discussion into the epistemological age by continuing to concentrate on our centering theme of personal identity. Descartes belongs to the Augustinian Oratory.22,23 For Descartes, as for Augustine, there are two faculties, both the will and the intellect. Freedom of the will determines our ethical values, whereas spontaneity secures our epistemic judgments. Our passive sensations are immediate and transient, they instantaneously appear, but they do not last. And they are not “acts.” They support but do not initiate either ethical or epistemic judgments. Whereas by contrast, the immediate act of the cogito, “I think=I exist,” is intuitively, spontaneously generated and next it is mediately, temporally followed by the formation of relations following which when combined lead either to conclusionary judgments of affirmation or denial, the yeas or nays of assertion, as well as going forth into more complex inferential judgments arguments. Accordingly, there is a critical element of “spontaneity” that connects both Augustine’s certainty of his own existence with Descartes’ cogito, as well, as with his epistemic judgments. In the Beata Vita, a work contemporary with Contra Academicos [which is Augustine’s answer to skepticism and atheism], Augustine for the first time puts in recognizable form the argument that will lead to the Cogito of Descartes. In this dialogue, Augustine asks his hesitant interlocutor…do you know that you think? Yes. Then it is true that you think. Yes. Certainty of the thinking subject’s existence, as opposed to all further certitude, is based directly on the certainty of the existence of thought,

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and that incontestable truth is also the first of all certitudes...It is no accident that Augustine begins with his proof of God with the proof of his own existence.23 The point in the dialogue between Augustine and his interlocutor, Navigius, is that “thought in itself” can only occur with spontaneity, and it is intrinsically ensconced in self-certitude and the substantiality of self-­ existence; absolute self-existence attests to an indubitable personal identity. It is the point from which we must and can only begin. For Descartes, as for Augustine, there are two human faculties, will and intellect (apparently faith is subservient to will), but the will, and now more technically, spontaneity in its expanded role is capable of assuming a dual function, both an ethical and an epistemic one. (Presumably in God, will and intellect are “one.”) Sensations are immediate, passive, and transient, whereas both the intuitive, immediate, spontaneous act of the cogito and its ensuing mediating act, its conclusionary judgment, its either yea or nay capacity, are mediate, relational. And Descartes further draws on a medieval scholastic distinction, sensations are immediately apprehended, whereas judgments and inferences are mediately, that is, relationally comprehended. There is therefore a critically “causeless” beginning, an initiating element of epistemic “spontaneity” inherent in all human consciousness. And in terms of the will and the intellect, Descartes clearly connects the two within human consciousness. From all this I recognize that the power of will which I have received from God is not the source of my errors—for it is very ample and very perfect of its kind—any more than is the power of understanding; for since what I understand is nothing but the power which God has given me for understanding, there is no doubt that all that I understand is as I ought, and it is not possible that I err in this. Whence then come my errors? They come from the sole fact that since the will is much wider in its range and compass than the understanding, I do not restrain it within its bounds, but extend it also to things which I do not understand: and as the will is of itself indifferent to these, it easily falls into error and sin, and chooses the evil for the good, or the false for the true (Meditation IV, Of the True and the False). Accordingly, Descartes, in his Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Distinction between Mind and Body Are Demonstrated, in Meditation II, titled Of the Nature of the Human Mind; and that It Is More Easily Known than the Body, he offers an epistemic experiment by considering two (presumably) external appearances. First,

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he considers a piece of wax as exposed to a flame. All its primary features (extension shape and motion), as well as its secondary changing qualities (smell, color, hardness, etc.), are altered, and yet he mediately, inferentially judges it to be the same piece of wax after he removes it from the fire. Further, he notices pedestrians traversing by his window attired with coats and hats and he judges that they are not robots but rather that they are men like himself. For it is not by the senses or the imagination that we say that it is the same wax as before and that the walkers are men rather than automatons, but rather by a spontaneous act followed by a judgment, by a mediating, relational inference. For we say that we see the same wax, if it is [immediately] present, and not that we simply [mediately] judge that it is the same from it having the same colour and figure. From this I should conclude that I knew the wax by means of vision and not simply by the [immediate] intuition of the mind; unless by chance I remember that, when looking from a window and saying I see men who pass in the street, I do not really see them, but infer that what I see is men just as I say that I see the wax. And yet, what do I see from the window but hats and coats just as I say that I see wax. And yet what do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines? Yet I [mediately, inferentially] judge these to be men. And similarly, solely by the [mediating] faculty of judgment which rests in my mind I [discursively,] comprehend that which I believed I saw with my eyes.24 Clearly, the difference between the immediacy of sensations and the mediacy of thoughts can only be identified and defined in terms of a qualitative distinction; sensory qualities as distinguished from thinking, acting, or relational qualities. Quantitative distinctions completely fail us. But once more, can this difference be distinguished in neuronal terms? Does a sensory neuron look or act empirically different than a thought neuron? No. Also, in this context, we recall Plato’s discussion in the Theaetetus and the Sophist that we judge—but not by our senses—regarding our affirmations and denials concerning what we can know, but rather it is by our judgments and not by our sensations. This is also Descartes’ epistemic account of how (a) first the immediate presence of sensations, sensory images appear in consciousness; (b) then second spontaneous acts follow; and (c) third they are followed by the concluding relational mediacy of inferential judgments. All three are temporally required for attaining knowledge. By contrast, psychological behaviorism and the current neurosciences are incapable of (a) first identifying which neuronal aggregates

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are the sensations; (b) second which are the act neurons; and third how they are responsible for all the varieties and complexities of reflexive self-­ consciousness and transcendent intentionality. How does one separate and isolate sensory neurons from meaningful, judgmental, and inferential neurons? How are they distinguished on an electroencephalograph? But at this early point in the Second Meditation, Descartes cannot be certain of the veracity of his judgments because he still may be deceived by the evil Genius (Meditation I), and therefore he must (first) prove God’s existence (Meditation III) and (secondly) that He is not a deceiver (Meditation V). Accordingly, in Meditation IV, Of the True and the False, he assures us that “likewise I cannot complain that God has not given me a free choice or a will which is sufficient, ample and perfect, since as a matter of fact I am conscious of a will so extended as to have no limits” (page 174). But our original question persists: how are the cogito, “I exist,” the existence of God, and free will intrinsically related through spontaneity? Is there a sustaining connection? In Poulet’s description of Descartes’ Dream of 1619, he is in despair. “The spontaneous act by which he turns toward God does not yet possess at this moment the necessary efficacy: it is not pure spontaneity; it is not addressed directly to a God of the present but to a God of the past.”25,26 Further, Truth is attained only by a pure spontaneous act which excludes any kind of a driving wind; an act of which, an instant earlier Descartes had an idea, but one from which he had turned aside in a vain effort to regain the past (page 60). Similarly, Augustinian faith means an “immediate union of subject and object,” man’s soul and God, a veritable creation ex nihilo, which occurs in the very moment (Activitas instantanea creationen). (page 71)

This was Descartes’ criterion of truth—intuition, the immediacy of a spontaneous assurance for God’s existence and in the same moment the confirmation of both his own existence and his faith. But this was 1619. By 1640, Descartes learned to distinguish the intuitive spontaneity of the cogito from the conceptual mediacy of judgments without, however, any awareness of the temporal quality of self-consciousness. Plato, we recall, without any notion of Christian faith, lingered in the temporal immanence of the stream, the flow of self-conscious reflexivity (Theaetetus, Sophist).

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Thus, we are curious to discover how are (a) sensations and (b) spontaneous acts relevant to (c) the temporal flow of self-consciousness as formed and executed within the mind of man? For Augustine, human time is a mystery. What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it, explain it so someone who does ask me, I do not know. Yet I state confidently that I know this: if nothing were passing away, there would be no past time, and if nothing were coming, there would be no future time, and if nothing existed, there would be no present time. (Augustine, Confessions, Chapter 14) By the same token, for Descartes, time is unreal. It is not grounded in the empirical perception of material motions that “cause” the appearance of time. That is why the cogito must be intuitive. For Descartes, it is God Who is metaphysically responsible for creating time. Indeed, for Descartes’ mathematical frame of mind, time is unreal and irrelevant. Thus, he states, “That God is the First Cause of movement and that He always preserves an equal amount of movement in the universe” (Principles of Philosophy, XXXVI). But the mystery of time arises as early as Plato’s rumination on the subject as he informs us. Time is as Plato says, the moving image of Eternity, which it resembles as much as it can. Eternity is the [reflexive] sphere of Spirit, and time is the sphere of the soul…Eternity is the atmosphere in which spiritual existence lives. As for the phenomenal world, ‘things that are born are nothing without their future.’ It is their nature and the condition of their existence to be always making [successive] acquisitions. Each individual life in this world would be truncated and shorn of its meaning if taken by abstraction, out of the temporal sequence in which it lives…The form of [human] existence in the world of time is succession. The stages follow each other…The Stoics identified Time with motion. But motion is in [the consciousness of human] Time. Notice the reflexive circularity of both metaphors, “Eternity is the sphere of Spirit and time is the sphere of the soul,” of human consciousness as mirroring self-consciousness. And then imagine what this might look like when you scan it on an electroencephalograph. All of which is simply to say that the problematic issue of human time was already of paramount interest in the idealist speculations of Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine. But not Descartes.

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Notes 1. Eliade, Mircea, A History of Religious Ideas: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, translated by Willard Trask (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), Volume 1, Section 103, italics mine. 2. Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), and article on Faith, II, 209b. 3. Hamilton, Edith, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York: Meridian, 1969), 74, and Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1981), I, 141–143. 4. Dictionary, ibid., cf., for the Calvinist sin of pride, III, 288a, and cf., Graves, ibid., II, 9 ff.; on Greek hubris, consult 228a, 289b, 413a, 414b. 5. Plato, Ion, translation and Introduction by Benjamin Jowett (Google: Gutenberg Project, 2013); cf., Paul Shorey, What Plato Said (University of Chicago Press, 1958), 96–97; and Dictionary, ibid., on Plato cf., II, 293b, 299b, 308a, 318b, 320b. Indeed, the terms genius, madness, inspiration, and enthusiasm are frequently interspersed throughout the extant texts of Western philosophical literature as synonymous; cf., Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), I, 184 ff.; and cf., Israel Fox, Schopenhauer’s Aesthetic Theory: “By some strange paradox---or is it rather the logic of his irrationalism---Schopenhauer is compelled to associate the man of genius with the madman,” in Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement, edited by Michael Fox (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980), 136–137. For Schopenhauer, the source, the origin of this madness, with its originality and its creativity, lies hidden in the subterranean, irretrievable, subconscious self, as opposed to the Freudian unconscious, as it is embedded in the primeval roots of consciousness, in our spontaneous qualitas occulta acts (opus cit., I, 80 and passim). 6. Barker, E., The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (New York: Dover Publications, 1946), 9; and A.  E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (New York: Meridian, 1960), 4–5, 7–9, 284, 371 ff. 7. Grube, G. M. A., Plato’s Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 216. 8. Ross, W.D. Aristotle: A Complete Exposition of His Works & Thought (New York: Meridian, 1961), 155. In general, the concept of Aristotelian evil is not mentioned in any of the commentaries of Marjorie Grene, H. H. Joachim, John Herman Randall, G. E. R. Lloyd, Phillip Wheelwright, or Werner Jaeger, et al. 9. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by George Lawrence, edited by J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969). Consult the extensive section titled “What are the Chances That the American

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Union Will Last? What Dangers Threaten It?” pages 363–395; on loneliness, 444, 697; and Schrodinger, Erwin, “Indeterminism and Free Will,” Nature, 138 (1936), 13–14; cf., Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Dictionary, II, 588b, 589b-590a. We recall that Epicurus also posited a random swerve to the atoms. 10. Cf., Schrodinger, Erwin, “Indeterminism and Free Will,” Nature, Volume 138 (1936), 13–14; Dictionary, II, 588b. 11. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, translated by E. S. Haldane and Frances Simson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), opening paragraph to Volume II, 1. 12. Mijuskovic, Ben Lazare, Consciousness and Loneliness: Theoria and Praxis (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2018), 257–264 and passim. 13. On spontaneity, cf., Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, Feeling Lonesome: The Philosophy and Psychology of Loneliness (Santa Barbara, CA: Prager ABC/ Clio, 2015), 62–63, 99, 155–156, 158; Consciousness and Loneliness: Theoria and Praxis (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2019), passim; Metaphysical Dualism, Subjective Idealism, and Loneliness: Matter and Mind (London: Routledge, 2022), and passim; The Philosophical Roots of Loneliness and Intimacy: Political Narcissism and the Problem of Evil (Springer Nature: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and passim; cf., Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 25, 29–30, 45, 52, 70, 86, 207, 248; and Corey Dyck, Kant and Rational Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2014), 67, 170, 204, 214–215. 14. Barker, Ernest, Greek Political Theory: Plato and His Predecessors (London: Methuen, 1960), 1–2. On Socrates influence on Plato, see Ernest Barker, The Political Theory of Plato and Aristotle (New York: Dover, 1959), 51 ff. 15. Cf., Hurley, Kyle, Kenoticism in Augustine and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. “Christ’s kenotic gesture is to completely empty his Spirit in becoming a man so as to humble himself to experience human suffering and even death in order to absolve mankind from their sins.” 16. The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett (New York: Random House, 1950), “Rebellion,” 283. 17. Barrett, William, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1990), 136, 174–175, 199, 244; Cf., Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Random House, 1968), 64. Just so, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. 18. Eliade, Mircea, A History of Religious Ideas: From Muhammed to the Age of Reforms, translated by Alf Hiltebeitel and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (University of Chicago Press, 1988), Volume 3, Section 255. 19. Copleston, Fredrick, A History of Philosophy: Augustine to Bonaventure (Garden City: NY: Doubleday & Co., 1959), Volume 2, Part I, 97–98;

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italics his. Interestingly, Copleston and Bertrand Russell engaged in a public debate on the existence of God with Copleston arguing on both metaphysical and moral grounds for his existence and Russell’s denial turning on agnostic grounds, British Broadcasting Company, January 28, 1948, and in April 1959. 20. Inge, William Ralph, The Philosophy of Plotinus (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), I, 20–21; cf., Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine, translated by L.  E. M.  Lynch (Toronto: Random House, 1967), 21–22, 56, 77–78, 105–111. The term “ecstasy” in Plotinus seems related to freedom with its transcendent meaning suggesting a “going beyond one’s self” (Inge, II, 142). And in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, “ek-stasis” also seems to mean “a standing outside,” “a beyond of one’s self,” “transcendently,” intentionally. 21. Brehier, Emile, The Philosophy of Plotinus (University of Chicago Press, 1967), 103. Cf., Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, opus cit., II, 406 ff; and Ben Mijuskovic, opus cit., The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments, 8–10. 22. Mijuskovic, Ben, “The Problem of Evil in Camus’s The Plague,” Sophia, 15:1 (1976). 23. Beck, L. J., The Metaphysics of Descartes: A Study of the Meditations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 43 note 4, 58 note 2, 202 note 2, 212. Augustine anticipates the cogito argument in his Contra Academicos. Cf., A. Boyce Gibson, The Philosophy of Descartes (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), 23 ff., 45, 55, 64, 78, 100, 146, 323, and S. V. Keeling, Descartes (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 31, 51–52, 58. 24. Gilson, opus cit., 41–42. Thus, Descartes in the Meditations. 25. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, translated by Elizabeth Haldane and G, R.  T. Ross (New York: Dover, 1955), Second Meditation, 155–156. Cf., Mijuskovic, Ben, “Descartes’s Bridge to the External World: The Piece of Wax,” Studi Internazionali di Filosofia, Volume 3 (1971); reprinted in Rene Descartes: Critical Assessments, edited by Georges Moyal (London: Routledge, 1996); II, 312–328. 26. Poulet, Georges, Studies in Human Time, translated by Elliott Coleman (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 59, and cf., Ben Mijuskovic, Consciousness and Loneliness: Theoria and Praxis (Leiden: Brill, 2018–19), 144–145. Part II, xxxvi.

CHAPTER 6

Time-Consciousness, Subjective Idealism, and Personal Identity

This chapter concentrates on the issue of the identity of the self, its temporality, its reflexive self-consciousness, and the classic problem of personal identity. Both Kantian commentators, Norman Kemp Smith and H. J. Paton, stress Kant’s philosophical debt to Leibnizian sources. In the Monadology, Leibniz emphasizes both the spontaneity of temporal acts of consciousness and its reflexive unity. Leibniz’s own involvement is traced to his role in The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, in which Clarke represents Newton on God’s absolute creation of an infinite Space and an eternal Time, while Leibniz argues in support of a humanly subjective and relative conception of time. In turn, this influenced both Kant’s discussions of time in the Aesthetic as a Newtonian intuitive time, as an immediate “pure form of sensibility,” while in the Analytic Kant credits spontaneity in creating an immanent time-consciousness through an elaborate and complex process, including a threefold a priori Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition, a Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination, and a Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept. The importance of this argument is that it transcendentally grounds the subjective reality of our personal identity. Leibniz’s position serves as an answer to Locke on personal identity. This chapter concentrates on the issue of the identity of the self, its temporality, its reflexive self-consciousness, and the classic problem of personal identity. Aristotle defines a substance as an entity that can exist independently from all other substances. In this sense, for Aristotle, both a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_6

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particular pencil and particular man qualify as individual substances. But for the metaphysical dualist tradition, for Plato’s psyche, Augustine’s soul, and Descartes’ cogito all three qualify as inviolable and purely rational mental substances. In other words, Plato, Augustine, and Descartes metaphysically sever the relation between mind and matter, thought and extension, as two completely standalone substances, whereas both Leibniz and Kant actively endow the mind with the power of epistemically contributing to our awareness of “the external world.” Thus, as we go forward, we shall see that both Leibniz and Kant are subjective idealists, that human awareness not only properly begins from within the mind, rather than from without, but that our knowledge of an “external world consisting of matter” is subservient to and dependent upon the activities of the mind. Nevertheless, we need to differentiate Leibniz’s monadic rationalism from Kant’s transcendental a priori synthetic version, which distinguishes between the phenomenal sphere of the mind and its relation to a noumenal transcendent—versus a transcendental—human “reality.” Both philosophers’ versions concentrate on what can be established on the assumption, on the principle, on the major premise that the self innately possesses the ability to act spontaneously. But the first difficulty will be that although Kant is influenced by Leibniz, he needs to separate his version of transcendental subjective idealism from Leibniz’s version of a purely rational monadic idealism. The second difficulty is that Kant shares Leibniz’s twin principles of the temporality of consciousness, as well as its unity, but he rejects the latter’s extreme one-sided monadic, essentially solipsistic idealism. Further, Kant, in the first edition of the Critique, in 1781, also needs to distance his subjective idealism from the dualist metaphysics of Plato, Augustine, and Descartes, but again also from Leibniz’s own version of subjective idealism but the problem is that he has “borrowed” too much and he has been too heavily influenced by the latter. The paralogistic criticisms in the first edition apply to the first three thinkers, but not to Leibniz. Both Kemp Smith and Paton interpret Kant as remaining essentially a Leibnizian epistemically, ethically, and spiritually. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Kant, under the influence of Leibniz, continued to regard reality as composed of monads, although he became convinced that the proofs advanced by Leibniz were fallacious, and indeed that knowledge of [ultimate noumenal] reality is unobtainable by man. If we assume some such belief to be at the back of Kant’s mind, it must be remembered that for Kant the conception of the monad has

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altered. His monads are not self-sufficient [as are Leibniz’s], and there is some sort of contact between the knower and the known. If the mind of man is a monad, it is not a windowless monad, but looks out through its windows at reality. Its windows, however, are not of transparent glass. As coloured glass imposes its colour on the objects seen, so the windows of our mind impose upon all objects sensed the forms of time and space, and it is only through these windows that we can be conscious even of ourselves.1 Accordingly, Kant’s version of an idealist transcendental subjectivity must be different from the traditional radical metaphysical dualisms of Plato, Augustine, and Descartes, but it also must vary from Leibniz’s theistic, monadic, solipsistic, idealist version as well. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the purpose of the Paralogisms for Kant is to demonstrate that the traditional rationalist conceptions and arguments for the soul, as an immaterial substance in Western thought, are inconclusive and fallacious, they are famously supported and predicated on five mistaken demonstrations, the four Paralogism in the A edition (1781) and the single B edition in 1787. Only then can Kant show the value of his own transcendental structures of immanent time-consciousness and the unity of self-consciousness against his famous predecessors. In following this train of thought, I shall begin with Leibniz, for it is Leibniz who first introduces us to the “internal” processes and the spectacle of human time-consciousness, as opposed to Newtonian “scientific time,” and actually to God’s ex nihilo creation of infinite Space and eternal Time, but it is Leibniz who will be the direct influence on Kant’s Analytic, with his threefold constitutive transcendental temporality, first as structured by his Synthetic Apprehension in Intuition, with its immediate imagery; second followed by the spontaneous Synthetic Reproduction in the Imagination, the imagination as both sensory and yet free; and third as followed by its successive cognitive Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept in the Analytic (Kant, Critique, A 99–104). By contrast, in the Aesthetic, time is intuitively given as an immediate form of “pure sensibility” (A 31 = B 46) more in conformity with Newton. And as we go forward, it will be Leibniz who is the positive foil against Locke, the antithesis to Locke, whom we have already discussed. In many ways, the eighteenth century is “the century of the imagination,” as it rivals pure reason, as it challenges the primacy of the abstractions of reason, and as it actively functions as the mediating link between sensuous imagery and conceptual thought in Kant. It is also worth

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mentioning that the term “aesthetics” derives from the ancient Greek; it denotes the immediacy, the “givenness’” of sensations and feelings. Obviously, however, time cannot be an immediate sensation or feeling. Sensations and feelings are immediate; but human time is an epistemic active flowing of self-consciousness itself. Again, by contrast for empiricism, although it is also the imagination that empirically causes “the association of ideas” epistemic principle, as it is passively “given” to consciousness, it simply appears. But once more, for empiricism, events “in” time are provided by the perception of observing the external motion of bodies moving through space. Kant’s transcendental Deduction is an indirect argument, but the guiding premise is that human self-consciousness is indubitable. If so, how is it possible? What are its conditioning factors? Kant begins by assuming that our self-consciousness is temporally structured, but what must we presuppose about both the elements and the activities that underlie our conscious states? What are its constitutive, as opposed to any externally caused, contents, that is, its images; its spontaneous acts; and its necessary and universal, a priori synthetic temporally structuring relations? Only if it can be shown how self-consciousness is temporally constituted, by exposing its transcendental underlying conditions, elements, acts, and structures, can we successfully demonstrate the reality of a unique selfhood, of an unshakable personal self-identity. (Later, by contrast, as we shall see, the Hegelian dialectic will trace a circular presuppositionless course in developing our reflexive self-consciousnesses (Phenomenology, Sense Certainty, Sections 90 ff. and Perception, Sections 111 ff.)). But in either case, whether it is Kant’s and/or Hegel’s idealisms, anything less can only entail that human loneliness is a meaningless paradox and that our brains are as impersonal as our computers. While Descartes is a dualist, Leibniz compliments himself as being the first subjective idealist. To be sure, his immaterial and active Monads are comparable to Descartes’ souls, Leibniz however introduces the factor of perceptual change but critically it “lies” within self-consciousness; his petites perceptions are not only continuously changing but more importantly they serve as the connecting elements, the mediating links in defining, in establishing the uniqueness of a temporal personal identity. As we have shown, there are two “times,” empirical time as consisting in the measurement of moving objects traveling through space and time as the immanent stream or flow of self-consciousness. Time as it continuously flows within our awakened human consciousness just as assuredly as our lungs continuously

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form breaths in our bodies as we live. We recall Thomas Wolff’s previous considerations regarding two different forms, aspects of time, “external” and “internal.” But let me begin with Professor Latta’s helpful commentary. In his extensive Introduction to Leibniz’s Monadology, he offers a penetrating analysis regarding Leibniz’s concept of freedom in the section sub-titled “Freedom is Spontaneity + Intelligence.” Our question: is time dependent on matter and motion or is it a spontaneous active creation of human self-­ consciousness? And is it both? Accordingly, Leibniz following Aristotle, regards freedom as consisting essentially in spontaneity and intelligence. But intelligence is not to be interpreted merely as the abstract understanding of pure self-­consciousness: it includes every degree of [imaged] perception and representation. There is thus an infinite variety of degrees [and continuities] of freedom, and no actual concrete substance is subject to an absolutely pure necessity…And as all Monads alike have spontaneity (for they unfold the whole of their life from within themselves), the degree of freedom belonging to any Monad depends on the degree of its intelligence…but the highest freedom accompanies the most perfect knowledge and God is the freest of beings, not because He always acts spontaneously from the necessity of his own nature, but because every act of His is determined by infinite wisdom to the best possible ends.2 Again, all forms of rationalism are predicated on the goal, on the purpose of achieving “final ends.” Further: As in other respects, Leibnitz represents the extreme antithesis to Newton, so in respect of philosophy he presents a striking contrast to Locke and his empiricism. He upholds thought as against the perception of the English school and in lieu of sensuous Being he maintains Being for thought to be the essence of truth just as Boehme at an earlier time upheld implicit truth. While Spinoza asserted the universality, the oneness of substance merely…Leibnitz, by means of his fundamental principle of [monadic] individuality, brings out the essentiality of the opposite aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy, existence for self, the monad, but the [self-conscious] monad regarded as absolute notion. (Hegel, Lectures, III, 325)

Once more, we are reminded of the perpetual episodic Battle between the Gods and the Giants. But it is Kant who is impressed the most by Leibniz’s train of argumentation. Leibniz’s commitment is both to the

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temporality and to the unity of consciousness, as together they command Kant’s attention. And vitally important are Leibniz’s twin theses that the Monad, qua substance, is both self-enclosed and actively self-contained, from which it follows that consciousness of time can only arise from within the mind. But it is a mind that is sui generis active, spontaneously active. 1. The [soul] Monad, of which we shall here speak, is nothing but a simple [i.e., immaterial active] substance…By ‘simple’ is meant without [physical] parts. 7. The Monads have no windows, through which anything could come in or go out. Accidents [i.e., the active predications attributed to the soul substance] cannot separate themselves from substances nor go about outside of them…Thus neither substance nor accidents can come into a Monad from outside. This is important precisely because if the Monad is absolutely, subjectively self-enclosed, then it means that all its monadic acts must spontaneously emanate, arise from within. It also signifies the complete exclusion of any external causes impinging from without or externally on the Monad. If nothing can enter the soul from external causes from without, and nothing can escape from within, then all monadic acts must arise, that is, can only spontaneously begin from within. In short, this is a complete repudiation of Locke’s meandering empiricism. 8. Yet the Monads must have some qualities [as opposed to extended material Epicurean quantities] otherwise they would not be existing things. And if simple [i.e., immaterial but active] substances did not differ in quality, there would be absolutely no means of perceiving any [temporal!] change in things. For what is in the compound can come only from [within] the simple elements it contains and the Monads, if they had no qualities, would be indistinguishable from one another, since they do not differ in quantity. [i.e., because they are immaterial; italics mine] Nota bene. It is the element of intrinsic qualitative differentiations that testifies to Leibniz’s principle of a personal identity, to a principle of monadic individuation, and a subjective self-enclosed loneliness. Metaphysically, the soul is all alone. What distinguishes each of us from each other are our unique qualities, not our quantities, not our bodies.

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Leibniz’s distinction between the “transcendental” categories of “quantity” and “quality,” which courses throughout the Monadology, will be the hallmark in Kant’s own subjective idealist distinction between the categories of the Axioms of Intuition (Critique, Quantity, A 162=B 202) and the Anticipations of Perception (Quality, A 166=B 207), as well as in Hegel’s own objective idealism, as it ponderously, stealthily, and dialectically immerses itself in Being by moving from Quality into Quantity in the Science of Logic, his crowning philosophical achievement. To reaffirm, both Kant and Hegel are proponents of the comprehensive and coherence theory of truth with its “doctrine of internal relations” and its compatibility in asserting “degrees of truth” (So, Bradley, Bosanquet, and Royce). 9. Indeed, each Monad must be different from every other. For in nature there are never two beings which are perfectly alike and in which it is not possible to find an internal difference grounded upon an intrinsic quality. (Leibniz’s Principle of Individuation, italics mine) It is our qualitative features and not our quantitative, that is, bodily features that define our unique identities. It is this distinction which anchors the uniqueness of personal identity. But notice, despite his solipsistic premise, Leibniz nevertheless simply assumes there are “two beings,” and even a multiplicity of other beings, although he offers no proof that there are other beings. That assurance and provision is simply left to the fecundity and beneficence of the Deity, and (presumably) it is also based on the consequent (apparent) interaction of the pre-established harmony instituted by God between separate Monads (Latta, pages 39 ff.). 10. I assume as admitted that every created Being…is subject to [perceptual, internal] changes [within self-consciousness] and further that this change is continuous in each. Consciousness of change must be both temporal and continuous, otherwise our personal identity could not be secured. It would mean that every time we awoke, we would be a different person. By contrast, we recall, in empiricism, time perceptually—not constitutively—consists in the physical measurement of the movement of objects traveling through space, it has nothing to do with self-consciousness but rather with distinct, that is, separate sensations. As I have argued, in our discussion of Locke, the term perception in empiricism means an observational awareness of

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some external object, some entity that is other than the self. But again, Leibniz’s epistemic, his personally cognized “changes,” are wholly internal, mental, reflexive; they are not empirically caused from without; and they are not susceptible to external physical changes because there is no “outside,” nor are they “outwardly observational” sightings; they are completely and internally “perceptual” and self-contained and therefore subjective. 11. It follows…that the natural changes of the Monads come from an [active] internal principle, since an external cause can have no influence upon their inner being. Thus, each Monad manifests a continuous personal identity. There is an essential and inescapable temporal “quality” to all human thought in each of us as assumed separate beings. 12. But, besides the principle of the [internal temporal] changes, there must be a particular [i.e., a personal, intimate] series of changes, which constitutes [but are not externally caused] so to speak, the specific nature and variety of the simple substances [i.e., the singular personal identity of the soul Monad]. 13.This particular [temporal] series of changes should involve a multiplicity in the [Monadic] unit or in that which is simple [i.e., within the immaterial, ideal, and active soul]. This constitutes Leibniz’s principle of the monadic unity of self-­ consciousness, as it anticipates Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception principle. 14. The passing condition, which involves and represents a multiplicity in the unit or in the simple [soul] substance, is nothing but what is called [a passive internal imaged] Perception, which is to be distinguished from [an active reflexive] Apperception [i.e., Self-Consciousness]. It thus follows that when (a) all the imaged elements of perceptive qualities are then, next (b) spontaneously unified within consciousness, epistemically the soul’s subjective idealism has been attained. Lastly,

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23. And as, waking from a stupor [in our dreams], we are conscious of our perceptions, we must have had [unconscious] perceptions immediately before we awoke, although we were not at all conscious of them; for one perception can in a natural way come only from another perception, as a [successive, continuous] motion can in a natural way come only from a motion.3 For Leibniz, the conception of space is defined as a set of internal relations appearing, as if holding spatially “apart,” between sensory petites perceptions, which appear as visual and tactile unextended points, as minima sensibilia. Space is the relational “order of co-existing things,” while time is the relational “order of the successive movement of things” and both occur and transpire within the immaterial simple, single Monad. Thus, Leibniz argues that space and time are the result of the mind’s active ordering, the arrangement of scattered visible points within the soul, while Newton argues that Space and Time are absolute “given” ontological universal “containers” created by God which exist in complete independence from human souls. But as Leibniz states: In order to prove that space, without bodies, is an absolute reality; the author [Samuel Clarke, Newton’s defender] objected that a finite material universe might move forward in space. I answered, it does not appear reasonable that the material should be finite; and though we should suppose it to be finite; yet ‘tis unreasonable it should have motion otherwise, then as its parts [relationally] change their situation among themselves; because such a motion would produce no change that could be observed [without a relative, relational frame of reference]. ‘Tis another thing, when its parts change their situation among themselves; for then there is a [relative] motion in space; but it consists in the order of relations which are changed. The author [Clarke] replies now that the reality of motion does not depend upon being observed; and that a ship may go forward, and yet a man may, who is in the ship, may not perceive it. I answer, motion does not indeed depend upon being observed, but it does depend upon being possible to be [subjectively] observed.4

If there were only one material point in reality, then neither motion nor time could be perceived. Simply put, in order for something to be a difference, it must make a difference. Interestingly, the Correspondence editor also comments that time presupposes space and I would assume matter as well. And he significantly applies the comment as relevant to Kant’s

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Critique and by implication time as well. Significantly, in all that follows time is rather the poor relation to space. This order of importance is reflected in Kant’s Dissertation and in the Transcendental Aesthetic. Part of the difficulty in understanding the Critique of Pure Reason derives from the reversal in emphasis which takes place between the Aesthetic and the Analytic. In the former, problems of space are to the fore, while in the latter it is almost exclusively time which is discussed (xxxiii, xlvi, xlviii). It is specifically this “reversal” which will be addressed in a forthcoming discussion. But for the moment, it is the conception of change that announces the temporal nature and flow of human consciousness, with its defining essence of succession. What is at stake in this passage is to preserve the soul’s personal, that is, unique moral identity. Obviously, no proof is offered by Leibniz that there really are other Monads. Leibniz simply assumes God created many souls, but they display the aforementioned apparent pre-established harmony, as coordinated by God. When I am self-conscious that I am speaking to you within myself, in the same moment “you” are conscious that you are listening to “me” but in reality, each of us is solipsistically, subjectively self-enclosed and completely alone. (See also Malebranche’s doctrine of “occasionalism,” wherein God is the real cause of our apparent interactions between the dualism of our body and our soul.) But notice above that in the ontological “order” of God’s creation of the universe, Space must precede Matter, and then Matter in Motion must precede Time. We have thus sought to punctuate the critical distinction in idealism between the qualitative elements in consciousness, as opposed to the reductively physical quantitative factors prevailing in materialism and empiricism. The former strongly serve and dominate in Leibniz’s Monadology. The critical importance of these radically opposed definitional principles between idealism and materialism cannot be overstated. But try to imagine how our current neuroscientists would undertake to resolve the distinction, the opposition between quantitative versus qualitative neurons in the brain, or the difference between spatial and temporal neurons? Can we distinguish spatial neurons from temporal ones? Thus, according to Leibniz, the temporal movement of these petites perceptions are the constitutive formative elements for the immanency of human time-­ consciousness. And while Locke and later Hume both deny the unconscious, as do all empiricists, Leibniz asserts it (Leibniz, Proposition 23 above). Presumably this is also the case with our dreams, which are temporally structured and will be highlighted in Freud as well. This

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implication of an unconscious activity will also strongly, epistemically influence Kant as we shall see.5 We recall that the soul must always think, a premise Leibniz shares with the Cambridge Platonists with both parties consequently committing to the immortality of the soul. And as we shall see, Kant, in the first edition Critique, will allude to an active unconscious force below self-conscious thought (Critique, A xvii), which in turn will be fully exploited by Schopenhauer’s “dynamic” subconscious—versus unconscious principle—of qualitas occulta. These distinctions will aid us in our later discussions concerning Schopenhauer, Freud, and Jung. Consequently, we can conclude that all three elements of Leibnizian dynamics, namely, the spontaneity of consciousness, its temporal succession, and its monadic unity strongly influenced Kant’s own conceptions of spontaneity, immanent temporality, and the unity of self-consciousness. In 1781, in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposes the spontaneity of an immanent time-consciousness, as the guiding major premise, as it sets the ground and pace, so to speak, for the entire Analytic, while also setting the stage as well for his comprehensive and internally coherent system of knowledge, his coherence theory of truth (Critique, A 990.6 Thus, so as well for Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Bradley, Blanshard, and H. D. Lewis, and so on, while the empirical correspondence theory of truth, by contrast, remains limited to particular facts at the cost of losing any possibility of deriving support by appealing to intrinsically relational unities, as is the case for Locke, Moore, Russell, Ayer, and company). Again, this is once more another critical extension of the Battle between the Gods and the Giants. If each representation were completely foreign to every other, standing apart in isolation, no such thing as knowledge [or reflexive self-­ consciousness] would ever arise. For knowledge is essentially a whole in which representations stand compared and connected [i.e., relationally synthesized] …But to such a synopsis a synthesis [i.e., a unity] must always correspond, receptivity can make knowledge possible only when combined with spontaneity. Now this spontaneity is the ground of a threefold synthesis which must necessarily be found in all knowledge [i.e., in all acts of human cognition], namely the [immediate] apprehension of representations as modifications of the mind in intuition [i.e., inner sense replete with images], their [temporal] reproduction in imagination [by serving in their formation of internally connected images], and their [self-conscious, reflexive, sustaining] recognition in a concept. These point to three subjective sources of knowledge which make possible the understanding

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itself—and consequently all [temporal] experience as its empirical product (Kant, Critique, A 97–98; cf., and A 99–104).7 But as we have shown, the problem with this first principle version is that in the Aesthetic, consciousness of time is relegated to the faculty of intuition, and therefore to immediacy; so either the immanence of mediating temporality (above) is redundant or it is conflicting. In addition, there is the problem of two “kinds,” two “forms” of time in Kant. In the Aesthetic, time is an immediate, a “universal pure form of sensibility,” an intuition; but in the Analytic, it is constituted—not caused or presented by external factors—as a mediate a priori synthetic imaged>reproductive> conceptual relation within self-awareness. We recall that in Newton, both Space and Time, as absolute metaphysical containers, presumably could continue to exist even if all sentient life were obliterated. But for both subjective and objective idealism, this is an inconceivable possibility. How could one prove it? How could a “pure” Newtonian completely immaterial eternity exist alone, and absolutely empty, even if God later elected to create material objects to populate Space and added motion to the objects in order to create Time. But in the second edition Deduction, Kant adopts Leibniz’s principle of the unity of self-consciousness. It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me. That representation, which can be given prior to all thought is entitled [sensuous] intuition. All the manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the ‘I think,’ in the same subject in which this manifold is found. But this representation is an act of spontaneity, that is it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility. I call it pure apperception, to distinguish it from empirical apperception, or, again original apperception, because it is that self-consciousness, which while [spontaneously] generating the representation ‘I think’…cannot itself be accompanied by any further representation. The unity of this apperception I likewise entitle the transcendental unity of self-consciousness in order to indicate the possibility of a priori [synthetic] knowledge arising from it. For the manifold representations, which are given in an intuition, would not be one and all my representations, if they did not all belong to one self-consciousness. As my representations (even if I am not conscious of them as such) they must conform to the [categorical] conditions under which alone they can stand together in one

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universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me (Critique, B 131–132). But in this new and alternative premise in the second edition Analytic, it is not the temporality of consciousness that leads us to the guiding path (A 99–104), but rather it is the unity of self-consciousness, the transcendental unity of apperception. But also notice the phrase “even if I am not conscious of them as such” thereby indicating the possibility, the conceivability of an unconscious sphere of unawareness, presumably below and conceivably independently of self-consciousness. This reference to an “unconscious” thought will soon engage us when we discuss Schopenhauer. This second replacement principle of the unity of self-consciousness supplants the original grounding premise of time-consciousness at Critique A 99–104, but it will be directly vulnerable to Kant’s own criticism of the Second Paralogism, Of Simplicity (A 352), as well as to his own postulation of the transcendental unity of apperception. Importantly, both the Paralogism at A 352 and the Analytic at B 131 reject metaphysical materialism, but at A 352, his criticism of (presumably) Leibnizian “monadic simplicity” compromises his own subsequent principle at B 131–132. Ever since Aristotle’s definition of philosophy as a search for first principles, thinkers have found it critically important to assert that their first principle to an argument must be indubitable and uncontested. This is the Achilles [the most powerful] of all dialectical inferences in the pure doctrine of the soul. It is no mere sophistical play, contrived by a dogmatist [i.e., a pure rationalist, e. g., a Cartesian] in order to impart to his assertions a superficial plausibility, but an inference which appears to withstand even the keenest scrutiny and the most scrupulously exact investigation. It is as follows. Every [material] composite substance is an aggregate of several [distinct, disunified] substances, and the action [i.e., the physical motion] of a composite, or whatever inheres in it as thus composite, is an aggregate of several actions or accidents, distributed among the [separate disunified] plurality [i.e., parts] of the substances. Now an effect that arises from the concurrence of many [physically] acting substances is indeed possible, namely when this effect is external only (as, for instance, the [material] motion of a body is the combined motion of all the parts). But with thoughts, as internal [immaterial] accidents [i.e., predicates] belonging to a thinking being, it is different. For suppose it to be the [material] composite that thinks: then every part of it would be a [distinct, separate, discontinuous] part of the thought, and only all of them taken together would contain the whole thought. But this cannot be

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consistently maintained. For representations (for instance, the single words of a verse), distributed among different beings, never make up a whole thought, and it is therefore impossible that a thought should inhere in what is essentially composite [and material as human bodies are] and are meaningless in themselves. It is therefore possible only in a single [ideal, immaterial] substance, which, not being an aggregate of many [material parts] is absolutely simple [i.e., immaterial, i.e., ideal] (A 352). In short, matter, being essentially composed of separate physical parts, cannot in principle be self-consciously unified and therefore thought, consciousness itself must arise, originate spontaneously from within an immaterial and active soul. For Kant, the setting for the Paralogisms is critical. He must discredit the entire history from Plato to Leibniz. Most commentators simply disregard their importance. Both the temporality and the unity of reflexive self-consciousness is the foundation of Kant’s transcendental subjective idealism. But he must first discredit all versions of the Augustinian soul, the Cartesian cogito, and the Leibnizian monadic soul before positing his own reality of a personal epistemic and an ethical a single identity. That is not to say that Leibniz was wrong but rather that Kant progressed no further. And both were right about the necessity of the temporalty and the unity of self-consciousness. But Kant apparently upon reflection during the intervening six years (1781) between the two editions of the Critique (1787) realized that his second edition principle for the unity of consciousness argument at B 131–132 was itself vulnerable to the Second Paralogism criticism and he elected to scrap and devalue the entirety of the first four Paralogisms of 1781, and since he could hardly delete their presence from the original first edition printed text, he replaced all four Paralogisms, the first dealing with the Cartesian substantiality of the soul (A 349), the second with the unity of consciousness (A 352), the third with the temporal essence of personal identity (A 362), and the fourth with the ideality of all human consciousness (A 367). Instead, in the second edition Paralogism (1787), he offers a new and a single fifth Paralogism this time dealing with the immortality of the soul based on Moses Mendelssohn’s defense of Plato’s Phaedo at B 414. In accounting for the motive in executing this serious and completely unexplained change, I follow Kemp Smith’s interpretation as he calls into question Kant’s alleged demonstration of a paralogistic “fallacy” in the Second Paralogism.

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Kant’s reply as given…is in effect to refer the reader to the results of the Analytic, and is formulated in the manner of his Introduction to the Critique. The principle that the multiplicity of representations presupposes absolute unity in the thinking subject can neither be demonstrated analytically from mere concepts nor derived from experience. Being a synthetic a priori judgment, it can be established only by means of transcendental deduction. But in that form, it will define only a condition required for the possibility of consciousness; it can tell us nothing in regard to the noumenal nature of the thinking being. And, as Kant argues, in the third Paralogism, there may be a possible analogy between thought and motion.8 In other words, not only Kant cannot disprove the Second Paralogism but indeed it may be applicable to his own B 131–132 version of the unity of consciousness. Nevertheless, as Kemp Smith notes, “This Paralogism is as Kant declares, ‘the Achilles of all the dialectical inferences in the pure doctrine of the soul,’ meaning that it may well seem a quite invulnerable argument” (page 458). If so, then the question becomes is it also then impermeable as an argument against Kant’s B 131–132? Initially, Kant’s Second Paralogism is designed to address and discredit the Leibnizian viability on the issue of personal identity as a “unity of consciousness.” But if we assume that Kant realized his Second Paralogism could be directed against his own positive formulation of the transcendental unity of apperception at B 131–132, then it appears that he elected to remove all four first edition Paralogisms altogether, and also to rewrite the entire second edition Deduction, but also to “dilute” the second edition Paralogism to the innocuous old warhorse of the immortality argument as well. To summarize, whereas Newtonian science assumes that both infinite Space and eternal Time are independent and absolute quasi-substances, that is, “containers” created by God, separately existing apart from human consciousness, by contrast Kant turns first to transcendentally acknowledging the temporal nature of self-consciousness (first Critique, A 99, above, in 1781) and only later in asserting its reflexive unity (second Critique, B 131–132, above, 1787). But obviously there can be no unity in human self-consciousness without the immanence of continuous, successive imaged contents. Therefore, Kant’s version of subjective idealism will have to relate and unify several constitutive elements within consciousness: (a) imaged sensory contents; (b) spontaneous acts creating, initiating the aspect of temporal change, succession within its encapsulation, and (c) its unification by a reflexive and unitary self-consciousness. “I am

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temporally self-aware of my unified thoughts.” This makes his transcendental argument radically different from the dualisms of Plato, Augustine, and Descartes but not the idealism of Leibniz. In the Aesthetic, time is an immediately given intuition, while in the Analytic the mediacy of temporality, of succession, is a spontaneous a priori, that is, a universal and necessary synthetic creation; it is actively earned—but not intuitively given—and it encompasses a flock of difficult entanglements as Kemp Smith proposes and accordingly Kant decides to switch from the temporality to the unity of consciousness principle in the second edition Deduction. But both temporality and unity must be a priori synthesized within our self-­consciousness and are required in critically establishing each of our own unique personal identities. Kant is absolutely right about that. Kant’s self-consciousness reflexivity must and does include both time-consciousness and the unity of consciousness. In sum, my point is that Kant’s paralogistic criticisms of the rationalist tradition as pertaining to the substantiality of the soul spanning a history from Plato through Augustine and to Descartes may undo that tradition, but it does not answer Leibniz. By contrast to my above interpretation, Professor Allison includes Leibniz as one of its violating members. By ‘rational psychology’ Kant means a metaphysical theory of the soul, mind or self which is based solely upon an analysis of its capacity to think or, equivalently, its presumed nature as a “thinking being”…This, in turn, is intended to provide a basis for a demonstration of its immortality, which is the ultimate goal of this “science.” Although it incorporates theses and arguments advanced by a number of other philosophers, most notably Leibniz, rational psychology as a whole is obviously a systematic extension of the Cartesian project.9 The Second Paralogism then according to Professor Alison can be readily dismissed in the interest of brevity and reduced to a mere ten lines. But this is quite misleading and superficial. As we have emphasized, Kant is concerned to discredit not only the old warhorse of an argument for immortality but also the “dogmatic” and rationalist arguments for the soul’s substantiality, its unity, its temporality, and its assumed ideality, and, in short, its entire Plotinian and Leibnizian foundations. But none of the Kantian commentaries I am aware of explain (a) why Kant deleted the first edition Paralogisms; (b) added the completely rewritten second edition single Paralogism by substituting an innocuous criticism of Moses Mendelssohn’s version of Plato’s Phaedon on the immortality of the soul; and (c) then also added the second edition

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Analytic Deduction under the hallmark of the “transcendental unity of apperception.” My explanation is that Kant realized that Leibniz’s twin principles of temporality and unity were already expressed in the Monadology and he was only repeating his predecessor’s arguments as related to the Second Paralogism and Third Paralogism. In sum, the Paralogisms were written by Kant to dismiss the entire previous history of rationalist, theological, philosophical, and doctrinal discussions and arguments supporting the immateriality of the soul in Western thought from Plato through Augustine, Descartes, Malebranche, the Cambridge Platonists, and Leibniz, basically the path of the Christianized soul as it enjoyed relatively clear sailing. But when Kant reflected on Leibniz’s subjective idealist version in the Monadology, on both its temporality and its unity, he realized his Second Paralogism, Of Simplicity, applied as well to his own transcendental unity of apperception at B 131–132. And he decided to abandon all four Paralogisms in the first edition of 1781, but especially the Second Paralogism, Of Simplicity in order to deflect attention to the problem by substituting a red herring, namely, the second edition’s single Paralogism, which merely invalidates the proof for the immortality of the soul as provided in Mendelssohn’s version of Plato’s Phaedo, again that old warhorse of an argument. In short, Kant misdirected the entire problem and basically swept it under the philosophical rug. But why wouldn’t Kant simply acknowledge his dilemma or seek to emend his mistake either in the second edition Deduction or in the second Paralogism section? According to Kemp Smith’s commentary, Kant was extraordinarily inconsistent as a writer, as he invokes the so-called patchwork thesis of Eric Adickes and Hans Vaihinger regarding Kant’s writings. And it is important to remember that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is translated by Kemp Smith and it reputationally stands much stronger than the Max Mueller version. Indeed, the legend prevails that German Kant scholars learned English in order to read Kant in English because it made more sense. Seldom, in the history of philosophy, has a work been more conscientiously and deliberately thought out, or more hastily thrown together than the Critique of Pure Reason…What is much more serious, is that Kant flatly contradicts himself in almost every chapter; and that there is hardly a technical term which is not employed by him in a different and conflicting sense. As a writer, he is the least exact of the great thinkers…It can now be proved that the Critique is not a unitary work, and that in the five months

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in which, as Kant tells us, it “was brought to completions” it was not actually written but pieced together by the combination of manuscripts written at various dates throughout the period 1769–1780 (Kemp Smith, Commentary) xix–xx. Paton, in his turn, is offended by this claim and regards that “It is a scandal to philosophical scholarship, and not the least German philosophical scholarship, that, more than a hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Kritik, we still lack an [adequate] commentary” (opus cit., 15). But beyond all that, I have a deeply vested interest in the issue of Personal Identity, as the most critical History of an Idea in its own right and as the main focus of this text. And in addition, I believe it supports my previous study, Metaphysical Dualism, Subjective Idealism, and Existential Loneliness. We recall that in Chapter III, Professor Chomsky reiterated with approval that Descartes claimed to have explained the phenomena of the material world in mechanistic terms, while, demonstrating that mechanical philosophy is not all-encompassing, not reaching to the domain of mind—again pretty much in accordance with the common-sense dualistic interpretation of one’s self and the world around us. (footnote 5)

And Hume from his empirical vantage point asserted the same. But finally, I would forcefully add that however we read the first edition Paralogisms, they all five follow Leibniz’s edict that what distinguishes each person’s unique personal identity, are the qualitative factors and not our empirical and Lockean bodily senses.

Notes 1. Paton, H. J., Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience: A Commentary on the first Half of the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), I, 183. Often in teaching students Kant’s philosophy, it is aided by asking them to imagine putting on a pair of blue glasses. The structural, relational categories are like wearing a pair of blue glasses. The blueness represents the categories. For both Descartes and Sartre, by contrast consciousness is translucent and clear; cf., also Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), xxxii–xxxiii. 2. Leibniz: The Monadology and Other Writings, translated with an Introduction by Robert Latta (Oxford University Press, 1968), 145–146, italics mine. On

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Hegel’s discussion of Aristotle’s conception of spontaneous activity, which includes dynamis (potentiality), energeia (actuality), and entelecheia (completion); in Hegel, it is always developmental, dialectical; see again Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, translated by E.S. Haldane and Frances S. Simson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), II, 138–139; also cited in the previous chapter. We shall expand on this critical theme as we pursue our discussions on the concept of spontaneity in relation to the innateness of human freedom. 3. On Leibniz’s influence on Kant, see Latta, 168 ff., 208 ff.; “The doctrines of Leibniz formed the permanent atmosphere of Kant’s mind,” 172, note 2, as well as later on Fichte’s philosophy, 178. Cf., Charles Sherover, The Human Experience of Time: The Development of Its Philosophic Meaning (New York University Press, 1975), on Leibniz, 105–109 and on Kant, 109–111; and cf., Julia Von Bodelschwingh, “Leibniz on Concurrence, Spontaneity, and Authorship” in 17th Century Free Will: Historical and Analytic Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Interestingly, Hume, an empiricist, also recruits the minima sensibilia; cf., Ben Mijuskovic, “Hume on Space and Time,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 15:4 (1987), 387–394; reprinted in David Hume: Critical Assessments, edited by Stanley Tweyman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1994), 167–175; and B. M. Laing (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 106, 112–113. 4. The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, edited by H.G. Alexander (Manchester University Press, 1956), xxv ff., 73–74.; Cf. Wolff, Robert Paul, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 4–8. 5. Mijuskovic, Ben, “The Simplicity Argument and the Unconscious: Plotinus, Cudworth, Leibniz and Kant,” Philosophy and Theology, 20:1 (2008–09), 53–83. 6. Kemp Smith, Norman, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), on Kant’s coherence theory, see xxxvii–xxxiii, 36 ff. 7. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1929), A 99; cf., 99–104; cf. Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, The Philosophical Roots of Loneliness and Intimacy: Political Narcissism and the Problem of Evil (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2022), Chapter 1, “Time Consciousness, Personal Identity and Loneliness.” 8. Kemp Smith, Norman, Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (New York: Humanities Press, 1962) 458. 9. Allison, Henry, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 283.

CHAPTER 7

The Philosophical Application of the Concepts of Freedom, Spontaneity, and Genius in Various Contexts

This chapter offers an extended discussion on Kant’s ethics in the Critique of Practical Reason and how the concept of spontaneity influenced his a priori synthetic threefold categorical imperative and his aesthetic Critique of Judgement as well as the theories of Fichte, Schiller, and Hegel. I now wish to continue tracing, in a History of Ideas fashion, the concepts of freedom, spontaneity, and genius (or inspiration) but more specifically as they serve in ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic contexts in opposition to the strictures of scientific determinism. There is a common saying in philosophy that you can argue with Kant or against him, but you cannot argue without him. I agree. For Kant, not only is spontaneity critically important in his epistemic system, but it also plays a vital role in both his ethical and aesthetic Critiques. We have already discussed his recruitment of spontaneity in relation to its epistemic involvement as embedded within his theory of an internal time-consciousness and the unity of consciousness and now we can address its role within its ethical context for it is the spontaneous acts of the will, in its positing of subjective human intentions, that creates the threefold doctrine of his moral commands. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant’s categorical imperative initiates three distinct spontaneous acts with each responsible for creating a mutually supportive triad of comprehensively interrelated a priori synthetic moral principles, ethical commands based on his presupposition that a noumenal realty is conceivable, that is, a possibility without © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_7

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involving a self-contradiction.1 But, in the Preface to the second edition Critique of Pure Reason, he announces, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith” (Critique, B xxx). The moral principle lies in the will’s pure intentionality. “In such a will, however, the complete fitness of intentions to the moral law is the supreme condition of the highest good.” It is the spontaneity of intentions, of willing that confirms the will’s goodness, Kant’s categorical, that is, its unconditional moral imperative. While the spontaneous transcendental epistemic application remains operative in the first Critique, the postulated freedom of the will rules ethically in the Critique of Practical Reason. Synthetically it envelops three distinct intentions.2 To paraphrase Kant. First, always act so that the subjective maxim of your action (i.e., your will) can spontaneously create a universal rule (i.e., an objective law) for all rational beings in any conceivable universe. (Kant considered the possibility that there might be other rational creatures in the universe.) The synthesis is constituted from within—not caused from without—by an a priori relation connecting the spontaneity of the subjective will to the objective law along with its intentionality toward goodness as opposed to evil. The intentional act of the will to do good lies in its freedom to create goodness, that is the controlling ethical principle, it is the criterion. Kant’s ethic is deontological; the faculty of reason should be intrinsically, intentionally good; an act is virtuous only if its intention is to do good. This conception of duty to others is not unrelated to the deontological principle of the Stoics, to which Kant’s principle was favorably compared. Second, always act so that the subjective maxim (i.e., your will) of your action is to treat all other rational beings as ends in themselves possessing intrinsic worth and never as a means for your own selfish or utilitarian ends. Third, when you apply the moral law to yourself, and obey your own law, then you are both sovereign and subject and therefore free: principle of reflexive self-consciousness. This echoes Rousseau’s principle of freedom: autonomy is spontaneously active, while the law remains reflexively relational, it is a mediate command unifying the will with the law. It synthetically relates the subjective will to the objective moral law. Its intentionality is to bind its spontaneous acts to the moral as its “final cause.” But even in the midst of his moral reflections, Kant takes advantage of the opportunity in connecting the act of spontaneity with his epistemic thoughts by confirming his dedication to the coherence theory of truth.

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Reason must therefore conceive the totality of causes for any given event, and this totality of causes, because it is a totality, cannot itself be caused. So, we come to the necessary Idea of an unconditioned or uncaused cause, a spontaneous action which produces effects, but it is not caused to do so by anything external to itself. The concept of such an unconditioned absolute spontaneity is the transcendental [transcendent?] Idea of freedom, a concept not of pure understanding but of pure reason. (Paton, IX Appendix, Section 4, page 99) Clearly, the concept of spontaneity performs a “double duty,” a dual role, sometimes it is epistemic, transcendental, as in the Critique of Pure Reason, and at other times it is ethical, noumenal, and transcendent, as in the Critique of Practical Reason. Again, this last formulation, the principle of autonomy, is borrowed from Rousseau. For Kant, his religious faith is expressed in “postulating,” in assuming three noumenal realities: the existence of God; the freedom of the will as a “noumenal spontaneous causation”; and the immortality of the soul. But Kant’s three metaphysical assumptions are separable. For example, an existentialist can affirm the freedom of the will without committing either to the existence of God or the immortality of the soul, for example, Camus and Sartre. For Kant and for Christianity in general, it is the encapsulating principle of deontological intentions, of duties to aid others that is the ruling criterion. By contrast, according to Bentham’s ethical principle of utilitarianism, it is the empirical consequences that determine the moral value, the criterion lies in the measurable and determinable quantity of physical pleasure over pain achieved; or in Mill’s utilitarianism, the criterion rests in the amount of measurable mental happiness or unhappiness produced, for “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” However, as it has been frequently pointed out, the difficulty is that happiness, as a quality, is not quantitively measurable. How does one measure the quality of pleasure prevailing in an adult in comparison to the pleasures of a child? For Kant, spontaneity not only rules epistemically and ethically, but aesthetically as well, for it is Baumgarten who alerts him to the study of art in his unfinished text, Aesthetica (1748–1750), as it influences Kant in his use of the principle of spontaneity, as it also operates in the Critique of Judgment, his critique of aesthetic taste, through its determination of the value of beauty as opposed to plainness. If we seek the result of the preceding analysis, we find that everything that runs up into this concept of [aesthetic] taste—that it is a faculty for judging an object in reference to the imagination’s free conformity to law.

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Now, if in the judgment of taste the imagination must be considered in its freedom, it is in the first place not regarded as [causally] reproductive, as it is subject to the [empirical] laws of association, but as productive [i.e., creative] and spontaneous (as the author of arbitrary forms of possible intuition) [i.e., imagery, parentheses his].3 Again, in many ways, the eighteenth century is the age of the productive, the creative imagination—as opposed to the empiricist’s merely mechanical “association of ideas principle”—as it challenges the abstractions of metaphysical dualism and the traditionally empty concepts of pure reason. Once more, for Kant, the imagination is both sensuous and yet free. But whereas Kant’s categories of the understanding apply universally and necessarily in epistemic judgments, by contrast no painter seeks to repetitively reproduce the same aesthetic creations over and over again. Even Monet’s haystacks are presented in different lights. It would be an abdication of the artist’s creativity to repaint the same images. Unlike the restrictive unifying categories of the understanding, the spontaneity of artistic creation and expression has no boundaries. Following Kant, Friedrich Schiller similarly raises the banner that humanity must first learn to spontaneously secure the value of Beauty, as an absolute ethical commitment before it can be recruited into servicing the goals of our “political freedoms,” and further by demonstrating that it is necessary to prepare for a “true conception of art by first developing a deeper sense of the beautiful.”4 Similarly, for Fichte, in agreement with Kant’s epistemic use of spontaneity, art animates, energizes, and unifies the presented imagery in consciousness through the imagination. And all art intrinsically strives for originality through self-expression. However, we shall not merely argue here, but will cite the words of Kant himself. At B 132 he says: “But this representation, ‘I think’ is an act of spontaneity, that is, it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility.” Hence not to [intuitive] inner sense either, I would add, which is where the above-described identity of consciousness assuredly belongs. “I call it pure apperception, to distinguish it from empirical perception.5 Further, it is the imagination, not the will that carries the self forward. We know well enough that the thing comes into being surely through an action in accord with these laws, that it is nothing else but the totality of these relations unified by the imagination, and that all these relations together constitute the thing; the object is surely the original synthesis of all these concepts. (page 23 and passim)

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Empiricism depends on the principle of external causality, but for Kant and Fichte, it is the internal constitutive acts of the productive imagination, which has the virtue of being both sensory and free, as Fichte emphasizes throughout the Science of Knowledge. Spontaneity requires an internal force, and it is the imagination that provides the requirement. Thus, We can now see perfectly, how the self is able to determine its [imaged] passivity through and by means of its activity, and how it can at once both be active and passive. It is determinant, insofar as it posits itself, through absolute spontaneity…[And] it is determinate, insofar as it is regarded as posited in this particular [self-conscious] sphere, without regard for the spontaneity of the posting as such. We have discovered the original synthetic act of the self, whereby the proposed contradiction is resolved, and have thus alighted on the new synthetic concept. (page 135)

And: It was the spontaneity of the human mind which brought forth, not only the object of reflexion—those very possibilities of thought, though according to the rules of an exhaustive, synthetic system—but also the form of reflexion, the act of reflexion itself. (page 198)

For Fichte, without spontaneity values in general could not exist nor could personal responsibility be assessed and determined. While recalling the opening passage to Chap. 5, citing Professor Eliade’s phrase of a “creation ex nihilo,” we find Fichte emphasizing the concept of spontaneity repeatedly throughout the Science of Knowledge in multiple contexts. If we inquire how far-reaching such a comprehensive spontaneity might extend and reach in Fichte, we only need to consult Jon Mills. For Fichte (1794), the father of German Idealism, the absolute self-­ positing self was a pure assertion—I! Schopenhauer (1818) was so enamoured with the I that he believed it was the foundation for all that which is both determined and that which is determining, thus in The World as Will and Representation—the fundamental reality is will, a will that suffers. And as we have seen, Hegel meticulously argues that Geist is a self-­ articulating process of becoming: essence must [imaginatively] appear in order for anything to exist, and hence to be made actual.6 In turn, “it is the freedom of the productive imagination that secures the synthesis between images and thought” (ibid., 20, 130, 150, 186–168,

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188, 193, 207 and passim). And Mills further extends and traces the Freudian unconscious from Hegel’s “abyss” in two closely related studies. Consequently, Hegel’s notion of madness in the afflicted soul similarly hinges on both the dialectical and the dynamical struggle that ensues in the troubled soul as it struggles between desire and reason, thus once again emphasizing the conflict within the self to gain mastery over the mind’s experiences of pain, distress, despair, and suffering. The abyss is an imagined primeval, feral state of madness, “the ground without a ground.”7 Thus, Mills masterfully summarizes the dynamic roles and the agency of the unconscious as it plays throughout our lives. 1. Hegel provides a coherent and surprisingly well articulated theory of the unconscious which becomes a pivotal concept in his entire philosophy of Spirit; 2. The unconscious is the foundation for conscious spiritual life that 3. plays a role in both mental health and illness; 4. Because all mental life has its genesis in unconscious processes, the [dark unfathomable] abyss maintains an ontological priority in the very constitution of [Hegelian] Spirit; 5. Conscious human development is the modification of unconscious structure; 6. Having its origins in the unconscious soul [i.e., “the feeling soul” in the Philosophy of Mind], reason is the exalted dialectical growth of desire; 7. Although the unconscious undergoes a dialectical evolution, it is never fully sublated [i.e., overcome, transcended], remaining a [suppressed] repository where failed or diseased shapes of Spirit return; and 8. Hegel’s theory of the unconscious anticipates and parallels Freud’s discoveries in many remarkable ways; thus, his theory is of significance for psychoanalysis today. (pages 15–16) But as Mills perspicaciously points out, the origins and roots of the unconscious lie deeply embedded in the psyche, in the works of Plotinus, Proclus, and Neoplatonism, and especially in the mystical Christian texts of Jakob Boehme and his insistence on quality over quantity (Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, III, 188–216), as well as Fichte’s Science of Knowledge and Schelling’s writings.8 In a later chapter, we shall turn to Freud’s psychoanalytic dynamic principle and its relation to political narcissism, sadism, and societal destructions.

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By contrast, contemporary linguists and analytic philosophers critically fail to realize that human consciousness is radically different from language. What they miss is the role of the spontaneity and pregnancy of human thought and the viability of the imagination. Even higher order animals are perfectly capable of thinking and imagining without words. The use of words and the free implementation of thoughts are very different enterprises. Language is a tool, an instrument for communication, just as mathematics is. But when I try to “share” my feelings, images, meanings, judgments, and meandering thoughts with another human being through language and written symbols, it cannot be done. Something is always lost in translation. Words are beggars in the Kingdom of the Imagination. Interestingly, the spontaneity of the imagination sometimes undertakes to play some puzzling tricks with us. Consider the Gestalt example of the silhouetted assemblage of dots that compose the outlines of either a duck or a rabbit. Some subjects “see” the duck and others the rabbit and a few “see” both meanings. The sensory data is the same for all three subjects, but it isn’t simply the visual aspects that are cognitive but the meanings of what is imaginatively “seen.” A similar puzzle is offered by Thomas Kuhn’s The Structures of Scientific Revolutions, in which both the astronomical Ptolemaic geocentric and the Copernican heliocentric paradigms offer the same scientific data of astral predictions but obviously the paradigms mean very different things concerning “reality” of our stellar universe. But clearly, the difference emanates from their radically different spontaneity.

Notes 1. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Lewis White Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956). 2. Beck, Lewis White, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (University of Chicago Press, 1960); on spontaneity, freedom, and evil, cf., 177, 188–189, 194 ff., 203, 224 227; and cf., H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 142–143; see also H. J. Paton, Immanuel Kant Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, translated and analyzed by H.  J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 98–99, 104; and as Paton points out, the criterion of ethical universality also demonstrates that the egoist cannot simply will to lie whenever it is to his advantage because if his maxim is universally applied, that each person should lie when it is to their advantage, then no one would believe them; it would be self-defeating; cf., pages 97 ff., 100–101, 111–112, 118, 119–120; and cf., Immanuel Kant, Foundations of

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the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Lewis White Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959), 66–67; and cf., T.  C. Williams, The Concept of the Categorical Imperative: A Study of the Place of the Categorical Imperative in Kant’s Ethical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press) 26–27, 50–51, 101–103. 3. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, translated by J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), Section 22; originally published in 1790, thus from at least 1781 to 1790, Kant remained committed to the concept of spontaneity; cf., also Paton, opus cit., 144. As a parenthetical note, within the context of the History of Ideas discipline and in regard to aesthetic principles, R. G. Collingwood, an erstwhile promoter of Hegelian idealism, offers that within the purview of the History of Ideas, there are three stages of dialectical progression in the principles of art. In Plato and Aristotle, the aesthetic principle derives from imitation; for Kant, it is the imagination; and for Croce it originates in our subjective modes of intuitive expressions, as impregnated by Hegel’s historical version of aesthetics; cf., Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic, translated by Douglas Ainsley (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), 136, 297 ff. 4. Schiller, Friedrich, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, translated by Reginald Snell (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1965), Letters 22 and 23. 5. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, The Science of Knowledge, translated by Peter Heath (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), 49. Cf. Ben Mijuskovic, “Loneliness and Narcissism” that focuses on Fichte in the Psychoanalytic Review, 66:4 (1979–80), 479–492. 6. Mills, Jon, Underworlds: Philosophies of the Unconscious from Psychoanalysis to Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2014), 71. 7. Mills, Jon, The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis (Albany, NY: State of New  York Press, 2002), 14. Interestingly, another author copiously quoting Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind concerning the “feeling soul” points out how spontaneity also plays a key role in madness and loneliness. “In melancholy or ‘madness proper,’ the individual is imprisoned in the fixed idea of the loathsomeness of life, and constantly broods over its unhappy idea, to the exclusion of all else becoming unable to rise to spontaneous thought and action.” Cf., Daniel Berthold-Bond, Hegel’s Theory of Madness (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1995), 30, as we realize how consistently unpredictable and freewheeling the a priori synthetic relation between narcissism and madness is. Berthold-Bond’s deep study offers a powerful insight into the complex intricacies playing out between narcissism, loneliness, and madness. The very essence of psychosis is spontaneity and loss of self-control and even self-identity. Spontaneity is the last desperate attempt to avoid loneliness by creating an untethered “reality.” In turn, Freud as we know avoided treating psychotics for obvious reasons. 8. Mills, Jon, Origins: On the Genesis of Psychic Reality (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2010), 41 ff., 61–62.

CHAPTER 8

On the Distinction Between the Ought and the Is, Values and Facts, and Ethics and Science

Hume, an empiricist, in A Treatise of Human Nature, distinguishes two forms of objective judgments, factual and ethical. He belongs to the “moral sense” school of thinkers, including Burke, Hutcheson, and Shaftesbury. By contrast, Kant grounds his moral criterion, his categorical imperative, in a purely a priori act, an intentional act of doing one’s duty toward others. Thus, Hume posits a moral sentiment, a feeling of sympathy and pity toward others of his kind. It is grounded in a sense common to all mankind, embedded in the realization that human beings are fundamentally social and suffer from loneliness. By contrast, the empirical utilitarian thinkers, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill base their criterion on consequences, as opposed to intentions, Bentham on measurable physical pleasures and Mill on “happinesses,” “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Most significantly, I follow Max Weber’s admonition that science is constitutionally incapable of putting forth any ethical principles or judgments. In his “Science and Politics as a Vocation,” he bluntly states that both are constitutionally unfit to settle questions of value and hence questions of meaning for personal existence. The author agrees and follows by supporting Sartre’s principle that man is existentially free, indeed “condemned” to freely choose his values from an infinite variety of possibilities. We have already discussed Kant’s criterion of an active ethical principle of freedom, as based on acts of transcendent (or transcendental) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_8

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spontaneity, which is followed by his categorical imperative, a “pure” intentional duty of doing good for the sake of others. In contrast to Kant, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, as empiricists, are classed as “utilitarians,” the criterion resides in the consequences rather than the intentions. For Jeremy Bentham, it is the quantity of physical pleasure produced, while for Mill it is the “quality” of “happiness” produced, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” But obviously happiness as a quality is a highly indeterminate and completely subjective criterion, as a measure, as a “scientific” criterion, it is worthless because both Bentham and Mill bypass the ethical “oughtness” of the issue. Morality is about the “goodness” and the “evil” of human values, as opposed to feelings of pleasure and happiness. For example, imagine a motorist whose vehicle breaks down and a good Samaritan stops and helps him by repairing the problem and the motorist goes on his way only to have a terrible accident. The consequences are awful, but we wouldn’t blame the Samaritan. All of which brings us to the Is and Ought distinction. Like Bentham and Mill, Hume is an empiricist (and he actually expresses some early utilitarian undertones) but importantly before Kant and Mill he proposes an alternative empirical ethical principle, which is grounded in a general rule embedded in our commonly shared human nature, in a sentiment of sympathy, as opposed to Kant’s purely formal rule. But like Kant, Hume separates judgments of value, as distinct from judgments of fact, as he endorses the Ought versus the Is dichotomy. Consequently, unlike utilitarianism, it follows that kindness, as a value, is a quality and not a quantity. It is not quantifiable or measurable either in terms of intensive degrees or extensive dimensions. A child’s act of kindness is not quantifiably “more” or “less” intense or expansive than an adult’s, as is the case in the dual criteria invoked in the two brands of utilitarianism, physical pleasure in Bentham’s and happiness in Mill’s case. Neither pleasure nor happiness admit of degrees of “oughtness”; either you should or you should not do an act. To attempt to apply numbers to values is like comparing colors to sounds. Accordingly, Hume proposes: In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of God or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpiz’d to find that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not. This change is

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i­mperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.1 Hume

According to Hume, ‘Judgments of value’ appear to be objective in some important sense in which [the passions of] love and hate are not. Objectivity consists in taking into account those features of a situation which would be common to any spectator. Hume’s answer to the rationalists consists in his attempt to show how the objective point of view can be accounted for in terms of well-­ known human motives, which operate in our understanding as well as in practical [i.e., moral] affairs. There is no need to appeal to a special faculty of reason to account for this. In fact the motive behind objective judgment can be seen to belong to our passions as much as any other motive. ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.’ Even if the ‘ought’ is taken to be rhetorical, the ‘is’ must be taken seriously.2

Hume’s empirical moral sense theory, with its determining principle and criterion, is embedded in our commonly shared general sentiments of particular feelings of sympathy for others, as well as in our “naturally” induced shared feelings of approbation or censure, which are engrained in the immediacy of our human sentiments, whereas by contrast Kant’s criterion of an ethical categorical imperative is anchored in rational a priori synthetic commands. But according to Hume, morality rather resides in our general capacities as human beings, as, for example, in our naturally inclined sentiments in approving a mother’s inclination to care for her child and criticizing her neglect. Consequently, Hume is seeking to complement Newton’s success in the natural sciences with a corresponding empirical reading of our common human nature, and what Newton so successfully accomplished in the study of physical nature, Hume seeks to establish in the realm of our social intercourses and interventions. Such an achievement would at the same time constitute a refutation of Hobbes’ moral skepticism and relativism. Thus, Hume seeks to establish both his principle and his arguments as empirically grounded, whereas Kant’s principle is rationally “postulated,” but both recognize the distinction between the Ought and the Is and both concur in an identical conclusion, namely, that moral values and

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distinctions are real. Again, the target of Hume’s praise with regard to mankind’s benevolent inclinations toward his fellow man is directed against Hobbes’ counter principle, which is also psychologically general but based on mankind’s instinctual and egoistic motivations of self-­ preservation and self-interest. Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every other man, the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal…and the life of man shall be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Leviathan, Chapter XIII). For Hobbes, human existence is essentially, as he states, “a war of all against all.” And because the condition of man, as hath been declared in the precedent chapter, is a condition of war of everyone against everyone, in which case everyone is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth, that in such a condition every man has a right to everything; even to one another’s body (Chapter XIV). In short, Hobbes’ reading of our common human nature is that it is egoistic and dangerous. By contrast, Hume joins with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson’s moral sense doctrine against Hobbes’ view of man.3 Accordingly, as Hume declares: So far from thinking, that men have no affection for anything beyond themselves, I am of opinion, that tho’ it be rare to meet with one, who loves any single person better than himself; yet ‘tis as rare to meet with one, in whom all the kind affections, taken together, do not over balance the selfish. (Hume, Treatise, 487)

Thus, he affirms that mankind as a whole experience sympathy and pity for the less fortunate and in that regard feelings of tenderness prevail, as we realize that it is society in general that makes us perceptually—but not rationally, not reflexively—reflect on both our common heritage and our underlying human bonds. Nevertheless, it is because of our natural sense of loneliness that we are encouraged to reach out to others of our species. The best method of reconciling us to this [moral] opinion is to take a general survey of the universe and observe the force of sympathy thro’ the whole animal creation and the easy communication of sentiments from one being to another. In all creatures that prey not upon others and are

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not agitated with violent passions, there appears a remarkable desire of company, which associates them together, without any advantages they can ever propose to reap from their union. This is still more conspicuous in man, as being the creature of the universe, who has the most ardent desire of society, and is fitted for it by the most advantages. We can form no wish, which has not reference to society. A perfect solitude is, perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer. Every pleasure languishes when enjoy’d apart from company, every pain becomes more cruel and intolerable (Hume, Treatise, 362–363). Interestingly, Hume also believes that the moral sense can be damaged by bad experiences, just as the eye can be injured by harmful exposures. Ethical values literally reside in a moral sense, it is virtually a sixth sense, as a mother’s love for her child. And Hume’s sentiments are but an echo of Edmund Burke’s similar affirmation in Section XI, titled Society and Solitude, as it highlights the powerful aspect of loneliness in human intercourse. The second branch of the social passions is that which administers to society in general. With regard to this, I observe, that society, merely as society, without any particular heightenings [i.e., advantages], gives us no particular pleasure in the enjoyment; but absolute and entire solitude, that is, the total and perpetual exclusion from all society, is as great a positive pain as can almost be conceived.4 We recall once more Aristotle’s ancient political admonition that The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore, he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient unto himself, must be either a beast or a god; but he is no part of a state. (Politics, 1253a, 25–30)

The theme of loneliness is further deepened in Shaftesbury, by whose writings Hume was heavily influenced. How wretched it must be, therefore, for man, of all creatures, to lose that sense and feeling, which is proper to him as a man, and suitable to his character and genius? How unfortunate it must be, for a creature whose dependence on society is greater than any other, to lose that natural affection, by which he is prompted to the good of his species and community? Such indeed is man’s natural share of this affection, that he, of all creatures, is plainly least able to bear solitude. Nor is anything more apparent

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than that there is naturally in every man such a degree of social affection as inclines him to seek the familiarity and friendship of his fellows.5 By contrast, for the metaphysical theories of materialism promoted by Hobbes, and later in partnership with the epistemic behavioral doctrines of psychology, including classical behaviorism, cognitive behaviorism, and our current neurosciences collectively, for whom all “values” are contingent and particular but neither universal (Kant) nor general (Hume), all Oughts and Values are meaningless. Rather they are restricted to our contingent, factual, secondary, and immediate subjective feelings, which are in turn always reducible in the last analysis to physical pain and pleasure. They are strictly variable and relative to the individual, as they vary from person to person, from time to time, and culture to culture dependent as they are on the particularity of our surrounding circumstances and the vagaries regarding the vicissitudes of our self-interest. But importantly and positively for the proponents and defenders of our anthropologically oriented “scientists” of human nature, for ethicists like Hume, Burke, Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson, there are empirical general “oughts” that serve as common guideposts for all mankind, and their criterion is readily recognized by the common man, while for Kant our moral commands are constituted by the spontaneous acts of synthetic a priori bindings and their compelling rules of conduct. But the critical coupling feature in this salutary concurrence, the agreement between (a) the empiricists and (b) the rationalists is that for both Hume and Kant, the principles and the criteria of oughtness are either rooted in a general or a universal value; for both imperatives, both expressions are grounded in a judgmental objectivity. Both guide us ethically. Whether you like ice cream and I don’t, we don’t argue about it, we both recognize that it is merely an accidental, contingent, and completely subjective matter of a personal, but not a general, taste. However, whether one supports slavery and racism or condemns it, it is not simply a matter of taste. Men and nations have gone to war over that value. It is an existential choice made for or against a value, a controlling tertiary cognitive judgment concerning an objective quality for which men have warred and been animated with a conflictful fervor, a violent animosity, and by a singular force as promoted by the contending parties. Once more we recall that Professor Gomperz distinguishes and clearly defines only two “realities” and two forms of judgments, first a commitment to an independent realm of objective material objects, of extended and measurable quantities, as leading to causal and predictable

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interactions, and second to a private sphere of personal subjective sensations and feelings, as they vary from person to person, but both are ruled by the scientific principle of causality and determinism. What follows for our currently popular behavioral and neuroscientific advocates is the reduction, the “translation” of all human reality into bodily and neuronal motions but only in so far as they can be both quantitatively measured and causally tracked as time-structured events, both in terms of large-bodied human behaviors, as well as by the minutely neuronal cerebral motions in the brain, which, when tracked, essentially display in their turn behavioral and neurological predictions (Fig.  8.1). But the difficulty is that these paradigms enlighten us no further than Professor Gomperz’s explanation that the subjective, qualitative feelings and emotions will always remain restrictively mind-dependent while transiently varying from person to person and consequently by always remaining physically “attached” to our individual bodies and/or brains as they are completely incapable of creating human values. And that is because Professor Gomperz is wrong. There is a radical distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities and judgments. Empirical sensations and feelings impersonally arise from

Fig. 8.1  Neuroscientific paradigm of the brain

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their sensory origins, as they become imaginatively processed by our five senses, by the empirical “association of ideas principle.” But they are not values, values are intentionally universal oughts. Rather what makes the Ought versus an Is, a Value versus a Fact, and distinguishes ethics from science is that the former are intrinsically different, pregnant, and imbued with the throbbing force of life itself. It is this consideration alone, namely, that I uniquely, self-consciously, intentionally avow my values as my own; they are my values and mine alone. So, you say are my sensations and feelings, but they express no continuity, no self-conscious propriety, no transcendent Husserlian intentionality, and no purposiveness. I alone can attest to my values, only I am morally and aesthetically responsible for them, only I can change or confirm them. In short, they are objective judgmental existential values. Courage is an ethical value; kindness is an ethical value. They command my duty to be courageous and kind which arises from my ethical judgments, my existential commitments. And so is the Hobbesian principle of egoistic self-preservation. Professor Gomperz’s secondary qualities are composed of both sensations and feelings. Fear and pain may be reducible to sensations and feelings, but courage is a value; kindness is a value; and so are cowardice and meanness. Only human beings are guided by values. Values may be positive or negative, but for better or worse they serve as guidepost for and in our lives. You may praise your pet as obedient but not as good and kind. And your pet may respond to your commands, but it will not do so because it values obedience as a virtue “in-itself.” What I now wish to elaborate upon is the importance of tertiary judgments of value, intentional acts—and not simply tertiary values—as pertaining to our assertions regarding existential value judgments. Humans are the only animal creatures who are guided throughout their lives by continually making value judgments for themselves between good and evil, beauty and plainness, pleasure and work, safety and danger, boredom and excitement, and so on, but above all loneliness and intimacy. Each of us constantly chooses how we wish to pursue and control our burgeoning feelings, thoughts, desires, fantasies, and activities—and most of all our intentions—in terms of judgmental goals and their criteria. Humans are explicitly purposive animals. That is why the ancient Greeks defined humans as rational, as purposeful. But unlike lower-order species, not only are we alone capable, indeed alone endowed with the ability to conceptually formulate values, goals, moral guidelines, and purposes, but we are also capable of verbally articulating and specifying what it is we desire, what we

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believe in as an ethical principle. Again, that is why humans have been characterized as “rational animals.” Each of us, singly, self-consciously, and intentionally, declares principles that we can pursue individually or collectively. But existentially, as unique individuals, each of us is both intimately and ultimately free to choose his or her own goals and values, values which we continuously ponder and select among an infinite variety of possibilities. As Sartre declares, my values are spontaneous, I alone create them for my self alone (Fig. 8.2). It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and that nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values. As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable. My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while itself without foundation. It is anguished in addition because values, due to the fact that they are essentially [individually] revealed to a freedom, can not disclose themselves without being at the ETHICAL PRINCIPLES/CRITERIA ABSOLUTISM The good is variable/unchanging

RELATIVISM The “Good” varies from culture to culture, time to time

OBJECTIVE Morality is independent of what subject feels/thinks

SUBJECTIVISM Perceiver distorts what he “knows”/feels is “good” reduced to personal pleasure/taste

Values are independent of external forces/necessary

“Values” are caused/conditioned by external forces/contingent

Values are universal or “general” to human nature

“Values” are tied to particulars, factual contexts (nominalistic)

There is moral knowledge; certainty

SCEPTICISM There is no objective/universal principle

1)

2)

3)

Scientific/descriptive relativism

Normative ethical relativism

Metaethical relativism

The same value can be “right in one society and “wrong” in another

Democritus Epicurus Hobbes Freud Ayer Hospers A) B) C)

F.H. Bradley W.G. Sumner

Analyzes moral language, terms, arguments

4)

5)

Rationalism =

Experience/human nature

(Some) truth is known independently of experience/sensation

Intellectual Intuition/direct Immediate

Demonstrative/ Relations Stoics Kant W.D. Ross Rawls

Plato Spinoza Hegel

Wittgenstein

Factual Conditioned, contingent, caused by external causes Personal

IS FACT

Fig. 8.2  Ethical principles chart

A) B) C)

6) Fideism faith revelation

7) Existentialism

All truth is derived from experience Immediate feeling, moral sense, sentiment

Aristotle Shatesbury Butler Hume Hutcheson

Relational/calculate consequences

Direct Immediate

Indirect, Interpretational

Utilitarians Bentham, MIL, G. E. Moore Hedonsitic Fudaemonistic Agathistic Act vs. Rule Utili..

Conscience

Authority

Discovered by reason, experience, faith Independent of external causes Universal or “common to all mankind”

OUGHT, VALUE

Prot. Fundamentalism

A) B) C)

R.C. lib. belief

Kierkegaard Nietzsche Sartre

Created____ Independent of external causes Individual

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same time “put into question” for the possibility of overturning the scale of values appears complementarily as my possibility. It is anguish before values which is the recognition of the ideality of values.6 For each of us, the value is created for my self alone. I am condemned to be free. And if I were inclined to choose in the interest of science, I am also free to deny values altogether or to be neutral. And most importantly, I am also free to choose goodness over evil or to choose evil over goodness. As I have uttered elsewhere, I am absolutely free to choose between saintliness and sadism. As Max Weber pointed out in the aftermath of the First World War in a famous pamphlet, There is a valuable sense in which science gives us “no” answer, and it is worth noting that the claim that science cannot address questions of value grounds Weber’s argument that science cannot ground politics, and more particularly, that intellectual integrity demands that lecturers not expound their own political views in lecture halls. To have a vocation for science thus involves this further commitment in just the sense that to espouse a political position from the lectern is a betrayal of the intellectual demands of one’s subject; it is to make a claim that cannot be scientifically grounded and yet is presented under the auspices of one’s authority as a scientist.7

In general and overall, science per se, in the very broadest sense of the term, is intrinsically incapable of adjudicating or pronouncing upon either a single tertiary value or the ensuing tertiary principles and judgments concerning my personal commitment to an ethical value and indeed to any values altogether, whether in the contexts of ethics, epistemics, or aesthetics, science is conceptually, constitutively sterile, bankrupt. Science is homogeneous; quantitatively neutral, factual, causal, measurable, deterministic but above all valueless, while by contrast human values bespeak of qualitatively intimate, personal, and intentional values, purposive goals, and above all ethical commitments. But seriously, what do atoms have to do with values? Ethical values display an intrinsic relation to Aristotle’s definition of a teleological “final cause”; for the “why,” for the motives animating our voluntary “practical,” moral, and immoral existential decisions. But by contrast, for example, the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, the “Father of Sociology,” describes the steady and presumably factual evolution of the empirical sciences in terms of a graduated

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complexity ranging from the simplest to the most complex, as each science has historically “progressed” continuously, predictably first through astronomy, then physics, then chemistry, then physiology, then biology until it reaches its final pinnacle, its culmination in the statistical science of sociology. But scientifically this entire continuous empirical advance, this alleged progression, is factually unable to pronounce on what is “best for mankind,” because the best is a value. Interestingly, Comte also takes great pains to dismiss psychology as a science because the reflexive nature of self-­consciousness cannot function as both the instrument of an analysis and, in the same moment, its own subject matter. A hammer alone cannot make a hammer. Sociology is inherently unable “to look at its self.” It can flood us with a sea of statistics, but it only provides us with a complete drought of values. Nevertheless, Comte is perspicacious enough to devise a monthly Calendar of Saints, composed of notable scientists thus suggesting at least a subliminal ethical aura of respectability.

Notes 1. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 469. 2. Ardall, Pall S., Passions and Values in Hume’s Treatise (Edinburgh at the University Press, 1966), 118. Interestingly, Hume’s full title of his major work is A Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into MORAL SUBJECTS.  As mentioned, he hoped to accomplish for the human sciences what Newton had delivered for the natural sciences. 3. Laird, John, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature (Archon Books, 1967), 209 ff., 223, and B.  M. Laing, David Hume (New York: Russell & Russell), 84 ff. 4. Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 43. 5. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men Manners, Opinions, Times (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964), 315. 6. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, translated by Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 46. On the creation of values in Nietzsche, cf., Richard Schacht, Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995); values are created, not discovered, and continuously reevaluated; 11, 16–17, 31, 33, 54–55; in Thus Spoke

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Zarathustra, Nietzsche designates him as the spokesman for his new doctrine concerning the creativity of values; cf., Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 113–114, 134–136, 207–209; we recall we began our ethical journey in companionship with Zoroaster; and further on his existentialism, “This view is perspectivism, Nietzsche’s famous insistence that every view [of a value] is only one among many possible interpretations, his own views, particularly this very one, [i.e., his] included” (page 1 and ff.). I tend not to concentrate on Nietzsche because he denies the “unity of the self” (pages 26, 172, 176–177); Consult, Schacht, ibid., 104–115; and cf., Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); the author credits both the Greek influence on Nietzsche and the derivation for his “will to power principle” as issuing from Zarathustra, as the plenary spokesman for its expression (pages 192–193). We began our ethical journey with the Persian sage, and so it is only fitting that we end it with the same prophet. Our History of Ideas methodology has two virtues, as does Hegel, it has both an oppositional and a dialectical path as well as a circular, a reflexively gathering path. First, it intentionally looks ahead, and second, it bundles together what it has learned before moving on. 7. Weber, Max, The Vocation Lectures: “Science as a Vocation,” “Politics as a Vocation,” translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2004), xxxi; cf., also Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), which highlights “Max Weber’s lecture on ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in which he bluntly states that science [and politics are] constitutionally unfit to settle questions of value and hence questions of meaning for personal experience,” 79 ff. Once more, sociology as a science is ethically impotent. Science will always remain essentially descriptive as opposed to evaluative.

CHAPTER 9

Narcissism, Loneliness, and the Problem of Evil

This chapter welds and fuses together, in an interdisciplinary fashion, the five positive theories of consciousness introduced throughout the previous text, namely, Kant’s theory of reflexive self-consciousness; Hegel’s Master-­ Slave dialectic; Schopenhauer’s metaphysical irrational Will, Husserl’s transcendent intentionality; and Freud’s dynamic ego in accounting for how and why mankind is ethically responsible for man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. In a previous chapter, I suggested that within the scope of philosophy, one can argue with Kant or against him, but one cannot argue without him. The same respect applies to Freud. Consequently, in order to achieve an equally supporting balance between our cognitive insights and understanding into the spontaneities of ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic judgments of value, now we must turn to examining a corresponding psychological motivational dynamic in relation to our affective makeup, as it contributes to our feelings of loneliness and intimacy. We must complete the full cycle of human activity by intertwining both the cognitive and the motivational aspects of consciousness.1 And more specifically in accounting for how the emotional components attach to our notions of good and evil as they have been forged within the crucible of our human thoughts and passions and as they “surface” affectively, as they result in creating human and even subhuman evils, as they become shaped and formed by our desires, lusts, and fantasies. In pursuing this course of investigation, I shall turn to Freud’s description of the dynamic relationship between narcissism and sadism, as they are constituted within the framework of his © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_9

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theory of the ego and especially in the formation of our personal identities. At the same time, we also need to keep in mind that human consciousness is indelibly permeated by incessantly recurring spontaneities resulting in the creation of the ensuing features of Kant’s reflexive self-­ consciousness, as well as Husserl’s transcendent intentionality. Each sphere of human loneliness expresses two powerful, intrinsically related, and inseparable aspects of consciousness: cognition and motivation; both must be taken into account. Idealist spontaneity is the permeating epistemic initiating factor, while its ensuing psychoanalytic dynamism is the desiderative instinct originating in the Id as it produces and evinces an all-­ consuming subjective desire for a special kind of satisfaction. It issues consciously forth from within as a goal-directed function manifesting itself as both a value judgment and a ruling principle of conduct, a purpose to be pursued and accomplished. In a political framework, sadistic individuals organize their valuative activities and efforts in line with their grander all-­ consuming political aspirations. All this is in agreement with Hegel’s observation as expressed in The Philosophy of History in which he describes certain World-Historical Individuals, such as Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon, “whose vocation it is to be agents of the World-Spirit through the cunning of reason.” They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labor and trouble; their whole nature nought else but their master-passion…It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderably; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path.2 Correspondingly, Hannah Arendt documents the same political forms of evil, the abounding atrocities prevalent during the Second World War under the rule of such “world historical individuals,” as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, as they turned loose the long-simmering hatreds between the lesser European principalities and nations, as we shall document. The atmosphere of disintegration, though characteristic of the whole of Europe between the two wars, was more visible in the defeated than in the victorious countries, and it developed fully in the states newly established after the liquidation of the Dual Monarchy and the Czarist Empire [after World War I]. The last remnants of solidarity between the non-emancipated nationalities in the “belt of mixed populations” evaporated with the disappearance of a central despotic bureaucracy which had also served to

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gather together and divert from each other the diffuse hatreds and conflicting national claims. Now everybody was against everybody else, and most of all against his closest neighbor—the Slovaks against the Czechs, the Croats against the Serbs, the Ukrainians against the Poles.3 Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious shares a theoretical consonance with Leibniz. Both believe that the mnemonic contents of the unconscious mind are theoretically retrievable in principle. For Leibniz, it is through simple memory retentions following sleep, whereas for Freud, the traumatically repressed memories are in vain driven into the unconscious self where they fester and do their damage. Consequently, they need to be painfully mined, often with the assistance of a therapist. For Freud, this accessibility is crucial in accomplishing the therapeutic goal he seeks. Through free association and the interpretation of dreams, the subject is enabled to dynamically recreate, regrasp the repressed and intertwined complexities of the original trauma—both cognitively and emotionally—and thus in effect to “rationally” and “causally” gain control over its irrational grip. Thus, the concept of the “spontaneous” is essentially epistemic in Leibniz, while the concept of the “dynamic” in Freudian psychoanalysis is primarily motivational, as it is predominantly fueled by instinctual sexual desires and fantasies grounded in the Id.4 But as Ellenberger makes clear, the heritage of Jung’s “shadow self” belongs to Schopenhauer’s conception of an impenetrable subconsciousness, as it represents an irretrievable sphere of “unawareness” in the shadow self, as opposed to the retrievable unconscious force prevailing in both Leibniz and Freud. The shadow is the sum of those personal characteristics that the individual seeks to hide from others and from himself. But the more the individual tries to hide it from himself, the more the shadow may become active and evil-doing. An example from literature was “the Dark Monk,” which accompanied the monk Medardus in Hoffman’s novel The Devil’s Elixir. This was a literary example of “the shadow” emancipating itself from the control of the conscious personality to commit evil actions behind his back. But the shadow can also be projected; the individual sees his own dark features reflected in another person whom he may choose as a scapegoat [e. g., politically as in Nazism’s treatment of the Jews]. At times too, owing to the influence of alcohol, the shadow can temporarily take hold of an individual, who later might be quite surprised that he was capable of such evil behavior. The Jungian concept of the shadow should not be confused with the Freudian concept of the repressed; it is related to

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the phenomenon of [subconscious] unawareness, as opposed to unconsciousness. To unawareness belong those aspects of the world and of oneself that an individual does not [self-consciously, reflexively] see…A man can visualize himself as a good husband and father, who is liked by his subordinates, and respected by his fellow citizens, and yet this man ignores the fact that he is a selfish husband, a tyrannical father, hated by his subordinates, and more feared than respected by his fellow men. This negative side of which this man is unaware is precisely what Jung calls the shadow.4 By projecting our insight into Kant’s conception of spontaneous acts and a priori synthetic unifying relations, we are now able to apply these intrinsic connections to our guiding motivational concepts, to our intentional goals, as they fuel the coupling of an individual’s inflamed injured feelings as leading to a continuously synthesizing relation between its ego-­ narcissistic>lonely>hostile>sadistic>scapegoating features and motives. It is precisely this dynamic, which fuels much of the evil in the world in individuals, as well as in religious, nationalistic, political, and ethnic groups and settings. Although Freud publicly downplayed Schopenhauer’s influence on him, it is clear they shared certain identical lines of thought and he was impressed more than he is prepared to admit. Basically, Freud’s empirical theory of consciousness is phenomenalistic, as is Schopenhauer’s as well. The line of argument developed by the philosopher Schopenhauer in 1851 has had a decisive influence on a number of writers. Our picture of the universe, in his view, is arrived at by our intellect taking the impressions that impinge on it from outside and remoulding them into the forms of time, space and causality. During the daytime the stimuli from the interior of the organism from the sympathetic nervous system, exercise at the most an unconscious effect upon our mood. But at night, when we are no longer deafened by the impressions of the day, those which arise from within are able to attract attention—just as at night we can hear the murmuring of a brook which is drowned by daytime noises. But how is the intellect to react to these stimuli otherwise than by carrying out its own peculiar function on them? The stimuli are accordingly remodeled into forms occupying space and time and obeying the rules of causality, and thus dreams arise.5 Obviously, Freud in this passage is agreeing with Schopenhauer’s Kantian phenomenalist interpretations of space, matter, motion, time, and causality. Phenomenally, empirically, scientifically all three, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Freud, are phenomenal determinists. But it will be left

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to Jung to plunge into the more deeply submerged hidden abyss of the subconscious, as opposed to the Freudian unconscious. Note especially the distinguishing feature between the unconscious mind in both Leibniz and Freud, as mnemonically retrievable, against the subconscious mind featured in Schopenhauer and Jung representing a dynamic force but without any possibility of a successful retrievable unraveling. This is a primary issue both in philosophy and psychology; granted that a human being cannot “know” another’s thoughts and feelings, the much deeper critical question is, what are the limits to our own self-knowledge?6 The salient point, however, is that the sources for both the spontaneity of subjective idealism and the dynamism of psychoanalysis are attributed to immanent forces, as emanations arising from within consciousness. An emanation, as opposed to a spontaneous creation ex nihilo, is conceived as a flowing, a seeping forth from a powerful underlying force. In subjective idealism, the source is the self and in psychoanalysis it is the ego, but in both the power is projected from within, as it surges forward and often becomes dangerously destructive. By contrast, the sterile theoretical principles of classical and cognitive behaviorism, the current neurosciences, and the biosciences, the latter acknowledging evolution, collectively and indiscriminately assign the causes of human motivation to physical bodily and neuronal sources, to an abounding bombardment of physical sensations and atomistic sensory stimuli thus resulting in bodily and brain responses and reactions. More specifically, as we recall, for the neuroscientist the predicated causes for our motivational human behaviors are triggered by external stimuli and electrical synapses. But seemingly, as a scientific “explanation,” it is no more revealing or insightful than describing the formation of our feelings, desires, motives, and thoughts by analogizing it to turning on a light bulb. All the previous exchanges we have cited between the paradigms of human self-consciousness versus bodily and brain behaviors once more hearken us back to our introductory reference to Plato’s Battle between the Gods and the Giants, as it recaptures our historical and philosophical conflict between the dual manifold guises of the freedom of self-­ consciousness and the ego’s dynamism battling against the pillars of a causal and scientific determinism. Granted that Freud is a psychological determinist, but the initial force, the triggering, primitive, instinctual, and dynamic power of the ego both surge and explode unpredictably from within. If only the incipient ego were not predisposed and vulnerable to

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the Id’s darker side, perhaps our human natures would be much less problematic. The same unresolved paradoxical dualism that occurs between Freud’s unconscious and Jung’s subconscious is reflected in Kant and Schopenhauer. Kant virtually recruits a noumenal—as opposed to a “transcendental” spontaneity—although epistemically it “provides” for a phenomenal determinism—while Schopenhauer similarly recruits an unknowable subconscious causa sui and various qualitas occulta, which spawn the same phenomenal determinism. But Schopenhauer also proceeds to endow his metaphysical irrational will with an indirect force upon both nature and the affairs of men. But this is precisely my point. Human consciousness is deeply paradoxical and unresolvable. Often its elements and activities clash with each other. It is inextricably laced with the elements of various sensations, images, feelings, subconscious, unconscious, and conscious desires, as well as acts of reflexive self-consciousness (Kant), an underlying irrational Will (Schopenhauer), a transcending intentionality (Husserl) and a dynamic ego (Freud), thus creating both subjective illusions as well as realities resulting in both the aspects of good and evil. But the looming question remains: how did this “dynamic” Freudian force, along with its trailing psychoanalytic theory, get started? In the first edition Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant distinguishes two theoretical paths forward. The first is the transcendental, which we have already amply addressed in Chapter VII, but in addition he promises to explore a “somewhat hypothetical” but completely novel discussion on “how thought itself is possible?” which Kant quickly excuses will have to be postponed to a later date for a fuller account. The intimation is that below and before his transcendental categories come into play, there are supervening elements and acts of a more primordial consciousness. Nevertheless, he assures the reader that both paths are vitally important and they should be fulfilled, if we hope to possess a comprehensive and coherent account concerning the foundational and underlying acts and structures of our reflexive self-consciousness, and the immanent nature of our time-consciousness, as well as our transcending intentionality regarding our deepest acts and thoughts, thoughts so deep, primordial, complex, and irretrievable that for Schopenhauer they will appear within the mind as insubstantial specters of who we really are and what we are really capable of knowing and presumably doing. But it is Kant who opens the portals of the subconscious mind thus allowing for Schopenhauer to

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enter and indeed to rush within. Kant’s allusion to a noumenal realm will become Schopenhauer’s metaphysical irrational Will. I know of no enquiries which are more important for exploring the faculty which we entitle understanding, and for determining the rules and limits of its employment, than those which I have instituted in the second chapter of the Transcendental Analytic under the title Deduction [i.e., the conditional justification] of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding. They are also those which have cost me the greatest labour—labour, as I hope, not unrewarded. This enquiry, which is somewhat deeply grounded, has two sides. The one refers to the objects of pure understanding [i.e., the twelve relational categories] and is intended to expound and render intelligible the objective [scientific] validity of its a priori [synthetic] concepts. It is therefore essential to my purposes. The other seeks to investigate the pure understanding itself, its possibility, and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests; and so deals with it in its subjective [unconscious? subconscious?] aspect. Although this latter exposition is of great importance for my chief purpose, it does not form an essential part of it. For the chief question is always simply this:—what and how much can the understanding and reason know apart [i.e., as separate and before] from all experience? not:—how is the faculty of thought itself possible? The latter is, as it were, the search for the cause of a given effect, and to that extent is somewhat hypothetical in character (though, as I shall show elsewhere, it is not really so); and I would appear to be taking the liberty simply of expressing an opinion, in which case the reader would be free to express a different opinion. For this reason, I must forestall the reader’s criticism. By pointing out that the objective [transcendental] deduction with which I am chiefly concerned retains its force even if my [proposed] subjective deduction should fail to produce that complete conviction for which I hope.7 Now Kant never fulfilled his promise, namely, to demonstrate “how the faculty of thought itself is possible?” But the significant factor is that he is proposing that beneath, hidden below, subconsciously, and quite irretrievably different from his transcendental concepts, which constitute the universal and necessary conditions for the possibility of human self-consciousness and the empirical sciences, there also exists a deeper, even an inaccessible fundamental reality which is buoyed by metaphysically occult acts as it supports the entire structure and edifice of human consciousness itself. This theoretical possibility, as he suggests, opens toward a possibly revolutionary and hitherto unknown underlying sphere of preconscious,

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subconscious forces; a submerged and irretrievable epistemic corridor, which is inexplicably generated by “thought itself,” and which, when unfolded, would by definition lead, beneath his transcendental activities, indeed to a Schopenhauerian irretrievable subconscious source. Kemp Smith’s challenging query is critically relevant here. Kant appears here to have been unwilling to regard the ‘understanding’ as ever unconscious of its activities. Why he was unwilling, it does not seem possible to explain; at most his rationalist leanings and Wolffian training may be cited as contributing causes. To the end he continued to speak of the understanding as the faculty whereby the a priori is brought to consciousness. In order to develop the distinctions demanded by the new Critical attitude, he had therefore to introduce a new faculty capable of taking over the activities which have to be recognized as non-conscious. For this purpose he selected the imagination giving to it the special title, productive [i.e., a creative, spontaneous] imagination. The empirical reproductive processes hitherto alone recognized by psychologists are not, he declares, exhaustive of the imagination. It is also capable of transcendental [noumenal?] activity and upon this the “objective affinity” of appearances and the resulting possibility is made to rest…Productive imagination acts in the manner required to yield experiences which are capable of relation to the unity of self-consciousness.8 As we have shown, six years later, in the much lengthier Second Preface to the Critique (1787), no mention is made concerning the possibility of investigating this postponed issue nor in further exploring the theme of “how thought itself is possible?” Rather the emphasis now shifts to Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” to the manner in and by which completely independent and metaphysical noumenal entities, “things in themselves,” are able to constitutively “conform” to the transcendental categories, to the active structures of the phenomenally prepared and oriented mind. But let me tender a suggestion on how Schopenhauer may have profited by Kant’s speculations concerning the possibility of subconscious, primordial acts, as directly leading to his own recruitment of an irrational, irretrievable, unknowable Will, as well as leading to his further recruitment of qualitas occulta, purely metaphysical, groundless, and indirect presences, thus replacing Kant’s transcendental causal structures as the unique noumenal source—but not phenomenal causes—as (a) “responsible” for all natural phenomena; (b) for all of man’s willful evil; and (c) for all the pain and suffering so prevalent in the world. We know that Schopenhauer preferred Kant’s first edition Critique. But I suggest that it is because he

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takes Kant seriously on the issue of “how is the faculty of thought itself possible?” And his answer is that there lies and undergirds—the categorical term “existence” cannot apply—an absolutely unknowable realm of metaphysical causa occulta which indirectly and hiddenly serve in “expressing” not only all natural phenomena but all human consciousness as well. For Schopenhauer, this mysterious unapproachable irrational Will constitutes ultimate Reality. Kant’s premise begins with a mature self. Self-consciousness is constituted by the a priori synthetic relation between the subject and its conceptual object (Critique, A 107–110). By contrast, Hegel instead begins by positing an amorphous, formless immediate Sense-Certainty, a now and a this, an un-relational immediacy, which dialectically advances to the category of Perception and only then to the subject, to the “I” in relation to a conceptual object.9 But in the Philosophy of Mind, Hegel offers a more literal and concrete—as opposed to a philosophical—description of the primal “feeling soul.” The life of the unborn child resembles that of the plant. When the babe is brought into the world out of this vegetative state in which “it” exists in the womb, it then passes into the animal mode of life. Birth is, therefore, a tremendous qualitative leap. By it the babe emerges from the state of life completely devoid of opposition and into a relation, into a state of separate existence from the external world and other selves. This original primitive immersive state of consciousness later will be portrayed by Freud as an “oceanic feeling state,” a sense of absolute totality, as a forerunner to the ego’s stage of a self-sufficient narcissism. The sensory feeling of individual self-sufficiency, of a complete “ideality,” is the subjective side of self-existence. What the “feeling soul” must do next is to raise its substantiality, its force, its “selfhood,” its distinctive personal identity against the conflicting presences and realities of external objects and other competing “selves.” It must muster its energy to master, to dominate over what is “other” than its “self.” As simply sentient, the developing “ego” is merely natural and potential, but now it must struggle toward a more self-sufficient liberation and independence.10 But these differences between Kant and Hegel and Freud are important because they directly contribute to our centering theme of how each of our unique personal identities are formed, for it is always the manifold varieties of human consciousness that engulf each of us. But they are vitally important because they are all creative human possibilities and as such, they massively contribute toward our own unique self-enclosed realities.

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The force and virtue of subjective idealism is that whatever our sensations, feelings, and thoughts, they are real in some significant meaningful sense in deeply fashioning who we are. But the critical factor in all subjective idealism always remains that self-­ consciousness requires an explicit distinction within consciousness itself, between the active subject and its relational conceptual “object” as its counterpart. This is precisely what empirical science fails to provide. Whereas for materialism, empiricism, phenomenalism, behaviorism, and the neurosciences the distinction between self and “other than self” disappears and collapses; a substantive personal identity does not exist; the self is unreal, reducible to fleeting perceptions alone. For science, human consciousness evaporates and deteriorates into an anonymous and homogeneous mass of bodily, neuronal, and/or chemical properties. But pray tell, how, conceivably, can material, biological, and chemical parts alone account for reflexive self-consciousness and transcendent intentionality? Beyond this, according to our History of Ideas panoramic perspective, for Hegel, Modern Philosophy begins with Francis Bacon, with his empirical discovery of an inductive logic in contrast to Jacob Boehme’s mystical speculations. Both thinkers serve as the twin initiators of Modern thought. This is Hegel’s version of Plato’s Battle between the Gods and the Giants. This is when the continuing history of philosophy—but not the History of Ideas—restarts anew. Bacon’s domain is the finite natural world. With Boehme, however, it issues forth from an inward, mystical, godly Christian life and with the indubitable existence of the soul. For the former thinker, it starts from experience and induction, from moving from particulars to generals, while for the latter it begins with God and the pantheism of the Trinity. The spirit of the philosophy of Bacon is to take human experience, empiricism as the true and only source of knowledge, and then to obediently follow its path. Knowledge in external experience stands by contrast and in opposition to knowledge arising from philosophical and even mystical speculation as expounded by Boehme.11 Bacon’s philosophy is founded on the sensuous observations of the external world, while Boehme’s speculative thought is pantheistic, as it stands in direct antithesis to Bacon. This is Hegel’s manner of smuggling in his own politically guarded pantheistic convictions. What Hegel admires in Boehme is the profundity, the depth of his intellect. While Kant was inclined to contend with Leibniz, Hegel regards Boehme as the spiritual leader of the Protestant German mind with its emphasis on individual self-­consciousness, as he extolls the self’s concentration on qualities, only qualities can be

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unified, never quantities, they are always merely linear, stringed out dots along a line (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, III, 192 ff.). This first substance contains all powers or qualities as not yet separated; it like wise appears as the body of God, who embraces all qualities in Himself. Quality thus becomes an important conception, the first determination with Boehme; and he begins with qualities in in his work, “Morgenroth in Aufgang.” (III, 199) Precisely because Hegel is an idealist, he must begin with Quality as ideal. Quantities are material, extended, and inert. Human self-­ consciousness is qualitative. We must begin with it. Conceptual quantity can only follow. Hegel actually credits Boehme over Leibniz as the spiritual founder of German philosophical thought and Protestant individualism. The matter of Jacob Boehme’s philosophy is genuinely German; for what marks him out and makes him noteworthy is the Protestant principle of placing the intellectual world within one’s own mind and heart, and of experiencing and knowing and feeling it in one’s own self-consciousness all that formerly was conceived as a Beyond. (III, 191) Hegel expends no less than pages 188–216 in his tribute to Boehme. It is Boehme who incorporates Proclus’ dialectical principle of the unity of all consciousness. “Only in thought can this unity be accommodated; thought alone is capable of unity.” And “Boehme stands in exact antithesis to Bacon.” Thus, in the context of the issue concerning the existence of evil, he declares the following. Faith possesses the truth but unconsciously, without knowledge, without knowing it as its self-consciousness; and seeing that thought, the Notion [the Idea], is necessarily in self-consciousness, the unity of opposites. Its moments as particular forms [dualistically] fall apart, more especially the highest moments—good and evil, or God and the Devil. God is and the Devil likewise, both exist for themselves. But if God is absolute existence, the question may be asked, What absolute existence is this which has all actuality, and more the particularity of evil within it? How is evil present in good? Boehme’s great struggle has been—since to him God is everything—to grasp the negative evil, the devil, in and from God, to grasp God as absolute. (Lectures, III, 194) There is both God and the Devil in the world, both goodness and evil. But Hegel’s “absolute Spirit” is really Man. So now the question is, how was the world formed, how did it come into being; how was it created?

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In scholastic philosophy, there is a distinction drawn between the immediacy of apprehension versus the mediacy of comprehension. In the above passage, Hegel is describing Boehme’s task as the unification of both man’s qualities of evil and goodness within a single comprehensive and coherent system. Once more, Hegel is a pantheist, and Boehme is a mystic, but that will do.12 Throughout his extended discussion of Boehme, Hegel draws on the conflict between the Baconian, the empirical, and the scientific quantitative factors regarding knowledge in opposition to his own Boehmian ideal. The fundamental idea in Jacob Boehme is the effort to comprise every thing in an absolute divine unity and the union of all opposites in God. Boehme’s chief, and one may even say, his only thought—the thought that permeates all his works—is that of perceiving the Holy Trinity in every thing, and recognizing every thing as its revelation and manifestation, so that it is the universal principle in which and through which every thing exists; in such a way, moreover, that all things have the divine Trinity in themselves, not as a Trinity pertaining to the ordinary [religious mis-]conception, but as the real Trinity of the absolute Idea. Every thing that [dialectically, developmentally] exists is, according to Boehme, this three-fold alone, and this three-fold is every thing. (Lectures, III, 196) Boehme’s unique transformation of reality is to turn everything into a threefold synthesis of qualities. Both good and evil will coalesce rather than remain in opposition. Anything less is one-sided and incomplete. For Hegel, Kant’s philosophy remains dualistically unresolved and not triadic, it accommodates both noumenal and phenomenal “realities,” “entities,” and worse it is static, but Hegel’s triads are all-encompassing and intrinsically developmental. Just so is his opening triad in the Science of Logic, which emerges and flows, as it emanates through Being>Nothing>Becoming; the thought of Parmenides>Democritus>He raclitus. Once more, nothing less will do. This is his qualifying principle and desideratum in his establishment of a comprehensive and coherent absolute system. And we recall that for both Zoroaster and Augustine, God creates the world and man ex nihilo. And it is also in this context that Hegel inquires what is the origin, what is the self-initiating forward movement of the mind, with its all-encompassing ultimate principle of origination operant in the creation of an absolute synthetic unity of a pure something, be it consciousness, space, or time into a complete and viable philosophical system? How does man’s “thought alone” produce “something out of nothing”? We recall Zarathustra’s illuminating passage that

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we discover reality in Ahura Mazda, “in thought.” But for Hegel, it is the human mind, not God that creates. And it will be Jacobi who solves the problem of spontaneously moving from the empty abstractions of thought to the concrete determinations of Being. The most eloquent, perhaps most forgotten accounts of the impossibility of advancing from an [empty] abstraction to something [determinate] beyond it, and of uniting the two, are given by Jacobi in support of his polemic against the Kantian a priori synthesis of self-consciousness…[Jacobi] defines the task as one of demonstrating the originating or the producing of a synthesis in a pure somewhat, be it consciousness, space, or time. Let space be a one, time a one; consciousness a one. Now do say how any of these three ‘ones’ purely turns itself into a [determinate, concrete] manifold: each is a one and no other; an all-the-sameness, just selfhood in general without a he-hood, she-hood, or it-hood, for these still slumber with the he, she, it in the infinite zero of the indeterminate from which and every determinate being has yet to proceed! What brings finitude [i.e., determinateness, concrete existence] into these three [abstract] infinitudes? What impregnates them as space and time a priori with number and measure [i.e., its empirically quantitative scientific factors], and turns it into a [qualitative] pure manifold [i.e., a unity]. What brings [the act of a] pure spontaneity (‘I’) into oscillation [a swinging moving back and forth movement like a pendulum]?13 Again, the problem is that Kant’s categories are static, non-­ developmental, they merely reverberate back-and-forth; and they remain abstract, purely empty, merely formal; they possess no determinacy. In short, literally, they absolutely “go nowhere.” But the above will be Hegel’s solution to the problem of Cartesian dualism. It is the spontaneous active “movement of thought” that creates the transition from the abstract indeterminacy of Being (Parmenides) to the abstraction of Nothingness (Democritus, Buddhism), to the temporal existence of Becoming (Heraclitus), as well as the creative transformation from Quality into Quantity. Again, we recall Zarathustra’s dictum: “man knows God from thought itself.” For Plato and Aristotle, and for idealists in general, the absolute reality is thought. Therefore they must show that matter is produced by thought. Plato and Aristotle did not show this. Therefore they left matter as an underived principle, an independent being, an absolute reality, alongside of thought—dualism. For this they are blamed. But when Hegel attempts to reconcile dualism in the only possible way, namely by [rationally]

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deducing matter from thought, he is considered to be doing something ludicrous. But the critics cannot have it both ways. Unless they are to rest in an unreconciled dualism, they must admit either that thought produces matter or that matter produces thought [the latter Hume’s solution, Chapter III]. In the latter case they are materialists. In the former case, they have admitted the position of Hegel. If we admit the general position of idealism, that thought is the Absolute, then we must show that thought produces matter. If not, we are landed in the dualism of Plato and Aristotle. And there are only two ways in which it is possible to conceive that thought produces matter. Either thought, the Absolute is prior to matter in time, and produces it as a cause produces its effect; or the Absolute is logically prior to and produces matter as its logical consequent.14 The latter choice is Hegel’s. But the argument also favors Freud’s following psychological account. The newborn infant has no discriminative powers. “It” only “experiences” immediate momentary sensations. In “its” “absoluteness,” in the totality of “its” consciousness, “it” is initially unaware of both Time and Space. But the babe’s first cognitive self-­ realization is temporal; it is grounded in the sheer mediacy of successive sensory passages. Thus, infant consciousness can be said to have synthetically created temporality from “within” and from which moment forward it will follow. But before continuing, at this point in our discussion, it is helpful to contrast Piaget’s empirically oriented and constructivist theory of time, as he argues that If time were completely intuitive [i.e., as innate], as Kant has often been interpreted to have claimed, Piaget observes that there would be no real problem of development [e. g., succession, irreversibility, etc.]. But this is not the case: young children have no demonstrable grip on the idea of time. Therefore, the study of this conceptual development must start at an age “when the child does not yet suspect that time is common to all phenomena.” What is found to have been developed is a concept of time as dependent on “the operational co-ordination of the child’s [bodily] observed motions themselves”; what is demonstrated is that “the relations between simultaneity, succession and duration must first be constructed [i.e., genetically], one by one.”15

Piaget hence contends that the child empirically learns—again it is not innate—to tell time; it is subservient to the child’s interactive bodily

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experiences as externally manifested, as events “in” time. And that it is the motions of the body instead of the motions of external objects, and thus the Kantian subjective fusion of time-consciousness with personal identity is not only radically different but totally absent. But of course, as we have sufficiently indicated, Kant’s deeper understanding of time is not simply as intuitive in the Aesthetic but rather as it is inextricably linked and provided for through his conception of an indubitable threefold spontaneous Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition (immediate imagery), the Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination (temporal mediacy), and the Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept (accomplished self-consciousness) in the Analytic (Critique, A 97–A 94). Hegel’s dialectic is always mired in conflict, as it ponderously moves forward seeking synthetic unity. But it always becomes synthetically resolved. By contrast, Kant’s category of Quality irreconcilably clashes with Quantity, as in Kant’s Critique, which separates and distinguishes the Axioms of Intuition, that is, as extensive magnitudes from the Anticipations of Perception, that is, as intensive magnitudes/degrees (Critique, from A 162=B 202 to A 176=B 218). But for Hegel, “Quality is a [determinate existing] property and only when, in an external connection, it manifests itself as an immanent determination,” as he expresses it in his section on Boehme in the Lectures, only then does it meaningfully and dialectically turn into the reality of the absolute Idea. But it is not until The Science of Logic in 1831 that he declares the following. Quality specifically is a property only when, in an external connection, it manifests itself as an immanent determination “…Qualiering” or “Inqualiering,” an expression of Jacob Boehme’s profound but also profoundly turbid philosophy, signifies the movement of a quality in as much as in its negative (in its Quell or torment) the quality posits itself securing itself from another, it signifies in general the internal unrest of quality by which it produces and preserves itself in conflict. (Science of Logic, 21.102) Personal identity, as a unique determinateness, always depends on qualitative features and never on quantitative bodily features, as the Logic virtually moves conceptually from the Determinateness of Quality to merge with the conceptual Magnitude of Quantity. For Hegel, the solution to the problem of Cartesian metaphysical dualism depends on the spontaneity of consciousness, as it dialectically moves seamlessly from the developing determinant categories of Quality into those of conceptual Quantitative measurements and accordingly when it fuses with the realm of the empirical sciences. For Hegel, the Battle between the Gods and the Giants is

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resolved when the “Gods,” actually the human Spirit, subsumes and envelopes the quantitative categories of the empirical Giants within Spirit’s inclusive enveloping idealistic purview, as it unifies and sublates, when it transforms, when it conceptualizes quantities into the subordination of a higher unity to make it intelligible in terms of both quality and quantity as one complete and coherent system. Simply put, for idealism, whether subjective or objective, all human consciousness as knowledge is conceptual and not material nor sensory; it subsumes the conceptually “material” within its “spiritual” objective idealism. Very differently described in the Phenomenology, the human affective conflict arises between man and man, between Independence and Dependence, Lordship and Bondage, and freedom and servitude. Politically, in terms of personal identity, it is graphically described in the following terms. Notice the emphasis on personal identity. Man is Self-Consciousness. He is conscious of himself, conscious of his human reality and dignity; and it is in this that he is essentially different from animals, which do not go beyond the level of simple sentiment of self. Man becomes conscious of himself at the moment when—for the “first” time—he says “I.” To understand man by understanding his “origin” is, therefore, to understand the origin of the revealed I by speech…The man who contemplates is “absorbed” by what he contemplates, the “knowledge” by what he contemplates; the “knowing subject” “loses” himself in the object that is known. Contemplation [intentionally] reveals the object, not the subject. The [desired] object, and not the subject, is what shows itself to him in and by—or better, as—the act of knowing…Desire is what transforms Being, revealed to itself by itself in (true) knowledge, into an “object” revealed to a “subject” by a subject different from the object and “opposed” to it. It is in and by—or better still, as— “his” Desire that man is formed and is revealed—to himself and to others as an I, as the I that is essentially different from, and radically opposed to, the non-I. The (human) I is the I of a Desire or of Desire [itself].16 In Kojeve’s interpretation, this desire leads to Hegel’s battle to the death against the other self for a uncontested recognition. “And Hegel says that the being that is incapable of putting its life in danger in order to attain ends that are not immediately vital—i.e., the being that cannot risk its life in a Fight for Recognition, in a fight for pure prestige—is not a truly human being” (page 41; cf., 37–45), and Kojeve goes on to discuss the Napoleonic wars and the Battle of Jena. This is the dynamic description of man’s narcissistic desire to dominate others and it is from this critical point

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that human consciousness develops and progresses into the conflicting and conflictful realms of politics and nationhood. It is thus in the Phenomenology that the conflict first arises between man and man, between the values of Independence and Dependence, Lordship and Bondage, and freedom and slavery. But as always thought only moves forward with conflict and through pain. By contrast, according to Hegel, Kant’s premise of self-consciousness is “unopposed,” presupposed, assumed, and unproven. It begins with a mature self. Self-consciousness is constituted by the a priori synthetic relation between the subject and its internal conceptual “object” (Critique, A 107–110). Again, by contrast, Hegel posits an amorphous, formless immediate Sense-Certainty, a now and a this, an un-relational immediacy, which dialectically, developmentally advances to the category of Perception, to the I and its conceptual object. In Hegel, the critical dynamic is grounded in the human desire for mastery and recognition over the other self that will define the “I” of the victor. Whether the conflict is personal or political, the goal to be achieved is a complete vanquishment of the loser(s). Even the mundane example of competing narcissistic “sporting“ events serve as testimonies to man’s natural aggressiveness. The goal is to annihilate the other contending ego(s). For example, observe an American football game and 100,000 screaming and angry “fans.” Many—most?—human beings are competitive and peaceful competition is a contradiction it terms. By contrast, for empiricism and science, there is no struggle, there is nothing easier than opening your eyes and extending your hand and “truth” and “knowledge” are “given” to you. The task of securing and recording the tabulation, the artificial systemization of the corresponding “facts,” naturally follows. What could be easier? Man is potentially omniscient. All material existences are simply nailed down and tethered by and to sensations. Put a measurement and a number on them and they will all be epistemically secured forever. But it is Schopenhauer, who admires Kant, especially against Hegel, and who has no reservation in grabbing Kant’s epistemic baton and running with it by announcing his dualistic guiding principles that both a metaphysical noumenal reality, a subterraneous irrational Will exists, and it secretly operates throughout our subjective spheres of subconsciousness. The irrational Will is intrinsically uncompromised, uncaused, causa sui, sui generis, expressed through its qualitas occulta, and intrinsically unknowable to mankind, while man remains phenomenally chained to Kant’s

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transcendental categories. In effect, Kant’s transcending—not transcendental—schematic is now supplanted by an unknowable realm of reality, which stands adamantly impermeable to any possible or suggestive hints of a cognitive penetration.17 And it is the unknowable irrational Will by and through which mankind’s egoism and insatiable evil is expressed. Consequently, unlike Kant, Schopenhauer posits and assumes an irrational Will as an impregnable but (presumably) continuous subconscious force (presumably) a subterranean stream, irretrievable and unknowable by any cognitive human standards available to an empirical and deterministically oriented subjective self. The irrational Will is indirectly and inexplicably “responsible” for everything that phenomenally appears to exist for mankind, for all our scientific appearances, as legislated by and through our perceptions of space, matter, motion, time, and causality, and as seemingly evident in our subjective phenomenal appearances, which include gravitational, electrical, magnetic forces, as well as chemical compounds, and thus as readily accessible to and by our human brains (Schopenhauer had studied medicine, passim), as well as in all the evil that transpires in man’s subjective and intimate hidden sphere of self-consciousness, and especially as it surfaces in the evil intentions of man, in his incorrigible egoism and narcissism, as Schopenhauer ridicules Leibniz’s (II, 582–583) and Rousseau’s ethical optimisms (II, 155), both of whom perpetuate the delusion that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” In fact, it is the very worst one imaginable. The noumenal Will is not only “responsible” for all the pain and suffering in the world, including pestilences and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed 50,000 people on All Soul’s Day, but also for all the evils perpetrated by man, as he punctuates his overriding principle of an encaptured and an inviolably subjective idealism. “The world is my representation.” This is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflexive, abstract [self-]consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned upon him. It becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world around him is there only as a [subjective] representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and that is his self. If any truth can be expressed a priori, it is this: for it is the statement of that form of all possible and conceivable experience, a form that is more general than all others, that [Kant’s] time, space, and causality, for all these presuppose it. (I, Section 1)

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This is the opening passage to his magnum opus. Here again, we observe Schopenhauer’s subjective idealism. Mankind’s empirical “reality” is nothing but a construction of phenomenal sense data. In another passage, Schopenhauer pays his compliments to Malebranche’s insight for the latter’s theory of “occasional causes” serving as a variable predecessor for his own causa sui and qualitas occulta acts. [W]e shall also recognize the perfect truth and deep meaning of Malebranche’s doctrine of occasional causes…with my present description, and to observe the perfect agreement of the two doctrines in spite of so great a difference in the trains of [our] thought. I must admire how Malebranche…hit on the truth so happily, so correctly. (I, 137) Malebranche’s “occasionalist” theory anticipates Schopenhauer’s causa occulta principle in the way that both agree that any human “knowledge” concerning the interactions between mind and matter and soul and body are completely inexplicable and irrelevant. What prevails is that both man and the world are in principle incomprehensible. To be sure, scientific knowledge on the surface seems to apply to all our natural and human phenomena, both seem to be manifest as strictly causal chains of deterministic events. But, as for Kant, so for Schopenhauer, there is an unknowable reality. However, the difference is that Schopenhauer endorses its indirect and unknowable active force on our phenomenally appearing world of nature and as well as on the apparent affairs of mankind. Kant’s entire phenomenal world of nature, space, matter, time, and causality, as well as our subjective spheres of human thought and behavior are all merely deceptive and illusionary appearances while Schopenhauer’s irrational Will acts in some indeterminate manner as it somehow inexplicably and misleadingly undergirds the entire manifold of events in nature as well as in the affairs of mankind. Nothing is what it seems. For Schopenhauer, there are two forms of evil prevailing in our world. The first characterizes the nature of human suffering, of human pain as universally extant through diseases, natural disasters, famines, victims of wars, and so on. But the second expression is ethical, it refers to the commission of supposedly intentional acts of evil by man. To highlight a few passages sprinkled throughout the text. “Hence, we are all innocent to begin with, and this merely means that neither we nor others know the evil of our own nature. This appears only in the motives, and only in the course of time do the motives appear in knowledge. Ultimately, we become acquainted with our selves as quite different from what a priori we considered ourselves to be; and then we

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are alarmed at ourselves” (I, 296). “The thirst for revenge is closely related to wickedness. It repays evil with evil” (I, 364). “It is further an original and evangelical doctrine of Christianity, which Augustine, with the consent of the heads of the Church, defended against the platitudes of the Pelagians [as defenders that man is radically free and not predetermined to evil]…and Luther’s efforts as it is expressly declared in his book De Servo Arbitrio; namely the doctrine that the will is not free, but is originally subject to a propensity of evil. Therefore the works of the will are always sinful and imperfect” (I, 406). “It is quite superfluous to dispute whether there is more good than evil in the world for the mere existence of evil decides the matter since evil can never be wiped off, and consequently can never be balanced by the good that exists along with or after it”. (II, 576) Further and more specifically, we find that the spontaneous irrational Will is in conflict within its self and thus so is man. According to Schopenhauer, The Will, which objectifies itself in the world, is not only one, not only will to life, but also at variance with itself, in conflict, ‘a striving without aim or end,’ shows all its manifestation’s that variance with itself which is essential to the will…This conflict, which is involved in the desire to find satisfaction on the one hand and the inability to find it on the other hand, belongs to the Will, for it is at once an endless striving-after and an endless-­ inability-­to-find…Schopenhauer finds illustration of this in the organic [human] sphere…But this conflict shows itself most clearly and most poignantly in man—homo homini lupus. The individual is identical, in his inner nature, with Will and the Will’s striving reflects itself in him as egoism, so that he regards himself as the centre of the world and has respect only for his own existence and wellbeing, not caring for the existence and welfare of others. Man (unless he penetrates the veils of appearance and realizes the futility of egoism), is imprisoned in the phenomenal world, the world of perception. He is ready, therefore, to annihilate the whole world, if that were necessary, in order to preserve himself in existence a little longer…This natural egoism is seen, as it regards its terrible side, in the lives of great tyrants and miscreants, and in world desolating wars, as regards its absurd side in petty self-conceit and vanity [e. g., as later in Hitler]…Schopenhauer thus finds a metaphysical explanation for cruelty, which may appear farfetched, but his suggestion that cruelty is loved as an expression of personal power and egoism is undoubtedly true in many cases. It has become the fashion for writers in magazines and papers to speak of all love and cruelty as ‘sadistic’; but there is really no reason to

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suppose that all love of cruelty is an expression of the sexual libido. That sadism is a real phenomenon, it would be folly to deny; but the fact that some people are sadists does not show that all cruel people are sadists, for the deliberate infliction of pain on others may be loved, not only as a stimulus to or expression of the libido, but also as an expression of the will to power, of perverted egoism of a type not connected to sex. Sadistic impulses and impulses to the unbridled expression of the will to power may run together to constitute an individual’s impulse to deliberate cruelty.18 Once more, the Will-in-Itself is intrinsically unknowable, irrational, unpredictable, as Schopenhauer endows it with a mysterious and incomprehensible qualitas occulta, forces which are absolutely and theoretically alien to causal limitations, scientific explanations, and projected predictions. Both natural events and human motives are essentially and forever unknowable. Every explanation not leading back to such a relation for which no Why can further be demanded, stops at an accepted qualitas occulta; but this is also the character of every force of nature. Every explanation of natural science must ultimately stop at such qualitas occulta, and thus at something wholly obscure. It must therefore leave the inner nature of a stone just as unexplained as that of a human being. (I, 80) And Schopenhauer has no reservations about the irrational Will’s universal omnipresence and omnipotence and the insidious power it exhibits in the spheres of the subconscious mind. Whereas Kant attributes an epistemic spontaneity to man, Schopenhauer posits what essentially amounts to a humanly unknowable, inconceivable, metaphysical agency, a supervening Irrational Will, a commitment to a Reality-in-Itself, which inexplicably rules in both the natural physical realm and the spheres of subjective human consciousnesses. Again, in our world of appearances, Schopenhauer recognizes the phenomenal manifestation of chemical compounds, electricity, gravitation, magnetism, and so on, as “Men tacitly resigned themselves to starting from mere qualitas occulta, but whose further elucidation was entirely given up for the intention was to build upon them, not to undermine them, but such a thing as we have said cannot succeed” (I, 125). In short, science is worthless. It provides neither insight nor understanding. What is important, however, is that between Leibniz, Rousseau, and Kant’s optimism, Schopenhauer’s pessimism stands unmoved. Perhaps this is one of the most profound ultimate divides between human beings

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and their personality, between their character as either optimistic or pessimistic, and therefore as perhaps either kind or malicious. In the end, as an atheist, the only solace Schopenhauer offers to humans is inconsistently and pathetically facile as he promotes it as given through Eastern religions, Buddhism, Brahminism, and so on, which collectively emphasize the unreality of our world and the “self,” as his subjective idealism gives way to a fleeting evanescent and ephemeral eastern Mayanism. What is meant here is the transmigration of the souls. This teaches that all sufferings inflicted in life by man on other beings must be expiated in a following life in his world by precisely the same sufferings. It goes to the length of teaching that a person who kills only an animal, will be born as just such an animal at some point in endless time, and will suffer the same death. It teaches that wicked conduct entails a future life in suffering and despised creatures in this world and will suffer the same death; that a person is accordingly born again in lower castes, or as a woman, or as an animal, as a pariah or Chandala, as a leper, a crocodile, and so on. All the torments threatened by the myth are supported by it with prescriptions from the world of reality, through suffering creatures that do not know how they have merited the punishment of their misery; and it does not need to call in the assistance of any other hell. On the other hand, it promises reward, rebirth in better and nobler forms, as Brahmans, sages, or saints. (I, 356) What he gives with one hand, namely, an unmitigated preponderance of human evil and pain, he restores with the expiation of the soul in the afterlife with the other hand. But at least we may ask how the above passage can conceivably be resolved and somehow rematched with Schopenhauer’s juggling defenses of palingenesis, his denial of the immortality of the soul, his atheism, the resurrection of the soul, and with the doctrines of Maya and the Upanishads, while all these remain to be resolved by the bewildered reader (Fox, opus cit., 150–153, 179, 216–218). And finally, Schopenhauer concludes his entire philosophy by contrasting his version of the Battle between Plato’s Gods and the Giants, as it pertains to the all-encompassing issue between (a) metaphysical dualism and/or subjective idealism against metaphysical materialism, first engendered by the premises of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, namely, that all that exists is matter plus motion. Both forever seek to gain a real advantage over the other by the assertion of one perfectly justified step, namely, that either human self-consciousness exists preemptively versus the premise that both matter and motion exist alone (Schopenhauer,

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II, 14). This represents the ultimate opposition between the dueling metaphysical first principles of mind versus matter, as it generates the following irreconcilable dialogue. The Subject I am and beside me there is nothing. For the world is my representation. Matter Presumptuous folly! I am, and besides me there is nothing. For the world is my fleeting form. You are a mere result of a part of this form, and quite accidental. The Subject What silly conceit! Neither you nor your form would exist without me; you are conditioned through me. Whoever thinks me away, and then thinks he can still think of you, is involved in a gross delusion; for your existence outside my representation is a direct contradiction, a wooden-iron. You are, represented by me. My representation is the locality of your existence. I am therefore its first condition. (II, 17) The dialogue continues with four more exchanges and concludes with the following. Both So we are inseparably connected as separate parts of one whole, which includes us both and exists through us both. Only a misunderstanding can set the two of us as enemies in opposition to each other, and lead to the false conclusion that the one contests the existence of the other, with which its own existence stands or falls (II, 18). But from this all-observing vantage point, from Schopenhauer’s overriding principle of subjective idealism alone, we can readily and surely infer that man’s existential condition confirms our absolutely lonely existence.

Now when we ask ourselves, given the preceding discussion, what can we surmise so far before proceeding, we find that for Leibniz, both epistemic self-consciousness and ethical free will are initiated spontaneously, but the unconscious is mnemonically retrievable. For Kant, the transcendental categories are generated spontaneously, but free will is only postulated as ethically conceivable and it is denied any empirical knowability; it is transcendent—but not transcendental—it is conceived, that is, postulated as “necessary” only for ethical purposes through faith. For Schopenhauer, however, as for Jung, the subconscious is completely inaccessible on both counts, epistemically and ethically. But for Schopenhauer, the unknowable Will entirely but indirectly prevails both over the natural

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realm, as well as our subjective spheres of consciousness. But the difficulty with Schopenhauer is that he cannot have it both ways. Either the motives and the actions of men are (a) controlled by completely unknowable qualitas occulta and therefore man is not responsible for his evil acts or (b) there are phenomenal and psychological, that is, “scientific laws” controlling human behavior and therefore evil cannot be attributed to man’s free will. Regarding this dualistic paradox, Schopenhauer is once more fatally inconsistent. Indeed, he supports five conflicting and therefore irreconcilable possibilities. 1. The intellect cannot know the will as the thing-in-itself by the usual method of acquiring knowledge. 2. The intellect can know the thing-in-itself. 3. The intellect is the servant of the will. 4. The intellect can function free from the service to the will. 5. The intellect can quiet and stifle the will.19 Either man is free to do evil or he is not. Both Augustine and Luther select the first alternative, and I agree. Evil is real but it is man who is alone fully and freely responsible for it. But now as we proceed, we shall see that for Freud, the incipient ego first arises dynamically from “within,” both through its feelings and the unconscious instincts of the Id, rather than epistemically from the self-­ conscious reflexivity of the ego. It emanates, emerges, arises from an internally expressive and powerful force, as it moves forward; “it” battles against life’s external challenges, as it develops through infancy and toward childhood, adolescence, and maturity; through repressed unconscious memories but which will remain in principle retrievable. So now we are prepared to begin our itinerary with Freud’s amorphous immediacies of infantile consciousness. Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If we may assume there are many people in whose mental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater degree, it would exist in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply [cognitively] demarcated ego-feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of

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limitlessness and of a bond with the universe—the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the ‘oceanic feeling’20. In this passage, Freud speculates that this “oceanic feeling” may be the ultimate source for his friend’s sense of religiosity, but he also suggests that it is the fount for our narcissistic compulsions. Further reflection tells us that the ego-feeling cannot have been the same from the beginning. It must have gone through a process of development, which cannot of course, be demonstrated but which admits of being constructed with a fair degree of probability. An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him. He gradually learns to do so, in response to various promptings. He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which he will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time—among them what he desires most of all, his mother’s breast—and only reappear as his screaming for help. In this way there is for the first time set over against the ego an ‘object’ in the form of something which exists ‘outside’ and which is only forced to appear by a special action. (ibid., page 14) This corresponds to the first dualist and subjectivist competitive relation of the active ego to its epistemic object, its self, and other than its self. This also constitutes the original source for both the a priori synthetic coupling of the infant’s desire for a special object, the mother’s breast, and the resulting narcissistic anger, which is dynamically triggered by the fluctuating unavailability of the breast as controlled by another independent force, an alien competing force. But how can the sadistic instinct, whose aim is to injure the object [e. g., the mother’s breast by biting], be derived from Eros [the principle of unification], the preserver of life? Is it not plausible to suppose that this sadism is in fact a death instinct, which under the influence of the narcissistic libido, has been forced away from the ego and has consequently only emerged in relation to the object? It now [later in maturity] enters into the service of the sexual function. During the oral stage of organization of the libido, the act of obtaining erotic mastery over an object coincides with that object’s destruction. Later the sadistic impulse separates off.21 Now it is also critical to notice that there is an epistemic distinction between (a) the indefinite, indeterminate non-ego feelings of the newborn infant and (b) the subsequently developing ego-cognitive maturity of self-­ conscious awareness. The latter separates the mind from the world, the ego

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from what opposes it, and most importantly what it cannot control as its own, namely, the entirety of the external world and most dangerously the opposing and imposing threats of other selves. Freud begins by describing the infant’s primary “oceanic feeling,” as one of boundlessness, a totality, and an inviolable self-sufficiency. This non-cognitive awareness is the ultimate source of unbridled narcissism; it is the primal origin of the ego’s intrinsic narcissism; “the original narcissism in which the childish ego enjoyed complete self-sufficiency.”22 All human beings are narcissistic. Essentially, it is a requirement for psychic self-survival, it is a necessary and defining feature of the instinct for self-preservation. In Hobbes’ empiricism, we recall it is described as an unmitigated, unilateral desire for power over all other aspirants. And from this difference of one another there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation; that is by force or wiles to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he sees no other power great enough to endanger him. (Leviathan, Chapter XIII) In the rationalism of Spinoza, it is instantiated by the principle of the conatus. ‘The endeavour (conatus) wherewith each thing endeavours to persist in its own being is nothing more than the actual essence of the thing itself.’ The greater the power of self-maintenance, of the particular thing in the face of external causes, the greater the reality it has, and the more clearly it can be distinguished as having a definite nature and individuality (Proposition VII, Part III, Ethics; cf., Wolfson, Harry Austryn, The Philosophy of Spinoza. (Meridian Books, 1958), II, 195–208) But as a value, the narcissistic individual can seek positive, as well as negative, purposes, its choice of “final ends,” as in childhood, adolescence, and maturity spans a spectrum of goals from saintliness to sadism. But now in following through with our Freudian context, we will be concerned with the very worst form of narcissistic self-expression, namely, sadism, as expressed within individuals, groups, as well as political leaders, who persist in manifesting and exhibiting a prevailing cruelty in their personal, social, and political situations; they are those who are above all others destructively dangerous; who above all others exhibit cruelty against those closest to them, as they constitute the most violent source for perpetuating human evil when they hold power over others personally, domestically, politically, and nationally. Psychologically, dynamically during the process of the infantile original differentiation, the separation between the ego and its object, the breast,

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and the mother, there ensues considerable pain and effort with the child. It is important to realize that this dynamic “effort,” this “impetus,” and “force,” during this feeling of separation and loneliness, it is significant to understand that the energy is animated from within the self-ego. It is not “programmed” by external causes, nor by stimuli-response behaviors, nor by neuronal electrical synapses, nor by familial, environmental, and cultural causes. The ego has a “mind” of its own. It doesn’t even cognitively know there is an “external world” existing apart from the self. It dynamically desires, surges, and chooses its own direction, goals, and its incipient values. It will soon learn what to choose. But the unwelcome factor of loneliness, the original undesired separation from the nurturance provided by “the other,” the mother, first foments anger and if unresolved and unconquered, it leads first to anger, then anxiety, and then ultimately despair and death (Cf., Chapter I, footnote 5, Rene Spitz). In terms of loneliness, what is powerfully operating throughout this dynamical force is a uniquely dysfunctional conflict between the emotions of anger and sadness and between hostility and depression. Which is primary; or is one tandem to the other? But the critical point is that as the narcissistic self feels lonely, rejected, abandoned, its first impulse is to respond with anger. And as the anger intensifies and/or prolongs, it becomes increasingly paramount. The impulse to strike outwardly becomes dominant, to blindly injure, to destroy the “other” or “others,” the enemies whoever they are or whoever might be available. But dynamically, anxiety only shows its submissive face when loneliness is accepted, and despair conquers. The mind surrenders. We often mistakenly tend to assume that lonely egos are first sad, depressed; but they are not, they are first angry. The narcissistic injury inclines the ego toward punishment, either specific or general; it demands retaliation, any payment from the other or even the world at large. But we are reminded that after Hegel’s description in the Phenomenology of Spirit, first, in regard to the conceptualized category of immediacy, the here and now, the section on Sense-Certainty, Sections 90–110, which correspond to Freud’s oceanic feeling; second, Hegel’s relational mediacy of Perception, of the subject to its conceptual object (Sections 111–131), which corresponds to the infant’s desire for the mother’s breast; third for Hegel’s Force and Understanding (Sections 132–165), which corresponds Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s scientific understanding, the stage of mental development in which the mind regards opposites as mutually exclusive and absolutely cut off from each other, the infant enters the stage in the

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development of mind, as it rises to the principle of the identity and unity of opposites (Sections 132–165), but in Freud it corresponds to the child’s stage of social awareness; and fourth and lastly it is followed by Hegel’s Master-Slave conflict (Sections, 178–196), as the self and the other self engage in “a battle to the death” for supremacy, while in Freud it corresponds to the self’s instinctual needs to fulfill its narcissistic “desire for a victorious recognition” over the competing other self; it is a conflict for an absolute capitulation of the vanquished to the victor. It is all an all or nothing conflict. Psychiatrically, for sadists, they are most dangerous when they have nothing to lose. Similarly, the Freudian ego demands an acknowledgment of complete surrender and defeat by the other self, as forged by the overwhelming desire of the triumphant master to turn the other self virtually into an unfree object, a slave. This dynamic prevails not only in personal contexts but also in domestic, social, political, religious, racial, and nationalistic contexts as well. On the issue of the original American slavery, it is easily recognizable why a large segment of the population is so resistant in giving up this narcissistic value. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud discusses the dynamic source required in gaining insight into the relation between narcissism and sadism. The reference to “a death instinct” (above) may well be an allusion to the original Greek myth in which Narcissus falls in love with his own image when he sees his reflection in a pool of water and, in his self-­ consuming absorption of his own vanity, he falls into the pond and drowns. It is also interesting to note that it is Gregory Zilboorg, who authors the Introduction to the English translation, and we shall see how he connects narcissism not only to loneliness but also to extremes of anger with its consequent instinctual desire not only to destroy others but often even one’s own self if narcissistic satisfaction fails. Frequently, these killings are perpetrated by adolescents’ and young men against school children clearly indicating that the throes of loneliness and rejection often originally begins in childhood. Sadism is sometimes relatively indiscriminate in terms of victims, but also frequently it is prejudicial with the perpetrator’s original rejection, hurt, and anger, and the memory of their initial aggrieved social isolation leading to an overwhelming desire to pay back the first source of their sorrow. To show others how “unfairly” they have been injured! To punish indiscriminately or with discrimination but always to make others pay and suffer!

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But beyond all this, it is important to note the parallel similarity between Kant’s epistemic transcendental spontaneity and Freud’s instinctual desiderative dynamic. For both thinkers the initial source of the power emanates from within the self or ego as opposed to re-sponding, re-acting to external stimuli from without. We recall the newborn infant’s anger that started even before “it” realized there was an external world. Anger is innate. The anger and the hatred both start from within. In infancy, childhood, adolescence, and maturity, the projected excuse may appear as from without, but the evil festers and awaits from within. As Freud continues, We have given it the name of ‘narcissism.’ The subject behaves as is if he were in love with himself; his egoistic instincts and his libidinal wishes are not yet separable under our analysis…We suspect already that this narcissistic organization is never wholly abandoned. [Indeed!] A human being remains to some extent narcissistic even after he has found external objects for his libido.23

And should we inquire just how early we can discover a full-blown manifestation of narcissistic sadism in the human ego, we can even determine the chronological age by following a notation added by Freud in a footnote in 1919. An observation made by a parent who had knowledge of psycho-­ analysis caught the actual moment at which his highly intelligent four-year daughter perceived the distinction between being ‘gone’ and being ‘dead.’ The little girl had been troublesome at meal-time and noticed that one of the maids was looking at her in askance. ‘I wish Joseline was dead,’ was the child’s comment to her father. ‘Why dead?’ enquired her father soothingly; ‘wouldn’t it do if she went away?’ ‘No’ replied the child; ‘then she’d come back again.’ The unbounded self-love, the narcissism of children regards any interference as an act of lese majeste’ and their feelings demand…that any such crime shall receive the one form of punishment which admits of no degrees, i.e., death as complete annihilation.24 But returning to the issue whether loneliness first generates sorrow or hostility, an instructive comparison can be made with Elizabeth Kubler-­ Ross’ study on mourning in On Death and Dying, in which she outlines the progressive stages of loneliness and grief in the following order: denial and isolation, a sense of inconsolable loneliness; then anger; then bargaining; then depression; and finally, acceptance. The response of anger

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constitutes the initial and primary motivational act whenever we experience a sense of abandonment, loneliness, and rejection. Depression follows only after we feel we have lost, and we imagine that the continuing loneliness will become irredeemably entrenched forever. Importantly, in clinical situations and in terms of therapeutic approaches to loneliness, I have found it most helpful to explore the dynamics of anger first in the subject and only then to evaluate and monitor their sense of hopelessness. The first article written on loneliness, penned as a subject matter in its own right, is by the aforementioned psychoanalyst, Gregory Zilboorg, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Zilboorg, who was familiar with Kant’s philosophy, draws on the synthetic a priori relational acts and its constitutive components, as they are dynamically bound and unified within the ego’s narcissistic>lonely>anger, as he brings to the fore in his groundbreaking article.25 The term ‘narcissism’ does not mean mere selfishness or egocentricity; it denotes specifically that state of mind, that spontaneous attitude of man, in which the individual happens to choose only himself instead of others as the object to love; he wants everything for himself; he is inwardly in love with himself and seeks everywhere for a mirror in which to admire and woo his own self image. (page 46) Loneliness is intimately related to man’s narcissism. And narcissism also carries with it more than a seed of malice; it transmits hostility (page 49). And thus, we come upon a deeply seated psychological triad: first, the narcissistic quality of the ego with its megalomanic delusions of unlimited power; second the injury of rejection with its sense of the deep incumbency of loneliness; and third, its desire to hurt others indiscriminately as the dynamics of compensation come to the fore as a retaliation for one’s rejection and sense of loneliness. These centering, unifying urges appear under a striking variety of aspects and combinations (page 50). And Zilboorg is quick to stress that it all begins in infancy. The infant’s first response to solitary confinement, abandonment, and neglect is anger, not despair which, as we have pointed out, only surfaces when the sense of a continuous isolation becomes chronic and hopeless. Let us watch some of these manifestations in the human infant. There the child lies in the crib, quiet, self-contained, serene and satisfied despite its precarious weakness, and despite total dependence on others. Unaware and unappreciative of the support of the external world, it perceives the need for food, and it is fed. The child need not toil or bother about living

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wages—all it has to do is to whimper or squirm for a moment; yet if it could think or talk it would be convinced that it is omnipotent, because it always gets what it wants when it wants it. But here is the seed of that which is stored away in the invisible recesses of the adult human psyche as a paradoxical conviction of our greatness and all-importance, of our essential megalomania (page 52). Further, Let us return to the crib where the omnipotent baby peacefully rules the world with serene mastery. It is alone mostly, if not only, when it is asleep. During its waking hours it is always observed by mother or nurse; it is played with, amused, taken care of, attended to, talked to, cuddled, and otherwise made to feel that the universe is ready to serve its pleasure. It learns the joy of being admired and loved, before it learns anything about the outside world. Here we have the quintessence of what later becomes a narcissistic orientation; a conviction that life is nothing but being loved and hence admired—hence self-centredness, self-admiration, which are difficult to keep in abeyance in later life when adulthood asserts its allegiance to civilization. (ibid.)

But now the dynamic source of the painful adjustment commences. Let us spend a little longer at the crib, a few weeks, a few months. Now the infant is crying; it is good for it to cry for a while. Now, while in his crib, he also shows all the external earmarks of suffering, he twitches, he struggles with his little body and limbs; he does not like the impact of the external world. Hold off feeding him for a few minutes; he continues to struggle and kick. He wants food; he does not want to wait; the omnipotent serene master of a few minutes ago suddenly becomes transformed into a small, weak thing, lost in the wilds of an enormous world that is the crib. He is restless, unhappy, angry, anxious. The tragedy resolves itself, and the battle with and for life comes to a standstill with the first eager, aggressive suck of milk. The world is reconquered; it paid to squirm, cry, kick, and be angry. Here is the nucleus of hostility, hatred, impotent aggression of the lonely and abandoned. Here is the beginning of that intolerant anger which some day civilization will have to subdue, or until mental illness will discharge again into the open. And if we continue on from crib to nursery, and to the kindergarten, we can observe, scene by scene, the enactment of the very story entitled ‘narcissism, megalomania, and loneliness’. (ibid)

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As Zilboorg proposes, in the real tragedies of life, domestically and socially the anger is often followed by malicious murder and destruction, which in turn may precipitate the perpetrator’s own suicide in the desire to avoid public humiliation and punishment. The sadist’s purely motivational malice is to destroy others but often also to ensure that he himself is safely removed from being outraged and punished by committing suicide. Currently, in the US, there is an epidemic of school shootings, as we have amply seen an increasing acceleration in the murderous and suicidal reactions of youthful individuals, while the press and the media in general remain puzzled by the question of “motivation.” Frequently, adolescent males seek out their former school settings in wreaking punitive and murderous acts and then escaping punishment by committing suicide. The overwhelming motive is narcissistic loneliness and the resulting anger, thus culminating in the desire to hurt others in compensation, in retribution for their isolation and misery, thus blaming the world at large for their “undeserved” unhappiness. It is important to realize, as Zilboorg emphasizes, that the relation between narcissism and sadism dynamically occurs not only in individuals but also in the context of ethnic groups, races, religions, nations, and most importantly within political parties where it exhibits an enormous capability of doing the most harm, and especially through wars both civil and global. Currently, the US is engaged in a projected civil war, which has dangerously escalated recently, but which has actually surreptitiously persisted ever since its early inception of slavery followed by a prolonged and debilitating practice of racism, prejudice, bigotry, and discrimination that remains essentially unchecked and now threatens to escalate. Zilboorg published his article in 1938. But already in 1933, clearly on the political horizon, the darkening shadows of Nazism were clouding Europe. The Germans, feeling bitter and harshly punished, were still arrogant and feeling humiliated, while at the same time suffering from their sense of global isolation and they were already busy in fomenting plans of revenge by turning their unbridled political and military aggression on their European tormentors. The [narcissistic] satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal is also among the forces which are successful in combating the hostility to culture within the cultural unit. This satisfaction can be shared in not only by the favored classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unity.26

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Today in the US, we see this narcissistic dynamic playing out politically in the former President’s continued endorsement by his party and in the violent throes of his supporters, his “base,” as they promote racial prejudice and their disdain for human rights. The former president’s grip on his loyal supporters is secured by a single principle: by their overwhelmingly shared goal to injure others economically, physically, racially, politically, and so on. What binds the two forces together is not political “ideals” of freedom but rather that they share the goal of hurting others—physically, socially, psychologically, economically, and in general in whatever way it hurts others who disagree with them. Beyond that, currently and globally, we observe both large and small nations, from the US to Russia, to small principalities like North Korea, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey practicing xenophobic restrictions on “outsiders” and immigrants while invoking racial, religious, nationalistic, and ethnic prejudices and punishments. And these are all easily transformed into political values. In sum, loneliness involves both affective (feeling) states and cognitive (meaning) states of consciousness. And we can further generalize that loneliness is the genus and its various forms of real and imagined injuries are its species. Metaphorically loveliness serves as an umbrella concept, and under its extended spokes, it subsumes, it enfolds a multitude of Kantian and protean synthetic a priori unities, as well as Hegelian dialectical processes. Loneliness “consumes” the feelings and the meanings of anger, jealousy, anxiety, abandonment, desertion, betrayal, despair, rejection, revenge, which all too often lead to pathological delusions of grandeur culminating in sadistic expressions and violent actions. And it all begins in infancy. In Chapter I, I discussed how as a clinician I was expected to diagnose Axis I disorders from Axis II disorders. But now I can attest that in this current political climate, these diagnoses are extremely helpful in anticipating, recognizing, and predicting what Axis II individuals will do and what they are capable of doing. It is not a question of trying to change them, that is a predetermined losing battle. But the current situation is very much like recognizing a venomous viper. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. Again, it is important to remember that Narcissism is a Personality Disorder (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 301.81). It is not merely a passing symptom; it is a way of life fully laden with its own values. We recall that the Manual distinguishes Axis I symptom disorders from Axis II Personality Disorders. The

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difference is that in the first classification, the sufferer seeks relief from the loneliness, the anger, the anxiety, the depression, the drug addiction, and so on, the sufferer wants help, wishes to change. By contrast, Personality Disorders are socially disagreeable to others and very often destructive and dangerous toward others. The possessor not only believes that there is nothing wrong with them but rather that their behaviors should be indulged by others, even supported by others. Clinically, they exhibit the following characteristics. They are grandiose, lack empathy and intimacy, have serous entitlement issues, exaggerate their own achievements and talents, are unable to give trust, as they display a sense of superiority and fantasies of unlimited success, and that in some fashion they are very special individuals who accordingly require excessive admiration from others. Interpersonally they are exploitative, envious, and arrogant. Frequently they also exhibit the features of an Antisocial Personality Disorder (DSM, 301.7), which is highlighted by a complete lack of a moral conscience and they display no sense of guilt or shamelessness. They systematically exploit others for their own benefit. But clinically, the importance of the Axis II individuals is their predictability in their relation to their dangerousness. For instance, it is easy to anticipate their cruelty and their complete disregard for the rights of others. And when they are losing power, they will try to destroy as much as they can of everything that surrounds them. They make others pay for their defeats, and they are most cruel and rapacious when they are losing and their sense of insurmountable loneliness, anger, shame, and guilt engulfs them but they never express guilt for what they have done. In John McGraw’s book, he connects the diagnosis of narcissism as belonging to Group II Axis Personality disorders along with sociopaths, as “displaying overt arrogance, a quality that itself vehemently opposes any alteration”27. Further, according to McGraw, “intimacy problems are invariably linked to many mental health problems and intimacy and psychological health seems to go hand in hand…Intimacy difficulties are at the heart of interpersonal problems, which are absolutely central in those mental health and more specifically mental trait disorders known as personality aberrations” (passim). Group II also includes paranoids, as individuals who are incapable of trust. They trust no one but cannot be trusted themselves. The pathological experience of power struggles concerning intimacy relationships, whereas normals generally desire to share power in

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relationships and usually employ peaceful means to achieve these ends, the narcissist’s emotional volcanism emerges especially from their deep need and desire for intimacy, including that of nurturance and being cared for in general lest they be left alone in forsakenness and other states of maximal exclusion. (page 191) Once more it is loneliness and rejection that fuels their anger and hatred. These intrinsic negative complexities are what makes loneliness and hostility so difficult to understand and manage. The self is consumed by internal conflicts within itself. It desires and yearns for intimacy, but it is never enough. We recall that empathy rests on a mutual sharing between two selves on their feelings, meanings, and affection, while intimacy requires a mutual sharing between two selves based on trust, respect, and values. That mutual sharing, especially and foremost of trust is precisely what the extreme narcissistic personality is incapable of providing.

Notes 1. Mijuskovic, Ben, “Loneliness and Intimacy,” Journal of Couples Therapy, I:3–4 (1991) reprinted in Intimate Autonomy: Autonomous Intimacy, edited by Barbara Jo Brothers (Philadelphia: Haworth Press, 1991); Feeling Lonesome: The Philosophy and Psychology of Loneliness (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, ABC/Clio, 2015), passim; “Cognitive and Motivational Roots of Universal Loneliness,” in Addressing Loneliness: Coping, Prevention, and Clinical Interventions, edited by Ami Sha’ked and Ami Rokach (New York: Routledge, 2015); Chapter 2; Consciousness and Loneliness: Theoria and Praxis (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 376–388; The Philosophical Roots of Loneliness and Intimacy: Political Narcissism and the Problem of Evil (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), passim; and “The Role of Empathy as a Path to Intimacy,” in Paedagogia Christiana: Being Alone Together Again (Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika, 2020). 2. Hegel, G.  W. F., The Philosophy of History, translated by J.  Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 31–32. 3. Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest Books, 1968, originally published in 1948), 268. 4. Ellenberger, Henri, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 707; on Leibniz as the founder of dynamic psychiatry, consult 289–291; on the relation between Schopenhauer and Leibniz consult 205, 208–209, 311–312, 513, 537, 542, 628; and on the problem of evil in Jung, consult 664–665. Freud was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer; “Freud and Schopenhauer,” in Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement, edited by Michael Fox (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980), 236–254.

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5. Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), 70; cf., 541–542. 6. Mijuskovic, Ben Lazare, opus cit., Chapter 15, “The Limits of Self-­ Knowledge,” which also discusses Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and Golding’s Pincher Martin. Conrad especially was influenced by Schopenhauer where the dynamic of evil surfaces in his portrayal of Kurtz, by the evil in the darkness of his soul, locked in the heart of man, in the falseness of his pretense to bring the values of “enlightenment” when he is confronted by the immoral darkness of the jungle; cf., Bruce Johnson, Conrad’s Models of Mind (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1971), 6, 9, 11, 14–15, 23, 30, 41–53, 130, 160–161, 204–207. 7. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan & Co., 1929), A xvi–xvii (italics in parenthesis his). 8. Kemp Smith, Norman, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 264; cf., 273–274. 9. This same relation is described in Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 10. Hegel, G.  W. F., Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, translated by A.  V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), Section 403. And consult The Feeling Soul in Its Immediacy, Section 404. This corresponds to Sense-Certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit before the mediacy of the relation between subject-­object intervenes and it supplants the earlier “moment.” Clearly for Hegel, during the infant’s first developmental experiences, there is no self, no external world; just immediate sensations, the now, the here. The soldering acts of the mediacy of consciousness are still undeveloped. 11. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, translated by E. S. Haldane and Frances Simson (London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1968), III, 188–195. “Imagine the perceptible world lacking any quantitative relations between sensuous features, so that at most it exhibits that indefinite regress of ‘this’ and ‘that’ out of which quantitative character will arise but has not yet arisen, and you have roughly the phenomenal embodiment of the category of Quality,” G.  R. M.  Mure, An Introduction to Hegel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 3.2 (page 133). 12. Loewenberg, Jacob, Hegel’s Phenomenology: Dialogues on the Life of Mind (La Salle, IL: Open Court,1965), on Hegel’s pantheism, see 349. 13. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Science of Logic, translated by George Di Giovanni (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 21.83. 14. Stace, W.  T., The Philosophy of Hegel (New York: Dover, 1955), on Zoroaster, see Sections 736–737; and Loewenberg, opus cit., on Persian religions and Zoroaster, see 304–306, 347.

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15. Sherover, Charles, The Human Experience of Time: The Development of the Philosophical Meaning of Time (New York: New  York University Press, 1975), 441. 16. Kojeve, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, translated by James Nichols (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 3–4 and passim. 17. Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1980), Sections 20–23. 18. Copleston, Fredrick, Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism (Andover: Burns Oates, 1947), 86–88. This critical summary will be further discussed when we turn to Freud. 19. Schopenhauer, opus cit., Wayne Sheeks, “Schopenhauer’s Solution of the Intellect-Will Problem,” 70–71. 20. Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961), 15, italics mine, and consult 30–31. 21. Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated by James Strachey, Introduction by Gregory Zilboorg (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961), 48. 22. Freud, Sigmund, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1959), 42. 23. Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo, translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company), 89. Schopenhauer’s concept of “egoism,” in all its major aspects, corresponds to Freud’s “narcissism.” His influence on Freud is highlighted in R.  K. Gupta’s “Freud and Schopenhauer,” in Schopenhauer, opus cit., 226–235, and 104, 172–173. 24. Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), 288, note 5 and cf. 192. 25. Zilboorg, Gregory, “Loneliness,” Atlantic Monthly magazine, February 1938, 46–54. Cf., Chapter I, footnote 5 for Rene Spitz’s discussion on early infant deaths. On loneliness and anxiety, see Frieda FrommReichmann, “Loneliness,” Psychiatry: A Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes, 22:1 (1959), 1–15. 26. Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion, translated by James Strachey (New York: W.  W. Norton & Company, 1961), 13–14; originally published in 1927. On the connection between national loneliness, sadism, and the implementation of terror against others in Nazism, see Arendt, opus cit., 474–477; first published in 1948 soon after the close of the Second World War. An easy comparison can be made currently with Mr. Trump’s ­narcissistic political supporters and his violently aggressive adherents capable of extreme incidents of “behavioral ‘acting out.’” 27. McGraw, John, Personality Disorders and States of Aloneness (Amsterdam: Brill Rodopi, 2012), 297.

CHAPTER 10

Déjà Vu and the Problem of Evil: A Case Study of Political Narcissism and Sadism

During the Second World War in Yugoslavia, there were five countervailing military forces jockeying for power in the country. First, the dominant prevailing German Nazis; second, the British forces supplying direction and armaments under the direction of Prime Minister Winston Churchill; third, the Allied guerrilla Serbian Royalist Chetniks under the command of Draza Mihailovic; fourth, the guerilla Serbian Communist Partisan forces under Tito committed to Russia; and fifth, the collaborative Croatian Nazi forces committed to severing their political relationship to Yugoslavia. Religiously, the Serbs were Eastern Orthodox and the Croatians were Catholic, both however were “ethnically” Slavic, both, for example, spoke the same language, Serbo-Croatian. But the Croatians were secessionists, and they operated the “cruelest Nazi concentration death camp ever in the entire system, Jasenovac,” which practiced the most extreme forms of torture and genocide. The authors’ father was from Montenegro and fought on the side of the Allies, while his mother was from Croatia. Jasenovac only targeted Serbs, Montenegrins, Jews, and gypsies. But this is one reason the author wrote this book, to warn that the US is now treading toward this same historic path of the old Yugoslavia, which no longer exists. It is Michel de Montaigne who describes his written expressions, as “the book of myself,” and he is credited with having formulated the essay mode of communication, as a unique literary style, a highly personal narrative means of self-disclosure, as he states, “I am myself the material of my book.” Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language defines © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_10

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the essay as “a literary composition, analytical or interpretative in nature, dealing with its subject matter from a more or less personal standpoint and permitting a considerable freedom of style and expression.” Montaigne began his Essays in his 38th year of life, but I am now more than twice that age, which provides me with the advantage of a longer purview of my own life and development. The other perspectival advantage inherent in the essay mode of self-expression is that it offers an intrinsically therapeutic element to reflexive insight, self-understanding, and contemplation. This realization has become not only an integral aspect of my own “personal identity,” but even more significantly it has alerted me about some of the most troublesome aspects of our shared human nature. Accordingly, I now wish to begin by going back to what politically transpired during the First and Second World Wars in Europe and see if it can further provide us with a deeper insight and understanding into our present crisis in the Ukraine, which was recently engendered by Russia’s military attack and its violations of basic humanitarian and ethical principles and rights, and in general by anticipating all such future situations with lessons to be learned. On psychological, political, and ethical grounds, it is frightfully reminiscent of what transpired during the First and Second World Wars. Both wars concluded with the wishful but now discredited and debunked promise that the first and the second global conflicts would be the end to all world wars. This chapter is a sequel to my last book. On September 18, 2020, I gave a talk at the University of Szczecin in Poland, at the “Together Alone Again” International Conference, and I warned about a looming global political situation in which half-a-dozen world leaders, seeking unlimited autocratic power, possess the nuclear capabilities at their disposal to pursue their narcissistic political ambitions through violence.1 As suggested in my opening Preface, both historically and tragically devastating conflicts are initially politically fueled and controlled by dangerously charismatic and autocratic leaders. As a general rule, every individual’s evaluative principles, those by which each of us guides his or her own life, are a creation, a compilation, and a rendering forged by what John Dewey in my opening introductory statement called one’s uniquely personal “lived experiences,” and obviously mine were and still are no exception to the rule. But the most important and influential values in each of our lives are shaped by how each one of us, as an individual existentially chooses and evaluates not simply for ourselves, but it is also always within the context of our shared human

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nature at large. Oddly as it turned out and quite unexpectedly, I sadly experienced a major reawakening which only occurred very belatedly in life, as I approached my 80th year when I stumbled on a series of recently discovered historical family and national facts concerning my immediate family and their lives in Montenegro and Croatia, which I was forced to acknowledge. Accordingly, now with my newly acquired burgeoning biographical history, my reevaluation of my “personal identity” began by taking on a rather troublesome direction while at the same time conflicting with the values that I had made until then and especially how I had previously evaluated human nature in general. And it all began suddenly and unexpectedly with my family ancestry, a subject matter in which I had no interest until a decade ago and it all started with my grandfather, Lazar Mijuskovic (1867–1936), whose political importance and accomplishments began before the First World War (1914–1918). He was Prime Minister to King Nikola of Montenegro (1910–1918), a title the monarch had achieved with some considerable difficulty, only to have it taken away at the end of the conflict. My grandfather and the King, I think it is fair to say, were at some odds over the issue of the unification of Montenegro with Serbia, the King hoping to continue reigning rather than give way to King Peter II of Serbia, whereas Lazar sought unity with Serbia with the goal in view of strengthening Montenegro’s political influence in the Balkans. To provide the reader with a quick glimpse into the frequent machinations of Balkan politics during that time, a single example may suffice. On December 3, 1912, my grandfather was dispatched by King Nikola to represent Montenegro at The London Conference of Ambassadors. As Russian belligerence waxed and waned it was even rumored that the Montenegrin ‘black princesses’ [the King’s daughters, Anastasia and Milica] had succeeded in influencing the tsar [Nicholas of Russia] to take a stronger stance against Austria’s pro-Albanian policy by bribing Rasputin. The Great Powers convened two separate but interconnected peace conferences in London. The first, known as the St. James Conference, was between the belligerents, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, and Montenegro against Turkey and the Ottoman Empire at large. Although Montenegro sent a delegation led by prime minster Lazar Mijuskovic, King Nikola did not call off the military offensive at Scutari. But if the ambassadors representing the second conference Great Powers made some progress, the same could not be said for the first conference of belligerents. Although at

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first the [Turkish] Ottomanians were ready to concede the territory west of Adrianople to the Balkan allies, their offer did not prove acceptable to the Greeks or Bulgarians. Fighting around Scutari resumed where it had never really stopped, as the debilitating struggle continued. With so much at stake, King Nikola was convinced that if Scutari were to fall before the signing of a final peace treaty, the Entente Powers would not seek to overturn a fait accompli, it was therefore especially galling to the Montenegrins that the Turkish General Riza, despite prohibitions managed to have military supplies brought to Scutari thereby threatening the siege and Armistice. In the end, however, Riza’s success was not enough to save him or the city. On the night of January 30, on his way home after dinner with his rival and second-in-command, Essad Pasha, Riza was murdered by unknown assailants. Although it was never conclusively proved, Essad Pasha remained the prime suspect on the basis of cui bono.2 So much for Balkan “politics.” But as usual Montenegro continued to be in its own inimitable fashion a rather troublesome political entity throughout the hostilities, as amply documented by historians. Between 1908 and 1914, Montenegro, the tiny Serb land nestled in the southwestern corner of present- day Yugoslavia, was a mouse that roared repeatedly in European affairs. A poor country whose capital [Cetinje] was smaller than many backwater European towns, it was constantly in diplomatic crises, many of its own making. “On the map she looks like a mere pin head,” remarked one author in discussing Montenegro’s past glories. “But the point to that pin becomes an unendurable irritation in the side of Turkey’s empire and helped save Europe from entire domination by the Orient.” In time, however, Montenegro became a source of never-ending irritation for the same Europe she had helped save. In 1912, she struck a final blow against Turkey, initiating the first Balkan War. On other occasions, some thought that she might provide the casus belli for a much wider [global] conflict [i.e., a world war].3 According to author Rebecca West, King Nikola was quite the political opportunist and intriguer. King Nikola’s reign mounted from peak upon peak of treachery. In 1914, when he had been fifty-three years on the throne [as a prince], he telegraphed to Belgrade as soon as the war had broken out and promised King Peter Karageorevitch that he and his subjects would stand by Serbia till death. When the Serbian and Montenegrin troops jointly invaded Bosnia, they were more successful than they had hoped, and soon were sweeping down on Sarajevo. But just when it seemed inevitable that the

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town must fall into their hands, Nicholas withdrew his army without notice, and the Serbians were obliged to retreat.4 Interestingly, King Nikola had nine daughters, whom he sought to politically marry off to the nobilities and aristocracies of European society, thereby securing a firmer foothold on continuing his royal ambitions and sovereignty. He was often humorously referred to as the “father-in-law of Europe.” Two of the princesses, Anastasia and Millica, married into the Russian aristocracy, the first to the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaievich and the second to the Grand Duke Peter Nikolaievich. Although they were quite attractive and well-educated (French was the favored diplomatic language), they were referred to as “the two crows,” because of their dark complexion by the Russian Bolshevist opponents to the Czar (Treadway, opus cit., 13, 117, 127). Nevertheless, they were befriended by the Czarina, Alexandra, and in turn they introduced her to “the mad mystic monk,” Rasputin, who had a spell-binding influence on the Empresses only son, Alexei, the inheritor to the Russian throne, who suffered from hemophilia, while Rasputin also possessed an inexplicable and uncanny ability to calm the child’s bloodletting. Unfortunately, however, as time transpired and conspired, Rasputin had not only achieved a strong therapeutic role in relation to the tsarevich, but more alarmingly he had also gained a politically consultative influence over the Czarina, who, in turn, also had her husband Nicholas’ ear as well. Tragically, the whole affair ended with the Bolshevik assassination of the entire royal family in 1918, and then, as they say, sadly “the rest is history.” In addition, King Nikola’s beautiful and clever daughter, Princess Jelena, married Viktor Emmanuel II, King of Italy, whose first official action at the start of the Second World War was to appoint Benito Mussolini as his Prime Minister (Treadway, opus cit., 15, 217, 237; Roberts, opus cit., 28, 260–265). After the speedy Nazi military takeover of Montenegro at the start of the conflict in 1940, its rule was given over to Mussolini and the Italian Fascists and shortly thereafter Montenegro became an Italian Protectorate during the Second World War (Roberts, 346 ff.).

Postscript The Balkan Wars and First World War. Early in 1914 the Montenegrin statesman, Lazar Mijuskovic, began serious discussions for a financial and customs union between Serbia and Montenegro, a fusion of two armies, a

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joint foreign policy and diplomatic representation, but a retention of the two dynasties. These negotiations became known to Austria, who warned Petrograd that “Austria-Hungary would not remain a silent observer” and regarded union as a challenge to her Adriatic interests. But the movement for union was rapidly becoming irresistible when the First World War broke out and the two states found themselves side by side in resistance to Austria-Hungary. Serbian General Jankovic had been sent at Russia’s insistence to reorganize the Montenegrin army. In November, during the invasion of Serbia, Crown Prince Danilo made overtures to the Central Powers, by offering to cut off the Serbian retreat to the coast in return for territorial concessions in Montenegro. During the retreat the attitude of the Montenegrin dynasty remained highly equivocal, and the key position of Mount Lovcen was surrendered to the Austrians almost without a struggle. Parliament voted unanimously in favor of holding out to the end with Serbia, but King Nikola negotiated on his own initiative without authorization or consultation from his Government and on January 1916 addressed a telegram of submission to Francis Joseph. Failing to obtain the terms which he had hoped, he and his family, first with the premier Mijuskovic, fled to Italy. Next, King Nikola resided in France and tried to silence criticism and replaced Premier Mijuskovic and threw himself definitely into the arms of the anti-unionists and by the end of the war found his court reduced to a tiny clique of personal dependents and adventurers.5

Aftermath These historical facts gave me a “richer,” albeit a decidedly more troubling perspective on the relationship between my grandfather and the King and consequently into my own ancestry, and “who” I was and now possibly who I would come to be. As a child and adolescent, I had never learned any of this from my father and to be frank I never cared to ask anything about my family residing in Europe as I grew older. But now in a strange fashion and oddly I reflected that it must be similar to all those adults who are separated from their parents at birth and who yearn to know who their forefathers and parents are or were and thereby gaining insight into one’s inherited traits and the search for “who” we really are, into our singular personal identity, and what we might be truly capable of doing is a much more difficult and lifelong quest, as it festers in the hidden and secret recesses of our mind and soul, within the hollows of the self, in one’s

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critical relation to the alien world beyond our self and to our presumed “family of man.” I was born in 1937  in Budapest, a year after Lazar died. My grandmother, nee Katarina Kirilov, was the daughter of the Russian consul to Skadar in Albania. When Lazar decided to favor her family with his proposal of an arranged marriage, she was only 13 years of age, while he was 29 and so he quite appropriately honored her with the gift of a doll to celebrate the engagement. In John Treadway’s study, whom I had the good fortune to meet in 2009 in Washington, he traces the strategic history of Lazar’s involvement with the King and the country’s embattled struggles before the First World War in his study cited above. As stated, both King and Minister had gone into voluntary exile. They soon separated when the King broke with Lazar and went to France. After the war, Lazar was posted as the ambassador to Serbia. He died in 1936, a year before I was born. As it happens, I am the last of Lazar’s genealogical line, dating back to the thirteenth century. Only males are included in the “family tree” (lucky for me). The Montenegrin Academy of Science and the Arts has recently published a biography of Lazar and his accomplishments and there are photographs of my mother and father and their brief biographies and a portrait of myself, my wife Ruth, and our two daughters and Lazar’s extended biography.6 My mother, Ines, was from Croatia and a Catholic. She was raised in a very wealthy family situated in a small and lovely coastal village community on the Dalmatian seacoast, Makarska, when she met my father, Max, who was studying law, and they were soon married on the nearby island of Brac. (On our first visit to Makarska in 2009, Ruth and I actually obtained a copy of my parent’s marriage certificate at the City Hall.) The village was bombed repeatedly by the Allies during the Second World War, so it is amazing that both the Catholic monastery and the City Hall were able to preserve all sorts of family records. In 1939, there is a photograph, stamped Makarska, of me with a companion of the same age playing on the beach (Fig. 10.1). Later, there are pictures of me with my grandmother holding me in her arms in Belgrade (Fig.10.2), where Lazar had been serving when he died in 1936. And there is a photograph of me at the Budapest Zoo in a pony cart with a little girl as a companion (Fig.  10.3). And I remember my mother used to drop me off at the Embassy in Budapest when she went shopping. I recall mounting the stairs to the second floor and hung above the landing was a very larger-than-life portrait of King Alexander of Serbia, who was assassinated in 1934. His

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Fig. 10.1  Photograph of author as child on beach in Makarska, Croatia

son was then King Peter, who had fled to London at the start of the hostilities. And when I would go to the outdoor balcony on the second floor to bid farewell to my departing mother as she went shopping, the older children from the Russian Embassy across the street, perched on their corresponding balcony, would mock and tease me, shouting “Maman! Maman! Au revoir.” My father, Max, was from Montenegro, born in the old capital, Cetinje, a soldier, a lawyer, and a diplomat, assigned to the Yugoslavian Embassy in Budapest. It was an important post because politically Budapest was an integral part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire soon to be appropriated by the Nazis. At the time, in Montenegro, every young man was militarily trained and there is a photograph of my father on horseback armed with a sword (Fig. 10.4). The earlier bishops (Vladikas) were trained to lead in battle against the Turks with a pistol in the right hand and a cross in the left. In 1939, the German blitzgrieg, with its lightening military invasion, overran the Czechoslovakian Sudentland and proceeded, essentially unopposed, into Yugoslavia. My three uncles were castrated, according to the family historian, Ilija Mijuskovic, and my only male cousin was killed by the Nazis, as he tried to flee the Nazis. In 1940, the Yugoslavian Embassy

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Fig. 10.2  Photograph of author as child with paternal grandmother in Belgrade

transferred my parents and I to the Embassy in Tel Aviv, where British Intelligence recruited my father as a cryptographer to decipher Fascist communiques regarding Montenegro, which had already been taken, overrun, and was instituted as an Italian Protectorate. My father was fluent in French and Italian having lived in Italy after the First World War. I remember visiting Jerusalem and the catacombs and my mother buying me a small tin ikon of Mary and other graphic memories, as, for instance, a seaplane skimming the placid waters and gliding to a rest on the Dead Sea, visiting a Moorish citadel in Baghdad where the Crusaders had tried to scale the walls on ladders only to have the defenders pour boiling oil on them.

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Fig. 10.3  Photograph of author as child at Budapest zoo

But also in 1940, the embassy reassigned us to Cairo where my father upon our arrival volunteered to serve in the British Eighth Army as a cavalry officer, first under generals Claude Auchinleck and later Bernard Montgomery, both of whom were engaged in desert warfare against Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and his elite Panzer Divisions and Afrika Korps. For a short while, we lived at the British officers’ residence, Gabalaja House, situated along the Nile River, and I attended a French elementary school while my father was militarily deployed. I was quite shy and very embarrassed to ask the teacher for permission to use the bathroom with the result that I not infrequently soiled myself and miserably had to trudge home along the river. My father was on military deployment and my mother and I had moved into a tall apartment building. She suffered from anxiety and migraines, which often became accentuated by the threat of German bombing raids, as Rommel was fighting to reach Cairo. The city itself was never bombed but I remember the nightly sirens screaming in the street below, as I could see fleeing mobs of people running and emptying streetcar passengers all heading for underground shelters, while my mother and I struggled to get into the elevator in our apartment building with me holding on to my teddy bear with one hand while tightly grasping

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Fig. 10.4  Photograph of author’s father as young soldier on horseback

her hand with the other. During other moments, I also remember a kind Egyptian janitor gifting me a fez and a prayer rug and practicing my kneelings. Due to my father’s military position, we belonged to the Gezira Country Club, a lavish and resplendent sports complex complete with polo fields, swimming pools, tennis courts, cricket fields, and so on, to which all the military officers from various nations, including Scots, Australians, Free French, east Indians, Greeks, and others, belonged. And there is a very special photograph when he was on a leave with him standing while holding the reins of a camel and my mother and I sitting aboard

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the animal with one of the pyramids and the Sphynx in the background (Fig. 10.5). Meanwhile a fierce guerilla conflict against the German Nazis had split Yugoslavia apart, torn between two contending factions, the Communist Partisans, headed by Josip Broz, whose nom de guerre was Tito, and the Serbian Chetnik Royalists, whose leader was Draza Mihailovic. Both were against the Nazis, but they radically differed on how Yugoslavia should be ruled following the end of the war. Interestingly, Yugoslavia was the only country engaged in guerilla warfare. Other European countries had to remain satisfied in conducting their underground “resistance” movements in the cities. The warring situation in Yugoslavia, as I learned to understand it from Professor Robert’s study, consisted of a fourfold square, with the shifting corners fluctuating between first the militaries of Nazi Germany and their Croatian collaborators; second the Royalist Serbian and Montenegrin Chetniks; third the Communist Partisans; and fourth the British military forces and the aforementioned famed Eighth Army (cf., Roberts, opus cit., 30, 336, 353–354, 371 ff., 378.)

Fig. 10.5  Photograph of author as child on camel with parents in Egypt

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At first, Churchill and the English supported the Chetniks but as the reprisals by the Nazis for German soldiers killed or wounded was horrendous, with 100 villagers killed for each death of a German soldier and 50 for one wounded. Churchill’s dilemma then was to decide which guerrilla force, Chetniks or Partisans, to support because not only were they fighting the Germans but each other as well for control of Yugoslavia after the hostilities were ceased. But basically, the British military perspective completely dominated the flow of the war on the Allies side. In September 1943, Fitzroy Maclean’s report stressed that Tito’s National Liberation Army must be officially recognized as an Allied Force, and that its leader would be the power in post-war Yugoslavia. It suggested sending a great deal more aid to the Partisans and that support for Mihailovic be discontinued. In the course of the Teheran Conference, which opened on 28 November, the Big Three [Britain, America, and Russia] authorized a military directive to say Tito should be supported to the greatest possible extent. Mihailovic was not mentioned and received no more British supplies from then on; while in the next three months of 1943, the Partisans received over 2000 tons of supplies.7 In addition: Maclean and Churchill met in December, who received him in bed, and Maclean summarized his conclusions that Mihailovic’s contribution to anti-­ Axis operations in Yugoslavia was negligible and that any operations were largely the work of the British officers attached to the Chetniks. He also emphasized his conviction that Tito would be the decisive political factor in post-war Yugoslavia and that his regime would be Communist. “The Prime Minister’s reply resolved my doubts,” wrote Maclean. “Do you intend,” he asked, “to make Jugoslavia your home after the war?” “No sir,” I replied. “Neither do I,” he said. “And being so, the less you and I need worry about the form of Government they set up, the better.” …From then on, Mihailovic was lost. There was no hope for his survival in an Eastern Europe that was to be liberated and therefore dominated by Soviet Russia. (ibid., 283)

There was even a musical ditty sung by the British soldiers about the political impasse with the following refrain. We’ve got a partisan itch [meaning Tito]. And then there’s Mihailovitch. And the Foreign Office never seems. To know which is which.

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Churchill, of course, couldn’t care less what would happen to Yugoslavia after the war. That was none of his concern, as documented in the following account by a British officer serving in Cairo. The indictment against Mihailovic was repeated. On December 25, 1943, back in Cairo, the British emissary Fitzroy Maclean met with Churchill and in a report stressed that Tito’s National Liberation Army must be officially recognized as an Allied Force, and that its leader would be the power in post-war Yugoslavia. It suggested sending a great deal more aid to Tito’s Partisans and that ‘support for Mihailovic should be discontinued.’ At the Teheran Conference on December 28, the Big Three authorized a military directive to say that Tito should be supported to the greatest possible extent. Mihailovic was not mentioned, and he received no more British supplies from then on; while in the last three months of 1943, the Partisans received over 2000 tons of supplies. (Cf., Roberts, opus cit., 370–371, 375, 378) How prescient Churchill’s political evaluation proved to be, we can easily surmise when we reflect on Russia’s role in the post-war’s so-called cold war and their construction of the “Berlin wall”? And it is also relatively easy to remember his disastrous decision to invade the shores of Gallipoli during the First World War. Meanwhile, young King Peter II of Yugoslavia, who had defected to England, was heavily pressured by Churchill to commit more Yugoslavian resistance fighters against the Nazis in the homeland. All this resulted in a shift in the strategy for the two guerrilla factions. The Partisan forces owed their loyalty to Russia and to the anticipation of a triumphant Communist takeover for Yugoslavia after the war, while by contrast the Chetniks regarded the Nazi retaliatory reprisals aimed at villagers as too high a price and turned their effort in two quite different directions, first to rescue and return Allied downed bomber pilots, British and American, to safety in England and second to prevent a political Communist victory and a takeover of Yugoslavia. This political difference resulted in Churchill and the British favoring the Partisans along with the forementioned support of arms, while Tito and his forces attacked the Chetniks over the issue post-­ war supremacy. The capital of Montenegro, Podgorica (later titled Titograd after the war), which was held by the Italians, was bombed 87 times by the Allies. Again, both the political and the military frameworks regarding the warring guerilla factions were shifting dramatically at the expense of the Chetniks. As for Churchill and the British government, they achieved

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what they wanted and basically demeaned young King Peter of Yugoslavia, still then exiled in England, who after the war left in bitterness and relocated to Libertyville, PA.  Years later, in 1949, my father met with him during a meeting at a hotel on Michigan Ave. in Chicago, while we were living in Gary, Indiana, after the war. King Peter died soon after of alcoholism and depression. Meanwhile, after the war, Mihailovic was captured by the Communists and tried in Belgrade and on June 10, 1946, sentenced to death and executed by a firing squad. Later in 1946, US President Harry Truman posthumously awarded Mihailovic the Legion of Honor medal for his role in rescuing hundreds of Allied airmen downed by the Nazis over Yugoslavia. In 2015, “the Serbian court overturned his conviction, ruling that it was a Communist political show trial that was fundamentally and clearly unfair and held to be null and void” (Wikipedia). As the war was closing, my father returned to his Embassy assignment in Cairo, and we were once more reassigned but this time to Ankara. Turkey had been neutral during the war. Late in November 1944, we were again dispatched but this time to the Embassy in Washington and transported by a B29 military bomber. Meanwhile in Yugoslavia, Tito had consolidated power and the capital of Montenegro was renamed Titograd. In 1947, my father’s loyalty to the Communist regime was questioned and we were scheduled to be transferred to Bucharest, Romania, behind the Iron Curtain. My father applied for political protection, and we were awarded asylum status under the auspices of the Displaced Persons Act. From 1947 to 1950, my father, who didn’t speak much English at the time and experienced considerable difficulties in gaining work, was employed as a janitor at a dairy factory in Gary, Indiana. But he had a gift and facility for learning languages, and he quickly mastered English. In 1950, the US Central Intelligence Agency recruited him for his knowledge and expertise concerning Yugoslavian Communists, even though Tito had broken with the Russian version in 1948. When years later the political weather changed again, he was given a job with the FBI as a translator in their legal department, which he held until he died in 1975. My mother had predeceased him in 1963 following an extremely painful cancerous condition for five years. Neither of my parents ever spoke to me about their respective “old countries,” Croatia and Montenegro, or offered any political insight into their relative situations during the war. And as I say, I wouldn’t have been interested if they had.

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In 1956, I had gone off to college and completed my undergraduate work at the University of Chicago, married Ruth my favorite person in the world in 1965 and received my PhD at the University of California at San Diego, which was probably at that time the strongest History of Philosophy department in the US. Beginning in 1972, I taught at Southern Illinois University until 1979, while Ruth had completed her law degree at the school. We both wanted to return to southern California. Ruth became a highly successful attorney but as it turned out for me, I ended up having to manage two seemingly very different occupations, first as a social worker and second as a clinical therapist during the day while also teaching philosophy and humanities courses in the evenings at various universities. In 2008, while I was working at Harbor-UCLA Hospital as a clinician and purely by chance, I learned that the President of Montenegro, Filip Vujanovic, spoke English and so on a whim I wrote him a letter telling him I was Lazar’s grandson. A couple of weeks later, I received a telephone call in my office telling me that the President of Montenegro was on the phone. At the time, I happened to be seeing a schizophrenic patient, who was from Montenegro and in my effort to establish a trusting connection, I told him the little that I knew about the country, its people, and my long-lost family history. And so, I immediately thought it was him phoning me either in a delusional state or as a prank. Well, as it turned out, Ruth and I were invited to visit the President in person. That summer, we went and met his wife, Svetlana, who was a judge and two of his children, Danilo and Nina. And then we toured the towns of Niksic, where my family’s mausoleums cover the cemetery grounds, and Kotor, which is basically a citadel-fortress of thirteenth-century vintage on the Bay of Kotor, and the capital, Podgorica, now renamed back to its original designation. And we drove to Makarska, Croatia, where my mother grew up. There we met with Fra Karlo Jurisic, a 92-year-old Franciscan monk living in the town’s monastery, who knew my family well and provided us with all sorts of copies of church-related documentations regarding my mother’s Christening and my aunt Olga’s marriage, and so on, and then he walked us over to my maternal grandfather’s two second-story stone houses, one served as his business office and jeweler’s shop and the second as his residence in the Stari Grad, the old town. What a sudden revelation and replete with an instant heritage and ancestry! Why hadn’t I known all this? Well, to be honest with myself, I never asked my parents or cared I was so wrapped up in my own issues.

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Annually, after 2009, Ruth and I made annual pilgrimages to Kotor and Podgorica and then Makarska, where I had inherited a seaside property, and we always managed to stop in Dubrovnik, a wonderfully beautiful old town. A few years later, on our annual visit, while enjoying a few beers in the magnificent town square amid ancient stone buildings, cafés, and restaurants, I noticed a huge sign being mounted on a building. As a child, I spoke Serbo-Croatian but had essentially forgotten it by disuse. But the word “rat,” meaning war, jumped out at me, and I asked the waiter about the advertisement. And he responded that it was a documentary about the bombing of Dubrovnik by the Montenegrins during the Serbian Balkan wars of 1991–1992, which tragedies and violations of human rights involved Milosevic and the Serbians, who were engaged in the “ethnic cleansing” of the Moslem population in Bosnia and Sarajevo. Madness! Disgust! I was now in my eighties, and I was stunned to realize for the first time that I had never asked my parents on how they had experienced the Second World War, their feelings, their thoughts, their fears, and their hopes. I had been so wrapped up in my own adjustment issues, in my own loneliness, and that had been about all I ever dwelt on. It was then for the first time that I suddenly became more deeply aware of my dual ethnic heritage and when I researched the enormity of the affair, it was only then that I came sadly to learn more about all the terrible atrocities perpetrated by the Croatian Nazi Ustasha and the Catholic Church during the war and the notorious Croatian concentration camp, Jasenovac. I also discovered the egregious sense of betrayal of Mihailovic, which was strongly condemned by the international news media, as I began learning more about the most sinister and horrifying concentration camp in the entire Nazi system. Jasenovac was a Croatian complex of elaborate camp facilities on the Sava River, which operated from 1941 to 1945. Its motto, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” was borrowed from Dante’s Inferno, which was more than the imagination could conceive as the prisoners, Serbs, Montenegrins, Jews, and Gypsies entered the promised gates of Hell with its nine circles of sadism. “Even the German Nazis were appalled by the intensity, the systematic torture of children, the aged, the infirm, women, and men!” It has always been a mystery to me how the German culture could have morally produced the most profound extremes of ethical values ranging between Kant’s categorical imperative and Hitler’s atrocities with his rantings brought to reality in Mein Kampf. The fervent extreme forms of Croatian nationalism, the intensity of the

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Ustasha, the Croatian political and military arm, as it sought to form an independent state from Yugoslavia, and which even directly implicated the Catholic church in their tortures, totally engulfed me. It all became suddenly visibly, graphically forced upon me. Ten priests had declined to participate in the atrocities, and they were tortured in their turn before they were killed. The number of victims is estimated as high as between 130,000 and 140,000 with some estimates running as high as 700,000. The entire documentation of those four years of tragic incidents is powerfully depicted and chronicled in Marcia Christoff Kurapovna’s book. In her far-ranging and sensitive study on the contentious and divisive struggles between the British government and Churchill, the Royalist Chetniks under Mihailovic, and the Communist Partisans under Tito, she documents the horrific atrocities perpetrated by the Croatian commandants and prison guards, including women guards, and the Catholic clergy at the camp during the raging civil war.8 In her book, she treats Mihailovic throughout as a military hero and a scapegoated victim by Tito and the Communists. Additionally, during his trial, a petition from hundreds of Allied downed bomber pilots, both American and British, who had been rescued in Yugoslavia by the Chetniks, was featured, along with an impassioned plea from John Plamenatz (nee Jovan Petrov Plamenac), a famous Montenegrin-­ born Oxford scholar of philosophy, was received in his support. Professor Plamenatz’s eloquent and moving defense was privately published in 1944.9 But what was the holocaust really like? Jasenovac was notorious for its barbaric practices and the large number of victims. Unlike the Nazi-run camps, it specialized in one-on-one violence of a particularly sadistic kind. Prisoners were murdered manually by the use of blunt objects, such as knives, hammers, and axes. It was comprised and operated exclusively by Croatians, including Catholic monks, priests, and nuns. Before the war, the Ustasha was an ultra-nationalist, fascist, and terrorist organization fighting for independence from Yugoslavia under the leadership of Ante Pavelich. Many historians have simply characterized it as a systematic form of genocide. (Wikipedia)

I was absolutely stunned! I couldn’t believe it! My mother’s people represented the most sadistic elements of the human race, while my father’s people represented the victims. And my parents never told me. Guess what? But now, only now, and to my shame and regret, I never asked them

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what happened during the war while I was so preoccupied with my own issues, and even later as an adult I never asked. On their part, I believe they wanted to protect me. As it happens, I have two daughters who are in their early fifties and now, “as it happens,” I have never told them, and I probably never shall. But the real story is Jasenovac. How could two Slavic peoples, both Christian, one Catholic and the other Eastern Orthodox, with only their ethnic—but not Christian—differences between them become so enflamed that one faction could be so cruel toward the other? And what incredible atrocities and horrors followed! But how could I “process” all these surrounding historical and tragic facts along with my ancestral background and also philosophically unravel the roots of good and the evil? What did all this teach me about human nature? How do I “process” the realization that if my parents and I had been trapped in Makarska, then our fate would have been sealed! Today Russia is following in Hitler’s path and Putin, who prides himself as a Hegelian World Historical Individual, is engaged in destroying Ukraine. Meanwhile a growing civil war is accelerating in the US. Americans own more guns than any other nation—and tragically use more than any other nation on each other. According to a recent national survey, one out of every three Americans assume that an armed civil war is imminent. Meanwhile, the nation remains enveloped in its on-going historical plague of slavery and prejudice as it has consistently darkened the political skies since the nation’s early founding. And the cult of autocratic sadism is now becoming increasingly threatening. Philosophically the definition of a sadist is a person who paradoxically wishes to be both loved and feared and nothing less will do. Without that reassurance and adulation, their own loneliness will destroy them. In summary, in the foregoing I have sought to combine the principles of Kant’s reflexive self-consciousness, Schopenhauer’s irrational Will, Husserl’s transcendent intentionality, and Freud’s dynamic ego as supporting my theory of subjective idealism. And in summation, I would like to recall Wilhelm Dilthey’s helpful distinction regarding his epistemic threefold World Historical paradigms of Materialism, Subjective Idealism, and Objective Idealism. But in a more properly ethical context, I would also suggest there are three corresponding existential choices offered to be made between science, religion, and humanism.

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Afterword Throughout the preceding discussions and the tracings of the History of Ideas, I have recruited various theories of consciousness in my effort to unravel the active dynamics of loneliness and intimacy and my reflections on how the values of good and evil stand and now personally for me requiring a complete reevaluation of my own values, as well as of my fellow man. I have reflexively asked myself, how far and how deeply am I capable of such evil? Socrates dictum is “Know thyself!” How ruthlessly honest should one be with one’s own self? One possible criterion, an existential one, is that if one cannot imagine or conceive one’s self in such an evil role, then they have earned the right to judge the evil, then perhaps it means that one could conceivably “excuse” one’s self from the evil. Judge it and condemn it. If one cannot imagine any circumstances, conditions, or situations under which one could condone such acts, then perhaps one has the moral right to condemn them. But how would Schopenhauer treat such a criterion, such a defense, or such an excuse? Today cognitive behaviorism and the current neurosciences assure us that there are no such realities as “goodness” and “evil”; there are only neutral bodily conditioned behaviors and homogeneous neurons activated by electrical synapses. Along these permissive movements, materialists, empiricists, and phenomenalists reduce all values to sensations, to the subjective feelings of pleasure and pain, while the linguists in their turn sterilize the distinction into the essential neutralities of nominalism, which denies the very existence of any universal “meanings.” There are only sensory particulars.

But there is also a vital secondary issue adding a political dimension to all of this and that is the realization that certain current religious, racial, national, cultural, and ethnic movements are presently engaged in practicing a dangerous and narcissistic intolerance toward others. They are promoting exclusionary values for themselves alone, while at the same time ostracizing, exiling, and punishing all others who trespass on their protected values. I believe there is a lesson to be learned from the foregoing and so I have struggled at some length to present my concerns both within a personal, a domestic, as well as a political context, while contrasting it against a more “existential” perspective. And I believe the current civil war in the US is heading in the same direction as the two conflicting warring parties during the Second World War in Yugoslavia, with one party intent on

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depriving the rights of any individual freedom to the others. Today, the US praises itself as the world’s longest living democracy. But was it ever a democracy? From the very beginning it was steeped in slavery, racism, prejudice, and bigotry, which persists to this day. Doubly unfortunate for us today is the fact that our political chaos is compounded by a sociological global pandemic of loneliness, as the burgeoning population of the world explodes into eight billion souls and egos and counting. Currently, countless lost, nomadic, and rootless human atoms are circumnavigating the endless environs of the world, which so readily offers the transiency of unlimited travel. Additionally, our social communications with each other are reduced to superficial and shallow media outlets and various flat two-dimensional “Facebook” entries on a computer. For the longest time and basically unnoticed, the natural biological, psychological, and ethical connections and relations between human beings, which formerly held us together, the Greek polis, the feudal manors, tribal relations, the family clans, all of which historically provided a sense of belonging and the advantages of a shared “intimacy” as they had in the past are now long gone. And presently, our rapidly fragmenting conjugal relations, our disappearing extended families, our skyrocketing divorce rate, the increasing single-parent households, the disappearances of the rural families, the ethnic neighborhoods, the communal villages, are all contributing to the current sociological malaise. Time was when children simply inherited their father’s and their mother’s duties. It is now far more usual for the children to leave home and go away to college, meet someone from another state, get married elsewhere, find employment in a different city, professionally, and statistically migrate on the average seven times during their professional lives by changing their employment. There was a time when humans naturally gravitated toward groups for companionship and intimacy. But today we seem more clearly driven toward physical transiency and mobility and a penchant for superficial media communication. Recently, Britain instituted a Minister of Loneliness, Stacey Crouch, who just as quickly resigned. On my part, I had the opportunity to give talks on loneliness and its psychological aftermath at Brunel University in England, “Reimagining Loneliness: Perspectives from Philosophy and Religion” (Google, 2/2/2015); Tampere University in Finland, “Loneliness and the Built Environment” (Google, 10/9/2020); and the University of Szczecin in Poland, “Together Alone Again “on

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Political Narcissism” (Google, 9/18/2020). I welcomed the opportunity because it gave me a chance to set my own house of values in order. Finally in sum, the study of the History of Ideas suggests that basically there are two sociological and political paradigms of human association: the organic community and the atomistic society.10 As a result and in response what is presently occurring worldwide now is that countries are trying to manufacture political intimacy by nationally closing in within their own borders, by seeking an ethnic “intimacy,” by quixotically struggling to preserve the “purity” of their language, their customs, their prejudices, their exclusive religion, in short by promoting their nationalistic and narcissistic tendencies, as it is now currently transpiring in Russia, China, North Korea, Hungary, Italy, Turkey, and most dangerously trending in the US, with all of these nations energized by their political and legal impositions against “aliens,” with their appeals to traditional customs, with enforced rules on limited voting, on denying abortions, and by xenophobically restricting immigration, and practicing prejudicial treatment on all designated “outsiders.” Meanwhile in the US, which is singularly steeped historically in the institution of slavery and racism, it is now well on the path to a virulent form of exclusive political narcissism, while in the same moment the country is gripped by an uncompromising paranoid and exclusionary loyalty to a charismatic, narcissistic, and sadistic political pretender in the guise of a presidential candidate. I make these ethical comments from the vantage point of a cultural neutrality. Before the age of eight, I was exposed to various cultures, both good and evil; Hungarian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Palestinian, Jewish, Egyptian, Turkish, and American. Personally, I disavow all political, ethnic, nationalist, and religious values. Hopefully, I can still value ethical ones. Long ago, the Stoic philosophers conceived that humanity as a whole constitutes a single species, that we are all akin, and that no man is born a slave. We are all cosmopolitans, citizens of the world. When the Nazis were tried at Nuremburg after the Second World War, they were charged with crimes against all humanity. Both the Stoics and Kant appeal to the same deontological ethical principle, namely, that we are all of the same species, and that we, as individuals, own an inviolable duty to our fellow man. But admittedly that is an existential choice that each of us can either make or disregard. But to bring our History of Ideas outlook to a conclusion. To recall, interestingly, Aristotle in his Politics distinguishes six forms of human

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association. The best is monarchy and the worst is tyranny; the second best is aristocracy and the second worst oligarchy; and the third best is democracy and the least worst is anarchy—but to each his own. But today, in the US, both democracy and humanity are fighting for their very existence, and they are in danger of giving way to tyranny and a very peculiar but readily recognizable form of political sadism toward minorities, aliens, and even against women and their inalienable rights. More darkly, when we trace mankind’s evolutionary path, we discover four stages. First, homo erectus, bipedal man with his opposing thumbs. Second, productive man, homo faber, man who fashions and makes. Third, homo sapiens, scientific man, knowledgeable man. But now we are on the verge of our fourth and final stage: homo destructus, man with implements so powerful that an individual with a rifle can murder a classroom of children and their teacher in a matter of seconds, and a single political tyrant can threaten another nation with nuclear extermination. And then there is the absurdity of Stephen Pinker’s thesis. This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence…But it is an unmistakable development visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.[11.] But in conclusion, allow me to paraphrase my Foreword and offer it as an Afterward. There are two ways to approach political situations that are extremely dangerous and destructive. One way is to confront them when you are in their midst. And the other way is to warn about the devastating consequences if you persist in allowing them to continue. As Lord Acton warned: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And as a value, evil and sadism have no bounds, they tend to corrupt absolutely…We are now on that dangerous precipice staring down into the abyss of a subconscious darkness and evil that is our own self.

Notes 1. Mijuskovic, Ben Lazare, Philosophical Roots of Loneliness and Intimacy: The Problem of Evil, Chapter 7, “Loneliness and Political Narcissism” (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan), 2022.

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2. Roberts, Elizabeth, Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007) 289–290; hereafter cited as Roberts, opus cit. 3. Treadway, John, The Falcon and the Eagle: Montenegro and Austria-­ Hungary: 1908–1914 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University, Press, 1983), ix. On Lazar’s multiple political assignments and interventions on behalf of Montenegro before the First World War, as well as during the war, which conflict was heralded as “the end to all world wars,” see passim, and cf., Andrej Mitrovic, Serbia’s Great War, 1914–1918 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007), on Lazar, 156–157, 191; and Lazar Mijuskovic: YCIIOMEHE (Memories, Niksic; Montenegro: Montenegrin Academy of Science and the Arts, 2016). For a “thumbnail sketch,” of the hostilities, see chapters on “Montenegro during The First Word War,” “Montenegro’s Loss of Independence, The Second World War,” and “The Second Yugoslavia”; cf., Roberts, opus cit., 12–18, 26–33. 4. West, Rebecca, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (New York: Penguin, 2007); originally published in 1941, 1053–1056. 5. Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago London Toronto, 1953), article on Montenegro, Volume 15, 757–758. 6. YCII0MEHE, opus cit., 237. 7. Cooper, Artemis, Cairo in the War, 1939–1945 (published in Great Britain: John Murray, 2013), 282–285. It is also worth noting that Winston Churchill’s cavalier attitude toward the forces under his military command during the First World War turned into a tragic disaster during the invasion of Gallipoli. 8. Kurapovna, Marcia Christoff, Shadows on the Mountain: The Allies, the Resistance, and the Rivalries That Doomed WWII Yugoslavia (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 63–68, 245–246. Roberts, opus cit., 336, 342, 348, 351–352, 354–358, 366, 368–369, 374–375; YouTube documentary: Wikipedia; and cf., John Plamenatz, The Case of General Mihailovic (printed by J.  Bellows, private edition, January 1, 1944); cf., YouTube: Lordan Zafranovic, Jasenovac: the cruelest death camp of all times (1983), a documentary available on Google; and later in the film, “Dara of Jasenovac,” directed by Peter Antonijevic (2021). 9. Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (New York: Mentor, 1957); cf., Ben Mijuskovic, “The Organic Community, the Atomistic Society and Loneliness,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 19:2 (1992); and Ferdinand Tonnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesselschaft (Leipzig, 1935). 10. Pinker, Stephen, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), xvi.

CHAPTER 11

Are the Environmental and Existential Conditions of Mankind Improving or Deteriorating?

The penultimate chapter philosophically asks the reader to decide for himself or herself whether Leibniz is right in his optimistic conviction that “this world is the best of all possible worlds?” or whether instead Schopenhauer is correct and that “this world is the worst of all possible worlds?” According to Leibniz’s defense “of God’s ways toward man,” in his Essais de Theodicee sur la bonte de Dieu, la liberte d’lhomme, et l’origine du mal (1710), he seeks to justify that God has fashioned our world as “the best of all possible worlds,” and his criterion for determining what is best is that it is aesthetically the fullest and the richest in complexity and yet coherently and perfectly unified, that is, rationally meaningful.1 This optimism, as we have shown, however, is strongly challenged by Schopenhauer. But against the palpably sophistical proofs of Leibniz that this is the best of all possible worlds, we may oppose seriously and honestly the proof that it is the worst of all possible worlds. For possible means not what we may picture in our imagination, but what can actually exist and last. Now this world is arranged as it had to be if it were capable of continuing with great difficulty to exist; if it were a little worse, it would no longer be capable of continuing to exist. Consequently, since a worse world could not continue to exist, it is absolutely impossible; and so, this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds.2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_11

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The critical phrase in the passage is: “if it were a little worse, it would no longer be capable of existing.” That qualification seems puzzling at best and non-probative at worst. In any case, Schopenhauer’s conviction is one of unmitigated pessimism. Thus, regardless of the flawed logic, Schopenhauer’s opinion unfortunately may have more than a ring of truth in it. And now the question is can it get worse? Both World Wars promised to be the end of all world wars. But all that has since transpired is that our production of increasingly more powerful means of destroying other countries and civilizations, as well as our own, and especially in terms of nuclear weapons, have exponentially “improved” and reinforced our thrust toward a more virulent political narcissism along with its sadistic indulgences. At the time of this writing, Russia is decimating Ukraine, killing children and civilians, raping women, destroying homes, hospitals, kindergartens, schools, shelling nuclear installations, and so on while committing crimes against humanity en masse. Zoologically for a long time, the graveyards of extinct animal species have been multiplying rapidly. I remember years ago learning that the last passenger pigeon, a species that once clouded the Western skies, a female, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1912. Soon our zoos will give way to the art of taxidermy. Environmentally global warming is melting the polar ice caps endangering both the coastal cities and the plains. Pollution is toxifying the seas and oceans. Soon smog will eclipse the moon at night and the sun by day. Wildfires, the banes of nature, are denuding our forests. If that weren’t enough, farmers are stripping the Amazon forests of their trees. Throughout the previous text, I have argued that we have adopted our deepest values in terms of an existential choice between good and evil. But another way to evaluate the quality of our human experiences is under the twin aspects of optimism (Leibniz) and pessimism (Schopenhauer). Simply put, the question is should we despair and let the world continue on its own pace without our participation or should we struggle in going forward with it? For over four decades I served as a social worker and a clinical therapist, and essentially my “scope of practice” concentrated on the subject’s “personal identity,” that was what my philosophical training had trained me to do. But it wasn’t until very late in life that I learned the important lesson that how one comes to fashion his or her own values, as pertaining to himself or herself, there is one measure in particular that each of us is grossly negligent about and that is the critical role of the battle between optimism and pessimism, as it is currently playing out, with Leibniz against

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Schopenhauer. There are two evaluative poles in human consciousness, how I evaluate myself but just as importantly how I evaluate my fellow human beings in general. Significantly, each invokes a different criterion. But one cannot understand himself or herself without evaluating mankind in general. Socrates understood himself and he understood his fellow man but on quite different terms and according to quite different criteria.

Notes 1. Lovejoy, A.  O., The Great Chain of Being (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, Cambridge, 1936), 144–182. 2. Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), I, 583.

CHAPTER 12

Is the History of Our Universe and Mankind Cyclical or Linear?

The ancient Greek philosophers believed that the entire cosmos, as well as each of our individual lives, will be uniquely repeated, that throughout endless time, eternal gigantic repetitive cosmic conflagrations will reoccur and everything will once more become exactly the same, both in the new repeated world and in each of our unique individualities, in our personal identities. Now this may seem quite farfetched, but we may more readily entertain the possibility that instead of a cosmic resurgence, it is more likely that a current global disaster will be produced by a highly powerful nuclear bomb. We could then expect that the new evolutionary humans would recycle through their previous four stages, homo erectus, bipedal man, treeless man; homo faber, man as maker of products; homo sapiens, scientific man, man armed with great technological knowledge; and finally man as homo destructus, self-destroying man, and then we will be ready once more either to repeat the tragedy or the comedy of the world and man all over again. Interestingly, the metaphysical doctrine of a universal cyclical “Eternal Recurrence” controlling both the entire natural history of the cosmos and mankind’s individual fate were in fact prominent concerns in the thought of the early Greeks, including the Pre-Socratic atomists, as well as Anaximander, Empedocles, and Pythagoras, who collectively declared:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4_12

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Everything will eventually return in the self-same order, and I shall converse with you staff in hand, and you will sit where you are sitting now, and so it will be in everything else, and it is reasonable to assume that time too will be the same.1

Cambridge scholar J. B. Bury’s study contends that the idea of progress is foreign to the mind of the early Greeks. But with few exceptions, ancient writers were committed to a theoretically harmonious cycle for both the universe and individually for each person. They believed that mankind revolved—rather than evolved—in a series of cosmic repetitions and predictable stages. “The early Greeks, who were so fertile in their speculations on human life, did not hit upon an idea that seems so simple and obvious as the Idea of Progress.”2 Indeed, the Stoic Roman emperor and philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, states in his Meditations: The rational soul wanders round the whole world and through the encompassing void, and gazes through infinite time, and considers the periodic destructions and rebirths of the universe, and reflects that our posterity will see nothing new, and that our ancestors saw nothing greater than we have seen. (Ibid., 13)

For the Stoics, the elaboration of the doctrine of cosmic Eternal Recurrences extends to predicting periodic world conflagrations that have resulted and will continue in cataclysmic rounds of chaos, from which an identical new “universal” world-order will reappear. Cosmically, we can also imagine that our present universe is dying, that as it collapses and expires, it will form into an increasingly dense ball of matter, and that at a certain stage it will erupt and explode into a new but distinctively recognizable universe. And all this has occurred endlessly for innumerable eternities, and at each new time we can all begin again refreshed. Exposed to such events, the ensuing chaos could once more conceivably regenerate through unending periods of recurrent biological evolutions. Conceivably and scientifically, it is possible that there have been endless recurrences of Big Bangs in the universe.3 Perhaps our current world has experienced endless recurrences. But even more likely there may be forthcoming an accelerated variation on the Big Bang theme, an earthly, a global Big Bang confined to our planet alone. Two thousand years ago, the Athenians and the Trojans attacked each other with swords and shields, bows and arrows. Eight

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decades ago, one nation attacked and obliterated another with two atomic bombs. Currently, there are at least half-a-dozen nations threatening each other with even more powerful nuclear armaments and virtual annihilations. Perhaps as humans evolved from our Stone Age to our currently present Nuclear Age, at which time there now exist absolutely nihilistic powers available, we can readily envision the possibility of a complete nuclear holocaust partnered with the accompanying possibility of having to start all over again biologically and evolutionally and as arising once more from a cataclysmic morass. After the Second World War, many Americans built nuclear bomb shelters, especially for themselves and for a few other highly selected sexually and genetically chosen future forefathers and foremothers. I recall years ago viewing the movie, Planet of the Apes, when at the end of the film the protagonist stumbles on a deserted beach only to discover the half-buried head of the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps a nuclear third world war will catapult us backward to an earlier state thousands of millions of years ago and to our primitive levels of aggression and arsenals? Darwinian and social evolution? (William Graham Sumner in Folkways). Bows and arrows once again? Who knows? And the whole cycle would begin again. Or perhaps we will have to start much earlier with Freud’s allusion to the “kingdom of the protista” cited in Aristophanes speech in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. We began our ethical speculations with “the thought” of Zoroaster and so it is fitting that we close our discussion with it as well.4 But for the moment, leaving all this aside, for me as an individual, at this tardy time in my life, while existentially reflecting on multiple possibilities, I have selected two final orienting values for myself, one tandem to the other, with which to complete the time I have remaining. First, I have decided to endorse Husserl’s closing philosophical remark at the end of the Cartesian Meditations. The Delphic motto, “Know thyself!” has gained a new signification. Positive science is a science lost in the world. I must lose the world by epoche’ in order to regain it by a universal self-examination, says Augustine, “Do not wish to go out, go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.” In terms of adopting my own personal philosophical path for my self, I would agree. But ethically, I wish to heed the advice of Socrates in the Republic and for myself I am satisfied to leave this world at its own peril with his following words.

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I have watched the frenzy of the multitude and seen that there is no soundness in the conduct of public life, nowhere an ally at whose side a champion of justice could hope to escape destruction; but like a man fallen among wild beasts, if he should refuse to take part in their misdeeds and could not hold out alone against the fury of all, he would be destined, before he could be of any service to his country or his friends, to perish, having done no good to himself or to anyone else—one who has weighed all this keeps quiet and goes his own way, like the traveler who takes shelter under a wall from a driving storm of dust and hail; and seeing lawlessness on all sides, is content if he can keep his hands clean from iniquity while this life lasts, and when the end comes take his departure, with good hopes, in serenity and peace (Plato, Republic, vi, 496). This last sentence, I assume, alludes to the position of Plato himself after he had renounced his early hopes of establishing a secure political reality on behalf of the Sicilian republic.

Notes 1. Diels, H. and Krans, W., Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 58B34. 2. Bury, J.  B., The Idea of Progress: An Enquiry into Its Origin and Growth (New York: Macmillan, 1955) 7. 3. Randerson, James, “One Big Bang or were there many?” The Guardian, May 6, 2006. 4. I must thank Professor Heinrich Gomperz, of Vienna, for the following discussion on the origin of the Platonic myth, which I give partly in his own words. It is to be remarked that what is essentially the same is already to be found in the Upanishads. For we find the following passage in the Brihadaran-yaka-upanishad…where the origin of the world from the Atman (the Self or Ego) is described: “But he felt no delight. Therefore, a man who is lonely feels no delight. He wished for a second. He was so large as man and wife together. He then made himself into two, and then arose husband and wife. Therefore, Yagnavalkyra said: ‘We two are thus (each of us) like half a shell.’ Therefore, the void, is filled by the wife.” …I should hesitate to give an unqualified denial to the possibility to Plato’s myth being derived, even only if indirectly, from the Indian source. Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), page 52, long extended footnote). Perhaps the best we can achieve is to escape loneliness and secure intimacy with a few friends (Epicurus).



Appendix

A picture of Author’s father, Max, in uniform in Egypt

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Appendix

A picture of Author’s grandparents, Lazar Mijuskovic, prime minister of Montenegro, and Katarina

 Appendix 

211

A picture of Author’s mother, Ines, that appeared in an Egyptian newspaper

A picture of King Nikola of Montenegro, with his family and friends, including Author’s grandfather, Lazar Mijuskovic, at far left in photo

Name Index1

A Aaron, Richard, 66n10 Alexander, H. G., 117n4 Allison, Henry, 114 Ardall, Pall, 137n2 Arendt, Hannah, 140, 175n26 Aristotle, 47, 55, 65n3, 67–69, 71–73, 77–79, 83, 84, 89, 99, 103, 111, 117n2, 126n3, 131, 136, 151, 152, 198 Ayer, A. J., 1, 7, 63, 64, 109 B Barker, Ernest, 96n6, 97n14 Barrett, William, 87 Beck, Lewis White, 126n2 Bergson, Henri, 21, 31n5, 50, 65n5 Bodelschwingh, von Julia, 117n3 Boehme, Jacob, 1, 2, 103, 124, 148–150, 153

1

Brentano, Franz, 7, 47, 50, 65n3 Burke, Edmund, 127, 131, 132 Bury, J. B., 206 C Chomsky, Noam, 36, 39n5, 116 Cohen, Elliott, 32n12 Copleston, Fredrick, 1, 2, 89, 98n19 Cooper, Artemis, 200n7 Cummins, Phillip, 39n4 D Democritus, 1, 2, 17, 18, 42, 45–49, 59, 65n2, 151, 160 Descartes, Rene, 1, 2, 7, 17, 20, 26, 36, 41, 49, 51, 70, 75, 89–95, 100–102, 114–116, 116n1 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 85–87

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4

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NAME INDEX

E Eliade, Mircea, 69, 73, 74, 88, 123 Epicurus, 1, 2, 42, 59, 80, 97n9, 160 F Faulkner, William, 21, 31n6 Fichte, Johann Gottleib, 9, 39n7, 51, 67, 117n3, 119, 122–124 Fox, Michael, 96n5, 160, 173n4 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 4, 7–9, 15n3, 60, 74, 108, 109, 124, 126n7, 139, 141–144, 147, 152, 162–167, 175n23, 175n26, 195, 207, 208n4 Fromm, Eric, 25 Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda, 21, 22, 175n25 G Gassendi, Pierre, 59 Gilson, Ettienne, 98n20 Gomperz, Theodor, 48, 49, 51, 52, 58, 65n4, 68, 81, 132–134 Graves, Robert, 96n3, 96n4 Grube, G. M. A., 96n7 H Hamilton, Edith, 14n2, 96n3 Hartog, Joseph, 15n4, 31n10 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1, 2, 9, 51, 82, 83, 89, 102, 103, 105, 109, 117n2, 119, 123, 124, 126n3, 126n7, 138n6, 140, 147–155, 165, 166, 174n10 Hendel, Charles, 38n2, 39n6 Hobbes, Thomas, 1, 2, 9, 23, 24, 48, 49, 52, 56, 59, 129, 130, 132, 164

Hume, David, 1, 2, 7, 11, 12, 33–37, 38n2, 48, 49, 51, 52, 59–64, 108, 116, 117n3, 127–132, 152 Husserl, Edmund, 1, 6, 7, 14, 26, 50, 51, 139, 140, 144, 195, 207 Hutcheson, Francis, 127, 130, 132 I Inge, William, 98n20 J James, William, 21, 39n7, 88 Jung, Karl, 60, 109, 141–144, 161, 173n4 K Kant, Immanuel, 1–3, 6, 7, 9, 13, 14, 17, 19–22, 26, 31n7, 49–51, 57, 60, 62, 63, 66n13, 67, 68, 72, 82, 99–116, 116n1, 117n3, 119–123, 126n3, 127–129, 132, 139, 140, 142, 144–148, 150–153, 155–157, 159, 161, 165, 167, 168, 193, 195, 198 Kemp Smith, Norman, 38n2, 99, 100, 112–115, 146 Kojeve, Alexandre, 154 Kurapovna, Marcia Christoff, 194 L Lahav, Ran, 31n12 Laing, B. M., 60, 66n11 Laird, John, 66n11 Latta, Robert, 103, 105, 116n2 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1, 2, 7, 17, 20, 41, 50, 51, 57, 60, 66n13, 67, 99–110, 112, 114–116, 117n3, 141, 143, 148,

  NAME INDEX 

149, 156, 159, 161, 173n4, 201, 202 Locke, John, 1, 2, 9, 24, 36, 39n5, 41, 48, 49, 51–60, 63, 64, 65n7, 99, 101, 103–105, 108, 109 Loewenberg, Jacob, 174n12, 174n14 Lovejoy, A. O., 3 Lucretius, 80, 160 M Mahler, Margaret, 15n5 McGraw, John, 172, 175n27 McNabb, D. G. C., 39n6 Mijuskovic, Ben Lazare, 15n4, 15n9, 30n2, 39n7, 65n5, 66n8, 66n9, 66n12, 66n13, 173n1, 174n6, 179, 181, 182, 184 Mills, John, 123, 124 Montaigne, Michel de, 22, 52, 58, 177, 178 N Newton, Isaac, 36, 99, 101, 103, 107, 110, 129, 137n2 Nowell, Elizabeth, 31n4 P Passmore, john, 66n11 Paton, H. J., 99, 100, 116, 121, 125n2 Payne, E. F. J., 96n5, 175n17, 203n2 Perrinetti, Vario, 38n2 Peters, Richard, 31n8 Piaget, Jean, 152 Pinker, Stephen, 199 Plamenatz, John, 194 Plato, 1–4, 7–9, 17, 18, 20, 41, 43, 45–47, 54, 64, 65n2, 67, 69,

215

71–79, 82–84, 89, 93–95, 97n14, 100, 101, 112, 114, 115, 126n3, 143, 148, 151, 152, 160, 208, 208n4 Poulet, Georges, 94 R Roberts, Elizabeth, 181, 188, 190, 200n2 Rokach, Ami, 15n4, 173n1 Ross, W. D., 96n8 Rousseau, Jean Jacque, 9, 15n7, 120, 121, 156, 159 Ruch, Floyd, 15n5 Russell, Bertarand, 1, 2, 66n11, 98n19, 109 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1, 2, 8, 98n20, 116n1, 121, 127, 135 Schiller, Friedrich, 119, 122 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1, 6, 7, 22, 50, 51, 60, 68, 73, 90, 96n5, 109, 111, 123, 139, 141–147, 155–162, 173n4, 174n6, 175n17, 175n23, 195, 196, 201–203 Schrodinger, Erwin, 37, 81, 97n9 Shaftesbury, Anthony Earl of, 127, 130–132 Sheeks, Wayne, 175n19 Sherover, Charles, 117n3, 175n15 Shorey, Paul, 96n5 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 138n7 Spitz, Rene, 5, 15n5, 165, 175n25 Stace, W. T., 174n14 Stainton, Edward, 30n2 Stillingfleet, Edward, 39n5, 56

216 

NAME INDEX

T Taylor, A. E., 96n6 Tocqueville, de Alexis, 80 Treadway, John, 181, 183 W Weber, Max, 127, 136, 138n7 West, Rebecca, 180 Wiener, Phillip (editor, Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Pivotal Ideas, Volumes I-V), 30n1, 65n1, 96n2

Wolfe, Thomas, 20–22, 24, 25, 31n9 Wolff, Robert Paul, 103 Y Yolton, John, 66n9 Z Zafranovic, Lordan, 200n8 Zilboorg, Gregory, 15n3, 25, 166, 168, 170, 175n21, 175n25 Zinaich, Samuel, 32n12

Subject Index1

A “Association of ideas” versus spontaneity of thoughts, 35, 54, 57, 102, 134

D Dualism, 12, 41–43, 50, 51, 57, 58, 68, 71, 72, 82, 85, 88, 101, 108, 114, 122, 144, 151–153, 160

C The coherence theory of truth concentrating on ethics and the correspondence theory of facts, 1, 2, 109 determinism, 68 epistemics, 68, 77, 120 phenomenalism, 1 Conceptions, 3, 7, 10, 24, 41, 47, 53, 56, 57, 59, 65n3, 67, 70–72, 75, 76, 78, 80, 88, 89, 99–101, 107–109, 117n2, 120, 122, 141, 142, 149, 150, 153

E Existentialism, 37, 138n6

1

F Feeling, 6, 10, 13, 14, 18, 21, 23, 24, 26, 35, 37, 48, 49, 51, 58, 71, 75, 80, 81, 102, 124, 125, 127–134, 139, 142–144, 147–149, 162–165, 167, 170, 171, 173, 193, 196 Freedom, 1, 3, 7, 11, 30, 32n12, 46, 48, 54, 67–95, 103, 117n2,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. L. Mijuskovic, Theories of Consciousness and the Problem of Evil in the History of Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26405-4

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SUBJECT INDEX

119–125, 127, 135, 143, 154, 155, 171, 178, 197 Freud’s dynamic ego, 139, 195 H Hegel’s dialectical development, 82 Husserl’s transcendent intentionality, 1, 6, 14, 51, 139, 140, 195 I Idealism, 12, 14, 19, 50–52, 57, 68, 82, 84, 99–116, 123, 126n3, 143, 148, 152, 154, 156, 157, 160, 161, 195 Immanent temporality and unity of self-consciousness, including the activities of a subconscious, unconscious, conscious, reflexive self-consciousness in Kant, 109 Immediacy, 10–12, 58, 93, 94, 102, 110, 129, 147, 150, 155, 162, 165 Impressions, images, 11, 12, 18, 19, 24, 33, 35, 37, 47–49, 53–56,

59–64, 76, 93, 95, 102, 109, 122, 123, 125, 142, 144, 166, 168 P Phenomenology, 154, 155, 165 R Rationalism, 2, 37, 75, 84, 100, 103, 164 Reflection, 21, 35, 41, 52, 56–58, 85, 112, 120, 163, 166, 196 S Schopenhauer’s irrational Will, 1, 157, 195 Sensations, 8, 10, 11, 18, 19, 24, 41–43, 45–58, 60, 64, 66n8, 71, 75, 80, 81, 91–95, 102, 105, 133, 134, 143, 144, 148, 152, 155, 163, 174n10, 196 Subjective and objective, 19, 110