Editorial: 17th Issue April 1st 2019

Blog: http://michaelrdjames.org/

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

https://joom.ag/AQva

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

International Politics: Lecture Four”. The lecturer Rhashad Khalidi outlines a
view of the role of American Politics in the world in accordance with the thesis
that “The US is an Empire”. The concrete political context of the discussion is
the two wars against Iraq and its eventual dismantling as a state. Henry
Kissinger’s work suggests a position similar to Khalidi’s but with differences:

when Kissinger used these words in his work “Diplomacy” he was referring to a new Balance of Power situation
involving 6 major countries, namely the US, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and India. In relation to the question
“Is the US an Empire?” we need to look no further Kissinger's work “World Order” and the following words:

“No truly global “world order” has ever existed”.

Kissinger is no stranger to the concept of overwhelming force. He refers in the first chapter of the above work to
President Truman and the Atomic attacks on the Japanese and the fact that this was a moment Truman was proud
of because it brought his enemies back into “the community of nations”.

This suggests that the US only uses overwhelming forced conditionally and instrumentally in order to restore
order amongst the community of nations which in its turn suggests that the US possesses no absolute Imperial
intentions. This may be true but this fact does not, however, suffice to give the US the right to bear the title of
“the beacon for the world” as Kissinger suggests in his earlier work, “Diplomacy”.

The Political Philosophy of Kant is called upon to counter the American

position which is described as not knowing whether it is an Empire or not.
Kant’s position is that military means will never achieve ethico-political
objectives but that there is a globalization process moving toward a telos of
Cosmopolitanism which can be achieved through more resources being diverted
to education and political, cultural and social development:

“We are cultivated to a high degree by art and science. We are civilized to the point of excess in all kinds of
social courtesies and proprieties. But we are still a long way from the point where we could consider ourselves
morally mature. For while the idea of morality is indeed present in the culture, an application of this idea which
only extends to the semblances of morality, as in love of honour and outward propriety, amounts merely to
civilization. But as long as states apply all their resources to their vain and violent schemes of expansion, thus
incessantly obstructing the slow and laborious efforts of their citizens to cultivate their minds, and even deprive
them of all support in their efforts, no progress in this direction can be expected. For a long internal process of
careful work on the part of each commonwealth is necessary for the education of its citizens.”
The lecture concludes with the summary:
This position is in accordance with the positions of both Plato and Aristotle who tie the character or personality
of the individual to the kind of state he inhabits. So, the question of whether the US is an Empire or not is largely
irrelevant in the Cosmopolitan process. The Paradox of the US as the beacon of all political value and as the
commonwealth using overwhelming force on other commonwealths is a modern paradox which we all live with
and prevents us from regarding the US as the saviour of the New World Order. Paradoxically for the Americans
we Europeans believe that the beacon of all political value is the much older Kantian beacon shining through the
fog and mists of time into the future. Whether or not this beacon will light the way into the future will also
depend on whether the European Project can live up to its Kantian hopes and provide commonwealths of peace
and prosperity via cosmopolitan educational institutions.

The second lecture is a critique of Lectures 18,19, and 20 of Professor Smiths

Yale Series of Lectures on Political Regimes. These concern the Political
Philosophy of Rousseau. The lecture begins thus:
The following is Professor Smith’s introduction:

"What did he believe? Was he a revolutionary? He believed that people in their collective capacity are the only
legitimate source of sovereignty and "Man is born free but everywhere in chains". Did his writings, then, seek to
release us from the bonds of society, as it appears to do in the second discourse "On Inequality". His writings
provide the base for romantic individualism: a celebration of the simplicity of peasant life and rural life. He
helps to bring to completion the intellectual movement we know as the Enlightenment whilst at the same time
being its severest critic. He defended the savage against civilized man and took the side of the poor against the
elite. The Second Discourse is a conjectural history, a philosophical reconstruction of history but not of what has
actually happened in the past: it is a history of what had to have happened for humans to have achieved their
current condition."

The lecture proceeds with the following commentary and critique:

This introduction (brilliant that it is) does not quite, in my opinion, capture the full historical significance of
Rousseau's work for the History of Philosophy in general and Political Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology
and Ethics in particular. Kant was not particularly impressed with romantic and poetic images of savage and
oppressed man or the plight of any class in the "battle for civilization". He did, however, see and appreciate the
extent to which Rousseau's speculations, descriptions, and explanations would fit into his metaphysical and
epistemological claims about man and his relation to Reality. The very terms ""romantic" and "conjectural" belie
the power of philosophy to, as Kant puts it, in his "Conjectural Beginnings of human history", "fill in the gaps in
the record" For Kant part of the record is contained in the Bible, the book Rousseau would not let Emile read as
part of his early adult education
firstly because of the fear of attachment to other men's opinions, fear of dependence upon other opinions, and
secondly because such works excite the imagination unnecessarily in terms of desires, hopes, and fears. The only
book Emile is allowed to read is Robinson Crusoe which seems to be approved of by Rousseau because as Alan
Bloom points out in his introduction to his translation:

Robinson Crusoe is an atom detached from his family and society and would not
have inspired either the Greek Philosophers or Kant. The atom of the individual,
for Kant was a part of a family in his “Conjectural beginnings of Human
History” and was presented symbolically in the narratives of the Bible. Kant, in
spite of his great respect for Rousseau’s work “Emile” would have disapproved
of the fact that he was kept away from the Bible and given Robinson Crusoe to
read. This of course is an omen of the disintegration of the contribution Kant
himself would make to an Enlightenment that was already on its way toward the
rejection of all authority: an Enlightenment that would end in a modern
embracing the contraries of Science and Romanticism. The lecture argues:
Kant's complete account of the transition of the species from being slaves of nature ("in chains") to being
masters of our destiny is meant to take place in a series of complex stages over extremely long periods of time
(100,000 years) but it is clear that during this process the common good will be constituted as a concern of the
human species and thus of all individuals belonging to the human species. This is a different more optimistic
account than the one we find in Rousseau who has a more pessimistic analysis of the human condition and its
Discontents. For Rousseau man led the life of a noble savage or a solitary Robinson Crusoe in the state of nature
that in his view was transformed the moment men began to gaze at each other and gather around huts and trees
for the company. The gaze must have been experienced as a questioning of one's moral value and resulted in
many different forms of artificial strivings motivated by the imagination in order to gain recognition. Included in
this "work of the imagination" is the transformation of natural judgment into artificial and mythical
interpretations of the world:

Involved in this installation of the power of imagination at the expense of reason

is the emotion of “amour propre” which is characterised thus by Smith:
"Amour propre is the desire to be esteemed and to have your values and points of view esteemed by those
around you: it is, in fact, a violent and uncontrollable passion..So much of its civilization and discontent grows
out of this passion”

The consequences of the sometimes violent rejection of reason for society were
very clear for Kant in his response to the French Revolution(Rousseau’s
revolution?) which was mixed: admiration for the commitment to freedom but
disgust at the consequent violent excesses.

Rousseau’s models of Civilization are based somewhat paradoxically on the

ideals of Sparta and Rome. Sparta we know was less than an ideal for Aristotle
and he would have been similarly disposed toward the so called ideal of
militaristic Rome. Given the problems that these civilizations caused for the idea
of freedom for Kant one can but presuppose that their ideas of Empire were
very different to Kant’s conception of a Cosmopolitan Callipolis.

On the legacy of Rousseau the lecture concludes the following:

Prof Smith concludes the lecture with a section entitled "Legacies". He includes amongst these the influence
Rousseau's work had on the French Revolution, the fact that he was approached to assist in the formations of the
constitutions of Poland and Corsica, the influence on Jefferson in the USA, the influence on de Tocqueville, the
influence on the kibbutz movement in Israel. He ends with the following:

"Kant was taught by Rousseau to respect the rights and dignity of man. Kant called him "The Newton of the
Moral Universe". Kant's entire moral philosophy is a kind of deepened and radicalized Rousseauism where the
General Will is transmitted into the rational will of the categorical imperative."

The sense in which Kant's philosophy is deeper is probably the sense in which Kant continued in the tracks of
Aristotelian philosophy and was prepared to investigate the benefits that religious discourse has had for
mankind, even if the concept of God the creator and cause of the universe is not in itself responsible for the
cultural progress of mankind toward a kingdom of ends. For according to Kant, all that is required for this
cultural and moral journey is freedom that is an idea of reason.
Professor Smith could also have mentioned under the heading "Legacies", Rousseau's influence on our
educational systems everywhere in the world but perhaps the jury is still out in relation to this issue. Opinion is
divided about this vision of a lonely Robinson being educated by a tutor supposedly unaffected by the more
destructive social passions.

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

focus of attention. The lecture begins thus:
Aristotle's scientific work, according to Brett in his work "The History of Psychology", is best characterised in
terms of a methodology of observation and classification and a search for a definition that expressed the essence
of whatever it was that was being studied:

"Explanation of the behaviour of a thing consists in referring to the essential properties of the natural kind or
class of things to which it belongs, each class having its characteristic and invariant ways of behaving. Why do
bodies fall or smoke rise? Because it is part of their essence to seek their natural places on the earth or in the
heavens. Why do men make laws? Because rationality is part of their essence. Things do what they do because
they are what they are. This is true but not very illuminating....Aristotle....substituted the logic of classification
for Pythagorean mathematics as the key to the ground plan of nature. Qualitative distinctions were for him
irreducible. Quality, not quantity was the basic category of reality."

There is much that is problematic with the above characterization of Aristotle's scientific work. Firstly, the
search for definition referred to above was only a part of a wider search for explanation that for Aristotle was
four-fold because he believed there are four kinds of explanation or four ways of explaining the nature of
something that together constitute the knowledge we have of any object studied. Three kinds of explanation
(final formal and efficient "causes") all reveal the form of the object and one explanation, (the "material cause")
describes the particular material that is the bearer of "the form". Material per se is just particular material and
only identifiable in terms of the(universal) form it takes. This explanation-system is the epistemological aspect
of Aristotle's wider attempt as a "Scientist" to metaphysically or systematically study the world as a whole.
Aristotle's metaphysical position is embedded in his thesis that Being or Reality has many meanings, amongst
which one will encounter the category of the Substantial that is, as a matter of fact, as much a basic category of
reality as the qualitative. The Substantial, for Aristotle, is of course not a property of a thing but rather
something more like the principle of that thing's existence. A substance is, according to Aristotle not dependent
on anything else for its existence. Substantial change, for Aristotle, concerns the generation of substances (the
bearer of all properties). The substantial principle of man, for example, is his rationality that manifests itself not
just in the act of passing laws (the act of bringing laws into existence) but also in the theoretical activity of
understanding the world as a systematic or metaphysical whole. Both of these types of activities are logically
related to man's essence and his form, and these claims are surely both true and illuminating. Furthermore, there
is a conflation in much of modern science between the contexts of discovery and the contexts of
Explanation/Justification. In the former when we discover qualities or measure quantities or relations, we answer
"what" questions but once discovered we can also use qualities, quantities and relations in contexts of
justification to answer "why" questions ("Why did the building collapse", "because it was unstable"). In these
kinds of explanations, qualities etc. begin to function like principles, giving reasons for the occurrence of events
transcending their use as mere reports of observations or classifications.

Insofar as the claims relating to body's falling and smoke rising to their so-called "natural places" are concerned
these claims may be unhelpful characterizations of the Aristotelian idea of "final cause" or teleological
explanations that in fact cannot be arbitrarily isolated from other types of explanations.

The thread of Ariadne running through these commentaries is well illustrated in

this lecture. The works of Aristotle was for a long time after his death eclipsed
by the works of Plato which because of its dualism appealed to the controllers
of ideas, namely the religious authorities. When Aristotle was finally translated
and revived in the world of ideas he was either Platonised and then finally
criticised for being unscientific in accordance with the assumptions of scientists
who found no contradiction in embracing naturalism and mysticism. Brett
continues his process of undermining Aristotle and claims that when Aristotle
claimed that man is a rational animal this is not an illuminating truth, being
devoid of deductive consequences and causal assumptions. Persual of the above
quote will reveal that there are many meanings of the concept or category of
“cause” beyond that envisioned by Science or Humean Philosophy. Deductive
consequences certainly followed even for Aristotle who subsequently amended
his defintion to “rational animal capable of discourse”. The lecture continues
with its criticism and commentary thus:
This is an unilluminating characterization of Aristotelian reflection on the essence and form of man that will
definitively claim it to be substantially true that the formal, efficient and final causes or explanations are
involved in any animal being a human form of an animal. There appears to be a fixation in the above quote on a
perspectival view of "definition" that regards Aristotelian definitions as analytic truths constructed in an ivory
tower far from the fields of observation and classification. Such a view believes there to be a realm of synthetic
truths that alone can give us access to the truth about the world we dwell in. Aristotle did not divide truth up in
such a radical fashion and like Kant would have insisted in response to such radical divisions that there are
intermediate forms of truth(synthetic a priori truths) such as "Every event has a cause" that transcend experience
and the context of discovery. Aristotle would have thought of such truth as substantial-truths belonging to the
context of explanation/justification. Brett also claims that when we ask why men make laws that we do not want
to be told that this is because he is a rational animal capable of discourse (which would be Aristotle's complete
definition of human being). We do not want, that is, to be given a barren analytical definition devoid of causal
terms. This is obviously a position that rejects the entire metaphysical and epistemological apparatus of
Aristotle's theory without engaging it directly in the context of counterargument and justification. This is also a
position that attempts for no good reason to reduce Aristotle's fourfold explanatory schema to something
simpler. Indirectly we are told that Galileo "consciously discarded" teleological causes" in favour of:

"Explanations in terms of the functional dependence of variables which had far greater deductive possibilities
than Aristotelian explanation by recourse to qualitative classifications."

Mathematics played a role in this reconceptualisation of the role of Science that

began to form in the fourteenth century with the Franciscans. Of course
quantifying physical phenomena, given its infinite capacity for variation is going
to have what have been called “deductive consequences”, although if quantities
are causally related to each other that might seem to some logical empiricists to
be a criterion for empirical rather than logical connections. Brett continues by
complaining about the dearth of empirical consequences that flowed from
Aristotle’s Philosophy. He is here continuing a tradition that goes back to
Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. The commentary criticizes this position
thus:
Brett appears to be unaware of the philosophical objection to his position that would claim that Causality is a
conceptual category of thought, a cognitive attitude that we must adopt when investigating phenomena (that can
be isolated from a whole and divided into causes and effects) in both the contexts of discovery and the contexts
of explanation/justification. Causality can also, contra the view of Hume, be observed, as is the case when we
observe a builder building a house. This division, however, of psychological wholes into cause and effect may
actually be a form of mechanization of the field of investigation that Brett complains is useless.
On the face of it there does seem to be disagreement over what causation is but
what is not directly taken up in Brett’s account is the extent to which Aristotles
view of the soul and epistemology seamlessly interact with political and ethical
considerations in a way in which is impossible for scientific psychology.
Seamlessy interacts that is, with a theory of action which is still alive today after
a period of ca 2300 years:
Human action is obviously a rational power or potentiality connected conceptually with many other powers such
as perception, memory, imagination, language as well as desire, wish, and reason. Given the interconnection of
this schema of "powers", the futility of a materialistically inclined behavioural account of action can
immediately be appreciated. Psuche is a principle that moves the body, and thought and consciousness is the
medium in which such movement is initiated. Psuche also possesses powers or potentialities which are capacities
to do certain things and it is absolutely absurd to postulate that capacity is something that can be moved or move.
Brett has no difficulty in pointing out this logical objection in relation to capacity but not in relation to Psuche-
the principle. Thought is in no sense a spatial entity. It has an essential relation to temporality and insofar as
thought can then be said to possess parts, they would have the serial unity similar to that of a number. A thought
occurs in a time and comes to rest in that time in accordance with its category and telos. If the thought is a belief
it will aim at the truth and if it is an intention it will aim at the good action. The point of origin of such thoughts
is in the soul. In a certain sense, the concept of action appears to be logically connected to the reason that
regulates the action in relation to the rules of successful performance leading to an end. In other words, action is
a value-laden concept in the way in which the concept of behaviour is not. This might account for the fact that it
is behaviour and not action the contemporary Psychologist prefers to study: behaviour is easier to isolate as a
variable and thus easier to manipulate and measure. The conceptual framework of action and its connection to a
matrix of powers or capacities makes this task of observation, isolation, manipulation, and measurement much
more difficult, if not impossible.

Aristotle’s reflections on human action and psychological powers have survived

thus far exactly because of their empirical richness and because of the
possibility of the integration of these reflections into a deductive theory of the
rational animal capable of discourse.