Morality,choice and inwardness

The present paper tries to analyse the way in which Judge William, in Sören Kierkegaard's work Either/Or, distinguishes between the aesthetic and the ethical way of life. Basically his distinctions seem to be that the ethicist is a seriously committed person (has inwardness) whereas the aestheticist is indifferent, and that the former accepts universal rules whereas the latter makes an exception for himself. — In order to come from the aesthetic to the ethical stage one must, according to Judge William, make a choice of oneself. We try to show that such a choice is only one among several factors implicit in his reasoning and that he does not at all consider it as a ‘leap’, but as based upon reasons, though his reasons are mostly of an aesthetic nature. Far from seeing the Judge as a champion of choice, we maintain that the book primarily contains a plea for a certain personality ideal. This probably has to do with the fact that he does not seem to be in doubt as to what one ought to do, only as to how to become a person who does what he ought to do. We shall also argue that a choice of oneself, as a matter of fact, is neither necessary nor sufficient in order to bring a person within the ethical stage, as described by the Judge. — A person who lives ethically does not, according to Judge William, necessarily act rightly, but his actions are either right or wrong, as opposed to the actions of the aestheticist which fall outside the domain of the ethical. In order to obtain a tenable distinction within his philosophy between ‘being within the ethical stage’ and ‘acting ethically rightly’ the first concept should be defined in terms of inwardness (serious commitment), the latter as inward conformity with certain universal rules. — This idea of inwardness, probably the most original and fruitful contribution of ‘Equilibrium’, seems to be based, however, like most of his ethical reasoning, on certain controversial assumptions about human nature.     

An objection to gareth evans' account of self-identity

In chapter seven ‘Self Identification’ of his challenging book The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans attempts to give an account of how it is that one is able to think about oneself self‐consciously. On Evans’ view, when one attempts to think of oneself self‐consciously that person is having what he calls an ‘I’ thought. Since these ‘I’ thoughts are a case of reference, more specifically self‐reference, Evans thinks that these thoughts can be explained by employing the same theoretical framework that he uses to explain other kinds of reference. Evans thinks all thoughts are essentially structured, and this means that they must fall under his ‘generality constraint’. Since ‘I’ thoughts are also ‘thoughts’ they are essentially structured as well, and they too must be subject to the generality constraint. The radical implication of this is that Evans thinks that if ‘I’ thoughts are subject to the generality constraint, then he can show that self‐reference must be reference to a thing which we can locate on a spatio‐temporal map. In this article I hope to accomplish three things. First, I will spell out in detail the argument Evans uses to arrive at his claim that self‐reference must be reference to something located on a spatio‐temporal map. Second, I will raise an objection, which states that Evans’ conclusion that self‐reference must involve spatio‐temporal location is not a consequence of the generality constraint. Finally I will argue that Evans’ conclusion that self‐reference must involve spatio‐temporal location is in fact in tension with the generality constraint, rather than being an implication of it.     

Difficulties in Defining the Concept of God: Kierkegaard in Dialogue with Levinas,Buber, and Rosenzweig

This article investigates difficulties in defining the concept of God by focusing on the question of what it means to understand God as a ‘person.’ This question is explored with respect to the work of Søren Kierkegaard, in dialogue with Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. Thereby, the following three questions regarding divine ‘personhood’ come into view: First, how can God be a partner of dialogue if he at the same time remains unknown and unthinkable, a limit-concept of understanding? Second, if God is love in person and at the same time a spiritual reality ‘between’ human agents, in what ways are his personal and trans-personal traits related to each other? Third, what exactly is revealed through God’s ‘name’? By way of an inconclusive conclusion, divine personhood is discussed in regard to prayer, where the problems of predication that arise in third-personal speech about God are linked with the second-personal encounter with God.

     

Hacking on the Looping Effects of Psychiatric Classifications: What Is an Interactive and Indifferent Kind?

This paper examines Ian Hacking’s analysis of the looping effects of psychiatric classifications, focusing on his recent account of interactive and indifferent kinds. After explicating Hacking’s distinction between ‘interactive kinds’ (human kinds) and ‘indifferent kinds’ (natural kinds), I argue that Hacking cannot claim that there are ‘interactive and indifferent kinds,’ given the way that he introduces the interactive‐indifferent distinction. Hacking is also ambiguous on whether his notion of interactive and indifferent kinds is supposed to offer an account of classifications or objects of classification. I argue that these conceptual difficulties show that Hacking’s account of interactive and indifferent kinds cannot be based on—and should be clearly separated from—his distinction between interactive kinds and indifferent kinds. In clarifying Hacking’s account, I argue that interactive and indifferent kinds should be regarded as objects of classification (i.e., kinds of people) that can be identified with reference to a law‐like biological regularity and are aware of how they are classified. Schizophrenia and depression are discussed as examples. I subsequently offer reasons for resisting Hacking’s claim that the objects of classification in the human sciences—as a result of looping effects—are ‘moving targets’.     

The public good that does the public good: A new reading of Mohism

Mohism has long been misrepresented. Mo‐tzu is usually called a utilitarian because he preached a universal love that must benefit. Yet Mencius, who pined the Confucian way of virtue (humaneness and righteousness) against Mo‐tzu's way of benefit, basically borrowed Mo‐tzu's thesis: that the root cause of chaos is this lack of love—except Mencius renamed it the desire for personal benefit. Yet Mo‐tzu only championed ‘benefit’ to head off its opposite, ‘harm’, specifically the harm done by Confucians who with good intent (love) perpetuated rites that did people more harm than good. Mo‐tzu wanted his universal love to be the public good that would actually do the public good (i.e. benefit the collective). And he derived this from Confucius’ teaching of ‘Love (all) men’ and his Golden Rule: Render not what others would not desire. No man desires harm. As a critic of Confucian rites (especially the prolonged funeral), Mo‐tzu worked to replace the blind custom of rites with his rational measure of ‘rightness’: what is right must do good (i.e. benefit the intended recipient). It is not true that Mohists were ‘joyless’ ascetics; they would gladly celebrate a good harvest with wine and folk song—not expensive court music—with the people. Since Mohist discourse is ‘public’ (that is, accountable), it is also only proper that what is ‘right’ should be outer (means‐end efficacy) and not inner as Mencius would insist.     

The philosopher and the Fly Bottle

Wittgenstein said that what he does in philosophy is ‘to show the fly out of the fly bottle’ (Philosophical Investigations¶309). He is, himself, both the fly, his alter-ego, and the philosopher who turns the fly around. This is a transformation in his vision of and perspective on those matters which tempted him, through the questions it posed for him, into the bottle, there to be trapped – trapped into a form of scepticism, realism, or one of its many reductionist satellites, for instance. The transformation which releases him into the open takes philosophical work which unearths unspoken assumptions and subjects them to criticism. As for the movement into and out of the bottle, this is the philosophical journey in the course of which the philosopher comes to a new understanding of the matters he questioned in a way that led him into the bottle. To come to such a better understanding, therefore, the philosopher has to have the courage of his temptations and not be afraid to give up what he holds on to. What he learns in coming out of the bottle belongs to the work that frees him from the compelling pictures that held him captive within the space of opposed theories held together by common assumptions. It cannot be acquired or conveyed independently of such work. It is in this sense that philosophy is a struggle with difficulties which each philosopher has to face and work through himself. The difficulties are not in him, but they are his– they are difficulties for him. He has to work on them. That is why, while he can learn from others, he cannot borrow from them, build on or go on from what they have established. In the first section of the paper I put on some flesh on this. But what I provide is still a thumb-nail sketch. The question ‘what is philosophy?’ is itself a philosophical question, like any other, and can only be ‘answered’ like them. It is only that with which we are familiar – in our mastery of the language we speak or in our experience of life –that can raise philosophical questions for us. Thus contrast ‘what is knowledge?’, ‘what is thinking?’ with ‘what is cancer?’, ‘what is osmosis?’. The question ‘what is philosophy?’ similarly can only be asked by a philosopher, someone who has asked and struggled with its questions. Otherwise it is a request for information to which the full answer is: you have to study philosophy if you really want to find out. It follows that what I say about the way philosophical questions are to be answered applies equally to the question about the nature of philosophy. Hence I can do no other than provide a thumb-nail sketch for those who have themselves struggled with philosophical questions. As for what I provide in the following three sections, they are no more than illustrations of a way of working on those sample questions – questions on which hopefully the reader will have thought himself. I am able to offer such illustrations only because I have myself been caught up by these questions and have worked on them and discussed them more fully elsewhere (see Bibliography).     

Paving the Way? Penalty and Atonement in Thomas Aquinas's Soteriology

This article explores the soteriology of Thomas Aquinas. In particular, it considers recent debates over whether Thomas altered Anselm's satisfaction theory in a way which opened the door to the later theory of penal substitution. The article argues that Thomas did indeed alter Anselm's atonement theory in this way insofar as he incorporates punishment within his concept of satisfaction; however, it further contends that his use of ‘placation’ or ‘appeasement’ language does not contribute to such an alteration.     

Additive Theories of Rationality: A Critique

Additive theories of rationality, as I use the term, are theories that hold that an account of our capacity to reflect on perceptually‐given reasons for belief and desire‐based reasons for action can begin with an account of what it is to perceive and desire, in terms that do not presuppose any connection to the capacity to reflect on reasons, and then can add an account of the capacity for rational reflection, conceived as an independent capacity to ‘monitor’ and ‘regulate’ our believing‐on‐the‐basis‐of‐perception and our acting‐on‐the‐basis‐of‐desire. I show that a number of recent discussions of human rationality are committed to an additive approach, and I raise two difficulties for this approach, each analogous to a classic problem for Cartesian dualism. The interaction problem concerns how capacities conceived as intrinsically independent of the power of reason can interact with this power in what is intuitively the right way. The unity problem concerns how an additive theorist can explain a rational subject's entitlement to conceive of the animal whose perceptual and desiderative life he or she oversees as ‘I’ rather than ‘it’. I argue that these difficulties motivate a general skepticism about the additive approach, and I sketch an alternative, ‘transformative’ framework in which to think about the cognitive and practical capacities of a rational animal.     

Winnicott's invitation to ‘further games of Jung‐analysis’

Winnicott signs off his celebrated review of Jung's (1963) autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections with the warning that translation of ‘erreichten’ as ‘attained’ (implying assimilation) rather than as ‘reached to’, could ‘queer the pitch for further games of Jung‐analysis’. This subtly underscores his view that Jung—who he described earlier as ‘mentally split’ and lacking ‘a self with which to know’—remained essentially dissociated. However, Winnicott, whilst immersed in this work on Jung, wrote a letter to Michael Fordham describing himself as suffering ‘a lifelong malady’ of ‘dissociation’. But this he now reported repaired through a ‘splitting headache’ dream of destruction, dreamt ‘for Jung, and for some of my patients, as well as for myself’ (Winnicott 1989, p. 228). Winnicott's recurrent concern during his last decade was with ‘reaching to’—that quintessential Winnicottian term—some reparative experience that could address such difficulties in constellating a ‘unit self’. This is correlated with his engagement with Jung and tracked through his contemporaneous clinical work, particularly ‘Fear of Breakdown’ (1963). Themes first introduced by Sedgwick (2008) and developed by the author's earlier ‘Winnicott on Jung; destruction, creativity and the unrepressed unconscious’ (2011) are given further consideration.     

Eschatology and Theology of Hope: The Impact of Gaudium et Spes on the Thought of Edward Schillebeeckx

Before the Second Vatican Council, Edward Schillebeeckx O.P. (1914–2009) had begun to reassess and the role and nature of eschatology as a discipline within Catholic theology. He began to formulate an early theology of hope in the 1950s which he would later develop quite extensively. His reflections during the Council on the famous draft of Gaudium et Spes, and on the finished document reveal the urgency of rethinking the essential relationship between ‘church’ and ‘world’. This article examines the impact of Gaudium et Spes on Schillebeeckx's work in two aspects. First, the way that it helped to orient his eschatological thought towards an emphasis on the ‘future’. The distance between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’, coupled with the essential place of creation as the site of God's salvific activity in history, began to push Schillebeeckx towards an eschatological and primarily future‐oriented understanding of Christian praxis and preaching. Second, this article will examine the anthropology that Schillebeeckx reads from Gaudium et Spes and the way in which a ‘new image’ of humanity, in light of a future‐oriented eschatology, contributed to his attempts to rethink the tension between ‘church’ and ‘world’.     

How to become an idealist: Fichte on the transition from dogmatism to idealism

In Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant claims that all human beings are originally and radically evil: they choose to adopt a ‘supreme maxim’ that gives preference to sensibility over the moral law. Because Kant thinks that all agents have a duty to develop good character, part of his task in the Religion is to explain how moral conversion is possible. Four years after Kant publishes the Religion, J. G. Fichte takes up the issue of conversion in slightly different terms: he is interested in how people he characterizes as ‘dogmatists’ (those who minimize or deny their status as free agents) become ‘idealist’ (those who recognize and exercise their freedom). Against recent interpreters, I argue that Fichte characterizes the choice to convert from dogmatism to idealism as one that is grounded in a non-rational choice. Along the way, I consider Daniel Breazeale and Allen Wood’s recent arguments to the contrary, alternative accounts of what it might mean for a conversion to count as ‘rational’, and how well my conclusion harmonizes with Fichte’s views on education.     

Justification as faultlessness

According to deontological approaches to justification, we can analyze justification in deontic terms. In this paper, I try to advance the discussion of deontological approaches by applying recent insights in the semantics of deontic modals. Specifically, I use the distinction between weak necessity modals (should, ought to) and strong necessity modals (must, have to) to make progress on a question that has received surprisingly little discussion in the literature, namely: ‘What’s the best version of a deontological approach?’ The two most obvious hypotheses are the Permissive View, according to which justified expresses permission, and the Obligatory View, according to which justified expresses some species of obligation. I raise difficulties for both of these hypotheses. In light of these difficulties, I propose a new position, according to which justified expresses a property I call faultlessness, defined as the dual of weak necessity modals. According to this view, an agent is justified in \(\phi\)-ing iff it’s not the case that she should [/ought] not \(\phi\). I argue that this ‘Faultlessness View’ gives us precisely what’s needed to avoid the problems facing the Permissive and Obligatory Views.     

'Little Hans': From his phobic episode to becoming an opera director

‘Little Hans’ is one of the most highly commented cases in the psychoanalytic literature. His work as an opera director from 1925 in Europe and then in the United States of America is much less well known. This may seem especially surprising given that Freud very soon detects Hans’s emerging interest in this subject. Yet Freud does not mention it either in 1909 when he reports the case, or when Hans visits him in 1922, even though Hans had already decided to become an opera director at this point. The author of this article endeavours to show how this artistic choice could be understood as a way of accommodating, in a double transference relationship with Freud and with his father, the unanalysed residue of the ‘Krawall’ (a term invented by Hans) and ‘the black thing’, both of which appeared during the phobic period.     

Two Jungs. Apropos a paper by Mark Saban

Jung's idea of the ‘personal equation’ amounts to the reflection that theoretical differences between the psychologies that people teach are rooted in their personalities, in other words, that they are due to the psychology each one ‘has’. This concept also applies to different interpretations of Jung's work. The serious difficulties that Mark Saban has with my psychology are a case in point. Recourse to the concept of the personal equation reveals that Saban has his Jung and I have mine. With his insistence on his Talmudic methodological principle of dream interpretation, that ‘the dream is its own interpretation’, according to Saban Jung means nothing but a rejection of Freudian free association. My Jung goes far beyond that. Jung understands this methodological principle above all in terms of what he calls ‘circumambulation’. The main part of this paper is devoted to an elucidation of what circumambulation involves as a mode of dream interpretation. The paper concludes with the distinction Jung himself introduced between two types of reading of his work, either as ‘paper’ and ‘dead nostrums’ or as ‘fire and wind’, and pleads for a reconstruction of Jung's psychology as a whole in terms of his most advanced, deepest insights, instead of a dogmatic reading mainly based on the early Jung, a reading for which his later revolutionary insights are at best negligible embellishments.     

Pierre De Bérulle (1575–1629) and the renewal of Catholic spiritual life in France

Pierre de Bérulle, founder of the Oratoire de Jésus (commonly known as the Oratoire de France), is a leading figure in the renewal of the Catholic Church in France in the first half of the seventeenth century. He is generally regarded as the founder of the French School of Spirituality (École française de spiritualité), though this term has been much criticised in recent years. He is often described as a ‘reformer’ of the Church in France, but this is a half-truth which obscures his real originality; he certainly shared the aims of those striving to create a clergy which would be better educated, more morally upright and more pastorally sensitive and zealous; but above all else he was concerned with the spiritual renewal of the clergy and with the Church in France generally. Lastly, he has often been accused of wishing to create chiefly, if not exclusively, a spirituality of the priesthood and to work for the ‘sanctification’ of the clergy. But his work and ideas must be seen here in a broader perspective, for Bérulle and his disciples shared with St Francis de Sales the aim, expressed in his Introduction à la vie devote (1608), of creating and promoting a spirituality available to all Christians. This article examines his conception of the Oratory, which he intended to be an intermediary between the religious orders and the secular clergy, his spiritual theology, what I have called his ‘spiritual pedagogy’, and his influence in France and elsewhere.     

Frank in mind: a journey to self

Abstract

This paper describes two years’ intensive psychotherapy with an 11 year old boy I shall call Lou, who as a result of traumatic experiences in his early life, struggled to integrate a robust sense of self and in particular to find accord with a sense of himself as male. The impact of maternal depression, paternal gender dysphoria and domestic violence are discussed in relation to this young boy’s capacity to resolve the ordinary Oedipal challenge and find narcissistic value in a male body image to consolidate his gender identity. Concomitant difficulties with separation from his mother and aggression towards himself and others significantly impacted his ability to manage in a mainstream school environment and he was excluded at the time the therapy began. A clinical narrative is presented which illustrates Lou’s journey in psychotherapy, where he began to engage and allow links to be made. He sought to understand his position in a world that did not make sense to him, to face a hitherto ‘unthinkable’ past and to integrate disparate aspects of himself including a male gender identity. Notably Lou’s creation of ‘Frank’ constructed from dead, lost and reanimated objects is described and the actual and symbolic functions of this therapy object are discussed in relation to his internal development and the progress of the work. Parallels are drawn with Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, where the creature strives for psychological birth and understanding. Lou and I struggled in the paradox of the themes of his narrative; a male/female father; potency and castration; corruption and repair and how to be a boy, held and helped in part through the paternal function of a female therapist.