Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority
James Preus

Chapter One: Background and Project
Main Points:
*Previous scholars tend to paint Spinoza as a 'rationalistic' interpreter of scripture, which misses the rather obvious point that he advocated a historical interpretation.
*The goal of the book, then, is to put Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise within the context of the broader theological and political debates of his time, and, by doing so, to stress that Spinoza's real genius lie in stressing the interconnectedness of theological interpretation and political arguments, in order to undermine the political consequences of interpretation.
*Though Spinoza nominally focused his attention on long-dead Jewish authors, this really provided a cover to comment on current debates.
*Most significant was the one prompted by his friend, Ludwig Meyer's, book, Philosophia S. Scripturae, published in 1666. Essentially, Meyer tried to overcome the schisms in Christianity, predicated on differing interpretations, by developing a method that would lead to a single interpretation.
*Spinoza, in contrast, wanted to make room for a multiplicity of interpretations, in order to prevent the Calvinists from legislating scripture.
*Current politicians both sought to enact laws based on scripture, and to fashion national history after sacred history, so as to turn it into the story of a New Jerusalem. Yet, there was a significant split between the biblicists, who believed (roughly), that Scripture needed to based on text, language, etc., and the Enthusiasts, who claimed to be moved by the Spirit to find the proper interpretation.

Chapter 2: Meyer
*Essentially, Meyer sought to apply Cartesian rationalism to the Bible, in order to find the true interpretations. He began with Cartesian doubt, discarding Descartes's own doubts about the possibility/wisdom of solving theological difficulties through his method.
*He came up with a reader-oriented theory. The reader's interpretations were the site of meaning in the text, and the interpretations possible depended on the resources brought to it by the reader.
*So he proceeds from the assumption that the text is infallible. If we were to doubt that, we would be making merely historical arguments about the text.
*He then critiques theologians, saying they're not nearly attentive enough to the ambiguities of sentence structure, the ways in which meaning can be obscured because we can't hear it spoken, etc.
*He also questioned the tendency to use one text to interpret another, arguing that their intentions may be different.
*Essentially, one interprets atomized sections of text, which may or may not be interconnected, hoping to find the intention.
*All meanings found in the text are true meanings, yet the meanings found in the bible must be subject to analysis by natural reason. (He operates under the assumption of Scriptural exceptionalism.)
*We have – though he doesn't explain how – certain innate ideas or truths about the nature of God and the sacred, that we look to find confirmed in the Scripture. Scripture must be interpreted in accordance with the “internal witness” of reason.
*And yet, despite this, he thinks it impossible to have a properly critical stance toward the bible without outside knowledge.

Chapter 3: Conservative Reactions
Basically, Meyer pissed everyone off, but for different reasons.
*The conservatives resented the implication that natural reason or scientific discoveries could at all offer anything to faith, seeing philosophy as one more golden calf, leading the people astray. Thus, they largely shut themselves out of the revolutions being created in the sciences and humanities.
*The conservative reaction isn't particularly interesting. They basically ignored the ways in which Meyer showed interpretation to be problematic, simply reiterating their privileged knowledge of scripture, the power of revelation, and the infallibility of Scripture.
*They also stressed the exceptionalism of Scripture, arguing that, while meaning might be unclear in other text, the authors of the bible were the penmen of God, so the text was absolutely clear.
*Finally, they also interpreted Scripture through Scripture, ignoring Meyer's argument against such practices, and suggestions that arguments must be accessible to all.
*The reasons are more interesting. First, the fact that Scripture needed interpretation at all contradicted the basic protestant principle that each man is a priest. So the establishment was interested in disclaiming any interpretive work, insofar as possible.
*Yet, Calvinism was an imported doctrine, making interpretation unavoidable (not sure that exactly made sense).
*So, in sum, they were defending their own authority.

Chapter 4: Liberal Reaction
*First, liberal here mainly means a “determination to engage the intellectual culture at large” (107).
*The liberals were generally a little more sympathetic to Meyer, believing philosophy could be of service to theology, but skeptical as to Meyer's application of it. Preus takes two men as examples: Ludwig Wolzogen (pastor, later professor of theology at university of Utrecht) and van Velthuysen (physician and liberal magistrate).
*Two basic points of liberal counter-critique: 1) ordinary usage, not reason, determines meaning of language. 2) the bible was an irreducibly historical book and had to be analyzed as such.
*Wolzogen: more democratic than Meyer, arguing that all readers were interpreters, by virtue of assigning meaning to words, and thus no authoritative interpreter was needed. Also argued superstition was spawned by theologians who refused to look rationally at religious doctrines.
*Van Velthuysen: no 'truths' contained in bible, according to Meyer's model; rather, only historical facts. Historical truths could not be deduced by reason; rather, they had to be attested to by witnesses. Thus, it was a category mistake to treat the bible philosophically.
*Likewise, meaning was discovered by learning language, usage, outside facts, etc. It was impossible to interpret a text outside of a certain linguistic and historical framework. Wolzogen, who promoted ordinary language interpretation, made the claim that, since God had deigned to communicate via human language, it was only appropriate to interpret.
*The analogy is basically to the order of a emperor. We know we must obey his commands, but it is appropriate to ask after their meaning and context. We may not understand everything, because God decided to produce one Bible for all time, with parts written in particular contexts, yet we're bound to it.
* In essence, we must interpret the /bible through reason, in order for it to be accessible. To claim divine inspiration is to be an Enthusiast.
*In sum: Liberals were in favor of rational readings, without being rationalists, advocated learning the languages, and treating the text historically as an object with a long, and complex history that shaped the form that it took.

Chapter 5:Spinoza's Naturalized Bible
This chapter essentially shows how Spinoza synthesizes Meyer, and critiques of Meyer, in order to form TTP.
*To recap: The conservatives had disengaged from the text and history, while the liberals protested the tendency to use the text to awaken preexisting ideas in the mind, arguing instead that meanign must me excavated from the text. Though Spinoza obviously sided with the latter, he went further than them, because he was not held back by the desire to read the meaning of the text in the present, or any belief in scriptural exceptionalism.
*Spinoza turned to natural history in order to expand the notion of interpretation to include history, language, previous interpretation, etc., in what went into interpretive work. Essentially, he was out to subvert the dogmatism of his time, not reject it.
*So, can't start with infallibility of text; must start with its history.
*While there are some overlaps with Meyer, such as Spinoza's belief that one can identify general truth – such as love, justice, and charity in the Bible – Spinoza didn't have any beliefs nearly as extensive as Meyer's claim that the mind possesses a series of truth that the text triggers memory of.
*Rather than Meyer's rationalism (which Preus saw as an echo of Maimonides), Spinoza took a “bottom up” approach, modeled after Bacon, taking the scripture as a source of data out of which a hypothesis could be formed.
*Preus suggests that Spinoza chose to create a natural history of scripture – which Bacon had not – in order to highlight to his friends the difference between his stance and Meyer's.
*Spinoza also said at some point that “the interpreter of the text is like the studier of nature,” meaning that each is a self-contained system which must be studied as a discrete entity. The bible is a system of meanings that presuppose a certain worldview.
*This worldview was teleological, tending to anthropomorphize God. Only by understanding that writers were superstitious and modeled their cosmos after person experience is it possible to understand the text. Thus, the text is sui interpres, in that its interpretation is derived from itself.
*Spinoza thus attacked philosophers for promoting superstition.
*Spinoza supported Meyer's dismissal of divine guidance in interpretation by pointing out that the original participants in history had no need of the spirit; rather, they witnessed biblical events in real time.
*There is no sacred history, and the canon is a historical construct, whose sacredness was determined by finite groups in specific situations. Thus, Scripture is not necessarily binding in the present.
*Deceptively, cleverly, Spinoza used the language of discovering the 'intention' of the text, despite believing there was no god as intender. Contemporary believers, then, were authorized to accommodate the text to fit their own notions of justice, etc.
*Spinoza used anachronism to show the historicity of the text, and argued we can use the Scripture to comment on the present, but only through analogy. Thus, the Old Testament proved that religious functionaries should not have political power and beliefs should not be legislated.
*Preus sees Spinoza as making more radical use of Cartesian and Baconian philosophies, and in doing so, redefining the relation between philosophy and theology. He radically separated the two by making questions of truth and interpretations of textual meaning into separate questions. He also introduced a new theory of religion that made the bible as historical as any other historical religious document.
*Yet, for all that, Spinoza is often accused of having a rationalistic interpretation of religion, largely because of his discussion on miracles, when he suggests a miracle is something that
simply isn't known yet. Still, he thought that necessary for establishing historical truths.

Afterword
Preus argues Spinoza was relatively ignored because his work failed to conform to either liberal or conservative approaches to history, scripture, though he gives him credit for helping undermine theocracies and create pluralism.

Harry Frankfurt - Demons, Dreamers and Madmen

(Note: this post only covers Chapters 1-12)

PT. 1: THE FIRST MEDITATION

1. Frankfurt begins his explication of the First Meditation with some general thoughts: Descartes' task is to find his generic identity as a rational creature (4). It is a characteristically religious endeavor that begins with the naivete of the reader and progresses toward illumination. He writes in the first person to entice the reader into his own perspective.

2. Descartes rehashes the arguments of skepticism to three ends: 1) to prepare the reader for the intellectual matters that lie ahead, 2) to respond to and deal with each of them, 3) to make the truths he eventually arrives at seem firm. He admits the difficulty of doubting our senses, as habit forces us into belief. But given that his purpose seems to be less substantive and more mood-setting, isn't Gassendi's criticism that the first meditation could simply be rewritten "Universal doubt!" justified? Frankfurt wants to distinguish two phases of the 1st Meditation: throwing out the beliefs and then re-examining each one. The first is easy, the second a bit more time consuming.

3. Descartes throws out his beliefs less because of their falsity and more because of their doubtability. Indeed, the pair truth/falsity is less important for D than certain/doubtful. But shouldn't the concept of reason he employs to distinguish certain/doubtful have been thrown out with his other beliefs? No, because D's task is precisely to make a provisional commitment to reason and see if it fails.

4. Frankfurt wants to analyze D's argument as a dialectic: first, there is the validity of the senses. Then, first antithesis: our senses are sometimes deceptive. Second thesis: the senses are sometimes deceptive. Second antithesis: is it possible that I'm mad? No. But let's revise the thesis just in case. Third thesis: whatever is perceived under ideal external conditions by an ideally qualified perceiver certainty exists (55). Third antithesis: what if I'm dreaming? The dream argument unsettles even this third thesis. Even on their best terms, the senses are incapable of providing certainty.

5. The problem D is confronting is how to formulate an alternative policy in terms of which no judgment will be certified except those that cannot be shaken by conflicting testimony (62). Frankfurt emphasizes that at this point in the Meditations, D is arguing from the perspective of common sense and not from a fully mature perspective. It is important to keep this in mind so as not to hang D for simply representing and not necessarily arguing for a common sense viewpoint.

6. So again, the dream argument means someone committed to their senses alone cannot distinguish physical objects and dream images (75). But dreams are like paintings, they might not themselves be real but surely represent something real. D argues that those things are the simple and universal elements of sensory objects (colors, shapes, etc.), which the imagination merely rearranges in dreams. Of course, one has to wonder what right D has to present a theory of the imagination at this point. But let's move on.

7. Frankfurt claims that the 1st Meditation only deals with sense material. So what about the mathematics discussion. His claim again is that math, for this naive subject of the 1st Meditation, is indeed extracted from sense data.

8. The existence of an omnipotent deity raises the possibility that there are no material objects at all, that even the most simple and universal things are not real (95) (because the non-existence of the material world means the non-existence of simples) (98). The hypothesis of an omnipotent deity leads to a slightly different way of doubting the truths of mathematics: while math doesn't need particular things for its truths to be valid (as physics needs objects, astronomy needs stars, etc.), but it does need something, anything to exist. If we can't be sure of the existence of anything, we can't be sure of the truths of mathematics.

9. The hypothesis that God somehow made me defective is the first thesis, which is then negated by the antithesis, God is good. But then we're at a dead end, universal doubt: we can neither decide on the existence of God, nor on whether his existence would allow our deception. It is possible that God allows us to always be deceived. But then, it seems even more likely that we are always deceived if we come from an even less perfect source. Frankfurt is showing here that we arrive at universal doubt without the introduction of God or the malin genie. God is brought in as an attempt to eliminate doubt. The malin genie is brought in not to prove universal doubt, but to entertain the possibility that our ideas are actually false, and not just doubtful.

PT. 2: REASON AND ITS VALIDATION

10. At the beginning of the 2nd Meditation, Descartes turns to himself and finds a belief particularly immune to skepticism: SUM. This does not mean that I exist but rather that the statement sum is in a certain sense indubitable. There are a few ways in which he proves the certainty of this statement, though the most well-known runs as follows:

1. I am deceived in thinking that I exist.
2. If I am deceived about anything, then I exist.
3. Hence, if I am deceived in thinking that I exist, then I do exist.
4. Therefore I do exist.
5. If I do exist, then I am not deceived in thinking that I exist.
6. Therefore, I am not deceived in thinking that I exist.

It is therefore logically impossible to utter sum without it being true (137). The conclusion is not necessarily cogito ergo sum. The assertion is that whenever sum is considered, not necessarily believed, it is true. An interesting sidestepping of the question of belief. To repeat again, Frankfurt believes that D is not so much concerned with truth and falsity as he is with certainty and doubt. His aim here is to show that the certainty of sum is ubiquitous. Sum is permanently available as a solid foundation of knowledge because it is derivable from a premiss that is necessarily available whenever needed (152).

11. Res cogitans is introduced as a more explicit rendering of sum (156). Res cogitans is not my essence. As he says later in the 6th Meditation, my essence is to be a union of body and soul. Thinking thing is simply the only thing I can ascribe to myself indubitably at this juncture in the Meditations. It is indispensable to my existence but not, in itself, my essence.

12. What is clear and distinct perception (cdp)? To recognize something as necessarily true is to cdp it. Cdp does not in and of itself guarantee existence but only that we know what is necessarily involved in a concept. To cdp a triangle is to know that it has three sides. To cdp myself is to know that I exist. Existence is thus necessary attribute of myself in a way that it is not of the triangle.

Cdp is not, as is often thought, a kind of immediate, visual encounter with an object. It is, rather, an affair of reason (187). To perceive something clearly is to understands that there are no reasonable grounds upon which a thing can be doubted. To perceive something distinctly is to understand its implications and attributes. It is possible to perceive something clearly without perceiving it distinctly (he gives the example of pain), but not the other way around. In the end, Frankfurt argues that cdp is more a matter of prudence than it is absoluteness in method.

Meditations on First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Distinction Between the Soul and the Body are Demonstrated

Descartes, 1641

Background: As Marion notes, it would be incorrect to think of Descartes as, “a solitary, or even autistic thinker, soliloquizing, in the manner, perhaps, of a Spinoza.” The bulk of the meditations was written in 1637. Descartes then had it circulated to a series of theologians at the Sorbonne, requesting that they raise any objections that came to mind. (My intuition and hazy memory suggests to me that Adorno mocked Descartes for this procedure in Minima Moralia, when he claimed that a true thinker should aim at losing every philosophical argument). He particularly wanted a Jesuit to read it, both because of their notorious scholarly rigor, influence, and frat boy-like sense of community, but also because of his own education by Jesuit teachers. One of the readers was Hobbes, who dismissed the book’s method as rehashing old forms of skepticism, and Descartes’s dualism more generally, insisting that the mind was dependent on the body. Descartes then dismissed Hobbes. The key thing to note, then, is that the book premiered in a very Catholic context, and was originally published in one volume with the objections and replies to it. Hence, the opening letter of dedication.

Letter of Dedication

Addressed to the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris, Descartes begins by situating his work as a defense of theism/Christianity. He claims that philosophers, not theologians, ought to establish proofs for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul in order to convince non-believers, since arguments reliant on Scripture will be rejected out of hand by those not touched by God’s grace. He supports the orthodoxy of his venture (i.e. proving the existence of God through natural reason) by referencing to Scripture which claims that anyone should be able to deduce the existence of the creator by reference to its creatures. Likewise, his efforts to seek out and arrange the best proofs for the existence of the soul (here he denies originality) is simply a response to the Lateran Council, which enjoined all philosophers to find rational proofs thereof.

The next section expresses Descartes doubts about being properly understood by the untrained masses, while simultaneously asking the theologians to critique his work. Crucial to properly understanding his work, he claims, is reading it as a whole, for logical connections, and a sort of monastic/ascetic withdrawal from the senses.

The rest of the letter sums up the meditations, so, for the sake of brevity, I’ll omit it and move on.

Meditation One: Concerning Those Things That Can be Called into Doubt

The text begins with an autobiographical confession. Sever years prior to publishing the text, Descartes claims to have been seized by the realization that all of his knowledge was built on “false opinions,” and decided to embark on a project of absolute skepticism, once he acquired a period of suitable solitude and leisure. (Or, as Serres once put it, beautifully, “Take everything away so I can see.”)

Rather than prove his opinions all false, Descartes decided to start from nothing and withhold assent from opinions that couldn’t be proven absolutely true. If he found reason to doubt, he would reject them. Thus, opinions built on the sense were the first to go, as the senses could be mistaken. He initially resists the idea that he could be utterly deceived about large, basic things - that he sits in a room, writing, next to a candle, etc, thinking that he would be like the insane to believe that. But then he remembers that dreams often reproduce these images, incorrectly. Unable to decide if he is dreaming or awake, he decides he has to reject the details of his physical presence as doubtful. The upshot of this is that certain sciences, such as mathematics and logic, are given priority of natural sciences, like astronomy.

Next, then, he turns to the possibility that God is deceiving him, constantly. It would be contrary to the nature of a good and omnipotent god to do so; thus, he entertains the possibility that God is not omnipotent. But if that is so, everything is up to be doubted.

Still, sustaining this doubt is difficult. Habit keeps turning him back to old prejudices. Unable to escape all thoughts, Descartes decides to confront them, and imagine that these opinions are all false, the product of an evil, manipulative, omnipotent demon, who desires nothing but to deceive him. The first meditation ends in total doubt.

Meditation Two: Concerning the Nature of the Human Mind: That it is Better Known than the Body

The second meditation begins with an interesting intrusion of the temporal. “Yesterday’s meditation,” Descartes asserts, “has thrown me into such doubt that I can no longer ignore them.” It’s curious that Descartes feels the need to narrate his meditations day-by-day, given that temporality should be in much as doubt as anything. It implies a rootedness that the project seems intent on denying. But, a digression.

He claims a crisis, when faced with the idea that everything is false, and first seeks certainty in the idea that nothing is certain, but moves restlessly away from that thought to the idea of some transcendent God, securing his existence, putting thoughts in his head. That, however, denies the possibility of solipsism. Finally, then, Descartes arrives at the idea that his existence is the only certainty.

Yet, “I am, I exist,” provides no content for the “I.” Though the body and senses may seem certain, those could equally be the product of some demonic deceiver. The only thing he can affirm is that he is “a thinking thing,” at least so long as he thinks.

This thinking thing is not dependent on the specific thoughts of his imagination; rather, it is an active “I.” “But what then am I? A thing that thinks? What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies , wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses.”

From there, Descartes moves on to the question of what we deny, grasp, perceive, etc. Here is his discussion of wax. Because it changes shape, form, smell, consistency, etc., under different circumstances, without ceasing to be wax, Descartes concludes that wax is an “extended, flexible, and mutable subject.” The wax is grasped through the mind, not through the imagination. His argument for this is the peculiar one that he knows the wax is capable of more permutations than his imagination allows. Nor, he argues, can objects be known solely through the eyes. After all, despite seeing only moving hats and cloaks below, he judges the figures in the street to be men, not robots. Therefore perception is always really the mind grasping an object.

This act of the intellect throws Descartes back on himself. The more clearly he understands the way in which his intellect understands object, the more clearly he understands the functioning of his intellect. Since everything comes back to the intellect, Descartes then decides to turn his attention to his intellect, as the most direct route to (self)knowledge.

Meditation Three: Concerning God, that He Exists

Descartes returns inward, secure in the knowledge that he is a “thinking thing,” wondering if he might know anything as securely as he knows that he possesses these modes of thought. Thinking about the way in which he knows, he posits as a general rule that “everything I very clearly and distinctly perceive is true.”

This leads him back to notions of geometry, which he had rejected out of the principle that everything could be simply put there by some deceitful God. It becomes increasingly clear, then, that he can’t get very far without settling the question of the nature and existence of God.

Rather than go directly to that, though, Descartes stops to classify his thoughts and to ask in which truth or falsity reside. Things that appear in his mind as images he labels ideas. Ideas (i.e. Representations) can’t be wrong in themselves, since they don’t immediately pose the question of whether their referent exists. Thus, only judgments can be false.

The question, then, is what is the origin of ideas. They seem to come from some external source, but all Descartes can definitely say is that they come from some faculty other than his will. That doesn’t exclude the possibility that they come from some other faculty, as dreams do. In sum, up to this point, it was only a blind impulse to believe that things existed outside of Descartes and send their images into him.

Backtracking, Descartes decides to rate ideas by their content. Thus, ideas such as omnipotence must have more objective reality than those that represent modes or accidents, or finite substances.

Here he enters his version of the cosmological argument. There must be as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in its effect. Thus, nothing comes from nothing. A stone can’t suddenly come into existence out of nothing; there must be something that precedes it, which has all of the essential material/qualities of the stone. Likewise, ideas must come from some sort of archetype that exceeds them. No infinite regress of ideas is permitted.

“But what am I ultimately to conclude? If the objective reality of any of my ideas is found to be so great that I am certain that the same reality was not in me, either formally or eminently, and that therefore I myself cannot be the cause of the idea, then it necessarily follows that I am not alone in the world, but that something else. Which is the cause of these ideas, also exists.” These ideas include in/corporeal things, angels, animals, God, other men. The ideas of men, animals, and angels, could be fashioned from his ideas of God, self, and corporeal things.

Corporeal things, he thinks, could easily have originated within himself, because if they are false, they represent nothing, and the creation of falsity could easily be ascribed to some lack in his nature. If, however, they are true, they exhibit so little reality and are so illusory, and transient that there’s no reason to assume they can’t come from him. He could simply have borrowed the idea of substance from himself and applied it to a stone. Therefore, all corporeal things could just be modes of thinking of his own being.

But is there anything in the idea of God that could not have originated within him? The idea of the infinite substance. There’s no reason for a finite creature to think of an infinite substance unless it existed. One could imagine the idea of the infinite as simply the negation of the finite, if not for the fact that the idea of the infinite clearly has more reality than the finite. How could he know that he doubt, desires, and lack, if not by virtue of the idea of a more complete substance?

God must exist, then, because the idea of God is the most clear and distinct of all ideas, and contains the most real. It’s no objection to say that he cannot understand any number of things about God because, as a finite creature, his understanding is necessarily too flawed to grasp the infinite.

But what if he is something greater than he understands, a la Feuerbach? Isn’t it possible that he might obtain the qualities of God through infinite progress? He would answer yes, except that one of the qualities of God is that nothing in him is potential. As actually infinite, nothing can be added to his perfection.

Descartes toys with the idea that maybe he’s mistaken, and that he really derives his existence from something other than God. Had it been himself, he would have made himself perfect, God. Nor is the idea that he always existed a plausible counter-argument, because existing requires the same force and action maintain something’s existence, as would have been necessary to create it. Put otherwise, he cannot guarantee his future existence, and, thus, is dependent on something outside of himself.

Parents are no help, because even if one shuffle’s one’s existence off on to them, one has to ask all over again about whether they had the power to be self-generating. The answer is no, leaving us with God. God can’t be a name put to a series of finite causes, because God is defined by his simplicity and unity.

In sum, turning inward reveals both his finitude and dependence on something more perfect.

Meditation Four: Concerning the True and the False

Having ascertained that God exists and Descartes is utterly dependent upon him in his finitude, he turns to contemplating his qualities. First, God cannot deceive, because deceiving is the mark of an imperfect being. Next, he received his faculty of judgment from God; ergo, he can trust it, because God is trustworthy. That he makes mistakes simply shows that his faculty of judgment is lacking, because finite. (Interestingly, Descartes has shifted the traditional definition of evil as a lack over to the idea of the mistake). That begs the question as to why a perfect God would give an imperfect faculty of judgment. It seems the mark of a shitty craftsman.

Answers: might not know God’s reasons, imperfection might only be relative (that is, necessary when viewed in the context of the universe). He may conclude reasonably that the creator God may have created him as part of a universal scheme.

Furthermore, errors occur when the faculty of knowing corresponds with the faculty of choosing. He can’t complain about the deficiencies of his faculty of knowing, for reasons listed above; likewise, he can’t complain about his free will, because it’s his most ample and perfect possession. Taken as simply the capacity to choose, it’s equal to God’s. If he feels indifferent, it’s because he lacks clear knowledge in certain instances of the good. Were his knowledge perfect, he would always choose the good.

The only correct response to the finitude of his knowledge, Descartes thinks, is gratitude to God, who, after all, did not need to create him at all. While the world might seem more perfect if Descartes were given unerringly clear knowledge, in truth, that neither takes into account the possibility of some greater or schema, or that God endowed him with perfectibility. So he ends this meditation, resolving to try harder.

Meditation Five: Concerning the Essence of Material Things, and Again Concerning God, That He Exists

Descartes begins this meditation by launching into an almost Platonic notion of memory. Turning inward, he recalls thing such as shape, quantity, geometry, and so on, which all have immutable, eternal essences, and, consequently could not have been fabricated by him.

To reiterate the line of argument: What he knows clearly is true, and everything that he clearly and distinctly perceives as its property belongs to it. What is true is clearly something, rather than nothing. Therefore he must assent to everything he knows clearly, such as logic, mathematics, and, now, God.

Here he basically launches into a version of the ontological argument. God’s existence is clearly and distinctly perceived as inseparable for God’s essence, and it would be impossible to think of God without the property of existence. Therefore, God exists.

In the end, his argument in this section comes down to faith in his sight, in what he clearly perceives. God is both that which he most clearly perceives, and that which grounds all knowledge. The fact that God exists as creator, and as good, guarantees that Descartes is not so made as to be mistaken when he clearly perceives something. So is God the foundation of the subject or the cogito?

Meditation Six: Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction Between Mind and Body

Descartes now knows that material things do exist, at least insofar as they are the objects of pure mathematics. And as God can bring anything into existence, there is no reason he could not have done so for material things. Moreover, he seems to have perceived it clearly through the faculty of imagination, which is “a certain application of the knowing faculty to a body intimately present to it.”

Imagining, as Descartes describes it, is literally the power to embody a thought in an image. It’s a certain way of accessing a thought, but, he thinks, ultimately unnecessary to knowledge. The intellect turns to a mind to consider an idea’ the imagination turns to the body.

Initially, Descartes took the senses for granted. After all, they impressed on him clearly and distinctly such ideas as tactility, heat, cold, etc., in such a way that they seemed to come from something external to him. In addition, nature had preconditioned him to associate certain physical desires - hunger - with physiological reactions.

And yet, experience taught him to mistrust his senses. As he said, seeming square towers turned out to be round upon closer inspection, and so on. Then came the doubts of the first meditation (dreaming, etc).

Here he establishes his mind body dualism. He knows that he is a thinking thing, and while he perceives that he has a body intimately linked to him, it also has a series of properties that aren’t necessary to a thinking thing. It has extension, substance, the capacity to move, imagination, etc - none of which really impact his identity as a thinking thing. All of these sensations of corporeal things could either come from God or from a body. As it would be a form of deception for God to implants these sensations of corporeality, without that being their true origin, it makes sense that the true origin is the world.

Likewise, since God does not deceive, it seems plausible to hope that the material world not only exists, but can also be known. Trusting now in nature, he concludes that his mind and body must be so tightly conjoined as to be the same thing. Why else would he experience pain when his body is injured?

He then goes on to clarify what he means by nature. Rather than referring to the totality of everything bestowed on him by God, he takes it to simply mean “what God has bestowed on me insofar as I am composed of mind and body.” This knowledge, perhaps better thought of as instinct, prevents man from harm, by inducing pain when burnt and so on. The mistake, however, lies in using this knowledge to deduce anything about the essence of things or reality. This nature can sometimes be deceived, as in when eats poison concealed in pleasant food, or desires certain foods or water when ill that would be detrimental to it. Yet, all that shows is that nature is not omniscient. He uses the example of a faulty clock.

On the whole, Descartes thinks, the mind-body relation is well constructed. The two maintain are different, in the sense that the mind is indivisible, while the body could easily have some limbs lopped off without that disturbing the mind. (Presumably). And the two are connected by nerves that reach a particular corner of the mind. So when the foot suffers, it communicates to the mind the idea of pain, and it reacts accordingly. When it thirsts, it likewise communicates that desire to the mind. All of this is optimally designed to preserve the body’s well-being, at least on the whole. The occasional mistake is justified by the efficacy of the system as a whole.

The meditation ends with a reaffirmation of knowledge, and the goodness of God, who by nature cannot deceive.

Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams

The Interpretation of Dreams notes (Joyce Crick translation - it is alot less bulky than the Strachey translation)

I. The Scientific Literature on the Problem of Dreams

The short: a brief survey of the basic scientific literature available at the time on the problem of dreams. Punchline: scientists believe dreams are mental froth. They be hella wrong.

The long: although Freud is mostly recapitulating the opinions of others in this chapter, he does offer some hints of what is to come. He writes that "the human mind's endeavor to see everything in coherent connection such that it involuntarily makes good the flaws in its coherence" (41); he is thus already offering up a theory of mind, something that makes coherent, or brings into unity. He also notes the "dream's command of childhood material" (16), how it holds on to "trivialities" (17), how it is difficult to reduce the dream to somatic sources (though many do) (20), that "we should have the greatest reservation about denying our responsibility for sings and crimes committed in dreams" (58), the importance of "involuntary ideas (images)" (60), that, following Robert, "dreams are the excretion of undeveloped thoughts, thoughts nipped in the bud" (66), and finally that there is probably some relation between dreams and mental illnesses. All of this stuff can be skipped over (Freud himself found writing this section to be irritating), as it is basically him trying to be a good scholar/scientist. Nonetheless, the way in which he structures this literature review foreshadows much of what is to come.

II. The Method of Interpreting Dreams

The short: Dream-interpretation en detail, not en masse. Foundational dream of Irma's injection.

The long: there are two ways of interpreting a dream: 1) take the dream content as a whole and replace the symbols to make sense (symbolic interpretation), or else 2) start with the symbols and try to translate them to make a coherent text (decoding interpretation). Freud basically opts for the latter, interpretation en detail, not en masse, with the caveat that there is no "fixed key" for decoding (83).

In this chapter he gives a pretty clear description of his technique: "I want [the patient] to do two things: to pay attention to his psychical perceptions more intently, and to switch off the critical faculty he normally uses to sift the thoughts arising in him" (81). This is free-association in a nutshell. He says you can always tell if someone is trying to hard by a "tense expression" (81). He wants his patients to get in that "right-before-bed" mood.

He then launches in to the famous dream of Irma's injection. The basic plot: Freud dreams that he examines his patient Irma with his rival Otto, Otto's rival Leopold, and their superior Dr. M. He realizes that something organic has been overlooked (which Dr. M confirms), and that this has resulted from an injection that Otto had given her. Freud's interpretation is that the dream's content is a wish-fulfillment in that it blames Irma's illness on Otto. "I am not to blame for Irma but Otto is" (94).

Note: Freud introduces the "broken kettle" joke on page 96.

III. The Dream is a Wish-Fulfillment

Everyone knows that you can't do everything you want to do. Dreams replace these unexpressed actions (99). What does a good dream of? Corn (105). Plain and simple.

Freud has some interesting comments on children in this chapter: "Child psychology is in my opinion destined to perform a service for the psychology of adults," (102) but then on pg. 105 shows just how far off he is from Three Essays: "If we consider childhood a happy time because it does not yet know sexual desire...." He does talk about "children being aroused by food," however, a precursor to the oral stage.

IV. Dream-Distortion

Here Freud distinguishes between the manifest dream-content and the latent dream-thought as separated by the dream-work (107). The tendency of the dream-content to require interpretation (that is, the revelation of the dream-thought) is called dream-distortion (107). Freud posits two psychical forces to explain this distortion: one which forms the wish (Ucs), and one which censors it (Pcs) (113). The stricter the censorship, the more far-reaching the disguise (113).

In this chapter Freud has the dream of a long, yellow face, a composite of his uncle Josef and two of his colleagues, R and N. In real life, Freud likes both R and N quite a bit, but thinks of his uncle as a numbskull and a criminal. His interpretation of the dream is that he wants to associate R and N with a numbskull/criminal because they are both Jews up for the same "Professor Extraordinarus" position that Freud is up for, and he wants a way to put some distance between himself and his colleagues, as if to say, "I am not like them and I can get this position."

Another important dream in this chapter is the lady who dreams of bring frustrated by not being able to have a dinner party because she has nothing but salmon in the house. She knows that if she had a dinner party, a friend of hers would come who is attractive to her husband, and Freud interprets her dream to mean that she would rather not have a dinner party than offer up occasion for her friend to interact with her husband. But on a second level, the woman is also identifying with her friend, as her friend's favorite dish is smoked salmon. At yet a third level, this lady had wanted to prove Freud's wish-fulfillment theory wrong, and her dream was a wish-fulfillment in that sense as well!

There is finally the dream of the woman who dreams of her son Karl in a coffin in a similar manner to her son Otto, who had actually died. Freud takes it that the woman is not wishing that Karl and not Otto had died (the seemingly obvious interpretation), but that she could again see a man who was at Otto's funeral. Dubious!

Freud ends the chapter with a concise formulation: The dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish (124).

V. The Material and Sources of Dreams

(a) Recent and Insignificant Material in Dreams: the dream always contains material from the day just past, the day's residue. In probably the most elaborate explanation in the book, Freud provides evidence of this with his "botanical monograph" dream (p. 129), which is an amazing exercise in association. Why do we include seemingly trivial material from the day just past in our dreams? By attaching themselves on to innocuous ideas, repressed affects can get by the censoring agency and find expression. Nothing is actually innocuous: we do not let mere trifles disrupt our sleep (140).

Freud also introduces here the idea that the dream "obeys a compulsion to form a unity out of [two or more experiences]" (137). In other words, there is something about the psychic apparatus that both merges/condenses together and displaces the psychically valuable for the trivial.

(b) Material from Infancy as a Source of Dreams: Freud says that we always "find the active involvement of childhood experiences in dreams whose content would in no way lead us to suspect it" (146). "We find the child, with its impulses, living on in the dream" (147). Freud talks about his own childhood ambitions and longings (for Rome, in particular). As in all interpretation, one must uncover the scene of infancy, which "is represented in the manifest dream-content only by an allusion" (152).

(c) The Somatic Sources of Dreams: Do dreams come from the stomach? Yes, they have somatic factors, but "the motivation for dreaming" lies "outside the somatic sources of stimulus" (173). He takes as an example his dream of riding a grey horse. At the time, he had an apple-sized abscess on his perinium (177). Yes. Apple-sized. At first glance, this dream is somatic in origin, for if he is able to ride a horse, he no longer has the abscess. But following the details of the dream back, he finds his childhood competitions with his nephews. The dream does have one important somatic function though: "the dream is the guardian of sleep, not its disturber" (180). When the dream incorporates a light shined into one's bedroom into the dream, it is to keep the sleeper from waking up.

(d) Typical Dreams:

Freud examines a few typical dreams, including exhibition-dreams, those of nakedness, where the wish is expressed by changing the "real" affect associated with it into its opposite: so instead of being excited by it, one is embarrassed. Instead of revealing oneself to one's family, one is usually naked in front of strangers.

He then talks about death dreams. He makes it clear that when we dream of someone's death, we do not really wish for that person to be dead (a dubious claim). We should trace the affect back to the latent thought and not the manifest content, after all. Nonetheless, he does believe that although we wouldn't wish ill will on them today, many of us still carry childhood wishes to hurt our family, our siblings in particular.

But he understands that he's on shaky ground now, and turns to mythology and tragedy to justify his discussion. Look at the Greek Gods: what violence! He then introduces the Oedipus myth on pg. 198: "the girl's first affection is for her father, and the boy's first infant desire is for his mother. Thus the father becomes an intrusive rival for the boy, as the mother does for the girl, and we have already explained in the case of siblings how little the child needs for this feeling to lead to a death-wish" (198). (Freud had explained that children easily wish death upon others because they do not understand the gravity of its consequences, the forever-ness of it.)

In an important footnote on pg. 204, Freud explains Hamlet in terms of the Oedipus complex: Hamlet is paralyzed in action because "he cannot take revenge on the man who removed his father and took the latter's place beside his mother" because this man, his uncle, "shows him his own repressed infant wishes realized" (204).

Freud ends by noting the self-centered-ness of dreams (an expression of the influence of childhood) (205). In a footnote on pg. 206, also, "the sheer size, the excessive abundance, scale, and exaggeration of dreams, could be an infantile characteristic" (206).

VI. The Dream-Work

The dream-work is why the dream requires interpretation. "The dream is a picture-puzzle of this kind, and our predecessors in the field of dream-interpretation made the mistake of judging the rebus as if it were a pictorial composition" (212). How exactly does the dream-work work?

(a) The Work of Condensation: Every element in a dream is overdetermined (which is why we always think there is more to our dreams that we can't remember) (214). We can think of condensation as roughly akin to metaphor.

(b) The Work of Displacement: Low-value elements are charged with intensity taken from high-value elements (235). Let's call this metonymy.

(c) The Means of Representation in Dreams: how do dreams represent logical relations? First, in terms of simultaneity, one thing coming after another (239). Causal relations are often represented by minor dream, main dream = sub-clause, main clause (240). There are no either-or relations in dreams: whenever the patient says either-or, he means to be represented a concatenation of two things into one (241). Contradictions in dreams are simply disregarded, as "to the dream, 'No' does not seem to exist" (243). Relations of similarity are expressed in terms of unity (244). Identification is one of the ways this unity can be expressed (244); composite formation is another. Motor inhibition in dreams usually means "a conflict of wills" (254).

(d) Regard for Representability: Dreams like to turn everything into symbols, visual symbols, a feature they share with "psychoneuroses, legends, and popular customs" (259).

(e) Examples: Calculating and Speaking in Dreams: Numerals and calculations often symbolize something else (an idea he probably picked up under the influence of Wilhelm Fliess).

(f) Absurd Dreams. Intellectual Performance in Dreams: Dreams are often absurd because they have to don the fool's cap to speak the truth and get by the censor (285). We should neither take too seriously intellectual thinking in dreams: "everything in our dreams that ostensibly looks like the activity of the function of judgement is not to be understood as, say, an act of thinking on the part of the dream-work; rather, it belongs to the material of the dream-thoughts and has passed from there as a ready-made structure into the manifest dream-content" (286).

(g) Affects in Dreams: "Analysis teaches us that the imagined ideas in the dream-content have undergone displacements and substitutions, while the affects have remained in place unaltered" (299). "Inhibition of affect would be the second achievement of the dream-censorship, as dream-distortion was its first" (306). In other words, dream-censorship succeeds when it a) mixes up our ideas, and b) suppresses affects and/or transforms an affect into its opposite (308). Although affect is suppressed and/or transformed in the dream-work, it is also the productive energy of the dream, what inspires the dream to form in the first place (311).

(h) Secondary Revision: "A function of the psyche indistinguishable from our waking thoughts can make some contribution to the dream-content" (319). Secondary revision is the tendency to make intelligible, to make whole; by doing so, it wants to make something like a daydream out of the dream's material, the expression of a fantasy (a key term which he introduces but does not fully develop here, like much in the Dreambook) (321). Then Freud introduces the "Gotcha" moment: "It is probably, then, that the agency requiring the dream-content to be intelligible is none other than our normal thinking" (327).

So in conclusion, the four factors involved in the dream-work are: 1) condensation, 2) displacement, 3) regard for representability, 4) secondary revision. And "the work of the psyche in the formation of dreams can be broken down into two tasks: it generates the dream-thoughts, and it transforms them into the dream-content" (328).

VII. The Psychology of Dream-Processes

Freud here introduces his "topographic" model of mind, a model which would dominate his thinking until the introduction of the "structural" model (id, ego, superego) in 1923. I have scanned a model of the topographic model made by Dr. Christopher Allegra here. It is somewhat helpful in thinking about this last, more philosophical chapter. Much of what we find here is adapted from his abandoned "Project for a Scientific Psychology," so Chapter VII is kinduva strange addition to the book, but crucial nonetheless.

(a) Forgetting in Dreams: We forget because we resist. "Whatever disturbs the continuation of the work of analysis is a resistance" (336). In other words, we forget purposefully. But we can't remember everything: "the best-interpreted dreams often have a passage that has to be left in the dark...this is the dream's navel, and the place beneath which lies the Unknown" (341).

(b) Regression: Recap: Dreams are fully paid-up psychical acts. The driving force behind them is wish-fulfillment which tries to escape psychical censorship (347).

Freud here introduces his "picket fence" model of the mind. On one side we have Perception, on the other, Motor Activity, both in a way, systems of consciousness (Cs). In between we have a series of "memory traces," and a store of repressed memory traces called the unconscious. Between motor activity and the unconscious (Ucs) stands the preconscious (Pcs). The Ucs "has no access to consciousness except by way of the Preconscious" (353). If we think of the chain perception -> memory -> motor action, we have progressive activity. Dreams are regressive in that they work from the Ucs back toward recent memories and then make hallucinations for the perception system. This chain could also be represented 1. wish from infancy/sexual wish -> 2. days residue -> 3. dream.

(c) On Wish-Fulfillment: Why wishes? Because there is the Unconscious. "I imagine that the conscious wish becomes the initiator of a dream only if it succeeds in wakening an unconscious wish consonant with it, and drawing reinforcement from this" (362). "The wish represented in the dream has to be an infantile one" (363). So there are really two sources for the dream, one repressed in the unconscious, one merely suppressed in the preconscious. Freud compares the two to an entrepreneur and a capitalist: "the daytime thought might possibly play the part of entrepreneur for the dream; but the entrepreneur who has the idea, as we say, and the will to translate it into action, still cannot do anything without capital; he needs a capitalist to take on the expenses,....a wish from the Unconscious" (365). He describes this linkage of the two wishes as transference (to be distinguished from what he later theorizes as patient-analyst transference, though certainly related) (367).

Why does the censor allow us to dream? Precisely because our motor activity has been shut down and it's not dangerous for anyone to have our suppressed/repressed wishes expressed. If we regressed when we were awake, we would be psychotic (some theorists believe that, for this reason, psychotics do not dream).

This opens the way for connecting psychoneurotic symptoms to dreams: "I can say that a hysterical symptom only comes into being when two opposing wish-fulfillments, each with its source in a different psychical system, are in a position to coincide in one expression" (372).

(d) Arousal by Dreams. The Function of Dreams. Anxiety-Dreams: in Ucs, there is no past, nothing is forgotten, nothing brought to an end (378). Under these circumstances, it needs release every once in awhile: the dream is where Pcs acts as a safety-valve for Ucs (379). It allows wishes out insofar as they are compatible with each other. Every once in awhile though, it lets out conflicting wishes, and these result in anxiety dreams (380). Anxiety dreams can also be caused by the expression of wishes that have been down in Ucs for so long that they have turned from pleasurable to unpleasurable, from wine into vinegar, as the model goes. Strangulated libido turned into anxiety. Anxiety is also often associated with witnessing parental coitus at a young age (383).

(e) Primary and Secondary Process. Repression: "The most complicated feats of thinking are possible without the participation of consciousness" (389). When a train of thought is not given adequate expression in consciousness and lingers in Pcs for awhile, it is then "drawn into the Unconscious" (391). This fact leads us to thinking of two different psychical process that play a part in forming dreams: "the one creates perfectly rational dream-thoughts, just as valid as normal thinking; the other treats these in a most disconcerting, irrational manner" (393). The first psy system is "directed towards the free discharge of quantities of excitation; and the second system inhibits this discharge by emitting its own energy-charges, transforming the charge into a quiescent one and probably raising its level" (395). All the first system can do is wish (396). The primary process "aims to discharge excitation in order to set up a perceptual identity; the secondary process has abandoned this intention and taken up another in its place - to set up a thought-identity. All thinking is only a roundabout way..." (397). Primary process is there from the beginning, while secondary process only evolves later in life (398).

When the fulfillment of wishes no longer produce an affect of pleasure but one of unpleasure, those wishes are said to be repressed. The transformation of affect is what is called repression (399).

(f) The Unconscious and Consciousness. Reality: "The Unconscious is the true reality of the psyche, its inner nature just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and just as imperfectly revealed by the data of consciousness as the external world is by the information received from our sensory organs" (405). The Pcs is the "partition screen" between Ucs and Cs (407).

And what of reality? "Whether we should ascribe reality to unconscious wishes, I cannot say" (411).

Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy

This initial post about "Freud and Philosophy" is going to be short for two reasons: 1) This book is a beast, and I'd prefer to purposefully leave things out and keep it short than try to cover everything. It clocks in at 550 pages, and there is not much filler (or the whole thing is filler, I can't decide). 2) It was written (or given, really, because it's a collection of lectures) as a follow-up piece to "Symbolism of Evil," and a proper treatment of it should be written with that work, which I have not yet read, fresh in mind.

The Book is split up into three sections: 1) Problematic (wherein Ricoeur lays out Freud's challenge to his own project of developing a hermeneutics of symbols) , 2) Analytic (wherein he reads publicly just about everything Freud ever wrote), 3) Dialectic (wherein he brings philosophy to bear on Freud and answers some questions he raises in the Problematic).

In Part I, the Problematic, Ricoeur introduces points he covered in "Symbolism of Evil:" he defines a symbol as "a double-meaning linguistic expression that requires interpretation," and interpretation as "a work of understanding that aims at deciphering symbols" (9). "Symbolism of Evil," I gathered, explores symbols and interpretation from the side of religion, in terms of the restoration of meaning that we work through when confronted with a kerygma (proclamation) or message. In this kind of "phenomenology of the sacred," we are essentially interested in the religious "truth" of symbols. When we hear "deciphering" and "double-meaning," however, we should also think of its exact opposite, the "hermeneutics of suspicion" that goes along with the "demystification of illusions" one finds in the works of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, the "masters of suspicion." He takes all hermeneutics to be an unwieldy combination of the two, opposing projects, of "a willingness to suspect and a willingness to listen" (27).

I'm not going to talk about Part II, the Analytic, because it's way too long and basically just an explanation of Freud. Philosophical development/work happens in this part, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that Ricoeur was probably just "reading in public," working through alot of Freud's stuff for the first time and preparing himself for a full encounter.

In Chapter 1 of Part III, the Dialectic, Ricoeur distinguishes psy-A from scientifc psychology on the one hand, and phenomenology on the other. Despite "operational reformulations" of psy-A (attempts to make it more scientifc), it will never be so, because the reality that it aims at is interpreted, not observed. The compare and contrast with phenomenology is a bit more interesting. He compares them on 4 points: 1) phenomenology is a reflexive discipline, and psychoanalysis is not (dubious), 2) phenomenology has no real Cs/Pcs/Ucs distinction, only a much less weighty conscious v. "unconscious" distinction, 3) there are infra- and supralinguistic phenomena in psy-A (primal repression, for instance) which do not exist in phenomenology, 4) intersubjectivity in psy-A is defined around the work of transference, a concept absent from phenomenology.

In Chapter 2, "Reflection: An Archaeology of the Subject," Ricoeur says "the philosophical place of analytic discourse is defined by the concept of an archaeology of the subject" (419). This is his first attempt to place psy-A in relation to philosophy. The primary philosophical lesson that psy-A has to offer us is that "the ego is not the master of his own house;" psy-A thus "wounds" and "humiliates" us in uncovering instinctual drives behind supposedly rational processes.

Before developing the consequences of psy-A's reduction to instinct for philosophy, he takes a few moments to confront a philosophical challenge to the theory of instincts, which is that if they are unknowable, how can we say they are at the root of everything? He proposes that we understand that instincts in terms of Kant's divide between empirical realism and transcendental idealism: we can be empirical realists about the knowable instinct representatives and transcendental idealists about the unknowable instincts themselves. He takes it that this "solves" the problem of how we know the instincts.

He then moves on to demonstrating the philosophical benefits of viewing everything in terms of the regressive nature of the instincts: for instance, psy-A demonstrates that the foundation of morality (the victory over the Oedipus complex) bears the archaic marks of fear and thus has the function of both preparing the way for autonomy and blocking it off at an archaic stage (449). In the field of language, psy-A demonstrates the potency of desire in speech. For Ricoeur, the philosophical upshot of the unconscious is to impose a limit on any linguistic transcription that would claim to be without remainder (454). In this sense, Ricoeur disagrees with Lacan: the unconscious is not language but the drive to language, the drive behind expression.

In Chapter 3, "Dialectic: Archaeology and Teleology," Ricoeur wants to show that a full philosophy can be gathered from psy-A, because every arche implies a telos (459). Freud himself, however, always warned that psy-A is not to be completed by a psycho-synthesis (460). Ricoeur nonetheless believes there is an implicit and unthematized teleology in psy-A (461), and to demonstrate this, he goes to the master of teleology: Hegel. He takes it that the phenomenology of spirit and psy-A could not be more opposed on certain things, but nonetheless uses Hegel's categories to draw out the implicit teleology of Freudianism: 1) analyst and analysand are like master and slave: the point of analysis is a rising of sick consciousness to the level of healthy consciousness, and inasmuch as this is the case, analysis has a goal (something that probably could have been said without Hegel), 2) identification: I'm not sure whether Ricoeur brings in identification (the union of "desire to be like and desire to have" (479)) to say that getting beyond its regressive tendencies constitutes a telos or whether identification itself, in that it allows for the subject's maturation, is itself an end. 3) sublimation, an obvious choice when defining a Freudian telos. Ultimately, Ricoeur says, everything comes down to Freud's basic formula in the Introductory Lectures, "Wo es war, soll Ich werden." The slow conquering of the id is the telos of psy-A.

Chapter 4 of Part III, the last chapter of the book, "Hermeneutics: The Approaches to Symbol," is supposed to be the philosophical payoff of this book, but it reflects the winding and comprehensive nature of the book itself (in other words, know that the following summary is my attempt to tie together something that might not be itself completely tied together).

The domain of symbols is marked by two horizons, one of regression, one of progression, one where faith degenerates into idolatry (object worship), one where the mytho-poetic function renews symbols and keeps culture from being a huge artifact. The work of creation in the symbolic is a work of culture, of sublimation, of the categories of Kantian anthropology (having, power, worth (507)) mixing intersubjectively and producing new relationships to self, other and world (thus new symbols (508)). But in order for that creation to take place, one needs to take out the garbage that is piling up on the other end of the symbolic: this involves a critique (demystification) of idols and illusions. The hermeneutics of suspicion is thus necessary for the health of religious life: "idols must die so that symbols may live."

(Side note: the interpretation of symbols recognizes a wholly other because it takes seriously evil, an impossibility in absolute knowledge. Hermeneutics thus forces us back from Hegel to Kant. I don't know what this means precisely, but Liane, you might be interested in this section (527)).

In this light one can reread and soften Freud's critique of religion: analysis does shed light on the birth of idols, but it has no way of deciding whether idolatry/illusion is all that faith is (533). "Analysis can reveal to religious man his caricature, but it leaves him the task of meditating on the possibility of not resembling his distorted double" (533). All of Freud's figures can be read in two lights: is the founding act of the social the fraternal conciliation or the perpetual repetition of parricide (535)? Is the father figure himself only important insofar as he returns as repressed or can we see him in his creative function, as a name-giver (542)? Is religion just a product of fear or of consolation as well (548)? Is reality (in Freud's sense, not just an observable field but the world of men and thing as they appear as objects of desire) something that one has to resign oneself to (i.e., give up one's pleasure for), or is it also something one can wholly love (550)?

The Concept of the Political

Carl Schmitt, 1932

Translation George Schwab. The University of Chicago Press, Expanded Edition.

Main Thesis: “The concept of the state presupposes the category of the political” (19). “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (26). OR: The political is defined by the friend-enemy distinction, which is neither metaphorical nor allegorical, but, rather, a fundamental antithesis, like that of good and evil, that invariably divides concrete people in two by creating the possibility of war. Though the political distinction doesn’t invariably lead to war, the enemy is the Other who always presents the possibility of conflict. The state is the political entity, which is to say, the state is the sovereign entity that has the power to declare an enemy. The friend-enemy distinction can never be escaped and constitutes the political as such.

Schmitt begins by interrogating traditional definitions of the state, which usually make reference to a geographically isolated group of people. The footnote suggests - and this seems logical - that Schmitt has in mind here the relatively modern nation states, and not the Greek polis or the feudal states. The political, he claims, is a word we tend not to define clearly in itself. Typically, we use it for polemical purposes, as part of some sort of binary (the political and economy, the political and morality, etc). While such usage may clarify the matter at hand, it does little to explain what the political is in and of itself. Indeed, if we do push a little farther in that direction, the closest we come is to the idea that the political is something that pertains to the state, why the state is something political. Needless to say, Schmitt finds this a useless tautology. (Is a ‘useless tautology’ a tautology?) Similarly, most juridic literature eschews defining the political, conceiving it as an adjective that functions within the stable framework of a state.

The instant that the state and society begin to commingle, so that previously neutral regions of culture, such as religion, become affairs of the state, and the affairs of the state become integrated into culture, the naive equation of politics to the state becomes hopelessly useless and deceptive. Schmitt is thinking particularly here of the ‘total ‘(i.e. Totalitarian) state (22).

Here Schmitt in the Expanded Edition inserts a helpful note. His analysis, it turns out, takes as its backdrop a progression from the absolute state of the 18^th century, to the noninterventionist (bourgeois) state of the 19^th, to the total state of the 20^th. Political theory for him in the 19^th century is a gradual process of collapsing the state into culture, which had originally been held distinct. This book, I think, ought to be read as Schmitt’s polemic against the classical liberalism of the preceding era, specifically with its privileging of the bourgeois/private sphere. The desire to be a ‘private citizen,’ to shield oneself from political decisions and the reality that the political consists necessarily of the friend-enemy distinction, which is to say, the possibility of war against a concrete set of individuals, is for him deplorable naivete.

At its base, the political depends on the friend-enemy distinction. As it can’t be reduced any further or traced back to other distinctions, it holds the same status as other couple, such as good-evil, beautiful-ugly. That is to say, the enemy doesn’t need to be defined in any of these other categories as ugly or evil or so on, though he frequently is, of course. The category of the enemy is autonomous. He has his own ontological status. He is, “the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible” (27).

The possibility or necessity of conflict with an enemy can never be decided by a neutral, third-party observer, or by some external norm. Only the participants can decide if the enemy intends to negate his way of life and, whether or not, as a consequence, the enemy must be attacked.

Schmitt goes on to stress the concrete, existential meaning of the friend-enemy distinction. It is not an allegory or a metaphor, he’s disinterested in moral or normative evaluations of the concept, and refuses to engage with the utopian hope that such a distinction might disappear. He’s interested in the pragmatic, and this pragmatic truth is that the enemy is only ever public. The enemy is hostis, not inimicus. (I have a sense that this is an important distinction when reading Schmitt scholarship). Thus, in Latin, “love your enemy” is “diligite inimicos vestros,” not “diligite hostes vestos” (29). Loving your enemies only makes sense in a private sphere, when talking about a relatively circumscribed notion of the enemy. The Bible, Schmitt claims, never suggested that we should love our political enemies.

“The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping” (29). The state, then, is the entity that decides on the friend-enemy distinction. Party politics are political insofar as they weaken the unity and identification with the state.

Inherent in the notion of the enemy is the possibility of combat. “War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy” (33). That is not to say, Schmitt argues, that the political can be reduced to war, or the existence of an enemy demands his annihilation. No particular policy necessarily follows from the friend-enemy distinction; neither pacifism, nor imperialism, nor militarism. War is not “the continuation of politics by other means,” but war does always presuppose that the decision has been made about who counts as the enemy.

Enemies don’t have to be eternal; alliances may shift, bringing together different combinations of tensions. A world without the possibility of war would be a world without the friend-enemy distinction and, hence, a world without the political. That’s not to say that there might not be other tensions, but only the friend-enemy antithesis has the meaning and power that requires men to kill and be killed.

Other antitheses - religious, moral, economic, ethical, and so on - may become political if it’s a sufficiently strong distinction that allows the grouping of humans according to the friend-enemy distinction. Thus, religious persecution is no longer simply religious; it’s political. All other antitheses are always subordinate to the friend-enemy distinction of politics. The political distinction, by its nature, is always the most extreme distinction. If a political entity exists at all, it is always the “decisive entity.” It is “sovereign in the sense that the decision about the critical situation, even if it is the exception, must always necessarily reside there” (38).

Schmitt concedes that the theory of the omnipotence of the state is transparently a secularization of theological concepts about the sovereignty of God, but goes on to argue that none of that matters - genealogy, in effect, has no use for critique. The question is always this: is there a group capable of deciding who is the enemy and, by extension, if we are to go to war with him? If so, that is the political entity, and all other distinctions are subordinate to it. Pluralism or federalism, in effect, is a way of eliding the reality of the sovereignty of the political entity. This political entity is, typically, the state. The state, then, is the one with the power to declare war.

Moreover, the state has the capability to declare an internal enemy, and every state, in addition to naming an external enemy must declare an internal enemy during times of crisis in order to survive. Think of this as the capacity of the state to charge someone with treason or, in cases of civil war, to combat internal dissidents. Families can also declare enemies, but in a narrower sense, not that of hostis. Such internal feuds, though, like that of warring clans, must be subordinate to the political conflict in times of war.

War can only ever be justified by the claim that it is being fought against an enemy. As Schmitt argues, “To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy. It is manifest fraud to condemn war as homicide and then demand of men that they wage war, kill and be killed, so there will never again be war. War, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong on the side of the enemy - all this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy” (49).

Any treaty that claims to make war illegal always implicitly contains exceptions regarding the eventuality of being attacked. These exceptions are what give the treaty meaning. It’s impossible for private citizens to ever disown the state’s declaration of the friend-enemy distinction. To claim that one has no enemies does not dissolve the distinction; rather, it simply places the private citizen outside of the state, as an enemy.

It would be “ludicrous,” Schmitt thinks, to believe that a defenseless people somehow has only friends. If a people lacks the strength or will to defend itself, it cannot count on its enemies disappearing or somehow being touched. Nor can a people hope to bring about a utopia by evading the political decision. Politics will never vanish; “only a weak people will disappear” (53). (A disturbing paragraph).

The political entity always presupposes other political entities. Humanity can’t have a political enemy, because it includes the totality of all men. To declare a group an “enemy of humanity,” then, is a rhetorical move, designed to declare the enemy a universal outlaw and to deprive him the possibility of being a human.

Schmitt is also skeptical of the League of Nations, thinking that it, in practice, simply transfer the right to declare war from a state to an alliance. He also argues that all political theory presupposes an anthropology that designates man as evil and dangerous. Because the political always starts form the possibility of the enemy - i.e., the possibility of war with a dangerous Other - it would be nonsensical to believe that any theory of the political could start from an anthropological optimism. In this, Schmitt sees a connection to theology. A man, he thinks, ceases to be a theologian the instant he stops thinking of man in need of redemption.

Concepts such as justice and freedom, Schmitt argues, are mainly forms of propaganda, used to legitimate one’s position vis a vis the enemy. The canny observer of politics will, however, always be able to recognize the true friend-enemy distinction beneath any such rhetoric, and, in turn, realize that when combatants reproach him for cynicism for saying as much, that those combatants are merely employing their rhetoric and reproaches as one of the tools of the political.

The end of a people is always presaged by the unwillingness or inability to recognize the enemy. Thus, the aristocrats in the French revolution, right up until the end, propounded a sentimental view of the peasant as “by nature good.”

Schmitt basically ends with a critique of liberalism - which wants to depoliticize the political - by reemphasizing his major point: “State and politics cannot be exterminated” (78). He claims to be living in a time when liberal rhetoric, that terms the enemy a “disturber of the peace,” has come to dominate. We no longer want to name the enemy as such. Nonetheless, as always, groupings - economic and otherwise - continually emerge that have the possibility of becoming friend-enemy groupings. There will always be an enemy and nothing can escape the logic of the political.