Leviathan: Part One
Thomas Hobbes, 1668
Introduction:
The piece begins by asserting the mechanistic notion of nature and physics, with the heart like a spring, and man the most perfect creation of the grand artificer, God. Under that metaphor, then art imitates man, the “most excellent work of nature, man.” The Commonwealth, or Leviathan, is like a giant automaton, created to protect man. Sovereignty is an artificial soul; the magistrates artificial joints; rewards and punishments, nerves; laws, reason and will; magistrates memory.
The aim of the book, then, is to discuss this artificial body in five parts. 1) the artificer, man. 2) how and by what covenants it is made. 3) the rights and just power of the sovereign, and how those are forfeited. 3) The Christian commonwealth. 4) the Kingdom of Darkness.
Chapter I: Of Sense
Thoughts are a representation of a body, or object, outside of us, created when an object impresses itself on an organ associated with that particular sense. So we see when an object imposes itself on the eye, hear when a sound strikes our ears, etc. Sense, Hobbes says, is “nothing other than original fancy, caused...by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of external things” (7). The object, then, is primary.
Chapter 2: Of Imagination
The imagination is something like the memory of a sense impression/representation. After we have closed our eyes, Hobbes argues, an image of the thing we just observed remains with us, though it is swiftly overshadowed by new images. Thus, imagination is “decaying sense.” Imagination and memory are the same thing, just emphasizing different aspect. When we focus on the image, the thing-itself, we speak of “imagination.” When we focus on the sense of decay and loss, we speak of “memory.”
Experience is the memory of many things; dreams are the imaginations of those who sleep. Like Descartes, Hobbes spends some time worrying about how we distinguish between waking and sleeping, given that we have images in each. He also worries how we explain the images of dreams if we believe all representations come from an object acting on the body. The answer is that images are created by the internal motions of the body, with different zones corresponding to different types of dreams, and remain particularly vivid, because there are no other stimuli to offer competing images. The relationship between consciousness in sleeping and waking life is asymmetrical. I can know while awake that I am not dreaming, because the absurdity of my waking thoughts are immediately apparent, but while dreaming I cannot differentiate between the two states.
From here, he launches into a charming discussion of superstitions, claiming that much superstition emerged from the inability to distinguish waking and dreaming images. He argues basically that witches deserve to be burned, not because they have the power to do anything dangerous, but rather because they're manipulating the masses, and in duping them making the masses into less obedient subjects.
Understanding is the imagination raised by words and voluntary signs. Both men and animals possess some form of understanding. Man's understanding is unique in encompassing his will, conceptions, thoughts, those of other men, and most generally of language.
Chapter 3: Of the Consequence or Train of Imaginations
By consequence, Hobbes means that our thoughts can follow each other, rather than just being discrete images. Mental discourse can either be unguided, stream-of-consciousness, or regulated by some desire or passion. Regulated thought can either start from an effect and seek its cause, or start with a cause and seek all its possible effects. “In sum, the discourse of the mind, when it is governed by design, is nothing but seeking, or the faculty of invention” (13).
Seeking the lost past is remembrance; orienting oneself toward the future based is prudence/providence/foresight. The essence of man consists in sense, thoughts, and trains of thoughts. All other capabilities are merely one of these capacities improved through training.
Hobbes ends the piece by asserting, contra Anselm, that everything we imagine is finite. Thus, we can't imagine God, and when we call him ”infinite” we are merely honoring him,not actually ascribing any predicates to him.
Chapter 4: Of Speech
Society is predicated on speech, without which we would be animals. Hobbes describes speech, the noblest human invention, as names and their connections, which man uses to register their thoughts, recall them when past, and declare them to others for “mutual utility.” God started speech by giving Adam the concept of names, and basic evolution led to verbs, etc.
We use speech to register causes, teach our discoveries to others, articulate our desires and purposes in order to receive help, and finally to please ourselves. Man can abuse speech through incorrectly registering thoughts, speaking metaphorically, lying, and insulting.
Names serve to remember, and may be proper or universal and can be joined together in propositions. If a proposition correctly refers to the state of affairs, it is true. When it signifies something incomprehensible, it is false. All truth and falsity are properties of language, Hobbes claims. Thus, when setting out on any work, a thinker should be careful to state clearly his terminology, to avoid saying something absurd. Hence, the method of the book.
Understanding is conception caused by speech. However, since, in speech, we impose names to signify our conceptions, one should always be wary of a statement's prejudices. As Hobbes says, depending on their passions, one man may name cruelty that which another considers justice, and so on.
Chapter 5: Of Reason and Science
Reason is conceptualized mathematically, as conceiving a sum through additions or subtractions. Logicians are basically the mathematicians of words, adding or subtracting them to create propositions, which they can then evaluate.
“Reason is nothing but reckoning of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts; I say marking them when we reckon by ourselves and signifying when we demonstrate or approve our reckonings before other men” (23).
Reason is supposed to start from common definitions and reason their consequences (which is why we need to analyze definitions.) Error is a deception, presuming something past which never existed, or to come which never will. In contrast, absurdity is when we make meaningless sentences. Only man can be absurd (24). Reason is the way and end of man, though it is often clouded by absurdities.
There are two types of wisdom arrived at through reason; prudence, which is knowledge based on experience, and sapience, which is science, or knowledge gained through skill/practice.
Chapter 6: The Passions
Motions can be divided between vital (the flow of blood, etc.) and voluntary (movement made at will).
In man, voluntary motions also include speech. Since all movement presupposes a thought about where one moves, “imagination is the first internal beginning of all voluntary motion” (27). The small beginnings of motions, before fully actualized, are called “endeavor.”
Endeavor turned toward something which causes it is called appetite or desire, while, when it turns away form what causes it, it's called aversion. Appetite and aversion are essentially motions in different directions.
Love and desire share the same motion of turning toward an object, the difference being that in love the object is usually present, and in desire, absent. So too with hate and aversion. We hate the object which is present, we have an aversion to the object which is absent. We only have desire for things we have experienced as pleasurable, while we feel aversion both for things we have directly experienced as painful and those we suspect would be painful.
We contemn those things we neither desire or hate. Contempt is an immobility of the heart. Because man's body is in constant flux, it is impossible that the same objects should always arouse the same passions.
Good and evil don't say anything about the objects themselves, but rather simply the reaction to them. Those we desire we call good; those we have an aversion to, we call evil; those we contemn, we call vile or inconsiderable. The individual man makes these distinctions in the absence of a commonwealth, but in the presence of one a judge or representative decides which objects deserve which appellations.
Good can be good in promise; good in effect, as the end desired; good as means. Likewise, the same distinctions apply to evil.
The appearance or sense of the motion of the appetite we either call “delight or trouble of the mind.” When we derive pleasure form the object itself, we call it “pleasure of the sense,” or, if displeasure, “pain.” If we derive pleasure from its consequences, we call it “joy,” displeasure, “grief.”
Everything derives from appetite, desire, love, aversion, hate, joy and grief.
Appetite which might be gratified, hope; unlikely to be gratified, despair. Aversion with opinion of hurt, fear; the same with hope of averting hurt by resistance, is courage. Sudden courage, anger. Constant hope, confidence. Constant despair, diffidence.
Love results in: kindness, natural lust, luxury, the passion of love and jealousy.
Contempt: magnanimity, valor, fortitude, liberality, impudence, cruelty.
Desire: revengefulness, curiosity, ambition, pusillanimity.
Fear: superstition, true religion, panic, terror.
Joy:admiration, glorying, vainglory.
Grief: dejection, shame, pity, emulation, envy
Deliberation is the constant shift of desires, appetites , and aversion in the mind when considering an object or possibility. It's impossible in the past, since nothing can be done about those possibilities. Even animals deliberate and possess will, the last appetite in deliberation. Will is what moves a desire from an inclination to a voluntary action.
Different parts of speech usually correspond to different passions (zB: imperative, desire and aversion), but these may deceive, so the best gauge of another's passion is body language, tone of voice. Continual success at obtaining desires is called “felicity,” and signifies the only type of joy we may know, contra the speculations of scholastics.
Chapter 7: Of the Ends or Resolutions of Discourse
All discourse driven by desire knowledge ends either is resolution or in someone giving up. (My, that's optimistic). Opinion is the presumption that something will or will not be, has or has not been, and holds an indefinite character. Judgment is the resolute and final sentence in discourse. No discourse can end in absolute knowledge of a fact, either past or future, because knowledge of a past fact relies on sense and memory, both of which are uncertain and prone to decay. Knowledge of a future fact, or consequence, can only be known hypothetically.
The difference between science and opinion is essentially that science takes care to possess correct definitions, logically joined with other affirmations,whereas opinion is not nearly as methodical and prone to absurdity.
Hobbes thinks that our idea of conscience stems from the initial sense of being conscious of something. As so much depended on men accurately reporting what they knew, it became extremely important not to 'violate one's conscience.' He then thinks, though, conscience began being used more metaphorically, until it became a cover for men to adhere blindly to their opinions, because, to renounce them would be to 'violate conscience.'
Belief or faith is a type of discourse predicated on trust in an assertion or fact given by another. One can either believe or trust another (direct object) or believe in, in which case we are discussing affirmation of a creed. Yet, when our belief doesn't come from natural reason, we're believing the authority of men. It's not God who we honor or trust by believing certain things about him,in the absence of revelation, but rather men. Similarly, when we distrust propositions about God, it does not mean we dishonor God, but rather doubt the man who asserts them.
Chapter 8: Of the Virtues Commonly Called Intellectual and Their Contrary Defects
Virtue is something valued in all subjects and consists of comparison. There are natural and acquired virtues. Natural is “wit” acquired by use and experience, but without instruction or culture. It consists primarily of quickness and discipline/direction. Acquired wit, by contrast, is reason, which is”grounded on the right use of speech” and produces the sciences.
The differences in quickness stem from the differences in passions. Differences in wit are determined by difference in desire for riches, knowledge, and honor – which is to say, power. A man who lacks great passion for these will correspondingly lack much wit. “For as to have no desire is to be dead” (41). Thoughts function as spies, scouts, sent out ahead to seek means to gratify desire. To have desire for everything is giddiness, or distraction, while to passion too strongly is madness.
Passions may be caused by violence done to organs, or passions may cause damage to organs. Either way, one is mad. Madness stems from pride, self-conceit,, or dejection. Pride makes man prone to wrath; dejection makes on melancholic, here, subjected to causeless fears. The passions, when they tend toward evil,are simply degrees of madness.
Hobbes holds the fascinatingly suspicious idea that most are, at heart, a little mad, but oftentimes this doesn't emerge until men are gathered in a group and mob mentality takes over. Madness, in essence is “too much appearing passion,” as evidenced by man's behavior when drunk,which Hobbes sees as simply our inner life made public.
Generally, people have ascribed madness to passions or demons. Hobbes obviously thinks the former, but then has to deal with why Jesus spoke of demons. The answer: Scripture is meant to prepare men to be obedient subjects of God, not to give natural truths. Thus, whether or not Jesus had a correct theory of madness is irrelevant.
He ends by citing philosophy as a final type of madness, as a group of men gather together and start speaking absurdities. By philosophy he means the Scholastics.
All together, an awesome chapter.
Chapter 9: Of the Several Subjects of Knowledge
Knowledge is either knowledge of fact or the consequence of an affirmation. History is the register of knowledge of fact. The science that registers the consequences of affirmations is called philosophy. Types of philosophy: science of body, magnitude, and motion, which the first philosophy; magnitude defined by figure or number is geometry; motions of internal parts of body is physics; astronomy, body of the universe; meteorology movement of celestial bodies; study of man leads to politics or civil philosophy.
Chapter 10: Of Power, Worth, Dignity, Honor, and Worthiness
Power is man's ability to procure some current or future good. Natural power consists of natural faculties of mind or body (intelligence, speed, strength, etc), while instrumental powers are those which are means to acquire more power, as in reputation, etc.
The goal and greatest human power consists of gaining friends,servants, sycophants. One can do that with reputation of power, liberality, patriotism, prudence, or with various forms of charisma, such as nobility, affability, eloquence, beauty, etc.
The value or worth of a man can be quantified as how much one would give for use of his power. The price is always relative. A man's public worth is his dignity, while to pray to another for aid is to honor. Here follows a long list of ways to honor a man, through flattery, fear, love, trust, hope, obedience, etc. The sovereign can also honor his inferiors by bestowing rights or titles. Honorable, is whatever quality, possession, or action is a sign of power. To be dishonorable is to lack power.
Another long list follows, which, while interesting, is not particularly pertinent to the main point, which is mainly that honor is distinct from morality. Whether or not action is just or unjust doesn't make it honorable; rather, only whether or not it displays power.
In contrast to all of this, worthiness refers to a man's aptitude, or ability to do a certain thing will. Merit, in contrast, means to have a claim on something. So one may be worthy of receiving a certain office, because he or she is best qualified for it, but not necessarily merit it, because he has no hereditary right to it. A fascinating perspective on meritocracy.
Chapter 11: Of the Differences of Manners
Manners are the qualities of mankind that concern their living together in peace and unity. There is no telos or summum bonum. “Felicity is the progress of desire from one object to another.” Diverse passions create diverse objects of desire, and diverse means of gratifying them, but the structure is the same.
The most basic desire is that of power, mostly because power provides security. Desire of riches, fame,
honor, etc., usually lead to war in order to gain them, while desire of luxury tends to lead men to unite for peace. Desire for praise leads men to laudable actions.
Hate stems from some sort of inequality in situation. I hate an equal when he does me a service I can't hope to return; likewise, I hate the man I have injured, because I can expect revenge from him.
The ambitious man turns to politics; frugal men, when wealthy, are unlikely to achieve greatness.
Ignorance of causes/science makes man prone to listen to the advice of others; ignorance of the causes and original rule of law predisposes man to take custom as the guide for his actions. Ignorance of natural causes predisposes man to be gullible; anxiety of the future makes man inquire into causes to better prepare for the future. Curiosity – no longer an evil, like in Augustine – draws man to inquire into causes, and, in doing so, to reach the idea of the first cause. Thus, the seeds of religion.
Chapter 12: Of Religion
The seed of religion must be in man, because only man shows signs on religion. The impulse stems from man's tendency to observe the relation of cause and effect, and from the there to assume that all effects must have a cause. This fills man with anxiety. He is constantly seeking a way to secure himself against evil and attain the good, so as not to worry about the future. Combining ignorance of causes, the conviction that causes must exist, and anxiety, man comes to believe in a first cause, or invisible powers, which control the world, even if he can't understand how. Essentially, then, man ascribes power to invisible beings out of ignorance, develops superstitions to placate them, and honors them as they would other men, with gifts, all the while trying to find signs to predict the future.
Out of these seeds, some men have created their own versions of religion, while others have done so under the guidance of God. The Gentiles are the foil for the Judeo-Christian religion. Essentially, their religions take random, earthly material as objects of worship. Mostly, these religions were established by the powerful as a form of keeping order in the polis. They relied heavily on idolatry, spurious, nonsensical prophecies, and and sought to convince the masses that the rulers were divine. Eventually, the people became disenchanted with these religions, seeing that they advanced the power of the elite, who seemed not to place much faith in the signs they and beliefs they tried to impose on others.
In contrast, the Judeo-Christian tradition procured actual miracles. Only miracles, true prophecy, or almost otherworldly felicity/virtue can reasonably persuade men to the truth of a religion, as supernatural beliefs require supernatural signs. Eventually, of course, the Israelites did stray, but significantly, only once the miracles had stopped.
Part of the reason Christianity made so many converts was because so many were so disenchanted with the Gentile religion. From here, Hobbes draws a parallel to the Protestant reformation, which similarly drew on the disaffection of the masses with the Catholic church.
Chapter 13: Of the Natural Condition of Mankind
This is basically the part of Hobbes everyone knows. People are essentially equal in their natural powers, at least enough so that it's incredibly difficult to overpower one man without the assistance of others. But once one overpowers a man, it becomes necessary to worry about being attacked in turn. So, left to their own devices, men engage in an endlessly process of trying to augment their own powers at the expense of others. Society degenerates into a state of “War of all against all.” War, according to Hobbes, is not simply the battle, but, rather, the tract of time in which open hostility exists. In this situation, “nothing can be unjust,” and cunning, force, and deceit, are considered cardinal virtues. Eventually, men are driven by reason to formulate laws for the general good. Hobbes ends by noting that he doubts the whole world was ever in this state at once. But notes there are still regions where people are in this state.
Chapter 14: Of the First and Second Natural Laws and of Contracts
Each man has a right of nature, which is to say a right to do anything for self-preservation. Liberty is the absence of external restraints. A Law of nature is “a general rule found out by reason , by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life or taketh away the means of preserving the same, and to omiteth that by which he he thinketh it may be best preserved” (79). Right, in essence, speaks of liberty, which law speaks of obligation.
In the state of nature, everything is allowable, because in a war of all against all,anything you can do to harm an enemy falls under the purview of your right to self-preservation. Thus, no one is safe, and people have to renounce some of their liberty to reach a state mutual protection.
Men may lay down their rights by renouncing them or transferring them to another (i.e. the sovereign). Once he transfers his rights, he is obligated not in way to hinder the actions of the man to whim he gives his rights.
People can only renounce rights in order to gain some good. It is impossible to renounce the right to self-defense, which we recognize by making guards attend executions. Rights or things are transferred in covenants. When the transfer is not mutual, it is called giving a gift, or grace. Words cannot bind one to give a gift, unless stated in the present tense. (“I will give this to you tomorrow” is different from, “I will that you have have this tomorrow.”)
Contracts are void when reasonable suspicion presents itself that the other will not come through, as in the state of war. In that case, to give something to the enemy would be equivalent to weakening yourself, which violates the right of self-preservation. Mere words aren't binding in a state of war; rather, one must swear by God. In a civil state, though, a covenant can only be declared invalid if some new condition or piece of knowledge about it arises. It's impossible to make a covenant with an animal or God (unless through revelation).
Covenants may be dismissed by fulfilling them or having them forgiven. Covenants entered to in a state of fear are binding.
Chapter 15: Of Other Laws of Nature
Justice and injustice only come into being with the establishment of covenants. The definition of injustice is break a covenant. While it's true there is only strength in the state of nature, it would be idiotic to apply those rule to a civil states, essentially because safety depends on trusting your confederates and being trusted by them in turn. If you cavalierly lie and break covenants, society will expel you, which will end in death. Or, if society doesn't expel you, it's only because it made a mistake, and in that case you're making a terrible bet to assume society will be wrong.
There is a difference between justice when applied to men and actions. A man may perform a few unjust actions and still be considered just, on the whole. An action, though, is judged just or unjust independent of past actions.
Just as justice is given meaning in the context of a preexisting covenant, so too is gratitude dependent of a preexisting gift. On of the laws of nature, stemming from the desire for peace, is that men not do anything that should make their benefactors repent of generosity.
Similarly, men must strive to accommodate themselves to others, and, out of caution about his own future, forgive those who desire pardon. In revenges, one ought not look at the past evil, but the good that follows from revenge. And, since showing contempt provokes men to war, people ought to tamp down on that impulse.
Once entering into a contract, men ought to avoid appropriating for themselves any rights which they would not want others to hold over them. They ought not be arbiters in their own disputes, either.
Basically, in order for society to function, people have to try not to undermine it, or to create/submit to laws which promote injustice, ingratitude, inequity, arrogance, or pride.
Chapter 16: Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated
A person is he whose words or actions are considered his own, or representing another, whether true or in fiction. (i.e. a person is embedded in speech). A natural person speaks his own words;a feigned or artificial person speaks those of another (presumably like a character in a play). To personate is to act or represent oneself or another. The author owns the words being acted and it is by his authority that an actor acts. An actor can bind himself to an author by a covenant and, in doing so, assumes the consequences of the act. However, no actor is bound to a covenant that defies the laws of nature.
Institutions can't be personated, but children, idiots, and the insane can by guardians. Children, et al, can't be considered authors in any binding sense until emerging into adulthood/sanity.
Both idols and the true God may be personated. Likewise, the multitude may be personated through a representative, but only to a degree in keeping with the amount of authority they grant him. If there are contradictory voices in the multitude personated, then majority rules. The author can either own the action of another “simply,” or “conditionally,” as is the case with “sureties” or “sponsors.”
Monday, March 1, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Preus - Explaining Religion
Introduction: Preus' goal is to account for the paradigm shift that resulted in the modern, naturalistic study of religion, both its breaking free from theology and its institutionalization. In short, the modern study of religion was born from challenging the claim that only a supernatural referent grounded religious language. With Eliade and others, this foundational challenge has been questioned: now we want to understand religion on its own terms. Preus hates this trend: "it seems self-serving rather than rationally persuasive to argue that religion can therefore be understood only from within a religious perspective" (xix). Instead, he argues in favor of the naturalistic desire to "explain religion," its existence and persistence, and wants to clearly distinguish it from "religious apologetics" (xxi).
PART ONE: RELIGION AS A PROBLEM
Chapter 1 - JEAN BODIN: In Bodin's time, religious conflict in Europe and the reality of the vast religious world outside of Christendom demanded an inquiry into the origin of religion as a way to arbitrate competing claims. Political crisis and the introduction of "religion" to the west coincided. Preus structures Bodin's response in the Colloquium into three categories: religious truth, policy and conscience (the intellectual, political and attitudinal).
1) Intellectual: Bodin seems to argue through his characters that the "best" religion is not the oldest, but that there is no basis on which to judge the "best." He begins, however, to turn to natural law as a common ground for interpreting religious claims. He also makes an important distinction between inner conviction and outer practice.
2) Political: Bodin, like Machiavelli and Hobbes, was an outsider to religion, approaching it from a socio-political angle and arguing for toleration for the sake of stability. He recognizes the connection between political power and religion, but, contra Spinoza, thinks superstition is necessary for political harmony. He thus self-contradictorily asserts that government should both practice tolerance and promote a state religion for political harmony.
3) Attitudinal: Senamus/Bodin wants to shift the attention of the debate from questions about religious object to questions about the religious subject and his motivations (Arendt's "modern" turn), opening the road for psychological assessments of religion.
PART TWO: RATIONALIST V. HISTORICAL APPROACHES
Chapter 2 - HERBERT OF CHERBURY: A contemporary of Descartes and Bacon, Herbert shared Descartes' desire to solve the crisis of the criteria of truth. He thus set out to find the five common notions lying behind all religions, to each of which he accorded some worth. In doing so, he strictly distinguishes truth from tradition, a distinction Spinoza would accept in full. He also strangely paved the way for Freud in arguing that the reality of God conforms to the fondest wishes of mankind (Freud's essential thesis, stripped of its theological presuppositions). Finally, though he was ultimately looking for that universal root of religion, Herbert was honest enough to admit when historical data contradicted his theory, thus making him an important predecessor of the modern academic.
Like Bodin, he was greatly affected by religious conflict but nonetheless worked out of a religious perspective. Unlike Bodin, however, he did not resort to any "magical" elements (angels and demons), he more or less fully demotes revelation and authority from significance to his investigation, he imagines a global universal history of religions and he ignores, like a good Englishman, socio-political implications.
Chapter 3 - BERNARD FONTENELLE: wanted to explain why it is that people believe what they do when and where they do (41). Where do fables come from? Man's desire to explain a power that lies beyond his control. In the case of both philosophy/science and myth, the mind is working in the same way (43). Unmistakably, myths are absurd (even as they pass over into religion), but they are revelatory of the human mind, which makes them worth studying (47). Oracles can be explained in a similar fashion.
Fontenelle advances upon Herbert's rationalism, uses a naturalistic scheme and clearly separates his project from theology. Herbert was trying to create generic theology, Fontenelle looking to the common psychohistorical causes of religious belief. For Herbert, religion is to be legitimated, for Fontenelle, to be explained. Herbert the 17th c. rationalist, Fontenelle the 18th c. empiricist. Herbert represents the deistic-theological strategy, which incorporates particular values into a universal theory and has the advantage of universality but at the cost of reductionism (modern example: Cantwell Smith's Toward a World Theology). Fontenelle represents the "two-realms" strategy, which proceeds in reductive and explanatory fashion but exempts one's own religion (modern example: Berger's Sacred Canopy).
PART THREE: A SCIENCE OF RELIGION?
Chapter 4 - GIAMBATTISTA VICO: Vico's basic thesis, known as "maker's knowledge," is that we can know social institutions because we have made them. These institutions are best studied by investigating their origins. We can only understand a culture's institutions on its own terms: thus, we cannot simply analyze myth and try to gain from it an esoteric knowledge that makes sense on our own terms (reason). He proposes that we understand myth not in terms of reason but in terms of poetry.
There are nevertheless three common socio-historical institutional universals (rather than universal ideas à la Herbert) which we share with them: religion (belief in providence), sexual order/marriage and immortality/burying of the dead (this sounds alot like Charles Taylor in Understanding and Ethnocentricity). If we take these universals to have existed in more primitive times, then myths are not collective fantasies but rather refer to real history, real things that happened to them and their way of dealing with those things. For instance, man encounter thunder and assumes that thunder is like him (his ideal-ego), leading to its personification: thus, Zeus.
Despite his acknowledgement of historical irony, Vico assumed providence because it gave meaning to history. Hume applied Vico but stripped it of theological significance. Weber, on the other hand, would be greatly interested in the meaning giving function of religion. Although Vico himself did not outwardly criticize religion, thus defying the thesis of the book, his is a case of new wine bursting old wineskins.
Chapter 5 - DAVID HUME: With Hume, a line of criticism ends and the construction of an alternative theory begins. Following the "historic mission of the Enlightenment," Hume's aim is to overthrow religion. In that pursuit, he sought to undermine the three basic theological-apologetic pillars: 1) specific revelation (in "Of Miracles"), 2) the design argument (in the Dialogues), 3) an innate sense of the divine (in Natural History). His aim was to produce a science of man, that spurned analyzing man in terms of Newtonian mechanics. Neither did he want to refer to any platonic reality underneath it all: to the senses alone!
"Of Miracles": A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature. Testimony is what establishes miracles. Testimony is not enough to found a system of religion. In fact, we should be even more worried that there is no God if the regularity of natural processes were to fail.
Dialogues: The watchmaker argument is mistaken: the world ought to be thought of more as an organism than as a machine. From the senses alone, we clearly see that mind is generated from matter and not the other way around. So why should we assume a divine mind preceding all else? We have never witnessed a world being made. There is no data for a system of cosmogony. Why, then, would we assume world-making to be at all like house-building (i.e., necessitating a divine architect)?
Natural History: We encounter nature's unpredictable and unmanageable power, which causes fear and anxiety over our future well-being. Our first way of contemplating nature in order to master it is to personify it. There are thus two moments to the "religious experience": 1) the fixing of the passions on objects, and 2) the modeling of unknown powers on human volitions. Only impressions, passions and instincts are innate. Religion is only a historically-acquired reaction formation.
Hume did not share his contemporaries' belief in the progress to rationality. Man, for him, was controlled by his passions and haunted by terrors, thus making him an easy target for priestcraft.
Hume was decisive in talking about ways of coping with life rather than theology. His influence on Tylor and the field of anthropology is unmistakable. The three problem areas of Hume's new science included: 1) defining the nature of man, 2) pinpointing what experiences account for religion, and 3) figuring out how to account for the variety of religious belief.
Hume's problems: 1) lack of evidence. Charles de Brosses (who interestingly coined the term fetishism) advanced upon his science by filling in the details. 2) a lack of interest in the social (making Hume a target for Durkheim), 3) no developmental theory, 4) no interest in the content of religion.
PART IV: THE PROGRESS OF REASON AND THE SURVIVAL OF RELIGION
Chapter 6 - AUGUSTE COMTE: Comte is known for his two sides, one scientific, one messianic, one convinced that science is leading us to progress, the other worried about the spiritual crisis we face. Preus chooses to see these two sides as of a piece. Comte's two most important ideas are his belief in the evolution of religion and the need at all times for it or its functional equivalent. Together, they explain his supposedly schizophrenic philosophy, how religion can be both necessary and obsolete. Comte understood that science was right, but also that we need to replace theology with something else, something that can take on the social role of religion.
Like his predecessors, Comte wanted to look to our origins not because there is some absolute beginning or end, but because it is important to look at idio-social genesis. For him, ideas are important but only in their reciprocal relationship to society. Though Comte emphasizes observation and experience, he also thought it impossible to proceed scientifically without some kind of theory. Indeed, facts are only data inasmuch as they fit into some theory. Thus, we are justified in talking about paradigm shifts, so long as we have read and observed carefully.
He divides the world into three ages: 1) Theological/fictitious-military state, 2) Metaphysical/abstract-feudal state, 3) Scientific/positive-industrial state. The first stage of the theological state was fetishism, where man projects himself outwards on objects and demands an absolute explanation of the world out of himself. As opposed to Hume, Comte thought fetishism was a productive stage, despite being childish. Fetishism is essentially right to recognize a power of order immanent in nature. Later he will say they were right to essentially be worshiping man inasmuch as he has the potential to become powerful.
But then we grow up and discover that nature is governed by laws, not wills. This is the first principle of positive philosophy. The advance of the intellect throws off anthropomorphism, but with the negative result of an introjection of natural-law analysis into the human. Comte wants to re-establish the realm of the human, to be as constructive as the first age. He was thus critical of critical philosophy for denying spiritual power in nature and society. He was also against the unregulated individuals that results from criticism. This rampant egoism is all the more deplorable for coinciding with wealth.
To combat this trend, Comte wanted to reunite feeling and understanding, man's affective and cognitive life, which he thought divorced in the second age. To do this, we ought to worship the "Great Being," or humanity itself. Our knowledge is not only power, like nature, but a lovable power, unlike nature, for it is at our command, a thesis not unlike Feuerbach's. Comte was convinced that by re-imagining religion, we could proceed on the inexorable progress of the mind toward mastery over human destiny.
Comte's two most important ideas, evolution and functional equivalency, translate into modern terms in the following way: if we define religion substantively and look for it in its evolution, we are bound to encounter places without religion. If we define it in terms of functional equivalency, we begin to find religion everywhere.
Chapter 7 - EDWARD BURNETT TYLOR: With the aid of new disciplines like geology, biology and archaeology, Tylor wanted to write a science of culture with his master key notion of animism. First, he held that the laws of nature hold everywhere and every-when and that savages were rational empiricists just like us. Savages held the notion of animism, which consists of two "dogmas:" 1) individuals have souls and 2) the world is populated with spirits. The evidence? Dreams. We see ghosts in dreams and assume that they are real. Thus, we do not "project" spirits onto the world but simply observe and attempt to explain. Thus, Tylor grants the same rationality to his subjects that he claims for himself, but nonetheless thinks of animism as a "survival," something that has outlasted its use into the modern age. Religion, which he defines as "belief in spiritual beings," is essentially animism. Though this is an evolutionary theory, Tylor does not assume progress. He thought civilization was superior to savagery, but that it was still savage nonetheless. What we share with the savages is the dualistic doctrine of the person. Today, animism has come full circle, and it is now only a doctrine of the human soul. Tylor pitted against the "survival" of animism his own materialism, which was nonetheless "mentalistic" in that he believed in the power of ideas to causally shape the world. Contra Hume, no talk of feelings. Contra Robertson Smith, no talk of the rationalization of ritual action. Contra Herbert and Kant, no irreducible ethical dimension. Contra Freud, no unconscious. Contra Durkheim, no account of the social. Freud will, however, take from Tylor the notion that religion is essentially childish and that analogy is an important principle of scientific discovery.
PART V: RELIGION EXPLAINED
Chapter 8 - EMILE DURKHEIM: Two lines of inquiry drawn on by Durkheim and Freud: 1) anthropological, individualistic, developmental, intellectualistic (Hume, Tylor, Comte #1), and 2) sociological, functional equivalency (Vico, Comte #2). Durkheim and Freud both acknowledge that religion continues to be socially necessary and that explaining religion does not mean explaining it away. Durkheim reacted against the British (Tylor) for ignoring the social, Freud for their equivalence of religious and logical thought. Durkheim and Freud both wanted to take religious actors seriously, rather than just call them crazy. Thus, they said that believers are not deceived in their conviction that they are in the embrace of powers larger and more profound than reason can control. In order to understand this, one must go underneath the symbol to reality itself.
Choosing whether one will begin with the social or the individual is square one for the study of religion. Society, for Durkheim, is a system of active forces in which it becomes possible to explain men in a new way. Social facts are sui generis. We cannot reduced the sociological to the psychological. Durkheim says the defining feature of religion is the distinction between sacred and profane, the sacred being that which is elaborated by a collectivity and embodies the community as a whole. Durkheim rejects Hume's account of the birth of the gods. The real religious question is how reality gets divided into two.
Like many scientists of his day, Durkheim looked to totemism. In the case of the plants and animals that serve as clan totems, there is nothing special about them. They are sacred not because man projects his essence onto them but because the totem is a symbol of the clan. The totem is the condensation of social force, as in fetishism (Marx would say that the condensation of social force into an object makes it mysterious but not necessarily sacred). It is the very type of the sacred thing. Only, then, when you get the symbolization of community do you get religion. The power that religion is a response to is thus a social rather than a natural power. Collective life brings the individual into a state of effervescence that leads to heightened psychic activity. This in turn leads to the positing of an ideal reality that embodies the aims of social life. The believer is thus not deceived when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he receives all that is best in himself.
Chapter 9 - SIGMUND FREUD: Freud proposed an anthropological thesis that is irreducibly social as well. Freud brought his pre-established structure to the study of religion, but matching religion and neurosis was not simply name-calling. Neurosis is a structure common to all humankind. Thus, there exists in the life of the individual fragments of an archaic heritage. Freud's analysis is centered around the model of the family. A collective is defined as that which shares a common father figure (superego). Freud's contribution to the analysis of religion was to have substituted an immanent within (unconscious wish) for a transcendent ground.
Freud's basic thesis on the persistence of religion: religion continues on because of the indestructible power of childhood wishes. Religion begins with totemism. Psychoanalysis sheds a single ray of light on the understanding of totemism: children are known to project onto animals feelings toward their father. The sacred in totemism is thus nothing but the perpetuated will of the father. The renunciation of incest and the symbolization of the father figure that follow the primal scene is both an act of fellowship amongst the brothers and the establishment of the God figure. For Freud, it was important that the primal scene actually took place: religious ideas not only include wish-fulfillments but also historical recollections, thus making it both a past and present force.
Preus again emphasizes how, despite the fact the Durkheim and Freud were wrong about certain things, the critical tradition is open to changing data, unlike theology, which is controlled by no reality principle. He also emphasizes again how Freud and Durkheim are ultimately motivated by a desire to give the benefit of the doubt to religious believers, as they take it that "no human institution can be founded on error alone."
PART ONE: RELIGION AS A PROBLEM
Chapter 1 - JEAN BODIN: In Bodin's time, religious conflict in Europe and the reality of the vast religious world outside of Christendom demanded an inquiry into the origin of religion as a way to arbitrate competing claims. Political crisis and the introduction of "religion" to the west coincided. Preus structures Bodin's response in the Colloquium into three categories: religious truth, policy and conscience (the intellectual, political and attitudinal).
1) Intellectual: Bodin seems to argue through his characters that the "best" religion is not the oldest, but that there is no basis on which to judge the "best." He begins, however, to turn to natural law as a common ground for interpreting religious claims. He also makes an important distinction between inner conviction and outer practice.
2) Political: Bodin, like Machiavelli and Hobbes, was an outsider to religion, approaching it from a socio-political angle and arguing for toleration for the sake of stability. He recognizes the connection between political power and religion, but, contra Spinoza, thinks superstition is necessary for political harmony. He thus self-contradictorily asserts that government should both practice tolerance and promote a state religion for political harmony.
3) Attitudinal: Senamus/Bodin wants to shift the attention of the debate from questions about religious object to questions about the religious subject and his motivations (Arendt's "modern" turn), opening the road for psychological assessments of religion.
PART TWO: RATIONALIST V. HISTORICAL APPROACHES
Chapter 2 - HERBERT OF CHERBURY: A contemporary of Descartes and Bacon, Herbert shared Descartes' desire to solve the crisis of the criteria of truth. He thus set out to find the five common notions lying behind all religions, to each of which he accorded some worth. In doing so, he strictly distinguishes truth from tradition, a distinction Spinoza would accept in full. He also strangely paved the way for Freud in arguing that the reality of God conforms to the fondest wishes of mankind (Freud's essential thesis, stripped of its theological presuppositions). Finally, though he was ultimately looking for that universal root of religion, Herbert was honest enough to admit when historical data contradicted his theory, thus making him an important predecessor of the modern academic.
Like Bodin, he was greatly affected by religious conflict but nonetheless worked out of a religious perspective. Unlike Bodin, however, he did not resort to any "magical" elements (angels and demons), he more or less fully demotes revelation and authority from significance to his investigation, he imagines a global universal history of religions and he ignores, like a good Englishman, socio-political implications.
Chapter 3 - BERNARD FONTENELLE: wanted to explain why it is that people believe what they do when and where they do (41). Where do fables come from? Man's desire to explain a power that lies beyond his control. In the case of both philosophy/science and myth, the mind is working in the same way (43). Unmistakably, myths are absurd (even as they pass over into religion), but they are revelatory of the human mind, which makes them worth studying (47). Oracles can be explained in a similar fashion.
Fontenelle advances upon Herbert's rationalism, uses a naturalistic scheme and clearly separates his project from theology. Herbert was trying to create generic theology, Fontenelle looking to the common psychohistorical causes of religious belief. For Herbert, religion is to be legitimated, for Fontenelle, to be explained. Herbert the 17th c. rationalist, Fontenelle the 18th c. empiricist. Herbert represents the deistic-theological strategy, which incorporates particular values into a universal theory and has the advantage of universality but at the cost of reductionism (modern example: Cantwell Smith's Toward a World Theology). Fontenelle represents the "two-realms" strategy, which proceeds in reductive and explanatory fashion but exempts one's own religion (modern example: Berger's Sacred Canopy).
PART THREE: A SCIENCE OF RELIGION?
Chapter 4 - GIAMBATTISTA VICO: Vico's basic thesis, known as "maker's knowledge," is that we can know social institutions because we have made them. These institutions are best studied by investigating their origins. We can only understand a culture's institutions on its own terms: thus, we cannot simply analyze myth and try to gain from it an esoteric knowledge that makes sense on our own terms (reason). He proposes that we understand myth not in terms of reason but in terms of poetry.
There are nevertheless three common socio-historical institutional universals (rather than universal ideas à la Herbert) which we share with them: religion (belief in providence), sexual order/marriage and immortality/burying of the dead (this sounds alot like Charles Taylor in Understanding and Ethnocentricity). If we take these universals to have existed in more primitive times, then myths are not collective fantasies but rather refer to real history, real things that happened to them and their way of dealing with those things. For instance, man encounter thunder and assumes that thunder is like him (his ideal-ego), leading to its personification: thus, Zeus.
Despite his acknowledgement of historical irony, Vico assumed providence because it gave meaning to history. Hume applied Vico but stripped it of theological significance. Weber, on the other hand, would be greatly interested in the meaning giving function of religion. Although Vico himself did not outwardly criticize religion, thus defying the thesis of the book, his is a case of new wine bursting old wineskins.
Chapter 5 - DAVID HUME: With Hume, a line of criticism ends and the construction of an alternative theory begins. Following the "historic mission of the Enlightenment," Hume's aim is to overthrow religion. In that pursuit, he sought to undermine the three basic theological-apologetic pillars: 1) specific revelation (in "Of Miracles"), 2) the design argument (in the Dialogues), 3) an innate sense of the divine (in Natural History). His aim was to produce a science of man, that spurned analyzing man in terms of Newtonian mechanics. Neither did he want to refer to any platonic reality underneath it all: to the senses alone!
"Of Miracles": A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature. Testimony is what establishes miracles. Testimony is not enough to found a system of religion. In fact, we should be even more worried that there is no God if the regularity of natural processes were to fail.
Dialogues: The watchmaker argument is mistaken: the world ought to be thought of more as an organism than as a machine. From the senses alone, we clearly see that mind is generated from matter and not the other way around. So why should we assume a divine mind preceding all else? We have never witnessed a world being made. There is no data for a system of cosmogony. Why, then, would we assume world-making to be at all like house-building (i.e., necessitating a divine architect)?
Natural History: We encounter nature's unpredictable and unmanageable power, which causes fear and anxiety over our future well-being. Our first way of contemplating nature in order to master it is to personify it. There are thus two moments to the "religious experience": 1) the fixing of the passions on objects, and 2) the modeling of unknown powers on human volitions. Only impressions, passions and instincts are innate. Religion is only a historically-acquired reaction formation.
Hume did not share his contemporaries' belief in the progress to rationality. Man, for him, was controlled by his passions and haunted by terrors, thus making him an easy target for priestcraft.
Hume was decisive in talking about ways of coping with life rather than theology. His influence on Tylor and the field of anthropology is unmistakable. The three problem areas of Hume's new science included: 1) defining the nature of man, 2) pinpointing what experiences account for religion, and 3) figuring out how to account for the variety of religious belief.
Hume's problems: 1) lack of evidence. Charles de Brosses (who interestingly coined the term fetishism) advanced upon his science by filling in the details. 2) a lack of interest in the social (making Hume a target for Durkheim), 3) no developmental theory, 4) no interest in the content of religion.
PART IV: THE PROGRESS OF REASON AND THE SURVIVAL OF RELIGION
Chapter 6 - AUGUSTE COMTE: Comte is known for his two sides, one scientific, one messianic, one convinced that science is leading us to progress, the other worried about the spiritual crisis we face. Preus chooses to see these two sides as of a piece. Comte's two most important ideas are his belief in the evolution of religion and the need at all times for it or its functional equivalent. Together, they explain his supposedly schizophrenic philosophy, how religion can be both necessary and obsolete. Comte understood that science was right, but also that we need to replace theology with something else, something that can take on the social role of religion.
Like his predecessors, Comte wanted to look to our origins not because there is some absolute beginning or end, but because it is important to look at idio-social genesis. For him, ideas are important but only in their reciprocal relationship to society. Though Comte emphasizes observation and experience, he also thought it impossible to proceed scientifically without some kind of theory. Indeed, facts are only data inasmuch as they fit into some theory. Thus, we are justified in talking about paradigm shifts, so long as we have read and observed carefully.
He divides the world into three ages: 1) Theological/fictitious-military state, 2) Metaphysical/abstract-feudal state, 3) Scientific/positive-industrial state. The first stage of the theological state was fetishism, where man projects himself outwards on objects and demands an absolute explanation of the world out of himself. As opposed to Hume, Comte thought fetishism was a productive stage, despite being childish. Fetishism is essentially right to recognize a power of order immanent in nature. Later he will say they were right to essentially be worshiping man inasmuch as he has the potential to become powerful.
But then we grow up and discover that nature is governed by laws, not wills. This is the first principle of positive philosophy. The advance of the intellect throws off anthropomorphism, but with the negative result of an introjection of natural-law analysis into the human. Comte wants to re-establish the realm of the human, to be as constructive as the first age. He was thus critical of critical philosophy for denying spiritual power in nature and society. He was also against the unregulated individuals that results from criticism. This rampant egoism is all the more deplorable for coinciding with wealth.
To combat this trend, Comte wanted to reunite feeling and understanding, man's affective and cognitive life, which he thought divorced in the second age. To do this, we ought to worship the "Great Being," or humanity itself. Our knowledge is not only power, like nature, but a lovable power, unlike nature, for it is at our command, a thesis not unlike Feuerbach's. Comte was convinced that by re-imagining religion, we could proceed on the inexorable progress of the mind toward mastery over human destiny.
Comte's two most important ideas, evolution and functional equivalency, translate into modern terms in the following way: if we define religion substantively and look for it in its evolution, we are bound to encounter places without religion. If we define it in terms of functional equivalency, we begin to find religion everywhere.
Chapter 7 - EDWARD BURNETT TYLOR: With the aid of new disciplines like geology, biology and archaeology, Tylor wanted to write a science of culture with his master key notion of animism. First, he held that the laws of nature hold everywhere and every-when and that savages were rational empiricists just like us. Savages held the notion of animism, which consists of two "dogmas:" 1) individuals have souls and 2) the world is populated with spirits. The evidence? Dreams. We see ghosts in dreams and assume that they are real. Thus, we do not "project" spirits onto the world but simply observe and attempt to explain. Thus, Tylor grants the same rationality to his subjects that he claims for himself, but nonetheless thinks of animism as a "survival," something that has outlasted its use into the modern age. Religion, which he defines as "belief in spiritual beings," is essentially animism. Though this is an evolutionary theory, Tylor does not assume progress. He thought civilization was superior to savagery, but that it was still savage nonetheless. What we share with the savages is the dualistic doctrine of the person. Today, animism has come full circle, and it is now only a doctrine of the human soul. Tylor pitted against the "survival" of animism his own materialism, which was nonetheless "mentalistic" in that he believed in the power of ideas to causally shape the world. Contra Hume, no talk of feelings. Contra Robertson Smith, no talk of the rationalization of ritual action. Contra Herbert and Kant, no irreducible ethical dimension. Contra Freud, no unconscious. Contra Durkheim, no account of the social. Freud will, however, take from Tylor the notion that religion is essentially childish and that analogy is an important principle of scientific discovery.
PART V: RELIGION EXPLAINED
Chapter 8 - EMILE DURKHEIM: Two lines of inquiry drawn on by Durkheim and Freud: 1) anthropological, individualistic, developmental, intellectualistic (Hume, Tylor, Comte #1), and 2) sociological, functional equivalency (Vico, Comte #2). Durkheim and Freud both acknowledge that religion continues to be socially necessary and that explaining religion does not mean explaining it away. Durkheim reacted against the British (Tylor) for ignoring the social, Freud for their equivalence of religious and logical thought. Durkheim and Freud both wanted to take religious actors seriously, rather than just call them crazy. Thus, they said that believers are not deceived in their conviction that they are in the embrace of powers larger and more profound than reason can control. In order to understand this, one must go underneath the symbol to reality itself.
Choosing whether one will begin with the social or the individual is square one for the study of religion. Society, for Durkheim, is a system of active forces in which it becomes possible to explain men in a new way. Social facts are sui generis. We cannot reduced the sociological to the psychological. Durkheim says the defining feature of religion is the distinction between sacred and profane, the sacred being that which is elaborated by a collectivity and embodies the community as a whole. Durkheim rejects Hume's account of the birth of the gods. The real religious question is how reality gets divided into two.
Like many scientists of his day, Durkheim looked to totemism. In the case of the plants and animals that serve as clan totems, there is nothing special about them. They are sacred not because man projects his essence onto them but because the totem is a symbol of the clan. The totem is the condensation of social force, as in fetishism (Marx would say that the condensation of social force into an object makes it mysterious but not necessarily sacred). It is the very type of the sacred thing. Only, then, when you get the symbolization of community do you get religion. The power that religion is a response to is thus a social rather than a natural power. Collective life brings the individual into a state of effervescence that leads to heightened psychic activity. This in turn leads to the positing of an ideal reality that embodies the aims of social life. The believer is thus not deceived when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he receives all that is best in himself.
Chapter 9 - SIGMUND FREUD: Freud proposed an anthropological thesis that is irreducibly social as well. Freud brought his pre-established structure to the study of religion, but matching religion and neurosis was not simply name-calling. Neurosis is a structure common to all humankind. Thus, there exists in the life of the individual fragments of an archaic heritage. Freud's analysis is centered around the model of the family. A collective is defined as that which shares a common father figure (superego). Freud's contribution to the analysis of religion was to have substituted an immanent within (unconscious wish) for a transcendent ground.
Freud's basic thesis on the persistence of religion: religion continues on because of the indestructible power of childhood wishes. Religion begins with totemism. Psychoanalysis sheds a single ray of light on the understanding of totemism: children are known to project onto animals feelings toward their father. The sacred in totemism is thus nothing but the perpetuated will of the father. The renunciation of incest and the symbolization of the father figure that follow the primal scene is both an act of fellowship amongst the brothers and the establishment of the God figure. For Freud, it was important that the primal scene actually took place: religious ideas not only include wish-fulfillments but also historical recollections, thus making it both a past and present force.
Preus again emphasizes how, despite the fact the Durkheim and Freud were wrong about certain things, the critical tradition is open to changing data, unlike theology, which is controlled by no reality principle. He also emphasizes again how Freud and Durkheim are ultimately motivated by a desire to give the benefit of the doubt to religious believers, as they take it that "no human institution can be founded on error alone."
Thursday, February 11, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
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.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
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).
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).
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