Ethics
Nietzsche again today.
If the subject is false, untrue or awkward it needs to be abolished.
In the same way, psychoanalysis can be understood. We are talking of Freud because we want to know what is useful in psychoanalysis for ethics.
It’s in the same direction as Nietzsche, it is an analysis in trying to realise how the discourse is formulated in such a way that it helps the person in question dealing with the situation. The idea of psychoanalysis is that developing a discourse in a deceitful way ends up in an unhealthy situation. What is best is not to hide away from the truth, but get closer to how things really are.
Of course the approach of psychoanalysis and Nietzsche is entirely different.
Nietzsche expresses his despair, anxiety and so on in a very baroque way, whilst PA is more sober and ’scientific’. A lot of scientists don’t see it as a science now.
When professor was young, institute of philosophy were interested in PA. Many professors were also part of the Belgian school of PA and knew Lacan personally. There were also constant seminars on Freud and Lacan. This seems to have faded away. Certain interests may be a matter of fashion, ie. PA was fashionable and is dead now.
Some things we are deeply involved with without being aware of. In dreams, this can come to the forth. As such, dreams can be interesting for that or something.
When are people are not in an urgent tension, the image of satisfaction can be stimulated without satisfaction, which insofar gives a kind of satisfaction. Our desires are borne out of something we experienced earlier, and this is in our brains, and guides us to find solutions for future tensions.
Sexual desire differs from other kinds of desires. By stimulating certain images there is the possibility of different sexual desires. When we were young, we collect images of satisfaction, which become the kind of map that we use to find back to satisfactory moments.
On the one side we have triebe, instinct or desire built up by energy which needs release. Then there is vorstellung, the things we long for and which we desire in our lives. Then there is the possibility of these being blocked, as a kind of defense-mechanism, so that we are more civilised, and fit into society. As such, society requires a kind of self-censorship. Sometimes these blockings are so severe that it becomes problematic and unhealthy for us. We become neurotic. It is in the process of using words that we can handle these kinds of blocks. To get closer to the triebrepresentierende Vorstellung. What is dreaming then? When there is no acttivity, and we explore our Vorstellung by trying to give us a kind of satisfaction in order to stay in sleep. We try to go back to our real desires and what we really want. However, it is difficult to be conscious of these things lest we use words.
As such, there is the possibility to construct with words, networks and logical classifications. By making use of words, by talking, we decide what to do. Words guide memory. Words give us the freedom to think in a certain direction. However, with words we can be misguided, essentially when we refuse to describe a certain desire properly. Our conscious is blocked by the unconscious.
Words follow a strict kind of ordered logic. But in the sphere of the triebrepresentierende Vorstellung, they aren’t guided by the same kind of logic that forces us down in waking space. There is more association rather than pure category.
When we wake up, we need to be quick to capture with words the kind of images that were only bound by association, and the things bound by association were not entirely conscious because they were driven by the unconscious.
If we analyse our dreams properly, we will get close to what we busy ourselves with, and often of the kind of things we don’t think about openly.
Therefore, Freud was convinced that sexual desire was not determined by a biological order, but was rather determined by the first impressions in life, as a child. The first moments of each emotion is the most formative for each individual.
To know ourselves, is to know how these patterns were formed in childhood.
In development of ourselves, we are essentially harmed at some point, likely at least, and if we go back we can understand why we long for things in particular ways.
Freud wrote an essay on Leonardo DaVinci. DaVinci makes quite androgynous figures. All his characters are not really sexually appealing. If DaVinci sketches men, they are generally very ugly, being masculine in quite horrifying ways. He was probably homosexual. Freud thinks that this all has to do with Leonardo’s childhood, why he makes maternal figures and so on. It is a kind of bourgeoning homosexuality. Sexuality in Freud is not inborne, but is rather based on the initial impressions the child receives in life.
Freud dreams of a scientific work of plants, der Botanische Monografi. It is about a dried plant. Which is a flower his wife likes. But it is dried, and it is scientific. So Freud associates like: all that is blossoming, is dried and ’put away’ from the viewpoint of a scientist. By taking science seriously and studying all the time he distances himself from the things he loves. A Leuven professor analysed that Freud probably stopped analysing too far, because he was afraid of sharing too much of his private life.
Professor also wanted to be psychoanalyst. He tried to do the therapy, all you do is talk. There is barely any intervention by the psychoanalyst, and this is intentional. The point is to confront you to your own discourse. When you explain things, you have a kind of imaginary audience, whom you want to explain things in such a way so that they are in favour of you. However, when the idea of the audience is gone, through the psychoanalyst sitting behind you, it helps us to talk in a way that is more like we talk in our heads, our personal discourse. There is less thinking of what they are thinking of you. And by just being quiet, they give you the opportunity to discover our own fantasies about what the person is thinking about you. The therapist can’t intervene, because then you are confronted with a different individual with their own problems, which you will start to worry about. When you sit and explain things like that, you realise quite quickly that a lot of the ways in which we tell stories to ourselves aren’t very truthful.
This is an element we must realise in dealing with a philosophical discourse as such. Philosophical discourses themselves are not privy to avoiding these kinds of problems. From Nietzsches perspective it is bad then to take on ideas which are essentially lies, of which most are. It is a giving into our sickness.
If Socrates is telling us a story in order to not be afraid of death, we end up with certain ideas which are inherently tied to the telling of that story. So the ideas borne out of this story, is only a story which covers up those things which we are nonetheless afraid of.
The whole idea of PA then is that it would help all those hysterical and neurotic people. It can be a method of realising the unhealthy coping we deal with every day.
Next to neuroticism, there are those are schizophrenic. They seem to have a disturbance in their drive-representing-imagination. They fail to make contact with reality. A talking cure for these people is not very helpful at all. There is a difference between thoes disturbed by desires, and those whose problem is with the very existance of desire.
PA seems unsuccessful in treating these kind of problems.
Children are polymorph perverse, and by developing desires in different erogein zones, we develop different ways of encountering satisfaction. Now the body becomes quite central.
The Ego seems to invest in reality by putting energy into it, but by frustration we can put this back into ourselves, and as such creating a narcisstic personality. This is a different paradigm which is quite different from the prior issues.
Later on, also distinguishes between a libido and destruction. Sexual desire and the tendency to dissolve: death. Another theory or something.
The starting point of Freud’s philosophy is close to sensationalism, with pleasure-pain principles, with tension and release. But he is very creative in developing it in different directions. By analysing desires, emotions, love and sexuality, there seems to be a better understanding of emotions. As long as we lack a clear theory of emotion, they are entirely some chaotic thing. This can lead to the idea that ethics has something to do with that chaotic, inner emotional world, perhaps connected with a sensitivity beyond the here and now. Freud explains this, arguing that it is more about the world in which we are borne into, rather the world we are borne from. A lot of our emotions then, are actually a matter of transference from before to now. A repetition of what we had before. If we have a competition with a friend, it might come from our brother and so on and so on.
PA gives us an instrument that can help us to analyse why we long for certain emotions.
A Leuven professor: Anton Vergote, was trained with Lacan in Paris, who was a priest and a believer, interested in religious emotions. Guilt and Desire, in which he analyses religious emotions. He uses the Freudian paradigm, and analyses the emotions of religion as a transference from emotions found in our early life, and we project that, rather than having a direct relation to God. For Freud, religion is an extension of longing for someone that covers us and keeps us safe and recognised. In AP-lit religion is too good to be true, it is wishful thinking.
Freud has an article distinguishing Treuer and Melancholie. When we lose someone, we grieve, but this is not depression. In depression, there is something that makes you feel worthless. There seems to have been an introjection of a severe instance in your life, that blocks you from just feeling fine. In there you find the idea that people who develop a severe uberich, have no feeling that they can do anything, and block their own initiatives, and fail themselves, to be reassured in the conclusion that they are worthless. Therefore it seems important to love ourselves and be critical towards ourselves when we bash ourselves.
We are generally optimistic about our own chances to become of importance is higher than that of other people. The only realistic people are depressive, so we might need a bit of depression sometimes.
We should see ethical theories in what ways they are helpful to us, always at a certain point.
Mauritz Schlick, beginning of analytical philosophy.
A reaction to Hegelian philosophy, anti-metaphysics and so on. Neo-kantians were intrigued by the fact that the way reality appears to us is different from the way reality is, it is obstructed by a kind of sheen which we add to it. This sounds crazy to ordinary people, because all the things in front of us seem to be real, it is an empirical relation with reality. We need to stick with science and real things.
In science all kinds of improvements are made during this time, whilst philosophy was still busy with aristotle and plato and so on. We need to stop all this idealistic thinking and come close to reality as it is. So there was a rebellion against hegelianism. This is not only the logical-positivists, but analytic philsosophy as a whole. It is a kind of rebellion against hegelianism.
Russel and Moore also active in this. Russel makes a lot of fun of the incomprehensibility of Hegel. Reading one sentence is enough to say that it is all rubbish. If you can’t understand a philosopher, it is a bad philosopher.
This kind of thinking made a philosophers like Bradley almost unknown after this, all of his ideas then later being reborne in analytic philosophy itself in philosophers like Hare.
Moore started the tradition of firmly refusing to doubt things. He wants to come back to common sense. Good is something everyone understands, and we can’t define it. Everyone in real life experiences what the good is through common sense. Good can only manifest.
Bradley was very in favour of common sense, all his texts are specifically about common sense, and he is explicitly against philosophers, and theoretical ethics. He thought the vulgar notion of good was much more interesting the things utilitarians or Kantians were developing. People are very aware of their duties because of their station in society. You don’t need philosophers for that. The starting notion should be what, at hand, is our task. Bradley didn’t believe that he as a philosopher could guide people into the right direction, he was more interested in describing what happened around him.
For analytical philosophers, the common sense is the direct experience of things without culture or anything colouring it. As such, the sober and clear cut interpretation of things.
There is a tendency in Russel to think that we can develop a new language that helps us to see things as they really are, closer to real experience, by naming particular objects and their relations, and forming sentences that express these relations, and the closer we develop this language to the world, we will be more truthful. This is explained by Hegel as ridiculous, since we cannot move back to that kind of immediacy, we cannot have the objects as immediately present to our minds.
Therefore, the word hegelian became famous as that which denies reality as it is.
Wittgenstein answers the logicist question, and generally denies it. He rather says that the way we experience reality relies on the forms of life in a particular social environment. It is rather about immutable awareness of how we do things, but there are no names of concrete objects. This is silly to Wittgenstein.
A lot of modern philosophers who rediscover the social relevance of ethics relied on Wittgenstein. They suggest that Wittgenstein is the one that brought them back to the general agreement on how things are. Professor thinks Wittgenstein was mainly moving back to a kind of hegelianism, especially as he agrees that we have no access to immediacy.
”So you are saying that human agreement decides what is false and what is true? – it is what human beings say that is false and true; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life”.
It is what human beings say that is false or true, what is said must be understood in a praxis: what is said can only be true given the form of life in which it happens. Without this form of life, we cannot say anything about what is at stake.
John Austin How to do things with words:
Austin was interested in what we actually say with words. Instead of trying to figure out the metaphysical theory that makes certain expressions true or false, they were far more interested in trying to analyse what is expected within a particular context, and how language is used and makes sense where it is used. Austin believed we can do some formative actions with words. A lot of things we do with words is more than talking.
Once we have discovered all the reasons why we use language in a particular way, all the philosophical problems will be solved. They only did this in the English language however, and cared mainly for this. They were not aware of the importance of the cultural element in their language. There was no reflection on what language does in other cultural environments.
Still today, there are a lot of essays on blaming. But as a matter of fact, there is no translation of blaming in Dutch. There is no expression of the matter at all. So if you write a whole essay on the use of the word ’blame’, and a culture doesn’t have it, what does that word do for them?
Ordinary language philosophy, if it is just about English, becomes quite a bit odd, you actually move away from reality according to Professor.
Isaiah Berlin
Liberty and shit.
Self realisation is discovering a project, a calling or something you want to realise because it seems to be worthwhile, and by realising it we make something of ourselves. For instance, becoming a good teacher is a positive project. But society needs to also believe that it is a worthwhile project. If a society hates teachers, it becomes difficult to see it as a positive project.
The problem with this positive conception of Freedom, is that there is a kind of dangerous group pressure to stimulate certain ideals in an authoritative manner. This can in turn suffocate individual freedom instead. Freedom must be interpreted as not being obliged to do anything, so that you can develop what you really want as an individual.
Being free is the power to do as one pleases; freedom from physical restraint; freedom from arbitrary or despotic control; the power of choice.
Freedom must be understood as leaving people alone and letting them decide for themselves. Positive freedom is involved in the answer to the question what is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?
There was an anxiety in Berlin’s approach about getting a kind of authoritarian leadership out of this kind of positive struggle based on society generally rather than individuals as individuals.
We cannot come up with positive projects, we need rather to create conditions in which people can develop themselves, we only need to make sure there is a total equality of opportunities. What they need to develop, we can’t answer, because that would be elitist.
But why do we need to be free? We shouldn’t bother, everyone gets to decide for themselves, adults have sufficient imagination and creativity to figure life out by themselves. At this moment, we also stop distinguishing between high culture and low culture. But what are free for???? There is no right thing to do. This creates instead a kind of anxiety related to what should we live for.
Karl Schmitt: if everyone can do whatever he likes, can he escape being able to do that?? It isn’t freedom anymore. There is no serious discussion on the quality of relations, and we don’t have the freedom to care for this either. So there is nothing left, a kind of nihilism. People who fail to create an identity will then become guided by incredibly fanatic ways of life.
Quenton Skinner: A geneaology of liberty
He explains all the concepts of liberty in history and distinguishes the different ones that have existed. Just watch the video.
Peter Frederick Strawson
Freedom and Resentment 1962: it was not wellknown. I forgot to listen to what he said about it.
On the one side there are those who believe in Freedom, and then there are those who are skeptics, who believe that freedom cannot exist due to being determined by the causal relations of things. Strawson does not take a clear position himself. He suggests rather that he does not know what determinism means. In ordinary life, the vulgar notion of how people deal with things, distinguish between those who are not seen as responsible like small children or people with dementia, whilst we do believe that certain people are free and responsible, and this distinction is based on the kind of reactive attitude based on what people are doing certain different things. If someone is hurting you, you will immediately react, but if you see that that person couldn’t help it, for example by falling on you because they were pushed, and continuing to act angry in this case would make no sense. In our daily life, we seem to develop what he calls reactive attitudes, and we make a distinction between those times in which it is appropriate to react a certain way because certain people are responsible and some aren’t. This is how we actually deal with it. If we take a non-relational position, a position outside of life, a philosopher, we can start to think that there is no freedom and therefore no responsibility. Imagine a philosopher who gives a speech about the fact that there is no responsibility because there is no freedom because all is a matter of causal relation. He then comes home because he has not taken out the garbage, can he answer that he isn’t responsible? In the way that he actually uses that language, that doesn’t make sense. Strawson is suggesting on the relational context, in which freedom or the lack of it can actually exist.