Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), the most important and immediate heir of Kant, took up his teacher's theme of autonomy. Under the influence of the French Revolution with its ‘rights of man’ and the Romantic Movement of Germany with its affinities to Christian mysticism, Fichte amplified the function of Kant's ‘practical reason.’ For Fichte, man's life and experience originate in his ego or will; out of the commitment of the will the person posits an opposite in the world and then fuses the self with that. Through a series of dialectical and self-transcending steps one thereby ascends to full knowledge of the absolute. Though in his later work Fichte called this process God, in his early work the dialectical process is clearly the creative praxis of persons who are rational, active, and social. In Fichte humanity and God, humanism and theism were indistinguishably fused.
The influence of Fichte on Marx is evident in Fichte's notions of the self-creative freedom of humanity, of the human being as a practical and social being, of the person's continuous self-transcendence, of the dialectical process of development, and of the revolt against theoretical and social dualisms.
The most powerful intellectual influence on the young Marx during his university years was the thought of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). In his youth Hegel was a theological student at the Protestant seminary at Tübingen. The problem occupying him then and throughout his life was the rationality of Christianity, or the spiritual character of reason: What is the relation of faith to intellect, of humanity to God? The work of Kant and the Enlightenment converged with that of German Romanticism (especially Herder) and Rousseau to produce in Hegel a unique synthesis. Whereas Kant made a Copernican revolution by showing how a person's understanding revolves around its own forms, Hegel's revolution was bolder: it turned everything into history, the divine history of Spirit that culminates in the reason of humanity. Hegel combined the Romantic view that humankind is evolving through history and becoming like God with the view that the whole of history is the work of Reason. Here the unifying concept was Geist, which means both Mind and Spirit. The young Hegel's historical studies of Christianity led him, on a Kantian basis, to distinguish the interior moral power of reason from the external forms of religion. ‘Pure Reason completely free of any limit or restriction whatsoever is the deity himself. In explaining the alienation of Christianity, he contrasted the rigid and ‘positive’ religion of Jewish law with the free religion of the Greeks, and the anti-naturalism and dualism of the Jews with the naturalism and mysticism of the Greeks.29 Christianity has ‘fallen’ from its ideal unity into the ‘depravity’ of the privatized and fragmented Roman world. God has been objectified and alienated, and human lives have been divided between religion and secularity, church and state, and piety and virtue. The overcoming of such estrangement is Jesus' ‘pantheism of love’ and the Kingdom of God.
Hegel's mature philosophy was an elaborate reformulation of this early statement of the problem and its solution. One may in finding that he persistently argues in the state of alienation (Selbst-Entfremdung) from himself, others, one's own moral law, and society. Such self-alienation takes the form of ‘objectification’ (Vergegenständlichung), in which one's world is hastened into separate objects that stand over against one and appear as real things. In such a world of alienation and otherness (Entausserung) one either becomes master (subject) or slave (object); nevertheless, in either case one has fallen from the realm of freedom or self-consciousness into the realm of blind necessity or ignorance. As one comes to recognize one's true self in the other, one begins the movement back toward an unalienated and unified self-consciousness (Aneigung). This movement of self-reconciliation in the person, via Reason, is nothing more than the activity of Geist or God in the world. Though the reworking of the Christian theme of the drama of salvation is apparent in this theodicy, Hegel has substituted human Reason for a personal God, made illusion the Tempter, and replaced moral Sin with intellectual Gullibility.
Was Hegel an atheist? Some orthodox religious leaders suspected so, and some philosophers, especially the Young Hegelians, believed so. Feuerbach took up the attack on Hegel from a materialist viewpoint, arguing that the subjective being of God resolves into the predicates of the human being, that theology is reducible to anthropology. Feuerbach completed the humanizing, subjectivizing tendency in German thought that had begun with mystics like Eckhart and with Reformers like Münzer and Luther, and ran through Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.
Hegel's philosophy displayed the double irony of starting out as a critique of orthodox religion and society and ending as a justification of them, and of starting out as a philosophy of religion and ending as an implicit atheism. He sought to heal dualisms and to take the Incarnation of his faith seriously, but in so doing he assimilated God to the world-process, and eventually to the Prussian State.
The radical Young Hegelians, among whom were counted Marx and Engels, saw what was the most radical feature of Hegel's philosophy: It’s emphasis upon change, movement, interconnection, transformation, and development -in a word, upon dialectical process. The one constant and absolute reality is the creative process itself; Its contents and the forms of what it creates are transient and relative. The creative process itself, however, is moving toward triumph over its obstructions in history. This was a new version of the dynamic and majestic sovereignty of God, recalling in a materialist and dialectical form the visions of the Old Testament prophets and sages, the Messianic expectations of the early Christians, the yearning of the mystics, and the nostalgic and fugitive fantasies of Christian millennialists. In its romantic exaltation of action, will, freedom, and the organic unity of humankind and history, it belonged with those other visions that inspired men at this time, such as the dream of Rousseau that impelled the plebeian revolutionaries of the Year II in France. In its assurance of a victory in progress which humanity might join, it evoked again the apocalyptic dream that had haunted the imaginations of Christians for almost two-thousand years. It set itself against not only the ideology of feudalism but the modern ideology of the ascendent class of rationalists, mechanists, and Newtonian liberals of the bourgeois order. In the hands of the philosophies this liberal vision had helped to undermine French absolutism but, in turn, it became suspect in the eyes of many who saw it as an anti-populist viewpoint. This Romantic suspicion also had its conservative roots, for while the Romantic imagination was allied to the spirit of the Revolution, with its mood of ‘alienation’, it sought to recover its lost harmony in primitive man, in the ‘folk’, and even in the middle ages. For many Romantics the non-alienated unity of man could be recovered only in and through humankind with its history and its goals transcending the in dividual what Hegel called the March of God on Earth.
Insofar as Marx took over the grand dialectic of Hegel, he was a Romantic. Under the impact of his reading of Feuerbach (1804-1872), however, the young Marx saw that Hegel's dialectic must come down to earth and enter practice, and that its speculative view of the state did not explain the contradictions in society. Marx attacked Hegel from a Feuerbachian base: the state is derived from people and not vice versa; The ‘heavenly’ political life is alienated from our ‘species-life’, and religious alienation rests in economic life. He substituted ‘socialized man for Hegel's abstractive and spiritual idea for Feuerbach's individualized substantia of man.
What leads to the alienation of our ‘species-life’? As Marx developed his answer to this question posed by Hegel and Feuerbach, he developed his own philosophy. Religion is an expression of a widespread alienation of men in society, of ‘private interest . . . property . . . and . . . egoistic persons’. With that the Christian State ‘is not the genuine realization of the human basis of religion’. The theological state has not succeeded in instituting in human, secular form ‘the human basis of which Christianity is the transcendental expression’. Marx's appreciation of ‘the human basis’ of religion appeared later in his ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right’ (1843), which states that ‘religion is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no reality. Here religion is not described as a fantasy or as a phenomenon isolated from man; it is an expression of man, but of alienated man.
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
Marx's criterion for this criticism is his humanism. Inheriting the notion of self-alienation from German idealism, this humanism sees its roots not in illusion as such but in the material and social condition of human life. Consequently in his critique of religion Marx's main attack is directed against ‘a condition that needs illusions’. In answer to Hegel, Marx insists that religious criticism must not remain in the domain of the Idea and ‘the other world’, but must come downwards to trajectories that equally stabilize the earth and the suffering of real men, ‘the halo of which is religion’. Criticism as well to expose of all other forms deemed self-alienating, later described on one side that Marx legally, politically, religiously, aesthetically, and philosophically pursued of a ‘superstructure’ of class society. All of them are abstractions and distortions of the really human being; Yet, seem utterly mistaken as the false human being for the true one. They do not make humanity, nor does humanity make them as forms of its mythical illusory and unhappy discernment for which is in the lacking of consciousness, as there be of that which enables us to think. At the same time Marx dialectically recognized in humanity's religion its revolt against its suffering, and humanity and its discontent with false consciousness, that is, with the human ‘spirit’ in a ‘spiritless situation’. Rather than seeing the person as fallen and alienated from the institution and thought of religion, Marx sees religion and the religious person as a fall or alienation from the real person, while humanism is a first but an abstract step toward positive communism. It should be noted that because Marx was opposed to theism ultimately because of its anti-humanism, any joining of the argument between Marxist humanism and theism must be joined on the issue of humanism. Could, it has been demonstrated, Marx presumably would have accepted a faith humanistic and naturalistic in all respects, however religion appeared to be identified historically with alienated ideology and a set-class society? Marx had an appreciation for the humanism of the story of ‘the carpenter whom the rich men killed’ and the religion ‘that taught us the worship of the child’; Engels expressed admiration for the revolutionary character of early Christianity; While Lenin believed that cooperation between Marxists and believers was possible.
Marx's emphasis on the material and social world of practice as the source of our delineation culminated in the notion of the working class as the chief bearer of the new society. Marx probably first learned about the role of labour in human life from the Phenomenology of Hegel, who had been influenced by his reading of Adam Smith. The labour theory of value has, if not alone, the virtue of qualities, finding its roots in the medieval communism of many Christian groups as well as in the Scholastics, and, beyond that, in the Bible. It echoed Christian-Stoic organicism and the Cusanus-Bruno-Leibniz notion of the macrocosm in the microcosm, especially as the revolutionary labour movement mirrored the dialectical movement of the whole universe. Whereas, the mysticism from Eckhart to Hegel had spoken of the alienated individual as returning home by way of individual, contemplative knowledge, Marx insisted that it must be accomplish by collective political action. That is, it must be carried out by the members of that remnant class in society who is most dehumanized by ‘radical chains’, and hence most likely to pass over the stage of bourgeois society as self-delusive dehumanization and then become genuinely human. Analogously, Eckhart and the other mystics argued that the man who is most empty and ignorant is the most likely to become divine, as Jesus declared that the last shall be first. Thus Hegel's abstract form of alienation, Entaüsserung (externalization), becomes Marx's veraüssern (selling). Religious and philosophical accounts of this alienation (Christian ‘sin’, and Hegel's ‘appearance’) have been, for Marx, only alienated reinforcements of the alienation inherent in the exploitive labour situation of class society. Similarly, Christian and Hegelian notions of the unity of workers yet to be achieved by some formality of indirect abstraction for being a truth but away from ‘the real movement’ of working people and of communism ‘to abolish the present state of things’ and to create the unity longed for in religion and philosophy.
Marx and Engels' Manifesto of the Communist Party, with its militant call for the workers of the world to break their chains and build a new world, was the climax of a rich period of German philosophy in its struggle to solve the problem of human alienation and freedom. As we have seen, this problem was inherited from Christianity. Most of all Christians have taken to be of an article of faith that human beings have an organic connection with Spirit (Logos). Hegel started here, finding this Logos to be supremely revealed in the self-consciousness of the human being. For Christianity's authoritarian autonomy, however, this was a fatal step; For the young followers of Hegel soon saw that the pre-existent Logos may go and leave only the human being. Spirit is already characterologically secularized in humanity. On this view, the vehicle of the human spirit, which the young Marx called ‘species-being’ and the mature Marx called ‘development’, is not the Church or any other institution but is potentially everywhere. The working class, organized to bring to pass the de-alienated unity of persons with one another and with nature, becomes the major source of value in history. A social prometheanism has replaced a religion of sacrificial submission; Human compassion and privily superseded humility.
The promethean insistence on the power of human self-transcendence had been operatively Christian itself, as had been the notion of creative practice, which was strong in German idealism and was carried to its conclusion in Marx's social praxis. Engels asserted that ‘the German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy’. Through that it is also the heir of the humanistic vision in Christianity that laid emphasis upon the mutuality and solidarity of people in actual living relations and upon the value of work as such. Paul enjoined the first Christians: ‘If any would not work, neither should he eat.’ Engels approving recognition of Christianity have remarkedly made ‘notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement’: an oppressed people's movement, slaves and poor people expectant of liberation from bondage, and people against whom the persecution of the ruling groups is directed but who struggle victoriously against it. The working people who responded to the humanist vision of Marx, Engels, and Lenin was responding to a vision that was similar to that of early Christianity, but which are largely medieval and modern Christianity, having become a movement of the ruling and privileged classes rather than of the suffering classes, had abandoned.
Though for Marx humanity and its ideas continuously change, he also believed, following Hegel and Feuerbach, that it has an essence (Wesen). Some things in the human being remained constant: Generic needs, general relations to one's fellow-man and nature, and the laws of development. Such development is intrinsically dialectical, social, and historical, for the human essence is dividual but communal, being ‘the ensemble of the social relations’. Not only human values but also human knowledge is social tasks and achievements. Further, human development is not fixed at a certain limit; it is open-ended, bounded only by species-death. It is this-worldly and not other-worldly-which for Marx and Engels means life-affirming and not life-denying. This concept of the human essence had an affinity to the Christian concept that ‘we are members of one-another’ and that we are creative: Together with others we can transcend the present forms of our thoughts, actions, and values toward a new and fulfilled future.
Such values of Christianity have been articulated principally within the Neo-Platonic framework of Greco-Roman civilization, the dualisms of the medieval period, the individualistic and predestinarian theologies of early bourgeois Protestantism, and the ambiguous liberal theologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Conscious of the material origins of ideologies, Marx and Engels were able to point to the limits of these formulations. At the same time they undertook to express the values of our sociality and creativity, with the necessary changes made, in materialistic, economic, and political terms, though demanding drastic changes to realize them. In this way, Marxism absorbed, negated, preserved, and transformed those values of Christianity.
Because Marx's humanism represents a fusion of empirical humanism (from the Enlightenment) and rationalistic humanism (from German idealism), Marxism has taken two different positions toward theism. Following the French materialists and Feuerbach and applying the ‘sensuous’ test, Marx's early criticisms of humanism stress that theism does not meet this principle of verifiability, and hence is involved in a flight from sensuous, material reality. However, the Hegelian critique also appears: because ‘every historically developed social form [is] in fluid movement . . . and . . . transient’, from this ‘critical and revolutionary’ point of view, the idea of God must be a symptom of alienation and the reification of an abstraction in order to secure comfort in ‘an unspiritual situation’. Drawing support from science, Engels affirms that what is real is not a timeless, isolated, fixed, completed, metaphysical reality that is the Deity, but ‘a process’ or world ‘in constant motion, change, transformation, development.’ Hence a ‘system of natural and historical knowledge’ that is all-inclusive and final, not to mention supernatural knowledge that claims to pass beyond history, is ‘a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectical reasoning’. Ultimate reality and value are to be found neither in the depths of individual subjective experience nor in a supernatural God, but in the processes and relations of social history and physical and biological nature.
In its criticisms of theism, Marxism need not simply point to the supersensuous presumptions of theism. In the spirit both of empiricism and of the rationalism developed in Hegel and still further in modern science, it also can call attention to theism's unwarranted transcendence of relativities and to its violation of the best established principle in the modern mind, that is, the relativity of sensuous knowledge. In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx saw that Feuerbach himself by his mechanical materialism had falsely absolutized the sensuous, static object of contemplation. When it is concrete, that activity, ‘developed by idealism . . . Took to contradistinctions to materialism’, defines what is real. Accordingly, either God must be a concrete activity or some aspect of such activity, or He must be a non-entity.64 Marxism finds no such activity.
Christian theism has also been affected by such developments in the modernity of some physical theory as bounded by an unformidable combination of equations that to some understanding that make change and relativity essential to the comprehension of reality. Among Roman Catholics, Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeck have sought to find divinity by way of our existential and interpersonal situation, while a theology of hope and of the future has been developed by Johannes Metz and Leslie Dewart. This latter theology has its counterpart in the work of Protestants like Jürgen Moltmann and Herbert Richardson. These theological innovations in Catholicism have been evoked in large part by the Ecumenical Council, itself the result of the sensitivity of Pope John XXIII to the material and cultural changes throughout the globe. They have been more dramatic than the changes in Protestant theology, whose existentialist, Kierkegaard, had to wait for the disintegration of bourgeois civilization before his voice was heard. Most Protestant theologians of the present epoch-Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Tillich, Robinson, Macquarrie-in various ways reflect this existentialist, secular trend. The Catholic Teilhard de Chardin and the Protestant Alfred North Whitehead have made heroic attempts to interpret religious concepts within the framework of an ontology required by a universe of process as portrayed in the sciences.
Such new theologies, while secular and relative in many ways, have also sought to take account of the sacred and the absolute. On the other side, Marxism, with Engels and Lenin's insistence on naturalistic or materialistic categories, has never given up the categories of the objective and the absolute. The secularizing of Christian theists learned in part from the worldly successes of Marxism, and the emphasis of the Marxists on a natural or secular absolute, brought Christian theism and Marxist humanism together at the level of theory. There they can begin to understand one-another, and dialogue may become fruitful, and practicably cooperative.
The standard of absolute, ultimate value for the Christian is a transcendent God as revealed in the Jesus Christ of history. Among persons this takes form of forgiving and redemptive love as exemplified in the fellowship of the faithful. Nevertheless, this value is said to be a pattern of personal being independent of such a fellowship and beyond history as its source and end. The status of Jesus Christ is thus both immanent and transcendent, both historical and super-historical. It is known by all those who, through faith from within and grace from without, receive revelation mediated through Scripture and Church tradition. This way of knowing is self-authenticating.
For the Marxist, the standard of ultimate value is a pattern of events immanent in man and in history. Though it has neither a supernatural status nor lies beyond history, it transcends man's present state of development as an order of human fulfilment that is actualized in history past and future, and in history as a whole. This pattern is exemplified by the individual in relation to other persons and to the non-human world of nature, and by humanity as a species in relation to the world of nature. The concrete possibilities of the pattern of value can never be exhausted, since it is of the nature of historical events to be incomplete. This standard is known by the critical-practical method of dialectic, that is, interaction with other persons and with the world in order to transform them in accordance with the demands of human need.
It is a mistake to say either that Christian theology is wholly transcendental, or that Marxism's theory of value is wholly arbitrary or narrowly humanistic. Some Christian theologies, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, have stressed the absolute otherness of God; However such theologies could never consistently take account of the incarnation by which God not only is in history but takes its evils unto himself, suffers, dies, and triumphs over the world's evils. Other Christian theologies, chiefly liberal-Protestant, have stressed the historicity of God, at times reducing Christ to the man, Jesus; however, such theologies have made Christianity simply one relative factor alongside many others. Christian orthodoxy, as established in the early Councils, maintained both positions in balance, i.e., the divine transcendence and historicity.
Similarly, there have been both extremely humanistic and extremely materialistic and necessitarian Marxists; the classical writings may be partially quoted in support of both. If not read carefully and comprehensively, the work of Marx could easily give the impression that values are relative only to class or to a given historical stage of development. His over-all position, however, is that, like facts, values are not only relative and subjective, but also non-relative and objective. Nevertheless, Marx is not always clear on the exact status of these values: are some values unconscious, either in individual or in society? In history, are their impersonal processes, such as machines and processes of industrial production, which participate in human value processes; in what sense are human values subtended by such historical processes or by processes in nature; and what is the relation to pre-human processes of the first distinctively human values arising out of social production?
Because of his concern with historical studies and political practice, the emphasis of Marx's writings is humanistic and historical. At the same time, he is quite aware of the wider background of nature within which history moves. It is this awareness, developed explicitly in Engels, which has led some to transform Marxism into a transcendentalism of nature, according to which nature or physical laws transcend history and completely determine it. This is a historical deviation from Marx, just as mechanical predestinarianism is an a-spiritual deviation from Christian orthodoxy. In both cases’ humanism is sacrificed to mechanism, and the human to the non-human, the free to the necessary, individual project to totalitarian control, and the unformed to the formed.
Within Christianity the impulse toward such transcendentalism has been associated with a variety of motives, such as the longing for unity in Augustine, a sense of vocation in history in Calvinism, and disapproval of liberal views in Jansenism. Marx believed that only a proper grasp of the objective existence of matter. Independent of us and in dialectical motion in both nature and history, can correct the tyrannies of a ‘false consciousness’, false idealism, and false materialism. This objective world with its ‘laws’ is required by Marx for human reality and value. Similarly, Christianity has taught that, except for establishing a correct relation to things other than us and transcending our own purposes, if it is left alone, cannot be saved from its own self-destructive tendencies. In both cases, the irony is that in enforcing the transcendental law, people have sometimes generated bloodier tyrannies than the evils they intended to forestall or rectify.
In opposition to the individualistic and mechanistic cosmologies, Christianity and Marxism hold social or organicist views, in that both are philosophies of community or social order. Because of classes and class struggle, in Christian history socials order has been interpreted ambiguously both as elitist and as democratic in character. On the other hand, Marxism, as a product of late-feudal and modern revolutions, has merely been a theory of unambiguously democratic certainty, also thee deviations have yielded to the temptation of elitism. In fact, the main reason for Marxism's vehement rejection of religion was precisely its alliance with ruling elites and oppressive social orders, and its suppression of a democratic social order. Although the feudal Roman Catholic Italian Church had to reject both capitalism and Protestantism because together they opposed its economic and ecclesiastical power, like Marxism it was compelled in principle to reject all individualism and sectarianism because, from an organicist viewpoint, freedom and dissent carried to the point of fragmentation are great evils. On this point Christianity and Marxism are agreeing. At the same time, should the Church or a socialist society become an instrument of oppression, its prophets must arise to criticize it by its own best standards, and call it back to its historic mission of binding people together in mutual care and labour.
Because Christianity and Marxism also converge in belief in the non-mechanistic, creationist, spiritual attribution of quality values existent to the world and of its history, they give priority in their world-views to the domain of values over that of facts. This means that they look ultimately to practice, and not to theory alone, for the resolution of their problems, though for Christianity, unlike Marxism, this priority ultimately originates outside of history and nature. Both Christianity and Marxism see the universe as a value-universe that is orderly and hence intelligible, in its workings and responsiveness to human creative activity. Human, spiritual history represents the end and significance of natural history. This is finally understandable only by means of spiritual history, though not reducible to its categories. The history of nature displays a tendency toward the history of the human being, who, as the highest expression of value in nature and as ‘crowned with honour and glory’, is endowed, in turn, with ‘dominion . . . over all the earth’69 and with a responsibility for what happens upon it.
We are able to understand, control, appreciate, and thus unite with and elevate nature because we are formed of the same dust and ordered according to the same laws, though possessed of the higher law of spiritual freedom. For Marxism the value-standard is the immanent and ultimately intelligible dialectical law of development; For Christianity it is the transcendent will of God, which, though its natural laws can be understood, is ultimately unintelligible and must be accepted on faith. For the Marxist our transcendence is a function of our immanence since spirit comes from and depends upon dialectical matter; Whereas for the Christian, spirit has a chronological and logical priority over matter that is purely contingent. Here Marxism has struggled to give our transcendent spirit its proper place, whereas all metaphysical transcendentalism attenuates matter and human history. For both, that we must be guided by the provisional, relative ethics and by categorical, absolute morality. However, whereas for Marxism the latter are always progressively revealing it through the former as we approximate to full knowledge of the absolute, Christian thought has emphasized the discontinuity between natural theologies with virtuousness on the one hand, and revealed theology, on the other.
Marxism and Christianity share the view that transcending and determining the individual's present act is one's own past. One’s own imagined future as presently operative, other persons and things of one's particular community and human society, and the established world of nature. In the broad sense of the term, these are all social orders, each of which supports the other. Where for Marxism, however, this sociality in its ultimate dialectical character is a final metaphysical fact, for some traditional Christian theologies, at least, the sociality is contingent. The only necessary fact is Gods who, even as love, is not always thought to need a world outside himself to love. For the Marxist humanist to whom love is equally mutual, in care and creation ever being transformed, love is historical if not a metaphysical necessity. We cannot conceive history without it; More accurately, our own natural history, as the only history we know and that matters, is in its essence the history of loving beings in their struggle to be and to develop their being and to help others to do so.
In Christian orthodoxy the ultimate value, or God, remains essentially unchangeable and impassible in relation to the world. In the Incarnation, the Divine became man, not in order to change or improve the divine nature-for that would be impossible-but either to provide a ransom for the Devil who had humanity in his power, or to pay for the infinite satisfaction for humanity's infinite sin against the divine, or to persuade, by sacrificial example, sinful persons to repent of their sins. In short, the divine entered history to reveal their perfection to imperfect people and to rescue them from the Fall that defines history. The Fall requires an Incarnation and Redemption, just as history requires a super-historical Creation. The Incarnation occurred because, according to the respective theories, God's supreme power, honour, and goodness had been violated by humanity and demanded vindication. Because God cannot suffer and people have fallen beyond self-help, the significance and fulfilment of history lie not in history among people, but outside of history in God alone.
These pre-feudal and feudal views of the Atonement reflect the sharp distinction and separation between the lord and his subjects. The more humanistic view, suppressed but never destroyed by hierarchal power and thought, found God in the very depths of men's hearts, the Living Christ and Emmanuel in the midst of history, recurrently suffering, dying, and rising again to transform persons. The mystical, communal, reformative, apocalyptic, and revolutionary movements within Christianity were alive to the Presence of Christ in history, and derived their energy and inspiration from a sense of that Presence. Such movements fed the modern streams of socialist thought and German idealism, which having converged with such other streams as materialism and science issued, in turn, in the dialectical and historical materialism of Marx.
For Christian Theology the divine or ultimate value became human in order to display the divine more fully and to draw human beings to it. For Marxism, on the contrary, persons approached the divine, understood as an ultimate value already immanently within them as their human potential, in order to become more fully human and draw the divine unto persons. For the first, one is raised by God into eternity; for the other, humanity evolves by its collective struggle from pre-history into genuine human history. For both, there is a qualitative transformation into a new being and a fulfilled, non-alienated life. Once more, though the difference between Christian transcendence and Marxist immanence is evident, historically the difference is not a simple one. Alongside its emphasis on the impossibility of God, Christian theology has given an important place to the sufferings of Jesus, the historical fellowship of the visible and invisible Church as the body of Christ, and the historical continuity of the Church through its apostolic succession, its army of martyrs, and the communion of the faithful. Practically speaking, the belief in God's impossibility as the eternity of the realm of value did not always arrest activity in history; At times it spurred efforts to improve people and their conditions in history. Though this activity might not add to God's superabundant goodness, which for the orthodox Christian is finished and perfected, it might be win for persons’ eternal bliss or participation in that goodness.
Similarly, while for the Marxist value is process and hence ever changing, it manifests at the same time a universal, absolute, objective structure embedded in its various manifestations. This structure does not lie beyond history, but is inherent in history to which it provides the directive norm. The process of the material dialectic rises ideals that both reflect and selectively guide humanity into interactive relations with the world in order to transform these ideals into actualities. Such interactions are themselves dialectic and therefore have awareness; They modify both man and the world so that values are embodied and new values conceived and actualized. Thus, whereas for the Marxist history is a material process of the realization of value, for the Christian value has already been realized outside of history. For the Marxist, the creating of values by which humanity transcends itself is a function of natural history and is contained in it; For the Christian, this transcendent creating lies beyond the limits of history and nature. Whereas the human ideal for the Marxist is to struggle to contribute to the creative historical process, for the Christian the ideal is to seek and find God in eternity. The Christian stresses our dependence upon and determination by God, while the Marxist calls on us to be independent and self-determinative.
Does this difference irreconcilably divide a religious perspective from a scientific one, and separate theism from humanism? ; Might, so, that it does stem from an ancient Platonic-Aristotelian way of conceiving things, as contrasted with the dialectical materialist approach to the world? If, then, that both are one in the same of a regional orientation course. In short, can a religious person hold to dialectical materialism, and can a dialectical materialist be religious? If the answer is no to both, then the remaining question is where the two can converge in belief and cooperate in practice.
In Christian thought evil has been understood as (1) a power or powers resistant to or destructive of God, (2) an unthinkable distribution in power that lays propositional to the order of God's creation, and (3) the absence of good (the view of St. Augustine and others) or of perfection (St. Thomas). Evil finds its expression in the world at large (symbolized by the figure of the Devil) and in the sin and falls of human beings (Genesis 2:4-3:24). In sin the self arrogantly exalts itself above its Creator, and His creation, refusing faith in God. Nonetheless, evil is dependent of the world and God. Embedded in the context of God's created order and creativity, it draws its existence and meaning from its relations within this wider domain of good. Evil obstruction and destruction in humankind represent forms of alienation from God, from self, from others, and from non-human nature. Yet such sin and its alienation are not absolute and final. Human idolatry can be transformed if the sinner, in confession and repentance, will give himself or herself to God, who will grant forgiveness and restoration to a right order. God is the redemptive power in the world, at work in Christ and ‘reconciling the world unto Himself’. He is overcoming evil with good.
Marxism's views of evil are kindred to this position, namely, that there is no absolute opposition between the progressive force in history and the reactionary force; in particular societies this is the opposition of the ruled to the ruling class. Some Marxists, like some Christians, have tended to say that evil people and groups in history will be judged, defeated, and cast into the outer darkness of damnation. In general, however, Marxism is neither Manichaean nor dualistic; it maintains that in the dialectical movements of history opposites are always united, interpenetrate, and transform one another. In this view, evil is transformed (aufgehoben) in the Hegelian sense, that is, in the moving order of history brought from a state of alienation to a state of creative contribution as far as possible.
So far as possible, Marx and Engels argued, socialism should be achieved by peaceful means; Each person should become a ‘midwife’ assisting in the birth of the new society. Struggle with resistant forces, though sometimes violent, cannot always be avoided, for violence will sometimes issue from the ruling groups intent on fighting against change. Marx's attitude toward evil is not radically different from Christian teaching according to which temptations will come, ‘but woe to the man by whom the temptation comes’. The sinner ought to cut off violently the offending member; the money changers ought by force to be driven from the temple. In the face of evil Christianity is not passive nor is Marxism terroristic, but both desire to maintain and to humanize the underlying order of society and history.
Our views of the universe and of history, which stretch beyond our limited capacity to perceive and to comprehend, are reflections and extensions of our own experiences. Our inner life, the images that we gather and store, the concatenations and developments of those images in the consciousness and unconsciousness, the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of connections between them, all represent the source of those world-views we present to ourselves and others. As the inner life or formation of personal identity is an introjection of the world, the construction of a picture of the world's identity is a projection of the inner life of man.
The earliest, most formative, and essential relation of ourselves to the world is our relation to another human being. The ideologies of many religions are ways of dealing with this relation in the most primordial terms of the relation of infant to parentals motivations. Whether the Others be conceived as bountiful mother, a lawgiving father, etc., this relation is conceived in the religions as that of our dependence on the Other. In such a relation each person is seen to be what he or she is, namely a helpless child necessitates of a face-to-face relation of mutual recognition, confirmation, and creation. In the Judaic-Christian religious tradition, the Fall is the individual's separation from this state of innocent bliss through the intervention of our own autonomous activity. From time to time congratulatory and mere unregenerated self-presumptuousness disrupts the relation held of mutuality, the bonds between Self and Other are voluntarily sundered? The consequence is separation, isolation, suffering, and spiritual death-in a word, the lovelessness of hell. The only way for us to be restored to the paradise of love is to acknowledge our dependence on the Other, to confess and repent of our prideful sin, and to commit ourselves once more to that relation ‘in whom we live and move and have our being.’
For the Jews, Jesus, and the early Christians, that relation of Self and Other was always personal: the Divine was defined as a relation whose terms were the Self and Other. The author of the letters of John put this matter succinctly: Beloved, let us love one-another; For love is of God, and he who love is born of God and know in Him. He who does not love does not know God; For God is love.
In the course of Christian history this ideal was sometimes distorted or displaced by a rigid, punitive morality that cowed people through superstition, cruelty, and fear of eternal punishment in hell. Though with the dissolution of civic life under the Empire, people were thrown back to their fundamental relations in families, villages and, in time, feudal estates, these relations remained brief and transient, forever threatened by famine, disease and war. Self became estranged from Other. Accordingly, God was transformed into that Supremely Distant and Totally Other, who was simultaneously inscrutable and all-powerful and sent both good and evil alike on the world. With the periodic upsurge of mysticism among the solitary monks, he was defined as existing in the depths of the Self. In both cases the divine was always defined as an unknown being apart from persons because persons, being parted from their counterparts, could not know who he was. God remained the unconscious representation of the self's mystery to the self; the divine was the alienated expression of human self-alienation.
With the revival of commerce and urban and civic life in Europe in the 10th and 11th centuries, human being’s relational attributions were of one another had commenced a change, and where there is the given choice of change there is chance. Sustained by new food supplies and other necessities for physical existence, the whole institutional structure of secular life began to spread and elaborate itself. The Self rediscovered the Other, and hence itself, in the manifold dimensions of their mutuality: Commercial, industrial, political, linguistic, religious, aesthetic, sensuous, and scientific. The ‘revolutions’ of this secular transformation worked themselves out in every sphere of human life. Often they took two forms, though in much historical writing one form has obscured the other. The most successful form, whose development has been responsible for the writing of such history, was the revolution of the Self against the Other. This expressed the new mercantile movement seeking to break free from traditional feudal restrictions. In Theology, it appears in both human and divine manifestations as a conflict between the insurgent individual and autonomous Self and the Church or totalitarian Other. Hence emerged the preoccupation of philosophers at this time with the problems of the particular and the universal, mysticism and authority, pantheism and classical theism, Manichaeism and God's omnipotence, and the like. After capitalism, and its religion of semi-autonomous Protestantism, had secured a certain autonomy for the Self, these problems were superseded by a more detailed examination of the relation of sin and grace, and of the degree of human freedom alongside that of God's determination of humanity.
The subordinated form of revolution against the totalitarian Other is to be found in the mystical, communal, and apocalyptic sects, commencing with the heretical Cathari and continuing through the recurrent clerical and lay thinkers and movements who demanded and sometimes achieved reform. These groups, gripped by a vision of the early Christian community, wished to return to the pristine fellowship of Self and Other which had infused the life of that archetypical community. They longed to feel Christ as incarnate in people's relations one to another. Although they looked backward for inspiration and remained utopians in their idealism, they were the predecessors of modern secular socialism and the bridge between first-century Christianity and the contemporary world.
Like its antithesis, capitalism, Marxism defiantly asserts Self before the authoritarian Other and proclaims the modern hatred of arbitrary human limitation. At this point the similarity ends, for the capitalistic man still lives under the shadow of his feudal past and feels the vague urgings of conscience to store up merit in self-regarding works. The capitalist ethic is only this harsh and Oedipal conscience made secular and respectable in the name of some human aims; it is a persistent will that makes the Other pure means to Self as end. For the last four centuries the principal problem of Western man has not been the inquisitions and crusades of the Christian Church, but the deprivations and wars inflicted by the capitalistic enterprise on humanity. This enterprise is driven by the need to negate the Other in all forms; it reincorporates in its own behaviour the harsh external conscience it negates; passing over remains arrested at the level of autonomy and initiative, unable and authenticate of the requisite trust of childhood affiliations or forward to the matured determination of Self toward Other. The destiny of the capitalistic spirit, consistently pursued, is the despondency and destructiveness of the fascist state. Forever directed against the Enemy, its ‘collective’ spirit is only a facade for the underlying emptiness of its component individuals. For them God the Other, the Enemy, is transformed into God the Self. Like the feudal Other, such is God, doomed to become an empty void, for its inability to relate lies beyond its redactional foundation as it to is meaningless.
Marx found the answer to this problem neither in that pathological affirmation of Self that fears the absorption of the Self in the Other, nor in that pathological fear of Self that seeks refuge and submission in the Other. Marx's answer was similar to that of the early Christians: Self and Other define and create one another in a developing relation of mutual care and responsibility. The directive of human living is to be found neither in the autonomous Self nor in some Other, whether earthly ruler or heavenly lord, whose nature and purpose are closed to us. It is to be found in the mass of exploited and dispossessed men, who in the particular and universal connections of Self and Other can form a world-wide community of interdependence: ‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ In its continuous unfolding such a community would combine the freedom of the Self with the conditioning care of the Other, the Immanence of individual or social achievement with the Transcendence of history, Independence with Interdependence, Individuality with Universality, and Activity with Receptivity.
In this light, Marxism and Christianity converge at the point of affirming the interdependence and mutual creation of Self and Other. When Christianity asserts that God is Love in such a relation, it means both (1) that God is the relation in virtue of which persons achieve a fulfilment that they alone cannot consciously achieve, and (2) that God is the personal being who is the source and end of the relation, and who accordingly must be the Supreme Other toward which our love is directed. For one to love another means implicitly to love that creative, transforming and saving relation that both enable one to love and make the other lovable. Our personal love for the other person, nonetheless very well intentioned, is always confined by immature development, self-concern and defensive operations that must be broken and restructured by a process coming from beyond the powers of thought and will of the most virtuous person.
One of the stumbling blocks in this Christian thought is the essential fundamental whose associates leave ahead to the spoken exchange with ‘God,’ and through its substantiated possessions bequeathing to philosophy, and hence the tendency to conceive deities as fixed and removed from interpersonal relations. Teilhard's process cosmology has begun to overcome this by using the term ‘divine’ as an adjective that qualifies its operations. Marxism's naturalistic position is that the only personal Others whom we encounter are other persons like ourselves, and that it is a confusion and reification to identify our interpersonal relations with a supernatural or superhuman being. Nevertheless, Marxism implies that as individual persons we can relate to those concrete interpersonal relations of men whose ‘ensembles’ compose the very essence of humanity as a species-being78 and which are the very creators of history. That is, as individuals, we can either understand and facilitate those creative interpersonal relations or remain blind to them and obstruct them.
In Marxists as in Christian thought, these relations are not entirely of our own doing and thinking; They stand over against us and make and break us. Marxism agrees with Christianity that the true and rightful objects of our human devotion are not merely finite, individual people but the creative, loving relations we are enabled to sustain with them, persons come and go, but this creative relation abides. It is this capacity to enter such relations that we really cherish in others. Dating from Jesus' own teachings, like that on the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 and the parable of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25, there has been a humanistic, pragmatic tradition in Christianity. According to this what counts is, not a person's concepts, but one's responses too human need, that is, one's capacity to relate one’s affirmative others. This is the last judgment under which all stand, humanist and theist, Marxist and Christian.
Because Marxist and Christian agree on the essential nature of the Self-Other relation, they are already involved in dialogue. Nevertheless, a dialogue presupposes differences within unity, for it would be meaningless between two who are in accord in every respect. The differences between Marxist and Christian are ample enough to furnish vivifying contrast in the context of a basic agreement.
Christians understand the incompleteness, dependence, and receptivity of human nature; Accordingly, on the one hand, they value human humility, gratitude, reverence, submission, obedience, and confession, and, on the other hand, forgiveness, nurturance, succory, solace, and compassion. Marxists understand the phases of human fulfilment, independence, and activity as accordingly they value self-reliance, resourcefulness, criticism, struggle, and ‘revolutionizing practice.’ Where Christians believe that a person is and remains a child or a finite creature who derives one's being and fulfilment from beyond one’s history, Marxists hold that the person, while not totally self-sufficient, is in essence the maturing creator of history, and that this in turn is both the place and the goal of his fulfilment. Where Christians understand the threat to the self in its own isolation and solitude, and value both man's need of the other and the gift of the other that fulfills that need, Marxists understand the threat to the self in the absorption or oppression of the other, and value the integrity of the self. Where Christians discern in our fulfilment of grace or power at work beyond our own to generate advantageous favour in one's individual and collective life, Marxists emphasize the power of the person's own body and intellect to maximize ‘all right’ and minimize ‘wrong’. Where Christians see our limitations and alienations and tend to stress the tension between the actual and the ideal, Marxists see our possibilities and stress the conquest of his conditions and limitations.
A creative dialogue would have each participant express candidly, freely, and fully his perspectives, listen sensitively to the perspectives of the other, and differentiate and integrate so far as possible the perspectives thus expressed. The differentiation and integration must occur not only in individual persons, but in their relations one to another. In dialogue people change their perspectives in relation to each other; the very integration of qualities, forms, intentions, etc., which defines their personality is defined by its relation to the perspectives comprising the other. Furthermore, these contents of personality are not inert images entertained by an idle mind, but the very forms of our response to others and to the world; they pertain to the world upon which the personality intends to act. As one is known by one's fruits, the point of dialogue is not only to interpret the world but to change it. Hence, the final situation and test for dialogue between Christians and Marxists must be human society itself, with its problems of war, poverty, political tyranny, racism, and cultural deprivation. The forms and extent of the exploitation of people on our planet are urgent enough to destroy us if we do not cooperate in discussion and action to solve them. They are deep and widespread enough to keep us all, theists and hedonist’s coincidingly busy and the human in our dealings with one-another for centuries to come.
Though it has taken different forms, the principle of dialogue is basic to both Christianity and Marxism: the Christian ‘speaking the truth in love’ to friend and foe alike, and the Marxist engaged in the dialectic of critical practice. In the past, these two forms have sometimes seemed diametrically and irreconcilably opposed. The first did not vaunt itself, but were patient and kind, and in suffering took the evils of the world upon itself; The second strove strenuously to change and control the material conditions of the world. However, the present crisis of technology, of nuclear and other genocidal weaponry, and of massive poverty and indebtedness, has brought them closer together. Many Christians living in a secularized world can see the impact of material conditions, while many Marxists recognize the limits and dangers of force in human affairs. Not only has the threat of mutual destruction driven them together; they also share a common faith in the saving value of dialogue between people working in a common cause.
Both Christians and Marxists have also recognized the transforming and revolutionary nature of dialogue and dialectic between persons when it touches them not only in conversation but in action as the outcome and test of conversation. To interact expressively, sensitively, and creatively with other persons and the world is an act of great faith, for it means that one considers one's own system of ideas and values to be subject to the transformation that might emerge in such interaction, generating new insights and new ways of doing things. It means that the reality of the creative, transforming power working between persons and their world takes priority over what they as individual persons and institutions desire and conceive. It means that, although one cannot foresee how he or she and others will be changed, the relation of mutual trust in their communication and common labour provides them with a bond of security that will enable them to tolerate frustration, conflict, and suffering and to rejoice in new problems and truth. The demand and opportunity of our age are dialogue and common labour at all levels, between as many persons and groups as possible. We must learn either to live in this way or to die; we must learn either to love with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, or to face a physical and spiritual hell.
The readiness and willingness to enter dialogue and cooperation are growing on both sides. Recalling the influence of ‘that extraordinary figure’ of Jesus Christ on his political faith and his concentration since youth on ‘the revolutionary aspects of Christian doctrine and of Christ's thought’, Fidel Castro has said: In my opinion, religion from the political point of view is not anaesthetic or a miraculous remedy. It can be an opiate or a wonderful cure to the degree that it is used or applied to defend the oppressors and exploiters or the oppressed and exploited--depending on the way in which one approach the political, social, or material problems of the human being who, apart from theology or religious beliefs, is born into this world and must live in it.
From a strictly political point of view-and I believe that I know something about policies I even think that one can be a Marxist without giving up one's being Christian and can work united with the Marxist Communist to transform the world. The important thing is that, in both cases, they are sincere revolutionaries willing to overcome the exploitation of persons by others and to struggle for the just distribution of social wealth, equality, fraternity, and the dignity of all human beings -that is, to be the bearers of the most advanced political, economic and social consciousness, even though, in the case of the Christians, starting from a religious conception.
The National Conference of Catholic Bishops (USA) has called on the educated Christian to engage in ‘seriously studying’ Marxism. The Bishops criticize Marxism's atheism, anti-transcendence, the economic interpretation of alienation, such as can is an exclusively human eschatology and hope, and the reduction of moral norms to social, revolutionary practice. For all this, they assert, that still the ideological outlook of the communist movement is not the only factor that determines cooperation on the part of Christians. In some areas of universally human concern collaboration with communist governments or communist parties has become a practical necessity. Due to the socialization that Pope John XXIII recognized as one of the distinctive characteristics of our time, modern life requires the cooperation of all men and women of good will. Citizens of a world united by unrestricted technology and instant communication, yet devoid of an effective international authority, has no choice but to seek common approaches and concerted action in attacking global problems.
As we, the very wide and long procession of people in history, do solve our problems and turn to new creative tasks, we shall know more fully the answers to our present questions about humanity and the divine. The very forms in which we pose the questions are limited by our own perspectives. Love moving into the creative dialectic of practice is the only path by which new positions can be attained and our eyes lifted to new horizons. Mysteries that mislead theory find their ultimate solution, if such can be found at all, in reflective practice: Faith without practice is dead. Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart conceived, what is prepared for those who truly practice love, for now we see ourselves and our fulfilment only through a glass darkly, but in the triumphant future we shall see them face to face.
Nietzsche never offers his readers a lengthy, coherent discussion of the role of instinct in human life, but makes brief, frequently contradictory remarks on the subject throughout his works. Additionally, Nietzsche uses the term to refer to two distinct forms of human action - any non-conscious mental process and self-created dispositions to act in which the latter are a species of the former and both are related to the instincts found in animals. In order to clarify Nietzsche's comments on instinct, all three of these usages will be examined in turn.
(1) Instinct as innate animal drives
In common parlance, instinct refers to inborn patterns of behaviour in animals that respond to specific external stimuli. A cat playing with a mouse before killing it or a lioness hunting down a fleeing antelope does not seem to arise from the type of conscious, self-aware choices possible to humans; they are representations of those animals' innate drives. Nietzsche notices and admires the grace and fluidity found in these unconscious animal actions, qualities that are absent in much of human behaviour, due to the misuse and overuse of reason by humans. Nietzsche regards the voice of reason as halting and uncertain and therefore sees that action arising from a conscious process of relational deliberation as similarly halting and uncertain. As a result, the proper wellspring of moral action for Nietzsche is not rational deliberation but something akin to animal instinct. Thus Nietzsche applies the term ‘instinct’ to human action sharing the grace, certainty, and spontaneity of animal action, i.e., to patterns of action originating in unconscious mental processes and to self-created moral dispositions that have become subconscious.
(2) Instinct as unconscious mental processes
In certain passages, Nietzsche uses the term instinct broadly to describe any unconscious mental processes. For example, in a discussion of the frequently-made distinction between the ‘true world’ and the ‘apparent worlds, Nietzsche writes, appearance is an arranged and simplified world at which our practical instincts have been at work; it is perfectly true for us, which is to say, we live, we are able to live in it.’ Because we created the ‘apparent world’ on a buried, subconscious level, Nietzsche considers it to be instinctual.
(3) Instinct as a moral disposition
However, Nietzsche most frequently uses instinct to refer to a specific type of unconsciously mental process - those self-created dispositions that unconsciously give rise to certain types of action. Although these instincts often originate in a conscious process initiated by the individual, they are then internalized and automated, thereby yielding fluid and spontaneous responses to moral situations. Those actions guided by instincts are acted unconsciously on a certain level and are thus deserving of their metaphorical connection to the concept of innate animal drives. It is, of course, this particular moral conception of instinct that is of direct interest to this thesis.
(4) Instinct and the example of the right to make promises
The vast majority of Nietzsche's commentary on instinct is focussed on its relation to rationality and consciousness. However, in, On the Genealogy of Morals, we find a rare explanation of the process of creating instincts embedded within Nietzsche's discussion of the development of the right to make promises. Nietzsche begins this discussion with an examination of the positive force of forgetfulness, which he equates to a door-keeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette’ and without which ‘there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present.’ In opposition to this force is the ‘memory of the will,’ which requires that a man ‘must undergo the fundamentally learnt necessities to distinguish between events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and the means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute’. This memory of the will, then ‘makes men to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable. This memory of the will that allows men to make promises is, in fact, a product of the socialization by the herd to the morality of mores, and so it gives the herd neither the right to make promises nor the true responsibility for those promises.
This is the background against which the instinct of responsibility to one's promises is created in the autonomous individual. In that individual, the conflict between forgetfulness and memory of the will that inhabits a turning-side paradigm of being outdone, such that he ‘has his own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises’. According to Nietzsche, there is in him ‘the proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has at length been achieved and become flesh in him, a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation of humanity comes to completion’. So, ‘the proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom over oneself and fate, has in this case penetrated to the depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct,’ which he without a doubt calls ‘his conscience’.
The instinct created in the sovereign individual is not a moral principle enjoining him to honour his promises; in fact, that ‘morality of mores’ is precisely that which the sovereign individual has overcome. Being that his responsibility flows from his conscience, rather than from social code of ethics to be deliberated about, the sovereign individual spontaneously honours his promises as a natural expression of his inner character.
In this example of the sovereign individual, three distinct elements can be highlighted in the instinct created -its origin, the process by which it is created, and the results, in action, of possessing the instinct. The instinct begins with the individual's conscious, almost bodily awareness of the unique and valuable capacity to honour promises that he created for himself out of the morality of mores. This sense of self-responsibility is, over time, deeply integrated into the very ‘soul’ of the sovereign individual to become his conscience, such that he could not separate himself from it. In concrete action, this instinct result in a certain type of attitude and certain behaviours toward the promises he makes, without thought or question, he honoured those promises, not because of the opinions of his neighbours or fear of negative consequences, but because to do otherwise would be a travesty against his very person.
These three elements found in the instinct of responsibility, relating to its origin, the processes by which it is created, and the results in action, are also found, although in a more general form, in all Nietzschean instincts. First, instincts originate from within the individual, not in response too outside pressures; they are created, with a certain degree of consciousness, by autonomous agents. Second, over time, instincts go beyond the conscious awareness in which they arise, to the depths of subconscious. Finally, the result of this process is the fluid, spontaneous action characteristic of animals.
(A) The origin of instincts
A central element in Nietzsche's conception of virtue is that genuine virtues are self-created, in the sense that the impetus for their creation must lie within the individual rather than from external circumstance. In a comparison of the ‘higher man’ to the ‘herd animal’ in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes the essential constitution of that higher man. The greatest man will be ‘the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man Beyond Good and Evil, the master of his virtues, the superabundant of will’. He will possess ‘the creative fullness of power and mastery’ and ‘the ability to be different’. This comparison highlights the role of self-creation and self-mastery in Nietzsche's ideal; the higher man does not acquire his virtues from outside sources such as teaching or socialization; he creates his virtues for himself. As a type of virtue, instincts followed the same pattern of being created by an initiated process and directed by the individual, although not necessarily controlled. Although we will want to make room for moral insights that are hastened by external events or individuals in our lives in our account of moral dispositions, Nietzsche's focus on self-determination and autonomy will prove useful to that account of moral dispositions.
(B) The process of creating instincts
Nietzsche devotes much attention to the second element of instinct -the process by which instincts are created particularly to the complicated relationship between instinct, consciousness, and the subconscious. In essence, Nietzschean instincts originated in conscious awareness and then transform of becoming validated in the affirmation of the internalized and automated, such that we are no longer particularly aware of possessing or acting on them. The fact that instincts come to reside deep within the individual, rather than on the surface of consciousness makes them far superior to any conscious moral principles. They regulate action better, because they do not depend upon the fumbling deliberation of reason at the moment of moral choice. Additionally, because our instincts contribute to an individual's inner person, they are authentic and genuine in a way that any conscious moral theory adopted or absorbed from others will never be.
Contrary to common thinking, conscious awareness of our motives, for Nietzsche, is not necessarily a virtue. In fact, he regards that which is not consciously intentional in an action as more revealing than an individual's deliberate or professed intentions. In a discussion of the view that the value of an action lie in the intentions behind it, Nietzsche writes, ‘today, when among us immoralists at least the suspicion has arisen that the decisive value of an action resides precisely on that which is not intentional in it, and all that in it that is intentional, of all that can be see, known, 'conscious,' consciously still belongs to its surface and skin - which, increase excessively upon the smooth exteriors, in that it betrays something but conceals still more?’ This perspective on the meaningfulness and value of intentionality even leads to the idea that the reasons for which an instinct was created, i.e., the original intentionality of an instinct, is not particularly important. Because instincts lose much of their intentionality in the process of internalization, they are not subject to the great suspicion Nietzsche accords to consciousness and reason.
Nietzsche's views on intentionality and his positive evaluation of instincts are well-integrated into his broader perspective on the role of reason in moral action, such that the former cannot be understood but through the latter. Throughout his works, particularly The Will to Power, Nietzsche adamantly criticizes the common ideal of moral action achieved through a rational, methodical process of deliberation. Nietzsche characterizes this view as the idea that ‘one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark desires by producing the permanence of daylight -the daylight of reason. One must be prudent, clear, bright at any cost; Every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward’. Rational deliberations in moral choice, according to Nietzsche, are ‘merely tentative’ and ‘show a far lower standard of morality’ than thinking and action directed by instincts. Conscious thinking is pained, labourious, and unwieldy; it ought to be considered only a stepping stone toward moral action, as an aspect of human life to be overcome, through the creation of instincts. In fact, at times, Nietzsche advocates that we do more than simply use instincts to go beyond rationality and consciousness, that actually lose our awareness of the reasons for those instincts. Nietzsche writes ‘we must in fact seek the perfect life where it has become least conscious (i.e., least aware of its logic, its reasons, its means and intentions, its utility) the demand for a virtue that reasons is not reasonable’.
Despite this strong language against any intentionality in moral action, Nietzsche is not wholly rejecting the power of reason in moral decision-making. He is vehemently opposed to the ‘return to nature’ advocated by Rousseau, because it constitutes regression rather than its overcoming. In the section of Twilight of the Idols entitled ‘Progress in my sense,’ in which Nietzsche differentiates himself from Rousseau, he writes, ‘I too speak of a 'return to nature' although it is not really a going-back but a going-up - up into a high, free, even frightful nature and naturalness’ That ‘going-up’ represents the overcoming of both reason and animality made possibly by self-created instincts. In other words, Nietzsche's disdain for reason and conception of virtue as arising from instinct does not constitute ‘a reversion to the level of the 'beast of prey’.
Nietzsche's view that instincts represent an overcoming of reason, rather than a regression into the animality, tempers some of his more extreme denunciations of reason. For example, Nietzsche comments that the ‘absurd overestimation of consciousness’ and the association of the unconscious with ‘falling back to the desires and senses’ and ‘becoming the primordial animal’ by philosophers resultants in the erroneous view that ‘every advance lies in an advance in becoming conscious, whereby every regression in becoming unconscious’ Given his sharp criticism of Rousseau, Nietzsche ought not be understood as advocating the exact opposite perspective, i.e., that blind unreason is necessarily an advance over consciousness. Reminisces for arguing that the process of becoming less conscious through creating instincts is a great advance over attempts rationally to calculate the moral course of action. Nevertheless, there are aspects of Nietzsche's attacks on reason that are deeply troublesome to his account of instincts because they prevent him from distinguishing between emotions and instincts.
Although most of Nietzsche's discussion of instinct focuses on the relationship between instinct and reason, he does occasionally speak of creating instincts through the passions. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes, ‘once you suffered passion and called them evil. Nonetheless, it now seems that you have only your virtues left: They grow out of your passions. You commended your highest goal to the heart of these passions: Then they became your virtues and passions you enjoyed’. In this instance, instincts are not created by the usual process of animalizing reason, only the spiritualising of the passions. Thus, Nietzschean instincts are not necessarily created by one and only one process; There are variational possibilities in that their becoming a process of creation.
© The action produced by instincts
Moving now from the origin and creation of instincts to the final element of instinct, Nietzsche regards the type of action made possible through instincts as the fluid and spontaneous action found in animals. Nietzsche's basic perspective is summed up in his expressed words that genius resides in instinct, as well of belonging goodness also. One acts perfectly when one is to act instinctively. Moral action is the natural outcome of a set of healthy, well-formed instincts.
In his book Nietzsche, Richard Schacht illustrates the animal-like grace of Nietzsche's conception of instinctual action through a comparison between instinct and the body's ‘knowledge’ of a certain set of movements. In learning physical tasks, such as typing or playing musical instruments, Schacht writes, one may be said to know how to do them once one has learned how to execute certain rudiments of them, but so long as one's mastery of them is only partial, one's performance will be halting, tentative, uncertain, and flawed. One is still in the position of having to think about how various procedures are and must be mediated by one's consciousness.
Only when one has been able to ‘dispense with the mediation of conscious deliberation and reckoning at each step of the way’ does ‘one's engagement in the activity [take] on the appearance of complete 'naturalness'’. A person who has made an activity ‘second nature’ or ‘instinctual’ does not lose consciousness, accept, that Schacht points out, often experiences ‘a higher degree of psychic intensity and sensitivity’. Instinct creates this naturalness in action; acting morally becomes second nature, intrinsic to whom we are, rather than something that reasons must force us to do.
Nietzsche's theory of instincts, then, can be summed up as follows. The work of the reason is hesitant and labourious, while animal instincts are blind and lacking in self-direction and self-control. Instincts unify the spontaneity and beauty of animal action with the intentionality and self-mastery of rational action, by internalizing and automatizing certain types of moral actions . . . The result is that, ‘so long as life is ascending, happiness and instincts are one’.
Nietzsche's account of instinct, as compelling at it is, faces serious challenges. To begin with, the moral stratification of men into higher and lower types, which we find throughout his ethics, also permeate his theory of instincts, thus unnecessarily limiting the application of his theory to a few rare individuals. A more significant problem, however, lies in Nietzsche's view that the genuinely moral agent ought not be aware of the reasons, logic, and intentions of his instincts, because it prevents Nietzsche from differentiating between mere emotional responses and genuine instincts, as well as hampers and severely complicates the development of a real method by which old instincts can be overturned in favour of new ones. Although the problems posed by Nietzsche's focus on moral stratification within humankind can be resolved, the unconsciousness that Nietzsche advocates placing between moral action and the reasons for that action will strip Nietzsche's theory of instincts of much of its force and power.
(I) Nietzsche's assumptions of moral stratification
Much of Nietzsche's moral philosophy depends upon a division of men into higher and lower types, into the master and the slave or into the beast of prey and the lamb. This form of stratification is almost deterministic; The herd and the nobles are set, well-defined groups in which individuals remain. There is no gradual process of moral growth, only perhaps the rare man who breaks free from the ‘morality of mores’ to becomes a higher form of life. This stratification permeates Nietzsche's perspective on instincts, because instincts are so intimately bound up with the ideals of control and self-mastery found in the supramoral individual. In the discussion of the sovereign individual who creates an instinct of responsibility in On the Genealogy of Morals, for example, such an individual, clearly rising to overcome the morality of custom, is a rare phenomenon. The creation of such an instinct requires such an attenuated sense of self-awareness and self-mastery that it be only attainable to a few; the rest, ‘the feeble windbags who promise without the right to do so,’ do not have the power even to create such an instinct for themselves.
This moral stratification is unwelcome essentially because a normative account of moral decision-making ought to have a wider audience than the rare supramoral individual, who, in all likelihood wouldn't need or want a philosopher's judgment of how moral choices ought to be made. Those ‘lower’ individuals who struggle with moral choices might be able to use instincts in order to become more self-determined and spontaneous in their actions. Placing Nietzsche’s moral stratification on the periphery of his theory of instincts would not be particularly difficult, however, such that, although the creation of instincts would necessitate some degree of self-disciple, sovereignty, and self-awareness, an individual would not have to be fully supramoral in order to benefit from the power of moral instincts. The power, efficacy, and authenticity of these instincts would, in all probability, be dependent upon degree to which Nietzschean virtues were present in that individual. Nevertheless, instincts could still be effectively created and used to achieve moral action, even by that Nietzsche would consider being lesser men
(II) Differentiating Nietzschean instincts from simple emotions
The moral stratification found in Nietzsche's ethics, however, is not the most formidable challenge to Nietzsche's account of instincts. It is Nietzsche's view that ‘we must in fact seek perfect life where it has become least conscious, i.e., least aware of its logic, its reasons, its means and intentions, its utility that is most troublesome, emphasis added. Such a gulf between the origin of instincts in consciousness and the unconscious expression of them would prevent individuals from properly and easily differentiating between simple (non-moral) emotional responses and genuine, self-created instincts. Because our passions do resemble instincts and, in fact, our instincts can be seen as a particular type of passion, we must remain aware, on some level, of the intentionality behind instincts in order too properly separate instinct from emotional responses that do not provide the moral guidance as instincts do. Additionally, critical examination of the instincts possessed by individuals and the entire process of overturnings old instincts in favour of new ones would be impossible with the separation of instinct from intentionality that Nietzsche advocates.
The passions do not hold the moral weight of Nietzschean instincts. Emotional responses, whether in the form of pleasure or blind rage, do not necessarily reflect an individual's deeply-held moral values; They often arise from socialized beliefs or superficial attitudes. We can often only differentiate instincts form (other) passions by retaining an awareness of the purpose of the instinct, of the reasons for creating the instinct for ourselves. Instincts are consciously created in order to serve a specific moral function, namely enabling spontaneous moral action in response to specific types of situations. It is, however, precisely this critical consciousness and intentionality that Nietzsche believes individuals ought to separate themselves as exampled from its subjective matters and physical theories. Based on his comments in The Will to Power, we ought to become completely unconscious as to the reasons why we have the instincts we do. However, if we do make ourselves unaware of the justification for our instincts, then we cannot determine whether any particular emotional response is the result of caprice, socialization, or instinct. Therefore, although we still may act spontaneously, with animal-like grace and speed, the awareness and intentionality behind our actions vanquish as we no longer have a method of moral decision-making which results in moral outcomes of choices.
It is not the case that an account of moral dispositions requires an individual to be aware, at any given time, of the reasons for the dispositions she has or even to know when she is acting on those dispositions. Still, an individual must have that knowledge available to her consciousness in order to engage in the self-reflection required for genuinely self-directed moral decision-making.
This position taken by Nietzsche on the distance that ought to arise between instincts and intentionality also would effectively prevent the moral growth naturally resulting from an overturning of old, obsolete instincts in favour of new, life-relevant ones. Although many of our moral dispositions remain constant through changes in our lifetimes, others are refined or completely overhauled. New dispositions are constantly created in the wake of new relationships, new jobs, or simply the fact of growing older. An individual might, for example, realize that she is too argumentative in intellectual discussions, thus impeding good philosophical discussion. In response to this realization, she might try to cultivate an instinct for joint philosophical exploration and jettison the old instinct for appositional debate. These sorts of changes are inherent to life and must be taken into consideration, even promoted, in a normative account of moral decision-making.
If however, the ideal that we are trying to achieve is a lack of awareness of the intentionality behind our instincts, then we have no standard by which to judge whether our instincts are serving us or whether they have put us on the path of descending life. We could not reflect upon what our instincts were created to achieve and whether they are actually achieving results for which they were designed. For example, under Nietzsche's ideal, a woman who was being taken advantage of by ‘friends,’ because of her instinct for benevolence and generosity toward others, would not be able to examine and change what was wrong with the moral situation. Because she had driven her reasons for her benevolence from her consciousness, she would not be able to reflect upon at what end benevolence was aimed to accomplish or examine the ways in which that instinct was harming her. Perhaps she could engage in a long chain of analytical reasoning to determine how best to modify her instinct, but at that point having retained some awareness of the intentionality behind her instincts would have been more useful for her.
Nietzsche could respond to this particular criticism by arguing that old instincts are easily overturned by new ones. Nonetheless, that without any awareness of the intentionality of instincts, it is unclear why new instincts would arise in the first place or how an individual could tell, if they did emerge, whether they were essentially in the service of life than the old instincts.
These criticisms of Nietzsche, which arise out of his strong stand against rationality and conscious awareness in ethically decision-making, do not fully undermine his account of moral dispositions. His insistence that instincts are self-created and freely chosen, rather than unconsciously absorbed from society, is essential to an account of moral dispositions that values self-determination and autonomy. Additionally, the connection that Nietzsche makes between instinct and the smoothness and spontaneity of animal action is essential for a conceptualization of instinct as integrating rational judgment and emotional motivation. Nevertheless, an alternative to the relationship that Nietzsche construes between moral dispositions and conscious intentionality would greatly strengthen the account of moral dispositions. Aristotle offers such an alternative, for he posits a much stronger connection between moral dispositions and rational deliberation.
The psychological genre as it relates to sociologically and medicinal matter has gained an increasing amount of scientific approval. Impartiality and the scientific method are both integral components to a psychologist's mode of practice. However, even the most esteemed of psychologists can only speculate at what makes human beings act the way they do. Absolutes play no function in psychology. Everything is relative and open to conjecture. Theologians give us their visions or thoughts about life. In the field of psychology, there have been many different regions of interest and speculation. Psychoanalysis has been the pinnacle of arenas to examine within the vast field of psychology. Psychoanalysis has been an area that Carl Jung has explored, critiqued and perfected in his lifetime. Jung was not alone in his exploration of the psyche; there were many other psychoanalytic perspectives as well. Carl Jung was said to have been a magnetic individual who drew many others into his circle. Sigmund Freud was Carl Jung's greatest influence. Although he came to part company with Freud in later years, Freud had a distinct and profound influence on Carl Jung's psychoanalytic perspectives, as well as many others. Within the scope of analytic psychology, there exist two essential tenets. The first is the system in which sensations and feelings are analysed and listed by type. The second has to do with a way to analyse the psyche that follows Jung's concepts. It stresses a group unconscious and a mystical factor in the growth of the personal unconscious. It is unlike the system described by Sigmund Freud.
Analytic psychology does not stress the importance of sexual factors on early mental growth. The best understanding of Carl Jung and his views regarding the collective unconscious are best understood in understanding the man and his influences. In keeping with the scope and related concepts of Carl Jung, unconscious is the sum of those psychic activities that elude an individual's direct knowledge of himself or her. This term should not be confused either with a state of awareness, that is, a lack of self knowledge arising from an individual's unwillingness to look into himself or herself (introspection), nor with the subconscious, which consists of marginal representations that can be readily brought to consciousness. Properly, unconscious processes cannot be made conscious at will; Their unravelling requires the use of specific techniques, such as free association, dream interpretation, various projective tests, and hypnosis.
For many centuries, students of human nature considered the idea of an unconscious mind as self contradictory. However, it was noticed by philosophers such as St. Augustine, and others, as well as early experimental psychologists, including Gustav Sechner, and Hermann Von Helmholtz, that certain psychological operations could take place without the knowledge of the subject. Jean Sharcot demonstrated that the symptoms of post-traumatic neuroses did not result from lesions of the nervous tissue but from unconscious representations of the trauma. Pierre Janet extended this concept of ‘unconscious fixed ideas’ to hysteria, wherein traumatic representations, though split off from the conscious mind, exert an action upon the conscious mind in the form of hysterical symptoms. Janet was an important influence on Carl Jung, and he reported that the cure of several hysterical patients, using hypnosis to discover the initial trauma and then having it reenacted by the patient, was successful. Josef Breuer also treated a hysterical patient by inducing the hypnotic state and then elucidating for her the circumstances that had accompanied the origin of her troubles. As the traumatic experiences were revealed, the symptoms disappeared. Freud substituted the specific techniques of free association and dream interpretation for hypnosis. He stated that the content of the unconscious has not just been ‘split off,’ but has been ‘repressed,’ that is forcibly expelled from consciousness. Neurotic symptoms express a conflict between the repressing forces and the repressed material, and this conflict causes the ‘resistance’ met by the analyst when trying to uncover the repressed material. Aside from occasional psychic traumas, the whole period of early childhood, including the Oedipus situation or the unconscious desire for the parent of the opposite sex and hatred for the parent of the same sex, has been repressed. In a normal individual, unknown to himself or herself, these early childhood situations influence the individual's thoughts, feelings, and acts; in the neurotic they determine a wide gamut of symptoms which psychoanalysis endeavours to trace back to their unconscious sources.
During psychoanalytic treatment, the patient's irrational attitudes toward the analyst, referred to as the ‘transference,’ manifests a revival of old forgotten attitudes toward parents. The task of the psychoanalyst, together with the patient, is to analyse his resistance and transference, and to bring unconscious motivations to the patient's full awareness. Carl Jung considered the unconscious as an autonomous part of the psyche, endowed with its own dynamism and complementary to the conscious mind. He distinguished the personal from the collective unconscious; the later he considered to be the seat of ‘archetypes’ -universal symbols loaded with psychic energy.
As new approaches to the unconscious came about, Jung introduced the word association test, that is, spontaneous drawing, and his own technique of dream interpretation. His therapeutic method aimed at the unification of the conscious and the unconscious through which he believed man achieved his ‘individuation,’ the completion of his personality. Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung's concepts of the unconscious have provided a key to numerous facts in psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and sociology, and for the interpretation of artistic and literary works. (Ellenberger) Hypnosis has contributed largely to our understanding of psychoanalysis. Carl Jung understood this and utilized hypnosis throughout his many experiments and tests. In recent times, our understanding of the unconscious has been expanded due to experimental hypnosis and as well projective psychological tests. It has been observed that Jung's relations with the other significant people in his life appear to have been as unsatisfactory as his own. It has been observed that Jung despised his pastor father as a weakling and failure and had mixed feelings about his mother. After Jung broke with Freud, his former collaborator and mentor, Jung went on to develop his own psychological system. This incorporated a number of key concepts that included the collective and conscious, the repository of mankind's psychic heritage, and realm of the archetypes -inherited patterns in the mind that exist through time and space. Then there were the anima/animus, the image of contrasexuality in the unconscious of each individual, and shadow, the repressed and wanted aspect of a person. There is also the theory of psychology types, i.e., introverts, and extraverts, which influenced William James' dichotomy of tough and tender minded individuals. Jung also developed his theory of individuation, which holds that each individual's goal in life is to achieve his own potential. These theories on the different approaches to psychoanalysis each have valid points. As such, theories will always have to deal with paradigmatic assumptions. These are ideas that the theorist has taken for granted as facts. An example is Freud's notion that women suffer from a lack of self-esteem or self worth all their lives because of penis envy. Freud's assumption possibly could have been derived for being merely because of the time when he lived, and it was a time when women were treated as second class citizens. Freud's assumption that sex is the driving force behind everything could also be a product of his times. Sexual feelings were often repressed. The problem with paradigmatic assumptions is that each person grows up in a different culture and some theories do not apply to everyone. The problem with psychology remains that it is not an exact science. Though Jung's ideals may have been moulded by Freud and further critiqued and perfected, it may further be perfected in the future. Such is the arena of science, an ever-changing, dynamic field that undergoes much scrutiny and much refinement.
All we really know about feeling is: it is only expressed within our own minds, the feelings we understand as sensory impressions seem to draw our attention to the material world around us; pain leaves us little choice to focus on anything other than the unique material object in the real world, our own body, and sensibilities that spread off the feeling by equally establishing by its owing reflections that does not endure its own pain nor neurological affiliations, indicate the current emotional tone of our own thoughts and consciousness. While this is probably, all unconscious understandings need immediately to grasp a difference between feelings representing real conditions and their meanings to ourselves, we can only share a model of unconscious thought processes if these differences are translated into rational terms. If we discount moralized rationalizations of feeling experiences to isolate a purely rational conception of what our feelings are trying to tell us, there is no choice in where to look for the meanings that will replace them; we must turn to an introspective evaluation of feeling already recognized as leading to an individuated personal value structure. An awareness of this possibility always seems advisable when considering the worth of unshareable ideas, but there is something a little different about personal rationalizations of profoundly instinctual values - accepting them as true doesn’t entail denial of established rational conceptions there are any conceptions of emotionally felt meanings that meet the standards for shareable rational truth. All we are doing when considering unconscious values as they will be described in this model, is looking for a way to overcome an impasse created when obviously really human experiences are beyond representation in purely rational terms - and if this sound’s familiar, we need look no further than moral values to find an everyday example of already doing it. This is where the risk of individuation in an investigation like this can be found, in individuating our personal perspective on the moral meanings of emotion experiences. It’s an important factor to be sure, but whether one sees the source of our moral sense in an innate human conscience, or ressentiments embedded in our personal value structures during early childhood (as this model does), by the time a mind can understand the complexities of the conception that will follow, if shared moral norms are not believed to be unquestionably necessary in human interactions (as this model’s supports), they will never be. This leaves us with only one real issue to deal with; if we don’t look into our own mind for an understanding of instinctually formulated feeling values, we must live with the conception our rational thoughts will produce - ‘one would like to say: Human mental life can’t be described at all; it is so uncommonly complicated and full of scarcely graspable experiences.’ While this is probably the most reasonable position, a highly rational mind can take when considering the human mental experience, this comment by Ludwig Wittgenstein is not typical of his viewpoint. His carefully considered comments and questions more often point out the rationally understandable aspects of confusing mental experiences; Chosen between the complications and complex relationships is the existent simultaneous presence that await to feelings, experiences, and consciously understandable values, whereby a collection of his observations (quotes without notation of an author) are included in the following. However, understanding unconscious values as this model sees them actually employed in unconscious thought, means each of us must find our own way to grasp them as they are actually experienced in our minds; Which leaves us with the uncomfortable prospect of looking for them in a form that cannot be communicated to, or verified by, anyone else. Science will eventually explain the how, why and what of the mortality will innately assemble by some sorted cognation for life will never exhaust it, and those who have no immediate need for an answer can await the presence to the future, for its careful methods to come up with a clear description everyone can share. In the meantime, those of us with a more pressing need can avoid an entirely personal interim understanding by relating what we find to mental phenomena we can safely assume are, in a general sense, the same in our own minds as they are in others; Like the mental image/feeling relationship Wittgenstein’s comments, and Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment as well, seem to establish as something we all find in consciousness at times. It would have the course of been comforted by knowing what physical processes are creating the things of our consciousness, and what sensory ability then makes us aware of them, but this model aspires to nothing more than a description of the role mental phenomena play in helping us deal with reality. Consequently, its conception of underlying physical processes can be metaphorical rather than real.
There are any number of philosophical and theological reasons we can find for the existence of feelings in consciousness and yet, if we leave emotion aside for a while, one seems particularly relevant here; Because ‘pain could be regarded as a kind of tactile sensation’, but it is not what we would describe as a tactile experience in the realm of consciousness. All tactile experiences in a given moment - from the pain of a toothache, to sensations arising from a breeze passing over exposed skin - are included in the flood of real time impressions continuously bringing us a comprehensive grasp of current real conditions. Simultaneously representing all of it in the images and feelings of consciousness cannot give us our best understanding of reality however; it would overwhelm our current thoughts with mostly commonplace data; while feeling pain like any other tactile impression would inhibit our ability to isolate an immediate personal threat in current sensory data. A process that edits and separates the sensory impressions coming to consciousness must exist somewhere in our thought processes, because the results are apparent when we compare a recollection with an original visual impression - ‘the tie-up between imaging and seeing is close, but there is no similarity.’ What we actually see is more comprehensive and robust, while recalled images seem clearly to highlight the data we need to understand an object’s meaning in the context of the thought it’s related kin by some sortal formality that is addressed only through and by itself. Because the process for accomplishing this is beyond conscious recognition, it’s an unconscious function that presumably would, in a model of thought employing only one thought process, similarly simplify representations for all of this in the language of unconscious thought as well. Whether simplified or not felt values would still be indistinct, distracting and confusing and yet, if the sensory information being confused highlights what’s instinctually important, unconscious thought would then be a medium in which a limited number of currently meaningful feeling values are unavoidably mingled, in essence confused, to establish a combined impression of everything being sensed in a given moment (reality as a whole). This perspective makes what we feel in consciousness much more than an accidental by-product of brain processes; it’s a meaningful representation of current conditions that extends our human cause and effect logic, by juxtaposing values that cannot be quickly related to each other with physically connected memory associations. We can physically connect them if they become consistently relevant to each other, creating another among the countless experience-proven sets of associations existing in our memories, but when unusual conditions arise, we cannot rely on rigidly ordered remembered data; we need sensory qualities tailored to represent unfamiliar conditions. In such circumstances, an ability to find and understand what is currently important is paramount, so both feelings and images alike would be more clearly understandable if they did not include all of the information gathered by our senses, as is actually the case when images in our minds do not include enough information to get confused with concurrent pictures of the world. Whether it’s the difference, we see in actual and recalled visual images, or one we feel between tactile sensations representing a breeze and pain, the mind and brain seem to share a closed-loop representational system for sensory data that is closely related to, but not identical with, the full range of sensations produced by sensory organs.
Individual values in the mind/brain representational system must be created and edited somehow, and without proof of how it really works, the best we can do is represent this process in a way that accounts for what we do understand about these processes. We know the values of consciousness are related to physical brain processes somehow, because people who experience physical brain (memory) damage also experience a change, of one sort or another, in the value mix coming into their consciousness. Our model assumes this mind/brain relationship exists at the level of individual memories - each physical memory being converted into a representation compatible with the intangible things of thought. Whatever information our senses discover begins its existence as personal knowledge when an energetic sensory signal interacts with the living brain tissues this model describes as perceptual memories. As a physical process the assumption is this: sensory information reaches the brain as many specific and separate signals, each of which is an elemental part of a noticeable quality - a vertical line would arrive as a set of specific elemental parts (signals) that in a rational sense, would come together to represent understandable line qualities like width, orientation, duration and colour. Each elemental part of a noticeable quality is stored in a separate perceptual memory site retaining a representation of that part alone; so any sensory quality or object we may require in unconscious thought, or even conscious images, is constructed from an associated set, or pattern of these one-element memory sites. Because individual memory sites can store only a single, very basic elemental part of sensory data in this scheme, any memory in a pattern representing one object can be part of any other object (pattern) that includes the same elemental part - a line element representing part of a curve in the pattern representing our sensory grasp of an egg’s shape, would represent the same part of a curve in all others.
Translating these wholly physical events into the values of consciousness is a role played by feelings that are generated when the tiny energy potentials of physical brain processes stimulate a microscopic memory site. It’s a feeling only strong enough to contribute a consciously indistinct feeling value to consciousness, and to keep descriptions of these representations of memory stimulations clearly separate from familiar, consciously understandable sensory qualities - loud, red, sour, smooth or toothache - the feelings arising from memory stimulations, which this model sees as individually too faint for even an unconscious grasp, are described as perceptual feelings. Because they originate in groups representing the pattern of physical memories needed to store all of the individual elemental parts of a particular sensory quality, the pattern of perceptual feelings produced would, if we could isolate them, represent the same sensory quality as a value in the feeling language of unconscious thought. This conception describes a memory site like any other object; a thing make real through sensory impressions of it, but the sensory ability that detects the feelings we find in our consciousness remains beyond our understanding. Still, whatever eventually does prove to be the mechanism bringing us an awareness of our own feelings and consciousness must conform to a basic truth of human knowledge: in order to communicate the existence of anything we must eventually ground our proof in an ability to grasp its reality with our senses - we must be able to feel it. ‘We learn to describe objects, and thereby, in another sense, our sensations.’ In fact, the only mental values not already represented by feelings of one sort or another are rational images, facts, and ideas. If this outline of how they are created proves to be a valid metaphor only allows one to an alliance with the self-gratification. Yet rational values will join everything else in reality and become conceivable as essentially feelings as well. ‘The ground of perception precedes all intellectual things, all philosophy, and it is the first assumption linking inner and outer things simultaneously . . .
Perception remains a largely mystical experience when we recognize the impressions of reality we see in our minds are mental images created to represent them in thought, rather than pictures of it. Because the physical process that creates them remains unknown, this proposal for how thought works are limited to the mental representations, we find in our thoughts - one value structure to represent reality, and another for our knowledge of it. Because it is by compatibility with an underlying language that must include both. In the language of unconscious thought proposed by this model, vanishingly faint perceptual feelings represent everything we can sense in the real world of objects, events and ideas - from chemical adjustments in the brain, a change in the quality of light entering the eye, to the softness, weight, taste or pain we feel when in contact with an external object. They represent the truth about reality in a multitude of elemental bits that form patterns unconscious thought processes then employ as for differing sensory value qualities; As a result, the patterns they form don’t represent distinctly different ideas like we find in rational thoughts; they are feelings. If we try to keep track of the feeling value (pattern) representing a particular sensory quality, or the collections of patterns representing different objects in each of many concurrent thoughts, the feeling values of unconscious processes run into the same problem rational processes would if we could think several simultaneous conscious thoughts, all using the same value structure -confusion. Our model’s solution to his problem will eventually dispense with the idea of separate unconscious thoughts and values altogether; in a sense, embrace confusion by mixing everything we can feel into a single pattern representing all of the information currently being gathered from reality, current thoughts, and the endless supervision of body controls carried out in unconscious processes as well. It’s an undivided reality represented by all perceptual memories currently in consciousness, and it feels like the constantly evolving sensory aspect of self-aware existence, from the perspective of the sense currently dominating our sensory data stream - a pervasive taste, smell, sound, and particularly pains, can dominate the reality of consciousness; However, it’s usually our current visual image. While this generalized feeling experience must serve as the unconscious representation of reality from this perspective, the memories producing it retain their integrity in associative groups related to individual thoughts in underlying physical processes. When stimulated, these associated physical perceptual memories come into consciousness as a wide variety of sensory qualities, which seems to indicate the individual perceptual feelings creating sensory values might include a range of feeling tones as well. We do not know this to be the case however, and without a need to identify specific elements in this model’s representation of unconscious reality, which will become more apparent later, modelling each perceptual feeling as a different value adds a conceivable imaginary, surely daunting layers of complexity. Instead, the model opts for clarity by simply representing perceptual feelings that are always beyond our grasp anyway, as identical; While the patterns they create account for the describable differences in feeling values, we find in consciousness.
Individual perceptual memories represent an endless variety of sensory elements, each a specific interchangeable part of reality that is routinely incorporated into a wide variety of familiar qualities (patterns), which are then understandable parts in mental images of really remembered events. They can also be elemental parts in images that transcend the truths of any real experience, as in dreams, fantasies, and the creative acts that create something new from existing and familiar parts. Yet most of the time, the feelings arising from perceptual memories aggregate into patterns that simply allow our thoughts to distinguish red from blue, straight lines from curves, horizontal from vertical and, if one has learned to differentiate them, Chenin Blanc from Chablis. Perceptual feelings do not establish which colour or wine we like best or even why they differ, they combine to create distinct values that allow our unconscious thoughts to tell them apart without recourse to rational descriptions. They are faint, nondescript values combining to represent real things unconscious thoughts need for instinctual understandings of causes (objects) that may or may not eventually appear in a conscious thought or noticeable sensory impressions. An unconscious representation like this wouldn’t look like an object as it appears in conscious thought, but it would otherwise unconsciously feel like it through representations of sensory impressions we will invariably experience when we encounter it. They cannot be the values that determine whether we desire or want to avoid an object either because, as Wittgenstein observed about the words we see and hear, they ‘should explain only in the stream of life’. Perceptual memories determine nothing beyond the truth of existence, so whenever we hear a word - red, bright, doctors, down -it can sometimes cause us to feel fear, and sometimes joy. To understand unconscious representations of our changing affinities and aversions to particular truths, we must look to more subjective feelings that have little to do with the shareable realities found by less than of what contained the greater of an equal neurological ability.‘The idea is that although no doubt is possible in the case of what the senses tell us, there is always a doubt possible as to interpretation.’
Subjective feelings are evaluations ultimately based on each individual’s varying reactions to what is sensed rather than its bare truth value -it is the difference between the sensory truth of a person’s existence when we see them, and the feeling of how that person affects our life -affection, jealousy, respect, fear, curiosity a message conveyed by emotion. A real object that has been experienced before is represented by an established pattern of perceptual memories and when current sensory impressions stimulate them, they produce a pattern of feelings to represent it in thought, which means the mind must utilize a clearly different type of feeling value to represent what we think about the prospect of that object continuing to generate effects on us. If the object is far away and sensed only by sight, current sensory data cannot convey pain or any other instinctually meaningful tactile value because there has been no physical contact, but it can bring anticipatory anxiety to consciousness. For this to happen, we must be capable to occasion of our ability to contribute, and as yet, the presence of the unknown (future) experiences within to occur the internationalities that give rise to cause harm or satisfy as needed. When we think rationally, ‘An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions’; while an unconscious dialogue between one kind of feeling representing external conditions and another representing their personal meanings, cannot symbolize some of these more subtle rational understandings. In the simple language of feeling, if a rock in ones paths are not treated as having an intent to cause harm, it’s likely we will get proof it had one when it trips us - and because experience is the only proof with instinctual meaning. We will have to trip over a few unconsciously to understand their intent. Our instincts eventually determine that rocks intend to force us into the instinctual reactions our experiences prove are necessary to avoid falling afterward, and because the unconscious self-realization, producing the immediate reactions that cannot include complex deliberations when they must quickly determine the ill-reasoning implications that guide its course within the unconscious manifestations to endeavour upon that which implicates their application to the actions that best serve the momentary survival needs. The unconscious meaning for a rock in our way, always remains upon the deprivation in reflection to this urgency by being essentially the same as a decision about what action to take, not whether one is desirable or required. This gives us the opportunity to equate the instinctual meaning for an object with our reaction to it - recalling instructions for the body movements that prevent a fall after tripping, produces a feeling to represent these memory stimulations (reactions) in unconscious thought, just as perceptual memories produce perceptual feelings to represent the sensory elements they store. Nevertheless, if we relate all emotionally meaningful feelings to instinctual reactions as this formula indicates, experiencing one that doesn’t accompany a noticeable body movement, means we must answer an important question, ‘could one . . . if to be done, could it achieve something in ones mind or head, which one cannot do perceptibly, for which there is no such thing as a perceptible equivalent?’ Our model says yes; it maintains that emotionally toned feelings originate as stimulations of specialized body control memory sites, each of which codes for a very specific element in the suite of instructions necessary for carrying out a particular action - an external change in body configuration is the most obvious example of an action, but physical brain processes retrieving more information through memory stimulations are also actions in the real world of material things, only different in being confined to the brain. Speaking for example, would result from many separate instructions, each found in a different memory site that, when associated together, control the lung, throat, mouth and facial muscle actuations necessary to say a word or phase. If not speaking for some reason seems best, we might still think what we were going to say (act it out in mind), and each stimulation of a memory site necessary to retrieve memories of words that will not be expressed in this situation, would also produce feelings to represent them in thought, perhaps some of the same ones required for speech. Like the perceptual feelings that aggregate into consciously understandable patterns representing sensory impressions (objects), these feelings combine into sometimes noticeable felt meanings (emotions) built from elemental parts that represent body control memories. Each memory relates to a store of some single instruction for a body change (reaction) that is a part of what we do in specific circumstances, and together they represent a reaction strategy. These unnoticeable components are then, in essence feelings that represent elemental parts of conceptions. Our model describes them as concept feelings, produced by control memories.
Complex animal life must make choices and to make choices, and animals must have an ability to prejudge what is about to happen. Forming abstract notions is perhaps understandable that our human ability (concepts) seems unique to our kind, but it is least that is abstractive by any animal that determines it should avoid something experience proves will be detrimental, without actually experiencing its ill effects again. This judgment to avoid a recurrence of something that was unpleasant in the past (or embrace something proven to be rewarding) is a concept for specific dynamic functioning, a grasp of what is not actually existing at a given moment. An instinctual understanding that knows nothing about concepts can become aware of the success or failure of a remembered action represented in perceptual memories without rational help, if the feeling value in an unconscious thought parallel with a rationalized feeling like anxiety, as our model maintains - a felt concern for what is going to happen if current conditions are not changed to either avoid or embrace what memory tells us might soon be actual. Conscious thought can rationalize such information into specific mathematical probabilities for what will eventually happen, but unconscious thought must also have represented probable effects when we instinctually react to imminent threats because, aside from manners, the unconscious processes that produce immediate reactions often accomplish almost everything rational thought would have. Concept feelings, when they combine to form a pattern we notice as a distinct tone of anxiety, reflect the meaning (effect) a familiar object -a dog for instance is likely to produce through vicariously re-living the reactions usually required when this particular object shows up in our sensory data. ‘If I say ‘I am anxiously awaiting his coming’, this means: I am occupied with his coming (in thought, and one can also say: in thought and action).’ If we see a snarling dog fifty feet away, that sensory image stimulates (acts on) memories of similar experiences, and through associating memories of seeing angry dogs twenty, ten feet and one foot away, together with others representing an actual attack (even a memory of being told it could happen), they create a felt context in unconscious thought something like a god’s eye view of all these memories at once, which feels like fearful anxiety to most of us. By associating, and concurrently experiencing all relevant memories, instinctual understanding is creating a concept to represent what can be expected from an object that has, as yet not produced a senseable effect in the current context. It may not a very refined abstractive idea of what might really happen, not that it is not a very specific possibility, but the only predictably interesting possibilities in instinctual considerations are not very specific either, these entwining threats and intuitive celebrations are met by self-gratification. A concept built from feelings we can sometimes notice as anything from fear to affection, has a quality specific to a particular possibility, and this kind of understanding can be applied to represent similar effects produced by a wide variety of objects; even rule structures can become unconsciously apparent when memories depicting how they affect specific behaviours are recalled.
When the memories controlling body functions give rise to concept feelings they serve two purposes. Concept feelings give consciousness mental values that, in aggregate patterns, represent remembered opinions of an object as an undistinguished part of its current context, while the physical memory sites producing them instruct the body to act in an established way for that particular combination of control elements. It is the complete collection of these unconscious physical reactions in a particular moment that determines how we feel, and some become consciously apprehensible. We usually think of body feelings as produced by sensory organs, but before we can actually sense how it feels to carry out a reaction, the instructions for it are felt in consciousness. Even reactions that do no more than seek out new memory associations are changes in external conditions from the perspective of mind altering the existing circumstances (remembered data) our thoughts must take into consideration if they are accurately to represent all we currently know about reality. Until we sense a result, concept feelings represent something like the anxiety that accompanies conscious thoughts while awaiting completion of a pending action. Assuming it our instinctual unconscious understandings also have cause to feel anxious about the still unknown effect of what they have just done seems reasonable or thought about doing (acted out within the mind) - ‘Fear hangs together with misgivings, and misgivings are thoughts.’ The emotional values that bring meaning to unconscious thoughts are then, resentment-like feelings similar to the felt valuations we feel in conscious thoughts; they are anxieties representing the physical effects (personal meanings) of remembered concepts and ideas. If we are to succeed in integrating conscious and unconscious values, this seems to give us reasonable grounds to establish a dual conscious/unconscious need for meaningful resentment-like feelings, and since the range for them has already been established, the extremes of these similarly subjective feeling experiences are the same; Love and fear -feelings that represent our judgment of an object’s worth (meaning). With respect to love we are dealing with a conception implying no more than a very strong affinity for an object that, to avoid confusion will be described as joy, reserving love for the special kind of joy accompanying ecstatic saintly experiences. These seem to be easily understandable as clearly subjective feelings familiar in consciousness, and have the advantage of being recallable by everyone in memories we can nebulously describe as the most fearful and blindly joyful experiences we have ever had. These are strong sensations, readily recognized as permeating our consciousness (mood) and there are other anxiety feelings that are familiar because they represent strong effects in our minds; Feelings that routinely accompany and add meaning to ideas like anger, war, injustice, envy, Hitler, and by comparing with positive feels, as happiness, home, kittens, God and contentment. The feeling representations of these concepts are apparent in our conscious attention, modifying our mood, posture, gestures and tone of voice to include, often even if we choose not to, a message about the feelings we are experiencing. Not all changes in our emotions and body states are senseable however, objects and ideas accompanied, least of mention, by that which is less extreme anxiety feelings are much more difficult, perhaps impossible to apprehend in an adult human mind because they represent moderate physical reactions. Experience and the authorities that held sway at the time of learning have taught us, with varying degrees of success, that personalized reactions to natural laws and culturally enforced rules of behaviour, language, science and even interpretations of God’s will are not required, useful or acceptable. Until we notice their absence, our survival instincts, tempered by consistent experience, can assume these invisible influences are still there, and are not immediately challenged to respond beyond the point of anticipatory reactions like focussing our attention, or perhaps simply sending precautionary messages within the nervous system. This means a wide range of objects and ideas are accompanied by feelings we cannot name because the reaction is slight, and consequently our ability consciously to identify some fact/feeling relationships is poor, or perhaps simply underdeveloped - they are emotionally neutral mental images with resentment-like feelings that are neither good nor bad, happy or apprehensive, angry or content. However, we can give them names by accepting one of the model’s premises: a concept feeling is produced by a reaction that, for emotionally neutral rational ideas, is a search for a perceptual memory needed to create a mental image; and this process gives us an equation of concept feeling = reaction = mental image. This formula allows us to equate any fact we can conceive as a mental image. With a pattern of concept feelings that each represents a physical reaction required to complete the image of the idea in consciousness; a feeling values we cannot sense except as an element of the mental image. It’s a long way from conceiving of anger as rationally communicable idea accompanied by a consciously apprehensible feeling, to a similar understanding of what we experience in obtaining a concise representation of the colour we all describe as red, but in essence they are the same.
When aggregated into anxiety feelings, concept feelings are similar to the ‘somatic markers’ postulated by Antonio Damasio in Descartes Error, body feelings accompanying rational thoughts that ‘have been connected, by learning, to predict outcomes of certain scenarios’, that are by their inductive apprehension of thoughts that stem from their controlling omission by gathering forces that manifest the beginning inclinations through intuitive certainties that succumb with one important qualification. Wherefore, Wittgenstein goes forward to explicate upon its functional contribution: ‘If I say every time I thought about it I was afraid - ill-satisfactions having brought forth the ill’s succumbing to hesitorial anticipations for which accompany my thoughts? - How is one to conceive of separating what does, the accompanying from what is accompanied?’ Our model’s equivalent of a somatic marker (an anxiety feeling) would not be accompanied by, but would represent the stimulus for, an internally generated image of a rational fact. This modulation of unconscious thought into the values of rationality happens only for our sole conscious thought. Perceptual (truth) memories and body control (concept) memories give us a feeling of truth conveyed by our senses (that the object is there) and a feeling of anxiety associated with that object (the effect it usually produces contributes as one stand alone), and whether we notice any of it depends on the quality of the anxiety value. We physically react to all sensory impressions, but we are only aware of them when they produce acts or feelings we can, and actually do, consciously notice. In a simplified scenario, a pattern of perceptual elements we might rationally describe as dryness or a bit of dust, stimulates various body control elements (reactions) we could only notice as a blink, but usually do not. Similarly, the perceptual pattern that indicates a lack of oxygen produces a body reaction sometimes noticeable as an increased rate of breathing and perhaps a little anxiety; a nearby moving object produces reactions that result from control memories involved in maintaining eye contact, and is accompanied by anxious anticipation. While an oncoming bus is a pattern of perceptual elements that consciously feels like fear, and represents very noticeable and usually unanticipated body controls for running or jumping - all happening together with many others and sensed in a complex rational/moral/instinctual totality of understanding that feels like the current state of our consciousness.
The body’s reaction to a particular object is represented in thought as an anticipated effect but, our assessment of what can be expected is not limited to something everyone can understand as right or wrong, it’s based on the unique reactions each of us has learned are appropriate through personal life experiences. To be sure, the one conscious thought that holds our interest usually represents reality according to values maintained by culture, while the concurrent unconscious ‘multiple drafts’ that Daniel Dennett identified in Consciousness Explained, represents possible future conscious thoughts following in the same line of enquiry that, in this model, are allied unconscious thoughts being considered as feeling alone. We have been taught with good reason, which productive thought is rationally thought, and we learn to be obsessed with shared rules and symbols because they bring clearly, shareable understandings that hold the promise of being beneficial to distribute equally among those that are without others. It’s also quite true that this negation of feeling in favour of fact is made easier by realizing that we cannot relate a specific feeling to most conscious images. This limitation does not apply in the opposite sense however; the language of unconscious thought can produce a pattern of concept feelings for every rational fact we have retained in memory, but red is still red, D-O-G still spells dog, and good behaviour is still good. The difference is that they are not associated to other concepts based on the logic endorsed for rational thought - as red would be associated with an idea like colour; dog with a shape, word or pet, and good behaviour would not mean emotional contentment or rewards. Unconsciously, one pattern of concept feelings is associated to another, the juxtaposition of which is beyond our knowledge until they are brought to conscious thought and yet, when we hear ourselves speak without first thinking of what we are going to say, or understand a sequence of rational symbols suddenly occurring to us as a logical thought about words or numbers, the underlying unconscious thoughts that produced them seem closely related to coherent and cognitive lines.
That we believe human minds can only think in rational concepts, ideas, and images are a result of our reliance, like all animals, on sensory information to provide the ultimate strand of truth for our actions and thoughts. The model treats our shared rational symbols like all other objects, they exist in the brain as remembered perceptual elements that are recalled to unconscious thought by a specific suite of control memories that, in turn can be apprehended by conscious thought as mental images. In a sense, the phenomenon of mind in this model is the place where we are made aware of the actions of the body and it’s understandably a little difficult to conceive of thinking about dog or red as a body reaction, but if we consider it for a moment, the body is the only part of us that materially exists in the world and its sole aim is to keep on existing. Mind allows us to establish an overview of its ongoing struggle, and when we think rationally (react to rational concepts) we modify its behaviour to conform to agreed upon rules that are unimportant to a solitary animal’s needs. Unconscious thought is the one mental arena in which all of the various concept feelings generated by many concurrent reactions can be considered, combined and sorted to find the one concept that means most to our survival. When we identify it, by becoming aware of the one with the highest anxiety value, we then associate it to experiences in order to experience past reactions mentally and the results they brought. As we have evolved from a simple consciousness of feelings, into an awareness of how others are affected by our actions, we have created special, unchanging patterns of concept feelings (reactions) to represent meanings that are shared, and each particular culture does its best to establish the feelings associated with important ideas as good or bad so we will all react to them in the way we collectively intend. Wittgenstein’s search for the feeling of red was truly a monumental undertaking from this perspective. While we all represent it with more than once are less at the same tine, only can the same perceptual feelings that everyone would experience an anxiety feeling (meaning) solely dependent on the reactions they have learned is necessary to recall the sensory experience we all describe as red. It’s easier to see the personal qualities included in a fact/feeling relationship if we consider an idea like mother, country, or God - these are clearly different feeling experiences in different minds, although most of us believe our personal feeling (idea) is the one that represents objective truth for everyone, or at least should.
When we look into the implications of this model, the survival of rational concepts depends solely on their continual iteration into developing individual minds, through sensing symbols along with instructions as to how they should feel (how we should react to them), and if culture fails constantly to preestablish their validity with rewards and penalties, as European Culture failed to do for many scientific and philosophical concepts during the middle ages, those ideas are lost to that segment of humanity because they cannot enter our perceptual memories(truths) in any other way except a new creative act. If we insist that a moral code would seem like a good idea whether we have lost a rational understanding of its foundations or not, that’s true; our sensory grasp of its existence in human interactions would be the same as long as it remains in use; and the felt meanings (physical effects) of its rules would continue to encourage acceptance of it. We would still experience anxiety feelings, from a conscience perhaps, indicating where and when to apply rules appropriate to familiar situations - though recalling images representing the absence of ill effects when our actions conform to it, is that the usual penalties and punishments that will be felt when it’s violated as well. This is the way young children understand the rules of their proven stability as situated for parental care environments; only once we enter the outside world, the value of a consistent rational understanding shared by culture and oneself becomes apparent. It’s the only way we can avoid an endless series of trial and error derivations of each rule’s personal meaning to others when conflicts arise. Because each individual’s replacement for a rational foundation, can only be a sense of justice that is unavoidably skewed to their own life experiences. Regardless of the rigour of our objectivity, the basis of its ideas is that each of us exercises for a conscious understanding, are limited to those we have learned. If we have learned that faith in family loyalty, nationalism, or God’s will, not science and ethics, are the foundation of cultural order, any transgression is a violation of felt beliefs - meanings that are, no matter how hard we try to see it otherwise, essentially incommunicable felt understandings that cannot be rationalized in precisely the same way by anyone else.
In the chaotic context of the mind’s many thoughts and feelings, being aware of but one conscious thought at a given moment gives us an opportunity to see an inherent problem this model of unconscious processes brings into the light of reflective rational thought. When internal reactions stimulate memories, the pattern of perceptual feelings representing them in consciousness is an abbreviated copy of what was actually sensed - the difference between consciously looking at an object or event and imaging it in thought; it seems the same but ‘It appears to us as if memory were a secondary experience when compared with experience of the present.’ The real time mental image of an object is generated by all of the information being gathered at that moment, each element of information activating its specific memory site; while a recalled mental image of it is constructed from only those perceptual elements that played a role in causing our original reaction to the object; and here we come face to face with our prejudices and stereotypes. However sketchy our memory is, recalling it to reflective thought seems equivalent to sensing a real object, and it is then the stimulus for a pattern of concept feelings (reactions) directed toward what seems like a real object but is really an object represented by only those sensory elements we considered meaningful (worthy of a reaction) when it was created - some of which were not characteristics of the object itself, but a part of the now past context that is largely beyond conscious recall, since much of it was only noticed unconsciously and never symbolized in rational values. Each time the thought moves from generating an imprecise object created from remembered perceptual elements, to a reaction, thoughts follow ones own familiar, trusted associations that are actually reactions to a limited and distorted object; and as a result, we have created a realistic conscious image accompanied by a felt valuation constructed from some rationally valid concept feelings (reactions), together with many rule-poor instinctually formulated allied unconscious thoughts that include unidentified influences from no longer existing contextual factors, obscure associations, and even errors in the perceptual images caused by instinctually unimportant similarities in truth feelings. These movements in thought can easily bring currently irrelevant, rationally invalid anxiety into the conscious values representing an otherwise desirable object or idea. It’s unavoidable if we do not take an interest in understanding feeling values, because they seem like the felt valuations our cultures encourage - resentments.
‘One of the mistakes oftenest committed in human affairs, is that of supposing that the same name always stands for the same aggregation of ideas’ (J.S. Mill). Concept feelings personalize sensory truths, even names, by giving them felt meanings we can only fully understand with complete knowledge of the experiences of the individual who created them and . . . ’the only way to understand someone else would be to go through the same upbringing as his - which is impossible.’ The shared meanings to a word for which, a rational standard and the best we can do insofar as our individualized representation can carry it with a stereotypical meaning that, because it cannot include all of the shared qualities of our original experience, must be prejudicially abbreviate, and regardless of our intent. Without resorting to simplified stereotypes, physical memory sites would have to store not only the whole range of meanings we can find and imagine for words, but the complete images of every recallable idea and object experienced during our lifetime. Even estimates ranging to trillions of cells and synaptic connections in the brain are insufficient for a task like this. Poorly detailed prejudices are solutions to this inconceivable data storage problem and they work very well when confined to survival issues judged by animal (instinctual) values - the only issues and values we were concerned with until a few thousand years ago - and assuming the worst possible intent is almost always instinct’s first solution and quite often its last principle, at least for those of us who survive. When societal forces move to discourage a particular prejudice, they ask each of us to acquire more detailed knowledge to augment what we have previously relied on to represent the specific object or idea being revalued; they ask us to make new associations to old concepts. It might be racial prejudice, ethnic stereotypes, evolving personal relationships or accepting X as a symbol for a number, but the perennial problem is the same, associating new, more detailed, and presumably more enlightened facts to explain away an ingrained and therefore dependable reaction strategy. If an outdated idea is accompanied by a highly anxious feeling tone, the new information, no matter how egalitarian it may be, will be represented by a concept feeling pattern, sharing many elements with the original stereotype because they both deal with closely related subject matter -the real object has changed very little (only invisible rules) and it will be a long time before experience based instinctual understandings are convinced (have enough evidence to prove) the changes are dependable reflections of real conditions. Whether we can actually change an ingrained prejudice remains and open question in this model, because it seems to indicate that the only way to avoid a reliable instinctual prejudice is to begin with a fresh new mind; accept there is always a way to resolve conflict internally if we want it badly enough to think about it. We must add the new knowledge, not as an association to the original subject of the prejudice, but to some other non-threatening stereotype, and the trick is to do it while culturally approved tastes for entertainment and ethnic diversity are busy drawing ever more stereotypical pictures of the world around us.
The solution will come when we are forced to give up something we think we cannot live without. Emerging science, as represented by Galileo, forced the all-powerful church of his time to justify its most sacred texts without the support of historically unassailable proof they had previously found in Aristotle’s ethics and simple cosmology. Slavery was abolished at a time when millions were willing to die to defend it. It’s a bit more difficult to understand that something as rationally worthwhile and widely enjoyed as ethnically specific foods and lifestyles can provide reinforcement for out-dated rational ideas - and it’s not a problem limited to those who willfully twist good intentions into something else, because they are utilizing the same tools on which we all must rely. The feelings (reactions) we use to prove the worth of conscious ideas are naturally occurring human qualities; some are even encouraged as support for moral and ethical standards, and problems only arise when shared rational meanings are changed, while the unconscious processes of individual minds continue to produce unchanged felt valuations to reinforce the new rational meanings. The solution is to accept the unavoidable fact that human communal life is a unique order imposed on nature: one that can only control violence and deliver what we want when we want it, if shared rules dominate our interactions - some of which produce conflict in consciousness. Shared standards cannot solve these conflicts because rational conceptions don’t include understandings of feeling experiences, so it’s up to each individual to recognize that felt valuation can easily be confused with instinctual inclinations our cultures have simply legislated away. If we make a plea for returning to the essential truths of nature instead, all we know about what naturalized perceptivity would be like, is that we would experience unrationalized feelings and react to external stimuli in a reasonable manner: no symbols, rational understanding, felt valuations, words, or sensory impressions with a meaning extending beyond their usefulness in the present moment. The simple truths of nature often seem appealing in our complex social arrangements, but experiencing them without the support of reason is really inaccessible to humans because, when ‘one thinks one is tracing the outline of the things in nature over and over again . . . one is merely tracing around the frame through which we look at it’ . . . so you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false? - It is what human beings represent that is true and false, and they agree in the language they use. That is no agreement in opinions but in a form of life.’
In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations, The Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practice’s psychology and who has devised 'a new psychology'. Many aspects of Nietzsche's work are viewed by several authors (for instance, Kaufmann and Golomb) as psychological ones, a fact that is disregarded by numerous authors who regard Nietzsche as a mere anti philosopher and a writer of short, beautiful verse. Nietzsche has also sought to bring the nature of man, the unconscious, the conscious, self conscious, self analysis, relationships with other individuals, the inner state (emotions, sensations, feelings and the like), irrational sources of man's power and greatness as well as his morbidity and self-destructiveness into the scope of existence.
Further, in his numerous writings Nietzsche also talks of the mind, the mental, instincts, reflexes, reflexive movements, the brain, symbolic representations, images, views, metaphors, language, experiences, innate and hereditary psychological elements, defence, protective, mechanism, repression, suppression, overcoming, an overall battle, struggle and conflict between individuals etc. As an illustration, Nietzsche describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility and aggression. Moreover, Nietzsche strives to analyse human being, his crisis, his despair and his existence in the world and to find means so as to alleviate human crises and despair.
These aspects of Nietzsche's work elicit a tendency to compare Nietzsche's doctrine with that of Freud and psychoanalysis and to argue that the Freudian doctrine and school (the psychoanalytic theory of human personality on which the psychotherapeutic technique of psychoanalysis is based) and methods of treatment (psychoanalysis) have been influenced and affected by Nietzsche's philosophy and work and the Nietzschean doctrine. As a demonstration from the relevant literature, according to Golomb's (1987) thesis, the theoretical core of psychoanalysis is already part and parcel of Nietzsche's philosophy, insofar as it is based on concepts that are both displayed in it and developed by it - concepts such as the unconscious, repression, sublimation, the id, the superego, primary and secondary processes and interpretations of dreams.
Nevertheless, the actual situation in the domains of psychotherapy, psychiatry and clinical psychology is, by no means, strictly so. While the two savants (Nietzsche and Freud) endeavour to understand man, to develop the healthy power that is still present in the individual and the neurotic patient so as to overcome and suppress the psychological boundaries that repress his vitality and inhibit his ability to function freely and creatively and attain truth, the difference between the psychodynamic school, approach, movement and method of treatment, in general, and psychoanalysis, in particular, and the existential approach to psychotherapy, the existential movement and the existential, humanistic school of psychology and method of treatment that have been stemmed from the doctrines and views of Freud and Nietzsche is profound and significant, as far as the actual psychotherapeutic treatment is concerned. The reason as for these differences lies in the variation in the two savants' view and definition of man and human existence, the nature and character of man and his relationship with the world and the environment, as well as in the variation in the intellectual soil, that nourished and nurtured the two giant savants' views, doctrines (that is, the pundit philosophical and historical roots and influences) and the manners according to which they have been devised and designed.
In fact, Freudian psychoanalysis (as part of the psychodynamic movement and approach) and existential, humanistic, psychotherapy (which is stemmed from the Nietzschean ideas and doctrine, among others) constitutes two totally independent, distinct and rival approaches of psychotherapy, which employ their own method of treatment, doctrine and principles. As an illustration, Viktor. E. Frankl has been expelled from the Psychoanalytic society and organisation because of his views and critic of psychoanalysis, broke away from psychoanalysis and established Logotherapy, an existential, psychotherapeutic method and school in psychiatry, known as the third force in Viennese psychotherapy (after Freud and Adler), which is based upon the Nietzschean doctrine. Thus, Logotherapy and Psychoanalysis constitute two rival types and methods of psychotherapeutic treatment with their own objectives, principles, theoretical core and doctrines.
Hence, as a response and alternative to the works that compare psychoanalysis and the Nietzschean doctrine and maintain that the Nietzschean doctrine constitutes the theoretical core of psychoanalysis, the present paper endeavours to contrast these works and their thesis and demonstrate that the definition and treatment of both its subject matter (as man’s humanly existence) and key concepts in human existence by Freudian psychoanalysis and the principles and essences of Freudian psychoanalysis totally differ both from the treatment of the same subject matter and key concepts by the Nietzschean doctrine and from the essence and principles of the Nietzschean doctrine. Thus, the main thesis of the present paper is that the Nietzschean doctrine by no means constitutes the theoretical core and essence of psychoanalysis.
Accomplishing the objective of the present paper and establishing and strengthening its thesis would be carried out by doing two things simultaneously. Firstly, depicting Freudian psychoanalysis and the Freudian psychoanalytic doctrine, the historical and philosophical roots of the psychodynamic movement, the Nietzschean doctrine, the existential movement and Frankl's technique and the psychotherapeutic approach of Logotherapy and its doctrine (and showing that the Nietzschean doctrine, in fact, constitutes the theoretical core of Logotherapy, rather than of psychoanalysis). Secondly, displaying the differences between psychoanalysis and existential psychotherapy (when Logotherapy is utilised as an illustration and as a representative of the existential approach to psychotherapy and is labelled existential analysis) in the domain of psychiatry and clinical psychology, in terms of the differences between the Nietzschean doctrine and the Nietzschean philosophy and the Freudian psychoanalytic method of treatment, school and doctrine, while still acknowledging and demonstrating the similarities between the Nietzschean and Freudian doctrines, mainly as far as terminology is concerned.
Nonetheless, while endorsing the difference and rivalry between psychoanalysis and existential psychotherapy, as well as the distinction between the Freudian and the Nietzschean doctrines, it should be emphasised that it was the relation between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche's ideas, which contributed to the development of the understanding of man and his crisis, and Freud's development of specific methods and techniques for the investigation of the fragmentation of the individual - human - being in the Victorian period that has provided the basis for existential psychotherapy. In fact, both practical approaches (Freudian psychoanalysis and existential psychotherapy), coupled with the Nietzschean theoretical work and doctrine, examine the human being, his existence and his crisis, such as despair and misery (both neurosis and psychosis) in an attempt to alleviate them.
Accordingly, since the technique of interacting directly with the given individual and analysing the analysed individual is almost similar for both approaches and schools of psychotherapy, it is the distinguished variation in the essence, nature and character (as far as the view of man and his character and of the human existence are concerned) between the Nietzschean (and the Kierkegaardian, for that matter) doctrine and the Freudian doctrine as well as in the manner in which they have been devised which makes most of the difference and affects the psychotherapeutic treatment. Hence, it is the difference between the Nietzschean (and the Kierkegaardian) theoretical doctrine, endeavours, system and approach and those of the Freudian psychoanalytic school and doctrine that is responsible for the difference between the two approaches of and to psychotherapy.
Both the Freudian and the Nietzschean doctrines (and for that matter the Kierkegaardian doctrine) strive to comprehend man, his existence and his crisis, each of these doctrines possesses a different theory as for the nature and image of man, i.e., what he is and what determines him and makes him what he is, which they employ so as to obtain this understanding and a knowledge of the manner in which this understanding should be achieved. Consequently, the psychodynamic school and movement (namely, psychoanalysis) and existential psychologies are two distinguished and distinct theories of personality that govern and affect the clinical, psychotherapeutic treatment and method of treatment.
Sigmund Freud was a physician, a specialist in neurology, with a wide education in the life sciences and the natural philosophy and sciences. He practised neurology and medicine and focussed on the cure of ill, neurotic, individuals, or at least on an improvement of and in their condition and state of health. He was a brilliant, distinguished and ambitious member of the community of scientists, neurologists and doctors and strived to make a reputation for himself in those fields. Moreover, at the beginning, before his becoming famous, he was dependent on a career as an established physician and neurologist so as to make a living and support himself and his dear ones and could not allow himself the slightest reputation as an outcast and as an eccentric.
As a result, the psychoanalytic school and the psychodynamic movement that have been created and devised by Freud at the turn of the nineteenth century have their roots and have been immensely influenced by the spirit and mood of the second half of the nineteenth century in which Freud lived and commenced his career. The materialist, reductionist, empiricist, positivist and mechanist ideas of the time have created an ambience that asserted that everything in the universe has an indisputable reason, cause and determinant. Accordingly, nothing in the universe is accidental which may occur due to chance or free will. Moreover, the positivist doctrine and movement maintain that the ultimate goal of man is to find the explications, reasons, causes and determinants for every single element in the universe. Consequently, according to this assertion and to doctrines such as reductionism, empiricism and associationism, even such a complex 'object' as a human being can be fully explained by being reduced to human elements, such as personality, character, behaviour, utterances, emotions, mental processes etc., which are induced and well-determined by the entities which cause and generate them and, thus, have reasons as for why they occur.
Hence, the Freudian method of psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytic doctrine and the psychodynamic movement have, originally, endeavoured to turn the fields of psychology and psychiatry, and the area of psychotherapy, into a science, which is rooted in the fields of biology and mechanist physiology but spreads outwards into sociology, which describes human personality, behaviour and mental and physical condition in dynamic and goal-directed terms in an attempt to explain them. It aims to look for and find the indisputable reasons, causes and determinants for all aspects and forms of human mental events, human personality, human utterances, human behaviour and human emotions, feelings, disturbances, crisis and hardships (illnesses, both neurosis and psychosis, malaise etc.). As a consequence, the emphasis, and presupposition, of psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic movement is the search for all those elements that define, design and determine this object, called a person, in order for him to understand himself by explaining and analysing himself. It, thus, comes up with specific theories as for the structure, makeup, components and features of the human psyche and the reasons as for man's crisis, despair and neurotic/psychotic condition.
Hence, Freudian psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic schools are approaches that regard all human beings as a single, homogeneous entity that should be treated in a similar manner by a single, predetermined, homogeneous set of theories and a single technique so as to obtain the desired cure, mainly to an organic, physiological manifestation, the cease of paralysis, the end of vomiting and repulsive sensations of food and liquid and the like. Thus, the development of human personality, human nature and morality and the character and the components of the human psyche are induced, determined, innate, predetermined and the same in and for all individuals and constitute solid explanations for human conduct human feelings, emotions, morals, ideologies and the like.
Furthermore, the disturbances and the crisis of given individuals are also induced and determined by specific events, experiences and stimuli and interruptions with the normal proceeding of the predetermined development of the human personality and morality. The psychoanalytic treatment is, therefore, also one for all patients. The causes, determinants and reasons as for the patient's illness and condition have to be discovered, explained, analysed treated and cured, using the given doctrine and technique of psychoanalysis. The desired outcome of the approach is the alleviation and elimination of the undesired syndromes and, by consequence, the cure of the condition, crisis and illness.
Accordingly, the psychoanalytic, psychotherapeutic technique strives to take the suffering individual and relieve his condition by searching and finding the sources, reasons and causes for it and to make the analysed individual fully aware of the causes, determinants and reasons for his condition, based on the rigid, predetermined, psychoanalytic theories. The examined, analysed individual may lie on a coach or sit on a chair facing the psychoanalyst. So doing, he talks about the things that annoy, distresses or trouble him as well as about his life history (case study) and whatever comes up into his mind (free association). He recounts his dreams, his most intimate feelings, urges and emotions, events that occurred to him (both disagreeable and agreeable) in the course of his entire life and the like.
The psychoanalyst listens very carefully and attempts to study and examine carefully the analysed individual's utterances and find meaning in them and to employ his (the psychoanalyst's) findings so as to alleviate the analysed individual's crisis, annoyance, distress, despair and illness. Thus, the psychoanalyst strives to find the reasons, causes and determinants as for the crisis, distress, neurosis and psychosis of the analysed individual and attempts to cure them and ameliorate the analysed individual's condition and state of being by virtue of finding connections and relations between the analysed individual's life story (events that occurred to him) and his distress, neurosis and psychosis, analyse those sources and causes of the neurotic/psychotic condition and make sure that the analysed individual is fully aware of them and whatever feelings, urges, emotions and sensations that they involve - hatred, frustration, aggression, anger, fear, terror, attraction attractiveness, love and the like.
Hence, the psychoanalytic, psychotherapeutic sessions focus on and work away at the revelation, examination and analysis of these events and items that are, in turn, thought by the psychoanalyst to have induced and determined the distress, neurosis and psychosis in an attempt to scrape and withdraw all the defensives, protective layers, which the analysed individual creates and employs so as to protect himself and prevent himself from suffering, and find out as much as possible about them. These defensive, protective layers prevent and suppress the painful information, events and experiences from being aware of and felt and experienced by the individual who has undergone and experienced them in the past. The objective of the psychoanalysis is to discuss and analyse the causes for the patient's condition in a free manner, is without restraints and suppression.
As part of the endeavour to find reasons, causes and determinants for everything and every human aspect, in general, and for the patient's condition, in particular, an important aspect and element in the Freudian psychoanalytic doctrine and in the Freudian technique of psychoanalysis is the search for symbolic meanings that are meant to have significant meaning as symbolic representations of other matters, far essential for the understanding of the patient's life and condition than the given, original, items. This technique is normally applied in Freudian dreams interpretation where the unconscious has to be revealed and analysed. With that, a complete innocence, and ordinary, everyday image and object can represent something far more significant, as far as the patient's condition is concerned. As an illustration, an image of a comb may represent a penis and combing one's hair can represent and mean a hidden, subconscious sexual urges that are directed toward a given person and which is taken to be the source of the particular neurosis/psychosis. Likewise, in the famous case of little Hans' phobia of horses (1909), a big horse and Hans' fear of it have represented Hans' father and Hans fear of being castrated by him, the Oedipus complex.
The psychoanalyst, therefore, places meaning into every single word and item that the analysed patient has uttered in her recalling of her dreams by using a series of formerly activated definitions and preconceived theories and explanations (which are likely to involve sex, the Oedipus Complex, for instance) so as to find the reasons and explanations as for the patient's condition. To be fair, Freud has demanded that the interpretation of dreams would be carried out by a professional psychoanalyst who is well trained in this technique.
As a clinical, practical illustration as for the psychoanalytic doctrine and the technique and method of psychoanalysis, the psychoanalyst may conclude from the analysed neurotic patient's utterances during free association, her recounting of her dreams and fragments of memories of events in her life and by virtue of applying symbols and symbolic representations to her utterances and images in the patient's dreams that the patient's inability to have someone touching, grabbing or holding her head and her feeling of severe stress and terror while this action is being carried out is the result and direct consequence of a sexual abuse that occurred during early childhood, in the course of which the abuser has forced the abused child to have oral sex with him by holding and grabbing the young child's head, and was regressing and suppressed by the patient from her consciousness so as to protect herself from suffering as part of her defence mechanism.
The psychoanalytic therapy is based on the presumption that once the adult neurotic patient overcomes and overpowers the defence mechanisms and becomes aware of the event and experience that are viewed as the reason as for her neurosis and the feelings, emotions and sensations that these experiences and events induce the patient and, thereby become as a consequent. The Great Theoretical Difference Between the Psychotherapeutic, Existential Application of the Nietzschean Doctrine and Freudian Psychoanalysis.
In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations, The Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practice’s psychology and who has devised 'a new psychology'. The many aspects of Nietzsche and the neurotic patient's feelings and emotions toward the abuser, toward her parents and other family members, any feelings of guilt, shame, humiliation etc. The psychoanalytic sessions, thus, endeavour to scrape and remove the protective layers that suppress those feelings and emotions and the traumatic event and experience, itself, in order to be able to analyse them and discuss them freely.
Consequently, the sources, causes and determinants of the neurosis/psychosis are, therefore, suppressed, repressed and regressed and buried deep in the human psyche and are obscure and hidden from one's awareness, although active in his psyche. This given neurotic patient holds to some latent causalities, which he has regressively suffered the horrendous, traumatic experiences from an ever vanquishing consciousness, however as part of her defence mechanism so as to defend and protect herself and was not conscious of it. Nevertheless, the traumatic experience was embedded and active in her psyche, unaware of by her. It influenced her conscious mental feelings, emotions, utterances, dreams and actions and came up in the form of her neurosis and inability to have her head held, touched or grabbed. The objective of the psychoanalysis is, thus, to crush and overcome the defence mechanisms and have the sources of the neurosis/psychosis released and come up to the surface, where it is aware of by the patient and can be revealed, analysed, explained and observed freely.
The reason posted as for those doctrines, approach and technique lies in the fact that Freud, in his objection to the fact that some of the human mental aspects and human conduct would remain unexplained, obscure and incoherent to the psychoanalyst and his possession of the need to search for means of avoiding this situation and to both explain beyond any doubt for the reason as to the uncertainty might that the human condition may have latently been lost to that of any expressive linguistic utterance, in that of turn, is given to some interpretation or finds to some given or self-explanation, however lucid, comprehensive ones, maintains both that the essence of regression of information is of information being restrained and withheld from becoming conscious, by the defence mechanism where stress, grief and anguish are involved and by lack of interest and stimulation when no stress is involved, and, thus, forms a part of unconsciousness, a condition of latency that is not perceived by the mind, and that unconscious information becomes known, in the course of psychoanalysis, merely by being translated into consciousness (the objective of psychoanalysis), as merely conscious things are perceived and known? Thus, Freud defines the unconscious as whatever is not conscious and vice versa, whereas the preconscious is defined by him as a screen between the unconscious and consciousness and forms a part of consciousness for the sake of this specific definition. Accordingly, Freud regards all conscious information as unconscious information that became conscious.
Consequently, Freud maintains that since "the data of consciousness are exceedingly defective" (Freud's, The Unconscious, 1915) mental acts can often be explicated merely by assuming and referring to other processes that are outside consciousness. In other words, one is not aware of some of his mental experiences that, nevertheless, affect his actions, bodily, physical, performances (repulsive sensations, paralysis and the case illustrated above of the neurotic patient), dreams and utterances and, thus, these mental experiences are found outside his awareness/consciousness and influence those experiences of which he is aware. Therefore, the individuals fulfill actions and utter utterances that are obscure, unclear inexplicable and unexplainable on their own, by being observed directly by those given individuals, and need to look outside direct observation in order to explain them and make them utterly lucid.
The neurotic patient illustrated in the present paper has not been aware of the real reason (the sexual abuse) as for her inability to let her head be held and taken hold of which, nevertheless, has led to this mental disability, the neurosis. Once this awareness has been achieved by the method, described above, the patient has become cured. Hence, according to psychoanalysis, when the given patient becomes aware of her sexual abuse by her father or another adult that she had to regress as part of her defence mechanism so as to defend and protect herself and is able to analyse it and discuss it freely then she is cured.
Thorough look into the procedure in which the unconscious mental information is being revealed and becomes a part of consciousness which permits the awareness of the given individual/patient is beyond the aim of the present paper and should be read in Freud's writings. Here, mentioning that the unconscious information undergoes a main is sufficient censorship, of which if it passes, it goes up to the level of the preconscious, where it is already in possession of consciousness and is being aware of by the agent, although not fully grasped and interrelated within terms of its context (if it does not pass this censorship, then it is occasioned of regressive behaviour that lay back within unconsciousness), then, another censorship awaits to it, of which if it passes, it goes up to the level of consciousness, where it is being directly and fully experienced, related to, sensed and comprehended by the individual. Freud provides clinical illustrations of the hysterics, neurotics, ( the classic Interpretation of Dreams, Freud, 1900) so as to demonstrate this theory.
To make sure that the reader who is a philosopher, rather than a psychologist, comprehends the relation between the unconscious and the conscious and consciousness, in The Unconscious (Freud, 1915), Freud asserts that psychoanalysis compares the perception of unconscious mental processes and experiences by consciousness with the perception of the outside, external, world through the sense-organs so as to obtain new knowledge from the comparison. Thus, Freud refers to Kant's work and view of the mind as an activity that manipulates experiences, borrows it for the sake of his argument, takes it out of context, distorts and changes it and comes up with the assertion that just as the external world is not viewed in the way it really is in nature but is subject to the viewer's subjective perception of it (Kant's account of the active mind), so are consciousness and the conscious affected by the unconscious and unconsciousness, manipulated and modified by them and are observed/treated by them.
In devising the Freudian psychoanalytic doctrine and the psychoanalytic technique of psychoanalysis, Freud has devised rigid theories (psychoanalytic theories) as for the nature and character of man and his existence that tailor and fit all individuals and which constitute the basis as for the psychoanalytic treatment, i.e., psychoanalysis. He, therefore, devised his theory as for morality and personality development in both men and women which proceeds through five psychosexual stages in children and adolescents as well as his theory as for the structure of personality and human interaction and moral or immoral conduct, the id, ego and superego. These theories serve as a model for the psychoanalytic treatment of all individuals who undergo psychoanalysis and are meant to be suitable for all individuals - human - beings. Accordingly, the events that occurred in the life of the individual who undergoes psychoanalysis are tailored and fit into these Freudian theories. Thus, the very case of sexual abuse, which is illustrated in the present paper, is tailored and fit into the various aspects of the Electra Complex and the psychosexual stages of personality and moral development and the personality structure, any feelings of guilt and the like.
On the other hand, the existential movement has been formed and devised in the nineteenth century as a protest movement against the established spirit, mood and ambience of the mainstream of the intellectual world - notably of the philosophical domain, natural, moral and metaphysical philosophy, but also of deterministic, rigid theories and schools of thought and movements. The existential movement has protested against the destruction of both the authentic, independent, unreduced and free individual being and the personal, biased, subjective, authentic truth by the established mainstream of the intellectual world, in general, and doctrines such as the Hegelian and the Kantian doctrines, the empiricist doctrine, the positivist doctrine and the psychodynamic doctrine, in particular. Those doctrines have reduced the individual being into metaphysical theories, deterministic, innate, developmental theories, physiological and biological processes, innate releasing mechanisms, information processing devices etc., and made him fit into a single, unified and universal system of truth and reason.
The existential movement in the nineteenth century has maintained that the concept of truth has become unreal, distant, universal, abstractive, and alienated from the individual being himself. Accordingly, the concept of truth has become an idea of the manner in which the universe should be like. The individual being has had to make himself fit within this kind of truth rather than lead his life in accordance with his own idea of truth and being fully committed to this idea of truth. Thus, the individual being has been swallowed by the idea of whom he should be, which has been dictated to him and forced and imposed upon him by society and deterministic elements, has lost his individuality and uniqueness and has become a part of theories as for whom he should be and why.
Hence, the existential movement objects to the endeavour to reduce the individual-human-being into sets and systems of reasons, explanations, metaphysical and scientific theories and causal determinants as for his nature, his conduct, his mental/inner state (feelings, sensations, emotions and the like) and his mental state of being (neurosis, and psychosis and 'stability/sanity'). Instead, the existential movement endeavours to examine and study the individual-human-being's existence, Being-In-The-World, so as to comprehend it, to have the most agreeable, authentic existence, Being-In-The-World possible and to be able to actualise his personal existence in the world and, as a consequence, himself and his life.
As just noted, the existential movement also objects to the notion of universal, objective truth but introduces truth as the subjective, personal entity of the individual who devises it, possesses it and lives his life and designs and determines himself as in accordance with it. Thus, according to the existential movement, man is existing of some self-determinates, emerging, becoming being who defines himself in accordance with his own subjective view of truth and possesses a full responsibility as for his life as well as the capacity and power to choose whatever and whoever he wishes to become and be, his values and ideologies with a view to actualise them and to lead an authentic life and existence.
In other words, man is an individual who determines, designs and realises himself in accordance with the choices, deeds and wishes that he makes, rather than a determined entity who is determined by social conformism, genetically hereditary and the environment, i.e., the past and present. Man, according to the existential movement, is, therefore, emerging, proceeding toward the future and becoming being and is defined by his own past and present actions, decisions and choices and by the future outcome of these actions, decisions and choices. That is, man becomes what he is.
The forebears and the devisers of the existential movement, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, were loners who have excluded and isolated themselves from the establishment and from their fellow philosophers and savants and constantly occupied and devoted themselves by spending all their time analysing themselves and studying themselves. Kierkegaard has never had an academic, university post while Nietzsche has been forced, at the young age of thirty-five, to resign of full professorship of philology in Basel, and, therefore, a truly brilliant academic career, due to ill health. The two brilliant savants have lived on their own financial means that freed them from the necessity of having a paid position and from being a part of the establishment and allowed their questioning and critic of the state, society and the establishment and their fellow philosophers and other savants.
Accordingly, the forebears and the devisers of the existential movement, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, devised their doctrines as personal, individualistic, self-analytic accounts of their own state of being and as an attempt to solve their personal crisis and to ameliorate their feelings of severe anxiety, depression and desperation (numerous authors also claim that the two were psychotic due to syphilis) and to achieve responsibility as for their lives and realise authenticity and true self and to become whoever and whatever they desired to be (authentic individuals, apart from the crowd and the establishment). Nietzsche's writings, unlike those of Kierkegaard who was a tremendous poet (Kierkegaard, in fact has regarded himself as nothing other than a poet) and a writer of beautiful, well-structured, literary works, have been written in unorganised note forms, which, many times, constitute beautiful, literary, verse, in small notebooks as part of spills of creativity and ingenuity and an urge to write down his personal thoughts, feelings and sensations so as to alleviate anxiety attacks and to feel better about himself. Nonetheless, these two giant savants have written to an imaginary audience to which they wished to preach and inform their teachings as for the authentic manner in which individuals ought to live their lives. In fact, Nietzsche writes as if he were a desperate doctor who suffers the disease and who carries out a self analysis and diagnosis in order to propose his views as for a good mental health to his readers and followers with a view to ameliorate their state of being and attain authenticity and truth.
Nietzsche proclaims that "the levelling and diminution of European man are our greatest danger" (as Nietzsche is quoted in May et al., 1958). Nietzsche's ultimate objective is to create a powerful individual who is able to live a true, creative and authentic life and create, construct and reconstruct while in a nihilistic, meaningless world without dogmatic beliefs. Thus, despite an existential vacuum and the need of existential filling, he is able to endure a difficult, authentic, gloomy and tragic truth and actualise himself, without succumbing and escaping to the more comfortable option of universal, detached and determined truth, illusive and metaphysical fantasies and consolations, which constitute constant temptations and appeals to him. By doing so he, therefore, avoided destroying himself and turning himself into a part of this gloomy world and nihilism and of the universal, determined truth and is able to realise himself and to lead a meaningful, authentic life.
Accordingly, in the case of this powerful, authentic individual, this gloomy, meaningless world does not provoke the collapse of the self, but, the individual manages to resist it and free his creative sources, repressed until then by determined and compelled morality, social norms and psychological, mental, disabilities. Those creative forces lead the individual to destroy the ideologies that have been determined for him and enforced upon him and create and adopt new beliefs and ideologies for himself that are, themselves, abandoned and replaced by him once they lose their usefulness for him.
Once obtained in achieving this state of emptiness and blank slate, the individual is able to adopt ideologies as he pleases, rebuild and determine himself and renew and reconstruct afresh the temples (morals) which have been imposed upon him. Nevertheless, he always possesses the ability to succumb to the external, determined, imposed ideologies, absorb himself in them and, as a consequence, lose and deny himself. Thus, the process of The Great Theoretical Difference Between the Psychotherapeutic, Existential Application of the Nietzschean Doctrine and Freudian Psychoanalysis.
In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations, The Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practice’s psychology and who has devised 'a new psychology'. Nietzsche's works are viewed by several authors (for instance, Kaufmann and Golomb) as psychological ones, a fact that is disregarded by numerous authors who regard Nietzsche as a mere anti philosopher and a writer of short, beautiful verse. While being a young, frustrated, physically and mentally ill, retired professor of Philology, who has viciously attacked his colleagues, the state, society and the establishment and wrote provocative verses and notes, Nietzsche has also sought to bring the nature of his own ideologies and his own perspectives and wishes so as to obtain power and authenticity. What is most important, the will to power involves what Nietzsche calls self surpass? Self surpasses, or transcendence, is the process in which the individual is able to achieve self control, mastery and responsibility over his own life and to fight the urge to adopt and absorb himself in the social, biological, hereditary, external, deterministic ideologies, norms, morals, conventions and generalisations. That is the urge to become a part of the crowd and give up the painful, tormenting process of being the sole responsible for himself and his existence and determining, adopting and setting up his own ideologies and norms by himself. Self surpasses, therefore, involves overcoming this urge and create and determine oneself.
Accordingly, the more will to power the individual manifestations seem more to incline to the qualitative and self-given will to power, in is that the higher degree of power, truth and authenticity that the individual attains and realises. Similarly, the less qualitative is the will to power for which is possessed by the given individual the more than there is less that the individual wishes to be determined, misplaced and bound by himself, as absorbing himself in the crowd and deny himself.
Nevertheless, in talking about power 'macht' and the will to power, Nietzsche talks about negative power and positive power. The negative power is really a psychological weakness and constitutes a wish to accomplish and acquire power by committing cruel acts and demonstrating muscles while The Great Theoretical Difference Between the Psychotherapeutic, Existential Application of the Nietzschean Doctrine and Freudian Psychoanalysis.
Consequently, the authentic individual is one who wills to (positive) power while the inauthentic individual is an individual who possesses negative power and does not will to power. The more positive power and will to power the individual possesses the higher level of authenticity he possesses and the more negative power and the less will to power the individual possesses the higher level of inauthenticity he possesses and vice versa.
In fact, Nietzsche's philosophy should be regarded as a means to entice its followers to overcome deterministic elements, to will to power, to determine themselves, to achieve responsibility for their lives, to form and actualise their authenticity, to obtain increasing positive power and true self and to direct their efforts toward their own positive power, testing their ability to reach it and activate it in the course of their lives. The Nietzschean doctrine should, therefore, be regarded as the granting of therapies, education and intellectual temptations to the individual with a view to prepare him for assuming responsibility and mastery over his life, leading and living an authentic, creative and well worthwhile life and to free his creative resources and realise and actualise himself in a nihilistic, meaningless world without dogmatic convictions.
The individual is, thus, enticed to be directed and direct himself toward his positive power and a powerful, spiritual, creative resource, to examine whether or not he is able to achieve them and absorb them and to obtain as much positive power, will to power and creativity as possible. Nevertheless, it is merely the individual, himself, who is able to actualise his power, facing bravely the numerous temptations to succumb to the easy, comfortable manner of living in accordance with the external, deterministic norms and convictions that surround him, let himself be determined by them and deny himself and resisting these temptations in an attempt to actualise and fulfil his existence and himself. Accordingly, the Nietzschean doctrine mainly intends to entice the individual to will to power.
Hence, enticing the individual's will to power, self surpasses and authenticity and truth are the real purposes of the Nietzschean doctrine. Nietzsche employs the method of writing short notes and verses and utilises a provocative, refined, poetic, arrogant language and a manner of writing, full of daring slogans, swaggers, paradoxes, myths and scepticism so as to raise consent and profound emotions and feelings in his readers with a view to obtain enticement and assist him in this process of enticing his readers. This reason joins the reasons that are mentioned above as for the unique type of writing which Nietzsche adopts and employs.
Furthermore, the more qualitative will to power which the individual possesses the more he possesses the enticement to will to power and the wish to obtain increasing power so as to become more authentic, true, perfect and powerful being. Thus, the individual who possesses a weak will to power is likely to deny the enticement to will to power and succumb to continue with the external and, deterministic, norms and convictions that are determined for him and are imposed upon him and, therefore, to possess a negative power and be a weak, unactualized individual. An individual with higher degree of qualitative will to power can and is likely to be enticed to will to power and, thus, to obtain positive power, authenticity and true self and to overcome the negative power. Nonetheless, the individual can also be a superman whose level of qualitative will to power is convincing, that he does not need to be enticed to will to power. As a superman, he can, therefore, create himself and his ideologies and perspectives on his own without this enticement and without the need to be enticed.
Nietzsche asserts that man is distinguished from the primordial animal in his potentiality to cultivate his nature and image (i.e., who he is, his own self) and his true nature and to create his ideologies, norms and conventions as he pleases, rather than have himself and his ideologies and conventions are determined, designed and created for him. This ability raises man above the other animals and permits man to overcome the inclination to deny himself and be absorbed and determined and, instead, to surpass himself, to realise himself and to assume full control and mastery over his existence and life. Nevertheless, the vast majority of men never realised themselves but succumb to the conformism and to society and its norms and ideologies and let themselves be absorbed in them and determined by them.
Thus, according to Nietzsche, man's task and role are to surpass, overcome and transcendent those impediments that suppresses, repress and prevent the mental powers from freeing, creating and realising the self (those mental powers are rooted in man). Man has to activate those mental powers in the manner described above so as to obtain increasing power and mastery over his life, his existence and himself and, by consequence, increasing authenticity, self realisation and true self. If man does not do so then he is degraded to the degree of beast (monkey, as influenced by Darwinism that has been devised and was very popular and rigorous in that corresponding period of time). Nonetheless, if man does so then he gains ever more power and mastery over his life, personal existence and himself and, in a world where God is dead, man becomes closer and closer to the degree of God, the creator of man, truth, ideologies, norms and the self, by virtue of adopting for himself God's role of creating and determining himself, man, (his image and nature), his own ideologies and his own truth and morality. In fact, man's greatest ambition and possibility is to assume increasing power and perfection and to become closer and closer to the degree of power and perfection of God.
Man, according to the Nietzschean doctrine, is, therefore, responsible for his own existence and life and is free to design, determine and create himself and his ideologies freely in accordance with his own ideologies and with whom and what he desires for himself to become and be. The purpose of living is, therefore, to detach the living individual from biological, social and mechanical restraints (which determine his image and nature) and take on and follow the difficult, exhaustive and tormenting road and journey of self analysis and self learning and knowing and changing, with a view constantly to grow, construct and create himself, realising himself and becoming more independent, powerful and authentic being. Hence, man is an emerging and becoming being who emerges toward the future and becomes. Man is defined and determined by his emergence toward the future and by his becoming. He is, therefore, defined and determined by his choices and actions and their outcome. He, therefore, becomes what he is. In fact, the sub-title of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo is 'How One Becomes What One Is'.
From reading the two accounts, those of Freud and Nietzsche, it is very easy to conclude that the essence of the two doctrines, in terms of the actual psychotherapeutic treatment, is virtually similar. In both doctrines, man has to suppress and overcome a psychological, mental, boundary that has to be scraped and shattered so as to obtain truth, allow the individual, the neurotic/psychotic patient, to function freely and establish a grasp of the given individual, the neurotic/psychotic patient. This fact has misled readers and researchers into maintaining that the Nietzschean doctrine constitutes the theoretical core of the psychoanalytic technique (psychoanalysis), methodology and approach.
Nevertheless, while according to Freudian psychoanalysis, man is a determined entity that follows universal, successive stages of morality and personality development, which are deterministic, common to all men and according to which all men behave, act, experience, feel and live their life, and have his neurosis/psychosis and crisis induced and determined by specific past events and experiences in his life, the Nietzschean doctrine views to man as an entity that is responsible for himself and for his existence in the world. The 'Nietzschean man' possesses the power and ability to choose and determine his ideologies and actions, who and what he wishes to become and be and strives to overcome all boundaries, to surpass himself, realise himself and become a powerful, authentic individual.
According, to the Nietzschean doctrine, man is neither good nor evil. 'Man is beyond good and evil' asserts Nietzsche and has named one of his important works 'Beyond Good and Evil'. The ability of man to assume control and responsibility for his life and existence, to determine himself, to realise himself and to achieve his truth and authenticity is suppressed and prevented from doing so by both an inner, psychological, need (such as cowardliness) and external deterministic elements, the state, the establishment, society and the like. Nonetheless, man possesses the power and capacity to overcome and free himself from these puissant constraints, surpass, transcendent and overcome himself and realise his will to power, his power and himself while living in a nihilistic, meaningless, world. Alternatively, he also possesses the ability to succumb to those constraints, rather than to attempt to overcome them, to absorb himself in them, not to will to power only, to adopt a negative type of power and be determined and weak and inauthentic. Accordingly, the psychological, mental, elements and aspects of the Nietzschean doctrine are both ones that prevent man from his self-realising selfness, that the ones that lead to his will to power, self surpasses and self realisation.
Freudian psychoanalysis, on the other hand, views the defence mechanism as an element that the given individual has had to construct so as to prevent and suppress painful and stressful information from entering the individual's memory and consciousness in order to protect himself from stress and suffering. The patient, with the aid and guidance of the psychoanalyst, has to overcome it so as to find the sources and determinants of his neurosis/psychosis and the feelings and emotions that are induced by those sources of the illness and bring them to the patient's consciousness/awareness, where they can be revealed, analysed and examined freely. The psychoanalyst endeavours to explain the individual patient in accordance with the achievement of comprehension of what determines him, his conduct, his malaise, his illness (neurosis/psychosis) and crisis, as well as his ideologies and morals, in terms of the rigid and predetermined theories, as for the elements that determine the nature of man and his conduct and morality, of the psychoanalytic approach.
Accordingly, despite the fact that both the Freudian, psychoanalytic doctrine (and Freudian psychoanalysis) and the Nietzschean doctrine endeavours to overcome suppressive boundaries so as to both obtain truth and cure, the two constitute two different approaches that vary completely one from the other in terms of essence and by definition. Their view as for their subject matter (Man, and the human prerequisite are within him to exist) and the nature and image of man are contradictory. In order to demonstrate the difference between psychoanalysis further, and the psychoanalytic doctrine, and the Nietzschean doctrine in the domain of psychotherapy and display strong, additional evidence in favour of the thesis of the present paper, the existential school, technique and approach of and to psychotherapy in the field of psychiatry Logotherapy, which has been stemmed from the Nietzschean doctrine and devised by Viktor. E. Frankl, needs to be described, depicted and illustrated. This way, the reader would be shown the practical application of the Nietzschean ideas in psychotherapy and psychiatry and be able to compare and contrast it with the psychoanalytic method and with Freudian psychoanalysis.
While crediting Freud with new insights into human nature, Frankl felt that Freud's ideas had hardened into rigid, predetermined ideas that determine the nature of man and the analysed individual and, as a consequence, dehumanise and reduce man. What was needed, according to Frankl, was the understanding of the human-individual-being in his totality as a whole, unreduced, independent, free and self-determining being who emerges toward the fulfilment of a given goal, objective and task in his life and personal existence and who defines and determines himself in accordance with those objective and goal and their realisation, rather than focussing on the specific event and experience that the psychoanalysts regard as the cause, reason and determinant of the given crisis and condition and analyse and examine them. Frankl, thus, set on a career in psychiatry in which he introduced the concepts of meanings and values and their realisation into psychiatry. The essence of his doctrine is that all reality has meant (logos) and that the individual never ceases to have fabricated meaning.
Logotherapy is the search for the unique meaning and purpose in one's life in an attempt to design and reveal his particular journey in life and his role and task to do whatever it takes to actualise and realise his meanings, potentials, potentialities and himself, determines him, gives himself and his experiences and actions and identity and existential meaning and become somebody, a true, actualised and authentic individual being. The Greek word 'logo’, in fact, denotes meaning. Thus, Logotherapy regards the individual's striving to find meaning and purpose in his life (which logotherapists call the will to meaning), as well as a personal identity that would make his life meaningful, fully actualised and worthwhile, as the motivational force in man and as the element that defines and determines the individual, his life and his existence.
For the need of comparison with the rival approach of Freudian psychoanalysis and as an illustration of the motivational force, the primary motivational force in the Freudian doctrine and psychoanalysis is the urge and inclination to seek self satisfaction and pleasure, normally in the form of the most brutish and primitive, basic sources of pleasure (sexual pleasure and urge, satiating hunger and thirst and sleeping). This Freudian motivational force plays a crucial role in the Freudian deterministic theory of personality and morality development, which was depicted above, as constituting the motivational force for this development of human personality and morality. For its part, Logotherapy focus man, the unconscious, the conscious, self conscious, self analysis, relationships with other individuals, the inner state (emotions, sensations, feelings and the like), irrational sources of man's power and greatness as well as his morbidity and self-destructiveness into the scope of existence.
Further, in his numerous writings Nietzsche also talks of the mind, the mental, instincts, reflexes, reflexive movements, the brain, symbolic representations, images, views, metaphors, language, experiences, in and instincts or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of the id, ego and superego or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment and has himself determined by them. Man is, thus, free and responsible for his life and personal existence and defines, creates and determines himself by his willing to meanings, purposes and values and striving to surpass himself and his existence and actualise those meanings and values and, as a consequence, himself, his life and personal existence in the world. Nevertheless, he can always succumb to the world of willing to mere pleasure and its satiation, determinism by others, conformism, genetics and hereditary, mass crowds, industry etc., absorb in it and give up the inclination to search for meanings and values in his own existence and life and actualise them. The destructive result of such a deed is described below Man's life, according to Logotherapy, ought to be a journey of surpassing his everyday existence, situations and existence and realising the meanings and objectives that he sought, searched, found and set to himself to actualise.
The process of finding meanings is one of exploring all human values for those that fit best with the given treated individual's own, unique life experiences and that he can most profitably pursue as a surge for meaning. Actually, Frankl teaches that merely through the process of education and through the acceptance of full responsibility as for his personal, individualistic and unique choices of meaning by the treated individual, the treated individual can build an integrated personality with a special life task that will give direction and sense of purpose to his own existence.
Thus, in order to lead a meaningful life the treated individual has to explore all of the areas of traditional values and pick up those that can supply special meaning to him and, then, surpass his existence and realise his chosen meanings. The logotherapist's role is, therefore, to guide and help the treated individual. The Great Theoretical Difference Between the Psychotherapeutic, Existential Application of the Nietzschean Doctrine and Freudian Psychoanalysis.
In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations, The Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practice’s psychology and who has devised 'a new psychology'. Nietzsche possesses a tendency to inactivate and silent this feature and absorb themselves in mere immediate, superficial pleasure seeking, in conformism and the mechanical and let their lives be determined by other individuals, their environment, their daily routine, their genes and the like. Thus, they incline to cover themselves in those things, conform, despair and have themselves (their behaviour, ideologies, beliefs etc.) determined.
The result of such action, however, is likely to be a development and emergence of a feeling of an existential vacuum, a feeling of existential frustration and noogenic neurosis. An existential vacuum is the experience of lack of meaning and purpose in one's personal existence that generates a feeling of emptiness and nihilism. As a foot note: Logotherapy views nihilism as an evil, destructive force that destroys and consumes man and leads to severe crisis and despair in his life and to his dehumanisation. Existential frustration, for its part, is a reaction to the failure of fulfilling to achieve meaning. As for Noogenic neurosis, it is a neurosis that is generated by the neurotic patient's feeling of lack of meaning in life and human existence, as a whole, and in her personal life and personal existence, in particular
Logotherapy endeavours to tempt and challenge man with a potential meaning for him to fulfil and to urge him to struggle hard for some goals worthy of him to actualise and achieve and, thus, to evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency and actualise his will to meaning and self actualising. Logotherapy, therefore, strives to guide and assist the individual patient in overcoming the inclination to be absorbed and determined. Logotherapy attempts to make the patient aware of the hidden 'logos' of her existence, actualising the potential meanings of her existence. Logotherapy aspires to assist the patient in filling the existential vacuum, searching for meanings, finding them, surpassing her existence and herself, actualising those meanings and realising herself and recreating herself in accordance with those meanings.
The result of Logotherapy is the scraping of the inclination to be determined and the filling of the existence with a cause, finding the reason as for one's personal existence in the world and recreating and realising the patient's existence. Hence, Logotherapy wishes to make the treated individual aware of what he actually aspires for the depth of his being and make him fully aware of the task of his life and of his personal existence. In fact, cases treated using Logotherapy has demonstrated that enticing the treated individual and making him aware of his assignments and tasks in the course of his life and personal existence, should assist in ameliorating his ability to overcome and alleviate his neurosis, crisis and malaise.
The symptoms are accepted, for the time being, as they are and are looked beyond them (transcendent them). The individual 'dereflects' (a term Frankl devised) attention from the immediate powerful situation to unimpaired assets and potentials that can be utilised in spite of the symptoms. Hence, Logotherapy endeavours to teach the individual to cope and deal with his malaise and painful situation, surpass and transcendent them and find meaning in his suffering by finding a potential for a good thing in all painful events and suffering (as long as nothing can be done to alleviate and alter them, in which case, where the painful events can be modified and improved, it is a mere sadistic act) and, thus, employ his suffering for the sake of a good element and for the sake of self actualisation. In fact, Logotherapy, itself, has been tested, devised and refined by Frankl as a method for treating individuals' suffering and for combatting dehumanisation and reductionism in the course of the three years that he spent as an inmate in four different Nazi concentration camps and, thus, constitutes the meaning and the positive (good) element in Frankl's enormous suffering.
Some clinical illustrations are called for so as to depict Logotherapy and its doctrine in practice and to display the great differences between psychoanalysis and Logotherapy: Frankl recounts of an American diplomat in Austria who has visited him in Vienna. The diplomat was discontented with his career and found it difficult to comply with American foreign diplomacy. Consequently, he experienced a sensation of void and emptiness and felt depressed and miserable. He has undergone psychoanalytic treatment for five years but his condition and state of being have merely gone worse. His psychoanalyst told him to reconcile with his father as it was obvious to the psychoanalyst that the powerful, authoritative American government has really symbolised and was nothing other than the father of the diplomat who tried to dominate his son and take charge over him and his life. Hence, the psychoanalytic approach has asserted and concluded that the reason, cause and determinant of the diplomat's difficulties in complying with American foreign diplomacy and his depression and states of being were, in effect, his relationship with his father, his fear of his father and his desire to rebel against his father. This stands on the same line as the Freudian rigid personality and moral development of the Oedipus complex.
Nevertheless, Frankl has taken the diplomat and his situation in their totality and concluded that it was the diplomat's lack of satisfaction and interest in his job and career and his inability to find meaning and purpose in them that have led to his state of being and depression. He, therefore, proposed to the diplomat to quit his career in foreign diplomacy and search for a career that would be more meaningful and purposeful to him and his personal existence and would enable him to actualise the (and his) meaning and purpose in his personal existence, his life and himself. Needless to say, the diplomat has complied, changed his career to a more meaningful one to him that fulfilled his interests and intellectual objectives, actualised his personal existence and himself and has been totally cured of his crisis and malaise.
As another illustration, Frankl recounts of a rabbi who came to see him, suffering from severe depression. His first wife and six sons have been murdered in concentration camps and his second wife has been barren. Frankl has guided him and assisted in the surpassing and transcendent journey’s that his situation and to try to search for meanings and purposes in his great suffering and in his personal existence and life so as to be able to actualise himself and his life and existence and to cope with his great grief and malaise and to live and lead a decent, meaningful life. They concluded that the great suffering that the rabbi experienced would enable him to attain the highest place in heaven, which is normally reserved merely to martyrs and infants, and, thus, the sole manner to join his six young sons who perished as martyrs. The rabbi has been able to find meaning in his suffering and his depression has been alleviated.
Once the rabbi had enabled to surpass his existence and his situation, to find meanings in them and actualise them, he has been able to actualise his life and existence, fill in his noogenic and empty feelings and his will to meaning and purpose, to actualise himself, to cope with his malaise and with his life and existence and to feel much better A Freudian psychoanalyst would have worked away at exposing, examining and analysing the problem, the rabbi's relationship with his parents, his childhood, the sensations that the deaths of his dear ones have elicited in him, his feelings toward his second wife and their relationship etc., in an attempt to cure the depression and to be able to cope with his grief. This would take numerous years, would be extremely costly and, thus, make the psychoanalyst wealthier (and of interest to delay the psychotherapeutic treatment) and would lead to the worsening of the rabbi's depression.
This leads back to the neurotic patient who is unable to have her head be touched, rather than opening the patient's wounds and focussing on and working away at the revelation, examination and analysis of the traumatic event and the dreadful experience of sexual child abuse, with a view to work away at the examination carefully and the analysis freely of what the psychoanalyst considers as the reason, cause and determinant of the neurosis, as it is compatible with the psychoanalytic rigid and predetermined theories (but can very easily is induced by other factors, which are part of the individualistic life and existence of the treated, analysed patient), the logotherapist would have guided and advised the patient not to confine herself in the past and constantly analyse her trauma only to go on living and to continue experientially. That in fact, the patient would be advised to try to overstep and transcendent both her traumatic experience of sexual abuse and her inability to have her head touched and seek for meanings and purposes and will to meanings and purposes in her life and her personal existence and in her trauma, suffering and crisis. Nonetheless, by no means, the trauma would be ignored or not treated in a serious manner. The trauma, would not enjoy the full attention of the logotherapeutic sessions, which would be devoted to the patient's ability to live a meaningful and rewarding life. The trauma would simply fit in this endeavour, to make the patient able to lead a meaningful life and existence.
The sexual abuse is, thus, viewed as an event that happened in the past. It must be accepted as an event that occurred already and cannot be erased, reversed and altered. It should be treated as if nothing could be done about changing it. There is no point in spending the entire psychotherapeutic sessions in discussing it, focussing on it and working away at analysing it as an event in the past, but the logotherapeutic sessions should intend to plan and devise the present and future of the patient's life and existence (the emergence and becoming of the patient), search for and find meanings and purposes in her life and personal existence and try to actualise them and, as a consequence, herself, her personal existence and life. The traumatic experience has to fit with (and in) this objective and with the patient's overall task in life and be employed so as to actualise her meaning and purpose in life and personal existence and be beneficial and have a meaning and purpose traumatic sexual abuse and in the patient's life. Again, the overall objective and the justification of logotherapy and the logotherapeutic sessions are to have the patient's living a meaningful, pleasant, actualised and authentic life.
As a clinical illustration for the danger in searching for correlation between a given, past event and the given neurosis/psychosis and in asserting that it was this particular event that has induced the condition of the patient, Elisabeth Lukas reports of two sisters whom she has encountered in treating their mother of severe despair and depression. The mother has recounted that the older sister has been an unwanted child who has been severely sexually abused by her father throughout her childhood and has been ill-treated and mentally and physically abused by her entire family and has not been loved by her mother. The other, younger, child, on the other hand, has been a desired child and loved and well-taken care of and treated by her family. She has had an excellent, normal, warm, fatherly relationship with her father and was adored by her mother.
It was, nevertheless, the older, abused and undesirable of sisters who has been able to lead a perfectly normal life. She has been perfectly healthy, both mentally and physically. She was kind, well mannered and easy to get along with. She has been married, had children and has been a superb mother and wife. She has had a job and a rewarding career that she enjoyed and has lived a happy, meaningful and actualised life. Overall, she has been an active, valuable member of society and a happy individual being. Her younger sister, the desired and loved one, on the other hand, have developed severe psychotic/neurotic symptoms and has experienced severe numerous mental and physical problems. She has had sexual problems, has been lonely and could not develop and have relationships whatsoever with other individuals and with men. She has lied regularly, was rude and very hard to get along with. She broke the law many times and spent time in prison. Overall, she appeared to suffer from an existential vacuum, a feeling of existential frustration and noogenic neurosis.
The mother, who could not understand how this situation was feasible, has become severely depressed. The mother needed to be explained by the logotherapist (Dr. Lukas) that a person is determined by her search for meanings (will to meaning) in life, human existence and her life and personal existence and by the surpassing of her existence and the actualising of those meanings, rather than being automatically determined by given, specific events in her life.
Those clinical cases show that Logotherapy endeavours to overcome and suppress the inclination not to will to meaning, to surpass the patient's existence and to realise the patient's will to meanings and purposes in her life and her personal existence and values that are to be actualised, find them and set herself to the fulfilment of the task of actualising them and, as a consequence, herself, her life and existence, with the overall view to lead a happy, meaningful life. The supposition of Logotherapy is that finding meanings and purposes in the neurosis, in terms of the meanings in the patient's personal existence and life would assist in alleviating it.
According to Logotherapy, the 'Freudian' defence mechanism that prevents the patient from having a direct access to his painful experience also prevents the exposure to an event that cannot be altered and reversed but, generate severe pain and suffering. Thus, while ignoring the painful experience is a wrong thing to do, devoting the entire psychotherapeutic sessions to overcoming and suppressing the defence mechanism and exposing the trauma and, therefore, regressing to and remaining in the past, merely for the sake of revealing and analysing the trauma, is likely to lead to the opening of closed wounds and make them expect more than might be we again to overcoming, an overall battle, struggle and conflict between undevout viciously. The Great Theoretical Difference Between the Psychotherapeutic, Existential Application of the Nietzschean Doctrine and Freudian Psychoanalysis.
In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations, The Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practice’s psychology and who has devised 'a new psychology'. Nietzsche's works are viewed by several authors (for instance, Kaufmann and Golomb) as psychological ones, a fact that is disregarded by numerous authors who regard Nietzsche as a mere anti philosopher and a writer of short, beautiful verse. Nietzsche has also sought to bring the nature of man, the unconscious, the conscious, self conscious, self analysis, relationships with other individuals, the inner state (emotions, sensations, feelings and the like), irrational sources of man's power and greatness as well as his morbidity and self-destructiveness into the scope of existence.
Further, in his numerous writings Nietzsche also talks of the mind, the mental, instincts, reflexes, reflexive movements, the brain, symbolic representations, images, views, metaphors, language, experiences, innate and hereditary psychological elements, defence, protective, mechanisms, repression, suppression als etc. As an illustration, Nietzsche describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility and aggression. Moreover, Nietzsche strives to analyse human being, his crisis, his despair and his existence in the world and to find means so as to alleviate human crises and despair.
These aspects of Nietzsche's work elicit a tendency to compare Nietzsche's doctrine with that of Freud and psychoanalysis and to argue that the Freudian doctrine and school (the psychoanalytic theory of human personality on which the psychotherapeutic technique of psychoanalysis is based) and method of treatment (psychoanalysis) has been influenced and affected by Nietzsche's philosophy and work and the Nietzschean doctrine. As a demonstration from the relevant literature, according to Golomb's (1987) thesis, the theoretical core of psychoanalysis is already part and parcel of Nietzsche's philosophy, insofar as it is based on concepts that are both displayed in it and developed by it - concepts such as the unconscious, repression, sublimation, the id, the superego, primary and secondary processes and interpretations of dreams.
Nevertheless, the actual situation in the domains of psychotherapy, psychiatry and clinical psychology is, by no means, strictly so. While the two savants (Nietzsche and Freud) endeavour to understand man, to develop the healthy power that is still present in the individual and the neurotic patient so as to overcome and suppress the psychological boundaries that repress his vitality and inhibit his ability to function freely and creatively and attain truth, the difference between the psychodynamic school, approach, movement and method of treatment, in general, and psychoanalysis, in particular, and the existential approach to psychotherapy, the existential movement and the existential, humanistic school of psychology and method of treatment that have been stemmed from the doctrines and views of Freud and Nietzsche is profound and significant, as far as the actual psychotherapeutic treatment is concerned. The reason as for this difference lie in the variation in the two savants' view and definition of man and human existence, the nature and character of man and his relationship with the world and the environment, as well as in the variation in the intellectual soil, the tasks, roles, endeavours, relationships and encounters and actualising set and determined (by the individual patient herself) objectives and tasks make the old event a matter of the past and the life of the patient too full, excited and actualised so as to analyse and experience the problem and cause of the neurosis/psychosis and, therefore, influence and alleviate the psychosis/neurosis. Frankl and Lukas recount and provide numerous clinical illustrations so as to demonstrate this point.
This has shown that the Nietzschean doctrine may be regarded as a personality theory and, as such, may be employed as the foundations for the devising of a psychotherapeutic approach. The Nietzschean doctrine defines man as a being who is fully responsible for his life and personal existence and possesses mastery over his fate, life and existence as well as his conduct, his nature, identity and image. As such, he possesses the power to determine, create and organise his ideologies, values and morals and, as a consequence, himself, who and what he is. Nevertheless, the individual has to suppress and overcome the psychological inclination to have his ideologies and values be determined for him. Then, he has to realise the power to determine himself so as to gain as much power as possible and become a powerful, individual being.
In order to demonstrate the applicability of the Nietzschean doctrine in psychiatry and psychotherapy, Frankl's existential approach of Logotherapy was displayed, briefly outlined, described and illustrated. Logotherapy guides the treated patient in overcoming the inclination to conform and be determined and help her seek and realise meanings and purposes throughout her life and personal existence with a view to create, actualise and determine herself, to lead a meaningful life and existence and to become whoever and whatever she wishes to become and be.
With that, in the course of Logotherapy, the treated individual must assume power, responsibility and mastery over his own life and personal existence and create and design his life and existence and, as a consequence, himself in accordance with his own set values and purposes. Once the individual has found the reasons, meanings and purposes to living and in all aspects of his life and personal existence (the painful ones and the happy ones) he is able to lead a more meaningful life and put up with almost any living conditions. In fact, Frankl employs Logotherapy by two famous quotes from Nietzsche - "whatever does not kill me makes me stronger" and "Man can have the how if he has the why.” Thus, according to Logotherapy, the individual's entire state of being and mental and physical conditions are likely to be ameliorated, alleviated and sometimes even cured once he has established meanings and purposes into, to and in the human existence, as a whole, and his own life and personal existence, in particular, and is able to lead a meaningful, purposeful and actualised life.
Once establishing that the Nietzschean doctrine has many psychological aspects and elements in it and, therefore, possesses the ability and the potentiality to provide the core and essence of a psychotherapeutic approach in psychiatry and clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, which is the most popular and known psychotherapeutic approach (in as well as outside the relevant fields of psychiatry and psychology), immediately comes up to one's mind. In fact, the present paper was commenced by stating the similarity in terms of the terminology and the concepts that are employed in both the Nietzschean doctrine and the Freudian, psychoanalytic, doctrine and psychoanalysis. Moreover, the present paper has described the inclination to compare the Freudian doctrine with the Nietzschean doctrine and the Nietzschean doctrine to the psychoanalytic method and approach of psychotherapeutic treatment (i.e., psychoanalysis). The present paper has even gone as far as quoting Golomb's clear and bold assertion that the Nietzschean doctrine, in fact, constitutes not less than the theoretical core of Freudian psychoanalysis. In fact, the present paper has set itself the task of examining this assertion by professor Jacob Golomb.
Nevertheless, it was the present paper's primary objective to refute this assertion and to show that the Nietzschean doctrine does not constitute the theoretical core of psychoanalysis. Both the theoretical, conceptual, and the practical, applied psychotherapeutic, differences between the Freudian doctrine and its method of psychotherapeutic treatment (Psychoanalysis) and the Nietzschean doctrines were displayed, outlined, illustrated and depicted in the present paper in some length. On the other hand, the present paper has demonstrated that the Nietzschean doctrine constitutes the theoretical core and essence of the existential approach to psychotherapy, which, in fact, constitutes the most vicious rival to psychoanalysis.
Moreover, the existential approach of Logotherapy is depicted as a rival approach to psychoanalysis in the same field as psychoanalysis (that is psychiatry and clinical psychology) it is described as the one that really employs the Nietzschean doctrine as its true theoretical core and essence and as its foundation. It seems less feasible to ignore and skip on the similarities in and between the 'will to power' and its realisation and the 'will to meaning' and its actualisation, the ambition to surpass and overcome all that prevents and suppresses the will to power/meaning and the individual existence, the idea of free will, the notion of full responsibility for and mastery over one's life and the idea of the freedom to determine and create oneself. Those last three concepts constitute key concepts in the Nietzschean doctrine, the existential movement and Logotherapy. The existential movement was described in the present paper and Nietzsche was shown to have been the forebear and deviser of the existential movement, together with Soren, Aabye Kierkegaard.
The Freudian, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic doctrines, for their part, regard human personality, morality, ideologies, feelings, emotions and conduct as deterministic ones that are either innate or determined by events and other types of stimuli. The Freudian doctrine, therefore, maintains that the best manner to alleviate human crisis and despair (both neurosis and psychosis) is to search and find the reasons, causes and determinants for them. The psychoanalytic method of treatment is, therefore, really a technique of searching and finding and analysing and examining thoroughly and freely the events, experiences and stimuli that it assumes to be the causes and determinants of the neurosis/psychosis.
The process of searching and finding significant stimuli and events in the individual patient's life and of analysing the individual patient's life and existence freely applies the shuttering and overpowering of a defence mechanism that represses those events and stimuli from being revealed and aware of by the given analysed individual who has undergone them and regressed them to his subconscious. This process, therefore, strives to make the stimuli and events, which are assumed to be the cause, reason and determinant of the neurosis/psychosis, come up to the analysed neurotic/psychotic patient's consciousness and become fully aware of by the analysed neurotic/psychotic patient and, thus, revealed and analysed freely and thoroughly by both the patient and the psychoanalyst.
While overcoming the defence mechanism and fully revealing the reasons and causes as for the neurosis/psychosis and exposing them to the patient's consciousness enable their analysing freely and without any restraints. Once the patient is fully aware of the event and stimulus that have generated his illness, crises and despair and those events and stimuli are analysed and examined thoroughly and freely the neurosis/psychosis is cured.
A tendency to assert that the Nietzschean doctrine influences the Freudian, psychoanalytic doctrine and approach and the Freudian method of psychoanalysis and that the Nietzschean doctrine constitutes the theoretical essence and core of Freudian psychoanalysis is erroneous and misleading. The Nietzschean doctrine, on the other hand, is the theoretical basis and core of the existential movement, existential, humanistic psychology and the existential approach to psychotherapy. Specifically, the Nietzschean doctrine constitutes the foundations of Logotherapy, also known as existential analysis.
The two movements, schools and approaches are rival ones and so are Logotherapy and Psychoanalysis. While there are some similarities in their shared ambition to alleviate man's crises and despair, in the terminology that they employ and in their shared endeavour to suppress and overpower the psychological boundaries that repress the individual patient from attaining truth and true self and to free truth and the true self, the representational notion of what man actually is, an individual being, the self, the true self, actualisation and the like, which constitute key issues in theories of personality and which define human personality, vary immensely and cannot differ more, in terms of their treatment and definition by the two movements and approaches.
In fact, other movements and schools such as Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence also employ concepts such as the self, consciousness, unconsciousness, memory, recall, morality, revelation, human nature, personality and character. Nevertheless, attempting to compare them with psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic movement would be an absurd task. Their view and definition of those concepts vary immensely from the definition of those concepts by Psychoanalysis and their application and application of those concepts differs greatly from the utilisation of those concepts by psychoanalysis, although Cognitive Psychology has created cognitive psychotherapy and talks about the recall and storage of information by and in the mind and the access and revelation of information -that is the representational model of Cognitive Psychology and the cognitive revolution and movement, which dominates cognitive psychology.
It is, thus, the overall designing, devising and depiction of the approach, doctrine and theory, and of what they endeavour to do and achieve - their definition of their main subject matter (Man, and his existence in the world, his personality, nature, image and character) and of key concepts; The combining of those key concepts by them. Their manner of applying those definitions in practice - which make up a given doctrine, approach and method of treatment and applicability and enable the comparison of the particular doctrine (approach) with other doctrines, approaches and methods of applicability and treatment of a similar type. Comparing selected aspects, components and elements of two or more doctrines and approaches may lead to the omission of important features and constituents that, in fact, vary and are contrasted significantly in the two doctrines and approaches and, therefore, to the adoption of the erroneous conclusion that the doctrines and approaches are similar and comparable when they are, in fact, totally different and contrasted. The Nietzschean/Freudian case to which the present paper was devoted and dedicated has, thus, shown how careful one should be so as not to be misled in comparing two doctrines, theories and approaches and claiming that one doctrine, theory and approach affect and influences another doctrine, theory and approach and constitutes its theoretical core.
According to Nietzsche, tragedy began in the musical, undifferentiated Dionysian chorus and only later developed the discursive and discrete Apollonian action and characters in which Aristotle had located the essence of the genre. Real tragedy, according to Nietzsche, depicts the doomed efforts of the Apollonian heroes to rise above the constraints of their individuality. It celebrates those efforts as a characteristic human gesture in the face of the ultimate irrationality of the world, and in the chorus, which always remains on stage after the hero's destruction, it offers, of The Birth of Tragedy, the "metaphysical comfort . . . that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable.”
Nietzsche resigned from the university in 1879 and devoted the rest of his life to writing. Though Schopenhauer and Wagner ceased to be the dominant influences on his thought, many of the questions addressed in The Birth of Tragedy continued to occupy him throughout his life; the book itself, despite its many problems, has remained one of his most popular and well-known works.
Too such "dogmatic" or "metaphysical" thought Nietzsche opposed his "perspectivism," a view he once expressed by writing that "facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations.” He believed that the emergence of the possibility of perspectivism was due in part to the fact that Christianity had provided it’s very own undermining. This is the sense of his notorious dictum, "God is dead.” By this he meant that faith in God, which involves a total commitment to truthfulness, has finally led to the gradually emerging realization that God does not exist after all and that therefore there can be no objective, absolute values.
“God is dead” -and man, in his heart of hearts, is incapable of forgiving himself for having done away with Him, he is bent upon punishing himself for this, his “greatest deed.” Fir the time being, however, he will take refuge in many an evasive action. With the instinct of as born hunter, Nietzsche pursues him into all his hiding places, cornering him in each of the morality without religion? Not so: “All purely moral demands without their religious basis,” he says, “must needs end in nihilism.” The time, Nietzsche predicts, is fast approaching when secular crusaders, tools of man’s collective suicide, will devastate the world with their rival claims to compensate for the lost Kingdom of Heaven by setting up on earth the ideological rules of Love and Justice that, by the very force of the spiritual derangement involved, will lead to the rules of cruelty and slavery, and he prophesies that the war fair global domination will be fought on behalf of philosophical doctrines.
Was he, having lost God, capable of truly believing in anything? “He who no longer finds what is in God will find it nowhere -he must either deny it or create it.” Only the “either-or” does not apply. All his life Nietzsche tried to do both. He had the passion for truth and no belief in it. He had the love of life and despaired of it. This is the stuff from which demons are made perhaps the most powerful secret demon eating the heart out of the modern mind. To have written and enacted the extremist story of this mind is Nietzsche’s true claim to greatness.
What, then, is the final importance of Nietzsche? For one, lies in his example that is so strange, profound, confounded, alluring, and forbidding that it can hardly be looked upon as exemplary, but it cannot be ignored either. For it has something to do with living lucidly in the dark age of which he so creatively despaired.
Obnoxious as Nietzsche found the specific values of Christian morality, he reacted even more negatively to its universalism. Christian morality, he believed, prevents the few people who do not belong to "the herd" from going in good conscience against the majority's values and from fashioning their own way of life--a way of life that will differ from one type of person to another and will make no claim to universal validity. Nietzsche constantly praised such creativity and claimed that the only difference between the Christian and the type of character he praises as the Übermensch, the "free spirit" or "new philosopher," is that while both are creators of values, only the latter remains aware of this fact and actually takes pleasure in it.
That Nietzsche believes about life he also believes about interpretation--hence his immense importance for literary theory and criticism. As certain values come to appear binding, so many interpretations cease to display their interpretive status and begin to appear as fact about the texts they concern, which means that they no longer appear as interpretations at all. Just as Nietzsche's "genealogical" method aims to show how the particular interpretations of life that created the moral values of Christianity came about, so literary criticism must turn to an unmasking of what we take for granted in connection with every text. Such "facts" are the products of earlier, accepted, and therefore unacknowledged interpretations. Just as there is not a single mode of life, good for all people, so there can clearly ever be a single, overarching interpretation of a particular text that everyone will have to accept. "The" world and "the" text are equally indeterminate.
All interpretation, moral or literary, is an expression of what Nietzsche calls "the will to power." Much that he wrote about this idea sounds as if he believed in some sort of crude overpowering of "the weak" by "the strong" and has seemed too many to align him with fascist theories of political power. Nevertheless, the idea that interpretations manifest the will to power is the idea that no interpretation is a pure objective mirroring of the facts, since there are no facts to be mirrored in the first place. All the same, it is an effort to fashion a mode of life, or a reading of a text, through which the type of character each interpreter constitutes can best be manifested: "One seeks a picture of the world in that philosophy in which we feel freest, i.e., in which our most powerful drive feels free to function. This will also be the case with me"
Nietzsche therefore urges those who are able to do so not to remain in the grip of dogmatism and to fashion instead interpretations and lives of their own. In his view, being important is much more important than to be good. Even if the interpretation of life we are in the process of fashioning cannot but seem binding to us--because conceiving of another is impossible, at that time, -he still urges that we retain the generalized awareness that there is nothing necessary about it. Any such construct is our own creation. Nietzsche, furthermore, wants his readers to revel in their difference from everyone else, if they are, of course, capable of being different in the first place. However, he cannot possibly convince his readers to be different: one either is or is not capable of that. Accordingly, the nature of his intended audience and the mode of address appropriate to them remain for him questionable throughout his writings.
In doing so, Nietzsche also made the form of his writing essential to its content and thus raised profound questions about the relationship between philosophy and literature. The consequences of his views and of his overall project are still being pursued in philosophy, literature, and criticism. If his perspectivism is, after all, true, then, in appropriately paradoxical fashion, this pursuit will never be finally over.
Nietzsche’s apropos question, it turns out, is a good place to begin regarding his subject. For the Problem of God cannot be defined by any single. Question but is
more an umbrella term covering a variety of ancient, modern and postmodern questions regarding God. Does God exist? What is the nature of God? Why is there evil and suffering in the world? Although a slight ray of light is obscured but implicitly within these are questions about our own meaning and purpose in the world. If God does exist, why has humanity been created? If God is dead, what is the right way for us to go about conducting our lives?
It is in defining and examining the (for him historical) phenomenon of nihilism that Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity sets in, and it has remained the only truly subtle point that, within the whole range of his more unrestrained argumentativeness, this Antichrist makes against Christianity. For it is at this point that Nietzsche asks (and asks the same question in countless variations throughout his work): What is the specific qualifying that the Christian tradition has instilled a cultivated in the minds of men? They are, he thinks, two fold: on the one hand, a more refined sense of truth than any other civilization has known, an almost uncontrollable desire for absolute spiritual and intellectual certainties, and, ion the other hand, the ever-present suspicion that life on this earth is not a supreme value, but in need of a higher, belief transcendental justification. This, Nietzsche believers, is a destructive, and even self-destructive alliance, which is bound finally to corrode the very Christian beliefs on which it rests, for the mind exercised and guided in its search foe knowledge by the most sophisticated and comprehensive theology the world has ever known -a theology that through Thomas Aquinas has assimilated into its grand system the genius of Aristotle was at the same time fashioned and directed by the indelible Christian distrust of the ways of the world. Consequently, it ought to follow, with the utmost logical precision and determination, a course of systematically “devaluing” the knowable real.
This mind, Nietzsche predicts, will eventually, in a frenzy of intellectual honestly, unmask a humbug what it began by regarding as the finer things in life. The boundless faith in that, the joint legacy of Christ and Greek, will in the end dislodge every possible belief in truth of any faith. Souls, long disciplined in a school of unworthiness and humility, will insist upon knowing the worst about themselves, and only be able to grasp what is humiliating. Psychology will denigrate the creations of beauty, laying bare the wangle of unworthy desires of which they are “mere” sublimation.
All new knowledge about the soul I knowledge about a different soul. For can I ever happen that the freely discovering mind says to the soul, “This is what you are, “is it not quite as if the mind said to the soul: “This is how I wish you to see yourself. This is the image after which I create you. This is my secret about you: I shock you with it and, shockingly, at once wrest it from you.” Worse: having received and revealed it secret, their soul is no longer what I was when it lived in secrecy. For there are secrets that are created in the process of their revelation. Worse still, having been told its secrets, the soul may create to be a soul. This step from modern psychology to soullessness is imperceptibly distanced from that of modern physics, just as dissoluble the concept of “Matter.”
This valuing quantification is manifest in today’s world, which we live in an age during which many of us have experienced the death of God. It’s well known that the phrase "God is dead" was made famous by the 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Although he was by temperament and atheist, Nietzsche’s controversial statement was more a realization on his part than a pronouncement. He simply weighed the astonishing German military power of his day and the incredible advances in modern science (including Darwinism) and technology against the declining belief in the Christian God. For Nietzsche, human ingenuity and power had reached such heights as to make God psychologically irrelevant. Although he has often been ridiculed and scorned by right-wing fundamentalists who have misunderstood his meaning, Nietzsche himself felt great ambivalence concerning the death of God. On the one hand, he feared and predicted humanity, with no system of moral guidance, would plunge itself into wars and disasters the likes of which have never been seen. On the other hand, he was hopeful the life denying ethics of Christianity might be replaced with a new life affirming philosophy. "At last," he wrote, "the sea, our sea, lies open before us. Perhaps there has never been so open a sea." If Nietzsche only gave voice to a thought concerning the relevancy of God that was increasingly on the minds of many in his day, it was the horrific Holocaust a few years later that would nail the lid on God’s coffin. In the face of such horror and suffering it became impossible for many to believe in the existence of a just and loving God. As the German Theologian and pacifist, Deitrich Bonhoeffer wrote while imprisoned for plotting to assassinate Hitler, ". . . everything evidently gets along without ‘God,’ and just as well as before."3 In this statement, like Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer realized that humanity had come of age, no longer needing faith in God when it could rely upon its own inventiveness to determine its fate and control the forces of nature. However, the concentration of human suffering and evil displayed during the Holocaust touched upon a nerve essential to the human condition and much older than recent advancements through science and technology. More than a century before both Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer, philosopher David Hume asked "Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? From what place then is evil?"4 Theologians as renown as C.S. Lewis and thinkers as ancient as Epicurus have voiced similar questions. For many the facts of human suffering is proof enough that God cannot exist. Nonetheless, the problem of suffering has proven such a stumbling block for theologians over the centuries that a range of differing solutions has been proposed. In specific regard to the Holocaust, for example, Robert L. Rubenstein argues in his book After Auschwitz, "To see any purpose in the death camps, the traditional believer is forced to regard the most demonic, antihuman explosion in all history as a meaningful expression of God’s purpose. He goes on to say, "A God who tolerates the suffering that become more even that one single innocent child, may that is either infinitely cruel or hopelessly indifferent. For Rubenstein the reality of such evil proves that even if God does exist, such a being cannot be all-powerful.
Other solutions to the problem suggest suffering is a divine test of some sort, such as the biblical character Job went through. Unfortunately this solution also implicates God in the malicious and intentional suffering humans experience. Some blame humanity itself for evil and suffering, through the doctrines of original sin and free will. This argument has several problems. Firstly, if God is omniscient, all-knowing, why create a world that would fall so utterly from its original perfection? Furthermore, even if God is bound by some self imposed guideline of non-interference, as Creator such a God must take some, if not full, responsibility for the outcome of Creation. Finally, blaming human beings for the existence of evil and suffering in the world may explain moral evils, but it doesn’t explain the presence of natural evil such as disease, tornadoes, droughts, hurricanes, etc., etc., event’s human beings have no control over. Finally, some theologies give God a get-out-of-jail-free-card by simply concluding the ways of God are incomprehensible to human beings. That is, God may appear indifferent, malicious, uncaring, but this is only because we, in our limited capacity, cannot understand the mind of God. All of these arguments, however, may be last ditch efforts to cling to the belief in God even amid what some have concluded is overwhelming evidence that such a God does not exist.
In fairness, it should be noted that the hope for a perfect world without suffering and evil may be typical of modern humanity and not indicative of humanity in general. With the advent of science and the increasing sufficiency of technology, both mechanical and medical, is our latent hope that we will one day solve all our problems by ushering in a techno-utopian world. To do so, however, many have come to the conclusion that we must kill first kill God, which is to say, if we are to advance we must move beyond our antiquated and traditional beliefs. In his book, The Problem of God, Yesterday and Today, John Courtney Murray describes two types of postmodern atheists, the atheist of the communist world Revolution and the atheist of the Theatre 8. For the Marxist, according to Murray, the goal is to build a new world, free of all misery, by giving human beings their freedom, a freedom from belief in God and from religion itself that is viewed as an opium of the people. "He has discovered that it is history, not God, that makes the nature of man." Inscribes Murray, "This discovery was the death of God. When man came to know himself through history, when he came to understand that he is the creature of history and not of God, God was dead. He died out of history, leaving man as its master."
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely rational explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of Cartesian dualism with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’ do not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘essences’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily dismissed all pervious philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The problem, claimed Nietzsche, is that earlier versions of the ‘will to power’ disguise the fact that all allege truths were arbitrarily created in and are expression or manifestations of individual ‘will’.
In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and mater is more absolute and total than had previously been imagined. Based on the assumptions that there are no real or necessary correspondences between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, he declared that we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language’. The prison as he conceived it, however, it was also a ‘space’ where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature’ and articulate a new massage of individual existence founded on will.
“Those who fail to enact their existence in this space,” says Nietzsche, “are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialist ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd.” Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said, not only exalted natural phenomena and favours reductionistic examinations of phenomena at the expense of mind. It also seeks to educe mind to a mere material substance, and thereby to displace or subsume the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic description that disallows any basis for the free exercise of individual will.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and his radical empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulful mechanistic inverse proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Though a curious course of events, attempts by Edmund Husserl, a philosopher trained in higher math and physics, to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of human consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche. Husserl, of course, was a principal founder of ‘phenomenology’ and from Franz Brentano (1838-1917) inherited the view that the central problem in understanding thought is that of explaining the way in which an intentional direction, or content, can belong to the mental phenomenon that exhibits it. Mental phenomena are founded in sensory data, but whereas for Brentano there is no sharp distinction between ‘intuitions’ and concepts, Husserl reinstates that this way of thinking is that the content is immanent, existing within the mental act, and anything external drops out as secondary or irrelevant to the intrinsic nature of the mental state. The problem is nonetheless of reconciling the subjective or psychological nature of mental life with its objective and logical content preoccupied Husserl from this time onwards. Husserl eventually abandoned his attempt to keep both a subjective and a naturalistic approach to knowledge together, abandoning the naturalism in favour of a kind of ‘transcendentalism’ idealism.
`Nietzsche, in an effort to subvert the epistemological authority of scientific knowledge, sought to legitimatize a division between mind and world much starker than that originally envisioned by Descartes. What is not as widely known, however, is that Nietzsche and other seminal figures in the history of philosophical postmodernism were very much aware of an epistemological crisis in scientific thought than arose much earlier that, that occasioned by wave-particle dualism in quantum physics. This crisis resulted from attempts during the las5t three decades of the nineteenth century to develop a logically self-consistent definition of number and arithmetic that would serve to reinforce the classical view of correspondence between mathematical theory and physical reality. As it turned out, these efforts resulted in paradoxes of recursion and self-reference that threatened to undermine both the efficacy of this correspondence and the privileged character of scientific knowledge.
Nietzsche appealed to this crisis in an effort to reinforce his assumption that, the absence of ontology, all knowledge (including scientific knowledge) was grounded only in human consciousness. As the crisis continued, a philosopher trained in higher mathematics and physics, Edmund Husserl, attempted to preserve the classical view of correspondence between mathematical theory and physical reality by deriving the foundation of logic and number from consciousness in ways that would preserve self-consistency and rigour. Even so, this effort to ground mathematical physics in human consciousness, or in human subjective reality, was no trivial matter. It represented a direct link between these early challenges and the efficacy of classical epistemology and the tradition in philosophical thought that culminated in philosophical postmodernism. Nietzsche’s emotionally charged decence of intellectual freedom and his radical empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought.
`Friedrich Nietzsche is openly pessimistic about the possibility of knowledge. ‘We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’: We know (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species: and even what is called ‘utility’ is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we will not perish some day’ (The Gay Science).
This position is very radical, Nietzsche does not simply deny that knowledge, construed as the adequate representation of the world by the intellect, exists. He also refuses the pragmatist identification of knowledge and truth with usefulness: he writes that we think we know what we think is useful, and that we can be quite wrong about the latter.
Nietzsche’s view, his ‘Perspectivism’, depends on his claim that there is no sensible conception of a world independent of human interpretation and to which interpretations would correspond if hey were to constitute knowledge. He sums up this highly controversial position in The Will to Power: ‘Facts are precisely what there is not. Only interpretation’.
It is often claimed that Perspectivism is self-undermining. If the thesis that all views are interpretations is true then, it is argued there is at least one view that is not an interpretation. If, on the other hand, the thesis is itself an interpretation, then there is no reason to believe that it is true, and it follows again that nit every view is an interpretation.
Yet this refutation assumes that if a view, like Perspectivism itself, is an interpretation it is wrong. This is not the case. To call any view, including Perspectivism, an interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views, and that is not a sufficient refutation. To show the Perspectivism is literally false producing another view superior to it on specific epistemological grounds is necessary.
Perspectivism does not deny that particular views can be true. Like some versions of cotemporary anti-realism, its attributional approach for ‘truth in relation to facts’ specified internally those approaches themselves. But it refuses to envisage a single independent set of facts, To be accounted for by all theories. Thus Nietzsche grants the truth of specific scientific theories does, however, deny that a scientific interpretation can possibly be ‘the only justifiable interpretation of the world’ (The Gay Science): Neither t h fact science addresses nor the methods it employs are privileged. Scientific theories serve the purposes for which hey have been devised, but these have no priority over the many other purposes of human life. The existence of many purposes and needs relative to which the value of theories is established-another crucial element of Perspectivism is sometimes thought to imply a reason relative, according to which no standards for evaluating purposes and theories can be devised. This is correct only in that Nietzsche denies the existence of single set of standards for determining epistemic value, but holds that specific views can be compared with and evaluated in relation to one another the ability to use criteria acceptable in particular circumstances does not presuppose the existence of criteria applicable in all. Agreement is therefore not always possible, since individuals may sometimes differ over the most fundamental issues dividing them.
Still, Nietzsche would not be troubled by this fact, which his opponents too also have to confront only he would argue, to suppress it by insisting on the hope that all disagreements are in particular eliminable even if our practice falls woefully short of the ideal. Nietzsche abandons that ideal. He considers irresoluble disagreement and essential part of human life.
Knowledge for Nietzsche finds its point reference by the idea of the ‘given’ basis beyond which its conferring material and of a rational defensible theory of confirmation and inference. That it is based on desire and bodily needs more than social refinement’s Perspectives are to be judged not from their relation to the absolute but on the basis of their effects in a specific era. The possibility of any truth beyond such a local, pragmatic one becomes a problem in Nietzsche, since either a noumenal realm or a historical synthesis exists to provide an absolute criterion of adjudication for competing truth claims: what gets called truths are simply beliefs that have been for so long that we have forgotten their genealogy? In these Nietzsche reverses the Enlightenment dictum that truth is the way to liberation by suggesting that trying classes in as far as they are considered absolute for debate and conceptual progress and cause as opposed to any ambient behaviour toward the ease of which backwardness and unnecessary misery. Nietzsche moves back and forth without revolution between the positing of trans-histories; truth claims, such as his claim about the will to power, and a kind of epistemic nihilism that calls into question not only the possibility of truth but the need and desire of it as well. However, perhaps what is most important, Nietzsche introduces the notion that truth is a kind of human practice, in a game whose rules are contingent rather than necessary it. The evaluation of truth claims should be based of their strategic efforts, not their ability to represent a reality conceived of as separately autonomous than that of human influence, for Nietzsche the view that all truth is truth from or within a particular perspective. The perspective may be a general human pin of view, set by such things as the nature of our sensory apparatus, or it may be thought to be bound by culture, history, language, class or gender. Since there may be many perspectives, there are also different families of truth. The term is frequently applied to Nietzsche’s philosophy.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, the deconstructionist’s Jacques Lacan, Roland Bathes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, this direct linkage among the nineteenth-century crises about epistemological foundations of physics and the origins of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form.
Of Sartre’s main philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, Sartre examines the relationships between Being For-itself (consciousness) and Being In-itself (the non-conscious world). He rejects central tenets of the rationalalist and empiricist traditions, calling the view that the mind or self is a thing or substance. ‘Descartes’s substantialist illusion’, and claiming also that consciousness dos not contain ideas or representations . . . are idolist invented by the psychologists. Sartre also attacks idealism in the forms associated with Berkeley and Kant, and concludes that his account of the relationship between consciousness and the world is neither realist nor idealist.
Sartre also discusses Being For-others, which comprises the aspects of experience about interactions with other minds. His views are subtle: Roughly, he holds that one’s awareness of others is constituted by feelings of shame, pride, and so on.
Sartre’s rejection of ideas, and the denial of idealism, appear to commit him to direct realism in the theory of perception. This is neither inconsistent with his claim as been non-realist nor idealist, since by ‘realist’ he means views that allow for the mutual independence or in-principle separability of mind and world. Against this Sartre emphasizes, after Heidegger, that perceptual experience has an active dimension, in hat it is a way of interacting and dealing with the world, than a way of merely contemplating it (‘activity, as spontaneous, unreflecting consciousness, constitutes a certain existential stratum in the world’). Consequently, he holds that experience is richer, and open to more aspects of the world, than empiricist writers customarily claim:
When I run after a streetcar . . . there is consciousness of-the-streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken, etc., . . . I am then plunged into the world of objects, it is they that constitute the unity of my consciousness, it is they that present themselves with values, with attractive nd repellent qualities . . .
Relatedly, he insists that I experience material things as having certain potentialities -for-me (’nothingness’). I see doors and bottles as openable, bicycles as ridable (these matters are linked ultimately to the doctrine of extreme existentialist freedom). Similarly, if my friend is not where I expect to meet her, then I experience her absence ‘as a real event’.
These Phenomenological claims are striking and compelling, but Sartre pays insufficient attention to such things as illusions and hallucinations, which are normally cited as problems for direct realists. In his discussion of mental imagery, however, he describes the act of imaging as a ‘transformation’ of ‘psychic material’. This connects with his views that even a physical image such as a photograph of a tree does not figure as an object of consciousness when it is experienced as a tree-representation (than as a piece of coloured cards). Nonetheless, the fact remains that the photograph continues to contribute to the character of the experience. Given this, seeing how Sartre avoids positing a mental analogue of a photograph for episodes of mental imaging is hard, and harder still to reconcile this with his rejection of visual representations. If ones image is regarded as debased and the awareness of awakening is formally received as a differential coefficient of perceptual knowledge, but this merely rises once more the issue of perceptual illusion and hallucination, and the problems of reconciling them are dialectally the formalization built upon realism.
Much of Western religion and philosophical thought since the seventeenth century has sought to obviate this prospect with an appeal to ontology or to some conception of God or Being. Yet we continue to struggle, as philosophical postmodernism attests, with the terrible prospect by Nietzsche-we are locked in a prison house of our individual subjective realities in a universe that is as alien to our thought as it is to our desires. This universe may seem comprehensible and knowable in scientific terms, and science does seek in some sense, as Koyré puts it, to ‘find a place for everything.’ Nonetheless, the ghost of Descartes lingers in the widespread conviction that science does not provide a ‘place for man’ or for all that we know as distinctly human in subjective reality.
Nonetheless, after The Gay Science (1882) began the crucial exploration of self-mastery. The relations between reason and power, and the revelation of the unconscious striving after power that provide the actual energy for the apparent self-denial of the ascetic and the martyred were during this period that Nietzsche’s failed relationship with Lou Salome resulted in the emotional crisis from which Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-5, trans., as Thus Spoke Zarathustra) signals a recovery. This work is frequently regarded as Nietzsche’s masterpiece. It was followed by Jenseits von Gut and Böse (1887), trans., as Beyond Good and Evil); Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887, trans., as, The Genealogy of Moral.)
In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85), Friedrich Nietzsche introduced in eloquent poetic prose the concepts of the death of God, the superman, and the will to power. Vigorously attacking Christianity and democracy as moralities for the ‘weak herd’, he argued for the ‘natural aristocracy’ of the superman who, driven by the ‘will to power’, celebrates life on earth rather than sanctifying it for some heavenly reward. Such a heroic man of merit has the courage to ‘live dangerously’ and thus rise above the masses, developing his natural capacity for the creative use of passion.
Also known as radical theology, this movement flourished in the mid 1960s. As a theological movement it never attracted a large following, did not find a unified expression, and passed off the scene as quickly and dramatically as it had arisen. There is even disagreement as to whom its major representatives were. Some identify two, and others three or four. Although small, the movement attracted attention because it was a spectacular symptom of the bankruptcy of modern Theology and because it was a journalistic phenomenon. The very statement "God is dead" was tailor-made for journalistic exploitation. The representatives of the movement effectively used periodical articles, paperback books, and the electronic media. This movement gave expression to an idea that had been incipient in Western philosophy and theology for some time, the suggestion that the reality of a transcendent God at best could not be known and at worst did not exist at all. Philosopher Kant and theologian Ritschl denied that one could have a theoretical knowledge of the being of God. Hume and the empiricist for all practical purposes restricted knowledge and reality to the material world as perceived by the five senses. Since God was not empirically verifiable, the biblical world view was said to be mythological and unacceptable to the modern mind. Such atheistic existentialist philosophers as Nietzsche despaired even of the search of God; it was he who coined the phrase "God is dead" almost a century before the death of God theologians.
Mid-twentieth century theologians not associated with the movement also contributed to the climate of opinion out of which death of God theology emerged. Rudolf Bultmann regarded all elements of the supernaturalistic, theistic world view as mythological and proposed that Scripture be demythologized so that it could speak its message to the modern person.
Paul Tillich, an avowed anti supernaturalist, said that the only nonsymbiotic statement that could be made about God was that he was being itself. He is beyond essence and existence; therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him. It is more appropriate to say God does not exist. At best Tillich was a pantheist, but his thought borders on atheism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (whether rightly understood or not) also contributed to the climate of opinion with some fragmentary but tantalizing statements preserved in Letters and Papers from Prison. He wrote of the world and man ‘coming of age’, of ‘religionless Christianity’, of the ‘world without God’, and of getting rid of the ‘God of the gaps’ and getting along just as well as before. It is not always certain what Bonhoeffer meant, but if nothing else, he provided a vocabulary that later radical theologians could exploit.
It is clear, then, that as startling as the idea of the death of God was when proclaimed in the mid 1960s, it did not represent as radically a departure from recent philosophical and theological ideas and vocabulary as might superficially appears.
Just what was death of God Theology? The answers are as varied as those who proclaimed God's demise. Since Nietzsche, theologians had occasionally used "God is dead" to express the fact that for an increasing number of people in the modern age God seems to be unreal. Nonetheless, the idea of God's death began to have special prominence in 1957 when Gabriel Vahanian published a book entitled God is Dead. Vahanian did not offer a systematic expression of death of God theology. Instead, he analysed those historical elements that contributed to the masses of people accepting atheism not so much as a theory but as a way of life. Vahanian himself did not believe that God was dead. Still, he urged that there be a form of Christianity that would recognize the contemporary loss of God and exert its influence through what was left. Other proponents of the death of God had the same assessment of God's status in contemporary culture, but were to draw different conclusions.
Thomas J. Altizer believed that God had really died. Nonetheless, Altizer often spoke in exaggerated and dialectic language, occasionally with heavy overtones of Oriental mysticism. Sometimes knowing exactly what Altizer meant when he spoke in dialectical opposites is difficult such as "God is dead, thank God" Apparently the real meaning of Altizer's belief that God had died is to be found in his belief in God's immanence. To say that God has died is to say that he has ceased to exist as a transcendent, supernatural being. Alternately, he has become fully immanent in the world. The result is an essential identity between the human and the divine. God died in Christ in this sense, and the process has continued time and again since then. Altizer claims the church tried to give God life again and put him back in heaven by its doctrines of resurrection and ascension. However, the traditional doctrines about God and Christ must be repudiated because man has discovered after nineteen centuries that God does not exist. Christians must even now will the death of God by which the transcendent become immanent.
For William Hamilton the death of God describes the event many have experienced over the last two hundred years. They no longer accept the reality of God or the meaningfulness of language about him. Non theistic explanations have been substituted for theistic ones. This trend is irreversible, and everyone must come to terms with the historical-cultural -death of God. God's death must be affirmed and the secular world embraced as normative intellectually and good ethically. Doubtless, Hamilton was optimistic about the world, because he was optimistic about what humanity could do and was doing to solve its problems.
Paul van Buren is usually associated with death of God theology, although he himself disavowed this connection. Yet, his disavowal seems hollow in the light of his book The Secular Meaning of the Gospel and his article "Christian Education Post Mortem Dei." In the former he accepts empiricism and the position of Bultmann that the world view of the Bible is mythological and untenable to modern people. In the latter he proposes an approach to Christian education that does not assume the existence of God but does assume ‘the death of God’ and that ‘God is gone’. Van Buren was concerned with the linguistic aspects of God's existence and death. He accepted the premise of empirical analytic philosophy that real knowledge and meaning can be conveyed only by language that is empirically verifiable. This is the fundamental principle of modern secularists and is the only viable option in this age. If only empirically verifiable language is meaningful, by that very fact all language that refers to or assumes the reality of God is meaningless, since one cannot verify God's existence by any of the five senses. Theism, belief in God, is not only intellectually untenable, it is meaningless. In, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel van Buren seeks to reinterpret the Christian faith without reference to God. One searches the book in vain for even one clue, that van Buren is anything but a secularist trying to translate Christian ethical values into that language game. There is a decided shift in van Buren's later book Discerning the Way, however.
In retrospect, there was clearly no single death of God Theology, only death of God theologies. Their real significance was that modern theology, by giving up the essential elements of Christian belief in God, had logically led to what was really antitheologies. When the death of God theologies passed off the scene, the commitment to secularism remained and manifested itself in other forms of secular theology in the late 1960s and the 1970s.
Nietzsche is unchallenged as the most insightful and powerful critic of the moral climate of the 19th century (and of what of it remains in ours). His exploration of unconscious motivation anticipated Freud. He is notorious for stressing the ‘will to power’ that is the basis of human nature, the ‘resentment’ that comes when it is denied its basis in action, and the corruptions of human nature encouraged by religion, such as Christianity, that feed on such resentment. Yet the powerful human being who escape all this, the Ubermensch, is not the ‘blood beast’ of later fascism: It is a human being who has mastered passion, risen above the senseless flux, and given creative style to his or her character. Nietzsche’s free spirits recognize themselves by their joyful attitude to eternal return. He frequently presents the creative artist rather than the warlord as his best exemplar of the type, but the disquieting fact remains that he seems to leave himself no words to condemn any uncaged beast of prey whose best to find their style by exerting repulsive power find their style by exerting repulsive power over others. This problem is no t helped by Nietzsche’s frequently expressed misogyny, although in such matters the interpretation of his many-layered and ironic writings is no always straightforward. Similarly y, such Anti-Semitism as has been found in his work is balanced by an equally vehement denunciation of anti-Semitism, and an equal or greater dislike of the German character of his time.
Nietzsche’s current influence derives not only from his celebration of will, but more deeply from his scepticism about the notions of truth and act. In particular, he anticipated any of the central tenets of postmodernism: an aesthetic attitude toward the world that sees it as a ‘text’; the denial of facts; the denial of essences; the celebration of the plurality of interpretation and of the fragmented self, as well as the downgrading of reason and the politicization of discourse. All awaited rediscoveries in the late 20th century. Nietzsche also has the incomparable advantage over his followers of being a wonderful stylist, and his Perspectivism is echoed in the shifting array of literary devices-humour, irony, exaggeration, aphorisms, verse, dialogue, parody-with that he explores human life and history.
Yet, it is nonetheless, that we have seen, the origins of the present division that can be traced to the emergence of classical physics and the stark Cartesian division between mind and the bodily world is two separate substances, the self is as it happened associated with a particular body, but is self-subsisting, and capable of independent existence, yet Cartesian duality, much as the ‘ego’ that we are tempted to imagine as a simple unique thing that makes up our essential identity, but, seemingly sanctioned by this physics. The tragedy of the Western mind, well represented in the work of a host of writers, artists, and intellectual, is that the Cartesian division was perceived as uncontrovertibly real.
Beginning with Nietzsche, those who wished to free the realm of the mental from the oppressive implications of the mechanistic world-view sought to undermine the alleged privileged character of the knowledge called physicians with an attack on its epistemological authority. After Husserl tried and failed to save the classical view of correspondence by grounding the logic of mathematical systems in human consciousness, this not only resulted in a view of human consciousness that became characteristically postmodern. It also represents a direct link with the epistemological crisis about the foundations of logic and number in the late nineteenth century that foreshadowed the epistemological crisis occasioned by quantum physics beginning in the 1920's. This, as a result in disparate views on the existence of oncology and the character of scientific knowledge that fuelled the conflict between the two.
If there were world enough and time enough, the conflict between each that both could be viewed as an interesting artifact in the richly diverse coordinative systems of higher education. Nevertheless, as the ecological crisis teaches us, the ‘old enough’ capable of sustaining the growing number of our life firms and the ‘time enough’ that remains to reduce and reverse the damage we are inflicting on this world ae rapidly diminishing. Therefore, put an end to the absurd ‘betweeness’ and go on with the business of coordinate human knowledge in the interest of human survival in a new age of enlightenment that could be far more humane and much more enlightened than any has gone before.
It now, which it is, nonetheless, that there are significant advances in our understanding to a purposive mind. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary approach to cognition that draws primarily on ideas from cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and logic. Some philosophers may be cognitive scientists, and others concern themselves with the philosophy of cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Since inauguration of cognitive science these disciplines have attracted much attention from certain philosophers of mind. This has changed the character of philosophy of mind, and there are areas where philosophical work on the nature of mind is continuous with scientific work. Yet, the problems that make up this field concern the ways of ‘thinking’ and ‘mental properties’ are those that these problems are standardly and traditionally regarded within philosophy of mind than those that emerge from the recent developments in cognitive science. The cognitive aspect is what has to be understood is to know what would make the sentence true or false. It is frequently identified with the truth cognition of the sentence. Justly as the scientific study of precesses of awareness, thought, and mental organization, often by means of computer modelling or artificial intelligence research. Contradicted by the evidence, it only has to do with is structure and the way it functioned, that is just because a theory does not mean that the scientific community currently accredits it. Generally, there are many theories, though technically scientific, have been rejected because the scientific evidence is strangely against it. The historical enquiry into the evolution of self-consciousness, developing from elementary sense experience too fully rational, free, thought processes capable of yielding knowledge the presented term, is associated with the work and school of Husserl. Following Brentano, Husserl realized that intentionality was the distinctive mark of consciousness, and saw in it a concept capable of overcoming traditional mind-body dualism. The stud y of consciousness, therefore, maintains two sides: a conscious experience can be regarded as an element in a stream of consciousness, but also as a representative of one aspect or ‘profile’ of an object. In spite of Husserl’s rejection of dualism, his belief that there is a subject-matter lingering back, behind and yet remaining after each era of time, or bracketing of the content of experience, associates him with the priority accorded to elementary experiences in the parallel doctrine of phenomenalism, and phenomenology has partly suffered from the eclipse of that approach to problems of experience and reality. However, later phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty do full justice to the world-involving nature of Phenomenological theories are empirical generalizations of data experience, or manifest in experience. More generally, the phenomenal aspects of things are the aspects that show themselves, than the theoretical aspects that are inferred or posited in order to account for them. They merely described the recurring process of nature and do not refer to their cause or that, in the words of J.S. Mill, ‘objects are the permanent possibilities of sensation’. To inhabit a world of independent, external objects are, on this view, to be the subject of actual and possible orderly experiences. Espoused by Russell, the view issued in a programme of translating talk about physical objects and their locations into talking about possible experience. The attempt is widely supposed to have failed, and the priority the approach gives to experience has been much criticized. It is more common in contemporary philosophy to see experience as itself a construct from the actual way of the world, than the other way round.
Phenomenological theories are also called ‘scientific laws’ ‘physical laws’ and ‘natural laws.’ Newton’s third law is one example, saying that, every action ha an equal and opposite reaction. ‘Explanatory theories’ attempt to explain the observations rather than generalized them. Whereas laws are descriptions of empirical regularities, explanatory theories are conceptual constrictions to explain why the data exit, for example, atomic theory explains why we see certain observations, the same could be said with DNA and relativity, Explanatory theories are particularly helpful in such cases where the entities (like atoms, DNA . . . ) cannot be directly observed.
What is knowledge? How does knowledge get to have the content it has? The problem of defining knowledge in terms of true belief plus some favoured relation between the believer and the facts begun with Plato, in that knowledge is true belief plus logos, as it is what enables us to apprehend the principle and firms, i.e., an aspect of our own reasoning.
What makes a belief justified for what measures of belief is knowledge? According to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that to know that such and such is the case. None less, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These arguments are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief or facsimile, are mutually incompatible (the incompatibility thesis) or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so that each may exist without the other, but the two may also coexist (the separability thesis). The incompatibility thesis that hinged on the equation of knowledge with certainty. The assumption that we believe in the truth of claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that belief always involves uncertainty, while knowledge never does, believing something rules out the possibility of knowledge knowing it. Again, given to no reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence, to suggest otherwise, that we cease to believe things about which we are completely confident is bizarre.
A.D. Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozley’s version that deals with psychological certainty than belief per se, is that knowledge can exist without confidence about the item known, although knowledge might also be accompanied by confidence as well. Woozley says, ‘what I can do, where what I can do may include answering questions.’ On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people that correct responses on examinations if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley has given to acknowledge that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. Saying it would be peculiar, ‘I know it is correct.’ But this tension; still ‘I know is correct.’ Woozley explains, using a distinction between condition under which are justified in making a claim (such as a claim to know something) and conditioned under which the claim we make is true. While ‘I know such and such’ might be true even if I answered whether such and such holds, nonetheless claiming that ‘I know that such should be inappropriate for me and such unless I was sure of the truth of my claim.’
Colin Redford (1966) extends Woozley’s defence of the separability thesis. In Redford’s view, not only in knowledge compatible with the lacking of certainty, it is also compatible with a complete lack of belief. He argues by example, in this one example, Jean had forgotten that he learned some English history years prior and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as, ‘When did the Battle of Hastings occur?’ since he forgot that the battle of Hastings took place in 1066 in history, he considers his correct response to be no more than guesses. Thus when he says that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hasting took place in 1066.
Those who agree with Radford’s defence of the separation thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be directed through introspection. That Jean lacks’ beliefs out English history are plausible on this Cartesian picture since Jean does not find himself with the belief out of which the English history when with any beliefs about English history when he seeks them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting the Cartesian view of belief. One could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious. For example, (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are disposed to behave (and has not Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?) Since Jean gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviourist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.
Once, again, but the jargon is attributable to different attitudinal values. AS, D. M. Armstrong (1973) makes a different task against Radford. Jean does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radford that points, which in fact, Armstrong suggests that Jean believe that 1066 is not the actual date that did occur of the Battle of Hastings. For Armstrong parallels the belief of such and such is just possible bu t no more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. However, Armstrong insists Jean also believe that the Battle did occur in 1066. After all, had Jean been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1066, and had he forgotten being ‘taught’ this and subsequently ‘guessed’ that it took place in 10690, we would surely describe the situation as one in which Jean’ false belief about te Battle became a memory trace that was causally responsible or his guess. Thus while Jean consciously believes that the Battle did not occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to the claim that knowledge entails belief.
Suppose that Jean’s memory had been sufficiently powerful to produce the relevant belief. As Radford says, Jan has every reason to suppose that his response is mere guesswork, and so he has every reason to consider his belief false. His belief would be an irrational one, and hence one about whose truth Jean would be ignorant.
The attempt to understand the conceptual representation that is involved in religious belief, existence, necessity, fate, creation, sun, justice, Mercy, Redemption, God. Until the 20th century the history of western philosophy is closely intertwined with attempts to make sense of aspect of pagan, Jewish or Christian religion, while in other tradition such as Hinduism, Buddhism or Taoism, there is even less distinction between religious and philosophical enquiry. The classic problem of conceiving an appropriate object of religious belief is that of understanding whether any term can be predicated of it: Does it make to any sense of talking about its creating to things, willing events, or being one thing or many? The via negativa of Theology is to claim that God can only be known by denying ordinary terms of any application (or them); Another influential suggestion is that ordinary term only apply metaphorically, sand that there is in hope of cashing the metaphors. Once a description of a Supreme Being is hit upon, there remains the problem of providing any reason for supposing that anything answering to the description exists. The medieval period was the high-water mark-for purported proof of the existence of God, such as the Five-Ays of Aquinas, or the ontological argument of such proofs have fallen out of general favour since the 18th century, although theories still sway many people and some philosophers.
Generally speaking, even religious philosophers (or perhaps, they especially) have been wary of popular manifestations of religion. Kant, himself a friend of religious faith, nevertheless distinguishes various perversions: Theosophy (using transcendental conceptions that confuses reason), demonology (indulging an anthropomorphic, mode of representing the Supreme Being), theurgy (a fanatical delusion that feeling can be communicated from such a being, or that we can exert an influence on it), and idolatry, or a superstition’s delusion the one can make oneself acceptable to his Supreme Being by order by means than that of having the moral law at heart (Critique of judgement) these warm conversational tendencies have, however, been increasingly important in modern Theology.
Since Feuerbach there has been a growing tendency for philosophy of religion either to concentrate upon the social and anthropological dimension of religious belief, or to treat a manifestation of various explicable psychological urges. Another reaction is retreat into a celebration of purely subjective existential commitments. Still, the ontological arguments continue to attach attention. Modern anti-fundamentalists trends in epistemology are not entirely hostile to cognitive claims based on religious experience.
Still, the problem f reconciling the subjective or psychological nature of mental life with its objective and logical content preoccupied from of which is next of the problem was elephantine Logische untersuchungen (trans. as Logical Investigations, 1070). To keep a subjective and a naturalistic approach to knowledge together. Abandoning the naturalism in favour of a kind of transcendental idealism. The precise nature of his change is disguised by a penchant for new and impenetrable terminology, but the ‘bracketing’ of eternal questions for which are to a great extent acknowledged implications of a solipistic, disembodied Cartesian ego is its starting-point, with it thought of as inessential that the thinking subject is ether embodied or surrounded by others. However by the time of Cartesian Meditations (trans. as, 1960, fist published in French as Méditations Carthusianness, 1931), a shift in priorities has begun, with the embodied individual, surrounded by others, than the disembodied Cartesian ego now returned to a fundamental position. The extent to which the desirable shift undermines the programme of phenomenology that is closely identical with Husserl’s earlier approach remains unclear, until later phenomenologists such as Merleau -Ponty has worked fruitfully from the later standpoint.
Pythagoras established and was the central figure in school of philosophy, religion, and mathematics: He was apparently viewed by his followers as semi-divine. For his followers the regular solids (symmetrical three-dimensional forms in which all sides are the same regular polygon) with ordinary language. The language of mathematical and geometric forms seem closed, precise and pure. Providing one understood the axioms and notations, and the meaning conveyed was invariant from one mind to another. The Pythagoreans following which was the language empowering the mind to leap beyond the confusion of sense experience into the realm of immutable and eternal essences. This mystical insight made Pythagoras the figure from antiquity must revered by the creators of classical physics, and it continues to have great appeal for contemporary physicists as they struggle with the epistemological of the quantum mechanical description of nature.
Pythagoras (570 Bc) was the son of Mn esarchus of Samos ut, emigrated (531 Bc) to Croton in southern Italy. Here he founded a religious society, but were forces into exile and died at Metapomtum. Membership of the society entailed self-disciplined, silence and the observance of his taboos, especially against eating flesh and beans. Pythagoras taught the doctrine of metempsychosis or the cycle of reincarnation, and remained as to remember their former existence. The soul, which as its own divinity and may have existed as an animal or plant, can, however gain release by a religious dedication to study, after which it may rejoin the universal world-soul. Pythagoras is usually, but doubtfully, accredited with having discovered the basis of acoustics, the numerical ratios underlying the musical scale, thereby intimating the arithmetical interpretation of nature. This tremendous success inspired the view that the whole of the cosmos should be explicable in terms of harmonia or number. The view represents a magnificent brake from the Milesian attempt to ground physics on a conception shared by all things, and to concentrate instead on form, meaning that physical nature receives an approachable foundation in different geometric breaks. The view is vulgarized in the doctrine usually attributed to Pythagoras, that all things are number. However, the association of abstract qualitites with numbers, but reached remarkable heights, with occult attachments for instance, between justice and the number four, and mystical significance, especially of the number ten, cosmologically Pythagoras explained the origin of the universe in mathematical terms, as the imposition of limits on the limitless by a kind of injection of a unit. Followers of Pythagoras included Philolaus, the earliest cosmosologist known to have understood that the earth is a moving planet. It is also likely that the Pythagoreans discovered the irrationality of the square root of two.
The Pythagoreans considered numbers to be among te building blocks of the universe. In fact, one of the most central of the beliefs of Pythagoras mathematical, his inner circle, was that reality was mathematical in nature. This made numbers valuable tools, and over time even the knowledge of a number’s name came to be associated with power. If you could name something you had a degree of control over it, and to have power over the numbers was to have power over nature.
One, for example, stood for the mind, emphasizing its Oneness. Two was opinion, taking a step away from the singularity of mind. Three was wholeness (whole needs a beginning, a middle and its ending to be more than a one-dimensional point), and four represented the stable squareness of justice. Five was marriage-being the sum of three and two, the first odd (male) and even (female) numbers. (Three was the first odd number because the number one was considered by the Greeks to be so special that it could not form part of an ordinary grouping of numbers).
It should be noted that Murray wrote his book in 1964 when communism was still perceived by many as the world’s greatest threat. Had he written it a few years later he may have decided to call his atheist of communist world Revolution something else. Evidently, what he is truly talking about is any philosophy that suggests human beings can create a utopian world completely on their own. Nowadays we might refer to this as the atheist of the techno-revolution, or the atheist of humanism-which, again, values our expectation that our own inventiveness will save us.
The second kind of atheist, the atheist of the Theatre, refers to the sort of person who simply tries to exist in a godless world. The atheist of the Theatre is a tragic character who wants the best for the world but feels helpless to do much about it and is ultimately reduced to a mere spectator. "His mind is full of darkness," writes Murray, "it is oppressed with a sense of the finitude and fragility of existence; it shivers before the un-predictabilities of history."10 Unlike the atheist of the Revolution who links freedom with freedom from poverty, the atheist of the Theatre wants freedom from the angst of a purposeless and uncertain existence. Such a person can only accomplish this through self-invention or self-determination. This, however, cannot be accomplished so long as God lives. If God is present, then God is the inventor of the human being who has no choice but to adhere to a predetermined nature and destiny. So, in order for the atheist of the Theatre to gain the freedom to chart one’s own destiny, God must be dismissed.
As different as these two types may appear, Murray suggests they share several characteristics in common. Firstly, they both take the presence of evil as evidence of God’s nonexistence. Secondly, they both accept the death of God, that is, belief in God is irrelevant. Thirdly, atheism is a postulate they feel obliged to express. This is to say that not only do they not believe in God, but they feel such a belief is somehow harmful, primarily because it is detrimental to freedom.
Of course, the deaths of God pundits have not been met without plenty of criticism. Nonetheless, they simply respond by claiming their critics choose to avoid the modern condition by clinging to archaic and meaningless fantasies. As Thomas Ogletree has written concerning The Death of God Controversy, "The refusal of God’s death amounted to a nostalgic desire to avoid the present moment by a flight into a past that is no more. The notion of God’s death has become so prominent and argument that there have been several Deaths of God theologians who have attempted to abstract positive meaning from Christianity while accepting the death of God philosophy. Ogletree’s book introduces us to three such theologians, William Hamilton, Paul Van Buren and Thomas J.J. Altizer.
For Hamilton, the death of God implies that God can no longer be thought of as a "need-fulfiller and problem-solver." He rejects the idea that God is a kind of candy dispenser or "cosmic bellhop," ever ready to attend to humanity’s needs. Unlike those Christians who cling to their idea of God, even in the wake of divine irrelevance, by rejecting contemporary society and holding to tradition, Hamilton seems to have found a way to have his cake and eat it too. For Hamilton, the Christian’s task is to find God by returning to society and becoming active in the alleviation of human suffering. This is not entirely different from the idea expounded by Paul Van Buren who wrote, ". . . . If I understand the nature and development of Christianity, I would want to argue that what Christianity is basically about is a certain form of life-patterns of human existence, norms of human attitudes, and dispositions and moral behaviour."14 For these two theologians there are something in Christianity that presents a viable, even necessary, way of living even in the wake of God’s death.
Thomas Altizer takes the matter as step further by insinuating that God must die in order for Jesus to live. The modern problem of God might best be illustrated in the argument that only God is or only the world is-the sacred or the profane, pantheism vs. materialism. The modern atheist chooses the world, the material, the profane. "If there is one clear portal to the twentieth century," writes Altizer, "it is a passage through the death of God, the collapse of any meaning or reality lying beyond the newly discovered radical immanence of modern man, immanently dissolving even the memory or the shadow of transcendence."15 The loss of transcendence, however, is not understood by Altizer as the loss of the sacred but as the redemption of the profane. God is not killed by modern humanity, but sacrifices God-self to humanity by entering into the profane world via the Christ, God made flesh. Although those who cling to Christian tradition will likely consider such a radical notion as heresy, it seems somehow comforting to think that God might somehow dwell among us, in our very suffering and profanity.
So far I have spoken as if the death of God is to be taken for granted, as if it is an undeniable fact of the modern condition. This, however, is a presupposition I am not entirely sure of. Just this week I spent several days in Washington, D.C. and had the opportunity to hear all of Kentucky’s State Representatives and U.S. Senator Jim Bunning address a large group of their constituents. Without fail, each one of them had something to say about God, mostly in reference to George W. Bush and his intention to go to war with Iraq. Congressman Ken Lucas, the only Democrat among Kentucky’s Washington delegation, asked the group to pray for Mr. Bush and concluded by saying "the Almighty is with him." Congressman Ernie Fletcher, who hopes to become the next Kentucky Governor, spoke of a presentation he attended during which the Gideon Bible Society presented Mr. Bush with its one-billionth printed Bible. Mr. Bush responded by assuring those present that the "Will of God" is his top priority. Representative Ann Northup referred to him as a "deeply spiritual man," and Harold Rogers publicly thanked God that Mr. Bush was in office at the time of 911. In regard to war with Iraq, Representative Ron Lewis quoted Abraham Lincoln’s reference to the Civil War by saying "the question is not whether or not God is on our side, but whether or not we are on God’s side." Finally, U.S. Senator Jim Bunning boasted about a Senate resolution supporting the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, thanked God for George W. Bush, and concluded by warning the audience that in light of pressing problems "we must keep our faith in God or we won’t survive as a people or as a nation."
Perhaps you will agree, it doesn’t sound like those who represent the people of at least one State in the Nation are atheists. The fact is that the people of the United States remain highly religious, especially compared with the rest of the Western world. According to an article in The Economist entitled The Fight for God, 47% of the people in the United States regularly attend church services, as compared with only 20% in Western Europe and 14% in Eastern Europe. What is more is that only 2% of the population in the United States actually claims to be atheists?
Yet these statistics do not necessarily mean all of this talk about the death of God has been for not, but they serve as a framework for reinterpreting the meaning of God’s death. I would suggest that even though the idea of God lives on, the experience of God having died. In this sense the death of God may have begun much earlier than with the rise of science and technology. It was during the Patristic age of the early Church Fathers that the problem became purely ontological, that is, asking the question "What is God?" Rather than "Is God with us?" This arose over the controversy concerning Jesus’ divinity. Is he human or God? If he is God, what then is God? Tertullian tried to solve the problem with a biological and an anthropomorphic answer, claiming the Father and the Son are both part of a single organism and share the same mind and will. Origen claimed the Son (Logos) emanates from the Father in a diminished capacity. Arius taught that there was a time "when he was not," which is to say Jesus, although a perfect creature is nonetheless a creation of God. All of this became heresy after the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, after it was determined that the Father and the Son are of the same substance (homoousios), relying heavily upon Athenasius of Alexandria’s credo that the Son is like the Father in every way except for the name Father. The Nicene Creed ushered in the age of Christian scholasticism that gave birth to thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine, but it also dramatically altered the nature of the Problem of God.
Before this event the Problem of God had always been about the living God and whether or not such is God who dwells with us, rather than the distant and abstract God of theological debate. The Problem of God, which is a uniquely western theological term, is rooted deep within the Judeo/Christian tradition, beginning with the Biblical story of Moses’ encounter with the burning bush. When Moses asks God’s name, God replies, "ehyeh ser ehyeh" I am who I am. Murray understands this to mean God is present with the people.
Ancient people did not think abstractly about God. Nor did they wonder why evil and suffering were in the world. They took the existence of both for granted. What they wanted to know was whether or not God would be with them in the midst of their struggles. In Exodus, for instance, the Israelites are reported to have asked, "Is the Lord among us or not?" Murray breaks the Old Testament Problem of God into four questions, the Existential question, Is God here with us now? The Functional question, How will this God who is with us save us? The Noetic question, How is this God who is present to be known? The Onomastic question, How is this God who is present among us to be named? After Jesus came on the scene, these questions remained essentially the same, but were answered through the lens of the Christ.
This sort of question implies a desire to have intimate knowledge of the Divine. They are questions about how we ought to conduct our lives rather than about abstract thoughts and concepts. If there is any value to having a belief in God today, perhaps these sort of question ought to be at the heart of such belief, less we remain as those who would contribute to the pain and suffering of others by making war and poverty while paying intellectual lip service to an abstract notion of God. Perhaps, furthermore, the Problem of God is not a problem that is to be solved or ought to be solved. Early theologians celebrated the fact that God cannot be truly known. As Thomas Aquinas said, "One thing that remains completely unknown in this life, namely, what God is."19 Augustine said similarly, "If you have comprehended, what you have comprehended is not God." Or as Cryil of Jerusalem said, "In the things of God the confession of no knowledge is great knowledge." "It is by this ignorance, as long as life lasts, that we are best united with God," wrote Aquinas, "This is the darkness in which God dwells."
So the Problem of God remains today very much the same as it has throughout history. Even in our limited understanding and modern disbelief in the relevance of God, we want to know, in the midst of the turmoil, suffering and evil we face today, is it possible that God is with us? Or are we left alone to deal these problems completely on our own? Are we creatures of purpose and destiny, or must we choose our own way? Do we need God? In their book The Invisible Landscape, Terrence and Dennis McKenna write; Western humans have lost their sense of unity with the cosmos and with the transcendent mystery within themselves. Modern science has given us a picture of human beings as accidental products of random evolutionary processes in a universe that is itself without purpose or meaning. This alienation of modern humans from the numinous ground of their beings has engendered the existentialist ethic and the contemporary preoccupation with the immediate historical situation. Humans are regarded as leading a wholly profane existence within a wholly profane time, which is within history; the reality of the sacred is denied or reduced to the level of psychology.
In the end it would seem the Problem of God is ultimately the Problem of Humanity, for it is our suffering that draws us toward the idea of God, and repels us from it.
Friedrich Nietzsche had very different opinions concerning the man known to history as Jesus Christ and his legacy, the religion called Christianity. As a well-known philosopher of contemporary times, Nietzsche's reputation with Christianity is severely ambiguous, as a result of a "long customary" association with the Nazi Party of Germany, which, as one critic points out, is "like linking St. Francis with the Inquisition in which the order he founded played a major role." Still, despite much misunderstanding and prejudice, Nietzsche's influence on the world remains consistently strong, as "few thinkers of any age equal his influence." Nietzsche's philosophy is rooted in his own interpretation of the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the history of Christianity, as he considered himself the first philosopher of the "irrevocable anti-Christian era" from which all Christian and secular systems associated with Christianity would henceforth bow. Nietzsche, however, does not see this new era in the history of the world as essentially negative; he believes that he is the first of 'the new way'; and "things will be different," positively. Furthermore, one must understand Nietzsche's position on Jesus and Christianity, the most crucial part of his philosophical system, as separate issues, to appreciate completely and comprehend the rest.
To this end, Nietzsche is clear that he has different attitudes about Jesus and Christianity. This distinction is "no less than the distinction between life and death, the great 'Yes' and the decadent 'No.'" Furthermore, there is a "severance" between Jesus and the Christian tradition. This is clearly a result, according to Nietzsche, of the greediness and short-sightedness of St. Paul, who lock up Christianity so much that the religion has little in common with the ideas and teachings that its founder represented. As a consequence, Western society has gone backwards, Nietzsche writes, "everything is visibly becoming Judiazed, Christianized, moblike (what does the words matter)."
Nietzsche considers himself "the atheist," whose challenges against Christianity all Christians must now face and consider. Although he admits that he is "an opponent of Christianity de riguer," Nietzsche has a distinct respect for the man Jesus. While Nietzsche does not go so far as to embrace all of the ideas and teachings of Jesus, he clearly draws a clear dichotomy between Jesus and Nazareth and "the Christ of the creeds"Cand what Nietzsche is most concerned with is the historical Jesus. The end of Nietzsche's analysis of Jesus and Christianity is a request for the re-assessment of Western culture's values, especially religious values, which call for the eventual expulsion of Christianity as he knew it.
In short, Nietzsche respects and admires Jesus of Nazareth, "but denies that he has any meaning for our age" Nietzsche believes the Jewish contention that Jesus is not the Messiah and that the Messiah has not yet appeared in history. Even so, Nietzsche reveres Jesus as no other character in history, particularly because he came to know Jesus as the very opposite of Christianity. Nietzsche writes as a philologist, "The word 'Christianity' is already a misunderstanding reality there has only been one Christian, and he died on the Cross." While leaving such an impact on the world is admirable (and a good characteristic of a Übermensch), Nietzsche "could know Jesus as the greatest and truest revolutionary in history," despite the sour legacy he left.
Despite all of this hostility, Nietzsche looked upon the symbol of the crucified Christ as “the most sublime of all symbols." Nonetheless, Jesus remains the only Christian in whom will ever have lived, yet he was crucified by mortals. The Christians were making their professed faith a weird comedy. The cross, to Nietzsche, is a "ghastly paradox" that revolves around the idea of "God of the cross." This concept is absurd to Nietzsche, who wonders how it is logical that the "mystery of an unimaginable and ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man?" Furthermore, Nietzsche comments:
God himself sacrifices himself for the guilt of humankind, God himself makes payment to himself, God as the only being who can redeem man from what has become unredeemable for man himself, the creditor sacrifices himself for his debtor, out of love (one can credit that?) Out of love for his debtor-Nietzsche sees this entire concept of a crucified god as utterly ridiculous and ironic for a god to do so "out of love." While "Christianity's self-sacrificing God makes infinite its adherents' guilt and debt," Nietzsche observes, "Jesus had done away with the concept of 'guilt.'" Yet, to Nietzsche, Jesus, like himself, had come "too early" and died "too young . . . not 'at the right time.'" They were both revolutionaries who were rebelling against the old ways.
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