Editorial: 23rd Issue October 1st 2019

Blog: http://michaelrdjames.org/
Journal site https://www.aletheiaeducation.eu/


The first mini lecture is entitled “ PISA and the abstract operations of a
Humanistic mind”

PISA is an educational test created by the OECD to “measure” the school

achievements of 15 year old childten and has been used by governments to
evaluate the level of achievement of the country’s educational system! (The
whole world has not gone mad only selected parts of it). There are many many
educational objections to this but the major problem is that this tool belongs to
GERM(The Global Educational Reform movement) whose “good” intentions
and poor knowledge of Philosophy of Education has managed to reduce
education to the measuring of skills that belong at the level of Piaget’s
“Concrete operations”. Germany upon falling in the PISA “league table” did
the only sensible thing to do in such circmstances, namely, teach the students
how to take the PISA tests whilst getting on with the more serious business of
improving the educstional system.
The Second mini-lecture is on Totalitarianism and Globalisation:

“Hannah Arendt argues that Totalitarianism was unleashed by Imperialism which in its turn
unleashed the power of a subterranean stream of globalising forces that surfaced and began
to flow with a power that the nation-state was unable to harness or control: forces such as the
will to colonise, the omnipotent will which felt that there was nothing which could limit its
power, and the mass feeling of powerlessness in the face of powerful institutions. Running
deeply in a part of this stream is a paradoxical cross-current: a belief amidst an educated
middle class in the actualizing potential of the moral personality and the universal importance
of an ethical imperative”.

Hannah Arendt’s work “Origins of Totalitarianism is a classical work of

Philosophical History, operating at several levels of analysis simultaneously.
Whilst “interpreting” the events on the world stage in what she called this
“terrible century”(the 20 century) she maintains a sound connection with both
th

Ethics, Politial Philosophy and Philosophical Psychology. She charts the rise of
the totalitarian regimes that wreaked havoc upon the world with clinical
precision and considerable philosophical acumen. Here is a “Historian” that
knows the humanistic power of thought and the dreadful power of popular
thinking. Her work “Eichmann in Jerusalem” came to the conclusion that
Eichmann was not “evil” but merely lacked the capacity to think. This capacity
was at the time so undervalued that she was accused of trivialising a serious
matter. What she was experiencing in this backlash against her work was
merely the undertow of the powerful wave of populism that brought the fascists
and the communists to power. Cassirer argued in his “Myth of the State” that the
rise of the Romantic spirit and the residual appreciation of the the Stoic idea of a
so called “moral personality” contributed to a cult of hero-worship which also
played its role in turning a religious prejudice against the Jews into a racial
prejudice, Science of course had a role in this which they would prefer
everybody forgot. In a forthcoming work “A Philosophical History of
Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action”, it is argued that
applying Science to Psychology at the end of the 1800’s caused considerable
confusion in academic circles. Philosophical thinking was being marginalised:
the only form of systematic thinking that promoted our value systems in a
methodical and objective way. Kant’s Philosophy had previously produced an
idea of the moral personality that was academically sustainable but the
Romantic spirit of Hegel overturned Kant’s Philosophy and a “popular” view
of science that appealed to the mind seeking “conrete operations” dominated
Philosophy, Psychology and Education(producing GERM).Once Marx appeared
on the scene it was inevitable that Politics too was to become “popularised”
creating polar opposites on the right and the left that detached themselves from
the central core of our value systems.

The central core of our system is however preserved in various forms in our
culture and waits idling in the wings of world-historical events for the
turbulence of the previously mentioned events and movements to dissipate:
“Romanticism and the scientific imperative, together with the dissolution of religious and
many other forms of authority, including the authority of institutions, produced what Freud
called the "discontents of civilization" as well as the idea of a global cosmopolitan community
that is the world historical equaivalent of a moral personality. Globalization does not mean
the creation and maintenance of the commodious life styles promoted by Hobbes and his
followers. Globalisation means many things but amongst these things we find moral and
political attitudes that have been on the aims and objectives lists of both Aristotelian and
Kantian moral and political Philosophy.”

The third lecture is entitled Religion, Mythology and Psychoanalysis. It begins

thus:
“The Philosophy of Religion in the 20th century managed two major offensives against what
many have regarded as the global force of secularism and one or both of these offensives may
turn out to be the decisive territorial gain for religion ensuring its position in the globalizing
processes leading to Cosmopolitanism. The Philosophers behind these offensives were
Wittgenstein and Ricoeur. They both represent the challenges of Hermeneutics and
Philosophical Psychology to the secularization process. They also, I would argue, represent
the presence of philosophical cosmopolitan imperatives in the multi-dimensional
globalization process.

Popular commentators on the subject of the decline of the authority of Religion have claimed,
perhaps prematurely, that God is dead (although no one has actually seen his body). The
postulated first cause of all things, it is argued, is no longer efficacious in the world of mobile
phones, television sets, computers, driverless cars, robots cutting the lawn, robots hoovering
the house, internet diagnoses of physical and mental diseases etc. The major causes involved
in what is hopefully an accidental death are 1. The claim of Kant that God was just an idea of
the mind. 2 The claim of Darwin that man who was supposed to be made in the image of God
in fact evolved from the animal kingdom in accordance with the mechanisms of random
variation, natural and sexual selection. 3. The claim of Freud that religious belief may have
neurotic and psychotic characteristics, i.e. that the idea of God in man's mind is not an idea
one finds in a healthy mind. 4 Economical systems that seemed to have done more for the
poverty of billions of people than divine assistance could ever manage(God died from an
extended period of inactivity).”

The fate of Religion was also decided in the “troubling 1800’s”. Here we find
Darwin being forced to publish a work he would have prefeered not to, perhaps
because he foresaw consequences which he would not have intended. In
Aristotelian times (according to Aristotle, man is a rational animal capable of
discourse) some eyebrows may have been lifted but anyone rushing to claim that
the Gods were dead would have felt the wrath of the Athenians. Aristotle would
have been happy with the claim that God was an idea of the mind(not “in” the
mind). He would have been largely in agreement with Darwin and Freud but he
would have been nonplussed at the important place of Economics in our
Political systems.

The response of the Religious authorities to Darwin may have had its hysterical
moments but in the end the respnse was a measured one:
“Darwin's ideas initially threw the religious world into a state of ferment for a time but
theologians soon realized that all that was needed to survive the Darwinian storm was to
claim that Evolution is a process proceeding in accordance with divine laws of creation. God's
invisible hand was steering the process and the mechanism of random variation was not a real
mechanism but an illusion of mans fragile and ethically flawed mind. The embarrassing facts
of the creation scene in the Bible needed re-interpretation and some scholars began to argue
that one should not interpret everything in the Bible literally. Reading the creation scene
metaphorically and symbolically could allow space for the existence of mechanisms of natural
and sexual selection functioning in accordance with the expression of God´s will.”

The response of a Philosopher like Wittgenstein to increasing discontent,

alienation, high anxiety levels, and Religion was to become a Christian:
“Freud was one of the few psychologists Wittgenstein studied: perhaps both thinkers believed
that surrounding the heart of our understanding was a kind of madness or soul blindness, the
cure for which was therapy. But Wittgenstein probably did not subscribe to psychoanalysis as
the sole route to understanding the human condition for he turned to a higher power for his
succor, namely Christianity. One year before his death we find Wittgenstein reflecting upon
God and suffering and suggesting that if Christianity is the truth about the human
condition, then all the philosophy about it is false. He rejects the concentration on the
argument that Gods essence guarantees his existence and claims that if one leads one's life in
the right way a belief in God will naturally condense from the cloud of suffering that
surrounds man. Donald Hudson, a religious philosopher, and commentator on Wittgenstein's
work, points out that we should not expect the religious man to reason about his beliefs in the
religious language-game in the same way in which the scientist reasons about his theories. A
man believing in the Last Judgment may act every day against the background of the fear or
promise of such an event. Is this not reasonable asks Hudson? Does not this practical belief
system seem to be stronger than any hypothetical belief system any scientist can produce?
The scientist has his set of commitments and expects that every event which occurs has an
explanatory cause in a systematically uniform world-view in which moons continuously exist.
The scientist is building a system of knowledge which does not know what to do with
transcendental truths. Wittgenstein realized this from his earlier work but let us conclude
with a quote from Kant's "Religion within the bounds of mere Reason.":

"The nature and intrinsic limits of thought and human knowledge preclude any demonstration
of the existence of God"
And further on:

"non-existence cannot be demonstrated either"

How then are we to interpret the avowals of the suffering souls of the Psalms or the suffering
patients in secularized psychiatric waiting rooms? Surely their cries are not just facts being
stated, the effects of causes or the consequences of observations? surely the realm of Hope
and Faith that Kant referred to is the home of their language games? Surely their cries are
symbolic? Surely these cries are relating to how the soul believes the world ought to be.”