Egoist or Egotist?

Thomas Hobbes by John Michael Wright

Freud is usually credited with the discovery of the ego, but should it rightfully be Hobbes since it was he who really viewed man as a creature locked in his own skin? Freud once did say the ego is a body ego. What that means is that the border guard of the personality is the epidermis and that’s a Hobbesian idea too. But if you look at Hobbes occupying a street corner, he would reside at the intersection of Human Character and Political Philosophy. Freud did go on to write Civilization and Its Discontents, a treatise about the realpolitik of human desire and the way in which instinct must be relinquished in order for man to live in society. But it was the Enlightenment that really produced the brilliant idea of analyzing man's place in nature and its implications for the polity. The Enlightenment gave more credit to reason than darker nineteenth century thinkers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. They were more interested in instinct or that part of the mind which Freud would later term the libido. Nietzsche and Freud were ultimately talking about an unconscious in which a moral imperative doesn’t exist. Thus Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil. For Hobbes self will needed to be curbed, but it was still something man was conscious of and capable of doing something about. Democracy with its constitution and its system of checks and balances was the way that the individual will, the solitary ego, could be harnessed in the service of the greater good.

And That's the Way It Is

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Naked Ape

“Analysis of Neanderthal Genome Points to Interbreeding With Modern Humans” was the headline of a recent Times piece (5/7/10). In philosophy, a tautology is a phrase like “the red dress is red.” Isn’t the above headline a tautology? Was it it really necessary to fund this research? Should scientists set out to prove the oft-stated proposition, “men are dogs”? It seems obvious that at some point in evolution a Pegasus-type situation occurred, in which either a man accidentally impregnated a dog or a dog impregnated a woman. Cross speciation is not common, but it’s been known to occur, and this anomaly turned out to be naturally selective. In American law we are deemed innocent until proven guilty, but the Napoleonic code is just the opposite. Taking the a posteriori evidence of experience in both our own backyards and in such far-flung places as Bosnia, Chechnya, Somalia, Burma and Rwanda, we would have to conclude, employing the Napoleonic code, that man is guilty of being more beast than human. The cerebral cortex is a wonderful device which in fact enables us to think about the structures of our own brain and about questions like whether we exist or not, along with right and left matters, like ratiocination versus intuition. But far too much has been made of this development in brain structure. What seems to be causing much of our current suffering are expectations. We expect our fellows to act like men, while more often than not they behave like beasts, as Desmond Morris pointed out in his classic tome, The Naked Ape. Men have brains enough to argue about the nature of the self, as Locke and Hobbes started to do during the Enlightenment when Hobbes, perceiving the untamed side of human nature, proposed checks and balances to deal with animal appetite. But thinking is delusive. Cogito ergo sum. However, cogito doesn’t release us from the desire to hump thy neighbor’s wife.

War of the Worlds

Lingua Franca and Social Text, Hagler and Hearns, Nixon and Kennedy, Plato and Aristotole, Coleridge and Wordsworth, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, Heraclitus and Zeno, light and dark, hot and cold—marriage in general. Whereas one commentator on the institution once said seemingly oppositional partners displace onto each other desirable attributes, such as reserve or gregariousness, it’s unfortunate that so many people grow to hate the differences they once loved, admired, and envied.

Hegel’s philosophy of history was based on the idea of opposition. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis were the terms he used. In modern terms, Walmart and Amazon go to war and give birth to a new discount giant. What will be the synthesis of these two oppositional elements—Walzon? In the Enlightenment, the pessimism about human nature posited by Hobbes and the clearly idealistic vision of man portrayed by Locke coalesce in the framing of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights—checks and balances, the inalienable rights of the individual in the face of the democratic rule of the majority, all are products of two opposing views of human nature.

   

In the 20th century, communism lost out to capitalism, but historical progression created the curiosities of elites within the Politburo and the decline of class in the mercantile structure. But what are the new warring forces of our present age? Fundamentalism (in both its religious and political incarnations) versus globalism, literal versus abstract, uni- versus cyber-verse, e-mail versus snail mail (no contest). Then there are the oppositions that are still-born, like pre-op transsexuals who maintain both female and male gonads without fusing into a new creature.

Naturally those who analyze the market seek to discover the answer to such oppositions on a daily basis, considering that profits lie in the secrets of mergers and acquisitions. Will Citicorp continue as an unruly giant, or will it be forced to sell some of its divisions? Google has already triumphed over Yahoo, but will an emboldened adversary come to the fore, developing a new service called Houyhnhnm? Big- and small-world theories, special and general, relativity, quantum, and string—the war of the worlds continues.