Ben Mijuskovic

Hume, an empiricist, in A Treatise of Human Nature, distinguishes two forms of objective judgments, factual and ethical. He belongs to the “moral sense” school of thinkers, including Burke, Hutcheson, and Shaftesbury. By contrast, Kant grounds his moral criterion, his categorical imperative, in a purely a priori act, an intentional act of doing one’s duty toward others. Thus, Hume posits a moral sentiment, a feeling of sympathy and pity toward others of his kind. It is grounded in a sense common to all mankind, embedded in the realization that human beings are fundamentally social and suffer from loneliness. By contrast, the empirical utilitarian thinkers, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill base their criterion on consequences, as opposed to intentions, Bentham on measurable physical pleasures and Mill on “happiness,” “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Most significantly, I follow Max Weber’s admonition that science is constitutionally incapable of putting forth any ethical principles or judgments. In his “Science and Politics as a Vocation,” he bluntly states that both are constitutionally unfit to settle questions of value and hence questions of meaning for personal existence. The author agrees and follows by supporting Sartre’s principle that man is existentially free, indeed “condemned” to freely choose his values from an infinite variety of possibilities.

This chapter philosophically pits the idealists, dualists, rationalists, phenomenologists, existentialists, and the coherence theory of truth and advocates against the materialists, mechanists, empiricists, phenomenalists, linguists, and analysts, and the correspondence theory of truth proponents against each other endlessly. The first group includes Plato against Democritus; Plotinus against Epicurus; Augustine and Aquinas against Skeptics and Atheists; Ficino against Valla; Boehme against Bacon; Descartes against Hobbes; Leibniz against Locke; Kant against Hume; Hegel against Marx; Sartre against Ayer; and Copleston against Russell.

The ancient Greek philosophers believed that the entire cosmos, as well as each of our individual lives, will be uniquely repeated, that throughout endless time, eternal gigantic repetitive cosmic conflagrations will reoccur and everything will once more become exactly the same, both in the new repeated world and in each of our unique individualities, in our personal identities. Now this may seem quite farfetched, but we may more readily entertain the possibility that instead of a cosmic resurgence, it is more likely that a current global disaster will be produced by a highly powerful nuclear bomb. We could then expect that the new evolutionary humans would recycle through their previous four stages, homo erectus, bipedal man, treeless man; homo faber, man as maker of products; homo sapiens, scientific man, man armed with great technological knowledge; and finally man as homo destructus, self-destroying man, and then we will be ready once more either to repeat the tragedy or the comedy of the world and man all over again.

In the History of Ideas discipline, the relation between freedom and ethics begins with Zarathustra and becomes transmitted through Plotinus to the Christianity of Augustine where it becomes enmeshed with the “problem of evil.” There is both a “natural evil,” pain and suffering, plagues, and floods and droughts, and an ethical, “human evil” wrought by man’s free will. And the question arises if God is in any way responsible for either or both these evils? But in Plato and Aristotle there is no evil but there is goodness through knowledge in Plato and virtue in Aristotle achieved through the training of voluntary choices. Just so epistemic spontaneity rules in the domain of knowledge, as Aristotle recruits the acts of dynamis (potentiality), energeia (actuality), and entelecheia (completion). This conception of spontaneity is picked up by Leibniz’s conception of his “windowless Monad,” since according to him nothing can enter the Monad from without and nothing can escape from within, it follows that the Monad can only spontaneously act from within. In his turn Kant subscribes via Leibniz’s spontaneity for his transcendental theory of immanent time-consciousness and the reflexive unity of self-consciousness. Dutifully, Fichte follows suit. Plato aesthetically summons spontaneity in the Ion for accounting for the rhapsode’s artistic genius in interpreting the Homeric myths. Both Kant in the Critique of Judgement and Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representations appeal to the principle of spontaneity in their aesthetic as well.

During the Second World War in Yugoslavia, there were five countervailing military forces jockeying for power in the country. First, the dominant prevailing German Nazis; second, the British forces supplying direction and armaments under the direction of Prime Minister Winston Churchill; third, the Allied guerrilla Serbian Royalist Chetniks under the command of Draza Mihailovic; fourth, the guerilla Serbian Communist Partisan forces under Tito committed to Russia; and fifth, the collaborative Croatian Nazi forces committed to severing their political relationship to Yugoslavia. Religiously, the Serbs were Eastern Orthodox and the Croatians were Catholic, both however were “ethnically” Slavic, both, for example, spoke the same language, Serbo-Croatian. But the Croatians were secessionists, and they operated the “cruelest Nazi concentration death camp ever in the entire system, Jasenovac,” which practiced the most extreme forms of torture and genocide. The authors’ father was from Montenegro and fought on the side of the Allies, while his mother was from Croatia. Jasenovac only targeted Serbs, Montenegrins, Jews, and gypsies. But this is one reason the author wrote this book, to warn that the US is now treading toward this same historic path of the old Yugoslavia, which no longer exists.

Using Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, as the standard bearer for the empiricist’s theory of personal identity, in this chapter the author shows that Locke’s conception of reflection is fatally flawed. Reflections are observational, they concentrate on objects that are “other than themselves”; sensations do not “see” themselves; they are both passive and linear and they are immediate, as opposed to relational, that is, mediate. By contrast, from Plato to Augustine through Descartes and Leibniz, reflexions are self-referential, circular, they are active in the respect that the active subject is a priori synthetically related to a conceptual “object” within self-consciousness. Worse yet, “Locke regards the mind as a substance but a substance which is immaterial. He accepts the dualism, ‘the two parts of nature,’ active immaterial substance and passive material substance. At the same time, he is most uneasy in his mind about the conception of substance itself as both material and immaterial. It is a fundamental point with him that the universe cannot be explained in terms of either matter alone or mind alone. Of the two perhaps the mind is more indispensable, for mind is the active, productive principle. Matter produces nothing.” This leaves his empirical conception of “personal identity” completely bankrupt.

This chapter concentrates on the issue of the identity of the self, its temporality, its reflexive self-consciousness, and the classic problem of personal identity. Both Kantian commentators, Norman Kemp Smith and H. J. Paton, stress Kant’s philosophical debt to Leibnizian sources. In the Monadology, Leibniz emphasizes both the spontaneity of temporal acts of consciousness and its reflexive unity. Leibniz’s own involvement is traced to his role in The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, in which Clarke represents Newton on God’s absolute creation of an infinite Space and an eternal Time, while Leibniz argues in support of a humanly subjective and relative conception of time. In turn, this influenced both Kant’s discussions of time in the Aesthetic as a Newtonian intuitive time, as an immediate “pure form of sensibility,” while in the Analytic Kant credits spontaneity in creating an immanent time-consciousness through an elaborate and complex process, including a threefold a priori Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition, a Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination, and a Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept. The importance of this argument is that it transcendentally grounds the subjective reality of our personal identity. Leibniz’s position serves as an answer to Locke on personal identity.

Hume in both A Treatise of Human Nature and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding argues “we must separate the question concerning the substance of the mind from that considering the cause of its thought; and that confining our selves to the latter question we may certainly conclude that matter may be, and actually is, the cause of thought and perception.” Hume’s perceptions are impressions and ideas, but he is not a dualist in the Cartesian sense because he denies that the self is a substance rather claiming that the “self is merely a bundle of loose and fleeting successive impressions following each other with inconceivable rapidity.” But when he invokes a temporal succession, he has lost the argument because there must be a self to unite the perceptions to each other.

According to the metaphysical principle of materialism of Leucippus and Democritus, all that exist are the voids of space and the atomistic movements of physical particles, thus reducing all reality to matter plus motion and accordingly to the causal and determinism of sciences and there is no true self. By contrast, Plato argues that the psyche or soul is both immaterial and active from which it conceptually follows that (1) the soul is a substance, a personal identity; (2) a reflexive unity of self-consciousness; (3) a temporal identity; (4) a subjective ideality; and (5) presumably it is intrinsically immortal. However, Kant seeks to reject these purely rationalist and “dogmatic” arguments in both his Paralogism versions of 1781 and 1787 in order to pave the way for his own transcendental philosophy—as opposed to a purely rationalist principle—which can only succeed if he discredits the soul as a noumenal entity as proposed from Plato through Augustine, Descartes, and Leibniz.

The article distinguishes two models of human organization: the organic community and the atomistic society. It maintains that the organic paradigm stresses (a) the ideal unity of the whole; (b) internal relations; (c) teleological or dialectical processes; (d) co- or inter-dependent members (e. g. the human body or face); (e) a role-orientation; (f) living functions; (g) freedom defined as doing as you should; and (h) qualitative factors prevail. By contrast, the atomistic model emphasizes (a) the value of individual freedom; (b) external relations; (c) mechanical or causal explanations; (d) separate “parts”(e.g. a machine); (e) a rule orientation; (f) formal, legal, or artificial frameworks; (g) freedom defined as doing as you please; and (h) quantitative factors prevail. The article contends that the sense of individual loneliness or alienation experienced is generally much greater in the atomistic society. And since both the American family and its surrounding society are, in the main, atomisticly-structured, it follows that loneliness is more pronounced and prevalent in American society. The article concludes by offering some programmatic ideals and measures to reverse and mitigate the present tendency toward increasing loneliness in the United States.

In this book, Ben Lazare Mijuskovic uses both an interdisciplinary and History of Ideas approach to discuss four forms of intertwined theories of human consciousness and reflexive self-consciousness (Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel; Schopenhauer’s subconscious irrational Will; Brentano and Husserl’s transcendent intentionality; and Freud’s dynamic ego). Mijuskovic explores these theories within the context of psychological issues, where the discussion is undergirded by the conflict between loneliness and intimacy. He also explores them in the context of ethics, where the dynamic is between the values of good and evil. The book historically traces these issues in both a personal as well as a political framework.

Since the ages of the Old Testament, the Homeric myths, the tragedies of Sophocles and the ensuing theological speculations of the Christian millennium, the theme of loneliness has dominated and haunted the Western world. In this wide-ranging book, philosopher Ben Lazare Mijuskovic returns us to our rich philosophical past on the nature of consciousness, lived experience, and the pining for a meaningful existence that contemporary social science has displaced in its tendency toward material reduction. Engaging key metaphysical discussions on causality, space, time, subjectivity, the mind body-problem, personal identity, freedom, religion, and transcendence in ancient, scholastic, modern, and contemporary philosophy, he highlights the phenomenology of loneliness that lies at the very core of being human. In challenging psychoanalytic and neuroscientific paradigms, Mijuskovic argues that isolative existence and self-consciousness is not so much of a problem of unconscious conflict or the need for psychopharmacology as it is the loss of a sense of personal intimacy. The issue of the criteria of "personal identity" in relation to loneliness has long engaged and consumed the interest of theologians, ethicists, philosophers, novelists and psychologists. This book will be of great interests to academics and students of the humanities, and all those with an interest in the philosophy of loneliness..

The article offers a brief set of definitions of metaphysical and epistemological principles underlying three distinct theories of consciousness and then relates these paradigms to a triad of contemporary therapeutic modalities. Accordingly, it connects materialism, empiricism, determinism and a passive interpretation of the “mind”=brain to medication interventions and behavioral and cognitive treatments. In this context, the paper proceeds to argue that these treatment approaches are theoretically incapable of addressing the dominant issue of man’s loneliness, and his struggle to escape from it, as the most basic universal drivein human beings. Next, it discusses the dualist, idealist, and rationalist assumptions of an active reflexive, self-consciousness, which has dominated insight-oriented treatment methodologies since Freud. And, finally, it treats the Hesperian and Sartre an phenomenological andexistential descriptions of awareness as grounded in the transcen­dent principle of intentionality emphasizing the aspects of the freedom of consciousness. Lastly, it claims that the first view stresses the temporal present; the second the past; and the third the future.

I argue that Kant’s four Paralogistic conclusions concerning (a) substantiality; (b1) unity and (b2) immortality, in the famous “Achillesargument”; (c) personal identity; and (d) metaphysical idealism, in the first edition Critique of Pure Reason (1781), are all connectedby being grounded in a common underlying rational principle, an a priori (universal and necessary) presupposition, namely, that boththe mind and its essential attribute of thinking are immaterial and unextended, i.e., simple. Consequently, despite Kant’s predilectionfor architectonic divisions and separations, I show that in fact the simplicity assumption grounds all four Paralogisms and reinforcesKant’s corresponding commitments to the principles of continuity and coherence. Further, I maintain that Kant, under the influence ofhis earlier Leibnizian and subjective idealist leanings, continued to be guided in the first edition Critique, not only in the Paralogismsbut also in certain sections of the Analytic, by emphasizing unconscious activities, which once more reinforced his commitments to aparadigm of the simplicity, unity, and identity of self-consciousness or apperception.