Sigmund Freud
Having read about Sigmund Freud, two things stayed in my memory above all else. The first was that Freud was terrified of the number 62. He became convinced it was following him around, and that this meant he would die at the age of 62, so as a result he refused to stay in a hotel if it had more than 61 rooms. The other thought to occur was the implausibility of his theory that men have a desire to sleep with their mothers. Because even if there WAS an attraction, your mum would ruin it by saying "well alright then – but only if you tidy your room first."
This isn’t to deny that Freud, like the other characters in this series, was a genius who changed the world. But they were all wonderfully flawed and magnificently human. So the series is an attempt to portray just that, as well as the only way to show Lord Byron as Joe Strummer, Isaac Newton as Carol Vorderman and Darwin as the man who goes mad in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In these times in which our world appears to be dominated by the mundane and passionless, whether in the guise of Westlife, the Big Brother house or our politicians, it may be a comfort to know the people who mattered the most were all splendidly passionate and endearingly mental.
Here are examples of each. In the Politics, Aristotle makes it clear that he approves of slavery, and that he thinks women are fitted by nature for a subordinate position. In doing so, he was, of course in keeping with his time: the elegant democracy found in Athens was a democracy only for free men who were citizens of the city-state. Aristotle also comes a cropper in some of his scientific treatises that haven't passed the test of time: it’s not true that the world is comprised of four elements - water, earth and air and fire, but this was part of his world view. Here, Aristotle’s explanations fell apart in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as quantitative methods began to be applied to everyday objects, and maths and physics came to be seen as more basic sciences than biology.
Some of his thought is just very odd. In the Physics he argues that plants have souls. Why is this? A soul is a unifying element – it is the thing that gives coherence to a thing. And plants need this unifying element because… their roots grow towards the centre of the earth and their leaves grow towards the sky. If it wasn’t for them having souls, they would split in two.
This sort of explanation is difficult to take seriously, because we no longer share the pre-scientific world view within which it makes sense. However, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle lays down some of the most basic categories of thought – and these are categories that cannot be shown to be right or wrong by investigating material things, because they come before material things (meta means before). So for example, Aristotle divides events into those that happen by necessity, and those that are accidents. He goes on to argue that we can only have knowledge of necessity. When a child attempts to escape blame for something by saying ‘but it was an accident’ they are appealing to a version of Aristotle’s distinction. He thinks very carefully about the distinction between ‘form’ and ‘matter’ and uses this distinction to say interesting things about the essence of a thing.
In the Lecture, Mark worries about whether he had ever seen the Four Tops. If the essence of the Four Tops consists in their matter, then it can’t survive any changes in that matter (so the Four Tops cease to exist when even one of them drops out and is replaced – or even, perhaps, has a haircut.) But if the essence of the Four Tops resides in their form, then material changes can take place.
In the Politics, he is the first to come up with the realisation that humans (well, alright: he says men) are social animals, and he argues that friendship is one of the greatest achievements, and the root of a happy life. The ethical writings which expand on this are featured prominently in a fairly new approach to moral philosophy, known as virtue ethics. Aristotle seems to be asking (and giving answers to) questions about moral character and education, morality and the emotions, and what it is to be a virtuous person; questions that are vibrant today.
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was the first literary megastar - a poet who, for a few years after the fall of Napoleon, was the most famous man in the western world. He dominated literary Europe, where he was seen as the prophet and champion of liberty, though ironically he was known only through prose translations of his poems. After his death, young poets and artists throughout Europe idolised Byron, becoming oppositional, self-assertive, freedom-loving, and opposed to conventional sexual morality. In England, his poetry led to a public obsession with his scandalous private life, with its succession of public affairs with married women, and rumours of dark sexual secrets.
As a boy Byron was subjected to a series of painful but useless treatments for the club foot with which he had been born. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he had crushes on fellow boys, though his gay encounters always tended to be when there were no women around, or in countries like Greece where homosexuality was regarded as perfectly acceptable.
His first poems, Hours of Idleness (1807) were generally well received, but one very hostile review upset him, "it knocked me down - but I got up again. Instead of bursting a blood-vessel, I drank three bottles of claret, and began an answer." This was a satire attacking his critics, and the poetry of most contemporaries, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, published in 1809. After a tour of the Mediterranean he returned to England in 1811, and in 1812 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was published. It sold out in three days, and Byron remarked, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." The sensation created by this poem is hard to understand today, when its style appears overblown and often absurd and affected. The attraction was the hero Harold, the Byronic hero: a gloomy, passionate, misanthropic type who stands aloof, moodily and cynically observing the follies of the world, and doomed by some dark but unspecified "crime" to be cut off forever from the one woman he loves. Byron insisted "I would not be such a fellow as I made my hero for all the world," but his female readers saw only the poet, who though jaded with "concubines and carnal company", might yet be saved by a good woman. He was besieged, the road outside his apartments jammed with coaches bringing invitations from aristocratic hostesses, and women of all classes virtually queuing up for the opportunity to try some salvation on him.
He became the hero of fashionable society, and irresistible to women - who, mostly, had never met him. The (married) Lady Caroline Lamb was his biggest fan, declaring that ugly or not, she must see him. When she did, she decided "that beautiful, pale face is my fate." As, indeed, it was. Their very public affair was followed by tempestuous scenes when he tried to end the relationship. Byron had affairs with numerous other married women, and in June 1813 began a relationship with his older half-sister Augusta. Augusta had a daughter, Medora, who was assumed to be Byron's, though this seems unlikely.
Byron's private life was now very like those of the heroes of the verse narratives he somehow found time to write, which included The Bride of Abydos (1813), written in four days, and The Corsair (1814), which sold ten thousand copies on the day of publication. With their best selling ingredients of war, exotic settings and sexy Byronic heroes, they were best sellers, yet Byron was under no delusion as to the quality of these experiments on "public patience".
As if seeking stability, on 2 January 1814 he entered a worldly "marriage of reason" with the cool and rational Annabella Milbanke, who had previously rejected him. The marriage was disastrous, with Byron openly preferring Augusta to his wife. Shortly after the birth of a daughter, Augusta Ada, Lady Byron left him. The marriage had provoked intense interest, but not half as much as the long-drawn out divorce proceedings that followed. What was the mysterious crime for which she could never forgive him? (There probably wasn't one.) Gossips, in particular Lady Byron's lawyers, spread a series of wild speculations and rumours - he was accused of attempting to rape a ten year old girl, of sharing a bed with his wife and his half-sister, of brutalising and trying to rape his wife, allegations which he repeatedly and categorically denied and for which there is no evidence. Yet the damage was done, and the society that had idolised him now rejected him.
Soon after being seduced by the young Claire Clairmont, Byron fled England in 1816 to escape public ostracism and debt, narrowly avoiding the bailiffs who arrived to seize his property a few hours after his departure. At Dover society women disguised as chambermaids watched the disgraced poet leave. He crossed Europe to Switzerland, and in Geneva he found Claire Clairmont waiting to seduce him again. At the Villa Diodati with the poet and free-love advocate Shelley, his young wife Mary, and a doctor, John Polidori, there was much discussion and reading, and a famous ghost story writing competition, from which emerged the first version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Meanwhile English tourists, who had 'cut' the divorced poet in public, watched the villa through telescopes from the other side of the lake and circulated rumours about incest and four-in-a-bed sex games.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) has rightly acquired the reputation of an Olympian among scientists and is widely regarded as the greatest naturalist for his discovery of the holy grail of biology – the modern theory of evolution. Darwin’s life and scientific work grips the popular imagination to a degree reached by few other scientists. Adventure and discovery on a famous voyage on the Beagle; the heart-rending tragedy of losing a most-loved daughter at such a young age; the publication of a blockbuster that fundamentally and irrevocably changed man’s self-image and ideas of his place in nature; burgeoning fame, but recurrent illness; burial in Westminster Abbey: these are just some of the key moments in the Darwin story. The fascination in studying Darwin’s life and scientific work perhaps lies in the paradox that the radically subversive and revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection was accomplished by such a genteel and eminently respectable Victorian. Charles Darwin was possibly the most mild-mannered revolutionary of all time. The many religious and political controversies that Darwin’s theory of evolution posed will help us to appreciate the revolutionary and iconoclastic nature of his work and to understand the extraordinary personal dilemma of the author.
Before Darwin, the origins of life on earth were understood through a framework of interpretation known as "natural theology". The design of an omniscient and omnipotent God took pride of place in this explanatory scheme. Natural theologians supplied a beautiful evocation of life abounding with goodness and joy. All species of animals were complex mechanisms shaped in the divine workshop. They were exquisitely fitted to their niches in the world and they were so well designed that there had to be a designer, just as every watch presupposes the existence of a watchmaker. This comforting and reassuring “argument from design” was radically undermined and could never recover from Darwin’s painstaking observational research and resultant theory of evolution by natural selection, for it was Darwin’s genius to provide a natural explanation for the organisational and functional design of living beings, thereby bringing the living world fully into the realm of natural science.
After his voyage on the Beagle – his reflections on Galapagos turtles and finches famously guiding him to understanding the evolutionary mechanism – Darwin had effectively rejected the prevailing Christian-influenced view. This held that organisms were perfectly adapted to their environment through God’s agency. Instead, Darwin suggested a conception of the natural world as an arena of incessant struggle between competing individuals with different degrees of fitness for survival. His reading in 1838 of Malthus on population helped him clinch the formulation of the theory. Malthus had highlighted the tension between the “arithmetic” increase in food supply and the “geometric” rate of population growth, so that population increase was always checked by a limited food supply. Darwin saw that, under similar conditions in the natural world, favourable variations would be preserved and unfavourable ones destroyed. He became convinced that, over vast periods of time in response to changes in the environment, that mechanism provided the basis for the transmutation of species.
The result of these ideas was revealed many years later in Darwin’s bestseller, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). To the chagrin and indignation of many in Darwin’s social circle, the arguments in the Origin seemed to challenge many aspects of Victorian Christianity: the historical accuracy of the Creation narratives; the persuasive force of the argument from design; the meaning of humankind’s supposed contrivance in the image of God; the ultimate grounds of religious and moral values. There was certainly no room for God or miracles in this evolutionary explanation of the development of forms of life. Darwin’s identification of 'natural selection' as the mechanism of evolutionary change insisted that the apparent design in nature was not the result of God’s creative mind, but – alarmingly for respectable and devout Victorians – of random variation and struggle.
A longer-term perspective helps dramatise Darwin’s revolutionary accomplishment, for he effectively completed the project embarked upon by Copernicus when he dethroned the earth from its special place at the heart of God’s universe. After Darwin, not even man was special or the most favoured species in the eyes of God. Darwin’s fundamental scientific idea connected all life together; all life to nature – above all, linking humanity to nature. We, too, have evolved, just like other creatures and could no longer be viewed as separate from or above nature by divine dispensation. No wonder that Darwin memorably acknowledged that coming up with the theory of evolution was “like confessing a murder”.
It is worth reflecting on the extraordinary personal dilemma faced by this Victorian gentleman with a burdensome secret. Here was a man from a pious upper middle class family whose father, a well-to-do physician, wanted him to become an Anglican clergyman! After giving up on the idea of becoming a doctor, largely because of his horror at the dissection table and his dread of witnessing pain and suffering at the bedside, Charles moved south from radical Edinburgh to Tory-Anglican Cambridge, where he was encouraged by the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, Professor of Geology, and the Reverend John Henslow, Professor of Botany. Of course, in this period, Oxbridge dons were clergymen by definition. These were men who stood steadfastly for God’s laws and for whom the very idea of transmutation was an abomination. Darwin’s recurrent illness, often attributed to psychosomatic causes, has been seen as a symptom of his pervasive fear over his dangerous secret. Indeed, Darwin had sat on his theory for nearly 20 years and was impelled to publish only when he realised that A. R. Wallace had independently arrived at an almost identical theory, threatening to pre-empt Darwin’s life’s work. Still another irony in the saga is the fact that the reader of Origin will find only one sentence that even mentions mankind – to the effect that “light may yet be shed” on human origins by the evolutionary theory outlined in the book.
Freud and Psychoanalysis
Theories don’t emerge from a vacuum. To understand Freud’s ideas it is useful to get some sense of his life. He was born in 1856 and spent most of his life in Vienna; only moving to London in the last year of his life to escape the hostility of the Nazis. While there is every evidence (for example from his letters) that Freud was a passionate man, he didn’t himself have much of a sex life. As far as we know this was limited to his relationship with his wife Martha - and that petered out in his forties. Perhaps not surprising, then, that the repression of sexuality is a strong theme in his work. As to his education, a distinguishing characteristic was its breadth. He studied classics and history at school; philosophy and biology at university. He was equally at home in the worlds of literature and science. And one of the great features of his theory is that it links our biological being with the meanings that constitute our experience.
Becoming a great scientist was Freud’s initial ambition but - for practical reasons - he eventually turned to what we would now call psychotherapy. He began by studying what others were doing in this field, working in Paris with Charcot who was using hypnosis to treat hysterical patients. Charcot’s clinic was a bit like a theatre, with patients being hypnotised in front of an audience of medical students - as well as occasional members of the lay public. Freud also tried using hypnosis at first. But he later discarded it in favour of techniques like free association (the patient saying whatever comes into the mind), dream interpretation and closely analysing the relationship between patient and the therapist himself. Freud’s original aim was to release blocked feelings (catharsis), but later it became to help the patient gain insight into the unconscious feelings that led to neurosis.
Freud's theories are best understood as covering three key areas:
The first is the idea of the importance of unconscious feelings. Freud’s first case studies purported to show the way that when strong feelings cause conflict, they may be blocked from awareness - repressed. This, however, doesn’t mean that they go away. One way they may express themselves is in the form of neurotic symptoms, usually in some way expressing the underlying conflict. As an example, a young woman who was disgusted by seeing a dog drink from a household glass developed symptoms where she couldn’t drink liquids. Unconscious feelings may also show themselves in distorted form in dreams. The goal of Freudian dream interpretation is to unravel the different kinds of distortion which mask the motivations underlying the dream. Freud also thought slips of the tongue and the mistakes we make were motivated by unconscious conflicts and feelings.
The second base of Freud’s theories is his theory of psychosexuality and its foundations in early childhood. He related psychosexuality to the pleasurable sensations that come from the stimulation of certain body areas. He saw the young child as going through a biologically timetabled series of stages. Initially, at the oral stage, the erogenous area is the mouth and - as you may have noticed - when babies get old enough to be able, they love putting things to their mouths. (Each stage is characterised by a particular body area, a physical ‘mode’ - at the oral stage, sucking or biting - and a psychological ‘modality’ - at this stage the child is dependent on others for survival and satisfaction.)
The anal stage comes next where the core conflict relates to the requirement of the child to control his/her own body functions to the requests of others. According to Freud, this may lay the foundation for many different kinds of personality characteristics from stinginess (holding on) to creativity (being proud of what you produce!). In particular, it lays the foundation for your style of relating to authority - whether this be conformity or rebellion.
The third or phallic stage focuses on the genital area and in boys takes the form of the famous Oedipal conflict. Feeling close to the mother, and developing an awareness of the relationships of others, the boy may come to perceive the father as a rival, producing feelings of both hostility and fear. Given the child’s focus on the phallus at this stage, this can take the form of unconscious fears of castration. If all this sound rather far-fetched to you, think of the extraordinary themes found in the classical fairy tales, where people are frequently eaten (oral aggression) and giant’s heads are cut off (castration of the father?). Many psychoanalysts would see the popularity among young children of such bloodthirsty themes as indication of their resonance with children’s unconscious feelings.
All ideas, Marx would argue, are a product of their time and place in history. Marx formed his ideas as Europe embarked upon the massive transformations which changed traditional, peasant farming societies into modern, industrial ones. As he wrote, for the first time large industrial cities were being developed. Filth, overcrowding, sickness and poverty existed alongside a new urban rich. Marx was not alone in offering an analysis of these changing conditions. What is distinctive about his thought is that he sees the key factor in understanding the development of these new societies, the thing which at the end of the day shapes how the society is organised, what we think and believe, who we are and what we can become, is not the new industrial technologies nor even the new urban spaces but the way in which production is organised.
The new world that Marx was analysing was the first flowering of a mature capitalist system. Today we are so used to talk of ‘market forces’ that it is hard to remember that there is nothing natural or God-given about the capitalist economic system. It exists because human beings have created it and sustained it. The key difference between capitalism and the economic systems that had gone before it is the way in which the relationships between property and labour are organised. Capital lies in private hands and those who own it seek profit as their reward for its deployment in the economy. Investment - whether in farming, mining, manufacturing or services - requires workers if it is to see a return; there is no point building a factory unless there are workers to labour in it. As well as bringing into being a new class of owner, capitalism also requires a new kind of worker: one tied not by traditional loyalties or by relationships of servitude, but formally free labour entering into a contractual relationship with the employers for wages.
When Marx looked at this relationship between the owners of capital and those who have to sell their labour power to survive, he saw not a fair deal, but a system of exploitation. To take a simplified example: imagine you have a pile of wood, glue, nails, varnish and screws worth £10 and at the end of the day these have been turned into a table, retail price £200. What has transformed these raw materials into a table is the labour of the workers. Even after subtracting the costs of electricity, machinery, distribution and advertising (say another £10 pounds per table) we are still left with a value added by the hands of the workers of £180. Of course they are not paid this much: they are paid enough to keep them alive (so that they come back to work tomorrow) and to enable them to raise children (so that someone will come to work in twenty years time and keep the whole show on the road). What’s left over is taken as profit. Profit is not the legitimate reward for investment – it is the theft from workers of the value of their labour. Workers and owners are (says Marxist analysis) thus in a fundamentally antagonistic relationship – each side trying to keep a greater slice of this ‘surplus’ value.
This fundamental conflict between workers and owners is for Marx the dialectical engine at the heart of history. All earlier economic systems had contained within them the seeds of their own destruction and capitalism is no different. The logic of seeking greater and greater profit would lead to amalgamations, mergers and giant corporations whilst skilled workers and small shop keepers would be eaten up by the system and become deskilled and pauperised like all other workers. The two great historic classes at the heart of the capitalist system - capitalists and proletariat - would face each other across the barricades of history and private property would be done away with.
Marx may have analysed the position of the workers and seen them as sharing a situation and destiny, but their unity was far from inevitable. Workers did not come home from work spontaneously complaining that they’ve had a bad day experiencing the fundamental contradictions between labour and capital. Workers struggled against each other for survival. Skilled workers would hold themselves to be better than the unskilled; immigrant groups would be accused of stealing the jobs of indigenous workers; women would be seen as a cheap labour threat to male workers. If these divisions were to be overcome, workers would have to overcome these false understandings of their condition and become a united class. This is no easy task for, Marx argued, the dominant beliefs in any era - those accepted as obvious and common sense - are those that work in the interests of the ruling class. If religion was the opiate of the people, other beliefs such as the superiority of white ‘races’ and the ‘natural’ inferiority of women also acted to alienate workers from their shared experiences and from uniting together.
It is easiest to appreciate how Marx formed his ideas if we look back to the social conditions and the intellectual traditions within which they were born. But is this nineteenth century ‘grand theory of everything’ only applicable in that brief historical moment? Undoubtedly the world in which we live is very different from the one Marx knew. Ownership of capital is now dispersed through share ownership and pension plans. The divisions among those of us who work and sell our labour power for a wage seem greater than ever. This is especially true if we remember that capitalist enterprises are now operating in a global way.
Many social scientists reject Marx’s approach whilst others have built upon it and provided increasingly sophisticated analyses of society and culture. Much social science debate has been characterised as a debate with Marx’s ghost. In applying dialectical analysis to the material conditions of life Marx may have hit upon a method which we can still apply in these changing times.
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642, in the tiny hamlet of Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire. He was born prematurely, apparently "so small that they could have fit him into a quart pot". His father had died three months earlier and when young Isaac was three his mother remarried, and he was brought up by his grandmother. This event was to scar him and could well have led to his rather unpleasant character – although if things had been otherwise, Newton might have ended up as illiterate as his parents, neither of whom were able to sign his birth certificate. When Isaac was eleven his mother's new husband died, and he was soon to be sent away to the Free Grammar School of Edward VI in Grantham.
From the beginning, Newton enjoyed constructing models – for example, he made a small windmill that actually ground flour and was powered by a small mouse in a wheel. In later life he was to construct the apparatus for his research – such as the equipment that enabled him to grind his own lenses for his optics experiments. It is important to remember that Newton was as much a practical scientist as a constructor of grand theories.
At school, his achievements gave no indication as to what would develop later, but he enjoyed mathematics there and probably learned more from his teacher, Mr Stokes, than he would do later from his tutor at Cambridge.
When he was seventeen, Newton returned to Woolsthorpe to manage the estate, but he was an unqualified failure. His mind was so full of problems that he wanted to solve, he had no interest in the matters in hand. Indeed the - probably apocryphal - story is told that he was once leading a horse up a hill when it slipped its bridle. Newton didn’t notice and went on leading the bridle up the hill.
Fortunately both Newton’s uncle and his mathematics master had noticed his talent. They persuaded his uneducated mother that Isaac should return to school and prepare for entrance to Cambridge.
Newton went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in June 1661. Because he was not of gentry sock, he was a subsizar, required to wait on his tutor at table, clean his shoes and do other menial tasks. He did not take to the Aristotelian approach to physics and philosophy and increasingly devoted his time to reading the great scientific works, such as Euclid’s Elements. In particular, Newton spent much time studying Descartes’ Geometry.
Another writer that Newton read avidly was John Wallis. Wallis had been a code-breaker for the Parliamentarians during the Civil War and was to become the greatest English mathematician of his day - after Newton.
Newton’s first researches into mathematics were inspired by Wallis’ work on infinite series. In particular he was concerned to extend the binomial theorem. Newton had an aversion to publishing his results and his generalised binomial theorem did not appear in print until 1704.
Newton graduated from Cambridge in 1665 but soon afterwards, because of the plague that had devastated London, he had to leave. The university was closed for two years and Newton returned to Lincolnshire. He went to Boothby Pagnell where his uncle was rector and where there was a nice orchard of apple trees.
It was during this time that the story of Newton and the apple originated. Seeing an apple fall, Newton realised that the force that draws the apple to earth is the same universal force that keeps the moon in orbit around the earth, and the earth and planets in orbit around the sun. Moreover, as Newton came to realise, this force is governed by a universal law of gravity: that the force of attraction between any two objects is proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the distance between them – so if the distance increases ten-fold, the force decreases a hundred-fold. Although his main writings on the subject were not to appear for twenty years, in the Principia, his initial ideas came from these plague years.
This isn’t to deny that Freud, like the other characters in this series, was a genius who changed the world. But they were all wonderfully flawed and magnificently human. So the series is an attempt to portray just that, as well as the only way to show Lord Byron as Joe Strummer, Isaac Newton as Carol Vorderman and Darwin as the man who goes mad in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In these times in which our world appears to be dominated by the mundane and passionless, whether in the guise of Westlife, the Big Brother house or our politicians, it may be a comfort to know the people who mattered the most were all splendidly passionate and endearingly mental.
Here are examples of each. In the Politics, Aristotle makes it clear that he approves of slavery, and that he thinks women are fitted by nature for a subordinate position. In doing so, he was, of course in keeping with his time: the elegant democracy found in Athens was a democracy only for free men who were citizens of the city-state. Aristotle also comes a cropper in some of his scientific treatises that haven't passed the test of time: it’s not true that the world is comprised of four elements - water, earth and air and fire, but this was part of his world view. Here, Aristotle’s explanations fell apart in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as quantitative methods began to be applied to everyday objects, and maths and physics came to be seen as more basic sciences than biology.
Some of his thought is just very odd. In the Physics he argues that plants have souls. Why is this? A soul is a unifying element – it is the thing that gives coherence to a thing. And plants need this unifying element because… their roots grow towards the centre of the earth and their leaves grow towards the sky. If it wasn’t for them having souls, they would split in two.
This sort of explanation is difficult to take seriously, because we no longer share the pre-scientific world view within which it makes sense. However, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle lays down some of the most basic categories of thought – and these are categories that cannot be shown to be right or wrong by investigating material things, because they come before material things (meta means before). So for example, Aristotle divides events into those that happen by necessity, and those that are accidents. He goes on to argue that we can only have knowledge of necessity. When a child attempts to escape blame for something by saying ‘but it was an accident’ they are appealing to a version of Aristotle’s distinction. He thinks very carefully about the distinction between ‘form’ and ‘matter’ and uses this distinction to say interesting things about the essence of a thing.
In the Lecture, Mark worries about whether he had ever seen the Four Tops. If the essence of the Four Tops consists in their matter, then it can’t survive any changes in that matter (so the Four Tops cease to exist when even one of them drops out and is replaced – or even, perhaps, has a haircut.) But if the essence of the Four Tops resides in their form, then material changes can take place.
In the Politics, he is the first to come up with the realisation that humans (well, alright: he says men) are social animals, and he argues that friendship is one of the greatest achievements, and the root of a happy life. The ethical writings which expand on this are featured prominently in a fairly new approach to moral philosophy, known as virtue ethics. Aristotle seems to be asking (and giving answers to) questions about moral character and education, morality and the emotions, and what it is to be a virtuous person; questions that are vibrant today.
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was the first literary megastar - a poet who, for a few years after the fall of Napoleon, was the most famous man in the western world. He dominated literary Europe, where he was seen as the prophet and champion of liberty, though ironically he was known only through prose translations of his poems. After his death, young poets and artists throughout Europe idolised Byron, becoming oppositional, self-assertive, freedom-loving, and opposed to conventional sexual morality. In England, his poetry led to a public obsession with his scandalous private life, with its succession of public affairs with married women, and rumours of dark sexual secrets.
As a boy Byron was subjected to a series of painful but useless treatments for the club foot with which he had been born. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he had crushes on fellow boys, though his gay encounters always tended to be when there were no women around, or in countries like Greece where homosexuality was regarded as perfectly acceptable.
His first poems, Hours of Idleness (1807) were generally well received, but one very hostile review upset him, "it knocked me down - but I got up again. Instead of bursting a blood-vessel, I drank three bottles of claret, and began an answer." This was a satire attacking his critics, and the poetry of most contemporaries, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, published in 1809. After a tour of the Mediterranean he returned to England in 1811, and in 1812 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was published. It sold out in three days, and Byron remarked, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." The sensation created by this poem is hard to understand today, when its style appears overblown and often absurd and affected. The attraction was the hero Harold, the Byronic hero: a gloomy, passionate, misanthropic type who stands aloof, moodily and cynically observing the follies of the world, and doomed by some dark but unspecified "crime" to be cut off forever from the one woman he loves. Byron insisted "I would not be such a fellow as I made my hero for all the world," but his female readers saw only the poet, who though jaded with "concubines and carnal company", might yet be saved by a good woman. He was besieged, the road outside his apartments jammed with coaches bringing invitations from aristocratic hostesses, and women of all classes virtually queuing up for the opportunity to try some salvation on him.
He became the hero of fashionable society, and irresistible to women - who, mostly, had never met him. The (married) Lady Caroline Lamb was his biggest fan, declaring that ugly or not, she must see him. When she did, she decided "that beautiful, pale face is my fate." As, indeed, it was. Their very public affair was followed by tempestuous scenes when he tried to end the relationship. Byron had affairs with numerous other married women, and in June 1813 began a relationship with his older half-sister Augusta. Augusta had a daughter, Medora, who was assumed to be Byron's, though this seems unlikely.
Byron's private life was now very like those of the heroes of the verse narratives he somehow found time to write, which included The Bride of Abydos (1813), written in four days, and The Corsair (1814), which sold ten thousand copies on the day of publication. With their best selling ingredients of war, exotic settings and sexy Byronic heroes, they were best sellers, yet Byron was under no delusion as to the quality of these experiments on "public patience".
As if seeking stability, on 2 January 1814 he entered a worldly "marriage of reason" with the cool and rational Annabella Milbanke, who had previously rejected him. The marriage was disastrous, with Byron openly preferring Augusta to his wife. Shortly after the birth of a daughter, Augusta Ada, Lady Byron left him. The marriage had provoked intense interest, but not half as much as the long-drawn out divorce proceedings that followed. What was the mysterious crime for which she could never forgive him? (There probably wasn't one.) Gossips, in particular Lady Byron's lawyers, spread a series of wild speculations and rumours - he was accused of attempting to rape a ten year old girl, of sharing a bed with his wife and his half-sister, of brutalising and trying to rape his wife, allegations which he repeatedly and categorically denied and for which there is no evidence. Yet the damage was done, and the society that had idolised him now rejected him.
Soon after being seduced by the young Claire Clairmont, Byron fled England in 1816 to escape public ostracism and debt, narrowly avoiding the bailiffs who arrived to seize his property a few hours after his departure. At Dover society women disguised as chambermaids watched the disgraced poet leave. He crossed Europe to Switzerland, and in Geneva he found Claire Clairmont waiting to seduce him again. At the Villa Diodati with the poet and free-love advocate Shelley, his young wife Mary, and a doctor, John Polidori, there was much discussion and reading, and a famous ghost story writing competition, from which emerged the first version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Meanwhile English tourists, who had 'cut' the divorced poet in public, watched the villa through telescopes from the other side of the lake and circulated rumours about incest and four-in-a-bed sex games.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) has rightly acquired the reputation of an Olympian among scientists and is widely regarded as the greatest naturalist for his discovery of the holy grail of biology – the modern theory of evolution. Darwin’s life and scientific work grips the popular imagination to a degree reached by few other scientists. Adventure and discovery on a famous voyage on the Beagle; the heart-rending tragedy of losing a most-loved daughter at such a young age; the publication of a blockbuster that fundamentally and irrevocably changed man’s self-image and ideas of his place in nature; burgeoning fame, but recurrent illness; burial in Westminster Abbey: these are just some of the key moments in the Darwin story. The fascination in studying Darwin’s life and scientific work perhaps lies in the paradox that the radically subversive and revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection was accomplished by such a genteel and eminently respectable Victorian. Charles Darwin was possibly the most mild-mannered revolutionary of all time. The many religious and political controversies that Darwin’s theory of evolution posed will help us to appreciate the revolutionary and iconoclastic nature of his work and to understand the extraordinary personal dilemma of the author.
Before Darwin, the origins of life on earth were understood through a framework of interpretation known as "natural theology". The design of an omniscient and omnipotent God took pride of place in this explanatory scheme. Natural theologians supplied a beautiful evocation of life abounding with goodness and joy. All species of animals were complex mechanisms shaped in the divine workshop. They were exquisitely fitted to their niches in the world and they were so well designed that there had to be a designer, just as every watch presupposes the existence of a watchmaker. This comforting and reassuring “argument from design” was radically undermined and could never recover from Darwin’s painstaking observational research and resultant theory of evolution by natural selection, for it was Darwin’s genius to provide a natural explanation for the organisational and functional design of living beings, thereby bringing the living world fully into the realm of natural science.
After his voyage on the Beagle – his reflections on Galapagos turtles and finches famously guiding him to understanding the evolutionary mechanism – Darwin had effectively rejected the prevailing Christian-influenced view. This held that organisms were perfectly adapted to their environment through God’s agency. Instead, Darwin suggested a conception of the natural world as an arena of incessant struggle between competing individuals with different degrees of fitness for survival. His reading in 1838 of Malthus on population helped him clinch the formulation of the theory. Malthus had highlighted the tension between the “arithmetic” increase in food supply and the “geometric” rate of population growth, so that population increase was always checked by a limited food supply. Darwin saw that, under similar conditions in the natural world, favourable variations would be preserved and unfavourable ones destroyed. He became convinced that, over vast periods of time in response to changes in the environment, that mechanism provided the basis for the transmutation of species.
The result of these ideas was revealed many years later in Darwin’s bestseller, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). To the chagrin and indignation of many in Darwin’s social circle, the arguments in the Origin seemed to challenge many aspects of Victorian Christianity: the historical accuracy of the Creation narratives; the persuasive force of the argument from design; the meaning of humankind’s supposed contrivance in the image of God; the ultimate grounds of religious and moral values. There was certainly no room for God or miracles in this evolutionary explanation of the development of forms of life. Darwin’s identification of 'natural selection' as the mechanism of evolutionary change insisted that the apparent design in nature was not the result of God’s creative mind, but – alarmingly for respectable and devout Victorians – of random variation and struggle.
A longer-term perspective helps dramatise Darwin’s revolutionary accomplishment, for he effectively completed the project embarked upon by Copernicus when he dethroned the earth from its special place at the heart of God’s universe. After Darwin, not even man was special or the most favoured species in the eyes of God. Darwin’s fundamental scientific idea connected all life together; all life to nature – above all, linking humanity to nature. We, too, have evolved, just like other creatures and could no longer be viewed as separate from or above nature by divine dispensation. No wonder that Darwin memorably acknowledged that coming up with the theory of evolution was “like confessing a murder”.
It is worth reflecting on the extraordinary personal dilemma faced by this Victorian gentleman with a burdensome secret. Here was a man from a pious upper middle class family whose father, a well-to-do physician, wanted him to become an Anglican clergyman! After giving up on the idea of becoming a doctor, largely because of his horror at the dissection table and his dread of witnessing pain and suffering at the bedside, Charles moved south from radical Edinburgh to Tory-Anglican Cambridge, where he was encouraged by the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, Professor of Geology, and the Reverend John Henslow, Professor of Botany. Of course, in this period, Oxbridge dons were clergymen by definition. These were men who stood steadfastly for God’s laws and for whom the very idea of transmutation was an abomination. Darwin’s recurrent illness, often attributed to psychosomatic causes, has been seen as a symptom of his pervasive fear over his dangerous secret. Indeed, Darwin had sat on his theory for nearly 20 years and was impelled to publish only when he realised that A. R. Wallace had independently arrived at an almost identical theory, threatening to pre-empt Darwin’s life’s work. Still another irony in the saga is the fact that the reader of Origin will find only one sentence that even mentions mankind – to the effect that “light may yet be shed” on human origins by the evolutionary theory outlined in the book.
Freud and Psychoanalysis
Theories don’t emerge from a vacuum. To understand Freud’s ideas it is useful to get some sense of his life. He was born in 1856 and spent most of his life in Vienna; only moving to London in the last year of his life to escape the hostility of the Nazis. While there is every evidence (for example from his letters) that Freud was a passionate man, he didn’t himself have much of a sex life. As far as we know this was limited to his relationship with his wife Martha - and that petered out in his forties. Perhaps not surprising, then, that the repression of sexuality is a strong theme in his work. As to his education, a distinguishing characteristic was its breadth. He studied classics and history at school; philosophy and biology at university. He was equally at home in the worlds of literature and science. And one of the great features of his theory is that it links our biological being with the meanings that constitute our experience.
Becoming a great scientist was Freud’s initial ambition but - for practical reasons - he eventually turned to what we would now call psychotherapy. He began by studying what others were doing in this field, working in Paris with Charcot who was using hypnosis to treat hysterical patients. Charcot’s clinic was a bit like a theatre, with patients being hypnotised in front of an audience of medical students - as well as occasional members of the lay public. Freud also tried using hypnosis at first. But he later discarded it in favour of techniques like free association (the patient saying whatever comes into the mind), dream interpretation and closely analysing the relationship between patient and the therapist himself. Freud’s original aim was to release blocked feelings (catharsis), but later it became to help the patient gain insight into the unconscious feelings that led to neurosis.
Freud's theories are best understood as covering three key areas:
The first is the idea of the importance of unconscious feelings. Freud’s first case studies purported to show the way that when strong feelings cause conflict, they may be blocked from awareness - repressed. This, however, doesn’t mean that they go away. One way they may express themselves is in the form of neurotic symptoms, usually in some way expressing the underlying conflict. As an example, a young woman who was disgusted by seeing a dog drink from a household glass developed symptoms where she couldn’t drink liquids. Unconscious feelings may also show themselves in distorted form in dreams. The goal of Freudian dream interpretation is to unravel the different kinds of distortion which mask the motivations underlying the dream. Freud also thought slips of the tongue and the mistakes we make were motivated by unconscious conflicts and feelings.
The second base of Freud’s theories is his theory of psychosexuality and its foundations in early childhood. He related psychosexuality to the pleasurable sensations that come from the stimulation of certain body areas. He saw the young child as going through a biologically timetabled series of stages. Initially, at the oral stage, the erogenous area is the mouth and - as you may have noticed - when babies get old enough to be able, they love putting things to their mouths. (Each stage is characterised by a particular body area, a physical ‘mode’ - at the oral stage, sucking or biting - and a psychological ‘modality’ - at this stage the child is dependent on others for survival and satisfaction.)
The anal stage comes next where the core conflict relates to the requirement of the child to control his/her own body functions to the requests of others. According to Freud, this may lay the foundation for many different kinds of personality characteristics from stinginess (holding on) to creativity (being proud of what you produce!). In particular, it lays the foundation for your style of relating to authority - whether this be conformity or rebellion.
The third or phallic stage focuses on the genital area and in boys takes the form of the famous Oedipal conflict. Feeling close to the mother, and developing an awareness of the relationships of others, the boy may come to perceive the father as a rival, producing feelings of both hostility and fear. Given the child’s focus on the phallus at this stage, this can take the form of unconscious fears of castration. If all this sound rather far-fetched to you, think of the extraordinary themes found in the classical fairy tales, where people are frequently eaten (oral aggression) and giant’s heads are cut off (castration of the father?). Many psychoanalysts would see the popularity among young children of such bloodthirsty themes as indication of their resonance with children’s unconscious feelings.
All ideas, Marx would argue, are a product of their time and place in history. Marx formed his ideas as Europe embarked upon the massive transformations which changed traditional, peasant farming societies into modern, industrial ones. As he wrote, for the first time large industrial cities were being developed. Filth, overcrowding, sickness and poverty existed alongside a new urban rich. Marx was not alone in offering an analysis of these changing conditions. What is distinctive about his thought is that he sees the key factor in understanding the development of these new societies, the thing which at the end of the day shapes how the society is organised, what we think and believe, who we are and what we can become, is not the new industrial technologies nor even the new urban spaces but the way in which production is organised.
The new world that Marx was analysing was the first flowering of a mature capitalist system. Today we are so used to talk of ‘market forces’ that it is hard to remember that there is nothing natural or God-given about the capitalist economic system. It exists because human beings have created it and sustained it. The key difference between capitalism and the economic systems that had gone before it is the way in which the relationships between property and labour are organised. Capital lies in private hands and those who own it seek profit as their reward for its deployment in the economy. Investment - whether in farming, mining, manufacturing or services - requires workers if it is to see a return; there is no point building a factory unless there are workers to labour in it. As well as bringing into being a new class of owner, capitalism also requires a new kind of worker: one tied not by traditional loyalties or by relationships of servitude, but formally free labour entering into a contractual relationship with the employers for wages.
When Marx looked at this relationship between the owners of capital and those who have to sell their labour power to survive, he saw not a fair deal, but a system of exploitation. To take a simplified example: imagine you have a pile of wood, glue, nails, varnish and screws worth £10 and at the end of the day these have been turned into a table, retail price £200. What has transformed these raw materials into a table is the labour of the workers. Even after subtracting the costs of electricity, machinery, distribution and advertising (say another £10 pounds per table) we are still left with a value added by the hands of the workers of £180. Of course they are not paid this much: they are paid enough to keep them alive (so that they come back to work tomorrow) and to enable them to raise children (so that someone will come to work in twenty years time and keep the whole show on the road). What’s left over is taken as profit. Profit is not the legitimate reward for investment – it is the theft from workers of the value of their labour. Workers and owners are (says Marxist analysis) thus in a fundamentally antagonistic relationship – each side trying to keep a greater slice of this ‘surplus’ value.
This fundamental conflict between workers and owners is for Marx the dialectical engine at the heart of history. All earlier economic systems had contained within them the seeds of their own destruction and capitalism is no different. The logic of seeking greater and greater profit would lead to amalgamations, mergers and giant corporations whilst skilled workers and small shop keepers would be eaten up by the system and become deskilled and pauperised like all other workers. The two great historic classes at the heart of the capitalist system - capitalists and proletariat - would face each other across the barricades of history and private property would be done away with.
Marx may have analysed the position of the workers and seen them as sharing a situation and destiny, but their unity was far from inevitable. Workers did not come home from work spontaneously complaining that they’ve had a bad day experiencing the fundamental contradictions between labour and capital. Workers struggled against each other for survival. Skilled workers would hold themselves to be better than the unskilled; immigrant groups would be accused of stealing the jobs of indigenous workers; women would be seen as a cheap labour threat to male workers. If these divisions were to be overcome, workers would have to overcome these false understandings of their condition and become a united class. This is no easy task for, Marx argued, the dominant beliefs in any era - those accepted as obvious and common sense - are those that work in the interests of the ruling class. If religion was the opiate of the people, other beliefs such as the superiority of white ‘races’ and the ‘natural’ inferiority of women also acted to alienate workers from their shared experiences and from uniting together.
It is easiest to appreciate how Marx formed his ideas if we look back to the social conditions and the intellectual traditions within which they were born. But is this nineteenth century ‘grand theory of everything’ only applicable in that brief historical moment? Undoubtedly the world in which we live is very different from the one Marx knew. Ownership of capital is now dispersed through share ownership and pension plans. The divisions among those of us who work and sell our labour power for a wage seem greater than ever. This is especially true if we remember that capitalist enterprises are now operating in a global way.
Many social scientists reject Marx’s approach whilst others have built upon it and provided increasingly sophisticated analyses of society and culture. Much social science debate has been characterised as a debate with Marx’s ghost. In applying dialectical analysis to the material conditions of life Marx may have hit upon a method which we can still apply in these changing times.
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642, in the tiny hamlet of Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire. He was born prematurely, apparently "so small that they could have fit him into a quart pot". His father had died three months earlier and when young Isaac was three his mother remarried, and he was brought up by his grandmother. This event was to scar him and could well have led to his rather unpleasant character – although if things had been otherwise, Newton might have ended up as illiterate as his parents, neither of whom were able to sign his birth certificate. When Isaac was eleven his mother's new husband died, and he was soon to be sent away to the Free Grammar School of Edward VI in Grantham.
From the beginning, Newton enjoyed constructing models – for example, he made a small windmill that actually ground flour and was powered by a small mouse in a wheel. In later life he was to construct the apparatus for his research – such as the equipment that enabled him to grind his own lenses for his optics experiments. It is important to remember that Newton was as much a practical scientist as a constructor of grand theories.
At school, his achievements gave no indication as to what would develop later, but he enjoyed mathematics there and probably learned more from his teacher, Mr Stokes, than he would do later from his tutor at Cambridge.
When he was seventeen, Newton returned to Woolsthorpe to manage the estate, but he was an unqualified failure. His mind was so full of problems that he wanted to solve, he had no interest in the matters in hand. Indeed the - probably apocryphal - story is told that he was once leading a horse up a hill when it slipped its bridle. Newton didn’t notice and went on leading the bridle up the hill.
Fortunately both Newton’s uncle and his mathematics master had noticed his talent. They persuaded his uneducated mother that Isaac should return to school and prepare for entrance to Cambridge.
Newton went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in June 1661. Because he was not of gentry sock, he was a subsizar, required to wait on his tutor at table, clean his shoes and do other menial tasks. He did not take to the Aristotelian approach to physics and philosophy and increasingly devoted his time to reading the great scientific works, such as Euclid’s Elements. In particular, Newton spent much time studying Descartes’ Geometry.
Another writer that Newton read avidly was John Wallis. Wallis had been a code-breaker for the Parliamentarians during the Civil War and was to become the greatest English mathematician of his day - after Newton.
Newton’s first researches into mathematics were inspired by Wallis’ work on infinite series. In particular he was concerned to extend the binomial theorem. Newton had an aversion to publishing his results and his generalised binomial theorem did not appear in print until 1704.
Newton graduated from Cambridge in 1665 but soon afterwards, because of the plague that had devastated London, he had to leave. The university was closed for two years and Newton returned to Lincolnshire. He went to Boothby Pagnell where his uncle was rector and where there was a nice orchard of apple trees.
It was during this time that the story of Newton and the apple originated. Seeing an apple fall, Newton realised that the force that draws the apple to earth is the same universal force that keeps the moon in orbit around the earth, and the earth and planets in orbit around the sun. Moreover, as Newton came to realise, this force is governed by a universal law of gravity: that the force of attraction between any two objects is proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the distance between them – so if the distance increases ten-fold, the force decreases a hundred-fold. Although his main writings on the subject were not to appear for twenty years, in the Principia, his initial ideas came from these plague years.
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