Chapter 1 Introduction to the Simplicity Argument and its Relation to Previous Studies

The safest characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. alfred north whitehead ∵

The following treatise concerns a special theory of consciousness and its ­application to human loneliness. In terms of a methodology, it follows along the lines of the History of Ideas discipline, which was originally instituted in the early part of the twentieth century under the aegis of Johns Hopkins Uni- versity by A.O. Lovejoy and George Boas. In the ensuing years, it was emulated by other institutions of higher learning, including the Ideas and Methods and the Committee on Social Thought programs at the University of Chicago, the History of Ideas at Brandeis University, and the History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz as well as various other universi- ties all implementing different combinations, concentrations, and approaches ­between the disciplines. It consists in an attempt to implement an interdisciplinary perspective by emphasizing certain strains of metaphysical dualism and subjective idealism and then applying these tenets to a substantive theory of the self and the in- nate quality of human loneliness. It concentrates on a historically important paradigm of the mind, grounded in a premise asserting that consciousness is both immaterial and active and more specifically that it exhibits a reflexive form of self-consciousness as well as the transcendent features of a purposive intentionality. It is a sequel to four previous efforts by the author, The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments: The Simplicity, Unity, and Identity of Thought and Soul from the Cambridge Platonists to Kant; Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature; Contingent Immaterialism: Meaning, Freedom, Time, and Mind; and Feeling Lonesome: The Philosophy and Psychology of Loneliness, with all four studies designed to coalesce in supporting a theory of consciousness in rela- tion to human loneliness. By their very nature interdisciplinary studies assume that there are certain principles and paradigms that are so central in Western thought that their

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4 Chapter 1 themes are best explored in unison with other related disciplines thereby ­enhancing the possibility of comprehensive insights within the participating inter-related fields. Against the combination of reductive materialism and naïve empiricism, the present study contends that these dual perspectives are unable to account adequately for the activity of human consciousness, the reality of the self, and its inescapable sense of an enclosed subjective isolation. It further seeks to coherently integrate the various intertwined filaments of dualism, rational- ism, and idealism, which are threaded throughout the many historical concep- tions of the self found in the Greek psyche, the Christian soul, the Cartesian cogito, the Leibnizian monad, German idealism, Husserlian phenomenology, and Sartrean existentialism, which mutually conclude in portraying human consciousness as inevitably lonely. The work defends a substantive concept of the self, while offering a theory of cognitive consciousness coupled with a psychology of motivational drives animated by the fear of loneliness and the consequent desire for shared intimacy. While defending this view, it criticizes and rejects the underlying assumptions in regard to the alternate model of the “self” presented in the related movements of materialism, mechanism, deter- minism, empiricism, phenomenalism, behaviorism, and the current vogue of reductivism and ethical relativism so evident in the neurosciences. But first let me begin by addressing a distinction suggested by Kant between the Critique of Pure Reason employing the synthetic or progressive method of proof, as opposed to the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, which rather summons the analytic or regressive approach (Sections 263–64, 274–75, 278–79, 283–284) by recruiting his distinction for my own purposes. The difference is highlighted by a passage in Kemp Smith.

The synthetic method would start from given, ordinary experience (in its simplest form, as consciousness of time), to discover its conditions, and from them to prove the validity of knowledge that is a priori. The analytic method would start “from the sought as if it were given,” that is, from the existence of a priori synthetic judgments, and, assuming them as valid, would determine the conditions under which alone such validity can be possible.1

Thus there are two ways to address the problem of cognition. We can simply start with human consciousness—“in its simplest form, as consciousness of

1 Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (New York: Humani- ties Press, 1962), 43 ff.; hereafter cited as Kemp Smith, Commentary.