Theodor Reik Part 4: Dream Analysis & The Compulsion to Confession

This blog originally appeared on December 21, 2011.

Dream analysis for Reik, as for Freud, was of fundamental significance in self-analysis of the psyche. The emotional and iconic nature of the dream is one that is somehow closest to alchemy and analogical thought.

Described by Freud as "the royal road to the unconscious," Reik proposes dream analysis to be the cornerstone of self-analysis. He offers an analysis of his own dream (known as the "judgement" dream) to illustrate how an analyst goes about analyzing a dream of their own.

Reik remains faithful to classical Freudian dream interpretation and offers an analysis that brings us closer to his understanding of himself as a proud and vengeful person, who might feel somewhat inadequate (or falsely humble) in his contributions to psychoanalysis. The admission, as it were, of Reik's pride and desire to dominate (he takes great pains to point out that this is not physical, but intellectual domination) is repeated frequently. One wonders whom Reik was writing to in this chapter? It is almost a confession in itself. In this way, Reik points out that his dream was a confession, and that confession is a desire to re-experience the "guilty" action. In this way, Reik contends, a confession is way of emotionally reliving the act, and not without some sort of satisfaction.

Reik describes how dream images (emotionally loaded icons) at the unconscious, latent level, resonate with imagery and action in the waking life. Oftentimes the full exposure of the latent content of a dream is not immediate, but rather, unfolds over the course of months and years. Reik explains that the recollection of a dream, or portion of a dream, can be understood in the context of what is happening in the person's life at the moment of recollection. Emotionally charged symbols resonate with the imagery and context of the waking life, which elicits the the dream imagery to manifest in consciousness. Paying attention to the emotional, environmental, and intellectual events, preceding and following the recollection of the dream, will offer clues to its meaning. A dream continues to be analyzed and revised within the context of the conscious life.

The symbolic-emotional nature of dreams are archetypal, emotionally loaded, iconography that takes on general emotional relationships. The everyday interactions of objects in our life are experiences within a certain set of analogical archetypes that are amalgamated at the symbolic level. It is not the icon itself that holds significance in the analogical process, but rather, the emotional and relational phenomenon that comes forth from the interaction between objects. This is the wisdom of the analogical dream -the structure of the configurations of knowing, which is the outcome of dream analysis.

Direct questions, comments, & corrections to Matthew Giobbi.

PART 5

The Marketing Character Type

This blog originally appeared on October 23, 2011.


When Jean-Paul Sartre described a life lived etre de mauvaise foi (bad faith) he was not speaking so much of dishonesty or destructiveness to others, but rather, a dishonesty to oneself. The bad faith examined by Sartre is the life lived in what Heidegger called  fallenness. Heidegger described the person who has become lost in culture, buried so deeply in the layers of the social that the authentic self is concealed. Heidegger does not isolate the self from culture; however, he does describe authenticity as a remembering or awareness of the identification with culture. This is the soul of Sartre’s bad faith -a life completely forgotten in the isolated spectacle of the manufactured desire.

Nearly seventy years ago Erich Fromm described a panorama of bad faith found in contemporary, American society. Whereas Sartre spoke of bad faith in a general way, Fromm identified and described taxonomy of social personality patterns. Although these descriptions were made in the postwar heyday of consumer America, they are more prevalent now than ever before. The character orientations of American society clearly illustrate our cultural evolution from Homo sapiens to Homo consumens.

“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.” -Eric Fromm

The Ways of Being in Society: Ethics of Adaptiveness

In Man for Himself Fromm describes five character styles that are of bad faith. In speaking of these five ways of being, Fromm uses the term character. Although this term has become demonized in contemporary, objective trait theory, the term necessarily includes ethics as a core of who we are. Fromm’s 1947 text is subtitled: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. The point here is a vital one -a personality theory that is value-free is, necessarily, free of value. Purging ethics from the human removes the distinction between the species, the thing that makes Homo sapiens, sapiens.

Character is an adaptive quality or orientation that arises from a specific environment. Evolutionary psychology calls this the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA). Personality, however, must be considered not only in terms of the environment but also in terms of the attitude one takes towards the EEA. In this way we have a very complex interaction between the EEA, attitude, and style of being. Some of this, of course, is deliberate, calculated, and intentional, but most of who we are is completely habitual and unconscious.

As both a product and producer of our social and political environment, we can see the traits of individual character in the political and social milieu of the EEA. There is no better archetype of culture manifested as character than that of contemporary, America and what Fromm called the marketing character.

The Industrial Revolution introduced the ability to produce massive surplus. Unlike the artisan who would be individually employed to produce a particular table or chair for a specific patron, the mechanized factory can mass-produce replicated, identical goods in such quantity that no wait is necessary for the consumer. However, this changed the dynamic between producer and consumer, from an individually produced article for a unique customer, to a mass produced product for an abstract consumer. When supply exceeded demand, demand itself needed to be manufactured. This was the birth of marketing -the manufacturing of desire.

It was not long until human beings, categorized as either blue or white-collared, became commodities themselves. The Industrial Revolution and mass marketing of products cultivated an EEA in which human beings, themselves, became commoditized products with a market value. This is most evident today in the corporate human resources departments. In contemporary America we cease to be people and instead become brands, commodities, or resources to be bought, sold, and consumed.

Growing up in this EEA makes one oblivious to it. This is known as captivation-in-an-acceptedness, the state of not considering to question the taken for granted conditions of existence. The contemporary Zeitgeist of American culture is that of the marketing orientation. The objective of the American education system is not to encourage innovative, dynamic, and radical thinking, but rather to produce marketable job candidates. We have come to value ourselves in terms of marketability.

The objective of the American education system is not to encourage innovative, dynamic, and radical thinking, but rather to produce marketable job candidates.

The result of this shift, from I am what I do to I am what will sell, is evident in the advertising and media images that are used as icons of success. The celebrated image of the survival of the fittest businessperson, like Donald Trump, or the vacuously hollow indifference of the fashion model, is imitated on the street and in the office. Although we do not personally know these celebrities we rely on their image to teach us how to be (or appear to be) successful.

A basic need of human being is a sense of identity. The marketing character comes to understand herself not by what she is, but rather, by what others think of her.  Fromm proposed that prestige, status, success, and notability are the basis of the marketing character’s sense of self. I will argue that today it is not merely success, status, and notability that is important, but rather, it is the appearance of these qualities that makes the marketable self.

It is also noticeable of this way of being that as one regards himself as a commodity he will come to regard others as commodities to be bought and sold as well. Others cease to be people, for the marketing character, and are instead a means to an end. The marketing character does not have a human exchange with others, but uses others as she uses products.

The marketing character style is a phenomenon of contemporary, American, culture. This life orientation is unique to the social and political climate of Post-World War II, America. It is a way of being that orients itself not on what one is, but rather, on what one appears to be.

Direct all comments, questions, & corrections to Matthew Giobbi.

L’Homme Moyen: How the Industrial Revolution Influenced the Social Sciences

 This blog first appeared on October 23, 2011.

“The average human has one breast and one testicle.”

                                                            -Des McHale

When the French positivist Auguste Comte received word about a Belgian statistician’s use of the term “social physics“(in the book Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale, 1835) he quickly distanced himself from his origination of the word. In fact he began using a replacement term, one that would come to bring him recognition as the first “sociologist”.

What was new about the sociology of Comte and the social physics of Adolphe Quetelet was the implementation of the science of statistics to the human being. Statistics had come to greatly influence astronomy and physics (in Europe Quetelet was the leading voice) and was becoming a standard of industrialized production of goods (developer of the t-distribution, William Sealy Gosset , employed by the Guinness Brewing Co. in Dublin, developed mathematical models for standardized production of stout).

Quetelet and Comte both envisioned a scientific study of human beings that could be possible through the quantitative methodology of statistics. The field of scientific (quantifiable) sociology had been born, and it would not be long until German psychophysicists Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt were applying statistics to the study of sensation and consciousness. The quantitative movement, having merged with Darwinian natural selection, became the rage in Britain and the United States. Psychometrician Francis Galton, social theorist Herbert Spencer, and statistician Karl Pearson (all supporters of human eugenics) promoted the quantitative method in the new social sciences of sociology and psychology celebrating it as the elevation of these disciplines to empirical sciences.

Today the research fields of sociology and psychology are dominated by quantitative, statistical methods. The American education system has been greatly influenced by educational psychology, a field which defines itself by the quantitative approach. The American schwarmerei with quantifiable, statistical research has not diminished since the industrial revolution and Herbert Spencer’s Darwinian capitalism. Quantifiable statistical research made workers more productive, factories more efficient, and capitalists more profit; why wouldn’t it be a way of making education more effective?

Knowledge and thinking is not a commodity. It can be bought and sold (like those of us who prostitute our minds for university positions) and probably is most conspicuous in the term human resources reducing a person to a commodity. Have the concepts of salary and hourly pay not become the mechanism by which the business-owner alleviates their guilt? In this way, the mercantile system is in place, rules established by those who have the resources of power, and obedient “citizens” (the herd) raised and schooled to be good little workers.

Assessment in American education has nothing to do with thinking. Through curriculum designed around what can be quantifiably measured, aassessment focuses the educational process on producing obedient, automaton, employees. Skills such as creative thinking, novel problem solving, stressing of argument over fact (multi-perspectivism), and synthesis (combining ideas in new ways) are threatening to a system that relies on slave labor (1/4 of Americans with jobs make $25,000 per year or less, at least 10% of Americans are  unemployed).

Please direct comments, questions, and corrections  to Matthew Giobbi.

The Birth of Science: A Primer on Intellectual History (Part 3)

Empiricism, Sensationalism, Rationalism, & Positivism

As we described in Part 2, science is a distinct type of philosophy. The Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers who established what we today think of as science are customarily classified by their stance on a few basic, philosophical, perspectives: empiricism, sensationalism, rationalism, and positivism.

Empiricism and sensationalism both refer to the belief that all knowledge comes through the senses. These philosophies are very similar, both stressing that all knowledge enters the mind through the senses. Empiricism was most popular with the British philosophers, and sensationalism with the French.

Empiricists and sensationalists both rejected rationalism, the position established be DesCartes, that  argued thinking and the processes of the mind should be the route to knowledge. The distinction between empiricism and rationalism can be blurred. I often like to think of rationalism as information that comes through thinking, whereas empiricism comes through the senses. For example a thought experiment, or speculating about something is rationalism, whereas measuring something and categorizing it is empiricism.

Positivism is a concept that was very popular in early science, and increased in popularity into the 20th century. Positivism places importance on publicly observable events. This ideology was very common with empiricists and sensationalists, who felt that science should focus on measurable and observable experience. Positivism is a strict scientific attitude that holds as the goal of science to establish scientific laws and statements. In the 20th century the ideas of positivism would be challenged by what is sometimes called postpositivism. An extreme form of positivism, one in which the belief is that the only valid or useful form knowledge comes from science is referred to as scientism.

A momentous year for intellectual history, and for the philosophy of science is 1781. In this year, Immanuel Kant published a work entitled Critique of Pure Reason. In this tome of critical philosophy, Kant presented a model of individual thinking that synthesized empiricism and rationalism. Kant described how empirical and rational are both active in experience, in other words, we do not passively record the world, as empiricists would have it, but actively participate in making of the world through perception.

Kant's synthesis resulted in a divisive chasm in philosophy, sometimes called the Kantian split. We can see philosophy taking two different directions in the following 19th century, both claiming lineage back to Kant. One side of this split is called analytic philosophy and is popular in the English speaking world. It prefers logic, mathematics, and empiricism through controlled experimentation. Continental philosophy was mostly popular in the German, French, and Italian cultures, and is skeptical of much of analytic philosophy's claims. The lineage of continental philosophy can be seen from Kant, to G.W.F Hegel, to Karl Marx. Continental philosophers include figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, the existential philosophers, and Martin Heidegger. Science as we know it today has grown out of analytic philosophy, whereas science criticism grows out of continental philosophy.

It is important to consider what the implications of the Kantian split are for epistemology and the philosophy of science. On one side, the analytic philosophers, we have belief that logic, mathematical models, and method will lead to laws of nature. On the other we find a critique of this, and an emphasis on cultural, social, political, biological, and economic pressures on human knowledge. This might best be illustrated through what is known as the science wars.

As a conclusion to this primer on the history and philosophy of science, I will introduce three different philosophers of science and their take on what science is. These three thinkers might serve as an introduction to the science wars. They are: Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend.

20th Century Science Wars

Karl Popper argued that science starts with a problem. He said that scientific method follows three steps: problem, conjectures, refutations. The emphasis here is that science is a method that is used to arrive at a solution, and that, in time, all theories are found to be false and replaced by improved theories. This is the common impression of what science is to most laypeople. However, it is important to point out that how science is actually done and what people believe about it, is much different than what Popper describes.

Popper proposed that science must limit itself to falsifiability, that is, an idea (hypothesis) must be testable for incorrectness. The hypothesis must make risky predictions that can be incorrect. For Popper, the scientists should be trying to prove their ideas to be wrong, rather than trying to find evidence for their ideas. This is where current practices by scientists run countercurrent to Poppers system. Many scientists today look for evidence to support their hypothesis, rather than disprove it.

Thomas Kuhn published a book in 1962 that revolutionized how we think about science. In The Structures of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn suggests that science is not a method, but rather a social phenomenon. He claims that science is a product of social, economic, and political pressures that dictate what is studied and how it is studied. Kuhn argued that thought progressed in popular viewpoints of how science should be done, and what it studied, called paradigms. He contended that the history of science is a series of shifting paradigms, based more on who held the positions of power in the scientific community (journal editors, professors, research funding) rather than the scientific findings themselves. Kuhn said that these paradigm shifts in science occur not because of a significant finding, but rather, because old ways of thinking are retired when the people who hold them retire. Kuhn's view of science emphasizes science as a social phenomenon.

Paul Feyerabend was an anarchist thinker. In his 1975 text, Against Method he argues that the only true way to scientific discovery is an "anything goes" approach to thinking. Feyerabend says that the methods and rules that the scientists follow actually discourage and inhibit new discoveries. He points out that all of the major scientific discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries were made by people who rejected the methods and systems that their peers followed. Feyerabend's works challenge all of the assumptions of Enlightenment thinking and seems poised to make a significant impact on contemporary scientific thought.

PART 1

PART 2

Please direct all comments, corrections, and questions to Matthew Giobbi.

The Birth of Science: A Primer on Intellectual History (Part 2)

PART 1

Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci

The Late Renaissance

Another critical element for the Renaissance was the mechanical movable type printing press, which was introduced in Germany in 1450. The printing press afforded thinkers like Martin Luther, Desiderius Erasmus, and later, Niccolo Machiavelli an amplified voice. With the printing press, Renaissance thinkers shared their thoughts in mass production,  something that served to increases the dissemination of ideas and the rate of change in society.

The renaissance is typically dated as 1450 to 1600. These years are, as is true with all historical period mapping, general and not specific; the labels are described later in time by scholars who are writing their narrative of history. There are a few hallmark characteristics of the Renaissance mood, what we often call the Zeitgeist. These qualities include: individualism, personal religion, an intense interest in the past, and anti-Aristotelianism (Hergenhahn). It is interesting to note that Aristotle had ushered in the Renaissance within Catholic church doctrine (these Aristotelian church philosophers are called Scholastics) but later he was attacked by Renaissance humanists. This rejection of Aristotle had more to do with a rejection of Catholic Scholasticism than with Aristotle's work itself. The influential Renaissance theorists include Francesco Petrach, Giovani Pico, Erasmus, Luther, and Michel de Montaigne.

The burning of Giordano Bruno in 1600

In the later years of the Renaissance, a few key figures in the foundation of science emerged. Each of these figures contributed something unique to the foundation of what we call science. Nicolaus Copernicus published The Revolution of Heavenly Spheres in 1543. This book is important because it essentially changed the intellectual worldview from a geocentric (earth-centered) narrative to the heliocentric system (sun-centered) of the universe. This change took some time, and it had significant cultural repercussions. Copernicus had managed to escape the Catholic wrath that his book touched off, largely because he died the year it was published. Others who embraced Copernicus' heliocentric theory did not fare so well.

Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for heretic views against the Christian church. Another figure who offended the Catholic church was Galileo Galilei who, in 1543 published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and invented the telescope in 1609. Although he escaped the fate of Bruno, the Catholic church did place him under house arrest until his death in 1642. He continued to write.

I like to think of Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci as the two figures who embodied the spirit of Renaissance thinking, as well as the foundations for modern science. Both pursued knowledge in diverse ways, from art to experimentation. The etymology of the word science is scientia, which means knowledge. These two thinkers were scientists in the broadest sense, not bound by contemporary divisions of academic thought.

The question on the minds of the late Renaissance thinkers was, what is the best method for thinking? Renee Descartes published his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences in 1637. Descartes' work focused on establishing a system of thinking that would lead us to sound conclusions about nature. I like to think of Descartes as one of four theorists who laid the foundation for modern thought. We typically discuss modernity as beginning in 1600 and ending somewhere around World War I and World War II. The other four philosophers that contributed to the groundwork of modernism are Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and John Locke.

Modernity

The modern period (from 1600 to around 1905) is characterized by the attitudes of modernism. Modernism is an attitude that basis knowledge on systematic thinking, mathematics, logic, and objective experience. Renee Descartes contributed mathematics and deductive logic to this attitude. Francis Bacon worked extensively on induction and experimentation. Isaac Newton added mathematics and the idea of universal laws, and John Locke emphasized empiricism and universal laws. Central to the attitude of modernism, the idea that mathematics, logic, and a scientific method serves to answers all questions that humans face. The idea of objectivity, or the existence of an objective reality separate from human "subjective" experience dominates this scientific worldview. We call this tradition the Enlightenment (Age of Reason). We often refer to this period, which begins with Copernicus and melds into The Enlightenment, The Scientific Revolution. It describes the flourishing of mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology, and empirical philosophy.

Albert Einstein

The modernist attitude reached its zenith in what we commonly call the classical period (mostly the 18th century) and lasted into the 19th century. In the philosophy of science we refer to the scientific worldview of this time as the old view of science. The philosopher of science, Hilary Putnam describes the old view of science as being based on the idea that scientist collect and accumulate facts and build those facts into a "treasure chest" of accumulated knowledge. The old science idea that inductive logic (collecting observable evidence), scientific method, and the gathering of facts verified by experiment, was replaced in the 20th century by the new view of science, which most sciences use today. The new view of science is marked by the attitude that there is a human contribution to the phenomenon of reality (not merely an objective reality), that there is not one "method" of science (each science does science differently), and that multiple "true" descriptions of reality exist simultaneously. The transition from the old view to the new view of science is mostly due to what we call the Einsteinian revolution, which took place in 1905, when Albert Einstein published his Annus Mirabilis papers on special relativity. However, some important events occurred long before 1905 that lead to this change in the way we think about and do science.

PART 3

The Birth of Science: A Primer on Intellectual History (Part 1: From Antiquity to the Renaissance)

For over a decade I have been teaching a course on the history and systems of psychology at Rutgers University at Newark. The class, which serves as a capstone course for undergraduate psychology students, surveys an intellectual history from antiquity through the 21st century. It is my goal in this course to help students to understand and appreciate the political, philosophical, cultural, and historical influences on psychology through the ages.

We begin the course with a survey of intellectual history. As I am a believer in presenting a reading of history, rather than the history, I ask my students, as I now ask you, to appreciate that this sketch of intellectual history is one that I have arrived at, and is not the only reading available. As I have researched over the years, my understanding of the story has evolved. I have no doubt that the story I tell now will be different from the story I tell ten years from now. One thing that we know from thinking about intellectual history is that we must speak in the plural, of histories, rather than of history.

Giobbi's Timeline of Intellectual History

Antiquity (to 600 B.C.E.)

The earliest appearance of human questioning and answering came in the form of narrative stories. We call this myth, taken from the Greek mythos, which means "speech, thought, story... anything deriving form the mouth". These narratives center around animism, anthropomorphism, and magic. 

The term myth is commonly thought of in a more narrow sense, meaning something that is invented and not necessarily true. The sense of the word in the context of intellectual history is simply narrative explanation. There are narratives that are no longer practiced, but enjoyed for their wisdom and entertainment, such as the early Greek Olympian and Dionysiac-Orphic narratives. There are narratives of antiquity continue to be practiced, such as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic narratives.

The term animism refers to the practice of viewing the world as something that is living and active, rather than inanimate. For example, the poetic idea of angry skies or happy clouds is animism. A more precise term, anthropomorphism is used to describe nature as having human attributes. This can be seen in the human motivations, feelings, and actions of the Greek, Olympian gods.

Any ritual or act that is done to influence nature or a God is referred to as magic. Magic includes any type of ritualistic behavior, such as a rain dance, or ritualistic thought, such as prayer. The essence of magic is the idea that ritual can influence occurrences. We see this tradition alive and well today in what we call religious and spiritual belief. The important aspect to keep in mind is that myth serves to predict, control, and understand the natural world (Humphrey). 

The two main forms of narrative that existed in the ancient Greek world were the Olympian religion and the Dionysiac-Orphic religion. It is common to characterize the former as the religion described in the Homeric poems. The ideal life was one lived for glory through noble deeds and ended at death. The Olympian gods appear to mirror the characteristics of the Greek nobility, which comprised most of the religion's followers.

The poorer ancient Greeks; peasants, laborers, and slaves, tended to believe in the Dionysiac-Orphic religions. This religion, based on Dionysus, incorporated wine, sexual frenzy, and the transmigration of the soul; the belief that the soul is trapped in a body, as punishment for a sin committed in the heavens. The belief that the soul escapes earthly existence at death would later influence the Judeo-Christian belief.

In the East, the Vedic religions; Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, as well as the East Asian  Taoism, Shinto, and Confucianism all emerged from 1500, B.C.E. on. These belief systems are treated as a religion by some practitioners, and as a life philosophy for others. This is an important distinction to be aware of. We find that Eastern and Western thought synthesize in many thinkers from 600 B.C.E. to the present.

Western Philosophy

It is commonly accepted that the first Western philosopher was Thales (ca. 625-547 B.C.E.). What made Thales different from other thinkers is that he rejected supernatural phenomena (such as gods and spirits) and looked to the physical world for explanations to the fundamental question, what is the world made of? Thales had traveled in the East and it is believed that his thinking was influenced by Eastern thought. The primary question that Thales proposed, and the question that would dominate philosophy (the love of wisdom) until Socrates, was; what is the fundamental substance of which the world is made? This primary element was called physis meaning the nature of stuff. Thales concluded that the fundamental physis was water. Thales is said to have once fallen into a well while deep in thought.

Early philosophers proposed various answers to the question of what the fundamental physis is. Anaximander proposed the basic physis was chaos (an abyss, wide open), which is almost postmodern in its vagueness. It certainly conjures up contemporary work in theoretical physics. Heraclitus proposed that the physis is fire, and pointed out that everything is in a state of becoming, rather than being.

The thinkers that came before Socrates are typically called the Pre-Socratics. The reason for this is because with Socrates came a distinct shift in philosophy's focus. Unlike the earlier philosophers, Socrates was interested in the question, what does one mean by....? What does one mean by "beauty". What does one mean when they say "justice"? Socrates is said to have lived by the dictum "know thyself". Because Socrates never wrote anything down, the Socrates that we know comes from the writings of his friend Plato, he featured Socrates as a character in a series of 25 dialogues. This is  the reason that some scholars refer to the earlier Greek philosophers as the "Pre-Platonics" rather than the "Pre-Socratics".

Along with the earliest philosophers were a group of thinkers who are customarily called the Sophists. These thinkers challenged the idea that one could arrive at an ultimate, universal truth, and instead proposed that truths existed within contexts. The Sophists were frequent targeted by Socrates and Plato. The contemporary manifestation of the Sophists is postmodernism.

Raffael's The School of Athens

In Raffael's painting The School of Athens, we find two central figures, one pointing up and the other pointing down. These two characters are Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle, who is pointing down, was a student of Plato's. Raffael depicted Aristotle pointing to the earth because his philosophy was based on finding truth through the natural world. Plato is depicted by pointing upwards because his philosophy was based on truth being metaphysical (beyond the physical). Both of these philosophers were looking to establish ultimate, universal, truth, and each proposed that it existed someplace different.

With the rise of the Roman Empire we find a shift towards life philosophy, or a philosophy for the good life. This idea was not new, Plato and Aristotle both discussed the idea. However, for these philosophers, how to live was at the center of philosophy. Pyrrho of Elis formed a school called Skepticism. Antisthenes proposed Cynicism. Epicurus taught that the good life found through simple living. Much of the other philosophers were influenced by Plato's teachings, and we call them neoplatonists (new Platonism). These neo-Platonists influenced early Christianity a great deal; much of Christian theology of this time can be traced to Plato's thinking. By the time that the Roman Empire fell in 476 C.E., the writings of Aristotle had been lost to the Western world. Aristotle's works were alive and well in Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Persia, Sicily, and Spain. From about 410 C.E. until around 1000 C.E., Europe experienced what is described as a "dark" period. Just how dark these Dark Ages were is debated. What we do know is that at the very same time, the Islamic world was the cultural center of the world. Much of our modern mathematics and science is based on Middle Eastern thought from this period.

In the High Middle Ages (1000s through 1300) and the Late Middle Ages (1300s through the 1500s) there was a 200 year struggle for control of the Holy Lands between the Roman Catholic Church and Islam. During this time, returning crusaders and trade merchants reintroduced Aristotle from the Islamic world back into Europe. This reintroduction of Aristotle is said to have been one of the major catalysts for the European Renaissance; the cultural rebirth of the 15th century.

PART 2