Urination, Sexual Selection, and the Control of Fire

Control of fire is the most important invention of human history. Only language comes close, which didn't come to a written form until 5,000 years ago. Control of fire in a systematic way occurred anywhere between 100,000 and maybe over a million years ago, presumably by our ancestor Homo Erectus. For Homo Sapiens it definitely happened during the last ice age, 2 million to 12,000 years ago. The evidence we have is from charred remains at human sites, from temperatures too hot to occur on their own as well as physiological changes suggestive of eating cooked food. Control of fire contributed to important changes in human evolution. Most importantly humans activity was not limited to daylight, providing light and warmth for the almost hairless ape. Fire allowed our ancestors to develop new kinds of tools and weapons, creating the art of metallurgy. Cooked food it is speculated contributed to physiological changes lime decreased jaw size, shorter digestive tracts, smaller teeth and a larger cranium to house our big brains which differentiate us from the apes. Our diets could contain more energy, to fuel our expensive brains and it is speculated decrease male-female dimorphism, difference in size between males and females, I suppose by increasing the food to share, reducing male competition.

How was the ability to control fire discovered? This is something we don't really know, despite our knowledge of its many effects. Humans didn't learn it from observing other animals, so far as we know. The well known explanation from Greek mythology is that fire was given to humans by the titan Prometheus who stole it from the gods. For this Prometheus was chained to a rock where his regenerating liver was to continually be eaten by an eagle. In fact the theft of fire from the gods is a recurring theme in different culture's mythologies, found among the native North Americans, though usually with animals stealing the fire. It's clear that the control of fire was an epochal event in human history for all cultures.

Sigmund Freud looking at such myths provided the most interesting if most bizarre at face value account for how fire was controlled. First in a footnote in his classic Civilization and its Discontents 1929 he speculated while admitting the paucity of evidence that the control of fire was the result of males renouncing the urge to urinate on fires they came across in nature. The pleasure of such activity can shared with other males, as women are anatomically unable to urinate on fire. One day a male renounced this infantile homosexual desire and was able to take the fire back to camp for his own use, and for females to take care of, not having the same urge to put it out. 

"Psycho-analytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to clear interpretation, nevertheless admits of a conjecture – a fantastic-sounding one – about the origins of this human feat. It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came into contact with fire, of satisfying the infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upward. Putting out the fire by micturating – a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark back – was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire. It is remarkable, too, how regularly analytic experience testifies to the connection between ambition, fire, and urethral eroticism."

Freud in his later essay The Acquisition and Control of Fire 1932 examined the Prometheus tale and argued that its content is fundamentally phallic. Prometheus gives fire to humans win a hollow tube, emptied of urine(?). The eagle eating his liver is the homosexual phallus, and the liver was thought to be a seat of emotions. The continual assault on the liver and its regeneration is the indestructibility of the suppressed desire to not extinguish fire. The urinary function of the penis is tied to its sexual function, as children have the theory that daddy impregnates mommy by peeing inside her. 

Hercules in his legend uses fire to defeat the hydra and comes to release Prometheus. Hercules reverses what humans did; instead of putting fire with liquid, he put out the water beast with fire. By being able to relive the desire, presumably by burning things which many little boys do, man can overcome the original cost of instinct renunciation. The triumph over nature, over other beasts, paid off for the investment. 

This explanation continues to offend many people, like most of Freud's theories. But when analyzing legends just like dreams, it is the latent content that is important. Humans first learn about themselves through myths, and gain knowledge about their own self through dreams. It is only after analyzing the content of these myths and dreams that we can get some understanding of the world before written language or modern notions of self-consciousness and philosophical naturalism. To argue that our ancestors discovered fire by trial and error of observation or some sort of experiment is to project our thinking into the past, a way of thinking that has grown out of and had to overcome thousands of years of myths. 

I think however that Freud is missing something very important in his explanation, something from evolutionary theory which can make more sense of his explanation and not rely on myth interpretation. This factor is sexual selection, a type of natural selection in which physical traits are chosen, that is inherited, not to adapt to the environment but to increase success in mating. An example of this is the male peacock's tail which is highly visible to predators and costly to develop and maintain, but attracts female peacocks, who do not have this plumage. Traits can be selected for which do not increase environmental fitness but contribute to signaling reproductive fitness for females or help males compete. It is expected that given the difference in investment between males and females, males contributing sperm while females have to carry the child to term, females will be more "choosy" with mates and males will have to compete with other males for mates. Women limit the amount men can reproduce given that having more women than men means more offspring than more men than women (polygamy is more common than polyandry) given that human females can only have one child every nine months.

As sexual dimorphism decreases with humans, women get more power to choose on factors to their liking. The difference in size between men and women is thought to come from our more polygamous past. As we became more monogamous, male competition decreased to challenge the alpha male and females had more freedom to select mates. It's obvious what men want in females, small waist to hip ratio and large breasts. Females chose larger penises in men. Human genitals are enormous relative to other mammals, and their size does not enable greater ejaculation or urination, making sexual selection the most likely explanation for human male genital size.  

We don't see many animals urinating on fires they come across as Freud speculated human males did when they came across fire. This is because humans are pretty much the only bipedal land animal. How would a wolf pee on a fire, go up to it and raise his leg? That would be too risky, and would have to be a very small fire. Or pee on top of the fire? No way. Bipedalism allows humans to be at a safe distance from the fire to urinate on it. Large penises, via sexual selection by females, would give bipedal human males aim to douse the fire. 

Does it have to be urine that put out fires? Maybe not, but it makes the most sense. What else immediately available would put out a fire? Dirt? A blanket? Could use water, but that would be wasteful and have to be transported. Urine is immediately available and requires little opportunity cost to have in store, it occurs naturally in the body. Being at a safe enough distance would preclude just running away, and the fire would be dangerous enough to not want it to spread. 

Coming across fire would most likely be at first an anxious experience, encountering fire from a lightning strike or bush fire directly would be unfamiliar, especially in a relatively safe position. Thus putting out the fire would be an almost instinctual reaction. It would take effort to resist the urge. Unlike Freud, I think the urge to put out the fire is not just sexual but also from fear. The anger of the gods for taking fire is our continued fear of the power of fire, the power of nature. Zeus is the one who threw lightning bolts, a source of fire. The control fire is basically a renunciation of instinct, both sexual and anxious, enabled by male physiology. The ambivalence of the encounter encourages its extinguishment. 

The male ambivalence toward fire as an object of arousal and fear would only end once women also had control over fire. Women as in Freud's original formulation don't have the same urge to urinate on fire for anatomical reasons and in the presence of fire would evade or use it in a safe setting. Getting fire back to the women would be advantageous to the male who accomplished relative to other male competitors, so sexual selection again. The women at home then could use it for cooking, warmth etc according to the sexual division of labor, and not have the same urge to put the fire out. The control of fire is enabled by women, their love replaces the ambivalent instinctual relationship towards fire. 

Man first learned sublimation, the channeling of sexual desires into different productive ventures, which would enable the rest of the process of civilization. Man is rewarded by woman for the triumph of intellect over the desires of the penis, as it were. 

There you have it. Sexual selection meant that bipedal females chose larger penises for bipedal males who urinated on fire when encountered in nature at a safe distance, and humans learned control of fire when a male renounced the ambivalent sexual and anxious attitude towards fire and brought it home for women, and this improved his chance for mating and provided benefits for the group at large. Women protected the hearth not having the same urges to extinguish fire and used it in the sexual division of labor. But fire remains for a very long time and even today something mysterious and powerful. The renunciation of instinct and nature's control shows up in legends substituting gods or animals for men taking fire from nature and giving it to others. 

In this story, humans don't yet learn how to produce fire at will. But we do learn to be familiar and comfortable around it and it's uses when it occurs in nature, bringing it to camp and getting warm, cooking food, and/or making rudimentary tools. Fire becomes the first in a long line of technological advancements which alter human nature itself. 

The sexual selection explanation is as male driven as Freud's original explanation, but I'll have to look more into the decrease of sexual dimorphism and the role of female choice. My reading of psychoanalytic literature after Freud criticizes his emphasis on the phallus and the whole Oedipus complex as the determinant of human culture. Nonetheless the phallic content of the Promethean myth is important to consider. My sexual selection explanation differs from Freud's I think in giving women more of a direct role than he did. 

The phallic symbolism could just be symbolism and the urination story can still be useful. The important point is that renunciation of instinctual desires towards the unfamiliar led to our control of nature. It was an internal repression of our energy channeled towards new productive means which is the basis for society. A parallel is with the domestication of dogs, which also occurred during the last ice age. We and the proto-dog wolves around our ancestors campsites had to renounce our mutual fear and desire to eat one another so we could live together. The benefits of domestication aren't as immediately obvious as evading danger or consumption of meat, for both human and dog. An affective attachment must have developed from chance, of wolves following humans and eating our leftovers, which would alleviate this anxiety. We had to take an active step to domesticate the animals and get over our fear and desires. The risk takers who went against their instincts were rewarded with man's best friend. Accomplishing this would be quite advantageous to the male and the females of the camp would be willing to care the wolves and their pups with perhaps not the same urge to evade or kill. 

Before the invention of language/writing we don't have any notion what the humans who discovered fire were doing, let alone their motivations. The only currency we have from the past about this event is myth and fantasy, which is of scientific value for its latent content. All we have to infer prehistoric events are these remnants. So Freud's explanation with modifications from evolutionary thinking suffices for me.

From Conatus to Drive Theory

Spinoza's Conatus 

For some reason, Spinoza has had a very strong influence on German philosophy since the late 18th century. Chiefly because of Johann Von Goethe, German idealism and German philosophy hithero have strong Spinozist overtones, chiefly a pantheistic/monist view of the universe. There is another way besides pantheism and monism that Spinoza seems to have influenced German thinking. This is in the view that willing is part of the universe, that living things have an internal drive to preserve their form. This is known to some as vitalism when applied only to living things and voluntarism when applied to the world. Spinoza's conatus brought this thinking into modern philosophy, having its roots in Stoic doctrine but updated with the revolutionary law of inertia to be a distinctly physical phenomenon.

In the 18th century there was an ongoing debate about how life developed. Was it purely material causality, mechanical, or was there formal design? Does the embryo develop from a mixture of male sperm and the female egg, or is the complete animal already existent in the sperm as a tiny version of itself? The former theory was called epigenesis and the latter preformationism. Today we mostly accept epigenesis when it comes to embryology, though the development of DNA and the arguments that genes determine behavior harkens back to preformationism. The notion that there exists a small version of the fully developed organism inside male sperm seems downright ludicrous today, and also totally sexist( the meaning of "before you were formed in the womb I knew you"). But what these theories debated was the question of whether living things are different and develop differently than inorganic material things which is still important.

Vitalism became the new theory to oppose the mechanical view of living things. Instead of a prevenient design, living things have a force or a fluid unique to them. This force or material is what makes organic things grow in a certain way. Vitalism is considered debunked or as pseudoscience today, specifically the claim that organic compounds cannot be synthesized from inorganic compounds. The problem is in specifying something either supernatural or not known by natural sciences which can be proven or disproven, or relegated to philosophy, such as Henri Bergson's once popular Elan Vital. However the question of what makes life different from non-life continues to be debated.

In German, the opposing views are kraft and trieb, force and drive. A force is what an object has or imparts onto an object a state of motion or rest. Kraft is external and mechanical change, dependent on the inertia a body has. Trieb or drive is the becoming nature of something, the impetus to grow a certain way and maintain a form. With the growing influence of epigenesis by the 18th century animals were coming to be viewed as dynamic not static creatures which are defined by developmental contingency not the unfolding of a plan. The word evolution was used before the mid 19th century to describe preformationist theories, as the word evolution means "unfolding." But if animals are dynamic, what makes life different from non-life? Are living things just complicated machines able to manufacture copies of themselves?

Johann Blumenbach the 18th century biologist described life as having a bildungstrieb, a formative drive. This is a tendency to grow a certain way and maintain a certain form under resistance. He discovered this by cutting up plants and observing their ability to regenerate parts. The bildungstrieb differs from vitalism in that it is descriptive and not a special force or fluid. There's no reason to believe that organisms have something extra to make them alive, they just behave in a way which preserves their existence. As with Spinoza's conatus, the drive is the internal aspect of the same world experienced in a different way.

“In all living creatures from the human to the maggot and from the cedar up to the steed there lies a particular, inborn, effective drive active throughout life, first in order to attain their specific form, then to maintain it, and if it is destroyed, to restore it where possible.” Blumenbach

The bildungstrieb united the mechanistic explanation of biology with aspects of teleology, which Kant described as teleonomy, the apparent design we see in things. We can only understand living things by ascribing the appearance of purposeful behavior even if that isn't what is really happening. It works that way from an individual perspective because we see the finished product and not the contingencies involved. The process of selection results in what seems purposeful by a sort of disguising of history.

Much like Spinoza's conatus, drive theory is not teleological from the cosmological perspective. Species are not static and the telos is from self-preservation. Only individual things in so far as they persevere have ends, which over time in relation to environmental selection determines the nature of the species.

The notion of drive entered into German thought via Blumenbach as well by Spinoza's philosophy of conatus. Immanuel Kant, Johann von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller adopted the bildungstrieb into their thinking.

Darwin's theory of natural selection incorporated aspects of drive thinking by giving a naturalistic explanation of the apparent design and complexity of nature through the struggle of living things against their surroundings. Evolution, "unfolding", could be used by naturalists to explain the nature of life. German poets and philosophers like Johann von Goethe presaged evolutionary thinking because of their attempt to square naturalism with a vital life force. Goethe in his work with plants revealed for him an archetype of living things, the urtypus, which things grow from, like a common ancestor from which analogous, homologous, and vestigial structures emerge in descendants. Among German intellectuals evolutionary theory was along with drive theory part of a monistic philosophy of the universe, most prominently by the German Darwin Ernst Haeckel in his The Riddle of the Universe in 1899. It was because of their predisposition to evolutionary thinking combined with the monistic and non-dualist philosophy which allowed them to incorporate natural selection into a comprehensive world view. Whereas in Anglo societies Darwin's ideas more than in Europe are still controversial, with the largest number of creationists being in the United States and a significant number in Britain. Alexis de Toqueville said Americans were Cartesians without ever having read Descartes. It is I think the static view of instinct and the separation of mind from body which makes it hard for many Americans to understand evolutionary theory and think that it portrays the universe as random and meaningless, if not for an intelligence like humans above and beyond the material world. 

The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

I read The Problems of Philosophy over a century after it was published, and it's remarkable how well it has held up. A much more recent philosopher who is alive Daniel Dennett described philosophy in a TED Talk as making sense of what the sciences tell us. Russell himself described philosophy as concerning problems science hasn't yet answered or found a way to frame the question in a way it could be answered, and as a critical means of unifying the sciences. Philosophers still debate the nature of consciousness, free will, sense data, God, morality, Justice etc which the sciences still haven't taken over. The discovery that space and time don't always work the way we think we do was known to Russell back in 1912. The content is still relevant to philosophical problems today. 

The specific problems of philosophy are the difference between how we perceive the world and how it actually is (if there is a difference), the nature of physical objects and how we come to know them, the existence of universals like the kind we use in discourse, and the justification of truth. Absent are discussions of more "hot button" controversial issues like free will, God, ethics, or justice. Russell by his own admission follows in the tradition of modern philosophy since Rene Descartes and begins with doubt. Whatever cant be doubted should be the basis of philosophy if we are to find any certainty to our beliefs. This is a very different understanding of philosophy than the ancient Greeks or medieval thinkers had, and was inspired because of how wrong these old trusted authorities were about many things. This way of thinking precludes moral and metaphysical thinking until a basis for them is established, which is what Russell is trying to do here. It is critical for if there aren't things like universals as Russell thinks there are then universal morality and justice are in question. In Russell's time the certainty of the Newtonian worldview of classical physics was being undermined by the discovery of non-Euclidean space and the nature of light as a physical phenomenon, etc. Advances in logic, which Russell helped pioneer, made many philosophical questions capable of an answer or at least clarification. This of course became the "Analytic" school of philosophy which is dominant in English speaking countries. 

Russell can be described as an indirect realist. He acknowledges the difference between perception and reality, and that all we know if what we perceive, which is sense data. Yet he believes we can infer the independent existence of physical objects. Besides immediate sense data we have memories which gives us a sense of a past which is no longer. Next we alone among animals are aware of our own awareness, self-consciousness. We surmise that this thinking activity belongs to a self, which is the first relation to a universal concept we know. Our awareness of properties apart from instances implies something common with them. 

Yet Russell shares Hume's skeptical doubts regarding the "I think therefore I am"; that among our different thoughts there exists a self which is not located in any of these thoughts. So universals are relations between things, not an actual thing as it was for Plato. Universals have being, but not existence. For it to be true that Russia is north of Turkey, there must be truth to the relation north. The relation north is not mental or physical, it is just in mind, kind of like the self. This is the most confusing but I think crucial part of the book to establish Russell's indirect realism, and any realism I suppose. 

Idealists and phenomenalists argue that these relations are mental, either constituted by mind or not independent of the phenomena we're describing. Russell devotes a chapter refuting idealism by claiming it conflates having an idea of something in the mind as constituting the nature of that thing. As Berkeley argued, for something to exist it must be perceived by a mind, either our mind or the mind of someone else like God. Yet my having an idea of a tree doesn't really constitute its essence besides it being a thought of something. I don't get anymore information than that from just the having of an idea. As for phenomenalism I think he spends the whole book trying to argue not that it's wrong but that there is more than sense data. But his accordance with Humean doubts makes that difficult. Perhaps if he was a direct realist this wouldn't be as much a problem.  

An important distinction he makes is between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. It is possible for something to be true without our being familiar with it. It's true that Australia exists because others who are acquainted with the country can describe it to me in ways I'd understand if I had been there. This is like the criteria of replicability for experiments, under the same conditions the same conclusion should hold. Of course the phenomenalist would define this as the possibility of experience, not the knowledge of something without experience. This distinction relies on his acceptance of universals, more important than I realized.  

Russell holds what is called a correspondence theory of truth. All true statements refer to something beyond themselves, be it physical facts or universals. He has three requirements for truth: 1) truth has the opposite falsehood possible 2) truth is a property of beliefs 3) truth is related to outside things. The opposing theory of truth is called coherentism; the truth of a statement is relative to the truth of other statements. Something can be true in a circular way, coherent with one's background beliefs, and not refer to anything outside. Coherentism accepts the first two criteria of truth and denies the third. Russell claims that by relying on noncontradiction for coherence this view depends on the truth of logic being itself independent of statements. Again the importance of universals. 

The rest of the book from beginning to end is familiar ground for those with background knowledge of philosophy. He recommends Plato's Republic, Descartes' Meditations, Spinoza's Ethics, Leibniz's Monadology, Berkeley's Three Dialogues, Hume's Enquiry, and Kant's Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics for beginners from which he draws from all heavily. 

What Russell gives in this short book are the important questions from the foundations of these author's arguments, minus the historical idiosyncrasies. Given the depth of Russell's work, this is a simple and very accessible book which does a good job of summarizing modern philosophy, even in the 21st century. I pretty much agree with it. 

The Universe as Energy

The world is fundamentally unconscious will which is divisible into what can be described by the physical concepts of matter and energy, which are the causal constructs imposed by consciousness on the metaphysical will.

The world is comparable to a continual transfer of electrical energy into mechanical energy and vice versa. The continual motion of mass via energy. The transfer of photons between electrons and the transfer between gravitational energy to kinetic energy between material bodies. Wavelength motion in mediums. Motion and attraction/repulsion between bodies. Enough energy for some reason was converted into rest mass so that space is filled with objects which light passes through, taking different forms in these processes which result from the motion of light energy through mediums (heat, color) and governing interactions between the objects in space exchanging electrical charge (electromagnetic force). 

Space and time, as distinct from our perception of them, are physical things which are affected by energy. What we call space is just another feature of the gravitational field of the universe; space-time does not exist apart from the matter and energy that creates the gravitational field. Energy is convertible into mass, e=mc^2. Energy and mass warp the fabric of the phenomena of space-time. 

It is the existence of matter that allows us to see light in a visible form, both as an object and as a subject. 

A world of pure light would be blinding and incomprehensible. Light become matter so that we could comprehend it, so to speak. A world of pure space would be dark and indistinct, without light. The existence of material objects gives us the contrast of the light and dark, light and "empty" space. Pure light and pure dark have no color, just as when one looks directly into the sun or into space. It is the sky around the sun and the planets in space which have color.  It is the interaction of energy with mass and space-time which constitute the world we inhabit.

In light we can understand how the different things can be fundamentally the same, such as mind and body. Light has aspects of both particle and wave; a field of force and a particle. Our vision is due to the mechanical movement of the retina and the transfer to electrical energy via the optical nerve to the brain. In a medium light travels at different wavelengths, which seems to slow down the speed of light. However the speed of light is finite, even in a vaccuum. Light still travels faster than anything else in a medium, so the the law of causality still holds for other phenomena. This is how people can see different colors, while the wavelengths of light being the same.

Light is our awareness of the world, our personal connection to the universal energy. Light is the free energy not bound to do work by its nature. After exchanging energy with objects, light travels at its speed as a massless particle. Thought processes are synonymous with the nervous system which is comparable to a system of electric signals. Mind's qualities of simultaneity and instantaneity of events as compared with matter is like the activity of an electromagnetic field. Electromagnetic processes occur at the speed of light, a transfer of energy from one particle to another. The speed of light is the speed of causality because it occurs faster than anything else as it is in itself free of causality. Light travels faster than anything else because light has no rest mass, meaning that there is no energy to overcome to accelerate. At the speed of light all there is no distance between events, there is no before and after, only the present. 

It is everything else, including our bodies, which have rest mass which fall under causality. Since force equals the product of mass and acceleration, F=MA, with no rest mass the speed acceleration is as great as the energy gained by motion. As E=Mc^2, light is pure energy free of individuation within space and time since light has no rest mass to overcome its acceleration. 

The existence of rest mass, our body, is the physical analogue to desire as the source of suffering. Because of rest mass we don't live in the present. We can imagine different states of affairs, but not always act in accordance with them. We have to choose among alternatives presented and not created by us. We form expectations about the future and fixations about the past which do not reflect the present. In animals and indeed for most humans in most of their history little energy was free to speculate on the different possibilities. Thus for us the idea is different than reality, creating duality and opposition between things. But living things are dynamic, constant energy converting machines. The meaning of the idea is only in the transient individual forms. The objects of consciousness define the meaning of existence. Individuality and suffering are bound into the nature of conscious existence. 

A Poem: The Illusion of History.

One is not unhappy if their natural history of creation is untold
To open the past is to forget the present
Three days was all it took to undo history
For life is the book unwritten
Five years the same as five millennia

The Mystery of the Universe: The Relation of Subject and Object

"Throughout nature, as presented to the senses, everything depends on the relation which things bear to each other, but especially on the relation to which man, the most important of these, bears to the rest. Hence the world divides itself into two parts, and the human being as subject, stands opposed to the object. Thus the practical man exhausts himself in the accumulation of facts, the thinker in speculation; each being called upon to sustain a conflict which admits of no peace and no decision."
-Johann von Goethe Theory of Colors

The great mystery of the world is why reality is divided into knower and the known, where both are in a relationship but the knower knows itself more than the known. From this we can proceed no further.


Arithmetic comes to us via the perception of time, of a succession between moments. The inner experience of time is the most basic cognition, which is a one dimensional succession of experiences. The beating of our heart, the expansion of our lungs, the most vital involuntary bodily processes are the origin of our a priori sense of time. From time comes our knowledge of arithmetic, the rules governing numbers which succeed one another in an ordered fashion. Arithmetic follows the rules of discrete succession, whereas music, which seems to be the most immediate form of art, follows rules of relative succession, to our aesthetic senses.

The pleasing sound of our familiar parent's voices, and the sound of their beating hearts when they hold us, being so immediate could make music like arithmetic and time so primary. Our sense of sound is more developed than our sense of sight when born.

Geometry is known to us via spatial perception of several dimensions together. Outer experience of space requires several dimensions, experiences occurring in different successions. Memory brings this plurality of experience together. Beginning with the contraction and relaxation of muscles the effects of past experiences exist with current more intense sensations. Contraction is potential energy and relaxation is kinetic energy. The effects of the build up and release of energy remain in the body for some time and can lead to mechanical change, muscle memory. The notion of spatial extension comes from the possibility of continual experience, inferred from past experience (time). The notion of infinite space is the possibility of taking one step further. The knowledge of geometry comes from spatial perception, giving mutual relationships for different successions between points. Geometry is the static application of rules to successive dimensions. Physics, the most ancient of which seems to be astronomy, is the study of objects in motion in spatial dimensions.

Causality is a synthesis of both space and time, which is systematized into science, the body of knowledge. A preceded B in time in this space, and B succeeds A in this space at a different time, so A caused B.

That the a priori is an actual part of the world of experience, though a very selective part, is demonstrated by the fact that there are non-Euclidean geometries which does not assume space is flat and only three dimensional. The shortest distance between two points in curved space is a geodesic! A curve, not a straight line. Kant died before these discoveries, first made by the Russian Lobachevsky in the 19th century. In this geometry Euclid's synthetic fifth postulate, that between a line and a point not on the line there is one parallel line which does not intersect, is not a priori. The two parallel lines intersect in curved space.



The more we explore the interconnection between the a priori and the world, the more we see it as an an aspect of the world of perceptual experience. Phenomena is a part of the world just as objects, noumena, are. The a priori is part of the world of experience itself, it follows the same rules as objects.

Eclipse of Reason by Max Horkheimer

I decided to read Horkheimer because of his interest in Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher usually not dear to those in the Marxist tradition given his intense personal hatred of Hegel and the association with Nietzsche and the Nazis. His metaphysical pessimism seems to go against the gospel of the inevitable triumph of the workers and the possibility of an end to human misery in the communist society.

But Horkheimer and other western Marxists, especially in the Frankfurt School which he was a founder of, were willing to explore the boundaries of Marxist theory. They were puzzled as to why the working class didn't revolt after World War I. Why didn't the Bolshevik Revolution spread to Western Europe and succeed?

Marxism was considered a scientific theory in the level of Darwin's by its followers, with the triumph of socialism an inevitable result of the laws of nature. Marx thought the Western European nations like British and France were where capitalism had developed to a point where the working class was large enough and self-conscious in urban society to challenge the bourgeoisie. Lenin and others who thought a undeveloped nation like Russia could establish socialism, the revolution would eventually succeed on an international level. Otherwise Russia would be isolated on all sides by hostile powers.

What instead happened was fascism. It could be argued that the ideological wave inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution was fascism, which swept over Europe from the 1920s until after World War II. In an economically advanced and educated Germany came a fanatical regime which in the course of twelve years tried its best to transform the entire world order.

This forced in the west a reexamination of the fundamentals of Marxist theory, from its philosophical foundations. The question of Eclipse of Reason is how in the post-enlightenment west could people be so blind to their interests under capitalism and rationalize the irrational brutality of fascism?

Horkheimer argues that what the Nazis did, barbaric as it was, was nonetheless guided by rationality. The regime used brutal technological efficiency to control and exterminate millions of people.

Approaching the book one must understand that common discourse aside, there are different kinds of rationality, which is the only way to understand how the Nazis could be called rational. Horkheimer argues that this kind of rationality has pervaded western thinking, as not only a German or class phenomenon.

Horkheimer present three kinds of reason: objective, subjective, and instrumental.

Objective reason deals with ends, determining actions by how reasonable their purpose is. Objective reason sees facts as leading to ethical ends, is determining ought. This is the reason used by Plato and Aristotle. Objective reason is connected with religion which has ethical and explanatory dimensions. Philosophy emerges which critiques religion, hoping to replace superstition and prejudice with reason. Horkheimer identified German idealism within this tradition, as against those who accuse the tradition of inspiring relativism.

Subjective reason determines the rationality of ends by the means available. Something is rational if it gets me what I want, even if what I want is immoral or against my actual interests. This kind of reason emerges in the modern era with Machiavelli and Hobbes and is linked towards the hard sciences, which are true without regard to human purposes and morality. Subjective reason separates is and ought, fact and value. The only "universal" value of subjective reason is self-preservation. Subjective reason coincides with the rise of capitalism and individualism, with the breakdown of traditional modes of being.

Instrumental reason is a formalization of subjective reason which dispenses with ends altogether, instead adopting the criterion of usefulness of meaningfulness. If ends cannot be defined from means, they are useless and meaningless. Pragmatism and positivism are representatives of instrumental reason, wanting to emulate the sciences in the experimental method (pragmatism), logical rigor (positivism) and in eliminating metaphysics. Instrumental reason's goal is the unification of reason, the elimination of ordinary folk language, and value free knowledge. This is the product of late capitalism when the individual is subsumed to new technological social organization. As opposed to subjective reason, not all aims are equal. The very notion of the subject and introspection is not formalizable and so useless and meaningless. This kind of reason eliminates the individual for the furtherance of the social system.

Horkheimer prefers objective reason out of the three because it doesn't just seek domination of nature, but also understanding. There is some kind of moral grounding for our actions, a healthy criticism of our ends, and resistance to certainty. Subjective and instrumental reason in contrast see reality foreign and even dangerous in so far as they are out of our control. Sir Francis Bacon's dictum "knowledge is power" is the essence of instrumental reason. Knowledge also becomes a tool of social domination, as human nature becomes demystified and unified with the rest of nature as an object to be controlled.

Fascism is rational in the instrumental sense. Their ideologies of the race and nation are vague and mythological, but the means towards these ends become ends in themselves. Humans, seeking collective fulfillment in the nation, a race, or leader, become objects of domination. Their needs become something in of themselves, reaching toward nothing more than gratification, by means of control. Fascism imposed order on capitalism which was facing serious challenges by suppressing dissidents in the population, defending the social order at all costs, subordinating reason to will.

Horkheimer explores the psychology behind fascism through mimicry. We aim to control nature by becoming like it. We find freedom through blind brute force. Unfortunately nature is out of control and will destroy us if we do not act in our interests.

Unfortunately for conservatives we can't just go back to older forms of objective reason like Thomism. A critical point of Horkheimer is that ideas are rooted in culture and society. Subjective and instrumental reason rise with the capitalist society. Thomism was made to reconcile Christian doctrine with Aristotle, one of the few authorities available on science. In today's world of quantum physics, Thomism is of no help. Today's secularized and individualized world has little need for scrutiny of arcane Christian dogma.

The best chapter of the book is The Rise and Decline of the Individual. Here he defines individuality in historical consciousness, not just spatial temporal and sensual existence. The development of the self is determined by external factors, which we must gain knowledge of to be free and not have our identity be determined from without. The western individual Horkheimer says comes from Greek tragedy. "The tragic hero originates in the conflict between the tribe and its members, a conflict in which the individual is always defeated." The individual is defined by its conflict with external forces and circumstances to eliminate that division is to eliminate the individual. Resistance to irrationality is the core of true individuality. Formalized reason eliminates irrationality by control of nature, and in the process comes to eliminate the individual.

The resistance to instrumental reason can only come from a philosophy devoted to criticism from outside the inner rationality of the system, using philosophical dialectics. Horkheimer however rejects the higher synthesis that Marx and Hegel's dialectic offered, the end point of human social development which resolves the fundamental contradiction between the individual and society. There is no teleology to history as consciousness is developed under historical conditions for certain needs. There isn't an end point for philosophy; what philosophers and intellectuals should do is to highlight those who struggled against formalization and push history forward. History and the positive data of science is a record domination to be criticized. Ideology is always aimed at some kind of control, an overcoming of difference by denying to consciousness certain aspects of reality. This totally undermines objective reason and the German idealist tradition he looks favorably on and creates a new kind of reasoning: critical theory.

Critical theory treats ideas as inherently social and therefore political. There is no distinction between fact or value and in keeping with Marx the dominant ideas of society are impositions of the ruling class. In the hands of critical theory however the ruling base of society is cultural as well as economic. Race and gender as well as class are sources of oppression and so reason ignoring such realities accepts the status quo. There isn't as in classical Marxism an objective reason for inequality, which makes critical theory purely negative and disdainful of science. In essence, what has become known as political correctness.

To forward Marxism, one has to relentlessly criticize western culture which gave rise to capitalism but also to objective reason which Horkheimer and the Frankfurt school undermined. This for me seriously undermines Horkheimer's own critique of instrumental reason, which now seems like a demand for science to be in service of political correctness, as defined by the Marxists.

This is the first time I read Horkheimer or any of the Frankfurt School directly, and I can already see how pessimistic their worldview is. Which is where I suspect where Horkheimer's interest in Schopenhauer came from. The rest of the school were heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud and inherited Schopenhauer's pessimism that way.

Unfortunately in the hands of Marxists, such pessimism turns into defeatism and the regressive ideology of political correctness aka cultural Marxism which the Frankfurt school helped found. If one does not believe in such a thing as a human nature or transcendent moral truth, the world becomes completely intolerable, science politicized, and any weakness is to be obsessed over and any greatness condemned. Marxists should have been pessimistic since World War I seeing how their ideas failed over the 20th century, but should have realized the fault is socialism itself and not western civilization.

Despite the awfulness of the ideas Horkheimer's work helped found, the book is not bad. Given the unintellectual nature of the cultural Marxists today, this book is of interest for conservatives to find out where western thought went wrong, for the fascists and the Marxists.