Jakobsen Letters on metaphysics

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-87-430-5195-4
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 108 Seiten

Selected letters to, or from, Arthur Norman Prior, on metaphysics edited and introduced by David Jakobsen. Prior's correspondence, with Karl Popper, J.J.C Smart, Georg Henrik von Wright and his wife Mary Prior contributes to a fine-grained perspective on the importance of Arthur Prior's work for the return of metaphysics in analytic philosophy.

David Jakobsen holds a Ph.D from Aalborg University on the history of tense-logic.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jakobsen, David

Leseproben

1. Letter from Arthur Prior to Mary Wilkinson, 24, February, 1943

NZ 4214986

AC2 Prior (A.N.)

Workshops

RNZAF Station

Harewood Chch

Dear Mary,3

Many thanks for returning the Journal & my mss., & for your note. A word, however, in your ear. If (as may well be, in view of this feeling of your brother & the like) you have hardly the time to pay me the compliment of criticizing my writings, that’s O.K. by me; but for the love of Mike don’t indulge in this boloney about its being an “impertinence” to do so.*4

Anyway, it has always been one of my few basic convictions that if a person is capable of really reading anything, he or she is ipso facto capable of criticising it. I suppose that one of the people who has helped to fix that belief in my mind is John Anderson, the writer of the article on “Art and Morality” in the Journal, & you may have perceived something of that point of view in the article. I held it, though, also as a Christian. I don’t know whether your father, as an ex-missionary, subscribes to Dr. William Paton’s excellent quarterly, the International Review of Missions; if so, you will be able to find in the issue for June or July 1940 an article by me entitled Missions & the Home Front5, wherein I maintain this view about missionaries & their victims: There is no “common ground” between Christianity and heathenism upon which the missionary can build; the Word of God, by the aid of His Spirit, must create in those to whom it comes the power to hear & understand it. (This, by the way, is a typical Barthian position. What is it that you were going to ask me about Barth?) But this doesn’t mean that the missionary can adopt a dictatorial attitude to his converts, because if his hearers are given the power to hear the Word of God in this message, they are ipso facto given the power to criticise & correct his presentation of it; & in general the “Younger Churches” can teach the older ones something about Christianity, as well as leave from them … My articles, in any case, didn’t claim to be the Word of God6 or even the work of an authority on the subjects considered. In psychology my position is much more analogous to that of a field naturalist than to that of a biological scientist of a higher order. And my mind feeds on criticism from all quarters & can never get very far without it. This habit of systematically picking other people’s brains (after which, of course, it is I who get the {2} credit for being clever) has sometimes gained me the reputation of being modest, not snobbish, & so on, but I don’t think you’ll be taken in by that.

I must confess though that when I first read the criticism you eventually did make of “Reactions to Determinism”7, I felt that it was rather captious (though the phrase “fantastic anecdotalism” delighted me, & seemed well worthy of a poetess). After all, what the hell did it matter whether Father Zossima [sic] was real of fictitious so long as he was well drawn? In any case I had said in the article itself that his views were Dostoyevski’s [sic] own, & if he can’t check up on Zossima, one can on Dostoyevski. I though about your criticism a bit more though, & in the end it has so impressed me that I have decided not to send away that article for publication, as I had intended doing some time soon. The fault which you have put your finger on is too big for it to go in its present form. “Fantastic anecdotalism” is not only nice to read, but also the cap fits.

I was stimulated by your remarks to consider again exactly what it was that I had said about Father Zossima. And one thing that then seemed to me very obvious was that the second half of my article – the half about the opposite of determinism - wasn’t really as good as the first, & its conclusion in particular looked a bit “lame”. Particularly weak was the argument that because one’s attitude to determinism reflects the emotions of childhood, one’s attitude to the opposite “must” reflect the “opposite” emotions, those of parenthood. And I was fully aware of one of the main sources of the attitude of weakness of Part II. In actual fact neither Shelley nor Father Zossima were the persons I had primarily in mind when I wrote the article; the real determinist + anti-determinist were private persons of my acquaintance whom it would hardly have been proper to psychoanalyse in public. And the “happy” determinist were myself; that was why I knew so much about him - & why I knew so much more about him than about his opponent (the “dismal determinist” + the advocate of “total responsibility” were in fact {3} one person in different moods).

Precisely this fact, however – that Part II was about someone other than myself – made me reluctant to scrap it. For I felt it was one of the most fruitful bits of “brain-pricking” I’ve ever done. When I first embarked on psychoanalysing of religion, it was only my own religionI had to go on, a religion essentially expressing the emotions of a son; & it was something like a revelation to me to encounter a form of religion which hardly fell into this pattern at all, & which seemed on analysis to express feelings of “pure” parenthood.” And it was even a quite important stage in my own “growing up” to enter into a sympathetic understanding of this quite novel emotional structure, as utterly unlike my own.

But the more I reflected on my attempt, in that article, to put this “discovery” into words, the more objections & complications came into my mind. I’ll mention a few of them, more or less in the order in which they occurred to me. In the first place, this “pure parenthood” conception of mine seemed, superficially at least, to violate some of the most asserted conclusions of psychoanalysis. For instance, it is pretty well a dogma of the Freudian school that really serious psychological complications can always be traced back to the “forgotten years” of earliest childhood.8 It is not a genuine piece of analysis, or at all events it is very far from a complete analysis, to trace anything to crises of adult life, e.g. to a parent’s feelings for a child, or an adult person’s desire for one. The parent-child relationship is “asymmetrical”, so to speak; a child’s relation to its parents can generate “complexes”, but a parent’s relationship to children cannot, as it doesn’t occur in the critical first few years of life in which “complexes” are generated. There are ways of meeting this objection, of course. Feelings of “pure parenthood” might for example, be regarded as a partial explanation of an illusion or “complex”, & would themselves have to be traced back to some infantile crisis. And that {4} was in fact what I did with the person who was the real-life original of my “Father Zossima”, though I didn’t bring this out in the article. It was a more than usually plain case – I hardly had to make any inferences at all; the “subject” said practically all of it herself – of a girl in love with her father, who wished to deny or wipe out her relationship to her mother (“Pure parent” = “Not a daughter.” She was afraid that determination by heredity*) … Or one might say that the desire, though not the capacity, for “pure parenthood” might actually come into being during the infantile period. Maybe this is just another way of stating the same answer to this objection.

Another objection that occurred to me will take a bit of leading up to. Psychoanalysis tends to operate with a rather uncritical & uncriticised conception of what is “normal”; or perhaps it would be better to say, psychoanalysts tend to claim that a standard of “normality” can be arrived at from psychoanalysis itself. I don’t how with this at all; & was quite appalled when Dr. Popper told me that he had gathered from my dialogue on “Can Religion be Discussed?” that I did. He said that the remarks of “Psychoanalyst” in that dialogue suggested that he considered he had proved religion false by tracing it back to our attitude to our father, &c. What I really meant to suggest, by the order in which the participants said their piece in the dialogue, was that religion is first proved false (or rather nonsensical) by someone else (not by the {5} Psychoanalyst but by the Logician), & only then is the psychoanalyst called in to explain how these false or nonsensical beliefs come to be held. Whether a belief is a perception of reality or an illusion cannot be decided by means of psychoanalysis; the standard of “normality” here is set by something else. That’s how things stand as far as our perceptions go; & in relation to our desires, I don’t think there’s any absolute standard of “normality” at all. Psychoanalysis is only of use in clarifying & helping to eliminate conflicts in desires, or desires for things which an unclouded perception shows to be impossible. To return, now, to my article. Some of the desires considered in it can be definitely classed as “abnormal”,even...