Thank you for buying this eBook,
published by GOKO Publishing
To learn more about GOKO Publishing you can visit us at:
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved.
In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, and the Australian Copyright Act of 1968, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Distributed by GOKO Publishing
Cover Design and eBook Conversion by Katherine Owen
Spillane, Robert
An Eye for An I: Philosophies of Personal Power
ISBN: 978-1-61339-7-961
1. Philosophy / History and Surveys
2. Philosophy / Ethics & Moral Philosophy
3. Education / Philosophy, Theory & Social Aspects
CONTENTS
1 Homeric Heroes: Power and Tragedy
2 Greek Rationalists: Arguing for Argument
3 Cynics: The Hounds of Heaven
5 Machiavellians: Princes and Politicians
6 Mind Matters: The Myth of Mental Illness
7 British Empiricists: Scientists and Sceptics
8 German Romantics: Triumph of the Will
9 Vitalists: Romantic Evolutionists
10 French Existentialists: Personal Power as Freedom
For Katherine
‘[The philosopher] is a sort of miser, secretly hoarding up the treasures of reflection which other people wear as the occasional ornaments of intercourse, or use as a part of the heavier coinage of conversation. If, as non-professional philosophers, you confine your reflections to moments, the result is perhaps a serious talk with a friend, or nothing more noteworthy than an occasional hour of meditation, a dreamy glance of wonder, as it were, at this whole great and deep universe before you, with its countless worlds and its wayward hearts. Such chance heart searchings, such momentary communings with the universal, such ungrown gems of reflection, would under other circumstances develop into systems of philosophy. If you let them pass from your attention you soon forget them, and may then even fancy that you have small fondness for metaphysics. But none the less, all intelligent people, even including the haters of metaphysics, are despite themselves, occasionally metaphysicians.’
(Josiah Royce)
This book owes its existence to my having been invited by the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales in Sydney to deliver a series of lectures, The Mind’s Eye: An Introduction to Philosophy. I should like to thank Louise O’Halloran, whose idea it was to have me deliver the lectures, and her colleagues who ably supported me: Craig Brush, Fran Hellier, Vanessa Herlihy, Michelle Munro, Ian Shadwell and Judith White.
I sincerely thank Lenore Grunsell for allowing me to work from the unpublished lecture notes of her late husband and my friend, John Martin, whose ideas and arguments are sprinkled liberally throughout the pages of this book, and especially the first half of Chapter 9.
Once again the University of New South Wales Press has kindly allowed me to use material from Personality and Performance: Foundations of Managerial Psychology coauthored with John Martin.
Thanks are also due to Michelle Anderson who published the first edition of this book and several thereafter.
I am especially grateful to Katherine Owen for encouraging me to re-write and agreeing to publish a substantially revised edition of An Eye for an I.
Note: Dates of birth and death for the individuals cited appear in the Index of Names.
This book is an attempt to personalise Western philosophy by emphasising those ideas which enable individuals to gain insight into and mastery of themselves. Although this sounds like psychology, the ancient Greeks called it moral philosophy and its main precept is ‘know oneself’.
While some philosophers discussed in these pages are concerned with religion and others with science, they all have something of importance to say about human existence and explore the possibility of arriving at a form of wisdom which is neither theological nor scientific. Whether this remains merely a possibility or a pipe-dream is itself a philosophical question. That is to say, the acceptance of the writings of philosophers is not entirely a matter of logic or science but of commitment to a particular view of oneself and one’s place in the world.
When it comes to beliefs about personal existence two main options confront us. We can agree with those philosophers who argue that it is freedom that we find to be so powerful within us that we cannot conceive of anything more significant. Or we can deny what is for them a personal truth and adopt the doctrine of psychological determinism which claims that we are products of our biological and social conditioning: mere puppets without freedom or responsibility. How do we choose between freedom and determinism? We can look to the local religious views for an answer. Or we can accept the views of those scientists who tell us that human beings, as cogs in the machine of the world, are condemned to a state of bondage. We can analyse the assumptions which ground all philosophies but, as to freedom and determinism, we shall probably forsake