Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

Transcript (PDF)

The 19th Century
Presentation 1 of 13

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
The Transformation to Material Man.
Scientific Social Theory, Happiness Calculus, Economic History and Utilitarianism
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, December 6, 1983

Transcript:

The nineteenth century– The nineteenth century is the blind spot of the twentieth century. We want less to look at the nineteenth century than any other time period. The reason being is that there's an overlap, an overlay, and the cultural subconscious, habitual matrix of our personalities is all rooted in the structures of the nineteenth century. That is to say, the thinkers, the writers, the artists that we will consider in this particular sequence lay a structural development, an archetypal arrangement, which still plays itself out in our personalities, especially in the cultural forms in which we are required to live, and by which we are conditioned to respond. So that the personality of twentieth century man is circumscribed and addicted to the patterns that the nineteenth century thought produced. There are exceptions. There are individuals who have been raised outside of the Western European cultural matrix who are not particularly subject to the personal recursive influence, and yet they find themselves subject to the society and the civilization, the culture, thus circumscribed, which accounts for the tremendous amount of revolt whirled round against the European mind in our time.

So in presenting the nineteenth century, with– with its theme of materialism, I have to subtitle it: The Pilgrimage Through the World as a Permanently Dissolving Inferno, because rediscovered again and again during the nineteenth century by the secession of individuals which we consider, the material world which they seek to possess in each and every case, is pushed further and further away from any graspable possession. That is the phenomenal having of the world in any secure mode is jeopardized increasingly as the success of the apprehensive tools is developed. So that the nineteenth century mind pushed success away from it with an ever increasing rapidity. That is, it wanted to possess a secure material world. The phrase in the late Victorian era was that we have crawled ashore from the sea of evolution, and are no longer subject to the changes that other human beings have been subject to; that we now have the society.

This was written in 1912, but the difficulty for us to realize is that at the origins of the nineteenth century, thought are three great thinkers and these three great thinkers create a career in a continuity, a structure, which increasingly comes to dominate the time and thus the subconsciousness of our time and the conditions, socially and culturally, under which we labor today. The three thinkers are Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer. Now it seems incredible that we have not heard very much of Spencer and Bentham. The reason being is that their influence has been so indelible as to become invisible in a phenomenal way. That is to say, they are so pervasively influencing our cultural milieu, our psychological blind spot, that we do not even recognize that they exist as phenomena, as entities, as individuals, as collections of thoughts and ideas, as processes of analysis, which were once formulated by men, specifically by two ordinary human beings, extraordinary in their intelligence, extraordinary in their application, but mortal men nevertheless. Thus, the mythological substrate of twentieth century man is dominated by two colossal phantasmal shapes and one colossal shape that is seeking to become phantasmal to half the world and seeking to become unphenomenal to the other half of the world.

So Marx becomes singled out in our time as the revolutionary -ism dominating our lives. But in fact, without understanding Bentham and without understanding Spencer, Marx and Marxism occur in a vacuum and are unattainable to the mind for inspection on an ideational basis. Thus, the quandary of our time is that the communist world, dominated by Marxism, is unable to have a critical analysis of its own axiomatic basis because they resent and reject, outright, any application of capitalism, which owes itself to Jeremy Bentham more than any other single individual. And there is no possibility of a meta-criticism because they exclude Herbert Spencer, and exclude the possibility of a superior synthesis of knowledge based on extraordinarily wider fields of analytical basis than Karl Marx offered. Thus, we have to present Marx, because Marxism dominates our time, and we have to present Bentham and Spencer because they are absolutely essential to understanding Marxism, and essential in their own right to illuminate these phantasmal personal subconscious shapes, which are not subconscious so much in our civilization as numinous rites that we consider essential. Therefore, we start the whole course and start the nineteenth century with Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham is an extraordinary figure. He is the single most unknown and important thinker of the nineteenth century. He dominates the imagination of social expectation in the twentieth century. Everything that we will see him talking about is, in fact, what we today would both like to hear and fear to hear at the very same time. He is a conundrum, a quandary. Bentham wrote, in November 1779, on the banking system, the following quotation. The banking system was just coming into being. The first bank was the chartered Bank of England, and Bentham had this to say in November 1779 on the banking system:

“I have been turning my thoughts a little (and but very little) to the effects of your circulating medium plan.”

Now here's the first Benthamite modification. He does not call money ‘money’. In Bentham's language, to call money ‘money’ is to dupe oneself with a fiction. And later on, we'll get to Bentham's theory of fictions – the way in which language dominates our illusory world and carries the illusion into the social world and we put into actual practice impossibilities and then wonder why we are constantly faced with revolution, impracticality, and so forth. So he does not call money ‘money’, but he calls money a ‘circulating medium’. And a bank is an– a banking system is a ‘circulating medium plan’.

So he says, “I have been turning my thoughts a little (and but very little) to the effects of your circulating medium plan, and I see in it a vast resource for government. Why should the Charter of the Bank of England be renewed? or why should bankers exist at all? Neither the one nor the other contribute to augment the property of the country; while by dealing in money, and assisting monopolizers, who are always hurtful to every state, they acquire immense fortunes by availing themselves of a resource which properly belongs to the state.” Or, as Bentham will say later, “to the people.” “The transformative quality known as a circulating medium, which we mistakenly call money, belongs to the people and not to the banks, and which, under a proper system of management, would not only ease the country of the pressure of war taxes” – where have we heard that before? – “but would even enable government to pay off the national debt” – and where have we heard that before? “I dare say you are already convinced of this from the consideration you have given the subject. But this is not all the good it would produce. Those commercial distresses which beget distrust and produce ruin to many respectable individuals, while they disturb the beneficial intercourse of commerce, could rarely happen.”

In other words, the bankruptcies, the impoverishment of individuals, could rarely happen. Did money belong to the people? Did the circulating annuity work for the government of the people, and not for banks abstracted in an illusory way from the government, from the people, to induce a monopolizing tendency for a few?

Bentham will take this tack again and again into almost every field of life. In particular, he will criticize education, saying that the education of the many is far more important than the education of the few. And that his experiences at Oxford, and later on as a prospective lawyer at Lincoln's Inn in London, only convinced him more that education never happens even for the few, so that we fall from generation to generation upon increasingly bad habits, steered only by the avaricious desire of an increasingly prosperous few who then seek to dominate and control the formative elements of society, in particular education, so that their purposes, their pleasures, their goods, are seen as the social norms, and anyone deviating from these is labeled a criminal, or at least a malcontent.

And so, Bentham will style himself for the first time in history as neither a Whig nor a Tory, but a radical, and will publish, in fact, a magazine, a newspaper – the Westminster Review – devoted to radical politics. Neither Whig nor Tory, but realistic, that is radical in the sense that it refuses to accept even the language used, the ideas put forth by the pseudo-contending opposition of two banks of precious few dominating. Bentham, in fact, will carry the issue personally all of his life and become one of the most famous men in the world. And when he died in 1831, he was the first man in history to devote his corpse to science. He willed his body to science, hoping they would be able to make some use of it for the help and benefit of others. They used his body. They couldn't figure out what to do with his head, so they mummified his head. And because he founded the University of London, the University of London still has the mummified head of Jeremy Bentham. And to go with it, they made a full-scale, life-size, model of Bentham, which occasionally they drag out on display and shows the 84 year old master next to his petrified head, reminding us that there are many ways to be human in this world.

Bentham is responsible in large part for the following list of achievements in his lifetime. He is responsible for the reform of the representative system in Parliament. He wrote as we will see voluminously on laws. He was attached all of his life, from the very first, to the question of punishment and criminals, because he saw in this phenomenon that criminals exist and that therefore punishment must exist. What does this mean about society, what does this mean about us, what does this mean about human nature that such persons as criminals and such processes as punishment exist. These are not just to be accepted at face value. They are an indication that something in the structure, something in the arrangement of human life, is incorrect. To permit increasing numbers of so-called crimes to be committed, criminals to be committed, punishments to be meted out. Therefore, Bentham will say, who is deserving of more education than the convicted? That instead of being locked up in rows in cells, to be punished so that society feels good about inflicting– inflicting pain on these individuals, they should be housed in circular buildings where they would have a chance to realize that they belong to a unified humanity, and that the jailer should not be not be visible, but invisible. They should be in the center. Obscured by screens. Able to view the prisoners by mirrors. So that the reform element is centered around the idea that mankind as an invisible whole is always there in the background, and therefore one is not acting aberrantly alone in just the context of the moment. But one has to begin to develop the sense that there is an invisible unity of man, which is available at all times to be consulted, and therefore the development of an individual conscience is increased.

Bentham had a whole plan for this. He called these prisons, these kinds of circular prisons, Panopticon – ‘pan’ meaning all, ‘opticon’ meaning seeing – all-seeing centers. That the reform, not the adjustment to the irrational society, but the reform of criminals and the reform of society together, is offering man an all encompassing view of life. And so the reform of the representative system in Parliament is accompanied by the mitigation of the terrible criminal law and the abolition of transportation, removing people from venues just by our countries, just by happenstance. The improvement of prisons for which he spent eventually over twenty thousand pounds. It took a long time, but the government of England, under George the Third, finally repaid Bentham twenty-three thousand pounds in 1813, because they did not go through with his system of reform, as the Parliament had decided they would, had passed laws, had passed legislation, and Bentham, because he was a tremendously intelligent individual, had made enough money to begin building the prototypes of these types of prisons and advanced all this money. And it took him years and years, almost twenty years, to get his funds back from the government of England. That took a special Act of Parliament in 1813 to pay Bentham back.

The nominal abolition of imprisonment for debt. That is to say, he got rid of the idea that you could just throw someone in prison because he was a debtor. The sweeping away of usury laws. The straightening up of the law of evidence. Before Bentham the whole law of evidence– the use of evidence in court was completely scrambled up. So that the modern understanding of evidence in law, in the jurisprudence system, is due to Bentham. The overhauling of the jury system; the repeal of religious tests; the reform of the Poor Law; the establishment of a national system of education; taking away the parochial element as much as could be; making it a responsibility of the people to educate the young. The development of the idea of savings banks, which he called friendly societies – friendly societies. That is, they would be advisory in the capacity, advisory as to how to participate in the application of circulating annuities. They were educational in tone rather than money-making in tone, although later on they would suffer changes. Cheap postage without the object of national profit coupled with Post Office money orders.

Bentham organized all of this because these were direct attacks on the monopolistic system coming into being at that time. A complete and uniform registry of births, marriages, and deaths – before Bentham, there was no uniform registry of births, marriages, and death. So that the basic orderings of society were put into motion by this man. A code for merchant shipping – before Bentham, there was no real code for merchant shipping. Most of the transportation of goods in the world at that time was, of course, by ship, especially international. There were no trains; there were no planes; there were no trucks – ships. So the merchant code for shipping influenced the whole notion of an international economy. In fact, the word ‘international’ was coined by Jeremy Bentham. There was no such idea before Bentham of an ‘international culture’ based upon the reality that all human beings belong to the same order of phenomenon. All men in reality relate and can relate to each other. The circulation of parliamentary papers – before Bentham, it was not considered needful to publish the texts of parliamentary acts in public form. Bentham made sure that any laws that were passed were printed up and available not in one place, on one set of papers, but put, for instance, in the newspaper. The protection of inventors – Bentham was instrumental in getting the first protection in the world for inventors rights, and having those rights passed on to their families, their progeny. Uniform and scientific methods of drafting acts of Parliament. So that there was a uniform methodology by the way in which, Acts of Parliament, Bills of law, were put through so that one could understand the process so that it wasn't a whole new ball game with each issue, so that one could become educated in the way in which politics was supposed to work and and the art of governing. A general register of real property and the passing of public health legislation.

All of these facets are so taken for granted today that we can't imagine that they were the brainchild of a single individual, of one man who had to fight tooth and nail all of his life to get these passed. So we have an odd character on our hands – Bentham is really amazing. He would often single out culprits. Bentham was not a vindictive individual, but he loved specificity and he had a culprit named Jug. And Jug was short for juggernaut, and juggernaut meant organized religion, and he felt that organized religion, in the history of man, was often like a juggernaut, symbolizing its ruthless march of self-aggrandizement for its organizational structure, and its use of suppression by economic coercion, its consolidation of its position, especially in economic terms, to be a major departure from any theological concerns, no matter how they were understood. That, in fact, any educational systems that were set up seem to have organized religion insinuate itself in one way or another, into departments, into faculties, and finally into the structure of the whole school. He singled out Oxford and Cambridge in his time as perfect examples. He said there's very little difference, except that when the monks ran Oxford they were usually married and unmarried and honest, and now that they were secular dons, they were dishonest, and that his experience there was perfect proof. He wanted to protect, in particular the children from age 7 to 14, from what he called the ‘nefarious prattle’, of what we today would call ‘brainwashers’, what he called ‘ignorant persons’. That is, those who would seek to dominate, especially through religious phantoms and religious imagery, the minds and imaginative capacities of individuals. And the fact that they were so successful at dominating the imaginative capacities of the young, meant that they were able to carry through the fictive elements of their so-called truth structures later on in adult life, and almost forbid anyone of waking up. He was responsible for a new science called orthography. It was a hundred years ahead of its time. Orthography is the study of language in terms of its origins and its structures and its purposes. The chief questions that he asked concerning language were the following six points:

1. What can words do for us? That is to say, what is the nature of language?
2. What is the nature of psychological language in particular?
3. How are we to think of a ‘right’ or of an ‘obligation’ when we come to define it?

In particular, this question of right bothered Bentham and in his great work, The Theory of Legislation, which, when it came out originally in the French language – Bentham could write equally well in French or English – was one of the most widely read books in the world. It immediately influenced his friend Catherine in Russia. It immediately influenced the formulation of the laws in both Portugal and Spain, and thus all of the Western Hemisphere under their control. It reformed the laws in England. The French Revolution finally made him a citizen of the Republic, and he was influential there in reforming the laws of France. Bentham was somebody, but in this Theory of Legislation, divided into three parts, the first part is on The Principles of Legislation; the second part on Civil Code; and the third on Penal Code.

But I want to give you a section in The Principles of Legislation about natural right, because he asks here in the third comment, how are we to think of a right or an obligation when we come to define it? This is central to his theory of fictions. And he writes in here, “The word rights, the same as the word law, has two senses; one a proper sense, the other a metaphorical sense. Rights, properly so called, are the creatures of law properly so called; real laws give birth to real rights. Natural rights are the creatures of natural law; they are a metaphor which derives its origin from another metaphor. What there is natural in man is means, – faculties.” That's what is natural in man, the faculties. “But to call these means, these faculties, natural rights, is again to put language in opposition to itself. For rights are established to insure the exercise of means and faculties. The right is the guarantee; the faculty is the thing guaranteed.” So there is a confusion leading to all kinds of problems. “The right is the guarantee; the faculty is the thing guaranteed. How can we understand each other with a language which confounds under the same term things so different?”

And he will insist that in logic there is not only subject and predicate, but copula. That is, something that links them together, something that does the bridging and makes them practicable, makes them real. So he says, he writes, “Where would be the nomenclature of the arts, if we gave to the mechanic who makes an article the same name as to the article itself? Real rights are always spoken of in a legal sense; natural rights are often spoken of in a sense that may be called anti-legal. When it is said, for example, that law cannot avail against natural rights, the word rights is employed in a sense above the law; for, in this use of it, we acknowledge rights which attack the law which overturn it, which annul it. In this anti-legal sense, the word right is the greatest enemy of reason, and the most terrible destroyer of governments. [There are] There is no reasoning with fanatics, armed with natural rights, which each one understands as he pleases, and applies as he sees fit; …” In other words, there's an element of anarchy. And of course, the nineteenth century has a great undercurrent of anarchic thought running all the way through it.

He writes, “Instead of examining laws by their effects, instead of judging them as good or as bad, they consider them in relation to these pretended rights; that is to say, they substitute for the reasoning of experience the chimeras of their own imaginations. This is not a harmless error; it passes from speculation into practice. ‘Those laws must be obeyed, which are accordant with nature; the others are null in fact; and instead of obeying them, they ought to be resisted. The moment natural rights are attacked, every good citizen ought to rouse up [to] their defense…’ ” And so on and so forth. But then he says, “But not to be accused of gratuitously ascribing such seditious maxims to these inspired politicians of nature, I shall cite a passage from Blackstone, directly to the point; …”

Blackstone was the great writer on laws in nineteenth century England, early nineteenth century England. Bentham knew him, did not much care for Blackstone, individually. “...and I choose Blackstone, because he is, of all writers, the one who has shown the most profound respect for the authority of governments. In speaking of these pretended laws of nature, and of the laws of revelation, he says: ‘Human laws must not be permitted to contradict these; if a human law commands a thing forbidden by the natural or divine law, we are bound to transgress that human law.’ ”

So, Bentham writes, “Is not this arming every fanatic against all governments? In the immense variety of ideas respecting natural and Divine law, cannot some reason be found for resisting all human laws? Is there a single state which can maintain itself a day, if each individual holds himself bound in conscience to resist the laws, whenever they are not conformed to his particular ideas of natural or Divine law? [What] What a cut-throat scene of it we should have between all the interpreters of the code of nature, and all the interpreters of the law of God! ‘The pursuit of happiness is a natural right.’”

So it is stated, the pursuit of happiness is a natural right. This is in our Declaration of– Declaration of Independence, Jefferson. What is Bentham saying?

32:00

“The pursuit of happiness is certainly a natural inclination; but can it be declared to be a right? That depends on the way in which it is pursued. The assassin pursues his happiness, or what he esteems such, by committing an assassination. Has he a right to do so? If not, why declare that he has? What tendency is there in such a declaration to render men more happy or more wise? … Utility having been often badly applied, understood in a narrow sense, and having lent its name to crimes, has appeared contrary to eternal justice. It thus became degraded, and acquired a mercenary reputation. It needs courage to restore it to honor, and to reestablish reasoning upon its true basis. I propose a treaty of conciliation between be with the partizans of natural rights, if nature has made such and such a law. Those who cite it with so much confidence, those who have modestly taken upon themselves to be its interpreters, must suppose that nature had some reasons for her law. Would it not be sure, shorter and more persuasive, to give us those reasons directly, instead of urging upon us the will of this unknown legislature as itself an authority? In other words, the question of utility is one of purpose. Where does it lead for? For what purpose is this? Why are we told that this is necessary? That this should be so? What is the purpose for this? If we can understand the purposes, are we not then closer, Bentham says, in more direct contact with what we would all like to call. Right? It is right because it leads to such and such. And we can even introduce, introduce, as Bentham will say, a fictive term which we all use almost all the time.

The term good, if the purposes lead to good, to happiness, to pleasure. Then we can understand why we are told that such and such should be done, or such and such is the right. So he brings in the term utility, and from him comes the philosophy known as utilitarianism, which Bentham founded, which was carried on by John Stuart Mill, one of the giants of philosophic thought in the nineteenth century. John Stuart Mill, as a youngster, grew up around Bentham's expanded household. He bought an abbey called Forde Abbey down in Devonshire. In John Stuart Mill's father, James Mill, when he was writing The Great History of India, took his whole family to live six months out of the year on Bentham's estate. Bentham, incidentally, made an awful lot of money in his time. He invested an enormous amount of money, many thousands of pounds in the factories that Robert Owen was running in the west of England, around a town called New Lanark. Robert Owen is very famous in socialist thought. He was the one who one who first set up educational institutions for the children of the workers in his factories, who set up limited hours so that the workers in the factories could spend time with their families, gave them holidays off, including the first Sundays off. So Owen was a socialist reformer in his New Lanark community. There were whole groups of owenites which influenced the United States history in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Will Bentham, a very good friend of Robert Owen, invested a lot of money, and because they ran their factories right, and had good, good relationships with the workers, they made a lot of money. Bentham occasionally would lose money. He lost 8,000 pounds once in a marble mine. This is a lot of money. In 1810, 8,000 pounds British sterling was a lot of money. So he's writing here about utility. And from this we get utilitarian. And he says, this is not such a ambiguous situation as we first thought, because there are ways to be specific. In fact, Bentham will invent a calculus for pleasure. And you used pleasure as a synonym for good, for good purposes. What happens when you when you obey those laws which lead in their purposes to the good of all the happiness of a great many, at least, if not all, pleasure. And what happens if you don't pain? That pain is inflicted. They. The statements that I made at the beginning are not so light. They may sound like to you, but they're very fraught with electrical peril for us in our time. Freud used Bentham's pleasure and pain principles as one of the basic platforms upon which he built the model of the human psyche and his psychology. The pleasure principle in Freud is a Bentham creation. So we're not we're not dealing here with a lightweight. We're dealing, as I said before, with someone who is so influential, so pervasive as to be invisible in our time, but pervasive not only in the sense that he influenced history and thus the culture that we live in, but that history, when it was made in the nineteenth century, entered into the patterns which are now part of our subconscious.

And transpersonal subconscious, so that there is a resonance between the tendencies that we have as a people and the social situations, trying to elicit those tendencies as a people, so that we are caught in between two resonating symbols that were smashed 150 years ago and have been held apart, and we're still trapped in the resonance of those ideas. We're still bouncing back and forth between the society and the psyche that were given to us without our knowing it. Many of the problems of our individuation today are that we now are unable to accept either aspect. Either the society in which it comes down to us or the psyche in which we would compulsively fall were it not for discipline and intelligence and experience. So we have a real problem on our hands. And Bentham is at the formative, transformative core of it all, because the upshot of all of his writings is that the emphasis must be upon the material world. The material man, not the spiritual man, because the spiritual man is subject to the fictive play of his imagination, because his knowing must focus itself upon the material world. But that is real, and this is a guide for him.

So he writes an abundance of words, serves to cover a paucity and a falsity of ideas whenever there are many words used instead of the single right word. We are being fed propaganda. We are being fed a fiction because the spiritual man is subject to the fictive play of his imagination. So he is writing in here about utility. And then he says, I conclude with a general observation, and this is the conclusion, incidentally, of the whole argument of the principles of legislation, which is the first third of the theory of legislation. And this was the textbook that was used to build most of the governmental systems of the Western world. What are they built on? This is the first building block. When Adam Smith read the critiques that Bentham had about his work, He said, I'm very glad to be criticized by a mind as acute as Mr. Bentham. And in future editions I shall revise my positions. I conclude with the general observation, writes Bentham. The language of error. Is always obscure and indefinite. In other words, this is a general observation that he's making, that when we notice obscurity, when we notice the indefiniteness, the ambiguity, we are in the realm of error. For he says, man is capable of specifically knowing, of exactly knowing, because his knowing must focus itself upon the material world. But that is real and this is a guide for him.

So he writes an abundance of words serves to cover a paucity and a falsity of ideas. Whenever there are many words used instead of the single right word, we are being fed propaganda. We are being fed a fiction. And if we are using two words instead of a single word, it's almost a sure indication to us that we have somewhere in our background an ambiguity, a fictive phantom, as he would say, of imagined meaning, which is metaphorical. That is to say, it is not based as a sign of something real, but just leads back in a sequence of referential mirrors from metaphor to metaphor to metaphor. So this is a real problem, he writes. Also, the oftener terms are changed, the easier it is to dilute the reader. The language of truth is uniform and simple. These are all general observations with which, like cannon shots, were literally heard around the world. The same ideas are always expressed by the same terms. Everything is referred to pleasures or to pains. Every expression is avoided, which tends to disguise or intercept the familiar idea that from such and such actions result such and such pleasures and pains. Trust not to me, but to experience and especially your own of two opposite methods of action. Do you desire to know which should have the preference? Calculate their effects in good and evil, and prefer that which promises the greater sum of good. And so the whole thrust of Bentham's theory of legislation was to bring, for the first time in contemporary modern Western history, a codification of laws.

Bentham is responsible for the word codification. That is, he worked most of his long life to develop the patterns of codes which could play together to make one large, comprehensive code of laws. So in these six aspects of Orthology study of language, the science of his theory. Of his theory of fictions was the cornerstone of this science. How are we to think of a right or an obligation when we come to define it? And the fourth one is how can we translate a fiction such as force or liberty into non-fictional language? Five. How can language be improved? And six. What can be done about a universal or international language? Bentham says that the basic psychological reality that permits fictions to operate as if they were true is a process that he first called archetypal ization. And he says that archetypes are basic pointing symbols. Archetypes are basic pointing symbols and that in fact, this process is responsible for most of what we come to experience in the in the fictive world. Now, Bentham, in his theory of fictions, takes us back to his childhood, the first time that he noticed that things were not as they should be, that they are not what they are. He writes, I went to see a puppet show. There were Punch and Judy, and there was a devil whom I had seen before. But I saw for the first time with the devil an nymph.

A devil's imp. The devil was black as he should be, but the devil's imp was white, and I was as much. I was much more alarmed at his presence than that of his principal. I was haunted by him. I went to bed. I wanted to sleep. The devil appeared to me in a dream. The imp was in his company. I had, which is not uncommon in dreams, at least with me. A sort of consciousness. That this was a dream with the hope that with a little exertion I might spring out of it. I fancied that I did so. Imagine my horror when I still perceive devil and imp standing before me. It was out of the rain and into the river. I made another desperate effort. I tried to be doubly awake. I succeeded. I was in a transport of delight when the illusion altogether vanished. But it was only a temporary relief for the double devil. And the imp dwelt in my waking thought. Then for about a year afterwards. This is when he was young. He was nine years old. So he began to think seriously about what is real. What in the mind is real? What level of imagery could one depend upon as a true guide for what is natural, for what is capable of being used as a basis for thought? What image base? What level of imagery is real? And Bentham would come into all kinds of horrific experiences as a youngster.

In fact, for most of his life he had an inordinate fear of ghosts because he believed that they could possibly be real. In fact, his first rooms at Oxford University, he was taken there when he was very young. He was an early teenager when he was taken there 12 or 13 years old. And his first rooms were very gloomy. It looked into the churchyard and was covered with lugubrious hangings. He had all kinds of fears of visitations of spiritual beings coming upon him, and fears of ghosts and the darkness of the chamber and everything. It was on this grim foundation that later on, Bentham would begin to build his theory of symbols so that when it would come to describing in language what has happened or what is happening, or what one believes. His analysis of language placed a great suspicion upon what he called word magic. That evil primarily has its origin in what he called word magic. That the pain on almost any level that human beings are able to in, endure for themselves Cells or inflict upon others, either in forms of punishment. And here's his concern with prisons. Punishment. Inflicting. Inflicting that pain on others. Wishing to see others. Have it. Cruelty. So forth. Bentham, in fact, was one of the first humane individuals for animals. He couldn't suffer the fact that people were inhumane to animals. In fact, he used to say that he would talk to his cats all the time.

If only he could understand what they said in reply. It'd be very far ahead. But he was struggling with the fact that evil had its origin, its basis. And what he called a fictive capacity of language called word magic. This, incidentally, is one of the subtitles of the chapter in one of Ernst Kazuha's books, Language and myth. Because Bentham put his finger on a problem which has increasingly come to dominate twentieth century thought. There's a great book I think I've mentioned before, published by Cambridge University Press by Stanley Cavell, called Must We Mean What We Say? This is a real problem. So he developed his theory. From the age of nine, with these experiences of supernatural terror, which he then tried to think about, were they real? On what level would they be real? And as early as 1775, when he was in his 20s, he wrote, he was 27. He wrote what we are continually talking of, merely from our having been continually talking of it. We imagine, we understand. In other words, everybody is talking about these kinds of happenings and things all the time. We think we understand what we are talking about, not just ghosts, but anything. So close. A union has habit connected between words and things that we take one for the other. When we have words in our ears, we imagine we have ideas in our minds. When an unusual word presents itself, we challenge it.

We examine it ourselves to see whether we have a clear idea to annex to it. But when a word that we are familiar with comes across us, we let it pass under favor of old acquaintance. The long acquaintance we have had with it makes us take for granted. We have searched it already. We deal with it in consequence, as the customs House officers in certain countries who, having once set their seal upon a packet so long as they see or think they see that seal upon it. Reasonably enough, suppose themselves dispense with visiting it anew. So we have all kinds of fictions that are let pass, and because they are passed on by corrupt educational systems, because they are founded upon societies that have no real understanding of law and no real understanding of rights. Such notions as liberty become super ambiguous. So he says, we need to have instruments of discovery which are dependable in language. We have to have a A methodology by which we can clear up the fictive quality. We have to have these fictions, evidently, in order to have something to talk about that's so pervasive, is it that our very language is made up of fictive elements? Were we to refrain from using them assiduously, he says, we would all fall silent. But we have to be conscious, then, of using fictive concepts and not imagine that they refer to real things, and that they refer to imaginative levels that are metaphorical and that they in themselves refer to other metaphors.

We have to therefore have a way, and we have to have instruments of discovering what is real and of transforming what is fictive into what is real, and only then do we have the capacity to rescue ourselves from the swamp in which we find ourselves. And the only guide that we have is that it all has to come down to material things. It's our only true guide. And so the conversion of man to material being at the beginning of the nineteenth century has a very convincing, very real bill of goods, as it were. Bill of rights, as it turned out to be, that we need to do this. Now, you can already get a glimmer, if you have any understanding already, of what Karl Marx was doing, of some of the basis that was laid by Jeremy Bentham. Karl Marx, as you will find out next week, did all of his studying in the British Museum in London, working for a newspaper in London. And Bentham was everywhere because his ideas were everywhere. The governments of all the British Empire were redesigned by Benthamite. The Constitution of Canada, the Constitution of Australia, the Government of India, South Africa. Everywhere that the British Empire was in the world in the nineteenth century was redone, according to Bentham and Benthamite ideas. The United States also was not immune from this, not immune, and because he wrote many of his works originally in French and most of them were translated into French, it influenced all the French speaking world.

And because they influenced Spain and Portugal, all of the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world, you have a large section of the world in the nineteenth century. When you take these languages into consideration, because everywhere that these people went, they took these structures and ideas with them, these expectations. So when somebody in India would tell you about yoga, the Britisher would say, that's a lot of tommyrot because you look like a beggar. How do you know anything at all about life? Whereas I'm dressed in a fine Scottish kilt and I'm here on your own terrain, you better listen to me. In fact, I think I'll. I'll set things up. We. We don't need these books of your religion. What you need is a good British education. All this, ladies and gentlemen, became real for hundreds of millions of people. What's at the core of this? The theory of fictions was elaborated in order to cope with the symbolic A factor in all of its ramifications. A legal, scientific and metaphysical. And in the list of instruments by which his various discoveries were made possible. It appears as number one was epitomized as follows. Division of entities into real and fictitious. We have to make some sort of day and night. To create order. The first thing we have to do is divide the. Real from the fictitious.

Or, say, the division of noun substantive into names of real entities. And names of fictitious entities. The British loved it. They loved to say this here. And pound the desk, or load their gun, or point to their land by the division and distinction thus brought to view. Great is Great is the light thrown upon the whole field of logic, because this was not just a pleasant doctrine dreamed up over gin and tonics in some club. This is a very profound psychology. This is a very penetrating linguistic theory. This is a very formative philosophy. Really powerful. Really powerful. Still around, still around. So we're going to throw light upon the whole field of logic. That is the whole order of understanding and the way in which things are taught and the way in which the world is run and what is important over the whole field of art and science, and more especially the psychical. Cyclical. We're going to clear up the psychical realm. And thence the ethical or moral realm. So we're going to– we're going to have a moral. Majority, says Bentham, because we're going to go about this systematically from the core. The second instrument is the division of entities, real and fictitious, together into physical and psychical. So the first division, the first instrument was to find out what it was real, which is material. And the second attack is to separate the physical and the psychical, by means of which, as we shall see, he maintained that considerable light could be thrown upon both the origin and the formation of language, and on the connection between the nomenclature of psychology on the one hand and that of physics and physiology on the other.

So the emphasis increasingly will be upon the physical world, the material world, and as we'll see in the course that the material world recedes from this view at an alarming rate. And as they become better and better at apprehending the physical world towards the end of the century, and not so far away from Bentham's death, within 45 years of Bentham's death, James Clerk Maxwell will write his great treatise on electricity and magnetism and say, the physical world isn't what we thought it was. It's a pulsing, moving, invisible phantasm of forces, and there isn't much there to stand on when you really think about it. And this will cause a crisis of consciousness, which the twentieth century will inherit. Full blown. They'll get the disease called lack of nerve. And Arnold Toynbee, in his study of history, says that every single civilization of the 28 that fell in world history fell because of lack of nerve. Because they could not face the challenges with appropriate responses. Because they didn't believe that they could. And so they didn't. And Toynbee, in a conversation, once told me one of the real poignant moments of his life was to come upon a statue of a Roman general done up in a patinated bronze.

So it was all green and the hard, beautiful, rough features the square jaw, the tremendous shoulders, until he got close enough, and he could see the expression in the eyes of this firm, manly individual, and it was pure pathos. He said it would have driven you to tears, to see the expression in the eyes of this general, the failure of nerve, which is based upon a perception of psychological possibility, which is controlled by the way in which language structures Possibility, which Bentham says at its core has an operating symbolic process known as archetypal ization, and that the archetypes are the basic pointing symbols that orient consciousness. This is about 1815, and he wrote this. Bentham then. Says of Mythologization, insofar as it is performed by denomination, the subjects, the immediate subjects are names and nothing more. Things, yes, but no otherwise than through the medium of their names. What is primordial in apprehension? Names. It is only by means of names, simple or compound, that things are susceptible of arrangement. The whole ordering of the exterior world. As Bertrand Russell will call it, is done on the basis of naming. We first order. The mental language, and then we conform the things to that order. Understand? Of arrangement in the psychical sense. In which sense? Strictly speaking, it is only the ideas of the things in question that are the subjects of the arrangement, not the things themselves. It is different to arrange the ideas of something than it is to arrange the names of something.

If you arrange the names of something, you have a correlation to the things of the material world. But if you arrange the ideas of something, Bentham says, you have a fictive level of operation and that the arrangement is susceptible. Only to infinite, regressive metaphorical possibilities. He says no wonder we are confused. I'm going to skip over just about everything in here because I want to get over to. I have everything arranged. I think you should know that there are five basic elements that go into his analysis. He's very complete. This analysis of Bentham and his theory of fictions was like a mathematics. The elements are motion and motions. The second is quantity. The third is quality. The fourth form or figure. And the fifth was relation. Let's just have a sentence or two about relation just to make this a little expedient. Insofar as any two objects are regarded by the mind at the same time, the mind for a greater or less length of time passing from the one to the other. By this transition, a fictitious entity termed relation a relation is considered as produce. The one of these objects. Either of these objects is said to bear a relation to the other. Between the two objects, a relation is said to said to exist or have place. The time during which the two objects are regarded or kept under consideration is as above, for shortness spoken of at the same time.

It would seem, however, that with exactly the same degree of attention, objects more than one cannot be regarded, considered, examined, surveyed at exactly the same instant or smallest measurable portion of time, but that on the occasion and for the purpose of comparison, the mind is continuously passing and repassing from the one to the other and back again. In other words, vibrating after the manner of a pendulum of a clock. This motion, this vibration, the emotion acquired by an elastic cylinder or prism in which the length is a prevalent dimension on its being suddenly dragged, impelled, or drawn, and let go in a direction other than that of its length. This vibration, then, of the mind being the simplest of all recurrent motions, is the sort of motion best suited, or rather, it is the only sort of motion in any degree at all suited to the purpose of comparison. Hence, it seems to be that in speaking of a relation in a number of objects greater than two are not brought to view. For on this occasion the preposition employed is always between, never among. By the proposition between, the number of the objects in question is restricted to two, restricted universally and incontrovertibly. Way. Hence it is that in methodical division, the bifurcate mode is the only one that is completely satisfactory. Thus, Western philosophy and science opted for. True and false. Yes and no. Because of the technological bias of this methodology.

It also plays itself out in the perfect bifurcate phenomenon of our time. The computer. An infinite number of yes's and no's, mimicking the benthamite conception of the mind, is a vibration limited to a bifurcate, specific order. If it is seen to be more than that, it is a fictive, imaginative, metaphorical reality and is not real is not true. And at least minimally, is in sad and badly need of transformation. So what? What would the mind of Western twentieth century man say to the Yogi? Say, you're pretty close to the point if you let us transform what you mean into our mode. So what is happening today? In 1980s, the wisdom of Asia is being ground up into the hopper of Western technological bifurcation, because the predisposition subconsciously of the mind to do that, to grind up the experience of the spirit in terms of the technology of bifurcate order Is inherent in the very structure of that mind. Unconsciously does not even know that it does. It does not even know. Symbols. Symbols. I guess I don't have time to go into all of the ramifications that I wanted to go into. I didn't get to all of the aspects of Bentham that I wanted to, but we're running out of time. He just is an amazingly beautiful individual in many ways. He was a challenging man, but you can see from just the short, brief introduction here that he was profound. He was befriended after his first published essay by Lord Shelburne Burn.

And for months on end he would go to Lord Shelburne's estate. And there he met almost anybody and everybody of importance. William Pitt was a very close friend of Bentham's. He was there the first year or so that Bentham was there. Bentham's younger brother, Samuel, was a military advisor throughout Europe, and especially at one time was in Russia and was helping organize the Russian military command under Catherine. And Bentham went to visit him and went the long way around. Spent a month in Turkey and Smyrna. Spent six weeks in Constantinople. Went overland through Bucharest and Kiev, up into Russia. Spent two years in Russia. And whenever his works would be published. They would be translated into Russian right away. Catherine had her minister write to Bentham that they were reforming the entire structure of Russian laws on the model of Bentham's ideas, and if he could at any time come and visit, that he should. Tolstoy was three years old when Bentham died. And we end this course with Tolstoy, because Tolstoy alone, of all the individuals of the nineteenth century that we could consider in Europe, understood what had happened, because he received it all in a place that he could not forget, that he had received it. His aching heart, his vomiting psyche that drove him almost to madness and suicide. And we get to Tolstoy. You'll have– you'll have some better idea of how the unity of this course really is marked up.

There are many individuals I could have chosen, but I chose an order which revealed the time. We have to understand the time because it's not only invisible within ourselves, but it's highly visible, super visible within the societies in which we have to live. When you talk about the implicate order, is it one of Bentham's numerous asides and the implications of his theory for psychology runs as follows. What is here meant is not that no such fictions ought to be employed, but that to the to the purpose and on the occasion of instruction, whenever they are employed, the necessity of the use of them should be made known to say that in discourse Fictitious language ought never on any occasion to be employed, would be as much to say that no discourse on the subject of which the operations or affections or other phenomenon of the mind are included. We can't even talk about the mind without fictitiousness, he's saying. For no ideas being ever to be found in it, which have not their origin in sense. Matter is the only direct subject of any portion of verbal discourse. Why did they flee to the material world in droves? Because it was the only place that they could stand. Given this assessment, this psychology matter is the only direct subject of any portion of verbal discourse. It's only. It's the only real reference there is. As we'll see. Matter is going to dissolve before the eyes of the nineteenth century, almost as fast as their ability to keep up with trying to find new ways to approach it.

They will try all kinds of approaches, all kinds of structures. Wagner, very seriously, will consider making an entirely new civilized art form to do an end run around the conundrum, and his close friend Friedrich Nietzsche will call him crazy for even attempting. We'll see what Dostoyevsky does trying to struggle with the psychology of a material man in a material world with capacities of spirituality that he doesn't want to recognize. All of these. But Bentham says matter is the only direct subject of any portion of verbal discourse. On the occasion and for the purpose of the discourse, the mind is all along considered and spoken of as if it were a mass of matter. And it is only in the way of fiction that, when applied to any operation or affection of the mind, anything that is said is either true or false. Yet, in as far as such fictions are employed, the necessity of them if, as in the case just mentioned, necessary, or the use of them, if simply useful, should be made known, why in the first place, to prevent that perplexity which has placed in the mind, in far as truth and falsehood being confounded. That which is not true is supposed to be true. In other words, the basic fundamental confounding is to lose. The whole notion of identification to lose.

The whole notion of negation. There must be true, and there must be false in order to have a logical form to proceed with. In the next place, by putting it as far as possible in the power of the learner to perceive and understand the use and value, as well as the nature of the instruction communicated to him. To lighten the burden of the labor necessary to be employed in the acquisition of it. And thus was born at the same time what was come to be known as the liberal view that we have to improve the material world, because it's the only basis on basis on which we have to actually work. And the arrangement of the material world is the arrangement of the names of the things. And therefore our education needs to be based primarily upon the correct arrangement of the names at that level. All of these were powerful ideas when they came out. You can imagine for yourself when we took the course on the enlightenment, and we came to understand somewhat about reason, somewhat about the predilection for the mind. We see how the chickens really come home to roost. Bentham lived until 1831, 1832, actually. So he lived a third of the way into the nineteenth century. But what was more influential was the fact that he left behind him a tremendous entourage of workers who were thoroughly versed. They were called benthamite, who would go anywhere in the world and help arrange the laws of the society, help arrange the ideas of education, help arrange the way in which life was lived.

And largely wherever they went, the British Empire followed them. And the sun never set on the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Bentham towards the end of his life. The last 14 years of his life. Moved to an industrial working class section of London, and there he bought. A little house that had once belonged to John Milton, and he planted trees around it. He planted flowers and flower boxes, and he used to entertain there all the time. He used to have famous men come and have dinner together there almost all the time. And they would have to walk through these grimy industrial sections, these narrow streets. And then, almost like a shrine of reformed nature, there would be Bentham's house. New Queen Street was the name of the street. And Bentham's house became a sort of a national shrine and finally an international shrine. It became a totemic center of rational power for the British Empire, where the mind of questioning man seeking to reform and remake society, remake man's history along rational lines could be formed. Well, Bentham started the wheels in motion. He would hardly have believed the dynamic that would be churned up by the next figure. I think most of you are familiar somewhat with Karl Marx, but we'll see next week the philosophy of material man and economic history writ really large. Okay.