OPTIONS FOR THE MIND, by jocelyn braddell

Philosophy was partially dragged away from the academics by Foucault, who in his book “Discipline and Punish” drew the terrible punitive aspects of mans characteristics into the fore-ground, and subsequently prison regimes and death-penalties were investigated at the public level. It was as long ago as the Middle Ages that accusatory regimes began to be investigated – but it wasn’t until Freud, followed by Lacan in France, sought the constant patterns of the psyche and the manner in which these developed, that philosophy was spurred to seek outwardly for the real and possible causes of intractable regimes that had settled in social societies - such as the use of the Death Penalty, still in use in the USA, and elsewhere, today..

The American philosopher,Charles Peirce, who died in 1914, had given a strong impetus to the investigations that followed the great discovery and unveiling of man’s inner mind. His invention of the word pragmatism, which today even reaches political discourse in the newspapers, drove philosophical speculation outward into the real, its events and what common sense derived there. Meaning and representation was his focus, and the origin of bias and prejudice examined.

Pragmatism in his thought attested to the accumulation of enquiry in all fields, seeking what had continued among the ruins of the past to create values and realities that are still historically valid.

He was also greatly interested in chance as a stepping stone or passage to new developments.

He was greatly interested in symbols and signs that mankind constantly devises either to hide or to secretly convey his meanings.

Peirce defended an evolutionary cosmology explaining how the world of existing things and law-governed behaviour evolved from pure possibility. I suggest that the following is for today’s turbulent political phase, of great importance: If every regularity must have an explanation, we avoid a regression to ever more general and abstract laws by invoking a “historical explanation”.

The extraordinary and tragic developments in the Middle East, if they are to be solved and prevent the terrible resolutions of religious and political prejudice, have brought to the fore the especial need to extract from history only what is useful for a peaceful solution.

The Ottoman Empire which ruled for many years there was thwarted by a Turkish regime that came to rely almost exclusively on a military regime, and possibly does so today. The Muslim religion was pushed into the background, an activity encouraged by the English, who trained the first echelons of such politically aware military personnel.

When the English and French took over with “mandates” the territories of the Middle East, they assumed that they would have a similar success with the Muslim regimes of the Wahabes in Saudi Arabia and the Hashemite families who had ruled for centuries past .However the religious and communal needs for regional Law governance that the Muslim religion offers is not so easily turned aside, as they are also finding out in Turkey today.

Now we have the additional problems of the Israelies and their “promised land”, that under the investigation of the archaeologists is beginning to look increasingly fragile, and possibly only religious and political propaganda, or historic revision, that creates a lot of scars in people’s age-old beliefs that are retained today.