Versions of Finitude

Heidegger claims to radicalize Kantian finitude. He “wants to applaud Kant for appreciating the finitude of thinking — in Kant its dependence on sensible and pure intuition — also note the hidden importance of the imagination in Kant’s project, and yet also demonstrate that Kant has not broken free of the prior metaphysical tradition but remains solidly within its assumptions” (Pippin, The Culmination, p. 82).

“Kant treats our immediate familiarity with the world as an unimportant issue, since real knowledge of what really is resides in mathematical physics, and how things show up in ordinary experience is of no account” (p. 83).

Pippin is characterizing Heidegger’s view here. The last part strikes me as an overstatement by Heidegger. Kant aims, among other things, to give an account of ethics and human life that would be compatible with Newtonian physics, but never even comes close to suggesting that ethics could be explained in terms of physics.

“Heidegger claims that not only is freedom a problem of causality, but causality is itself a problem of freedom” (ibid).

Kant does occasionally mix up discussions of freedom and causality, as when he makes the unfortunate suggestion that we think of freedom as an alternate kind of causality besides the one exhibited in Newtonian physics. But in the main, he treats ethical freedom and mechanical causality as two very different registers. Heidegger is tendentiously assuming that for Kant, physics must provide the outer frame of reference for ethics. But despite Kant’s great reverence for Newton, he famously argues for the primacy of practical reason.

“Heidegger wants to explore the implications of the remarkably Fichtean formulation that anything actual must be understood to be ‘posited’, that being, the meaning of being, is ‘positing'” (p. 84).

This notion of positing has come up several times, in relation to Hegel (and Fichte, who first made it a major theme). It is closely related to the contested notion of judgment. As Aristotle might remind us, judgment is said in more than one way.

“Position or positing is treated throughout as judging, the discursive form of representing” (p. 85, emphasis in original).

Judgment in the sense I care about mainly names a kind of free inquiry where the outcome is not decided in advance, rather than a completed conclusion. It should be understood as subject to all the nuances that affect jurisprudence. Judging as an activity has to be an open process of interpreting, not the mere representing of something identified in advance or known in advance. Only in hindsight — with a conclusion already in view — can judgment even be expressed in terms of representation. But the early modern tradition in logic identifies judgments with propositions, assertions, or conclusions.

Pippin quotes Heidegger quoting Kant, “The concept of positing or asserting [Position oder Setzung] is completely simple and identical with that of being in general” (p.86).

To “be” X is to be well said to be X.

For Kant, Pippin explains, “We have the power to determine objectively when something exists or not, so that what there is can be understood as what this power can determine…. [T]he concept of something existing beyond our capacity to determine in principle if it exists (or if we cannot but believe it exists) is an empty notion” (pp. 86-87).

He quotes Kant again, “I find that a judgment is nothing but the manner in which given modes of knowledge are brought to the objective unity of apperception. This is what is intended by the copula is. It is employed to distinguish the objective unity of given representations from a subjective unity” (p. 87).

This will lead Heidegger to say that for Kant, the meaning of Being is unity of apperception. That seems plausible enough.

“The primordial mode of being of Dasein is not primarily as a perceiver but being-in-the-world” (p. 88).

Heidegger wants to disqualify any purely cognitive approach to these issues, and simultaneously to claim that all the philosophers do take a purely cognitive approach, which renders their conclusions invalid. This second claim is once again highly tendentious, because many of the philosophers take a normative approach that is in no way “purely cognitive”.

“Kant takes himself to have demonstrated that all that relation to an object, a determination of any being, can amount to is the objective unity of an apperceptive synthesis…. And there is no indication that he thinks that demonstration will show that the mind imposes a form on a formless matter” (p. 89, emphasis in original).

Hegel and Heidegger both at times blame Kant for using language that tends to suggest the two-stage, “impositionist” view.

“[Kant’s transcendental] deduction is not about ‘stamping’ but about demonstrating that there cannot be any intuited content (i.e., any cognitively relevant content) that is incongruent with the required a priori conditions…. But Heidegger is simply asserting that this unity is ‘subjective’ and imposed…. There is quite a lot, most of it simply assumed by Heidegger, packed into ‘Thinking is esconced in human subjectivity'” (p. 90).

“As a student of Husserl, Heidegger is certainly aware of the objections to any psychologistic account of judgment, and his suggestions about ‘stamping’ and being ‘sunk’ in subjectivity do not trade on any such psychologizing…. Judgment too is a mode of public comportment towards entities, a modality of being-in-the-world, and not originally an inner episode…. [H]e appears to think that locating the intelligibility of being in judgment unavoidably transforms the objects of judgment into mere present-at-hand entities. Given the claim that the primordial, fundamental, or original meaning of beings is as pragmata, equipment, read-to-hand, our fundamental mode of comportment towards beings is engaged and unreflective use, and any interruption of such unreflective use, such as a cognitive judging, must lose any grip on this primordial meaning and primordial comportment in favor of a present-at-hand substance” (p. 93).

Judgment as public comportment rather than inner episode makes good sense. Beings as pragmata are fine. But I simply do not see any “unavoidable” transformation of objects of judgment into present-at-hand entities. Yes, something like this fixing of presence-at-hand does occur in various circumstances. But the history of philosophy provides plenty of counterexamples, among whom I would include Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. Hegel even addresses the issue very explicitly, with his famous complaints about “dead” objects and such. It is disingenuous for Heidegger to ignore this.

Heidegger also appears to claim that unreflective engagement in the world is unequivocally superior to the best Kantian and Hegelian reflection. Unreflective engagement should be granted some role and dignity, but this goes way too far.

“Unless there is such a link between judgment as such and being as constant presence…, this mere link to a thinking subject… would not appear to justify any claim to a distortion or unthinking appropriation of the core metaphysical tradition” (p. 94).

I think we just established that there is no such unqualified link.

“[I]t would not be fair to Kant to insist that he understands this cognitive or judgmental modality as either exclusive or even privileged…. In fact, a good case can be made that one of Kant’s contributions to philosophy is his demonstration that our primary and most significant mode of comportment towards being ‘as a whole’ is not cognitive but practical, the experience of the moral law, our own status as free subjects, and our sensitivity to the beautiful and the sublime” (ibid).

Yes indeed.

“And Kant is famous for denying the possibility of ontology, claiming that the proud name of ontology must give way to the humbler analytic of the understanding” (p. 99).

And I say he is right to do so, and that Hegel follows him in this.

“But there is no moment in Kant that holds that the Being of beings is a matter of disclosure” (p. 100).

Indeed not. If anything, Kant is overly categorical in asserting the purely active nature of thought.

“There can be no undifferentiated mere matter of sensation that is then in a second step shaped by pure concepts” (p. 101).

As I mentioned, Pippin and Brandom have pretty conclusively refuted the old “two stage” reading of Kant on thought and intuition.

Pippin quotes a particularly outrageous claim by Heidegger, that “In order to understand the Critique of Pure Reason, this point must be hammered in, so to speak: knowing is primarily of intuiting…. All thinking is merely in the service of intuition” (ibid).

“This is not exactly Kant’s position. It would be more accurate to summarize it as: knowing is always a thinking intuiting and an intuiting thinking” (pp. 101-102).

Heidegger “even freely admits that Kant insists on a reciprocity between thinking and intuiting, but he proposes forging ahead anyway with his claim for the priority of intuition” (p. 104).

“The ‘basic faculty’ is the imagination, and it is ‘pre-ontological’ because it is the exercise of a nondiscursive, nonconceptual imagining” (p. 109).

I am myself fascinated by the role of imagination in Aristotle and Kant (see also Sellars on Kantian Imagination). I would not claim, however, that imagination is the root of all thought. Imagination in its immediate presentation is nondiscursive and nonconceptual, but Kant’s subtler point is that discursive and conceptual elements nonetheless get wrapped into it. Imagination in the broadest Aristotelian sense seems to be a kind of link between organic being and thought. Without imagination, an organic being cannot be said to think. But thought is more than just imagination. What makes thought rational is its non-arbitrariness. Kant would tell us that imagination cannot be completely arbitrary either, since the categories of thought also apply to it, as he argues in the famously difficult “transcendental deduction” in the Critique of Pure Reason. (See also Capacity to Judge; Figurative Synthesis.)

“More radically put: both intuition and understanding are derivative…. What he appears to mean by derivative is that there could be no role to play for the understanding and intuition conceived as distinct capacities, were there not an original imaginative projection of a horizon of possible encounterable beings” (p. 111).

This part seems unobjectionable.

“So, the question is not whether conceptual capacities are necessary for any experience…. The issue is rather the mode of conceptual actualization. The chess grand master has ‘immediately’ ‘in mind’ a sense of areas of threats, dangers, degrees of possibilities and probabilities, all because of the years he has spent playing and reading chess books. But those moves are determinate, and concepts are in play” (p. 114).

This illustrates what Hegel calls “mediated immediacy”.

“The point of all these metaphors is, of course, to find as many ways as possible to suggest some spontaneous activity in intuiting other than assertoric judging or acts of conceptual sorting, or deliberate rule-following” (p. 115).

In a Kantian context, spontaneous activity and intuition are mutually exclusive, though in real life we never get either of these purely by itself.

“The horizon-forming work of the imagination is not a determination of conceptual intelligibility but our comportment with a world everywhere always already ‘irradiated’ with meaning, significance” (ibid).

This again seems fine. The notion of horizon comes from Husserl’s phenomenology.

“He means that one cannot say of a Dasein, a human person, that this sort of being is simply ‘in time’, in some supposed ‘flow’ of temporal moments. It can, of course, for various purposes, be considered that way, as if Dasein were a table or a plant, but that aspect is derivative from how Dasein orients itself in in time, and in that sense ‘affects itself’…. Heidegger means, again in a way that involves the imagination, that we never experience time simply ‘passing’, but our temporal awareness always (again) involves the issue of meaning…. [T]he notion of time is presented as [a] kind of self-determining and so self-affecting, since time is a pure intuition, where that means not a pure intuited but a pure intuiting…. This is not an empirical event, and so there is not a self that ‘affects’ itself as already present to itself as a substance-like self, a subject” (p. 117).

Here we get to why Heidegger called his magnum opus Being and Time. He wants to give us anything but a boring mathematizing theory of uniform Newtonian time. A radical, nonuniform, constitutive experience of time is one of his more interesting thoughts. It seems to start from Kant’s notion of time as a “pure intuition”. (See also Ricoeur on Husserl on Memory; Ricoeur on Augustine on Memory.)

“A self is the way it stretches itself along in time” (p. 118).

“According to Heidegger, the world, a historical world, sets a horizon of possible meaningfulness — fundamentally the meaning of Being as such — and Dasein’s inheritance of and orientation from such a horizon does not require any self-conscious discursive orientation, but is a matter of simply being involved in the interrelated nexus of practical significances that amounts to the various tasks and projects of the world” (p. 120).

That orientation from a horizon is generally not self-conscious goes with the territory. The same might be said of a human’s uptake of culture.

Heidegger contrasts a good “ready-to-hand” with the bad present-at-hand. The good one is supposed to be original and primordial, which seems to mean it is that by comparison with which he will say everything else is effectively in bad faith (though that is not his term).

“[T]his primordial meaningfulness of entities should be understood as (although not exclusively as) the ready-to-hand, Zuhandenheit, affordances, and not the present-at-hand, at-handedness simply present before us, the vorhanden, primarily stable substances enduring through time understood as a sequence of nows, what Heidegger generally calls standing presence, ständige Anwesenheit. By contrast with empirical intelligibility, our understanding of the ready-to-hand is a matter of attunement and appropriate comportment, something like skillful involvement. This fundamental level of significance has been obscured by the metaphysical tradition since Plato and Aristotle. This is because of the mistaken assumption that our original familiarity with beings in a world is illusory and truth is a struggle towards cognitive intelligibility” (pp. 120-121).

I think something like attunement and comportment and skillful involvement is very much present in Plato and Aristotle (and in Stoicism and Epicureanism, for that matter), so for me the whole negative argument about metaphysics never even gets off the ground. Heidegger is reading what is really a modern issue too far backwards in history.

“Every projection of what matters to us into the future involves a being, Dasein, with no inherent teleology or universal or even available ground (an answer to the question of why what fundamentally matters in the world does or ought to matter). What originally matters is inextricable from our thrownness into a certain historical world, so what comes to matter is a question of contingency, what we plan out concerning what matters is subject to the massive contingency of our lack of control not only over our own ‘ground’ but over our fate or our ever-possible death” (p. 121).

We have not seen any argument why there is no “teleology or universal or even available ground” related to human being-in-the-world, though this is a common modern assumption.

“Most importantly for our present purposes, the priority of the ständige Anwesenheit assumption cannot be assumed in the question of our own being, how our own being is a meaningful issue, at stake for us. At the heart of Heidegger’s analysis in [Being and Time] is the claim that the authentic meaning of Dasein’s being can also crudely but accurately be summarized: anxious being-towards-death” (ibid).

Heidegger has exerted a very great influence on Continentally oriented discourse about the “question of the subject”. There does seem to be a kind of correlation between the broadly syntactic definition of substance as an “underlying thing” in Aristotle’s Categories, and what Heidegger calls “standing presence”, but this is precisely the definition that is superseded in the Metaphysics.

The whole notion that “anxious being-towards-death” is the most important aspect of human subjectivity — and the key to its “authenticity” — seems very implausible. I stand with Spinoza’s “The philosopher thinks of nothing less than of death”. This stuff about death is directly personal for me, as a recent cancer survivor. I choose to meditate on life — the good, the true, and the beautiful — and as much as possible to cherish every moment.

“Heidegger’s basic picture focuses on Dasein’s unique awareness of our own mortality, and so the question of whether one lives with a resolute readiness for anxiety, or a flight from such awareness by the tranquilizing notions like ‘everyone must die; we can’t do anything about it, so why worry about it?’ or ‘what a morbid way to look at life'” (pp. 121-122).

I choose neither of these. Heidegger tries to force us with a false dichotomy.

“This is also a dramatically isolating and individualizing approach. A background standing attunement to the constant impendingness of one’s own death is intensely private and unshareable, and with such a notion at the center it makes almost all of ordinary life escapist and even cowardly” (p. 122).

What Pippin correctly recognizes as a “dramatically isolating and individualizing approach” does not bode well for ethics.

Calling almost all of ordinary life escapist and cowardly sounds like emotional blackmail. This is of a piece with Heidegger’s very uncharitable account of the history of philosophy.

“If we ask this question of Kant in the register in which Heidegger asks it, then it would hardly be correct to suggest that for Kant, ‘primordially’, what it is to be a human, to exist in a distinctively human way, is to be a self-conscious knower…. Kant is under no illusion about the fact that our little ‘island’ of factual knowledge of nature, the pinnacle of which is Newtonian mechanics, is of no deep significance for human life. This is a radical rejection of so many conceptions of philosophy, from the Socratic-Platonic notion of philosophy as a way of life to the notion of philosophy as therapeutic in the Wittgensteinian sense. Human significance and worth are based wholly on a rational faith in our moral vocation. That is what primordially matters. We don’t ‘know’ that we have such a capacity, but its availability is a matter of its practical undeniability” (ibid).

For Kant, our status as what I would call ethical beings is more “primordial” than our status as knowers. I see harmony rather than conflict between the Socratic-Platonic notion of philosophy as a way of life, and a rational faith in our moral vocation.

“Heidegger understands this feature of Kant, that the true significance in being human does not for Kant reside in being a knowing subject” (ibid).

“It is not enough to acknowledge our finitude in this context by noting the inevitability of moral struggle. If there is moral struggle at all, that is already an indication that the moral law is not practically motivating just by being acknowledged. That would be what Kant calls a ‘holy will’. This is a pretty close analogue to his conclusion that the unity of the understanding and intuition requires that the nature of the understanding itself cannot be formulated in terms of the logic of judgment alone (that it requires the prior function of pure imagination). The bearing of pure reason on our sensible inclinations cannot be understood as a mere imposition on an independently conceived sensible nature. (There is also an analogue to Hegel’s early critique of Kant — that this picture of imposition means the law is experienced as wholly positive, an alien authority, as alien as a divine command theory of morality, the mere imposition of a law ‘from without’. It is Hegel’s way of raising the necessary question of what our moral vocation means to us, beyond merely ‘being commanded’.)” (p. 124).

Plato already has a well-developed alternative to a command theory of morality, as well as a good awareness of the importance of mixed forms (see Middle Part of the Soul). As Pippin has already suggested, Kant scholars now generally reject the attribution of an “impositionist” theory to Kant.

“Even if imperfectly, Kant realized that our access to the moral dimension of our being is through a kind of attunement…. As in so many other cases in Kant, what look like two steps, acknowledgement of our duty, then producing a consequent feeling of respect, is actually one moment” (p. 125).

Heidegger approves of Kant’s talk about moral feeling, but he wants to counterpose feeling to judgment in ways Kant would not accept. He does correctly make the important point that meaning is of greater import for ethics than causality.

“Feeling obligated is feeling respect. (A summary account of Heidegger’s point would be that the whole issue of respect looks different when the framework is not the question of practical causality but the meaning of our moral vocation)…. Respect is what gives the way morality fits into a life as a whole its meaning. This is why Heidegger applauds Kant so enthusiastically” (p. 126). Pippin quotes Heidegger, “This feeling of respect for the law is produced by reason itself; it is not a feeling pathologically induced by sensibility…. [M]y having a feeling of respect for the law and with it this specific mode of revelation of the law is the only way in which the moral law as such is able to approach me” (ibid).

“There is more ambiguity about this in Kant than Heidegger lets on. Heidegger’s interpretation of Kantian respect, at least prima facie, would ultimately not seem to be consistent with the notion of autonomy so important to Kant” (p.127).

Kant would not use a metaphor of revelation. He certainly would not call it the “only way” we encounter ethical principles. And he would not speak of the moral law approaching us. For Kant, it is we who are the agents, because it is we who are ethically responsible.

As a would-be experimental poet in my youth, I used to be fascinated by these metaphors of Heidegger, where Being reaches out to us, and so on.

“Heidegger does not think Kant can make any of the metaphysically significant distinctions he wants to make between a phenomenal or psychological subject and a moral or transcendental subject because he treats them all as substances underlying thought, action, and empirical sensations” (ibid).

Here we come back to the question of what a subject is for Kant. Heidegger is right that it should not be thought of as a substance in the sense of Aristotle’s Categories.

“The other conception of the thing or any being is what he calls primordial, authentic, originary, and closest to us — what is directly available in our ordinary comportments, a being always already irradiated, to use Wittgenstein’s word, with meaning” (p. 129).

This seems to be an immediate that is supposed to be more true than any mediation.

“We have somehow come to misunderstand and distort what is and always remains most familiar to us…. What we inherit is a world where the unreflective basic and orienting meaning amounts to an assumption about what matters (and therewith what doesn’t matter or matter very much), that what is cared about, what in the world has ‘prevailed’ (gewaltet), is manipulability, beings understood as manipulable stuff, available for satisfying human self-interests….We have even come to experience ourselves in this way, as things of a sort” (ibid).

There is a significant grain of truth here, but a similar insight can already be found in many of the world’s religious traditions; in a more philosophical form among the neoplatonists; and in a purely philosophical form in Hegel.

“We do not recognize our own openness to meaningful being. This is not like ignorance or a mistake…. There is a kind of self-evasion even in dealing with, comporting with, objects that makes them predictable and secure, manipulable all out of a kind of thoughtless, laziness, and instrumentalizing scientism” (pp. 129-130).

He seems to be saying that humans as a whole are dominated by a kind of willful bad faith that imposes shallowness on everything, and for which we are more culpable than if we were merely ignorant or mistaken.

“Mention is made again of the fact that ‘the essence of the thing [is] determined on the basis of the essence of propositions’…. Language, history, the work of art are all understood in terms of this ontology, which has now assumed the role of a pre-ontological orientation, distorting our self-understanding, our own experiences of ourselves. He even suggests that the reason poetry is so poorly taught (a claim he simply assumes) is because poetry teachers cannot distinguish between the distinct mode of being of a poem and a thing” (pp. 130-131).

To put it another way, Heidegger claims that humans in general — and Western philosophers in particular — distort everything in theoreticist and logocentric ways. It’s hard to know what to do with such sweeping condemnations. I earlier compared this to the circular logic of emotional blackmail, which basically tells us that if we disagree, we obviously must be part of the problem.

Pippin suggests that for Heidegger, at root this is an issue with the social dominance of modern science. I have my own criticisms of modern science, but I by no means see it in a purely negative light. The neo-Kantians who dominated German philosophy in the early 20th century seem to have been one of Heidegger’s main targets, both because of their relation to Kant and because of their strong advocacy of modern science.

“[I]t has proven to be inevitable that our self-understanding would have to change to accommodate the approach of scientific naturalism, and that was and remains the intent of the project. A look at how modern economics understands rational agents, or how psychiatry does, or the research paradigms in the social sciences and now even in the humanities make that clear…. Heidegger’s idea for a recovery, a new beginning in philosophy (which he accuses of complicity with this ‘standing presence’ project since its beginning) rests on the claim that such claims of scientific objectivity can be shown to be based on a distortion of a primordial level of meaningfulness” (pp. 134-135).

While I would put a modest notion of ethical being ahead of the requirements of science, I do also believe that there are requirements of science. Methodological criticism should not be confused with global dismissal. I generally disagree when philosophers globally dismiss other philosophers.

Simple Thoughts About Being

It has been over three years since I preliminarily sketched what I want to positively say about being and beings (see also Ethical Being; Back to Ethical Being). Since then, further work on Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel has provided many additional resources for addressing various aspects of this question.

Kant stresses the ethical notion of respect for others, meaning other humans. I advocate respect for all beings, including animals and even inanimate objects that cannot share with us in a full mutuality of recognition, as a fundamental guiding attitude. For example, we respect objects by practicing benevolent stewardship and avoiding any form of wanton destructiveness. As I understand this generalized respect, it rules out the ascetic, world-denying attitude that Hegel calls the Unhappy Consciousness, which abases itself and everything else before an infinite God. It also rules out the negative attitude toward anything that is not Dasein that is promoted by the Heideggerian ontic/ontological distinction.

As to what being is in the most general sense, I think Aristotle has the right idea in starting out from the ways in which the transitive verb “is” is said (see Things Said; “Said of”). This becomes an investigation into the proprieties of saying, asserting, or claiming — or, as Aristotle might put it, what it is that makes anything said to be well said. This kind of normative saying broaches the distinction between essence and appearance.

It ultimately turns out that the distinction between essence and appearance can only be sustained within some given context. The very “same” thing that is nonessential in one context can be essential in another, and vice versa.

Being primarily expresses the “what” of things. I broadly agree with Dietrich of Freiberg that essence says all there is to say about being and beings. A human being is the same as a human.

The essence of things is not fixed in advance; rather, it is emergent. (See also What and Why; What We Mean by Meaning.)

What things are can only be a matter of what Kant and Hegel call reflective judgment. There is no external authority to which we could finally appeal. (See Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity; Reflection, Judgment, Process; The Scope of Reflective Judgment in Hegel.)

As Kant might remind us, existence is not a predicate. Etymologically from the Greek, to exist is to be able to be picked out or distinguished from other things in some context. A mathematical proof of something’s “existence” means that if certain things are true in a given context, it is then possible to pick out a distinct something within the context, and we then say that that something “exists”.

Finally, I agree that poetry, music, and other arts can tell us something qualitative about being that we do not get any other way than through the appreciation of beauty. (See also Adverbial Otherness.)

Heidegger’s Story About Metaphysics

This will be quite a long one. For a quick capsule of my own views in this area, see Simple Thoughts About Being.

In Heidegger we have another instance of philosophical historical storytelling, such as came up recently with Brandom’s discussion of Rorty’s links to Dewey’s pragmatism, but this one is the story of a disaster rather than an optimistic vision of progress. This post is part of a response to Robert Pippin’s new book on Heidegger’s “overcoming” of German idealism. I am no Heidegger scholar, but I do know something about the history of things that have been called metaphysics.

Heidegger has famously promulgated an extremely simplified story about the history of Western metaphysics, as from beginning to end the story of a wrong direction. All the philosophers — from Plato to Hegel and beyond — stand indicted, except for Heidegger himself. Any such sweeping condemnation ought to be automatically suspect, but this thesis gained wide currency in the 20th century. According to Heidegger, Hegel’s substitution of “logic” for traditional metaphysics makes the wrong direction that metaphysics has always taken completely explicit.

“Heidegger begins by noting that Hegel, ‘the culminator’, had correctly seen that the underlying commitment of the Western tradition is that metaphysics… is ‘logic’. He does not, of course, mean formal logic, …but what Heidegger calls begreifendes Denken, conceptualizing thinking. He means a commitment to the view that what he calls the actuality of the actual, or the real essence of anything, is what can be grasped conceptually…, a determination of what must be the case for anything to be a determinate thing at all” (Pippin, The Culmination, p. 8).

“This means that being is already understood as what Heidegger will call ‘standing presence’ (ständige or beständige Anwesenheit). By this he means a being that is determinate, discriminable from other beings, and so potentially available to a subject in the present and able to endure through a temporal phase. The comprehensive concept for such an understanding is ousia, substance” (p. 11).

The ousia that has these characteristics is substance in the merely syntactic sense that it is given in Aristotle’s Categories for use in formal logic. Across many posts, we have seen how one of Aristotle’s main goals in the collection of manuscripts the ancient editors called “after the Physics” (meta ta phusika) involves explicating ousia not as a syntactic category, but first as form, and then as act and potentiality.

“This then raises the question that is at the heart of the matter for Heidegger: Why have we not asked whether this (let us say as shorthand, determinately standing being as thinkability) should be assumed to be the orientation for any inquiry about the meaning of being qua being? What grounds can justify such an orientation? Is it possible that a finite, mortal being can understand itself as an in-principle, completely self-knowing being with respect to the fundamental issues of first philosophy? If the question is the meaning of Being as such, it must mean the meaning available for the one being open to that question, and that being is not rightly understood as exclusively self-conscious, a pure thinking being, but as a living, finite being — what Heidegger calls Dasein — and the task of first philosophy must be reformulated in the light of the analysis of that being, a Daseinsanalytik. So, instead of a Phenomenology of Spirit, culminating in the self-knowing of a Science of Logic, we need a ‘metaphysics’ of Dasein” (ibid).

Pippin rather carefully states Hegel’s claim: living, finite beings can have reflective self-knowledge “in principle” and “with respect to the fundamental issues of first philosophy”. This involves neither infallibility nor omniscience.

Heidegger is right that Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, among others, think of being as inseparable from intelligibility. He is right too that Aristotle and Hegel, in their pursuit of intelligibility, direct inquiry away from being qua being as a matter of principle. I would say this is because their investigations have convinced them that being qua being cannot explain intelligibility or meaning. But Heidegger has only asserted — and not shown — that the sincere pursuit of intelligibility must inevitably go wrong.

Pippin emphasizes Heidegger’s insistence that we are finite, mortal beings. Heidegger criticizes Kant for allegedly giving up his insistence on our finitude in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in favor of emphasis on the transcendental.

Hegel takes the emphasis on finitude to be a defeatist stance. He provocatively claims that in spite of our finitude and mortality, language and reflection introduce humans to a kind of infinity. He argues that we should embrace that infinity.

“But when Heidegger argues against any absolute status for philosophical judgments, he is not merely arguing against Hegel or an old-fashioned self-understanding but against all traditional philosophy itself” (p. 12, emphasis in original).

This is all deeply related to the question of whether humans can have genuine knowledge at all. Hegel is an optimist about this; Heidegger is a pessimist.

The vexed term “absolute” seems to be used by Heidegger in a blunt, black-and-white sense. For better or worse, “absolute” was a much overused term in Hegel’s Germany, made fashionable by the Schellingians. Hegel has quite a few wry comments about these pundits of “absolute” truth.

I have suggested that for Hegel, knowledge is said to be “absolute” when it fully recognizes its own relativity, which is to say its own conditioned character. Hegel’s claim would then be that anything deserving the name of knowledge in the fullest sense can and must in principle be capable of recognizing its own relativity. Perhaps indeed this is a criterion for knowledge in the fullest sense, not unlike the Socratic criterion for wisdom as recognition of all we do not know.

“[I]increasingly after Being and Time, Heidegger came to characterize what he was about as an attempt to ‘overcome’ Hegel, whom he consistently characterized as the ‘culmination’ of the entire Western tradition as well as German Idealism” (p. 13). Pippin quotes Heidegger, “with
German Idealism, it seemed as if philosophy as such had reached an end and had entrusted the administration of knowledge exclusively to the sciences” (ibid).

“This is all tied to Heidegger’s view that true metaphysical thinking is not to be understood as a strictly cognitive exercise of pure reason, and this is linked with a hermeneutic rather than analytic character of thinking. For him this means that such interpretive or ‘meaning-seeking’ thinking is inseparable from how such thinking should matter to any thinker” (p. 14).

But Aristotle and Hegel each in their own way do practice a kind of thinking that is more hermeneutic than analytic. They just don’t use the word, at least in its contemporary sense. (Aristotle’s On Interpretation is literally hermeneutike, but it is among the least hermeneutic of Aristotle’s texts.) Aristotle and Hegel’s difference with Heidegger is that like Paul Ricoeur also does, they recognize that more “analytic” investigations do also have value for a primarily hermeneutic orientation.

“And this mattering is complicated by the fact that such thinking is burdened by a dependence on a ground we constantly experience as beyond our ability to grasp conceptually” (p. 15).

Here is where things get complicated. For Heidegger, the ground is in principle beyond our ability to grasp conceptually. I think this assumes what Hegel would call an unreflective and therefore untrue (representational) notion of what is conceptual.

Brandom has written a lot about the very unordinary because nonrepresentational notion of the conceptual in Kant and Hegel, and I see something similar in Aristotle. (I find it a bit odd that Brandom is so generous in his reading of Heidegger, and am quite sure that Heidegger would not return the favor.)

“Heidegger has rejected understanding beings as mere objects standing over against a subject as a derivative and misleading assumption, and his references to Being are not to a being. So ‘being lasts as the withdrawing-proferring’ must refer to an ultimate source of meaningfulness that emerges historically, contingently, in a way that orients Dasein but cannot be determinately discriminated” (p. 20).

I find this ironic. It could be said that Hegel’s life work was devoted to promoting a point of view other than that of a subject confronting an object. Hegel can be abstruse and frustrating, but I better trust his version of this.

“[T]here is no other being like Dasein, whose own being is what Heidegger calls ‘existence’, a being of pure possibility that flees its call to itself to interrogate the meaning of its being, until wrenched out of its daily thoughtlessness by anxiety” (p. 21).

The description of “pure possibility” recalls some discussions of potential intellect in the broadly Aristotelian tradition. Of course, Aristotelian intellect does not “flee its call to itself”, or need to be “wrenched out of its daily thoughtlessness,” or experience anxiety. On some accounts such things might be said of the soul, but Aristotelian psyche has organic roots and is in no way a pure possibility. On the other hand, as a result of a complex contingent development, a fused notion of “intellectual soul” gained wide currency in the Latin middle ages, and this laid the ground for the oddly amphibious character of the Cartesian cogito and the Lockean understanding, which obliterate any distinction at all between intellect and a psychological entity.

“Dasein is described as always already ‘thrown’ into its world, inheriting a structure of significance, mattering, salience, and importance that forms a horizon of meaningfulness for any Dasein’s self-interrogation” (p. 22).

This sort of thing is probably one of the major appeals of Heidegger. Some of the vocabulary is uniquely his. But what is being said here is actually not that far from a traditional view (substitute “the soul” for Dasein). Experiences of encountering meaningfulness in a “world” that is already constituted independent of our willful doing are not far to find.

“The continuity of [Heidegger’s] emphasis on meaningfulness as the crux of the issue of Being’s availability is the interpretation I want to defend…. We can call this a resolute reading of Heidegger” (p. 25).

“The major question is the question of the meaningful availability of being at all”…. In Division One of [Being and Time], the possibility of any such nondiscursive availability is established by demonstrating phenomenologically that Dasein is Being-in-the World, not a subject standing over against objects, and a being whose meaning is care” (p. 26).

I am tempted to suggest that Hegelian Geist could also be said to be “Being-in-the World, not a subject standing over against objects, and a being whose meaning is care”. The difference is that Heidegger insists this all occurs at a nondiscursive level. A common Hegelian model is that things that do not start out as immediate can effectively acquire an immediate character.

(This calls for a brief sidebar on the strange way “discursivity” is used in the literature on Kant. Discursivity ought to simply mean something depending on articulation in discourse, as opposed to intuition or immediacy. But what is commonly called Kant’s “discursivity thesis” is his rather extreme claim that the understanding is entirely active, and includes no passive or receptive component or aspect whatsoever.)

“This is not at all to deny that this emphasis after the war shifted from existential thrownness into a world to the problem of language. But the general theme of most relevance to the critique of German Idealism — dependence, and so the impossibility of Hegel’s (and all of philosophy’s pure, autonomous thinking — is still apparent. In ‘Poetically Man Dwells’, a 1951 lecture…, we read, ‘Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man’ ” (p. 27).

Brandom might remind us here of Hegel’s own very sharp critique of “independence” and mastery.

“But, and here lies the source of the difficulty, what we have come to understand as metaphysics actually has never really addressed the question it poses for itself, aside from traces of an appreciation of the genuine issue in the pre-Socratics. Metaphysics has asked instead about the possible meaning of the ‘beings’…. The ancient answer to such a question was, of course, form. But… that leaves unanswered, in all traditional metaphysics, the possible meaningfulness of Being qua Being itself” (p. 28).

Here we get Heidegger’s line — only the pre-Socratics and Heidegger got Being right, and everyone else in history is completely off base. What’s peculiar is that Heidegger, who emphasizes how the Latin tradition distorts the Greek, takes up the scholastic valorization of “being qua being” without seeming to recognize how un-Aristotelian it actually is. Not that the equivalent phrase never appears in Aristotle (it does, in a relatively peripheral role), but only a huge weight of commentary promoted it to the central role it has in Aquinas.

“The problem of the ‘meaning of being’ is the problem of the meaningfulness of beings — that is, beings in the way they matter…. The source of that meaningfulness is the possibility of meaningfulness as such, the possible meaningfulness of Being as such. That possibility of meaningfulness question is not a transcendental possibility for Heidegger because it cannot be raised in strict distinction from the meaningfulness of beings. That is, this relation, between the general possibility of meaningfulness of Being at all, and the meaningfulness of entities, is not a matter of conceptual necessity but of what Heidegger calls ‘primordiality’…. There is a profound difference between the two regimes of meaningfulness, what Heidegger calls the ontological difference” (pp. 31-32).

Heidegger’s insistence on a radical split between “ontic” and “ontological” things — beings versus Being — is unprecedented. I cannot help being reminded of the sharp division between created things and the Eternal in the Hegelian “Unhappy Consciousness”. Perhaps Heidegger represents a contemporary Unhappy Consciousness.

“In his 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger is unambiguous about what he considers the basic philosophical problem. ‘We assert now that being is the sole and proper theme of philosophy.’ Philosophy itself is said to be ‘the science of being’. That Heidegger believes is unambiguous. No philosopher has ever concentrated so intensely on one question for the entirety of his fifty-plus-year career. But the first question for any student of Heidegger is simply what this question concerns…. Is the question of the meaning of Being even a question — that is, a question with a possible answer?” (p. 33).

Before this book of Pippin’s, I was very aware of Heidegger’s reverence for Parmenidean Being, but the close linkage that Pippin brings out between the “question of Being” and general questioning about meaning is new to me. My own attitude is that Aristotelian first philosophy is best understood as itself a kind of higher-order or generalized hermeneutics, and that general questioning about meaning does not benefit from being related to a notion of being as such.

“This issue is made more difficult because Heidegger is eager to qualify and to some extent marginalize the usual and much more familiar semantic ways of addressing the problem: the various senses of the word ‘is'” (ibid).

Indeed. Aristotle’s classic discussion of the ways in which being is said is structured entirely around the transitive senses of “is”. Being as such is not a substance but a transitive verb, “to be x”. Aristotle mentions it mainly in the context of the extreme generality of an incompatibility of contradictory assertions that is more than just syntactic. Being as such is something separate from Aristotle’s own notion of first cause (see also here); this identification was introduced much later.

“[Heidegger] tells us that such formulations assume the answer to the question he is trying to pose and so do not point to a way of addressing it…. Heidegger’s lifelong claim is that forgetting the question of the meaning of being is a catastrophic event in the history of mankind, that it leads to nihilism and a predatory, self-destructive technical manipulation of the earth” (p. 34).

If “forgetting” the question is a catastrophic event in history, this implies that it was previously clearly understood, at least by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides. We are then supposed to return to an immaculate origin. But history doesn’t show any such immaculate origin, and Plato’s dialogues already demonstrated that the teachings of both Heraclitus and Parmenides are untenable as they stand. Plato is vastly more sophisticated than either of them, with respect to the kinds of arguments he exhibits in his dialogues. And Aristotle is even more sophisticated than Plato. Here we really do have an example of the kind of progressive development that Brandom, following Rorty and Dewey, thinks we should be looking for in history. But as Nietzsche said, philosophers tend to be untimely. No historic society or culture as a whole has ever lived up to the deeper insights of Plato and Aristotle. In terms of sophistication of arguments, the contemporary world at a broad social level still has a pre-Platonic level of understanding.

“His is not a question of ontological commitment, the question of what beings there are or what kinds of beings. (E.g., Is there a God? Are there minds? Are there possibilities? And he does not ask: what makes it possible for beings to be the determinate beings they are? How can they be what they are and be differentiated from other beings? (E.g. what is it to be a mind? What is it to be a possibility?… He does not even mean what must be true of anything at all” (p. 35).

Heidegger argues for the primacy of “fundamental ontology”, which he distinguishes from the ordinary ontology that presupposes a great deal of implicit understanding about things in the world. This latter kind of ontology was already decisively criticized by Kant as dogmatic. But at least as interpreted by the neo-Kantians who dominated German academia in the early 20th century, Kant’s critique represented a turn toward epistemology. Indeed the whole “modern” tradition from Descartes on is sometimes characterized as primarily epistemological and science-oriented. Heidegger is definitely arguing for something new here, a new kind of first philosophy linked more closely with art and poetry.

“[A]ll consciousness-based and representational models of intentionality, are all improperly formulated and misleading. The possibility of such intentionality should rather be understood as requiring ‘being in the world’. A subject-conscious-of-a-distinct-object model should be replaced by an inseparable subject-object nexus, a subject always already transcended in a practical and unthematic relation to its objects. The relation is not one of spectatorship or simple perceptual awareness but ‘comportment’ (Verhalten), an active engagement with the world, an involvement that is driven by how things have come to matter” (p. 36).

We are agreed on this. But Brandom has argued that Kant and Hegel already moved beyond a consciousness-based or representational model of intentionality to one grounded in normativity. Moreover, the normativity model seems a better fit for Plato and Aristotle as well. So what Heidegger is criticizing does not seem to apply to any of the four greatest philosophers in the tradition.

“For Heidegger, world is not the totality of what there is, as in Kant, or all that is the case, as in Wittgenstein. World is a necessarily presupposed (i.e., primordial) condition for the possible availability or accessibility of beings within such a world in the first place…. This notion of availability as deep familiarity implies a kind of immediacy in our original encounter with beings in the world, but not like the direct presence of intentional objects as in theories of a pure ‘given’…. This implies a kind of immersion in the field of significances” (ibid).

I’m not quite sure about this. Immersion in a field of significances sounds promising, but what is this deep familiarity and immediacy that would not be a direct presence?

“In a very shorthand way, we can say that the background world for any possible accessibility and for [the individuation of humans] is a historical world — what Heidegger will call, using another term for openness, a clearing (Lichtung), not a species form” (p. 39).

Heidegger’s metaphor of a “clearing” has a kind of appeal. This seems to be a kind of historically emergent indeterminacy. All human experience is historically conditioned. There is no logos without ethos.

“Dasein is what it takes itself to be, within a world into which it is thrown, over which it has no power or influence. This means that primordial access to beings and to beings as a whole, being as such, is not originally cognitive, not the object of judgments, but requires instead what Heidegger calls a prior attunement…. [I]t is that involvement within a world that allows meaningful access to the beings that show up in such a world” (ibid).

Here we see a number of familiar themes, expressed in a novel vocabulary that is more dramatic and more categorical. The “taking” part is a familiar Kantian notion, but here it seems to be absolutized for the single individual in a way that Hegel at least would call one-sided. The social/ethical reciprocity in the constitution of meaning that Hegel so emphasizes is completely absent here. The world into which we are thrown again seems to be a very blunt dramatization of the non-independence and non-mastery that is an essential feature of human being for Hegel. But Kant or Hegel would also never say that we have no power or influence over the world, only that it is finite.

I’m still not quite sure what is going on with this vocabulary of “access” and “availability” of beings. At first I thought Pippin meant to associate it with what Heidegger pejoratively calls presence-at-hand, which seems to involve a kind of prejudice, like what the philosophically oriented sociologist Karl Mannheim calls ideology in the general sense. (Mannheim does in fact rather superficially refer to Heidegger, among others.) But here this access or availability seems to be playing a more positive role in Heidegger’s account, and to the extent that it does, it suggests a rather Cartesian separation of subject and object, which seems very ironic. Heidegger denounces all of “Western metaphysics”, from beginning to end, for supposedly assuming something like this. I don’t think this “Cartesian” notion of subject and object really applies to key figures like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, among others. Meanwhile, the researches of Alain de Libera on the “archaeology of the subject” strongly suggest that what is called the Cartesian subject has deep roots not only in scholasticism, but also earlier among the Christian church fathers.

I think the sharp dualism Heidegger puts between the bad, empirical ontic of the everyday and the good, metaphysical ontological that addresses only Being with a capital B is undesirable, and too much like the uncrossable separation between worldly beings and God in what Hegel calls the Unhappy Consciousness. Heidegger throws away too much. The philosophical dignity of the ontic should be rehabilitated. Even Hegel — who is very concerned not to swallow all particulars up in the whole in the way that he says that Spinoza does — sometimes seems to me to go too far in his critique of reified “things”.

“If there were no Dasein, there would be all the entities there now are, but none of them would mean anything. The world is the condition of availability…. The question of what accounts for things existing at all is not Heidegger’s question” (p. 40).

If there were no interpretive activity, there would be no meaning. He is right that this has nothing to do with the uninteresting question of whether things exist or not.

“The task of metaphysics is said to be to ‘awaken’ a fundamental attunement to the world (or to awaken us to the realization that we are already attuned)… in the musical sense of being tuned, on the right wavelength, or appreciatively engaged in this field of what matters” (p. 41).

The musical metaphor, like the appeals to poetry, has a kind of intuitive resonance, but here we have to tread carefully. Heidegger seems to appeal to simple intuition in places where there would be ramified reflection in Hegel.

“The ontologically significant states that disclose such meaningfulness as such are attunements like anxiety or boredom, where all such mattering in a sense fails, and so, in such a brutal contrast, the fundamentality (and contingency) of meaningfulness and manifestness as such is salient. And Heidegger always insists that such a significance, such degrees of mattering, cannot be understood as a subject projecting onto otherwise meaningless entities. There are no two steps in such Bedeutsamkeit, or meaningfulness: an encounter with a mere object and then a subjective projection of value by an individual or community. There are not two steps because there is no such first step; Dasein is ‘always already’ within the world of meaningfulness” (pp. 41-42).

That there is an “always already” aspect to our engagement with meaning seems entirely right. But what is this “manifestness as such”? It sounds like mere appearance that contributes nothing to understanding.

“Heidegger is proposing to shift the main tasks of philosophy from the analysis of concepts involved on knowledge claims, empirical experience, and moral claims to an interpretive enterprise, at the center of which are these notions of familiarity (Vertrautheit), meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit), and care (Sorge). As he tells us, a ‘fundamental ontology’ is a ‘hermeneutics of facticity’, and for all the revisions in his language and approach, I don’t believe he ever changed his views about the ‘fundamentality’ of such a hermeneutics (p. 42).

I found an early (1923) lecture course of Heidegger entitled Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, in which he emphasizes that hermeneutics is “not just a doctrine about interpretation… Hermeneutics has the task of making the Dasein which is in each case our own accessible to this Dasein itself with regard to the character of its being, communicating Dasein to itself in this regard, hunting down the alienation from itself with which it is smitten” (p. 11 in link above).

Heidegger delights in putting forward new jargon, like specifying what is to be interpreted as “the being-there of Dasein in the awhileness of temporal particularity” (p. 5 in link above). In any case, Dasein is supposed to better characterize us than reason or intellect or Husserlian phenomenology.

I agree that interpretation does (or should) come before any account of knowledge or being. Meaning is never reducible to something merely given to us, but requires a kind of practical engagement. It is something that we create or construct as much as find.

“That is why the epistemological issue is not prominent in what follows. The manifestation of such significance… ‘happens’ as a matter of mattering and is not a problem of idealism and realism… [also] not a psychological or social-normative issue” (p. 43).

He wants significance to be something that “happens”. I agree it is not a psychological or sociological or other empirical fact. At a simple level, significance could be said to “happen” when interpretation happens. But as such, meaning is no more an event than it is a fact.

“Heidegger’s question is not about the content of the concept Being, but rather about the meaningfulness of our engagements and comportings” (p. 44).

“As Heidegger increasingly insists throughout the ’30s, manifestness in this sense is an event” (ibid).

Unlike meaning, it does seem as though manifestness could be considered at least closely related to a kind of event (an appearing). But I don’t think meaning or significance is reducible to such manifestness.

“Beings don’t have this familiar signification in isolation but within a horizon of possible meaningfulness — that is, within a world…. [T]he world can never become an object, a being, in the world…. And he claims: ‘We can never look upon the phenomenon of world directly’…. That is, the problem of the worldhood of the world in effect names the problem of the meaning of Being as such…. The combination of the world’s centrality and relative cognitive unavailability is what produces what Heidegger refers to as a kind of homesickness, an uncanniness at our being always subject to such a world into which we are thrown, but which we cannot redeem, make sense of theoretically, or directly articulate…. [S]uch worldhood is not a source we have any extra-worldly access to. Anyone for whom anything matters knows that such mattering cannot be understood as the result of any prior reflection on what ought to matter” (p. 45, emphasis in original).

There is no meaning of anything in isolation. Meaning exists only in relation to other meaning. It is an effect of the interconnection of things. “Worldhood” is a name Heidegger gives to this non-isolation of meanings, of which I note again that Hegel was the pioneer in modern times. But once more, I do not see what this would have to do with being as such. The relations that make up the world are concrete.

“Given that the emphasis here on our primary access to the meaning of Being as such is an attunement, not any theoretical claim, and given this focus through boredom, it is clearly the case that Heidegger is tracking how things ‘mean’ to us (‘how things stand concerning us’) as a matter of mattering, a kind of mattering that could contingently collapse and thereby reveal itself” (pp. 47-48).

Heidegger’s novel focus on motifs like boredom and anxiety in Being and Time became a major catalyst for 20th century existentialism. Pippin is generously tracing this back to the much more general question of how things come to “matter” to us. I think there is a more direct and more classical path into this question of mattering, which need have nothing to do with boredom or anxiety. At the level of “us”, we need to stop dichotomizing reason and feeling. As Aristotle said, ethical choice is “either intellect fused with desire, or desire fused with thinking, and such a source is a human being”.

Pippin expands on what he means by “mattering”. His account recalls both Hegel and American pragmatism.

“Our initiation into any historical world is primarily an initiation into this realm of mattering…. Language use is normative not only grammatically but in the matter of its proprieties. That is, we are implicitly attuned to proprieties, or meaningfulness and significances, in daily exchanges with others. (Being so attuned is not incompatible with disregarding or challenging such assumed norms. In fact, it is a necessary condition for doing so.) Likewise, when we learn a task, like cooking, we learn the normative proprieties of the art: what utensils are for, how to use them, what makes for good seasoning, good time management, best techniques, mis en place, etc. We learn to understand the relation between eating and dining, and the place of food and cooking in the rituals of family and social life. In this and many other domains, all the beings we encounter are encountered within a world in which public proprieties have come to prevail, and we are onto these not by having beliefs about them or as a result of explicit evaluations but through being in a world, coping with other beings and other Dasein, in our Verhalten, as Heidegger keeps saying: comportment, a practical mode of access everywhere normative” (p. 48).

Clearly, “mattering” has what the Kant scholars would nowadays call a normative character.

“Heidegger’s main point is that the present-at-hand seems to be such that an engagement with mere substances and their proprieties is treated as if it weren’t a worldly interpretation. We are engaged in a practical comportment that we take ourselves to be avoiding, to be aspiring to ‘the view from nowhere’. This would be like saying that what has come to matter most is a ‘not mattering’ world-relation” (p. 50, emphasis in original).

Pippin elsewhere compares the Heideggerian present-at-hand to the point of view of mere Consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology. They are both concerned with the reification of experience into subject and object. They both suppress their own interpretive character.

“I should also signal here that, especially with respect to Hegel, we will have to revisit the issue of a logical prejudice and examine whether Hegel is guilty of it. After all, Hegel relies in the Phenomenology on such nondiscursive moments as the struggle for recognition, which is certainly not an exchange of judgmental claims” (ibid).

Pippin elsewhere points out that Heidegger’s claim that Hegel’s approach to meaning necessarily involves a “logical prejudice” and ignores nondiscursive dimensions is itself tendentious.

Where he seems to have more sympathy to Heidegger is in relation to the Hegelian talk about the absolute. It now seems to me that like Brandom, Pippin ultimately rejects the Hegelian absolute, rather than just having a deflationary interpretation of it, such as I would propose. I think the “absolute” is inflated (originally Schellingian) rhetoric for the much more modest claim that there is after all some knowledge in the strong sense of episteme. Properly speaking, the Hegelian absolute is not God, though Hegel does figuratively connect the two, especially when he is trying to be understood by nonphilosophers. More properly, the absolute is any instance of pure thought. But the reality of pure thought is itself challenging to explain, especially as applicable to us humans, who experience and indeed are constituted by the fusion of intellect and desire. Aristotle, Averroes, Hegel, and Husserl all make important contributions to such an explanation.

“[T]he way in which the problem of being as such gets any kind of grip on Dasein is not as the result of judgmental claims. The manifestness of beings as a whole cannot be understood as the content of any ‘as such’ judgment. That is the ‘apophantical as’ and cannot be original because it depends on a prior ‘hermeneutical as’…. [T]he meaning should not be thought of in terms of discursivity — again, the cardinal sin of the metaphysical tradition, culminating in Kant and Hegel” (p. 52).

It seems to me that Heidegger’s notion of discursivity is too narrow. In Pippin’s account we see a kind of dichotomy operating, between the kind of judgment associated with assertion, and interpretation. Yes, the “apophantical as” does indeed depend on the “hermeneutic as”, but in my view this was already anticipated by Aristotle. Wisdom is excellence in interpretation, not allegedly “knowing” some pre-existing truth. Truth is not prefabricated in Plato or Aristotle; it is only arrived at through sustained inquiry, and it is the sustaining of the inquiry that gives it its solidity.

“[F]or Heidegger, in all of Western philosophy, we do not know what we mean when we simply note that something, whatever it is, is manifested as what it actually is, endures, or is still alive or occupies space — or, to broach a large topic for him, what ‘happens’ to be” (p. 55).

I say that this is obscurantist. Mere happening to be in and of itself has no meaning at all. It corresponds to inarticulate noise. We begin to have meaning when we talk about some detailed way of being. A mere accident has no meaning.

“So the question is not what some being is, or what it is as such, but what it ‘means’ for it to be at all. By ‘meaning’ here he does not mean linguistic meaning (he says that all linguistic meaning is founded on ontological meaning), and he does not mean meaning in the sense of purposiveness” (p. 56).

So the conclusion does not follow. The linguistic meaning that is rejected here seems to be that of a banal representationalism, and the purposiveness a banal form of utility. But ordinary linguistic meaning is not purely representational; it too has a “poetic” dimension. And internal teleology in Aristotle and Hegel is precisely not reducible to utility (see Teleology After Kant).

“Heidegger will often also note that being should be considered a ‘presencing’ (Anwesende) of being, not something present at hand. By making this distinction, he means that any being present to us (which Heidegger thinks we usually and thoughtlessly attend to as merely present-at-hand (Vorhanden) is only a result” (p. 58, emphasis in original).

That everything that seems to be simply given or present at hand is better understood as a result, is an insight that goes all the way back to Aristotle’s insistence on the priority of ends. It appears in a particularly vivid form in Kant and Hegel.

“This would mean a wholly contingent shifting from beings available as substantial in one period, …to, in another, beings available as created beings, to beings available only as represented for a subject, to being available only as material for technological manipulation…. The Greek notion of ousia (which Heidegger insists is already connected to property, material for use, disposability), the medieval focus on ens creatum, the post-Cartesian notion of represented-being, and the technological orientation all involve a kind of concealment (and therein lies a crude summary of Heidegger’s entire history of metaphysics) that must be different from the inevitable and, one might say, ontologically appropriate sort of ‘concealing’ (more a kind of elusiveness) in the ‘work of art’ — a Greek temple, say” (pp. 66-67).

This recognition of “elusiveness” goes all the way back to Socrates and Plato. It is what underlies Socratic questioning and the long detour.

“Plato and Aristotle set us in a direction we have found it impossible to free ourselves from — the metaphysics of presence, the primordial mattering of intelligibility, knowing, which shows up even in Nietzsche’s claim to have freed us from metaphysical illusions” (p. 67).

Plato and Aristotle were the original critics of the metaphysics of presence. In modern times, this critique was notably taken up by Hegel.

“Nothing is ever originally available to us as such present-at-hand beings, but remarkably we have come to experience the world through some sort of willful blindness thanks to which our everyday world, what should be closest to us, the familiarity of the world as pragmata, is furthest from us…. The question of the meaning of Being has been not only forgotten but suppressed, layered over with some putative ‘neutral’ posing of observing subjects against present at hand substances” (p. 69, emphasis in original).

Hegel’s Phenomenology is from beginning to end an elaboration of a more sophisticated version of this insight.

“Heidegger asks… ‘Why is logic the science of assertion?’…. But there is an obvious answer to Heidegger’s question. The assumption behind the priority of logos is that only an assertion can be a truth-bearer, can be true or false. And if true, then an assertion says how things are, corresponds with being ” (p. 70).

I say logic is a tool that is helpful in interpretation.

“[C]ontrary to what Heidegger says, truth must still reside in some assertion about what is disclosed. An event cannot itself be true or false” (p. 71).

Assertions are what is “true or false”. But I also recognize poetic truth, which is not “true or false”.

“The meaning of one’s being is one’s ‘ownmost’….Such knowledge can only be arrived at first-personally…. And so in cases like these (where the meaning of Dasein’s being is at issue), a propositional formulation would get us nowhere” (ibid).

Essence is not reducible to propositional content, to statements that are true or false. It involves propositional content and valuation and poetic truth. It is characteristic of Plato’s depictions of Socrates that he already makes makes a major theme of showing in many different ways that essence is elusive. That is what distinguishes it from appearance.

“The issue of the original meaningfulness of being in any historical world is simply not statable in propositional terms, and its availability in literature and life is a matter of interpretation, not cognition, attunement not assertion…. Instead any propositional formulation and assertion must be said to presuppose a ‘context of significance’…. Such a context is not one Dasein has a mediated relation ‘to’; hence all the formulations about Dasein being its disclosedness…, that it is the ‘clearing’ where such disclosure happens'” (p. 73).

In the mode of poetic truth, it could even be said that we interpreting animals come to be what we are by participating in the clearing where meaning “happens”. But if we are to speak of a happening of meaning, it should be said that such happening is not at all purely contingent. I am inclined to think that “purely contingent meaning” is an oxymoron. Where there is meaning at all, it must be possible to give some kind of account of it, even if it be not univocal.

Culmination of the Culmination

Right before his final conclusion, Pippin recalls a wonderful quote from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols:

“Learning to see — habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual in all its aspects. This is the first schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in control. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilosophical language strong will-power: the essence of it is precisely not to ‘will’, the ability to defer decision. All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus — one has to react, one obeys a stimulus” (The Culmination, p. 216).

Heidegger argues that art — and poetry in particular — represents a disclosure of meaningfulness that must be understood as prior to philosophy and to all the works of reason. Pippin explains Heidegger’s talk about attunement to the question of Being as a way of putting meaning before knowledge. I too think meaning comes before knowledge; I believe in a kind of Platonic reticence about knowledge claims.

But Heidegger effectively attributes to Aristotle and Hegel, among others, what Derrida would call a logocentrism — a bad-smelling thing redolent of ethnocentrism, but having to do with the role of reason. I sharply disagree with this characterization of Aristotle and Hegel, as well as with the characterization of the role of reason that Heidegger assumes.

I think that across a great many posts here, we have clearly seen that interpretation of meaning comes before knowledge in Aristotle and Hegel. Reason itself, for the two greatest “rationalist” philosophers, has a fundamentally hermeneutic or interpretive character, which takes precedence over logic in the sense of formal calculation. Hegel can be forgiven for using the term “logic” in a very nonstandard way, and even for calling it a science. Heidegger was an important promoter of a kind of hermeneutics in the 20th century, but he seems to think of a hermeneutic approach as standing in opposition to the “rationalism” of Aristotle and Hegel.

Pippin says that for Hegel, “The role of art is to make available the speculative truth of philosophy in a sensible and affective register, and that means in an incomplete and finally unsatisfactory, because not fully self-conscious, way, and that way must be and can only fully be articulated in the Logic. Obviously, this touches on the basic issue that has arisen scores of times in the preceding: is there or is there not a form of nondiscursively available meaningfulness in human experience, and one that bears directly on philosophy in a fundamental way, given that such original familiar meaningfulness must count as bearing on the ‘first’ question all philosophy must be oriented from — the possible availability of anything at all, the availability of being qua being?” (p. 217).

That some more fundamental interpretation of meaning must precede calculable, univocal forms of reasoning is, I think, abundantly clear. Even from the side of formal systems, it is always necessary to begin with axioms, postulates, or hypotheses that are presumed to have a status independent of the development of the system. No formal system is truly self-contained. But philosophers like Aristotle and Hegel are not developing formal systems.

And what does this all have to do with talk about “being qua being”? This connection, so important to Heidegger, seems like sheer presumption. I’m objecting to the identification from the hermeneutic side, but I could imagine that some Thomists might also be unhappy with it, because they would identify being qua being with God, and therefore not with human hermeneutic activity.

On the other hand, I do greatly appreciate Pippin’s gloss that Heidegger’s question of the meaning of Being can alternately be expressed more simply as questioning about meaning. That takes the mystifying element out of it. But it still raises the question why it is necessary to raise the topic of questioning about meaning in such a roundabout and mystifying way, if that is really the aim.

Pippin equates the possible availability of being qua being to the “possible availability of anything at all” (ibid). I doubt this. Being qua being is a very specific historically developed theory or theories, mainly due to Avicenna, Aquinas, and Scotus. Anything at all is anything at all.

“[W]e can say that there is in [Hegel’s] Encyclopedia system a non-theoretical, nondiscursive, and philosophically significant role for art…. Heidegger’s affirmative answer… ranges from his early emphasis on the disclosive role of ‘attunements’ to his later emphasis on historical ‘uncoverings and self-concealings’ in the arts…. [I]n Hegel, … fine art should count as a ‘sensible and affective’ register of what could be called the way in which the meaning of Geist’s being is available to it at a historical period in a historical community” (ibid).

The medieval Albertist Dietrich of Freiberg would frankly tell us that the meaning of Geist‘s being should be understood to be the same as the meaning of Geist said simply (he says that a human being is in no way different from a human, and similarly for all such cases).

For Hegel “Consciousness as Sense-Certainty… assumes the world is available to it simply by virtue of its sensible presence. One is immediately onto sensed objects directly just by sensing them. But any distinctly human form of apprehension must, insists Hegel, be able to say what it claims to know, otherwise it is just differentially responsive and not an instance of knowing. The absence of such saying would be untrue to its experienced nature as a human knower and in that sense, not being who one is, would be unfree. It puts itself unavoidably to the test by trying to say what it knows and failing. This is the first manifestation of the conatus of freedom, the realization of self-conscious self-knowledge…. As we have seen Heidegger argue, … in phenomenological terms the ultimacy of this conatus, from the beginning… means that metaphysics as unconditioned thinking on thinking… is an illusion, question-begging (p. 219, emphasis in original).

Conatus is a term from early modern theories of motion that was used by Spinoza for the ongoing effort of a living being to be the being that it is. It seems to me to describe more or less the same phenomena as Aristotelian entelechy or Kantian internal teleology, in a vocabulary that is compatible with mechanism and avoids reference to teleology.

Pippin adds in a footenote to “question-begging” : “I state here the Heideggerian position, not my own. Heidegger has to claim that what for the Hegelian, or in the Hegelian tradition, must count as the pathologies of modernity — alienation, reification, domination instead of mutuality of recognitive status, the humiliating conditions of the modern organization of labor, anomie, deracination — are all best understood as implications of the still ‘unthought’ question, the meaning of Being, as descendants of the ‘metaphysical’ tradition…. [T]his claim is worth taking more seriously than it has been, but the way Heidegger formulates the issue seems to exclude all other options as derivative from and so complicit with that tradition. Even on strictly hermeneutical grounds, such exclusivity leaves us with an incomplete interpretation of what we need to understand” (p. 219n).

The theory of how the unconditioned can emerge from the conditioned, and the eternal from what is in time, is very delicate and easily misunderstood, but it is central to what Hegel is about. I don’t claim to know that that is how things are, but it is my fervent conviction. Hegel uses very idiosyncratic talk about “negation” and “negativity” to explain it.

“Heidegger has framed all such issues as dependent on, and reflecting some sense of, the historical meaningfulness of Being and that means the context of his question about the reconciling powers of reason is a question about mattering” (ibid).

I’m all for attention to meaning and mattering, but for me that means attention to interpretation and ethics, not ontology. Heidegger distinguishes an inferior, everyday “ontic” character of things from the superior, extraordinary, ineffable character of Being, and castigates others for ignoring this distinction. I think this distinction is false and should be ignored. Rather than a binary division between the ineffable and the boring world of ordinary things and ordinary life, it is better to learn to see the nonordinary in the ordinary.

Availability of Being?

After a quick first pass through Robert Pippin’s new book, I have some initial responses. It doesn’t seem either quite as momentous or quite as disruptive to the orientation I have been developing here as I imagined it might. It does give a nice survey of the various writings of Heidegger that address Kant’s and Hegel’s roles in Heidegger’s summary story about a rise and fall of “Western metaphysics”. It incorporates much material that has been only relatively recently made public in posthumous volumes of Heidegger’s collected works.

Pippin says in the front matter that he came to regard as chimerical the Hegelian “Absolute” that he so valiantly sought to explain in Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. He also seems here to reject a thesis that he emphasized and I puzzled over in the other book, namely that “logic is metaphysics”. But of course “logic” here doesn’t mean logic in the ordinary sense, but rather an account of the conditions of intelligibility or something like that, and I go against the mainstream in dissociating Aristotle from the later “metaphysics” oriented toward being as such. I don’t think Hegel means to dwell on being as such either. “Metaphysics” simply is not an Aristotelian word. Aristotle speaks of first philosophy or wisdom, as what does seem to me to be a kind of “meta” level of interpretation. Hegel was the first modern philosopher to take Aristotle seriously, and he clearly says he is not doing metaphysics as traditionally understood. But in doing what he does he is doing a kind of first philosophy, in what I take to be the general ballpark of Aristotle’s sense, so in that sense Pippin is right.

That giving an account of the conditions of intelligibility (“logic”) could be seen as a development of meta levels of interpretation (“first philosophy”) sounds pretty reasonable to me. But Pippin is speaking in a more conventional way of metaphysics that is supposed to be an account of being qua being. This results in a very different claim. As Pippin rightly points out, on this interpretation it is closely related to Hegel’s claim that contrary to Kant, there is no irreducible gap between being and thinking; indeed that there could be none if thought is to be possible at all. I note that Schelling and Engels assert in actually very similar language that there is a fundamental dispute about whether being or thought comes first, that Hegel puts thought first, and that we should instead put being first.

This claim that being comes before thought is something I used to identify with. Now I would just say that the two are deeply interwoven. Does this mean “identity” in Hegel’s sense? But Hegel uses that term very loosely, as covering all kinds of cases where things are not unequivocally separable, as in Aristotelian hylomorphism.

Hegel claims not that we have perfect knowledge of being qua being, but that a Kantian/Hegelian notion of reflection like Pippin emphasizes in the other book straddles the boundary between so-called “subject” and so-called “object”, and — if pursued far enough — eventually opens the way to a concrete from which abstractions like “thought” and “being” are derived.

I suppose my own very minimalist version of a deflationary account of the misleadingly named Hegelian absolute must be considerably weaker in the sense of claiming less than it claims in Pippin’s interpretation. There are quite a few texts that pose problems for my minimalist view, but I think there are quite a few texts that pose problems for “stronger” readings as well.

Pippin devotes about equal space to Heidegger’s reading of Kant and of Hegel. He makes the rather obvious point that Heidegger’s claim that intuition is the root of all thought for Kant is tendentious at best. But in this book, he seems to recharacterize Hegel in ways that make it easier for him to agree with Heidegger. He talks about reason “exfoliating” things, which hardly seems an inviting metaphor. He now expresses sympathy for Heidegger’s claim that the whole tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel implicitly presumes the “availability” of being to knowledge, a presumption that Hegel is supposed to have finally made explicit via his identification of logic with metaphysics, thus “culminating” the metaphysical tradition. This is also related to what Heidegger called the “enframing” related to manipulation and technology, which I agree is a real thing. But what Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Hegel, with their primarily ethical orientation of reason, have to do with dehumanizing aspects of technology, I have no idea. Heidegger’s argument is extremely telescoped and reductive.

I want to suggest that on the contrary, reason is built on reasonableness, or not over-reacting to things in life, which is largely a matter of emotional constitution.

The contents of our thought are not easily separable from what we imagine. It seems to me that any positive content will include an element of imagination. I don’t claim to rigorously know this or to have a proof of it, but I have high confidence in it. At the same time, I also have high confidence that there is something deserving of the term “knowledge”, in spite of all human frailty. But there is vastly more in which we can reasonably have high confidence than which we can seriously claim to know.

Pippin’s The Culmination

Robert Pippin is the author of two of the best books on Hegel I know, and much else of interest besides. In The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy (2024), he promises to thoroughly examine the thorny issues of Martin Heidegger’s claims about the history of metaphysics and the meaning of Being, which philosophically villainize both Hegel and Aristotle. For some time I have felt a need to better settle accounts with Heidegger, and this looks like a good occasion for it.

In my youth, I was impressed by secondary descriptions of Heideggerian “being-in-the-world”, and was for a while attracted to the poeticizing approach of his later works. At a very broad level, he seemed to endorse a principle that was my own first independent philosophical thought — that relations should be understood as coming before “things”. His name was associated with a critique of the Cartesian subject that I broadly agreed with. I agreed with some of his critique of Sartre. For several years I was even an enthusiast for Derrida’s extension of Heidegger’s critique of the notion of presence. But I always felt there was something repugnantly unctuous in the Heideggerian talk about Dasein — his special word for specifically human being — which stands sharply counterposed to Aristotle’s more empirical characterization of humans as rational or talking animals.

When fascism is even remotely in the mix, otherwise innocent philosophical doubts about the legitimacy of reason take on a whole different character. I have come to take much more seriously the implications of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism (lengthy Wikipedia article here). Whatever one concludes about that, his strong identification with the agenda of the Weimar German “Conservative Revolution” (another lengthy Wikipedia article here) is undisputed. Though not technically fascist in the sense of being grounded in a mass movement of the displaced petit bourgeoisie, the Weimar Konservative Revolution embodied many of the attitudes typical of fascism, and has been a wellspring for the European New Right. While it is not my aim to write directly about politics here, let me say bluntly that fascism is close to pure evil, and the road to it is built on many lesser evils. What needs to be assessed is the extent to which the concerns about Heidegger are more than just an invalid ad hominem, and affect what should be said about the substance (that word, again) of his thought.

Finally, I have come to adamantly oppose reductive broad-brush negative generalizations about “Western metaphysics”, which long ago I too easily accepted from Alan Watts (Wikipedia here) and similar sources. Heidegger was the 20th century’s most authoritative and influential promoter of claims of this sort. This kind of gross oversimplification is the direct opposite of the kind of carefully differentiated and nuanced philosophical “archaeology” to which my work here is dedicated. Sometimes it is indeed necessary to simplify in order to make a point (for instance, I just suggested a very un-archaeological polar opposition), but I believe that due diligence entails an obligation to be able to answer questions about what the simplification leaves aside, so I want to make good on that.

Meanwhile, my own attitudes toward Kant and Hegel have undergone almost a 180 degree shift. Influenced by writers associated with so-called structuralism in France (even more confusingly called “post-structuralism” in the English-speaking world), I formerly related German idealism as a whole to a bad philosophy of subject-centeredness, while retaining sympathy for the Greek philosophers precisely because they did not seem to be subject-centered (see The Dreaded Humanist Debate.) But I have learned to leaven and indeed overturn some of these judgments, and now seek the best of both worlds, just as I have found a space for sympathetic reading that can include everything from anti-authoritarian secularists to medieval theologians and neoplatonists.

Ethical Meanings of Substance

I think the ethical meanings of “substance” are more than just homonymous. Particularly, I have in mind the contrast of substance and accident. Traditionally, this is supposed to be an ontological distinction that builds on the logical one. I want to question that, not least because I don’t really believe that ontology as conventionally understood serves well for first philosophy, which ought to be more hermeneutic. That is something I’ve written about several times already.

Recently, we saw that a sharp distinction of substance and accident was important for Averroes, and for thinkers working in the broad tradition of Albert the Great. The ethical meanings of substance are related to that contrast.

Averroes probably thought the distinction between substance and accident was absolute. Following Hegel, I would instead relativize it. What is substance and what is accident can vary depending on context.

However, what I am inclined to call the fact that the distinction is only relative in no way detracts from its importance. In any context, we ought to focus on what is more essential. The contrast retains its value, even when we recognize that a strong enough accumulation of “accidents” can in some circumstances cease to seem accidental.

As an older person with short-term memory issues, I also take some solace in the circumstance that the things I am prone to forget are not matters of substance or essence or meaning, but only superficial “accidents” from the realm of events and utility. Individual events are ephemeral and strictly accidental in the Aristotelian sense. But what matters most is substance. (See also Essence and Explanation.)

Substantial Form?

One of the things I have learned recently is that the common scholastic (but post-Aristotelian) notion of substantial form goes back at least to Averroes. Aristotle talks separately about form and about substance, but never combines them in a single phrase like “substantial form”.

One of the important meanings of “substance” (ousia) is indeed form-like, as when he speaks of the what-it-is of things. Aristotle presents this meaning as superseding its more syntactic meaning of “underlying thing”. But eventually, this too is superseded by the uniquely Aristotelian notion of “act” (energeia), about which I have written much in the past year.

I’m now curious whether something like “substantial form” makes any appearance in the neoplatonic commentators like Simplicius and Philoponus. As Platonists, they would have an interest in turning the interpretation of substance back in the direction of form. (See also Substance, Essence, Form).

Flasch on Eckhart

“What is essential is the ability of the soul to give itself a form, to shape itself. It does not stand there fixed, like a tree; it knowingly and willingly throws itself upon others, it becomes what it takes up” (Flasch, Meister Eckhart, pp. 35-36; see Eckhart as Philosopher: Background for introduction).

“The eye, opened and cast on the wood, is, within itself, over there with the wood” (p. 44).

With this example taken from visual perception, Eckhart illustrates the essence of the Aristotelian theories of perception and intellect that, according to Flasch, are at the core of Eckhart’s thought. At the heart of both perception and intellectual knowing, Aristotle posits a kind of fusion of what modern people call subject and object.

Also central to Eckhart’s thought is the neoplatonizing medieval notion of “intellectual soul”, which fuses together the separate Aristotelian notions of intellect and soul, emphasizing their status as an operational whole. For the many medieval writers who attribute such a strong unity to the operational whole of soul and intellect, all the unique attributes of Aristotelian intellect may then also be said of the human soul, though it is far from clear that Aristotle himself would agree with this.

Eckhart also upholds a unitary interpretation of the “substantial form” of hylomorphic unities, which aims to be a completely univocal kind of form. Elsewhere, Flasch notes that this late and specialized version of the more general (and not entirely univocal) notion of form in Aristotle is already present in Averroes’ Long Commentary on the Metaphysics. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas used it to argue against the sharp soul-body dualism defended by some medieval Augustinians. Substantial form poses a stronger unity in the forms of things than I want to claim for a reading of Aristotle, but that seems to be a relatively separate issue that does not greatly affect Eckhart’s argument here.

“[L]ike the seeing eye that casts a glance at the wood and becomes one with the wood, man, through active performance, through seeing and loving, becomes that which he sees and loves in the mind…. We retroactively separate eye and wood from the eye-wood unity. Is the wood-eye union the truer reality? Or is it merely an image, or simply a thought? Seeing things clearly in this regard, according to Eckhart, is the necessary precondition for understanding everything he says — not study of the Bible or dogmatic theology. First and foremost, we need to occupy ourselves with understanding this unity. It is our daily life. It is not a thing of nature, but rather the having of natural things” (p. 38).

We become that which we contemplate and love, that toward which we direct our attention. For Eckhart, the intellectual soul is not just a theoretical construct, but a part of everyday experience and of the basic ways of human being. Where the modern “subject” is usually considered to stand aloof from its objects, Aristotelian soul and intellect actively find or develop their content in and by means of what modern people would call their objects. Though we may marvel at it, this kind of fusion is not a mystical ecstasy, but part of the normal working of everyday life. It is not passivity, but a kind of fused activity. It seems to be this fusion at the heart of human experience that for Eckhart involves the divine giving birth to itself.

Eckhart uses philosophical senses of logos (word, speech, discourse, relation, ratio; what distinguishes the human from other animals) to explain its religious sense associated with Incarnation. We might say he uses logos as a name and descriptor for the intellectual soul’s fused active relationality.

“Why is ‘Word’ the keyword? It signifies relation. The Word unifies the speaker and the spoken content” (p. 36).

“‘Word’ in its essence refers to the intellect; the one who speaks and that which is spoken occur in the Word. The Word has a relational character; it unifies within itself those that are separate as natural things…. Eckhart conceives of man as Word, not primarily as a thing of nature” (p. 37).

It seems that for Eckhart, the Biblical Word and the Incarnation refer to the fused activity of the intellectual soul.

“[R]eason conceives of itself as an image identical to its exemplar, which is within it in eidetic fashion, that is, as actual intellectual being, uncreated and uncreatable” (p. 43).

As in Plotinus, for Eckhart the intellectual soul has a direct link with the divine, and may be said to contain metaphysical realities within itself.

“The unity of reflective self-consciousness and ethical orientation follows from this. The way reason — always in the qualified sense — is, it has nothing in common with anything else” (ibid).

“Eckhart does not say: ‘Until now, you have misunderstood Christianity.’ He says: ‘You have misunderstood yourselves, and as long as you persist in this error, you cannot provide Christianity with the intellectual and ethical form which is possible today, in 1300′” (p. 44).

Eckhart makes the astonishing claim that Aristotle, the Old Testament, and the New Testament all teach the same thing. According to Flasch, he even says that the Bible contains all natural philosophy. A first clue to what such sayings mean is that he says he will explain the Bible using nothing but the natural reasons of the philosophers. He will not appeal to revelation to justify what he says. This is not entirely atypical among medieval theologians. Flasch notes that even Anselm of Canterbury, a rather cautious thinker who precedes the main development of Latin scholastic philosophy, considered it a theological best practice to minimize the use of conversation-ending appeals to revelation.

“What previous readings of Eckhart often lack are linguistic discipline, semantic specification, and a philological basis: the way we have labeled and interpreted Eckhart and the categories into which we attempt to squeeze him even today were created at a time when his Latin works were still unknown. And yet they far outnumber his German works, and their tradition is more secure” (p. 46).

Flasch highlights Eckhart’s systematic use of the qualifier “insofar as”, an Aristotelian device that picks out and distinguishes one sense of something that may be considered in several ways. This he combines with a radical notion of what he calls primary determinations. These include the traditional four “transcendentals” Being, Oneness, Truth, and Goodness, as well as Idea, Wisdom, Love, and Justice. In a rather Platonic way, Eckhart will say things like “Insofar as we are just, Justice itself operates through us.”

“If something is, the primary determination is completely present within it. Then not only is the primary determination’s product or its similarity within us; the primary determination itself is present…. Everything that the primary determination itself effects, it effects not toward the outside, but rather into itself. Being has no outside. Again, those imaginative ideas taken from the working methods of craftsmen are problematic. The effecting of the primary determinations is not a producing…. Their effecting consists of making what has been established resemble them, of making what has been established into a being. Eckhart teaches elementary concepts of reciprocity…. Someone who has not learned from the prologues that the active pulls the passive toward itself, that is, that it makes it active, cannot interpret Eckhart’s birth cycle in the proper Eckhartian sense” (p. 80).

“Being, Oneness, and Goodness are active primary determinations, not abstractions. Thus, one has to say that this is God. As Aristotle saw the being of green in the being of the tree, so Eckhart sees the being of things in Being itself” (p. 82).

“I must not speak of Being or of ens in general in the same way that I can speak of this or that individual being…. In substance, they are in each other. This is what pious people mean when they say the world is created. This needs to be explained. Otherwise, the imagining thinking, that is, thinking that creates mental images, edges forward and makes us believe that the creation of the world consisted of God externalizing things from within himself” (pp. 82-83).

“In Eckhart’s time, the concept of pantheism… did not exist. Eckhart removed the issue… by differentiating… between primary determination and individual thing, but he made it clear that Being was not distinguished in the way that individual things were differentiated” (p. 83).

“This theology is short and clear. And it argues philosophically. It easily solves all or almost all questions that can be asked about God, and it does so in the light of natural reason…. There is nothing here of the abyss, nothing of the blinding darkness of Dionysius…. Moses says that God created the world in six days, but he said this for simple people; we know that Being is directly present in self-positing. People say that God created the world, but we know that Being continually posits itself anew in the present” (ibid).

“Placing his Biblical interpretation… before the doctrine of primary determinations — that means contradicting Eckhart” (p. 85).

“[T]ruth, Eckhart says, belongs to the intellect; it indicates relation or includes it within itself. Then follows a strange sentence […]: ‘A relation, however, has its entire being from the soul and as such is a real category, just as time, although it has all its being from the soul, is nonetheless a subspecies of quantity, that is, of a real category'” (p. 89).

“This sentence is strange for several reasons. It shifts from the statement ‘I am the Truth’ to a general theory of relations. Truth, Eckhart says, either is a relation or includes a relation, but a relation stems entirely from the soul and as such is an actual ‘predicament’. Every philosopher admitted that there existed relations purely of thought…. But no one who argued for real relations claimed that they were entirely derived from the soul” (ibid).

This is in Eckhart’s Parisian Questions. Here he rejects the argument of Aquinas that being comes before life and knowing, saying, “I, however, believe the exact opposite” (quoted, p. 91). Eckhart indeed explicitly puts knowing before being.

“[H]e reminds us in good Aristotelian fashion that mathematical objects cannot be considered according to intent or good, and that something that has being is identical [sic] to the good. Good and evil exist in the things themselves, but true and false only in the soul” (p. 91).

“Eckhart successfully describes the special status of the image. It still has, so to speak, a foot in the world of natural things; it consists of wood or stone or canvas; it has an efficient cause and often also an aim. But as an image, it does not have being; rather, it is the relation to the thing it represents…. Insofar as it is knowledge, it belongs to a different world. In questions such as this one, philosophical analysis has to be detached from the imagination” (p. 92).

“Properties are not beings; only their substance has being” (ibid).

“The intellect must not be a specific physical nature if it is to be able to comprehend all physical natures. The knower is the living negation of the known” (p. 93).

Eckhart makes the implicit “negativity” of Aristotelian intellect explicit, and applies it also to the soul.

“Our intellect is nothing, and our intellectual knowledge is not being…. This means that we are talking about the intellect as the actual having of universal objects, and about perception as the grasping of perceivable things. Not about the eye as a sensory organ, not about the equipment of the soul with the faculty of knowledge. Eckhart has transformed the question of an angel’s knowing and being into a general negative theory of sensory and intellectual recognition and claims. The intellect as such and also perception as such are neither here nor now, and insofar as they are neither, they are nothing, but insofar as they are natural faculties of the soul, they are something” (pp. 95-96).

“Here, in what appears to be an excessively dry critique of the Aristotelian ontology of the schools of the time, Eckhart lays the foundation of his thinking. He is looking for the special condition of the intellectual being, its nonmateriality, its energeia-like unity of knower and knowledge” (p. 99).

“Thus, intellectual knowledge is being God’s form or becoming God’s form, since God also is intellectual knowledge and is not being” (p. 100).

In different contexts, Eckhart says both that God is being and that God is not being.

“In summary, the first Parisian questions seem to be concerned with God and angels, but they are actually exercises in the search for intellectual being. They lead us to the edges of ontology, which cannot grasp image and knowledge. Its consequence is that we imagine God and the soul as thing-like. But that way is best forgotten” (p. 101).

“[W]isdom is infinite. Within it, everything always continues. Where it actually is, it is continually re-created. It is not born once and for all; its eternity is perpetual becoming” (p. 103).

Eckhart clarifies that creation is not meant as an occurrence in time.

“Eckhart, we must remember, permitted everyone so inclined to call God being. Now he proposes to say ‘Being’ (esse) and ‘Justice’ (iusticia) instead of ‘God'” (p. 104).

“God is Being. This tenet remains. But since Heidegger, the sentence has had a different ring to it from what Eckhart intended it to mean” (ibid).

“The human mind is the eagle that ascends to the origins of things” (ibid).

“What Eckhart calls Being is the productivity of the primordial mind, which produces images of ideas that the human intellect grasps as the immanent origin of the experiential things. Being is defined through the intellect, not through presence, not as a whole of facticity” (ibid).

“Being” taken in a positive sense especially means “intelligible being”.

“Primordial mind” is intellect outside of space and time. In this regard, Eckhart is closer to Augustine’s strong emphasis on eternity than to Hegel’s valorization of becoming.

“The philosopher, like the lover, does not look for the origin from which something developed, that is, its efficient cause, nor for what it is good for, that is, its purpose. Analyzing efficient and final causes is indispensable for investigation into natural things, but Eckhart is searching for the pure form as the true Being. He construes the divine life and the life of the deified man, the homo divinus, as a disclosure of form outside efficient and final causes…. [P]hilosophy was the eagle-like ascent to the realm of the grounds of being, the return to living substances that have their purposes within themselves, the elimination of thing-oriented ways of thinking, and the path to a proper life…. The proper human life is the aimless settling into the perpetually new Wisdom that is also Justice and Godhead” (p. 105).

Flasch points out numerous Platonic-sounding phrases in Eckhart, like the “pure form as the true being” above.

That efficient causality has no role in first philosophy is how I read Aristotle. But the neoplatonic commentator Ammonius (a student of Proclus, and teacher of Simplicius, Philoponus, and Damascius) argues that the first cause is also an efficient cause, and not only “that for the sake of which”, as Aristotle says. Most medieval writers (certainly Aquinas) follow Ammonius on this, and assume that the first cause is an efficient cause. Eckhart is an important exception.

Eckhart’s negative conclusion about “final causes” applies to external ends of a utilitarian sort, but ignores Aristotle’s emphasis on entelechy, which involves precisely an end that is intrinsic to a being’s being what it is. I want to say that we are our ends, as confirmed by our actions. In Eckhart as in many medieval writers, the later construct of univocal “substantial form” takes over most of the large role that Aristotle assigns to entelechy. It is admittedly hard to see entelechy as completely independent of time, which I think is what leads Hegel to reverse the traditional order and make eternity dependent on becoming.

“Eckhart’s God sheds the regalia of otherworldly imperial honors and endorses man as his own kind” (ibid).

Eckhart develops a theology that clearly rules out what Brandom rightly decries as the “command-obedience model” of normativity. As in Plotinus, a human’s connection to the Good instead involves an intimate sharing, and even a kind of reciprocity.

“The active above attracts the initially passive below. The below becomes the eagle that flies up to the hidden grounds of the world. It is our reifying contemplation that does not recognize the coincidental dynamic in the process between the above and the below” (ibid).

The active above works as an attractor. This is important. Though Eckhart doesn’t seem to explicitly talk about the teleology that Kant called “internal” and that on my reading is the mode of operation of the first cause in Aristotle, he nonetheless seems to come to a similar conclusion. For both Eckhart and Aristotle, the “below” is attracted to the “above”. But Eckhart is closer to Plotinus and the monotheistic mainstream in his insistence that the First is a source as well as an end.

“Eckhart declares… that he intends to proceed as a philosopher, and he adheres to this stated method. He aims to answer all or almost all questions about God with philosophical arguments, and in clear and simple terms…. This aspiration appears so impracticable, so immoderate that some Eckhart scholars have felt the need to understate it in order to present Eckhart in a better light. But Eckhart asserted this claim sharply and clearly. We can choose to reject it, but we should refrain from reinterpreting and changing it” (p. 109).

“The intellect is supernature. Plato’s intellectual world will become Leibniz’s ‘realm of grace'” (p. 111).

“Every reader of Eckhart has to fight his own imagination, which presents justice to him like an additional property of a person that is dependent on the person” (ibid).

“Eckhart’s God is Being and Unity, Justice and Wisdom. He is the all-encompassing attraction or love…. God is the original formal act, the primus actus formalis…; he discloses the having of form.” (ibid).

Again we have attraction, rather than a making, a push, or a command.

“The primary determinations attract to themselves everything that follows” (p. 112).

And again we have attraction. By this description, Eckhart’s primary determinations are after all what Aristotle would call ends that are sought for themselves, and not for the sake of something else.

“What matters in the context of moral actions is the intention, not the external act…. This justice is before and outside external actions” (ibid).

Eckhart is not the only medieval philosopher to say something like this. Peter Abelard similarly emphasizes the importance of intentions in ethics.

“Justice, in Eckhart’s writings, becomes the life of the mind. Thus, the just man finds peace in works and does not expect rewards; his ethical actions have value in themselves” (p. 113).

One of the charges against Eckhart was that he denied the importance of external works and ritual observances. But the context was implicitly things done for the sake of something else. That, I presume, is what Eckhart meant. But ethical actions have value in themselves. They have their end in themselves. They are not done for the sake of something else. And, he says according to Flasch, the just man finds peace in works. Whatever may be said about his relation to orthodoxy, Eckhart is on firm Platonic and Aristotelian ground here.

“Eckhart does everything he can not to construe God’s relation to the world as having developed arbitrarily, although there are people who imagine that this is precisely what proves the freedom of a personal God” (p. 119).

Like Albert the Great as previously discussed by Flasch, Eckhart puts intellect decisively ahead of will in his theology. To my layman’s eye Aquinas seems to formally maintain the same, but to make more concessions to voluntarism.

“Only thinking overcomes the false imagination to which many people succumb: they imagine God and the world as separate and relate the two as efficient cause and effect” (p. 121).

So there is someone else besides Aristotle who agrees that the first cause is not an efficient cause.

“[I]n divinis, that is, in the nature of God, but also in the homo divinus, in grace and salvation, there is no place for the category of causality, only the category of the ideational ground of reason, of ratio, which shows itself as disclosure of form. Aquinas described grace in man as the presence of God as efficient cause…. Eckhart’s philosophical reform consisted also of silencing the voice of efficient causality. Only grounds of an ideational-formal kind are at once wholly immanent and wholly transcendent…. They make possible the qualified concept of the living that has its telos within itself, just as Aristotle conceptualized it in the twelfth book of his Metaphysics” (p. 122).

Aha, now we even get living with a telos within itself, and a reference to book Lambda. Previously we saw him exclude external “final causes”, while remaining silent about the “internal” kind that are of far greater interest. But here the internal kind seems to be affirmed.

Eckhart’s first commentary on Genesis “rests on the combination of the Neoplatonizing metaphysics of Being and Oneness with the doctrine of intellect as presented by Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and Averroes and as corresponding with Augustine’s theory of mens. Eckhart’s anthropology, like his philosophical theology, is also a theory of intellect. This becomes especially clear when Eckhart speaks of man as God’s image. The Platonizing metaphysics of Being joins the philosophy of intellect and produces an ethics. Eckhart’s ethics presents the concept of the homo divinus” (ibid; see also The Goal of Human Life; Properly Human, More Than Human?).

“Eckhart writes that the reader should take the Biblical narrative as parable. He is supposed to let go of the narrative as events and facts” (p. 125).

“If someone says that God commands, then his commanding is to be interpreted in the light of his intellectual nature: his is not an external commanding. He is not ordering about. His ordering consists in providing things with their form” (p. 127).

Those who have understanding do not need to be commanded to be good. Commands are for those who lack understanding.

“The intellect is the root of freedom…. The goal of acting freely is to become a deified man, homo divinus. Within the deified man, the just man and justice are one. For him, the Good itself is the goal and in itself is its own reward. He does not look for external reward. Punishments, too, are intrinsic to acting. The good life consists of a consequent inner orientation, of inner being, not of doing. Action implements the way to being and life. God does not order any external act” (pp. 128-129).

In his commentary on the Book of Wisdom, Eckhart “continues his battle against the advancement of reified ideas, as though Being were a retrospective abstraction of many things or as though it were added to things in the form of a property. It is a rejection not so much of the representation of things in the imagination as of their dominance within philosophical thought” (p. 132).

“Eckhart recommends substituting primary determinations’ names for one another as a method. We may as well say Being instead of ‘God’ or Oneness or Justice or Wisdom. This was not uncommon among philosophers; Plato said ‘the idea of the Good’ instead of ‘God’ when he was not referring to the gods of popular religion; Aristotle, ‘the prime unmoved mover’, Avicenna, ‘the necessary being’, Aquinas , ‘being that exists by itself'” (p. 135).

“As we have seen, other primary determinations, such as Oneness, Wisdom, and Justice, are supposedly uncreatable. If God is called the esse, it is also uncreatable. Different meanings of ‘esse’ are operating here. Readers of Eckhart have to learn how to handle the flexibility of the concept” (p. 136).

“‘Many,’ Eckhart says, imagine creation as an effecting, as it were, toward the outside” (p. 137).

“Eckhart also rejects the idea that man should act well in order to receive earthly and heavenly rewards. The ethical good is an intrinsic value, not a means to an end” (p. 192).

“The sermons criticize the theology of the time, not just the wrong kinds of living. They correct the dominance of the imagination of stable, ontologically autonomous things, which hinders man from understanding himself and God and from grasping that his ‘neighbor’ lives beyond the ocean, too” (p. 198).

“The humble man compels God so that God must give himself according to his nature, and indeed must give himself wholly, for he is indivisible. God must: that is the message. His grace is not a random selection of blessed individuals out of a mass of sinners. God must; this motif appears again and again, not in the sense of an external compulsion, but rather from his nature, which he follows freely. Thus, he gives me everything that he gave Jesus, without exception; he gives the soul the power to birth; and thus it births itself and all things” (p. 200).

Peter Abelard, who was interested in safeguarding divine goodness, had argued more generally that God can only do what he does. Albert the Great had argued for the possibility of purely natural beatitude.

“Someone who speaks of God but does not talk about his oneness with the ground of the soul is not speaking of the true God. The ground of the soul has nothing in common with anything; it is not like anything else and is thus like God” (p. 201).

Here again we have Eckhart’s version of the intellectual soul. The “ground of the soul” would presumably be intellect, since it is described in the same terms.

“The soul exists more in Justice than in the human body” (p. 210).

The human soul carries intellect and the One within it, Eckhart might affirm with Plotinus. Plotinus is the only other writer I can think of who has as exalted a view of the soul as Eckhart.

“One does not learn the correct understanding of the world from the Bible; one must have developed this understanding in order not to read the Bible mindlessly” (p. 212).

“‘Reason’ needs to be conceptualized differently than a ‘power’. It is by no means a sort of mental hand that grasps something and thereby comprehends it” (p. 213).

The Reason he wants to call upon is about the interpretation of form.

“The truly wise life consists not in contemplative joy, but rather in the directing of external action to the best thing that love demands (p. 222).

Here we see how he does make a place for external action.

“The just man exists in Justice. No vision or intuition tells us this is possible, but only the philosophical analysis of the concrete’s containedness within the universal (abstractum) — with a realism of universals taken for granted” (p. 229).

Realism about universals here seems to acquire both a distinctive ethical dimension, and something like a neoplatonic “procession” from the universals in the soul that I have not encountered before in discussions of realism and nominalism.

“In pre-nominalist fashion, Eckhart takes it for granted that Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness) is the common and real determinant shared by all just men and then proceeds by eliminating the idea of making regarding the activity of Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness)” (p. 227).

Eliminating the idea of making in thinking about the activity of justice makes sense as part of a program of de-emphasizing efficient causes and accidents in favor of substance and internal telos, such as it now seems Eckhart supported.

Eckhart as Philosopher: Background

In Meister Eckhart (German edition 2011; English translation 2015), Kurt Flasch takes issue with common portrayals of Eckhart as a “mystic”. Eckhart, who lived ca. 1260-1328, was the third German, after Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg, to earn the highest academic title of magister at the University of Paris, but his Latin philosophical works have been little studied until recently. Flasch discusses him as a serious philosopher in the tradition of Albert and Dietrich, and describes the social background. Eckhart is known to have had close contact with Dietrich, and may have also directly interacted with Albert. In any case, Eckhart clearly takes up Albert’s notion of natural beatitude.

“Albertus Magnus had harshly criticized the failings of Latin scholars: he did not merely want to incorporate Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes into the seemingly harmonious collective wisdom of Christianity, but instead strove to rebuild all the sciences, including theology, from the ground up. He emphasized the autonomous method of philosophy. He complained about obscurantism, something especially prevalent among the Dominicans; he showed that miracles had no place in matters of physics. His autonomous philosophical research became a model for Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia [who have been considered the main targets of the condemnation of 1277]. Thomas Aquinas instead opted for a middle course. His approach was criticized for its inconsistency…. His handling of Augustine and Aristotle was too imprecise, according to Henry of Ghent, Dietrich of Freiberg, and Duns Scotus” (p. 10).

“Since the twelfth century, Western Europe had been developing a new sense of the human individual and his rational and organizational abilities. It was no longer taken for granted that people were subjects to be ruled. Lords had to justify themselves. Authority could be challenged. Several classical authors (Aristotle in his Logic, Cicero, Seneca, and especially Boethius) all contributed to a heightened trust in reason within the more progressive regions of Europe. The experience of urban life, the organization of corporations, legislation not based on customary law or decisions by episcopal lords, supraregional trade and monetary transactions, encounters with foreign cultures, religions, and values — all these created the need for a new way of explaining the world that took in everything, including secular rulers and religious topics…. New ideas and developments were no longer automatically stigmatized…. In science, philosophy, and organization, Christian self-awareness was constantly recreating itself in different and often opposing directions through continual debate. Without these historical and cultural multiplications and disturbances, Meister Eckhart would not have been possible ” (pp. 10-11).

“[The famous classical scholar] Werner Jaeger described the beginnings of philosophy up to Plato as this kind of work: correcting the royal-court model of religion; replacing the feuding heavenly clans with a single God; stressing wisdom over capriciousness, and ungrudging goodness and justice over incontestable power; the world as kosmos and physis, not a mere footstool for God” (p. 18).

Flasch here refers to two of my three candidates for “Enlightenments” before the modern one. (The other — inspired by the great upsurge in translation of ancient philosophical and scientific works to Arabic during what came to be known as the Islamic Golden Age, in which the philosophical work of Alfarabi (roughly 870-950 CE) also played a prominent role — came in between.)

The striking phrase “essence of the criteria” is I think original to Flasch, but he is definitely onto something here. Soul as the essence of criteria sounds like it might begin to take us into the territory of Kantian ethical judgment, and might be not at all wholly unrelated to the normative view of intentionality and consciousness that Brandom attributes to Kant.

He unpacks this a bit, saying “Everything looked different after this philosophical revolution, nature and polis. It changed the way people thought of themselves. They now knew: they were both reason and soul; and they demanded of God that he be reason and be related to them as soul. The meaning of ‘soul’ changed: soul was no longer a vapor of the blood, a breath of life, or the presence of one’s ancestors. Soul became the essence of the criteria. It was subjected to the rule that it had to become as similar to God as possible, a God conceptualized as mind and as wholly good. Greek philosophy dematerialized and ethically ennobled both God and the human soul” (p. 19).

“Plato’s Republic developed the idea of the Good: it was not an individual good, but the indeterminate Good that humans could and should employ to judge everything, even the gods. For the conduct of life, that is, for ethics and politics, that meant man was supposed to live in a way that would make him as similar to the Godhead as possible…. [T]here had to exist a faculty of differentiation and consolidation above sense perceptions. The soul is active, harmonizing and evaluating what has been perceived, especially whether it is good or bad. It is indispensable for finding commonalities among wholly different perceptions. Whether these perceptions are similar or dissimilar, one or many, good or bad, is decided not by individual perceptions themselves, but only by the thinking soul itself. It engages in dialogue with itself; which means: it thinks” (ibid; see also Aristotle on Perception; Aristotle on the Soul.)

Once again, we see that this ancient and medieval notion of intellect (nous) is anything but entirely passive. The differently inflected Augustinian mens (mind) also seems to have a largely active character. Numerous later medieval writers emphasized this aspect of Augustine rather strongly.

Flasch continues, “This Platonic deliberation… refutes the false impression we have of certain epochs, that is, the legend of antiquity — and even more so of the Middle Ages — as ‘objective ages’ that had no knowledge of the productive nature of the mind-soul, of ‘consciousness’ or the ‘subjectivity’ of knowledge” (p. 20).

In slightly different wording, this is a point I have recently been attempting to make. The translator uses the English “mind”, which I generally try to avoid as prejudicial, due to its many modern connotations that are quite different from those of nous in Plato and Aristotle. I usually go with “intellect” for nous, even though it may sound stilted, because it brings in fewer connotations that are alien to Aristotelian or Platonic discourse. “Mind” makes me think of Descartes and Locke and modern empirical psychology and self-help, which I lump together as a sort of modern “mentalism” that is not to be recommended.

“Mind, nous, intellectus, was seen as essential and as the true human. We can read it thus in Aristotle; Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas adopted his position. Living according to the mind is the right kind of living; it is the life that pleases God. Mind is the possession of those criteria that determine what a true God must be and how a rational human has to conceptualize himself. Mind is an active ground of unity; it is synthesis” (ibid; see also Figurative Synthesis).

Here he comes back to the intriguing phrase about “criteria”. He goes on to more closely characterize Aristotelian nous:

“Mind has nothing in common with anything else. It is not a natural thing; none of the determinations with which we define the world apply to it. It is essentially energy and activity. It is the active nothingness of the world; it is the energy not to be like the world…. Mind is the possession of the universal. Everything is its object…. It is the possession of its contents. It is its contents. It becomes what it thinks” (p. 21).

Aristotelian energeia (act or activity or actuality) is not usually translated “energy”, though it does begin to acquire energy-like connotations in later writers (e.g., Proclus and some late medieval theologians).

“It is divine; it is the divine. Since Plato and Aristotle, European philosophy has based its general view of humanity, of nature, of politics, and of religion on nous as its model. Instead of being represented as a royal court, religion became the relation between God and the mind-soul” (ibid).

Flasch echoes Aristotle’s statement that of all things, intellect most deserves to be called divine. Because I want to highlight the more specific character of this broadly Aristotelian “intellect”, I would not claim it has been adopted by European philosophy as a whole, but I do believe it is taken up by those strands that remain relatively closer to Plato and Aristotle. This is especially true of the “Albertists” that Flasch spent much of his career studying. The dominant modern traditions stemming from Descartes and Locke develop their own rather different notions of reason and consciousness, their place in the world, and our relation to them.

“For Augustine, the rational soul represented the essence of all criteria…. God is the true God only if he adheres to the rules of reason. It was Augustine who created this standard, and it was he who later destroyed it” (p. 22).

Again there is a much longer story here. Flasch nicely captures the ambiguity (or perhaps change, motivated by his late polemic against the Pelagians) in Augustine’s attitude toward philosophical reason.

“For Albertus Magnus, the object of the intellect is the universal, a universal that exists in reality, which is the foundation of individual things…. This universal informs the particular things; it makes them into what they are. The mind…is the possession of the principles from which all knowledge develops. That is why the intellect finds itself in all objects. It is the reason why Plato’s definition of philosophy is quintessentially true: philosophy is the knowledge of one’s self…. If, through understanding, the intellect is linked to the first Truth and Good, then it is itself divine, divinus, and as Homer says, it no longer seems like the son of a man, but the son of God. That is why Hermes Trismegistus says of the intellect that it is the link between God and the world” (pp. 22-23).

Albert is known as a strong defender of realism about universals, as opposed to nominalism. This actually quite facinating and extraordinarily rich dispute is something I have barely touched upon to date. But here Flasch brings out a less familiar, more neoplatonic-sounding angle about the ennobling presence of the universal in the human soul, which will be central for Eckhart.

“The intellect is man, and it connects God and the world… Albertus Magnus cites pagan authorities for his concept of divine filiation…. There is nothing super-natural in this for him; he calls it the most natural, the naturalissimum” (p. 23).

This identification of intellect with the human that he attributes to Albert is interesting, and stands in sharp contrast to some other theologians at this time, who seem to have identified intellect with divine illumination, or with something angelic. I have not been sure where Albert stood on this. Of course Aquinas embarked on a major campaign to locate intellect entirely within the human soul, even siding with the so-called materialist Alexander of Aphrodisias against Averroes, and even though he continued to speak of illumination in a more expressly theological context. (See also Pseudo-Dionysius on the Soul.)

I can only applaud Albert’s apparent remark about the “most natural”. Medieval theologians were not all immoderate supernaturalists; the example of Peter Abelard also comes to mind. Virtue is not opposed to nature; it just doesn’t automatically come along with nature. It involves the cultivation and flowering of “second nature”.

For Albert, according to Flasch, human reason “is not supposed to obey, but to conceptualize itself, the world, and God…. [F]or Albertus Magnus, the intellect as developed in the Aristotelian-Arabic tradition was a part of man’s relation to God…. [I]n fact, it was man’s relation to God” (p. 24).

This is truly fascinating. Flasch is saying human reason as understood by the philosophers itself plays a fundamental theological role for the great theologian Albert, as I think it also does in Alfarabi’s neoplatonizing account of intellect. For these writers, our participation in intellect “is” the human’s relation to God.

Flasch goes on to relate all of this to Eckhart.

“Eckhart explains how he wants men to conceive of God: God is that which fulfills reason’s highest criteria. He must be just…. It is only through justice that God becomes recognizable and worthy of recognition…. God does not belong to whatever exists, not even as the pinnacle. Reason must break through to the true content of the term ‘God’. Which is justice” (p 35).

Eckhart apparently agrees with what Leibniz later said, that God should be identified with justice rather than with infinite power. Flasch emphasizes the “negative” aspect of Aristotelian intellect, which to me suggests a possible Aristotelian source for this important theme in Hegel.

“[T]he soul forms itself according to its objects. It becomes what it is after. It does not simply exist. It is not a fixed component of the world; it obtains its essence through attention and rejection…. What is essential is the ability of the soul to actively give itself a form, to shape itself” (pp. 35-36).

Here too I can’t help but recall Hegel’s talk about spirit giving birth to itself. Flasch notes that Hegel was among Eckhart’s admirers.

“Eckhart is stating the premises for a radical reform of living. Man must grasp that he is a creature of relations: he becomes that which he decides; he exists as intentional activity” (p. 43).

Again, Flasch introduces huge implications in a few words. The human is a “creature of relations”. Language and culture begin to take us to shareable meaning that is beyond the immediacy of apparent things with which we physically interact. As Kant might say, as beings with intelligence we actively “take” things in various ways, and our talk about how the world is is actually subordinate to that.

Later, we will see Eckhart speak of a divinisation of the human, which Flasch will explain as primarily rooted in Aristotle and neoplatonism, rather than in revealed theology.