Affirmation

Nietzschean affirmation used to be a very important thing for me. Something like it still is. At root, this just means judging particular goods on intrinsic/situational criteria, from a stance that embraces life without the poison of ressentiment (holding on to reactive, negative emotion). Nietzsche’s poetic images of Zarathustra coming down from the mountain, being friends with the earth, and embracing the eternal return were significant moments of my youth. (See also Genealogy; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Interpretive Charity.)

Later, I came to think that Spinoza had in a way already said what I most valued in Nietzsche. (Many have recognized the affirmative character of Spinoza’s thought.)

Still later, I came to think that Aristotle had already expressed the affirmative kernel I valued most in Spinoza, and much more.

I have been reading the core ethical message of Brandom’s Spirit of Trust in a related light. (See Index for many posts on Aristotle and Brandom.)

History of Philosophy

Philosophy is best conceived as a dialogue with the best insights of our fellow rational animals over the centuries. It is something far more valuable than just views or opinions — a sustained rational development aimed at progressive improvement in distinguishing the better from the worse.

Hegel wrote that the history of philosophy is inseparable from philosophy itself, and I find that to be very true. He was actually the first major philosopher to write explicitly about the history of philosophy. Medieval scholasticism had treated the history of philosophy as a valuable repository of possible opinions and arguments, but was little concerned with issues of historical interpretation. Early modernity largely ignored the history of philosophy and wanted to start over, every man for himself. Anti-scholastic prejudice ran so high that apart from Leibniz, no major modern philosopher until Hegel treated Aristotle as anything more than a straw man. But since the 19th century and especially since the later 20th century, innumerable rich and sophisticated contributions to the historically informed interpretation of individual philosophers have been made, along with many excellent analyses of periods and trends.

I find it useful to alternate between consideration of a small number of essential reference points among the greatest of the great, and a much broader scope including many “minor” figures. (See History of Philosophy and Historiography sections.)

Brandom and Kant

Besides offering a clear and nonvoluntarist account of Kantian freedom, Brandom strongly puts forward the idea that the formation of unities of apperception is an ethical task for Kant. This was new to me when I encountered it in Reason in Philosophy, and very exciting. Kant suddenly made a whole lot more sense, and began to look much less unattractive.

I have not had the opportunity to confirm whether this is just what Kant should have said by Brandom’s reconstruction, or whether he actually did say it somewhere. (In my early readings uninformed by secondary literature, I had taken Kant to be asserting that the synthesis of unities of apperception was something that just necessarily happened for any subject, qua subject. This seemed like an unattractive, failed attempt to establish objectivity on a subjectivist foundation.)

Secondary literature on Kant is vast, and much of it is outstanding in quality. Leading interpreters have deep differences, and this is as it should be. A mark of great philosophy is that it encourages creativity and spawns ever new interpretations.

If I could hazard a generalization, though, it seems that subjectivist readings of Kant are more and more challenged these days. To mention but one example, Frederick Beiser’s recent history of German idealism before Hegel is entitled German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism. Young Karl Marx’s 1844 essay on Hegel’s Phenomenology, which reduced Hegel (and arguably Kant as well) to a bad subjectivist cartoon of Fichte, is profoundly misleading. (See also Copernican.)

Aristotle and Kant

Kant and Aristotle are both very concerned to develop a thick, discursive concept of rationality, which goes far beyond the merely logical to address many questions of what is right.

Nancy Sherman and others have substantially softened the traditional contrast between Kantian and Aristotelian ethics. Kant’s critique of eudaimonism (pursuit of happiness as an ethical criterion) was mainly aimed at the British utilitarians, who really did make subjective happiness into a criterion of sorts. It would be very wrong to think this applies to the Aristotelian notion. Sherman makes a strong case that in less familiar works dealing with moral anthropology, Kant recovers something like an Aristotelian notion of character. Kant’s extended development of the concept of judgment in the third Critique also recovers something like Aristotelian practical judgment or phronesis. (See also Freedom Through Deliberation?)

Aristotle and Kant have similarly thick notions of experience. In neither case is experience something immediate, as it was with the British empiricists. For Aristotle, it is as when we say someone is “experienced”. For Kant, it involves synthesis and extensive use of concepts, which themselves have complex derivation. Properly understood, Aristotelian “metaphysics” was concerned with higher-order interpretation of experience, and thus consistent with Kantian scruples. (See also Pure Reason, Metaphysics?)

Plato and Aristotle’s strong insistence on the autonomy of reason was largely submerged in the later tradition until Kant recovered it. (See also The Word “Rationalism”.)

Some of the argument of the paralogisms of pure reason is strongly reminiscent of things Aristotle said about the soul. Aristotle and Kant are equally opposed to Augustinian/Cartesian notions of reflexive constitutive immediacy. (See also God and the Soul; Modernity, Again.)

The main target of Kant’s attacks on dogmatism was the Wolffian school in Germany. He was not much concerned with the history of philosophy, and some of his language was overly sweeping.

We should forgivingly take this into account in assessing the relation of the Critical philosophy to what I have called the epistemic modesty of Plato and Aristotle. (As Hegel recognized, Plato and Aristotle were not at all dogmatic. Plato doubted the deliverances of sense, and rejected opinion outright. Aristotle’s more optimistic, proto-pragmatist stance was elaborated in thoughtful response to that questioning. Neither of them was a simplistic realist. Moreover, the two of them were the original pioneers of rational inquiry in ethics.)

Nonetheless, neither Plato nor Aristotle anticipated the very substantial detail and development of Kant’s argument. The explicit concepts of the transcendental/empirical distinction and of unities of apperception are distinctly Kantian, as is a finer-grained analysis of processes of synthesis. Kant also more explicitly treated normativity as an outer frame around all other considerations. It is to him that we owe the notion of the primacy of practical reason. A stronger emphasis on ethical universality through the categorical imperative was another Kantian innovation. (See also Copernican; Brandom and Kant; Hegelian Genealogy.)

Hegelian Genealogy

[The title above was conceived as an initial answer to the question posed below about the main ways Hegel extends Aristotle, but the article then wanders away from Hegelian genealogy in further pursuit of that question.]

Hegel was at the same time deeply Aristotelian, deeply Kantian, and highly original. Across numerous posts, I have been pointing out Hegel’s connections with Aristotle. This implicitly poses the question, how should we summarize the aspects of Hegel’s contributions that go beyond Aristotle?

What Brandom has called Hegel’s genealogy captures most of this at a high level. A Hegelian genealogy is a recollective making more explicit of our current best self-understanding in terms of a backward projection of part of that current understanding onto what we take to be its historic roots, in order to then trace a sequence of its development into our full current understanding. I would note that this sort of understanding involves the kind of interweaving of history and creative fiction that has been discussed at length by Paul Ricoeur.

Hegel is at one with Aristotle in recognizing that the end goal of a process is emergent rather than pre-established from the beginning, as someone like Leibniz or Plotinus might suggest. He does not mean to literally assert, e.g., that Socrates already explicitly thought in terms of German Idealist concepts like Subjectivity and Freedom. In part, he is deliberately using anachronistic terms as a sort of pedagogy for a contemporary audience. More significantly, he is making a historical claim based on current understanding that the roots of German Idealism go all the way back to Socrates.

On the other hand, while Aristotle and Hegel are both very concerned with development and take a retrospective perspective on it, Aristotle does not explicitly address the development of large cultural formations or development over long periods as Hegel does. Aristotle takes large formations in a mostly synchronic way.

On a small scale, while Aristotle makes heavy use of both material incompatibility and material consequence, he does not tightly combine these as Hegel does.

Aristotle recognizes that a concern for error and its rectification is integral to the pursuit of truth, but does not apply this to whole social formations or historical periods the way Hegel does. He does not have Hegel’s positive vision of the necessity of error for learning, and of a path to greater rationality that can only be achieved through the successive resolution of errors.

Aristotle treats mutual recognition as an important part of the description of the key ethical goal of friendship or love. Hegel further develops the idea of mutual recognition, makes it more primary, broadens its applicability, and also uses it to explain how normativity is socially and historically constituted.

Hegel also takes over Kant’s idea that normativity forms an outer frame around all other concerns. (See also Aristotle and Kant; Brandom and Kant; History of Philosophy; Edifying Semantics; Mutual Recognition.)

Hylomorphism

Hylomorphism refers to the fact that Aristotelian form and matter are found in a pair, are only analytically distinguishable, and have no separate existence. This is utterly different from a dualism such as the Augustinian one between a separately constituted soul and body, or the Cartesian one between mind and matter. Form and matter — an active way of being and its contingent situatedness — are so deeply interwoven that one cannot be empirically picked out from the other. I think something similar applies to substance and accident. At the end of the day, the distinction is only analytical. (See also Purpose, Contingency.)

Form

[This early skeletal note is preserved in its original form. For a somewhat more expansive treatment, see Form Revisited; Form as Value; Form, Substance; Form vs Action.]

The expressive metaconcept of form has multiple levels of meaning in Aristotle. A theme common to these various senses is that depending on the context, form is a way of being, or a way of being and doing.

A way of being and doing can be understood as constituted by a counterfactually robust effective orientation with respect to ends. The ends in question may belong either to whatever is considered as “having” the form, or to an intelligence that discerns the form, but in either case, the effective orientation that is form is attributed to the “thing” that “has” the form.

Thinking in terms of form is thinking in terms of a sort of primarily adverbial, richly modal, differential-consequential pragmatic determination rather than in terms of objects and extensional identity. That mouthful notwithstanding, it is often actually simpler than life in the kingdom of nouns.

The first sense is close to what Brandom would call a concept. (See also Conceptual, Representational.)

Then there is a hylomorphic biological one where psyche or “soul” is said to be the “form” or first actuality of the body, which seems to include its capacity for nutrition and self-movement and what we might call its elemental desire.

Things having to do with second nature or second actuality, such as character or intellect in a human, constitute a further level grounded in sociality and language.

Yet another is associated with the complete actualization of a thing, which includes not only actuality but its interweaving with material contingency and structured potentiality. It is at this level that we can speak of form as a counterfactually robust effective orientation in some delimited context, fusing potentiality and actuality together.

The complex functional role of form in Aristotle has a relatively close analogue in the role of mediation in Hegel. (See also

Substance; Mutation of Meaning; Concept, Form, Species; Aristotelian Dialectic; Structure, Potentiality; Meant Realities; Difference; More Difference, Less Conflict.)

Structure, Potentiality

I now want to say, structure — which statically captures a determinate field of potential inferences — is isomorphic to Aristotelian potentiality. These concepts are mutually illuminating.

This helps clarify how Aristotelian potentiality differs from the Platonic power referenced by the same Greek word, as well shedding light on the association I have made between potentiality and counterfactual inference.

From the other direction, the thing to notice is that for Aristotle, potentiality exists only in a pair with actuality or at-work-ness. Similarly, synchronic structure exists only in a pair with diachronic process. I always read the conspicuous lack of definition of the synchronic/diachronic interface as reflecting something like Aristotle’s principled use of underdetermination in order to focus on what is most essential and clearly justifiable.

A lot of people seem to have been very confused about this latter point during the drama over 1960s French structuralism. What passed for dialogue was often a complete disconnect. “Look at how much can be explained synchronically!” “Oh no, you’re abolishing history, free will, personality, and identity!” If the new viewpoint was forgivably one-sided in its enthusiasm, some of the reaction verged on hysteria. (See also The Dreaded Humanist Debate.)

Another source of confusion seems to be that many people apparently thought of structural causality in terms of a monolithic, complete determination. I think instead that structural causality comes in many separate blocks, in an overall context of less-than-complete determination. (See also Structural Causality, Choice; Values, Causality; The Importance of Potentiality.)

Structuralism

As a very youthful person in the 1970s, I was delighted to discover support for “my” thesis that relations are prior to things (and much else of interest) in the French writers associated with so-called structuralism. (The Anglophone comparative literature people had not yet invented “poststructuralism”.) There have been many structuralisms and attributions thereof over the years. I tend to be sympathetic to a lot of them — mathematical, linguistic, and historiographical.

From my current perspective, the unifying theme is that structure — of whatever sort —statically captures a field of potential inferences. Fields of potential inference are the basis on which diverse things such as mathematical theories, proprieties of linguistic usage, practices and practical attitudes of individuals, and large cultural formations are all constituted as determinate. I actually use a variant of the notion of static capture in my day job, at the mundane level of capturing potential inferences in a software or data model. (See also Difference; Althusser’s Hegel; Foucault; Empirical-Transcendental Doublet; Archaeology of Knowledge; 1968; Imaginary, Symbolic, Real; Immediacy, Presence; Ricoeur on Structuralism; Genealogy.)

In Aristotelian terms, in addition to structure’s connection with potentiality, what has been called structural causality is actually a good interpretation of efficient causation, and also turns out to look like the operation of an unmoved mover. (See also Structure, Potentiality; Efficient Cause, Again; Potentiality, Actuality; Values, Causality.)

Leibniz

Leibniz was one of the greatest minds ever — deeply original, vastly prolific, encyclopedic like Aristotle, but working in the ferment of early modernity. He formulated many differently detailed systems, in an exploratory and tentative way. What he published during his lifetime was only a tiny fraction of his output, and not fully representative of his thought. The critical edition of his collected works will not be completed for many decades yet to come.

Leibniz favored an ethical and political ideal of what he called wise charity. An ethical being is one who does more for others than is required to satisfy rights and responsibilities or social contract, and demands less of others than would be justified, while taking care to act in ways that are sustainable and not self-destructive. I like this very much.

An avowed Lutheran who cultivated extensive dialogue with Catholic scholars and religious leaders, Leibniz was deeply disturbed by Europe’s terrible religious wars. He sought to promote tolerance, diplomacy, and understanding.

As a Platonist in theology who stressed the importance of Plato’s Euthyphro, Leibniz said that God is first and foremost supposed to be good and reasonable, not just obeyed. His God would never say “…because I said so!” Leibniz was highly sensitive to the dangers of subordinating Reason and the Good to any kind of arbitrary Will, be it divine or political. To those who objected that this limited God’s power, he replied that attributing an arbitrary will to God would degrade God to a mere tyrant and despot rather than a good and wise ruler (see Leibniz on Justice vs Power).

Leibniz partly anticipated Einstein in saying that space and time are relations.

He held that mathematical physics of the sort he helped develop was fundamentally compatible with — and complementary to — what I have referred to as Aristotle’s semantic physics.

He argued for what I take to be the Aristotelian position that identity is just discernibility.

Leibniz defended the principle of sufficient reason (cleverly phrased by the scholastics as “nothing comes from nothing”). At the same time, he held that all necessity is of the hypothetical (if-then) variety, which means that nothing is unconditionally necessary, either.

The famous monads apply his pioneering work on infinite series to an inspiration from his friend Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microscopic organisms. On the one hand, each monad is supposed to be a self-contained microcosm of the entire universe; on the other hand, each monad contains many others that each contain many others that are also such microcosms (each with its own unique point of view on the whole), and so on to infinity. (See also Unity of Apperception.) Leibniz also had a fascinating theory of unconscious microperceptions.

Monads are said not to causally interact, but instead to mutually reflect one another in a purely synchronic way. For Leibniz, it is as though in reality everything has always already happened. It all comes down to one eternal act of God selecting the best of all possible already completely formed worlds. His thesis of the unreality of interaction seems bizarre and was never widely accepted, but the idea of synchronic mutual reflection is fascinating. (This is quite different from the pattern of determination in Hegelian mutual recognition, which has a substantial synchronic dimension but is based on interaction and has an irreducible diachronic component.) (See also Things In Themselves; Redding on Morals and Modality.)

I think Leibniz’s preformationism may be intended as a kind of edifying Platonic myth, but that is a side issue. Its practical consequence is a vision of determination and explanation by synchronic structure rather than sequential causality. Like most people, I think we also need a diachronic, interactive dimension. However, the possibilities of synchronic structural explanation are huge.

Leibniz controversially argued that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Whether or not we adopt such a view, it is important to understand that it was not nearly as naive as Voltaire’s famous satire made it out to be. For Leibniz, the criteria for a possible world are rather rigorous. A possible world is certainly not just any world we might idly imagine. All its details and all their realistic consequences must be able to coherently coexist.

Brandom has characterized Leibniz as an early inferentialist. In English, recent secondary literature is far better than most older accounts. In French, I was impressed by Yvon Belaval’s Leibniz, critique de Descartes (1960) and his student Michel Serres’ dissertation Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathémathiques (1968).