Acts in Brandom and Žižek

Both Brandom and Žižek recognize what Brandom has called the “world’s stubborn recalcitrance to mastery and agency”, and yet hold out for the possibility of transformative action.

Brandom ingeniously secures the practical reality of choice through the indirect route of an Enlightenment idea that we can only be bound by values to which we have at least implicitly committed ourselves. The recalcitrance of the Real prevents this from becoming a subjectivism, specifically by virtue of his complementary thesis that the meaning of our commitments is not up to us. But actively taking responsibility for things beyond our power turns out to indirectly have a kind of efficacy. Retrospectively, this may change meant reality.

A lengthy article by Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner discusses agency in Žižek from various angles. This account at least is happily free of the Badiouian narrowing of consideration to a few inflationarily conceived “exceptional” acts that afflicts some of the Žižekians (see “Hard” Kantianism?). The concern is with acts in general, and subjectivity in general. Here I can find a good deal more common ground.

For Žižek, our desires are not our own, but the split in the subject that makes us never fully ourselves also connects us with the social. A subject is contrasted with subjectivation. Although passive, alienating subjectivation is inescapable, it also can never be complete. A subject is positively constituted by its own nonidentity or “impossibility” (i.e., impossibility of complete identity with itself). According to Vighi and Feldner, “this decentred kernel of otherness embodies my self-consciousness, the only place where I have a chance to locate the truth about myself”. The conscious activity of individuals is said to be not free, but we can nonetheless accomplish a free act through identifying with the destabilizing effect of what is “in us more than ourselves”. They argue that Žižek does not hypostatize an abstract negativity in the way that I think Sartre did.

Žižek himself wrote that “To ‘pass to the act’ means to assume the risk that what I am about to do will be inscribed into a framework whose contours elude my grasp” (Tarrying with the Negative, p. 31). This connects agency with the Lacanian Real. He also wrote that freedom corresponds to “my ability to choose/determine which causes will determine me. ‘Ethics’, at its most elementary, stands for the courage to accept this responsibility” (The Parallax View, p. 203).

So, despite huge differences in approach and terminology and Žižek’s negative comments about Brandom, on this question at this level of abstraction, there is a similar practical import.

Self-Evidence?

Once upon a time, mathematical axioms were considered to be statements of self-evident truth. At least since development of the so-called axiomatic method, however, they have mostly been treated more like stipulative definitions chosen for convenience.

Between the respective times of Aristotle and Kant, allegedly self-evident truths found their way into philosophy. Descartes and others pulled principles like rabbits out of a hat, much as many of the scholastics had done earlier. There was a good deal of sound reasoning based on the dubious establishment of principles, but needless to say, the selection of principles drove the results.

Kant tried very hard to do better, and largely succeeded. In the Transcendental Dialectic section of the Critique of Pure Reason, arguments are examined that do seem to appeal to self-evident truths, but invariably, something is found by Kant himself to be wrong with the arguments.

I’ve previously referred to his antinomies as artificially staged. There, contradictory conclusions are derived from conflicting assumptions about self-evident truth, and Reason itself is apparently blamed for the result. Some commentators have thought that the arguments on the non-creationist side actually seem stronger than those on the creationist side, which raises the possibility that the apparently symmetrical presentation was an exercise in diplomacy on these sensitive matters. On the other hand, a counter-argument could be made that Kant had sympathy for both sides. Regardless, both sides of the antinomies appeal to allegedly self-evident truths, and it is the combination of these premises that leads to contradictory conclusions.

In the introduction to the antinomies, Kant himself says that “every transcendental illusion of pure reason rests on dialectical inferences” (Cambridge edition, p. 459). This seems to invoke either the common early modern pejorative sense of “dialectic” used in denunciations of scholasticism, or an actual Aristotelian distinction between dialectic and demonstration, where they are said to use the same inferential structures, but whereas demonstration aims at showing the reasons behind conclusions that are considered to be true, dialectic particularly examines the inferential consequences of using various premises, without assuming their actual truth. In any case, it seems Reason is found guilty of leading to contradiction when it mistakenly treats dialectical premises as if they were pre-existing truths. There is nothing particularly surprising about that. (See also Kantian Discipline; Dialectical Illusion?)

Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), the name most associated with existentialism, was a leading literary figure, public intellectual, and political activist in mid-20th century France. He initially became famous for dwelling on things like nausea and absurdity.

Sartre propounded one of the most extravagant voluntarisms ever conceived, grounded in a novel, atheistic metaphysics rather than the extreme supernaturalism that has usually supported such views. “[N]o limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself…. [F]or human reality, to be is to choose oneself; nothing comes to it either from the outside or from within which it can receive or accept…. Man… is wholly and forever free” (Being and Nothingness, pp. 439-441). We are “condemned” to freedom, are free even in prison, were never freer than during the Nazi occupation, and so on. For my own contrasting view, see Freedom and Free Will; Freedom Without Sovereignty; Choice, Deliberation; Structural Causality, Choice; Brandomian Choice.

Later, he developed a theory of what he called totalization. “If dialectical Reason exists, then, from the ontological point of view, it can only be a developing totalisation, occurring where the totalisation occurs, and, from the epistemological point of view, it can only be the accessibility of that totalisation to a knowledge which is itself, in principle, totalising in its procedures.” (Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 47). This sounds like a nightmare of the sort of bad old metaphysical Hegelianism that would swallow everything, completely opposed to Hegel’s own acute sensitivity to context and the essential role of mediation.

What is common to Sartre’s notions of freedom and totalization is their inflationary character. This is not a sound basis for anything.

“Hard” Kantianism?

Kantian Deeds (2010) by Henrik Jøker Bjerre is a book-length argument for a Žižekian Kant, with extensive, relatively polite polemical discussion of Brandom and John McDowell. Non-Žižekian readings of Kant are labelled “Soft”, while a Žižekian reading is introduced as a uniquely “Hard” Kantianism.

The main ingredients seem to be an identification of Kantian freedom with voluntarism; literal endorsement of Kant’s argument that reason necessarily leads to antinomies, as a segue to Žižekian contradiction; and a Heideggerian argument for the importance of metaphysics and the question of Being. Bjerre combines these in an attempt to justify claims for the importance of an extraordinary, “extra-moral” morality in Kant alongside ordinary morality. Ordinary morality is made to sound more like social conformity.

Each part of the above summary seems wrong to me. Here I won’t repeat contents of the above-linked articles that give some of my reasons.

While I welcome the elementary insight that Kantian morality involves more than rule-following, there seems to be no real textual basis in Kant for the “extra-moral” morality of a nonrational “surplus” of the deed that this book imports or invents. Simultaneously, the breadth and substantiality of Kant’s actual discussions of “ordinary” morality is much diminished, in order to leave a bigger territory for the putative extra-moral.

Dominik Finkelde’s Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan, and the Foundations of Ethics (2017; German edition 2015) continues along a similar path. “To put it plainly, for Kant the subject is either premoral or extramoral” (p. 8). If Kant said anything suggesting that, I would attribute it to his rather pessimistic view of human nature, not to any endorsement of arbitrariness. We are treated to the spectacle of a Kant made to sound like a Badiouian decisionist. Again, a “deed” presented as fundamentally irrational is everything, and this is supposed to be the way to social emancipation. This is illustrated by a description of Rosa Parks’ historic refusal to sit in the back of the bus as effectively a Badiouian disruptive “event” leading to a new arbitrary “truth”. Never mind that racial segregation in the U.S. was an obvious, egregious violation of ordinary Kantian respect and universality, which any truly honest person could see as irrational all along. Rosa Parks’ action was not at all arbitrary, but rather full of meaning.

Neither social emancipation nor philosophy benefits from all this metaphysics and all this apologetic for arbitrariness. Moreover, the denigration of reason and ordinary ethics as inherently “conservative” weakens the real basis of emancipation. (See also Kantian Will; In Defense of Ordinariness.)

Recognition, Identity

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy confirms that so-called “identity politics” has penetrated into contemporary philosophical discussions of recognition more than I had realized. It seems to me anything aimed at recognition of preconceived, contentful identities of existing selves has far less emancipatory potential than the generic Kantian respect for rational animals and open-ended, deconstructive Socratic question and answer that is at the core of what I call mutual recognition. (See also Trust as a Principle; Scorekeeping; Habermasian Recognition.)

Habermasian Recognition

I have not engaged a lot with the work of Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), but he is well known for promoting a version of mutual recognition.

At a very preliminary level, it seems he relies more on a presumption of abstract equality between participants, where Brandom incorporates consideration of their actual performance (see Scorekeeping). Habermas has also tended to assume that full consensus is the only desirable outcome, whereas Brandom takes a more positive view of clarifications that do not lead to consensus.

Habermas is a prolific writer, so I may be missing something mitigating, but both these differences seem to me to make the Žižekian criticisms of mutual recognition more applicable to the Habermasian version than to the Brandomian one.

More Difference, Less Conflict

This is not a panacea because often people are not attuned to logical subtleties, but strife can be reduced by closer attention to distinctions. Even opposite assertions about what are actually different things do not conflict at all, except possibly through their implications. More qualified assertions also reduce the potential for conflict.

Claims of incommensurability tend to end dialogue rather than promote it, so it is not clear that they actually reduce conflict. Intelligible distinctions, on the other hand, are an important part of the implicit basis of civility. Much of civility and ethics is about appropriate response, which depends on intelligible distinctions.

Attention to distinctions is entirely consistent with a Kantian concern for ethical universality. It actually helps. We can do a better job of applying universals to particulars when we have more distinctions to work with. (See also Practical Judgment; Reasonableness; Contradiction.)

Broken Synthesis

It is mainly Kant who is the thinker of synthesis. For Kant, synthesis is partly a moral ideal, and partly something we are always already caught up in, and need to deconstruct.

The Žižekians are right that Hegel specialized in pointing out how Kantian syntheses break. I’ve written at greater length about my own Brandomian take on this latter point under Error.

So-called absolute knowledge is actually a deconstruction, not a synthesis.

Meant Realities

In speaking of meant realities, my purpose is to suggest a contrast both with a view that meaning pertains to mental representations, and with anything purely formal in the modern syntactic sense, though meant realities may be understood as a sort of pure forms in an Aristotelian sense (see Mutation of Meaning).

I am not thinking of direct reference or correspondence. Reference and correspondence do come into play, but only circuitously. In the first instance, meant realities emerge with relative robustness from the cross-referencing, cross-checking, and mutual involvement — or preconscious Kantian synthesis — of many meanings, affirmations, and values.

The expression of meant realities in ordinary language forms the subject matter of material inference.

Common sense, ordinary language use, and the unconscious all jump over processes of synthesis to a taking of meant realities as they currently appear in context. Such practically necessary but always implicitly provisional shortcuts can be deconstructed again through interpretation and dialogue. (See also Reality; Substance; Beings; Reference, Representation.)