Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic

When Hegel talked about dialectic instead of just using it, he occasionally made it sound as if dialectic governed events in the world. This is a loose, popular way of speaking that should not be taken literally. Dialectic is the main tool of the forward progress of philosophical criticism, and thus indirectly helps refine our understanding of the world and events in it. It could not directly drive events.

It is actually very hard to draw a sharp line between the world “in itself” and our understanding of it, because our understanding (in the general, not the specifically Hegelian sense) is all we actually have to go on. Our sense of the world in itself is permeated by artifacts of our understanding, because it comes entirely from our understanding.

But then it turns out that our understanding is not just some private, subjective thing of ours. Our understanding participates in the world, and is part of it. The cultivation of shareable thought grounds objectivity in (our sense of) the world. Much of the content of shareable thought comes to us from outside. In a poetic manner of speaking, it could be said that the world thinks itself through us. But in a more direct way, we are the agents and stewards of the world’s thought. In particular, it advances through us. There is thus no wall between our understanding and the world. There is a meaningful distinction, but the content of shareable thought straddles the boundary, so to speak.

Aristotle’s version of dialectic is much less famous nowadays, but a great deal easier to understand, and it does not require apologetics of the sort I just provided for Hegel’s. It uses logic and semantics to analyze the meaning of things said, making no assumption whether or not they are grounded in knowledge.

Aristotle explicitly said (Topics, book 1) that this is the way to investigate first principles (i.e., starting points) of knowledge. With respect to such starting points, we have no possibility of knowledge in the strong sense (episteme) — which requires development — but only a kind of initial personal acquaintance or familiarity (gnosis), as he said in Posterior Analytics.

There has been a strong tradition of misinterpretation of this latter passage. With no textual basis, many people who wanted to read Stoic-style foundationalism back into Aristotle — or were influenced by others with this sort of motivation — have glossed Aristotelian gnosis as something like a strong intellectual intuition, and claimed Aristotle was saying first principles of knowledge were better known in a strong sense, rather than just more familiar. (See also Aristotelian Demonstration.)

Aristotle’s actual practice, however, confirms the reading of first principles of knowledge as themselves objects of mere familiarity rather than strong knowledge. (Aristotle’s loftier principles are ends, not starting points of knowledge, and he typically places discussion of them at the end of an inquiry.) His starting points for inquiries are very pragmatic. He typically begins an inquiry with logical/semantic (i.e., “dialectical”) analysis of widely known opinions on the subject. He also explicitly recommends that we begin any inquiry from what is closer to us, and then, through analysis, refine our understanding. (See also The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle).

The development of knowledge starts from what is close to us and easier to grasp, and becomes progressively more secure through the dialectical work we do on it. Aristotelian dialectic uses the same logical forms as demonstration, but is mainly concerned with inferential semantic analysis rather than deriving conclusions. (Even Aristotelian demonstration is concerned not so much with deriving conclusions, as with perspicuously showing their basis.) Aristotle does the great majority of his actual work with dialectic rather than demonstration.

Once one becomes familiar with the profile of the Aristotelian version, it becomes possible to see something very like it at the core of Hegel’s way of working — not so much in what he says about it, as in what he does. (See also Essence and Concept; Aristotelian Dialectic; Dialogue; Scholastic Dialectic; Contradiction vs Polarity; Three Logical Moments.)

Foundations?

Foundationalism is the mistaken notion that some certain knowledge comes to us ready-made, and does not depend on anything else. One common sort involves what Wilfrid Sellars called the Myth of the Given.

Certainty comes from proof. A mathematical construction is certain. Nothing in philosophy or ordinary life is like that. There are many things we have no good reason to doubt, but without proof, that still does not make them certain.

In life, high confidence is all we need. Extreme skepticism is refuted by experience. It is not possible to live a life without practical confidence in many things.

Truth, however, is a result, not a starting point. It must be earned. There are no self-certifying truths, and truth cannot be an unexplained explainer.

In philosophy, we have dialectical criticism or analysis that can be applied from any starting point, then iteratively improved, and a certain nonpropositional faith in reason to get us going. All we need is the ability to question, an awareness of what we do not know, and a little faith. We can always move forward. It is the ability to move forward that is key. (See also Interpretation; Brandom on Truth; The Autonomy of Reason.)

Interpretation

It seems to me that the main thing human reason does in real life is to interpret the significance of things. When we think of something, many implicit judgments about it are brought into scope. In a way, Kant already suggested this with his accounts of synthesis.

In real-world human reasoning, the actually operative identity of the things we reason about is not the trivial formal identity of their names or symbols, but rather a complex one constituted by the implications of all the judgments implicitly associated with the things in question. (See also Identity, Isomorphism; Aristotelian Identity.)

This is why people sometimes seem to talk past one another. The same words commonly imply different judgments for different people, so it is to be expected that this leads to different reasoning. That is why Plato recommended dialogue, and why Aristotle devoted so much attention to sorting out different ways in which things are “said”. (See also Aristotelian Semantics.)

I think human reason uses complex material inference (reasoning based on intermediate meaning content rather than syntax) to evaluate meanings and situations in an implicit way that usually ends up looking like simple summary judgment at a conscious level, but is actually far more involved. A great deal goes on, very rapidly and below the level of our awareness. Every surface-level judgment or assertion implicitly depends on many interpretations.

Ever since Aristotle took the first steps toward formalization of logic, people have tended to think of real-world human reasoning in terms modeled straightforwardly on formal or semi-formal logical operations, with meanings of terms either abstracted away or taken for granted. (Aristotle himself did not make this mistake, as noted above.) This fails to take into account the vast amount of implicit interpretive work that gets encapsulated into ordinary terms, by means of their classification into what are effectively types, capturing everything that implicitly may be relevantly said about the things in question in the context of our current unity of apperception.

A logical type for a thing works as shorthand for many judgments about the thing. Conversely, classification and consequent effective identity of the thing depend on those judgments.

As a result of active deliberation, we often refine our preconscious interpretations of things, and sometimes replace them altogether. Deliberation and dialectic are the testing ground of interpretations.

In general, interpretation is an open-ended task. It seems to me that it also involves something like what Kant called free play. (See also Hermeneutics; Theory and Practice; Philosophy; Ethical Reason; The Autonomy of Reason; Foundations?; Aristotelian Demonstration; Brandom on Truth.)

Three Logical Moments

The “Logic Defined & Divided” chapter of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic contains some brilliant, relatively popular aphorisms from his lectures, and provides a nice introduction to his views. Having recently treated with approval Kant’s denunciation of speculation in the usual sense, I’m turning to this now because among other riches, it contains Hegel’s recovery of an alternative, much more positive sense for “speculation”. As Aristotle would remind us, things are said in many ways, and it is wise to give heed to the differences.

Hegel says that every notion and truth involves three moments that are all essential and cannot really be separated from one another: Understanding, Dialectic, and Speculation.

In other places, Hegel frequently polemicizes against the narrowness and rigidity of mere Understanding. Here, he rounds out the picture, noting that “apart from Understanding there is no fixity or accuracy in the region of theory or of practice” and that knowledge begins “by apprehending existing objects in their specific differences”. He cites examples of how Understanding contributes to science, mathematics, law, practical life, art, religion, and philosophy.

Preparing the transition to dialectic, he notes “It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions — but the man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract ‘either-or’, and keeps to the concrete”. Dialectic for Hegel if viewed separately is the moment of “negative” Reason or criticism. He says that dialectic subordinated to Understanding’s mode of thought leads to skepticism, but dialectic freed from this subordination builds on distinctions developed by the Understanding, even while “the one-sidedness and limitation of the predicates of understanding is seen in its true light”. Dialectic studies things “in their own being and movement”. He goes on to expound Plato’s use of dialectic, and its difference from sophistry. (See also Contradiction vs Polarity; Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic.)

Speculation in Hegel’s special sense is the “positive” moment of Reason, which if considered separately begins from a kind of faith in reasonableness in the world. He implicitly connects it with a charitable reading of the long religious tradition of faith seeking understanding, construed in such a way as to be not incompatible with a charitable version of Enlightenment criticism. He notes that “the true reason-world, so far from being the exclusive property of philosophy, is the right of every human being [of] whatever grade of culture or mental growth”, adding that “experience first makes us aware of the reasonable order of things… by accepted and unreasoned belief”. Once this rational order becomes an object of thought rather than mere belief, we have speculative Reason proper.

Speculative Reason builds on both Understanding and dialectic. “A one-sided proposition… can never even give expression to a speculative truth.” He notes a connection between this and basic intuitive fairness. Starting from a simple faith in the reasonableness of the world and advancing through various stages of criticism, speculative Reason ultimately realizes substance as subject, and overcomes the dichotomy of subject and object.

Dialectic undid the abstract, atomistic, foundationalist, “either-or” tendencies of isolated Understanding. Speculative Reason in Hegel’s sense turns this into a new affirmation. In many places, Hegel talks about Reason or dialectic in ways that subsume both the dialectical and the speculative moment described here.

I read Hegelian speculative Reason — or dialectic incorporating the speculative moment — as just ordinary reason moving forward without the crutches of foundationalism and dogmatic claims of certainty. Reason without foundationalism is concerned with the very same open-ended work of interpretation I have attributed to Aristotle. Ultimately, Hegelian Reason is defeasible rational interpretation of experience, optimistically doing the best we can with the resources we have, and always on the lookout for something better. Thus, it too can be reconciled with Kantian discipline. (See also “Absolute” Knowledge?)

Pure Reason, Metaphysics?

I expressed the concern of Kantian pure reason as higher-order interpretation of experience. Previously, I ventured a nontraditional, historically oriented gloss of the concern of Aristotle’s dialectical/semantic “metaphysics” in the exact same words. Obviously, this is not how it was generally understood in the later tradition, although numerous authors recovered partial insights along these lines. (See also Kantian Discipline; Aristotle and Kant; Dialectic, Semantics.)

Likely Stories

Plato had his characters engage in a good deal of speculation, but generally was very conscientious about explicitly identifying it as such. Larger speculations are often explicitly couched as myth or poetic invention. All such things are explicitly considered no more than “likely stories”. On a smaller scale, verbal cues generally abound to tell us when things are intended in a more tentative way.

Plato and Aristotle were generally — each in their own way — extraordinarily good at this sort of thing. However, the much more “dogmatic” style of the Stoic school set a new default tone for the later tradition, all the way to the time of Kant. It became standard to present what was actually speculation as if it were a simple report on the truth, or a certainty grounded in a strong kind of knowledge. (See also The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle; Kantian Discipline.)

Kantian Discipline

The Discipline of Pure Reason chapter in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason makes a number of important points, using the relation between reason and intuition introduced in the Transcendental Analytic. It ends up effectively advocating a form of discursive reasoning as essential to a Critical approach.

If we take a simple empirical concept like gold, no amount of analysis will tell us anything new about it, but he says we can take the matter of the corresponding perceptual intuition and initiate new perceptions of it that may tell us something new.

If we take a mathematical concept like a triangle, we can use it to rigorously construct an object in pure intuition, so that the object is nothing but our construction, with no other aspect.

However, he says, if we take a “transcendental” concept of a reality, substance, force, etc., it refers neither to an empirical nor to a pure intuition, but rather to a synthesis of empirical intuitions that is not itself an empirical intuition, and cannot be used to generate a pure intuition. This is related to Kant’s rejection of “intellectual” intuition. We are constantly tempted to act as if our preconscious syntheses of such abstractions referred to objects in the way that empirical and mathematical concepts do, each in their own way, but according to Kant’s analysis, they do not, because they are neither perceptual nor rigorously constructive.

All questions of what are in effect higher-order expressive classifications of syntheses of empirical intuitions belong to “rational cognition from concepts, which is called philosophical” (Cambridge edition, p.636, emphasis in original). This is again related to his rejection of the apparent simplicity and actual arbitrariness of intellectual intuition and its analogues like supposedly self-evident truth. It opens into the territory I have been calling semantic, and associating with a work of open-ended interpretation. (See also Discursive; Copernican; Dogmatism and Strife; Things In Themselves.)

I am more optimistic than Kant that something valuable — indeed priceless — can come from this sort of open-ended work of interpretation. Its open-endedness means no achieved result is ever beyond question, but I think we implicitly engage in this sort of “philosophical” interpretation every day of our lives, and have no choice in the matter. I also think serious ethical deliberation necessarily makes use of such interpretation, and again we have no choice in the matter. So, pragmatically speaking, defeasible interpretation is indispensable.

Kant goes on to polemicize against attempts to import a mathematical style of reasoning into philosophy, like Spinoza tried to do. Spinoza’s large-scale experiment with this in the Ethics I find fascinating, but ultimately artificial. It does make the inferential structure of his argument more explicit, and Pierre Macherey used this to great advantage in his five-volume French commentary on the Ethics. But there is a big difference between a pure mathematical construction — which can be interpreted without remainder by something like formal structural-operational semantics in the theory of programming languages, and so requires no defeasible interpretation of the sort mentioned above, on the one hand — and work involving concepts that can only be fully explicated by that sort of interpretation, on the other. Big parts of life — and all philosophy — are of the latter sort. So it seems Kant is ultimately right on this.

Kant points out that definition only has precise meaning in mathematics, and prefers to use a different word in other contexts. I make similar well-intentioned but admittedly opinionated recommendations about vocabulary, but what is most important is the conceptual difference. As long as we are clear about that, we can use the same word in more than one sense. As Aristotle would remind us, multiple senses of words are an inescapable feature of natural language.

Kant says that unlike the case of mathematics, in philosophy we should not put definitions first, except perhaps as a mere experiment. Again, he probably has Spinoza in mind, and again — personal fondness for Spinoza notwithstanding — I have to agree. (Macherey in his reading of Spinoza actually often goes in the reverse direction, interpreting the meaning of each part in terms of what it is used to “prove”, but the order of Spinoza’s own presentation most obviously suggests the kind of thing to which Kant is properly objecting.) More than anything else, meanings are what we seek in philosophical inquiry, so they cannot be just given at the start. We can certainly discuss or dialectically analyze stipulated meanings, but that is strictly secondary and subordinate to a larger interpretive work.

Following conventional practice, Kant allows for axioms in mathematics, but says they have no place in philosophy. He has in mind the older notion of axioms as supposedly self-evident truths. Contemporary mathematics has vastly multiplied alternative systems, and effectively treats axioms like stipulative definitions instead. If we have in mind axioms as self-evident truths, Kant’s point holds. If we have in mind axioms as stipulative definitions, then his point about stipulative definitions in philosophy applies to axioms as well.

A similar pattern holds for demonstration or proof. Mathematics for Kant always has to do with strict constructions, which do not apply in philosophy, where there is always matter for interpretation. (From the later 19th century, mathematicians began increasingly to invent theories that seemed to require nonconstructive assumptions — transfinite numbers, standard set theories, and so on. This is currently in flux again. Contrary to what was thought at an earlier time, it now appears that all valid “classical” mathematics, including transfinite numbers, can be expressed in a higher-order constructive formalism. Arguments are still raging about which style is better, but I am sympathetic to the constructive side.) Philosophical arguments are informally reasoned interpretations, not proofs.

Kant says that speculative thought in general, because it does not abide by these guidelines, unfortunately ends up full of what he does not hesitate to call dishonesty and hypocrisy. (When I occasionally ascribe honesty or dishonesty to a philosopher, it is with similar criteria in mind — especially the presence or absence of frank identification of speculation as such when it occurs. See also Likely Stories.)

The kind of philosophy I am recommending is concerned with explication of meanings, not a supposed generation of truths, so it is not speculative in Kant’s sense. What may not be obvious is just how large and vital the field of this sort of interpretation really is in life. The most common and compact form by which such interpretations are expressed in the small looks syntactically like ordinary assertion, and in ordinary social interaction, mistaking one for the other has little effect on communication. When the focus is not on practical communication but on improving our understanding, we have to step back and look at the larger context, in order to tell what is a speculative assertion and what is an interpretation expressed in the form of assertion. (See also Pure Reason, Metaphysics?; Three Logical Moments.)

(In the present endeavor, the great majority of what look like simple assertions are actually compact expressions of interpretations!)

Dialectical Illusion?

The Transcendental Dialectic part of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is mainly concerned with negative conclusions about traditional metaphysics, after the positive conclusions of the Transcendental Analytic. Some sections of the Dialectic, like his arguments about the soul in the Paralogisms and about rational proofs of the existence of God in the section on the Ideal, seem sound, while others, like the overall thesis of the Antinomies that reason necessarily produces contradictory conclusions about cosmology, seem very forced.

Kant’s notion of “dialectic” as essentially generating illusions rather than as the antidote and testing ground for illusions seems unfortunately grounded in little more than early modern anti-Scholastic prejudice (but see Self-Evidence for an alternate or complementary explanation based on the difference between dialectic and demonstration).

I thoroughly agree with his main point that the role of pure reason is not to give us new truths about the world, but to be concerned with higher-order interpretation of experience. I also think the various illusions he points out do seem like illusions, but they seem to me more like tacit assumptions deriving from specific historical cultural formations than inevitable accompaniments of the use of reason. (See Aristotelian Dialectic; Mediation.)

Paralogisms

The Paralogisms section of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason provides an excellent account of dubious metaphysical theses about the soul common to Descartes and others. They are that the soul is a substance in its own right; that it is simple; that it is a person; and that it is directly conscious of itself, but conscious of other things only as representations. Aristotle was a careful minimalist in his talk about the soul, and did not assert any of these. I have addressed theses of this sort myself numerous times (see, e.g., Mind Without Mentalism; Aristotelian Subjectivity; Subject; God and the Soul; Soul, Self; Parts of the Soul.)

Antinomies?

Despite many brilliant breakthroughs, Kant sometimes went astray. In his eagerness to recommend that reason should confine itself to matters of possible experience, in the Antinomies section of the Critique of Pure Reason he resorted to artificially staged arguments purporting to show that reasoning beyond possible experience necessarily leads to opposite conclusions, between which it cannot arbitrate. It seems to me that the apparent contradictions he derives are all due to uncontrolled use of particular conflicting assumptions, and therefore say nothing at all about limitations of pure reason per se. Kant should have been content simply to argue that there are many kinds of questions that pure reason alone cannot decide. On the other hand, the unfortunate weakness of these arguments does not affect the general soundness of his recommendation to stay within the realm of possible experience. (See also Self-Evidence.)