Kantian Intuition

Kant discussed intuition (Anschauung) mainly in the Critique of Pure Reason. Its meaning has been extensively debated in the secondary literature. Part of the difficulty is that Kant does not directly discuss “psychological” matters in any detail, except for the very informal treatment in the Anthropology.

I had been used to considering intuition and thought in Kant as an inseparable hylomorphic unity, like matter and form in Aristotle. This would mean that when we speak of Kantian intuition, it is always as an abstracted partial aspect of a larger whole of experience. (See also Figurative Synthesis.) Recent reading has raised a question about this, though.

Most famously, Kant speaks of the intuition of a sensible manifold. This resembles Aristotle’s account of sensation as mainly passive, but complemented by and interwoven with more active processes (see Passive Synthesis, Active Sense). Kant developed this quite a bit more extensively than Aristotle did. Aristotle hinted at something like passive synthesis, but mainly used its tentative results (common-sense objects) as a provisional starting point. Kant tried to reach back further into the preconscious generative process. My favorite discussion of this is Beatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge. (See also Kantian Synthesis.)

According to Kant, mathematical construction, which produces an object and not just a theorem, operates on the basis of a kind of pure intuition not tied to sensory perception. This was the original inspiration for Brouwer’s mathematical “intuitionism”.

More broadly, I think Kantian intuition corresponds to the element of immediacy in experience, including what I have called feeling, as well as a kind of holistic summation of previous experience preconsciously associated with patterns preconsciously discerned in the current manifold. There seems to be a complex reverberation and mutual determination between immediate and mediate elements in experience. This appears both in the Kantian transcendental deduction (see Longuenesse, cited above) and in the Hegelian idea that immediacy is always “mediated immediacy” and thus never purely immediate. It also again reflects the fundamental hylomorphism of intuition and thought.

Something like Hegelian ethical Spirit or the Kantian transcendental is all mediation, in contrast to traditional views of spiritual or mystical experience as something immediate and unanalyzable. I take Kantian intuition, Brandomian sentience, and the main import of Aristotelian soul to be on the immediate side, but subject to the reverberation and mutual determination mentioned above. (See also What is “I”?; Psyche, Subjectivity.)

In contrast to Descartes and Locke, Kant famously rejected the idea of intellectual intuition, or passive reception of thought contents, just as he rejected the medieval notion of the intellectual soul. Anything “intellectual” would be on the side of thought rather than intuition for Kant, and thought for Kant always involved explicit, active development rather than passive reception. Hegel, Sellars, and Brandom take this as a starting point, and I think Aristotle would concur. (See also Subject.)

Categorical Hegel?

I just discovered a book-length nLab web draft with extremely detailed interpretation of Hegel’s Science of Logic into higher category theory and homotopy type theory. (Reading category theory into Hegel was originally suggested by William Lawvere in the 1960s.) A lot of it is way beyond me, but there is much of interest. nLab in general hosts world-class work in math and logic, as well as applications of it to physics and philosophy. Remarks there about historical philosophers are uneven in quality, but a number of them are interesting, and the more mathematical or logical they are, the better the quality gets. The aforementioned draft does reference old, inadequate generalizations about Hegel as “mystical”, but the detail and scope of the interpretation into state-of-the-art mathematics are awe-inspiring. It also includes a nice formalization of Aristotelian logic, which is mathematically much simpler and relatively easy to understand. I previously found a much shorter page there that explicitly mentions Brandom, and connects with his interest in modal logic. (See also Identity, Isomorphism; Categorical “Evil”; Higher Order.)

Suther on Hegel on Freedom

I’m always nervous about strong emphasis on “Freedom” in treatments of German idealism, but recent literature has considerably improved the situation. Jensen Suther in “Hegel’s Logic of Freedom: Towards a ‘Logical Constitutivism’” makes a number of points I would endorse. While his is a “metaphysical” reading, it also owes something to Sellars and Brandom.

Hegelian logic for Suther is “a logic of freedom not only in the sense that it articulates the logic of what it means to be free, but also in the sense that it is a fully free practice of logic, leaving no presupposition uncontested and demanding of thought that it learn to think for itself” (see my The Autonomy of Reason). Suther also says “the only true or intelligible conception of being is one of which the good is taken to be constitutive” (emphasis in original). He recognizes that purposes are not merely subjective. Further, “it is essential to the intelligibility of what is that it be rendered intelligible, that reasons be given and asked for as to why we take things to be as they are”. He also recognizes the positive importance of error. (See also Reasons; Being, Existence; Freedom and Free Will.)

It gets a bit more problematic when he says “rational agency is not something we achieve, but is instead the distinctive form of living beings that are capable of being initiated into a social and historical process of progressive actualization of the potential for agency”. I don’t see why a distinctive form cannot also be something achieved. He seems mainly concerned to deny that it is an individual achievement, a view he attributes to Robert Pippin. I would agree that rational agency is at least as much a historical achievement as an individual one, but every human qua rational/talking animal or even just every modern person is not thereby a full-fledged rational agent. To be a rational animal (or to be sapient in Brandom’s sense) is just to be capable of being initiated, etc., to borrow Suther’s words quoted above.

In the Aristotelian commentary tradition, al-Farabi (10th century CE) and others explicitly developed a notion of a distinct form of acquired intellect, such that being “acquired” was considered key to the distinctness of that form. (Intellect for al-Farabi was at root more cosmic than cultural, but that is not the point here.) Only second-nature things could be of an acquired kind. The “acquired” status was part of an elaboration of several structural degrees of actualization. A classic example would be someone who has already learned something, say geometry, but is not currently using it. Actualization of intellect only advances to the further degree of “active” by being in use, as when the geometer is busy proving a theorem.

Suther generalizes about “the neo-Aristotelians”, referencing John McDowell and Robert Stern. I appreciate it when people like McDowell make significant positive references to Aristotle, but McDowell is hardly a full-blooded Aristotelian. According to Suther, what counts as freedom for McDowell and Stern is something given in advance. Suther calls this a neo-Aristotelian position. I don’t think Aristotle considered anything to be “given in advance”. He was the original emergentist.

Suther has a great quote from Hegel that “there is nothing degrading about being alive”, and a nice emphasis on the unity of life and knowing. For me, this comes back to the way second nature positively builds on first nature, rather than standing in opposition to it. Suther, though, seems to think there is something essential about death, fear, anxiety, and pain. While these are not entirely absent in Hegel, in this respect Suther’s reading seems influenced by early Heidegger. Contra Heidegger, I would cite Spinoza’s “the philosopher thinks of nothing less than of death”. I prefer Brandom’s explanation of the struggle to the death in the Phenomenology as a dramatic extreme example of a much more general concept of commitment to what we hold dear as willingness to sacrifice something else for it.

Second Nature

In the case of a human, Aristotle spoke of the soul as the “first” actuality of the body, and of intellect as a second actuality of a human being. This was extrapolated by later commentators into a broader concept of second nature. Nature for Aristotle is not just the way something statically is, or a set of abstract laws; it is an internal source of motion and rest within each natural thing. In the case of an animal, it is responsible for growth and characteristic bodily movements or behavior. I have glossed actuality (energeia) as at-work-ness, or a status of being effectively operative in a process, so there is a kind of metonymic relation between nature and actuality.

The idea that nature or actuality is something admitting of structural degrees seems very useful. Modern discourse is full of awkward contrasts between, e.g., nature and culture, as if these were mutually exclusive domains. But culture or character or mind exists within — or layered on top of — what we would call physical nature. It is a relatively autonomous additional layer with additional capabilities, that would not exist without the first layer. It is a complex adverbial modification of the active processes associated with first nature. Hegelian Spirit is a thing of this kind. (See also Ethos, Hexis; Rational/Talking Animal; Parts of the Soul; Alienation, Second Nature.)

Layers

Human reasoning is never purely formal. I think it works mainly along the lines of the material inference described by Sellars and Brandom. But as Brandom pointed out in Between Saying and Doing, any given material inference can still be represented by a formal inference.

Direct brain-computer analogies don’t seem to me to yield much. On the other hand, the theory of programming languages does yield insights into the foundations of formal reasoning, and the foundations of formal reasoning may indirectly yield insights into the ways human reasoning works.

A case in point is the notion of compilation stages. All programs need to be compiled or interpreted to be run. Usually, this happens in multiple stages. At each stage, expressions in a more expressive language are re-encoded into operationally equivalent expressions in a less expressive language. It may seem counterintuitive that this is even possible, but it is essential to the way something intelligible to us can be made to “run”.

This tells us that operational equivalence and expressive equivalence are not the same thing, and it suggests an analogy for the way second nature relates to first nature. Operational equivalence can be preserved by substituting references for inferences. Something that can only be expressed at a higher level can nonetheless be executed at a lower level. Things that can only be expressed through human language and reason can provide the occasion for operational execution by a physiological mechanism. (See also Free Will and Determinism; Psyche, Subjectivity; Bookkeeping.)

Parts of the Soul

For Aristotle, psyche or “soul” is an ordinary empirical concept. First and foremost, it names a set of functional characteristics and abilities that distinguish living from nonliving things. Associations with what we might call specifically mental functions are secondary to this. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good introduction.

When speaking of “parts” of the soul, Aristotle means distinguishable groups of functions. He explicitly leaves open the question whether they are actually separable from one another. Sometimes he seems to distinguish three main parts: one associated with the basic functions of nutrition and reproduction shared by all living things, including plants; one associated with desire and sensorimotor functions, shared by all animals; and one associated with reason and intellect. At other times, he makes finer distinctions.

Perhaps unexpectedly, reason (logos) and intellect (nous) for Aristotle seem to be more sharply distinguished from what we might call mental functions than mental functions are from biological ones. In contrast with, e.g., memory, which he says cannot exist independent of a living body, and in spite of the fact that he thinks thought contents build on sense perception, he explicitly says intellect has no bodily organ and comes from outside. The very closely connected concept of reason is mainly associated with language and the right kind of socialization. I think reason and intellect still get treated as part of the soul mainly because their presence reshapes the whole (See also Reasonableness; Feeling; Second Nature; Intelligence from Outside; Psyche, Subjectivity; Passive Synthesis, Active Sense.)

For animals, including rational animals, Aristotle located the seat of the soul in the heart. In his time, there was as yet no evidence to refute this traditional conception; understanding of the physiological role of the brain and nervous system only developed in later Greek medicine. But recall also that the psyche for Aristotle is at root more vital than mental. Even today, we still distinguish life by a literal heartbeat, and associate emotion figuratively with the heart.

Why Brandom’s Hegel?

Brandom offers us an ethically oriented Hegel, read as anticipating many 20th and 21st century concerns. He provides an ethical path to overcoming the separation of subject and object.

Importantly, Brandom’s Hegel even turns out to have anticipated the main concerns of the 1960s French anti-Hegelians, while standing untouched by their criticism. He turns out to be the original critic of mastery and totalization; never uses subjectivity as an unexplained explainer; and claims no forward-moving historical teleology.

While Brandom’s approach to Hegel involves more original philosophical development than historical scholarship, I nonetheless believe based on my own independent reading that with a few caveats on nonessential points, it is historiographically sound. (That is far from saying it is the only valid or interesting interpretation; historiographical soundness just means that a reasonable case can be made.) At any rate, I find it both sound and tremendously inspiring.

Pinkard on Brandom on Hegel

Leading Hegel scholar Terry Pinkard, who has written several outstanding books, recently reviewed Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust. Pinkard, whose approach to Hegel is broadly related to Brandom’s but not the same, has worked rather closer to the Hegelian text than Brandom, who is principally an original philosopher in his own right. Two things Pinkard questions are Brandom’s thesis about the unparalleled significance of the transition to modernity, and his emphasis on ethical naturalism as the main thing wrong with the morality of the valet. I have some sympathy with both these points (see Brandom and Hegel on Modernity; Genealogy).

In passing, Pinkard contrasts Brandom’s normative-pragmatic reading with “neo-Platonist, neo-Aristotelian and neo-Spinozist interpretations”. While at a certain level this is uncontroversial and there are many conventional readings of Hegel that I think go wrong in one or more of these directions, I also still think that even from a broadly Brandomian viewpoint, something can be salvaged from each of these categories, provided we go beyond old clichés. Plotinus made something like Aristotelian unmoved movers the model for all determination, partially anticipating 1960s notions of structural causality (which I have given a somewhat Brandomian interpretation), while later neoplatonists like Proclus and Damascius also hinted at more dynamic mutual determination. I have developed connections between Aristotle and Brandom at some length, and Pinkard himself has elsewhere noted significant Aristotelian elements in Hegel. Spinoza pioneered modern thinking in terms of relations before things, which was further advanced by Kant and Hegel. He was celebrated as a proto-inferentialist in Brandom’s Tales of the Mighty Dead.

Pinkard seems to think Brandom dwells too much on the Hegelian critique of mastery, seeing instances of it everywhere. To my mind, this emphasis is salutary, and of vital importance as a corrective to previous claims about the “totalizing” nature of Hegelian thought.

Pinkard argues that the end of the Spirit chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology has more to do with a critique of a Kantian claim that free moral action involves a special kind of causality not available in experience than with a critique of mastery. Kant did inconsistently suggest such a thing, but I think the charitable reading is that this was infelicitous phrasing that is not at all essential. But whether or not one attributes such voluntarist thoughts to Kant, voluntarism basically just is the assertion that the will has mastery, so a critique of voluntarism would also be a critique of mastery.

He has doubts about the bottom-up nature of Brandom’s expanded account of mutual recognition in A Spirit of Trust, even suggesting that it ends up being more Fichtean than Hegelian, and implies starting with an “I”. He objects to a passing phrase of Brandom’s about experience incorporating recognition of error as a “two-stroke engine”, suggesting that it leads to something like a Fichtean opposition of I and not-I.

Passing phrases notwithstanding, I think Hegel and Brandom both go below the level of an “I” to ground the sapient dimension of subjectivity in shareable thought contents and their interconnection. What is below the level of an “I” in this way is thus already social.

Pinkard has a nice phrase about Hegelian phenomenological thinking being in “the middle, as opposed to the active or passive, voice”.

He suggests that Brandom goes too far in reading the Phenomenology as an allegory, assimilating to this Brandom’s comments about applying a methodology that differs from Hegel’s own. I don’t see any allegorical reading of the whole, even though Brandom does give extreme weight to what obviously is an allegory at the end of the Spirit chapter (see Brandomian Forgiveness).

Pinkard does not see why Brandom dwells so extensively on forgiveness. I don’t think Brandomian forgiveness is supposed to yield new ground-level ethical conclusions, only sound ones. What is novel in this area is Brandom’s rethinking of meta-level concepts of responsibility and agency, which provides an ethical path to overcoming the subject-object dichotomy by means of what I have called normative monism.

Brandom is not principally a contributor to the rich literature on the historical Hegel in the way that Pinkard and Robert Pippin are. He reads somewhat selectively, interprets into different vocabulary that has its own complex associations, and makes many points of his own. A highly original philosophical account like Brandom’s should not be taken as competing with the historically oriented literature. They serve complementary purposes.

Kantian Synthesis

We naturally tend to take our experience for granted. One of the profound innovations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was an emphasis on processes of synthesis at several levels in the formation of experience. Dominant medieval and early modern views had tended to assume some kind of direct, unproblematic mental uptake of experienced objects or data from appearances. Kant’s talk about processes of synthesis is the positive account that complements his famous rejection of this “dogmatism”. For him, all conceptual uptake involves judgment, and all judgment involves synthesis, or putting together many things.

Aristotle had hinted at something like processes of synthesis in his mention of a common sense responsible for correlating perceptions from different senses like sight and touch into what we might call sensory objects. This was slightly expanded upon by Alexander of Aphrodisias in the late 2nd or early 3rd century CE, but it was not until Kant that the idea of synthesis began to be developed more fully. Plato and Aristotle treated judgment and what we might call synthesis as a good deal more difficult and provisional than other authors in the intervening period.

The best known kind of Kantian synthesis happens when concepts are applied to parts or aspects of the manifold of sensory and other intuition. Even in very simple cases, this turns out to involve many judgments, which in turn involve others. Kant associates this with reason and conscious activity.

Another kind of Kantian synthesis applies at a more elemental level to pieces or aspects of content in the manifold of intuition. This seems to be an essentially unconscious operation of what Kant after Aristotle called “imagination”. As Beatrice Longuenesse pointed out in her outstanding Kant and the Capacity to Judge (1998), Kant argued that this preconscious synthesis in imagination and the better known one involved with concepts in thought both depend on the same top-level table of categories. One possible way to interpret this is that Kantian intuition incorporates and in its own way autonomously and preconsciously applies conclusions of previous judgments or processes of synthesis, based on some kind of primitive sense of similarity to current circumstances. Of course, this is not guaranteed to be sound, but the idea is that it works well enough in many practical situations, and can be also refined and corrected by conscious judgment. (See also Passive Synthesis, Active Sense.)

A third kind of Kantian synthesis is the synthesis of unities of apperception. This is a high-level, “self-conscious” combination of very many judgments or commitments in a way that respects coherence. With either the addition of a track record or the interpretation of commitment as the commitment reflected in actions, this is what constitutes the moral identity of a person, which does not come ready-made (but see Obstacles to Synthesis).

The theme of synthesis was extended by Hegel to describe purely logical processes, as well as what Brandom would call genealogical ones. Hegel complements Kant’s emphasis by dwelling especially on how syntheses break.

Obstacles to Synthesis

Brandom’s reading of the Kantian synthesis of unities of apperception as an ethical task or end has enormously impressed me. One could largely identify the Kantian transcendental with the commitment part of what Aristotle called ethos, and with what Brandom and other contemporary writers call normativity. This seems to bring many things into sharper focus. I am also inclined to identify Hegelian self-consciousness with the result of what Kant spoke of in terms of synthesis, which leads me to want to speak of something like “synthesis or self-consciousness” as an ethical task. The Kantian and Hegelian characterizations take quite different paths, but (in part because of this) can be mutually illuminating. But I actually want to focus on the ethical task part.

As I said, I find this enormously inspiring. Nonetheless, I am still struggling with the fact that some people whom I want to call good, including one very dear to me, are largely prevented by past traumatic events and/or some organic disturbance from ever achieving much synthesis or self-consciousness of this sort, so that they are largely unable to participate in what in this context it feels a bit insensitive to call higher ethical considerations. A well-meaning person thus afflicted may have unstable responses to things and show what would look to us like deep inconsistency, basically dealing with very partial views one at a time in exclusion from one another, rather than reconciled or meaningfully related to one another. For the person experiencing in this way, just going through ordinary life is confusing, and can easily provoke high anxiety. Where thoughts and feelings form no coherent community and just atomistically bump against one another, ability to fully participate in the mutuality of social relationships will suffer. Such a person needs all the kindness and patience we can offer.

Subjectivity is a complex and multi-leveled affair. In terms of the development underway here, we at least need to distinguish transcendental, psychological, and organic levels in the scenario just described. Synthesis and self-consciousness are transcendental; the aforementioned obstacles are organic or psychological. One’s local bit of the transcendental is supposed to be independent of the empirical in one way, but in another way, in lack of the right empirical conditions, it will not grow and flourish. Still, I want to emphasize, there is a human being there deserving of respectful consideration. This last kind of insight is, I think, what is behind Kant’s insistence on the dignity of all human beings, simply as such. (See also Aphasia; Coherence; Honesty, Kindness.)