Matter, Mind

I don’t think any kind of stuff could come first, be it matter or some sort of mind-stuff. What comes first in the sense of principle would be something like form or structure or mediation. (“First” in the general sense of principle is said in several ways, but I’m inclined to re-collapse some of them. These days, I consider ontology to be mostly either redundant with semantic and epistemological methodological senses, or else just a mistake. This leaves a long view of methodology as the best candidate for a principle.) The air of paradox associated with saying something like mediation comes first is dispelled if we recall that apparent immediacy is mediated immediacy. This just reflects the fact that methodologically, we are never at a completely pure beginning, and always start in medias res.

Mind especially seems to me not best approached as a kind of stuff at all. It is first and foremost a way of doing. (See also Mind Without Mentalism.) Then, too, what is loosely called the “matter” that we care about in concrete cases often comes down to potentiality, or dispositions to respond in certain ways when acted upon (which is distinct from Aristotelian matter, as I understand it). Both of these are adverbial characterizations, though things of this sort can always be nominalized for convenient reference.

Aristotle suggests that what is first “for us” (the short view of methodology) is some sort of activity that we tentatively pick out within appearance. We then move forward by developing the adverbial characterization of that activity in terms of form or structure or mediation. (See also Objectivity of Objects; First Principles Come Last; Owl; Passive Synthesis, Active Sense; Radical Empiricism?; Realism, Idealism; Johnston’s Pippin.)

Modernity, Rousseau?

I discovered a 2018 lecture handout of Brandom’s that offers a few more clues to his particular notion of modernity. There, Rousseau’s specific version of the social contract is singled out as achieving a synthesis of attitude-dependence of normative statuses (from natural-law voluntarism) with the status-dependence of normative attitudes (from what Brandom calls the perfectionist tradition of self-governance). Hegel is cited as saying that “the principle of freedom emerges in Rousseau”. I am not a Rousseau scholar, and lack familiarity with a specific “perfectionist” tradition. The Hegel quote is of the sort that used to give me no end of trouble, as seeming to imply an endorsement of voluntarism.

Brandom says that Rousseau’s notion of the sovereign applies the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity with a unique twist — since Rousseau’s sovereign includes all the citizens, the commanding superior subject and the obedient subordinate subject coincide. I’ll hazard my own characterization of Rousseau as an antirationalist voluntarist antiphilosopher with a commendable if naive notion of the natural equality of persons and an insight into the moral difficulties associated with the notion of property that are still insufficient to make his overall position endorsable in the form in which he presented it.

Granting the huge impression Rousseau made on Kant, and Hegel’s endorsement of Kant’s response, I still want to say the important thing is what Kant and Hegel did to transform naive Rousseauian free will and equality into something viable, moving away from the subordination-obedience model altogether.

(The French Encyclopedists and the Spinozist movement evinced an actually more universal concern for social justice than Rousseau and his followers, while putting a positive value on reason and opposing voluntarism. This seems to me like a better antecedent than the one Kant and Hegel actually recognized. Going further back, Aristotle recognized inequality as a contingent fact but already thought something like mutual recognition applied between friends, while implying that members of a polity should treat one another like friends. Looking forward, I still think Plato and Aristotle have more in common with Kant and Hegel, and offer more that should be genealogically recollected, than someone like Rousseau; and that, based on the History of Philosophy lectures, Hegel would agree.)

Mutual Recognition

Hegelian mutual recognition puts ethical considerations of reciprocity with others to the fore. In part, it is a more sophisticated version of the idea behind the golden rule. It also suggests that anyone’s authority and responsibility for anything should always be evenly balanced. It is also a social, historical theory of the genesis of meaning, value, and identity. Hegel’s notion was partly anticipated by Fichte.

Brandom reads mutual recognition as central to Hegel’s ethics or practical philosophy, and Hegel’s practical philosophy as central to his philosophy as a whole. Prior to the publication of A Spirit of Trust (2019), what I take to be Brandom’s own deep ethical engagement was often not recognized. I hope the situation will soon improve.

Consistent with Brandom’s general approach, the ethics of A Spirit of Trust appears in a highly mediated form. Much of the work of ethics for Brandom comes down to the implementation and practice of normative pragmatics and inferential semantics, which he has been expounding at least since Making It Explicit (1994). So, I think he has been laying the groundwork for a long time.

One recent commentator (Lewis 2018) suggested that ethics proper was just missing from Brandom’s earlier accounts. His citations for this were to Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard, whose readings of Hegel are often compared to Brandom’s. I cannot find the text of Pinkard’s 2007 article, but Pippin in the course of his searching but still very sympathetic review “Brandom’s Hegel” (2005) had suggested there was at that time an important gap in Brandom’s reading, related to Hegel’s lifelong concern with a critical treatment of positivity, i.e., received views and institutionalized claims.

Pippin cited an ambiguous argument from Making It Explicit that seemed to support the social legitimacy of a commitment to enlist in the Navy by a drunken sailor who was tricked into a contract by accepting a shilling for more beer. Brandom has since clarified in several places that he did not mean to himself endorse this argument, based as it is on a partial perspective (see, e.g., Hegel’s Ethical Innovation). In Spirit of Trust terms, Brandom’s point in such a context would be to emphasize that the freedom associated with agency does not entail mastery, and in particular that we do not have mastery over the content of our own commitments. The issue for Pippin in 2005 was that Brandom appeared to put sole responsibility and authority for determining the content of commitments on the audience. Pippin found with respect to positivity “not so much a problem as a gap, a lacuna that Brandom obviously feels comfortable leaving unfilled” in Making It Explicit. I suspect Brandom’s lack of discomfort was directly tied to a deferral of such considerations to his 40-year magnum opus project, A Spirit of Trust.

For years, something like Pippin’s positivity issue was a main topic of discussion between my late father and me. For both of us, it was the big hurdle to overcome in fully recognizing Brandom as the world-historic giant we both thought he would probably turn out to be. I thought the positivity issue already began to be addressed in the early web draft of A Spirit of Trust, and I suspect it was a significant focus while Brandom was working on the final text.

In any event, I think it is clear that in the published Spirit of Trust, the determination of the content of commitments is envisioned not as stopping with an immediate audience, but as involving an indefinitely recursive expansion of mutually determining I-Thou relationships. On my reading, normative statuses that are both fully determinate and unconditionally deontically binding would only emerge from the projection of this expansion into infinity. But in practical contexts, we never deal with actual infinity, only with indefinite recursive expansions that have been cut off at some relatively early point. (See also Hegelian Genealogy.)

We always work with defeasible approximations — finite truncations of a recursive expansion through many relationships of reciprocal determination. This means in particular that judgments of deontic bindingness are defeasible approximations.

Further, the kind of approximation at issue here is not a statistical one, but a more Aristotelian sort of “probability”. It therefore cannot be assumed to monotonically improve as the expansion progresses, so it is not guaranteed that further expansion will not suddenly require a significant revision of previous commitments or concepts, as Brandom explicitly points out (see Error).

This means that the legitimacy of the queen’s shilling and any other received truth is actually open to dispute and therefore open to any rational argument, including those the sobered-up sailor might make. In Brandom’s favorite example, new case law — though of course subject to higher-level canons of determinate negation in its own future interpretation and evaluation — may significantly revise existing case law in unforeseeable ways.

I believe this gives us all the space we need for social criticism. We need have no fear that Brandom’s version of the mutual recognition principle will bind us to positivity. Nothing is out of bounds for the autonomy of reason. We only have to be honest about the conceptual content we encounter in the detail of the recursive expansion. I believe this is the answer to the lingering concerns I expressed in Robust Recognition and Genealogy. Even if Brandom himself were to turn out not to go quite this far, I think at worst this is a friendly amendment that does not disrupt the framework. (See also Edifying Semantics; Reasonableness.)

The recursive expansion of mutual recognition pushes it toward the kind of universality on which Kant based the categorical imperative. Practical outcomes from the two approaches ought to be similar. Hegel’s version is useful because it is grounded in social relationships rather than a pure metaphysics of morals, but still escapes empirical, “positive” constraints by indefinitely expanding the network toward the concrete universality of a universal community of rational beings. (See also Mutual Recognition Revisited; Pippin on Mutual Recognition; Hegel’s Ethical Innovation).

Realism, Idealism

I’d like to start with what for me is a sort of baseline scenario for thinking about these things. Aristotle often begins a discussion by speaking in the common way about the being of things encountered in experience; but as the discussion progresses, emphasis shifts increasingly from the original naive talk about being and things to talk about form and concepts and meaning. At this point (though not at the start) we could also begin to talk objectively about objects in the modern sense. (I take it that any objectivity is always emergent and synthetic.) (See also Aristotelian Dialectic.)

Modern talk about realism and idealism is very slippery, and sometimes tends to slide in an undisciplined way between several different concepts. To begin with, are we taking the terms in an “epistemological” or an “ontological” sense? And what exactly do we mean by either of these? Then, if we talk about idealism, do we mean the mental, subjective kind that is usually only attributed in the third person to people we don’t like, or something else that is nonpsychological and nonsubjective?

I take it that the Aristotelian scenario I opened with could be characterized either in terms of some sort of non-naive realism or in terms of some sort of nonsubjective idealism. These to me are the only interesting options, and to be honest, I have some difficulty telling them apart.

I then take this as a norm for everything else. The baseline is that almost everyone wants to be some kind of non-naive realist or nonsubjective idealist, and it does not matter very much which, because the practical result is very similar.

The real work — and the interesting part — is doing what it takes to be good at either. We should aim to develop the specificity of our non-naivete and our non-subjectivism. But here again, the developed specificity of our non-naivete or non-subjectivism is far more interesting than whether we opted at the base to call it realism or idealism.

I see both Kant and Hegel in particular as aiming simultaneously at nonsubjective idealism and non-naive realism. They each differently in their own much more complicated ways work out the details, and again that is where the interest lies. Hegel adds yet another layer around Kant. I think most people see Hegel as aiming at a more ambitious non-naive realism than Kant (and perhaps a more ambitious nonsubjective idealism as well). (See also The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle; Aristotle and Kant; Brandom and Kant; Hegelian Genealogy; Mutual Recognition; Radical Empiricism?; Substance Also Subject.)

Johnston’s Pippin

Adrian Johnston’s A New German Idealism just arrived, and I’m taking a quick look. It is mainly concerned with Slavoj Žižek’s work. But for now, I’m just concerned with chapter 2 — where Johnston launches a broadside against “deflationary” readings of Hegel, particularly the one he attributes to Robert Pippin — and the preface.

Johnston can be forgiven for not addressing Pippin’s 2018 work on the Logic, but I do not understand why he ignores my favorite book by Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (2008).

There, Pippin dwells extensively on Hegel’s Aristotelian side. Much of interest could be said on what it means to be Aristotelian in a post-Kantian context. Many received views will be challenged by such an examination. (For a beginning, see Aristotle and Kant.) As I have said, I read Hegel as both Kantian and Aristotelian (as well as original).

In any case, Johnston seems to think Pippin in Hegel’s Idealism (1989) was intent on reducing Hegel to Kant. That book was indeed concerned to show a strong Kantian element in Hegel. But I did not think of it as reductive. If anything, I read Pippin’s book as a salutary response to those who want to reduce Hegel to a pre-Kantian, and to read Hegel as rolling back from Kant rather than moving forward from Kant. Because he assumes a bad old subjectivist reading of Kant, Johnston seems to think Pippin’s reading of Hegel necessarily rules out the possibility of seeing a realist side to Hegel.

The whole challenge of Hegel is to understand how it it is possible in his terms to be both Critical and realist, without engaging in logical nonsense. (But see Realism, Idealism.) This sort of thing typically requires significant semantic labor, but the achievement of such semantic elaboration is the whole point. Here I worry where Johnston intends to go with his defense of “undialectical” distinctions in the preface. It is one thing to recognize that Hegel does not intend to just do away with Understanding and its distinctions, and quite another to treat those distinctions as final. (See also Univocity.)

Johnston’s lengthy discussion of the positive value of Understanding in the preface does not address how it relates to dialectical transitions. He mainly wants to defend Žižek’s tactic of presenting forced binary choices at particular moments. In particular cases and circumstances this conceivably can be good pedagogy, but it is the details that matter, and Johnston offers no advice on how we are to distinguish a pedagogically good forced choice from a bad one.

(I suspect Žižek’s tactic may be related to his friend Badiou’s defense of the Maoist “One divides into Two” line, which always seemed like blustering nonsense to me. There have been some very rational strands within Marxism; I do not comprehend why someone as intelligent as Badiou would prefer to apologize for the coarsest and most anti-intellectual, but to a lesser extent Althusser did as well. See also Democracy and Social Justice.)

(Worlds away from this, Brandom has a wonderfully clear account of the nonfinality of Understanding’s particular conclusions, illustrated precisely by its very important positive role in the recognition and resolution of error, in which the operations of the Understanding on its own terms give rise to dialectical transitions at the level of Reason, understood in terms of the revision of commitments and possibly of concepts.)

Johnston also seems to assume there is something necessarily reductive about a non-ontological (or not primarily ontological) reading of Hegel. Again, I don’t see why.

I think Aristotle’s metaphysics was basically a semantic investigation, just like his physics. It is the historic forcing of this inquiry back from the wide universe of meaning onto narrow registers of being and existence that I see as reductive.

Based on the work of Olivier Boulnois on the role of the medieval theologian Duns Scotus in the reinterpretation of metaphysics as ontology, I have come to think that in general, modern emphasis on ontology tends to reflect what I take to be historically a medieval Scotist mystification of things Aristotle approached in clearer terms we should recognize today as mainly semantic. (For what it’s worth, the homonymous use of “ontology” in computer science is also mainly semantic.)

Metaphysics or “first philosophy” or “wisdom” was supposed to help us with higher-order understanding, not to be a place where strange existence claims are made.

Rational Ethics

When Hegel said that Plato and Aristotle were the great educators of the human race, I think he had in mind not only their exemplary nondogmatism, but also their rational ethics. The advent of rational ethics was a world-historic advance. I even think it might be unequalled. (See also Reasons.)

This suggests a further clarification of my view on the vexed modernity debate. At a more elemental level, I had suggested that philosophy — understood as the recognition of genuine questions in normative matters — might almost be substituted for modernity, hypothetically understood typologically as any step away from the unquestioned governance of pre-given traditional norms. At issue then was philosophy as a whole, the content of which I believe is all at least indirectly normative. But a more specific argument could also be made about rational ethics, where the content is by definition normative.

Aristotle would remind us that if we speak of this flowering of expressive metaconcepts as an “event”, it is said in an extremely different way than a bare reference to an empirical event, the content of which is completely undetermined by the reference.

This suggests a clarification of something else that has been nagging at me in the modernity debate, and why I have been anxious to substitute an explicit typological criterion of modernity for references to what sounds like a chronological threshold. A chronological threshold is just an abstraction for some empirical events associated with it. The geistlich content we might attribute to empirical events is not made evident at all by reference to them, so there is a lack of determination in all simple, putatively empirical references to “modernity”.

Anyway, I’d like to suggest that the greatest watershed in the development of Geist was the advent of rational ethics. Then the next biggest thing after that could be said to be the making explicit of the mutual recognition model.

This also clarifies another perplexity I had about the relation between valuations of modernity and Brandomian postmodernity. Phase two of three in Brandom’s schema seems objectively to be mainly characterized by what really did turn out to be understood by him as negatively valued alienation, but in other passages he lauds phase two as the main event of progressive history. In that case, I would have expected the positively valued big event to be the phase three synthesis resolving the alienation, rather than the phase two alienation itself. But if we instead specify phase two as something like rational ethics and phase three as its enhancement by the mutual recognition model, then it does make more sense to assign the highest value to phase two. Since it restores to norms an emergent, synthetic objectivity — arising out of the mutual recognition process — the mutual recognition model can be understood as the (second) negation of the questioning (first negation) of the traditional putative simple, pre-given objectivity of norms from which rational ethics begins.

(As the above paragraph illustrates, it takes real interpretive work to identify something like a Hegelian triple and give it reasonable semantics.)

Theology

I believe there is an implicit suggestion in Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel that sound theology must include extensive concern with a universally accessible common ground of ethics understood by means of reason with no appeal to external authority.

My own view is that the highest form of faith is intransitive. It could not have articles. It is not a belief in some propositions, but a pure affective attitude and way of being and doing. Anything else is just a way to get to that, if it is a way to anything at all. This would be somewhat akin to traditional negative theology. (See also Plotinus; God and the Soul; First Principles Come Last; Affirmation; Belief.)

Antiphilosophy

Badiou first drew my attention to the Counter-Enlightenment concept of “antiphilosophy”. He uses this as a kind of spice, ostensibly to keep philosophy on its toes. I find it useful as a historical category, but apply it with different extension and different valuation. Jonathan Israel discusses the original Counter-Enlightenment version in Enlightenment Contested.

To me, antiphilosophy is unequivocally a bad thing. I take it to be defined by an overt or implicit hostility to philosophy as an integral discipline — or to most philosophy — while at the same time appropriating pieces of it. It is (I say with polemical voice) the pseudo-philosophy of people who actively refuse the rational discipline of real philosophy, but want to cherry-pick a few conclusions for a different agenda.

Consistent with that, I would not want to call Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or Lacan an antiphilosopher, as Badiou does. For me, the antiphilosophers include (paradigmatically) the voluntaristic, emphatically supernaturalist theologians like Philo of Alexandria and al-Ghazali who explicitly saw themselves in competition with “philosophy”; then the Counter-Enlightenment people who coined the word antiphilosophy; then also, other avowed antirationalists like Rousseau and Kierkegaard; those like Descartes who hold the history of philosophy in utter contempt; and the cruder advocates of empiricism.

Badiou

Alain Badiou (b. 1937) is probably the leading living philosopher in France today. He is a very complex figure who writes well-organized, multidimensional books and says things that are sometimes quite insightful, but who takes a number of fundamental positions I find utterly antithetical. To oversimplify in the extreme, I read him as a highly original Sartrean existentialist who borrowed a few arguments from Sartre’s structuralist nemesis, and added a lot of layers of his own. Somewhat unfortunately in my view, he has become very influential in continentally inclined academic leftist circles. Slavoj Žižek, who offends my sensibilities less often and catches my interest more, has dedicated books to Badiou.

One thing I appreciate is that unlike some others of his generation, Badiou unapologetically identifies himself as a philosopher in the classical sense. I also like the fact that he overtly puts a high value on reasoning (though I think at a deeper level he is more committed to several kinds of voluntarism, including those of Rousseau, Sartre, Mao, and the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt). I appreciate his sharp-tongued critique of identity politics and some of his other social criticism, but think he draws some very wrong conclusions about the way forward (again in a voluntarist direction). I like the way he integrates diverse interests like mathematics and literature, but strongly object to his claims about political implications of classical versus constructive mathematics. If one were to make such a connection, it seems to me that contrary to what Badiou says, constructive mathematics — with its nonreliance on assumptions — would be the more “liberating”.

Badiou has developed an elaborate and very original account of agency and subjectivity. I like the fact that Badiouian subjects are emergent rather than pre-existent. Unfortunately, his concepts of subjectivity and agency are both extremely narrow and extremely inflationary. Subjectivity and agency are grounded in an arbitrary, exceptional decision to embrace an arbitrary, exceptional new “truth” that cannot be rationally comprehended. Then on the basis of this arbitrary truth, subjects may exceptionally constitute themselves through fidelity and purely formal logical consistency. Rational development begins only after — and on the basis of — an utterly arbitrary decision. In the context of the initial decision, he invokes the Kierkegaardian leap of faith, and promotes a reading of the apostle Paul as the prototype of a revolutionary. He has no use for rational analysis of social conditions. It all comes down to a kind of arbitrary revolutionary will, calling to mind the worst excesses of Robespierre and Mao.

I note in passing that he has promoted a useful clarification of abstraction as a kind of subtraction.

His first big book was Being and Event. I believe the emphasis on Being is misguided, as is that on set theory. His highly original attempt to redefine events, truths, and subjects that we actually care about as limited to the exceptional cases is quite fascinating, but ultimately spoiled by a rather arbitrary canonization of particular exceptions, and by the voluntarist root agenda.

His early Theory of the Subject included elements of a sort of Lacanian Maoist reading of Hegel. I suspect the young Slavoj Žižek attended the original seminars on which it was based, and got significant inspiration there. At this stage, Badiou was emphasizing a so-called “scission of the subject” in Lacan, while attempting to relate it to the more general Maoist “One divides into Two” dogma.

While I think Lacan himself deserves serious consideration, “One divides into Two” is a subtheoretical atrocity that would not only undo all of Hegel’s careful work to develop a concept of determinate negation, but also completely reverse the thrust of Engels’ quite reasonable account of the conditional, relative status of opposites in Anti-Dühring. “One divides into Two” reduces dialectic to crude talk about opposed forces. Badiou still defends this. (See also Contradiction vs Polarity; 1968; Antiphilosophy; “Hard” Kantianism?; Johnston’s Pippin; Weak Nature Alone; Democracy and Social Justice.)

I am even more disturbed by Badiou’s apparent strong sympathy for the work of the political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who was an ardent Nazi, and wrote key legal opinions legitimizing Nazi actions. Schmitt’s Nazi involvement seems much worse than Heidegger‘s, and his thought far less mitigating. I just read a couple of secondary accounts of Schmitt for the first time — a bunch of stuff about will and enemies. There are more lessons here about the political evils of voluntarism. Badiou’s explicit references to Schmitt are apparently only the tip of an iceberg. I now realize there are many more implicit resonances in his texts.

Enlightenment

I have previously referred to Jonathan Israel’s trilogy on the Enlightenment. The volumes are Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), and Democratic Enlightenment (2011). There are other good treatments of this period, but I think Israel set a new standard, and his unique emphases are extremely valuable. Here are a few highlights.

Volume 1 documents the large social importance of the Spinozist movement in 17th and 18th century Europe and its role in pioneering democratic politics, with much fascinating detail.

Volume 2 rounds out the picture of a three-way contest between “moderate” or mainstream Enlightenment, “radical” Spinozist Enlightenment, and Counter-Enlightenment.

Volume 3 covers the relatively sudden emergence of democracy as a mainstream concern, via the American and especially the French revolution.

His description of the mainstream Enlightenment suggests that its representatives were actually a good deal more timid than I judge Plato and Aristotle to have been in asserting the place of reason over one-sided authority in politics and religion. While I generally agree with these assessments of the relative conservatism of the mainstream Enlightenment, I support a more charitable reading of Kant, putting more stress on his general view of autonomy of reason.

The French Encyclopedists and their cothinkers appear as continuing the Spinozist “radical Enlightenment” democratic tradition (and, I would say, as closer to carrying out the implications of Plato and Aristotle on the unfettered use of reason); advocating a more robust rationalism than other Enlightenment thinkers, and a principled approach to social justice; and even strongly anticipating 20th century criticisms of colonialism and racism. As Israel presents their positions, they look both saner than and politically well to the left of the ideologically Rousseauian Robespierre faction responsible for the Terror. (See also Hegel and the French Revolution.)

Israel documents in wonderful detail the huge, amazing popularity of illegal political and “philosophical” pamphlets in 18th century France. He argues that the unusually high social importance of pamphlets and books and what the 18th century French called “philosophy” was a decisive factor in the actual advent of the French Revolution. I think this is utterly fascinating. (It in some ways parallels the florescence of social democracy in Germany before World War I, or the flourishing of interest in translations of “ancient wisdom” among literate craft people in medieval Baghdad.)

Unfortunately, Israel thinks his emphasis on the widespread social importance of “philosophy” is necessarily incompatible with other historiographical emphases, such as economic or Foucaultian ones. As a sort of Aristotelian, I question assumptions of — or requirements for — such univocality in accounts of the determination of complex things, especially something as rich as history. I don’t see any reason why we can’t usefully deploy all these ways of understanding as seems fitting.