Ethics, Hermeneutics, Historiography
Justice is the charity of the wise, as Leibniz said. It is the conjunction of kindness and intelligence.
Equally, it could be founded on the mutual recognition discussed by
Hegel and Brandom. (See also Categorical Imperative.)
Either way, it ought to lead us to social concern. (See also Ricoeur on Justice.)
Through most of the 18th century, democracy was mainly associated with what would today be called the far left (see Enlightenment). Historian Richard Hofstadter reports that in the debates that led to the American constitution, worries were expressed that the people might just vote to redistribute wealth. This led to an elaborate system of checks and balances designed essentially to limit democracy. (Of course, I am oversimplifying. Democracy can have serious issues, as Plato would remind us, and a constitution is a good thing overall, as Aristotle would remind us. See also Justice in General; Authority, Reason; The Autonomy of Reason; Freedom from False Freedom; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love.)
The American and French revolutions temporarily gave the cause of democracy more of a mainstream status. But after the 1848 events in Europe led to more worries over possible redistribution of wealth, further progress in the direction of democracy again depended on mainly the activity of the left. (See also Fragility of the Good; Economic Rationality?; Rights; Stubborn Refusal.)
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the strongest support for democratic advances worldwide actually came from the socialist movement, which had an amazingly vibrant and fertile tradition of rational debate on principles of theory and practice. (After Stalin and Mao and their imitators and successors substituted cynical, corrupt, and repressive nationalist populism for the ideals of socialism, it may be hard to remember this. Stalin brutally suppressed all debate and especially exterminated criticism from the left, while systematically betraying everything the movement had stood for. Mao was even further removed from the historic rational tradition of left-wing social democracy. But all such monstrosities do nothing to invalidate the rational ideas of social justice they travestied.)
I remain perplexed by the place of the May 1968 spontaneous Paris worker-student uprising in French intellectual history. This was the most significant challenge to the status quo in a Western country since the aftermath of World War I, but not nearly as substantial as Paris 1870, which also did not lead to permanent change. It was the 1960s and spontaneity expressed the spirit of the time, but it also ensured the transience and superficiality of those colorful events.
I find staggering the suggestion by Badiou and others that May 1968 represented some kind of world-historic new political paradigm. People seriously concerned for social change should know better. The most important concrete social consequence of the events that I am aware of was the formation of the new experimental university of Vincennes, which eventually became much more mainstream.
Reportedly, “Structures don’t march in the streets” was grafittied onto a Paris wall (I presume by some existentialist who already had an axe to grind). Exactly what consequence was supposed to follow from this is unclear. It implies a silly, sophistical argument that should not have bothered any serious person.
The peculiar thing is that a number of leading French intellectuals who said very positive things about so-called structuralism before May 1968 and were undisturbed by previous anti-structuralist polemics suddenly wanted to rhetorically distance themselves from it afterward, when not much about their own positions had changed. (This later led comparative literature people to reify into existence a category of more-radical-than-thou “poststructuralism” unknown in the French context, and to exaggerate its difference from a by then said-to-be objectionably conservative “structuralism”.)
The important thing is not whether or not we call ourselves structuralists (or jabberwocks, or whatever). The important thing is what we actually manage to articulate, and the kind of practical doings to which we commit ourselves, and in which actually engage.
Rhetorical considerations do matter in social situations. We can also argue about more substantive questions of the status and value of particular kinds of synchronic analysis and understanding.
But given all that, no dumb event as such (and empirical events, I insist, are dumb) can refute any analysis or understanding that is valid in its own right. Only new analysis and understanding can do that. This might be stimulated by an event, but the important thing would still be the quality and content of the new analysis and understanding, which has to be shown. (See also Historiography.)
In the old days, my favorite text of Foucault was the beginning of the Archaeology of Knowledge (online here), revised from his “Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie”, published summer 1968 (o pregnant time!) in Cahiers pour L’Analyse, the original of which is separately translated in Essential Works vol. 1. There is a nice summary of the original and its historical context here.
At this time, Foucault and Althusser were both working toward what has been called a rationalist philosophy of the Concept related to the work of Jean Cavaillés and Georges Canguilhem, in contrast to then popular existential/phenomenological philosophies of the Subject. (See Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillés to Deleuze.)
The Epistemological Circle that Foucault was responding to was a group of Althusser’s students interested in the philosophy and history of science, as well as structural Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, who had asked Foucault a series of methodological questions. Althusser was something like the dean of France’s most prestigious university. He had actually written his dissertation (which I have still not seen) on the Concept in Hegel. By this time he was in high anti-Hegelian mode, as was Foucault.
Foucault himself acknowledged considerable debt to his Hegelian mentor Jean Hyppolite, who translated the Phenomenology to French. Hyppolite read Hegel as focused more on discourse than on subjectivity. His 1952 Language and Existence, referred to by Foucault as “one of the great books of our time”, argued strongly for the importance of language in Hegel. (It was also very favorably reviewed by the young Deleuze.) Foucault had written a thesis on “The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” under Hyppolite in 1949.
There is more good historical background in James Muldoon, “Foucault’s Forgotten Hegelianism”. While I don’t endorse, e.g., Muldoon’s remarks on Hegel and free will, his suggestion that an identification with certain specifics of Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel — particularly the attribution of a strong “totalizing” impulse — contributed significantly to the anti-Hegelian turn of Foucault and others is quite interesting.
Though I don’t recall this from his translated works, Hyppolite apparently both saw a strong element of totalization in Hegel and strongly rejected it, while continuing to identify as a Hegelian. (Previously, in absence of more specific evidence I had surmised it was mainly a reaction against Alexandre Kojève’s reading that drove the French anti-Hegelian turn. Muldoon also says Hyppolite’s reading was initially welcomed as a contrast to Jean Wahl’s more phenomenologically oriented 1929 book on the unhappy consciousness, which apparently also contributed to French perceptions of Hegel as subject-centered.)
In any case, the Hegel whom Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and others famously rejected in the 1960s was identified as the proponent of a totalizing historical teleology of the Subject. Each of the three components of this was independently strongly rejected — the subject-centeredness, the historical teleology, and the totalization. I still agree today that these are all serious errors that should be rejected.
However, Hegel read in a broadly Brandomian way is utterly untouched by this criticism. There is no historical teleology at all in what Brandom calls Hegelian genealogy (so a fortiori not a totalizing one), and there is no subject-centeredness in the analysis of conceptual content. Subjectivity is never invoked as an unexplained explainer. Brandom’s exposition of the Hegelian critique of Mastery offers us a Hegel utterly opposed to the kind of totalization attributed to him by Foucault, Althusser, and Deleuze.
Foucault presented a long list of forms of discontinuity that should be attended to in the history of ideas. Each of these could be analyzed in Brandomian/Hegelian terms as a determinate negation.
I agree with Foucault that it is very important not to take the simple continuity of a tradition for granted. In principle, such things need to be shown. However, I still think defeasible assertions about “traditions” and other such unities that should be questioned can play a useful role in historical discussion. (See also Ricoeur on Foucault; Structuralism; Structure, Potentiality; Difference; Identity, Isomorphism; Univocity; Historiography; Genealogy.)
Previously, I objected to Althusser’s invocation of the clinamen (the mythical swerve of the atoms) in Lucretius when talking about historical contingency. (He, Deleuze, and the young Marx all seem to have fixated on what seems to me this most dubious — even if charming — aspect of Epicurean thought. I’m enough of a Leibnizian to believe in the principle of sufficient reason. I just don’t think that all determination takes the form of univocal causality.)
I actually enjoy Lucretius, and also found the strangely titled book about him, The Birth of Physics by Michel Serres, quite interesting. Lucretius is full of poetic descriptions of hydrodynamic phenomena. Serres argues that Lucretius considered the conceptual norm for matter in general to be liquid rather than solid; that he wanted to use hydrodynamic phenomena to model aggregate behavior of the atoms, always considering them in aggregate; and that this has widespread implications for thought. It is a not-so-atomistic atomism.
Critical thinking and interpretive charity are both essential components of a rational response to anything. What a complete appropriate response looks like depends on the details of the matter at hand. Being appropriately critical does not mean turning off our charity, nor does being appropriately charitable mean turning off our brains. We aim for an Aristotelian mean. This applies just as much to ordinary social interaction as it does to the evaluation of theoretical claims. See also Reasonableness; Affirmation; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love.
Nietzschean affirmation used to be a very important thing for me. Something like it still is. At root, this just means judging particular goods on intrinsic/situational criteria, from a stance that embraces life without the poison of ressentiment (holding on to reactive, negative emotion). Nietzsche’s poetic images of Zarathustra coming down from the mountain, being friends with the earth, and embracing the eternal return were significant moments of my youth. (See also Genealogy; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Interpretive Charity.)
Later, I came to think that Spinoza had in a way already said what I most valued in Nietzsche. (Many have recognized the affirmative character of Spinoza’s thought.)
Still later, I came to think that Aristotle had already expressed the affirmative kernel I valued most in Spinoza, and much more.
I have been reading the core ethical message of Brandom’s Spirit of Trust in a related light. (See Index for many posts on Aristotle and Brandom.)
Philosophy is best conceived as a dialogue with the best insights of our fellow rational animals over the centuries. It is something far more valuable than just views or opinions — a sustained rational development aimed at progressive improvement in distinguishing the better from the worse.
Hegel wrote that the history of philosophy is inseparable from philosophy itself, and I find that to be very true. He was actually the first major philosopher to write explicitly about the history of philosophy. Medieval scholasticism had treated the history of philosophy as a valuable repository of possible opinions and arguments, but was little concerned with issues of historical interpretation. Early modernity largely ignored the history of philosophy and wanted to start over, every man for himself. Anti-scholastic prejudice ran so high that apart from Leibniz, no major modern philosopher until Hegel treated Aristotle as anything more than a straw man. But since the 19th century and especially since the later 20th century, innumerable rich and sophisticated contributions to the historically informed interpretation of individual philosophers have been made, along with many excellent analyses of periods and trends.
I find it useful to alternate between consideration of a small number of essential reference points among the greatest of the great, and a much broader scope including many “minor” figures. (See History of Philosophy and Historiography sections.)
Besides offering a clear and nonvoluntarist account of Kantian freedom, Brandom strongly puts forward the idea that the formation of unities of apperception is an ethical task for Kant. This was new to me when I encountered it in Reason in Philosophy, and very exciting. Kant suddenly made a whole lot more sense, and began to look much less unattractive.
I have not had the opportunity to confirm whether this is just what Kant should have said by Brandom’s reconstruction, or whether he actually did say it somewhere. (In my early readings uninformed by secondary literature, I had taken Kant to be asserting that the synthesis of unities of apperception was something that just necessarily happened for any subject, qua subject. This seemed like an unattractive, failed attempt to establish objectivity on a subjectivist foundation.)
Secondary literature on Kant is vast, and much of it is outstanding in quality. Leading interpreters have deep differences, and this is as it should be. A mark of great philosophy is that it encourages creativity and spawns ever new interpretations.
If I could hazard a generalization, though, it seems that subjectivist readings of Kant are more and more challenged these days. To mention but one example, Frederick Beiser’s recent history of German idealism before Hegel is entitled German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism. Young Karl Marx’s 1844 essay on Hegel’s Phenomenology, which reduced Hegel (and arguably Kant as well) to a bad subjectivist cartoon of Fichte, is profoundly misleading. (See also Copernican.)
Kant and Aristotle are both very concerned to develop a thick, discursive concept of rationality, which goes far beyond the merely logical to address many questions of what is right.
Nancy Sherman and others have substantially softened the traditional contrast between Kantian and Aristotelian ethics. Kant’s critique of eudaimonism (pursuit of happiness as an ethical criterion) was mainly aimed at the British utilitarians, who really did make subjective happiness into a criterion of sorts. It would be very wrong to think this applies to the Aristotelian notion. Sherman makes a strong case that in less familiar works dealing with moral anthropology, Kant recovers something like an Aristotelian notion of character. Kant’s extended development of the concept of judgment in the third Critique also recovers something like Aristotelian practical judgment or phronesis. (See also Freedom Through Deliberation?)
Aristotle and Kant have similarly thick notions of experience. In neither case is experience something immediate, as it was with the British empiricists. For Aristotle, it is as when we say someone is “experienced”. For Kant, it involves synthesis and extensive use of concepts, which themselves have complex derivation. Properly understood, Aristotelian “metaphysics” was concerned with higher-order interpretation of experience, and thus consistent with Kantian scruples. (See also Pure Reason, Metaphysics?)
Plato and Aristotle’s strong insistence on the autonomy of reason was largely submerged in the later tradition until Kant recovered it. (See also The Word “Rationalism”.)
Some of the argument of the paralogisms of pure reason is strongly reminiscent of things Aristotle said about the soul. Aristotle and Kant are equally opposed to Augustinian/Cartesian notions of reflexive constitutive immediacy. (See also God and the Soul; Modernity, Again.)
The main target of Kant’s attacks on dogmatism was the Wolffian school in Germany. He was not much concerned with the history of philosophy, and some of his language was overly sweeping.
We should forgivingly take this into account in assessing the relation of the Critical philosophy to what I have called the epistemic modesty of Plato and Aristotle. (As Hegel recognized, Plato and Aristotle were not at all dogmatic. Plato doubted the deliverances of sense, and rejected opinion outright. Aristotle’s more optimistic, proto-pragmatist stance was elaborated in thoughtful response to that questioning. Neither of them was a simplistic realist. Moreover, the two of them were the original pioneers of rational inquiry in ethics.)
Nonetheless, neither Plato nor Aristotle anticipated the very substantial detail and development of Kant’s argument. The explicit concepts of the transcendental/empirical distinction and of unities of apperception are distinctly Kantian, as is a finer-grained analysis of processes of synthesis. Kant also more explicitly treated normativity as an outer frame around all other considerations. It is to him that we owe the notion of the primacy of practical reason. A stronger emphasis on ethical universality through the categorical imperative was another Kantian innovation. (See also Copernican; Brandom and Kant; Hegelian Genealogy.)
The Postmodern Peripatetic 