Matter, Potentiality

I’ve suggested nonstandard readings of both Aristotelian matter and Aristotelian potentiality. While traditionally there is thought to be a loose analogy such that matter is to form as potentiality is to actuality, the two concepts as I am reading them are sharply distinct. Matter captures the accumulation of contingent fact. Potentiality captures counterfactually robust inference. Matter particularizes, while potentiality universalizes.

Potentiality seems to me to be a kind of form. This is a bit tricky, because an important classical sense of Aristotelian matter that I have not been emphasizing is associated with a disposition to respond in certain ways when acted upon. This, however, sounds like counterfactual potentiality to me.

Objectivity

“Objectivity” is said primarily of some shapes of subjectivity that have a high degree of universality. It could not mean simple passive assimilation of an object just as it was supposed to be. The path to universality lies through a robustness or resilience of inferences across counterfactual cases. Universality and objectivity are closely tied to considerations of all kinds of appropriateness in particular cases.

Universality is inherently a journey through many things, not a destination. The objectivity of objects is derivative from such an open, free process of interaction with material contingency, governed by an end of unity of apperception and mutual recognition. (See also Truth, Beauty.)

Instances of consideration of objectivity in particular contexts appear throughout the Ethics; Reason; Semantics; Historiography; Philosophy of Math etc. sections here.

Historically, there has been a near reversal of the meaning of the term “objective”.

Definition

The deeper Hegelian truth of a conceptual content can only be approached diachronically, via a historical recollective expressive genealogy. But in passing in the course of his world-historically groundbreaking interpretation, Brandom says Hegel rejects the very possibility of conveying a conceptual content by defining it, without saying what definition is or elaborating on what this denial means for the status of definition (Spirit of Trust, p.7). I find this to be ambiguous, and potentially a little misleading. At least within any given synchronic context and to some extent even more broadly, I believe definition in the sense of an Aristotelian “what it is” still has a positive role to play. It would not be reasonable to suppose that Brandom really means to ban the philosophical use of definitions; otherwise, we would have an extreme nominalism incompatible with his stated goals, which include what he calls conceptual realism. (See also Abstract and Concrete.)

The ambiguity in the passage has to do with how strong a sense we give to “conveying”. We should not expect a run-of-the-mill definitional representation to literally convey conceptual (inferential) content in its explicit form. But such a representation absolutely does address or concern conceptual content, and therefore can still “convey” that content in the weaker sense of referring to it or reliably picking it out. (We could also atypically construct definitions in terms of explicit material incompatibilities and consequences. These would presumably in a stronger sense convey the conceptual content isomorphic to them. We could even atypically construct definitions in terms of the current best expressive genealogy, so I don’t really see these as counterposed.)

I do not think Hegel would go so far as to deny the high pragmatic value of definition in synchronic contexts. This is part of the necessary moment(s) of determinacy (and Understanding) in the larger process of the development of Spirit. He just wants to make the larger point that diachronically, any realized ground-level definition is ultimately just a stopping point along the way. That does not mean we should not attempt to sum up the best understanding we have achieved at each moment. I think we are deontically obligated to do just that. Every ground-level definition is contextualized by its historical situation and therefore subject to change, but at every moment we should still strive to speak and act in accordance with the best definitions we can achieve. Representational clarity is imperfect and always dependent on other considerations in the background, but it is still a moment to be preserved.

We should distinguish the conceptual-content-related doing associated with developing a definition from the representation produced. Further, I find it difficult to separate a concern for definition from a methodological concern for problems of definition, as evinced by Plato and Aristotle for instance. From this perspective, definition has more to do with a line of questioning than a putative answer. The question of the “what” or conceptual content of things is actually far more substantial and interesting than those of mere fact or abstract existence. Even if it aims at a representation, definition as a practical task is all about inquiry into that whatness of things. The norm to which synchronic representation of whatness is responsible comes down to the best achievable view of the relevant difference and mediation, or material incompatibility and material consequence (as Brandom would put it) in the circumstances of that logical moment. This I think is actually independent of the diachronic moves of expressive genealogy.

Hegel’s “Substance that is also Subject” is explicitly presented as an extension of Aristotle’s (expressive meta) concept of ousia, and I think Aristotle anticipates even more than Hegel recognizes. (Expressive genealogy is distinctively Hegelian, but Substance certainly not, and Hegel himself notes in the History of Philosophy lectures that the concerns he groups under “Subject” were significantly addressed by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.)

If Brandom is right that Hegel intended to exclude such expressive metaconcepts from the general prognosis that all (ground-level) concepts eventually elicit their own negation, then it is at least logically possible that Aristotle’s metaconcept had already achieved the requisite stability to be incorporated by Hegel without negating the subordinate aspect of ousia that for Aristotle corresponds to a definition.

Without prejudice to claims about what Hegel added, I would argue that Hegel did in this way intend to incorporate all the multiple nuances of Aristotelian ousia, including the definitional one. With due respect for Brandom’s distinction between determination as Hegelian process and determinateness as Kantian/Fregean property (and the importance of the process as a superior point of view), I also think we need to forgivingly recollect all best attempts at determinateness. (See also Classification.)

I wonder what Brandom would say about the role of definitions in the articulation of mathematical conceptual content. The doing of mathematics seems to join the doing of history as problematic for simple subsumption under a genealogical approach as Brandom has described it. Mathematics needs definitions, and history needs to evaluate data without Whiggish filtering. (But Brandom does not exactly disallow either, and I can’t imagine that he would want to. The meaning of mathematical theorems can certainly be expressed in terms of material incompatibility and consequence, and the concepts used in non-Whiggish historiography could themselves be Whiggishly genealogically grounded.)

We should think about the functional inferential role of stipulative definitions, as well as the definitions of empirical concepts that I expect Brandom has foremost in mind. We could say that in both cases, the meaning sought by definition — as distinct from the definiens — is actually constituted through material incompatibility and material consequence. But a stipulative definition is a making rather than a taking. It in a sense starts a whole course of reasoning, whereas empirical concepts implicitly summarize results of reasoning.

Also, mathematical definition is mostly concerned with structures and structural properties. I believe a case could be made that in general, such structures and structural properties are expressive metaconcepts in much the same sense that logical concepts are.

I don’t think it’s historically right that expressive metaconcepts are a “discovery or invention” of German Idealism (p.5). Aristotle already had quite a few expressive metaconcepts, as at least partially exhibited in this blog. I believe Hegel himself recognized this.

Potentiality

Potentiality (dynamis) is yet another great Aristotelian expressive metaconcept. Plato had the intriguing idea of explaining things and states of affairs in terms of power (also dynamis), but left power as an unexplained explainer, and required it to be postulated as pre-existent. Aristotle thoroughly reconceptualized the term to eliminate these weaknesses. Every Aristotelian potentiality begins from actuality or at-work-ness.

Instead of referring to postulated powers behind things or abstract logical possibility, Aristotelian potentiality is a way of talking about the aspects of a conceptual content captured by what Brandom would call modally robust counterfactual inference. Such robustness of inference across counterfactual cases is implicitly central to the most elementary meaning of Aristotelian substance or “what it was to have been” a thing (ousia), as what grounds the weak unity that allows us to talk about the same “thing” persisting through time even though something about it changed.

The semantic importance of counterfactual inference in determining the sense of what things are is a thesis shared by Aristotle, Hegel, and Brandom. It is explicit in Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel, and implicit in Aristotle. We cannot even really form a view of any thing as a thing of a certain kind unless we at least implicitly consider its potentiality.

Aristotle was clear that potentiality is an irreducible ingredient in things, and potentiality clearly captures counterfactuals. Brandom has made the role of counterfactuals in the development of universality more explicit. Facts alone give us at best a very brittle structure of assertions with no real conceptual articulation or interpretation, so perspectives that try to ground things on facts alone are doomed to ultimate failure. (In this light, Nietzsche‘s elimination of potentiality also turns out to have been a very serious error.) Overly strong, question-begging notions of the Identity of things have helped obscure the vital role of counterfactual inference in stabilizing our experience of the world. (See also Modality and Variation.)

Tentatively mapping this to Brandom’s Fregean terminology, I think Aristotle would intend the relation of potentiality to actuality to be one of reciprocal sense dependence paired with asymmetrical reference dependence. That is to say, at a level of determination of meaning, potentiality and actuality are interdependent and equally important, but in the order of logical truth about representations, actuality or the concrete is the starting point in terms of which potentiality is evaluated. Potentialities are potentialities of some actuality. (See also The Importance of Potentiality; Potentiality, Actuality; Structure, Potentiality; Matter, Potentiality.)

Philosophy

No mere expression of opinion counts as philosophy, as Plato was wont to remind us. One minimal necessary (but not sufficient) identifying mark of philosophy seems to me to be the recognition of at least some questions as genuine questions — that is to say, questions for which we explicitly acknowledge that we do not have immediate answers.

I also have a candidate for a necessary and sufficient condition. It now seems to me that all the questions that have traditionally been regarded as philosophical can be interpreted as at least indirectly having normative import, regardless of whether all those discussing them thought in that way. So we could say philosophy as a practice is the recognition of questions with normative import as genuine questions (and this is the way to the good life for a rational animal).

By this definition, we should expect to find no philosopher in any time exemplifying the attitude that all normative questions are already settled. I believe this is also true for all those who have in fact been commonly called philosophers in any serious sense (but see Antiphilosophy). If modernity is defined typologically as any step away from the attitude that all normative questions are already settled, then all philosophy would be “modern” in this somewhat unusual sense. (I’m not a big fan of the pre-Socratics, but I do think they fit this description. Most serious theology through the centuries has been enough influenced by philosophy to recognize that there are genuine normative questions, and in that measure I count it too as philosophy.) (See also History of Philosophy.)

I’m almost tempted to suggest substituting “philosophy” for “modernity” in the discussion of the history of normativity. But there may be unphilosophical modernity. The Sophists strike me as “modern” under this criterion and I don’t consider them philosophers, since I am taking Plato and Aristotle at their word that the Sophists claimed either to have all the answers or that there were no real answers. (I have not examined recent literature on the Sophists, some of which I believe argues for a different assessment.)

I suspect the first glimmerings of typological modernity (as distinct from philosophy) go back at least as far as the first cities, and possibly as far as the relatively long-distance trade in the late Upper Paleolithic that began to put people raised in traditional attitudes face-to-face with others reared with different traditional attitudes. However, Aristotle and Hegel would remind us that fully fledged forms are more relevant than origins for most purposes. (See also Interpretation; Ethical Reason.)

Plotinus

As a very young man, I was deeply invested in a holistic, minimally unworldly reading of Plotinus. At the time, I was impressed by his view of Intellect (nous) as a sort of synoptic rational intuition or vision. I liked his (actually Aristotelian) view that the good of any being is its natural act, which leaves it to us to determine what that actually is. I read the One as the All viewed sub specie aeternitatis (“under the form of eternity”, in Spinoza’s later phrase). I was fascinated by so-called “emanation” or “procession”, which obscurely suggested a sort of rational unfolding into detail from a more purely holistic starting point.

Plotinus was a 3rd century CE Alexandrian Greek who founded the so-called “neoplatonic” school that came to dominate philosophy and theology in late antiquity. He combined Platonic, Aristotelian, and various religious influences. His work The Enneads was a major inspiration to the greatest early Catholic thinker Augustine, and part of it was later translated to Arabic and Latin under the misleading title Theology of Aristotle. Plotinus associated the Good of Plato’s Republic with the One of Plato’s Parmenides.

Too briefly, one might say that for Plotinus and the neoplatonists generally, the One unfolds into the One-Many of Intellect, which unfolds into the Many-One of Soul, which unfolds into the Many of nature, and then it all re-folds back into itself, forming a big eternally repeating M.C. Escher loop. To say it in a more Aristotelian way, in that loop, what would be an Aristotelian unmoved mover and “first” cause that is really an end — along with everything it attracts — gets folded back into itself, making it literally also the beginning and the complete cause of everything, unlike anything in Aristotle. (As a youth who enjoyed mixing things up, I liked to imagine that the big Escher loop was also Nietzsche’s eternal return.)

Soul for Plotinus has no inherent dependency on the body — all the dependency at least ought to run in the other direction. Soul “There” seems to have connotations of simple immediate enjoyment of the intelligible realm, but “Here” is agitated and disturbed. He suggested a model of meditative discipline in which higher principles should detach themselves from immersive involvement in the layer beneath, but function as unmoved movers for it, leaving the lower layer to function autonomously except for the unmoved-mover influence of the higher layer.

He made an interesting suggestion that each Platonic form in a way includes all the others.

Neoplatonism is finally getting better treatment from scholars these days. 19th and 20th century summary accounts often reflected little acquaintance with texts, and were full of hostile stereotypes. Even the name is now considered misleading. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the web is a decent starting point, though it anachronistically talks about “Consciousness”. (In fact, that English term was coined by Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth in the 17th century for use in his translations of Plotinus. But in my opinion, the word has far too many modern connotations to be a good choice for historical scholarship. While such anachronism is expected in Hegelian/Brandomian recollective genealogy, that is because such genealogy serves different purposes from historical scholarship.)

The most impressive large-scale study I’ve seen in English is Kevin Corrigan’s Plotinus’ Theory of Matter-Evil and the Question of Substance: Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander of Aphrodisias, which addresses a broader scope than the title suggests, while tackling Plotinus’ most apparently objectionable thesis head-on. (While Plotinus idiosyncratically identified Alexander’s abstract prime matter with evil due to its complete lack of form, he strongly defended the goodness of the manifestation of the physical world that includes ordinary matter against the gnostics.) Corrigan’s book is especially interesting because it highlights an abundance of implicit dialogue with Aristotle and Alexander — unnoticed by previous scholars — in Plotinus’ texts that contributes substantially to the Plotinian synthesis.

In French, there is an excellent treatment of the differences between Aristotle and Plotinus from an Aristotelian point of view: Gwenaëlle Aubry’s Dieu sans la puissance: dunamis et energeia chez Aristote et Plotin. (Neither Plotinus nor Aristotle sees any temporal origin of the world or beginning of time. The key difference is that Aristotle’s “First” cause is also not supposed to be any kind of eternal origin either. It is purely that which everything ultimately aims at, a “final cause”. For Plotinus, by contrast, the One is simultaneously that which everything aims at and the eternal origin of everything.) Aubry takes as a starting point Aristotle’s notion that the “First” cause is just pure actuality, with no admixture of the power Plato talks about, let alone the Stoic-inflected omnipotence averred by Plotinus (or the even stronger unconditional counterfactual omnipotence claimed by Philo of Alexandria and later theological voluntarists). Aubry has also written extensively on subjectivity in Plotinus.

Nowadays my sympathies are entirely on the Aristotelian side, but Plotinus is still an important figure worthy of serious attention — in his own right; as a reader of Aristotle; and as an important influence on later neoplatonically inflected Aristotelianisms as well as later Platonisms. (See also Plotinus on Intellectual Beauty; Beauty and Discursivity; Subjectivity in Plotinus; Power of the One?; Neoplatonic Critique of Identity?).

Alienation, Modernity

The positively connotated (and actually not anti-naturalist) “alienation” of Spirit from nature noted earlier did turn out to be an exception. Hegel’s more usual, negatively connotated talk about alienation is explained by Brandom as picking out any asymmetry between authority claimed and responsibility acknowledged. On this reading, traditional Sittlichkeit that takes responsibility for too much would be just as alienated as the modernity that takes responsibility for too little.

The model of a positively connotated alienation is still interesting, though, and may possibly shed further light on the vexed question of how modernity is to be picked out and assessed. Perhaps the thought is not only that any move in any direction away from the unquestioned governance of tradition is ultimately progressive, even if only through its eventual consequences, but also that a given degree of asymmetry on the modern side is therefore less bad than an equivalent asymmetry on the traditional side, because the modern one starts a dynamic that (normatively, not causally) leads to something better, while the traditional one just preserves the status quo.

Karl Mannheim in his 1925 essay on the sociology of knowledge adopted a vaguely Hegelian notion of modernity as the progressive self-relativization of thought. (He was at pains to argue that this did not lead to the “relativism” decried by some of his contemporaries.) I was fascinated by this in my youth. Here is a modernity with a Hegelian pedigree that bears no trace of Cartesianism. Mannheim’s version is more practical-epistemological than normative, and merely programmatic rather than really developed, where Brandom has a very thorough account of recognition-based normativity in many different circumstances. But it does seem to correlate with the move away from tradition that Brandom talks about. It focuses more on the notion of progress itself, and less on a particular achieved status.

Modernity, Again

Brandom is a systematic philosopher, and he has always been clear that his aims are not principally historical. Nonetheless, like Pippin, he considers it very important to argue that Hegel, despite all his criticisms of modernity and admiration for Plato and Aristotle, regarded modernity’s advent both as the single most important event in history and as fundamentally progressive. Brandom’s uncharacteristically telegraphic argument deliberately constructs coarse historical stereotypes, with a specific, edifying purpose in mind. I am a lover of the fine grain of history, deeply concerned with subtleties and ambiguities of historiography, and critical of clichés in the history of philosophy. Coarse periodizations in cultural and intellectual matters always trouble me. So, while highly sympathetic to the edifying intent, I worry about historiographical soundness of predications on coarse periodizations.

Chapter 13 of Spirit of Trust provides the best available clarification of the conceptual content Brandom means to impute to modernity. In the more careful treatment there, the order of explanation begins from a type based simply on what Hegel would call the determinate negation of immediate Sittlichkeit — a move away from the unquestioned governance of tradition. Association of this with a particular periodization is a separate, secondary move. Also, from the point of view of the edifying intent, conceptual content is what matters, not the periodization with which it is associated. So on two separate grounds, disagreement on the periodization would not really touch the main argument, which is good. (See also Alienation, Modernity.)

Having now completed a first pass through the book, I find the less careful language of the introduction repeated in the conclusion. This could be just an editorial issue. But some of the wording again sounds like periodization could come first, and again attributes major unexplained significance to Descartes, with no earlier signpost. (He refers to a suppressed chapter on normativity in early modernity that probably would have been helpful. I’m guessing it expanded on the role he attributes to social contract theories in the published text. See also Modernity, Rousseau?)

Let me try to forgivingly recollect what is going on here. In the very big picture, stepping away from tradition is progressive compared to never doing so, and Descartes did step away from tradition. In sharp contrast to the highly technical and deeply contexted discourse of the academic philosophers of his day, Descartes became famous for simple reflections in the first person addressed to a much broader audience and presupposing no acquaintance with other philosophical texts. That is to say, he became famous as an instigator of a style of writing. A kind of individualism and a kind of democratic impulse — both interpretable as counterposed to the governance of tradition — can be read into this style, so in very broad terms that gives it a proto-Enlightenment shape that undoubtedly inspired others. The large social/historical impact of his proto-Enlightenment writing style cannot be denied, regardless of the verdict we reach on the relative merits of his philosophical claims and arguments. He also tried to build a complete foundationalist system of his own, which for better or worse could be read as another expression of burgeoning individualism. In conjunction with this, he promoted a kind of know-nothing attitude toward previous philosophy, which if we are being very charitable could again be loosely tied to a sort of democratic impulse.

That said, while reflections in the first person are important in our social relations, to claim to derive the only true system of the world from first-person reflections is a terrible and extremely arrogant way to do philosophy. To think otherwise is a particularly bald example of the illusion of Mastery. The wholesale rejection of previous philosophy is another artifact of hopeless Mastery. The specific conceptual content Descartes gives us does little to improve the situation. (I’ve commented before on Descartes and representation — see the Repraesentatio post.)

The thrust of the famous cogito ergo sum was already anticipated in Augustine’s Confessions. A more detailed version was developed by Avicenna, in an argument known to the medievals as the “flying man”. He proposed a thought experiment, considering someone in counterfactual absolute sensory deprivation from birth, with the intent of asking whether awareness could be completely independent of sensibility. He argued that the person in absolute sensory deprivation would still be aware of her own existence, due to a pure immediate reflexive awareness intrinsic to the soul and independent of the body. This kind of claim would have been accepted by Plotinus, but rejected by Aristotle or Hegel. Medieval Augustinians, however, enthusiastically adopted many of Avicenna’s ideas.

More originally but even less auspiciously, Descartes argued for the incorrigibility of raw appearance qua appearance as an epistemic foundation. In Brandom’s Fregean terms, this gives us bare reference to an unspecified something, but no sense we could begin to work with. This kind of incorrigibility is a trivial truth, but because it is trivial, nothing of interest follows from it. As Brandom says, a contraction to appearance-talk is a refusal of actual commitment to anything. And we don’t want an incorrigible foundation anyway. What does any of this add to our expressive genealogy? It still seems like a node deserving of omission in a short account.

Brandom himself in his study guide to Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” says “the Cartesian way of talking about the mind is the result of confusion about the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic items, and the roles they can play in various sorts of explanation”. (See also Enlightenment.)

Genealogy

Aside from the critique of immediacy, one of the things that initially attracted me to the first web draft of Spirit of Trust was the discussion of edelmütig (noble-spirited) and niederträchtig (denigrating) attitudes, now concentrated in chapter 15. Though moderately acquainted with earlier sections, I had not yet grasped much of this part of Hegel’s Phenomenology in the original, so it was all new to me. I then read the view Brandom attributed to Hegel as an interesting anticipation of Nietzsche‘s critique of ressentiment. The published version, however, has a significant negative mention of Nietzsche (along with Marx, Freud, and Foucault).

The sense, especially of Hegel’s contrasting pole, is superficially quite different from Nietzsche’s, stressing what Hegel and Brandom call “Forgiveness” and I call interpretive charity, whereas Nietzsche starts from what he takes to be a sort of ideal type of an ancient aristocrat, and notoriously portrays this character as in a sense more hard-hearted than sympathetic. I never liked that particular aspect of Nietzsche, or the way he assimilates Plato to later religious attitudes I see as quite different. But there is a huge literature dispelling all the crude stereotypes of the hard-hearted Nietzsche that are abetted by some of his surface rhetoric. And even if Nietzsche avoided the Christian-sounding word “forgiveness” in favor of something like active forgetting, the essence of the ressentiment he is concerned to reject is holding grudges. Not holding grudges seems a lot like forgiveness. And referentially, Niederträchtigkeit overall still seems to me to pick out about the same characters as ressentiment.

Brandom is especially concerned to pick out the reductive naturalism of a preoccupation with causes of behavior at the expense of considering reasons for it as niederträchtig. This is a much more specialized focus. But reductive naturalism does unfortunately still carry a lot of weight today, and it does characterize numerous elements of Hegel’s account of the valet’s attitude.

In a passing remark, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Foucault are all said to share the niederträchtig attitude. Here I must part company. This sounds like the old “masters of suspicion” stereotype, which I have never considered well-founded. I don’t believe any of them intended to denigrate persons or to circumvent rational argument. They developed new forms of understanding (in the ordinary not the Hegelian sense). Especially in the case of Nietzsche, the great critic of ressentiment, and really for any such intellectual pioneer, the burden of proof for attributing Niederträchtigkeit should be quite high. (See Nietzsche, Ethics, Historiography; Interpretive Charity; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Robust Recognition.)

As much as I also want to defend the rights and place of reason more strongly than Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, or Foucault did, I don’t see any of them as wanting to simply replace explanation by reasons with explanation by causes the way Brandom says. (Spinoza in his account of human behavior and emotions seems to me closer to actually doing this, but still gets positive treatment in Tales of the Mighty Dead, as he should.)

Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Foucault challenged not Reason but rather the claims of what Hegel called Mastery, the nonrelation of which to Reason Brandom has done so much to make explicit. I don’t think any of them stand philosophically on the level of Aristotle or Hegel or Brandom, but they all had important things to say, deserving of far more than one-line dismissals. Marx and Freud did talk about causes, but they both also put a strong value on rationality. Nietzsche especially stresses what Aristotle would call character as a conditioning factor on reason. Foucault talks a lot about historical forms of rationality. Though analyzable in terms of determinate negation, his metaphorical “archaeology” was light-years away from an expressive recollection. But real history is not Whiggish, and at some point we need to address it.

I can recognize Brandom’s description of Whiggish recollective expressive genealogy in my own various attempts at intellectual autobiography. Brandom points out that Hegel’s lectures on philosophy of history, art, and religion also practice this kind of genealogy. (Bad histories of science do too, but I am not sure that is a recommendation.) I cannot guess what if any consequences Brandom sees for general historiography, or even the history of philosophy. But I think we also need to attempt unfiltered, non-Whiggish accounts.

He does clearly say that something that got filtered out in one Whiggish account may become relevant again in another. This would also suggest that attempting to work at the unfiltered level has some importance. (See also Mutual Recognition; Immediacy, Presence; Structuralism; Difference; Affirmation.)

Error

Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel highlight the centrality of the experience of error in any learning process. In section VI of the Conclusion to Spirit of Trust, he says this is “because the rational, conceptual character of the world and its stubborn recalcitrance to mastery and agency are equally fundamental, primordial features of the way things are”. This simple double-edged insight, I would argue, has been approached by many, possibly as far back as Plato. I have wanted to affirm both theses since childhood, without ever being quite satisfied with the level of inter-articulation achieved. Most authors are better in their treatment of one side of this than the other. I think Brandom has shed unprecedented light on how the bases of these contrasting insights are not only compossible, but actually interdependent.

Mastery as a model of rationality turns out to be a non-starter. Mastery turns out to be an anti-model of rationality, not the thing that putatively shows where rationality goes wrong. The pragmatic workings of rationality through the experience of error — analyzed by Brandom in fine detail — are in fact radically opposed to Mastery. Not only beliefs but the understood meanings of determinate empirical concepts have an intrinsic instability that cannot be reduced away. Rationality has to do in large part with a responsiveness to this instability — how we recognize our own conceptual errors and respond to them.

Many have written eloquently but ultimately onesidedly about the rationality of the world OR the failure and badness of Mastery or some analogue of it, without adequately developing the deep connection between these two. Brandom has performed a world-historic service to humanity in showing a way beyond this impasse.

Brandom says that for Hegel, there is and could be no set of determinate empirical concepts that when correctly applied would not eventually generate incompatible commitments in some new situation. Apparent brute immediacy gives rise to perceptual commitments that cannot be integrated into our previous best schema.

This is how immediacy has an irreducible role in experience — not as some foundational guarantee of mastery, but quite the opposite, as a sort of surplus ensuring the inevitability of eventual error from the most impeccable procedure, and hence of a need to perennially revise our commitments and possibly our concepts. As the disparity between subjective and objective forms of conceptual content, it is a principle of instability providing a normative demand for change. As Hegel puts it, the evanescent itself must be regarded as essential. This is the way Hegel recovers a role for something like Kantian sensibility or intuition as a complement to the conceptual.

As Brandom says, this requires reconceptualizing both truth and determinateness. Truth can no longer be simply thought of as a prospective goal (as if it were determined beforehand, entirely independent of our process of seeking it), because any fully determinate prospective goal will eventually be invalidated. One of Hegel’s great original thoughts is that genuine, deeper truth will not stay still, as it were. The principal locus of truth shifts to a truth-process.