Aphasia

In most contexts, I have become quite convinced that meaning and intelligibility are inseparable from actual articulation, and that knowledge is the ability to explain. However, there are people who frequently turn out to have insight and understanding that goes well beyond what they can articulate. Perhaps the apparent difficulty here could be explained away by noting that actual articulation need not be immediately actual. But without by any means giving up on the linguistic turn, I suspect the neuroscience people may ultimately have something to offer us in this area.

I think transcendental subjectivity inhabits a space of conceptual articulation mainly conditioned by language, while empirical subjectivity is also conditioned by neurology, among other things. We should not be in a hurry to identify these two very different kinds of subjectivity, or to explain one in terms of the other. Rather, we should maintain the distinction, and work on the metaphorical topology of their interweaving. (See also What Is “I”?)

Stoicism, Skepticism

Brandom makes interesting connections between Hegel’s rather idiosyncratic discussion of Stoicism and Skepticism in the Phenomenology and the preceding discussion of Mastery. Stoicism and Skepticism for Hegel each in a different way reflect aspects of Mastery’s attitude that wants to claim total independence.

Hegel’s criticism of Stoicism in this context is rather different from my previously expressed issues with its foundationalism, claims of a completed system, and what the ancients called its dogmatism. My remarks probably apply more to the system of Zeno and Chrysippus, whereas Hegel’s apply more to the narrower ethical concerns of someone like Epictetus.

Zeno and Chrysippus are known only from references in other authors; none of their original works survive. Surviving references to early Stoic teaching often tend to be somewhat anonymous and generic. The details of the system are quite fascinating and worthy of study in their own right (see the collected fragments in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers; also Sambursky, Stoic Physics; Mates, Stoic Logic; and Nussbaum, Therapies of Desire).

Ancient Skepticism is also quite worthy of study in its own right. In addition to fragments, a number of works by the late author Sextus Empiricus survive. Ancient skeptics were mainly skeptical about theoretical developments. (The more extreme skepticism many modern authors have worried about in the third person seems to be a post-Cartesian development.)

Brandom says Hegel’s Stoics and Skeptics both refuse the experience of error that is crucial to the elicitation of conceptual content. On his reading, Hegel’s Stoic in, say, refusing to recognize physical pain, is both just being stubborn and refusing to address what turn out to be incompatible commitments, effectively denying the reality of the object in order to maintain the independence of consciousness at all cost. The Skeptic is just refusing to make any commitments at all, which is another attempt to maintain the independence of consciousness at all cost. Hegel’s point is that this attitude of wanting to maintain the total independence of consciousness from anything other is unsustainable.

Cogito

(Descartes aggravates me so much that I tend to rant. For a somewhat more constructive treatment, see Descartes Revisited; Gueroult on Descartes; Cartesian Metaphysics; What Descartes Proved.)

The “I think” of Descartes is perhaps the most famous example of what I have called a mentalist confusion of empirical and transcendental elements in subjectivity. Among other things, Descartes promoted an aggressive simplification of self/subject/mind into one simple foundational thing corresponding to a personal identity, while presenting this as a natural intuition. He also sharply privileged immediate presence to the mind. There are some very misleading passages in Kant and Hegel that appear to endorse a Cartesian “I think”, but Kant and Hegel’s own versions of “I think” were far more sophisticated, and fundamentally different. To begin with, Kantian unity of apperception and its analogues in Hegel are complex and shifting results and goals, not alleged foundational starting points.

Descartes is widely considered to have made nontrivial contributions to science and mathematics, although Leibniz argued that these were exaggerated. In any case, in philosophy I regard Descartes as mainly an arrogant pretender who really better fits the profile of an antiphilosopher. He simply refused to engage with the whole philosophical tradition, while replicating the Stoics’ dogmatic claim to possess a whole system of the world founded in certain knowledge. His abrupt dismissals of “dialectical subtlety” in favor of things allegedly simple and clear are mostly just bombastic rhetoric.

The famous hyperbolic doubt seems to me but a vast pretension, and a rhetorical ruse to clear the way for a foundationalist revindication of traditional values that was in most ways far less sophisticated than the arguments of medieval scholasticism. To claim to have doubted everything all at once is intellectually dishonest; we only doubt what it occurs to us to doubt. See my What and Why for a more reasonable alternative.

Descartes incoherently asserted both supernatural voluntarism (applied to God and man) and mechanistic determinism (applied to everything else). (See remarks on Descartes in Modernity, Again and Psyche, Subjectivity.)

Rereading Making It Explicit, I finally found a brief comment that better explains how Brandom somehow connects Descartes with some kind of revolution in normativity. It is pretty indirect. On p. 10, he says that Kant retrospectively read into Cartesian doubt an implicit requirement that we take responsibility for all our claims, and that we be prepared to justify them. This seems quite plausible, as a statement about Kant. Brandom offers his own account of the “notorious” failures of Descartes to adequately explain representation on pp. 6-7. In a nutshell, representation for Descartes is an unexplained explainer.

Thought for Aristotle and Hegel is in the first instance something shareable, determined by its publicly examinable inferential articulation. Cartesian thought, by contrast, is a private, interior affair. (See also Ego; Subject.)

Desire of the Master

Serious readers of Hegel have long known that he presents the Servant who learns about the world through work in far more positive terms than the Master. Mastery is a false freedom that is actually an obstacle to true freedom.

The Master effectively claims total independence, or authority without responsibility. Brandom renders Hegel’s critique of “the ills of Mastery”, “all these dimensions of defectiveness”, “the subordination-obedience model of normativity allegorized as Mastery” in wonderfully sharp terms. At bottom, “Pure independence is a Bad Idea” (underscore in original). (I would extend this diagnosis to voluntarisms theological, psychological, legal, political, and historical, as well as to claims of sovereign power. I say no power can even possibly be normatively sovereign or unconditional.)

Brandom characterizes Mastery by a second-order desire to have all its desires immediately satisfied (directly constitutive of reality), which ends up leading to a desire for a sort of imperial sovereignty that is inherently in conflict with anyone else having the same desire. Mastery wants its way with no other consideration and is unable to share power, like Plato’s tyrant. (To me at least, this seems a very undesirable sort of desire. All the desirable desires seem to me be sharable. But unfortunately, on a social scale we are still deeply afflicted by the Master’s desire.)

Mastery is thus also the totalizing impulse par excellence. Hegel’s very strong rejection of it is a fortiori a very strong rejection of the desire for totalization that has often been attributed to him, as far back as Kierkegaard. This is a veritable revolution in the interpretation of Hegel’s most fundamental intent, which also seems to be strongly supported by Terry Pinkard’s biography.

Mastery for Brandom is unequivocally an evolutionary dead end, not something to be rationalized and excused as somehow historically progressive. Only the Servant moves forward at all. This is huge. Our troubled potentially rational ape-kind rather desperately needs a bold clarity of this sort. Not only is Mastery not the answer, there is no convoluted path that makes it a justifiable means to an answer. Of course the Trumps of the world will not be enlightened by this, but we can be. (Marx may have been right that the leisure of a few at the expense of the many was a temporary historical economic prerequisite for the emergence of higher culture, but that is an argument in a material register, not a normative one.)

This is helping me with my difficulty over Brandom’s theses about modernity and an ethical importance of the Enlightenment. His usual wordings make me think of what I consider to be highly questionable Cartesian and British empiricist epistemology, then wonder what about this has to do with any new ethical insight. But there was also an important strand of rejection of Mastery in the Enlightenment, especially in France. I think more of the group around the Encyclopedia as documented by Jonathan Israel’s recent trilogy, whereas Brandom through Kant seems to be thinking more of Rousseau’s ideas about equality, and of the general idea of a social contract as partly anticipating Hegelian mutual recognition. (See also Ego; Freedom Without Sovereignty.)

Robust Recognition

Having just completed a first pass through chapter 8 of Brandom’s published Spirit of Trust, I am currently pondering his introduction of a “robust” concept of recognition that is to be fully transitive as well as mutual. He wants to say that robust recognition is the transitive closure of simple recognition. Clearly the motivation is to be able to argue that if a recognitive relation is both symmetric and transitive, then it is also reflexive, as a relation in the mathematical sense would be. So far, this seems to be isolated in one step of a much larger argument about the mutually recognitive institution of normative statuses and the nature of what Hegel calls self-consciousness.

My concern is that in real life practice of mutual recognition, we not only do in fact stop short of fully transitive, logically complete recognition of all judgments by those recognized by the ones we recognize (and by those they recognize, and so on indefinitely) as authoritatively binding on us, but we should stop short of that. To see this, we need not even consider the indefinite regress. We need not even go beyond the immediate other being recognized.

I recognize you as a recognizer, and thereby as having what Brandom would call some authority (always symmetrically balanced by responsibility), such that I should take your judgments seriously. But we may have nontrivial disagreement with someone for whom we have the utmost regard. To accept a conclusion or an argument merely on someone’s say-so, no matter how much we love them or how wise we think they are in general, is not intellectually or morally responsible. We are always in a sense morally obligated to risk seeming to second-guess those whom we grant some authority over us, by attempting to follow and thus validate their reasoning. From the fact we recognized they were right about many things and generally worthy of being taken seriously, it does not follow that they are right about everything. Good people make mistakes, and sometimes they make serious errors. Recognizing someone as worthy of recognition cannot entail treating them as infallible. (See also Authority, Reason; The Autonomy of Reason; Interpretive Charity; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love.)

Brandom says the authority we acknowledge in mutual recognition with someone is “probative, but provisional and defeasible”. This seems reasonable.

He has not yet made any claim about actual occurrences of robust recognition, but it seems to be postulated as logically complete, which I worry could be too strong to ever actually occur or to be appropriate for ethical use. To “acknowledge as authoritative whatever ground-level takings the one robustly recognized acknowledges as authoritative” (p. 255) sounds to my ear as if the authority would have us in a deontological vise that would not be defeasible. If the acknowledgement of a ground-level taking as authoritative is intended to be implicitly defeasible, then “acknowledge as authoritative” only means “take seriously”, which would be fine.

Part of the difficulty here is that the common or usual understanding of authority is inherently asymmetric, and Brandom is going against that with a symmetric notion of authority/responsibility. The usage here suggests that we should read all references to acknowledgments of authority in Brandom as also inherently including built-in defeasibility. There would then be a kind of symmetry between this and his idea that the very act of making an assertion inherently includes a built-in taking of responsibility for the assertion.

As usual, this leaves me wondering about the status of Brandom’s continually reaffirmed choice in favor of deontological vocabulary. Deontology is all about claiming something analogous to necessity in ethics. If a ground-level conclusion is defeasible like the best judgments of the wise in Aristotle, then to my simple mind it cannot be said to follow necessarily. If ground-level ethical conclusions really should be considered to follow with something a little weaker than necessity, why keep talking as if deontology were the only framework available for ethics? Even if such vocabulary could be a good fit for addressing higher-order constraints on thought (which I am beginning to see more and more), other alternatives are available for talking about ground-level ethical deliberation and choice.

Mean

An Aristotelian mean is not the subject of a fixed formula that could just be “applied” to yield a result, like an arithmetical mean. An Aristotelian mean also has nothing to do with mere compromise. It is a kind of structural rather than quantitative criterion. A mean is not necessarily between one-sided options, but may instead be outside the space determined by their confrontation. It is a product of practical judgment or phronesis. It takes interpretive work to arrive at one. The mean just represents an ideal of avoiding one-sidedness. When Hegel complains about something being one-sided, he is saying the mean has been missed.

Difference

Difference is not a univocal concept. X and Y may be orthogonally different like “day” and “raining”, or they may be relationally different like “black” and “white”. Things of whatever sort that are relationally different from each other are materially incompatible; things that are orthogonally different from each other are not materially incompatible.

Aristotle and Hegel both emphasize the importance of what I just called relational difference as the principal source of meaning and intelligibilty. Information theory, arithmetical subtraction, and the Euclidean logos or ratio between two magnitudes are all purely concerned with relational as opposed to orthogonal difference.

I’d like to point out that Saussurean phonological difference — say, the distinction between a “b” sound and a “p” sound — is also a relational difference, not an orthogonal one. Interpreting the sound as “b” is materially incompatible with interpreting the sound as “p”. (Brandom’s reference to Saussure as pre-Kantian and pre-Fregean on the ground that the latter worked with subsentential units of analysis in what was actually phonology is an unfortunate mistake.)

The famous 20th century “structuralism”, for which Saussurean difference was widely considered to have been a launching point, did not seem to be explicitly much concerned with inference, but it was very much concerned with the relational kind of difference, and in this way should be considered a potential ally of inferentialism rather than an opponent. Popular accounts do not much mention the role of 20th century French epistemological rationalism in the structuralist ferment, but I think it was significant, and that this could support additional connections to the inferentialist project. Synchronic structure is an expressive metaconcept, in no way inherently conflicting with a simultaneous recognition of the importance of diachronic process.

Writers like Deleuze and Badiou, on the other hand, and perhaps even someone like Rorty, while making valid points against our culture’s obsession with identity, have unfortunately chosen to valorize nonexclusive difference. This is not the answer. Ironically, an exclusive focus on nonexclusive, orthogonal difference leads back to undifferentiated sameness, via incommensurability. Deleuze and Badiou actually celebrate this, with slogans like “pluralism = monism” or “generic multiplicities”. This is precisely the night in which all cows are black. Even Kant’s point about the infinity of each person tends in this direction.

As Hegel saw clearly and pointed out in the Encyclopedia Logic, the polemic of Reason against Understanding should not lead us to try to throw out determinateness. Understanding wants to lock everything down under Identity, which is ultimately disastrous. The indiscriminate valorization of orthogonal Difference, on the other hand, ultimately destroys meaning and intelligibility. We should be looking for an Aristotelian mean (outside of, rather than between) these one-sided, shallow, and unattractive extremes.

I want to say that difference, when unbounded, ceases to be what I wanted to mean by difference. A thoughtful dwelling on relational difference, with due attention to real-world contingency and ambiguity, would be my candidate for the mean. (See also Determinate Negation; Conceptual, Representational.)

Deontic

Having previously agreed there is no issue with deontically necessitating constraints analogous to the modal ones for material incompatibility and material consequence, I’m now starting to wonder if this might be as far as Brandom’s deontology really goes anyway.

When I hear “deontology”, I hear rigid rules for everything going all the way to the practical last instance, and feel compelled to defend the place of an always somewhat open Aristotelian practical judgment (phronesis) in contrast to it. But I would rather not attribute such rigidity to Brandom or Kant, both of whom emphasize kinds of rules that are actually higher-order. A simultaneously logical and ethical necessitation of respect for abstract principles like material incompatibility and material consequence can be fully granted without reducing what we should do in concrete situations to a deterministic formula. I want to say that first-order rules belong in logic and mathematics, not ethics.

It feels a bit ironic that I am the one effectively appealing for a need for freedom here, but it really shouldn’t. It’s freedom of reason, not any appeal to will. (See also Varieties of Ethics; Evaluation of Actions; Necessity in Normativity; Binding; Robust Recognition; Mutual Recognition; Euthyphro.)

Binding

Brandom says Kant understands all empirical activity as consisting in subjects binding themselves by conceptual norms. All empirical activity is thus implicitly embedded in an outer frame that has a value-oriented character. Brandom immediately acknowledges that the nature of normative binding in Kant is obscure and deeply entwined with some of the most problematic aspects of Kant’s work, “such as the distinction between the activities of noumenal and phenomenal selves“.

Brandom thinks Hegel better explained this binding, and that Hegel would approve of John Haugeland’s slogan “transcendental constitution is social institution”. Crucially, though, the social dimension is here conceived not as a putatively immediate communitarian identity of “we” but in an extensively mediated way, through reciprocal determination of attitudes and statuses over time by constellations of mutually recognitive I-Thou dyads.

I prefer to speak of a responsibility to differences and gradients rather than a binding. “Binding” sounds a bit too univocal to my ear to be a preferred usage. Responsibility can be materially real without being subject to univocal determination. It has the character of a material tendency rather than a law.

I’m not proposing to ban talk about bindingness. I’m just recommending that it be reinterpreted in this less obvious material sense that still allows for a bit of play in the determination, rather than that it be understood in the more apparent formal and strict sense.

In my view, all the processes of reciprocal determination result in very real material tendencies sufficient to ground all needed talk about responsibility, but we need not and should not claim that these real material tendencies have the absolute force of formal law. That is the difference between law and what is right. Law is to what is right as Hegelian Understanding is to Hegelian Reason.

Some abstract, higher-order principles do have the force of formal law, but their interpretation and applicability in actual cases can never be self-evident (nothing contentful ever is).

So that which is genuinely normatively binding is either only a real material tendency of responsibility, and interpretive work is required to discern it; or it is an open-formula higher-order principle, and interpretive work is required to apply it. If we intend to be ethical, we need to focus on that interpretive work. I believe the reciprocity of authority and responsibility and the reciprocity of mutual recognition both also point to a similar openness and a similar need for work. (See also Necessity in Normativity; Mutual Recognition; Making It Explicit.)

Untimely

We aiming-to-be rational animals are all deeply conditioned by our development in particular social and cultural circumstances. A truly great philosopher like Aristotle perhaps comes closest to becoming “untimely” in something like a Nietzchean sense.

Though I know of no explicit textual evidence for it, I wonder if Hegel resolved the material incompatibility between his mature patronizing attribution of naive realism about norms to the ancient world as a whole on the one hand, and all the insights he attributes to Plato and Aristotle on the other, by implicitly exempting them from the generalization about the ancient world. That generalization is sound at a broad sociological level, but we should not assume without specific evidence that sociological generalizations about a philosopher’s time and place apply to the philosopher.