Category: Uncategorized

Golden Rule

Because I favor the unconditional autonomy of reason I generally dislike any reduction of ethics to rules that would supposedly tell us what to do in all cases, but the so-called golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you; or, do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you) seems like a variant of Kant’s categorical imperative, which is a higher-order rule that rather obviously leaves a place to be filled in by judgment.

Some prefer the negative version of the golden rule, as avoiding possible arrogance or presumption. I like the Leibnizian idea that to be truly ethical is to do more than what is merely required of us, so I actually like the positive version.

The golden rule could also be considered a nice popularization of the ethical import of Hegelian mutual recognition.

Honesty, Kindness

To be honest or sincere is first of all to be intellectually honest with oneself, which is a commitment to what Kant called unity of apperception, whether one thinks of it in such terms or not. As Brandom would remind us, this means to the best of our ability honoring an implicit higher-order commitment — to the consequences of our commitments, and to avoiding incompatible commitments — that we have necessarily made in being committed to anything at all.

We could refer to this as integrity, or a commitment to commitment. Recall Aristotle’s indignation in the Metaphysics against the sophist who refused to honor the principle of noncontradiction.

This is obviously a high standard, if we intend to apply it to people’s emotional responses in ordinary life. We need to be forgiving of the fallibility of others, as well as of ourselves. Honesty to others needs to be tempered with kindness (or wise charity, as Leibniz would say). But we should strive to be integral beings in our emotional responses.

Kindness has no set formula; sometimes something like tough love is appropriate. These things are always matters of judgment. I would go beyond Kant and say we should be kind to all beings, period, but the mode of that kindness should be appropriate to the situation. I am kind to inanimate objects by not engaging in senseless destruction or waste. I may kindly question your conclusion, or tell you what you don’t want to hear. I may even kindly revolt against your oppressive regime. That just means there is no spite or ressentiment in my heart as I take a stand for justice. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; Things Said; Interpretive Charity; Affirmation; Genealogy.)

Substance

Aristotle thought we should be ethically committed to the idea that becoming or process is in principle intelligible. An often misunderstood part of his program for showing this was to emphasize that our very talk about change presupposes that we can pick out relative stability or persistence somewhere in the context.

This is a careful, minimalist assertion of moments of weak unity or stable points of attraction within the flux, intended only to deny Plato’s strong pessimistic denial of the knowability of any such points of attraction. It has nothing to do with some direct incarnation of metaphysically given essences. (See Aristotelian Identity; Identity, Isomorphism; Equivocal Determination.)

Plato recommends an ethic of quasi-skeptical honesty about the epistemic difficulties involved in any practical judgment or view of the world. Aristotle deeply respects the intellectual honesty promoted by Plato about what we do not know in life, while putting a higher value on things subject to becoming.

Ousia (traditionally “substance”, or more accurately “what it was to have been” a thing) is Aristotle’s preferred alternative to talking about Being (either as utterly general or as utterly unique). It redirects our attention away from these sterile extremes toward a fertile middle ground where conceptual articulation is possible. In the Metaphysics, it undergoes a major dialectical development through many senses, including a division into actuality and potentiality. (See also Abstract and Concrete; Being, Existence; Aristotelian Dialectic; Free Will and Determinism.)

Later authors developed increasingly rigidified reinterpretations of Aristotelian substance, such as the Latin medieval notion of substantial form. This laid the basis for early modern redefinitions of substance in terms of some kind of logical identity.

The Animal’s Leg Joint

In De Motu Animalium, Aristotle says there is an unmoved mover in the animal’s leg joint, and proceeds to a geometrical description of the axis of rotation of the joint. More famously, he says there are unmoved movers in the apparent motion of the fixed stars and planets, and there too associates them with geometrical axes of circular motions. What is going on here? This is a good illustration of several points.

First, Aristotle is perfectly happy to use mathematics in natural science. (He just correctly judged that early Greek arithmetic and geometry generally had little to contribute to the intelligibility of becoming, and wisely objected to the Pythagorean numerology that found a place in the Platonic Academy.)

Second, there is nothing mysterious about what he calls an unmoved mover. In the best-known cases, it refers to something that is in fact not only observable but mathematically describable. (This is not the only way a concept can have value, but that is not the point here.)

Third, he calls the unmoved mover a “mover” in the sense that it is the descriptive law or form of the physical motion in question, not a driving impulse or force. In a similar move, Leibniz famously said God is the law of the series.

Aristotelian Dialectic

It was no sophomoric error when Friedrich Engels described Aristotle — not Plato or some neoplatonist — as the greatest dialectician of the ancient world. Aristotelian “dialectic” is just cumulative, exploratory discursive reasoning about concrete meanings in the absence of initial certainty.

Broad usage of the term “dialectic” includes meanings of both dialogue and logic. For Plato, dialogue aimed directly at truth (though not necessarily reaching it). Aristotle considered a many-sided logical/semantic analysis to be the single most important tool of science, and to be more rigorous than the dialogue that was Plato’s favorite literary device.

For Aristotle, unlike Plato, dialectic is not a direct quest for truth. Plato had already emphasized that dialectic is a matter of an ethically motivated quest for truth rather than a claim to mastery or simple possession of it. Aristotle opened things up further by preferring an indirect, semantically oriented approach to the quest. Dialectic ends up being his main critical tool.

Aristotelian dialectic is a semantic and pragmatic inferential examination of opinion or what is merely said (or analogously, I would argue, of appearance). It uses the same logical forms as the rational knowledge Aristotle called episteme; but unlike the latter, yields results that Aristotle calls only “probable”, because they depend on premises that are merely “said” rather than rationally known. (This is a qualitative assessment having nothing to do with statistical probability.)

This has often been taken as a denigration of dialectic. I take it instead as Aristotle’s affirmation of the importance of semantics and pragmatics.

Because dialectic for Aristotle makes no assumptions about what is really true, it is perfectly suited for the examination of arguments for their purely inferential structure. Because it examines concrete arguments with concrete terms, the role of material as well as formal inference can be considered. (See also Inferential Semantics.)

Aristotle also says (Topics Book 1) that dialectic in just this sense is the best means we have for getting clarity about first principles. This is a good example of Aristotle’s inferentialism. Aristotle’s own approach to what later came to be called “metaphysics” is (“merely”) dialectical in this specific sense. In being so, it is essentially semantic and normative. I don’t think Aristotle regarded metaphysics as episteme (“science”) any more than he regarded ethics or phronesis (“practical judgment”) as episteme, and in neither case is it a denigration. (Aristotle is far more honest than most later writers about the relatively less certain nature of so-called first principles, compared with many other apparently more derivative results. He is the original antifoundationalist. See also Dialectic Bootstraps Itself; Demonstrative “Science”?; Abstract and Concrete.)

Hegel actually said the greatest example of ancient dialectic was the commentary on Plato’s Parmenides by neoplatonist Proclus (412 – 485 CE). (He did not know the work of the other great late Neoplatonist, Damascius (458 – 538), which included an even more sophisticated development along similar lines.) The Parmenides explicitly examines a series of antithetical propositions, which does resemble the common image of Hegelian dialectic. (See The One?) In any case, I think this is misleading.

While at least the common image of Hegelian dialectic as concerned with antitheses does not apply well to Aristotle, very fruitful clarifications of Hegel can be obtained by looking out for his use of Aristotelian-style dialectic, despite that fact he — general enthusiasm for Aristotle notwithstanding — did not much mention Aristotle when expounding his own version. Underlying the occasional emphasis on antitheses in Hegel is a broader concern for actually many-sided inferential/semantic examination of opinion or appearance, which is just what Aristotle’s dialectic does. (See also Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic; Three Logical Moments; Contradiction vs Polarity.)

My own candidate for the greatest example of ancient dialectic is the development of the concepts of ousia (“what it was to have been” a thing) and energeia (“at-work-ness”) in the central books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. As in the biological works, merely binary distinction is not the main point there.

The stereotype of a binary schematism at work in Hegel is not without basis, but more careful commentary has limited its scope. Aristotelian dialectic actually pervades Hegel’s works.

In a dialectical development (Aristotelian or Hegelian), it is common to begin with one presumed meaning for a term, and end up with a different one. The classic discussion in the Metaphysics mentioned above begins with the idea of a simple substrate that remains constant through a change, and goes through multiple transformations to progressively richer concepts. (See also Form, Substance; Aristotelian Demonstration.)

Aristotelian Semantics

When Aristotle talks about ways in which a word “is said” — which is one of the main things he does — it is not inappropriate to reconstruct this as a semantic concern. I would say the same about both Plato and Aristotle’s concern with definition and classification of terms. This is taking “semantics” in the broad sense of having to do with meaning.

For Aristotle and Plato, meanings are developed principally in terms of other meanings. Aristotle also pays a lot of attention to use. For neither of them is there any thought of reducing meaning to extensional criteria, as in modern model-theoretic semantics. Plato famously contrasted definition of “what” something is with enumeration of examples. Aristotle was interested in both, but respected the contrast.

Aristotle agrees with Frege that the minimal unit of truth or falsity is a complete proposition. (Medieval logicians working in a broadly Aristotelian tradition extended this to an elaborate theory of what they called “supposition” (see de Rijk, Logica Modernorum), which concerned meanings in the context of concretely uttered sentences. Various kinds of “supposition” — or ways in which a referential meaning can be logically intended — were analyzed, in a now forgotten technical vocabulary largely shared by realist and nominalist logicians.)

Aristotelian practical judgment (phronesis) is a kind of interpretation or hermeneutics of the implications of situations. Ultimately, I think Kantian judgment moves into the same territory. Judgment in general involves far more than mere assertion or belief. “Judgment” should refer first and foremost to a process, an investigation, and only very secondarily to a conclusion. All such processes are in principle open. The final word is never said.

For both Plato and Aristotle, implications and presuppositions uncovered in dialogue or many-sided monologue are more important in getting at meaning and truth than any referential pointing. Even medieval scholastics arguing for or against a proposition did this largely in terms of analyzing its implications and presuppositions.

I don’t think it’s possible to cleanly separate considerations of truth from considerations of meaning. Truth can only be apprehended in terms of some meaning. Much more interesting than the abstract question whether some proposition is true is insight into what is really being said. (See also Dialectic, Semantics; “Said of”; Aristotelian Propositions; Univocity; Agency; Inferential Semantics; Edifying Semantics.)

Edifying Semantics

I like Brandom’s recent motto of “edifying semantics”. It strikes me that this is what Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel were after more than anything else in their particular ways of doing philosophy — inquiry into meaning, with an ethical intent. Aristotle even developed natural science in the form of an edifying semantics.

Behind the formidable technical development of Brandom’s other recent motif of “semantic descent” is, I believe, a profound ethical concern to show the relevance of philosophy to ordinary life. Semantic descent shows how lofty higher-order abstractions are effectively operative in the ordinary use of concepts in ordinary experience.

This is not reductionism, but quite the opposite. It is a vindication of the relevance of higher-order things in ordinary life.

Agency

Agency is not causality or causal power in the modern sense. Acting and doing are distinct from mere occurrence of an event by virtue of their meaning or interpretation.

The modern notion of causal power is something blind, mechanical, taken over from mathematical physics. Events follow one another in accordance with mathematical law. Even physical causality, though — insofar as we seek to understand it — is more about mathematical form than about the operation of raw power.

Talk about agency belongs in the register of semantics rather than physics in the modern sense. This takes us even further away from considerations of raw power.

Greek mathematics was really just getting started in Aristotle’s time. Aristotle correctly judged that that mathematics did not begin to address interesting problems of the intelligibility of becoming. Accordingly, he developed a discourse about the intelligibility of becoming in other — we could say, more semantic — ways. For Aristotle, even physics is fundamentally a semantic investigation. As Leibniz saw, there need be no contradiction between Aristotle’s semantic physics and modern mathematical physics. They simply investigate different things.

Aristotle originally introduced talk about agents, and did so in the context of his semantically oriented physics. From early modern times, physics moved to a mathematical approach that was immensely fruitful. At the same time, the Aristotelian semantic-physical notion of agents was (badly) translated into a register of mathematical-physical causes. (See also Aristotelian Matter.)

Because of its fundamentally semantic character, the semantic-physical notion of agency was well suited to be extended to social and ethical contexts. Its mathematical-physical analogue is not nearly so well suited. It took the monumental achievements of Kant and Hegel to begin to restore a semantic notion of agency. (See also Expansive Agency.)

Euthyphro

In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asks whether it is better to say that a thing is holy because the gods love it, or that the gods love it because it is holy. Socrates clearly favors the second option. To use “because the gods love it” (or, implicitly, “because it is God’s will”) as an unexplained explainer is to assert a form of theological voluntarism. As Leibniz said much later, this is to make of God a tyrant or a despot, arbitrary rather than wise and good.

It turns out that assertions of the form “it is God’s will” necessarily involve argument from authority. The exchange between Socrates and Euthyphro exhibits the hollowness and nonrational character of argument from authority in general.

Elsewhere, Plato famously makes Socrates argue that only the wisest should rule. The best rule is based on wisdom; only the worst is based on sheer power. (See also Freedom and Free Will.)

It might seem that to say that the gods love a thing because it is holy is implicitly to presume that what is holy is somehow simply given. Leibniz may or may not have presumed this, but I think Plato did not in regard to anything practical, because I don’t think Plato regarded anything in becoming as simply given.