Authority, Reason

[This post assumed what I still take to be the common or usual notion of “authority” as something that is supposed to be unconditionally binding under some circumstances. It does not apply to a notion of authority that would be always symmetrically balanced by reciprocal responsibility, and therefore always defeasible.]

Authority is a poor substitute for reason. It gives us ready-made conclusions that may be true, but are without justification. When we have reason and reasons, we have no need to be guided by authority.

Respectable authors have nonetheless talked about rational authority. The idea is that reasons should have something like a sort of authority over us. That is fine, as long as we recognize it as a metaphor or simile rather than a literal truth.

The difference is, precisely, that authority operates fundamentally in registers of will, compulsion, and obedience. Authority at its core does not answer to reasons. “Do it because I said so!” or just “Obey!” is its first and last move. Obedience to authority is characterized by heteronomy rather than autonomy, in Kant’s sense of those terms.

We may be freely “compelled” only by reasons, when we genuinely find them to be genuinely convincing. That is very different from someone compelling us, or from our having internalized an external compulsion. (See also Euthyphro; Necessity in Normativity; Binding; Deontic; Enlightenment.)

Evaluation of Actions

Part of my issue with the deontological approach to ethics is that by putting rules first (above both intentions and consequences), it seems to suggest that an action has the normative status it does intrinsically — that is to say, independent of intentions and consequences. I don’t think the notion of value is even intelligible apart from some context of evaluation. It seems to me that intentions and consequences together form the relevant context in which actions occur and should be evaluated.

I believe any putatively intrinsic value of an action is just a reification. We might be inclined to say, e.g., that killing is intrinsically bad, but I would say instead that it is bad because by definition it has a bad consequence. The difference is that consequences can be weighed against other consequences, so we can say killing is bad but might nonetheless be justified in some particular case, if that bad thing would prevent what would truly be a worse evil.

We should put interpretive charity first. No one should be blamed or penalized for an action that was sincerely and responsibly well-intentioned, or the consequences of which were in balance good.

Geist

Hegel’s talk about Geist (commonly translated as “Spirit”) is not a reflection of some sort of evolutionary pantheism. Geist in its developed form is something like ethical-cultural practice. Its progressive development is a retrospective reconstruction, a story that we tell ourselves. Geist is not the motor of history. (I think the idea of anything like a “motor” of history is ultimately unintelligible.) It is a historically conditioned conditioner of actions, rather than an agent. It works through mediation. (See also Second Nature.)

Geist is also Hegel’s historicization and naturalization of what Kant called the transcendental. The transcendental field of value or normativity includes neither empirical objects nor empirical subjectivity, but conditions both. It is neither subjective nor objective, in the way those terms are popularly understood. Mutual recognition processes involve a kind of mutual determination. Geist can be imagined as the cumulative result of innumerable concrete mutual recognition processes, each of which occurred against the background of a previous cumulative result. Mutual determination allows for a kind of synthesis of freedom and determination. (See also Hegel’s Ethical Innovation.)

Ferrarin’s Brandom

Alfredo Ferrarin’s Hegel and Aristotle was an interesting and provocative book, but his 2012 essay “What Must We Recognize? Brandom’s Kant and Hegel” is unfortunately nowhere near doing justice to its subject.

Ferrarin’s first word concerning Brandom’s approach is “reductionism.” But Brandom is clear that he is being highly selective for a particular purpose, and that other productive readings are possible. At one point Ferrarin seems to suggest Brandom would reduce Hegel’s whole enterprise to what Brandom calls propositionalism: the idea that concepts get their meaning from their use in judgments. Brandom does believe Hegel would be sympathetic to that primarily Fregean idea, but that’s about as far as it goes.

Then we learn that Brandom’s real “object of attack” is the notion of a prelinguistic given, and of intuition as evidence. Ferrarin turns out to be quite hostile to Brandom’s thesis of the priority of inference (Hegelian mediation) over immediacy.

The critique of immediacy is not some weird analytic fetish. If anything is a weird fetish, immediacy is. Influential continental thinkers would agree. And intuition is not knowledge. It may yield truth by the correspondence theory, but the defining characteristic of knowledge is its ability to explain itself. Knowledge is not just true belief.

Ferrarin wants to maintain that recognition cannot do all the work Brandom wants it to, and justifies this by arguing for a much narrower and more impoverished concept of recognition. Mutual recognition is hardly mentioned, and the rich dialectical development of the mutual aspect by Brandom is completely ignored. It is precisely the open dialectic of mutual recognition that provides a nonsubjective grounding for normativity, creating a third “postmodern” alternative (in the new, Hegelian sense suggested by Brandom) to traditionalist rigidity and modern subjectivist alienation.

One of the things that initially attracted me in Brandom’s discussions of Hegel is the absence of a lot of nonsense about consciousness and self-consciousness. Brandom discusses consciousness mainly in terms of meaning and normativity. Consciousness and self-consciousness are ways of doing — nominalized adverbial descriptions conditioning and informing agency, not some kind of mental stuff or container, not direct exercisers of agency either. Kant and Hegel hinted at this, but Brandom explained it much more clearly. (See also What Is “I”?)

To me, the most important lesson about self-consciousness in Hegel is that it is anything but consciousness of an immediately given thing called “self”. (Hegel’s actual concept might be better called other-consciousness or normative awareness.) Ferrarin, however, calls Brandom’s approach theoretical and abstract, and even claims Brandom “misses so obviously the practical origin of self-consciousness” (emphasis in original).

Ferrarin correctly points out that judgment cannot be adequately conceived as merely applying rules. I agree, but despite my own reservations about Brandom’s preference for deontological modes of expression, I think Brandom’s concept of judgment is much richer than that.

Necessity in Normativity

I agree with Aristotle that ethics cannot be an exact science. I also hold with Leibniz that all necessity whatsoever is conditional.

Practical judgment or phronesis discerns differences and gradients, not “things as they are”. Questions of the form “What is to be done in circumstance c” do not in general have a single, necessary answer.

Ground-level ethical rules, I want to say, have no value apart from such always somewhat open judgment of situations. If all I were doing were conforming to a rule, I would be showing no sign of reason or intelligence. (Kant at least partially makes a similar point by distinguishing between rules and concepts of rules, though it it is a bit unclear what this means.) Only if I can be said to have reasonably judged that following rule r in circumstance c was situationally appropriate, was my rule-following rational. Judgment could not be reducible to simply applying a pre-existing formula.

Needless to say, I don’t really like deontology. Necessity in first-order ethics smells to me of subrational compulsion.

On the other hand, it would be absurd to say that because there is no hard necessity in first-order ethics, anything goes. An ought that we positively assert about anything in particular is based on differences and gradients, not binary necessity. Binary necessity could at best apply only to prohibitions, not to any positive injunction to do x. I don’t even believe it applies in the negative case. But in any event, what we ought positively to do is the real concern of ethics, and that is a weaker sort of ought.

Still, we “ought” (in some different, stronger sense that applies only to meta-level generalities like the categorical imperative) to be faithful to our best judgment of those differences and gradients. I would also agree that we “ought” in this stronger sense to practice mutual recognition as described by Hegel, and we “ought” to practice wise charity as described by Leibniz. Brandom points out two more things that I agree “ought” in this stronger sense not to be done: affirming contradictory things, and affirming something while denying a consequence of it. I have no issue with speaking of necessity in these meta-level cases.

In line with a practice of interpretive charity, I want to resolve the ambiguity in Kant’s (and Hegel’s) talk about moral “necessity” by saying that any true necessity must refer to meta-level principles in themselves, not their application.

In chapter 1 of Making It Explicit, Brandom talks about the desirability avoiding “regulism”, or the attempt to rely on explicit rules all the way down. Wittgenstein’s infinite regress of rules-to-interpret-rules is said to show that the conception of norms as rules “is not an autonomous one, and so does not describe the fundamental form of norm”. This seems promising. He both invokes Kant’s distinction between rules and concepts of rules, and suggests a move from rules to practices, attitudes, and construals. Mere conformity to a norm is not even a candidate for a construal in accordance with a normative attitude.

I also want to say, as Aristotle would, that the correctness of such construals, though emergently relatively objective in terms of something like multidimensional gradients of “should”, is not in general decidable in Boolean yes/no terms. Brandom seems more worried about avoiding collapse of moral necessity into causal necessity or mere factual regularity. While I thoroughly agree that normative conclusions cannot be derived from non-normative premises, I take overly rigid prescription to be still the more practically important concern. Pufendorf’s doctrine of imposition of norms by a sovereign will is huge step backward from Aristotle.

What is needed is ground-level, broadly rational interpretation of real-world situational particulars, complexities, and ambiguities that is not strict rule application; i.,e., phronesis.

The objectivity of ethics does not consist in strictly univocal determinations, but in shareable reasonableness. The interesting cases are not like “It’s raining and I don’t want to be wet, so I should open my umbrella.” There could be no precise formula for how to balance independent concerns when they are in partial conflict. (See also Kantian Maxims; Categorical Imperative; Kantian Obligation; Binding; Varieties of Ethics.)

Determinate Negation

Something actually means something to the extent that it actually rules out something else. Brandom calls this material incompatibility. I think he is right that this has more to do with contrariety in Aristotle than with so-called “contradiction”, about which a tremendous amount of nonsense has been written in purported reference to Hegel. Hegel’s wording was not always clear, to put it mildly, but I think it is clear that he never meant to talk logical nonsense.

Brandom’s examples (e.g., triangular vs. circular) make it clear that he has in mind a sort of n-ary contrariety, as distinct from the binary kind Aristotle talks about in the Physics (e.g., triangular vs. non-triangular). However, Aristotle’s own argument for distinction based on n-ary rather than binary division in Parts of Animals Book 1 supports Brandom’s extension of Aristotelian contrariety to an n-ary form.

Aristotle also in many places speaks of difference in ways that resemble Brandom’s n-ary contrariety. Aristotle and Hegel and Brandom all laudably direct our attention to conceptual difference. Brandom argues that for Hegel, this also explicitly includes differences in inferential consequence.

There is an important contrast between this “determinate” negation and “infinite” negation or simple polar opposition, in which each of a pair of terms is the simple negation of the other. This latter kind has been called “infinite”, because it does nothing to specify what the difference is between the two terms. (See also Conceptual, Representational; Material Inference; Material Consequence.)

Being, Existence

Aristotle should not be lumped together with the later trend that treats ultra-abstract (or singular) terms like “being” or “existence” as having deep philosophical significance.

He famously wrote that “being is said in many ways”.

Though he did twice mention a possible “science” of being qua being, in both of the books of the Metaphysics in which he starts to discuss it, anticlimactically the only content he gives it is the principle of noncontradiction, behind which lies a kind of ethical obligation to respect material incompatibility of meanings. Aristotle’s sole explicit criterion for “being qua being” is passing the test of this respect for material incompatibility. To successfully pick out a “being” or meant reality, a concept or concept use must respect material incompatibility. The importance of this respect is shown by Aristotle’s very uncharacteristic display of anger at the Sophist who tramples on such respect.

He prefers to direct our attention to “beings” rather than to singular “Being” or a generic “being of beings”. The aspect of picking out a “being” by its specific “essence” is essential to its being a being. “Essence” — understood as constituted through intelligible distinctions, rather than pre-given — is far more important for Aristotle than the bare fact of so-called “existence”. (Facts are important too, but much more for their meaningful content than for any sheer “facticity”. For Aristotle, something like facticity as such would be a subordinate aspect of materiality.)

Metaphysics was a title assigned by a later editor to a collection of manuscripts of different dates. Commentators debated about its true subject matter. The idea that metaphysics equals ontology — opposed in the middle ages by the highly influential Averroes — became dominant only relatively late. The equation with ontology was especially associated with projects significantly different from Aristotle’s, like those of Avicenna and Duns Scotus. Eventually it became canonical with Wolff.

Heidegger wanted to distinguish Being from beings, and spoke about a forgetting of Being after the pre-Socratics, who allegedly had it in view. I say good riddance, if there ever was such a thing.

It is true and good that there is no Being in Aristotle. He correctly said “being” is not a unitary concept. The core of the Metaphysics is instead about what he calls ousia, or what answers the question “what a thing was to have been” — i.e, form or essence, not being as existence in the common modern sense. He also mentions other sorts of being, such as being the case or being true.

Kant correctly pointed out that existence is not a property. Hegel in the Logic correctly said Being is empty and equivalent to Nothing.

In Greek, “existence” literally means standing out. To “exist” in this sense is to be determinately distinguishable or, in modern terms, to be a subject of some existential quantification, as when we formulate a mathematical proof that for any given A with specified properties, there “exists” (i.e., we can pick out) some B or a unique B with specified other properties. Existence in the sense of standing out is always relative to something else.

An abstract, nonrelative concept of “existence” is not needed in order to express real-world constraints and determinacy. Aristotle for instance uses more specific and supple concepts for this, like energeia (“at-work-ness” or actuality) and dynamis (potentiality).

The notion of existence as a nonrelative property of a thing, I suspect, owes something to the concern of medieval theologians to prove such a property for a nonobservable entity.

If something is normatively important, it is so regardless of whether it “exists” or is ideal or virtual. What is practically important is not abstract existence but practical difference, normative importance and conceptual articulation. (See also Form, Substance; Aristotelian Dialectic.)

Spirit of Trust

There seems to be a lot of new content in Brandom’s epic A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Belknap 2019), since the first version he posted on the web some years ago. It will take me quite a while to do it justice.

Simply put, this is a proper Great Book by a living great philosopher, which happens to take the form of a book about another great philosopher. It is not to be missed if you care about such things. The first version decisively overthrew my preconceptions about Hegel, acquired from too hasty a reading of Hegel himself and much time spent in earlier years with French anti-Hegelians. Simultaneously, Brandom’s book attracted me with its ethical message. (See many related articles under Hegel, and Brandom on Hegel; also under Brandom and Hegel on Modernity.)

Useful related resources include the works of Brandom’s co-thinkers Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard on Hegel, and the monumental line-by-line commentary on the argument of the Phenomenology by H.R. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder.

Immediacy, Presence

Broadly speaking, the Brandomian critique of claims of two-stage models of representation — where representings are sharply distinguished from representeds, as supposedly having immediate intelligibility that representeds lack — seems to me to have at least a partial analogue in early Derrida’s critique of presence and of what he called a transcendental signified, as well as to some of what Foucault wrote about representation in The Order of Things.

Brandom does not want to entirely subvert representation, as Derrida and Foucault sometimes seemed to. He just wants to insist that it is always derivative, and cannot be a starting point. Although Derrida was less anti-Hegelian than many of his contemporaries, I don’t recall that he recognized, as Brandom does, that there was a strong precedent for the critique of immediacy/presence in Kant and Hegel. Foucault’s very sharp overt rejection of Hegel needs to be balanced against the fact that his own historical account of what are in effect shapes of subjectivity covers many of the same moments as Hegel’s, and in effect strongly continues the Hegelian critique of Mastery.

Unfortunately, Brandom sees both Foucault and Derrida as meriting no more than one-line dismissals, where I see common ground in the critiques of mastery, immediacy, and representation. These days, Brandom’s more rationalist and ethical version of these critiques seems a good deal more useful to me, but I still prefer a more irenic attitude. (See also Genealogy.)

Brandom is bothered by Derrida’s thesis that signifiers technically refer to other signifiers that refer to other signifiers, and so on, without end. While I agree that an indefinite expansion of inferences is more perspicuous than an indefinite expansion of references, Brandom’s explanation of reference in terms of inference ought to make it possible to substitute the one for the other. Also, the notion of a signifier is very abstract; we should not equate signifiers with individual words, which Brandom also seems to do in this context. A signifier could be a complex expression. Thinking about substitution of complex expressions makes it easier to map expansions of references to expansions of inferences. I think the indefinite deferral of a “transcendental signified” should also be related to the Kantian indefinite deferral of claims about things in themselves, and to the Kantian thesis that transcendental concepts do not refer to objects.

Concept, Form, Species

Where Kant and later writers talk about concepts, Plato and Aristotle and medieval writers talked about forms in somewhat analogous ways. Neither concepts nor forms have the immediate unproblematic accessibility that is claimed for Cartesian mental representations or Lockean ideas or medieval species. Where concepts or forms are to the fore, we are generally in discursive territory.

Leen Spruit has documented that the middle ages also saw a huge variety of doctrines of so-called “species”, both perceptible and intelligible, which in one aspect were mental representations, some resembling phantasmata in Stoicism, some seeming rather like Cartesian mental representations or Lockean ideas. These were generally considered to be contents immediately accessible to the mind. I tend to think a lot of these were probably associated with what Brandom calls two-stage models of representation, where representings are considered to have an immediate intelligibility that representeds lack.