Repraesentatio

Representation was not invented by Descartes, as Brandom tends to suggest. Concepts of representation had wide currency in the middle ages. The word used was literally repraesentatio. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice summary, which traces its philosophical use to the Latin translations of Avicenna.

John Duns Scotus (1266 -1308) wanted to rewrite Aristotle by insisting that there is a single meaning for “being” that underlies all the different meanings Aristotle had distinguished. The underlying minimal definition of being he proposed was precisely representability. Olivier Boulnois documents how Scotus believed he had invented a unified ontology that Aristotle thought was impossible, and did so on the basis of a doctrine of being as pure representability. Scotus thus appears as an arch-representationalist. Whatever else one may say about it, his notion of representation is clearly not the same as resemblance. Every medieval university had a Scotist on the faculty.

If memory serves, Aquinas had a doctrine of the possibility of perfect representation. Since it is perfect, this cannot be reducible to mere resemblance. Perfect representation is effectively equivalent to a kind of immediacy.

Some contemporary scholars also translate Greek Stoic phantasma as “representation”, based on the functional role it plays in the Stoic system. The Stoic theory in question dealt with sense perception, and was part physiological and part epistemological. It purported to provide a foundation for immediate certain knowledge of represented objects from their mental representations in perception. This sounds like representation before inference, and also like another variant of putatively perfect representation, which therefore would again not be reducible to resemblance, and would again be effectively equivalent to immediacy.

Languages, Books, Curricula

During the time when Latin was the de facto language for scholarship in the West, there was no division in philosophy based on national languages. The huge disconnect of most early modern philosophy from what preceded it was greatly intensified by two factors — people started writing in French or English or German instead of Latin, and they started relying on printed books, mainly in their native languages. It took a long time for many older works to become available in printed form. A huge proliferation of Latin philosophical texts just sank into oblivion.

Due to the common European university curriculum in the middle ages, there was a great deal of shared (basically modified Aristotelian) technical vocabulary and training among people who had strong disagreements about everything else (including disagreements with Aristotle). This made it possible for people with very different positions to have extensive substantive dialogue rather than talking past each other. The quality of argument was generally high. So when all this sank into oblivion, it was a great loss.

Some medieval writers were so good at restating arguments they disagreed with that scholars argue about which position they actually supported. (Usually there is a textual indication which opinion is the author’s, but there may be question about whether to believe it, because the argument for a conflicting opinion may be better, and it is thought that some authors presented their more controversial views as not their own.)

The same unfortunately cannot be said for modern philosophical writers. Even great modern philosophers often do great injustice to other philosophers they disagree with, badly misstating their positions. Many people do not even realize that this has not always been true of philosophers. (See also Renaissance.)

Hegel on the Ancients

In early writings predating the Phenomenology, Hegel argued that the modern Christian world needed to learn spiritually from the ancient world to overcome its alienation. Starting with the Phenomenology, his mature public view made the Christian world a big step forward from the ancient world instead. But in the late History of Philosophy lectures, Plato and Aristotle are praised above “all others” — even above Kant, who apparently comes third.

Already in the early period, Hegel tried his hand at a retrospective reconstruction of the Christian gospel in terms of Kantian ethics. The later Philosophy of History lectures trace a line of development from primitive Christianity via Lutheranism to Kant and German idealism, retrospectively using key German idealist terms like freedom and subjectivity to explicate the whole development. The here assumed high value of German idealism is used to show the value of the earlier stages. In the Philosophy of Religion lectures, he argues at length for the superiority of what he calls revealed religion, but his notion of revelation is making things plain and open to all, not any kind of supernatural special knowledge. Religion is said to express in images what philosophy expresses in concepts.

The idea of making things open to all is consistent with Hegel’s rejection of aristocracy in favor of a modern civil state based on a constitution rather than the mere will of a monarch or ruling class. But Aristotle too regarded constitutional rule as vastly superior to any form of tyranny or despotism.

Plato and Aristotle thought we would be better off if society were governed by those best capable of normative reasoning. Hegel criticized Aristotle’s view that some people turn out to be incapable of adequately reasoning about normative matters for themselves, and that they ought to be ruled by people who can do this adequately. But Aristotle already noted that existing social distinctions did not just reflect this.

Hegel’s mature vision for the future was a synthesis of the best of the ancient and modern worlds. If we compare that synthesis to his view of the modern world, it differs by what it incorporates from the ancient world. Hegel would never have wanted to roll the clock back, but even in his mature view, I think he still believed the moderns had something to learn from the higher-order and normative approach of Plato and Aristotle. (See also The Ancients and the Moderns; Untimely.)

Higher Order

Before and after early modern mechanism and in contrast to it, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel all broadly agreed on the normative importance of higher-order things.

In modern terms, Plato’s forms are higher-order things, as distinct from first-order things. Plato trusts higher-order things more than first-order ones, because he considers only higher-order things to be knowable in the sense of episteme, because only higher-order things contain an element of universality, and episteme applies only to universals, not particulars.

Aristotle agrees that higher-order things are ultimately more knowable, but believes it is possible to say more about first-order things, by relating them to each other and to higher-order things; that our initial rough, practical grasp of first-order things can help us to begin to grasp higher-order things by example; and that going up and down the ladder of abstraction successively can help us progressively enrich our understanding of both.

(Incidentally, I have always read the Platonic dialogues as emphasizing the normative importance of acquiring a practical grasp of forms more than specific existence claims about “the forms”. Aristotle’s criticisms make it clear that at least some in the Platonic Academy did understand Plato as making such existence claims, but particularly in what are regarded as later dialogues like Parmenides, Sophist, and Theaetetus, what is said about form seems relatively close to an Aristotelian view. It is even possible that these dialogues were influenced by the master’s even greater student.)

Early modern mechanism completely discarded Plato and Aristotle’s higher-order orientation. Descartes famously recommends that we start by analyzing everything into its simplest components. This temporarily played a role in many great scientific and technological advances, but was bad for philosophy and for people. Hegel calls this bottom-up approach Understanding, as distinct from Reason.

Early and mid-20th century logical foundationalism still adhered to this resolutely bottom-up view, but since the later 20th century, there has been an explosion in the use of higher-order formal concepts in mathematics, logic, and computer science. It turns out that even from an engineering point of view, higher-order representations are often more efficient, due to their much greater compactness.

Leibniz already tried to reconcile mechanistic science with a higher-order normative view. He also contributed to the early development of higher-order concepts in mathematics.

Kant and Hegel decisively revived an approach that is simultaneously higher-order and normative.

What Is “I” ?

Empirical subjectivity is not really “I”, in the sense of the “I think” that is the pure unity of apperception in Kant and Hegel. We could informally call it “me” or “myself”. That is a concrete thing in the world of things and facts, to which we participants in reason have a special relation that is nonetheless not identity. Strictly speaking, “I” is a mobile index for the tendency toward unity in a unity of apperception, with no other characteristics of any kind.

What is called consciousness is not a medium or container, but a way of being. What gets called self-consciousness in Hegel is anything but immediate awareness of an object called “self”. It has more to do with an awareness of the limitations of empirical self.

There is a long ancient and even medieval prehistory or archaeology to the now ubiquitous conception of “subjectivity”, which was pioneered in its modern form by Kant and Hegel and has been varied and/or vulgarized in innumerable ways. We can recognize the bold innovations of Kant and Hegel in the modern context and still be intrigued and enriched by this prehistory.

When dealing with such retrospective reconstruction of a putative intellectual development, it is never a matter of the persistence or mere repetition of an identical conception. Rather, the first task is to recognize a larger space of variations and developments, and then, tentatively and subject to revision, to retrospectively reconstruct a stratified and multilinear but coherent development. In French, one might consult Alain de Libera’s massive ongoing L’Archeologie du Sujet.

In the middle ages Averroes, in his Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle, developed a nuanced distinction between what he called intellect, which transcends the individual psyche but operates in it where there is rational apprehension, and what he called the cogitative faculty of the soul, which in modern terms is the seat of empirical subjectivity. The potential aspect of intellect, according to Averroes, subsists in time and accumulates forms as an indirect result of human activity, but is not part of the soul. Rather, it is something shared by all rational animals insofar as they are rational, and it would not persist if there were no living rational animals. (See translation by Richard Taylor.) In modern terms, the cogitative faculty is psychological. The potential aspect of intellect is not psychological but social and historical, resembling what I have called the transcendental field. The active aspect can be reconstructed as ideal in something close to a Kantian/Hegelian sense.

Aristotle himself has provocative, minimalist language about intellect coming to the psyche from without, and about active intellect somehow being identical with its objects. The idea of intellect being identical with its objects was revived by Hegel, with explicit reference to Aristotle. This could never be true of an empirical subjectivity.

Nonetheless — and this is the interesting part — we concrete embodied beings can participate in a transcendental unity of apperception that is bigger than we are in some some delicate virtual sense, like Spirit in Hegel. A suggestion provocatively attributed to Kant and Hegel is that paradoxically it is by virtue of this participation — which insofar as it is active dissociates or decenters us from our empirical selves — that we can say “I” at all. Then because we can say “I”, we can confuse “I” with our empirical selves. (See also Subject; Psyche, Subjectivity; Brandom and Kant; Rational/Talking Animal; Intelligence from Outside; Alienation, Second Nature; Empirical-Transcendental Doublet; Nonempirical But Historical?)

Empirical-Transcendental Doublet?

Foucault, near the end of The Order of Things, with brilliant prose attacked what he called the empirical-transcendental doublet in Kant, by which Foucault meant a putative subject that is supposed to be simultaneously empirical and transcendental.

Kant is often criticized for his apparent dualisms, and with some justification. Foucault’s criticism has an opposite form. It presupposes that Kant’s distinction between empirical subjectivity and the transcendental does not really hold. If it did, there would be no confusion between the two. Here is a case where Kant’s so-called dualism is really helpful.

There is a subtlety here, because there must still be some interaction among these things that need to be distinguished. The transcendental is independent of experience, without being otherworldly. It helps shape experience, without violating that independence.

I think empirical subjectivity is grounded in our emotions and emotional constitution, which also form the main basis of common-sense personal identity. Kantian transcendental subjectivity, on the other hand, is grounded in our ethos.

What Foucault’s criticism legitimately applies to is a bad Kantianism that re-establishes Cartesian-Lockean mentalism by imbuing empirical subjects with transcendental powers, and implicitly uses the transcendental as a foundational guarantee for some alleged properties of empirical subjectivity. Wherever there is undifferentiated talk about “the” subject, this sort of thing is likely to be at work. Kant himself is not guilty of this.

I want to say that the transcendental is intimate to us without being immanent in us. (See also Archaeology of Knowledge; Ethos, Hexis; Soul, Self; Apperception, Identity; Self-Consciousness vs Identity.)

The Autonomy of Reason

The Enlightenment has been widely described as an age of reason, but the moderate Enlightenment — at least until Kant — put many more limits on reason, especially in areas like religion and politics, than Plato and Aristotle did.

Kant made the autonomy of reason — its non-subordination to anything else — an explicit theme. Rhetorically, of course, he also famously talks about limits on reason, but really what he wants to limit are extra-rational accretions woven into Cartesian and Wolffian rationalisms — various received truths, and so on. Descartes had quickly moved from hyperbolic doubt to question-begging acceptance of many received truths as intuitively reasonable. Wolff and his followers, to whom Kant was primarily reacting, did not even pretend to doubt.

If reason is to be truly autonomous, it cannot start from received truths. Kant himself was sympathetic to some of these received truths, but too honest to pretend they were self-evident or derivable from reason alone. Kant is often misunderstood as mainly a critic of reason, and certainly not its unconditional defender, but he is actually clear that the autonomy of reason is unconditional. Too often, readers of Kant focus too much on autonomy of a subject rather than autonomy of reason, but the practical autonomy attributable to a so-called subject in Kant is actually derivative, based on the putative subject’s participation in the autonomy of reason. In Making It Explicit, Brandom says where Descartes had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant focused instead on their grip on us (p. 9). (See also Kant’s Groundwork.)

Hegel has been widely misunderstood as an example of the autonomy of reason gone mad. Brandom, Pippin, and Pinkard have performed an invaluable service in clarifying what Hegel was really trying to do, which was in part to sincerely take up Kant’s honesty about received truths and to push it even further.

Aristotle said that of all things, reason most deserves to be called divine. He does not use a word like autonomy, but the effect is the same. Nothing is higher. (See also Interpretation; Brandom on Truth.)

I think of the Kantian autonomy of reason as necessarily involving something like the free play of the Critique of Judgment. The Reason that is truly autonomous in the Kantian sense will be a hermeneutical Reason (see Brandom and Hermeneutics).

Heroism and Magnanimity

Robert Brandom is in my estimate the most important philosopher ever to write originally in English. His recently published lecture Heroism and Magnanimity recaps some of the argument of the monumental Spirit of Trust, which translates Hegel’s Phenomenology into analytic terms, partly via the development in his other monument, Making It Explicit.

Brandom is primarily a systematic thinker in his own right. He deliberately stands at arm’s length from historical texts, favoring high-level reconstructions in his own very illuminating idiom over fine-grained textual interpretation. To the limited extent that he engages in broader historical discussion, it is at an even much higher level of abstraction. Despite deep admiration for his systematic development and insights into particular figures, I find some of his historical schematizations to be problematic.

In the lecture, he presents a tripartite historical schema of a heroic age, a modern age, and Hegel’s own vision for the future, for which Brandom appropriates the term “postmodern”, thus giving that word a new meaning that inspired the “Postmodern” part of the title of this blog. To the extent that he develops this new concept of postmodernity — which has very little to do with fashionable “postmodernism” — in terms of Hegel’s vision for the future, I find it exemplary.

In tension with this, however, is his longstanding characterization of Hegel as a very strong advocate of the modernity embodied specifically by Descartes and the Enlightenment. This collapses the new distinction between Cartesian/Enlightenment modernity and Hegelian postmodernity. If we take into account the rich detail of actual history, it is impossible to periodize very meaningfully at this gross a level. But even if we do squint and cheat, what emerges from Hegel’s text is a different division.

While I have issues with Hegel’s treatment of Christianity, Hegel’s own broad summary of historical development in the Philosophy of History lectures suggest a different tripartite periodization, between the pre-Christian ancient world, historical Christianity, and his own vision for the future. In his explicit text, he actually seems more concerned to apologize or propagandize for Christianity as he reinterprets it than for his positive appropriation of Descartes and the Enlightenment. (That there is such a positive appropriation is clear, but Hegel positively appropriates every significant development of thought, even those he severely criticizes.) Hegel is dismissive of the middle ages and abhors Catholicism, but gives high praise to the Christianity of the gospels as a precursor to German idealism and his own vision. He retrospectively associates the decisive emergence of themes of subjectivity and freedom on a social scale all the way back to primitive Christianity, not to modernity as such.

Modernity did further develop these themes, and for Hegel as for Aristotle, results are of greater value than beginnings. But still, Hegel devotes a much more extensive apologetic to Christianity (and his own radical reinterpretation of it) than to Enlightenment modernity. His explicit discussions of Enlightenment in the Phenomenology mainly criticize what are presented as overly severe, uncharitable assessments of religion. (In the Encyclopedia Logic, he does make an important defense of the essential role of Understanding, which we can associate with Cartesian/Enlightenment styles of reasoning, as a moment in a larger process. But Understanding is standardly presented by Hegel as grossly deficient compared to what he calls Reason. According to Hegel, Plato and Aristotle reached the level of Reason, whereas the Enlightenment only reached the level of Understanding.)

I find Hegel’s treatment of Descartes in the History of Philosophy surprisingly charitable, given the profoundly non-Cartesian character of Hegel’s (and Kant’s) own thought. But it is Plato and Aristotle that Hegel says above all others deserve to be called educators of the human race.

I read Hegel as a highly original, genuinely Kantian recoverer of Aristotelian insights. I think both that Plato and Aristotle anticipate Kant more than is generally recognized, and that Kant has far more in common with Aristotle than Kant himself seems to have recognized. Aside from Hegel’s explicit praise for and recurring implicit use of the two, Aristotle and Kant are the two thinkers who get the longest treatment in the History of Philosophy.

Brandom characterizes the heroic or tragic age as one in which normative statuses were regarded as objective facts, and people were held responsible for objective outcomes, regardless of their intentions. This repeats Hegel’s own oversimplification, which is hard to reconcile with Hegel’s praise of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

Brandom contrasts this with the modern age, in which people are responsible only because they have already at least implicitly taken responsibility. But taking responsibility is a Kantian concept, and even one that was little recognized until recently. (Brandom himself has been a contributor to this recognition.) It was hardly characteristic of the Enlightenment in general.

There is a much better case for attitude-dependence of normative statuses (which Brandom also cites) as typical of the Enlightenment, but the typical Enlightenment version of this was ultimately subjectivist. All of Hegel’s criticisms of subjectivism ought to have full force here (and to be applied to typical Enlightenment modernity).

While there is arguably something heroic about accepting one’s fate, in contrast to both Hegel and Brandom’s usage I would rather save the word heroism for something exceptional. I would say a hero in the ancient sense can be understood in a contemporary sense as someone who genuinely takes responsibility for more than what is in her power, as when I stay behind and fight against hopeless odds to save my friends when I could have turned and run.

“Magnanimity” is a word Brandom uses for an attitude of confession, forgiveness, and interpretive charity (a spirit of trust) that he associates with Hegel’s vision for the future. This is different in emphasis from the magnanimity discussed by Aristotle, but in line with Hegel’s positive treatment of Christian themes.

Magnanimity (literally “great-souledness”) in Aristotle is almost proto-Nietzschean rather than Christian (but scholarship has shown that Nietzsche was a good deal kinder and gentler than the crude stereotype). Aristotle’s great-souled man is proud and assertive, but his pride is entirely well-founded and never false. This is the kind of pride that leads to a generosity of spirit that is the opposite of arrogance. (I find it appalling and totally unhistorical that some people act as if generosity of spirit had never been recognized as a value before Christianity. Even less is there a special connection between generosity of spirit and the Enlightenment.)

Despite my reservations about the historical schema, I think the ethical message in Brandom’s work is deeply important. He is among the foremost exponents of recently developed concepts of normativity and its genesis in mutual recognition. His general reading of Kant and Hegel and his creative use of analytic philosophy to understand them have been groundbreaking. My friendly amendment is to find better historical antecedents for the new understanding of normativity in Plato and Aristotle than in the Enlightenment.

I see that in the introduction to the published version of Spirit of Trust, Brandom says “The transformation began with the ancient Greeks and proceeded at an accelerating pace.” This does give at least a nod to the point I am trying to make, but I still have an issue with the part about an accelerating pace.

I think that when we are recollectively reconstructing a historical teleological story, while it is expected that we will exercise some poetic license and will ignore many details we think are less significant, we should still try to do justice to the real nonlinear ebb and flow of things, and not just come out with a Whiggish monotonic ascent of man. While there is real progressive development, there is also real regress. Hegel thought that in various ways, Roman culture was a step back from Greek culture, and he thought the middle ages were an even bigger step back. (I actually think Hegel did not do justice to the middle ages, but he did not have access to many texts available today.)

In general, a new form of Geist will be more adequate in some ways than its predecessor, but may be less so in others. It is not guaranteed that the improvements will outweigh a decline in other respects every time. I think Hegel’s contention was that for the known data, each decline has eventually been or will be made up, so there is or will be an overall positive accumulation in spite of inevitable local declines. (See also The Ancients and the Moderns; Hegel on the Ancients; Enlightenment; Modernity Clarified; Alienation, Modernity; Modernity, Again.)

Blame and Blamelessness

Ethics for Aristotle is primarily concerned with ethos (dispositions to act in particular ways, associated with character and culture), and only secondarily with particular actions. Particular actions are mainly addressed in a higher-order way, through discussions of practical judgment and responsibility. We should try raise people to have good character, and we should generally trust people with good character to do the right thing.

For Aristotle, perfection is always perfection according to a kind, and perfection according to a kind is understood in such a way as to be actually achievable. The Greeks in general had a concept of blamelessness that was considered to be achievable. The world could do with a lot less blame; we should learn from this.

I would say you are blameless if you have done all that is within your power (and you are a hero if you in a meaningful way actually take responsibility for things that are beyond your power). If you really act from a disposition to recognize others as independent of yourself and your wishes — as one would a friend — and are reasonably attentive to circumstances, then you cannot reasonably be faulted for your actions, and your conduct will be blameless. If one has been well socialized, being blameless is not really all that hard.

A blameless person can be wrong, and can even do things for which apology is appropriate (because of an actual bad effect, not any blameworthiness). But if you consistently recognize others as independent of your wishes and take reasonable care that your words and deeds are appropriate to the situation, then you are blameless.

I think the practical import of this stands even on the basis of Brandom’s innovations (see Rethinking Responsibility; Expansive Agency; Brandomian Forgiveness). Adding back in a responsibility for unintended consequences that is shared with many others and whose failures are forgiven should not negate what I am calling blamelessness.

I also think that blaming in general serves no constructive practical purpose. To blame someone is basically to say they deserve punishment. Punishments resemble vengeance; they may be deemed justified in some circumstances, but we should not fool ourselves that they are constructive. Punishment per se does not improve anyone’s ethos. Either someone really gets the message that they did something wrong — in which case there is no need for punishment — or they don’t, in which case it is unlikely that punishment will change that. I don’t pretend to have a general solution for crime in society or for misbehavior of children, but I distrust the impulse to punish. Fear of punishment sometimes prevents bad behavior, and sometimes behavior is what counts, but fear has nothing to do with moral improvement.

Free Will and Determinism

Free will and determinism both represent overly strong claims when applied in an unqualified way. I’ve already written a bit about the evils of voluntarism.

Aristotle’s “cause” or aitia can be any kind of reason why something is the way it is, and a way that something is typically has multiple reasons of different kinds. The modern notion of cause, by contrast, is intended to provide a single, complete explanation of why an event does or does not occur. The modern notion, unlike the Aristotelian one, is univocal. (See also Equivocal Determination.)

In the reception of Aristotle, historically too much attention was paid to the identity of the underlying “something”, as contrasted to the way something is, emphasized by Aristotle himself — to the point where the standard Latin translation for ousia (Aristotle’s main word for a way of being) came to be substantia or “substance” (something standing under). By contrast, the central books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics start from the notion of something persisting through a change and ask what that is, but in addressing that question eventually reverse the order of explanation, and argue that what can best be said to be underlying just is a way that something is actively what it is. An ousia may be expressed in speech as a simple noun, but this is only a kind of shorthand that can always be unpacked into something like an adverbial expression.

In general, Aristotle suggests that we should value ends more than origins. How something turns out is much more important than where it came from.

Already in Neoplatonism, there was a decidedly non-Aristotelian turn toward putting higher value on origins than results, based on the idea that the One was the origin of everything, and nobler than everything. For monotheistic theologians, it was obvious that God as origin was superior to creation.

Aristotle ends up suggesting that what he calls efficient causes — the direct means by which change is triggered or effectuated, which would include mechanical cases like the classic bumping billiard balls — are not what is most fundamental in making things the way they are. By contrast, the Latin medievals made the efficient cause the root of all others, also applying it to God’s activity of creation from nothing.

Common early modern notions of causality started from this medieval reversal of Aristotle, assuming that efficient causes of the billiard-ball variety came first in the order of explanation. This was related to a widespread anti-Aristotelian privileging of immediacy. Kant and Hegel later developed strong critiques of the privileging of immediacy, but this aspect of their thought was not adequately understood and highlighted until recently. A reduction of all causes to allegedly immediate causes is an error common to both voluntarism and determinism.

Descartes developed a bottom-up explanatory model, starting from simple mechanical causes. This was good for science at a certain stage of development, but bad for philosophy. I would not wish to say that bottom-up explanations have no use (in delimited contexts, they most certainly do). I mean only that it is a delusion to think that nothing else is required, or that they can provide an absolute starting point.

In ethics, Aristotle’s notion of character is a nice relief from the seesaw of free will and determinism. Character is an acquired disposition to act in certain ways. The character of an individual resembles the culture of a community, and the same word (ethos) is used for both. We acquire it gradually over time, from an accumulation of our actions and things that have happened to us. Due to the contributing role of our actions in successive layers of character formation, we are in a broad way accountable for our disposition. On the other hand, it makes little sense to blame someone for acting in accordance with their disposition.