Regard for Objects

People and other sentient beings certainly deserve our consideration, but I want to go all the way and claim that all objects whatsoever deserve some measure of respect.

In Brandom’s terms, this would be a bad, traditionalist direction, because it seems to attribute to things a kind of normative status that is intrinsic, rather than being derived from a taking, judgment, or attitude. But I am more committed to the proposition that the normative status or goodness of things depends upon explainable reasons, than to the proposition that it only has meaning as following from how they are for someone. It seems to me that the Kantian arguments about the fundamental role of our taking things to be thus-and-such stress the answerability of such takings to ethical reason, more than any mere Cartesian-style unimpeachable fact of their seeming so to someone.

There can be no normativity without normative judgment. But equally, there can be no proper normative judgment without reasons. And the question may remain open whose judgment it is. (See Consciousness and Identity; Grammatical Prejudice?.)

All Kantian scruples about existence claims notwithstanding, I don’t see anything necessarily dogmatic in saying that something has inherent value. This kind of open, nonexclusive affirmation is worlds apart from, for example, a claim that some individual human or group of humans is inherently superior to others. If we judge that we soundly judge something to have value, why not then allow ourselves to say it “has” value? Isn’t that a good enough meaning for the word? (See also Respect for All Beings.)

Brandom on Reason and Authority

Brandom respectfully takes issue with his teacher Richard Rorty’s claim that all talk about an ultimate objective reality — or objective truth — should be rejected as authoritarian. He uses Hegel to answer Rorty.

“Authoritarianism is an attitude toward the relation between normative statuses and critical practices of giving and asking for reasons. It consists in practically or theoretically taking it that there can be genuine authority without a corresponding critical responsibility to give reasons entitling one to that authority” (Robert Brandom, Pragmatism and Idealism: Rorty and Hegel on Reason and Representation, p. 63, emphasis in original).

“Rorty takes it that Kant was right to draw from his distillation of the insights of the Enlightenment the lesson that genuine norms essentially involve liability to rational criticism, to demands for reasons justifying and legitimating claims to authority…. Seeing norms as instituted (solely) by power relations… (‘might makes right’) is authoritarianism” (p. 64).

As I have pointed out, Plato and Leibniz anticipated Kant and Hegel in explicitly rejecting this kind of authoritarianism. Gwenaëlle Aubry has extensively documented the lengths to which Aristotle went to avoid grounding normativity in power.

Brandom notes that Rorty goes on to argue that “The idea that inanimate objects and objective states of affairs can exercise representational authority over the beliefs of those who can engage in critical rational challenges and defenses is a remnant of fetishistic authoritarianism” (p. 65).

Brandom rejects this last claim, as do I (see Things in Themselves; Essence and Explanation).

He says, “I argue for two claims. The first is that the considerations and commitments that shape the final, anti-authoritarian argument of Rorty’s… are among the central concerns Hegel addresses in his Phenomenology. The second is that Hegel there assembles and deploys conceptual resources that suffice to disarm Rorty’s anti-authoritarian arguments against the legitimacy and ultimate intelligibility of the concept of representation” (pp. 65-66).

“I think Rorty accepts the first point, and that is largely why he saw Hegel (at least, in a Deweyan, suitably naturalized form) as representing a way forward for philosophy…. But I do not think he was ever in a position to appreciate the second point (p. 66).

“Hegel takes over from Kant the insight that what distinguishes us sapient, discursive beings from the merely natural ones is the normative character of the space in which we live, and move, and have our being. Geist [spirit or ethical culture], Hegel’s focal concept — what the [Phenomenology] is a phenomenology of — is the whole comprising all of our implicitly norm-governed performances, practices, and institutions, the explicit theoretical expressions of them that constitute our normative self-consciousness, and everything that those normative practices and institutions make possible” (pp. 67-68).

“We are what things can be something for, which is to say that we are conscious beings. Hegel understands the origins of this capacity to lie in our nature as organic, desiring beings…. For something is food for the hungry animal who eats it, but is actually food… only if it in fact satisfies hunger. Hegel takes this possibility of practically experiencing error… to be the organic origin of consciousness” (p. 68-69; see also For Itself).

“We are, further, essentially self-conscious beings. That is, what we are for ourselves is an essential component of what we are in ourselves” (p. 69; see also Consciousness and Identity).

The qualifier “essential component of” is extremely important. To simply equate what we are in ourselves with what we are for ourselves would be subjectivism.

“As I am characterizing Hegel’s thought, his idea is that social pragmatism about norms is the master idea of modernity, and the Enlightenment is the explicit theoretical consciousness of this change of practical attitude. Rorty, Dewey, and Hegel are at one on this point, different as their expressions of it might seem” (pp. 72-73).

Brandom connects Hegel’s ethical ideas about mutual recognition with John Dewey’s characteristic concern for democratic values, as discussed by Rorty. The mere phrase “social pragmatism” sounds a bit shallow, but at this point Brandom has already given his own capsule history of pragmatism and described Dewey’s social and political concerns, so he is using it as a sort of extreme shorthand.

“My overall contention here is that because Rorty’s grasp of the social and historical articulation of normativity that Hegel discovers remains at a highly abstract and programmatic level, he does not understand how the more detailed structure Hegel discerns provides the resources to respond to Rorty’s anti-authoritarian critique of the ultimate intelligibility of representational norms. The rational criticizability of normative statuses can be seen to be built into them when we appreciate the social and historical fine structure of the process by which they are instituted by normative attitudes” (p. 73, emphasis added).

Brandom in effect argues that mutual recognition in Hegel is not only ethical, but that it also conditions knowledge and first philosophy.

Authority, Representation, Pragmatism

The controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty was a mentor and colleague of Robert Brandom. In the essay I will treat here, he presents himself as especially identifying with the pragmatism of John Dewey.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty’s 1967 edited collection The Linguistic Turn “did much to cement the idea of a linguistic turn… as a sea change in the history of philosophy”. He came to sharply criticize analytic philosophy as then practiced, as well as the prevailing self-perception of modern science, but did so from a modernist point of view.

Rorty is best known for his radical critique of modern representationalism — from Descartes to analytic philosophy — in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Like Brandom’s more constructive development of an “inferentialist” alternative approach to meaning in Making It Explicit (1994), that book takes as its point of departure Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the Myth of the Given in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, and W. V. O. Quine’s essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”.

Here, however, I will focus on Rorty’s very informal 1999 essay “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism”. For an initial sketch of my own views relevant to this, see Authority. This is all in preparation for upcoming coverage of recent lectures by Brandom that shed new light on Brandom’s extremely important work, by explicitly relating it to Rorty’s.

Rorty begins, “There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’ criticism of the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality and the Enlightenment’s criticism of the idea that morality is a matter of correspondence to the will of a Divine Being. The pragmatists’ anti-representationalist account of belief is, among other things, a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. Seeing anti-representationalism is a version of anti-authoritarianism permits one to appreciate an analogy which was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to accept the distinction between Reality and Appearance” (p. 7).

The parallelism he points out between two kinds of correspondence does seem significant. This is actually the main contribution of Rorty’s essay. However, the essay’s main body consists of Rorty’s historical storytelling about pragmatism, with a digression on Freud’s critique of religion.

The formulation about ceasing to accept the distinction between appearance and reality is too blunt. Their relation is very far from being a simple binary opposition, but they cannot simply be identical either. Explanation, understanding, and intelligibility depend on making distinctions of degrees of reality within appearance. This is part of what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

Epistemological foundationalism — typically associated with a correspondence theory of truth — is the claim that there is such a thing as noninferential knowledge. I say that whatever is claimed to be noninferential knowledge is not knowledge at all in the proper sense, but rather what Plato called opinion (doxa). And again, knowledge in Aristotle’s sense is an ability to explain itself. Explanation appeals to inference, not to a supposed registering of brute facts. Foundationalism is dogmatic in Kant’s sense. It puts ultimate principles beyond any possibility of explanation or understanding. This also makes it arbitrary.

Representationalist theories of knowledge are implicitly foundationalist, and commonly have recourse to a correspondence theory of truth. Pragmatism, meanwhile, is largely defined by its opposition to the correspondence theory. Pragmatists also tend to downplay the distinction between ontology and epistemology. It does seem that the correspondence theory of truth implies something like Rorty’s Reality with a capital R, that is what it is entirely independent of the knower. This ignores the essential role of interpretation and relating things together in understanding.

What Brandom calls the authority-obedience model of normativity is presented by Rorty, not unreasonably, as an insistence on simple correspondence or conformity to the presumed will of God. Simple obedience and simple correspondence have equally little use for reasons or reasoning. For them, everything is supposed to be a matter of sheer fact, with no thought required in its uptake. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic preceded the pragmatists in showing that purported facts alone (mere being or objects of immediate consciousness, in Hegel’s terms) do not provide an adequate basis for either understanding or ethical action.

Some of Rorty’s claims about Dewey have been disputed. Not knowing Dewey very well, I am unsure how close the part about ceasing to believe in Sin is to Dewey’s own ways of expressing himself. Rorty doesn’t say much here about what he means by the belief in Sin that he rejects, but I think his idea is that it stresses mere obedience over actual ethical goodness.

I would say that the kind of view that unequivocally puts divine will or command first, above any consideration of the good, is far from accurately typifying all religion. Such radical voluntarism or commandism is indeed horrible in its consequences, but it is certainly not good Thomism, to mention but one example.

Much more common than radical voluntarism are views that equivocate in this area. Rorty seems to lump those who equivocate together with the unequivocal voluntarists. But Leibniz sought to convince equivocating mainstream theologians to actively side with him against radical voluntarism. I like this more optimistic point of view.

Pragmatists are generally recognized as having their own distinctive theories of truth — in one way or another emphasizing the roles it plays in human practices — in competition with the correspondence theory, which is closely tied to representationalism. The correspondence theory of truth, while formally distinct from any particular variety of philosophical realism, at the same time seems to suggest a kind of naive realism that is difficult to separate from the dogmatism that was criticized by Kant. I put Aristotle closer to the pragmatists here than to medieval or modern realists or representationalists.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved. As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans” (ibid).

Democracy and consensus were strong themes of Dewey’s. But even to my shallow acquaintance, the picture Rorty paints of Dewey’s views of religion is a bit one-sided. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey seems to aim to heal the rift between science and religion. He says in effect that the dogmatically religious and the dogmatically anti-religious both identify religion with belief in the supernatural. Dewey rejects that identification, as Hegel does. As a pragmatist, he is more concerned with what people actually do in their lives.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was quite willing to say of a vicious act that it was sinful, and of ‘2+2=5’ or ‘Elizabeth the First’s reign ended in 1623’ that these sentences were absolutely, unconditionally, eternally, false. But he was unwilling to gloss ‘sinful’ or ‘falsehood’ in authoritarian terms. He did not want to say that a power not ourselves had forbidden cruelty, nor that these false sentences fail to accurately represent the way Reality is in itself. He thought it much clearer that we should not be cruel than that there was a God who had forbidden us to be cruel, and much clearer that Elizabeth I died in 1603 than that there is any way things are ‘in themselves’. He viewed the theory that truth is correspondence to Reality, and the theory that moral goodness is correspondence to the Divine Will, as equally dispensable.”

“For Dewey, both theories add nothing to our ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling right from wrong, and truth from falsity. But their pointlessness is not the real problem. What Dewey most disliked about both traditional ‘realist’ epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something Inscrutable, something toward which we have duties, duties which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid pain and obtain pleasure” (pp. 8-9).

These two paragraphs seem pretty solid. He then gives a capsule history of pragmatism, seemingly intended as a sort of advertisement. In another part, he says one of the things he likes about Dewey is Dewey’s historical storytelling. Here Rorty practices such storytelling himself.

“Peirce kicked pragmatism off by starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action. Starting from this definition, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. This means getting rid of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes — and especially of the idea of intuitive self-knowledge, knowledge unmediated by signs” (p. 10).

Hegel was Pierce’s great predecessor in the critique of representation. This has not been adequately appreciated. And Dewey’s views on democracy in part reflect a continued serious engagement with broadly Hegelian themes.

“Peirce was anti-foundationalist, coherentist, and holist in his view of the nature of inquiry. But he did not, as most of Hegel’s anglophone followers did, think of God as an all-inclusive, atemporal experience which is identical with Reality. Rather, as a good Darwinian, Peirce thought of the universe as evolving. His God was a finite deity who is somehow identical with an evolutionary process” (ibid).

James and Dewey “focused on the profound anti-Cartesian implications of Peirce’s development of Bain’s initial anti-representationalist insight. They developed a non-representationalist theory of belief acquisition and testing” (ibid).

“Peirce thought of himself as a disciple of Kant, improving on Kant’s doctrine of categories and his conception of logic. A practicing mathematician and laboratory scientist, he was more interested in these areas of culture than were James or Dewey. James took neither Kant nor Hegel very seriously, but was far more interested in religion than either Peirce or Dewey. Dewey, deeply influenced by Hegel, was fiercely anti-Kantian. Education and politics, rather than science or religion, were at the center of his thought” (p. 11).

“James hoped to construct an alternative to the anti-religious, science worshipping, positivism of his day” (ibid).

“Dewey, in his early period, tried to bring Hegel together with evangelical Christianity” (ibid).

“The anti-positivist strain in classical pragmatism was at least as strong as its anti-metaphysical strain” (ibid).

“All of Dewey’s books are permeated by the typically nineteenth-century conviction that human history is the story of expanding human freedom” (p. 12).

“I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’ case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their Utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their ‘fit’ with the objects being described” (p. 14).

This idea of a plurality of noncompeting descriptions serving different purposes is no less important for being elementary. But for foundationalists and fundamentalists, everything has to reduce to black and white, and claims to truth are exclusive.

“If James’ watchword was tolerance, then Dewey’s was, as I have said, anti-authoritarianism. His revulsion from the sense of sinfulness which his religious upbringing had produced led Dewey to campaign, throughout his life, against the view that human beings needed to measure themselves against something non-human. Dewey used the term ‘democracy’ to mean something like what Habermas means by the term ‘communicative reason’: for him, the word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non human. This is why he grabbed hold of James’ pragmatic theory of truth” (ibid).

The connection he makes between Dewey and Habermas seems sound to me.

There is a multi-page digression on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I will skip. According to Rorty, Freud would have “seen worship of the bare Idea of Father as the origin of the conviction that it is knowledge, rather than love, which is the most distinctively human” (p. 18).

Here I must beg to differ. I see no polar opposition between knowledge and love. The twin pinnacles of Aristotle’s ethics are intellectual virtue, and friendship or love. Hegel stresses both as well. A principled rejection of epistemological foundationalism does not entail the rejection of knowledge — quite the contrary.

“This conviction of the importance of knowledge runs through the history of what Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’…. The quest for such a reassuring presence is, for all those who resonate to Aristotle’s claim that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, the proper way of life for the good child. To devote oneself to getting knowledge as opposed to opinion — to grasping unchanging structure as opposed to awareness of mutable and colorful content — one has to believe that one will be cleansed, purified of guilt and shame, by getting closer to something like Truth or Reality” (ibid).

The sharp Platonic opposition between knowledge and opinion is something I want to defend. I would completely dissociate it from bad or harmful concepts of authority and representation (still leaving aside the relation between these two). I would sooner associate bad or harmful concepts of authority with opinion that is claimed to take precedence over actual knowledge.

The story about Aristotle and presence is Heidegger’s, not Aristotle’s. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence really has nothing to do with Aristotle (his immediate target was actually Husserl). I agree that the metaphysics of presence — a variant of the privileging of immediacy that Hegel opposes — is a terrible idea. At least from the time of Plotinus and perhaps from that of the Stoics, the Western tradition has been affected by it. But to claim that the whole history of philosophy has been hegemonically dominated by it is a gross oversimplification.

Strangely, Rorty finishes, “[Dewey’s] anti-authoritarianism was a stage in the gradual replacement of a morality of obligation by a morality of love. This is the replacement which, in the West, is thought to have been initiated by certain passages in the New Testament” (p. 20).

I would say that the moment Socrates initiated the free ethical inquiry that was taken up and developed by Plato and Aristotle, the authority-obedience model no longer universally held sway. Plato and Aristotle are less beholden to it than the leading lights of the moderate Enlightenment. Even among the Latin scholastics, there was plenty of genuine inquiry.

Rorty never gets any further in explaining the relation between representationalism and authoritarianism that he began with. It seems this is just a provocative metaphor, with a conciliatory gesture at the end. But my real interest is in Brandom’s very different presentation, when he relates and contrasts his own work and Rorty’s.

The globally negative reference to obligation may also reflect Rorty’s very negative view of Kant.

In a footnote, Rorty claims with winking anachronism that “eventually [Dewey’s] bete noir became the doctrine which [later writer Thomas] Nagel makes explicit: that something less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions which shape a human being’s moral identity is necessary if morality is not to be an illusion” (p. 16n).

This goes way beyond the scope of the rest of the essay. I have little appreciation for arguments that claim something else is necessary for morality to be possible, so I was hoping to find common ground. But now Rorty is objecting to anything “less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions”. To me, this sounds more like the positivism that the historic pragmatists opposed.

The pragmatist tradition in general has an ambiguous relation to mainstream varieties of empiricism. Here Rorty sounds like an empiricist.

Earlier in his career, he was known as a defender of eliminative materialism, the view that mental states simply do not exist. Coming from this kind of direction, he would scarcely have needed metaphorical talk about authoritarianism to arrive at a repudiation of representationalism.

I’m very critical of the notion of mental states myself. But I don’t see this as a black-and-white question of whether or not something exists. It is rather a question of how we interpret things. Posing the question in terms of existence implies that there is nothing to interpret, that we already know what all the things in life are. This is an example of the attitude that Kant called dogmatic.

Authority

“Authority” is not one thing. Aristotle might remind us that it is said in many ways. Two of the most important have nearly opposite senses. One asserts an arbitrary power over others, or an entitlement to coerce others: “Do what you are told”. Why? “Because I said so”. The other is a kind of earned respect that is virtually identical with justification.

An important case is what is called argument from authority. There are practical situations in which very rapid response is required, and there is literally no time for debate. We don’t hesitate to simply grab a child who is in danger from an oncoming car, and we don’t consider this a violation of Kantian respect for others. We also tend to trust the judgment of those we judge to have good judgment. But in any situation in which what is good or what is true is disputed, argument from authority is basically cheating.

“Because I said so” or “because someone in authority said so” is logically circular, and a circular argument does not establish anything. A particularly insidious version of this is appeals to the will of God, as if all by itself this were a criterion of what is right.

What these conceal is the speaker’s unboundedly prideful implicit claim to personally know the will of God beyond any doubt, regardless of anyone else’s contrary view of what the will of God is.

Plato in his dialogue Euthyphro portrays Socrates as asking whether we should say that a thing is holy because the gods love it, or on the contrary that the gods love a thing because it is holy. ”Because the gods love it” or “because it is God’s will” is logically equivalent to “because I said so”, because the speaker simply assumes it is beyond doubt that the speaker’s view is God’s view.

Building on Plato, Leibniz asks whether a thing is good and just because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is good and just, and answers that it must be the latter, because to assert the former would make of God a tyrant rather than a being good and just. If on the other hand God is good and just, and therefore wills whatever is actually good and just in each situation, then we are responsible for understanding what is good and just in each case.

Claimed entitlements to coerce others should require substantial justification. We might be tempted to say that no one should ever coerce anyone else, but there are sociopaths and Nazis who do not respect others at all. The problem is that once an authority to coerce is instituted, it takes on a life of its own, and is prone to abuse. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But occasionally, coercion is the only way to avoid a greater evil. There are no easy answers here.

Subject of Passion

Here I will very briefly treat Alain de Libera’s Le sujet de la passion (2021), which consists of his 2016 lectures at the College de France. The modern notion of a subject-agent, he has previously argued at length, has its origins not in Descartes but in Latin scholasticism. Here in part he takes the argument back further, to the Greek fathers of the Christian church and their speculations about the nature of Christ. He takes up the theme of a “decolonization” of the Middle Ages and of theology, which have been stigmatized since early modernity. As usual, he covers a vast territory that I will only sample.

He begins on a humorous note. “Sociopaths don’t yawn, we say. Or better, they do not know yawning by contagion. They do not suffer when they see someone else suffer. They do not know pity. Generally, they haven’t read Aristotle” (p. 12, my translation throughout). He recalls Aristotle’s numerous statements that action and passion reside in the patient, not the agent.

He goes on to note how the 17th century writer Le Laboureur argued that French is superior to Latin, because its word order more explicitly refers every action to a subject. Le Laboureur claimed that “Cicero and all the Romans thought in French before they spoke in Latin” (p. 20). Bemusedly, de Libera points out that in the 20th century, Martin Heidegger claimed that French writers must do their thinking in German, because German is the naturally philosophical language.

“While the notion of subject-agent can appear as contradictory — it only has historical purchase once what I call the ‘chiasm of agency’, that is to say, the devolution of the functions and conditions of agency to the ‘subject’, has been realized –, the notion of subject-patient poses no problem: it is the sense that the word ‘subject’ originally had, otherwise said before the chiasm, the hypokeimenon–subjectum, which, we have seen many times, in Augustine as in Aristotle, designates a support or a substrate, … in short a bearer, a receptor of qualities or accidental properties.”

“This poses the problem of WHICH is the subject who suffers, then WHO is the subject who suffers, the passage from the WHICH to the WHO” (pp. 57-58).

“Is there a single subject of thought, of perception, and of emotions? Or: Who says ‘I’ in ‘I think’, ‘I perceive’, ‘I feel’?” (p. 59).

“Can we say ‘it suffers in me’, like we say, with Schelling, it thinks in me?… We can perhaps admit that I am not the subject of my thoughts or that there is in me a subject of my thoughts that is not a part of me, but indeed only something in me, aliquid in anima rather than aliquid animae — for example, the nous, the intellect called ‘possible’ or ‘patient’ in medieval philosophy — but can this hold good for suffering, can it hold good for passion, can it hold good for what we today call emotion? We can doubt this…. Passion implies the body, suffering implies the body, we say. Thought does not imply it” (pp. 59-60).

“I respond: for a dualist [such as Descartes], thought does not imply the body. But not everyone is a dualist. For an Aristotelian, for example, especially an Averroist, intellect has need of the body, because it has need of a furnisher of images. It has need of the body and its images not as a subject, but as an object. Cannot the same argument be made for passion, for suffering, for pain?” (p. 60).

“[I]s it not evident that if there is a subject of my passion, it can only be a subject-patient, and that the last can only be me, whatever thing or entity the term ‘me’ designates: body, or soul, or soul united with a body…?” (ibid).

Emphasizing how christological debates among theologians have affected common views of the human, he recalls the aim of what he previously called a deconstruction of the Heideggerian deconstruction of subjectivity, which among other things ignores this aspect.

“The articulation between Passion — upper case — and passion — lower case is the central element of the archaeology of the subject of passion” (p. 66).

“The central element is the introduction of hypostatic union into anthropology, otherwise said, the intervention of the subject — of the hypostasis — in the relation soul-body, and indeed in the relation spirit-soul-body… which makes possible the emergence of the person as subject where not only actions, but also passions are susceptible to imputation” (p. 493).

Beginning of this series: Archaeology of the Subject

Imagination and Reflection

I find myself advocating a quasi-dualist account of subjectivity grounded in imagination and reflection, on top of a non-dualist first philosophy that puts questions of value and meaning before questions of logistics.

Imagination lies at the basis of all first-order awareness. Closely tied at an organic level to sense perception and emotion, it immediatizes things into the form of apparently self-contained, presentable objects. Immediatization is a complex process of synthesis of awareness or “consciousness” that in a human combines what common sense would call impressions of external things with previous results of reflection. This initial synthesis of awareness or consciousness occurs outside of awareness or consciousness.

Once the immediatization by imagination has done its work, we are left with the appearance of a simple transparency of consciousness in which objects are presented. “Appearance” and “consciousness” are correlated terms — all consciousness is consciousness of appearance, and all appearance involves consciousness. Everything in consciousness is an appearance. Some appearances are well-founded, others are not.

It is reflection that works on appearance to distinguish whether or not it is well-founded, and that grounds any well-foundedness of the appearance. Reflection may also consider what is better in a given context. It is the basis of both practical and theoretical wisdom. There is no reflection without the involvement of consciousness at some point, but consciousness does not necessarily involve reflection. Reflection is an open-ended discursive relation, in which the identities of things are not necessarily taken for granted.

One of Kant’s important conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason is that the figurative synthesis of imagination involves the same fundamental forms of judgment as conscious reasoning. Hypothetical (if-then) and disjunctive (distinction-making) judgments are what give meaning to both, and this is why reason can be applicable to experience: for us talking animals, all experience already involves judgment at a preconscious level. Reflection then involves a questioning and refinement (up to possible overturning) of our preconscious judgments that apply patterns of past judgment to new experience.

Consciousness and Identity

Previously, I raised a doubt about Robert Pippin’s statement to the effect that “I know I am the one acting because I am the one acting”. For this line of argument, he cites Sebastian Rödl’s work. Pippin also says, drawing on Rödl, that “judgment is the consciousness of judging” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 105).

In the first case, my doubt had to do with what counts as knowledge. I tend to adhere to Plato’s sharp distinction between knowledge on the one hand, and belief or opinion on the other. In the second case, I draw a sharp line between Hegelian consciousness and self-consciousness, or between Kantian empirical and transcendental subjectivity (see numerous posts under Subjectivity). It is my contention that when they are being more careful, both Kant and Hegel too emphasize such a distinction. But they both also make more casual remarks that blur the distinction.

Judgment in the Kantian and Hegelian sense, I want to say, belongs to reflection and to what Hegel calls self-consciousness, which is not a kind of plain simple “consciousness” that just happens to take for its object a substantial “self”, but something else altogether. The plain simple consciousness that we share at least with all animals has an organic basis related to perception and emotion, but no one is born with self-consciousness. Self-consciousness belongs to what the scholastics used to call second nature. In modern terms, it is in part a cultural acquisition, and in part something that we give birth to ourselves, or, as Hegel might prefer to say, that is able to give birth to itself in us, once we have the necessary acculturation.

Ordinary consciousness includes what has traditionally been called inner sense. This involves immediately having images of one’s (empirical) self, or of aspects of it, analogous to the way that we experience external sensation. This is a kind of imagination, not a kind of reflexivity.

Thought and judgment on the other hand are inherently reflexive, and self-conscious in the sense of reflexivity, but — I want to say, and I think this is implicit in Aristotle and Hegel — the reflexivity of thought and judgment belongs directly to each specific thought and judgment itself, rather than to a separate substantial “self” that “has” them. In the main example that Pippin gives, the reflexivity of a judgment consists in all the reasons for it, which refer to it.

At one point in this discussion, Pippin says that “Finally, there is little doubt that Hegel realized that apperception was not a kind of consciousness” (p. 107). He quotes Hegel saying that the “original deed” corresponding to a Kantian unity of apperception is “liberated from the opposition of consciousness, is closer to what may be taken simply as thinking as such. But this deed should no longer be called consciousness; for consciousness holds within itself the opposition of the ‘I’ and its intended object which is not to be found in that original deed. The name ‘consciousness’ gives it more of a semblance of subjectivity than does the term ‘thought’, which here, however, is to be taken in the absolute sense of infinite thought, not encumbered by the finitude of consciousness” (pp. 107-108).

This is what I have been saying, and I do not see how it can be reconciled with the claim that judgment is identical to a consciousness of judgment, if judgment is inherently apperceptive. Apperception is something higher than mere consciousness. Apperception and judgment are inherently discursive; mere consciousness is not.

Which comes first, reasons we live by and things we care about, or a substantial self? I say it is what we live by and care about. Put another way, it is discursivity and not consciousness that involves reflexivity. (And even our basic sentience need not be attributed to a substantial self. See Droplets of Sentience?.)

What is true is that judgment does presuppose that misleadingly designated “self-consciousness” which is not a kind of consciousness and does not involve a substantial self. Consciousness of judgment would be judgment’s presentation in imagination. It may well be true that there is no judgment without its also being presented in imagination, but a reflexive, apperceptive, discursive judgment and its immediate presentation as an image in animal imagination are by no means the same thing.

Passivity Revisited

One point on which I sharply differ from Pippin is his claim that Aristotelian intellect is purely passive. I think I have sufficiently documented that this is not historically accurate. But the context of Pippin’s claim is Kant’s great elaboration of the active side of judging and thinking. And undoubtedly, Kant was arguing against a received view. So whose view was it?

I think the answer has to be Leibniz, his popularizer Christian Wolff, and the Wolffians like Mendelsohn and Baumgarten who dominated philosophy in German universities in Kant’s time. An examination of Kant’s work shows that most of the received views Kant argues against are Wolffian views.

Basic to Leibniz’s and the Wolffians’ point of view is a very categorical preformationism. One of Leibniz’s best known theses asserts a pre-established harmony that not only aims to explain the relationship of mind and body, but encompasses all things whatsoever. According to Leibniz, God creates nothing less than an entire, coherent world, every detail of which is providentially anticipated in advance. Once there is a world, God never “intervenes” in it, because all the work of providence was done in creation. (Providence in the Greek (pronoia) is literally forethought.) God’s creative act consists in the selection of the best of all possible worlds. I personally regard the pre-established harmony as a kind of Platonic myth or “as if” — a speculative hypothesis that makes a kind of poetic sense, but is nonetheless very extravagant.

Consistent with his assertion of pre-established harmony, Leibniz denies that there is real causal interaction between things in the world. Instead, each being carries within it a microcosm of the whole, and is causally affected only by God.

One of Kant’s earliest publications was a defense of real causal interaction against Leibniz. Whether or not Kant thought about it at the time, he was effectively defending an Aristotelian view of the reality of secondary causes. Against this wider background, Kant’s later insistence on the active character of thought can be seen as taking the perspective that we too rank among the real secondary causes.

If the harmony of all things were pre-established, there would be no active work for intellect to do. It would just need to assimilate itself to the pre-established harmony. Intellect would thus be a passive recognition of pre-existing structures. Thus the Leibnizian-Wolffian world view intrinsically promotes the passivity of intellect that Kant opposes.

Reflection and Apperception

According to Robert Pippin, the most important feature of Kant’s theory of thinking, account-giving, and judging is that “judging is apperceptive” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 103). “Apperception” is a term coined by Leibniz. The “ap-” prefix etymologically suggests a redoubling of perception, or a “perception of perception”. Leibniz broadens its meaning to cover all forms of self-awareness. Aristotle’s surviving texts include only a few lines about the “common sense”, which both synthesizes inputs from different senses into perceptions of objects, and is the root of self-awareness. Kant’s first and third Critiques greatly expand on this.

Pippin quotes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, “I find that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception” (p. 102), commenting, “This is a new theory of judgment and accordingly grounds a new logic” (ibid). That judging is apperceptive is for Hegel a logical truth.

Therefore, for Hegel “it is quite misleading for Kant to formulate the point by saying that the ‘I think’ must ‘accompany’ (begleiten) all my representations (B132). Representing objects is not representing objects, a claiming to be so, unless apperceptive (which is in effect what the B132 passage claims). And that has to mean, in a very peculiar sense that is important to Hegel and that will take some time to unpack, that such judgings are necessarily and inherently reflexive, and so at the very least are self-referential, even if such a reflected content is not substantive, does not refer to a subject’s focusing on her judging activity as if it were a second consciousness.”

“Virtually everything in [Hegel’s] Logic of significance descends in one way or another from the proper understanding of this claim” (p. 103).

He quotes Hegel, “The concept, when it has progressed to a concrete existence which is itself free, is none other than the ‘I’ or pure self-consciousness” (p. 104).

I like to turn this last point around, and say that self-consciousness, the pure ‘I’, for Hegel is none other than the concept — not a static self-image, but a pure reference to the active taking of things to be thus-and-such. My individual essence as a “rational” animal is constituted by all that I care about and hold to be true, as confirmed in my actions and follow-through, not by what I happen to believe about myself.

What Pippin calls the “very peculiar” sense in which apperceptive judging inherently involves reflection and self-reference seems completely normal to me. My self-consciousness straightforwardly consists of what I actually care about and hold to be true, not some abstract “consciousness of consciousness”, in which ordinary consciousness would be its own object. It is not mere organic consciousness or “awareness”, but self-consciousness — Kantian discursive “taking as” — that is inherently reflexive.

This is a relational reflexivity that does not presuppose a substantial “self”, only a kind of “adverbial” self-reference. Takings have reasons, which in turn have other reasons. When all goes well, the reasons mutually support one another, and there is no infinite regress. This results in what Kant calls a unity of apperception, which is a truer, deeper self than any self-image we may have, and indeed not an image at all — and not something presupposed or achieved once and for all, but something we must constantly aim for anew, even when we did just achieve it.

We are the sum of our takings. Meanwhile, what we take to be the case — and what we take to be important or good — is not necessarily what we say it is, but what our actions and follow-through imply.

The Scope of Reflection in Hegel

It now seems to me that reflection turns out to be the driving concept in Hegel’s Logic, and indeed perhaps in Hegel overall. This is fairly amazing, given the prevalence of accounts that do not even mention reflection, or do so only incidentally. True, the ambivalence with which Hegel treats most of his key terms is strongly in evidence here, insofar as he also makes many remarks about the limits of merely “external” reflection. But reflection seems to be a central orienting concept that says many of the same things as Hegelian “mediation” or “dialectic”, says them a bit more clearly, and thus expresses more.

What has particularly captured my interest is the reflection Hegel specifies as “general” or “absolute”. Merely external reflection correlates with the way that he characterizes mere “Consciousness” in the Phenomenology, in which subject and object are mutually exclusive terms, each defined in opposition to the other. But what he calls “general” reflection seems to precisely name a perspective that is at home in what the Phenomenology‘s Preface calls “otherness”, and in which the polarity of subject and object things is replaced by a continuum of relational distinctions. And indirectly, reflection names that otherness itself.

As the last couple of posts have begun to evidence, reflection plays an explicitly central role in the “logic of essence” that Hegel develops in book II of his Logic, which in contrast to the results of the logic of being in book I is said to represent a permanent acquisition. And although the term “reflection” is no longer literally at center stage in book III’s “logic of the concept”, the work done with it in book II is incorporated into the very “concept of the concept” at the beginning of book III.

“[T]he concept is at first to be regarded simply as the third to being and essence, to the immediate and to reflection” (Logic, di Giovanni trans., opening of book III, p. 508, emphasis in original).

He had begun book II by saying essence is the “truth” of being. In just the same way, then, Hegel is saying here that reflection is the “truth” of the immediate.

“Hence the objective logic, which treats of being and essence, constitutes in truth the genetic exposition of the concept…. The dialectical movement of substance through causality and reciprocal affection is thus the immediate genesis of the concept by virtue of which its becoming is displayed. But the meaning of its becoming, like that of all becoming, is that it is the reflection of something which passes over into its ground, and that the at first apparent other into which this something has passed over constitutes the truth of the latter” (p. 509, emphasis in original).

For immediacy, then, reflection is this other that Hegel calls its truth. Immediacy itself is untrue, but it “has” a truth in reflection. Mere being or immediacy by itself is sterile, but reflection makes it fruitful.

I haven’t yet treated Hegel’s discussion of substance and causality within the logic of essence. For now, what I want to draw attention to is his more general point that the logic of essence — which could equally be termed the logic of reflection — already shows, and indeed primarily deals with, the genesis and becoming of the concept. By contrast, what he calls the logic of the concept treats the concept of the concept as already achieved, and focuses on a suitably expansive treatment of its use in judgment and inference.

“The concept is now this absolute unity of being and reflection whereby being-in-and-for-itself only is by being equally reflection or positedness, and positedness only is by being equally in-and-for-itself” (ibid).

Previously, we left simple being, subjects and objects, and existence claims behind, but now being returns, as relatedness and in the content of what we affirm.

For Kant and Fichte, any unqualified reference to being or to what “is” can only be dogmatic. All that we can undogmatically talk about are judgments about what is, and all judgments are subject to questioning about their reasons. (Fichte characteristically speaks of judgments that we affirm as “posited”.)

Hegel regards Kant and Fichte’s effective ban on direct talk about what is as making an extremely important point, but also as overly fastidious. In effect, he wants to suggest that the deeper meaning of “is” coincides with what can reasonably be judged to be the case, and I think Plato and Aristotle would agree.

At the level of what Hegel calls the concept, we have achieved a kind of indifference with respect to talk about being or the immediate. What this means is that what a truly universal community of rational beings would reflectively judge to be the case is constitutive of what we should say “is”.

Perhaps surprisingly, Hegel defers all consideration of normativity and teleology to the logic of the concept in book III, whereas the more explicit discussion of reflection is in the logic of essence in book II. But Hegel’s Logic is ordered as a successive uncovering of presuppositions: in order to successfully claim this apparently simple and straightforward thing, we discover that we must also presuppose that more subtle thing. So the true order of dependency he means to affirm is the opposite of his order of presentation. He also saves his discussion of the “tedious” traditional-logical topics of forms of judgment and syllogisms for book III, but this is with the intent of radically transforming them.

What he really wants to advocate in this last context is a view of judgment and inference — simultaneously very Aristotelian and very nontraditional — as fundamentally reflective and normative, rather than fundamentally formal and quasi-mechanical in nature. The apparent textual separation of reflection from normativity is thus only an appearance. (See also Apperceptive Judgment; Hegel on Reflection; Reflection and Dialectic.)