Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), the name most associated with existentialism, was a leading literary figure, public intellectual, and political activist in mid-20th century France. He initially became famous for dwelling on things like nausea and absurdity.

Sartre propounded one of the most extravagant voluntarisms ever conceived, grounded in a novel, atheistic metaphysics rather than the extreme supernaturalism that has usually supported such views. “[N]o limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself…. [F]or human reality, to be is to choose oneself; nothing comes to it either from the outside or from within which it can receive or accept…. Man… is wholly and forever free” (Being and Nothingness, pp. 439-441). We are “condemned” to freedom, are free even in prison, were never freer than during the Nazi occupation, and so on. For my own contrasting view, see Freedom and Free Will; Freedom Without Sovereignty; Choice, Deliberation; Structural Causality, Choice; Brandomian Choice.

Later, he developed a theory of what he called totalization. “If dialectical Reason exists, then, from the ontological point of view, it can only be a developing totalisation, occurring where the totalisation occurs, and, from the epistemological point of view, it can only be the accessibility of that totalisation to a knowledge which is itself, in principle, totalising in its procedures.” (Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 47). This sounds like a nightmare of the sort of bad old metaphysical Hegelianism that would swallow everything, completely opposed to Hegel’s own acute sensitivity to context and the essential role of mediation.

What is common to Sartre’s notions of freedom and totalization is their inflationary character. This is not a sound basis for anything.

“Hard” Kantianism?

Kantian Deeds (2010) by Henrik Jøker Bjerre is a book-length argument for a Žižekian Kant, with extensive, relatively polite polemical discussion of Brandom and John McDowell. Non-Žižekian readings of Kant are labelled “Soft”, while a Žižekian reading is introduced as a uniquely “Hard” Kantianism.

The main ingredients seem to be an identification of Kantian freedom with voluntarism; literal endorsement of Kant’s argument that reason necessarily leads to antinomies, as a segue to Žižekian contradiction; and a Heideggerian argument for the importance of metaphysics and the question of Being. Bjerre combines these in an attempt to justify claims for the importance of an extraordinary, “extra-moral” morality in Kant alongside ordinary morality. Ordinary morality is made to sound more like social conformity.

Each part of the above summary seems wrong to me. Here I won’t repeat contents of the above-linked articles that give some of my reasons.

While I welcome the elementary insight that Kantian morality involves more than rule-following, there seems to be no real textual basis in Kant for the “extra-moral” morality of a nonrational “surplus” of the deed that this book imports or invents. Simultaneously, the breadth and substantiality of Kant’s actual discussions of “ordinary” morality is much diminished, in order to leave a bigger territory for the putative extra-moral.

Dominik Finkelde’s Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan, and the Foundations of Ethics (2017; German edition 2015) continues along a similar path. “To put it plainly, for Kant the subject is either premoral or extramoral” (p. 8). If Kant said anything suggesting that, I would attribute it to his rather pessimistic view of human nature, not to any endorsement of arbitrariness. We are treated to the spectacle of a Kant made to sound like a Badiouian decisionist. Again, a “deed” presented as fundamentally irrational is everything, and this is supposed to be the way to social emancipation. This is illustrated by a description of Rosa Parks’ historic refusal to sit in the back of the bus as effectively a Badiouian disruptive “event” leading to a new arbitrary “truth”. Never mind that racial segregation in the U.S. was an obvious, egregious violation of ordinary Kantian respect and universality, which any truly honest person could see as irrational all along. Rosa Parks’ action was not at all arbitrary, but rather full of meaning.

Neither social emancipation nor philosophy benefits from all this metaphysics and all this apologetic for arbitrariness. Moreover, the denigration of reason and ordinary ethics as inherently “conservative” weakens the real basis of emancipation. (See also Kantian Will; In Defense of Ordinariness.)

Recognition, Identity

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy confirms that so-called “identity politics” has penetrated into contemporary philosophical discussions of recognition more than I had realized. It seems to me anything aimed at recognition of preconceived, contentful identities of existing selves has far less emancipatory potential than the generic Kantian respect for rational animals and open-ended, deconstructive Socratic question and answer that is at the core of what I call mutual recognition. (See also Trust as a Principle; Scorekeeping; Habermasian Recognition.)

Habermasian Recognition

I have not engaged a lot with the work of Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), but he is well known for promoting a version of mutual recognition.

At a very preliminary level, it seems he relies more on a presumption of abstract equality between participants, where Brandom incorporates consideration of their actual performance (see Scorekeeping). Habermas has also tended to assume that full consensus is the only desirable outcome, whereas Brandom takes a more positive view of clarifications that do not lead to consensus.

Habermas is a prolific writer, so I may be missing something mitigating, but both these differences seem to me to make the Žižekian criticisms of mutual recognition more applicable to the Habermasian version than to the Brandomian one.

More Difference, Less Conflict

This is not a panacea because often people are not attuned to logical subtleties, but strife can be reduced by closer attention to distinctions. Even opposite assertions about what are actually different things do not conflict at all, except possibly through their implications. More qualified assertions also reduce the potential for conflict.

Claims of incommensurability tend to end dialogue rather than promote it, so it is not clear that they actually reduce conflict. Intelligible distinctions, on the other hand, are an important part of the implicit basis of civility. Much of civility and ethics is about appropriate response, which depends on intelligible distinctions.

Attention to distinctions is entirely consistent with a Kantian concern for ethical universality. It actually helps. We can do a better job of applying universals to particulars when we have more distinctions to work with. (See also Practical Judgment; Reasonableness; Contradiction.)

Broken Synthesis

It is mainly Kant who is the thinker of synthesis. For Kant, synthesis is partly a moral ideal, and partly something we are always already caught up in, and need to deconstruct.

The Žižekians are right that Hegel specialized in pointing out how Kantian syntheses break. I’ve written at greater length about my own Brandomian take on this latter point under Error.

So-called absolute knowledge is actually a deconstruction, not a synthesis.

Meant Realities

In speaking of meant realities, my purpose is to suggest a contrast both with a view that meaning pertains to mental representations, and with anything purely formal in the modern syntactic sense, though meant realities may be understood as a sort of pure forms in an Aristotelian sense (see Mutation of Meaning).

I am not thinking of direct reference or correspondence. Reference and correspondence do come into play, but only circuitously. In the first instance, meant realities emerge with relative robustness from the cross-referencing, cross-checking, and mutual involvement — or preconscious Kantian synthesis — of many meanings, affirmations, and values.

The expression of meant realities in ordinary language forms the subject matter of material inference.

Common sense, ordinary language use, and the unconscious all jump over processes of synthesis to a taking of meant realities as they currently appear in context. Such practically necessary but always implicitly provisional shortcuts can be deconstructed again through interpretation and dialogue. (See also Reality; Substance; Beings; Reference, Representation.)

Split Subject, Contradiction

The Žižekians, referencing Lacan, like to talk about a “split subject” that is noncoincident with itself. In broad terms, I think this is useful. What we call subjectivity is divided, and lacking in strong unity. (See also Pure Negativity?; Acts in Brandom and Žižek.) But it seems to me that if we try to speak carefully about this, we should not then go on using singular articles like “the” or “a”.

I tend to think subjectivity is not just fractured or un-whole, but also actually consists of a complex overlay of different things that we tend to blur together. In particular, it seems clear to me that a common-sense, biographical “self” whose relative unity over time is trackable by relation to the “same” physical body — or by Lockean continuity of memory — is not the same as what we might in a given moment view from a distance as an individualized ethos, or up close as a unity of apperception. This is, I believe, the same distinction that Brandom discusses in terms of sentience and sapience.

Ethos and unity of apperception, and their constituent values and conceptions — the very things that most properly say “I”, and play the functional role of an ethical “subject”, or of a subject of knowledge — are profoundly involved with language, social relations, and what Lacan in his earlier work called the Symbolic and the “Other”. These instances of sapience are pure forms whose identity can only be expressed in terms of sameness of form — nonempirical, but inseparable from a larger ethical world — and simultaneously intimate to us, but by no means strictly “ours”. (See also Self, Subject.)

Where I am still a bit torn is that I also feel that emotions — which I’ve been locating on the former, “self” side — are fundamental to subjectivity as a whole, but I have theoretically separated them from the main locus of transcendental ethical and epistemic subjectivity, even though they play an essential role in making it possible. One logical solution would be to say this just means subjectivity as a whole is more than just ethical and epistemic. Another would be to say that there is a separate kind of emotional subjectivity. I’m not entirely satisfied yet, because I think feeling combines these, but the noncoincidence of our factual selves with our ethical and epistemic being seems very important in understanding how we overcome empirical limitations.

The Žižekians will perhaps remind us that they were not talking about a split between self and subject, but about a split within the subject. I think we habitually overstate the degree of unity and identity we attribute to selves, subjects, and things in general, so I’m fine with that, too. They also want to expand this into a general “ontological” point, which I see as a semantic point.

Perhaps the Žižekians are more comfortable talking about “a” or “the” subject in part due to their doctrine of the ubiquity of contradiction. Todd McGowan in Emancipation After Hegel (2019) nicely distinguishes the Žižekian notion from the old confusion between contradiction and conflict or polarity — and from immediate self-contradiction — but still wants to maintain that the standard logical law of noncontradiction ultimately “refutes itself”, and that Hegel thought this as well. This argument combines a laudable awareness of some of the practical issues with identity, with a logically invalid use of the distinction between explicit and implicit self-contradiction.

Hegel meditated profoundly on the difficulties of applying logic to meaningful content and to real life. He strained language to the breaking point trying to express his conclusions.

On the frontiers of mathematical logic today, the so-called law of identity has been replaced by a requirement to specify identity criteria for each formally defined type, and identity in general has been weakened to isomorphism. (See also Form as a Unique Thing.)

Real-world applications of strong identity typically involve loose “extensional” reference to things assumed to be the same, and a lot of forgetting. The linchpin of old “identity thinking” was inattention to difficulties of formalization from ordinary language — basically an illegitimate moving back and forth between formal and informal domains, resulting in lots of homogenizing confusion of things that ought to be distinct. Weaker, “intensional” assertions about identity as specifiable sameness of form make it the exception rather than the rule. What come first conceptually are distinctions within the manifold, not pre-synthesized things already possessed of identity. Where things are not the same to begin with, contradiction — far from being omnipresent — is not even potentially at issue. (See also Self-Evidence?)

Meanwhile, Sellars and Brandom have revived material inference about meant realities in contrast to formal logic, which deals with purely syntactic relations between presumed extensional “things” with presumed identity. Things Kant and Hegel said about Understanding and Reason can be nicely understood in terms of the relation between syntactic inference about symbolic terms standing for formless extensional “things” and substantive, material inference about the actual form of meant realities. Especially in the reading of Hegel, not having the resource of this distinction available now seems positively crippling.

Finally, Aristotle, who originated the law of noncontradiction as a kind of ethical imperative, and stands in the background to all of Hegel’s discussions of logic, was himself rather cautious and tentative about applying identity to real things, and in his logic was also mainly concerned with (composition of) material inferences, which have more to do with the actual form of things .

Hegel never violated Aristotle’s imperative not to say opposite things about the same thing said in the same way. What he did was to constantly point out the gap between reality and traditional semi-formal logic applied to ordinary language — not to encourage us to reject logic, but rather to refine and sublimate it. (See also Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic.)

Hegel and the French Revolution

Rebecca Comay’s Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (2011) is a far better book than her recent collaboration with Frank Ruda (see Hopes Dashed). This is in the genre of literature people doing a sort of philosophy, and tends to dwell too much for my taste on broadly “existentialist” themes like sickness, loss, anxiety, etc., but it is a prolonged meditation on its subject matter, ending with a substantial discussion — and ultimately a positive, if somewhat paradoxical assessment — of the role of forgiveness in Hegel’s Phenomenology, as politically liberating.

Around 1800 in Germany, it was something of a commonplace to claim that Germany did not need a political revolution like France did, because Germany had already had the Reformation, as well as Kant’s Copernican revolution as interpreted by Fichte. Kant had expressed sympathy with the French Revolution’s ideals, but horror both at the idea of revolution, and at the execution of the French monarch in particular. (See also Enlightenment.) To oversimplify a bit, the German Romantics tended to feel that the freedom of the Subject claimed by Fichte captured everything good about the Revolution.

Hegel distanced himself from the Romantics, and mixed praise of Fichte with sharp criticism of his one-sidedness. Though Hegel championed what he considered to be true freedom, he also noted there was an uncomfortable relation between one-sided freedom and Terror. This should not be too surprising, since one-sided freedom on Hegel’s analysis is a kind of mastery. (See also Independence, Freedom; Freedom Without Sovereignty.)

In the context of the paranoia that drove the Terror, which Comay associates with Hegel’s allegory of the hard-hearted judge, Comay quotes Hegel saying “the fear of error is itself the error” that “mistrusts everything except [its] own mistrust” (p. 121).

I think every state and every revolution has sometimes followed a kind of Realpolitik, under which ethical goods are sacrificed in the name of what are expediently deemed to be greater goods, e.g., the conformist political “Virtue” promoted by Robespierre. It becomes all too easy to denounce others as counter-revolutionaries or Reds or terrorists or the moral equivalent thereof, while equating one’s own Terror with Virtue. There is a rather desperate need for an Aristotelian mean here. People should not be unconditionally pacifist in the face of oppression or aggression, but we ought to be very selective and conditional about endorsing the legitimacy of violence in the name of a greater good. (See also Stubborn Refusal; Sanctions.)

Hegelian forgiveness, Comay says, “evacuates the substantial plenitude of every community. The opening of the universal is thus neither reconstructive (forgiveness does not presuppose the stable identity of the social context) nor constructive (it does not stipulate a social norm).” (p. 133.) Then “The event is historicized: instead of determining the future, the past is freed to receive a new meaning from the future…. I am freed from the past, freed to act differently, only by exposing myself to the moral claim of others…. If I am no longer the prisoner of my act, this is because I am not its proprietor either.” (p. 133.) And “The reconciling yes… retains its participial, unfinished aspect. It speaks not of reconciliation but of an unfinished and ongoing movement of reconciling” (p. 136).

Rhetorical differences notwithstanding, this much seems to me entirely compatible with Brandom’s reading of Hegelian forgiveness.

Comay says, however, that it “challenges every politics of recognition (especially those formulated in Hegel’s name) constructed on a model of dialogical transparency” (p. 135). I’m not quite sure what is meant to be implied here by “dialogical transparency”, but I don’t think the work of reason in dialogue is “transparent”. Work is not a metaphor here. Dialogue involves actual conceptual/interpretive and communicative work leading to developments that do not come ready-made.

Comay goes on to associate a politics of recognition with identity politics, without saying of whom she is thinking. I’m used to a more positive, universalist Kantian-ethical view of recognition that has nothing to do with identity politics.