Who we are is mainly constituted by on the one hand, the practical and epistemic commitments we actually live by, and that are implicit in our words and deeds, as measured by what we hold dear and are willing to sacrifice something else for; and on the other, our track record of responsibility in keeping our words and deeds in line. These together make up what Aristotle called our ethos (root of “ethics”, commonly translated as “character” or “culture”). Appraisals of such things are subject to standards of interpretive charity and reasonableness. Since this has to do purely with what we actually say and do, thinking of who we are as mainly constituted by these commitments does not depend on any extravagant assumptions about free will or exemption from natural causality. (See also Commitment to Commitment; Reasons; Ends; Choice, Deliberation; Practical Judgment; Error; Belief; Epistemic Conscientiousness; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Rational/Talking Animal; Second Nature.)
Individuation
Individuation might be said to have two sides, unity and particularity. I would rather say coherence and specificity. What are called individuals are generally complex wholes, not true atoms; and to the extent that they are definite and subject to understanding, they are something more than mere particulars.
As this applies to people, I have been arguing that the unity of personality or self should be expressed as some intermediate degree of coherence — what the Platonists called a One-and-Many. If we are being really precise, empirical “me” is never exactly the same as it was yesterday, even though there is a very strong family resemblance. Empirical “me” also has many different tendencies and aspects, with some degree of tension and inconsistency. Lockean continuity of memory too is a matter of degree; memory is malleable and incomplete.
I recently read some phenomenologist praising the idea of a “one-level model of consciousness”. That sounds horrible to me, the complete opposite of the lessons of Kant and Hegel, mixing up the empirical and the transcendental and ignoring the fact that differentiation is what gives meaning and form. (See also Empirical-Transcendental Doublet.)
While still feeling kinship with all life, I am fully won over to the importance of Brandom’s sentience/sapience distinction. Applying this to individuation yields interesting results. Sapience is not a kind of super-powered sentience that overcomes natural limitations. It is something wholly other, a social-historical-normative-linguistic transcendental field that natural sentience can nonetheless indirectly partially participate in, thanks to the mediation of second nature.
The formal “I” that indexes the transcendental field is in one way anonymous, but in another way more individual, more intimate, and a much stronger unity than empirical “me”. Empirical “me” is subject to Humean flux, while formal “I” is prone to ecstatic identification. If, extending the Platonic metaphor, each of these names a kind of community or ecosystem — one of empirical psychic tendencies, and one of shareable Thoughts — the ecosystem of shareable Thoughts in the zone of interaction will normally be more coherent than the associated ecosystem of psychic tendencies.
A synthesis of shareable Thoughts also turns out to be far more unique than a synthesis of purely private experience. “I” as unity of apperception has much sharper focus than the “me” of putative immediate awareness. My commitments say much more about who “I” am than my private experience says about “me”. (See also Psyche, Subjectivity.)
Rights
Rights are an important legal concept, and in the interest of justice in an imperfect world sometimes need to be defended, but ethics should guide law, not the other way around. Mutual recognition makes the blunter instrument of unilateral “rights” superfluous for ethical purposes. Kantian respect for others and the Aristotelian spirit of friendship already do so. If we respect others in our actions and treat them in a friendly way, they need not worry about enforcing any putative rights in relation to us. (See also Leibniz.)
If we examine what Hegel called “positive” (actually existing) law, it is often not guided by good ethics as it should be. All too much law is devoted to institutionalizing unilateral privilege (etymologically, “private law”) of one sort or another. We are supposed to be consoled that by the fact that everyone is assigned at least a few privileges, but the whole model of unilateral privilege is ethically deeply wrong.
It is an unsavory fact that the unilateral, unconditional privileges associated with modern ownership and sovereignty historically descend from medieval European libertas or “liberty”, or the arbitrary “right” claimed by the Master to rape the peasant’s daughter and generally do as he pleases, with no regard for others. This kind of “liberty” is an ugly voluntarist fantasy associated with what Plato called the worst sort of character, that of a tyrant. Just such ugliness is recalled by, e.g., the old British Tory slogan “liberty and property”. It is the liberty of the privileged to walk over the rest of us.
Years ago, I was shocked to learn that the classic modern development of the notion of rights explicitly models all rights on unilateral property rights, making reciprocal rights of people a derivative afterthought. (See, e.g., C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism.) Hobbes and Locke did this, and specifically on the question of rights Kant and Hegel unfortunately followed suit, even though their views provide resources for a much better, people-first account, based on respect or mutual recognition.
All rights deserving of legal recognition should be grounded in respect. If we respect property, it should be rationally related to respect for people. No one has a “right” to be a billionaire. (See also Freedom from False Freedom.)
Material Inference
Most “real world” reasoning is actually material in the sense developed by Sellars and Brandom. The “materiality” of material inference recalls several things.
Material inference addresses meant realities through the medium of their expression in ordinary language.
The “materiality” of material inference also refers to the fact that it always involves meaning-based judgments about proprieties of inference, not simple mechanical application of formal transformations. These may subsequently be given formal representation, but the starting point is what I want to call a form of ethical judgment, that it is right to make this inference about these things in this situation. This could equally be applied to questions of what really is the case, or of the appropriateness of actions. The “meaning” at issue should itself be understood in terms of other normative material inferences, provisionally held constant while the inference at hand is assessed.
Finally, the “materiality” of material inference also recalls its recursive dependence on previous concrete judgments.
Material inference works with two kinds of relational judgments: material consequence and material incompatibility.
Reasons
As ethical beings possessed of second nature, except for a few very spontaneous acts, we always have reasons for what we say and do. We hope they are good reasons.
Ethical merit consists essentially in conscientiousness about the goodness of the reasons that motivate words and deeds and are used to justify them. Such goodness of reasons is never merely formal or technical; it is also social and situational. (See also Commitment; Ends; Reasonableness; Interpretive Charity; Agency; Rational/Talking Animal; Things Said; Rational Ethics; Evaluation of Actions; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Honesty, Kindness.)
Things Said
Saying is a specialized form of doing. When saying and doing are contrasted, what is asserted is a contrast between kinds of doing that have different implications. Proprieties of both saying and doing are matter for material inference.
Implicit consideration of a material-inferential ethical dimension is what distinguishes canonical Aristotelian saying from the mere emission of words. This dimension of ethics of material inference gives more specific content to epistemic conscientiousness.
Saying is also a social act that occurs in a larger social context. This gives it a second ethical dimension, starting from consideration of others and situational appropriateness. (See also Interpretive Charity; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Mutual Recognition.)
Aristotle and Brandom?
For the second time, I think I discovered a significant new insight into a major Aristotelian concept by thinking it through in Brandomian terms. When I began this effort, Aristotle and Brandom were just the two philosophers with whom I was most engaged, who seemed to me to share my overarching concern with the ethical import of reasons and things said, but it is growing to be something more.
(To some, this might seem a strange pairing. However, in spite of his own lack of direct engagement with Aristotle, Brandom has commented that a number of his best interlocutors (unnamed) were what he called neo-Aristotelians. Certainly, Hegel — the historic philosopher with whom Brandom has been most engaged — makes major use of Aristotle, and Brandom’s co-thinkers on Hegel, Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard, have highlighted this.)
Earlier, I noted a kind of isomorphism between Aristotelian potentiality and Brandomian modally robust counterfactual inference, which then turned into a three-way correspondence with the structuralist concept of structure, and helped illuminate the old synchronic/diachronic issue associated with structuralism.
The other day, I noted a second isomorphism, between canonical Aristotelian proposition-forming combination and separation and Brandomian material consequence and material incompatibility. The result is that Aristotle’s canonical conception of logical truth seems very consistent with what Brandom recommends, in terms of using goodness of material inference to explain truth rather than using truth to explain inference.
Brandom has referred to this sort of interpretation as a recollective genealogy, grounded in Hegel’s way of retrospectively interpreting past philosophers in light of the present. Obviously there is a creative element to such an endeavor. The important and delicate point is that it not be an arbitrary imposition, but something that yields genuine insight that is both relevant to the present and honestly compatible with the best historiographic objectivity we can fallibly attain. In the two cases mentioned above, I think that has been achieved.
Going in the other direction, developing an Aristotelian interpretation of Brandom’s distinction between sentience and sapience has helped me to achieve full sympathy with this notion, and with several of Kant’s apparently dualistic moments as well.
Somewhat ambidextrously, it seems to me that Brandomian commitments, together with the sort of pattern of performance with respect to responsibility measured by Brandomian deontic scorekeeping, make up the ethical character or culture that Aristotle called ethos. (See also Ethos; Aristotelian Subjectivity; Brandomian Choice.)
Aristotelian Propositions
Every canonical Aristotelian proposition can be interpreted as expressing a judgment of material consequence or material incompatibility. This may seem surprising. First, a bit of background…
At the beginning of On Interpretation, Aristotle says that “falsity and truth have to do with combination and separation” (Ch. 1). On its face, the combination or separation at issue has to do not with propositions but with terms. But it is not quite so simple. The terms in question are canonically “universals” or types or higher-order terms, each of which is therefore convertible with a mentioned proposition that the higher-order term is or is not instantiated or does or does not apply. (We can read, e.g., “human” as the mentioned proposition “x human”.) Thus a canonical Aristotelian proposition is formed by “combining” or “separating” a pair of things that are each interpretable as an implicit proposition in the modern sense.
Propositions in the modern sense are treated as atomic. They are often associated with merely stipulated truth values, and in any case it makes no sense to ask for internal criteria that would help validate or invalidate a modern proposition. But we can always ask whether the combination or separation in a canonical Aristotelian proposition is reasonable for the arguments to which it is applied. Therefore, unlike a proposition in the modern sense, an Aristotelian proposition always implicitly carries with it a suggestion of criteria for its validation.
The only available criteria for critically assessing correctness of such elementary proposition-forming combination or separation are material in the sense that Sellars and Brandom have discussed. A judgment of “combination” in effect just is a judgment of material consequence; a judgment of “separation” in effect just is a judgment of material incompatibility. (This also helps clarify why it is essential to mention both combination and separation affirmatively, since, e.g., “human combines with mortal” canonically means not just that human and mortal are not incompatible, but that if one is said to be human, one is thereby also said to be mortal.)
This means that Aristotle’s concept of the elementary truth and falsity of propositions can be understood as grounded in criteria for goodness of material inference, not some kind of correspondence with naively conceived facts. It also means that every Aristotelian proposition can be understood as expressing a judgment of material consequence or incompatibility, and that truth for Aristotle can therefore be understood as primarily said of good judgments of material consequence or incompatibility. Aristotle thus would seem to anticipate Brandom on truth.
This is the deeper meaning of Aristotle’s statement that a proposition in his sense does not just “say something” but “says something about something”. Such aboutness is not just grammatical, but material-inferential. This is in accordance with Aristotle’s logical uses of “said of”, which would be well explained by giving that a material-inferential interpretation as well.
The principle behind Aristotelian syllogism is a form of composition, formally interpretable as an instance of the composition of mathematical functions, where composition operates on the combination or separation of pairs of terms in each proposition. Aristotelian logic thus combines a kind of material inference in proposition formation and its validation with a kind of formal inference by composition. This is what Kant and Hegel meant by “logic”, apart from their own innovations.
Mutual Recognition and the Other
Part of what I like so much about both Aristotle and Brandom is that they each offer a sustained non-Subject-centered development of what I broadly think of as meta-ethical concerns, including subjectivity itself.
Since I first encountered him in the 1970s, Lacan’s broad perspective on subjectivity as decentered always seemed very sensible and right to me, and in accord with the epistemic modesty I have attributed to Plato and Aristotle. At this very broad level, there is an important consonance here.
A large emphasis on language is obviously another point Aristotle, Brandom, and Lacan all have in common, but while I have previously suggested a possibility of bidirectional translation specifically between relational structures and inferentialist modes of expression based on a common denominator of Hegelian determinate negation, the difference between metaphoric-metonymic and normative-inferential approaches to language is huge.
Lacan identified what he called the Other primarily with language analyzed in Jakobsonian terms, and with Levi-Straussian “Law”. Now I want to focus on the latter aspect. This seems to be just normativity, albeit in global synchronic relational form rather than the fine-grained interactive diachronic form developed by Brandom.
To say that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other in this sense results in an anonymous, social unconscious rather than a personal, biological one, which I find highly intriguing. It also puts the unconscious and normativity in the same “place”. At first that made me worry about explaining primary process from a Brandomian point of view, but I have decided there is no requirement to do that. I am inclining toward a view that primary process and normativity would each pick out aspects of what goes on in that hypothetical anonymous, role-based social subjective “place”, and that those aspects would be basically orthogonal.
The Other seems to be mainly considered as synchronic and global, viewed from a distance, whereas mutual recognition is a fine-grained, ongoing interactive process. The Other could be hypothetically considered as the global synchronic product of the whole mutual recognition process. Conversely, mutual recognition could be considered a detailed, internal, genetic explanation of the Other that Lacan never contemplated.
I have yet to find mutuality in Lacan. He talked a fair amount about Hegel, but through a Kojèvian lens. Kojève had stressed the struggle for one-sided recognition associated with Mastery. Lacan seems to have regarded love as primarily a narcissistic phenomenon, which I cannot agree with. (See also Imaginary, Symbolic, Real.)
Primary Process
Lacan saw both language and the primary process of the unconscious as mainly governed by Jakobsonian metaphor and metonymy. While especially well adapted to accounting for poetry, word salads, and dreams, the Jakobsonian approach seems insufficiently constrained to be able to account for proprieties of inference; but then, it was not developed for that purpose. (See also Imaginary, Symbolic, Real.)
Brandom sees any descriptive, formal view of language such as the Jakobsonian one as ultimately parasitic on a nonformal, normative, and material-inferential view. For rational, discursive purposes where we want deontic modal constraints, Brandom’s approach works very well. Brandom’s account focuses on the normative and inferential meaning of ordinary empirical concepts, and has nothing to say about free metaphor and metonymy, which also have a big place in the wider world; but then, it was not developed for the latter purpose.
I don’t mean to suggest any facile symmetry here, just the bare possibility of some reconciliation in view of the fact that the main concerns of the two approaches are mutually exclusive. Saying that a view is parasitic on another view is very different from saying it is wrong. The question is whether it is fair to expect that Brandom’s claim of parasitism at a general level of formal on “material” and of descriptive on normative approaches imposes on Brandom an obligation to be able to explain any possible formal account in his terms, including one mainly designed for a case well outside his focus. I think it does impose on him an obligation to be able to explain any formal account addressing the scope of determination of empirical concepts, but does not impose an obligation to be able to explain something like metaphor and metonymy. So, at least in this measure I do think the perspectives can coexist.
In my youth when I was a linguistically experimental poet among other things, I put more stress on metaphor and metonymy myself. At that point, I still believed in rational intuition, did not really think of reasoning in terms of language, and was even a bit disdainful of breaking things down into steps. Now I think all intuition is secondary to some prior development. As soon as I encountered Brandom’s argument about the priority of inference over representation, it seemed very right, and I began to engage with other aspects of his work from there. We could squint and say metaphor and metonymy are forms of representation, but if so it is certainly not empirical conceptual representation, so I’m inclined to think in that case we’re dealing with an Aristotelian homonym.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 