Theology

I believe there is an implicit suggestion in Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel that sound theology must include extensive concern with a universally accessible common ground of ethics understood by means of reason with no appeal to external authority.

My own view is that the highest form of faith is intransitive. It could not have articles. It is not a belief in some propositions, but a pure affective attitude and way of being and doing. Anything else is just a way to get to that, if it is a way to anything at all. This would be somewhat akin to traditional negative theology. (See also Plotinus; God and the Soul; First Principles Come Last; Affirmation; Belief.)

Antiphilosophy

Badiou first drew my attention to the Counter-Enlightenment concept of “antiphilosophy”. He uses this as a kind of spice, ostensibly to keep philosophy on its toes. I find it useful as a historical category, but apply it with different extension and different valuation. Jonathan Israel discusses the original Counter-Enlightenment version in Enlightenment Contested.

To me, antiphilosophy is unequivocally a bad thing. I take it to be defined by an overt or implicit hostility to philosophy as an integral discipline — or to most philosophy — while at the same time appropriating pieces of it. It is (I say with polemical voice) the pseudo-philosophy of people who actively refuse the rational discipline of real philosophy, but want to cherry-pick a few conclusions for a different agenda.

Consistent with that, I would not want to call Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or Lacan an antiphilosopher, as Badiou does. For me, the antiphilosophers include (paradigmatically) the voluntaristic, emphatically supernaturalist theologians like Philo of Alexandria and al-Ghazali who explicitly saw themselves in competition with “philosophy”; then the Counter-Enlightenment people who coined the word antiphilosophy; then also, other avowed antirationalists like Rousseau and Kierkegaard; those like Descartes who hold the history of philosophy in utter contempt; and the cruder advocates of empiricism.

Badiou

Alain Badiou (b. 1937) is probably the leading living philosopher in France today. He is a very complex figure who writes well-organized, multidimensional books and says things that are sometimes quite insightful, but who takes a number of fundamental positions I find utterly antithetical. To oversimplify in the extreme, I read him as a highly original Sartrean existentialist who borrowed a few arguments from Sartre’s structuralist nemesis, and added a lot of layers of his own. Somewhat unfortunately in my view, he has become very influential in continentally inclined academic leftist circles. Slavoj Žižek, who offends my sensibilities less often and catches my interest more, has dedicated books to Badiou.

One thing I appreciate is that unlike some others of his generation, Badiou unapologetically identifies himself as a philosopher in the classical sense. I also like the fact that he overtly puts a high value on reasoning (though I think at a deeper level he is more committed to several kinds of voluntarism, including those of Rousseau, Sartre, Mao, and the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt). I appreciate his sharp-tongued critique of identity politics and some of his other social criticism, but think he draws some very wrong conclusions about the way forward (again in a voluntarist direction). I like the way he integrates diverse interests like mathematics and literature, but strongly object to his claims about political implications of classical versus constructive mathematics. If one were to make such a connection, it seems to me that contrary to what Badiou says, constructive mathematics — with its nonreliance on assumptions — would be the more “liberating”.

Badiou has developed an elaborate and very original account of agency and subjectivity. I like the fact that Badiouian subjects are emergent rather than pre-existent. Unfortunately, his concepts of subjectivity and agency are both extremely narrow and extremely inflationary. Subjectivity and agency are grounded in an arbitrary, exceptional decision to embrace an arbitrary, exceptional new “truth” that cannot be rationally comprehended. Then on the basis of this arbitrary truth, subjects may exceptionally constitute themselves through fidelity and purely formal logical consistency. Rational development begins only after — and on the basis of — an utterly arbitrary decision. In the context of the initial decision, he invokes the Kierkegaardian leap of faith, and promotes a reading of the apostle Paul as the prototype of a revolutionary. He has no use for rational analysis of social conditions. It all comes down to a kind of arbitrary revolutionary will, calling to mind the worst excesses of Robespierre and Mao.

I note in passing that he has promoted a useful clarification of abstraction as a kind of subtraction.

His first big book was Being and Event. I believe the emphasis on Being is misguided, as is that on set theory. His highly original attempt to redefine events, truths, and subjects that we actually care about as limited to the exceptional cases is quite fascinating, but ultimately spoiled by a rather arbitrary canonization of particular exceptions, and by the voluntarist root agenda.

His early Theory of the Subject included elements of a sort of Lacanian Maoist reading of Hegel. I suspect the young Slavoj Žižek attended the original seminars on which it was based, and got significant inspiration there. At this stage, Badiou was emphasizing a so-called “scission of the subject” in Lacan, while attempting to relate it to the more general Maoist “One divides into Two” dogma.

While I think Lacan himself deserves serious consideration, “One divides into Two” is a subtheoretical atrocity that would not only undo all of Hegel’s careful work to develop a concept of determinate negation, but also completely reverse the thrust of Engels’ quite reasonable account of the conditional, relative status of opposites in Anti-Dühring. “One divides into Two” reduces dialectic to crude talk about opposed forces. Badiou still defends this. (See also Contradiction vs Polarity; 1968; Antiphilosophy; “Hard” Kantianism?; Johnston’s Pippin; Weak Nature Alone; Democracy and Social Justice.)

I am even more disturbed by Badiou’s apparent strong sympathy for the work of the political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who was an ardent Nazi, and wrote key legal opinions legitimizing Nazi actions. Schmitt’s Nazi involvement seems much worse than Heidegger‘s, and his thought far less mitigating. I just read a couple of secondary accounts of Schmitt for the first time — a bunch of stuff about will and enemies. There are more lessons here about the political evils of voluntarism. Badiou’s explicit references to Schmitt are apparently only the tip of an iceberg. I now realize there are many more implicit resonances in his texts.

Enlightenment

I have previously referred to Jonathan Israel’s trilogy on the Enlightenment. The volumes are Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), and Democratic Enlightenment (2011). There are other good treatments of this period, but I think Israel set a new standard, and his unique emphases are extremely valuable. Here are a few highlights.

Volume 1 documents the large social importance of the Spinozist movement in 17th and 18th century Europe and its role in pioneering democratic politics, with much fascinating detail.

Volume 2 rounds out the picture of a three-way contest between “moderate” or mainstream Enlightenment, “radical” Spinozist Enlightenment, and Counter-Enlightenment.

Volume 3 covers the relatively sudden emergence of democracy as a mainstream concern, via the American and especially the French revolution.

His description of the mainstream Enlightenment suggests that its representatives were actually a good deal more timid than I judge Plato and Aristotle to have been in asserting the place of reason over one-sided authority in politics and religion. While I generally agree with these assessments of the relative conservatism of the mainstream Enlightenment, I support a more charitable reading of Kant, putting more stress on his general view of autonomy of reason.

The French Encyclopedists and their cothinkers appear as continuing the Spinozist “radical Enlightenment” democratic tradition (and, I would say, as closer to carrying out the implications of Plato and Aristotle on the unfettered use of reason); advocating a more robust rationalism than other Enlightenment thinkers, and a principled approach to social justice; and even strongly anticipating 20th century criticisms of colonialism and racism. As Israel presents their positions, they look both saner than and politically well to the left of the ideologically Rousseauian Robespierre faction responsible for the Terror. (See also Hegel and the French Revolution.)

Israel documents in wonderful detail the huge, amazing popularity of illegal political and “philosophical” pamphlets in 18th century France. He argues that the unusually high social importance of pamphlets and books and what the 18th century French called “philosophy” was a decisive factor in the actual advent of the French Revolution. I think this is utterly fascinating. (It in some ways parallels the florescence of social democracy in Germany before World War I, or the flourishing of interest in translations of “ancient wisdom” among literate craft people in medieval Baghdad.)

Unfortunately, Israel thinks his emphasis on the widespread social importance of “philosophy” is necessarily incompatible with other historiographical emphases, such as economic or Foucaultian ones. As a sort of Aristotelian, I question assumptions of — or requirements for — such univocality in accounts of the determination of complex things, especially something as rich as history. I don’t see any reason why we can’t usefully deploy all these ways of understanding as seems fitting.

Democracy and Social Justice

Through most of the 18th century, democracy was mainly associated with what would today be called the far left (see Enlightenment). Historian Richard Hofstadter reports that in the debates that led to the American constitution, worries were expressed that the people might just vote to redistribute wealth. This led to an elaborate system of checks and balances designed essentially to limit democracy. (Of course, I am oversimplifying. Democracy can have serious issues, as Plato would remind us, and a constitution is a good thing overall, as Aristotle would remind us. See also Justice in General; Authority, Reason; The Autonomy of Reason; Freedom from False Freedom; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love.)

The American and French revolutions temporarily gave the cause of democracy more of a mainstream status. But after the 1848 events in Europe led to more worries over possible redistribution of wealth, further progress in the direction of democracy again depended on mainly the activity of the left. (See also Fragility of the Good; Economic Rationality?; Rights; Stubborn Refusal.)

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the strongest support for democratic advances worldwide actually came from the socialist movement, which had an amazingly vibrant and fertile tradition of rational debate on principles of theory and practice. (After Stalin and Mao and their imitators and successors substituted cynical, corrupt, and repressive nationalist populism for the ideals of socialism, it may be hard to remember this. Stalin brutally suppressed all debate and especially exterminated criticism from the left, while systematically betraying everything the movement had stood for. Mao was even further removed from the historic rational tradition of left-wing social democracy. But all such monstrosities do nothing to invalidate the rational ideas of social justice they travestied.)

1968

I remain perplexed by the place of the May 1968 spontaneous Paris worker-student uprising in French intellectual history. This was the most significant challenge to the status quo in a Western country since the aftermath of World War I, but not nearly as substantial as Paris 1870, which also did not lead to permanent change. It was the 1960s and spontaneity expressed the spirit of the time, but it also ensured the transience and superficiality of those colorful events.

I find staggering the suggestion by Badiou and others that May 1968 represented some kind of world-historic new political paradigm. People seriously concerned for social change should know better. The most important concrete social consequence of the events that I am aware of was the formation of the new experimental university of Vincennes, which eventually became much more mainstream.

Reportedly, “Structures don’t march in the streets” was grafittied onto a Paris wall (I presume by some existentialist who already had an axe to grind). Exactly what consequence was supposed to follow from this is unclear. It implies a silly, sophistical argument that should not have bothered any serious person.

The peculiar thing is that a number of leading French intellectuals who said very positive things about so-called structuralism before May 1968 and were undisturbed by previous anti-structuralist polemics suddenly wanted to rhetorically distance themselves from it afterward, when not much about their own positions had changed. (This later led comparative literature people to reify into existence a category of more-radical-than-thou “poststructuralism” unknown in the French context, and to exaggerate its difference from a by then said-to-be objectionably conservative “structuralism”.)

The important thing is not whether or not we call ourselves structuralists (or jabberwocks, or whatever). The important thing is what we actually manage to articulate, and the kind of practical doings to which we commit ourselves, and in which actually engage.

Rhetorical considerations do matter in social situations. We can also argue about more substantive questions of the status and value of particular kinds of synchronic analysis and understanding.

But given all that, no dumb event as such (and empirical events, I insist, are dumb) can refute any analysis or understanding that is valid in its own right. Only new analysis and understanding can do that. This might be stimulated by an event, but the important thing would still be the quality and content of the new analysis and understanding, which has to be shown. (See also Historiography.)

Archaeology of Knowledge

In the old days, my favorite text of Foucault was the beginning of the Archaeology of Knowledge (online here), revised from his “Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie”, published summer 1968 (o pregnant time!) in Cahiers pour L’Analyse, the original of which is separately translated in Essential Works vol. 1. There is a nice summary of the original and its historical context here.

At this time, Foucault and Althusser were both working toward what has been called a rationalist philosophy of the Concept related to the work of Jean Cavaillés and Georges Canguilhem, in contrast to then popular existential/phenomenological philosophies of the Subject. (See Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillés to Deleuze.)

The Epistemological Circle that Foucault was responding to was a group of Althusser’s students interested in the philosophy and history of science, as well as structural Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, who had asked Foucault a series of methodological questions. Althusser was something like the dean of France’s most prestigious university. He had actually written his dissertation (which I have still not seen) on the Concept in Hegel. By this time he was in high anti-Hegelian mode, as was Foucault.

Foucault himself acknowledged considerable debt to his Hegelian mentor Jean Hyppolite, who translated the Phenomenology to French. Hyppolite read Hegel as focused more on discourse than on subjectivity. His 1952 Language and Existence, referred to by Foucault as “one of the great books of our time”, argued strongly for the importance of language in Hegel. (It was also very favorably reviewed by the young Deleuze.) Foucault had written a thesis on “The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” under Hyppolite in 1949.

There is more good historical background in James Muldoon, “Foucault’s Forgotten Hegelianism”. While I don’t endorse, e.g., Muldoon’s remarks on Hegel and free will, his suggestion that an identification with certain specifics of Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel — particularly the attribution of a strong “totalizing” impulse — contributed significantly to the anti-Hegelian turn of Foucault and others is quite interesting.

Though I don’t recall this from his translated works, Hyppolite apparently both saw a strong element of totalization in Hegel and strongly rejected it, while continuing to identify as a Hegelian. (Previously, in absence of more specific evidence I had surmised it was mainly a reaction against Alexandre Kojève’s reading that drove the French anti-Hegelian turn. Muldoon also says Hyppolite’s reading was initially welcomed as a contrast to Jean Wahl’s more phenomenologically oriented 1929 book on the unhappy consciousness, which apparently also contributed to French perceptions of Hegel as subject-centered.)

In any case, the Hegel whom Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and others famously rejected in the 1960s was identified as the proponent of a totalizing historical teleology of the Subject. Each of the three components of this was independently strongly rejected — the subject-centeredness, the historical teleology, and the totalization. I still agree today that these are all serious errors that should be rejected.

However, Hegel read in a broadly Brandomian way is utterly untouched by this criticism. There is no historical teleology at all in what Brandom calls Hegelian genealogy (so a fortiori not a totalizing one), and there is no subject-centeredness in the analysis of conceptual content. Subjectivity is never invoked as an unexplained explainer. Brandom’s exposition of the Hegelian critique of Mastery offers us a Hegel utterly opposed to the kind of totalization attributed to him by Foucault, Althusser, and Deleuze.

Foucault presented a long list of forms of discontinuity that should be attended to in the history of ideas. Each of these could be analyzed in Brandomian/Hegelian terms as a determinate negation.

I agree with Foucault that it is very important not to take the simple continuity of a tradition for granted. In principle, such things need to be shown. However, I still think defeasible assertions about “traditions” and other such unities that should be questioned can play a useful role in historical discussion. (See also Ricoeur on Foucault; Structuralism; Structure, Potentiality; Difference; Identity, Isomorphism; Univocity; Historiography; Genealogy.)

Lucretius

Previously, I objected to Althusser’s invocation of the clinamen (the mythical swerve of the atoms) in Lucretius when talking about historical contingency. (He, Deleuze, and the young Marx all seem to have fixated on what seems to me this most dubious — even if charming — aspect of Epicurean thought. I’m enough of a Leibnizian to believe in the principle of sufficient reason. I just don’t think that all determination takes the form of univocal causality.)

I actually enjoy Lucretius, and also found the strangely titled book about him, The Birth of Physics by Michel Serres, quite interesting. Lucretius is full of poetic descriptions of hydrodynamic phenomena. Serres argues that Lucretius considered the conceptual norm for matter in general to be liquid rather than solid; that he wanted to use hydrodynamic phenomena to model aggregate behavior of the atoms, always considering them in aggregate; and that this has widespread implications for thought. It is a not-so-atomistic atomism.

Interpretive Charity

Critical thinking and interpretive charity are both essential components of a rational response to anything. What a complete appropriate response looks like depends on the details of the matter at hand. Being appropriately critical does not mean turning off our charity, nor does being appropriately charitable mean turning off our brains. We aim for an Aristotelian mean. This applies just as much to ordinary social interaction as it does to the evaluation of theoretical claims. See also Reasonableness; Affirmation; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love.