Modernity, Again

Brandom is a systematic philosopher, and he has always been clear that his aims are not principally historical. Nonetheless, like Pippin, he considers it very important to argue that Hegel, despite all his criticisms of modernity and admiration for Plato and Aristotle, regarded modernity’s advent both as the single most important event in history and as fundamentally progressive. Brandom’s uncharacteristically telegraphic argument deliberately constructs coarse historical stereotypes, with a specific, edifying purpose in mind. I am a lover of the fine grain of history, deeply concerned with subtleties and ambiguities of historiography, and critical of clichés in the history of philosophy. Coarse periodizations in cultural and intellectual matters always trouble me. So, while highly sympathetic to the edifying intent, I worry about historiographical soundness of predications on coarse periodizations.

Chapter 13 of Spirit of Trust provides the best available clarification of the conceptual content Brandom means to impute to modernity. In the more careful treatment there, the order of explanation begins from a type based simply on what Hegel would call the determinate negation of immediate Sittlichkeit — a move away from the unquestioned governance of tradition. Association of this with a particular periodization is a separate, secondary move. Also, from the point of view of the edifying intent, conceptual content is what matters, not the periodization with which it is associated. So on two separate grounds, disagreement on the periodization would not really touch the main argument, which is good. (See also Alienation, Modernity.)

Having now completed a first pass through the book, I find the less careful language of the introduction repeated in the conclusion. This could be just an editorial issue. But some of the wording again sounds like periodization could come first, and again attributes major unexplained significance to Descartes, with no earlier signpost. (He refers to a suppressed chapter on normativity in early modernity that probably would have been helpful. I’m guessing it expanded on the role he attributes to social contract theories in the published text. See also Modernity, Rousseau?)

Let me try to forgivingly recollect what is going on here. In the very big picture, stepping away from tradition is progressive compared to never doing so, and Descartes did step away from tradition. In sharp contrast to the highly technical and deeply contexted discourse of the academic philosophers of his day, Descartes became famous for simple reflections in the first person addressed to a much broader audience and presupposing no acquaintance with other philosophical texts. That is to say, he became famous as an instigator of a style of writing. A kind of individualism and a kind of democratic impulse — both interpretable as counterposed to the governance of tradition — can be read into this style, so in very broad terms that gives it a proto-Enlightenment shape that undoubtedly inspired others. The large social/historical impact of his proto-Enlightenment writing style cannot be denied, regardless of the verdict we reach on the relative merits of his philosophical claims and arguments. He also tried to build a complete foundationalist system of his own, which for better or worse could be read as another expression of burgeoning individualism. In conjunction with this, he promoted a kind of know-nothing attitude toward previous philosophy, which if we are being very charitable could again be loosely tied to a sort of democratic impulse.

That said, while reflections in the first person are important in our social relations, to claim to derive the only true system of the world from first-person reflections is a terrible and extremely arrogant way to do philosophy. To think otherwise is a particularly bald example of the illusion of Mastery. The wholesale rejection of previous philosophy is another artifact of hopeless Mastery. The specific conceptual content Descartes gives us does little to improve the situation. (I’ve commented before on Descartes and representation — see the Repraesentatio post.)

The thrust of the famous cogito ergo sum was already anticipated in Augustine’s Confessions. A more detailed version was developed by Avicenna, in an argument known to the medievals as the “flying man”. He proposed a thought experiment, considering someone in counterfactual absolute sensory deprivation from birth, with the intent of asking whether awareness could be completely independent of sensibility. He argued that the person in absolute sensory deprivation would still be aware of her own existence, due to a pure immediate reflexive awareness intrinsic to the soul and independent of the body. This kind of claim would have been accepted by Plotinus, but rejected by Aristotle or Hegel. Medieval Augustinians, however, enthusiastically adopted many of Avicenna’s ideas.

More originally but even less auspiciously, Descartes argued for the incorrigibility of raw appearance qua appearance as an epistemic foundation. In Brandom’s Fregean terms, this gives us bare reference to an unspecified something, but no sense we could begin to work with. This kind of incorrigibility is a trivial truth, but because it is trivial, nothing of interest follows from it. As Brandom says, a contraction to appearance-talk is a refusal of actual commitment to anything. And we don’t want an incorrigible foundation anyway. What does any of this add to our expressive genealogy? It still seems like a node deserving of omission in a short account.

Brandom himself in his study guide to Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” says “the Cartesian way of talking about the mind is the result of confusion about the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic items, and the roles they can play in various sorts of explanation”. (See also Enlightenment.)

Genealogy

Aside from the critique of immediacy, one of the things that initially attracted me to the first web draft of Spirit of Trust was the discussion of edelmütig (noble-spirited) and niederträchtig (denigrating) attitudes, now concentrated in chapter 15. Though moderately acquainted with earlier sections, I had not yet grasped much of this part of Hegel’s Phenomenology in the original, so it was all new to me. I then read the view Brandom attributed to Hegel as an interesting anticipation of Nietzsche‘s critique of ressentiment. The published version, however, has a significant negative mention of Nietzsche (along with Marx, Freud, and Foucault).

The sense, especially of Hegel’s contrasting pole, is superficially quite different from Nietzsche’s, stressing what Hegel and Brandom call “Forgiveness” and I call interpretive charity, whereas Nietzsche starts from what he takes to be a sort of ideal type of an ancient aristocrat, and notoriously portrays this character as in a sense more hard-hearted than sympathetic. I never liked that particular aspect of Nietzsche, or the way he assimilates Plato to later religious attitudes I see as quite different. But there is a huge literature dispelling all the crude stereotypes of the hard-hearted Nietzsche that are abetted by some of his surface rhetoric. And even if Nietzsche avoided the Christian-sounding word “forgiveness” in favor of something like active forgetting, the essence of the ressentiment he is concerned to reject is holding grudges. Not holding grudges seems a lot like forgiveness. And referentially, Niederträchtigkeit overall still seems to me to pick out about the same characters as ressentiment.

Brandom is especially concerned to pick out the reductive naturalism of a preoccupation with causes of behavior at the expense of considering reasons for it as niederträchtig. This is a much more specialized focus. But reductive naturalism does unfortunately still carry a lot of weight today, and it does characterize numerous elements of Hegel’s account of the valet’s attitude.

In a passing remark, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Foucault are all said to share the niederträchtig attitude. Here I must part company. This sounds like the old “masters of suspicion” stereotype, which I have never considered well-founded. I don’t believe any of them intended to denigrate persons or to circumvent rational argument. They developed new forms of understanding (in the ordinary not the Hegelian sense). Especially in the case of Nietzsche, the great critic of ressentiment, and really for any such intellectual pioneer, the burden of proof for attributing Niederträchtigkeit should be quite high. (See Nietzsche, Ethics, Historiography; Interpretive Charity; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Robust Recognition.)

As much as I also want to defend the rights and place of reason more strongly than Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, or Foucault did, I don’t see any of them as wanting to simply replace explanation by reasons with explanation by causes the way Brandom says. (Spinoza in his account of human behavior and emotions seems to me closer to actually doing this, but still gets positive treatment in Tales of the Mighty Dead, as he should.)

Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Foucault challenged not Reason but rather the claims of what Hegel called Mastery, the nonrelation of which to Reason Brandom has done so much to make explicit. I don’t think any of them stand philosophically on the level of Aristotle or Hegel or Brandom, but they all had important things to say, deserving of far more than one-line dismissals. Marx and Freud did talk about causes, but they both also put a strong value on rationality. Nietzsche especially stresses what Aristotle would call character as a conditioning factor on reason. Foucault talks a lot about historical forms of rationality. Though analyzable in terms of determinate negation, his metaphorical “archaeology” was light-years away from an expressive recollection. But real history is not Whiggish, and at some point we need to address it.

I can recognize Brandom’s description of Whiggish recollective expressive genealogy in my own various attempts at intellectual autobiography. Brandom points out that Hegel’s lectures on philosophy of history, art, and religion also practice this kind of genealogy. (Bad histories of science do too, but I am not sure that is a recommendation.) I cannot guess what if any consequences Brandom sees for general historiography, or even the history of philosophy. But I think we also need to attempt unfiltered, non-Whiggish accounts.

He does clearly say that something that got filtered out in one Whiggish account may become relevant again in another. This would also suggest that attempting to work at the unfiltered level has some importance. (See also Mutual Recognition; Immediacy, Presence; Structuralism; Difference; Affirmation.)

Error

Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel highlight the centrality of the experience of error in any learning process. In section VI of the Conclusion to Spirit of Trust, he says this is “because the rational, conceptual character of the world and its stubborn recalcitrance to mastery and agency are equally fundamental, primordial features of the way things are”. This simple double-edged insight, I would argue, has been approached by many, possibly as far back as Plato. I have wanted to affirm both theses since childhood, without ever being quite satisfied with the level of inter-articulation achieved. Most authors are better in their treatment of one side of this than the other. I think Brandom has shed unprecedented light on how the bases of these contrasting insights are not only compossible, but actually interdependent.

Mastery as a model of rationality turns out to be a non-starter. Mastery turns out to be an anti-model of rationality, not the thing that putatively shows where rationality goes wrong. The pragmatic workings of rationality through the experience of error — analyzed by Brandom in fine detail — are in fact radically opposed to Mastery. Not only beliefs but the understood meanings of determinate empirical concepts have an intrinsic instability that cannot be reduced away. Rationality has to do in large part with a responsiveness to this instability — how we recognize our own conceptual errors and respond to them.

Many have written eloquently but ultimately onesidedly about the rationality of the world OR the failure and badness of Mastery or some analogue of it, without adequately developing the deep connection between these two. Brandom has performed a world-historic service to humanity in showing a way beyond this impasse.

Brandom says that for Hegel, there is and could be no set of determinate empirical concepts that when correctly applied would not eventually generate incompatible commitments in some new situation. Apparent brute immediacy gives rise to perceptual commitments that cannot be integrated into our previous best schema.

This is how immediacy has an irreducible role in experience — not as some foundational guarantee of mastery, but quite the opposite, as a sort of surplus ensuring the inevitability of eventual error from the most impeccable procedure, and hence of a need to perennially revise our commitments and possibly our concepts. As the disparity between subjective and objective forms of conceptual content, it is a principle of instability providing a normative demand for change. As Hegel puts it, the evanescent itself must be regarded as essential. This is the way Hegel recovers a role for something like Kantian sensibility or intuition as a complement to the conceptual.

As Brandom says, this requires reconceptualizing both truth and determinateness. Truth can no longer be simply thought of as a prospective goal (as if it were determined beforehand, entirely independent of our process of seeking it), because any fully determinate prospective goal will eventually be invalidated. One of Hegel’s great original thoughts is that genuine, deeper truth will not stay still, as it were. The principal locus of truth shifts to a truth-process.

Alienation, Second Nature

In chapter 14 of Spirit of Trust, Brandom points out a distinction developed by Hegel in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology between “actual” and “pure” consciousness. These turn out to correspond closely to practical and theoretical culture, respectively. Here it is important to note that “consciousness” is therefore a very different thing from the “consciousness” of the Consciousness chapter, where we began with a putatively immediate awareness and discovered that even then, every apparent immediacy eventually revealed itself as mediated.

Acculturation, and therefore the “consciousness” of the later chapter basically is a form of mediation. We are no longer making any pretense of beginning with the putatively immediate. Culture is very thick, and a long journey. More superficially, it includes all our attitudes.

In chapter 13, Brandom had quoted Hegel saying it is through culture that the individual acquires actuality. The “individual” here is not the atomistic psychological individual beloved of the Enlightenment, externally confronting objects and others, but a participant in Geist with some much more interesting topology. True individuality for Hegel is not given but emergent. Its borders are much wider, and not topologically closed. Atomic psychological individuals are a hallucination of the modern illness Hegel called Mastery. (Hegel explicitly says the pure “I”, by contrast — conceived after Kant as having no content of its own, but as a mere index of the unity of a transcendental unity of apperception — depends on language for its existence. Brandom reminds us that language is the medium of recognition, the sea in which normative fish swim; and that things said, in being public, acquire a significance that runs beyond what the speaker intended. The purely linguistic “I” becomes the focus of commitment and responsibility, which depend on linguistic articulation.)

In the same passage Hegel also speaks of Spirit as alienation from our natural being. Reading those words I sort of cringe, but in fact Hegel is not talking about anything like Gnostic or Plotinian alienation. The word has that heritage, but Hegel uses it in the same breath with actualization. This alienation is supposed to be a good thing. It is de-immediatization, which is just the other side of the coin of mediation. Hegel is here using an originally negatively connotated Gnostic and Plotinian word for what is for him a positively connotated Aristotelian concept of actualization, which Brandom associates with expression and making explicit. Mediation is in this passage allegorized by Hegel as, in effect, becoming strange (alien) to our putative atomistic psychological selves.

Spirit as alienation should not be read as any repudiation of nature. As Terry Pinkard points out in Hegel’s Naturalism, Hegel is in fact a naturalist, but of the expansive, Aristotelian sort, explicitly antireductionist. The difference with 2oth century naturalisms is that it allows for the emergence of increasingly higher forms of Geist and Hegelian “freedom” over a natural basis. In Aristotelian terms, 20th century naturalism only addresses “first” nature, the more primitive one. Aristotelian and Hegelian naturalism also recognize second nature that includes culture. Even though in other contexts there will still be talk of overcoming alienation, at least one meaning of “alienation” is just the move to second nature.

Independence, Freedom

Brandom points out that Hegel in the Spirit chapter explicitly contrasts the truly desirable form of freedom with the bad total “independence” or one-sided freedom of the Master. The voluntarism I have been concerned to reject effectively equates freedom with such independence. Some of Hegel’s superficial rhetoric about freedom leaves it unclear what kind of freedom is at issue, while seeming to repeat some voluntarist tropes. Pippin’s work previously helped me see past that. Here is another confirmation of what Hegel intended. (See also Freedom Without Sovereignty; Hegel and the French Revolution.)

Modernity Clarified

In chapter 13, Brandom expands significantly on what he means by modernity, and what he wants to contrast it with. Modernity in effect includes any determinate negation of what is now referred to perspicuously as a traditional attitude.

As we might expect, the traditional attitude takes norms as just simply given. That is just a type, and as such perfectly clear and sensible, raising no historiographical issues. Hegel’s examples from Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus Rex provide excellent illustrations of what is at stake. Before, I got the sense Brandom was predicating this attitude of a very broad chronological category that might include everything before Descartes, and this seemed wrong. I believe Hegel himself in this context speaks of the “ancient world” as an undifferentiated whole, which is similarly confusing.

Brandom already mentioned in passing that the first seeds of the modernity he has in mind were present in classical Greece. This now makes perfect sense. I would venture to suggest that within classical Greece, Sophocles gave poetic expression to the traditional attitude; the Sophists represented an early instance of modern subjectivism and alienation; and Plato and Aristotle were already postmodern in Brandom’s sense of recovering genuine normativity without the anchor of tradition. (See also Alienation, Modernity.)

Purpose, Contingency

In chapter 11 of Spirit of Trust, Brandom begins to talk about the interweaving of purpose and contingency. I may repeatedly revise a plan of action to realize the same intention. I may even redefine my intention along the way.

Only retrospectively, after this incorporation of contingency, can the intention be viewed as fully determinate. I look back and discover what I have turned out to have actually intended all along.

As Pippin and Pinkard have noted, this kind of Hegelian thought is also very Aristotelian. For Aristotle, it is only in this way — retrospectively — that we can make judgments about someone’s “happiness” or success in living a good life. Aristotle’s biological works are full of concrete examples of the worked out interweaving of purpose and contingency, but there are few other precedents for this kind of thinking.

Historically, thinking about purpose in the world was usually remapped to very un-Aristotelian notions of particular providence, and as a result considerations of contingency were suppressed. Explicit thinking about human purposes has usually occurred in unrealistically voluntaristic contexts, again resulting in the suppression of considerations of contingency. Early modern mechanism banished purpose to a supernatural realm, and attempted to reduce contingency away. Recovering this Aristotelian insight of the interweaving of contingency and purpose in a modern context was one of Hegel’s great achievements, and recovering that Hegelian insight is another great achievement.

Renaissance

Renaissance Aristotelianism has finally at least become a subject of specialized scholarship. Decades ago, John Herman Randall Jr. put forth the thesis that modern science actually originated from Italian Renaissance secular Aristotelianism, especially in the University of Padua. Consensus seems to be that Randall overstated his case, but he put it in very strong terms. A weaker version of that seems a lot more plausible to me than what are still more common attempts to associate modern science with Renaissance Platonism. Renaissance Platonism was interesting, but not remotely scientific or mathematical. People like Ficino and Pico and Bruno were actually more interested in magic.

Even theological Aristotelianisms always preserved a fair amount of naturalistic content. Unlike most medieval and Renaissance universities, the Italian ones were dominated by the faculties of medicine and law rather than the faculty of theology. Italian scholasticism therefore developed in a more secular context. Secular masters of arts played an important role across Europe, and theologians too addressed many philosophical concerns in a sophisticated way, so the distinction is relative. But especially strong currents of largely naturalistic scholasticism developed in Italy.

It is also a little known fact that more commentaries on Aristotle were produced in the 16th century than in all previous history. There is a good high-level overview in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (See also Languages, Books, Curricula.)

Intentionality

Brandom’s treatment of intentionality is extremely refreshing, particularly in contrast to the tradition stemming from Husserl that made intentionality a primitive. Brandom sees intentionality both as in need of explanation and as explainable. The explanation ends up tracing it back to purposeful activity, which Brandom thinks of in pragmatist terms and I think of in closely related Aristotelian terms. Though many other perspectives are possible of course, one might say that the whole of both Spirit of Trust and Making It Explicit have been devoted to this. (See also Scorekeeping.)