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.)

Aphasia

In most contexts, I have become quite convinced that meaning and intelligibility are inseparable from actual articulation, and that knowledge is the ability to explain. However, there are people who frequently turn out to have insight and understanding that goes well beyond what they can articulate. Perhaps the apparent difficulty here could be explained away by noting that actual articulation need not be immediately actual. But without by any means giving up on the linguistic turn, I suspect the neuroscience people may ultimately have something to offer us in this area.

I think transcendental subjectivity inhabits a space of conceptual articulation mainly conditioned by language, while empirical subjectivity is also conditioned by neurology, among other things. We should not be in a hurry to identify these two very different kinds of subjectivity, or to explain one in terms of the other. Rather, we should maintain the distinction, and work on the metaphorical topology of their interweaving. (See also What Is “I”?)

Stoicism, Skepticism

Brandom makes interesting connections between Hegel’s rather idiosyncratic discussion of Stoicism and Skepticism in the Phenomenology and the preceding discussion of Mastery. Stoicism and Skepticism for Hegel each in a different way reflect aspects of Mastery’s attitude that wants to claim total independence.

Hegel’s criticism of Stoicism in this context is rather different from my previously expressed issues with its foundationalism, claims of a completed system, and what the ancients called its dogmatism. My remarks probably apply more to the system of Zeno and Chrysippus, whereas Hegel’s apply more to the narrower ethical concerns of someone like Epictetus.

Zeno and Chrysippus are known only from references in other authors; none of their original works survive. Surviving references to early Stoic teaching often tend to be somewhat anonymous and generic. The details of the system are quite fascinating and worthy of study in their own right (see the collected fragments in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers; also Sambursky, Stoic Physics; Mates, Stoic Logic; and Nussbaum, Therapies of Desire).

Ancient Skepticism is also quite worthy of study in its own right. In addition to fragments, a number of works by the late author Sextus Empiricus survive. Ancient skeptics were mainly skeptical about theoretical developments. (The more extreme skepticism many modern authors have worried about in the third person seems to be a post-Cartesian development.)

Brandom says Hegel’s Stoics and Skeptics both refuse the experience of error that is crucial to the elicitation of conceptual content. On his reading, Hegel’s Stoic in, say, refusing to recognize physical pain, is both just being stubborn and refusing to address what turn out to be incompatible commitments, effectively denying the reality of the object in order to maintain the independence of consciousness at all cost. The Skeptic is just refusing to make any commitments at all, which is another attempt to maintain the independence of consciousness at all cost. Hegel’s point is that this attitude of wanting to maintain the total independence of consciousness from anything other is unsustainable.

Cogito

(Descartes aggravates me so much that I tend to rant. For a somewhat more constructive treatment, see Descartes Revisited; Gueroult on Descartes; Cartesian Metaphysics; What Descartes Proved.)

The “I think” of Descartes is perhaps the most famous example of what I have called a mentalist confusion of empirical and transcendental elements in subjectivity. Among other things, Descartes promoted an aggressive simplification of self/subject/mind into one simple foundational thing corresponding to a personal identity, while presenting this as a natural intuition. He also sharply privileged immediate presence to the mind. There are some very misleading passages in Kant and Hegel that appear to endorse a Cartesian “I think”, but Kant and Hegel’s own versions of “I think” were far more sophisticated, and fundamentally different. To begin with, Kantian unity of apperception and its analogues in Hegel are complex and shifting results and goals, not alleged foundational starting points.

Descartes is widely considered to have made nontrivial contributions to science and mathematics, although Leibniz argued that these were exaggerated. In any case, in philosophy I regard Descartes as mainly an arrogant pretender who really better fits the profile of an antiphilosopher. He simply refused to engage with the whole philosophical tradition, while replicating the Stoics’ dogmatic claim to possess a whole system of the world founded in certain knowledge. His abrupt dismissals of “dialectical subtlety” in favor of things allegedly simple and clear are mostly just bombastic rhetoric.

The famous hyperbolic doubt seems to me but a vast pretension, and a rhetorical ruse to clear the way for a foundationalist revindication of traditional values that was in most ways far less sophisticated than the arguments of medieval scholasticism. To claim to have doubted everything all at once is intellectually dishonest; we only doubt what it occurs to us to doubt. See my What and Why for a more reasonable alternative.

Descartes incoherently asserted both supernatural voluntarism (applied to God and man) and mechanistic determinism (applied to everything else). (See remarks on Descartes in Modernity, Again and Psyche, Subjectivity.)

Rereading Making It Explicit, I finally found a brief comment that better explains how Brandom somehow connects Descartes with some kind of revolution in normativity. It is pretty indirect. On p. 10, he says that Kant retrospectively read into Cartesian doubt an implicit requirement that we take responsibility for all our claims, and that we be prepared to justify them. This seems quite plausible, as a statement about Kant. Brandom offers his own account of the “notorious” failures of Descartes to adequately explain representation on pp. 6-7. In a nutshell, representation for Descartes is an unexplained explainer.

Thought for Aristotle and Hegel is in the first instance something shareable, determined by its publicly examinable inferential articulation. Cartesian thought, by contrast, is a private, interior affair. (See also Ego; Subject.)

Desire of the Master

Serious readers of Hegel have long known that he presents the Servant who learns about the world through work in far more positive terms than the Master. Mastery is a false freedom that is actually an obstacle to true freedom.

The Master effectively claims total independence, or authority without responsibility. Brandom renders Hegel’s critique of “the ills of Mastery”, “all these dimensions of defectiveness”, “the subordination-obedience model of normativity allegorized as Mastery” in wonderfully sharp terms. At bottom, “Pure independence is a Bad Idea” (underscore in original). (I would extend this diagnosis to voluntarisms theological, psychological, legal, political, and historical, as well as to claims of sovereign power. I say no power can even possibly be normatively sovereign or unconditional.)

Brandom characterizes Mastery by a second-order desire to have all its desires immediately satisfied (directly constitutive of reality), which ends up leading to a desire for a sort of imperial sovereignty that is inherently in conflict with anyone else having the same desire. Mastery wants its way with no other consideration and is unable to share power, like Plato’s tyrant. (To me at least, this seems a very undesirable sort of desire. All the desirable desires seem to me be sharable. But unfortunately, on a social scale we are still deeply afflicted by the Master’s desire.)

Mastery is thus also the totalizing impulse par excellence. Hegel’s very strong rejection of it is a fortiori a very strong rejection of the desire for totalization that has often been attributed to him, as far back as Kierkegaard. This is a veritable revolution in the interpretation of Hegel’s most fundamental intent, which also seems to be strongly supported by Terry Pinkard’s biography.

Mastery for Brandom is unequivocally an evolutionary dead end, not something to be rationalized and excused as somehow historically progressive. Only the Servant moves forward at all. This is huge. Our troubled potentially rational ape-kind rather desperately needs a bold clarity of this sort. Not only is Mastery not the answer, there is no convoluted path that makes it a justifiable means to an answer. Of course the Trumps of the world will not be enlightened by this, but we can be. (Marx may have been right that the leisure of a few at the expense of the many was a temporary historical economic prerequisite for the emergence of higher culture, but that is an argument in a material register, not a normative one.)

This is helping me with my difficulty over Brandom’s theses about modernity and an ethical importance of the Enlightenment. His usual wordings make me think of what I consider to be highly questionable Cartesian and British empiricist epistemology, then wonder what about this has to do with any new ethical insight. But there was also an important strand of rejection of Mastery in the Enlightenment, especially in France. I think more of the group around the Encyclopedia as documented by Jonathan Israel’s recent trilogy, whereas Brandom through Kant seems to be thinking more of Rousseau’s ideas about equality, and of the general idea of a social contract as partly anticipating Hegelian mutual recognition. (See also Ego; Freedom Without Sovereignty.)