Deontic

Having previously agreed there is no issue with deontically necessitating constraints analogous to the modal ones for material incompatibility and material consequence, I’m now starting to wonder if this might be as far as Brandom’s deontology really goes anyway.

When I hear “deontology”, I hear rigid rules for everything going all the way to the practical last instance, and feel compelled to defend the place of an always somewhat open Aristotelian practical judgment (phronesis) in contrast to it. But I would rather not attribute such rigidity to Brandom or Kant, both of whom emphasize kinds of rules that are actually higher-order. A simultaneously logical and ethical necessitation of respect for abstract principles like material incompatibility and material consequence can be fully granted without reducing what we should do in concrete situations to a deterministic formula. I want to say that first-order rules belong in logic and mathematics, not ethics.

It feels a bit ironic that I am the one effectively appealing for a need for freedom here, but it really shouldn’t. It’s freedom of reason, not any appeal to will. (See also Varieties of Ethics; Evaluation of Actions; Necessity in Normativity; Binding; Robust Recognition; Mutual Recognition; Euthyphro.)

Binding

Brandom says Kant understands all empirical activity as consisting in subjects binding themselves by conceptual norms. All empirical activity is thus implicitly embedded in an outer frame that has a value-oriented character. Brandom immediately acknowledges that the nature of normative binding in Kant is obscure and deeply entwined with some of the most problematic aspects of Kant’s work, “such as the distinction between the activities of noumenal and phenomenal selves“.

Brandom thinks Hegel better explained this binding, and that Hegel would approve of John Haugeland’s slogan “transcendental constitution is social institution”. Crucially, though, the social dimension is here conceived not as a putatively immediate communitarian identity of “we” but in an extensively mediated way, through reciprocal determination of attitudes and statuses over time by constellations of mutually recognitive I-Thou dyads.

I prefer to speak of a responsibility to differences and gradients rather than a binding. “Binding” sounds a bit too univocal to my ear to be a preferred usage. Responsibility can be materially real without being subject to univocal determination. It has the character of a material tendency rather than a law.

I’m not proposing to ban talk about bindingness. I’m just recommending that it be reinterpreted in this less obvious material sense that still allows for a bit of play in the determination, rather than that it be understood in the more apparent formal and strict sense.

In my view, all the processes of reciprocal determination result in very real material tendencies sufficient to ground all needed talk about responsibility, but we need not and should not claim that these real material tendencies have the absolute force of formal law. That is the difference between law and what is right. Law is to what is right as Hegelian Understanding is to Hegelian Reason.

Some abstract, higher-order principles do have the force of formal law, but their interpretation and applicability in actual cases can never be self-evident (nothing contentful ever is).

So that which is genuinely normatively binding is either only a real material tendency of responsibility, and interpretive work is required to discern it; or it is an open-formula higher-order principle, and interpretive work is required to apply it. If we intend to be ethical, we need to focus on that interpretive work. I believe the reciprocity of authority and responsibility and the reciprocity of mutual recognition both also point to a similar openness and a similar need for work. (See also Necessity in Normativity; Mutual Recognition; Making It Explicit.)

Untimely

We aiming-to-be rational animals are all deeply conditioned by our development in particular social and cultural circumstances. A truly great philosopher like Aristotle perhaps comes closest to becoming “untimely” in something like a Nietzchean sense.

Though I know of no explicit textual evidence for it, I wonder if Hegel resolved the material incompatibility between his mature patronizing attribution of naive realism about norms to the ancient world as a whole on the one hand, and all the insights he attributes to Plato and Aristotle on the other, by implicitly exempting them from the generalization about the ancient world. That generalization is sound at a broad sociological level, but we should not assume without specific evidence that sociological generalizations about a philosopher’s time and place apply to the philosopher.

Self-Referential Rules

Brandom says that concepts are rules. However, I want to remark that they are in no way associated with the objectionable, naive kind of rules intended to just tell subrational beings what they must do. Brandomian concepts are a self-referential kind of “rules that determine what counts as a reason for (or against) applying them, and what applying them counts as a reason for (or against).”

Conceptual, Representational

In passing, Brandom glosses Hegel’s famous contrast of Reason and Understanding as conceptual versus representational thinking. This seems worthy of a pause.

As we have seen in previous posts, Brandom argues that Hegel sees conceptual content in terms close to Brandom’s own inferentialism, particularly stressing the dual role of material incompatibility and material consequence in the constitution of meaning on the one hand, and in the proprieties of normative judgment on the other.

Brandom relates material incompatibility to Aristotelian contrariety. I have also related it to Aristotelian difference, which functions as a sort of n-ary contrariety. (Aristotle talks much more about difference than about identity, and this is no accident. He happily lacks later identitarian obsessions.) Meaning comes primarily from distinctions of form, not referential pointing. Aristotelian form — at least in one very important sense — is constituted by distinctions. The kinds of distinctions that are particularly relevant are those that impact reasoning. If you follow out enough of the consequences of materially incompatible things, for both Aristotle and Hegel you will eventually get a logical contradiction. Brandom’s Hegel is more interested in understanding how we end up at a point of contradiction and do something about it, than in using contradiction to allegedly explain historical change.

I also think that with the conceptual, there is always at least implicitly something normative or value-oriented. Brandom call this “Kant’s second master idea”. By contrast, representation seems to be purportedly value-independent. (Brandom tells us that Kant’s alternative to the representationalist view of representation is to treat it in terms of claims to normative validity.) Representation also tends to privilege identity over difference.

Most of what Hegel explicitly says about Understanding treats it as an overly narrow style of reasoning typical of, say, Descartes or Locke. Descartes and Locke are in fact the arch-representationalists of early modernity, but an association of Understanding to representation or representationalism is not in the foreground in Hegel’s text, so Brandom’s gloss of Understanding as representational thinking represents a significant nonobvious insight.

“Said of”

Aristotle seems to have enjoyed using expressions in a polymorphic way. For example, he very commonly writes that B “is said of” A. This never just refers to an empirical report of linguistic practice. It always should be understood to refer to a judgment that B is properly said of A. This in turn means all of the following:

It is apparently a fact that A is B.
It is properly judged that A is B.
It is good usage to say that A is B.

He is using one abstract expression to make multiple isomorphic assertions (in respective registers of objective reality, normative judgment, and linguistic usage) all at the same time. Too often, people assume these are all mutually exclusive topics, when they are not. By actually doing it in a simple way, Aristotle offers hope that we can talk about reality, and be Critical, and follow the linguistic turn all at once.

Brandom refers to Frege to begin to explain Hegel’s notion of conceptual content. Frege said “A fact is a thought that is true.” As Brandom points out, this is a nonpsychological approach. Hegel, Frege, and Brandom have recovered ways of speaking that include at least the first two of the three senses above, and I imagine Brandom at least would be sympathetic to the third as well.

We might consider the “it is apparently a fact” form to be materially implied by the “it is properly judged” form. I think Plato and Aristotle considered the “it is properly judged” form to be materially implied by the “it is good usage to say” form, as well as accepting the first implication. Good language use should be consistent with good judgment, which should be consistent with reality. So, by transitivity, “said of” (understood as shorthand for “properly said of”) would also materially imply both the others.

All three forms are inherently normative. This is most obvious with the second form, which is expressly concerned with judgment. But the form concerned with language use is about good usage, not any and all randomly occurring usage; and the form concerned with fact is really about normatively valid judgments of apparent fact. (See also Aristotelian Semantics.)

Translations influenced by the Latin commentary tradition render “said of” in terms of predication, which misleadingly suggests the purely syntactic way in which a grammatical predicate is “said of” its grammatical subject, and obscures Aristotle’s focus on normative logical assertion.

Postscript

Some time after writing this post, I came to the realization — reflected in Aristotelian Propositions — that “said of” may also be taken to directly express a material-inferential relation. Based on an analysis of implicit propositions like the one developed there — and recalling that A and B are canonically universals or higher-order terms — I now think the root meaning of “B is said of A”, is that if we have x: A, then it is a good material inference that we also have x: B. Goodness of material inference is what stands behind and justifies the initial formulation that B is properly said of A, and the other polymorphic meanings.

Rational/Talking Animal

Sometimes I think zoon logon echon should be translated more literally as “talking animal” rather than the classic “rational animal”. (Perhaps “animal” should be “living being”, but here I am not worried about discrimination against plants.) Logos was a highly overdetermined word that could also mean word, ratio, measure, or principle, as well as language or reason, but the linguistic meanings seem to be more primary. Within the Aristotelian corpus there are several longer alternate phrasings, of which some stress the linguistic aspect and others the rational aspect. (The human being is said to be a “political” animal as well.)

I don’t think Aristotle imagined human reason to be separable from some articulation in language. Thus I disagree with those who want to interpret nous (classically , “intellect”) as some kind of originary intuition. This seems to me very alien to Aristotle’s whole way of approaching things. (Plotinus did explicitly treat nous as something like intellectual intuition, and had major influence on later readers of Aristotle. I do think there is such a thing as intuition, but it is not a kind of knowledge and it is not originary.)

Echon is literally “having”, which applies better to the linguistic interpretations of logos, whereas philosophically speaking we don’t strictly have reason as a full possession, but rather a potential for it.

That said, “rational animal” accurately conveys our two-sided nature. We are animals, and because we have language, we can potentially participate in reason.

But regardless of how well we do or do not take care of things, this has the effect of making us ethical beings. Who we are will turn out to be more than anything a matter of the commitments we make. This is transforming.

Incidentally, nothing about this says anything that singles out our particular kind of ape. It just happens that we only know of one biological species that meets this very abstract definition, but this is a merely contingent truth. So, all the talking species in science fiction would be human to Aristotle if they were real, and if we could prove that dolphins had a comparable linguistic ability, they would be human, too. (See also What Is “I”?; Psyche, Subjectivity; Individuation; Happiness; Second Nature.)

Happiness

The translation of Aristotle’s ethical goal of eudaimonia as “happiness” is misleading. Eudaimonia refers not to an immediate feeling or attitude, but to a state of affairs that is judged to have been the case by an observer. Properly speaking, it can only be the subject of a retrospective judgment that what it was to have lived that whole life was good. The goal of living beings is to live a life that is good for the kind of beings they are. (See also Commitment; Ends.)

Therapy

Martha Nussbaum wrote a book on the therapeutic intent of Hellenistic philosophy with respect to emotions. This was a particular extension of the broader ancient idea that philosophy was not just a theory of the world, but the way to the good life for a rational animal.

It actually seems to me that there could be such a thing as clinical philosophy. (To the partial extent that I think I understand Lacanian psychoanalysis, that seems to me to be a significant part of what Lacan was doing. He would have disagreed, because he claimed to have a point of view superior to that of the philosopher, but what makes his work interesting to me is the philosophical content and the way it is related to the clinical context.)

Ultimately, I think it is hard to separate ethics from something like therapy. Aristotle did not think this way. He in effect considered ethical discourse to be for the happy few who really don’t need therapy. But if we push ethics in a more democratic direction, then we do need therapy.

Neurophilosophy?

Aristotle would be fascinated by recent developments in neuroscience. I even imagine there is some connection between these developments and the general spirit of Aristotelian biology, with its emphasis on contingency and emergence.

Some enthusiasts seem to think that all these exciting discoveries make traditional philosophy obsolete. Nothing could be further from the case. Philosophy is pursuit of wisdom, not just knowledge. New empirical discoveries may be endlessly suggestive of philosophical implications and stimulating to thought. They are not a replacement for thought.

There is also a danger that too much dwelling on physiology — no matter how fascinating its implications — may lead by default back to a very old-fashioned physiological determinism that ignores linguistic, social, historical, cultural, and ethical considerations. What is needed is a balanced integration of reflection on these new discoveries with broader philosophical concerns.