Unconscious Intellect?

If intellect in a broadly Aristotelian sense is at least partly nonpsychological and has a significant linguistic/cultural/social/historical aspect, how does the nonpsychological aspect relate to the psychological aspect?

Many 20th century authors, from Frege and Husserl to Lacan, sharply rejected the idea that thought should be approached primarily in psychological terms. Also, we should not consider the individual psyche to be like an island with unambiguous boundaries. Aristotle uses the single word ethos (the main subject matter of “ethics” in his view) both for individual acquired character and for culture. Character is a sort of micro-culture. Plato already famously compared the soul to a city.

Beatrice Longuenesse, who previously wrote a marvelous book on the Kantian transcendental deduction, recently suggested an unexpected connection between Kantian transcendental considerations and Freudian metapsychology. Meanwhile, at the end of the day, Kant ends up relatively closer to Aristotelian ethics than it would first appear. (Many scholars have debated the fine points of this, and Nancy Sherman wrote a whole book on it.) So what about an Aristotelian metapsychology?

Actually, it seems to me that Aristotle is more interested in metapsychology than in what we call psychology, and that his views on thought are better considered in this light. Frege and Husserl might part company with us here, but logically oriented criticisms of psychologism do not rule out all uses of metapsychology (or even psychology, for that matter).

Owl

Hegel’s famous phrase “the owl of Minerva flies at dusk” refers to his Aristotelian view that ends are more important than origins. Since Minerva (Athena) is the goddess of wisdom, he is also emphasizing that wisdom is the product of a lengthy development, and implying that it is in a sense backward-looking.

Euclid is reputed to have quipped that “there is no royal road” to geometry. This applies to many other things as well. Understanding comes gradually, through practical engagement.

Intelligence from Outside

I very much like Aristotle’s cryptic remark in De Anima about intellect coming to us “from outside”. Intellect is very far from purely belonging to the individual psyche. On other grounds, I think our very notions of self only emerge through social interaction, and not any sort of originary intuition.

In a certain sense, then, specifically human as distinct from animal intelligence is already artificial in the sense that its basis is not purely organic. It cannot be separated from our acquisition of language and culture.

Where there is still a difference between human intelligence and anything in a computational domain is in the normative, practical dimension of human reason, which does not seem to be susceptible to formalization. Practical judgment (phronesis) cannot be programmed. (See also What Is “I”?)

Machine Learning?

So-called machine learning is producing all kinds of results these days. People find it very useful. Given what it actually is, though — purely statistical analysis of uninterpreted data — I think it is very misleading to call it learning by the machine. The simple execution of numerical computations and yielding of results — no matter how advanced the computations, or how useful the results — is not normally considered learning, and does not establish intelligence.

There could be a more interesting argument over whether software implementations of formal reasoning represent some form of artificial intelligence. The problem is, you cannot get real-world conclusions from purely formal reasoning, so the appearance of intelligence is rather limited.

AI researchers recognized this early on, and came up with the idea of complementing computational reasoning with some sort of “knowledge representation”. Then, in a fascinating spontaneous development within this specialized research domain, the pendulum swung back again, and there came to be a broad consensus that “knowledge representation” was best approached as intimately interdependent with reasoning.

Passive Synthesis, Active Sense

Husserl suggested an intriguing notion of passive synthesis, which I believe in his view would be the source of what Hegel calls mediated immediacy. Something like this could help round out the Kantian account of synthesis, which is strongly tilted toward active synthesis associated with deliberate conscious acts. Language is straining here; passive synthesis is just short of paradox. I think the idea here is that “passive” synthesis is synthesis that comes to us more or less ready-made, based on previous syntheses we have formed or socially assimilated.

Something related to this is also involved in the Aristotelian notion of a “common” sense, which in effect synthesizes our experience of sensible things into a unified whole. Aristotle’s remarks are in a very minimalist style, but were developed in a little more detail by the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias. Kant and Aristotle both generally treat sense perception in passive terms, but Aristotle’s common sense clearly cannot be entirely passive. Many medieval authors working in the broadly Aristotelian tradition developed more detailed accounts of sense perception in general as also involving an active component.

These various efforts to describe such processes in terms that are neither purely active nor purely passive seem very important to me as laying the ground for a reasonable account of human agency, free of both voluntarism and simplistic determinism.

Preface to Historiography

Generically, historiography is writing about the writing of history. As applied to the section “Historiography for History of Philosophy”, I’m using the term in a slightly idiosyncratic way. Those articles mostly concern particular historical interpretations that I think significantly impact — or should significantly impact — other, broader historical interpretation, as well as interpretation of things in the present. Needless to say, this is difficult to divide cleanly from my other section devoted to History of Philosophy, but here the accent is more on the history, and there it is more on the philosophy.

I take historiography to be a kind of supplement to Hermeneutics (see dedicated menu section). Perhaps even especially as presented here, it stands in contrast with what Brandom calls Hegelian genealogy, which I highly value in a different context. The “historiography” here is largely concerned with things and perspectives that the retrospective teleology of a Hegelian genealogy largely filters out. It still involves all kinds of ultimately normative judgments in the process of making judgments of historical fact, but focuses mainly on discerning the irregularities, quirkiness, local retrograde movements, and specific materiality of the actual forward-moving succession of events.

Nature is full of purposes or quasi-purposes, but any appearance of pre-existing purpose or predetermination in history is an artifact of our story-telling.

Telling such a story is a delicate enterprise. There is no invisible hand guiding temporal succession, nor is there inherent unity unfolding in successive events. The raw material of history is strictly an accumulation of accidents. As much as possible, we should let the details speak for themselves. Yet we almost cannot help giving it a plot. This helps us orient ourselves. Inevitably, we select certain details as important and ignore others. We tend to give it direction and shape.

Independent of purpose, though, there is a kind of quasi-material accumulation of forms associated with temporal succession. (I mean that the accumulation associated with succession is independent of purpose, while the forms accumulated may themselves be purposeful.)

Succession has materially inherent directionality to it. Time only flows forward. Successive forms get superimposed on one another so to speak and become indistinct, resulting in something new and unintended, but cumulative. This is not progress, and there is nothing normative about it. It is a quasi-material analogue of arithmetic addition, indifferent to considerations of what is better or worse. But we may experience it as better or worse. And because it does have a materially inherent direction (the pile gets thicker, so to speak, and forms within it materially condition other forms), it is possible for us to take that direction in some purposeful way. We look at a raw accumulation of forms, and imagine a story that has some basis in the actual development.

It’s a bit mythical to speak as if there were two distinct phases to this. We don’t ever have the pure or original thing in a philosophical sense. But various kinds of accumulation are one of the significant features of temporal succession in a world, and we do have actual material cultural artifacts to which we can refer.

My use of “historiography” is also roughly synonymous with nonstandard uses of “archaeology” derived from the work of Michel Foucault, particularly as applied to the history of philosophy by writers like Alain de Libera and Gwenaëlle Aubry.

Univocity

Aristotle is the source of our modern notion of univocity. He was also the first to point out many things of interest that overflow our attempts at univocal representation.

Something is said univocally (i.e., without equivocation) if the meaning is the same whenever the representation is the same. This is an important, desirable property in logic, modern science, and engineering. A lack of univocity is one of the major sources of logical inconsistency or incoherence in representation.

A kind of univocity also applies to a Kantian unity of apperception. The unity of a unity of apperception is more or less equivalent to the univocity of an account of something. So since there is a kind of moral imperative to achieve unity of apperception or improve upon it, there is in that way also an ethical use for univocity. But just as unity of apperception requires constant renewal, so too do our attempts at comprehensive univocal accounts of things.

Aristotle frequently points out things that are “said in many ways” (i.e., not univocally). This refers not just to practices of ordinary language, but to meant realities as well (see Equivocal Determination). Being and cause are among the things said in many ways. He also points out cases where a more fluid, pluralistic approach is appropriate — the classification of animals, for instance — or just applies such an approach. Aristotle wants to be faithful to the variety, subtlety, and complexity of the world and everything in it. This is the famous Aristotelian manysidedness, often praised by Hegel.

Univocity is never simply found; it is a possible property of our constructions and passive syntheses. In the design of representations and schemas, there may be tradeoffs between coherence and correspondence, or consistency and comprehensiveness.

If there is an ethical imperative to univocity, there is also one to manysidedness. These are really two sides of one coin (a sort of responsibility our representations have to reality, as Brandom would say). To paraphrase Whitehead, we should seek univocity and distrust it. (See also Aristotelian Semantics; Mutation of Meaning.)

Althusser’s Hegel

French Marxist Louis Althusser (1918-90) was the academic director of France’s most prestigious university during the 1960s. He open-mindedly helped promote the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, and maintained personal friendships with other important figures such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Althusser left provocative, underdeveloped sketches of a historiography opposed to all forms of historical teleology or predetermination (see also Structural Causality, Choice). In 1960s Paris, this new historiography was considered inseparable from a strong polemic against any and all forms of Hegelianism or Hegelian influence in contemporary social thought. (See also Archaeology of Knowledge).

There indeed have been a lot of bad Hegelianisms to which this criticism legitimately applies. But much careful work in recent decades has by now, I think, established that it need not apply to Hegel himself. In fact, Hegel even appears as a major precursor of the putatively anti-Hegelian historiography.

Before his famous anti-Hegelian period, Althusser interpreted Hegelian Spirit as “process without a subject”. Process without a subject already anticipated the characteristics he later called “aleatory”. In the late period, he emphasized that history is about understanding results, not origins.

In an extremely different context and style, Brandom has developed a reading of Hegel as practicing backward-looking recollective reconstruction of the present rather than asserting forward-moving teleology or predetermination in history.

Aleatory Matter

The resurgence of interest in French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser has largely centered around his late concept of “aleatory materialism”, based on a reading of Lucretius on the alleged spontaneous swerving of atoms in the void.

Like most other recent French writers, Althusser had little use for Aristotle. He repeated many old bad stereotypes and counterposed a good Lucretius to a bad Plato and Aristotle, to whom he mistakenly ascribed — among other things — a modern-style univocal notion of causality. Althusser’s Lucretius, by contrast, stands for recognition of the contingency of events.

It is therefore all the more intriguing to note that Althusser was unwittingly recovering a key feature I have associated with Aristotelian matter. I like the Aristotelian version better, because it does not rely on a quasi-myth of a miraculous originary swerve, but just appropriately asserts the contingency of things.