Wittgenstein and Social Practices

I was fascinated to discover Brandom’s 1976 dissertation, which overall is an original reconstruction of the key themes of the classic American pragmatists’ approach to the theory of knowledge. A number of Brandom’s own characteristic themes are already in evidence here; others have yet to be developed.

The first chapter elaborates the basis for Brandom’s later oft-repeated but rather telegraphic references to the great analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) as a pragmatist, an identification that Wittgenstein does not make himself. Brandom argues that the main theme of Wittgenstein’s posthumous work Philosophical Investigations (1953) is a pragmatist account of knowledge, which aims to be a third way that is neither objectivist in the manner of Wittgenstein’s other main work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German ed.1921; English tr. 1922), nor subjectivist in the manner of the Cartesian and phenomenalist traditions.

Brandom sees late Wittgenstein as offering a more incisive argument for the centrality of social practices in an adequate account of knowledge than any of the “official” (self-described) pragmatists Pierce, James, Dewey, and Mead. He aims to provide the clear account of what is meant by social practices that the canonical American pragmatists and even Wittgenstein did not. Brandom himself here will still rely on a broad notion of community to ground the justification of claims, which is less sophisticated and less adequate than his later account based on Hegelian mutual recognition.

“But what is a social practice? I think that most of the misunderstanding and undervaluation of the pragmatists (Wittgenstein included) stems from their failure to give a clear and unambiguous answer to this question” (pp. 8-9).

“Social practices are best understood in terms of a criterial classification of things…. There are three basic criterial categories. First of all, there are things whose criteria involve only the attitudes and behavior of an individual person. Sensations are things of this kind…. Following Rorty, I call things for which we accord this sort of criterial authority mental. Second, there are things whose criteria are the attitudes and behavior of groups and communities of people. A particular motion is a greeting gesture for a tribe just in case they take it to be one…. I will call this kind of thing social practices…. Finally, there are things whose criteria of identity are independent of the attitudes or behavior of any individual or group…. I call this kind of thing objective” (pp. 10-11).

The second chapter of the dissertation builds on Rorty’s distinctive and original account of the role of “incorrigibility” in Descartes. I’ll address this in an upcoming post.

In later works, Brandom has often rather summarily dismissed definition and classification, as made obsolete by Hegelian recollective genealogy. I think his dismissals go too far, because they suggest that definition and classification are only ever applied in an objectivist manner, as if they simply fell from the sky. Such a suggestion does not adequately recognize the profound dialecticization that identity, definition, and classification already undergo in the hands of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For them, definition and classification are anything but taken for granted. It is precisely open inquiry into criteria of identity, definition, and classification that they commend to us.

“The criterial division is simply into things that are whatever some one person takes them to be, things that are whatever some community takes them to be, and things which are what they are no matter what individuals or groups take them to be…. Put another way, meanings, the things that we grasp when we understand something, are taken to consist of social practices by the pragmatist, of mental particulars by the subjectivist, and objective facts by the Tractarian [early Wittgensteinian] objectivist…. In the rest of this chapter we will examine perhaps the clearest sustained argument for the pragmatic rendering of meaning and understanding in terms of social practices, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” (pp. 11-12).

In later works, Brandom has usually discussed “taking” things to be thus-and-such in Kantian terms. Here it takes on a pragmatist coloring, and Kant is not mentioned. But the founder of pragmatism, Charles Pierce (1839-1914), was deeply influenced by Kant (and expressed an affinity for Hegel as well).

“The pragmatist must be able to explain how, by engaging in various social practices (which are things of the second kind, over which the community has complete dominion), we can come to express, make claims, and have views about objective matters of fact (which are things of the third kind, independent of the attitudes of any community)…. Pragmatism as a view of human functioning stands or falls with the project of giving some such account. No pragmatist, including Wittgenstein, has explained what it is about our linguistic social practices in virtue of which they are appropriately taken to involve claims about objective things” (pp. 12-13).

This concern with the constitution of objectivity — indeed the treatment of objectivity as something constituted rather than as something given, never-you-mind how, is a very Kantian sort of problem. Kant does not really address the social aspect that is in the foreground here though.

Next he gives an overview of the argument he will be attributing to Wittgenstein.

“There are three basic lines of argument running through the Investigations, corresponding to three ways which one might think of to eliminate the reference to social practices in talking about meaning and understanding in favor of things of the other two kinds, objective and mental…. In the argument we consider first, Wittgenstein examines the Tractarian notion that meanings are objective things, which objectively determine the correct applications of expressions. The second argument we will consider examines the Cartesian notion that meanings are mental things (such as images), which objectively determine the correct usage of expressions…. Third, we will consider the so-called ‘private language argument’, which I take to be an examination of the view that meanings, whether mental or objective things, determine correct occasions of use of expressions by a mental process. The argument in each case will try and establish the same claim, namely that whatever sort of thing one imagines as intervening between an expression and its use or application in concrete circumstances, that use or application must be taken to be a social practice” (p. 14).

“What kind of thing Xs are (meanings, uses, understandings in this sense) is a matter of the criteria which determine whether something is an X or not…. Wittgenstein will develop an answer to the question of whether something counts as meaning or understanding something (or learning, remembering, thinking, reading it) by creating a series of analogies (‘family resemblances’) to other familiar activities which share the criterial properties of social practices” (p. 16).

“The objectivist takes meanings to be, not uses or social practices, but objective things like words…. [S]ocial practices admit of a sort of indefiniteness or vagueness which objective things do not. Thus Wittgenstein begins his attack on the view that meanings are objective things and determine the application of expressions objectively (‘according to definite rules’) by asking whether the use of a sentence or a word must be everywhere determined by rules in order for the expression to have a meaning, or for someone to understand it” (p. 17).

In passing, I would point out that Plato and Aristotle too treat rules with a healthy skepticism. That is why Plato insists that good government requires philosophers, and Aristotle builds his ethics on deliberation and practical judgment.

“For some performance to count as an instance of a social practice is for it to be accepted as such by the relevant community. And this means that there can be a social practice without its being the case that for every imaginable performance the community has decided in advance whether it would be acceptable or not. There is a social practice as long as there is sufficient agreement about the cases which actually come up…. In just this respect social practices differ from things of the third kind, which are independent of the attitudes of particular communities” (p. 18).

The very notion of “practice” has an inherent open-endedness.

In Brandom’s later terminology, the constitution of normativity has an inherent dependency on attitudes. While it acquires a kind of (always qualified) objectivity, it does not originate as something objective.

“There is no vagueness about whether, for instance, a given word appears in the rule or not. Insofar as this sort of thing is left vague, one has not specified a rule or expression at all. The question is whether for an expression to have a meaning (or be understood) its application has to be similarly objective and definite, whether the syntactic objectivity must be matched by semantic objectivity. Wittgenstein attacks this sort of objectivism by pointing to the vagueness we tolerate in the application of expressions, arguing that the use of an objective rule or expression is a social practice, that is, that the criterion of successful application is its actual functioning in the community” (p. 19).

“The attempt to eliminate social practices generates a regress, for no rule generates its correct application to concrete circumstances by an objective process” (p. 23).

This point about rules is fundamental. While we can always try to express things as objectively as possible by formulating rules for the application of rules (and more rules for the application of those rules, and so on), this is at best an infinite regress, and there is always a remainder.

“An object, such as a rule, can determine a practice only if there are other practices, e.g., of responding to the object, in the community…. Wittgenstein explicitly draws the lesson that social practices, as things of a different kind from objective things, are ineliminable in accounts of this sort” (p. 24).

In a nutshell, this is what justifies Brandom’s characterization of Wittgenstein as a pragmatist.

“The social practices which are being contrasted with objective things in these passages are not strange or spooky things, and they are certainly not subjective” (p. 25).

At a popular level and even in some philosophical discourse, “pragmatism” is often treated as a kind of subjectivism. The full basis for rejecting this has not yet been elaborated, but it will involve a contrast with Rorty’s notion of incorrigibility.

“Mastering the practice is not a matter of following any set of rules, but rather of behaving in a way acceptable to the rest of the community. Rules may play a role in this, but need not. This line of thought can be brought to bear against the notion that cognitive functioning consists of manipulation of things of the first kind, mental events or processes” (p. 26).

“Mental things do not have an essentially different relation to such applications than linguistic rules did…. [U]nderstanding the meaning of an expression does not consist in some sort of mental grasp” (p. 27).

Again, part of his argument depends on Rorty’s innovative re-characterization of what it is to be “mental”, about which we will see more in a future post.

“The discussion of objective rules goes over to mental events and processes quite unchanged…. The connection between being in a certain mental state and understanding an expression is empirical. The criterion for being in the mental state is, roughly, that one sincerely think that one is, while the criterion for understanding an expression is that one be able to apply it in ways that the community accepts as correct…. The understanding one has of the meaning of an expression is so far from identical to a mental state that the state only becomes sufficient evidence for the understanding in virtue of a social practice of taking it to be so…. The mental functions here only as the invisible inward sign of a visible outward (i.e., social) grace” (pp. 28-29).

“Thus it is clear that the meaning of an expression may not be taken to be a kind of mental state which is elicited by the expression in the members of some population when they understand the expression, and which then objectively determines the use they make of that expression. There must be a social practice of applying the expression…. Wittgenstein is not claiming that mental states have no role to play in this process. He is claiming that they cannot replace the social practices of applying linguistic expressions…. [W]hat makes the performance correct is its consonance with the practices of the rest of the community, and this cannot be a matter of mental or objective processes” (p.30).

“The famous private language argument seeks to show that by the very act of making the language mine own, I must make it a poor thing…. The argument Wittgenstein makes is that ‘ “obeying a rule” is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule “privately”: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it’ ” (p. 32).

This is a decisive point: a “private rule” — one in which the one acting is identical with the one authorized to evaluate that one’s compliance with the rule — is no constraint at all. It is indistinguishable from sheer arbitrariness.

“For one’s authority over the character of his mental states and processes is complete. One is incorrigible about such matters, that is what it is for them to be mental according to our stipulated usage. What is wrong with such mental rules? What is wrong is that they cannot, in principle, be transgressed. Accordingly, they do not establish any boundaries between correct and incorrect usage, not even the vague boundaries induced by social practices” (p. 33).

In a footnote, he says “I am not taking into account the strand in [Wittgenstein’s] thought which would deny any cognitive status to incorrigible first-person avowals” (p. 33n). Apparently Brandom does not (or at least, at this time did not) consider this to be part of Wittgenstein’s “better wisdom” that he wants to emphasize.

This matter is a bit delicate. I suspect Brandom wanted to save the appearances by not throwing out a common-sense acceptance of first-person insights, but I am inclined to think that this reported denial by Wittgenstein is a necessary consequence of the argument. Whatever is in principle immune to criticism ought to have no standing in serious discourse. As Habermas says about the entry conditions for ideal speech situations, each participant must willingly submit to questioning and criticism. The delicate part is that the concern to save the appearances of common sense is also a legitimate one. But I think the legitimate concern to “save” a common-sense validity for first-person avowals and reports does not require giving common sense a strictly cognitive status.

This comes back to the Platonic distinction between knowledge and opinion. At odds with the mainstream tradition that “knowledge = justified true belief”, I maintain that there are many things that are legitimately considered to be objects of well-founded belief, but that still do not strictly qualify as knowledge in a strong sense.

He quotes Wittgenstein, “One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And this only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’ ” (p. 34). This is a passage Brandom frequently cites in his later works. I think it similarly means that here we can’t talk about “knowledge” in the strong Platonic sense that I uphold.

Brandom adds more support for my argument in the following.

“In a social language, the community which determines whether a given utterance is a correct use of an expression is different from the individual who utters the expression. There is accordingly room for a judgment of incorrectness. But in the case we are imagining, the individual who produces the utterance and the one who judges its correctness with respect to the original rule or definition are identical. There can be no check of whether a given performance is in accord with the rule which is independent of the performance itself. Indeed, there can be no evaluation which is not identical to the performance” (ibid).

“One may wish to call an activity with no rules whatsoever a game, but one may not then go on to claim that there is a difference between playing it and not playing it” (p. 35).

Next in this series: Seeming, Trying

After Virtue?

Analytic philosopher Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1981) analyzes what he calls the failures of 20th century moral theory, and argues that the broadly Aristotelian tradition has more to offer in ethics than any contemporary alternative. He calls the Enlightenment a failed project. Much of his argument is historical, which is unusual in the analytic tradition. He says he wants to do what Hegel calls philosophical history, which he also connects with the work of the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood. Macintyre thinks that the dominance of methodological individualism and what I would call subjectivism in ethics has made genuine dialogue about ethical questions impossible in the modern world. But he regards this as a contingent historical situation that could be changed.

Macintyre argues that traditional societies were in this regard better off, in that they had locally shared standards of evaluation that they treated as objective. These were always particular, and reflected no aspiration to the kind of universality sought by the proponents of Enlightenment. He makes this argument more interesting by pointing out the wide prevalence of historical cases in which the simple traditional moral univocity of a “heroic” culture no longer directly governs moral discourse, but nonetheless remains a reference point and an object of nostalgia or idealization. He applies this description to both classical Greece and medieval Europe.

By contrast, he notes the ubiquity of people talking past each other in modern morals and politics.

“The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on — although they do — but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture” (3rd ed., p. 6).

“From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion. Hence perhaps the slightly shrill tone of so much moral debate” (p. 8).

He attributes this impasse to a widespread, partially subterranean prevalence of beliefs resembling the “emotivism” that was propounded by a number of early 20th century British analytic philosophers.

“Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character” (p. 12).

Macintyre is constructing a polar opposition between a good Aristotelianism and a bad emotivism. While I am sympathetic to a great deal of what he adduces in the course of the argument, I think the conclusion is ultimately too strong and too simplistic. But Macintyre deserves credit both for reviving a kind of broadly Aristotelian ethics, and also for making a place for historical arguments in what were then completely unhistorical discussions of ethics in analytic philosophy.

“In the eighteenth century Hume embodied emotivist elements in the large and complex fabric of his total moral theory; but it is only in this [20th] century that emotivism has flourished as a theory on its own. And it did so as a response to a set of theories which flourished, especially in England, between 1903 and 1939…. The theory in question borrowed from the early nineteenth century the name of ‘intuitionism’ and its immediate progenitor was G.E. Moore” (p. 14).

Moore was one of the founders of analytic philosophy. He aggressively propounded a philosophy of “common sense” that would combat “metaphysics”. Although he developed an influential critique of ethical naturalism, he effectively reduces all ethics to mere opinion.

“Propositions declaring this or that to be good are what Moore called ‘intuitions’; they are incapable of proof or disproof and indeed no evidence or reasoning whatever can be adduced in their favor or disfavor” (p. 15).

Macintyre sees Moore as promoting an extreme ethical subjectivism. He sees most modern moral discourse as inconsistently incorporating both elements of radical subjectivism and other beliefs that are incompatible with it. He recalls the somewhat tyrannical practices of intimidation employed by Moore and his followers.

“But, of course, as Keynes tells us, … ‘In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility’ and Keynes goes on to describe the effectiveness of Moore’s gasps of incredulity and head-shaking, of Strachey’s grim silences and of Lowes Dickinson’s shrugs…. Moore’s followers had behaved as if their disagreements over what is good were being settled by an appeal to an objective and impersonal criterion; but in fact the stronger and psychologically more adroit will was prevailing” (p. 17).

“Purported witches there may be, but real witches there cannot have been, for there are none. So emotivism holds that purported rational justifications there may be, but real rational justifications there cannot have been, for there are none” (p. 19).

It is a terribly impoverished notion of reason that is incapable of justification in this way. Moore claims there is no such thing as rational justification of an ethical attitude, and the advocates of emotivism followed him in this. This is basically to say that all ethical views are arbitrary.

Ethical “emotivism” is thus both a form of radical subjectivism and a form of radical voluntarism. Macintyre argues that this kind of deeply impoverished and despairing view of moral phenomena is implicitly given credence by many who would not explictly defend it.

“Analytical philosophers had defined the central task of philosophy as that of deciphering the meaning of key expressions in both everyday and scientific language; and since emotivism fails precisely as a theory of the meaning of moral expressions, analytical philosophers by and large rejected emotivism. Yet emotivism did not die and it is important to note how often in widely different modem philosophical contexts something very like emotivism’s attempted reduction of morality to personal preference continually recurs in the writings of those who do not think of themselves as emotivists” (p. 20).

“The terminus of justification is thus always, on this view, a not further to be justified choice, a choice unguided by criteria. Each individual implicitly or explicitly has to adopt his or her own first principles on the basis of such a choice. The utterance of any universal principle is in the end an expression of the preferences of an individual will” (ibid).

This is the conceit of a choice unguided by criteria, and a consequent reduction of everything to arbitrary will.

“What is the key to the social content of emotivism? It is the fact that emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations” (p. 23).

This obliteration of the distinction between manipulation and non-manipulation is also characteristic of the Sophists who were confronted by Socrates. It is the cynical perspective that everyone is manipulative, so manipulation cannot be condemned.

Then in the absence of rational criteria for judging what is right, the only path left for morals is the bad one of the authoritarian command/obedience model that was already explicitly criticized by Kant (and Spinoza). Macintyre recalls Kant’s critique of it.

“On Kant’s view it can never follow from the fact that God commands us to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such. In order for us to reach such a conclusion justifiably we would also have to know that we always ought to do what God commands. But this last we could not know unless we ourselves possessed a standard of moral judgment independent of God’s commandments by means of which we could judge God’s deeds and words and so find the latter morally worthy of obedience. But clearly if we possess such a standard, the commandments of God will be redundant” (pp. 44-45).

This argument is based on the nature of commands. The other issue with divine command theories is that is that they surreptitiously depend on human judgment about applicability to particular cases.

As I would put it, obedience as such is not a virtue, and is not particularly conducive to virtue, though it may have utility in some settings. But Macintyre notes later on that in the early modern period, virtue was often reduced to the single component of obedience to the law, both human and divine. He contrasts this with accounts grounded in something like Aristotelian potentiality and act and teleology.

The argument proceeds at a historical rather than a textual level. His concern is not with a reading of Aristotle, but rather with the social import of common characteristics of the various historical traditions of broadly “Aristotelian” ethics.

The positive object of his investigation is “the moral scheme which in a variety of diverse forms and with numerous rivals came for long periods to dominate the European Middle Ages from the twelfth century onwards, a scheme which included both classical and theistic elements. Its basic structure is that which Aristotle analyzed in the Nicomachean Ethics. Within that teleological scheme there is a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature. Ethics is the science [sic] which is to enable men to understand how they make the transition from the former state to the latter. Ethics therefore in this view presupposes some account of potentiality and act, some account of the essence of man as a rational animal and above all some account of the human telos. The precepts which enjoin the various virtues and prohibit the vices which are their counterparts instruct us how to move from potentiality to act, how to realize our true nature and to reach our true end. To defy them will be to be frustrated and incomplete” (p. 52).

Such generalities are of little help in making specific choices. Hedonism is lame that way. But Aristotle treats the good too in a polymorphous way. And Aristotelian phronesis or practical judgment is at home with such polymorphism, just as Hegel in the introduction to the Phenomenology develops a kind of interpretation that is to be at home in “otherness”.

The reference to the 12th century is pretty specific. The historical center of gravity of his argument is the middle ages, not the Greece of Aristotle’s time, though he does make some interesting observations about the classical period.

“This scheme is complicated and added to, but not essentially altered, when it is placed within a framework of theistic beliefs, whether Christian, as with Aquinas, or Jewish with Maimonides, or Islamic with Ibn Roschd. The precepts of ethics now have to be understood not only as teleological injunctions [sic], but also as expressions of a divinely ordained law. The table of virtues and vices has to be amended and added to and a concept of sin is added to the Aristotelian concept of error. The law of God requires a new kind of respect and awe. The true end of man can no longer be completely achieved in this world, but only in another” (p. 53).

It is significant that he refers to “a teleological scheme” in the singular. This is in accordance with his claim that the theistic context does not essentially alter Aristotle’s teleology. Though his approach is historical, Macintyre does not aim to reach the level of a history of the different Aristotelianisms. His focus is on a global contrast between modern and premodern ethics.

In the history of world religions, there have been many that were non-theistic. By non-theistic I simply mean not theistic. Contrary to what etymology suggests, theism is not the genus of which monotheism is a species, such that its only contrary would be atheism. Theism is a particular kind of theology that is only possible in a monotheistic context. It makes especially strong claims, and is to be distinguished from other kinds of monotheism that make weaker claims, such as Stoic theology and early modern deism.

“Most medieval proponents of this scheme did of course believe that it was itself part of God’s revelation, but also a discovery of reason and rationally defensible. This large area of agreement does not however survive when Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism — and their immediate late medieval predecessors — appear on the scene. For they embody a new conception of reason” (ibid).

This early modern “new conception of reason” effectively claims that there is no such thing as what I have called ethical reason. It holds that reason addresses only calculation and facts. It makes any real ethics solely dependent on revelation.

“Reason can supply, so these new theologies assert, no genuine comprehension of man’s true end; that power of reason was destroyed by the fall of man. ‘Si Adam integer stetisset’, on Calvin’s view, reason might have played the part that Aristotle assigned to it. But now reason is powerless to correct our passions (it is not unimportant that Hume’s views are those of one who was brought up a Calvinist). Nonetheless the contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos remains and the divine moral law is still a schoolmaster to remove us from the former state to the latter, even if only grace enables us to respond to and obey its precepts. The Jansenist Pascal stands at a peculiarly important point in the development of this history. For it is Pascal who recognizes that the Protestant-cum-Jansenist conception of reason is in important respects at one with the conception of reason at home in the most innovative seventeenth-century philosophy and science. Reason does not comprehend essences or transitions from potentiality to act; these concepts belong to the despised conceptual scheme of scholasticism. Hence anti-Aristotelian science sets strict boundaries to the powers of reason. Reason is calculative; it can assess truths of fact and mathematical relations but nothing more. In the realm of practice therefore it can speak only of means. About ends it must be silent” (pp. 53-54).

What is lost here is reason as interpretation, as distinct from reason as calculation. The connection to Pascal is interesting.

“Pascal’s striking anticipations of Hume — and since we know that Hume was familiar with Pascal’s writings, it is perhaps plausible to believe that here there is a direct influence — point to the way in which this concept of reason retained its power. Even Kant retains its negative characteristics; reason for him, as much as for Hume, discerns no essential natures and no teleological features in the objective universe available for study by physics. Thus their disagreements on human nature coexist with striking and important agreements and what is true of them is true also of Diderot, of Smith and of Kierkegaard. All reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end. But to understand this is to understand why their project of finding a basis for morality had to fail” (p. 54).

Again he is going very broad brush with a rather unrefined notion of teleology. The great criticisms of so-called teleology by Spinoza, for example, only address the “external” teleology that is said to be from God and providence. They do not even touch the kind of purely “internal” teleology that is distinctively Aristotelian. (And in fact Spinoza’s conatus plays a role not unlike that of internal teleology in Aristotle.)

I also think it is an error to treat a telos or an essence as something fixed that could be known once and for all. Open-endedness is built into Aristotelian teleology (at least in Aristotle himself) from the ground up. For example, hypothetical necessity says that the animal must eat in order to sustain itself as a well-living animal of its kind, but the details of what it will eat and when and how are all matters of accident that are not predetermined.

“From such factual premises as ‘This watch is grossly inaccurate and irregular in time-keeping’ and ‘This watch is too heavy to carry about comfortably’, the evaluative conclusion validly follows that This is a bad watch’. From such factual premises as ‘He gets a better yield for this crop per acre than any farmer in the district’, ‘He has the most effective programme of soil renewal yet known’ and ‘His dairy herd wins all the first prizes at the agricultural shows’, the evaluative conclusion validly follows that ‘He is a good farmer’.”
“Both of these arguments are valid because of the special character of the concepts of a watch and of a farmer. Such concepts are functional concepts; that is to say, we define both ‘watch’ and ‘farmer’ in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or a farmer are characteristically expected to serve. It follows that the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch nor the concept of a farmer independently of that of a good farmer; and that the criterion of something’s being a watch and the criterion of something’s being a good watch — and so also for ‘farmer’ and for all other functional concepts — are not independent of each other. Now clearly both sets of criteria — as is evidenced by the examples given in the last paragraph — are factual” (pp. 57-58).

While it is a valid conclusion that the watch as described is a bad watch, I would call such a conclusion a reasonable judgment, and not a fact.

It turns out that Macintyre wants to defend a kind of ethical naturalism. This is the claim that value judgments can be derived from facts. I do not associate this with Aristotle or Plato.

“Thus we may safely assume that, if some amended version of the ‘No “ought” conclusion from “is” premises’ principle is to hold good, it must exclude arguments involving functional concepts from its scope. But this suggests strongly that those who have insisted that all moral arguments fall within the scope of such a principle may have been doing so, because they took it for granted that no moral arguments involve functional concepts. Yet moral arguments within the classical, Aristotelian tradition — whether in its Greek or its medieval versions — involve at least one central functional concept, the concept of man understood as having an essential nature and an essential purpose or function; and it is when and only when the classical tradition in its integrity has been substantially rejected that moral arguments change their character so that they fall within the scope of some version of the ‘No “ought” conclusion from “is” premises’ principle. That is to say, ‘man’ stands to ‘good man’ as ‘watch’ stands to ‘good watch’ or ‘farmer’ to ‘good farmer’ within the classical tradition. Aristotle takes it as a starting-point for ethical enquiry that the relationship of ‘man’ to ‘living well’ is analogous to that of ‘harpist’ to ‘playing the harp well’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1095a 16). But the use of ‘man’ as a functional concept is far older than Aristotle and it does not initially derive from Aristotle’s metaphysical biology” (p. 58).

I want to defend the “no ought from is” principle. “Functional” is a modern notion that fits better in a utilitarian context than in a teleological normative one. “No ought from is” reflects the autonomy of ethical reason. What we do have a lot of in ordinary life, though, is the opposite direction of “is from ought”. Ethical reason and interpretive judgment are “bottomless” or non-foundationalist. As Brandom says, it is normative all the way down, so all ultimate justification has a normative character.

Macintyre refers several times, without explanation, to “Aristotle’s metaphysical biology” as something he wants to avoid. I do not think of Aristotle’s biology as metaphysical in any of the senses that word can have. Teleology and essence in Aristotle’s normative sense do not make his biology “metaphysical”. (See my longer discussion of the explanatory use of teleology.)

“It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that ‘man’ ceases to be a functional concept…. So the ‘No “ought” conclusion from “is” premises’ principle becomes an inescapable truth for philosophers whose culture possesses only the impoverished moral vocabulary which results from the episodes I have recounted. That it was taken to be a timeless logical truth was a sign of a deep lack of historical consciousness which then informed and even now infects too much of moral philosophy…. To call a particular action just or right is to say that it is what a good man would do in such a situation; hence this type of statement too is factual. Within this tradition moral and evaluative statements can be called true or false in precisely the way in which all other factual statements can be so called. But once the notion of essential human purposes or functions disappears from morality, it begins to appear implausible to treat moral judgments as factual statements” (p. 59).

I don’t think the issues of modernity come from a failure to treat moral judgments as factual. I do think he is right about the weakness of ethical individualism, and about its historical importance for understanding modernity. Hegel has much to say about this.

The “roles” here seem to orient his notion of “functional” concepts. But roles are a much older notion.

Macintyre makes an interesting connection between modern methodological individualism and the denial of teleology. But I would not call any judgment a factual statement. What a good person would do is not a fact either, but a judgment. Ultimately I do not think there is any “is” that is completely independent of normative judgment. But he is very right to focus on the issue of individualism.

“[M]oral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices. In that context moral judgments were at once hypothetical and categorical in form. They were hypothetical insofar as they expressed a judgment as to what conduct would be teleologically appropriate for a human being: ‘You ought to do so-and-so, if and since your telos is such-and-such’ or perhaps ‘You ought to do so-and-so, if you do not want your essential desires to be frustrated’. They were categorical insofar as they reported the contents of the universal law commanded by God” (p. 60).

He refers to a “theistic and teleological world order” (ibid). Not long after writing this book, Macintyre began to explicitly identify as a Thomist. Theistic revealed theology is far removed from Aristotle’s modest concern to better explain things by starting with questions of value. But that of course does not mean that theistic traditions could not incorporate significant Aristotelian elements. Manifestly they did. Latin scholasticism generally had high standards of argument, and minimized appeals to revelation.

He briefly refers to the rise of the early modern notion of the individual that is so omnipresent today.

“What was then invented was the individual and to the question of what that invention amounted to and its part in creating our own emotivist culture we must now turn” (p. 61, emphasis in original).

Here he only scratches the surface of the history of subjectivity. There is far more to be said.

I sympathize with his rejection of deontological (rule-based) ethics.

“If such rules cannot be found a new status which will make appeal to them rational, appeal to them will indeed appear as a mere instrument of individual desire and will. Hence there is a pressure to vindicate them either by devising some new teleology or by finding some new categorical status for them. The first project is what lends its importance to utilitarianism; the second to all those attempts to follow Kant in presenting the authority of the appeal to moral rules as grounded in the nature of practical reason” (p. 62).

The claim that utilitarianism’s calculating reasoning about ends and means offers a new kind of “teleology” makes it clear how different his use of this word is from Aristotle’s that for the sake of which. Macintyre goes on to highlight utilitarianism’s weaknesses.

“[D]ifferent pleasures and different happinesses are to a large degree incommensurable: there are no scales of quality or quantity on which to weigh them. Consequently appeal to the criteria of pleasure will not tell me whether to drink or swim and appeal to those of happiness cannot decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a soldier.”
“To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes” (p. 64).

“[I]t follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. Hence when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use. To say this is not of course to deny that many of its uses have been in the service of socially beneficial ideals” (ibid).

The idea of making morals a matter of calculation goes nowhere.

“It was a mark of the moral seriousness and strenuousness of the great nineteenth-century utilitarians that they felt a continuing obligation to scrutinize and rescrutinize their own positions, so that they might, if at all possible, not be deceived. The culminating achievement of that scrutiny was the moral philosophy of Sidgwick. And it is with Sidgwick that the failure to restore a teleological framework for ethics finally comes to be accepted” (pp. 64-65).

It is not from a lack of seriousness that utilitarianism fails. We come back to G. E. Moore again.

“It was of course from Sidgwick’s final positions that Moore was presently to borrow without acknowledgment, presenting his borrowings with his own penumbra of bad argument in Principia Ethica. The important differences between Principia Ethica and Sidgwick’s later writings are ones of tone rather than of substance. What Sidgwick portrays as failure Moore takes to be an enlightening and liberating discovery. And Moore’s readers, for whom, as I noticed earlier, the enlightenment and the liberation were paramount, saw themselves as rescued thereby from Sidgwick and any other utilitarianism as decisively as from Christianity. What they did not see of course was that they had also been deprived of any ground for claims to objectivity and that they had begun in their own lives and judgments to provide the evidence to which emotivism was soon to appeal so cogently” (p. 65).

“Utilitarianism advanced its most successful claims in the nineteenth century. Thereafter intuitionism followed by emotivism held sway in British philosophy, while in the United States pragmatism provided the same kind of praeparatio evangelica for emotivism that intuitionism provided in Britain. But for reasons that we have already noticed emotivism always seemed implausible to analytical philosophers primarily concerned with questions of meaning largely because it is evident that moral reasoning does take place, that moral conclusions can often be validly derived from sets of premises. Such analytical philosophers revived the Kantian project of demonstrating that the authority and objectivity of moral rules is precisely that authority and objectivity which belongs to the exercise of reason. Hence their central project was, indeed is, that of showing that any rational agent is logically committed to the rules of morality in virtue of his or her rationality” (pp. 65-66).

The way that Brandom and Habermas make use of pragmatism puts pragmatism on the rational side.

Macintyre is dismissive of Enlightenment notions of natural rights: “the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns” (p. 69).

“The eighteenth-century philosophical defenders of natural rights sometimes suggest that the assertions which state that men possess them are self-evident truths; but we know that there are no self-evident truths. Twentieth-century moral philosophers have sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions; but one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument” (ibid).

Self-evident truths and arguments from intuition are well criticized by Hegel. Macintyre speaks of rights as moral fictions.

“A central characteristic of moral fictions which comes clearly into view when we juxtapose the concept of utility to that of rights is now identifiable: they purport to provide us with an objective and impersonal criterion, but they do not. And for this reason alone there would have to be a gap between their purported meaning and the uses to which they are actually put. Moreover we can now understand a little better how the phenomenon of incommensurable premises in modem moral debate arises. The concept of rights was generated to serve one set of purposes as part of the social invention of the autonomous moral agent; the concept of utility was devised for quite another set of purposes” (p. 70).

Not only are there issues with the hypostasized notions of both utility and rights, they don’t work well together. He says the same about empiricism.

“The empiricist concept of experience was a cultural invention of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is at first sight paradoxical that it should have arisen in the same culture in which natural science arose. For it was invented as a panacea for the epistemological crises of the seventeenth century; it was intended as a device to close the gap between seems and is, between appearance and reality. It was to close this gap by making every experiencing subject a closed realm; there is to be nothing beyond my experience for me to compare my experience with, so that the contrast between seems to me and is in fact can never be formulated. This requires an even more radical kind of privacy for experience than is possessed by such genuinely private objects as after-images” (p. 80).

“By contrast the natural scientific concepts of observation and experiment were intended to enlarge the distance between seems and is” (ibid).

“The empiricist concept was intended to discriminate the basic elements from which our knowledge is constructed and on which it is founded; beliefs and theories are to be vindicated or not, depending on the verdict of the basic elements of experience. But the observations of the natural scientist are never in this sense basic” (pp. 80-81).

“There is indeed therefore something extraordinary in the coexistence of empiricism and natural science in the same culture, for they represent radically different and incompatible ways of approaching the world” (p. 81).

I agree; science is more rational than empirical.

“What [the early moderns] agreed in denying and excluding was in large part all those aspects of the classical view of the world which were Aristotelian. From the seventeenth century onwards it was a commonplace that whereas the scholastics had allowed themselves to be deceived about the character of the facts of the natural and social world by interposing an Aristotelian interpretation between themselves and experienced reality, we moderns — that is, we seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century moderns — had stripped away interpretation and theory and confronted fact and experience just as they are. It was precisely in virtue of this that those moderns proclaimed and named themselves the Enlightenment, and understood the medieval past by contrast as the Dark Ages. What Aristotle obscured, they see” (ibid).

It is unclear to me why he says classical when he means medieval. Perhaps it is because some consider the term “medieval” to be derogatory, as it often is. The need for interpretation and theory is unavoidable.

“Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics (together of course with the De Anima [On the Soul]) are as much treatises concerned with how human action is to be explained and understood as with what acts are to be done. Indeed within the Aristotelian framework the one task cannot be discharged without discharging the other” (p. 82).

This is very true. As of the early 19th century, Hegel deemed Aristotle’s work on the soul (psyche) to be unsurpassed by any modern psychology. Things are more complicated now, but the level of abstraction at which Aristotle works seems particularly well suited for ethical purposes.

“When in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Aristotelian understanding of nature was repudiated, at the same time as Aristotle’s influence had been expelled from both Protestant and Jansenist theology, the Aristotelian account of action was also rejected. ‘Man’ ceases, except within theology — and not always there — to be what I called earlier a functional concept” (ibid).

I had not thought about Jansenism in this connection before. This is an important historical detail.

He points out that generalizations in social science lack predictive power. Oddly, he blames modern bureaucracy on a “Weberian vision of the world”. Max Weber described the rise of bureaucracy and worried about it. He was not its advocate.

Macintyre uses Nietzsche as a kind of foil for the theistic Aristotelianism he is recommending, referring at one point to “Nietzsche and all his existentialist and emotivist successors” (p.118). I think Nietzsche is a more complicated case. Like Hume, Nietzsche thinks that we humans live mainly by our passions and not by our reason. But in spite of his rhetoric, he continues to make many evaluative judgments and to write philosophically.

“The role of Aristotelianism in my argument is not entirely due to its historical importance. In the ancient and medieval worlds it was always in conflict with other standpoints, and the various ways of life of which it took itself to be the best theoretical interpreter had other sophisticated theoretical protagonists. It is true that no doctrine vindicated itself in so wide a variety of contexts as did Aristotelianism: Greek, Islamic, Jewish and Christian; and that when modernity made its assaults on an older world its most perceptive exponents understood that it was Aristotelianism that had to be overthrown. But all these historical truths, crucial as they are, are unimportant compared with the fact that Aristotelianism is philosophically the most powerful of pre-modern modes of moral thought. If a premodern view of morals and politics is to be vindicated against modernity, it will be in something like Aristotelian terms or not at all” (ibid).

It is a fascinating historical fact that after being almost entirely eclipsed shortly after Aristotle’s death, Aristotle’s influence grew continuously in the early centuries CE, to the point where Islamic, Jewish, Christian, and possibly also Zoroastrian scholars all came to regard him as the greatest philosopher of antiquity. The succession of dominant philosophies from Stoicism in the early Hellenistic period, through neoplatonism, and finally to Aristotelianism seems to me like one of the more plausible cases of historical “progress”.

“What then the conjunction of philosophical and historical argument reveals is that either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place. There is no third alternative and more particularly there is no alternative provided by those thinkers at the heart of the contemporary conventional curriculum in moral philosophy, Hume, Kant and Mill. It is no wonder that the teaching of ethics is so often destructive and skeptical in its effects upon the minds of those taught” (ibid).

This polarity is overdrawn. Nietzsche’s critique of the hollowness of modern values can be radicalized or moderated. I have documented unexpected links between Aristotle, Plato, Kant, and Hegel, and it seems to me that this does represent a third way. Aristotle’s own distinctive notion of a teleological openness within things is “ethical”, and neither providential nor utilitarian.

“It is yet another of Nietzsche’s merits that he joins to his critique of Enlightenment moralities a sense of their failure to address adequately, let alone to answer the question: what sort of person am I to become? This is in a way an inescapable question in that an answer to it is given in practice in each human life. But for characteristically modern moralities it is a question to be approached only by indirection. The primary question from their standpoint has concerned rules: what rules ought we to follow? And why ought we to obey them? And that this has been the primary question is unsurprising when we recall the consequences of the expulsion of Aristotelian teleology from the moral world” (pp. 118-119).

Here he points out a more global issue with the rule-based character of deontological ethics: it has nothing to say about the human character that is all-important for ethics in an Aristotelian context. But in his campaign against emotivism, Macintyre wants to completely deny the kind of positive view of moral sentiment that is to be found for instance in Shaftesbury.

Human character for Aristotle is fundamentally shaped by emotional disposition. Without a “reasonable” emotional disposition, Aristotelian ethics cannot begin.

“The virtues are sentiments, that is, related families of dispositions and propensities regulated by a higher-order desire, in this case a desire to act from the corresponding moral principles’, asserts John Rawls, one of the latest moral philosophers of modernity … and elsewhere he defines ‘the fundamental moral virtues’ as ‘strong and normally effective desires to act on the basic principles of right…. Hence on the modern view the justification of the virtues depends upon some prior justification of rules and principles; and if the latter become radically problematic, as they have, so also must the former'” (p. 119).

He is quite right, of course, that most appeals to sentiment do not take the high ground shared by Aristotle and Shaftesbury.

He broadly counterposes virtue to rules.

“[S]uppose that we need to attend to virtues in the first place in order to understand the function and authority of rules; we ought then to begin the enquiry in the quite different way from that in which it is begun by Hume or Diderot or Kant or Mill. On this interestingly Nietzsche and Aristotle agree” (ibid).

This seems well said.

Primordial Choice?

Plotinus speaks of a primordial choice implicitly made by every human: to turn either toward the separated soul, or away from it. The idea is that such a choice comes first, and is not conditioned by anything. This is completely unlike Aristotle’s treatment of choice.

Aristotle discusses choice in the context of concrete ethical doings. A choice is the outcome of a deliberation, not something undertaken in a vacuum. Our freedom consists in many such choices, based on reasons. Our unfreedom consists in part in constraint by the cumulative consequences of all our previous choices.

(I call this particular kind of unfreedom superficial because because it is “unfree” mainly in the shallow sense that it is not completely unconditioned. A conditioning grounded in reasons that we assent to is very unlike a conditioning by relations of force. In a deeper sense, a grounding in reasons doesn’t at all make us less free; indeed, many philosophers have made a grounding in reasons the very criterion of freedom. Of course, our choices may also have unintended consequences, and we have to live with these as well. That is a less superficial unfreedom. And we may be swayed by passion or imagination, which is another kind. Or we may be constrained by relations of force.)

In modern times, various writers have abstracted the notion of unconditioned choice even further, so that in principle anything could be a matter of purely arbitrary decision. Completely unconditioned choice can only be arbitrary. Here lie the seeds of tyranny. (See also Desire of the Master.)

Operativity?

Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (2013) by Giorgio Agamben is the sixth book of a nine- or ten-volume series growing out of his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). In the course of it, he propounds his own variant of Heidegger’s “history of (the forgetting of) Being”. Like Heidegger, he seems to partly blame Aristotle for later historical developments that he casts in a very negative light. He particularly claims that Aristotle’s distinction of potentiality and actuality and Aristotle’s thesis of the priority of actuality — both of which I find to be extremely valuable good things — are the ultimate root of various modern evils. I also could not endorse his negative remarks about Kant. But many of the details of his analysis are quite fascinating. This will be another longer post.

Agamben is an eminent Italian scholar whose major influences include Heidegger, Foucault, and Walter Benjamin. He has written in depth about the ethical consequences of the existence of concentration camps. He has analyzed the wider implications of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s grounding of claims for the absolute sovereignty of the modern state in a voluntaristic theology of omnipotence. (But lately, some people have thought he went off the deep end vociferously opposing Covid vaccination.)

He begins, “Only what is effective, and as such governable and efficacious, is real: this is the extent to which office, under the guise of the humble functionary or the glorious priest, has changed from top to bottom the rules of first philosophy as much as those of ethics” (preface). [For this I tried an online Kindle edition, which is not so good for citation. There is only one page number for each two pages of the printed book, and the preface has no page numbers.]

The rhetoric here is reminiscent of Foucault’s “archaeological” period, and indeed the fine grain of his analysis noticeably follows an “archaeological” method as well, bringing up many distinctions that are typically blurred together in more conventional historical writing that aims to produce a simple, unified narrative. I find it encouraging to see that others have picked up Foucault’s “archaeological” approach, while turning it toward the history of philosophy. Agamben here offers an archaeology of selected elements of Western (especially Catholic) religious practice that he thinks have philosophical and broader social importance.

Agamben summarizes Heidegger’s discussion of the way medieval Latin translations of various Aristotelian philosophical terms changed their meaning as focusing on how the meanings were changed to make them compatible with creationism. Aquinas’ sophisticated philosophical defense of creation from nothing seems to be a major implicit target of Heidegger’s critique, though he does not mention Aquinas by name. An important part of Heidegger’s critique has to do with the same medieval developments promoting the status of so-called efficient causality and changing its meaning that I have been pointing out (most recently, here).

A major thesis of Agamben’s book is that the “new” notion of efficient causality originated much earlier than Heidegger places it, among the early Christian church fathers and some Roman writers they read, like Quintillian (1st century CE) and Calcidius (4th century). (Of course, that it was a notion of “efficient causality” would not have been recognized by authors unfamiliar with Aristotle.)

Agamben argues that this was associated primarily with accounts of the efficacity of the mass rather than the doctrine of creation. He posits the officium (“office”) of the priest performing the sacraments as the original model for a new kind of efficient cause, and argues that it was applied originally in theological notions of “governance” and “economy”, even though it could also serve as a model for creation. He emphasizes that the officium of the priest completely separates the action of performing the mass from the subject who performs it, which is what allows the mass to be effective as the work of God even if the priest who performs it is sinful.

He is particularly examines Latin uses of the term effectus. He notes that Quintilian distinguishes between arts in actu or in agendo like dance, “which has its end in itself and does not leave behind any work once the act is ended” (p. 43), and arts in effectu like painting, “which reaches its end in a work” (ibid). An opus is the effectus of an operatio. This passage from Quintillian is cited by 4th century Church Father Ambrose.

Agamben writes, “in truth [Ambrose] is moving in an ontological dimension that has nothing to do with Aristotle. What is in question is not the mode of being and the permanence of a form and a substance (that is, of a being that, in Aristotelian terms ‘is what it was’) but a dislocation of being into the sphere of praxis, in which being is what it does, is its operativity itself…. The work, which was in Aristotle the paradigm of being, is here only the proof and the effect of a working…. The ontological status of the liturgical act, of the opus Dei, in which being and praxis, effectiveness and effect, operation and work, opus operatum and opus operans are inseparably intertwined, here has its obscure precursor…. What is decisive here is that it is a specifically artistic operation (theatrical or choral) that furnishes a new ontological-practical paradigm, that is to say, that what is in question is not an ethical paradigm, but a particular technical paradigm. While Aristotle in fact considered the work (ergon) as the telos of the artisan or artist’s poiesis, here, by means of the paradigm of performing arts like dance and theater, which are by definition without a work, the telos is no longer the work, but the artis effectio (execution of the art)” (p. 44).

Again, there is no indication that the authors in question were even aware of how Aristotle used the corresponding terms.

What someone (not me) might call the “dislocation of being into the sphere of praxis” is by my reckoning a major part of what Aristotle himself aimed to achieve in the texts that make up what is conventionally called the Metaphysics. (But praxis is not really one of my words in English; I don’t think of it as a dislocation; and I think this still puts too much emphasis on “being” at the expense of things that matter more to Aristotle.) On my view, Aristotle in the Metaphysics offers a deliberately deflationary account of being as such, while devoting his main attention to a kind of teleological meta-ethics that constitutes what could equally be called first philosophy or “wisdom” or a kind of philosophical “theology”.

The example from Quintillian also poses an interesting question as to what Aristotle would say about dance or theatrical performance. The Poetics is mainly concerned with written works such as the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and only very secondarily with performance on stage. The writing of the works in question would be a standard case of poieisis (making or productive doing; root of English “poetry”). I’m inclined to think that the performative aspect of music, dance, or theater is better understood as a corner case of the mainly ethical non-productive simple doing that Aristotle calls praxis in Greek (root of English “practice”).

I don’t think it’s accurate to claim that this focus on performative doing in itself necessarily reflects or results in an essentially “technical” paradigm, even though artistic technique is involved in the examples. In calling it “technical”, Agamben implicitly invokes Heidegger’s fulminations against the modern technological world. I find it stilted to speak of doing performative art as an “operation”.

I think Aristotle wants us to see being largely in terms of doing. I don’t at all see a dichotomy of being versus doing in Aristotle, though maybe there is such a dichotomy between doing and “Aristotelian being according to Heidegger”. The ostensibly Aristotelian baseline to which Agamben compares later developments seems to be more assumed than argued for, and what he assumes is Heidegger’s concoction of being as presence.

“It is from this semantic constellation that an ontological paradigm is progressively elaborated among the Christian authors in which the decisive characteristics of being are no longer energeia and entelecheia but effectiveness and effect. It is from this perspective that one must consider the appearance in the Fathers, around the middle of the third century, of the terms efficacia and efficiencia, closely linked to effectus and used in a technical sense to translate (and betray) the Greek energeia” (ibid).

This tells us that the terms used in the eventual medieval translations of Aristotle to Latin already had well-established theological usages, which could not help but color the way that Aristotle was read in Latin. That is very important to know.

On the other hand, I’m already starting to think it is too broad a brush to associate any and all appeals to any kind of efficacy or effectiveness with the same criticisms that apply to more specific medieval and early modern uses of “efficient cause”.

Agamben points out that in explaining efficacia and efficiencia, Rufinus (340-410) gives the example of “the work of the blacksmith or of the one who effectu operis agit, renders his work effective (literally, ‘acts with the effectiveness of the work, with its operativity’). The thing and the work, considered inseparably in their effectiveness and in their function: this is the new ontological dimension that is substituted for the Aristotelian energeia. And it is interesting to note that before finding its canonical translation as potentia–actualitas, the couple dynamis-energeia had been rendered by the Latin Fathers as possibilitas–efficacia (effectus)” (p. 46).

By analogy with the housebuilding example from the Physics, Aristotle would say that properly speaking, the “source of motion” of the blacksmith’s work is the art of blacksmithing. Clearly Rufinus is speaking of something different.

It seems that Agamben implicitly wants to oppose any reliance on a concept of function. This is again an extremely sweeping condemnation, going far beyond specific notions of efficient cause.

He mentions that that “in Paul (and in his Latin translators) energeia indicates not a mode of being but the effectuation of a potency, the operation through which it receives reality and produces determinate effects” (p. 47).

This is also very important to know. Again, we have a pre-existing usage (this time in New Testament Greek) that would have encouraged distinctly non-Aristotelian interpretation of a key Aristotelian term among early Christian readers. The word energeia — which Aristotle had coined as a technical term for the most important modality of being (of which the first cause is the pure instance) — has entered into general circulation and lost its original precise meaning. It is used for a kind of happening in Paul.

“It is in Augustine (De gratia Christi et peccato originalis 1.4.5) that we find confirmed with perfect awareness the pertinence of effectus in ontology” (p. 46). Agamben concentrates on Augustine’s restatement of an argument by Pelagius that I won’t repeat. He concludes, “What is decisive is no longer the work as a stable dwelling in presence but operativity, understood as a threshold in which being and acting, potential and act, working and work, efficacy and effect, Wirkung and Wirklichkeit enter into a reciprocal tension and tend to become undecidable. This tension and this undecidability define the liturgical mystery that the Church recognizes as its most proper and highest task” (p. 47).

The stable dwelling in presence is Heidegger again. I think Aristotelian entelechy is a more nuanced concept, involving a kind of higher-order consistency in the pursuit within becoming of a goal that may itself be open-ended. Simple presence (even “presencing”) just is not an Aristotelian concept.

“The place where the ontology of effectiveness finds its complete expression is the theory of the sacrament as sign, elaborated by the scholastics from Berengar of Tours and Hugh of St. Victor up to Aquinas. According to this theory, what defines the sacraments is their being at once a sign and the cause of that of which they are a sign” (ibid).

“The decisive characteristic of the new effective ontology is operativity, to which the coinage of the adjective operatorius [by Ambrose] and, even earlier, the enormous diffusion of the term operatio (extremely rare in classical Latin…) both testify” (p. 48).

This linguistic point is again significant. I recall that variants of operatio play an important role in surviving manuscripts of the 13th century arts master Siger of Brabant, who not only was not a theologian, but was considered radically secular by some. This anecdotally supports the “enormous diffusion” of operatio.

Discussing a passage from Marius Victorinus, the Latin translator of Plotinus, on the Trinity Agamben concludes that the author is saying “operativity itself is being and being is in itself operative” (p. 50).

“[T]he mystery [of the liturgy] is the effect; what is mysterious is effectiveness, insofar as in it being is resolved into praxis and praxis is substantiated into being” (p. 54). “The sacramental celebration only causes the divine economy to be commemorated and rendered each time newly effective” (ibid).

“To what extent this effective ontology, which has progressively taken the place of classical ontology, is the root of our conception of being — to what extent, that is to say, we do not have at our disposal any experience of being other than operativity — this is the hypothesis that all genealogical research on modernity will have to confront” (ibid).

Maybe. But as broadly as he has defined it, in spite of all my scruples about “efficient causality” and sympathy for his concerns about sovereignty, etc., I would most certainly by Agamben’s lights be a captive of operativity, too, just for taking seriously the interplay between being and doing.

This kind of massively global generalization (a “metaphysics of operativity” applicable to nearly everything) is a recipe for confusing apples with alligators, so to speak. Too many different things are all being thrown together, which seems ironic and very unfortunate after all the careful “archaeological” scholarship oriented toward making additional distinctions.

Just to be clear, Agamben is the one calling these theological views views an “ontology” or a “metaphysics”.

“In the paradigm of operativity, a process that was present from the very beginning of Western ontology, even if in a latent form, reaches its culmination: the tendency to resolve, or at least to indeterminate, being into acting. In this sense the potential-act distinction in Aristotle is certainly ontological (dynamis and energeia are ‘two ways in which being is said’): nevertheless, precisely because it introduces a division into being and afterwards affirms the primacy of energeia over dynamis, it implicitly contains an orientation of being toward operativity. This distinction constitutes the originary nucleus of the ontology of effectiveness, whose very terminology takes form, as we have seen, by means of a translation of the term energeia. Being is something that must be realized or brought-into-work: this is the decisive characteristic that Neoplatonism and Christian theology develop, starting from Aristotle, but in what is certainly a non-Aristotelian perspective” (p. 57).

Now he says the paradigm of operativity was “present from the beginning”, meaning in Aristotle. How could the potential-act distinction “introduce a division into being” for a thinker whose most indisputable and elementary view of being is that it is said in many ways? There is no hint that he recognizes either Aristotle’s explicit subordination of sources of motion to that-for-the-sake-of-which, or his far from immediately “operative” paradigm for so-called efficient causality in something like the art of building.

Where Agamben says “certainly ontological”, this seems to recall Heidegger’s idiosyncratic specification that ontology is supposed to be about Being and not about beings. Agamben equivocates on the word “being”, substituting an extravagant and unitary Heideggerian meaning for Aristotle’s deflationary and multiple one based on uses of the word “is” in speech. (I get the impression that Heidegger detests Aquinas, and thus find it ironic how much he in a way ended up imitating him, in raising Being to the lofty heights.)

“The place and the moment when classical ontology begins that transformation is the theory of the hypostases [the One, Intellect, and Soul] in Plotinus (which will exercise a decisive influence on Augustine’s trinitarian doctrine through Marius Victorinus)…. [O]ntology is conceived fundamentally as a realization and a hypostatic process of putting-to-work, in which the categories of classical ontology (being and praxis, potential and act) tend to be indeterminated and the concept of will, as we shall see, develops a central function” (ibid).

Now we are back to talking about a major transformation in the hands of Plotinus and the church fathers, rather than continuity from the beginning. This part seems relatively much more solid, though I have doubts whether there is such a thing as “classical ontology”. The Greek term for the persons of the Trinity was none other than that used by Plotinus for his three “hypostases”. Augustine regarded his reading of Plotinus as second only to his conversion to Christianity among the milestones of his life. Agamben correctly points out that there is a connection between the way Plotinus introduces something like a kind of dynamism into the eternal, on the one hand, and the subtle mutual relations of the persons of the Trinity in Augustine on the other.

He quotes from Heidegger’s 1941 course “Metaphysics as History of Being”, referring to the conceptual transformations that accompanied the latinization of Aristotle: “Now ergon becomes the opus of the operari, the factum of the facere, the actus of the agire. The ergon is no longer what is freed in the openness of presencing, but what is effected in working. The essence of the ‘work’ is no longer ‘workness’ in the sense of distinctive presencing in the open, but rather the ‘reality’ of a real thing which rules in working and is fitted into the procedure of working. Having progressed from the beginning essence of energeia, Being has become actualitas” (p. 58).

Here again we see Heidegger’s idiosyncratic claim about the centrality of “presencing”, but this is a distraction. His point about the connotations of the Latin terms, on the other hand, makes good sense. These terms do have a somewhat “operative” feel, and a kind of bite that does not seem to be there in the Greek.

“Putting the creationist paradigm at the center of his reconstruction of the history of being leads Heidegger to define the central trait of modern metaphysics as a working in the sense of a causing and producing…. And it is this conception of being as effectiveness that, according to Heidegger, renders possible the transformation of truth into certainty, in which the human being, whom faith in God renders certain of salvation, secures its unconditional dominion over the world by means of techniques” (p. 60).

Here he speaks of “causing” in the modern sense, rather than Aristotle’s very different one of various kinds of why. It is quite true though that Aristotle regards considerations of “production” or “making” as something secondary compared to what in modern terms might be called ethical doing. Ethical doing is “more beautiful” than useful making, even though we also need what is useful. For Aristotle, what is more beautiful is more appropriate to the divine.

“It is just as much and above all governance and oikonomia, which in the last analysis can even provisionally put causal production between parentheses in the name of a more refined and diffuse form of management of human beings and of things. And it is this peculiar practice whose characteristics we have sought to define through our analysis of liturgy” (ibid).

Here the mutual relations between persons in the Trinity meet late Foucault’s analysis of power as something that is distributed throughout a field, rather than concentrated in points of authority.

Aristotle had distinguished between doing (praxis) and making (poieisis). According to Agamben, the Roman scholar Varro (2nd-1st centuries BCE) added a third, “distinctively Roman” type of human action (p. 81). “Gerere, which originally meant ‘to carry’, means in political-juridical language ‘to govern, administer, carry out an office'” (ibid).

So now we also have a Roman political dimension of government interacting with these ecclesiastical concerns. Whereas Hegel in his analysis of Rome especially focuses on the negative aspects of the “only one is free” character of the Roman emperor’s personal absolute rule, Agamben dwells on the institution of a commandist bureaucracy.

“The nature of office and its gerere is strikingly illuminated if one puts it in relation to the sphere of command, that is, with the action proper to the imperator” (p. 83).

“Here one can see the proximity between the ontology of command and the ontology of office that we have sought to define…. The official — like the officiant — is what he has to do and has to do what he is: he is a being of command. The transformation of being into having-to-be, which defines the ethics as much as the ontology and politics of modernity, has its paradigm here” (p. 84).

Elsewhere in the text he dwells on Hannah Arendt’s protrayal of the Nazi bureaucrat Adolph Eichmann, who lived for his office in this sense, in a book subtitled The Banality of Evil. I detest nothing more than arbitrary power, or power exercised arbitrarily, so I thoroughly understand the desire to denounce an “ontology of command”, even if I do not really believe first philosophy calls for an “ontological” approach. But as we will see, this concept too turns out to be dangerously vague.

Agamben thinks there is something wrong with the Aristotelian notion of hexis (emotional constitution or “habit”), which serves as a kind of mediating bridge between potentiality and act in a human.

“Habit is… the mode in which a being (in specific, a human being) ‘has’ in potential a technique, a knowledge, or a faculty, ‘has’ a potential to know and to act. It is, that is to say, the point where being crosses into having. But it is precisely this that constitutes hexis as an aporetic concept…. The strategic meaning of the concept of habit is that, in it, potential and act are separated and nonetheless maintained in relation…. Having the hexis of a potential means being able not to exercise it” (p. 93). “As Aristotle never stops repeating against the Megarians, someone truly has a potential who can both put it and not put it into action” (p. 94).

Potentiality is not univocally determining. It always involves multiple alternatives. The absence of univocal determination does not in itself constitute an aporia. This is how Aristotle accounts for human freedom, without making extravagant assumptions about the power of a “will”.

Agamben’s use of “aporia” also seems excessively broad. He seems to mean anything that is not subject to a univocal interpretation, and he writes as though aporia is necessarily a bad thing. For Aristotle, that is not the case at all; aporias for Aristotle provide valuable insight.

Agamben doesn’t like the fact that Aristotelian virtue is measured against practice. Apparently this is too “operational”. But how else are we to make ethical judgments? Ethics is first and foremost about good doing.

He sees Aquinas as already anticipating a Kantian notion of duty. “In the concept of virtue whose sole object is a debitum, of a being that coincides totally with a having-to-be, virtue and officium coincide without remainder” (p. 101). I haven’t specifically studied Aquinas on this point, but for Aristotle there is simply no such thing as a virtue that corresponds only to an obligation. Virtue is always being good in some positive way.

He does cite the late scholastic Francisco Suárez as calling specifically religious duty an “infinite debt”, but I don’t see what this has to do with Aristotle or Kant. He doesn’t like the idea of an “infinite task” either, but doesn’t explain why.

“Here one clearly sees that the idea of a ‘duty-to-be’ is neither solely ethical nor solely ontological; rather, it aporetically binds being and praxis in the musical structure of a fugue” (p. 106).

(I would say rather that attempts to approach first philosophy as “ontology” reach a fundamental aporia. Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel already showed us a way out of this mess.)

“It is obvious that the paradigm of duty or office… finds its most extreme and aporetic formulation in Kantian ethics” (p. 110). “What in Kant reaches completion in the form of having-to-be is the ontology of operativity…. It is not possible, however, to understand the proper characteristics of the ontology of operativity if one does not understand that it is, from the very beginning and to the same extent, an ontology of command” (p. 117).

“From the very beginning” presumably means in Aristotle. But where on earth would anyone claim to find and “ontology of command” in Aristotle? Notions of command and obedience really have no place at all in Aristotelian ethics. Theological and political voluntarism imply what might reasonably be called an ontology of command. Neither Aristotle nor Kant have anything to do with this.

As with Aristotle, what is “aporetic” in Kantian ethics is actually a strength. Kant leaves an irreducible role for thoughtful judgment about how to best apply principles to particulars in each case. The “aporia” is that Kantian ethics doesn’t aim to give us ready-made answers on what we should positively do, and is not reducible to any schema of unconditional command and obedience.

“The imperative presupposes as its foundation and, at the same time, as its object not a being but a willing…. One understands, from this perspective, why juridical-religious formulas (of which the oath, the command, and the prayer are eminent examples) have a performative character: if the performative, by the simple fact of being uttered, actualizes its own meaning, this is because it does not refer to being but to having-to-be” (p. 118).

I generally share Agamben’s concerns about the imperative form in grammar, which tends to absolutize a “should” or leave it standing in the air, when in reality every “should” is just as strong as the balance of reasons favoring it, and no genuine “should” is a matter of arbitrary obedience. Kant’s categorical imperative, on the other hand, is of a form that cannot possibly be simply “obeyed”, because it is only a procedural guideline.

Agamben recalls Hannah Arendt’s meditations on the trial of the Nazi bureaucrat Eichmann, who claimed to have sincerely followed Kantian precepts of duty in carrying out his governmental responsibilities. But whatever duty to the state he may have believed he was following was obviously antithetical to the universalism of Kantian ethics, which puts respect for all human beings over all other considerations. But Agamben even represents respect as something bad.

“Kant represents the moment when the ontology of command and having-to-be reaches its most extreme elaboration” (p. 120). “Kant’s thought represents… the catastrophic reemergence of law and religion in the bosom of philosophy” (p. 121).

Agamben strenuously objects to Kant’s superficial but nonetheless very prominent emphasis on duty. Duty was a favorite theme of Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia in Kant’s time, and Kant as a university professor was a civil servant. Kant’s talk about duty — which I also don’t particularly care for — was close to, if not in fact, a civil obligation of his position. But the real substance of Kantian ethics has to do with free rational search and testing for appropriate maxims to guide action in different kinds of situations. I prefer to express this in a more Aristotelian form of deliberation and practical judgment, but the import is the same.

He cites Pufendorf’s opinion that ethics should be expressed in terms of duties rather than virtues. But unlike Aristotle or Kant, Pufendorf really is a political voluntarist who does put the will of the sovereign ahead of everything else.

Kant abstracts duty to the point where it does not dictate specific actions, only a kind of procedural best practices for making judgments. This is far removed from what Brandom calls the authority-obedience model. Calling Kantian ethics an “ontology” of “command” as Agamben does seems utterly inappropriate. Kant is anything but a defender of arbitrary authority.

Next Agamben turns to the origins of the ontology of command.

“With a gesture in which one can make out the birth of the modern metaphysics of the will, Plotinus ultimately identifies will with being itself…. It is precisely this ‘voluntarization’ of Greek metaphysics that, by transforming from within both the image of the world of the Timaeus and the Aristotelian unmoved mover, will render possible the Christian creationist paradigm” (p. 126).

He is onto something real here. Although most of his treatises do not mention it, Plotinus in at least one of them speaks very explicitly of a will, which Plato and Aristotle do not. Agamben quotes from Plotinus’ treatise “Free Will and the Will of the One”: “all therefore was will and in the One there was nothing unwilled or prior to will: he was above all will” (p. 126). And again, “will [boulesis] and substance [ousia] must in itself coincide necessarily with being in itself” (ibid).

(On the other hand, Michael Frede has convincingly argued that the notion of a distinct faculty of will — or of the possibility of arbitrary choice, as distinct from choice based on goodness of reasons — is Stoic rather than neoplatonic in origin. Agamben’s focus on the Christian tradition also leads him to ignore Philo of Alexandria’s earlier development of a radically voluntarist theology of omnipotence, in explicit opposition to the whole previous tradition of Greek philosophy.)

He concludes, “The problem of the coming philosophy is that of thinking an ontology beyond operativity and command and an ethics and a politics entirely liberated from the concepts of duty and will” (p. 128).

Ethics and philosophy do still need to be freed from all-too-common dogmas regarding the very existence of arbitrary will not grounded in reasons; the priority of efficient causality over other kinds of explanation; and certain specific non-Aristotelian concepts of efficient causality that emphasize either immediate production or force. But only some concepts of duty are objectionable, and “operativity” is just way too broad a notion to be subject to a uniform evaluation or account. Global condemnation of operativity throws out the baby with the bath water.

Is and Ought in Actuality

Aristotle regards the priority of actuality over potentiality to be one of his most important innovations. He regards it as a necessary condition for anything being intelligible. Along with the primacy of the good and that-for-the-sake-of-which in explanation, it is also central to his way of arguing for a first cause.

The Western tradition generally did not follow Aristotle on these points. Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin monotheisms have most often treated God as an absolute power, seeking to put unlimited omnipotence first in the order of explanation, before goodness. Christians were happy to criticize occasionalism in Islam, but theologians like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham defended an extreme sort of theological voluntarism, which was taken up again by Descartes. In the 19th century, Kierkegaard valorized Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as unconditional obedience to God, claiming that faith should take precedence over ethics generally. In the 20th century, Sartre defended unconditional free will for humans, while asserting a militant atheism and the absurdity of existence. His currently influential follower Alain Badiou goes even further. He bluntly says that concern for ethics is a waste of time, and that dialogue and democracy are a scam — not just in particular cases, but in general.

Mainstream views of religion have always insisted that the absolute power is also absolutely good, but have been unable to show why or how this is the case. This has opened the door to simplistic but unanswerable arguments that the facts of the world cannot be reconciled with claims that it is governed by a good absolute power.

Instead of sacrificing ethics and the good on either religious or secular grounds, we should put them first. Leibniz argues that an emphasis on the absolute power or arbitrary will of God is bad theology, and effectively makes God into the kind of tyrant that Plato denounced (see also Euthyphro; Arbitrariness, Inflation).

Aristotle’s first cause doesn’t govern the facts of the world. It is the world’s normative compass. It is the pure good and pure fulfillment that all things seek, according to their natures and insofar as they are capable. Or as Hegel might say, it is pure Idea.

The priority of actuality is a priority of the good and of normativity. For Aristotle, we shouldn’t call something “actual” just because it exists or is the case. Rather, something is actual when it is the case that it is fulfilling its potential, as it “ought” to do.

It is not a matter of pure moralism either though. Actuality does involve an element of being the case; it is just not reducible to that. What is true also matters quite a lot in the determination of what is right, even though it is not all that matters. Every particular good is interdependent with particular truth. That is why Aristotle seems to make the understanding of causes into one of the most important elements of virtue, while at the same time cautioning us that ethics is not a matter of exact knowledge.

We are looking for a kind of mean here. What is true matters for what is right, but what is right also matters for what is true. Truth is not reducible to a matter of neutral fact. There can be no truth without intelligibility, and there can be no intelligibility without taking normative considerations into account in interpretation.

Formalist Existentialism?

The English translation of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event III: The Immance of Truths has just been published. There is not much in this book that I would recognize as philosophy; neither other philosophers nor questions of interpretation are discussed at any length. Badiou primarily wants to assert that actual infinity is established by classical set theory as an “absolute ontological referent”.

Badiou’s deepest influences are Sartrean existentialism and what at first appears to be a kind of extreme formalist view of mathematics. For Sartre, what distinguishes the human is an ability to make utterly arbitrary choices. Such views have historically been justified by appeals to human likeness to an omnipotent God that, while commonly raised by religious sectarians, actually diverge from more broadly accepted views of orthodoxy in religion, which temper appeals to raw infinite power by emphasizing that God is good and more reasonable than we are, and therefore does not act arbitrarily. Sartre and Badiou, however, are both militant atheists who aim to ground the argument for human arbitrariness in some other, nonreligious way.

I think what we need for ethics is to recognize that we are beings who partake of an active character. We do things, and along the way we make choices between alternatives, but real-world decisions — the only kind there are — are never made in a vacuum. I think activity necessarily involves purposefulness (seeking some good, i.e., something judged by someone to be good in some way, even if we would completely reject the judgment). Any kind of purpose at all is incompatible with complete arbitrariness. (See also Beings.) But Badiou would disqualify this whole line of thought, because he doesn’t believe in ethics or in purposes that are independent of arbitrary decision.

I call Badiou’s appeals to formalism in mathematics extreme because — utterly contrary to the spirit of the early 20th century program of David Hilbert, which is usually taken as the paradigm of mathematical formalism — Badiou claims that his formalist arguments directly apply to the real world. Even so-called mathematical Platonism only asserts the independence of mathematical objects, and nothing like the immediate relevance to politics claimed by Badiou. The whole point of Hilbert’s formalism is that it doesn’t care about the real world at all. For Hilbert, mathematics consisted in purely hypothetical elaboration of the consequences of arbitrary axioms and definitions. He likened this to a kind of game.

Badiou’s use of purely formal elaboration from arbitrary starting points is decidedly not hypothetical; it is combined with an extreme realism. According to Badiou, Paul Cohen’s theorems about generic subsets, for instance, are supposed to directly lead to political consequences that are supposed to be liberating. We are supposed to get some enlightenment from considering, e.g., immigrant workers as a generic subset, and this is supposed to represent a kind of unconditional or “absolute” truth that is nonetheless immanent to our concrete experience. But the treatment of arbitrary hypotheses as unconditional truths is utterly contrary to what Hegel meant by “absolute” knowledge, which I would argue is really supposed to involve the exact opposite of arbitrariness. Hegel’s “absolute” is about as far from Badiou’s “absolute ontological referent” as could be. (See also Hegelian Finitude.)

I am only a moderately well-informed mathematical layman and claim no deep understanding of Cohen’s results, but the basic idea of a generic set or subset seems to be that it is an arbitrary selection of elements from some pre-existing set. Being arbitrary, it has no definition or characteristic function (other than by sheer enumeration of its elements). But in classical set theories, new sets and subsets can be formed from an arbitrary set. Badiou relates this to Georg Cantor’s proof that any set has more subsets than elements. In itself, I find the latter unobjectionable. But Badiou likes classical set theory because it gives a putative mathematical respectability both to arbitrary beginnings and to actual infinity. (See also Categorical “Evil”; Infinity, Finitude.)

According to Badiou, belief in actual infinity is revolutionary and good, whereas disbelief in actual infinity is conservative and bad. Infinity is supposed to be revolutionary precisely because it is unbounded. This just means that it can be used as a putative license for arbitrariness. I want to insist on the contrary that there is nothing socially progressive about arbitrariness! Badiou’s recommended political models are the chaotic Maoist cultural revolution of the 1960s and the ephemeral May 1968 Paris uprising. I don’t see that the oppressed of the world gained any benefit from either.

Badiou explicitly endorses arguments of the notorious Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt that were used to justify a permanent “state of exception” in which absolute political power is asserted. This intellectual red-brown coalition is unfortunately being taken seriously by some academic leftists. The unifying theme is the claim that metaphysical support for arbitrariness is the key to achieving social justice. There are much better ways…

Aquinas and Scotus on Power

Gwenaëlle Aubry’s Genèse du dieu souverain (Genesis of the Sovereign God) concludes with chapters on Aquinas and Scotus. She finds that Aquinas systematically substitutes power and action for Aristotle’s less familiar and more subtle ends-oriented concepts of potentiality and act. Aquinas then distinguishes between active power and receptive or passive power, neither of which has much to do with Aristotelian potentiality.

For Aristotle, Aubry says, potentiality is an indwelling tendency of a being to be attracted toward an end. Pure act is the realization of an end (and, I would add, not itself a movement but an unmoved mover that is an attractor). For Aquinas, the receptive power of beings is the power to receive being from God. Pure act is equated with God’s creation from nothing. Aquinas strongly associates being with power; the power of God, pure Being, pure Existence, is for him an active and efficient cause, not an unmoved attractor. On my reading of Aristotle, it is only the less-than-pure acts of moved movers that are active and efficient causes; the “first” cause is an end that attracts beings.

Duns Scotus, according to Aubry, seems to have originated the modern notion of purely logical possibility. For Scotus, anything at all that is noncontradictory is possible, whereas Aristotle considered possibility more pragmatically, in relation to real-world conditions.

Scotus held that the order of the world is radically contingent, able to be reshaped by God’s will. According to Aubry, he explicitly speaks of God’s arbitrary choice, and attributes a power of arbitrary choice to the human will as well. For Aristotle, the source of contingency in the world is the potentialities of things. For Scotus, it is the absolute power of God.

Whereas Bonaventure, Aquinas, and the 14th century pope John XXII treated the “absolute” power of God as only logically distinct from the “ordained” power associated with the order of the world as we know it, and as not actually separately exercised, Scotus insisted that the absolute power of God is actually exercised. He identified the absolute power of God with a kind of pure fact, and insisted that God from eternity could choose to change the order of the world. (I’m inclined to think Abelard was right, and choice is incompatible with eternity.)

God’s choice for Scotus has no reason beyond itself. Scotus explicitly rejects the passage from Plato quoted by Abelard that everything that is has a cause or reason. Aubry says that for Scotus, the good is only good because God wills it so. This is the exact opposite of the argument of Plato, Abelard, and Leibniz that goodness comes first.

Scotus strongly emphasizes the infinity of God in contrast to the finitude of creatures; infinity for Scotus is God’s most important attribute. Moreover, God’s infinite power acts immediately in the world. This reminds me of the extreme positions on omnipotence articulated by Philo and al-Ghazali. According to Aubry, Scotus also says that a worldly prince enjoys a similar absolute power.

In passing, Aubry notes that Descartes — also a voluntarist — held that God creates eternal truths. This seems to be a somewhat Scotist position. (See also Aubry on Aristotle; Leibniz on Justice vs Power; Power of the One?; Disambiguating “Power”; Not Power and Action; Nature and Justice in Augustine; Peter Abelard; 1277; Being and Essence; Being and Representation.)

Leibniz on Justice vs Power

In Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice (ca. 1703), Leibniz made points that deserve to be quoted at length. Editor Patrick Riley notes that “Leibniz’ radical formulation of this question follows Plato’s Euthyphro (9E-10E) almost literally, though Plato was dealing with ‘holiness’ rather than justice” (Leibniz, Political Writings, p. 45).

Leibniz says, “It is agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just: in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things, as do numbers and proportions” (ibid).

For present purposes, what is important is whether justice and goodness depend on an arbitrary will or have criteria of their own, not whether those criteria are necessary and eternal.

To say that justice and goodness depend upon an arbitrary will “would destroy the justice of God. For why praise him because he acts according to justice, if the notion of justice, in his case, adds nothing to that of action? And to say… my will takes the place of reason, is properly the motto of a tyrant” (pp. 45-46; brackets in original).

“This is why certain persons, too devoted to the absolute right of God, who have believed that he could justly condemn innocent people and even that this might actually happen, have done wrong to the attributes that make God lovable, and, having destroyed the love of God, they left only fear [behind]” (p. 46; brackets in original).

“Thus all [Lutheran] theologians and most of those of the Roman Church, and also most of the ancient Church Fathers and the wisest and most esteemed philosophers, have been for the second view, which holds that goodness and justice have their grounds… independent of will and of force.”

“Plato in his dialogues introduces and refutes a certain Thrasymachus, who, wishing to explain what justice is, [says] that is just… which is agreeable or pleasant to the most powerful. If that were true, there would never be a sentence of a sovereign court, nor of a supreme judge, which would be unjust, nor would an evil but powerful man ever be blameworthy. And what is more, the same action could be just or unjust, depending on the judges who decide, which is ridiculous. It is one thing to be just and another to pass for it, and to take the place of justice.”

“A celebrated English philosopher named Hobbes, who is noted for his paradoxes, had wished to uphold almost the same thing as Thrasymachus: for he wants God to have the right to do everything, because he is all-powerful. This is a failure to distinguish between right and fact. For what one can do is one thing, what one should do, another” (pp. 46-47; brackets added).

“[I]f power were the formal reason of justice, all powerful persons would be just, each in proportion to his power; which is contrary to experience.”

“It is thus a question of finding this formal reason, that is to say, the why of this attribute, or this concept which should teach us what justice is” (p. 48). By “formal” Leibniz here means something like “essential”.

Aubry on Aristotle

Gwenaëlle Aubry’s brilliant Dieu sans la puissance (2006) recovers a distinctly Aristotelian theology. Aristotelian potentiality is to be distinguished from Platonic power, even though Aristotle used the same Greek word (dunamis) for it. For Aristotle, god is moreover pure energeia or act (what I have translated as “at-workness”) with no admixture of potentiality.

Aubry says, “As such, [Aristotle’s god] is distinguished from the Platonic Idea of the Good, exceeding being in power, as much as from the Christian God in whom power and being merge to exceed the Good. Because he is act, the god of Aristotle is not the essential Good (the Idea of the Good), but the essentially good substance. And because he is without power, he does not act as an efficient cause. But he is not, however, powerless: his efficacy is non-efficient. If he acts, it is as end…. Aristotle thus thinks the causality proper to the good as being not power, but potentiality as tendency toward the end” (p. 201, my translation, emphasis added).

In a 2015 lecture “Genesis of the Violent God” at Cornell, anticipating her second volume Genèse du dieu souverain (2018), she develops in fine historical detail various theological positions on omnipotence that eclipsed Aristotle’s view, explicitly subordinating goodness to absolute power. She traces the way divine omnipotence has served as an explicit model for political doctrines of sovereignty, from the absolute monarchist Jean Bodin through Hobbes to the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Noting that various writers who have grappled with the moral significance of Auschwitz ended up suggesting a “weak” God, she instead urges us to take more seriously Aristotle’s view of a god of pure act.

This work is a development out of her 1998 doctoral thesis. She has worked extensively on Plotinus. She has co-edited volumes of essays on Aristotle’s ethics and on ancient concepts of self, as well as editing a volume on Proclus’ Elements of Theology. Aubry is actually better known as a novelist, and has won several literary awards.

Perils of Utility

Hegel derives the historic Enlightenment notion of Utility from a simple alternation of perspectives (being-in-itself, being-for-another, being-for-self) that is abstracted from all particular content. It is a sort of objective correlate for the “Pure Insight” that results from free use of the Understanding in practical matters.

The correlate of the Understanding’s freedom on the objective side is its abstraction from all content, which makes it “merely formal” in the sense we have seen Hegel criticize before. An alternation without content could go on without end, which makes it an instance of what he called “bad infinity”. Utility is “the awareness of the world as useful, not the comprehension of that world as the real self” (Harris, Hegel’s Ladder II, p. 380). It is the “pure self-estrangement of the Concept” (p. 386).

As with Understanding in general, Utility by no means appears only in a bad light. It is taken to presuppose a community of equal persons, and to imply the absolutely free Rousseauian general will of a sovereign People, which Hegel presents sympathetically. Consciousness is even said to “find its concept” in Utility (p. 384). Harris notes though that in Hegelian terms, the reference to “finding” indicates a less mature attitude than making or development.

A concept that generates a “bad infinity” ultimately cannot serve as a criterion for value judgment, because it leads to an infinite regress. But Hegel is not so much concerned with the theoretical error of the British Utilitarians’ reduction of all values to utility as with the political danger of the harshly “utilitarian” attitude of those who promulgated the Terror in the late stages of the French Revolution. The idea there was effectively that whatever action was deemed “useful” by the new authorities required no further justification. It seems clear to me, as it did to Hegel, that the French Revolution was a good thing on a historical level, but to acknowledge a generality like that is by no means necessarily to endorse every detail of the way it was carried out.

I have to say I think debates about whether or not “the end justifies the means” in general are pretty meaningless and unhelpful. We can meaningfully discuss the appropriateness of particular means to particular ends. The answer will be yes in some cases and no in others. Harsh measures that are unfortunately necessary in some cases are completely unjustifiable in others. Sometimes the tradeoffs can be very difficult. “Utility” as a putative criterion is only helpful in the easy cases. In difficult cases it ends up being tautological or sophistical. What is unequivocally wrong is the notion of arbitrary license, or the claim that no more substantive development of justification for an extreme course of action is even relevant in the first place.

Hegel is indeed concerned with a slippery slope here. The slippery slope concerns not the ends-means cliché but the use of utility as a criterion, which at the shallow end seems innocuous enough. But vague generality shades into arbitrariness, and utility is a vague generality. (My own judgment is that the notions of sovereignty and the general will are also tainted with what Hegel would call “bad infinity”.)

Next in this series: A Moral Self?