Living Well and Equity

“[A]n analogy between logos and medical treatment is extremely old and deep in ancient Greek talk about the personality and its difficulties. From Homer on we encounter, frequently and prominently, the idea that logos is to illnesses of the soul as medical treatment is to illnesses of the body. We also find the claim that logos is a powerful and perhaps even a sufficient remedy for these illnesses; frequently it is portrayed as the only available remedy. The diseases in question are frequently diseases of inappropriate or misinformed emotion” (Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 49).

“Philosophy’s claim, later on, to be ‘the art of life’ is a defiant and highly contentious claim. It is, in effect, the claim that it can do more for the suffering pupil than other available sources of logos, healing the suffering soul in a way that goes beyond the other popular arts and pseudo-arts. Above all, philosophy opposes itself here to superstition and popular religion” (p. 50).

“It seems to have been Democritus, however, who first really developed the analogy at length in a clearly philosophical context. ‘Medicine’, he wrote, ‘heals the sicknesses of bodies; but wisdom [sophia] rids the soul of its sufferings [pathe]'” (p. 51).

Nussbaum uses the literary device of imagining how an intelligent Greek woman might have experienced both Aristotle’s ethical teaching and that of the Hellenistic schools. To hear Aristotle’s lectures, she has to disguise herself as a man. Classical Athenian culture did not expect women to be involved in philosophy or politics.

The Aristotle I am interested in is the one who emphasizes mutuality and reciprocity, and therefore could not be reasonably interpreted as an “elitist”, a term that Nussbaum applies a couple of times.

Aristotle develops principles of mutuality from which it could be concluded that social inequality in general is wrong, but does not explicitly draw the conclusion. There are a few passing remarks that I find embarrassing, but in reading a historical philosopher, we should not blame the philosopher for incomplete emancipation from the preconceptions of her culture. Such remarks are made in passing in the philosopher’s capacity as a lay person, not in her capacity as a philosopher.

Plato on the other hand was an early advocate of equality of the sexes. Nussbaum suggests that the status of Plato’s aristocratic family enabled him to depart further from what was generally accepted in the culture.

“We should also bear in mind, however, that to include women in ethical/political instruction at Athens would have been a most unconventional step, bringing the practitioner public ridicule and criticism (as we know it did in the case of Epicurus). Aristotle, as a resident alien at Athens, without any civic, religious, or property rights, twice forced into exile by political opponents suspicious of his Macedonian connections, was not in a position to make surprising gestures — whereas Plato’s wealthy aristocratic family protected him from abuse” (p. 54).

She quotes from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics: “[E]veryone has something of his own to contribute to the truth … and it is from these that we go on to give a sort of demonstration about these things” (p. 58).

This is but one of many passages that evince a concern for all people.

And again, “We aim not to know what courage is but to be courageous, not to know what justice is but to be just, just as we aim to be healthy rather than to know what health is, and to be in a good condition rather than to know what good condition is” (p. 59).

Aristotle is often characterized one-sidedly as an intellectualist who values theory over practice. Here we see the other side. Being good is more important than knowing the good, even though he highly values knowledge. This also has an anti-elitist character.

Philosophical study should make us better at making choices in life. As Nussbaum summarizes, “If [ethics] makes human lives no better, it will be deservedly ignored” (p. 59).

“Aristotle does not mourn the absence of [standards independent of experience]: for the boundaries of experience are also, he holds, the boundaries of discourse and thought. The search for truth is the search for the most accurate account of the world, as we do (and shall) experience it. But this is unqualifiedly a search for truth; and no apologies need be made for using that word” (p. 61).

Here Aristotle anticipates Kant and Hegel.

“Nothing like a view of original sin plays any role in [Aristotle’s] thinking. He rejects the view that the good life is primarily a matter of luck or innate talent — and rejects these views as false ethical views — not on the grounds that some independent cosmic evidence refutes them, but on the grounds that such a view would ‘strike too false a note’, be too out of line with people’s aims and hopes” (ibid).

The status of humans with respect to the good is neither innate nor arbitrarily established.

“But human desires constrain ethical truth in a much more exacting way. For it turns out that the true account of the good human life must describe a life that contains ends that human beings choose for their own sake (as well as the willing choice of the ends); and it must, apparently, be inclusive of all such ends, lacking in nothing which, being added, would make the life in question better or more complete. This famous and much discussed requirement leads Aristotle, among other things, to rule out accounts that narrow the good life to that which can be completely controlled by the individual’s own agency” (p. 63).

This is the way that is neither innate nor arbitrary.

“When Aristotle’s method asks about desire and permits itself to be constrained by what people want and choose, it does not simply record the status quo, or commit itself in any simple way to preserving ordinary beliefs. Aristotle is not the ordinary-belief philosopher of our first chapter, because he refuses any simple majoritarian principle for sorting appearances, insisting on a deeper and more critical scrutiny. Appearances about ethics contain contradictions and ambiguities. The job of inquiry is to listen to every pupil’s contribution, along with previous theories and information about other societies — but not to stop there” (p. 64).

Once again, inquiry into the good is conceived as maximally inclusive.

“The accounts of the good that emerge in the existing works are, as we might by now expect, far from being uncritical records of ordinary belief. They are, in fact, extremely critical of many of the popular views they record: critical, for example, of the views allegedly held by most people about the importance of money, about bodily pleasure, about status and reputation, about anger and revenge” (pp. 64-65).

Inclusiveness does not mean equally accepting every detail of the status quo — quite the opposite.

“Not all people are able or willing to perform such a sorting; but the resulting account will nonetheless be true for them, as well as for those who do participate” (p. 65).

For them too, the results of ethical deliberation will be true in the sense of importantly valid, because the practical principles it seeks to elicit are inherently shareable, even when they are not straightforwardly available.

“For this procedure does claim to arrive at truth, despite the medical nature of its operations. Some reasons for this should already be evident. It insists on a rigorous scrutiny of appearances and on the fundamental role of consistency. It claims correspondence, too, with the deepest human beliefs and desires. And one further point should now be stressed. Results in ethics must be consistent, not just internally, but also with everything else held to be true: with the best accounts, then, of the universe, the soul, substance, and so forth. Exactly how far this will constrain the ethical account can be seen only concretely; and Aristotle never states that where there is a prima facie tension, ethical intuitions must yield to metaphysical or psychological appearances. But his demand for overall consistency helps to justify his use of the word ‘true’ in the ethical case, encouraging the idea that we are not just looking into ourselves, but also coming to grips with the world as a whole, as we experience it” (ibid).

This is really important. What is right must be consistent with the whole of what is true. But our judgment of what is true in a concrete sense also depends on many value judgments. Ethical judgment depends on the whole of our interpretation of things. But interpretation is by no means merely subjective. That it not be merely subjective is not a fact but a moral imperative. This is the “virtuous circle” of hermeneutics.

“Most of the sciences, as Aristotle understands them, deal with what is so always or for the most part. Their principles will therefore often be highly general. Medicine, however, on account of its practical commitment, must strive for a fully adequate perception of the particular cases before it” (ibid).

“Medical treatment, the conjunction of the two passages implies, is a form of bia [force], of external causal intervention. Argument is something else, something apparently gentler, more self-governed, more mutual” (ibid).

“[A doctor] must be flexible and attentive; if he simply insisted on going by the book, his treatment would be crude and medically irresponsible. The same, Aristotle argues, is true in ethical reasoning. General principles are authoritative only insofar as they are correct; but they are correct only insofar as they do not err with respect to the particulars” (p. 66).

“It is not only change over time that concerns Aristotle here; it is also the context-sensitivity of good ethical choice…. A rule, like a joke manual (like a medical textbook) would do both too little and too much…. In the context of love and friendship, it is possible that Aristotle may recognize particularity in a yet stronger sense, recognizing that some valuable forms of ethical attention and care are not even in principle universalizable” (p. 67). She mentions the love of a particular child or friend.

“In all these ways, general principles, if seen as normative for correct practical judgment, prove insufficient. Nor, for related reasons, is there any general algorithm that will suffice to generate, in each case, the virtuous choice” (p. 68).

“Aristotle has used the medical analogy to depict a philosophical approach to ethics that is practical, fruitfully related to human hopes and beliefs, responsive to the complexities of cases. But his conception of practical philosophy makes him turn away from the analogy at a crucial point, so that he rejects a group of ‘medical’ traits of philosophy that the Hellenistic schools will in many cases defend” (p. 69).

In the Eudemian Ethics, “Aristotle gives his reasons for excluding children and insane people from the range of those whose ethical opinions will be surveyed. He says that such people have many beliefs that no sane person would consider seriously. Then he adds what appears to be an argument for omitting the holders of these opinions from the philosophical process in which teacher and pupil are now engaged: ‘They are in need not of arguments, but, in the former case, of time to grow up, and, in the latter case, of either political or medical chastisement — for the administering of drugs is a form of chastisement no less than beating is’. Here Aristotle speaks of medical treatment as a causal technique for the manipulation of behavior; he links it with beating and sharply dissociates it from the giving and receiving of arguments among reasonable people. Similarly, in [Nicomachean Ethics] X.9, he speaks of irrational people whose condition yields not to argument but only to ‘force’ (bia)” (ibid).

“In Nicomachean Ethics VI.13 , Aristotle confronts an opponent who charges that the intellectual element in ethics is useless…. Aristotle does not dispute the opponent’s point about medicine; he implicitly grants that medicine has an intellectual asymmetry about it. Its practical benefits require that the doctor should know, but not that the patient should know; its logoi are authoritative and one-sided. He does, however, go on to dispute the claim vigorously for ethics, arguing that study and the application of intellect have a practical value for everyone in this area. Ethics appears to be less one-sided, more ‘democratic’, than medicine is: the benefits of its logoi require each person’s active intellectual engagement. (We now notice that even the positive use of the medical analogy … was strained: for it compared what each person ought to do in ethics with what the good doctor does in medicine.) This observation fits well with the contrast, in the Eudemian Ethics passage, between force and argument: ethical logoi are unlike medical treatment, in that they involve a reciprocal discourse in which the pupil is not ordered around by an authority figure, or manipulated by coercive tactics, but is intellectually active for herself” (pp. 69-70).

“Aristotle repeatedly claims … that the proper recipient of ethical arguments and lectures must already be a person of a certain maturity, who has been well brought up and who has both some experience and some passional balance…. Balance is necessary because disorderly people are ill-equipped for the give and take of rational argument, and they will ‘listen badly'” (p. 70).

“The real question seems to be why Aristotle opts for the sort of discourse that is gentle, complicated, reciprocal, and quite unlike force and drug treatment” (p. 71).

“In Nicomachean Ethics VI, he answers the opponent who claimed that intellectual grasp is useless by insisting, in fact, on the great practical value of clarity. We do not pursue our own health by studying medicine, he grants: but we do go after ethical and political goodness by pursuing the intellectual study of ethics because through the intellectual scrutiny of our ends we get a clearer vision of what pertains to the end, that is, of the constituents of the good human life and how they stand to one another” (ibid).

“The task demanded of logoi, being one of clarification and articulation, requires clarity and articulateness in the logoi themselves” (ibid).

“To live well, we must have our lives ordered toward some end of our choice. But then, ‘it is most especially important first to demarcate within oneself [diorisasthai en hautoi], neither hastily nor carelessly, in which of the things within our power living well consists’. This careful clarification is contrasted with the ‘random talk’ (eikei legein) in which most people usually indulge on matters ethical. Then, in a most important passage, Aristotle tells us that this enterprise, and its related goal of communal attunement, are best served by a cooperative critical discourse that insists on the philosophical virtues of orderliness, deliberateness, and clarity” (p. 72, citations by Becker numbers omitted).

She quotes Nicomachean Ethics again: “For from what is said truly but not clearly, as we advance, we will also get clarity, always moving from what is usually said in a jumbled fashion [sunkechumenos] to a more perspicuous view. There is a difference in every inquiry between arguments that are said in a philosophical way and those that are not. Hence we must not think that it is superfluous for the political person to engage in the sort of reflection that makes perspicuous not only the ‘that’ but also the ‘why’: for this is the contribution of the philosopher in each area” (ibid).

“The goals of personal clarification and communal agreement require a progress beyond the hasty and confused modes of ordinary discourse, toward greater coherence and perspicuity. But this, in turn, requires the sort of argument that sorts things out and clarifies, that leads people to shift their alleged ground by pointing to inconsistencies in their system of beliefs and, in the process, makes evident not only the fact of our commitments, but also their ‘why’, that is, how they contribute to one another and to the good life in general. Aristotle tells us unabashedly that to give this sort of logos is the business of the professional philosopher, and that this is why the philosopher is a useful person to have around and to emulate” (p. 73).

“Clarity, deliberateness, and logical consistency are not enough: arguments must also be medical in the good way, rooted in the particulars and attentive to them. But we should not let the empty glibness of some philosophers give ethical philosophy a bad name” (ibid).

She returns to the reasons for Aristotle’s ultimate rejection of the medical analogy — its focus on isolated individuals; the instrumental character of its procedures; the fact that it treats philosophical argument as purely instrumental; the asymmetry of roles it presupposes; and the fact that it discourages sympathetic exploration of alternatives.

The student of ethics “is to emulate the philosopher, entering actively into the give and take of criticism, being not subservient but independent, not worshipful but critical” (p. 74).

“When [Aristotle] begins his devastating criticism of Plato, he says that it may be difficult to criticize the views of those who are dear to us: but we must put the truth first, all the more since we are philosophers” (p. 75).

“Respectful dialectical scrutiny is a fundamental part of Aristotelianism. What we are after is to find out more clearly what we share or can share. And this requires a patient and non-hasty working through of the available accounts of the subject, accounts, as Aristotle says, of both ‘the many’ and ‘the wise’. Aristotle’s position is that each person has something to contribute to the ethical truth. As he remarks of some of the alternatives he is examining, ‘Some of these things have been said by many people over a long period of time, others by a few distinguished people. It is reasonable to suppose that none of them has missed the mark totally, but each has gotten something, or even a lot of things, right'” (ibid).

“[T]hey will usually be somewhat tentative and respectful of other possibilities. Insofar as they have done their historical and experiential work, they will be somewhat confident — they will not expect to be overthrown completely — but they leave open the possibility of revision and correction” (p. 76).

“Aristotle seems to be committed to something still stronger: that each questioned person’s beliefs contain at least some truth” (p. 77).

Next in this series: Emotion and Belief

Gadamer on Socratic Questioning

“Socratic conversation [has] the single goal of achieving an authentic shared process of speech…. Part of the meaning of genuine substantive explication is that it can continually justify and clarify itself…. A sophistic logos fails to meet this requirement because one did not acquire it with a view to the facts of the matter but rather with a view to its effectiveness in impressing the people around one” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (German ed. 1931), p. 56).

Since Habermas cites Gadamer as an influence, Gadamer’s work may well be the primary source for Habermas’ striking remark “Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech”. In any case, it provides a good explication. I find this particularly valuable, because although Habermas and Brandom neglect Plato and Aristotle, Gadamer himself treats them as not merely of antiquarian interest, but as having central contemporary relevance. (In the introduction to his Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002), Brandom too cites Gadamer’s hermeneutics as representative of one of two major ways of reading philosophical texts, neither of which he intends to follow strictly.)

“Precisely because the sophist’s logos, with its agonistic goals, does not make explicit or stick to the sense in which it is intended in each case, it falls prey itself to these ambiguities when someone else uses them against it. Socrates, on the other hand, keeps his eye on the subject matter even in these circumstances” (p. 57, emphasis added).

Real dialogue is not a social negotiation between individuals confronting one another. It holds fast to the shareable subject matter under discussion. Not our “immediate” egos but the rich and variegated terrain of open-ended meaning that we jointly inhabit is at issue here. What matters is not the competitive question of who is right, but the open-ended, shared exploration of what follows from what.

(Brandom’s first major work is called Making It Explicit. Sophistical sleight of hand — be it in politics, religion, or everyday life — depends on an opposite strategy of keeping it obscure what really or properly follows from what, in order to keep things safe for arbitrary “truths” plucked out of thin air. Although Making It Explicit does not directly address the topic of sophistry, that book of linguistic philosophy is a very substantial and original development of something like the positive side of Gadamer’s argument here, which folds in additional perspectives not addressed by Gadamer. Brandom also points out that Habermas’ work articulating what constitutes an “ideal speech situation” provides a detailed and interesting explication of Hegel’s central ethical notion of mutual recognition.)

Gadamer goes on, “Socrates’ logical traps are not meant to be the manipulations of a virtuoso technician which are simply applied where they promise success; instead, they are living forms of a process of seeking shared understanding” (p. 58). “[R]efutation in the Socratic style is positive: not a process of reducing the other person to silence so as, tacitly, to make oneself out as the knower, in contrast to him, but a process of arriving at a shared inquiry” (p. 59).

“The good, then, is knowledge’s object; that is, it is the unitary focal point to which everything must be related and in relation to which human existence in particular understands itself in a unified way. The general character of the good is that it is that for the sake of which something is, and thus, in particular, that for the sake of which man himself is. It is in the light of it that human beings understand themselves in their action” (ibid).

Here Gadamer brings out into the clear the central role of what Aristotle calls that for the sake of which — the telos or “final cause” — which extends all the way from the understanding of living beings in nature to the highest first philosophy. To ask after that for the sake of which is precisely to step back from what is immediately present. This is the beginning of wisdom.

“Just that, then, which presents itself unambiguously as good, in its immediate presentness, should and must be ‘measured’, if it is supposed to be ‘the good’, in relation to something that is not contained in its immediate attractiveness itself. So it certainly cannot be the immediate attractiveness that constitutes the goodness” (p. 61).

“Thus it is no more the case that the immediate experience of well-being is an indubitable testimonial of its goodness than that any behavior that is regarded as virtuous is so automatically, without being justified by reference to the good itself. Thus the demand for an art of measuring pleasures — which alone could justify the claim of pleasure to be the good — succeeds, despite the impossibility of such an art, in making clear what the good is sought as. Dasein understands itself in relation to what it is ‘for the sake of’, not on the basis of how it feels at any present moment but on the basis of its highest and constant potential” (pp. 61-62).

Real understanding is precisely a movement beyond what is immediate. Gadamer is still partly under the spell of Heidegger, and refers to Heideggerian Dasein, but this plays no real role in the argument. I would refer more simply to “our” understanding of ourselves.

“The methodological point of the imagined art of measurement, then, is to show that an understanding of Dasein must understand present things in terms of non-present ones and can grant them goodness only in such a relation. Thus this Socratic course of argumentation allows us to see what the good must (in any case) be sought as: namely, the central thing on the basis of which human being understands itself. So the positive point of Socratic refutation consists not only in achieving a positive perplexity but also — by the same token — in explaining what knowledge really is and what alone should be recognized as knowledge. It is only in the concept of the good that all knowledge is grounded; and it is only on the basis of the concept of the good that knowledge can be justified” (p. 63).

Again, for Dasein I would just say “ourselves”.

Here he again brings out the central role of the good in the constitution of what we call knowledge and truth. He points out that in order to make distinctions at all, we must have some preliminary idea of the good, even if we cannot articulate it.

“Insofar as the search for grounding that gives an accounting is a shared search and has the character of a testing, it operates, fundamentally, not by one person’s making an assertion and awaiting confirmation or contradiction by the other person, but by both of them testing the logos to see whether it is refutable and by both of them agreeing in regard to its eventual refutation or confirmation. All testing sets up the proposition to be tested not as something for one person to defend, as belonging to him or her, and for the other person to attack, as belonging to the other, but as something ‘in the middle’. And the understanding that emerges is not primarily an understanding resulting from agreement with others but an understanding with oneself. Only people who have reached an understanding with themselves can be in agreement with others” (p. 64).

Gadamer on Platonic Dialogue

“But a real conversation itself already requires one to attend only to the substantive intention of what is said and not to what the speech expresses, along with that, about Dasein” (Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, German ed. 1931, English tr. 1991, p. 42). This is from Gadamer’s first published book, which focuses on the ethical meaning of Platonic dialogue, but also implicitly addresses the broader human condition.

He is saying that in genuine dialogue, the concern of the participants is only with what is being said about the topic under discussion; with what should be said about it; and specifically not with each other’s character, intentions, or social position.

“A dialectical contradiction is not present when one opinion opposes another…. It is not a contradiction in the dialectical sense when another person speaks against something, but only when a thing speaks against it, whether it is another person or I myself who has stated this” (p. 44).

I still don’t particularly care for the use of “contradiction” in this sort of context. But the important point — that real life is full of tensions, conflicts, and ambiguities — is entirely valid. The tensions and conflicts of main concern here are not those between people or views, but rather those that are internal to the matter under discussion.

“Plato characterizes again and again the ‘substantive’ spirit (the spirit that is concerned with the facts of the matter) of the dialogical pursuit of shared understanding…. [It] can be summed up as the exclusion of phthonos. Phthonos … means concern about being ahead of others or not being left behind by others. As such, its effect in conversation is to cause an apprehensive holding back from talk that presses forward toward discovering the true state of affairs…. This proviso prevents the talk from adapting freely to the connections in the subject matter and thus prevents, precisely, an unreserved readiness to give an account. Someone who, on the contrary, answers aneu phthonou, eumenes, alupos (without being inhibited by the pain of an aggrieved desire to be right), is prepared to give an account ‘aphthonos‘ (in a manner that is not affected by phthonos)” (ibid).

Here we are at the heart of the matter, which has to do with Plato and Aristotle’s principled opposition to the Sophists, who (for a fee) offered instruction on how to verbally impress, overwhelm, dominate, and manipulate others, while calling it “virtue”.

A major aspect of what makes any participation in dialogue serious is that it not be “inhibited by the pain of an aggrieved desire to be right”. The “aggrieved desire to be right” has no interest in truth, or in what really is right. The Sophists’ techniques of domination and manipulation on the other hand cater to that aggrieved desire.

“Speech gives itself the appearance of having knowledge to the extent that it is able, through the seduction that is inherent in it, to secure other people’s agreement or to refute them. Thus it is characteristic of the way in which this apparent claim is carried out… to cut off the possibility of a free response by the other person. Thus such pretended knowledge takes the form of something that aims either at getting someone’s agreement or at refuting them. In both forms of such speech its function is not primarily to make the facts of the matter visible in their being and to confirm this through the other person but rather to develop in speech independently of the access that it creates to the facts of the matter, the possibility precisely of excluding the other person in the function… of fellow speaker and fellow knower” (pp. 45-46).

Overwhelming ways of speaking are an aggression against the possibility of dialogue and the aim of reaching of shared understanding.

“That this claim can represent only a pretended claim to knowledge is clear from the fact that to the talker, … what he says is not really important…. What is important to the talker is only his ascendency over contradiction. The claim that his talk makes to knowledge always presents itself as already having been satisfied, and not as yet to be satisfied by coming to shared understanding” (p. 47).

“Thus the concern about the ascendency of one’s logos obstructs one’s view of the facts of the matter, which point precisely through the refutation to an explication that makes progress, by taking with it and retaining what is revealed in the pros and cons” (p. 48).

“Part of the essence of such talk, therefore, is to avoid dialogue. It tends toward making speeches, toward makrologia (speaking at length), which of course makes it difficult to go back to something that was said” (ibid).

The essence of dialogue lies in what he here calls going back to what was said. Alternating monologues do not constitute dialogue, because they don’t “go back to what was said”.

“Insofar as someone who enters into conversation with Socrates thinks he has knowledge of what he is asked about, then, he cannot refuse the demand that he answer for it. The genuineness of his claim to knowledge is put to the test by this demand for accountability” (p. 51). “[I]n Plato’s historical situation there is a reason for the fact that knowledge is no longer possible as the wise proclamation of the truth but has to prove itself in dialogical coming to an understanding — that is, in an unlimited willingness to justify and supply reasons for everything that is said” (p. 52).

What wants to be called knowledge has to prove itself in a dialogical coming to shared understanding. True dialogue requires an unlimited willingness to answer questions and give reasons.

“But in that case everyone must also be willing and able to give an accounting as to why he acts and conducts himself as he does; he must be able to say what he understands himself to be…, at least insofar as he is able, through the logos, to understand himself in terms of something — that is, in terms of something that is not present at the moment” (p. 53).

Gadamer shares this “dialogical” ethic with Habermas and Brandom, while explicitly connecting it with Plato and Aristotle, as I have been seen to do across many posts. I am happy to find support from a major philosopher for the inclusion of Plato and Aristotle in this contemporary discussion. (Habermas had significant interaction with Gadamer, and Brandom cites Gadamer in Tales of the Mighty Dead.)

“Everyone must be able to answer this question, because it asks him about himself. Every Socratic conversation leads to this sort of examination of what a person himself is…. One must be able to say why one behaves in a certain manner — that is, what the good is that one understands oneself as aiming at in one’s behavior” (p. 54, emphasis added.).

Communicative Action

When it appeared, Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action was called the most ambitious study in social theory in recent memory. Its scope is far larger than I will address. Here my aim is only to capture a few top-level highlights from his first chapter that are relevant in an ethical context.

Habermas aims to develop a notion of communicative action that treats meaning as inherently social, thus overcoming the modern “philosophy of consciousness” that threatens to reduce everything to individual subjectivity. At the same time, he emphasizes that every saying is a doing.

“To the goal of formally analyzing the conditions of rationality, we can tie neither ontological hopes for substantive theories of nature, history, society, and so forth, nor transcendental-philosophical hopes for an aprioristic reconstruction of the equipment of a nonempirical species subject, of consciousness in general. All attempts at discovering ultimate foundations, in which the intentions of First Philosophy live on, have broken down…. Theories of modern empirical science, whether along the lines of logical empiricism, critical rationalism, or constructivism, make a normative and at the same time universalistic claim that is no longer covered by fundamental assumptions of an ontological or transcendental-philosophical nature” (vol. 1, p. 2).

I’m a little more hopeful that first philosophy is still a meaningful endeavor. Correlated with this difference, Habermas seems to regard Aristotelian first philosophy as inevitably foundationalist, whereas I think that is by no means the case. But this all has to do with what we mean by first philosophy. For example, Avicenna complains that Aristotle should have put the first cause at the beginning of the Metaphysics, rather than only arriving at it at the end. That is to say, Avicenna takes a foundationalist view of the first cause as the Necessary Being (God), from which all else follows. Aristotle instead takes a hermeneutic approach, starting with the concrete while cultivating a variant of what Paul Ricoeur calls the long detour. Habermas too speaks of hermeneutics in this context.

“[R]ationality has less to do with the possession of knowledge than with how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge” (p. 8).

“We can call men and women, children and adults, ministers and bus conductors ‘rational’, but not animals or lilac bushes, mountains, streets, or chairs. We can call apologies, delays, surgical interventions, declarations of war, repairs, construction plans or conference decisions ‘irrational’, but not a storm, an accident, a lottery win, or an illness” (p. 9).

One way to think of this is that rationality and irrationality (and normative properties in general) are properly said only of things that have intentional structure, which is something different from sensible form or gestalt.

Habermas examines in detail Max Weber’s early 20th century theory of modernity as an increasing, primarily economic but also scientific and technological, “rationalization” of society. He points out that Weber was actually highly critical of the effects of this rationalization. This kind of rationalization is exclusively concerned with what the Frankfurt school critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno called instrumental reason, which involves a calculating, utilitarian approach to the selection of means, while downplaying any evaluation of the goodness of ends. Horkheimer and Adorno were pessimists about modernity. In this regard, Habermas is much closer to Rorty and Brandom, in that all three are optimists about modernity.

Habermas sees a night-and-day contrast between instrumental reason and the communicative reason he is concerned to promote. In Aristotelian terms, instrumental reason treats everything in light of a degraded concept of efficient causality, as if that were the only thing that is relevant. Communicative reason on the other hand aims at shared understanding, and shared understanding implicitly tends toward universality.

“These reflections point in the direction of basing rationality of an expression on its being susceptible of criticism and grounding…. A judgment can be objective if it is undertaken on the basis of a transsubjective validity claim that has the same meaning for observers and nonparticipants as it has for the acting subject himself. Truth and efficiency are claims of this kind. Thus assertions and goal-directed actions are the more rational the better the claim (to propositional truth or to efficiency that is connected with them) can be defended against criticism” (ibid).

“This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld” (p. 10, emphasis in original).

“It is constitutive of the rationality of the utterance that the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim for the proposition p, a claim that the hearer can accept or reject for good reason…. It is constitutive of the action’s rationality that the actor bases it on a plan that implies the truth of p…. An assertion can be called rational only if the speaker satisfies the conditions necessary to achieve the illocutionary goal of reaching an understanding about something in the world with at least one other participant in communication” (p. 11).

“Behavioral reactions of an externally or internally stimulated organism, and environmentally induced changes of state in a self-regulated system can indeed be understood as quasi-actions, that is, as if they were the expressions of a subject’s capacity for action. But this is to speak of rationality only in a figurative sense, for the susceptiblity to criticism and grounding that we require of rational expressions means that the subject to whom they are attributed should, under suitable conditions, himself be able to provide reasons or grounds” (p. 12, emphasis in original).

This recalls Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism argument.

To make assertions at all is to invite critical discussion. This is a very familiar point from Brandom. Brandom himself acknowledges significant influence from Habermas.

This kind of free inquiry is also exactly what Socrates was all about. Plato implicitly illustrates it time and again through abundant examples in his dialogues.

“The abstract concept of the world is a necessary condition if communicatively acting subjects are to reach understanding among themselves about what takes place in the world or is to be effected in it. Through this communicative practice they assure themselves at the same time of their common life-relations, of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld. This life world is bounded by the totality of interpretations presupposed by the members as background knowledge. To elucidate the concept of rationality the phenomenologist must then examine the conditions for communicatively achieved consensus” (p. 13, emphasis in original).

Husserl’s notions of intersubjectivity and lifeworld were extensively developed in the socially oriented phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, to which Habermas makes reference.

“In the context of communicative action, only those persons count as responsible who, as members of a communication-community, can orient their actions to intersubjectively recognized validity claims” (p. 14).

Intersubjectivity — genuine sharing and community — also counts as an ethical ideal. Habermas advocates “dialogical” approaches instead of “monological” ones.

“But there are obviously other types of expressions for which we can have good reasons, even though they are not tied to truth or success claims” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

“Normatively regulated actions and expressive self-presentations have, like assertions or constative speech acts, the character of meaningful expressions, understandable in their context, which are connected with criticizable validity claims. Their reference is to norms and subjective experiences rather than to facts. The agent makes the claim that his behavior is right in relation to a normative context recognized as legitimate, or that first-person utterance of an experience to which he has privileged access is truthful or sincere. Like constative speech acts, these expressions can also go wrong. The possibility of intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims is constitutive for their rationality too” (pp. 15-16, emphasis in original).

He takes very seriously the notion of argumentation, discussing at some length the work of Stephen Toulmin. This approach dwells on the validity of arguments, rather than the deduction of conclusions from assumptions.

“Thus the rationality proper to the communicative practice of everyday life points to the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes it possible to continue communicative action with other means when disagreements can no longer be repaired with everyday routines and yet are not to be settled by the direct or strategic use of force” (pp. 17-18).

“Corresponding to the openness of rational expressions to being explained, there is, on the side of persons who behave rationally, a willingness to expose themselves to criticism and, if necessary, to participate properly in argumentation” (p. 18).

“In virtue of their criticizability, rational expressions also admit of improvement; we can correct failed attempts if we can successfully identify our mistakes. The concept of grounding is interwoven with that of learning” (ibid).

“In philosophical ethics, it is by no means agreed that the validity claims connected with norms of action, upon which commands or ‘ought’ sentences are based, can, analogously to truth claims, be redeemed discursively. In everyday life, however, no one would enter into moral argumentation if he did not start from the strong presupposition that a grounded consensus could in principle be be achieved among those involved. In my view, this follows with conceptual necessity from the meaning of normative validity claims” (p.19, emphasis in original).

“Anyone who systematically deceives himself about himself behaves irrationally. But one who is capable of letting himself be enlightened about his irrationality possesses not only the rationality of a subject who is competent to judge facts and who acts in a purposive-rational way, who is morally judicious and practically reliable, who evaluates with sensitivity and is aesthetically open-minded; he also possesses the power to behave reflectively in relation to his subjectivity and to see through the irrational limitations to which his cognitive, moral-practical, and aesthetic-practical expressions are subject. In such a process of self-reflection, reasons and grounds also play a role” (p. 20).

“One behaves irrationally if one employs one’s own symbolic means of expression in a dogmatic way. On the other hand, explicative discourse is a form of argumentation in which the comprehensibility, well-formedness, or rule-correctness is no longer naively supposed or contested but is thematized as a controversial claim” (p. 22).

“We can summarize the above as follows: Rationality is understood to be a disposition of speaking and acting subjects that is expressed in modes of behavior for which there are good reasons or grounds” (ibid).

“Argumentation makes possible behavior that counts as rational in a specific sense, namely learning from explicit mistakes” (ibid).

“But if the validity of arguments can be neither undermined in an empiricist manner nor grounded in an absolutist manner, then we are faced with precisely those questions to which the logic of argumentation is supposed to provide the answers: How can problematic validity claims be supported by good reasons? How can reasons be criticized in turn? What makes some arguments, and thus some reasons, which are related to validity claims in a certain way, stronger or weaker than other arguments?” (p. 24).

“We can distinguish three aspects of argumentative speech. First, considered as a process, we have to do with a form of communication that is improbable in that it sufficiently approximates ideal conditions. In this regard, I tried to delineate the general pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation as specifications of an ideal speech situation. This proposal may be unsatisfactory in its details; but I still view as correct my intention to reconstruct the general symmetry conditions that every competent speaker must presuppose are sufficiently satisfied insofar as he intends to enter into argumentation at all” (p. 25).

More generally, I think we can say that an ideal speech situation is characterized by dialogue under conditions of mutual recognition.

“Participants in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication, by virtue of features that can be described in purely formal terms, excludes all force — except the force of the better argument (and thus that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that of a cooperative search for truth). From this perspective argumentation can be conceived as a reflective continuation, with different means, of action oriented to reaching understanding” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The fundamental intuition connected with argumentation can best be characterized from the process perspective by the intention of convincing a universal audience and gaining assent for an utterance; from the procedural perspective, by the intention of ending a dispute about hypothetical validity claims with a rationally motivated agreement; and from the product perspective by the intention of grounding or redeeming a validity claim with arguments” (p. 26).

Next in this series: Worldview, Lifeworld

Ricoeurian Ethics

In the final chapters of Oneself as Another, Ricoeur develops a meta-level discourse about ethics, and concludes with a few “ontological” suggestions. Universalizing Kantian morality and the obligation it entails are said to provide a valuable extension to Aristotelian ethics, but ultimately to require supplementation by a return to Aristotelian practical judgment. This seems just about exactly right.

On the Kantian side, norms are said to concretize Aristotelian aims. The most important and general Kantian norm, according to Ricoeur, is reciprocity. He argues for the importance of the golden rule, citing Rabbi Hillel and the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. The distinction between “power over” and “power to” is discussed. The notion of persons as ends in themselves is emphasized. Procedural justice is seen to complement Aristotelian distributive justice. John Rawls’ summary of justice as fairness is endorsed. Although it is ultimately necessary to return to the openness of practical judgment, the passage through universalizing morality is equally necessary, as a safeguard against arbitrariness. Universality and contextuality go hand in hand, much as I have been arguing.

Writing at a time when French anti-Hegelianism was still quite influential and before the rise of new interest in Hegel, Ricoeur did not think Hegelian Geist — which he mistakenly saw as turning the state into an “agency capable of thinking itself by itself” (p. 255) — fit well with the notion of self Ricoeur wanted to advance. He did not want to follow what he saw as Hegel’s path in returning to an ethics of Sittlichkeit or mores embedded in concrete culture, but saw great potential value in a Sittlichkeit separated from the “ontology of Geist” (ibid) and the “thesis of the objective mind” (p. 256), especially if Sittlichkeit were “bent” in the direction of the openness of Aristotelian practical judgment. (A reading of Geist free of such ontology has more recently been argued by Brandom and others to be a better reading of Hegel himself.) “Our final word in this ‘little ethics’… will be to suggest that the practical wisdom we are seeking aims at reconciling Aristotle’s phronesis, by way of Kant’s Moralität, with Hegel’s Sittlichkeit” (p. 290).

On other matters such as the broad thrust of Hegel’s critique of atomistic individualism in the Philosophy of Right and the general value of dialectic, Ricoeur defended Hegel. The Hegelian concept of Right, he says, “surpasses the concept of justice on every side” (p. 253). The “problematic of realization, of the actualization of freedom, is ours as well in this study” (ibid). Reflection, he says, needs the mediation of analysis.

He says that institutionalized conflict is an essential feature of democracy. We should be accepting of conflict, but draw the line at violence. The idea of Rawls that argumentation is “the critical agency operating at the heart of convictions” (p. 288; emphasis in original), raising convictions to the level of considered convictions and resulting in a “reflective equilibrium”, is cited with approval. Ricoeur speaks of a “reflective equilibrium between the ethics of argumentation and considered convictions” (p. 289).

Respect for persons should take priority over respect for the law. The importance of keeping promises extends beyond its role with respect to personal identity to the space of reciprocity and the golden rule. Gabriel Marcel is quoted as saying all commitment is a response to an other. A notion of imputability is introduced as an ascription of action “under the condition of ethical and moral predicates” (p. 292). To this is added a notion of responsibility. Finally, he endorses Hegel’s concept of mutual recognition.

Unlike Brandom, Ricoeur construed the philosophy of language as analytically separate from ethics. He thus saw a need to go beyond its boundaries, and characterized that as an “ontological” moment. This seems to have two main ingredients.

First, the key to understanding the notion of self he wants to advance lies in Aristotelian potentiality and actuality. He also wants to understand actuality and self in connection with Heideggerian being-in-the-world. “[S]elf and being-in-the-world are basic correlates” (p. 313). Actuality should not be thought in terms of presence. Self should not be confused with “man”, and is not a foundation. Spinoza’s conatus or the general effort of beings to persevere finds its highest expression in Aristotelian energeia or actuality, and thus overflows its deterministic origins. The distinction between actuality and potentiality is associated with that between selfhood and sameness. (See also The Importance of Potentiality.)

Second, a discussion of Husserl’s distinction between the body (viewed externally) and “flesh” in which we live leads eventually to the conclusion that a dialectic of the Same and the Other cannot be constructed “in a unilateral manner” (p. 331). A final discussion of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Lévinas leads to an “ultimate equivocalness with respect to the Other in the phenomenon of conscience” (p. 353). We need an alternative to “constitution in and through the ego” (p. 334), and he thinks an adaptation of Husserl’s notion of flesh provides this. Unfortunately, he speaks in passing of an “originary, immediate givenness of the flesh to itself” (p. 333). I think the notion of flesh is supposed to suggest something that softens the kind of rigid boundaries between self and other that we associate with an ego, and that is all good. But the other big issue with constitution of meaning through the ego is precisely that the ego was supposed to be a locus of originary, immediate givenness. It seems to me that one of the great values of a hermeneutic perspective is that it does not need to assume anything like that.

With the exception of this brief reference and his apparent attribution in passing of a reflexive “self” to Aristotle, the degree of convergence with what I have been developing here is impressive indeed.

(I think the kind of reflexivity Ricoeur had in mind in the latter case was only intended to be related to action, so his intent was to capture the fact that we can and do act on ourselves. This, I think, is a true and important observation. My quibble there is with attributing a notion of self as a simple unity to Aristotle.)