Tag: Aristotle

Between Good and Evil

Title for this post recalls the English subtitle of Rüdiger Safranski’s biography Martin Heidegger (German ed. 1994, English tr. 1998). I’ll try and keep this relatively short, but I wanted to make few remarks on this and Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1993). In the last few days I have been pouring over these, with a few specific questions in mind: What led to Heidegger’s profoundly negative view of Plato, Aristotle, and Western philosophy in general? What details are known about the development in his religious views? And what else is known about his political views, and involvement with the Nazis?

In 1907, one of his teachers gave him a copy of Franz Brentano’s dissertation on the meaning of being in Aristotle. Brentano was the one who introduced the medieval term “intentionality” into modern philosophy. Latter, Heidegger enthusiastically read the Logical Investigations of Brentano’s student Husserl. But in 1915, he anticipated a career interpreting medieval philosophy. He was originally going to be a Catholic priest. Some time around 1916, though, he left the Catholic church, citing “epistemological issues”, and for a time identified himself as a “free Christian”. Around the same time, he came into personal contact with Husserl, eventually becoming Husserl’s assistant. His early work under Husserl was devoted mainly to a phenomenology of religion.

Heidegger in his early works favors intuition over reason, and puts a high value on immediacy. He identifies with German romanticism, particularly the work of Schleiermacher on religion. As late as 1921, he still refers to himself as a theologian. An early work on Augustine decries the bad influence of Greek philosophy on Christian theology.

His early philosophical involvements were mainly with medieval philosophy, and with the German philosophy of his own day. Plato and Aristotle hardly figure at all in the story told in these two books, up to the point when Heidegger starts lecturing on them as a supposed expert. He claimed to be working on a book on Aristotle in the early 1920s, but only completed the introduction. He did give several lecture courses on Aristotle, and a couple on Plato.

I used to be fascinated by his discussions on the etymology of Greek philosophical words, but my understanding is that these are not taken very seriously by linguists. As someone who “reads” classical Greek mainly in bilingual editions with heavy use of a dictionary, I came to realize that this kind of informal talk about etymologies did not imply a very deep study of the texts in question, or a very deep knowledge of the language. I could write with great confidence about individual Greek words the way Heidegger does, but I am nowhere near competent to critically discuss major Greek texts in the original.

In 1923, Heidegger apparently had the flash of inspiration that Greek ousia really meant standing presence. Neither the biography nor the study of his early work gives any indication of close textual or historical study of Greek philosophy leading up to this. His attention seems to have been mostly elsewhere. It seems that ousia as presence was no more than a quite unhistorical intuition. But Heidegger apparently had great charisma as a teacher, and he asserted it with great confidence. Cheap shots against Aristotle are an easy sell in the modern world; hardly anyone looks at them critically.

I cannot help but notice that a notion of “presence” does play a significant role in Husserl, while it really does not in Plato or Aristotle. The most plausible hypothesis, I think, is that Heidegger reads a strong notion of presence into Plato and Aristotle because he has been immersed in Husserl, for whom presence is very important.

The biography does fill in a bit more about his involvement with Nazism. Heidegger was originally a Catholic conservative, though he left the church during the First World War. He seems to have supported the Nazis at least as early as 1931. He does not seem to have been personally anti-Semitic, but he was willing to adopt anti-Semitic behavior in order to conform.

In 1933, Safranski says Heidegger was positively “electrified” by Hitler’s ascendance. This had some kind of huge significance for him, and he wanted to give it a profound philosophical meaning. He reportedly even called it a collective emergence from Plato’s cave. Evidently he imagined that there was a world-historical philosophical significance to nazification as a new spiritual era, and he had the hubris to believe that he himself could somehow personally guide the movement. Those last hopes were dashed fairly quickly. They didn’t listen to him at all. He was never part of the Nazi inner circle, and he left his Nazi-appointed university rectorship in 1934. But at least as late as 1935 and perhaps quite a bit longer, he still politically supported the regime.

Later, Heidegger downplayed the Nazi chapter of his life as a simple “error in judgment”. Biographer Safranski does not find this disavowal to be credible. He says there is just too much evidence of how tremendously important these events were for him, and how excited he was about it all. It was the most important thing in his life for over a year. But the great phenomenologist Husserl at one point called this man his best student. The young Hannah Arendt, who would go on to become one of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century in her own right, apparently was really in love with her professor. And I cannot honestly say I am sure that the philosophical positions I have major issues with in themselves lead to fascism or anything like that. But I do find it troubling.

So we end still with deep ambivalence.

Heidegger’s Story About Metaphysics

This will be quite a long one. For a quick capsule of my own views in this area, see Simple Thoughts About Being.

In Heidegger we have another instance of philosophical historical storytelling, such as came up recently with Brandom’s discussion of Rorty’s links to Dewey’s pragmatism, but this one is the story of a disaster rather than an optimistic vision of progress. This post is part of a response to Robert Pippin’s new book on Heidegger’s “overcoming” of German idealism. I am no Heidegger scholar, but I do know something about the history of things that have been called metaphysics.

Heidegger has famously promulgated an extremely simplified story about the history of Western metaphysics, as from beginning to end the story of a wrong direction. All the philosophers — from Plato to Hegel and beyond — stand indicted, except for Heidegger himself. Any such sweeping condemnation ought to be automatically suspect, but this thesis gained wide currency in the 20th century. According to Heidegger, Hegel’s substitution of “logic” for traditional metaphysics makes the wrong direction that metaphysics has always taken completely explicit.

“Heidegger begins by noting that Hegel, ‘the culminator’, had correctly seen that the underlying commitment of the Western tradition is that metaphysics… is ‘logic’. He does not, of course, mean formal logic, …but what Heidegger calls begreifendes Denken, conceptualizing thinking. He means a commitment to the view that what he calls the actuality of the actual, or the real essence of anything, is what can be grasped conceptually…, a determination of what must be the case for anything to be a determinate thing at all” (Pippin, The Culmination, p. 8).

“This means that being is already understood as what Heidegger will call ‘standing presence’ (ständige or beständige Anwesenheit). By this he means a being that is determinate, discriminable from other beings, and so potentially available to a subject in the present and able to endure through a temporal phase. The comprehensive concept for such an understanding is ousia, substance” (p. 11).

The ousia that has these characteristics is substance in the merely syntactic sense that it is given in Aristotle’s Categories for use in formal logic. Across many posts, we have seen how one of Aristotle’s main goals in the collection of manuscripts the ancient editors called “after the Physics” (meta ta phusika) involves explicating ousia not as a syntactic category, but first as form, and then as act and potentiality.

“This then raises the question that is at the heart of the matter for Heidegger: Why have we not asked whether this (let us say as shorthand, determinately standing being as thinkability) should be assumed to be the orientation for any inquiry about the meaning of being qua being? What grounds can justify such an orientation? Is it possible that a finite, mortal being can understand itself as an in-principle, completely self-knowing being with respect to the fundamental issues of first philosophy? If the question is the meaning of Being as such, it must mean the meaning available for the one being open to that question, and that being is not rightly understood as exclusively self-conscious, a pure thinking being, but as a living, finite being — what Heidegger calls Dasein — and the task of first philosophy must be reformulated in the light of the analysis of that being, a Daseinsanalytik. So, instead of a Phenomenology of Spirit, culminating in the self-knowing of a Science of Logic, we need a ‘metaphysics’ of Dasein” (ibid).

Pippin rather carefully states Hegel’s claim: living, finite beings can have reflective self-knowledge “in principle” and “with respect to the fundamental issues of first philosophy”. This involves neither infallibility nor omniscience.

Heidegger is right that Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, among others, think of being as inseparable from intelligibility. He is right too that Aristotle and Hegel, in their pursuit of intelligibility, direct inquiry away from being qua being as a matter of principle. I would say this is because their investigations have convinced them that being qua being cannot explain intelligibility or meaning. But Heidegger has only asserted — and not shown — that the sincere pursuit of intelligibility must inevitably go wrong.

Pippin emphasizes Heidegger’s insistence that we are finite, mortal beings. Heidegger criticizes Kant for allegedly giving up his insistence on our finitude in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in favor of emphasis on the transcendental.

Hegel takes the emphasis on finitude to be a defeatist stance. He provocatively claims that in spite of our finitude and mortality, language and reflection introduce humans to a kind of infinity. He argues that we should embrace that infinity.

“But when Heidegger argues against any absolute status for philosophical judgments, he is not merely arguing against Hegel or an old-fashioned self-understanding but against all traditional philosophy itself” (p. 12, emphasis in original).

This is all deeply related to the question of whether humans can have genuine knowledge at all. Hegel is an optimist about this; Heidegger is a pessimist.

The vexed term “absolute” seems to be used by Heidegger in a blunt, black-and-white sense. For better or worse, “absolute” was a much overused term in Hegel’s Germany, made fashionable by the Schellingians. Hegel has quite a few wry comments about these pundits of “absolute” truth.

I have suggested that for Hegel, knowledge is said to be “absolute” when it fully recognizes its own relativity, which is to say its own conditioned character. Hegel’s claim would then be that anything deserving the name of knowledge in the fullest sense can and must in principle be capable of recognizing its own relativity. Perhaps indeed this is a criterion for knowledge in the fullest sense, not unlike the Socratic criterion for wisdom as recognition of all we do not know.

“[I]increasingly after Being and Time, Heidegger came to characterize what he was about as an attempt to ‘overcome’ Hegel, whom he consistently characterized as the ‘culmination’ of the entire Western tradition as well as German Idealism” (p. 13). Pippin quotes Heidegger, “with
German Idealism, it seemed as if philosophy as such had reached an end and had entrusted the administration of knowledge exclusively to the sciences” (ibid).

“This is all tied to Heidegger’s view that true metaphysical thinking is not to be understood as a strictly cognitive exercise of pure reason, and this is linked with a hermeneutic rather than analytic character of thinking. For him this means that such interpretive or ‘meaning-seeking’ thinking is inseparable from how such thinking should matter to any thinker” (p. 14).

But Aristotle and Hegel each in their own way do practice a kind of thinking that is more hermeneutic than analytic. They just don’t use the word, at least in its contemporary sense. (Aristotle’s On Interpretation is literally hermeneutike, but it is among the least hermeneutic of Aristotle’s texts.) Aristotle and Hegel’s difference with Heidegger is that like Paul Ricoeur also does, they recognize that more “analytic” investigations do also have value for a primarily hermeneutic orientation.

“And this mattering is complicated by the fact that such thinking is burdened by a dependence on a ground we constantly experience as beyond our ability to grasp conceptually” (p. 15).

Here is where things get complicated. For Heidegger, the ground is in principle beyond our ability to grasp conceptually. I think this assumes what Hegel would call an unreflective and therefore untrue (representational) notion of what is conceptual.

Brandom has written a lot about the very unordinary because nonrepresentational notion of the conceptual in Kant and Hegel, and I see something similar in Aristotle. (I find it a bit odd that Brandom is so generous in his reading of Heidegger, and am quite sure that Heidegger would not return the favor.)

“Heidegger has rejected understanding beings as mere objects standing over against a subject as a derivative and misleading assumption, and his references to Being are not to a being. So ‘being lasts as the withdrawing-proferring’ must refer to an ultimate source of meaningfulness that emerges historically, contingently, in a way that orients Dasein but cannot be determinately discriminated” (p. 20).

I find this ironic. It could be said that Hegel’s life work was devoted to promoting a point of view other than that of a subject confronting an object. Hegel can be abstruse and frustrating, but I better trust his version of this.

“[T]here is no other being like Dasein, whose own being is what Heidegger calls ‘existence’, a being of pure possibility that flees its call to itself to interrogate the meaning of its being, until wrenched out of its daily thoughtlessness by anxiety” (p. 21).

The description of “pure possibility” recalls some discussions of potential intellect in the broadly Aristotelian tradition. Of course, Aristotelian intellect does not “flee its call to itself”, or need to be “wrenched out of its daily thoughtlessness,” or experience anxiety. On some accounts such things might be said of the soul, but Aristotelian psyche has organic roots and is in no way a pure possibility. On the other hand, as a result of a complex contingent development, a fused notion of “intellectual soul” gained wide currency in the Latin middle ages, and this laid the ground for the oddly amphibious character of the Cartesian cogito and the Lockean understanding, which obliterate any distinction at all between intellect and a psychological entity.

“Dasein is described as always already ‘thrown’ into its world, inheriting a structure of significance, mattering, salience, and importance that forms a horizon of meaningfulness for any Dasein’s self-interrogation” (p. 22).

This sort of thing is probably one of the major appeals of Heidegger. Some of the vocabulary is uniquely his. But what is being said here is actually not that far from a traditional view (substitute “the soul” for Dasein). Experiences of encountering meaningfulness in a “world” that is already constituted independent of our willful doing are not far to find.

“The continuity of [Heidegger’s] emphasis on meaningfulness as the crux of the issue of Being’s availability is the interpretation I want to defend…. We can call this a resolute reading of Heidegger” (p. 25).

“The major question is the question of the meaningful availability of being at all”…. In Division One of [Being and Time], the possibility of any such nondiscursive availability is established by demonstrating phenomenologically that Dasein is Being-in-the World, not a subject standing over against objects, and a being whose meaning is care” (p. 26).

I am tempted to suggest that Hegelian Geist could also be said to be “Being-in-the World, not a subject standing over against objects, and a being whose meaning is care”. The difference is that Heidegger insists this all occurs at a nondiscursive level. A common Hegelian model is that things that do not start out as immediate can effectively acquire an immediate character.

(This calls for a brief sidebar on the strange way “discursivity” is used in the literature on Kant. Discursivity ought to simply mean something depending on articulation in discourse, as opposed to intuition or immediacy. But what is commonly called Kant’s “discursivity thesis” is his rather extreme claim that the understanding is entirely active, and includes no passive or receptive component or aspect whatsoever.)

“This is not at all to deny that this emphasis after the war shifted from existential thrownness into a world to the problem of language. But the general theme of most relevance to the critique of German Idealism — dependence, and so the impossibility of Hegel’s (and all of philosophy’s pure, autonomous thinking — is still apparent. In ‘Poetically Man Dwells’, a 1951 lecture…, we read, ‘Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man’ ” (p. 27).

Brandom might remind us here of Hegel’s own very sharp critique of “independence” and mastery.

“But, and here lies the source of the difficulty, what we have come to understand as metaphysics actually has never really addressed the question it poses for itself, aside from traces of an appreciation of the genuine issue in the pre-Socratics. Metaphysics has asked instead about the possible meaning of the ‘beings’…. The ancient answer to such a question was, of course, form. But… that leaves unanswered, in all traditional metaphysics, the possible meaningfulness of Being qua Being itself” (p. 28).

Here we get Heidegger’s line — only the pre-Socratics and Heidegger got Being right, and everyone else in history is completely off base. What’s peculiar is that Heidegger, who emphasizes how the Latin tradition distorts the Greek, takes up the scholastic valorization of “being qua being” without seeming to recognize how un-Aristotelian it actually is. Not that the equivalent phrase never appears in Aristotle (it does, in a relatively peripheral role), but only a huge weight of commentary promoted it to the central role it has in Aquinas.

“The problem of the ‘meaning of being’ is the problem of the meaningfulness of beings — that is, beings in the way they matter…. The source of that meaningfulness is the possibility of meaningfulness as such, the possible meaningfulness of Being as such. That possibility of meaningfulness question is not a transcendental possibility for Heidegger because it cannot be raised in strict distinction from the meaningfulness of beings. That is, this relation, between the general possibility of meaningfulness of Being at all, and the meaningfulness of entities, is not a matter of conceptual necessity but of what Heidegger calls ‘primordiality’…. There is a profound difference between the two regimes of meaningfulness, what Heidegger calls the ontological difference” (pp. 31-32).

Heidegger’s insistence on a radical split between “ontic” and “ontological” things — beings versus Being — is unprecedented. I cannot help being reminded of the sharp division between created things and the Eternal in the Hegelian “Unhappy Consciousness”. Perhaps Heidegger represents a contemporary Unhappy Consciousness.

“In his 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger is unambiguous about what he considers the basic philosophical problem. ‘We assert now that being is the sole and proper theme of philosophy.’ Philosophy itself is said to be ‘the science of being’. That Heidegger believes is unambiguous. No philosopher has ever concentrated so intensely on one question for the entirety of his fifty-plus-year career. But the first question for any student of Heidegger is simply what this question concerns…. Is the question of the meaning of Being even a question — that is, a question with a possible answer?” (p. 33).

Before this book of Pippin’s, I was very aware of Heidegger’s reverence for Parmenidean Being, but the close linkage that Pippin brings out between the “question of Being” and general questioning about meaning is new to me. My own attitude is that Aristotelian first philosophy is best understood as itself a kind of higher-order or generalized hermeneutics, and that general questioning about meaning does not benefit from being related to a notion of being as such.

“This issue is made more difficult because Heidegger is eager to qualify and to some extent marginalize the usual and much more familiar semantic ways of addressing the problem: the various senses of the word ‘is'” (ibid).

Indeed. Aristotle’s classic discussion of the ways in which being is said is structured entirely around the transitive senses of “is”. Being as such is not a substance but a transitive verb, “to be x”. Aristotle mentions it mainly in the context of the extreme generality of an incompatibility of contradictory assertions that is more than just syntactic. Being as such is something separate from Aristotle’s own notion of first cause (see also here); this identification was introduced much later.

“[Heidegger] tells us that such formulations assume the answer to the question he is trying to pose and so do not point to a way of addressing it…. Heidegger’s lifelong claim is that forgetting the question of the meaning of being is a catastrophic event in the history of mankind, that it leads to nihilism and a predatory, self-destructive technical manipulation of the earth” (p. 34).

If “forgetting” the question is a catastrophic event in history, this implies that it was previously clearly understood, at least by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides. We are then supposed to return to an immaculate origin. But history doesn’t show any such immaculate origin, and Plato’s dialogues already demonstrated that the teachings of both Heraclitus and Parmenides are untenable as they stand. Plato is vastly more sophisticated than either of them, with respect to the kinds of arguments he exhibits in his dialogues. And Aristotle is even more sophisticated than Plato. Here we really do have an example of the kind of progressive development that Brandom, following Rorty and Dewey, thinks we should be looking for in history. But as Nietzsche said, philosophers tend to be untimely. No historic society or culture as a whole has ever lived up to the deeper insights of Plato and Aristotle. In terms of sophistication of arguments, the contemporary world at a broad social level still has a pre-Platonic level of understanding.

“His is not a question of ontological commitment, the question of what beings there are or what kinds of beings. (E.g., Is there a God? Are there minds? Are there possibilities? And he does not ask: what makes it possible for beings to be the determinate beings they are? How can they be what they are and be differentiated from other beings? (E.g. what is it to be a mind? What is it to be a possibility?… He does not even mean what must be true of anything at all” (p. 35).

Heidegger argues for the primacy of “fundamental ontology”, which he distinguishes from the ordinary ontology that presupposes a great deal of implicit understanding about things in the world. This latter kind of ontology was already decisively criticized by Kant as dogmatic. But at least as interpreted by the neo-Kantians who dominated German academia in the early 20th century, Kant’s critique represented a turn toward epistemology. Indeed the whole “modern” tradition from Descartes on is sometimes characterized as primarily epistemological and science-oriented. Heidegger is definitely arguing for something new here, a new kind of first philosophy linked more closely with art and poetry.

“[A]ll consciousness-based and representational models of intentionality, are all improperly formulated and misleading. The possibility of such intentionality should rather be understood as requiring ‘being in the world’. A subject-conscious-of-a-distinct-object model should be replaced by an inseparable subject-object nexus, a subject always already transcended in a practical and unthematic relation to its objects. The relation is not one of spectatorship or simple perceptual awareness but ‘comportment’ (Verhalten), an active engagement with the world, an involvement that is driven by how things have come to matter” (p. 36).

We are agreed on this. But Brandom has argued that Kant and Hegel already moved beyond a consciousness-based or representational model of intentionality to one grounded in normativity. Moreover, the normativity model seems a better fit for Plato and Aristotle as well. So what Heidegger is criticizing does not seem to apply to any of the four greatest philosophers in the tradition.

“For Heidegger, world is not the totality of what there is, as in Kant, or all that is the case, as in Wittgenstein. World is a necessarily presupposed (i.e., primordial) condition for the possible availability or accessibility of beings within such a world in the first place…. This notion of availability as deep familiarity implies a kind of immediacy in our original encounter with beings in the world, but not like the direct presence of intentional objects as in theories of a pure ‘given’…. This implies a kind of immersion in the field of significances” (ibid).

I’m not quite sure about this. Immersion in a field of significances sounds promising, but what is this deep familiarity and immediacy that would not be a direct presence?

“In a very shorthand way, we can say that the background world for any possible accessibility and for [the individuation of humans] is a historical world — what Heidegger will call, using another term for openness, a clearing (Lichtung), not a species form” (p. 39).

Heidegger’s metaphor of a “clearing” has a kind of appeal. This seems to be a kind of historically emergent indeterminacy. All human experience is historically conditioned. There is no logos without ethos.

“Dasein is what it takes itself to be, within a world into which it is thrown, over which it has no power or influence. This means that primordial access to beings and to beings as a whole, being as such, is not originally cognitive, not the object of judgments, but requires instead what Heidegger calls a prior attunement…. [I]t is that involvement within a world that allows meaningful access to the beings that show up in such a world” (ibid).

Here we see a number of familiar themes, expressed in a novel vocabulary that is more dramatic and more categorical. The “taking” part is a familiar Kantian notion, but here it seems to be absolutized for the single individual in a way that Hegel at least would call one-sided. The social/ethical reciprocity in the constitution of meaning that Hegel so emphasizes is completely absent here. The world into which we are thrown again seems to be a very blunt dramatization of the non-independence and non-mastery that is an essential feature of human being for Hegel. But Kant or Hegel would also never say that we have no power or influence over the world, only that it is finite.

I’m still not quite sure what is going on with this vocabulary of “access” and “availability” of beings. At first I thought Pippin meant to associate it with what Heidegger pejoratively calls presence-at-hand, which seems to involve a kind of prejudice, like what the philosophically oriented sociologist Karl Mannheim calls ideology in the general sense. (Mannheim does in fact rather superficially refer to Heidegger, among others.) But here this access or availability seems to be playing a more positive role in Heidegger’s account, and to the extent that it does, it suggests a rather Cartesian separation of subject and object, which seems very ironic. Heidegger denounces all of “Western metaphysics”, from beginning to end, for supposedly assuming something like this. I don’t think this “Cartesian” notion of subject and object really applies to key figures like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, among others. Meanwhile, the researches of Alain de Libera on the “archaeology of the subject” strongly suggest that what is called the Cartesian subject has deep roots not only in scholasticism, but also earlier among the Christian church fathers.

I think the sharp dualism Heidegger puts between the bad, empirical ontic of the everyday and the good, metaphysical ontological that addresses only Being with a capital B is undesirable, and too much like the uncrossable separation between worldly beings and God in what Hegel calls the Unhappy Consciousness. Heidegger throws away too much. The philosophical dignity of the ontic should be rehabilitated. Even Hegel — who is very concerned not to swallow all particulars up in the whole in the way that he says that Spinoza does — sometimes seems to me to go too far in his critique of reified “things”.

“If there were no Dasein, there would be all the entities there now are, but none of them would mean anything. The world is the condition of availability…. The question of what accounts for things existing at all is not Heidegger’s question” (p. 40).

If there were no interpretive activity, there would be no meaning. He is right that this has nothing to do with the uninteresting question of whether things exist or not.

“The task of metaphysics is said to be to ‘awaken’ a fundamental attunement to the world (or to awaken us to the realization that we are already attuned)… in the musical sense of being tuned, on the right wavelength, or appreciatively engaged in this field of what matters” (p. 41).

The musical metaphor, like the appeals to poetry, has a kind of intuitive resonance, but here we have to tread carefully. Heidegger seems to appeal to simple intuition in places where there would be ramified reflection in Hegel.

“The ontologically significant states that disclose such meaningfulness as such are attunements like anxiety or boredom, where all such mattering in a sense fails, and so, in such a brutal contrast, the fundamentality (and contingency) of meaningfulness and manifestness as such is salient. And Heidegger always insists that such a significance, such degrees of mattering, cannot be understood as a subject projecting onto otherwise meaningless entities. There are no two steps in such Bedeutsamkeit, or meaningfulness: an encounter with a mere object and then a subjective projection of value by an individual or community. There are not two steps because there is no such first step; Dasein is ‘always already’ within the world of meaningfulness” (pp. 41-42).

That there is an “always already” aspect to our engagement with meaning seems entirely right. But what is this “manifestness as such”? It sounds like mere appearance that contributes nothing to understanding.

“Heidegger is proposing to shift the main tasks of philosophy from the analysis of concepts involved on knowledge claims, empirical experience, and moral claims to an interpretive enterprise, at the center of which are these notions of familiarity (Vertrautheit), meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit), and care (Sorge). As he tells us, a ‘fundamental ontology’ is a ‘hermeneutics of facticity’, and for all the revisions in his language and approach, I don’t believe he ever changed his views about the ‘fundamentality’ of such a hermeneutics (p. 42).

I found an early (1923) lecture course of Heidegger entitled Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, in which he emphasizes that hermeneutics is “not just a doctrine about interpretation… Hermeneutics has the task of making the Dasein which is in each case our own accessible to this Dasein itself with regard to the character of its being, communicating Dasein to itself in this regard, hunting down the alienation from itself with which it is smitten” (p. 11 in link above).

Heidegger delights in putting forward new jargon, like specifying what is to be interpreted as “the being-there of Dasein in the awhileness of temporal particularity” (p. 5 in link above). In any case, Dasein is supposed to better characterize us than reason or intellect or Husserlian phenomenology.

I agree that interpretation does (or should) come before any account of knowledge or being. Meaning is never reducible to something merely given to us, but requires a kind of practical engagement. It is something that we create or construct as much as find.

“That is why the epistemological issue is not prominent in what follows. The manifestation of such significance… ‘happens’ as a matter of mattering and is not a problem of idealism and realism… [also] not a psychological or social-normative issue” (p. 43).

He wants significance to be something that “happens”. I agree it is not a psychological or sociological or other empirical fact. At a simple level, significance could be said to “happen” when interpretation happens. But as such, meaning is no more an event than it is a fact.

“Heidegger’s question is not about the content of the concept Being, but rather about the meaningfulness of our engagements and comportings” (p. 44).

“As Heidegger increasingly insists throughout the ’30s, manifestness in this sense is an event” (ibid).

Unlike meaning, it does seem as though manifestness could be considered at least closely related to a kind of event (an appearing). But I don’t think meaning or significance is reducible to such manifestness.

“Beings don’t have this familiar signification in isolation but within a horizon of possible meaningfulness — that is, within a world…. [T]he world can never become an object, a being, in the world…. And he claims: ‘We can never look upon the phenomenon of world directly’…. That is, the problem of the worldhood of the world in effect names the problem of the meaning of Being as such…. The combination of the world’s centrality and relative cognitive unavailability is what produces what Heidegger refers to as a kind of homesickness, an uncanniness at our being always subject to such a world into which we are thrown, but which we cannot redeem, make sense of theoretically, or directly articulate…. [S]uch worldhood is not a source we have any extra-worldly access to. Anyone for whom anything matters knows that such mattering cannot be understood as the result of any prior reflection on what ought to matter” (p. 45, emphasis in original).

There is no meaning of anything in isolation. Meaning exists only in relation to other meaning. It is an effect of the interconnection of things. “Worldhood” is a name Heidegger gives to this non-isolation of meanings, of which I note again that Hegel was the pioneer in modern times. But once more, I do not see what this would have to do with being as such. The relations that make up the world are concrete.

“Given that the emphasis here on our primary access to the meaning of Being as such is an attunement, not any theoretical claim, and given this focus through boredom, it is clearly the case that Heidegger is tracking how things ‘mean’ to us (‘how things stand concerning us’) as a matter of mattering, a kind of mattering that could contingently collapse and thereby reveal itself” (pp. 47-48).

Heidegger’s novel focus on motifs like boredom and anxiety in Being and Time became a major catalyst for 20th century existentialism. Pippin is generously tracing this back to the much more general question of how things come to “matter” to us. I think there is a more direct and more classical path into this question of mattering, which need have nothing to do with boredom or anxiety. At the level of “us”, we need to stop dichotomizing reason and feeling. As Aristotle said, ethical choice is “either intellect fused with desire, or desire fused with thinking, and such a source is a human being”.

Pippin expands on what he means by “mattering”. His account recalls both Hegel and American pragmatism.

“Our initiation into any historical world is primarily an initiation into this realm of mattering…. Language use is normative not only grammatically but in the matter of its proprieties. That is, we are implicitly attuned to proprieties, or meaningfulness and significances, in daily exchanges with others. (Being so attuned is not incompatible with disregarding or challenging such assumed norms. In fact, it is a necessary condition for doing so.) Likewise, when we learn a task, like cooking, we learn the normative proprieties of the art: what utensils are for, how to use them, what makes for good seasoning, good time management, best techniques, mis en place, etc. We learn to understand the relation between eating and dining, and the place of food and cooking in the rituals of family and social life. In this and many other domains, all the beings we encounter are encountered within a world in which public proprieties have come to prevail, and we are onto these not by having beliefs about them or as a result of explicit evaluations but through being in a world, coping with other beings and other Dasein, in our Verhalten, as Heidegger keeps saying: comportment, a practical mode of access everywhere normative” (p. 48).

Clearly, “mattering” has what the Kant scholars would nowadays call a normative character.

“Heidegger’s main point is that the present-at-hand seems to be such that an engagement with mere substances and their proprieties is treated as if it weren’t a worldly interpretation. We are engaged in a practical comportment that we take ourselves to be avoiding, to be aspiring to ‘the view from nowhere’. This would be like saying that what has come to matter most is a ‘not mattering’ world-relation” (p. 50, emphasis in original).

Pippin elsewhere compares the Heideggerian present-at-hand to the point of view of mere Consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology. They are both concerned with the reification of experience into subject and object. They both suppress their own interpretive character.

“I should also signal here that, especially with respect to Hegel, we will have to revisit the issue of a logical prejudice and examine whether Hegel is guilty of it. After all, Hegel relies in the Phenomenology on such nondiscursive moments as the struggle for recognition, which is certainly not an exchange of judgmental claims” (ibid).

Pippin elsewhere points out that Heidegger’s claim that Hegel’s approach to meaning necessarily involves a “logical prejudice” and ignores nondiscursive dimensions is itself tendentious.

Where he seems to have more sympathy to Heidegger is in relation to the Hegelian talk about the absolute. It now seems to me that like Brandom, Pippin ultimately rejects the Hegelian absolute, rather than just having a deflationary interpretation of it, such as I would propose. I think the “absolute” is inflated (originally Schellingian) rhetoric for the much more modest claim that there is after all some knowledge in the strong sense of episteme. Properly speaking, the Hegelian absolute is not God, though Hegel does figuratively connect the two, especially when he is trying to be understood by nonphilosophers. More properly, the absolute is any instance of pure thought. But the reality of pure thought is itself challenging to explain, especially as applicable to us humans, who experience and indeed are constituted by the fusion of intellect and desire. Aristotle, Averroes, Hegel, and Husserl all make important contributions to such an explanation.

“[T]he way in which the problem of being as such gets any kind of grip on Dasein is not as the result of judgmental claims. The manifestness of beings as a whole cannot be understood as the content of any ‘as such’ judgment. That is the ‘apophantical as’ and cannot be original because it depends on a prior ‘hermeneutical as’…. [T]he meaning should not be thought of in terms of discursivity — again, the cardinal sin of the metaphysical tradition, culminating in Kant and Hegel” (p. 52).

It seems to me that Heidegger’s notion of discursivity is too narrow. In Pippin’s account we see a kind of dichotomy operating, between the kind of judgment associated with assertion, and interpretation. Yes, the “apophantical as” does indeed depend on the “hermeneutic as”, but in my view this was already anticipated by Aristotle. Wisdom is excellence in interpretation, not allegedly “knowing” some pre-existing truth. Truth is not prefabricated in Plato or Aristotle; it is only arrived at through sustained inquiry, and it is the sustaining of the inquiry that gives it its solidity.

“[F]or Heidegger, in all of Western philosophy, we do not know what we mean when we simply note that something, whatever it is, is manifested as what it actually is, endures, or is still alive or occupies space — or, to broach a large topic for him, what ‘happens’ to be” (p. 55).

I say that this is obscurantist. Mere happening to be in and of itself has no meaning at all. It corresponds to inarticulate noise. We begin to have meaning when we talk about some detailed way of being. A mere accident has no meaning.

“So the question is not what some being is, or what it is as such, but what it ‘means’ for it to be at all. By ‘meaning’ here he does not mean linguistic meaning (he says that all linguistic meaning is founded on ontological meaning), and he does not mean meaning in the sense of purposiveness” (p. 56).

So the conclusion does not follow. The linguistic meaning that is rejected here seems to be that of a banal representationalism, and the purposiveness a banal form of utility. But ordinary linguistic meaning is not purely representational; it too has a “poetic” dimension. And internal teleology in Aristotle and Hegel is precisely not reducible to utility (see Teleology After Kant).

“Heidegger will often also note that being should be considered a ‘presencing’ (Anwesende) of being, not something present at hand. By making this distinction, he means that any being present to us (which Heidegger thinks we usually and thoughtlessly attend to as merely present-at-hand (Vorhanden) is only a result” (p. 58, emphasis in original).

That everything that seems to be simply given or present at hand is better understood as a result, is an insight that goes all the way back to Aristotle’s insistence on the priority of ends. It appears in a particularly vivid form in Kant and Hegel.

“This would mean a wholly contingent shifting from beings available as substantial in one period, …to, in another, beings available as created beings, to beings available only as represented for a subject, to being available only as material for technological manipulation…. The Greek notion of ousia (which Heidegger insists is already connected to property, material for use, disposability), the medieval focus on ens creatum, the post-Cartesian notion of represented-being, and the technological orientation all involve a kind of concealment (and therein lies a crude summary of Heidegger’s entire history of metaphysics) that must be different from the inevitable and, one might say, ontologically appropriate sort of ‘concealing’ (more a kind of elusiveness) in the ‘work of art’ — a Greek temple, say” (pp. 66-67).

This recognition of “elusiveness” goes all the way back to Socrates and Plato. It is what underlies Socratic questioning and the long detour.

“Plato and Aristotle set us in a direction we have found it impossible to free ourselves from — the metaphysics of presence, the primordial mattering of intelligibility, knowing, which shows up even in Nietzsche’s claim to have freed us from metaphysical illusions” (p. 67).

Plato and Aristotle were the original critics of the metaphysics of presence. In modern times, this critique was notably taken up by Hegel.

“Nothing is ever originally available to us as such present-at-hand beings, but remarkably we have come to experience the world through some sort of willful blindness thanks to which our everyday world, what should be closest to us, the familiarity of the world as pragmata, is furthest from us…. The question of the meaning of Being has been not only forgotten but suppressed, layered over with some putative ‘neutral’ posing of observing subjects against present at hand substances” (p. 69, emphasis in original).

Hegel’s Phenomenology is from beginning to end an elaboration of a more sophisticated version of this insight.

“Heidegger asks… ‘Why is logic the science of assertion?’…. But there is an obvious answer to Heidegger’s question. The assumption behind the priority of logos is that only an assertion can be a truth-bearer, can be true or false. And if true, then an assertion says how things are, corresponds with being ” (p. 70).

I say logic is a tool that is helpful in interpretation.

“[C]ontrary to what Heidegger says, truth must still reside in some assertion about what is disclosed. An event cannot itself be true or false” (p. 71).

Assertions are what is “true or false”. But I also recognize poetic truth, which is not “true or false”.

“The meaning of one’s being is one’s ‘ownmost’….Such knowledge can only be arrived at first-personally…. And so in cases like these (where the meaning of Dasein’s being is at issue), a propositional formulation would get us nowhere” (ibid).

Essence is not reducible to propositional content, to statements that are true or false. It involves propositional content and valuation and poetic truth. It is characteristic of Plato’s depictions of Socrates that he already makes makes a major theme of showing in many different ways that essence is elusive. That is what distinguishes it from appearance.

“The issue of the original meaningfulness of being in any historical world is simply not statable in propositional terms, and its availability in literature and life is a matter of interpretation, not cognition, attunement not assertion…. Instead any propositional formulation and assertion must be said to presuppose a ‘context of significance’…. Such a context is not one Dasein has a mediated relation ‘to’; hence all the formulations about Dasein being its disclosedness…, that it is the ‘clearing’ where such disclosure happens'” (p. 73).

In the mode of poetic truth, it could even be said that we interpreting animals come to be what we are by participating in the clearing where meaning “happens”. But if we are to speak of a happening of meaning, it should be said that such happening is not at all purely contingent. I am inclined to think that “purely contingent meaning” is an oxymoron. Where there is meaning at all, it must be possible to give some kind of account of it, even if it be not univocal.

Next in this series: Versions of Finitude

Substantial Form?

One of the things I have learned recently is that the common scholastic (but post-Aristotelian) notion of substantial form goes back at least to Averroes. Aristotle talks separately about form and about substance, but never combines them in a single phrase like “substantial form”.

One of the important meanings of “substance” (ousia) is indeed form-like, as when he speaks of the what-it-is of things. Aristotle presents this meaning as superseding its more syntactic meaning of “underlying thing”. But eventually, this too is superseded by the uniquely Aristotelian notion of “act” (energeia), about which I have written much in the past year.

I’m now curious whether something like “substantial form” makes any appearance in the neoplatonic commentators like Simplicius and Philoponus. As Platonists, they would have an interest in turning the interpretation of substance back in the direction of form. (See also Substance, Essence, Form).

Passivity Revisited

One point on which I sharply differ from Pippin is his claim that Aristotelian intellect is purely passive. I think I have sufficiently documented that this is not historically accurate. But the context of Pippin’s claim is Kant’s great elaboration of the active side of judging and thinking. And undoubtedly, Kant was arguing against a received view. So whose view was it?

I think the answer has to be Leibniz, his popularizer Christian Wolff, and the Wolffians like Mendelsohn and Baumgarten who dominated philosophy in German universities in Kant’s time. An examination of Kant’s work shows that most of the received views Kant argues against are Wolffian views.

Basic to Leibniz’s and the Wolffians’ point of view is a very categorical preformationism. One of Leibniz’s best known theses asserts a pre-established harmony that not only aims to explain the relationship of mind and body, but encompasses all things whatsoever. According to Leibniz, God creates nothing less than an entire, coherent world, every detail of which is providentially anticipated in advance. Once there is a world, God never “intervenes” in it, because all the work of providence was done in creation. (Providence in the Greek (pronoia) is literally forethought.) God’s creative act consists in the selection of the best of all possible worlds. I personally regard the pre-established harmony as a kind of Platonic myth or “as if” — a speculative hypothesis that makes a kind of poetic sense, but is nonetheless very extravagant.

Consistent with his assertion of pre-established harmony, Leibniz denies that there is real causal interaction between things in the world. Instead, each being carries within it a microcosm of the whole, and is causally affected only by God.

One of Kant’s earliest publications was a defense of real causal interaction against Leibniz. Whether or not Kant thought about it at the time, he was effectively defending an Aristotelian view of the reality of secondary causes. Against this wider background, Kant’s later insistence on the active character of thought can be seen as taking the perspective that we too rank among the real secondary causes.

If the harmony of all things were pre-established, there would be no active work for intellect to do. It would just need to assimilate itself to the pre-established harmony. Intellect would thus be a passive recognition of pre-existing structures. Thus the Leibnizian-Wolffian world view intrinsically promotes the passivity of intellect that Kant opposes.

Hegel’s Recovery of Aristotelian Act

More than any other author, Robert Pippin has contributed to an understanding of the central role of Aristotelian act or “actuality” (energeia ) in orienting the thought of Hegel. (For general background on what is at stake here, see Actuality, Existence; Is and Ought in Actuality).

Hegel is the first modern philosopher to explicitly engage with Aristotle in a constructive way, and he does so informed by a broadly Kantian perspective. Though he is occasionally unfair to each of them, Kant and Aristotle are his two principal inspirations, and he very seriously aims to combine their respective insights. In the ways that Aristotle and Kant have been respectively stereotyped, this might seem a quixotic enterprise, but I think the past year’s posts here have provided ample indications that on the contrary, it may be exactly what philosophy needs.

In his book Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (2008), Pippin particularly develops an ethical dimension of Hegelian Wirklichkeit or actuality — which Hegel identifies with Aristotelian energeia — as the counterbalance to our subjective impulses and our unreflective, immediate sense of self (see Actualization of Freedom; Hegel on Willing). This in itself does not yet capture all the teleological dimensions of act pointed out by Gwenaëlle Aubry in her analysis of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but it accurately captures and sustains Aristotle’s own point that a person’s deeds are a more reliable indicator of character than her words.

In Hegel’s Realm of Shadows (2019), Pippin greatly expands the scope of his treatment of Hegelian actuality, based on a groundbreaking in-depth analysis of the marriage of Aristotle and Kant achieved in Hegel’s Logic.

On the Kantian side, Pippin emphasizes the fundamental orienting role of reflective judgment in Hegel’s view of “logic” (see More on Reflection; Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity; Reflection, Judgment, Process; Hegel on Reflection; Reflection and Dialectic; Apperceptive Judgment.)

What is actual for Hegel is always a matter of Kantian reflective judgment, and never a simple matter of putative facts. Kant and Hegel more explicitly develop the role of reflective judgment than Aristotle does, but we have seen that a kind of reflective judgment can reasonably be said to be the more specific ground of Aristotelian wisdom.

On the explicitly Aristotelian side, Pippin in an exemplary way points out the many ways in which Hegel uses Aristotle to help resolve Kantian problems. Especially important for this is Hegel’s removal of the qualifications in Kant’s endorsement of internal teleology, and his explicit return to a more full-bloodedly Aristotelian way of treating it (see Hegel’s Union of Kant and Aristotle; Essence and Explanation; “The” Concept?; Unconditioned Knowledge?; Life: A Necessary Concept?; The Logic’s Ending).

Internal teleology has nothing supernatural about it, but it represents an alternative to mechanistic or reductionistic styles of explanation. As Aristotle puts it, it is about explanation in terms of “that for the sake of which”, which allows for a deeper and more rounded understanding of the why of things, which is what explanation for both Aristotle and Hegel is about, first and foremost. And act or actuality is the key orienting term in Aristotle’s teleology.

Wisdom and Judgment

For Aristotle, the ultimate aim of a talking animal as such is wisdom, which cannot be separated from ethical sensitivity and concern for others. This wisdom might be characterized as an excellence in reflective judgment or interpretation.

There has, however, come to be a traditional view of what is called judgment — especially common in early modern logic — that reduces it to the grammatical form of predication (“A is B”), and its truth to a matter of simple correspondence to fact, which is presumed to be independently knowable. Predication on this view aims to be a kind of authoritative saying of how things are, grounded in putatively immediate truth that is not supposed to depend on any kind of normative inquiry or process of interpretation in order to be known. Things just factually are certain ways, and judgments are conclusions produced immediately that are supposed to correspond to the facts. Judgments are either right, and thereby count as objective; or wrong, and to be dismissed as merely subjective. But in neither case do they involve any depth of engagement or extensive activity. They are “shallow”.

This dogmatic way of thinking, criticized by Kant and Hegel, is utterly alien to the kind of spirit of rational inquiry promoted by Plato and Aristotle, who thought that assertions should be grounded in reasons shareable and discussible with other humans, and not on vain claims of immediate insight. But both this reductive use of “judgment” for the mere immediate production of a representation, and the reduction of truth to a correspondence to presumed fact, have often been wrongly characterized as Aristotelian, when they are really of much later origin.

I would suggest that the very idea of better or worse judgment, or of judgment as something of which there could be an excellence, is incompatible with the shallow black-and-white view of judgment as simply right or wrong. Judgment as activity is anything but an immediate production. It is an extensive and intensive activity of interpretation and reflection.

The contemporary American philosopher Robert Brandom writes, “Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea…. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for…. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from unminded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental” (Reason in Philosophy, pp. 32-33; see Kantian Intentionality).

Over the course of many posts, we have seen not only that what Aristotle calls nous and gets translated as “intellect” is an activity and not a stuff, but also that it is intrinsically concerned to seek the better in each instance. The highest good for Aristotle is not a pre-given content, but the result of a truly consistent aiming at the better in life, where what is better is intelligible, and once again not pre-given, but expressible in terms of reasons that any human can share in evaluating.

A important notion of responsibility is also implicit in Aristotle, as when he points out that the freedom of ethical beings is not an arbitrary license, but is commensurate with the taking of responsibility. For Aristotle, unfree beings have no responsibility insofar as they are unfree. It is free beings capable of real deliberation and choice that have responsibility.

On the other hand, at a top level Aristotle prefers to stress the affirmative values of friendship, love, and reciprocity over the constraints of responsibility. For Aristotle, an ethically serious person guided by affirmative aims will turn out to be responsible in her actions. Kant was more distrustful of our affirmative aims, as possibly biased by our individual impulse, and therefore tended to emphasize duty and responsibility as more reliable motivators for ethical action. Aristotle has the more optimistic view that there can be such a thing as desire that is consistent with reason about what is better. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; The Goal of Human Life).

Plato and Aristotle on Religion

Aristotle’s statements about “god” have sometimes troubled both religious people and non-religious people. For the believers they seem to say too little, and yet for nonbelievers they seem to say too much. But views that generate opposite complaints might be taken to represent a happy medium of sorts. In this troubled world of ours, so full of religious strife, the generous and optimistic spirit of Plato and Aristotle has much to be commended.

I use the lower case “god” to translate Plato and Aristotle’s ho theos, which can also be rendered “the god”. Many have read an incipient monotheism into this term.

In the course of their philosophical work, Plato and Aristotle address many issues relevant to religion, without attaching themselves to any particular creed or orthodoxy. Conventional Greek religion in their day was more concerned with ceremonial observance than with specific belief. Plato nonetheless criticizes the very human foibles attributed to the gods in Greek mythology, and generally rejects argument from authority in favor of shareable reasoning. For Plato, worthiness of the designation “god” implies a virtual identity with the good, the true, and the beautiful. A god would, for example, be incapable of jealousy. Aristotle shares this positive perspective, and does not speak about mythology at all, except in a literary way.

Reception of Plato and Aristotle in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions was largely filtered through the complex history of neoplatonism. At the same time, neoplatonism — and especially the work of its founder, Plotinus — greatly influenced later theology. Although Plotinus was nominally a polytheist, his philosophy focuses intensely on the relation of all things to the One. Augustine in his Confessions describes his reading of Plotinus as a halfway point toward his conversion to Christianity. During the Islamic Golden Age, an Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus circulated under the title Theology of Aristotle.

After the Roman Empire became officially Christian, the emperor Julian briefly attempted to overthrow Christianity, while claiming support from the later neoplatonic philosophy of Iamblichus. Iamblichus’ Athenian successor Proclus treats the works of Plato as themselves divinely inspired, while also broadly embracing the polytheisms of all nations. Proclus wrote a Platonic Theology as well as an Elements of Theology, and championed a theological interpretation of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides at great length. The Athenian neoplatonic school was eventually closed by the Christian Roman emperor for its persistent advocacy on behalf of pagan traditions.

The Alexandrian neoplatonic school under Ammonius sought to distance itself from the Athenian school’s advocacy of paganism, while at the same time shifting its curriculum to focus much more on Aristotle rather than Plato. Ammonius’ students included both the Christian John Philoponus and the pagan Simplicius, who between them authored the majority of the surviving Greek commentaries on Aristotle. Without endorsing all the details of either of their work, I find it inspiring that they were able to coexist within the same school.

Religion and politics both need more dialogue and less denunciation of the other. Plato and Aristotle and discussions of their work have much to teach us along these lines.

Desire, Image, Intellect

In the previous post, we saw an argument developed by Giorgio Agamben that for the great medieval Italian poets Dante and Cavalcanti, there is a very close connection between love, imagination, and intellect, and that in this they were inspired by the controversial views of the great commentator Averroes in his Long Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. Taking Agamben’s essay as a point of departure, Jean-Baptiste Brenet explores Averroes’ critique of his Andalusian predecessor Ibn Bajja on the relation between intellect and imagination.

Ibn Bajja is historically important for his very strong notion of the role of imagination in the constitution of a human being. He develops this as an elaboration of the Greek commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias’ view that the so-called material intellect is a “pure preparation”, and is purely immanent in a faculty of imagination that is ultimately grounded in the body. Alexander’s view partly anticipates modern empiricism. Averroes’ criticisms of Alexander and of Ibn Bajja partly anticipate some contemporary criticisms of empiricism.

Brenet begins by recalling Aristotle’s statement in book Lambda of the Metaphysics that the first cause “moves as the object of love” (quoted in Agamben and Brenet, Intellect d’amour, p. 35, my translation throughout). Following Alexander, Averroes repeats that “Every thing is related to the prime mover as the lover to the loved” (ibid, emphasis in original).

According to Brenet, Averroes holds that “[T]he human, in tending toward the prime mover, only achieves her desire in acquiring in a complete way her initially extrinsic intellect.”

“This idea here of mental acquisition is an Arabic concept, and not a Greek one” (ibid, emphasis added). It seems to have been Alfarabi who particularly developed the distinction between intellect “in habit [hexis]” and intellect fully “acquired”. In the tradition that Alfarabi founded, the “acquired” intellect is sometimes said to result from a human being’s “conjunction” with a transcendent “agent intellect”. Unlike Alexander, who identified the agent intellect (nous poietikos, literally “doing or making intellect”) with the intellect Aristotle associates with the first cause, Alfarabi and the subsequent Arabic tradition treated it as a distinct metaphysical entity subordinate to the first cause.

The sense of the distinction between “in habit” and “acquired” seems to oppose a common level of achievement and actualization to an extraordinary one, or perhaps an ordinary empirical psychology to a normative ideal.

Averroes in his early works generally follows Ibn Bajja on this issue, but later develops his own unique position.

“In [Averroes’] Compendium of the Metaphysics, he too recalls that that which moves the lover is nothing but the form (sura) of the beloved that we bear within ourselves. What form? Not the absolute intelligible that the lover’s intellect apprehends, but that singular one that her imagination summons: her phantasm” (p. 36).

Aristotle separately says that the first cause moves as the object of love, and speaks of the large role of imagination in what we might call the psychology of thought. Ibn Bajja and the early Averroes thoroughly merge these two considerations.

“When we say that the intellect moves itself toward the object of love, we should not see a metaphor that translates the tendency toward accomplishment. To describe the process of intellectual acquisition, Averroes poses that ‘we move ourselves toward the conjunction’ (dicimur moveri ad continuationem), and with him this recovers a veritable physics of thought…. or more precisely, cinematics…. Certainly, he says, we find a celebrated manner of apprehending movement, which consists in making it ‘a path toward perfection’, this path being distinct from perfection itself (via ad perfectionem quae est alia ab ipsa perfectionae). But there is another way, ‘more true’, according to which ‘movement […] does not differ from the perfection toward which it tends, except by the more and the less […]. Movement in effect is nothing other than the engenderment, part by part, of this perfection (generatio partis post aliam illius perfectionis)” (p. 37, emphasis and bracketed ellipses in original).

We have recently seen that Aristotle himself treats all motion as a kind of entelechy.

“Fascinating thesis, where movement is nothing but the thing itself in its partial realization” (ibid). He quotes Averroes, “To go toward heat is in a certain way heat itself” (ibid). He continues, “This is the model that applies to thought. To move oneself toward the conjunction is to go toward the complete intellect, that is to say to become it, part by part, being it more and more” (ibid).

As individuals we approach this completeness not by perfectly realizing some one particular thought, but primarily by simultaneously realizing many thoughts, from multiple perspectives. Spinoza seems to have been influenced by this, as well as by Averroes’ critique of the image.

Brenet also says that Averroes implicitly references Alexander’s remarks in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (surviving Arabic fragments of this lost work having been recently translated to French) on the simultaneous continuity and discontinuity observable in the process of a body of water’s freezing. Averroes applies a similar combination of continuity and discontinuity to thought. Brenet suggests that Averroes compares arriving at determinate thought to a process of “freezing”, and suggests that Alexander’s model of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity holds good for the history of concepts and sciences as well.

“From Ibn Bajja, Averroes takes [the idea] that our concepts of things are composites. If they are, as universals, abstracted from matter, they conserve a form of materiality in that they only exist for us as applied to the images from which they are extracted. The concept is not simple, pure. It bears the mark of its concrete origin, and is first conceived only through this. That is to say, [the concept] only occurs in relation to the image which is its source, to the point of including this in its nature. That every thought is the thought of something signifies not that it aims at a noematic content, but that it is the thought of an image, of the intelligible of an image, and that necessarily the two, like all relational things, coexist while thought lasts. There is no concept but in presence of its image, with it, just as there is no son in act except by and from a father in act” (p. 38).

This is emphasizing the role of psychological immanence in thought, as distinct from thought’s objectivity, a transcendent object, pure structure, or an ideal concept in itself.

“In this composition, the required image plays the role of matter, not only as furniture, but in the sense that it is a point of support that must be integrated into the grasp of what is supported there. This is what the text repeats, that the concept is related to the imagined form, that it is attached to it, coupled. Copulatio in Latin translates Arabic irtibat, which designates a bond, like the rope that holds an animal. The universal only appears to humans in the copula to the image (from which proceed, moreover, language and speech). In its first aspect, thought thus presents two united sides, or better, occurs as their very ligature” (p. 39).

In more modern terms, even if thought primarily resides in inference rather than in some presented content, a psychologically immanent “content” corresponding to the image is nonetheless what gives it a point of application. Averroes emphasizes the role of immanent presentation in the form of images in the genesis of thought, while refusing to grant them normative status.

“That which is constitutive in the human, who is neither god nor angel, is a predisposition to think, and this, insofar as it is not mixed, necessarily has an anchorage. This pure mental aptitude is not floating, absolutely separated. It has its place, exists only as preparation of a subject, which, according to Ibn Bajja, can only be the image. By this, Averroes thinks Ibn Bajja means not only that imagination constitutes the substrate of which intellect as a power has need in order to exist, but that it is also, via the disposition of which it is the bearer, that in which thought in act is realized. The reading, which takes in a maximal sense the intermediary (mutawassit) status of the imagination, is dizzying. This would not only be the support of the faculty of thought, nor indeed, by the active images, the correlate of conception, but… the very space of intelligibilization, the place of the happening of the intelligible” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Averroes, after having been seduced, contested this, bequeathing to scholasticism an exclusively negative portrait of his first master. The image in the intellect moves, it is not moved; it is subiectum movens, and not recipiens. What Ibn Bajja loses is the equivocity of the very notion of the power of thought. If we mean to designate the capacity for universalization, a universality latent but virtual, initially this works well for the image, which conceals an intelligible charge of multiple ‘states’ (ahwal) close to the universal immediately susceptible of becoming concept. But if we dream of the power to receive thought, which the tradition calls the ‘material’ intellect, this no longer works. Reading Ibn Bajja, writes the final Averroes, ‘it seems […] that he wanted to say that the material intellect is the imaginative faculty insofar as it is prepared for the entities that are in it conceived in act, and that there is no other faculty serving as subject for these intelligibles outside of this faculty’. But he was wrong. The image is only the landmark and the subject-mover, and not the subject-substrate (that which leads it to invest the body). Thought cannot realize itself in the place from which it is pulled, even though it depends on it, and if there must be an intermediary, a diaphaneity of the intelligible, and then a receptacle for what is extracted from the image, this can only be an intellect adjoining but substantially distinct (‘separated’), this ‘possible’ intellect about which Cavalcanti as a poet will repeat that in it ‘as in a subject’ (come in subiecto) the form ‘takes its place and its abode'” (p. 40, emphasis and ellipses in original).

For a general orientation to the point of view Averroes is expressing here, Brenet turns to Hannah Arendt, summarizing part of the argument of her Life of the Spirit.

“To think, she explains, consists in a retreat, withdrawing oneself from place, not from where one is, from the quotidian space of worry and noise, but from all place, from all space, from spatiality itself. For thinking has for its object ‘essences’, and essences, as generalities, products of a de-sensorialization or of a stripping away of matter, offer themselves subtracted from spatial qualities: ‘In other words, the “essential” is what applies everywhere, and this “everywhere” which gives to thought its characteristic weight, is in terms of space a “nowhere”. The thinking me which moves itself among the universals, the invisible essences, is strictly speaking found nowhere: it is a non-citizen of any state, in the strongest sense of the term — that which explains perhaps the precocious development of a cosmopolitan mentality among the philosophers'” (pp. 40-41).

“Cosmopolitan” literally means “citizen of the cosmos”, indeed an appropriate epithet for a philosopher. Thought is nonspatial in the sense that it cannot be reduced to “seeing” an image, as something immediately there in a place. He notes that she particularly singles out Aristotle as having understood “that this status of being a non-citizen is the state of nature of thought” (p. 41).

To be a “citizen” of the cosmos , or of the universal community of rational animals, makes one to an extent a “non-citizen” of one’s particular community. It is also to be capable of detachment from the immediacy and naturality of imagination in experience.

Brenet quotes Albert the Great’s summary of the views of Ibn Bajja. “They say that there is no possible intellect in the human that is the subject of the intelligibles insofar as they are intelligible, because for them the form thought (forma speculationis) […] cannot have a subject in which it is found, given that it is universal, that is to say valid everywhere and for all time — but if it had a subject, it would be necessarily individuated, since every form is individuated and determined by its subject. From this they concluded that what we call possible or potential intellect is that which is potentially the thinking (speculativus) intellect, and that this is the image (phantasma) in the imagination (phantasia)” (ibid, ellipses in original).

“Without following Avempace [Ibn Bajja], many ‘Averroists’ contemporary to Dante and Cavalcanti also insisted on a form of implantation of thought by the image. This is the case with Antonio di Parma, medical doctor and philosopher, whom the two poets could have read or crossed paths with. The problem for him is not to conceive of the non-place of the universal, the atopia of the concept as such, that which is in evidence. Inversely, it concerns a being-there that makes of thought, in spite of the substantial separation of the intellect, something other than a cosmic phenomenon without relation to the incarnate personality of the thinker. The solution is in the image. Thought indeed is abstracted from the image, it is pulled from it, but this does not mean that it ‘leaves’ (leaving us at the same time), as if intellectual abstraction corresponded to a transit of the form, from the place that is the image (where it is intelligible potentially), to another place (the intellect, where it would be in act). For the universal form there is no other place, since by the way properly speaking it ‘does not go outside of us’ (non exit extra nos) when we abstract. And not only does the intellect ‘think nothing outside of us’ (non intelligit extra nos), even if it is separated, but since thought does not happen somewhere else than there where the image is transmuted, it is ‘in us’ (in nobis) that it happens, so to speak, in place. Thought does not migrate, it is not exported, and the atopism of its being promotes the immanence of its fabric. The image, homeland of thought” (pp. 41-42).

But if the image is the homeland of thought, for Averroes and his many Latin followers it is not thought’s destiny.

“These philosophers nonetheless did not make the image their last word. The individual thought that conjoins the universal to the phantasm from which it is extracted is only a form of thought in mid-course, characteristic of the apprenticeship by which physical knowledge proceeds from the punctual experience of things. A human of this sort accedes to the true, but always in mediate fashion, in a dependency on the body that keeps the ‘thing itself’ at a distance. ‘The one who attains the theoretic rank, writes Ibn Bajja, certainly regards the intelligible, but through an intermediary, like the sun appearing in water, where what we see in the water is the image and not [the sun] itself’. The intelligible linked to the image, as a consequence, is like the sun reflected in water, or in a mirror, that is to say also an image, that it is necessary to go beyond if we intend to approach reality as closely as possible.”

“To express this going beyond, Averroes uses a strong term: abolition” (pp. 42-43, emphasis in original).

Brenet quotes Averroes: “The form of the intellect in habitus is corrupted and destroyed, and nothing remains but the material intellect” (p. 43, emphasis in original).

“Finally, the image and that which it founds are reduced to nothing, leaving the power alone faced with the full act” (ibid).

This is indeed strong language, almost ascetic in character. But the emphasis is not on a rejection of worldly being, but on a detachment from overly specific representations as they spontaneously arise. The goal is not abstraction or suppression of passion, but true universality.

“The notion of Entbildung in the ‘mysticism’ of Meister Eckhart is not without support — under the veil of sermons — from the Averroist idea of the effacement or the annihilation of phantasms. Entbilden is to dis-imagine, and this de-figuration imposes itself on the soul, to render it available to the highest truth” (pp. 43-44).

Meister Eckhart has become famous in popular spirituality as a mystic, but he was also the third German master of theology from the University of Paris after Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg, and held important positions in the Dominican Order. Scholars increasingly emphasize the importance of his philosophical work. Brenet quotes from Meister Eckhart’s commentary on the gospel of John:

“This is why certain philosophers affirm that the agent intellect, which they call a separate substance, is united with us in the images (nobis uniri in phantasmatibus) thanks to its light that illuminates and penetrates our imaginative faculty by that illumination, and when this intellect is multiplied by multiple acts of intellection, it unites itself finally with us and becomes for us our form (tandem nobis unitur et fit forma) in such a way that we perform the works proper to that substance, which is to say that we intellectually know the separate beings, as these last know themselves. And according to these philosophers, this intellect is therefore in us an acquired intellect (iste est in nobis secundum ipsos intellectus adeptus)” (p. 44).

Someone might object that this passage only seems to refer to the Arabic tradition in a general way. References to Arabic philosophers are not exactly uncommon in scholastic theology. But I think Brenet’s implicit argument here is that the reference to the imaginative faculty in the passage suffices to establish that the philosophers mentioned are not just Arabic but specifically Andalusian in the tradition of Ibn Bajja, and this in turn allows us to safely infer that the reference is to Averroes, because it was overwhelmingly through translations of Averroes that the Latin-speaking world gained knowledge of the Andalusian tradition. In presence of such a reference, it seems unlikely that Eckhart’s explicit talk about “dis-imagination” is a mere coincidence.

“Why this abolition of the image?… Even if their competition was necessary and must expand, the images need to disappear because our current intellect, that of abstract thought, disengaged from the world, is never transmuted. There is no great work in the individual intelligence, no alchemy. The possible does not turn into the necessary, the transitory into the incorruptible, and the intellect in habitus must finally be corrupted in order to allow to subsist, under its collapse, only the in-itself universal and timeless power of thought that is the intellect called material” (p. 45).

“But the destroyed images have been indispensable (as a path, otherwise desired, that it is a question of traveling, and not as an impurity that it would be preferable to immediately get rid of)…. The image allows the power of thought to accede, not first to the act but beneath that, to its own power; in actualizing it, it opens it up to its essential capacity” (p. 46, emphasis in original).

“If it has to build its power (for it does not at first have it, being at first only an aptitude), our intellect must also increase its scope, to the point of maximizing it, and it is by the image that it can do so. The image that the human desires, in which and by which she desires, is for the person the space of the appropriation of thought. It is like the mark made on the concept that not only individualizes it, but imputes it and attributes it” (ibid).

“In his Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, which the Latins could read, Averroes recalls the progress of the material intellect toward the acquired intellect, and of the first he writes: ‘if this intellect strips itself of all potentiality, when human perfection is realized, it is necessary that its act, which is not itself, annihilates itself (yubtilu; destruatur)’. Stripping, then ruin of the fruit of the stripping. Intellect must divest itself of its power in actualizing itself in the thoughts of the world, then obliterate this actualization solidary with the images of things…. It is on this intentional nihilism, of which the image is the paradoxical operator, that felicity depends” (pp. 46-47).

Nonetheless, “The theory of thought by ‘conjunction’ is founded on a doctrine of desire, which raises the subalternate question of moral action. There is never thought except by desire” (p. 47, emphasis added).

Brenet recalls that in book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains choice by orektikos nous (desiring intellect) “or” orexis dianoetike (reflective desire), “and such a principle is a human” (quoted, ibid). Averroes in turn speaks of cogitatio — the cogitative faculty of the soul, responsible for deliberation — sometimes in terms of discursive reasoning and sometimes in terms of imagination, but it should be understood as both simultaneously. “The principle of the human is only made effective in the crossing and the permanent division of these two dimensions” (p. 48).

The claim is that without ever becoming exempt from desire, “[T]he intellect of the human can have as object not only the abstract intelligible but the separate intelligible, universal in itself” (ibid, emphasis in original). “For Averroes, convinced of the necessity of this thought that is literally supernatural (though operated in the world here below, and by the force of reason alone), the question is not one of knowing whether our intellect accedes to the pure intelligible, but of establishing how it does so, how it can do so, what is the power that will make it capable of this” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This worldly and rational “supernatural” is a technical consequence of Aristotle’s narrow identification of the natural with terrestrial materiality. I prefer to use the term “natural” in a more expansive way, as including both astronomical entities and the whole scope of Aristotelian teleology.

“Why are all the individuals not already thought ‘in’ the thinking intellect, in the way that Augustine held that all humans have sinned in Adam? The solution again draws on the image” (p. 50).

“We have said that there are two dispositions to think in the human. The first is that which her images procure; … the second follows on this, and is its reward. This is the disposition toward the supreme thinkable, which occurs when the intellect has been taken to the limits of its capacity by the cumulative effect of all kinds of images” (p. 51).

“As for the philosopher, the beatific thinker, she is intellectually subtracted from time, and as Ibn Bajja says, that of her which is eternalized does not ‘redescend’.”

“In spite of all this, knowledge does not remain without a body. Each singular body that wears out and perishes in its images must be constantly relayed if the resulting universal is to be a constant event…. [T]he body in its phantasms is dead. Long live the immense Body” (p. 53).

“While Dante wrote his Monarchy to defend in the name of Averroes the existence of a ‘multitude’ allowing all its power to be activated, the theologian Thomas Wylton in Paris wrote an ‘Averroist’ text also maintaining that what the intellect completes is always in the first instance the species and not the individual: ‘the first perfectible of the material intellect is not Socrates or Plato, nor is it the universal abstracted by the intellect, but human nature itself, which in itself and in relation to quiddity is one in all its supports, even though it is numerically distinct in them. Insofar as it is one in this manner, it is the first perfectible of the material intellect, and as such it is — if we speak of a determinate singularity within a species — neither numbered nor singular: one may call it singular, but [only in the sense of] a vague singularity‘” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Brenet has written an entire book on Wylton.

“It appears, but as a vague individual, of which we perceive only that it is some animal, or some human, an aorist, the indeterminate individual of which what follows must show the figure or the face” (p. 54, emphasis in original).

“The phantasm is abolished, indetermination advances, the images return. Desire resumes” (ibid).

Ethical Roots of Aristotelian Dynamis

“The notion of dunamis is present from the earliest writings of Aristotle, associated each time with an ethical context” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 100, my translation throughout). She cites studies of this issue by D. W. Graham and E. Berti.

The Protrepicus is an Aristotelian dialogue, famous in antiquity as an exhortation for people to learn philosophy, but surviving only in fragments quoted by other authors. According to Aubry, it discusses dynamis in terms still based on those of Plato’s Theaetetus — a kind of having, as distinct from use — but it already introduces Aristotle’s neologisms of energeia and entelecheia, or act and the closely related notion of entelechy. Significations according to act are already treated as focal, relative to significations according to dynamis.

“Finally, the distinction also shows a normative and teleological sense” (ibid).

“The notion of energeia is found associated not only with that of usage, but also with that of good usage and that of end, and by the latter ultimately with that of ergon [a completed work] — the text having ultimately for objective the determination of the ergon of the soul, not only its function but the act in which its end properly resides” (p. 101).

We saw recently that Plato already used ergon in a sense like this. Aristotelian energeia is the fulfilling activity from which the Platonic ergon emerges.

“It is with a normative and teleological sense that the notion of ergon intervenes again in fragment 6: the accomplishment of the ergon in effect is that in virtue of which a thing can be called good, agathos, that in which also resides its virtue, arete. For in the case of a composite being, this work cannot be immediately determined: constituted of different parts, such a being is also constituted of multiple acts and multiple powers. Its end resides in the accomplishment of its best work, its most proper dunamis, indeed that of that part of it in which its identity most resides. For the human, her end and her happiness reside in the accomplishment of the power of thinking, phronesis, which is at the same time her divine part and her most proper identity. The notion of dunamis is thus articulated to those of ergon and of energeia, which themselves are articulated to that of end, telos” (ibid).

Much of Aristotle’s most characteristic thought is expressed here. (On a side note, I am especially intrigued that phronesis or practical judgment is here explicitly assigned the same ultimate role that theoria or contemplation plays in the Nicomachean Ethics. I have long been skeptical of any sharp contrast between these two. See Aristotelian “Wisdom”.)

“The Protrepicus strongly associates notions that were present but disjoint in Plato: that of effective usage, of ergon and end, which are conjoined in Aristotle’s invented terms of energeia and entelecheia” (ibid).

She also points out a discussion of dynamis in book IV of the Topics, where it is opposed to choice based on deliberation. No one should be blamed for a dynamis. “One does not say of a human who is capable of acting badly that she is bad…. The bad is the one who is not only capable of evil, but chooses it…. Contrary to what Platonic aristocratism affirms, there are no naturally good or bad [rational beings]; in particular, it makes no sense to speak of someone as naturally virtuous: because virtue, the Nicomachean Ethics says, is not a dunamis, a native power, an innate quality, any more than vice is. It is a hexis, a disposition acquired… by means of repetition of one same act, and of which the actualization, in its turn, is suspended from prohairesis [choice grounded in deliberation]” (p. 102).

Next in this series: Potentiality for Interaction

Aristotelian “Wisdom”

Aristotle is conventionally considered to regard theoria (reflective “contemplation”) and sophia (the reflective wisdom concerning causes and principles discussed in the Metaphysics) as superior to praxis (ethical doing) and phronesis (reflective judgment about ethical doing). This is often represented in terms of modern contrasts of “theory” versus “practice”, and Aristotle is then claimed to regard theory as superior to practice. I think this seriously misrepresents Aristotle’s meaning.

Reflective wisdom concerning causes and principles provides higher-order grounding for reflective judgment about first-order ethical doing. In the life of human beings, however, these are only analytically distinct. They are features of the continuum of reflection within which we orient ourselves.

Aristotle speaks of reflection as valuable for its own sake, and not only for the sake of something else. This is an important truth. But we also see the fruits of reflective wisdom (or the lack of it) in ethical doing.

I think that in addition to being valuable for its own sake, reflective wisdom is also “for the sake of” ethical doing. Every instance of ethical doing can be seen as manifesting some high or low degree of reflective wisdom, and from an Aristotelian point of view, this concrete manifestation has an irreducible place in the scheme of things.