Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic

When Hegel talked about dialectic instead of just using it, he occasionally made it sound as if dialectic governed events in the world. This is a loose, popular way of speaking that should not be taken literally. Dialectic is the main tool of the forward progress of philosophical criticism, and thus indirectly helps refine our understanding of the world and events in it. It could not directly drive events.

It is actually very hard to draw a sharp line between the world “in itself” and our understanding of it, because our understanding (in the general, not the specifically Hegelian sense) is all we actually have to go on. Our sense of the world in itself is permeated by artifacts of our understanding, because it comes entirely from our understanding.

But then it turns out that our understanding is not just some private, subjective thing of ours. Our understanding participates in the world, and is part of it. The cultivation of shareable thought grounds objectivity in (our sense of) the world. Much of the content of shareable thought comes to us from outside. In a poetic manner of speaking, it could be said that the world thinks itself through us. But in a more direct way, we are the agents and stewards of the world’s thought. In particular, it advances through us. There is thus no wall between our understanding and the world. There is a meaningful distinction, but the content of shareable thought straddles the boundary, so to speak.

Aristotle’s version of dialectic is much less famous nowadays, but a great deal easier to understand, and it does not require apologetics of the sort I just provided for Hegel’s. It uses logic and semantics to analyze the meaning of things said, making no assumption whether or not they are grounded in knowledge.

Aristotle explicitly said (Topics, book 1) that this is the way to investigate first principles (i.e., starting points) of knowledge. With respect to such starting points, we have no possibility of knowledge in the strong sense (episteme) — which requires development — but only a kind of initial personal acquaintance or familiarity (gnosis), as he said in Posterior Analytics.

There has been a strong tradition of misinterpretation of this latter passage. With no textual basis, many people who wanted to read Stoic-style foundationalism back into Aristotle — or were influenced by others with this sort of motivation — have glossed Aristotelian gnosis as something like a strong intellectual intuition, and claimed Aristotle was saying first principles of knowledge were better known in a strong sense, rather than just more familiar. (See also Aristotelian Demonstration.)

Aristotle’s actual practice, however, confirms the reading of first principles of knowledge as themselves objects of mere familiarity rather than strong knowledge. (Aristotle’s loftier principles are ends, not starting points of knowledge, and he typically places discussion of them at the end of an inquiry.) His starting points for inquiries are very pragmatic. He typically begins an inquiry with logical/semantic (i.e., “dialectical”) analysis of widely known opinions on the subject. He also explicitly recommends that we begin any inquiry from what is closer to us, and then, through analysis, refine our understanding. (See also The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle).

The development of knowledge starts from what is close to us and easier to grasp, and becomes progressively more secure through the dialectical work we do on it. Aristotelian dialectic uses the same logical forms as demonstration, but is mainly concerned with inferential semantic analysis rather than deriving conclusions. (Even Aristotelian demonstration is concerned not so much with deriving conclusions, as with perspicuously showing their basis.) Aristotle does the great majority of his actual work with dialectic rather than demonstration.

Once one becomes familiar with the profile of the Aristotelian version, it becomes possible to see something very like it at the core of Hegel’s way of working — not so much in what he says about it, as in what he does. (See also Essence and Concept; Aristotelian Dialectic; Dialogue; Scholastic Dialectic; Contradiction vs Polarity; Three Logical Moments.)

Pure Reason, Metaphysics?

I expressed the concern of Kantian pure reason as higher-order interpretation of experience. Previously, I ventured a nontraditional, historically oriented gloss of the concern of Aristotle’s dialectical/semantic “metaphysics” in the exact same words. Obviously, this is not how it was generally understood in the later tradition, although numerous authors recovered partial insights along these lines. (See also Kantian Discipline; Aristotle and Kant; Dialectic, Semantics.)

Likely Stories

Plato had his characters engage in a good deal of speculation, but generally was very conscientious about explicitly identifying it as such. Larger speculations are often explicitly couched as myth or poetic invention. All such things are explicitly considered no more than “likely stories”. On a smaller scale, verbal cues generally abound to tell us when things are intended in a more tentative way.

Plato and Aristotle were generally — each in their own way — extraordinarily good at this sort of thing. However, the much more “dogmatic” style of the Stoic school set a new default tone for the later tradition, all the way to the time of Kant. It became standard to present what was actually speculation as if it were a simple report on the truth, or a certainty grounded in a strong kind of knowledge. (See also The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle; Kantian Discipline.)

Paralogisms

The Paralogisms section of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason provides an excellent account of dubious metaphysical theses about the soul common to Descartes and others. They are that the soul is a substance in its own right; that it is simple; that it is a person; and that it is directly conscious of itself, but conscious of other things only as representations. Aristotle was a careful minimalist in his talk about the soul, and did not assert any of these. I have addressed theses of this sort myself numerous times (see, e.g., Mind Without Mentalism; Aristotelian Subjectivity; Subject; God and the Soul; Soul, Self; Parts of the Soul.)

Antinomies?

Despite many brilliant breakthroughs, Kant sometimes went astray. In his eagerness to recommend that reason should confine itself to matters of possible experience, in the Antinomies section of the Critique of Pure Reason he resorted to artificially staged arguments purporting to show that reasoning beyond possible experience necessarily leads to opposite conclusions, between which it cannot arbitrate. It seems to me that the apparent contradictions he derives are all due to uncontrolled use of particular conflicting assumptions, and therefore say nothing at all about limitations of pure reason per se. Kant should have been content simply to argue that there are many kinds of questions that pure reason alone cannot decide. On the other hand, the unfortunate weakness of these arguments does not affect the general soundness of his recommendation to stay within the realm of possible experience. (See also Self-Evidence.)

Classification

Like definition, classification sometimes gets an unjustified bad name. It is not a kind of truth about the world, but rather plays an expressive role, helping to explain the meaning of what is said. Classification makes it possible to substitute simple names for arbitrarily complex conditions or adverbial expressions, allowing the underlying complexity to be abstracted away, or reconstructed as needed.

In Book 1 of Parts of Animals, Aristotle shows great sophistication about this. He explicitly argues against Plato’s recommended procedure of “division” or repeated application of binary distinctions, noting that many significant real-world distinctions are better approached as n-ary or manifold than as binary.

He also explicitly notes how difficult and arbitrary it ends up being to develop real-world classifications in a strictly hierarchical manner, arguing for a more holistic approach, which cannot be reduced to a sequential application of lower-level operations.

Good real-world classifications are arrived at through dialectical trial, error, and iterative self-correction over time. Conversely, behind every ordinary referential use of simple names for things is a complex implicit dialectical/semantic development. (See also Aristotle’s Critique of Dichotomy; Hermeneutic Biology?; Difference; Aristotelian Identity; Substance; Aristotelian Semantics.)

Emotional Intelligence

I originally glossed Aristotelian hexis as something like acquired emotional constitution. In adopting the contemporary term “emotional intelligence” for the kind of good development of hexis that is conducive to ethical development, I have in mind especially its broad association with a strong capacity for empathy and a related kind of self-awareness, rather than the details of a contemporary psychological theory. I also mean to recall something more like a kind of practical wisdom than any connection to what Aristotle said about intellect per se.

Freedom Through Deliberation?

All sincere deliberation cumulatively contributes to opening our minds.

Kant did not discuss Aristotle directly, but he clearly wanted to assert a stronger notion of freedom than emerges just from Aristotle’s distinction of willing from unwilling actions. This relative kind of voluntariness was not enough to ground the kind of freedom Kant was after. For Kant, as long as we are under the sway of our own internal impulses, we are not free, so a lack of external compulsion is not sufficient. But that is not the end of the matter.

“Will” for Kant turned out to be a rational, positively developed alternative to impulse, grounded in a concept (i.e., thoughtful interpretation) of law. Aristotle’s version of thoughtful interpretation in this context is deliberation. It makes sense that active deliberation would positively, incrementally contribute to deautomatizing our tendency to act or respond impulsively. So, I think the closest analogue for what Kant would call true freedom in Aristotle is action on the basis of deliberation. Everything Aristotle says about what is in effect acquired emotional intelligence is also relevant to these Kantian considerations. (See also Beauty, Deautomatization.)

Kant’s Recovery of Ends

Aristotle’s talk about ends was part of a pragmatic semantics of experience, in which so-called efficient causes were understood mainly as means. In the later tradition, however, talk about ends, or teleology, acquired a strongly theological coloring, and events in time were often conceived as directly governed by divine will. Then early modern mechanism strove to give an independent account of nature in mathematical terms. Twentieth-century mathematics developed notions of attractors, which at least function in a way broadly like ends rather than impulses, but early modern mechanists wanted to explain nature without any recourse to teleology. The debate was posed in terms of mathematics versus invocations of divine will.

Kant struggled with these early modern dilemmas, seemingly unaware of the historical Aristotelian way of looking at the matter. Like the Critique of Practical Reason, the Critique of Judgment was aimed at reconciling Newtonian mechanism with broadly theological values. In the second Critique, he said that while we cannot have theoretical knowledge of freedom, it is a necessary practical postulate. In the third, which was initially about aesthetic judgment, he concluded that although we have no theoretical basis for affirming actual purpose in nature, thinking about purposes is nonetheless a practically useful heuristic, particularly in the case of biology. Kant ultimately argued for the primacy of practical reason, so this “merely” practical perspective is actually fundamental. (See also Natural Ends.)

Aristotelian Subjectivity

If we want to find an analogue in Aristotle for the notion of (transcendental) subjectivity developed by Kant and Hegel, the best place to look is in the concept of ethos, rather than in something like soul or intellect, which for Aristotle have more specialized roles. Then, going in the other direction, this Aristotelian point of view centered on ethos helps to clarify and consolidate many of the points Brandom has wanted to make about the mainly normative or ethical import of subjectivity in Kant and Hegel.

Philosophical interest in subjectivity applies especially to the transcendental kind. Traditionally, this has been situated between what was called metaphysics and something like the “rational psychology” classically criticized by Kant. With inspiration from Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Brandom, I’ve been proposing that the constitution of transcendental subjectivity is instead ethical at root. This seems much more helpful than the traditional version for addressing the human condition and questions of who and what we are. The values we actually live by are far more important for this than claims about the existence of some abstract entity like a personal Subject. Meanwhile, personal identity is better left outside the transcendental sphere, and located instead in our concrete emotional constitution. (See also Ethos, Hexis; Two Kinds of Character; Substance Also Subject.)