Ends

The nature of ends is addressed in book 1 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. “Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.” (Sachs translation, p.1.) The Kantian primacy of practical reason and the primacy of normativity in Brandom express a similar insight.

“Good”, however, is meant in as many ways as “being” is, so there is no common good that is one and universal, no good-in-itself.

In the course of this discussion, Aristotle repeatedly emphasizes that one should not seek more precision in a given subject than is appropriate to it. One also should not try to derive conclusions that are more exact than what they are derived from. In areas like ethics and politics especially, one should be content to point out the truth roughly and in outline, and to say what is true for the most part.

Aristotle would object to the notion of “value free” science. Even his physics is a pragmatic, broadly semantic inquiry. His notion of cause (aitia) is much broader and more pluralistic than the modern one. An end is a kind of cause in Aristotle’s sense, but not in the modern sense. Aristotelian ends are orthogonal to modern causality. Not until Kant and Hegel did the modern world begin to recover a similar sophistication. (See also Univocity; Free Will and Determinism.)

There is nothing subjective about an Aristotelian end. Aristotelian teleology does not involve any mental intentions of spiritual beings (see God and the Soul). An end is just what Brandom would call the conceptual content of something sought or achieved. It is a pure form. (An aim on the other hand is an end that is taken up subjectively.)

An end may be sought on its own account, or for the sake of something else. The realization of an end may involve the realization of subordinate ends, which may involve the realization of further subordinate ends, and so on. Ends for the sake of which other ends are realized and ends sought on their own account are considered to be of greater value. An end may be a way of being at work, or a work produced. An end sought on its own account is typically a way of being at work. Aristotle suggests that the most comprehensive and therefore most valuable end for humans is politics as an activity, which is concerned with the good of all. In general, a good or end is better the more complete and self-sufficient it is.

In accordance with the emphasis on completeness, the end of an individual is to live a whole life that is good, which can only be judged retrospectively. The work of a human being is “a being-at-work of the soul in accordance with reason, or not without reason… and actions that go along with reason… [done] well and beautifully” (p.11). (See also Reasonableness; Reasons; Commitment; Happiness.)

People are good at making distinctions about the things they are acquainted with. “This is why one who is going to listen adequately to things that are beautiful and just, and generally about things that pertain to political matters, needs to have been beautifully brought up by means of habits.” (p.4.)

I read Aristotle as suggesting that immanent ends of natural beings are ultimately the most influential of the “causes” or reasons why things turn out as they do. Yet they are a kind of soft “cause” that only attracts. All of Aristotle’s causes are soft in one way or another. Each of the four interacts with the others in quasi-reciprocal fashion, and none of them results in the sort of hard determination classically attributed to early modern mechanical impulse. (See also Efficient Cause; Form; Aristotelian Matter.)

Nothing in this is incompatible with also incorporating modern mathematics into the account, but Aristotle’s main concern is with a pragmatic semantics of experience.

It is relatively easy for us to imagine how nonrational, sentient beings that still have desire are moved by internal ends. Nonsentient things do not literally have desire, and we have been taught not to think as if they did. It is only a metaphor to say, e.g., that heavy objects “want” to fall, but there is no inherent category mistake or personification in talking about an apparent material tendency as exhibiting a kind of apparent end, below the level of sentient desire.

In quasi-Brandomian terms, Aristotelian ends are an expressive metaconcept useful in the interpretation of experience, not a hypothesis about something beyond experience. (See also Natural Ends; Kant’s Recovery of Ends.)

The same could be said of Aristotle’s view that the “first” principle of all things is actually related to all things as an ultimate end that attracts them.

Practical Judgment

Practical judgment or practical wisdom (phronesis) is the main topic of book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics. This involves a broadly rational assessment of particulars that is subject to error. It is closely associated with deliberation and choice. Its outcome is neither knowledge nor opinion, but action or a specific kind or manner of action. Practical judgment concerns what should be done, with the expectation that it will be done.

Good practical judgment is astute in a calculating way as well as compassionate, forgiving, and considerate of others (Sachs translation, p.114). It achieves an Aristotelian mean that avoids one-sidedness. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love.)

Choice, Deliberation

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics book 3 chapter 2 concerns choice. Choice is something willing, but not everything done willingly is done by choice. Things spontaneously done by children and animals and things done on the spur of the moment are done willingly and so are subject to praise or blame, but they are not done by choice.

Choice is not desire or spiritedness or wishing or opinion. It is involved with reason and thinking things through. It is the outcome of deliberation, the subject of chapter 3. It is the deliberate desire of things that are up to us (Sachs translation, p.43). It comes from desire combined with a rational understanding that is for the sake of something (p.103); it is “either intellect fused with desire, or desire fused with thinking, and such a source is a human being” (p.104). (The phrase “fused with” is actually an interpolation by the translator — the Greek actually just has “intellect and desire”, without specifying how they are related.)

We deliberate about things that are up to us and are matters of action. Deliberation is neither knowledge nor opinion. Inquiry about exact sciences or general truths or ends is not deliberation, but deliberation is a kind of inquiry. Deliberation applies to means for achieving ends, when outcomes can be predicted with some confidence, but are still uncertain. On big issues, we consult others. When there is more than one means to an end, deliberation seeks the one that is easier and more beautiful.

Deliberation may also examine how a thing will come about through a particular means, what other means are required for that means, and so on. Aristotle says that the analysis of dependencies of means and ends in particular works just like a mathematician’s analysis of a geometrical diagram.

Deliberating well overall belongs to people with good practical judgment (p.112). “What is deliberated and what is chosen are the same thing, except that the thing chosen is already determined, since the thing chosen is what is decided out of the deliberation.” (p.43.) Aristotelian choice is therefore anything but arbitrary. It is a normative and rational determination, emerging from an open, fallible, and pluralistic process. (See also Brandomian Choice.)

Willing, Unwilling

Book 3 chapter 1 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics deals with willing and unwilling actions. “Praise and blame come about for willing actions, but for unwilling actions there is forgiveness and sometimes even pity…” (Sachs translation, p. 36.)

Unwilling acts are those that are forced by someone else, or come about through ignorance. Those that come about through ignorance include cases when people are talking and something slips out unintentionally, as well as all sorts of mistakes. Things done on account of spiritedness or desire, as well as those done on account of reasoned deliberation, are considered willing.

There are mixed cases in which the act would normally be done only if it were forced, but in particular circumstances it is done willingly to avoid a greater evil or to realize a greater good. Tradeoffs of this sort generally deserve praise or blame based on the goodness or badness of the tradeoff, but in extreme cases, mixed actions may just deserve forgiveness or pity.

Aristotle says there are perhaps some things one should never do regardless of the tradeoff, but that these cases are difficult to distinguish. He notes that it is in general not easy to say whether or not the ends justify the means. (See also What We Really Want.)

Nicomachean

I am fond of repeating Hegel’s dictum that Plato and Aristotle are the great educators of the human race. Of all their works, if I had to pick one, it is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that stands out most for its combination of excellence and broad relevance to the human condition. This is the same one I would recommend to someone starting out reading Aristotle. It is exceptionally well balanced in considering many angles of the subject matter, and very accessible to the nonspecialist. All rational animals should read it.

That said, translations of Aristotle can also make a huge difference. I especially like the one by Joe Sachs, which goes straightforwardly from Greek to English without introducing traditional Latin-based terminology that often obscures Aristotle’s meaning for English readers. Sachs, who has done outstanding translations of many works by Aristotle and Plato, also preserves more of the original syntax, which yields additional insights into the way the philosophers thought. Like Sachs’ other translations, this one comes out very lively and engaging. It is supplemented with excellent notes, introduction, and glossary. (If you have enough Greek to use a lexicon, it is also good to consult the Loeb edition or the old W.D. Ross Oxford edition, both of which include the Greek text.)

Aristotle himself would caution that only people who are fortunate enough to have had upbringing and life experiences leading to the formation of a disposition to be emotionally reasonable will really benefit from this. (See also Reasonableness; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Ends; Willing, Unwilling; Choice, Deliberation; Practical Judgment; Mean; Happiness. )

Substance Also Subject

Hegel’s many references to Aristotle should help to clarify the Hegelian claim that “Substance is also Subject”. In particular, Aristotle’s own thesis of the identity of thought with the thing thought is relevant, as is his dialectical development of the different senses of ousia (“substance”) in the Metaphysics.

A thought for Aristotle is identical with its content. It just is a discursively articulable meaning, not a psychological event. What we care about in thought is shareable reasoning. Moreover, this shareable reasoning has a fundamentally ethical character.

Thought in this sense is essentially self-standing, and unlike the mental-act sense not dependent in the determination of its meaning on a “thinker” (who optionally instantiates it, and if so is responsible for the occurrence of a related event). This gives a nice double meaning to the autonomy of reason. (What such thoughts do depend on is other such thoughts with which they are inferentially connected.)

The primary locus of Aristotelian intellect is directly in shareable thoughts of this sort and their interconnection, rather than in a sentience that “has” them. Hegel adopts all of this.

Concepts in a unity of apperception are forms to be approached discursively, not mental representations or intentional acts. They are more like custom rules for material inference. The redoubling implied in apperception, like that of the Aristotelian “said of” relation, hints at the recursive structure of inferential articulation. The Hegelian Absolute, or “the” Concept, just nominalizes such an inferential coherence of concepts.

Thus, “Substance is also Subject” has nothing to do with attributing some kind of sentience to objects, or to the world. Rather, it is the claim that Substance properly understood (in the Aristotelian conceptual sense of “what it was to have been” a thing, rather than in the naive sense of a real-world object, or of a substrate of a real-world object, that Aristotle starts with but then discards) is already the right sort of thing to be able to play the functional role of a transcendental subject. A “Subject” for Hegel just is a concept or commitment, or a constellation of concepts and commitments. (See also Subject and Substance, Again; Substance and Subject.)

Consistent with this general approach, I consider the direct locus of the subject-function to be in things like Brandomian commitments and Kantian syntheses. The subject-function is also indirectly attributable to “self-conscious individuals” by metonymy or inheritance, and to empirical persons by a further metonymy or inheritance. (See also Subject; Substance; Aristotelian Dialectic; Brandom and Kant; Rational/Talking Animal; Second Nature.)

Propositions, Terms

Brandom puts significant emphasis on Kant and Frege’s focus on whole judgments — contrasted with simple first-order terms, corresponding to natural-language words or subsentential phrases — as the appropriate units of logical analysis. The important part of this is that a judgment is the minimal unit that can be given inferential meaning.

All this looks quite different from a higher-order perspective. Mid-20th century logical orthodoxy was severely biased toward first-order logic, due to foundationalist worries about completeness. In a first-order context, logical terms are expected to correspond to subsentential elements that cannot be given inferential meaning by themselves. But in a higher-order context, this is not the case. One of the most important ideas in contemporary computer science is the correspondence between propositions and types. Generalized terms are interpretable as types, and thus also as propositions. This means that (higher-order) terms can represent instances of arbitrarily complex propositions. Higher-order terms can be thus be given inferential meaning, just like sentential variables. This is all in a formal context rather than a natural-language one, but so was Frege’s work; and for what it’s worth, some linguists have also been using typed lambda calculus in the analysis of natural language semantics.

Suitably typed terms compose, just like functions or category-theoretic morphisms and functors. I understand the syllogistic principle on which Aristotle based a kind of simultaneously formal and material term inference (see Aristotelian Propositions) to be just a form of composition of things that can be thought of as functions or typed terms. Proof theory, category theory, and many other technical developments explicitly work with composition as a basic form of abstract inference. Aristotle developed the original compositional logic, and it was not Aristotle but mid-20th century logical orthodoxy that insisted on the centrality of the first-order case. Higher-order, compositionally oriented logics can interpret classic syllogistic inference, first-order logic, and much else, while supporting more inferentially oriented semantics on the formal side, with types potentially taking pieces of developed material-inferential content into the formal context. We can also use natural-language words to refer to higher-order terms and their inferential significance, just as we can capture a whole complex argument in an appropriately framed definition. Accordingly, there should be no stigma associated with reasoning about terms, or even just about words.

In computer-assisted theorem-proving, there is an important distinction between results that can be proved directly by something like algebraic substitution for individual variables, and those that require a more global rewriting of the context in terms of some previously proven equivalence(s). At a high enough level of simultaneous abstraction and detail, such rewriting could perhaps constructively model the revision of commitments and concepts from one well-defined context to another.

The potential issue would be that global rewriting still works in a higher-order context that is expected to itself be statically consistent, whereas revision of commitments and concepts taken simply implies a change of higher-level context. I think this just means a careful distinction of levels would be needed. After all, any new, revised genealogical recollection of our best thoughts will be in principle representable as a new static higher-order structure, and that structure will include something that can be read as an explanation of the transition. It may itself be subject to future revision, but in the static context that does not matter.

The limitation of such an approach is that it requires all the details of the transition to be set up statically, which can be a lot of work, and it would also be far more brittle than Brandom’s informal material inference. (See also Categorical “Evil”; Definition.)

I am fascinated by the fact that typed terms can begin to capture material as well as purely formal significance. How complete or adequate this is would depend on the implementation.

Johnston’s Pippin

Adrian Johnston’s A New German Idealism just arrived, and I’m taking a quick look. It is mainly concerned with Slavoj Žižek’s work. But for now, I’m just concerned with chapter 2 — where Johnston launches a broadside against “deflationary” readings of Hegel, particularly the one he attributes to Robert Pippin — and the preface.

Johnston can be forgiven for not addressing Pippin’s 2018 work on the Logic, but I do not understand why he ignores my favorite book by Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (2008).

There, Pippin dwells extensively on Hegel’s Aristotelian side. Much of interest could be said on what it means to be Aristotelian in a post-Kantian context. Many received views will be challenged by such an examination. (For a beginning, see Aristotle and Kant.) As I have said, I read Hegel as both Kantian and Aristotelian (as well as original).

In any case, Johnston seems to think Pippin in Hegel’s Idealism (1989) was intent on reducing Hegel to Kant. That book was indeed concerned to show a strong Kantian element in Hegel. But I did not think of it as reductive. If anything, I read Pippin’s book as a salutary response to those who want to reduce Hegel to a pre-Kantian, and to read Hegel as rolling back from Kant rather than moving forward from Kant. Because he assumes a bad old subjectivist reading of Kant, Johnston seems to think Pippin’s reading of Hegel necessarily rules out the possibility of seeing a realist side to Hegel.

The whole challenge of Hegel is to understand how it it is possible in his terms to be both Critical and realist, without engaging in logical nonsense. (But see Realism, Idealism.) This sort of thing typically requires significant semantic labor, but the achievement of such semantic elaboration is the whole point. Here I worry where Johnston intends to go with his defense of “undialectical” distinctions in the preface. It is one thing to recognize that Hegel does not intend to just do away with Understanding and its distinctions, and quite another to treat those distinctions as final. (See also Univocity.)

Johnston’s lengthy discussion of the positive value of Understanding in the preface does not address how it relates to dialectical transitions. He mainly wants to defend Žižek’s tactic of presenting forced binary choices at particular moments. In particular cases and circumstances this conceivably can be good pedagogy, but it is the details that matter, and Johnston offers no advice on how we are to distinguish a pedagogically good forced choice from a bad one.

(I suspect Žižek’s tactic may be related to his friend Badiou’s defense of the Maoist “One divides into Two” line, which always seemed like blustering nonsense to me. There have been some very rational strands within Marxism; I do not comprehend why someone as intelligent as Badiou would prefer to apologize for the coarsest and most anti-intellectual, but to a lesser extent Althusser did as well. See also Democracy and Social Justice.)

(Worlds away from this, Brandom has a wonderfully clear account of the nonfinality of Understanding’s particular conclusions, illustrated precisely by its very important positive role in the recognition and resolution of error, in which the operations of the Understanding on its own terms give rise to dialectical transitions at the level of Reason, understood in terms of the revision of commitments and possibly of concepts.)

Johnston also seems to assume there is something necessarily reductive about a non-ontological (or not primarily ontological) reading of Hegel. Again, I don’t see why.

I think Aristotle’s metaphysics was basically a semantic investigation, just like his physics. It is the historic forcing of this inquiry back from the wide universe of meaning onto narrow registers of being and existence that I see as reductive.

Based on the work of Olivier Boulnois on the role of the medieval theologian Duns Scotus in the reinterpretation of metaphysics as ontology, I have come to think that in general, modern emphasis on ontology tends to reflect what I take to be historically a medieval Scotist mystification of things Aristotle approached in clearer terms we should recognize today as mainly semantic. (For what it’s worth, the homonymous use of “ontology” in computer science is also mainly semantic.)

Metaphysics or “first philosophy” or “wisdom” was supposed to help us with higher-order understanding, not to be a place where strange existence claims are made.

Affirmation

Nietzschean affirmation used to be a very important thing for me. Something like it still is. At root, this just means judging particular goods on intrinsic/situational criteria, from a stance that embraces life without the poison of ressentiment (holding on to reactive, negative emotion). Nietzsche’s poetic images of Zarathustra coming down from the mountain, being friends with the earth, and embracing the eternal return were significant moments of my youth. (See also Genealogy; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Interpretive Charity.)

Later, I came to think that Spinoza had in a way already said what I most valued in Nietzsche. (Many have recognized the affirmative character of Spinoza’s thought.)

Still later, I came to think that Aristotle had already expressed the affirmative kernel I valued most in Spinoza, and much more.

I have been reading the core ethical message of Brandom’s Spirit of Trust in a related light. (See Index for many posts on Aristotle and Brandom.)

Aristotle and Kant

Kant and Aristotle are both very concerned to develop a thick, discursive concept of rationality, which goes far beyond the merely logical to address many questions of what is right.

Nancy Sherman and others have substantially softened the traditional contrast between Kantian and Aristotelian ethics. Kant’s critique of eudaimonism (pursuit of happiness as an ethical criterion) was mainly aimed at the British utilitarians, who really did make subjective happiness into a criterion of sorts. It would be very wrong to think this applies to the Aristotelian notion. Sherman makes a strong case that in less familiar works dealing with moral anthropology, Kant recovers something like an Aristotelian notion of character. Kant’s extended development of the concept of judgment in the third Critique also recovers something like Aristotelian practical judgment or phronesis. (See also Freedom Through Deliberation?)

Aristotle and Kant have similarly thick notions of experience. In neither case is experience something immediate, as it was with the British empiricists. For Aristotle, it is as when we say someone is “experienced”. For Kant, it involves synthesis and extensive use of concepts, which themselves have complex derivation. Properly understood, Aristotelian “metaphysics” was concerned with higher-order interpretation of experience, and thus consistent with Kantian scruples. (See also Pure Reason, Metaphysics?)

Plato and Aristotle’s strong insistence on the autonomy of reason was largely submerged in the later tradition until Kant recovered it. (See also The Word “Rationalism”.)

Some of the argument of the paralogisms of pure reason is strongly reminiscent of things Aristotle said about the soul. Aristotle and Kant are equally opposed to Augustinian/Cartesian notions of reflexive constitutive immediacy. (See also God and the Soul; Modernity, Again.)

The main target of Kant’s attacks on dogmatism was the Wolffian school in Germany. He was not much concerned with the history of philosophy, and some of his language was overly sweeping.

We should forgivingly take this into account in assessing the relation of the Critical philosophy to what I have called the epistemic modesty of Plato and Aristotle. (As Hegel recognized, Plato and Aristotle were not at all dogmatic. Plato doubted the deliverances of sense, and rejected opinion outright. Aristotle’s more optimistic, proto-pragmatist stance was elaborated in thoughtful response to that questioning. Neither of them was a simplistic realist. Moreover, the two of them were the original pioneers of rational inquiry in ethics.)

Nonetheless, neither Plato nor Aristotle anticipated the very substantial detail and development of Kant’s argument. The explicit concepts of the transcendental/empirical distinction and of unities of apperception are distinctly Kantian, as is a finer-grained analysis of processes of synthesis. Kant also more explicitly treated normativity as an outer frame around all other considerations. It is to him that we owe the notion of the primacy of practical reason. A stronger emphasis on ethical universality through the categorical imperative was another Kantian innovation. (See also Copernican; Brandom and Kant; Hegelian Genealogy.)