Tag: Aristotle

Living Well and Equity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here Aristotle anticipates Kant and Hegel.

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

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

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

This is the way that is neither innate nor arbitrary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Emotion and Belief

Therapy of Desire

Is philosophy a kind of therapy? Martha Nussbaum’s excellent The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994) impressed me greatly when it first came out. Looking at it again 30 years later, this ethical “therapy” turns out to follow a different paradigm from the emphasis on mutuality in dialogue that I have been addressing from various angles recently. The discussion has many interesting twists and turns.

What is philosophy for, anyway?

Nussbaum says “The idea of a practical and compassionate philosophy — a philosophy that exists for the sake of human beings, in order to address their deepest needs, confront their most urgent perplexities, and bring them from misery to some greater measure of flourishing — this idea makes the study of Hellenistic ethics riveting for a philosopher who wonders what philosophy has to do with the world” (p. 3).

Her main point in this early work is to exhibit the sophistication of Epicurean, Stoic, and Skeptical understandings of emotion. She highlights their practical commitment and “combination of logic with compassion” (p. 9). An important part of her argument, though, is that these later figures further developed themes that Aristotle already raised. I’m currently expecting to cover her first three chapters, where Aristotle plays a larger role. This post focuses on the introduction and first chapter.

“In order to get a purchase on this complex issue, I shall begin this book with Aristotle. For Aristotle sketched an account of the emotions and desires that is very close to the more elaborate accounts we find in the Hellenistic philosophers. And yet he did not defend a norm of detachment from the mutable good things of this world. His best human life is a life rich in attachments to people and things outside the self — friendships, family loves, political ties, ties of certain sorts to possessions and property. Thus it is a life rich in possibilities for emotions such as love, grief, fear, and even anger; the study of these connections will shed light, by contrast, on the Hellenistic conceptions” (pp. 41-42).

Aristotle’s positive valuation of various forms of emotion stands in opposition to these later philosophers.

The Hellenistic period is usually said to extend from Alexander the Great up to Roman times. Increased long-distance trade brought many cultures into closer contact with one another. Religions became detached from local traditional communities, with many coexisting side by side. The new philosophies that emerged in these times were simpler than those of Plato and Aristotle and more dogmatically presented, but still quite sophisticated and interesting. It is largely through them that philosophy for a while gained an unprecedented place in mainstream culture. Meanwhile, Aristotle’s uncirculated manuscripts were left to decay in the attic of a relative who had greedily claimed them. The great rise in Aristotle’s influence began only later, after a third or so of his uncirculated works were recovered and edited. (See Fortunes of Aristotle.)

“The major Hellenistic schools are all highly critical of society as they find it; and all are concerned to bring the necessary conditions of the good human life to those whom society has caused to suffer. They are, moreover, far more inclusive and less elitist in their practice of philosophy than was Aristotle, far more concerned to show that their strategies can offer something to each and every human being, regardless of class or status or gender. On the other hand, the way they do this has little to do, on the whole, with political, institutional, or material change. Instead of arranging to bring the good things of this world to each and every human being, they focus on changes of belief and desire that make their pupil less dependent on the good things of this world. They do not so much show ways of removing injustice as teach the pupil to be indifferent to the injustice she suffers” (p. 10).

I hold that a consistent application of Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical values rules out any kind of elitism, by grounding everyday values in mutuality and reason.

“Aristotelianism sets exacting worldly conditions for the good life, making virtuous activity dependent in many ways upon material and educational conditions that are beyond the individual’s control. But Aristotle then assigns to politics the task of bringing those conditions to people: the good political arrangement is the one ‘in accordance with which each and every one might do well and lead a flourishing life'” (ibid).

Several important points about Aristotle are expressed in condensed terms here. Virtuous activity depends in part on conditions the individual does not control. Good politics should benefit all, not only some. He favors engagement rather than withdrawal, and he favors refining our emotional sensitivities rather than casting them aside or suppressing them.

On the other hand, “Epicurus urged a complete withdrawal from the life of the city, Skeptics an uncritical obedience to forces of existing convention. Even among the Stoics, whose commitment to the intrinsic value of justice is plain, we hear less about how to alter the political fact of slavery than about how to be truly free within, even though one may be (politically) a slave; less about strategies for the removal of hunger and thirst than about the unimportance of these bodily goods in a wise life; less about how to modify existing class structures and the economic relations that (as Aristotle argued) explain them, than about the wise person’s indifference to such worldly distinctions. In all three schools, the truly good and virtuous person is held to be radically independent of material and economic factors: achieving one’s full humanity requires only inner change…. I shall conclude that this criticism has some merit” (p. 11).

But there is also substantial common ground.

“[B]oth Aristotle and the Hellenistic thinkers insist that human flourishing cannot be achieved unless desire and thought, as they are usually constructed within society, are considerably transformed. (Both hold, for example, that most people learn to value money and status far too highly, and that this corrupts both personal and social relations.)” (ibid).

Here we come to the center of her reading, which is that for the Hellenistic philosophers, philosophy is a kind of therapy of the soul. (I note in passing the unanimity with which the philosophers denounce the overvaluation of money and status.)

“Epicurus wrote, ‘Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sicknesses of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul.’ The ancient Skeptical teacher, too, portrays himself as a healer of the soul. Being a lover of humanity, the Skeptic wishes to heal by argument, insofar as possible, the arrogant empty beliefs and the rashness of dogmatic people” (p. 13).

“Or as Cicero, speaking on behalf of the Stoa, more succinctly puts it: ‘There is, I assure you, a medical art for the soul. It is philosophy, whose aid need not be sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside ourselves. We must endeavor with all our resources and all our strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves’. Philosophy heals human diseases, diseases produced by false beliefs” (p. 14).

“All three schools, in short, could accept the Epicurean definition of philosophy: ‘Philosophy is an activity that secures the flourishing [eudaimon] life by arguments and reasonings.’ And all can agree that a precise, logically rigorous argument that is not well suited to the needs of its hearers, an argument that is simply and entirely academic and unable to engage its audience in a practical way, is to that extent a defective philosophical argument” (p. 15).

She contrasts all this with Augustine, for whom “God has set up certain ethical standards; it is our job to do what God wants. But we may or may not be endowed with the capability of seeing, or wanting, what God wants. Truth and God’s grace are out there; but the ability to see ethical truth or to reach for grace is not something we can control. There is, therefore, no reliable method by which we can construct an ethical norm from the scrutiny of our deepest needs and responses and desires” (p. 18).

“For both Platonists and these Christians, digging more deeply into ourselves is not the right way to proceed in ethical inquiry” (p. 19).

Here we reach a matter of deep ambivalence, and correspondingly great interest. Nussbaum will argue that on this particular point, Aristotle is closer to the “therapeutic” attitude of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics than to the heaven-centered, more objectivist views of ethics that she attributes to Plato and Augustine. I broadly agree.

Referring to mytho-poetic imagery in Plato’s Phaedrus, she says “We do not inquire into the human good by standing on the rim of heaven; and if we did, we would not find the right thing. Human ways of life, and the hopes, pleasures, and pains that are a part of these, cannot be left out of the inquiry without making it pointless and incoherent. We do not in fact look ‘out there’ for ethical truth; it is in and of our human lives. More than this, it is something to and for human lives” (pp. 20-21).

For Aristotle, the Good is always concrete and situationally attuned.

“The medical conception of ethical inquiry opposes itself, as well, to another conception of ethics that stands, so to speak, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Platonism. This is the idea that ethical inquiry and teaching are simply the recording of traditional social belief and have no legitimate goal beyond this” (p. 24).

As Nussbaum points out, none of the Greek philosophers defends this kind of traditionalist view of ethics. The Hellenistic philosophers in particular see much that is wrong with the social world.

“For according to the Hellenistic philosophers, society is not in order as it is; and, as the source of most of their pupils’ beliefs and even of their emotional repertory, it has infected them with its sicknesses. The upbringing of young people is held to be deformed in various ways by false views about what matters: by excessive emphasis, for example, on money, competition, and status” (p. 26).

This is quite a far cry from the divine right of kings, the invisble hand, and other providential underwriting of the status quo that was claimed in early modern times. The Hellenistic philosophers dwelt more extensively than their avid readers in the Enlightenment on what modern people might call alienation.

Nussbaum next turns to address the limits of the therapeutic paradigm.

“All this suggests that the medical kind of ethics may be inclined — like medicine itself, but even more so — to adopt an asymmetrical model of the relationship between teacher and pupil, doctor and patient” (p. 27).

As she points out, at the heart of the therapeutic paradigm is an asymmetrical social relation. This stands in implicit conflict with the ideal of mutual and reciprocal relations in Aristotle’s ethics.

“Hellenistic ethics combines immersion with critical distance in something like this way — insisting on the rigorous scrutiny of belief and desire, while insisting, too, that it is to real people and their beliefs and desires that ethics must ultimately be responsible” (p. 28).

“In the course of developing their medical norms of health, the Hellenistic philosophers appeal to ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’. These slippery notions had better be scrutinized, since misunderstanding them could cause serious misunderstanding of the entire medical approach” (p. 29).

“The ancient appeals to nature that we shall be considering do not … pretend to derive value-norms from a value-free account of the ‘scientific’ underpinnings of human life. Ancient accounts of ‘nature’, especially of ‘human nature’, are value-laden accounts…. Norms follow from an account of ‘nature’ because the account is frankly normative to begin with” (p. 30).

The therapeutic paradigm’s appeals to nature ought therefore to be sharply distinguished from what 20th century philosophers called ethical naturalism. Even the account of nature is frankly normative from the outset.

“A good introduction to the Hellenistic appeals to nature, which clearly reveals both the normative and the anti-conventional thrust of these appeals, is in the famous lines of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself concerning the animal kingdom” (p. 31).

“What the animals show Whitman is not a value-free realm of life; nor does he learn from them to glorify that which exists without effort or teaching. What he sees is that certain practices that (already) appear to him to impede human flourishing — practices connected with religious fear and guilt, with economic obsession and accumulation, with status and power — need not exist. Moreover, when they do not exist, certain deformations of life — sleepless fear, groveling subservience, anxiety, dissatisfaction — do not exist either. The ‘tokens of myself’ that the animals show Whitman are possibilities for self-respect, self-expression, and social equality that are frequently obscured by the realities of human social life. So too, I shall argue, in Hellenistic appeals to the nature of the child, the nature of the animal: the purpose is to construct a radical norm of true human flourishing. This norm is not value-free or ‘scientific’: it is justified by appeal to deep human desires and judgments, and it is value-laden; but it is highly critical of ordinary belief, and sees many of our ordinary beliefs as impediments to flourishing” (p. 32).

“The medical conception seeks to combine the critical power of Platonism with the worldly immersion of ordinary-belief philosophy. And it adds something further of its own: a commitment to action” (pp. 32-33).

“Philosophy understood along medical lines deals with both beliefs and emotions or passions. One reason why the tension described earlier seems to arise is that philosophy is asked not simply to deal with the patient’s invalid inferences and false premises, but to grapple, as well, with her irrational fears and anxieties, her excessive loves and crippling angers” (p. 37).

“Both Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools hold, furthermore, that many, if not all, of the passions rest upon beliefs that do not spring up naturally (if any beliefs do this), but are formed by society” (p. 38).

“All the schools dedicate themselves to the searching critique of prevailing cognitive authority, and to the amelioration of human life as a result” (p. 40).

But in contrast to Aristotle, “These philosophers do not simply analyze the emotions, they also urge, for the most part, their removal from human life” (p. 41). This idea of aiming to cast off all emotion I vehemently reject. Nussbaum too finds it troubling.

“Aristotle accepts and develops at length the idea that ethical philosophy should resemble medicine in its dedication to the practical goal of ameliorating human lives. And he develops, in some detail, aspects of the analogy between the philosopher’s and the doctor’s tasks. And yet Aristotle also criticizes the medical analogy at certain points, arguing that there are some very important ways in which ethical philosophy should not be like medicine” (p. 42).

She lists three points common to Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers.

“1. Arguments have a practical goal: they are directed at making the pupil better, and can be assessed for their contribution to this end. (This, as I said, does not entail that the value of argument must be merely instrumental.)
“2. They are what we might call value-relative: that is, at some level they respond to deep wishes or needs of the patient and, again, are to be assessed in accordance with their success in doing this.
“3. They are responsive to the particular case: just as a good doctor heals case by case, so good medical argument responds to the pupil’s concrete situation and needs” (p. 46).

Then she lists five more characteristics that apply to the Hellenistic philosophers but not to Aristotle.

“4. Medical arguments, like bodily medical treatments, are directed at the health of the individual as such, not at communities or at the individual as member of a community.
“5. In medical argument, the use of practical reason is instrumental. Just as the doctor’s technique is no intrinsic part of what the goal, health, is, so too the philosopher’s reasoning is no intrinsic part of what the good human life itself is.
“6. The standard virtues of argument — such as consistency, definitional clarity, avoidance of ambiguity — have, in medical argument, a purely instrumental value. As with the procedures of the medical art, they are no intrinsic part of the goal.
“7. In medical argument, as in medicine, there is a marked asymmetry of roles: doctor and patient, expert authority and obedient recipient of authority.
“8. In medical argument, the teacher discourages the sympathetic dialectical scrutiny of alternative views. Just as a doctor does not urge the patient to experiment with alternative medications, so the teacher does not encourage cognitive pluralism” (ibid).

Next in this series: Living Well and Equity

Gadamer on Socratic Questioning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Virtue?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I agree; science is more rational than empirical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He broadly counterposes virtue to rules.

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

This seems well said.

Gadamer on Logos

“Hegel demonstrates that the pure ‘I’ is spirit…. The truth of the ‘I’ is pure knowing…. ‘[A]rt’, ‘religion’, and ‘philosophy’ … are absolute because they are no longer opinions of consciousness which extend to an object beyond that which presents and fully affirms itself within these forms” (Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, German ed. 1971, English tr. 1976, p. 77).

It is important to notice the directedness of this identification. Hegel is clearly not saying that spirit, whatever that is, should be understood in terms of a Cartesian ego that we experience immediately. Rather, he is saying that the “I”, whatever that is (which Kant analyzed as a pure indexical reference to a unity of apperception), should be understood in terms of what he calls forms of spirit. Ramified forms of Hegelian “spirit” (or Aristotelian ethos) effectively make up the contents of a unity of apperception.

I like the way Gadamer subtly folds in a reference to Plato’s sharp critique of “opinion”, and relates it to “consciousness” in Hegel. As I would put it, “consciousness” is the subjective form of that same appearance that Plato radically questions. Canonically for Hegel, consciousness is defined as an attitude that sees itself as looking out on fully preformed objects that are external to it. It does not see the mythical character of the Myth of the Given.

(Elsewhere, though, like many others, Gadamer treats consciousness as the common denominator of the whole Phenomenology, rather than a specific name for the lowest stage of spirit’s development, that is most of all superseded in the course of development of the Phenomenology. The true common denominator of the Phenomenology is one of those concepts that Aristotle mentions as being implicit in a context of use, without being adequately named by any noun in common speech.)

I also like Gadamer’s deflationary treatment (at least in the above passage) of “absolute knowing” in terms of the productions of art, religion, and philosophy. Hegelian absolute knowing, whatever that is, is not some impossible thing. It should be understood as that which is expressed in art, religion, and philosophy. Wherever there is art, religion, or philosophy, there is some form of absolute knowing in Hegel’s sense.

“Hegel lays his very own foundation, on which he rebuilds absolute knowing as the truth of metaphysics as Aristotle, for one, conceived of it in nous or Aquinas, for another, in intellectus agens. And thus a universal logic — which explicates the ideas of God before the creation — is made possible. Hegel’s concept of spirit which transcends the subjective forms of self-consciousness thus goes back to the logos-nous metaphysics of the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions, which predates the whole question of self-consciousness” (p. 78).

I must applaud this situating of Hegel in relation to Plato and Aristotle. Heidegger does the same, but gives the whole a decidedly negative spin (“forgetting of Being”, etc.).

Gadamer’s reference to Aquinas gives me pause. Aquinas developed his own highly original philosophy and theology, which uses core Aristotelian vocabulary in ways very different from those of Aristotle himself. This has resulted in great confusion, when Thomistic concepts are mistakenly re-applied to the reading of Aristotle.

The reference to ideas of God before the creation does recall a passage from Hegel. More recently though, Robert Pippin has convincingly argued that the passage is extremely misleading, for multiple reasons.

We also see here how Aristotelian “intellect” is something constitutive rather than something empirical.

“In Greek philosophy Hegel saw the philosophy of logos, or put another way, the courage to consider pure thoughts per se. As a result, Greek thought succeeded in unfolding the universe of ideas. For this realm Hegel coins a new expression, typical of him, namely, ‘the logical’. What he is characterizing here is the entire cosmos of ideas as Plato’s philosophy dialectically develops it. Now Plato was driven by the desire to provide justification for every thought and his doctrine of ideas was intended to satisfy the demand which Socrates makes in the dialogues that for every contention a reason or argument must always be given (logon didonai)” (ibid).

Pure thought just means thought that develops from its own resources, and in its workings avoids any decisive appeal to unjustified assumptions, authority, givenness, etc.

This helps clarify what Gadamer means by “logos philosophy”. Although in the first instance it seems to involve careful attention to language and to the pragmatics of communicative speech or writing, Gadamer links it to a shared view of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel — that the rarified thing we call thought is in principle capable of developing an adequate account of things. This giving of an account (another meaning of logos) has nothing to do with certainty or foreknowledge or immediate knowledge that could be simply possessed. Rather, it seems to be the space in which Socratic dialogue and Aristotelian phronesis do their work.

In his magnum opus Truth and Method, Gadamer briefly but explicitly ties in the logos (“Word”) from the Gospel of John. At greater length, he traces the origin of Romantic hermeneutics to early Protestant emphasis on direct reading of scripture over the institutional mediation of the Church. Above, we saw him invoke Aquinas on the agent intellect. Without fanfare, he seems intent on building an ecumenical bridge between Christianity and the ethical-rather-than-epistemic logos that he sees in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Gadamer on History of Philosophy

Gadamer’s preface to The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (German ed. 1978, English tr. 1986) provides valuable perspective on the history of 20th-century readings of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the nonexistent or negative relation of those readings to Hegel. I’ll excerpt a few dense paragraphs and then comment.

“Hegel, it cannot be denied, did indeed grasp the speculative tendency in both Plato’s doctrine of ideas and Aristotle’s substance ontology, since his thinking was so congenial to theirs. And to that extent he is the first in modern times to break through the schema of interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of the ideas shaped by Aristotle and further developed in Neoplatonism and the Christian tradition. Nor can one say that Hegel has remained without any lasting influence on scholarship in the history of philosophy. Such good Aristotelians as Trendelenburg and Eduard Zeller owe him a great deal. Above all, Hegel was the first to make the philosophical significance of Plato’s ‘esoteric’, ‘dialectical’ dialogues accessible. However, the unitary effect connecting Plato’s and Aristotle’s logos philosophy — which did not remain hidden from Hegel — was underestimated, it seems to me, in the period following him and continues to be until this day.”

“There are various reasons why. To be sure, there was a concealed, unacknowledged Hegelianism behind the neo-Kantian interpretations of Plato in Cohen and Natorp and in their successors Cassirer, N. Hartmann, Hönigswald, and Stenzel. But given their particular mentality, it was exclusively Plato, and not in the least Aristotle, who could sustain this generation of scholars, in their critical-idealistic purposes. A complete elaboration of Hegel’s insights was totally obstructed, on the one hand, by the dogmatic overlay superimposed on Aristotle by the neo-Thomism prevailing in the Catholic camp, and on the other, by the hereditary feud between modern natural science and the Aristotelian teleological understanding of nature or, in fact, any idealistic philosophy of nature. Furthermore, when it interpreted the ‘idea’ as the ‘natural law’, thereby bringing together Plato and Galileo, the neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato, especially that of Natorp, proceeded all too provocatively with the Greek text while remaining insensitive to historical differences. If one starts from this idealistic neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato, then Aristotle’s critique of Plato can only appear as an absurd misunderstanding. This fact further contributed to the failure to recognize the unitary effect in Plato and Aristotle, thereby blocking a full incorporation of the Greek heritage into our own philosophical thought. Such naive and trivial juxtapositions as ‘Plato, the idealist’, versus ‘Aristotle, the realist’, gained universal currency, although they actually only confirmed the truly abysmal depth of prejudice in any idealism of consciousness. In addition, the schema for which Hegel provided the inspiration which construed Greek thought as not yet able to conceive of the absolute as spirit, life, and self-consciousness, did not promote a proper evaluation of the fundamental significance of Greek thought for modern philosophy.”

“Nicolai Hartmann’s dissociation of himself from neo-Kantian idealism stimulated me to try to penetrate Aristotle’s thought, and the French and English research — of Robin, Taylor, Ross, Hardie, and, above all, the incomparable Hicks — proved most helpful in my endeavors. At the time, however, I fell far short of seeing the unity in the logos philosophy, which started with Socrates’ questioning and then quickly deteriorated in the post-Aristotelian period, but which, nevertheless, permanently determined the entire conceptual apparatus of Western thought. Encountering Heidegger turned out to be decisive for me at this stage. Heidegger had worked his way through both the Catholic-Aristotelian and neo-Kantian traditions, and in appropriating Husserl’s minutely detailed art of conceptualization, he had steeled the endurance and power of intuition, which are indispensable for doing philosophy with Aristotle. Here, then, was an advocate of Aristotle who, in his directness and the freshness of his phenomenological insights, far surpassed all the traditional shadings of Aristotelianism, who surpassed Thomism and, yes, even Hegelianism. To this day hardly anything has been made public of this event, but it has had its effect on academic teaching, and my own path was defined beginning there. By the time I published my first book in 1931 (Platos dialektische Ethik), the convergence, at least in the area of practical philosophy, of the aim of Plato’s thinking with Aristotle’s conceptual distinctions had become evident to me” (pp.1-4).

In this context, Gadamer contrasts “a phenomenological exposition of their subject matter itself” (p. 5, emphasis in original) to textual analysis.

“Decades of teaching were devoted to elaborating and testing what is called here the Platonic-Aristotelian unitary effect. But in the background was the continuous challenge posed for me by the path Heidegger’s own thought took, and especially by his interpretation of Plato as the decisive step toward ‘metaphysical thought’s’ obliviousness to being (Sein)…. The following studies too, it is hoped, will serve to keep alive both Platonic dialogue and the speculative dimension common to Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel” (ibid).

Gadamer points out that common German readings of Plato and Aristotle in part reflect Hegel’s interpretations. The reference to Aristotle’s “substance ontology” reflects a common reading of the Metaphysics that I reject. Gadamer is right though to point out that Aristotle’s explicit criticisms of Plato are not the last word on Plato. He is very right that after Aristotle, there was a breakdown in continuity of understanding.

Gadamer particularly points out the role of neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato and Aristotle in promoting a shallow opposition between the two. He helps to explain how it was that Heidegger came to be regarded as dramatically advancing the study of Plato and Aristotle, which seems quite preposterous to me.

Apparently in early 20th-century Germany, neo-Kantian and neo-Thomist accounts of Plato and Aristotle were the main available alternatives. As Gadamer presents it, each of these two had its own dogmatism and shallowness.

Heidegger was doing something clearly different from either, while appealing to an audience sympathetic to Romanticism, and to the vitalist Lebensphilosophie or “philosophy of life”. He offered an approach very different from that of neo-Kantianism or neo-Thomism. He was already famous in Germany as a charismatic lecturer, before the publication of Being and Time. Gadamer principally notes Heidegger’s “directness and freshness”, but seems to make no claim at all about Heidegger’s historical scholarship. Heidegger’s vigorous assertiveness must have impressed people. Gadamer is polite and circumspect, but the “continuous challenge” due to Heidegger that he says he felt must have been to defend Plato against Heidegger’s claims about the forgetting of Being.

Gadamer on Plato and Aristotle

Some of Gadamer’s most interesting work is on Plato and Aristotle. More so than many modern commentators, he sees their work as closely connected. He is especially fond of Plato. In the introduction to Gadamer’s The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, (German ed. 1978, English tr. 1986), translator P. Christopher Smith offers useful comments.

For Gadamer, “Plato and Aristotle both belong to the unified tradition of logos philosophy. In the Phaedo Plato’s Socrates turns away from naturalistic accounts of things to the logoi, our ways of speaking; similarly, Aristotle founds his investigations on ‘pos legetai’, how something is spoken of” (Smith, p. xiv).

At least in this work, the term “logos philosophy” is not explicitly defined. But in the passage above, it clearly indicates a linguistic character. It is nice to see a recognition that Plato’s — and even more so Aristotle’s — work has a substantial linguistic dimension.

Smith recalls that the Ionian pre-Socratics had “only two kinds of explanation at their disposal — from what, and by the agency of what — [and so they] could not properly grasp the cosmos, in which things occur for the sake of (heneka) what is good” (p. xv).

The moderns on the whole don’t really do much better than the pre-Socratics at recognizing what Aristotle calls “for the sake of” and the role it plays in the constitution of things. This involves not providential intervention, or even a reified indwelling ontological principle that could simply unfold. It is also not just a fact, but something that motivates without necessitating.

In Plato, “To begin with there are the refutational, or elenchtic, dialogues, in which Socrates confronts the great sophists of his time — Protagoras, Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus — and displays the emptiness of their claims to be able to teach virtue. In truth theirs is a technical mentality, and what they teach is only a techne of succeeding. The conclusion to be drawn from these dialogues — at times explicit, but more often implied negatively or indirectly — is that knowledge in virtue is somehow different from knowledge in techne. This shows up above all in the fact that virtue cannot be taught. And there is a further truth that emerges here, again largely unsaid, that the traditional ideas of arete upon which the sophists rely and which might be learned by imitating a paragon have become groundless and susceptible of sophistic dissimulation. Therefore, to withstand seduction by self-interest and by otherwise insatiable desires for sensuous gratification and power, to which sophism panders, one must now be able to give justification for what is good, that is, justification for one’s choices of what is right as opposed to what is wrong. But nobody seems to know how to do that, least of all those sophists who claim that they do” (pp. xv-xvi).

This concern with justification is something Gadamer shares with Habermas and Brandom. But Gadamer traces it all the way back to Plato, whereas Habermas and Brandom are modernists. It seems to me that Plato and Aristotle’s outrage at the Sophists has to do with the Sophists’ subversion of justification.

“The primary concern in these elenchtic dialogues, then, is a practical one, and that makes the Phaedo and the Republic, in which concern seems to shift to epistemological and ontological matters, appear to mark a definite transition in Plato’s thought. For in these next works the ‘ideas’ are introduced, and in the Republic even the ‘idea of ideas’, the idea of the good which would seem to serve as a first principle of both true knowledge and true reality. In the twentieth-century traditions of Plato interpretation — particularly the neo-Kantian, which found support for its theory of science in this ‘stage’ of Plato — would have it that the question Plato is addressing here is a new, theoretical one no longer related to the Socratic question concerning arete. But Gadamer sees a serious oversight here. A careful reading, he argues, shows that Plato is still dealing with the same issue” (p. xvi).

“Gadamer maintains … that if one asks what question is actually being addressed in the allegory of the cave, one sees that the concern is not just, or even primarily, a theoretical, scientific one, but in fact an existential-practical question of holding steadfastly to the truth in the face of tests or refutations (elenchoi) much as a soldier holds his ground in battle or a wrestler stands firm against attempts to throw him — this is the language Plato uses here. And what are these tests of mettle? The guardians will find themselves in a conflict between honest execution of the duties of their office for the public weal and the ‘pursuit of power after power’, as we in the English-speaking world might put it, using the words of Thomas Hobbes. The guardians, in other words, will be tested by the flattery of both their own desires for gratification and sophistic sycophants, flattery that might seduce them into sacrificing their integrity” (p. xvii).

“In short, it turns out that the theory of dialectic in which they are to be trained is a way of distinguishing and, above all, of distinguishing practically between right and wrong, good and bad. To do that, the guardians must know the idea of the good, for that idea is exactly what those in the cave do not know. The cave-dwellers’ technai (arts) give them the knowledge ‘how to’ do something, knowledge of the means to an end, but not knowledge of the end itself, the hou heneka, the ‘what for’…. Thus, knowledge of the good turns out to be not just a theoretical insight, not just a matter of logos (reasoning). It is a principle on ergon (deed), and makes possible constancy in the choice of the life that one leads (Aristotle: prohairesis tou biou)” (p. xviii).

The sense in which he says the guardians “must know” the idea of the good seems to me to be of necessity quite different from the way in which we may be said, e.g., to know the Pythagorean Theorem. I would rather say something like, the guardians “must have wisdom” about the good.

“And now the real meaning of the hypothesis of the eidos in the Phaedo becomes evident. As opposed to what the neo-Kantian school might have seen in it, the hypothesis of the eidos is not at all the ‘scientific’ postulation of a universal idea that is to be verified by the facts. As in the Republic, the issue in the Phaedo is how to head off whatever might mislead us, how to head off sophistic talk…. Hypothesizing the eidos thus has nothing to do with empirical verification but, instead, with making precisely these eidetic distinctions…. The paradigm for steadfastness … remains Socrates, who was not to be dissuaded from what he saw to be right, no matter what arguments concerning his own ‘advantage’ might be advanced. His arete was such that he would not even accept the escape from death offered to him by his friends” (pp.xviii-xix).

At first I was confused by the reference to verification by facts. To speak of empirical verification of an eidos would be a category mistake. But I think “the hypothesis of the eidos” refers not to any particular eidos, but to the general “hypothesis” that there are eidei.

The important point here is the Socratic “steadfastness”, where steadfastness means not being lured and fooled by the verbal tricks of the clever sophists, who aim at success and at victory in argument, rather than at truth and shared understanding. It seems very relevant today.

“[The Philebus] too begins with an ethical issue — whether the good life is one of pleasure or of intellect or of some third thing — and it also involves its interlocutors in the task of giving justification for their contentions concerning the good life, justification that will make their arguments invulnerable to the sophistic arts of confusing and confounding people with sleights of hand that interchange the one and the many” (p. xix).

“Here the techniques of Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology can be put to good use, for the task is to display the phenomenon that Plato is getting at. In the Philebus Plato speaks of the good as the structure of a ‘mixture’ someone might brew, the ‘potion’ as it were, which is our human life. The various ‘ingredients’, the kinds of pleasure and intellect, are not to be mixed indiscriminately, but well…. A ‘good’ mixture is thus one that has limits to it, and the good itself is limitedness (measuredness, or metriotes) in the midst of constantly threatening indeterminacy and limitlessness…. As measuredness, the good in the Philebus, we now see, is precisely Aristotle’s mean between the extremes” (pp. xx-xxi).

Paul Ricoeur also points out the importance of a notion of mixture in Plato. This undoes many old stereotypes about Platonism.

I am rather unclear on what Husserlian phenomenology is supposed to specifically contribute to the history of philosophy here. I imagine Husserl might question this claim himself. He wanted phenomenology to be a precise “science”, grounded in the phenomenological and eidetic reductions. Here instead we have a thoughtful examination of Plato’s metaphorical language.

“In anticipating Aristotle’s criticisms, it should be noted that, as measuredness, the good in Plato must be distinguished, or ‘separated’ intellectually, from the mixture itself. But if one abstracts from this metaphor, one finds that, as measuredness, the good is what Hegel calls ein Moment, namely, an aspect of something which does not exist separately from it. In short, it is in the thing of which it is the structure. Thus, when we say that it is choriston (separate), we are not denying that it is in the thing. We are saying only that it must be distinguished from the thing in our thinking” (p. xxi).

For Aristotle, a thing that is called “separate” is simply a thing that is conceptually distinct, whereas for Plato, separateness involves independence from matter. This means a thing that Aristotle calls “separate” may nonetheless never exist apart from the whole to which it belongs. This has been discussed in detail by Gwenaëlle Aubry.

“These striking convergences of Plato’s thought with Aristotle’s leave us puzzled about Aristotle’s critique of Plato. Why would he criticize Plato if in fact he and Plato are saying the same thing? “(ibid).

We should be careful about saying things are “the same”. I have sympathy for Leibniz’s argument that no two things are the same. Then there is the question, at what level of blurriness can we no longer distinguish two things? But again the important point is rather the relative one that it is on the whole a lot less false to say Plato and Aristotle thought the same, than it is to present them as if they were opposites, as has also been done at times.

“At the core of the argument in all three [of Aristotle’s surviving ethical works] is the contention that Plato improperly fuses the ontological and the practical in his applications of the idea of the good” (p. xxii).

“Aristotle, of course, is a consummate phenomenologist who wishes above all to avoid running distinct things together. But is it just his ‘descriptive caution’ that leads him to try to keep ontological and practical theory separate? Gadamer suggests that there is something else fundamental in Aristotle’s way of inquiring that leads him to put things as he does, namely, his orientation toward life science. Mathematically oriented thinking such as Plato’s would indeed lead to inquiry about the idea of the good as an abstract structure of good things…. But that is not the orientation of Aristotle’s questioning, which gives primacy to the concrete living thing” (p. xxiv).

“The relationship of moral theory to practice is not at all the modern relation of theory to practice in which an objective, neutral theory can be applied generally to particular problems. In distinction to producing something (techne, poiesis), doing the right thing is not simply an application of general rules” (p. xxvi).

Even Kant has qualification and subtlety in his rule-orientedness.

“In the first place, as Aristotle recognizes, we need an ‘appropriate principle’ (oikeia arche) for moral reasoning, which is not to be confused with mathematical deductive reasoning. For in moral reasoning I always find myself in a particular situation, and the task is not to subsume this particular case under a universal rule which I could know apart from the situation I am in, but to define from within my situation what the general rule is of which this situation is an instance. The particular virtues and virtue in general, as finding the ‘mean between extremes’ are not universal principles that I apply to a situation, but universalizations of what I am doing when I do what is right. Hence it should be noted carefully that, although Aristotle does indeed speak of the ‘practical syllogism’, he in fact uses this syllogistic reasoning only to exemplify the technical choice of the right means to an end” (p. xxviii).

This is an interesting hybrid view on the universality issue. It is certainly true that Aristotle does not treat ethical conclusions as a matter of deduction (instead, they are matters of interpretation).

“[Cleverness] deals with means to an end, and for just that reason, he says, it is to be distinguished from [moral reasonableness]” (ibid).

“Moral reasonableness” is how Smith translates Aristotelian ethical phronesis. This is a kind of reason, which I have called ethical reason.

“As both the Philebus and Aristotle’s ethical treatises make clear, human beings are not gods, and thus the life that is best for them has to be a life that combines theoria and praxis…. The point that both wish to make — which is the fundamental point of agreement between them concerning the good — is that, in distinction to gods, human beings are always under way toward the divine, or, as Gadamer puts it, their best life is philosophia, not sophia, that is, striving for wisdom, not wisdom itself. Human beings are finite, not absolute — never absolved from the ‘remnant of earth’ (Goethe) in them that inevitably involves them in the task of living well here in the practical world” (pp. xxviii-xix).

Finitism and infinitism are both said in many ways. The very sharp distinction being made here between humans and gods seems rather one-sided in relation to Aristotle.

Gadamer is apparently a pretty strong finitist, and strongly opposed to the infinitism he sees in Hegel. What infinity means in the more “deflationary” views of Hegel I have sympathy for is quite different from this. Meanwhile Aristotle literally says that the world is finite, but allows for an expansive notion of human being.

“Thus, in both Plato and Aristotle, the good emerges as that toward which we are striving, that for the sake of which (hou heneka), that at which we aim (to telos). But not only we. The whole universe is to be understood as striving for perfection…. [T]he universe, and not only human experience, is to be thought of in relation to the good ” (p. xix).

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).