Mutual Recognition Revisited

Mutual recognition has two distinct senses.

The first is an ethical ideal with roots in Aristotle’s discussion of friendship and love, as generalized by Fichte, and especially Hegel. Brandom and others consider it central to the understanding of what Hegel was really trying to do.

The second is a nonreductive meta-ethical theory of how normativity or the “ought” in general comes to be. Such a theory was broadly suggested by Hegel, and has been recently developed in great detail by Brandom in A Spirit of Trust. It addresses the emergence of normativity, but bootstraps itself from within the domain of a clarified understanding of normativity itself. Other accounts of the emergence of normativity have generally explained it in terms of something else, effectively reducing the “ought” to some kind of facts.

While I don’t see how anyone could reasonably object to the ethical ideal, its meta-ethical elaboration into a “normative all the way down”, self-bootstrapping theory of the constitution of normativity is an extensive, highly original, many-faceted theoretical account building on the first that no one could be expected to fully grasp on merely hearing it mentioned. I think its combination of detail and coherence is an amazing and unprecedented accomplishment, confirming Brandom’s place among the greatest philosophers who could be counted on one hand, but it takes real work to assimilate. (See Hegel’s Ethical Innovation; Brandom on Postmodernity; Mutual Recognition; Pippin on Mutual Recognition; Recognition; Kantian Respect; Trust as a Principle.)

Space of Reasons

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-89) was one of the greatest American philosophers of the 20th century. A pragmatist trained in the analytic tradition, he rethought analytic philosophy from a broadly Kantian point of view, and famously criticized the “Myth of the Given”. His positive reference to Hegel as “that great foe of immediacy” made a great impression on the young Robert Brandom.

Sellars originated the phrase “space of reasons”, now much used by Brandom and others. He said that to hold a commitment at all is to invite questions about the reasons for it. The particular reasons for a commitment involve other reasons, which involve still others, and so on, forming a “space” that can be explored through dialogue.

I would note that in Aristotelian terms, the space of reasons would be a kind of field of potentialities. Because the space of reasons is potential rather than actual, it involves a vast multiplication of alternate (counterfactual) paths, structures, and fibrations. I associate it with an open field of potential Socratic questioning and negotiation. By contrast, both individualized ethos and the beliefs generally shared by an existing community would be kinds of actuality, in which particular alternatives are already selected, but may change over time. (See also Space vs Natural Light; Normativity; Intentionality.)

Pure Thinking?

Another recent article by Adrian Johnston continues his polemic against Robert Pippin — as well as Brandom — on the reading of Hegel, addressing Pippin’s 2019 book on Hegel’s Logic and his review of Slovoj Žižek’s book on Hegel, Less than Nothing. Among other things, Johnston takes aim at Pippin’s talk about “pure thinking”, claiming that any such emphasis must necessarily reflect a subjective idealism, like that which Johnston attributes to Kant and Fichte.

Johnston takes Pippin and Brandom’s appeals to unity of apperception in a Hegelian context as prima facie evidence of subjective idealism. This does not follow at all. He objects to Pippin’s emphasis on intelligibility as opposed to sheer “being”. Here I have to agree with Pippin — real philosophers have always been more concerned with intelligibility, and there is nothing subjective about that, either. Intelligibility is the basis of objectivity.

I don’t think Kant’s concern with subjectivity was at all subjectivist. Even Fichte, despite his tendency to ontologize a transcendental Subject, was no garden-variety subjectivist. Johnston rightly points out that Fichte talked about an “I” that “cannot be gone behind”, and that Hegel regarded this as a very one-sided point of view. He is right that the young Hegel briefly aligned himself with Schelling against Fichte. But as much as I find Fichte’s subject-centeredness antithetical, and in spite of a few interesting bits in Schelling, Schelling’s metaphysics of a self-dividing Absolute seems to me but a shallow imitation of neoplatonism, much less worthy of philosophical attention than either the original neoplatonists or Fichte’s objectionably subject-centered point of view. Žižek and Johnston, however, want to use a valorized Schelling to help prop up a metaphysical Hegel.

Johnston claims that Pippin and Brandom end up with a dualism of reasons and causes, and argues that their defense of a kind of modified naturalism is not strong enough to prevent a lapse into subjective idealism. For Johnston, it seems the only way to avoid this would be a direct causal derivation of the “space of reasons” from something physical. I occasionally worry myself that some of Pippin and Brandom’s remarks on naturalism dwell too much on a very narrow if influential kind of naturalism that wants to reduce everything to physical causes. I also want to go a bit further than they do in affirming a nonreductive naturalism. Johnston says he wants to be nonreductive, but many of his remarks (e.g., about reasons vs. causes) seem reductive to me.

I see causes in the modern narrow sense as just one kind of reasons why (see Free Will and Determinism; Aristotelian C auses; Why by Normative Pragmatics). Through the diffuse influence of early modern mechanism, modern people have become conditioned to thinking of causation in what are really just metaphors of some kind of impulse. But in modern physics, serious discussions of causality have much more to do with mathematical law. Mathematical law is a specific kind of reason. So to me, the requirement to explain reasons in terms of causes has things somewhat backwards.

Ultimately, Johnston and Žižek are interested in the emancipatory potential of a kind of materialism broad enough to take in Hegel along with neuroscience or quantum mechanics. At this very generic level I have no issue, but it seems to me that the kind of examination of material conditions that has the most emancipatory potential is directed at things historical, social, and cultural, rather than physiological or physical. Also, it is broadly hermeneutic rather than merely concerned with facts. Overall, Žižek’s prodigous output reflects this, but Johnston’s texts seem curiously removed from such considerations.

Johnston objects that Pippin narrows Hegel’s focus to ethics and epistemology. I’m actually content with just ethics, as it seems to me that already indirectly includes everything else (see Practical Reason). (See also Johnston’s Pippin; Weak Nature Alone.)

Judgments

I usually think of judgment as a process of interpretation or a related kind of wisdom, but at least since early modern reformulations of Aristotelian logic, “a” judgment has also traditionally meant a logical proposition, or an assertion of a proposition.

An older, but still post-Aristotelian notion is that what the early moderns called a judgment “A is B” should be understood (on the model of its surface grammar) as the potentially arbitrary predication “A is B”. Such a potentially arbitrary predication by itself does not contain enough information for us to assess whether it is good or bad. The predication model was associated with a non-Aristotelian notion of truth as simple correspondence to supposed fact.

L. M. De Rijk, arguably the 20th century’s leading scholar on medieval Latin logic, developed a very detailed textual argument that the understanding of logical “judgments” in such grammatical terms is actually an unhistorical misreading of Aristotle. In the first volume of his Aristotle: Semantics and Ontology, De Rijk concluded that Aristotle’s own logical or semantic use of “is” or “is not” should be understood not in the traditionally accepted way as a “copula” or binary operator of predication, but rather as a unary operator of assertion on a compound expression — i.e., on the pair (A, B), as opposed to its two elements A and B.

I also want to emphasize that Aristotle himself did not admit simple, potentially arbitrary predications as “judgments”. The special form of Aristotelian propositions makes them express not arbitrary atomic claims as is the case with propositions in the standard modern sense, but two specific ways of compounding subclaims. Aristotle’s two truth-value-forming operations of combination and separation (expressed by “is” and “is not”) limit the scope of what qualifies as a proper Aristotelian “judgment” to cases that are effectively equivalent to what Brandom would call judgments of material consequence or material incompatibility (see Aristotelian Propositions). What the moderns would call Aristotelian “judgments” thus end up more specifically reflecting judgments of what Brandom would call goodness of material inference.

Proper Aristotelian “judgments” thus turn out to express not just arbitrary predications constructed without regard to meaning, but particular kinds of compound claims that can in principle be rationally evaluated for material well-formedness as compound thoughts, based on the actual content of the claims being compounded. (Non-compound claims are just claims, and do not have enough content to be subject to such intrinsic rational evaluation, but as soon as there is some compounding, internal criteria for well-formedness come into play.)

So, fortuitously, modern use of the term “judgment” for these ends up having more substance than it would for arbitrary predications. For Aristotle, truth and falsity only apply to what are actually compound thoughts, because truth and falsity express assessments of material well-formedness, and only compound thoughts can be assessed for such well-formedness. The case for the fundamental role of concerns of normativity rather than simple surface-level predication in Aristotelian truth-valued propositions is further supported by the ways Aristotle uses “said of” relations.

Independent of this sort of better reading of Aristotle, Brandom in the first of his 2007 Woodbridge lectures points out that Kant also strongly rejected the traditional analysis of judgment in terms of predication. Brandom goes on to argue that for Kant, “what makes an act or episode a judging in the first place is just its being subject to the normative demand that it be integrated” [emphasis in original] into a unity of apperception. This holistic, integrative view of Kantian judgment seems to me to be strongly supported by Kant’s discussion of unities of apperception in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, as well as by the broad thrust of the Critique of Judgment.

Thus, a Kantian judgment also has more substance than the standard logical notion, but while an Aristotelian “judgment” gets its substantive, rational character from intra-propositional structure, a Kantian judgment gets it from inter-propositional structure.

Logic as Semantics

I think of logic in general as mainly concerned with the perspicuous rendering of distinctions for use in reasoning, rather than with the arbitration of truth based on some other presumed truth as a starting point.

An emphasis on this expressive or semantic role was, I think, what led Aristotle to insist that what modern people call logic should be viewed as a tool (organon) and not a “science”.

The great scholar of Latin medieval logic L. M. De Rijk, in his major study Aristotle: Semantics and Ontology (2002), recommended replacing references to Aristotle’s own “logic” with references to semantics, or investigation of meaning.

Hegel contended that traditional metaphysics should be replaced by a kind of “logic” that addresses meaningful content.

Brandom has given us an unprecedentedly thorough and clear account of the conditions that make meaningful content possible in the first place.

On the formal side, type theory and category theory provide a new, unified view of logic, mathematics, and formal languages that fits very well with this “meaning before truth” perspective.

Intentionality

Standard notions of intentionality as a mental state involving representations of objects go back to the medieval Iranian philosopher Avicenna (980 – 1037). Augustine had already spoken of of “intentions” as acts of the soul, but it was Avicenna who explicitly gave what were translated to Latin as “intentions” the later standard sense of mental representations. Discussion of Avicennan “intentions” was common in the Latin scholastic tradition, but disappeared in the early modern period, only to be revived by Franz Brentano. In his 1874 work Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano characterized intentionality as having to do with mental states that are directed toward objects that are themselves mental representations, and argued that intentionality is the defining characteristic of mind in general. Edmund Husserl later attempted to separate a logical concept of intentionality from empirical psychology, and made it a central theme of his phenomenology. Intentionality is widely discussed among analytic philosophers as well.

A main focus of Brandom’s Making It Explicit was to develop in great detail a novel concept of intentionality that is linguistic, social, and normative, rather than mental in the usual sense. Intentionality for Brandom is rooted in normative social practices and dialogue rather than psychology. Representation is treated as something to be explained, rather than as an unexplained explainer. The objects Brandomian intentionality is concerned with are not objects of mental representations, but objects of normative social practices and dialogue. Accepting Brentano’s thesis that intentionality is the defining characteristic of mind, this gives us a concept of mind that is mainly ethical, linguistic, and social (see Mind Without Mentalism).

I think the kind of hermeneutics implicitly practiced by Aristotle throughout his work was concerned with real things, but primarily as objects of normative social practices and dialogue, and only secondarily in a more direct way. Aristotle also said that intelligence comes to us “from outside”. I read him too as working with a primarily ethical, linguistic, and social notion of mind (see also Aristotelian Subjectivity). Plato’s Forms were also explicitly nonpsychological. Even Augustine’s “inner man” has nothing private about it, but rather participates in an ethical community of the spirit that tends toward universality.

An ethical-linguistic-social view of intentionality also gives us a good way of talking about all the practical, real-life concerns of human subjectivity, without the bad theoretical baggage of referring all those concerns to a supposedly sovereign individual Subject or Ego.

Experience

Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Brandom all work with thick, nonprimitive, structured notions of human experience that do not involve treating consciousness as a transparent medium in which ready-made contents are immediately presented. Aristotle emphasized experience as a product of accumulation over time, as when we say someone is “experienced”. Kant emphasized that all experience is a product of preconscious synthesis that involves complex applications of concepts. Hegel developed a radical critique of the supposed positive role of immediacy. Whereas many previous readings tended to water down the impact of Kant and Hegel by explicitly or implicitly assimilating their work to empiricist or existential-phenomenological views that treat experience as something primitive, Brandom has emphasized how Kant and Hegel anticipated Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the “Myth of the Given”, and developed an innovative “negative” account of the role of immediacy within experience (see Error; Negativity in Experience.)

The bottom line of all of this is that experience cannot be used as an unproblematic beginning point, as if all the difficult issues were separate from it, out there in the world somewhere. There is no such separation; we find ourselves only in and through a process of understanding life and the world. It is the forms brought to light through this process that matter.

Experience can still be a beginning point of sorts, but in the Aristotelian pragmatic sense that gives no privilege to beginnings. (See also Empirical-Transcendental Doublet.)

Reading “Reading Brandom”

I’ve commented on the introduction to Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust, and on the contributions by Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard. Here I will briefly attend to the remainder of the book.

A moderately phrased essay by Elena Ficara wants to recover a more conventional notion of propositional truth in Hegel, while adhering to the view that real “contradictions” literally violate the law of noncontradiction. John McDowell, a notorious opponent of coherentism, predictably takes issue with Brandom’s coherentist reading of the Kantian unity of apperception. He also claims Hegel is not engaged in the critique of representationalism that Brandom imputes to him, and argues for a forward-moving necessity in the emergence of one shape of consciousness from another. A thoughtful and well-balanced piece by Paul Redding unfortunately wants to recover a place for a more conventional positive role for immediate experience. Georg Bertram argues for the importance of conflict, and says that Brandom overstresses reconciliation. In a nuanced piece on Brandom’s take on realism and idealism in Hegel, Dean Moyar argues that thinking of practical judgment in terms of values rather than deontology could strengthen Brandom’s argument. I have some sympathy for this.

J.M. Bernstein adheres to an ethically “positivist” reading of Making It Explicit, and claims that the notion of forgiveness in Spirit of Trust invalidates Brandom’s previous stance. Italo Tesla objects to some of the detail of Brandom’s treatment of alienation, and rejects Brandom’s subsumption of all human activity under ethical practice. Editor Gilles Bouché claims Brandom “retreats” to a “pure philosophy of language” ill-suited for ethical purposes. Franz Knappik claims Brandomian trust is incompatible with critical thought, and thus has bad political consequences. Charles Taylor globally rejects Brandom’s reading of Hegel in favor of a more conventional view of a self-unfolding teleology, but says Brandom’s ethics contain a message much needed in contemporary politics.

Trust as a Principle

Trust as a principle does not mean blind trust. It means trust as a default attitude. Trust as a universal default is perfectly compatible with every kind of critical thinking.

When we trust someone, we grant them a kind of authority, but authority must always be balanced by symmetrical responsibility. To make any assertion at all is enter the space of reasons. To make an assertion is to make oneself responsible for it, along with its consequences and incompatibilities. No one has privileged access to what is right, which depends upon shareable criteria. Generalized trust does not mean naivete or credulity, just a kind of fairness. It could not mean an abdication of our responsibilities as rational beings. In the context of what Brandom would call deontic scorekeeping, generalized trust means a level playing field, not an absence of standards.

Pinkard on Spirit of Trust

Terry Pinkard’s contribution to the recent, rather negatively skewed collection Reading Brandom offers a judicious and measured critique of Brandom’s reading of Hegel in A Spirit of Trust. I previously commented on Pinkard’s separate book review, which was a bit more sharply worded, and covers some of the same points in more detail. I’ll focus here on a couple of further matters.

Pinkard nicely develops the contrast between Fichtean and Hegelian accounts of mutual recognition. For Fichte, a denial of the need for mutual recognition would simply be a philosophical error. Hegel went further, in maintaining that the slave society that institutionalized such a denial was ultimately unable to make sense of itself by its own criteria.

Somewhat my surprise, Pinkard objects to what he takes to be Brandom’s reading of the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology in terms of Kantian or Fichtean transcendental philosophy. He takes this to mean that Hegel’s apparent historical references must on Brandom’s reading be taken to have only an allegorical significance. It is true that the transcendental has no historical dimension in Kant or Fichte. But according to Brandom, “Hegel brings the normative down to earth by explaining discursive norms as the products of social practices…. the diachronic historical dimension of recognitive communities is at the center of Hegel’s story” (Spirit of Trust, pp. 12, 14). Brandom’s Hegel’s transcendental is linguistic, social, and historical.

Pinkard correctly points out that historical development does not follow the principles of what Brandom calls a forgiving Hegelian genealogy, which Brandom likes to explain by analogy with the retrospective evaluations of case law in jurisprudence. I don’t think Brandom meant this as an account of the objective sequence of historical development, but rather as a guiding ideal for the retrospective interpretations we use in understanding cumulative results embodied in the present.