Power and Its Shadow

Omnipotence has been a problematic concept introduced by theologians in the monotheistic traditions. It has affected traditional metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, and politics. It has deep historical connections with political absolutism.

Ethics in the Socratic tradition take as a starting point something like the Kantian autonomy of reason, coupled with an agnostic but sympathetic view of religion.

For the Latin scholastic theologians, the autonomy of philosophical inquiry is only relative. But most stop short of a completely unqualified omnipotence, and do endorse a relative autonomy of philosophy. There is a long tradition of “faith seeking understanding”. This allows for a socially beneficial relation of benevolent mutual respect between theological and philosophical discourse.

For several centuries in the later middle ages, the main vehicle for expression of Christian theology consisted of meta-commentaries on the 12th-century theologian Peter Lombard’s commentary on the Bible, known as the Sentences. Lombard’s work was one of the foundations of Latin scholasticism. Over 1400 commentaries on it are known. Lombard was a student of the great Peter Abelard, but backed off from Abelard’s more controversial views.

Here I will largely translate and comment upon a brief survey of omnipotence in the Sentences commentary tradition by Olivier Boulnois. This introduction to his edited volume La puissance et son ombre: de Pierre Lombard à Luther (1994) touches upon many points of “historiographical” interest. The French volume focuses on Lombard’s distinctions 42-44, which are the parts dealing with omnipotence. It includes translations from Lombard himself, William of Auxerre, Hugh of Saint-Cher, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Augustinus Triumphus, Duns Scotus, Durand of Saint-Pourcain, William of Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, and Martin Luther. My aim here is only to partially translate and comment upon the introduction by Boulnois, which is entitled “What God Cannot Do”.

“Can God walk, speak, lie, sin, die, make a mistake? Can he restore virginity? Do other than what he does? Create other worlds?…. Can God annul the most fundamental eternal truths or change them?” (p. 11, my translation throughout).

First, it should be noted that there is not just one concept of omnipotence. Its meaning has been the subject of great controversy in the past. We will see several competing versions in what follows.

Second, the medieval theological mainstream in fact recognized that there are some things God cannot do, or at least will never do. The great scholastics recognized that omnipotence has be qualified in some way in order to be at all defensible, even if they would not themselves phrase it that way. Their arguments are about where and how to draw the line.

“[T]o ask what God cannot do is to research the limits of the possible, and to pose a question that bears on one of the principal senses of being in Aristotle” (pp. 11-12).

The last is a reference to potentiality (dynamis in Aristotle’s Greek), which in the Latin tradition is mainly understood as a kind of power.

“The fundamental question becomes: what does the proposition ‘he can’ signify? To respond, it is necessary to articulate three concepts: power [puissance], ability [pouvoir], possibility” (p. 12).

Puissance and pouvoir can both mean power, but with different nuances. Puissance is standardly used to translate the potentia of the Latin tradition. Pouvoir is used to express ability, and also political power.

Boulnois asks, “With what power [pouissance] are we concerned here? With Aristotle’s being in potentiality (intermediate between being and non-being)? Or with the effective power [pouissance] to make be what is not? But doesn’t that presuppose power [pouissance] in the first sense?” (ibid).”

“Effective power to make be what is not” recalls the theory of creation in Aquinas.

Boulnois continues, switching to the other French term for power, “With what model of power [pouvoir] are we confronted? With the generosity of an overcapacity that dispenses in accord with its own goodness? With the arbitrariness of always-revocable decrees? With the fixation of laws in conformity with which power [pouvoir] must itself act to act legitimately?” (ibid).

Here we begin to see the connection with political power.

“What form of the possible do we encounter? This is the whole problem of modality: in the logical sense, everything noncontradictory is possible; but isn’t it necessary to add a second form of possibility, real possibility, that which can be effectively realized by causes?” (ibid).

Possibility and necessity are both modal concepts. I still need to write more about the ethical significance of modality. While preparing this post I dashed off another quick note.

“For the problem of omnipotence bears on the limit conditions of an order of the world and an order of discourse” (ibid).

Claims of omnipotence have a global impact on how we understand everything else, which is literally explicit in the very term. (“Omni” is Latin for “all”).

“The situation of the question of omnipotence in the organic unity of the Sentences leads to thinking the possible in terms of divine omnipotence, and not the inverse” (p. 15).

When two terms are identified or linked, questions of the order of explanation can acquire a large importance. Here this involves the relation between philosophy and theology.

“Peter Lombard analyzes divine power in a double way” (p. 16). “From then on, the question turns on the status of the possible in the divine understanding: does what is impossible for God come from God (as Henry of Ghent believed at one time) or rather from the inconsistency of the thing itself (Duns Scotus)? Or again, is it necessary to say that the question has no sense, it being given that there is a strict reciprocity between the reality of the possible and divine thought (Ockham, reprised by Luther)?” (p. 17).

“But the evolution of the interpretation explains the modern contradiction between divergent points of view: a God who is the cause of the possibility of eternal truths (Descartes), or is submitted to the necessity of the best of [all] worlds (Leibniz), or again is identical with the necessity of all his attributes (Spinoza)” (p. 18).

Omnipotence in Descartes underwrites a theological voluntarism. Infinity and a very different kind of omnipotence are the most important properties of Spinoza’s God, who is also equated with Nature. Leibniz uses another nonstandard kind of omnipotence, explicitly developing his metaphysical views in terms of a highly rationalized form of creationism.

“For the problem of omnipotence is first of all a problem of exegesis” (p. 19). “If God can do anything, isn’t it necessary to say that he can lie, be mistaken, be put to death? Doesn’t one go to the point of making God a bad power? Augustine strives to resolve the difficulty: ‘And its inability to lie is a great power of the Word’. As a consequence, divine omnipotence does not consist in being able to do all, except in an inadequate sense…. Thus omnipotence is defined simply as God’s power to not be prevented from doing all the good that he wills. Augustine carefully avoids defining omni-potence as a power to do all” (p. 20).

We are teetering on the edge of paradox here. It is precisely the qualifications of what initially seems like the unqualified par excellence that allow an ethical perspective to be recovered. At the very least, this is in great tension with the motif of unqualified power.

“If God cannot do something, that is because it is not a true power (walking, sinning, being mistaken are marks of imperfection)…. If all that God cannot do is only weakness and negativity, God will be in himself every positive power. ‘He can do all that power can do’. Divine omnipotence has become the infinite affirmation of power” (p. 21).

For the 11th-century monastic reformer Peter Damian, according to Boulnois, “The origin of nature is not subject to the same laws as nature. Creation ex nihilo affords a striking illustration of this: ‘Nature itself is made against nature’. Nature thus becomes identical to the will of God: ‘Nature itself has its proper nature, which is to say the will of God” (pp. 24-25).

“The whole question of modality is raised here…. For Aristotle, only the future is contingent…. But for the theologian, who speaks of the possible insofar as it is the object of divine power, even if a thing is, insofar as it is, it can not be…. Even if an event is realized, at the very moment when it is real, it is not necessary. For it could not be if it were not willed by God” (p. 25). “The restoration of [virginity, according to Damian] resembles a new creation, and it is not subject to any mundane law, even that of contradiction…. All power and all knowing are coeternal with God, sovereign creator of the world” (pp. 26-27).

Again modality comes up. The idea that the present state of the world is contingent is reasonable in itself.

Among the most radical claims associated with omnipotence is that God can change the past. Up to a point, it seems to me that we should affirm the contingency of the present as well as the future, but it is also very possible to go too far in this. What is challenging to specify is how to draw the line between good flexibility and bad arbitrariness.

For Aristotle, Boulnois says ” ‘That which is, when it is, and that which is not, when it is not, is necessary’. This principle does not bear only on a necessity of discourse. It also implies a real necessity. For Aristotle, the possible is nothing but being in potentiality, that is to say being which tends toward existence, and which at the end of an infinite time, will end by coming to be. There is what could be called a statistical interpretation of modality, according to which that is possible which was, is, or will be in an infinite time. Indeed it is a temporal interpretation, according to which there always will be a state of affairs in which the contingent is realized. Relayed by Maimonides, this principle is the basis of the celebrated ‘third way’ of showing the existence of God in Thomas Aquinas” (p. 32).

Aristotle’s “statistical” modality is not statistical in the numerical sense. He defines the necessary as that which is always true. “Always” may not be entirely air-tight. He also explicitly speaks of things that are true “for the most part”, and sometimes of things that are always true or true for the most part.

Boulnois continues, “The motif of this disequilibrium can be easily designated: it is the primacy of presence in all metaphysical analysis of manifestation. While the [more traditional] theologians, following Augustine, envisage temporality as a triple manifestation of the divine power in the past, present, and future, Bonaventure, in the manner of the Aristotelian metaphysics, places himself in the perspective of the thing in its evidence enunciable by the finite subject. He goes on to invoke an important argument: between the thing and its form of presence (be it a presence of the past or an existence in the present instant), there exists an analytic relation…. The presence of the thing is included in all manifestation. On the other hand the future, which is not yet, is not analytically included in the content of the thing that comes to be” (pp. 32-33).

There really was a “metaphysics of presence” in Latin scholasticism. The error is to attribute it to directly to Aristotle.

“From this point on, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and Ockham pose only the question of the necessity of the past…. They no longer ask if the same question can be extended to the future. The reference to Peter Damian conceals a mutation of the problematic: instead of being posed from the transcendent freedom of God, the possibility of the contingent will only be envisaged starting from the human experience of the present. The ontology of the contingent becomes the possibility of finite freedom” (p. 33).

“All the commentaries on the Sentences, following the line of Peter Lombard, preserve the memory of the condemnation of Abelard by the council of Sens. In the spirit of this council, it is not permitted to think that God is necessarily determined to act and can only do what he does. The council Fathers, led by Bernard of Clairvaux, see in this prohibition a line that is not to be crossed. The omnipotence of God requires us to think that he can do what he does not do, omit what he does not omit, do what he does in another manner or at another moment, or similarly omit it. The divine omnipotence thus appears as sovereignly free, indifferent between acting and not acting” (pp. 33-34).

This is the point at which the thesis of omnipotence becomes dangerous.

“Peter Abelard himself was moved by a metaphysical principle, the principle of reason. God can only do what he does, because ‘God does nothing without a reason’…. Abelard does not admit that God can act against the order he has decided to follow…. God cannot go against his proper wisdom and his proper rationality. Reason imposes itself on him in being the form of his freedom. In a sense, Abelard is quite simply faithful to the patristic tradition that orients divine action toward the good. But he systematizes to the point of paradox, in limiting divine freedom by his wisdom” (p. 34).

The whole question about whether or not God can act “against” what he has “decided” is artificial, because it assumes an anthropomorphic and temporal notion of “decision”. If God is pre-eminently the Eternal as Augustine says, the temporal metaphor of decision is inappropriate.

“Peter Damian makes an equation between divine omnipotence and human freedom: what is possible for the human must at least be possible for God” (ibid).

This argument clearly depends on an anthropomorphic analogy. What is called “possible” for the human depends in part on the particular character of human finitude. It is not at all the same as what would be called “possible” for an eternal neoplatonic God exempt from all finitude. Frankly, it is not even clear that it is appropriate to speak of possibility in relation to God at all. Aristotle says that the first cause is pure act and entelechy. Augustine very strongly associates God with the eternal.

“As Peter Lombard well saw, contrary to the censors of Abelard who ignore the point, the position of Abelard is equally motivated by the principle of the best. As with Leibniz later on, the principle of the best follows from an interpretation of the principle of causality…. Abelard in turn follows the principle of causality, attested by Plato: ‘Nothing comes to be without a cause’. But he reinterprets it in the light of Christian theology, for which the cause of the created resides in the exemplary reason, the divine idea, model, or archetype by which God thinks the creatable before instituting it. It is in this sense that Augustine writes: ‘Who would dare say that God created things without reason?’ For Abelard, as a consequence, the world is created in a universal order, and in it no event escapes divine providence: nothing that appears contingent or due to chance comes to be outside of his prescience or his wisdom. Reason itself is a means of revelation. Despite the apparent disagreements between the Bible and Plato, a more profound reading of these two texts allows us to reconcile them, and to underline the identity between the rationality of God and his freedom” (p. 36).

“For in this problematic cause and reason are synonyms: ‘ratio vel causa‘, writes Peter Lombard…. The position of Abelard is indeed an important stage in the constitution of the principle of reason, between Plato and Leibniz. In Plato, the principle of causality, exterior to the demiurge, and the principle of the goodness of the cosmos are enunciated separately. For Abelard, the principle of reason has become interior to the divine wisdom, and conforms to the primacy of goodness. For Leibniz, finally, the principle of reason is no longer divine, but is identified with essence in general: every substance is the sufficient reason of its accidents” (p. 37).

“Without a doubt, the condemnation of Abelard played a decisive role here. We recall that Heidegger speaks of a ‘time of incubation’ of the principle of reason, already formulated since the birth of philosophy. But he does not respond to the question he himself raises” (p. 37). “In all the rigor of their terms, the condemnations of the council of Sens, in rejecting the application of the principle of reason to God, preserved the principle of reason in an incubator” (p. 38).

“If God creates a world, he cannot create it without what makes it a world: its order, the harmony of its parts…. God cannot create without: 1) what makes it a totality: that which is required for the achievement of a universe; 2) what makes its parts compatible with one another: the conditions of existence of creatures, one in relation to another; 3) what permits each of its parts to have sufficient consistency to possess the perfection of an essence and that of existing. The creation of a world results in the positing of a finite order, governed by the mathematical or musical principle of the harmony of the all, that is to say a certain proportion between the parts” (p. 39).

The strong notion of the coherence requirements of a world in Leibniz removes the usual arbitrariness from the notion of creation.

“This common problematic leaves room for a whole gamut of individual positions, from Albert the Great to Ockham. For Albert the Great, ‘if one places oneself in the point of view of being’, starting from the things that really exist, no better order is conceivable…. For Bonaventure, … God can make either a world different by its substances (but which is not really better, because it is incomparable), or a world different by its accidents (but that is really the same as this one)…. For Ockham, on the contrary the most probable position is ‘that which admits that God can make another world better than this one and specifically distinct from it’ ” (pp. 39-40).

“Can God change eternal truths?…. Descartes raises this question” (p. 40). “God does not know truths as true unless he wills that they be so” (p. 41). “This debate has a long medieval history” (ibid).

Hugh of Saint-Cher is credited with originating the distinction between absolute and ordained power.

“Hugh of Saint-Cher [distinguishes] two aspects of divine power. As conditioned, it cannot be contradictory…. In the measure that the order of the finite is subject to the principle of contradiction, God cannot make two opposed propositions [both] true. But in itself, the same power as absolute is not subject to the principle of contradiction: nothing can limit its power” (ibid). “In this he anticipates in an unheard-of way the motifs and the difficulties of the Cartesian position, even if he does not like [Descartes] speak of creation or of eternal truths” (p. 42).

“Thomas Aquinas poses the same question, but he responds in a completely different way…. The divine power can only make what is possible, that is to say what is in the nature of things. The nature of simple essences and the principle of non-contradiction are the source of all their proprieties, and the divine power is in a way limited to these possibilities” (pp. 42-43).

Here Aquinas comes across as much more sensible than some of the others. In significant measure at least, he upholds the reality of secondary causes. A concept of God construed in a way that would invalidate all other concepts and reason itself seems fit only for sectarians.

“Subsequently, the debate develops in another form: is the impossible impossible because God so decided, or is it impossible by nature…? Henry of Ghent at one time held the first thesis, but ended up retracting it. Duns Scotus maintains an order that supposes the distinction of diverse moments…. It is only logical contradiction between the parts that grounds the formal impossibility of the thing, and indeed the divine intellection of that impossibility. There is an irrevocable anteriority of the possible and indeed of the impossible to the divine intellect. Possibility is imposed on God in the same way it is imposed on the human (that is to say in a univocal way)” (p. 43).

This is an important qualification about Scotus. Although he was regarded as a realist in the controversies about nominalism and realism, he generally comes across as an extreme voluntarist. But Boulnois is a leading Scotus scholar who has translated 2000 pages of Scotus and written a large book about him, so I assume he knows what he is talking about.

“For Ockham, on the contrary, power and the possible are correlatives. There is in the first instance an absolute real identity between divine intellect and will. And in addition, there is no anteriority of the possible to the intellect. The possible not being other than the non-contradictory, all the possibles are independent. No limit of the ontological consistency of the possible restrains the divine power…. Ockham accepts all the consequences of the identification of the absolute possible with the divine power…. There is neither an anteriority of the impossible to the divine omnipotence (Scotus), nor an anteriority of omnipotence to the impossible (Henry of Ghent), but a strict correlation” (pp. 43-44).

Once again, when two things are assimilated together, it may mean that one is being reduced to the other. For instance, I hold that there is no separately existing thing called will — that Aristotelian intellect, practical judgment, and wisdom better explain the freedom that some want to supernaturally explain by will. Ockham on the other hand is a voluntarist who sees will everywhere, and seems to deny that modality is anything real.

“An other is not always a world. It is only after Bonaventure that the theologians come to speak of a possible other world” (p. 46).

This is fascinating. I never would have guessed that Bonaventure would partially anticipate Leibniz on the subject of worlds.

“For Scotus, the order fixed by God appears to be necessary from the point of view of every inferior agent, when it acts according to that order…. In the order instituted by God (nature), starting from contingent hypotheses, the laws of nature are necessary for the finite. They draw their necessity from the fact that it is God who invests them with their legality” (p. 47).

From this point of view, necessity only comes about from divine will. Sheer will conceived as a brute fact is thus said to come before justice or wisdom. This undermines all criteria.

“For Aristotle, the concept of world is that of a totality: there is only one possible world, and it is a fortiori the best” (p. 48).

But the argument that this is the best world because there is no other is a very weak one that Aristotle does not himself make, because he does not consider alternate worlds, and also does not consider the world to be created.

“For [Peter Damian], even a good that is never produced is in the power of God, the reason for its retention residing in the secret of his good will. His analysis results in distinguishing two poles in the divine power: on the one hand, the omni-potence taken in itself, which no im-potence can encumber, and on the other hand the order in which it is exercised, and which can explain that omnipotence is not manifested…. Thus, Peter Damian constructs the conceptual armature between two poles, which later took the name of absolute power and ordained power” (p. 53).

Peter Damian was an 11th-century monastic reformer who campaigned vigorously against corruption in the Church. He advocated solitude and ascetism, and reportedly introduced practices of flagellation that were regarded as too extreme by some. In the early 20th century, it was argued that Damian exempted God from the principle of non-contradiction, but this has been rejected by later scholars. He wrote a treatise on omnipotence arguing that God can restore virginity, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he neither claimed that God can change a past event, nor that God can contradict himself.

What will become the distinction between absolute and ordained power allows appearances to be (mostly) saved while the claim of absolute power is maintained. I would note that this is an elaboration of Augustine’s reconciliation of miracles with natural causes, which treats natural causes as God’s established habits that are not invalidated by miracles. It will often be expressed using Aristotle’s notion of things that happen in a certain way “for the most part”, but there is no indication that Aristotle intended this as a way of leaving room for miracles. What happens for the most part in Aristotle involves variation in the way that the order of nature works out in particular cases, not suspension of it or exceptions to it.

“The ordained power has for object that which has been preordained, or disposed by God. It is a preordination of the possible in the divine understanding, and not the order of the real outside of God. Indeed it coincides with his prescience…. The ordained power does not presuppose order and is not determined by it; on the contrary, it is it that determines it in determining itself: it prefigures it, it is the pre-supposition of order. It is the pre-order” (p. 55).

According to this view, the order of the world corresponds to the “habitual” operation of creation. The habitual order is subordinate to the power of creation that produces it. The habituality of the created order is real, but it also has real exceptions in the form of miracles.

According to Boulnois, “Absolute power and ordained power form a couple of concepts, a dialectic, such that we never find one without the other. There is no theology of absolute power without the theology of ordained power. What we find instead are different ways of thinking this dialectic” (ibid).

“The object of absolute power is identical to the object of divine wisdom, to the totality of what is possible for God. The object of ordained power is identical to the object of the principled will of God” (pp. 55-56).

“For God does nothing without prescience. His action is subordinated to the order predetermined by him, and can never depart from that order. As a consequence, operative power is subordinated to ordained power; and reciprocally, God never operates directly by his absolute power. Absolute power taken in itself, naked, is not operative” (p. 56).

It was I and not Boulnois who earlier brought Augustine’s justification of miracles into the discussion. I much prefer Aristotelian natural variability to the Augustinian theory of miracles. But on the older view Boulnois is characterizing here — that God never acts directly by his absolute power — it would seem that there could be no exceptions to the ordained order. This seems consistent with Augustine’s rigorous view of eternity, but it is in tension with Augustine’s justification of miracles.

It appears that Duns Scotus (1266-1308) was instrumental in changing the traditional Augustinian pattern in these matters. Boulnois is a world-class expert on Scotus, so he is well qualified to point this out.

“While reprising these classical elements, the interpretation of Scotus breaks with his predecessors, for three reasons: 1) The theory of absolute power and ordained power is extended to every free being. 2) In reprising the distinction between fact and principle, Scotus conceives the two members of the distinction as two ways of acting and not simply as two powers. God intervenes in fact by his absolute power to modify what is in principle the course of things. 3) Even when he has chosen an order, at the same time and from the same point of view, God can do that which he did not decide upon. The divine power is open to an array of synchronic possibilities, and the state chosen in fact does not exclude other possibilities” (p. 56).

Each of these three points is significant: 1) Beliefs about human free will come to be patterned on a pronouncedly voluntaristic interpretation of divine omnipotence. 2) Fact is for possibly the first time asserted to be more decisive and more inclusive than principle or essence. Reason must accommodate presumed facts, rather than governing their interpretation. 3) Far from being stably grounded in eternity and essence, order of all kinds is now treated as fundamentally contingent and revocable.

In 20th-century scholarship, the emergence of such “modernist” views was most often associated with William of Ockham, who as the arch “nominalist” in accounts of the 14th-century debate about universals has been treated as diametrically opposed to the more traditional “realism” attributed to Scotus. But according to Boulnois, Scotus was the decisive innovator with respect to these views about will, fact, and order.

“It is this interpretation that seems to have had the most influence on subsequent medieval thought.”

“There are two models, fundamentally distinct: 1) A logical model, for which absolute power is the power capable of the totality of possibilities (of all that is non-contradictory), and the ordained power corresponds to the choice of a particular order. 2) An operative model, for which divine intervention de potentia absoluta is a possibility of modifying in fact that which is in principle the course of things. What is outside of order is not disorder but fact.” (ibid). “For Scotus, the model is no longer a logical model, but an operative model. He no longer distinguishes two forms of power but two forms of action (according to the law and outside the law)” (p. 57).

What is described as the traditional view here tends to make order overly strong, presuming it to be capable of explaining all facts, while the “modernist” view makes fact overly strong, tending toward a proto-fundamentalist denial of the need for interpretation, and at the same time shrinking the scope of order so that fact always exceeds it.

As Boulnois argues more generally in his big book on Scotus, L’Être et représentation (“Being and Representation”, 1999), this historic transformation is too large to be attributed to a single figure, but Scotus is nonetheless at its center. Modern large-scale interpretation of the history of Latin philosophy has generally centered on Aquinas, who was canonized as a saint in 1323, and specially declared by the Pope to be central to Catholic philosophy in 1879 after the rise of neo-Thomism.

(From a broad point of view, the “moderate realism” of Aquinas has much to recommend it, but one-sided emphasis on Aquinas has obscured the real diversity and complexity of Latin philosophical views and the important role of numerous others, including Scotus. The pragmatist Charles Pierce rather casually called himself a Scotist realist. Heidegger wrote his dissertation on Scotus, but in later work tended to reject Latin philosophy with a very broad brush, without addressing important historical detail.)

“No more than his predecessors does Scotus say that God acts by an absolute power, but only that he can act otherwise than he does (and it is in this that his power is absolute). This has no immediate operative content…. Duns Scotus does not say that God acts by his naked absolute power, but precisely always, according to a beautiful oxymoron, ‘in the manner ordained by his absolute power’. What characterizes the position of Scotus, more than the operative model of absolute power alone, is at the same time the extreme opposition of this dialectic between the two concepts and the possibility at every instant of one toggling to the other. To safeguard divine freedom, Scotus creates an infinite oscillation between an instituted juridical order and a de facto power that is nonetheless not disordered and immoral” (ibid).

What Boulnois calls a beautiful oxymoron in Scotus, the de facto claim of an infinite oscillation between order and fact — evinced by the phrase “ordained by his absolute power” — seems to collapse the evolved distinction between ordained and absolute power. Perhaps this is why Scotus was called the “subtle doctor”. But the implications of this position are not at all subtle. They are quite dramatic.

“What characterizes the end of the Middle Age is at once the inflation of arguments resorting to absolute power and a fragmentation of models allowing it to be thought” (p. 58).

Boulnois cites Avignon Pope John XXII’s blunt declaration that the absolute and ordained power of God are the same thing. John apparently used this to justify a politicized claim that salvation can only be achieved through the institutionalized sacraments of the Church. “All that which is ordained by God is irrevocable” (p. 59). This was a time of bitter conflict between the Avignon Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV. It was under John that Aquinas was canonized as a saint. John was also the one who formally declared witchcraft to be a heresy.

We saw above that William of Ockham also emphasized the inseparability of absolute and ordained power. But he apparently used it to argue for the opposite practical conclusion, that law and ordained power can always be surpassed by fact and absolute power, and that salvation can be achieved through faith alone. Under the protection of Louis IV, Ockham accused the Pope of heresy.

(From the point of view of the logical pragmatics I have discussed in reading Brandom, the formal identification of two things with different connotations can be interpreted as a reduction of one to the other, or of the other to the one, or as a nonreductive combination of the two. Different connotations imply different pragmatics or conditions of use.)

Boulnois says that Ockham interprets the thesis of the nonseparability of the nominally distinct powers (absolute versus ordained) in terms of its consequences for the power’s object (the world), rather than in terms of its subject (God).

“John XXII insists on the fact that the identity of divine power entails the invariability of the order chosen by God…. For [Ockham], the theory of John XXII comes back to saying that the order of the world cannot be other than it is. From this it follows evidently that no creature can do what it does not do…. He sees in this a resurgence of Greco-Arabic necessitarianism, an error condemned in 1277. And to say that humans can only be saved by the institution is not only an error, but a heresy: in fact, many humans are saved by their faith without being baptized” (p. 60).

“Greco-Arabic necessitarianism” is another exaggeration. Among the Greeks, the only real necessitarians are the Stoics. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes do all seem to slant things in the direction of objective order and necessity, but the radical voluntarism of Ghazali seems to have been more historically influential in the Arabic tradition.

“For Ockham, order is always a de facto order, a complex of contingent and revocable singularities. It is thus the object of ordained power; but what God can do (in principle), even if he never does it, is the object of absolute power. There is here an extraordinary cross-chase in relation to Duns Scotus. What the one calls the object of ordained power, the other calls the object of absolute power, and vice versa. The fact and the principle exchange their role” (ibid).

On Boulnois’s account, Ockham is a less radical voluntarist than Scotus.

“For Ockham, it is necessary to thus understand the distinction ‘power to do something’: the expression is sometimes taken according the laws ordained and instituted by God, and of these things one says that God can do them by his ordained power. In another way, ‘power’ is taken in the sense of power to do anything that is not self-contradictory, that God has ordained that he will do or not do, and of these things, one says that God can do by his absolute power. The ‘ordained power’ indeed does designate the order established by God, as in Duns Scotus. But the ‘absolute power’ designates not his de facto power, but only everything that is not contradictory: it has a logical sense and not an operative one (since it designates what God does not do); he returns quite simply to the traditional sense admitted before Scotus” (pp. 60-61).

“[Ockham’s influential student] Adam Wodeham explicitly cites two interpretations of absolute power…. Adam Wodeham clearly thinks ordained power as an order instituted regularly and capable of dispensation, like Scotus and Ockham. But he is also aware of the existence of two models for thinking absolute power: that of Duns Scotus, for whom the power to do the contrary of the established order is absolute, that is to say autonomous and absolutely capable of acting; and that of Ockham, for whom the absolute power of God is subject to the logical principle of contradiction. For Scotus, even when God has ordained the contrary, he can do something by his absolute power. For Ockham, God can only act by his absolute power if there is no contradiction with what he has ordained” (p. 61).

“As a consequence — and contrary to received ideas — the great epistemological rupture of the 14th century was effectuated by Scotus more than by Ockham…. [Scotus] is infinitely more revolutionary, in admitting that God has a de facto power that is other than the power in principle without being immoral. Nonetheless, the position of Ockham and that of Scotus converge on one point, essential for theological ethics: even if, by the ordained power of God, the human can only be saved by baptism and entry into the institution, by the absolute power of God, the human can be saved without Church or charity…. One of the distant consequences of this hypertrophy of absolute power will be the possibility, vigorously enunciated by Luther, that there is a predetermination indifferent to good and evil” (p. 62).

Luther argued for justification by faith alone, traced all authority solely to the Bible, and tended to emphasize its literal word.

“It would be exaggerated to make the new theory of divine power bear all of the motif of the metamorphosis of theology after Scotus. It would also be exaggerated to try to reduce everything to the new theories of intuition or of the primacy of will. First of all, Scotus is only the spokesman for a whole generation of thinkers who each contributed to the restructuring of theology” (p. 63).

But these caveats address only certain over-simplifications of the historical interpretation Boulnois develops.

“It is the triangle of power, knowledge, and will that is modified in its entirety. In the human as in God, power [pouvoir] becomes a power [puissance] to act in principle or in fact. Power remains a capacity to act according to an order (interpreted juridically as a law), but it also becomes the capacity to act outside the law or against it. Furthermore, for thinking of the problems of beatitude from the side of common abstractive knowledge, there developed a theory of intuitive knowledge of the singular contingent. Finally, for the Franciscan theologians above all, freedom of the will is an innate quality” (p. 63).

On the threshold of modernity, new voluntaristic super-powers are attributed both to God and to the human. The alleged fact of voluntaristic will is no longer constrained by an orientation toward the good.

“As a consequence, willing is no longer tautologically willing the good. But reciprocally, what God wills is ipso facto the good. On the edge of the new theology of omnipotence, the theories of intuition and of will will be adjoined, to construct a new model of practice and of epistemology. With this new device, it is the whole harmony between the transcendentals, being, truth, and the good, that is disrupted. The objects of power, of will, and of knowledge are no longer necessarily aligned” (pp. 63-64).

“Conceiving divine intervention de potentia absoluta as a real possibility led to an undermining of the intelligibility and predictability of natural phenomena. The order of the real no longer appears except as a descent into particularity in the ocean of possibles. This disjunction has a paradoxical consequence: philosophy is all the more free to expound the necessity of the order of the present world, while the theologian makes contingency surge into this world here, when he does not invoke an infinity of other possible worlds. The present order can become an absolute, and the absolute can contain an infinity of other orders. The order and the absolute are disseminated in an indefinite variation of hypothetical orders. The order and the absolute are no longer articulated; they pass one into the other” (p. 64).

As Boulnois says, treating divine intervention in the world by absolute power as a real possibility tends to undermine intelligibility. I would add that this undermining of intelligibility undermines ethics as well.

“This renewal of the problematic figures an evolution of theology. It makes God less and less human, less and less reached by knowledge of the order of the universe, less and less oriented toward the norm of the good. Divine omnipotence thus founds a ‘skeptical’ movement, which has consequences for the theology of justification (from Scotus to Luther). The order of salvation appears more and more contingent…. The equilibrium between the order of the world and the omnipotence of God attained in the Sentences of Peter Lombard ended up a victim of its own success. After being articulated with nature, the supernatural becomes omnipresent, and finally suspends all autonomy of the order of nature. There is no longer a consistent finite order. Omnipotence figures a more and more uncertain order of the world, and results in a complete concealment of God and his plans from the human. God is so unknowable that his attributes are founded in the brilliance of his omnipotence, reachable only by faith, and not allowing any certainty to exist. Following this metamorphosis, God, the object par excellence of theological intelligence, who was at first thought of as ineffable, will be finally named as incomprehensible. The world will appear as a labyrinth of axiomatics and exceptions, in which individuals are toys” (pp. 64-65).

This omnipresence of the possibility of supernatural intervention, outside the order of nature — and the correlated suspension of all autonomy of the order of nature — are what undermine intelligibility.

“It is now the model of political power [pouvoir] that serves to think the divine power in an identical, univocal sense, even in a particular case: all power can be exercised either juridically, or de facto” (p. 65).

“By a cross-chase of which history has the secret, these ‘absolutist’ arguments will serve later for the exaltation of monarchic power against pontifical pretensions. In Jean Bodin, they serve to describe the absolute power of the prince. This theory leads to a reinforcement of political absolutism — and simultaneously to an evanescence of the predictability of the law of nature” (p. 66).

“The theme of absolute power grounds the work of Duns Scotus in three dimensions: ontological (the action of every free agent), juridical (the king and his realm), theological (God and his decrees). This origin reveals a structural correspondence between the modern concepts of individual freedom, of divine power [puissance], and of political power [pouvoir]” (ibid).

“The black sun of omnipotence shines with a paradoxical light. When power wants to be without shadow and without limits, it accumulates within itself the night in which all evils are absolved; it endorses dark things and obscurity. On the contrary, the power that is incapable of evil and excludes it is a pure light without darkness. It does not suppress the shadow, or assume it, or absolve it, but dissociates it from itself and separates it from its sharp light. But for this it must be a power capable of lacking power” (p. 68).

Versions of Finitude

Heidegger claims to radicalize Kantian finitude. He “wants to applaud Kant for appreciating the finitude of thinking — in Kant its dependence on sensible and pure intuition — also note the hidden importance of the imagination in Kant’s project, and yet also demonstrate that Kant has not broken free of the prior metaphysical tradition but remains solidly within its assumptions” (Pippin, The Culmination, p. 82).

“Kant treats our immediate familiarity with the world as an unimportant issue, since real knowledge of what really is resides in mathematical physics, and how things show up in ordinary experience is of no account” (p. 83).

Pippin is characterizing Heidegger’s view here. The last part strikes me as an overstatement by Heidegger. Kant aims, among other things, to give an account of ethics and human life that would be compatible with Newtonian physics, but never even comes close to suggesting that ethics could be explained in terms of physics.

“Heidegger claims that not only is freedom a problem of causality, but causality is itself a problem of freedom” (ibid).

Kant does occasionally mix up discussions of freedom and causality, as when he makes the unfortunate suggestion that we think of freedom as an alternate kind of causality besides the one exhibited in Newtonian physics. But in the main, he treats ethical freedom and mechanical causality as two very different registers. Heidegger is tendentiously assuming that for Kant, physics must provide the outer frame of reference for ethics. But despite Kant’s great reverence for Newton, he famously argues for the primacy of practical reason.

“Heidegger wants to explore the implications of the remarkably Fichtean formulation that anything actual must be understood to be ‘posited’, that being, the meaning of being, is ‘positing'” (p. 84).

This notion of positing has come up several times, in relation to Hegel (and Fichte, who first made it a major theme). It is closely related to the contested notion of judgment. As Aristotle might remind us, judgment is said in more than one way.

“Position or positing is treated throughout as judging, the discursive form of representing” (p. 85, emphasis in original).

Judgment in the sense I care about mainly names a kind of free inquiry where the outcome is not decided in advance, rather than a completed conclusion. It should be understood as subject to all the nuances that affect jurisprudence. Judging as an activity has to be an open process of interpreting, not the mere representing of something identified in advance or known in advance. Only in hindsight — with a conclusion already in view — can judgment even be expressed in terms of representation. But the early modern tradition in logic identifies judgments with propositions, assertions, or conclusions.

Pippin quotes Heidegger quoting Kant, “The concept of positing or asserting [Position oder Setzung] is completely simple and identical with that of being in general” (p.86).

To “be” X is to be well said to be X.

For Kant, Pippin explains, “We have the power to determine objectively when something exists or not, so that what there is can be understood as what this power can determine…. [T]he concept of something existing beyond our capacity to determine in principle if it exists (or if we cannot but believe it exists) is an empty notion” (pp. 86-87).

He quotes Kant again, “I find that a judgment is nothing but the manner in which given modes of knowledge are brought to the objective unity of apperception. This is what is intended by the copula is. It is employed to distinguish the objective unity of given representations from a subjective unity” (p. 87).

This will lead Heidegger to say that for Kant, the meaning of Being is unity of apperception. That seems plausible enough.

“The primordial mode of being of Dasein is not primarily as a perceiver but being-in-the-world” (p. 88).

Heidegger wants to disqualify any purely cognitive approach to these issues, and simultaneously to claim that all the philosophers do take a purely cognitive approach, which renders their conclusions invalid. This second claim is once again highly tendentious, because many of the philosophers take a normative approach that is in no way “purely cognitive”.

“Kant takes himself to have demonstrated that all that relation to an object, a determination of any being, can amount to is the objective unity of an apperceptive synthesis…. And there is no indication that he thinks that demonstration will show that the mind imposes a form on a formless matter” (p. 89, emphasis in original).

Hegel and Heidegger both at times blame Kant for using language that tends to suggest the two-stage, “impositionist” view.

“[Kant’s transcendental] deduction is not about ‘stamping’ but about demonstrating that there cannot be any intuited content (i.e., any cognitively relevant content) that is incongruent with the required a priori conditions…. But Heidegger is simply asserting that this unity is ‘subjective’ and imposed…. There is quite a lot, most of it simply assumed by Heidegger, packed into ‘Thinking is esconced in human subjectivity'” (p. 90).

“As a student of Husserl, Heidegger is certainly aware of the objections to any psychologistic account of judgment, and his suggestions about ‘stamping’ and being ‘sunk’ in subjectivity do not trade on any such psychologizing…. Judgment too is a mode of public comportment towards entities, a modality of being-in-the-world, and not originally an inner episode…. [H]e appears to think that locating the intelligibility of being in judgment unavoidably transforms the objects of judgment into mere present-at-hand entities. Given the claim that the primordial, fundamental, or original meaning of beings is as pragmata, equipment, read-to-hand, our fundamental mode of comportment towards beings is engaged and unreflective use, and any interruption of such unreflective use, such as a cognitive judging, must lose any grip on this primordial meaning and primordial comportment in favor of a present-at-hand substance” (p. 93).

Judgment as public comportment rather than inner episode makes good sense. Beings as pragmata are fine. But I simply do not see any “unavoidable” transformation of objects of judgment into present-at-hand entities. Yes, something like this fixing of presence-at-hand does occur in various circumstances. But the history of philosophy provides plenty of counterexamples, among whom I would include Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. Hegel even addresses the issue very explicitly, with his famous complaints about “dead” objects and such. It is disingenuous for Heidegger to ignore this.

Heidegger also appears to claim that unreflective engagement in the world is unequivocally superior to the best Kantian and Hegelian reflection. Unreflective engagement should be granted some role and dignity, but this goes way too far.

“Unless there is such a link between judgment as such and being as constant presence…, this mere link to a thinking subject… would not appear to justify any claim to a distortion or unthinking appropriation of the core metaphysical tradition” (p. 94).

I think we just established that there is no such unqualified link.

“[I]t would not be fair to Kant to insist that he understands this cognitive or judgmental modality as either exclusive or even privileged…. In fact, a good case can be made that one of Kant’s contributions to philosophy is his demonstration that our primary and most significant mode of comportment towards being ‘as a whole’ is not cognitive but practical, the experience of the moral law, our own status as free subjects, and our sensitivity to the beautiful and the sublime” (ibid).

Yes indeed.

“And Kant is famous for denying the possibility of ontology, claiming that the proud name of ontology must give way to the humbler analytic of the understanding” (p. 99).

And I say he is right to do so, and that Hegel follows him in this.

“But there is no moment in Kant that holds that the Being of beings is a matter of disclosure” (p. 100).

Indeed not. If anything, Kant is overly categorical in asserting the purely active nature of thought.

“There can be no undifferentiated mere matter of sensation that is then in a second step shaped by pure concepts” (p. 101).

As I mentioned, Pippin and Brandom have pretty conclusively refuted the old “two stage” reading of Kant on thought and intuition.

Pippin quotes a particularly outrageous claim by Heidegger, that “In order to understand the Critique of Pure Reason, this point must be hammered in, so to speak: knowing is primarily of intuiting…. All thinking is merely in the service of intuition” (ibid).

“This is not exactly Kant’s position. It would be more accurate to summarize it as: knowing is always a thinking intuiting and an intuiting thinking” (pp. 101-102).

Heidegger “even freely admits that Kant insists on a reciprocity between thinking and intuiting, but he proposes forging ahead anyway with his claim for the priority of intuition” (p. 104).

“The ‘basic faculty’ is the imagination, and it is ‘pre-ontological’ because it is the exercise of a nondiscursive, nonconceptual imagining” (p. 109).

I am myself fascinated by the role of imagination in Aristotle and Kant (see also Sellars on Kantian Imagination). I would not claim, however, that imagination is the root of all thought. Imagination in its immediate presentation is nondiscursive and nonconceptual, but Kant’s subtler point is that discursive and conceptual elements nonetheless get wrapped into it. Imagination in the broadest Aristotelian sense seems to be a kind of link between organic being and thought. Without imagination, an organic being cannot be said to think. But thought is more than just imagination. What makes thought rational is its non-arbitrariness. Kant would tell us that imagination cannot be completely arbitrary either, since the categories of thought also apply to it, as he argues in the famously difficult “transcendental deduction” in the Critique of Pure Reason. (See also Capacity to Judge; Figurative Synthesis.)

“More radically put: both intuition and understanding are derivative…. What he appears to mean by derivative is that there could be no role to play for the understanding and intuition conceived as distinct capacities, were there not an original imaginative projection of a horizon of possible encounterable beings” (p. 111).

This part seems unobjectionable.

“So, the question is not whether conceptual capacities are necessary for any experience…. The issue is rather the mode of conceptual actualization. The chess grand master has ‘immediately’ ‘in mind’ a sense of areas of threats, dangers, degrees of possibilities and probabilities, all because of the years he has spent playing and reading chess books. But those moves are determinate, and concepts are in play” (p. 114).

This illustrates what Hegel calls “mediated immediacy”.

“The point of all these metaphors is, of course, to find as many ways as possible to suggest some spontaneous activity in intuiting other than assertoric judging or acts of conceptual sorting, or deliberate rule-following” (p. 115).

In a Kantian context, spontaneous activity and intuition are mutually exclusive, though in real life we never get either of these purely by itself.

“The horizon-forming work of the imagination is not a determination of conceptual intelligibility but our comportment with a world everywhere always already ‘irradiated’ with meaning, significance” (ibid).

This again seems fine. The notion of horizon comes from Husserl’s phenomenology.

“He means that one cannot say of a Dasein, a human person, that this sort of being is simply ‘in time’, in some supposed ‘flow’ of temporal moments. It can, of course, for various purposes, be considered that way, as if Dasein were a table or a plant, but that aspect is derivative from how Dasein orients itself in in time, and in that sense ‘affects itself’…. Heidegger means, again in a way that involves the imagination, that we never experience time simply ‘passing’, but our temporal awareness always (again) involves the issue of meaning…. [T]he notion of time is presented as [a] kind of self-determining and so self-affecting, since time is a pure intuition, where that means not a pure intuited but a pure intuiting…. This is not an empirical event, and so there is not a self that ‘affects’ itself as already present to itself as a substance-like self, a subject” (p. 117).

Here we get to why Heidegger called his magnum opus Being and Time. He wants to give us anything but a boring mathematizing theory of uniform Newtonian time. A radical, nonuniform, constitutive experience of time is one of his more interesting thoughts. It seems to start from Kant’s notion of time as a “pure intuition”. (See also Ricoeur on Husserl on Memory; Ricoeur on Augustine on Memory.)

“A self is the way it stretches itself along in time” (p. 118).

“According to Heidegger, the world, a historical world, sets a horizon of possible meaningfulness — fundamentally the meaning of Being as such — and Dasein’s inheritance of and orientation from such a horizon does not require any self-conscious discursive orientation, but is a matter of simply being involved in the interrelated nexus of practical significances that amounts to the various tasks and projects of the world” (p. 120).

That orientation from a horizon is generally not self-conscious goes with the territory. The same might be said of a human’s uptake of culture.

Heidegger contrasts a good “ready-to-hand” with the bad present-at-hand. The good one is supposed to be original and primordial, which seems to mean it is that by comparison with which he will say everything else is effectively in bad faith (though that is not his term).

“[T]his primordial meaningfulness of entities should be understood as (although not exclusively as) the ready-to-hand, Zuhandenheit, affordances, and not the present-at-hand, at-handedness simply present before us, the vorhanden, primarily stable substances enduring through time understood as a sequence of nows, what Heidegger generally calls standing presence, ständige Anwesenheit. By contrast with empirical intelligibility, our understanding of the ready-to-hand is a matter of attunement and appropriate comportment, something like skillful involvement. This fundamental level of significance has been obscured by the metaphysical tradition since Plato and Aristotle. This is because of the mistaken assumption that our original familiarity with beings in a world is illusory and truth is a struggle towards cognitive intelligibility” (pp. 120-121).

I think something like attunement and comportment and skillful involvement is very much present in Plato and Aristotle (and in Stoicism and Epicureanism, for that matter), so for me the whole negative argument about metaphysics never even gets off the ground. Heidegger is reading what is really a modern issue too far backwards in history.

“Every projection of what matters to us into the future involves a being, Dasein, with no inherent teleology or universal or even available ground (an answer to the question of why what fundamentally matters in the world does or ought to matter). What originally matters is inextricable from our thrownness into a certain historical world, so what comes to matter is a question of contingency, what we plan out concerning what matters is subject to the massive contingency of our lack of control not only over our own ‘ground’ but over our fate or our ever-possible death” (p. 121).

We have not seen any argument why there is no “teleology or universal or even available ground” related to human being-in-the-world, though this is a common modern assumption.

“Most importantly for our present purposes, the priority of the ständige Anwesenheit assumption cannot be assumed in the question of our own being, how our own being is a meaningful issue, at stake for us. At the heart of Heidegger’s analysis in [Being and Time] is the claim that the authentic meaning of Dasein’s being can also crudely but accurately be summarized: anxious being-towards-death” (ibid).

Heidegger has exerted a very great influence on Continentally oriented discourse about the “question of the subject”. There does seem to be a kind of correlation between the broadly syntactic definition of substance as an “underlying thing” in Aristotle’s Categories, and what Heidegger calls “standing presence”, but this is precisely the definition that is superseded in the Metaphysics.

The whole notion that “anxious being-towards-death” is the most important aspect of human subjectivity — and the key to its “authenticity” — seems very implausible. I stand with Spinoza’s “The philosopher thinks of nothing less than of death”. This stuff about death is directly personal for me, as a recent cancer survivor. I choose to meditate on life — the good, the true, and the beautiful — and as much as possible to cherish every moment.

“Heidegger’s basic picture focuses on Dasein’s unique awareness of our own mortality, and so the question of whether one lives with a resolute readiness for anxiety, or a flight from such awareness by the tranquilizing notions like ‘everyone must die; we can’t do anything about it, so why worry about it?’ or ‘what a morbid way to look at life'” (pp. 121-122).

I choose neither of these. Heidegger tries to force us with a false dichotomy.

“This is also a dramatically isolating and individualizing approach. A background standing attunement to the constant impendingness of one’s own death is intensely private and unshareable, and with such a notion at the center it makes almost all of ordinary life escapist and even cowardly” (p. 122).

What Pippin correctly recognizes as a “dramatically isolating and individualizing approach” does not bode well for ethics.

Calling almost all of ordinary life escapist and cowardly sounds like emotional blackmail. This is of a piece with Heidegger’s very uncharitable account of the history of philosophy.

“If we ask this question of Kant in the register in which Heidegger asks it, then it would hardly be correct to suggest that for Kant, ‘primordially’, what it is to be a human, to exist in a distinctively human way, is to be a self-conscious knower…. Kant is under no illusion about the fact that our little ‘island’ of factual knowledge of nature, the pinnacle of which is Newtonian mechanics, is of no deep significance for human life. This is a radical rejection of so many conceptions of philosophy, from the Socratic-Platonic notion of philosophy as a way of life to the notion of philosophy as therapeutic in the Wittgensteinian sense. Human significance and worth are based wholly on a rational faith in our moral vocation. That is what primordially matters. We don’t ‘know’ that we have such a capacity, but its availability is a matter of its practical undeniability” (ibid).

For Kant, our status as what I would call ethical beings is more “primordial” than our status as knowers. I see harmony rather than conflict between the Socratic-Platonic notion of philosophy as a way of life, and a rational faith in our moral vocation.

“Heidegger understands this feature of Kant, that the true significance in being human does not for Kant reside in being a knowing subject” (ibid).

“It is not enough to acknowledge our finitude in this context by noting the inevitability of moral struggle. If there is moral struggle at all, that is already an indication that the moral law is not practically motivating just by being acknowledged. That would be what Kant calls a ‘holy will’. This is a pretty close analogue to his conclusion that the unity of the understanding and intuition requires that the nature of the understanding itself cannot be formulated in terms of the logic of judgment alone (that it requires the prior function of pure imagination). The bearing of pure reason on our sensible inclinations cannot be understood as a mere imposition on an independently conceived sensible nature. (There is also an analogue to Hegel’s early critique of Kant — that this picture of imposition means the law is experienced as wholly positive, an alien authority, as alien as a divine command theory of morality, the mere imposition of a law ‘from without’. It is Hegel’s way of raising the necessary question of what our moral vocation means to us, beyond merely ‘being commanded’.)” (p. 124).

Plato already has a well-developed alternative to a command theory of morality, as well as a good awareness of the importance of mixed forms (see Middle Part of the Soul). As Pippin has already suggested, Kant scholars now generally reject the attribution of an “impositionist” theory to Kant.

“Even if imperfectly, Kant realized that our access to the moral dimension of our being is through a kind of attunement…. As in so many other cases in Kant, what look like two steps, acknowledgement of our duty, then producing a consequent feeling of respect, is actually one moment” (p. 125).

Heidegger approves of Kant’s talk about moral feeling, but he wants to counterpose feeling to judgment in ways Kant would not accept. He does correctly make the important point that meaning is of greater import for ethics than causality.

“Feeling obligated is feeling respect. (A summary account of Heidegger’s point would be that the whole issue of respect looks different when the framework is not the question of practical causality but the meaning of our moral vocation)…. Respect is what gives the way morality fits into a life as a whole its meaning. This is why Heidegger applauds Kant so enthusiastically” (p. 126). Pippin quotes Heidegger, “This feeling of respect for the law is produced by reason itself; it is not a feeling pathologically induced by sensibility…. [M]y having a feeling of respect for the law and with it this specific mode of revelation of the law is the only way in which the moral law as such is able to approach me” (ibid).

“There is more ambiguity about this in Kant than Heidegger lets on. Heidegger’s interpretation of Kantian respect, at least prima facie, would ultimately not seem to be consistent with the notion of autonomy so important to Kant” (p.127).

Kant would not use a metaphor of revelation. He certainly would not call it the “only way” we encounter ethical principles. And he would not speak of the moral law approaching us. For Kant, it is we who are the agents, because it is we who are ethically responsible.

As a would-be experimental poet in my youth, I used to be fascinated by these metaphors of Heidegger, where Being reaches out to us, and so on.

“Heidegger does not think Kant can make any of the metaphysically significant distinctions he wants to make between a phenomenal or psychological subject and a moral or transcendental subject because he treats them all as substances underlying thought, action, and empirical sensations” (ibid).

Here we come back to the question of what a subject is for Kant. Heidegger is right that it should not be thought of as a substance in the sense of Aristotle’s Categories.

“The other conception of the thing or any being is what he calls primordial, authentic, originary, and closest to us — what is directly available in our ordinary comportments, a being always already irradiated, to use Wittgenstein’s word, with meaning” (p. 129).

This seems to be an immediate that is supposed to be more true than any mediation.

“We have somehow come to misunderstand and distort what is and always remains most familiar to us…. What we inherit is a world where the unreflective basic and orienting meaning amounts to an assumption about what matters (and therewith what doesn’t matter or matter very much), that what is cared about, what in the world has ‘prevailed’ (gewaltet), is manipulability, beings understood as manipulable stuff, available for satisfying human self-interests….We have even come to experience ourselves in this way, as things of a sort” (ibid).

There is a significant grain of truth here, but a similar insight can already be found in many of the world’s religious traditions; in a more philosophical form among the neoplatonists; and in a purely philosophical form in Hegel.

“We do not recognize our own openness to meaningful being. This is not like ignorance or a mistake…. There is a kind of self-evasion even in dealing with, comporting with, objects that makes them predictable and secure, manipulable all out of a kind of thoughtless, laziness, and instrumentalizing scientism” (pp. 129-130).

He seems to be saying that humans as a whole are dominated by a kind of willful bad faith that imposes shallowness on everything, and for which we are more culpable than if we were merely ignorant or mistaken.

“Mention is made again of the fact that ‘the essence of the thing [is] determined on the basis of the essence of propositions’…. Language, history, the work of art are all understood in terms of this ontology, which has now assumed the role of a pre-ontological orientation, distorting our self-understanding, our own experiences of ourselves. He even suggests that the reason poetry is so poorly taught (a claim he simply assumes) is because poetry teachers cannot distinguish between the distinct mode of being of a poem and a thing” (pp. 130-131).

To put it another way, Heidegger claims that humans in general — and Western philosophers in particular — distort everything in theoreticist and logocentric ways. It’s hard to know what to do with such sweeping condemnations. I earlier compared this to the circular logic of emotional blackmail, which basically tells us that if we disagree, we obviously must be part of the problem.

Pippin suggests that for Heidegger, at root this is an issue with the social dominance of modern science. I have my own criticisms of modern science, but I by no means see it in a purely negative light. The neo-Kantians who dominated German philosophy in the early 20th century seem to have been one of Heidegger’s main targets, both because of their relation to Kant and because of their strong advocacy of modern science.

“[I]t has proven to be inevitable that our self-understanding would have to change to accommodate the approach of scientific naturalism, and that was and remains the intent of the project. A look at how modern economics understands rational agents, or how psychiatry does, or the research paradigms in the social sciences and now even in the humanities make that clear…. Heidegger’s idea for a recovery, a new beginning in philosophy (which he accuses of complicity with this ‘standing presence’ project since its beginning) rests on the claim that such claims of scientific objectivity can be shown to be based on a distortion of a primordial level of meaningfulness” (pp. 134-135).

While I would put a modest notion of ethical being ahead of the requirements of science, I do also believe that there are requirements of science. Methodological criticism should not be confused with global dismissal. I generally disagree when philosophers globally dismiss other philosophers.

Next in this series: Heidegger vs Hegel

Book Theta: Summing Up

We’ve reached the end of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s chapter on book Theta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. At this point, with the textual analysis complete, she pauses to reflect on what this all means. I for one have been extremely impressed with the quality of her argument, upon this rather close examination in which we have been embarked. Here her conclusions seem to follow with ease. I’ll keep my comments to a minimum here, and mostly let her speak for herself.

“The movement of book Theta, such as we have attempted to trace, appears to us… as having for its object to subtract dunamis from the logic of force” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, pp. 145-146, my translation throughout).

“Theta 8 also justifies the etymology of the very terms, of Aristotelian invention, energeia and entelekheia, in posing the identity between act, ergon (function or work), and end…. Act says something more than ousia: not only subsistence, but being-in-the-end…. Thenceforth, dunamis and energeia are not only opposed as that which can be to that which is fully, or as the potential to the actual. They are articulated as oriented movement — tendency — toward its end” (p. 146).

“Act, for this reason, no longer appears only as another name for the composed ousia, but for ousia as such, and power, univocally characterized as the power of contraries, is designated as the principle of a fundamental contingency” (ibid).

“The notion of act is charged with an axiological significance [one having to do with value], the same that it already had in the Protrepicus where it made its appearance. If the identity of act and good is not explicitly posed in Theta (as it will be on the other hand in book Lambda), it is nonetheless presupposed by the identification between act, end, and ergon” (ibid).

“If the birthplace of the notion of energeia is ethics, and if this notion thereafter passes to ontology, it is indeed for founding an axiological ontology which in its content pronounces the identity of being, the end, and in the same way the good” (ibid).

“Going forward, what is proper to the ontology of dunamis and energeia seems to us to reside in that it allows being to be thought otherwise than as power and otherwise than as presence. Being, in the way that dunamis and energeia express it, is not only that which is there, not only that which acts [agit]” (p. 147).

(In the front matter to her second volume, Aubry says clearly, “Act is not action. Act does not act [L’acte n’agit pas].”)

“Dunamis, we have said, is reducible neither to active power nor to passive power, but must be thought as the possibility of a movement toward act. As for act, it expresses not only presence, but being-in-the end and the good as realized or (when it excludes in-potentiality) as real: substance having realized its essence as good, or essentially good substance. Act thus appears as the ontological name of the good. It expresses the unity of being and value, the conjunction of the ideal and the real. Every act is a perfection, however ephemeral it may be — a place of absoluteness, an inalienable achievement. That is in act which, however weak it may be, was successful — that in which an Idea is here and now, even for a brief instant, incarnated. The Aristotelian good, we recall, is not an abstract universal, a Form without substantiality, or an empty ideal: it is, for each being, a possibility that is proper to it, and that can be effectuated. An axiological ontology, the ontology of act appears also as an ontology of non-scission” (ibid).

She notes that Pierre Aubenque, with whom she studied, wrote about both scission (a cut) and mediation in Aristotle in this context, but tended to emphasize the scission. She also sees both as important, but prefers to emphasize the mediation.

“In a sense, our reading only modifies this accentuation. But at the same time, far from seeing in the thought of Aristotle a metaphysics of inachievement and a wisdom of limits, we see an ontology of perfection, which also carries with it an ethics of surpassing: what is important is not that being is not immediately perfect, the human not necessarily divine, but that by way of the notion of in-potentiality, they are posed as capable of being so, by way of the notion of act as having being, even fugitively” (p. 147n).

“Aristotle nonetheless thinks the difference of being and the good at the same time as their identity. It is in-potentiality that serves to name this difference, this division. If it does not have being absolutely, neither is being in-potentiality an absolute non-being. It is at the same time in the mode of not yet and of always already: being in-potentiality is to be awaiting what we will be. But it is also, since in-potentiality is for a determinate act and becoming, to carry its becoming and its end in itself: being in-potentiality is being able to become what one is. If in-potentiality expresses the division between a being and what it has to be (its act, indeed, in which reside also its end and its good), it also expresses the possibility of annulling that division. In-potentiality at the same time poses distance and its crossing: if it expresses difference, it is as a provisionally differentiated identity. Indeed no more than the good is an empty ideal (or a Form-Idea) is in-potentiality an indefinite desire doomed to unfulfillment” (p. 147).

“In this way, Aristotle avoids the misfortune of scission. But he nonetheless does not fall into the naivete of immediacy. With dunamis is introduced the mediation of time, of movement, and even, with dunamis meta logou in the human, of liberty” (p. 148).

Here she gives the Greek for what is traditionally translated as rational power. More literally, this is “power after logos“, which more clearly captures the dependency of such power on the logos associated with deliberation.

“This division introduces the possibility of encounter, of error, of accident. An ontology of non-scission, the ontology of in-potentiality and in-act also leaves a place for the thought of failure or messing things up. If act poses the good and the end as real, and in-potentiality as to be realized, the passage from in-potentiality to act is never assured. The potential cannot be called a future actual, and the actualization of in-potentiality is never necessary, since it can be suspended by deliberated choice, or interrupted by accident” (ibid).

“Finally, the distance between act and in-potentiality leaves a place not only for difference, but for alterity [otherness]” (ibid).

She goes on to give some conclusions about causality.

“[E]fficiency is not suppressed…, but subsumed under finality: alterity is required as a moment of this progress toward self” (ibid).

“Efficiency nonetheless is only a means for finality, and transitive causality is only a means for immanent development. For the articulation of dunamis and energeia has something else remarkable in that it allows the efficacy of the end and the good to be thought. We have seen that in-potentiality is not thought in the order of force. It is nonetheless the source of a movement, or of a change, which has for principle the form as end, or act. For the end does not act, at least in the sense that it is not an efficient cause…; if it is, it is only metaphorically, kata metaphoran. The end indeed is efficacious without being efficient. If it acts, or has an effect, it is not as an efficient cause, in implementing an active power, it is a cause as act and end of in-potentiality. We could say, going forward, that if act names the mode of being of the good and the end, in-potentiality names its mode of action” (pp. 148-149, emphasis in original).

“The correlation of in-potentiality and act also allows the specificity of final causality as causality that is effective but not efficient to be thought” (p. 149).

This, she recalls, was one of the projects laid out in book Alpha, where Aristotle insisted on his originality with respect to the causes.

“For to identify this causality implies precisely to think the good neither as power and efficient cause, in the manner of Love or Intellect [as Empedocles and Anaxagoras respectively held], nor as in-potentiality, in the manner of the separate Forms. Plato in the Republic attributed dunamis to the Good: but if we want to think the power of the good, it is necessary to think it not as dunamis, but as energeia, and as the end of in-potentiality” (ibid).

“It is indeed in the articulation of dunamis to energeia that the secret of the power of the Good resides, that ‘daimonic force that makes it so that things are disposed in view of the better and the more perfect’, and to which Socrates in the Phaido relates his quest” (ibid).

“Going forward we understand that book Alpha of the Metaphysics, which we can read in part as an echo of this text from the Phaido, encompasses Socrates and Anaxagoras in the same critique: to succeed where they both failed, it is necessary to understand that the power of the good is daimonic or divine precisely in that it is not a power” (ibid).

Here of course she uses “power” in two different senses.

Then, as I have also emphasized, hypothetical necessity is central to Aristotle’s notion of explanation. Here we have Aristotle’s answer to questions about freedom and determinism.

“Hypothetical necessity governs both the facts of nature and those of choice. It is indeed as compatible with contingency as it is with the frequency or modality of natural phenomena such that their regularity can be interrupted by accident” (p. 150). She cites book II of the Physics.

“[Hypothetical necessity] nonetheless does not hold good as a simple heuristic concept, or a simple ‘as if’, but indeed as a constitutive principle, since in-potentiality inscribes in the very heart of beings, natural as well as artificial, the efficacity of the end and the reality of act” (p. 151).

Next I’ll take a look at her chapter on book Lambda.

Next in this series: Book Lambda: Introduction

The Self in Plotinus

Besides standing at a half-way point between Plato and Aristotle and later articulations of monotheistic theology, Plotinus occupies a special place in the history of subjectivity. In a 2016 document “Power, Subject, Sovereignty”, prepared for her confirmation as a director of research at the Centre National de la Rechereche Scientifique, Gwenaëlle Aubry treats her extensive work on Plotinus as the connecting theme of her philosophical investigations. I’m still waiting for the 2nd edition of her Aristotle book to arrive, and wanted in the meantime to extend my coverage of her work on subjectivity in Plotinus.

For the Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism (2014), Aubry wrote an outstanding more introductory article that was translated to English as “Metaphysics of soul and self in Plotinus”.

“One of the great singularities of the philosophy of Plotinus consists in thinking of the self for its own sake and, in particular, in producing a concept of it different from that of soul. This philosophical breakthrough is inseparable from the discovery of immediate reflexivity, that is, the subject’s ability to apprehend itself independently of its relation to an object or to another subject. In Plotinus, however, this reflexivity occurs only in an interrogative form” (p. 310).

“In other words, it does not, as in Descartes, assume the form of an intuition by means of which the subject, grasping itself as consciousness, would, at the same time, have an evident revelation of its essence….[W]e will see how Plotinus, although he seems to think of the self by means of the connected notions of soul and human being, but also of individual or even of consciousness, ceaselessly produces and renews a gap between them and the self” (ibid).

Plotinus was the first to assert a kind of immediate reflexivity, and indeed arguably the first to speak of generalized consciousness in something like a modern sense, independent of particular contents. But this reflexivity remains associated with a sort of Socratic questioning, and does not degenerate into the dogmatic intuition of a present self that we find in Descartes.

“The self properly so called, which Plotinus refers to as the hēmeis (“we”), is distinct both from the essential or separated soul and from the soul linked to the body. Situated rather than defined, it cannot be substantified. To use Plotinian terminology, the hēmeis is neither god nor animal, but rather the power to become either one. These two possible and exclusive identifications depend on the orientation it gives to its consciousness. Consciousness therefore does not appear, as it will in Descartes, as a revelation of identity, but as a means of identification” (ibid).

“Another singular aspect of the philosophy of Plotinus is that it affirms the existence of a
separated soul, which remains in the Intellect and alien to both the powers and the passions of the body. This doctrine was to be rejected by the later Neoplatonists, particularly Iamblichus and Proclus…, but it occupies a fundamental place in Plotinian thought” (p. 311).

The “separated soul” is a unique doctrine of Plotinus that seems to have indirectly influenced the more unified scholastic notion of an “intellectual soul”. Later, Aubry refers to it as an “intellective soul”. By means of it Plotinus gives us an especially close connection to the divine.

“[I]f the Plotinian subject grasps itself only in an interrogative form, that is, not as something obvious but as something strange, it is because it undergoes the experience of several modes of relation to itself” (ibid).

“[S]trictly speaking, the intellective soul cannot be counted among the parts of the soul, and yet, it is indeed ours (hēmeteron); in fact, he continues, “it is ours without being ours … It is ours when we use it; it is not ours when we do not use it” (pp. 311-312).

Here Plotinus remains faithful to Aristotle in maintaining that intellect is not a proper part of the soul, and yet can still be said to be “ours”.

“Like the total Intellect, and each of the intellects of which it is composed, the higher soul is characterized by intuitive thought, that is, by the simultaneous, inarticulated and non-propositional grasp of a complex content – comparable to a glance that embraces all the features of a face in a single vision” (p. 312).

This is precisely the kind of originary intellectual intuition that Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel would deny. As Kant would say, this kind of unitary vision could only be a result of synthesis. But for Plotinus, unitary intellectual intuition is the starting point of all thought, which Aristotelian “thinking things through” only weakly imitates. Nonetheless, he retains a partial faithfulness to Aristotle in maintaining that this does not include a putatively full intuition of self.

“The soul’s forgetfulness of the Intellect is also a forgetting of its own intellective origin –
an origin that nevertheless has not come and gone, nor does it belong to a mythic past,
but that remains in a state of unperceived presence. This forgetfulness is characteristic of
pre-philosophical consciousness. Unaware of its dignity, soul is fascinated by externality:
the body, the sensible. Narcissistic, it prefers its reflection to itself, ignorant of the fact that
without it, this reflection, which is merely the effect of its power, could not subsist” (ibid).

For Plotinus, we remain potentially in touch with the separate intellective soul. All that is required to experience it is that we choose to turn ourselves toward it, but Plotinus says many people never make this choice, and instead remain ensnared in what Aubry calls narcissism.

“[T]his essential self constituted by the separated soul must indeed be distinguished from the hēmeis and from what we may call the biographical subject, that is, the bearer of a history, a memory, and the form of consciousness that is linked to them” (ibid).

“Like memory and individual history, consciousness disappears in the Intellect. More precisely, it gives way to a feeling of presence in which the duality between subject and object is abolished. In this state, Plotinus writes, we are ‘only potentially ourselves’ (Enn[eads].IV.4[28].2.5–8). We merge with that which we contemplate” (p. 313).

Here we really do have a “metaphysics of presence”.

“This state in which the subject no longer experiences itself as such, but in its unity
with being and with the others, is nevertheless designated by Plotinus as the site of its
greatest proximity to itself, at the same time as it is genuine self-knowledge: “Being in this
way, we are more than anything conscious of ourselves (hautois synetoi), and we acquire
knowledge of ourselves as we make ourselves one” (Enn. V.8.[31].11.31–3)” (ibid).

The subject experiences itself “in its unity with being and with the others”. Here we can see a precedent for the nonprivate interiority that distinguishes Augustine’s thought from that of Descartes and Locke. Clearly we have here a non-empirical notion of self.

“Still, the question arises of what the subject, thus identified with the intellective soul and unburdened of all biographical content, then grasps of itself. At this essential level, can we still speak of identity? Of individuality?” (ibid).

“The paradox of the Plotinian personal self is thus illuminated: if, for Plotinus, one is never
more oneself than when one is no longer conscious of oneself, this is because the subject identified with its essential soul is not abolished in the universal. Rather, it is identified with the very source of its individuality, that is, with the singular viewpoint of its intellect upon the total Intellect, as well as with the logos that bears the power of its own becoming” (ibid).

“Indeed, the notion of a separated soul orients Plotinian ethics, which has no other goal than to transform this constant but ordinarily unperceived presence into a conscious presence. Far from being immediate or mechanical, this transformation is given as a demanding, normed itinerary, whose various stages correspond to various degrees of virtue…. This ethical itinerary, and we shall return to this point, is inseparably a trajectory of consciousness, which gradually turns away from the body to orient itself towards the separated soul” (ibid).

Once again, here is a real “metaphysics of presence”.

“In truth, then, the Plotinian beyond is very close: to reach it, it is enough to make oneself deaf to the tumult of the body, to release oneself from narcissistic fascination. For Plotinus, Odysseus represents the anti-Narcissus: he is the one who was able to resist the spells of the sensible, the charms of Circe and of Calypso (Enn. I.6[1].8.18–20). Yet the Plotinian Odyssey is a return to something that is always-already-there, which is the locus in us of a divine autarky, lucidity and happiness” (p. 314).

Again, for Plotinus the divine is very near.

“[S]trictly speaking, for Plotinus the soul does not descend. What descends, or mixes with the body to animate it, is the power, the dynamis, that emanates from the separated soul” (ibid).

Here we have a profound difference from Aristotle. In Aristotle, soul is strictly emergent. Souls don’t pre-exist and there is no “descent” at all, only an upward movement.

“In its confrontation with the body and with temporality, noēsis [pure thought] is transformed into dianoia [thinking things through]. This is the moment by which the soul is truly constituted qua soul, in its difference from the Intellect” (ibid).

Plotinus has the unprecedented idea that soul is constituted as a “procession” from Intellect.

The pre-existent “separate” soul lives eternally in unitary intuition. For Plotinus, ordinary human “thinking things through” is the result of the extension, folding, and division of originary intuition into time. This “descent” is necessary in order for anything to be manifested, and therefore not to be equated with anything like Biblical original sin.

“The descent can be considered as a fall or a fault only when dianoia and the consciousness linked to it, forgetful of the separated soul, are completely oriented towards the body” (ibid).

For Plotinus, we are “fallen” beings not by virtue of our embodiment, but only insofar as we are individually lost in the soul’s narcissistic pursuit of its own reflection.

“As early as chapter 2 of Enn. IV.8[6], Plotinus states a principle: ‘It is not a bad thing for the soul to provide the body with the power of good and being, since it is not true that all providence applied to lower reality prevents this providential agent from remaining in what is best’ (2.24–5)” (ibid).

Soul in Plotinus is not just something that descends. It is the very agent of providence. But it is capable of being waylaid or losing its way.

“[T]he World Soul [as distinct from soul in general] does not “descend”. What is “sent” into the world is not it, but its “lowest power” (dynamis). Yet it is precisely because the World Soul does not descend that it is able to govern the universe, to set it in order into a cosmos, a beautiful totality. This point of doctrine is explicitly formulated elsewhere, for instance at Enn. IV.3[27].6.21: “The souls that incline toward the intelligible world have a greater power”; or else Enn. II.9[33].2, where one reads that the World Soul governs “simply by looking at what is before it, thanks to its wonderful power. The more it devotes itself to contemplation, the more it is beautiful and powerful” (15–16)” (p. 315).

Unlike Aristotle and the scholastics, Plotinus also speaks of a Soul of the World that is distinct from individual souls.

“This description of the mode of governance of the World Soul is nothing other than an application of the Plotinian model of causality. This states that from every being in act (energeiai) there necessarily emanates an active, productive power (dynamis), which in turn is the cause of a new being and a new act” (ibid).

This sheds light on how the descent of the soul is not inherently a fall. It is part of the larger cosmic process of procession (known via the Latin translations of Avicenna as “emanation”), which is what in Plotinus takes the place of creation. Plotinus seems to claim that when we turn toward the separated soul, from us too will proceed or emanate a productive power, capable anew of spontaneously carrying forward our engagement with the world in all its complexity. This spontaneous engagement, freed from narcissistic pursuit of our own reflection, is for Plotinus strictly more capable than a narcissistically involved engagement.

It is not worldly engagement as such but narcissistic attachment to worldly things that corresponds to the Fall.

“For the individual soul as for the World Soul, however, Plotinus emphasizes that it is this power, this dynamis, and not the soul itself, that descends and is mixed with the body. This is why the Aristotelian definition of the soul as first entelechy of the body must be opposed by the assertion that the soul is itself in act, already entelekheia, without the body, and that only for this reason there can be a body. Thus, the synamphoteron, that is, the living body, is not a mixture of body and soul, but only of the body and the power emanated from the soul” (ibid).

Again we see the dramatic difference between Aristotle’s modest experience-oriented and biologically grounded emergent notion of soul, and the grand metaphysical or divine pre-existent intellective soul posited by Plotinus.

“If the higher soul does not descend, if only its emanated dynamis is mixed with the body, how should we understand Plotinus’ words that the soul ‘leaps’ towards its own body? The answer is that this motion is what constitutes the soul qua soul, in its difference from the Intellect, or again that by which noēsis is modified into dianoia. Indeed, dianoia is the result of the encounter of intellective thought with time. It deploys the immediacy and totality of intuition into successive moments, to respond to the demands of the body, of action, and of a life diffracted by temporality (Enn. III.7[45].11). Thus, it must be considered “the sign of a diminishment of the Intellect” (Enn. IV.3[27].18.1–7)” (ibid).

Here we have a major source for all the arguments about whether intellect should be conceived as originally immediately intuitive or as originally discursive. Many people read Aristotle as if his notion of intellect were the intuitive one that Plotinus articulates explicitly. I think Aristotle is closer to Kant and Hegel’s position that intellect is inherently discursive, and that unifying intuitions only come about as the result of processes of synthesis.

“This movement seems to attest an oscillation between two conceptions of the subject: the reflexive subject and the subject of attribution (the logical or ontological substrate). What in fact appears, however, is that once again the reflexive subject – the hēmeis – does not allow itself to be reduced to the subject of attribution…. In this irreducibility of the hēmeis to the various levels of the soul, we may see an effect of Plotinus’ discovery of the difference between subject-consciousness and subject-substrate” (p. 317).

Here indeed we have the root of modern notions of “the subject” as consciousness. This same gap that Aubry speaks of is what leads Augustine to deny that the soul, spirit, or mind is to be identified with a subject as substrate.

“Consciousness is therefore not so much constitutive of identity as it is a condition for identification. We are not what we are aware of: quite the contrary, we become what we become aware of. If the reflexive question ends up in the acknowledgement of a duality, becoming aware, for its part, is equivalent to the choice of an identity” (p. 320).

For Plotinus, consciousness in itself is not a foundation for personal identity, as it is in Descartes and Locke. Instead, Aubry locates the basis of individuality for Plotinus in the “separated” soul.

The idea that we make a sort of primordial choice of what kind of being we are is unprecedented.

“[T]he constant activity within us of the separated soul is the necessary condition for such everyday cognitive operations as judgment…. It is in the latter — identical to the pure ousia, that is, the separated soul — that the foundation of individuality resides, together with the most intense life and an unalterable happiness” (p. 321).

The suggestion that the separated soul is involved in judgment is new to me, and intriguing. This makes it seem not so “separated” after all.

“Plotinus, for his part, is able to conceive both the permanent, impersonal subject and the
ethical subject defined as what makes the choice of its identity” (ibid).

Life: A Necessary Concept?

Hegel argues that we ultimately cannot explain intelligibility without presupposing Aristotelian/Kantian “internal” teleology, which in turn requires the concept of the distinction between living and nonliving beings.

With nonliving beings, events simply happen. A piece of iron may rust, for instance, and that is that. It is still iron.

A living being, however, is always subject to a normative comparison to its concept. For Hegel, a plant that is dying of thirst is a “failing” instance of what it is to be a plant. There is no comparable status for the rusting piece of iron.

Mechanistic explanation offers an allegedly complete system of causality. But for Hegel, it raises the same “problem of indifference” that the logic of being encountered.

In a similar kind of move to what he has been doing in the Logic as a whole, Hegel argues that mechanism implicitly presupposes a more comprehensive kind of explanation, that it cannot really solve its own problems when it is pursued as the only valid form of explanation. He then considers in succession “chemism”, which additionally takes into account internal properties of materials that affect how they may combine with one another; “external” teleology applicable to artificial things, which explicitly presupposes a designer; and finally the immanent “internal” teleology considered by Aristotle and Kant.

Pippin dwells extensively on the similarities and differences between Kant and Hegel in this area. On the Kantian side, this involves an important evolution of Kant’s thought that occurred while he was writing what became the Critique of Judgment.

“In early 1789 Kant began to formulate the new problem of reflective judgment, as well as a new a priori principle for such a faculty, the purposiveness of nature. What is important to notice for our purposes is that with that development, the shape of the entire critical project began to change dramatically” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 290).

“Kant had realized that something like the deep structure of judgments like ‘this rose is beautiful’ actually contravened its own surface structure, that the predicate ‘beautiful’ was not really functioning as a standard predicate, as it appeared to. It referred to no objective property or mere secondary quality. Instead, he concluded, it involved a nonconceptually guided reflective activity on the part of the subject of the experience, whose novel logic required notions like a free play of the faculties, purposiveness without a purpose, disinterested pleasure, a commonsense and universal subjective validity” (pp. 290-291).

“The realization of the distinct features of this reflective activity was only the beginning of a series of more strikingly novel claims of interest to us…. [T]he reflective judging that resulted in aesthetic judgments, also constituted the basic structure of teleological judgments, and so could account for the unique intelligibility of organic beings” (p. 291).

“And then a number of other issues seem to be thrown into the same reflective judgment pot. The formulation of scientific theories not fixed or determined by empirical generalizations involved this activity and its logic, as did the systematizing of empirical laws necessary for genuine scientific knowledge. Finally, even the determination of ordinary empirical concepts now seemed to require this newly formulated reflective capacity…. So reflective judging and its a priori principle were now necessary not only for explaining the possibility and validity of aesthetic judgments, but in accounting for the necessary distinction between organic and nonorganic nature, the formation of empirical concepts, the proper integration of genera and species, the general unification of empirical laws into systems of scientific law, theory formation itself, and the right way to understand the attribution of a kind of necessity to all such principles, judgments, concepts, laws, and systems” (ibid).

“Kant continued to hold that such reflective judging was not constitutively necessary for there being objects of experience at all, and so could not be properly called cognition…. But Kant himself seems to be conceding that that result alone leads to an impoverished notion of cognition…. We wouldn’t know much… without empirical concepts, laws, systems, and distinctions between living and nonliving. So all the above products of reflective judgment must count as indispensable, and in a way that is not just convenient, but nevertheless remains merely regulative” (p. 292).

“Given their necessity and indispensability, given how much we would miss in the world if we could not claim to know that things fall into kinds (that there are empirical concepts), that nature is law-governed with necessity, that species fall under genera, and that some beings are alive, the Hegelian question is: Why does Kant persist, even after the expansion of his system in the third Critique, in claiming that we do not really know any of these things, that we just require them of ourselves and can’t see a way to abandon such commitments?” (ibid).

Kant seems to have held that in spite of its value for subjective understanding, teleology stands in conflict with scientific explanation; that the only objective causality is efficient causality; and that an objective teleology would imply a sort of “backwards” determination in time. Hegel contests all of this.

“For Kant, a living being requires us to think something we cannot, how the whole causes the parts that cause it” (p. 293).

Pippin, like Kant, seems to regard the last formulation as a reduction to absurdity. But he himself notes that in biological reproduction, parts and whole are produced simultaneously. And many processes in nature work by a kind of feedback, which involves circular dependencies that play out over time in an alternating or simultaneous way.

“[J]ust as Kant did not attempt to deduce the necessary existence of events in causal relations, but sought to show that any event that did exist must stand in a necessary relation to some prior event, and just as Kant did not try to deduce the necessary existence of living beings, but tried to show that any world that required mechanistic explanations of what exists, or any world in which change is a matter of efficient causation, must also allow, cannot rule out, that there are changes like gestation, birth, growth, reproduction, disease, and death, which cannot be accounted for by the logical form appropriate for nonliving beings, so Hegel is not out to deduce a priori the necessary existence of living beings, but has an ambition similar to Kant’s… but much greater because Hegel denies that teleological explanations are merely subjectively necessary” (p. 274).

“In terms of the logic of the Concept where the concept of life appears, [Hegel] means to show that there could not be adequate mechanistic and chemical and ‘external’ teleological explanations (say, the production of an artifact guided by a maker’s representation) without the contrasting distinction with living beings, without, following Kant, ‘internal’ teleology. (That is, a case where an element is for the sake of the whole without its being the — impossible — case that the element or part intends to be for the whole, and without reference to any designer’s intention.) His unusual thesis is that teleology is ‘the truth of mechanism’. That is, mechanistic explanations are domain specific, and so represent an abstraction from a more comprehensive and complex domain that includes subjective or intentional teleology and objective teleology in organic beings” (pp. 275-276).

“For Hegel, … the conceptual forms required for the unity of judgment are, at the same time, the forms necessary for any object determinacy. The forms of thought are the forms of being” (p. 276).

This is not because thought has magic powers, but because of the kind of thing that being has turned out to be in the investigations of the Logic. In my estimation at least, Hegel has convincingly shown that true being is inseparable from meaning and intelligibility. It is not some dumb and arbitrary “existence”.

“Life is said to be the ‘immediate’ manifestation of the Idea” (p. 277).

What this means is that “Life will reveal at an initial level the true unity of subjectivity and objectivity. This is said in the sense in which even plants, for Hegel, have ‘subjectivity’ even as objects. Their growth and nutrition cannot be comprehended adequately as just the product of mechanical forces. Each can be said to ‘direct’ the course of its life as it requires; each has an inner distinct from an outer, where this does not just mean inside as opposed to outside its surface” (ibid).

It was not clear to me that the Idea would even have an “immediate manifestation”. At this point, the Idea seems to me to be something that in itself would be purely mediate, even though experience always involves an element of immediacy. But at least within a human subjectivity, something purely mediate can always be represented, and the representation in itself does have a kind of immediacy. This case is a little different, but the argument that a plant has a kind of rudimentary “subjectivity” while also being a kind of object does, I think, suggest a way of understanding this simultaneous subjectivity and objectivity that could be seen as a simple instance of the union of subjectivity and objectivity that characterizes the Hegelian Idea.

“[H]aving shown the truth of the object in self-consciousness, in conceptuality, Hegel proposes to investigate the concept in that status, now understood as being-true, or in its being the ground of the intelligibility of the object. As he says, now ‘the concept determines itself as objectivity’…. This begins after a consideration of the concept in its formality, in the structure of concept, judgment, and syllogism. This then suggests the question of the world of objects, of ‘the truth’, of being-in-and-for-itself, already reflected in the truth-preserving inferential structure of such a syllogistic. To have reached this stage, presupposing everything that has gone before, is to see the logic of the relation among concepts in judgments and of judgments in inferential syllogistic relations as comprehending objects and their interrelations as explicable in a system” (p. 278).

This kind of use of “system” simply expresses the coherence in real intelligible being, and does not have the objectionably pretentious character that was all too common in talk of philosophical “systems” in Hegel’s Germany. Since Hegel does use “system” in this more benign and substantial sense, I am inclined to be forgiving of his rhetorical participation in the enthusiasm for philosophical “systems”.

“At such a point, we will have fleshed out considerably the ‘object’s being its concept’ in a much fuller logical system of judgmental interrelations, systematically, and a modally robust one, prescribing what must and cannot happen under this or that condition. In this fuller systematic picture, we need a determinate characterization of the norm, comprehensibility, as such. Such a norm or pure concept of genuine understanding will tell us what a thing is in terms of its relevant relational properties” (pp. 278-279).

With the concept, we have explicitly entered the territory of normativity. A concept for Hegel is never just a representation. Every Hegelian concept has a normative character.

“That determinate norm of comprehensibility is what is introduced by the pure concept Mechanism — more broadly in the claim that true comprehensibility is and is only mechanistic, paradigmatically Newtonian mechanics. Yet again, it is this sort of overreach that reveals the limitations and incompleteness of such a norm of comprehensibility. This is the first, immediate, simplest manifestation of the a priori claim to a norm for determinate explicability…. This is essentially a ‘billiard balls’ model of moving and inertial forces, in which there is what Hegel continually calls ‘an indifference’ in the relation among objects. And therein will lie its chief problem” (p. 279).

The concept of mechanism now shows a dynamic very similar to what we saw before with the concept of Being. In both cases, Hegel wants to extract as much insight and value as possible from their respective failures.

“That is, the indifference of objects external to each other, or comprehended only as matter moving and colliding in space, means there is no real explanation of what happens, just a formalization of what happens. There is no way (except pragmatically or ‘subjectively’ for Hegel) to select in or out the relevant relations among such indifferent objects, and we will find instead that we are awash in infinite contingency, with no real ground for our isolation of the relevant units of comprehension” (pp. 279-280).

“Chemism does make such an appeal to internal properties, the chemical properties, to explain why some chemical compounds are possible and others are not. Objects considered chemically are not ‘indifferent’ but determine their relationality as dependent on the kind they are” (p. 280).

“When we say that average acceleration over a period of time is its change in velocity divided by the duration of the period, or when we say that the hydrogen and oxygen molecules combined to form water, or when we say that that clock functions poorly, or that wolf is deformed, these are not empirical distinctions within a common notion of comprehensibility. In Hegel’s language, they are objective aspects of the logical distinctions between immediacy, mediation, and self-mediation necessary for all objective intelligibility” (p. 281).

Hegel in the Logic aims to develop a kind of universal logical meta-language for explaining the more concrete concepts we use to explain the world.

“A living being’s concept is not external to it as a particular being. That particularity is essentially nothing other than the becoming of its concept. The concept is internal to its nature, and that nature is self-determining, not determined from without. (Hence the claim that life is the first, immediate manifestation of the Absolute Idea, the unity of subjectivity and objectivity.)” (ibid).

“Now, a simple way to sum all of this up, however misleading, would be to say that for Hegel life is an objectively necessary pure concept because we know that mechanism is such a concept, and that chemism is, and that artifactual teleology is, and that these pure concepts are incomplete without teleological concepts, ultimately the concept of living organisms” (p. 282).

“As we have already seen, Kant distinguishes, and Hegel praises him for doing so, between an element in a complex that is purposive because it satisfies the ends of the designer or maker, like a radiator in a car, or external purposiveness, and an element the purposiveness of which is determined not by any appeal to an external designer, but rather ‘internally’ in an organic self-organizing and self-maintaining whole. We explain the parts by reference to this whole, which itself is, reciprocally, the reason the parts are as they are; and all of this without any intention of the parts, such as organs, to represent anything as their end. So, for example, we can say what leukocytes, white blood cells, are for, without reference to a designer of the system, but by reference to the internal ends of the living being, such as maintaining health by attacking foreign invaders like bacteria or parasites. As Kant says, we can show that the parts of a living being ‘as far as their existence and their form are concerned are possible only through their relation to the whole'” (pp. 283-284).

“But, again, [for Kant] this is all a matter of what we must think for the sake of a satisfying explanation…. It must be merely that because… teleological causality makes no sense in the scientific terms Kant considers himself to have established…. ‘Strictly speaking, therefore, the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us'” (p. 284).

“But all of this is supposed to be consistent with the unavoidability of teleological explanations, that is, with their necessity…. He asserts as a philosophical truth that we will never be able to [reduce life to mechanistic principles], and even that it is ‘absurd’ to imagine that we could. (No ‘Newton for a blade of grass’, ever.) He says clearly that we can no more give up the teleological principle and the idea of final causality than we could give up the universal causal principle itself” (pp. 284-285).

“One brief reason [Kant] gives for this is that this abandonment would leave us without anything ‘for guidance in observing’…. While we have the possibility of a physical and chemical account of cell division, we are not observing a mere series. With that account alone, we would have no way of understanding that these processes are part of one series, no way to isolate anything like ‘what comes next’ and so no language to explain what happens when it does not” (p. 285).

“What [Hegel] tries to show is that mechanism as a principle, as a pure or logical principle…, already amounts to, implicitly, what is most distinctive about teleology, an ‘explanation by concept’, how a thing ‘matches up’ to its concept, although in mechanism this concept is only ‘in itself’, not ‘for itself’…. [H]is claim is that while mechanism posits a radical independence among objects in motion, the results of mechanism itself reveal a regular dependence, fixed and unvarying, among such putative independent objects, and it must transform itself into a position that can do this justice, not treat it as an astonishing accident” (p. 288).

Final installment in this series: The Logic’s Ending

Teleology After Kant

Kant is responsible for recovering something like the modesty stemming from deep seriousness with which Plato and Aristotle approached claims of knowledge, though I don’t think he realized just how far they were from the dogmatism that broadly characterizes the intervening tradition. Kant indeed often speaks as if all previous philosophy had a dogmatic cast. I don’t think the tradition between the times of Aristotle and Kant was the uniform sea of dogmatic positions that Kant makes it out to be, either, but I agree that a dogmatic cast was dominant.

Kant also goes further than Aristotle or even Plato in positively asserting a principled basis for limiting claims to knowledge. Plato emphasizes sharp distinctions between appearance and reality. Aristotle is more inclined to emphasize that we do after all indirectly encounter something real in and through appearances, but he is in agreement with Plato (and Kant) that there is no magical overleaping of the fact that what we experience directly are only appearances.

For all three of them, knowledge in a strong sense could only be a product of the indirect work of reason reflecting on experience. Aristotle further emphasizes the variability of things in the world, and the large role of ambiguity in experience. Kant on the other hand is still beholden to the early modern assumption that knowledge ought to be subject to a completely univocal account. But his notions of synthesis are a great contribution to the understanding of how experience works — how “immediate” experience is a result of pre-conscious processes of constitution. In a nutshell, this is the additional principled basis for limiting knowledge claims that we owe to Kant.

With extremely broad brush, it could be said that Hegel takes up the Kantian emphasis that experience is a result of processes of synthesis but, unlike Kant, he also wants to emphasize that synthesis is not a self-contained activity of each individual. At the same time, he takes the more Aristotelian perspective that we really do indirectly encounter reality in and through appearances. For Hegel, to deny this would be to deny the possibility of knowledge altogether.

Hegel sees synthesis taking place at the level of what he calls spirit — i.e., the level of the universal community of rational beings across space and time, of shareable thought contents, and of broadly (but not entirely) shared values. But he also recognizes Aristotelian variability and ambiguity. At this extremely high level of generality, Hegel is a Kantian Aristotelian or an Aristotelian Kantian. Spirit for Hegel transcends nature, without being opposed to it.

In the Preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel glosses reason as purposeful activity, while sympathetically referring to Aristotle’s view of nature as purposeful activity. In the Science of Logic, he carefully distinguishes the internal kind of teleology Aristotle attributed to nature from the external kind that refers particular events to the will of God. He distinguishes three kinds of determination. Mechanism and “spiritual mechanism” determine things from outside, in ways that are indifferent to their specific character or content. An intermediate form he calls “chemism” determines things from outside in ways that do involve their specific character or content. These are both contrasted to teleology, which according to Hegel is the internal determination of things by what I at least would call their nature or essence.

For Hegel, mechanism and chemism together represent means by which ends are realized. He explicitly identifies these with efficient causes operating in ways ultimately subordinate to final causes. I was unaware of this when I previously glossed the Aristotelian efficient cause as fundamentally a means by which an end is realized, but it is nice to know it has Hegel’s concurrence.

For Hegel, the external determination of things is subordinate to their internal or “self”-determination. Self-determination meanwhile is anything but the result of arbitrary will; it develops out of the concrete detail of the “self-relatedness” in which the very forms of things consist. He treats this as an elaboration of the Phenomenology Preface’s assertion that “substance is also subject”.

The very essence or substance of things is able to act in subject-like ways, because form for Hegel is explainable in terms of self-relatedness. Meanwhile, Science of Logic translator George di Giovanni notes that Hegel’s selbst or “self” has no interpretation in German as a noun. As I would put it, “self” is purely adverbial and relational, and therefore is constituted in what Hegel in the Phenomenology Preface calls otherness. So, for Hegel the primacy of internal determination is perfectly compatible with the logical primacy of otherness. “Self” refers to a constitution in otherness, rather than being opposed to it. From the start, Hegelian otherness is conceived as beyond any naive opposition between a substantive self and what is other than it.

Thus Hegel can be seen as more thoroughly vindicating the content of Aristotelian internal teleology from a Kantian point of view. Kant himself made an important start at this in the Critique of Judgment, but qualified the legitimate application of internal teleology to nature as ultimately only having a heuristic value useful to our understanding, that would not be literally applicable to nature as it is in itself. Hegel in the Science of Logic carefully and at length develops objectivity out of something like what I would call reasonable interpretation, and on this basis recovers a valid notion of internal teleology as something real. This notion of objectivity as something constituted is a further development of another Kantian theme. (See also Aristotle on Explanation; Nature, Ends, Normativity.)

Spontaneity

Spontaneity has a technical meaning in Kant and Husserl that is at odds with common usage. In ordinary speech, we are said to do something “spontaneously” when we do it on the spur of the moment, without a previous plan. But Kant and Husserl call everything guided by reason “spontaneous”, even though reason is involved with conscious deliberation and thinking things through.

According to an older usage, things in nature were said by some to occur “spontaneously” when they had no discernible cause. In the scholastic tradition, others argued that “nothing comes from nothing”, and rejected the assumption that things with no discernible cause really happen without a cause, as was purported to occur in what was called “spontaneous generation”.

Leibniz embraced and codified the “nothing from nothing” argument as the principle of sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason does not itself imply the kind of particular providence associated with the popular expression “everything happens for a reason”. It just says that everything has some kind of reasonable explanation, not that what we subjectively perceive as cosmic injustice is part of a divine plan, even though Leibniz separately argued for that as well.

Of course, it matters a lot what kinds of causes or reasonable explanations we recognize. In Leibniz’s time, the notion of cause had already been greatly contracted by early modern writers, who further transformed the late scholastic notion of efficient cause in a mechanistic direction, while accentuating the late scholastic tendency to reduce all other causes to efficient causes. Leibniz himself recommended the use of only mechanistic explanations in natural science, but did not see natural science as all-encompassing, and defended the use of teleological explanation in broader philosophy. He compensated for the narrowness of mechanistic causality by speaking of sufficient reason rather than sufficient cause, and kept a place for form and ends as reasons.

Kant ultimately also defended a kind of teleology, especially in biology and in his account of beauty, but he was much more reserved about using it in general explanation than Leibniz, due to his scruples about grounding all “theoretical” explanation in experience. However, he assigned all ethical matters to a separate “practical” domain, which he wanted to exempt from the kind of narrow causal explanation that he considered the norm for physics, and he argued that for us humans, “practical” reason is more fundamental.

Human action for Kant belongs to the practical domain, which he famously argued is governed by “spontaneity” and “freedom”. I now think “spontaneous” and “free” for Kant simply mean not subject to mechanistic explanation. Thus insofar as we are positively motivated by moral imperatives or values, he would say we act spontaneously and freely. I think he also believed that all human thinking is ultimately motivated by ultimate ends, and therefore called it spontaneous and free.

Kant confused generations of scholars by borrowing voluntaristic rhetoric, which he did with the aim of emphasizing that human thought and action are not reducible to mechanistic physics. But freedom and spontaneity in Kant do not mean arbitrariness, as they effectively do for defenders of voluntarism. Rather, they are meant to allow room for positive motivation by moral imperatives or values.

Another confusing move Kant made was to argue for a special “causality of freedom” that he never explained adequately. Due to its contrast with physical causality, it sounded at times like a kind of supernatural break in the natural order he otherwise recognized. Many commentators thought Kant contradicted himself in arguing both that the natural order is self-contained and that there is a separate causality of freedom. I think these problems are ultimately explained by the narrowness of the mechanical concept of causality in nature. The “causality of freedom”, I want to say, simply means motivation by moral imperatives or values rather than by impulse. Kant considered impulse to be within the realm of natural-scientific causality, and therefore opposed it to spontaneity, whereas contemporary common usage associates “spontaneity” with acting on impulse.

(Aristotle, with his much broader notion of cause that essentially identifies causes with any kinds of “reasons why”, would treat values and moral imperatives as one kind of final causes, or what I have been calling “ends”.)

Husserl’s way of speaking about these matters is to contrast human motivation with causality. For him, “causality” is exclusively the causality of modern physical science, but human thought and action are to be explained by “motivation” rather than causality. Husserl’s use of “spontaneity” is related to that of Kant, and applies to everything that he explains in terms of motivation. (See also Kantian Freedom; Kantian Will; Allison on Kant on Freedom; Freedom Through Deliberation?.)

Legal Uses of “Cause”

According to Wikipedia, two main kinds of “cause” are used in (U.S.) legal assessments of liability: cause-in-fact and proximate cause. A cause-in-fact is anything without which something would not have happened. The same event could clearly have multiple causes-in-fact. Cause-in-fact is a necessary but not sufficient condition for proving proximate cause. Proximate causation involves the additional element that the causing event be sufficiently related to the injury for the courts to consider it “the” cause of the injury for purposes of liability. I think it serves effectively as a kind of model for talk about “the” cause of something in general.

The notion of proximate cause seems close to the naive notion of cause that Russell wanted to remind us plays no role in modern science, and at the same time to the intuition of causal efficacy that Whitehead took to be involved in the common-sense apprehension of medium-sized wholes. I have associated both of these with what I have called “causality in the modern sense”. Proximate causes differ from these insofar as the law is only concerned with the proximate causes of particular events or states of affairs, whereas Russell and Whitehead were both concerned with what are taken to be repeatable cases of causal efficacy.

It is important to point out that the notion of proximate cause is explicitly tied to questions of legal liability. In the wake of Kant and Brandom, it should not be surprising to find that more generally, the descriptive “causality in the modern sense” that allows us to reductively talk about “the” cause of something has this close connection to considerations of blame and culpability. Similarly, Aristotle’s “categories” are etymologically kinds of accusations, and Locke spoke of the person as a “forensic” concept.

Russell on Causality

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was one of the founders of analytic philosophy. His contributions to mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of language were highly influential, and he wrote on a host of other topics as well. In a famous 1912 essay “On the Notion of Cause”, he addressed the common prejudice that I have been referring to vaguely as “causality in the modern sense”, and argued that modern science does not in fact rely on it. I support this conclusion.

According to Russell, “the word ’cause’ is so inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable” (Mysticism and Logic, p.180). “In spite of these difficulties, it must, of course, be admitted that many fairly dependable regularities of sequence occur in daily life” (p. 187).

The idea of the supposed “law of causality” is that the same causes always produce the same effects. Russell points out that the alleged necessity with which one “event” is said to follow another depends on an abstracted notion of repeatable “events”, but every concrete event implicitly involves such a vast amount of individualizing detail as to be essentially unrepeatable.

“What I deny is that science assumes the existence of invariable uniformities of sequence of this kind, or that it aims at discovering them. All such uniformities, as we saw, depend upon a certain vagueness in the definition of the ‘events’…. In short, every advance in a science takes us farther away from the crude uniformities which are first observed” (p. 188, emphasis added).

Behind such presumptions of uniformity lies the prejudice that a cause somehow compels a particular effect. “What I want to make clear at present is that compulsion is a very complex notion, involving thwarted desire. So long as a person does what he wishes to do, there is no compulsion, however much his wishes may be calculable by the help of earlier events. And where desire does not come in, there can be no question of compulsion. Hence it is, in general, misleading to regard the cause as compelling the effect” (p. 190, emphasis added). “A volition ‘operates’ when what it wills takes place; but nothing can operate except a volition. The belief that causes ‘operate’ results from assimilating them, consciously or unconsciously, to volitions” (p. 191).

“[A]ny causal sequence which we may have observed may at any moment be falsified without a falsification of any laws of the kind that the more advanced sciences aim at establishing” (p. 194). “The uniformity of nature does not assert the trivial principle, ‘same cause, same effect’, but the principle of the permanence of laws” (p. 196). “In all science we have to distinguish two sorts of laws: first, those that are empirically verifiable but probably only approximate; secondly, those that are not verifiable, but may be exact” (p. 197).

“We cannot say that every law which has held hitherto must hold in the future, because past facts which obey one law will also obey others, hitherto indistinguishable but diverging in future. Hence there must, at every moment, be laws hitherto unbroken that are now broken for the first time. What science does, in fact, is to select the simplest formula that will fit the facts. But this, quite obviously, is merely a methodological precept, not a law of Nature” (p. 204, emphasis in original).

“We found first that the law of causality, as usually stated by philosophers, is false, and is not employed in science. We then considered the nature of scientific laws, and found that, instead of stating that one event A is always followed by another event B, they stated functional relations between certain events at certain times, which we called determinants, and other events at earlier or later times or at the same time…. We found that a system with one set of determinants may very likely have other sets of a quite different kind, that, for example, a mechanically determined system may also be teleologically or volitionally determined” (pp. 207-208, emphasis added).

I have suggested that scientific laws expressed in terms of equations are a specific kind of what Aristotle called formal “causes” (or better, formal “reasons why”). They are the kind that is expressible in mathematics. But natural or physical causes are still commonly conceived as efficient causes in the sense that this term acquired in late scholasticism, and it is this prejudice that Russell was addressing here.

The diverse compilation Aristotle’s early editors called Metaphysics (“after the Physics“) includes a summary of the four causes discussed in the Physics. Unlike other parts of the Metaphysics that, for example, discuss the term commonly translated as “substance” in far greater depth than in the Categories, the summary of efficient cause in the Metaphysics is less sophisticated than the discussion in the Physics. Thomistic and late scholastic notions of efficient cause seem to be based on the more simplistic account given in the Metaphysics, where the efficient cause is treated as more narrowly concerned with motion.

The Physics says very explicitly that the art of building, not the carpenter or the carpenter’s action, is most properly the “efficient cause” of the building of a house. The building of a house is implicitly considered as an end, not as a concrete motion. The art of building is the primary means by which this end can be successfully accomplished. This suggests to me that just as the “material cause” in Aristotle is hylomorphically paired with the “formal cause”, the “efficient cause” is related to the “final cause” as means are related to ends. Efficient cause as the means by which an end is realized is quite a bit different than, and more general than, the efficient cause as cause of motion that is the basis of the Thomistic and late scholastic concepts, as well as of the “modern” prejudice addressed by Russell.

Whitehead: Process, Events

The originally British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was profoundly concerned with the inter-relatedness of things. His later “philosophy of organism” inspired a movement of so-called “process theology”.

Whitehead was one of the inventors of universal algebra, which extends algebraic principles to symbolic representations of things that are not numbers. He collaborated with Bertrand Russell on the famous Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913) , which sought to ground all of mathematics in the new mathematical logic, but was less attached than Russell to the goal of reducing math to logic.

He did work in electrodynamics and the theory of relativity, emphasizing a holistic approach and the nonlocal character of electromagnetic phenomena. Counter to the spirit of the time, he developed a philosophy of science that aimed to be faithful to our intuitions of the interconnectedness of nature. He characterized mathematics as the abstract study of patterns of connectedness. In Science and the Modern World (1926), rejecting the world views of Newton and Hume as understood by the logical empiricists, he developed alternatives to then-dominant atomistic causal reductionism and sensationalist empiricism. Eventually, he turned to what he and others called metaphysics.

His Process and Reality (1929) is a highly technical work that is full of interesting insights and remarks. It aims to present a logically coherent system that radicalizes the work of John Locke in particular, but also that of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. As with many systematic works, however, it doesn’t engage in depth with the work of other philosophers.

Whitehead’s radicalization involves, among other things, a systematic rejection of mind-body dualism; of representationalism; of metaphysical applications of the subject-predicate distinction; and of Locke’s distinction between “primary” (mathematical) and “secondary” (nonmathematical) qualities. Plato and Aristotle both get positive mention. Whitehead thoroughly repudiates the sensationalist direction in which Hume took Locke’s work; aims deliberately to be “pre-Kantian”; and seems to utterly ignore Hegel, though he gives positive mention to the “absolute idealist” F. H. Bradley.

He wants to promote a thoroughgoing causal realism and to avoid any subjectivism, while eventually taking subjective factors into account. He wants to reinterpret “stubborn fact” on a coherentist basis. He is impressed by the work of Bergson, and of the pragmatists William James and John Dewey.

For Whitehead, “experience” encompasses everything, but he gives this an unusual meaning. Experience need not involve consciousness, sensation, or thought. He stresses the realist side of Locke, and wants to apply some of Locke’s analysis of the combination of ideas to realities in general.

He says that the world consists fundamentally of “actual entities” or “actual occasions” or “concrescences”, which he compares to Descartes’ extended substances. However, he interprets Einstein’s theory of relativity as implying that substances mutually contain one another, a bit like the monads in Leibniz.

For Whitehead, every actual entity has a kind of self-determination, which is intended to explain both human freedom and quantum indeterminacy. On the other hand, he also says God is the source of novelty in the universe. Whitehead recognizes what he calls eternal objects, which he compares to Platonic ideas, and identifies with potentiality.

Compared to the Aristotelian notions of actuality and potentiality I have been developing here, his use of actuality and potentiality seems rather thin. Actuality is just factuality viewed in terms of the connections of things, and potentiality consisting in eternal objects amounts to a kind of abstract possibility. His notion of causality seems to be a relatively standard modern efficient causality, modified only by his emphasis on connections between things and his idea of the self-determination of actual entities. His philosophy of science aims to be value-free, although he allows a place for values in his metaphysics.

According to Whitehead, perception has two distinct modes — that of presentational immediacy, and that of causal efficacy. Humean sensationalism, as codified by early 20th century theories of “sense data”, tries to reduce everything to presentational immediacy, but it is our intuitions of causal efficacy that connect things together into the medium-sized wholes recognized by common sense. As far as it goes, I can only applaud this move away from presentational immediacy, though I have also tried to read Hume in a less reductionist way. (I also want to go further, beyond intuitions of efficient causality in the modern sense, to questions of the constitution of meaning and value that I think are more general.)

In his later works, he emphasizes a more comprehensive notion of feeling, which he sees as grounded in subjective valuations, glossed as having to do with how we take various eternal objects. Compared to the logical empiricism that dominated at the time, this is intriguing, but I want to take the more radically Aristotelian (and, I would argue, also Kantian) view that values or ends (which are themselves subjects of inquiry, not simply given) also ultimately drive the constitution of things we call objective. I also don’t see “metaphysics” as a separate domain that would support the consideration of values, over and above a “science” that would ostensibly be value-free.

Whitehead considered the scientific reductionism of his day to exemplify what he called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. What I think he wanted to question by this was the idea that scientific abstractions are more real or more true than common-sense apprehensions of concrete things. I would phrase it a bit differently, but the outcome is the same. Abstractions can have great interpretive value, but they are things entirely produced by us that have value because they help us understand concrete things that are more independent of us.

Attempting to take into account the idea from quantum mechanics that reality is not only relational but also granular, he made what is to me the peculiar statement that “the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism”. Whitehead is certainly not alone in this kind of usage; indeed, the standard modern physical notion of “atoms” allows them to have parts and internal structure. That concept is fine in itself, but “atom” is a terrible name for it, because “atom” literally means “without parts”. The word “atom” ought to denote something analogous to a point in geometry, lacking any internal features or properties whatsoever.

Be that as it may, Whitehead sees an analogy between the granularity of events in quantum mechanics and the “stream of consciousness” analyzed by William James. “Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all” (Process and Reality, p. 68). To me, this is an expression not of atomism but of a kind of irreducibility of medium-sized things.

Anyway, Whitehead’s “atomic” things are events. Larger events are composed of smaller events, but he wants to say there is such a thing as a minimal event, which still may have internal complexity, and to identify this with his notion of actual occasion or actual entity.

I like the identification of “entities” with occasions. For Whitehead, these are a sort of what I call “medium-sized” chunks of extension in space-time. Whitehead’s minimal events are nonpunctual.

Freed of its scholastic rigidifications, this is close to what the Aristotelian notion of “primary substance” was supposed to be. I think of the latter as a handle for a bundle of adverbial characterizations that has a kind of persistence — or better, resilience — in the face of change. Only as a bundle does it have this kind of resilience.

Although — consistent with the kind of grounding in scientific realism he is still aiming at — Whitehead emphasizes the extensional character of actual occasions, they implicitly incorporate a good deal of intensional (i.e., meaning-oriented, as distinguished from mathematical-physical) character as well. Following Brandom’s reading of Kant on the primacy of practical reason, I think it is better to explain extensional properties in terms of intensional ones, rather than vice versa. But I fully agree with Whitehead that “how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is” (p. 23, emphasis in original), and I think Aristotle and Hegel would, too.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Whitehead’s work was attractive to theologians especially because it offered an alternative to the traditional notion of an omnipotent God creating everything from nothing. Whitehead argued that the Christian Gospel emphasizes the “tenderness” of God, rather than dominion and power: “not… the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love” (p. 343). “The purpose of God is the attainment of value in the world” (Whitehead, Religion in the Making, p. 100). God for Whitehead is a gentle persuader, not a ruler.

(I would not put unmoved moving in anywhere near the same bucket as ruling omnipotence. Unmoved moving in Aristotle is attraction or inspiration by a pure end, where all the motion occurs in the moved thing. It is not some kind of ruling force that drives things.)