Neo-Stoicism to Descartes

We have reached part 2 of Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, which will develop a portrait of the major alternative to the natural law tradition in 17th-century ethics. Within this scope, the major figures will be the neo-Stoics; the Cambridge Platonists; and the four canonical “rationalists”, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz. What makes Schneewind’s book especially interesting is his strong focus on the history of ethical thought. I am giving it unusually thorough treatment because I agree with his assessment that the history of ethics tends to be badly under-represented in general histories of philosophy, and in briefer accounts of individual major philosophers.

The first chapter of part 2, which I will discuss here, treats the neo-Stoics and Descartes. We have seen before that a concept of “right reason” derived from the Roman writers Cicero and Seneca already began to play a role in medieval ethics. This is now joined by notions of constancy and self-governance that also come from Cicero and Seneca. Not only the neo-Stoics but also Descartes embrace all three. The view of Descartes that emerges here is new and interesting, and quite unexpected.

To set up a contrast with the account he will be developing here, Schneewind quickly recalls the ground already covered.

“The modern natural lawyers held that by reasoning from observable facts we can find out how to cope with the moral and political problems that beset our lives. Experience gives us the evidence we need in order to infer that God exists and cares for us. Part of what we learn from it is that God has made the proper structure of our common life independent of any larger cosmic scheme” (p. 169).

“The major seventeenth-century alternative to modern natural law theory rejected both its empiricism and its refusal to tie morality to a divinely supervised universe. Many of those who rejected natural law theory held that God’s mind and ours are fundamentally akin…. As we improve our understanding — as we perfect ourselves — we will see ever more clearly that we are part of a harmonious whole and can live on harmonious terms with ourselves and others. On this view our participation in the divine mind is the most important fact about us” (pp. 169-170).

These writers have what I would call the Greek philosophical idea that reason and nature are themselves divine, or at least can legitimately be said to participate in a divine character. They do not rely on specific revelation for their respective views of God, but that does not make them irreligious. They reject a reductive, empiricist view of reason. They think that through participating in reason, we ourselves can be said to participate in divine activity, and this is our highest calling. So I don’t think it is quite right to say that these writers want to defend a divinely supervised universe. They variously defend a divine universe or a divinely created universe. Supervision sounds like direct intervention from outside. But Herbert of Cherbury has been called the father of English deism. The original Stoics saw divinity as immanent. Spinoza would have vigorously rejected the applicability of a notion like supervision to God. For Leibniz, God exercises providence at the level of possible worlds. There are a great many alternatives to the traditionalist or literalist theism that is implied by the term “supervised”.

From the phrase “as we perfect ourselves”, we begin to get a sense of what Schneewind will mean by perfectionism. (Part 2 is called “Perfectionism and rationality”. This chapter is called “Origins of modern perfectionism”.) It is uncontroversial that the figures he surveys in part 2 used the term “perfection” in various ways. But it is quite a leap to conclude from that fact, that this whole scope is appropriately summed up by an ism term of very recent coinage, “perfectionism”. At the outset, it has yet to be established that this grouping of figures has enough in common even to be appropriately called a stream. Leibniz is very different from Spinoza, and they are both very different from Descartes. One might also be concerned that an exclusive focus on perfecting ourselves is too narrow or individualistic to adequately characterize some of these figures. But Schneewind will bring to light a great deal that is of interest. In any case, he does an excellent job at the detailed level.

“The thought that our morality arises from our awareness of the divine mind was worked out in detail by the Stoics; and restatements of Stoicism were formative for seventeenth-century moral philosophy…. In the late fifteenth century the first printings of the works of Cicero and Seneca and of Latin translations of Epictetus made some of the major accounts of Stoicism readily accessible. Two sixteenth-century books helped spread Stoic teaching even more widely…. The Latin text [of Lipsius] went through more than eighty editions and was translated into several vernaculars” (p. 170).

Stoicism commonly contrasts our current state with the figure of the ideal Stoic sage, who by following the immanent divine logos or reason is able to rise above all disturbance by the passions.

“If Stoicism was to help modern Europeans cope with their lives, or if it was, as du Vair hoped, to shame them into improvement by showing how virtuously even a pagan could live, its doctrines had to be made acceptable to Christian readers. Neo-Stoicism was the result of the effort to blend two rather disparate views” (p. 171).

Much the same could be said of scholastic Aristotelianism. Whether we approve or disapprove of their innovations, both neo-Stoicism and scholastic Aristotelianism have an innovative character, and do not simply repeat Greek philosophy.

“Du Vair has no qualms about adding a notion of will to Stoic moral philosophy” (p. 171n). “The will’s main task is to enable us to pursue only what is truly in our power…. Du Vair ends by saying that God is delighted above all else by seeing us attain the perfection he created us for; but because ‘our natural forces can never bee sufficient of themselves to keepe us in this perfection’ we must invoke God’s favor” (p. 172).

It is important to note that a notion of will has to be added here. The way it is defined by du Vair above is unique and interesting. It recalls the later Greek Stoic Epictetus’s recommendation that only that which is in our power should be called good or evil.

“Lipsius gives us rather more theory than du Vair, but with no less of a Christian turn. In urging the great virtue of constancy upon us, Lipsius is urging us to live by right reason, ‘a true sense and judgement of things human and divine’. Reason, he says, is the remainder in man of the image of God…. Reason is divinity within us…. Through right reason all of us belong to a common kingdom” (p. 173).

The reference to constancy and right reason is significant. Both of these terms are important in both Cicero and Seneca. They do not exactly come from Greek Stoicism, but rather represent new contributions to Stoic thought (or Stoic-influenced thought, in Cicero’s case). In a bit, we will see that Descartes also adopts them.

“[Lipsius] develops Cicero’s deep belief that the honorable course of life is also the useful course” (p. 174).

“[Neo-Stoicism] tells us that if we look at our own reason we can both see what the highest good is and move toward attaining it. We can do so essentially because reason in us is the divine in us” (p. 175).

“For Herbert [of Cherbury], and for the moral innatists generally, our guide to God’s mind is our own mind, and therefore moral ignorance, leading to wrongdoing, is first of all defective self-knowledge” (p. 183).

The neo-Stoic notion of innate ideas will be adopted by Descartes, and criticized from an empiricist point of view by Locke.

“Herbert held that, in becoming aware of the Common Notions, we are sharing thoughts with God” (p. 184).

Herbert’s Common Notions with respect to religion consist of five affirmations: existence of God; a duty of worship; centrality of virtue; need for repentance; and reward or punishment in an afterlife.

“Descartes rejects this view because of a position he holds firmly but never fully expounds, a position that greatly distressed a good many of his early readers. He thinks that truths of the kind Herbert’s Common Notions contain would constrain God, the way pagan deities are tied by fate; and he is emphatic in asserting that we must not admit that anything could subject God to such necessities. Even eternal verities must depend on God’s will, as a king’s laws do in his country. There are eternal truths, such as that the whole is greater than the part; but they would not be true unless God had willed them to be so. God’s will is as much the cause of essences and of what is possible as it is of what is actual” (ibid, extensive embedded citations omitted here and below).

Here we get a taste of Descartes’s famous voluntarism, which, it seems to me, leads in a very different direction from those of Herbert and the neo-Stoics. But even here, there is a new twist.

“God’s creative willing is completely free because he is initially indifferent to every possible state of affairs. He does not create something because it is better that it should exist than that it should not; rather, his willing something to exist makes its existence better. Before he wills, he could have no reason to will as he does. Descartes goes to the extreme of allowing that God could perfectly well have commanded his creatures to hate him. But unlike Luther, Calvin, and Suarez, he says not a word about God’s having commanded that we are to obey certain laws of nature” (ibid).

This last distinction has huge importance. In common with the fundamentalists, Descartes defends an outrageous voluntarism, but in so doing he does not appeal to special revelation or fundamentalist literalism.

“It will become clear that Descartes is proposing a thoroughgoing ethic of self-governance.”

This I find utterly fascinating. Self-governance is another important theme from Cicero and Seneca. I think of it as a kind of opposite pole to voluntarism and the command/obedience paradigm. But as we were just reminded, Descartes is one of history’s more notorious voluntarists. We have recently seen that there were defenders of natural law who were not at all voluntarist. With Descartes, it is the converse — we get a very strong but abstract voluntarism that is not tied to any claims about specific natural law.

“His refusal to make any claims about divine imposition of laws of nature goes beyond his determination not to discuss anything that is properly a matter for theologians” (pp. 184-185). “It is part of the same outlook that leads him to exclude all talk of final causes from physics” (p. 185).

This is another large subject. Galileo and Descartes are among the early advocates of a physics that looks to mathematics rather than teleology to ground its explanations of the workings of nature. What is less frequently recognized in standard accounts of this is that Avicenna, Aquinas, Suarez, and their co-thinkers already turn what they call efficient causality into a “cause of existence”, which then makes it appear that efficient causality is fundamental and grounds all other causality, rather than being limited to an account of the relations of means to ends. Or again in another way more relevant to modern physical explanation, the means are given an expanded explanatory role that eclipses the original Aristotelian priority of ends.

“Descartes is no atheist, but he does not think that we can use rational knowledge of God to solve problems either in theory or in practice. His God is at least as inscrutable as the God of Luther and his predecessors, perhaps more so” (ibid).

Descartes uses the unknowability of God in a way that is in a sense opposite to the role it plays in Luther’s proto-fundamentalism. For Descartes it opens up a large space for secular modes of explanation; for Luther on the other hand, it requires an increased reliance on revelation over natural knowledge.

“Our most basic ways of thinking do not allow us to infer anything at all about how God thinks. The fact that we cannot conceive alternatives to the laws of geometry and logic shows the limits only of our minds, not of God’s power. Confined thus to our own way of thinking, we cannot ‘share in God’s plans’. Hence in physics, Descartes holds, ‘we must never argue from ends’ ” (ibid).

Though they do have points in common, mathematical physics and what I would call Aristotle’s hermeneutics of nature are fundamentally different disciplines. Received views of the history of science notwithstanding, the one does not really compete with the other. If we are doing mathematical physics, Aristotelian ends will not be relevant.

In common with the neo-Stoics, Descartes defends an important role for innate ideas. But Descartes does not understand his innate ideas in the Stoic way, as immanent fragments of a divine mind within us.

“The same is true in practice. Knowing nothing of God’s purpose in making the world, we cannot suppose that he made everything in it for our benefit” (ibid).

“We can know God’s purposes only if he reveals them” (ibid). Here Descartes is closer to Luther.

“If we are speaking ‘from the human point of view adopted in ethics’, we rightly say that God made all things for his glory; but all that this means is that we must praise God as the efficient cause of all that exists. A further conclusion also follows. Whoever loves God fully will be completely resigned to whatever happens, even if it involves evil or death to himself. For Descartes as for the Christian neo-Stoics, God’s providence is a kind of fate, showing us that mere fortune has no role in the world” (ibid).

Descartes takes for granted the notion of efficient cause as “cause of existence” that was developed by Avicenna, Aquinas, and Suarez to replace Aristotle’s “source of motion”.

“But from the attitude we are to take toward life as a whole, we cannot infer any specific guidance” (ibid).

For Descartes at least, it is a straightforward consequence of his voluntarism that God has nothing like an ethical stance, from which practical conclusions can be drawn. From God’s completely arbitrary freedom, logic dictates that no definite ethical conclusion can possibly follow. The more theologically minded voluntarists, on the other hand, follow tradition rather than strict logic on this point, and assume that morality should be derived from God’s commands, which are assumed to be known by revelation.

“Descartes offers an a priori proof of God’s existence, and an a priori proof to show that he is not a deceiver; he thinks of God as the creator and the indispensable continuing ground of the existence of the world; but his voluntarist insistence on keeping God untrammeled entails that although God’s existence and power explain everything in general, they can never be used to explain anything in particular” (ibid).

The thought behind this seems to be that to directly explain particulars by appeals to God is to treat God as unconditionally committed to those particulars, whereas Descartes wants to say that God is not unconditionally committed to any particulars. But this also means that we should not claim the authority of God’s will to justify any worldly particulars. No human view of worldly particulars has an exclusive or unquestionable claim to divine sanction. Love of God, properly understood, can never legitimately excuse dogmatism, sectarianism, or claims that some particular human authority is unconditional.

“What is true of physics and biology is equally true of morality. We can come to trust our faculties by considering God’s perfection, but then we must do our science for ourselves. We can come to love God by considering his perfection, but then we must determine for ourselves how we are to act” (ibid, emphasis added).

“He included what he called a ‘provisional morality’ … but he told Burman that he did so only ‘because of people like the Schoolmen [who] would have said that he was a man without any religion or faith, and that he intended his method to subvert them’…. The provisional morality is to be used while Descartes, or his reader, is withholding assent from all his beliefs…. obey the laws and customs of your country … be constant once you have chosen a course of action … master yourself rather than the world, by making yourself desire only what is fully within your power…. God gave us the power to separate truth from falsity ourselves, and he intends to spend his lifetime using it…. Metaphysics may constitute the root of the tree of knowledge, but the useful sciences are its fruits” (p. 186).

Constancy, mastering oneself, and desiring only what is in our power are all precepts highlighted by the neo-Stoics. At each point in time we work from the best resources available to us, but no general inquiry into morality is ever really over. Something new can always arise.

“[N]one of us will ever have all the knowledge we need to live an ideal life. Whatever morality we come to, it will always be ‘provisional’ ” (p. 187).

“For Descartes the thinking substance that is our mind is simple. All the different mental functions must therefore be construed as ways of thinking. To a critic’s suggestion that this must entail that there is no such thing as will, Descartes replies that the conclusion does not follow: ‘willing, understanding, imagining, and sensing and so on are just different ways of thinking, and all belong to the soul. The thoughts we experience as depending on us alone are volitions, the sole actions of the mind; the perceptions that constitute knowledge are passions. Some volitions, such as those directing us to think about an abstract entity, aim inward; others aim outward, as when we decide to walk. However directed, volitions, as thoughts, are about some object; and their function is to unite us to or separate us from that object” (pp. 187-188).

Gone is the insistence of the theological voluntarists on a separate faculty of arbitrary choice. For Descartes it is the whole person who is unconditionally free.

“The will is as important in purely theoretical thinking as it is in practice. When a theoretical thought occurs to us, we can either accept it — make it ours — or reject it; and if we accept it, we come to believe or know it. When a thought about something good occurs to us, our acceptance of it is what we call desire, and the desire may effectively move our body by redirecting spirits to the pineal gland. Willing in relation to action is thus active thought about good and ill, or about perfection and its opposite. We necessarily pursue what we take to be good and avoid what we take to be ill. If we see clearly and distinctly ‘that a thing is good for us’, then, Descartes says, as long as we keep that thought before us it is impossible to ‘stop the course of our desire’. We can abstain from pursuing a clearly perceived good only by thinking that it is good to demonstrate, by so doing, that we possess free will” (p. 188).

Will is here identified with Stoic interior freedom to assent or not assent to anything that is suggested to us. This is not the same thing as arbitrary choice of a course of action.

“Our liberty is thus not basically a liberty of indifference. We are indifferent to alternatives before us only when we lack sufficient clear knowledge of the goods and ills involved in them. Indifference in us is an imperfection — a lack of knowledge — though on God it is a result of omnipotence. But our ability to give or withhold assent, or our freedom, is a positive power, and no imperfection. That we have this power is so self-evident, Descartes claims, that our knowledge that we possess it ranks with our knowledge of the other innate ideas. We cannot doubt our freedom, even when we see that God has predetermined all events and cannot understand how this predestination is compatible with our freedom. When we act freely we do what we most want to do. We want to assent to clear and distinct propositions, since clarity and distinctness give us the best reasons for assent. And we want to unite ourselves with what we clearly see to be good, since, again, there could be no better reason for desiring something. We can be indifferent when we lack reasons either to accept or to reject; and acting without reason is not what we think of as acting freely. ‘And so’, Descartes says to a critical questioner, ‘I call free in the general sense whatever is voluntary, whereas you wish to restrict the term to the power to determine oneself only if accompanied by indifference’. We can indeed act freely in cases of indifference, but the ability to do so is not significant. It is because free will is the power to accept or reject that we are open to praise and blame and can acquire merit or demerit” (pp. 188-189).

This seems to further confirm that human freedom in Descartes is an elaboration of neo-Stoic concepts, rather than a continuation of the scholastic liberum arbitrium, or power of arbitrary choice.

“For Descartes, then, ‘voluntariness and freedom are one and the same thing’, and the proper use of freedom is to lead us to act only from clear and distinct perceptions. But these are hard to obtain, in large part because the soul is tied to the body. The body causes us to have imperfect perceptions of objects in the world. These perceptions are confused and indistinct thoughts that what is perceived would be good or bad for us. The desires they tend to lead to are usually desires for what is in fact not as good as it is made it seem. Only knowledge can help us; yet even though we desire knowledge when we see how good it is, we cannot always get it” (p. 189).

The association of freedom with acting on clear and distinct perceptions combines Descartes’s own criterion of clarity and distinctness with the Stoic theory of assent. This is the result we would expect when both are affirmed.

“Descartes’s remedy for ignorance lies in the second maxim of his provisional morality: to be as decisive as possible and to be constant in acting even on doubtful opinions, once he has made a decision. He later rephrases the rule as requiring ‘a firm and constant resolution to carry out whatever reason recommends’, even when we know we may not have the final truth. Virtue, he adds, ‘consists precisely in sticking firmly to this resolution’. If we had clear and distinct knowledge of the good, it would give order to our action. Because we lack such knowledge, only the will’s strong resolve to be constant can create order. If we are resolute, we act firmly even on beliefs we are not sure of. The free will, Descartes repeatedly says, is what comes closest to making us like God. God is utterly constant. As long as we are constant and act on what seem to us after reflection the best reasons, we will never feel remorse or regret. We will have nothing with which to reproach ourselves” (ibid).

This is the richest elaboration of the Stoic virtue of constancy that we have seen. In the inevitable presence of uncertainty, the best we can do is to consistently act based on our best assessments, and not to abandon our current best assessment of any given matter until we have a better one. He is making the point that vacillation is not evidence of open-mindedness. Rather, it is due to a lack of constancy.

“Descartes’s definition of virtue as resolute constancy of will puts self-governance squarely at the center of his ethics” (ibid).

In order to achieve this, we must not be swayed this way and that by passions. This is a Stoic criterion.

“Our final goal ought to be to obtain the supreme good…. Next, he supposes that the sovereign good must be something that is wholly within our power. Plainly wealth, power, and other external goods are not so. If anything is, it is our thought” (p. 190).

That our highest good must be something that it is within our power to achieve again recalls the precept of Epictetus that only things within our power are properly called good or evil. Descartes does not, however, share the Stoic goal of eradicating the passions.

“But because the passions are to be accepted and are in any case not eliminable… We must form the habit of thinking that only what lies wholly within our power is good. What lies wholly within our power is the exercise of our will…. [T]o show that we have free will, we can suspend action…. Suspension for Descartes … is an act that enables us to make a better decision” (p. 191).

What he calls suspension here is again the Stoic withholding of assent that Epictetus says is always within our power. This shows how constancy as a criterion leads to a concept of self-governance. To hold consistently to right reason is to show constancy, and the ability to show constancy only emerges as a consequence of self-governance. Right reason itself is not reducible to any set of fixed rules. It is rather a higher-order criterion of coherence. In this way, it is not unlike Kant’s criterion of unity of apperception, which is also a higher-order criterion. Stoic self-governance is the remote ancestor of Kantian autonomy. According to Schneewind’s front matter, this is the single most important thesis of his book. No Greek philosopher would agree with the medieval and early modern reduction of morality to obedience.

” ‘It is the nature of love’, Descartes says in his longest discussion on the subject, ‘to make one consider oneself and the object loved as a single whole of which one is but a part; and to transfer the care one previously took of oneself to the preservation of this whole’ ” (p. 192).

For all his emphasis on the individual cogito, Descartes recognizes that those we love are from a moral point of view part of us.

“Descartes presents what he calls ‘generosity’ as the quality that leads us ‘to esteem ourselves at our true value’…. We properly esteem ourselves most highly when we find that we know that only our power of free willing belongs to us” (ibid). “Generosity involves control of one’s desires, and leads one to think well of others, as being equally with oneself able to use their free will well. Generosity is thus ‘the key to all other virtues’. The generous person will be led away from love of the kinds of goods that are made less valuable when others share them, such as wealth or glory, and toward love leads us toward the kinds of things whose value is not altered when everyone shares them, such as health, knowledge, and virtue. When the love of God leads us to think of ourselves as part of the great whole he has made, the nobler we think the whole, the more we will esteem ourselves as well” (p. 193).

Descartes’s allergy to Aristotle may prevent him from invoking Aristotelian magnanimity, but when he says generosity is the key to all other virtues, the effect is similar.

“Because believing something and knowing that one believes it are different, ‘many people do not know what they believe’. Innatism is thus compatible with a denial of any cognitive standing to commonsense views of morality; and it is significant that, unlike Herbert, Descartes makes no appeal to common agreement as a test of truth. He does, however, agree with Herbert in stressing that we should each think things through for ourselves…. Self-perfection, either through increased knowledge or, lacking that, through constant will, is the key to all morality. And only seeing for ourselves will give us the knowledge we need” (ibid).

Here we are indeed coming close to the Kantian criterion of autonomy.

Seeming, Trying

In pursuing a pragmatist account of what meaning is, the young Brandom already anticipates a theme that will be very important in A Spirit of Trust: a thoroughgoing critique of claims to “mastery” in knowledge and action, illustrated here by the example of Descartes.

The main object of his 1976 dissertation is to show that from a starting point in what he calls social practices, pragmatism can go on to affirm that some things are nonetheless objectively real. This is in part an implicit criticism of his teacher and colleague Richard Rorty, who notoriously made ethical arguments against the very idea of objective reality. My last post treats the first chapter, which enlists Wittgenstein as a source of powerful arguments supporting the basic pragmatist emphasis on social practices as a sort of third way that avoids both subjectivism and objectivism. This post treats the second chapter.

Brandom distinguishes between two different legacies of Descartes, one concerning the special privileged status of the mental, which he strongly rejects, and one consisting of a very broadly specified epistemological project the core of which Brandom wants to uphold, while transposing it to different ground. From a highly abstracted perspective, he generously attributes philosophical worth to the very idea of a medium of thought and knowledge, and treats this as a Cartesian innovation. But for Descartes, this medium is something like consciousness that is supposed to be immediately and fully self-aware. The medium Brandom wants to uphold on the other hand is substantive language use and the inherently social practices that govern it.

“The challenge which [the second Cartesian] legacy presents to the pragmatist is this: if the use of a language, the application of expressions, consists of social practices which are whatever some community takes them to be, as Wittgenstein has argued, how is it that those practices enable the community to talk about objective things, which are independent of the community?…. According to the Cartesian tradition, all of our cognitive interaction with the objective world is by means of that medium with which alone we have direct, immediate commerce, namely the mind” (p. 42).

Compared to Brandom’s later much more fine-grained emphasis on the constitutive role of Hegelian mutual recognition, his undifferentiated Wittgensteinian appeal to the “takings” of empirical communities here is a blunt instrument. Community stands in contrast to the common modern notion of the individual as a sort of atom, but no community is a monolith, and no empirical community fully incarnates the ideal universal community of all rational animals. The “takings” of empirical communities are as much subject to error as the takings of individuals.

“This [second legacy] is a project with which the Cartesian tradition had only limited success. When the project failed, the result was a phenomenalism which concluded that because all cognition is by means of mental particulars, only mental particulars are knowable, that all knowledge is of mental particulars. There is a parallel danger for the pragmatist tradition. It is the danger that one might conclude from the fact that all cognition is by means of the social practices which make up our languages, that these practices are all that is knowable…. The prime project of this thesis is to show how knowledge which consists of social practices can be knowledge of objective states of affairs” (p. 43).

Brandom says the parallel danger for the pragmatist tradition is instrumentalism, which he characterizes as the view that social practices are all that is knowable. I have endorsed a kind of “instrumentalism” myself, but see it as applying more narrowly to practices of empirical science, not to all that is knowable.

Brandom treats the putative certainties of Descartes in light of Rorty’s account of “incorrigibility”. Like “certainty” in Hegel’s deflationary view of it, incorrigibility in this sense is a mere fact and not at all a foundation for knowledge. Things are about to become very interesting.

“There is an account of the social practices we use to talk about mental things … which may be extracted from Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and Rorty’s “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental”…. Thoughts and sensations became mental only when the noninferential reports of these entities which it turned out that people could make came to be taken to be incorrigible…. Rorty calls an utterance-type ‘incorrigible’ if within the community within which it is used there are no procedures for overruling it” (pp. 44-45).

Whether or not incorrigibility is the criterion for calling things “mental”, the implications of incorrigibility that Brandom is unfolding here offer a very important lesson.

“It will be useful … to consider an elaboration of this account of how practices of issuing reports on one’s inner states can become incorrigible. The elaboration is suggested by Sellars’ account of the ‘looks’ and ‘seems’ idiom…. [T]he practice of making seems-reports arises out of a situation in which there are sufficient regularities perceivable in the mistakes that users of the language make in their ordinary reports of their surroundings…. In such a case one makes the weaker claim ‘it seems to me that I see X’ which is understood to be noncommittal as to whether X in fact holds…. The ‘seems’ statements are so used that whenever a report is incorrect, the corresponding ‘seems’ statement is correct” (pp. 46-47).

I have always thought of “seems” phrasing as an acknowledgement that other perspectives may be possible. It honestly never occurred to me to think of it as a way of always being right. But the logic here is impeccable.

“Thus ‘seems’ is a non-iterable sentential operator — one cannot say ‘It seems to me that it seems to me that X’. Because of this feature of the ‘seems’ idiom, there are things, namely ‘seemings’… about which we cannot be overruled, and we are hence incorrigible. The social practices of using the expression are such that there is no way to overrule the statement ” (pp. 47-48).

With this argument about non-iterability, we have a case of linguistic analysis yielding an interesting and important conclusion that most likely could not have arisen by other means. It has long “seemed” to me that consciousness as such is a syntactic variant on appearance, rather than a kind of knowledge as Descartes and many others have taken it to be. But this link between non-iterability and incorrigibility is entirely new to me.

One thing that stands out about incorrigibility is that it is the very opposite of a condition for ethical dialogue abundantly illustrated by Plato, and more recently made explicit by Gadamer, Habermas, and Brandom. Real polar opposites are rare, but this is one of them. Incorrigibility has absolutely no place in what Habermas would call an ideal speech situation. All participants in genuine dialogue are corrigible. But Descartes and other bad authorities have tried to make incorrigibility a condition of knowledge. We ought to respect other people’s first-person reports. But that is a social grace, not a key to truth.

“Mental events are those which we report with expressions which fit into the same linguistic niche that seemings do. The notion of a linguistic niche is here to be taken as parallel to that of an environmental niche which an evolving organism can occupy. The particular property which I have in mind as specifying the linguistic niche which ‘seemings’ define for other mental events is the inappropriateness of embedding such things inside ‘seems’ operators. Thus ‘It seems to me that I am thinking of a red bear’ is a peculiar utterance in that ‘I am thinking of a red bear’ is already an incorrigible utterance. I am suggesting that the mark of incorrigibility is not being appropriately qualified by a ‘seems’ statement…. Thoughts and sensations are kinds of entities which are reported by expressions which cannot appear embedded in ‘seems’ statements” (pp. 48-49).

Next he explicitly draws the conclusion that incorrigibility has no place in inquiry about the nature of knowledge.

“[T]here is nothing epistemologically useful about incorrigibility in the account we have given of it. The ‘seems’ operator which creates the linguistic niche within which mental events and processes thrive must be added to a language which already has more basic sentences which can be embedded in ‘seems’ contexts. And we have seen that those more basic sentences cannot have the incorrigibility characteristic of ‘seems’ statements. The ‘seems’ idiom can be added only to a language that already has other sentences in use which are not incorrigible. Given ordinary, corrigible reports, the ‘seems’ idiom offers a way of producing trivially incorrigible reports from them. Sellars and Rorty have developed this line of thought in considerable detail, to show the error of traditional epistemological programs which seek to ground the authority of ordinary claims in the incorrigibility of these ‘seeming’ analogues. When once the priority of ordinary, corrigible utterances has been understood, there will be little desire to ‘justify’ them in terms of the incorrigible utterances that are derivative from them” (pp. 49-50, emphasis added).

“Seems” talk in effect syntactically adds a wrapper around simple assertion that must therefore already be understandable on its own if the “seems” talk that modifies it is to be understandable.

“Further, the line of thought we have just considered completes the pragmatist’s refutation of the Cartesian view of the mental as the medium of cognition, by showing that the specially criterioned realm of things which was Descartes’ first legacy will not support the sort of epistemological justification demanded by his second legacy. The incorrigibility of the mental is no ground on which to base claims about the correctness of ordinary corrigible claims” (p. 50, emphasis added).

The correctness of ordinary corrigible claims is what we ought to be concerned with. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom talks about “semantic descent” from the lofty abstraction of philosophical metaconcepts back to ordinary life. The idea is that their real meaning lies in their consequences for how we live our life. Klaus Vieweg’s outstanding new biography of Hegel suggests to me that Hegel himself would have appreciated this.

Brandom has already characterized “seems” talk as presupposing ordinary simple assertion. Earlier, he suggested that the whole project of modern epistemology — including pragmatist approaches to it — is historically shaped by what are essentially Cartesian questions. More specifically, he has suggested an analogy between the Cartesian problem of relating the mind to reality and the task he has set for himself of relating a pragmatist account of social practices to what we mean by “real” and “reality”.

Initially I wanted to resist this analogy. But Brandom suggests that the project of epistemology is itself specifically post-Cartesian, and there is a level of specificity at which this is undoubtedly true. I must acknowledge that Pierce’s account discussed further below, which I find attractive, does address recognizably Cartesian kinds of questions, even if his answers stand in opposition to those of Descartes.

Nonetheless the implicit contrast presupposed by seems-talk has been approached in other ways. The notion of appearance and something standing in contrast to it goes back at least to Plato, if not into the hazy prehistory of philosophy. In Plato we do not find hypostasized concepts of “the mind” and “the external world” confronting one another as they do in Descartes, but something more like a contrast between appearance and deeper truth. My own way of approaching such questions is broadly Platonic in this sense, and doesn’t owe much to modern notions of subject and object. Plato and Aristotle ask about “our” knowledge — meaning, for Aristotle at least, the knowledge available to rational animals — not about “the mind’s” knowledge. In medieval terms, knowledge belongs to the whole human being.

“In the rest of this section I will seek to show that the classical notion of the real serves the function of constraint of our fancy. This function requires an aspect of the Cartesian notion of the mind which we have not yet considered, that of the will. We will present a pragmatic reconstruction of that characteristic, parallel to the pragmatic reconstruction of incorrigibility we have derived from Rorty and Sellars” (p. 54).

This development of a parallelism between incorrigibility and Descartes’s voluntaristic notion of will is of great interest. The connection between the real and Cartesian will is initially not clear at all (especially to an anti-voluntarist such as myself), but Pierce’s remarks quoted by Brandom below implicitly suggest a relation through a double negative.

“So far, the notion of the real has been exhibited by means of a distinction between things which can be changed merely by the activity of ‘Thinking about X’ and those which cannot. What is it about thinking which makes a classification based on its capacity to alter things more significant than any other classification in terms of some human activity which differentiates the thing classified? Thus we can consider those things which I can alter merely by digging a hole with a spade, and those which I cannot so alter. In the former category would be holes, tunnels, graves, and so on, and in the latter would be the square root of seventeen, Plato’s Republic, and the interior of distant black holes. For what problem is the classification induced by thinking illuminating (and that induced by digging not)?” (p. 55).

The orientation through asking what problem is at issue is commendable. The comparison with digging a hole has a nice pragmatist flavor, but also would not be out of place in Plato or Aristotle. Now we get to Pierce’s point.

“I think the key may be found in some other passages of Pierce, echoed by Russell. Pierce says: ‘… the real is that which insists upon forcing its way to recognition as something other than the mind’s creation’. [Brandom continues] That the real is other than the mind’s creation is implied by the previous definition…. That this otherness is ‘forced’ upon us is an element we have not encountered, however” (ibid).

He quotes Pierce again, “…reality is insistency. That is what we mean by reality. It is the brute irrational insistency that forces us to acknowledge the reality of what we experience” (ibid).

He continues, “What is important here is … the constraint on our thinking which the real, external world exerts on our thoughts. Russell characterizes the realm of fact in terms of the same two elements: that facts don’t depend on what we think about them and that what we think is constrained by the facts…. This element of constraint of the mind, stubbornness to volitions, seems to me to be the key to understanding the role reality played in the classical philosophical tradition. The fact of being forced to think one thing rather than another suggests an answer to our question” (p. 56).

The conclusion to A Spirit of Trust memorably mentions the world’s “stubborn recalcitrance to mastery by knowledge and agency” (Spirit of Trust, p. 689). The “stubbornness to volitions” above is central to Pierce’s notion of reality, and the reference to volitions ties it back to Descartes.

“I think the picture which is being appealed to involves a distinction of two sorts of activities with respect to our control or dominion over them. On the side of fancy are things like imagining a red bear, or thinking of Vienna. These are activities in which we cannot be thwarted. We can simply do them. No effort is required, because there is no gap between trying and succeeding. Contrasted with this, we find activities like digging, which require the special circumstances (the presence of a shovel, sufficiently soft materials, etc.) for their performance, and over which we do not have total control. The point of defining as real a class of things which are in the relevant sense independent of what we think of them is that we do not have dominion over these things in the same sense in which we do over the creations of fancy. Reality is that in virtue of which there are activities like digging, in which we are constrained by circumstances beyond our immediate control. The role which the real is to play in our understanding of things is captured in the explanation it is to provide of why we cannot do whatever we want to do simply by wanting to do it” (pp. 56-57).

In the terminology Brandom will shortly introduce here, the real is that which constrains and resists our “trying”. He illustrates this by returning to the example of digging a hole.

In the terminology of A Spirit of Trust, we could say here that Descartes is overly impressed with our “mastery” over our fancy. The error of many is to treat this relation to our fancy as paradigmatic or programmatic for our relations in the world, when it is our relations in the world that come first. (I do not say “to” the world, because that does implicitly invoke a Cartesian parsing of everything into hypostasized categories of mind and world.)

“Once again, moving the arms and back in this way is something people can be trained to just do, but once again it can be asked ‘How do you move your arms and back in this fashion?’ At this point it is so far from being the case that one must know the answer to such a question in order to engage in the specified activity that we do not know what an answer should look like” (p. 57).

“Our inability thus to describe further what counts as trying to move a ‘voluntary’ muscle marks the end of possible explanations of such movement…. The fact that such explanations of activity… must stop at the attempt to produce ‘voluntary’ muscular activity is the basis for the classical doctrine of volitions. This is the doctrine that there are mental activities called volitions which are the first source of all human activity” (p. 58).

In this tradition, volition serves as the unexplained explainer of “voluntary” actions. By contrast, we have recently seen how Aristotle explains the difference between willing and unwilling actions without hypostasizing a separate faculty of will.

“We now seek a story about indefeasible dominion which will describe the function which the mind plays in Cartesian stories about acting. The mind has an active role here as the medium of activity. This means that anything which is not itself a mental activity is accomplished by means of the immediate mental activity of willing” (p. 59).

The Cartesian hypostases of mind and will have sovereignty and mastery over a hypostasized private domain of fancy. And just as we are incorrigible in our reports of “seeming”, we are the sovereign masters of our pure willing and “trying” . But as Brandom points out, in both cases this is true only in a trivial way. It is rather to ordinary activities that we should look as a paradigm.

“I want to claim that indefeasible domain over inner, mental activities is of the same trivial, stipulative nature and origin as we have seen the property of incorrigibility which characterizes our knowledge of inner, mental events to be…. Our approach is to account for dominion over the realm of fancy in terms of the ‘tries’ idiom in a way formally analogous to that in which we accounted for incorrigibility in terms of the ‘seems’ idiom” (p. 62).

“The basic point of the analogy is that just as the ‘seems’ operator forms a report such that there is nothing in the language which counts as sufficient evidence to contradict it, so the ‘trying’ operator forms a description of an action for which nothing counts as significant evidence that the action was not performed. The important formal point is that just as ‘seems’ operators cannot be iterated…, neither can ‘trying’ operators (‘I am trying to try to do X’)” (ibid).

“The second ‘trying’ is redundant…. We use the ‘trying’ operator in such a way that one can always succeed at trying to do X, whatever troubles one may have actually doing X” (p. 63).

“For ordinary activities like digging, one can actually say what the trying consisted of — e.g., certain movements of the back and arms — and why it failed, just as one can often say why it is that things seemed a certain way. The extension of these operators to cases in which no activity was successfully engaged in which can be described by the language without the operators of the mental expressions they epitomize is linguistically straightforward. So we can explain how we could come to talk about reports which are incorrigible and activities over which we have indefeasible dominion by starting off only talking about ordinary corrigible reports and activities in which we may be frustrated” (pp. 63-64).

“The reason for that non-iterability is the way the conditions under which it is appropriate to say ‘I am trying to do X’ relate to the conditions under which it is appropriate to say ‘I am doing X’. And this relation is to be understood by analogy to ‘seems’ ” (p. 64).

“For any activity which we can try to engage in and fail, such as signaling a bus, there must be some conditions of success which are not dependent merely on our tryings (else we could not try and fail” (p. 65).

“Now the important thing for Pierce, as for the empiricists and the Cartesian tradition in general, is that what we believe is constrained in this fashion. Within our framework, this is just to say that believing is not one of the things one can do simply by trying to” (ibid).

We do not “choose” to believe X. Others may have conflicting beliefs about the same thing, but that does not mean that belief is arbitrary. We believe things for reasons that are not simply plucked out of thin air.

“[T]he ‘trying’ operator must be introduced into a language which already talks about things which we can try to engage in and fail (such as signaling a bus). The primary and essential role of the ‘trying’ operator is to make this distinction between ‘doing X’ and ‘trying to do X’. It is a relatively trivial consequence of the performance of this role that the ‘trying’ operator is non-iterable” (p. 66).

“In sum, activities which can be done just by trying to do them are a by-product of activities which one can try to do and fail, not the other way around” (ibid, emphasis added).

“Once we have seen how ‘tries’ works, we can no longer maintain the Cartesian stance in which we take activities over which we have indefeasible dominion for granted and find others problematic, requiring a further notion of ‘the real’ to explain them…. Insofar as the notion of the real involves merely the idea that we are constrained, of course, it is as unobjectionable as it is unilluminating” (p. 67, emphasis added).

“It is interesting to note that in showing that the notion of a realm of unconstrained fancy over which the subject exercises an indefeasible dominion presupposes the existence of constrained activities (with respect to which alone the ‘trying’ operator can be sensibly introduced) we have provided a pragmatic version of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism in the Critique of Pure Reason…. For Kant may be understood as trying to show that the notion that we have of a faculty of spontaneity (the realm of our dominion) must be extracted from a notion of its function in concert with a faculty of receptivity (the source of constraint), and cannot be coherently described out of all connection with that receptive faculty” (ibid).

Next in this series: Pragmatics of Inquiry

Consciousness, Personhood

There is a common modern view that aims to explain who I am in terms of my consciousness. Locke, who popularized his friend the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth’s coinage of the new English word “consciousness”, already seems to have thought this way. Historically, a gradual increase in emphasis on the immediate awareness central to the thought of Descartes and Locke can be traced through Plotinus, Augustine, Avicenna, and the Latin scholastics. The curious thing is that consciousness is commonly supposed to be both a sort of universal transparent medium of experience and the locus of our personal self. I don’t think it is either of these.

I want to question the claim that there is any universal transparent medium of experience. It seems to me that the multitude of forms of awareness we experience is rooted more concretely in particular “contents”, rather than in a medium that allegedly contains them. In Lockean terms, particular kinds of awareness would be built into particular “ideas”. Ideas would no longer be inert representations as they are for Locke, but would have an active aspect of their own. In Aristotelian terms, I think the primary locus of human awareness is in our “imaginings” (see Imagination, Emotion, Opinion).

Personhood, I want to say, is neither psychological nor metaphysical but rather primarily ethical in nature. Who we are comes not from our consciousness but from our character and what we do. With respect to character, this is almost a tautology, but that is kind of the point.

Character is not inborn but acquired. It is Aristotelian ethos as particularly manifested in individuals. Ethos begins as a social acquisition of culture, but everyone completes it for themselves through the detail of their ethical practice.

The Act of Thought

Volume 3 part 1 of Alain de Libera’s Archéologie du sujet carries subtitles translating to The Act of Thought for volume 3 overall, and The Double Revolution for part 1. The cast of major characters will include Averroes, Aquinas, and the Scottish philosopher of common sense Thomas Reid (1710-1796). This tome is packed with extremely interesting material. It also appears to me to intersect with the important work of Gwenaëlle Aubry on the historical transformation of Aristotelian potentiality and actuality into a neoplatonic notion of power and a more modern notion of action. At the time part 1 was published (2014), part 2 was supposed to be a few months away, and de Libera announced titles for volumes 4 through 7. Instead, he has since published three volumes of related lectures at the College de France.

“The philosophers pose all sorts of questions concerning thought. Who thinks? Am I the author of my thoughts? What is the place of thought? What is its theater or its scene? In what way are the thoughts that come from me or that I have mine? Am I the owner of my thought? In sum: is it necessary to say ‘I think’ with Descartes, or ‘it thinks’ with [Belgian new wave musician] Plastic Bertrand, [and philosophers like] Lichtenberg, Schelling, and Schlick? It seems natural to us to believe that the act of thinking takes place in us. ‘Takes place‘ says a lot. That which takes place is [emphasis added]. Being is having a place of being — in other words: it is having (a) reason for being. But what takes place also happens. What takes place in us happens in us, is produced, is effectuated, is accomplished in us. What takes places in us is in us, in whatever way that it has being. It certainly seems natural to believe that since the act of thinking takes place in us, it begins and is completed in us. In us, that is to say in our soul (if we are religious), in our spirit (if we know the French for Mind), or in some part of us (if we [participated in the May 1968 Paris uprising]).”

“There is nothing ‘natural’ in all this. All these beliefs are cultural, and historically constructed. They are assimilated philosophical theses, philosophemes neither proven as such nor a fortiori proven as historical constructs, philosophemes (learned theorems, technical injunctions, theoretical words of order) lived without justification as immediate givens of consciousness, as a flower of experience” (p. 13, my translation throughout).

De Libera refers to very strong assertions by Thomas Reid about the common-sense character of all this. Reid explicitly refers to the mind as a subject. It was philosophers, de Libera says, “who decided that this, or that which thinks, was the SUBJECT of an act, the act of thinking. It was philosophers who decided on this subjective basis that this ‘that’ or this ‘it’ could be known as the author or the actor. They did this partly against Aristotle, and partly in the name of Aristotle….”

“The philosophical construction accounts for a fact of experience: we sense ourselves as the principle, that is to say also as the beginning, the point of departure… of our actions, notably, and very particularly of our thought. But exactly in accounting for this fact, the philosopher encodes it, and never ceases throughout history to re-encode it, to complicate it, to invest in it and reinvest in it linguistically, conceptually, argumentatively.”

“‘Denomination’ is one of the keys of this code” (p. 15). “According to Reid, to say that an agent x acts on a thing y is to say that a power or force exercised by x produces or has a tendency to produce a change in y. What is particularly interesting for an archaeology of the subject-agent of thought is that this schema does not apply to perception” (p. 17).

According to Reid, when we perceive objects, the objects don’t act on the mind, and the mind doesn’t act on the objects. To be perceived is an external denomination. According to de Libera, in the language of the Latin scholastics, causal denomination finds its main application in the domain of action. An action denominates its agent causally, and not formally or extrinsically. On the other hand, extrinsic denomination applies perfectly to the ontological and noetic analysis of the object of thought.

For most of the scholastics, as for most modern people, the being-thought of a stone is real in the human, but is not real in the stone. But de Libera points out that the great Thomist Cajetan says about thought in the passive sense what Reid says about perception — both the stone and the thinker are only extrinsically denominated by the being-thought of the stone.

As de Libera points out, Averroes and his Latin followers have been understood as arguing that thinking is an extrinsic denomination of the human. “It requires a solid engagement with [Aristotle’s work on the soul] and its Greek, Arabic, Jewish, and Latin interpretive tradition to understand what this means” (p. 22).

Church councils in the 14th and 16th centuries upheld the opposing views of Aquinas as doctrinally correct. According to de Libera, this opened two paths, one leading to Descartes and the “Cartesian subject”, and the other leading to what he calls a Leibnizian notion of subject as the “thing underlying actions”. He says there is also a third path, leading from Averroes to Brentano, who reintroduced the scholastic notion of intentionality in the late 19th century. In this sense, he says the middle ages were more modern than we realize, and modernity is more medieval than we realize.

De Libera notes that Foucault ultimately derived his philosophical use of the word “archaeology” from Kant. Such archaeology is concerned with very Kantian “conditions of possibility”.

Taking the modern notion of “subject” at its point of emergence demands that we look back to the scholastic subjectum and “being in a subject” — not for the pleasure of returning to the middle ages, but in order to understand Descartes in context. It was not actually Descartes who was responsible for the transition from what Heidegger called “subjectity” (simply being a thing standing under something else) to the mental “subjectivity” of an ego.

Incidentally, de Libera points out one of the first uses of the word “subjective” in a modern sense in Martin Schoock, an early Dutch critic of Descartes who objected that Descartes reduced thought to something “subjective”. He quotes Schoock as saying “The reason Descartes brags about is not reason understood in a general sense, but in a subjective sense, that is to say the reason he can consider in himself” (p. 30).

Here I would note that in an interesting little meditation on Averroes called Je phantasme (“I imagine”), de Libera’s former student Jean-Baptiste Brenet points out that general Latin use of the verb cogitare referred primarily to operations of what in Aristotelian terms was called “inner sense”, as distinct from intelligere, which was the standard word for the “thinking” attributed to “intellect”.

(Inner sense is the closest Aristotelian analogue to what Locke more abstractly called “consciousness”. At least in the Arabic commentary tradition, it seems to involve several distinct faculties that all have what Aristotle and the scholastics following him called “imagination” as their common root. These are said to include what animals use in place of reason to make meaningful discriminations such as the nearness of danger, which is not actually given in external sense. Descartes’ own usage of cogito (first person singular of cogitare) basically covers all forms of awareness. It is a commonly repeated “Aristotelian” dictum that nothing comes to be in intellect without first coming to be in sense perception, but de Libera in an earlier volume pointed out that a more accurately Aristotelian version would be that nothing comes to be in intellect without some basis in imagination, and nothing comes to be in imagination without some basis in sense perception.)

Next in this series: Averroes as Read by de Libera

Origins of a Subject-Agent

How did the modern equation of subjecthood and agency come to be? How did the notion of “I” or ego come to be substantialized? An extremely influential argument of Heidegger makes this an innovation of Descartes. Alain de Libera argues that this is too hasty, and that the groundwork for this identification was actually laid in the later middle ages. I’m continuing a high-level treatment of de Libera’s extremely important “archaeology of the subject“ (see also On a Philosophical Grammar).

Answering this question will involve an extended historical odyssey through complex interactions between Aristotelian and Augustinian views, and much more. De Libera sees Aquinas in his polemic against Averroes raising four interrelated questions of a more fundamental nature: Who thinks? What is the subject of thought? Who are we? What is man? The second of these seems to have been first asked by Averroes. The other three are largely attributable to Aquinas and his contemporaries, in their reactions to Averroes.

Several points of Aristotelian interpretation (What is substance? What is form? What is act? What is an efficient cause? What is the soul?) will be relevant to answering these, as will Augustine’s meditations on personhood and the nature of the Trinity. De Libera notes that John Locke — a major contributor to modern views on “the subject” — was deeply involved in debates on trinitarian theology. He also discusses Franz Brentano’s modern revival of the medieval notion of intentionality. The medieval version was closely bound up with a notion of “inexistence” or “existing in” of mental objects (forms separated from their matter) in the soul.

In the Categories, Aristotle gives substance the logical sense of something standing under something else. This influenced the Greek grammarians who formulated the notion of a grammatical subject. But in the Metaphysics, he treats this as only a starting point that is quickly superseded by an identification of substance with form or “what it was to have been” a thing, before moving into an account of substance as potentiality and actuality.

De Libera notes a historic division among readers of Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul between those who interpret the soul as an attribute of the body, and those who treat it as a substance in its own right. The latter position has different meanings, depending on whether substance is taken in the “standing under” sense or in the sense of form. De Libera will be particularly interested in the consequences of a further family of positions that make the non-obvious equation of human actions and passions with attributes of the soul.

He notes that “category” in Greek originally meant accusation, and relates this to Locke’s characterization of personhood as a “forensic” notion. We have here to do with subtle relations between attribution, inherence, and imputation with respect to actions and passions in relation to the soul. But what is an action? Must we explain an act in terms of a substantial subject’s power of efficient causation in a late scholastic sense that is far from Aristotle’s? (See also Expansive Agency; Brandomian Forgiveness.)

Next in this series: “The Subject” in Medieval Times

Wisdom and Responsibility

Among other works, the great early 20th century philosopher Edmund Husserl wrote his own Cartesian Meditations, an expanded version of lectures delivered in Paris in 1929. Husserl developed his own version of phenomenology, very different from Hegel’s, and his own version of transcendental subjectivity, very different from Kant’s. Throughout his career, he was concerned to criticize naive notions of objectivity. While disagreeing with a few of his fundamental principles, I enormously admire his nuanced development and intellectual honesty.

Husserl writes that “The aim of [Descartes’] Meditations is a complete reforming of philosophy into a science grounded on an absolute foundation” (Cartesian Meditations, p. 1). I think of philosophy as concerned with generalized, coherent interpretation of life and the world as an ongoing, never-finished project, rather than a completed rational “science”. But Husserl, with all his scruples about premature claims of objectivity, is famously provisional in most of his actual developments. As long as the ultimate “science” remains an aim and is not claimed as a present possession, we have not fallen into dogmatism. I think Husserl overall actually does better than Kant at avoiding overstated claims of “scientific” accomplishment.

According to Husserl, Descartes “gives rise to a philosophy turned toward the subject himself” (p. 2). I tend to worry more about illegitimate claims on behalf of a sovereign Subject than about premature claims to know about real objects, but both concerns are valid. “Philosophy — wisdom (sagesse) — is the philosopher’s quite personal affair. It must arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step” (ibid).

The literal meaning of the Greek philosophia is “love of wisdom”. Some kind of wisdom, rather theoretical knowledge, was the main goal of ancient philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle through the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics, all the way to the neoplatonists. An emphasis on wisdom as distinct from knowledge puts a “practical”, ultimately ethical dimension above all particular inquiries, whereas Latin scholastics focused on more technical debates about the truth of propositions, and early modern philosophy was permeated with ideals of pure science. I think it was really more the Kantian primacy of practical reason than the Cartesian cogito that initiated a partial turn back to the ethical concerns of the ancients. Some writers have suggested that claims for the revolutionary character of the cogito are more shaped by Kant’s interpretation and by the perception of Descartes as a precursor to Kant than by Descartes’ original.

Commentators have noted that ethical concerns are basically absent from Descartes’ Meditations. Kant and Husserl each in their own way reinfused broadly ethical concerns into Descartes’ preoccupations with the foundations of knowledge.

Husserl appeals to “the spirit that characterizes radicalness of philosophical self-responsibility” (p. 6). “Must not the demand for a philosophy aiming at the ultimate conceivable freedom from prejudice, shaping itself with actual autonomy according to ultimate evidences it has itself produced, and therefore absolutely self-responsible — must not this demand, instead of being excessive, be part of the fundamental sense of genuine philosophy?” (ibid).

This Husserlian appeal to autonomy, like Kant’s, ultimately still has to answer to the critiques of Hegel and Brandom (see In Itself, For Itself; Autonomy, Normativity; Self-Legislation?). Nonetheless, it is a high point in the development of the human spirit.

Flying Man?

Back in 2019, I included the following in a tangent near the end of a longer post:

“The thrust of the famous cogito ergo sum was already anticipated in Augustine’s Confessions. A more detailed version was developed by Avicenna, in an argument known… as the “flying man”. He proposed a thought experiment, considering someone in counterfactual absolute sensory deprivation from birth, with the intent of asking whether awareness could be completely independent of sensibility. He argued that the person in absolute sensory deprivation would still be aware of her own existence, due to a pure immediate reflexive awareness intrinsic to the soul and independent of the body. This kind of claim would have been accepted by Plotinus, but rejected by Aristotle or Hegel. Medieval Augustinians, however, enthusiastically adopted many of Avicenna’s ideas.” Peter Adamson, a scholar of Islamic philosophy, has a nice short article on this.

What Descartes Proved

The Latin subtitle of Descartes’ Meditations advertises that they not merely assert but demonstrate the existence of God and an immortal soul. However, as noted in the Cambridge Descartes Lexicon, neither the word “immortality” nor “immortal” even appears in the body of the text. Descartes does convincingly argue that even in the very act of doubting everything, it is apparent that something is going on — that there is awareness or “thinking”, even on the extreme assumption that everything it thinks is mistaken.

“What then did I formerly believe myself to be? Undoubtedly I thought myself to be a man. But what is a man? Shall I say a rational animal? No, for then I should have to inquire what is ‘animal’, what ‘rational’; and thus from one question I should be drawn on into several others yet more difficult. I have not, at present, the leisure for any such subtle inquiries. Instead I prefer to meditate on the thoughts which of themselves spring up in my mind” (Descartes’ Philosophical Writings, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, pp. 203-204).

Descartes argues that bodily phenomena are not clearly “me”, but that I cannot separate myself from my awareness. “Thinking? Here I find what does belong to me: it alone cannot be separated from me. I am, I exist. This is certain. How often? As often as I think” (p. 205).

He makes a subtle transition from arguments about the indubitable existence of some awareness to arguments about something that has the awareness.

“What is a thinking thing? It is a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, abstains from willing, that also can be aware of images and sensations” (p. 206). Elsewhere he also includes love and hate. Using contemporary vocabulary, Gueroult calls this a thinking subject (Gueroult, Descartes, p. 40), a word Descartes himself does not use in this context. Descartes identifies it with his own view of the soul. Though Descartes thinks it is separable from the body and the world, he treats it as a concrete “me”.

This concrete me-thing is supposed to have some very strong properties. Descartes claims it is a substance — apparently in the sense of something underlying — and that we can know something is a substance without knowing it as a substance. Secondly, “Interior to the Cogito, consciousness [French conscience, which predated Cudworth and Locke’s English word] and consciousness of consciousness are identical” (Gueroult, p. 99, my translation, brackets and emphasis added). Thirdly, the Cartesian soul is supposed to have “infinite” free will.

On my reading, the earlier transition from the indubitability of the existence of some concrete awareness — which I take to be genuinely irrefutable — to the assumption of a “thing” that has the awareness, is only valid if the “thing” is strictly identified with the awareness itself. But if the “thing” is identical with the awareness we started with, then the transition to calling it a substance is not justified. Conversely, if “thing” does have strong enough meaning to justify calling it a substance, the transition from thinking to a thinking thing was unjustified.

The identity of consciousness and consciousness of consciousness seems to be a completely unproven and unprovable assumption — one that I think Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Ricoeur each convincingly suggest we should oppose. Gueroult quotes Descartes in a letter making the weaker claim that (contrary to what Locke would assert a bit later) the soul is capable of thinking of many things at once. If we accept this, that would make a simultaneity of consciousness and consciousness of consciousness possible in particular cases, but it still falls far short of establishing their identity.

Like many voluntarists, Descartes makes a leap from the much weaker claim that we make real choices, to the ultra-strong claim that our power of choice is completely unconditioned, and that divine omnipotence exempts it from the natural order altogether.

He argues at length that an omnipotent God is the necessary foundation of the razor-thin subjective certainty he discovered by introspection. The arguments about God are introduced as follows: “Those [ideas] which represent substances are without doubt something more, and contain in themselves, so to speak, more objective reality (that is to say participate by representation in a higher degree of being or perfection) than those which represent only modes or accidents; and again, the idea by which I apprehend a supreme God, eternal, infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and the creator of all things which are on addition to Himself, has certainly in it more objective reality than those ideas by which finite substances are represented.”

“Now it is manifest by the natural light that there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause. For whence can the effect draw its reality if not from its cause? How could this cause communicate to it this reality if it did not itself have it? And hence it follows… that what is more perfect, i.e. contains more reality, cannot proceed from what is less perfect” (pp. 219-220).

“By the name God I mean a substance that is infinite, immutable, independent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and by which I myself and everything else, if any such things there be, have been created. All those attributes are so great and so eminent, that the more attentively I consider them the less does it seem possible that they can have proceeded from myself alone; and thus, in the light of all that has been said, we have no option save to conclude that God exists” (p. 224).

Out of nowhere, we suddenly have an unexplained appeal to a fully formed late-scholastic distinction between substance, mode, and accident, and other scholastic reasoning about the superiority of causes to their effects. The implicit claim seems to be that these very particular historical formulations are universally given in intellectual intuition.

Descartes’ subsequent argument is literally that God is the efficient and total cause of everything, therefore He exists. Need I point out that only an existing being could be an efficient and total cause in the first place (assuming there is such a thing as a total cause)? And that the argument is therefore patently circular? Though still debatable, Anselm’s ontological proof and the various arguments of Aquinas were much more persuasive than this.

Plotinus, Augustine, and Avicenna all anticipated Descartes’ strong sense of interiority. What was relatively new in the metaphysics of Descartes was his narrow point about the otherwise empty certainty that “awareness exists”, but even that was partially anticipated by Avicenna’s “flying man” argument.

Cartesian Metaphysics

For Descartes, according to Gueroult, “metaphysics” is the universal science or the system of science, and also a kind of introduction to more concrete studies. Here we are far from Aristotle and much closer, I think, to the view of metaphysics in Duns Scotus. Without knowledge of God and oneself, Descartes says, it would never be possible to discover the principles of physics. Gueroult says that Descartes insists on an “incomprehensibility” of God that is neither unknowability nor irrationality but the “formal reason of the infinite” (Descartes selon l’order des raisons, p. 17). This again has a somewhat Scotist sound to my ear.

The infinitude of God puts God absolutely first, as the first truth that founds all others. Gueroult quotes Descartes saying, “It is a ‘blasphemy’ to say that the truth of something precedes God’s knowledge of it…, because the existence of God is the first and the most eternal of all the truths that can be, and the truth from which all the others proceed” (ibid; my translation).

Descartes says that God “freely creates” eternal truths. I have no idea what creation of eternal truths could even possibly mean, though such a notion seems to be at least implicit in the teaching of Duns Scotus. To be eternal is to have no before and after. Therefore, it seems to me, all eternal things must be co-eternal. This point of view accommodates part of Descartes’ thesis, insofar as if all eternal things are co-eternal, then an eternal truth would not “precede” God’s knowledge of it. In broadly neoplatonic terms, eternal truths could plausibly be regarded as aspects of the “nature” of God. I can also grasp the idea of truths following logically from the “nature” of God, but I suspect Descartes would either follow Scotus in arguing that God’s infinite power is not a “nature”, or follow Aquinas in arguing that God is pure existence and has no other “nature”. I don’t see how anything more specific can directly follow from either infinite power or pure existence.

For Descartes, though, God’s omnipotence “excludes the possibility of error” and “alone founds the objective validity of my intellectual faculty” (ibid). Descartes aims at “a total system of certain knowledge, at the same time metaphysical and scientific, … entirely immanent to mathematical certitude enveloped in the clear and distinct intellect, … in its requirement of absolute rigor. This totality of the system is in no way that of an encyclopedia of material knowledge effectively acquired, but the fundamental unity of the first principles from which follow all possible certain knowledge” (p. 18). Descartes’ doctrine is for him “a single block of certainty” (p. 19) that would be falsified by adding or removing any detail. All this seems way too strong to me.

Gueroult points out that Descartes wants to contrast an “order of reasons” with an “order of material”, as being more principled. However, unlike geometry, the total system of metaphysical reasoning for Descartes has “psychological” as well as logical requirements. Gueroult says it is for this reason that the Meditations best represent Descartes’ paradigm of rigorous analytic demonstration.

Granted that there is a clear “psychological” aspect to the Meditations, at this point I’m unsure what it means to relate that to the claimed rigor of the system. Moreover, adding a “psychological” dimension to what was said before about mathematical reasoning affects the very meaning of the claim of rigor. I think I understand what mathematical rigor is. I do not understand what “psychological” rigor would be in this context, but I suspect it may be wrapped up with what I would call extraordinary presumptions of absolute self-transparency and immediate reflexivity.

Gueroult on Descartes

Having been greatly impressed by Martial Gueroult’s two extant volumes on Spinoza’s Ethics, I wanted to challenge myself to get some sense of the detail of his magisterial Descartes selon l’order des raisons (1968). Sometimes called a “structuralist” in the history of philosophy, Gueroult systematically developed the fine grain of argument in Spinoza’s demonstrations, and here he does the same for Descartes’ Meditations.

Beginning with a distinction between understanding and explanation, Gueroult announces his intention to subordinate the former to the latter (p. 9). Here “understanding” is a sort of intuitive or imaginative grasp of the whole, whereas “explanation” develops the details in their interrelation. I am reminded of Paul Ricoeur’s great theme of the value of the “long detour”.

Gueroult says Descartes viewed “isolated thoughts” with a sort of horror. This is already interesting. I have long puzzled over Brandom’s treatment of Descartes as a proto-inferentialist, when Descartes has seemed to me on the contrary like an arch-representationalist who plucked “truths” out of thin air. Both Gueroult and Brandom take Descartes’ “method” very seriously. Brandom’s work previously set me on a path that led me to radically change my views of Kant and Hegel. Perhaps I’ll have to revise or modulate some of my judgments of Descartes as well.

For Gueroult, it is objective structures of argument that distinguish philosophy from poetry, spiritual or mystical elevation, general scientific theory, or mere metaphysical opinions. He says that even while “excommunicating” the history of philosophy, Descartes nonetheless formulated a good principle of reading, rejecting eclectic tendencies to pull out this or that idea from a great author, in favor of a systematic approach. Descartes is quoted saying the “precious fruit” must come from “the entire body of the work” (p. 11). This is an important complement to his one-sided insistence elsewhere on beginning with what is simple. However, Descartes is also quoted insisting that all conflicts of interpretation are due to shallow eclecticism and deficiency of method, and that wherever there is such a conflict, one side must certainly be wrong (pp. 13-14).

This insistence on univocal interpretation is one of my big issues with Descartes. It works well for things like geometry, but much less well for sorting out arguments about power or potentiality, for instance. Pushing univocal interpretation as far as it can go can be a very valuable exercise, but as soon as we leave pure mathematics, it also shows its limits. I think that while mathematical necessity can be understood as something we “ought” to recognize for a multitude of reasons, sound ethical judgment must in principle reach beyond what can be expressed with certainty by formal equations. Much as I admire a good mathematical development, I therefore think ethics is more fundamental for us humans than mathematics, and philosophy is more ethical than mathematical.

According to Gueroult, the seminal idea guiding all of Descartes’ work is that human knowledge has unavoidable limits due to the limits of thought, but within those limits it is capable of perfect certainty (p. 15). For Descartes, we do not know thought by things, but we know things by thought. As a matter of principle, we should doubt everything that does not come from the certainty of thought. We are thus offered a stark division between that which is supposed to be certain beyond question, and that which is vain and useless. I think this results both in a treatment of too many things as certain, and in a premature dismissal of aspects of human reality that are uncertain, but nonetheless have real value.

I agree that mathematical reasoning is capable of (hypothetical) certainty, but I contend that we humans live mainly on middle ground that is neither certainty nor mere vanity.