Tag: Dialectic

Living Well and Equity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here Aristotle anticipates Kant and Hegel.

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

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

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

This is the way that is neither innate nor arbitrary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gadamer on History of Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gadamer on Platonic Dialogue

“But a real conversation itself already requires one to attend only to the substantive intention of what is said and not to what the speech expresses, along with that, about Dasein” (Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, German ed. 1931, English tr. 1991, p. 42). This is from Gadamer’s first published book, which focuses on the ethical meaning of Platonic dialogue, but also implicitly addresses the broader human condition.

He is saying that in genuine dialogue, the concern of the participants is only with what is being said about the topic under discussion; with what should be said about it; and specifically not with each other’s character, intentions, or social position.

“A dialectical contradiction is not present when one opinion opposes another…. It is not a contradiction in the dialectical sense when another person speaks against something, but only when a thing speaks against it, whether it is another person or I myself who has stated this” (p. 44).

I still don’t particularly care for the use of “contradiction” in this sort of context. But the important point — that real life is full of tensions, conflicts, and ambiguities — is entirely valid. The tensions and conflicts of main concern here are not those between people or views, but rather those that are internal to the matter under discussion.

“Plato characterizes again and again the ‘substantive’ spirit (the spirit that is concerned with the facts of the matter) of the dialogical pursuit of shared understanding…. [It] can be summed up as the exclusion of phthonos. Phthonos … means concern about being ahead of others or not being left behind by others. As such, its effect in conversation is to cause an apprehensive holding back from talk that presses forward toward discovering the true state of affairs…. This proviso prevents the talk from adapting freely to the connections in the subject matter and thus prevents, precisely, an unreserved readiness to give an account. Someone who, on the contrary, answers aneu phthonou, eumenes, alupos (without being inhibited by the pain of an aggrieved desire to be right), is prepared to give an account ‘aphthonos‘ (in a manner that is not affected by phthonos)” (ibid).

Here we are at the heart of the matter, which has to do with Plato and Aristotle’s principled opposition to the Sophists, who (for a fee) offered instruction on how to verbally impress, overwhelm, dominate, and manipulate others, while calling it “virtue”.

A major aspect of what makes any participation in dialogue serious is that it not be “inhibited by the pain of an aggrieved desire to be right”. The “aggrieved desire to be right” has no interest in truth, or in what really is right. The Sophists’ techniques of domination and manipulation on the other hand cater to that aggrieved desire.

“Speech gives itself the appearance of having knowledge to the extent that it is able, through the seduction that is inherent in it, to secure other people’s agreement or to refute them. Thus it is characteristic of the way in which this apparent claim is carried out… to cut off the possibility of a free response by the other person. Thus such pretended knowledge takes the form of something that aims either at getting someone’s agreement or at refuting them. In both forms of such speech its function is not primarily to make the facts of the matter visible in their being and to confirm this through the other person but rather to develop in speech independently of the access that it creates to the facts of the matter, the possibility precisely of excluding the other person in the function… of fellow speaker and fellow knower” (pp. 45-46).

Overwhelming ways of speaking are an aggression against the possibility of dialogue and the aim of reaching of shared understanding.

“That this claim can represent only a pretended claim to knowledge is clear from the fact that to the talker, … what he says is not really important…. What is important to the talker is only his ascendency over contradiction. The claim that his talk makes to knowledge always presents itself as already having been satisfied, and not as yet to be satisfied by coming to shared understanding” (p. 47).

“Thus the concern about the ascendency of one’s logos obstructs one’s view of the facts of the matter, which point precisely through the refutation to an explication that makes progress, by taking with it and retaining what is revealed in the pros and cons” (p. 48).

“Part of the essence of such talk, therefore, is to avoid dialogue. It tends toward making speeches, toward makrologia (speaking at length), which of course makes it difficult to go back to something that was said” (ibid).

The essence of dialogue lies in what he here calls going back to what was said. Alternating monologues do not constitute dialogue, because they don’t “go back to what was said”.

“Insofar as someone who enters into conversation with Socrates thinks he has knowledge of what he is asked about, then, he cannot refuse the demand that he answer for it. The genuineness of his claim to knowledge is put to the test by this demand for accountability” (p. 51). “[I]n Plato’s historical situation there is a reason for the fact that knowledge is no longer possible as the wise proclamation of the truth but has to prove itself in dialogical coming to an understanding — that is, in an unlimited willingness to justify and supply reasons for everything that is said” (p. 52).

What wants to be called knowledge has to prove itself in a dialogical coming to shared understanding. True dialogue requires an unlimited willingness to answer questions and give reasons.

“But in that case everyone must also be willing and able to give an accounting as to why he acts and conducts himself as he does; he must be able to say what he understands himself to be…, at least insofar as he is able, through the logos, to understand himself in terms of something — that is, in terms of something that is not present at the moment” (p. 53).

Gadamer shares this “dialogical” ethic with Habermas and Brandom, while explicitly connecting it with Plato and Aristotle, as I have been seen to do across many posts. I am happy to find support from a major philosopher for the inclusion of Plato and Aristotle in this contemporary discussion. (Habermas had significant interaction with Gadamer, and Brandom cites Gadamer in Tales of the Mighty Dead.)

“Everyone must be able to answer this question, because it asks him about himself. Every Socratic conversation leads to this sort of examination of what a person himself is…. One must be able to say why one behaves in a certain manner — that is, what the good is that one understands oneself as aiming at in one’s behavior” (p. 54, emphasis added.).

Independent Things

Having just posted notes on Aristotle’s Metaphysics book Zeta (VII), I wanted to pause for some personal reflections. The hands-on engagement of putting together a textual commentary like that with extensive quotes always gives me a quality of insight into the material that I don’t get from just reading or re-reading a text.

One of the ways Aristotle stands out as a philosopher — to speak a bit figuratively — is his philosophically generous attitude toward not only living, “independent” beings, but ordinary “things” of all sorts. This carries over into his ethics.

Engagement in the world, approached the right way, need be no distraction from our essential concerns. Rather, for Aristotle it is a fulfillment of the “purpose” of the kind of beings that we are. He encourages us to cultivate a feeling of being fundamentally at home in life in the world, a feeling strong enough to remain ultimately unshaken by our emotional responses to events and circumstances. By contrast, Plotinus, for instance, though appreciative of beauty in all its forms, ultimately directs our attention both spiritually and philosophically away from the world and toward the One. Modern philosophers tend to view the world as inert matter for us to manipulate, not something with which we would feel kinship and a sense of belonging.

Hegel criticizes Kant for being “too tender” toward objects, but I feel that this and some other remarks are a bit lacking in interpretive charity, even though Hegel is deeply Kantian in many ways. In particular, I have a lot more sympathy for Kant’s notion of “things in themselves” than Hegel did.

Kantian things in themselves don’t exactly align with either Aristotle’s notion of independent things or with the what-it-is of those things, but they have relations to both, which may suggest an alternate way out of the Kantian “impasse” that troubles Hegel. What Hegel regards as an unresolved impasse in Kant in this area is the irreducible gap Kant sets up between knowledge and things in themselves. But Aristotle also says we do not have knowledge of independent things or their what-it-is.

We may have knowledge of their articulations, but articulations are only expressible in terms of universals (words with posited meanings that are applicable to multiple things), while independent things and their what-it-is are particulars. Therefore, for Aristotle too there will be a sort of Kantian gap between knowledge and independent things. I have praised this as a kind of “epistemic modesty”.

We have only experience and acquaintance with independent things, not knowledge. We may also dialectically inquire, interpret, and make judgments about them, thus reaching relatively well-founded belief, but we cannot know them, because they are particulars independent of us, while all knowledge (episteme) is discursive.

When it comes to the what-it-is of things as distinct from the independent things themselves, we have no experience or acquaintance either, but only the “long detour” of dialectic, interpretation, and judgment. This, it seems to me, is what Hegel’s logic of essence addresses. In the logic of essence, Hegel speaks to Aristotelian considerations, and I would now say more specifically that Hegel’s logic of essence explores more or less the same dialectical level as Metaphysics book Zeta.

Kant’s things in themselves seem utterly remote and mysterious to nearly everyone — I dare say much more so than the Aristotelian what-it-is. A historical reason for this is not far to seek. Kant’s intellectual formation was in the milieu of the Wolffian school, within which the small fraction of the works of Leibniz published in his lifetime played a leading role.

Leibniz developed the highly original notion of the “complete essence” of a thing, corresponding to the way God would know it — as including every true statement about a thing, including all the empirical facts applicable to its past, present, and future. Leibniz’ God is concerned with the totality of logical truth about a thing.

From the point of view of Aristotle or Hegel, this turn to the totality of logical and factual truth abolishes the distinction between essence and what is not essence. It thus effectively abolishes the more specific concept of essence and a “deeper truth”. An emphasis on complete essence also foregrounds something we could not possibly experience over the sensible independent things with articulable properties that we do experience.

For Leibniz, naturally enough, only God knows complete essences. Humans could not possibly know them. What I want to suggest here is that the reason the Kantian thing-in-itself is inherently unknowable by us is that it basically is a Leibnizian complete essence.

Because a complete essence is no longer a proper what-it-is that can potentially be distinguished from the many incidental facts about a thing, it is far less tractable to Aristotelian or Hegelian dialectic than a what-it-is that at least potentially can be so distinguished. A complete essence poses head-on what Hegel calls the “problem of indifference”, which plagued early modern philosophy. Among all the true statements about a thing, there is no clear way to pick out which would be more relevant to what Aristotle would call the articulation of what-it-is.

While Aristotelian independent things and their what-it-is are unknowable because they are particulars, they remain relatively tractable to dialectical inquiry, and are therefore not radically unknowable to humans in the way a complete essence or thing in itself would be. Certainly Aristotle seems to say more about them that is meaningful than Kant is able to say about things in themselves.

Hegel wants to abolish things “in themselves” — not at all because he wants to abolish Aristotelian independent things or their what-it-is, but because he objects both to the Hermetic isolation of complete essences from one another and to the problem of indifference that complete essences pose. He in effect goes back to Aristotle on this.

It is important to emphasize that the independence of an Aristotelian independent thing means it cannot be just an object of consciousness. It is supposed to be a reality in its own right. While this is not the only point of view we may adopt, the kind of deeper truth that Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel all seek is not to be found by fleeing the world and leaving such realities behind.

If we accept an Aristotelian revision of the Kantian gap between knowledge and what is, the gap no longer brings inquiry to a halt. Then the broadly Kantian view that there is a gap and the broadly Hegelian view that we can go a long way toward overcoming it can both be sustained. (See also Practical Wisdom.)

Next in this series: Toward Potentiality and Actuality

Aporias

“Aporia” is Aristotle’s Greek technical term used by many philosophers in English for what Sachs in his glossary to the Metaphysics calls an “impasse” or “logical stalemate that seems to make a question unanswerable. In fact, it is the impasses that reveal what the genuine questions are” (p. lv).

Book Beta (III) of the Metaphysics develops many such impasses. I take this as evidence of Aristotle’s extraordinary intellectual honesty and depth of insight.

Aristotle writes, “[T]hose who inquire without first coming to an impasse are like people who are ignorant of which way they need to walk, and on top of these things, …one never knows whether one has found the thing sought for or not. For the end is not apparent to this one, but to the one who has first been at an impasse it is clear. And further, one must be better off for judging if one has heard all the disputing arguments as if they were opponents in a lawsuit” (ch. 1, p. 35).

“About all these things it is not only difficult to find a way to the truth, but it is not even an easy thing to articulate the difficulties well” (p. 37).

For anyone who has been following recent posts a little, we have seen abundant examples of such challenging but fruitful impasses in the development of Hegel’s Logic. Those were not just some weird things that Hegel cooked up, but yet more evidence of Hegel’s profoundly Aristotelian approach.

Aristotle mentions a long series of such impasses related to the subject matter of the Metaphysics, including those about the nature and number of causes; whether causes are universal or particular; whether there are things beyond perceptible things; the status of mathematical objects; and whether there are causes that are independent of what he calls matter (or “material”, as Sachs calls it to help disambiguate Aristotle’s more “logical” distinction from modern physicalistic concepts).

“Furthermore, the most difficult question of all, that has in it the greatest impasse, is whether one and being, as the Pythagoreans and Plato said, are not anything different, but are the thinghood of things — or whether this is not so, but the underlying thing is something different” (p. 36).

“And there is a question whether the sources of things are universal or like particular things, and whether they have being potentially or at work, and in turn whether they are at work in some other way or by way of motion” (p. 37).

“But now if there are a number of kinds of knowledge of the causes, and a different one for a different source, which of these ought one to say is the one… being sought?” (ch. 2, p. 36).

“And in general, is there one or more than one kind of knowledge about all beings? And if there is not one, with what sort of beings ought one to place this kind of knowledge? But that there is one about them all is not reasonable; for then there would also be one kind of demonstrative knowledge about all attributes” (p. 39).

“But it is not possible for either oneness or being to be a single genus of things…. [I]f oneness or being is a genus, no differentia would either be or be one…. And on top of these things, the differentia are sources still more than are the genera” (ch. 3, p. 43).

“So from these things, it seems that the predicates applied directly to the individual things are sources more than are the general classes; but then in turn, in what way one ought to understand these to be sources is not easy to say” (p. 44).

“For if there is nothing apart from particular things, while the particulars are infinite, how is it possible to get a hold of a knowledge of infinitely many things? For insofar as something is one and the same, and insofar as it is present as a universal, in this way we know everything. But if this is necessary, and there has to be something apart from particulars, the general classes of things would have to have being apart from the particulars…. But we just went through an argument that this is impossible” (ch. 4, p. 44).

“Now if there is nothing apart from the particulars, there could be nothing intelligible, but everything would be perceptible and of nothing could there be knowledge, unless someone claims that perception is knowledge. What’s more, neither could there be anything everlasting or motionless (since all perceptible things pass away and are in motion). But surely if there is nothing everlasting, neither could there be coming-into-being. For there must be something that comes into being and something out of which it comes into being” (pp. 44-45).

“And an impasse no lesser than any has been neglected by both present and earlier thinkers, as to whether the sources of destructible and indestructible things are the same or different. For if they are the same, in what way and through what cause are some things destructible and others indestructible?…. But about mythological subtleties it is not worthwhile to inquire seriously; but on the part of those who speak by means of demonstrations, one must learn by persistent questioning why in the world, when things come from the same sources, some of the things have an everlasting nature but others pass away. But since they neither state any cause, nor is it reasonable that it be so, it is clear that there could not be the same sources or causes of them” (p. 46).

“[B]ut if there are different sources, one impasse is whether they themselves would be destructible or indestructible…. Furthermore, no one has even tried to speak about different sources, but all say that the same sources belong to all things. But they gulp down the thing first stated as an impasse as though taking it to be something small.”

“But the most difficult thing of all to examine, as well as the most necessary for knowing the truth, is whether being and oneness are the thinghood of things…. But surely if there should be some being-itself and one-itself, there is a considerable impasse about how there would be anything besides these — I mean how things will be more than one” (pp. 47-48).

“So it is necessary to raise both these impasses about the sources, and one as to whether they are universal or what we call particular. For if they are universals, they will not be independent things. (For none of the common predicates signifies a this but rather an of-this-sort, while an independent thing is a this….) So if the sources are universal, these things follow; but if they are not universal but are in the same way as particulars, there will be no knowledge, since of all things the knowledge is universal” (ch. 6, pp. 51-52).

Next in this series: Being as Such?

The Knowledge Sought

Following the emphasis of al-Farabi on demonstrative “science”, the Latin scholastic tradition treated “metaphysics” as a completed science. Some writers attributed such a completed science to Aristotle, while others, following in the wake of Avicenna, put forward their own improvements.

With respect to being, Aristotle himself speaks of knowledge sought rather than possessed. In inquiring about being “as such”, he is exploring a question given prominence by others. Far from claiming to have final knowledge of being as such, he highlights the ambiguity of “being”. There can be no “as such” — and hence no final knowledge — of an ambiguous thing.

This is not the end of the story, however. The very first sentence of the Metaphysics is “All human beings by nature stretch themselves out toward knowing. A sign of this is our love of the senses; for even apart from their use, they are loved on their own account (book capital Alpha (I), ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 1).

We are after knowledge of something. It is just not clear that that something would be accurately characterized as “being”, full stop.

“[A] sign of the one who knows and the one who does not is being able to teach, and for this reason we regard the art, more than the experience, to be knowledge” (p. 2).

“Further, we consider none of the senses to be wisdom, even though they are the most authoritative ways of knowing particulars; but they do not pick out the why of anything” (ibid).

“[T]he person with experience seems wiser than those who have any perception whatever, the artisan wiser than those with experience, the master craftsman wiser than the manual laborer, and the contemplative arts more so than the productive ones. It is apparent, then, that wisdom is a knowledge concerned with certain sources and causes” (p. 3).

This concern with sources and causes, with the why, is the true subject matter of the Metaphysics. This is emphasized again at length in book Epsilon (VI).

“Since we are seeking this knowledge, this should be examined: about what sort of causes and what sort of sources wisdom is the knowledge. Now if one takes the accepted opinions we have about the wise man, perhaps from this it will become more clear. We assume first that the wise man knows all things, in the way that is possible, though he does not have knowledge of them as particulars. Next, we assume that the one who is able to know things that are difficult, and not easy for a human being to know, is wise; for perceiving is common to everyone, for which reason it is an easy thing and nothing wise. Further, we assume the one who has more precision and is more able to teach the causes is wiser concerning each kind of knowledge. And among the kinds of knowledge, we assume the one that is for its own sake and chosen for the sake of knowing more to be wisdom than the one chosen for the sake of results” (ch. 2, p. 3).

“Now of these, the knowing of all things must belong to the one who has most of all the universal knowledge, since he knows in a certain way all the things that come under it; and these are just about the most difficult things for human beings to know, those that are most universal, since they are farthest away from the senses. And the most precise kinds of knowledge are the ones that are most directed at first things, since those that reason from fewer things are more precise than those that reason from extra ones” (p. 4).

For long I struggled with this last statement. How could a knowledge of first things be the most precise of all? In the Topics, he says that first principles can only be investigated by dialectic: “[T]his task belongs properly, or most appropriately, to dialectic; for dialectic is a process of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries” (Collected Works, Barnes ed., p. 168).

Some commentators — influenced by al-Farabi and the subsequent tradition’s overwhelming emphasis on the place of demonstration as opposed to dialectic in Aristotle — have considered it a puzzle or a defect that the Metaphysics and other Aristotelian texts do not seem to consist in demonstrations as described in the Prior Analytics. The answer is that the Metaphysics and the others generally do follow the model of dialectic articulated in the Topics, as the Topics itself says they ought to.

Returning to the Metaphysics, Aristotle has already stressed that the most universal knowledge is also the most difficult. Also, he standardly distinguishes between how things are “in themselves” and how they are “for us”. The knowledge of first things would be most precise in itself, not necessarily for us in our relative achievement of it.

To anticipate, I think the final conclusion of the Metaphysics will be something like “All things are ultimately moved by love of the good”. The qualification “ultimately” is essential to making sense of this.

(For Aristotle himself, all becoming and terrestrial motion are grounded in — though not in detail determined by — the entelechy or entelechies of circular celestial motion. The stars are a kind of everlasting living beings endowed with superior intellect, and are directly moved by love of the first cause. This might seem quaint to modern people. I find the love part beautiful in a poetic sort of way, but think Aristotle’s theoretical astronomy in general and his views of the special status of celestial objects have relatively little impact on interpretation of the rest of his work — particularly with respect to the teleology affecting earthly things and the discussions here in the Metaphysics.)

Plato says that the Good surpasses all things in ancientness and power. He represents Socrates as provocatively arguing that all beings desire the good, regardless of how confused they may be about what the good really is. No one deliberately and self-consciously desires what they recognize as evil. That is impossible, because it is logically self-contradictory. For the same reason, there also could not be a “principle” of evil. This is a tremendously powerful thought, of unparalleled importance for ethics. It sets a fundamental tone of charitable interpretation, in diametrical contrast to the kind of point of view that says those people over there are just evil.

Aristotle, however, says that Plato does not clearly explain the mode of activity of the Good, or how it acts as a cause. According to Aristotle, when Plato does gesture in this direction, he lapses into treating the Good as either a formal cause or an efficient cause, or both. But speaking in terms of formal or efficient causality loses what is most essential about the good — what many contemporary philosophers would call its normative character.

Aristotle considered his own contribution in this area to be a thorough account of how all things are ultimately moved by that for the sake of which, and of how the Good indirectly influences things just as that for the sake of which. This, once again, is what Kant called “internal teleology”.

After the horrors of the 20th century, many people have lost faith in the fundamental goodness of life. This is basically an emotional response. The indubitable factuality of horrendous evil in the world is not an Aristotelian or Hegelian actuality, and does not touch actuality. The factuality of evil does pose a roadblock for common interpretations of particular providence or “external” teleology, but not for Aristotelian or Hegelian teleology.

But how could a knowledge of first things be exact? We certainly don’t have knowledge of the first cause in itself. But coming back to my formulation “All things are ultimately moved by love of the good”, this does meet Aristotle’s criterion of simplicity: all things are said to be ultimately moved by one thing (even though more directly, they are moved by their own love of whatever they do love, which seems good to them within the limits of their understanding).

We have exact knowledge neither of the first cause in itself nor of the particulars we encounter in life, but perhaps we can after all have exact, certain knowledge that “All things are ultimately moved by love of the good”. This is the kind of thing I think Aristotle is suggesting. (See also Aristotle on Explanation.)

Next in this series: The Four Causes Revisited

The Unity of Aristotle’s Metaphysics

The anthology that the ancient editors of Aristotle’s manuscripts entitled literally After the Physics is the original paradigm for “meta level” inquiry in general. Medieval writers like Avicenna, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus took it as an authoritative treatise on Being.

The German classical scholar Werner Jaeger greatly influenced early and mid-20th century readings, with claims that apparently inconsistent statements in the Metaphysics reflected different stages in the development of Aristotle’s thought. Earlier, the Marburg neo-Kantian Paul Natorp had proposed that parts of the Metaphysics reflected an immature stage of Aristotle’s thought, and should be removed from the text.

The mid-20th century Catholic scholars Joseph Owens and Giovanni Reale, who both produced valuable major studies of the Metaphysics, were prominent opponents of these developmental approaches, emphasizing instead the dialectical character of Aristotle’s thought. My favorite translator, Joe Sachs, strongly agrees with them. Just because Aristotle says apparently conflicting things on the same topic is no reason to assume that he changed his mind.

That Aristotle’s thought is in general highly coherent ought to be clear to serious students. That it is highly dialectical is easy to establish. Aristotle frequently makes preliminary statements that are easy to grasp, and then substantially corrects them later within the same text. If we are serious about interpretive charity, we ought to try this sort of reading first.

But neither is its dialectical coherence proof that the Metaphysics, despite appearances, was originally written by Aristotle as a single work, structured in the order in which it has come down to us. The coherence of his thought is one question; the composition of the manuscript is another. Owens, Reale, and even Sachs tend to write as if the fact that it is dialectically coherent meant that the surviving text must be basically in the form in which Aristotle wrote it (but see quote below). This is also too strong.

Many different linear orderings of presentation may reflect the same underlying dialectical coherence, so the finding of coherence is not sufficient to establish that the order of the text is Aristotle’s.

Sachs notes that “Its first two books are both numbered one (with upper and lower case alphas)…. But in content, the Metaphysics begins over again much more than twice. Of its fourteen books, only books VIII, IX, and XIV are not new beginnings. The eleven sections of the whole inquiry are not set end-to-end like bricks in a row, but are woven together like threads in a complex design” (p. xv). “And there is no question that the composition of the Metaphysics was not a single act; the work is compiled from a number of separately composed pieces” (p. xii).

I like to imagine that my many blog posts are “woven together like threads in a complex design”, even though they were all written separately, and can be read in many different orders. If I were to turn them into a book, it would not consist of all the posts in chronological order, but would be thematically organized in some way. That is part of the art of editing. I do change my mind from time to time, but the great majority of differences in treatment of related topics have to do with differences in context, or different “places” in a more abstract dialectical development.

I see the various “sections” of the Metaphysics in the same way — as originally separate writings that nonetheless cohere, because the thought in them coheres.

What makes this question important is its relative effect on various points of interpretation. For example, I see Aristotle’s two brief discussions of “being qua being” as relatively isolated responses to what would be an important Platonic question that Aristotle himself decisively moves beyond (especially in books VI through IX), and thus as far from defining the subject of the Metaphysics as a whole. Even if the text were a continuous whole, the claim that the whole is adequately characterized as about being qua being ought to be viewed as at best highly contentious.

I very much like Sach’s top-level summary quoted in Long Detour?, which emphasizes not being qua being, but the dependencies of being on forms and the good.

Next in this series: Entelechy

Reflection and Dialectic

As with dialogue, reflection provides a kind of model for dialectic. Reflection can be understood as an either metaphorical or literal dialogue with ourselves. We “question ourselves”, which is to say we examine and potentially criticize or refine the basis of our own commitments. Further, actual dialogue is always implicitly dialogue among fellow rational beings, all of whom are engaged at least to some extent in their own reflective activity, just by virtue of being rational beings, so dialogue implicitly presupposes reflection.

Pippin quotes Hegel: “But at issue here is neither the reflection of consciousness, nor the more specific reflection of the understanding that has the particular and the universal for its determination, but reflection in general…. For the universal, the principle or the rule and law, to which reflection rises in its process of determination is taken to be the essence of the immediate from which the reflection began…. Therefore, what reflection does to the immediate, and the determinations that derive from it, is not anything external to it but is rather its true being” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, pp. 238-239).

And again: “In general, this means nothing but this: Anything which is, is to be considered to exist not as an immediate, but as a posited; there is no stopping at immediate determinate being [Dasein] but a return must rather be made from it back into its ground, and in this reflection it is a sublated being and is in and for itself. What is expressed by the principle of sufficient reason is, therefore, the essentiality of immanent reflection as against mere being” (p. 239).

In the first quote, Hegel is again emphasizing that what he means by reflection is not just looking in a figurative mirror, but rather something more like finding an orientation among (or building a synthesis of) the potentially infinite mutual reflections in a hall of mirrors. Reflection “in general” is a name Hegel gives to reflection with this kind of potentially infinite dimension. (That the infinity here should be called potential is my friendly Aristotelian interpolation.)

In the second quote, he is saying that this kind of reflection — lifted out from the distinction between reflective activity and what it reflects upon — is what he would call the “truth” of everything that appears to be immediately determinate.

The principle of sufficient reason as formulated by Leibniz effectively says that for everything that is in some definite way, there is a reason why it is that way. Hegel is saying more specifically that such “reasons why” emerge immanently from the reflective grounding of what he is in a nonstandard way calling essence. What Leibniz cannot show is how a particular essence or monadic point of view results in certain predicates and not others; despite great sophistication, he is still to some extent using essence and monads as unexplained explainers to avoid what Hegel calls the “problem of indifference”. Hegel on the other hand explicitly makes essence and explanation interdependent.

“[T]he ‘principles’ of identification and differentiation are deeply intertwined, not independent of each other” (p. 240).

“[A] thing’s determinate properties are not, cannot be, a mark of that thing’s unlikeness from other things, just by being those properties…. If one thing is red and another square, we do not thereby know one is unlike the other; they are just two different things. A locomotive has nothing to do with a melody; it is not unlike a melody. We are trying to account not for determinate otherness, as in the logic of being, but for how objects that share properties (are like) could be, even with an extraordinary degree of such likeness, still unlike” (p. 241).

“Some of this anticipates topics in the logic of the Concept. Two trees are alike in being trees but unlike in being two individual trees. The idea will be that just in their likeness, their way of being alike, that they are unlike (different trees), just in the way each distinctly instantiates ‘treeness’ that they are unlike. Such a different ‘way of being a tree’ is not another property but the way the tree-properties are ‘had’ by the individual” (p. 242).

“Hegel is thinking of the way in which the specifying work of ‘unlikeness’ cannot be a matter of individual properties, atomistically conceived, but unlikeness within likeness is best understood as some content, the unlikeness of which is strict, even within such likeness. Some charge can be both positive and negative; some number, 4, can be both +4 and -4; some quantity of money can be an asset and also a debt pending; some force can be attractive and repelling; some distance marched east is canceled by the same distance marched west, and all these are ‘opposed’ only within some common likeness” (ibid).

I find “either-or” language more appropriate to these cases than the “both-and” language above, but the intent is the same. The distinctions in each sub-case are concrete “opposites” applicable to some specific context, and each definable only in reference to the other. In each case, it is possible to abstract an indifferent thing being measured or assessed — “positive-or-negative-quantity” for the one, and “virtue-or-vice” for the other.

“The ‘world’s being contradictory’ means nothing more than that, as he says, virtue cannot be virtue just by being other than, different from, in comparison with, vice, but only by ‘the opposition and combat in it’ against vice” (p. 243, emphasis in original).

Pippin complicates the matter with this example, because “relative” seems to have a different significance in the context of virtue and vice than it does in, say, that of positive and negative numbers. But the intended point is a very abstract one about constitution of meanings that is common to both cases. Whatever the difference between the two “oppositions” (positive/negative, virtue/vice), in each case the two sub-terms are somehow measured or assessed “against” one another.

“Hegel is trying to specify how affirming contrary predicates (‘in opposition’) does not amount to a logical contradiction. That is the point of his discussion, to make this distinction, not to treat such oppositions as if they were logically contradictory and then to affirm them anyway. As [Michael] Wolff puts it, Hegel’s orientation… is not from sentence or predicate negation, but from developments in the understanding of negative numbers and from Kant’s defense of Newton on positive and negative magnitudes. In general, then, mathematical, not logical negation” (pp. 243-244).

This is extremely important. The status of negative numbers was still controversial in Hegel’s time. Kant and Hegel contributed to their acceptance. Hegel struggled to invent new language to distinguish ambiguous cases in his Logic and to say reasonable things about them, but readers (certainly including myself) have found his unique idioms very hard to follow. Most of the ink spilled over “contradiction” in Hegel has been based on fundamental misunderstandings. (See also Negation and Negativity.)

“To use an empirical example, if the question is something like ‘Why did the ball fall to the ground?’ we want to avoid two kinds of answers: ‘because whenever a heavy object is dropped from a height, it falls’; and ‘it is in the nature of heavy things to fall’. Doing so, avoiding these alternatives, will allow us to see that the relation between a ‘ground’ and ‘what it grounds’ must be understood as a dynamic relation, one whereby the determinacy of the ground and that of the grounded cannot be fixed in isolation from each other” (pp. 245-246).

He quotes Hegel: “But the being that appears and essential being stand referred to each other absolutely. Thus concrete existence is, third, essential relation; what appears shows the essential, and the essential is in the appearance. — Relation is the still incomplete union of reflection into otherness and reflection into itself; the complete interpenetrating of the two is actuality” (p. 246).

“The general point [Hegel] keeps making is: a strict separation of the two moments, and an insistence that the nature of an appeal to an essence, or to a causal law, or to someone’s reason for acting cannot be understood as punctuated moments on the billiard-ball model of causation, but involve a kind of unity, the development of a kind of unity, much closer (yet again) to Aristotle on energeia. This essential-being-as-activity, manifesting itself in its appearances, is what should count as ‘actuality’. This has the implication that many existing things have no actuality, are not really ‘anything’. A lump of dirt, a cough, a strand of wire” (ibid).

“The question for Hegel is the question of ‘actuality’, not ‘existence’, or the sensibly apprehensible, just as for Aristotle, the question is the ‘really real’, to ontos on.” (p. 247).

Pippin quotes from the Encyclopedia Logic, “The logical is to be sought in a system of thought-determinations in which the antithesis between subjective and objective (in its usual meaning) disappears. This meaning of thinking and of its determinations is more precisely expressed by the ancients when they say that nous [“intellect”, or thought in a non-psychological sense] governs the world” (p. 248).

Here “governs” is meant in a constitutive sense. The important point is that the “thought-determinations” here are indifferent to the ordinary distinction between a subjective “thinker” and an objective “thought content”.

In this context he speaks of “this dynamical relation, this Ur-relation of all relations” (ibid).

“I have tried to show in another book that the most important, most clarifying implications of this Ur-relation occur in Hegel’s practical philosophy, both in his account of human agency, and in the implications of that account for the practical theory of freedom in his Philosophy of Right and theory of objective spirit in general (ibid).

“[T]he full demonstration of the truth of this Ur-relation lies in what it actually illuminates, in the cogency and credibility of, for example, an account of agency based on it” (p. 249).

It was the outstanding (and very Aristotelian) account of Hegel’s view of agency in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy that first attracted me to Pippin’s work.

In his own idiom, Hegel says “thus the inner is immediately the outer, and it is this determinateness of externality for the reason that it is the inner; conversely, the outer is only an inner because it is only an outer” (quoted, ibid.)

Pippin comments, “He does not mean here anything as obvious as: when I do something, my ex ante intention is fulfilled and so becomes something outer, just as what was done, the bodily movement, counts as an action because it expressed this ex ante intention. The passage does not say that the inner becomes the outer, nor that the outer is the expression of the inner. It says: there is no ex ante intention except as outer. It is the outer. And there is no outer except as what must count as inner, nor that it expresses a separable inner. There is no such separation” (pp. 249-250; see also Hegel on Willing).

This concludes Pippin’s chapter on the logic of essence. Unsurprisingly, we have not uncovered any magic formula that would tell us which appearances manifest the essence in particular cases. Such a thing seems completely impossible to me; we should not expect to be able to find any general formula covering an unspecified collection of particulars. Any judgments involving particulars must in part at least come back to something like Aristotelian deliberation and practical judgment, which yield only particular results.

Nonetheless, in discussing the logic of essence we have ruled out some important classes of misunderstandings, and we have set the stage for the climax of Hegel’s Logic in the “logic of the concept”. The logic of the concept will take as a starting point the non-separation of “inner” and “outer” that has been shown in the logic of essence.

Next in this series: “The” Concept?

Foreshadowing the Concept

This will conclude my walk-through of the Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology. Here he gives an explicit anticipation of what he calls “the concept”, which will be a key term in the Phenomenology‘s successor work, the Science of Logic. Along with “idea”, “concept” for Hegel represents something that is already beyond the naive opposition of subject and object.

If we imagine the naive view of subject and object as a pair of distinct points, a preliminary analogy for Hegelian concept and idea would be a line between the subject and object points. This can be understood as including all the meaningful content of experience, and can be taken as close as you like to either or both endpoints, but does not include either endpoint. Then the inversion of point of view that Hegel speaks of between ordinary consciousness and the standpoint of his logic would correspond to the relation between seeing experience in terms of the static duality of subject and object, and seeing it in terms of “living” concept and idea.

He begins this part with some remarks about mathematics that are overall very negative-sounding. This is setting up for a contrast between mathematics as the paradigm of static “formal” reasoning, and the meaning-oriented, becoming-oriented “dialectical” reasoning he wants to promote. To put the negative remarks in proper perspective, it is worth knowing that he will devote nearly 200 pages in the early part of the Science of Logic to a serious and sympathetic discussion of mathematics that shows good familiarity with the leading mathematical writers of his day.

“As for mathematical truths, one would hardly count as a geometer if one only knew Euclid’s theorems by heart without knowing the proofs” (p. 25).

Here he repeats the important point that knowledge does not consist in bare conclusions or propositions.

However, I think he goes astray when adds that really, “The movement of mathematical proof does not belong to the object but is a doing that is external to the item at hand” (ibid). I would say almost the opposite: the appearance of externality between theorem and proof — the idea that theorems have a status of simple truth independent of their proofs — reflects the very same kind of error that he pointed out before in the separation of results from the development that produced them.

It is true that a mathematical proof viewed as an object does not consist in the kind of becoming of knowing that Hegel attributes to good philosophical thinking. To mix terminology from computer science and Aristotle, mathematical proofs are in principle “statically” evaluable; this means they do not depend on any runtime accidents. In Platonic terms, mathematical objects are “eternal”, and proof is a kind of strict unfolding of their essence that we can imagine after the fact to have been predetermined, even though we don’t see the full predetermination in advance.

Earlier in the Preface, Hegel has argued that in the genuine becoming of knowing, “accidents” play an essential role, just as I would say they do in any actual working out of Aristotelian teleology. The means is not irrelevant to the end to the extent that we care about the end’s actualization. Like Aristotle, Hegel treats the process of actualization as primary.

Thus he is right that the becoming of knowing that philosophy ought to aim at does not — and ought not to — follow the canons of mathematical proof. In philosophy, we learn as much from our mistakes as from our successes, but errors in mathematics do not present the same kind of opportunities for improving our wisdom. Mathematics is not philosophy but something else. It is not “conceptual” in Hegel’s sense that involves a kind of “life” and “self-movement” of the concept.

However, he goes on to say that “In mathematical cognition, insight is an external doing vis-à-vis the item at issue” (p. 26, emphasis added). I don’t find this to be true today, and think it was, if anything, further from true in Hegel’s day.

Surely the maximal externalization of human insight from proof would be today’s computer-based proofs. While it is now possible to produce purely symbolic proofs whose validity depends only on the syntactic rules of a functional programming language, and sometimes even to produce proofs in a fully automated way, the really big successes of computer-based mathematical proof in recent decades have involved automated proof checkers that eschew fully automated proof development in favor of “dialogue” with an insightful human. At least in the current and foreseeable state of the art, human insight is not at all external to the development of mathematical proofs, even though the checking of completed or partial proofs for errors can be fully automated.

I say that mathematics is not philosophy, but its practice is far from being the mindlessly formal “defective cognition” he makes it out to be here in the Preface. Mathematical objects including completed proofs are static, but I say that the doing of mathematics essentially involves the activity of human intelligence.

“[W]hat is formal in mathematical convincingness consists in this — that knowing advances along the line of equality. Precisely because it does not move itself, what is lifeless does not make it all the way to the differences of essence…. For it is magnitude alone, the inessential difference, that mathematics deals with” (p. 27).

Mathematics only deals with things that are in principle strictly univocal. Strictly univocal things lack “life” for Hegel, and are therefore inessential.

“In contrast, philosophy does not study inessential determinations but only those that are essential. The abstract or the non-actual is not its element and content; rather, its element and content is the actual, what is self-positing, what is alive within itself, or existence in its concept. It is the process which creates its own moments and passes through them all; it is the whole movement that constitutes the positive and its truth. This movement just as much includes within itself the negative ” (p. 28).

Philosophy for Hegel is especially concerned with actuality, and as with Aristotle, what is actual is not simply to be identified with what is factual.

“Appearance is both an emergence and a passing away which does not itself emerge and pass away… which constitutes the actuality and the living moment of truth…. Judged in the court of that movement, the individual shapes of spirit do not stably exist any more than do determinate thoughts, but they are also equally positive, necessary moments just as much as they are negative, disappearing moments” (pp. 28-29).

Here he is using “appearance” in a very different way from what Plato called mere appearance. It seems to be something like the concrete manifestation that is necessarily implicit in actuality.

“In the whole of the movement… what distinguishes itself in it and what gives itself existence is preserved as the kind that remembers, as that whose existence is its knowing of itself” (p. 29).

Previously, he said that the true is the whole. In this movement of self-knowing, which is quite different from being an object for oneself, the subject and object that are quite distinct for ordinary consciousness become interwoven.

“It might seem necessary to state at the outset the principal points concerning the method of this movement…. However, its concept lies in what has already been said, and its genuine exposition belongs to logic, or is instead even logic itself, for the method is nothing but the structure of the whole in its pure essentiality” (ibid).

The entry point for what Hegel calls “logic” is what I have glossed as being at home in otherness. For Hegel, logic is not about formal manipulations. It is a very non-ordinary way of looking at things that leaves distinctions of subject and object behind. The Phenomenology is supposed to provide a way into this perspective, starting out from what Aristotle would call the way things (ordinarily) are “for us” (see Otherness; At Home in Otherness).

“In everyday life, consciousness has for its content little bits of knowledge, experiences, sensuous concretions, as well as thoughts, principles, and, in general, it it has its content in whatever is present, or in what counts as a fixed, stable entity or essence…. [I]t conducts itself as if it were an external determining and manipulation of that content” (p. 30).

Ordinary consciousness regards things in the world as fixed, pre-known, and manipulable. It regards itself as somehow standing off to the side from the order of the world, and implicitly as able to act in complete independence from that order. It is “Cartesian”. The weakness of this point of view is progressively exhibited in the Phenomenology.

“Science may organize itself only through the proper life of the concept…. [D]eterminateness… is in science the self-moving soul of the content which has been brought to fulfillment. On the one hand, the movement of ‘what is’ consists in becoming an other to itself and thus in coming to be its own immanent content; on the other hand, it takes this unfolding back into itself, or it takes its existence back into itself, which is to say, it makes itself into a moment, and it simplifies itself into determinateness” (p. 33).

Hegelian rational “science”, sustained in otherness, examines a movement of “logical” unfolding and return that (unlike the unfolding and return in neoplatonism) occurs not in eternity but in worldly coming-to-be. The fact that the return occurs in becoming and in time gives it the form not of a simple circle but of an open-ended spiral that never literally returns to its origin.

“[S]cientific cognition requires… that it give itself over to the life of the object” (ibid, emphasis added).

In the main body of the Phenomenology, the Consciousness chapter shows the limitations of the ordinary view that we are wholly separate from the object, and the Self-Consciousness chapter develops a sharp critique of the attitude of the master who attempts to claim unilateral control over both objects and other people.

“[T]he stable being of existence… is itself its own inequality with itself and its own dissolution — its own inwardness and withdrawal into itself — its coming-to-be. — Since this is the nature of what exists, and to the extent that what exists has this nature for knowing, this knowing is not an activity which treats the content as alien. It is not a reflective turn into itself out of the content… [W]hile knowing sees the content return into its own inwardness, its activity is instead sunken into that content, for the activity is the immanent self of the content as having at the same time returned into itself, since this activity is pure self-equality in otherness” (p. 34).

Here we have a direct statement about what overcoming alienation ought to look like.

“Its determinateness at first seems to be only through its relating itself to an other, and its movement seems imposed on it by an alien power. However, … it has its otherness in itself…, for this is the self-moving and self-distinguishing thought, the thought which is its own inwardness, which is the pure concept. In that way, the intelligibility of the understanding is a coming-to-be, and as this coming-to-be, it is rationality” (p. 35).

Overcoming alienation is anything but the suppression of what is other. Neither is it a return to an original perfection. Rather, it consists in a non-ordinary sense of self that is not opposed to the other or to the field of otherness.

“Logical necessity in general consists in the nature of what it is [for something] to be its concept in its being. This alone is the rational, the rhythm of the organic whole, and it is just as much the knowing of the content as that content itself is the concept and the essence…. The concrete shape which sets itself into movement… is only this movement, and [its concrete existence] is immediately logical existence. It is therefore unnecessary to apply externally a formalism to the concrete content. That content is in its own self a transition into this formalism, but it ceases to be the latter external formalism because the form is the indigenous coming-to-be of the concrete content itself” (ibid).

In emphasizing the contentfulness of the concept rather than formal syntax as the true driver of logical necessity, he seems to be talking about something like what Sellars and Brandom call material inference.

“Although what is stated here expresses the concept, it cannot count as more than an anticipatory affirmation. Its truth does not lie in this narrative exposition” (p. 36, emphasis added).

Truth, once again, must lie in an extensive development that is never truly finished by us humans. This remark could reasonably apply to the whole Preface, but I am struck by the reference to the concept and by the place in which it occurs, just after an explicit reference to logic. Here he is looking forward not only to the main body of the Phenomenology, but even more so to what will become the Science of Logic.

He goes on to criticize “clever argumentative thinking” at length, and to contrast it with “comprehending thinking”.

“[C]lever argumentation amounts to freedom from content and to the vanity that stands above all content” (p. 36).

By Hegel’s high standards, any argument that assumes meanings are determined in advance at least tends toward the vanity and irresponsibility of what Plato and Aristotle denounced as sophistry.

Hegel wants to recommend instead that “This vanity is expected to give up this freedom, and, instead of being the arbitrary principle moving the content, it is supposed to let this freedom descend into the content and move itself by its own nature…. This refusal both to insert one’s own views into the immanent rhythm of the concept and to interfere arbitrarily with that rhythm by means of wisdom acquired elsewhere, or this abstinence, are all themselves an essential moment of attentiveness to the concept” (pp. 36-37).

Moreover, what plays the role of the subject of thought is not at all the same for comprehending thinking as it is for clever argumentation.

“[C]lever argumentative thinking is itself the self into which the content returns, and so too, the self in its positive cognition is a represented subject to which the content is related as accident or predicate. This subject constitutes the basis in which the content is bound and on the basis of which the movement runs back and forth” (p. 37).

He continues, “Comprehending thinking conducts itself in quite a different way. While the concept is the object’s own self, or the self which exhibits itself as the object’s coming-to-be, it is not a motionless subject tranquilly supporting the accidents; rather, it is the self-moving concept which takes its determinations back into itself. In this movement, the motionless subject itself breaks down; it enters into the differences and the content and constitutes the determinateness, which is to say, the distinguished content as well as the content’s movement, instead of continuing simply to confront that movement” (pp. 37-38).

Comprehending thinking “enters into the differences and the content”.

“[T]here is an obstacle based in the habit of grasping the speculative predicate according to the form of a proposition instead of grasping it as concept and essence” (p. 41).”

The form of a proposition is simply to be true or false. He may also have in mind the form of predication. Grasping something as concept and essence is treating it as articulable meaning to be interpreted, rather than as a mere thing to be pointed at.

“True thoughts and scientific insight can be won only by the labor of the concept. Concepts alone can produce the universality of knowing” (p. 44).

Facts and Incomplete Information

A modern notion of hard-nosed common sense is to appeal exclusively to positive facts. This is also a major basis of simplistic notions of empirical science. Serious scientific methodologies are more indirect, and quite a bit more involved.

From a broadly Kantian point of view that I think Plato and Aristotle would also endorse, all putative facts are really just assertions of facts, made by people. The validity of the corresponding assertions depends on the soundness of the reasons that lead us to believe them. Thus, regardless of whether our concern is ethical or scientific, it is always the quality of reasons that matters in assessing the validity of assertions.

The notion of a fair and objective weighing of evidence for or against an assertion presupposes that we symmetrically consider the pro and con, as Plato emphasized in his discussions of “dialectic”. But the simplistic bias for positive facts results in an inherently asymmetrical treatment any time we have to deal with incomplete information, because what putative facts we currently have in our possession is in part a matter of sheer chance.

In a fact-biased approach, if there happen to be insufficient facts in our possession to adequately support a hypothesis, the hypothesis is likely to be be dismissed out of hand as “speculation”, regardless of how inherently plausible it might otherwise be. We end up assuming something is not true merely because we cannot empirically prove it is true. This is independent of any other prejudice that may also enter into situations involving human judgment.

Once again, I want to recommend a prudent suspension or qualification of belief in cases of incomplete information, rather than active disbelief. (See also Debate on Prehistory.)