Empiricism and Voluntarism

“We risk serious historical distortion if we insist on piecing together a comprehensive moral theory from writings Locke never suggested should go together. He may not have had any such theory” (Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, p. 142).

“Locke frequently cites Hooker in the Second Treatise, yet, as his strong endorsements of Pufendorf suggest, it is better to take him to be working with the modern natural law framework than to be using a Thomistic view. His description of the state of nature is Grotian without being Hobbesian” (ibid).

For Locke, we humans are divided by money and religion.

“In the Second Treatise Locke refers to money, which, by making it possible for people to accumulate great wealth, also puts us at odds with one another; and elsewhere he adduces a strong tendency in all of us to hold views that naturally diverge greatly and to insist that other people agree with our own opinions on important matters such as religion. He does not appeal to original sin to explain discord” (p. 143).

Law aims to resolve these conflicts.

“Controversies among sociable beings seem therefore to set the problem that gives law its utility. Law directs rational free agents to their own interest ‘and prescribes no farther than is for the general Good of those under the Law. Could they be happier without it, the Law, as an useless thing would of itself vanish’. There is no suggestion here of Hooker’s Thomistic belief in our participation in the divine reason as the source of laws of nature, or of the idea that we all naturally work for the good of others as well as our own. Law does not show us our eternal roles in a cosmic harmony. It just limits our quarrels” (ibid).

Here we see Locke’s famous appeal to rational self-interest, which grounds his ethical naturalism. This is a very individualist view that we have not seen before in the current inquiry. Anselm’s “affection for justice” has no role here. There is not even a conception of the good of a community, only your self-interest and my self-interest.

“The reference to ‘general Good’ here should not mislead us. Locke is not adverting to a substantive common good. He is saying that law gives each of us what we want, namely security in disposing as we please of our person, actions, and possessions. He is at one with the Grotians in refusing to discuss the highest good…. It follows, Locke thinks, that there is as little point in discussing the highest good as there is in disputing ‘whether the best Relish is to be found in Apples, Plumbs, or Nuts’…. [T]he ancient question of the summum bonum cannot be answered in a way that is both valid for everyone and useful in guiding action” (ibid).

The reference to possessions here is decisive in this new stance. There are no innate principles, and conscience is merely an opinion. The best we can hope for in this life is a more enlightened selfishness.

“Locke promises a science of morality. To see why he makes the promise and how he thinks it can be carried out, we must look first at his attack on innate ideas in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, book I. Locke there specifically denies that morality has any innate aspect…. Since there are many ways other than reading what is ‘written in their hearts’ by which men can learn the principles of morals, there is no need to claim that the principles are innate in the conscience. Conscience is simply one’s opinion of the rightness or wrongness of one’s own action, and one’s opinions can come from education, or custom, or the company one keeps. People frequently break basic moral rules with no inner sense of shame or guilt, thereby showing that the rules are not innate. Finally, no one has been able to state these allegedly innate rules. Attempts to do so either fail to elicit agreement or else contain utterly vacuous propositions that cannot guide action” (p. 144).

Schneewind has already told us that Locke never delivers this promised science. But we have already seen a proto-utilitarianism in Cumberland, so I have little doubt that if it had been developed, it would have been based on a kind of utilitarian calculation.

“Locke’s points here are in accord with similar ideas in Hobbes, Cumberland, and Pufendorf…. [M]orality concerns laws and obligation, and these require concepts that can only be understood in terms of a lawmaker. The first lawmaker involved in morality is God. His ability to obligate us requires a life after this observable one, since it is plain that he does not make us obey him by rewarding and punishing in this life” (p. 145).

There is no place here for an attractiveness of the good, only a voluntarist emphasis on reward and punishment, and that only in the promised afterlife. This seems grim indeed. His individualism’s best face is an encouragement to think for ourselves.

“Underlying his many objections to innate ideas is Locke’s belief that God gave us a faculty of reason sufficient to enable us to discover all the knowledge needed by beings such as we are. It would have been useless for him to have given us innate ideas or innate knowledge. He meant us to think for ourselves…. We must therefore be able to reason out for ourselves what is required of us. To claim that a set of principles is innate is to claim that there is no need for further thought about the matters they cover; and this in turn is an excellent tactic for anyone who wants those principles taken on authority, without inquiry. But God could not have meant the use of our rational faculties to be blocked in this way. The theme of the importance of thinking for oneself is as central to Locke’s vision of moral personality as his belief that we are under God’s laws and owe him obedience” (ibid).

That God means for us to use our reason to think for ourselves is a worthy precept. It should be noted, however, that the “for ourselves” language does not really add anything. Insofar as we ever really use our reason to actively think, this can always be glossed as thinking for ourselves.

“We know that the Essay grew out of discussions concerning morality. In denying the topic any privileged place within the book Locke is underscoring the belief he shares with Hobbes and Cumberland, that moral ideas can be explained using the terms that suffice for all our other ideas and beliefs. There is no need for any separate faculty or mental operation as their source” (ibid).

This is the thesis of what is now called ethical naturalism. There are no Pufendorfian moral entities here.

“The divine law, the law God makes known either by revelation or by reason, is ‘the only true touchstone of moral Rectitude‘.” (p. 146).

Ours is but to obey, and otherwise to follow our individual self-interest.

“Willing, he holds, is simply ‘preferring of Action to its absence’. And preference, Locke holds, disagreeing with most of his predecessors, is not determined by our beliefs about what course of action would bring about the greatest good. If it were, no one would sin…. More importantly, we are not mechanically moved by our desires. We are free agents, possessing the ability to refrain from action while we consider the different desires and aversions we feel, to decide which of them to satisfy, and then to act on our decision. Only the person, not the will, is properly said to be free. The will is the power of considering ideas and of suspending and deciding on action, and it makes no sense to speak of a power as free” (pp. 146-147).

Unlike earlier voluntarists, Locke does not seem to hypostasize will as a separate faculty. The idea that it is the person and not the will that is free is a good one, though all the ambiguities of freedom still apply.

“Locke takes these considerations to show that the elements needed to explain our moral ideas — ideas of God, law, good, will, reward, and happiness — can all be obtained from data given by experience. We need no other ideas to build up our complex repertoire of moral concepts” (p. 147).

I don’t think the ideas of God and a divine reward come from experience. Moreover, this is a very impoverished list of moral ideas.

“It is a matter of considerable importance to Locke that moral ideas are complex ideas of the kind he calls ‘mixed modes’. They are constructed by us, not copied from observation of given complexes. They are not intended to mirror or be adequate to some external reality, as ideas of substances are. They are rather ‘Archetypes made by the mind, to rank and denominate Things by’, and can only err if there is some incompatibility among the elements we bring together in them. Consequently if we are perfectly clear about the moral ideas our moral words stand for, we know the real and not only the nominal essences of moral properties” (pp. 147-148).

This does seem more clear than Pufendorf’s invocation of moral entities. But while he does not use Pufendorf’s striking language of “imposition”, the claim that we need only be clear about the meaning of a few words to know the real essence of moral properties does imply something similar. What those words are is fairly well suggested by the impoverished list of moral ideas above. By this reasoning, morality is effectively an imposition because it is obedience to law, and law is an imposition not grounded on anything else. This also suggests the likely content of his easily achievable but never presented “science” of morality.

Locke himself says mixed modes are “the complex ideas we mark by the names obligation, drunkenness, a lie, &c….. That the mind, in respect of its simple ideas, is wholly passive, and receives them all from the existence and operations of things, such as sensation or reflection offers them, without being able to make any one idea, experience shows us. But if we attentively consider these ideas I call mixed modes, we are now speaking of, we shall find their original quite different. The mind often exercises an active power in making these several combinations. For, it being once furnished with simple ideas, it can put them together in several compositions, and so make variety of complex ideas, without examining whether they exist so together in nature” (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. I, ch. XXII, p. 381).

Schneewind says “Locke’s notion of mixed modes so helpfully fills out Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities that it might have been designed for the purpose…. Locke emphatically rejects any explanation invoking God’s immediate action on the mind. All mixed-mode ideas are our creation. They show our God-given reason doing what it was meant to do: providing us with the guidance we need through life” (Schneewind, p. 148).

Reason as a guide for life sounds like the Stoic criterion of right reason that was popular among the Latin scholastics. (Incidentally, Locke had someone translate his Essay into Latin to reach European audiences, and the term selected to render Lockean “understanding” was none other than the intellectus that was the subject of so much scholastic discussion.) This goes along with the salutary injunction we saw earlier, that we should think for ourselves.

“Consider some moral concept, such as injustice. It contains as a part the concept of property, which in turn is the idea of something to which someone has a right. ‘Injustice’ is the name given to the mixed-mode idea of violating someone’s right to something. It follows demonstrably that where there is no property, there is no injustice” (p. 149).

The reduction of justice to respect for bourgeois property rights and ethics to verbal definitions is horrible. I say that justice begins with the idea of fairness in relations between people, which is far more general, and more humane as well.

“Even if no virtuous person ever existed, it is still demonstrably certain that a just man never violates another’s rights…. But he never gave us the science of morality whose foundations he claims to have worked out” (ibid).

If we accept the stipulated definitions, this claim is true, though I don’t see that it has any value. This again strongly suggests that the advertised science consists in nothing more than formal reasoning about the meanings of a few words that are not even the interesting ones.

“In several places, moreover, Locke insists that there is nothing in nature that corresponds to our mixed-mode moral ideas. There can be nothing in nature, then, to set a moral limit to God’s will. If neither law nor nature can constrain Locke’s God, then Locke is taking the voluntarist position, that God’s will is the origin of moral attributes…. The possession of unlimited power merely enables God to be, at best, a benevolent despot, at worst, a tyrant. There seems to be a good case for Burnet’s claim that on Locke’s view the laws God has laid down for us are ‘entirely arbitrary’ ” (p. 150).

And there we have it.

“Locke does indeed hold that we are dependent on a being ‘who is eternal, omnipotent, perfectly wise and good’. He appeals to these attributes when claiming that a science of morality is possible. But his proof of God’s existence does not show that God is naturally good. Put briefly, the argument is this. We know that we ourselves exist, and that we can perceive and know. The only possible explanation of this fact is that we were made by an eternal most powerful and most intelligent being…. Neither in the expansion of this proof that occupies the rest of the chapter nor anywhere else in the Essay does Locke show how to deduce God’s essential benevolence. If the deduction seemed easy to him, it has not seemed so to his readers” (ibid).

“Locke’s view of how to demonstrate moral truths makes matters worse, because it suggests that there could not be a demonstration of a moral principle that satisfies his own standards…. It must not be trivial or vacuous, a mere verbal statement that does not enable us to pick out right acts” (p. 151).

That the just man never violates another’s rights is a tautology based on stipulated definitions. That is to say, it is precisely a trivial and vacuous and merely verbal statement.

“Although Locke says we must start our moral demonstrations from self-evident principles, he also says that there are no self-evident moral principles with substantial content” (ibid).

By Locke’s lights, this is not a problem, because he believes that morality depends only on self-interest and obedience.

“Locke’s moral psychology compounds all these difficulties…. An untrammeled ruler giving arbitrary direction to a selfish population seems indeed to emerge as his model of the moral relations between God and human beings” (ibid). “Some of Locke’s remarks in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) reinforce the rather grim vision of morality suggested by the Essay” (p. 152).

“Locke has argued that reason could have taught even those to whom the Jewish and Christian revelations were not delivered the crucial rudiments of religious truth. Reason could have shown, for instance, that the natural law requires that we forgive our enemies…. But as thus discovered and taught, the precepts would still have amounted only to counsel or advice from wise men about how to live a happy life. The precepts could not have been taught as laws that obligate. Only the knowledge that the precepts are the command of a supreme lawgiver who rewards and punishes could transform them into moral laws” (pp. 152-153).

Locke is justly celebrated as an early advocate of religious tolerance, but he reportedly excluded atheists and Catholics.

“It is not evident how this position can be made compatible with Locke’s view that God has given us reason enough to discover what we need to know concerning the things most important to us, morality and religion…. ‘The greatest part of Mankind want Leisure or Capacity for Demonstration … you may as soon hope to have the Day-Labourers and Tradesmen, the Spinsters and Dairy Maids perfect Mathematicians, as to have them perfect in Ethics by teaching them proofs of moral laws. ‘Hearing plain Commands’, Locke continues, ‘is the sure and only course to bring them to Obedience and Practice. The greatest Part cannot know, and therefore they must believe’ ” (p. 153).

I think the answer is plain enough. “Us” refers to the sons of gentlemen for whom he recommended the reading of Pufendorf, and not to Tradesmen or Dairy Maids.

“Locke makes it clear that he does not view God as a tyrant. He notes that to obey a king merely out of fear of his power ‘would be to establish the power of tyrants, thieves, and pirates’. To avoid charging God with tyranny Locke appeals to the principle that a creator has the right to control his creations” (p. 154).

The first part seems like a laudable sentiment, but the second part is not at all reassuring. Such a right recalls the Roman emperor’s “right” to treat everyone as his property.

“We do know from Burnet and others that his readers had more general worries … about his views on morality. Their worries arose from his voluntarism. And we can see how Locke’s political concerns could well have forced him into voluntarism and into the empiricism that is connected with it” (p. 157).

It is good to hear that people were worried about this. Schneewind’s wording even suggests that voluntarism might be more fundamental to Locke than his empiricism. Apparently some people saw legal positivism as a way to try to guard against the ravages of sectarianism.

“Locke was concerned to combat both skeptical doubts about morality and enthusiastic claims to have divinely inspired insight into it. All of the modern natural lawyers would have shared these aims. Both skepticism and enthusiasm work against the possibility of sustaining a decent and stable society. An empiricist naturalism seemed to Locke, as it did to Hobbes and Pufendorf and Grotius, the only response that could offer a scientific way of settling disputes and avoiding the deadlock of appeals to authority or personal preference” (pp. 157-158).

“Only voluntarism keeps God essential. But Locke’s theory of meaning then forces him to hold that only God’s power makes him our ruler. Nothing else can meaningfully be said” (p. 158).

“In 1675 Thomas Traherne published Christian Ethicks, a systematic if unoriginal exposition of morality. A devout poet and advocate of virtue rather than a thinker, he nonetheless pithily summarized a concern raised by voluntarism quite generally. ‘He that apprehends God to be a tyrant’, Traherne says, ‘can neither honour God, nor Love him, nor enjoy him’…. The combination of voluntarism and empiricism was taken to lead inescapably to a vision of the relations between God and his human subjects that is morally unacceptable” (ibid).

“Locke’s version of naturalism in ethics seems to many philosophers now to be misguided because it gets the meanings of words wrong. Traherne’s remark suggests that the problem Locke’s readers had with it was different. Their problem was that … Locke could not portray God’s dominion over us as resting on anything but his power and skill as creator. He could admit no difference in principle between God’s rule and that of a benevolent despot except at the cost of allowing into his scheme concepts that could not be derived from experience” (ibid).

“It was not the problem about proving the great law of charity, I suggest, that made Locke refuse to publish a deductive ethic. What did so was his embarrassment at his inability to give Burnet a satisfactory explanation of how we could even say and mean, let alone prove, that God is a just ruler…. Locke’s failure drew attention to the moral consequences of empiricism more forcibly than previous empiricist ethics had done. Hobbes argued for the elements of an empiricist ethic, but his epistemology was massively overshadowed by his extremely contentious political views, and his views on religion were in any case scandalous. His work therefore raised problems more urgent than any that might arise from a connection between empiricism and voluntarism. Pufendorf, though an empiricist, did not develop a general theory of the derivation of concepts from experience” (pp 158-159).

“With Locke it was different. Locke was more interested in the epistemology of natural law than in working out a code. As a result the connection between voluntarism and empiricism stood out more starkly…. Locke’s readers could hardly avoid seeing that if, like him, they embraced naturalistic empiricism about moral concepts, then they would be forced into voluntarism — unless they left God entirely out of morality” (p. 159).

Magnanimity and Its Opposite

When I hear “magnanimity” (literally “big-souledness”, in the ethical complimentary sense of “that’s big of you”), I think of its prominent place in Aristotle’s ethics, as the most comprehensive virtue of character. It is an expansive way of being, an uplifting and morally elevating attitude.

In the final few words of the introduction to A Spirit of Trust (2019), Brandom speaks of “a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all” (p. 32). Much later, his chapter on Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit concludes, “When recognition takes the form of recollection, it is magnanimous, edelmütig forgiveness. The result is the final form of Geist [Hegelian “spirit”, or ethical culture], in which normativity has the form of trust” (p. 582).

Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit are Hegel’s words in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology for what Brandom calls two contrasting metanormative attitudes. One possible translation of Edelmütigkeit is indeed “magnanimity”. An overly literal, etymological rendering of the two would be “noble courage” and “down-heaviness” (perhaps “putting down”, or “down-dragging”, or “dragging through the mud”). We could call them benevolent generosity and mean-spiritedness, or magnanimity and pettiness. The draft of A Spirit of Trust that Brandom first put on his web page around 2012 initially caught my interest largely based on this part of the book.

Hegel’s discussion revolves around the allegory of a valet or Kammerdiener (“room-servant”) to a great moral hero. In Hegel’s time, there was apparently a common saying, “No man is a hero to his valet”. The Kammerdiener‘s job is essentially to service someone’s petty personal needs. Even a great moral hero has petty personal foibles, which will be most visible to one whose job it is to service them.

Hegel portrays the Kammerdiener character as showing a mean-spirited disbelief in the genuineness of the hero’s virtue. In this it seems to me that Hegel anticipates Nietzsche’s later analysis of ressentiment. In Nietzschean terms, Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit are respectively an affirmative stance and a stance of what he calls ressentiment (French for “resentment”). A person with ressentiment tries to feel good by taking a diminishing attitude toward others. Nietzsche famously criticizes common notions of morality as really more grounded in ressentiment than in any positive value or virtue. He particularly interprets religious and metaphysical otherworldliness as grounded in a generalized ressentiment toward life and the world. But in Hegelian terms, Nietzsche himself takes a one-sidedly negative view of religion and most philosophy.

Writing before Nietzsche, Hegel in the Phenomenology sharply criticizes the otherworldliness of what he calls the unhappy consciousness (or better, an unhappiness and bad faith at the root of otherworldliness), for which everything in the world is as nothing compared to the infinity of God. But he also sees one-sidedness and a kind of bad faith in the Enlightenment dismissal of religion as mere superstition and priestly manipulation.

In Kantian terms, the Kammerdiener reduces the hero’s ethical stance entirely to her personal petty inclinations that have nothing to do with the greater good. The hero of the allegory we can see as a Kantian moral hero who is posited to act entirely out of high moral principle. In this way she is not unlike the ideal sage in Stoicism, who similarly is said to leave the equivalent of Kantian inclination behind.

It is important to recognize that for the point Hegel aims to make here, it does not matter in the least whether or not we believe that as a matter of fact a perfect sage or moral hero exists. The question is rather whether we acknowledge that there are some genuinely ethical or genuinely magnanimous actions.

The Kammerdiener takes the attitude that there are no genuinely ethical actions, that all human actions are really grounded in some kind of self-interested motive or other. The most generous and other-oriented acts imaginable can unfortunately be diminished in this way.

Brandom stirs things up by associating the ethical naturalism discussed in analytic philosophy (a reduction of ethical stances and normative attitudes to psychology or biology or sociology or other non-normative empirical terms), with the Niederträchtigkeit embodied by the Kammerdiener in Hegel’s allegory.

“Because objective conceptual norms are (reciprocallly) sense-dependent on the normative statuses of subjects, the niederträchtig reductive naturalist is wrong to think that he can deny the intelligibility (his reason for denying the existence) of normative statuses and still be entitled to treat the objective world as a determinate object of potential knowledge. ‘No cognition without recognition’ is the slogan here. Because normative attitudes and normative statuses are both reciprocally sense-dependent and reciprocally reference-dependent, the attempt to entitle oneself to talk about determinately contentful normative attitudes while denying the intelligibility and (so) existence of normative statuses is bound to fail” (pp. 580-581).

Or “no objectivity without normativity”, one might say. Cognitive norms that ground knowledge are ultimately a kind of ethical norms.

“Understanding the stances and the choice between them as a matter of adopting a practical commitment, as producing the unity it discerns, hence ultimately as a recognitive matter of community- and self-constitution, corresponds to the response Hegel makes to Enlightenment’s misunderstanding of the nature of the community of trust, on Faith’s behalf…. Understanding the edelmütig attitude as a practical-recognitive commitment that has always already implicitly been undertaken as a pragmatic condition of semantically contentful cognition and agency of determinate subjective attitudes), then, corresponds to breaking through the confines of alienated modernity into the form of self-consciousness Hegel calls ‘Absolute Knowing’ ” (p. 581).

Kant asks about the conditions for the possibility of knowledge and thought. Hegel asks about the conditions of the possibility of meaningfulness and agency, and finds that they require a particular kind of ethical stance. His “absolute knowing” is an ethical stance grounded in reciprocity, not at all the arrogant claim of an epistemological super power.

“At the first stage, in which necessity is construed as objective necessity, the norms are found. For normative statuses (duty, propriety, what one is committed to do, what one is responsible for doing) reflect and are determined by objective (attitude- and practice-independent) norms. In the middle, modern stage, in which necessity is construed as subjective necessity, normativity and reason must be made by our attitudes and practices, rather than being found. At the projected postmodern stage, finding and making show up as two sides of one coin, two aspects of one process, whose two phases — experience and its recollection, lived forward and comprehended backward, the inhalation and exhalation that sustain the life of Spirit — are each both makings and findings. In the first phases of an episode of experience, error is found and a new phenomenon is made. In the recollective phase a rational selection and reconstruction of an expressively progressive trajectory of phenomena in experience is made, and an implicit noumenon is found. Explicitating senses are made, and the implicit referents they express are found. The unity, the identity of content, that consciousness and action involve must be made, and the complementary disparity is found. Absolute knowing is comprehending, in vernünftig [expansively rational] form, the way in which these aspects mutually presuppose, support, complement, and complete one another” (pp. 581-582).

This reciprocity of finding and making that conditions thought and knowledge has the same shape as the reciprocity in ethical mutual recognition, and is grounded in it. “Absolute” knowing in Hegel is the actually modest recognition of reciprocity in the constitution of things, of meaning, and of value.

Rorty’s Pragmatism

We’re in the middle of Robert Brandom’s recent Spinoza lectures, published as Pragmatism and Idealism (2022). He has been situating the work of his teacher Richard Rorty (and implicitly his own as well) in the context of 20th-century philosophy in the English-speaking world. Rorty aimed to revive the minority tradition of American pragmatism, which historically adopted a number of insights from Kant and Hegel, upon which Brandom aims to further expand. Rorty wanted to question standard received views of experience and representation. Brandom has been contrasting pragmatist views of the philosophy of science with the mid-20th century orthodoxy of logical empiricism.

“[E]xperience is not an input to the process of learning. Experience is the process of learning” (Pragmatism and Idealism, p. 23, emphasis in original).

“The rationality of science is best epitomized not in the occasion of the theorist’s sudden intellectual glimpse of some aspect of the true structure of reality, but in the process by which the skilled practitioner coaxes usable observations by experimental intervention, crafts theories by inferential postulation and extrapolation, and dynamically works out a more or less stable but always evolving accommodation between the provisional results of these two enterprises. The distinctive pragmatist shift in imagery for the mind is not from mirror to lamp, but from telescope and microscope to flywheel governor” (ibid).

Brandom has also been diagnosing inherent conflicts within the tradition of logical empiricism.

“A threatening and recalcitrant tension accordingly concerned how to proceed when respect for the deliverances of science as the measure of what there is and how it is in nature collides with empiricist strictures on when we are entitled to claim to know what there is and how it is. Otto Neurath thought that naturalism should prevail, while Moritz Schlick thought that empiricism should. Rudolph Carnap struggled mightily to keep the two wings of the movement from flying off in different directions. In spite of his many pragmatist corrections to and emendations of his hero Carnap, Quine could never bring into harmony his own scientific naturalism and residual empiricist hostility to modality” (pp. 25-26).

It is in this context that Rorty calls for a revival of pragmatism. More than Rorty himself, Brandom brings out the Kantian and Hegelian background of the pragmatist alternative.

“Rorty’s call for a second pragmatist Enlightenment, completing the first, is a Hegelian extrapolation of the original Kantian understanding of the Enlightenment, extending the application of that concept from ethics to encompass also semantics and epistemology. Further on, I will say more about what makes it Hegelian, and what difference that step beyond Kant makes. But first it is worth filling in the argument behind this subsumption of semantic anti-representationalism under the banner of humanistic Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism. In its largest structure, I think it consists of two moves: a Kantian appreciation of the normative character of representational relations, and a Hegelian social pragmatism about normativity in general” (p. 30, emphasis in original).

Here we are at the core of Brandom’s work on Kant and Hegel. It is fascinating to see how much of this he attributes to Rorty. This is a nice capsule account. (I’m still wary of the extremely compressed term “social pragmatism”, which presupposes a much more elaborate understanding like the one he is developing.)

“The first [of the two moves Brandom attributes to Rorty] is part and parcel of Kant’s radical recasting of Descartes’s division of things into minds and bodies in terms of the distinction between norms and causes. Kant reconceives discursive intentionality (apperception or sapience) as a normative phenomenon. What principally distinguishes judgments and intentional actions from the responses of merely natural creatures is their normative status” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This has huge significance. In language compatible with modern notions of cause, discourse around the notion of normativity seems able to express all practical matters of mind or spirit. This was a great problem with which the early moderns mightily struggled.

“Knowers and agents are responsible for how they take things to be and make things to be. Candidate knowings and doings express commitments as to how things are or shall be. They are exercises of a distinctive kind of authority: the authority to commit oneself, to make oneself responsible. This is the authority to bind oneself by rules in the form of the concepts discursive beings apply in judging and intending. Merely natural creatures are bound by rules in the form of laws of nature. Discursive beings are bound by rules they bind themselves by: concepts they apply, which are rules determining what they have thereby made themselves responsible to and for. Their normative statuses (responsibility, commitments) are instituted by their attitudes of undertaking or acknowledging these commitments” (pp. 30-31, emphasis in original).

Brandom is literally reinventing the notion of authority. This is not some power emanating from a central source, but the authority of all rational beings to undertake commitments and responsibilities just by binding themselves to those commitments and responsibilities. This is a version of Kantian autonomy.

At the same time Brandom appeals to Kant’s provocative, non-representationalist suggestion that concepts should be thought of as a kind of rules.

He continues, “Autonomy is the essence of Kantian rationality. It is a distinctive normative sort of freedom, which Kant develops by turning Rousseau’s definition of freedom — [Rousseau] says ‘obedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom’ — into a criterion for genuinely normative bindingness” (p. 31).

The autonomy of reason means that reason is not subordinated to any unquestioned assumptions. Its exercise is free.

I have long puzzled over Kant and Hegel’s enthusiasm for Rousseau, who has usually seemed to me like an anti-rationalist voluntarist, with his emphasis on will rather than reason. I also tend to viscerally reject social contract theory, as a vulgar business-transaction metaphor for considerations that ought to be treated in more comprehensively ethical terms. But this particular formulation does seem to have a more specific relation to Kantian autonomy. “Obedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself” implies a strong consistency, which Brandom elsewhere relates to the Kantian meta-goal of unity of apperception. A delicate question that arises here is whether the mythical founding moment of such obedience is taken to be arbitrary, or rather on the contrary is subject to the same conditions of Socratic questioning as everything else.

“I think that in his later critique of representationalism in semantics on the basis of a more thoroughgoing and general version of Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism, Rorty follows Hegel in focusing on the rulishness of Kant’s conception of representation. For Hegel reads Kant as offering a normative concept of representation, as a way of filling in his normative conception of intentionality. Kant dug down below Cartesian epistemological concerns about the warrant for our confidence in the success of our representational undertakings to uncover the underlying semantic understanding of representational purport they presuppose” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Despite his emphasis on autonomy, Kant is very much a philosopher of rules and law, who emphasizes the nomos (law or custom) in autonomy. From Hegel’s point of view, this is partly a strength and partly a weakness. Kant sees formalism as a safeguard against arbitrariness, and implicitly expects it to be deployed in a reasonable way. Hegel recognizes this, but also thinks that every formalism will eventually go wrong.

Brandom continues, “Where Descartes takes for granted the representational purport of our thought (construing it as something we immediately know, just by having thoughts at all) — their being, in his phrase, tanquam rem, ‘as if of things’ — Kant asks what it is about our thoughts in virtue of which they so much as seem to represent something else, purport to point beyond themselves to something they are of or about” (pp. 31-32).

Descartes and many others take the contents of thought and their apparent meanings for granted. Kant and Hegel and the pragmatists do not.

“One lesson that Hegel learns from Kant, as I understand him, is that a representing is responsible to what it represents for assessments of its correctness, in a distinctive sense. What is represented exercises authority over what count as representings of it just in virtue of its serving as a standard those representings are responsible to for such assessments of correctness (as representings). This is a radical reconceptualization of the representational relations between representeds and representings as a normative relation of authority and responsibility” (p. 32, emphasis in original).

Here Brandom lays the ground for a response to Rorty’s rejection of the “authority” of Reality with a capital R. For Brandom, genuine authority is not something imposed on us from above, but something in which we too participate from a ground level. And representation is not just a matter of fact, but something we do well or poorly, and thus something subject to normative appraisal.

“Pragmatism in this sense is the claim that normative statuses — paradigmatically responsibility or authority, commitment or entitlement — are always and everywhere features of the role something plays in social practices. Norms are creatures of our practices, instituted by our practical attitudes: how we take or treat things. Apart from their involvement in such practices, there are no normative proprieties, only natural properties” (p. 32, emphasis in original).

Brandom here implicitly associates pragmatism with the Kantian thesis of the primacy of “practical” reason. Kantian practical reason is ethical reason.

Pragmatism has commonly been presented as continuing something like the spirit of the British utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. The utilitarians certainly have ethical concepts of their own, but they are “ethical naturalists” who ultimately explain ethics in terms of utility or pleasure.

Kant’s thesis of the primacy of practical reason, especially as radicalized by Brandom, goes in the opposite direction. It makes value judgment the root of all other judgment, including judgment of ordinary facts. Questioning about the good comes before any conclusions about the real or the true in the constitutive order of things. I think Plato and Aristotle would both endorse this.

“This is a social, Hegelian version of a central enlightenment idea. Samuel Pufendorf theorized about what he called the ‘imputation’ of normative characteristics of things: the way they acquire this new sort of normative significance by playing a suitable role in our practices. Social contract theories of political obligation looked for the origin of normative statuses of political authority and responsibility in practical attitudes of contracting and consenting. By contrast to traditional ideas of an objective natural or supernatural order of normative superiority and subordination (the scala naturae, the Great Chain of Being), the modern idea is that there were no statuses of authority and responsibility, no superiors and subordinates, until we started taking or treating each other as authoritative and responsible, as entitled to command and obliged to obey” (pp. 32-33, emphasis in original).

Pufendorf played a major role in the development of the notion of a social contract, and early modern secular theories of “natural law”. He was a political voluntarist, and a defender of absolute sovereignty in the tradition of Bodin and Hobbes. But Brandom points out that Pufendorf also sought to explain normative significances in terms of roles in social practice. (Any serious thinker ought to be embarrassed at the prospect of defending sheer arbitrary will, so it is not surprising that voluntaristic political theorists ended up tempering their voluntarism.)

Now we come back to Rorty and Cartesian representationalism.

“The answer [Rorty] eventually came to, starting off with the rough, popular characterization of ‘privacy’ and ending with the substantially more focused notion of ‘incorrigibility’, was in explicitly normative terms. The key, he came to see, is a distinctive kind of first-person authority. Sincere contemporaneous first-person reports count as reports of mental occurrences just in case and insofar as they have a distinctive kind of un-overrideable epistemic authority. We can’t be either wrong about or ignorant of how things sensuously seem to us, or about what we are currently thinking, in the sense that no-one else’s claims about our experience have the social significance of decisive objections to our sincere first-person avowals” (pp. 33-34).

For this, Brandom cites articles by Rorty from 1965 and 1970. Incorrigibility is central to Brandom’s own account of Descartes. At a certain level, the argument does seem to be irrefutable. But it doesn’t seem to do much for knowledge, since what is thereby determined to be in a way incorrigible is just a certain seeming or appearing. I cannot be mistaken about how things seem to me. Everyone is an uncontestable authority on their own subjective feeling, and this has relevance in ethical contexts. But, needless to say, this incorrigibility does not extend to our beliefs about how things actually are. This is an important practical distinction in ethical contexts. You are the incontestable authority on how things seem to you. But the moment you make claims about what is true in the real world, you become responsible to answer questions and doubts about those claims.

Brandom seems to be suggesting that a broadly Cartesian concept of the mental can be retained, provided that we reinterpret it in terms of normativity rather than supposed facts of consciousness.

“Understanding minds in the Cartesian sense accordingly shows up as the task of understanding the nature of that authority. One option is that the authority should be understood as a natural, objective, ontological feature of mental phenomena. But Rorty has learned from the later Wittgenstein to be suspicious of this idea. Normative statuses, he thinks, must ultimately be understood as social statuses. (This is the positive, Hegelian, pragmatist lesson Rorty learns from Dewey.)” (p. 34).

“[Rorty thinks] social practices of according such authority to reports changed. Descartes both theoretically reflected and practically encouraged modern practical attitudes of taking or treating sincere first-person reports of contemporaneous mental events as having incorrigible authority. That change in normative attitudes brought into existence a new ontological category of thing: mental episodes as incorrigibly knowable by their possessors” (ibid).

“According to Rorty’s radicalized version of social pragmatism about norms, the very idea of objective things as exercising epistemic authority over our attitudes — underwritten by the semantic idea of representeds serving as normative standards for assessments of the correctness of what count as representings of them just in virtue of being responsible to them for such assessments — is deeply and irremediably confused. All authority is in the end communal authority. Further, as we shall see, the critical function of reason as legitimating norms, as understood by the Enlightenment and made most fully explicit by Kant, teaches that we can only be genuinely responsible to each other, to what we can engage with in conversation, to what we can give justifying reasons to and in turn demand justifying reasons from” (pp. 36-37).

“This radicalization of social pragmatism about norms is now explicitly construed in political terms of freedom and dignity. ’Only in a democratic society which describes itself in pragmatist terms, one can imagine Dewey saying, is the refusal to countenance any authority save that of consensus reached by free inquiry complete'” (p. 37).

“The incipient pragmatist emancipation Rorty is working toward is the substitution of a pragmatics of consensus for the semantics of representation. All we can do is give and ask for reasons with each other. Authority and responsibility are creatures of those discursive practices. We should accordingly reject the idea that our discursive practices answer to, are responsible to, need to acknowledge the authority of, anything outside those practices and the practical attitudes of those who engage in them. The constraint of the objective world should be understood as exclusively causal, not normative. We are normatively constrained only by our reasons” (p. 38, emphasis in original).

“Like his hero Dewey, Rorty never questioned the utility and importance of a basically ecological concept of reality…. This is the stubborn, recalcitrant reality that causally constrains, challenges, frustrates, and rewards our practical undertakings” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Rorty’s critique of representationalism is founded not on denying or ignoring the causal context in which our talk takes place…, but precisely on a hard-headed insistence and focus on that context” (p. 39).

“Rorty sees Dewey as having usefully added an emphasis on the social character of practices that transcend individual learning processes. At this level, the ‘habits’ that are cyclically shaped by ecological-adaptational causal interactions with the environment are in the first instance social practices. Rorty takes it that this broadened social naturalism (a ‘second-nature naturalism’ as per McDowell in Mind and World) is endorsed also by the later Wittgenstein and the Heidegger of Division One of Being and Time. And Rorty himself goes beyond even Dewey, in making common cause with Wittgenstein in further focusing on specifically discursive practices” (p. 40).

“Rorty sometimes seems to draw the lesson that we should do pragmatics instead of semantics (which he identifies with appeals to the notions of truth and representation), study use rather than meaning. When talking this way, he is following the later Wittgenstein (who recoils from his semantics-only Tractarian view to a pragmatics-only approach), James, and Dewey, but not Pierce, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson. They should be understood as pursuing pragmatics-first, rather than semantics-first explanatory strategies, but not as trading the traditional neglect of pragmatics by the representationalist semantic tradition for a corresponding pragmatist dismissal of semantics holus bolus” (pp. 41-42).

“He does have views about meaning. But he thinks we should understand it in terms of justificatory practices rather than a notion of truth understood in terms of representation” (p. 42).

I for one understand ethical truth in terms of such justificatory practices. I also recognize poetic truth that is neither representational nor justificatory, but nonetheless significant.

Virtue Not a Potential

I picked up L’excellence de la vie especially for the early essay of Gwenaëlle Aubry, “Actuality and Potentiality in Aristotelian Ethics” (my translation). Here she makes a number of important distinctions. Contrary to some modern interpretations, Aristotle’s natural teleology and values-first approach to ultimate philosophical questions do not lead to what 20th century philosophers called ethical naturalism, or to any kind of nature-based elitism. I’ve been assuming this all along, but it is good to spell out the argument.

Virtue can sound like the optimal realization of a healthy nature, but for Aristotle it is actually a kind of habit, so it cannot be straightforwardly natural. In Nicomachean Ethics book 2 chapter 1, Aristotle points out that we can throw a stone up in the air a thousand times, but this doesn’t change its natural tendency to fall back to the ground. One may be born with a penchant for courage, justice, or temperance, but for these qualities to become true virtues requires the engagement of reason and what Aubry calls the “transcendental” intellectual virtue of practical judgment (phronesis). Virtue is not an unevenly distributed innate talent, but a result of extensive practice that is available to all. It requires effort and “seriousness”.

If biological nature itself is shaped by implicit ends, what distinguishes human ethical development? “[T]he position of Aristotle is clear: virtue is not natural, but neither is it contrary to nature” (Aubry, p. 78, emphasis in original). Here we are in the territory of what the commentary tradition called “second nature”. Virtue for Aristotle is an acquired disposition. This rules out the notion that it is just the unfolding of something innate. Aubry says that ethical practice is a mediation between nature and something beyond nature. Before the fact, Aristotle evicts both naturalism and supernaturalism, in the way that these are commonly understood.

According to Aubry, in the ethical domain Aristotle’s standard notion of potentiality is subject to a triple modification. First, the goal of virtue is not to “be all you can be”. It is selective. Only the “definitional” potentiality of the human — to be what makes us properly human — is involved in virtue. Second, one only becomes fully human under the condition of actively choosing what one is essentially. “If everyone tends naturally toward the good, no one is naturally virtuous” (p. 79). Third, virtue can only be actualized in the context of a free exercise of reason.

“Virtue, albeit a necessary condition for the actualization of the definitional potentiality of the human, is not itself a potentiality” (p. 81). She quotes Aristotle in book 2 chapter 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics, “It is neither by nature nor against nature that the virtues are born in us, but nature has given us the capacity to receive them, and this capacity is brought to maturity by habit [hexis]” (p. 82). And again from the same, “All that we have naturally, we receive first in a state of potentiality, and it is later that we manifest it in act, as is clear in the case of the sensory faculties…. For the virtues on the contrary, their possession presupposes a previous exercise, as is the case for the other arts” (p. 83).

Aubry notes that this might seem like a vicious circle: it is necessary to act well to become capable of acting well. And in avoiding naturalism, have we replaced it with the opposite excess of a pure imposition? But this is artificial, and resembles the false paradoxes of learning. To be a good musician, one must play an instrument well, and one learns this through repeated practice. To become virtuous, one “practices” doing the right thing in the right way.

Moral Faith Is Not Dualism

Leading Kant scholar Allen Wood argues in the front matter to his early work Kant’s Moral Religion (1970) that previous mainstream interpretation of Kant was mistaken in treating his views on religion as a weak point of his philosophy. This post is limited to Wood’s valuable orienting remarks in the preface and introduction, so it won’t get to the core of what Kantian moral faith is supposed to be.

According to Wood, Kant’s own concern with very detailed argument has led interpreters to focus on these details to the detriment of a broad view of the outlines of his philosophy as a whole, in which the as yet unelaborated notion of “moral faith” will be of fundamental importance. He aims to recover such a broad view.

(It was Brandom’s original synoptic suggestion of similarly broad outlines cutting across the theoretical and practical parts of Kant’s philosophy that first led me to radically re-assess my previous very negative view of Kant, which had been based on negative remarks in Hegel and Nietzsche and my own earlier lost-in-the-details reading of Kant himself. See Kantian Intentionality; Kantian Freedom.)

For Wood, Kant’s philosophy is at root a philosophy of human self-knowledge in the Socratic tradition. He disagrees with those who have found an irreconcilable (and untenable) dualism at the heart of Kant’s thought.

“The ‘dualism’ in Kant’s view of human nature arises because human activity in all its forms is at once subject to the necessary principles of man’s reason and to the inevitable limitations of his finitude. Humanity for Kant is not composed of ‘two irreconcilable natures’, but there does appear throughout the critical philosophy a kind of irreconcilable tension between man’s rational destination and the finitude within which his reason is destined to operate. This tension, in Kant’s view, is the destiny of man as such, and defines the problems which confront human existence” (Kant’s Moral Religion, p. 3).

To be finite for Kant, according to Wood, is to be subject to the conditions of sensibility. Sensibility constrains the kind of intuitions that we can possibly have. What are called the conditions of sensibility are not just empirical facts, but have to do with the kind of beings we are. Kant asserts that we are beings that have a “blind” sensory intuition of being affected in this or that way, but do not have any infallible “intellectual intuition” that could legitimately give us immediate truths.

Noting that Kant’s epistemology has often been characterized as “empiricist” because of its emphasis on experience, Wood says it is actually founded on a view of the finitude of human nature as a whole, and not on an epistemological dogma that all knowledge must be grounded in immediate sensation. (Like Hegel, I would note) Kant operates with an extremely broad notion of human experience.

Kant famously defends naturalism in science, while simultaneously rejecting what analytic philosophers have called ethical naturalism, or the idea that ethics can be reduced to naturalistic explanations. The thrust of Wood’s argument is that this rejection and Kant’s strong rhetoric about freedom should not be taken to imply a dualism (which latter, as it seems to me, would introduce a supernaturalism about human persons alongside a naturalism about all else).

The logical claim as I reconstruct it is that one can consistently be a naturalist in matters of natural science, but not an ethical naturalist, and at the same time not a dualist and therefore not a supernaturalist about persons either. This seems possible, but more needs to be said. Where is the Aristotelian mean that avoids all the associated dilemmas? As a first indication, it seems to me to characterize a space that includes the ethics of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel.

“Man’s finite and hence sensibly affected will is a condition for the possibility of moral life, in Kant’s view. If man were not subject to inclinations (if he possessed a divine holy will), obligation would not be the necessary feature of moral life that it is. The very concept of a holy being excludes the possibility of obligation, for such a being would by its own inner nature follow the law, and would not need the constraint which the concept of obligation presupposes. A holy being could not be ‘autonomous’, since an ‘autocracy’ of reason would necessarily govern all its willing. Such a being would no longer be subject even to moral imperatives. Human sensibility is thus a condition for the possibility of our moral life, as well as of our empirical knowledge” (p. 4).

The hypothetical “human holy will” to which Kant contrasts the actual sensibly affected will would be perfect, in the sense of being a perfectly good will such as we might attribute to God.

Such a posited perfection of goodness, I would note, is independent of questions of power or efficacy. Traditional theological views have sometimes attributed total counterfactual omnipotence — an ability to do absolutely any arbitrary thing — to God, but that is a logically separate move. There is an old counter-argument that the state of the world suggests God must not be both all-good and all-powerful. Gwenaëlle Aubry in her outstanding Dieu sans la puissance: dunamis et energeia chez Aristote et Plotin (2006) argues that for Aristotle himself as distinct from the commentary tradition following Plotinus, the notion of God as pure act makes questions of power inapplicable.

While speaking in language that is deferential to tradition, Kant stresses divine goodness over divine power, and moral faith over faith in miracles.

Wood says in effect that a hypothetical perfect human will could not even be autonomous in Kant’s sense. Presumably this kind of perfection would render ethics irrelevant, because everything would already be decided for it. I don’t consider it the job of philosophy to speculate about impossible what ifs, but this is interesting for shedding further light on the nature of Kantian autonomy as requiring finitude.

Here I find a further argument that leads to the same conclusion as Wood’s. Autonomy in the Kant I want to read presupposes activities like Aristotelian deliberation and practical judgment, which presuppose that we have less-than-perfect understanding. Therefore, on my own view that will is not really distinct from our reason and feeling but just a different way of talking about them, a less-than-perfect “will” is necessarily a prerequisite for Kantian autonomy.

Wood says that for Kant, reason inevitably suggests the idea of something unconditioned, which is always at least thinkable even if we can never experience it. This makes it tempting to just assume it also has reality. This takes me a step closer to a sympathetic reading of the Antinomies of Pure Reason, which I still have a hard time with.

Contrary to Kant, I still think the Antinomies are due to conflicting assumptions that should not be blamed on any dialectical illusion inherent to reason itself, since I don’t think Reason itself immediately gives us anything at all, be it truth or illusion. Conclusions follow not from Reason alone, but only in combination with particular premises. Therefore I think the direct opposite of what Wood quotes Kant saying, to the effect that dialectical illusions “are sophistries not of men but of pure reason itself” (p. 7).

But the broader Kantian point that Wood makes is that independent of that detail, reason does at least suggest the idea of something unconditioned, which precisely as he says must necessarily be in tension with our finitude. “The tension, the problematical condition in which man finds himself, is thus a result not of ‘two irreconcilable natures’ in man but of the natural conflict between man’s finite limitations and his rational tendency to overcome them. Critical self-knowledge thus reveals human nature not as ‘dualistic’ but as dialectical” (pp. 6-7). Here Wood seems to take Kant’s thought toward a more positive connotation of “dialectic”.

“The dialectic which leads to moral faith is a dialectic not of theoretical but of practical reason. It results not from our limitations as regards knowledge, but rather from our limitations in the pursuit of our unconditional and final moral end” (p. 7).

“The critical philosophy, then, views it as essential to the human condition for man to be concerned with the awesomeness and nobility of his rational destiny, and yet to be aware of his finitude, his inability ever to gain a firm hold on that which reason proposes as his destiny” (p. 8).

Here I prefer to bend Kant in the direction of Hegel, while simultaneously bending Hegel in the direction of Kant in a way that I think Hegel himself suggests. There is more to getting a hold on that which reason proposes as our destiny than a simple on/off state. We do get as far as a firm hold, but that firm hold is still never final or complete.

“Socratic self-knowledge does not end, of course, with a mere recognition of man’s situation, but rather functions as part of man’s higher aspirations themselves…. [It] involves also an appropriate response of a rational and active being…. Moral faith is for Kant the rational response of the finite being to the dialectical perplexities which belong essentially to the pursuit of the highest purpose of his existence” (ibid).

Potentiality, Actuality

Potentiality and actuality are Aristotle’s indispensable modal tools, providing resources for a variety of sophisticated analyses. Notable applications include a nonreductive, “dialectical” interweaving of is and ought that allows conditional “oughts” to be constructed subsuming applicable details of a contextual “is”. This allows something like structural causality to coexist with something like Kantian freedom.

Modern discourse on the relation of “is” and “ought” has generally oscillated between a reductive ethical naturalism that explains “ought” exclusively in terms of “is” on the one hand, and an unexplainable dualism of “is” and “ought” on the other.

With his explicit distinction between modes of potentiality and actuality, Aristotle had a better way. He also talked about the typical modern modalities of abstract possibility and necessity, but concrete potentiality and actuality are the crown jewels of Aristotle’s modal discourse. (See also The Importance of Potentiality.)