Tag: Ethics

Eckhart as Philosopher: Background

In Meister Eckhart (German edition 2011; English translation 2015), Kurt Flasch takes issue with common portrayals of Eckhart as a “mystic”. Eckhart, who lived ca. 1260-1328, was the third German, after Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg, to earn the highest academic title of magister at the University of Paris, but his Latin philosophical works have been little studied until recently. Flasch discusses him as a serious philosopher in the tradition of Albert and Dietrich, and describes the social background. Eckhart is known to have had close contact with Dietrich, and may have also directly interacted with Albert. In any case, Eckhart clearly takes up Albert’s notion of natural beatitude.

“Albertus Magnus had harshly criticized the failings of Latin scholars: he did not merely want to incorporate Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes into the seemingly harmonious collective wisdom of Christianity, but instead strove to rebuild all the sciences, including theology, from the ground up. He emphasized the autonomous method of philosophy. He complained about obscurantism, something especially prevalent among the Dominicans; he showed that miracles had no place in matters of physics. His autonomous philosophical research became a model for Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia [who have been considered the main targets of the condemnation of 1277]. Thomas Aquinas instead opted for a middle course. His approach was criticized for its inconsistency…. His handling of Augustine and Aristotle was too imprecise, according to Henry of Ghent, Dietrich of Freiberg, and Duns Scotus” (p. 10).

“Since the twelfth century, Western Europe had been developing a new sense of the human individual and his rational and organizational abilities. It was no longer taken for granted that people were subjects to be ruled. Lords had to justify themselves. Authority could be challenged. Several classical authors (Aristotle in his Logic, Cicero, Seneca, and especially Boethius) all contributed to a heightened trust in reason within the more progressive regions of Europe. The experience of urban life, the organization of corporations, legislation not based on customary law or decisions by episcopal lords, supraregional trade and monetary transactions, encounters with foreign cultures, religions, and values — all these created the need for a new way of explaining the world that took in everything, including secular rulers and religious topics…. New ideas and developments were no longer automatically stigmatized…. In science, philosophy, and organization, Christian self-awareness was constantly recreating itself in different and often opposing directions through continual debate. Without these historical and cultural multiplications and disturbances, Meister Eckhart would not have been possible ” (pp. 10-11).

“[The famous classical scholar] Werner Jaeger described the beginnings of philosophy up to Plato as this kind of work: correcting the royal-court model of religion; replacing the feuding heavenly clans with a single God; stressing wisdom over capriciousness, and ungrudging goodness and justice over incontestable power; the world as kosmos and physis, not a mere footstool for God” (p. 18).

Flasch here refers to two of my three candidates for “Enlightenments” before the modern one. (The other — inspired by the great upsurge in translation of ancient philosophical and scientific works to Arabic during what came to be known as the Islamic Golden Age, in which the philosophical work of Alfarabi (roughly 870-950 CE) also played a prominent role — came in between.)

The striking phrase “essence of the criteria” is I think original to Flasch, but he is definitely onto something here. Soul as the essence of criteria sounds like it might begin to take us into the territory of Kantian ethical judgment, and might be not at all wholly unrelated to the normative view of intentionality and consciousness that Brandom attributes to Kant.

He unpacks this a bit, saying “Everything looked different after this philosophical revolution, nature and polis. It changed the way people thought of themselves. They now knew: they were both reason and soul; and they demanded of God that he be reason and be related to them as soul. The meaning of ‘soul’ changed: soul was no longer a vapor of the blood, a breath of life, or the presence of one’s ancestors. Soul became the essence of the criteria. It was subjected to the rule that it had to become as similar to God as possible, a God conceptualized as mind and as wholly good. Greek philosophy dematerialized and ethically ennobled both God and the human soul” (p. 19).

“Plato’s Republic developed the idea of the Good: it was not an individual good, but the indeterminate Good that humans could and should employ to judge everything, even the gods. For the conduct of life, that is, for ethics and politics, that meant man was supposed to live in a way that would make him as similar to the Godhead as possible…. [T]here had to exist a faculty of differentiation and consolidation above sense perceptions. The soul is active, harmonizing and evaluating what has been perceived, especially whether it is good or bad. It is indispensable for finding commonalities among wholly different perceptions. Whether these perceptions are similar or dissimilar, one or many, good or bad, is decided not by individual perceptions themselves, but only by the thinking soul itself. It engages in dialogue with itself; which means: it thinks” (ibid; see also Aristotle on Perception; Aristotle on the Soul.)

Once again, we see that this ancient and medieval notion of intellect (nous) is anything but entirely passive. The differently inflected Augustinian mens (mind) also seems to have a largely active character. Numerous later medieval writers emphasized this aspect of Augustine rather strongly.

Flasch continues, “This Platonic deliberation… refutes the false impression we have of certain epochs, that is, the legend of antiquity — and even more so of the Middle Ages — as ‘objective ages’ that had no knowledge of the productive nature of the mind-soul, of ‘consciousness’ or the ‘subjectivity’ of knowledge” (p. 20).

In slightly different wording, this is a point I have recently been attempting to make. The translator uses the English “mind”, which I generally try to avoid as prejudicial, due to its many modern connotations that are quite different from those of nous in Plato and Aristotle. I usually go with “intellect” for nous, even though it may sound stilted, because it brings in fewer connotations that are alien to Aristotelian or Platonic discourse. “Mind” makes me think of Descartes and Locke and modern empirical psychology and self-help, which I lump together as a sort of modern “mentalism” that is not to be recommended.

“Mind, nous, intellectus, was seen as essential and as the true human. We can read it thus in Aristotle; Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas adopted his position. Living according to the mind is the right kind of living; it is the life that pleases God. Mind is the possession of those criteria that determine what a true God must be and how a rational human has to conceptualize himself. Mind is an active ground of unity; it is synthesis” (ibid; see also Figurative Synthesis).

Here he comes back to the intriguing phrase about “criteria”. He goes on to more closely characterize Aristotelian nous:

“Mind has nothing in common with anything else. It is not a natural thing; none of the determinations with which we define the world apply to it. It is essentially energy and activity. It is the active nothingness of the world; it is the energy not to be like the world…. Mind is the possession of the universal. Everything is its object…. It is the possession of its contents. It is its contents. It becomes what it thinks” (p. 21).

Aristotelian energeia (act or activity or actuality) is not usually translated “energy”, though it does begin to acquire energy-like connotations in later writers (e.g., Proclus and some late medieval theologians).

“It is divine; it is the divine. Since Plato and Aristotle, European philosophy has based its general view of humanity, of nature, of politics, and of religion on nous as its model. Instead of being represented as a royal court, religion became the relation between God and the mind-soul” (ibid).

Flasch echoes Aristotle’s statement that of all things, intellect most deserves to be called divine. Because I want to highlight the more specific character of this broadly Aristotelian “intellect”, I would not claim it has been adopted by European philosophy as a whole, but I do believe it is taken up by those strands that remain relatively closer to Plato and Aristotle. This is especially true of the “Albertists” that Flasch spent much of his career studying. The dominant modern traditions stemming from Descartes and Locke develop their own rather different notions of reason and consciousness, their place in the world, and our relation to them.

“For Augustine, the rational soul represented the essence of all criteria…. God is the true God only if he adheres to the rules of reason. It was Augustine who created this standard, and it was he who later destroyed it” (p. 22).

Again there is a much longer story here. Flasch nicely captures the ambiguity (or perhaps change, motivated by his late polemic against the Pelagians) in Augustine’s attitude toward philosophical reason.

“For Albertus Magnus, the object of the intellect is the universal, a universal that exists in reality, which is the foundation of individual things…. This universal informs the particular things; it makes them into what they are. The mind…is the possession of the principles from which all knowledge develops. That is why the intellect finds itself in all objects. It is the reason why Plato’s definition of philosophy is quintessentially true: philosophy is the knowledge of one’s self…. If, through understanding, the intellect is linked to the first Truth and Good, then it is itself divine, divinus, and as Homer says, it no longer seems like the son of a man, but the son of God. That is why Hermes Trismegistus says of the intellect that it is the link between God and the world” (pp. 22-23).

Albert is known as a strong defender of realism about universals, as opposed to nominalism. This actually quite facinating and extraordinarily rich dispute is something I have barely touched upon to date. But here Flasch brings out a less familiar, more neoplatonic-sounding angle about the ennobling presence of the universal in the human soul, which will be central for Eckhart.

“The intellect is man, and it connects God and the world… Albertus Magnus cites pagan authorities for his concept of divine filiation…. There is nothing super-natural in this for him; he calls it the most natural, the naturalissimum” (p. 23).

This identification of intellect with the human that he attributes to Albert is interesting, and stands in sharp contrast to some other theologians at this time, who seem to have identified intellect with divine illumination, or with something angelic. I have not been sure where Albert stood on this. Of course Aquinas embarked on a major campaign to locate intellect entirely within the human soul, even siding with the so-called materialist Alexander of Aphrodisias against Averroes, and even though he continued to speak of illumination in a more expressly theological context. (See also Pseudo-Dionysius on the Soul.)

I can only applaud Albert’s apparent remark about the “most natural”. Medieval theologians were not all immoderate supernaturalists; the example of Peter Abelard also comes to mind. Virtue is not opposed to nature; it just doesn’t automatically come along with nature. It involves the cultivation and flowering of “second nature”.

For Albert, according to Flasch, human reason “is not supposed to obey, but to conceptualize itself, the world, and God…. [F]or Albertus Magnus, the intellect as developed in the Aristotelian-Arabic tradition was a part of man’s relation to God…. [I]n fact, it was man’s relation to God” (p. 24).

This is truly fascinating. Flasch is saying human reason as understood by the philosophers itself plays a fundamental theological role for the great theologian Albert, as I think it also does in Alfarabi’s neoplatonizing account of intellect. For these writers, our participation in intellect “is” the human’s relation to God.

Flasch goes on to relate all of this to Eckhart.

“Eckhart explains how he wants men to conceive of God: God is that which fulfills reason’s highest criteria. He must be just…. It is only through justice that God becomes recognizable and worthy of recognition…. God does not belong to whatever exists, not even as the pinnacle. Reason must break through to the true content of the term ‘God’. Which is justice” (p 35).

Eckhart apparently agrees with what Leibniz later said, that God should be identified with justice rather than with infinite power. Flasch emphasizes the “negative” aspect of Aristotelian intellect, which to me suggests a possible Aristotelian source for this important theme in Hegel.

“[T]he soul forms itself according to its objects. It becomes what it is after. It does not simply exist. It is not a fixed component of the world; it obtains its essence through attention and rejection…. What is essential is the ability of the soul to actively give itself a form, to shape itself” (pp. 35-36).

Here too I can’t help but recall Hegel’s talk about spirit giving birth to itself. Flasch notes that Hegel was among Eckhart’s admirers.

“Eckhart is stating the premises for a radical reform of living. Man must grasp that he is a creature of relations: he becomes that which he decides; he exists as intentional activity” (p. 43).

Again, Flasch introduces huge implications in a few words. The human is a “creature of relations”. Language and culture begin to take us to shareable meaning that is beyond the immediacy of apparent things with which we physically interact. As Kant might say, as beings with intelligence we actively “take” things in various ways, and our talk about how the world is is actually subordinate to that.

Later, we will see Eckhart speak of a divinisation of the human, which Flasch will explain as primarily rooted in Aristotle and neoplatonism, rather than in revealed theology.

Brandom on Rorty on Justification

Brandom suggests that we direct our attention to the doings involved in our attitudes toward truth. He has been both sympathetically and critically reviewing the work of his former teacher and colleague Richard Rorty.

He says his own earlier book Making It Explicit “offers Rorty two ways in which his justification-first pragmatic approach to truth might be improved, consonant with his own pragmatist scruples. First, instead of thinking of truth Pierce-wise, in terms of consensus, we can think about it in social-perspectival terms of the pragmatics of knowledge ascriptions. The idea is to think about what practitioners are doing in taking someone to know something” (Brandom, Pragmatism and Idealism, pp. 44-45).

“To take someone to know something one must do three things. To begin with, one attributes a belief. In the normative vocabulary I have been using to codify Rorty’s views, this is attributing a distinctive kind of normative status: a discursive commitment. Next, one takes that stance or status to be justified…. What one is doing in taking that justified commitment one attributes to be, in addition, true should not be understood as attributing to it some further property (which would most naturally be understood in representationalist terms). Rather, what one must do to take it to be true is to endorse it oneself” (p. 45).

As Kant said about existence, truth is not a property of things. Rather, I would say it is a measure of the integrity of our valuations. I think truth-related statuses are inseparable from ultimately ethical processes of valuation that are involved in any discourse or dialogue with others that seriously and in good faith aims at truth.

“[P]ragmatists about truth owe an explanation of uses of ‘true’ that occur as components of more complicated assertibles. When I say ‘If what the representationalist says in the passage at the top of page 17 is true, then pragmatism is in trouble,’ I have not endorsed or agreed to the offending remark. Redundancy and disquotationalist approaches to truth-talk extend to these unasserted, embedded uses, as well as the free-standing endorsement-indicating ones. The most sophisticated and technically adequate theory of this sort, in my view, is anaphoric, prosentential accounts, according to which sentences such as ‘that is true’ inherit their content from their anaphoric antecedents” (p. 46).

Brandom recalls Rorty’s support for Brandom’s Making It Explicit. At the same time, he generously credits Rorty as his own most direct inspiration.

“Rorty enthusiastically embraced both these ways of filling in his account of how pragmatists should think about truth” (ibid).

“By focusing to begin with on justification, rather than truth, Rorty not only opens up a path from pragmatics to semantics (theorizing about use to theorizing about meaning), but also carves out a distinctively normative space within the broadly naturalistic Piercean pragmatist picture…. In this way, Rorty turns the axial Kantian distinction between normative questions… and objective factual ones… back on Kant’s most basic semantic concept: representation. He does so by combining another Kantian idea with the Hegelian understanding of normative statuses as ultimately social statuses. Rorty fully endorses and exploits Kant’s distillation of the Enlightenment lesson, that what distinguishes rational authority (normative constraint) from mere compulsion (causal constraint) is liability to criticism, in the sense of answerability to demands for reasons…. In this sense, we can only answer to each other: to those who give and demand reasons” (pp. 47-48).

“By insisting on the essentially social character of the rational, critical, and justificatory practices within which performances acquire genuine normative significance, Rorty knowingly takes a giant leap toward a Hegelian understanding of that Kantian distinction” (p. 48).

Ethics has an inherent social dimension because it is mainly about what is right in relations with others. Obedience to any authority other than good reasons — or to any authority that is taken to be unilateral — is not an ethical relation but a power relation.

“What arouses passion, I think, is the consequent rejection of the very idea of objective reality…. But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that he rejects representationalist semantic models on behalf of the ideals of reason, freedom, and democracy. For Rorty does so on behalf of a humanized, nonrepresentational conception of rationality as consisting of responsiveness to reasons providing norms governing our practice…. But when he further construes giving and asking for reasons, assessing evidence, justifications, and explanations, as all ultimately and ineluctably a matter of politics…– the gauntlet has been thrown down and the battle joined” (p. 49).

I think there is actually an Aristotelian basis for this connection of ethics with politics. Politics is ethics writ large. This latter formulation also recalls Plato’s metaphor of the soul as a city in the Republic.

“The foes of the original Enlightenment could not understand how anyone who denied the authority of God to determine right and wrong concerning actions, independently of human attitudes, could nonetheless be a good person, concerned about acting as one ought. The foes of Rorty’s projected second Enlightenment cannot understand how anyone who denies the authority of objective facts to determine right and wrong beliefs, independently of human attitudes, could nonetheless recognize a distinction between better and worse arguments: genuine reasons for and against claims” (p. 51).

Here Brandom speaks of the traditional notion of unilateral authority, not his own highly original account of the symmetrical relations between authority and responsibility or answerability, which allows us to say that all authority is constituted by participation in reciprocal ethical relations of rational answerability and responsibility to others.

“Rorty takes it that it follows from social pragmatism about norms in this sense that nothing nonhuman can exercise authority over us, that we cannot be responsible to any nonhuman authority. His reason, I think, is that discursive authority and responsibility are rational authority and responsibility — in the sense of being normative statuses that matter for practices of giving and asking for reasons. What doesn’t make a difference for those practices is semantically inert and epistemically irrelevant” (p. 54).

Again, “pragmatism” here does not refer to the coarse popular notion that implies a lack of principle, but to a philosophical view about the order of explanation that treats human practice and doing as constitutive of the representations we speak about.

“We should acknowledge the authority only of what we can critically interrogate as to its reasons. Only what can fulfill its critical rational responsibility to give reasons justifying the exercise of that authority should count as having genuine authority. He concludes that only parties to our conversations, only participants in our practices, can have normative statuses. In the end, the only authority we ought to recognize is each other: those to whom we owe reasons for our commitments and those who owe such justifying reasons to us for exercises of their authority. Rational authority involves a correlative justificatory responsibility. To attribute such normative statuses to anything that can’t talk is to fetishize…. [I]t is precisely his devotion to reason and its essential critical function in making normative statuses genuinely binding — the great Enlightenment discovery — that drives this whole line of thought. He is trying to think through rigorously what reason is and what it requires of us” (p. 55).

“At the base of this argument is a new principle, which builds on but goes beyond social pragmatism about normative statuses. Its slogan is ‘No (genuine) authority without (rational) responsibility.’ I think there is something deeply right about it” (ibid).

I too think there is something deeply right about this.

Brandom goes on to explain the genesis of objectivity from normativity,

“Once implicitly normative social practices are up and running, derivative sorts of normative statuses, parasitic on the basic ones that characterize discursive practitioners, become possible. It is true that, as social pragmatism about norms has it, it is only in virtue of playing a suitable role in social practices that anything acquires specifically normative significance…. But in the context of discursive practices that include the kinds of authority characteristic of us as a reason-giving-and-assessing participants, those interlocutors can confer other, parasitic sorts of normative significance on things that are not themselves capable of giving and asking for reasons” (pp. 57-58).

“So the three principles I have excavated as the basis of Rorty’s argument, when properly understood, leave room for the possibility that our discursive practices can confer on objective things and occurrences the normative significance of serving as standards for assessment of the correctness of what count as representings of them just in virtue of being in that sense responsible for their correctness to how it objectively is with what thereby counts as represented by them. That is conferring on representeds a distinctive kind of authority over representings….The important point remains that nonhuman beings can have only the authority we grant them…. [A]uthority must be granted to, practically taken to reside in and be exercised by, the things themselves” (p. 59-60).

With Brandom’s symmetrical view of authority, objectivity is something emergent rather than something pre-existent. Objectivity as something emergent is not affected by Rorty’s critique of assumptions about objective reality.

“Explaining how that possibility — which I have argued is left open in principle by the three principles on which Rorty’s representationalism-as-fetishism argument against the very idea of objective reality is based — can actually be realized is a tall order and a hard job” (p. 60).

In Brandom’s view, this is why we need Hegel.

“I think Hegel offers just such an account…. In my second lecture I will explain how I think Hegel’s story about the institution of normative representational relations goes. In the end, I want to claim, Rorty did not follow his line of thought all the way through to its proper conclusion because he (following Dewey) did not sufficiently appreciate the thorough-going nature of Hegel’s historicism, and the remarkable and distinctive conception of specifically recollective rationality it articulates” (pp. 60-61).

Natural Beatitude

Scholarship of recent decades has begun to fill in a picture of Albert the Great as a distinctive theologian, philosopher, and scholar of natural science in his own right, and not just the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. In the French version of his lectures From Averroes to Meister Eckhart, medieval specialist Kurt Flasch emphasizes that the great Christian theologian Albert follows Aristotle in holding that there is such a thing as natural beatitude (see The Goal of Human Life; Properly Human, More than Human; Errors of the Philosophers; 1277).

I recently suggested that there have been at least three other “Enlightenments” before the modern one: the beginning of philosophical ethics with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; Arabic hybrid neoplatonic-Aristotelian falsafah in the tradition of Alfarabi; and the spread of Greco-Arabic learning to the Latin West. Albert the Great was at the center of this last one. Flasch documents a whole cluster of Albert’s attitudes that are consistent with this.

Beatitude is a specifically Christian religious term for the highest state of blessedness and joy that a human could experience. It is often understood to be capable of existing only as a special supernatural gift from God, intervening in the natural order of things. It is also often understood to apply only to the souls of the chosen in heaven, and not as part of earthly existence at all.

Albert is a deep and sincere Christian theologian and philosopher, who nonetheless finds the Latin West of his own day to be quite primitive compared to the enlightenment of the Greek and Arabic philosophers. He devoted his life to spreading Greco-Arabic enlightenment and education in the Christian world. Reportedly, he was the first European to publicly lecture on Aristotle, after the teaching of Aristotle had been banned in the earlier 13th century.

Flasch characterizes Albert’s vast literary output as pluralistic and exploratory. Albert accepts the monotheistic-neoplatonic Book of Causes as a work of Aristotle, and the Christian neoplatonic theologian (pseudo) Dionysius the Areopagite as a contemporary of Paul. But he avoids appeal to theological presuppositions in his philosophy, and at the same time brings philosophical concerns and sophistication to bear in his theology. Overall he shows great respect for secular reason and learning, and for Aristotelian ethics, which he reads in a context of broadly neoplatonic metaphysics fused with an Aristotelian ethical notion of intellect. He seems to see revelation as what I would call a kind of poetic truth, and as confirming rather than contradicting the higher ethical conclusions of natural reason.

What We Mean by Meaning

Returning to Brandom’s Spinoza lectures, he has been clarifying his relation to the tradition of American pragmatist philosophy, which is largely mediated by the work of his former teacher and colleague Richard Rorty.

“At the core of the capacious ‘big tent’ tradition Rorty retrospectively rationally reconstructs under the rubric of ‘pragmatism’ is this broadly naturalistic, anthropological-ecological conception of language as an evolving population of discursive practices that is a, indeed the, distinctive feature of the natural history of creatures like us” (Pragmatism and Idealism, p. 41).

Aristotle defines humans as animals that have logos, or meaningful discourse. Hegel says that “language is the Dasein [“existence”, literally “being there”] of spirit”. The pragmatists Pierce and Dewey were interested in Hegel, and notably took a down-to-earth attitude toward his work. Brandom picks up this somewhat loose link to Hegel, and strengthens and sharpens it.

“This is what motivates and justifies [Rorty’s] use of this term [pragmatism] to characterize not only philosophers such as Pierce and Dewey, who embraced it themselves, but others such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, who (sometimes explicitly and emphatically) did not. Rorty sees a stark contrast between this way of thinking about language and the analytic representationalist tradition that runs from Frege, Russell, and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus through Carnap and Tarski to his colleague David Lewis. This tradition models language on formal monological logistical calculi, justification on proof of theorems from axioms, and truth conditions on model-theoretic semantics for such artificial languages. What, Rorty asks, does any of that have to do with what users of natural languages do?” (ibid).

Brandom himself speaks of “pragmatism” in this same very broad and yet distinctly philosophical way. Here we get a glimpse of how he arrived at that.

“In taking this line, Rorty rightly understands himself as appealing to the Pierce-Dewey tradition of American pragmatism to amplify and radicalize Quine’s and Sellars’ criticisms of Carnap, and following up on Wittgenstein’s advice for philosophers to look not to the [formal, logical, representational] meaning of expressions, but to their use‘” (ibid).

Brandom more commonly cites Wittgenstein’s other formulation, that “meaning is use”. He clearly does not mean that there is no meaning. He means that meaning as use comes before meaning as representation. This focus on order of explanation as an alternative to reducing one thing to another, or denying one in favor of the other, is one of Brandom’s great contributions.

“Rorty sometimes seems to draw the lesson that we should do pragmatics instead of semantics (which he identifies with appeals to the notions of [logical] 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 dismissal of semantics holus bolus. I think that another genuine strand in Rorty’s thought belongs in this tradition…. [H]ere we see both a subtle interplay and perhaps a residual tension between pragmatist naturalism and an insistence on a Kantian disjunction between norms and causes” (pp. 41-42).

“Rorty inscribes within his Piercean, broadly naturalistic account, a distinction between the social-normative and the nonsocial, so non-normative, merely natural world of vocabulary-less things. The norms that articulate vocabulary use are to be understood functionally, in terms of roles in social practices that include the adoption of normative attitudes. Practitioners adopt such attitudes by taking or treating each other in practice as committed or entitled, responsible or authoritative” (p. 42).

Vocabularies are a characteristic theme of Rorty’s. I take this to resemble my own attitude in examining usages of words — not looking for “the” meaning (as if there could be such a thing), but rather thoughtfully exploring what uses are better or worse, and why.

In contrast to reductionist views, naturalism should be understood in terms broad enough to encompass beings like us who have their being in language and normativity, and thus live mainly in “second nature”.

“In the sort of pragmatics-first order of explanation he recommends, we think of what one is doing in claiming, say, that the frog is on the log, as undertaking a commitment. Doing that is taking up a stance in a normative space, acquiring a distinctive kind of social status. Rorty understands such statuses ultimately in terms of interpersonal practices of justification. In adopting normative stances we make ourselves answerable to each other for doing so. We are liable to be challenged, and obliged to defend the normative statuses we claim. One commitment is treated by community members as providing a reason for another, as providing a justification for it” (pp. 42-43).

Every assertion we make has some kind of ethical consequences.

“The meaning expressed by using some bit of vocabulary is to be understood in terms of the role it plays in these practices of giving and practically assessing reasons: what its application provides reasons for and against, and what provides reasons for and against its application. All there is to confer meaning on our noises is the role they play in our taking up, challenging, and defending the stances taken up by applying them…. Understanding meaning or semantic content in terms of inferential roles read off of justificatory practices is a way of implementing the pragmatics-first order of explanation without giving up on semantics” (p. 43).

Ethics and hermeneutics come before epistemology. This is not to say that a theory of knowledge is impossible, but only that it should not be foundationalist. We never begin a philosophical account of things with certainty, but rather with questions and practices of questioning. The highest kind of certainty we can have is still only a “moral” certainty, not an absolute one.

“Rorty thinks such a pragmatist explanatory strategy can underwrite unobjectionable kinds of truth-talk. We just have to restrict ourselves to properties of truth that can be cashed out in pragmatic terms of what we are doing in taking or treating something as true” (ibid).

I don’t really see this as a restriction. There are ultimately ethical truths of reason and reasoning and emotional reasonableness that can be brought to light by Socratic dialogue, and there is poetic truth. Spiritual truth I take to be one or the other of these, or both. Neither of these is an authoritarian representational Truth with a capital T that I personally claim to know, but never mind how.

“Once the meanings are fixed, it is of course nonsense to think the community can in general make true whatever sentences it likes simply by taking or treating them as true. But our words do not mean what they mean apart from which sentences involving them we actually take to be true” (p. 44).

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.

Hegel’s Recovery of Aristotelian Act

More than any other author, Robert Pippin has contributed to an understanding of the central role of Aristotelian act or “actuality” (energeia ) in orienting the thought of Hegel. (For general background on what is at stake here, see Actuality, Existence; Is and Ought in Actuality).

Hegel is the first modern philosopher to explicitly engage with Aristotle in a constructive way, and he does so informed by a broadly Kantian perspective. Though he is occasionally unfair to each of them, Kant and Aristotle are his two principal inspirations, and he very seriously aims to combine their respective insights. In the ways that Aristotle and Kant have been respectively stereotyped, this might seem a quixotic enterprise, but I think the past year’s posts here have provided ample indications that on the contrary, it may be exactly what philosophy needs.

In his book Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (2008), Pippin particularly develops an ethical dimension of Hegelian Wirklichkeit or actuality — which Hegel identifies with Aristotelian energeia — as the counterbalance to our subjective impulses and our unreflective, immediate sense of self (see Actualization of Freedom; Hegel on Willing). This in itself does not yet capture all the teleological dimensions of act pointed out by Gwenaëlle Aubry in her analysis of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but it accurately captures and sustains Aristotle’s own point that a person’s deeds are a more reliable indicator of character than her words.

In Hegel’s Realm of Shadows (2019), Pippin greatly expands the scope of his treatment of Hegelian actuality, based on a groundbreaking in-depth analysis of the marriage of Aristotle and Kant achieved in Hegel’s Logic.

On the Kantian side, Pippin emphasizes the fundamental orienting role of reflective judgment in Hegel’s view of “logic” (see More on Reflection; Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity; Reflection, Judgment, Process; Hegel on Reflection; Reflection and Dialectic; Apperceptive Judgment.)

What is actual for Hegel is always a matter of Kantian reflective judgment, and never a simple matter of putative facts. Kant and Hegel more explicitly develop the role of reflective judgment than Aristotle does, but we have seen that a kind of reflective judgment can reasonably be said to be the more specific ground of Aristotelian wisdom.

On the explicitly Aristotelian side, Pippin in an exemplary way points out the many ways in which Hegel uses Aristotle to help resolve Kantian problems. Especially important for this is Hegel’s removal of the qualifications in Kant’s endorsement of internal teleology, and his explicit return to a more full-bloodedly Aristotelian way of treating it (see Hegel’s Union of Kant and Aristotle; Essence and Explanation; “The” Concept?; Unconditioned Knowledge?; Life: A Necessary Concept?; The Logic’s Ending).

Internal teleology has nothing supernatural about it, but it represents an alternative to mechanistic or reductionistic styles of explanation. As Aristotle puts it, it is about explanation in terms of “that for the sake of which”, which allows for a deeper and more rounded understanding of the why of things, which is what explanation for both Aristotle and Hegel is about, first and foremost. And act or actuality is the key orienting term in Aristotle’s teleology.

Hegel on Ethics and Religion

Hegel had complex views on the relation between ethics and religion, and his thought on these matters evolved over time. As a teenager, he was impressed by writers of the German moderate Enlightenment, and immersed himself in the literature of classical antiquity. He graduated from the Lutheran seminary at Tübingen (where his roommates were the future philosopher Schelling and the future poet Hölderlin), but was reportedly very critical of the way theology was taught there.

Hegel’s earliest work is principally concerned with religious and social themes. He develops a critique of what he there calls “positive” religion, which he sees as putting excessive emphasis on particular representations, doctrines, and institutional forms. As a source for spiritual renewal, at this stage he looks mainly to the classical Greeks. He does not yet share Schelling and Hölderlin’s enthusiasm for Kantian philosophy. But a bit later, he begins to engage with Kant, and to move away from his earlier more unconditional classicism. In the works of this period, he interprets the teachings of Jesus as anticipating Kantian ethics, while also emphasizing love as a fundamental motivator. Now he begins to interpret Christianity and Kantian philosophy as the two main elements of a major historic spiritual advance beyond what was achieved in classical Greek culture.

I take the Phenomenology of Spirit to contain the best statement of Hegel’s mature views in this area, and will save that for last here.

His later lectures on the philosophy of history are very accessible, but in some ways extremely misleading. In general, Hegel popularizes and simplifies a lot in his lectures. And while today his so-called Philosophy of History is the best known example of this old genre, it is very much a genre piece. “Philosophies of history” particularly dedicated to valorizing the contributions of the nascent German nation had become commonplace in Germany since the late 18th century. University professors were civil servants who were expected as a condition of their employment to contribute to what might uncharitably be called propaganda supporting German nationalism and its state-sponsored religion. The most notorious characteristics of Hegel’s Philosophy of History in fact have much more to do with this obligatory social context than with the distinctive philosophy that Hegel develops mainly in the Phenomenology and the Logic.

Overly simplified formulations in the philosophy of history lectures are the main source for very common but deeply mistaken claims that Hegel sees world history as straightforwardly governed by a single linear and universal teleological unfolding (e.g., of “the realization of the consciousness of freedom”) that is either ordained by God, or itself constitutes God. As someone very interested in the details of Aristotelian teleology, Kantian “internal” teleology, and Hegel’s use of them, I see such a simplistic and overly strong historical teleology as completely incompatible with the principles Hegel defends in his main philosophical works.

Hegel does indeed see genuine progressive development within history, and not a mere succession of accidents as Aristotle was more inclined to do, but contrary to the common stereotype, this does not constitute or correspond to a global development of “History”, as if Hegel thought that History were itself an independent thing in its own right in the Aristotelian sense. History is just a summation of many largely independent developments, a very weak form of unity. Even in the philosophy of history lectures, Hegel points out what he considers to be instances of retrograde development — from better to worse — such as the transition from the Greek world to the Roman world.

If history for Hegel had the strong unity claimed by the stereotype, this would be logically incoherent. But for Hegel himself it poses no problem, because he has no commitment to such a strong unity. He emphasizes that the independence of Aristotelian independent things is not absolute, but he agrees with Aristotle that it is with the independent things that we should be principally concerned, in our attempts to understand history as in anything else.

In the philosophy of history lectures, Hegel is polemically concerned to contrast the modern “German world” — as the embodiment of freedom, genuine community, and progress — with the old “Roman world” of imperial absolutism, bureaucratic administration, and negation of the individual. Martin Luther is presented as the original hero of the German world, and Kant as his successor. Luther’s founding gesture is interpreted as the assertion of the priority of individual conscience over institutional authority, and thus as consistent with moderate Enlightenment.

Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion also aim primarily at an edifying popular presentation. There he among other things gives a sympathetic account of core elements of common Christian doctrine and symbolism, and eventually argues for the superiority of offenbare or “revealed” religion over other forms that he discusses with more limited sympathy. But at the same time, he seems to radically reverse the traditional understanding of revealed religion. For Hegel, offenbare means out in the open, intelligible in the light of day, not anyone’s private preserve. These again may seem to be compatible with the traditional meaning. But the kind of unconditional authority traditionally claimed for revelation is effectively ruled out by Hegel, who considers all appeals to unconditional authority to represent a low state of ethical development.

In some measure, what Hegel means by offenbare was Luther’s point too. Luther did after all translate the Bible to German so that more people could read it for themselves, and advocated that they do so. But for Luther, the text of the Bible is simply given to us by God as literal truth. He promotes a new direct authority of the literal text in the common tongue as a replacement for the mediating institutional authority emphasized by the Catholic Church. But for Hegel, no truth in the full sense of the word can depend on authority for its validation; the authority of a text can only derive from judgments about the content it articulates; and all such judgments could in principle be contested anew. Truth is a matter of intelligibility that should be understandable by anyone, never the special province of some particular authority. Hegel sees that behind emphasis on divine authority — as opposed to, say, goodness or love — lie strong claims on behalf of some human authority.

In Hegel’s Phenomenology, these issues are touched upon from multiple points of view. What corresponds to the later Roman world is particularly associated with the religious point of view of what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness, which emphasizes the extreme transcendence of an eternal and infinite monotheistic God, while devaluing worldly life. In general, Hegel’s portrayal of this kind of religion is unfavorable. Yet the unhappy consciousness is also said to have a progressive aspect, insofar as its new notion of the infinite God potentially leads to a questioning of the ultimateness of all finite representations, and thereby also to a questioning of any representation that is supposed to be simply given to us. Hegel explicitly suggests that the development of “negative” theology in the new monotheistic setting of the later Roman world leads in principle to the questioning of finite representations.

Later in the Phenomenology, Hegel at length and in several stages criticizes what happens when purely individual notions of Reason are applied to these matters. First comes the naive activist who unilaterally judges everything in the world by her own principles, and finds the world to be lacking. In part this has to do with uncharitable interpretation, even though there also really are plenty of things that are wrong with the world. But the main problem with this point of view is its complete lack of Socratic self-questioning. It focuses simply on the vigorous assertion of one’s own conclusions. Though this does involve a glimmer of self-consciousness, it is only a glimmer. The essentially reflective character of what Hegel means by self-consciousness is fundamentally lacking.

Much later still comes the Kantian/Fichtean moral self, which has a much more reflective character, and recognizes that it is bound by duties. But this moral self is still limited to a strictly individual point of view on what ought to be universal. Hegel thinks that ultimately, even the best — most sincere and open-minded — unilateral moral judgment by an individual involves an untenable hubris (the excessive pride commonly highlighted in Greek tragedies). As Brandom points out, one of the great lessons of the Phenomenology overall is that moral judgment should not be unilateral — anyone judging someone else must also confess and ask for forgiveness. This should in turn make us more forgiving of others. For Hegel, moral judgment is the province of participation in the universal community of rational beings, under conditions of mutual recognition. Only thus can individual and narrower community prejudices be overcome.

In between, Hegel discusses the relations between Enlightenment and faith. Here he is mainly concerned to defend faith against overly broad or unilateral Enlightenment critiques that, e.g., simply identify religion with superstition or a conspiracy of priests and kings, as if it had no relation at all to ethics.

Toward the end of the Phenomenology, as a resolution of the issues he has pointed out with the alleged self-sufficiency of the Kantian/Fichtean moral self, he develops an account of the essence of religion as having to do most fundamentally with promoting mutual recognition in a community. As I put it before, religion and the notion of something greater than ourselves for Hegel play an essential role in keeping individual conscience honest. This applies not only to some ideal philosophical religion we might imagine, but also to concrete, imperfect historical religion in real communities. Hegel now suggests that in this way, even concrete historical religion, in spite of its reliance on particular representations, helps us to overcome the limitations inherent to the individual moral self.

In a final turn, Hegel argues that religion and philosophy are in a way concerned with the same subject matter. The difference is that religion as usually understood assumes and works from particular representations of what is universal, whereas philosophy for Hegel aims to approach the universal in a universal way, and in this sense constitutes the “truth” of religion. To approach the universal in a universal way for Hegel necessarily involves beginning from the concrete. But it also involves letting the thought of that concrete actively explicate itself through reflection, rather than attempting to ground it in something said to be simply given to us, or to be justified by pre-existing authority.

In more traditional language, I am tempted to say this amounts to treating something like a negative theology that nonetheless does not turn its back on the world as taking precedence over all positive theology that presupposes particular representations. Negative theology and its analogues hold that no positive assertions we are capable of formulating about the divine should, strictly speaking, be held to be true, but that the divine can nonetheless be approached by saying it is not this, and it is not that. Giving precedence to this over the positive theology that presupposes particular representations has generally not been regarded as an orthodox position (unless perhaps we consider certain schools of Buddhism), but it is one whose possibility is suggested by the very existence of something like a negative theology.

Historically, anything like a negative theology has usually been associated with very strong insistence on the transcendence of the divine. If by analogy we apply the term to Hegel (which to my knowledge he never did himself), it must be with the proviso that for him its object would not be a transcendence, but rather something like the ultimate ethical intelligibility of life (which, we might say in an Aristotelian way, of all things properly knowable by us “most deserves to be called divine”), viewed as compatible with the recognition that many things in life are not as they ought to be, and need to change.

Normative Attitudes

Robert Brandom sees Kant and Hegel as both working to reconcile the modern notion that normative statuses depend on normative attitudes with a genuine bindingness and objectivity of normativity. The key point that he associates with modernity is the idea that normative statuses are not somehow pre-given. As I would put it, the normative statuses of things depend on complex reflective judgments involving many elements.

Brandom’s language about attitude-dependence is intentionally broad enough to encompass all the forms of modern subjectivism, which is the opposite evil to traditional groundings of normative statuses in pure deliverances of authority. At its most primitive level, it expresses the idea that everyone judges for herself, which is indeed a popular sentiment in modern culture. Expressed this way, without qualification, it makes it impossible to separate right from wrong. Brandom seems to want to say that even this vulgar subjectivism or voluntarism is historically progressive compared to the traditional “authority-obedience model”; I tend to think they are equally bad.

The real positive lesson that Brandom extracts from this, though, is something to the effect that everyone deserves a seat at the table in inquiries about the good. He does not himself support the view that everyone gets to judge everything for herself.

Indeed he points out that the very best version of this individualist view — Kant’s theory of the autonomy of moral subjects — is criticized by Hegel as one-sidedly individualistic. Kant complements autonomy with a strong emphasis on respect for others, but according to Brandom, Hegel also thinks that Kant effectively treats both autonomy and respect as principles that themselves do not depend on any normative taking of things to be such-and-such; i.e., at a meta-level Kant still treats autonomy and respect as the same kind of givens that he recommends we avoid depending upon in all our particular judgments. With his theory of the coming-to-be of genuine objective oughts through processes of mutual recognition, Hegel is able to show a genesis of autonomy and respect, as themselves instances of the same kind of normative taking involved in particular judgments.

I’m not completely happy with Brandom’s choice of the thin term “attitude” in this context. I would prefer to say, for example, that normative statuses depend on reflective judgment. Attitude by itself says nothing about its derivation; an attitude just is what it is, and might be entirely arbitrary. But I suspect that Brandom implicitly has in mind something like a complex propositional “attitude”. Then on his view of what it is to be a proposition, necessarily we are in the space of reasons, and subject to all of its dialogic give and take, just by having such an attitude.

Plato and Aristotle on Religion

Aristotle’s statements about “god” have sometimes troubled both religious people and non-religious people. For the believers they seem to say too little, and yet for nonbelievers they seem to say too much. But views that generate opposite complaints might be taken to represent a happy medium of sorts. In this troubled world of ours, so full of religious strife, the generous and optimistic spirit of Plato and Aristotle has much to be commended.

I use the lower case “god” to translate Plato and Aristotle’s ho theos, which can also be rendered “the god”. Many have read an incipient monotheism into this term.

In the course of their philosophical work, Plato and Aristotle address many issues relevant to religion, without attaching themselves to any particular creed or orthodoxy. Conventional Greek religion in their day was more concerned with ceremonial observance than with specific belief. Plato nonetheless criticizes the very human foibles attributed to the gods in Greek mythology, and generally rejects argument from authority in favor of shareable reasoning. For Plato, worthiness of the designation “god” implies a virtual identity with the good, the true, and the beautiful. A god would, for example, be incapable of jealousy. Aristotle shares this positive perspective, and does not speak about mythology at all, except in a literary way.

Reception of Plato and Aristotle in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions was largely filtered through the complex history of neoplatonism. At the same time, neoplatonism — and especially the work of its founder, Plotinus — greatly influenced later theology. Although Plotinus was nominally a polytheist, his philosophy focuses intensely on the relation of all things to the One. Augustine in his Confessions describes his reading of Plotinus as a halfway point toward his conversion to Christianity. During the Islamic Golden Age, an Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus circulated under the title Theology of Aristotle.

After the Roman Empire became officially Christian, the emperor Julian briefly attempted to overthrow Christianity, while claiming support from the later neoplatonic philosophy of Iamblichus. Iamblichus’ Athenian successor Proclus treats the works of Plato as themselves divinely inspired, while also broadly embracing the polytheisms of all nations. Proclus wrote a Platonic Theology as well as an Elements of Theology, and championed a theological interpretation of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides at great length. The Athenian neoplatonic school was eventually closed by the Christian Roman emperor for its persistent advocacy on behalf of pagan traditions.

The Alexandrian neoplatonic school under Ammonius sought to distance itself from the Athenian school’s advocacy of paganism, while at the same time shifting its curriculum to focus much more on Aristotle rather than Plato. Ammonius’ students included both the Christian John Philoponus and the pagan Simplicius, who between them authored the majority of the surviving Greek commentaries on Aristotle. Without endorsing all the details of either of their work, I find it inspiring that they were able to coexist within the same school.

Religion and politics both need more dialogue and less denunciation of the other. Plato and Aristotle and discussions of their work have much to teach us along these lines.

Ethical Roots of Aristotelian Dynamis

“The notion of dunamis is present from the earliest writings of Aristotle, associated each time with an ethical context” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 100, my translation throughout). She cites studies of this issue by D. W. Graham and E. Berti.

The Protrepicus is an Aristotelian dialogue, famous in antiquity as an exhortation for people to learn philosophy, but surviving only in fragments quoted by other authors. According to Aubry, it discusses dynamis in terms still based on those of Plato’s Theaetetus — a kind of having, as distinct from use — but it already introduces Aristotle’s neologisms of energeia and entelecheia, or act and the closely related notion of entelechy. Significations according to act are already treated as focal, relative to significations according to dynamis.

“Finally, the distinction also shows a normative and teleological sense” (ibid).

“The notion of energeia is found associated not only with that of usage, but also with that of good usage and that of end, and by the latter ultimately with that of ergon [a completed work] — the text having ultimately for objective the determination of the ergon of the soul, not only its function but the act in which its end properly resides” (p. 101).

We saw recently that Plato already used ergon in a sense like this. Aristotelian energeia is the fulfilling activity from which the Platonic ergon emerges.

“It is with a normative and teleological sense that the notion of ergon intervenes again in fragment 6: the accomplishment of the ergon in effect is that in virtue of which a thing can be called good, agathos, that in which also resides its virtue, arete. For in the case of a composite being, this work cannot be immediately determined: constituted of different parts, such a being is also constituted of multiple acts and multiple powers. Its end resides in the accomplishment of its best work, its most proper dunamis, indeed that of that part of it in which its identity most resides. For the human, her end and her happiness reside in the accomplishment of the power of thinking, phronesis, which is at the same time her divine part and her most proper identity. The notion of dunamis is thus articulated to those of ergon and of energeia, which themselves are articulated to that of end, telos” (ibid).

Much of Aristotle’s most characteristic thought is expressed here. (On a side note, I am especially intrigued that phronesis or practical judgment is here explicitly assigned the same ultimate role that theoria or contemplation plays in the Nicomachean Ethics. I have long been skeptical of any sharp contrast between these two. See Aristotelian “Wisdom”.)

“The Protrepicus strongly associates notions that were present but disjoint in Plato: that of effective usage, of ergon and end, which are conjoined in Aristotle’s invented terms of energeia and entelecheia” (ibid).

She also points out a discussion of dynamis in book IV of the Topics, where it is opposed to choice based on deliberation. No one should be blamed for a dynamis. “One does not say of a human who is capable of acting badly that she is bad…. The bad is the one who is not only capable of evil, but chooses it…. Contrary to what Platonic aristocratism affirms, there are no naturally good or bad [rational beings]; in particular, it makes no sense to speak of someone as naturally virtuous: because virtue, the Nicomachean Ethics says, is not a dunamis, a native power, an innate quality, any more than vice is. It is a hexis, a disposition acquired… by means of repetition of one same act, and of which the actualization, in its turn, is suspended from prohairesis [choice grounded in deliberation]” (p. 102).

Next in this series: Potentiality for Interaction