Responsibility as Two-Sided

It is all too easy to judge others — to hold them unilaterally responsible for what we deem to be wrong. The saying “Judge not lest ye be judged” recognizes that there is something wrong with this.

I wanted to say a bit more about Brandom’s account of responsibility as inherently two-sided. This is related to the very simple — if uncommon — idea that there should be a correlation between the degree of one’s responsibility for something and one’s authority over it. This means that in ethical terms, no one has a monopoly on authority over anything, and no one is responsible for something without having some authority over it. Two-sided responsibility comes hand in hand with the sharing of authority.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel develops an allegory of the softening of the heart of a hard-hearted judge. For Brandom in A Spirit of Trust, this allegory serves as a kind of climax of Hegel’s monumental work.

Traditional views commonly define morality in terms of obedience or conformity to authority. What we should do is simply given to us from an external source. Brandom calls this the authority-obedience model.

At least from the time of Socrates, those concerned with ethics have recognized that mere obedience or conformity is at best only a very rudimentary level of ethical development, and therefore the same must apply to naked authority.

In diametric opposition to the authority-obedience model, Kant famously emphasized autonomy as a necessary basis of morality. For Kant, we are only truly moral insofar as we genuinely think our judgments through for ourselves, rather than relying on external authority.

While fully endorsing Kant’s rejection of the authority-obedience model, Hegel criticized the Kantian alternative of autonomy as one-sidedly individualistic. It would be a bit arrogant to claim that we really did think everything through all by ourselves. Moreover, there is a kind of symmetry in the all-or-nothing attitudes of the authority-obedience model and the autonomy model. It would be more reasonable to acknowledge that most things in life depend partly on us and partly on something or someone(s) outside of us.

As Brandom reconstructs Hegel’s argument, Hegel wants to say that genuine moral responsibility is always two-sided. The hard-hearted judge in the allegory, moved by a lawbreaker’s sincere confession, confesses in turn that she too is not without fault. I think this applies even more clearly to conflicts and people’s judgments of one another outside a judicial setting.

The point is not at all to obliterate distinctions or impose an artificial equivalence between the actions of the participants. It is rather just to recognize that nothing of this sort is ever completely unilateral, and then to systematically take heed of this in real life.

Brandom and Pippin on Hegelian Ethics

Robert Brandom and Robert Pippin are two major “deflationary” readers of Hegel these days. Counter to the old bad stereotype of Hegel as an extravagant metaphysician who turned his back on Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics, they both see Hegel as further developing the most essential aspects of Kant’s innovations. Both aim to carry forward Wilfrid Sellars’ Kant-inspired critique of the “myth of the given”. They both see human intentions in terms of shareable meanings rather than private mental contents.

Brandom sees Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition not only as leading to a radically new, expanded notion of responsibility, but also as providing a basis for a novel general account of the objectivity of knowledge. Pippin meanwhile has developed an innovative, strongly Aristotelian reading of Hegel’s practical philosophy. I like putting the two of these together.

Brandom radicalizes the Kantian theme of the primacy of practical reason, effectively putting ethical inquiry before epistemology, ontology, or formal logic. He replaces metaphysics with a new kind of meta-ethics. Unlike many who have used the term “meta-ethics”, he does not seek some naturalistic or empirical foundation for ethics; rather, he sees “normativity all the way down”. Normative considerations are involved in the interpretation of anything at all. Judgments of fact depend on value judgments, and value judgments implicitly depend on the possibility of dialogue under conditions of mutual respect. It is principally through being subject to open-ended rational dialogue that judgments are verified.

Brandom’s expanded notion of responsibility is aimed at promoting greater and wider forgiveness, while simultaneously eliminating common excuses for misdeeds. Aristotle and important strands of the Christian tradition already promoted the idea that people should not be blamed or punished for unintended consequences of their actions (or for things they were coerced into doing). Brandom attributes to Hegel the novel view that everyone shares responsibility for all unintended consequences.

Pippin makes the profoundly Aristotelian point that what we actually did is the best guide to what our intentions really were. He argues that for Hegel, our own interpretation of our intentions has no privileged status in comparison to the interpretations of others. He would undercut excuses of the sort “I did x, but I really wanted y“. Rather, he would say that what we really wanted — not in the abstract, but under all the conditions that actually applied — was just what we did.

The actuality referenced here is a matter neither of simple fact nor of empirical consensus or majority opinion, but is itself a matter of normative evaluation under conditions of rational dialogue and respect for all.

Form Revisited

My original skeletal note on form dates back to the first months of my writing here. This is intended to be the beginning of a better treatment.

When I speak of form, I have in mind first of all the various uses of the term in Aristotle, but secondly a family of ways of looking at the world largely in terms of what we call form, as one might broadly say that both Plato and Aristotle did. Then there is a very different but also interesting family of uses in Kant. There are also important 20th century notions of “structure”.

Form in its Platonic and Aristotelian senses is closely related to what we might call essence, provided we recognize that essence is not something obvious or pre-given. At the most superficial level it may refer to a kind of shape, but it may involve much more.

Plato was classically understood to assert the existence of self-subsistent intelligible “forms” that do not depend on any mind or body. I prefer to emphasize that he put a notion of form first in the order of explanation — ahead of any notion of something standing under something else, ahead of notions of force or action, ahead of particular instances of things. Related to this, he put the contents of thought before the thinker, and used the figure of Socrates to argue that a thing is not good because God wills it to be so, but rather that God wills a thing because it is good.

Aristotle identified form with the “what it is” of a thing. He put form and things like it generally first in the order of explanation, but explicitly argued that form is not self-subsistent. At the same time, he made the notion of form much more lively. While Plato had already suggested that form has an active character and that the soul is a kind of form, most of his examples of form were static, like the form of a triangle or the form of a chair. Aristotle on the other hand was very interested in the forms of the apparent motions of the stars; the marvelous variety of the forms of animals, considering not only their anatomy but patterns of activity and ways of life; and the diverse forms of human communities, their ways of life and institutionalized concepts of good. Form figures prominently in the development of the notion of ousia (“what it was to have been” a thing) into potentiality, actualization, and prior actuality in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Aristotelian form is interdependent with logical “matter” in such a way that I think the distinction is only relative. It is also inseparable from a consideration of ends. (See also Form as Value; Form, Substance.)

At first glance, Kant’s notion of form seems like the “mere form” of formalism, contrasted with something substantive called “content”. A certain notion of formalism is so strongly identified with Kant that in some contexts it has become a name for whatever was Kant’s position. I think some of Hegel’s criticisms of Kantian formalism are legitimate, and some overstated. In any case, the categorical imperative and its consequences of respect for others and the value of seeking to universalize ethical precepts — perhaps the first really original constellation of ethical ideas since Aristotle — are deeply tied to Kant’s so-called ethical formalism. Kant seeks a formalist path to the highest good, and argues that only a formalist path can truly reach it. The fact that it is a path to the highest good has deep implications for the meaning of this kind of “formalism”, and sets it apart from what is referred to as formalism in mathematics, logic, or law. This could also be related to Kant’s idea that ethical reason comes before tool-like reason in the order of explanation.

The 20th century notion of “structure” — to hazard a simplifying generalization — is about understanding each thing in terms of its relations to other things — principally how things are distinguished from one another, and how one thing entails another. Structure is form interpreted in a relational way that transcends fixed objects and properties. Objects and properties can be defined by relations of distinction and entailment.

Commitment to Commitment

A commitment to the practices associated with commitment is more fundamental than any particular commitment we may have. To say it another way, taking our committedness seriously is more important than the exact content of our particular commitments as to what is good and true, or to what we will do.

A high level of seriousness about commitments does not mean sticking to our guns at all cost. If we truly take our commitments seriously, that ought to mean that we also want to improve them when we have the opportunity, and to fix them when they are broken.

The American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) famously made the remark that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do”. One might hope that he really meant to distinguish between a foolish consistency and a wise one — between a kind of rigid adherence to mere formalisms, and what I might call consistency in substance or essence or deep meaning. The latter would be more akin to personal integrity.

Emerson himself was a bit intemperate in the passage that followed (“Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today”). He further confuses the matter by connecting this message with the theme that “great souls are always misunderstood”. This is all in his essay “Self-Reliance”. The rhetoric is quite memorable and there is a sense in which each of these sayings has validity, but they are both what Hegel would call “one-sided” formulations that are highly vulnerable to misuse. Their combination suggests the dangerous implication that it must be our fault if we don’t understand the one who says contradictory things. This clearly goes too far.

In the course of arguing that it is actually possible for a human to have a kind of general knowledge of being, Aristotle in Metaphysics book IV chapter 3 famously defends a principle of noncontradiction that is not merely formal.

He says in part, “For that which is necessary for one who understands any of the beings whatever to have is not a hypothesis” (Sachs translation, p. 58).

“[W]hat it is, after this prelude, let us state. It is not possible for the same thing at the same time both to belong and not to belong to the same thing in the same respect (and as many other things as we ought to specify in addition for the sake of logical difficulties, let them have been specified in addition). And this is the most certain of principles” (p. 59).

“[T]he starting point… is not the demand that one say something either to be or not to be (for perhaps one might suppose that this would require from the outset the things to be shown), but that what he says must mean something to both himself and someone else; for this is necessary, if he is going to say anything” (p. 60).

Robert Brandom argues that all the most important and valuable parts of Kant’s thought can be reconstructed in terms of the process of synthesizing a unity of apperception. This process is not a sequence of events that happen in the world; it is an ethical task for which we are responsible.

No truths follow from the principle of noncontradiction alone. In particular, it is not a deductive source of metaphysical conclusions.

On the other hand, it is what in Kantian language might be called a moral imperative. To be committed to commitment, I would argue, is to embrace that imperative. Stubborn persistence in self-contradiction destroys the possibility of shareable meaning and dialogue. In real life, self-contradiction happens to good people, but that should be an occasion for learning and humility, never something to proudly affirm.

As soon as we acknowledge piecemeal responsibility for the integrity of our commitments, we implicitly have responsibility for the integrity of the whole constituted by all our commitments. Commitment to commitment is an implicit condition of all our particular commitments, and it involves a responsibility for safeguarding and improving the integrity of the whole of our commitments. However fallible it may be, by its very nature it involves at least the germ of the crucial ability to learn, to improve itself and to correct itself.

This also has important consequences for what Kantian respect for others and the related notion of Hegelian mutual recognition look like in practice. First and foremost, respect for others takes the form of recognition of their implicit commitment to commitment, even when we do not endorse all the others’ particular commitments. (See also Brandomian Forgiveness.)

Real-World Reasoning

I think most people most of the time are more influenced by apprehended or assumed meanings than by formal logic. What makes us rational animals is first of all the simple fact that we have commitments articulated in language. The interplay of language and commitment opens us to dialogue and the possibility of mutual recognition, which simultaneously ground both values and objectivity. This opening, I’d like to suggest, is what Hegel called Spirit. (See also Interpretation.)

Distinction

So, I want to say that distinction is something good, not a defect we ought to remedy. It is a fundamental symptom of life. Stoics, Buddhists and others remind us that it is best not to be too attached to particular forms. This is a wise counsel, but not the whole truth. I am tempted to say there is no compassion without some passion. Caring about anything inevitably involves distinction. It is better to care than not to care.

Everything flows, Heraclitus said. But in order to make distinctions, it has to be possible to compare things. Things must have a character, even if they do not quite ever stay still within their frames. Having a character is being this way and not that. Real being is always being some way or other. Its diversity is something to celebrate.

It is not immoral to prefer one thing to another. We can’t be who we are without definite commitments. Perfect apathy would lead to many sins of omission. It is better to have lived fully. We are not apart from the world, but inhabit the oceans of difference, and sometimes must take a side.

Husserl on Normativity

Translator J. N. Findlay ranks Husserl (1859-1938) with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, and calls Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1899-1901) his greatest work. My previous acquaintance with Husserl has been limited to his later, explicitly “phenomenological” period.

In the first two chapters, Husserl surveys and criticizes the then-dominant views of Utilitarian John Stuart Mill and his followers on the nature of logic, objecting that they reduced it to a “technology dependent on psychology” (p. 56). Frege had already introduced mathematical logic, but the great flowering of the latter had not occurred yet. Husserl in these chapters is particularly concerned with the objectivity of knowledge, and with principles of validation.

I was initially confused by his polemic against the claim that logic is a “normative discipline”. To me, “normative” means “axiological”, i.e., concerned with value judgments. I take the Aristotelian view that judgment refers first of all to a process of evaluation, rather than a conclusion. In this sense, judgment and normativity inherently involve a Socratic dimension of genuinely open inquiry about what is good.

All versions of normativity involve a “should”. But it turns out that the view Husserl is polemicizing against treated a “normative discipline” as one that takes some particular and predetermined end for granted, and is only concerned with what we “should” do to realize that predetermined end. On this view, “normativity” is only concerned with necessary and/or sufficient conditions for achieving predetermined ends. Thus Husserl associates it with a sort of technology, rather than with something ultimately ethical. So, what he is doing here is rejecting a merely technological view of normativity.

There is also a theoretical-versus-practical axis to Husserl’s argument. Aristotle had contrasted the ability to successfully perform an operation with the ability to explain the principles governing it. One does not necessarily imply the other. Husserl notes how many activities in life are merely oriented toward operational success, and says that most of the practice of modern sciences — including mathematics — has a mainly operational character.

Elsewhere I have contrasted “tool-like” reason with what I like to call ethical reason, but I don’t think they are mutually exclusive, and my notion of “tool-like” reason has potentially rather more positive connotations than that toward which Husserl seems to be leading. I don’t take the fact that engineering tends to drive science to be inherently bad. I think engineering can drive science in a good way, involving an integral consideration of ends; a concern with good design guided by those ends and the best practices we can come up with; and a recognition that the real world doesn’t always cooperate with our intentions.

On the other hand, I also find that the best engineering relies more on fundamental theoretical insight and well-rounded judgment than on sheer technology. This is a perspective that is simultaneously “practical” and concerned with first principles. When Husserl argues for the priority of theoretical disciplines over practical ones, he is mainly arguing for the importance of a concern for first principles. While I generally prefer the Kantian/Brandomian primacy of practical reason, I find common ground with Husserl in the concern for principles.

Wisdom and Responsibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gueroult on Descartes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Would Kant Say?

Kant famously put strictures on metaphysical speculation. Sometimes it sounded as if he intended to abolish metaphysics altogether, but I think his actual intent was a reform. What would he say about my recent dwelling on medieval debates about omnipotence? Perhaps the most obvious answer is that these all involve unknowable claims. But this might be proceeding too hastily. It was actually a tangent in a post on Kant’s notion of moral faith that got me thinking again about the first volume of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s “archaeology”, which led to my discovery of her second volume.

Aubry suggests that for Peter Abelard, actual good ethics are the most important thing in religion, more important than professing adherence to revelation. I think Kant would have been profoundly sympathetic to the broad spirit of this. Abelard seems to have held that ethical reason and revelation, properly understood, teach us the very same lessons. His faith was a moral faith, not the kind that claims to be a superior knowledge. Granted that saying is a special kind of doing and that what we say in life has a deep ethical importance of its own, it is still true that what we actually do in the general sense counts for more than what we say or profess.