Poetic Thinking

In a sort of postscript, Pippin makes a few comments on Heidegger’s valorization of poetry.

“The later Heidegger’s work is dominated by reflections on thinking, poetry, and language. That is, his focus remains on the meaningfulness of Being, now as embodied in language and material works of art, not in Dasein’s comportment and actions…. Moreover, he constantly stresses the great difficulty of the uncovering or disclosing striven for in any understanding of the meaning of Being, going so far as to note frequently that this requires a kind of ‘violence’ on our part to ‘achieve’ such openness” (The Culmination, p. 205).

I am troubled by this invocation of necessary violence. On the one hand it could serve as a metaphor for the difficulty of dislodging prejudices, but in recent years I have come to worry more, hearing talk about violence from a philosopher who is generally weak on ethics, and who evidently believed in 1933 that Hitler’s rise could somehow lead to a better, more spiritual Germany, saving the world from capitalism and communism.

“We have noted several times that Heidegger’s charge of forgetfulness and the consequences of this forgetfulness in a technological, spiritless, even nihilistic world would be empty were there not some contrast with this rejection of the prioritization of discursive intelligibility as the thinking proper to sources of meaning in an epoch” (p. 206).

“The most familiar term for this new sort of thinking is ‘poetic’, by which Heidegger means in very general terms the authentic sort of contemplative activity, expressed in a suitable language, rightly attuned to the disclosure of meaningfulness” (p. 207).

“Poetry is now treated in the terms used for what is demanded of ‘thinking’, the uncovering of meaningful existence as being-in-the-world…. In what we would call modernist poetry, Rilke’s especially, this is an attunement to what is missing, to evoking our sense of dependence on a primordial site of possible meaningfulness that seems available only by its continuing elusiveness or decay…. At this point, however, turning to Heidegger’s voluminous work on Hölderlin and poetry would amount to beginning another book” (p. 208).

Pippin doesn’t really seem very sanguine about this.

“There is only so far one can go in what amounts to promises about the resources of nineteenth and twentieth century German poetry. The general remarks soon become repetitious, and at that level of generality the promises about the potential weightiness and depth of thought in poetic thinking, especially as some sort of new alternative to Plato, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, cannot be persuasive” (ibid).

“Paradoxically, Heidegger makes clear… that he does not mean that the task of poetry is to render the unsaid sayable; it is precisely to disclose such meaning in its unsayability, obviously a difficult and paradoxical notion…. A good deal of Heidegger’s commentary is like this, an explication of something evoked that cannot be named; something disclosed but with no determinate content, a revelation with nothing revealed (no determinate content but not mere absence); rather an evocation of absence with [such] density of possible inflections and implications that it defies critical paraphrase” (p. 210).

In my youth, I wrote reams of linguistically thick deconstructionist prose poetry myself, imagining that I was disclosing great unsayable secrets of the universe through Finnegan’s Wake-like word salads, and that this was superior to any theoretical construction. Today, though I no longer actively dwell on it, I still in principle recognize a kind of poetic truth that seems to at least partly escape ordinary discursive articulation, but would not claim it to be superior, only a kind of supplement whose role is hard to specify.

Authority, Representation, Pragmatism

The controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty was a mentor and colleague of Robert Brandom. In the essay I will treat here, he presents himself as especially identifying with the pragmatism of John Dewey.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty’s 1967 edited collection The Linguistic Turn “did much to cement the idea of a linguistic turn… as a sea change in the history of philosophy”. He came to sharply criticize analytic philosophy as then practiced, as well as the prevailing self-perception of modern science, but did so from a modernist point of view.

Rorty is best known for his radical critique of modern representationalism — from Descartes to analytic philosophy — in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Like Brandom’s more constructive development of an “inferentialist” alternative approach to meaning in Making It Explicit (1994), that book takes as its point of departure Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the Myth of the Given in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, and W. V. O. Quine’s essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”.

Here, however, I will focus on Rorty’s very informal 1999 essay “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism”. For an initial sketch of my own views relevant to this, see Authority. This is all in preparation for upcoming coverage of recent lectures by Brandom that shed new light on Brandom’s extremely important work, by explicitly relating it to Rorty’s.

Rorty begins, “There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’ criticism of the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality and the Enlightenment’s criticism of the idea that morality is a matter of correspondence to the will of a Divine Being. The pragmatists’ anti-representationalist account of belief is, among other things, a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. Seeing anti-representationalism is a version of anti-authoritarianism permits one to appreciate an analogy which was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to accept the distinction between Reality and Appearance” (p. 7).

The parallelism he points out between two kinds of correspondence does seem significant. This is actually the main contribution of Rorty’s essay. However, the essay’s main body consists of Rorty’s historical storytelling about pragmatism, with a digression on Freud’s critique of religion.

The formulation about ceasing to accept the distinction between appearance and reality is too blunt. Their relation is very far from being a simple binary opposition, but they cannot simply be identical either. Explanation, understanding, and intelligibility depend on making distinctions of degrees of reality within appearance. This is part of what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

Epistemological foundationalism — typically associated with a correspondence theory of truth — is the claim that there is such a thing as noninferential knowledge. I say that whatever is claimed to be noninferential knowledge is not knowledge at all in the proper sense, but rather what Plato called opinion (doxa). And again, knowledge in Aristotle’s sense is an ability to explain itself. Explanation appeals to inference, not to a supposed registering of brute facts. Foundationalism is dogmatic in Kant’s sense. It puts ultimate principles beyond any possibility of explanation or understanding. This also makes it arbitrary.

Representationalist theories of knowledge are implicitly foundationalist, and commonly have recourse to a correspondence theory of truth. Pragmatism, meanwhile, is largely defined by its opposition to the correspondence theory. Pragmatists also tend to downplay the distinction between ontology and epistemology. It does seem that the correspondence theory of truth implies something like Rorty’s Reality with a capital R, that is what it is entirely independent of the knower. This ignores the essential role of interpretation and relating things together in understanding.

What Brandom calls the authority-obedience model of normativity is presented by Rorty, not unreasonably, as an insistence on simple correspondence or conformity to the presumed will of God. Simple obedience and simple correspondence have equally little use for reasons or reasoning. For them, everything is supposed to be a matter of sheer fact, with no thought required in its uptake. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic preceded the pragmatists in showing that purported facts alone (mere being or objects of immediate consciousness, in Hegel’s terms) do not provide an adequate basis for either understanding or ethical action.

Some of Rorty’s claims about Dewey have been disputed. Not knowing Dewey very well, I am unsure how close the part about ceasing to believe in Sin is to Dewey’s own ways of expressing himself. Rorty doesn’t say much here about what he means by the belief in Sin that he rejects, but I think his idea is that it stresses mere obedience over actual ethical goodness.

I would say that the kind of view that unequivocally puts divine will or command first, above any consideration of the good, is far from accurately typifying all religion. Such radical voluntarism or commandism is indeed horrible in its consequences, but it is certainly not good Thomism, to mention but one example.

Much more common than radical voluntarism are views that equivocate in this area. Rorty seems to lump those who equivocate together with the unequivocal voluntarists. But Leibniz sought to convince equivocating mainstream theologians to actively side with him against radical voluntarism. I like this more optimistic point of view.

Pragmatists are generally recognized as having their own distinctive theories of truth — in one way or another emphasizing the roles it plays in human practices — in competition with the correspondence theory, which is closely tied to representationalism. The correspondence theory of truth, while formally distinct from any particular variety of philosophical realism, at the same time seems to suggest a kind of naive realism that is difficult to separate from the dogmatism that was criticized by Kant. I put Aristotle closer to the pragmatists here than to medieval or modern realists or representationalists.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved. As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans” (ibid).

Democracy and consensus were strong themes of Dewey’s. But even to my shallow acquaintance, the picture Rorty paints of Dewey’s views of religion is a bit one-sided. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey seems to aim to heal the rift between science and religion. He says in effect that the dogmatically religious and the dogmatically anti-religious both identify religion with belief in the supernatural. Dewey rejects that identification, as Hegel does. As a pragmatist, he is more concerned with what people actually do in their lives.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was quite willing to say of a vicious act that it was sinful, and of ‘2+2=5’ or ‘Elizabeth the First’s reign ended in 1623’ that these sentences were absolutely, unconditionally, eternally, false. But he was unwilling to gloss ‘sinful’ or ‘falsehood’ in authoritarian terms. He did not want to say that a power not ourselves had forbidden cruelty, nor that these false sentences fail to accurately represent the way Reality is in itself. He thought it much clearer that we should not be cruel than that there was a God who had forbidden us to be cruel, and much clearer that Elizabeth I died in 1603 than that there is any way things are ‘in themselves’. He viewed the theory that truth is correspondence to Reality, and the theory that moral goodness is correspondence to the Divine Will, as equally dispensable.”

“For Dewey, both theories add nothing to our ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling right from wrong, and truth from falsity. But their pointlessness is not the real problem. What Dewey most disliked about both traditional ‘realist’ epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something Inscrutable, something toward which we have duties, duties which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid pain and obtain pleasure” (pp. 8-9).

These two paragraphs seem pretty solid. He then gives a capsule history of pragmatism, seemingly intended as a sort of advertisement. In another part, he says one of the things he likes about Dewey is Dewey’s historical storytelling. Here Rorty practices such storytelling himself.

“Peirce kicked pragmatism off by starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action. Starting from this definition, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. This means getting rid of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes — and especially of the idea of intuitive self-knowledge, knowledge unmediated by signs” (p. 10).

Hegel was Pierce’s great predecessor in the critique of representation. This has not been adequately appreciated. And Dewey’s views on democracy in part reflect a continued serious engagement with broadly Hegelian themes.

“Peirce was anti-foundationalist, coherentist, and holist in his view of the nature of inquiry. But he did not, as most of Hegel’s anglophone followers did, think of God as an all-inclusive, atemporal experience which is identical with Reality. Rather, as a good Darwinian, Peirce thought of the universe as evolving. His God was a finite deity who is somehow identical with an evolutionary process” (ibid).

James and Dewey “focused on the profound anti-Cartesian implications of Peirce’s development of Bain’s initial anti-representationalist insight. They developed a non-representationalist theory of belief acquisition and testing” (ibid).

“Peirce thought of himself as a disciple of Kant, improving on Kant’s doctrine of categories and his conception of logic. A practicing mathematician and laboratory scientist, he was more interested in these areas of culture than were James or Dewey. James took neither Kant nor Hegel very seriously, but was far more interested in religion than either Peirce or Dewey. Dewey, deeply influenced by Hegel, was fiercely anti-Kantian. Education and politics, rather than science or religion, were at the center of his thought” (p. 11).

“James hoped to construct an alternative to the anti-religious, science worshipping, positivism of his day” (ibid).

“Dewey, in his early period, tried to bring Hegel together with evangelical Christianity” (ibid).

“The anti-positivist strain in classical pragmatism was at least as strong as its anti-metaphysical strain” (ibid).

“All of Dewey’s books are permeated by the typically nineteenth-century conviction that human history is the story of expanding human freedom” (p. 12).

“I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’ case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their Utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their ‘fit’ with the objects being described” (p. 14).

This idea of a plurality of noncompeting descriptions serving different purposes is no less important for being elementary. But for foundationalists and fundamentalists, everything has to reduce to black and white, and claims to truth are exclusive.

“If James’ watchword was tolerance, then Dewey’s was, as I have said, anti-authoritarianism. His revulsion from the sense of sinfulness which his religious upbringing had produced led Dewey to campaign, throughout his life, against the view that human beings needed to measure themselves against something non-human. Dewey used the term ‘democracy’ to mean something like what Habermas means by the term ‘communicative reason’: for him, the word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non human. This is why he grabbed hold of James’ pragmatic theory of truth” (ibid).

The connection he makes between Dewey and Habermas seems sound to me.

There is a multi-page digression on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I will skip. According to Rorty, Freud would have “seen worship of the bare Idea of Father as the origin of the conviction that it is knowledge, rather than love, which is the most distinctively human” (p. 18).

Here I must beg to differ. I see no polar opposition between knowledge and love. The twin pinnacles of Aristotle’s ethics are intellectual virtue, and friendship or love. Hegel stresses both as well. A principled rejection of epistemological foundationalism does not entail the rejection of knowledge — quite the contrary.

“This conviction of the importance of knowledge runs through the history of what Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’…. The quest for such a reassuring presence is, for all those who resonate to Aristotle’s claim that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, the proper way of life for the good child. To devote oneself to getting knowledge as opposed to opinion — to grasping unchanging structure as opposed to awareness of mutable and colorful content — one has to believe that one will be cleansed, purified of guilt and shame, by getting closer to something like Truth or Reality” (ibid).

The sharp Platonic opposition between knowledge and opinion is something I want to defend. I would completely dissociate it from bad or harmful concepts of authority and representation (still leaving aside the relation between these two). I would sooner associate bad or harmful concepts of authority with opinion that is claimed to take precedence over actual knowledge.

The story about Aristotle and presence is Heidegger’s, not Aristotle’s. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence really has nothing to do with Aristotle (his immediate target was actually Husserl). I agree that the metaphysics of presence — a variant of the privileging of immediacy that Hegel opposes — is a terrible idea. At least from the time of Plotinus and perhaps from that of the Stoics, the Western tradition has been affected by it. But to claim that the whole history of philosophy has been hegemonically dominated by it is a gross oversimplification.

Strangely, Rorty finishes, “[Dewey’s] anti-authoritarianism was a stage in the gradual replacement of a morality of obligation by a morality of love. This is the replacement which, in the West, is thought to have been initiated by certain passages in the New Testament” (p. 20).

I would say that the moment Socrates initiated the free ethical inquiry that was taken up and developed by Plato and Aristotle, the authority-obedience model no longer universally held sway. Plato and Aristotle are less beholden to it than the leading lights of the moderate Enlightenment. Even among the Latin scholastics, there was plenty of genuine inquiry.

Rorty never gets any further in explaining the relation between representationalism and authoritarianism that he began with. It seems this is just a provocative metaphor, with a conciliatory gesture at the end. But my real interest is in Brandom’s very different presentation, when he relates and contrasts his own work and Rorty’s.

The globally negative reference to obligation may also reflect Rorty’s very negative view of Kant.

In a footnote, Rorty claims with winking anachronism that “eventually [Dewey’s] bete noir became the doctrine which [later writer Thomas] Nagel makes explicit: that something less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions which shape a human being’s moral identity is necessary if morality is not to be an illusion” (p. 16n).

This goes way beyond the scope of the rest of the essay. I have little appreciation for arguments that claim something else is necessary for morality to be possible, so I was hoping to find common ground. But now Rorty is objecting to anything “less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions”. To me, this sounds more like the positivism that the historic pragmatists opposed.

The pragmatist tradition in general has an ambiguous relation to mainstream varieties of empiricism. Here Rorty sounds like an empiricist.

Earlier in his career, he was known as a defender of eliminative materialism, the view that mental states simply do not exist. Coming from this kind of direction, he would scarcely have needed metaphorical talk about authoritarianism to arrive at a repudiation of representationalism.

I’m very critical of the notion of mental states myself. But I don’t see this as a black-and-white question of whether or not something exists. It is rather a question of how we interpret things. Posing the question in terms of existence implies that there is nothing to interpret, that we already know what all the things in life are. This is an example of the attitude that Kant called dogmatic.

Presence

The “presence” for which I would like to recover a positive meaning is not so much a presence of things to us as our presence to things, situations, and other people. Looked at from this perspective, it seems to me that presence is really all about relatedness and engagement.

This makes presence not at all a simple matter of immediately “being there”, but rather something more subtle, that comes in many degrees. For example, when I am tired, I am much less “present”. My responsiveness is narrower and shallower. I think we become more present through more active participation in a wider and deeper range of relations.

In the Husserlian phenomenological tradition, there is a related notion of attention that I have always found somewhat troublesome, because it seemed to reduce to a subjective act of will. Aristotle and Hegel instead dwell on human character as something constituted over time by deeds, rather than on any constitutive role of instantaneous willings.

On the side of a dogmatic “presence” of things to us, discussion for the past century has been dominated by Martin Heidegger’s famous claim that Western metaphysics is fundamentally a “metaphysics of presence” in the sense of what he calls presence-at-hand. He largely blames this on Aristotle’s account of time, which he takes as privileging present time over past and future time. Heidegger claims that Aristotle fails to adequately recognize the properly temporal and not just “present” dimensions of human existence.

As I understand it from afar, the basis for this claim that Aristotle unduly privileges presence is supposed to be none other than Aristotle’s notion of entelechy, or what Kant calls internal teleology. Robert Pippin provocatively connects the latter to what Hegel calls “logical movement”. I say that the things like Aristotelian ousia (“what it was to have been” something or someone) that are subject to internal teleology and logical movement also have what Paul Ricoeur calls narrative identity. This means they do not have identity in a strict formal sense, like mathematical objects do.

A dogmatic presence-at-hand like Heidegger imputes to Aristotle seem to me to presuppose a strict notion of the identity of whatever is supposed to be present. By contrast, a fundamental emphasis on internal teleology like Aristotle’s implicitly calls for notions like logical movement and narrative identity, which make strict identity impossible for whatever they are applied to. This seems to me to be about as far from a privileging of presence-at-hand as could be.

The Heideggerian critique of a “metaphysics of presence” is related to Heidegger’s other famous critique of so-called Aristotelian “ontotheology”. Aristotle’s Metaphysics does most certainly have a theological dimension, but my recent walk-through found little support for the most common reading that it is first of all supposed to be an “ontology”. Aristotle’s theology is better understood not in terms of a general account of being, but rather in terms of the explanatory priority of “that for the sake of which”. (See also Pure Entelechy; The Goal of Human Life.)

Is and Ought in Actuality

Aristotle regards the priority of actuality over potentiality to be one of his most important innovations. He regards it as a necessary condition for anything being intelligible. Along with the primacy of the good and that-for-the-sake-of-which in explanation, it is also central to his way of arguing for a first cause.

The Western tradition generally did not follow Aristotle on these points. Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin monotheisms have most often treated God as an absolute power, seeking to put unlimited omnipotence first in the order of explanation, before goodness. Christians were happy to criticize occasionalism in Islam, but theologians like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham defended an extreme sort of theological voluntarism, which was taken up again by Descartes. In the 19th century, Kierkegaard valorized Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as unconditional obedience to God, claiming that faith should take precedence over ethics generally. In the 20th century, Sartre defended unconditional free will for humans, while asserting a militant atheism and the absurdity of existence. His currently influential follower Alain Badiou goes even further. He bluntly says that concern for ethics is a waste of time, and that dialogue and democracy are a scam — not just in particular cases, but in general.

Mainstream views of religion have always insisted that the absolute power is also absolutely good, but have been unable to show why or how this is the case. This has opened the door to simplistic but unanswerable arguments that the facts of the world cannot be reconciled with claims that it is governed by a good absolute power.

Instead of sacrificing ethics and the good on either religious or secular grounds, we should put them first. Leibniz argues that an emphasis on the absolute power or arbitrary will of God is bad theology, and effectively makes God into the kind of tyrant that Plato denounced (see also Euthyphro; Arbitrariness, Inflation).

Aristotle’s first cause doesn’t govern the facts of the world. It is the world’s normative compass. It is the pure good and pure fulfillment that all things seek, according to their natures and insofar as they are capable. Or as Hegel might say, it is pure Idea.

The priority of actuality is a priority of the good and of normativity. For Aristotle, we shouldn’t call something “actual” just because it exists or is the case. Rather, something is actual when it is the case that it is fulfilling its potential, as it “ought” to do.

It is not a matter of pure moralism either though. Actuality does involve an element of being the case; it is just not reducible to that. What is true also matters quite a lot in the determination of what is right, even though it is not all that matters. Every particular good is interdependent with particular truth. That is why Aristotle seems to make the understanding of causes into one of the most important elements of virtue, while at the same time cautioning us that ethics is not a matter of exact knowledge.

We are looking for a kind of mean here. What is true matters for what is right, but what is right also matters for what is true. Truth is not reducible to a matter of neutral fact. There can be no truth without intelligibility, and there can be no intelligibility without taking normative considerations into account in interpretation.

Being as Such?

Aristotle begins book Gamma (IV) of the Metaphysics by saying that after all, “There is a kind of knowledge that contemplates what is insofar as it is, and what belongs to it in its own right” (ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 53).

To understand what this really means, we need to consider book Gamma as a whole, also taking into account in advance Aristotle’s disambiguation of “being” and “is” in book Delta (V). (There is another enumeration of the meanings of being in book Epsilon (VI), but it is does not really add anything to the one in book Delta.)

Here in book Gamma, he adds the new element that “Being is meant in more than one way, but pointing toward one meaning and some one nature rather than ambiguously…. just as every healthful thing points toward health…. For some things are called beings because they are independent things, others because they are attributes of independent things, others because they are ways into thinghood, or destructions or deprivations or qualities of thinghood, or are productive or generative of independent things, or of things spoken of in relation to independent things, or negations of any of these or of thinghood, on account of which we say even nonbeing is nonbeing. So just as there is one kind of knowledge of healthful things, this is similarly the case with the other things as well” (ch. 2, pp. 53-54).

Classically, “said in many ways” means said homonymously, like “flies” in “Time flies like an arrow” and “Fruit flies like bananas”. The same sound and spelling are used for different meanings that have no discernible relation to one another.

The comparison to health gives a pretty clear indication of what he wants to say here. But the “one thing” that is pointed to in the same way that health is pointed to is not “being”, but rather the concept of what Sachs calls independent things (“substances”).

In the disambiguation in book Delta, Aristotle says “just as many things are said to be in their own right as are meant by the modes of predication”. This is an allusion to the various ways in which things are said, which are enumerated and discussed in an elementary way in the Categories. Ousia (“substance”, or what Sachs calls “independent thinghood”) has a somewhat privileged place in this enumeration — we might say, just because it is the one that the others “point” to. Ousia will later turn out to be the “what it is” or “what it was to have been” of a thing.

The uses of “is” that he mentions are exclusively the transitive ones. He does not even mention any case like “Socrates is, full stop”. There is absolutely no mention of an “is” of existence, as opposed to the “is” of saying something about something. Saying something about something is the only role of “is” here, and this is strongly borne out by the remainder of the text of book Gamma.

Saying the what-it-is of something of that thing is for Aristotle the central, focal way of saying something about something in general. The other ways of saying something about something form what linguists might call a family of metonymies clustered around the saying of what-it-is. Metonymy involves indirectly referring to a thing by referring to one of its attributes. By contrast, Aristotle takes the what-it-is to refer directly to the thing (which is probably why Sachs calls the what-it-is the “thinghood” of the thing).

All the ways of saying something about something have in common that they are ways of saying something about something. In Sachs’ language, they are “modes of predication”. But the saying of what-it-is serves as a kind of paradigm for the rest.

The main body of book Gamma is actually a long polemic against the Sophists and the friends of Cratylus. It is about the conditions of rational discourse.

A number of the Sophists outraged Aristotle by making flagrantly self-contradictory assertions, and claiming a right to do so. Very uncharacteristically, Aristotle seems to lose his cool over this. He goes on and on about it, beating the dead horse into the ground. He does so because for him this is a violation of fundamental ethics.

To deliberately assert something and its contrary, or to claim a right to do so, is not just to talk nonsense. Aristotle implies it is deeply immoral — the deepest possible violation of intellectual integrity and the integrity of thought. As he says, it is completely impossible to have dialogue with someone who insists on this, and dialogue is the foundation of reason. For Aristotle, such a person hardly even qualifies as human.

Kant and Hegel treat unity of apperception not as something that spontaneously happens, but as the fulfillment of an ethical norm. When we commit ourselves to something by asserting it, we are then also morally committed to the assertion of what follows from it, and even more so to the denial of what is contrary to it. Aristotle’s outrage shows how strongly he shares this point of view.

The friends of Cratylus were radical Heracliteans. Heraclitus famously said that all things flow, and you cannot step in the same river twice. Cratylus claimed it would be more correct to say you cannot step in the same river once. Effectively, this means there is no such thing as being the same at all, so “same” has no real meaning. But if there is no sameness, there can be no contradiction, because contradiction is saying contrary things about the same thing. So the friends of Cratylus too ended up justifying what we would regard as self-contradictory statements.

So when Aristotle is concerned to assert that there is after all a knowledge of being as such and that it is the business of the philosopher to have it, all the evidence in book IV leads to the conclusion that what he is really saying is that the philosopher doesn’t just believe but knows that contraries are not true of the same thing in the same respect at the same time. This is simultaneously a genuine knowledge and a condition of any possible dialogue, a moral imperative as Kant would say.

The only other thing besides the principle of non-contradiction that Aristotle mentions in book IV as applying to being as such is mathematical axioms, which are similarly supposed to be true of all things whatsoever (he does not enumerate them).

Famously, Aquinas read Aristotle’s notion of “pointing toward one meaning” as a kind of analogy. The notion of an analogy of being is better considered as original to Aquinas. Analogy is a symmetrical relationship. If A is analogous to B, we should be able to conclude that B is similarly analogous to A.

But Aristotle’s example of the relation of health to healthful things is not symmetrical; health has a kind of logical primacy over healthful things, and Aristotle very explicitly gives the saying of what-it-is a similar primacy over its metonymic relatives corresponding to the other categories. That is the very means by which he gets from the non-univocity of being to a single concept. That concept is ousia — i.e., “substance”, “essence”, what Sachs calls “thinghood”, or the what-it-is of a thing.

Some commentators have argued that the subject of the Metaphysics is “ousiology”. That seems more accurate than the conventional “ontology”. In any case, Aristotle’s focus is on the conditions of meaningful saying, and especially on saying of what-it-is — not at all on being in the sense of existence.

In the big picture, existence as such is just not an important philosophical concept for Aristotle. What something is and why it is that way are what he is concerned with.

There will be a further level beyond this, in which we will further distinguish the saying of what something is by looking at it in potential and in act, where these terms are understood in a way that is independent of motion, and instead is oriented toward that-for-the-sake-of-which and the good.

Next in this series: Causes and Sources

Actuality, Existence

I have been using the English “actuality”, following old standard translations of Aristotle. As with any Aristotelian technical term, in interpreting its meaning I try to rely on what the Aristotelian texts say about it, and to avoid importing connotations associated with other uses of the English word used to translate it. Aristotle’s Greek term is energeia, a word he apparently invented himself from existing Greek roots. Joe Sachs translates it as “being at work”, which I think is good provided “being” is taken in the ordinary sense that we transitively say something “is” at work, rather than taking “being” as a noun. The word is formed from the noun ergon, which in its root sense means “work”; the prefix en, which corresponds to the preposition “in”; and the suffix eia, which makes the whole thing into a noun, like English “-ness” or “-ity”. So, in the most literal sense, energeia means something like “in-work-ness”.

Even the literal sense is a bit misleading, because Aristotle is very clear that the primary reference of energeia is not to a present state or a factual state of affairs, but to a primitive or ultimate end, understood as a kind of fullness or achievable perfection after its kind.

We are not used to thinking seriously about achievable perfection, but Aristotle’s fundamental intention regarding “perfection” is that it not be out of reach of finite beings. The “perfection” Aristotle has in mind is not a godlike attribute of unqualified or infinite perfection, but rather something like what modern ecology calls a “climax state” of an ecosystem (like the exceedingly rich environment of a rain forest).

Ecological succession involves a series of states that lead to other states, whereas a climax state leads back to itself, as in Aristotle’s other related coined word entelechy, which Sachs renders “being at work staying itself”, and is literally something like “in-end-having”. An ecosystem in a climax state is maximally resilient to perturbation; it is more able to recover its health when something throws it out of balance.

When Aristotle speaks of “substances” persisting through change, it is not a simple persistence of given properties that he has in mind, but rather something more like a stable (i.e., highly resilient, not unchanging) ecosystem. Stability in ecosystems and populations comes from biodiversity, which is a modern scientific analogue of Aristotelian “perfection”. Diversity provides a richer set of capabilities. With respect to human individuals, the analogue would be something like a “well-rounded” character. In ethics, we could speak of a well-rounded pursuit of ends, in contrast with a narrow or selfish one.

Thus the concept of “actuality” in Aristotle has to do with a kind of immanent teleology or interpretation of things based on ends and values, which for Aristotle takes the place of what later writers called “ontology”, as a supposed fundamental account of what exists.

Some contemporary analytic philosophers have spoken of “actualism” as an alternative to the possible worlds interpretation of modal logic. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in this context “actuality” is simply equated with factual existence. Instead of making confusing claims about the reality of non-actual possible worlds, this approach locates alternate possibilities within the actual world instead of somehow alongside it. As far as it goes, I have some sympathy for this. But I want to resist some of the conclusions with which it is commonly associated, which follow from the very non-Aristotelian identification of actuality with mere factuality. (See also Redding on Morals and Modality.)

I said above that actuality in Aristotle’s sense refers to processes and states of actualization relative to ends and values, not just to present existence or the current factual state of affairs. Readers of Aristotle as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Gwenaëlle Aubry are united in stressing the primacy of “in-act-ness” over mere factuality in the interpretation of “actuality”. Robert Pippin’s account of actuality in Hegel (see also here) in an ethical context spells out the consequences of this very nicely. I think Aristotle would endorse the views Pippin attributes to Hegel in this context.

Heidegger, Sartre, Aquinas?

The heyday of existential Thomism is well past, but Etienne Gilson and others were certainly not wrong to take note of a close connection, despite other large differences.

Heidegger in Being and Time (1926) famously claimed that philosophers since Plato had been preoccupied with questions about beings and had lost sight of the central importance of Being writ large. Many 20th century Thomists partially accepted this argument, but contended that Aquinas was an obvious exception, citing Aquinas’ identification of God with pure Being. Heidegger rejected that identification, and would have insisted that Being was not a being at all, not even the unique one in which essence and existence were identified. Nonetheless there is a broad parallel, to the extent that Heidegger and Aquinas each in their own way stress the dependency of beings on Being.

In some circles, Aquinas has been criticized for promoting a “philosophers’ God”. But according to Burrell, Aquinas argued in effect that on the assumption that there is only one God, the God of Summa Theologica and the God of common doctrine must be acknowledged to have the same referent even if they have different senses, like Frege’s example of the morning star and the evening star.

Sartre in his 1945 lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” put forth the formula that “existence precedes essence”. Aquinas in Being and Essence had argued that God has no essence other than existence. Sartre argued in effect that the human has no essence other than existence. In his context, this is to say either that the human essence consists only in matters of fact, or that there is simply no such thing as a human essence.

Sartre’s use of the word “essence” reflects a straw-man caricature of bad essentialism. Whatever we may say that essence really is, contrary to Sartre’s usage it is supposed to be distinguished from simple matters of fact. On the other hand, in formal logic, existence does reduce to matters of fact.

What Aquinas, Heidegger, and Sartre have in common is that they all want to treat existence as something that transcends the merely factual and formal-logical. Speaking schematically, it is rather the analogues of essence that transcend the merely factual in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. Thus Aquinas made a major innovation in inventing a new, unprecedented concept of existence that transcends the factual. I’m inclined, however, to sympathize with Dietrich of Freiberg’s argument that the concept of essence could already do all the work that Aquinas’ new supercharged concept of existence was supposed to do.

What is important for practical purposes is that there is something that transcends the merely factual. I think the close connection of “essence” with form and ends makes it an ideal candidate. The big difference between form and ends on the one hand and facts on the other is that logically speaking, facts can be arbitrary, whereas any form or end or essence necessarily implies some nonarbitrary order.

For Aquinas, God is simultaneously a fact and more than fact, and is unique in this regard. Nothing else has this dual status. Sartre transferred this unique dual status to the human. By contrast, the neoplatonic One is strictly more than fact — in traditional language, the One as source of being was said to be “beyond being” altogether. The 20th century theologian Paul Tillich quipped that it could be considered blasphemy to say that God exists (because “existence” is mundane and factual).

The “To-Be itself” of Aquinas, while profoundly innovative with respect to previous tradition and certainly not strictly Aristotelian, is nonetheless arguably more Aristotelian in spirit than the neoplatonic One, insofar as it is less ambiguous about the goodness of the actual world. Plotinus struggled mightily to reconcile a commitment to the goodness and beauty of this actual world with an ascetic tendency to devalue all finite things in face of the infinite One. In Aquinas there is still some tension between the reality of secondary causes and the absolute dependence of everything on God, but I think it is fair to say that the way Aquinas sets up the problem makes the reconciliation easier to achieve. This was a huge accomplishment. Nonetheless, taking into account other factors like assertions about the place of omnipotence and sheer power in the scheme of things, my overall sympathies lie more with the neoplatonic “strictly more than fact” perspective, and even more so with Aristotle’s more modest view that the “First” cause is strictly a final cause.

Being and Creation

Gaven Kerr in Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Creation (2019) argues that Aquinas’ original notion of esse (being or existence, as distinct from essence or the “what it is” of a thing) is the common root of both his account of creation and his distinctive metaphysics (see Being and Essence). “In focusing on esse Thomas is the first to take note of the centrality of the actual existence of things as a metaphysically significant feature of them, rather than simply a general fact about them” (p. 50).

“All other metaphysical components such as matter and form are subject to esse, so that without esse there would be no actuality. Esse then is the act of all acts, and in being so it is the perfection of all perfections” (pp. 50-51). Pure esse is a name for God. Other beings receive the esse without which they would not exist from God’s act of creation.

Kerr cites arguments that neither Plato nor Aristotle had a concept of being as sheer existence. Only Avicenna seems to have preceded Aquinas in this regard. Aquinas considers the emphasis on being as existence to be more universal, and therefore an advance.

It seems to me that Aquinas’ esse as sheer existence is a new super-concept that will implicitly redefine the meaning of existing Aristotelian concepts, for which the old names will still be used. The novelty of esse will be largely hidden due to a combination of ordinary practices of translation; its apparent common-sense character; and the use of familiar Aristotelian terms with transformed meanings.

Aquinas developed a correlative notion of ens commune or “common being” as the subject matter of a reformulated metaphysics, based on his famous interpolation of a uniformly analogous sense of being in Aristotle.

Creation as the immediate bringing of things into being from nothing becomes the new model for efficient causation (quite unlike Aristotle’s art of building). Efficient causes meanwhile become the most important kind of cause.

According to Kerr, the act of creation should not be conceived as the first event in a series. It is characterized more abstractly in terms of what Kerr calls the absolute dependency of beings on Being. It is not a kind of change. Whole causal series are created instantaneously. What is created is the total substance.

Aquinas steered a middle course between Bonaventure, who claimed to prove that creation implied a beginning in time, and Siger of Brabant, who held that natural reason implied the eternity of the world. Aquinas argued that both are possible according to natural reason.

Kerr argues that Aquinas’ notion of creation is agnostic to questions of natural science, and fully compatible with, e.g., Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. “When it comes to metaphysics, Thomas is committed to thinking through the issues involved therein on the basis of natural reason” (p. 4).

Kerr makes the interesting argument that mathematics and natural science are limited because they consider only the essence of things, and not their existence. He says Aquinas would have us focus on what it means for things to be rather than not to be.

Descartes Revisited

Descartes is among my least favorite of those conventionally termed great philosophers. My treatment to date has been mainly limited to a few dismissive remarks. Here I’d like to add a few “historiographical” points of demarcation.

Insofar as there is general consensus among scholars, Descartes (1598-1650) first and foremost has claim to fame as a very influential promoter of something recognizably close to modern scientific method. He is often credited with the invention of analytic geometry, based on an early recognition of the systematic isomorphism between geometry and algebra. Galileo (1564-1642) had already taken up an approach to natural science based on mathematical analysis, which Descartes enthusiastically adopted. Descartes particularly promoted a methodology based on clear and distinct ideas, which he held to give certain knowledge. He advocated an orderly progression from the simple to the complex.

On a broad social level, Descartes is remembered for promoting the independence of scientific investigation, particularly from the doctrinal concerns of the Catholic Church. But he was also a religious thinker. While confessing in a private letter that he did not literally believe various details of received scripture, he was very engaged with proofs of the existence of God.

Numerous scholars have pointed out that outside the domains of mathematics and natural science, Descartes in many ways remained close to the Latin scholasticism of which he has been commonly regarded as the slayer. In Descartes and the Modern Mind (1952), for example, Albert Balz argued at length that the thought of Thomas Aquinas was an essential precursor to Descartes. I note that Augustine had already emphasized the importance of the interpretive role of reason, even in matters of faith. On Aquinas’ account, God gives us not only revelation, but also the natural light of reason. In Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas addressed questions of philosophy and theology entirely from the point of view of that “natural light”, while aiming to show that the natural light of reason independently leads to many of same truths he attributed to revelation. Descartes makes great use of a similar concept of the natural light of reason.

Both Descartes and Aquinas thought the natural light of reason, properly understood, gives us truths, full stop. I think it gives us invaluable criteria for judgment and interpretation, while always in principle leaving room for discussion about what conclusions should be drawn. I also think the “natural light” itself comes to us in degrees, and is never a simple or unproblematic possession.

A different strand of Latin scholastic thought tended to claim that all human knowledge originates in sensible images, while attributing such a view to Aristotle. (I think this is overly strong, and that Aristotle only meant to defend the pragmatic value of sensation against Platonic skepticism about all deliverances of sense.) Descartes famously argued that sensible images are not the only source of knowledge, and I think that is true, as far as it goes.

Here is where Descartes’ theses about clear and distinct ideas come into play. A methodological discipline based on examining whether our ideas are clear and distinct is an important source of human knowledge. Again, this much I can agree with, but I think clarity and distinctness are relative criteria and not absolutes. As relative criteria, they have been implicitly employed by most if not all serious thinkers. I take such evaluations to have been a major implicit concern of Platonic and Aristotelian dialectic, which in part aims to discern meanings that are more clear and distinct.

Descartes effectively claimed that clarity and distinctness are absolute, decidable properties of ideas. One of the broadly scholastic views he sharply criticized was that our best knowledge of sensible things is only “probable”. Descartes claimed that the results of his methodological analyses were certain, in the same way that mathematical conclusions follow with certainty from their premises. This goes well beyond the claim that there is practical value in such methodology.

Building on arguments of Augustine and Avicenna, he also famously gave great importance to the claim that immediate contents of the mind give evidence of unconditional certainty of the abstract existence of something. The very possibility that I could be deceived implies the abstract existence of an abstract something that could be deceived. Further, if something in any way appears to me to be such and such — even if I am wrong about all the details — independent of all the details, the barest fact of the appearance implies that some appearance generically “exists”.

The “I” that is in this way proven to exist and the appearance that is proven to exist are both extreme abstractions. Even Descartes did not claim that either of these existences by itself gives us any further knowledge. From this basis alone, I could still be entirely mistaken about the kind of being that I am, and about every detail of what appears to me to be the case. In spite of the famous Cartesian doubt, Descartes actually wanted to makes strong claims of certainty and to refute skepticism. Many readers have concluded, though, that he opened the door for a new, more global form of skepticism, because what he clearly establishes as certain seems so utterly lacking in content.

I would hasten to add that unreasonable, excessive skepticism about human knowledge is best refuted by successful achievements of goals in real-life situations. Only a hypocrite could claim to live in the world with no well-founded beliefs whatsoever. The ancient Skeptics were only “skeptical” about theoretical accounts of things, not about practical concerns of everyday life.

By setting the bar too high and aiming at absolute certainty, Descartes actually opened the door for more radically subjectivist views that no one in the ancient world would have taken seriously (and not just because ancient people were naive). At the same time, he was very impatient with “dialectic”, and tended to foreshorten discussions of meaning and interpretation, in favor of claims that certain contents are unequivocally clear and distinct. Thus the ultimate result of his thought oscillates unstably between extremes of “Cartesian” skepticism and dogmatism.

Another point on which Descartes has been very influential is his strong representationalism. For Descartes, strictly speaking we never have practical knowledge of things in the world, only knowledge about contents of our mental representations, insofar as they are clear and distinct. In particular, we only know bodies through our mental representations of them. Rather than consisting in an interpretive stance of a situated being in the world, the Cartesian cogito achieves its purely subjective certainty in a way that is supposed to be peculiarly “outside” the real world altogether.

Unlike the representationalism of Locke, which is grounded in a kind of empirical psychology, that of Descartes is closely bound up with an ontological mind/world dualism more radical than anything Plotinus, Augustine, or Avicenna ever contemplated. For Plotinus, Augustine, and Avicenna, the soul was a very special kind of “something” existing in the real world, even if for Plotinus and Augustine it was not a “subject” in the sense of something underlying something else. For Locke — the other great early modern promoter of representationalism — our mental worlds are ultimately contained within the natural world. For Descartes, there is the world and there is the soul, and never the twain shall meet. The soul has its own mental world where it seems to relate directly only to God, and human knowledge occurs only in that mental world.

It is due to this unprecedentedly radical mind/world dualism of Descartes, I think, that virtually no one — even among his admirers — wants to uphold his metaphysics. This is an extreme example of what Hegel called “alienation”.

Being and Essence

The early short work of Thomas Aquinas Being and Essence argued very influentially that the essence or “whatness” of a thing can be understood independent of its existence, and therefore its existence must be something separate from its essence. Aquinas’ fellow student of Albert the Great, Dietrich of Freiberg (1250-1310), held on the contrary that there is no real distinction between being and essence, and that they are only distinct by their modes of signification, or ways in which they are said of things.

Aquinas points out that although essence is also called form, properly speaking the essence of non-simple beings or “composite substances” not only should not be identified with matter, but also should not be identified with form. The essence of a composite substance must include both the form and the matter. However, according to Aquinas, the composite of form and matter still has to separately be given being or existence by the Creator.

In contrast to common neo-Augustinian views that were more sharply dualistic than Augustine himself, Aquinas advanced a distinctive variant of hylomorphism, or the interdependence of form and matter. “Through the form, surely, which is the act of the matter, the matter is made a being in act and a certain kind of thing” (chapter 2).

This is a novel formulation using Aristotelian vocabulary in a somewhat Aristotelian style, and it has a kind of intrinsic appeal. The hylomorphic and implicitly anti-dualist sentiment is admirable. The suggestion that “form is the act of the matter” is appealing in its simplicity, but I don’t find Aristotle using act to explain the relation of form and matter.

Aristotle leaves the relation of form and matter happily underdetermined. He is more interested in ranges of variation of concrete things than in propositions with all abstract terms, however intriguing. That through the act of the matter, the matter is made a being in act is an intelligible and interesting claim, but I don’t think Aristotle would have said that either.

The notion of “act” in Aquinas is moreover not the same as it is in Aristotle. As Gwenaëlle Aubry notes, pure act in Aristotle is a final cause only, and explicitly not an efficient cause, whereas pure act in Aquinas is action, which is precisely and primarily an efficient cause. Aristotle’s first cause is the good that attracts beings; Aquinas’ God creates beings from nothing.

Aquinas goes on to give a novel account of being, famously arguing that in God — but only in God — essence and existence are indistinguishable. God for Aquinas — “I am who am” — is pure Being. His essence is pure existence. He has no other essence, and alone of all beings essentially exists. All other beings get their being or existence from God, and therefore their essence is really distinct from their existence.

Aquinas’ teaching of God as pure Being has to be understood as deliberately counterposed to the neoplatonic One beyond being. It is also incompatible with Plato’s Good that is more ancient and powerful than being.

Dietrich of Freiberg made the Aristotelian point that being is said in different ways for different kinds of things. He argued against Aquinas that the essence of a thing refers to everything about it, just as its being does. A human and a human being, he says, are exactly the same thing. Essence as such already involves being, and there is no being that is not the being of some essence. There is a nice little French edition L’Être et l’essence (1996), edited by Alain de Libera and Cyrille Michon, that has Latin and French texts of both Aquinas’ and Dietrich’s works by this title, with commentary.

Dietrich’s own theology was a highly original Aristotelianizing Christian neoplatonism. He tended to identify God with the neoplatonic One. He was known for his interest in natural science, and developed a detailed, accurate account of the optics of rainbows. According to de Libera and Michon, he spoke of a kind of natural providence. Inspired by Arabic Aristotelianism, he developed an elaborate cosmological-ethical theory of creative intellect. He argued that the human intellect does not just passively receive images of things, but has an active, creative component.

Dietrich was in Paris in the 1270s. Without a doubt he later became a leading light of the German Albertism that de Libera and others have associated both with the so-called “radical Aristotelianism” condemned in 1277 and with the rise of German mysticism. His slightly younger contemporary Meister Eckhart is known to have been influenced by his work.