Tag: Freedom

Ethics and the Dogma of Free Will

The last post treated Olivier Boulnois’s discussion of ethical deliberation and proairesis or “resolution” (which I formerly called “choice”) in Aristotle, which grounds Boulnois’s “genealogy of freedom”. Here are a few highlights of his discussion of how the very un-Aristotelian notion of free will emerged in the later tradition, along with parts of his conclusion.

Elsewhere I have used the common translation of Latin liberum arbitrium as “free will”, but more literally it is something like “free arbitration”, which is what a free will is characteristically supposed to do. In the context of this “archaeological” discussion where the terms appear side by side, the distinction matters.

Frequently, talk about will is fraught with ambiguity. Good will — and more generally, definite will as intent subject to interpretation — is a completely different thing from the indeterminate will conceived as a power of decision ex nihilo that is being criticized here, but the two are often mixed together.

“Voluntas did not always mean will, if we understand by that a directing principle of the powers of the soul, trigger of action and repose, and capable of contraries. The word is attested in classical Latin, in the sense of ‘favor’, ‘good disposition’ ” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 254, my translation throughout). “[The Greek boulesis], which Cicero translated as voluntas, designates a sage emotion, a rational desire, the superior form that desire takes when the [Stoic] sage is no longer subject to passions” (ibid).

In the Stoics, we can see the beginning of an evolution toward modern concepts of will. But the Stoic usage properly applies only to the ideal of the Stoic sage. It is not yet a faculty of the soul that all humans are supposed to have.

According to Boulnois, the next major step was taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, in late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. Standing near the beginning of the Greek Aristotelian commentary tradition, Alexander is the most historically influential of the Greek commentators. Relevant here are his arguments against Stoic determinism, in the non-commentary treatise On Fate.

“Is it necessary to define freedom as freedom of the will, or free arbitration? The problem of free arbitration, understood as a completely undetermined power to resolve [or choose], arises from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in a metaphysical rereading of Aristotle. In effect, Alexander is responding to a non-Aristotelian problematic, that of [Stoic] determinism. To do this, he establishes a connection between the concept of proairesis and the rejection of the cosmic determinism of the Stoics, thus giving birth to a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of decision, indeed to the concept of (undetermined) free choice. Where Aristotle affirms that we generically have the capacity to act or to not act, Alexander holds that we singularly, in each conjuncture, have the possibility to act or not, and to act otherwise. This is to say that proairesis becomes a faculty of choice independent of the state of the world — a free arbitration. And it is this concept, called ‘Aristotelian’ by Heidegger but in fact Alexandrian, that imposes itself, as well in [the early Augustine of the Treatise on Free Will] as in scholasticism, up to Descartes. It becomes necessary for this to consider not only action, but an interior power of choice. Free arbitration thus becomes free arbitration of the will” (p. 472, emphasis in original).

“In inventing a libertarian conception of action, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] founds an ethic centered on the capacity to choose for oneself a thing or its contrary, without depending on a preceding cause” (p. 248).

“The concept of free arbitration had already received its certificate of nobility from [the early Christian theologian] Origen…. But he implied no metaphysical thesis on determinism and indeterminism. It is Augustine who submits the concept of free arbitration to this problematic, and discovers the power of the will, in his Treatise on Free Will” (p. 253).

“But it is Augustine who made [voluntas] the founding concept of Western ethics, in joining it to that of free arbitration (liberum arbitrium). He made it the free arbitration of the will” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

“The Treatise on Free Will was at first conceived as a treatise on the good, in which Augustine demonstrated the divine goodness and the origin of evil, in opposition to the Manicheans. But to exonerate God, it was necessary to make the human will responsible for evil” (p. 256).

“The association of the will proper and free arbitration … suggests that the key of the fault [of original sin] resides in a power of choice belonging to the will. Evil does not come from nature, but from that will, in its exercise of choice…. Thus the first occurrence of [the phrase] free arbitration appeared at a crucial moment of reflection on the origin of evil” (p. 257, emphasis in original). “It is the human who is culpable, and God is innocent” (p. 259). “Willing is always in our power; in this consists our freedom” (p. 260).

“Augustine inherits the turn made by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Freedom of action has become a freedom of choice. And the power of choice is identified at once with the principle of assent to representations and the triggering principle of action: the will. Instead of a casuistry, instead of founding responsibility in the meeting of our beliefs and our desires, on the one hand, and on the circumstances of action, on the other, Augustine prefers to construct a unique and hidden inner principle, which is situated in an invisible part of the human (her soul); this principle is will, endowed with a free arbitration” (ibid).

Also influential in this context was the late 5th to early 6th century CE Roman Christian philosopher Boethius.

“In Aristotle, the problem of willing action and that of prescience of the future are totally disjoint. The first is treated in a reflection on ethical responsibility, the second in the framework of a logico-linguistic analysis of statements about the future” (p. 159). But “Boethius elaborates what will become the key argument: if the future is necessarily determined, free arbitration perishes, along with all moral responsibility” (ibid).

In the high middle ages, such arguments were developed to a fine pitch by the Latin scholastics. This turns out to be interrelated with the scholastic turn away from Aristotle’s own very innovative meta-ethical emphasis on the primacy of explanation by final causes, to a new privileging of a transformed notion of efficient cause that is closer to early modern mechanism than it is to Aristotle.

” ‘The final cause is not productive. That is why health is not productive, except metaphorically’ ” (p. 116). “At the end of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus understood this passage in an absolute manner. They deduced that the final cause produces nothing, that it is not really a cause” (p. 117). Henry of Ghent wrote, ‘The good that is known, insofar as it is represented in the intellect, moves the will only in a metaphorical way’ ” (quoted, p. 117, emphasis in original).

Though highly sophisticated and genuinely original, this scholastic devaluation of the final cause completely undoes what Aristotle himself highlights as his most important accomplishment in first philosophy (the detailed working out of a unique “final causes first” way of thinking and understanding, which orients itself through a hermeneutics of “that for the sake of which”). The scholastic reversal of Aristotle’s distinctive emphasis on final causes (in favor of putting a transformed notion of efficient causality first) puts a value-neutral notion of sheer power in top position in place of the good at the origin of things. Not only the first cause but also human agency are re-visioned in terms of this creative misreading of efficient causality as not just the means by which ends are achieved, but as a primordial value-neutral driving impulse, or (in the case of God) a value-neutral supreme power of creation from nothing. In philosophical anthropology, this is accompanied by a devaluation of Aristotelian teleological “intellect” in favor of the new voluntaristic notion of will, as the human analogue of creation from nothing.

“For Henry and Scotus, our passage means that the intellect and its object do not move the will…. But this interpretation, which reduces finality to the conjunction of a representation and a subjective will, is a hazardous extrapolation: Aristotle speaks here only of the need to distinguish between a productive cause and a final cause (the aim pursued is not the efficient cause of movement). And all the rest of his thought implies a teleology, that is to say a motion by a final cause, even for the beings that have no representation” (ibid).

“The will ceases to be simply the excellence of good humans (as with the Stoics). It implies a mentalist theory and a causal theory of action. — 1) Mentalist: because all action is explained as the exterior deployment of a mental state…. –2 ) Causal: the will is the cause of action…. Action becomes the effect of the will” (pp. 260-261, emphasis in original).

“At first, the fundamental definition of freedom is strictly ethical. It consists in the absence of constraint and of ignorance, independent of any metaphysical position on determinism or causal indeterminacy” (p. 473). “For at the origin, in Aristotle, [desire and logos or discourse] are clearly distinct…. The aporia arises when in an articulation that is not ontologically clarified, we confuse desire and the logos in the concept of ‘will’ (since the Stoics and Augustine). Successfully to rethink this articulation is the challenge and the task of an ethics. This imposes on us the task of destroying this metaphysical confusion that obstructs the philosophy of action” (p. 475).

The reference to “destruction” might sound a bit shocking, but it refers back to Boulnois’s methodological preliminaries. There, he said

“In the element of thought, destruction and construction are one sole and same act…. My approach is a form of ‘discursive dissolution’: through dissolution, we approach the resolution of the problem.”

“To solve: resolve, destroy. Here it is not simply a matter of ‘deconstruction’…. Can we again philosophize after analytic philosophy? If the analytical method has a virtue, it is to conduct a rational reflection on problems, and to accept that they can have a solution” (p. 20, emphasis in original).

“It is undoubtedly impossible to give a complete analytic interpretation of the problem of freedom. It is likewise impossible to give a complete history of the diverse statements responding to the question. But paradoxically, what is impossible separately becomes possible conjointly.”

“I will reconstruct the principal sources of the doctrine of freedom, and of its intrinsic aporia. I attach myself particularly to the work of Aristotle….”

“When Aristotle affirms that an action ‘accomplished willingly engenders praise and blame, while an action accomplished unwillingly only engenders compassion (suggnome) and perhaps pity’; when Descartes declares that the freedom of indifference is ‘the positive faculty of determining oneself for one or the other of two contraries, that is to say to pursue or to flee, to affirm or to deny’; when Nietzsche demands, apropos of the eternal return: ‘do you will that again and innumerable times again?’, not only does it not concern the same thesis, but above all it does not concern the same question” (pp. 20-21, emphasis in original).

He devotes a whole subsection of the introduction to “the legitimacy of the middle age” as a field of scholarly endeavor.

“In studying the middle ages, we indeed study the hidden face of our history…. To choose the long path, which passes through the Middle Age, is to choose multiplicity and discontinuity” (p. 22).

“[T]here are not two eternal conceptions, one determinist, the other libertarian…. an alternative of which both terms were unknown to Aristotle, who envisaged neither free arbitration (but solely willingness) nor determinism (but only cause and responsibility)” (p. 23).

“This study supposes that we first research the origin and the structure of the question of free arbitration, then we examine the sense of action from Aristotle, as well as its obliteration under a theory of free arbitration” (ibid).

In the conclusion, he says

“The problem of free arbitration, or of the freedom of the will, is a metaphysical artifact for two reasons:”

“1. The will was introduced by the commentators on Aristotle through a complex series of translations and projections, such that rational desire (boulesis) became a will, which renders the primordial sense of action and of practical reason incomprehensible.”

“2. Freedom is not essentially a power of the soul, but a social and ethical aptitude.”

“To go further in the elucidation of the problem of freedom, it is necessary to destroy the concept of will, as the mental and causal principle of human actions. As Wittgenstein well saw, for this it is necessary to confront a radical analysis of action without reproducing this term (anachronistic in relation to Aristotle). For the idea of an interior principle, capable of contraries and cause of action, not only conceals an internal contradiction, but is a fiction that occults the different levels of action in which we are responsible.”

“We have given an account of the actions of which we are the authors. To be responsible for an action, it is necessary to be a cause. This signifies that the agent has the power to act, and for Aristotle, this is a bivalent power, to act or not to act in general. Aristotle never says that, in some precise conjuncture, given the beliefs and representations of the agent, she must have the power to do a thing and its contrary, and to not do what she does. For that is not the question: that is not what makes ethical responsibility; we are responsible for actions of which we are generically the origin; action depends on us, it is ours, when we are not constrained by an exterior force. That is also why we cannot excuse ourselves (exclude ourselves from the cause), by arguing that faulty action was necessarily brought about by our desires…. For our desires are part of us, and our action is not imputable to another…. To speak of a ‘weakness of the will’, is precisely to render the phenomenon incomprehensible” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original).

“It is only through confusion with the problematic of future contingents that the metaphysical question of the contingency of choice emerged…. For Aristotle never claimed that our capacity to act or to not act now depends uniquely on us” (p. 477, emphasis in original).

“Free arbitration becomes the condition of responsibility, which makes free arbitration a necessary but indemonstrable condition of ethics. — This argument has a double inconvenience: first of all, it requires the admission of an indemonstrable principle; then, in making free arbitration the condition of morality, it prevents us from seeing the converse, that ethical orientation is constitutive of its concept” (p. 478).

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power to determine oneself. Neither the term ‘will’ nor its functions exist at the origin, in Aristotle: we find neither a power that centralizes the other faculties of the soul, nor a principle of assent at the source of action….. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 479, emphasis in original).

“Freedom is not a postulate of practical reason; it is practical reason. And the human is not born free, but she may become so” (p. 481).

New Biography of Hegel

Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom by Klaus Vieweg (German ed. 2019; English tr. 2023) is a highly acclaimed new biography of Hegel. Even more so than the also good one by Terry Pinkard, it provides evidence refuting longstanding misinformation about Hegel, and especially his political views. It gives more of a sense of what kind of person Hegel was and what his core values were than anything I’ve seen before. This background will be good to bear in mind for the upcoming treatment of Heidegger’s claims about Hegel.

Hegel comes across as warm, sociable, witty, deeply concerned with equality, and personally courageous. Vieweg says that his extensive engagement with the arts has been underappreciated, and that Hegel’s lectures on art basically gave birth to art history as a discipline. He also says the place of both ancient and modern skepticism in Hegel’s formation has been underestimated, and in particular that Hegel’s distinctive notion of negation reflects a skeptical heritage.

“The two pillars of [Hegel’s] thinking are freedom and reason…. He is the most famous figure in modern philosophy, arguably its greatest master…. Today, Hegel’s portrait deserves to be finally liberated from clichés and grotesque fairy tales” (ibid).

“Reason” in Hegel generally means something holistic, never mere logic chopping. “Freedom” is a key topic throughout German Idealism, and a subject of much ambiguous rhetoric. Its meanings include both civil liberties and something called free will. But Hegel at least — like Paul Ricoeur — has a clearly non-voluntarist notion of free will that is one of his most important ideas (see Actualization of Freedom; Hegel on Willing).

Vieweg emphasizes Hegel’s deep commitment to democratic or “republican” politics. Hegel took personal risks as a firm supporter of the moderate Girondin faction of the French Revolution, as well as defending the legal reforms of the Napoleonic Code, which ended the legal basis for aristocratic privilege. He repeatedly went to great lengths to defend students who had been arrested by the police. He could have been charged with treason for delivering a letter to a revolutionary in Paris.

“In Berlin, Hegel established himself as the premier intellectual opponent of the Restoration…. The secret police were watching him all along…; it was widely known that Hegel supported traitors and revolutionary students” (p. 3).

“Hegel was among ‘the first to really conceptualize people as social beings. He ushered in a normative, free era of thought ” (p. 6).

“According to Hegel, … a person is the ‘sum of their deeds’. It is our actions that show what lies deep within us” (p. 9).

Robert Pippin has very thoroughly developed this point in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy.

“A life should not be seen as ‘internally congruent’ but rather full of ‘strange interwoven branching paths’, which are affected by contingencies…. In Hegel’s own words, the particularity of a person, the unique, the ‘individual character’, is the most important thing” (ibid).

Individual character is emergent, and it is an accomplishment. I think Paul Ricoeur’s work on “narrative identity” is more Hegelian than Ricoeur himself recognized..

“Lawrence Stern’s Tristram Shandy, one of Hegel’s favorite books, posits that a biography should depict a person’s character such that the reader can discern the subject’s ruling passions. Hegel describes these quintessences, these crucial inner attitudes and motivations, by the Greek word pathos, and calls them the ‘self-justifying power of the mind, which holds rationality and free will'” (ibid).

“A life should be reconstructed in all its dimensions and perspectives, its changing circumstances, experiments, continuities, and moments of transition, for it contains all the errors and confusions of a human ‘I’: an ‘independent unity’ of countless deeds and episodes, synthesizing diverse personality traits that were, when they were being lived out, incoherent and full of self-contradictions. The identity, that which stays ‘true to itself’ throughout the changes, should and can only be determined afterwards” (pp. 9-10).

Similarly, unity of apperception is an emergence, and a tendency that reconstitutes itself at every moment. It can be treated as static only in hindsight, and it is never pre-given.

“[B]iography is but a medium for a plea for free thought. To use Lawrence Stern’s words: it must be an attack on stupidity, on any and all superstition, on vanity, on rationalizing dogma and fanaticism, on scholars lolling on the floor with their inkpots, on pompous philosophers. The most important thing to clarify is that Hegel sought to make philosophy the most rigorous form of knowledge, and that reason and freedom remained the common thread and continual credo of his entire life” (p.11).

In this example of unity of apperception and biography, we can see how the theoretical and the practical are being thoroughly intermingled.

“Let us get this straight: at every stage of his work, Hegel stood for free republican ideals, against the Restoration and conservative models of thought” (p. 12).

“To philosophize: to think and live freely” (p.13).

“They were up against a strong and despotic nobility” (p. 18).

“With respect to his budding philosophical interests, we may note his occupation with Epictetus’s understanding of freedom and self-determination, which was inspired by Aristotle’s thoughts on prohairesis” (p. 22).

With this reference to Aristotle and Epictetus, we again have an indication that Hegel’s talk of free will should not be interpreted voluntaristically.

“As early as 1787, in Stuttgart, the seventeen-year-old Hegel distanced himself from the religious vision that ‘all-powerful God rules at will'” (p. 25). “He referred to Rousseau’s view of God in Émile, which turns against the superstition inherent in all religions and against the notion that God brings happiness and unhappiness, and portrays God as connected with all ideas of understanding and good” (p. 26).

For years, I could not understand why Kant and Hegel would esteem Rousseau so highly, when Rousseau is an anti-rationalist voluntarist. The answer is that it was not his rather shallow “philosophy” that attracted them, but his practical and literary views of politics and religion and human goodness. And much of Hegel’s engagement with Rousseau was through the poet Schiller.

“Hegel was also a great admirer of poetry…. Hegel liked Schiller’s tone” (p. 28). “Schiller likened Rousseau’s philosophy to Prometheus’s fire which provided arms against the horrors of poverty and ‘demonic self-interest'” (p. 29).

The French Revolution’s “declaration of inalienable human rights and its first article — ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights’ — as well as Rousseau’s and Kant’s philosophy of autonomy — were suggestions and challenges for the young Hegel” (p. 32).”The [French] Revolution was motivated by philosophy; Hegel called it ‘the dawn of freedom’…. [F]reedom means rights for all humanity” (p. 36).

“[R]eports from the French capital proclaimed the the importance of philosophy for revolution — ‘the breath of life which is philosophy has reached every atom of civil society’ — and educated people far and wide on the concept of human rights” (p. 37).

All this is what Hegel means by freedom — human rights and civil liberties, nothing metaphysical.

[The poet] Hölderlin called his friend a genius; Schelling saw Hegel, with his bold and Kant-inspired philosophical revolution, as the one who would most ‘tear apart the web of stupid superstitions'” (ibid). “Rousseau’s and Kant’s ideas would help him construct a more profound subjective religion, a folk religion, which ‘goes hand in hand with freedom’…. Religion is one of the most important subjects, a Hegelian fragment declares. Hegel also loved Schiller’s Sturm und Drang poem ‘The Gods of Greece’…, with its provocative line ‘For gods were more human / and so humans were more divine’, not to mention Goethe’s creed, his invective against childlike faith. Meanwhile, Rousseau saw humankind not as burdened by original sin but as born free and good” (pp. 43-44, emphasis in original.).

“Schelling quoted Lessing almost verbatim in a letter to Hegel: ‘Orthodox concepts of the divine are not for me — hen kai pan! [one and all!] I know no other. Hölderlin also invokes hen kai pan in Hegel’s journal” (p. 44, emphasis in original).

This candid remark by the revered literary figure Lessing, along with Lessing’s enthusiastic endorsement of Spinoza, created a huge stir when publicized by the anti-rationalist literary figure F. H. Jacobi in the 1780s. Jacobi was a proponent of intuition and immediacy as superior to reason. He claimed that reason leads to atheism and anarchy.

“Theologians tore down Rousseau’s arguments, which Hegel proceeded to rebuild in his critique of Tübingen’s Christian teachings: ‘respect for Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant’s virtue and morality'” (p. 45).

“Supernaturalist theology, according to which rights have their origins in heaven and are a revelation, went against the autonomy of reason…. The second theological pillar Hegel attacked is original sin” (p. 46).

Rousseau may have been the first modern European writer to publicly oppose original sin. But such a belief is also utterly alien to Plato and Aristotle.

“At the core of Hegel’s thinking is the famous image of the Reich Gottes: an inner life, not a physical church or a positive religion but an invisible church, a realm of morality. One enters not not through external forces like subordination, cults, or belief in miracles but rather, as Hegel answers Kant, by speaking and conducting one’s life in accordance with moral law” (pp. 46-47).

Invisibility here is not any kind of occult property, but a poetic name for universality. There is a close link between universality and considerations of equality.

“While still in Tübingen, Hegel diagnosed society as being harmfully detached from nature; instead, he advocated, people should recognize the power of nature. Much as we emphasize the legitimacy of spirit and the laws of reason, he wrote, ‘we must do the same when considering humankind in general: the sensuality of their lives, the dependence of the inner and outer natures, the effects of their surroundings, the desires of their senses’. And reason is to life as spices to a dish: it determines the taste of the whole thing. Like a light that shines through all of nature, reason is not a substance of old metaphysics but ‘looks, like light, different for each object'” (p. 47).

“Meanwhile, enlightenment through the cultivation of understanding is indispensable despite deficits. Hegel always based his philosophical understanding of nature on the latest science…. [W]ithout this kind of analytical understanding, there could be no reason” (ibid).

“Spinoza’s deus sive natura argued against the dualistic division between spirit and nature…. Reason and sensuality, moral law and bliss are all equally important to the development of humankind and free will. This comes from the view that humankind ‘is made of sensuality and reason together’ and is also how [Hegel] critiqued Enlightenment conceptions of bliss, ‘those hawkers of empirical cure-alls’, as well as Kant” (p. 48).

And I want to say that this non-division of reason and sensuality is good Aristotelianism, even if many of Aristotle’s later readers downplay it.

“Pyrrhonist skepticism… would be very important to Hegel (p. 42). “Hegel lived at the height of the revival of skepticism and Pyrrhonism (an ancient form of radical skepticism). [Hegel’s first biographer] Rosenkranz insisted that the principle of harsh, unbiased, true skeptical inspection was key to Hegel’s philosophical development. The revival of skepticism in the 1790s, especially Pyrrhonism and skeptical Kantianism, is often unfairly dismissed as a marginal event in Hegel’s life. But we are missing a huge part of Hegel’s thinking if we do not consider them. His conception of negativity was, without a doubt, a turning point in his philosophical growth. [The leading Pyrrhonist] Sextus Empiricus was, starting in Tübingen, a symbol for the exclusivity of Hegel’s absolute ideals of freedom. The young Hegel’s critical and skeptical thinking begins with Fichte’s response to Leonhard Creuzer and Gottlob Ernst (Aenesidemus) Schulze. He went from his philosophical critiques of the Frankfurt parallel reading on Plato and Sextus to his Jena Skeptizismusuafsatz (On Skepticism) to the project of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a self-fulfilling skepticism” (p. 49).

Hume already pointed out that ancient Pyrrhonic skepticism is very different from the kind of skepticism that people began to worry about after Descartes. For one thing, skepticism came to be regarded as a nihilistic position to refute, rather than as the kind of intellectual scruples we see Hegel reaching for here.

Vieweg’s phrase of “self-fulfilling skepticism” in connection with the arc of development across Hegel’s Phenomenology seems to mean the same kind of thing that I mean when I provocatively suggest that Hegelian “absolute” knowledge is principally distinguished by a thoroughgoing recognition of the relativity and conditioned character of knowledge claims.

“The heated controversies on skepticism were a huge motivation for Hegel’s astonishing philosophical development between 1790 and 1810. And [the skeptic] Schulze, an astute man who attacked Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, was an especially important agent provocateur. Schulze pushed Fichte and Hegel to revise their ideas and drafts more carefully. It all started in the Stift [Tübingen]: skeptical thinking instilled in the young revolutionaries both Pyrrhonic and skeptical Kantian methods, ‘a fundamentally unique part of transcendental philosophy’, two forms of anti-dogmatism par excellence” (ibid).

“Hegel was taken by the Pyrrhonists’ understanding of themselves not as lethargic doubters but harsh, unbiased scouts and inspectors who weighed pros and cons. He loved the Greek root word, skepsis, meaning investigation and proof, and Hume’s characterization of skeptics as diligent inspectors and critics. The principle of isothenia — for every opinion there is an opposite, equally valid opinion — is a cry against mere opinionation. Hegel had encountered this isothenic-antinomian motivation in Plato’s Parmenides as well as in Aristotle. The implicit or explicit presence of isothenia and antinomy would assist Hegel’s future conceptions of negativity and contradiction” (p. 50).

The skeptics’ real point is to advocate suspension of judgment. We could advocate suspension of judgment without making the positive claim that all opinions are equal, and this would allow us to embrace a kind of skepticism without destroying the possibility of discourse. Saying all opinions are equal is like saying everything is an illusion. It obliterates distinction, but without distinction there can be no meaning or understanding. In spite of this, there have been a few people who tried to seriously sustain such a claim. Hegel too sometimes writes as if things were more evenly balanced than I think they could be, but he certainly would not countenance any wholesale obliteration of distinctions.

“The images of the ‘free republican’ and of a rationally formed society of self-possessed, free agents were a big part of this ‘young generation’s ideal’. Such a way of life would require a republican national education. All people, regardless of culture, nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, and so forth are born free, and all have the right to a free life…. Their ideal of freedom and brotherhood were part of the reason for Hegel’s interest in stoicism, especially Epictetus [who was himself a slave], who doubled as a symbol of overcoming slavery through education. Meanwhile the ideals of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius took equal rights and freedom to a new, universal level: the polis became cosmopolitan. We are all citizens of one state. The world is a public under a great law, the general law of reason” (pp. 51-52).

Here we see a French Revolution style linking of freedom with equal rights. And on this kind of topic, we get to see Stoicism in a sympathetic light.

I should write on Epictetus one of these days. His ethical focus is almost entirely independent of the representationalist-realist dogmatism in Stoicism that I often use as a negative reference in contrast to Plato and Aristotle. (Many other aspects of Stoic ethics, physics and logic are interesting as well. It is what Kant calls dogmatism that I object to. The historic characterization of then-dominant Stoicism as “dogmatism” by other ancient philosophers is the source of Kant’s usage of the term.)

“Hegel was an ardent advocate for separation of church and state: only in the ‘unhappiest countries’ do ‘religious leaders rule’. Hegel was also against the idea that religion and morality are inherently inseparable; he insisted, in fact, that they be divided. National religion (Volksreligion) and freedom of conscience must be able to coexist. Hegel favored free thought as portrayed in Schiller’s Don Carlos, … and he referenced Lessing’s Nathan the Wise as he argued for a diversity of religions and perspectives. Neither church nor state, he also argued, nor ‘fanatic priests nor decadent despots’ could issue ‘any commands or prohibitions’ on morality and religion; otherwise, as he would later add, there arises fanaticism, his word for fundamentalism. Neither church nor state can send out moral overseers, judges who measure morality with ‘a religious ruler'” (p. 52).

Genuine morality cannot be based on obedience to commands. (But fortunately, Plato and Aristotle never proposed such a thing.)

“In 1794, German idealism was born in Jena, with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, a text that sparked the single most creative decade in the history of philosophy” (pp. 58-59).

“Meanwhile, there were stormy skies ahead for the French Revolution…. As [Hegel] would later say, Robespierre’s answer to everything ‘was la mort!‘ [death!]. Despite these profound conflicts, Hegel remained — unlike many contemporary German intellectuals — loyal to the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity and would eventually become the philosopher of modern freedom” (p. 59).

“Something is not true just because people posit or assume it, because it is an accepted fact, or because everyone agrees that it is so. As for censorship, Hegel’s thoughts on positive religion, as well as his Rousseau- and Kant-inspired Life of Jesus, would have generated tremendous outcry…. Hegel wisely kept [these] manuscripts to himself” (p. 60).

“The second constant was his employment of poetic devices in philosophical argumentation, his appeal to the senses, his use of his vast literary knowledge. This set him apart from Kant and Fichte, whose literary and artistic knowledge was rather limited” (ibid).

This is a significant point. Hegel employs a great many figures of speech, and has a high linguistic awareness. This is not just idiosyncrasy.

“His Berne writings, for example, combined Lessing’s Nathan and its thoughts on religious tolerance with ancient Greek tragedy, which thematizes human accountability and responsibility (Oedipus Rex) and the collision of different ethical principles (Antigone)” (p. 61).

“He was concentrating on developing a unique, systematic way of philosophizing, in which he does not separate the themes of religion, art, and education” (ibid, emphasis in original).

That is an interesting different take on “system”.

“Ultimately, Hegel’s thoughts culminated in a radical critique of all authoritarian religion. For him, the important thing was to develop a new way of educating people…. Going back to Lessing, Rousseau, and Kant, Hegel believed that only a natural and rational religion could count as a religion, not this positive faith that only served to establish external authority. No one should be blindly obedient to laws they have not themselves made. And religions of obedience are founded not in the freedom of the will or any kind of freedom at all but in subordination….The court of moral law, as he put it, has the question ‘Rational or irrational?’ engraved over its doorway” (pp. 62-63).

“Thinking of Lessing, he wrote that if Jesus teaches a pure moral religion, how could Christianity become positive, that is, authoritarian? ‘The objectivity of divinity goes hand in hand with corruption and the enslavement of humankind’…. This ‘downfall’ replaces reason with miracles. The higher power lies in a totally unknown world, which we do not share…. The most disturbing thing is that, in the name of this ‘objective’ God, one ‘murders, slanders, burns, steals, lies, and betrays’. Such a distorted religion is the ‘tool’, ‘advocate’, and ‘fiery praise of the ungodly crime’ of soul-sucking despotism. With that said, Hegel knew that rights cannot exist without positive rights and that religion cannot exist without positivity” (p. 63).

“Nothing had done more to make religion authoritarian than belief in miracles” (p. 64).

“After the fall of the Jacobins, Hegel distanced himself from the folk religion idea and ended up emphasizing the separation of church and state. All his ponderings about folk education wound up being fundamentally unviable; his search for a close connection between Rousseau and Kant brought no great results. But as he considered original sin, his folk education project came back into the picture. He began attacking both theological and Kantian positions by emphasizing human self-respect: People are not sinners nor carved out of crooked timber, and they must never be treated with disdain” (p. 65).

“While Hegel was in Berne, his theories did not paint a picture of decadence and decay, even though he was influenced by Rousseau…. Hegel foresaw no downfall, nor was he pessimistic. Instead, he describes a human tendency toward authoritarian despotism and argues against subordination and for an ideal of freedom. One can see how he distanced himself from Rousseau. Inalienable human rights, he writes, are the ‘beautiful sparks of reason’; slaves and servants will not behave like sheep forever. The supposedly subordinated ones have no duty toward a higher power, since they have human rights. Yet rights and duty are indivisible…. When people are subjugated, they are wounded in the most profound way. People’s rights are infinite, inalienable, and absolute. In the Berner Briefen, Hegel asks: Why did it take humanity so long to realize that this dignity lies at the center of things?” (ibid).

“[M]easured, carefully articulated withdrawal from Kant, Fichte, and Schelling was accompanied by praise of their work…. [Hegel] called for dignity, human freedom, and a cosmopolitan, anti-despotic way of thinking…. Now he proposed an anti-Kantian ‘amalgam of sensuality and reason’. One must not divide intention from result, reason from sensuality…. So Hegel bid adieu to Kant’s deontology, despite having consulted it for many early fragments about freedom. This was inevitable: Hegel focused on friendship and love, while Kant worked ‘in a world of intangible ideas’, a stranger to the five senses…. He … pits love against asceticism. Ascetics want to tax every thought, control every feeling, crush one’s joy, love, friendship and social life — things that Hegel valued tremendously his whole life long” (pp. 66-67).

The friendship and love and anti-ascetism here all sound like Aristotle.

“Hegel further opposed the dogma of the ‘sin we are naturally born with’, that is, original sin. He believed that people must take responsibility for their actions; only then can free will exist…. One is only responsible for one’s actions if one undertook them knowingly and with an awareness of the law…. People are not deficient because of their sensual desires; they are natural beings, not sinful weeds in God’s garden”(p. 67).

Free will here basically means unimpaired reason.

His first systematic-philosophical manuscript from 1795 “is full of reservations about Fichte’s, Kant’s, and Reinhold’s notions of freedom. In the first place, they all think they need to master nature: they conceptualize the unity of reason and nature, but one is the master while the other is mastered…. Free thought does not come from assuring people that there is support from on high…. And in regard to nature, there can be no relationship of ‘master’ and ‘slave'” (p. 68).

As Brandom has especially emphasized, Hegel is utterly opposed to the idea of “mastery” that is sometimes foisted on him.

“Hegel … identified the fatal flaw in all abstract concepts of unity: How does one derive different concrete things from a vague, even empty unity?” (p. 70). Manuscript 41 from 1795 says “where subject and object, or freedom and nature, are thus unified, so that nature is freedom and subject is not to be divided from object, that is divine” (p. 71). “With unified thought, it cannot be about master and servant; it cannot be that the subject is powerful while the object is submissive, nor vice versa. Right after arriving in Frankfurt, though it created a huge burden of proof, Hegel would say that the true hen kai pan [one and all] is love” (ibid).

“In the fight against ‘living in chains’, against being ‘rowers in a galley’, against political and religious despotism, against all master/slave structures, Hegel employs the principle that people must live exclusively by laws that they have made for themselves” (p. 76).

“[T]he core of modernity is freedom of thought (Meinung, ‘opinion’), knowledge (Wissenschaft), art, and religion. The ‘coincidental differences of opinion and belief’, people who think or believe differently, must be respected. A good citizen should believe whatever they want; yet the Holy Inquisition and colonizers ‘avenged the offended majesty of God through murder’, upon indigenous peoples, pagans, Muslims, and Jews…. These hypocrites profess sympathy or love toward people whom they really see as deeply mistaken just because they have differing beliefs…. [A] clear distinction must be made between legality and morality. A ‘virtuous state’, whether it comes from religious fundamentalism or a Robespierre-like regime, tends to exclude all people who think differently, making them seem like deviants and promoting fanaticism” (pp. 76-77).

“Hegel repeatedly distinguishes between beautiful, free imagination and its ‘adventurous excesses and images of a terrifying world’. The latter is the source of prejudice” (p. 78).

“The ideal of his youth can be summed up in a single word: freedom. Freedom as Rousseau, Schiller, Kant, and Fichte defined it, in the spirit of the French Revolution” (p. 87).

“From the Romans, who owned slaves and indulged in their vices, to the wild ‘barbarians’ and the Italian city-states, to the monarchies that held their people in bondage, it is an ambiguous history, full of great scientific and artistic achievements but also of banning and censorship…. Christianity preached love of one’s fellow humans and equality; yet under the Spanish cross, entire populations of Native Americans were being wiped out. The English sang songs praising the destruction of India” (p. 97).

“Positive faith creates a master/slave structure, through abstract opposition and heteronomy. This is no sign of the ‘Reich Gottes’ (Kingdom of God), for nothing that rules me, within or without, can be godly…. Hegel looked to Aristotle to demonstrate the unity of humanity and God. The actualization of divine reason in an active life, as an individual, containing opposition, must be understood in this way (p. 101).

“Nothing that rules me can be godly” — I like that.

“Humans and God must be imagined as being of the ‘same nature’, which is spirit itself imagined by spirit (human beings)…. In 1799, Hegel described the divine as ‘the highest freedom, whose existence and relationship to the world comes in the form of beauty’…. Miracles illustrate the extreme of positive or objective religion; the ‘most ungodly’ lies in creatio ex nihilo [creation from nothing]. In the context of religion, too, Hegel is concerned with the insufficiency of unity without diversity: disdain for the diversity of life leads only to fanaticism. If the divine is pure, shapeless, and unconnected, then it follows that everything else must be impure and loathsome. It also leads to the idea that people who worship different gods are ‘unbelievers’. Those who hate all gods but their own must ‘carry a hatred of all humankind in their pocket'” (pp. 101-102).

“To Hegel, an avid reader of Shakespeare, love between two people… represents the ‘finding of one in the other’…. ‘The more I give, the more I have. The individual finds within the other a way to be free” (p. 102).

“Hegel did not see humans as Fremdlinge (aliens) in nature or Pfichtlinge (dutiful beings) in the moral world. Regardless of categorical imperatives, they have a right to happiness and well-being, to act on their desires; duty and desire cannot be pitted against each other. In religion, God must be imagined as a ‘friendly being’, and humans must be not only beings of duty but beings of joy, love, and laughter…. In Frankfurt, Hegel changed his terminology, ‘unifying’ morality and legality into a higher term. As Rosenkranz puts it, ‘first came simply life, later came ethical life” (p. 103).

“Aristotle’s Metaphysics, book 12, was particularly important for his understanding life as identity” (p. 106).

“Truth is freedom from ruling / being ruled” (ibid).

“Beginning in the autumn of 1801, he was close to Goethe, and they often went together to the theater” (p. 113).

“Dogmas generally come in the form of presuppositions without evidence: assumptions, revelations, empty assurances…. Each of these approaches assumes that there is something before reflection, beyond reflection — spontaneous, given facts, the unchangeable. All are variations of the myth of the given. An unexamined assumption, a pure reassurance, cannot found or ground a philosophy, because critical examination remains suspended. Immediacy, if merely assumed, is fraudulently acquired: a fatal leap into belief or faith, akin to an appeal to oracles” (p. 120).

“Instead of ‘I = I’, the postulate is ‘I should be I’, only a demand for unification, a unification that will never happen” (ibid).

“No logical path leads from pure unity to duality or diversity, and vice versa. In Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, the One is supposed to metaphorically radiate outward. Fichte also made an illegitimate leap in logic, from the ‘I’ to the ‘not-I’…. Finding evidence (Beweis) for the beginning forced Hegel to drastically change his strategy of thinking while still in Jena” (p. 128).

“Reading Aristotle and Fichte, Hegel understood thought and will as different but not as confronting each other; in each, the theoretical and the practical are connected…. Reason must stand against both dogmatism and skepticism — against Plotinus’s example of empty unity, empty monism, and against Sextus’s example of mere division, empty dualism…. Philosophical thinking cannot accept pure immediacy, or anything prereflective…. [T]he key concept of ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) aims at a philosophy of concrete self-determination” (p. 130).

“True ethical life must overcome extremes, both for private subjects that are only for themselves and for empty and abstract generalities” (p. 133). “True ethical life claims the identity of the universal and the particular in form and content: concrete freedom” (p. 134).

Vieweg quotes from an 1803 fragment, “Geist is not being, but becoming; it comes from negation and, having prepared for itself the ideal element of nothingness, can move freely. Geist is but the elevation of its other; this other self is nature; Geist makes this other and itself the same…. Geist recognizes that this nature, or otherness, is not actually other. This knowledge makes Geist free, for the first time truly Geist…. Only by leaving itself and returning to find itself can Geist prove itself Geist” (p. 139, ellipses in original).

“With a precise categorical definition of development, he countered the relativist mantra of procedure as an endless cycle of self-creation and self-destruction up until the bad infinity of St. Neverland Day. There is no lottery without a payout; the purpose of being-in-oneself becomes real when it becomes for-oneself…. Second, he defined the relationship with oneself as knowing” (p. 140).

“Hegel fought against the fiction of pure, unconditional immediacy, and abhorrent dogmatic assurances of a pure immediate, setting against these assertions the skeptical climbing of the ‘rope ladder of logic”. Skepticism was his weapon against what is supposedly sacrosanct, primordial, prereflective doubt, or skepsis, is the opposite of the pure immediate” (p. 142).

“[H]e continued his debate with skepticism and sharpened his concept of negativity, a point whose importance is still underrated” (p. 143).

“The monadic-solipsistic ego is only able to achieve self-consciousness in a thinking self-relation through the sublation of its imaging and yearning self-relation, only through knowledge of the will, which is thus conceived as a universal will and is essentially being-recognized” (p. 144, emphasis in original).

“He was working to overcome the paradigm of consciousness” (p. 148, emphasis in original).

“Hegel wrote a popular, accessible essay called ‘Who Thinks Abstractly?’ This little gem is an excellent place to start on Hegel’s philosophy; it addresses the main barrier to philosophy — namely, that it is too abstract: ‘Metaphysics, thought, and abstraction are words that make everyone run away more or less as if from the plague’. Hegel’s answer to the titulary question is perhaps surprising: it is the uneducated who think abstractly, not the educated. Abstract thinking means, for example, seeing in a murderer nothing but the abstract fact of being a murderer, thereby denying them everything else — their concreteness, the fact that they may also be a strong, attractive person on whom the sun likewise shines; an uneducated person thinks abstractly, reducing a person to a single predicate” (p. 185).

“‘The answer that Robespierre gave to everything: whatever anyone said, thought, did, or wanted, he cried, La mort! It became repetitive’. Schelling’s absolute knowing is the same: ‘great broom, sweeping everything away'” (p. 186).

“Hegel wrote the Philosophy of Right inspired by the spirit of 1789. The Restoration proved a danger to his publishing it. (It is a double irony that Hegel-haters today call him a Restoration ideologue.)” (p.269).

“Hegel was a danger to the Restoration. In his lectures and books, he insisted fearlessly on free thought. He supported students who stood accused of treason” (p. 270). “Hegel spoke with hotheaded youths, sympathizing with their yearning for freedom and discouraging nationalism and anti-Semitism, evidently with some success…. [H]is Philosophy of Right proved that theories of nationalism, especially those that excluded Jewish and French people, were absurd” (p. 271). “The secret police, inevitably, kept an eye on him, for he was supporting ‘traitors’…. And yet, despite all this, there are still those who call Hegel a Restoration apologist. They should read the Philosophy of Right, which is arguably history’s greatest book against Restoration ideology, against nationalism, colonialism, and racism, and for a modern society of freedom and justice” (p. 272).

“The preface to the Philosophy of Right is one of the most misunderstood texts in philosophical history….. [Hegel] would be vilified for his universalism and his rejection of German chauvinism, nationalism, and racism at key moments in later history — 1870, 1914, and 1933″ (p. 274).

“Not everything that exists is ‘actual’ (wirklich); only rational forms have that attribute. Positive rights cannot be equated with the right of reason (Vernunftrecht)…. What exists is not the standard, as the Prussian state would have it, but rather reason: the standard and the court where ‘rights’ must justify themselves. In a lecture Hegel said, ‘What is actual (wirklich), is rational. But not all is actual, that exists” (p. 275).

“In colloquial speech, actuality encompassed every ‘stunted, transitory existence’. Vieweg quotes Hegel, “But when I speak of actualization (Wirklichkeit), one should instantly wonder in what sense I use this expression, for I also discussed actuality in the Logic and I do not just mean contingencies, which do exist. I have precisely distinguished actuality from Dasein, existence, and other categories'” (ibid).

“The prologue also includes one of the most beautiful metaphors in philosophy: ”The owl of Minerva begins her flight when dawn breaks’, The cliched, pessimistic interpretation is that philosophy comes too late. But Hegel described the French revolution as a glorious sunrise: for the first time, there was a constitution based on rights” (ibid). The modern world represents the ‘dawn’ of history, the highest stage of freedom. First, it suggests that a free society can realize the singular freedom of all subjects. Dawn and sunrise stand for the French Revolution” (p. 276).

“Relationships such as master/slave and despotism are not forms of freedom: both ‘master’ and ‘slave’ are unfree, as is the despot; they are ‘in the same relationship’ of unfreedom. People’s reciprocal recognition is intrinsic to Hegel’s free will. The idea of interpersonality appeared in the Encyclopedia back in 1817: a person is ‘realized only in the being of other people’; only then am I ‘a real person for me‘. The principle of recognition is fundamental in the Philosophy of Right. It is the substance of true community, of friendship, love, family, state. Abstract right demands that I ‘be a person’, and with regard to intersubjectivity, ‘respect every other “I” as a person, a subject with rights’…. All actions that do not respect a person as a subject with free will or interfere with their freedom are unfree. Third, Hegel has a concept that goes back to Kant and Fichte: every being with free will is — unlike a thing — its own end” (p. 281).

“The three dimensions — recognition, inviolability, and the end in itself — all concern people’s equality in their ‘humanity’, with their right to personality/personhood and are the foundation of human rights…. Every being with free will has the absolute right to recognition of their person” (ibid).

But at the same time, “Equating arbitrariness with freedom is a theoretical fallacy” (p. 296).

“Having finished the Philosophy of Right, Hegel became one of the main inspirations for the explosion of poetry in the 1820s…. Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art, which were about modern and Romantic literature and art in general, were especially important to them” (p. 318). “Hegel was a big part of the Berlin musical scene….’Hegel was especially at home in the company of Berlin women, and quickly they, too, came to care for and look after him, the good and humorous professor'” (p. 320).

“Hegel’s success and polemical statements also inspired jealousy, hatred, and rejection….Hegel had friendly, collegial relationships with many fellow intellectuals…. But he also had influential enemies” (p. 327). “The nobility, correctly, did not find Hegel to be a Prussian political philosopher, a royalist; in fact, he was one of the most philosophically dangerous enemies of the Restoration” (pp. 327-328).

Versions of Finitude

Heidegger claims to radicalize Kantian finitude. He “wants to applaud Kant for appreciating the finitude of thinking — in Kant its dependence on sensible and pure intuition — also note the hidden importance of the imagination in Kant’s project, and yet also demonstrate that Kant has not broken free of the prior metaphysical tradition but remains solidly within its assumptions” (Pippin, The Culmination, p. 82).

“Kant treats our immediate familiarity with the world as an unimportant issue, since real knowledge of what really is resides in mathematical physics, and how things show up in ordinary experience is of no account” (p. 83).

Pippin is characterizing Heidegger’s view here. The last part strikes me as an overstatement by Heidegger. Kant aims, among other things, to give an account of ethics and human life that would be compatible with Newtonian physics, but never even comes close to suggesting that ethics could be explained in terms of physics.

“Heidegger claims that not only is freedom a problem of causality, but causality is itself a problem of freedom” (ibid).

Kant does occasionally mix up discussions of freedom and causality, as when he makes the unfortunate suggestion that we think of freedom as an alternate kind of causality besides the one exhibited in Newtonian physics. But in the main, he treats ethical freedom and mechanical causality as two very different registers. Heidegger is tendentiously assuming that for Kant, physics must provide the outer frame of reference for ethics. But despite Kant’s great reverence for Newton, he famously argues for the primacy of practical reason.

“Heidegger wants to explore the implications of the remarkably Fichtean formulation that anything actual must be understood to be ‘posited’, that being, the meaning of being, is ‘positing'” (p. 84).

This notion of positing has come up several times, in relation to Hegel (and Fichte, who first made it a major theme). It is closely related to the contested notion of judgment. As Aristotle might remind us, judgment is said in more than one way.

“Position or positing is treated throughout as judging, the discursive form of representing” (p. 85, emphasis in original).

Judgment in the sense I care about mainly names a kind of free inquiry where the outcome is not decided in advance, rather than a completed conclusion. It should be understood as subject to all the nuances that affect jurisprudence. Judging as an activity has to be an open process of interpreting, not the mere representing of something identified in advance or known in advance. Only in hindsight — with a conclusion already in view — can judgment even be expressed in terms of representation. But the early modern tradition in logic identifies judgments with propositions, assertions, or conclusions.

Pippin quotes Heidegger quoting Kant, “The concept of positing or asserting [Position oder Setzung] is completely simple and identical with that of being in general” (p.86).

To “be” X is to be well said to be X.

For Kant, Pippin explains, “We have the power to determine objectively when something exists or not, so that what there is can be understood as what this power can determine…. [T]he concept of something existing beyond our capacity to determine in principle if it exists (or if we cannot but believe it exists) is an empty notion” (pp. 86-87).

He quotes Kant again, “I find that a judgment is nothing but the manner in which given modes of knowledge are brought to the objective unity of apperception. This is what is intended by the copula is. It is employed to distinguish the objective unity of given representations from a subjective unity” (p. 87).

This will lead Heidegger to say that for Kant, the meaning of Being is unity of apperception. That seems plausible enough.

“The primordial mode of being of Dasein is not primarily as a perceiver but being-in-the-world” (p. 88).

Heidegger wants to disqualify any purely cognitive approach to these issues, and simultaneously to claim that all the philosophers do take a purely cognitive approach, which renders their conclusions invalid. This second claim is once again highly tendentious, because many of the philosophers take a normative approach that is in no way “purely cognitive”.

“Kant takes himself to have demonstrated that all that relation to an object, a determination of any being, can amount to is the objective unity of an apperceptive synthesis…. And there is no indication that he thinks that demonstration will show that the mind imposes a form on a formless matter” (p. 89, emphasis in original).

Hegel and Heidegger both at times blame Kant for using language that tends to suggest the two-stage, “impositionist” view.

“[Kant’s transcendental] deduction is not about ‘stamping’ but about demonstrating that there cannot be any intuited content (i.e., any cognitively relevant content) that is incongruent with the required a priori conditions…. But Heidegger is simply asserting that this unity is ‘subjective’ and imposed…. There is quite a lot, most of it simply assumed by Heidegger, packed into ‘Thinking is esconced in human subjectivity'” (p. 90).

“As a student of Husserl, Heidegger is certainly aware of the objections to any psychologistic account of judgment, and his suggestions about ‘stamping’ and being ‘sunk’ in subjectivity do not trade on any such psychologizing…. Judgment too is a mode of public comportment towards entities, a modality of being-in-the-world, and not originally an inner episode…. [H]e appears to think that locating the intelligibility of being in judgment unavoidably transforms the objects of judgment into mere present-at-hand entities. Given the claim that the primordial, fundamental, or original meaning of beings is as pragmata, equipment, read-to-hand, our fundamental mode of comportment towards beings is engaged and unreflective use, and any interruption of such unreflective use, such as a cognitive judging, must lose any grip on this primordial meaning and primordial comportment in favor of a present-at-hand substance” (p. 93).

Judgment as public comportment rather than inner episode makes good sense. Beings as pragmata are fine. But I simply do not see any “unavoidable” transformation of objects of judgment into present-at-hand entities. Yes, something like this fixing of presence-at-hand does occur in various circumstances. But the history of philosophy provides plenty of counterexamples, among whom I would include Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. Hegel even addresses the issue very explicitly, with his famous complaints about “dead” objects and such. It is disingenuous for Heidegger to ignore this.

Heidegger also appears to claim that unreflective engagement in the world is unequivocally superior to the best Kantian and Hegelian reflection. Unreflective engagement should be granted some role and dignity, but this goes way too far.

“Unless there is such a link between judgment as such and being as constant presence…, this mere link to a thinking subject… would not appear to justify any claim to a distortion or unthinking appropriation of the core metaphysical tradition” (p. 94).

I think we just established that there is no such unqualified link.

“[I]t would not be fair to Kant to insist that he understands this cognitive or judgmental modality as either exclusive or even privileged…. In fact, a good case can be made that one of Kant’s contributions to philosophy is his demonstration that our primary and most significant mode of comportment towards being ‘as a whole’ is not cognitive but practical, the experience of the moral law, our own status as free subjects, and our sensitivity to the beautiful and the sublime” (ibid).

Yes indeed.

“And Kant is famous for denying the possibility of ontology, claiming that the proud name of ontology must give way to the humbler analytic of the understanding” (p. 99).

And I say he is right to do so, and that Hegel follows him in this.

“But there is no moment in Kant that holds that the Being of beings is a matter of disclosure” (p. 100).

Indeed not. If anything, Kant is overly categorical in asserting the purely active nature of thought.

“There can be no undifferentiated mere matter of sensation that is then in a second step shaped by pure concepts” (p. 101).

As I mentioned, Pippin and Brandom have pretty conclusively refuted the old “two stage” reading of Kant on thought and intuition.

Pippin quotes a particularly outrageous claim by Heidegger, that “In order to understand the Critique of Pure Reason, this point must be hammered in, so to speak: knowing is primarily of intuiting…. All thinking is merely in the service of intuition” (ibid).

“This is not exactly Kant’s position. It would be more accurate to summarize it as: knowing is always a thinking intuiting and an intuiting thinking” (pp. 101-102).

Heidegger “even freely admits that Kant insists on a reciprocity between thinking and intuiting, but he proposes forging ahead anyway with his claim for the priority of intuition” (p. 104).

“The ‘basic faculty’ is the imagination, and it is ‘pre-ontological’ because it is the exercise of a nondiscursive, nonconceptual imagining” (p. 109).

I am myself fascinated by the role of imagination in Aristotle and Kant (see also Sellars on Kantian Imagination). I would not claim, however, that imagination is the root of all thought. Imagination in its immediate presentation is nondiscursive and nonconceptual, but Kant’s subtler point is that discursive and conceptual elements nonetheless get wrapped into it. Imagination in the broadest Aristotelian sense seems to be a kind of link between organic being and thought. Without imagination, an organic being cannot be said to think. But thought is more than just imagination. What makes thought rational is its non-arbitrariness. Kant would tell us that imagination cannot be completely arbitrary either, since the categories of thought also apply to it, as he argues in the famously difficult “transcendental deduction” in the Critique of Pure Reason. (See also Capacity to Judge; Figurative Synthesis.)

“More radically put: both intuition and understanding are derivative…. What he appears to mean by derivative is that there could be no role to play for the understanding and intuition conceived as distinct capacities, were there not an original imaginative projection of a horizon of possible encounterable beings” (p. 111).

This part seems unobjectionable.

“So, the question is not whether conceptual capacities are necessary for any experience…. The issue is rather the mode of conceptual actualization. The chess grand master has ‘immediately’ ‘in mind’ a sense of areas of threats, dangers, degrees of possibilities and probabilities, all because of the years he has spent playing and reading chess books. But those moves are determinate, and concepts are in play” (p. 114).

This illustrates what Hegel calls “mediated immediacy”.

“The point of all these metaphors is, of course, to find as many ways as possible to suggest some spontaneous activity in intuiting other than assertoric judging or acts of conceptual sorting, or deliberate rule-following” (p. 115).

In a Kantian context, spontaneous activity and intuition are mutually exclusive, though in real life we never get either of these purely by itself.

“The horizon-forming work of the imagination is not a determination of conceptual intelligibility but our comportment with a world everywhere always already ‘irradiated’ with meaning, significance” (ibid).

This again seems fine. The notion of horizon comes from Husserl’s phenomenology.

“He means that one cannot say of a Dasein, a human person, that this sort of being is simply ‘in time’, in some supposed ‘flow’ of temporal moments. It can, of course, for various purposes, be considered that way, as if Dasein were a table or a plant, but that aspect is derivative from how Dasein orients itself in in time, and in that sense ‘affects itself’…. Heidegger means, again in a way that involves the imagination, that we never experience time simply ‘passing’, but our temporal awareness always (again) involves the issue of meaning…. [T]he notion of time is presented as [a] kind of self-determining and so self-affecting, since time is a pure intuition, where that means not a pure intuited but a pure intuiting…. This is not an empirical event, and so there is not a self that ‘affects’ itself as already present to itself as a substance-like self, a subject” (p. 117).

Here we get to why Heidegger called his magnum opus Being and Time. He wants to give us anything but a boring mathematizing theory of uniform Newtonian time. A radical, nonuniform, constitutive experience of time is one of his more interesting thoughts. It seems to start from Kant’s notion of time as a “pure intuition”. (See also Ricoeur on Husserl on Memory; Ricoeur on Augustine on Memory.)

“A self is the way it stretches itself along in time” (p. 118).

“According to Heidegger, the world, a historical world, sets a horizon of possible meaningfulness — fundamentally the meaning of Being as such — and Dasein’s inheritance of and orientation from such a horizon does not require any self-conscious discursive orientation, but is a matter of simply being involved in the interrelated nexus of practical significances that amounts to the various tasks and projects of the world” (p. 120).

That orientation from a horizon is generally not self-conscious goes with the territory. The same might be said of a human’s uptake of culture.

Heidegger contrasts a good “ready-to-hand” with the bad present-at-hand. The good one is supposed to be original and primordial, which seems to mean it is that by comparison with which he will say everything else is effectively in bad faith (though that is not his term).

“[T]his primordial meaningfulness of entities should be understood as (although not exclusively as) the ready-to-hand, Zuhandenheit, affordances, and not the present-at-hand, at-handedness simply present before us, the vorhanden, primarily stable substances enduring through time understood as a sequence of nows, what Heidegger generally calls standing presence, ständige Anwesenheit. By contrast with empirical intelligibility, our understanding of the ready-to-hand is a matter of attunement and appropriate comportment, something like skillful involvement. This fundamental level of significance has been obscured by the metaphysical tradition since Plato and Aristotle. This is because of the mistaken assumption that our original familiarity with beings in a world is illusory and truth is a struggle towards cognitive intelligibility” (pp. 120-121).

I think something like attunement and comportment and skillful involvement is very much present in Plato and Aristotle (and in Stoicism and Epicureanism, for that matter), so for me the whole negative argument about metaphysics never even gets off the ground. Heidegger is reading what is really a modern issue too far backwards in history.

“Every projection of what matters to us into the future involves a being, Dasein, with no inherent teleology or universal or even available ground (an answer to the question of why what fundamentally matters in the world does or ought to matter). What originally matters is inextricable from our thrownness into a certain historical world, so what comes to matter is a question of contingency, what we plan out concerning what matters is subject to the massive contingency of our lack of control not only over our own ‘ground’ but over our fate or our ever-possible death” (p. 121).

We have not seen any argument why there is no “teleology or universal or even available ground” related to human being-in-the-world, though this is a common modern assumption.

“Most importantly for our present purposes, the priority of the ständige Anwesenheit assumption cannot be assumed in the question of our own being, how our own being is a meaningful issue, at stake for us. At the heart of Heidegger’s analysis in [Being and Time] is the claim that the authentic meaning of Dasein’s being can also crudely but accurately be summarized: anxious being-towards-death” (ibid).

Heidegger has exerted a very great influence on Continentally oriented discourse about the “question of the subject”. There does seem to be a kind of correlation between the broadly syntactic definition of substance as an “underlying thing” in Aristotle’s Categories, and what Heidegger calls “standing presence”, but this is precisely the definition that is superseded in the Metaphysics.

The whole notion that “anxious being-towards-death” is the most important aspect of human subjectivity — and the key to its “authenticity” — seems very implausible. I stand with Spinoza’s “The philosopher thinks of nothing less than of death”. This stuff about death is directly personal for me, as a recent cancer survivor. I choose to meditate on life — the good, the true, and the beautiful — and as much as possible to cherish every moment.

“Heidegger’s basic picture focuses on Dasein’s unique awareness of our own mortality, and so the question of whether one lives with a resolute readiness for anxiety, or a flight from such awareness by the tranquilizing notions like ‘everyone must die; we can’t do anything about it, so why worry about it?’ or ‘what a morbid way to look at life'” (pp. 121-122).

I choose neither of these. Heidegger tries to force us with a false dichotomy.

“This is also a dramatically isolating and individualizing approach. A background standing attunement to the constant impendingness of one’s own death is intensely private and unshareable, and with such a notion at the center it makes almost all of ordinary life escapist and even cowardly” (p. 122).

What Pippin correctly recognizes as a “dramatically isolating and individualizing approach” does not bode well for ethics.

Calling almost all of ordinary life escapist and cowardly sounds like emotional blackmail. This is of a piece with Heidegger’s very uncharitable account of the history of philosophy.

“If we ask this question of Kant in the register in which Heidegger asks it, then it would hardly be correct to suggest that for Kant, ‘primordially’, what it is to be a human, to exist in a distinctively human way, is to be a self-conscious knower…. Kant is under no illusion about the fact that our little ‘island’ of factual knowledge of nature, the pinnacle of which is Newtonian mechanics, is of no deep significance for human life. This is a radical rejection of so many conceptions of philosophy, from the Socratic-Platonic notion of philosophy as a way of life to the notion of philosophy as therapeutic in the Wittgensteinian sense. Human significance and worth are based wholly on a rational faith in our moral vocation. That is what primordially matters. We don’t ‘know’ that we have such a capacity, but its availability is a matter of its practical undeniability” (ibid).

For Kant, our status as what I would call ethical beings is more “primordial” than our status as knowers. I see harmony rather than conflict between the Socratic-Platonic notion of philosophy as a way of life, and a rational faith in our moral vocation.

“Heidegger understands this feature of Kant, that the true significance in being human does not for Kant reside in being a knowing subject” (ibid).

“It is not enough to acknowledge our finitude in this context by noting the inevitability of moral struggle. If there is moral struggle at all, that is already an indication that the moral law is not practically motivating just by being acknowledged. That would be what Kant calls a ‘holy will’. This is a pretty close analogue to his conclusion that the unity of the understanding and intuition requires that the nature of the understanding itself cannot be formulated in terms of the logic of judgment alone (that it requires the prior function of pure imagination). The bearing of pure reason on our sensible inclinations cannot be understood as a mere imposition on an independently conceived sensible nature. (There is also an analogue to Hegel’s early critique of Kant — that this picture of imposition means the law is experienced as wholly positive, an alien authority, as alien as a divine command theory of morality, the mere imposition of a law ‘from without’. It is Hegel’s way of raising the necessary question of what our moral vocation means to us, beyond merely ‘being commanded’.)” (p. 124).

Plato already has a well-developed alternative to a command theory of morality, as well as a good awareness of the importance of mixed forms (see Middle Part of the Soul). As Pippin has already suggested, Kant scholars now generally reject the attribution of an “impositionist” theory to Kant.

“Even if imperfectly, Kant realized that our access to the moral dimension of our being is through a kind of attunement…. As in so many other cases in Kant, what look like two steps, acknowledgement of our duty, then producing a consequent feeling of respect, is actually one moment” (p. 125).

Heidegger approves of Kant’s talk about moral feeling, but he wants to counterpose feeling to judgment in ways Kant would not accept. He does correctly make the important point that meaning is of greater import for ethics than causality.

“Feeling obligated is feeling respect. (A summary account of Heidegger’s point would be that the whole issue of respect looks different when the framework is not the question of practical causality but the meaning of our moral vocation)…. Respect is what gives the way morality fits into a life as a whole its meaning. This is why Heidegger applauds Kant so enthusiastically” (p. 126). Pippin quotes Heidegger, “This feeling of respect for the law is produced by reason itself; it is not a feeling pathologically induced by sensibility…. [M]y having a feeling of respect for the law and with it this specific mode of revelation of the law is the only way in which the moral law as such is able to approach me” (ibid).

“There is more ambiguity about this in Kant than Heidegger lets on. Heidegger’s interpretation of Kantian respect, at least prima facie, would ultimately not seem to be consistent with the notion of autonomy so important to Kant” (p.127).

Kant would not use a metaphor of revelation. He certainly would not call it the “only way” we encounter ethical principles. And he would not speak of the moral law approaching us. For Kant, it is we who are the agents, because it is we who are ethically responsible.

As a would-be experimental poet in my youth, I used to be fascinated by these metaphors of Heidegger, where Being reaches out to us, and so on.

“Heidegger does not think Kant can make any of the metaphysically significant distinctions he wants to make between a phenomenal or psychological subject and a moral or transcendental subject because he treats them all as substances underlying thought, action, and empirical sensations” (ibid).

Here we come back to the question of what a subject is for Kant. Heidegger is right that it should not be thought of as a substance in the sense of Aristotle’s Categories.

“The other conception of the thing or any being is what he calls primordial, authentic, originary, and closest to us — what is directly available in our ordinary comportments, a being always already irradiated, to use Wittgenstein’s word, with meaning” (p. 129).

This seems to be an immediate that is supposed to be more true than any mediation.

“We have somehow come to misunderstand and distort what is and always remains most familiar to us…. What we inherit is a world where the unreflective basic and orienting meaning amounts to an assumption about what matters (and therewith what doesn’t matter or matter very much), that what is cared about, what in the world has ‘prevailed’ (gewaltet), is manipulability, beings understood as manipulable stuff, available for satisfying human self-interests….We have even come to experience ourselves in this way, as things of a sort” (ibid).

There is a significant grain of truth here, but a similar insight can already be found in many of the world’s religious traditions; in a more philosophical form among the neoplatonists; and in a purely philosophical form in Hegel.

“We do not recognize our own openness to meaningful being. This is not like ignorance or a mistake…. There is a kind of self-evasion even in dealing with, comporting with, objects that makes them predictable and secure, manipulable all out of a kind of thoughtless, laziness, and instrumentalizing scientism” (pp. 129-130).

He seems to be saying that humans as a whole are dominated by a kind of willful bad faith that imposes shallowness on everything, and for which we are more culpable than if we were merely ignorant or mistaken.

“Mention is made again of the fact that ‘the essence of the thing [is] determined on the basis of the essence of propositions’…. Language, history, the work of art are all understood in terms of this ontology, which has now assumed the role of a pre-ontological orientation, distorting our self-understanding, our own experiences of ourselves. He even suggests that the reason poetry is so poorly taught (a claim he simply assumes) is because poetry teachers cannot distinguish between the distinct mode of being of a poem and a thing” (pp. 130-131).

To put it another way, Heidegger claims that humans in general — and Western philosophers in particular — distort everything in theoreticist and logocentric ways. It’s hard to know what to do with such sweeping condemnations. I earlier compared this to the circular logic of emotional blackmail, which basically tells us that if we disagree, we obviously must be part of the problem.

Pippin suggests that for Heidegger, at root this is an issue with the social dominance of modern science. I have my own criticisms of modern science, but I by no means see it in a purely negative light. The neo-Kantians who dominated German philosophy in the early 20th century seem to have been one of Heidegger’s main targets, both because of their relation to Kant and because of their strong advocacy of modern science.

“[I]t has proven to be inevitable that our self-understanding would have to change to accommodate the approach of scientific naturalism, and that was and remains the intent of the project. A look at how modern economics understands rational agents, or how psychiatry does, or the research paradigms in the social sciences and now even in the humanities make that clear…. Heidegger’s idea for a recovery, a new beginning in philosophy (which he accuses of complicity with this ‘standing presence’ project since its beginning) rests on the claim that such claims of scientific objectivity can be shown to be based on a distortion of a primordial level of meaningfulness” (pp. 134-135).

While I would put a modest notion of ethical being ahead of the requirements of science, I do also believe that there are requirements of science. Methodological criticism should not be confused with global dismissal. I generally disagree when philosophers globally dismiss other philosophers.

Next in this series: Heidegger vs Hegel

Critique of the Megarians

Euclid of Megara (not to be confused with the geometer) was a student of Socrates who combined Socratic and Eleatic ideas. He reportedly claimed that virtue is knowledge of the Parmenidean One Being, which he also identified with the Good, God, reason, and mind. At a time when Megarians were banned from Athens for some reason, he is said to have entered the city disguised as a woman in order to listen to Socrates. He was present at Socrates’ death, and afterwards offered refuge to Plato and others in Megara. Socrates reputedly rebuked him for arguing more for the sake of winning than for the truth, but Euclid was said to have been very concerned with moral virtue. Plato credits him with having written down an actual conversation between Socrates and Theaetetus, which became the basis of Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus.

Euclid’s students were mainly interested in logic and argument. Some of them apparently founded a separate school, known as the Dialecticians, which developed a form of propositional logic. This latter group is considered to have been the major source for Stoic logic.

In chapter 3 of book Theta of the Metaphysics, Aristotle criticizes Megarian arguments that there is no distinction between power and act. Aubry quotes Aristotle’s restatement of the Megarian claim, “It is when a thing acts that it can act, but when it does not act, it cannot act” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 122, my translation throughout).

Independent of Aristotle’s development of a normative and teleological dimension of act that plausibly extends even to physical motion, he is also very concerned to carefully distinguish between power and its exercise. Thus he had to confront the Megarians, who argued that there is no such distinction.

Later writers of quite varying persuasions have wittingly or unwittingly developed variants of this Megarian position. Nietzsche, for instance, explicitly denied the reality of anything that is not actual. Any kind of argument for complete determinism has a similar effect, as does theological occasionalism, which subsumes all becoming under the model of creation.

“Against this thesis, it is necessary to affirm not only the distinction of act and power but, more precisely, that with a given act can coexist not only the power of which it is the effect, but the power for another, opposed, act” (ibid).

Aubry noted a bit earlier that the emphasis on contraries in the discussion of rational powers is rather accidental. The more general point — expressed at the level of potentiality rather than power — is that potentiality includes multiple alternate possibilities concretely grounded in the same state of actuality. The more specific notion of contrariety only comes into play because — due to the fact power is consistently understood by Aristotle as power to do or undergo something definite — related deliberation may be conceived as about exercising a power or not.

She quotes Aristotle, “It is possible for a thing to be capable of being and nonetheless not be, or capable of not being and nonetheless be” (ibid).

This, it seems to me, is an unavoidable presupposition of any coherent account of becoming. It is again also the foundation of Aristotle’s account of human freedom. This way of approaching freedom is greatly to be recommended, because it avoids both the dubious and dangerous concept of a separate faculty of will distinct from reason, and the worse concepts of arbitrary will, or will as “superior” to reason.

“The critique of the Megarians indeed carries a double, and paradoxical, positivity: it invites us to think at the same time becoming in relation with dunamis, and energeia in relation with being. In doing this, it indicates also the double stakes of the inquiry: to think becoming and being at the same time; to determine the mode of their articulation.”

The dynamis–energeia pair is what uniquely enables Aristotle to think of being and becoming in a non-opposed way, though this is far from exhausting its significance.

“The extension from the kinetic sense of energeia to the ontological sense is presented as a deepening: otherwise said, and in conformity to what Theta 1 noted already, it is the ontological sense that is primary. In effect, if we have a tendency to consider that energeia is manifested above all in movement, this is insofar as we take it as an index of being” (p. 123, emphasis in original).

“For not to be in act but to be capable of being so, is also a mode of being: that which in-potentiality names. Of certain things that are not, but are nonetheless capable of being, one says thus that they are dunamei” (pp. 123-124).

Here we have a good example of the explicitly dative grammatical form of dynamis (dynamei) that she finds to be associated with Aristotle’s distinctive notion of being in potentiality. These are things that have being potentially, or are potentially thus-and-such. Here the emphasis is all on “things” in a state of potentiality, or potential “states of affairs”. Potentiality (as distinct from actuality) is the modality in which these have being and are said. This is indeed clearly different from a power to do, cause, or undergo.

“That which is in-potentiality, nonetheless, is not, ‘because it is not an entelechy‘” (p. 124).

We do not say of that which is in-potentiality that it “is” simply, or in an unqualified sense.

At the link above, I suggested that entelechy is probably the most important guiding concept of the Metaphysics. I have also suggested that entelechy serves as a kind of explanation for how ousia or (substance or essence, or what Sachs calls “thinghood”) works. In turn, Aristotle uses ousia to help disambiguate and organize what is meant by the various ways in which we say something is something. In the quote above, he directly uses entelechy as the criterion for what we do and do not say “is”. It is vitally important that he appeals to this much more nuanced concept, instead of referring back to the blunt instrument of a common-sense notion of existence or reality. For Aristotle, being, existence, or reality is not an explainer; instead, it needs to be explained.

Nonetheless, Aubry points out that here, Aristotle does not explicitly invoke the normative aspect of entelechy. We are still primarily investigating the more common “kinetic” sense of dynamis and energeia that accounts for physical motion. The aspect of entelechy that is to the fore is therefore that of the continuing activity that constitutes a substance as something persisting, or a motion as ongoing.

Next in this series: Potentiality and Possibility

Rational and Natural Powers

“Theta 2 prolongs the analysis of dunamis in proposing another distinction, which no longer opposes active power to passive power, but power that is rational or accompanied by a logos, to irrational power. This analysis marks progress in comparison with Theta 1, in that it considers at the same time the relation of power to its effect. In so doing it gives a maximal extension to the notion, in manifesting that it applies as much to animate as to inanimate beings, and as much in the field of nature as in that of techne” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 121, my translation throughout). 

“What distinguishes rational power is that it can be power for two contrary effects, ton enantion, where irrational power is only for one sole contrary: thus, the medical art can produce sickness or health, while fire can only heat. The logos in effect ‘shows at the same time a thing and its privation’…. Privation, which we have seen cannot in any case characterize a power, but rather characterizes its contrary, impotence, is given as the object of the logos that governs it. This object is nonetheless derived, or ‘in a certain way accidental’: it is in initially considering the positive contrary, or the form, then in negating it by reasoning that we see the negative contrary. The primacy of the positive contrary is thus maintained” (ibid).

The medical art and fire are very different kinds of things. They are both called “powers”, but the one is “rational” and the other natural or “irrational”. The medical art seems analogous to the art of housebuilding that serves as the canonical example of an Aristotelian principle of motion or “efficient cause”. Fire for Aristotle is one of four material elements defined by a division in terms of primitive qualities. In a recent post, we briefly saw how even the cyclical transformations of these qualitative elements can fit into an ultimately teleological schema, without any extravagant hypotheses.

We saw in the last post that Aubry’s strong emphasis on the distinctively Aristotelian dative form dynamei as characteristic of being in potentiality does not by any means rule out a recognition that Aristotle in fact devotes more space to the more common nominative form dynamis, which can after all be reasonably translated as “power”, which has wider non-Aristotelian usage, and which plays an important role in Plato.

Aristotle specifies the applicable meaning of logos in this context as the rational deliberation that governs prohairesis or choice, and thereby also governs the exercise of power or capability.

In the case of natural powers like that of fire to heat things, for Aristotle it is always a matter of power to do, cause, or undergo something definite. Then independently, as a matter of general logic (and of even more fundamental ethical seriousness about consistency of our assertions), we must affirm that a power we have stipulated to be for something definite is just that. If we accept that a particular “power” is for something definite, then we must also accept that is not a power for the opposite of that definite something, nor indeed for anything other than what it is for.

It is thoughtful deliberation that involves a consideration of pro and con, and determines a choice about the exercise of a power that in itself just is what it is. In the rational case too, the power at issue is still a power to do something definite, just like a natural power. But here the governing deliberation — in order to be a genuine deliberation at all — must be fundamentally open, and not predetermined in its outcome. This is how rational animals have freedom. We have flexibility and plasticity in the exercise of definite powers.

So we see that outside of first philosophy, Aristotle does use a more conventional notion of power. But Plato, Aristotle, and the classical Greeks generally regarded the idea of unlimited power — and indeed anything unlimited — with a kind of horror. (It seems to have been Philo of Alexandria who introduced the very un-Greek notion of infinite power.) Aristotle treats both rational and natural powers always as powers for something definite. It is reason, and more specifically deliberation about alternatives — not power in itself — that allows us freedom.

“This analysis allows two requirements that are apparently conflicting, but equally essential to Aristotelian thought about power, to be reconciled: affirming its positivity, all while introducing within it an indetermination” (p. 122, emphasis in original).

This is a really essential point about the nature of freedom. Besides developing the wholly new concept of being in potentiality, Aristotle distinguishes much more clearly than his predecessors between the more common notion of power and its exercise. Freedom belongs to the thoughtful exercise of definite powers and capabilities, not to any power in itself.

Next in this series: Critique of the Megarians

Primordial Choice?

Plotinus speaks of a primordial choice implicitly made by every human: to turn either toward the separated soul, or away from it. The idea is that such a choice comes first, and is not conditioned by anything. This is completely unlike Aristotle’s treatment of choice.

Aristotle discusses choice in the context of concrete ethical doings. A choice is the outcome of a deliberation, not something undertaken in a vacuum. Our freedom consists in many such choices, based on reasons. Our unfreedom consists in part in constraint by the cumulative consequences of all our previous choices.

(I call this particular kind of unfreedom superficial because because it is “unfree” mainly in the shallow sense that it is not completely unconditioned. A conditioning grounded in reasons that we assent to is very unlike a conditioning by relations of force. In a deeper sense, a grounding in reasons doesn’t at all make us less free; indeed, many philosophers have made a grounding in reasons the very criterion of freedom. Of course, our choices may also have unintended consequences, and we have to live with these as well. That is a less superficial unfreedom. And we may be swayed by passion or imagination, which is another kind. Or we may be constrained by relations of force.)

In modern times, various writers have abstracted the notion of unconditioned choice even further, so that in principle anything could be a matter of purely arbitrary decision. Completely unconditioned choice can only be arbitrary. Here lie the seeds of tyranny. (See also Desire of the Master.)

Negation and Negativity

“Hegel is willing to say some extraordinary things about the concept he sometimes calls ‘negation’, sometimes ‘negativity’. What he has been taken to mean has been the source of most of the criticism of Hegel: that he confused logical negation with actual opposition, as in the oppositions of forces or magnitudes in general in the world; that he thought everything in the world contradicted itself, and so believed that pairs of contradictory judgments could both be affirmed; or simply that what he said about negation and contradiction cannot be coherently understood. And any commentator must face the fact that he invoked the notion of negation in many different contexts in many different ways. So the first task is to have in view that variety of contexts before we can understand what they all might have in common (if anything)” (Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 139).

Some time ago I touched on the most elementary parts of this thorny issue in Contradiction vs Polarity. My basic sense at this point is that Hegel does indeed have very worthwhile things to say on this very distinctive theme of his, but that the standard connotations of his core vocabulary for talking about it — negation, negativity, contradiction — are so impoverished relative to what he really means in his extensive and varied metaphorical uses of it that the vocabulary does not communicate well.

Pippin identifies five somewhat overlapping contexts that ought to be taken into account in a serious interpretation of Hegelian negation: the nature of thinking; the talk about freedom; the nature of intelligibility; the notion of speculative truth; and the talk about contradiction.

In the context of the nature of thinking, he says “In the simplest sense, we are talking about the logical structure of apperceptive intentional knowledge, as well as the ontological status of agency. What it means to claim that the intelligibility of any content of empirical knowledge is not… wholly ‘positive’… is best understood by contrast. If it were not so and were wholly positive, subjectivity would be something like a mere complex registering and responding device (of the same ontological status as a thermometer) ” (p. 141).

“As we have seen, one is not simply wholly absorbed in the presence of the world to one, not wholly and merely reactive to the stimulation of sensibility, and that ‘not’ is the beginning (but certainly not the end) of all the logical issues of negation that emerge in Hegel’s philosophy, at both the phenomenological and the logical level. In making such a judgment I ‘negate’ the mere immediacy or givenness of perceptual content, negate it as immediate and putatively given, and take up, am always taking up, a position of sorts about what is there, what is the case” (p. 142).

The suggestion is that all “taking” of things to be thus-and-such for Hegel implicitly involves a negation of immediacy.

“What thinking is is such a ‘negation’ of one’s immediate ‘positive’ state. (One can say: this negation of mere immediacy is ‘taking a stand’, rather than being put into a state.) Any thinking could be a seeming-to-be-the-case, not what is the case, and that possibility is constitutive of the act’s being a judging in the first place…. The constitutive feature attended to in a Hegelian philosophical logic is the fact that judgments are potentially responsive to reasons and revisions just qua judgments” (ibid).

Pippin thus cites responsiveness to reasons as another non-obvious instance of negation for Hegel.

“And in being an agent, I am not simply causally responsive to inclinations and desires; there is no ‘fullness of positive being’ here either. I interrupt or negate positive being (what I feel inclined to do, experience as wanting to do) by deliberating and resolving what to do” (p. 143).

Deliberation is another non-obvious instance.

“As noted before, the closest first and general approximation of what he means is Aristotelian: subjectivity (thinking and acting according to norms) is the distinct being-at-work… of the biological life form that is the human, reason-responsive substance; this in the same sense in which Aristotle says, if the eye were body, seeing would be its form, its distinctive being-at work” (ibid).

Subjectivity in general is another.

“Instead of thinking of the fundamental act of understanding as a synthesis of independent, originally unrelated elements, either by subsuming an individual under a concept, or by including one concept under another, we should understand ourselves, both in experience and in logical reflection, beginning with ‘wholes’, never with experiential or logical subsentential simples [individual words] or atoms” (pp. 143-144).

Hegel presents this last point as a sort of inversion of Kant, and it does speak to some of Kant’s language. But I would argue that the true starting point of Kantian synthesis is not experiential or logical atoms, but rather the sensible manifold in intuition, which is only potentially differentiable. This brings Kant closer to Hegel. True, the manifold has such a loose unity that arguably it might have trouble qualifying as a “whole”, but even less does it consist in already predifferentiated “atoms”. In Kant I think we have no basis for identifying putative atoms in experience until “after” the figurative synthesis of imagination has done its work. (It is the preconscious, in a non-Kantian sense “spontaneous” figurative synthesis that for Kant creates an inevitable gap between being and thinking, and that for Hegel gives us the fixed representations relied upon by common sense.)

In the context of freedom, Pippin says that “In the same way that judging, insofar as it is genuine, holds open the possibility of its negation or disconfirmation, just by being judging, not by virtue of any second, reflective act…, a deliberation about action, if it is to be a deliberation, is open to the force of reasons the agent has already accepted by deliberating at all, a possibility criterial for his acting at all…. [Hegel] is insisting on the logical or categorical requirements of the normative, and in that sense (the sense in which freedom is normatively constrained judgment and rational action), the negative (here only the possibility of not doing what I am powerfully inclined to do) is ‘that by which a person is free’. (And he does not mean any uncaused causality, but that which counts to the subject as a reason” (p. 147).

Normativity in general thus counts as depending on a kind of negation.

“In terms of the structure of the Logic, what Hegel will want to argue is that we cannot adequately explain freedom if we consider just a determinate property that some beings happen to have…, and we cannot explain it either as a kind of essential ideal, manifest in but never adequately expressed in its appearances, in concrete individual actions…. We need the logic of the Concept, in which concepts are said to ‘give themselves their own content’ and be ‘self-determining’ in a way indebted to [the] Kantian claim on self-legislation…. Any philosophical determination of actuality must be understood as ‘self-legislating’ in the broad sense [that] reason relies only on itself in determining such a normative structure. These are not empirical questions. There is no flash of ‘essence intuition’ (Wesenschau) giving access to a world of abstract immaterial objects, essences” (p. 148).

Self-legislation too involves some subtle kind of negation.

In the context of the nature of intelligibility, Pippin says “Every determination of every sort of content in the Logic is a negation of some insufficient determinacy that must be able to be conceived positively” (p. 153). This is another way of characterizing the basis of the notorious “movement” in Hegel’s logic.

The determination of content for sure involves negation.

In the context of speculative truth, he mentions that “[E]valuative judgments, like ‘this action is good’, or our familiar ‘this is a bad house’, will be paradigmatic examples of judgment in the logic of the Concept. They do not qualitatively specify a thing by distinguishing it from other things; they do not identify the appearances that show the ‘essence’ of the thing; they understand the content ‘in terms of its concept'” (p. 154).

Evaluation of anything against its concept is another subtle variety.

In the context of the notorious “contradiction”, Pippin says “So in a general sense, one has to say that a thing… ‘includes’ its contrary, or more precisely its relation to its contrary, in order to be, and be known to be, what it is. Neither of these ‘moments’ of negation involves contradiction in the Aristotelian sense because ‘is’ and ‘is not’, while said of the same thing and at the same time, are not meant in the same sense. But Hegel wants for various reasons to call such an analyzed state a ‘contradiction’, and there is some ground in the use of the term for saying that…. In the simplest sense, personifying the process, what someone intends to say, means to say, can be ‘contradicted’ by what is actually said, what he finds he has to or can say” (p. 156).

Evaluation of any outcome against intent is another.

Pippin notes that Hegel says retrospectively at the end of the Logic that the abstract treatment typical of the logic of being and the logic of essence is due to “mere opinion” or lack of awareness of what it is actually treating. “It cannot say what it means to say” (p. 157). This is yet another way of characterizing the Logic‘s “movement”.

Logical “movement” is another.

“Hegel’s speculative notion of contradiction is not predicate or sentence negation…. [H]e means to focus attention on concept negation…. Now concepts, understood as rules, have content by being understood to have the content that they have. To understand a rule is to know how to use it, and in using it, to know one is following it…. So understanding… is not… ‘grasping a content’ but understanding what the rule instructs us to think. That is, the concept is always already a moment of discursive activity, a thinking through of its implications” (pp. 158-159).

“[T]he considerations discussed so far should not be understood to be matters of formal clarity…. As Hegel insisted, we are not studying how we think about (or talk about) matters (or even how we ‘must’ think). The question is a question about ‘any possible intelligibility’, and so about being in its intelligibility, … not ‘our ways’ of rendering intelligible” (p. 160).

All the above varieties of “negation” involve normativity in one way or another. Here Pippin again emphasizes the universality of criteria of intelligibility that Hegel counterposes to the Kantian gap between thinking and being.

“The forms of intelligibility are the forms of what could be true, although they do not settle the question of what, in particular, is true” (p. 175).

“[O]ur first orientation in trying to understand Hegelian negation should be not the logical operation of predicate or sentence negation, but real opposition…. [Michael] Wolff also thinks that the controversy in the eighteenth century about positive and negative magnitudes, especially as it surfaced in Kant, as well as the emerging clarity about negative numbers, played a far larger role in the development of Hegel’s thinking about negation and contradiction than did a reflection on the logic of the formal operator” (pp. 177-178).

Real opposition is an instance of contrariety, which is actually much more relevant to Hegel than formal logical contradiction.

“Hegel’s category of becoming, so important at the beginning of the logic of being, owes much to Hegel’s defense of Newton and the latter’s doctrine of the becoming equal of magnitudes” (pp. 178-179).

“Critics like Crusius were aghast at the idea of forces having positive and negative values. But Kant understood that such ‘values’ (and here again an important precedent for Hegel) had those values in relation to each other, not absolutely, that they were relative values, arbitrarily reversible even” (pp. 179-180).

Negative magnitudes are another instance of contrariety.

“This is not the sense of contradiction throughout the Logic, but it gives us enough background… to appreciate that Hegel is neither a lunatic for saying that ‘everything is contradictory’, nor a mystical Heraclitean” (p. 180).

Pippin devotes nearly half of this chapter to critical remarks about Brandom’s interpretation of Hegelian negation as material incompatibility, which involves a more nuanced form of contrariety. He says Brandom’s reading very well captures the meaning of negation in Hegel’s logic of being, but is inadequate for what Hegel goes on to do in the logic of essence and the logic of the concept. For example, material incompatibility alone is insufficient to explain things like the “self-legislation” of the concept or the idea of the good, but Hegel at least claims that these have something to do with the concept of negation.

Brandom’s interpretation of Hegelian negation seemed to me incomparably clearer than Hegel himself, so until now I have adopted it enthusiastically as a charitable rendering of what Hegel ought to have said to better express his meaning. This is the first of many counter-arguments to Brandom I have seen that really seems to me to at least raise a serious question, but for now I will forego another lengthy tangent.

Next in this series: Deeper Truth

Emancipatory Logic?

When it comes to Hegel’s “logic” the first question is, what does it really aim at? What is it even trying to do? Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows (2019) is the best attempt to answer this I have found so far.

“[Hegel] seems to promise something quite extraordinary and, no doubt to contemporary ears, something quite implausible, a treatment of ‘logic’ in some way in service of an emancipatory ideal — an emancipatory logic, of all things” (p. 24).

To briefly anticipate, it will be emancipatory in addressing the Aristotelian actualization of Kantian freedom.

“[T]he most important element in Hegel’s fulfilling such an ambition… is a ‘science of pure thinking’. What any thinking does is to render something intelligible, a task that, as we shall see, has many different dimensions and is inseparable from the giving of reasons. But, as we have also noted, to say what something is, or to explain why something happened, or to understand the point or purpose of anything, is not just to present a picture or grasp a content. It is to judge, something always open to challenge and interrogation” (p. 20).

What Hegel calls pure thinking is concerned with and exhibits the general shape of the space of reasons.

“Eventually… we would need a fully reflective account of the ‘ground of giving grounds’…. In the practical domain, in Kant and the post-Kantians, I am free when I am acting on reasons about what ought to be done. This is a form of self-consciousness that, according to Kant, is paradigmatically embodied when I act wholly on reasons, and not just prudently or instrumentally, as when I act for the sake of ends I have not rationally determined I ought to have” (p. 21).

Put another way, all our reasons ought to trace back to the highest good. When our reasons stop at some partial good, we are not yet free.

“[I]n just the same sense as Hegel will want to treat concept and intuition in experience as distinct but inseparable, he will want to say that so-called ‘material’ issues… are inseparable from forms of self-understanding, as inseparable as such forms are from their material embodiment” (p. 22).

Hegel’s strong emphasis on actuality and actualization leads him to see something like Aristotelian hylomorphism (inseparability of form and matter) in places where Kant tended to see dualities. For Hegel as for Aristotle, our true intent is expressed by what we actually did.

Pippin quotes the Phenomenology Preface’s statement that the task of modernity “consists in actualizing and spiritually animating the universal by means of the sublation of fixed and determinate thoughts” (p. 24).

“Hegel’s unease with [the dominance of fixed representations] is what begat those familiar later claims about the ‘ideological’ nature of bourgeois philosophy, the one-dimensionality of modern societies, the dominance of ‘identity thinking’, the crisis of the European sciences, the colonization of the life-world, and so forth. And while all such critiques can be traced back to Hegel, he does not make the case for such limitations by contrast with a positive or utopian theory, as is the case in many of these examples” (p. 25).

Hegel aims at a purely immanent development of self-critical understanding, in which forms of spirit all on their own eventually exhibit their own incompleteness and one-sidedness, rather than being claimed to fall short of some external ideal.

“Stated in the simplest possible terms, Hegel’s diagnosis of the fix we have gotten ourselves into consists in the claim that we have not properly understood how to understand ourselves and the social and natural world in which we dwell. This is not, though, because we have simply been regularly mistaken, the victim of false philosophies, wrong ideas. It is due to the inevitable partiality and one-sidedness of various ruling concepts (let us say, for shorthand, norms for explanation and justification, the normative structures of the ‘space of reasons’)” (p. 26).

The solution is not a matter of simply substituting more correct first-order beliefs. Of far greater import are our higher-order ways of thinking, judging, and assessing.

“Moreover, the problem is not the contents of our beliefs but the way we have come to collectively regulate what is believable…. Our norms for authoritative explanations and for how we justify ourselves to each other are imbricated in the everyday fabric of a form of life” (p. 28).

“Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Hegel’s basic claim… is that we have not properly understood the ‘grammar’ of spirit (the logic of self-relation, both individual and collective, that makes up spirit), and this is connected with our failure to understand the grammar of possible renderings-intelligible or account-givings in general…. And it would also not be an exaggeration to say that, for Hegel, once we do understand it, we (at least we philosophers) will be freed from the illusion that some particular form of account-giving (like modern Verstand [understanding based on simple fixed predications]) could be taken to be ‘absolute’; the proper relativization (historically and systematically) of different accounts of account-giving will have been made. Or, stated in its most surprising form: Hegelian philosophy has no distinct doctrine of its own; its content is the right understanding of past attempts at account-giving in their limitations and interconnection” (p. 30).

This notion of a “grammar” of spirit is quite fascinating. “Self-relation” is at the heart of Hegel’s often misunderstood talk about the “true infinite”. Hegel wants to say that the ordinary grammar of subject and predicate as fixed terms is not a very good form for expressing thought, because it lacks “life”. Pure thought for Hegel involves moving beyond all fixed terms. Self-relation involves no substantive “self”, only the purely relational character of an always re-emerging unity of apperception. Freedom for Hegel has a kind of grounding in the “true infinite”, but this has nothing to do with an infinite power. What makes self-relatedness “infinite” is its relations-first character, which does not depend on any pre-given fixing of ground-level terms. For Hegel, higher-order form is more primary than first-order form. First-order terms are degenerate cases, not foundational instances.

“Apperceptive spontaneity is not understood as a subjective mental activity, opposed to or addressed to or imposed on what there is…. If we understand this properly, we understand apperceptive spontaneity ‘in its actuality’, as having ‘given itself’ its own actuality, the actuality of the intelligibles, what there is” (p. 35).

What is free in us is not a separate faculty of decision-making, but the open-endedness of the basis of our understanding. For Hegel, there is no gap between understanding and action. What we really understood or didn’t understand is made publicly interpretable by our action. Meanwhile, what there is is inseparable from the intelligibility of that “what”.

Pippin notes that the original context for talk about “spontaneity” in Kant was the latter’s insistence against the tradition that thought is entirely active in character. Thought for Kant includes no moment of passive receptivity, and therefore generates and is responsible for all of its own content. Hegel adopts this perspective.

“Put in terms of the history of philosophy, what all of this will amount to is an attempt by Hegel at a highly unusual synthesis of the Kantian revolution in philosophy, especially the anti-empiricist, self-grounding character of reason (aka ‘the Concept’), and the most important Kantian innovation, the spontaneity of thinking, together with essential elements of Aristotle’s understanding of metaphysics, especially the Aristotelian notions of energeia, which Hegel translates as Wirklichkeit, actuality, the proper object of first philosophy, and, as we have seen, the core of the classical view that ‘nous’ [intellect] rules the world, all in contrast to the rationalist metaphysics of nonsensible objects accessible to pure reason alone. Hegel is no metaphysician in this rationalist sense, but he is most certainly a metaphysician in the Aristotelian sense. That is, at any rate, the thesis of the following book” (ibid).

It is refreshing to see metaphysics treated as something other than an ahistorical lump extending from Parmenides to the present. Later common usage has diverged so far from the meaning of Aristotelian first philosophy that I prefer not to call the latter “metaphysics” at all, but that term loses its objectionable connotations insofar as the reference is tied to something specifically Aristotelian.

I think recognizing that Hegel fundamentally aimed to combine Kantian and Aristotelian insights in a principled way is essential for grasping what he was really about. But to even have the perspective that such an aim makes sense requires work on the interpretation of both Aristotle and Kant; one would never come up with it based on textbook stereotypes.

More than any other commentator, Pippin has developed both the Kantian and the Aristotelian dimensions of Hegel. Later in the current book, he will have more to say specifically about Hegel’s post-Kantian recovery of Aristotelian teleology.

(He says in passing that the earliest precedents for Kant’s view that thought and reason are never purely passive are from the late 16th century. That is not quite right. Alain de Libera has documented that the foremost medieval commentator on Aristotle, Averroes, explicitly interpreted Aristotle as saying that the so-called potential intellect has an “activity” of its own and is not purely passive. In fact, even sense perception is not just passive in Aristotle. Aristotle’s remarks about the synthesizing role of the “common” sense and “inner” sense are unfortunately extremely sketchy, but it seems beyond doubt that they do have a synthesizing role.)

Next in this series: Logic and Metaphysics

Di Giovanni on Hegel’s Logic

“The subject matter of the Logic is not the ‘thing-in-itself’ or its phenomenal manifestations, whether one conceives the ‘in-itself’ as a substance or as freedom, but is discourse itself…. The Logic itself is a discourse about discourse” (George di Giovanni, translator’s introduction to Hegel, The Science of Logic, p. xxxv).

Writing about Hegel’s development, di Giovanni says that by 1803/04, “Consciousness is where organic nature acquires its highest point of concentration by reflecting upon itself and where nature as such becomes spirit. When this consciousness develops into language, and language in turn becomes the language of a people, the social character of spirit is then revealed” (ibid, p. xix).

“[W]hile in 1803/04 Hegel provided a smoother transition from nature to spirit by introducing the factor of consciousness and thus adding to nature, so to speak, a new dimension of depth, [in 1805/06/07] he adds to it yet another dimension by conceiving spirit as the place where nature becomes conscious of its being conscious, that is to say, the place where it becomes deliberate about itself or, again, where it becomes a product of spirit” (p. xxi).

“[Kant’s] notorious ‘thing-in-itself’, instead of being understood as an ideal term of reference that generates a universal space of reason… could be taken instead — as it in fact was by many contemporaries — as a sort of hyper-physical entity…. In a critical context, however, any appeal to causality… would have to fall on the side of a physiological pre-history of experience” (p. xxx).

“It was to remedy this failure that Fichte undertook his thought experiment [with pure freedom], asking his auditors to simply think for the sake of thinking and to reflect on the result…. The net result is that the whole of experience becomes colored with a moral tinge, exactly what Fichte had of course intended from the start. Experience is a call to transform the otherwise merely brute facts of experience…. The idea of construing objects of experience by applying categories to a presupposed given content loses all its meaning…. One must rather interpret experience” (pp. xxxi-xxxii).

(It always seemed to me that even the “application” of pre-existing categories to the sensible manifold implicitly requires interpretation in order to judge which categories are applicable in each specific context of the manifold, and how they are applicable in each case. To my knowledge Kant does not speak of this explicitly, but I don’t think he ever explicitly assumes specific contents in the manifold either. What would then be “given” for Kant ought to be just the manifold as a potentially differentiable lump. Following the principle of charitable interpretation, then, I read Kant as a bit closer to Fichte on this point. The implicit interpretation I want to attribute to Kant would probably operate via the pre-conscious figurative synthesis of imagination though, whereas I think Fichte has a more conscious process of interpretation in mind.)

“On Hegel’s analysis of both Kant and Fichte, the problem is that the ‘I’ that figures so prominently in their theories is too abstract a product…. Therefore, according to Hegel, it lets the content of experience… escape from it and fall, so to speak, on the side of a beyond from which it is retrievable only by means of such non-conceptual means as intuition…. And if Hegel did not want to travel the way of Schelling, which would have taken him to a pre-Kantian Spinozism, then the only avenue open to him was to comprehend facticity discursively, without intuition or myth-making” (pp. xxxiii-xxxiv).

“I have been deliberately using ‘discourse’ and ‘discursiveness’ instead of ‘dialectic’ (a term, incidentally, that Hegel uses sparsely in the Logic) in an attempt to demystify the latter term. But it should be clear that the meaning is the same” (p. xxxix).

“[W]e do not have anything that would amount to McTaggart’s Absolute Idea from which, allegedly, every minute detail of reality can in principle be deduced. This is a position that Hegel unequivocally rejected and even found infuriating…. As for Hegel, the strength of his Logic lies in that it finds a ground for this contingency in the indeterminacy necessarily inherent in the structure of things that are in becoming” (p. lviii).

Hegel takes us beyond sterile debates about freedom versus determinism by means of a novel account of determinacy itself as including built-in indeterminacy. Aristotle of course preceded him in this, albeit with a different account of determination-including-indeterminism.

“[I]t is nature which in the abstract medium of logical discourse attains the self-comprehension, and the efficacy, which we attribute to spirit. Nature is for Hegel, just as it was for Schelling, the ‘pre-self’ of the ‘self’, not just the ‘other-than-self’ of Fichte” (p. lix).

Incidentally, di Giovanni dedicates his 2010 translation of the Science of Logic to his “mentor and friend” H. S. Harris, whose unique literal commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology I previously treated at length.

Aristotle on Explanation

Book 1 chapter 1 of Parts of Animals provides an overview of Aristotle’s perspective on explanation in general. It is a nice synthetic text that brings together many of Aristotle’s core concerns, and shows his vision of how natural science ought to fit in with broader philosophy.

He begins by distinguishing between mere acquaintance with an area of study and being educated in it. “For an educated [person] should be able to form a fair judgment as to the goodness or badness of an exposition” (Complete Works, Barnes ed., vol. 1, p. 994). This seems to apply to any subject whatsoever.

Next he raises the more specific question of method. “It is plain then that, in the science which inquires into nature, there must be certain canons, by reference to which a hearer shall be able to criticize the method of a professed exposition, quite independently of the question whether the statements made be true or false” (ibid).

Continuing to emphasize the critical thinking that is the mark of an educated person, he makes it explicit that some of the most important questions about a subject are what I would call second-order questions, having to do with how we ought to approach the matter at hand. The educated person will give due emphasis to these, rather than naively rushing to deliver judgments on questions of fact.

“Ought we, for example (to give an illustration of what I mean) to begin by discussing each separate substance — man, lion, ox, and the like — taking each kind in hand independently of the rest, or ought we rather to lay down the attributes which they have in common in virtue of some common element of their nature? For genera that are quite distinct present many identical phenomena, sleep, for instance, respiration, growth, decay, death, and other similar affections and conditions…. Now it is plain that if we deal with each species independently of the rest, we shall frequently be obliged to repeat ourselves over and over again; for horse and dog and man present every one of the phenomena just enumerated” (ibid).

The educated person looks for explanations, not just facts or correspondences. The specific “dogginess” of a dog, for example, does not explain its sleeping, breathing, and so on. Instead these activities, which it shares with many other animals, are explained by natures common to all of them.

Further, the kind of method Aristotle commends to us is not a matter of following recipes by rote. Instead, it is a thinking approach that involves persistently following the thread of explanations wherever it leads.

“So also there is a like uncertainty as to another point now to be mentioned. Ought the student of nature follow the plan adopted by the mathematicians in their astronomical demonstrations, and after considering the phenomena presented by animals, and their several parts, proceed subsequently to treat of the causes and the reason why; or ought he to follow some other method? Furthermore, the causes concerned in natural generation are, as we see, more than one. There is the cause for the sake of which, and the cause whence the beginning of motion comes. Now we must decide which of these two causes comes first, which second. Plainly, however, that cause is the first which we call that for the sake of which. For this is the account of the thing, and the account forms the starting-point, alike in the works of art and in works of nature. For the doctor and the builder define health or house, either by the intellect or by perception, and then proceed to give the accounts and the causes of each of the things they do and of why they should do it thus” (p. 995).

He raises the question of which kind of cause comes first, because he wants to suggest a different answer from that of the pre-Socratic “physicists” who attempted to explain everything by properties of different kinds of matter. Elsewhere he says that Plato and the atomist Democritus (whose writings are lost) did better than others at following the thread of explanation, but he considers the elaborated account of ends or “that for the sake of which” to be one of his own most important contributions.

Notably he only mentions two kinds of cause here, rather than the classic four. Similarly, there are passages in other texts where he lists a different number of categories than the canonical ten from the Categories. Later authors often viewed things like causes and categories in a reified, univocal way, as susceptible to exact enumeration. But for Aristotle, these are abstractions from a concrete reality that comes first, to be wielded in a context-sensitive way, so the canonical enumerations are not absolute.

Aristotle’s understanding of the “beginning of motion” is different from that promoted by early modern physics. Conventionally in the reading of Aristotle, the “beginning of motion” is associated with the efficient cause, and these two terms are understood in a somewhat circular way, which is really informed by some broadly intuitive sense of what a “beginning” of motion is. Early modern writers assumed that this “beginning” must be some kind of immediate impulse or force. Aquinas associated it with God’s act of creation and with the free acts of created beings. For Aristotle himself it is neither of these.

My best reading of efficient cause is that it is the means by which an end is realized. In many cases the end is realized not by just one means but by a hierarchy of means (e.g., art of building, carpenter, carpenter’s hammer, hammer’s blow). Aristotle and the scholastics emphasized the top of such hierarchies (e.g., the art of building for Aristotle; God or some metaphysical principle for the scholastics), whereas the early moderns emphasized the bottom (e.g., the hammer’s blow), akin to the proximate cause of concern to liability lawyers. For Aristotle, the art of building and not the hammer’s blow is the true “beginning” of the motion of house construction, because it provides the guiding thread of explanation for the whole process of building the house. But even the art of building is still just a means that gets its meaning from the reasons why we would want to build a house in the first place.

He continues, “Now in the works of nature the good and that for the sake of which is still more dominant than in works of art, nor is necessity a factor with the same significance in them all; though almost all writers try to refer their accounts to this, failing to distinguish the several ways in which necessity is spoken of. For there is absolute necessity, manifested in eternal phenomena; and there is hypothetical necessity, manifested in everything that is generated as in everything that is produced by art, be it a house or what it may. For if a house or other such final object is to be realized, it is necessary that first this and then that shall be produced and set in motion, and so on in continuous succession, until the end is reached, for the sake of which each prior thing is produced and exists. So also is it with the productions of nature. The mode of necessity, however, and the mode of demonstration are different in natural science from what they are in the theoretical sciences [e.g., mathematics]…. For in the latter the starting-point is that which is; in the former that which is to be. For since health, or a man, is of such and such a character, it is necessary for this or that to exist or be produced; it is not the case that, since this or that exists or has been produced, that of necessity exists or will exist. Nor is it possible to trace back the necessity of demonstrations of this sort to a starting-point, of which you can say that, since this exists, that exists [as one might do in mathematics]” (ibid).

In Aristotle’s usage, “nature” applies to terrestrial things that are observably subject to generation and corruption. He earlier referred to astronomical phenomena like the apparent motions of the stars and planets as “eternal” because on a human scale of time, these are not observably subject to generation and corruption. For Aristotle, absolute necessity could only apply to things that are absolutely unchanging. We may have a different perspective on astronomy, but that does not affect the logical distinction Aristotle is making. His key point here is that things subject to generation are not subject to absolute necessity. Leibniz took this a step further and argued that hypothetical necessity is the only kind there is. Kant, in arguing that hypothetical and disjunctive judgment (“if A then B” and “not both A and B“) are more fundamental than categorical judgment (“A is B“), made a related move.

Hypothetical necessity has a particular form that is worth noting. As Aristotle points out in the quote above, under hypothetical necessity “it is not the case that, since this or that exists or has been produced, that of necessity exists or will exist”. To give a positive example, hypothetical necessity says that to continue living, we must eat. But it does not in any way dictate a particular series of motions that is the only way this can be accomplished, let alone the whole series of eating-related actions throughout one’s life. Neither does it dictate that we will eat in any particular instance.

How we meet a particular need is up to us. The reality of this flexibility built into nature is all we need to explain freedom of action. Humans can also affirmatively embrace commitments and act on them; that too is up to us. Freedom is not an arbitrary or supernatural power; it simply consists in the fact that nature is flexible, and many things are up to us.

Aristotle contrasts the way a thing is naturally generated with the way it is. “The best course appears to be that we follow the method already mentioned — begin with the phenomena presented by each group of animals, and, when this is done, proceed afterwards to state the causes of those phenomena — in the case of generation too. For in house building too, these things come about because the form of the house is such and such, rather than its being the case that the house is such and such because it comes about thus…. Art indeed consists in the account of the product without its matter. So too with chance products; for they are produced in the same way as products of art” (pp. 995-996).

“The fittest mode, then, of treatment is to say, a man has such and such parts, because the essence of man is such and such, and because they are necessarily conditions of his existence, or, if we cannot quite say this then the next thing to it, namely, that it is either quite impossible for a man to exist without them, or, at any rate, that it is good that they should be there. And this follows: because man is such and such the process of his development is necessarily such as it is; and therefore this part is formed first, that next; and after a like fashion should we explain the generation of all other works of nature” (p. 996).

This way of reasoning backwards from an essence to its prerequisites is complemented by the fact that for Aristotle (and Plato) essences themselves are a prime subject of investigation, and not something assumed. “Begin with the phenomena”, he says.

Many 20th century philosophers have objected to presumptuous talk about the “essence of man”, and to any explanation in terms of essence. But these objections presuppose that the essence is something assumed, rather than being an object of investigation as it clearly was for Plato and Aristotle. Here also it is needful to distinguish between what we might call the distinguishing essence of humanity used to pick out humans — e.g., “rational/talking animal” — and what Leibniz later called the complete essence of each individual. Clearly also, the parts of the human body do not follow directly from “rational/talking animal”, but from many other attributes “presented in the phenomena”. It turns out that humans share these attributes with other animals, and they can therefore be conceptualized as attributes of common genera to which we and those other animals belong.

Because essences themselves are a prime subject of investigation and are ultimately inferred from phenomena, the kind of teleological reasoning Aristotle recommends always has a contingent character, which is how it naturally accounts for what the moderns call freedom. This contingency is built into in the “hypothetical” character of hypothetical necessity.

“Does, then, configuration and color constitute the essence of the various animals and their several parts? For if so, what Democritus says will be correct…. And yet a dead body has exactly the same configuration as a living one; but for all that it is not a man. So also no hand of bronze or wood or constituted in any but the appropriate way can possibly be a hand in more than name. For like a physician in a painting, or like a flute in a sculpture, it will be unable to perform its function” (p. 997).

Aristotle was the historic pioneer of “functional” explanation. Here he insists that the essences of living beings and their parts must be understood in terms of their characteristic activities. This development for the sake of biology parallels the deeper development of the meaning of “substance” in the Metaphysics as “what it was to be” a thing, and as actuality and potentiality.

“If now the form of the living being is the soul, or part of the soul, or something that without the soul cannot exist; as would seem to be the case, seeing at any rate that when the soul departs, what is left is no longer an animal, and that none of the parts remain what they were before, excepting in mere configuration, like the animals that in the fable are turned into stone; if, I say, this is so, then it will come within the province of the natural scientist to inform himself concerning the soul, and to treat of it, either in its entirety, or, at any rate, of that part of it which constitutes the essential character of an animal; and it will be his duty to say what a soul or this part of a soul is” (ibid).

Here it is important that we consider soul in the “phenomena first” way that Aristotle develops it.

“What has been said suggests the question, whether it is the whole soul or only some part of it, the consideration of which comes within the province of natural science. Now if it be of the whole soul that this should treat, then there is no place for any philosophy beside it…. But perhaps it is not the whole soul, nor all of its parts collectively, that constitutes the source of motion; but there may be one part, identical with that in plants, which is the source of growth, another, namely the sensory part, which is the source of change of quality, while still another, and this is not the intellectual part, is the source of locomotion. For other animals than man have the power of locomotion, but in none but him is there intellect. Thus it is plain that it is not of the whole soul that we have to treat. For it is not the whole soul that constitutes the animal nature, but only some part or parts of it” (p. 998).

Aristotle’s opposition to treating the soul as a single lump reflects his overall functional, activity-oriented, and phenomena-first approach.

“Again, whenever there is plainly some final end, to which a motion tends should nothing stand in its way, we always say that the one is for the sake of the other; and from this it is evident that there must be something of the kind, corresponding to what we call nature” (ibid).

Overall teleology always has to do with tendencies, not absolute determinations. He begins to wrap up this introduction by giving another example of the hypothetical necessity whose concept he pioneered.

“For if a piece of wood is to be split with an axe, the axe must of necessity be hard; and, if hard, must of necessity be made of bronze or iron. Now in exactly the same way the body, since it is an instrument — for both the body as a whole and its several parts individually are for the sake of something — if it is to do its work, must of necessity be of such and such a character, and made of such and such materials.”

“It is plain then that there are two modes of causation, and that both of these must, so far as possible, be taken into account, or at any rate an attempt must be made to include them both; and that those who fail in this tell us in reality nothing about nature” (p. 999).

Again, the two modes here are “that for the sake of which” and the phenomena associated with generation. Considering either of these in isolation yields an incomplete understanding, as we see respectively in bad scholasticism and bad empiricism.

“The reason why our predecessors failed to hit on this method of treatment was, that they were not in possession of the notion of essence, nor of any definition of substance. The first who came near it was Democritus, and he was far from adopting it as a necessary method in natural science, but was merely brought to it by constraint of facts. In the time of Socrates a nearer approach was made to the method. But at this period men gave up inquiring into nature, and philosophers diverted their attention to political science and to the virtues that benefit mankind” (ibid).

Socrates and Plato initially pioneered the notion of “that for the sake of which”, but in turning away from the phenomena of generation and becoming, they gave it a somewhat one-sided character.

The subtle way in which Aristotle wields the concept of essence avoids treating it as an absolute, or as something strictly univocal. In any given context, there is a clear relative distinction between essence and accident, but the distinction is not the same across all contexts. Hypothetical necessity provides the mechanism by which what is “accident” at one level of analysis can be incorporated into “essence” at another level. (See also Hermeneutic Biology?; Aristotelian Causes; Secondary Causes; Aristotle’s Critique of Dichotomy; Classification.)