Pure Negativity?

I’m still hoping to arrive at a more constructive engagement with the Žižek school of contemporary Hegel interpretation. Žižek’s reading is more “metaphysical” than the Aristotle-and-Brandom-inspired one I’ve been developing here, and I’m not fond of his penchant for showmanship, but there is a broad proximity of concerns. I’m looking now at Sbriglia and Žižek, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism (2020). The unusual “materialism” at issue here is openly proclaimed to be a development of German idealism. The contributors seek to distinguish themselves from other recent currents of so-called “cultural materialism”, “new historicism”, “new materialism”, and “object-oriented ontology”. I’ve briefly reviewed one of the representative works from which the Žižekians want to distinguish themselves.

Common to all these trends, the Žižek school, and the work pursued here is a rejection of a classic Cartesian Subject. As against the others, the Žižek school and I both also want to nonetheless affirm the importance of subjectivity. While I am not a Lacanian, I also think Lacan deserves serious engagement, and the Žižek school is pursuing that.

Sbriglia and Žižek write that “the self-limitation of the phenomenal that renders matter un-whole, the fact that the phenomenal field is in itself never ‘all’, never a complete, consistent whole, is strictly correlative to subjectivity as such” (p. 10, emphasis in original). Mladen Dolar in his contribution writes, “Subject is rather the very impossibility of substance to be substance” (p. 38). Žižek in his contribution adds, “when Kant asserts the limitation of our knowledge, Hegel does not answer him by claiming he can overcome the Kantian gap…. the Kantian gap already is the solution: Being itself is incomplete…. This dimension gets lost in Fichte and Schelling, who both assert intellectual intuition” (pp. 107-108, emphasis in original). This seems exactly right.

I would add that for similar reasons having to do with criteria of identity, there is an impossibility like Dolar’s (developed by Aristotle himself in the central books of the Metaphysics) for Aristotelian “what it was to have been” a thing to just be the kind of quasi-grammatical substrate that came to be commonly understood by Latin substantia. The above-quoted formulations are a big advance over notions of mere epistemic incompleteness due to the inexhaustibility of a naively conceived in-itself. In my more Aristotelian language, not only do we rational animals never have a completely univocal perspective on the whole, but we should not be afraid to speak of equivocal determination in the real. Equivocal determination is still determination, but it is incomplete.

My only caveat to Sbriglia and Žižek’s formulation would be on the Schellingian sound of “self-limitation of the phenomenal”. It seems to me the Žižek school sometimes wants to put a Schellingian spin on Hegel’s famous “substance is also subject” claim, which would be an unfortunate regression. I think Hegel not only wanted to sharply distinguish his perspective from that of Schellingian identity philosophy, but succeeded in doing so.

Sbriglia and Žižek use the picturesque Lacanian language of a “hole in reality” as a defining characteristic of subjectivity, commenting that “the inaccessibility of the transcendent In-itself… is a result of the inscription of the perceiving subject into reality” (ibid). I prefer to minimize implicit identity claims, and thus to say (some) subjectivity rather than “the” subject. In some contexts, I think this is merely a terminological difference. Insofar as they just mean a decentered subjectivity with roots in the unconscious, the formulation seems fine, provided “perceiving” is taken as referring to something like Hegelian “Perception” and higher levels of the Phenomenology, not to something like his intended-to-be-discarded starting point of putative empirical “Sense Certainty”.

I get less comfortable with their talk about “the” subject as an abyss of pure negativity. Here I hear echoes of Sartre. While this is neither a substantial Cartesian-medieval intellectual soul nor even a Husserlian transcendental Ego, talk about “pure” negativity or an “abyss” seems to imply a kind of immanent infinity, albeit stripped of traditional theological associations. Sartre used this kind of metaphysics of negativity to bolster an extreme voluntarist anthropology, ironically transferring claims from old bad theology to the service of a strident atheism. Alain Badiou, who is a significant influence on the Žižek school, began as a Sartrean, and is perhaps the most outspoken extreme voluntarist today. I think it is a disservice to bring Sartre and Badiou into the reading of Hegel. Voluntarism is at root a naked expression of the attitude of one-sided Mastery, and should have no place in a discourse that aims at emancipation. Emancipation cannot come from an imposition of will. It comes rather from the increase of justice through processes furthering concrete realization of the autonomy of reason and mutual recognition. (See also Independence, Freedom; Freedom Without Sovereignty.)

Claims of immanent infinity may get a bit of added credibility these days, due to circulating complaints against Kantian “finitude”. It is easy to superficially enlist quotes from Hegel that appear to support such complaints. Here I want to explicitly defend the Kantian perspective of the essential finitude of human reality, relating it back to the happily rather than unhappily finite perspective of Aristotle, and supporting that by an Aristotelian-Brandomian reading of Hegel. A perspective of human finitude can also draw on charitable understandings of much traditional wisdom.

I do also think there is an inherently good but distinctly inhuman Hegelian “negative infinity” that can be anonymously intimate to our finite reality and the formation of our values, through the mediation of second nature, without actually being “us” or “ours” or immanent in us. Even if that negative infinity is to be identified with the “pure Self” Sbriglia and Žižek mention from Hegel’s 1805-06 lectures, it should not be identified with any empirical or existentialist or common-sense self. The Žižek school’s way of expressing this is to speak of a “split subject” or a split in the subject. Various strands of traditional wisdom can be seen in retrospect to have bearing on such a distinction as well. Members of the Žižek school would probably eschew any favorable reference to “traditional wisdom” of the kind I am making here as incompatible with academic-leftist credentials important to them, but Hegel himself often showed an irenic and even valorizing attitude on matters of this sort. (See also Acts in Brandom and Žižek; Self, Subject; Empirical-Transcendental Doublet.)

Freedom Without Sovereignty

Talk about freedom tends to be terribly ambiguous. Do we mean freedom from compulsion, or freedom from determination, or freedom resulting from some positive power? Do we mean anything other than complete unfreedom, or a super-strong total freedom, or something in between?

As to the last question, we ought at least to avoid claiming we are subject to an overly strong unfreedom, without claiming we possess an overly strong freedom. There is an Aristotelian mean here waiting to be clarified.

A first step toward such a clarification is to recognize that freedom ought not to be understood as implying something like sovereignty. Sovereignty is a kind of unconditional, total, exclusive authority or power over a domain. I want to say that nothing in the real world really does or ought to work like that. True freedom involves freedom from this kind of false freedom.

Historically, theories of sovereignty trace back to the absolute and arbitrary power attributed to the Roman emperors. The modern concept of sovereignty originated in arguments for absolute monarchy, e.g., by Jean Bodin in the late 16th century. In later political thought, the notion of sovereignty was transferred to the state as an institution, or in Rousseau’s case to a supposed general will of the people. To the extent that sovereignty of nations really just implies a kind of respect, it is unobjectionable, but to the extent that it is taken to imply a right to do arbitrary things, it is harmful.

Modern notions of individual unilateral rights, while in many cases referring to things that ought to be protected and respected more than they are, are a bad theoretical basis for good ethical concern. The notion of unilateral rights is implicitly grounded in a notion of sovereignty of each individual over a certain domain. At best, rights are a safeguard against failures of mutual recognition and Kantian respect for people, which ought to come first.

We need to think about responsibility in ways that do not presuppose that we must have some kind of sovereignty in order to be responsible. (See also Phenomenology of Will; Rationality; Choice, Deliberation; Brandomian Choice; Kantian Freedom; Freedom Through Deliberation?; Free Will and Determinism; Freedom and Free Will; Desire of the Master; Independence, Freedom; Ego; Euthyphro; Strong Omnipotence; Tyranny.)

Freedom Through Deliberation?

All sincere deliberation cumulatively contributes to opening our minds.

Kant did not discuss Aristotle directly, but he clearly wanted to assert a stronger notion of freedom than emerges just from Aristotle’s distinction of willing from unwilling actions. This relative kind of voluntariness was not enough to ground the kind of freedom Kant was after. For Kant, as long as we are under the sway of our own internal impulses, we are not free, so a lack of external compulsion is not sufficient. But that is not the end of the matter.

“Will” for Kant turned out to be a rational, positively developed alternative to impulse, grounded in a concept (i.e., thoughtful interpretation) of law. Aristotle’s version of thoughtful interpretation in this context is deliberation. It makes sense that active deliberation would positively, incrementally contribute to deautomatizing our tendency to act or respond impulsively. So, I think the closest analogue for what Kant would call true freedom in Aristotle is action on the basis of deliberation. Everything Aristotle says about what is in effect acquired emotional intelligence is also relevant to these Kantian considerations. (See also Beauty, Deautomatization.)

Kantian Will

Will for Kant is the ability to act in accordance with a conception of law. In spite of his confusing rhetoric about free will, this is clearly not the voluntarist notion of a faculty superior to reason, free to do or choose any arbitrary thing. However much I dislike images of law in ethics — which by default suggest what Hegel called “positive” or empirically existing, first-order law — acting in accordance with a conception of law is clearly not acting arbitrarily.

Kant also distinguishes between acting in accordance with a conception of law from merely acting in accordance with law. The latter would be mere obedience, without thought. So the important thing is not really the law as such, but thought about how to interpret it. (See also Kant’s Groundwork; Kantian Freedom; The Autonomy of Reason.)

Kantian Freedom

Brandom’s 2007 Woodbridge lectures (reprinted in Reason in Philosophy) opened my eyes to a new and much more positive appreciation of what Kant was trying to say about freedom. Brandom’s treatment is a marvel of clarity in comparison to the tortured arguments of a text like the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant was among the greatest of philosophers, but much of the second Critique seems occupied with producing a square circle, in its attempt to reconcile overly strong Newtonian determinism with the legal and political voluntarism popular among 17th and 18th century theorists like Pufendorf and Rousseau, and related talk about an incompatibilist notion of free will.

Brandom charts a middle path between the extremes of determinism and voluntarism, highlighting Kant’s key insights into freedom as essentially normative and positive and involved with reason, while deemphasizing Kant’s questionable invocations of will and causality in this context. This turns the ugly caterpillar into a butterfly.

The kind of determinism Kant was sympathetic to was the univocal sort, which wants to say not only that that there are sufficient reasons why everything is the way it is, but also that it could not have turned out any other way. I want to say that in hindsight there are always sufficient reasons why everything turned out the way it did, but that in advance, multiple outcomes are possible. (See also Equivocal Determination.)

In terms of the classic medieval debates about the priority of reason or will, Brandom’s reading puts Kant squarely on the side of the priority of reason. Talk about freedom as positive and related to specific capabilities, rather than negative and “infinite”, already rules out voluntarism. Kant’s deep concern with the autonomy of reason is also materially incompatible with any subordination of reason to will.

I think understanding of Kantian freedom should focus on the autonomy of reason, as well as applying something like the Critique of Judgment notion of the free play of the imagination and understanding in reflective judgment to the synthesis of unities of apperception.

After clearing away univocal determinism and voluntarism, we are left with ethics, which seems a good outcome. (See also Structural Causality, Choice; Values, Causality; Kantian Will.)

Fichte

Having just mentioned Johan Gottlieb Fichte (1762 – 1814) again, I owe him a dedicated note. Along with Karl Reinhold (1757 – 1823), Fichte played a major role in promoting the philosophy of Kant, and helped shape the further development of German idealism, but Kant studiously avoided endorsing his interpretation. Recent scholarship has greatly enriched the historical picture of Fichte’s development.

In the early works for which he is best known, Fichte strove to simplify and systematize the Critical philosophy. In so doing, he made a number of important changes that have affected the reception of Kant ever since. For one thing, influenced by Reinhold, he wanted to derive everything from a single, simple principle. For Fichte, this was a transcendental Subject or “I” endowed with very strong unity and infinite freedom. Contrary to Kant, he suggested there could be a limited kind of intellectual intuition, applying only to the Subject. Meanwhile, he denied the reality of the “thing in itself” that Kant always insisted on. He also presented himself as a sort of polar opposite of Spinoza.

These moves gave him a reputation for extreme subjectivism, but recent scholarship has shown that Fichte at least worked very hard to avoid this sort of consequence. His “I” was supposed to be universal and to incorporate all sorts of epistemological scruples, and in spite of rejecting a thing-in-itself, he also wrote extensively about a “not-I” that the “I” was supposed to recognize. He partly anticipated Hegel’s later notion of mutual recognition, but Hegel also famously criticized any simple opposition of “I” and “not-I”.

Assuming that Fichte successfully avoided crude subjectivism, he still stands as an archetype of a subject-centered philosopher, very far from the vision pursued here of doing full justice to subjectivity without postulating a foundational Subject.

Suther on Hegel on Freedom

I’m always nervous about strong emphasis on “Freedom” in treatments of German idealism, but recent literature has considerably improved the situation. Jensen Suther in “Hegel’s Logic of Freedom: Towards a ‘Logical Constitutivism’” makes a number of points I would endorse. While his is a “metaphysical” reading, it also owes something to Sellars and Brandom.

Hegelian logic for Suther is “a logic of freedom not only in the sense that it articulates the logic of what it means to be free, but also in the sense that it is a fully free practice of logic, leaving no presupposition uncontested and demanding of thought that it learn to think for itself” (see my The Autonomy of Reason). Suther also says “the only true or intelligible conception of being is one of which the good is taken to be constitutive” (emphasis in original). He recognizes that purposes are not merely subjective. Further, “it is essential to the intelligibility of what is that it be rendered intelligible, that reasons be given and asked for as to why we take things to be as they are”. He also recognizes the positive importance of error. (See also Reasons; Being, Existence; Freedom and Free Will.)

It gets a bit more problematic when he says “rational agency is not something we achieve, but is instead the distinctive form of living beings that are capable of being initiated into a social and historical process of progressive actualization of the potential for agency”. I don’t see why a distinctive form cannot also be something achieved. He seems mainly concerned to deny that it is an individual achievement, a view he attributes to Robert Pippin. I would agree that rational agency is at least as much a historical achievement as an individual one, but every human qua rational/talking animal or even just every modern person is not thereby a full-fledged rational agent. To be a rational animal (or to be sapient in Brandom’s sense) is just to be capable of being initiated, etc., to borrow Suther’s words quoted above.

In the Aristotelian commentary tradition, al-Farabi (10th century CE) and others explicitly developed a notion of a distinct form of acquired intellect, such that being “acquired” was considered key to the distinctness of that form. (Intellect for al-Farabi was at root more cosmic than cultural, but that is not the point here.) Only second-nature things could be of an acquired kind. The “acquired” status was part of an elaboration of several structural degrees of actualization. A classic example would be someone who has already learned something, say geometry, but is not currently using it. Actualization of intellect only advances to the further degree of “active” by being in use, as when the geometer is busy proving a theorem.

Suther generalizes about “the neo-Aristotelians”, referencing John McDowell and Robert Stern. I appreciate it when people like McDowell make significant positive references to Aristotle, but McDowell is hardly a full-blooded Aristotelian. According to Suther, what counts as freedom for McDowell and Stern is something given in advance. Suther calls this a neo-Aristotelian position. I don’t think Aristotle considered anything to be “given in advance”. He was the original emergentist.

Suther has a great quote from Hegel that “there is nothing degrading about being alive”, and a nice emphasis on the unity of life and knowing. For me, this comes back to the way second nature positively builds on first nature, rather than standing in opposition to it. Suther, though, seems to think there is something essential about death, fear, anxiety, and pain. While these are not entirely absent in Hegel, in this respect Suther’s reading seems influenced by early Heidegger. Contra Heidegger, I would cite Spinoza’s “the philosopher thinks of nothing less than of death”. I prefer Brandom’s explanation of the struggle to the death in the Phenomenology as a dramatic extreme example of a much more general concept of commitment to what we hold dear as willingness to sacrifice something else for it.

Independence, Freedom

Brandom points out that Hegel in the Spirit chapter explicitly contrasts the truly desirable form of freedom with the bad total “independence” or one-sided freedom of the Master. The voluntarism I have been concerned to reject effectively equates freedom with such independence. Some of Hegel’s superficial rhetoric about freedom leaves it unclear what kind of freedom is at issue, while seeming to repeat some voluntarist tropes. Pippin’s work previously helped me see past that. Here is another confirmation of what Hegel intended. (See also Freedom Without Sovereignty; Hegel and the French Revolution.)