Flasch on Eckhart

“What is essential is the ability of the soul to give itself a form, to shape itself. It does not stand there fixed, like a tree; it knowingly and willingly throws itself upon others, it becomes what it takes up” (Flasch, Meister Eckhart, pp. 35-36; see Eckhart as Philosopher: Background for introduction).

“The eye, opened and cast on the wood, is, within itself, over there with the wood” (p. 44).

With this example taken from visual perception, Eckhart illustrates the essence of the Aristotelian theories of perception and intellect that, according to Flasch, are at the core of Eckhart’s thought. At the heart of both perception and intellectual knowing, Aristotle posits a kind of fusion of what modern people call subject and object.

Also central to Eckhart’s thought is the neoplatonizing medieval notion of “intellectual soul”, which fuses together the separate Aristotelian notions of intellect and soul, emphasizing their status as an operational whole. For the many medieval writers who attribute such a strong unity to the operational whole of soul and intellect, all the unique attributes of Aristotelian intellect may then also be said of the human soul, though it is far from clear that Aristotle himself would agree with this.

Eckhart also upholds a unitary interpretation of the “substantial form” of hylomorphic unities, which aims to be a completely univocal kind of form. Elsewhere, Flasch notes that this late and specialized version of the more general (and not entirely univocal) notion of form in Aristotle is already present in Averroes’ Long Commentary on the Metaphysics. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas used it to argue against the sharp soul-body dualism defended by some medieval Augustinians. Substantial form poses a stronger unity in the forms of things than I want to claim for a reading of Aristotle, but that seems to be a relatively separate issue that does not greatly affect Eckhart’s argument here.

“[L]ike the seeing eye that casts a glance at the wood and becomes one with the wood, man, through active performance, through seeing and loving, becomes that which he sees and loves in the mind…. We retroactively separate eye and wood from the eye-wood unity. Is the wood-eye union the truer reality? Or is it merely an image, or simply a thought? Seeing things clearly in this regard, according to Eckhart, is the necessary precondition for understanding everything he says — not study of the Bible or dogmatic theology. First and foremost, we need to occupy ourselves with understanding this unity. It is our daily life. It is not a thing of nature, but rather the having of natural things” (p. 38).

We become that which we contemplate and love, that toward which we direct our attention. For Eckhart, the intellectual soul is not just a theoretical construct, but a part of everyday experience and of the basic ways of human being. Where the modern “subject” is usually considered to stand aloof from its objects, Aristotelian soul and intellect actively find or develop their content in and by means of what modern people would call their objects. Though we may marvel at it, this kind of fusion is not a mystical ecstasy, but part of the normal working of everyday life. It is not passivity, but a kind of fused activity. It seems to be this fusion at the heart of human experience that for Eckhart involves the divine giving birth to itself.

Eckhart uses philosophical senses of logos (word, speech, discourse, relation, ratio; what distinguishes the human from other animals) to explain its religious sense associated with Incarnation. We might say he uses logos as a name and descriptor for the intellectual soul’s fused active relationality.

“Why is ‘Word’ the keyword? It signifies relation. The Word unifies the speaker and the spoken content” (p. 36).

“‘Word’ in its essence refers to the intellect; the one who speaks and that which is spoken occur in the Word. The Word has a relational character; it unifies within itself those that are separate as natural things…. Eckhart conceives of man as Word, not primarily as a thing of nature” (p. 37).

It seems that for Eckhart, the Biblical Word and the Incarnation refer to the fused activity of the intellectual soul.

“[R]eason conceives of itself as an image identical to its exemplar, which is within it in eidetic fashion, that is, as actual intellectual being, uncreated and uncreatable” (p. 43).

As in Plotinus, for Eckhart the intellectual soul has a direct link with the divine, and may be said to contain metaphysical realities within itself.

“The unity of reflective self-consciousness and ethical orientation follows from this. The way reason — always in the qualified sense — is, it has nothing in common with anything else” (ibid).

“Eckhart does not say: ‘Until now, you have misunderstood Christianity.’ He says: ‘You have misunderstood yourselves, and as long as you persist in this error, you cannot provide Christianity with the intellectual and ethical form which is possible today, in 1300′” (p. 44).

Eckhart makes the astonishing claim that Aristotle, the Old Testament, and the New Testament all teach the same thing. According to Flasch, he even says that the Bible contains all natural philosophy. A first clue to what such sayings mean is that he says he will explain the Bible using nothing but the natural reasons of the philosophers. He will not appeal to revelation to justify what he says. This is not entirely atypical among medieval theologians. Flasch notes that even Anselm of Canterbury, a rather cautious thinker who precedes the main development of Latin scholastic philosophy, considered it a theological best practice to minimize the use of conversation-ending appeals to revelation.

“What previous readings of Eckhart often lack are linguistic discipline, semantic specification, and a philological basis: the way we have labeled and interpreted Eckhart and the categories into which we attempt to squeeze him even today were created at a time when his Latin works were still unknown. And yet they far outnumber his German works, and their tradition is more secure” (p. 46).

Flasch highlights Eckhart’s systematic use of the qualifier “insofar as”, an Aristotelian device that picks out and distinguishes one sense of something that may be considered in several ways. This he combines with a radical notion of what he calls primary determinations. These include the traditional four “transcendentals” Being, Oneness, Truth, and Goodness, as well as Idea, Wisdom, Love, and Justice. In a rather Platonic way, Eckhart will say things like “Insofar as we are just, Justice itself operates through us.”

“If something is, the primary determination is completely present within it. Then not only is the primary determination’s product or its similarity within us; the primary determination itself is present…. Everything that the primary determination itself effects, it effects not toward the outside, but rather into itself. Being has no outside. Again, those imaginative ideas taken from the working methods of craftsmen are problematic. The effecting of the primary determinations is not a producing…. Their effecting consists of making what has been established resemble them, of making what has been established into a being. Eckhart teaches elementary concepts of reciprocity…. Someone who has not learned from the prologues that the active pulls the passive toward itself, that is, that it makes it active, cannot interpret Eckhart’s birth cycle in the proper Eckhartian sense” (p. 80).

“Being, Oneness, and Goodness are active primary determinations, not abstractions. Thus, one has to say that this is God. As Aristotle saw the being of green in the being of the tree, so Eckhart sees the being of things in Being itself” (p. 82).

“I must not speak of Being or of ens in general in the same way that I can speak of this or that individual being…. In substance, they are in each other. This is what pious people mean when they say the world is created. This needs to be explained. Otherwise, the imagining thinking, that is, thinking that creates mental images, edges forward and makes us believe that the creation of the world consisted of God externalizing things from within himself” (pp. 82-83).

“In Eckhart’s time, the concept of pantheism… did not exist. Eckhart removed the issue… by differentiating… between primary determination and individual thing, but he made it clear that Being was not distinguished in the way that individual things were differentiated” (p. 83).

“This theology is short and clear. And it argues philosophically. It easily solves all or almost all questions that can be asked about God, and it does so in the light of natural reason…. There is nothing here of the abyss, nothing of the blinding darkness of Dionysius…. Moses says that God created the world in six days, but he said this for simple people; we know that Being is directly present in self-positing. People say that God created the world, but we know that Being continually posits itself anew in the present” (ibid).

“Placing his Biblical interpretation… before the doctrine of primary determinations — that means contradicting Eckhart” (p. 85).

“[T]ruth, Eckhart says, belongs to the intellect; it indicates relation or includes it within itself. Then follows a strange sentence […]: ‘A relation, however, has its entire being from the soul and as such is a real category, just as time, although it has all its being from the soul, is nonetheless a subspecies of quantity, that is, of a real category'” (p. 89).

“This sentence is strange for several reasons. It shifts from the statement ‘I am the Truth’ to a general theory of relations. Truth, Eckhart says, either is a relation or includes a relation, but a relation stems entirely from the soul and as such is an actual ‘predicament’. Every philosopher admitted that there existed relations purely of thought…. But no one who argued for real relations claimed that they were entirely derived from the soul” (ibid).

This is in Eckhart’s Parisian Questions. Here he rejects the argument of Aquinas that being comes before life and knowing, saying, “I, however, believe the exact opposite” (quoted, p. 91). Eckhart indeed explicitly puts knowing before being.

“[H]e reminds us in good Aristotelian fashion that mathematical objects cannot be considered according to intent or good, and that something that has being is identical [sic] to the good. Good and evil exist in the things themselves, but true and false only in the soul” (p. 91).

“Eckhart successfully describes the special status of the image. It still has, so to speak, a foot in the world of natural things; it consists of wood or stone or canvas; it has an efficient cause and often also an aim. But as an image, it does not have being; rather, it is the relation to the thing it represents…. Insofar as it is knowledge, it belongs to a different world. In questions such as this one, philosophical analysis has to be detached from the imagination” (p. 92).

“Properties are not beings; only their substance has being” (ibid).

“The intellect must not be a specific physical nature if it is to be able to comprehend all physical natures. The knower is the living negation of the known” (p. 93).

Eckhart makes the implicit “negativity” of Aristotelian intellect explicit, and applies it also to the soul.

“Our intellect is nothing, and our intellectual knowledge is not being…. This means that we are talking about the intellect as the actual having of universal objects, and about perception as the grasping of perceivable things. Not about the eye as a sensory organ, not about the equipment of the soul with the faculty of knowledge. Eckhart has transformed the question of an angel’s knowing and being into a general negative theory of sensory and intellectual recognition and claims. The intellect as such and also perception as such are neither here nor now, and insofar as they are neither, they are nothing, but insofar as they are natural faculties of the soul, they are something” (pp. 95-96).

“Here, in what appears to be an excessively dry critique of the Aristotelian ontology of the schools of the time, Eckhart lays the foundation of his thinking. He is looking for the special condition of the intellectual being, its nonmateriality, its energeia-like unity of knower and knowledge” (p. 99).

“Thus, intellectual knowledge is being God’s form or becoming God’s form, since God also is intellectual knowledge and is not being” (p. 100).

In different contexts, Eckhart says both that God is being and that God is not being.

“In summary, the first Parisian questions seem to be concerned with God and angels, but they are actually exercises in the search for intellectual being. They lead us to the edges of ontology, which cannot grasp image and knowledge. Its consequence is that we imagine God and the soul as thing-like. But that way is best forgotten” (p. 101).

“[W]isdom is infinite. Within it, everything always continues. Where it actually is, it is continually re-created. It is not born once and for all; its eternity is perpetual becoming” (p. 103).

Eckhart clarifies that creation is not meant as an occurrence in time.

“Eckhart, we must remember, permitted everyone so inclined to call God being. Now he proposes to say ‘Being’ (esse) and ‘Justice’ (iusticia) instead of ‘God'” (p. 104).

“God is Being. This tenet remains. But since Heidegger, the sentence has had a different ring to it from what Eckhart intended it to mean” (ibid).

“The human mind is the eagle that ascends to the origins of things” (ibid).

“What Eckhart calls Being is the productivity of the primordial mind, which produces images of ideas that the human intellect grasps as the immanent origin of the experiential things. Being is defined through the intellect, not through presence, not as a whole of facticity” (ibid).

“Being” taken in a positive sense especially means “intelligible being”.

“Primordial mind” is intellect outside of space and time. In this regard, Eckhart is closer to Augustine’s strong emphasis on eternity than to Hegel’s valorization of becoming.

“The philosopher, like the lover, does not look for the origin from which something developed, that is, its efficient cause, nor for what it is good for, that is, its purpose. Analyzing efficient and final causes is indispensable for investigation into natural things, but Eckhart is searching for the pure form as the true Being. He construes the divine life and the life of the deified man, the homo divinus, as a disclosure of form outside efficient and final causes…. [P]hilosophy was the eagle-like ascent to the realm of the grounds of being, the return to living substances that have their purposes within themselves, the elimination of thing-oriented ways of thinking, and the path to a proper life…. The proper human life is the aimless settling into the perpetually new Wisdom that is also Justice and Godhead” (p. 105).

Flasch points out numerous Platonic-sounding phrases in Eckhart, like the “pure form as the true being” above.

That efficient causality has no role in first philosophy is how I read Aristotle. But the neoplatonic commentator Ammonius (a student of Proclus, and teacher of Simplicius, Philoponus, and Damascius) argues that the first cause is also an efficient cause, and not only “that for the sake of which”, as Aristotle says. Most medieval writers (certainly Aquinas) follow Ammonius on this, and assume that the first cause is an efficient cause. Eckhart is an important exception.

Eckhart’s negative conclusion about “final causes” applies to external ends of a utilitarian sort, but ignores Aristotle’s emphasis on entelechy, which involves precisely an end that is intrinsic to a being’s being what it is. I want to say that we are our ends, as confirmed by our actions. In Eckhart as in many medieval writers, the later construct of univocal “substantial form” takes over most of the large role that Aristotle assigns to entelechy. It is admittedly hard to see entelechy as completely independent of time, which I think is what leads Hegel to reverse the traditional order and make eternity dependent on becoming.

“Eckhart’s God sheds the regalia of otherworldly imperial honors and endorses man as his own kind” (ibid).

Eckhart develops a theology that clearly rules out what Brandom rightly decries as the “command-obedience model” of normativity. As in Plotinus, a human’s connection to the Good instead involves an intimate sharing, and even a kind of reciprocity.

“The active above attracts the initially passive below. The below becomes the eagle that flies up to the hidden grounds of the world. It is our reifying contemplation that does not recognize the coincidental dynamic in the process between the above and the below” (ibid).

The active above works as an attractor. This is important. Though Eckhart doesn’t seem to explicitly talk about the teleology that Kant called “internal” and that on my reading is the mode of operation of the first cause in Aristotle, he nonetheless seems to come to a similar conclusion. For both Eckhart and Aristotle, the “below” is attracted to the “above”. But Eckhart is closer to Plotinus and the monotheistic mainstream in his insistence that the First is a source as well as an end.

“Eckhart declares… that he intends to proceed as a philosopher, and he adheres to this stated method. He aims to answer all or almost all questions about God with philosophical arguments, and in clear and simple terms…. This aspiration appears so impracticable, so immoderate that some Eckhart scholars have felt the need to understate it in order to present Eckhart in a better light. But Eckhart asserted this claim sharply and clearly. We can choose to reject it, but we should refrain from reinterpreting and changing it” (p. 109).

“The intellect is supernature. Plato’s intellectual world will become Leibniz’s ‘realm of grace'” (p. 111).

“Every reader of Eckhart has to fight his own imagination, which presents justice to him like an additional property of a person that is dependent on the person” (ibid).

“Eckhart’s God is Being and Unity, Justice and Wisdom. He is the all-encompassing attraction or love…. God is the original formal act, the primus actus formalis…; he discloses the having of form.” (ibid).

Again we have attraction, rather than a making, a push, or a command.

“The primary determinations attract to themselves everything that follows” (p. 112).

And again we have attraction. By this description, Eckhart’s primary determinations are after all what Aristotle would call ends that are sought for themselves, and not for the sake of something else.

“What matters in the context of moral actions is the intention, not the external act…. This justice is before and outside external actions” (ibid).

Eckhart is not the only medieval philosopher to say something like this. Peter Abelard similarly emphasizes the importance of intentions in ethics.

“Justice, in Eckhart’s writings, becomes the life of the mind. Thus, the just man finds peace in works and does not expect rewards; his ethical actions have value in themselves” (p. 113).

One of the charges against Eckhart was that he denied the importance of external works and ritual observances. But the context was implicitly things done for the sake of something else. That, I presume, is what Eckhart meant. But ethical actions have value in themselves. They have their end in themselves. They are not done for the sake of something else. And, he says according to Flasch, the just man finds peace in works. Whatever may be said about his relation to orthodoxy, Eckhart is on firm Platonic and Aristotelian ground here.

“Eckhart does everything he can not to construe God’s relation to the world as having developed arbitrarily, although there are people who imagine that this is precisely what proves the freedom of a personal God” (p. 119).

Like Albert the Great as previously discussed by Flasch, Eckhart puts intellect decisively ahead of will in his theology. To my layman’s eye Aquinas seems to formally maintain the same, but to make more concessions to voluntarism.

“Only thinking overcomes the false imagination to which many people succumb: they imagine God and the world as separate and relate the two as efficient cause and effect” (p. 121).

So there is someone else besides Aristotle who agrees that the first cause is not an efficient cause.

“[I]n divinis, that is, in the nature of God, but also in the homo divinus, in grace and salvation, there is no place for the category of causality, only the category of the ideational ground of reason, of ratio, which shows itself as disclosure of form. Aquinas described grace in man as the presence of God as efficient cause…. Eckhart’s philosophical reform consisted also of silencing the voice of efficient causality. Only grounds of an ideational-formal kind are at once wholly immanent and wholly transcendent…. They make possible the qualified concept of the living that has its telos within itself, just as Aristotle conceptualized it in the twelfth book of his Metaphysics” (p. 122).

Aha, now we even get living with a telos within itself, and a reference to book Lambda. Previously we saw him exclude external “final causes”, while remaining silent about the “internal” kind that are of far greater interest. But here the internal kind seems to be affirmed.

Eckhart’s first commentary on Genesis “rests on the combination of the Neoplatonizing metaphysics of Being and Oneness with the doctrine of intellect as presented by Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and Averroes and as corresponding with Augustine’s theory of mens. Eckhart’s anthropology, like his philosophical theology, is also a theory of intellect. This becomes especially clear when Eckhart speaks of man as God’s image. The Platonizing metaphysics of Being joins the philosophy of intellect and produces an ethics. Eckhart’s ethics presents the concept of the homo divinus” (ibid; see also The Goal of Human Life; Properly Human, More Than Human?).

“Eckhart writes that the reader should take the Biblical narrative as parable. He is supposed to let go of the narrative as events and facts” (p. 125).

“If someone says that God commands, then his commanding is to be interpreted in the light of his intellectual nature: his is not an external commanding. He is not ordering about. His ordering consists in providing things with their form” (p. 127).

Those who have understanding do not need to be commanded to be good. Commands are for those who lack understanding.

“The intellect is the root of freedom…. The goal of acting freely is to become a deified man, homo divinus. Within the deified man, the just man and justice are one. For him, the Good itself is the goal and in itself is its own reward. He does not look for external reward. Punishments, too, are intrinsic to acting. The good life consists of a consequent inner orientation, of inner being, not of doing. Action implements the way to being and life. God does not order any external act” (pp. 128-129).

In his commentary on the Book of Wisdom, Eckhart “continues his battle against the advancement of reified ideas, as though Being were a retrospective abstraction of many things or as though it were added to things in the form of a property. It is a rejection not so much of the representation of things in the imagination as of their dominance within philosophical thought” (p. 132).

“Eckhart recommends substituting primary determinations’ names for one another as a method. We may as well say Being instead of ‘God’ or Oneness or Justice or Wisdom. This was not uncommon among philosophers; Plato said ‘the idea of the Good’ instead of ‘God’ when he was not referring to the gods of popular religion; Aristotle, ‘the prime unmoved mover’, Avicenna, ‘the necessary being’, Aquinas , ‘being that exists by itself'” (p. 135).

“As we have seen, other primary determinations, such as Oneness, Wisdom, and Justice, are supposedly uncreatable. If God is called the esse, it is also uncreatable. Different meanings of ‘esse’ are operating here. Readers of Eckhart have to learn how to handle the flexibility of the concept” (p. 136).

“‘Many,’ Eckhart says, imagine creation as an effecting, as it were, toward the outside” (p. 137).

“Eckhart also rejects the idea that man should act well in order to receive earthly and heavenly rewards. The ethical good is an intrinsic value, not a means to an end” (p. 192).

“The sermons criticize the theology of the time, not just the wrong kinds of living. They correct the dominance of the imagination of stable, ontologically autonomous things, which hinders man from understanding himself and God and from grasping that his ‘neighbor’ lives beyond the ocean, too” (p. 198).

“The humble man compels God so that God must give himself according to his nature, and indeed must give himself wholly, for he is indivisible. God must: that is the message. His grace is not a random selection of blessed individuals out of a mass of sinners. God must; this motif appears again and again, not in the sense of an external compulsion, but rather from his nature, which he follows freely. Thus, he gives me everything that he gave Jesus, without exception; he gives the soul the power to birth; and thus it births itself and all things” (p. 200).

Peter Abelard, who was interested in safeguarding divine goodness, had argued more generally that God can only do what he does. Albert the Great had argued for the possibility of purely natural beatitude.

“Someone who speaks of God but does not talk about his oneness with the ground of the soul is not speaking of the true God. The ground of the soul has nothing in common with anything; it is not like anything else and is thus like God” (p. 201).

Here again we have Eckhart’s version of the intellectual soul. The “ground of the soul” would presumably be intellect, since it is described in the same terms.

“The soul exists more in Justice than in the human body” (p. 210).

The human soul carries intellect and the One within it, Eckhart might affirm with Plotinus. Plotinus is the only other writer I can think of who has as exalted a view of the soul as Eckhart.

“One does not learn the correct understanding of the world from the Bible; one must have developed this understanding in order not to read the Bible mindlessly” (p. 212).

“‘Reason’ needs to be conceptualized differently than a ‘power’. It is by no means a sort of mental hand that grasps something and thereby comprehends it” (p. 213).

The Reason he wants to call upon is about the interpretation of form.

“The truly wise life consists not in contemplative joy, but rather in the directing of external action to the best thing that love demands (p. 222).

Here we see how he does make a place for external action.

“The just man exists in Justice. No vision or intuition tells us this is possible, but only the philosophical analysis of the concrete’s containedness within the universal (abstractum) — with a realism of universals taken for granted” (p. 229).

Realism about universals here seems to acquire both a distinctive ethical dimension, and something like a neoplatonic “procession” from the universals in the soul that I have not encountered before in discussions of realism and nominalism.

“In pre-nominalist fashion, Eckhart takes it for granted that Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness) is the common and real determinant shared by all just men and then proceeds by eliminating the idea of making regarding the activity of Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness)” (p. 227).

Eliminating the idea of making in thinking about the activity of justice makes sense as part of a program of de-emphasizing efficient causes and accidents in favor of substance and internal telos, such as it now seems Eckhart supported.

Whitehead: Process, Events

The originally British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was profoundly concerned with the inter-relatedness of things. His later “philosophy of organism” inspired a movement of so-called “process theology”.

Whitehead was one of the inventors of universal algebra, which extends algebraic principles to symbolic representations of things that are not numbers. He collaborated with Bertrand Russell on the famous Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913) , which sought to ground all of mathematics in the new mathematical logic, but was less attached than Russell to the goal of reducing math to logic.

He did work in electrodynamics and the theory of relativity, emphasizing a holistic approach and the nonlocal character of electromagnetic phenomena. Counter to the spirit of the time, he developed a philosophy of science that aimed to be faithful to our intuitions of the interconnectedness of nature. He characterized mathematics as the abstract study of patterns of connectedness. In Science and the Modern World (1926), rejecting the world views of Newton and Hume as understood by the logical empiricists, he developed alternatives to then-dominant atomistic causal reductionism and sensationalist empiricism. Eventually, he turned to what he and others called metaphysics.

His Process and Reality (1929) is a highly technical work that is full of interesting insights and remarks. It aims to present a logically coherent system that radicalizes the work of John Locke in particular, but also that of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. As with many systematic works, however, it doesn’t engage in depth with the work of other philosophers.

Whitehead’s radicalization involves, among other things, a systematic rejection of mind-body dualism; of representationalism; of metaphysical applications of the subject-predicate distinction; and of Locke’s distinction between “primary” (mathematical) and “secondary” (nonmathematical) qualities. Plato and Aristotle both get positive mention. Whitehead thoroughly repudiates the sensationalist direction in which Hume took Locke’s work; aims deliberately to be “pre-Kantian”; and seems to utterly ignore Hegel, though he gives positive mention to the “absolute idealist” F. H. Bradley.

He wants to promote a thoroughgoing causal realism and to avoid any subjectivism, while eventually taking subjective factors into account. He wants to reinterpret “stubborn fact” on a coherentist basis. He is impressed by the work of Bergson, and of the pragmatists William James and John Dewey.

For Whitehead, “experience” encompasses everything, but he gives this an unusual meaning. Experience need not involve consciousness, sensation, or thought. He stresses the realist side of Locke, and wants to apply some of Locke’s analysis of the combination of ideas to realities in general.

He says that the world consists fundamentally of “actual entities” or “actual occasions” or “concrescences”, which he compares to Descartes’ extended substances. However, he interprets Einstein’s theory of relativity as implying that substances mutually contain one another, a bit like the monads in Leibniz.

For Whitehead, every actual entity has a kind of self-determination, which is intended to explain both human freedom and quantum indeterminacy. On the other hand, he also says God is the source of novelty in the universe. Whitehead recognizes what he calls eternal objects, which he compares to Platonic ideas, and identifies with potentiality.

Compared to the Aristotelian notions of actuality and potentiality I have been developing here, his use of actuality and potentiality seems rather thin. Actuality is just factuality viewed in terms of the connections of things, and potentiality consisting in eternal objects amounts to a kind of abstract possibility. His notion of causality seems to be a relatively standard modern efficient causality, modified only by his emphasis on connections between things and his idea of the self-determination of actual entities. His philosophy of science aims to be value-free, although he allows a place for values in his metaphysics.

According to Whitehead, perception has two distinct modes — that of presentational immediacy, and that of causal efficacy. Humean sensationalism, as codified by early 20th century theories of “sense data”, tries to reduce everything to presentational immediacy, but it is our intuitions of causal efficacy that connect things together into the medium-sized wholes recognized by common sense. As far as it goes, I can only applaud this move away from presentational immediacy, though I have also tried to read Hume in a less reductionist way. (I also want to go further, beyond intuitions of efficient causality in the modern sense, to questions of the constitution of meaning and value that I think are more general.)

In his later works, he emphasizes a more comprehensive notion of feeling, which he sees as grounded in subjective valuations, glossed as having to do with how we take various eternal objects. Compared to the logical empiricism that dominated at the time, this is intriguing, but I want to take the more radically Aristotelian (and, I would argue, also Kantian) view that values or ends (which are themselves subjects of inquiry, not simply given) also ultimately drive the constitution of things we call objective. I also don’t see “metaphysics” as a separate domain that would support the consideration of values, over and above a “science” that would ostensibly be value-free.

Whitehead considered the scientific reductionism of his day to exemplify what he called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. What I think he wanted to question by this was the idea that scientific abstractions are more real or more true than common-sense apprehensions of concrete things. I would phrase it a bit differently, but the outcome is the same. Abstractions can have great interpretive value, but they are things entirely produced by us that have value because they help us understand concrete things that are more independent of us.

Attempting to take into account the idea from quantum mechanics that reality is not only relational but also granular, he made what is to me the peculiar statement that “the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism”. Whitehead is certainly not alone in this kind of usage; indeed, the standard modern physical notion of “atoms” allows them to have parts and internal structure. That concept is fine in itself, but “atom” is a terrible name for it, because “atom” literally means “without parts”. The word “atom” ought to denote something analogous to a point in geometry, lacking any internal features or properties whatsoever.

Be that as it may, Whitehead sees an analogy between the granularity of events in quantum mechanics and the “stream of consciousness” analyzed by William James. “Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all” (Process and Reality, p. 68). To me, this is an expression not of atomism but of a kind of irreducibility of medium-sized things.

Anyway, Whitehead’s “atomic” things are events. Larger events are composed of smaller events, but he wants to say there is such a thing as a minimal event, which still may have internal complexity, and to identify this with his notion of actual occasion or actual entity.

I like the identification of “entities” with occasions. For Whitehead, these are a sort of what I call “medium-sized” chunks of extension in space-time. Whitehead’s minimal events are nonpunctual.

Freed of its scholastic rigidifications, this is close to what the Aristotelian notion of “primary substance” was supposed to be. I think of the latter as a handle for a bundle of adverbial characterizations that has a kind of persistence — or better, resilience — in the face of change. Only as a bundle does it have this kind of resilience.

Although — consistent with the kind of grounding in scientific realism he is still aiming at — Whitehead emphasizes the extensional character of actual occasions, they implicitly incorporate a good deal of intensional (i.e., meaning-oriented, as distinguished from mathematical-physical) character as well. Following Brandom’s reading of Kant on the primacy of practical reason, I think it is better to explain extensional properties in terms of intensional ones, rather than vice versa. But I fully agree with Whitehead that “how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is” (p. 23, emphasis in original), and I think Aristotle and Hegel would, too.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Whitehead’s work was attractive to theologians especially because it offered an alternative to the traditional notion of an omnipotent God creating everything from nothing. Whitehead argued that the Christian Gospel emphasizes the “tenderness” of God, rather than dominion and power: “not… the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love” (p. 343). “The purpose of God is the attainment of value in the world” (Whitehead, Religion in the Making, p. 100). God for Whitehead is a gentle persuader, not a ruler.

(I would not put unmoved moving in anywhere near the same bucket as ruling omnipotence. Unmoved moving in Aristotle is attraction or inspiration by a pure end, where all the motion occurs in the moved thing. It is not some kind of ruling force that drives things.)

Heidegger, Sartre, Aquinas?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Thomistic Grammar of Action

David Burrell’s Aquinas: God and Action (1st ed. 1979; 3rd ed. 2016) is a very interesting unorthodox sympathetic treatment that provides much food for thought. Burrell’s reading of Aquinas’ notion of action is quite different than what I expected to find — more Aristotelian and less proto-modern. How to relate this to the less favorable picture of Aquinas that emerges from Gwenaëlle Aubry’s account — which heavily emphasizes how Aristotelian concern with ends and the good is displaced by the notion of the priority of divine omnipotence, which is not discussed by Burrell — is an open question.

“This is philosophy as therapy, not as theory” (p. 17). “[P]roofs play an ancillary role at best in the theological task [Aquinas] sets himself: to elucidate the parameters of responsible discourse about God” (p. 9). “It seems that he regarded philosophy’s role in these matters less after the model of a scientific demonstration than as a manuductio: literally, a taking-by-the-hand-and-leading-along…. This somewhat novel contention is designed deliberately to help us rediscover philosophy in its proper medieval dress” (pp. 15-16).

“He is not proposing a synthesis of religious experience. He does not write to edify, nor does he appeal to religious life or practice as offering relevant evidence for his assertions” (p. 18).

Noting the intensive preoccupation of 13th century writers with logic and language, Burrell characterizes Aquinas’ work as principally a sort of philosophical grammar designed mainly to show what cannot be properly said of God. He suggests that we take Aquinas’ expressions of negative theology with utmost seriousness. Aquinas’ positive theology should be taken not as a doctrine of God (which would undermine the seriousness of his negative theology), but rather as an exploration of the limits of language.

God for Aquinas is ipsum esse, “to-be itself”. “Odd as it may seem, however, this assertion does not succeed in telling us whether God exists. For its form is not that of an existential assertion, but of a definition giving the nature of the thing in question” (p. 8).

For Aquinas according to Burrell, “to-be itself” cannot be properly described. What appear to be descriptions of God in Aquinas’ works need to be interpreted in some other way. Aquinas uses language indirectly to show what it cannot say, “to increase our awareness of what we are doing in speaking as we do” (p. 7). “Where less patient thinkers would invoke paradox, Aquinas is committed to using every resource available to state clearly what can be stated….We cannot pretend to offer a description of a transcendent object without betraying its transcendence. But reflecting on the rules of discourse brings to light certain contours of discourse itself. And those very outlines can function in lieu of empirical knowledge to give us a way of characterizing what we could not otherwise describe” (ibid).

Metaphysics involves no arcane method or privileged noetic access, only “an adept use of skills commonly possessed” (ibid).

“What people have failed to do is to take seriously Aquinas’ disclaimer about our being able to know what God is…. By attending closely to what Aquinas does, we can see that he is scrupulously faithful to that original limitation. What God is like is treated in the most indirect way possible” (p. 15). When we say that we clearly know a proposition about God to be true, we are in fact speaking only “of God in so far as he is the proper cause of certain effects” (p. 9). “If whatever we can say about something reflects the formal feature of compositeness, anything lacking it will lie quite beyond the range of our linguistic tools” (p. 17).

“[O]ne could easily mistake the logical treatment for a more substantive doctrine…. [Aquinas] even encourages the confusion by using object-language constructions to do metalinguistic jobs. Yet he had clearly warned us that he was not undertaking to treat of God’s nature” (p. 19).

Aquinas is commonly understood to have taught that although “being” has no one univocal meaning, there is an “analogy of being” that makes its meaning uniform by analogy. I have been at some pains to point out that scholarship does not support attributing this view to Aristotle, as is also commonly done. Burrell says it is a serious mistake to attribute it to Aquinas — the analogy of being was actually pieced together by Cajetan, and depends on views significantly different from those of Aquinas.

“Actus stands out as the master metaphor guiding Aquinas’ grammatical treatment of divinity” (p. 130). “It is the distinctively human activities of knowing and loving which offer Aquinas a paradigm for understanding action more generally” (p. 131). Here we are very far indeed from Gwenaëlle Aubry’s emphasis on the relation of action in Aquinas to a very non-Aristotelian notion of power. This certainly complicates the picture.

Burrell thinks Aquinas would agree that “exists” is not a predicate. He also thinks that “existentialist” readings of Aquinas miss the mark, and are distinguished by an inattention to language.

“Aquinas’ account neatly avoids what most of us today are persuaded lies at the heart of human action: decision” (p. 140). “[F]or Aquinas willing remains an activity of reason, broadly speaking. So it is proper that the pattern of receptivity be preserved in the consent which lies at the heart of more manifest voluntary actions like choosing. Furthermore, properly speaking, it seems that ends or goals are rarely chosen or even decided upon. Rather they grow on us. Or is it that we grow into them?” (ibid).

“It is at this point that one appreciates how a philosophical analysis works, especially in dissolving pseudo-problems. I have remarked how Aquinas’ analysis of action appears truncated. For it seems that the development of habitus [Latin for Aristotle’s hexis] as a proximate principle of activity demands one more step: to articulate what it is who acts. Such a step would carry us to the ‘transcendental ego’. But Aquinas neatly avoids that problem by recognizing there is no step at all. The one who acts, as Aquinas views the matter, is articulated in the remote and proximate principles of action. Nothing more need be said because nothing more can be said: the self we know is known by those characteristics that mark it” (p. 144).

“Aquinas manages to clear away certain endemic yet misleading ways of conceiving causal process by refusing to accept ’cause’ as the primary meaning of actus” (p. 146).

“Let me first put it paradoxically: the act of making something happen (causation) is not itself an action. As Aquinas analyzes it, causing an effect is properly a relation. The fact that A causes something to happen in B requires acts, of course, but it itself is not an action distinct from these” (p. 147). “In short, what happens is what we see happening to B (or in B). We say that A is causing this to happen, not because we ascertain that something is going on between them…, but simply because we understand that B depends on A to this extent…. Thus, causing does not have to be explained as a further act by the agent. It is, in fact, more accurately structured as a relation of dependence” (p. 148).

“The merit of Aquinas’ analysis is to exorcise the demand that a specific action be identified as ‘the causal process’. He succeeds, moreover, in locating ‘the causal nexus’ squarely in the category of relation. Causality can thus be explained as an ordering relation, given the capacities to act and to be acted upon in the factors so related…. [But] considerable intellectual therapy is always required to render plausible a formal or relational account of causality” (p. 158).

“A causal model misleads us, moreover, when we inquire into the source of action. That road leads one to adopt the language of will. We have already noted how elusive a notion will is…. Actions, however, require justifications rather than explanations — precisely in the measure that they are actions and not movements. Whoever understands actions to be the sort of thing for which the agent takes responsibility appreciates the import of this distinction. Hence Aquinas insisted that the will is an intellectual appetite, thus consciously adopting an intentional rather than a causal model in accounting for action” (p. 190).

All this is much closer to my reading of Aristotle than I expected. There is apparently also a much bigger distance between efficient causes in Aquinas and in Suárez than I thought. Suárez reportedly had just the notion of “influence” between cause and effect that Burrell finds to be absent in Aquinas.

Aubry on Aristotle

Gwenaëlle Aubry’s brilliant Dieu sans la puissance (2006) recovers a distinctly Aristotelian theology. Aristotelian potentiality is to be distinguished from Platonic power, even though Aristotle used the same Greek word (dunamis) for it. For Aristotle, god is moreover pure energeia or act (what I have translated as “at-workness”) with no admixture of potentiality.

Aubry says, “As such, [Aristotle’s god] is distinguished from the Platonic Idea of the Good, exceeding being in power, as much as from the Christian God in whom power and being merge to exceed the Good. Because he is act, the god of Aristotle is not the essential Good (the Idea of the Good), but the essentially good substance. And because he is without power, he does not act as an efficient cause. But he is not, however, powerless: his efficacy is non-efficient. If he acts, it is as end…. Aristotle thus thinks the causality proper to the good as being not power, but potentiality as tendency toward the end” (p. 201, my translation, emphasis added).

In a 2015 lecture “Genesis of the Violent God” at Cornell, anticipating her second volume Genèse du dieu souverain (2018), she develops in fine historical detail various theological positions on omnipotence that eclipsed Aristotle’s view, explicitly subordinating goodness to absolute power. She traces the way divine omnipotence has served as an explicit model for political doctrines of sovereignty, from the absolute monarchist Jean Bodin through Hobbes to the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Noting that various writers who have grappled with the moral significance of Auschwitz ended up suggesting a “weak” God, she instead urges us to take more seriously Aristotle’s view of a god of pure act.

This work is a development out of her 1998 doctoral thesis. She has worked extensively on Plotinus. She has co-edited volumes of essays on Aristotle’s ethics and on ancient concepts of self, as well as editing a volume on Proclus’ Elements of Theology. Aubry is actually better known as a novelist, and has won several literary awards.

Time and Eternity in Hegel

H. S. Harris in Hegel’s Ladder I points out that Hegel took an unprecedented view of the relation between time and eternity in the Phenomenology. He argues that Hegel’s later advertisement of his logic as characterizing “the mind of God before creation” is extremely misleading with respect to Hegel’s actual views. According to Harris, detailed examination of texts suggests Hegel retained the novel view of time and eternity expressed in the Phenomenology.

Harris notes that from around 1801, Hegel came to agree with Reinhold and Bardili that logic should be “objective” in the sense of being neutral with respect to subject-object distinctions, even though he sharply rejected their formalism. Logic for Hegel should not be subjective in the sense of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre or Schelling’s work before his break with Fichte.

“Hegel was able to make history subordinate in his speculative Logic precisely because he allowed it to be predominant in the lengthy formation of subjective consciousness for truly logical ‘objectivity’, which is the theme of the Phenomenology…. ‘The experience of consciousness’ is necessarily a psychological experience of the singular subject, since only singular subjects are ‘conscious’, but the ‘phenomenology of Spirit’ is the biography of God, the metaphysical substance who becomes ‘as much subject as substance’ when He is comprehended as ‘Spirit’. The ‘experience of consciousness’ must happen in a single lifetime; the ‘phenomenology of Spirit’ cannot happen so.”

“We might remark that neither can become ‘Science’ except through the recollection in a singular consciousness of a historical process that is necessarily not confined (or confinable) within a single lifetime. This is a way of saying that God cannot be ‘spirit’ without man being ‘spirit’ likewise — which is, of course, quite correct…. [N]ot the comprehension of ‘self’ but the comprehension of the whole social history of selfhood [is the topic of the Phenomenology]” (p. 11).

Harris says the Phenomenology was Hegel’s “decisive divergence” (p. 13) from the whole tradition of intellectual intuition and cognitive immediacy.

“The implication is that ‘the eternal essence of God’ is not ‘outside of time’ in the way that God’s thought and action have traditionally been supposed to be.”

“We cannot mediate the problem of how logic is in time, unless we shift our attention from the ‘real philosophy’ that comes after logic (in every sense) to the ‘real philosophy’ that goes before ‘logic’, as a comprehension of the time in which it was shown finally that logic itself is as much in time as out of it and that it must come to be self-consciously ‘in’ time in order to be properly ‘out’ of it…. [F]rom Heraclitus and Parmenides to Kant and Fichte, no one has managed to formulate a consistent theory of human experience as a rational whole on any intuitive basis. Instead of simply taking it for granted that eternity comprehends time, just as ‘possibility’ comprehends ‘actuality’, we must start from the other end and ask how time comprehends eternity.”

“There is no intuitive answer to this question” (p. 14). The project of the Phenomenology “involves a total inversion of the intuitive assumption of all the ‘philosophers of experience’ before Hegel…. But the history of religion is more important to the argument than is the history of philosophy, in any case, because it is in religion that the natural assumption is inverted for the natural consciousness itself. It is Hegel’s predominant concern with the actual experience of the natural (i.e., nonspeculative) consciousness that makes it hard for us to see and understand what happens to Descartes, and to the ‘philosophers of experience’ proper, in Hegel’s argument” (pp. 15-16).

Harris speaks of an “explicitly Fichtean self…. But his self makes no Fichtean assumptions, and has no absolute ‘intuitions’. It merely observes; and what it learns, in the end, is precisely what the standpoint of philosophical ‘observation’ is and means. This observing consciousness leaves Fichte behind decisively when it leaves moral judgment to the valets and aligns itself with the Weltgeist [world Spirit] in its evaluation of all the experience it recollects.”

“This all-accepting and all-forgiving alignment with the Weltgeist is the logical standpoint, the eternal standpoint concretely established in time and now, at last, comprehensively understood” (p. 17). What is shown is “Spirit’s eternity in time” (p. 18), but “The ‘hero’ is the finite consciousness — Jacob wrestling with the angel” (ibid).

Harris is here using the word “consciousness” in an equivocal way to refer to something that is far beyond what Hegel described as the standpoint of Consciousness. It is already Spirit. The standpoint of Consciousness is inseparable from assumptions of immediacy and of what philosophers from Locke to Schelling have called “intuition”, as some sort of immediate grasping. Emphasizing some underlying continuity where something underwent a transformation is a common way of speaking, but I would rather identify the continuity with “us” rather than an abstracted property like consciousness.

Harris properly distinguishes between “natural consciousness” and “the philosophers of experience” who purport to speak on its behalf. Hegel sharply rejects the philosophers of experience as propounding a bad notion of experience focused on immediacy, but he wants to entice common sense to become philosophical.

The Fichtean self is already a difficult topic. Fichte, in his better known early writings at least, propounded a very extreme “subject-centered” point of view, but he was a brilliant writer and serious philosopher who cannot be simply reduced to that. His “self” is certainly not an empirical matter of fact, and seems constitutionally incompatible with petty egocentrism or self-seeking (certainly a far cry from the acute vulgarization of Max Stirner in The Ego and His Own), even though it seems like he had some bad ideas about German cultural superiority. I think the Fichtean self not so much “has” intuitions as Harris suggests, but rather is itself an “absolute intuition” (the only one) for Fichte. But Fichte also in his later writings formulated a notion of ethical mutual recognition.

Harris alludes to Hegel at a certain early point turning back from Schelling’s mystical intuitionism toward Fichtes’s practical philosophy. Although I think this is historically accurate, if taken out of context or connected with stereotypes of Fichte, it could lead to serious misunderstanding.

Harris himself does not make this mistake. He clearly indicates that Hegel cannot be reduced to Fichtean subjectivism, as the young Marx and some others have done or precipitously claimed others had done. He goes on to discuss the fundamental role of “otherness” in Hegel’s thought, particularly in regard to constitution of self. This is as far from an “absolute intuition” of self as could be. But Fichte’s practical-ethical orientation and sharp mind tower above not only the woolly-minded forgotten Schellingian epigones who so irritated Hegel, but also the superficial dazzle of Schelling himself. I would also note that to ground the social in concrete relations rather than abstract collectivity is in no way to reduce the social to actions of individuals.

Fichte was accused of atheism and drummed out of Jena for identifying God with the moral order. Now I can’t find the passage, but I think Harris somewhere says Hegel put God as the moral order historically in between God as law and God as love.

The explicit idea that the eternal is constituted in time that Harris highlights is, I think, original to Hegel. Others had denied the eternal, but I don’t recall anyone arguing that a genuine eternal originates in time. Harris relates this novel aspect of Hegel’s thought to his inversion of the Kantian priority of possibility over actuality. Aristotle of course also maintained that actuality comes first, but never explicitly suggested a temporal origin of the eternal.

I think a temporal constitution of the eternal — especially when connected with logic, as Harris suggests it was for Hegel — actually makes a lot of sense. After a temporal process of experience and learning that may involve reversals and twists and turns, it is possible to construct a static logical theory (not logical in Hegel’s sense, but in the formal sense) of all the lessons learned, but not before. What Hegel calls logic is a lot closer to the twists and turns of experience. Formal logic obviously has no temporal element, but the “logic” of experience and learning does. Formal logic comes “after” Hegelian logic. Hegelian logic can be read as an account of the constitution of formal logic, through the constitution of meaning.

Next in this series: Sense Certainty?

Between Transcendentalism and Pragmatism

Josiah Royce (1855-1916) was known as the leading American exponent of absolute idealism. He was recognized for contributions to philosophy of religion, psychology, and logic, as well as metaphysics. I thought of him because apparently, at least in his earlier works, he really did identify the Absolute with an all-embracing, divine consciousness that was supposed to include and underwrite all of reality, quite opposite to the way I read Hegel’s Phenomenology as an extended critique of the point of view of consciousness.

Also quite unlike the “deflationary” approach taken here, he straightforwardly identified his Absolute with God and with Being. Royce’s was a definitely personal God, also existing in time rather than eternally. Early in his career, he developed a novel argument for the existence of God based on the existence of error. According to Royce, the very existence of error presupposes the existence not only of truth against which the error can be recognized, but of a Knower who knows the truth.

Royce had strongly communitarian ethical views, sharply criticizing both the “heroic individualism” of the American Transcendentalists, with whom he shared an interest in German Idealist philosophy, and the individualist views of his close friend, the pragmatist William James. Among other things, Royce thought James in his famous Varieties of Religious Experience focused too much on intensely private experiences of extraordinary individuals, to the detriment of attention to the community aspect of religion. In his theology, Royce strongly associated God with an ideal of a Universal Community.

In his late work, he was increasingly influenced by the great founder of pragmatism, Charles Pierce. He became fascinated with Pierce’s notions of signs, semiotics, and interpretation. While this was not quite the full-fledged anti-foundationalist notion of interpretation developed here, I think it at least points in a similar direction. At this point, Royce developed a new notion of God as “the Interpreter Spirit” providing a metaphysical ground in time for all acts of interpretation, without the interpreters necessarily being aware of this. He extended his notion of the Universal Community, now explicitly calling it a “Community of Interpretation”. I think the latter is a fascinating partial anticipation of Brandom’s much more detailed work on mutual recognition, which also draws on the pragmatist Kantianism of Wilfrid Sellars.

(From Brandom’s point of view, Royce’s communitarianism would still be a one-sided overreaction to individualist trends. It seems to me that Brandom and Ricoeur converge on a very attractive alternative to this old seesaw, putting concrete relations with others and intersubjectivity before either individuality or community.)

Martin Luther King, Jr., acknowledged Royce as the source of King’s own more elaborated notion of the ideal of the Beloved Community, a vision of tolerance and mutual acceptance. I have not evaluated claims of a recent book that in spite of this, Royce also in effect promoted a cultural version of the racist “white man’s burden”.

Royce attempted to derive all of ethics from a single principle of loyalty, understood as loyalty to a cause. He claimed that loyalty to vicious or predatory causes fails to meet a criterion of “loyalty to loyalty” intrinsic to his principle of loyalty. Thus the argument seems to be that loyalty has the kind of universality that Kant claimed for the categorical imperative. However, I don’t think the argument succeeds nearly as well as Kant’s. Kantian respect for people gives a crucial human face to Kant’s formalism in ethics. Even if loyalty to loyalty is concerned to avoid undermining the loyalty of others to the cause, as Royce argued, that seems to me to be a much narrower kind of concern for others. Also, loyalty is by nature particular, whereas Kant’s various formulations of the categorical imperative are actual tests for universality.