Actualization of Freedom

Chapter 4 of Pippin’s Hegel’s Practical Philosophy is concerned with the actualization of freedom. Hegel makes abundant use of the Aristotelian concepts of actuality and actualization. To begin with, Pippin wants to resolve worries that Hegel’s emphasis on the actuality of Spirit submerges the agency of individuals, or that it gives too strong a “providential” sanction to existing states of affairs. Hegel indeed had little use for the narrow “self-will” of individuals, and in his semi-popular lectures on the philosophy of history applied potentially misleading metaphors of providence and theodicy to history. As Pippin observes, the meaning especially of some of Hegel’s more rhetorical statements is sometimes “profoundly unclear”, and apparently at odds with his more careful articulations.

If we step back and consider what actuality is in both Aristotle and Hegel, individualization is one of its fundamental characteristics. Actual things are specific, concretely embodied, and indeed particular. The actuality of spirit is not some ghostly presence over and above things, but lies rather in the concrete actions of individual people as ethical agents. And actuality, as Pippin notes, “is not merely a question about whether a concept does or does not have instances corresponding to it in the real world” (p. 95).

Hegel distinguished “ideas” from mere concepts precisely as taking into account their actuality and embodiment. In language that could very easily be misunderstood, he also spoke of the concept giving itself its own actuality. Pippin begins to explain this by noting that concepts for Hegel always involve an “ought”. They are “rules telling us how to make categorical distinctions, principles that govern material inferences, that prescribe what ought or ought not to be done” (p. 97), and “the Concept” with a capital “C” just is normativity. All concept use is involved with considerations of rightness. “By virtue of what is one inferential move legitimate, another not?” (ibid). To be able to judge what anything is, we must be able to distinguish it from what it is not.

Hegel gives unqualified praise to Kant’s thesis that the unity of the concept is none other than the unity of apperception. Pippin says this gives the concept a non-empirical origin that ties it to self-legislation. “[A]ll judgment rests on excluding and inferring relations [Brandom’s material incompatibility and material consequence] that constrain what we can intelligibly think and articulate by normatively constraining ‘what we ought to think’, not by being psychological propensities or limits” (p. 99). This all has to do with the determination of what is right, not with any causing of things to exist in a certain way.

Pippin says the whole third part of Hegel’s Logic – the “logic of the concept” – is concerned with these Kantian considerations related to self-legislation. He concludes that actuality for Hegel especially refers to the objective validity of a normative status, not simple existence. This is what is behind Hegel’s famous and tremendously misunderstood phrase “the rational is the real, and the real is the rational”. Both reason and actuality or reality for Hegel are normative concepts.

Here we have an answer to the worries about a conservative providential seal on factual existence. What is metaphorically said to be governed by something like rational providence is not factual existence but normative validity. “The Science of Logic’s argument suggests that… such a responsiveness to reason… is neither an imposition nor an unreflective subordination to the ‘practically given’” (p. 102).

In talk about self-legislation “The point being made is about the autonomy of the normative domain, in both theoretical and practical contexts. It is because of this claim that Hegel is completely untroubled by the threat of scientific or any other form of determinism…. This is not a claim about the theoretical requirement of an uncaused spontaneity of thought, as Kant flirted with…, but a claim about the space of reasons itself and what could and could not in the Hegelian sense be ‘logically’ relevant to it” (p. 103).

For Hegel, conceptual determinacy is not separable from conceptual legitimacy. Normative authority is “constructed we might even say, not discovered” (p. 104). Pippin says Hegel’s notion that the concept should be understood as a “free” structure only makes sense in these terms. “Conceptual legitimacy is not secured by being shown to be hooked onto the world in a certain way, but by virtue of its being instituted and sustained in the right way” (p. 105).

Hegel is concerned to develop “a theory of the possibility of content in general – how concepts in their judgmental use and claims to normative authority, might successfully pick out and re-identify an aspect of reality” (p. 107). For both Kant and Hegel, objectivity is no longer a matter of representation, but rather a matter of a kind of legality. “[W]e will not be searching about in the metaphysical or empirical world for the existent truth-makers of such claims” (p. 109).

“Whereas Kant held out some hope for a deductive demonstration of a notion’s or a norm’s actuality, or objectivity or bindingness, Hegel’s procedures in all his books and lectures are developmental, not deductive…. The proof procedure shifts from attention to conceptually necessary conditions and logical presuppositions to demonstrations of the partiality of some prior attempt… and the subsequent developments and reformulations necessary to overcome such partiality” (pp. 109-110).

“I am only subject to laws I in some sense author and subject myself to. But the legislation of such a law does not consist in some paradoxical single moment of election…. The formation of and self-subjection to such constraints is gradual and actually historical” (p. 117).

Next in this series: Hegel on Willing

Self-Legislation?

In chapter 3 of Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, Robert Pippin develops a contrast between Kantian and Hegelian approaches to “self-legislation”. “What spirit legislates for itself are laws, not cultural preferences and so the binding and non-arbitrary nature of such self-legislating must find a place in any account” (p. 65). Another important consideration related to this was mentioned in the introduction. “[I]t can fail, go dead, lose its grip, and a very great deal of what interests Hegel is simply what such shared practical meaningfulness must be that it could fail, and how we should integrate our account of action into a fuller theory of the realization of such a condition and its failure” (p. 6).

In Kant’s original version, self-legislation is practiced separately by each individual, but under strict conditions of universality that ideally should make it valid for all. In Hegel’s version, “spirit” is said to do the legislating. Spirit is metaphorically said to be the product of successive historical self-modifications, but it is ultimately people who are the concrete agents in the vast ensemble of relations of mutual recognition that gives form to spirit.

It should be noted that the way Kant talks about universality is very different from the way that Aristotle usually talks about “universals”. The key feature of Kantian universality is that it is supposed to be unconditional. Also, it mainly applies to people, with the aim of rooting out privilege, discrimination, and special pleadings or excuses. Aristotle and Hegel, on the other hand, are mainly concerned with universals in the sense of intermediate abstractions on the model of ordinary words or concepts, which are “said of many things” but not of all. Insofar as we take ourselves seriously and are committed to our abstractions, these are also binding, precisely because we have bound ourselves to them. At the same time, such intermediate abstractions ground a kind of freedom by the incompleteness of their determination.

Kant’s approach has the merit of putting “democratic” considerations first, while emphasizing something like the rule of law in a way that staves off Plato’s objections to a “democracy” that might better be called unprincipled populism. As many — starting with Aristotle — have noted, though, in the real world it is very hard to move back and forth directly between single individuals and unconditional generalizations, if we take ourselves seriously. Intermediate abstractions smooth the path.

Aristotle’s emphasis on constitutional government — in which all both participate in some way in the process of government, and are governed — is incipiently democratic while emphasizing the rule of law, but has historically sometimes been distorted and abused by ruling minorities. With intermediate abstractions, there is always a similar risk that some prejudice will be incorporated. Aristotle preferred to dwell on more optimistic scenarios, so he only deals with prejudice in a very general way. Hegel’s explicit concern with the possibility of failure in spirit’s self-legislation effectively combines Aristotelian and Kantian insights.

As Pippin points out, Hegel is commonly said to have a social role theory of right human conduct, but this immediately raises problems. Putative entitlements associated with social roles must be able to survive a full “reflective endorsement” that does not presuppose the roles in question. Merely “being in a social role could never of itself count as a reason to do anything” (p. 67; emphasis in original). This kind of consideration leads back to a Kantian position on obligation. Pippin says that for Hegel, though, any complete abstraction from our ongoing ways of life, attachments, and dependencies results in an artificial construct amounting to a philosophical fantasy world. Also, to understand one another as merely passively shaped by social roles is to fail to accord appropriate respect to one another. For Hegel too, Pippin says there must be a reflective endorsement, but such endorsements are not simply made by individuals. Rather, they stem from broader concrete practices of giving and asking for reasons.

“Kant’s solution to the problem of obligation descended from the dead ends created by the divine command and natural law traditions” (p. 69) had been to ground an unconditional obligation in one’s own first-person reflective endorsement, under requirements of strong self-consistency and deep honesty with oneself. For Hegel, this is still too Cartesian. None of our reasoning takes place in true isolation, but he very much wants to hold on to Kant’s emphasis on actual reasoning and the autonomy of reason in the determination of what is right.

Pippin quotes the eminent Kant scholar Christine Korsgaard saying that for Kant, reflective endorsement is not a way of justifying morality; rather, reflective endorsement is morality itself. (I think Plato and Aristotle would agree.) But Pippin goes on to note that Kant’s talk about self-legislation is clearly metaphorical. If we literally legislated everything for ourselves as individuals, it would be paradoxically up to a kind of lawless selves to inaugurate the process. As Pippin points out, this sounds more like Kierkegaard or Sartre than Kant. According to Pippin, Hegel here aims in a way to be more Kantian than Kant, by avoiding this kind of dilemma. Holding on to the essential point about reflective endorsement, Hegel deepens Kant’s move away from the atomistic and overly simplistic Cartesian model of subjectivity.

Pippin notes that Kant says uncritically accepting the authority of a command negates our very status as agents. He quotes Korsgaard’s maxim that soldiers should obey orders, but humans should not massacre people. Pippin says that for Kant, the mere act of obedience involves taking responsibility. Responsibility and respect for others morally take precedence over obedience, even to duly constituted authority. Laws state principles, but commands are particular. Even principles can conflict with one another, though this can to some extent be resolved with higher-order rules, such as that one’s responsibilities as a human in at least in some circumstances take precedence over one’s responsibilities as a soldier.

“[W]hile this picture of self-legislation has the appearance of something radical and potentially paradoxical, it is not crazy. It does not suggest: ‘I am only bound because I bound myself, so I hereby unbind myself’…. [If] someone playing chess… moved his rook diagonally…. The point is not that he is violating what everyone sees is this ideal object, ‘Chess’, but that he is contradicting himself, his own agreement to play chess and all that that commits him to” (p. 74; emphasis in original).

On Hegel’s account, once practices are instituted, people often “see” what to do without deliberation, and certainly without having to invent everything for themselves. However, norms also change, and they change because we change them. Pippin says that Hegel saw a coming major breakdown in the modern attempt to found morality on a purely individualist basis.

Pippin goes on to criticize part of the detail of Korsgaard’s argument about what happens when we fail to do what is right. For Korsgaard, this will be fundamentally a failure of our reason, but Pippin suggests that her description of a case involving fear sounds more like an instance of disease or outside interference than a failure of our reason that would make us cease to be rational agents in that moment. He is unsatisfied with Korsgaard’s Kantian appeal to weakness. Instead, he suggests, “Someone simply finds out that she wasn’t who she thought she was; all these years firmly convinced that she was seeking A; it turns out she wasn’t…. It seems more appropriate… to concentrate on what her actions reveal about the ends she really does care about. That is just what we shall see Hegel doing in his reflections on the ‘self-legislated’ view of normative authority” (p. 85). I would add that it is also in accordance with what Aristotle says about assessing a life.

“This makes it unlikely that there could be any deductive account of someone’s core moral or practical identity… whatever legitimating account there might be will probably be developmental, not deductive, and whatever self-legislation is going on it will be collective and specific to some stage or other of this development, and never from the ground up” (p. 90). Hegel “focuses our attention on the experience of normative insufficiency, on a breakdown in a form of life… and thereby, through such a via negativa [negative path], tries to provide a general theory of re-constituted positive normative authority out of such breakdowns” (p. 91; emphasis in original). (See also Autonomy, Normativity.)

Next in this series: Actualization of Freedom

Naturalness, Mindedness

I’ll be devoting several posts to Robert Pippin’s important book Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (2008). Pippin suggests we translate “philosophy of Geist (Spirit)” in a non-metaphysical way as “practical philosophy”, taking “practical” in the ethical sense. He will be centrally concerned to elaborate Hegel’s notion of freedom — which avoids any kind of dualism or voluntarism — and to explore the significance of Hegel’s claims that freedom is the most important thing in ethics. He calls Hegel’s account of the real possibility of freedom the most ambitious in the history of philosophy.

Pippin says he wants to suggest with Hegel that we are free when we can recognize our deeds and projects as expressing our own meaningful agency. According to Hegel, even organic life already involves purposes as distinct from causal relations, but freedom in the sense of arbitrary choice is a delusion. Rather, freedom for Hegel involves “a certain sort of self-relation and a certain sort of relation to others; it is constituted by being in a certain self-regarding and a certain sort of mutually recognizing state” (p. 39). Hegel’s name for these normative relations is Spirit.

For Hegel, things like spirit and individual soul are distinguished from simple nature “logically” rather than ontologically or metaphysically. They are not separate “substances” in the medieval or early modern sense, but “way[s] of being” (pp. 39-40). Freedom — said to be the essence of spirit — does not involve “having a special causal origin or being undertaken by a causally exempt being” (p. 40).

Pippin suggests that when Hegel talks about “the concept”, he effectively means normativity. Freedom involves a kind of normative self-determination. “[T]he truth that will set spirit free will not be a revelation or a discovery but its coming to act as fully what it is, a being constrained and guided by self-imposed norms” (ibid). He quotes Hegel saying it is freedom that makes spirit true, and that the philosophy of spirit can be neither empirical nor metaphysical.

Kant’s dualism was ethical rather than metaphysical, Pippin says, but it was strict. Hegel develops a continuity between nature and spirit, while enthusiastically embracing Kant’s critique of so-called rational psychology and his conclusion that the soul is not a thing, but rather to be identified with the “I” and with freedom. Hegelian Spirit is a form of activity .

Hegel says in freedom we are “with self in another” (p. 43). Pippin says this means “an achievement in practices wherein justificatory reasons can be successfully shared” (ibid). What could count as free action depends on this achievement of shareability of reasons.

Spirit’s self-legislation — in which we participate — can be identified with “the unconditioned”. Spirit as realized freedom is a historical achievement, related to the extension of freedom from a few to all. Spirit’s “production of itself”, while not reducible to natural terms, occurs as a result of the agency of natural beings. This must be distinguished from all empirical or philosophical psychologies. Hegel is quoted saying reason constitutes the substantial nature of spirit.

Nature is not a manifestation of cosmic spirit, or a mere appearance or illusion. Hegel’s complex view of teleology is not as a sort of providence or any kind of neoplatonic unfolding. Hegelian Spirit always presupposes nature. “Natural beings begin to understand themselves in ways not explicable as self-sentiment or mere self-monitoring because the form of their reflexive self-relation is an aspect of what is to be represented, not a separable, quasi-observational position” (p. 46). Once we begin talking about what a being takes itself to be, we have moved beyond simple nature. Wilfrid Sellars is quoted saying to think of someone as a person is not to “classify or explain, but to rehearse an intention” (p. 61).

Hegel vindicates “the oldest and original premise of ancient rationalism, that to be is to be intelligible” (p. 49; emphasis in original). Pippin characterizes his reading as “clearly neo-Aristotelian”. He concludes that there is no “missing ontology” in a position like this. Moreover, “the issues that dominate so much of the modern post-Cartesian, post-Kantian discussion about nature and mentality do not ever arise for Hegel: subjective self-certainty, raw feels, intentional states, mental objects, … and the problem of spontaneous causation in action” (p. 57).

Next in this series: Self-Legislation?

Ricoeur on Practical Reason

I just found a nice essay on practical reason in Ricoeur’s From Text to Action (French ed. 1986). An account of practical reason must confront “the two great classical problematics of ‘meaningful action’, those of Kant and of Hegel” (p. 189). As Ricoeur himself notes, though, his account has a “greater affinity” (p. 191) with Aristotle’s accounts of choice and practical wisdom than with Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Like Aristotle, Ricoeur wants to assert “no break between desire and reason” (ibid).

Practical reason for Ricoeur “must deserve the name of reason, but it must maintain certain features irreducible to scientifico-technical rationality” (p. 188). (I think design in engineering — while it must have a strong technical basis — already goes beyond purely technical concerns, insofar as key criteria of its “goodness” lie in the broad pragmatics of use of its products in real-world contexts.) What Ricoeur has in mind here is that practical reason inherently involves concrete judgments of value that cannot be reduced to calculation.

He adds that practical reason is critical rather than speculative. I would also add that common sense, practical reason, and Reason with a capital “R” all work mainly by material inference, which is concerned with meaning and values from the ground up.

There is a syntactic ordering of reasons-for-acting as relative ends and means, but Ricoeur dislikes Aristotle’s talk of “practical syllogisms” as sharing the same formal structure with theoretical ones. I think Aristotle is right about the formal structure, but Aristotle would agree with Ricoeur that this much narrower kind of reasoning is very far from encompassing practical reason as a whole. Practical reason or wisdom in Aristotle crucially includes processes of judgment behind the formation of the propositions used in syllogisms (and canonical Aristotelian propositions codify material inferences).

Ricoeur emphasizes that practical reason involves interpretation, normativity, and resolution of “opposing normative claims” (p. 195). He commends Aristotle’s definition of virtue for joining together psychological, logical, normative, and personal components. Aristotelian practical wisdom “joins together a true calculus and an upright desire under a principle — a logos — that, in its turn, always includes personal initiative and discernment” (p. 197). There is an “epistemological break between practical reasoning and practical reason” (p. 198).

In the Critique of Practical Reason “Kant, it seems to me, hypostatized one single aspect of our practical experience, namely, the fact of moral obligation, conceived as the constraint of the imperative” (ibid). Though I think Kant tempered this in other places, I am very sympathetic to the thrust of Ricoeur’s criticism (and Brandom’s tendency to follow Kant on this in some contexts has evoked a mixture of criticism and apologetics from me; see, e.g., Necessity in Normativity; Modality and Variation). Ricoeur also says that “by constructing the concept of the practical a priori after the model of that of the theoretical a priori, Kant shifted the investigation of practical reason into a region of knowledge that does not belong to it” (p. 199). I thoroughly agree with Ricoeur that there can be no science of the practical, but here I would also follow Brandom in noting that while the practical cannot be reduced to the theoretical, theoretical reason itself is ultimately subordinate to practical reason (taken in a more Hegelian than Kantian sense).

Ricoeur here follows an old-school reading of Hegel’s Geist as a sort of objective mind directly embodied in the State, and correctly points out how such a notion has great potential for abuse. He prefers the “hypothesis of Husserl, Max Weber, and Alfred Schutz” (p. 205) that would ground communities — including things like the State — in relations of intersubjectivity. (I would note that Brandom’s nuanced and multi-dimensional grounding of Geist and normativity in a vast ensemble of processes of mutual recognition over time provides a convincing, original “deep” reading of Hegel that meets Ricoeur’s criterion of grounding in intersubjectivity, while avoiding what seems to me the very crude and implausible notion of an objective mind that would somehow be capable of being definitively embodied in the State. Any such notion of definitive embodiment of objective mind also involves huge confusion between potentiality and actuality.)

“One must never tire of repeating that practical reason cannot set itself up as a theory of praxis. We must repeat along with Aristotle that there is knowledge only of things that are necessary and immutable…. [P]ractical reason recovers a critical function by losing its theoretical claim to knowledge” (p. 206; emphasis in original).

Finally, he wryly observes that “practical wisdom, in situations of alienation, can never be without a certain madness on the part of the sage, since the values that govern the social bond have themselves become insane” (p. 207). (See also Ricoeur on Justice.)

Philosophy of History?

Hegel’s Philosophy of History lectures are written in an accessible, semi-popular style and are not without interest, but it is a huge mistake to take them as representative of his core views. “Philosophies of history” had actually been a common genre in late 18th century Germany, as witnessed by the title of Herder’s 1774 book Yet Another Philosophy of History. Works by now-forgotten authors typically took the form of valorizing the present in terms of the past. The triumphalist character commonly associated with Hegel’s philosophy of history in particular was actually a norm of the genre. In conjunction with the common, highly inflationary misunderstanding of Hegel’s “absolute knowledge”, this makes it easy to completely misunderstand what Hegel was getting at, as I did myself for many years.

Though sympathetic to various aspects of Hegel’s thought, Ricoeur in volume 3 of Time and Narrative associates Hegel’s view with insistence on an “impossible total mediation” (p. 202). Quite properly, Ricoeur says what we really want instead is an “open-ended, incomplete, imperfect mediation” (p. 207). “We must renounce consolation to attain reconciliation” (p. 197; emphasis in original). “The realization of freedom cannot be taken as the plot behind every plot” (p. 206). There is no “plot behind every plot” in history. I could not agree more. But careful reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, Science of Logic, and other works actually refutes the very widespread idea that Hegel claimed to have achieved a total mediation. In fact, I would say it was Hegel who originally thematized mediation as inherently open-ended, incomplete, and imperfect.

Literary Narrative

Resuming the thread on Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, the beginning of volume 2 makes it clear he thinks the stakes in discussing fictional narrative — distinguished from historical narrative by not being oriented toward anything analogous to historical truth — extend well beyond the traditional concerns of literary criticism. (Of course, going beyond those traditional concerns is pretty much the norm for literary critics these days.) Let me say that I am no scholar of literature, though I used to write experimental “language on language” poetry, and have read a bit of literary theory mainly for its philosophical content.

Philosophically, he will defend the “precedence of our narrative understanding in the epistemological order” (vol. 2, p. 7). There will be a great “three-way debate” between lived experience, historical time, and fictional time. He will extensively take up the idea of the “world” projected by a text. There will be a sort of analogy between the place of a structuralist or semiotic analysis of a literary text and the work of explanation in history, but Ricoeur says the analysis will eventually show that literary narrative has different relations to time than historical narrative.

Thinking about literary narrative, he suggests, will turn out to be more helpful in shedding light on Augustine’s paradoxes of the experience of time. In the literary case, there will be a distinction between the time of the act of narration and the time of the things narrated.

The continuing relevance of a notion of plot in modern literature, he says, needs to be shown rather than assumed. Rather than extending and further abstracting the general principle of formal composition that Aristotle had begun to articulate, modern literary studies began with an odd combination of struggle against old conventions, concern for increased realism, and inappropriate borrowing from models of ancient genres. According to Ricoeur, this resulted in a mutilated, dogmatic, not very interesting notion of plot associated mainly with a linear sequence of events, that “could only be conceived as an easily readable form” (p. 9).

Modern novels, on the other hand, have greatly increased the importance of character, and explored the dynamic process of its growth. They may take alternate forms, such as streams of consciousness, diaries, or exchanges of letters. Action accordingly has to be understood in a broader and deeper way no longer limited to external behavior, encompassing things like growth of character and moments in a stream of consciousness. Once this is done, he says, a generalized notion of imitation of action will again apply.

But the early English novelists “shared with empiricist philosophers of language from Locke to Reid” (p. 11) an ideal of purely representational language stripped of metaphor and figurative constructs. “Implicit in this project is the reduction of mimesis to imitation, in the sense of making a copy, a sense totally foreign to Aristotle’s Poetics” (p. 12). I’m more inclined to think so-called literal language is just a limit case of metaphor. I would also note that this representationalist paradigm of transparency is the direct opposite of the “language on language” perspective. “Today it is said that only a novel without plot or characters or any discernible temporal organization is more genuinely faithful to experience” (p. 13). The kind of justification offered, he says, is the same as the one for naturalistic literature — reproduction of experience rather than synthesis. I’m sure someone must have done that, but appeals to experience are somewhat inimical to the structuralist “language on language” view.

Ricoeur wants to suggest that literary paradigms originate “at the level of the schematism of the narrative understanding rather than at the level of semiotic rationality” (p. 15). He will argue that a purely semiotic approach to narrative has the same weaknesses as the positivist “covering law” model in history. I’m a little confused by this, because earlier he more charitably compared the semiotic approach to historical explanation in general, which he had presented as legitimately different from narrative understanding.

He suggests that structural analysis at lower levels like phonology or lexical semantics does not lose nearly as much context of meaning as structural analysis of narrative, which aims to reduce away all temporal elements and replace them with logical relationships. He also says the identity of a style is transhistorical, not atemporal, and that styles are perennial rather than eternal.

He contests the assertion of Roland Barthes that there is an “identity” between language and literature, and that each sentence already has the essential features of a narrative. Behind what Ricoeur is objecting to, I think, may be the additional idea of a strictly compositional, bottom-up interpretation of meaning, which he alluded to earlier. In a formal context like that of structural analysis, compositionality is an extremely important property, but in a broader hermeneutics, I agree with Ricoeur that a bottom-up approach is basically a non-starter. My own past enthusiasm for structuralism had much more to do with its relational, difference-before-identity aspect. I’ve always had severe doubts about any bottom-up reduction when it comes to meaning.

On the other hand, while recognizing many valuable contributions of Husserl and his followers, I fundamentally disagree with what I take to be that tradition’s identification of “consciousness” with what I take Hegel to have sharply distinguished from consciousness as “self-consciousness”.

On my reading, this distinction is the radical “break” in Hegel’s Phenomenology. I have glossed “self-consciousness” as actually other-focused even though it does involve a unity of apperception, and as anything but a species of a genus “consciousness”. I think unity of apperception and Hegelian “self-consciousness” have to do with Aristotelian ethos and what we care about, as a discursive stance in relation to others. I do of course agree that there is consciousness, and that it has a kind of interiority of its own. I also agree that one of its features is something like Husserl’s “living present”, but I think consciousness and the living present belong to what Brandom calls our sentience rather than to what he calls our sapience, which I associate with unity of apperception and “self-consciousness”.

What attitude one takes on this question of the identity or distinctness of consciousness and self-consciousness matters greatly when it comes to something like the debate between structuralism and phenomenology in the tradition of Husserl. I care about rich concepts of reason and feeling, but “consciousness” not so much. I am not worried about the impact of structuralism on the living present, because I see them as pertaining to disjunct domains.

On the other hand, I think Ricoeur is right to be very doubtful whether narrative can be adequately understood without temporality, and right again to reject bottom-up determination of meaning. I am inclined to be sympathetic to his view that temporality cannot be reduced to logic.

I also think it makes a big difference whether one is considering a stereotyped form like the folk tales whose analysis by Vladimir Propp he discusses, or something as complex as a modern novel. Structural analysis may come much closer to yielding comprehensive insight in the one case, while falling much further short in the other. (Ricoeur is not satisfied even in the case of the folk tale.)

Ricoeur also discusses work on a higher level “logic of narrative” concerned with roles of characters, and the narrative grammar of Greimas. He says narrative has more to do with history than with logic. He makes the very valid point that the structuralist notion of the “diachronic” captures only a simple notion of succession. I agree that one should not look to structuralism for rich analyses of time itself, but that does not mean it cannot give us insight about things happening in time, which in turn does not mean it gives us the whole story either.

Next in this series: Narrative Time

Ricoeur on Psychoanalysis

The concluding book of Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy aims at a reconciliation of two contrasting approaches in hermeneutics — demystifying and kerygmatic — that would be not merely eclectic but genuinely dialectical. He suggests on the one hand that faith ought to be entirely compatible with a sharp critique of idols, and on the other that Freud never adequately considered how his late concept of Eros and its sublimations could be legitimately reconnected with notions of spiritual love.

He develops a bit further his earlier contrast between a “philosophy of consciousness” and a “philosophy of reflection”. A philosophy of consciousness grounds a false Cogito on the immediacy of consciousness. A philosophy of reflection on the other hand pays attention to the always mediated character of experience, and to subjectivity as something that is constituted as well as constitutive. It therefore decenters subjectivity. Ricoeur argues that Husserl as much as Freud considered subjectivity as something constituted.

At the same time, Ricoeur in this work still wants to speak of a true Cogito of reflection, and in this context wants to distinguish between immediate consciousness and the “living self-presence” to which Husserl appealed. Although Ricoeur does not say it, it seems to me that Husserl’s living self-presence is supposed to be precisely a kind of non-empirical (i.e., transcendental) immediate consciousness. I think on the contrary that the transcendental is all mediation, and hold what I take to be a Kantian position that feelings of living presence or self-presence belong on the side of introspective appearance that is ultimately empirical rather than transcendental.

Ricoeur notes that for Freud, it is more a question of “it speaks” rather than “I think”.

He thinks there is an ambiguity in Freud between primitive, sub-linguistic and transcendental, supra-linguistic concerns, so that symbolic meaning expressing poetic or spiritual truth is not clearly separated from something like word play. This goes back to his earlier concern with the phenomenology of religious symbols. I actually think that word play can serve as an indirect expression of poetic or spiritual truth, but then I also think spiritual truth is inherently “poetic”.

In spite of criticizing (the old stereotype of) Hegel for claiming a sort of omniscience, Ricoeur suggests that Hegel’s phenomenology, with its distinction between Consciousness and Spirit and its discussions of the relation between Spirit and desire, provides a “teleology” complementary and inverse to Freud’s “archeology” of subjectivity. For this to be a truly dialectical relation, he says, each must contain a moment approximating the other, and he thinks that in fact they do.

He also connects Freud’s work with Spinoza’s critique of consciousness and free will; Leibniz’s theories of unconscious perception; and Kant’s simultaneous assertion of a transcendental idealism and an empirical realism. Freud’s “topographies” are associated with a kind of realism in this Kantian sense.

For Ricoeur’s Freud, life and desire always have an unsurpassable character. Because of this, a relation to reality is always a task, not a possession. What ultimately distinguishes psychoanalysis, Ricoeur says, is not just the idea that we have motives of which we are ignorant, but Freud’s account of the resistance of an always somewhat narcissistic ego and the corresponding extended work of overcoming it. This relates directly to the idea of reality as a task. “We did not regard this realism as a relapse into naturalism, but as a dispossession of immediate certitude, a withdrawal from and humiliation of our narcissism” (p. 432). “It is one and the same enterprise to understand Freudianism as a discourse about the subject and to discover that the subject is never the subject one thinks it is” (p. 420).

“I consider the Freudian metapsychology an extraordinary discipline of reflection: like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but in the opposite direction, it achieves a decentering of the home of significations, a displacement of the birthplace of meaning. By this displacement, immediate consciousness finds itself dispossessed to the advantage of another agency of meaning — the transcendence of speech or the emergence of desire…. We must really lose hold of consciousness and its pretension of ruling over meaning, in order to save reflection” (p. 422). What Ricoeur called reflection and will, I give the more classical name of Reason.

Meditation on Death?

I’m preparing to write something about Ricoeur’s treatment of the Freudian “death instinct”, but first wanted to separately express some views of my own. I disapprove of attempts to make death into a philosophical theme. Our finitude has plenty of other more illuminating and ethically relevant aspects, and I think the living should focus on life. Spinoza’s “The philosopher thinks of nothing less than of death” seems right to me. In cherishing the memory of lost loved ones, it is the loved ones who are important.

I don’t like early Heidegger’s melodramatic talk about “being toward death”. I don’t even like Plato’s literary representation of what I would call Socrates’ excessive acceptance of his impending execution. Even though it is counterbalanced by more life-affirming passages in other places, the suggestion that the philosopher should welcome death goes too far.

I thoroughly approve of Brandom’s reinterpretation of the Hegelian myth of a “struggle to the death” between competing would-be Masters as a melodramatic extreme illustration of an underlying much more general concept of risk-taking. The importance of risk-taking is the real essence there and the message to carry forward, not struggle against others and not death. (Apart from this, Hegel’s Master serves as an extreme negative example of attitudes that exist but should be overcome.)

Ricoeur on Husserl’s Ideas II

In Ricoeur’s volume of essays on Husserl, I just discovered a piece on Ideas II. Apparently in this work, Husserl rather surprisingly introduced a notion of “spirit” related to the German notion of Geisteswissenschaft (i.e., social or human science). However, it still seems thinner than that of even a deflationary Hegel.

Ricoeur writes, “In reintroducing the dimension of the person and that of community Husserl completes the ego-psyche polarity with a new schema where spirit (Geist) is not the empirical counterpart of the pure subject of phenomenology but is rather a sort of cultural equivalent much more awkward to situate in the phenomenological structure” (Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, pp. 68-69). Further on, he adds that for Husserl, “Spirit ‘works’… in the world only so far as people understand and approve it” (p. 76). He concludes that Husserl’s “Geist is nothing other than the ego of phenomenology, but without the light of the phenomenological reduction” (p. 80).

Ricoeur on Recognition

Paul Ricoeur’s very last book The Course of Recognition (French ed. 2004) is a fascinating discussion of the history and variety of concepts of recognition in philosophy, from judgments of identification of things in general to Hegel’s ethical principle of mutual recognition. It is full of insightful remarks on the history of concepts of self, from Homer and Sophocles to Bergson and Husserl. I am myself especially interested in further progress that takes Hegel’s ethical principle as a starting point and is essentially unrelated to concerns of identification, but for its intended scope this is a fine study. Even recognition in the sense of identification turns out to be ramified in all sorts of interesting ways.

The introduction is devoted to a highly nuanced discussion of treatments of the word “recognition” in two large-scale French dictionaries that each included many literary citations, somewhat like the Oxford English Dictionary does. (Of course, as Ricoeur warned, lexicography does not directly translate into philosophy.) The 19th century Littré dictionary gave 23 distinct meanings for recognition, and attempted to show their interconnection in a “rule-based polysemy”. The 20th century Robert evinced a different theory of the interconnection of the different meanings. In both cases, a sort of lexicographical equivalent of the Thomistic doctrine of analogy seems to me to be at work, presenting the diverse meanings as unified after all, by means of a sort of ordered series.

The problem with such an emphasis on recovering unity through analogy is that it tends to reduce away the kind of non-univocity that Aristotle was so careful to point out. In the main body of the book, Ricoeur developed a similar ordered series from philosophical senses of recognition, attempting to connect the final ethical notion of mutual recognition back to purely cognitive or epistemic judgments of identity of things in general, using a discussion of what he calls self-recognition as a capable human being (via his notions of ipse identity and narrative identity of personal selves from Oneself as Another) as a sort of middle term to connect them. In the earlier book, narrative identity was itself supposed to be a sort of mean between the logical identity associated with sameness, on the one hand, and ethical notions of self-constancy and promise keeping that he developed there, on the other. (See also Solicitude.)

Although I think Ricoeur’s notions of self-constancy and promise-keeping are quite valuable and are indeed related to the ethical principle in mutual recognition, I would myself emphasize the difference between these concerns — which seem to pertain to the integrity of ethical beings — and concerns pertaining to the identification of individuals. One seems to address a kind of ethical substantiality associated with responsibility, whereas the other seems to address a kind of uniqueness. I don’t really see any mean between these, but rather an interweaving of strands that remain distinct. (But see Self, Infinity for a new insight on what Ricoeur was aiming at here.)

Nonetheless, the ramifications of the sense of “recognition” that starts from mere identification show how even a narrow concern with logical identity can be broadened in all sorts of unexpected ways. At the dictionary level, the ordered series progresses from recognition of sameness through various shadings of recognition of truth, then to various avowals and confessions, and finally to appreciation and gratitude.

The book’s main philosophical discussion moves from the technical role of an identity-related “synthesis of recognition” in Kant’s account of processes of synthesis, through the aforementioned discussion of notions of self, to an account of Hegelian mutual recognition as an alternative to Hobbes’ famous thesis of the state of nature as a war of all against all, and more positively in terms of Axel Honneth’s emphasis on an emergence of mutual recognition from an underlying “struggle” for recognition.

Ricoeur points out that even Descartes said judgments of identity are inseparable from judgments of difference. Augustine’s view of time as internal to the soul — in contrast to Aristotle, who associated time with a measure of externally perceptible change — is presented as a step toward modern forms of subjectivity, which Locke’s explicit association of personal identity with consciousness and continuity of memory is taken to successfully consummate, in spite of various paradoxes with which it is associated.

Historically this seems right, but to my surprise Ricoeur seems to have viewed it as progress toward a better understanding, whereas I see in early modernity an immense new confusion of subjectivity with selfhood that only began to be sorted out again with Kant and Hegel. “There is no doubt that we owe the decisive impulse in the direction of a what I propose calling hermeneutics of self to the Cartesian philosophy of the cogito and Locke’s theory of reflection” (p. 89; emphasis in original). I would agree as far as a decisive impulse in the direction of emphasis on self is concerned, but I think the confusion of subjectivity with selfhood has greatly impeded understanding of both. (See also Self, Subject.)

In this same context, Ricoeur speaks of Kant’s “effacement of ipseity in the treatment of moral autonomy” (p. 90). I would rather speak of his salutary separation of moral autonomy from notions of self. Moral autonomy is related to our integrity and substantiality as ethical beings — to what we really care about, specifically as made clear by how we show that care in our lives. Our ethical substance is actualized in the adverbial “how” of that care. Other biographical details that contribute to making us distinguishable from others are not really relevant to that.

I also think we love someone first of all in response to that “how” of their caring, and then because we love them for that, other details about them become dear to us.

Though broadly endorsing the ethical concept of mutual recognition, Ricoeur seems to have had a worry about its emphasis on reciprocity, related to his acceptance of Lévinas’ idea of an asymmetrical priority of the Other. I don’t understand this. Mutual recognition applies to relations between rational animals; it does not apply to the kind of relation to God that Lévinas often had in mind. It may well be appropriate to say that each participant should in various ways put consideration of the other before self, but in turn, the other should also do the same. An asymmetry in each direction is perfectly compatible with a symmetry between the directions.

Ricoeur did not live to see Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust, where the ethical concept of mutual recognition finally becomes a guiding criterion for judgment in general, and for the grounding of objectivity in general. I think he would have been highly intrigued by this landmark development. (See also Ricoeurian Ethics.)