Pure Thinking?

Another recent article by Adrian Johnston continues his polemic against Robert Pippin — as well as Brandom — on the reading of Hegel, addressing Pippin’s 2019 book on Hegel’s Logic and his review of Slovoj Žižek’s book on Hegel, Less than Nothing. Among other things, Johnston takes aim at Pippin’s talk about “pure thinking”, claiming that any such emphasis must necessarily reflect a subjective idealism, like that which Johnston attributes to Kant and Fichte.

Johnston takes Pippin and Brandom’s appeals to unity of apperception in a Hegelian context as prima facie evidence of subjective idealism. This does not follow at all. He objects to Pippin’s emphasis on intelligibility as opposed to sheer “being”. Here I have to agree with Pippin — real philosophers have always been more concerned with intelligibility, and there is nothing subjective about that, either. Intelligibility is the basis of objectivity.

I don’t think Kant’s concern with subjectivity was at all subjectivist. Even Fichte, despite his tendency to ontologize a transcendental Subject, was no garden-variety subjectivist. Johnston rightly points out that Fichte talked about an “I” that “cannot be gone behind”, and that Hegel regarded this as a very one-sided point of view. He is right that the young Hegel briefly aligned himself with Schelling against Fichte. But as much as I find Fichte’s subject-centeredness antithetical, and in spite of a few interesting bits in Schelling, Schelling’s metaphysics of a self-dividing Absolute seems to me but a shallow imitation of neoplatonism, much less worthy of philosophical attention than either the original neoplatonists or Fichte’s objectionably subject-centered point of view. Žižek and Johnston, however, want to use a valorized Schelling to help prop up a metaphysical Hegel.

Johnston claims that Pippin and Brandom end up with a dualism of reasons and causes, and argues that their defense of a kind of modified naturalism is not strong enough to prevent a lapse into subjective idealism. For Johnston, it seems the only way to avoid this would be a direct causal derivation of the “space of reasons” from something physical. I occasionally worry myself that some of Pippin and Brandom’s remarks on naturalism dwell too much on a very narrow if influential kind of naturalism that wants to reduce everything to physical causes. I also want to go a bit further than they do in affirming a nonreductive naturalism. Johnston says he wants to be nonreductive, but many of his remarks (e.g., about reasons vs. causes) seem reductive to me.

I see causes in the modern narrow sense as just one kind of reasons why (see Free Will and Determinism; Aristotelian C auses; Why by Normative Pragmatics). Through the diffuse influence of early modern mechanism, modern people have become conditioned to thinking of causation in what are really just metaphors of some kind of impulse. But in modern physics, serious discussions of causality have much more to do with mathematical law. Mathematical law is a specific kind of reason. So to me, the requirement to explain reasons in terms of causes has things somewhat backwards.

Ultimately, Johnston and Žižek are interested in the emancipatory potential of a kind of materialism broad enough to take in Hegel along with neuroscience or quantum mechanics. At this very generic level I have no issue, but it seems to me that the kind of examination of material conditions that has the most emancipatory potential is directed at things historical, social, and cultural, rather than physiological or physical. Also, it is broadly hermeneutic rather than merely concerned with facts. Overall, Žižek’s prodigous output reflects this, but Johnston’s texts seem curiously removed from such considerations.

Johnston objects that Pippin narrows Hegel’s focus to ethics and epistemology. I’m actually content with just ethics, as it seems to me that already indirectly includes everything else (see Practical Reason). (See also Johnston’s Pippin; Weak Nature Alone.)

Logic as Semantics

I think of logic in general as mainly concerned with the perspicuous rendering of distinctions for use in reasoning, rather than with the arbitration of truth based on some other presumed truth as a starting point.

An emphasis on this expressive or semantic role was, I think, what led Aristotle to insist that what modern people call logic should be viewed as a tool (organon) and not a “science”.

The great scholar of Latin medieval logic L. M. De Rijk, in his major study Aristotle: Semantics and Ontology (2002), recommended replacing references to Aristotle’s own “logic” with references to semantics, or investigation of meaning.

Hegel contended that traditional metaphysics should be replaced by a kind of “logic” that addresses meaningful content.

Brandom has given us an unprecedentedly thorough and clear account of the conditions that make meaningful content possible in the first place.

On the formal side, type theory and category theory provide a new, unified view of logic, mathematics, and formal languages that fits very well with this “meaning before truth” perspective.

Experience

Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Brandom all work with thick, nonprimitive, structured notions of human experience that do not involve treating consciousness as a transparent medium in which ready-made contents are immediately presented. Aristotle emphasized experience as a product of accumulation over time, as when we say someone is “experienced”. Kant emphasized that all experience is a product of preconscious synthesis that involves complex applications of concepts. Hegel developed a radical critique of the supposed positive role of immediacy. Whereas many previous readings tended to water down the impact of Kant and Hegel by explicitly or implicitly assimilating their work to empiricist or existential-phenomenological views that treat experience as something primitive, Brandom has emphasized how Kant and Hegel anticipated Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the “Myth of the Given”, and developed an innovative “negative” account of the role of immediacy within experience (see Error; Negativity in Experience.)

The bottom line of all of this is that experience cannot be used as an unproblematic beginning point, as if all the difficult issues were separate from it, out there in the world somewhere. There is no such separation; we find ourselves only in and through a process of understanding life and the world. It is the forms brought to light through this process that matter.

Experience can still be a beginning point of sorts, but in the Aristotelian pragmatic sense that gives no privilege to beginnings. (See also Empirical-Transcendental Doublet.)

Reading “Reading Brandom”

I’ve commented on the introduction to Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust, and on the contributions by Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard. Here I will briefly attend to the remainder of the book.

A moderately phrased essay by Elena Ficara wants to recover a more conventional notion of propositional truth in Hegel, while adhering to the view that real “contradictions” literally violate the law of noncontradiction. John McDowell, a notorious opponent of coherentism, predictably takes issue with Brandom’s coherentist reading of the Kantian unity of apperception. He also claims Hegel is not engaged in the critique of representationalism that Brandom imputes to him, and argues for a forward-moving necessity in the emergence of one shape of consciousness from another. A thoughtful and well-balanced piece by Paul Redding unfortunately wants to recover a place for a more conventional positive role for immediate experience. Georg Bertram argues for the importance of conflict, and says that Brandom overstresses reconciliation. In a nuanced piece on Brandom’s take on realism and idealism in Hegel, Dean Moyar argues that thinking of practical judgment in terms of values rather than deontology could strengthen Brandom’s argument. I have some sympathy for this.

J.M. Bernstein adheres to an ethically “positivist” reading of Making It Explicit, and claims that the notion of forgiveness in Spirit of Trust invalidates Brandom’s previous stance. Italo Tesla objects to some of the detail of Brandom’s treatment of alienation, and rejects Brandom’s subsumption of all human activity under ethical practice. Editor Gilles Bouché claims Brandom “retreats” to a “pure philosophy of language” ill-suited for ethical purposes. Franz Knappik claims Brandomian trust is incompatible with critical thought, and thus has bad political consequences. Charles Taylor globally rejects Brandom’s reading of Hegel in favor of a more conventional view of a self-unfolding teleology, but says Brandom’s ethics contain a message much needed in contemporary politics.

Pinkard on Spirit of Trust

Terry Pinkard’s contribution to the recent, rather negatively skewed collection Reading Brandom offers a judicious and measured critique of Brandom’s reading of Hegel in A Spirit of Trust. I previously commented on Pinkard’s separate book review, which was a bit more sharply worded, and covers some of the same points in more detail. I’ll focus here on a couple of further matters.

Pinkard nicely develops the contrast between Fichtean and Hegelian accounts of mutual recognition. For Fichte, a denial of the need for mutual recognition would simply be a philosophical error. Hegel went further, in maintaining that the slave society that institutionalized such a denial was ultimately unable to make sense of itself by its own criteria.

Somewhat my surprise, Pinkard objects to what he takes to be Brandom’s reading of the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology in terms of Kantian or Fichtean transcendental philosophy. He takes this to mean that Hegel’s apparent historical references must on Brandom’s reading be taken to have only an allegorical significance. It is true that the transcendental has no historical dimension in Kant or Fichte. But according to Brandom, “Hegel brings the normative down to earth by explaining discursive norms as the products of social practices…. the diachronic historical dimension of recognitive communities is at the center of Hegel’s story” (Spirit of Trust, pp. 12, 14). Brandom’s Hegel’s transcendental is linguistic, social, and historical.

Pinkard correctly points out that historical development does not follow the principles of what Brandom calls a forgiving Hegelian genealogy, which Brandom likes to explain by analogy with the retrospective evaluations of case law in jurisprudence. I don’t think Brandom meant this as an account of the objective sequence of historical development, but rather as a guiding ideal for the retrospective interpretations we use in understanding cumulative results embodied in the present.

“Secondary” Literature

One of my favorite Hegelian aphorisms is that philosophy is inseparable from the history of philosophy. Presentations ordered in the form of “my system of the world” or “the Truth according to me” rather quickly become tedious, and contribute to the misapprehension that there is no possibility of a cumulative development. Far better is a reflexive turn that interrogates the best that has been said before.

Socrates — at least, the Socrates of Plato’s “Socratic” dialogues — inaugurated a related approach, treating serious pursuit of questions as more valuable than supposed answers. Aristotle especially deserves credit for initially showing how such questioning can lead to a truly cumulative development, with many tentative answers along the way. Many later figures approached philosophy primarily as a sort of dialogue with Aristotle or Plato, or meditation or commentary on their works. In the later European middle ages, very extensive catalogs of nuanced alternative views, interpretations, and arguments were recorded by individual authors. This tradition rather suddenly died in the 17th century. In the midst of many scientific and technical advances, philosophy largely regressed from hermeneutic engagement to competing “systems of the world” that mostly talked past each other.

Hegel himself largely initiated serious interest in the history of philosophy. His historical view enabled him to recover the possibility of a cumulative development. Nowadays, philosophers again spend much of their time writing about other philosophers. Very important philosophical work takes place in what is nominally “secondary” literature, and “primary” works are full of secondary references. Without extensive secondary literature, the works of great later philosophers like Kant and Hegel would remain largely closed books. High-quality secondary literature on historical philosophers has especially flourished since the later 20th century, so it is really quite a recent development.

After 20 years of engagement, I have come to include Brandom on the short list of the very greatest philosophers that I can count on one hand. He is the first analytic philosopher to rise nearly so high in my estimation. His Woodbridge lectures revived my interest in Hegel, and overcame my previous deep reservations about Kant. Now, for the first time, in Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust we have a true Great Book by a true great philosopher that is nominally a “secondary” work about another philosopher. Needless to say, it is also a work of great originality. I still look to others for closer textual engagement and a more historical view, but Brandom’s Hegel requires less in the way of apologetics than I ever would have expected from reading Hegel himself.

Many Hegels?

It is common etiquette among contemporary philosophers to preface sharp criticism with kind remarks. I try to do this myself — to find something positive I can say with full sincerity. I hope that my own practice never gives anyone the kind of feeling of insincerity I sometimes get when the subsequent criticism seems to actually undermine the previous praise, rather than rounding it out.

Gilles Bouché’s introduction to Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust moves from weak praise to a valid elementary point about the difficulties of evaluating interpretations of Hegel, but his rhetoric quickly reveals an undercurrent of global hostility that makes me doubt the appearance of an unprejudiced beginning. For some unspecified reason, Brandom is singled out as “bringing his very own criteria to the bench”, as if every serious interpreter did not do just that. The question of the hermeneutic value of Brandom’s work is then shelved.

Bouché correctly notes that A Spirit of Trust is also a major presentation of Brandom’s own philosophy. He then claims that Brandom’s other major work Making It Explicit only discussed assertions and commitments “against the background of a firmament of fixed concepts”. I am aware of no textual evidence that Brandom ever presupposed such a background of fixed concepts — to me, this seems antithetical to his whole approach, which centers on a fine-grained though abstract analysis of open-ended processes of interpretation and evaluation, in contexts framed by dialogue and social relations.

Like some others, Bouché affects surprise that Brandom would “want to present us with an ethics at all”, even though questions related to normativity were already central to Making It Explicit. He claims this can only be understood in terms of a “constitutive limitation” of Brandom’s philosophy. His brief expansion of this presents Brandom’s sharp distinction of human “sapience” from organic “sentience” in extremely unsympathetic light without explaining it at all, and tries to support this by artificially tying it to a claim that Making It Explicit had nothing to offer to a wider circle of readers who expect philosophy to help them with cultural, existential, and political issues.

Twenty years ago, I struggled with the sapience/sentience distinction myself. Now I would emphasize that it is just a distinction between different concerns, one of which Brandom chooses to focus on. (In articles under Subjectivity in the menu, I have elaborated somewhat on both sides of this distinction.) It is true that Making It Explicit is a highly technical work, clearly addressed to professional analytic philosophers, rather than to that wider circle of readers. Analytic philosophy in general is technical, and has little to say directly to that wider circle. But Making It Explicit is an epic reorientation of analytic philosophy, in a direction that ultimately reconnects it with concerns that I trace back to Plato and Aristotle, who did address that wider circle.

Bouché correctly points out that for Brandom, the practices described in Making It Explicit already imply a commitment to realize the kind of community based on mutual recognition and trust that is advocated in A Spirit of Trust. He goes a little too far in identifying Brandom’s philosophy as “exactly what he ascribes to Hegel”, and then characterizes the essays he is introducing as “defend[ing] Hegel” against Brandom’s “supposedly magnanimous” reading.

Brandom makes it very clear that A Spirit of Trust is a selective and highly synthetic reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, and that he does not intend it to exclude other approaches, even though he does contradict many particular old-school claims about Hegel. I take him at his word on this, and myself find complementary value in, for example, H. R. Harris’ monumental Hegel’s Ladder, which is a line-by-line literal commentary on the Phenomenology that does an amazing job of clarifying the fine grain of Hegel’s argument. Harris’ approach could hardly be more different from Brandom’s very high-level reconstruction, but I find both to be invaluable. I have also been impressed by, e.g., Michael John Petry’s exegesis of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, in spite of the fact that Petry is quite disparaging of the Phenomenology. Despite their many differences, Brandom, Harris, and Petry all contribute to a view of a basically very reasonable Hegel, far from from the old stereotype.

In my own modest efforts here, connections with Aristotle — about whom Brandom says nothing at all — are very important. Aristotle helps me understand Hegel and Brandom, and Hegel and Brandom help me understand Aristotle. I am very interested in what I call “historiographical” questions, which directly address the kind of more concrete cultural concerns that Bouché misses in Brandom. I am also very interested in broader questions about the nature of subjectivity, and about ground-level ethics as well as meta-ethics. I don’t think it makes me any less Brandomian to have additional interests that Brandom does not pursue himself. Nor would I dream of faulting Brandom for not devoting his time to my other interests. In one lifetime, it is not possible to do everything. To accomplish something significant, one must have focus.

I believe one of the marks of a truly great philosopher is to be the subject of many different readings that are both interesting and have some plausibility. Some will be better than others and it is appropriate to critically demarcate this, but there will be something to gain from many of them. (See also Why Brandom’s Hegel.)

Negativity in Experience

A first collection of critical responses to Brandom’s landmark work on Hegel has recently appeared (Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust, Routledge 2020). Leading Hegel scholar Robert Pippin’s contribution takes issue with Brandom’s methodology of “semantic descent”, and argues that Brandom’s account of negation in Hegel is incomplete.

While Kant and Hegel both focused most of their explicit philosophical attention on very high-level concepts that help explain the meaning of other concepts, I think they nonetheless intended their thought to have practical relevance to life. (Pippin himself wrote a book I cannot recommend too highly, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy.) Brandom goes a step further than Kant and Hegel did, and explicitly claims that the same kinds of considerations they found relevant to the interpretation of what he calls expressive metaconcepts are always already involved in kinds of questions that a philosophically inclined person can see as implicitly arising in ordinary life. I find this thesis of the rich philosophical import of interpretations in ordinary life very appealing, and take it as expansive rather than reductive in intent.

Pippin quotes Brandom to this effect, but somehow still seems to think there is a reduction involved in Brandom’s semantic descent. In a related move, Pippin first commends Brandom’s analysis of Hegelian negation in terms of material inference and modality, but then goes on to argue that this still only addresses the concerns of the first of three parts of Hegel’s Logic — what Hegel called a logic of being, as distinguished from a logic of essence or a logic of the concept.

Very schematically, for Hegel, a logic of being addresses facts about presumed existing things, in this way resembling the approach of standard contemporary formal logic. This turns out to presuppose a logic of essence, which is concerned with higher-level judgments about the natures or ways of being of things, like the inquiries of Plato and Aristotle. This in turn implicitly presupposes a logic of the concept, which leads from something like Kantian synthesis to Hegel’s so-called “Absolute” as a sort of ultimate horizon, under which the context-dependence of the most objectively valid particular determinations is to eventually become explicit.

I think that Brandom’s modal realism already involves what Hegel would call a logic of essence, and that Brandom’s notions of forgiveness, magnanimity, and truth-as-process operate at the level of what Hegel would call a logic of the concept.

Part of the significance of modal realism is as a grounding for concepts of natural law employed by modern science, which do still belong to what Hegel would call a logic of being, as Pippin says. But for Brandom, modal realism also plays the even more important role of grounding Kantian moral necessity. Brandom does not use the term “essence” in his semantics, but I would say that judgments of Kantian moral necessity are concerned with essence rather than mere fact. While it is not quite the same thing, I also think that in a Hegelian context, they belong on the level of a logic of essence.

Whereas I have worried a little about passages in Brandom that exclusively associate truth with truth-as-process — which seems to me not to give enough weight to the positive value Hegel recognized in Understanding, alongside his famous criticism of its limitations — Pippin has an opposite worry, that Brandom ends up reducing Hegelian Reason to Understanding.

Pippin seems to construe what Brandom refers to as “ground-level empirical concepts” in an overly narrow way. Pippin glosses these as “cases of, largely, matters of fact known empirically”, and then refers to “empirical discovery” as the “engine generating incompatible commitments”. While he quotes Brandom’s reference to “ground-level empirical and practical concepts” [emphasis added], he ignores the “practical” part of Brandom’s formula, which presumably refers to concepts used in concrete ethical judgments. It is true that Brandom uses “red” as his canonical example of a ground-level empirical concept, but I think this choice is only meant to provide opportunities to point out the already inferential character of the use of such an apparently simple perceptual term, rather than in any way to undo his explicit inclusion of ground-level practical concepts.

Surprisingly, Pippin also seems to blur together talk about Kantian empirical concepts; talk about Kantian empirical intuition, to which Brandom attributes a key “negative” role providing occasions for recognition of error; and talk about matters of empirical fact. This results in what I think is an unfair characterization of Brandom’s interpretation as reducing Hegelian good negativity to matters of empirical discovery, external to Reason.

To say, as Brandom effectively does, that the main role of the element of immediacy or Kantian intuition in experience is “negative” rather than “positive”, while also in a different context saying that ground-level empirical and practical concepts always already involve the kinds of complexity and nuance associated with expressive metaconcepts, does not imply that Brandom’s strategy of semantic descent reduces Hegelian negativity to anything empirical. I strongly believe that for Brandom, critical thought and dialogue provide additional sources for the good kind of “negativity” of Reason that Hegel thematized in contrast to the “positivity” of things merely taken as given.

Pippin wants to emphasize that Hegelian negativity is an internal feature of Hegelian Reason, not something that comes to it only from an external empirical source. So far, I agree, and I think Brandom would as well. But then, to my surprise, Pippin seems to take up an old-school, very literal reading of Hegel’s metonymies of logical “motion” and an associated “life” of the negative. To me, the better reading is to take these rather obvious metonymies as metonymies. Logic in itself does not move, and negativity in itself is not a form of life. It is we who move and are alive. (Who we are is another complicated story; see under Subjectivity in the menu.)

Auspicious Grafts

Ideas of different philosophers — or interpretations of them — cannot just be arbitrarily combined, but they may turn out to be compatible if there is some common basis, or if they have a different scope of application. My semantic Aristotle has a substantial common basis with Brandom’s Kant and Hegel, which is not too surprising, since my reading of Aristotle has among other things benefited from thinking about Brandom’s work, and at a deeper historical level, independent of Brandom, there is a common basis in guiding notions of reason and rational ethics.

I’ve recently commented on connections between Aristotelian and Hegelian dialectic, and previously on Aristotle’s partial anticipation (in his discussion of friendship) of Hegel’s key notion of mutual recognition. It also seems to me that in a very broad way, something like the idea of Kantian synthesis was implicit in Aristotle, so a fuller account can be treated as a welcome addition. Related to this, Kant’s notion of unity of apperception — particularly with Brandom’s way of reading it as an ethical goal — sounds very good from an Aristotelian point of view concerned with ends. (See also Aristotle and Kant; Hegelian Genealogy; Retrospective Interpretation.)

Contradiction vs Polarity

The simple term “day” does not contradict the simple term “night”, although they may be conventionally treated as polar opposites. If we agree to treat them that way, then the proposition “It is day” contradicts the proposition “It is night”.

Hegel developed idiosyncratic shorthand ways of talking that may have the misleading appearance of suggesting that he ignored this distinction. In popular references to Hegelian dialectic, it is very common to hear about “contradictions” between so-called opposites. This can lead to massive misunderstanding of what Hegel was really trying to say, especially if one does not realize how concerned he was to deconstruct so-called polarities.

Polarities involve pairs of terms related by classical negation. A is the opposite of B if A = not-B, where “not” satisfies not-not-X = X. In fact, Hegel routinely criticized so-called Understanding for taking such polarities at face value.

In another piece of idiosyncratic shorthand, he talked about a “unity of opposites”. This refers to a sort of conceptual interdependence, not identity in the strict sense.

A single term may be taken as shorthand for many judgments characterizing a thing. Then “contradiction” between two terms actually refers to some contradiction between implications of the associated judgments.

Platonic dialectic in its most canonical form considered in turn the implications of pairs of contradictory propositions, in order to canvas all possibilities. The important part was really the examination of implications. Hegel, too, was far more interested in analyzing extended implications of things than in some dance of polarities.

Hegel’s dialectic — like Aristotle’s — is fundamentally about improving the subtlety of our distinctions, and thus the quality of our reasoning. If we begin with a polar opposition, the intent is to supersede it. As I previously noted, the standard method for superseding a polar opposition for Hegel is to move toward the concrete — i.e., to replace the abstract, “infinite”, classical negation of polar opposition with some suitable finite difference or specific material incompatibility or “determinate negation”, as he liked to call it. (See also Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic; Three Logical Moments.)