Tag: Hegel

Error

Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel highlight the centrality of the experience of error in any learning process. In section VI of the Conclusion to Spirit of Trust, he says this is “because the rational, conceptual character of the world and its stubborn recalcitrance to mastery and agency are equally fundamental, primordial features of the way things are”. This simple double-edged insight, I would argue, has been approached by many, possibly as far back as Plato. I have wanted to affirm both theses since childhood, without ever being quite satisfied with the level of inter-articulation achieved. Most authors are better in their treatment of one side of this than the other. I think Brandom has shed unprecedented light on how the bases of these contrasting insights are not only compossible, but actually interdependent.

Mastery as a model of rationality turns out to be a non-starter. Mastery turns out to be an anti-model of rationality, not the thing that putatively shows where rationality goes wrong. The pragmatic workings of rationality through the experience of error — analyzed by Brandom in fine detail — are in fact radically opposed to Mastery. Not only beliefs but the understood meanings of determinate empirical concepts have an intrinsic instability that cannot be reduced away. Rationality has to do in large part with a responsiveness to this instability — how we recognize our own conceptual errors and respond to them.

Many have written eloquently but ultimately onesidedly about the rationality of the world OR the failure and badness of Mastery or some analogue of it, without adequately developing the deep connection between these two. Brandom has performed a world-historic service to humanity in showing a way beyond this impasse.

Brandom says that for Hegel, there is and could be no set of determinate empirical concepts that when correctly applied would not eventually generate incompatible commitments in some new situation. Apparent brute immediacy gives rise to perceptual commitments that cannot be integrated into our previous best schema.

This is how immediacy has an irreducible role in experience — not as some foundational guarantee of mastery, but quite the opposite, as a sort of surplus ensuring the inevitability of eventual error from the most impeccable procedure, and hence of a need to perennially revise our commitments and possibly our concepts. As the disparity between subjective and objective forms of conceptual content, it is a principle of instability providing a normative demand for change. As Hegel puts it, the evanescent itself must be regarded as essential. This is the way Hegel recovers a role for something like Kantian sensibility or intuition as a complement to the conceptual.

As Brandom says, this requires reconceptualizing both truth and determinateness. Truth can no longer be simply thought of as a prospective goal (as if it were determined beforehand, entirely independent of our process of seeking it), because any fully determinate prospective goal will eventually be invalidated. One of Hegel’s great original thoughts is that genuine, deeper truth will not stay still, as it were. The principal locus of truth shifts to a truth-process.

Alienation, Second Nature

In chapter 14 of Spirit of Trust, Brandom points out a distinction developed by Hegel in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology between “actual” and “pure” consciousness. These turn out to correspond closely to practical and theoretical culture, respectively. Here it is important to note that “consciousness” is therefore a very different thing from the “consciousness” of the Consciousness chapter, where we began with a putatively immediate awareness and discovered that even then, every apparent immediacy eventually revealed itself as mediated.

Acculturation, and therefore the “consciousness” of the later chapter basically is a form of mediation. We are no longer making any pretense of beginning with the putatively immediate. Culture is very thick, and a long journey. More superficially, it includes all our attitudes.

In chapter 13, Brandom had quoted Hegel saying it is through culture that the individual acquires actuality. The “individual” here is not the atomistic psychological individual beloved of the Enlightenment, externally confronting objects and others, but a participant in Geist with some much more interesting topology. True individuality for Hegel is not given but emergent. Its borders are much wider, and not topologically closed. Atomic psychological individuals are a hallucination of the modern illness Hegel called Mastery. (Hegel explicitly says the pure “I”, by contrast — conceived after Kant as having no content of its own, but as a mere index of the unity of a transcendental unity of apperception — depends on language for its existence. Brandom reminds us that language is the medium of recognition, the sea in which normative fish swim; and that things said, in being public, acquire a significance that runs beyond what the speaker intended. The purely linguistic “I” becomes the focus of commitment and responsibility, which depend on linguistic articulation.)

In the same passage Hegel also speaks of Spirit as alienation from our natural being. Reading those words I sort of cringe, but in fact Hegel is not talking about anything like Gnostic or Plotinian alienation. The word has that heritage, but Hegel uses it in the same breath with actualization. This alienation is supposed to be a good thing. It is de-immediatization, which is just the other side of the coin of mediation. Hegel is here using an originally negatively connotated Gnostic and Plotinian word for what is for him a positively connotated Aristotelian concept of actualization, which Brandom associates with expression and making explicit. Mediation is in this passage allegorized by Hegel as, in effect, becoming strange (alien) to our putative atomistic psychological selves.

Spirit as alienation should not be read as any repudiation of nature. As Terry Pinkard points out in Hegel’s Naturalism, Hegel is in fact a naturalist, but of the expansive, Aristotelian sort, explicitly antireductionist. The difference with 2oth century naturalisms is that it allows for the emergence of increasingly higher forms of Geist and Hegelian “freedom” over a natural basis. In Aristotelian terms, 20th century naturalism only addresses “first” nature, the more primitive one. Aristotelian and Hegelian naturalism also recognize second nature that includes culture. Even though in other contexts there will still be talk of overcoming alienation, at least one meaning of “alienation” is just the move to second nature.

Independence, Freedom

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

Purpose, Contingency

In chapter 11 of Spirit of Trust, Brandom begins to talk about the interweaving of purpose and contingency. I may repeatedly revise a plan of action to realize the same intention. I may even redefine my intention along the way.

Only retrospectively, after this incorporation of contingency, can the intention be viewed as fully determinate. I look back and discover what I have turned out to have actually intended all along.

As Pippin and Pinkard have noted, this kind of Hegelian thought is also very Aristotelian. For Aristotle, it is only in this way — retrospectively — that we can make judgments about someone’s “happiness” or success in living a good life. Aristotle’s biological works are full of concrete examples of the worked out interweaving of purpose and contingency, but there are few other precedents for this kind of thinking.

Historically, thinking about purpose in the world was usually remapped to very un-Aristotelian notions of particular providence, and as a result considerations of contingency were suppressed. Explicit thinking about human purposes has usually occurred in unrealistically voluntaristic contexts, again resulting in the suppression of considerations of contingency. Early modern mechanism banished purpose to a supernatural realm, and attempted to reduce contingency away. Recovering this Aristotelian insight of the interweaving of contingency and purpose in a modern context was one of Hegel’s great achievements, and recovering that Hegelian insight is another great achievement.

Stoicism, Skepticism

Brandom makes interesting connections between Hegel’s rather idiosyncratic discussion of Stoicism and Skepticism in the Phenomenology and the preceding discussion of Mastery. Stoicism and Skepticism for Hegel each in a different way reflect aspects of Mastery’s attitude that wants to claim total independence.

Hegel’s criticism of Stoicism in this context is rather different from my previously expressed issues with its foundationalism, claims of a completed system, and what the ancients called its dogmatism. My remarks probably apply more to the system of Zeno and Chrysippus, whereas Hegel’s apply more to the narrower ethical concerns of someone like Epictetus.

Zeno and Chrysippus are known only from references in other authors; none of their original works survive. Surviving references to early Stoic teaching often tend to be somewhat anonymous and generic. The details of the system are quite fascinating and worthy of study in their own right (see the collected fragments in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers; also Sambursky, Stoic Physics; Mates, Stoic Logic; and Nussbaum, Therapies of Desire).

Ancient Skepticism is also quite worthy of study in its own right. In addition to fragments, a number of works by the late author Sextus Empiricus survive. Ancient skeptics were mainly skeptical about theoretical developments. (The more extreme skepticism many modern authors have worried about in the third person seems to be a post-Cartesian development.)

Brandom says Hegel’s Stoics and Skeptics both refuse the experience of error that is crucial to the elicitation of conceptual content. On his reading, Hegel’s Stoic in, say, refusing to recognize physical pain, is both just being stubborn and refusing to address what turn out to be incompatible commitments, effectively denying the reality of the object in order to maintain the independence of consciousness at all cost. The Skeptic is just refusing to make any commitments at all, which is another attempt to maintain the independence of consciousness at all cost. Hegel’s point is that this attitude of wanting to maintain the total independence of consciousness from anything other is unsustainable.

Desire of the Master

Serious readers of Hegel have long known that he presents the Servant who learns about the world through work in far more positive terms than the Master. Mastery is a false freedom that is actually an obstacle to true freedom.

The Master effectively claims total independence, or authority without responsibility. Brandom renders Hegel’s critique of “the ills of Mastery”, “all these dimensions of defectiveness”, “the subordination-obedience model of normativity allegorized as Mastery” in wonderfully sharp terms. At bottom, “Pure independence is a Bad Idea” (underscore in original). (I would extend this diagnosis to voluntarisms theological, psychological, legal, political, and historical, as well as to claims of sovereign power. I say no power can even possibly be normatively sovereign or unconditional.)

Brandom characterizes Mastery by a second-order desire to have all its desires immediately satisfied (directly constitutive of reality), which ends up leading to a desire for a sort of imperial sovereignty that is inherently in conflict with anyone else having the same desire. Mastery wants its way with no other consideration and is unable to share power, like Plato’s tyrant. (To me at least, this seems a very undesirable sort of desire. All the desirable desires seem to me be sharable. But unfortunately, on a social scale we are still deeply afflicted by the Master’s desire.)

Mastery is thus also the totalizing impulse par excellence. Hegel’s very strong rejection of it is a fortiori a very strong rejection of the desire for totalization that has often been attributed to him, as far back as Kierkegaard. This is a veritable revolution in the interpretation of Hegel’s most fundamental intent, which also seems to be strongly supported by Terry Pinkard’s biography.

Mastery for Brandom is unequivocally an evolutionary dead end, not something to be rationalized and excused as somehow historically progressive. Only the Servant moves forward at all. This is huge. Our troubled potentially rational ape-kind rather desperately needs a bold clarity of this sort. Not only is Mastery not the answer, there is no convoluted path that makes it a justifiable means to an answer. Of course the Trumps of the world will not be enlightened by this, but we can be. (Marx may have been right that the leisure of a few at the expense of the many was a temporary historical economic prerequisite for the emergence of higher culture, but that is an argument in a material register, not a normative one.)

This is helping me with my difficulty over Brandom’s theses about modernity and an ethical importance of the Enlightenment. His usual wordings make me think of what I consider to be highly questionable Cartesian and British empiricist epistemology, then wonder what about this has to do with any new ethical insight. But there was also an important strand of rejection of Mastery in the Enlightenment, especially in France. I think more of the group around the Encyclopedia as documented by Jonathan Israel’s recent trilogy, whereas Brandom through Kant seems to be thinking more of Rousseau’s ideas about equality, and of the general idea of a social contract as partly anticipating Hegelian mutual recognition. (See also Ego; Freedom Without Sovereignty.)

Difference

Difference is not a univocal concept. X and Y may be orthogonally different like “day” and “raining”, or they may be relationally different like “black” and “white”. Things of whatever sort that are relationally different from each other are materially incompatible; things that are orthogonally different from each other are not materially incompatible.

Aristotle and Hegel both emphasize the importance of what I just called relational difference as the principal source of meaning and intelligibilty. Information theory, arithmetical subtraction, and the Euclidean logos or ratio between two magnitudes are all purely concerned with relational as opposed to orthogonal difference.

I’d like to point out that Saussurean phonological difference — say, the distinction between a “b” sound and a “p” sound — is also a relational difference, not an orthogonal one. Interpreting the sound as “b” is materially incompatible with interpreting the sound as “p”. (Brandom’s reference to Saussure as pre-Kantian and pre-Fregean on the ground that the latter worked with subsentential units of analysis in what was actually phonology is an unfortunate mistake.)

The famous 20th century “structuralism”, for which Saussurean difference was widely considered to have been a launching point, did not seem to be explicitly much concerned with inference, but it was very much concerned with the relational kind of difference, and in this way should be considered a potential ally of inferentialism rather than an opponent. Popular accounts do not much mention the role of 20th century French epistemological rationalism in the structuralist ferment, but I think it was significant, and that this could support additional connections to the inferentialist project. Synchronic structure is an expressive metaconcept, in no way inherently conflicting with a simultaneous recognition of the importance of diachronic process.

Writers like Deleuze and Badiou, on the other hand, and perhaps even someone like Rorty, while making valid points against our culture’s obsession with identity, have unfortunately chosen to valorize nonexclusive difference. This is not the answer. Ironically, an exclusive focus on nonexclusive, orthogonal difference leads back to undifferentiated sameness, via incommensurability. Deleuze and Badiou actually celebrate this, with slogans like “pluralism = monism” or “generic multiplicities”. This is precisely the night in which all cows are black. Even Kant’s point about the infinity of each person tends in this direction.

As Hegel saw clearly and pointed out in the Encyclopedia Logic, the polemic of Reason against Understanding should not lead us to try to throw out determinateness. Understanding wants to lock everything down under Identity, which is ultimately disastrous. The indiscriminate valorization of orthogonal Difference, on the other hand, ultimately destroys meaning and intelligibility. We should be looking for an Aristotelian mean (outside of, rather than between) these one-sided, shallow, and unattractive extremes.

I want to say that difference, when unbounded, ceases to be what I wanted to mean by difference. A thoughtful dwelling on relational difference, with due attention to real-world contingency and ambiguity, would be my candidate for the mean. (See also Determinate Negation; Conceptual, Representational.)

Binding

Brandom says Kant understands all empirical activity as consisting in subjects binding themselves by conceptual norms. All empirical activity is thus implicitly embedded in an outer frame that has a value-oriented character. Brandom immediately acknowledges that the nature of normative binding in Kant is obscure and deeply entwined with some of the most problematic aspects of Kant’s work, “such as the distinction between the activities of noumenal and phenomenal selves“.

Brandom thinks Hegel better explained this binding, and that Hegel would approve of John Haugeland’s slogan “transcendental constitution is social institution”. Crucially, though, the social dimension is here conceived not as a putatively immediate communitarian identity of “we” but in an extensively mediated way, through reciprocal determination of attitudes and statuses over time by constellations of mutually recognitive I-Thou dyads.

I prefer to speak of a responsibility to differences and gradients rather than a binding. “Binding” sounds a bit too univocal to my ear to be a preferred usage. Responsibility can be materially real without being subject to univocal determination. It has the character of a material tendency rather than a law.

I’m not proposing to ban talk about bindingness. I’m just recommending that it be reinterpreted in this less obvious material sense that still allows for a bit of play in the determination, rather than that it be understood in the more apparent formal and strict sense.

In my view, all the processes of reciprocal determination result in very real material tendencies sufficient to ground all needed talk about responsibility, but we need not and should not claim that these real material tendencies have the absolute force of formal law. That is the difference between law and what is right. Law is to what is right as Hegelian Understanding is to Hegelian Reason.

Some abstract, higher-order principles do have the force of formal law, but their interpretation and applicability in actual cases can never be self-evident (nothing contentful ever is).

So that which is genuinely normatively binding is either only a real material tendency of responsibility, and interpretive work is required to discern it; or it is an open-formula higher-order principle, and interpretive work is required to apply it. If we intend to be ethical, we need to focus on that interpretive work. I believe the reciprocity of authority and responsibility and the reciprocity of mutual recognition both also point to a similar openness and a similar need for work. (See also Necessity in Normativity; Mutual Recognition; Making It Explicit.)

Untimely

We aiming-to-be rational animals are all deeply conditioned by our development in particular social and cultural circumstances. A truly great philosopher like Aristotle perhaps comes closest to becoming “untimely” in something like a Nietzchean sense.

Though I know of no explicit textual evidence for it, I wonder if Hegel resolved the material incompatibility between his mature patronizing attribution of naive realism about norms to the ancient world as a whole on the one hand, and all the insights he attributes to Plato and Aristotle on the other, by implicitly exempting them from the generalization about the ancient world. That generalization is sound at a broad sociological level, but we should not assume without specific evidence that sociological generalizations about a philosopher’s time and place apply to the philosopher.