From Tragedy to Dialogue

The historical development of philosophy follows a different trajectory from that of human ethical culture as a whole. Philosophical development tends to have what Nietzsche called an untimely character. In their ethics and meta-ethics, Plato and Aristotle for example are far ahead of the nostalgia for heroic values that was still typical of classical Greek culture as a whole. In the culture as a whole, the highest expression of traditional values was tragedy, expressed both intimately in the poetic word and publicly as a performative spectacle. At the same time, traditional values were already challenged by the corrosive and alienating effects of proto-modernity in the ethical individualism and subjectivism of the Sophists. This impasse between tradition and individualism is still typical of modern culture as a whole today, even though Plato and Aristotle already showed the way out of it, through rational discourse in a context of mutual regard.

Brandom in A Spirit of Trust (2019) provocatively suggests that to limit our ethical responsibility to what we do intentionally is to perpetuate the alienation brought about by individualism and subjectivism. The solution to this dilemma, he says, is not to return to the traditional views that treated right and wrong simply as objective social facts or as commands given to us by society or by the gods, but rather to view what Aristotle would call unwilling actions and the unintentional consequences of the actions of each as the joint responsibility of everyone in the universal community of rational beings.

The broadly traditional view, according to Brandom, is that we are individually responsible for the totality of our objectively ascribable deeds, regardless of circumstances and regardless of what we intended. Oedipus in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles must accept guilt and punishment for unwittingly having killed one who turned out to be his father, and for having married one who turned out to be his mother, after his parents had left him in the wilderness at birth because of a prophecy that he would bring them ruin. Oedipus is exiled from the city — a punishment regarded as worse than death — and deliberately blinds himself out of remorse, showing that he too accepts the verdict. From this point of view, even great humans are but pawns of fate, but we are nonetheless objectively responsible for the objective status of our objective deeds, whatever it may be.

The modern view is that responsibility is “subjective” rather than objective. We are individually responsible only for what we deliberately choose and intend, and no one at all is responsible for what happens by accident or unintentionally. But a great deal of what happens overall is accidental or unintentional.

Brandom reads Hegel in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology as providing the first real alternative to both the traditional view and this modern view. Hegel’s view is what Brandom calls “postmodern”, not in the pop culture sense of so-called postmodernism, but in the sense of providing a serious alternative to both traditional and modern views, which is what motivates the “Postmodern” in the masthead under which I write here.

For Brandom, Hegel’s achievement as expressed in the theory of mutual recognition is unprecedented. I think that mutual recognition is already implicit in the form of Platonic dialogue — rational discourse in a context of mutual regard — and begins to be made explicit when Aristotle treats forms of friendship and love that emphasize mutuality and recognition of the other as one of the two pinnacles of ethical development, along with wisdom.

Normative Attitudes

Robert Brandom sees Kant and Hegel as both working to reconcile the modern notion that normative statuses depend on normative attitudes with a genuine bindingness and objectivity of normativity. The key point that he associates with modernity is the idea that normative statuses are not somehow pre-given. As I would put it, the normative statuses of things depend on complex reflective judgments involving many elements.

Brandom’s language about attitude-dependence is intentionally broad enough to encompass all the forms of modern subjectivism, which is the opposite evil to traditional groundings of normative statuses in pure deliverances of authority. At its most primitive level, it expresses the idea that everyone judges for herself, which is indeed a popular sentiment in modern culture. Expressed this way, without qualification, it makes it impossible to separate right from wrong. Brandom seems to want to say that even this vulgar subjectivism or voluntarism is historically progressive compared to the traditional “authority-obedience model”; I tend to think they are equally bad.

The real positive lesson that Brandom extracts from this, though, is something to the effect that everyone deserves a seat at the table in inquiries about the good. He does not himself support the view that everyone gets to judge everything for herself.

Indeed he points out that the very best version of this individualist view — Kant’s theory of the autonomy of moral subjects — is criticized by Hegel as one-sidedly individualistic. Kant complements autonomy with a strong emphasis on respect for others, but according to Brandom, Hegel also thinks that Kant effectively treats both autonomy and respect as principles that themselves do not depend on any normative taking of things to be such-and-such; i.e., at a meta-level Kant still treats autonomy and respect as the same kind of givens that he recommends we avoid depending upon in all our particular judgments. With his theory of the coming-to-be of genuine objective oughts through processes of mutual recognition, Hegel is able to show a genesis of autonomy and respect, as themselves instances of the same kind of normative taking involved in particular judgments.

I’m not completely happy with Brandom’s choice of the thin term “attitude” in this context. I would prefer to say, for example, that normative statuses depend on reflective judgment. Attitude by itself says nothing about its derivation; an attitude just is what it is, and might be entirely arbitrary. But I suspect that Brandom implicitly has in mind something like a complex propositional “attitude”. Then on his view of what it is to be a proposition, necessarily we are in the space of reasons, and subject to all of its dialogic give and take, just by having such an attitude.

Activist Reason?

We are still in the middle of the “Reason” chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology. From “observing” Reason we now move to “active” Reason. In the immediate context Hegel here seems to have in mind neither activity in an Aristotelian sense nor a Reason he really wants to endorse, but instead a sort of political “activism” driven by negative, “hard-hearted” emotion. This particular kind of “activist” attitude turns out really not to be very reasonable in its pursuit of “reasonableness”.

In the bigger picture though, we have finally reached the threshold of ethics. Harris in his commentary anticipates that this will eventually lead to a “Happy Consciousness of the Ethical Substance” (Hegel’s Ladder II, p. 7), in contrast to the Unhappy Consciousness of the Unchangeable. But for now we are still at the very beginning of this movement. As anyone following the development will have come to expect by now, there will still be many twists and turns to come, and many more false starts to overcome.

As Harris puts it, in Observing Reason we ended up with “the embodied mortal self that knows that it is free” (ibid). Having patiently followed the development so far, we already have a much less one-sided view of this freedom. Hegel often makes simple, unqualified remarks of this sort about both Freedom and Necessity that can easily be misunderstood if taken in isolation; in reality he sharply rejects both voluntarism and determinism. Here I think the “knowledge” he charitably ascribes at this stage is really akin what he elsewhere calls (a merely subjective) “certainty”. It does contain a very important grain of truth, though.

According to Harris, “The observing self was immediately identical with its observed knowledge. Self-Actualizing Reason is a higher mode of Self-Consciousness; it knows that the objective world is there, but it is there to be transformed. Selfhood is not to be found in the world, but expressed there; Reason is not to be observed, but made. This making is an interaction, because the immediate object of this self-conscious activity is another self (and is soon to be recognized as a world of other selves)” (ibid). But “The active self has to learn how to recognize itself in the other” (p. 8).

Expanding on Hegel’s reference to Goethe’s Faust, Harris uses the literary character of Faust to illustrate this stage. “Faust is quite aware that everyone recognizes his rational status; and he recognizes theirs, likewise. He is not in any danger of getting into a life and death struggle, and he does not keep serfs in fear of their lives. But the self-realization of others is not his concern; and the first lesson that life teaches him is that that is a mistake” (ibid).

Hegel here refers back to the unalienated character of traditional Sittlichkeit or “ethical life”. Harris notes that many readers have misunderstood Hegel as simply advocating communal values over the individual. He says the Greek polis or city-state with its large reliance on custom and tradition did not in fact realize Hegel’s Ethical Substance, but was only a kind of ethical “thing”, even though Ethical Substance implicitly had to be there already, in the form of the Greek people.

Moving on, “The ‘active Reason’ that we are actually observing… is the Self-Consciousness that has emerged from the ‘night of the supersensible Beyond into the daylight of the present'” (p. 16). “Neither the natural nor the rational self-consciousness has any memory of a ‘Paradise Lost’ that is to become ‘Paradise Regained'” (p. 18). The self-consciousness that we are observing has to begin again “from nothing” (p. 19).

But “Like the freedom of the Lord in the world of the natural self, the higher freedom of Reason now exists (paradoxically) only in order to organize the life of natural necessity” (ibid). The rational self “lives in a world of utilities” (p. 18). At this stage “The social substance is selbstlos [selfless]; ‘selfhood’ belongs only to the individuals who have their careers to make, and their family fortunes to maintain” (p. 19). This is the modern world of civil society.

“Faust’s lesson is about human relations. He has to learn from actual experience that his own rational self is constituted by its relations with others” (p. 21).

What Hegel calls the attitude of “Active Reason” here seems to have more to do with a desire to impose a personal conception of “reasonableness” on the world and others whom we encounter than with “reasoning”.

Active Reason’s first approach to morality is grounded in a crusading form of personal conscience that Hegel calls the Law of the Heart. Purely in its own name, it passes judgment on the world and everything in it. It finds that something is wrong with the world, and sets out naively to make things right. This can quickly go overboard. Harris here speaks of “an insane crusade to bring the false Heart into subjection” (p. 23). Hegel himself refers to the Law of the Heart as a “frenzy of self-conceit” (quoted, p. 32). The Heart concludes that “The world is mad, and the madness is induced and sustained by the selfish interests of its rulers. The fault lies… with certain bad apples” (p. 42). Hegel thinks this kind of personally blaming attitude inevitably goes wrong.

Rousseau had used the term “Law of the Heart” to express a positive ideal. Hegel’s overwhelmingly negative discussion can thus be read as implicit criticism of Rousseau, but he also uses the term to characterize the attitude of some Romantic literary characters.

A “second inversion” of active Reason takes the form of a certain abstract modern notion of “Virtue” like that promoted by Robespierre and the Jacobins in the French Revolution, where everyone is called upon to unconditionally subordinate themselves to the needs of the social order. This takes us from an error of one-sided individualism to an error of one-sided collectivism.

What would deserve to be called ethical Reason does not appear fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. For Hegel it is always a matter of human practice. These unbalanced early stages of human Reason’s self-actualization reflect its immaturity at this point, but (according to Hegel, if we take a long view) constitute necessary stages in its process of learning.

Next in this series: Real Individuality?

Between Transcendentalism and Pragmatism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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