Tag: Interpretation

Understanding Social Actions

The concluding section of the introduction to Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action is again very rich with insights. Several different notions of what rationality is are in play.

“With a formal world-concept an actor becomes involved in suppositions of commonality that, from his perspective, point beyond the circle of those immediately involved and claim to be valid for outside observers as well. This connection can easily be made clear in the case of teleological [sic] action. The concept of the objective world — in which the actor can intervene in a goal-directed manner — which is presupposed with this model of action must hold in the same way for the actor himself and for any other interpreter of his actions” (p. 102).

There is a kind of objectivity associated with utilitarian concerns.

“In the case of objectively purposive-rational action, the description of an action … has at the same time explanatory power in the sense of an explanation of intentions. To be sure, even if the objective purposive-rationality of an action is established, this does not at all mean that the agent must also have behaved subjectively in a purposive-rational manner; on the other hand, a subjectively purposive-rational action can of course prove to be less than optimal when judged objectively” (p. 103).

He recognizes a gap between “subjective” and “objective” views of utility.

“In advancing what Weber calls a rational interpretation, the interpreter himself takes a position on the claim with which purposive-rational actions appear; he relinquishes the attitude of a third person for the performative attitude of a participant who is examining a problematic validity claim and, if need be, criticizing it” (ibid).

Like Brandom, Habermas argues for the constitutive priority of the second person, and of I-Thou relationships.

“An actor’s behavior is subjectively ‘right’ (in the sense of normative rightness) if he sincerely believes himself to be following an existing norm of action; his behavior is objectively right if the norm in question is in fact regarded as justified among those to whom it applies…. [But the actor] challenges the interpreter to examine not only the actual norm-conformity of his action, or the de facto currency of the norm in question, but the rightness of this norm itself” (p. 104, emphasis added).

Unlike Brandom, who is wary of “regulism”, Habermas seems to identify norms with precisely identifiable rules and instituted law. This does not prevent him from saying many similar things about how normativity works. In particular, they both uphold a Kantian notion of normativity as independent of causal explanation. They both uphold an essentially intersubjective view of normativity. Brandom acknowledges Habermas as a significant influence.

“If the interpreter adopts … a skeptical standpoint, he will explain, with the help of a noncognitive variety of ethics, that the actor is deceiving himself in regard to the possibility of justifying norms, and that instead of reasons he could at best adduce empirical motives for the recognition of norms. Whoever argues in this way has to regard the concept of normatively regulated action as theoretically unsuitable; he will try to replace a description initially drawn in concepts of normatively regulated action with another one given, for example, in causal-behavioristic terms. On the other hand, if the interpreter is convinced of the theoretical fruitfulness of the normative model of action, he has to get involved in the suppositions of commonality that are accepted … and allow the possibility of testing the worthiness to be recognized of a norm held by an actor to be right ” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Normativity is not to be reduced to anything else. The rightness of norms can always be questioned.

“A similar consequence follows from the dramaturgical model of action…. Again, the formal world-concept provides a basis for judgment that is shared by the agent and his interpreter…. The interpreter can, furthermore, uncover the systematically distorted character of processes of understanding by showing how the participants express themselves in a subjectively truthful manner and yet objectively say something other than what they (also) mean (unbeknownst to themselves)” (p. 105).

Habermas carefully distinguishes sincerity from objective truthfulness. It is possible to be sincere and wrong.

“The procedures of rational interpretation enjoy a questionable status in the social sciences…. In my view these objections are themselves based on empiricist assumptions that are open to question” (ibid).

He defends and builds on Max Weber’s interpretive Verstehen method for the social sciences.

“In communicative action, the very outcome of interaction is even made to depend on whether the participants can come to an agreement among themselves on an intersubjectively valid appraisal of their relations to the world…. Unlike those immediately involved, the interpreter is not striving for an interpretation on which there can be a consensus…. But perhaps the interpretive accomplishments of observer and participant differ only in their functions and not in their structure” (p. 106, emphasis in original).

Validity in communicative action is always intersubjective or shareable.

“Sociology must seek a verstehenden, or interpretive, access to its object domain, because it already finds there processes of reaching understanding through which and in which the object domain is antecedently constituted (that is, before any theoretical grasp of it)” (p. 107).

Underlying explicitly theoretical interpretation is a kind of pre-theoretical interpretation, in which we are always already engaged. Interpretation of one sort or another plays a constitutive role in every activity that is distinctively human. Human uptake of culture is in large measure a preconscious uptake of shared interpretive principles.

“The object domain of the social sciences encompasses everything that falls under the description ‘element of a lifeworld’. What this expression means can be clarified intuitively by reference to those symbolic objects that we produce in speaking and acting, beginning with immediate expressions (such as speech acts, purposive activities, and cooperative actions, through the sedimentations of these expressions (such as texts, traditions, documents, works of art, theories, objects of material culture, goods, techniques, and so on, to the indirectly generated configurations that are self-stabilizing and susceptible of organization (such as institutions, social systems, and personality structures)” (p. 108).

The core of a lifeworld can be understood as a set of interpretive principles, an ethos.

“The problem of Verstehen is of methodological importance in the humanities and social sciences primarily because the scientist cannot gain access to a symbolically prestructured reality through observation alone, and because understanding meaning [Sinnsverstehen] cannot be methodically brought under control in the same way as can observation in the course of experimentation. The social scientist basically has no other access to the lifeworld than the social-scientific layman does…. As we shall see, this circumstance prohibits the interpreter from separating questions of meaning and questions of validity” (ibid).

Scientists are people too. All recognition of validity and invalidity depends upon shareable interpretive principles. For Habermas, meaning is inseparable from justification.

“Historicism (Dilthey, Misch) and Neo-Kantianism (Windelband, Rickert) constructed a dualism for the natural and human sciences at the level of the contrast between explanation and understanding. This ‘first round’ of the explanation/understanding controversy is no longer alive today. With the reception of phenomenological, language-analytic, and hermeneutic approaches in sociology, however, a discussion has arisen in connection with Husserl and Schutz, Wittgenstein and Winch, and Heidegger and Gadamer” (ibid).

“Opposed to this case, the empiricist theory of science has defended the concept of the unity of scientific method that was already developed in the Neo-Positivism of Vienna. This discussion can be regarded as over. The critics … misunderstood Verstehen as empathy, as a mysterious act of transposing oneself into the mental states of another subject” (p. 109).

“The next phase of the discussion was introduced with the post-empiricist turn of the analytic theory of science…. In [Mary Hesse’s] view, the debate concerning the history of modern physics that was touched off by Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, and Feyerabend has shown: first, that the data against which theories are tested cannot be described independently of the theory language in question; and second, that theories are constructed not according to the principles of falsificationism but in dependence on paradigms that … relate to one another in a manner similar to particular forms of life…. Hesse infers from this that theory formation in the natural sciences is no less dependent on interpretations than it is in the social sciences” (ibid).

“Giddens speaks of a ‘double’ hermeneutic because in the social sciences problems of interpretive understanding come into play not only through the theory-dependency of data description and the paradigm-dependency of theory languages; there is already a problem of understanding below the threshold of theory construction, namely in obtaining the data and not first in theoretically describing them” (p. 110).

“This is, of course, not a new insight; it is precisely the thesis that the critics of the unity of scientific method had always put forward. It has merely been placed in a new light because the analytic theory of science has, with its recent postempiricist turn, rediscovered in its own way the critical insight that was held up to it by the Verstehen theorists (and that was to be found in any case along the path of the pragmatist logic of science from Pierce to Dewey)” (pp. 110-111).

This is significant. Habermas joins Weber’s Verstehen method for social science with an explicitly pragmatist view of how science works, opposing both to empiricism.

“One who, in the role of a third person, observes something in the world or makes a statement about something in the world adopts an objectivating attitude. By contrast, one who takes part in a communication and, in the role of the first person (ego), enters into an intersubjective relation with a second person (who, as the alter ego, behaves to ego in turn as to a second person) adopts a non-objectivating, or as we would now say, a performative attitude” (p. 111).

Like Brandom, Habermas emphasizes a constitutive role for second-person forms over the first and third person. Again we see the importance of dialogue. Although by their respective avowals Brandom has a much more positive view of Hegel, they both adopt a Hegel-like critique of objectification and a Kantian/Hegelian critique of the supposed givenness of objects.

“Meanings — whether embodied in actions, institutions, products of labor, words, networks of cooperation — can be made accessible only from the inside…. The lifeworld is open only to subjects who make use of their competence to speak and act” (p. 112).

Meanings are immanently constituted, but the field of their immanence is the world or a shareable lifeworld, not someone’s private consciousness. There is no meaning without interpretation. Interpretation does not just play a supporting role in what Habermas calls communicative action, but is fundamental to it. Conversely, interpretation in its first instance is communicative. Monologue and private thought are derivative; dialogue is primary.

“Skjervheim draws our attention here to the interesting fact that the performative attitude of a first person in relation to a second means at the same time an orientation to validity claims” (p. 113).

The notion of performativity in language was introduced in Austin’s work on speech acts, for kinds of action that find their consummation in language. A performative attitude is involved in a promise or commitment. It is a social act. These are kinds of more full-blooded doing in language that are distinct from mere representation or logical assertion.

“Thus the interpreter cannot become clear about the semantic content of an expression independently of the action contexts in which participants react to the expression in question with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ or an abstention. And he does not understand these yes/no positions if he cannot make clear to himself the implicit reasons to take the positions they do. For agreement and disagreement, insofar as they are judged in light of reciprocally raised validity claims and not merely caused by external factors, are based on reasons that participants supposedly or actually have at their disposal” (p. 115).

The “content” of meaning or assertion depends essentially and not just accidentally on the context in which it is embedded. This context has the shape of reasons and a space of reasons, though I haven’t yet seen Habermas use the latter term.

“These (most often implicit) reasons form the axis around which processes of reaching understanding evolve. But if, in order to understand an expression, the interpreter must bring to mind the reasons with which a speaker would if necessary and under suitable conditions defend its validity, he is himself drawn into the process of assessing validity claims. For reasons are of such a nature that they cannot be described in the attitude of a third person, that is, without reactions of affirmation or negation or abstention. The interpreter would not have understood what a ‘reason’ is if he did not reconstruct it with its claim to provide grounds” (pp. 115-116, emphasis in original).

There could be no “value-free science” of meaning. Interpretation is not separable from evaluation.

“One can understand reasons only to the extent that one understands why they are or are not sound…. An interpreter cannot, therefore, interpret expressions connected through criticizable validity claims … without taking a position on them” (p. 116, emphasis in original).

Evaluation is a matter of reasons and the goodness of reasons.

“We thereby expose our interpretation in principle to the same critique to which communicative agents must mutually expose their interpretations. But this means that the distinction between descriptive and rational interpretations becomes meaningless at this level…. Or better: that interpretation that is rational in conception is here the only way to gain access to the de facto course of communicative action ” (p. 119).

For Habermas, the social scientist and the philosopher in doing their characteristic work of interpretation themselves engage essentially in communicative action that is not fundamentally different in kind from the communicative action that the social scientist is concerned to study.

In sociology, ethnomethodology is concerned with the social construction of lifeworlds. It is commonly associated with the claim of a so-called social construction of “reality”, for which the canonical source is Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966). These nonphilosophers deny that there is any objective reality, and so fall into a relativistic subjectivism. Habermas, with his very serious concern for the justification of validity claims, strongly rejects this.

“In ethnomethodology and philosophical hermeneutics this insight has been revived and is upsetting the conventional self-understanding of sociology determined by the postulate of value-freedom…. [T]he social scientist … is moving within the same structures of possible understanding in which those immediately involved carry out their communicative actions…. These same structures also simultaneously provide the critical means to penetrate a context, to burst it open from within and to transcend it; the means, if need be, to push beyond a de facto established consensus, to revise errors, correct misunderstandings, and the like” (p. 120).

Here he explicitly rejects the empiricist notion of “value-free science”. At the same time, he stresses the liberating potential of the study of communicative action.

“Schutz makes a remark in passing that suggests the starting point for a solution: ‘Verstehen is by no means a private affair'” (p. 123).

He again cites the socially oriented phenomenologist Alfred Schutz. Schutz too agrees that Weber’s Verstehen is an essentially social kind of interpretation that is irreducible to any individual consciousness. Human subjectivity has its ground in intersubjectivity and shareable meaning, rather than in individual egos. This is not to say there is no ego, but that ego is a derivative result and not a principle.

“In everyday communication an utterance never stands alone; a semantic content accrues to it from the context the speaker presupposes that the hearer understands. The interpreter too must penetrate that context of reference as a participating partner in interaction. The exploratory moment oriented to knowledge cannot be detached from the creative, constructive moment oriented to producing consensus” (p. 125).

“The social scientist also has no privileged access to the object domain…. Ethnomethodological critique … attempts to demonstrate that the usual constructions of social science have at bottom the same status as the everyday constructions of lay members. They remain bound to the social context they are supposed to explain because they fall prey to the objectivism of ordinary consciousness” (ibid).

This “objectivism of ordinary consciousness” has the characteristics of what Kant calls dogmatism. Meaning exists only in relation to other meaning; it is never self-contained.

“Theoretical work is, like religion or art, an activity distinguished by reflexivity; the fact that it makes an explicit theme of the interpretive processes on which the researcher draws does not dissolve its situational ties” (p. 126).

Even interpretation with the greatest explicitness, objectivity, and universality remains tied in principle to some limiting context of interpretation. Definiteness implies limitation.

“Garfinkel [in his work on ethnomethodology] wants to carry out the phenomenological program of grasping the general structures of lifeworlds as such by searching out in the interpretive activities of everyday routine action the practices through which individuals renew the objective appearance of social order” (p. 127).

“Garfinkel treats as mere phenomena the validity claims, on whose intersubjective recognition every communicatively achieved agreement does indeed rest — however occasional, feeble, and fragmentary consensus formation may be. He does not distinguish between a valid consensus for which participants could if necessary provide reasons, and an agreement without validity — that is, one that is established de facto on the basis of the threat of sanctions, rhetorical onslaught, calculation, desperation, or resignation…. The ethnomethodologically enlightened sociologist regards validity claims that point beyond local, temporal, and cultural boundaries as something that participants merely take to be universal” (pp. 128-129).

Habermas rejects Garfinkel’s conclusion that no genuinely objective reality emerges from social construction.

“But if Garfinkel is serious about this recommendation, he has to reserve for the ethnomethodologist the privileged position of a ‘disinterested’ observer” (p. 129).

“In thematizing what participants merely presuppose and assuming a reflective attitude to the interpretandum, one does not place oneself outside the communication context under investigation; one deepens and radicalizes it in a way that is in principle open to all participants” (p. 130, emphasis in original).

This openness to all participants is very important.

“The ethnomethodologist is interested in the interactive competence of adult speakers because he wants to investigate how actions are coordinated through cooperative processes of interpretation. He is concerned with interpretation as an ongoing accomplishment of participants in interaction, that is, with the microprocesses of interpreting situations and securing consensus, which are highly complex even when the participants can effortlessly begin with a customary interpretation of the situation in a stable context of action; under the microscope every understanding proves to be occasional and fragile” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics … is concerned with interpretation as an exceptional accomplishment, which becomes necessary only when relevant segments of the lifeworld become problematic, when the certainties of a culturally stable background break down and the normal means of reaching understanding fail; under the ‘macroscope’ understanding appears to be endangered only in the extreme cases of penetrating a foreign language, an unfamiliar culture, a distant epoch or, all the more so, pathologically deformed areas of life” (pp. 130-131).

When Habermas speaks of hermeneutics, he primarily has the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer in mind. Gadamer is another figure I need to write about in the future.

“The paradigm case for hermeneutics is the interpretation of a traditional text. The interpreter appears at first to understand the sentences of the author; in going on, he has the unsettling experience that he does not really understand the text so well that he could, if need be, respond to the questions of the author. The interpreter takes this to be a sign that he is wrongly embedding in the text a context other than the author himself did, that he is starting with other questions” (p. 131).

“The interpreter … seeks to understand why the author — in the belief that certain states of affairs obtain, that certain values and norms are valid, that certain experiences can be attributed to certain subjects…. Only to the extent that the interpreter grasps the reasons that allow the author’s utterances to be considered rational does he understand what the author could have meant…. The interpreter cannot understand the semantic content of a text if he is not in a position to present to himself the reasons that the author might have been able to adduce in defense of his utterances under suitable conditions. And because it is not the same thing for reasons to be sound as for them to be taken to be sound … the interpreter absolutely cannot present reasons to himself without judging them, without taking a positive or negative position on them” (pp. 131-132).

“If the interpreter would not so much as pose questions of validity, one might rightfully ask him whether he is interpreting at all” (p. 133).

“We credit all subjects with rationality who are oriented to reaching understanding and thereby to universal validity claims, who base their interpretive accomplishments on an intersubjectively valid reference system of worlds, let us say, on a decentered understanding of the world” (p. 134).

“Gadamer endangers his fundamental hermeneutic insight because hidden behind his preferred model of philological concern with canonical texts lies the really problematic case of the dogmatic interpretation of sacred scriptures” (p. 135).

“Our discussion of the basic concepts of action theory and of the methodology of Verstehen have shown that the rationality problematic does not come to sociology from the outside but breaks out within it…. If this rationality problematic cannot be avoided in the basic concepts of social action and of understanding meaning, how do things stand with respect to the substantial question of whether, and if so how, modernization processes can be viewed from the standpoint of rationalization?” (p. 136).

“If the understanding of meaning has to be understood as communicative experience, and if this is possible only on the performative attitude of a communicative actor, the experiential basis of an interpretive [sinnsverstehenden] sociology is compatible with its claim to objectivity only if hermeneutic procedures can be based at least intuitively on general and encompassing structures of rationality. From both points of view, the metatheoretical and the methodological, we cannot expect objectivity in social-theoretical knowledge if the corresponding concepts of communicative action and interpretation express a merely particular perspective on rationality, one interwoven with a particular cultural tradition” (p. 137).

Habermas wants to deeply investigate particulars, without falling into particularism.

“We have, by way of anticipation, characterized the rational internal structure of processes of reaching understanding in terms of (a) the three world-relations of actors and the corresponding concepts of the objective, social, and subjective worlds; (b) the validity claims of propositional truth, normative rightness, and sincerity or authenticity; (c) the concept of a rationally motivated agreement, that is, one based on the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims; and (d) the concept of reaching understanding as the cooperative negotiation of common definitions of the situation. If the requirement of objectivity is to be satisfied, this structure would have to be shown to be universally valid in a specific sense. This is a very strong requirement for someone who is operating without metaphysical support and is also no longer confident that a rigorous transcendental-pragmatic program, claiming to provide ultimate grounds, can be carried out” (ibid).

He is very honest about the challenge of making his case for an emergence of objectivity out of interpretation and dialogue.

“It is, of course, obvious that the type of action oriented to reaching understanding, whose rational internal structure we sketched above in very rough outline, is by no means everywhere and always encountered as the normal case in everyday practice…. In claiming universal validity — with, however, many qualifications — for our concept of rationality, without thereby adhering to a completely untenable belief in progress, we are taking on a sizable burden of proof. Its weight becomes completely clear when we pass from sharp and oversimplified contrasts supporting a superiority of modern thought to the less glaring oppositions disclosed by intercultural comparison of the modes of thought of the various religions and world civilizations” (p. 138).

He calls a belief in progress in history “completely untenable”. This is a sharp difference from Brandom. On the other hand, he also rejects the pessimism of Adorno. I seek to develop a middle road in this regard, which is one of the reasons for my interest in Habermas.

“I shall take up conceptual strategies, assumptions, and lines of argument from Weber to Parsons with the systematic aim of laying out the problems that can be solved by means of a theory of rationalization developed in terms of the basic concept of communicative action. What can lead us to this goal is not a history of ideas but a history of theory with systematic intent…. Thus for any social theory, linking up with the history of theory is also a kind of test; the more freely it can take up, explain, criticize, and carry on the intentions of earlier theory traditions, the more impervious it is to the danger that particular interests are being brought to bear unnoticed in its own theoretical perspective” (pp. 139-140).

This is another point I would strongly endorse. I like Hegel’s view that philosophy is inseparable from its history, as Habermas says about theory.

“I shall take the following path: Max Weber’s theory of rationalization extends, on the one side, to the structural changes in religious worldviews and the cognitive potential of the differentiated value spheres of science, morality, and art, and, on the other side, to the selective pattern of capitalist rationalization…. The aporetic course of the [“Western”] Marxist reception of Weber’s rationalization thesis from Lukacs to Horkheimer and Adorno shows the limits of approaches based on a theory of consciousness and the reasons for a change of paradigm from purposive activity to communicative action…. In this light, Mead’s foundation of the social sciences in a theory of communication and Durkheim’s sociology of religion fit together in such a way that the concept of interaction mediated by language and regulated by norms can be given an explanation in the sense of a conceptual genesis. The idea of the linguistification of the sacred … provides a perspective from which Mead’s and Durkheim’s assumptions regarding the rationalization of the lifeworld converge” (pp. 140-141).

This is a fascinating project, with much relevance to the work I’ve been pursuing here. I’m still curious for more detail on what he sees in the philosophically oriented social science of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead.

Next in this series: Habermas on Disenchantment

Uncurtailed Communication

Habermas has said that reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech. While deeply involved in the theory of empirical social science, he wants to look at language beyond its status as an empirical phenomenon, to the expansive ethical possibilities of “uncurtailed communication”. This is closely bound up with his idea of communicative action as representing the kind of ideal speech situation that I have summarized as “dialogue under conditions of mutual recognition“. Uncurtailed communication would be a full-blooded realization of the Enlightenment values of freedom and equality. At the same time, it gives freedom and equality a more specific reference, by developing intersubjectivity at the micro level of concrete interactions between people.

“Even the strategic model of action can be understood in such a way that the participants’ actions, directed through egocentric calculations of utility and coordinated through interest situations, are mediated through speech acts. In the cases of normatively regulated and dramaturgical action we even have to suppose a consensus formation among participants that is in principle of a linguistic nature. Nevertheless, in these three models of action language is conceived one-sidedly in different respects” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 94).

Again we should note that he is using the terms “normative” and “teleological” in different senses than I have been developing here. This homonymy need not be an issue, provided that we keep each meaning distinct.

“The teleological [sic] model of action takes language as one of several media through which speakers oriented to their own success can influence one another in order to bring opponents to form or to grasp beliefs and intentions that are in the speakers’ own interest. This concept of language — developed from the limit case of indirect communication aimed at getting someone to form a belief, an intention, or the like — is, for instance, basic to intentionalist semantics. The normative model of action presupposes language as a medium that transmits cultural values and carries a consensus that is merely reproduced with each additional act of understanding. This culturalist concept of language is widespread in cultural anthropology and content-oriented linguistics. The dramaturgical model of action presupposes language as a medium of self-presentation; the cognitive significance of the propositional components are thereby played down in favor of the expressive functions of speech acts. Language is assimilated to stylistic and aesthetic forms of expression” (p. 95, emphasis in original).

The “teleological” and “normative” models that he criticizes both treat language and values as inert, while the dramaturgical one focuses on immediate presentation. The notion of intentionality that Habermas uses here is not the very innovative one that Brandom attributes to Kant, but a more standard, empiricist one.

He clarifies what he means by “formal pragmatics”, linking it to the notion of uncurtailed communication. This quality of being uncurtailed relates not only to a micro-level realization of freedom and equality, but also to the addressing of all three of Popper’s “worlds”.

“Only the communicative model of action presupposes language as a medium of uncurtailed communication whereby speakers and hearers, out of the context of their preinterpreted lifeworld, refer simultaneously to things in the objective, social, and subjective worlds in order to negotiate common definitions of the situation. This interpretive concept of language lies behind the various efforts to develop a formal pragmatics” (p. 95, emphasis in original).

I really like this point about “uncurtailed” communication. It has important consequences for personal life too.

“The one-sidedness of the first three concepts of language can be seen in the fact that the corresponding types of communication singled out by them prove to be limit cases of communicative action…. In each case only one function of language is thematized: the release of perlocutionary effects, the establishment of interpersonal relations, and the expression of subjective experiences. By contrast, the communicative model of action, which defines the traditions of social science connected with Mead’s symbolic interactionism, Wittgenstein’s concept of language games, Austin’s theory of speech acts, and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, takes all the functions of language equally into consideration” (ibid).

“In order to avoid mislocating the concept of communicative action from the start, I would like to characterize the level of complexity of speech acts that simultaneously express a propositional content, the offer of an interpersonal relationship, and the intention of the speaker” (p. 96, emphasis added).

Habermas wants to define or discover communicative action as involving all three of Popper’s worlds. The mislocation he speaks of reminds me of some silly debates about whether Aristotle’s Categories is about language or about the world, as if these were two mutually exclusive possibilities, when there is clear textual evidence that Aristotle aims at both.

“In the course of the analysis it will become evident how much this concept owes to investigations in the philosophy of language stemming from Wittgenstein. Precisely for this reason it might be well to point out that the concept of following a rule with which analytic philosophy begins does not go far enough. If one grasps linguistic conventions only from the perspective of rule following, and explains them by means of a concept of intentions based on rule consciousness, one loses that aspect of the threefold relation to the world of communicative agents that is important for me” (ibid).

This is an important qualification to keep in mind. Habermas elsewhere stresses a Kantian emphasis on rules, which is intended to avoid particularism. Here he effectively recognizes that rules are not a sufficient basis for meta-ethical interpretation.

(Earlier, I had expected to move quickly to his discussions of discourse ethics, but I must confess that so far, I find those to be rather narrowly technical. There seems to be richer “ethical” content here in his main work that inspires me to write than in those discussions. But my personal view is that broad meta-ethical inquiry is the actual heart of ethics, and is what ought to constitute first philosophy. I relate this to Brandom’s thesis that meta-ethics is properly “normative all the way down”, and need never reduce ethical conclusions to non-normative ones. I recall also Aristotle’s advice (Nicomachean Ethics book 1) not to seek greater precision in an inquiry than is appropriate to the subject matter.)

“I shall use the term ‘action’ only for those symbolic expressions with which the actor takes up a relation to at least one world. I shall distinguish from actions the bodily movements and operations that are concurrently executed…. In a certain sense, actions are realized through movements of the body, but only in such a way that the actor, in following a technical or social rule, concomitantly executes these movements. Concomitant execution means that the actor intends an action but not the bodily movements with the help of which he realizes it. A bodily movement is an element of an action but not an action” (pp. 96-97, emphasis in original).

Action is not reducible to motion. It involves “relating to a world”. I would also put a caveat on language like “the actor intends”, which reflects neither an innovative account of Aristotelian act like Aubry’s, nor an innovative account of Kantian intentionality like Brandom’s. Habermas rejects what he calls the philosophy of consciousness, but seems to retain a relatively conventional notion of an acting subject.

“Operational rules do not have explanatory power; following them does not mean, as does following rules of action, that the actor is relating to something in the world and is thereby oriented to validity claims connected with action-motivated reasons” (p. 98).

This seems to be a development of Kant’s distinction between being governed by rules and being governed by concepts of rules, which he associates exclusively with free rational beings.

“This should make clear why we cannot analyze communicative utterances in the same way as we do the grammatical sentences with the help of which we carry them out. For the communicative model of action, language is relevant only from the pragmatic viewpoint that speakers, in employing sentences with an orientation to reaching understanding, take up relations to the world, not only directly as in teleological [sic], normatively regulated, or dramaturgical action, but in a reflective way. Speakers integrate the three formal world-concepts, which appear in the other modes of action either singly or in pairs, into a system…. They no longer relate straightaway to something in the objective, social, or subjective worlds; instead they relativize their utterances against the possibility that their validity will be contested by other actors…. A speaker puts forward a criticizable claim in relating with his utterance to at least one ‘world’; he thereby uses the fact that this relation between actor and world is in principle open to objective appraisal in order to call upon his opposite number to take a rationally motivated position” (pp. 98-99, emphasis in original).

Taking up relations to the world in a reflective way is what we’re about here.

“Thus the speaker claims truth for statements or existential presuppositions, rightness for legitimately regulated actions and their normative context, and truthfulness or sincerity for the manifestation of subjective experiences. We can easily recognize therein the three relations of actor to world presupposed by the social scientist in the previously analyzed concepts of action; but in the context of communicative action they are ascribed to the perspective of the speakers and hearers themselves. It is the actors themselves who seek consensus and measure it against truth, rightness, and sincerity, that is, against the ‘fit’ or ‘misfit’ between the speech act, on the one hand, and the three worlds to which the actor takes up relations with his utterance, on the other (pp. 99-100).

This way of formulating the matter seems like it would also be applicable to interpersonal relations, independent of its relevance to social science.

“For both parties the interpretive task consists in incorporating the other’s interpretation of the situation into one’s own in such a way that in the revised version ‘his’ external world and ‘my’ external world can — against the background of ‘our’ lifeworld — be relativized in relation to ‘the’ world, and the divergent situation definitions can be brought to coincide sufficiently. Naturally this does not mean that interpretation must lead in every case to a stable and unambiguously differentiated assignment. Stability and absence of ambiguity are rather the exception in the communicative picture of everyday life” (p. 100).

Life with others is a negotiation of shared interpretation. The process can also fail.

Next in this series: Understanding Social Actions

Versions of Finitude

Heidegger claims to radicalize Kantian finitude. He “wants to applaud Kant for appreciating the finitude of thinking — in Kant its dependence on sensible and pure intuition — also note the hidden importance of the imagination in Kant’s project, and yet also demonstrate that Kant has not broken free of the prior metaphysical tradition but remains solidly within its assumptions” (Pippin, The Culmination, p. 82).

“Kant treats our immediate familiarity with the world as an unimportant issue, since real knowledge of what really is resides in mathematical physics, and how things show up in ordinary experience is of no account” (p. 83).

Pippin is characterizing Heidegger’s view here. The last part strikes me as an overstatement by Heidegger. Kant aims, among other things, to give an account of ethics and human life that would be compatible with Newtonian physics, but never even comes close to suggesting that ethics could be explained in terms of physics.

“Heidegger claims that not only is freedom a problem of causality, but causality is itself a problem of freedom” (ibid).

Kant does occasionally mix up discussions of freedom and causality, as when he makes the unfortunate suggestion that we think of freedom as an alternate kind of causality besides the one exhibited in Newtonian physics. But in the main, he treats ethical freedom and mechanical causality as two very different registers. Heidegger is tendentiously assuming that for Kant, physics must provide the outer frame of reference for ethics. But despite Kant’s great reverence for Newton, he famously argues for the primacy of practical reason.

“Heidegger wants to explore the implications of the remarkably Fichtean formulation that anything actual must be understood to be ‘posited’, that being, the meaning of being, is ‘positing'” (p. 84).

This notion of positing has come up several times, in relation to Hegel (and Fichte, who first made it a major theme). It is closely related to the contested notion of judgment. As Aristotle might remind us, judgment is said in more than one way.

“Position or positing is treated throughout as judging, the discursive form of representing” (p. 85, emphasis in original).

Judgment in the sense I care about mainly names a kind of free inquiry where the outcome is not decided in advance, rather than a completed conclusion. It should be understood as subject to all the nuances that affect jurisprudence. Judging as an activity has to be an open process of interpreting, not the mere representing of something identified in advance or known in advance. Only in hindsight — with a conclusion already in view — can judgment even be expressed in terms of representation. But the early modern tradition in logic identifies judgments with propositions, assertions, or conclusions.

Pippin quotes Heidegger quoting Kant, “The concept of positing or asserting [Position oder Setzung] is completely simple and identical with that of being in general” (p.86).

To “be” X is to be well said to be X.

For Kant, Pippin explains, “We have the power to determine objectively when something exists or not, so that what there is can be understood as what this power can determine…. [T]he concept of something existing beyond our capacity to determine in principle if it exists (or if we cannot but believe it exists) is an empty notion” (pp. 86-87).

He quotes Kant again, “I find that a judgment is nothing but the manner in which given modes of knowledge are brought to the objective unity of apperception. This is what is intended by the copula is. It is employed to distinguish the objective unity of given representations from a subjective unity” (p. 87).

This will lead Heidegger to say that for Kant, the meaning of Being is unity of apperception. That seems plausible enough.

“The primordial mode of being of Dasein is not primarily as a perceiver but being-in-the-world” (p. 88).

Heidegger wants to disqualify any purely cognitive approach to these issues, and simultaneously to claim that all the philosophers do take a purely cognitive approach, which renders their conclusions invalid. This second claim is once again highly tendentious, because many of the philosophers take a normative approach that is in no way “purely cognitive”.

“Kant takes himself to have demonstrated that all that relation to an object, a determination of any being, can amount to is the objective unity of an apperceptive synthesis…. And there is no indication that he thinks that demonstration will show that the mind imposes a form on a formless matter” (p. 89, emphasis in original).

Hegel and Heidegger both at times blame Kant for using language that tends to suggest the two-stage, “impositionist” view.

“[Kant’s transcendental] deduction is not about ‘stamping’ but about demonstrating that there cannot be any intuited content (i.e., any cognitively relevant content) that is incongruent with the required a priori conditions…. But Heidegger is simply asserting that this unity is ‘subjective’ and imposed…. There is quite a lot, most of it simply assumed by Heidegger, packed into ‘Thinking is esconced in human subjectivity'” (p. 90).

“As a student of Husserl, Heidegger is certainly aware of the objections to any psychologistic account of judgment, and his suggestions about ‘stamping’ and being ‘sunk’ in subjectivity do not trade on any such psychologizing…. Judgment too is a mode of public comportment towards entities, a modality of being-in-the-world, and not originally an inner episode…. [H]e appears to think that locating the intelligibility of being in judgment unavoidably transforms the objects of judgment into mere present-at-hand entities. Given the claim that the primordial, fundamental, or original meaning of beings is as pragmata, equipment, read-to-hand, our fundamental mode of comportment towards beings is engaged and unreflective use, and any interruption of such unreflective use, such as a cognitive judging, must lose any grip on this primordial meaning and primordial comportment in favor of a present-at-hand substance” (p. 93).

Judgment as public comportment rather than inner episode makes good sense. Beings as pragmata are fine. But I simply do not see any “unavoidable” transformation of objects of judgment into present-at-hand entities. Yes, something like this fixing of presence-at-hand does occur in various circumstances. But the history of philosophy provides plenty of counterexamples, among whom I would include Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. Hegel even addresses the issue very explicitly, with his famous complaints about “dead” objects and such. It is disingenuous for Heidegger to ignore this.

Heidegger also appears to claim that unreflective engagement in the world is unequivocally superior to the best Kantian and Hegelian reflection. Unreflective engagement should be granted some role and dignity, but this goes way too far.

“Unless there is such a link between judgment as such and being as constant presence…, this mere link to a thinking subject… would not appear to justify any claim to a distortion or unthinking appropriation of the core metaphysical tradition” (p. 94).

I think we just established that there is no such unqualified link.

“[I]t would not be fair to Kant to insist that he understands this cognitive or judgmental modality as either exclusive or even privileged…. In fact, a good case can be made that one of Kant’s contributions to philosophy is his demonstration that our primary and most significant mode of comportment towards being ‘as a whole’ is not cognitive but practical, the experience of the moral law, our own status as free subjects, and our sensitivity to the beautiful and the sublime” (ibid).

Yes indeed.

“And Kant is famous for denying the possibility of ontology, claiming that the proud name of ontology must give way to the humbler analytic of the understanding” (p. 99).

And I say he is right to do so, and that Hegel follows him in this.

“But there is no moment in Kant that holds that the Being of beings is a matter of disclosure” (p. 100).

Indeed not. If anything, Kant is overly categorical in asserting the purely active nature of thought.

“There can be no undifferentiated mere matter of sensation that is then in a second step shaped by pure concepts” (p. 101).

As I mentioned, Pippin and Brandom have pretty conclusively refuted the old “two stage” reading of Kant on thought and intuition.

Pippin quotes a particularly outrageous claim by Heidegger, that “In order to understand the Critique of Pure Reason, this point must be hammered in, so to speak: knowing is primarily of intuiting…. All thinking is merely in the service of intuition” (ibid).

“This is not exactly Kant’s position. It would be more accurate to summarize it as: knowing is always a thinking intuiting and an intuiting thinking” (pp. 101-102).

Heidegger “even freely admits that Kant insists on a reciprocity between thinking and intuiting, but he proposes forging ahead anyway with his claim for the priority of intuition” (p. 104).

“The ‘basic faculty’ is the imagination, and it is ‘pre-ontological’ because it is the exercise of a nondiscursive, nonconceptual imagining” (p. 109).

I am myself fascinated by the role of imagination in Aristotle and Kant (see also Sellars on Kantian Imagination). I would not claim, however, that imagination is the root of all thought. Imagination in its immediate presentation is nondiscursive and nonconceptual, but Kant’s subtler point is that discursive and conceptual elements nonetheless get wrapped into it. Imagination in the broadest Aristotelian sense seems to be a kind of link between organic being and thought. Without imagination, an organic being cannot be said to think. But thought is more than just imagination. What makes thought rational is its non-arbitrariness. Kant would tell us that imagination cannot be completely arbitrary either, since the categories of thought also apply to it, as he argues in the famously difficult “transcendental deduction” in the Critique of Pure Reason. (See also Capacity to Judge; Figurative Synthesis.)

“More radically put: both intuition and understanding are derivative…. What he appears to mean by derivative is that there could be no role to play for the understanding and intuition conceived as distinct capacities, were there not an original imaginative projection of a horizon of possible encounterable beings” (p. 111).

This part seems unobjectionable.

“So, the question is not whether conceptual capacities are necessary for any experience…. The issue is rather the mode of conceptual actualization. The chess grand master has ‘immediately’ ‘in mind’ a sense of areas of threats, dangers, degrees of possibilities and probabilities, all because of the years he has spent playing and reading chess books. But those moves are determinate, and concepts are in play” (p. 114).

This illustrates what Hegel calls “mediated immediacy”.

“The point of all these metaphors is, of course, to find as many ways as possible to suggest some spontaneous activity in intuiting other than assertoric judging or acts of conceptual sorting, or deliberate rule-following” (p. 115).

In a Kantian context, spontaneous activity and intuition are mutually exclusive, though in real life we never get either of these purely by itself.

“The horizon-forming work of the imagination is not a determination of conceptual intelligibility but our comportment with a world everywhere always already ‘irradiated’ with meaning, significance” (ibid).

This again seems fine. The notion of horizon comes from Husserl’s phenomenology.

“He means that one cannot say of a Dasein, a human person, that this sort of being is simply ‘in time’, in some supposed ‘flow’ of temporal moments. It can, of course, for various purposes, be considered that way, as if Dasein were a table or a plant, but that aspect is derivative from how Dasein orients itself in in time, and in that sense ‘affects itself’…. Heidegger means, again in a way that involves the imagination, that we never experience time simply ‘passing’, but our temporal awareness always (again) involves the issue of meaning…. [T]he notion of time is presented as [a] kind of self-determining and so self-affecting, since time is a pure intuition, where that means not a pure intuited but a pure intuiting…. This is not an empirical event, and so there is not a self that ‘affects’ itself as already present to itself as a substance-like self, a subject” (p. 117).

Here we get to why Heidegger called his magnum opus Being and Time. He wants to give us anything but a boring mathematizing theory of uniform Newtonian time. A radical, nonuniform, constitutive experience of time is one of his more interesting thoughts. It seems to start from Kant’s notion of time as a “pure intuition”. (See also Ricoeur on Husserl on Memory; Ricoeur on Augustine on Memory.)

“A self is the way it stretches itself along in time” (p. 118).

“According to Heidegger, the world, a historical world, sets a horizon of possible meaningfulness — fundamentally the meaning of Being as such — and Dasein’s inheritance of and orientation from such a horizon does not require any self-conscious discursive orientation, but is a matter of simply being involved in the interrelated nexus of practical significances that amounts to the various tasks and projects of the world” (p. 120).

That orientation from a horizon is generally not self-conscious goes with the territory. The same might be said of a human’s uptake of culture.

Heidegger contrasts a good “ready-to-hand” with the bad present-at-hand. The good one is supposed to be original and primordial, which seems to mean it is that by comparison with which he will say everything else is effectively in bad faith (though that is not his term).

“[T]his primordial meaningfulness of entities should be understood as (although not exclusively as) the ready-to-hand, Zuhandenheit, affordances, and not the present-at-hand, at-handedness simply present before us, the vorhanden, primarily stable substances enduring through time understood as a sequence of nows, what Heidegger generally calls standing presence, ständige Anwesenheit. By contrast with empirical intelligibility, our understanding of the ready-to-hand is a matter of attunement and appropriate comportment, something like skillful involvement. This fundamental level of significance has been obscured by the metaphysical tradition since Plato and Aristotle. This is because of the mistaken assumption that our original familiarity with beings in a world is illusory and truth is a struggle towards cognitive intelligibility” (pp. 120-121).

I think something like attunement and comportment and skillful involvement is very much present in Plato and Aristotle (and in Stoicism and Epicureanism, for that matter), so for me the whole negative argument about metaphysics never even gets off the ground. Heidegger is reading what is really a modern issue too far backwards in history.

“Every projection of what matters to us into the future involves a being, Dasein, with no inherent teleology or universal or even available ground (an answer to the question of why what fundamentally matters in the world does or ought to matter). What originally matters is inextricable from our thrownness into a certain historical world, so what comes to matter is a question of contingency, what we plan out concerning what matters is subject to the massive contingency of our lack of control not only over our own ‘ground’ but over our fate or our ever-possible death” (p. 121).

We have not seen any argument why there is no “teleology or universal or even available ground” related to human being-in-the-world, though this is a common modern assumption.

“Most importantly for our present purposes, the priority of the ständige Anwesenheit assumption cannot be assumed in the question of our own being, how our own being is a meaningful issue, at stake for us. At the heart of Heidegger’s analysis in [Being and Time] is the claim that the authentic meaning of Dasein’s being can also crudely but accurately be summarized: anxious being-towards-death” (ibid).

Heidegger has exerted a very great influence on Continentally oriented discourse about the “question of the subject”. There does seem to be a kind of correlation between the broadly syntactic definition of substance as an “underlying thing” in Aristotle’s Categories, and what Heidegger calls “standing presence”, but this is precisely the definition that is superseded in the Metaphysics.

The whole notion that “anxious being-towards-death” is the most important aspect of human subjectivity — and the key to its “authenticity” — seems very implausible. I stand with Spinoza’s “The philosopher thinks of nothing less than of death”. This stuff about death is directly personal for me, as a recent cancer survivor. I choose to meditate on life — the good, the true, and the beautiful — and as much as possible to cherish every moment.

“Heidegger’s basic picture focuses on Dasein’s unique awareness of our own mortality, and so the question of whether one lives with a resolute readiness for anxiety, or a flight from such awareness by the tranquilizing notions like ‘everyone must die; we can’t do anything about it, so why worry about it?’ or ‘what a morbid way to look at life'” (pp. 121-122).

I choose neither of these. Heidegger tries to force us with a false dichotomy.

“This is also a dramatically isolating and individualizing approach. A background standing attunement to the constant impendingness of one’s own death is intensely private and unshareable, and with such a notion at the center it makes almost all of ordinary life escapist and even cowardly” (p. 122).

What Pippin correctly recognizes as a “dramatically isolating and individualizing approach” does not bode well for ethics.

Calling almost all of ordinary life escapist and cowardly sounds like emotional blackmail. This is of a piece with Heidegger’s very uncharitable account of the history of philosophy.

“If we ask this question of Kant in the register in which Heidegger asks it, then it would hardly be correct to suggest that for Kant, ‘primordially’, what it is to be a human, to exist in a distinctively human way, is to be a self-conscious knower…. Kant is under no illusion about the fact that our little ‘island’ of factual knowledge of nature, the pinnacle of which is Newtonian mechanics, is of no deep significance for human life. This is a radical rejection of so many conceptions of philosophy, from the Socratic-Platonic notion of philosophy as a way of life to the notion of philosophy as therapeutic in the Wittgensteinian sense. Human significance and worth are based wholly on a rational faith in our moral vocation. That is what primordially matters. We don’t ‘know’ that we have such a capacity, but its availability is a matter of its practical undeniability” (ibid).

For Kant, our status as what I would call ethical beings is more “primordial” than our status as knowers. I see harmony rather than conflict between the Socratic-Platonic notion of philosophy as a way of life, and a rational faith in our moral vocation.

“Heidegger understands this feature of Kant, that the true significance in being human does not for Kant reside in being a knowing subject” (ibid).

“It is not enough to acknowledge our finitude in this context by noting the inevitability of moral struggle. If there is moral struggle at all, that is already an indication that the moral law is not practically motivating just by being acknowledged. That would be what Kant calls a ‘holy will’. This is a pretty close analogue to his conclusion that the unity of the understanding and intuition requires that the nature of the understanding itself cannot be formulated in terms of the logic of judgment alone (that it requires the prior function of pure imagination). The bearing of pure reason on our sensible inclinations cannot be understood as a mere imposition on an independently conceived sensible nature. (There is also an analogue to Hegel’s early critique of Kant — that this picture of imposition means the law is experienced as wholly positive, an alien authority, as alien as a divine command theory of morality, the mere imposition of a law ‘from without’. It is Hegel’s way of raising the necessary question of what our moral vocation means to us, beyond merely ‘being commanded’.)” (p. 124).

Plato already has a well-developed alternative to a command theory of morality, as well as a good awareness of the importance of mixed forms (see Middle Part of the Soul). As Pippin has already suggested, Kant scholars now generally reject the attribution of an “impositionist” theory to Kant.

“Even if imperfectly, Kant realized that our access to the moral dimension of our being is through a kind of attunement…. As in so many other cases in Kant, what look like two steps, acknowledgement of our duty, then producing a consequent feeling of respect, is actually one moment” (p. 125).

Heidegger approves of Kant’s talk about moral feeling, but he wants to counterpose feeling to judgment in ways Kant would not accept. He does correctly make the important point that meaning is of greater import for ethics than causality.

“Feeling obligated is feeling respect. (A summary account of Heidegger’s point would be that the whole issue of respect looks different when the framework is not the question of practical causality but the meaning of our moral vocation)…. Respect is what gives the way morality fits into a life as a whole its meaning. This is why Heidegger applauds Kant so enthusiastically” (p. 126). Pippin quotes Heidegger, “This feeling of respect for the law is produced by reason itself; it is not a feeling pathologically induced by sensibility…. [M]y having a feeling of respect for the law and with it this specific mode of revelation of the law is the only way in which the moral law as such is able to approach me” (ibid).

“There is more ambiguity about this in Kant than Heidegger lets on. Heidegger’s interpretation of Kantian respect, at least prima facie, would ultimately not seem to be consistent with the notion of autonomy so important to Kant” (p.127).

Kant would not use a metaphor of revelation. He certainly would not call it the “only way” we encounter ethical principles. And he would not speak of the moral law approaching us. For Kant, it is we who are the agents, because it is we who are ethically responsible.

As a would-be experimental poet in my youth, I used to be fascinated by these metaphors of Heidegger, where Being reaches out to us, and so on.

“Heidegger does not think Kant can make any of the metaphysically significant distinctions he wants to make between a phenomenal or psychological subject and a moral or transcendental subject because he treats them all as substances underlying thought, action, and empirical sensations” (ibid).

Here we come back to the question of what a subject is for Kant. Heidegger is right that it should not be thought of as a substance in the sense of Aristotle’s Categories.

“The other conception of the thing or any being is what he calls primordial, authentic, originary, and closest to us — what is directly available in our ordinary comportments, a being always already irradiated, to use Wittgenstein’s word, with meaning” (p. 129).

This seems to be an immediate that is supposed to be more true than any mediation.

“We have somehow come to misunderstand and distort what is and always remains most familiar to us…. What we inherit is a world where the unreflective basic and orienting meaning amounts to an assumption about what matters (and therewith what doesn’t matter or matter very much), that what is cared about, what in the world has ‘prevailed’ (gewaltet), is manipulability, beings understood as manipulable stuff, available for satisfying human self-interests….We have even come to experience ourselves in this way, as things of a sort” (ibid).

There is a significant grain of truth here, but a similar insight can already be found in many of the world’s religious traditions; in a more philosophical form among the neoplatonists; and in a purely philosophical form in Hegel.

“We do not recognize our own openness to meaningful being. This is not like ignorance or a mistake…. There is a kind of self-evasion even in dealing with, comporting with, objects that makes them predictable and secure, manipulable all out of a kind of thoughtless, laziness, and instrumentalizing scientism” (pp. 129-130).

He seems to be saying that humans as a whole are dominated by a kind of willful bad faith that imposes shallowness on everything, and for which we are more culpable than if we were merely ignorant or mistaken.

“Mention is made again of the fact that ‘the essence of the thing [is] determined on the basis of the essence of propositions’…. Language, history, the work of art are all understood in terms of this ontology, which has now assumed the role of a pre-ontological orientation, distorting our self-understanding, our own experiences of ourselves. He even suggests that the reason poetry is so poorly taught (a claim he simply assumes) is because poetry teachers cannot distinguish between the distinct mode of being of a poem and a thing” (pp. 130-131).

To put it another way, Heidegger claims that humans in general — and Western philosophers in particular — distort everything in theoreticist and logocentric ways. It’s hard to know what to do with such sweeping condemnations. I earlier compared this to the circular logic of emotional blackmail, which basically tells us that if we disagree, we obviously must be part of the problem.

Pippin suggests that for Heidegger, at root this is an issue with the social dominance of modern science. I have my own criticisms of modern science, but I by no means see it in a purely negative light. The neo-Kantians who dominated German philosophy in the early 20th century seem to have been one of Heidegger’s main targets, both because of their relation to Kant and because of their strong advocacy of modern science.

“[I]t has proven to be inevitable that our self-understanding would have to change to accommodate the approach of scientific naturalism, and that was and remains the intent of the project. A look at how modern economics understands rational agents, or how psychiatry does, or the research paradigms in the social sciences and now even in the humanities make that clear…. Heidegger’s idea for a recovery, a new beginning in philosophy (which he accuses of complicity with this ‘standing presence’ project since its beginning) rests on the claim that such claims of scientific objectivity can be shown to be based on a distortion of a primordial level of meaningfulness” (pp. 134-135).

While I would put a modest notion of ethical being ahead of the requirements of science, I do also believe that there are requirements of science. Methodological criticism should not be confused with global dismissal. I generally disagree when philosophers globally dismiss other philosophers.

Next in this series: Heidegger vs Hegel

Simple Thoughts About Being

It has been over three years since I preliminarily sketched what I want to positively say about being and beings (see also Ethical Being; Back to Ethical Being). Since then, further work on Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel has provided many additional resources for addressing various aspects of this question.

Kant stresses the ethical notion of respect for others, meaning other humans. I advocate respect for all beings, including animals and even inanimate objects that cannot share with us in a full mutuality of recognition, as a fundamental guiding attitude. For example, we respect objects by practicing benevolent stewardship and avoiding any form of wanton destructiveness. As I understand this generalized respect, it rules out the ascetic, world-denying attitude that Hegel calls the Unhappy Consciousness, which abases itself and everything else before an infinite God. It also rules out the negative attitude toward anything that is not Dasein that is promoted by the Heideggerian ontic/ontological distinction.

As to what being is in the most general sense, I think Aristotle has the right idea in starting out from the ways in which the transitive verb “is” is said (see Things Said; “Said of”). This becomes an investigation into the proprieties of saying, asserting, or claiming — or, as Aristotle might put it, what it is that makes anything said to be well said. This kind of normative saying broaches the distinction between essence and appearance.

It ultimately turns out that the distinction between essence and appearance can only be sustained within some given context. The very “same” thing that is nonessential in one context can be essential in another, and vice versa.

Being primarily expresses the “what” of things. I broadly agree with Dietrich of Freiberg that essence says all there is to say about being and beings. A human being is the same as a human.

The essence of things is not fixed in advance; rather, it is emergent. (See also What and Why; What We Mean by Meaning.)

What things are can only be a matter of what Kant and Hegel call reflective judgment. There is no external authority to which we could finally appeal. (See Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity; Reflection, Judgment, Process; The Scope of Reflective Judgment in Hegel.)

As Kant might remind us, existence is not a predicate. Etymologically from the Greek, to exist is to be able to be picked out or distinguished from other things in some context. A mathematical proof of something’s “existence” means that if certain things are true in a given context, it is then possible to pick out a distinct something within the context, and we then say that that something “exists”.

Finally, I agree that poetry, music, and other arts can tell us something qualitative about being that we do not get any other way than through the appreciation of beauty. (See also Adverbial Otherness.)

Heidegger’s Story About Metaphysics

This will be quite a long one. For a quick capsule of my own views in this area, see Simple Thoughts About Being.

In Heidegger we have another instance of philosophical historical storytelling, such as came up recently with Brandom’s discussion of Rorty’s links to Dewey’s pragmatism, but this one is the story of a disaster rather than an optimistic vision of progress. This post is part of a response to Robert Pippin’s new book on Heidegger’s “overcoming” of German idealism. I am no Heidegger scholar, but I do know something about the history of things that have been called metaphysics.

Heidegger has famously promulgated an extremely simplified story about the history of Western metaphysics, as from beginning to end the story of a wrong direction. All the philosophers — from Plato to Hegel and beyond — stand indicted, except for Heidegger himself. Any such sweeping condemnation ought to be automatically suspect, but this thesis gained wide currency in the 20th century. According to Heidegger, Hegel’s substitution of “logic” for traditional metaphysics makes the wrong direction that metaphysics has always taken completely explicit.

“Heidegger begins by noting that Hegel, ‘the culminator’, had correctly seen that the underlying commitment of the Western tradition is that metaphysics… is ‘logic’. He does not, of course, mean formal logic, …but what Heidegger calls begreifendes Denken, conceptualizing thinking. He means a commitment to the view that what he calls the actuality of the actual, or the real essence of anything, is what can be grasped conceptually…, a determination of what must be the case for anything to be a determinate thing at all” (Pippin, The Culmination, p. 8).

“This means that being is already understood as what Heidegger will call ‘standing presence’ (ständige or beständige Anwesenheit). By this he means a being that is determinate, discriminable from other beings, and so potentially available to a subject in the present and able to endure through a temporal phase. The comprehensive concept for such an understanding is ousia, substance” (p. 11).

The ousia that has these characteristics is substance in the merely syntactic sense that it is given in Aristotle’s Categories for use in formal logic. Across many posts, we have seen how one of Aristotle’s main goals in the collection of manuscripts the ancient editors called “after the Physics” (meta ta phusika) involves explicating ousia not as a syntactic category, but first as form, and then as act and potentiality.

“This then raises the question that is at the heart of the matter for Heidegger: Why have we not asked whether this (let us say as shorthand, determinately standing being as thinkability) should be assumed to be the orientation for any inquiry about the meaning of being qua being? What grounds can justify such an orientation? Is it possible that a finite, mortal being can understand itself as an in-principle, completely self-knowing being with respect to the fundamental issues of first philosophy? If the question is the meaning of Being as such, it must mean the meaning available for the one being open to that question, and that being is not rightly understood as exclusively self-conscious, a pure thinking being, but as a living, finite being — what Heidegger calls Dasein — and the task of first philosophy must be reformulated in the light of the analysis of that being, a Daseinsanalytik. So, instead of a Phenomenology of Spirit, culminating in the self-knowing of a Science of Logic, we need a ‘metaphysics’ of Dasein” (ibid).

Pippin rather carefully states Hegel’s claim: living, finite beings can have reflective self-knowledge “in principle” and “with respect to the fundamental issues of first philosophy”. This involves neither infallibility nor omniscience.

Heidegger is right that Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, among others, think of being as inseparable from intelligibility. He is right too that Aristotle and Hegel, in their pursuit of intelligibility, direct inquiry away from being qua being as a matter of principle. I would say this is because their investigations have convinced them that being qua being cannot explain intelligibility or meaning. But Heidegger has only asserted — and not shown — that the sincere pursuit of intelligibility must inevitably go wrong.

Pippin emphasizes Heidegger’s insistence that we are finite, mortal beings. Heidegger criticizes Kant for allegedly giving up his insistence on our finitude in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in favor of emphasis on the transcendental.

Hegel takes the emphasis on finitude to be a defeatist stance. He provocatively claims that in spite of our finitude and mortality, language and reflection introduce humans to a kind of infinity. He argues that we should embrace that infinity.

“But when Heidegger argues against any absolute status for philosophical judgments, he is not merely arguing against Hegel or an old-fashioned self-understanding but against all traditional philosophy itself” (p. 12, emphasis in original).

This is all deeply related to the question of whether humans can have genuine knowledge at all. Hegel is an optimist about this; Heidegger is a pessimist.

The vexed term “absolute” seems to be used by Heidegger in a blunt, black-and-white sense. For better or worse, “absolute” was a much overused term in Hegel’s Germany, made fashionable by the Schellingians. Hegel has quite a few wry comments about these pundits of “absolute” truth.

I have suggested that for Hegel, knowledge is said to be “absolute” when it fully recognizes its own relativity, which is to say its own conditioned character. Hegel’s claim would then be that anything deserving the name of knowledge in the fullest sense can and must in principle be capable of recognizing its own relativity. Perhaps indeed this is a criterion for knowledge in the fullest sense, not unlike the Socratic criterion for wisdom as recognition of all we do not know.

“[I]increasingly after Being and Time, Heidegger came to characterize what he was about as an attempt to ‘overcome’ Hegel, whom he consistently characterized as the ‘culmination’ of the entire Western tradition as well as German Idealism” (p. 13). Pippin quotes Heidegger, “with German Idealism, it seemed as if philosophy as such had reached an end and had entrusted the administration of knowledge exclusively to the sciences” (ibid).

“This is all tied to Heidegger’s view that true metaphysical thinking is not to be understood as a strictly cognitive exercise of pure reason, and this is linked with a hermeneutic rather than analytic character of thinking. For him this means that such interpretive or ‘meaning-seeking’ thinking is inseparable from how such thinking should matter to any thinker” (p. 14).

But Aristotle and Hegel each in their own way do practice a kind of thinking that is more hermeneutic than analytic. They just don’t use the word, at least in its contemporary sense. (Aristotle’s On Interpretation is literally hermeneutike, but it is among the least hermeneutic of Aristotle’s texts.) Aristotle and Hegel’s difference with Heidegger is that like Paul Ricoeur also does, they recognize that more “analytic” investigations do also have value for a primarily hermeneutic orientation.

“And this mattering is complicated by the fact that such thinking is burdened by a dependence on a ground we constantly experience as beyond our ability to grasp conceptually” (p. 15).

Here is where things get complicated. For Heidegger, the ground is in principle beyond our ability to grasp conceptually. I think this assumes what Hegel would call an unreflective and therefore untrue (representational) notion of what is conceptual.

Brandom has written a lot about the very unordinary because nonrepresentational notion of the conceptual in Kant and Hegel, and I see something similar in Aristotle. (I find it a bit odd that Brandom is so generous in his reading of Heidegger, and am quite sure that Heidegger would not return the favor.)

“Heidegger has rejected understanding beings as mere objects standing over against a subject as a derivative and misleading assumption, and his references to Being are not to a being. So ‘being lasts as the withdrawing-proferring’ must refer to an ultimate source of meaningfulness that emerges historically, contingently, in a way that orients Dasein but cannot be determinately discriminated” (p. 20).

I find this ironic. It could be said that Hegel’s life work was devoted to promoting a point of view other than that of a subject confronting an object. Hegel can be abstruse and frustrating, but I better trust his version of this.

“[T]here is no other being like Dasein, whose own being is what Heidegger calls ‘existence’, a being of pure possibility that flees its call to itself to interrogate the meaning of its being, until wrenched out of its daily thoughtlessness by anxiety” (p. 21).

The description of “pure possibility” recalls some discussions of potential intellect in the broadly Aristotelian tradition. Of course, Aristotelian intellect does not “flee its call to itself”, or need to be “wrenched out of its daily thoughtlessness,” or experience anxiety. On some accounts such things might be said of the soul, but Aristotelian psyche has organic roots and is in no way a pure possibility. On the other hand, as a result of a complex contingent development, a fused notion of “intellectual soul” gained wide currency in the Latin middle ages, and this laid the ground for the oddly amphibious character of the Cartesian cogito and the Lockean understanding, which obliterate any distinction at all between intellect and a psychological entity.

“Dasein is described as always already ‘thrown’ into its world, inheriting a structure of significance, mattering, salience, and importance that forms a horizon of meaningfulness for any Dasein’s self-interrogation” (p. 22).

This sort of thing is probably one of the major appeals of Heidegger. Some of the vocabulary is uniquely his. But what is being said here is actually not that far from a traditional view (substitute “the soul” for Dasein). Experiences of encountering meaningfulness in a “world” that is already constituted independent of our willful doing are not far to find.

“The continuity of [Heidegger’s] emphasis on meaningfulness as the crux of the issue of Being’s availability is the interpretation I want to defend…. We can call this a resolute reading of Heidegger” (p. 25).

“The major question is the question of the meaningful availability of being at all”…. In Division One of [Being and Time], the possibility of any such nondiscursive availability is established by demonstrating phenomenologically that Dasein is Being-in-the World, not a subject standing over against objects, and a being whose meaning is care” (p. 26).

I am tempted to suggest that Hegelian Geist could also be said to be “Being-in-the World, not a subject standing over against objects, and a being whose meaning is care”. The difference is that Heidegger insists this all occurs at a nondiscursive level. A common Hegelian model is that things that do not start out as immediate can effectively acquire an immediate character.

(This calls for a brief sidebar on the strange way “discursivity” is used in the literature on Kant. Discursivity ought to simply mean something depending on articulation in discourse, as opposed to intuition or immediacy. But what is commonly called Kant’s “discursivity thesis” is his rather extreme claim that the understanding is entirely active, and includes no passive or receptive component or aspect whatsoever.)

“This is not at all to deny that this emphasis after the war shifted from existential thrownness into a world to the problem of language. But the general theme of most relevance to the critique of German Idealism — dependence, and so the impossibility of Hegel’s (and all of philosophy’s pure, autonomous thinking — is still apparent. In ‘Poetically Man Dwells’, a 1951 lecture…, we read, ‘Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man’ ” (p. 27).

Brandom might remind us here of Hegel’s own very sharp critique of “independence” and mastery.

“But, and here lies the source of the difficulty, what we have come to understand as metaphysics actually has never really addressed the question it poses for itself, aside from traces of an appreciation of the genuine issue in the pre-Socratics. Metaphysics has asked instead about the possible meaning of the ‘beings’…. The ancient answer to such a question was, of course, form. But… that leaves unanswered, in all traditional metaphysics, the possible meaningfulness of Being qua Being itself” (p. 28).

Here we get Heidegger’s line — only the pre-Socratics and Heidegger got Being right, and everyone else in history is completely off base. What’s peculiar is that Heidegger, who emphasizes how the Latin tradition distorts the Greek, takes up the scholastic valorization of “being qua being” without seeming to recognize how un-Aristotelian it actually is. Not that the equivalent phrase never appears in Aristotle (it does, in a relatively peripheral role), but only a huge weight of commentary promoted it to the central role it has in Aquinas.

“The problem of the ‘meaning of being’ is the problem of the meaningfulness of beings — that is, beings in the way they matter…. The source of that meaningfulness is the possibility of meaningfulness as such, the possible meaningfulness of Being as such. That possibility of meaningfulness question is not a transcendental possibility for Heidegger because it cannot be raised in strict distinction from the meaningfulness of beings. That is, this relation, between the general possibility of meaningfulness of Being at all, and the meaningfulness of entities, is not a matter of conceptual necessity but of what Heidegger calls ‘primordiality’…. There is a profound difference between the two regimes of meaningfulness, what Heidegger calls the ontological difference” (pp. 31-32).

Heidegger’s insistence on a radical split between “ontic” and “ontological” things — beings versus Being — is unprecedented. I cannot help being reminded of the sharp division between created things and the Eternal in the Hegelian “Unhappy Consciousness”. Perhaps Heidegger represents a contemporary Unhappy Consciousness.

“In his 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger is unambiguous about what he considers the basic philosophical problem. ‘We assert now that being is the sole and proper theme of philosophy.’ Philosophy itself is said to be ‘the science of being’. That Heidegger believes is unambiguous. No philosopher has ever concentrated so intensely on one question for the entirety of his fifty-plus-year career. But the first question for any student of Heidegger is simply what this question concerns…. Is the question of the meaning of Being even a question — that is, a question with a possible answer?” (p. 33).

Before this book of Pippin’s, I was very aware of Heidegger’s reverence for Parmenidean Being, but the close linkage that Pippin brings out between the “question of Being” and general questioning about meaning is new to me. My own attitude is that Aristotelian first philosophy is best understood as itself a kind of higher-order or generalized hermeneutics, and that general questioning about meaning does not benefit from being related to a notion of being as such.

“This issue is made more difficult because Heidegger is eager to qualify and to some extent marginalize the usual and much more familiar semantic ways of addressing the problem: the various senses of the word ‘is'” (ibid).

Indeed. Aristotle’s classic discussion of the ways in which being is said is structured entirely around the transitive senses of “is”. Being as such is not a substance but a transitive verb, “to be x”. Aristotle mentions it mainly in the context of the extreme generality of an incompatibility of contradictory assertions that is more than just syntactic. Being as such is something separate from Aristotle’s own notion of first cause (see also here); this identification was introduced much later.

“[Heidegger] tells us that such formulations assume the answer to the question he is trying to pose and so do not point to a way of addressing it…. Heidegger’s lifelong claim is that forgetting the question of the meaning of being is a catastrophic event in the history of mankind, that it leads to nihilism and a predatory, self-destructive technical manipulation of the earth” (p. 34).

If “forgetting” the question is a catastrophic event in history, this implies that it was previously clearly understood, at least by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides. We are then supposed to return to an immaculate origin. But history doesn’t show any such immaculate origin, and Plato’s dialogues already demonstrated that the teachings of both Heraclitus and Parmenides are untenable as they stand. Plato is vastly more sophisticated than either of them, with respect to the kinds of arguments he exhibits in his dialogues. And Aristotle is even more sophisticated than Plato. Here we really do have an example of the kind of progressive development that Brandom, following Rorty and Dewey, thinks we should be looking for in history. But as Nietzsche said, philosophers tend to be untimely. No historic society or culture as a whole has ever lived up to the deeper insights of Plato and Aristotle. In terms of sophistication of arguments, the contemporary world at a broad social level still has a pre-Platonic level of understanding.

“His is not a question of ontological commitment, the question of what beings there are or what kinds of beings. (E.g., Is there a God? Are there minds? Are there possibilities? And he does not ask: what makes it possible for beings to be the determinate beings they are? How can they be what they are and be differentiated from other beings? (E.g. what is it to be a mind? What is it to be a possibility?… He does not even mean what must be true of anything at all” (p. 35).

Heidegger argues for the primacy of “fundamental ontology”, which he distinguishes from the ordinary ontology that presupposes a great deal of implicit understanding about things in the world. This latter kind of ontology was already decisively criticized by Kant as dogmatic. But at least as interpreted by the neo-Kantians who dominated German academia in the early 20th century, Kant’s critique represented a turn toward epistemology. Indeed the whole “modern” tradition from Descartes on is sometimes characterized as primarily epistemological and science-oriented. Heidegger is definitely arguing for something new here, a new kind of first philosophy linked more closely with art and poetry.

“[A]ll consciousness-based and representational models of intentionality, are all improperly formulated and misleading. The possibility of such intentionality should rather be understood as requiring ‘being in the world’. A subject-conscious-of-a-distinct-object model should be replaced by an inseparable subject-object nexus, a subject always already transcended in a practical and unthematic relation to its objects. The relation is not one of spectatorship or simple perceptual awareness but ‘comportment’ (Verhalten), an active engagement with the world, an involvement that is driven by how things have come to matter” (p. 36).

We are agreed on this. But Brandom has argued that Kant and Hegel already moved beyond a consciousness-based or representational model of intentionality to one grounded in normativity. Moreover, the normativity model seems a better fit for Plato and Aristotle as well. So what Heidegger is criticizing does not seem to apply to any of the four greatest philosophers in the tradition.

“For Heidegger, world is not the totality of what there is, as in Kant, or all that is the case, as in Wittgenstein. World is a necessarily presupposed (i.e., primordial) condition for the possible availability or accessibility of beings within such a world in the first place…. This notion of availability as deep familiarity implies a kind of immediacy in our original encounter with beings in the world, but not like the direct presence of intentional objects as in theories of a pure ‘given’…. This implies a kind of immersion in the field of significances” (ibid).

I’m not quite sure about this. Immersion in a field of significances sounds promising, but what is this deep familiarity and immediacy that would not be a direct presence?

“In a very shorthand way, we can say that the background world for any possible accessibility and for [the individuation of humans] is a historical world — what Heidegger will call, using another term for openness, a clearing (Lichtung), not a species form” (p. 39).

Heidegger’s metaphor of a “clearing” has a kind of appeal. This seems to be a kind of historically emergent indeterminacy. All human experience is historically conditioned. There is no logos without ethos.

“Dasein is what it takes itself to be, within a world into which it is thrown, over which it has no power or influence. This means that primordial access to beings and to beings as a whole, being as such, is not originally cognitive, not the object of judgments, but requires instead what Heidegger calls a prior attunement…. [I]t is that involvement within a world that allows meaningful access to the beings that show up in such a world” (ibid).

Here we see a number of familiar themes, expressed in a novel vocabulary that is more dramatic and more categorical. The “taking” part is a familiar Kantian notion, but here it seems to be absolutized for the single individual in a way that Hegel at least would call one-sided. The social/ethical reciprocity in the constitution of meaning that Hegel so emphasizes is completely absent here. The world into which we are thrown again seems to be a very blunt dramatization of the non-independence and non-mastery that is an essential feature of human being for Hegel. But Kant or Hegel would also never say that we have no power or influence over the world, only that it is finite.

I’m still not quite sure what is going on with this vocabulary of “access” and “availability” of beings. At first I thought Pippin meant to associate it with what Heidegger pejoratively calls presence-at-hand, which seems to involve a kind of prejudice, like what the philosophically oriented sociologist Karl Mannheim calls ideology in the general sense. (Mannheim does in fact rather superficially refer to Heidegger, among others.) But here this access or availability seems to be playing a more positive role in Heidegger’s account, and to the extent that it does, it suggests a rather Cartesian separation of subject and object, which seems very ironic. Heidegger denounces all of “Western metaphysics”, from beginning to end, for supposedly assuming something like this. I don’t think this “Cartesian” notion of subject and object really applies to key figures like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, among others. Meanwhile, the researches of Alain de Libera on the “archaeology of the subject” strongly suggest that what is called the Cartesian subject has deep roots not only in scholasticism, but also earlier among the Christian church fathers.

I think the sharp dualism Heidegger puts between the bad, empirical ontic of the everyday and the good, metaphysical ontological that addresses only Being with a capital B is undesirable, and too much like the uncrossable separation between worldly beings and God in what Hegel calls the Unhappy Consciousness. Heidegger throws away too much. The philosophical dignity of the ontic should be rehabilitated. Even Hegel — who is very concerned not to swallow all particulars up in the whole in the way that he says that Spinoza does — sometimes seems to me to go too far in his critique of reified “things”.

“If there were no Dasein, there would be all the entities there now are, but none of them would mean anything. The world is the condition of availability…. The question of what accounts for things existing at all is not Heidegger’s question” (p. 40).

If there were no interpretive activity, there would be no meaning. He is right that this has nothing to do with the uninteresting question of whether things exist or not.

“The task of metaphysics is said to be to ‘awaken’ a fundamental attunement to the world (or to awaken us to the realization that we are already attuned)… in the musical sense of being tuned, on the right wavelength, or appreciatively engaged in this field of what matters” (p. 41).

The musical metaphor, like the appeals to poetry, has a kind of intuitive resonance, but here we have to tread carefully. Heidegger seems to appeal to simple intuition in places where there would be ramified reflection in Hegel.

“The ontologically significant states that disclose such meaningfulness as such are attunements like anxiety or boredom, where all such mattering in a sense fails, and so, in such a brutal contrast, the fundamentality (and contingency) of meaningfulness and manifestness as such is salient. And Heidegger always insists that such a significance, such degrees of mattering, cannot be understood as a subject projecting onto otherwise meaningless entities. There are no two steps in such Bedeutsamkeit, or meaningfulness: an encounter with a mere object and then a subjective projection of value by an individual or community. There are not two steps because there is no such first step; Dasein is ‘always already’ within the world of meaningfulness” (pp. 41-42).

That there is an “always already” aspect to our engagement with meaning seems entirely right. But what is this “manifestness as such”? It sounds like mere appearance that contributes nothing to understanding.

“Heidegger is proposing to shift the main tasks of philosophy from the analysis of concepts involved on knowledge claims, empirical experience, and moral claims to an interpretive enterprise, at the center of which are these notions of familiarity (Vertrautheit), meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit), and care (Sorge). As he tells us, a ‘fundamental ontology’ is a ‘hermeneutics of facticity’, and for all the revisions in his language and approach, I don’t believe he ever changed his views about the ‘fundamentality’ of such a hermeneutics (p. 42).

I found an early (1923) lecture course of Heidegger entitled Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, in which he emphasizes that hermeneutics is “not just a doctrine about interpretation… Hermeneutics has the task of making the Dasein which is in each case our own accessible to this Dasein itself with regard to the character of its being, communicating Dasein to itself in this regard, hunting down the alienation from itself with which it is smitten” (p. 11 in link above).

Heidegger delights in putting forward new jargon, like specifying what is to be interpreted as “the being-there of Dasein in the awhileness of temporal particularity” (p. 5 in link above). In any case, Dasein is supposed to better characterize us than reason or intellect or Husserlian phenomenology.

I agree that interpretation does (or should) come before any account of knowledge or being. Meaning is never reducible to something merely given to us, but requires a kind of practical engagement. It is something that we create or construct as much as find.

“That is why the epistemological issue is not prominent in what follows. The manifestation of such significance… ‘happens’ as a matter of mattering and is not a problem of idealism and realism… [also] not a psychological or social-normative issue” (p. 43).

He wants significance to be something that “happens”. I agree it is not a psychological or sociological or other empirical fact. At a simple level, significance could be said to “happen” when interpretation happens. But as such, meaning is no more an event than it is a fact.

“Heidegger’s question is not about the content of the concept Being, but rather about the meaningfulness of our engagements and comportings” (p. 44).

“As Heidegger increasingly insists throughout the ’30s, manifestness in this sense is an event” (ibid).

Unlike meaning, it does seem as though manifestness could be considered at least closely related to a kind of event (an appearing). But I don’t think meaning or significance is reducible to such manifestness.

“Beings don’t have this familiar signification in isolation but within a horizon of possible meaningfulness — that is, within a world…. [T]he world can never become an object, a being, in the world…. And he claims: ‘We can never look upon the phenomenon of world directly’…. That is, the problem of the worldhood of the world in effect names the problem of the meaning of Being as such…. The combination of the world’s centrality and relative cognitive unavailability is what produces what Heidegger refers to as a kind of homesickness, an uncanniness at our being always subject to such a world into which we are thrown, but which we cannot redeem, make sense of theoretically, or directly articulate…. [S]uch worldhood is not a source we have any extra-worldly access to. Anyone for whom anything matters knows that such mattering cannot be understood as the result of any prior reflection on what ought to matter” (p. 45, emphasis in original).

There is no meaning of anything in isolation. Meaning exists only in relation to other meaning. It is an effect of the interconnection of things. “Worldhood” is a name Heidegger gives to this non-isolation of meanings, of which I note again that Hegel was the pioneer in modern times. But once more, I do not see what this would have to do with being as such. The relations that make up the world are concrete.

“Given that the emphasis here on our primary access to the meaning of Being as such is an attunement, not any theoretical claim, and given this focus through boredom, it is clearly the case that Heidegger is tracking how things ‘mean’ to us (‘how things stand concerning us’) as a matter of mattering, a kind of mattering that could contingently collapse and thereby reveal itself” (pp. 47-48).

Heidegger’s novel focus on motifs like boredom and anxiety in Being and Time became a major catalyst for 20th century existentialism. Pippin is generously tracing this back to the much more general question of how things come to “matter” to us. I think there is a more direct and more classical path into this question of mattering, which need have nothing to do with boredom or anxiety. At the level of “us”, we need to stop dichotomizing reason and feeling. As Aristotle said, ethical choice is “either intellect fused with desire, or desire fused with thinking, and such a source is a human being”.

Pippin expands on what he means by “mattering”. His account recalls both Hegel and American pragmatism.

“Our initiation into any historical world is primarily an initiation into this realm of mattering…. Language use is normative not only grammatically but in the matter of its proprieties. That is, we are implicitly attuned to proprieties, or meaningfulness and significances, in daily exchanges with others. (Being so attuned is not incompatible with disregarding or challenging such assumed norms. In fact, it is a necessary condition for doing so.) Likewise, when we learn a task, like cooking, we learn the normative proprieties of the art: what utensils are for, how to use them, what makes for good seasoning, good time management, best techniques, mis en place, etc. We learn to understand the relation between eating and dining, and the place of food and cooking in the rituals of family and social life. In this and many other domains, all the beings we encounter are encountered within a world in which public proprieties have come to prevail, and we are onto these not by having beliefs about them or as a result of explicit evaluations but through being in a world, coping with other beings and other Dasein, in our Verhalten, as Heidegger keeps saying: comportment, a practical mode of access everywhere normative” (p. 48).

Clearly, “mattering” has what the Kant scholars would nowadays call a normative character.

“Heidegger’s main point is that the present-at-hand seems to be such that an engagement with mere substances and their proprieties is treated as if it weren’t a worldly interpretation. We are engaged in a practical comportment that we take ourselves to be avoiding, to be aspiring to ‘the view from nowhere’. This would be like saying that what has come to matter most is a ‘not mattering’ world-relation” (p. 50, emphasis in original).

Pippin elsewhere compares the Heideggerian present-at-hand to the point of view of mere Consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology. They are both concerned with the reification of experience into subject and object. They both suppress their own interpretive character.

“I should also signal here that, especially with respect to Hegel, we will have to revisit the issue of a logical prejudice and examine whether Hegel is guilty of it. After all, Hegel relies in the Phenomenology on such nondiscursive moments as the struggle for recognition, which is certainly not an exchange of judgmental claims” (ibid).

Pippin elsewhere points out that Heidegger’s claim that Hegel’s approach to meaning necessarily involves a “logical prejudice” and ignores nondiscursive dimensions is itself tendentious.

Where he seems to have more sympathy to Heidegger is in relation to the Hegelian talk about the absolute. It now seems to me that like Brandom, Pippin ultimately rejects the Hegelian absolute, rather than just having a deflationary interpretation of it, such as I would propose. I think the “absolute” is inflated (originally Schellingian) rhetoric for the much more modest claim that there is after all some knowledge in the strong sense of episteme. Properly speaking, the Hegelian absolute is not God, though Hegel does figuratively connect the two, especially when he is trying to be understood by nonphilosophers. More properly, the absolute is any instance of pure thought. But the reality of pure thought is itself challenging to explain, especially as applicable to us humans, who experience and indeed are constituted by the fusion of intellect and desire. Aristotle, Averroes, Hegel, and Husserl all make important contributions to such an explanation.

“[T]he way in which the problem of being as such gets any kind of grip on Dasein is not as the result of judgmental claims. The manifestness of beings as a whole cannot be understood as the content of any ‘as such’ judgment. That is the ‘apophantical as’ and cannot be original because it depends on a prior ‘hermeneutical as’…. [T]he meaning should not be thought of in terms of discursivity — again, the cardinal sin of the metaphysical tradition, culminating in Kant and Hegel” (p. 52).

It seems to me that Heidegger’s notion of discursivity is too narrow. In Pippin’s account we see a kind of dichotomy operating, between the kind of judgment associated with assertion, and interpretation. Yes, the “apophantical as” does indeed depend on the “hermeneutic as”, but in my view this was already anticipated by Aristotle. Wisdom is excellence in interpretation, not allegedly “knowing” some pre-existing truth. Truth is not prefabricated in Plato or Aristotle; it is only arrived at through sustained inquiry, and it is the sustaining of the inquiry that gives it its solidity.

“[F]or Heidegger, in all of Western philosophy, we do not know what we mean when we simply note that something, whatever it is, is manifested as what it actually is, endures, or is still alive or occupies space — or, to broach a large topic for him, what ‘happens’ to be” (p. 55).

I say that this is obscurantist. Mere happening to be in and of itself has no meaning at all. It corresponds to inarticulate noise. We begin to have meaning when we talk about some detailed way of being. A mere accident has no meaning.

“So the question is not what some being is, or what it is as such, but what it ‘means’ for it to be at all. By ‘meaning’ here he does not mean linguistic meaning (he says that all linguistic meaning is founded on ontological meaning), and he does not mean meaning in the sense of purposiveness” (p. 56).

So the conclusion does not follow. The linguistic meaning that is rejected here seems to be that of a banal representationalism, and the purposiveness a banal form of utility. But ordinary linguistic meaning is not purely representational; it too has a “poetic” dimension. And internal teleology in Aristotle and Hegel is precisely not reducible to utility (see Teleology After Kant).

“Heidegger will often also note that being should be considered a ‘presencing’ (Anwesende) of being, not something present at hand. By making this distinction, he means that any being present to us (which Heidegger thinks we usually and thoughtlessly attend to as merely present-at-hand (Vorhanden) is only a result” (p. 58, emphasis in original).

That everything that seems to be simply given or present at hand is better understood as a result, is an insight that goes all the way back to Aristotle’s insistence on the priority of ends. It appears in a particularly vivid form in Kant and Hegel.

“This would mean a wholly contingent shifting from beings available as substantial in one period, …to, in another, beings available as created beings, to beings available only as represented for a subject, to being available only as material for technological manipulation…. The Greek notion of ousia (which Heidegger insists is already connected to property, material for use, disposability), the medieval focus on ens creatum, the post-Cartesian notion of represented-being, and the technological orientation all involve a kind of concealment (and therein lies a crude summary of Heidegger’s entire history of metaphysics) that must be different from the inevitable and, one might say, ontologically appropriate sort of ‘concealing’ (more a kind of elusiveness) in the ‘work of art’ — a Greek temple, say” (pp. 66-67).

This recognition of “elusiveness” goes all the way back to Socrates and Plato. It is what underlies Socratic questioning and the long detour.

“Plato and Aristotle set us in a direction we have found it impossible to free ourselves from — the metaphysics of presence, the primordial mattering of intelligibility, knowing, which shows up even in Nietzsche’s claim to have freed us from metaphysical illusions” (p. 67).

Plato and Aristotle were the original critics of the metaphysics of presence. In modern times, this critique was notably taken up by Hegel.

“Nothing is ever originally available to us as such present-at-hand beings, but remarkably we have come to experience the world through some sort of willful blindness thanks to which our everyday world, what should be closest to us, the familiarity of the world as pragmata, is furthest from us…. The question of the meaning of Being has been not only forgotten but suppressed, layered over with some putative ‘neutral’ posing of observing subjects against present at hand substances” (p. 69, emphasis in original).

Hegel’s Phenomenology is from beginning to end an elaboration of a more sophisticated version of this insight.

“Heidegger asks… ‘Why is logic the science of assertion?’…. But there is an obvious answer to Heidegger’s question. The assumption behind the priority of logos is that only an assertion can be a truth-bearer, can be true or false. And if true, then an assertion says how things are, corresponds with being ” (p. 70).

I say logic is a tool that is helpful in interpretation.

“[C]ontrary to what Heidegger says, truth must still reside in some assertion about what is disclosed. An event cannot itself be true or false” (p. 71).

Assertions are what is “true or false”. But I also recognize poetic truth, which is not “true or false”.

“The meaning of one’s being is one’s ‘ownmost’….Such knowledge can only be arrived at first-personally…. And so in cases like these (where the meaning of Dasein’s being is at issue), a propositional formulation would get us nowhere” (ibid).

Essence is not reducible to propositional content, to statements that are true or false. It involves propositional content and valuation and poetic truth. It is characteristic of Plato’s depictions of Socrates that he already makes makes a major theme of showing in many different ways that essence is elusive. That is what distinguishes it from appearance.

“The issue of the original meaningfulness of being in any historical world is simply not statable in propositional terms, and its availability in literature and life is a matter of interpretation, not cognition, attunement not assertion…. Instead any propositional formulation and assertion must be said to presuppose a ‘context of significance’…. Such a context is not one Dasein has a mediated relation ‘to’; hence all the formulations about Dasein being its disclosedness…, that it is the ‘clearing’ where such disclosure happens'” (p. 73).

In the mode of poetic truth, it could even be said that we interpreting animals come to be what we are by participating in the clearing where meaning “happens”. But if we are to speak of a happening of meaning, it should be said that such happening is not at all purely contingent. I am inclined to think that “purely contingent meaning” is an oxymoron. Where there is meaning at all, it must be possible to give some kind of account of it, even if it be not univocal.

Next in this series: Versions of Finitude

Culmination of the Culmination

Right before his final conclusion, Pippin recalls a wonderful quote from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols:

“Learning to see — habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual in all its aspects. This is the first schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in control. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilosophical language strong will-power: the essence of it is precisely not to ‘will’, the ability to defer decision. All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus — one has to react, one obeys a stimulus” (The Culmination, p. 216).

Heidegger argues that art — and poetry in particular — represents a disclosure of meaningfulness that must be understood as prior to philosophy and to all the works of reason. Pippin explains Heidegger’s talk about attunement to the question of Being as a way of putting meaning before knowledge. I too think meaning comes before knowledge; I believe in a kind of Platonic reticence about knowledge claims.

But Heidegger effectively attributes to Aristotle and Hegel, among others, what Derrida would call a logocentrism — a bad-smelling thing redolent of ethnocentrism, but having to do with the role of reason. I sharply disagree with this characterization of Aristotle and Hegel, as well as with the characterization of the role of reason that Heidegger assumes.

I think that across a great many posts here, we have clearly seen that interpretation of meaning comes before knowledge in Aristotle and Hegel. Reason itself, for the two greatest “rationalist” philosophers, has a fundamentally hermeneutic or interpretive character, which takes precedence over logic in the sense of formal calculation. Hegel can be forgiven for using the term “logic” in a very nonstandard way, and even for calling it a science. Heidegger was an important promoter of a kind of hermeneutics in the 20th century, but he seems to think of a hermeneutic approach as standing in opposition to the “rationalism” of Aristotle and Hegel.

Pippin says that for Hegel, “The role of art is to make available the speculative truth of philosophy in a sensible and affective register, and that means in an incomplete and finally unsatisfactory, because not fully self-conscious, way, and that way must be and can only fully be articulated in the Logic. Obviously, this touches on the basic issue that has arisen scores of times in the preceding: is there or is there not a form of nondiscursively available meaningfulness in human experience, and one that bears directly on philosophy in a fundamental way, given that such original familiar meaningfulness must count as bearing on the ‘first’ question all philosophy must be oriented from — the possible availability of anything at all, the availability of being qua being?” (p. 217).

That some more fundamental interpretation of meaning must precede calculable, univocal forms of reasoning is, I think, abundantly clear. Even from the side of formal systems, it is always necessary to begin with axioms, postulates, or hypotheses that are presumed to have a status independent of the development of the system. No formal system is truly self-contained. But philosophers like Aristotle and Hegel are not developing formal systems.

And what does this all have to do with talk about “being qua being”? This connection, so important to Heidegger, seems like sheer presumption. I’m objecting to the identification from the hermeneutic side, but I could imagine that some Thomists might also be unhappy with it, because they would identify being qua being with God, and therefore not with human hermeneutic activity.

On the other hand, I do greatly appreciate Pippin’s gloss that Heidegger’s question of the meaning of Being can alternately be expressed more simply as questioning about meaning. That takes the mystifying element out of it. But it still raises the question why it is necessary to raise the topic of questioning about meaning in such a roundabout and mystifying way, if that is really the aim.

Pippin equates the possible availability of being qua being to the “possible availability of anything at all” (ibid). I doubt this. Being qua being is a very specific historically developed theory or theories, mainly due to Avicenna, Aquinas, and Scotus. Anything at all is anything at all.

“[W]e can say that there is in [Hegel’s] Encyclopedia system a non-theoretical, nondiscursive, and philosophically significant role for art…. Heidegger’s affirmative answer… ranges from his early emphasis on the disclosive role of ‘attunements’ to his later emphasis on historical ‘uncoverings and self-concealings’ in the arts…. [I]n Hegel, … fine art should count as a ‘sensible and affective’ register of what could be called the way in which the meaning of Geist’s being is available to it at a historical period in a historical community” (ibid).

The medieval Albertist Dietrich of Freiberg would frankly tell us that the meaning of Geist‘s being should be understood to be the same as the meaning of Geist said simply (he says that a human being is in no way different from a human, and similarly for all such cases).

For Hegel “Consciousness as Sense-Certainty… assumes the world is available to it simply by virtue of its sensible presence. One is immediately onto sensed objects directly just by sensing them. But any distinctly human form of apprehension must, insists Hegel, be able to say what it claims to know, otherwise it is just differentially responsive and not an instance of knowing. The absence of such saying would be untrue to its experienced nature as a human knower and in that sense, not being who one is, would be unfree. It puts itself unavoidably to the test by trying to say what it knows and failing. This is the first manifestation of the conatus of freedom, the realization of self-conscious self-knowledge…. As we have seen Heidegger argue, … in phenomenological terms the ultimacy of this conatus, from the beginning… means that metaphysics as unconditioned thinking on thinking… is an illusion, question-begging” (p. 219, emphasis in original).

Conatus is a term from early modern theories of motion that was used by Spinoza for the ongoing effort of a living being to be the being that it is. It seems to me to describe more or less the same phenomena as Aristotelian entelechy or Kantian internal teleology, in a vocabulary that is compatible with mechanism and avoids reference to teleology.

Pippin adds in a footenote to “question-begging” : “I state here the Heideggerian position, not my own. Heidegger has to claim that what for the Hegelian, or in the Hegelian tradition, must count as the pathologies of modernity — alienation, reification, domination instead of mutuality of recognitive status, the humiliating conditions of the modern organization of labor, anomie, deracination — are all best understood as implications of the still ‘unthought’ question, the meaning of Being, as descendants of the ‘metaphysical’ tradition…. [T]his claim is worth taking more seriously than it has been, but the way Heidegger formulates the issue seems to exclude all other options as derivative from and so complicit with that tradition. Even on strictly hermeneutical grounds, such exclusivity leaves us with an incomplete interpretation of what we need to understand” (p. 219n).

The theory of how the unconditioned can emerge from the conditioned, and the eternal from what is in time, is very delicate and easily misunderstood, but it is central to what Hegel is about. I don’t claim to know that that is how things are, but it is my fervent conviction. Hegel uses very idiosyncratic talk about “negation” and “negativity” to explain it.

“Heidegger has framed all such issues as dependent on, and reflecting some sense of, the historical meaningfulness of Being and that means the context of his question about the reconciling powers of reason is a question about mattering” (ibid).

I’m all for attention to meaning and mattering, but for me that means attention to interpretation and ethics, not ontology. Heidegger distinguishes an inferior, everyday “ontic” character of things from the superior, extraordinary, ineffable character of Being, and castigates others for ignoring this distinction. I think this distinction is false and should be ignored. Rather than a binary division between the ineffable and the boring world of ordinary things and ordinary life, it is better to learn to see the nonordinary in the ordinary.

Next in this series: Heidegger’s Story About Metaphysics

Writing the History of Culture

Recently I’ve been somewhat mischievously interleaving two different series of posts — one on the great contemporary philosopher Robert Brandom’s recent account of his own relations to the American pragmatist tradition, and the other on Kurt Flasch’s groundbreaking investigations of the “Albertist” tradition in medieval philosophy. As different as these are, I have some sympathy for both.

Both of these series have to do with what I somewhat eccentrically call historiography. Historiography is methodologically oriented writing about history, and that description certainly fits, but what most people call historiography is completely abstracted from particular historical content, whereas I am aiming for concrete engagement with concrete content that seems to me to provide lessons of broader significance for how we think about history.

So for example, by Brandom’s light Flasch’s Albertist tradition should not even exist. We need to be very wary of sweeping historical generalizations that do not do justice to the details, such as claiming there was no recognition at all of an autonomy of reason before the Enlightenment. (See also Philosophical Storytelling). This is a distracting side claim that Brandom apparently inherits from Rorty, and in a way I’m happy to have that explanation. I call Brandom a truly great philosopher for his work on mutual recognition and his inferentialist account of meaning. On a broader level, I also value his emphasis on a kind of historical self-understanding.

Philosophical Storytelling

Plato uses a variety of literary devices to convey philosophical meaning — notably the dialogue form itself, but also the Platonic myths, which resemble traditional myths in form, but are deliberately constructed to make a point. In a contemporary context, Robert Brandom practices a kind of historical storytelling about the development of concepts of normativity.

Brandom’s recently published Spinoza lectures help fill out the picture of his own work, by critically reflecting on his teacher Richard Rorty’s relation to the tradition of American pragmatism, as well as to Hegel. The title of the first lecture, “Pragmatism as Completing the Enlightenment: Reason Against Representation”, well indicates its scope. Brandom is at pains to portray Rorty, “the quintessential anti-essentialist”, as a serious defender of reason. 

We see here the apparent origin of Brandom’s preoccupation with the stories that we tell ourselves to anchor and orient our sense of meaning. He purposely gives pride of place to such informal orienting stories, over formal theories that are supposed to straightforwardly represent reality. This is part of his way of carrying forward Hegel’s sharp critique of the idea that concepts are fixed once and for all in representation. Hegel himself talks about the “life” and “liveliness” of things that qualify as genuine concepts in his sense.

(It is an interesting historical paradox that Aristotle — one of the figures with whom the Latin term “essence” is most strongly associated — broadly agrees with modern anti-essentialism. ”Essentialism” as understood in contemporary discourse is partly a later development, and partly a product of bad historiography.)

Brandom says that at the end of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, “in a phrase he came not only to reject, but to regret, he prophesied the ‘death of philosophy'” (p. 2). By that Rorty mainly meant the enterprise of 20th century analytic philosophy, but also the Kantian preoccupation with epistemology and strict warrants for belief.

“[T]he new kind of pragmatism with which Rorty proposed to replace that sort of philosophy is evidently and avowedly Hegelian in spirit — albeit inspired by the naturalized (but still social and historical) form of Hegelianism he admired in Dewey and self-consciously emulated in his own work” (ibid).

Brandom continues, “Later, Rorty would applaud the broadly naturalistic, sociological, historicist impulse he saw Hegel as having bequeathed to the nascent nineteenth century, and speculate about how much further we might have gotten by now if at the end of that century Russell and Husserl had not, each in his own way, once again found something for philosophers to be apodeictic about, from their armchairs” (pp. 2-3).

“Apodeictic” was a favorite term of Husserl’s, referring to the certain knowledge he believed to be achievable by following his phenomenological method. Russell is considered by many to be the founder of analytic philosophy. A great champion of modern science and a pioneer of mathematical logic, he was hostile to what he called speculation in philosophy. Old mainstream analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology both make foundationalist claims of certain knowledge, and they both owe something to Kant’s distinctive emphasis on the theory of knowledge as coming before a direct account of things. (Although I do not regard Kant as a foundationalist, some of his rhetoric could be read that way). According to Brandom, Rorty presents these 20th century ambitions as a retrograde development compared to Hegel. 

Hegel’s great lesson, on Rorty’s Deweyan view according to Brandom, lies in his storytelling. (I would note that Hegel himself also makes claims of strong knowledge, even though he is an anti-foundationalist.) This is fascinating to me, because I have come to know Brandom as emphasizing this kind of storytelling, and I wondered where it came from, because it seemed to only very partially fit Hegel. Where Hegel himself is concerned, I think storytelling is an interesting theme, but (I find myself spontaneously saying) making it the theme throws out way too much of what Hegel is doing. 

In the case of Brandom himself, I would not at all say that his main strength is his historical storytelling. It is other aspects of his work that make him a contemporary giant — the inferentialism, the mutual recognition ethics, the developed account of the “historical fine structure” of the genealogy of normativity, and so on. I think Brandom overemphasizes telling a particular story, and at the same time the particular stories he tells are a bit historically shallow. Paul Ricoeur has a much richer meta-level account of the distinctive aspects of narrative as compared to ordinary assertion, and puts less emphasis on particular stories. 

I think of the storytelling that Brandom invokes as one way of expressing results of interpretation. I prefer to focus on the process of interpretation, before everything is decided.

“Rorty’s idea of the form of a justification for a recommendation of a way forward always was a redescription of where we have gotten to, motivated by a Whiggish story about how we got there that clearly marks off both the perils already encountered and the progress already achieved along that path. This is the literary genre of which Rorty is an undisputed master” (p. 3, emphasis in original).

The Whigs were a liberal political party in Enlightenment Britain, famous for promoting belief in the linear forward march of historical progress. Brandom contrasts an optimistic “Whiggish” genealogy with what Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion, associated with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Ricoeur, though, is far from simply condemning the “suspicious” point of view, and even says it is a necessary complement to the more affirmative approach he wants to emphasize.

Brandom quotes Rorty’s reminiscence of his undergraduate days, “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, and Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being gave me a taste for ambitious, swooshy, Geistesgeschichte [cultural history, literally “history of spirit”] that I never lost” (ibid).

I am well familiar with the experience of reading Hegel at the “swooshy” level, and would certainly acknowledge that historical storytelling is a valuable literary device that I too often use to make a point. But H.S. Harris’ monumental Hegel’s Ladder reconstructs the fine grain of Hegel’s argument in the Phenomenology, paragraph by paragraph, with great success. And albeit at a much higher level, more recently Robert Pippin has even reconstructed what is at stake in the argument of Hegel’s Logic. 

Brandom himself impresses me for the exemplary thoroughness of his own detailed arguments, not the quality of his stories. But he clearly has a soft spot for Rortyan stories. Although I tell such stories myself as part of a necessary pedagogy, I’m very concerned on the other hand not to lose the fine grain of the twists and turns and transformations and reversals that make up history. I don’t give my own stories any higher status than Platonic “likely stories”.

Of the three works Rorty mentions in the quote, Hegel’s Phenomenology is among the most important books ever written. By contrast, Whitehead’s Adventures (1933) is a only a minor classic. Lovejoy’s Great Chain (1936) is a shallow popular work of the 20th century that oversimplifies and badly misrepresents the philosophical thought of the middle ages, about which scholarship has vastly improved since it was written. But mentioning the three together suggests that Rorty is taking a lowest common denominator approach, as if the main point of all three were the telling of simplified stories. Lamentably, Brandom too seems to use Lovejoy as his main source for generalizing about the history of philosophy before the time of the Enlightenment. 

Incidentally, Brandom’s view of the Enlightenment seems to be largely based on Jerome Scheewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, whereas mine is particularly influenced by Jonathan Israel’s trilogy Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), and Democratic Enlightenment (2011).

Authority, Representation, Pragmatism

The controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty was a mentor and colleague of Robert Brandom. In the essay I will treat here, he presents himself as especially identifying with the pragmatism of John Dewey. 

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty’s 1967 edited collection The Linguistic Turn “did much to cement the idea of a linguistic turn… as a sea change in the history of philosophy”. He came to sharply criticize analytic philosophy as then practiced, as well as the prevailing self-perception of modern science, but did so from a modernist point of view.

Rorty is best known for his radical critique of modern representationalism — from Descartes to analytic philosophy — in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Like Brandom’s more constructive development of an “inferentialist” alternative approach to meaning in Making It Explicit (1994), that book takes as its point of departure Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the Myth of the Given in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, and W. V. O. Quine’s essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. 

Here, however, I will focus on Rorty’s very informal 1999 essay “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism”. For an initial sketch of my own views relevant to this, see Authority. This is all in preparation for upcoming coverage of recent lectures by Brandom that shed new light on Brandom’s extremely important work, by explicitly relating it to Rorty’s.

Rorty begins, “There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’ criticism of the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality and the Enlightenment’s criticism of the idea that morality is a matter of correspondence to the will of a Divine Being. The pragmatists’ anti-representationalist account of belief is, among other things, a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. Seeing anti-representationalism is a version of anti-authoritarianism permits one to appreciate an analogy which was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to accept the distinction between Reality and Appearance” (p. 7).

The parallelism he points out between two kinds of correspondence does seem significant. This is actually the main contribution of Rorty’s essay. However, the essay’s main body consists of Rorty’s historical storytelling about pragmatism, with a digression on Freud’s critique of religion.

The formulation about ceasing to accept the distinction between appearance and reality is too blunt. Their relation is very far from being a simple binary opposition, but they cannot simply be identical either. Explanation, understanding, and intelligibility depend on making distinctions of degrees of reality within appearance. This is part of what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

Epistemological foundationalism — typically associated with a correspondence theory of truth — is the claim that there is such a thing as noninferential knowledge. I say that whatever is claimed to be noninferential knowledge is not knowledge at all in the proper sense, but rather what Plato called opinion (doxa). And again, knowledge in Aristotle’s sense is an ability to explain itself. Explanation appeals to inference, not to a supposed registering of brute facts. Foundationalism is dogmatic in Kant’s sense. It puts ultimate principles beyond any possibility of explanation or understanding. This also makes it arbitrary.

Representationalist theories of knowledge are implicitly foundationalist, and commonly have recourse to a correspondence theory of truth. Pragmatism, meanwhile, is largely defined by its opposition to the correspondence theory. Pragmatists also tend to downplay the distinction between ontology and epistemology. It does seem that the correspondence theory of truth implies something like Rorty’s Reality with a capital R, that is what it is entirely independent of the knower. This ignores the essential role of interpretation and relating things together in understanding.

What Brandom calls the authority-obedience model of normativity is presented by Rorty, not unreasonably, as an insistence on simple correspondence or conformity to the presumed will of God. Simple obedience and simple correspondence have equally little use for reasons or reasoning. For them, everything is supposed to be a matter of sheer fact, with no thought required in its uptake. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic preceded the pragmatists in showing that purported facts alone (mere being or objects of immediate consciousness, in Hegel’s terms) do not provide an adequate basis for either understanding or ethical action.

Some of Rorty’s claims about Dewey have been disputed. Not knowing Dewey very well, I am unsure how close the part about ceasing to believe in Sin is to Dewey’s own ways of expressing himself. Rorty doesn’t say much here about what he means by the belief in Sin that he rejects, but I think his idea is that it stresses mere obedience over actual ethical goodness.

I would say that the kind of view that unequivocally puts divine will or command first, above any consideration of the good, is far from accurately typifying all religion. Such radical voluntarism or commandism is indeed horrible in its consequences, but it is certainly not good Thomism, to mention but one example. 

Much more common than radical voluntarism are views that equivocate in this area. Rorty seems to lump those who equivocate together with the unequivocal voluntarists. But Leibniz sought to convince equivocating mainstream theologians to actively side with him against radical voluntarism. I like this more optimistic point of view.

Pragmatists are generally recognized as having their own distinctive theories of truth — in one way or another emphasizing the roles it plays in human practices — in competition with the correspondence theory, which is closely tied to representationalism. The correspondence theory of truth, while formally distinct from any particular variety of philosophical realism, at the same time seems to suggest a kind of naive realism that is difficult to separate from the dogmatism that was criticized by Kant. I put Aristotle closer to the pragmatists here than to medieval or modern realists or representationalists.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved. As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans” (ibid).

Democracy and consensus were strong themes of Dewey’s. But even to my shallow acquaintance, the picture Rorty paints of Dewey’s views of religion is a bit one-sided. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey seems to aim to heal the rift between science and religion. He says in effect that the dogmatically religious and the dogmatically anti-religious both identify religion with belief in the supernatural. Dewey rejects that identification, as Hegel does. As a pragmatist, he is more concerned with what people actually do in their lives.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was quite willing to say of a vicious act that it was sinful, and of ‘2+2=5’ or ‘Elizabeth the First’s reign ended in 1623’ that these sentences were absolutely, unconditionally, eternally, false. But he was unwilling to gloss ‘sinful’ or ‘falsehood’ in authoritarian terms. He did not want to say that a power not ourselves had forbidden cruelty, nor that these false sentences fail to accurately represent the way Reality is in itself. He thought it much clearer that we should not be cruel than that there was a God who had forbidden us to be cruel, and much clearer that Elizabeth I died in 1603 than that there is any way things are ‘in themselves’. He viewed the theory that truth is correspondence to Reality, and the theory that moral goodness is correspondence to the Divine Will, as equally dispensable.”

“For Dewey, both theories add nothing to our ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling right from wrong, and truth from falsity. But their pointlessness is not the real problem. What Dewey most disliked about both traditional ‘realist’ epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something Inscrutable, something toward which we have duties, duties which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid pain and obtain pleasure” (pp. 8-9).

These two paragraphs seem pretty solid. He then gives a capsule history of pragmatism, seemingly intended as a sort of advertisement. In another part, he says one of the things he likes about Dewey is Dewey’s historical storytelling. Here Rorty practices such storytelling himself.

“Peirce kicked pragmatism off by starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action. Starting from this definition, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. This means getting rid of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes — and especially of the idea of intuitive self-knowledge, knowledge unmediated by signs” (p. 10).

Hegel was Pierce’s great predecessor in the critique of representation. This has not been adequately appreciated. And Dewey’s views on democracy in part reflect a continued serious engagement with broadly Hegelian themes.

“Peirce was anti-foundationalist, coherentist, and holist in his view of the nature of inquiry. But he did not, as most of Hegel’s anglophone followers did, think of God as an all-inclusive, atemporal experience which is identical with Reality. Rather, as a good Darwinian, Peirce thought of the universe as evolving. His God was a finite deity who is somehow identical with an evolutionary process” (ibid).

James and Dewey “focused on the profound anti-Cartesian implications of Peirce’s development of Bain’s initial anti-representationalist insight. They developed a non-representationalist theory of belief acquisition and testing” (ibid).

“Peirce thought of himself as a disciple of Kant, improving on Kant’s doctrine of categories and his conception of logic. A practicing mathematician and laboratory scientist, he was more interested in these areas of culture than were James or Dewey. James took neither Kant nor Hegel very seriously, but was far more interested in religion than either Peirce or Dewey. Dewey, deeply influenced by Hegel, was fiercely anti-Kantian. Education and politics, rather than science or religion, were at the center of his thought” (p. 11).

“James hoped to construct an alternative to the anti-religious, science worshipping, positivism of his day” (ibid).

“Dewey, in his early period, tried to bring Hegel together with evangelical Christianity” (ibid).

“The anti-positivist strain in classical pragmatism was at least as strong as its anti-metaphysical strain” (ibid).

“All of Dewey’s books are permeated by the typically nineteenth-century conviction that human history is the story of expanding human freedom” (p. 12).

“I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’ case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their Utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their ‘fit’ with the objects being described” (p. 14).

This idea of a plurality of noncompeting descriptions serving different purposes is no less important for being elementary. But for foundationalists and fundamentalists, everything has to reduce to black and white, and claims to truth are exclusive.

“If James’ watchword was tolerance, then Dewey’s was, as I have said, anti-authoritarianism. His revulsion from the sense of sinfulness which his religious upbringing had produced led Dewey to campaign, throughout his life, against the view that human beings needed to measure themselves against something non-human. Dewey used the term ‘democracy’ to mean something like what Habermas means by the term ‘communicative reason’: for him, the word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non human. This is why he grabbed hold of James’ pragmatic theory of truth” (ibid).

The connection he makes between Dewey and Habermas seems sound to me.

There is a multi-page digression on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I will skip. According to Rorty, Freud would have “seen worship of the bare Idea of Father as the origin of the conviction that it is knowledge, rather than love, which is the most distinctively human” (p. 18).

Here I must beg to differ. I see no polar opposition between knowledge and love. The twin pinnacles of Aristotle’s ethics are intellectual virtue, and friendship or love. Hegel stresses both as well. A principled rejection of epistemological foundationalism does not entail the rejection of knowledge — quite the contrary.

“This conviction of the importance of knowledge runs through the history of what Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’…. The quest for such a reassuring presence is, for all those who resonate to Aristotle’s claim that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, the proper way of life for the good child. To devote oneself to getting knowledge as opposed to opinion — to grasping unchanging structure as opposed to awareness of mutable and colorful content — one has to believe that one will be cleansed, purified of guilt and shame, by getting closer to something like Truth or Reality” (ibid).

The sharp Platonic opposition between knowledge and opinion is something I want to defend. I would completely dissociate it from bad or harmful concepts of authority and representation (still leaving aside the relation between these two). I would sooner associate bad or harmful concepts of authority with opinion that is claimed to take precedence over actual knowledge.

The story about Aristotle and presence is Heidegger’s, not Aristotle’s. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence really has nothing to do with Aristotle (his immediate target was actually Husserl). I agree that the metaphysics of presence — a variant of the privileging of immediacy that Hegel opposes — is a terrible idea. At least from the time of Plotinus and perhaps from that of the Stoics, the Western tradition has been affected by it. But to claim that the whole history of philosophy has been hegemonically dominated by it is a gross oversimplification.

Strangely, Rorty finishes, “[Dewey’s] anti-authoritarianism was a stage in the gradual replacement of a morality of obligation by a morality of love. This is the replacement which, in the West, is thought to have been initiated by certain passages in the New Testament” (p. 20).

I would say that the moment Socrates initiated the free ethical inquiry that was taken up and developed by Plato and Aristotle, the authority-obedience model no longer universally held sway. Plato and Aristotle are less beholden to it than the leading lights of the moderate Enlightenment. Even among the Latin scholastics, there was plenty of genuine inquiry.

Rorty never gets any further in explaining the relation between representationalism and authoritarianism that he began with. It seems this is just a provocative metaphor, with a conciliatory gesture at the end. But my real interest is in Brandom’s very different presentation, when he relates and contrasts his own work and Rorty’s.

The globally negative reference to obligation may also reflect Rorty’s very negative view of Kant. 

In a footnote, Rorty claims with winking anachronism that “eventually [Dewey’s] bete noir became the doctrine which [later writer Thomas] Nagel makes explicit: that something less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions which shape a human being’s moral identity is necessary if morality is not to be an illusion” (p. 16n).

This goes way beyond the scope of the rest of the essay. I have little appreciation for arguments that claim something else is necessary for morality to be possible, so I was hoping to find common ground. But now Rorty is objecting to anything “less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions”. To me, this sounds more like the positivism that the historic pragmatists opposed. 

The pragmatist tradition in general has an ambiguous relation to mainstream varieties of empiricism. Here Rorty sounds like an empiricist. 

Earlier in his career, he was known as a defender of eliminative materialism, the view that mental states simply do not exist. Coming from this kind of direction, he would scarcely have needed metaphorical talk about authoritarianism to arrive at a repudiation of representationalism. 

I’m very critical of the notion of mental states myself. But I don’t see this as a black-and-white question of whether or not something exists. It is rather a question of how we interpret things. Posing the question in terms of existence implies that there is nothing to interpret, that we already know what all the things in life are. This is an example of the attitude that Kant called dogmatic.

Imagination and Reflection

I find myself advocating a quasi-dualist account of subjectivity grounded in imagination and reflection, on top of a non-dualist first philosophy that puts questions of value and meaning before questions of logistics.

Imagination lies at the basis of all first-order awareness. Closely tied at an organic level to sense perception and emotion, it immediatizes things into the form of apparently self-contained, presentable objects. Immediatization is a complex process of synthesis of awareness or “consciousness” that in a human combines what common sense would call impressions of external things with previous results of reflection. This initial synthesis of awareness or consciousness occurs outside of awareness or consciousness.

Once the immediatization by imagination has done its work, we are left with the appearance of a simple transparency of consciousness in which objects are presented. “Appearance” and “consciousness” are correlated terms — all consciousness is consciousness of appearance, and all appearance involves consciousness. Everything in consciousness is an appearance. Some appearances are well-founded, others are not.

It is reflection that works on appearance to distinguish whether or not it is well-founded, and that grounds any well-foundedness of the appearance. Reflection may also consider what is better in a given context. It is the basis of both practical and theoretical wisdom. There is no reflection without the involvement of consciousness at some point, but consciousness does not necessarily involve reflection. Reflection is an open-ended discursive relation, in which the identities of things are not necessarily taken for granted.

One of Kant’s important conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason is that the figurative synthesis of imagination involves the same fundamental forms of judgment as conscious reasoning. Hypothetical (if-then) and disjunctive (distinction-making) judgments are what give meaning to both, and this is why reason can be applicable to experience: for us talking animals, all experience already involves judgment at a preconscious level. Reflection then involves a questioning and refinement (up to possible overturning) of our preconscious judgments that apply patterns of past judgment to new experience.