On Reason

Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel all give reason an ethical mission that goes far beyond what formal logic can do. Formal logic has immense value in specialized contexts like the engineering of systems, but does not necessarily or directly yield any philosophical insight. As Aristotle said, it is a tool and not an independent source of knowledge.

As Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, a wide variety of such technical tools can also indirectly serve to sharpen a hermeneutic understanding. But for that to be possible, a hermeneutic project must already be underway.

Nevertheless I would argue that for Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel among others, such a project is precisely what “reason” primarily amounts to. More than anything else, reason is constituted by reflective interpretive judgment. Only secondarily is it concerned to deduce consequences from premises. Every such deduction either implicitly presupposes reflective interpretive judgments about meaning, or simply assumes that meanings are already somehow pre-given.

But reason at its core is the ramified and expansive understanding of meaning, as well as the process of aiming at and achieving such understanding, and the putting of that understanding into practice. And “reasonableness” is a matter of an emotional constitution that allows judgments to be made without bias or prejudice or excessive self-centeredness, so that one’s actions reflect and manifest this kind of understanding.

Eternal Sensibles

Metaphysics Lambda chapter 8 returns to a consideration of astronomical entities as eternal sensible substances. While this “appears to be an insertion of physics (or of astronomy) into the metaphysical discourse” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 194, my translation throughout), Aubry sees it as fulfilling part of the program laid out in Lambda 1 for a unified account of the principles of all substance.

“Thoroughly interrogating [the principle’s] relation to the other substances allows the efficacity of the act without power to be shown” (p. 195).

Modern people are not generally used to thinking of the causality of a substance in relation to another substance. We are taught to approach causality in terms of events leading to other events, or to states of affairs. Aristotle on the other hand is less concerned with explaining particular events or states of affairs than with the much more general and multifarious question of why things are the way they are. He argues that “substance” (ousia) and final causality play the pivotal role in any account of the way things are.

Aristotelian substance is far from being simply the “kingdom of nouns”. For Aristotle no more than for Kant is the what-it-is of things a simple primitive that is just given to us. The “identities” of things are consequences of an involved process, and not a starting point. A substance is explained by its characteristic act, which can be further explained as aiming at a kind of entelechy. These can only be discovered by indirect means, through thoughtful interpretation.

“First, it is a matter of establishing against the Platonists that the principle is a cause, that it has efficacy, and in particular is able to explain the movements of the different substances, of which the theory of Ideas had failed to give an account…. Secondly, it is a matter of identifying the causality proper to the Good, while showing that the Good acts, not insofar as it has a dunamis, as suggested by the formula of Republic book VI, but insofar as it is energeia…. Finally, and this time against the Platonic episodism, it is a matter of marking not only that the Good is efficacious insofar as it has no power, but also that the separate substance is not disjoint from the other substances, though it has a primacy over them: or better, separation if it is conceived as being that of act and no longer that of form, determines the ordering, the very taxis of the ensemble of mobile substances” (ibid).

I am fascinated by this suggestion that the separate first substance is “not disjoint from the other substances”, and that “separation” is also a connecting link. Aristotle wants to emphasize the extent to which the astronomical substances are connected to the first cause by the nature of their ordering. Lambda 10 will extend this to earthly substances.

(We have seen the enumerated criticisms of Platonism before. While agreeing that Aristotle’s formulations in these areas represent a major advance, I also continue to find great value in many of Plato’s other insights.)

“It falls to Lambda 8 to show, against the Platonists, that if we conceive the principles and the separate substances as acts and not as Forms, we can give a complete and precise account of movement: not only that of the sphere of the fixed stars, but also those of the other spheres and planets” (p. 196).

The connection between astronomy and first philosophy that Aristotle works so hard to establish strikes me as poetically beautiful, but I don’t know what to do with it philosophically, except in the very broad sense that astronomical phenomena do affect earthly things, and represent a more inclusive cosmic whole of which our earth is but a part. I am personally inclined to de-emphasize this aspect in favor of his other characterizations of the first cause as the good, and as thought thinking itself. But on the other hand, his idea that the first cause moves other things as a final cause but not as a direct agent seems extraordinarily well argued, and incredibly fruitful and auspicious.

“But now is posed the problem of the relation between the unmoved prime mover and the others. These are ordered according to a hierarchy (taxis) , which follows that of the celestial movements. It appears nonetheless that this hierarchy is also ontological: unlike the first among them, which Lambda 7 had ended by identifying with god, the other unmoved movers are neither characterized in Lambda 8 as pure energeia, nor as identical with the first intelligible and with the best. Of them, it is said that they are immutable and eternal, but also impassible, and that ‘they have on their own attained the supreme good’…. This is insofar as they are ends, telos. Thus, unlike the prime mover, the others are not ends insofar as they are already themselves the good, but insofar as they have attained the good” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“But since it is said of them that they have attained the good, we can suppose that they have been in movement, and indeed that they have been in-potentiality: if the prime mover is always already an act without power, we can suppose that they are powers fully actualized and stabilized in their end” (p. 197).

This is an ingenious solution, within the context of Aristotle’s desire to link astronomy to first philosophy.

Next in this series: The Ideal

More on Reflection

The concept of reflection is fundamental to Kant and Hegel’s view of reason, and on a very down-to-earth level to supporting what I call emotional reasonableness.

Reflection occurs through the medium of discursive development. What we experience as immediate consciousness is the result of pre-conscious syntheses of imagination that in part build on past knowledge and experience in accordance with our dispositions and character, but in part simply represent shortcuts (assumptions and pre-judgments) that enable us to respond rapidly in situations where there is no time for prolonged reflection.

Neither Plato nor Aristotle has a Greek word that exactly corresponds to reflection in Kant and Hegel’s sense, but a similar concept permeates their work. Platonic dialogue is implicitly reflection that is shared between two or more persons. Aristotelian deliberation, contemplation, and normative saying are all implicitly grounded in reflection. Our higher destiny as talking animals is to reflect. What we reflect on includes deeds and motivations in general, not only the special kind of deeds that are sayings. It also includes relevant circumstances.

In recent times, Paul Ricoeur and Robert Pippin have each made important uses of the concept of reflection.

Aristotelian “Wisdom”

Aristotle is conventionally considered to regard theoria (reflective “contemplation”) and sophia (the reflective wisdom concerning causes and principles discussed in the Metaphysics) as superior to praxis (ethical doing) and phronesis (reflective judgment about ethical doing). This is often represented in terms of modern contrasts of “theory” versus “practice”, and Aristotle is then claimed to regard theory as superior to practice. I think this seriously misrepresents Aristotle’s meaning.

Reflective wisdom concerning causes and principles provides higher-order grounding for reflective judgment about first-order ethical doing. In the life of human beings, however, these are only analytically distinct. They are features of the continuum of reflection within which we orient ourselves.

Aristotle speaks of reflection as valuable for its own sake, and not only for the sake of something else. This is an important truth. But we also see the fruits of reflective wisdom (or the lack of it) in ethical doing.

I think that in addition to being valuable for its own sake, reflective wisdom is also “for the sake of” ethical doing. Every instance of ethical doing can be seen as manifesting some high or low degree of reflective wisdom, and from an Aristotelian point of view, this concrete manifestation has an irreducible place in the scheme of things.

Empathy and Mutual Recognition

On a purely universal ethical level, it seems to me that empathy is to “double empathy” as respect for others is to mutual recognition. This is a lesson for all humans. Life is a two-way street.

“Mind reading” — the attribution of mental states to people — is not particularly empathetic or respectful. When I empathize with you, I don’t claim to read your mind. I pay attention to you in your particularity, without imposing my view of you on you.

Kantian respect for others is better served by not imputing mental states to people. The imputation of mental states tends to be presumptuous, and that can make it invasive.

What really matters for ethics are our commitments as evinced by words and deeds, not our supposed mental states. Our deeper intentionalities and spirit are embodied in the nuances and context of our “outer” words and deeds. What are often taken as clues to supposed mental states, such as facial expressions and vocal intonations, are superficial, ephemeral, and unreliable in comparison with these.

Explicit words should be questioned mainly when they seem to be out of sync with our deeds. Things like the spontaneous facial expressions and vocal intonations of others affect us psychologically, but that is as much a matter of our psychology as of the other person. The bottom line is that by themselves, these are not decisive evidence of what anyone’s attitudes truly are. Evidence of a person’s commitments and character comes from looking at the bigger picture of everything they say and do.

We all have the experience of fleeting feelings that we do not act on, but that momentarily affect us. Our spontaneous physical mannerisms may reflect these. Insofar as it is practically necessary to make judgments about people, we should judge them based not on superficial and ambiguous signs of the fleeting impulses they experience, but rather on the nuances and context of what they deliberately do.

For example, I work very hard not to show impatience with exasperating but ultimately harmless little behaviors of people I care about, but a flicker of impatience may nonetheless show on my face. In this kind of circumstance, I think someone deserves to be given credit for the deliberate choice not to make an impatient remark, rather than to be judged for a facial expression that was not a deliberate act.

The bigger picture is far more important than what is immediate. And we should not assume that other people’s subjective experience (or its relation to physical expression in the moment) is analogous to our own.

Empathy as an Ethical Stance

Ethically, empathy belongs in the same space as Aristotelian friendship, in which the friend is as another self; and with the golden rule; Kantian respect for others; and Hegelian mutual recognition. It is a prescription for non-egotism and avoidance of self-centeredness. Nothing is really more important than genuinely caring for others, which must include listening to them, and not simply doing or telling them what we think is right for them.

There is a fine line between making and asserting our own independent judgments of what is right — which every ethical being needs to be able to do — and imposing them on others. Empathy is what helps us navigate these gray areas.

I personally see a complementary principle that helps complete this. That is that we should in general as much as possible mean what we say, and say what we mean. I see this partly as a matter of personal integrity, and partly as a way of helping others understand us as best possible, when they may not themselves see things as we do. This can also be understood as a kind of more specific empathy for the listener on behalf of the speaker.

Empathy and Psychology

The English term “empathy” is of recent origin; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was introduced only in 1909. But the idea is clearly present from ancient times, e.g., in Aristotle’s idea that a friend is for us like “another self”. At the end of the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel speaks of the softening of the hard heart of someone in the position of judging someone else, and more generally he proposes a sort of Kantian universalization of the Aristotelian ethical stance of friend toward friend, in his notion of mutual recognition.

Reflecting contemporary attitudes, the Wikipedia article on empathy is dominated by mentions of various psychological research. In general, I feel deep ambivalence about psychology as a discipline. It deals with matter of vital importance and sometimes affords valuable practical insights, but psychological theories often seem to me to afford narrow or partial insights into the complexity of human being that their proponents don’t recognize as narrow or partial. Psychology and psychiatry are dominated by an uneven mixture of empiricism and “common-sense” views of human subjectivity, only rarely leavened by engagement with philosophical approaches to the subject matter. What philosophy does get a hearing is most often a sort of popularized existential phenomenology, not the sort advocated here.

(Insofar as so-called anti-psychiatry advocates a more deeply philosophical approach to subjectivity, I am sympathetic, but here too the proponents often engage in unsound over-generalization. As many issues as there are with the medicalization of “mind”, therapy can still have real value for helping people, and research continues to uncover new and interesting results. We just have to be wary of overstated theoretical claims.)

I think about empathy mainly in an ethical rather than psychological way. Interactions between ethics and psychology (indeed, between ethics and empirical disciplines in general) are tricky. From an ethical standpoint, we need to take relevant empirical information into account, but in a thoughtful and practical way, without putting the results on a pedestal, and especially without over-generalizing.

Empathy is a very important value to me. In personal life, I tend to err in the direction of trusting too much and sharing too much. It is an important principle to me to give people the benefit of the doubt until they prove they don’t deserve it. I sometimes give too many chances, because I’d rather err in a kind-hearted way than in a hard-hearted way.

Much of the psychological literature on empathy treats it as a faculty or skill, and as part of a kind of social normalization. Unlike the standard caveat that normativity in ethics has nothing to do with mere social conformity, in the institutional context of psychology and psychiatry, “normality” is typically judged by empirical statistical criteria. What is “normal” in this sense is purely a matter of fact, which nothing to do with what is really good or best. But many people assume that what is empirically “normal” somehow has a normative status anyway.

It is likely that there are low-level neurological functions that may facilitate things like empathy, but that does not mean that empathy is reducible to these functions. So-called mirror neurons, initially discovered in monkeys, are specialized neurons that fire both when we do something and when we observe someone else doing the same thing. This could be seen as contributing to our partial tendency to spontaneously identify with others, but the initial finding only concerned externally observable motor functions, not deep feeling.

Again, from an ethical point of view, what is most important is not what the psychologists call “empathic accuracy”, but rather how much weight we give to empathy as a value in our lives. And from my more specific Aristotelian-Hegelian point of view, how much weight we give to empathy as a value is to be discerned primarily from our doings rather than from our self-reports. The “common sense” bias of empirical psychology shows up in the assumption that we can get accurate views of people’s character by simply scoring their responses to survey questions. People’s self-reporting does tell us something, but not the whole story.

How much weight people really give to empathy as a value also should not be judged by the incidental features of immediate social interaction. Someone may be a poor “mind reader” and socially somewhat clueless, yet care about others more deeply than those who are better mind readers, and manifest that in deeds when it really matters. But many people quickly judge others based on superficial aspects of immediate interaction. (See also “Mentalizing” vs Emotional Empathy.)

“Mentalizing” vs Emotional Empathy

My old thumbnail sketch Mind Without Mentalism now feels very underdeveloped when read on its own, but a fair amount of supporting detail has appeared by now. Pursuing a tangent of a tangent, today I ran across a 2001 article by a distinguished German psychologist, claiming to have experimental evidence of a dedicated physical neurocognitive mechanism for “mentalizing” of more or less the sort that I consider to be a philosophical disaster.

Uta Frith writes, “normal individuals have the capacity to ‘mind read,’ that is, to attribute mental states to self and other. This is referred to as the ‘theory of mind’ or ‘mentalizing.’ The theory assumes that this capacity, far from being the product of complex logical inference, rests on a dedicated neurocognitive mechanism…. Experimental evidence shows that the inability to attribute mental states, such as desires and beliefs, to self and others (mentalizing) explains the social and communication impairments of individuals with autism. Brain imaging studies in normal volunteers highlight a circumscribed network that is active during mentalizing.”

It’s not my purpose to question the experimental results presented. Neuroscience has made tremendous advances, and undoubtedly will make many more. But some of its practitioners make very strong statements that generalize and make interpretations about the human “mind” based on results that are really far narrower.

Very different things are implicitly blurred together in this notion of “theory of mind” as a “capacity” that is “missing” in autism, which was originally developed by British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen.

It is one thing to practically recognize the beliefs and desires of other people that are different from one’s own. That is at once an ethical stance and an interpretive judgment.

It is something quite different to conceptualize beliefs and desires of oneself or others as mental states. Plato and Aristotle developed very rich accounts of human belief and desire without ever speaking of mental states or of a mind as such. Rather than attributing beliefs and desires to minds, they attributed them to people.

The author claims that “mind reading” is not a kind of inference, but rather is physically grounded. This has all the hallmarks of attempts at highly reductive empirical-physicalistic “explanation”. For example, assuming that the data in question did show a statistical difference in neurological activity between “autistic” and “non-autistic” people, that in no way proves that inference does not play a major role in the considerations of belief and desire relevant to ethical doing.

The beliefs and desires of concern to ethics are evidenced in speech and doing. Sensitivity to them requires only interpretative judgment, not positing of mental states.

The binary division between “autistic” and “non-autistic” is also extremely suspect. Official psychiatric diagnostic standards currently define “autism” as a broad spectrum rather than a univocal concept. Meanwhile, “non-autistic” would include both so-called neuro-typical people, and all the people who are different in other ways. That makes it what Hegel would call merely an indeterminate negation.

Paralleling the Hegelian ethical theme of mutual recognition, an alternative view of autism calling for “double empathy” has been developed by English sociologist Damian Milton. This is supported by recent studies that distinguished between “cognitive” and “emotional” empathy, while finding autistic people to have higher than normal emotional empathy.

The psychologists who have talked about this ambiguous “theory of mind” in relation to autism have focused on autistic people’s lesser capacity for what is called cognitive empathy, colloquially called “mind reading” above. But other researchers have suggested that emotional empathy is more closely related to ethical concern.

Being myself a poor “mind reader” whom others deem to have high emotional empathy, I abhor the suggestion that empathy and ethics depend on mind reading. (See also Empathy and Psychology; Empathy and Mutual Recognition.)

On the Good as a Cause

Having recently prototyped a modest textual commentary of my own on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, I feel in a somewhat better position to begin examining the more detailed arguments of Gwenaëlle Aubry on what exactly the Metaphysics aims to do. Her very important 2006 work Dieu sans la puissance: dunamis et energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin highlights Aristotle’s own neglected statements on what his most distinctive contributions in first philosophy were, and argues that they make Aristotle very relevant today.

This leads to a very distinctive reading of the intent of the Metaphysics, which differs greatly from both the “ontological” view of Avicenna and the Latin scholastic mainstream, and the “forgetting of Being”, “metaphysics of presence” view promoted by Heidegger in the 20th century. Here I’ll just provide a top-level introduction.

Aubry sees the Metaphysics primarily as a very innovative work of philosophical theology, centered on what I would call a kind of teleological meta-ethics.

Aristotle’s first cause is the highest good, which works by attraction and motivation, not by creating, or by directly intervening in events. (This makes what Kant calls internal teleology Aristotle’s most fundamental explanatory principle, as is also made especially clear in Aristotle’s biological works, but also even in the Physics.)

Aristotle’s first philosophy treats the world as most fundamentally governed by the values that are at work in it. The logistical working out of means and ends is also essential to how things play out in the world, but Aristotle insists that orienting values come first in the order of explanation. The highest good is a kind of ultimate moral compass for those values. (And from a Kantian standpoint, the resolution of empirical questions of fact depends on the resolution of normative, ultimately ethical or meta-ethical questions of interpretation.)

Next in this series: Pure Act

Contradiction and Nonmonotonicity

In standard formal logic, even one pair of contradictory assertions is traditionally deemed to make any possible conclusion vacuously derivable. Ex falso quodlibet, as the scholastics used to say — from a contradiction, anything at all follows. Meaning is thus destroyed.

As an alternative to this, Hegel in the 19th century anticipated what 20th and 21st century logicians and artificial intelligence researchers have called “nonmonotonic” reasoning. In a nonmonotonic setting, a contradiction only invalidates what is contradictorily asserted. Something must still be wrong with one of the contradictory assertions, but the damage does not spread arbitrarily.

“[W]hat is self-contradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content; … such a negation is not just negation, but is the negation of the determined fact…, and is therefore determinate negation ” (Science of Logic, di Giovanni trans., introduction, p. 33, emphasis in original).

Robert Brandom has pointed out that material inference — the kind of reasoning based on meaning that most humans really rely on most of the time — has this nonmonotonic character:

“Gil Harman sharpens the point in his argument that there is no such thing as rules of deductive reasoning. If there were, presumably a paradigmatic one would be: If you believe p and you believe if p then q, then you should believe q. But that would be a terrible rule. You might have much better reasons against q than you have for either of the premises. In that case, you should give up one of them. He concludes that we should distinguish relations of implication, from activities of inferring. The fact that p, if p then q, and not-q are incompatible, because p and if p then q stand in the implication relation to q, normatively constrains our reasoning activity, but does not by itself determine what it is correct or incorrect to do” (Brandom, Reasons: Three Essays on their Logic, Pragmatics, and Semantics, pp. 4-5).

“Monotonicity… is not a plausible constraint on material consequence relations. It requires that if an implication (or incompatibility) holds, then it holds no matter what additional auxiliary hypotheses are added to the premise-set. But outside of mathematics, almost all our actual reasoning is defeasible. This is true in everyday reasoning by auto mechanics and on computer help lines, in courts of law, and in medical diagnosis. (Indeed, the defeasibility of medical diagnoses forms the basis of the plots of every episode of House you have ever seen — besides all those you haven’t.) It is true of subjunctive reasoning generally. If I were to strike this dry, well-made match, it would light. But not if it is in a very strong magnetic field. Unless, additionally, it were in a Faraday cage, in which case it would light. But not if the room were evacuated of oxygen. And so on” (p. 6).