Obstacles to Synthesis

Brandom’s reading of the Kantian synthesis of unities of apperception as an ethical task or end has enormously impressed me. One could largely identify the Kantian transcendental with the commitment part of what Aristotle called ethos, and with what Brandom and other contemporary writers call normativity. This seems to bring many things into sharper focus. I am also inclined to identify Hegelian self-consciousness with the result of what Kant spoke of in terms of synthesis, which leads me to want to speak of something like “synthesis or self-consciousness” as an ethical task. The Kantian and Hegelian characterizations take quite different paths, but (in part because of this) can be mutually illuminating. But I actually want to focus on the ethical task part.

As I said, I find this enormously inspiring. Nonetheless, I am still struggling with the fact that some people whom I want to call good, including one very dear to me, are largely prevented by past traumatic events and/or some organic disturbance from ever achieving much synthesis or self-consciousness of this sort, so that they are largely unable to participate in what in this context it feels a bit insensitive to call higher ethical considerations. A well-meaning person thus afflicted may have unstable responses to things and show what would look to us like deep inconsistency, basically dealing with very partial views one at a time in exclusion from one another, rather than reconciled or meaningfully related to one another. For the person experiencing in this way, just going through ordinary life is confusing, and can easily provoke high anxiety. Where thoughts and feelings form no coherent community and just atomistically bump against one another, ability to fully participate in the mutuality of social relationships will suffer. Such a person needs all the kindness and patience we can offer.

Subjectivity is a complex and multi-leveled affair. In terms of the development underway here, we at least need to distinguish transcendental, psychological, and organic levels in the scenario just described. Synthesis and self-consciousness are transcendental; the aforementioned obstacles are organic or psychological. One’s local bit of the transcendental is supposed to be independent of the empirical in one way, but in another way, in lack of the right empirical conditions, it will not grow and flourish. Still, I want to emphasize, there is a human being there deserving of respectful consideration. This last kind of insight is, I think, what is behind Kant’s insistence on the dignity of all human beings, simply as such. (See also Aphasia; Coherence; Honesty, Kindness.)

Beyond Subject-Object

Hegel famously wanted to move beyond the subject-object dichotomy he saw as typical of early modernity. In practical terms, Kant’s most famous concern to avoid “dogmatic” assumptions about direct possession of epistemic objects had seemed to accentuate the separation of subject and object, by focusing on the distinction between appearance and reality. But both Kant and Hegel wanted to assert the possibility of knowledge in a strong sense, while avoiding what Kant called dogmatism. They also had considerable common ground in a shared rejection of naive early modern notions of subjects and objects and their relations.

Kant had begun — seemingly unwittingly — to recover some neglected Aristotelian insights in these areas, and Hegel made this an explicit theme. Thus they both already questioned the dichotomous interpretation of subject-object relations. Kant had also already highlighted the inevitable involvement of concepts in experience. For Kant, there is no direct epistemic access to real-world objects, or things in themselves (or to our own subjectivity). All knowledge proceeds by way of concepts, but he retains the concept of objects (and subjects) as a sort of placeholders for new distinctions between appearance and reality that can always be wrapped around current concepts in a new iteration.

When dichotomous connotations have already been applied to a distinction in some communicative context, it can be tricky to simultaneously clarify the transcendence of the dichotomy and the preservation of the underlying distinction, but the general solution is not far to find — just ensure that the underlying distinction is expressed in terms of some finite relation, rather than A versus not-A. Then we have Hegelian determinate negation or Aristotelian difference between the terms, rather than classical negation. So in effect, the solution lies in recognizing that the previous understanding of the distinction in terms of dichotomy was wrong in the first place.

More positively, Hegel eliminates dichotomies by putting determinate relations, coherence, and mediation first in the order of explanation, before all particular terms. The Hegelian Absolute — or that which transcends the subject-object dichotomy — is just a handle for perspectives that put processes, relations, coherence, and mediation before any preconceived notion of the conceptual content of particular terms.

I think Hegel saw this sort of structure as common to Aristotelian substance or “what it was to have been” a thing on the one hand, and Kantian subjectivity or synthesis of apperception on the other.

Working in the Hegelian Absolute does not require epistemic super powers or specious Cartesian certainty, just a sustained honest effort that is still implicitly defeasible. Hegel intends the Absolute to be a kind of Aristotelian achievable perfection, not a kind of omniscience or theological perfection that could never be legitimately claimed by a rational animal. (See Substance Also Subject.)

In approaching these matters in A Spirit of Trust, Brandom characteristically focuses not directly on higher-order abstractions, but on their implications for what we do with ordinary concepts in ordinary experience. Like Aristotle and Hegel but following a distinct strategy of his own, Brandom avoids the impasse of a supposed transition from psychological to “metaphysical” terms, or from ordinary experience to something that would seemingly have to be like the mind of God, by clarifying what we implicitly mean by concepts in the first place.

With Aristotle, Hegel, and Frege and in contradistinction to the empiricist tradition, Brandom understands concepts and apperception in a nonpsychological, nonrepresentational, normative-pragmatic, inferential-semantic way. Through the discovery of counterfactually robust relations, concepts evolve toward increasing universality. Through the experience of error, synthesis of apperception comes to incorporate the recognition that not only its commitments but also its concepts are always in principle provisional, subject to reformulation when faced with a new case. Through both of these combined with the additional cross-checks provided by mutual recognition, synthesis moves toward increasing objectivity and what might be called contact with reality. Through Brandom’s “expansive” model of responsibility, the last remaining obstacle to a full resolution of subject-object separation — the lack of a normative interpretation of unintended consequences of actions — is removed.

Neither “subjects” nor “objects” as such are very prominent in an account of this sort. It is much more a story about processes, relations, coherence, and mediation. Aristotle, Hegel, and Brandom each develop their own ways of working that start in the middle, as it were, and do not need reified subjects and objects to begin with. This, again, is just what the Hegelian Absolute is — a name for the sort of perspective that emphasizes the in-principle provisional character of all finite concepts, as contrasted with the more directly practical sort of perspective that provisionally works with the current basis as a source of reasons for particular sayings and doings. (See also Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic; Contradiction vs Polarity; Three Logical Moments.)

Transcendental?

Kant already wanted to clearly distinguish his new concept of the transcendental from traditional notions of transcendence. He associated transcendence with things beyond the possibility of any knowledge — with which the critical philosopher has nothing to do — and the transcendental with knowledge that was a priori in his expansive sense of that term. What is a priori for Kant does not depend on any particular experience, but does concern the limits and conditions of possible experience or knowledge. A priori in this sense does not imply any self-evidence, simple givenness, or other coming out of nowhere. It just effectively captures higher-order structure of knowledge or experience. (See also Kantian Discipline.)

According to Brandom, the Kantian transcendental is socially, historically, and linguistically constituted, though this represents a Hegelian rather than Kantian interpretation. I would further suggest that the transcendental field includes only forms, and no entities such as subjects or objects. (See also Psyche, Subjectivity.)

Empiricism

Already in the 1950s, analytic philosophers began to seriously question empiricism. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1954), and Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956) all contributed to this.

Brandom explicates Sellars’ pivotal critique of the empiricist “Myth of the Given” as belief in a kind of awareness that counts as a kind of knowledge but does not involve any concepts. (If knowledge is distinguished by the ability to explain, as Aristotle suggested, then any claim to knowledge without concepts is incoherent out of the starting gate.) Building on Sellars’ work, Brandom’s Making It Explicit (1994) finally offered a full-fledged inferentialist alternative. He has rounded this out with a magisterial new reading of Hegel.

The terms “empiricism” and “rationalism” originally referred to schools of Greek medicine, not philosophy. The original empirical school denied the relevance of theory altogether, arguing that medical practice should be based exclusively on observation and experience.

Locke famously began his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) with an argument that there are no innate ideas. I take him to have successfully established this. Unfortunately, he goes on to argue that what are in effect already contentful “ideas” become immediately present to us in sensible intuition. This founding move of British empiricism seems naive compared to what I take Aristotle to have meant. At any rate, I take it to have been decisively refuted by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 2nd ed. 1787). Experience in Kant is highly mediated. “Intuitions without concepts are blind.” (See also Ricoeur on Locke on Personal Identity; Psyche, Subjectivity.)

In the early 20th century, however, there was a great flourishing of phenomenalism, or the view that all knowledge is strictly reducible to sensation understood as immediate awareness. Kant himself was often read as an inconsistent phenomenalist who should be corrected in the direction of consistent phenomenalism. Logical empiricism was a diverse movement with many interesting developments, but sense data theories were widely accepted. Broadly speaking, sense data were supposed to be mind-dependent things of which we are directly aware in perception, and that have the properties they appear to have in perception. They were a recognizable descendent of Cartesian incorrigible appearances and Lockean sensible intuition. (Brandom points out that sense data theory is only one of many varieties of the Myth of the Given; it seems to me that Husserlian phenomenology and its derivatives form another family of examples.)

Quine, Wittgenstein, and Sellars each pointed out serious issues with this sort of empiricism or phenomenalism. Brandom’s colleague John McDowell in Mind and World (1994) defended a very different sort of empiricism that seems to be a kind of conceptually articulated realism. In fact, there is nothing about the practice of empirical science that demands a thin, phenomenalist theory of knowledge. A thicker, more genuinely Kantian notion of experience as always-already conceptual and thus inseparable from thought actually works better anyway.

Thought and intuition are as hylomorphically inseparable in real instances of Kantian experience as form and matter are in Aristotle. A positive role for Kantian intuition as providing neither knowledge nor understanding, but crucial instances for the recognition of error leading to the improvement of understanding, is preserved in Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust. (See also Radical Empiricism?; Primacy of Perception?; Aristotle, Empiricist?)

Substance Also Subject

Hegel’s many references to Aristotle should help to clarify the Hegelian claim that “Substance is also Subject”. In particular, Aristotle’s own thesis of the identity of thought with the thing thought is relevant, as is his dialectical development of the different senses of ousia (“substance”) in the Metaphysics.

A thought for Aristotle is identical with its content. It just is a discursively articulable meaning, not a psychological event. What we care about in thought is shareable reasoning. Moreover, this shareable reasoning has a fundamentally ethical character.

Thought in this sense is essentially self-standing, and unlike the mental-act sense not dependent in the determination of its meaning on a “thinker” (who optionally instantiates it, and if so is responsible for the occurrence of a related event). This gives a nice double meaning to the autonomy of reason. (What such thoughts do depend on is other such thoughts with which they are inferentially connected.)

The primary locus of Aristotelian intellect is directly in shareable thoughts of this sort and their interconnection, rather than in a sentience that “has” them. Hegel adopts all of this.

Concepts in a unity of apperception are forms to be approached discursively, not mental representations or intentional acts. They are more like custom rules for material inference. The redoubling implied in apperception, like that of the Aristotelian “said of” relation, hints at the recursive structure of inferential articulation. The Hegelian Absolute, or “the” Concept, just nominalizes such an inferential coherence of concepts.

Thus, “Substance is also Subject” has nothing to do with attributing some kind of sentience to objects, or to the world. Rather, it is the claim that Substance properly understood (in the Aristotelian conceptual sense of “what it was to have been” a thing, rather than in the naive sense of a real-world object, or of a substrate of a real-world object, that Aristotle starts with but then discards) is already the right sort of thing to be able to play the functional role of a transcendental subject. A “Subject” for Hegel just is a concept or commitment, or a constellation of concepts and commitments. (See also Subject and Substance, Again; Substance and Subject.)

Consistent with this general approach, I consider the direct locus of the subject-function to be in things like Brandomian commitments and Kantian syntheses. The subject-function is also indirectly attributable to “self-conscious individuals” by metonymy or inheritance, and to empirical persons by a further metonymy or inheritance. (See also Subject; Substance; Aristotelian Dialectic; Brandom and Kant; Rational/Talking Animal; Second Nature.)

Brandom and Kant

Besides offering a clear and nonvoluntarist account of Kantian freedom, Brandom strongly puts forward the idea that the formation of unities of apperception is an ethical task for Kant. This was new to me when I encountered it in Reason in Philosophy, and very exciting. Kant suddenly made a whole lot more sense, and began to look much less unattractive.

I have not had the opportunity to confirm whether this is just what Kant should have said by Brandom’s reconstruction, or whether he actually did say it somewhere. (In my early readings uninformed by secondary literature, I had taken Kant to be asserting that the synthesis of unities of apperception was something that just necessarily happened for any subject, qua subject. This seemed like an unattractive, failed attempt to establish objectivity on a subjectivist foundation.)

Secondary literature on Kant is vast, and much of it is outstanding in quality. Leading interpreters have deep differences, and this is as it should be. A mark of great philosophy is that it encourages creativity and spawns ever new interpretations.

If I could hazard a generalization, though, it seems that subjectivist readings of Kant are more and more challenged these days. To mention but one example, Frederick Beiser’s recent history of German idealism before Hegel is entitled German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism. Young Karl Marx’s 1844 essay on Hegel’s Phenomenology, which reduced Hegel (and arguably Kant as well) to a bad subjectivist cartoon of Fichte, is profoundly misleading. (See also Copernican.)

Aristotle and Kant

Kant and Aristotle are both very concerned to develop a thick, discursive concept of rationality, which goes far beyond the merely logical to address many questions of what is right.

Nancy Sherman and others have substantially softened the traditional contrast between Kantian and Aristotelian ethics. Kant’s critique of eudaimonism (pursuit of happiness as an ethical criterion) was mainly aimed at the British utilitarians, who really did make subjective happiness into a criterion of sorts. It would be very wrong to think this applies to the Aristotelian notion. Sherman makes a strong case that in less familiar works dealing with moral anthropology, Kant recovers something like an Aristotelian notion of character. Kant’s extended development of the concept of judgment in the third Critique also recovers something like Aristotelian practical judgment or phronesis. (See also Freedom Through Deliberation?)

Aristotle and Kant have similarly thick notions of experience. In neither case is experience something immediate, as it was with the British empiricists. For Aristotle, it is as when we say someone is “experienced”. For Kant, it involves synthesis and extensive use of concepts, which themselves have complex derivation. Properly understood, Aristotelian “metaphysics” was concerned with higher-order interpretation of experience, and thus consistent with Kantian scruples. (See also Pure Reason, Metaphysics?)

Plato and Aristotle’s strong insistence on the autonomy of reason was largely submerged in the later tradition until Kant recovered it. (See also The Word “Rationalism”.)

Some of the argument of the paralogisms of pure reason is strongly reminiscent of things Aristotle said about the soul. Aristotle and Kant are equally opposed to Augustinian/Cartesian notions of reflexive constitutive immediacy. (See also God and the Soul; Modernity, Again.)

The main target of Kant’s attacks on dogmatism was the Wolffian school in Germany. He was not much concerned with the history of philosophy, and some of his language was overly sweeping.

We should forgivingly take this into account in assessing the relation of the Critical philosophy to what I have called the epistemic modesty of Plato and Aristotle. (As Hegel recognized, Plato and Aristotle were not at all dogmatic. Plato doubted the deliverances of sense, and rejected opinion outright. Aristotle’s more optimistic, proto-pragmatist stance was elaborated in thoughtful response to that questioning. Neither of them was a simplistic realist. Moreover, the two of them were the original pioneers of rational inquiry in ethics.)

Nonetheless, neither Plato nor Aristotle anticipated the very substantial detail and development of Kant’s argument. The explicit concepts of the transcendental/empirical distinction and of unities of apperception are distinctly Kantian, as is a finer-grained analysis of processes of synthesis. Kant also more explicitly treated normativity as an outer frame around all other considerations. It is to him that we owe the notion of the primacy of practical reason. A stronger emphasis on ethical universality through the categorical imperative was another Kantian innovation. (See also Copernican; Brandom and Kant; Hegelian Genealogy.)

Deontic

Having previously agreed there is no issue with deontically necessitating constraints analogous to the modal ones for material incompatibility and material consequence, I’m now starting to wonder if this might be as far as Brandom’s deontology really goes anyway.

When I hear “deontology”, I hear rigid rules for everything going all the way to the practical last instance, and feel compelled to defend the place of an always somewhat open Aristotelian practical judgment (phronesis) in contrast to it. But I would rather not attribute such rigidity to Brandom or Kant, both of whom emphasize kinds of rules that are actually higher-order. A simultaneously logical and ethical necessitation of respect for abstract principles like material incompatibility and material consequence can be fully granted without reducing what we should do in concrete situations to a deterministic formula. I want to say that first-order rules belong in logic and mathematics, not ethics.

It feels a bit ironic that I am the one effectively appealing for a need for freedom here, but it really shouldn’t. It’s freedom of reason, not any appeal to will. (See also Varieties of Ethics; Evaluation of Actions; Necessity in Normativity; Binding; Robust Recognition; Mutual Recognition; Euthyphro.)

Binding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is “I” ?

Empirical subjectivity is not really “I”, in the sense of the “I think” that is the pure unity of apperception in Kant and Hegel. We could informally call it “me” or “myself”. That is a concrete thing in the world of things and facts, to which we participants in reason have a special relation that is nonetheless not identity. Strictly speaking, “I” is a mobile index for the tendency toward unity in a unity of apperception, with no other characteristics of any kind.

What is called consciousness is not a medium or container, but a way of being. What gets called self-consciousness in Hegel is anything but immediate awareness of an object called “self”. It has more to do with an awareness of the limitations of empirical self.

There is a long ancient and even medieval prehistory or archaeology to the now ubiquitous conception of “subjectivity”, which was pioneered in its modern form by Kant and Hegel and has been varied and/or vulgarized in innumerable ways. We can recognize the bold innovations of Kant and Hegel in the modern context and still be intrigued and enriched by this prehistory.

When dealing with such retrospective reconstruction of a putative intellectual development, it is never a matter of the persistence or mere repetition of an identical conception. Rather, the first task is to recognize a larger space of variations and developments, and then, tentatively and subject to revision, to retrospectively reconstruct a stratified and multilinear but coherent development. In French, one might consult Alain de Libera’s massive ongoing L’Archeologie du Sujet.

In the middle ages Averroes, in his Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle, developed a nuanced distinction between what he called intellect, which transcends the individual psyche but operates in it where there is rational apprehension, and what he called the cogitative faculty of the soul, which in modern terms is the seat of empirical subjectivity. The potential aspect of intellect, according to Averroes, subsists in time and accumulates forms as an indirect result of human activity, but is not part of the soul. Rather, it is something shared by all rational animals insofar as they are rational, and it would not persist if there were no living rational animals. (See translation by Richard Taylor.) In modern terms, the cogitative faculty is psychological. The potential aspect of intellect is not psychological but social and historical, resembling what I have called the transcendental field. The active aspect can be reconstructed as ideal in something close to a Kantian/Hegelian sense.

Aristotle himself has provocative, minimalist language about intellect coming to the psyche from without, and about active intellect somehow being identical with its objects. The idea of intellect being identical with its objects was revived by Hegel, with explicit reference to Aristotle. This could never be true of an empirical subjectivity.

Nonetheless — and this is the interesting part — we concrete embodied beings can participate in a transcendental unity of apperception that is bigger than we are in some some delicate virtual sense, like Spirit in Hegel. A suggestion provocatively attributed to Kant and Hegel is that paradoxically it is by virtue of this participation — which insofar as it is active dissociates or decenters us from our empirical selves — that we can say “I” at all. Then because we can say “I”, we can confuse “I” with our empirical selves. (See also Subject; Psyche, Subjectivity; Brandom and Kant; Rational/Talking Animal; Intelligence from Outside; Alienation, Second Nature; Empirical-Transcendental Doublet; Nonempirical But Historical?)