Empirical-Transcendental Doublet?

Foucault, near the end of The Order of Things, with brilliant prose attacked what he called the empirical-transcendental doublet in Kant, by which Foucault meant a putative subject that is supposed to be simultaneously empirical and transcendental.

Kant is often criticized for his apparent dualisms, and with some justification. Foucault’s criticism has an opposite form. It presupposes that Kant’s distinction between empirical subjectivity and the transcendental does not really hold. If it did, there would be no confusion between the two. Here is a case where Kant’s so-called dualism is really helpful.

There is a subtlety here, because there must still be some interaction among these things that need to be distinguished. The transcendental is independent of experience, without being otherworldly. It helps shape experience, without violating that independence.

I think empirical subjectivity is grounded in our emotions and emotional constitution, which also form the main basis of common-sense personal identity. Kantian transcendental subjectivity, on the other hand, is grounded in our ethos.

What Foucault’s criticism legitimately applies to is a bad Kantianism that re-establishes Cartesian-Lockean mentalism by imbuing empirical subjects with transcendental powers, and implicitly uses the transcendental as a foundational guarantee for some alleged properties of empirical subjectivity. Wherever there is undifferentiated talk about “the” subject, this sort of thing is likely to be at work. Kant himself is not guilty of this.

I want to say that the transcendental is intimate to us without being immanent in us. (See also Archaeology of Knowledge; Ethos, Hexis; Soul, Self; Apperception, Identity; Self-Consciousness vs Identity.)

The Autonomy of Reason

The Enlightenment has been widely described as an age of reason, but the moderate Enlightenment — at least until Kant — put many more limits on reason, especially in areas like religion and politics, than Plato and Aristotle did.

Kant made the autonomy of reason — its non-subordination to anything else — an explicit theme. Rhetorically, of course, he also famously talks about limits on reason, but really what he wants to limit are extra-rational accretions woven into Cartesian and Wolffian rationalisms — various received truths, and so on. Descartes had quickly moved from hyperbolic doubt to question-begging acceptance of many received truths as intuitively reasonable. Wolff and his followers, to whom Kant was primarily reacting, did not even pretend to doubt.

If reason is to be truly autonomous, it cannot start from received truths. Kant himself was sympathetic to some of these received truths, but too honest to pretend they were self-evident or derivable from reason alone. Kant is often misunderstood as mainly a critic of reason, and certainly not its unconditional defender, but he is actually clear that the autonomy of reason is unconditional. Too often, readers of Kant focus too much on autonomy of a subject rather than autonomy of reason, but the practical autonomy attributable to a so-called subject in Kant is actually derivative, based on the putative subject’s participation in the autonomy of reason. In Making It Explicit, Brandom says where Descartes had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant focused instead on their grip on us (p. 9). (See also Kant’s Groundwork.)

Hegel has been widely misunderstood as an example of the autonomy of reason gone mad. Brandom, Pippin, and Pinkard have performed an invaluable service in clarifying what Hegel was really trying to do, which was in part to sincerely take up Kant’s honesty about received truths and to push it even further.

Aristotle said that of all things, reason most deserves to be called divine. He does not use a word like autonomy, but the effect is the same. Nothing is higher. (See also Interpretation; Brandom on Truth.)

I think of the Kantian autonomy of reason as necessarily involving something like the free play of the Critique of Judgment. The Reason that is truly autonomous in the Kantian sense will be a hermeneutical Reason (see Brandom and Hermeneutics).

Freedom and Free Will

Plato and Aristotle got along perfectly well with what many people think was no concept of a separate “will” at all. Aristotle nonetheless developed a nuanced account of deliberation and choice, which should have made it plain for all time that no extravagant assumptions are necessary to provide a basis for morality. All that is required for ethical development is that there be things within our power, not that we can somehow magically escape from all determination.

Curiously, the notion of a “freedom of indifference” emerged in Stoicism, generally thought to be a haven of determinism. The Stoic sage is claimed to be completely indifferent and unaffected by passions, therefore completely free. Some monotheistic theologians later applied an even stronger version of this to God. God in this view is absolutely free to do absolutely any arbitrary thing. Some even claimed that because man is in the image of God, man too is supernaturally exempt from any constraint on the will. Descartes claimed that the physical world was wholly determined, but that the human soul is by the grace of God wholly free. (See also Arbitrariness, Inflation.)

Others thought we are free when we are guided by reason. This view takes different shapes, from that of Aquinas to that of Spinoza.

Kant introduced another kind of freedom, based on taking responsibility. Where I decide to take responsibility, I am free in that sense, with no need for a supernatural power. I can take responsibility for things that are by no means fully within my control. Kant unfortunately confuses the matter by talking about freedom as a novel form of causality, while denying that this makes any gap in Newtonian physical causality. (See also Kantian Freedom; Kantian Will; Freedom Through Deliberation?; Beauty, Deautomatization; Phenomenology of Will.)

Hegel too reproduced some voluntarist-sounding rhetoric, but his version of freedom is a combination of both the reason and responsibility views with absence of slavery or oppression. (See also Independence, Freedom.)

Confusion continued into the 20th century notably with Sartre, who claimed that man is free even in prison, and attacked so-called structuralism for allegedly undermining said freedom.

Freedom as reason, freedom as responsibility, freedom as absence of slavery and oppression are all things we should want. As for the rest, see the Appendix to Book 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics (though unfortunately Spinoza is unfair to Aristotle in treating all teleology as supernatural in origin). (See also Subject; God and the Soul; Influence.)

Brandom explicitly mentions theological voluntarism as associated with what he calls the “subordination-obedience model” of normativity. (See also Voluntarism.)

The Ancients and the Moderns

The mature Hegel’s generalizations about the ancient world — discussed at length by Brandom and Pippin — remains a lingering puzzle for me. I would think, given Hegel’s deep appreciation for Plato, and even more so Aristotle, that Hegel would have recognized that Plato and Aristotle regarded normative statuses as anything but unproblematically given. But Hegel repeatedly imputes a naive, precritical attitude resembling that of the Consciousness chapter of the Phenomenology to the ancient world as a whole, apparently including Plato and Aristotle.

Talk about subjects and objects is distinctively modern, due mainly to Kant and Hegel. I want to say it is due to shallow readings of Kant and Hegel. I think not only Hegel but even Kant already wanted to overcome this dichotomy. I would argue that the transcendental in Kant is a third kind that is neither subjective nor objective, and that some of Plato and Aristotle’s discussions of form and its knowability were already at something like this level.

Kant famously criticizes the kind of realism that takes objects as unproblematically available to be known (“dogmatism”), without ever seeming to clearly recognize that the greatest philosophers of the ancient world would never have wanted to defend it. See separate post “The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle”.

Even Robert Pippin, a very close reader of Hegel who pays considerable attention to his affinities to Aristotle, seems to join the chorus when it comes to the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. (See also Hegel on the Ancients; Enlightenment; Heroism and Magnanimity; Modernity Clarified; Alienation, Modernity; Modernity, Again.)