Ethics of Communication

The work of Jürgen Habermas, whom I recently cited, has both significant points of commonality and significant points of contrast with that of Robert Brandom, who first opened my eyes to a sympathetic reading of Kant and Hegel. I’d like to explore how both of these can be related to the broad aims of Platonic dialogue. Eventually, I also hope to relate this all to the needs and circumstances of emotionally sensitive personal communication between individuals.

Most human sayings of things have ethical significance. Many if not most human conflicts are traceable to communication issues. Habermas is mainly interested in exploring this at a broad social and political level. At this point in my life, I mainly hope to have some positive impact on the micro level of personal relationships. But in the world, there are close connections between these, and it would be artificial to try to completely separate them.

Habermas combines a broadly Kantian, procedural and “cognitivist”, rules- and rights-oriented concept of morality with a post-Kantian concern for intersubjectivity. He combines serious attention to German and American sociology, law, and political science, with a sympathy for both American pragmatism and the social criticism of the Young Hegelians and the Frankfurt school. He has a rather old-school, negative view of Hegel, but defends the relevance and usefulness of the broader tradition of German idealism, construed in a way that is compatible with modern science.

Brandom explicitly credits Habermas as an early influence, but also finds great value and contemporary relevance in Hegel. Brandom and Habermas have each written some about the other. Like Brandom, Habermas is a strong defender of modernity, and of the core Enlightenment values of democratic freedom and equality.

Often cited as Habermas’s magnum opus is the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (German ed. 1981; English tr. 1984, 1987). Like Brandom, he regards the pragmatics (simply put, the use) of language as coming before semantics or the study of meaning. Habermas directly associates the pragmatics of language with justification and the giving of reasons.

Habermas and Brandom both connect linguistic pragmatics with American pragmatist philosophy, by recognizing that saying is a kind of doing. They both see meaning in terms of dialogue about reasons, which I think should also be strongly associated with Platonic dialogue.

The theory of communicative action is intended mainly as an explanatory theory dealing with questions of publicly addressable fact. It deliberately straddles the boundary between philosophy and social science.

Unlike Brandom, Habermas talks about a formal pragmatics, and a non-standard formal semantics (inspired by Michael Dummet’s argument that verification comes before truth, which also has affinities with constructive logic). Brandom applies a kind of Hegelian dislike of formalism in developing an account of material inference.

Habermas is also the leading promoter of what he calls discourse ethics, about which I’ll have more to say in upcoming posts. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (German ed. 1983, English tr. 1990) and Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (German ed. 1991, English tr. 1993) develop his more specific views on ethics and morality. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (German ed.1992, English tr. 1996) applies closely related principles at the level of politics and law. These are large and sophisticated developments, with many nuances that are not very amenable to haiku-like summary, but nonetheless, over the course of a few posts, I hope to capture an overview.

I see Platonic dialogue as a kind of ideal model for what Habermas calls communication, corresponding to what Hegel, Brandom, and Habermas all call mutual recognition. At the same time, the various prerequisites for good dialogue are constitutive for meta-level judgment about our practices of communication in life. This applies as much to overcoming misunderstandings between individuals in personal life, as it does to law and politics.

Next in this series: Communicative Action

Ethical Meaning of Autonomy

The significance of the autonomy of reason defended by Kant and Hegel is primarily ethical. It is not a claim about the power of epistemology or ontology to know the truth. The autonomy of reason stands for free inquiry about ethics and normativity, in contrast to the authoritarianism of what Brandom calls the “command/obedience” model of normative authority. This has nothing at all to do with excessive knowledge claims or objectification, or with what Derrida called logocentrism. Instead it’s about reasonableness and respect for people. (See also New Biography of 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.)

Authority

“Authority” is not one thing. Aristotle might remind us that it is said in many ways. Two of the most important have nearly opposite senses. One asserts an arbitrary power over others, or an entitlement to coerce others: “Do what you are told”. Why? “Because I said so”. The other is a kind of earned respect that is virtually identical with justification.

An important case is what is called argument from authority. There are practical situations in which very rapid response is required, and there is literally no time for debate. We don’t hesitate to simply grab a child who is in danger from an oncoming car, and we don’t consider this a violation of Kantian respect for others. We also tend to trust the judgment of those we judge to have good judgment. But in any situation in which what is good or what is true is disputed, argument from authority is basically cheating.

“Because I said so” or “because someone in authority said so” is logically circular, and a circular argument does not establish anything. A particularly insidious version of this is appeals to the will of God, as if all by itself this were a criterion of what is right.

What these conceal is the speaker’s unboundedly prideful implicit claim to personally know the will of God beyond any doubt, regardless of anyone else’s contrary view of what the will of God is.

Plato in his dialogue Euthyphro portrays Socrates as asking whether we should say that a thing is holy because the gods love it, or on the contrary that the gods love a thing because it is holy. ”Because the gods love it” or “because it is God’s will” is logically equivalent to “because I said so”, because the speaker simply assumes it is beyond doubt that the speaker’s view is God’s view.

Building on Plato, Leibniz asks whether a thing is good and just because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is good and just, and answers that it must be the latter, because to assert the former would make of God a tyrant rather than a being good and just. If on the other hand God is good and just, and therefore wills whatever is actually good and just in each situation, then we are responsible for understanding what is good and just in each case.

Claimed entitlements to coerce others should require substantial justification. We might be tempted to say that no one should ever coerce anyone else, but there are sociopaths and Nazis who do not respect others at all. The problem is that once an authority to coerce is instituted, it takes on a life of its own, and is prone to abuse. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But occasionally, coercion is the only way to avoid a greater evil. There are no easy answers here.

Brandom and Pippin on Hegelian Ethics

Robert Brandom and Robert Pippin are two major “deflationary” readers of Hegel these days. Counter to the old bad stereotype of Hegel as an extravagant metaphysician who turned his back on Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics, they both see Hegel as further developing the most essential aspects of Kant’s innovations. Both aim to carry forward Wilfrid Sellars’ Kant-inspired critique of the “myth of the given”. They both see human intentions in terms of shareable meanings rather than private mental contents.

Brandom sees Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition not only as leading to a radically new, expanded notion of responsibility, but also as providing a basis for a novel general account of the objectivity of knowledge. Pippin meanwhile has developed an innovative, strongly Aristotelian reading of Hegel’s practical philosophy. I like putting the two of these together.

Brandom radicalizes the Kantian theme of the primacy of practical reason, effectively putting ethical inquiry before epistemology, ontology, or formal logic. He replaces metaphysics with a new kind of meta-ethics. Unlike many who have used the term “meta-ethics”, he does not seek some naturalistic or empirical foundation for ethics; rather, he sees “normativity all the way down”. Normative considerations are involved in the interpretation of anything at all. Judgments of fact depend on value judgments, and value judgments implicitly depend on the possibility of dialogue under conditions of mutual respect. It is principally through being subject to open-ended rational dialogue that judgments are verified.

Brandom’s expanded notion of responsibility is aimed at promoting greater and wider forgiveness, while simultaneously eliminating common excuses for misdeeds. Aristotle and important strands of the Christian tradition already promoted the idea that people should not be blamed or punished for unintended consequences of their actions (or for things they were coerced into doing). Brandom attributes to Hegel the novel view that everyone shares responsibility for all unintended consequences.

Pippin makes the profoundly Aristotelian point that what we actually did is the best guide to what our intentions really were. He argues that for Hegel, our own interpretation of our intentions has no privileged status in comparison to the interpretations of others. He would undercut excuses of the sort “I did x, but I really wanted y“. Rather, he would say that what we really wanted — not in the abstract, but under all the conditions that actually applied — was just what we did.

The actuality referenced here is a matter neither of simple fact nor of empirical consensus or majority opinion, but is itself a matter of normative evaluation under conditions of rational dialogue and respect for all.

In Itself, For Itself

Robert Brandom’s Brentano lectures highlight key themes of his innovative reading of Hegel in A Spirit of Trust (2019). Despite a few disagreements on matters of historical interpretation, I think Brandom is probably the most important philosopher yet to write in English. In the first lecture, he explores the development of the notion of practical valuational doing and normative force from Kant to Hegel. He interprets Hegel’s abstract language about the “for itself” and the “in itself” in terms of the interplay between normative attitudes (the “for itself”) and normative statuses (the “in itself”) in concrete processes of valuation in human life.

Hegel thought that Kant almost got things right with his twin notions of ethical autonomy and respect for others. Brandom diagnoses two main flaws in Kant’s account from Hegel’s point of view. Both Kant and Hegel were working to reconcile the modern notion that normative statuses depend on normative attitudes with a genuine bindingness and objectivity of normativity. For Kant, respect for others was the counterweight to the individualist implications of autonomy, and Brandom traces its development into the Hegelian notion of mutual recognition. Kant’s notion of autonomy was a great contribution in the history of ethics, perhaps the most significant since Aristotle. (See also Autonomy, Normativity.) Nonetheless, the first flaw in Kant’s account has to do with autonomy.

“Kant’s construal of normativity in terms of autonomy is at base the idea that rational beings can make themselves responsible (institute a normative status) by taking themselves to be responsible (adopting an attitude)” (p. 7, emphasis in original throughout). While elsewhere showing great admiration for the broad thrust of this Kantian idea of normative “taking”, Brandom here goes on to ask more specifically, “What is it for an attitude of claiming or acknowledging responsibility to be constitutive of the status of responsibility it claims or acknowledges—that it immediately (that is, all by itself, apart from any other attitudes) institutes that status?” (p. 8). “For the idea of individual attitudes of attributing statuses that suffice, all by themselves, just in virtue of the kind of attitudes they are, to institute the statuses they attribute, is the idea of Mastery, or pure independence. (What it is purified of is all hint of dependence, that is, responsibility correlative with that authority.)” (p.10). Hegel will go on to reject the idea of Mastery in all its forms, even the seemingly benign Kantian one of attributing the autonomy characteristic of ethical reason directly to acts of individuals. (See also Hegel on Willing.)

“The idea that some attitudes can immediately institute the normative statuses that are their objects, that in their case, taking someone to be authoritative or responsible can by itself make them have that authority or responsibility, is, on Hegel’s view a characteristic deformation of the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. It is the idea allegorized as Mastery. Hegel sees modernity as shot through with this conception of the relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses, and it is precisely this aspect of modernity that he thinks eventually needs to be overcome. In the end, he thinks even Kant’s symmetric, reflexive, self*-directed version of the idea in the form of the autonomy model of normativity is a form of Mastery. In Hegel’s rationally reconstructed recollection of the tradition, which identifies and highlights an expressively progressive trajectory through it, Kant’s is the final, most enlightened modern form, the one that shows the way forward—but it is nonetheless a form of the structural misunderstanding of normativity in terms of Mastery” (p. 11).

Mastery understands itself as pure independence, “exercising authority unmixed and unmediated by any correlative responsibility…. The Master cannot acknowledge that moment of dependence-as-responsibility” (p. 12). Hegel considers this to be an incoherent conception, in that it is incompatible with the moment of responsibility necessarily involved in any and all commitment. Secondly, it cannot acknowledge the genuine insight that there is dependence of normative attitudes on normative statuses as well as vice versa. “[T]he Master must understand his attitudes as answering to (responsible to, dependent on) nothing” (p. 13). Finally, Brandom argues that no intelligible semantics — or account of conceptual content with any bite — could possibly be compatible with this kind of pragmatics. (See also Arbitrariness, Inflation.)

The second flaw diagnosed by Hegel is that Kant’s twin principles of autonomy and deservingness of respect on Kant’s account turn out to be exceptional kinds of normative status that are not instituted by a kind of taking. Instead, they are presented as a kind of ontological facts independent of any process of valuation. Brandom says Hegel thought Kant was on this meta-level still beholden to the traditional idea of pre-given normative statuses. Nonetheless, the Kantian criterion of respect already suggests that our normative takings take place in a mediating social context. With autonomy and respect, Kant “had all the crucial conceptual elements, just not arranged properly” (p. 17).

Through his account of mutual recognition, Hegel will go on to recover the values that are at stake in the Kantian notions of autonomy and respect, without treating them as pre-given. “Robust general recognition” of others is attributing to them “the authority to attribute authority (and responsibility)” (p. 19). Hegel wants to say that as individual rational beings we cannot ethically and cognitively lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but together we can and do.

As Brandom puts it, “recognitive statuses are not immediately instituted by recognitive attitudes, but they are instituted by suitably socially complemented recognitive attitudes” (p. 21).

He quotes Hegel saying, “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself, because and by virtue of its existing in and for itself for an other; which is to say, it exists only as recognized…. Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another…. Thus the movement is simply the double movement of the two self-consciousnesses. Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both.” (pp. 22-23). This is the genesis of Hegelian Spirit.

We can only be responsible for what we acknowledge responsibility for, but every commitment to anything at all is implicit acknowledgement of a responsibility. Commitment is meaningless unless we also implicitly license someone to hold us responsible to it.

I-Thou, I-We

Brandom has long insisted on the more fundamental role of I-Thou relations as compared with I-We relations. This means that a community is not a pre-given whole or an immediate belonging, but rather something that emerges out of concrete relationships. This seems to me like a good Aristotelian or Hegelian approach. Truth is concrete, as Hegel put it. There are also grounds for saying that face-to-face relations (literal or metaphorical) are more primary for ethics than any alleged immediacy of a community as an abstract entity. Even more than other things, our notions of actual unity of collectivities like communities are products of complex Kantian synthesis.

Martin Buber famously contrasted I-Thou relations with I-It relations. For Buber, I-It relations refer to objects viewed as separate from us and are typical of sensation, whereas I-Thou relations involve others we recognize as like us, and have an intrinsically ethical character.

Though we metaphorically speak of the spirit of a community, a community as a unity is not a person but an abstraction. In this way, it is more like an object. Kantian respect applies to persons — to concrete others.

It is only in Brandom’s interpretation of Hegelian mutual recognition in his later work that his emphasis on I-Thou relations reaches its full flowering. Earlier, I think he had wanted to achieve the same delicate balance as in the later work. Social norms are instituted from the normative attitudes of people, but nonetheless also acquire a kind of emergent objectivity, so that something is not right just because I or my empirically existing community say it is, but because of a whole complex of criteria that have acquired relative independence. On the other hand, the last word is never said, so even what emerges as objective and relatively independent can also be questioned and change. But his earlier work was mainly framed as an ambitious technical contribution to the philosophy of language, even though normativity played a central role in it. One reviewer characterized Brandom’s “normative pragmatics” as the first comprehensive attempt to ground the whole philosophy of language in Wittgenstein’s dictum that meaning is use.

Brandom’s mentor Richard Rorty already characterized Making It Explicit as taking analytic philosophy into a new Hegelian phase, but at this stage Brandom was still very circumspect about the ultimately Hegelian character of his views, engaging mainly with the work of other analytic philosophers. Without his later detailed argument about mutual recognition, his assertion that normativity also has a kind of objectivity derived from intersubjectivity seemed to many readers not to be adequately supported or developed.

Brandom spent decades carefully laying the ground for the idea that there really could be a unification of analytic philosophy with key aspects of Hegel’s thought that would be meaningful and convincing in analytic terms. Only after that long preparatory work did he begin to publicly focus on Hegel. Only then did his longstanding emphasis on I-Thou relations flower into a groundbreaking account of mutual recognition, and only then did its ethical significance become more clear.

A number of reviewers have suggested that he changed his mind on this issue, from a more one-sided emphasis on attitudes to his current view that emphasizes a kind of two-sided interaction. I have tended to see more continuity, but Making It Explicit did briefly flirt with applying the term “phenomenalism” to Brandom’s view of norms. The way I understand phenomenalism, such a term better applies to a one-sided emphasis on attitude-dependence of norms than to the two-sided, intersubjective view that I think is already implicit in his I-Thou emphasis. I have not seen this odd usage of “phenomenalism” recur in his later work. That term gets zero references in the index to A Spirit of Trust.

Brandom associates one-sided attitude-dependence with modernity, and the two-sided view with what he now calls Hegelian postmodernity. As I have mentioned too many times already, I do find it odd that he has chosen to valorize the one-sided view as historically progressive, when his own view is two-sided. For me, the subjectivist or voluntarist error is at least as bad as naive traditionalist acceptance of values as pre-given. I want to emphasize the two-sided view across the board.

It is worth noting that Ricoeur has rehabilitated the third person from Buber’s negative association with an “It” by connecting it with notions of justice, which he sees as involving as an additional mediation of ethical second-person relations through Kantian universality in the third person. But Ricoeur’s notion of justice has nothing to do with Buber’s I-It model; indeed, one of the two “axes” around which it revolves is an implicitly I-Thou based “dialogical” constitution of self that ends up being close to Brandom’s. (See Ricoeur on Justice; Ricoeurian Ethics.) An important strand of the argument of his late work Memory, History, Forgetting converges with Brandom’s critique of a focus on I-We: “It is, therefore, not with the single hypothesis of the polarity between individual memory and collective memory that we enter into the field of history, but with the hypothesis of the threefold attribution of memory: to oneself, to one’s close relations, and to others” (p. 132).