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.

Logic as Ethics

Since the groundbreaking work of Boole, De Morgan, Pierce, and Frege in the later 19th century, logic has been treated as either the foundation of mathematics — as Russell argued — or as a branch of mathematics, as suggested by contemporary type theory and category theory. This all builds on the “formal” view of logic that has been dominant in the West since the later middle ages.

In fact, the place of formalism in the practice of mathematics is debated by mathematicians. A century after Hilbert and Bourbaki, the complete systematic formalization of mathematics remains an unrealized ideal, although new work in homotopy type theory seems the most promising development yet for this (see New Approaches to Modality).

Plato and Aristotle never thought that reasoning should be “value free”. On the contrary, they treated it as an essential part of ethical life. Aristotle pioneered formal reasoning by composition, but justified the principle of non-contradiction in unmistakably ethical terms. Plato and Aristotle reasoned mainly by examining meanings, whereas in the formal view of logic, all that matters are formal rules for mechanical manipulation of arbitrary symbols. (See also Formal and Informal Language.)

Taking up Kant’s thesis of the primacy of practical (ethical) reason, Hegel took what he called “logic” in a very different direction from that of the modern formalists, focusing like Plato and Aristotle on the development of concrete meanings rather than rules for formal, meaning-agnostic operators.

Within the tradition of modern analytic philosophy, Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom have revived interest in non-formal approaches to logic that are closer to the reasoning we employ in everyday life. Brandom has also written extensively on the ethical content of Hegel’s work and its connections to Hegelian logic. He has always acknowledged that his earlier work on inferential semantics is deeply indebted to Hegel. Brandom’s “inferentialism” puts reason and the interpretation of meaning in relations of reciprocal dependence, in this respect recovering what I think is the perspective of Plato and Aristotle as well as Hegel.

The suggestion here — also supported, I believe, by Harris’ commentary on the Phenomenology — is that “logic” is most fundamentally concerned with what we ought to conclude from what, within the open philosophical perspective of what Hegel somewhat confusingly called “pure negativity”, where our view of the world is “inferential all the way down”. At the level of practical application with real-world meanings that I want to say is most important, logical “laws” are neither tautologies nor some strange kind of abstract facts, but rather a kind of best practices that themselves require interpretation to be applied.

Pure Negativity?

Hegel often characterizes the “Concept” that overcomes the opposition of subject and object in terms of what he calls “pure negativity”. This is very far removed from what contemporary logicians call classical negation (see Contradiction vs Polarity). Hegelian pure negativity is just a name for pure difference or relation with no pre-given, contentful positive terms, where the meaning of every “thing” depends on the meaning of other things, and nothing is absolutely first. This is why he can legitimately call it “absolute”. Such a perspective needs to be taken together with Hegel’s dictum that strictly speaking, there is truth only in the whole development.

Any representation involving contentful positive terms can always be superseded, as Hegel thinks it inevitably will be. But without preconceived contentful positive terms, there is nothing to supersede. Pure difference or relation thus has a kind of finality to it, precisely because it preserves the substantial content and truth we care about within a sort of ideal open-endedness.

Further and crucially, the attitude Hegel is describing is “open” not only in the epistemological sense that it avoids prejudice and may gain new insights, but also in the practical ethical sense that it is “forgiving”.

Harris in his commentary says “The concept (of self-conscious Absolute Knowing) fulfilled itself as ‘forgiveness’ in the ‘self-certain spirit’ that had no content except an ideal community; and it fulfilled itself as a real community in the historical evolution of Religion. But that real community depends for its unity on a projected image (Vorstellung) of its eternal destiny. The self-certainty of the broken-hearted Beautiful Soul must take the place of this Vorstellung…. In this final confrontation it is the singular self who acts and the community that judges. The crucial moment of ‘forgiveness’ belongs therefore to the community; but the absolute knowing belongs to the absolved individual, who thinks and knows at once for herself and for the reconciled community. It is the moral agent who steps out of the reconciled community in action; and it is she who has the knowledge of return and forgiveness. Everyone must recognize the reconciliation; but that communal recognition only preserves the community — it is not a knowing that is capable of further development.”

“In contrast, the ‘absolute knowing’ towards which we are now moving is capable of development. It is the experience precisely of the philosopher.”

“Hegel regards the self-assertion of conscientious action as identical with the advent of ‘pure thought’ — the thinking that can do Hegelian logic” (Hegel’s Ladder II, p. 723).

This last reflects a vitally important insight about Hegel’s perspective as a whole, little recognized until recently. It is one manifestation of the Hegelian version of the primacy of practical (ethical) reason. Harris has already made the better-recognized point that Hegel regarded the standpoint reached at the end of the Phenomenology as identical with that presupposed at the beginning of his Logic. Patiently following out the twists and turns of the Phenomenology with Harris, it seems to me we have come to the inescapable conclusion that — contrary to the way it has been presented by most earlier commentators — the Phenomenology is above all a book of ethics. But this conclusion then has profound implications for what Hegel will mean by “logic”, which is again very different from the way it has been characterized by most commentators. I will have more to say about this in the future.

“Pure knowing is neither judging, nor acting; it involves the letting go (Ablassen) of both ‘determinacies’ of the Concept (the active subjectivity of the agent, and the substantial Objectivity of the community). Thus pure knowing is a kind of return to the paradisal state of ‘innocence’. But we can speedily disabuse ourselves of the idea that there is anything particularly remarkable about it, by reflecting that we ourselves achieved it fairly easily and without much conscious strain, in adopting the posture of speculative observers of consciousness. The Absolute has been with us from the start, in the form of our knowledge of what our own proper position is, and what our behavior as observers should be” (p. 724).

“The Beautiful Soul is the hero of this last movement of Spirit, because its moral act is the withdrawal into Self as a pure observer. It is the antithesis of the self-actualizing Begriff [Concept], because it does not act, and is not actual. It participates in the antithesis; and in so far as it is independent knowledge of the Concept as pure essence, it is self-assertive and ‘evil’. But, in that it has become the simple knowing (observing) of the essence, the knowing that has received forgiveness, and gives it back freely to everything that it observes, it remains ‘good’. It lets the Concept go through the very same motion as Substance, or as the absolute essence. The doubling that occurs in this state of free release lets the Concept be ‘in and for itself’. In this pure knowing, the one-sidedness of self-assertion and the one-sidedness of simple being are both renounced” (ibid).

“The point is that the Spirit is what it makes itself to be, and ‘absolute Spirit’ is the unity of the knowing self with its world…. The movement is the same as in forgiveness, but we should not call it that, because it is more radical. The sides die for each other, exactly as Man and God ‘die’ for each other in the religious Vorstellung” (pp. 724-725).

“This philosophical consciousness that the knowledge-seeking Self is the world’s own necessary process of self-interpretation is the last Gestalt of Consciousness in the Science of its ‘experience'” (p. 726).

As ethical beings we are the agents of the world’s self-interpretation.