Seeming, Trying

In pursuing a pragmatist account of what meaning is, the young Brandom already anticipates a theme that will be very important in A Spirit of Trust: a thoroughgoing critique of claims to “mastery” in knowledge and action, illustrated here by the example of Descartes.

The main object of his 1976 dissertation is to show that from a starting point in what he calls social practices, pragmatism can go on to affirm that some things are nonetheless objectively real. This is in part an implicit criticism of his teacher and colleague Richard Rorty, who notoriously made ethical arguments against the very idea of objective reality. My last post treats the first chapter, which enlists Wittgenstein as a source of powerful arguments supporting the basic pragmatist emphasis on social practices as a sort of third way that avoids both subjectivism and objectivism. This post treats the second chapter.

Brandom distinguishes between two different legacies of Descartes, one concerning the special privileged status of the mental, which he strongly rejects, and one consisting of a very broadly specified epistemological project the core of which Brandom wants to uphold, while transposing it to different ground. From a highly abstracted perspective, he generously attributes philosophical worth to the very idea of a medium of thought and knowledge, and treats this as a Cartesian innovation. But for Descartes, this medium is something like consciousness that is supposed to be immediately and fully self-aware. The medium Brandom wants to uphold on the other hand is substantive language use and the inherently social practices that govern it.

“The challenge which [the second Cartesian] legacy presents to the pragmatist is this: if the use of a language, the application of expressions, consists of social practices which are whatever some community takes them to be, as Wittgenstein has argued, how is it that those practices enable the community to talk about objective things, which are independent of the community?…. According to the Cartesian tradition, all of our cognitive interaction with the objective world is by means of that medium with which alone we have direct, immediate commerce, namely the mind” (p. 42).

Compared to Brandom’s later much more fine-grained emphasis on the constitutive role of Hegelian mutual recognition, his undifferentiated Wittgensteinian appeal to the “takings” of empirical communities here is a blunt instrument. Community stands in contrast to the common modern notion of the individual as a sort of atom, but no community is a monolith, and no empirical community fully incarnates the ideal universal community of all rational animals. The “takings” of empirical communities are as much subject to error as the takings of individuals.

“This [second legacy] is a project with which the Cartesian tradition had only limited success. When the project failed, the result was a phenomenalism which concluded that because all cognition is by means of mental particulars, only mental particulars are knowable, that all knowledge is of mental particulars. There is a parallel danger for the pragmatist tradition. It is the danger that one might conclude from the fact that all cognition is by means of the social practices which make up our languages, that these practices are all that is knowable…. The prime project of this thesis is to show how knowledge which consists of social practices can be knowledge of objective states of affairs” (p. 43).

Brandom says the parallel danger for the pragmatist tradition is instrumentalism, which he characterizes as the view that social practices are all that is knowable. I have endorsed a kind of “instrumentalism” myself, but see it as applying more narrowly to practices of empirical science, not to all that is knowable.

Brandom treats the putative certainties of Descartes in light of Rorty’s account of “incorrigibility”. Like “certainty” in Hegel’s deflationary view of it, incorrigibility in this sense is a mere fact and not at all a foundation for knowledge. Things are about to become very interesting.

“There is an account of the social practices we use to talk about mental things … which may be extracted from Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and Rorty’s “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental”…. Thoughts and sensations became mental only when the noninferential reports of these entities which it turned out that people could make came to be taken to be incorrigible…. Rorty calls an utterance-type ‘incorrigible’ if within the community within which it is used there are no procedures for overruling it” (pp. 44-45).

Whether or not incorrigibility is the criterion for calling things “mental”, the implications of incorrigibility that Brandom is unfolding here offer a very important lesson.

“It will be useful … to consider an elaboration of this account of how practices of issuing reports on one’s inner states can become incorrigible. The elaboration is suggested by Sellars’ account of the ‘looks’ and ‘seems’ idiom…. [T]he practice of making seems-reports arises out of a situation in which there are sufficient regularities perceivable in the mistakes that users of the language make in their ordinary reports of their surroundings…. In such a case one makes the weaker claim ‘it seems to me that I see X’ which is understood to be noncommittal as to whether X in fact holds…. The ‘seems’ statements are so used that whenever a report is incorrect, the corresponding ‘seems’ statement is correct” (pp. 46-47).

I have always thought of “seems” phrasing as an acknowledgement that other perspectives may be possible. It honestly never occurred to me to think of it as a way of always being right. But the logic here is impeccable.

“Thus ‘seems’ is a non-iterable sentential operator — one cannot say ‘It seems to me that it seems to me that X’. Because of this feature of the ‘seems’ idiom, there are things, namely ‘seemings’… about which we cannot be overruled, and we are hence incorrigible. The social practices of using the expression are such that there is no way to overrule the statement ” (pp. 47-48).

With this argument about non-iterability, we have a case of linguistic analysis yielding an interesting and important conclusion that most likely could not have arisen by other means. It has long “seemed” to me that consciousness as such is a syntactic variant on appearance, rather than a kind of knowledge as Descartes and many others have taken it to be. But this link between non-iterability and incorrigibility is entirely new to me.

One thing that stands out about incorrigibility is that it is the very opposite of a condition for ethical dialogue abundantly illustrated by Plato, and more recently made explicit by Gadamer, Habermas, and Brandom. Real polar opposites are rare, but this is one of them. Incorrigibility has absolutely no place in what Habermas would call an ideal speech situation. All participants in genuine dialogue are corrigible. But Descartes and other bad authorities have tried to make incorrigibility a condition of knowledge. We ought to respect other people’s first-person reports. But that is a social grace, not a key to truth.

“Mental events are those which we report with expressions which fit into the same linguistic niche that seemings do. The notion of a linguistic niche is here to be taken as parallel to that of an environmental niche which an evolving organism can occupy. The particular property which I have in mind as specifying the linguistic niche which ‘seemings’ define for other mental events is the inappropriateness of embedding such things inside ‘seems’ operators. Thus ‘It seems to me that I am thinking of a red bear’ is a peculiar utterance in that ‘I am thinking of a red bear’ is already an incorrigible utterance. I am suggesting that the mark of incorrigibility is not being appropriately qualified by a ‘seems’ statement…. Thoughts and sensations are kinds of entities which are reported by expressions which cannot appear embedded in ‘seems’ statements” (pp. 48-49).

Next he explicitly draws the conclusion that incorrigibility has no place in inquiry about the nature of knowledge.

“[T]here is nothing epistemologically useful about incorrigibility in the account we have given of it. The ‘seems’ operator which creates the linguistic niche within which mental events and processes thrive must be added to a language which already has more basic sentences which can be embedded in ‘seems’ contexts. And we have seen that those more basic sentences cannot have the incorrigibility characteristic of ‘seems’ statements. The ‘seems’ idiom can be added only to a language that already has other sentences in use which are not incorrigible. Given ordinary, corrigible reports, the ‘seems’ idiom offers a way of producing trivially incorrigible reports from them. Sellars and Rorty have developed this line of thought in considerable detail, to show the error of traditional epistemological programs which seek to ground the authority of ordinary claims in the incorrigibility of these ‘seeming’ analogues. When once the priority of ordinary, corrigible utterances has been understood, there will be little desire to ‘justify’ them in terms of the incorrigible utterances that are derivative from them” (pp. 49-50, emphasis added).

“Seems” talk in effect syntactically adds a wrapper around simple assertion that must therefore already be understandable on its own if the “seems” talk that modifies it is to be understandable.

“Further, the line of thought we have just considered completes the pragmatist’s refutation of the Cartesian view of the mental as the medium of cognition, by showing that the specially criterioned realm of things which was Descartes’ first legacy will not support the sort of epistemological justification demanded by his second legacy. The incorrigibility of the mental is no ground on which to base claims about the correctness of ordinary corrigible claims” (p. 50, emphasis added).

The correctness of ordinary corrigible claims is what we ought to be concerned with. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom talks about “semantic descent” from the lofty abstraction of philosophical metaconcepts back to ordinary life. The idea is that their real meaning lies in their consequences for how we live our life. Klaus Vieweg’s outstanding new biography of Hegel suggests to me that Hegel himself would have appreciated this.

Brandom has already characterized “seems” talk as presupposing ordinary simple assertion. Earlier, he suggested that the whole project of modern epistemology — including pragmatist approaches to it — is historically shaped by what are essentially Cartesian questions. More specifically, he has suggested an analogy between the Cartesian problem of relating the mind to reality and the task he has set for himself of relating a pragmatist account of social practices to what we mean by “real” and “reality”.

Initially I wanted to resist this analogy. But Brandom suggests that the project of epistemology is itself specifically post-Cartesian, and there is a level of specificity at which this is undoubtedly true. I must acknowledge that Pierce’s account discussed further below, which I find attractive, does address recognizably Cartesian kinds of questions, even if his answers stand in opposition to those of Descartes.

Nonetheless the implicit contrast presupposed by seems-talk has been approached in other ways. The notion of appearance and something standing in contrast to it goes back at least to Plato, if not into the hazy prehistory of philosophy. In Plato we do not find hypostasized concepts of “the mind” and “the external world” confronting one another as they do in Descartes, but something more like a contrast between appearance and deeper truth. My own way of approaching such questions is broadly Platonic in this sense, and doesn’t owe much to modern notions of subject and object. Plato and Aristotle ask about “our” knowledge — meaning, for Aristotle at least, the knowledge available to rational animals — not about “the mind’s” knowledge. In medieval terms, knowledge belongs to the whole human being.

“In the rest of this section I will seek to show that the classical notion of the real serves the function of constraint of our fancy. This function requires an aspect of the Cartesian notion of the mind which we have not yet considered, that of the will. We will present a pragmatic reconstruction of that characteristic, parallel to the pragmatic reconstruction of incorrigibility we have derived from Rorty and Sellars” (p. 54).

This development of a parallelism between incorrigibility and Descartes’s voluntaristic notion of will is of great interest. The connection between the real and Cartesian will is initially not clear at all (especially to an anti-voluntarist such as myself), but Pierce’s remarks quoted by Brandom below implicitly suggest a relation through a double negative.

“So far, the notion of the real has been exhibited by means of a distinction between things which can be changed merely by the activity of ‘Thinking about X’ and those which cannot. What is it about thinking which makes a classification based on its capacity to alter things more significant than any other classification in terms of some human activity which differentiates the thing classified? Thus we can consider those things which I can alter merely by digging a hole with a spade, and those which I cannot so alter. In the former category would be holes, tunnels, graves, and so on, and in the latter would be the square root of seventeen, Plato’s Republic, and the interior of distant black holes. For what problem is the classification induced by thinking illuminating (and that induced by digging not)?” (p. 55).

The orientation through asking what problem is at issue is commendable. The comparison with digging a hole has a nice pragmatist flavor, but also would not be out of place in Plato or Aristotle. Now we get to Pierce’s point.

“I think the key may be found in some other passages of Pierce, echoed by Russell. Pierce says: ‘… the real is that which insists upon forcing its way to recognition as something other than the mind’s creation’. [Brandom continues] That the real is other than the mind’s creation is implied by the previous definition…. That this otherness is ‘forced’ upon us is an element we have not encountered, however” (ibid).

He quotes Pierce again, “…reality is insistency. That is what we mean by reality. It is the brute irrational insistency that forces us to acknowledge the reality of what we experience” (ibid).

He continues, “What is important here is … the constraint on our thinking which the real, external world exerts on our thoughts. Russell characterizes the realm of fact in terms of the same two elements: that facts don’t depend on what we think about them and that what we think is constrained by the facts…. This element of constraint of the mind, stubbornness to volitions, seems to me to be the key to understanding the role reality played in the classical philosophical tradition. The fact of being forced to think one thing rather than another suggests an answer to our question” (p. 56).

The conclusion to A Spirit of Trust memorably mentions the world’s “stubborn recalcitrance to mastery by knowledge and agency” (Spirit of Trust, p. 689). The “stubbornness to volitions” above is central to Pierce’s notion of reality, and the reference to volitions ties it back to Descartes.

“I think the picture which is being appealed to involves a distinction of two sorts of activities with respect to our control or dominion over them. On the side of fancy are things like imagining a red bear, or thinking of Vienna. These are activities in which we cannot be thwarted. We can simply do them. No effort is required, because there is no gap between trying and succeeding. Contrasted with this, we find activities like digging, which require the special circumstances (the presence of a shovel, sufficiently soft materials, etc.) for their performance, and over which we do not have total control. The point of defining as real a class of things which are in the relevant sense independent of what we think of them is that we do not have dominion over these things in the same sense in which we do over the creations of fancy. Reality is that in virtue of which there are activities like digging, in which we are constrained by circumstances beyond our immediate control. The role which the real is to play in our understanding of things is captured in the explanation it is to provide of why we cannot do whatever we want to do simply by wanting to do it” (pp. 56-57).

In the terminology Brandom will shortly introduce here, the real is that which constrains and resists our “trying”. He illustrates this by returning to the example of digging a hole.

In the terminology of A Spirit of Trust, we could say here that Descartes is overly impressed with our “mastery” over our fancy. The error of many is to treat this relation to our fancy as paradigmatic or programmatic for our relations in the world, when it is our relations in the world that come first. (I do not say “to” the world, because that does implicitly invoke a Cartesian parsing of everything into hypostasized categories of mind and world.)

“Once again, moving the arms and back in this way is something people can be trained to just do, but once again it can be asked ‘How do you move your arms and back in this fashion?’ At this point it is so far from being the case that one must know the answer to such a question in order to engage in the specified activity that we do not know what an answer should look like” (p. 57).

“Our inability thus to describe further what counts as trying to move a ‘voluntary’ muscle marks the end of possible explanations of such movement…. The fact that such explanations of activity… must stop at the attempt to produce ‘voluntary’ muscular activity is the basis for the classical doctrine of volitions. This is the doctrine that there are mental activities called volitions which are the first source of all human activity” (p. 58).

In this tradition, volition serves as the unexplained explainer of “voluntary” actions. By contrast, we have recently seen how Aristotle explains the difference between willing and unwilling actions without hypostasizing a separate faculty of will.

“We now seek a story about indefeasible dominion which will describe the function which the mind plays in Cartesian stories about acting. The mind has an active role here as the medium of activity. This means that anything which is not itself a mental activity is accomplished by means of the immediate mental activity of willing” (p. 59).

The Cartesian hypostases of mind and will have sovereignty and mastery over a hypostasized private domain of fancy. And just as we are incorrigible in our reports of “seeming”, we are the sovereign masters of our pure willing and “trying” . But as Brandom points out, in both cases this is true only in a trivial way. It is rather to ordinary activities that we should look as a paradigm.

“I want to claim that indefeasible domain over inner, mental activities is of the same trivial, stipulative nature and origin as we have seen the property of incorrigibility which characterizes our knowledge of inner, mental events to be…. Our approach is to account for dominion over the realm of fancy in terms of the ‘tries’ idiom in a way formally analogous to that in which we accounted for incorrigibility in terms of the ‘seems’ idiom” (p. 62).

“The basic point of the analogy is that just as the ‘seems’ operator forms a report such that there is nothing in the language which counts as sufficient evidence to contradict it, so the ‘trying’ operator forms a description of an action for which nothing counts as significant evidence that the action was not performed. The important formal point is that just as ‘seems’ operators cannot be iterated…, neither can ‘trying’ operators (‘I am trying to try to do X’)” (ibid).

“The second ‘trying’ is redundant…. We use the ‘trying’ operator in such a way that one can always succeed at trying to do X, whatever troubles one may have actually doing X” (p. 63).

“For ordinary activities like digging, one can actually say what the trying consisted of — e.g., certain movements of the back and arms — and why it failed, just as one can often say why it is that things seemed a certain way. The extension of these operators to cases in which no activity was successfully engaged in which can be described by the language without the operators of the mental expressions they epitomize is linguistically straightforward. So we can explain how we could come to talk about reports which are incorrigible and activities over which we have indefeasible dominion by starting off only talking about ordinary corrigible reports and activities in which we may be frustrated” (pp. 63-64).

“The reason for that non-iterability is the way the conditions under which it is appropriate to say ‘I am trying to do X’ relate to the conditions under which it is appropriate to say ‘I am doing X’. And this relation is to be understood by analogy to ‘seems’ ” (p. 64).

“For any activity which we can try to engage in and fail, such as signaling a bus, there must be some conditions of success which are not dependent merely on our tryings (else we could not try and fail” (p. 65).

“Now the important thing for Pierce, as for the empiricists and the Cartesian tradition in general, is that what we believe is constrained in this fashion. Within our framework, this is just to say that believing is not one of the things one can do simply by trying to” (ibid).

We do not “choose” to believe X. Others may have conflicting beliefs about the same thing, but that does not mean that belief is arbitrary. We believe things for reasons that are not simply plucked out of thin air.

“[T]he ‘trying’ operator must be introduced into a language which already talks about things which we can try to engage in and fail (such as signaling a bus). The primary and essential role of the ‘trying’ operator is to make this distinction between ‘doing X’ and ‘trying to do X’. It is a relatively trivial consequence of the performance of this role that the ‘trying’ operator is non-iterable” (p. 66).

“In sum, activities which can be done just by trying to do them are a by-product of activities which one can try to do and fail, not the other way around” (ibid, emphasis added).

“Once we have seen how ‘tries’ works, we can no longer maintain the Cartesian stance in which we take activities over which we have indefeasible dominion for granted and find others problematic, requiring a further notion of ‘the real’ to explain them…. Insofar as the notion of the real involves merely the idea that we are constrained, of course, it is as unobjectionable as it is unilluminating” (p. 67, emphasis added).

“It is interesting to note that in showing that the notion of a realm of unconstrained fancy over which the subject exercises an indefeasible dominion presupposes the existence of constrained activities (with respect to which alone the ‘trying’ operator can be sensibly introduced) we have provided a pragmatic version of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism in the Critique of Pure Reason…. For Kant may be understood as trying to show that the notion that we have of a faculty of spontaneity (the realm of our dominion) must be extracted from a notion of its function in concert with a faculty of receptivity (the source of constraint), and cannot be coherently described out of all connection with that receptive faculty” (ibid).

Next in this series: Pragmatics of Inquiry

Primordial Choice?

Plotinus speaks of a primordial choice implicitly made by every human: to turn either toward the separated soul, or away from it. The idea is that such a choice comes first, and is not conditioned by anything. This is completely unlike Aristotle’s treatment of choice.

Aristotle discusses choice in the context of concrete ethical doings. A choice is the outcome of a deliberation, not something undertaken in a vacuum. Our freedom consists in many such choices, based on reasons. Our unfreedom consists in part in constraint by the cumulative consequences of all our previous choices.

(I call this particular kind of unfreedom superficial because because it is “unfree” mainly in the shallow sense that it is not completely unconditioned. A conditioning grounded in reasons that we assent to is very unlike a conditioning by relations of force. In a deeper sense, a grounding in reasons doesn’t at all make us less free; indeed, many philosophers have made a grounding in reasons the very criterion of freedom. Of course, our choices may also have unintended consequences, and we have to live with these as well. That is a less superficial unfreedom. And we may be swayed by passion or imagination, which is another kind. Or we may be constrained by relations of force.)

In modern times, various writers have abstracted the notion of unconditioned choice even further, so that in principle anything could be a matter of purely arbitrary decision. Completely unconditioned choice can only be arbitrary. Here lie the seeds of tyranny. (See also Desire of the Master.)

Roots of Action

Returning again to Alain de Libera’s Archaeology of the Subject, de Libera had characterized a typical modern view of human subjectivity in terms of a “subject-agent” that combines the notion of a grammatical subject with that of a cause associated with a kind of “intentions” that are considered to be both mental acts and representations. This is a very specific cultural construct that makes many assumptions. It has acquired a kind of common-sense status, but treating human subjectivity in this way is very far from universally valid.

The common cliché is to call this the “Cartesian subject”, but de Libera’s project is to show that the groundwork for it was actually laid within the Latin scholastic tradition.

My treatment of de Libera’s work has been and will be a sort of journey of discovery; I don’t know in advance exactly where it will end up.

I had begun to look at his treatment of the particular place of Thomas Aquinas in this development. Previously, I have approached Aquinas mainly in terms of his admirable recovery and defense of what I consider to be good Aristotelian principles, and what I take to be his simultaneous divergence from or confusion of some of these that I regard as highly important. So, I felt the need to consult a few sympathetic secondary sources for a view of Aquinas more on his own terms. Now I feel a little better equipped to resume this thread.

It was a commonplace of 20th century Thomism to recommend itself as an alternative to broadly Cartesian views of what it is to be a human being. The contrasting picture de Libera paints is far more intricate and ambivalent. As well as recovering Aristotelian insights, Aquinas took some new steps in a “modern” direction, but many of these were only consolidated by the systematizing efforts of later Thomists. Part of the reason I felt the need to dwell a little on Aquinas was to be better prepared to understand distinctions between Aquinas himself and later Thomistic developments.

“The semantic field of action is nonetheless more complex, its frontiers more porous, when one considers effective usage, the real implementation of the principles mentioned, or when one analyses more finely the lexicon of the authors” (Archéologie du sujet volume 3 part 1, p. 312; my translation).

To begin with, leading 20th century Thomist scholar Bernard Lonergan concluded that a simple distinction between immanent and transitive action is “too rigid” (ibid). Lonergan is quoted (ibid) saying it was later authors who considered it metaphysically irreducible. For Aquinas, agere (to act) has a strong moral sense related to what de Libera calls a “subject of imputation”. In medieval Latin, actio (action) is used to translate both Greek praxis (glossed as moral conduct) and poieisis (glossed as production). Lonergan says Aquinas uses actio sometimes in a general sense that includes both of these, and sometimes more specifically for moral conduct. By contrast, action affecting external matter is more properly called factio.

For Aquinas, actio in the moral sense, according to de Libera’s summary of Lonergan, is associated with “free beings who are masters of their acts” (p. 313). I (and I think Aristotle as well) would say instead ethical beings who are responsible for their acts. Freedom and mastery are here implicitly defined in terms of one another, and ethical being and responsibility are also defined in terms of one another.

As I understand it, Aquinas regarded the will as a function of intellect rather than a separate faculty, so he would not be a voluntarist in the technical sense formulated that way. Nonetheless, as I understand it, he insisted that humans have the equivalent of arbitrary freedom.

I say that responsibility does not involve mastery, nor does ethical being involve freedom to act arbitrarily. This issue is independent of questions connecting action with efficient causality.

Mastery and arbitrary freedom (medieval Latin libertas, or the liberty of the lord to do whatever) are (mis)applications of something analogous to omnipotence on a moral or social level. Early modern apologists for absolute monarchy were strongly committed to an analogy between absolute monarchy and theologies stressing divine omnipotence. For Plato and Leibniz, this was the formula of tyranny. (See also Euthyphro.)

Alienation

At the stage we have currently reached in Hegel’s development, my “self” is to be identified with my concrete spiritual and cultural world. H. S. Harris in his commentary says “In its independent (or truth-knowing) aspect the rational self is not, as Descartes thought, a ‘thinking substance’; but neither is it simply the Aristotelian ‘soul’ — the form of one mortal living body” (Hegel’s Ladder II, p. 151). I think Aristotle himself — in contrast to very influential Latin medieval interpretations of his work — would have agreed with this.

“The essentially evanescent process of using a common language is Spirit as the universal Self” (ibid). “But the immediate truth of this consciousness is ambiguous. My community is a ‘universal’ for me, only when it particularizes itself” (ibid). “All of the previous shapes of consciousness are ‘abstractions’ from this ‘self-maintaining absolutely real essence'” (p. 153). “What is ‘uncovered’ but beyond speech in the Greek experience, is not deep but shallow. It is the aesthetic surface of truth and no more. But there is no need for anyone (except artists) to become ecstatic about the rediscovery of it” (p. 163). “Nothing could be less Hegelian than [an] aesthetically intuitive concept of ‘Truth'” (ibid).

Under the Roman empire’s dissolution of traditional culture and face-to-face community, “The formal universal unity is a spiritless community of atomic individuals, who are all equally persons…. The ethical substance was true spirit; but now it is supplanted by personal certainty” (p. 230). “We have entered the world of independent self-conscious wills. Everyone is a separate person with her own legal rights” (p. 231), “a legally rigid, abstract self not dissolved in the substance” (ibid). “The law defines what is mine, and what is yours” (p. 235). In the Roman Imperial world, “we were all in bondage, and obliged to recognize the absolute selfhood of an earthly Lord” (p. 247). We have moved from “Ethical Substance” to “the Condition of Right”.

Here Hegel takes up a positive aspect of the Unhappy Consciousness. As Harris recounts, “The Spirit must now embark on the great labor of self-making…. We are now invited to recognize ourselves in the ‘absolute otherness’… of a Spirit who is ‘not of this world’. In this present life we are estranged from our true selves in God’s kingdom” (ibid). “The ruin that seems to come upon the Empire from outside, really comes from the self-alienating activity of the spirit. The destruction is necessary, because self-alienation is the actualization of the Substance” (p. 248).

“Thus it was not the barbarians outside the Empire, but the revelation that the legal self-consciousness is itself barbaric, that made the decline and fall of the empire inevitable. This is what became clear when formal Reason sought to establish ‘mastery’ (a relation of unequal recognition) over the natural passions. The attempt was inevitably transformed into the tyranny of aggressive self-consciousness (the military) over finite life (the civil population)…. The whole system based upon the immediate recognition of ‘Personality’ is arbitrary. The Empire falls, because all selves must learn the lesson of self-estrangement, the lesson of submission to a command from above” (p. 250).

“In the world of True Spirit, the self simply forgot itself in the otherness of the objective custom. The Condition of Right was ‘spiritless’ because there was no absolute otherness, there was only an absolute but natural self. That absolute self has now been recognized as nothing but its own otherness — the unconscious and uncontrolled forces of natural life. This factual otherness must now regain selfhood from ‘Beyond'” (ibid).

“Antigone’s Zeus… has to yield to the ‘absolute otherness’ of Destiny. It is Destiny that becomes a Self for Unhappy Consciousness”…. “The whole actual world… is now inverted into the subordinate status of a mere moment in the divine plan for humanity…. In order to stabilize a social world in which authority is natural (and therefore arbitrary) we are forced to postulate that it is founded upon supernatural Reason.”

“This is an absurd postulate, because ‘absolute authority’ is contradictory” (p. 251). But “Reason can only coincide with Freedom; the absurd postulate of a rational divine Will… is just the first step in the emergence and evolution of this ‘identity’. Universal Christianity, as a social institution, justifies what is logically and ethically experienced and known to be absolutely unjustifiable: the acceptance of arbitrary authority. But without the projection of Reason into the Beyond, humanity could never become what it essentially is: a free self-making spiritual community, not a community of ‘natural Reason'” (p. 252).

“In order to follow Hegel’s argument, we have to employ certain concepts (notably those of ‘self’, ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘Universal’ in unfamiliar ways that seem paradoxical, because they violate our ordinary assumptions…. But if we make these logical adjustments, we can not only turn all the otherworldly talk of the world of culture into straight talk, but we can understand why the otherworldly talk was necessary….”

“[I]n due course, the division of the world of estranged spirit into the visible and the intelligible, the realm of actuality and the realm of faith, will collapse back into the categorical identity of the rational self; and as ‘pure insight’ this rational self will unmask the irrationality of the claim of faith that we can receive the truth of ‘pure consciousness’ by revelation” (p. 253). But “the Beyond of Faith is reborn almost at once as the necessary Beyond of Reason. Estrangement ends when Faith becomes Reason; but Reason is left to liquidate its own Beyond, the realm of ‘moral consciousness’ or ‘rational faith'” (p. 254).

“[H]istory and logic do not stay evenly in step in the story of the estranged world…. Faith in its stillness is not a mode of knowledge at all. It is the ‘devotion’ of the Unhappy Consciousness at the threshold of thought. In that strictly singular shape, it falls into contradiction whenever it seeks to realize itself in the world. Faith proper, has crossed the threshold into actual thought; and it does successfully transform the world. But as Pure Insight it will come back to the experience of contradiction” (p. 255). “Religion proper will be the overcoming of this whole conceptual pattern of estrangement…. With the dawning of ‘pure Culture’ we shall be equipped to deal with the ‘pure consciousness’ of Faith” (p. 257).

Next in this series: Culture

Self, Recognition, Work

“Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized'” (Hegel, Phenomenology, Baillie trans., p. 229). Thus Hegel begins the “Self-Consciousness” division, which in the final version of his outline occupies the remainder of the book.

Looking forward, Harris comments “‘Recognition’ is the Concept of Spirit as such. We are going to observe the motion of this Concept which is a ‘multi-sided and multi-significant complexity'” (Hegel’s Ladder I, p. 344).

Its ethical destiny is to become mutual recognition, but it begins as a deformed self-will. “We must realize that we are concerned with the pure self-will that has been communally designated as ‘original sin’, and that will typically designate itself as absolute virtue or duty (because it cannot have any other social justification)” (p. 353).

“When I recognize what I want to be in someone else, then I have ‘come out of myself’. The attraction (which is all that was attended to in the desiring posture) reveals itself first to be ‘self-repulsion’. The self that I presently am, I do not want. I have lost myself. Empirically I could be in despair. Those who recognize their ideal self in another sometimes are in despair. But logically the other side of the truth is more dangerous. As the object of my desire, what I see out there is not another independent self, but only a passive essence waiting for me to take possession of it. Actually, however, my relationship with that other self is more complicated. The self I want to emulate is not simply an object. She has to make herself into an object for my sake. If I am to know how to achieve what I want, she must help me, she must negate herself willingly and be at my disposal. But she may not see herself as the self that I see; or she may not want to be that. Above all, she may not want to help me to become that self” (p. 345).

Hegel famously discusses a life-and-death struggle that leads to servitude. The experience of servitude, however, will turn out to contain a vital key to further development. Labor provides a concrete model not only for the “constructive” role of the mind in interpreting things and the various practical constraints on doing this well, but also for the acquisition of skills, and for work on oneself.

In Harris’ words, “Serfdom reduces the free human agent to a thing. The serf himself is property for the free self-consciousness of his lord…. In place of the one thing and its many properties we have the one free self and his many serfs.”

“But there is a much more significant inversion of Perception here. Perception ‘takes the truth from things’ as they are given. But the human thing makes the truth of things, by controlling their properties. Serfdom is a new relation of the perceiving mind to its truth…. The lord turns the serf into a thing; but then in his labor the serf turns himself into a made thing. He trains himself into the shape of the practical Understanding” (p. 366).

“The [being-for-self] of the serf is different from that of the lord, because it is incorporated in his body — a laboring instrument which has ‘independent being’ for him. The being-for-self of the lord is just his commanding voice” (ibid).

“Through the laboring activity pure being-for-self comes to be a subsisting thing” (p. 367).

“Hegel’s reason for holding that the fear of death is essential to the right comprehension of the cycle at its finite climax is now fairly easy to graph, even if we do not find it convincing. Without the daily piecemeal discipline of obedience, the serf would never come to regard everything he touches as belonging to the lord and hence requiring to be treated with absolute respect…. If the sheep were his own, then his private interest, which Hegel calls ‘a vain sense of one’s own’, would have to be dominant. The discipline of service creates ultimately the recognition that the object has its own good, its own sense” (p. 369).

“And even if the Hellenic (or more precisely the Platonic) conviction abides with us — the conviction that spontaneous ‘desire’ can be developed into ever higher degrees of ‘love’, and that love not fear is the true road to practical objectivity — still we cannot deny that the ‘fear of the Lord’ (both the earthly and the heavenly Judge) has in fact been crucial to the evolution of our presently more fraternal (but how feebly effective) value-consciousness” (p. 370).

I think it’s also worth noting implications of this second beginning. Hegel’s approach is clearly developmental and in that sense “historical”, but it clearly does not follow a linear path that could correspond to a single progression in time. We just completed an arc from simple sensation to mathematical physics, and now we are beginning a new ethical arc, starting from the quasi-mythical origin of lordship and servitude.

On the other hand, I think Hegel actually thinks real human consciousness is always already self-consciousness, and actually considers the separate treatment of mere “consciousness” to be artificial. The ethical part of the book covers his main intent; the whole previous arc was a kind of preamble.

Next in this series: Freedom of Self-Consciousness?

Hegelian Finitude

Hegel has usually been considered to be anything but a thinker of finitude. However, the two previous philosophers to whom he devoted the most pages — Aristotle and Kant — are in their own very different ways perhaps the two most emblematic philosophers of finitude. If we start with Hegel’s ethics rather than his supposed metaphysics of Geist as a sort of divine immanence and his supposed doctrine of “absolute knowledge”, a deep resonance between his thought and Aristotle and Kant’s themes of finitude becomes evident.

Hegel is in fact extremely concerned to point out that we are not masters in life, and that error is inevitable. Further, more so than Kant — and arguably even more than Aristotle — he puts an overtly positive, optimistic face on this finite condition.

In his logical works, Hegel distinguished between a “good” and a “bad” infinity. Similarly, it could be said that he implicitly makes a very sharp distinction between “good” and “bad” finitude. Bad finitude is associated with what he called the Unhappy Consciousness. With the advent of monotheism in the West, one common extreme view held that before the infinity of God, we and all finite beings are as nothing. In this view, finite being is a mainly a burden to be overcome in the hereafter, and has no intrinsic value of its own.

“Good” finitude is what emerges from Hegel’s own view. As completely as Nietzsche but in a more balanced way, Hegel rejected the idea of finitude as a burden. For Hegel, finitude is an opportunity, not a curse. Error is an invitation to learning, and non-mastery is the path to reality. (See also Brandom on Postmodernity; Back to Ethical Being; Infinity, Finitude; Respect for All Beings; Affirmation; Truth, Beauty; Secondary Causes).

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.

Ricoeur on Locke on Personal Identity

“John Locke is the inventor of the following three notions and the sequence that they form together: identity, consciousness, self…. Locke’s invention of consciousness will become the acknowledged or unacknowledged reference for theories of consciousness in Western philosophy” (Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 102). The English word “consciousness” was actually coined by Locke’s friend the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth in a work inspired by Plotinus, but it is Locke’s systematic use of it that was spread throughout the modern world by his famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ricoeur’s account significantly draws on that of Etienne Balibar in Identity and Difference: Locke’s Invention of Consciousness.

Chapter 27 of book 2 of Locke’s Essay, “Of Identity and Diversity”, lays out his unprecedented new theory of personal identity as grounded purely in a continuity of memory, rather than any underlying substance. We tend to forget that Descartes’ cogito, as Ricoeur says, “is not a person…. It bursts forth in the lightning flash of an instant. Always thinking does not imply remembering having thought. Continual creation alone confers duration on it” (p. 103). Ricoeur says that whereas Descartes had sought to conquer doubt with certainty, Locke sought to conquer diversity and difference with an unprecedented concept of pure reflexive identity.

“Proposing to define in new terms the principle of individuation… ‘so much inquired after’…, Locke takes as his first example an atom, ‘a continued body under one immutable superficies’, and reiterates his formula of self-identity: ‘For being at that instant what it is, and nothing else, it is the same, and so must continue as long as its existence is continued; for so long it will be the same, and no other’” (p. 104).

“It is consciousness that constitutes the difference between the idea of the same man and that of a self, also termed person…. The knowledge of this self-identity is consciousness” (ibid). Locke is quoted saying “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now as it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done” (p. 105).

Ricoeur continues, “Personal identity is a temporal identity. It is here that the objection drawn from forgetting and from sleep, considered as interruptions of consciousness, suggests the invigorated return of the idea of substance: is not the continuity of a substance required to overcome the intermittence of consciousness? Locke replies bravely that, whatever may be the status of the substantial ground, consciousness alone ‘makes’ personal identity…. Identity and consciousness form a circle. As Balibar observes, this circle is not a logical fallacy of the theory: it is Locke’s own invention, supported by the reduction of substance…. It is not the soul that makes the man but the same consciousness. With regard to our inquiry, the matter has been decided: consciousness and memory are one and the same thing, irrespective of any substantial basis. In short, in the matter of personal identity, sameness equals memory” (ibid).

The word “self” is used by Locke in both generic and singular senses, with “no discussion concerning the status of the nominalized pronoun…. Locke had decided to disconnect ideas from names. Yet, ‘Person, as I take it, is the name for this self’” (p. 106). “The shift to a judicial vocabulary is not far off. The transitional concept is that of ‘person’, the other ‘name for this self’…. What makes it a synonym for the self, despite its ‘forensic’ character? The fact that it signifies that the self ‘reconciles’ and ‘appropriates’, that is to say, assigns, allocates to consciousness the ownership of its acts” (p. 107).

Locke thus not only completely rethought the notion of persons in terms of a pure logical identity in consciousness and an analogy with atoms in a void, but also formulated a radically new notion of ethical agency and responsibility, based on an analogy with the exclusive ownership associated with private property. The ownership model of agency and responsibility leaves no room for more subtle considerations of “power to”. Indeed, Ricoeur notes that Locke’s approach to politics is entirely grounded in “power over”.

From a purely logical standpoint, Locke successfully avoids many arguments against the putative total self-transparency of consciousness, by making its self-transparency a matter of definition rather than an empirical claim. Locke’s position is internally consistent. From a practical standpoint, however, any claim that total self-transparency actually applies to real life is, to say the least, fraught with difficulty. Total self-transparency seems to me to be more extravagantly supernatural than the Latin medieval notion of a substantial intellectual soul that it replaced. Also, real people are not atomic unities. From the point of view of more recent physical science, even atoms are not atomic unities. (See also Ego; Personhood; Meaning, Consciousness; Mind Without Mentalism; Aristotelian Identity; Narrative Identity, Substance; Ricoeur on Memory: Orientation; Ricoeur on Augustine on Memory.)

Next in this series: Ricoeur on Husserl on Memory

Respect for All Beings

Not just all people but all beings whatsoever deserve our respect. Many additional specialized considerations apply to beings subject to ethical appraisal (“us”), and a lot of the time I focus on these. Mutual recognition in the strong sense applies only between ethical beings, and thus only between potentially rational or talking animals, but the ethical significance of mutuality is much broader than that.

I want to say that a good ethical being claims no unequivocal mastery over any other being, period. Every being — even including inanimate objects — is to some extent an end in itself, and not simply a means to our ends. Of course, we are not unequivocally subordinate to the ends of any being, either, so it it not always wrong to sacrifice other beings to our ends. (We must eat, for instance.) But as ethical beings, we ought to be careful and thoughtful about how we achieve our ends. We are stewards, not masters.

There can be no simple rule about whether the end justifies the means. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. The answers are in the details of each case. Full evaluation of such questions could only be achieved by the universal community of all ethical beings, but the universal ethical community and its principles are not a finished achievement, only a work in progress. Nonetheless, ethical beings implicitly deliberate on behalf of all beings, not just on behalf of themselves. (See also Natural Ends.)

“Absolute” Knowledge?

The term “absolute” in Hegelian absolute knowledge refers only to a certain finality and stability of its form, not to any claim of infallibility or omniscience on the side of content. Intended for earthly actualization and thus finite in that sense (as distinct from Hegel’s sense of “finite” as what is viewed in isolation), it also does not involve any infinite or immediate reflexivity. As a first approximation, it is simply the result of a thorough renunciation of implicit pretensions of Mastery — that is to say, it is a result of the abstraction or subtraction of something from ordinary knowledge, not of the acquisition of some kind of super powers.

At the risk of courting paradox, it might be said that “absolute” knowledge is absolute precisely because it recognizes itself as relative, and true freedom is freedom from false freedom.

This is related not only to an abstract recognition that finite concepts in general are provisional and that understandings in general are context-dependent. It is also requires concrete recognition that each finite concept we actually use is in principle provisional and subject to question, and that each understanding we actually rely on implicitly involves a dependence upon context, therefore also on an assessment of context that can be questioned.

Hegel offers two further developments of this. The first is associated with the perspective that “substance is also subject”. The second is a related one involving overcoming modern thought’s characteristic separation of subject and object. While the mention of either of these may initially raise further questions, they are not difficult to grasp once explained. (See also Rationality.)