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

Transferences of the Subject

Here we have an important chapter in the emergence of the modern notion of “the Subject” as a mental entity.

The doctoral dissertation of Jean-Baptiste Brenet — supervised by Alain de Libera, and published as Transferts du sujet: La noetique d’Averroes selon Jean de Jandun (2003), is on John of Jandun’s reading of the noetics of Averroes.

John of Jandun was declared a heretic and excommunicated, but this was due to his support for his friend Marsilius of Padua’s work Defensor Pacis. That work uses a combination of theological and Aristotelian arguments to contest the pope’s and the Church’s authority over civil government. Marsilius reportedly also made the radical early claim that democracy is the best form of government. Like John, he is typically labeled as an “Averroist”.

Nineteenth-century scholar Ernest Renan wrote that “Few authors have been more cited and afterward more forgotten than John of Jandun” (quoted on back cover of Brenet’s book, my translation). Brenet, however, finds Renan and the great 20th-century Thomist Etienne Gilson to be extremely prejudiced in their accounts of so-called Latin Averroism.

The mid-20th century Thomist scholar F. Van Steenberghen wrote that John of Jandun was the first true Latin Averroist. Thirteenth-century figures like Siger of Brabant only defended a few key theses of Averroes. Brenet agrees that there was no real Latin Averroism in the 13th century, but he sharply challenges Renan’s and Gilson’s characterization of the “Averroism” that did emerge in the 14th century. They declared it completely lacking in philosophical substance, and claimed it was held together only by sheer dogmatism. Brenet’s book provides abundant evidence to refute this.

By Brenet’s account, John of Jandun sees himself first and foremost as a serious commentator on Aristotle. His works are full of references to Averroes, but his actual positions on issues by no means simply follow Averroes. Like many of the scholastics, he writes as a thoughtful philosopher examining questions that others have discussed. His original arguments about active sense are but one example. Conversely Averroes, known to the Latins as “the” Commentator, substantially influenced many writers whom no one would call “Averroist”. At one point during the nominalist controversy of the 14th century, it is reported that the pope explicitly directed European universities to continue teaching Aristotle using the commentaries of Averroes.

John of Jandun endorses the originally anti-Averroist slogan “this human thinks”. He accepts a variant of the scholastic “intellectual soul”. On a key question like the so-called material intellect’s relation to the human, he follows Siger of Brabant’s original theory that intellect is an “intrinsic motor”, a concept that has no precedent in Averroes.

I plan to devote a few posts to some of the details in Brenet’s book. For more context, see Aristotelian Subjectivity Revisited; “This Human Understands”; “This Human”, Again; Averroes as Read by de Libera; Averroes to Eckhart?; Desire, Image, Intellect.

Next in this series: “Intellect” and the Body

Rorty’s Pragmatism

We’re in the middle of Robert Brandom’s recent Spinoza lectures, published as Pragmatism and Idealism (2022). He has been situating the work of his teacher Richard Rorty (and implicitly his own as well) in the context of 20th-century philosophy in the English-speaking world. Rorty aimed to revive the minority tradition of American pragmatism, which historically adopted a number of insights from Kant and Hegel, upon which Brandom aims to further expand. Rorty wanted to question standard received views of experience and representation. Brandom has been contrasting pragmatist views of the philosophy of science with the mid-20th century orthodoxy of logical empiricism.

“[E]xperience is not an input to the process of learning. Experience is the process of learning” (Pragmatism and Idealism, p. 23, emphasis in original).

“The rationality of science is best epitomized not in the occasion of the theorist’s sudden intellectual glimpse of some aspect of the true structure of reality, but in the process by which the skilled practitioner coaxes usable observations by experimental intervention, crafts theories by inferential postulation and extrapolation, and dynamically works out a more or less stable but always evolving accommodation between the provisional results of these two enterprises. The distinctive pragmatist shift in imagery for the mind is not from mirror to lamp, but from telescope and microscope to flywheel governor” (ibid).

Brandom has also been diagnosing inherent conflicts within the tradition of logical empiricism.

“A threatening and recalcitrant tension accordingly concerned how to proceed when respect for the deliverances of science as the measure of what there is and how it is in nature collides with empiricist strictures on when we are entitled to claim to know what there is and how it is. Otto Neurath thought that naturalism should prevail, while Moritz Schlick thought that empiricism should. Rudolph Carnap struggled mightily to keep the two wings of the movement from flying off in different directions. In spite of his many pragmatist corrections to and emendations of his hero Carnap, Quine could never bring into harmony his own scientific naturalism and residual empiricist hostility to modality” (pp. 25-26).

It is in this context that Rorty calls for a revival of pragmatism. More than Rorty himself, Brandom brings out the Kantian and Hegelian background of the pragmatist alternative.

“Rorty’s call for a second pragmatist Enlightenment, completing the first, is a Hegelian extrapolation of the original Kantian understanding of the Enlightenment, extending the application of that concept from ethics to encompass also semantics and epistemology. Further on, I will say more about what makes it Hegelian, and what difference that step beyond Kant makes. But first it is worth filling in the argument behind this subsumption of semantic anti-representationalism under the banner of humanistic Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism. In its largest structure, I think it consists of two moves: a Kantian appreciation of the normative character of representational relations, and a Hegelian social pragmatism about normativity in general” (p. 30, emphasis in original).

Here we are at the core of Brandom’s work on Kant and Hegel. It is fascinating to see how much of this he attributes to Rorty. This is a nice capsule account. (I’m still wary of the extremely compressed term “social pragmatism”, which presupposes a much more elaborate understanding like the one he is developing.)

“The first [of the two moves Brandom attributes to Rorty] is part and parcel of Kant’s radical recasting of Descartes’s division of things into minds and bodies in terms of the distinction between norms and causes. Kant reconceives discursive intentionality (apperception or sapience) as a normative phenomenon. What principally distinguishes judgments and intentional actions from the responses of merely natural creatures is their normative status” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This has huge significance. In language compatible with modern notions of cause, discourse around the notion of normativity seems able to express all practical matters of mind or spirit. This was a great problem with which the early moderns mightily struggled.

“Knowers and agents are responsible for how they take things to be and make things to be. Candidate knowings and doings express commitments as to how things are or shall be. They are exercises of a distinctive kind of authority: the authority to commit oneself, to make oneself responsible. This is the authority to bind oneself by rules in the form of the concepts discursive beings apply in judging and intending. Merely natural creatures are bound by rules in the form of laws of nature. Discursive beings are bound by rules they bind themselves by: concepts they apply, which are rules determining what they have thereby made themselves responsible to and for. Their normative statuses (responsibility, commitments) are instituted by their attitudes of undertaking or acknowledging these commitments” (pp. 30-31, emphasis in original).

Brandom is literally reinventing the notion of authority. This is not some power emanating from a central source, but the authority of all rational beings to undertake commitments and responsibilities just by binding themselves to those commitments and responsibilities. This is a version of Kantian autonomy.

At the same time Brandom appeals to Kant’s provocative, non-representationalist suggestion that concepts should be thought of as a kind of rules.

He continues, “Autonomy is the essence of Kantian rationality. It is a distinctive normative sort of freedom, which Kant develops by turning Rousseau’s definition of freedom — [Rousseau] says ‘obedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom’ — into a criterion for genuinely normative bindingness” (p. 31).

The autonomy of reason means that reason is not subordinated to any unquestioned assumptions. Its exercise is free.

I have long puzzled over Kant and Hegel’s enthusiasm for Rousseau, who has usually seemed to me like an anti-rationalist voluntarist, with his emphasis on will rather than reason. I also tend to viscerally reject social contract theory, as a vulgar business-transaction metaphor for considerations that ought to be treated in more comprehensively ethical terms. But this particular formulation does seem to have a more specific relation to Kantian autonomy. “Obedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself” implies a strong consistency, which Brandom elsewhere relates to the Kantian meta-goal of unity of apperception. A delicate question that arises here is whether the mythical founding moment of such obedience is taken to be arbitrary, or rather on the contrary is subject to the same conditions of Socratic questioning as everything else.

“I think that in his later critique of representationalism in semantics on the basis of a more thoroughgoing and general version of Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism, Rorty follows Hegel in focusing on the rulishness of Kant’s conception of representation. For Hegel reads Kant as offering a normative concept of representation, as a way of filling in his normative conception of intentionality. Kant dug down below Cartesian epistemological concerns about the warrant for our confidence in the success of our representational undertakings to uncover the underlying semantic understanding of representational purport they presuppose” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Despite his emphasis on autonomy, Kant is very much a philosopher of rules and law, who emphasizes the nomos (law or custom) in autonomy. From Hegel’s point of view, this is partly a strength and partly a weakness. Kant sees formalism as a safeguard against arbitrariness, and implicitly expects it to be deployed in a reasonable way. Hegel recognizes this, but also thinks that every formalism will eventually go wrong.

Brandom continues, “Where Descartes takes for granted the representational purport of our thought (construing it as something we immediately know, just by having thoughts at all) — their being, in his phrase, tanquam rem, ‘as if of things’ — Kant asks what it is about our thoughts in virtue of which they so much as seem to represent something else, purport to point beyond themselves to something they are of or about” (pp. 31-32).

Descartes and many others take the contents of thought and their apparent meanings for granted. Kant and Hegel and the pragmatists do not.

“One lesson that Hegel learns from Kant, as I understand him, is that a representing is responsible to what it represents for assessments of its correctness, in a distinctive sense. What is represented exercises authority over what count as representings of it just in virtue of its serving as a standard those representings are responsible to for such assessments of correctness (as representings). This is a radical reconceptualization of the representational relations between representeds and representings as a normative relation of authority and responsibility” (p. 32, emphasis in original).

Here Brandom lays the ground for a response to Rorty’s rejection of the “authority” of Reality with a capital R. For Brandom, genuine authority is not something imposed on us from above, but something in which we too participate from a ground level. And representation is not just a matter of fact, but something we do well or poorly, and thus something subject to normative appraisal.

“Pragmatism in this sense is the claim that normative statuses — paradigmatically responsibility or authority, commitment or entitlement — are always and everywhere features of the role something plays in social practices. Norms are creatures of our practices, instituted by our practical attitudes: how we take or treat things. Apart from their involvement in such practices, there are no normative proprieties, only natural properties” (p. 32, emphasis in original).

Brandom here implicitly associates pragmatism with the Kantian thesis of the primacy of “practical” reason. Kantian practical reason is ethical reason.

Pragmatism has commonly been presented as continuing something like the spirit of the British utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. The utilitarians certainly have ethical concepts of their own, but they are “ethical naturalists” who ultimately explain ethics in terms of utility or pleasure.

Kant’s thesis of the primacy of practical reason, especially as radicalized by Brandom, goes in the opposite direction. It makes value judgment the root of all other judgment, including judgment of ordinary facts. Questioning about the good comes before any conclusions about the real or the true in the constitutive order of things. I think Plato and Aristotle would both endorse this.

“This is a social, Hegelian version of a central enlightenment idea. Samuel Pufendorf theorized about what he called the ‘imputation’ of normative characteristics of things: the way they acquire this new sort of normative significance by playing a suitable role in our practices. Social contract theories of political obligation looked for the origin of normative statuses of political authority and responsibility in practical attitudes of contracting and consenting. By contrast to traditional ideas of an objective natural or supernatural order of normative superiority and subordination (the scala naturae, the Great Chain of Being), the modern idea is that there were no statuses of authority and responsibility, no superiors and subordinates, until we started taking or treating each other as authoritative and responsible, as entitled to command and obliged to obey” (pp. 32-33, emphasis in original).

Pufendorf played a major role in the development of the notion of a social contract, and early modern secular theories of “natural law”. He was a political voluntarist, and a defender of absolute sovereignty in the tradition of Bodin and Hobbes. But Brandom points out that Pufendorf also sought to explain normative significances in terms of roles in social practice. (Any serious thinker ought to be embarrassed at the prospect of defending sheer arbitrary will, so it is not surprising that voluntaristic political theorists ended up tempering their voluntarism.)

Now we come back to Rorty and Cartesian representationalism.

“The answer [Rorty] eventually came to, starting off with the rough, popular characterization of ‘privacy’ and ending with the substantially more focused notion of ‘incorrigibility’, was in explicitly normative terms. The key, he came to see, is a distinctive kind of first-person authority. Sincere contemporaneous first-person reports count as reports of mental occurrences just in case and insofar as they have a distinctive kind of un-overrideable epistemic authority. We can’t be either wrong about or ignorant of how things sensuously seem to us, or about what we are currently thinking, in the sense that no-one else’s claims about our experience have the social significance of decisive objections to our sincere first-person avowals” (pp. 33-34).

For this, Brandom cites articles by Rorty from 1965 and 1970. Incorrigibility is central to Brandom’s own account of Descartes. At a certain level, the argument does seem to be irrefutable. But it doesn’t seem to do much for knowledge, since what is thereby determined to be in a way incorrigible is just a certain seeming or appearing. I cannot be mistaken about how things seem to me. Everyone is an uncontestable authority on their own subjective feeling, and this has relevance in ethical contexts. But, needless to say, this incorrigibility does not extend to our beliefs about how things actually are. This is an important practical distinction in ethical contexts. You are the incontestable authority on how things seem to you. But the moment you make claims about what is true in the real world, you become responsible to answer questions and doubts about those claims.

Brandom seems to be suggesting that a broadly Cartesian concept of the mental can be retained, provided that we reinterpret it in terms of normativity rather than supposed facts of consciousness.

“Understanding minds in the Cartesian sense accordingly shows up as the task of understanding the nature of that authority. One option is that the authority should be understood as a natural, objective, ontological feature of mental phenomena. But Rorty has learned from the later Wittgenstein to be suspicious of this idea. Normative statuses, he thinks, must ultimately be understood as social statuses. (This is the positive, Hegelian, pragmatist lesson Rorty learns from Dewey.)” (p. 34).

“[Rorty thinks] social practices of according such authority to reports changed. Descartes both theoretically reflected and practically encouraged modern practical attitudes of taking or treating sincere first-person reports of contemporaneous mental events as having incorrigible authority. That change in normative attitudes brought into existence a new ontological category of thing: mental episodes as incorrigibly knowable by their possessors” (ibid).

“According to Rorty’s radicalized version of social pragmatism about norms, the very idea of objective things as exercising epistemic authority over our attitudes — underwritten by the semantic idea of representeds serving as normative standards for assessments of the correctness of what count as representings of them just in virtue of being responsible to them for such assessments — is deeply and irremediably confused. All authority is in the end communal authority. Further, as we shall see, the critical function of reason as legitimating norms, as understood by the Enlightenment and made most fully explicit by Kant, teaches that we can only be genuinely responsible to each other, to what we can engage with in conversation, to what we can give justifying reasons to and in turn demand justifying reasons from” (pp. 36-37).

“This radicalization of social pragmatism about norms is now explicitly construed in political terms of freedom and dignity. ’Only in a democratic society which describes itself in pragmatist terms, one can imagine Dewey saying, is the refusal to countenance any authority save that of consensus reached by free inquiry complete'” (p. 37).

“The incipient pragmatist emancipation Rorty is working toward is the substitution of a pragmatics of consensus for the semantics of representation. All we can do is give and ask for reasons with each other. Authority and responsibility are creatures of those discursive practices. We should accordingly reject the idea that our discursive practices answer to, are responsible to, need to acknowledge the authority of, anything outside those practices and the practical attitudes of those who engage in them. The constraint of the objective world should be understood as exclusively causal, not normative. We are normatively constrained only by our reasons” (p. 38, emphasis in original).

“Like his hero Dewey, Rorty never questioned the utility and importance of a basically ecological concept of reality…. This is the stubborn, recalcitrant reality that causally constrains, challenges, frustrates, and rewards our practical undertakings” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Rorty’s critique of representationalism is founded not on denying or ignoring the causal context in which our talk takes place…, but precisely on a hard-headed insistence and focus on that context” (p. 39).

“Rorty sees Dewey as having usefully added an emphasis on the social character of practices that transcend individual learning processes. At this level, the ‘habits’ that are cyclically shaped by ecological-adaptational causal interactions with the environment are in the first instance social practices. Rorty takes it that this broadened social naturalism (a ‘second-nature naturalism’ as per McDowell in Mind and World) is endorsed also by the later Wittgenstein and the Heidegger of Division One of Being and Time. And Rorty himself goes beyond even Dewey, in making common cause with Wittgenstein in further focusing on specifically discursive practices” (p. 40).

“Rorty sometimes seems to draw the lesson that we should do pragmatics instead of semantics (which he identifies with appeals to the notions of truth and representation), study use rather than meaning. When talking this way, he is following the later Wittgenstein (who recoils from his semantics-only Tractarian view to a pragmatics-only approach), James, and Dewey, but not Pierce, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson. They should be understood as pursuing pragmatics-first, rather than semantics-first explanatory strategies, but not as trading the traditional neglect of pragmatics by the representationalist semantic tradition for a corresponding pragmatist dismissal of semantics holus bolus” (pp. 41-42).

“He does have views about meaning. But he thinks we should understand it in terms of justificatory practices rather than a notion of truth understood in terms of representation” (p. 42).

I for one understand ethical truth in terms of such justificatory practices. I also recognize poetic truth that is neither representational nor justificatory, but nonetheless significant.

Subject of Passion

Here I will very briefly treat Alain de Libera’s Le sujet de la passion (2021), which consists of his 2016 lectures at the College de France. The modern notion of a subject-agent, he has previously argued at length, has its origins not in Descartes but in Latin scholasticism. Here in part he takes the argument back further, to the Greek fathers of the Christian church and their speculations about the nature of Christ. He takes up the theme of a “decolonization” of the Middle Ages and of theology, which have been stigmatized since early modernity. As usual, he covers a vast territory that I will only sample.

He begins on a humorous note. “Sociopaths don’t yawn, we say. Or better, they do not know yawning by contagion. They do not suffer when they see someone else suffer. They do not know pity. Generally, they haven’t read Aristotle” (p. 12, my translation throughout). He recalls Aristotle’s numerous statements that action and passion reside in the patient, not the agent.

He goes on to note how the 17th century writer Le Laboureur argued that French is superior to Latin, because its word order more explicitly refers every action to a subject. Le Laboureur claimed that “Cicero and all the Romans thought in French before they spoke in Latin” (p. 20). Bemusedly, de Libera points out that in the 20th century, Martin Heidegger claimed that French writers must do their thinking in German, because German is the naturally philosophical language.

“While the notion of subject-agent can appear as contradictory — it only has historical purchase once what I call the ‘chiasm of agency’, that is to say, the devolution of the functions and conditions of agency to the ‘subject’, has been realized –, the notion of subject-patient poses no problem: it is the sense that the word ‘subject’ originally had, otherwise said before the chiasm, the hypokeimenon–subjectum, which, we have seen many times, in Augustine as in Aristotle, designates a support or a substrate, … in short a bearer, a receptor of qualities or accidental properties.”

“This poses the problem of WHICH is the subject who suffers, then WHO is the subject who suffers, the passage from the WHICH to the WHO” (pp. 57-58).

“Is there a single subject of thought, of perception, and of emotions? Or: Who says ‘I’ in ‘I think’, ‘I perceive’, ‘I feel’?” (p. 59).

“Can we say ‘it suffers in me’, like we say, with Schelling, it thinks in me?… We can perhaps admit that I am not the subject of my thoughts or that there is in me a subject of my thoughts that is not a part of me, but indeed only something in me, aliquid in anima rather than aliquid animae — for example, the nous, the intellect called ‘possible’ or ‘patient’ in medieval philosophy — but can this hold good for suffering, can it hold good for passion, can it hold good for what we today call emotion? We can doubt this…. Passion implies the body, suffering implies the body, we say. Thought does not imply it” (pp. 59-60).

“I respond: for a dualist [such as Descartes], thought does not imply the body. But not everyone is a dualist. For an Aristotelian, for example, especially an Averroist, intellect has need of the body, because it has need of a furnisher of images. It has need of the body and its images not as a subject, but as an object. Cannot the same argument be made for passion, for suffering, for pain?” (p. 60).

“[I]s it not evident that if there is a subject of my passion, it can only be a subject-patient, and that the last can only be me, whatever thing or entity the term ‘me’ designates: body, or soul, or soul united with a body…?” (ibid).

Emphasizing how christological debates among theologians have affected common views of the human, he recalls the aim of what he previously called a deconstruction of the Heideggerian deconstruction of subjectivity, which among other things ignores this aspect.

“The articulation between Passion — upper case — and passion — lower case is the central element of the archaeology of the subject of passion” (p. 66).

“The central element is the introduction of hypostatic union into anthropology, otherwise said, the intervention of the subject — of the hypostasis — in the relation soul-body, and indeed in the relation spirit-soul-body… which makes possible the emergence of the person as subject where not only actions, but also passions are susceptible to imputation” (p. 493).

Beginning of this series: Archaeology of the Subject

Wisdom and Judgment

For Aristotle, the ultimate aim of a talking animal as such is wisdom, which cannot be separated from ethical sensitivity and concern for others. This wisdom might be characterized as an excellence in reflective judgment or interpretation.

There has, however, come to be a traditional view of what is called judgment — especially common in early modern logic — that reduces it to the grammatical form of predication (“A is B”), and its truth to a matter of simple correspondence to fact, which is presumed to be independently knowable. Predication on this view aims to be a kind of authoritative saying of how things are, grounded in putatively immediate truth that is not supposed to depend on any kind of normative inquiry or process of interpretation in order to be known. Things just factually are certain ways, and judgments are conclusions produced immediately that are supposed to correspond to the facts. Judgments are either right, and thereby count as objective; or wrong, and to be dismissed as merely subjective. But in neither case do they involve any depth of engagement or extensive activity. They are “shallow”.

This dogmatic way of thinking, criticized by Kant and Hegel, is utterly alien to the kind of spirit of rational inquiry promoted by Plato and Aristotle, who thought that assertions should be grounded in reasons shareable and discussible with other humans, and not on vain claims of immediate insight. But both this reductive use of “judgment” for the mere immediate production of a representation, and the reduction of truth to a correspondence to presumed fact, have often been wrongly characterized as Aristotelian, when they are really of much later origin.

I would suggest that the very idea of better or worse judgment, or of judgment as something of which there could be an excellence, is incompatible with the shallow black-and-white view of judgment as simply right or wrong. Judgment as activity is anything but an immediate production. It is an extensive and intensive activity of interpretation and reflection.

The contemporary American philosopher Robert Brandom writes, “Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea…. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for…. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from unminded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental” (Reason in Philosophy, pp. 32-33; see Kantian Intentionality).

Over the course of many posts, we have seen not only that what Aristotle calls nous and gets translated as “intellect” is an activity and not a stuff, but also that it is intrinsically concerned to seek the better in each instance. The highest good for Aristotle is not a pre-given content, but the result of a truly consistent aiming at the better in life, where what is better is intelligible, and once again not pre-given, but expressible in terms of reasons that any human can share in evaluating.

A important notion of responsibility is also implicit in Aristotle, as when he points out that the freedom of ethical beings is not an arbitrary license, but is commensurate with the taking of responsibility. For Aristotle, unfree beings have no responsibility insofar as they are unfree. It is free beings capable of real deliberation and choice that have responsibility.

On the other hand, at a top level Aristotle prefers to stress the affirmative values of friendship, love, and reciprocity over the constraints of responsibility. For Aristotle, an ethically serious person guided by affirmative aims will turn out to be responsible in her actions. Kant was more distrustful of our affirmative aims, as possibly biased by our individual impulse, and therefore tended to emphasize duty and responsibility as more reliable motivators for ethical action. Aristotle has the more optimistic view that there can be such a thing as desire that is consistent with reason about what is better. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; The Goal of Human Life).

A “Mind-Soul Problem”?

Still slowly making my way through volume 3 part 1 of Alain de Libera’s Archéologie du sujet, I’ve passed through a section in which he raises the question of a “mind-soul problem”. In the wake of Descartes’ mind/body dualism, many modern authors have spoken of a “mind-body problem”, and proposed materialist or spiritualist alternatives to the dualism of Descartes. Hardly anyone in modern times has addressed a “mind-soul problem”.

My own usage of “soul” is intended purely as a translation of what Aristotle called psyche. I usually avoid “mind”, which has a heritage going back to Augustine’s mens, but has come to be widely used both for everything in the sphere of conscious awareness and for the object studied by modern psychology. Modern philosophers may speak of a philosophy of mind, but what is mind, really? In French and German, the word for spirit takes the place of the English “mind”.

The medieval term “intellect” (a translation of Aristotle’s nous) has much more specific connotations than any of these, though it might be argued that the role Aquinas gave it relative to underwriting the soul’s immortality played an important role in the emergence of modern notions of mind or spirit as something assumed to be a relatively uniform singular thing. Mind in Augustine does seem to have a kind of simplicity also, though Augustine’s soul/body dualism was very different from Aquinas’ combination of Aristotelian hylomorphism with his own non-Aristotelian metaphysical notion of intellectual soul.

De Libera points out that numerous medieval authors discussed the contrast between intellectio (thought, concerned with universals) and cogitatio (the soul’s awareness, concerned with particulars and grounded in what was called imagination). I like to read the discourse about intellect as pointing toward what Kant would later call transcendental considerations, whereas cogitation would belong to the empirical domain.

The common translation of Descartes’ cogito as “I think” confusingly crosses this boundary. The “I” part has also been questioned by various authors, but clearly Descartes was talking about a concrete awareness informed by many particulars, although he gave it a privileged metaphysical status. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding was certainly also concerned with concrete, empirical awareness, but when he had it translated to Latin, the Latin for “intellect” was used to render “understanding”.

As de Libera says, the “mind-soul problem” is concerned with questions like whether the being that has awareness of sensation is the same as the being that thinks. I imagine that there is a kind of sharing, overlap, and community between the two, but not an identity. Many ancient cultures East and West saw distinctions in this area, where most of the Latin Scholastics and Western modernity insisted on an overarching strong unity or formal uniformity of the “intellectual soul” or mind.

And again, what is thinking?

Speaking in the common way, “I think” that thinking is something more profound than the action of an ego. It’s not at all clear to me that it is entirely “mine”; I tend to think the contrary. And I think there is a big element of receptivity in the apprehension of reality. I don’t mean that anything is just handed to us ready-made, but I think it is equally wrong to say that we make it all. What’s interesting to me is the region in between. Thinking has an active component, but it is not simply an “action”. Models for action include creation from nothing and mechanical impulse; neither of these seems to me like a good analogy for thought. Activity is much wider than action.

On a Philosophical Grammar

It seems like a good time to get back to a bit more detail on Alain de Libera’s “archaeology of the subject”, which I introduced a while back. Volume 1 is subtitled Naissance du sujet or “Birth of the Subject”. He begins with a series of questions asked by Vincent Descombes in a review of Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another:

“1) What remarkable differences are there, from the point of view of use, between these words which we place too lazily in a single category of personal pronouns (and particularly here I, he, me, him, her, oneself)?

“2) What is the status of intentions to act? Are they first properties of the agent?

“3) Should we distinguish, as Ricoeur proposes, two concepts of identity, identity as sameness (idem) and identity as ipseity [“selfness”] (ipse)?

“4) What is this self that figures in the expression self-awareness?” (Archéologie du sujet vol. 1, p. 31).

The birth of the subject in the modern sense is what de Libera will investigate. He aims to show how “the Aristotelian ‘subject’ [hypokeimenon, or thing standing under] became the subject-agent of the moderns in becoming a kind of substrate for acts and operations” (p. 39). He quotes a famous passage from Nietzsche denouncing the “grammatical superstition” of the logicians who assume that wherever there is a predicate for an activity such as thinking, there must be something corresponding to a grammatical subject that performs it. Nietzsche says that a thought comes when it wants, not when I want.

De Libera asks, “How did the thinking subject, or if one prefers, man as subject and agent of thought, first enter into philosophy? And why?” (pp. 45-46). He points out the simple fact that a grammatical subject need not be an agent, as when we say “the boy’s timidity made him afraid”. He quotes Frédéric Nef to the effect that action is not a grammatical category. How then did “the subject” become bound up with agency?

He notes that something like this is already at play in Aquinas’ Disputed Questions on the Soul, when Aquinas develops the notion of a “subject of operation” related to sensibility, associating the subject of an action or passion with a power of the soul. How, de Libera asks, did we come to assume that every action requires “an agent that is a subject” and “a subject that is its agent” (p. 58)? (See also Not Power and Action.)

He will be looking for medieval roots of notions that most people, following Heidegger, consider to be innovations of Descartes. Meanwhile, de Libera recalls that Augustine had gone so far as to label it blasphemy to call the soul a “subject”. Knowledge and love, Augustine said, are not in the mind as in a subject.

Next in this series: Origins of a Subject-Agent

Simple Substance?

I tremendously admire Leibniz, but have always been very puzzled by his notion of “substance”. Clearly it is different from that of Aristotle, which I still ought to develop more carefully, based on the hints in my various comments on Aristotle’s very distinctive approaches to “dialectic” and “being”. (See also Form, Substance.)

Leibniz compounds a criterion of simplicity — much emphasized in the neoplatonic and scholastic traditions — with his own very original notion of the complete concept of a thing, which is supposed to notionally encompass every possible detail of its description. He also emphasizes that every substance is “active”. Leibniz’ famous monads are identified by him with substances.

A substance is supposed to be simple. He explicitly says this means it has no parts. In part, he seems to have posited substances as a sort of spiritual atoms, with the idea that it is these that fundamentally make up the universe. The true atoms, Leibniz says, are fundamentally spiritual rather than material, though he also had great interest in science, and wanted to vindicate both mathematical and Aristotelian physics. Leibniz’ notion of spiritual atoms seems to combine traditional attributes of the scholastic “intellectual soul” (which, unlike anything in Aristotle, was explicitly said by its advocates to be a simple substance) with something like Berkeley’s thesis that what can truly be said to exist are just minds.

On the other hand, a substance is supposed to be the real correlate of a “complete” concept. The complete concept of a thing for Leibniz comprises absolutely everything that is, was, or will be true of the thing. This is related to his idea that predicates truly asserted of a grammatical subject must be somehow “contained” within the subject. Leibniz also famously claimed that all apparent interaction between substances is only an appearance. The details of apparent interaction are to be explained by the details contained within the complete concept of each thing. This is also related to his notions of pre-established harmony and possible worlds, according to which God implicitly coordinates all the details of all the complete concepts of things in a world, and makes judgments of what is good at the level of the infinite detail of entire worlds. One of Kant’s early writings was a defense of real interaction against Leibniz.

Finally, every monad is said by Leibniz to contain both a complete microcosm of the world as expressed from its distinctive point of view, and an infinite series of monads-within-monads within it. Every monad has or is a different point of view from every other, but they all reflect each other.

At least in most of his writings, Leibniz accordingly wanted to reduce all notions of relation to explanations in terms of substances. In late correspondence with the Jesuit theologian Bartholomew Des Bosses, he sketched an alternate view that accepted the reality of relations. But generally, Leibniz made the logically valid argument that it is far simpler to explain the universe in terms of each substance’s unique relation to God, rather than in terms of infinities of infinities of relations between relations. For Leibniz all those infinities of infinities are still present, but only in the mind of God, and in reflection in the interior of each monad.

Leibniz’ logically simpler account of relations seems like an extravagant theological fancy, but however we may regard that, and however much we may ultimately sympathize with Kant over Leibniz on the reality of interaction and relations, Leibniz had very advanced intuitions of logical-mathematical structure, and he is fundamentally right that from a formal point of view, extensional properties of things can all be interpreted in an “intensional” way. Intension in logic refers to internal content of a concept, and to necessary and sufficient conditions that constitute its formal definition. This is independent of whatever views we may have about minds. (See also Form as a Unique Thing.)

So, there is much of interest here, but I don’t see how these ultra-rich notional descriptions can be true of what are also supposed to be logical atoms with no parts. In general, I don’t see how having a rich description could be compatible with being logically atomic. I think the notion of logical atomicity is only arrived at through abstraction, and doesn’t apply to real things.

Ideas Are Not Inert

In the British empiricist tradition, “ideas” are supposed to be inert contents of an active “mind”, and to be either identical with sensible contents or derived from sensory experience. They are supposed to have content that just “is what it is”, but is nonetheless sufficient to serve as a basis for our conclusions and motivations.

I want to argue instead that the only possible basis for our conclusions and motivations is other conclusions and motivations. As individuals we always start in the middle, with some already existing conclusions and motivations that were not necessarily individually ours to begin with. Language and culture and upbringing provide us with a stock of pre-existing conclusions and particularly shaped motivations.

Further, I don’t see ideas as inert. The notion that ideas are completely inert comes from an extreme polarization between active mind and passive idea that results from entirely subordinating this relation to the grammatical model of subject and predicate. Aristotle’s rather minimalist account of these matters effectively treats objects and ideas as having some activity of their own. For Aristotle, “we” do not hold a monopoly on activity. There is also activity in the world that is independent of us, and much of our activity is our particular reflection of the world’s activity. Indeed for Aristotle I take it to be thought rather than an assumed “thinker” that is primarily active.

Hegel has often been criticized for speaking as if “the Idea” had life of its own, independent of us humans. If one holds an empiricist view of ideas, this can only sound like nonsense, or some kind of animism. But with an Aristotelian view of thoughts as a kind of intrinsically active “contents”, that is not the case. If thoughts are intrinsically active, we need not posit a separate mental “subject” distinct from any actual thought or perception or content as the source of all activity, behind thought.

Plato compared the human soul to a city — a kind of unity to be sure, but a weak one consisting of a federated community and relatively specific “culture” of thoughts and perceptions, subject to varying degrees of coherence. Only under the influence of later theology did it come to be assumed that the soul must necessarily have the far stronger unity of a simple substance. A looser unity of the soul is very compatible with a view of thoughts and perceptions as multiple fibers of activity, from which the overall activity we attribute to the soul or mind is constituted.

Berkeley on Perception

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is most famous for his provocative claim that material objects don’t really exist. Positively, he claimed that “to be is to be perceived”. Berkeley took as a starting point the view of Descartes and Locke that perceptions are “ideas” in the mind, but took issue with the further assumption of Descartes and Locke that ideas nonetheless also “represent” things that exist independent of the mind. It seems to me that the implicit concept of mind in this kind of usage assumes way too much, but for now I won’t dwell on that.

Berkeley has been the subject of superficial ridicule as a poster child for extreme subjectivism, but that is a caricature. Famously, he is supposed to have maintained, e.g., that a tree falling in the woods and heard by no one makes no sound. As 20th century analytic philosophers have noted, however, even if his positions are ultimately untenable, the quality of his arguments is actually quite high. Apart from the abstract “metaphysical” question of the real existence of external objects, he also generally wanted to vindicate common sense.

Far from denying the existence of any objective reality, what he really wanted to do was articulate an alternate account of objectivity, based on something other than the independent existence of discrete objects. He had two different kinds of responses on the falling tree. One invokes counterfactual conditions; all that is of practical relevance to us are the conditions under which a perception would occur. The other invokes God as a universal witness.

From within the tradition of British empiricism, Berkeley partially anticipates the non-representationalist accounts of objectivity developed by Kant and Hegel, using the resources of a kind of Christian Platonism. Unlike Kant and Hegel, he flatly asserts that what really exists are what he calls spirits, which combine Christian-Platonic attributes with those of minds in a broadly Cartesian-Lockean sense.

A bit like the monads of Leibniz but without the infinite nesting and mutual inclusion Leibniz posited, Berkeley’s spirits are inherently active, and inherently endowed with perception. Spirits have experience that is expressed in purely immanent and immediate — but entirely passive and inert — contentful ideas.

Berkeley wrote an important early work on the theory of vision, arguing that what we really see is immediate phenomena of light and color, rather than inferred “things”. This was an important source for phenomenalism in early 20th century philosophy of science. Like the later phenomenalists, he tried to explain all cognitive error as bad inference from good immediate perception. From this point of view, “ideas” cannot be wrong, because they are purely immediate and purely inert; the possibility of error depends on the actions of finite spirits.

The common tradition of Cartesianism and British empiricism insists that there is a layer of immediate apprehension that is immune to error, and wants to ground knowledge and science by more authentically getting back to that immediate layer. I think Kant and Hegel convincingly showed that everything we experience as immediate actually has a prehistory, so that immediacy itself is only an appearance, and all immediacy that we experience is really what Hegel called mediated immediacy. Mediated immediacy has the same general kind of explanation as what is called “habit” in translations of Aristotle. We “just know” how to ride a bicycle once we have already learned. We don’t have to think about it; we just spontaneously do it. Similarly, I think “immediate” perception involves a complex unconscious application of categories that is affected by large bodies of previous experience.

Thus I want to say that there is no layer of human experience that is immune to error. On the other hand, through reflection and well-rounded judgment, we genuinely but fallibly participate in objectivity. Objectivity is not something that is simply “out there”; it is a real but always finite and relative achievement.