Eckhart as Philosopher: Background

In Meister Eckhart (German edition 2011; English translation 2015), Kurt Flasch takes issue with common portrayals of Eckhart as a “mystic”. Eckhart, who lived ca. 1260-1328, was the third German, after Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg, to earn the highest academic title of magister at the University of Paris, but his Latin philosophical works have been little studied until recently. Flasch discusses him as a serious philosopher in the tradition of Albert and Dietrich, and describes the social background. Eckhart is known to have had close contact with Dietrich, and may have also directly interacted with Albert. In any case, Eckhart clearly takes up Albert’s notion of natural beatitude.

“Albertus Magnus had harshly criticized the failings of Latin scholars: he did not merely want to incorporate Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes into the seemingly harmonious collective wisdom of Christianity, but instead strove to rebuild all the sciences, including theology, from the ground up. He emphasized the autonomous method of philosophy. He complained about obscurantism, something especially prevalent among the Dominicans; he showed that miracles had no place in matters of physics. His autonomous philosophical research became a model for Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia [who have been considered the main targets of the condemnation of 1277]. Thomas Aquinas instead opted for a middle course. His approach was criticized for its inconsistency…. His handling of Augustine and Aristotle was too imprecise, according to Henry of Ghent, Dietrich of Freiberg, and Duns Scotus” (p. 10).

“Since the twelfth century, Western Europe had been developing a new sense of the human individual and his rational and organizational abilities. It was no longer taken for granted that people were subjects to be ruled. Lords had to justify themselves. Authority could be challenged. Several classical authors (Aristotle in his Logic, Cicero, Seneca, and especially Boethius) all contributed to a heightened trust in reason within the more progressive regions of Europe. The experience of urban life, the organization of corporations, legislation not based on customary law or decisions by episcopal lords, supraregional trade and monetary transactions, encounters with foreign cultures, religions, and values — all these created the need for a new way of explaining the world that took in everything, including secular rulers and religious topics…. New ideas and developments were no longer automatically stigmatized…. In science, philosophy, and organization, Christian self-awareness was constantly recreating itself in different and often opposing directions through continual debate. Without these historical and cultural multiplications and disturbances, Meister Eckhart would not have been possible ” (pp. 10-11).

“[The famous classical scholar] Werner Jaeger described the beginnings of philosophy up to Plato as this kind of work: correcting the royal-court model of religion; replacing the feuding heavenly clans with a single God; stressing wisdom over capriciousness, and ungrudging goodness and justice over incontestable power; the world as kosmos and physis, not a mere footstool for God” (p. 18).

Flasch here refers to two of my three candidates for “Enlightenments” before the modern one. (The other — inspired by the great upsurge in translation of ancient philosophical and scientific works to Arabic during what came to be known as the Islamic Golden Age, in which the philosophical work of Alfarabi (roughly 870-950 CE) also played a prominent role — came in between.)

The striking phrase “essence of the criteria” is I think original to Flasch, but he is definitely onto something here. Soul as the essence of criteria sounds like it might begin to take us into the territory of Kantian ethical judgment, and might be not at all wholly unrelated to the normative view of intentionality and consciousness that Brandom attributes to Kant.

He unpacks this a bit, saying “Everything looked different after this philosophical revolution, nature and polis. It changed the way people thought of themselves. They now knew: they were both reason and soul; and they demanded of God that he be reason and be related to them as soul. The meaning of ‘soul’ changed: soul was no longer a vapor of the blood, a breath of life, or the presence of one’s ancestors. Soul became the essence of the criteria. It was subjected to the rule that it had to become as similar to God as possible, a God conceptualized as mind and as wholly good. Greek philosophy dematerialized and ethically ennobled both God and the human soul” (p. 19).

“Plato’s Republic developed the idea of the Good: it was not an individual good, but the indeterminate Good that humans could and should employ to judge everything, even the gods. For the conduct of life, that is, for ethics and politics, that meant man was supposed to live in a way that would make him as similar to the Godhead as possible…. [T]here had to exist a faculty of differentiation and consolidation above sense perceptions. The soul is active, harmonizing and evaluating what has been perceived, especially whether it is good or bad. It is indispensable for finding commonalities among wholly different perceptions. Whether these perceptions are similar or dissimilar, one or many, good or bad, is decided not by individual perceptions themselves, but only by the thinking soul itself. It engages in dialogue with itself; which means: it thinks” (ibid; see also Aristotle on Perception; Aristotle on the Soul.)

Once again, we see that this ancient and medieval notion of intellect (nous) is anything but entirely passive. The differently inflected Augustinian mens (mind) also seems to have a largely active character. Numerous later medieval writers emphasized this aspect of Augustine rather strongly.

Flasch continues, “This Platonic deliberation… refutes the false impression we have of certain epochs, that is, the legend of antiquity — and even more so of the Middle Ages — as ‘objective ages’ that had no knowledge of the productive nature of the mind-soul, of ‘consciousness’ or the ‘subjectivity’ of knowledge” (p. 20).

In slightly different wording, this is a point I have recently been attempting to make. The translator uses the English “mind”, which I generally try to avoid as prejudicial, due to its many modern connotations that are quite different from those of nous in Plato and Aristotle. I usually go with “intellect” for nous, even though it may sound stilted, because it brings in fewer connotations that are alien to Aristotelian or Platonic discourse. “Mind” makes me think of Descartes and Locke and modern empirical psychology and self-help, which I lump together as a sort of modern “mentalism” that is not to be recommended.

“Mind, nous, intellectus, was seen as essential and as the true human. We can read it thus in Aristotle; Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas adopted his position. Living according to the mind is the right kind of living; it is the life that pleases God. Mind is the possession of those criteria that determine what a true God must be and how a rational human has to conceptualize himself. Mind is an active ground of unity; it is synthesis” (ibid; see also Figurative Synthesis).

Here he comes back to the intriguing phrase about “criteria”. He goes on to more closely characterize Aristotelian nous:

“Mind has nothing in common with anything else. It is not a natural thing; none of the determinations with which we define the world apply to it. It is essentially energy and activity. It is the active nothingness of the world; it is the energy not to be like the world…. Mind is the possession of the universal. Everything is its object…. It is the possession of its contents. It is its contents. It becomes what it thinks” (p. 21).

Aristotelian energeia (act or activity or actuality) is not usually translated “energy”, though it does begin to acquire energy-like connotations in later writers (e.g., Proclus and some late medieval theologians).

“It is divine; it is the divine. Since Plato and Aristotle, European philosophy has based its general view of humanity, of nature, of politics, and of religion on nous as its model. Instead of being represented as a royal court, religion became the relation between God and the mind-soul” (ibid).

Flasch echoes Aristotle’s statement that of all things, intellect most deserves to be called divine. Because I want to highlight the more specific character of this broadly Aristotelian “intellect”, I would not claim it has been adopted by European philosophy as a whole, but I do believe it is taken up by those strands that remain relatively closer to Plato and Aristotle. This is especially true of the “Albertists” that Flasch spent much of his career studying. The dominant modern traditions stemming from Descartes and Locke develop their own rather different notions of reason and consciousness, their place in the world, and our relation to them.

“For Augustine, the rational soul represented the essence of all criteria…. God is the true God only if he adheres to the rules of reason. It was Augustine who created this standard, and it was he who later destroyed it” (p. 22).

Again there is a much longer story here. Flasch nicely captures the ambiguity (or perhaps change, motivated by his late polemic against the Pelagians) in Augustine’s attitude toward philosophical reason.

“For Albertus Magnus, the object of the intellect is the universal, a universal that exists in reality, which is the foundation of individual things…. This universal informs the particular things; it makes them into what they are. The mind…is the possession of the principles from which all knowledge develops. That is why the intellect finds itself in all objects. It is the reason why Plato’s definition of philosophy is quintessentially true: philosophy is the knowledge of one’s self…. If, through understanding, the intellect is linked to the first Truth and Good, then it is itself divine, divinus, and as Homer says, it no longer seems like the son of a man, but the son of God. That is why Hermes Trismegistus says of the intellect that it is the link between God and the world” (pp. 22-23).

Albert is known as a strong defender of realism about universals, as opposed to nominalism. This actually quite facinating and extraordinarily rich dispute is something I have barely touched upon to date. But here Flasch brings out a less familiar, more neoplatonic-sounding angle about the ennobling presence of the universal in the human soul, which will be central for Eckhart.

“The intellect is man, and it connects God and the world… Albertus Magnus cites pagan authorities for his concept of divine filiation…. There is nothing super-natural in this for him; he calls it the most natural, the naturalissimum” (p. 23).

This identification of intellect with the human that he attributes to Albert is interesting, and stands in sharp contrast to some other theologians at this time, who seem to have identified intellect with divine illumination, or with something angelic. I have not been sure where Albert stood on this. Of course Aquinas embarked on a major campaign to locate intellect entirely within the human soul, even siding with the so-called materialist Alexander of Aphrodisias against Averroes, and even though he continued to speak of illumination in a more expressly theological context. (See also Pseudo-Dionysius on the Soul.)

I can only applaud Albert’s apparent remark about the “most natural”. Medieval theologians were not all immoderate supernaturalists; the example of Peter Abelard also comes to mind. Virtue is not opposed to nature; it just doesn’t automatically come along with nature. It involves the cultivation and flowering of “second nature”.

For Albert, according to Flasch, human reason “is not supposed to obey, but to conceptualize itself, the world, and God…. [F]or Albertus Magnus, the intellect as developed in the Aristotelian-Arabic tradition was a part of man’s relation to God…. [I]n fact, it was man’s relation to God” (p. 24).

This is truly fascinating. Flasch is saying human reason as understood by the philosophers itself plays a fundamental theological role for the great theologian Albert, as I think it also does in Alfarabi’s neoplatonizing account of intellect. For these writers, our participation in intellect “is” the human’s relation to God.

Flasch goes on to relate all of this to Eckhart.

“Eckhart explains how he wants men to conceive of God: God is that which fulfills reason’s highest criteria. He must be just…. It is only through justice that God becomes recognizable and worthy of recognition…. God does not belong to whatever exists, not even as the pinnacle. Reason must break through to the true content of the term ‘God’. Which is justice” (p 35).

Eckhart apparently agrees with what Leibniz later said, that God should be identified with justice rather than with infinite power. Flasch emphasizes the “negative” aspect of Aristotelian intellect, which to me suggests a possible Aristotelian source for this important theme in Hegel.

“[T]he soul forms itself according to its objects. It becomes what it is after. It does not simply exist. It is not a fixed component of the world; it obtains its essence through attention and rejection…. What is essential is the ability of the soul to actively give itself a form, to shape itself” (pp. 35-36).

Here too I can’t help but recall Hegel’s talk about spirit giving birth to itself. Flasch notes that Hegel was among Eckhart’s admirers.

“Eckhart is stating the premises for a radical reform of living. Man must grasp that he is a creature of relations: he becomes that which he decides; he exists as intentional activity” (p. 43).

Again, Flasch introduces huge implications in a few words. The human is a “creature of relations”. Language and culture begin to take us to shareable meaning that is beyond the immediacy of apparent things with which we physically interact. As Kant might say, as beings with intelligence we actively “take” things in various ways, and our talk about how the world is is actually subordinate to that.

Later, we will see Eckhart speak of a divinisation of the human, which Flasch will explain as primarily rooted in Aristotle and neoplatonism, rather than in revealed theology.

Averroes to Eckhart?

I’m looking at the French edition of 2005 lectures given at the Sorbonne by German philosopher Kurt Flasch, who is responsible for the modern editions of the Latin translations of Averroes, Avicenna, and Maimonides, as well as publication of the Latin works of Albert the Great’s students Dietrich of Freiberg, Ulrich of Strasbourg, and Berthold of Moosburg.

Flasch has contributed greatly to scholarship on Meister Eckhart, who also stands in the tradition of Albert the Great, and may have studied with him at Cologne. Eckhart has been known in modern times as a “mystic”, mainly on the basis of his popular German writings. But a consideration of his Latin works suggests that he was also and primarily a scholastic philosopher, close to Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg. Even when he comments on scripture, he explicitly does so per rationes naturales philosophorum, “in terms of natural philosophical reasons”. This post will mainly cover Flasch’s discussion of Averroes.

I think this all makes a fascinating counterpoint to Rorty and Brandom’s provocative but nearsighted Deweyan historical storytelling about the rational maturation of humanity, which tends to treat premodern philosophy as if it were monolithic and all the same, and as if only in modern times did any worthwhile philosophy emerge. My own view is that there have been at least three other “Enlightenments” that substantially recognized the autonomy of reason, before the modern Enlightenment — one initiated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; another with the rise of philosophy in the Islamic Golden Age; and another with the spread of Aristotelian learning to previously backward Europe. Just as with the modern Enlightenment, these developments were sharply contested, and very uneven in their results. The historical picture is far more complex and nuanced than any simple “Whiggish” linear progress.

Flasch first gives an account of Averroes. Later, he will discuss how Averroes’ work is used by Albert, Dietrich, and Eckhart. He calls heretical “Averroism” an invention of theologians and of the 19th-century scholar Ernest Renan. Averroes and those who are sometimes called Averroist simply thought of themselves as Aristotelians.

Flasch highlights four broad characteristics of the thought of Averroes — a strong insistence that accidents depend on substance; sharp distinction of a “metaphysical” or first-philosophical point of view from ordinary logical and physical points of view; an exclusion of efficient causality from metaphysics (in favor of an emphasis on substantial form); and a notion of natural intellectual beatitude. Most of Averroes’ Long Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics has still only been published in Latin, and Flasch mentions something new to me, that Averroes excludes not only efficient causality but also final causality from metaphysics, giving pride of place to substantial form instead. From Flasch’s account, it sounds like Averroes is the major proximate source for Latin scholastic notions of substantial form, which do not come from Aristotle.

“The way in which Averroes constructs the relation between the individual human and the intellect is not very different from the way in which Christian theologians envisage the action of divine grace in the human: having a certain degree of accomplishment of representation (indeed of imaginatio [imagination], the individual human is united with the intellect that illuminates the images of representation by making their universal character appear. The perfection of the human consists in her union, her copulatio, with the intellect that contains all the intelligibilia. This union is realized in each act of intelligence, since knowledge of the universal liberates the individual human from spatio-temporal determination. This universalization of mental contents can also be interpreted as a certain divinization, given that it makes the human participate in the supratemporality of the universal” (D’Averroés á Maître Eckhart: les sources arabes de la “mystique” allemande, p. 37, my translation throughout, emphasis in original).

“In a human life consecrated to intellectual work, the singular human becomes more and more close to the intellect. The active intellect, which produces all the intellectual contents, becomes in this case more and more our form, and no longer an efficient cause. This transformation is our highest perfection, in this life and possibly in a future life. It is in this conjunctio [conjunction] that our beatitude resides” (ibid).

“According to Averroes, intellect is not a superhuman being, a sort of angel in the beyond, but a virtus animae [virtue of the soul]” (p. 40).

“Aristotle… proceeds to introduce a series of extraterrestrial, quasi-divine predicates for intellect, even as he calls it a part or a power of the human soul. In fact, these are negative predicates: to be capable of knowing ‘all’ (omnia), all that one could see or imagine, it is necessary that intellect be none of that all, it must be amiges, that is to say unmixed with things…. Indeed it has no determinate essence, non est hoc aliquid [it is not a this-something], so that it is capable of becoming all things…. To describe the non-natural nature of intellect, Aristotle repeats the Platonic formula in saying: the intellective soul is the place of ideas (topos eidon)” (p. 41).

“Its activity is its substance, it is what it thinks…. This identity signifies not only that its activity and its object are identical, but that the action of intellect is its substantial nature” (p. 43).

“[K]nowledge is (also) receptive…. But as we have seen, intellect is immaterial and impassible. Intellect cannot be directly determined by a thing of the exterior world. If it has a phase of receptivity, it is necessary to understand this receptivity according to the measure of its intellectual nature; it is an active receiving of an intellect that accepts something from an intellect…. Before being realized, this function is nothing…. It cannot be actualized by any bodily thing…. Only intellect — as active intellect — can actualize it. This active principle is the other face or function of intellect, that is the intellect called agent that produces all the intelligible contents. Intellect as center of activity merits all the predicates Aristotle attributes to nous: it is the light that illustrates all, it is activity in its essence, identical with its content” (p. 44).

“[I]t has nothing in common with anything, it must be void of the physical character of its objects to be identical with them, in the same way that the eye must be without color to be capable of seeing all the colors. We find all these metaphors in the texts of Albert the Great, of Dietrich, and of Eckhart…. These phrases of Aristotle speak with such insistence of the proper character of intellect and of its substantial negativity that those who have not mastered Aristotelian terminology inevitably take them for ‘mystical'” (p. 45).

“These are the Aristotelico-Averroist formulas and the metaphors that we find again in Dietrich and Eckhart. All these expressions are formulas of the negative philosophy of mind [esprit]. This is the principal message of [Averroes’] commentary on the De Anima…. Categories derived from physical nature and usual conceptions no longer serve: to understand intellectual knowledge, the philosopher must make a radical change of perspective.”

“From this point of view, Averroes has established a concrete criterion for our evaluation of the philosophers of the 13th and 14th centuries: have they or have they not realized the radicality of this general conversion in the way of thinking? Have they understood, have they accepted this challenge? If I speak of a challenge, I am not thinking of the heresies of the unity of the possible intellect and the eternity of the world, but of the consequences of the negative philosophy of the intellect” (p. 48).

Here I think we also see the ultimate origin of Hegel’s specialized discourse about the negative. I don’t mean that Hegel read Averroes, but he reached a similar Aristotelian conclusion that goes beyond anything Aristotle explicitly said.

“Averroes insists in any case on the following fact: if intellect, as Aristotle suggests, is impassible, (apathes), if it is separable and simplex, then it is not permitted to speak of it in the terms that are characteristic of the world of generation and corruption. It becomes necessary to reform the theory of mind, in proceeding to its ‘de-physicalization’. Intellect is not hoc aliquid, it is not a ‘this something’. It is not an individual. By its intellectual movements, it separates itself from every kind of material individuality” (ibid).

“Averroes always speaks of the intellect that is found in us. He writes: intellectus existens in nobis habet duas actiones [“the intellect existing in us has two actions”]. He underlines that thinking or not depends on our decision. Averroes describes this active phase as a process of detachment, of undressing or denuding (denudare). When we think, our concrete experience consists very exactly in the combination of the actions of these two faculties: invenemus no agere per has duas virtutes intellectus. It is we who act, by the two intellectual virtues” (p. 49).

“In the Latin translation, Averroes designates the activity of the agent intellect as a creation. It is intellect that makes or produces the universal. If it is necessary to make it, it did not already exist before. The intellectual activity of denudare is a facere [a making or doing], it is a veritable creative act: Intellectus qui creat et generat intelligibilia [intellect that creates and generates intelligibles]. In showing in relief the creative character of intellect, Averroes goes further than Aristotle. The fact that one designated the activity of intellect in the Latin of the ‘Christian’ middle ages as a creare is quite remarkable…. Averroes explains the ‘creative’ force of our intellectual virtue thusly: in intellectual knowledge, we formulate judgments regarding innumerable particulars by means of a sole and unique common judgment; and in this way, by this knowledge of what is common, we can attain a certain form of infinity” (ibid).

Here I think of Kant’s insistence on the active role of the understanding, and of Husserl’s talk about putting existence in brackets. We see that Averroes insists on the generally active character of Aristotelian intellect, to the point where it becomes challenging to explain its receptive aspect. This is quite opposite to the unfortunate prejudice that Aristotelian intellect is passive in an unqualified way — simply receiving the given — expressed by Robert Pippin in his otherwise excellent work on Hegel. Flasch says Averroes concluded that neither Aristotle’s Categories nor concepts from the Physics are adequate to address the questions raised in the Metaphysics. This makes perfect sense, because much of the Metaphysics is devoted to developing new concepts. We saw this in detail with substance in relation to the Categories, and with potentiality and actuality in relation to the Physics.

I have been extremely curious what lies within the Latin text of Averroes’ Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, most of which has yet to be translated to any modern language. As I would have hoped, Flasch’s summary remarks suggest that Averroes sees efficient causality as basically irrelevant to first philosophy. But unexpectedly, he also says that Averroes rejects the metaphysical use — let alone centrality — of final causes. Where I would have expected or hoped for a development highlighting the unity of Aristole’s use of teleological explanation in both biology and first philosophy, Flasch reports that Averroes instead presents a notion of “substantial form” that is probably the source of that term’s leading role in Albert and Aquinas.

From Flasch’s remarks, it sounds like Averroes favored this option because he believed that first-philosophical reality must in general be purely and strictly eternal and necessary, even though he also says there is a special case in that the “material” intellect depends on humans living in time for its existence and its contents. A teleology-first point of view like Aubry sees in Aristotle is not compatible with this kind of pure and strict eternity. In reviving a form of Aristotelian teleology as a meta-interpretive framework in his Logic, Hegel finds it necessary to conclude that the eternity of first-philosophical reality is not pure and strict — that what we call eternity actually has a dependency on becoming, rather than being its immaculate origin. I am also reminded of Avicenna’s claim that the human soul has no pre-existence, and yet persists in eternity.

Albert the Great set the standard for Latin scholasticism, treating Averroes as generally the best commentator on Aristotle, but also eclectically making substantial use of Avicenna and Maimonides. I read elsewhere that up to the 16th century, Albert the Great’s commentaries on Aristotle were better regarded and more used in European universities than those of Aquinas. Albert has a very favorable view of Averroes overall. When he criticizes him, he does so in moderate and respectful terms. (Aquinas’ early remarks about Averroes are closer in tone to those of Albert. But in the 1260s and 1270s, there was a growing clamor among conservative Augustinians against Greek and Arabic philosophy in general. I think Aquinas, as a moderate and a diplomat within the Church, made a tactical or strategic decision to try to focus all that ire on Averroes and sacrifice him, so to speak, so that Aristotle could be made acceptable to the Church. And he was successful. As a result, Aristotle’s works were not all burned by the forces of darkness, or permanently banned from being taught, as they actually were during part of the 13th century.

Flasch insists on the radicality of Averroes’ claim that intellect is nothing before it thinks, that it is simply not a this-something like other things at all.

“But other problems remain. We say that universal forms exist in individual things potentially, in potentia. What does this mean? In reality what does the agent intellect do with the forms? Is it content to take off their clothes? Do these forms exist in reality if they are present potentially, in potentia? But in that case, intellect does not make or produce them, and even less could it create them. What exactly does ‘being in potentiality’ signify in the exact sense of Aristotelian ontology?” (p. 50).

“To be in potentiality is indeed to be real, but not actual. For, according to Aristotle as well as Averroes, actual being is the measure of being in potentiality. But from another perspective, Averroes requires the permanence of species, and indeed the eternity of the world, in order to guarantee the potential of our intellectual knowledge for objectivity. But why require the permanence of species, even in potentiality, if our intellect can create them? No one better recognized the difficulty of this problem than Averroes. He never ceases to groan and complain about the extreme difficulty of this inquiry. At stake in the analysis of intellectual knowledge is the encounter of the eternal and the corruptible, and indeed of the universal with the individual: how can a single action, directed by my will, result in these two components? Aristotle’s explanations on this point are insufficient, and the philosophical analysis is very difficult, valde difficilis et ambigua, Averroes confesses” (ibid).

“The more one reads the commentaries of Averroes, the more distant is the Arab thinker from a scholastic rigidity of Aristotelian orthodoxy. He continually evokes his doubts, and indicates problems in suspense. In a great number of doctrines, he goes well beyond Aristotle. He knows very well that intellectual activity is a personal action of a singular human. The knowledge of the universal is the highest achievement of the human, it is her perfection. One cannot displace or transfer the supreme perfection of the human outside of her, and as a consequence one cannot transfer her beatitude to another world. According to Averroes, it is necessary to think of the ultimate stage as a conjunctio or copulatio with a supra-temporal intelligence. Averroes shows himself very preoccupied with the subject of intellectual individuality, but he does not hesitate to formulate aporias…. Aristotle left a great number of questions without solutions, says Averroes, and this is ‘why I thought about writing about this subject what I think myself. If what seems right to me is not perfect, it can at least be the beginning of a perfecting. And in this case, I bid my brothers who read my work to write their objections. Perhaps in this way the truth can become manifest, if I have not found it'” (pp. 50-51).

“Averroes conceived intellectual knowledge as capable of augmentation and intensification. The human who thinks adapts herself little by little to the intellectual and universal world. She becomes what she knows…. Intellect must become my proper essential form…. [T]he human in a certain measure becomes all things in knowing them. All the things are nothing else than her knowledge…. Intellect is reality; it produces reality, not arbitrarily, not insofar as it is individual, but insofar as it receives the impression of the universal, the spirit of humanity” (p. 52).

“This divinized life is the beatitude of the human. According to Aristotle, the nous, the intellect, is in reality the human. Intellect is substantial activity and felicity. Eudaimonia [true happiness] cannot be added, it cannot be thrown over our shoulders like a cloak. The mind or spirit is beatitude by its proper activity…. It is not reserved for the life of the beyond; it begins with our terrestrial life, as our ascension and nobility…. [T]he intellectual life is the true nobility, it is the life of the noble human, as Meister Eckhart says” (p. 53).

This is also broadly similar to the ethical stance of Plotinus, who says that the goal of a human being is to live by her proper act of intellect, and in this way to become as like to the divine as is possible for a mortal.

Shine and Reflection

Hegel introduces reflection in by contrasting it with immediacy and simple being.

“The truth of being is essence.”

“Being is the immediate. Since the goal of knowledge is the truth, what being is in and for itself, knowledge does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates beyond it on the presupposition that behind this being there still is something other than being itself, and that this background constitutes the truth of being. This cognition is a mediated knowledge, for it is not to be found with and in essence immediately, but starts off from an other, from being, and has a prior way to make, the way that leads over and beyond being or that rather penetrates into it. Only insofar as knowledge recollects itself into itself out of immediate being, does it find essence through this mediation” (Logic, di Giovanni trans., opening of book II, p. 337).

Knowledge “does not stop at the immediate”. The perspective of “Being” for Hegel is a mere starting point that turns out to be unsustainable on its own terms. Being by itself is not sufficient to make anything intelligible. Essence on the other hand begins to give us truth.

He goes on to say what essence is, in terms of reflection. This is initially introduced in rather classic Hegelese:

“For essence is an infinite self-contained movement which determines its immediacy as negativity and its negativity as immediacy, and is thus the shining of itself within itself. In this, in its self-movement, essence is reflection” (p. 345).

Each part of this actually makes sense, if you think in terms of reflection from the start and treat immediacy as derivative, which is just what Hegel ends up recommending here. Reflection is Hegel’s model for “good” infinity.

The metaphorical “shining” above is wordplay on Schein, Hegel’s term for a kind of appearance, which di Giovanni renders as “shine”. Kant had spoken of the Schein or illusion produced by pure reason outside the realm of experience. As an appearance-like thing, shine is contrasted with essence. For Hegel, essence is to be found nowhere else than within shine, but the articulation of essence involves a selectivity, distinction, and elaboration within shine that the logic of being (based as it is on a principle of indifference) is unable to support.

“Shine is the same as what reflection is; but it is reflection as immediate. For this shine which is internalized and therefore alienated from its immediacy, the German has a word from an alien language, ‘Reflexion’.”

“Essence is reflection, the movement of becoming and transition that remains within itself, wherein that which is distinguished is determined simply and solely as the negative itself” (ibid).

Hegel introduces talk about “the negative” as a reminder that higher thought requires moving beyond pre-given or “fixed” concepts. This “negative” has virtually nothing to do with classical negation in formal logic.

“In the becoming of being, it is being which lies at the foundation of determinateness, and determinateness is reference to an other” (ibid).

Being is supposed to be a stable foundation, but for Hegel any true stability of intelligibility cannot come from a foundation in mere fixity. At this level, any determinateness and any intelligibility really depend not on being as such, but on relation and relatedness that is external to the supposed foundation.

He continues, “Reflective movement is by contrast the other as negation in itself, a negation which has being only in self-referring” (ibid).

Here he explicitly connects negativity with reflection and self-reference, vocabulary I find far more illuminating.

Reflective judgment works in part by a sort of hall of mirrors effect, in which the back-and-forth of reflection effectively moots the question of which was the original of the images. All that remains is a new level of variegated and articulated whole. Hegel is saying something like essence is the equilibrium resulting from the back-and-forth of reflection. This is how intelligibility originates. Relations are prior to any notion of being that is not utterly indeterminate.

The following passage, read slowly and carefully, elaborates this identification of the Hegelian negative with self-reference and reflection. It portrays reflection as bootstrapping itself.

“The self-reference of the negative is therefore its turning back on itself; it is immediacy as the sublating of the negative, but immediacy simply and solely as this reference or as turning back from a one, and hence as self-sublating of immediacy. — This is positedness, immediacy purely as determinateness or self-reflecting. This immediacy, which is only as the turning back of the negative into itself, is the immediacy which constitutes the determinateness of shine, and from which the previous reflective movement seemed to begin. But, far from being able to begin with this immediacy, the latter first is rather as the turning back or as the reflection itself” (p. 347).

He says quite clearly that immediacy is only the semblance of a beginning.

“Immediacy comes on the scene simply and solely as a turning back and is that negative which is the semblance of a beginning, the beginning which the return negates” (ibid).

He explicitly recalls the Kantian background here.

“Reflection is usually taken in a subjective sense as the movement of judgment which transcends an immediately given representation and seeks more universal determinations for it or compares it with such determinations. Kant opposes reflective and determining judgment (Critique of Judgment, Introduction, pp. xxiiiff.). He defines judgment in general as the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the judgment which subsumes the particular under it is determining. But if what is given is only a particular, for which it is up to the judgment to find the universal, then the judgment is reflecting. Here, too, reflection is therefore a matter of rising above the immediate to the universal. On the one hand, the immediate is determined as particular only by being thus referred to its universal; for itself, it is only a singular or an immediate existent. But, on the other hand, that to which it is referred, its universal, its rule, principle, law, is in general that which is reflected into itself, which refers itself to itself, is the essence or the essential.”

“But at issue here is neither the reflection of consciousness, nor the more specific reflection of the understanding that has the particular and the universal for its determinations, but reflection in general. It is clear that the reflection to which Kant assigns the search of the universal for a given particular is likewise only an external reflection which applies itself to the immediate as to something given. — But the concept of absolute reflection, too, is implicit in it. For the universal, the principle or the rule and law, to which reflection rises in its process of determination is taken to be the essence of the immediate from which the reflection began; the immediate, therefore, to be a nothingness which is posited in its true being only by the turning back of the reflection from it, by the determining of reflection. Therefore, that which reflection does to the immediate, and the determinations that derive from it, is not anything external to it but rather its true being” (p. 350).

Here we are far indeed from early modern representationalism and its “given” objects, traces of which Hegel still finds in Kant. Yet nothing could be more contrary to this point of view than subjective arbitrariness. The process of the back-and-forth of reflection generates shareable rational objectivity out of practical distinctions of value. And reflection does not live within the confines of one person’s head. Hegel emphasizes the continuity of the inner and the outer, and elsewhere explicitly proposes mutual recognition as the ground not only of ethics but also of knowledge.

Shallow vs Deep Reflection

“Logic… cannot say what it is in advance, rather does this knowledge of itself only emerge as the final result and completion of its whole movement” (Hegel, Science of Logic, di Giovanni trans., introduction, p. 23).

From either an Aristotelian or a Kantian perspective, it seems to me this is true of any sort of “self-knowledge”. We don’t just look within and see the truth; it takes a long detour to get there.

Hegel here stresses the radically presuppositionless character of this thing that he calls “logic”. This results in a far more ambitious project than Aristotle’s “tool rather than knowledge” approach to logic, which is also primarily geared toward more ordinary contexts, in which we do not aim to be radically presuppositionless.

I’m still inclined toward a middle position that what is at stake here is better called a kind of hermeneutic wisdom than knowledge. I agree with Pippin that Hegel is engaging in a kind of what Aristotle would call first philosophy here, but I take first philosophy itself to be a kind of meta-level interpretation, and thus again to be wisdom more than knowledge.

“The concept of logic has hitherto rested on a separation, presupposed once and for all in ordinary consciousness, of the content of knowledge from its form, or of truth and certainty. Presupposed from the start is that the material of knowledge is present in and for itself as a ready-made world outside thinking; that thinking is by itself empty, that it comes to this material from outside” (p. 24).

Here he is both saying that the more ordinary concept of logic has not yet learned the lessons of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and implicitly criticizing the dualistic appearance of some of Kant’s formulations.

“These views on the relation of subject and object to each other express the determinations that constitute the nature of our ordinary, phenomenal consciousness. However, when these prejudices are carried over to reason, as if in reason the same relation obtained, as if this relation had any truth in and for itself, then they are errors, and the refutation of them in every part of the spiritual and natural universe is what philosophy is” (p. 25).

This is a very strong statement. Hegel has a very positive view of life in the world, but he strongly distrusts our ordinary consciousness of it. Philosophy is what teaches us to move beyond common sense, toward something higher.

“The older metaphysics had in this respect a higher concept of thinking than now passes as the accepted opinion. For it presupposed as its principle that only what is known of things and in things by thought is really true in them, that is, what is known in them not in their immediacy but as first elevated to the form of thinking, as things of thought. This metaphysics thus held that thinking and the determination of thinking are not something alien to the subject matters, but rather are their essence, or that things and the thinking of them agree in and for themselves (also our language expresses a kinship between them); that thinking in its immanent determinations, and the true nature of things, are one and the same content” (ibid).

Here he is clearly referring to Aristotle, and endorsing Aristotle’s point of view as in a way even superior to that of Kant. For Aristotle, thought and things meet on the middle ground of the “what-it-is” or essence of things, which is what allows the ultimate identification of thought with what it thinks.

He mentions the shallow “external” reflection he associates with Locke’s notion of human understanding, then the much more substantive kind of reflection discussed by Kant in the Critique of Judgment, which will be a major theme of this whole work.

“The [Kantian] reflection already mentioned consists in transcending the concrete immediate, in determining and parting it. But this reflection must equally transcend its separating determinations and above all connect them. The conflict of determinations breaks out precisely at the point of connection. This reflective activity of connection belongs in itself to reason, and to rise above the determinations and attain insight into their discord is the great negative step on the way to the true concept of reason. But, when not carried through, this insight runs into the misconception that reason is the one that contradicts itself” (p. 26).

Contrary to Kant’s pessimistic conclusion in the antinomies of the first Critique, reason does not contradict itself; it is rather the determinations in things and situations that are subject to conflicting objective evaluations. Hegel’s more optimistic view of reason is accompanied by a very honest recognition of the existence of genuinely hard problems for thought about life in the world.

Negation and Negativity

“Hegel is willing to say some extraordinary things about the concept he sometimes calls ‘negation’, sometimes ‘negativity’. What he has been taken to mean has been the source of most of the criticism of Hegel: that he confused logical negation with actual opposition, as in the oppositions of forces or magnitudes in general in the world; that he thought everything in the world contradicted itself, and so believed that pairs of contradictory judgments could both be affirmed; or simply that what he said about negation and contradiction cannot be coherently understood. And any commentator must face the fact that he invoked the notion of negation in many different contexts in many different ways. So the first task is to have in view that variety of contexts before we can understand what they all might have in common (if anything)” (Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 139).

Some time ago I touched on the most elementary parts of this thorny issue in Contradiction vs Polarity. My basic sense at this point is that Hegel does indeed have very worthwhile things to say on this very distinctive theme of his, but that the standard connotations of his core vocabulary for talking about it — negation, negativity, contradiction — are so impoverished relative to what he really means in his extensive and varied metaphorical uses of it that the vocabulary does not communicate well.

Pippin identifies five somewhat overlapping contexts that ought to be taken into account in a serious interpretation of Hegelian negation: the nature of thinking; the talk about freedom; the nature of intelligibility; the notion of speculative truth; and the talk about contradiction.

In the context of the nature of thinking, he says “In the simplest sense, we are talking about the logical structure of apperceptive intentional knowledge, as well as the ontological status of agency. What it means to claim that the intelligibility of any content of empirical knowledge is not… wholly ‘positive’… is best understood by contrast. If it were not so and were wholly positive, subjectivity would be something like a mere complex registering and responding device (of the same ontological status as a thermometer) ” (p. 141).

“As we have seen, one is not simply wholly absorbed in the presence of the world to one, not wholly and merely reactive to the stimulation of sensibility, and that ‘not’ is the beginning (but certainly not the end) of all the logical issues of negation that emerge in Hegel’s philosophy, at both the phenomenological and the logical level. In making such a judgment I ‘negate’ the mere immediacy or givenness of perceptual content, negate it as immediate and putatively given, and take up, am always taking up, a position of sorts about what is there, what is the case” (p. 142).

The suggestion is that all “taking” of things to be thus-and-such for Hegel implicitly involves a negation of immediacy.

“What thinking is is such a ‘negation’ of one’s immediate ‘positive’ state. (One can say: this negation of mere immediacy is ‘taking a stand’, rather than being put into a state.) Any thinking could be a seeming-to-be-the-case, not what is the case, and that possibility is constitutive of the act’s being a judging in the first place…. The constitutive feature attended to in a Hegelian philosophical logic is the fact that judgments are potentially responsive to reasons and revisions just qua judgments” (ibid).

Pippin thus cites responsiveness to reasons as another non-obvious instance of negation for Hegel.

“And in being an agent, I am not simply causally responsive to inclinations and desires; there is no ‘fullness of positive being’ here either. I interrupt or negate positive being (what I feel inclined to do, experience as wanting to do) by deliberating and resolving what to do” (p. 143).

Deliberation is another non-obvious instance.

“As noted before, the closest first and general approximation of what he means is Aristotelian: subjectivity (thinking and acting according to norms) is the distinct being-at-work… of the biological life form that is the human, reason-responsive substance; this in the same sense in which Aristotle says, if the eye were body, seeing would be its form, its distinctive being-at work” (ibid).

Subjectivity in general is another.

“Instead of thinking of the fundamental act of understanding as a synthesis of independent, originally unrelated elements, either by subsuming an individual under a concept, or by including one concept under another, we should understand ourselves, both in experience and in logical reflection, beginning with ‘wholes’, never with experiential or logical subsentential simples [individual words] or atoms” (pp. 143-144).

Hegel presents this last point as a sort of inversion of Kant, and it does speak to some of Kant’s language. But I would argue that the true starting point of Kantian synthesis is not experiential or logical atoms, but rather the sensible manifold in intuition, which is only potentially differentiable. This brings Kant closer to Hegel. True, the manifold has such a loose unity that arguably it might have trouble qualifying as a “whole”, but even less does it consist in already predifferentiated “atoms”. In Kant I think we have no basis for identifying putative atoms in experience until “after” the figurative synthesis of imagination has done its work. (It is the preconscious, in a non-Kantian sense “spontaneous” figurative synthesis that for Kant creates an inevitable gap between being and thinking, and that for Hegel gives us the fixed representations relied upon by common sense.)

In the context of freedom, Pippin says that “In the same way that judging, insofar as it is genuine, holds open the possibility of its negation or disconfirmation, just by being judging, not by virtue of any second, reflective act…, a deliberation about action, if it is to be a deliberation, is open to the force of reasons the agent has already accepted by deliberating at all, a possibility criterial for his acting at all…. [Hegel] is insisting on the logical or categorical requirements of the normative, and in that sense (the sense in which freedom is normatively constrained judgment and rational action), the negative (here only the possibility of not doing what I am powerfully inclined to do) is ‘that by which a person is free’. (And he does not mean any uncaused causality, but that which counts to the subject as a reason” (p. 147).

Normativity in general thus counts as depending on a kind of negation.

“In terms of the structure of the Logic, what Hegel will want to argue is that we cannot adequately explain freedom if we consider just a determinate property that some beings happen to have…, and we cannot explain it either as a kind of essential ideal, manifest in but never adequately expressed in its appearances, in concrete individual actions…. We need the logic of the Concept, in which concepts are said to ‘give themselves their own content’ and be ‘self-determining’ in a way indebted to [the] Kantian claim on self-legislation…. Any philosophical determination of actuality must be understood as ‘self-legislating’ in the broad sense [that] reason relies only on itself in determining such a normative structure. These are not empirical questions. There is no flash of ‘essence intuition’ (Wesenschau) giving access to a world of abstract immaterial objects, essences” (p. 148).

Self-legislation too involves some subtle kind of negation.

In the context of the nature of intelligibility, Pippin says “Every determination of every sort of content in the Logic is a negation of some insufficient determinacy that must be able to be conceived positively” (p. 153). This is another way of characterizing the basis of the notorious “movement” in Hegel’s logic.

The determination of content for sure involves negation.

In the context of speculative truth, he mentions that “[E]valuative judgments, like ‘this action is good’, or our familiar ‘this is a bad house’, will be paradigmatic examples of judgment in the logic of the Concept. They do not qualitatively specify a thing by distinguishing it from other things; they do not identify the appearances that show the ‘essence’ of the thing; they understand the content ‘in terms of its concept'” (p. 154).

Evaluation of anything against its concept is another subtle variety.

In the context of the notorious “contradiction”, Pippin says “So in a general sense, one has to say that a thing… ‘includes’ its contrary, or more precisely its relation to its contrary, in order to be, and be known to be, what it is. Neither of these ‘moments’ of negation involves contradiction in the Aristotelian sense because ‘is’ and ‘is not’, while said of the same thing and at the same time, are not meant in the same sense. But Hegel wants for various reasons to call such an analyzed state a ‘contradiction’, and there is some ground in the use of the term for saying that…. In the simplest sense, personifying the process, what someone intends to say, means to say, can be ‘contradicted’ by what is actually said, what he finds he has to or can say” (p. 156).

Evaluation of any outcome against intent is another.

Pippin notes that Hegel says retrospectively at the end of the Logic that the abstract treatment typical of the logic of being and the logic of essence is due to “mere opinion” or lack of awareness of what it is actually treating. “It cannot say what it means to say” (p. 157). This is yet another way of characterizing the Logic‘s “movement”.

Logical “movement” is another.

“Hegel’s speculative notion of contradiction is not predicate or sentence negation…. [H]e means to focus attention on concept negation…. Now concepts, understood as rules, have content by being understood to have the content that they have. To understand a rule is to know how to use it, and in using it, to know one is following it…. So understanding… is not… ‘grasping a content’ but understanding what the rule instructs us to think. That is, the concept is always already a moment of discursive activity, a thinking through of its implications” (pp. 158-159).

“[T]he considerations discussed so far should not be understood to be matters of formal clarity…. As Hegel insisted, we are not studying how we think about (or talk about) matters (or even how we ‘must’ think). The question is a question about ‘any possible intelligibility’, and so about being in its intelligibility, … not ‘our ways’ of rendering intelligible” (p. 160).

All the above varieties of “negation” involve normativity in one way or another. Here Pippin again emphasizes the universality of criteria of intelligibility that Hegel counterposes to the Kantian gap between thinking and being.

“The forms of intelligibility are the forms of what could be true, although they do not settle the question of what, in particular, is true” (p. 175).

“[O]ur first orientation in trying to understand Hegelian negation should be not the logical operation of predicate or sentence negation, but real opposition…. [Michael] Wolff also thinks that the controversy in the eighteenth century about positive and negative magnitudes, especially as it surfaced in Kant, as well as the emerging clarity about negative numbers, played a far larger role in the development of Hegel’s thinking about negation and contradiction than did a reflection on the logic of the formal operator” (pp. 177-178).

Real opposition is an instance of contrariety, which is actually much more relevant to Hegel than formal logical contradiction.

“Hegel’s category of becoming, so important at the beginning of the logic of being, owes much to Hegel’s defense of Newton and the latter’s doctrine of the becoming equal of magnitudes” (pp. 178-179).

“Critics like Crusius were aghast at the idea of forces having positive and negative values. But Kant understood that such ‘values’ (and here again an important precedent for Hegel) had those values in relation to each other, not absolutely, that they were relative values, arbitrarily reversible even” (pp. 179-180).

Negative magnitudes are another instance of contrariety.

“This is not the sense of contradiction throughout the Logic, but it gives us enough background… to appreciate that Hegel is neither a lunatic for saying that ‘everything is contradictory’, nor a mystical Heraclitean” (p. 180).

Pippin devotes nearly half of this chapter to critical remarks about Brandom’s interpretation of Hegelian negation as material incompatibility, which involves a more nuanced form of contrariety. He says Brandom’s reading very well captures the meaning of negation in Hegel’s logic of being, but is inadequate for what Hegel goes on to do in the logic of essence and the logic of the concept. For example, material incompatibility alone is insufficient to explain things like the “self-legislation” of the concept or the idea of the good, but Hegel at least claims that these have something to do with the concept of negation.

Brandom’s interpretation of Hegelian negation seemed to me incomparably clearer than Hegel himself, so until now I have adopted it enthusiastically as a charitable rendering of what Hegel ought to have said to better express his meaning. This is the first of many counter-arguments to Brandom I have seen that really seems to me to at least raise a serious question, but for now I will forego another lengthy tangent.

Next in this series: Deeper Truth

Pure Negativity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acts in Brandom and Žižek

Both Brandom and Žižek recognize what Brandom has called the “world’s stubborn recalcitrance to mastery and agency”, and yet hold out for the possibility of transformative action.

Brandom ingeniously secures the practical reality of choice through the indirect route of an Enlightenment idea that we can only be bound by values to which we have at least implicitly committed ourselves. The recalcitrance of the Real prevents this from becoming a subjectivism, specifically by virtue of his complementary thesis that the meaning of our commitments is not up to us. But actively taking responsibility for things beyond our power turns out to indirectly have a kind of efficacy. Retrospectively, this may change meant reality.

A lengthy article by Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner discusses agency in Žižek from various angles. This account at least is happily free of the Badiouian narrowing of consideration to a few inflationarily conceived “exceptional” acts that afflicts some of the Žižekians (see “Hard” Kantianism?). The concern is with acts in general, and subjectivity in general. Here I can find a good deal more common ground.

For Žižek, our desires are not our own, but the split in the subject that makes us never fully ourselves also connects us with the social. A subject is contrasted with subjectivation. Although passive, alienating subjectivation is inescapable, it also can never be complete. A subject is positively constituted by its own nonidentity or “impossibility” (i.e., impossibility of complete identity with itself). According to Vighi and Feldner, “this decentred kernel of otherness embodies my self-consciousness, the only place where I have a chance to locate the truth about myself”. The conscious activity of individuals is said to be not free, but we can nonetheless accomplish a free act through identifying with the destabilizing effect of what is “in us more than ourselves”. They argue that Žižek does not hypostatize an abstract negativity in the way that I think Sartre did.

Žižek himself wrote that “To ‘pass to the act’ means to assume the risk that what I am about to do will be inscribed into a framework whose contours elude my grasp” (Tarrying with the Negative, p. 31). This connects agency with the Lacanian Real. He also wrote that freedom corresponds to “my ability to choose/determine which causes will determine me. ‘Ethics’, at its most elementary, stands for the courage to accept this responsibility” (The Parallax View, p. 203).

So, despite huge differences in approach and terminology and Žižek’s negative comments about Brandom, on this question at this level of abstraction, there is a similar practical import.

Pure Negativity?

I’m still hoping to arrive at a more constructive engagement with the Žižek school of contemporary Hegel interpretation. Žižek’s reading is more “metaphysical” than the Aristotle-and-Brandom-inspired one I’ve been developing here, and I’m not fond of his penchant for showmanship, but there is a broad proximity of concerns. I’m looking now at Sbriglia and Žižek, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism (2020). The unusual “materialism” at issue here is openly proclaimed to be a development of German idealism. The contributors seek to distinguish themselves from other recent currents of so-called “cultural materialism”, “new historicism”, “new materialism”, and “object-oriented ontology”. I’ve briefly reviewed one of the representative works from which the Žižekians want to distinguish themselves.

Common to all these trends, the Žižek school, and the work pursued here is a rejection of a classic Cartesian Subject. As against the others, the Žižek school and I both also want to nonetheless affirm the importance of subjectivity. While I am not a Lacanian, I also think Lacan deserves serious engagement, and the Žižek school is pursuing that.

Sbriglia and Žižek write that “the self-limitation of the phenomenal that renders matter un-whole, the fact that the phenomenal field is in itself never ‘all’, never a complete, consistent whole, is strictly correlative to subjectivity as such” (p. 10, emphasis in original). Mladen Dolar in his contribution writes, “Subject is rather the very impossibility of substance to be substance” (p. 38). Žižek in his contribution adds, “when Kant asserts the limitation of our knowledge, Hegel does not answer him by claiming he can overcome the Kantian gap…. the Kantian gap already is the solution: Being itself is incomplete…. This dimension gets lost in Fichte and Schelling, who both assert intellectual intuition” (pp. 107-108, emphasis in original). This seems exactly right.

I would add that for similar reasons having to do with criteria of identity, there is an impossibility like Dolar’s (developed by Aristotle himself in the central books of the Metaphysics) for Aristotelian “what it was to have been” a thing to just be the kind of quasi-grammatical substrate that came to be commonly understood by Latin substantia. The above-quoted formulations are a big advance over notions of mere epistemic incompleteness due to the inexhaustibility of a naively conceived in-itself. In my more Aristotelian language, not only do we rational animals never have a completely univocal perspective on the whole, but we should not be afraid to speak of equivocal determination in the real. Equivocal determination is still determination, but it is incomplete.

My only caveat to Sbriglia and Žižek’s formulation would be on the Schellingian sound of “self-limitation of the phenomenal”. It seems to me the Žižek school sometimes wants to put a Schellingian spin on Hegel’s famous “substance is also subject” claim, which would be an unfortunate regression. I think Hegel not only wanted to sharply distinguish his perspective from that of Schellingian identity philosophy, but succeeded in doing so.

Sbriglia and Žižek use the picturesque Lacanian language of a “hole in reality” as a defining characteristic of subjectivity, commenting that “the inaccessibility of the transcendent In-itself… is a result of the inscription of the perceiving subject into reality” (ibid). I prefer to minimize implicit identity claims, and thus to say (some) subjectivity rather than “the” subject. In some contexts, I think this is merely a terminological difference. Insofar as they just mean a decentered subjectivity with roots in the unconscious, the formulation seems fine, provided “perceiving” is taken as referring to something like Hegelian “Perception” and higher levels of the Phenomenology, not to something like his intended-to-be-discarded starting point of putative empirical “Sense Certainty”.

I get less comfortable with their talk about “the” subject as an abyss of pure negativity. Here I hear echoes of Sartre. While this is neither a substantial Cartesian-medieval intellectual soul nor even a Husserlian transcendental Ego, talk about “pure” negativity or an “abyss” seems to imply a kind of immanent infinity, albeit stripped of traditional theological associations. Sartre used this kind of metaphysics of negativity to bolster an extreme voluntarist anthropology, ironically transferring claims from old bad theology to the service of a strident atheism. Alain Badiou, who is a significant influence on the Žižek school, began as a Sartrean, and is perhaps the most outspoken extreme voluntarist today. I think it is a disservice to bring Sartre and Badiou into the reading of Hegel. Voluntarism is at root a naked expression of the attitude of one-sided Mastery, and should have no place in a discourse that aims at emancipation. Emancipation cannot come from an imposition of will. It comes rather from the increase of justice through processes furthering concrete realization of the autonomy of reason and mutual recognition. (See also Independence, Freedom; Freedom Without Sovereignty.)

Claims of immanent infinity may get a bit of added credibility these days, due to circulating complaints against Kantian “finitude”. It is easy to superficially enlist quotes from Hegel that appear to support such complaints. Here I want to explicitly defend the Kantian perspective of the essential finitude of human reality, relating it back to the happily rather than unhappily finite perspective of Aristotle, and supporting that by an Aristotelian-Brandomian reading of Hegel. A perspective of human finitude can also draw on charitable understandings of much traditional wisdom.

I do also think there is an inherently good but distinctly inhuman Hegelian “negative infinity” that can be anonymously intimate to our finite reality and the formation of our values, through the mediation of second nature, without actually being “us” or “ours” or immanent in us. Even if that negative infinity is to be identified with the “pure Self” Sbriglia and Žižek mention from Hegel’s 1805-06 lectures, it should not be identified with any empirical or existentialist or common-sense self. The Žižek school’s way of expressing this is to speak of a “split subject” or a split in the subject. Various strands of traditional wisdom can be seen in retrospect to have bearing on such a distinction as well. Members of the Žižek school would probably eschew any favorable reference to “traditional wisdom” of the kind I am making here as incompatible with academic-leftist credentials important to them, but Hegel himself often showed an irenic and even valorizing attitude on matters of this sort. (See also Acts in Brandom and Žižek; Self, Subject; Empirical-Transcendental Doublet.)