Tag: Objects

Pragmatics of Inquiry

The third chapter of Brandom’s 1976 dissertation addresses a dispute in 20th-century philosophy of science between “realism” and “instrumentalism”. He aims to overcome this dichotomy with the help of concepts developed by John Dewey (1859-1952). Besides its intrinsic interest, the discussion sheds additional light on several terms that are prominent in Brandom’s later work.

“Within the structure of classical (positivist) philosophy of science there was a genuine and easily formulable issue between realists and instrumentalists concerning the nature of scientific theories. Both parties agreed that statements reporting observations are either true or false, and that the terms used in true observational statements refer to actual objects and properties. The realist claimed that theoretical statements are also true or false, and that if true their terms refer to actual objects and properties. The instrumentalist regarded theoretical statements as convenient codifications of inferential practices concerning observational statements. Theoretical statements are rather to be read as expressing rules for complicated practices of material inference. The origin of this suggestion for reading putative propositions as rules for inferential practices lies in the fact that in a formal logical system one can in general replace any premise such as ‘n is an A‘ with material inferential rules of the form ‘From “All As are Bs” infer “n is a B” ‘ ” (Brandom, “Practice and Object”, p. 71).

Here Brandom already makes use of Sellars’ notion of material inference, which is the foundation of the “inferentialism” that will be propounded in his first big book Making It Explicit (1994). Within the current chapter, he approaches realism and instrumentalism in an even-handed manner, but his references to this discussion elsewhere in this work are slanted in the direction of criticizing instrumentalism. Given that his later inferentialism advocates something closely related to what he criticizes here, it is clear that his thinking on this matter has evolved.

In the current context, “realism” refers not to a direct or naive realism (the idea that we directly interact with objectively real things, which are more or less as we take them to be), but to a commitment to the reality of theoretical objects. Alongside this he implicitly portrays both parties to the dispute as holding to a kind of empiricism that he does not criticize here, but does criticize in his later works.

“Beginning with Pierce, the primary motivation for wanting to eliminate commitment to theoretical objects has been a desire to accommodate the sort of open-ended conceptual change which has characterized scientific inquiry from the beginning…. Appreciation of this sort of conceptual change has taken the form of a regulative principle to the effect that there are to be no claims taken as ‘fixed points’ settled once and for all…. This is referred to by Pierce and Popper as ‘fallibilism’, and by Quine as the ‘revisability in principle’ of our beliefs and the concepts they are couched in” (pp. 71-72).

I hold in addition that this “revisability in principle” applies not only to scientific concepts and theories, but also to the concepts and beliefs that we apply in ordinary life and in any kind of dialogue.

“The realists argue that theoretical statements do not simply license certain inferential moves concerning observation statements, they also explain the efficacy and account for the legitimacy of those practices…. Appreciation of the need for some explanation of the sort the realists seek takes the form of a regulative principle for theories of inquiry which Quine calls ‘naturalized epistemology’. It is just the requirement that we be able to exhibit scientific inquiries as natural processes susceptible of ordinary empirical investigation and explanation” (p. 73).

The terms “empirical” and “naturalized” can also have broader meanings than they generally do in modern science. For example, I’ve had a lifelong interest in why people believe the things that they do. In this context it is hard to see any kind of dichotomy between justification and explanation. I approach both in terms of “reasons why”. The explanation at issue here, though, is more narrowly causal in a modern sense. (I take both naturalism and “empirical” inquiry in broader, more relaxed senses — empirical as meaning grounded in ordinary experience, and naturalism simply as not appealing to the supernatural as an unexplained explainer.)

“The classical theory/observation distinction simply repeats the Kantian picture of knowledge as the product of a faculty of receptivity (intuition, observation, the passive appropriation of the ‘given’) and a faculty of spontaneity (understanding, theory, the interpretation of the ‘given’)” (pp. 74-75).

More to the point, the common theory/observation distinction in early 20th-century philosophy of science reflects a common dogmatic attachment to empiricism. But at this early point, Brandom still seems to follow Rorty’s negative view of Kant, and he avoids directly criticizing empiricism. But since Kant emphasizes the interdependence of intuition and understanding and says we never find one of these without the other in any real case, it hardly seems fair to treat this as a rigid dualism. In later works, Brandom treats Kant much more sympathetically, and does directly criticize empiricism.

“It is important to realize that the original dispute proceeded as a disagreement about the nature of theories in which the objects immediately given in observation were taken as the measure against which ‘theoretical objects’ were to be laid…. The notion of a theory-neutral, interpretation-free observation language was attacked by Wittgenstein in the Investigations and by Sellars among others, and had fallen into disrepute in the philosophy of science by the 1960s” (p. 75).

That is once again to say that a kind of dogmatic empiricism reigned almost undisputed in early 20th-century philosophy of science. Within analytic philosophy, this commitment to empiricism only began to be questioned in the 1950s, with the work of late Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Quine.

“[T]he current [1976] situation may be put as follows. In the light of many recent criticisms, philosophers of science have denied that there are sharp differences of kind between objects of observation and objects of theory. Contemporary instrumentalists ([such as] Quine, Feyerabend, and Kuhn) may be thought of as taking this work as … showing that [observation] is more like theory as classically conceived than we had previously thought. So observation is to join theory as a matter of holistically criticizable practices. Realists (such as Putnam, Field, and Boyd) have taken the demise of [the observation/theory distinction] as illuminating our notion of theory, letting us see that theoretical objects are as real, causally efficacious, and independent of our knowledge of them as the classical observable objects” (pp. 76-77).

Each of these latter views seems to make a good point.

“It is not clear, however, … that the new positions are incompatible…. I believe that this is precisely the virtue of Dewey’s theory of inquiry” (p. 78). “Dewey’s idiosyncratic and often obscure account of the mechanics of inquiry … exhibits the realist/instrumentalist dispute as a confusion based on insufficient appreciation of the consequences of abandoning the theory/observation distinction” (p. 70).

He goes on to discuss a number of passages from Dewey. Dewey’s “inquiry into inquiry” is grounded in a specialized notion of situation.

Dewey says “The situation as such is not and cannot be stated or made explicit… It is present throughout [inquiry] as that of which whatever is explicitly stated or propounded is a distinction” (p. 79).

Certainly we never have unqualified “mastery” of our practical or epistemic circumstances, but this doctrine of inherently ineffable “situations” goes further than is needed to make that point. What Dewey says here resembles existentialist claims that existence is ineffable in principle. I was unaware that there was such a dimension to his thought. To my knowledge, none of Brandom’s later works builds on this Deweyan theory of situations. But the way Brandom relates this dubious notion to the making of distinctions puts it in a maximally positive light.

Brandom comments “To ‘know’ something, rather than simply ‘having’ the situation is a matter of repeatables ‘instituted’ within an unrepeatable situation. It is this process which we must investigate to understand the nature of inquiry…. What is excluded by the unrepeatable, non-cognitive nature of situations is only that in a given inquiry I should come to know, rather than simply have, the situation which is the context of that very inquiry. I may investigate other inquiries and their contexts, and this is what one must do to produce a theory of inquiry” (p. 80).

The positive idea that universals arise out of our practices that institute “repeatables” is provocative. No human inquiry partakes of perfect reflexivity, but inquiry is possible nonethless.

“From this external point of view situations are sub-types of the natural occurrences which Dewey calls various ‘histories’ or ‘affairs’. These are the basic elements for which our collective name is ‘nature’ ” (ibid).

He quotes Dewey: “[N]ature is an affair of affairs” (ibid).

Then he goes on: “Situations are a class of affairs which contain sentient organisms. These are the most complicated and interesting affairs in nature, for it is within them that cognition occurs. The model of this sort of affair is the transaction between an organism and its environment in which ‘integration is more fundamental than is the distinction designated by interaction of organism and environment’. The environment here is not just that bit of the physical world which happens to surround the organism. It is that part of the surrounding world with which the organism interacts to live. So from the outside, situations are just congeries of objects ‘falling within boundaries’ determined in some way by the inquirer, and considered as unique, datable occurrences.”

I guess this predates the sentience/sapience distinction that Brandom dwells on in Making It Explicit.

“But if situations are thus unrepeatable constellations of objects, how are the repeatables crucial to cognitive inquiry, as Dewey says, ‘instituted’ within them?” (p. 81).

That is indeed the question.

He quotes Dewey again: “A starting point for further discussion is found in the fact that verbal expressions which designate activities are not marked by the distinction between ‘singular’ (proper) names and ‘common’ names which is required in the case of nouns. For what is designated by a verb is a way of changing and/or acting. A way, manner, mode of change and activity is constant or uniform. It persists through the singular deed done or the change taking place is unique” (ibid).

Adverbial ways of being and ways of acting are far more interesting than mere attributions of undifferentiated existence or action. The association of these adverbial “ways” with a formal characteristic of verbs that is agnostic to the distinction between particulars and universals is unfamiliar and intriguing.

Brandom notes, “Practices, modes of activity involving the objects making up the situation, are to be the basis for repeatability in inquiry” (p. 82)

Now he says it more categorically. Universals become instituted through commonalities in practice, rather than through putative resemblances in perceptual experience. No universal is simply passively acquired.

He quotes Dewey again: “We are brought to the conclusion that it is modes of response which are the ground of generality of logical form, not existential immediate qualities of what is responded to…. ‘Similarity’ is the product of assimilating different things with respect to their functional value in inference and reasoning” (p. 82).

This resembles Brandom’s later critique of assumptions about resemblance.

Brandom comments, “Dewey wants to be able to present a ‘naturalized epistemology’, a theory of inquiry which will account for the practices of an inquirer in the ordinary empirical way, in terms of a set of objects existing antecedent to any activity of the inquirer, and which causally condition his behavior in explicable ways. One of the terms by means of which Dewey formulates the results of his ‘inquiry into inquiry’ is thus the situation. The situation of any particular inquiry we choose to investigate may well contain objects unknown to the inquirer who ‘has’ the situation…. With this introduction to the notion of a situation, we are prepared to approach Dewey’s notion of inquiry” (pp. 83-84).

The way he uses “empirical” here seems to straddle the boundary between empirical science on the one hand, and ordinary experience and natural language use on the other.

“[Dewey’s] official definition of inquiry is: ‘the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.’ Dewey later decided that this was ill-put, and his considered view is that ‘the original indeterminate situation and the eventual resolved one are precisely initial and terminal stages of one and the same existential situation’. We will see that the ‘transformation’ which is inquiry according to Dewey is a transformation of practices of reporting, inferring, eating, etc. Dewey’s talk of ‘existentially transforming’ situations by inquiring will seem less paradoxical if we recall that the paradigm of a situation from the external point of view is an organism in its environment” (pp. 84-85).

Inquiry is something existentially transforming that occurs within a broadly natural context.

“By insisting on the role of pre-cognitive situations in inquiry, Dewey enforces the constraint of practices and changes of practice by causal relations of pre-existing objects which make those practices possible” (p. 85).

Here Brandom aims to show that Dewey addresses the concerns of the realists.

An interesting sentence in one of his quotations from Dewey is that “The attitude, when made explicit, is an idea or conceptual meaning” (p. 87). The phrase “making explicit” appears here at several important junctures in this discussion of Dewey. The title of Making It Explicit may reflect a Deweyan inspiration. This also sheds light on Brandom’s later talk about the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The attitudes in question are not purely or shallowly subjective. They are practical stances in situations, subject to concrete give-and-take in the situations, and therefore to objective constraints that go into making the situation what it is.

Young Brandom explains, “A situation is indeterminate insofar as it is uncertain what to do in it, what past situation to assimilate it to…. An inquirer enters any situation with a repertoire of practices differentially elicitable by features of that situation…. The situation is determinate or resolved insofar as a concordant set of practices is unambiguously elicited by the situation. Inquiry is the process of producing such settled situations by applying high-order practices of criticism and refinement of initially conflicting claims made in accord with established practices whether inferential or non-inferential” (ibid).

The notion of a differentiating elicitation does occur in his later work.

“For Dewey, as for Pierce, inquiry is a matter of refining one’s practices toward an ideal in which no situation would elicit discordant or ambiguous activity in accord with those practices. Every time a problematic situation does arise, a re-assessment of the practices involved is required, an adjustment and refinement of that set of practices until concord is reached in the concrete situation” (p. 89).

Brandom’s later works express this repeated re-assessment in terms of the ongoing re-constitution of Kantian unities of apperception. Pierce and Dewey apparently put too much stock in a sort of universal movement toward consensus.

“It is important to this picture of inquiry that the inquirer and the habits which determine his practices are part of the situation. This means that altering one’s practices is a way of transforming one situation into another” (pp. 89-90).

“The essential feature of language is that ‘it compels one individual to take the standpoint of other individuals and to see and inquire from a standpoint that is not strictly personal but is common to them as participants or “parties” in some conjoint undertaking’ ” (p. 90).

Language in part presupposes and in part constitutes intersubjectivity. (Intersubjectivity is not something added onto individual subjectivity, but rather a precondition for its possibility. We could not be talking animals at all without others to talk with.)

“Common sense inquiries and scientific inquiries are alike, in that the same general description as ‘controlled transformation of problematic situations into resolved ones’ applies to both. They are different in that the practices of scientific inquiry are developed, inculcated, and criticized in social institutions unparalleled in the extra-scientific community” (p. 91).

I would say that any serious inquiry is an instance of what Habermas calls communicative action, and involves many considerations that do not apply to action in general.

“By looking thus from the outside at an inquirer and his situation in terms of the best scientific theory we have of them, we can also in principle describe conceptual change in an ordinary empirical way” (p. 93). “By describing their practices with respect to the objects which our best theories tell us make up their situations, we provide the framework for an ordinary empirical investigation of inquiry and conceptual change in terms of the physiological and sociological basis of their practices…. According to Dewey, the activity of the physiologist and sociologist investigating the basis in relation of objects for the practices of various groups of inquirers is itself to be thought of as a set of practices which occur within some non-cognitive situation (had but not known) and transformed as inquiry progresses. Inquiry into inquiry shares with all other inquiries the utilization and adaptation of practices forged in previous inquiries, and hence the revisability-in-principle of all these practices and the claims made in accordance with them” (p. 94).

This seems to treat natural-scientific explanation rather than discursive inquiry into meaning as the paradigm for explanation in general. As evinced by the work of Habermas, revisability in principle is an attribute of discursive or dialogical inquiry in general.

“It should be clear at this point that the realist’s claims and the instrumentalist’s claims as they appear in Dewey’s view of inquiry are completely compatible. Objects and practices occupy correlative functional roles in describing inquiry. Conceptual change is indeed viewed as a change of practice, but neither the practices nor the change is viewed as inexplicable” (pp. 95-96).

This is the main point that young Brandom wants to make here. Issues with classical pragmatist sources notwithstanding, I think he is basically successful.

“On the contrary, any practice or change of practice may in principle be explained by appealing to the objects reported, inferred about, or manipulated in any of the practices which are not then in question. This does not mean that there is any practice which cannot be explained or changed, and which is somehow a basis for the rest. We simply cannot change or explain all of our practices at once” (p. 96).

Any particular belief or concept we may have is subject to revision. But we doubt one thing in light of other things that are provisionally held constant. In real life no one doubts everything at any given time.

“There is a certain sort of circularity here, but it is the familiar non-vicious circularity of any self-regulating enterprise, a formal characteristic acknowledged by contemporary philosophy of science as applying to empirical inquiries, capsulized most vividly in Neurath’s famous figure of a ship making repairs at sea” (ibid).

This idea of practical mutual dependence among the elements of inquiry makes foundationalism untenable.

“The difficulty with the instrumentalists is that, having noticed the problems resulting from an ontology of objects, they sought to put epistemology on a firm footing by substituting an ontology of practices, claiming that objects were derivative entities, ultimately reducible to practices which, as we say, involve them…. Dewey teaches us that the problem is with the notion of ontology itself. Once we have become naturalistic, accepting a thoroughgoing fallibilism means eschewing the notion of a categorization of the kinds of things there are which is outside of and prior to any empirical investigation. Objects and practices are mutually dependent functional notions. We cannot account for the changing roles objects play in our conceptual economy without appealing to practices as well, and we cannot individuate practices without reference to objects” (p. 96n).

Objects are derivative entities, and there is a problem with ontology itself, whether it be taken merely as an a priori enumeration of kinds of things, or as something supposedly more fundamental.

“The problem which faced the realists, as we have argued, is allowing for fallibilism in their account of scientific activity. On the face of it, the explanation which the realist wants to be able to offer of the success of current practices, in terms of the actual existence and causal efficacy of the objects purportedly referred to in the theory will not explain why previous views which we have good empirical reason to believe false worked as well as they did. Nor is it obvious how believing in all those unreal objects enabled us to reach our present privileged position of believing in real ones (i.e., the ones which ‘really’ enable us to engage in the practices we do). Finally, fallibilism dictates that we be willing to accept the possibility of revisions in our current view as radical as those which have occurred in the past” (p. 97).

Here there is a clear parallel to the entry conditions for dialogue developed by Gadamer and Habermas. These apply not only to scientific discourse, but to discourse in general.

“According to Dewey’s view, each time our scientific view of things changes sufficiently, we will have to rewrite our account of the history of inquiry in terms of the sorts of objects which we have new practices of making claims about. But this fact no more impugns the project of explaining how previous practices worked as well as they did, than it impugns any other empirical project which may have to be rethought in view of the results of subsequent inquiry” (p. 98).

Naive views of the history of scientific progress as a linear accumulation toward presumed present truth cannot be sustained. When one view supersedes another in any context, it is not a simple matter of truth versus error. For example, geocentric astronomy had an important practical use in navigation that was not negated by the greater “truth” of heliocentric astronomy.

“As long as knowledge is thought of on the Kantian model, as the product of the collaboration of a faculty of receptivity and a faculty of spontaneity (and the observation/theory distinction is a straightforward version of this model, it will seem that there is a philosophical task of explaining the relations of these faculties. (Even Quine falls into this view in the very midst of a recommendation of a Deweyan naturalism about knowledge.) On this picture, philosophers are to tell us how theory relates to evidence, concept to intuition, in every possible cognition. This project stands outside of and prior to any empirical investigation. Dewey, having wrestled free of the picture generating the classical epistemological project, is able to present inquiry into inquiry as an ordinary empirical matter…. Thus Dewey’s naturalized account of inquiry can retain a distinction between inferential and noninferential practices, and between repeatable and non-repeatable elements. These categories are now meant to have only the same force that any empirical classification has, however. They can be discarded when an empirically better idea comes along. Once we give up the receptivity/spontaneity distinction, and with it the project of a philosophical discipline called ‘epistemology’ which is to relate the operations of the two faculties, we lose also the means to formulate a dispute between realism and instrumentalism concerning which faculty is to be given pride of place” (pp. 98-100).

As I noted earlier, in later works Brandom never blames Kant for the bad idea that there is such a thing as pure observation without any interpretation. That is an empiricist prejudice that ought in fact to be regarded as decisively refuted by Kant. Broadly construed, “naturalism about knowledge” is a good thing, provided it does not lead us back to empiricism.

Next in this series: Truth and Assertibility

Cogitation, Intention

“Besides access to the five senses and the common sense, the cogitative faculty in effect has a power proper to it, to know ‘non-sensible intentions‘. John of Jandun adopts a formula of Avicenna, which he read in Albert [the Great]. These non-sensible intentions are non-sensible properties of the things we sense. These are ‘properties’ of individuals, precisely those of things, and not general notions…. All that particularizes a thing and places me in a situation before it is not limited to what the external senses passively apprehend…. That which is sensed does not exhaust the properties [of the thing], and it is the charge of a faculty like the cogitative to know what the senses do not know” (Brenet, Transferts du sujet, p. 245, my translation throughout).

“Common” sense in Aristotle has to do with coordination of the five particular external senses, and especially with identification of objects and properties that affect more than one sense. His brief mention of internal “sense” was elaborated in the Arabic and Latin traditions to include imagination, memory, and cogitation or estimation. Brenet finds major differences between the accounts of Averroes and the 14th century philosopher John of Jandun, who was supposed by 19th and 20th century scholars to be an uninteresting, uncreative dogmatist who only repeated Averroes.

“Where nonsensible and non-sensed intentions are concerned, memory preserves the reflexive perceptions of the acts of sensation. In effect, I see and I know that I see, I touch and I know that I touch, etc.; that which I touch, I sense; that which I see, I sense; but that I see or that I touch, is not sensible…. A particular sense does not know its own operation, it makes no return upon itself” (p. 270).

This is a somewhat delicate point. It seems that in the course of its work of combining percepts from different particular senses, the common sense can be said to have perception of perceptions, i.e., a kind of second-order perception, that accounts for the reflexive element in experience.

Claims about reflexivity in experience are often overstated, in part because they are expressed as top-down generalities, and because they are used as what Brandom would call an “unexplained explainer”. I prefer Kant and Hegel’s more bottom-up ways of speaking about “reflection”.

Aristotle says in particular that we do not have direct perception of self. Self can only be a “mediate” concept, approached indirectly through the perception of accidents.

“It is the cogitative that ‘tells’ us that Socrates is a father, or a caring father…. The Parisian master holds that the cogitative is the principal of the powers of internal sense, insofar as it knows the non-sensible forms…. Memory retains the intentions known by the cogitative, and for that reason it is called the ‘treasury of intentions'” (p. 246).

On this account, the imagination-based “cogitative faculty” is thus responsible for all of what is commonly called our empirical “knowledge”. The role of “intellect” is only to extract universals from the intermediate abstractions of individuals that cogitation produces.

As background, Brenet develops at length the views of Albert the Great and Averroes on the so-called common and internal senses. On this subject, he says that Albert owes more to Avicenna than to Averroes, and John of Jandun owes more to Albert than to Averroes.

“[John] is close to Albert: the senses do not passively receive the non-sensible intentions” (p. 249).

What are here called nonsensible intentions only exist as constructions or inferences resulting from a kind of activity of the perceiver and knower that is concerned with individuals. In an Aristotelian context, knowledge of individuals is a matter of practical judgment, which is also the kind of judgment used in ethical deliberation. In effect all empirical knowledge is of this kind. Furthermore, our apprehensions of essence are reflectively derived in this same way — ultimately inferred from a consideration of accidents — rather than being simply receptive of “what is”.

“Intentions are accidental percepts. In a first sense, a sensible is called ‘by accident’ if it is not known by a particular sense…. A common sensible, for example size, is not directly suffered by a sense (sight), but it is necessary that we sense it in sensation proper: thus there is no color without a colored surface…. Things go otherwise with intention. On the one hand, the substantial individual Socrates does not as such affect a particular sense, since the only things effectively sensed are the sensible accidents; on the other hand, his relation to what we sense of him is totally contingent…. Here is a first reason for the characterization of the intention … as sensed by accident: it is not suffered, but added fortuitously to what we sense — we judge fortuitously, on the basis of that which we sense. But there is a second: we say of a sensible that it is ‘by accident’, not because it is not known by the senses, if the senses are incapable of knowing it, but if it absolutely speaking escapes from sense as sense” (pp. 249-250).

I would not say that this kind of intention is “totally contingent”, which would imply that it has no objective basis whatsoever. Even “fortuitous” sounds a little strong to me. But the main point here is that these “intentions” are neither axiomatic nor somehow simply given to us.

“The question of the object of the cogitative is decisive for the noetic reading of John of Jandun. It is this faculty that spiritually dominates all the individual powers of the human, and founds her intellectuality. The proper object of this virtue is the intention, which John thinks on the model of the ‘non-sensible properties’ ” (p. 250).

“Otherwise said, I know by my cogitative what it is that makes a human what she is” (p. 252). “The ‘substantial difference’ of the individual or her ‘individual intention’, [John] writes, does not in fact designate her substantial form, but a non-sensed property that follows from her individual substance” (p. 253, emphasis added).

“This all leads John of Jandun to assert that the phantasia of Aristotle — the ymaginatio of Averroes — is made explicit [s’explicite] in the cogitative. And if we want to translate the full sense of the major proposition of the Philosopher, … ‘The intellect does not think without the phantasm of the cogitative‘: the actus phantasiandi in reality is the actualis cogitatio, we do not think without ‘cogitating’ ‘” (p. 254, emphasis in original).

In this way of speaking, imagination in the narrower sense gives us the apparent wholes of experience. Cogitation works upon the details of an imagined whole, allowing us to more clearly re-identify and re-cognize the whole by bringing its characteristic accidents into focus.

“This is again to say that the intelligible species, which proceeds from my phantasms, has nothing eternal about it, is not perpetually subjected in the intellect…. In itself, once again, the intelligible species does not exist. It only persists when the phantasms that cause it persist” (p. 255).

John of Jandun is among those medieval authors who contest the idea that intelligible species come to us directly in any simple way. They are not pre-formed. For him they are our constructs.

“He insists that the intention, which causes the universal, is imagined…. The phantasm, in general again, directly engenders the universal, without the mediation of the agent intellect” (p. 257).

It seems that John wants the eliciting of intentions to be entirely immanent to imagination in the broader sense. Here we are not far from the self-contained cogito of Descartes. “The” cogito is a reification of the immanent activity of the cogitative.

“What is the act of the cogitative? We must not reduce it to the distinction of non-sensed intentions. The cogitative knows all the individual material forms…. The cogitative integrally knows the singular, and each of its phantasms comes back to one of the determinations of the ‘thing’.” (p. 258-259).

In other words, the cogitative subsumes all empirical “knowledge”.

“The imagination receives a sensible form from the common sense; the cogitative knows that same form, but in another mode, for sure always individual, but less sensible: subtilized” (p. 260, emphasis in original).

“Each thought depends systematically on two phantasms: the imaginative and the memorative” (p. 262).

Without imagination, we would have no sense of anything being “present” to us. Without memory, nothing would have coherent connection. These are neither guaranteed to be true nor merely subjective. Here we are in a space in between what is merely subjective, and what is supposed to be objective and unconditionally true.

“What is the ‘passive’ or passible intellect? The Long Commentary [of Averroes] says it is ‘the imaginative faculty'” (p. 265).

In Averroes, the passive or passible “intellect” is a third thing, distinct from both the “agent” and the “material” intellect, and human thought involves all three. According to Brenet, John of Jandun wants to explain human intellect entirely in terms of the immanent imaginative faculty. John rather forcibly reads this view into Averroes, who would have rejected it as one-sided.

“Ymaginatio in Averroes has a specific sense and a generic sense. The first properly concerns the faculty that receives sensible forms from the senses, one of the faculties of internal sense. The second on the other hand has a much larger extension, and stands for the ensemble of these faculties, as well as their combination” (ibid).

“It is not upon the image in a strict sense — that is to say, upon the block of percepts that the imagination holds in reserve — that the agent intellect operates to extract the intelligible, but upon the product of a first denuding, upon that which the cogitative extracts from the image…. Thought does not just obtain a partial supplement of information, or an ultimate incitation; it requires as its condition that [the cogitative] refine the otherwise uninterpretable data of sensation or of the imaginative” (p. 266).

There is no such thing as “raw sense data”. Modern discussions of Aristotelian abstraction have often presupposed an unproblematic binary distinction between what is abstracted and what is not, just as discussions of Kant have often made too much of a dualism between understanding and intuition. This is a delicate point, because we equally want to avoid obliterating the distinction, and to avoid reifying the distinction into a dualism. It is an instance of the old Platonic problem of the One and the Many, where (I would maintain) all the interest is in the in-between parts.

“The cogitative com-poses the intention of the imagined form with its individual…. Remembering consists in bringing back (to present consciousness) an intention of the past…. But again the representation of an intention is not a memory…. [I]t is necessary to search… to recompose the imagined form with its individual…. The ‘object’ of reminiscence is not stored as such, either in memory or in imagination” (p. 267).

This need to search and re-compose again expresses the active aspect of all interpretation.

“The cogitative re-composes what has been decomposed. It restores an integrity. It is the idol of the sensed thing that it tries to retrieve, and this idol does not in any way exist intact. The ‘object’ of reminiscence is not stored as such, either in memory or in imagination. It is not the memory of an image that we seek, not the memory of an intention, but indeed the memory of a thing, by the reconstitution of the best experience of it, the richest and most faithful to the singularities of sensation” (pp. 267-268).

Next in this series: Turn to a Subject

Regard for Objects

People and other sentient beings certainly deserve our consideration, but I want to go all the way and claim that all objects whatsoever deserve some measure of respect. 

In Brandom’s terms, this would be a bad, traditionalist direction, because it seems to attribute to things a kind of normative status that is intrinsic, rather than being derived from a taking, judgment, or attitude. But I am more committed to the proposition that the normative status or goodness of things depends upon explainable reasons, than to the proposition that it only has meaning as following from how they are for someone. It seems to me that the Kantian arguments about the fundamental role of our taking things to be thus-and-such stress the answerability of such takings to ethical reason, more than any mere Cartesian-style unimpeachable fact of their seeming so to someone.

There can be no normativity without normative judgment. But equally, there can be no proper normative judgment without reasons. And the question may remain open whose judgment it is. (See Consciousness and Identity; Grammatical Prejudice?.)

All Kantian scruples about existence claims notwithstanding, I don’t see anything necessarily dogmatic in saying that something has inherent value. This kind of open, nonexclusive affirmation is worlds apart from, for example, a claim that some individual human or group of humans is inherently superior to others. If we judge that we soundly judge something to have value, why not then allow ourselves to say it “has” value? Isn’t that a good enough meaning for the word? (See also Respect for All Beings.)

Aristotle on Perception

Real and meaningful analytic distinctions in experience such as activity and passivity need not be grounded in ontological dualities.

It is common to hear Aristotle summarized as asserting a monolithic passivity in processes of perception. This is a considerable simplification. What is true is that in the absence of something perceptible that does not depend on us for its being, Aristotle would say we have a case not of perception but of something else. This does not mean there are not many active dimensions to typical sense perception as well.

One of Aristotle’s deepest principles involves a recognition of profoundly mixed conditions as being more typical of real life than monolithic or homogeneous ones. Plato treats “mixture” as a first-class topic at the heart of what Aristotle would call first philosophy, and not as a mere derivative from “pure” concepts.

Later authors have often tended to downplay Plato and Aristotle’s emphasis on mixed cases in experience as normal, and instead to privilege pure “black and white” distinctions. I think we should if anything privilege the mixed cases, and demand evidence when confronted with claims that any real-world cases involve “pure” black-and-white distinctions.

Aristotle’s account of perception in book 2 of On the Soul relies mainly on descriptions expressed in terms of actuality, potentiality, and actualization. While it is true that actuality has a character that is mostly active and potentiality has a character that is mostly not active, it is once again an oversimplification to simply equate actuality with activity and potentiality with passivity.

Aristotle’s description of perception is deliberately abstract, which reduces the need to speculatively fill in missing details. Perhaps the most salient overall aspect of this account is that it involves a multi-leveled layering of actuality and potentiality and of active and passive aspects that may be only analytically distinct. He focuses very generally on the various requirements of the kinds of form involved, and works hard to avoid causal explanations not clearly grounded in evidence.

It is very characteristic that Aristotle treats perception and whatever is perceptible in a single context. For instance, his discussion of light occurs here. He has no theory of the transmission of light, which was only experimentally demonstrated in early modern times. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, he sees light as instantaneously diffused through a medium, and reasons that the medium must therefore play a necessary role in perception. For him, light is “the being-at-work of the transparent as transparent” (On the Soul book 2 ch. 7, Sachs trans., p. 101). “By transparent I mean what is visible but not visible in its own right, to put it simply, but on account of the color of something else…. Light is a sort of color of the transparent, whenever it is at-work-staying-transparent by the action of fire or something of that kind…. What, then, the transparent is, has been said, and what light is, that it is not fire or any body at all, nor anything that flows out of any body…, but the co-presence of fire or any such thing in the transparent” (ibid). “Rather, the color sets a transparent thing, such as air, in motion, and by this, if it is continuous, the sense organ is moved” (p. 103).

It is important to recognize that this is a thoughtful interpretation of ordinary experience, with minimal assumptions. We would say, e.g., that light is transmitted at the speed of light rather than instantaneously diffused, but this can only be justified by complex empirical evidence. We associate colors with particular wavelengths of light, and we think of light as consisting of material waves (or alternatively, particles of a particular kind) that cannot be directly observed, but all this depends on complex evidence and test equipment. By contrast, Aristotle aims mainly to do justice to our ordinary experience of seeing things — a dog, a rose, a landscape, and so on. He seems to think of the air in the presence of light as metaphorically “charged” with sensible forms, such that there is a continuous translation of visible configurations of color through the air along each perspectival line of sight.

He somewhat paradoxically speaks of a “transmission” of “forms without the matter” in perception, and of the soul-as-active-form-of-the-body “receiving” them. The soul, as an entelecheia (in Sachs’ translation “being-at-work-staying-itself”, or more literally “in [itself] end having”) of an organic body, is active at root. Perception is then at top level supposed to be the being-at-work of a receptivity of the primarily active soul. Since the “transmission” of color through the air is said to be without matter, it must be more like a translation of color between the medium and the eye.

Some contemporary writers have claimed that Aristotle’s account of perception is of historic interest only, sheerly on the ground that it focuses on potentiality and actuality rather than physical causes. But as usual, Aristotle is far more interested in interpreting experience in meaningful ways, with as few assumptions as possible.

I think it is better to have a very abstract description that remains descriptive of experience, rather than imaginatively positing physical or physiological explanations. That is to say, it is better to be only abstractly descriptive but faithful to ordinary experience like Aristotle, than it is to have a more physically grounded explanation like the Stoics, at the cost of depending on additional assumptions of fact that turned out to be wrong in light of more detailed empirical investigations.

The Stoic theory — following the general Stoic precept that everything that has being must be some kind of body — seems to involve a kind of subtly material forms of objects invisibly but literally flying through the air as distinct wholes, ancestral to the medieval “sensible species”. This is a logically consistent physical and physiological account, which however makes numerous speculative leaps of the sort Aristotle aimed to minimize.

The mathematicians Euclid and Ptolemy geometrically analysed properties of light rays, but believed light rays were actively emitted by the eye, rather than received by it.

The “father of modern optics” and early contributor to scientific method, Iraqi polymath Ibn al-Haytham (ca. 965-1040 CE), known to Latin readers as Alhazen, was the first to explain that vision occurs when light reflected from objects passes to the eye, and to assert that the brain plays a major (active) role in the process of identifying objects. His work was taken up by Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Huygens, Descartes, and Kepler, among others.

The reception of light in and of itself is passive, but ordinary seeing has a large cognitive and interpretive dimension, whether considered at the level of events in the brain or at the level of an interpretation of meaningful content. Reception of light rays is passive, but even the most minimal identification of objects cannot be entirely passive.

The visible forms of patches of color that are diffused through the transparent medium in Aristotle — just like the reflected light in the modern account — are indeed passively received, but that no more makes the entire process of vision necessarily passive in Aristotle than it does in the modern account.

“But about all sense perception in general, it is necessary to grasp that the sense is receptive of the forms of perceptible things without the material, as wax is receptive of the design of a ring without the iron or gold…; and similarly the sense of each thing is acted upon by the thing that has color or flavor or sound, but not in virtue of that by which each of those things is the kind of thing it is, but in virtue of that by which it has a certain attribute, and according to a ratio” (book 2 ch. 12, p. 118).

Joe Sachs comments in a note that “Some of the difficulty can be avoided if one keeps in mind that, by form, Aristotle does not mean shape or appearance. In the Platonic dialogues, it is always emphasized that the eidos is not the mere look of a thing…. That to which one must look, according to Aristotle, is the being-at-work of the thing. It is, then, no part of the analogy Aristotle intends with the wax impression, that the eyeball, say, becomes shaped and colored like an olive when it looks at one. What it takes on must be some sort of active condition” (p. 118n, emphasis added).

This last point about the active condition, I think, is the import of Aristotle’s phrase in the above quote, “not in virtue of that by which each of those things is the kind of thing it is, but in virtue of that by which it has a certain attribute, and according to a ratio”. We do not directly perceive the kinds of things we perceive, but rather “that by which [things have] a certain attribute, and according to a ratio”. I take this to be a suggestion of what should or should not count as a “perception”.

There is a puzzle here about how “that by which” a thing has an attribute would count as perceptible. I would argue that if this kind of abstraction does count as perceptible in some way, that would be another indication that perception is not entirely passive. Aristotelian “perception” would then be quite rich, including many things I have been calling products of the Kantian synthesis of imagination. But it would still stop short of, say, directly apprehending a complex gestalt or whole “image” as an immediately intelligible unit.

Worries about “passivity”, it seems to me, ought to be directed mainly at the kind of claims of direct apprehension of complex images as meaningful wholes that Aristotle explicitly rules out in this passage.

“But ‘being acted upon’ is not unambiguous either…. For the one who has knowledge comes to be contemplating, and this is either not a process of being altered (since it is a passing over into being oneself, namely into being-at-work-staying-oneself), or is a different class of alteration” (p. 98).

“Being-at-work perceiving is described in the same way as contemplating, but differs in that the things that produce the being-at-work of perceiving are external, the visible and audible things, and similarly with the rest of the senses. The reason is that active perception is of particulars, while knowledge is of universals, which are in some way in the soul itself. Hence thinking is up to oneself, whenever one wishes, but perceiving is not up to oneself, since it is necessary that the thing perceived be present. And similarly too, even the kinds of knowing that deal with perceptible things are not up to oneself, and for the same reason, that the perceptible things are among particular, external things” (book 2 ch. 5, pp. 98-99, emphasis added).

I note first of all the explicit reference to “active perception”. Second, it makes perfect sense that “the kinds of knowing that deal with perceptible things are not up to oneself” — that in some way sensible things are what they are, independent of us, in a way that abstractions and universals are not. Aristotle even seems to think there is an at least abstractly identifiable level at which the particular senses cannot be deceived.

“[T]he means by which we live and perceive is meant two ways, as is the means by which we know (by which is meant in one sense knowledge but in another the soul, since by means of each of these we say we know something)” (book 2 ch. 2, p. 87).

“And neither is thinking the same as perceiving, for in thinking there is what is right and what is not right, … for sense perception when directed at its proper objects is always truthful, and is present in all animals, but it is possible to think things through falsely, and this is present in no animal in which there is not also speech” (book 3 ch. 3, pp. 133-134).

Here he explicitly bounds the analogy between perception and thought. We have already seen that perception for Aristotle is not entirely passive, so thinking, as something that is more up to us, must be less passive than that.

“And it is certainly not the reasoning part, or intellect in the way that word is used, that causes motion, for the contemplative intellect does not contemplate anything that has to do with action…. And even when the intellect enjoins and the reasoning part declares that something is to be fled or pursued one does not necessarily move, but acts instead in accordance with desire, as does one without self-restraint…. But neither is it desire that governs this sort of motion, since self-restrained people, even when they desire and yearn for something, do not necessarily do those things for which they have the desire, but follow the intellect” (book 3 ch. 9, pp. 152-153).

Later he specifies that the motion mentioned here is motion with respect to place, i.e., bodily movement, not anything directly associated with perception or thought. Comparatively speaking, the earlier “motion” of air in the presence of light was said in a different, more figurative way. We should not assume that the way activity and passivity apply in the one context is the same as in the other.

He continues, “But it is obvious that these two things [together do] cause motion, desire and/or intellect, since many people follow their imaginings contrary to what they know, and in other animals there is no intellectual or reasoning activity, except imagination. Therefore both of these are such as to cause motion with respect to place, intellect and desire, but this is intellect that reasons for the sake of something and is concerned with action, which differs from the contemplative intellect by its end…. So it is reasonable that there seem to be two things causing the motion, desire and practical thinking, since the thing desired causes motion, and on account of this, thinking causes motion, because it is the desired thing that starts it. So it is one thing that causes motion, the potency of desire” (book 3 ch. 10, pp. 153-154, emphasis added).

What Aristotle initially mentions as “obvious” is refined and corrected later in the chapter. This sort of thing is very common in Aristotle. In book 2 chapter 2, he says that “what is clear and more knowable by reason arises out of what is unclear but more obvious” (p. 84).

“[B]ut the potency of desire is not present without imagination, while all imagination is either rational or sensory” (p. 156).

The imagination is identified in Aristotle’s On Memory and Recollection as the root of all perception. Here he suggests that it also depends on the particular senses. Both could easily be true if the sense in which imagination is the “root” of perception is teleological, rather than causal in the modern sense.

“For imagination is different both from perceiving [by the particular senses] and from thinking things through, and does not come about without perception, and without it there is no conceiving that something is the case” (book 3 ch. 3, p. 134).

Aristotle is saying that while conceiving that something is the case depends on imagination and imagination ultimately depends on the particular senses, we never directly perceive that something is the case. That something is the case is a practical judgment about particulars, rather than a perception. “Thinking things through” (dianoia) is discussed separately from pure thought or intellect (nous), and is a rational activity of the soul grounded mainly in imagination. To really “occur” in a human, pure thought depends on the activity of thinking things through as its vehicle.

“[F]alsehood is always in an act of putting things together…. What makes each thing be one is intellect” (book 3 ch. 6, p. 144). “[B]ut thinking what something is, in the sense of what it keeps on being in order to be at all, is true, and is not one thing attached to another” (p. 145).

Here he seems to be emphasizing that the idea of what something truly is, in the sense of being-at-work-staying-itself, is not adequately expressible in terms of a simple combination of pre-existing parts or independently defined features. Also, no expression of a “what” by itself forms an assertion that could then be either true or false. A “what” by itself has more of the character of a definition that could be either accepted by hypothesis or considered hypothetically.

If the thought of a being-at-work-staying-itself is simply “true”, it seems to me it must be true in some sense other than correspondence — perhaps a being-true-to-itself through coherence. This use of “true” is also different from the way it is defined in On Interpretation, where truth and falsity are said to apply if and only if we say something about something, which means a “what” taken in isolation would be neither true nor false. Only what is said about the what could be true in that sense, but then it could also be false, depending on what is said. So “true” is being said in a different, special way here.

“Knowledge, in its being-at-work, is the same as the thing it knows, and while knowledge in potency comes first in time in any one knower, in the whole of things it does not take precedence even in time, for all things that come into being have their being from something that is at-work-staying-itself. And… the perceiving thing is not [merely] acted upon nor is it altered. Hence this is a different kind of event from a motion” (book 3 ch. 7, pp. 145-146, brackets in original, emphasis added).

Here he emphasizes a distinction between motion in the primary sense of ordinary bodily motion on the one hand, and the actualization of a potential on the other, identifying perception with the latter.

Apperceptive Judgment

What Hegel calls “the concept” is not a simple content to be grasped, as if it were already completely formed as what it will turn out to be, and all of that in advance of and independent of the activity of judgment. Rather, it emerges out of the activity of judgment in the space of reasons. It also turns out to have an inherently normative character.

Pippin quotes Kant: “I find that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception…. I do not mean to say that these representations necessarily belong to one another in the empirical intuition, but rather that they belong to one another in virtue of the necessary unity of the apperception in the synthesis of intuitions” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 102).

As a first approximation, “apperception” here means something like apprehension of intelligible meaning. For Kant, “the basic feature” of the “general or content-less logic as rules for valid judgings and inferrings” is that “judging is apperceptive” (p. 103).

The significance of this will become a bit clearer further below. Hegel will go further than Kant in construing apperception in a purely “logical” (as opposed to psychological) way.

“Kant was well aware that with this notion of apperceptive judging he was breaking with the rationalist (and Lockean) notion of reflection as inner perception, and as we shall see, Hegel’s language is everywhere carefully Kantian in this respect” (p. 112).

(Aristotle too carefully distinguishes thought from inner sense, rather than identifying them as Descartes and Locke do.)

Pippin quotes Hegel: “It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the essence of the concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, the unity of the ‘I think’, or of self-consciousness” (ibid).

This suggests a three-way mutual explication of the essence of the concept, unity of apperception, and self-consciousness. Self-consciousness for Hegel turns out to be not a separate substantive “subject” distinct from its “object”, but rather an essential adverbial property of self-reference that is intrinsic to the thinking of every concept (see The Ambiguity of “Self”).

From Hegel’s perspective “it is quite misleading for Kant to formulate the point by saying that the ‘I think’ must ‘accompany’ (begleiten) all my representations…. Representing objects is not representing objects, a claiming to be so, unless apperceptive…. And that has to mean, in a very peculiar sense that is important to Hegel and that will take some time to unpack, that such judgings are necessarily and inherently reflexive, and so at the very least are self-referential, even if such a reflected content is not substantive, does not refer to a subject’s focusing on her judging activity as if it were a second consciousness…. Virtually everything in the Logic of significance descends in one way or another from the proper understanding of this claim” (ibid).

Judgings as activities are “necessarily and inherently… self-referential”. The suggestion seems to be that apperception and self-consciousness consist in complex self-referential judgings, rather than anything resembling perceptive receptivity or simple consciousness. “Reflexivity” for Hegel is an elemental property of judgments as judgments, not a global property of consciousness. To assert the inherent self-referentiality of judging activity is quite different from asserting the sort of inherent reflexivity of consciousness that Descartes and Locke presuppose.

“[W]e have to be clear that this has nothing to do with inner perception or the mind observing itself” (p. 105).

“There must be some way of saying that the self-conscious dimension of thought and action is a matter of the way a claim is made or an action undertaken. To adopt the formulations used by Ryle in accounting for many similar phenomena, they are accomplished ‘self-consciously’, rather than accompanied by or even identical with another act of consciousness” (p. 106).

“There is a self-referential component in any judgment or action too (‘I think this, I act thus’), but it can be misleading to think that this is the same problem as ‘how does the first-person pronoun have sense, and thereby pick me uniquely out’. As we shall see, it is misleading because it suggests a punctuated moment of awareness” (p. 107).

“Finally, there is little doubt that Hegel realized that apperception was not a kind of consciousness” (ibid).

In support of this he quotes Hegel: “[I]n this original deed there is not yet the representation of the ‘I’…. [T]his objectifying deed, liberated from the opposition of consciousness [between subject and object], is closer to what may be taken simply as thinking as such. But this deed should no longer be called consciousness; for consciousness holds within itself the opposition of the ‘I’ and its intended object which is not to be found in that original deed” (ibid).

It seems to me that apperception thus implicitly becomes the middle term of a syllogism: self-consciousness is apperception; apperception is not a kind of consciousness; therefore (contrary to what the formation of the word suggests) self-consciousness is not a kind of consciousness, but something “else”.

I take consciousness to be a form of presentation in what Aristotle calls imagination, and self-consciousness to be the form of the self-referential character of judgment or apperception. Outside the context of the Logic (e.g., in the Phenomenology), self-consciousness has an inherently social or intersubjective dimension; in both the Phenomenology and the Logic it has a normative dimension. Human as opposed to purely animal experience is always a mixture of “consciousness” and “self-consciousness”.

“I know what I am doing not by identifying myself with the one acting, but by being the one acting. So how can such a Two also be One? We are in the middle of everything of significance in Hegel’s Logic, not to mention Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Schelling’s early idealism…. This unusual identity is constitutive of ‘theoretical thought’ as such” (pp. 108-109).

“This too is important to state carefully. Hegel scholars often assume that Hegel inherits ‘identity philosophy’ from Schelling, and that it means ‘the identity of subject and object’. They then formulate various implausible versions of such an identity, such as that true reality is divine thought thinking itself, that objects are moments of this thought’s ‘intellectual intuition of itself’. But the Logic is not committed to anything remotely like this” (p. 109).

Rather, the identity Hegel is principally interested in is that “the thought (belief, assertion) of some content… is at the same time the thought of the reasons that are required for such an ‘answer'” (p. 110, emphasis added). This what it means to say that thought is inherently self-referential.

This helps to explain why it is true that “It is a condition of use of a concept that the use is subject to a norm of correct and incorrect use, and that norm is internal to the concept…. Such capacities as judgment and self-consciousness are called into play in a way that can be redeemed if challenged, for example” (p. 106).

Pippin elaborates, “being committed to the truth of a proposition, I am just thereby committed to the denial of everything inconsistent with it. The latter is not a separate inference I draw, on the basis of my first commitment. It is a dimension of the content of my first commitment. This is not to say I must be conscious of these implications and incompatibilities, but just that I could not be thinking of that content were I not able to be responsive to such considerations. This is all so just as someone’s believing something and her thought that it is something right to believe ‘are the same reality‘” (p. 112).

The idea that a proposition should be identified with the distinctions and entailments that it presupposes and that follow from it — rather than with a simple Boolean value of true or false, as in mainstream 20th century logic — has been developed with extraordinary thoroughness by Robert Brandom in Making It Explicit, which Richard Rorty credited with ushering in a new “Hegelian” stage of analytic philosophy.

“[N]o one could be said to ‘just’ assert, or just believe, or just act. Any such undertaking, if self-conscious, must be potentially responsive to the question of ‘Why?’; that is, to reasons. (An assertion is such a responsiveness; the latter is not a secondary or even distinct dimension of the former.)” (ibid).

This formulation that an assertion is such a responsiveness — which relies on the essential self-referentiality of judgment that Pippin is arguing for here — seems in a way more radical than the way Brandom puts it. For Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel, the concomittant commitments are material inferences, and there is a sort of Kantian imperative that we ought to show such responsiveness to everything with a material-inferential connection to our assertions. According to Pippin’s Hegel, the concommitant commitments are not inferences at all but integral to the true identity of the assertion, and we would not really have made an assertion at all if we did not show responsiveness to them. But they ultimately agree that we ought to show such responsiveness — that addressing the concomittant commitments of our assertions is not something we could legitimately choose to ignore — and that this has something to do with the very nature of assertion-making.

“And it is at least plausible to say that the greater the extent of such potential responsiveness (or said another way, the greater the self-understanding), the ‘freer’ the activity, the more I can be said to redeem the action as genuinely mine, back it, stand behind it. We thus have formulated what [Sebastian] Rödl rightly identifies as the heart of German Idealism, the principle ‘that self-consciousness, freedom and reason are one'” (pp. 113-114).

Statements like “self-consciousness, freedom and reason are one” used to give me no end of trouble, because I assumed they were meant to assert the sovereignty of a Subject (i.e., in this case that the Subject is self-conscious; the Subject has free will; and the Subject is the seat of reason). What I eventually realized through the closer study of Kant and Hegel is that I was assuming dictionary meanings of self-consciousness and freedom that are not applicable, and that Hegel and even Kant are much less “subject-centered” than common readings make them out to be. A strong concern for subjectivity need not be identified with the assumption of a sovereign Subject.

Because what Hegel means by “concept” is so fundamental to understanding the Logic and so far from the way it is commonly understood, Pippin repeats an earlier message in different words:

“[C]oncepts are determinate only by virtue of their roles in judgment, the ‘bringing to the objective unity of apperception’, in Kant’s definition” (p. 115).

“So a concept like ‘essence’, for example, can be said to be delimitable as just that concept by virtue of its possible uses in various contrasts to ‘appearance’ or by virtue of its negation (in the grand structure of the [Science of Logic]) of the concept ‘being’, or its role in distinguishing accidental from essential predicates. These are all roles in judgments (and are thereby tied to judgmental roles in inferences). Any of these uses, though, involves any such claim in a network of justifications, a normative order. The application of any such concept in judgment, since apperceptive, self-consciously applied, must be, just thereby, responsive to its possible misapplication, and the question of the general contours of its correct use implicates any one notion in the normative proprieties governing many others. Hence, as we shall see, the course of the ‘movement’ of the logic” (ibid).

“A proper understanding of the self’s relation to itself in thinking, the form of any conceiving and thereby any concept, and thereby any inferential relation, is also the core meaning of what Hegel calls the ‘infinity’ treated by speculative philosophy” (p. 118).

“This is yet again not an easy thought: some sort of self-relation that is not a two-place relation, but something like a circular structure, in which the self’s self-relation never terminates in a distinct object or determinate posit, but in so attending, returns to itself as a relating…. This is ‘infinity’ in the proper sense, Hegel tells us frequently, and… ‘Self-consciousness is thus the nearest example of the presence of infinity'” (p. 119).

My current impression is that what Hegel calls the “good” infinite has something to do with what I would tentatively call relational structures with cyclic dependencies, and he thinks we can and do implicitly use something like this in life, without getting stuck in what could be a mathematically infinite cyclic traversal of the structure. (That something like this is at least conceivable is anecdotally supported by the existence of computable and hence in that sense “finite” implementations of infinitely extensible data structures.) The more usual notion of infinity — at root mathematical, a paradoxical “value greater than any definite value” — Hegel derides as “bad” infinity, regardless of whether it is potential or actual (which was a key distinction for Aristotle). (See Hegel on Reflection for a somewhat better account of this issue.)

Hegel in effect seems to ask us to suspend the assumption that standard mathematical infinity is what infinity is, and to step back to the more general idea of the non-definite. Further, he identifies the contrasting term of finitude specifically with a non-relational view of things, as being whatever they are even in complete isolation from one another, so his condemnations of finitude are not at all condemnations of the view of things as finite in the sense of depending on other things. Pippin earlier even suggested that some kind of notion of things depending on other things for their intelligibility is the main source of the famous and difficult-to-understand “motion” in Hegelian logic.

“Discriminating what belongs together with what, what is connected to what in a temporal order, knowing that the successive perceptions of a house do not count as the perception of a succession in the world, requires an apperceptive unity; it does not just happen to consciousness” (p. 121).

“Without this ability to distinguish how things are from how they seem to me, there would be as many ‘I’s’ as associated seemings, and no unity of self-consciousness. Or, achieving the unity of self-consciousness is differentiating seeming from being” (p. 122).

Pippin returns to his larger argument about the Kantian basis of what Hegel is doing.

“The attempt has been to understand the Kantian claim about apperception as a logical, not psychological claim, and this goes some way toward understanding the link between this reflexive character of judging as the essence of intelligibility and ‘the intelligibles’. If it is possible to establish that certain a priori judgments have… objectivity, but without Kant’s limitation thesis, restricting that thesis to possible objects of sense experience (phenomena, not noumena), we will have a way into Hegel’s claim that logic can be understood as metaphysics. Our claim about Kant was that even for him, this relation to objects is not established by the imposition of subjective form onto received sensory material. Kant’s position is not ‘impositionist’ in this sense, and both he and Hegel are following the nonimpositionist, more Aristotelian (hylomorphic) line” (p. 125).

He includes several more quotes from Kant and one from Beatrice Longuenesse that offer hints in this more Aristotelian direction, then says, “We need only remember that for Hegel this is the core of Kant’s own position once we give up any notion of separable contributions from sensibility and understanding, and give up referring to pure forms of intuition as species-specific…. If we do, we get the careful statements about the identity within difference of concept and being in and for itself with which we began” (p. 126).

He returns to the more basic point that “There is no indication that Hegel thinks that being or God has an apperceptive discursive intellect and that we are manifestations of it. We are manifestations of the finitude of Verstand [understanding] and the possibility inherent in Verstand of the transcendence of such self-imposed finitude” (ibid).

In referring to “self-imposed” finitude, I think Pippin means the viewing of concepts as independent, isolated objects or fixed representations, rather than as pure moments in the traversal of the relational network of the space of reasons.

“[W]e need a kind of stereoscopic vision to keep in mind two aspects of this issue that Hegel keeps stressing…. The first is that conceiving is an activity and concepts are ‘moments’ of this activity. This is something stressed in a different way when Hegel tells us that concepts are not things, objects. The second is that… such activities are not actions, doings, and that Kant’s position, when properly understood (and so not as Kant understood it), should not be taken as a part of a two-step or impositionist account of such activity” (p. 127).

That activity is not reducible to punctual actions is a thesis I have been pursuing in an Aristotelian context.

“Hegel says that (Kant’s) objective or transcendental logic ‘replaces’… general metaphysics or ontology. Logic so construed also takes account of and replaces special metaphysics, the a priori doctrines of the soul, the world, and God” (p. 128).

Once again, Hegel’s “logical” alternative to rationalist metaphysics and psychology does not presuppose any fixed concepts. Pippin returns to this to avoid misunderstanding, because he has been emphasizing the non-psychological character of apperceptive judgment for Hegel.

“If we think, as some do, of Hegel’s Denkbestimmungen [thought determinations] as something like Fregean thoughts, objective in a Platonic sense, as abstract entities, then what I am quoting [to the effect that the “objective” part of Hegel’s logic is the true critique of such determinations] is very puzzling. Hegel certainly knows that Kant’s transcendental logic is in some sense or other a logic of subjectivity” (p. 129).

The distinction that is beginning to be made explicit here is between subjectivity in general and specifically psychological subjectivity. This will allow Hegel to develop a “subjective” logic that has nothing to do with psychology.

By analogy, Pippin notes that “Frege interpreters argue that there is no reason to go as far as the historical Frege did (a form of Platonism) to differentiate objective thought from mental episodes, private associations, etc.” (ibid).

“In a claim we shall have to return to and investigate, [Hegel] repeats often that the true critical question is not whether subjective forms of thought have any objective purchase, but whether the concepts of a logic ‘in and for themselves’ provide what they are supposed to provide: what is required for successful conceptual determination…. Kant did not sufficiently investigate what these pure concepts are; he did not pursue the question of their ‘nature’ and their very possibility” (p. 130).

Broadly speaking, the answer will be that concepts are not Platonic forms but get their meaning from their uses, as normatively evaluated in the space of reasons.

“Commentators are sometimes so eager to observe the spirit of this sort of critique of Kantian ‘subjectivism’ that they assume that the Logic is something like the ‘pure’ manifestation of the objective dependence and implication relations among ‘pure essentialities’, thoughts in the objective sense, logical entities that are in those relations in ways that have nothing to do with anyone ‘thinking them'” (p. 131).

The delicate point here is that we can take the activity of thinking into account by treating it as its own “subject”, rather than attributing it to a separate Subject.

“But the apperceptive or inherently reflexive determination of conceptual content… is no more external than the ‘I think’ is external to a content thought. Judgment and the consciousness of judgment are one act. No content represents anything except as thought/judged” (ibid).

Recalling the syllogism I constructed above from Hegel’s statements — which concluded that what he calls self-consciousness is not a kind of consciousness — I think Pippin should have said “self-consciousness” rather than “consciousness” in the above. “Self-consciousness” for Hegel is normative and non-psychological. What he calls “consciousness” (the aspect of immediacy and of presentation in the form of objects) does have a psychological character. In real life, we encounter mixtures of the two.

“The movement of pure thought is like the movement in a proof, on the assumption that the moves are inferences a thinker, on pain of contradiction, must make, and not merely formal-structural functions, as in a symbolic logic” (p. 132).

A proof involves not just a sequence of propositions but a sequence of judgments or assertions. Frege explained this difference in terms of an additional dimension of “assertoric force” alongside his Platonic view of concepts and propositions. For Pippin and Brandom, the consideration of assertoric force is where normativity enters into logic.

“[I]t is also question-begging to assume that anyone who makes the assertoric force inseparable from the logical structure of a unit of meaning (as Hegel unquestionably does) is thereby guilty of psychologism, or of relying on some ‘experiential’ standard of adequacy. Even Frege was willing to make the question of assertoric force a part of ‘logic’ in his own terms” (ibid).

Hegel takes assertoric force into account by treating it normatively rather than psychologically. Meanwhile, the movement of judging activity that is the bearer of Hegel’s notion of truth must also be distinct from the mere inspection of logical structure.

“[O]bjects moving about [in Hegel’s Logic]… is a mystification. At any rate, I have no idea what it would be to ‘observe’ one thought-object developing into another. (We don’t observe what happens when one step in a proof ‘becomes’ another; the inference has to be drawn, and drawn for a reason.) Such an objectivism makes it almost impossible to understand what Hegel calls the Logic‘s inner ‘drive’…, and it especially does not take account of the claim that conceptual form is itself apperceptive, that ‘the truth is self-consciousness’ (pp. 133-134).

“Essentialities do not move or establish relations with other essentialities…. A proposition cannot be the bearer of truth, does not even represent any state of affairs, except as judged, and therewith the identity of the acts of thinking involve[s] a wide variety of other commitments at the same time…. (I mean such things as being committed to the denial of all judgments inconsistent with the one that one asserts as true, and this not as a second act of thought.) By contrast, the basic unit of intelligibility for Hegel is not an internally complex object, even if in relations with other objects, but as he says in many ways and many different times, a result, the accomplishment of the ‘active universal’, which activity is judging…. The mode of logical connection is inseparable from the mode of connecting. They are co-constituting” (pp. 134-135).

Objective “thoughts” in Hegel’s sense are not just pure Platonic essentialities but judgments that have a shareable meaning and that inherently invite normative evaluation.

“Said another way, a strong way of insisting that Hegel’s new ‘metaphysics’ is a logic, none of this has anything to do with what anything is made of, consists in, with the furniture of the universe. What we want to know… about these concepts is their ‘logic’, how they function with account-givings governed by the norms of explanatory satisfactoriness and truth” (p. 137).

“This means that any concept of thinking and of the content of thought involves normative proprieties, exclusions, and implications, without which any thinking a thought could not be the thinking and the thought that it is. These normative commitments are independent of what a thinker might herself be able to acknowledge, but they cannot be denied on being noticed, on pain of incoherence, of not thinking anything at all” (ibid).

Thus apperception — or what we might call “pure” as opposed to empirical subjectivity, which need not be tied to an assumed separate Subject, but only to some judging activity — for Hegel is purely “logical” (having to do with the determination of meaning). It is independent of anything psychological, and at the same time it is inherently normative.

Next in this series: Negation and Negativity

Form and Things

I use the word “thing” in a very general sense for anything at all — real, ideal, or imaginary; abstract or concrete; including properties, actions, processes, and adverbial characteristics.

Kant controversially wanted to assume that things of all sorts have definite ways that they objectively are “in themselves”, i.e., completely independent of our experience and knowledge of them. But for him, there is inevitably a gap between our knowledge and reality. Every attempt to ignore or overleap that gap he called dogmatism. This was his way of practicing what I have called epistemic modesty, or the ethical virtue of avoiding unfounded knowledge claims. When we don’t know, we go ahead and act based on the best beliefs we have, while in principle remaining open to the possibility that our belief may require revision.

Hegel and others have worried that there is something wrong with Kant’s way of expressing the situation — with this gap between knowledge and reality that is inevitable and even virtuous for Kant. Some of Kant’s remarks make it sound as if reality as it really is and our experience could be two entirely nonoverlapping realms. If this were true, Kant’s position could be seen as leading to skepticism, or the conclusion that genuine knowledge of reality is impossible.

Kant himself would have resisted this conclusion with all his might. He does believe we have genuine knowledge; he just wants us to be very careful about what we claim to know. For Kant, genuine knowledge does not require access to things in themselves; rather, it keeps within the bounds of possible experience. It minimally designates an objectivity toward experience, consisting in the absence of dogmatism and an unceasing effort toward unity of apperception.

Hegel agrees with Kant in opposing dogmatism and emphasizing the effort toward unity of apperception. His strongest opposition to Kant’s talk of things in themselves assumes that “in themselves” means “in isolation”, as it would under the Wolffian view (rejected by both Kant and Hegel) that all knowledge is analytical. Hegel emphasizes that unities of apperception are not just individual but also shared. At the same time, he revives the Aristotelian idea that thoughts should be distinguished as forms or meanings shareable in principle with any rational being, and that as such, they are whatever they are independent of subjective presentation. This makes it quite reasonable for Aristotle and Hegel to claim that the form or meaning that is properly being thought is the very same as the form or meaning that is being thought about.

An analogous identity certainly does not apply to experience or consciousness. To assert that would be dogmatism in Kant’s sense. The thought that Aristotle and Hegel identify with form or meaning is not a kind of consciousness. The most fundamental characteristic of consciousness for Hegel is the separation of subject and object, whereas in thought proper there is no such separation, only a succession of forms. In Hegel, the gap between consciousness and its objects takes the place of the gap between knowledge and reality in Kant, and similarly commends to us a practice of epistemic modesty in life.

Another dimension of epistemic modesty in Aristotle and Hegel has to do with the non-univocal character of form in Aristotle, and with Hegel’s repeated warnings about the “falsity” of all fixed representations. Form is said in several ways in Aristotle, e.g., sensible form, mathematical form, linguistic meaning, and the life or soul of a living being. Of these the first two are univocal, but the last two are not.

From the point of view of form, we take a deflationary view of “things”. Things — like the thing in itself in Kant — are in a strict sense indexes delimiting our ignorance rather than univocal “objects” of knowledge.

The fact that our ignorance is delimited means it is not total. We do have knowledge, but insofar as either proper knowledge or Hegelian spirit has “objects”, those objects lack univocal identity.

Associative Synthesis

We have reached the heart of Husserl’s passive synthesis lectures, a long subdivision on associative synthesis. This is Husserl’s re-visioning of the classic notion of association that empirical psychology ultimately derived from Locke and Hume. For Husserl, it will provide the key to the constitution of subjectivity overall.

Rather than treating association in terms of a notion of psycho-physical causality, he wants to explain it as as a product of synthesis. As Husserl now reminds us, he has been implicitly working under the phenomenological reduction, which puts “in brackets” all questions of external existence and natural causality. He focuses on what to my Aristotelian eye look like questions of form and of a kind of teleology immanent to the subject matter.

Here he again refers to Kant’s discussion of synthesis in the Critique of Pure Reason (see Capacity to Judge; Figurative Synthesis). Husserl claims that he will go further than Kant in explicitly discussing synthesis of immanent contents of consciousness, as well as apprehensions of objects of external perception. For both Husserl and Kant, all this is closely bound up with the constitution of our experience of time. Memory and expectation will again play a key role.

“[T]he path is cleared from here toward a universal theory of the genesis of a pure subjectivity, and in particular, initially in relation to its lower level of pure passivity. Phenomenological eidetic [form-oriented] analyses of consciousness constituting a temporal objectlike formation already led to the beginnings of a lawful regularity of genesis prevailing in subjective life. We see very quickly that the phenomenology of association is, so to speak, a higher continuation of the doctrine of original time-constitution. Through association, the constitutive accomplishment is extended to all levels of apperception” (Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 163).

“The doctrine of the genesis of reproductions and of their formations is the doctrine of association in the first and more genuine sense. But inseparably connected to this, or rather, grounded upon this is a higher level of association and doctrine of association, namely, a doctrine of the genesis of expectations, and closely related to it, the genesis of apperceptions to which belong the horizons of actual and possible expectations. All in all, it concerns the genesis of the phenomena of expectation, that is, of those specific intentions that are anticipatory” (p. 164).

Association, as Husserl analyzes it, is constituted from memories of things similar to the present object. In turn, it is from particular associations that particular expectations are constituted. Now we see memory and expectation linked together in a larger process that is precisely one of association.

“But it is precisely the analysis of associative phenomena that draws our attention to the fact that consciousness must not necessarily be a consciousness of a single object for itself, and accordingly, we touch on a new problem here: how a consciousness of something particular and how a consciousness of explicit particulars becomes possible as a consciousness of a multiplicity and a consciousness of wholeness; namely, a comparative analysis also shows the opposing possibility of many [elements], indeed, a multiplicity being continually fused into a unity within one consciousness, [implicitly], such that consciousness is not a consciousness of a multiplicity, a consciousness that becomes aware of separated particulars in a unitary and yet separate manner” (p. 165).

Here he is leading up to the central role of the experience of time, simultaneity, and streaming in the constitution of subjectivity and in turn of external experience, already foreshadowed above.

“We realize, then, that it really concerns nothing else than clarifying the fundamental problem, the basic, essential conditions of the possibility of a subjectivity itself. What must belong to it so that a subjectivity can have the essential sense without which it could not be subjectivity, [namely,] the sense of an existing subjectivity being for itself, and precisely thereby of a subjectivity constituting itself as being for itself? Certainly, a complete phenomenology of reproductive awakening concerns and exhausts this problem only with respect to the one side, namely, with respect to the constitution of one’s past, or rather, the constitution of the self-having-been in endless immanent time. But we will see that the supplementary part, the other half of the problem, is the realm of the phenomenology of inductive, anticipatory association. Here we will make clear the essential conditions of the possibility of a subjectivity that can know itself as identically one, having its inherent endless future life” (p. 169).

“Awakening” seems to be Husserl’s preferred term for the activation of memory that is somehow relevant to what is present. This may relate to a distinction I have found obscure so far, between memory as “empty” intention and “intuitive” memory. My difficulty has been that no memory, insofar as it is of the past, concerns a present object, so it seems to me as though all memory then would be what he calls empty intention. But perhaps the “intuitive” memory is a memory of a past object insofar as it is related to an intuited present object.

“Clearly, what is presupposed is the synthesis that is continually accomplished in original time-consciousness. In the concretely full, streaming living present we have present, past, and future life already united in a certain mode of givenness. But this manner in which subjectivity becomes conscious of its past and future life along with its inherent intentional contents is an incomplete one. The aforementioned manner would be meaningless for the ego if there were no awakening, for the retentions are empty and even sink into the undifferentiated retentional background. Our consciousness of the protentional future is especially empty. On the other hand, there would be no progress at all without this beginning. In the ABCs of the constitution of all objectivity given to consciousness and of subjectivity as existing for itself, here is the ‘A’. It consists, we might say, in a universal, formal framework, in a synthetically constituted form in which all other possible syntheses must participate.”

As in Kant, the experience of time for Husserl is a synthetic construct that anchors things like identities of objects, as well as the overall shape of consciousness.

“Still many other types of syntheses are transcendental in the special sense, as apodictically [demonstrably] necessary for the genesis of a subjectivity (which is indeed only conceivable in genesis). As we said, these syntheses run their course together with the synthesis constituting the temporal form of all objects, and thus must co-relate to the temporal content, the temporally formed content of the object” (pp. 170-171).

“Since the spatial world is constituted through consciousness, since it can only be there for us as existing and can only be conceived at all by virtue of certain syntheses carried out in immanence, it is clear that the constitutive problems of the world presuppose the doctrine of the necessary, most general structures and the synthetic shapes of immanence that are possible in general” (p. 171).

Working under the phenomenological reduction, he is not concerned with the transcendent existence of external objects, but only with the more particular ways in which they are immanently determined or determinable as meanings for us.

“What is constituted universally through these syntheses is known under the rubric of coexistence and succession of all immanent objects in relation to one another” (p. 172).

The universality here has to do with the generality of the form of the experience of the flow of time.

“Accordingly, corresponding to every Now is a universal synthesis. Through this synthesis, a universal concrete present is constituted, a present into which all particulars that are set off from one another are integrated. Further, the fact that the Now streams in and through temporal orientations implies at the same time another universal synthesis in constituting life whereby we are conscious of the presents coursing as a sequential unity” (p. 173).

The integral Now and the streaming sequence of Nows are in effect the outermost frames in which all concrete experience is constituted as coherent.

“This is the most general and the most primary synthesis that necessarily connects all particular objects of which we become conscious…. But naturally, the synthesis of time-consciousness also contains (and already as a presupposition for possible coexistences and succession) that synthesis in which one object is constituted as identically one or (what amounts to the same thing) as enduringly one in streaming manifolds…. [T]ime-consciousness is the primordial place of the constitution of the unity of identity or of an objectlike formation, and then of the forms of connection of coexistence and succession of all objectlike formations” (ibid).

“But what gives unity to the particular object with respect to content, what makes up the differences between each of them with respect to content…, what makes division possible and the relation between parts in consciousness, and so forth — the analysis of time alone cannot tell us, for it abstracts precisely from content. Thus, it does not give us any idea of the necessary synthetic structures of the steaming present and of the unitary stream of the presents — which in some way concerns the particularity of content” (p. 174).

The implicit distinction between the constitution of identities of objects in the quotation before last, on the one hand, and that of their unities with respect to content in the quotation immediately above, on the other, is not yet clear to me. It makes sense that the general forms of time, coexistence, and succession do not tell us the whole story about particular concrete objects. I do not see, however, how it would be possible to constitute the identities of concrete objects — in Aristotelian terms, their surface status as “substances” in the sense of things persisting through change — without taking into account their content, or their deeper substantiality in the sense of “what it was to have been” the things in question. I expect that he will have more to say about the content in what follows, so hopefully this will be clarified.

The very idea of treating subjectivity as something constituted opens up a huge new territory that later authors like Foucault, Ricoeur, and de Libera have substantially developed, and in which I have been tremendously interested. The works that Husserl published in his lifetime seemed to me mainly to focus on the constitution of objects by a subjectivity that was somewhat taken for granted. That Husserl in fact went beyond this is important to recognize. (See also Passive Synthesis: Conclusion.)

Intention and Intuition

Husserl continues his passive synthesis lectures with more discussion of intuition as a confirmation of the concordance of intentions. It now seems pretty clear that intuition for Husserl is all about the “presentness” of presentations, and unlike the common usage does not involve any leaps. He distinguishes between intuitions that are “self-giving” (principally, external perceptions), and those that are not self-giving, but instead involve a “presentification”, like memories and expectations. He discusses at some length the question whether it is possible in advance to know which of our general intentions and presentations can potentially be confirmed in intuition.

He speaks of intentions “wanting” and “striving” to be fulfilled in present intuition, but contrasts this with a wish or will. Instead, it seems to be a more elemental directedness toward filling in the metaphorical hole in what he calls the “empty” intentions that are not correlated to a present object in intuition from external perception. Preconscious beliefs about an external object are subject to a kind of preconscious corroboration by comparison to direct impressions from sense perception.

I like the quasi-personification of intentions and intuitions here, as “wanting” or “giving themselves” (see Ideas Are Not Inert). Plato in the Republic compared the soul to a city or community of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, thus suggesting that the kind of unity the soul has is comparable to the kind of unity a concrete community has. All our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions thus need not be attributed monolithically to a single, central agent; rather, our agency as individuals is the combined effect of numerous specialized, more or less cooperating but somewhat decentralized agencies.

All our intentions “want” to coalesce into the unity of a world.

“That we have a consciousness of our own life as a life endlessly streaming along; that we continually have an experiencing consciousness in this life, but in connection to this in the widest parameters, an emptily presenting consciousness of an environing-world — this is the accomplishment of unity out of manifold, multifariously changing intentions, intuitive and non-intuitive intentions that are nonetheless concordant with one another: intentions that in their particularity coalesce to form concrete syntheses again and again. But these complex syntheses cannot remain isolated. All particular syntheses, through which things in perception, in memory, etc., are given, are surrounded by a general milieu of empty intentions being ever newly awakened; and they do not float there in an isolated manner, but rather, are themselves synthetically intertwined with one another. For us the universal synthesis of harmonizing intentional syntheses corresponds to ‘the’ world, and belonging to it is a universal belief-certainty.”

“Yet as we already mentioned, there are breaks here and there, discordances; many a partial belief is crossed out and becomes a disbelief, many a doubt arises and remains unsolved for a time, and so forth. But ultimately, proper to every disbelief is a positive belief of a new materially relevant sense, to every doubt a materially relevant solution; and now if the world gets an altered sense through many particular changes, there is a unity of synthesis in spite of such alterations running through the successive sequence of universal intendings of a world — it is one and the same world, an enduring world, only, as we say, corrected in its particular details, which is to say, freed from ‘false apprehensions’; it is in itself the same world. All of this seems very simple, and yet it is full of marvelous enigmas and gives rise to profound considerations” (Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, pp. 145-146).

Intuition, Presentation, Time

The first part of the detailed discussion of “evidence” in Husserl’s passive synthesis lectures expands on his previous remarks about the interrelations between present intuitions and “presentifications” of what he calls “empty” intentions, which seem to be those pertaining to things that are non-present, but somehow relevant to what is present. It somewhat clarifies what he means by intuition; begins to develop important ideas about the role of time in the synthesis of experience that have some analogy to similar themes in Kant; and introduces Husserl’s reinterpretation of association, which will probably turn out to be the centerpiece of these lectures overall.

There seems to be a two-sided character to Husserl’s development here. On the one hand, he starts with a strong bias in favor of presence and immediacy. On the other, he quickly and repeatedly points out that every present intuition “points beyond its own content” by means of a related horizon of “empty” intentions of contents that are not directly present, but are implied in or by what is directly present. It is this latter aspect that I find especially interesting.

Another term he uses, which seems to subsume both present intuitions and “presentifications”, is “presentation”. Husserl says “Thus there are intuitive presentations of something present that are surely not perceptions of that present something” (Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 110), and these are the presentifications of empty intentions, as in memory and expectation. The suggestion seems to be that no presentation is self-sufficient; as was said above about present intuitions, every presentation also intrinsically points beyond itself. This I would wholeheartedly endorse.

I note here that Husserl says we have intuitive presentifications of memories and expectations that are not themselves present intuitions. I think the idea is that these are synthetically joined together with present intuitions that point to them, and this is what explains the “intuitive but not intuition” status he attributes to them. So far at least, I am not aware that Kant ever spoke of concrete memories or expectations as “intuitive”. Kant did say that general intuitions of space and time are presupposed by our intuitions of the sensible manifold.

Does Husserl think we have intuitions of objects? Does Kant? I think that in both cases, positive answers involve equivocation on what an “object” is. We saw that Husserl speaks of loosely of “objects given to consciousness” by the senses, and refers to an object “in the flesh” that we always have, before quickly pointing out that what we definitely have in the flesh is highly indeterminate. Similarly, I see commentators on Kant sometimes referring to objects being “given” in intuition, but only in an indeterminate way.

It has been pointed out that German has two words that get translated as “object”: the cognate Objekt, and Gegenstand, which literally means “something standing against”. The “standing against” one seems well suited to the indeterminate case, and this would be helpful in resolving this kind of ambiguity about objects.

I think that at least in the context of Kant, it would be wrong to say that intuition gives us proper objects, because I don’t think we have a proper object in Kant until a concept (a universal) is applied. What Kantian intuition gives us is a raw manifold of particulars that can potentially be discriminated into proper objects once concepts are applied.

Husserl says, “[W]hat is past extends unaltered into the future in the manner of an object for consciousness. This future proceeds from the reproduced past and does so in such a way that this future is at the same time co-present, relative to our current perceptual present to which these things here in our current perceptual field belong…. Obviously, expectations are not always like this, merely extending the perceptual moment continuously into the future. Something unknown, something singular never yet experienced can also be fore-seen, like an event that is indeed expected, but yet is singularly new” (p. 111).

“The problem of evidence led us back to the distinctive syntheses of coinciding that forms identities, namely to such syntheses in which intuitions and empty presentations (or intuitions and intuitions) are synthetically united, but whereby empty presentations and their fulfillment once again play an essential role” (ibid).

Here we have the vital point that identities of things are not given to us; as we experience them, they are results of passive synthesis.

“[T]he primary task becomes elucidating the founding level of the passive syntheses of ‘verification’ lying at the basis of all active verification. To do this, however, one must gain deeper insights into the structures of the intuitions and empty presentations that may be functional here…. We will be led to insights into the most universal lawful regularities of essences, to the most universal lawful regularities of structure concerning the unity of transcendental inner life, but also to the most universal lawful regularities of genesis” (p. 112).

“In all of this we find internal structural intertwinings…. Only when we understand them in their structural interrelatedness can we also understand how they function in synthetic interrelatedness, including here, as well, how they can function as confirming or confirmed” (pp. 112-113).

Again, every presentation points beyond itself.

“[I]n the synthesis, we gain an evidence-consciousness, a consciousness that exactly the same [object] that was meant in an empty manner is there in intuition in a genuine way, as the same [object] actually presented…. This is certainly the first aspect of the fundamental lawfulness of the constitution of original time-consciousness: that every lived-experience, speaking most basically, every Now-phase that arises in a primordially impressional manner is continually modified in retention” (p. 114, brackets in original).

Now we have explicit mention of the “constitution of original time-consciousness”. This was an extraordinary idea of Kant that Husserl took up, that our experience of time itself is not something given to us, but is the product of a passive synthesis.

“In our analysis of perception, which was in this regard an analysis of the temporal modes of givenness, we have already touched upon the essentially new role of protentions over against the role of retentions. The rubric, protention, designates the second aspect of genetic primordial lawfulness that strictly governs the life of consciousness as the time-constituting unitary stream” (p. 115).

“In spite of its pure passivity, we spoke of protention as an expectation, with the colorful image of the present meeting the future with open arms. Accordingly, we already speak this way in pure passivity, which is to say, even prior to [actively] grasping and viewing the perceptual object. We did not use such expressions, and we could not use such expressions with respect to retention. In this connection, there is a difference in the way protention and retention function in mindful perception, when we take note [of something] and grasp it. We are mindfully directed, purely and simply, toward the present object, toward the ever new Now that emerges as fulfilling the expectation; and in and through it, it is directed further toward the approaching object. Mindful perceiving follows the protentional continuity. The directedness-ahead, which already lies in passive perception itself, becomes patent in mindful perceiving. On the other hand, there is however not a directedness in the retentional continuity; there is not a directedness that would follow the trail of pasts being pushed back further and further” (p. 116).

This assymmetry between protention and retention tracks with the distinction that we experience time as moving continuously forward, but never backward.

“In order to clarify all this it will do us well initially to go beyond protentions as intentions of expectation, and to draw upon other empty presentations that are structurally related to them, and that are at the same time different from all mere retentions. We have in mind making co-present, memories of the present as forms of intuitive presentations, alongside memories of the past and memories of the future” (pp. 116-117).

He doesn’t explain the reference to “memories of the future”. I can only suppose that what is meant is something like a reproduction of an expectation.

“If we now consider the genetically more original modes of making co-present, then at issue, e.g., for every perceptual object, are its entire horizons that are constitutive of it, horizons that belong immediately to it…. We recognize this peculiar feature with respect to all such presentations: that they exist with other presentations in a synthetic nexus of a special kind, namely, in a synthetic nexus that lies entirely outside of the genre of identifying syntheses or syntheses of coinciding” (p. 117).

He speaks of horizons and pointings-beyond as constitituting the object. They are not some sort of optional decorations that we could choose to ignore, and still have the object. This is vitally important.

“If, from the very beginning, we remain focused most simply on the realm that already has our exclusive interest now, the realm of passive presentations as the material for passively emerging syntheses, then we will be concerned generally speaking with such syntheses in which a presentation points beyond itself to another presentation. The latter gains a new inner character that it otherwise could not have. It is the character of the specific ‘intention’, that is, of teleological directedness, of being-intended, of meantness” (p. 118).

Here we have a genesis in passive synthesis of the famous Husserlian intentionality.

“For want of terms at our disposal, we will avail ourselves of the apposition, ‘passive’, passive intention. And from here on we will speak only of passively intending presentations. At the outset we also want to name the synthesis in which this intention arises: associative synthesis” (pp. 118-119).

I am not greatly enamored of this use of “passive” for something that is really only relatively more passive than something else, but for this exposition I’ll continue following Husserl and use it. I prefer “preconscious”.

We’ll hear much more about the associative synthesis associated with directedness and intentionality later on. For now, it’s worth remarking that its very characterization as a form of synthesis separates it from the more common psycho-physical causal notion of association.

“Indeed, even retentions, those emerging originally, synthetically cohere with one another and with the primordial impression, but this synthesis proper to original time-consciousness is not a synthesis of association; retentions do not arise through an associative awakening directed backward from the impression, and thus, they do not have in themselves a directedness radiating out from there toward the emptily presented past” (p. 119).

Here we have a sharp distinction between the synthesis responsible for our experience of the flow of time and the associative synthesis that generates intentionality.

“I said that retentions, as they arise in their originality, have no intentional character. This does not rule out that in certain circumstances and in their own way they can assume this intentional character later…. Now, how does a retention get this oriented structure? By a subsequent association, of course” (p. 120).

Enticing Possibilities?

After the interesting discussion of the “crossing out” of previous beliefs, Husserl continues his lectures on passive synthesis with a discussion of doubt and possibility.

In contrast to the “crossing out” that implements negation in lived experience — where a previous expectation is definitively refuted by a new apprehension — the mode of doubt represents a condition in which we experience conflicting apprehensions side by side in a modally weakened state, and the conflict remains as yet unresolved.

The mode of open possibility involves a different kind of modal weakening in which some more general frame has the status of “normal” perception and the associated subjective “certainty”, but unlike the simple case of normal perception, the associated halo of additional expectation does not converge on a single outcome, but rather diverges into alternatives, and nothing motivates us to preferentially expect one alternative rather than another.

What Husserl calls an enticing possibility, on the other hand, is one that we feel drawn to believe in. It is still only a possibility, and we may end up in doubt because conflicting alternative possibilities each entice us to some degree. I find this notion of “enticing possibility” highly intriguing.

“Motivation prefigures something positively, and yet does so in the mode of uncertainty” (Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 81). “Let us look back to the phenomenon of doubt. Whenever we speak of doubt, we also speak of propensities to believe. What occurs in the front side that is seen, together with its apprehended sense for the back side, may prefigure something determinate. But it does so ambiguously and not unequivocally. This happens when we become unsure whether what we see is a complete thing or a piece of scenery, for example…. In this way the normal egoic act of perception is modalized into acts we call enticements to believe. From the side of the objective senses, from the side of the objects given to consciousness, we also speak here of enticements to be, which is to say that affection issues from the side of the object, that the object exerts on the ego an enticing demand to be…. The sense itself has the propensity to be” (p. 82).

I was a bit surprised by the sudden introduction of an “egoic act of perception” out of the blue here. At minimum, any such reference takes us outside the sphere of passive synthesis. But Husserl means to discuss not only passive synthesis but also how it is interleaved with active synthesis, and he has already implicitly broadened the scope in speaking of belief, doubt, and judgment.

My lingering concern is that I consider anything like an ego to be a teleological tendency, and I don’t take a teleological tendency to be the kind of thing that could exercise simple agency. Perhaps the agency implied here is not really meant to be simple. I do think that all real-world agency is non-simple (i.e., involves a mixture of activity and passivity), but Husserl hasn’t discussed the nature of agency, and his references here seem to suggest the simple kind that I consider suspect. I hope this will be clarified later.

Similarly, I was surprised by the reference to “objects given to consciousness”. Perhaps I am being too literal here, but his earlier discussion of “adumbration” in perception seems to me to rule out any simple givenness of objects as objects. The best connection I can make for a givenness of objects is to the earlier discussion’s mention of the object “in the flesh” that we always have, but that discussion makes clear that the “object” we have in the flesh is far from completely determinate. But what exerts an enticing demand was first of all a determinate possibility.

I think he is saying “object” in more than one way here. The object that exerts an enticing demand to be is not the “object” given in the flesh.

His statement that “The sense itself has the propensity to be” is also intriguing, and seems less problematic to me. If we substitute “sense” for “object”, it makes good sense to me that “the sense exerts… an enticing demand to be” (see Ideas Are Not Inert).

“Let us call these new possibilities problematic possibilities or questionable possibilities. We do this because the intention to make a decision arising in doubt between one of the enticing factions of doubt is called a questioning intention. We speak of questionableness only where enticements and contraposing enticements play off of each other” (p. 83).

“It is now clear that we have determined a closed and exactly limited group of modalities from a primordial mode of straightforward naive certainty” (p. 84).

Here he seems to be claiming it is “clear” that the modalities discussed so far are the only possible ones that could modify naive perceptual certainty. I don’t immediately have any other candidates, but “closed and exactly limited” is a strong claim that seems to come out of the blue.

“We can continue our exposition of problematic possibilities by noting that they and only they appear with a different weight. The enticement is more or less enticing; and that also holds particularly when comparing all potentially diverse problematic possibilities that belong to one and the same conflict and that are bound synthetically through this conflict.” (ibid).

I generally like the analogy of comparing weights here, though it is not clear to me that the intrinsic “weights” of all enticements would be commensurable.

“Such opposing enticements, opposing possibilities, can have differing weight; they exercise a stronger or weaker pull, but they do not determine me. Determining me in belief is just the one possibility for which I am resolved, for which I have decided earlier, perhaps in a process of passing through doubt” (ibid). “Different witnesses speak and present their testimonies, having different weight. I weigh them and decide for the one witness and his testimony. I reject the other testimonies” (p. 85).

“Yet I can potentially mark the differing weights without deciding in favor of one of the enticements…. For example, a cloudy sky together with humidity speak in favor of a thunderstorm, but not ‘for sure'” (ibid).

“[T]he fact that I let myself ‘willingly’ be drawn in, that I am about to follow it, is still something new phenomenologically. However, here this ‘following’ can be inhibited by opposing propensities, or not be ‘efficacious’ at all…. It is not merely the case that the one testimony whose enticement is privileged is stronger: We lend it validity, believing in it in our subjective certainty…. We can then speak of presumption or of a presumptuous certainty in a specific sense…. In itself, in its own phenomenological character, this presumptuous certainty is characterized as an impure certainty…. Obviously, this impurity, this murkiness, has its degrees” (p. 86).

An anticipation of this new dimension of our weighing, willingness, lending of validity, and “presumptuous certainty” is probably what underlay the earlier sudden reference to “egoic acts”. I have no issue with this more concrete development. The fact that he refers to presumption, impurity, and murkiness here provides a reassuring weakening of what earlier seemed overly strong.