A Postmodern Peripatetic?

I began this blog in 2019, envisioning an expanding spiral. The starting points were Aristotle’s ethics and Robert Brandom’s then very recent A Spirit of Trust, which were hinted at in the “peripatetic” and “postmodern” parts of the title, respectively. As a whole, the title was meant to suggest a new kind of broadly Aristotelian philosophy. I don’t identify with postmodern-ism, but in A Spirit of Trust, Brandom uses the adjective form “postmodern” in a quite different way, to describe Hegel’s project. Postmodern-ism nonetheless does have roots in what English-speaking secondary writers have called poststructuralism (another name I don’t like). Along with Plato, some of the leading French philosophers who get lumped into this latter category were important inspirations for me from the late 1970s — until they were overtaken by an “archaeological” Aristotle and a “deflationary” Hegel.

I always viewed Aristotle sympathetically, but in the early 2000s began a deeper engagement with his work. Around the same time, my late father influenced me to begin reading Brandom. This eventually led me to a new and much more positive view of Kant as well as Hegel, and a parting of ways with French anti-Hegelianism.

In the blog I initially wrote a lot of very short pieces, preliminarily sketching many of the themes here in a very informal and minimalist way. The center of gravity has gradually shifted to more scholarly commentary, excerpting, and partial translations, still presented in a relatively informal way. The first new direction that emerged was a belated engagement with the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur in 2020. This also began a trend toward longer pieces engaging more deeply with particular texts. Still in 2020, I applied a similar quote-and-commentary approach to Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Practical Philosophy and Brandom’s Woodbridge lectures on Kant and Hegel, and wrote a preliminary sketch of Alain de Libera’s “archaeology of the subject”. In 2021, the quote-and-commentary approach was extended to H. S. Harris’s monumental Hegel’s Ladder. I also wrote a preliminary sketch of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s important work on Aristotle. Skipping ahead a bit, in 2023 I worked on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Since 2025 I have worked extensively on Olivier Boulnois’s investigations of the pivotal historical role of medieval philosophy in shaping views that have been widely assumed to be either distinctively modern, or else transhistorically endemic to “Western” thought. There has been much more besides, but these are some highlights.

An “archaeological” Aristotle and a “deflationary” Hegel have much to offer one another. The practitioners of each have an area of weakness that the other has resources to resolve. Thus the brilliant French writers on philosophical archaeology remain stuck in old-school prejudices about Kant and Hegel. Boulnois sees Kantian autonomy in terms of voluntarism, and Aubry sees Hegelian dialectic as totalizing. Meanwhile the brilliant American deflationary readers of Hegel — even Pippin, who makes salutary progress in recognizing the positive role of Aristotle for Hegel — continue to hold old-school prejudices about premodern philosophy as a whole. Thus in a footnote, Pippin summarily claims that Aristotelian and scholastic intellect is always passive. Brandom in the draft historical chapter of A Spirit of Trust that he omitted from the published version summarily claims that the non-voluntarist alternatives in premodern philosophy are more strongly linked to a morality of obedience than the voluntarist ones. But the whole mainstream of classical ethics emphasizes reason rather than authority, and treats Socrates — known above all for his practices of questioning — as a role model.

Passivity Revisited

One point on which I sharply differ from Pippin is his claim that Aristotelian intellect is purely passive. I think I have sufficiently documented that this is not historically accurate. But the context of Pippin’s claim is Kant’s great elaboration of the active side of judging and thinking. And undoubtedly, Kant was arguing against a received view. So whose view was it?

I think the answer has to be Leibniz, his popularizer Christian Wolff, and the Wolffians like Mendelsohn and Baumgarten who dominated philosophy in German universities in Kant’s time. An examination of Kant’s work shows that most of the received views Kant argues against are Wolffian views.

Basic to Leibniz’s and the Wolffians’ point of view is a very categorical preformationism. One of Leibniz’s best known theses asserts a pre-established harmony that not only aims to explain the relationship of mind and body, but encompasses all things whatsoever. According to Leibniz, God creates nothing less than an entire, coherent world, every detail of which is providentially anticipated in advance. Once there is a world, God never “intervenes” in it, because all the work of providence was done in creation. (Providence in the Greek (pronoia) is literally forethought.) God’s creative act consists in the selection of the best of all possible worlds. I personally regard the pre-established harmony as a kind of Platonic myth or “as if” — a speculative hypothesis that makes a kind of poetic sense, but is nonetheless very extravagant.

Consistent with his assertion of pre-established harmony, Leibniz denies that there is real causal interaction between things in the world. Instead, each being carries within it a microcosm of the whole, and is causally affected only by God.

One of Kant’s earliest publications was a defense of real causal interaction against Leibniz. Whether or not Kant thought about it at the time, he was effectively defending an Aristotelian view of the reality of secondary causes. Against this wider background, Kant’s later insistence on the active character of thought can be seen as taking the perspective that we too rank among the real secondary causes.

If the harmony of all things were pre-established, there would be no active work for intellect to do. It would just need to assimilate itself to the pre-established harmony. Intellect would thus be a passive recognition of pre-existing structures. Thus the Leibnizian-Wolffian world view intrinsically promotes the passivity of intellect that Kant opposes.

The Future and the Past

Practical interpretation is simultaneously forward- and backward-looking, as Ricoeur, Brandom, and Pippin have emphasized. Not only is the future not predetermined; for practical purposes, neither is the meaning of the past. The present is not a point, but a zone in which an incompletely determined past and an incompletely determined future overlap and fuse. (See Narrated Time; Hegel’s Ethical Innovation; Hegel on Willing.)