Wittgenstein and Social Practices

I was fascinated to discover Brandom’s 1976 dissertation, which overall is an original reconstruction of the key themes of the classic American pragmatists’ approach to the theory of knowledge. A number of Brandom’s own characteristic themes are already in evidence here; others have yet to be developed.

The first chapter elaborates the basis for Brandom’s later oft-repeated but rather telegraphic references to the great analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) as a pragmatist, an identification that Wittgenstein does not make himself. Brandom argues that the main theme of Wittgenstein’s posthumous work Philosophical Investigations (1953) is a pragmatist account of knowledge, which aims to be a third way that is neither objectivist in the manner of Wittgenstein’s other main work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German ed.1921; English tr. 1922), nor subjectivist in the manner of the Cartesian and phenomenalist traditions.

Brandom sees late Wittgenstein as offering a more incisive argument for the centrality of social practices in an adequate account of knowledge than any of the “official” (self-described) pragmatists Pierce, James, Dewey, and Mead. He aims to provide the clear account of what is meant by social practices that the canonical American pragmatists and even Wittgenstein did not. Brandom himself here will still rely on a broad notion of community to ground the justification of claims, which is less sophisticated and less adequate than his later account based on Hegelian mutual recognition.

“But what is a social practice? I think that most of the misunderstanding and undervaluation of the pragmatists (Wittgenstein included) stems from their failure to give a clear and unambiguous answer to this question” (pp. 8-9).

“Social practices are best understood in terms of a criterial classification of things…. There are three basic criterial categories. First of all, there are things whose criteria involve only the attitudes and behavior of an individual person. Sensations are things of this kind…. Following Rorty, I call things for which we accord this sort of criterial authority mental. Second, there are things whose criteria are the attitudes and behavior of groups and communities of people. A particular motion is a greeting gesture for a tribe just in case they take it to be one…. I will call this kind of thing social practices…. Finally, there are things whose criteria of identity are independent of the attitudes or behavior of any individual or group…. I call this kind of thing objective” (pp. 10-11).

The second chapter of the dissertation builds on Rorty’s distinctive and original account of the role of “incorrigibility” in Descartes. I’ll address this in an upcoming post.

In later works, Brandom has often rather summarily dismissed definition and classification, as made obsolete by Hegelian recollective genealogy. I think his dismissals go too far, because they suggest that definition and classification are only ever applied in an objectivist manner, as if they simply fell from the sky. Such a suggestion does not adequately recognize the profound dialecticization that identity, definition, and classification already undergo in the hands of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For them, definition and classification are anything but taken for granted. It is precisely open inquiry into criteria of identity, definition, and classification that they commend to us.

“The criterial division is simply into things that are whatever some one person takes them to be, things that are whatever some community takes them to be, and things which are what they are no matter what individuals or groups take them to be…. Put another way, meanings, the things that we grasp when we understand something, are taken to consist of social practices by the pragmatist, of mental particulars by the subjectivist, and objective facts by the Tractarian [early Wittgensteinian] objectivist…. In the rest of this chapter we will examine perhaps the clearest sustained argument for the pragmatic rendering of meaning and understanding in terms of social practices, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” (pp. 11-12).

In later works, Brandom has usually discussed “taking” things to be thus-and-such in Kantian terms. Here it takes on a pragmatist coloring, and Kant is not mentioned. But the founder of pragmatism, Charles Pierce (1839-1914), was deeply influenced by Kant (and expressed an affinity for Hegel as well).

“The pragmatist must be able to explain how, by engaging in various social practices (which are things of the second kind, over which the community has complete dominion), we can come to express, make claims, and have views about objective matters of fact (which are things of the third kind, independent of the attitudes of any community)…. Pragmatism as a view of human functioning stands or falls with the project of giving some such account. No pragmatist, including Wittgenstein, has explained what it is about our linguistic social practices in virtue of which they are appropriately taken to involve claims about objective things” (pp. 12-13).

This concern with the constitution of objectivity — indeed the treatment of objectivity as something constituted rather than as something given, never-you-mind how, is a very Kantian sort of problem. Kant does not really address the social aspect that is in the foreground here though.

Next he gives an overview of the argument he will be attributing to Wittgenstein.

“There are three basic lines of argument running through the Investigations, corresponding to three ways which one might think of to eliminate the reference to social practices in talking about meaning and understanding in favor of things of the other two kinds, objective and mental…. In the argument we consider first, Wittgenstein examines the Tractarian notion that meanings are objective things, which objectively determine the correct applications of expressions. The second argument we will consider examines the Cartesian notion that meanings are mental things (such as images), which objectively determine the correct usage of expressions…. Third, we will consider the so-called ‘private language argument’, which I take to be an examination of the view that meanings, whether mental or objective things, determine correct occasions of use of expressions by a mental process. The argument in each case will try and establish the same claim, namely that whatever sort of thing one imagines as intervening between an expression and its use or application in concrete circumstances, that use or application must be taken to be a social practice” (p. 14).

“What kind of thing Xs are (meanings, uses, understandings in this sense) is a matter of the criteria which determine whether something is an X or not…. Wittgenstein will develop an answer to the question of whether something counts as meaning or understanding something (or learning, remembering, thinking, reading it) by creating a series of analogies (‘family resemblances’) to other familiar activities which share the criterial properties of social practices” (p. 16).

“The objectivist takes meanings to be, not uses or social practices, but objective things like words…. [S]ocial practices admit of a sort of indefiniteness or vagueness which objective things do not. Thus Wittgenstein begins his attack on the view that meanings are objective things and determine the application of expressions objectively (‘according to definite rules’) by asking whether the use of a sentence or a word must be everywhere determined by rules in order for the expression to have a meaning, or for someone to understand it” (p. 17).

In passing, I would point out that Plato and Aristotle too treat rules with a healthy skepticism. That is why Plato insists that good government requires philosophers, and Aristotle builds his ethics on deliberation and practical judgment.

“For some performance to count as an instance of a social practice is for it to be accepted as such by the relevant community. And this means that there can be a social practice without its being the case that for every imaginable performance the community has decided in advance whether it would be acceptable or not. There is a social practice as long as there is sufficient agreement about the cases which actually come up…. In just this respect social practices differ from things of the third kind, which are independent of the attitudes of particular communities” (p. 18).

The very notion of “practice” has an inherent open-endedness.

In Brandom’s later terminology, the constitution of normativity has an inherent dependency on attitudes. While it acquires a kind of (always qualified) objectivity, it does not originate as something objective.

“There is no vagueness about whether, for instance, a given word appears in the rule or not. Insofar as this sort of thing is left vague, one has not specified a rule or expression at all. The question is whether for an expression to have a meaning (or be understood) its application has to be similarly objective and definite, whether the syntactic objectivity must be matched by semantic objectivity. Wittgenstein attacks this sort of objectivism by pointing to the vagueness we tolerate in the application of expressions, arguing that the use of an objective rule or expression is a social practice, that is, that the criterion of successful application is its actual functioning in the community” (p. 19).

“The attempt to eliminate social practices generates a regress, for no rule generates its correct application to concrete circumstances by an objective process” (p. 23).

This point about rules is fundamental. While we can always try to express things as objectively as possible by formulating rules for the application of rules (and more rules for the application of those rules, and so on), this is at best an infinite regress, and there is always a remainder.

“An object, such as a rule, can determine a practice only if there are other practices, e.g., of responding to the object, in the community…. Wittgenstein explicitly draws the lesson that social practices, as things of a different kind from objective things, are ineliminable in accounts of this sort” (p. 24).

In a nutshell, this is what justifies Brandom’s characterization of Wittgenstein as a pragmatist.

“The social practices which are being contrasted with objective things in these passages are not strange or spooky things, and they are certainly not subjective” (p. 25).

At a popular level and even in some philosophical discourse, “pragmatism” is often treated as a kind of subjectivism. The full basis for rejecting this has not yet been elaborated, but it will involve a contrast with Rorty’s notion of incorrigibility.

“Mastering the practice is not a matter of following any set of rules, but rather of behaving in a way acceptable to the rest of the community. Rules may play a role in this, but need not. This line of thought can be brought to bear against the notion that cognitive functioning consists of manipulation of things of the first kind, mental events or processes” (p. 26).

“Mental things do not have an essentially different relation to such applications than linguistic rules did…. [U]nderstanding the meaning of an expression does not consist in some sort of mental grasp” (p. 27).

Again, part of his argument depends on Rorty’s innovative re-characterization of what it is to be “mental”, about which we will see more in a future post.

“The discussion of objective rules goes over to mental events and processes quite unchanged…. The connection between being in a certain mental state and understanding an expression is empirical. The criterion for being in the mental state is, roughly, that one sincerely think that one is, while the criterion for understanding an expression is that one be able to apply it in ways that the community accepts as correct…. The understanding one has of the meaning of an expression is so far from identical to a mental state that the state only becomes sufficient evidence for the understanding in virtue of a social practice of taking it to be so…. The mental functions here only as the invisible inward sign of a visible outward (i.e., social) grace” (pp. 28-29).

“Thus it is clear that the meaning of an expression may not be taken to be a kind of mental state which is elicited by the expression in the members of some population when they understand the expression, and which then objectively determines the use they make of that expression. There must be a social practice of applying the expression…. Wittgenstein is not claiming that mental states have no role to play in this process. He is claiming that they cannot replace the social practices of applying linguistic expressions…. [W]hat makes the performance correct is its consonance with the practices of the rest of the community, and this cannot be a matter of mental or objective processes” (p.30).

“The famous private language argument seeks to show that by the very act of making the language mine own, I must make it a poor thing…. The argument Wittgenstein makes is that ‘ “obeying a rule” is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule “privately”: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it’ ” (p. 32).

This is a decisive point: a “private rule” — one in which the one acting is identical with the one authorized to evaluate that one’s compliance with the rule — is no constraint at all. It is indistinguishable from sheer arbitrariness.

“For one’s authority over the character of his mental states and processes is complete. One is incorrigible about such matters, that is what it is for them to be mental according to our stipulated usage. What is wrong with such mental rules? What is wrong is that they cannot, in principle, be transgressed. Accordingly, they do not establish any boundaries between correct and incorrect usage, not even the vague boundaries induced by social practices” (p. 33).

In a footnote, he says “I am not taking into account the strand in [Wittgenstein’s] thought which would deny any cognitive status to incorrigible first-person avowals” (p. 33n). Apparently Brandom does not (or at least, at this time did not) consider this to be part of Wittgenstein’s “better wisdom” that he wants to emphasize.

This matter is a bit delicate. I suspect Brandom wanted to save the appearances by not throwing out a common-sense acceptance of first-person insights, but I am inclined to think that this reported denial by Wittgenstein is a necessary consequence of the argument. Whatever is in principle immune to criticism ought to have no standing in serious discourse. As Habermas says about the entry conditions for ideal speech situations, each participant must willingly submit to questioning and criticism. The delicate part is that the concern to save the appearances of common sense is also a legitimate one. But I think the legitimate concern to “save” a common-sense validity for first-person avowals and reports does not require giving common sense a strictly cognitive status.

This comes back to the Platonic distinction between knowledge and opinion. At odds with the mainstream tradition that “knowledge = justified true belief”, I maintain that there are many things that are legitimately considered to be objects of well-founded belief, but that still do not strictly qualify as knowledge in a strong sense.

He quotes Wittgenstein, “One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And this only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’ ” (p. 34). This is a passage Brandom frequently cites in his later works. I think it similarly means that here we can’t talk about “knowledge” in the strong Platonic sense that I uphold.

Brandom adds more support for my argument in the following.

“In a social language, the community which determines whether a given utterance is a correct use of an expression is different from the individual who utters the expression. There is accordingly room for a judgment of incorrectness. But in the case we are imagining, the individual who produces the utterance and the one who judges its correctness with respect to the original rule or definition are identical. There can be no check of whether a given performance is in accord with the rule which is independent of the performance itself. Indeed, there can be no evaluation which is not identical to the performance” (ibid).

“One may wish to call an activity with no rules whatsoever a game, but one may not then go on to claim that there is a difference between playing it and not playing it” (p. 35).

Next in this series: Seeming, Trying

Gadamer on Socratic Questioning

“Socratic conversation [has] the single goal of achieving an authentic shared process of speech…. Part of the meaning of genuine substantive explication is that it can continually justify and clarify itself…. A sophistic logos fails to meet this requirement because one did not acquire it with a view to the facts of the matter but rather with a view to its effectiveness in impressing the people around one” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (German ed. 1931), p. 56).

Since Habermas cites Gadamer as an influence, Gadamer’s work may well be the primary source for Habermas’ striking remark “Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech”. In any case, it provides a good explication. I find this particularly valuable, because although Habermas and Brandom neglect Plato and Aristotle, Gadamer himself treats them as not merely of antiquarian interest, but as having central contemporary relevance. (In the introduction to his Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002), Brandom too cites Gadamer’s hermeneutics as representative of one of two major ways of reading philosophical texts, neither of which he intends to follow strictly.)

“Precisely because the sophist’s logos, with its agonistic goals, does not make explicit or stick to the sense in which it is intended in each case, it falls prey itself to these ambiguities when someone else uses them against it. Socrates, on the other hand, keeps his eye on the subject matter even in these circumstances” (p. 57, emphasis added).

Real dialogue is not a social negotiation between individuals confronting one another. It holds fast to the shareable subject matter under discussion. Not our “immediate” egos but the rich and variegated terrain of open-ended meaning that we jointly inhabit is at issue here. What matters is not the competitive question of who is right, but the open-ended, shared exploration of what follows from what.

(Brandom’s first major work is called Making It Explicit. Sophistical sleight of hand — be it in politics, religion, or everyday life — depends on an opposite strategy of keeping it obscure what really or properly follows from what, in order to keep things safe for arbitrary “truths” plucked out of thin air. Although Making It Explicit does not directly address the topic of sophistry, that book of linguistic philosophy is a very substantial and original development of something like the positive side of Gadamer’s argument here, which folds in additional perspectives not addressed by Gadamer. Brandom also points out that Habermas’ work articulating what constitutes an “ideal speech situation” provides a detailed and interesting explication of Hegel’s central ethical notion of mutual recognition.)

Gadamer goes on, “Socrates’ logical traps are not meant to be the manipulations of a virtuoso technician which are simply applied where they promise success; instead, they are living forms of a process of seeking shared understanding” (p. 58). “[R]efutation in the Socratic style is positive: not a process of reducing the other person to silence so as, tacitly, to make oneself out as the knower, in contrast to him, but a process of arriving at a shared inquiry” (p. 59).

“The good, then, is knowledge’s object; that is, it is the unitary focal point to which everything must be related and in relation to which human existence in particular understands itself in a unified way. The general character of the good is that it is that for the sake of which something is, and thus, in particular, that for the sake of which man himself is. It is in the light of it that human beings understand themselves in their action” (ibid).

Here Gadamer brings out into the clear the central role of what Aristotle calls that for the sake of which — the telos or “final cause” — which extends all the way from the understanding of living beings in nature to the highest first philosophy. To ask after that for the sake of which is precisely to step back from what is immediately present. This is the beginning of wisdom.

“Just that, then, which presents itself unambiguously as good, in its immediate presentness, should and must be ‘measured’, if it is supposed to be ‘the good’, in relation to something that is not contained in its immediate attractiveness itself. So it certainly cannot be the immediate attractiveness that constitutes the goodness” (p. 61).

“Thus it is no more the case that the immediate experience of well-being is an indubitable testimonial of its goodness than that any behavior that is regarded as virtuous is so automatically, without being justified by reference to the good itself. Thus the demand for an art of measuring pleasures — which alone could justify the claim of pleasure to be the good — succeeds, despite the impossibility of such an art, in making clear what the good is sought as. Dasein understands itself in relation to what it is ‘for the sake of’, not on the basis of how it feels at any present moment but on the basis of its highest and constant potential” (pp. 61-62).

Real understanding is precisely a movement beyond what is immediate. Gadamer is still partly under the spell of Heidegger, and refers to Heideggerian Dasein, but this plays no real role in the argument. I would refer more simply to “our” understanding of ourselves.

“The methodological point of the imagined art of measurement, then, is to show that an understanding of Dasein must understand present things in terms of non-present ones and can grant them goodness only in such a relation. Thus this Socratic course of argumentation allows us to see what the good must (in any case) be sought as: namely, the central thing on the basis of which human being understands itself. So the positive point of Socratic refutation consists not only in achieving a positive perplexity but also — by the same token — in explaining what knowledge really is and what alone should be recognized as knowledge. It is only in the concept of the good that all knowledge is grounded; and it is only on the basis of the concept of the good that knowledge can be justified” (p. 63).

Again, for Dasein I would just say “ourselves”.

Here he again brings out the central role of the good in the constitution of what we call knowledge and truth. He points out that in order to make distinctions at all, we must have some preliminary idea of the good, even if we cannot articulate it.

“Insofar as the search for grounding that gives an accounting is a shared search and has the character of a testing, it operates, fundamentally, not by one person’s making an assertion and awaiting confirmation or contradiction by the other person, but by both of them testing the logos to see whether it is refutable and by both of them agreeing in regard to its eventual refutation or confirmation. All testing sets up the proposition to be tested not as something for one person to defend, as belonging to him or her, and for the other person to attack, as belonging to the other, but as something ‘in the middle’. And the understanding that emerges is not primarily an understanding resulting from agreement with others but an understanding with oneself. Only people who have reached an understanding with themselves can be in agreement with others” (p. 64).

Gadamer on Logos

“Hegel demonstrates that the pure ‘I’ is spirit…. The truth of the ‘I’ is pure knowing…. ‘[A]rt’, ‘religion’, and ‘philosophy’ … are absolute because they are no longer opinions of consciousness which extend to an object beyond that which presents and fully affirms itself within these forms” (Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, German ed. 1971, English tr. 1976, p. 77).

It is important to notice the directedness of this identification. Hegel is clearly not saying that spirit, whatever that is, should be understood in terms of a Cartesian ego that we experience immediately. Rather, he is saying that the “I”, whatever that is (which Kant analyzed as a pure indexical reference to a unity of apperception), should be understood in terms of what he calls forms of spirit. Ramified forms of Hegelian “spirit” (or Aristotelian ethos) effectively make up the contents of a unity of apperception.

I like the way Gadamer subtly folds in a reference to Plato’s sharp critique of “opinion”, and relates it to “consciousness” in Hegel. As I would put it, “consciousness” is the subjective form of that same appearance that Plato radically questions. Canonically for Hegel, consciousness is defined as an attitude that sees itself as looking out on fully preformed objects that are external to it. It does not see the mythical character of the Myth of the Given.

(Elsewhere, though, like many others, Gadamer treats consciousness as the common denominator of the whole Phenomenology, rather than a specific name for the lowest stage of spirit’s development, that is most of all superseded in the course of development of the Phenomenology. The true common denominator of the Phenomenology is one of those concepts that Aristotle mentions as being implicit in a context of use, without being adequately named by any noun in common speech.)

I also like Gadamer’s deflationary treatment (at least in the above passage) of “absolute knowing” in terms of the productions of art, religion, and philosophy. Hegelian absolute knowing, whatever that is, is not some impossible thing. It should be understood as that which is expressed in art, religion, and philosophy. Wherever there is art, religion, or philosophy, there is some form of absolute knowing in Hegel’s sense.

“Hegel lays his very own foundation, on which he rebuilds absolute knowing as the truth of metaphysics as Aristotle, for one, conceived of it in nous or Aquinas, for another, in intellectus agens. And thus a universal logic — which explicates the ideas of God before the creation — is made possible. Hegel’s concept of spirit which transcends the subjective forms of self-consciousness thus goes back to the logos-nous metaphysics of the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions, which predates the whole question of self-consciousness” (p. 78).

I must applaud this situating of Hegel in relation to Plato and Aristotle. Heidegger does the same, but gives the whole a decidedly negative spin (“forgetting of Being”, etc.).

Gadamer’s reference to Aquinas gives me pause. Aquinas developed his own highly original philosophy and theology, which uses core Aristotelian vocabulary in ways very different from those of Aristotle himself. This has resulted in great confusion, when Thomistic concepts are mistakenly re-applied to the reading of Aristotle.

The reference to ideas of God before the creation does recall a passage from Hegel. More recently though, Robert Pippin has convincingly argued that the passage is extremely misleading, for multiple reasons.

We also see here how Aristotelian “intellect” is something constitutive rather than something empirical.

“In Greek philosophy Hegel saw the philosophy of logos, or put another way, the courage to consider pure thoughts per se. As a result, Greek thought succeeded in unfolding the universe of ideas. For this realm Hegel coins a new expression, typical of him, namely, ‘the logical’. What he is characterizing here is the entire cosmos of ideas as Plato’s philosophy dialectically develops it. Now Plato was driven by the desire to provide justification for every thought and his doctrine of ideas was intended to satisfy the demand which Socrates makes in the dialogues that for every contention a reason or argument must always be given (logon didonai)” (ibid).

Pure thought just means thought that develops from its own resources, and in its workings avoids any decisive appeal to unjustified assumptions, authority, givenness, etc.

This helps clarify what Gadamer means by “logos philosophy”. Although in the first instance it seems to involve careful attention to language and to the pragmatics of communicative speech or writing, Gadamer links it to a shared view of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel — that the rarified thing we call thought is in principle capable of developing an adequate account of things. This giving of an account (another meaning of logos) has nothing to do with certainty or foreknowledge or immediate knowledge that could be simply possessed. Rather, it seems to be the space in which Socratic dialogue and Aristotelian phronesis do their work.

In his magnum opus Truth and Method, Gadamer briefly but explicitly ties in the logos (“Word”) from the Gospel of John. At greater length, he traces the origin of Romantic hermeneutics to early Protestant emphasis on direct reading of scripture over the institutional mediation of the Church. Above, we saw him invoke Aquinas on the agent intellect. Without fanfare, he seems intent on building an ecumenical bridge between Christianity and the ethical-rather-than-epistemic logos that he sees in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Gadamer on History of Philosophy

Gadamer’s preface to The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (German ed. 1978, English tr. 1986) provides valuable perspective on the history of 20th-century readings of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the nonexistent or negative relation of those readings to Hegel. I’ll excerpt a few dense paragraphs and then comment.

“Hegel, it cannot be denied, did indeed grasp the speculative tendency in both Plato’s doctrine of ideas and Aristotle’s substance ontology, since his thinking was so congenial to theirs. And to that extent he is the first in modern times to break through the schema of interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of the ideas shaped by Aristotle and further developed in Neoplatonism and the Christian tradition. Nor can one say that Hegel has remained without any lasting influence on scholarship in the history of philosophy. Such good Aristotelians as Trendelenburg and Eduard Zeller owe him a great deal. Above all, Hegel was the first to make the philosophical significance of Plato’s ‘esoteric’, ‘dialectical’ dialogues accessible. However, the unitary effect connecting Plato’s and Aristotle’s logos philosophy — which did not remain hidden from Hegel — was underestimated, it seems to me, in the period following him and continues to be until this day.”

“There are various reasons why. To be sure, there was a concealed, unacknowledged Hegelianism behind the neo-Kantian interpretations of Plato in Cohen and Natorp and in their successors Cassirer, N. Hartmann, Hönigswald, and Stenzel. But given their particular mentality, it was exclusively Plato, and not in the least Aristotle, who could sustain this generation of scholars, in their critical-idealistic purposes. A complete elaboration of Hegel’s insights was totally obstructed, on the one hand, by the dogmatic overlay superimposed on Aristotle by the neo-Thomism prevailing in the Catholic camp, and on the other, by the hereditary feud between modern natural science and the Aristotelian teleological understanding of nature or, in fact, any idealistic philosophy of nature. Furthermore, when it interpreted the ‘idea’ as the ‘natural law’, thereby bringing together Plato and Galileo, the neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato, especially that of Natorp, proceeded all too provocatively with the Greek text while remaining insensitive to historical differences. If one starts from this idealistic neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato, then Aristotle’s critique of Plato can only appear as an absurd misunderstanding. This fact further contributed to the failure to recognize the unitary effect in Plato and Aristotle, thereby blocking a full incorporation of the Greek heritage into our own philosophical thought. Such naive and trivial juxtapositions as ‘Plato, the idealist’, versus ‘Aristotle, the realist’, gained universal currency, although they actually only confirmed the truly abysmal depth of prejudice in any idealism of consciousness. In addition, the schema for which Hegel provided the inspiration which construed Greek thought as not yet able to conceive of the absolute as spirit, life, and self-consciousness, did not promote a proper evaluation of the fundamental significance of Greek thought for modern philosophy.”

“Nicolai Hartmann’s dissociation of himself from neo-Kantian idealism stimulated me to try to penetrate Aristotle’s thought, and the French and English research — of Robin, Taylor, Ross, Hardie, and, above all, the incomparable Hicks — proved most helpful in my endeavors. At the time, however, I fell far short of seeing the unity in the logos philosophy, which started with Socrates’ questioning and then quickly deteriorated in the post-Aristotelian period, but which, nevertheless, permanently determined the entire conceptual apparatus of Western thought. Encountering Heidegger turned out to be decisive for me at this stage. Heidegger had worked his way through both the Catholic-Aristotelian and neo-Kantian traditions, and in appropriating Husserl’s minutely detailed art of conceptualization, he had steeled the endurance and power of intuition, which are indispensable for doing philosophy with Aristotle. Here, then, was an advocate of Aristotle who, in his directness and the freshness of his phenomenological insights, far surpassed all the traditional shadings of Aristotelianism, who surpassed Thomism and, yes, even Hegelianism. To this day hardly anything has been made public of this event, but it has had its effect on academic teaching, and my own path was defined beginning there. By the time I published my first book in 1931 (Platos dialektische Ethik), the convergence, at least in the area of practical philosophy, of the aim of Plato’s thinking with Aristotle’s conceptual distinctions had become evident to me” (pp.1-4).

In this context, Gadamer contrasts “a phenomenological exposition of their subject matter itself” (p. 5, emphasis in original) to textual analysis.

“Decades of teaching were devoted to elaborating and testing what is called here the Platonic-Aristotelian unitary effect. But in the background was the continuous challenge posed for me by the path Heidegger’s own thought took, and especially by his interpretation of Plato as the decisive step toward ‘metaphysical thought’s’ obliviousness to being (Sein)…. The following studies too, it is hoped, will serve to keep alive both Platonic dialogue and the speculative dimension common to Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel” (ibid).

Gadamer points out that common German readings of Plato and Aristotle in part reflect Hegel’s interpretations. The reference to Aristotle’s “substance ontology” reflects a common reading of the Metaphysics that I reject. Gadamer is right though to point out that Aristotle’s explicit criticisms of Plato are not the last word on Plato. He is very right that after Aristotle, there was a breakdown in continuity of understanding.

Gadamer particularly points out the role of neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato and Aristotle in promoting a shallow opposition between the two. He helps to explain how it was that Heidegger came to be regarded as dramatically advancing the study of Plato and Aristotle, which seems quite preposterous to me.

Apparently in early 20th-century Germany, neo-Kantian and neo-Thomist accounts of Plato and Aristotle were the main available alternatives. As Gadamer presents it, each of these two had its own dogmatism and shallowness.

Heidegger was doing something clearly different from either, while appealing to an audience sympathetic to Romanticism, and to the vitalist Lebensphilosophie or “philosophy of life”. He offered an approach very different from that of neo-Kantianism or neo-Thomism. He was already famous in Germany as a charismatic lecturer, before the publication of Being and Time. Gadamer principally notes Heidegger’s “directness and freshness”, but seems to make no claim at all about Heidegger’s historical scholarship. Heidegger’s vigorous assertiveness must have impressed people. Gadamer is polite and circumspect, but the “continuous challenge” due to Heidegger that he says he felt must have been to defend Plato against Heidegger’s claims about the forgetting of Being.

Gadamer on Plato and Aristotle

Some of Gadamer’s most interesting work is on Plato and Aristotle. More so than many modern commentators, he sees their work as closely connected. He is especially fond of Plato. In the introduction to Gadamer’s The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, (German ed. 1978, English tr. 1986), translator P. Christopher Smith offers useful comments.

For Gadamer, “Plato and Aristotle both belong to the unified tradition of logos philosophy. In the Phaedo Plato’s Socrates turns away from naturalistic accounts of things to the logoi, our ways of speaking; similarly, Aristotle founds his investigations on ‘pos legetai’, how something is spoken of” (Smith, p. xiv).

At least in this work, the term “logos philosophy” is not explicitly defined. But in the passage above, it clearly indicates a linguistic character. It is nice to see a recognition that Plato’s — and even more so Aristotle’s — work has a substantial linguistic dimension.

Smith recalls that the Ionian pre-Socratics had “only two kinds of explanation at their disposal — from what, and by the agency of what — [and so they] could not properly grasp the cosmos, in which things occur for the sake of (heneka) what is good” (p. xv).

The moderns on the whole don’t really do much better than the pre-Socratics at recognizing what Aristotle calls “for the sake of” and the role it plays in the constitution of things. This involves not providential intervention, or even a reified indwelling ontological principle that could simply unfold. It is also not just a fact, but something that motivates without necessitating.

In Plato, “To begin with there are the refutational, or elenchtic, dialogues, in which Socrates confronts the great sophists of his time — Protagoras, Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus — and displays the emptiness of their claims to be able to teach virtue. In truth theirs is a technical mentality, and what they teach is only a techne of succeeding. The conclusion to be drawn from these dialogues — at times explicit, but more often implied negatively or indirectly — is that knowledge in virtue is somehow different from knowledge in techne. This shows up above all in the fact that virtue cannot be taught. And there is a further truth that emerges here, again largely unsaid, that the traditional ideas of arete upon which the sophists rely and which might be learned by imitating a paragon have become groundless and susceptible of sophistic dissimulation. Therefore, to withstand seduction by self-interest and by otherwise insatiable desires for sensuous gratification and power, to which sophism panders, one must now be able to give justification for what is good, that is, justification for one’s choices of what is right as opposed to what is wrong. But nobody seems to know how to do that, least of all those sophists who claim that they do” (pp. xv-xvi).

This concern with justification is something Gadamer shares with Habermas and Brandom. But Gadamer traces it all the way back to Plato, whereas Habermas and Brandom are modernists. It seems to me that Plato and Aristotle’s outrage at the Sophists has to do with the Sophists’ subversion of justification.

“The primary concern in these elenchtic dialogues, then, is a practical one, and that makes the Phaedo and the Republic, in which concern seems to shift to epistemological and ontological matters, appear to mark a definite transition in Plato’s thought. For in these next works the ‘ideas’ are introduced, and in the Republic even the ‘idea of ideas’, the idea of the good which would seem to serve as a first principle of both true knowledge and true reality. In the twentieth-century traditions of Plato interpretation — particularly the neo-Kantian, which found support for its theory of science in this ‘stage’ of Plato — would have it that the question Plato is addressing here is a new, theoretical one no longer related to the Socratic question concerning arete. But Gadamer sees a serious oversight here. A careful reading, he argues, shows that Plato is still dealing with the same issue” (p. xvi).

“Gadamer maintains … that if one asks what question is actually being addressed in the allegory of the cave, one sees that the concern is not just, or even primarily, a theoretical, scientific one, but in fact an existential-practical question of holding steadfastly to the truth in the face of tests or refutations (elenchoi) much as a soldier holds his ground in battle or a wrestler stands firm against attempts to throw him — this is the language Plato uses here. And what are these tests of mettle? The guardians will find themselves in a conflict between honest execution of the duties of their office for the public weal and the ‘pursuit of power after power’, as we in the English-speaking world might put it, using the words of Thomas Hobbes. The guardians, in other words, will be tested by the flattery of both their own desires for gratification and sophistic sycophants, flattery that might seduce them into sacrificing their integrity” (p. xvii).

“In short, it turns out that the theory of dialectic in which they are to be trained is a way of distinguishing and, above all, of distinguishing practically between right and wrong, good and bad. To do that, the guardians must know the idea of the good, for that idea is exactly what those in the cave do not know. The cave-dwellers’ technai (arts) give them the knowledge ‘how to’ do something, knowledge of the means to an end, but not knowledge of the end itself, the hou heneka, the ‘what for’…. Thus, knowledge of the good turns out to be not just a theoretical insight, not just a matter of logos (reasoning). It is a principle on ergon (deed), and makes possible constancy in the choice of the life that one leads (Aristotle: prohairesis tou biou)” (p. xviii).

The sense in which he says the guardians “must know” the idea of the good seems to me to be of necessity quite different from the way in which we may be said, e.g., to know the Pythagorean Theorem. I would rather say something like, the guardians “must have wisdom” about the good.

“And now the real meaning of the hypothesis of the eidos in the Phaedo becomes evident. As opposed to what the neo-Kantian school might have seen in it, the hypothesis of the eidos is not at all the ‘scientific’ postulation of a universal idea that is to be verified by the facts. As in the Republic, the issue in the Phaedo is how to head off whatever might mislead us, how to head off sophistic talk…. Hypothesizing the eidos thus has nothing to do with empirical verification but, instead, with making precisely these eidetic distinctions…. The paradigm for steadfastness … remains Socrates, who was not to be dissuaded from what he saw to be right, no matter what arguments concerning his own ‘advantage’ might be advanced. His arete was such that he would not even accept the escape from death offered to him by his friends” (pp.xviii-xix).

At first I was confused by the reference to verification by facts. To speak of empirical verification of an eidos would be a category mistake. But I think “the hypothesis of the eidos” refers not to any particular eidos, but to the general “hypothesis” that there are eidei.

The important point here is the Socratic “steadfastness”, where steadfastness means not being lured and fooled by the verbal tricks of the clever sophists, who aim at success and at victory in argument, rather than at truth and shared understanding. It seems very relevant today.

“[The Philebus] too begins with an ethical issue — whether the good life is one of pleasure or of intellect or of some third thing — and it also involves its interlocutors in the task of giving justification for their contentions concerning the good life, justification that will make their arguments invulnerable to the sophistic arts of confusing and confounding people with sleights of hand that interchange the one and the many” (p. xix).

“Here the techniques of Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology can be put to good use, for the task is to display the phenomenon that Plato is getting at. In the Philebus Plato speaks of the good as the structure of a ‘mixture’ someone might brew, the ‘potion’ as it were, which is our human life. The various ‘ingredients’, the kinds of pleasure and intellect, are not to be mixed indiscriminately, but well…. A ‘good’ mixture is thus one that has limits to it, and the good itself is limitedness (measuredness, or metriotes) in the midst of constantly threatening indeterminacy and limitlessness…. As measuredness, the good in the Philebus, we now see, is precisely Aristotle’s mean between the extremes” (pp. xx-xxi).

Paul Ricoeur also points out the importance of a notion of mixture in Plato. This undoes many old stereotypes about Platonism.

I am rather unclear on what Husserlian phenomenology is supposed to specifically contribute to the history of philosophy here. I imagine Husserl might question this claim himself. He wanted phenomenology to be a precise “science”, grounded in the phenomenological and eidetic reductions. Here instead we have a thoughtful examination of Plato’s metaphorical language.

“In anticipating Aristotle’s criticisms, it should be noted that, as measuredness, the good in Plato must be distinguished, or ‘separated’ intellectually, from the mixture itself. But if one abstracts from this metaphor, one finds that, as measuredness, the good is what Hegel calls ein Moment, namely, an aspect of something which does not exist separately from it. In short, it is in the thing of which it is the structure. Thus, when we say that it is choriston (separate), we are not denying that it is in the thing. We are saying only that it must be distinguished from the thing in our thinking” (p. xxi).

For Aristotle, a thing that is called “separate” is simply a thing that is conceptually distinct, whereas for Plato, separateness involves independence from matter. This means a thing that Aristotle calls “separate” may nonetheless never exist apart from the whole to which it belongs. This has been discussed in detail by Gwenaëlle Aubry.

“These striking convergences of Plato’s thought with Aristotle’s leave us puzzled about Aristotle’s critique of Plato. Why would he criticize Plato if in fact he and Plato are saying the same thing? “(ibid).

We should be careful about saying things are “the same”. I have sympathy for Leibniz’s argument that no two things are the same. Then there is the question, at what level of blurriness can we no longer distinguish two things? But again the important point is rather the relative one that it is on the whole a lot less false to say Plato and Aristotle thought the same, than it is to present them as if they were opposites, as has also been done at times.

“At the core of the argument in all three [of Aristotle’s surviving ethical works] is the contention that Plato improperly fuses the ontological and the practical in his applications of the idea of the good” (p. xxii).

“Aristotle, of course, is a consummate phenomenologist who wishes above all to avoid running distinct things together. But is it just his ‘descriptive caution’ that leads him to try to keep ontological and practical theory separate? Gadamer suggests that there is something else fundamental in Aristotle’s way of inquiring that leads him to put things as he does, namely, his orientation toward life science. Mathematically oriented thinking such as Plato’s would indeed lead to inquiry about the idea of the good as an abstract structure of good things…. But that is not the orientation of Aristotle’s questioning, which gives primacy to the concrete living thing” (p. xxiv).

“The relationship of moral theory to practice is not at all the modern relation of theory to practice in which an objective, neutral theory can be applied generally to particular problems. In distinction to producing something (techne, poiesis), doing the right thing is not simply an application of general rules” (p. xxvi).

Even Kant has qualification and subtlety in his rule-orientedness.

“In the first place, as Aristotle recognizes, we need an ‘appropriate principle’ (oikeia arche) for moral reasoning, which is not to be confused with mathematical deductive reasoning. For in moral reasoning I always find myself in a particular situation, and the task is not to subsume this particular case under a universal rule which I could know apart from the situation I am in, but to define from within my situation what the general rule is of which this situation is an instance. The particular virtues and virtue in general, as finding the ‘mean between extremes’ are not universal principles that I apply to a situation, but universalizations of what I am doing when I do what is right. Hence it should be noted carefully that, although Aristotle does indeed speak of the ‘practical syllogism’, he in fact uses this syllogistic reasoning only to exemplify the technical choice of the right means to an end” (p. xxviii).

This is an interesting hybrid view on the universality issue. It is certainly true that Aristotle does not treat ethical conclusions as a matter of deduction (instead, they are matters of interpretation).

“[Cleverness] deals with means to an end, and for just that reason, he says, it is to be distinguished from [moral reasonableness]” (ibid).

“Moral reasonableness” is how Smith translates Aristotelian ethical phronesis. This is a kind of reason, which I have called ethical reason.

“As both the Philebus and Aristotle’s ethical treatises make clear, human beings are not gods, and thus the life that is best for them has to be a life that combines theoria and praxis…. The point that both wish to make — which is the fundamental point of agreement between them concerning the good — is that, in distinction to gods, human beings are always under way toward the divine, or, as Gadamer puts it, their best life is philosophia, not sophia, that is, striving for wisdom, not wisdom itself. Human beings are finite, not absolute — never absolved from the ‘remnant of earth’ (Goethe) in them that inevitably involves them in the task of living well here in the practical world” (pp. xxviii-xix).

Finitism and infinitism are both said in many ways. The very sharp distinction being made here between humans and gods seems rather one-sided in relation to Aristotle.

Gadamer is apparently a pretty strong finitist, and strongly opposed to the infinitism he sees in Hegel. What infinity means in the more “deflationary” views of Hegel I have sympathy for is quite different from this. Meanwhile Aristotle literally says that the world is finite, but allows for an expansive notion of human being.

“Thus, in both Plato and Aristotle, the good emerges as that toward which we are striving, that for the sake of which (hou heneka), that at which we aim (to telos). But not only we. The whole universe is to be understood as striving for perfection…. [T]he universe, and not only human experience, is to be thought of in relation to the good ” (p. xix).

Gadamer on Platonic Dialogue

“But a real conversation itself already requires one to attend only to the substantive intention of what is said and not to what the speech expresses, along with that, about Dasein” (Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, German ed. 1931, English tr. 1991, p. 42). This is from Gadamer’s first published book, which focuses on the ethical meaning of Platonic dialogue, but also implicitly addresses the broader human condition.

He is saying that in genuine dialogue, the concern of the participants is only with what is being said about the topic under discussion; with what should be said about it; and specifically not with each other’s character, intentions, or social position.

“A dialectical contradiction is not present when one opinion opposes another…. It is not a contradiction in the dialectical sense when another person speaks against something, but only when a thing speaks against it, whether it is another person or I myself who has stated this” (p. 44).

I still don’t particularly care for the use of “contradiction” in this sort of context. But the important point — that real life is full of tensions, conflicts, and ambiguities — is entirely valid. The tensions and conflicts of main concern here are not those between people or views, but rather those that are internal to the matter under discussion.

“Plato characterizes again and again the ‘substantive’ spirit (the spirit that is concerned with the facts of the matter) of the dialogical pursuit of shared understanding…. [It] can be summed up as the exclusion of phthonos. Phthonos … means concern about being ahead of others or not being left behind by others. As such, its effect in conversation is to cause an apprehensive holding back from talk that presses forward toward discovering the true state of affairs…. This proviso prevents the talk from adapting freely to the connections in the subject matter and thus prevents, precisely, an unreserved readiness to give an account. Someone who, on the contrary, answers aneu phthonou, eumenes, alupos (without being inhibited by the pain of an aggrieved desire to be right), is prepared to give an account ‘aphthonos‘ (in a manner that is not affected by phthonos)” (ibid).

Here we are at the heart of the matter, which has to do with Plato and Aristotle’s principled opposition to the Sophists, who (for a fee) offered instruction on how to verbally impress, overwhelm, dominate, and manipulate others, while calling it “virtue”.

A major aspect of what makes any participation in dialogue serious is that it not be “inhibited by the pain of an aggrieved desire to be right”. The “aggrieved desire to be right” has no interest in truth, or in what really is right. The Sophists’ techniques of domination and manipulation on the other hand cater to that aggrieved desire.

“Speech gives itself the appearance of having knowledge to the extent that it is able, through the seduction that is inherent in it, to secure other people’s agreement or to refute them. Thus it is characteristic of the way in which this apparent claim is carried out… to cut off the possibility of a free response by the other person. Thus such pretended knowledge takes the form of something that aims either at getting someone’s agreement or at refuting them. In both forms of such speech its function is not primarily to make the facts of the matter visible in their being and to confirm this through the other person but rather to develop in speech independently of the access that it creates to the facts of the matter, the possibility precisely of excluding the other person in the function… of fellow speaker and fellow knower” (pp. 45-46).

Overwhelming ways of speaking are an aggression against the possibility of dialogue and the aim of reaching of shared understanding.

“That this claim can represent only a pretended claim to knowledge is clear from the fact that to the talker, … what he says is not really important…. What is important to the talker is only his ascendency over contradiction. The claim that his talk makes to knowledge always presents itself as already having been satisfied, and not as yet to be satisfied by coming to shared understanding” (p. 47).

“Thus the concern about the ascendency of one’s logos obstructs one’s view of the facts of the matter, which point precisely through the refutation to an explication that makes progress, by taking with it and retaining what is revealed in the pros and cons” (p. 48).

“Part of the essence of such talk, therefore, is to avoid dialogue. It tends toward making speeches, toward makrologia (speaking at length), which of course makes it difficult to go back to something that was said” (ibid).

The essence of dialogue lies in what he here calls going back to what was said. Alternating monologues do not constitute dialogue, because they don’t “go back to what was said”.

“Insofar as someone who enters into conversation with Socrates thinks he has knowledge of what he is asked about, then, he cannot refuse the demand that he answer for it. The genuineness of his claim to knowledge is put to the test by this demand for accountability” (p. 51). “[I]n Plato’s historical situation there is a reason for the fact that knowledge is no longer possible as the wise proclamation of the truth but has to prove itself in dialogical coming to an understanding — that is, in an unlimited willingness to justify and supply reasons for everything that is said” (p. 52).

What wants to be called knowledge has to prove itself in a dialogical coming to shared understanding. True dialogue requires an unlimited willingness to answer questions and give reasons.

“But in that case everyone must also be willing and able to give an accounting as to why he acts and conducts himself as he does; he must be able to say what he understands himself to be…, at least insofar as he is able, through the logos, to understand himself in terms of something — that is, in terms of something that is not present at the moment” (p. 53).

Gadamer shares this “dialogical” ethic with Habermas and Brandom, while explicitly connecting it with Plato and Aristotle, as I have been seen to do across many posts. I am happy to find support from a major philosopher for the inclusion of Plato and Aristotle in this contemporary discussion. (Habermas had significant interaction with Gadamer, and Brandom cites Gadamer in Tales of the Mighty Dead.)

“Everyone must be able to answer this question, because it asks him about himself. Every Socratic conversation leads to this sort of examination of what a person himself is…. One must be able to say why one behaves in a certain manner — that is, what the good is that one understands oneself as aiming at in one’s behavior” (p. 54, emphasis added.).

Between Good and Evil

Title for this post recalls the English subtitle of Rüdiger Safranski’s biography Martin Heidegger (German ed. 1994, English tr. 1998). I’ll try and keep this relatively short, but I wanted to make few remarks on this and Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1993). In the last few days I have been pouring over these, with a few specific questions in mind: What led to Heidegger’s profoundly negative view of Plato, Aristotle, and Western philosophy in general? What details are known about the development in his religious views? And what else is known about his political views, and involvement with the Nazis?

In 1907, one of his teachers gave him a copy of Franz Brentano’s dissertation on the meaning of being in Aristotle. Brentano was the one who introduced the medieval term “intentionality” into modern philosophy. Latter, Heidegger enthusiastically read the Logical Investigations of Brentano’s student Husserl. But in 1915, he anticipated a career interpreting medieval philosophy. He was originally going to be a Catholic priest. Some time around 1916, though, he left the Catholic church, citing “epistemological issues”, and for a time identified himself as a “free Christian”. Around the same time, he came into personal contact with Husserl, eventually becoming Husserl’s assistant. His early work under Husserl was devoted mainly to a phenomenology of religion.

Heidegger in his early works favors intuition over reason, and puts a high value on immediacy. He identifies with German romanticism, particularly the work of Schleiermacher on religion. As late as 1921, he still refers to himself as a theologian. An early work on Augustine decries the bad influence of Greek philosophy on Christian theology.

His early philosophical involvements were mainly with medieval philosophy, and with the German philosophy of his own day. Plato and Aristotle hardly figure at all in the story told in these two books, up to the point when Heidegger starts lecturing on them as a supposed expert. He claimed to be working on a book on Aristotle in the early 1920s, but only completed the introduction. He did give several lecture courses on Aristotle, and a couple on Plato.

I used to be fascinated by his discussions on the etymology of Greek philosophical words, but my understanding is that these are not taken very seriously by linguists. As someone who “reads” classical Greek mainly in bilingual editions with heavy use of a dictionary, I came to realize that this kind of informal talk about etymologies did not imply a very deep study of the texts in question, or a very deep knowledge of the language. I could write with great confidence about individual Greek words the way Heidegger does, but I am nowhere near competent to critically discuss major Greek texts in the original.

In 1923, Heidegger apparently had the flash of inspiration that Greek ousia really meant standing presence. Neither the biography nor the study of his early work gives any indication of close textual or historical study of Greek philosophy leading up to this. His attention seems to have been mostly elsewhere. It seems that ousia as presence was no more than a quite unhistorical intuition. But Heidegger apparently had great charisma as a teacher, and he asserted it with great confidence. Cheap shots against Aristotle are an easy sell in the modern world; hardly anyone looks at them critically.

I cannot help but notice that a notion of “presence” does play a significant role in Husserl, while it really does not in Plato or Aristotle. The most plausible hypothesis, I think, is that Heidegger reads a strong notion of presence into Plato and Aristotle because he has been immersed in Husserl, for whom presence is very important.

The biography does fill in a bit more about his involvement with Nazism. Heidegger was originally a Catholic conservative, though he left the church during the First World War. He seems to have supported the Nazis at least as early as 1931. He does not seem to have been personally anti-Semitic, but he was willing to adopt anti-Semitic behavior in order to conform.

In 1933, Safranski says Heidegger was positively “electrified” by Hitler’s ascendance. This had some kind of huge significance for him, and he wanted to give it a profound philosophical meaning. He reportedly even called it a collective emergence from Plato’s cave. Evidently he imagined that there was a world-historical philosophical significance to nazification as a new spiritual era, and he had the hubris to believe that he himself could somehow personally guide the movement. Those last hopes were dashed fairly quickly. They didn’t listen to him at all. He was never part of the Nazi inner circle, and he left his Nazi-appointed university rectorship in 1934. But at least as late as 1935 and perhaps quite a bit longer, he still politically supported the regime.

Later, Heidegger downplayed the Nazi chapter of his life as a simple “error in judgment”. Biographer Safranski does not find this disavowal to be credible. He says there is just too much evidence of how tremendously important these events were for him, and how excited he was about it all. It was the most important thing in his life for over a year. But the great phenomenologist Husserl at one point called this man his best student. The young Hannah Arendt, who would go on to become one of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century in her own right, apparently was really in love with her professor. And I cannot honestly say I am sure that the philosophical positions I have major issues with in themselves lead to fascism or anything like that. But I do find it troubling.

So we end still with deep ambivalence.

Plato and Aristotle on Religion

Aristotle’s statements about “god” have sometimes troubled both religious people and non-religious people. For the believers they seem to say too little, and yet for nonbelievers they seem to say too much. But views that generate opposite complaints might be taken to represent a happy medium of sorts. In this troubled world of ours, so full of religious strife, the generous and optimistic spirit of Plato and Aristotle has much to be commended.

I use the lower case “god” to translate Plato and Aristotle’s ho theos, which can also be rendered “the god”. Many have read an incipient monotheism into this term.

In the course of their philosophical work, Plato and Aristotle address many issues relevant to religion, without attaching themselves to any particular creed or orthodoxy. Conventional Greek religion in their day was more concerned with ceremonial observance than with specific belief. Plato nonetheless criticizes the very human foibles attributed to the gods in Greek mythology, and generally rejects argument from authority in favor of shareable reasoning. For Plato, worthiness of the designation “god” implies a virtual identity with the good, the true, and the beautiful. A god would, for example, be incapable of jealousy. Aristotle shares this positive perspective, and does not speak about mythology at all, except in a literary way.

Reception of Plato and Aristotle in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions was largely filtered through the complex history of neoplatonism. At the same time, neoplatonism — and especially the work of its founder, Plotinus — greatly influenced later theology. Although Plotinus was nominally a polytheist, his philosophy focuses intensely on the relation of all things to the One. Augustine in his Confessions describes his reading of Plotinus as a halfway point toward his conversion to Christianity. During the Islamic Golden Age, an Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus circulated under the title Theology of Aristotle.

After the Roman Empire became officially Christian, the emperor Julian briefly attempted to overthrow Christianity, while claiming support from the later neoplatonic philosophy of Iamblichus. Iamblichus’ Athenian successor Proclus treats the works of Plato as themselves divinely inspired, while also broadly embracing the polytheisms of all nations. Proclus wrote a Platonic Theology as well as an Elements of Theology, and championed a theological interpretation of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides at great length. The Athenian neoplatonic school was eventually closed by the Christian Roman emperor for its persistent advocacy on behalf of pagan traditions.

The Alexandrian neoplatonic school under Ammonius sought to distance itself from the Athenian school’s advocacy of paganism, while at the same time shifting its curriculum to focus much more on Aristotle rather than Plato. Ammonius’ students included both the Christian John Philoponus and the pagan Simplicius, who between them authored the majority of the surviving Greek commentaries on Aristotle. Without endorsing all the details of either of their work, I find it inspiring that they were able to coexist within the same school.

Religion and politics both need more dialogue and less denunciation of the other. Plato and Aristotle and discussions of their work have much to teach us along these lines.

Book Lambda: Introduction

“Book Lambda of the Metaphysics responds to the exigencies defined in book capital Alpha: to pose the good as a principle; and to determine its proper mode of causality as being that of a final cause, and not an efficient or formal cause. These two exigencies are resolved in a single proposition: the principle is act, and is without power. Act here receives its full signification: it is act and not form that is the mode of being of separate substance; but act also serves to name the good as a principle” (Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 153, my translation throughout).

We saw last time that pure act (energeia) for Aristotle — unlike any being in subcelestial nature — has the character of unmixed necessity. This is true because pure act is the only thing that fully is what it is. It is the admixture of power (dynamis) and in-potentiality (dynamei) in other things that is the source of their contingency, as not being pure act.

“If the concepts of dunamis and energeia simultaneously unify ousiology and integrate theology into it, they also bear all the singularity of the Aristotelian thought of being, and within it of the first being, insofar as the latter is conceived not as an excess of power, but as the reality of the good” (p. 154).

Ousiology would be an account of ousia, or what we call “substance” from the Latin. Again, the first cause is not first in the sense of time, but first in the sense that all other things depend on it. The whole point of calling it pure act is to separate it from the contingency of the dependent things that have power and potentiality.

The very idea of an “excess of power” is utterly alien to Aristotle. We saw before that he understands power as always being power for something definite. Only those things that also have a dependency on something outside of themselves have this kind of “power” at all, corresponding to an unrealized in-potentiality. This “power” and potentiality are the mark of their contingency, not of implacable might.

It is Plato and Plotinus who on the other hand associate superlative power with the Good or the One. But Aristotle criticizes Plato for failing to explain how the Good acts as a cause. Then Plotinus later attempts to answer Aristotle’s criticism by adapting and dwelling upon the novel theme of the excessive character of the One’s power that first emerges in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

“To read book Lambda in a unitary manner, and to find this unity in ontology, that is to say in the sense of being that dunamis and energeia express, is not at all to deny or to minimize its theological content. It is on the contrary to affirm the unity of metaphysics, against the onto-theological readings that scission it between a science of common being and a science of the first being. It is also to recognize a continuity among the different treatises that have come down to us under the name of the Metaphysics” (p. 156).

“The date of composition of book Lambda is debated by commentators. But it is necessary in any case to distinguish between the historical question of its editorial status and that of its conceptual relation to the other books of the Metaphysics, with regard to the problems to which responds to, displaces, or resolves, the analyses that it deepens” (ibid).

“The problems treated in the central books [Zeta–Eta–Theta], and most especially in book Theta, seem to us to be decisive. In Lambda, the elucidation of [1] the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia that orients Theta in its entirety; [2] the analogical relation between them in Theta 6; and [3] the anteriority of act over in-potentiality subsequently developed in Theta 8, furnish the conceptual basis as much for the analogical unification of the principles of substance, as for the principal position of ousia energeia” (ibid).

“Massively mobilized in Lambda 6 and 7, [the notions of dunamis and energeia] are absent from the introductory chapter that constitutes Lambda 1, as from the analyses of Lambda 3, and little present in Lambda 8 and 10. Nonetheless, the successive and modulated interventions of dunamis–energeia (or — and it is necessary for us to ask ourselves about this variation, of their dative form dunamei–energeia) over the course of Lambda serve each time to respond to the different questions raised in Lambda 1, which serve as the program for the book in its entirety: what is a principle (notably in its difference from an element, stoicheion, or a cause, aitia)? What are the principles common to sensible substances? What is the nature of separate substance (is it a form or not)? Finally, and these two questions are intrinsically linked, in what way is separate substance a cause, and are there principles common to all substances, sensible or separate?” (p. 157).

Here Aubry notes that while still maintaining his own preferred sense of “separate” ousia (separate as subsisting with relative independence with respect to other things) as distinct from that of Plato (separate as independent of matter subject to becoming), Aristotle nonetheless in this part of the text turns to ask questions about substance that is separate in both of these senses.

“Going forward, we will be able to extract a unitary principle for all substances, sensible or separate, that is not reducible to the unity of the material composite; and at the same time to maintain, under the auspices of this unity, a hierarchy that is not episodic or disjunctive” (p. 158).

What makes the hierarchy of substance not episodic or disjunctive in Aristotle is the explanation he provides for the mode of causality of the end and the good as that for the sake of which.

“Lambda 2 will thus substitute the notion of in-potentiality for that of matter, in order to extend it, beyond the corruptible sensible substances, to the eternal sensible substances. This positive result is followed in Lambda 3 by a negative, but decisive, result, since we will establish, against Plato, that form cannot be separate. In Lambda 4, it is this time against its reduction to an element [i.e., a constituent in the material sense] by those who wrote about nature, that the notion of principle will be redefined” (ibid).

For Aristotle, a principle of something is never reducible to a constituent part of it, and what any given thing “is” is always more than a mere sum of its parts.

“The veritable pivot of book Lambda, chapter 5 goes on to integrate these various results, negative as well as positive: the extension of dunamis to the eternal sensibles; the exclusion of form from consideration as the mode of the being of the separate; the distinction between principle and element; and going forward, [chapter 5] brings two fundamental responses to the questions posed in the introductory chapter: separate substance must be conceived as act and not as form; and dunamis and energeia are, by analogy, the principles common to all sensible substances” (ibid).

“On this basis, the central concern of chapters 6-10 will consist in determining and exploring the mode(s) of relation between separate substance and the other substances. Lambda 6 having demonstrated that separate substance as ousia energeia is the condition of the movement of the other substances, it remains to identify its mode of causality as being that of the end (Lambda 7) and of the good (Lambda 9), but also the way in which this causality operates in the case of the eternal sensibles (Lambda 8), and, finally, the whole universe (Lambda 10)” (ibid).

The whole universe coheres intelligibly, both insofar as it realizes the good, and insofar there are also explanations when things fall short or go wrong. The world we live in is not a mere whole made up of discrete parts, as the pre-Socratic writers on nature tended to assume. Neither is it the mere sequence of disconnected episodes that follows from the Platonic sole emphasis on what Aristotle calls formal causes.

Next in this series: Physics and Theology

Dynamis Before Aristotle

Before proceeding to Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality and act in book Theta of the Metaphysics, Aubry surveys pre-Aristotelian usages of the Greek word dynamis (or dunamis, as Aubry romanizes it). This detour adds further fascinating nuances to her already very rich discussion. (She also surveys Aristotle’s uses of dynamis in other works besides the Metaphysics. I will treat that part in a separate post.)

The meaning of dynamis in Homer and Hesiod is contested. A 1919 study by Joseph Souilhé concluded that it meant physical force in Homer, and royal or divine power in Hesiod. But a 2018 study by David Lefebvre concentrates on the phrase kata dunamin [“in accordance with” dynamis], and concludes on the contrary that already in Homer and Hesiod this is an expression of the Greek “sense of measure” and “wisdom of limits”. Aubry says that according to Lefebvre, for Homer and Hesiod, “To act kata dunamin is to act within the limits of a nature” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 95, my translation throughout). Lefebvre sees in Plato a tension between a descriptive use of dynamis related to knowledge and definition, and a normative one related to what is proper to a given nature.

Turning to her own analysis of Plato, she says that in book V of the Republic, “dunameis are designated not as a sense of being, but as a genus of beings (genos ti ton onton); they are that by which ‘we can do what we can do, and in general every other thing can do precisely what it does’…. Dunamis is strongly associated with power and action. It does not help us say what a thing is, determining its distinctive properties, but rather what it can do, and what it does” (p. 96).

“This couple of power and action is associated neither with notions of latency and manifestation, nor with potentiality and effectivity” (p. 97). The thought here seems to be that Platonic power and action are more synchronic and in-the-moment than diachronic and involved with development.

On the other hand, already in Plato dynamis “is articulated to an ergon [work]” (p. 96). This is of the utmost importance. As we will see, for Plato ergon is not just any arbitrary product or outcome. It has an ethical significance.

“[Republic book I defines ergon] as either that which a thing is the only one capable of accomplishing, or that which it accomplishes better than all the others, and articulates it strongly with the notion of excellence, arete. As D. Lefebvre underlines, the articulation of dunamis to ergon, understood as a proper function allowing the deployment of an excellence, comes in play against the notion of indeterminate, non-normed power, the tyrannical or political ‘omnipotence’ to which the orators aspire, and of which, like book I of the Republic, the Gorgias presents a critique” (p. 96n).

Plato was extremely concerned to avoid the unprincipled political abuses of tyrants, and to combat the analogous unprincipled abuses of discourse by the Sophists. Neither the tyrant nor the Sophist nor the apologist for arbitrariness respects the good or the truth.

“In this articulation of the dunamis to the ergon, which nonetheless remains timid (the term ergon is not used, but only the [related] verb apergazetai), and is associated neither with a causal model nor with an ontology, one can already recognize a teleological and normative determination of power (here univocally characterized as active), in play against the idea of an undifferentiated and non-normed power” (pp. 96-97).

Plato thus partially anticipates Aristotle’s more developed teleological view.

In the Theaetetus, “Dunamis appears… as a power as much of possession as of usage, and not according to a progressive schema comparable to what Aristotle elaborates in De Anima [book] II [chapter] 5, where a native power (that for example which every human has to understand grammar) is transformed into a hexis [acquired disposition] by study, then can be exercised in an energeia, but according to a reversible and alternating schema” (p. 97).

Plato seems to emphasize a kind of symmetry in the relations between active and passive power, which makes them reversible. Aristotle subordinates this to the asymmetrical relation between act and potentiality, but it is important to recognize that he is not simply substituting an asymmetrical relation for a symmetrical one. Rather, he is fully accepting the symmetrical one, but then, so to speak, wrapping it in the asymmetrical one.

It is worth dwelling on the Platonic moment in its own right. There is already something quite profound in a truly symmetrical view of activity and passivity. Certainly there is also what might be called a vulgar view of activity and passivity that doesn’t recognize any symmetry between them at all. But that is not Plato’s view.

For the subtle initiates in the metaphor of the Theaetetus (in contrast to those non-initiates who count as being only what they can hold in their hands), Aubry notes that Plato says “the whole is movement […]; there are two forms of movement, each of infinite extension, but the one having the power to act, and the other to undergo” (quoted, pp. 97-98, ellipses in original). “It is at the same time, thus, that vision and the white are born, and they are not white and vision until that encounter: for something is an agent only by encountering a patient, only patient by encountering an agent, and that which in this encounter is agent can in another become patient” (p. 98).

Plato explicitly points out that what is an agent in one encounter may be a patient in another. The example of vision and the white also highlights the interdependence of what the moderns call subject and object.

“Power to act and power to undergo are at the same time relative to one another and reversible…. Active or passive dunamis is nonetheless articulated, beyond the epistemological context of the discussion, to an ontology: a paradoxical ontology, since, presented as subtle in that it reconciles being with becoming, it results in the negation of being to the benefit of becoming” (ibid).

Plato is famous for emphasizing eternal forms, but dialogues like Theaetetus and The Sophist invalidate many clichés about his broader views. This has the effect of bringing Plato closer to Aristotle.

“It is nonetheless in the Sophist that the ontological dimension of Platonic dunamis is most readable” (ibid). There the character known as the Eleatic Stranger (who expresses views contrary to — and to me far more interesting than — those of the historic Eleatics like Parmenides and Zeno) says “That which possesses a power, whatever it be, whether to act on no matter what other natural thing, or to undergo — even in a minimal degree, by the action of the weakest agent, and even if this occurs only once — all this, I say, really exists. And as a consequence, I pose as the definition that defines beings that they are nothing else but power” (quoted, pp. 98-99).

And again, this does not mean arbitrary power. Plato is after all the one who first said that the Good is the highest principle of all, even though Aristotle criticizes him for failing to explain how this works.

Aubry recounts that in the allegory of The Sophist, the Friends of the Earth are generally materialist, but accept the reality of virtues and vices. They therefore accept the Stranger’s definition of being as power, and this leads them also to change their minds and accept that the soul is a being too, since it is that in which virtues and vices are present. The Friends of the Forms on the other hand continue to resist the conclusion that “in ousia itself, insofar as it is known, and not only in in genesis, movement and passion occur” (p. 99). Aubry goes on, “but the Stranger and Theaetetus in their turn refuse what follows from that refusal: that being ‘solemn and sacred, stands immobile'” (ibid).

The Eleatic Stranger here is explicitly rejecting the historic Eleatic view of being, and at the same time Plato is implicitly rejecting the semi-Eleatic view of the “Friends of the Forms”. Aristotle indeed attributes to Plato the mistaken view that the forms are independent things, but he also says that Plato was initially influenced by the Heracliteanism of Cratylus, who is known for saying that you can’t step in the same river once, because it is always changing. There is no evidence that Plato was ever a Parmenidean. (Aristotle’s sharpest anti-Platonic remarks seem to me to be directed at Platonists, and perhaps at Plato’s successor Speusippus in particular.)

“Dunamis appears here as an instrument directed at the same time against the ‘materialists’, an extension of the notion of ousia to the incorporeal insofar as it posesses the power to act and to undergo, and, against the ‘idealists’, an inclusion in ousia, insofar as it is the object of knowledge, of traits considered by them to be characteristic of genesis: passion and movement” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Plato clearly wants to reject both the materialism of the Ionian pre-Socratics and the static One Being of Parmenides.

“From this brief examination of the principal places where Platonic dunamis is elaborated, one can conclude that the Aristotelian concept is found there ‘in potentiality’, by way of the normative articulation of dunamis to ergon, the distinction between capacity and effectivity, the project of an ontology unifying being and becoming, but only under the form of fragmentary and broken anticipations, which it remained for Aristotle to articulate and to systematize” (p. 100).

Next in this series: Ethical Roots of Aristotelian Dynamis