The Logic’s Ending

We’ve reached the very end of a walk-through of Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, discussing Hegel’s Science of Logic. I have particularly valued the way Pippin brings to the fore Hegel’s close ongoing dialogue with Kant and Aristotle.

It now seems to me there is more hope of giving an ethical meaning to the specifically “logical” part of Hegel’s work than I had realized. My suspicion that Hegel ought to have something interesting to say about his removal of the qualifications in Kant’s recovery of Aristotelian teleology has certainly been confirmed. I also appreciated learning about Hegel’s specific use of the Kantian vocabulary of “reflection”, which plays a significant role in the admirable work of Paul Ricoeur.

I very much like Pippin’s idea that the Logic fundamentally develops a rich and multi-layered notion of judgment. His recognition of the normative character of Aristotelian and Hegelian actuality is salutary. Finally, I appreciate his foregrounding of the effectively hermeneutic rather than “given” notion of being that Hegel adopts from Aristotle.

He quotes Hegel’s ironic remark near the end of the Encyclopedia Logic, “When one speaks of the absolute idea, one can think that here finally the substantive must come to the fore, that here everything must become clear” (p. 317). I think Pippin also stole some of his own thunder for the climax by front-loading his detailed discussion of apperceptive judgment and related matters, rather than treating these in-line in his account of the Logic‘s major transitions.

Hegel’s fusion of the meta-level hermeneutics of Aristotle’s Metaphysics with Kantian “transcendental” logic — concerned with questions of the constitution of meaning — is a very different enterprise from scholastic and classical early modern “metaphysics”, which was supposed to give us “Being” and entities and general truths about the world.

Hegel nonetheless wants to insist that knowing can and does get at the real truth of things. But that truth is higher-order, not any kind of simple correspondence of statements and facts. Hegel insists that it is actually the lower-order, ordinary “truths” that should be called abstract, because they fail to make explicit what they depend on.

“[A] pure concept is not a class concept under which instances fall, but the ‘truth’ of any object” (p. 301).

In the final section of the logic of the concept, Hegel introduces “the idea”, which results from one more reflective turn beyond the preliminary identification of subject and object in the concept. In this final turn, we look back again at the things in experience and recognize how they fall short of what the concept tells us they ought to be. For Hegel, this means they fall short of Aristotelian actuality — as presented, they can’t be “really real” or true in a philosophical sense.

At the same time, Hegel resists the Fichtean idea of an infinite progress, which implies that the actual can never be fully achieved in knowledge. He seems to suggest that the fault is not with the inherent capabilities of philosophical knowledge, but rather with the world, and that it is up to us to do something about that.

Pippin quotes, “But since the result now is that the idea is the unity of the concept and objectivity, the true, we must not regard it as a goal which is to be approximated but itself remains a kind of beyond; we must rather regard everything as actual only to the extent that it has the idea in it and expresses it. It is not just that the subject matter, the objective and the subjective world, ought to be in principle congruent with the idea; the two are themselves rather the congruence of concept and reality; a reality that does not correspond to the concept is mere appearance, something subjective, accidental, arbitrary, something in which there is not the truth” (p. 300).

Pippin comments, “[T]his last non-correspondence of concept and reality takes in all of the finite world, the world we want to know and on which, in which, we act” (ibid).

“[W]hat specifies the realization of [a living being’s] life is always other than such an individual life — it must always work, strive to live — and in so being a manifestation of the idea at work becoming itself and already having become itself, being a living being, it introduces us to the structure of knowing, a striving self-realization that does not achieve what would be the end of such striving — complete wisdom — and that focuses self-conscious attention on this logical structure of knowing, and how one comes to know it by working through the opposition of the subject-object relation in its finitude. (This characteristic is what we know in knowing the Absolute Idea, not the completed knowledge of content. The ‘realm of shadows’ metaphor is relevant again.) Life is presented as the model for understanding the object-concept relationship at the heart of knowing” (p. 302).

He quotes Hegel, “The identity of the idea with itself is one with the process; the thought that liberates actuality from the seeming of purposeless mutability and transfigures it into idea must not represent this truth of actuality as dead repose, as a mere picture, numb, without impulse and movement, … or as an abstract thought; the idea, because of the freedom which the concept has attained in it, also has the most stubborn opposition within it” (ibid).

“Said in a more Aristotelian way, a living being’s form, its principle of intelligibility, is its norm, not just a means of classification. This norm can be realized poorly or well. This is the way we understand the relation between objects in general and the Concept. (This does not amount to any suggestion that Hegel thinks we should view everything as alive, because every being’s truth is its concept. The domain of relevance implied [is] the nonempirical attempt to say what is, for those objects about which we can nonempirically say what they are: Geist [spirit], the state, friendship, art, religion.) Or, said in a Kantian way, pure concepts are constitutive of objecthood itself, not empirical classifications. In knowing this constitutive relationship, we acknowledge both the identity of conceptuality with determinate being, and the speculative nature of this identity, that is, the difference or ‘opposition’ remaining within this identity. Any finite thing can be known to be what it is only by knowing its concept, even though as finite, it is not, never will be, fully its concept, and the full articulation of its concept is not possible. That is what it means to say it is finite. And in just this sense, knowing can genuinely be knowing” (p. 303).

“More properly, in the appropriate philosophical register, we should say that what we want is to understand, not to know in the modern scientific sense, that is, to explain. When we understand something, we understand its cause, but in the Aristotelian sense, we mean we know why it is what it is, its mode of being. And this knowledge does not then ground explanation; it is self-standing. (Hegel is not leading us to: ‘Why does it rain?’ ‘Because it is in the nature of rain to water the crops’.)” (ibid).

Here Pippin is using “explanation” in the limited sense of accounting for empirical events, and “understanding” for something broader and more hermeneutic, taking into account form and ends. I use “explanation” in a more Aristotelian way, as what promotes what Pippin here calls “understanding”.

“Thinking can either overcome any opposition of being to knowing, by transforming itself… or transform the world in order to overcome the one-sidedness of subjectivity. The semblance of objectivity — that some being is the ‘actuality’ it presents itself as — can be penetrated, understood not to be such an actuality, and transformed by ‘the drive of the good to bring itself about'” (p. 305, emphasis in original).

Thinking transforming the world means us as thinking beings transforming the world.

“[I]n practical knowing, the subject does not face the world as an alien element that must be transformed on the basis of a subjective demand descending wholly from pure practical reason. Practical knowing consists both in acknowledging the ‘reality of the good’ and in participating in the world’s own constant realization of its ‘purpose’ by acting” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Hegelian practical “knowing” or practical judgment has the attitude of what I have called being “at home in otherness”.

“Material assumptions… must be and are present, are usually hidden, and reflect a specific historical context. We need to know something material about human beings to make any progress, and human beings being historical, some sort of practical knowledge is necessary to determine any rightful relation to others, a knowledge of practical reality inseparable from an assessment of what is to be done” (p. 306).

The Logic aims among other things to help us find the reflectively grounded wisdom to be able to formulate this kind of practical judgment of what ought to be in concrete cases.

He quotes Hegel, “The unsatisfied striving disappears if we know that the final purpose of the world has been brought about and to the same degree eternally brings itself about” (p. 307).

“It is this last phrase, ‘eternally brings itself about’… that makes it impossible to ascribe to Hegel the claim that with the arrival of representative institutions, a market economy, the bourgeois family, romantic art, and Protestant Christianity, the ‘world’s purpose’ simply has been achieved and may now only be contemplated in full reconciliation, or even that there is an ‘end of history'” (ibid).

“It is at least clear that Hegel is making an implicit distinction between, on the one hand, distinctly practical reasoning, as it is understood in Aristotle — that is, reasoning that concludes in an action, not in a judgment about what is to be done — and practical knowledge of the situation in which action is called for. (Something close to what the practically wise person, the phronimos as Aristotle understands her, would understand.) The assumption is that any such reasoning always relies on some knowledge of what we would call ‘practical actuality’, the ability to rightly distinguish between the ‘surface’ actuality, ‘vacuous and vanishing’, and ‘the genuine essence of the world’. We know from our discussion of the logic of essence that this is not a strictly either/or picture; such an essence is manifest in, and has to be seen in, such a surface or Schein. And Hegel is insisting that any exercise of action-oriented practical rationality is inseparable from such an attempt at practical knowledge, a knowledge that will have the speculative form we have been investigating” (p. 309).

Again there is a terminological difference from Sachs’ translation of Aristotle that I have been using for these terms, but the inseparability of what Sachs calls deliberation and what he calls practical judgment (which for Aristotle results in action) is the same in Hegel and Aristotle.

“Hegel’s position on the historicity of reason is quite complicated, and can sometimes seem like a moving target, at times making conceptual, a priori claims about what it is to be spirit (i.e., free, in the sense of self-realizing), and at times linking any understanding of spirit to an account of concrete historical actuality” (pp. 313-314).

In a way, this is Hegel’s whole point. He is neither simply a “historicist” affirming the relativity of circumstances, nor a Kantian/Fichtean moralist aiming to make universal prescriptions of what ought to be, but rather commends an Aristotelian mean that avoids the one-sidedness of both.

“The absolute idea, or ‘the logical idea’, is also called, revealingly for our interests, ‘the idea of thinking itself’…. Pure thinking, in determining what could be the object of a true self-conscious judgment, has turned to itself as the object of speculative judgment, since it has discovered, in detail, that the ‘truth’ of objects is the relevant pure ‘concept’, that conceptual determination without which no empirical determination would be possible, that is: qualitative and quantitative predication, a determination based on an essence-appearance distinction, the right understanding of substance, causality, and now the right understanding of the ‘thoughts’ that have made up the account thus far. Pure thinking is now in a position to ‘recollect’ what it ‘was’ to have been thinking purely. (We don’t thereby know any qualities or essences or attributes of modes of substance. We know the logic of substance-attribute, essence-appearance, and so forth…)” (p. 316).

At this final stage of the Logic, we are recollectively turning back to survey the whole “long detour” that was necessary for Hegel to be able to say what intelligibility is, and consequently, according to Hegel, for us to be able to judge what is actually true and good and right in concrete situations.

Pippin quotes, “Each of the stages considered up to this point is an image of the absolute, albeit in a limited manner at first, and so it drives itself on to the whole, the unfolding of which is precisely what we have designated the method” (p. 317).

“[T]his last characterization of method as the culmination of the entire book, as the absolute idea, is crucial” (ibid).

He quotes, “[The absolute idea] has shown itself to amount to this, namely that determinateness does not have the shape of a content, but that it is simply as form…. What is left to be considered here, therefore, is thus not a content as such, but the universal character of its form — that is, method” (p. 318).

Hegel is here telling us that what he has been discussing has been intended to clarify the “method” he implicitly follows throughout his work. Conversely, a fuller justification of that method will come from the concrete results of its use.

For Hegel, “truth, … the absolute idea, just is self-conscious conceptuality, or the right understanding of the implications of the logical structure of apperception, or purely logical knowledge, and in this purity the manifestation of absolute freedom” (p. 319; see also The True and the Good).

Ethical Practice

In Kant, practical means ethical. This initially seemed counter-intuitive to me. Like many, I used to think of the “practical” in technical and utilitarian terms, as how we realize desired results. I also used to think considerations of value needed to be guided by considerations of truth, and that pursuing the truth far enough and sincerely enough would spontaneously provide sufficient answers to ethical questions. I would no longer put it that way. I now think that the pursuit of truth, taken far enough, shows things to be “normative all the way down”, in Brandom’s phrase. Even the most narrowly technical considerations ultimately involve questions of value. Conversely, inquiry into values is the one kind of inquiry that need not presuppose any other.

Ethics are not a spontaneous byproduct of inquiry into the truth. In order to sincerely inquire into the truth, we need to deliberately focus on all the questions of value that come up along the way and affect our judgments. As a result, I now think of ethical practice as subsuming every other kind of practice.

Ethical inquiry is concerned with what we should do, which includes the details of how we do it. Every kind of doing is subject to this kind of consideration.

Engineering, to take one non-obvious example, is not just about coming up with designs that “work”, but about coming up with good designs. Various kinds of arguments that are relatively “value free” can be made about criteria for good design in specific contexts, but ultimately what matters most is that the design be “good” or better than the alternatives, however that is to be understood in the particular case.

An ethics-first view of philosophy puts ethics or “axiology” (inquiry into values) before epistemology, ontology, or formal logic in the order of explanation.

All doing has ethical implications of one sort or another, and all inquiry (also a kind of doing) ultimately involves questions of value.

Ricoeur on Practical Reason

I just found a nice essay on practical reason in Ricoeur’s From Text to Action (French ed. 1986). An account of practical reason must confront “the two great classical problematics of ‘meaningful action’, those of Kant and of Hegel” (p. 189). As Ricoeur himself notes, though, his account has a “greater affinity” (p. 191) with Aristotle’s accounts of choice and practical wisdom than with Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Like Aristotle, Ricoeur wants to assert “no break between desire and reason” (ibid).

Practical reason for Ricoeur “must deserve the name of reason, but it must maintain certain features irreducible to scientifico-technical rationality” (p. 188). (I think design in engineering — while it must have a strong technical basis — already goes beyond purely technical concerns, insofar as key criteria of its “goodness” lie in the broad pragmatics of use of its products in real-world contexts.) What Ricoeur has in mind here is that practical reason inherently involves concrete judgments of value that cannot be reduced to calculation.

He adds that practical reason is critical rather than speculative. I would also add that common sense, practical reason, and Reason with a capital “R” all work mainly by material inference, which is concerned with meaning and values from the ground up.

There is a syntactic ordering of reasons-for-acting as relative ends and means, but Ricoeur dislikes Aristotle’s talk of “practical syllogisms” as sharing the same formal structure with theoretical ones. I think Aristotle is right about the formal structure, but Aristotle would agree with Ricoeur that this much narrower kind of reasoning is very far from encompassing practical reason as a whole. Practical reason or wisdom in Aristotle crucially includes processes of judgment behind the formation of the propositions used in syllogisms (and canonical Aristotelian propositions codify material inferences).

Ricoeur emphasizes that practical reason involves interpretation, normativity, and resolution of “opposing normative claims” (p. 195). He commends Aristotle’s definition of virtue for joining together psychological, logical, normative, and personal components. Aristotelian practical wisdom “joins together a true calculus and an upright desire under a principle — a logos — that, in its turn, always includes personal initiative and discernment” (p. 197). There is an “epistemological break between practical reasoning and practical reason” (p. 198).

In the Critique of Practical Reason “Kant, it seems to me, hypostatized one single aspect of our practical experience, namely, the fact of moral obligation, conceived as the constraint of the imperative” (ibid). Though I think Kant tempered this in other places, I am very sympathetic to the thrust of Ricoeur’s criticism (and Brandom’s tendency to follow Kant on this in some contexts has evoked a mixture of criticism and apologetics from me; see, e.g., Necessity in Normativity; Modality and Variation). Ricoeur also says that “by constructing the concept of the practical a priori after the model of that of the theoretical a priori, Kant shifted the investigation of practical reason into a region of knowledge that does not belong to it” (p. 199). I thoroughly agree with Ricoeur that there can be no science of the practical, but here I would also follow Brandom in noting that while the practical cannot be reduced to the theoretical, theoretical reason itself is ultimately subordinate to practical reason (taken in a more Hegelian than Kantian sense).

Ricoeur here follows an old-school reading of Hegel’s Geist as a sort of objective mind directly embodied in the State, and correctly points out how such a notion has great potential for abuse. He prefers the “hypothesis of Husserl, Max Weber, and Alfred Schutz” (p. 205) that would ground communities — including things like the State — in relations of intersubjectivity. (I would note that Brandom’s nuanced and multi-dimensional grounding of Geist and normativity in a vast ensemble of processes of mutual recognition over time provides a convincing, original “deep” reading of Hegel that meets Ricoeur’s criterion of grounding in intersubjectivity, while avoiding what seems to me the very crude and implausible notion of an objective mind that would somehow be capable of being definitively embodied in the State. Any such notion of definitive embodiment of objective mind also involves huge confusion between potentiality and actuality.)

“One must never tire of repeating that practical reason cannot set itself up as a theory of praxis. We must repeat along with Aristotle that there is knowledge only of things that are necessary and immutable…. [P]ractical reason recovers a critical function by losing its theoretical claim to knowledge” (p. 206; emphasis in original).

Finally, he wryly observes that “practical wisdom, in situations of alienation, can never be without a certain madness on the part of the sage, since the values that govern the social bond have themselves become insane” (p. 207). (See also Ricoeur on Justice.)

Practical Reason

I think the introduction of rational ethics by Plato and Aristotle was the greatest single event in the history of talking animals on our planet, marking the threshold of a kind of historical cultural adulthood. Before that, there were traditional values; codifications of traditional values into law; and attempts by some people to impose their will on others; but there was no ethics as free and open inquiry into what is right.

Two millenia later, Kant took the next big step, and explicitly argued for the primacy of practical reason. This means that the kind of reasoning involved in rational ethics comes first in the order of explanation, before so-called theoretical reason. (See also Ricoeur on Practical Reason.)

Recently, Brandom’s highly original account of responsibility has closed any remaining gaps, making it possible to explain anything at all in terms that put ethical reasoning first. (See also Expansive Agency; Brandomian Forgiveness.) This also further refines Kant’s concept of the autonomy of reason, allowing for a stronger interpretation that eliminates the last vestiges of a dependency of ethical reasoning on anything external to it. It allows the primacy of practical reason to be fused with the autonomy of reason, resulting in a new kind of completeness of ethical reason. (See also Practice.)

Of course, any talk about a completeness of ethical reason presupposes a very broad construal of what ethical reasoning is (see also Reasonableness; What and Why; Context). It also requires that we be very careful to avoid taking its completeness in the wrong way. It presupposes a kind of epistemic modesty as a feature of rational inquiry.

Rational ethics stands in contrast to tradition, but as Hegel might remind us, much of the content of tradition turns out to be broadly rational after all, if we disregard its epistemic shortcuts.

The true antithesis of rational ethics is the subordination of values to a supposedly sovereign will — be it the will of God presumed as known; the expressed will of some individual; or a will attributed to an institution like the state, or to a social group. Such appeals to arbitrary will end the possibility of inquiry and dialogue. (See also Euthyphro; Authority, Reason.)

Practice

Some people have argued that a fundamentally ethical notion of practice is not sufficient to ground a full, well-rounded account of the varieties of human activity. I used to be one of them, but no longer.

Judgments of utility may on the surface seem mainly to involve various sorts of calculation, but ultimately they involve considerations of what is better or worse for the realization of some purpose.

Judgments of fact may also appear on the surface to be value-neutral, but ultimately they involve questions of what it is reasonable to believe, which also involves judgments of value.

What about physical operations? Physical operations always implicitly involve questions of how to proceed, and answers to these questions involve judgments of utility and judgments of fact, both of which involve judgments of value. (See also Practical Judgment; Choice, Deliberation; Expansive Agency; Brandomian Forgiveness; Meta-Ethics as First Philosophy; Normative Monism.)

Plato on the Soul

I read Plato’s various suggestions about the kind of thing that soul is as mainly practical, in the Kantian sense of being involved with ethics. As I read him, he does not intend to offer a consistent theory of the nature of soul.

There is strong textual basis for at least two rather different notions of “soul”, each of which I think Plato uses heuristically in a different kind of context. Soul might be a kind of essence that stands outside of time, or it might be a principle of life and cause of motion in time. Rather than trying to reconcile these at an ontological level as Plotinus and others did, I think it is more faithful to Plato to apply an Aristotelian semantic approach, and note that “soul” in Plato is said in more than one way. Plato is actually much more concerned with a more detailed level that is more directly involved with ethical considerations.

Ethics vs Metaphysics

On my reading, the original “metaphysics” (Aristotle’s) was developed mainly as a kind of dialectical semantics. It is fundamentally about higher-order interpretation of contents we have already encountered, not about exotic existence claims. In the later tradition, however, this became greatly confused, and “metaphysics” acquired a completely different meaning.

Although Aristotle regarded ethics as of pivotal importance and recognized that all reasoning has a normative aspect, he seems to have valued theoretical reason even more than practical reason. It is to Kant that we owe the refinement of a clearly expressed thought of the primacy of practical reason. This perspective was taken up by Hegel, and later by Brandom. Things like Hegelian Spirit are mainly ethical concepts.

In the spirit of both of these, I have been developing a philosophical account of subjectivity grounded in ethics, rather than metaphysics in the usual modern sense. From this perspective, metaphysics as dialectical semantics is subsumed under ethics and meta-ethics. (See also Ethos; Aristotelian Dialectic; Aristotelian Semantics; Material Inference; Metaphysical, Nonmetaphysical.)