Power and Its Shadow

Omnipotence has been a problematic concept introduced by theologians in the monotheistic traditions. It has affected traditional metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, and politics. It has deep historical connections with political absolutism.

Ethics in the Socratic tradition take as a starting point something like the Kantian autonomy of reason, coupled with an agnostic but sympathetic view of religion.

For the Latin scholastic theologians, the autonomy of philosophical inquiry is only relative. But most stop short of a completely unqualified omnipotence, and do endorse a relative autonomy of philosophy. There is a long tradition of “faith seeking understanding”. This allows for a socially beneficial relation of benevolent mutual respect between theological and philosophical discourse.

For several centuries in the later middle ages, the main vehicle for expression of Christian theology consisted of meta-commentaries on the 12th-century theologian Peter Lombard’s commentary on the Bible, known as the Sentences. Lombard’s work was one of the foundations of Latin scholasticism. Over 1400 commentaries on it are known. Lombard was a student of the great Peter Abelard, but backed off from Abelard’s more controversial views.

Here I will largely translate and comment upon a brief survey of omnipotence in the Sentences commentary tradition by Olivier Boulnois. This introduction to his edited volume La puissance et son ombre: de Pierre Lombard à Luther (1994) touches upon many points of “historiographical” interest. The French volume focuses on Lombard’s distinctions 42-44, which are the parts dealing with omnipotence. It includes translations from Lombard himself, William of Auxerre, Hugh of Saint-Cher, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Augustinus Triumphus, Duns Scotus, Durand of Saint-Pourcain, William of Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, and Martin Luther. My aim here is only to partially translate and comment upon the introduction by Boulnois, which is entitled “What God Cannot Do”.

“Can God walk, speak, lie, sin, die, make a mistake? Can he restore virginity? Do other than what he does? Create other worlds?…. Can God annul the most fundamental eternal truths or change them?” (p. 11, my translation throughout).

First, it should be noted that there is not just one concept of omnipotence. Its meaning has been the subject of great controversy in the past. We will see several competing versions in what follows.

Second, the medieval theological mainstream in fact recognized that there are some things God cannot do, or at least will never do. The great scholastics recognized that omnipotence has be qualified in some way in order to be at all defensible, even if they would not themselves phrase it that way. Their arguments are about where and how to draw the line.

“[T]o ask what God cannot do is to research the limits of the possible, and to pose a question that bears on one of the principal senses of being in Aristotle” (pp. 11-12).

The last is a reference to potentiality (dynamis in Aristotle’s Greek), which in the Latin tradition is mainly understood as a kind of power.

“The fundamental question becomes: what does the proposition ‘he can’ signify? To respond, it is necessary to articulate three concepts: power [puissance], ability [pouvoir], possibility” (p. 12).

Puissance and pouvoir can both mean power, but with different nuances. Puissance is standardly used to translate the potentia of the Latin tradition. Pouvoir is used to express ability, and also political power.

Boulnois asks, “With what power [pouissance] are we concerned here? With Aristotle’s being in potentiality (intermediate between being and non-being)? Or with the effective power [pouissance] to make be what is not? But doesn’t that presuppose power [pouissance] in the first sense?” (ibid).”

“Effective power to make be what is not” recalls the theory of creation in Aquinas.

Boulnois continues, switching to the other French term for power, “With what model of power [pouvoir] are we confronted? With the generosity of an overcapacity that dispenses in accord with its own goodness? With the arbitrariness of always-revocable decrees? With the fixation of laws in conformity with which power [pouvoir] must itself act to act legitimately?” (ibid).

Here we begin to see the connection with political power.

“What form of the possible do we encounter? This is the whole problem of modality: in the logical sense, everything noncontradictory is possible; but isn’t it necessary to add a second form of possibility, real possibility, that which can be effectively realized by causes?” (ibid).

Possibility and necessity are both modal concepts. I still need to write more about the ethical significance of modality. While preparing this post I dashed off another quick note.

“For the problem of omnipotence bears on the limit conditions of an order of the world and an order of discourse” (ibid).

Claims of omnipotence have a global impact on how we understand everything else, which is literally explicit in the very term. (“Omni” is Latin for “all”).

“The situation of the question of omnipotence in the organic unity of the Sentences leads to thinking the possible in terms of divine omnipotence, and not the inverse” (p. 15).

When two terms are identified or linked, questions of the order of explanation can acquire a large importance. Here this involves the relation between philosophy and theology.

“Peter Lombard analyzes divine power in a double way” (p. 16). “From then on, the question turns on the status of the possible in the divine understanding: does what is impossible for God come from God (as Henry of Ghent believed at one time) or rather from the inconsistency of the thing itself (Duns Scotus)? Or again, is it necessary to say that the question has no sense, it being given that there is a strict reciprocity between the reality of the possible and divine thought (Ockham, reprised by Luther)?” (p. 17).

“But the evolution of the interpretation explains the modern contradiction between divergent points of view: a God who is the cause of the possibility of eternal truths (Descartes), or is submitted to the necessity of the best of [all] worlds (Leibniz), or again is identical with the necessity of all his attributes (Spinoza)” (p. 18).

Omnipotence in Descartes underwrites a theological voluntarism. Infinity and a very different kind of omnipotence are the most important properties of Spinoza’s God, who is also equated with Nature. Leibniz uses another nonstandard kind of omnipotence, explicitly developing his metaphysical views in terms of a highly rationalized form of creationism.

“For the problem of omnipotence is first of all a problem of exegesis” (p. 19). “If God can do anything, isn’t it necessary to say that he can lie, be mistaken, be put to death? Doesn’t one go to the point of making God a bad power? Augustine strives to resolve the difficulty: ‘And its inability to lie is a great power of the Word’. As a consequence, divine omnipotence does not consist in being able to do all, except in an inadequate sense…. Thus omnipotence is defined simply as God’s power to not be prevented from doing all the good that he wills. Augustine carefully avoids defining omni-potence as a power to do all” (p. 20).

We are teetering on the edge of paradox here. It is precisely the qualifications of what initially seems like the unqualified par excellence that allow an ethical perspective to be recovered. At the very least, this is in great tension with the motif of unqualified power.

“If God cannot do something, that is because it is not a true power (walking, sinning, being mistaken are marks of imperfection)…. If all that God cannot do is only weakness and negativity, God will be in himself every positive power. ‘He can do all that power can do’. Divine omnipotence has become the infinite affirmation of power” (p. 21).

For the 11th-century monastic reformer Peter Damian, according to Boulnois, “The origin of nature is not subject to the same laws as nature. Creation ex nihilo affords a striking illustration of this: ‘Nature itself is made against nature’. Nature thus becomes identical to the will of God: ‘Nature itself has its proper nature, which is to say the will of God” (pp. 24-25).

“The whole question of modality is raised here…. For Aristotle, only the future is contingent…. But for the theologian, who speaks of the possible insofar as it is the object of divine power, even if a thing is, insofar as it is, it can not be…. Even if an event is realized, at the very moment when it is real, it is not necessary. For it could not be if it were not willed by God” (p. 25). “The restoration of [virginity, according to Damian] resembles a new creation, and it is not subject to any mundane law, even that of contradiction…. All power and all knowing are coeternal with God, sovereign creator of the world” (pp. 26-27).

Again modality comes up. The idea that the present state of the world is contingent is reasonable in itself.

Among the most radical claims associated with omnipotence is that God can change the past. Up to a point, it seems to me that we should affirm the contingency of the present as well as the future, but it is also very possible to go too far in this. What is challenging to specify is how to draw the line between good flexibility and bad arbitrariness.

For Aristotle, Boulnois says ” ‘That which is, when it is, and that which is not, when it is not, is necessary’. This principle does not bear only on a necessity of discourse. It also implies a real necessity. For Aristotle, the possible is nothing but being in potentiality, that is to say being which tends toward existence, and which at the end of an infinite time, will end by coming to be. There is what could be called a statistical interpretation of modality, according to which that is possible which was, is, or will be in an infinite time. Indeed it is a temporal interpretation, according to which there always will be a state of affairs in which the contingent is realized. Relayed by Maimonides, this principle is the basis of the celebrated ‘third way’ of showing the existence of God in Thomas Aquinas” (p. 32).

Aristotle’s “statistical” modality is not statistical in the numerical sense. He defines the necessary as that which is always true. “Always” may not be entirely air-tight. He also explicitly speaks of things that are true “for the most part”, and sometimes of things that are always true or true for the most part.

Boulnois continues, “The motif of this disequilibrium can be easily designated: it is the primacy of presence in all metaphysical analysis of manifestation. While the [more traditional] theologians, following Augustine, envisage temporality as a triple manifestation of the divine power in the past, present, and future, Bonaventure, in the manner of the Aristotelian metaphysics, places himself in the perspective of the thing in its evidence enunciable by the finite subject. He goes on to invoke an important argument: between the thing and its form of presence (be it a presence of the past or an existence in the present instant), there exists an analytic relation…. The presence of the thing is included in all manifestation. On the other hand the future, which is not yet, is not analytically included in the content of the thing that comes to be” (pp. 32-33).

There really was a “metaphysics of presence” in Latin scholasticism. The error is to attribute it to directly to Aristotle.

“From this point on, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and Ockham pose only the question of the necessity of the past…. They no longer ask if the same question can be extended to the future. The reference to Peter Damian conceals a mutation of the problematic: instead of being posed from the transcendent freedom of God, the possibility of the contingent will only be envisaged starting from the human experience of the present. The ontology of the contingent becomes the possibility of finite freedom” (p. 33).

“All the commentaries on the Sentences, following the line of Peter Lombard, preserve the memory of the condemnation of Abelard by the council of Sens. In the spirit of this council, it is not permitted to think that God is necessarily determined to act and can only do what he does. The council Fathers, led by Bernard of Clairvaux, see in this prohibition a line that is not to be crossed. The omnipotence of God requires us to think that he can do what he does not do, omit what he does not omit, do what he does in another manner or at another moment, or similarly omit it. The divine omnipotence thus appears as sovereignly free, indifferent between acting and not acting” (pp. 33-34).

This is the point at which the thesis of omnipotence becomes dangerous.

“Peter Abelard himself was moved by a metaphysical principle, the principle of reason. God can only do what he does, because ‘God does nothing without a reason’…. Abelard does not admit that God can act against the order he has decided to follow…. God cannot go against his proper wisdom and his proper rationality. Reason imposes itself on him in being the form of his freedom. In a sense, Abelard is quite simply faithful to the patristic tradition that orients divine action toward the good. But he systematizes to the point of paradox, in limiting divine freedom by his wisdom” (p. 34).

The whole question about whether or not God can act “against” what he has “decided” is artificial, because it assumes an anthropomorphic and temporal notion of “decision”. If God is pre-eminently the Eternal as Augustine says, the temporal metaphor of decision is inappropriate.

“Peter Damian makes an equation between divine omnipotence and human freedom: what is possible for the human must at least be possible for God” (ibid).

This argument clearly depends on an anthropomorphic analogy. What is called “possible” for the human depends in part on the particular character of human finitude. It is not at all the same as what would be called “possible” for an eternal neoplatonic God exempt from all finitude. Frankly, it is not even clear that it is appropriate to speak of possibility in relation to God at all. Aristotle says that the first cause is pure act and entelechy. Augustine very strongly associates God with the eternal.

“As Peter Lombard well saw, contrary to the censors of Abelard who ignore the point, the position of Abelard is equally motivated by the principle of the best. As with Leibniz later on, the principle of the best follows from an interpretation of the principle of causality…. Abelard in turn follows the principle of causality, attested by Plato: ‘Nothing comes to be without a cause’. But he reinterprets it in the light of Christian theology, for which the cause of the created resides in the exemplary reason, the divine idea, model, or archetype by which God thinks the creatable before instituting it. It is in this sense that Augustine writes: ‘Who would dare say that God created things without reason?’ For Abelard, as a consequence, the world is created in a universal order, and in it no event escapes divine providence: nothing that appears contingent or due to chance comes to be outside of his prescience or his wisdom. Reason itself is a means of revelation. Despite the apparent disagreements between the Bible and Plato, a more profound reading of these two texts allows us to reconcile them, and to underline the identity between the rationality of God and his freedom” (p. 36).

“For in this problematic cause and reason are synonyms: ‘ratio vel causa‘, writes Peter Lombard…. The position of Abelard is indeed an important stage in the constitution of the principle of reason, between Plato and Leibniz. In Plato, the principle of causality, exterior to the demiurge, and the principle of the goodness of the cosmos are enunciated separately. For Abelard, the principle of reason has become interior to the divine wisdom, and conforms to the primacy of goodness. For Leibniz, finally, the principle of reason is no longer divine, but is identified with essence in general: every substance is the sufficient reason of its accidents” (p. 37).

“Without a doubt, the condemnation of Abelard played a decisive role here. We recall that Heidegger speaks of a ‘time of incubation’ of the principle of reason, already formulated since the birth of philosophy. But he does not respond to the question he himself raises” (p. 37). “In all the rigor of their terms, the condemnations of the council of Sens, in rejecting the application of the principle of reason to God, preserved the principle of reason in an incubator” (p. 38).

“If God creates a world, he cannot create it without what makes it a world: its order, the harmony of its parts…. God cannot create without: 1) what makes it a totality: that which is required for the achievement of a universe; 2) what makes its parts compatible with one another: the conditions of existence of creatures, one in relation to another; 3) what permits each of its parts to have sufficient consistency to possess the perfection of an essence and that of existing. The creation of a world results in the positing of a finite order, governed by the mathematical or musical principle of the harmony of the all, that is to say a certain proportion between the parts” (p. 39).

The strong notion of the coherence requirements of a world in Leibniz removes the usual arbitrariness from the notion of creation.

“This common problematic leaves room for a whole gamut of individual positions, from Albert the Great to Ockham. For Albert the Great, ‘if one places oneself in the point of view of being’, starting from the things that really exist, no better order is conceivable…. For Bonaventure, … God can make either a world different by its substances (but which is not really better, because it is incomparable), or a world different by its accidents (but that is really the same as this one)…. For Ockham, on the contrary the most probable position is ‘that which admits that God can make another world better than this one and specifically distinct from it’ ” (pp. 39-40).

“Can God change eternal truths?…. Descartes raises this question” (p. 40). “God does not know truths as true unless he wills that they be so” (p. 41). “This debate has a long medieval history” (ibid).

Hugh of Saint-Cher is credited with originating the distinction between absolute and ordained power.

“Hugh of Saint-Cher [distinguishes] two aspects of divine power. As conditioned, it cannot be contradictory…. In the measure that the order of the finite is subject to the principle of contradiction, God cannot make two opposed propositions [both] true. But in itself, the same power as absolute is not subject to the principle of contradiction: nothing can limit its power” (ibid). “In this he anticipates in an unheard-of way the motifs and the difficulties of the Cartesian position, even if he does not like [Descartes] speak of creation or of eternal truths” (p. 42).

“Thomas Aquinas poses the same question, but he responds in a completely different way…. The divine power can only make what is possible, that is to say what is in the nature of things. The nature of simple essences and the principle of non-contradiction are the source of all their proprieties, and the divine power is in a way limited to these possibilities” (pp. 42-43).

Here Aquinas comes across as much more sensible than some of the others. In significant measure at least, he upholds the reality of secondary causes. A concept of God construed in a way that would invalidate all other concepts and reason itself seems fit only for sectarians.

“Subsequently, the debate develops in another form: is the impossible impossible because God so decided, or is it impossible by nature…? Henry of Ghent at one time held the first thesis, but ended up retracting it. Duns Scotus maintains an order that supposes the distinction of diverse moments…. It is only logical contradiction between the parts that grounds the formal impossibility of the thing, and indeed the divine intellection of that impossibility. There is an irrevocable anteriority of the possible and indeed of the impossible to the divine intellect. Possibility is imposed on God in the same way it is imposed on the human (that is to say in a univocal way)” (p. 43).

This is an important qualification about Scotus. Although he was regarded as a realist in the controversies about nominalism and realism, he generally comes across as an extreme voluntarist. But Boulnois is a leading Scotus scholar who has translated 2000 pages of Scotus and written a large book about him, so I assume he knows what he is talking about.

“For Ockham, on the contrary, power and the possible are correlatives. There is in the first instance an absolute real identity between divine intellect and will. And in addition, there is no anteriority of the possible to the intellect. The possible not being other than the non-contradictory, all the possibles are independent. No limit of the ontological consistency of the possible restrains the divine power…. Ockham accepts all the consequences of the identification of the absolute possible with the divine power…. There is neither an anteriority of the impossible to the divine omnipotence (Scotus), nor an anteriority of omnipotence to the impossible (Henry of Ghent), but a strict correlation” (pp. 43-44).

Once again, when two things are assimilated together, it may mean that one is being reduced to the other. For instance, I hold that there is no separately existing thing called will — that Aristotelian intellect, practical judgment, and wisdom better explain the freedom that some want to supernaturally explain by will. Ockham on the other hand is a voluntarist who sees will everywhere, and seems to deny that modality is anything real.

“An other is not always a world. It is only after Bonaventure that the theologians come to speak of a possible other world” (p. 46).

This is fascinating. I never would have guessed that Bonaventure would partially anticipate Leibniz on the subject of worlds.

“For Scotus, the order fixed by God appears to be necessary from the point of view of every inferior agent, when it acts according to that order…. In the order instituted by God (nature), starting from contingent hypotheses, the laws of nature are necessary for the finite. They draw their necessity from the fact that it is God who invests them with their legality” (p. 47).

From this point of view, necessity only comes about from divine will. Sheer will conceived as a brute fact is thus said to come before justice or wisdom. This undermines all criteria.

“For Aristotle, the concept of world is that of a totality: there is only one possible world, and it is a fortiori the best” (p. 48).

But the argument that this is the best world because there is no other is a very weak one that Aristotle does not himself make, because he does not consider alternate worlds, and also does not consider the world to be created.

“For [Peter Damian], even a good that is never produced is in the power of God, the reason for its retention residing in the secret of his good will. His analysis results in distinguishing two poles in the divine power: on the one hand, the omni-potence taken in itself, which no im-potence can encumber, and on the other hand the order in which it is exercised, and which can explain that omnipotence is not manifested…. Thus, Peter Damian constructs the conceptual armature between two poles, which later took the name of absolute power and ordained power” (p. 53).

Peter Damian was an 11th-century monastic reformer who campaigned vigorously against corruption in the Church. He advocated solitude and ascetism, and reportedly introduced practices of flagellation that were regarded as too extreme by some. In the early 20th century, it was argued that Damian exempted God from the principle of non-contradiction, but this has been rejected by later scholars. He wrote a treatise on omnipotence arguing that God can restore virginity, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he neither claimed that God can change a past event, nor that God can contradict himself.

What will become the distinction between absolute and ordained power allows appearances to be (mostly) saved while the claim of absolute power is maintained. I would note that this is an elaboration of Augustine’s reconciliation of miracles with natural causes, which treats natural causes as God’s established habits that are not invalidated by miracles. It will often be expressed using Aristotle’s notion of things that happen in a certain way “for the most part”, but there is no indication that Aristotle intended this as a way of leaving room for miracles. What happens for the most part in Aristotle involves variation in the way that the order of nature works out in particular cases, not suspension of it or exceptions to it.

“The ordained power has for object that which has been preordained, or disposed by God. It is a preordination of the possible in the divine understanding, and not the order of the real outside of God. Indeed it coincides with his prescience…. The ordained power does not presuppose order and is not determined by it; on the contrary, it is it that determines it in determining itself: it prefigures it, it is the pre-supposition of order. It is the pre-order” (p. 55).

According to this view, the order of the world corresponds to the “habitual” operation of creation. The habitual order is subordinate to the power of creation that produces it. The habituality of the created order is real, but it also has real exceptions in the form of miracles.

According to Boulnois, “Absolute power and ordained power form a couple of concepts, a dialectic, such that we never find one without the other. There is no theology of absolute power without the theology of ordained power. What we find instead are different ways of thinking this dialectic” (ibid).

“The object of absolute power is identical to the object of divine wisdom, to the totality of what is possible for God. The object of ordained power is identical to the object of the principled will of God” (pp. 55-56).

“For God does nothing without prescience. His action is subordinated to the order predetermined by him, and can never depart from that order. As a consequence, operative power is subordinated to ordained power; and reciprocally, God never operates directly by his absolute power. Absolute power taken in itself, naked, is not operative” (p. 56).

It was I and not Boulnois who earlier brought Augustine’s justification of miracles into the discussion. I much prefer Aristotelian natural variability to the Augustinian theory of miracles. But on the older view Boulnois is characterizing here — that God never acts directly by his absolute power — it would seem that there could be no exceptions to the ordained order. This seems consistent with Augustine’s rigorous view of eternity, but it is in tension with Augustine’s justification of miracles.

It appears that Duns Scotus (1266-1308) was instrumental in changing the traditional Augustinian pattern in these matters. Boulnois is a world-class expert on Scotus, so he is well qualified to point this out.

“While reprising these classical elements, the interpretation of Scotus breaks with his predecessors, for three reasons: 1) The theory of absolute power and ordained power is extended to every free being. 2) In reprising the distinction between fact and principle, Scotus conceives the two members of the distinction as two ways of acting and not simply as two powers. God intervenes in fact by his absolute power to modify what is in principle the course of things. 3) Even when he has chosen an order, at the same time and from the same point of view, God can do that which he did not decide upon. The divine power is open to an array of synchronic possibilities, and the state chosen in fact does not exclude other possibilities” (p. 56).

Each of these three points is significant: 1) Beliefs about human free will come to be patterned on a pronouncedly voluntaristic interpretation of divine omnipotence. 2) Fact is for possibly the first time asserted to be more decisive and more inclusive than principle or essence. Reason must accommodate presumed facts, rather than governing their interpretation. 3) Far from being stably grounded in eternity and essence, order of all kinds is now treated as fundamentally contingent and revocable.

In 20th-century scholarship, the emergence of such “modernist” views was most often associated with William of Ockham, who as the arch “nominalist” in accounts of the 14th-century debate about universals has been treated as diametrically opposed to the more traditional “realism” attributed to Scotus. But according to Boulnois, Scotus was the decisive innovator with respect to these views about will, fact, and order.

“It is this interpretation that seems to have had the most influence on subsequent medieval thought.”

“There are two models, fundamentally distinct: 1) A logical model, for which absolute power is the power capable of the totality of possibilities (of all that is non-contradictory), and the ordained power corresponds to the choice of a particular order. 2) An operative model, for which divine intervention de potentia absoluta is a possibility of modifying in fact that which is in principle the course of things. What is outside of order is not disorder but fact.” (ibid). “For Scotus, the model is no longer a logical model, but an operative model. He no longer distinguishes two forms of power but two forms of action (according to the law and outside the law)” (p. 57).

What is described as the traditional view here tends to make order overly strong, presuming it to be capable of explaining all facts, while the “modernist” view makes fact overly strong, tending toward a proto-fundamentalist denial of the need for interpretation, and at the same time shrinking the scope of order so that fact always exceeds it.

As Boulnois argues more generally in his big book on Scotus, L’Être et représentation (“Being and Representation”, 1999), this historic transformation is too large to be attributed to a single figure, but Scotus is nonetheless at its center. Modern large-scale interpretation of the history of Latin philosophy has generally centered on Aquinas, who was canonized as a saint in 1323, and specially declared by the Pope to be central to Catholic philosophy in 1879 after the rise of neo-Thomism.

(From a broad point of view, the “moderate realism” of Aquinas has much to recommend it, but one-sided emphasis on Aquinas has obscured the real diversity and complexity of Latin philosophical views and the important role of numerous others, including Scotus. The pragmatist Charles Pierce rather casually called himself a Scotist realist. Heidegger wrote his dissertation on Scotus, but in later work tended to reject Latin philosophy with a very broad brush, without addressing important historical detail.)

“No more than his predecessors does Scotus say that God acts by an absolute power, but only that he can act otherwise than he does (and it is in this that his power is absolute). This has no immediate operative content…. Duns Scotus does not say that God acts by his naked absolute power, but precisely always, according to a beautiful oxymoron, ‘in the manner ordained by his absolute power’. What characterizes the position of Scotus, more than the operative model of absolute power alone, is at the same time the extreme opposition of this dialectic between the two concepts and the possibility at every instant of one toggling to the other. To safeguard divine freedom, Scotus creates an infinite oscillation between an instituted juridical order and a de facto power that is nonetheless not disordered and immoral” (ibid).

What Boulnois calls a beautiful oxymoron in Scotus, the de facto claim of an infinite oscillation between order and fact — evinced by the phrase “ordained by his absolute power” — seems to collapse the evolved distinction between ordained and absolute power. Perhaps this is why Scotus was called the “subtle doctor”. But the implications of this position are not at all subtle. They are quite dramatic.

“What characterizes the end of the Middle Age is at once the inflation of arguments resorting to absolute power and a fragmentation of models allowing it to be thought” (p. 58).

Boulnois cites Avignon Pope John XXII’s blunt declaration that the absolute and ordained power of God are the same thing. John apparently used this to justify a politicized claim that salvation can only be achieved through the institutionalized sacraments of the Church. “All that which is ordained by God is irrevocable” (p. 59). This was a time of bitter conflict between the Avignon Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV. It was under John that Aquinas was canonized as a saint. John was also the one who formally declared witchcraft to be a heresy.

We saw above that William of Ockham also emphasized the inseparability of absolute and ordained power. But he apparently used it to argue for the opposite practical conclusion, that law and ordained power can always be surpassed by fact and absolute power, and that salvation can be achieved through faith alone. Under the protection of Louis IV, Ockham accused the Pope of heresy.

(From the point of view of the logical pragmatics I have discussed in reading Brandom, the formal identification of two things with different connotations can be interpreted as a reduction of one to the other, or of the other to the one, or as a nonreductive combination of the two. Different connotations imply different pragmatics or conditions of use.)

Boulnois says that Ockham interprets the thesis of the nonseparability of the nominally distinct powers (absolute versus ordained) in terms of its consequences for the power’s object (the world), rather than in terms of its subject (God).

“John XXII insists on the fact that the identity of divine power entails the invariability of the order chosen by God…. For [Ockham], the theory of John XXII comes back to saying that the order of the world cannot be other than it is. From this it follows evidently that no creature can do what it does not do…. He sees in this a resurgence of Greco-Arabic necessitarianism, an error condemned in 1277. And to say that humans can only be saved by the institution is not only an error, but a heresy: in fact, many humans are saved by their faith without being baptized” (p. 60).

“Greco-Arabic necessitarianism” is another exaggeration. Among the Greeks, the only real necessitarians are the Stoics. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes do all seem to slant things in the direction of objective order and necessity, but the radical voluntarism of Ghazali seems to have been more historically influential in the Arabic tradition.

“For Ockham, order is always a de facto order, a complex of contingent and revocable singularities. It is thus the object of ordained power; but what God can do (in principle), even if he never does it, is the object of absolute power. There is here an extraordinary cross-chase in relation to Duns Scotus. What the one calls the object of ordained power, the other calls the object of absolute power, and vice versa. The fact and the principle exchange their role” (ibid).

On Boulnois’s account, Ockham is a less radical voluntarist than Scotus.

“For Ockham, it is necessary to thus understand the distinction ‘power to do something’: the expression is sometimes taken according the laws ordained and instituted by God, and of these things one says that God can do them by his ordained power. In another way, ‘power’ is taken in the sense of power to do anything that is not self-contradictory, that God has ordained that he will do or not do, and of these things, one says that God can do by his absolute power. The ‘ordained power’ indeed does designate the order established by God, as in Duns Scotus. But the ‘absolute power’ designates not his de facto power, but only everything that is not contradictory: it has a logical sense and not an operative one (since it designates what God does not do); he returns quite simply to the traditional sense admitted before Scotus” (pp. 60-61).

“[Ockham’s influential student] Adam Wodeham explicitly cites two interpretations of absolute power…. Adam Wodeham clearly thinks ordained power as an order instituted regularly and capable of dispensation, like Scotus and Ockham. But he is also aware of the existence of two models for thinking absolute power: that of Duns Scotus, for whom the power to do the contrary of the established order is absolute, that is to say autonomous and absolutely capable of acting; and that of Ockham, for whom the absolute power of God is subject to the logical principle of contradiction. For Scotus, even when God has ordained the contrary, he can do something by his absolute power. For Ockham, God can only act by his absolute power if there is no contradiction with what he has ordained” (p. 61).

“As a consequence — and contrary to received ideas — the great epistemological rupture of the 14th century was effectuated by Scotus more than by Ockham…. [Scotus] is infinitely more revolutionary, in admitting that God has a de facto power that is other than the power in principle without being immoral. Nonetheless, the position of Ockham and that of Scotus converge on one point, essential for theological ethics: even if, by the ordained power of God, the human can only be saved by baptism and entry into the institution, by the absolute power of God, the human can be saved without Church or charity…. One of the distant consequences of this hypertrophy of absolute power will be the possibility, vigorously enunciated by Luther, that there is a predetermination indifferent to good and evil” (p. 62).

Luther argued for justification by faith alone, traced all authority solely to the Bible, and tended to emphasize its literal word.

“It would be exaggerated to make the new theory of divine power bear all of the motif of the metamorphosis of theology after Scotus. It would also be exaggerated to try to reduce everything to the new theories of intuition or of the primacy of will. First of all, Scotus is only the spokesman for a whole generation of thinkers who each contributed to the restructuring of theology” (p. 63).

But these caveats address only certain over-simplifications of the historical interpretation Boulnois develops.

“It is the triangle of power, knowledge, and will that is modified in its entirety. In the human as in God, power [pouvoir] becomes a power [puissance] to act in principle or in fact. Power remains a capacity to act according to an order (interpreted juridically as a law), but it also becomes the capacity to act outside the law or against it. Furthermore, for thinking of the problems of beatitude from the side of common abstractive knowledge, there developed a theory of intuitive knowledge of the singular contingent. Finally, for the Franciscan theologians above all, freedom of the will is an innate quality” (p. 63).

On the threshold of modernity, new voluntaristic super-powers are attributed both to God and to the human. The alleged fact of voluntaristic will is no longer constrained by an orientation toward the good.

“As a consequence, willing is no longer tautologically willing the good. But reciprocally, what God wills is ipso facto the good. On the edge of the new theology of omnipotence, the theories of intuition and of will will be adjoined, to construct a new model of practice and of epistemology. With this new device, it is the whole harmony between the transcendentals, being, truth, and the good, that is disrupted. The objects of power, of will, and of knowledge are no longer necessarily aligned” (pp. 63-64).

“Conceiving divine intervention de potentia absoluta as a real possibility led to an undermining of the intelligibility and predictability of natural phenomena. The order of the real no longer appears except as a descent into particularity in the ocean of possibles. This disjunction has a paradoxical consequence: philosophy is all the more free to expound the necessity of the order of the present world, while the theologian makes contingency surge into this world here, when he does not invoke an infinity of other possible worlds. The present order can become an absolute, and the absolute can contain an infinity of other orders. The order and the absolute are disseminated in an indefinite variation of hypothetical orders. The order and the absolute are no longer articulated; they pass one into the other” (p. 64).

As Boulnois says, treating divine intervention in the world by absolute power as a real possibility tends to undermine intelligibility. I would add that this undermining of intelligibility undermines ethics as well.

“This renewal of the problematic figures an evolution of theology. It makes God less and less human, less and less reached by knowledge of the order of the universe, less and less oriented toward the norm of the good. Divine omnipotence thus founds a ‘skeptical’ movement, which has consequences for the theology of justification (from Scotus to Luther). The order of salvation appears more and more contingent…. The equilibrium between the order of the world and the omnipotence of God attained in the Sentences of Peter Lombard ended up a victim of its own success. After being articulated with nature, the supernatural becomes omnipresent, and finally suspends all autonomy of the order of nature. There is no longer a consistent finite order. Omnipotence figures a more and more uncertain order of the world, and results in a complete concealment of God and his plans from the human. God is so unknowable that his attributes are founded in the brilliance of his omnipotence, reachable only by faith, and not allowing any certainty to exist. Following this metamorphosis, God, the object par excellence of theological intelligence, who was at first thought of as ineffable, will be finally named as incomprehensible. The world will appear as a labyrinth of axiomatics and exceptions, in which individuals are toys” (pp. 64-65).

This omnipresence of the possibility of supernatural intervention, outside the order of nature — and the correlated suspension of all autonomy of the order of nature — are what undermine intelligibility.

“It is now the model of political power [pouvoir] that serves to think the divine power in an identical, univocal sense, even in a particular case: all power can be exercised either juridically, or de facto” (p. 65).

“By a cross-chase of which history has the secret, these ‘absolutist’ arguments will serve later for the exaltation of monarchic power against pontifical pretensions. In Jean Bodin, they serve to describe the absolute power of the prince. This theory leads to a reinforcement of political absolutism — and simultaneously to an evanescence of the predictability of the law of nature” (p. 66).

“The theme of absolute power grounds the work of Duns Scotus in three dimensions: ontological (the action of every free agent), juridical (the king and his realm), theological (God and his decrees). This origin reveals a structural correspondence between the modern concepts of individual freedom, of divine power [puissance], and of political power [pouvoir]” (ibid).

“The black sun of omnipotence shines with a paradoxical light. When power wants to be without shadow and without limits, it accumulates within itself the night in which all evils are absolved; it endorses dark things and obscurity. On the contrary, the power that is incapable of evil and excludes it is a pure light without darkness. It does not suppress the shadow, or assume it, or absolve it, but dissociates it from itself and separates it from its sharp light. But for this it must be a power capable of lacking power” (p. 68).

What Meaning Is

Brandom has characterized the focus of his interests as the theory of meaning. Recent additions to his website include a fascinating 1980 typescript “Assertion and Conceptual Roles”. This early piece has a programmatic character. It goes even further than the 1976 dissertation in anticipating the leading ideas of his major works. (I will omit the also interesting mathematical-logical formalization that he experiments with here, but steers away from in Making It Explicit and A Spirit of Trust.)

While Brandom is resolutely modern in his identifications, this sort of investigation was pioneered by Aristotle. Meaning and truth are approached in terms of a kind of normative “saying” that is up to us. But the paradigmatic kind of saying is what Aristotle calls “saying something about something”, so it is not entirely up to us. Finally, the paradigmatic use of language is dialogical, imbued with a Socratic ethic of dialogue and free-spirited inquiry. And what we most fundamentally are is dialogical talking animals.

As Brandom puts it in the first sentence, “The paradigmatic linguistic activity is saying that-p, in the sense of asserting, claiming, or stating that-p for some declarative sentence p” (p. 1).

Today “declarative” is also an important if ill-defined concept in the theory of programming languages, where its use has a close relation to the logical use that is given ethical significance here. In that context, it is often glossed as focusing on the what not the how (or the end and not the means), although that is a simplification.

The deep issue underneath both these disparate cases is something like the meaning of meaning. In what follows, I think Brandom makes some real progress in clarifying what is at stake. It has both ethical and formal dimensions.

“Frege shows in the Begriffschrift that the ways in which sentences can occur as significant constituents of other sentences require us to distinguish the content of such an assertion (what is asserted) and the force of the assertion (the asserting of that content). For when a sentence appears as the antecedent of a conditional, it must have something, let us call it the ‘content’, in common with its occurrence as a free-standing assertion, or there would be no justification for detaching the consequent of the conditional when one is prepared to assert its antecedent. On the other hand, the asserting of the conditional does not include the asserting of the antecedent, since the asserter of the conditional might well take the former to be true and the latter to be false. It is a criterion of adequacy for any account of either of these features of declarative discourse that it be compatible with some correct account of the other” (ibid).

I had not realized that the Fregean distinction of Sinn (sense or force) and Bedeutung (reference) arose in this context of reference relations between parts of compound sentences. It seems likely that this point attributed to Frege was a source for Michael Dummet’s work on compound sentences in which one part refers to another, which Brandom had made significant use of a few years earlier, in the dissertation. Dummet was a leading Frege scholar.

It strikes me also that in a formal context, this inter-reference between components of compound sentences could serve as an inductively definable and thus paradox-free version of “self” reference. In a more discursive, less formal context, it recalls Kantian-Hegelian “reflection” and other interesting weakenings of strict identity like Hegel’s “speculative” identity or Ricoeur’s “narrative” identity. Instead of a formally strict and thus empty global self-reference, it is a matter of specifiable internal cross-reference.

Further below, Brandom will explicitly connect this with the theme of anaphora or internal back-reference that he later develops at length in Making It Explicit as a way in which identities are constituted out of difference. In the current text he will also relate it to the “prosentential” theory of truth. Prosentences like “that is true” are the sentential analogue of pronouns — they refer to sentences that express definite propositions in the same way that pronouns refer to nouns. Brandom is saying that concrete meaning involves both Fregean sense and Fregean reference.

“Exclusive attention to the practice of asserting precludes understanding the conceptual significance which such linguistic performances express and enable, while the complementary exclusion must cut off semantic theory from its only empirical subject matter, talking as something people do” (ibid).

Standard bottom-up compositional approaches to semantics focus exclusively on the “content”, and not on the related doing.

“[I]t might be tempting to think that such a theory offers special resources for a theory of asserting as representing, classifying, or identifying. It is important to realize that the same considerations which disclose the distinction of force and content expose such advantages as spurious” (ibid).

“There is no reason to suppose that the semantic representability of all sentences in terms of, say, set-membership statements or identity statements, reflects or is reflected in the explanatory priority of various kinds of linguistic performances” (p. 2).

“It then turns out that giving a rich enough description of the social practices involved in assertion allows us to exhibit semantic contents as complex formal features of performances and compound dispositions to perform according to those practices. In other words, I want to show that it is possible to turn exactly on its head the standard order of explanation canvassed above” (p. 3).

“To specify a social practice is to specify the response which is the constitutive recognition of the appropriateness of performances with respect to that practice…. But in the case of discursive practices, the constitutive responses will in general themselves be performances which are appropriate (in virtue of the responses the community is disposed to make to them) according to some other social practice. The appropriateness of any particular performance will then depend on the appropriateness of a whole set of other performances with similar dependences. Each social practice will definitionally depend upon a set of others” (p. 4).

This notion of practice is thus inherently normative or value-oriented. Brandom compares his holistic view of practices with Quine’s holistic view of the “web of belief”.

“Definitional chains specifying the extension of one practice in terms of its intension, and that intension in terms of another extension, and so on, may loop back on one another. We will say that any system of social practices which does so … is a holistic system…. Such a system of practices cannot be attributed to a community piecemeal, or in an hierarchic fashion, but only all at once.”

The key point about such a holistic system is that there are mutual dependencies between parts or participants.

“It follows that in systems containing essentially holistic practices, the norms of conduct which are codified in such practices are not reducible to facts about objective performances. The appropriateness or inappropriateness of any particular performance with respect to such a practice cannot ultimately be expressed in terms of communal dispositions to respond with objectively characterizable sanctions and rewards…. The norms themselves are entirely constituted by the practices of socially recognizing performances as according or not according with them” (p. 5).

“Facts about objective performances” have a monological character. In technical contexts this can be of great value. But ethical and general life contexts have an inherently dialogical or mutual character.

“A community ought to be thought of as socially synthesized by mutual recognition of its members, since a plausible sufficient condition of A‘s being a member of some community is that the other members of that community take him to be such…. This simple Hegelian model of the synthesis of social entities by mutual recognition of individuals has the advantage that it preserves the basic distinction between the individual’s contribution to his membership in a group and the contribution of the other members” (p. 6, emphasis added).

Here we have the first appearance of the great theme of mutual recognition in Brandom’s work. Brandom has dug deeply into this particular aspect of Hegel, making very substantial contributions of his own. In ethics, mutual recognition has roots in Aristotelian philia (friendship or love) and the so-called golden rule (do and do not do to others as you would have them do and not do to you). Brandom sees that Hegel treats mutual recognition not only as an ethical ideal but also as a fundamental explanatory principle.

“The crucial point is that the reflexive recognition (as social self-recognition) be an achievement requiring the symmetry of being recognized in a particular respect by those whom I recognize in that respect, and presupposing that my recognitions will be transitive…. A community is then any set P which is closed under transitive recognition…. [N]o one member is omniscient or infallible about such membership…, nor is it required that everyone recognize everyone else in the community” (p. 7).

The symmetry of recognizing and being recognized leads to the idea that authority and responsibility ought to be symmetrically balanced. This has tremendous implications.

“Asserting that-p is, among other things, to explicitly authorize certain inferences…. Saying this much does not yet say what the constitutive recognition of this authorizing consists in…. Our account of the authorizing of inferences will draw upon the second major feature of the social role of assertion” (ibid).

The idea of understanding acts of assertion principally in terms of an inferential constitution of meaning is transformative. Others have suggested or implied something like this, but Brandom expresses it with more clarity and thoroughness than anyone.

Reasoning is not a merely technical activity. The constitution of meaning has fundamental ethical significance.

“This second feature is noted by Searle when he says that an assertion (among other things) ‘counts as an undertaking to the effect that p represents an actual state of affairs’. Leaving aside the representationalist expansion of the content ascribed, we can see in the use of the term ‘undertaking’ the recognition of a dimension of responsibility in assertion, coordinate with the previously indicated dimension of authority. In asserting that-p one is committing oneself in some sense to the claim that-p. What sort of responsibility is involved? The leading idea of the present account is that it is justificatory responsibility which one undertakes by an assertion. Justification and assertion will be exhibited as essentially holistic social practices belonging to the same system of practices, internally related to one another. So the recognitive response-type which is the intension of the social practice of assertion must include recognition of the assertor as responsible for justifying his assertoric performance under suitable circumstances…. Authority in this sense consists in the social recognition of a practice as authorizing others” (pp. 9-10).

“What is essential is that the relation between the intensions and the extensions of a family of social practices underwrite a relation of what we may call (extending the usual sense) anaphoric reference between various performances. The term ‘anaphoric’ is used to indicate that this ‘referential’ relation is internal to a system of social practices, where one performance refers to another as one word refers to another in A: ‘Pynchon wrote the book’ B: ‘But has he tried to read it?’, where the pronouns anaphorically refer to the antecedent terms ‘Pynchon’ and ‘the book’. No relation between discursive and non-discursive items is supposed. A prime use of this expressive resource of anaphoric reference to typed utterings is exhibited just below, as a feature of demands for justification” (p. 12).

In Making It Explicit, Brandom uses linguistic anaphora to explain the constitution of objects as objects. Here he gives it an even broader role. Anaphora or back-referencing is the birth of substance, solidity, and modality in meaning. Again the ethical dimension comes to the fore. Assertion as lived concerns neither naked Parmenidean being nor pure objective facts.

“The key to our attempt to offer sufficient conditions for assertion by specifying a class of systems of social practices is the relation of justification which a set of assertions can have to another assertion…. Both the dimension of authority and the dimension of responsibility will be explicated in terms of the recognition of justification. Each of the different types of assertion which play a role in the systems we will examine, free-standing assertions, assertions which are the results of inferences authorized by other assertions, and assertions which are part of the justification which another asserting made its asserter responsible for, each of these types of assertion incurs a justificatory responsibility itself and authorizes further inferences. The relevant responsibility is to produce (what would be recognized as) an appropriate justification, if one is demanded…. The utterance of a conventional request for justification addressed to a foregoing assertion is to be always appropriate, and not itself in need of justification. The cognitive significance of the linguistic practices we describe stems from this universal appropriateness of demands for further justification (as Sellars takes the ‘rational’ structure of scientific practice to consist in its being a ‘self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once’…. An utterance in the conventional style of assertions (utterances which undertake justificatory responsibilities and issue inference licenses whose contents vary as the content of the assertion vary) will constitutively be recognized as possessing that authority only so long as the conditional responsibility to justify if queried has not been shirked…. No more for this distinction than elsewhere in the social practice story need we appeal to intentions or beliefs of performers” (pp. 12-13).

As I’ve mentioned a number of times, other variants of this ethics of dialogue or dialogical ethics have been developed by Plato, Gadamer, and Habermas.

“For just as inference passes the authority of assertion one way along the anaphoric chain, it also passes the justificatory responsibility incurred the other way along that chain” (p. 14).

“The extended responsibility induced by the presentation of a justification is defeasible by the performance of a counter-justification, comprising further assertions…. The categories of justificatory and counter-justificatory performances are not disjoint” (p. 17).

“Each of these conditions codifies some aspect of our ordinary practices of giving and asking for reasons” (p. 18).

“[A] set of basic and extended repertoires related by an accessibility relation will be called a conceptual idiom…. It is in terms of these still rather particularized structures that we will define assertional contents or conceptual roles” (pp. 18-19).

Next in this series: Conditionals and Conceptual Roles

Willingness, Deliberation, Choice

In Nicomachean Ethics book III, Aristotle with marvelous clarity, simplicity, and well-rounded good sense discusses what things we are and are not morally responsible for, without ever referring to or needing anything like the “free arbitration” (liberum arbitrium) that came to be widely assumed in the Latin tradition. I will continue to use Joe Sachs’s admirable translation.

“Now since virtue is concerned with feelings and actions, and praise and blame come about for willing actions, but for unwilling actions there is forgiveness and sometimes even pity, it is no doubt a necessary thing for those who inquire about virtue to distinguish what is a willing act and what is an unwilling act, and it is a useful thing for lawmakers as well, with a view to honors and punishments. Now it seems that unwilling acts are the ones that happen by force or through ignorance, a forced act being one of which the source is external, and an act is of this sort in which the person acting, or acted upon, contributes nothing, for instance if a wind carries one off somewhere, or people do who are in control. But with respect to those things that are done through fear of greater evils, or for the sake of something beautiful — for instance if a tyrant who was in control of one’s parents and children were to order one to do a shameful thing, and in the case of one’s doing it they would be saved but as a result of one’s not doing it they would be killed — there is some dispute whether they are willing or unwilling” (p. 36).

Aristotle’s positive regard for feeling and his early mention of it in this context are noteworthy, as is his explicit early mention of forgiveness. Equally important is the fact that from the very beginning, he focuses on the difficult cases in which we experience conflict or ambiguity between different values that we recognize. Characteristically, he does not aim to authoritatively lay down rules for every situation, but rather to encourage us to be thoughtful and understanding in our appraisals both of situations and of others’ responses to them.

“Something of this sort happens also in connection with things thrown overboard in a storm, for no one simply throws them away willingly, but all those who have any sense do so for their own safety and that of the rest of the people aboard. Such actions then are mixed, but they are more like willing acts, since at the time when they are done they are preferred, and the end for which an action takes place is in accordance with the occasion. So one has to say what is willing or unwilling at the time when someone does it; and one does things of this sort willingly, for the source of the moving of the parts that are instrumental in such actions is oneself, and anything of which the source is in oneself is also up to oneself either to do or not. So things of this sort are willing acts, though in an unqualified sense they would perhaps be unwilling acts, since no one would choose any such thing for itself” (pp. 36-37).

Even more than Plato, Aristotle addresses “mixed” cases and highlights their importance. Again characteristically, he qualifies what he says about the unqualified sense with a modest “perhaps”.

“Sometimes people are even praised for actions of this sort, when they endure something shameful or painful in return for things that are great and beautiful, and conversely they might be blamed, since enduring things that are exceedingly shameful for no beautiful object, or for one only moderately beautiful, belongs to a person of low moral stature. For some things, while no praise is forthcoming, there is forgiveness, when one does what one ought not to do on account of motives of this sort, when they strain human nature too far, and no one could endure them. Yet some things perhaps it is not possible to be forced to do, but one ought instead to die suffering the most terrible things, for the things that force the Alcmaeon of Euripides to kill his mother seem ridiculous. But it is difficult sometimes to distinguish what sort of thing should be chosen in return for what, and what should be endured for what, and still more difficult for those who have discerned it to abide by what they have chosen, since for the most part the things one anticipates are painful and the things they force one to do are shameful, which is why praise and blame come about according as people are or are not forced” (p. 37).

Again he mentions forgiveness. Again an otherwise more categorical-sounding statement is qualified by a “perhaps”. Again the focus is on difficult cases. A more general and abstract evaluation is called “difficult”. He notes that it is “still more difficult” to abide by what we have chosen.

Sachs’s glossary says for choice (proairesis): “Desire informed by deliberation, or thinking infused with desire, and hence an act of the whole human being, in which neither the rational nor the irrational part is superior. If desire predominates, one merely takes one thing in preference to others, as an animal or small child might, but deliberation allows one to take a course in the light of alternatives not immediately present and of long-term consequences not obvious at the moment…. [T]he only ‘rule’ that can make choice be right is the judgment of a person of good character, whose desires are neither excessive nor corrupted” (pp. 202-203).

This is very clearly not an arbitrary “choice”. It is the Latin tradition’s interpolation of a notion of arbitrary choice into the Aristotelian text that Boulnois rightly objects to.

Back to Aristotle, “So what sort of thing ought one to say is forced? In an unqualified sense, is it not what is done whenever the cause is in external things and the one acting contributes nothing? But with those things that are in themselves unwilling acts, but are chosen in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends, and their source is in the one acting, while they are unwilling acts in themselves, in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends they are willing acts. But they are more like willing acts, since actions are in the particulars, and with respect to these they are willing acts. But it is not easy to give an account of what sort of things one ought to choose in return for what sort of ends, since there are many differences among the particular circumstances” (p. 37).

Up to now, Aristotle has focused on examples that are somewhat extreme. Here he returns to the broader scope of all action.

“Actions are in the particulars”, which is why, once again, “it is not easy to give an account” of the more general case. In general, we cannot adequately say what the sense of an action is — or indeed what action it is — until we take its context appropriately into account.

In the very same way, there is no way we can adequately say, for example, what Kant’s categorical imperative would have us do in an unspecified particular situation x, based on the categorical imperative alone. Applying it only begins to have meaning as the situation begins to be specified.

Boulnois would have us avoid translating proairesis as “choice”, on the ground of the very real concern that the Latin tradition strongly identifies talk about choice with so-called free arbitration. But in the Aristotelian text we see a repeating pattern already, in which Aristotle focuses on difficult situations that require us to make tradeoffs between values that we genuinely accept, and which seem to require us to be unfaithful to one of them. These could hardly be construed as arbitrary choices. It is the sense given to the words rather than the bare words themselves that matters most.

Though Boulnois’s preferred translation of proairesis as “resolution” definitely has points in its favor, as at least possibly capturing the sense of its dependence on deliberation (which “choice” tends to obscure rather than highlight), the case is less compelling here, where the syntax doesn’t line up and it would be necessary to speak instead of a resolution of the tradeoff. We could still say we “resolved upon” one of the alternatives, but that still doesn’t capture the specific sense of making a judgment based on a comparative evaluation of definite alternatives.

As long as we are speaking of a comparison of definite alternatives rather than a decision that is allegedly made ex nihilo, the comparison basically defines the context, and we are clearly speaking of a normative judgment rather than an arbitrary choice.

It is arbitrary choice that has no applicability to the discernment of what would be a right action. Normative judgment (or for that matter, any kind of comparison between definite things), insofar as it has validity, is precisely not arbitrary, but rather — to a degree we can also assess — “right” for the situation.

Aristotle continues, “But if someone claims that things that are pleasant or beautiful are sources of compulsion (for they exert force even while being external), everything would be forced according to that person, since everyone does everything for the sake of these ends. Also, those who act by force and are unwilling act with pain, while those who act on account of what is pleasant and beautiful do so with pleasure. And it is ridiculous to blame external things but not oneself, for being easily caught by such things, and to take credit oneself for beautiful deeds but blame the pleasant things for one’s shameful deeds. So it appears that what is forced is that of which the source is from outside, while the one who is forced contributes nothing” (pp. 37-38).

For now I will skip to the summary of the immediately following part, which concerns unwillingness that is due to ignorance.

“So since ignorance is possible about all these circumstances in which the action takes place, the person who was ignorant of them seems to have acted unwillingly, and especially in the case of the most controlling circumstances; and the most controlling ones seem to be the things in which the action consists and for the sake of which it was done. And if an action is to be called unwilling as a result of this sort of ignorance, it is also necessary that it be painful to the one who does it and held in regret” (p. 39).

Then he summarizes the whole discussion of willingness and unwillingness. We are responsible for our “willing” acts, and are not responsible for unwilling acts.

“Since an unwilling act is one done by force or on account of ignorance, a willing act would seem to be one of which the source is in oneself, when one knows the particular circumstances in which the action takes place. For things done on account of spiritedness or desire are probably not rightly called unwilling acts. In the first place, none of the other animals would any longer do anything willingly, nor would children. And then, of the things that result from desire and spiritedness, do we do none of them willingly, or do we do the beautiful ones willingly and the shameful ones unwillingly? Or is this ridiculous when one thing is responsible for them? And perhaps it is absurd to call things toward which one ought to extend oneself unwilling, and one ought to get angry at some things and to desire some things, such as health and knowledge. And while unwilling acts seem to be painful, those that result from desire seem to be pleasant. Also, what difference does it make to whether things that are wrong are unwilling acts, that they result from reasoning or from spiritedness? Both kinds of error are to be avoided, and irrational feelings seem to be no less human than reasoning is, so that actions that come from spiritedness and desire belong to the human being too. So it is absurd to set those down as unwilling acts” (pp. 39-40, emphasis added).

Feeling and reason are equally human. Unlike the Stoics, Aristotle does not regard all feeling as an impediment, or as necessarily a source of unfreedom.

Next he turns to an explicit discussion of “choice”.

[Chapter 2.] “Now that willing and unwilling acts have been distinguished, it follows next to go through what concerns choice, for this seems to be what belongs most properly to virtue and to determine one’s character more than one’s actions do. A choice is obviously something willing, but they are not the same thing, as what is willing covers a wider range, since children and the other animals share in willing acts but not in choice, and we speak of things done on the spur of the moment as willing acts, but not as things done as a result of choice. Those who say that choice is desire, or spiritedness, or wishing, or some sort of opinion do not speak rightly. For choice is not shared by irrational beings, while desire and spiritedness are. And a person lacking self-control acts while desiring something but not choosing it, while a person with self-control conversely acts while choosing something but not desiring it. And while desire sets itself against choice, desire does not set itself against desire. And desire is for what is pleasant and painful, while choice is of something neither painful nor pleasant.”

“Still less is it spiritedness, for things done out of spiritedness seem to be the ones least in accord with choice. But surely it is not wishing either, even though that appears a close approximation to it, since there can be no choice of impossible things, and if anyone were to claim to choose something impossible, that person would seem to be foolish; but there is wishing even for impossible things, such as deathlessness. And there is also wishing for things that can in no way be done by oneself, such as for a certain actor to win an award, or for an athlete to win a contest, but no one chooses such things, but only those things one believes could come about by one’s own act. Also, wishing is rather for an end, while choice is of things that are related to the end; for example, we wish to be healthy, but we choose those things by means of which we will become healthy, and we wish to be happy and say so, while it would not fit the meaning to say we choose to be happy, since, universally, choice seems to be concerned with things that are up to us” (pp. 40-41).

Here he is saying not that choice is the efficient cause of action, as the Latin tradition would have it, but rather that it evaluates and compares possible efficient causes, with respect to how well they would serve as means to realize the ends we wish for.

“So it could not be opinion either, since there seems to be opinion about all things, and no less about things that are everlasting or things that are impossible than about things that are up to us; and opinion is divided into the false and the true, not into the bad and the good, while choice is divided into the latter two kinds. Now no doubt no one even claims that choice is the same as opinion as a whole, but it is not even the same as some particular opinion, for by choosing good or bad things we are certain kinds of people, but not by having opinions. And we choose to take or avoid something from among those alternatives, but we have an opinion about what it is or whom it benefits or in what way, while taking or avoiding is not at all what we have as an opinion. And choice is praised for being a choice of what it ought to be, more than for being rightly made, while opinion is praised for being as something truly is. And we choose what we most of all know to be good, but have opinions about things we do not know very well, and it seems not to be the same people who choose best who also have the best opinions, but rather some people seem to have better opinions but to choose what they ought not, on account of vice. And if an opinion comes before a choice or comes along with it, that makes no difference, for we are not considering this, but whether it is the same as any sort of opinion” (pp. 40-41).

Even though Aristotle does not follow Plato’s categorical devaluation of opinion, we can still hear echoes of Plato’s radical contrast between opinion and knowledge.

“What then is choice, or what sort of thing is it, since it is none of the things mentioned? It is obviously something willing, but not everything that is willing is something chosen. But might it just be the one that has been deliberated about first? For choice is involved with reason and thinking things through. And even its name [pro-airesis] seems to give a hint that it is something taken before [pro] other things”

In saying here that choice is involved with reason and thinking things through, and in suggesting that it “might just be” the outcome of deliberation, Aristotle anticipates what will be his eventual conclusion. Quite the opposite of being exercised in a vacuum, Aristotelian choice is the rational outcome of deliberation.

[Chapter 3.] “But do people deliberate about all things, and is everything a thing to be deliberated about, or about some things is deliberation not possible? Perhaps one ought to mean by a thing to be deliberated about, not what some fool or insane person might deliberate about, but those things that people with sense would deliberate about. Now no one deliberates about everlasting things, such as the cosmos, or about the diagonal and side of a square, that they are incommensurable; but neither does one deliberate about things that are in motion but always happen according to the same pattern, whether by necessity or else by nature or by means of some other cause, such as solstices and the risings of stars; nor about things that are sometimes one way and sometimes another such as drought and rain; nor about things that are by chance, such as finding a treasure; but not about all human things either, as no Spartan deliberates about how the Scythians should best be governed, for none of these things could happen through us. We deliberate about things that are up to us and are matters of action, and these are the ones that are left. For the causes responsible for things seem to be in nature, necessity, and chance, and also intelligence and everything that is due to a human being. And among human beings, each sort deliberates about the things to be done by its own acts.”

“And there is no deliberation about the precise and self-contained kinds of knowledge, such as about letters (for we are not in doubt about how something ought to be spelled), but as many things as come about by our act, but not always in the same way, about these we do deliberate, for example about the things done by medical skill or skill in business, and more so about piloting a ship than about gymnastic training, to the extent that the former is less precisely formulated, and similarly also about the rest of the skills but more about those that are arts than those that are kinds of knowledge, since we are more in doubt in connection with the former. Deliberating is present in things that happen in a certain way for the most part, but are unclear as to how they will turn out, and in which this is undetermined. And we take others as fellow deliberators for large issues, not trusting that we ourselves are adequate to decide them. We deliberate not about ends but about the things that are related to the ends, for a doctor does not deliberate about whether he will cure someone, nor a rhetorician about whether he will persuade, nor someone holding political office about whether he will produce good order, nor does anyone else deliberate about ends, but having set down the end, they consider in what way and by what means it would be the case.”

“When it appears that the end would come about by more than one means, people examine through which of them it will come about most easily and beautifully, but if the end will be accomplished by only one means, they examine how it will come to be through this means, and this in turn through some other, until they come to the first thing that will be responsible for the end, which is the last thing in the process of discovery” (pp. 40-42, emphasis added).

“What is deliberated about and what is chosen are the same thing, except that the thing chosen is already determined, since the thing chosen is what is decided out of the deliberation” (p. 43).

Aristotelian choice is the rational and feeling evaluative outcome of a well-rounded and multi-dimensional deliberation, not a power of arbitration or an arbitrary power that would allegedly be superior to reason and human feeling.

Thoughts on Meta-Ethics

When I first set up a category of “general meta-ethics”, it did not reflect a programmatic intent. It was a convenient heading for the broadest and sketchiest of my broad and sketchy notes. I see the whole development here as a sort of expanding spiral. The typical writing has evolved from extremely informal, minimalist fragments to somewhat more substantial pieces responding to some text or other.

At this point, “meta-ethics” very much has acquired a programmatic significance, particularly inspired first by Brandom’s idea of “normativity all the way down”, and then by Gwenaëlle Aubry’s detailed “axiological” reading of Aristotelian first philosophy, but encompassing all the concerns raised here. This now gives a more particular, more coherent form to my original goal of exploring possible connections between Aristotle and Brandom. It draws important support from the work of Paul Ricoeur, and from readings of Hegel developed by Robert Pippin and H. S. Harris, as well as my own work and that of numerous others on both the first-order history of philosophy and the second-order “historiography” of that history.

“Intellect” as Culminative Intuition

Once or twice before, I’ve somewhere mentioned the issue of interpreting the remarks Aristotle makes about intellect (nous) in the Posterior Analytics. Some people read this text as attributing to intellect a kind of immediate grasp that they associate with intuition. I have even seen nous translated as intuition.

If intuition is supposed to be immediate in an unqualified way, I don’t think this interpretation can be reconciled with Aristotle’s view that although there is what he calls an inner sense, the soul does not have direct self-knowledge, but only self-knowledge of an indirect sort.

My late father was quite impressed by Kant and Hegel’s critique of the notion that intuition is a source of immediate knowledge, but he also used to distinguish “culminative intuition” from “originary intuition”. This seems very useful to me. Originary intuition is the immediate kind that some people claim to have, but is rejected by Kant and Hegel. Culminative intuition on the other hand arguably resembles what the Arabic philosophers called “acquired intellect”. That is, it is an end result of a long process (see also Long Detour?; First Principles Come Last; Adeptio). One of my very first posts here suggested that Aristotle and Plato would have been sympathetic to the inferentialist account of reason propounded by Robert Brandom. Brandom himself reads Kant and Hegel as inferentialists.

Google returns zero references to culminative intuition on the internet. Now at least there will be one. If a kind of intuition does have a kind of immediacy, I think it must be what Hegel called mediated immediacy, which is like knowing how to ride a bicycle. That is, it depends on a process of learning, but eventually acquires a kind of immediacy.

Therapy of Desire

Is philosophy a kind of therapy? Martha Nussbaum’s excellent The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994) impressed me greatly when it first came out. Looking at it again 30 years later, this ethical “therapy” turns out to follow a different paradigm from the emphasis on mutuality in dialogue that I have been addressing from various angles recently. The discussion has many interesting twists and turns.

What is philosophy for, anyway?

Nussbaum says “The idea of a practical and compassionate philosophy — a philosophy that exists for the sake of human beings, in order to address their deepest needs, confront their most urgent perplexities, and bring them from misery to some greater measure of flourishing — this idea makes the study of Hellenistic ethics riveting for a philosopher who wonders what philosophy has to do with the world” (p. 3).

Her main point in this early work is to exhibit the sophistication of Epicurean, Stoic, and Skeptical understandings of emotion. She highlights their practical commitment and “combination of logic with compassion” (p. 9). An important part of her argument, though, is that these later figures further developed themes that Aristotle already raised. I’m currently expecting to cover her first three chapters, where Aristotle plays a larger role. This post focuses on the introduction and first chapter.

“In order to get a purchase on this complex issue, I shall begin this book with Aristotle. For Aristotle sketched an account of the emotions and desires that is very close to the more elaborate accounts we find in the Hellenistic philosophers. And yet he did not defend a norm of detachment from the mutable good things of this world. His best human life is a life rich in attachments to people and things outside the self — friendships, family loves, political ties, ties of certain sorts to possessions and property. Thus it is a life rich in possibilities for emotions such as love, grief, fear, and even anger; the study of these connections will shed light, by contrast, on the Hellenistic conceptions” (pp. 41-42).

Aristotle’s positive valuation of various forms of emotion stands in opposition to these later philosophers.

The Hellenistic period is usually said to extend from Alexander the Great up to Roman times. Increased long-distance trade brought many cultures into closer contact with one another. Religions became detached from local traditional communities, with many coexisting side by side. The new philosophies that emerged in these times were simpler than those of Plato and Aristotle and more dogmatically presented, but still quite sophisticated and interesting. It is largely through them that philosophy for a while gained an unprecedented place in mainstream culture. Meanwhile, Aristotle’s uncirculated manuscripts were left to decay in the attic of a relative who had greedily claimed them. The great rise in Aristotle’s influence began only later, after a third or so of his uncirculated works were recovered and edited. (See Fortunes of Aristotle.)

“The major Hellenistic schools are all highly critical of society as they find it; and all are concerned to bring the necessary conditions of the good human life to those whom society has caused to suffer. They are, moreover, far more inclusive and less elitist in their practice of philosophy than was Aristotle, far more concerned to show that their strategies can offer something to each and every human being, regardless of class or status or gender. On the other hand, the way they do this has little to do, on the whole, with political, institutional, or material change. Instead of arranging to bring the good things of this world to each and every human being, they focus on changes of belief and desire that make their pupil less dependent on the good things of this world. They do not so much show ways of removing injustice as teach the pupil to be indifferent to the injustice she suffers” (p. 10).

I hold that a consistent application of Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical values rules out any kind of elitism, by grounding everyday values in mutuality and reason.

“Aristotelianism sets exacting worldly conditions for the good life, making virtuous activity dependent in many ways upon material and educational conditions that are beyond the individual’s control. But Aristotle then assigns to politics the task of bringing those conditions to people: the good political arrangement is the one ‘in accordance with which each and every one might do well and lead a flourishing life'” (ibid).

Several important points about Aristotle are expressed in condensed terms here. Virtuous activity depends in part on conditions the individual does not control. Good politics should benefit all, not only some. He favors engagement rather than withdrawal, and he favors refining our emotional sensitivities rather than casting them aside or suppressing them.

On the other hand, “Epicurus urged a complete withdrawal from the life of the city, Skeptics an uncritical obedience to forces of existing convention. Even among the Stoics, whose commitment to the intrinsic value of justice is plain, we hear less about how to alter the political fact of slavery than about how to be truly free within, even though one may be (politically) a slave; less about strategies for the removal of hunger and thirst than about the unimportance of these bodily goods in a wise life; less about how to modify existing class structures and the economic relations that (as Aristotle argued) explain them, than about the wise person’s indifference to such worldly distinctions. In all three schools, the truly good and virtuous person is held to be radically independent of material and economic factors: achieving one’s full humanity requires only inner change…. I shall conclude that this criticism has some merit” (p. 11).

But there is also substantial common ground.

“[B]oth Aristotle and the Hellenistic thinkers insist that human flourishing cannot be achieved unless desire and thought, as they are usually constructed within society, are considerably transformed. (Both hold, for example, that most people learn to value money and status far too highly, and that this corrupts both personal and social relations.)” (ibid).

Here we come to the center of her reading, which is that for the Hellenistic philosophers, philosophy is a kind of therapy of the soul. (I note in passing the unanimity with which the philosophers denounce the overvaluation of money and status.)

“Epicurus wrote, ‘Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sicknesses of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul.’ The ancient Skeptical teacher, too, portrays himself as a healer of the soul. Being a lover of humanity, the Skeptic wishes to heal by argument, insofar as possible, the arrogant empty beliefs and the rashness of dogmatic people” (p. 13).

“Or as Cicero, speaking on behalf of the Stoa, more succinctly puts it: ‘There is, I assure you, a medical art for the soul. It is philosophy, whose aid need not be sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside ourselves. We must endeavor with all our resources and all our strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves’. Philosophy heals human diseases, diseases produced by false beliefs” (p. 14).

“All three schools, in short, could accept the Epicurean definition of philosophy: ‘Philosophy is an activity that secures the flourishing [eudaimon] life by arguments and reasonings.’ And all can agree that a precise, logically rigorous argument that is not well suited to the needs of its hearers, an argument that is simply and entirely academic and unable to engage its audience in a practical way, is to that extent a defective philosophical argument” (p. 15).

She contrasts all this with Augustine, for whom “God has set up certain ethical standards; it is our job to do what God wants. But we may or may not be endowed with the capability of seeing, or wanting, what God wants. Truth and God’s grace are out there; but the ability to see ethical truth or to reach for grace is not something we can control. There is, therefore, no reliable method by which we can construct an ethical norm from the scrutiny of our deepest needs and
responses and desires” (p. 18).

“For both Platonists and these Christians, digging more deeply into ourselves is not the right way to proceed in ethical inquiry” (p. 19).

Here we reach a matter of deep ambivalence, and correspondingly great interest. Nussbaum will argue that on this particular point, Aristotle is closer to the “therapeutic” attitude of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics than to the heaven-centered, more objectivist views of ethics that she attributes to Plato and Augustine. I broadly agree.

Referring to mytho-poetic imagery in Plato’s Phaedrus, she says “We do not inquire into the human good by standing on the rim of heaven; and if we did, we would not find the right thing. Human ways of life, and the hopes, pleasures, and pains that are a part of these, cannot be left out of the inquiry without making it pointless and incoherent. We do not in fact look ‘out there’ for ethical truth; it is in and of our human lives. More than this, it is something to and for human lives” (pp. 20-21).

For Aristotle, the Good is always concrete and situationally attuned.

“The medical conception of ethical inquiry opposes itself, as well, to another conception of ethics that stands, so to speak, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Platonism. This is the idea that ethical inquiry and teaching are simply the recording of traditional social belief and have no legitimate goal beyond this” (p. 24).

As Nussbaum points out, none of the Greek philosophers defends this kind of traditionalist view of ethics. The Hellenistic philosophers in particular see much that is wrong with the social world.

“For according to the Hellenistic philosophers, society is not in order as it is; and, as the source of most of their pupils’ beliefs and even of their emotional repertory, it has infected them with its sicknesses. The upbringing of young people is held to be deformed in various ways by false views about what matters: by excessive emphasis, for example, on money, competition, and status” (p. 26).

This is quite a far cry from the divine right of kings, the invisble hand, and other providential underwriting of the status quo that was claimed in early modern times. The Hellenistic philosophers dwelt more extensively than their avid readers in the Enlightenment on what modern people might call alienation.

Nussbaum next turns to address the limits of the therapeutic paradigm.

“All this suggests that the medical kind of ethics may be inclined — like medicine itself, but even more so — to adopt an asymmetrical model of the relationship between teacher and pupil, doctor and patient” (p. 27).

As she points out, at the heart of the therapeutic paradigm is an asymmetrical social relation. This stands in implicit conflict with the ideal of mutual and reciprocal relations in Aristotle’s ethics.

“Hellenistic ethics combines immersion with critical distance in something like this way — insisting on the rigorous scrutiny of belief and desire, while insisting, too, that it is to real people and their beliefs and desires that ethics must ultimately be responsible” (p. 28).

“In the course of developing their medical norms of health, the Hellenistic philosophers appeal to ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’. These slippery notions had better be scrutinized, since misunderstanding them could cause serious misunderstanding of the entire medical approach” (p. 29).

“The ancient appeals to nature that we shall be considering do not … pretend to derive value-norms from a value-free account of the ‘scientific’ underpinnings of human life. Ancient accounts of ‘nature’, especially of ‘human nature’, are value-laden accounts…. Norms follow from an account of ‘nature’ because the account is frankly normative to begin with” (p. 30).

The therapeutic paradigm’s appeals to nature ought therefore to be sharply distinguished from what 20th century philosophers called ethical naturalism. Even the account of nature is frankly normative from the outset.

“A good introduction to the Hellenistic appeals to nature, which clearly reveals both the normative and the anti-conventional thrust of these appeals, is in the famous lines of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself concerning the animal kingdom” (p. 31).

“What the animals show Whitman is not a value-free realm of life; nor does he learn from them to glorify that which exists without effort or teaching. What he sees is that certain practices that (already) appear to him to impede human flourishing — practices connected with religious fear and guilt, with economic obsession and accumulation, with status and power — need not exist. Moreover, when they do not exist, certain deformations of life — sleepless fear, groveling subservience, anxiety, dissatisfaction — do not exist either. The ‘tokens of myself’ that the animals show Whitman are possibilities for self-respect, self-expression, and social equality that are frequently obscured by the realities of human social life. So too, I shall argue, in Hellenistic appeals to the nature of the child, the nature of the animal: the purpose is to construct a radical norm of true human flourishing. This norm is not value-free or ‘scientific’: it is justified by appeal to deep human desires and judgments, and it is value-laden; but it is highly critical of ordinary belief, and sees many of our ordinary beliefs as impediments to flourishing” (p. 32).

“The medical conception seeks to combine the critical power of Platonism with the worldly immersion of ordinary-belief philosophy. And it adds something further of its own: a commitment to action” (pp. 32-33).

“Philosophy understood along medical lines deals with both beliefs and emotions or passions. One reason why the tension described earlier seems to arise is that philosophy is asked not simply to deal with the patient’s invalid inferences and false premises, but to grapple, as well, with her irrational fears and anxieties, her excessive loves and crippling angers” (p. 37).

“Both Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools hold, furthermore, that many, if not all, of the passions rest upon beliefs that do not spring up naturally (if any beliefs do this), but are formed by society” (p. 38).

“All the schools dedicate themselves to the searching critique of prevailing cognitive authority, and to the amelioration of human life as a result” (p. 40).

But in contrast to Aristotle, “These philosophers do not simply analyze the emotions, they also urge, for the most part, their removal from human life” (p. 41). This idea of aiming to cast off all emotion I vehemently reject. Nussbaum too finds it troubling.

“Aristotle accepts and develops at length the idea that ethical philosophy should resemble medicine in its dedication to the practical goal of ameliorating human lives. And he develops, in some detail, aspects of the analogy between the philosopher’s and the doctor’s tasks. And yet Aristotle also criticizes the medical analogy at certain points, arguing that there are some very important ways in which ethical philosophy should not be like medicine” (p. 42).

She lists three points common to Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers.

“1. Arguments have a practical goal: they are directed at making the pupil better, and can be assessed for their contribution to this end. (This, as I said, does not entail that the value of argument must be merely instrumental.)
“2. They are what we might call value-relative: that is, at some level they respond to deep wishes or needs of the patient and, again, are to be assessed in accordance with their success in doing this.
“3. They are responsive to the particular case: just as a good doctor heals case by case, so good medical argument responds to the pupil’s concrete situation and needs” (p. 46).

Then she lists five more characteristics that apply to the Hellenistic philosophers but not to Aristotle.

“4. Medical arguments, like bodily medical treatments, are directed at the health of the individual as such, not at communities or at the individual as member of a community.
“5. In medical argument, the use of practical reason is instrumental. Just as the doctor’s technique is no intrinsic part of what the goal, health, is, so too the philosopher’s reasoning is no intrinsic part of what the good human life itself is.
“6. The standard virtues of argument — such as consistency, definitional clarity, avoidance of ambiguity — have, in medical argument, a purely instrumental value. As with the procedures of the medical art, they are no intrinsic part of the goal.
“7. In medical argument, as in medicine, there is a marked asymmetry of roles: doctor and patient, expert authority and obedient recipient of authority.
“8. In medical argument, the teacher discourages the sympathetic dialectical scrutiny of alternative views. Just as a doctor does not urge the patient to experiment with alternative medications, so the teacher does not encourage cognitive pluralism” (ibid).

Brandom on Habermas

“Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech” (Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, p. 280).

I’m reviving a draft that earlier I put aside, in favor of first saying something about Habermas based on his own writings.

Habermas contrasts what he calls communicative reason with the instrumental reason that is oriented toward utility. Communicative reason aims at consensus on meanings and validity claims. Brandom recounts that when he was a brand-new assistant professor, his senior colleague Richard Rorty was more excited by Habermas’s early work Knowledge and Human Interests than by the publication of Rorty’s own Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

Habermas preceded Brandom in combining influences from German Idealism, American pragmatism, and analytic philosophy. He was one of the first to bridge the gap between Continental and analytic philosophy. Like Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom, he is a strong defender of modernity, which he understands in terms of Enlightenment values of reason, freedom, and equality. He has also been very involved with questions of democratic politics. His work emphasizes what Aristotle would call our status as talking animals, and the discursive character of reason. He combines a Kantian concern for ethical universality, rules, and deontology or moral necessity, with strong concern for intersubjectivity and the possible sharing of meaning.

Unlike Brandom, Habermas aims for what he calls a “formal” pragmatics and semantics, and his ethics seem to have a somewhat formal character as well.

For Habermas, there are three equally primordial kinds of meaning-critical validity: propositional truth, normative rightness, and sincerity of expression. He gives a specialized sense to “illocutionary” speech acts, as closely aligned with his idea of communicative reason. Speakers make validity claims in order to reach understanding. In making assertions, we implicitly guarantee that we can provide good reasons for them, and allow that hearers are free to either accept or reject what we said. This aspect is very close to Brandom.

Unlike Brandom, Habermas seems to have no idea of explaining propositional truth in terms of normativity. More conventionally, he treats truth and normativity as parallel concerns. This seems to go along with his more formal emphasis.

Habermas has an old-fashioned, stereotypical view of Hegel. In his recent Also a History of Philosophy, in passing he literally refers to Hegel as reviving the One of Plotinus. But Brandom credits Habermas as having first given him eyes to see the highly original ideas that he now sees in Hegel.

Brandom sees Habermas as applying detailed linguistic analysis from analytic philosophy to questions of social criticism: “A central pillar of [Habermas’s edifice] is his transposition of the issue raised by the unmaskers of ideology into a thoroughly linguistic key” (Brandom, “Towards Reconciling Two Heroes: Habermas and Hegel”, p. 32, emphasis in original).

“The appraisal and legitimation of social practices and institutions has become in the modern era a wholly discursive affair. That entails that unmasking an ideology is a metadiscursive matter of diagnosing systematic distortions in discursive structures: deformations of communicative action. These will have, to be sure, broadly pragmatic as well as narrowly semantic manifestations. But it is principally to the language we speak, the concepts we use, and the social-practical context in which we do so that we must look to understand distinctively modern forms of unfreedom, as well as for the tools to combat them” (ibid).

“If understanding the relations between reason and ideology is one of the principal philosophical tasks of our age, then there is indeed a case to be made for a suitably broadened (especially along the pragmatic dimension) philosophy of language as ‘first philosophy'” (ibid).

“Kant had the idea (and Hegel follows him down this path) that a post-theological conception of distinctively moral reasons could be built out of the idea that (to put the point in [Brandom’s] terms rather than [Kant’s]) certain principles of conduct make explicit, in the form of rules, normative commitments that are implicit in our engaging in discursive practices at all — simply in our talking and thinking, judging and acting intentionally” (p. 33).

It seems reasonable to apply the term “post-theological” to Brandom’s account of normativity. I think that for Kant though, it is better to speak simply of morality and ethics as having a basis that is independent from theology.

What Habermas calls universal pragmatics seems to refer to the elaboration of these meta-level commitments that are implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all. These include principles like the responsibility to be able to explain why we assert what we do, if we are asked; that the better argument should not be overruled; that everyone potentially affected by something should have a voice with regard to it; and so on. Similar principles were earlier articulated by Gadamer in his work on the ethical significance of Platonic dialogue. Brandom acknowledges a major debt to Habermas, and in Tales of the Mighty Dead he references Gadamer as the 20th-century standard-bearer for hermeneutics.

“One of the central ideas that binds the various German Idealists together is that the implicit structural pragmatic commitments that form the necessary background against which any semantically significant ground-level commitments (whether cognitive or practical) can be undertaken form in principle the basis for a philosophical ethics and a corresponding politics. It has been one of Habermas’s tasks in our own time to transpose that thought into a linguistic key, and to develop it in the light of the results of philosophy’s more than century-long fascination with language. This is his discourse ethics, and his idea for founding political theory on an account of the nature of communicative action” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Brandom and Habermas both stand out from the mainstream in arguing that pragmatics or language use takes precedence over semantics. But where Habermas calls for formal pragmatics and formal (verificationist rather than model-theoretic) semantics, Brandom develops a normative pragmatics and a material-inferential semantics.

“The route that Habermas establishes from a theory of communicative action in general to political theory turns on the assertion within that base theory of a necessary and essential connection between discursive meaningfulness and the making of validity claims that must under various circumstances be redeemed, vindicated, or justified in order to achieve their effect. The distinctive kind of authority speech acts claim comes with a correlative justificatory responsibility. The idea is that the notion of ‘meaning’ that is a principal topic of semantics cannot be understood apart from practices of justifying, of asking for and offering justifications or reasons, which are a principal topic of pragmatics” (p. 35, emphasis in original).

“Habermas has shown how much can be done with these two ideas: Thinking of discursive practice in terms of a distinctive kind of normative practical significance characteristic of speech acts as such, and thinking of semantics methodologically as a kind of explanatory auxiliary in the service of an account of the proprieties of the use of linguistic expressions, which is pragmatics” (ibid).

These are two ideas of Habermas that Brandom strongly endorses. Brandom turns to his own theses about Kant and Hegel, which put normativity and ethical inquiry at the root of an account of knowledge and truth.

“Kant’s deepest and most original idea is that what distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments. They are endorsements, exercises of authority. ‘Responsibility’, ‘commitment’, ‘endorsement’, ‘authority’—these are all normative notions. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from un-minded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental” (pp. 35-36).

Perhaps Kant’s greatest lesson is this questioning of naive notions of self, “subject”, and consciousness. This stands in sharp contrast to the one-sided readings of Kant as making “the” turn to “the” subject. This vital point has been obscured by the neo-Kantian and other commentators who aimed to make Kant as compatible as possible with empiricism and early 20th-century philosophy of science.

I am broadly sympathetic to Macintyre’s critique of deontology and rule-based ethics, but I think Hegel already showed the way out of this, and did it in a better way. This issue should be approached in terms of something like Robert Pippin’s highlighting of the simultaneous Aristotelian and Kantian elements in Hegel, rather than in terms of the theistically modified medieval Aristotelianism that Macintyre advocates.

Brandom summarizes, “Our freedom for Kant consists in our authority to make ourselves responsible for judgments and actions (thinkings and doings). This is a normative characterization of freedom” (p. 36).

One of Brandom’s most valuable contributions has been the explanation of Kantian freedom in a way that is not only not voluntaristic, but also does not attach freedom ontologically to “the” subject. Brandom is at one with Habermas and Gadamer in distinguishing what I call ethical reason from modern-style causal explanation.

Reason arises “freely” in a normative and reflective interpretive context. It is not caused to conclude as it does by any physical cause. Neither does it trace to a supernatural cause.

“Rationality in this sense does not consist in knowers and agents generally, or even often, having good reasons for what they believe and do. It consists rather just in being in the space of reasons, in the sense that knowers and agents count as such insofar as they exercise their normative authority to bind themselves by norms, undertake discursive commitments and responsibilities, and so make themselves liable to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. In particular, they are liable to assessment as to the goodness of their reasons for exercising their authority as they do, for taking on those specific commitments and responsibilities. Whatever the actual causal antecedents of their judgings and intentional doings, Kantian knowers and agents are obliged (committed) to have reasons for their judgments and actions” (ibid).

Brandom stresses Hegel’s ideal of the symmetry of authority and responsibility.

“Hegel takes it that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility (what show up in the Phenomenology as ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’) are socially instituted statuses. The attitudes and practices that institute them are recognitive attitudes and practices: taking or treating each other in practice as authoritative and responsible. Further, authority and responsibility are co-ordinate statuses. Authority and responsibility come together. (There is no independence that does not incorporate a moment of dependence — essentially, and not just accidentally.) For the context in which such statuses are non-defectively instituted is one of reciprocal or mutual recognition. Each attempted exercise of authority is at the same time implicitly a petitioning for recognition of it as valid, legitimate, or warranted, as one the author is entitled to. And that is to say that attempting to exercise authority is always also making oneself responsible to those one recognizes as authorized (entitled, perhaps obliged) to validate it by recognizing it in turn” (pp. 36-37).

“Correspondingly, an attempt to make oneself responsible, even in judgment and intentional action, is authorizing others to hold one responsible. Hegel’s fundamental idea [is] that self-conscious individual subjects and their communities (“social substance”) are alike synthesized by reciprocal recognition. This is Hegel’s way of making sense of the connection between meaningful speech acts and validity claims, between discursive authority and discursive responsibility that is at the center of Habermas’s account of communicative action and discursive practice. Seen the other way around, Habermas’s theory of communicative action is his account of the practices Hegel talks about under the heading of ‘reciprocal recognition’” (p. 37, emphasis added).

Once again, the very act of making an assertion at all already authorizes others to question it, and to hold us responsible for it. This point is common to Brandom, Habermas, and Gadamer.

“Hegelian Geist [spirit] is the normative realm of all our normatively articulated performances, practices, and institutions, and everything that makes them possible and that they make possible” (ibid). “It is socially instituted by reciprocal recognition… That normative discursive realm in which we live, and move, and have our being is itself instituted by recognitive relations that are constitutively mutual, reciprocal, and symmetric” (ibid).

Hegel’s Geist is ethical and cultural, not metaphysical or mystical.

“In particular cases, asymmetric recognitive relations are intelligible” (ibid). “But these are in principle derivative cases, parasitic on the universal normative medium of discursive practices” (ibid).

“Denizens of this realm, the speakers and agents who are the only candidates for exhibiting more specialized, derivative, institutional normative statuses, are, once again, rational in the normative sense of exercising rational authority and taking on rational responsibility — being permanently liable to distinctive kinds of assessment and appraisal — rather than in the descriptive sense that addresses how good they are at doing what they are responsible for doing or vindicating the sorts of authority they claim” (ibid).

Brandom expresses his debt to Habermas.

“When it is described in these terms, I hope it is clear that Habermas is the foremost contemporary theorist of Hegelian Geist, the one who has taught us the most about its fine structure, the theorist who has best found an idiom for making explicit the commitments that are implicit in our being discursive normative creatures” (ibid).

Habermas himself seems to take the Young Hegelians’ hostile caricatures of Hegel as the last word on the subject. The 19th-century Right and Left Hegelians give opposite values to what are in fact broadly similar misunderstandings of Hegel.

“One issue arises from what I take to be a misreading of Hegel that is evident in some recent German interpretations that understand Hegelian Geist as a kind of divine mind, a social subject that is self-conscious in something like a Cartesian sense. It is a development of the right-wing Hegelian picture of the Absolute as a kind of super-individual thinker (an interpretation propounded already by Hegel’s student Gabler). This reading was very influential for the British Idealist admirers of Hegel, and remains part of the popular conception of Hegel’s thought among non-philosophers. Some of Henrich’s students (Kramer, Düsing) seem to have drawn the conclusion from his brilliant reading of Fichte that Hegel must take as a central theme the self-reflective structure of individual self-consciousness. But one of Hegel’s decisive insights is expressed in his non-mentalistic, indeed non-psychological, normative conception of self-consciousness as a social achievement that takes place largely outside the skull of the particular organism who becomes a self-conscious individual by entering into recognitive relations with others whose practical attitudes are equally essential to the institution of that status. (Already in the 1920’s the neo-Kantian Hartmann had emphasized that ‘The founding intuition of German Idealism is: “The Absolute is reason. It is not consciousness”‘. ) This Hegel is Habermasian; the Hegel who is a ‘philosopher of consciousness’ in the sense of Fichte’s or Schelling’s ‘absolute subjectivity’ is not” (p. 38).

This is a really key point that is still often lost sight of today: “reason, not consciousness”.

“Hegel does think that there can be a fully adequate, final set of logical, metasemantic, metaphysical concepts — the organ of a distinctive kind of philosophical self-consciousness that permits us to say and think what it is we are doing when we say or think anything about ourselves and our world. But he does not think that bringing those concept-determining activities and structures out into the daylight of explicitness — achieving the alarmingly titled state of “Absolute Knowing” that both the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic aim to produce — settles what ground-level concepts we ought to have, or the conceptual commitments, theoretical and practical, that we ought to adopt. Inquiry and deliberation must go on as before, with the sole difference that now we know what it is we are doing when we inquire and deliberate” (ibid, emphasis added).

Inquiry and deliberation must go on as before. There is no magic, no sleight of hand.

“All that [Hegel] thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings” (p. 39).

“There is no thought that any particular development is necessary in the alethic [truth-oriented] sense of being inevitable or unavoidable, or even predictable. It is rather that once it has occurred, we can retrospectively exhibit it as proper, as a development that ought to have occurred, because it is the correct application and determination of a conceptual norm that we can now see, from our present vantage-point, as having been all along part of what we were implicitly committed to by prior decisions” (p. 40, emphasis in original).

Consider the trajectory of a life, or the evaluation of its Aristotelian “happiness”.

“That is what distinguishes the normative notion of ‘freedom’ Kant introduces from the elusive alethic notion Hume worried about” (ibid).

That is to say, contrary to a few confusing remarks by Kant, the freedom relevant to ethics is not to be understood in terms of a special kind of causality.

“Commitment to the sort of retrospective rational reconstruction that finds norms governing contingent applications of concepts (the process of reason) turns out to be implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all because it is only in the context of discerning such expressively progressive traditions that concepts are intelligible as having determinate contents at all. Coming to realize this, and so explicitly to acknowledge the commitment to being an agent of reason’s march through history, is achieving the distinctive sort of self-consciousness Hegel calls ‘Absolute knowing'” (ibid, emphasis in original).

We are the agents of reason in history. This has nothing to do with infallibility, but rather with our status as participants in dialogue.

“Of course, no retrospective story one tells can succeed in rationalizing all of the actual contingent applications of determinate concepts that it inherits. (That is what in the final form of reciprocal recognition, we must confess, and trust that subsequent judges/concept-appliers can forgive us for, by finding the line we drew between what could and what could not be rationalized as itself the valid expression of a prior norm.) And no such story is final, because the norms it discerns must inevitably, when correctly applied, lead to incompatible commitments, which can only be reconciled by attributing different contents to the concepts” (ibid).

Brandom argues for the very strong position that no historically achieved concrete truth is permanently stable. This has a liberating potential. It means that every received truth and every authority must be subject to questioning.

“It is open to us to repackage those kinds of authority and responsibility in accord with the best lessons we can draw from the history and tradition we are able to discern. This is an instance of the fundamental Hegelian lesson about the ultimately social character of normative statuses, which are understood as instituted by recognitive practices and articulated by recognitive relations. This insight marks a fundamental advance over Kant’s understanding of the normativity he rightly saw as constitutive of our sapience. And it is an insight as fundamental to Habermas’s thought as it is to Hegel’s” (p. 41).

Second-Person Thinking?

Still pondering Habermas’s notion of illocution, I wanted to add some informal thoughts. He criticizes first- and third-person thinking, and suggests that they are actually parasitic on a more primary, second-person thinking that would be characteristic of what he calls communicative action and illocution. I find this quite intriguing.

Second-person thinking would be “dialogical”, in contrast to the “monological” character of first- and third-person thinking. These terms, used by Habermas, were introduced by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. According to Habermas, monological thinking is objectifying, whereas dialogical thinking has the character of participation in a dialogue.

What psychologists more commonly refer to as internal “monologue” is sometimes also called internal dialogue. Apparently not everyone experiences this, but it is considered completely normal. Common speech says “I” talk to “myself”, but the self involved here is not really clear. “I” is a convenient shorthand (a sort of indexical reference to a flowing movement toward unity of apperception, as Kant said).

It is a bit ambiguous whether we are addressing “ourselves” or an imagined other when we have internal dialogue, but then the notion of self is itself ambiguous (see numerous posts under Subjectivity). Paul Ricoeur wrote a fascinating book called Oneself As Another. Plato in the Republic has Socrates compare the soul to a city. Aristotle says we regard our friend as “another self”. (Descartes did not really invent the so-called Cartesian subject either, as Alain de Libera has amply documented. Insofar as there is a common modern notion of a strongly unified self, it has a long prehistory in certain strands of theology.)

Habermas uses his notion of communicative reason as a way of getting at an originally intersubjective character of thought. As Brandom has noted, this picks out essentially the same conditions that Hegel associates with the ideal of mutual recognition. But Habermas apparently does not accept Brandom’s provocative claims that mutual recognition is by itself sufficient to ground genuine objectivity, and that normative discourse under conditions of mutual recognition can bootstrap itself.

Illocution

Habermas wants to promote a notion of communicative rationality as “uncurtailed communication”, an orientation toward developing shared understanding. He even calls shared understanding the telos of human speech, in something close to an Aristotelian sense, although he generally uses “teleology” only in a negative way, as a mere utilitarian calculation of the means to realize empirical self-interest. But I find the ethical sense that he gives to communication to be very admirable.

“The positivization, legalization, and formalization of law mean that the validity of law can no longer feed off the taken-for-granted authority of moral traditions but requires an autonomous foundation, that is, a foundation that is not only relative to given ends. Moral consciousness can satisfy such a requirement only at the postconventional level. It is here that there first emerges the idea that legal norms are in principle open to criticism and in need of justification” (p. 260, emphasis in original).

He speaks here of the postconventional and posttraditional in law and ethics, as he elsewhere speaks of the postmetaphysical and the postsecular.

“These posttraditional basic concepts of law and morality are first developed and systematized in modern natural law theories. The model for justifying legal norms is an uncoerced agreement, arrived at by those affected, in the role of contractual partners who are in principle free and equal” (p. 261).

I really was not at all familiar with the early modern “natural law” tradition when I first encountered Brandom’s significant references to it. Here we reach another limitation that Habermas finds in Weber.

“Weber stresses precisely the structural properties connected with the formalism of a law that is systematized by specialists and with the positivity of norms that are enacted. He emphasizes the structural features I have elucidated as the positivity, legalism, and formality of law. But he neglects the moment of a need for rational justification; he excludes from the concept of modern law precisely the conceptions of rational justification that arose with modern theories of natural law in the seventeenth century…. It is in this way that Weber assimilates the law to an organizational means applied in a purposive-rational manner, detaches the rationalization of law from the moral-practical complex of rationality, and reduces it to a rationalization of means-ends relations” (p. 262).

This remark by Habermas seems to have large consequences. He points to an important principle of rational justification in the natural law tradition that goes beyond means-ends calculations, and criticizes Weber for deemphasizing it.

“Rational natural law, in its different versions from Hobbes and Locke through Rousseau and Kant to Hegel, … rests on a rational principle of justification and is, in terms of moral-practical rationalization, further advanced than the Protestant ethic, which is still founded on religion. Nevertheless, Weber does not hold it to be purely and simply an element of modern law. He wants to separate it carefully ‘from revealed, as well as from enacted and from traditional law’. Thus he constructs an antithesis between modern law in the strict sense, which rests only on the principle of enactment, and the not yet completely ‘formal’ law of modern natural law theories which rests upon principles of grounding (however rational). In his view, modern law is to be understood in a positivistic sense, as law that is enacted by decision and fully disconnected from rational agreement, from ideas of grounding in general, however formal they might be.” (p. 263, emphasis in original).

I did not realize that Weber had a decisionist theory of modern law. “Decisionist” views of law and politics, as Habermas points out, fundamentally appeal to authority rather than to meaning or reason. In my view, this means they ought to be shunned by anyone who cares about meaning or reasonableness.

“This argument is confusing because it combines, in an opaque manner, an immanent critique of the deficient radicalism of natural law conceptions of grounding that are not yet sufficiently formal with a transcendent critique of the need for principles of justification at all and clothes both in the guise of a criticism of the naturalistic fallacy. One might certainly raise the objection that the concept of natural rights still had strong metaphysical connotations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, with the model of a contract through which all legal associates, after rationally weighing their interests, regulate their common life as free and equal partners, modern natural law theorists were the first to meet the demand for a procedural grounding of law, that is, for a justification by principles whose validity could in turn be criticized. To this extent, ‘nature’ and ‘reason’ do not stand in this context for some metaphysical contents or other; rather, they circumscribe formal conditions which an agreement must satisfy if it is to have legitimating force, that is, if it is to be rational. Weber again confuses the formal properties of a postconventional level of justification with particular substantive values (p. 264).

“[A]ssuming that legitimacy is a necessary condition for the continued existence of every type of political domination, how can a legal domination whose legality is based on a law that is viewed in purely decisionistic terms (that is, a law that devalues all grounding in principle) be legitimated at all?” (pp. 264-265, emphasis in original).

Habermas has a marvelously sharp critique of attempts to separate law and politics from requirements for rational ethical justification. He distinguishes two very different kinds of “proceduralist” views of law. One is reductively empiricist and collapses the distinction between is and ought. At best it orients toward a kind of conformity or obedience. The other aims to ground “procedure” in rational ethics, conditions of dialogue, and what Habermas calls ideal speech situations.

“Legitimation through procedure does not mean here going back to formal conditions for the moral-practical justification of legal norms; it means rather keeping to procedural prescriptions in administering, applying, and enacting law. Legitimacy rests then on ‘belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands’. It remains unclear how the belief in legality is supposed to summon up the force of legitimation if legality means only conformity with an actually existing legal order, and if this order, as arbitrarily enacted law, is not in turn open to practical-moral justification. The belief in legality can produce legitimacy only if we already presuppose the legitimacy of the legal order that lays down what is legal. There is no way out of this circle…. The transitions between ‘agreed upon’ and ‘imposed’ order are fluid” (p. 265, emphasis added).

Empirical, factual conformity to law is no guarantee of moral rightness. The Nazi regime in Germany, for example, had a factual conformity to law, thanks in part to the apologetics of Carl Schmitt. This can hardly be taken to legitimate it.

“Notwithstanding these fluid transitions, the two sources of legitimacy on which the belief in legality depends can certainly be distinguished analytically: rationally motivated agreement versus the imposition of a powerful will” (p. 266).

Here he puts it very clearly. Legal/political “impositionism” is a kind of voluntarism. Like all voluntarism, it elevates arbitrary will above reason. This effectively destroys the space in which ethical reason could flourish, by eliminating the possibility of questioning whatever is imposed.

Habermas is very clear that there is a sharp opposition between any kind of authoritative “imposition” and agreement based on reasons. I find this highly commendable. Unlike Brandom, he does not get caught up in apologizing for the elements of impositionism that can also be found in the natural law tradition.

(Brandom even takes this so far as to retrospectively claim a historically progressive role for theological voluntarism. I think Brandom is a truly great philosopher overall, but on this particular issue Habermas seems to do much better. Brandom is quite right that the natural law theorists like Pufendorf introduced new ideas of holding authority to certain standards of reasonableness. But he takes the voluntarist element in Pufendorf to be an essential ingredient, rather than an unresolved inconsistency. Indeed everyone seems to call Pufendorf a political voluntarist. But my brief examination of Pufendorf did not find him emphasizing the justification of arbitrary actions, which is the sin qua non of voluntarism. Quite the contrary, his avowed emphasis seemed to be on reasonable standards. Pufendorf wrote during the age of absolute monarchies, when any advocate of limitations on the monarch’s prerogative had to write cautiously.)

“Belief in the legality of a procedure cannot per se — that is, in virtue of positive enactment — produce legitimacy” (ibid).

Legality is a mere fact. Rightness is an ideal.

“Weber confuses an appeal to the need to justify legal domination — that is, an attempt to go back to the legitimating foundation of rational agreement — with an appeal to particular values” (p. 267).

Habermas is saying that Weber treats criteria of reasonableness in law and politics as inevitably particularist. Habermas sharply rejects this conclusion, as do I.

“Weber forcefully works out the formal properties of modern law, on the basis of which it is suited as a means of organization for subsystems of purposive-rational action. But he restricts the concept of law positivistically to such an extent that he can neglect the moral-practical aspect of rationalization (the principle of justification) and take account only of its cognitive-instrumental aspect (the principle of enactment). Weber considers the advances of modern legal development exclusively from the standpoint of formal rationality, that is, of a value-neutral, means-ends, systematic shaping of spheres of action, which is tailored to the type of strategic action. The rationalization of law is then no longer measured against the inner logic of the moral-practical sphere of value, as is that of ethics and life-conduct; it is directly connected to the progress of knowledge in the cognitive-instrumental sphere of value” (p. 268).

This is to say that despite his commendable neo-Kantian scruples regarding the importance of values, Weber aims to completely withdraw questions of value from law and politics.

“The assumption — which sprang up with legal positivism and was adopted and overextended by social-scientific functionalism — that normative validity claims could be withdrawn, without any noteworthy consequences for the stability of the legal system in the consciousness of the system’s members, is empirically untenable” (p. 269).

I quite agree with Habermas that a policy that is disconnected from all values cannot and does not govern in real life. But it matters a lot whether we criticize the empiricist freedom from values from a point of view of inquiry into reasons, or from a traditionalist point of view that takes reasons for granted, and treats the questioning of authority as improper.

“This leads to a rather ironic consequence for Weber’s diagnosis of the times. He deplores the switch from ethical to purely utilitarian action orientations…. Thus he ought to welcome movements that are directed against parallel tendencies in the law…. [But] Weber regards as detracting from the formal qualities of law not only traditionalist attempts to reideologize it but also progressive efforts to reattach it to procedural requirements for grounding” (ibid).

Apparently, Weber regards the formal positivity of law (the principle of “enactment”) as having more to do with the rationalization of modern society — which he sees in terms of technique — than any substantive inquiry into reasons. Habermas traces this to defects in the way action is understood.

“It is not my intention to pursue a critique of ideology probing the roots of this inconsistency. I am concerned with the immanent reasons for Weber’s inability to carry through his theory of rationalization as it is set up…. First, I want to unearth certain bottlenecks in the concept formation of his action theory…. Second, I would like to show that the ambiguity in the rationalization of law cannot be grasped at all within the limits of a theory of action” (p. 270).

This is extremely important. Meaning is not adequately explainable by the mental intentions of nominal subjects. Along with Habermas, Paul Ricoeur and Alain de Libera have pointed out major blockages in the 20th-century “theory of action”. Gwenaëlle Aubry has developed an Aristotelian alternative that I rather like. Brandom has developed a new normative pragmatics and a new inferentialist semantics. He sees Kant as having developed a highly original alternative notion of intentionality that is based on shareable notions of responsibility and commitment, rather than on attributions of private subjective consciousness or belief.

“Intentionalist semantics is based on the counterintuitive idea that understanding the meaning of a symbolic expression X can be traced back to understanding the intention of speaker S…. For a theory of communicative action only those analytic theories of meaning are instructive that start from the structure of linguistic expressions rather than from speakers’ intentions” (pp. 274-275).

Linguistic expressions have a degree of objectivity, substantiality, or seriousness mainly because they are shareable. About the private intentions and mental states of speakers we can only speculate in the ordinary pejorative, non-Hegelian sense. With what is said on the other hand (at the level of understandable meaning and what Habermas calls validity claims, not that of putative bare fact or event), we can go much further.

“Starting from the pragmatist theory of signs introduced by Pierce and developed by Morris, Carnap made the symbolic complex … accessible to an internal analysis from syntactic and semantic points of view. The bearers of meaning are not isolated signs but elements of a language system, that is, sentences whose form is determined by syntactic rules and whose semantic content is determined by relations to designated objects or states of affairs. With Carnap’s logical syntax and the basic assumption of referential semantics, the way was opened to a formal analysis of the representational function of language. On the other hand, Carnap considered the appellative and expressive functions of language as pragmatic aspects that should be left to empirical analysis” (p. 276).

“The theory of meaning was finally established as a formal science only with the step from reference semantics to truth semantics. The semantics founded by Frege and developed through the early Wittgenstein to Davidson and Dummet gives center stage to the relation between sentence and state of affairs, between language and the world. With this ontological turn, semantic theory disengaged itself from the view that the representational function can be clarified on the model of names that designate objects. The meaning of sentences, and the understanding of sentence meanings, cannot be separated from language’s inherent relation to the validity of statements. Speakers and hearers understand the meaning of a sentence when they know under what conditions it is true. Correspondingly, they understand the meaning of a word when they know what contribution it makes to the capacity of truth of a sentence formed with its help. Thus truth semantics developed the thesis that the meaning of a sentence is determined by its truth conditions” (pp. 276-277).

This mini-history of 20th-century philosophy of language is very close to that put forward by Brandom, who calls Habermas one of his heros. (Habermas in turn sympathetically cites Rorty.)

Habermas is enthusiastic about Austin and Searle’s work on speech acts, and points out that this belongs to the more generally neglected area of the pragmatics of language. I think this predates Brandom’s major original work on a normative pragmatics.

“The limits of this approach become visible as soon as the different modes of using sentences are brought under formal consideration…. Along the line from the later Wittgenstein through Austin to Searle, the formal semantics of sentences was extended to speech acts. It is no longer limited to the representational function of language but is open to an unbiased analysis of the multiplicity of illocutionary forces” (p. 277).

Here we touch on Habermas’s version of the critique of representationalism. In its place he suggests that we address a multiplicity of illocutionary forces (taking force in the Fregean linguistic sense, rather than the more common one). Habermas strongly ties Austin’s “illocution” — or the doing involved in speech acts — with conditions and practices for evaluation of what he calls validity claims, as distinct from claims of truth.

“The theory of speech acts marks the first step toward a formal pragmatics that extends to noncognitive modes of employment. At the same time … it remains tied to the narrow ontological presuppositions of truth-conditional semantics. The theory of meaning can attain the level of integration of the communication theory that Bühler advanced in a programmatic way only if it is able to provide a systematic grounding for the appellative and expressive functions of language (and perhaps also for the ‘poetic’ function related to the linguistic means themselves, as this was developed by Jakobson)” (ibid).

One of the areas in which Habermas has been criticized has been his avowed commitment to a form of “cognitivism”. But once again, the vocabulary is ambiguous. Cognitivism could mean anything from the view that all judgment is exclusively of a calculating sort, to the view that value judgments depend on interpretation of meaning. Habermas rejects the former, and endorses the latter. He emphasizes that there are also “noncognitive” elements in speech acts.

“For this purpose the paradigm change in philosophy of language that was introduced by J. L. Austin … must be radicalized in such a way that the break with the ‘logos characterization of language’, that is, with privileging its representational function, also has consequences for the choice of ontological presuppositions in the theory of language…. It is with this in mind that I have proposed that we do not set illocutionary force over against propositional content as an irrational force, but conceive of it as the component which specifies which validity claim a speaker is raising with his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what” (pp. 277-278).

Illocutionary force is “the component which specifies which validity claim a speaker is raising with his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what”. This seems like a nice alternative to subject-centered notions of intentionality.

“With the illocutionary force of an utterance a speaker can motivate a hearer to accept the offer contained in his speech act and thereby accede to a rationally motivated binding (or bonding, Bindung) force” (p. 278).

He criticizes the appeals that Weber and others make to consciousness, as if it were a source. We ought to look at shareable meaning instead. The only thing that makes anything binding is the so-called force of reasons.

“Weber does not rely here on a theory of meaning but on a theory of consciousness. He does not elucidate ‘meaning’ in connection with the model of speech; he does not relate it to the linguistic medium of possible understanding, but to the beliefs and intentions of an acting subject, taken to begin in isolation” (p. 279).

“Weber does not start with the social relationship. He regards as rationalizable only the means-ends relation of teleologically [sic] conceived, monological action. If one adopts this perspective, the only aspects of action open to objective appraisal are the effectiveness of a causal intervention into an existing situation and the truth of the empirical assertions that underlie the maxim or the plan of action — that is, the subjective belief about a purposive-rational organization of means” (p. 281).

Here he enumerates symptoms of what he calls a “monological” (opposite to dialogical) exclusive focus on what I would call a modern interpretation of efficient causality as a basis for explanation. He emphasizes the second-person, “I-Thou” communicative aspect of reason over the more common reduction of everything to first- and third-person (“subjective” and “objective”) points of view. He is arguing that the reason we ought to care about and cultivate has an I-Thou character, first and foremost.

“A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party, whether instrumentally through intervention in the situation directly or strategically through influencing the decisions of opponents. Agreement can indeed be objectively obtained by force; but what comes to pass manifestly through outside influence or the use of violence cannot count subjectively as agreement” (p. 287).

I want to cheer when I read things like this.

“If we were not in a position to refer to the model of speech, we could not even begin to analyze what it means for two subjects to come to an understanding with one another. Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech…. The concepts of speech and understanding reciprocally interpret one another” (ibid, emphasis added).

I think Plato and Aristotle were very aware of this reciprocity between speech and understanding, but it got largely forgotten later on. Plato centrally stresses open dialogue and questioning as the way to truth. Aristotle develops a whole art of simultaneously addressing linguistic meaning, reality, and ultimate rightness in a balanced way that anticipates many points in Kant and Hegel.

“”[E]xamples of the use of language with an orientation to consequences seem to decrease the value of speech acts as the model for action oriented to reaching understanding.”

Here consequences are understood in a modern causal sense, and not a logical or inferential one. Consequences and truth conditions were the main concern of earlier analytic philosophy. There is an ethical view called “consequentialism” that judges deeds strictly by their outcome, and is closely related to utilitarianism.

“This will turn out not to be the case only if it can be shown that the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use, upon which indirect understanding, giving something to understand or letting something be understood, and the instrumental use of language in general, are parasitic. In my view, Austin’s distinction between illocutions and perlocutions accomplishes just that” (p. 288, emphasis in original).

This is very important. Second-person communication is more primary than third-person representation. Habermas recalls Austin’s three-way distinction among speech acts.

“Through locutionary acts the speaker addresses states of affairs; he says something. Through illocutionary acts the speaker performs an action in saying something…. Finally, through perlocutionary acts the speaker produces an effect upon the hearer…. The self-sufficiency of the speech act is to be understood in the sense that the communicative intent of the speaker and the illocutionary aim he is pursuing follow from the manifest meaning of what is said. It is otherwise with teleological [sic] actions. We identify their meaning only in connection with the intentions their authors are pursuing and the ends they want to realize. As the meaning of what is said is constitutive for illocutionary acts, the intention of the agent is constitutive for teleological [sic] actions” (pp. 288-289).

The kind of meaning we should care most about links the “manifest” meaning of what is said with the pragmatics of justification. Representational and truth-conditional semantics are logistical tools that should be in service to a broader pragmatic inquiry. Brandom has developed an original inferential semantics, in close connection with a normative pragmatics that he considers ultimately to be more primary.

“What we mean by reaching understanding has to be clarified solely in connection with illocutionary acts” (p. 293).

This follows from his description of the three kinds of speech acts.

“I have called the type of interaction in which all participants harmonize their individual plans of action with one another and thus pursue their illocutionary aims without reservation ‘communicative action’ (p. 294, emphasis in original).

Now he says that the whole huge topic he has been addressing as distinctively communicative action revolves around illocution.

“Thus I count as communicative action those linguistically mediated interactions in which all participants pursue illocutionary aims, and only illocutionary aims” (p. 295, emphasis in original).

He glosses this in terms of the “acceptability” of speech acts.

“We understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable” (p. 297, emphasis in original).

“A speech act may be called ‘acceptable’ if it satisfies the conditions that are necessary in order that the hearer be allowed to take a ‘yes’ position on the claim raised by the speaker. These conditions cannot be satisfied one-sidedly, either relative to the speaker or to the hearer. They are conditions rather for the intersubjective recognition of a linguistic claim” (p. 298, emphasis in original).

“Registering a validity claim is not the expression of a contingent will; and responding affirmatively to a validity claim is not merely an empirically motivated decision…. Validity claims are internally connected with reasons and grounds” (p. 301, emphasis in original).

This is the beginning of wisdom.

“That a speaker means what he says can be made credible only in the consistency of what he does and not through providing grounds” (p. 303).

In an earlier post, we saw that Habermas carefully distinguishes between truth, validity, and sincerity.

“We have distinguished genuine imperatives, with which the speaker connects a claim to power, from speech acts with which the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim” (p. 304).

Claims of authority too are qualitatively different from claims of validity or general reasonableness. In discussions of validity, authority as such has no place. To bring claims of authority into a discussion of reasons, where claims of authority have no place, is a kind of cheating.

“We discover the incompleteness of the literal meaning of expressions only through a sort of problematizing that is not directly under our control. It emerges as a result of problems that appear objectively and have an unsettling effect on our natural worldview. The fundamental background knowledge that must tacitly supplement our knowledge of the acceptability conditions of linguistically standardized expressions if hearers are to be able to understand their literal meanings, has remarkable features: It is an implicit knowledge that cannot be represented in a finite number of propositions; it is a holistically structured knowledge, the basic elements of which intrinsically define one another; and it is a knowledge that does not stand at our disposition, inasmuch as we cannot make it conscious and place it in doubt as we please” (p. 336, emphasis in original).

Habermas on Heidegger

I don’t usually like to dwell on the negative, but Heidegger has aggressively demeaned Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Western philosophy as a whole, and I just stumbled on this. In the 2023 English translation of the first part of his Also a History of Philosophy (German ed. 2019), leading German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas has some very sharp remarks.

Habermas was only four years old when Hitler took power in 1933. Like many children, he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he “was shaken to his core by what he learnt of the Nazi atrocities from the Nuremberg Trials, and news coverage of the Holocaust. Thus, although still in his teens, he experienced 1945 as a turning point that would shape his political and cultural outlook”. In 1953, Habermas was again extremely disturbed when Heidegger published his 1934 Introduction to Metaphysics lectures, without removing a reference to “the inner greatness” of national socialism.

Speaking about Heidegger’s student the philosopher Karl Löwith, who was Jewish and was forced to emigrate, Habermas says “Löwith wants to strip away everything forced and solemnly exalted from the necessary return to the ancient understanding of nature, that gesture of elitist self-dramatization he had come to detest above all in the teaching and comportment, in the character and attitude, of his teacher Martin Heidegger” (p. 26). Elsewhere I read that Löwith himself recounts that when he met Heidegger in Switzerland during the war, Heidegger was wearing his swastika pin. This colors Heidegger’s claim that he had no more identification with the Nazis after 1934.

“[W]ith his concept of the ‘history of being’, Heidegger radicalized [philosophy of history] into a dubious second-level historicism…. Underlying this problematic figure of thought is the infallible claim to truth that Heidegger himself raises for the assertion of a metahistorical ‘occurrence of truth’, which in turn outstrips the already excessively strong claims to truth of the major systems of Western metaphysics” (p. 28).

“Being and Time could still have been situated in the context of those major nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual movements, which, since the Young Hegelians, contributed to a detranscendentalization of the world-projecting spontaneity of Kantian subjectivity” (ibid). “But in fact Heidegger’s pretension overshoots all attempts to merely desublimate the transcendental world-projecting subjectivity of the human mind into a spontaneous mode of life in the world” (pp. 28-29).

“Heidegger is indeed a master when it comes to explicating the habitual performative knowledge that enables us to engage in the everyday practices of dealing with whatever we encounter in the world. These convincing analyses of a broad spectrum of lifeworld references of human ‘Dasein’ are, however, deflected onto a different path when Heidegger short-circuits the examination of human beings’ mode of existence with the ontological intention of grasping the being of beings as such…. But since the question of being is internally connected with the question of truth, the ontological redirection of the analytic of Dasein to the question of the being of beings leads to a far-reaching prejudicing of the understanding of truth — namely, the confusion of truth with world disclosure” (p. 29).

This “world disclosure” is a comprehensive name for all immediate experience of appearance, or immediate consciousness. While at some level appearance does deserve a kind of embrace as a necessary condition of life, a resolve to treat immediate appearance as having the final character of an unquestionable revelation makes dialogue impossible.

“By transforming the performatively known ‘how’ of standing in the horizon of our lifeworld into an explicit ‘knowledge’ of ‘what’, Heidegger brings a network of categories and attitudes (the so-called existentials) to consciousness that enables us to see the world and occurrences in it from a certain perspective, to experience it in certain emotional states and to address it under certain aspects. It is the ontological radicalization of this topic of linguistic world disclosure (as he would put it following Humboldt) into the metaphysical question of being and truth that misleads Heidegger into assimilating ‘truth’ to ‘world disclosure’. Heidegger de-differentiates the clearly defined concept of propositional truth by assimilating it to the concept of ‘revealing’ world disclosure” (pp. 29-30).

As a young person, I was seduced by 1960s talk about immediacy and spontaneity, and for a while even took up the idea that what the world needed was a kind of renunciation of the non-immediate.

“The mistake, already implicit in Being and Time, of confusing the truth of propositions with a world disclosure that is ontologized and therefore immune to objections, is what lends the concept of the history of being its force” (p. 30). “In this way, the a priori of ‘world disclosure’ swallows up the critical potential of the ‘claim to truth’, because the power of the capacity to say ‘no’ can no longer extend to the basic conceptual structure in which being interprets itself. The crisis-proneness of the history of being is explained by the dialectical character of this self-interpretation of being: it simultaneously reveals and conceals itself in its epochal destinies. By withholding itself from apprehension, it makes itself felt by human beings as the calamity of God’s ‘absence’ or — in the Hölderlinesque neo-pagan jargon of the zeitgeist — of the gods” (ibid).

It is this immunity to objections that I object to as extremely dangerous.

“With the concept of the history of being, Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy in a way that retains from the concept of ideology the moment of historically imposed illusion, but at the same time excludes the possibility of illumination through reflection” (ibid).

The exclusion of reflection and questioning that follows from a fixation on immediacy is the real disaster. All the higher achievements of spirit depend on reflection and mediation. Heidegger claims to expose the dogmatism of all other philosophy, and makes a lot of noise about it. This deflects our attention from the fact that giving strong normative status to immediacy effectively rules out any alternative to dogmatism. There is bad faith in these accusations, and if we try to resist, bad faith will be unfairly projected onto to us, which is the most insidious aspect of all this.

“Heidegger blames science and technology for the crisis from which supposedly only a return to the origins of Greek mythology — reaching back behind even the axial threshold of the Platonic logos and the God of the Old Testament — can rescue us. His fixation on the question of being leads him to focus on the deficiencies of theoretical and not — as in Schmitt and Strauss — of practical reason. Ultimately, the fateful alienation from the origin is implicit in reason itself” (pp. 30-31).

This discussion of Heidegger is part of a larger critique by Habermas of 20th-century claims by conservative authors like Schmitt and Strauss that central Enlightenment values like reason, freedom, and equal rights inevitably lead modernity into moral crisis.

“Even simple predicative statements, with which the discursive unfolding of possible cognitions as such begins, already involve an objectivistic ‘distortion’ of the pre-predicative, purely performative ‘know-how’. This deficiency inherent in the operations of reason is supposed to be the result of an act of objectivization that suppresses all connections and holistic references with which we are acquainted only in performance — and fatefully ‘forgets’ them” (p. 31).

There is a huge difference between recognizing that simple predications can be taken in a dogmatic way, and claiming that they inevitably, intrinsically lead to crisis and disaster.

As Habermas writes with obvious irony, “Against this background of a devaluation of the ‘normal’ concept of reason, philosophers are promoted into thinkers and, together with the poets, are sworn to a nondiscursive ‘apprehension of being'” (ibid).

Henceforth, according to Heidegger, philosophy should concern itself exclusively with putative poetic revelation, and reject everything that is not such a revelation. Opposite to this, I think both poetry and religion fare better when what is called revelation is understood as a kind of poetic expression that may be intensely meaningful for us, but does not serve to exclude anything.

What gives standard assertion its weight or “bite” is the fact that it has meaning by virtue of distinguishing from what would contradict it. But one poetic expression does not contradict another. Treating poetic expression as a “revelation” of truth rather than as figurative undoes its character as poetic expression. Claims of revelation introduce a literalism or incipient fundamentalism that is the opposite of a poetic spirit.