Feeling

We talking animals are like amphibians or dual citizens. We share basic sentience and emotion with many other biological species (at the very least least other mammals, and perhaps in some rudimentary sense all living things). We also participate in a larger, shared realm of language and reason that is open to all possessed of such. Reason and emotion interact in complex ways.

The fact that we participate in language and reason thus contributes in a major way to the overall constitution of our feeling. Just as practical reasonableness is deeply tied to our emotional state and constitution, we also tend to respond emotionally when we judge things to be reasonable or unreasonable.

Our feelings are in one sense wholly ours, but the words we speak to ourselves are not wholly our own, and they do also significantly influence our feelings, so in another sense, our feelings are not wholly ours, either. (Also, there is a passivity in feeling.) In terms of taking responsibility, such questions of “ownership” do not matter much — far more important is what we feel and think, and how well. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; Honesty, Kindness.)

Mutual Recognition

Hegelian mutual recognition puts ethical considerations of reciprocity with others to the fore. In part, it is a more sophisticated version of the idea behind the golden rule. It also suggests that anyone’s authority and responsibility for anything should always be evenly balanced. It is also a social, historical theory of the genesis of meaning, value, and identity. Hegel’s notion was partly anticipated by Fichte.

Brandom reads mutual recognition as central to Hegel’s ethics or practical philosophy, and Hegel’s practical philosophy as central to his philosophy as a whole. Prior to the publication of A Spirit of Trust (2019), what I take to be Brandom’s own deep ethical engagement was often not recognized. I hope the situation will soon improve.

Consistent with Brandom’s general approach, the ethics of A Spirit of Trust appears in a highly mediated form. Much of the work of ethics for Brandom comes down to the implementation and practice of normative pragmatics and inferential semantics, which he has been expounding at least since Making It Explicit (1994). So, I think he has been laying the groundwork for a long time.

One recent commentator (Lewis 2018) suggested that ethics proper was just missing from Brandom’s earlier accounts. His citations for this were to Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard, whose readings of Hegel are often compared to Brandom’s. I cannot find the text of Pinkard’s 2007 article, but Pippin in the course of his searching but still very sympathetic review “Brandom’s Hegel” (2005) had suggested there was at that time an important gap in Brandom’s reading, related to Hegel’s lifelong concern with a critical treatment of positivity, i.e., received views and institutionalized claims.

Pippin cited an ambiguous argument from Making It Explicit that seemed to support the social legitimacy of a commitment to enlist in the Navy by a drunken sailor who was tricked into a contract by accepting a shilling for more beer. Brandom has since clarified in several places that he did not mean to himself endorse this argument, based as it is on a partial perspective (see, e.g., Hegel’s Ethical Innovation). In Spirit of Trust terms, Brandom’s point in such a context would be to emphasize that the freedom associated with agency does not entail mastery, and in particular that we do not have mastery over the content of our own commitments. The issue for Pippin in 2005 was that Brandom appeared to put sole responsibility and authority for determining the content of commitments on the audience. Pippin found with respect to positivity “not so much a problem as a gap, a lacuna that Brandom obviously feels comfortable leaving unfilled” in Making It Explicit. I suspect Brandom’s lack of discomfort was directly tied to a deferral of such considerations to his 40-year magnum opus project, A Spirit of Trust.

For years, something like Pippin’s positivity issue was a main topic of discussion between my late father and me. For both of us, it was the big hurdle to overcome in fully recognizing Brandom as the world-historic giant we both thought he would probably turn out to be. I thought the positivity issue already began to be addressed in the early web draft of A Spirit of Trust, and I suspect it was a significant focus while Brandom was working on the final text.

In any event, I think it is clear that in the published Spirit of Trust, the determination of the content of commitments is envisioned not as stopping with an immediate audience, but as involving an indefinitely recursive expansion of mutually determining I-Thou relationships. On my reading, normative statuses that are both fully determinate and unconditionally deontically binding would only emerge from the projection of this expansion into infinity. But in practical contexts, we never deal with actual infinity, only with indefinite recursive expansions that have been cut off at some relatively early point. (See also Hegelian Genealogy.)

We always work with defeasible approximations — finite truncations of a recursive expansion through many relationships of reciprocal determination. This means in particular that judgments of deontic bindingness are defeasible approximations.

Further, the kind of approximation at issue here is not a statistical one, but a more Aristotelian sort of “probability”. It therefore cannot be assumed to monotonically improve as the expansion progresses, so it is not guaranteed that further expansion will not suddenly require a significant revision of previous commitments or concepts, as Brandom explicitly points out (see Error).

This means that the legitimacy of the queen’s shilling and any other received truth is actually open to dispute and therefore open to any rational argument, including those the sobered-up sailor might make. In Brandom’s favorite example, new case law — though of course subject to higher-level canons of determinate negation in its own future interpretation and evaluation — may significantly revise existing case law in unforeseeable ways.

I believe this gives us all the space we need for social criticism. We need have no fear that Brandom’s version of the mutual recognition principle will bind us to positivity. Nothing is out of bounds for the autonomy of reason. We only have to be honest about the conceptual content we encounter in the detail of the recursive expansion. I believe this is the answer to the lingering concerns I expressed in Robust Recognition and Genealogy. Even if Brandom himself were to turn out not to go quite this far, I think at worst this is a friendly amendment that does not disrupt the framework. (See also Edifying Semantics; Reasonableness.)

The recursive expansion of mutual recognition pushes it toward the kind of universality on which Kant based the categorical imperative. Practical outcomes from the two approaches ought to be similar. Hegel’s version is useful because it is grounded in social relationships rather than a pure metaphysics of morals, but still escapes empirical, “positive” constraints by indefinitely expanding the network toward the concrete universality of a universal community of rational beings. (See also Mutual Recognition Revisited; Pippin on Mutual Recognition; Hegel’s Ethical Innovation).

Rational Ethics

When Hegel said that Plato and Aristotle were the great educators of the human race, I think he had in mind not only their exemplary nondogmatism, but also their rational ethics. The advent of rational ethics was a world-historic advance. I even think it might be unequalled. (See also Reasons.)

This suggests a further clarification of my view on the vexed modernity debate. At a more elemental level, I had suggested that philosophy — understood as the recognition of genuine questions in normative matters — might almost be substituted for modernity, hypothetically understood typologically as any step away from the unquestioned governance of pre-given traditional norms. At issue then was philosophy as a whole, the content of which I believe is all at least indirectly normative. But a more specific argument could also be made about rational ethics, where the content is by definition normative.

Aristotle would remind us that if we speak of this flowering of expressive metaconcepts as an “event”, it is said in an extremely different way than a bare reference to an empirical event, the content of which is completely undetermined by the reference.

This suggests a clarification of something else that has been nagging at me in the modernity debate, and why I have been anxious to substitute an explicit typological criterion of modernity for references to what sounds like a chronological threshold. A chronological threshold is just an abstraction for some empirical events associated with it. The geistlich content we might attribute to empirical events is not made evident at all by reference to them, so there is a lack of determination in all simple, putatively empirical references to “modernity”.

Anyway, I’d like to suggest that the greatest watershed in the development of Geist was the advent of rational ethics. Then the next biggest thing after that could be said to be the making explicit of the mutual recognition model.

This also clarifies another perplexity I had about the relation between valuations of modernity and Brandomian postmodernity. Phase two of three in Brandom’s schema seems objectively to be mainly characterized by what really did turn out to be understood by him as negatively valued alienation, but in other passages he lauds phase two as the main event of progressive history. In that case, I would have expected the positively valued big event to be the phase three synthesis resolving the alienation, rather than the phase two alienation itself. But if we instead specify phase two as something like rational ethics and phase three as its enhancement by the mutual recognition model, then it does make more sense to assign the highest value to phase two. Since it restores to norms an emergent, synthetic objectivity — arising out of the mutual recognition process — the mutual recognition model can be understood as the (second) negation of the questioning (first negation) of the traditional putative simple, pre-given objectivity of norms from which rational ethics begins.

(As the above paragraph illustrates, it takes real interpretive work to identify something like a Hegelian triple and give it reasonable semantics.)

Theology

I believe there is an implicit suggestion in Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel that sound theology must include extensive concern with a universally accessible common ground of ethics understood by means of reason with no appeal to external authority.

My own view is that the highest form of faith is intransitive. It could not have articles. It is not a belief in some propositions, but a pure affective attitude and way of being and doing. Anything else is just a way to get to that, if it is a way to anything at all. This would be somewhat akin to traditional negative theology. (See also Plotinus; God and the Soul; First Principles Come Last; Affirmation; Belief.)

Authority, Reason

[This post assumed what I still take to be the common or usual notion of “authority” as something that is supposed to be unconditionally binding under some circumstances. It does not apply to a notion of authority that would be always symmetrically balanced by reciprocal responsibility, and therefore always defeasible.]

Authority is a poor substitute for reason. It gives us ready-made conclusions that may be true, but are without justification. When we have reason and reasons, we have no need to be guided by authority.

Respectable authors have nonetheless talked about rational authority. The idea is that reasons should have something like a sort of authority over us. That is fine, as long as we recognize it as a metaphor or simile rather than a literal truth.

The difference is, precisely, that authority operates fundamentally in registers of will, compulsion, and obedience. Authority at its core does not answer to reasons. “Do it because I said so!” or just “Obey!” is its first and last move. Obedience to authority is characterized by heteronomy rather than autonomy, in Kant’s sense of those terms.

We may be freely “compelled” only by reasons, when we genuinely find them to be genuinely convincing. That is very different from someone compelling us, or from our having internalized an external compulsion. (See also Euthyphro; Necessity in Normativity; Binding; Deontic; Enlightenment.)