Interpretation

It seems to me that the main thing human reason does in real life is to interpret the significance of things. When we think of something, many implicit judgments about it are brought into scope. In a way, Kant already suggested this with his accounts of synthesis.

In real-world human reasoning, the actually operative identity of the things we reason about is not the trivial formal identity of their names or symbols, but rather a complex one constituted by the implications of all the judgments implicitly associated with the things in question. (See also Identity, Isomorphism; Aristotelian Identity.)

This is why people sometimes seem to talk past one another. The same words commonly imply different judgments for different people, so it is to be expected that this leads to different reasoning. That is why Plato recommended dialogue, and why Aristotle devoted so much attention to sorting out different ways in which things are “said”. (See also Aristotelian Semantics.)

I think human reason uses complex material inference (reasoning based on intermediate meaning content rather than syntax) to evaluate meanings and situations in an implicit way that usually ends up looking like simple summary judgment at a conscious level, but is actually far more involved. A great deal goes on, very rapidly and below the level of our awareness. Every surface-level judgment or assertion implicitly depends on many interpretations.

Ever since Aristotle took the first steps toward formalization of logic, people have tended to think of real-world human reasoning in terms modeled straightforwardly on formal or semi-formal logical operations, with meanings of terms either abstracted away or taken for granted. (Aristotle himself did not make this mistake, as noted above.) This fails to take into account the vast amount of implicit interpretive work that gets encapsulated into ordinary terms, by means of their classification into what are effectively types, capturing everything that implicitly may be relevantly said about the things in question in the context of our current unity of apperception.

A logical type for a thing works as shorthand for many judgments about the thing. Conversely, classification and consequent effective identity of the thing depend on those judgments.

As a result of active deliberation, we often refine our preconscious interpretations of things, and sometimes replace them altogether. Deliberation and dialectic are the testing ground of interpretations.

In general, interpretation is an open-ended task. It seems to me that it also involves something like what Kant called free play. (See also Hermeneutics; Theory and Practice; Philosophy; Ethical Reason; The Autonomy of Reason; Foundations?; Aristotelian Demonstration; Brandom on Truth.)

Three Logical Moments

The “Logic Defined & Divided” chapter of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic contains some brilliant, relatively popular aphorisms from his lectures, and provides a nice introduction to his views. Having recently treated with approval Kant’s denunciation of speculation in the usual sense, I’m turning to this now because among other riches, it contains Hegel’s recovery of an alternative, much more positive sense for “speculation”. As Aristotle would remind us, things are said in many ways, and it is wise to give heed to the differences.

Hegel says that every notion and truth involves three moments that are all essential and cannot really be separated from one another: Understanding, Dialectic, and Speculation.

In other places, Hegel frequently polemicizes against the narrowness and rigidity of mere Understanding. Here, he rounds out the picture, noting that “apart from Understanding there is no fixity or accuracy in the region of theory or of practice” and that knowledge begins “by apprehending existing objects in their specific differences”. He cites examples of how Understanding contributes to science, mathematics, law, practical life, art, religion, and philosophy.

Preparing the transition to dialectic, he notes “It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions — but the man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract ‘either-or’, and keeps to the concrete”. Dialectic for Hegel if viewed separately is the moment of “negative” Reason or criticism. He says that dialectic subordinated to Understanding’s mode of thought leads to skepticism, but dialectic freed from this subordination builds on distinctions developed by the Understanding, even while “the one-sidedness and limitation of the predicates of understanding is seen in its true light”. Dialectic studies things “in their own being and movement”. He goes on to expound Plato’s use of dialectic, and its difference from sophistry. (See also Contradiction vs Polarity; Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic.)

Speculation in Hegel’s special sense is the “positive” moment of Reason, which if considered separately begins from a kind of faith in reasonableness in the world. He implicitly connects it with a charitable reading of the long religious tradition of faith seeking understanding, construed in such a way as to be not incompatible with a charitable version of Enlightenment criticism. He notes that “the true reason-world, so far from being the exclusive property of philosophy, is the right of every human being [of] whatever grade of culture or mental growth”, adding that “experience first makes us aware of the reasonable order of things… by accepted and unreasoned belief”. Once this rational order becomes an object of thought rather than mere belief, we have speculative Reason proper.

Speculative Reason builds on both Understanding and dialectic. “A one-sided proposition… can never even give expression to a speculative truth.” He notes a connection between this and basic intuitive fairness. Starting from a simple faith in the reasonableness of the world and advancing through various stages of criticism, speculative Reason ultimately realizes substance as subject, and overcomes the dichotomy of subject and object.

Dialectic undid the abstract, atomistic, foundationalist, “either-or” tendencies of isolated Understanding. Speculative Reason in Hegel’s sense turns this into a new affirmation. In many places, Hegel talks about Reason or dialectic in ways that subsume both the dialectical and the speculative moment described here.

I read Hegelian speculative Reason — or dialectic incorporating the speculative moment — as just ordinary reason moving forward without the crutches of foundationalism and dogmatic claims of certainty. Reason without foundationalism is concerned with the very same open-ended work of interpretation I have attributed to Aristotle. Ultimately, Hegelian Reason is defeasible rational interpretation of experience, optimistically doing the best we can with the resources we have, and always on the lookout for something better. Thus, it too can be reconciled with Kantian discipline. (See also “Absolute” Knowledge?)

Kantian Discipline

The Discipline of Pure Reason chapter in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason makes a number of important points, using the relation between reason and intuition introduced in the Transcendental Analytic. It ends up effectively advocating a form of discursive reasoning as essential to a Critical approach.

If we take a simple empirical concept like gold, no amount of analysis will tell us anything new about it, but he says we can take the matter of the corresponding perceptual intuition and initiate new perceptions of it that may tell us something new.

If we take a mathematical concept like a triangle, we can use it to rigorously construct an object in pure intuition, so that the object is nothing but our construction, with no other aspect.

However, he says, if we take a “transcendental” concept of a reality, substance, force, etc., it refers neither to an empirical nor to a pure intuition, but rather to a synthesis of empirical intuitions that is not itself an empirical intuition, and cannot be used to generate a pure intuition. This is related to Kant’s rejection of “intellectual” intuition. We are constantly tempted to act as if our preconscious syntheses of such abstractions referred to objects in the way that empirical and mathematical concepts do, each in their own way, but according to Kant’s analysis, they do not, because they are neither perceptual nor rigorously constructive.

All questions of what are in effect higher-order expressive classifications of syntheses of empirical intuitions belong to “rational cognition from concepts, which is called philosophical” (Cambridge edition, p.636, emphasis in original). This is again related to his rejection of the apparent simplicity and actual arbitrariness of intellectual intuition and its analogues like supposedly self-evident truth. It opens into the territory I have been calling semantic, and associating with a work of open-ended interpretation. (See also Discursive; Copernican; Dogmatism and Strife; Things In Themselves.)

I am more optimistic than Kant that something valuable — indeed priceless — can come from this sort of open-ended work of interpretation. Its open-endedness means no achieved result is ever beyond question, but I think we implicitly engage in this sort of “philosophical” interpretation every day of our lives, and have no choice in the matter. I also think serious ethical deliberation necessarily makes use of such interpretation, and again we have no choice in the matter. So, pragmatically speaking, defeasible interpretation is indispensable.

Kant goes on to polemicize against attempts to import a mathematical style of reasoning into philosophy, like Spinoza tried to do. Spinoza’s large-scale experiment with this in the Ethics I find fascinating, but ultimately artificial. It does make the inferential structure of his argument more explicit, and Pierre Macherey used this to great advantage in his five-volume French commentary on the Ethics. But there is a big difference between a pure mathematical construction — which can be interpreted without remainder by something like formal structural-operational semantics in the theory of programming languages, and so requires no defeasible interpretation of the sort mentioned above, on the one hand — and work involving concepts that can only be fully explicated by that sort of interpretation, on the other. Big parts of life — and all philosophy — are of the latter sort. So it seems Kant is ultimately right on this.

Kant points out that definition only has precise meaning in mathematics, and prefers to use a different word in other contexts. I make similar well-intentioned but admittedly opinionated recommendations about vocabulary, but what is most important is the conceptual difference. As long as we are clear about that, we can use the same word in more than one sense. As Aristotle would remind us, multiple senses of words are an inescapable feature of natural language.

Kant says that unlike the case of mathematics, in philosophy we should not put definitions first, except perhaps as a mere experiment. Again, he probably has Spinoza in mind, and again — personal fondness for Spinoza notwithstanding — I have to agree. (Macherey in his reading of Spinoza actually often goes in the reverse direction, interpreting the meaning of each part in terms of what it is used to “prove”, but the order of Spinoza’s own presentation most obviously suggests the kind of thing to which Kant is properly objecting.) More than anything else, meanings are what we seek in philosophical inquiry, so they cannot be just given at the start. We can certainly discuss or dialectically analyze stipulated meanings, but that is strictly secondary and subordinate to a larger interpretive work.

Following conventional practice, Kant allows for axioms in mathematics, but says they have no place in philosophy. He has in mind the older notion of axioms as supposedly self-evident truths. Contemporary mathematics has vastly multiplied alternative systems, and effectively treats axioms like stipulative definitions instead. If we have in mind axioms as self-evident truths, Kant’s point holds. If we have in mind axioms as stipulative definitions, then his point about stipulative definitions in philosophy applies to axioms as well.

A similar pattern holds for demonstration or proof. Mathematics for Kant always has to do with strict constructions, which do not apply in philosophy, where there is always matter for interpretation. (From the later 19th century, mathematicians began increasingly to invent theories that seemed to require nonconstructive assumptions — transfinite numbers, standard set theories, and so on. This is currently in flux again. Contrary to what was thought at an earlier time, it now appears that all valid “classical” mathematics, including transfinite numbers, can be expressed in a higher-order constructive formalism. Arguments are still raging about which style is better, but I am sympathetic to the constructive side.) Philosophical arguments are informally reasoned interpretations, not proofs.

Kant says that speculative thought in general, because it does not abide by these guidelines, unfortunately ends up full of what he does not hesitate to call dishonesty and hypocrisy. (When I occasionally ascribe honesty or dishonesty to a philosopher, it is with similar criteria in mind — especially the presence or absence of frank identification of speculation as such when it occurs. See also Likely Stories.)

The kind of philosophy I am recommending is concerned with explication of meanings, not a supposed generation of truths, so it is not speculative in Kant’s sense. What may not be obvious is just how large and vital the field of this sort of interpretation really is in life. The most common and compact form by which such interpretations are expressed in the small looks syntactically like ordinary assertion, and in ordinary social interaction, mistaking one for the other has little effect on communication. When the focus is not on practical communication but on improving our understanding, we have to step back and look at the larger context, in order to tell what is a speculative assertion and what is an interpretation expressed in the form of assertion. (See also Pure Reason, Metaphysics?; Three Logical Moments.)

(In the present endeavor, the great majority of what look like simple assertions are actually compact expressions of interpretations!)

Dialectical Illusion?

The Transcendental Dialectic part of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is mainly concerned with negative conclusions about traditional metaphysics, after the positive conclusions of the Transcendental Analytic. Some sections of the Dialectic, like his arguments about the soul in the Paralogisms and about rational proofs of the existence of God in the section on the Ideal, seem sound, while others, like the overall thesis of the Antinomies that reason necessarily produces contradictory conclusions about cosmology, seem very forced.

Kant’s notion of “dialectic” as essentially generating illusions rather than as the antidote and testing ground for illusions seems unfortunately grounded in little more than early modern anti-Scholastic prejudice (but see Self-Evidence for an alternate or complementary explanation based on the difference between dialectic and demonstration).

I thoroughly agree with his main point that the role of pure reason is not to give us new truths about the world, but to be concerned with higher-order interpretation of experience. I also think the various illusions he points out do seem like illusions, but they seem to me more like tacit assumptions deriving from specific historical cultural formations than inevitable accompaniments of the use of reason. (See Aristotelian Dialectic; Mediation.)

Kant’s Groundwork

Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1784) was Kant’s first major ethical treatise, predating the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). Perhaps the most famous and commented upon of all Kant’s ethical works, Groundwork introduced the categorical imperative. Kant says that the true vocation of reason is not to give us the means to some end, but to produce a moral will that is good in itself. He goes on to sharply distinguish actions done from duty from actions done from inclination, as the only ones deserving of praise. He says that actions from duty get their moral worth from the worth of the maxim (i.e., rationale) that guides choice, rather than from the worth of the aim of the actions. Duty, he says, is the moral necessity of an action from respect for the law. The relevant kind of law must be universal, and the only thing fitting this requirement is the categorical imperative, which is defined in terms of a pure universality.

Kant goes on to argue that while we are constantly tempted to excuse ourselves from acting in accordance with universal moral duty, no utilitarian, prudential, or other excuses have any place in ethics. Everywhere, he says, “one runs into the dear self, which is always thrusting itself forward”. Any resolution of these issues requires common human reason to move into the field of practical philosophy. To be genuine, morality should hold with absolute necessity, binding for all rational beings. Of course, for Kant this does not mean that our subjective conclusions hold with such necessity. To believe that would be to fall for a trick of the “dear self”, and to claim it would be dogmatism.

For Kant, any genuine supreme principle of morality must depend on pure reason, independent of all experience. We should seek a “fully isolated” metaphysics of morals, “mixed with no anthropology, with no theology, with no physics or hyperphysics”, although its application to human beings also requires anthropology. All moral concepts originate in pure reason. The will, Kant says, is just pure practical reason. (See also The Autonomy of Reason.)

Kantian Will

Will for Kant is the ability to act in accordance with a conception of law. In spite of his confusing rhetoric about free will, this is clearly not the voluntarist notion of a faculty superior to reason, free to do or choose any arbitrary thing. However much I dislike images of law in ethics — which by default suggest what Hegel called “positive” or empirically existing, first-order law — acting in accordance with a conception of law is clearly not acting arbitrarily.

Kant also distinguishes between acting in accordance with a conception of law from merely acting in accordance with law. The latter would be mere obedience, without thought. So the important thing is not really the law as such, but thought about how to interpret it. (See also Kant’s Groundwork; Kantian Freedom; The Autonomy of Reason.)

Kantian Freedom

Brandom’s 2007 Woodbridge lectures (reprinted in Reason in Philosophy) opened my eyes to a new and much more positive appreciation of what Kant was trying to say about freedom. Brandom’s treatment is a marvel of clarity in comparison to the tortured arguments of a text like the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant was among the greatest of philosophers, but much of the second Critique seems occupied with producing a square circle, in its attempt to reconcile overly strong Newtonian determinism with the legal and political voluntarism popular among 17th and 18th century theorists like Pufendorf and Rousseau, and related talk about an incompatibilist notion of free will.

Brandom charts a middle path between the extremes of determinism and voluntarism, highlighting Kant’s key insights into freedom as essentially normative and positive and involved with reason, while deemphasizing Kant’s questionable invocations of will and causality in this context. This turns the ugly caterpillar into a butterfly.

The kind of determinism Kant was sympathetic to was the univocal sort, which wants to say not only that that there are sufficient reasons why everything is the way it is, but also that it could not have turned out any other way. I want to say that in hindsight there are always sufficient reasons why everything turned out the way it did, but that in advance, multiple outcomes are possible. (See also Equivocal Determination.)

In terms of the classic medieval debates about the priority of reason or will, Brandom’s reading puts Kant squarely on the side of the priority of reason. Talk about freedom as positive and related to specific capabilities, rather than negative and “infinite”, already rules out voluntarism. Kant’s deep concern with the autonomy of reason is also materially incompatible with any subordination of reason to will.

I think understanding of Kantian freedom should focus on the autonomy of reason, as well as applying something like the Critique of Judgment notion of the free play of the imagination and understanding in reflective judgment to the synthesis of unities of apperception.

After clearing away univocal determinism and voluntarism, we are left with ethics, which seems a good outcome. (See also Structural Causality, Choice; Values, Causality; Kantian Will.)

Rational or Ecstatic?

Reason takes us outside of ourselves, which is the literal meaning of “ecstatic”. Obviously I have in mind here more than just logical operations. It is going outside of our narrower selves into the field of values and entering into the inclusive universal community of mutual recognition that makes us fully human. The universal community only has a virtual existence, so it is up to us to help make it real through our actions and way of life. We can do this in part by treating others in our lives as part of that community, and in part through our own internal dialogue. The less inner noise and turbulence we have, the easier this will be.

The indwelling in us of ethos or Hegelian Spirit is an infinite journey. The journey itself is the goal.

Ethos

Our ethical development, or what Aristotle would call our ethos — our piece of Hegelian Spirit, as it were — builds on our emotional development. A relatively harmonious emotional constitution will be naturally open to the influence of ethical development grounded in mutual recognition.

It seems to me that this is already enough for a fully rich account of a human being. If we have ethos, then things like will, ego, intellectual soul, and mind-as-container seem superfluous.

Self-Consciousness vs Identity

In the development being pursued here, reason, self-consciousness, agency, and responsibility all end up being trans-individual and social things. My emotions are basically mine, but my thoughts, commitments, and actions and their consequences involve more than just me. At the same time, though, as I put it once before, these things that involve more than just me actually say more about who “I” am than my inner state says about “me”. Who we are as ethical beings involves much more than personal identity and what is strictly ours. (See also Ethos, Hexis; Apperception, Identity; Expansive Agency; The Ambiguity of “Self”; Essentially Self-Conscious?; Ego.)