Magnanimity and Its Opposite

When I hear “magnanimity” (literally “big-souledness”, in the ethical complimentary sense of “that’s big of you”), I think of its prominent place in Aristotle’s ethics, as the most comprehensive virtue of character. It is an expansive way of being, an uplifting and morally elevating attitude.

In the final few words of the introduction to A Spirit of Trust (2019), Brandom speaks of “a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all” (p. 32). Much later, his chapter on Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit concludes, “When recognition takes the form of recollection, it is magnanimous, edelmütig forgiveness. The result is the final form of Geist [Hegelian “spirit”, or ethical culture], in which normativity has the form of trust” (p. 582).

Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit are Hegel’s words in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology for what Brandom calls two contrasting metanormative attitudes. One possible translation of Edelmütigkeit is indeed “magnanimity”. An overly literal, etymological rendering of the two would be “noble courage” and “down-heaviness” (perhaps “putting down”, or “down-dragging”, or “dragging through the mud”). We could call them benevolent generosity and mean-spiritedness, or magnanimity and pettiness. The draft of A Spirit of Trust that Brandom first put on his web page around 2012 initially caught my interest largely based on this part of the book.

Hegel’s discussion revolves around the allegory of a valet or Kammerdiener (“room-servant”) to a great moral hero. In Hegel’s time, there was apparently a common saying, “No man is a hero to his valet”. The Kammerdiener‘s job is essentially to service someone’s petty personal needs. Even a great moral hero has petty personal foibles, which will be most visible to one whose job it is to service them.

Hegel portrays the Kammerdiener character as showing a mean-spirited disbelief in the genuineness of the hero’s virtue. In this it seems to me that Hegel anticipates Nietzsche’s later analysis of ressentiment. In Nietzschean terms, Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit are respectively an affirmative stance and a stance of what he calls ressentiment (French for “resentment”). A person with ressentiment tries to feel good by taking a diminishing attitude toward others. Nietzsche famously criticizes common notions of morality as really more grounded in ressentiment than in any positive value or virtue. He particularly interprets religious and metaphysical otherworldliness as grounded in a generalized ressentiment toward life and the world. But in Hegelian terms, Nietzsche himself takes a one-sidedly negative view of religion and most philosophy.

Writing before Nietzsche, Hegel in the Phenomenology sharply criticizes the otherworldliness of what he calls the unhappy consciousness (or better, an unhappiness and bad faith at the root of otherworldliness), for which everything in the world is as nothing compared to the infinity of God. But he also sees one-sidedness and a kind of bad faith in the Enlightenment dismissal of religion as mere superstition and priestly manipulation.

In Kantian terms, the Kammerdiener reduces the hero’s ethical stance entirely to her personal petty inclinations that have nothing to do with the greater good. The hero of the allegory we can see as a Kantian moral hero who is posited to act entirely out of high moral principle. In this way she is not unlike the ideal sage in Stoicism, who similarly is said to leave the equivalent of Kantian inclination behind.

It is important to recognize that for the point Hegel aims to make here, it does not matter in the least whether or not we believe that as a matter of fact a perfect sage or moral hero exists. The question is rather whether we acknowledge that there are some genuinely ethical or genuinely magnanimous actions.

The Kammerdiener takes the attitude that there are no genuinely ethical actions, that all human actions are really grounded in some kind of self-interested motive or other. The most generous and other-oriented acts imaginable can unfortunately be diminished in this way.

Brandom stirs things up by associating the ethical naturalism discussed in analytic philosophy (a reduction of ethical stances and normative attitudes to psychology or biology or sociology or other non-normative empirical terms), with the Niederträchtigkeit embodied by the Kammerdiener in Hegel’s allegory.

“Because objective conceptual norms are (reciprocallly) sense-dependent on the normative statuses of subjects, the niederträchtig reductive naturalist is wrong to think that he can deny the intelligibility (his reason for denying the existence) of normative statuses and still be entitled to treat the objective world as a determinate object of potential knowledge. ‘No cognition without recognition’ is the slogan here. Because normative attitudes and normative statuses are both reciprocally sense-dependent and reciprocally reference-dependent, the attempt to entitle oneself to talk about determinately contentful normative attitudes while denying the intelligibility and (so) existence of normative statuses is bound to fail” (pp. 580-581).

Or “no objectivity without normativity”, one might say. Cognitive norms that ground knowledge are ultimately a kind of ethical norms.

“Understanding the stances and the choice between them as a matter of adopting a practical commitment, as producing the unity it discerns, hence ultimately as a recognitive matter of community- and self-constitution, corresponds to the response Hegel makes to Enlightenment’s misunderstanding of the nature of the community of trust, on Faith’s behalf…. Understanding the edelmütig attitude as a practical-recognitive commitment that has always already implicitly been undertaken as a pragmatic condition of semantically contentful cognition and agency of determinate subjective attitudes), then, corresponds to breaking through the confines of alienated modernity into the form of self-consciousness Hegel calls ‘Absolute Knowing’ ” (p. 581).

Kant asks about the conditions for the possibility of knowledge and thought. Hegel asks about the conditions of the possibility of meaningfulness and agency, and finds that they require a particular kind of ethical stance. His “absolute knowing” is an ethical stance grounded in reciprocity, not at all the arrogant claim of an epistemological super power.

“At the first stage, in which necessity is construed as objective necessity, the norms are found. For normative statuses (duty, propriety, what one is committed to do, what one is responsible for doing) reflect and are determined by objective (attitude- and practice-independent) norms. In the middle, modern stage, in which necessity is construed as subjective necessity, normativity and reason must be made by our attitudes and practices, rather than being found. At the projected postmodern stage, finding and making show up as two sides of one coin, two aspects of one process, whose two phases — experience and its recollection, lived forward and comprehended backward, the inhalation and exhalation that sustain the life of Spirit — are each both makings and findings. In the first phases of an episode of experience, error is found and a new phenomenon is made. In the recollective phase a rational selection and reconstruction of an expressively progressive trajectory of phenomena in experience is made, and an implicit noumenon is found. Explicitating senses are made, and the implicit referents they express are found. The unity, the identity of content, that consciousness and action involve must be made, and the complementary disparity is found. Absolute knowing is comprehending, in vernünftig [expansively rational] form, the way in which these aspects mutually presuppose, support, complement, and complete one another” (pp. 581-582).

This reciprocity of finding and making that conditions thought and knowledge has the same shape as the reciprocity in ethical mutual recognition, and is grounded in it. “Absolute” knowing in Hegel is the actually modest recognition of reciprocity in the constitution of things, of meaning, and of value.

Potentiality for Interaction

“Before being elucidated in Metaphysics Theta as a sense of being, dunamis appears in the physical texts as the instrument of the thought of change and action. It is thus thought in the order of the correlation not of the in-potentiality to act, but of active power to passive power. The model is the mechanistic one of efficiency. This model is nonetheless subsumed under another, which for the correlation active dunamis / passive dunamis, substitutes that of dunamis to energeia, thus integrating the schema of efficiency under that of finality. The definition of movement and its characterization as the common act of the mover and the moved appears as an essential moment of this integration: it invites us to see in kinesis [motion] not only the result of the interplay between two powers, one active and the other passive, but the transition between two states of being. Interaction thus appears only as the means for actualization, the play of powers as the occasion of the realization of the in-potentiality” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 103, my translation throughout).

This all seems very sound. I would add only two more nuances. First, not only is so-called efficient causality or Aristotle’s notion of “sources of motion” subsumed by final causality, but it also subsumes mechanistic “action” under a broader notion of “means”, as in the example from the Physics in which the art of building is what is most properly said to be the source of the motion of building a house. Aubry herself also speaks of interaction as a “means for actualization”.

Second, she speaks here of interaction because Aristotle analyzes even the most unilateral, mechanistic physical “action” as a special kind of interaction between active and passive powers. Although Aristotle would also agree with Kant against Leibniz that there is real interaction between things, that is not at stake in the contrast here. For Aristotle, all action is really a kind of interaction in the special sense mentioned above, but I think what he means primarily to contrast with actualization is action as such, not interaction as such. I would thus suggest the friendly amendment “action appears only as the means for actualization”. On the other hand though, she is emphasizing the fact that all action for Aristotle is really interaction, which is also extremely important.

In On Generation and Corruption book I, Aristotle describes cyclical transformations of the four elements. Aubry notes that the elements are there said to have neither forms of their own nor any principle of autonomous movement. The reciprocal action of the elements is explained in terms of active and passive dunamis.

“[A]ction has for effect an assimilation of the patient to the agent; but always in the case of a material agent, it can entail a passion in return…. If dunamis determines the agent as well as the patient, it is indeed according to a reversible schema, and in a relation of co-implication” (p. 104).

“This first formula, which accounts for action by the correlation of an active dunamis and a passive dunamis, is nonetheless succeeded by another, which substitutes for the pair of powers that of in-potentiality and of act” (ibid).

“The agent is no longer solely determined as active, but as in act…. As for the patient, it is not only passive, but in-potentiality. If there can be action of the one on the other, it is because the effect is already present, dunamei [in potentiality], in the patient: fire, for example, can only heat that which is already hot-in-potentiality” (ibid).

She quotes from book II: “That which is hot in-act is cold in-potentiality, and that which is cold in-act is hot in-potentiality, so that, at least if they don’t equalize themselves, they transform themselves the one into the other” (p. 105).

She continues, summarizing “This cycle obeys the principle of the best, and has a finality of its own” (ibid).

“All the same, the elements are deprived as much of active power as of spontaneity. Their movement toward a place should not be understood on the model of action, or of the interaction of an active power and a passive power, but on that of actualization, and of the correlation of the in-potentiality and the in-act” (ibid).

“The case of elemental change indeed appears as an example of the substitution of the model of actualization for that of interaction, and of the model of finality for that of efficiency. Aristotle starts from the place where mechanistic explanation seems the most justified: the first elements, the original impulses of matter. But precisely, these are not, like the dunameis that fill the khora [receptacle] of [Plato’s] Timaeus, brute and disordered forces: they are passive powers, deprived of self-motion and of spontaneity, but which nonetheless are principles of movement, and have an orientation or a tendency. Between them and their act, the active power, efficiency, only intervenes as an exterior cause; it is nothing more than the occasion for their actualization” (p.106).

Far from serving as the primary model for causality in general, efficient causality in Aristotle only provides occasions for more essential causes or reasons why to operate. It is always only a means for something, a kind of circumstantial catalyst.

On the Soul book II distinguishes “two degrees of dunamis. The first, according to ‘the genus and the matter’ is a non-exercised native capacity — that in virtue of which every human is capable, simply insofar as she is human and possessed of reason, of understanding grammar; the second is a capacity already employed, exercised, the effectuation of which requires no supplementary apprenticeship, but simply the will and the absence of obstacles…; and finally entelechy, or the actual exercise of knowledge” (p. 107).

“The case of perception, like that of elemental change, must be conceived as a transition from second dunamis to entelechy. This kind of alteration (alliosis) neither affects nor destroys the nature of the subject, but on the contrary is ‘a progress toward itself and toward entelechy'” (pp. 107-108).

“Nonetheless, in the case of the apprenticeship of knowledge, the passage from first dunamis to second dunamis should also be conceived as alteration-amelioration…. More than on the distinction between two degrees of dunamis and between movement (kinesis) and change (metabole), it seems it is necessary to insist on that between two types of alteration, the one privative and the other positive. This distinction underlines once again that the intervention of the efficient cause and of the external agent can serve as the occasion of an immanent progress” (pp. 108-109).

“In the transition between the model of interaction and the model of actualization, the definition of motion as the common act of the mover and the moved also appears as an essential moment” (p. 109).

“In Physics III, movement is defined as the entelechy of that which is in-potentiality as such…. Movement, otherwise said, is the act of the dunamis of a being not as such, but as mobile: the process of fabricating a statue is not the act of the brass as brass, but of the brass insofar as it becomes a statue. Immediately proposed, this definition is designed as a sort of default; of movement, in effect, one can say neither that it is privation, nor power, nor act; it is necessary, ultimately, as difficult as this may seem, to define it as an incomplete act, energeia ateles, in opposition to a simple act, energeia haple” (ibid).

“Movement indeed manifests the power of a being whatever it is, that is, independent of what it is, [independent] as well as of that by which such a being can become other than it is…. Movement is indeed the the entelechy of a power as such, since being a power is being a principle of movement, but the power is always the power of a being that by that movement becomes what it is. As consequence, the distinction is not between two powers, but between becoming as the being of power, and the being in view of which there is becoming” (p. 110).

“If the analysis of movement makes appeal to the distinction between mover and movable, and indeed between agent and patient, this distinction nonetheless finds itself relativized: in fact… the mover moves in being itself moved — since there exists also, Aristotle points out, an unmoved mover. The agent indeed is at the same time patient, and the patient in its turn can become agent, so that everything is both agent and patient, poietikon kai pathetikon. But to this it must be added that act is the same in the agent and the patient” (ibid).

“The duality of agent and patient, or of mover and moved, is reabsorbed thus, according to the point of view specified, into that of in-potentiality and in-act. In-potentiality, to dunamei, recovers active power and passive power equally well: it is a point of view taken on both powers insofar as they in principle belong to one and the same movement, or again, insofar as they are the subject of one and the same accomplishment” (p. 111).

Nothing in the real world is ever purely active or purely passive. It is hard to overstate the significance of this.

“In the same way that book III of the Physics subsumes the correlation of powers under movement as the act of the in-potential, book Theta of the Metaphysics places movement under energeia, understood this time not as ateles [incomplete], but as identical to the telos [end]” (ibid).

Next in this series: Reading Metaphysics Theta

Hegel’s Ethical Innovation

Terry Pinkard’s biography of Hegel shows him as primarily motivated by ethical and social concerns. The common image of Hegel as an extravagant metaphysician ignores his many highly critical remarks about metaphysics, and his stated desire to replace metaphysics with a “logic” concerned with the elaboration and refinement of meaningful content. Hegel remains very challenging to read.

In his third and final Woodbridge lecture, “History, Reason, and Reality”, Brandom distills and reconstructs Hegel’s principal philosophical objectives, and clarifies his relation to Kant.

Hegel is arguably the inventor of what later came to be called meta-ethics. Further, he promotes a version of meta-ethics that is normative all the way down — that is to say, it does not try to explain values in terms of something else. There is no sharp boundary between ethics in the small and this kind of meta-ethics, which ends up including everything.

Brandom suggests that discourse about values or normativity is in fact the one kind of discourse that is truly self-sufficient; that all other discourse implicitly depends on it; and that developing explanations that take this into account is one of Hegel’s great contributions.

According to Brandom, Hegel thinks that Kantian ethical autonomy as Kant himself developed it, though a huge improvement over some previous explanations, still did not eliminate the asymmetry or one-sidedness of responsibility typical of the authority-obedience model. Hegel sees the one-sidedness of the responsibility to obey in the authority-obedience model and the one-sidedness of presuming to judge everything for ourselves as a sort of mirror-image variants of the same basic failure to treat responsibility as two-sided. He also thinks Kant could not adequately explain how autonomy and a universality of values could coexist, though Kant clearly wanted them to.

The reciprocity of mutual recognition is Hegel’s answer to these difficulties. We freely choose particular commitments over others, but the content of those commitments is not just whatever we say it is. On the other hand, that content is not fully predetermined either, so we do play a role in its determination. (See Mutual Recognition; Mutual Recognition Revisited; Pippin on Mutual Recognition.)

“[T]he reciprocal recognition model requires that the authority of conceptual contents over the activities of practitioners (their responsibility to those contents) be balanced by a reciprocal authority of practitioners over those contents, a responsibility of those contents to the activities of the subjects of judgment and action who apply them. And that is to say that Hegel is committed to understanding the practice of acknowledging commitments by rational integration as a process not only of applying conceptual contents, but also as the process by which they are determined” (Reason in Philosophy, p. 82; emphasis in original throughout).

What it is to be a concept for Kant and Hegel fundamentally involves playing a normative role. Hegel takes the further step of explaining the determination of concepts through concrete, historical, open-ended processes of mutual recognition. This has implications for the nature of determinateness itself.

“One of Hegel’s key ideas, as I read him, is that in order to understand how the historical process of applying determinately contentful concepts to undertake discursive commitments (taking responsibility for those commitments by rationally integrating them with others one has already undertaken) can also be the process of determining the contents of those concepts, we need a new notion of determinateness” (p. 88).

Here Brandom is highlighting a crucial aspect of Hegel’s deeper argument that runs counter to his frequent recourse to rhetoric about a “system” and related themes, which Fichte and the influential early Kant-interpreter Karl Reinhold before him had made very popular in German philosophy at the time. Hegel’s rhetoric often seems much easier to understand than his in-depth arguments, but it is a fatal mistake to assume that the apparent meaning of the rhetoric is a good guide to the meaning of the in-depth arguments. Hegel is far from the only philosopher to develop very nonstandard, idiosyncratic connotations for some common terms, but he may have done more of it than anyone else. This means it is better to interpret his rhetoric in light of an interpretation of his in-depth arguments than to take the rhetoric as authoritative.

The “new notion” of determinateness that Brandom attributes to Hegel is in effect what I would call an open, genuinely Aristotelian determinateness rather than a closed Stoic/Cartesian one. (See also Univocity; Equivocal Determination; Aristotelian Identity; Aristotelian Causes; Free Will and Determinism).

Brandom develops a detailed model of open-ended determination by mutual recognition, by dwelling at length on the kinds of things that happen in the evolution of common law and interpretations of case law in jurisprudence.

Unlike the way we think of the physical determination of events, which only “flows” in one direction, the determination of meanings and the meaning of talk about being is a reciprocal determination between forward application of concepts to situations and backward-looking interrogation of their meaning. Historical time understood as the time of the historical constitution of meaning inherently involves a reciprocal determination of forward- and backward-looking interpretation.

Brandom says that Hegel’s famous contrast between Understanding and Reason is one between a view that assumes conceptual determination is already complete and one that recognizes it as inherently subject to indefinite further development.

“[Hegel] is very much aware of the openness of the use of expressions that is the practice of at once applying concepts in judgment and determining the content of the concepts those locutions express. This is the sense in which prior use does not close off future possibilities of development by settling in advance a unique correct answer to the question of whether a particular concept applies in a new set of circumstances. The new circumstances will always resemble any prior, settled case in an infinite number of respects, and differ from it in an infinite number of respects. There is genuine room for choice on the part of the current judge or judger, depending on which prior commitments are taken as precedential and which aspects of similiarity and difference are emphasized” (p. 89).

Prior uses have real weight, but nonetheless do not by themselves “determine the correctness of all possible future applications of a concept” (p.90). (See also Brandomian Choice.) According to Brandom, Hegel develops a new “recollective”, “genealogical” approach to justification that takes into account the continual reshaping of the interpretation of past experience in the light of new experience.

Hegel the man was not immune to some of the common prejudices of his own cultural milieu, but his philosophy provides a principled basis for challenging all such prejudices, in a careful way that avoids indiscriminately denying the value of past experience.