The Ideal

“The last two chapters of book Lambda adopt a new point of view toward the divine: the latter is no longer in the first instance considered as energeia [act], but as good” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 197, my translation throughout).

“The question of the good is nonetheless raised in an indirect way in Lambda 9, by means of an inquiry into nous, or intellect. Here again, the text inscribes itself in the continuity of Lambda 7, and in two ways: first, because the intelligible and the good are identified through the mediation of substance and energeia; then also because the god was described there not only as act, but as an activity of thinking, and as being at the same time the thought of the best, and this thought or contemplation was described as the best and most agreeable” (pp. 197-198).

“Lambda 9 precisely poses the question whether the value of thought comes from its object, or from its very exercise. The response to this question is conditioned by a double premise, which directly articulates the two determinations of ousia energeia [substance as act] and of ousia ariste [the best substance, or ideal substance]: noesis or intellection is the best ousia, he ariste ousia; and as such, it cannot be dunamis. It can have no other object than itself, which would determine its activity of thinking and thus be superior to it; and in the same way, if it were dunamis and not energeia, maintaining the continuity of the activity would be hard. Finally, if it thought of an object other than itself, then it could equally well think different objects, not only the good but ‘something taken randomly'” (p. 198).

“As result, the two initial hypotheses must be eliminated: the value of thought cannot be derived from its object (at least, if the latter is exterior to it, and if it depends on it to be in-act). But no more than this can it be derived only from its activity, taken independently of its object: for thought and the activity of thought also pertain to the one who thinks the worst. If the value of thought can be derived neither from an (exterior) object, nor only from thought’s activity, it is then necessary to say that thought has value not due to what it thinks, but because in itself it thinks. Thus the prime mover ‘thinks itself, if it is true that it is the most excellent, and its thinking is thinking of thinking'” (ibid, emphasis added).

Thinking of thinking, or contemplation, can also be characterized as reflection. I would suggest that what more specifically makes thought thinking itself the best substance is its character of pure reflection. I think that intelligence is fundamentally reflective — a matter not of unexplainable direct apprehension, but of the elaboration of mediation, or of repeated refoldings of a self-referential thread. To be reflective for a human is also among other things to be indefinitely inclusive of new perspectives, while aiming to combine them in a unity of apperception. In the case of the first cause, this unity would be under the modality of always-already.

“But this again leaves open two possibilities: once we have excluded that the value of thought comes only from its own activity, or from an exterior object, we can again ask whether it comes from an object that is immanent to it, or from the very immanence of this object; in other words, does thought think itself because it is the best, or is it the best because it thinks itself? This is the sense of the question posed: ‘And again, if thinking and being thought are two different things, in virtue of which of these two terms does the good (to eu) belong to thought?” (pp. 198-199).

“The response consists in showing that in certain cases, which do not only concern the divine intellect, there is an identity between knowledge and its object — thus we respond to the objection… according to which the knowledge of self is only a parergon, a supplement or an accidental effect, of the knowledge of the object. This identity applies in the case of the practical sciences when they treat of an essence considered as independent of matter, and for the theoretical sciences or intellection, [this identity of knowledge and the known] is itself their object. It remains to know whether this object is indivisible or composed. The response proceeds by way of a new comparison, this time between the human intellect and the divine intellect” (p. 199).

“The passage admits an ethical reading: it is a matter of saying that the human intellect, insofar as it is the thought of composed beings (of matter and form, or of in-potentiality and act), does not have an immediate access to the good, to eu, but only attains the best, to ariston, in time, and as a being different from itself, on allo ti” (ibid).

“In effect it inherits from a decisive premise, which is that nous [intellect] is ousia ariste, the best substance. This proposition is supported in Lambda 7 by the identification of the intelligible, the good, and substance…. This premise, like the resurgence of the notions of the good and the best in the last lines of chapter 9, goes in the direction of an objective, and indeed also ethical, or more so axiological, reading of the text. Certainly thought is of nothing but itself; but if it thinks itself, this is because it is identical with the good” (p. 200).

Next in this series: The Universe

More on Reflection

The concept of reflection is fundamental to Kant and Hegel’s view of reason, and on a very down-to-earth level to supporting what I call emotional reasonableness.

Reflection occurs through the medium of discursive development. What we experience as immediate consciousness is the result of pre-conscious syntheses of imagination that in part build on past knowledge and experience in accordance with our dispositions and character, but in part simply represent shortcuts (assumptions and pre-judgments) that enable us to respond rapidly in situations where there is no time for prolonged reflection.

Neither Plato nor Aristotle has a Greek word that exactly corresponds to reflection in Kant and Hegel’s sense, but a similar concept permeates their work. Platonic dialogue is implicitly reflection that is shared between two or more persons. Aristotelian deliberation, contemplation, and normative saying are all implicitly grounded in reflection. Our higher destiny as talking animals is to reflect. What we reflect on includes deeds and motivations in general, not only the special kind of deeds that are sayings. It also includes relevant circumstances.

In recent times, Paul Ricoeur and Robert Pippin have each made important uses of the concept of reflection.

For Itself

Hegel’s distinctive phrase “for itself” (für sich, literally “for self”) always seemed a little mysterious to me. It seems to refer to a self-aware being’s taking itself to be this or that, following a more or less Kantian model of judgment. That part is clear enough. But what in the world is something like “the concept in and for itself”?

Once again, the simple Kantian/Hegelian notion of reflection sheds a great deal of light on this. It applies on two levels.

First, there is a purely relational one that applies to anything that may be conceived as having characteristics that are mutually related to one another. These in turn may be construed in terms of a kind of self-relatedness of the underlying thing. In this sense, “for itself” would apply to things that have self-relatedness. This means practically everything, except perhaps some abstractly simple things like points in geometry.

Second, there is the level of self-relatedness that is internal to a reflective judgment or unity of apperception, and to the value-oriented self-consciousness arising from mutual recognition. Self-consciousness is not a detached spectator beholding multifarious relations, but has its very being within and amidst all those relations. We might say, then, that in this context the relations themselves are “self-conscious”. Similarly, concepts involved in reflective judgment are in a way necessarily “self-conscious” concepts.

In a way, our essence as human beings is the integral whole that results from — or is teleologically aimed at by — the self-consciousness of our concepts. This whole would be the totality of our commitments — everything we hold to be good, true, or beautiful.

For Hegel as for Aristotle, what count as “our” commitments and “our” concepts are not just whatever we assert are ours. The measure of what commitments and concepts are truly ours lies in what we do in life. And what we really did in any particular case is not just what we say we did or meant to do, but also what others can observe and evaluate.

In this way, to be “for oneself” is simultaneously to be for others, because what counts as one’s deed — and ultimately as oneself — is partly up to all those others who experience us. This doesn’t mean we are not entitled to make contrary assertions of our own that may be right; maybe in some particular case, the others affected by our deeds are prejudiced. For Hegel, the bottom line is that everyone affected gets a hearing in such cases, and the outcome — what is ultimately right — is not subject to a predetermined formula, but rather follows from all the fine details of each case. This is characteristic of the openness by which Kant first distinguished reflective judgment. It is also characteristic of Aristotelian practical judgment.

To be “for itself” or “for oneself” is to be a subject of reflective judgment. For humans, it is also to be a subject of mutual recognition.

At least in the first instance, “subject” here need not imply a self-conscious subject, just a thing with properties with which the judgment is concerned. But perhaps the human case suggests something about how a self-conscious subject could be thought of as a special case or elaboration of a simple Aristotelian “subject” or underlying thing.

What distinguishes Aristotle’s view of the higher levels of subjectivity (and, I think, Hegel’s too) from typical modern ones is that self-consciousness inheres not in the subject per se as a special kind of entity, but rather in the activity of reflection (contemplation, thought thinking itself, deliberation) in which the subject is involved.

Shallow vs Deep Reflection

“Logic… cannot say what it is in advance, rather does this knowledge of itself only emerge as the final result and completion of its whole movement” (Hegel, Science of Logic, di Giovanni trans., introduction, p. 23).

From either an Aristotelian or a Kantian perspective, it seems to me this is true of any sort of “self-knowledge”. We don’t just look within and see the truth; it takes a long detour to get there.

Hegel here stresses the radically presuppositionless character of this thing that he calls “logic”. This results in a far more ambitious project than Aristotle’s “tool rather than knowledge” approach to logic, which is also primarily geared toward more ordinary contexts, in which we do not aim to be radically presuppositionless.

I’m still inclined toward a middle position that what is at stake here is better called a kind of hermeneutic wisdom than knowledge. I agree with Pippin that Hegel is engaging in a kind of what Aristotle would call first philosophy here, but I take first philosophy itself to be a kind of meta-level interpretation, and thus again to be wisdom more than knowledge.

“The concept of logic has hitherto rested on a separation, presupposed once and for all in ordinary consciousness, of the content of knowledge from its form, or of truth and certainty. Presupposed from the start is that the material of knowledge is present in and for itself as a ready-made world outside thinking; that thinking is by itself empty, that it comes to this material from outside” (p. 24).

Here he is both saying that the more ordinary concept of logic has not yet learned the lessons of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and implicitly criticizing the dualistic appearance of some of Kant’s formulations.

“These views on the relation of subject and object to each other express the determinations that constitute the nature of our ordinary, phenomenal consciousness. However, when these prejudices are carried over to reason, as if in reason the same relation obtained, as if this relation had any truth in and for itself, then they are errors, and the refutation of them in every part of the spiritual and natural universe is what philosophy is” (p. 25).

This is a very strong statement. Hegel has a very positive view of life in the world, but he strongly distrusts our ordinary consciousness of it. Philosophy is what teaches us to move beyond common sense, toward something higher.

“The older metaphysics had in this respect a higher concept of thinking than now passes as the accepted opinion. For it presupposed as its principle that only what is known of things and in things by thought is really true in them, that is, what is known in them not in their immediacy but as first elevated to the form of thinking, as things of thought. This metaphysics thus held that thinking and the determination of thinking are not something alien to the subject matters, but rather are their essence, or that things and the thinking of them agree in and for themselves (also our language expresses a kinship between them); that thinking in its immanent determinations, and the true nature of things, are one and the same content” (ibid).

Here he is clearly referring to Aristotle, and endorsing Aristotle’s point of view as in a way even superior to that of Kant. For Aristotle, thought and things meet on the middle ground of the “what-it-is” or essence of things, which is what allows the ultimate identification of thought with what it thinks.

He mentions the shallow “external” reflection he associates with Locke’s notion of human understanding, then the much more substantive kind of reflection discussed by Kant in the Critique of Judgment, which will be a major theme of this whole work.

“The [Kantian] reflection already mentioned consists in transcending the concrete immediate, in determining and parting it. But this reflection must equally transcend its separating determinations and above all connect them. The conflict of determinations breaks out precisely at the point of connection. This reflective activity of connection belongs in itself to reason, and to rise above the determinations and attain insight into their discord is the great negative step on the way to the true concept of reason. But, when not carried through, this insight runs into the misconception that reason is the one that contradicts itself” (p. 26).

Contrary to Kant’s pessimistic conclusion in the antinomies of the first Critique, reason does not contradict itself; it is rather the determinations in things and situations that are subject to conflicting objective evaluations. Hegel’s more optimistic view of reason is accompanied by a very honest recognition of the existence of genuinely hard problems for thought about life in the world.

Hegel on Hegel’s Logic

By his own account, Hegel makes a “completely fresh start” in what he calls logic (Science of Logic, di Giovanni trans., 1st preface, p. 9). Robert Pippin points out that insofar as it has precursors, the principal debts of Hegel’s effort are to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment and to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, none of which are ordinarily viewed as works of “logic”. Translator George di Giovanni calls it a “discourse about discourse” (p. xxxv). Fundamentally, it is about meaning, and the conditions for anything to be intelligible.

“[A]n altogether new concept… is at work here…. [Philosophy] cannot borrow its method from a subordinate science, such as mathematics, any more than it can remain satisfied with categorical assurances of inner intuition, or can make use of argumentation based on external reflection. On the contrary, it can only be the nature of the content which is responsible for movement in scientific knowledge, for it is the content’s own reflection that first posits and generates what that content is” (pp. 9-10).

He emphasizes “the nature of the content” (which is to say meaning), and “content’s own reflection”. That reflection, moreover, “first posits and generates what that content is“. Meaning’s own reflection “posits and generates” what it means. We are not far from Aristotle’s thought thinking itself that is the cause of the what-it-is of things. Hegel shares with Kant and Aristotle a discursively reflective view of thought and meaning.

I still prefer to speak of “knowledge” rather than “science” in a philosophical context. But Hegel just means a disciplined form of knowledge. The German word for science (Wissenschaft) literally means something like the art of knowing (wissen). Our word “science” comes from Latin scientia (knowledge in a strong sense). According to di Giovanni, wissen for Hegel “signifies the product or the origin, rather than the process, of reason” (p. lxx). It is distinguished from Erkenntnis (confusingly also rendered by some translators as “knowledge”), which starts from a root meaning of acquaintance or recognition, and comes to refer to the process of reason.

“The forms of thought are first set out and stored in human language…. In everything that the human being has interiorized, in everything that in some way or another has become for him a representation, in whatever he has made his own, there has language penetrated, and everything that he transforms into language and expresses in it contains a category, whether concealed, mixed, or well defined. So much is logic natural to the human being, [it] is indeed his very nature. If we however contrast nature as such, as the realm of the physical, with the realm of the spiritual, then we must say that logic is the supernatural element that permeates all his natural behavior, his ways of sensing, intuiting, desiring, his needs and impulses; and it thereby makes them into something truly human, even though only formally human — makes them into representations and purposes” (2nd preface, p. 12).

Our involvement with linguistic meaning is “our very nature”, or is the “supernatural” element in our natural behavior that makes us truly human. As one reading of Aristotle puts it, what makes us human is that we are talking animals.

“But even when logical matters and their expressions are common coin in a culture, still, as I have said elsewhere, what is familiar is for that reason not known…. To indicate the general features of the course that cognition goes through as it leaves familiar acquaintance behind, the essential moments in the relationship of scientific thought to this natural thought, this is the purpose of the present preface” (p. 13).

“First of all, it must be regarded as an infinite step forward that the forms of thought have been freed from the material in which they are submerged in self-conscious intuition, in representation, as well as in our desires and volitions or, more accurately, in ideational desiring and willing (and there is no human desire or volition without ideation); a step forward that these universalities have been brought to light and made the subject of study on their own, as was done by Plato, and after him by Aristotle especially” (pp. 13-14).

He credits Plato and Aristotle with first clearly articulating notions of thought and meaning in a way that is independent of particular subjectivity. Next he cautions against the illusion of mastery.

“We do not indeed say of our feelings, impulses, interests, that they serve us; on the contrary, they count as independent forces and powers, so that to have this particular feeling, to desire and to will this particular thing, to make this our interest — just this, is what we are. And it is more likely that we become conscious of obeying our feelings, impulses, passions, interests, not to mention our habits, than of having them in our possession, still less, in view of our intimate union with them, of their being means at our disposal. Such determinations of mind and spirit, when contrasted with the universality which we are conscious of being and in which we have our freedom, quickly show themselves to be particulars, and we rather regard ourselves to be caught up in their particularities and to be dominated by them. It is all the less plausible, therefore, to believe that the thought determinations that pervade all our representations — whether these are purely theoretical or hold a material belonging to sensation, impulse, will — that such thought determinations are at our service; that it is we who have them in our possession and not they who have us in theirs” (p. 15).

We are masters neither of our feelings nor of our thought.

“[W]hen the content that motivates a subject to action is drawn out of its immediate unity with the subject and is made to stand before it as an object, then it is that the freedom of spirit begins” (p. 17).

True freedom of spirit is the very opposite of following one’s arbitrary will or impulse.

“The most important point for the nature of spirit is the relation, not only of what it implicitly is in itself to what it actually is, but of what it knows itself to be to what it actually is” (ibid).

Here he already raises the Aristotelian theme of the priority of actuality.

“As impulses the categories do their work only instinctively; they are brought to consciousness one by one and so are variable and mutually confusing, thus affording to spirit only fragmentary and uncertain actuality. To purify these categories and in them to elevate spirit to truth and freedom, this is therefore the loftier business of logic” (ibid).

Hegel’s logic thus serves a profound ethical purpose.

“It is soon evident that what in ordinary reflection is, as content, at first separated from the form cannot in fact be formless, … that it rather possesses form in it; indeed that it receives soul and substance from the form alone and that it is this form itself which is transformed into only the semblance of a content…. By thus introducing content into logical consideration, it is not the things, but rather the fact [Sache], the concept of the things, that becomes the subject matter” (pp. 18-19).

What the moderns call “content” is a special case of what Plato and Aristotle call form. Hegel calls it a “semblance” of content. But its role in his logic is pivotal. Logic is concerned not with things as such but with meanings, Aristotelian forms, the what-it-is of things. What the translator calls “fact” seems rather different from ordinary English usage.

Reflection, Judgment, Process

Reflection is a key concept both for later Kant and for Hegel (see, e.g., Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity; More on Contemplation). We have seen that it led Kant to deepen the notion of judgment he had already used in the Critique of Pure Reason, giving more explicit attention to what I have called the process of interpretation, in contrast to the eventual conclusions that had been the exclusive preoccupation of early modern logic. He had already criticized the latter for confusing judgment with predication.

When judgment is identified with simple predication, the process of interpretation entirely disappears. Indeed, both early modern and contemporary formal logic are explicitly concerned with mechanical syntactic manipulation of uninterpreted terms.

Kant’s narrower point in the first Critique had been that only categorical judgments (those having the simple form A is B) can be analyzed as linguistic predications. Against the early modern tradition, Kant pointed out that neither hypothetical judgments (if A then B) nor disjunctive judgments (if A then not-B) can be understood in this way.

Whereas the early modern tradition strongly privileged categorical judgments, taking simple predications straightforwardly as simple assertions, Kant argues that hypothetical and disjunctive judgments have at least equal significance for thought, if not more. Hypothetical and disjunctive judgments are irreducibly inferential, as can be seen from the presence of “if” and “then” in their forms. What Kant suggests about this in the first Critique is that the inferential aspect of judgment is more fundamental than its assertive aspect. Brandom makes the further suggestion that the kinds of inferences Kant is primarily concerned with in this context are informal “material” inferences, which are grounded in the meanings of terms rather than in formal syntax.

With the enhanced concept of reflective judgment developed in the Critique of Judgment, Kant begins to take an even wider range of interpretive processes into account in his view of judgment overall. Reflective judgment is primarily focused on the process of interpretation, though it also reaches conclusions. This makes the contrast between Kantian judgment and judgment in early modern logic even more profound. Early modern logic codifies a “conclusory” notion of judgment grounded in simple assertion, and makes the formal manipulation of such assertions the paradigm for all reasoning. Kantian judgment on the other hand begins as primarily inferential, and comes to emphasize the wider, open-ended, reflective process of interpretation.

The “logic of being” that Hegel presents as a kind of necessary preliminary failure in his Logic is precisely the logic of simple assertion. From any arbitrary assertions, we can deductively generate more assertions that will be consistent with these, and we can classify other assertions according to whether they are consistent with the accepted ones or not. But Hegel is concerned with the possibility of genuine intelligibility and knowledge. Starting only from mere assertions, we can never reach these. The most we can achieve is some kind of relational discrimination between the implications of different assertions, whose meaning is merely assumed.

Kantian reflection is the main theme of Hegel’s “logic of essence”. Hegel’s conclusion is that the ultimate ground of essence is none other than pure reflection, which embodies a kind of reflective infinity of mutually referencing relations, that presupposes no fixed terms. Essence, as a kind of deeper truth of things than the shallow one of logical consistency alone, is not based on “fixed” concepts of the sort that are always assumed in formal logic. Rather, essence for Hegel is grounded in reflection all the way down, which we can pursue as deeply as we like. Socratic inquiry can be seen as a foreshadowing of this.

I see an important parallel to book Lambda of Aristotle’s Metaphysics here. There, the ground of the what-it-is of things is the pure contemplation of thought thinking itself. In other words, the ground of essence is pure reflection, just as Hegel says. The pure actuality or pure entelechy of Aristotle’s first cause is an actuality or entelechy of what Hegel calls pure reflection.

A major difference between Aristotle’s first cause and ourselves, as I read it, is that the purity of the first cause makes it only concerned with essence or deep truth, whereas we rational animals also live in a world of appearances, and therefore also have to deal with these. Because we live in a world of appearances, we humans have a need for judgment that Aristotle’s first cause does not share.

In the “logic of the concept” with which he concludes his Logic, Hegel gives a thoroughly Kantian treatment of judgment, effectively identifying all judgment with reflective judgment in Kant’s sense. If the logic of essence was concerned with the objective determination of essence from pure reflection, the “subjective” logic of the concept is concerned with applying reflection to particular appearances that we encounter in life. This is something we rational animals have to do that Aristotle’s first cause does not.

Pure reflection is a kind of ideal thing that is analytically separable from process, but the kind of reflection that we embodied beings engage in only occurs as part of a concrete process that involves particular appearances and development in time.

More on Contemplation

I’m still, as it were, contemplating Aristotelian contemplation or theoria (see also But What Is Contemplation?; Kantian “Contemplation”?).

The two main English meanings of theoria — “contemplation” and “theory” — have a rather different connotative feel. What is tricky is that by all accounts, contemplation is also an activity. But it is not grammatically obvious that the English “theory” is an activity. Indeed, a theory is commonly taken to be a kind of inert representation, and not an activity.

Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to say that “theory” by itself can also refer to a corresponding activity. Theory’s activity would be contemplative, and would not in itself aim at any external result. At least on a relative scale applicable to humans, it would be pure thinking. Meanwhile, contemplation for Aristotle is a kind of activity that does not in itself have an external result.

In the contemporary revival of American pragmatist philosophy, figures like Brandom and Pippin insist that thinking is a kind of doing. Rather than a distinction between theory and practice, this leads to a distinction between specifically “contemplative” or “theoretical” practice, and practice in general. Doing and practice in English can thus have the full generality that activity has in Aristotle. Not all doing is “external” doing; not all practice is “external” practice.

Human pure thinking may implicitly issue in a kind of result — a relatively coherent representation, or broadly speaking a “theory” of what it holds to be the case — but it may still be said that this implicit result is “internal”, until some additional external action gives the representation some kind of embodiment.

However, Hegel might remind us that the very distinction between “internal” and “external” is problematic. He argues that it is not really possible to draw an unambiguous line between them, and that internal and external are instead related by a kind of continuity.

(Hegel confusingly calls this a speculative “identity”, though he is very clear that a speculative identity is not a formal, exact identity. Having come to see the value in what Paul Ricoeur calls narrative identity — another “identity” that is not a formal, exact identity — I don’t object as strenuously to Hegel’s nonstandard uses of “identity” as I once did, though I still prefer to use some other word when what is meant is anything weaker than exact isomorphism or substitutional equivalence.)

The continuity of internal and external seems to me like a very Aristotelian point, albeit one that Aristotle does not himself make. But unlike Hegel, Aristotle has no need to respond to a sharp Cartesian or Lockean dualism between consciousness and its representations on the one hand, and everything else on the other.

I think most people would allow that contemplation may involve representations, but contemplation itself is neither an activity of representing, nor a simple consciousness of static representations.

The English connotations of contemplation and reflection are closely aligned. Connotations of words do not count as a philosophical argument for identifying terms that might be claimed to stand for different concepts, but such alignment is nonetheless helpful, because in doing philosophy we are also concerned with communicating clearly, and there are always issues with translated terms not meaning quite the same thing on the two sides of a translation.

Aristotle identifies contemplation with thought thinking itself. I am suggesting that thought thinking itself can be strongly identified with reflection in the sense discussed by Kant, Hegel, Ricoeur, and Pippin, which builds on the common one. That would mean that contemplation can be identified with reflection.

Though the precise meanings of reflection and apperception in Kant are debated by scholars, there seems to be broad agreement that Kant strongly connects pure reflection with pure or transcendental apperception, and a more empirical reflection with a more empirical apperception. (See also Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity).

These same concepts are fundamental to Hegel’s Logic. The three “logics” he develops there concern mere assertion; reflection or reflective constitution; and reflective or apperceptive judgment. Hegel innovatively explains the constitution of essence in terms of a pure reflective determination that presupposes no fixed terms, but builds determination from relations between terms. Then he explains judgment as normatively applying reflective determination to appearances.

I want to suggest that Hegelian reflective or apperceptive judgment should be considered as a more detailed elaboration of Aristotelian deliberation and practical judgment.

All of this leads to the conclusion that Aristotelian contemplation — at least the contemplation that he explicitly makes the goal of human life — can be explained as the exercise of reflective or apperceptive judgment. It is not clear to me that the contemplation attributed to the first cause also issues in judgment, but it certainly does seem to be a kind of pure reflection such as Hegel associates with the determination of essence, and this tracks with Aristotle’s claim that the what-it-is of things depends on the first cause.

Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity

Robert Pippin recounts how in writing what became the Critique of Judgment, Kant developed a new notion of reflection, which transformed his whole philosophy from the inside:

“In early 1789 Kant began to formulate the new problem of reflective judgment, as well as a new a priori principle for such a faculty, the purposiveness of nature. What is important to notice for our purposes is that with that development, the shape of the entire critical project began to change dramatically” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 290).

“Kant had realized that something like the deep structure of judgments like ‘this rose is beautiful’ actually contravened its own surface structure, that the predicate ‘beautiful’ was not really functioning as a standard predicate, as it appeared to. It referred to no objective property or mere secondary quality. Instead, he concluded, it involved a nonconceptually guided reflective activity on the part of the subject of the experience, whose novel logic required notions like a free play of the faculties, purposiveness without a purpose, disinterested pleasure, a commonsense and universal subjective validity” (pp. 290-291).

“The realization of the distinct features of this reflective activity was only the beginning of a series of more strikingly novel claims of interest to us…. [T]he reflective judging that resulted in aesthetic judgments, also constituted the basic structure of teleological judgments, and so could account for the unique intelligibility of organic beings” (p. 291).

“And then a number of other issues seem to be thrown into the same reflective judgment pot. The formulation of scientific theories not fixed or determined by empirical generalizations involved this activity and its logic, as did the systematizing of empirical laws necessary for genuine scientific knowledge. Finally, even the determination of ordinary empirical concepts now seemed to require this newly formulated reflective capacity…. So reflective judging and its a priori principle were now necessary not only for explaining the possibility and validity of aesthetic judgments, but in accounting for the necessary distinction between organic and nonorganic nature, the formation of empirical concepts, the proper integration of genera and species, the general unification of empirical laws into systems of scientific law, theory formation itself, and the right way to understand the attribution of a kind of necessity to all such principles, judgments, concepts, laws, and systems” (ibid).

Much of the discussion of judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason sounds like it is a simple matter of “applying” pre-existing concepts to things. But in reality, applying even pre-existing concepts is not a simple matter at all, if we care about the soundness of the application (as Kant certainly did), or about how anyone preliminarily judges what concepts might be applicable in a given case. This is what Kant began to consider in more detail with his new notions of reflection and reflective judgment.

Reflection is characterized above by Pippin as “nonconceptually guided”. I don’t think this means at all that reflection is nonconceptual, but rather only that it is fundamentally guided by something other than the kind of pre-existing concepts that Hegel would call “fixed”. Reflection involves the formation and interpretation of concepts that are not treated as already fixed. That is why it does not presuppose particular fixed concepts.

I want to relate this back to the Aristotelian deliberation and practical judgment (phronesis) that are concerned with particulars as such. The significance of addressing particulars as such is that we do not assume in advance what universals (i.e., Kantian concepts) apply to them, but rather let the particulars “speak” for themselves, and thoughtfully consider what they might mean or be in their own right. By particulars I mean in an Aristotelian way independent or non-independent “things”, not putative raw phenomena.

Aristotelian deliberation and practical judgment, I want to say, involve a “free play of the faculties” of the sort that Kant associates with reflection. Aristotle’s commonly cited conclusion that practical judgment is inferior to contemplative wisdom is entirely tied to the fact that he considers practical judgment’s outcome to be an action. I think the term practical judgment ought to apply just as much or more to the activity of interpreting particulars, without prejudice as to how the interpretation is used.

Kantian reflection seems to me to have the great virtue of uniting Aristotelian theoria (contemplation) and sophia (contemplative wisdom) with deliberation, thinking things through (dianoia), and practical judgment (phronesis). Kant also explicitly argues for the primacy of practical reason, which ultimately involves the reflective normative evaluation of particulars, even though he foregrounds a separate effort to articulate ethical universals. An Aristotelian sense for the Kantian primacy of practical reason would start from the interpretation of particulars mentioned above.

Kantian reflection also has an important relation to the Critique of Pure Reason‘s key term of apperception. The term “apperception” was coined by Leibniz, originally to imply a kind of “higher order” perception — a perception of perception. Kant gives it a more explicitly discursive character. If we add a Hegelian dimension, the dialectical character of discourse makes discourse inherently reflective in Kant’s sense. By virtue of their common reflective, discursive character, apperception in Kant is closely related to what is called “self-consciousness” in Hegel.

Kant famously speaks of the effort to maintain a unity of apperception. Here is where I think phronesis comes to the aid of theoria and sophia. Contrary to what both Kant and Aristotle sometimes suggest, it seems to me that the interpretation of particulars is actually prior to and more governing than the articulation of universals, although there is much interplay between the two. It is the interpretation of particulars that mainly provides occasions for the articulation of pertinent universals. This comes back to Aristotle’s other point that universals do not have independent reality in their own right, and to Kant’s other point about the primacy of practical reason.

The effort to maintain a unity of apperception is the effort to maintain a unity of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is not simple “consciousness” of a pre-existing “self”, as if the latter were a discrete, pre-existing object. Rather, self-consciousness is grounded in reflection that has potentially indefinite extent. I think a similar grounding in reflection is what makes intellect “something divine in us” — and more than just a part of the soul — in Aristotle.

Aristotle speaks of thought thinking itself as contemplation. He tends to emphasize that thought thinking itself is an identity. But with any kind of identity, we must consider the way in which it is said.

What then could constitute any persistent identity for a unity of apperception? Here we come to the problems that Paul Ricoeur discussed under the more general rubric of narrative identity. Strictly speaking, any particular unity of apperception is a concrete constellation of what Aristotle would call particular relations that hold at a given moment. It is something like the totality of what we are currently committed to. Insofar as we speak of it as existing in fact, its unity and coherence are relative. Only as a kind of ideal or ethical goal can its unity be considered to be unqualified.

Insofar as we want to speak of the relative persistent identity of a unity of apperception — or anything like the unity of a person — we also need the Aristotelian concept of entelechy. The narrative identity of a unity of apperception is a kind of entelechy in which the thing whose identity is maintained is itself a work in progress, as all living beings are. We only have the final form of a life when it is over (see Happiness).

The narrative identity of a unity of apperception, then, is a kind of entelechy of apperception. More generally, Aristotelian entelechy is the narrative identity of a unity, or just is a kind of narrative identity. An entelechy of apperception is the entelechy of a process of reflection. (See also More on Contemplation; Hegel on Reflection; Apperceptive Judgment.)

Kantian “Contemplation”?

Since what Aristotle says about theoria or “contemplation” in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Metaphysics seems highly important but still rather minimal, I wanted to consider what other historical resources there are for its interpretation.

On this score, the version of theoria in Plotinus yielded less than I had hoped. I had expected that in Plotinus, contemplation would look like what Kant calls an intellectual intuition, but hoped there would at least be a significant tie-in to the key Aristotelian notion of entelechy. But on closer examination, it seemed like the delicately nuanced Aristotelian framework of teleological explanation gets drowned out first by Plotinus’ emphasis on the One as the source of all, and then by his explicit reversal of Aristotle’s innovation of asserting the priority of actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment, which is critical to the way that Aristotle’s teleology works.

I already hinted at a connection of Aristotelian contemplation first with the Kantian notion of reflection, and then with the closely related notion of apperception. This is what I will explore next.

But What Is Contemplation?

Once again, a dictionary is not very helpful. I want to suggest that for Aristotle, contemplation (theoria) is best understood by the phrase that he famously uses to characterize the first cause: thought thinking itself. I want to contrast this with the model of consciousness of an object that seems to be widely regarded as applicable.

These two interpretations of contemplation — consciousness of an object, and thought thinking itself — are quite literally separated by the entire development of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Hegel’s whole effort there is by patient labor to overcome the Cartesian/Lockean dualism of consciousness and its object. What he finally arrives at is something he identifies with Aristotle’s thought thinking itself, and which seems to be all mediation, with no outside or inside. (See, e.g., Consciousness in Locke and Hegel; Sense Certainty?; Otherness; Long Detour?; Apperceptive Judgment.)

I associate thought thinking itself with “reflection”, as that term is used by Kant, Hegel, and Ricoeur. In writing about reflection before, I used the image of a hall of mirrors, in which one might figuratively lose oneself in all the richness of reflections of reflections. Along these lines, I would also suggest that contemplation exhibits higher-order structure, or is higher-order thinking. (See also Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity.)

One of Plotinus’ greatest works is his treatise “Nature, Contemplation, and the One”, to which I will devote an upcoming post. Plotinus, despite his major differences from Aristotle, also adopted a great deal from Aristotle, while transforming it. His particular notion of contemplation is quite different from the one I want to attribute to Aristotle. It seems to be a form of what Kant would call intellectual intuition, which is exactly what I want to avoid attributing to Aristotle. But in the broader scheme of things, it nonetheless plays a somewhat analogous role. His account of it is more developed, and interesting in its own right, though I found that the analogy with Aristotle is a lot weaker than I expected.