Kingdom of Ends

This title comes from Christine Korsgaard’s influential book of essays on Kantian ethics, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996). “When we enter into relations of reciprocity, and hold one another responsible, we enter together into the standpoint of practical reason, and create a Kingdom of Ends on earth”, she says in the final sentence of the title essay (p. 212).

She begins the same essay with a quote from Aristotle, “As the virtuous man is to himself, he is to his friend also, for his friend is another self” (p. 188). I have previously pointed out that Hegelian mutual recognition has roots in Aristotle’s notion of friendship and love as characterized by reciprocity.

Korsgaard makes the contrast that “to hold someone responsible is to adopt an attitude… rather than to have a belief” (ibid). I’ve previously noticed that Brandom’s use of the word “attitude” has rather different connotations from what I take to be its most common meaning (a kind of purely subjective stance that is irrefutable as such, but cannot properly justify any conclusion). Korsgaard’s usage of the term also diverges from this purely subjective sense. She explicitly refers to adopting an attitude as a kind of practical doing, and I imagine Brandom would say the same. This is helpful.

She notes that British empiricists such as Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith treated responsibility in terms of the approval or disapproval of others. She likes Kant’s contrasting emphasis on agents taking responsibility. While I ultimately prefer Hegel and Brandom’s idea that responsibility involves both of these, in context she makes a good point. Noting how Kant emphasizes that we finite beings can never perfectly know ourselves, she says Kant gives philosophical foundation to the Biblical “Judge not”.

But, she goes on to say, “in a broader sense it is not possible for us to avoid holding one another responsible. For holding one another responsible is the distinctive element in the relation of adult human beings. To hold someone responsible is to regard her as a person — that is to say, as a free and equal person, capable of acting both rationally and morally” (p. 189).

“When you hold someone responsible, you are prepared to exchange lawless individual activity for reciprocity in some or all of its forms. You are prepared to accept promises, offer confidences, exchange vows, cooperate on a project, enter a social contract, have a conversation, make love, be friends, or get married. You are willing to deal with her on the basis of the expectation that each of you will act from a certain view of the other: that you each have your reasons which are to be respected, and your ends which are to be valued. Abandoning the state of nature and so relinquishing force and guile, you are ready to share, to trust, and generally speaking to risk your happiness or success on the hope that she will turn out to be human” (pp. 189-190).

Korsgaard notes that both Aristotle and Kant regard the reciprocity of friendship as a kind of perfect ethical relation. She quotes Kant saying that friendship is “the most intimate union of love with respect” (p. 191), then continues “While love moves you to pursue the ends of another, respect reminds you that she must determine what those ends are; while love moves you to care for the happiness of another, respect demands that you care for her character too” (ibid).

She points out that for Aristotle justice is not needed between friends, because friendship already embodies the reciprocity characteristic of justice. She cites passages from Kant indicating that he would agree.

Friendship or mutual recognition is a higher ethical standard that goes beyond moral obligation. I note that Leibniz also emphasized that higher virtue involves doing more than is morally required of us. Korsgaard continues, “Anyone must tell the truth when the circumstances call for it, but between friends there is a presumption of intimacy, frankness, and confidence. Anyone must help another in need or emergency, but friends promote each other’s projects as routinely as they do their own. Anyone must refrain from leading others into temptation; but friends help each other to be good…. To become friends is to create a neighborhood where the Kingdom of Ends is real” (p. 194).

I think the ethical meaning of Hegelian mutual recognition in any particular case is no different from that of friendship in Aristotle and Kant. The difference is that Hegel applies it more broadly, and in his hands it becomes not just a higher ethical standard but also a meta-ethical explanation that ends up also explaining knowledge and being.

Respect for All Beings

Not just all people but all beings whatsoever deserve our respect. Many additional specialized considerations apply to beings subject to ethical appraisal (“us”), and a lot of the time I focus on these. Mutual recognition in the strong sense applies only between ethical beings, and thus only between potentially rational or talking animals, but the ethical significance of mutuality is much broader than that.

I want to say that a good ethical being claims no unequivocal mastery over any other being, period. Every being — even including inanimate objects — is to some extent an end in itself, and not simply a means to our ends. Of course, we are not unequivocally subordinate to the ends of any being, either, so it it not always wrong to sacrifice other beings to our ends. (We must eat, for instance.) But as ethical beings, we ought to be careful and thoughtful about how we achieve our ends. We are stewards, not masters.

There can be no simple rule about whether the end justifies the means. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. The answers are in the details of each case. Full evaluation of such questions could only be achieved by the universal community of all ethical beings, but the universal ethical community and its principles are not a finished achievement, only a work in progress. Nonetheless, ethical beings implicitly deliberate on behalf of all beings, not just on behalf of themselves. (See also Natural Ends.)

Pippin on Mutual Recognition

Hegel’s ethical, epistemological, and political notion of mutual recognition has its roots in his early writings, predating the Phenomenology of Spirit, and is most famously developed in the Phenomenology itself.

Some older commentators claimed that in the late period of the Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right, Hegel turned his back on this grounding in intersubjectivity in favor of what Robert Pippin calls “a grand metaphysical process, an Absolute Subject’s manifestation of itself, or a Divine Mind’s coming to self-consciousness” (Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, p. 184).

Pippin thinks those writers were “insufficiently attentive to the unusual foundations of the mature theory of ethical life, or to Hegel’s theory of spirit (Geist) and so the very unusual account of freedom that position justifies” (p. 185; for other aspects of Pippin’s reading, see Naturalness, Mindedness; Self-Legislation?; Actualization of Freedom; Hegel on Willing).

What Hegel calls “true” or “concrete” individuality “should not be confused with questions of pre-reflexive self-familiarity, self-knowledge, existential uniqueness, personal identity, psychological health, and so forth” (pp. 185-186).

The concrete individual for Hegel is an ethical being, i.e., a being to be understood through her actions and commitments, and as such embedded, ramified, and temporally extended — anything but an atom “acting” instantaneously in a vacuum. It is this ethical being — not factual existence — that is constituted by mutual recognition.

Pippin notes that recognition of others as “free” as an ethical aim is not directed at meeting any psychological need for recognition. (Certainly it is also not about believing they have arbitrary free will. Rather, it is to be identified with an elementary requirement of Kantian respect for others as a starting point for ethics.)

Pippin agrees with Ludwig Siep — a pioneer of scholarship on recognition in Hegel — that Hegel “understood himself to have clarified and resolved the great logical problems caused by the sort of relational claim implicit in a radical theory of the constitutive function of recognition (wherein the relata themselves, or agents, are ultimately also relational) in his account of ‘reflection’ in particular and the ‘logic of essence’ in general” (p. 183n).

The freedom said to be the essence of spirit — which emerges concretely from mutual recognition — involves a mediated relation to one’s own “individual immediacy”. Mediation grounds reason, which grounds universality (in the mid-range Aristotelian rather than the unconditional Kantian sense, as distinguished in Self-Legislation?), which grounds the actualization of freedom.

Hegel is quoted saying “in an ethical act I make not myself but the issue itself the determining factor” (p. 192). This is the perspective he identifies with “ethical life”. “When I will what is rational, I act not as a particular individual, but in accordance with the notions of ethical life in general” (ibid).

To interpret ourselves and others as ethical beings or “respectfully” is to understand ourselves and them as each “freely” acting from an ethos, in the sense that we genuinely share in it by virtue of “willingly” and actually acting on it — and that is genuinely ours by the fact that we have thus willingly taken it up, whoever “we” may turn out to be — rather than treating action as a matter of our empirical selves causing things and/or being caused to be in a certain way, and freedom as a matter of power-over.

Hegelian freedom is never an intrinsic property of a substance or subject; it is an achievement, and what is more, that achievement always has a certain fragility, or possibility of losing itself. The acting self “can only be said to be such a self when [it acknowledges] its dependence on others in any determination of the meaning of what is done” (p. 200). For Hegel, what agency consists in is thus not a “metaphysical or substantive question” (p. 204). Instead, it involves a kind of non-arbitrariness or responsiveness to reasons. It seems to me one might say it is a sort of procedural criterion.

Hegel is quoted saying “In right, man must meet with his own reason… The right to recognize nothing that I do not perceive as rational is the highest right of the subject” (p. 244). Pippin continues, “Further, it is not sufficient merely that subjects actually have some sort of implicit, subjective faith in the rectitude of their social and political forms of life, that they in fact subjectively assent….. What I need to be able to do to acknowledge a deed as my own… is in some way to be able to justify it” (pp. 245-246). “It is never a good reason simply to say, ‘This is how we do things'” (p. 266). For Brandom’s take on the same aspects of Hegel, see Hegel’s Ethical Innovation; In Itself, For Itself; Brandom on Postmodernity; Mutual Recognition.)

Fallible Humanity

Fallible Man (French ed. 1960) was the next installment after Freedom and Nature in Paul Ricoeur’s project for a philosophy of will. This account of our fallibility was to set the stage for the following installment dealing with the problem of evil, which I will address separately.

The main body of this shorter book develops a nice interweaving of Aristotelian and Kantian anthropology, with special emphasis on the role of feeling. We are “intermediate” beings, mediating beings, and as such there is an inherent “disproportion” in our relations to self. “[T]his ‘disproportion’ of self to self would be the ratio of fallibility” (p. 4; emphasis in original).

Ricoeur says we can retain neither the Cartesian distinction between a finite understanding and an infinite will, nor any other convenient mapping of “finite” and “infinite” to separate faculties. Character makes us finite, but our participation in language involves us in what he calls a kind of infinity. An ethical Self finally uniting these aspects of our being should be considered as an end and ongoing project rather than an actuality.

Philosophical anthropology has to proceed as a “second order elucidation of a nebula of meaning which at first has a pre-philosophical character” (p. 8). As a consequence, method has to be dissociated from the idea of a starting point. “Philosophy does not start anything independently” (ibid).

He adopts the language of Blaise Pascal (1623-62) on the “pathos” of human “misery”. I don’t like such pessimistic rhetoric, but fortunately Ricoeur says the whole pre-comprehension of this “misery” is contained in the more moderate Platonic myths of the soul.

“The [Platonic] soul… is the very movement from the sensible toward the intelligible… its misery is shown in that it is at first perplexed and searches…. The soul holds opinions and makes mistakes; it is not vision… but an aim. It is not contact and possession… but tendency and tension” (pp. 12-13). “Instead of a well-balanced structure, it is a non-determined movement, a system of tensions which emerges” (p. 14). Plato speaks of an ambiguous power of the soul that is affected by both reason and desire, and results from a kind of mixture. For Plato, the account must take a mythical form, because such matters cannot be explained in terms of permanent realities.

My body is a “zero origin” that ties every perception to a point of view (p. 33). Invoking a common Husserlian theme, Ricoeur notes that perception involves inference about the back sides of things that we cannot see, and so on.

More broadly, our character may be viewed as the summation of many limiting “perspectives”, at the same time that our engagement in acts of conceptual determination implicitly involves a degree of “transgression” of those pre-given limitations (p. 38).

Ricoeur argues that our very ability to recognize something as a perspective implicitly involves a “transgression” or escape from limitation by the perspective. “Therefore, I am not merely a situated onlooker, but a being who intends and expresses as an intentional transgression of the situation” (p. 41). “[T]he project of a phenomenology of perception, wherein the moment of saying is postponed and the reciprocity of saying and seeing is destroyed, is ultimately untenable” (p. 42). “I say more than I see” (p. 44). Referring to Hegel, he adds “We are always already in the dimension of truth” (p. 46). “The fact that the self is at variance with itself is the indefeasible worm in the fruit of the immediate” (ibid; emphasis in original). “Here again we must not move too quickly to the side of the subject, act or noesis, but proceed reflectively beginning with the object, content and noema” (p. 49). Referring to Aristotle, he talks about the “power of the verb” to express affirmation and judgment. “I myself become a synthesis of speech and perspective in this projection of objectivity” (p. 61). “[I]f point of view is a characteristic of openness, namely its narrowness, openness indicates that my point of view is transgressed” (p. 62).

Ricoeur says these considerations suggest something like the Kantian transcendental synthesis of imagination, in its mediating role between the passivity of sensible intuition and the activity of thought. He also relates them to the experience of time.

“Plato… advised against rushing headlong into the abyss of the infinite or into that of the One but recommended learning to linger in between…. What Plato said of the One we can apply to the totality. Nothing gives rise to deception more than the idea of totality. All too quickly it has been said: It is here, it is there, it is Mind, it is Nature, it is History. Violence is the next step” (pp. 73-74). Instead, the idea of totality should be taken as a task, a Kantian imperative.

Our practical finitude is summed up in the notion of character. Ricoeur provocatively suggests that our practical “infinitude” with respect to the constitution of meaning is summed up in Aristotle’s notion of happiness. What extends the mediation of the Kantian transcendental synthesis of imagination into the practical domain, he says, is the constitution of the person through Kantian respect.

“Character is the finite openness of my existence taken as a whole” (p. 89). There is no science of character. Ricoeur says “My humanity is my essential community with all that is human outside myself…. [M]y character is that humanity seen from somewhere” (p. 93).

Desire too fundamentally involves a kind of openness. We are not enclosed within our desire. But there is also an affective opacity or closing involved in attachment.

Bergson is quoted saying each feeling of sufficient depth represents the whole soul.

“The person is the Self which was lacking to the ‘I’ of the Kantian ‘I think’…. The Self is aimed at rather than experienced…. There is no experience of the person in itself and for itself” (p. 106). The person is the synthesis of the “antithetical notions” of character and happiness. “[T]he person is primarily the ideal of the person” (p. 110).

According to Ricoeur, feeling already overcomes the duality of subject and object. It simultaneously tells us something about both. Feeling is essentially concerned with values, and simultaneously with what is. “If one does not take into consideration the primordial disproportion of vital desire and intellectual love (or of spiritual joy), one entirely misses the specific nature of human affectivity” (p. 140).

Not pleasure itself but a blind preference for pleasure is evil. “[H]appiness, restored by the reflection on the ‘excellences’ of the ‘good’ man, is ultimately the highest form of the pleasant” (p. 148). Thomistic and Cartesian analysis of the passions fails to see the “innocence of ‘difference’ under the cloak of vain and deadly ‘preference'” (p. 163). “[E]ncountering of another person is what breaks the finite, cyclic pattern of the sensible appetite” (p. 168).

Kantian anthropology should learn from Aristotle’s treatment of pleasure, and seek to discover behind passions an innocent quest that is “no longer mad and in bondage but constitutive of human praxis and the human Self” (p. 170). Later he quotes Hegel saying all great accomplishments involve passion, while a morality that simply condemns passion is deadly and too often hypocritical.

“The quest for reciprocity, which no will to live can account for, is the true passage from consciousness to self-consciousness” (p. 184). “I esteem myself as a thou for another” (p. 188). “[T]his belief, this credence, this trust, constitutes the very feeling of my worth” (p. 189). “[I]ts character of belief makes its corruptions possible: what is believed is presumed; and the presumption of the preesumed can turn into the presumption of the presumptuous” (p. 190). According to Ricoeur, the unstable, ambiguous “middle part” of the soul in Plato’s myth mixes the vital and the spiritual. Feeling prospectively binds things together, in the process creating the disproportion of self to self. This is the fragility of the human being, with immense potential for both good and evil.

Freedom from False Freedom

This is just a tricky phrase rather than a new idea, but the idea is vital.

No person or institution has a “right” to do arbitrary things. Here, “arbitrary” means having no justification by ethical reason broadly construed. It thus applies to things like disrespecting others, or engaging in wanton destruction. Freedom should not be allowed to serve as a cover for unethical action.

With regard to wanton destruction, I would point out that we have no right to destroy the planet we live on. This raises issues of diffuse, expansive responsibility that no one wants to deal with, and for which most people at least cannot be individually blamed.

We all need to take more responsibility in cases where we could not be blamed for failing to do so. (See also Expansive Agency; Freedom Without Sovereignty; Mutual Recognition; Stubborn Refusal; Economic Rationality?)

Kantian Respect

One of the fundamentals of Kantian ethics is a universal respect for people — not just those of whom we are fond, or those of whom we approve, or those who belong to a group with which we identify. This of course does not mean we should one-sidedly tolerate extremes of abuse. Respect for people is actually an Aristotelian mean. Like all ethical considerations, it requires a bit of thought in the application.

I used to worry about “metaphysical” or theological preconceptions about what it means to be a person. Even now, I would not base respect for people on a theological notion of substantial personhood, which carries too many presuppositions. Rather, I would start from the Aristotelian concept of rational or talking animals, understood as participating in Brandomian sapience.

I actually believe in respect for all beings, period — including animals, plants, and even inanimate objects. At this level, respect just means a sort of general kindness. But Kant was right to note that there is a profound practical difference when it comes to our fellow talking animals. The fact that we can talk to each other and ask questions of one another makes our interaction with fellow rational animals unique. Even under a broad, somewhat non-Kantian notion of respect for all beings, the kinds of interaction that are possible among beings possessed of language are far richer, and entail more specific responsibilities. Kant himself chose to reserve the term “respect” for those more specific responsibilities.

Kantian respect for people has nothing to do with judgments of the competence or goodness of individuals. It is grounded in the sheer possibility of dialogue. (See also Recognition.)

Stubborn Refusal

Under an ideal of mutual recognition, what are we supposed to do with those who stubbornly refuse to participate, say by persistently disrespecting certain categories of people, or persistently disrespecting us in particular? What is a kind person to do when confronted with, say, Nazis? How do we deal with questions like this at a societal level? There is no easy general answer. As a child confronted by schoolyard bullies, I always turned the other cheek. This allowed me the kind of pride I cared more about, but not one of the bullies saw the errors of their ways as a result.

At a societal level, I don’t advocate affording one-sided recognition to those who consistently refuse to recognize others. What’s difficult is defining objective criteria that would yield the right outcome in all cases. For example, in the case of actual Nazis, I am more concerned that people ought to defend themselves against them than to protect the civil liberties of Nazis. There is a slippery slope here though, raising the classic question of who is to guard the guardians. In the 1960s, U.S. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover claimed that the pacifistic civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. was a dangerous subversive. This was patently outrageous, but there are many other cases in between, and I don’t claim to know how to account for all of them. (See also Kantian Respect; Fragility of the Good; Evil?)

Recognition

I’d like to say a few words about the kind of recognition involved in Hegelian mutual recognition, and in particular to distinguish it from the ideological interpellation described by Louis Althusser in 1970. I wonder if some of the continentally inclined people who object to a stress on mutual recognition are actually misunderstanding it to mean something like mutual ideological interpellation.

Althusserian interpellation is a specific kind of recognition oriented toward the fixing of personal identity. On this model, people are socially “recognized” as who they are through associating them with preconceptions of their identity. According to Althusser’s analysis, this kind of fixing of personal identity plays a major role in reinforcing the existing social status quo. Thus, people concerned with promoting social justice have naturally considered it an obstacle to be overcome.

In sharp contrast to this, the kind of recognition involved in Hegelian mutual recognition is grounded in Kantian ethical respect for people. This has nothing to do with the details of who they are. It is based on the generic fact that they are rational animals like us, so no fixing of identity is involved. On this latter model, people are “recognized” through being treated with consideration. This also means it has nothing to do with the kind of specific claims involved in so-called identity politics.

Mutual recognition is basically mutual respect. I find it hard to imagine how anyone could find such an ideal objectionable. It is of course supposed to be genuinely mutual. If someone fails to truly recognize someone else based on some spurious ground such as race, then there is by definition no mutual recognition in that case, which means that on the mutual recognition model, something is broken that implicitly calls out for change. (See also Fragility of the Good; Stubborn Refusal.)

Freedom Without Sovereignty

Talk about freedom tends to be terribly ambiguous. Do we mean freedom from compulsion, or freedom from determination, or freedom resulting from some positive power? Do we mean anything other than complete unfreedom, or a super-strong total freedom, or something in between?

As to the last question, we ought at least to avoid claiming we are subject to an overly strong unfreedom, without claiming we possess an overly strong freedom. There is an Aristotelian mean here waiting to be clarified.

A first step toward such a clarification is to recognize that freedom ought not to be understood as implying something like sovereignty. Sovereignty is a kind of unconditional, total, exclusive authority or power over a domain. I want to say that nothing in the real world really does or ought to work like that. True freedom involves freedom from this kind of false freedom.

Historically, theories of sovereignty trace back to the absolute and arbitrary power attributed to the Roman emperors. The modern concept of sovereignty originated in arguments for absolute monarchy, e.g., by Jean Bodin in the late 16th century. In later political thought, the notion of sovereignty was transferred to the state as an institution, or in Rousseau’s case to a supposed general will of the people. To the extent that sovereignty of nations really just implies a kind of respect, it is unobjectionable, but to the extent that it is taken to imply a right to do arbitrary things, it is harmful.

Modern notions of individual unilateral rights, while in many cases referring to things that ought to be protected and respected more than they are, are a bad theoretical basis for good ethical concern. The notion of unilateral rights is implicitly grounded in a notion of sovereignty of each individual over a certain domain. At best, rights are a safeguard against failures of mutual recognition and Kantian respect for people, which ought to come first.

We need to think about responsibility in ways that do not presuppose that we must have some kind of sovereignty in order to be responsible. (See also Phenomenology of Will; Rationality; Choice, Deliberation; Brandomian Choice; Kantian Freedom; Freedom Through Deliberation?; Free Will and Determinism; Freedom and Free Will; Desire of the Master; Independence, Freedom; Ego; Euthyphro; Strong Omnipotence; Tyranny.)

Magnanimity

Magnanimity (literally “great-souledness”) has a special place among the Aristotelian virtues. It is said to be a mean that avoids both vanity and small-mindedness. In the later tradition under Christianity, pride often tended to be regarded simply as a sin, but Aristotle made a strong distinction between vanity or arrogance and a legitimate, well-founded kind of pride that leads to good actions.

Aristotle says a person who has this legitimate kind of pride will be very willing to help others, but will generally avoid asking for help. Such a person will be open and frank, caring more about the truth than about negative judgments of others. They will generally not hide what they feel. They will have the confidence to assert themselves with others who have power and authority, but will treat others — especially those less fortunate — with kindness and respect, and perhaps ironic self-depreciation. Also, “it is not a mark of greatness of soul to recall things against people, especially the wrongs they have done you, but rather to overlook them”.