Tag: Self

Aristotle on Friendship

Philia, commonly translated as “friendship” or “love”, is one of the summits of Aristotelian ethics. It embodies a kind of reciprocating good will, grounded in fondness and a kind of identification with the other, and it motivates us to do good. Aristotle discusses it from many angles. This is a historical background for Hegel’s ideas about mutual recognition. I’ve selected a few core passages to comment upon.

“And friendship seems to be present by nature in a parent for a child and in a child for a parent, not only in human beings but also in birds and most animals, and for animals alike in kind toward one another, and especially among human beings, which is why we praise those who are friends of humanity. And one might see among those who travel that every human being is akin and a friend to a human being” (Nicomachean Ethics, book VIII ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 144, emphasis added).

He considers familial bonds as a kind of friendship grounded in nature, not only among humans but among other animals as well. As the feeling of commonality in human communities, friendship has political significance. He explicitly suggests that we ought by default to see every fellow talking animal as a friend or potential friend.

“And friendship seems to hold cities together” (ibid).

“Cities” are a figurative way of referring to human society in general. Just above, he explicitly mentions every human being.

“And when people are friends there is no need of justice, but when they are just there is still need of friendship, and among things that are just, what inclines toward friendship seems to be most just of all. And friendship is not only necessary but also beautiful, for we praise those who love their friends…. Moreover, people believe that it is the same people who are good men and friends” (ibid).

Without much effort, friends naturally tend to treat one another better than justice would demand. Friendship motivates us to do good.

“[Friends] have goodwill and wish for good things for one another, not being unaware of it” (p. 146).

“[T]here are three species of friendship, equal in number to the kinds of things that are loved; for in accordance with each, there is a reciprocal loving which one is not unaware of, and those who love one another wish for good things for one another in the same sense in which they love. So those who love one another for what is useful do not love one another for themselves, but insofar as something good comes to them from one another. And it is similar with those who love on account of pleasure, since they are fond of charming people not for being people of a certain sort, but because they are pleasing to themselves. So those who love one another for what is useful have a liking based on what is good for themselves, and those who love for pleasure have a liking based on what is pleasant to themselves, and the other person is loved not for what he is, but insofar as he is useful or pleasant. Therefore, these are friendships of an incidental kind, since it is not insofar as the one loved is the very person he is that he is loved, but insofar as he provides, in the one case, something good, or in the other case, pleasure” (ch. 3, p. 146).

Even in the friendships based on usefulness or pleasure, there is a “reciprocal loving”.

“And those who wish for good things for their friends for their own sake are friends most of all, since they are that way in themselves and not incidentally” (p. 147). “And people wish for good things for those they love for those others’ own sake, not as a result of feeling but as a result of an active condition” (ch. 5, p. 150).

Kant’s emphasis on treating other people as ends in themselves has its origins here.

“Now the friendships that have been discussed consist in an equality, since the same things come from both people and they wish for the same things for one another” (ch. 6, p. 151).

“But friendship seems to be present in loving more than in being loved…. And since friendship is present more in loving, and those who love their friends are praised, the virtue belonging to friends seems to be loving” (ch. 8, p. 153).

“And it is especially in this way that those who are unequal might be friends, since it could equalize them” (p. 154).

While there are also friendships among unequals, in which a kind of proportionality to circumstances stands as the next best thing to equality, friendship between equals clearly serves as a kind of model. This equalizing role of friendship is why it is closely linked to justice.

“Now it seems, as was said at the beginning, that friendship and justice concern the same things and are present in the same things; for in every sort of community there seems to be something just, and also friendship. At any rate, people address their shipmates and fellow soldiers as friends, and it is similar with those in other sorts of communities. To whatever extent they share something in common, to that extent there is a friendship, since that too is the extent to which there is something just. And the proverb ‘the things of friends are common’ is right, since friendship consists in community” (ch. 9, p. 154 ).

Aristotle uses the figure of speech that “the friend is another self” (book IX ch. 4, p. 168). We both tend to see our friends as like ourselves, and more often form friendships with those we are disposed to see as like ourselves. As is often the case, he moves back and forth rather fluidly between definition and description, and between more and less proper or exact senses of the word. Thus the same term serves here as a universalizing ideal and there as a distinguishing criterion.

“Intellect” and the Body

The Latin scholastics invented strongly univocal concepts of “substantial form” and “intellectual soul”, and read them back into Aristotle. The work of Jean-Baptiste Brenet shows how this is interwoven with the prehistory of the modern notion of a psychological subject as a knower and agent.

In the book that served as his doctoral thesis, Brenet develops a case study of the “prince of the Averroists” John of Jandun, who turns out to be closer to his Latin peers than to Ibn Rushd (Averroes) himself. Brenet has also published French translations of Aquinas’ questions on soul and body from Summa Theologica, as well as a work On the Intellectual Soul by the English Averroist theologian Thomas Wilton, whose theses we will see are disputed by John of Jandun.

Averroes had insisted that it is only equivocally that intellect is said to belong to the same soul that is said to be the form of the body. According to Brenet, John of Jandun wants to avoid two extremes. The first, which he associates with Alexander of Aphrodisias, in effect makes the human intellect entirely material, by insisting on the univocity of Aristotle’s definition of the soul. The second, represented by Themistius, treats intellect entirely as a transcendent principle, and absolutely denies that it is the form of the body. This latter view is often mistakenly attributed to Averroes. But in any case, John of Jandun reverses this emphasis, and pushes for a more “Alexandrian” solution. He searches the text of Averroes in order to highlight all the passages where Averroes says or suggests that intellect, in spite of its transcendent dimension, is nonetheless also in some meaningful way ours.

“Against the noetics of Averroes, to which he opposes in the first instance the experience of personal thought, Thomas Aquinas maintains in his De unitate intellectus that intellect is ‘a power of the soul that is the form of the body’. He even comes to write in this polemical context that ‘intellect is the form of the body’. It is this ‘information’ that, according to him, confers to each of us a principle for thinking that is our own” (Brenet, Transferts du Sujet, p. 35, my translation throughout).

Siger of Brabant had argued against Aquinas that the relation between intellect and the body is not one of substance, but rather is a kind of operational unity. Intellect is not the substantial form of the body, but is properly called a sort of “intrinsic mover or operator” within the soul. John of Jandun “is a child of this inaugural dispute. He inherits words and formulas from it, but not only that: he subscribes to the scholastic idea and its expression, that it is the form of the body that gives thought to the human” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“In fact Averroes, who paid extremely close attention to the exact problem of the being of intellect in potentiality, did not really seek to know in what sense intellect, without qualification, could be the form of the body. On the one hand, it is in effect the perfection of the human [i.e., the composite of soul and body] that interests him; on the other hand, he nearly always proposes a divided approach to the question” (p. 46).

“Not only must we not speak vaguely of the relation of intellect to human individuals, but things do not go the same way with each ‘intellect’. What is involved may be the thought of an infant, or that of a sleeping person” (p. 47). “The essential of [Averroes’] Long Commentary is developed in the third book, in the arborescence of modes of possible junction for the human, when Averroes details the diverse degrees of mediation that lead to the immediate information of the intellect, acquired at the end of the theoretical stage of thought: at this moment, the agent intellect has become directly our form” (ibid, emphasis in original).

(Here we have explicitly an immediacy that is not originary, but rather is a product of mediation. Hegel was not the first to raise such a possibility.)

John follows Siger of Brabant in modeling human intellect on the celestial intelligences that were believed to move the spheres by which the motions of the stars were explained. Like Siger, he uses Averroes’ commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens to derive conclusions about human intellect that conflict with what Averroes says in his more famous Long Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul.

“If intellect is the form of the body, it is so insofar as it is an ‘operator’. Every form is a giver either of being or of operation: the intellectual soul is precisely forma dans operationem” (p. 72).

Not without some irony, Brenet observes that “If we abstract away the corruptibility of the individual body, as well as its composition, if we neglect the fact that intellect has need of the image and needs it in its primary operation, we can justifiably say that it is a ‘form’ analogous to the celestial intelligence that is the mover of a sphere ” (p. 84).

“Between an immaterial form and a body that are ontologically separate, there can exist a relation in the order of act, a purely functional relation…. Even if it is separate from its Intelligence in its being, [the celestial sphere] is united to it in a certain way, i.e., to recall what John says himself, ‘at least as subject‘…. subjectum or ‘place’: the sphere-subject gives place to movement, the act of the Intelligence has a place in this sub-jection ” (p. 85, emphasis in original).

“Certainly, the Parisian master could say, the anti-Avicennan and anti-Platonic empirical orientation of the noetics of Averroes means that the implication of the body in the elaboration of thought must be strong, but intellect only has need of the human body for making thought, and not for being there” (p. 86).

“If the celestial sphere is indispensable as subject-receiver of the act caused by the Intelligence, insofar as it receives movement, how can it be compared to the human body, which does not receive thought from the intellect and is not, in this sense at least, the ‘subject’?” (p. 87).

Note well that intellect is not said to be “received” by the human here. In this Averroes differs from Alfarabi and Avicenna.

“We do indeed find a cosmologico-noetic analogy in Averroes, but Averroes does not reason in the same way. He does not found noetics on cosmology, he does the inverse, and goes from analyses of the human intellect to say something about the celestial Intelligences” (pp. 87-88). “John of Jandun seems to reverse this relation when he layers noetics over cosmology” (p. 88).

For Averroes, this raises the “problem of Theophrastus [Aristotle’s collaborator and immediate successor]”: How can we say that the material intellect has no form of its own, and yet that it is a being?

“Nothing can be in act that we call a ‘this’, which is to say a body or a faculty existing in a body, like the sensory faculty. The absolute denuding of its being is the condition of its receptivity to universals; in order for it to potentially be the intelligible, there can be nothing of its own in its being-in-potentiality” (pp. 89-90).

Here he is effectively saying that no concrete particular can be “in act” in the Aristotelian sense. Being a particular involves accident, and accident is incompatible with pure act.

“If the material intellect is by definition ‘that which is in potentiality all the ‘intentions’ of universal material forms, and is not any being in act before having conceived it, it is excluded that its nature could be that of (prime) matter, that of the separate forms, or that of a hylomorphic composite” (p.91).

(I am inclined to think that the notion of prime matter (i.e., matter abstracted from the form with which it is ordinarily said to be inseparable, and supposedly having no properties of its own) is an interpolation due to Alexander of Aphrodisias.)

“As a consequence, the subject of the intelligibles… constitutes a being sui generis…. The interpretation that Averroes gives in the Long Commentary rests on a double rejection of the readings of Alexander of Aphrodisias and of Themistius” (p. 92).

Brenet quotes Averroes, “Alexander explains the demonstration of Aristotle concluding that the material intellect is not passive, that it is not something of which one says ‘this’, (aliquid hoc), that is to say a body or a faculty [existing] in the body, as intending the preparation itself [for the reception of intelligibles] and not the subject of the preparation. That is why he writes in his book On the Soul that the material intellect more resembles the preparation that is in the tablet that has not been written upon, than the prepared tablet itself” (pp. 92-93, brackets in original). Averroes continues, “But it is impossible to show the nature of the preparation proper to the intellect without having recourse to the nature of the subject, since the preparation proper to each subject is parallel to (currit cursu) the perfection and the form of the subject” (p. 93).

Brenet continues, “Otherwise said, Aristotle could not speak of the receptive power of the material intellect without considering the very essence of that intellect…. Averroes in effect rejects the idea that a form adjoining a corporeal substrate can be other than inhering in and mixed with it: an intellect-disposition of the body can only be a corporeal form whose implication in matter renders impossible any apprehension of the universal” (ibid).

Logical and epistemic access to universals is for Averroes neither natural nor supernatural. I like to call it “ethical”.

“As a consequence, contrary to what Alexander of Aphrodisias maintains, the material intellect is really or substantially the subject of the intelligible; it is not the accident of a support; it cannot be reduced to a pure disposition attached to the material composite” (p. 94). “Themistius errs too, because he makes the material intellect a substance in which is found the disposition to receive the intelligibles” (ibid).

“Averroes bases his conceptual elaboration upon the being of the material intellect, and it is this that governs his cosmologico-noetic analogy, i.e., a reflection on the subjectity of the subject of universals. His question is not: Is the receptive intellect a subject or not? but rather, What subject or what being must it be?” (pp. 95-96).

“Averroes and John of Jandun do not defend the same thesis. John holds that the intellectual soul is to the body of the human as the mover-intelligence is to the heaven it moves, whereas Averroes maintains that the ‘celestial body’, i.e., its ‘soul’, is to its intelligence and to the separate forms of the universe, that which the material intellect is to the agent intellect and to the intelligibles it receives. This does not mean that John’s idea, which remained very current throughout the Middle Age, is absurd, impossible, or absolutely contrary to what Averroes wanted to say” (p. 104).

“In not working on the problem of the ‘fourth kind of being’, John truncates cosmology and unbalances its relation to noetics…. The master of arts develops his reading of Aristotle and Averroes from the angle of a question that the Cordovan does not pose: what is it that unites intellect to the human body? Like Siger when he was cornered by Aquinas, he is already dominated by the will to find the kind of union that will allow us to say that hic homo intelligit [“this human understands”], or that homo formaliter intelligit [the human formally understands]” (p. 109).

“[Averroes] does not ask himself about the act that unites intellect and the human, but first of all about the very possibility of any intellectual act, about its material possibility. Under what conditions is the intelligible received? Where can it be received? These are his questions. He wants to determine what is the subject of thought, independent of seeking to know who thinks, which far surpasses the question of human consciousness and that of individual intellection” (ibid).

In a footnote, Brenet quotes Jean Jolivet: “The contingency of individual knowledge, the empiricity of its constitution, are overlooked by a globalizing conception of being, of thought, and of their adequation. Transposing the matter into modern terms (with the required precautions), one could say that Ibn Rushd elaborated a philosophy not of consciousness but of the concept, that puts itself on the same side as Aristotle, properly understood, but also that of Spinoza, Hegel, Marx” (p. 109n).

The “Averroist” theologian Thomas Wilton “judges that the agent intellect is neither a forma inhaerens nor a forma informans, but that it intervenes solely as forma assistens” (p. 116).

But “For the Parisian master, … our intellect is constituted by the possible intellect and by the agent intellect, and the latter is united secundum esse [in being] to the first. Clearly opposed to Thomas Wilton, the master of arts goes so far as to say [the agent intellect] is our form informans” (p. 117). “This comes back to his conception of the intellectus possibilis and of the intellectual soul: John in effect rejects the idea that the possible intellect should be in act, … just as he denies the fact that the agent intellect is not part of the human soul” (p. 118).

Next in this series: Imagination, Cogitation

Second-Person Thinking?

Still pondering Habermas’s notion of illocution, I wanted to add some informal thoughts. He criticizes first- and third-person thinking, and suggests that they are actually parasitic on a more primary, second-person thinking that would be characteristic of what he calls communicative action and illocution. I find this quite intriguing.

Second-person thinking would be “dialogical”, in contrast to the “monological” character of first- and third-person thinking. These terms, used by Habermas, were introduced by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. According to Habermas, monological thinking is objectifying, whereas dialogical thinking has the character of participation in a dialogue.

What psychologists more commonly refer to as internal “monologue” is sometimes also called internal dialogue. Apparently not everyone experiences this, but it is considered completely normal. Common speech says “I” talk to “myself”, but the self involved here is not really clear. “I” is a convenient shorthand (a sort of indexical reference to a flowing movement toward unity of apperception, as Kant said).

It is a bit ambiguous whether we are addressing “ourselves” or an imagined other when we have internal dialogue, but then the notion of self is itself ambiguous (see numerous posts under Subjectivity). Paul Ricoeur wrote a fascinating book called Oneself As Another. Plato in the Republic has Socrates compare the soul to a city. Aristotle says we regard our friend as “another self”. (Descartes did not really invent the so-called Cartesian subject either, as Alain de Libera has amply documented. Insofar as there is a common modern notion of a strongly unified self, it has a long prehistory in certain strands of theology.)

Habermas uses his notion of communicative reason as a way of getting at an originally intersubjective character of thought. As Brandom has noted, this picks out essentially the same conditions that Hegel associates with the ideal of mutual recognition. But Habermas apparently does not accept Brandom’s provocative claims that mutual recognition is by itself sufficient to ground genuine objectivity, and that normative discourse under conditions of mutual recognition can bootstrap itself.

Beginning of this series: Ethics of Communication

Consciousness and Identity

Previously, I raised a doubt about Robert Pippin’s statement to the effect that “I know I am the one acting because I am the one acting”. For this line of argument, he cites Sebastian Rödl’s work. Pippin also says, drawing on Rödl, that “judgment is the consciousness of judging” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 105).

In the first case, my doubt had to do with what counts as knowledge. I tend to adhere to Plato’s sharp distinction between knowledge on the one hand, and belief or opinion on the other. In the second case, I draw a sharp line between Hegelian consciousness and self-consciousness, or between Kantian empirical and transcendental subjectivity (see numerous posts under Subjectivity). It is my contention that when they are being more careful, both Kant and Hegel too emphasize such a distinction. But they both also make more casual remarks that blur the distinction.

Judgment in the Kantian and Hegelian sense, I want to say, belongs to reflection and to what Hegel calls self-consciousness, which is not a kind of plain simple “consciousness” that just happens to take for its object a substantial “self”, but something else altogether. The plain simple consciousness that we share at least with all animals has an organic basis related to perception and emotion, but no one is born with self-consciousness. Self-consciousness belongs to what the scholastics used to call second nature. In modern terms, it is in part a cultural acquisition, and in part something that we give birth to ourselves, or, as Hegel might prefer to say, that is able to give birth to itself in us, once we have the necessary acculturation.

Ordinary consciousness includes what has traditionally been called inner sense. This involves immediately having images of one’s (empirical) self, or of aspects of it, analogous to the way that we experience external sensation. This is a kind of imagination, not a kind of reflexivity.

Thought and judgment on the other hand are inherently reflexive, and self-conscious in the sense of reflexivity, but — I want to say, and I think this is implicit in Aristotle and Hegel — the reflexivity of thought and judgment belongs directly to each specific thought and judgment itself, rather than to a separate substantial “self” that “has” them. In the main example that Pippin gives, the reflexivity of a judgment consists in all the reasons for it, which refer to it.

At one point in this discussion, Pippin says that “Finally, there is little doubt that Hegel realized that apperception was not a kind of consciousness” (p. 107). He quotes Hegel saying that the “original deed” corresponding to a Kantian unity of apperception is “liberated from the opposition of consciousness, is closer to what may be taken simply as thinking as such. But this deed should no longer be called consciousness; for consciousness holds within itself the opposition of the ‘I’ and its intended object which is not to be found in that original deed. The name ‘consciousness’ gives it more of a semblance of subjectivity than does the term ‘thought’, which here, however, is to be taken in the absolute sense of infinite thought, not encumbered by the finitude of consciousness” (pp. 107-108).

This is what I have been saying, and I do not see how it can be reconciled with the claim that judgment is identical to a consciousness of judgment, if judgment is inherently apperceptive. Apperception is something higher than mere consciousness. Apperception and judgment are inherently discursive; mere consciousness is not.

Which comes first, reasons we live by and things we care about, or a substantial self? I say it is what we live by and care about. Put another way, it is discursivity and not consciousness that involves reflexivity. (And even our basic sentience need not be attributed to a substantial self. See Droplets of Sentience?.)

What is true is that judgment does presuppose that misleadingly designated “self-consciousness” which is not a kind of consciousness and does not involve a substantial self. Consciousness of judgment would be judgment’s presentation in imagination. It may well be true that there is no judgment without its also being presented in imagination, but a reflexive, apperceptive, discursive judgment and its immediate presentation as an image in animal imagination are by no means the same thing.

The Self in Plotinus

Besides standing at a half-way point between Plato and Aristotle and later articulations of monotheistic theology, Plotinus occupies a special place in the history of subjectivity. In a 2016 document “Power, Subject, Sovereignty”, prepared for her confirmation as a director of research at the Centre National de la Rechereche Scientifique, Gwenaëlle Aubry treats her extensive work on Plotinus as the connecting theme of her philosophical investigations. I’m still waiting for the 2nd edition of her Aristotle book to arrive, and wanted in the meantime to extend my coverage of her work on subjectivity in Plotinus.

For the Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism (2014), Aubry wrote an outstanding more introductory article that was translated to English as “Metaphysics of soul and self in Plotinus”.

“One of the great singularities of the philosophy of Plotinus consists in thinking of the self for its own sake and, in particular, in producing a concept of it different from that of soul. This philosophical breakthrough is inseparable from the discovery of immediate reflexivity, that is, the subject’s ability to apprehend itself independently of its relation to an object or to another subject. In Plotinus, however, this reflexivity occurs only in an interrogative form” (p. 310).

“In other words, it does not, as in Descartes, assume the form of an intuition by means of which the subject, grasping itself as consciousness, would, at the same time, have an evident revelation of its essence….[W]e will see how Plotinus, although he seems to think of the self by means of the connected notions of soul and human being, but also of individual or even of consciousness, ceaselessly produces and renews a gap between them and the self” (ibid).

Plotinus was the first to assert a kind of immediate reflexivity, and indeed arguably the first to speak of generalized consciousness in something like a modern sense, independent of particular contents. But this reflexivity remains associated with a sort of Socratic questioning, and does not degenerate into the dogmatic intuition of a present self that we find in Descartes.

“The self properly so called, which Plotinus refers to as the hēmeis (“we”), is distinct both from the essential or separated soul and from the soul linked to the body. Situated rather than defined, it cannot be substantified. To use Plotinian terminology, the hēmeis is neither god nor animal, but rather the power to become either one. These two possible and exclusive identifications depend on the orientation it gives to its consciousness. Consciousness therefore does not appear, as it will in Descartes, as a revelation of identity, but as a means of identification” (ibid).

“Another singular aspect of the philosophy of Plotinus is that it affirms the existence of a
separated soul, which remains in the Intellect and alien to both the powers and the passions of the body. This doctrine was to be rejected by the later Neoplatonists, particularly Iamblichus and Proclus…, but it occupies a fundamental place in Plotinian thought” (p. 311).

The “separated soul” is a unique doctrine of Plotinus that seems to have indirectly influenced the more unified scholastic notion of an “intellectual soul”. Later, Aubry refers to it as an “intellective soul”. By means of it Plotinus gives us an especially close connection to the divine.

“[I]f the Plotinian subject grasps itself only in an interrogative form, that is, not as something obvious but as something strange, it is because it undergoes the experience of several modes of relation to itself” (ibid).

“[S]trictly speaking, the intellective soul cannot be counted among the parts of the soul, and yet, it is indeed ours (hēmeteron); in fact, he continues, “it is ours without being ours … It is ours when we use it; it is not ours when we do not use it” (pp. 311-312).

Here Plotinus remains faithful to Aristotle in maintaining that intellect is not a proper part of the soul, and yet can still be said to be “ours”.

“Like the total Intellect, and each of the intellects of which it is composed, the higher soul is characterized by intuitive thought, that is, by the simultaneous, inarticulated and non-propositional grasp of a complex content – comparable to a glance that embraces all the features of a face in a single vision” (p. 312).

This is precisely the kind of originary intellectual intuition that Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel would deny. As Kant would say, this kind of unitary vision could only be a result of synthesis. But for Plotinus, unitary intellectual intuition is the starting point of all thought, which Aristotelian “thinking things through” only weakly imitates. Nonetheless, he retains a partial faithfulness to Aristotle in maintaining that this does not include a putatively full intuition of self.

“The soul’s forgetfulness of the Intellect is also a forgetting of its own intellective origin –
an origin that nevertheless has not come and gone, nor does it belong to a mythic past,
but that remains in a state of unperceived presence. This forgetfulness is characteristic of
pre-philosophical consciousness. Unaware of its dignity, soul is fascinated by externality:
the body, the sensible. Narcissistic, it prefers its reflection to itself, ignorant of the fact that
without it, this reflection, which is merely the effect of its power, could not subsist” (ibid).

For Plotinus, we remain potentially in touch with the separate intellective soul. All that is required to experience it is that we choose to turn ourselves toward it, but Plotinus says many people never make this choice, and instead remain ensnared in what Aubry calls narcissism.

“[T]his essential self constituted by the separated soul must indeed be distinguished from the hēmeis and from what we may call the biographical subject, that is, the bearer of a history, a memory, and the form of consciousness that is linked to them” (ibid).

“Like memory and individual history, consciousness disappears in the Intellect. More precisely, it gives way to a feeling of presence in which the duality between subject and object is abolished. In this state, Plotinus writes, we are ‘only potentially ourselves’ (Enn[eads].IV.4[28].2.5–8). We merge with that which we contemplate” (p. 313).

Here we really do have a “metaphysics of presence”.

“This state in which the subject no longer experiences itself as such, but in its unity
with being and with the others, is nevertheless designated by Plotinus as the site of its
greatest proximity to itself, at the same time as it is genuine self-knowledge: “Being in this
way, we are more than anything conscious of ourselves (hautois synetoi), and we acquire
knowledge of ourselves as we make ourselves one” (Enn. V.8.[31].11.31–3)” (ibid).

The subject experiences itself “in its unity with being and with the others”. Here we can see a precedent for the nonprivate interiority that distinguishes Augustine’s thought from that of Descartes and Locke. Clearly we have here a non-empirical notion of self.

“Still, the question arises of what the subject, thus identified with the intellective soul and unburdened of all biographical content, then grasps of itself. At this essential level, can we still speak of identity? Of individuality?” (ibid).

“The paradox of the Plotinian personal self is thus illuminated: if, for Plotinus, one is never
more oneself than when one is no longer conscious of oneself, this is because the subject identified with its essential soul is not abolished in the universal. Rather, it is identified with the very source of its individuality, that is, with the singular viewpoint of its intellect upon the total Intellect, as well as with the logos that bears the power of its own becoming” (ibid).

“Indeed, the notion of a separated soul orients Plotinian ethics, which has no other goal than to transform this constant but ordinarily unperceived presence into a conscious presence. Far from being immediate or mechanical, this transformation is given as a demanding, normed itinerary, whose various stages correspond to various degrees of virtue…. This ethical itinerary, and we shall return to this point, is inseparably a trajectory of consciousness, which gradually turns away from the body to orient itself towards the separated soul” (ibid).

Once again, here is a real “metaphysics of presence”.

“In truth, then, the Plotinian beyond is very close: to reach it, it is enough to make oneself deaf to the tumult of the body, to release oneself from narcissistic fascination. For Plotinus, Odysseus represents the anti-Narcissus: he is the one who was able to resist the spells of the sensible, the charms of Circe and of Calypso (Enn. I.6[1].8.18–20). Yet the Plotinian Odyssey is a return to something that is always-already-there, which is the locus in us of a divine autarky, lucidity and happiness” (p. 314).

Again, for Plotinus the divine is very near.

“[S]trictly speaking, for Plotinus the soul does not descend. What descends, or mixes with the body to animate it, is the power, the dynamis, that emanates from the separated soul” (ibid).

Here we have a profound difference from Aristotle. In Aristotle, soul is strictly emergent. Souls don’t pre-exist and there is no “descent” at all, only an upward movement.

“In its confrontation with the body and with temporality, noēsis [pure thought] is transformed into dianoia [thinking things through]. This is the moment by which the soul is truly constituted qua soul, in its difference from the Intellect” (ibid).

Plotinus has the unprecedented idea that soul is constituted as a “procession” from Intellect.

The pre-existent “separate” soul lives eternally in unitary intuition. For Plotinus, ordinary human “thinking things through” is the result of the extension, folding, and division of originary intuition into time. This “descent” is necessary in order for anything to be manifested, and therefore not to be equated with anything like Biblical original sin.

“The descent can be considered as a fall or a fault only when dianoia and the consciousness linked to it, forgetful of the separated soul, are completely oriented towards the body” (ibid).

For Plotinus, we are “fallen” beings not by virtue of our embodiment, but only insofar as we are individually lost in the soul’s narcissistic pursuit of its own reflection.

“As early as chapter 2 of Enn. IV.8[6], Plotinus states a principle: ‘It is not a bad thing for the soul to provide the body with the power of good and being, since it is not true that all providence applied to lower reality prevents this providential agent from remaining in what is best’ (2.24–5)” (ibid).

Soul in Plotinus is not just something that descends. It is the very agent of providence. But it is capable of being waylaid or losing its way.

“[T]he World Soul [as distinct from soul in general] does not “descend”. What is “sent” into the world is not it, but its “lowest power” (dynamis). Yet it is precisely because the World Soul does not descend that it is able to govern the universe, to set it in order into a cosmos, a beautiful totality. This point of doctrine is explicitly formulated elsewhere, for instance at Enn. IV.3[27].6.21: “The souls that incline toward the intelligible world have a greater power”; or else Enn. II.9[33].2, where one reads that the World Soul governs “simply by looking at what is before it, thanks to its wonderful power. The more it devotes itself to contemplation, the more it is beautiful and powerful” (15–16)” (p. 315).

Unlike Aristotle and the scholastics, Plotinus also speaks of a Soul of the World that is distinct from individual souls.

“This description of the mode of governance of the World Soul is nothing other than an application of the Plotinian model of causality. This states that from every being in act (energeiai) there necessarily emanates an active, productive power (dynamis), which in turn is the cause of a new being and a new act” (ibid).

This sheds light on how the descent of the soul is not inherently a fall. It is part of the larger cosmic process of procession (known via the Latin translations of Avicenna as “emanation”), which is what in Plotinus takes the place of creation. Plotinus seems to claim that when we turn toward the separated soul, from us too will proceed or emanate a productive power, capable anew of spontaneously carrying forward our engagement with the world in all its complexity. This spontaneous engagement, freed from narcissistic pursuit of our own reflection, is for Plotinus strictly more capable than a narcissistically involved engagement.

It is not worldly engagement as such but narcissistic attachment to worldly things that corresponds to the Fall.

“For the individual soul as for the World Soul, however, Plotinus emphasizes that it is this power, this dynamis, and not the soul itself, that descends and is mixed with the body. This is why the Aristotelian definition of the soul as first entelechy of the body must be opposed by the assertion that the soul is itself in act, already entelekheia, without the body, and that only for this reason there can be a body. Thus, the synamphoteron, that is, the living body, is not a mixture of body and soul, but only of the body and the power emanated from the soul” (ibid).

Again we see the dramatic difference between Aristotle’s modest experience-oriented and biologically grounded emergent notion of soul, and the grand metaphysical or divine pre-existent intellective soul posited by Plotinus.

“If the higher soul does not descend, if only its emanated dynamis is mixed with the body, how should we understand Plotinus’ words that the soul ‘leaps’ towards its own body? The answer is that this motion is what constitutes the soul qua soul, in its difference from the Intellect, or again that by which noēsis is modified into dianoia. Indeed, dianoia is the result of the encounter of intellective thought with time. It deploys the immediacy and totality of intuition into successive moments, to respond to the demands of the body, of action, and of a life diffracted by temporality (Enn. III.7[45].11). Thus, it must be considered “the sign of a diminishment of the Intellect” (Enn. IV.3[27].18.1–7)” (ibid).

Here we have a major source for all the arguments about whether intellect should be conceived as originally immediately intuitive or as originally discursive. Many people read Aristotle as if his notion of intellect were the intuitive one that Plotinus articulates explicitly. I think Aristotle is closer to Kant and Hegel’s position that intellect is inherently discursive, and that unifying intuitions only come about as the result of processes of synthesis.

“This movement seems to attest an oscillation between two conceptions of the subject: the reflexive subject and the subject of attribution (the logical or ontological substrate). What in fact appears, however, is that once again the reflexive subject – the hēmeis – does not allow itself to be reduced to the subject of attribution…. In this irreducibility of the hēmeis to the various levels of the soul, we may see an effect of Plotinus’ discovery of the difference between subject-consciousness and subject-substrate” (p. 317).

Here indeed we have the root of modern notions of “the subject” as consciousness. This same gap that Aubry speaks of is what leads Augustine to deny that the soul, spirit, or mind is to be identified with a subject as substrate.

“Consciousness is therefore not so much constitutive of identity as it is a condition for identification. We are not what we are aware of: quite the contrary, we become what we become aware of. If the reflexive question ends up in the acknowledgement of a duality, becoming aware, for its part, is equivalent to the choice of an identity” (p. 320).

For Plotinus, consciousness in itself is not a foundation for personal identity, as it is in Descartes and Locke. Instead, Aubry locates the basis of individuality for Plotinus in the “separated” soul.

The idea that we make a sort of primordial choice of what kind of being we are is unprecedented.

“[T]he constant activity within us of the separated soul is the necessary condition for such everyday cognitive operations as judgment…. It is in the latter — identical to the pure ousia, that is, the separated soul — that the foundation of individuality resides, together with the most intense life and an unalterable happiness” (p. 321).

The suggestion that the separated soul is involved in judgment is new to me, and intriguing. This makes it seem not so “separated” after all.

“Plotinus, for his part, is able to conceive both the permanent, impersonal subject and the
ethical subject defined as what makes the choice of its identity” (ibid).

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.

Being the One Acting

Another passing doubt in my reading of Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows came up when he said something along the lines of “I know I am the one acting because I am the one acting”. This certainly captures an intuitive feeling that I have too, but on reflection it seems to rely on what I would call an appearance of inner sense.

With Aristotle I call all inner immediacy an appearance of inner sense. Then my Platonic instincts say that no appearance qualifies as knowledge.

Does Pippin mean to suggest that Hegel — “that great foe of immediacy” — believes in a sort of immediate self-knowledge of individuals via the identification of thinking and being? But he pointed out that Hegel’s German selbst is strictly an adverbial modifier that has no dual usage as a substantive noun, the way “self” does in English. What he wrote in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy seems at odds with this as well.

Pippin has argued that thought for Hegel is inherently self-referential. I think I want to affirm this, but the relational “self” of self-referentiality and unity of apperception is not the immediately contentful, more noun-like empirical “self” of me and mine (see The Ambiguity of “Self”), which I think we experience through the medium of Aristotelian/Kantian imagination rather than thought. Pippin’s remark with which I began seems to blur the line between transcendental self (-referentiality) and empirical self. The relation between transcendental and empirical “self” is one of neither isomorphism nor hylomorphism, I want to say. Something like what Plato called “mixing” does seem to occur in experience, but how to characterize it is a very difficult question.

Aristotle used episteme (knowledge as rationally articulable) and gnosis (direct personal familiarity) in contrasting ways, but it is common to see them both rendered to English as “knowledge”, as if they were interchangeable. With Hegel too we have to be careful, because multiple German words get translated by English “knowledge”.

Next in this series: Passive Intellect?

Apperceptive Judgment

What Hegel calls “the concept” is not a simple content to be grasped, as if it were already completely formed as what it will turn out to be, and all of that in advance of and independent of the activity of judgment. Rather, it emerges out of the activity of judgment in the space of reasons. It also turns out to have an inherently normative character.

Pippin quotes Kant: “I find that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception…. I do not mean to say that these representations necessarily belong to one another in the empirical intuition, but rather that they belong to one another in virtue of the necessary unity of the apperception in the synthesis of intuitions” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 102).

As a first approximation, “apperception” here means something like apprehension of intelligible meaning. For Kant, “the basic feature” of the “general or content-less logic as rules for valid judgings and inferrings” is that “judging is apperceptive” (p. 103).

The significance of this will become a bit clearer further below. Hegel will go further than Kant in construing apperception in a purely “logical” (as opposed to psychological) way.

“Kant was well aware that with this notion of apperceptive judging he was breaking with the rationalist (and Lockean) notion of reflection as inner perception, and as we shall see, Hegel’s language is everywhere carefully Kantian in this respect” (p. 112).

(Aristotle too carefully distinguishes thought from inner sense, rather than identifying them as Descartes and Locke do.)

Pippin quotes Hegel: “It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the essence of the concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, the unity of the ‘I think’, or of self-consciousness” (ibid).

This suggests a three-way mutual explication of the essence of the concept, unity of apperception, and self-consciousness. Self-consciousness for Hegel turns out to be not a separate substantive “subject” distinct from its “object”, but rather an essential adverbial property of self-reference that is intrinsic to the thinking of every concept (see The Ambiguity of “Self”).

From Hegel’s perspective “it is quite misleading for Kant to formulate the point by saying that the ‘I think’ must ‘accompany’ (begleiten) all my representations…. Representing objects is not representing objects, a claiming to be so, unless apperceptive…. And that has to mean, in a very peculiar sense that is important to Hegel and that will take some time to unpack, that such judgings are necessarily and inherently reflexive, and so at the very least are self-referential, even if such a reflected content is not substantive, does not refer to a subject’s focusing on her judging activity as if it were a second consciousness…. Virtually everything in the Logic of significance descends in one way or another from the proper understanding of this claim” (ibid).

Judgings as activities are “necessarily and inherently… self-referential”. The suggestion seems to be that apperception and self-consciousness consist in complex self-referential judgings, rather than anything resembling perceptive receptivity or simple consciousness. “Reflexivity” for Hegel is an elemental property of judgments as judgments, not a global property of consciousness. To assert the inherent self-referentiality of judging activity is quite different from asserting the sort of inherent reflexivity of consciousness that Descartes and Locke presuppose.

“[W]e have to be clear that this has nothing to do with inner perception or the mind observing itself” (p. 105).

“There must be some way of saying that the self-conscious dimension of thought and action is a matter of the way a claim is made or an action undertaken. To adopt the formulations used by Ryle in accounting for many similar phenomena, they are accomplished ‘self-consciously’, rather than accompanied by or even identical with another act of consciousness” (p. 106).

“There is a self-referential component in any judgment or action too (‘I think this, I act thus’), but it can be misleading to think that this is the same problem as ‘how does the first-person pronoun have sense, and thereby pick me uniquely out’. As we shall see, it is misleading because it suggests a punctuated moment of awareness” (p. 107).

“Finally, there is little doubt that Hegel realized that apperception was not a kind of consciousness” (ibid).

In support of this he quotes Hegel: “[I]n this original deed there is not yet the representation of the ‘I’…. [T]his objectifying deed, liberated from the opposition of consciousness [between subject and object], is closer to what may be taken simply as thinking as such. But this deed should no longer be called consciousness; for consciousness holds within itself the opposition of the ‘I’ and its intended object which is not to be found in that original deed” (ibid).

It seems to me that apperception thus implicitly becomes the middle term of a syllogism: self-consciousness is apperception; apperception is not a kind of consciousness; therefore (contrary to what the formation of the word suggests) self-consciousness is not a kind of consciousness, but something “else”.

I take consciousness to be a form of presentation in what Aristotle calls imagination, and self-consciousness to be the form of the self-referential character of judgment or apperception. Outside the context of the Logic (e.g., in the Phenomenology), self-consciousness has an inherently social or intersubjective dimension; in both the Phenomenology and the Logic it has a normative dimension. Human as opposed to purely animal experience is always a mixture of “consciousness” and “self-consciousness”.

“I know what I am doing not by identifying myself with the one acting, but by being the one acting. So how can such a Two also be One? We are in the middle of everything of significance in Hegel’s Logic, not to mention Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Schelling’s early idealism…. This unusual identity is constitutive of ‘theoretical thought’ as such” (pp. 108-109).

“This too is important to state carefully. Hegel scholars often assume that Hegel inherits ‘identity philosophy’ from Schelling, and that it means ‘the identity of subject and object’. They then formulate various implausible versions of such an identity, such as that true reality is divine thought thinking itself, that objects are moments of this thought’s ‘intellectual intuition of itself’. But the Logic is not committed to anything remotely like this” (p. 109).

Rather, the identity Hegel is principally interested in is that “the thought (belief, assertion) of some content… is at the same time the thought of the reasons that are required for such an ‘answer'” (p. 110, emphasis added). This what it means to say that thought is inherently self-referential.

This helps to explain why it is true that “It is a condition of use of a concept that the use is subject to a norm of correct and incorrect use, and that norm is internal to the concept…. Such capacities as judgment and self-consciousness are called into play in a way that can be redeemed if challenged, for example” (p. 106).

Pippin elaborates, “being committed to the truth of a proposition, I am just thereby committed to the denial of everything inconsistent with it. The latter is not a separate inference I draw, on the basis of my first commitment. It is a dimension of the content of my first commitment. This is not to say I must be conscious of these implications and incompatibilities, but just that I could not be thinking of that content were I not able to be responsive to such considerations. This is all so just as someone’s believing something and her thought that it is something right to believe ‘are the same reality‘” (p. 112).

The idea that a proposition should be identified with the distinctions and entailments that it presupposes and that follow from it — rather than with a simple Boolean value of true or false, as in mainstream 20th century logic — has been developed with extraordinary thoroughness by Robert Brandom in Making It Explicit, which Richard Rorty credited with ushering in a new “Hegelian” stage of analytic philosophy.

“[N]o one could be said to ‘just’ assert, or just believe, or just act. Any such undertaking, if self-conscious, must be potentially responsive to the question of ‘Why?’; that is, to reasons. (An assertion is such a responsiveness; the latter is not a secondary or even distinct dimension of the former.)” (ibid).

This formulation that an assertion is such a responsiveness — which relies on the essential self-referentiality of judgment that Pippin is arguing for here — seems in a way more radical than the way Brandom puts it. For Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel, the concomittant commitments are material inferences, and there is a sort of Kantian imperative that we ought to show such responsiveness to everything with a material-inferential connection to our assertions. According to Pippin’s Hegel, the concommitant commitments are not inferences at all but integral to the true identity of the assertion, and we would not really have made an assertion at all if we did not show responsiveness to them. But they ultimately agree that we ought to show such responsiveness — that addressing the concomittant commitments of our assertions is not something we could legitimately choose to ignore — and that this has something to do with the very nature of assertion-making.

“And it is at least plausible to say that the greater the extent of such potential responsiveness (or said another way, the greater the self-understanding), the ‘freer’ the activity, the more I can be said to redeem the action as genuinely mine, back it, stand behind it. We thus have formulated what [Sebastian] Rödl rightly identifies as the heart of German Idealism, the principle ‘that self-consciousness, freedom and reason are one'” (pp. 113-114).

Statements like “self-consciousness, freedom and reason are one” used to give me no end of trouble, because I assumed they were meant to assert the sovereignty of a Subject (i.e., in this case that the Subject is self-conscious; the Subject has free will; and the Subject is the seat of reason). What I eventually realized through the closer study of Kant and Hegel is that I was assuming dictionary meanings of self-consciousness and freedom that are not applicable, and that Hegel and even Kant are much less “subject-centered” than common readings make them out to be. A strong concern for subjectivity need not be identified with the assumption of a sovereign Subject.

Because what Hegel means by “concept” is so fundamental to understanding the Logic and so far from the way it is commonly understood, Pippin repeats an earlier message in different words:

“[C]oncepts are determinate only by virtue of their roles in judgment, the ‘bringing to the objective unity of apperception’, in Kant’s definition” (p. 115).

“So a concept like ‘essence’, for example, can be said to be delimitable as just that concept by virtue of its possible uses in various contrasts to ‘appearance’ or by virtue of its negation (in the grand structure of the [Science of Logic]) of the concept ‘being’, or its role in distinguishing accidental from essential predicates. These are all roles in judgments (and are thereby tied to judgmental roles in inferences). Any of these uses, though, involves any such claim in a network of justifications, a normative order. The application of any such concept in judgment, since apperceptive, self-consciously applied, must be, just thereby, responsive to its possible misapplication, and the question of the general contours of its correct use implicates any one notion in the normative proprieties governing many others. Hence, as we shall see, the course of the ‘movement’ of the logic” (ibid).

“A proper understanding of the self’s relation to itself in thinking, the form of any conceiving and thereby any concept, and thereby any inferential relation, is also the core meaning of what Hegel calls the ‘infinity’ treated by speculative philosophy” (p. 118).

“This is yet again not an easy thought: some sort of self-relation that is not a two-place relation, but something like a circular structure, in which the self’s self-relation never terminates in a distinct object or determinate posit, but in so attending, returns to itself as a relating…. This is ‘infinity’ in the proper sense, Hegel tells us frequently, and… ‘Self-consciousness is thus the nearest example of the presence of infinity'” (p. 119).

My current impression is that what Hegel calls the “good” infinite has something to do with what I would tentatively call relational structures with cyclic dependencies, and he thinks we can and do implicitly use something like this in life, without getting stuck in what could be a mathematically infinite cyclic traversal of the structure. (That something like this is at least conceivable is anecdotally supported by the existence of computable and hence in that sense “finite” implementations of infinitely extensible data structures.) The more usual notion of infinity — at root mathematical, a paradoxical “value greater than any definite value” — Hegel derides as “bad” infinity, regardless of whether it is potential or actual (which was a key distinction for Aristotle). (See Hegel on Reflection for a somewhat better account of this issue.)

Hegel in effect seems to ask us to suspend the assumption that standard mathematical infinity is what infinity is, and to step back to the more general idea of the non-definite. Further, he identifies the contrasting term of finitude specifically with a non-relational view of things, as being whatever they are even in complete isolation from one another, so his condemnations of finitude are not at all condemnations of the view of things as finite in the sense of depending on other things. Pippin earlier even suggested that some kind of notion of things depending on other things for their intelligibility is the main source of the famous and difficult-to-understand “motion” in Hegelian logic.

“Discriminating what belongs together with what, what is connected to what in a temporal order, knowing that the successive perceptions of a house do not count as the perception of a succession in the world, requires an apperceptive unity; it does not just happen to consciousness” (p. 121).

“Without this ability to distinguish how things are from how they seem to me, there would be as many ‘I’s’ as associated seemings, and no unity of self-consciousness. Or, achieving the unity of self-consciousness is differentiating seeming from being” (p. 122).

Pippin returns to his larger argument about the Kantian basis of what Hegel is doing.

“The attempt has been to understand the Kantian claim about apperception as a logical, not psychological claim, and this goes some way toward understanding the link between this reflexive character of judging as the essence of intelligibility and ‘the intelligibles’. If it is possible to establish that certain a priori judgments have… objectivity, but without Kant’s limitation thesis, restricting that thesis to possible objects of sense experience (phenomena, not noumena), we will have a way into Hegel’s claim that logic can be understood as metaphysics. Our claim about Kant was that even for him, this relation to objects is not established by the imposition of subjective form onto received sensory material. Kant’s position is not ‘impositionist’ in this sense, and both he and Hegel are following the nonimpositionist, more Aristotelian (hylomorphic) line” (p. 125).

He includes several more quotes from Kant and one from Beatrice Longuenesse that offer hints in this more Aristotelian direction, then says, “We need only remember that for Hegel this is the core of Kant’s own position once we give up any notion of separable contributions from sensibility and understanding, and give up referring to pure forms of intuition as species-specific…. If we do, we get the careful statements about the identity within difference of concept and being in and for itself with which we began” (p. 126).

He returns to the more basic point that “There is no indication that Hegel thinks that being or God has an apperceptive discursive intellect and that we are manifestations of it. We are manifestations of the finitude of Verstand [understanding] and the possibility inherent in Verstand of the transcendence of such self-imposed finitude” (ibid).

In referring to “self-imposed” finitude, I think Pippin means the viewing of concepts as independent, isolated objects or fixed representations, rather than as pure moments in the traversal of the relational network of the space of reasons.

“[W]e need a kind of stereoscopic vision to keep in mind two aspects of this issue that Hegel keeps stressing…. The first is that conceiving is an activity and concepts are ‘moments’ of this activity. This is something stressed in a different way when Hegel tells us that concepts are not things, objects. The second is that… such activities are not actions, doings, and that Kant’s position, when properly understood (and so not as Kant understood it), should not be taken as a part of a two-step or impositionist account of such activity” (p. 127).

That activity is not reducible to punctual actions is a thesis I have been pursuing in an Aristotelian context.

“Hegel says that (Kant’s) objective or transcendental logic ‘replaces’… general metaphysics or ontology. Logic so construed also takes account of and replaces special metaphysics, the a priori doctrines of the soul, the world, and God” (p. 128).

Once again, Hegel’s “logical” alternative to rationalist metaphysics and psychology does not presuppose any fixed concepts. Pippin returns to this to avoid misunderstanding, because he has been emphasizing the non-psychological character of apperceptive judgment for Hegel.

“If we think, as some do, of Hegel’s Denkbestimmungen [thought determinations] as something like Fregean thoughts, objective in a Platonic sense, as abstract entities, then what I am quoting [to the effect that the “objective” part of Hegel’s logic is the true critique of such determinations] is very puzzling. Hegel certainly knows that Kant’s transcendental logic is in some sense or other a logic of subjectivity” (p. 129).

The distinction that is beginning to be made explicit here is between subjectivity in general and specifically psychological subjectivity. This will allow Hegel to develop a “subjective” logic that has nothing to do with psychology.

By analogy, Pippin notes that “Frege interpreters argue that there is no reason to go as far as the historical Frege did (a form of Platonism) to differentiate objective thought from mental episodes, private associations, etc.” (ibid).

“In a claim we shall have to return to and investigate, [Hegel] repeats often that the true critical question is not whether subjective forms of thought have any objective purchase, but whether the concepts of a logic ‘in and for themselves’ provide what they are supposed to provide: what is required for successful conceptual determination…. Kant did not sufficiently investigate what these pure concepts are; he did not pursue the question of their ‘nature’ and their very possibility” (p. 130).

Broadly speaking, the answer will be that concepts are not Platonic forms but get their meaning from their uses, as normatively evaluated in the space of reasons.

“Commentators are sometimes so eager to observe the spirit of this sort of critique of Kantian ‘subjectivism’ that they assume that the Logic is something like the ‘pure’ manifestation of the objective dependence and implication relations among ‘pure essentialities’, thoughts in the objective sense, logical entities that are in those relations in ways that have nothing to do with anyone ‘thinking them'” (p. 131).

The delicate point here is that we can take the activity of thinking into account by treating it as its own “subject”, rather than attributing it to a separate Subject.

“But the apperceptive or inherently reflexive determination of conceptual content… is no more external than the ‘I think’ is external to a content thought. Judgment and the consciousness of judgment are one act. No content represents anything except as thought/judged” (ibid).

Recalling the syllogism I constructed above from Hegel’s statements — which concluded that what he calls self-consciousness is not a kind of consciousness — I think Pippin should have said “self-consciousness” rather than “consciousness” in the above. “Self-consciousness” for Hegel is normative and non-psychological. What he calls “consciousness” (the aspect of immediacy and of presentation in the form of objects) does have a psychological character. In real life, we encounter mixtures of the two.

“The movement of pure thought is like the movement in a proof, on the assumption that the moves are inferences a thinker, on pain of contradiction, must make, and not merely formal-structural functions, as in a symbolic logic” (p. 132).

A proof involves not just a sequence of propositions but a sequence of judgments or assertions. Frege explained this difference in terms of an additional dimension of “assertoric force” alongside his Platonic view of concepts and propositions. For Pippin and Brandom, the consideration of assertoric force is where normativity enters into logic.

“[I]t is also question-begging to assume that anyone who makes the assertoric force inseparable from the logical structure of a unit of meaning (as Hegel unquestionably does) is thereby guilty of psychologism, or of relying on some ‘experiential’ standard of adequacy. Even Frege was willing to make the question of assertoric force a part of ‘logic’ in his own terms” (ibid).

Hegel takes assertoric force into account by treating it normatively rather than psychologically. Meanwhile, the movement of judging activity that is the bearer of Hegel’s notion of truth must also be distinct from the mere inspection of logical structure.

“[O]bjects moving about [in Hegel’s Logic]… is a mystification. At any rate, I have no idea what it would be to ‘observe’ one thought-object developing into another. (We don’t observe what happens when one step in a proof ‘becomes’ another; the inference has to be drawn, and drawn for a reason.) Such an objectivism makes it almost impossible to understand what Hegel calls the Logic‘s inner ‘drive’…, and it especially does not take account of the claim that conceptual form is itself apperceptive, that ‘the truth is self-consciousness’ (pp. 133-134).

“Essentialities do not move or establish relations with other essentialities…. A proposition cannot be the bearer of truth, does not even represent any state of affairs, except as judged, and therewith the identity of the acts of thinking involve[s] a wide variety of other commitments at the same time…. (I mean such things as being committed to the denial of all judgments inconsistent with the one that one asserts as true, and this not as a second act of thought.) By contrast, the basic unit of intelligibility for Hegel is not an internally complex object, even if in relations with other objects, but as he says in many ways and many different times, a result, the accomplishment of the ‘active universal’, which activity is judging…. The mode of logical connection is inseparable from the mode of connecting. They are co-constituting” (pp. 134-135).

Objective “thoughts” in Hegel’s sense are not just pure Platonic essentialities but judgments that have a shareable meaning and that inherently invite normative evaluation.

“Said another way, a strong way of insisting that Hegel’s new ‘metaphysics’ is a logic, none of this has anything to do with what anything is made of, consists in, with the furniture of the universe. What we want to know… about these concepts is their ‘logic’, how they function with account-givings governed by the norms of explanatory satisfactoriness and truth” (p. 137).

“This means that any concept of thinking and of the content of thought involves normative proprieties, exclusions, and implications, without which any thinking a thought could not be the thinking and the thought that it is. These normative commitments are independent of what a thinker might herself be able to acknowledge, but they cannot be denied on being noticed, on pain of incoherence, of not thinking anything at all” (ibid).

Thus apperception — or what we might call “pure” as opposed to empirical subjectivity, which need not be tied to an assumed separate Subject, but only to some judging activity — for Hegel is purely “logical” (having to do with the determination of meaning). It is independent of anything psychological, and at the same time it is inherently normative.

Next in this series: Negation and Negativity

Logic and Metaphysics

In Emancipatory Logic? I began a walk-through of Robert Pippin’s important Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. This post borrows its title from his second chapter, though it only addresses the first part of it.

According to Pippin, Hegel’s Science of Logic is intended to exhibit the “spontaneous” or “self-generating” actualization of intelligibility. This takes places through the higher-order universals that Kant following Aristotle called “categories”.

Hegel’s “logic” provides his alternative to Kant’s notoriously long and difficult argument for the possibility of a priori knowledge that is not merely analytic, and to Kant’s derivation of the categories. As an exercise in what Aristotle called first philosophy, it is not supposed to depend on anything else.

By his own lights Hegel is extremely concerned with concreteness. He is therefore very conscious that his “logic as first philosophy” only addresses possible actualizations of intelligibility, and doesn’t derive anything real. We might think that the actualization of intelligibility would be a realm of light, but here the concern is with the emergence of light, hence his curious metaphor that “logic” is a realm of shadows.

“Hegel follows Kant’s innovation in his response to the empiricist challenge…. The basic question is, How could there possibly be objectively valid concepts, true of all objects, but not derived from experience? Where could they come from? In Hegel’s terms, this amounts to the question, How do concepts that are the products of thought alone ‘give themselves’ content, where by content we mean something extraconceptual?” (pp. 39-40).

Pippin says that Hegel will want “to determine objects in their thinkability, where that means their suitability not for a finite, subjective power, but for thought as such, that is, objects in their intelligibility, in their being at all intelligibly what they are. Their being what they are is their concept, or their ‘being their concept’, for Hegel. The concepts did not come from anywhere, any more than the thinking power comes from anywhere” (p. 40). Hegel aims for a “logic of the knowable as such” (p. 41).

“[Kant’s] critique concerns the modern tradition stemming from Descartes, embodied in Arnauld’s and Nicole’s Port Royal Logic in 1662, as well as the Leibnizian/Wolffian metaphysical tradition. The former held that clarity about the relations between ideas could lead the mind closer to the bearers of philosophical truth, clear and distinct ideas, known passively by the ‘light of reason’. For the latter, the laws of thought simply are the ‘laws of truth’ (to use Frege’s phrase), or a general logic is just thereby a logic of objects, because all philosophical truth is what Kant would call ‘analytic’, arrived at by logical analysis alone” (pp. 41-42).

Pippin emphasizes that Kant and Hegel both reject the early modern (originally Thomistic) idea of passive illumination by a “natural light” of reason. In the original Thomistic context, the idea of a natural light of reason played what I think was a very positive role as a counter-weight to sectarian tendencies in religion, but in the early modern context it led to a new kind of dogmatism.

“With general logic as it was understood in the Port Royal and the Wolffian traditions, [Hegel] agrees that logical reasoning, understood in that way, does not provide knowledge of objects. He especially agrees with Kant that reason and understanding are activities, not passively ‘illuminated’. As ‘that great foe of immediacy’, in Sellars’ phrase, he does not mention or rely on such receptive or noetic intuition. As such a great foe, Hegel is opposed to any notion of self-standing, atomic conceptual content. As he wants so famously to show in a dialectical logic, determinateness is a function of determination, always an identification ‘through an other’, his formulation for discursivity” (p. 42).

For Hegel, there is no determinateness without a prior activity of determination. That activity is a discursive articulation of otherness in its concreteness by means of language.

Hegel’s Science of Logic is divided into what he calls an “objective” logic, consisting in a “logic of being” and a “logic of essence”, and a “subjective” logic, consisting entirely in a “logic of the concept”.

“The logic of being seems clearly to correspond to the Kantian categories of quality and quantity, what Kant called the mathematical and constitutive categories, and the logic of essence certainly seems to correspond to the categories of relation and modality, or the dynamic and regulative categories. The logic of the Concept makes use of the same syllogistic central to Kant’s conception of the role of such an inferential structure in the activity of reason” (p. 43).

Incidentally, I find it intriguing and highly plausible that Hegelian essence would express relation and modality. As much of an improvement as this is over the early modern notion of essence as a putatively self-contained content, it still does not yet address the fluidity of what would have been essence in development over time.

Pippin notes that in an 1812 letter, Hegel also said the objective logic roughly corresponds to the “ontology” he saw articulated in Aristotle’s logical works. I would add that Hegel’s “logic of the concept” moves beyond the “objective” logic in somewhat the same way that the discussion of “substance” in Aristotle’s Metaphysics moves beyond that in the Categories.

Pippin says “there is no question that Hegel both wholeheartedly agreed with Kant’s critique of substantive metaphysics, and realized that that critique applied only to modern metaphysics and left several possibilities open” (p. 44). He quotes Hegel saying “What Kant generally has in mind here is the state of metaphysics of his time…; he neither paid attention to, nor examined, the genuinely speculative ideas of older philosophers on the concept of spirit” (ibid).

He begins to clarify what Hegel more specifically means by logic.

“[F]or both Kant and Hegel, the unit of significance for any logic is not the proposition or any static formal structure but acts of reasoning and assertion” (ibid).

“Hegel’s logic does not primarily concern relations among, operations upon, propositions, and is instead oriented from a logic of terms. So we don’t see a syntax specified by axioms, a proof theory, and a semantics” (ibid).

In mainstream 20th century logic, the older term logic was regarded as a mere historical relic. But since the late 20th century, type theory has provided a formulation of term logic in higher-order mathematics that subsumes not only first-order but also higher-order predicate logic, so even in strictly mathematical terms, term logic is once again highly relevant.

“But as becomes clearer in the logic of the Concept, conceptual content is not provided by analysis of atomistically conceived concepts. Concepts are understood, as they were in Kant, as ‘predicates of possible judgments’, and the roles they play in possible judgments in various contexts, involving other concepts, and the roles they can and cannot play in such judgments (including the inferential relations among the judgments) are necessary to specify such concepts. This is why Hegel metaphorically speaks of concepts as alive, in movement, and why the logic’s ‘motion’ is the key to the specification of any concept…. Concepts are rules for judgmental unification, and judgmental unifications are always apperceptive” (p. 45).

“So the structure of concepts in use is the structure of the apperceptive ‘I’ (ibid; see also Ideas Are Not Inert).

“The concept of the Concept, the apperceptive understanding of the implications of this apperceptive structure, is what Hegel calls ‘the Absolute'” (ibid).

He compares Hegel’s view of concepts to that of the contemporary philosopher John McDowell in Mind and World.

“[I]n McDowell’s view we can certainly distinguish thinking from what is thought (the world is not a thought-thing; thinking is a discursive activity; the world is not a discursive activity) and still insist that the world ‘is made up of the sort of things one can think. (That discursive activity is, in its unity, the unity of anything that can be known would be expressed on the ‘object side’ by claiming that a determinate object is articulable as a single unity.) Or, for example, the profound-sounding (even Heideggerian) claim that there is no ontological gap between thought and world just comes down to the fact that ‘one can think, for instance, that spring has begun, and that very same thing, that spring has begun, can be the case’. What I think when I know (think truly) that something is the case is simply what is the case. It is thus a truism of sorts that, with the issue posed in a Kantian way, ‘the forms of thought are the forms of things…. The distinction between ‘conditions on the possibility of knowledge of things’ and ‘conditions on the possibility of things themselves’, which some use to characterize Kantian idealism, should be rejected ‘on the ground that the relevant conditions are inseparably both conditions on the thought and conditions on objects, not primarily either the one or the other'” (p. 47).

Frege said a fact is a true thought. The early Wittgenstein identified the world with what is the case. Aristotle said there is no difference between thought in the strong sense (nous or “intellect”) and that of which it thinks. Pippin quotes Hegel’s implicit invocation of Aristotle on this point:

“The older metaphysics had in this respect a higher concept of thinking than now passes for accepted opinion. For it presupposed as its principle that only what is known of things and in things by thought is really true [wahrhaft Wahre] 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 held that thinking and the determination of thinking are not something alien to the subject matters, but rather are their essence, or that the 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” (p. 48; see also Form and Things).

Pippin points out that Hegel does not simply identify facts with propositions. Rather, in the spirit of Kant’s unities of apperception, he is concerned with “thought’s agreeing with itself” (p. 51). “The force of a judgment is judgment’s own force; it is not a natural force or the result of the accumulation of empirical data” (p. 52). In a footnote Pippin adds that “‘I did it because I thought I ought to’ could be appealed to to make the same point” (ibid).

“A wolf is not simply, in itself, what it is to be a wolf but to some degree or other a better or worse exemplification of such a concept ‘for itself’. The object is not just ‘as it is’; it is ‘for’ (here, in the sense of ‘for the sake of’) its concept and hereby itself…. This is all in keeping with Hegel’s general tendency to gloss his use of for-itself with Aristotle’s notion of an actualized potential” (pp. 54-55).

“To say that an object is ‘for its form’ is just to say that there is an intelligible dynamic in its development. (As in Aristotle, the particular kind of unity by which any thing or process or activity is what it distinctively is is the unity by virtue of which it is intelligible.)…. This intelligible dynamic is its concept and is not something that exists separate from or supervening on some physical attributes and efficient causation. It just is the intelligible way a development develops; there is nothing ‘over and above’ the development” (p. 55).

Pippin quotes Hegel’s Encyclopedia logic where Hegel specifically recalls Aristotle’s criticism of Plato for neglecting the actuality of forms.

“Self” and “other” are inseparably related in the Logic, as they are in the discussion of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology. In the Logic, “‘for itself’ and ‘for an other’ will be reciprocally dependent notions” (p. 56).

For Hegel, a being “is what it is and not anything else (it is ‘in itself’), but only by virtue of the properties that can intelligibly distinguish it from its contraries (can determine what it is ‘for itself’)…. Accordingly, everything… turns on the sweeping claim that ‘truth [the truth of being, the determination of what things truly are] is self-consciousness [the forms of self-conscious judgment]…. This does not claim it exists only as conceived, or that the conceiving on which its determinacy depends should be understood as subjective mental episodes” (pp. 56-57).

“Thought can determine its objects, but not by appeal to the light of reason, not ‘immediately’…. Much more will have to be said about this, but it will be very important to Hegel that to consider things in their intelligibility is also and at the same time to consider them in terms of the only beings for whom beings can be intelligible, rational beings” (p. 57).

Pippin says that Hegel rejects Kant’s “distinction between things considered in their possible intelligibility and things considered simply as they are in themselves” (p. 58). He again notes that Hegel is neither simply identifying things with thoughts nor identifying thought’s self-determination with anything like the Absolute’s knowledge of itself.

“[T]he initial, simple point at issue now is that anything’s being at all would be mere indeterminate and indistinguishable being were it not conceptually determinate, articulable — in the simplest sense, an instance of a concept” (p. 59).

“And this raises Hegel’s main question in the Logic: how to account for conceptual content…. The answer to that question will depend on two very difficult elements in Hegel’s project: … that the form of the concept is the form of the self, and that, accordingly, truth is self-consciousness; and the claim that the way to understand this content is to understand these concepts as ‘self-negating’, but in a way that promises a positive result” (ibid).

Next in this series: Hegel’s Union of Kant and Aristotle

Di Giovanni on Hegel’s Logic

“The subject matter of the Logic is not the ‘thing-in-itself’ or its phenomenal manifestations, whether one conceives the ‘in-itself’ as a substance or as freedom, but is discourse itself…. The Logic itself is a discourse about discourse” (George di Giovanni, translator’s introduction to Hegel, The Science of Logic, p. xxxv).

Writing about Hegel’s development, di Giovanni says that by 1803/04, “Consciousness is where organic nature acquires its highest point of concentration by reflecting upon itself and where nature as such becomes spirit. When this consciousness develops into language, and language in turn becomes the language of a people, the social character of spirit is then revealed” (ibid, p. xix).

“[W]hile in 1803/04 Hegel provided a smoother transition from nature to spirit by introducing the factor of consciousness and thus adding to nature, so to speak, a new dimension of depth, [in 1805/06/07] he adds to it yet another dimension by conceiving spirit as the place where nature becomes conscious of its being conscious, that is to say, the place where it becomes deliberate about itself or, again, where it becomes a product of spirit” (p. xxi).

“[Kant’s] notorious ‘thing-in-itself’, instead of being understood as an ideal term of reference that generates a universal space of reason… could be taken instead — as it in fact was by many contemporaries — as a sort of hyper-physical entity…. In a critical context, however, any appeal to causality… would have to fall on the side of a physiological pre-history of experience” (p. xxx).

“It was to remedy this failure that Fichte undertook his thought experiment [with pure freedom], asking his auditors to simply think for the sake of thinking and to reflect on the result…. The net result is that the whole of experience becomes colored with a moral tinge, exactly what Fichte had of course intended from the start. Experience is a call to transform the otherwise merely brute facts of experience…. The idea of construing objects of experience by applying categories to a presupposed given content loses all its meaning…. One must rather interpret experience” (pp. xxxi-xxxii).

(It always seemed to me that even the “application” of pre-existing categories to the sensible manifold implicitly requires interpretation in order to judge which categories are applicable in each specific context of the manifold, and how they are applicable in each case. To my knowledge Kant does not speak of this explicitly, but I don’t think he ever explicitly assumes specific contents in the manifold either. What would then be “given” for Kant ought to be just the manifold as a potentially differentiable lump. Following the principle of charitable interpretation, then, I read Kant as a bit closer to Fichte on this point. The implicit interpretation I want to attribute to Kant would probably operate via the pre-conscious figurative synthesis of imagination though, whereas I think Fichte has a more conscious process of interpretation in mind.)

“On Hegel’s analysis of both Kant and Fichte, the problem is that the ‘I’ that figures so prominently in their theories is too abstract a product…. Therefore, according to Hegel, it lets the content of experience… escape from it and fall, so to speak, on the side of a beyond from which it is retrievable only by means of such non-conceptual means as intuition…. And if Hegel did not want to travel the way of Schelling, which would have taken him to a pre-Kantian Spinozism, then the only avenue open to him was to comprehend facticity discursively, without intuition or myth-making” (pp. xxxiii-xxxiv).

“I have been deliberately using ‘discourse’ and ‘discursiveness’ instead of ‘dialectic’ (a term, incidentally, that Hegel uses sparsely in the Logic) in an attempt to demystify the latter term. But it should be clear that the meaning is the same” (p. xxxix).

“[W]e do not have anything that would amount to McTaggart’s Absolute Idea from which, allegedly, every minute detail of reality can in principle be deduced. This is a position that Hegel unequivocally rejected and even found infuriating…. As for Hegel, the strength of his Logic lies in that it finds a ground for this contingency in the indeterminacy necessarily inherent in the structure of things that are in becoming” (p. lviii).

Hegel takes us beyond sterile debates about freedom versus determinism by means of a novel account of determinacy itself as including built-in indeterminacy. Aristotle of course preceded him in this, albeit with a different account of determination-including-indeterminism.

“[I]t is nature which in the abstract medium of logical discourse attains the self-comprehension, and the efficacy, which we attribute to spirit. Nature is for Hegel, just as it was for Schelling, the ‘pre-self’ of the ‘self’, not just the ‘other-than-self’ of Fichte” (p. lix).

Incidentally, di Giovanni dedicates his 2010 translation of the Science of Logic to his “mentor and friend” H. S. Harris, whose unique literal commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology I previously treated at length.