Aristotelian Subjectivity

If we want to find an analogue in Aristotle for the notion of (transcendental) subjectivity developed by Kant and Hegel, the best place to look is in the concept of ethos, rather than in something like soul or intellect, which for Aristotle have more specialized roles. Then, going in the other direction, this Aristotelian point of view centered on ethos helps to clarify and consolidate many of the points Brandom has wanted to make about the mainly normative or ethical import of subjectivity in Kant and Hegel.

Philosophical interest in subjectivity applies especially to the transcendental kind. Traditionally, this has been situated between what was called metaphysics and something like the “rational psychology” classically criticized by Kant. With inspiration from Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Brandom, I’ve been proposing that the constitution of transcendental subjectivity is instead ethical at root. This seems much more helpful than the traditional version for addressing the human condition and questions of who and what we are. The values we actually live by are far more important for this than claims about the existence of some abstract entity like a personal Subject. Meanwhile, personal identity is better left outside the transcendental sphere, and located instead in our concrete emotional constitution. (See also Ethos, Hexis; Two Kinds of Character; Substance Also Subject.)

Soul, Self

At the risk of some repetition, and putting it very simply this time, my own view is that common-sense personal identity is centered in the emotions, and in what Brandom would call our sentience, and Aristotle and Averroes would have called our soul. Reason, on the other hand, while it does in one aspect get secondarily folded back into the individuality of our Aristotelian soul, is at root trans-individual and social. (See also Ethos, Hexis; Parts of the Soul; What Is “I”; Psyche, Subjectivity; Individuation; Subject; Mind Without Mentalism; Ego.)

Monism, Pluralism, Dualism?

I’d like to return to the question of keeping space open for the harmonious coexistence of a kind of monism, a kind of pluralism, and a kind of dualism at different levels of interpretation in the development pursued here.

At the level of the whole field of potential attributions of agency and responsibility, I’d like to foster the normative monism or monism of expression that I have attributed to Brandom. This seems to have the resources to translate any given empirical, factual content into the expressive terms of a transcendental normative evaluation. Here, everything that is expressible in any way whatsoever becomes expressible in ethical terms. The meaning of the monism in question has to do mainly with a kind of completeness of coverage in overcoming the subject-object dichotomy, not a lack of differentiation. Also, the complete field will include many overlapping attributions, so we should not expect it to have a univocal interpretation. So, in these ways, this monism is not incompatible with a pluralism after all.

At the level of detailed actual processes of evaluation of what is right and true, “monism” — or, more properly, unity of apperception — is only a guiding end that must be applied to a constantly moving target, so a unity that is momentarily achieved may partially unravel again. (See Error.) Also, there may be more than one sound interpretation of the “same” content under evaluation, and multiple explanations may yield complementary insight. The aimed-at “monism” here has to do mainly with a kind of coherence subject to all these caveats, so it is even more pluralistic.

At the level of an adequate account of the many aspects of subjectivity and experience, I want to be careful to preserve a broadly Kantian distinction between empirical and transcendental elements, while modeling their relation on the broadly Aristotelian relation of “first nature” to second nature. In Kant’s own presentation, the empirical/transcendental distinction has a dualistic appearance, but the first-nature/second-nature distinction I want to map it to involves a kind of emergence of second nature from first nature, rather than a dualism.

Previously, I resorted to programming language metaphors of compilation and “lifting” — and a distinction between operational and expressive equivalence — to help describe the relations between first and second nature in a way that would resolve the tension between my monistic claim and the distinction I want to maintain. (See Bookkeeping; Layers.) I’m still pondering the implications of such a metaphorical application of concepts from a formal domain to things that are after all not formal. While I still find that interesting, I think the above sketch might be sufficient to assuage concerns of overall consistency without it.

Inferentialism vs Mentalism

Brandom’s “inferentialism” or emphasis on material inference effectively makes what I call ethical reason the most important thing in the constitution of subjectivity — not psychology, and not some putative immediate mental presence, or universal transparent representational medium, or supposedly perfect reflexivity.

This is not to deny that there is such a thing as immediacy; it is rather to specify that immediacy is not foundational, and has nothing to do with certainty. Immediacy has a very different role to play, in showing us the world’s “stubborn recalcitrance to mastery and agency” and providing occasions for learning. (See also Mind Without Mentalism; Psyche, Subjectivity.)

Augustinian Interiority

Among the hallmarks of historiographical seriousness is a concern to avoid over-generalization. In that spirit, since I have made quasi-polemical references to Augustine and Augustinianism in broad-brush sketches of the history of notions of subjectivity, it seems right to pause for a few caveats.

Augustine is the main early source in the Western tradition for a specific notion of mental interiority. However, at the very beginning there is a surprising twist. At least, it is surprising for us moderns conditioned by Descartes and Locke. For it turns out that for Augustine, when one looks within to the inner man, what one finds is the opposite of something private.

For Augustine, the inner man participates in a community of the spirit, and interiority opens out into universality. The inner man is a source of a kind of integrity more than individuality. It is rather our view of the external world that is the locus of what we might call subjective particularity. The idea that what is inner is universal puts Augustine much closer to Plotinus than to Descartes in this way. The inner man is not a modern ego. Augustine fused notions of mind and personality, but again, his variant of the notion of personality had more to do with trinitarian theology than with individuality. Even the meaning of his early strong voluntarism is modified by this.

Among the early Christian fathers, Augustine was among the most philosophical. According to his own testimony in the Confessions, his reading of Plotinus was a spiritual event second only to his conversion to Christianity, and remained important after his conversion. As much as he emphasized faith, he also emphasized seeking understanding. He clearly acknowledged a degree of bilateral accommodation of faith and reason, for instance in his writings on the interpretation of scripture.

It should also be noted that many of the later theologians I broadly characterize as Augustinian developed sophisticated hybrid positions on various philosophical issues, however much I might criticize, e.g., their voluntarism or their anti-Aristotelianism couched in Aristotelian vocabulary. (See also Ricoeur on Augustine on Time; Nature and Justice in Augustine; Mind Without Mentalism; Subject; Freedom and Free Will; God and the Soul.)

Layers

Human reasoning is never purely formal. I think it works mainly along the lines of the material inference described by Sellars and Brandom. But as Brandom pointed out in Between Saying and Doing, any given material inference can still be represented by a formal inference.

Direct brain-computer analogies don’t seem to me to yield much. On the other hand, the theory of programming languages does yield insights into the foundations of formal reasoning, and the foundations of formal reasoning may indirectly yield insights into the ways human reasoning works.

A case in point is the notion of compilation stages. All programs need to be compiled or interpreted to be run. Usually, this happens in multiple stages. At each stage, expressions in a more expressive language are re-encoded into operationally equivalent expressions in a less expressive language. It may seem counterintuitive that this is even possible, but it is essential to the way something intelligible to us can be made to “run”.

This tells us that operational equivalence and expressive equivalence are not the same thing, and it suggests an analogy for the way second nature relates to first nature. Operational equivalence can be preserved by substituting references for inferences. Something that can only be expressed at a higher level can nonetheless be executed at a lower level. Things that can only be expressed through human language and reason can provide the occasion for operational execution by a physiological mechanism. (See also Free Will and Determinism; Psyche, Subjectivity; Bookkeeping.)

Why Brandom’s Hegel?

Brandom offers us an ethically oriented Hegel, read as anticipating many 20th and 21st century concerns. He provides an ethical path to overcoming the separation of subject and object.

Importantly, Brandom’s Hegel even turns out to have anticipated the main concerns of the 1960s French anti-Hegelians, while standing untouched by their criticism. He turns out to be the original critic of mastery and totalization; never uses subjectivity as an unexplained explainer; and claims no forward-moving historical teleology.

While Brandom’s approach to Hegel involves more original philosophical development than historical scholarship, I nonetheless believe based on my own independent reading that with a few caveats on nonessential points, it is historiographically sound. (That is far from saying it is the only valid or interesting interpretation; historiographical soundness just means that a reasonable case can be made.) At any rate, I find it both sound and tremendously inspiring.

Obstacles to Synthesis

Brandom’s reading of the Kantian synthesis of unities of apperception as an ethical task or end has enormously impressed me. One could largely identify the Kantian transcendental with the commitment part of what Aristotle called ethos, and with what Brandom and other contemporary writers call normativity. This seems to bring many things into sharper focus. I am also inclined to identify Hegelian self-consciousness with the result of what Kant spoke of in terms of synthesis, which leads me to want to speak of something like “synthesis or self-consciousness” as an ethical task. The Kantian and Hegelian characterizations take quite different paths, but (in part because of this) can be mutually illuminating. But I actually want to focus on the ethical task part.

As I said, I find this enormously inspiring. Nonetheless, I am still struggling with the fact that some people whom I want to call good, including one very dear to me, are largely prevented by past traumatic events and/or some organic disturbance from ever achieving much synthesis or self-consciousness of this sort, so that they are largely unable to participate in what in this context it feels a bit insensitive to call higher ethical considerations. A well-meaning person thus afflicted may have unstable responses to things and show what would look to us like deep inconsistency, basically dealing with very partial views one at a time in exclusion from one another, rather than reconciled or meaningfully related to one another. For the person experiencing in this way, just going through ordinary life is confusing, and can easily provoke high anxiety. Where thoughts and feelings form no coherent community and just atomistically bump against one another, ability to fully participate in the mutuality of social relationships will suffer. Such a person needs all the kindness and patience we can offer.

Subjectivity is a complex and multi-leveled affair. In terms of the development underway here, we at least need to distinguish transcendental, psychological, and organic levels in the scenario just described. Synthesis and self-consciousness are transcendental; the aforementioned obstacles are organic or psychological. One’s local bit of the transcendental is supposed to be independent of the empirical in one way, but in another way, in lack of the right empirical conditions, it will not grow and flourish. Still, I want to emphasize, there is a human being there deserving of respectful consideration. This last kind of insight is, I think, what is behind Kant’s insistence on the dignity of all human beings, simply as such. (See also Aphasia; Coherence; Honesty, Kindness.)

Nonempirical But Historical?

What I have been calling the transcendental field and Brandom just calls the transcendental is supposed to be social, historical, and linguistic in its constitution, but nonempirical in its manner of subsisting. Its content would be like a vast implicit structure that is continually being implicitly replaced by new versions incorporating further historical experience. Brandom does not use terms like “field” or “structure” in this context, but the point I currently want to consider is just the nonempirical but historical character of the transcendental, which might seem paradoxical.

There is a related issue with the associated universal “community” of rational beings that I have invoked. This would be larger than any empirical community. It also would not exist at a moment in time, but rather would include an extension across the span of a history, including a past that may need to be reinterpreted, and a future that is not yet determined. But in principle, each participant in the rational community should have some empirical correlate in an actual rational animal existing at some time.

The answers lie, I believe, in the delicate way empirical and transcendental subjectivity are related. Without ever directly intermingling or even existing in the same way, they are each indirectly affected by the other. I have previously begun to sketch how this could be possible (see What Is “I”; Subject; Psyche, Subjectivity; Individuation). (See also Geist; Hegelian Genealogy; Rational/Talking Animal; Ethos, Hexis.)

Beyond Subject-Object

Hegel famously wanted to move beyond the subject-object dichotomy he saw as typical of early modernity. In practical terms, Kant’s most famous concern to avoid “dogmatic” assumptions about direct possession of epistemic objects had seemed to accentuate the separation of subject and object, by focusing on the distinction between appearance and reality. But both Kant and Hegel wanted to assert the possibility of knowledge in a strong sense, while avoiding what Kant called dogmatism. They also had considerable common ground in a shared rejection of naive early modern notions of subjects and objects and their relations.

Kant had begun — seemingly unwittingly — to recover some neglected Aristotelian insights in these areas, and Hegel made this an explicit theme. Thus they both already questioned the dichotomous interpretation of subject-object relations. Kant had also already highlighted the inevitable involvement of concepts in experience. For Kant, there is no direct epistemic access to real-world objects, or things in themselves (or to our own subjectivity). All knowledge proceeds by way of concepts, but he retains the concept of objects (and subjects) as a sort of placeholders for new distinctions between appearance and reality that can always be wrapped around current concepts in a new iteration.

When dichotomous connotations have already been applied to a distinction in some communicative context, it can be tricky to simultaneously clarify the transcendence of the dichotomy and the preservation of the underlying distinction, but the general solution is not far to find — just ensure that the underlying distinction is expressed in terms of some finite relation, rather than A versus not-A. Then we have Hegelian determinate negation or Aristotelian difference between the terms, rather than classical negation. So in effect, the solution lies in recognizing that the previous understanding of the distinction in terms of dichotomy was wrong in the first place.

More positively, Hegel eliminates dichotomies by putting determinate relations, coherence, and mediation first in the order of explanation, before all particular terms. The Hegelian Absolute — or that which transcends the subject-object dichotomy — is just a handle for perspectives that put processes, relations, coherence, and mediation before any preconceived notion of the conceptual content of particular terms.

I think Hegel saw this sort of structure as common to Aristotelian substance or “what it was to have been” a thing on the one hand, and Kantian subjectivity or synthesis of apperception on the other.

Working in the Hegelian Absolute does not require epistemic super powers or specious Cartesian certainty, just a sustained honest effort that is still implicitly defeasible. Hegel intends the Absolute to be a kind of Aristotelian achievable perfection, not a kind of omniscience or theological perfection that could never be legitimately claimed by a rational animal. (See Substance Also Subject.)

In approaching these matters in A Spirit of Trust, Brandom characteristically focuses not directly on higher-order abstractions, but on their implications for what we do with ordinary concepts in ordinary experience. Like Aristotle and Hegel but following a distinct strategy of his own, Brandom avoids the impasse of a supposed transition from psychological to “metaphysical” terms, or from ordinary experience to something that would seemingly have to be like the mind of God, by clarifying what we implicitly mean by concepts in the first place.

With Aristotle, Hegel, and Frege and in contradistinction to the empiricist tradition, Brandom understands concepts and apperception in a nonpsychological, nonrepresentational, normative-pragmatic, inferential-semantic way. Through the discovery of counterfactually robust relations, concepts evolve toward increasing universality. Through the experience of error, synthesis of apperception comes to incorporate the recognition that not only its commitments but also its concepts are always in principle provisional, subject to reformulation when faced with a new case. Through both of these combined with the additional cross-checks provided by mutual recognition, synthesis moves toward increasing objectivity and what might be called contact with reality. Through Brandom’s “expansive” model of responsibility, the last remaining obstacle to a full resolution of subject-object separation — the lack of a normative interpretation of unintended consequences of actions — is removed.

Neither “subjects” nor “objects” as such are very prominent in an account of this sort. It is much more a story about processes, relations, coherence, and mediation. Aristotle, Hegel, and Brandom each develop their own ways of working that start in the middle, as it were, and do not need reified subjects and objects to begin with. This, again, is just what the Hegelian Absolute is — a name for the sort of perspective that emphasizes the in-principle provisional character of all finite concepts, as contrasted with the more directly practical sort of perspective that provisionally works with the current basis as a source of reasons for particular sayings and doings. (See also Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic; Contradiction vs Polarity; Three Logical Moments.)