Individuation

Individuation might be said to have two sides, unity and particularity. I would rather say coherence and specificity. What are called individuals are generally complex wholes, not true atoms; and to the extent that they are definite and subject to understanding, they are something more than mere particulars.

As this applies to people, I have been arguing that the unity of personality or self should be expressed as some intermediate degree of coherence — what the Platonists called a One-and-Many. If we are being really precise, empirical “me” is never exactly the same as it was yesterday, even though there is a very strong family resemblance. Empirical “me” also has many different tendencies and aspects, with some degree of tension and inconsistency. Lockean continuity of memory too is a matter of degree; memory is malleable and incomplete.

I recently read some phenomenologist praising the idea of a “one-level model of consciousness”. That sounds horrible to me, the complete opposite of the lessons of Kant and Hegel, mixing up the empirical and the transcendental and ignoring the fact that differentiation is what gives meaning and form. (See also Empirical-Transcendental Doublet.)

While still feeling kinship with all life, I am fully won over to the importance of Brandom’s sentience/sapience distinction. Applying this to individuation yields interesting results. Sapience is not a kind of super-powered sentience that overcomes natural limitations. It is something wholly other, a social-historical-normative-linguistic transcendental field that natural sentience can nonetheless indirectly partially participate in, thanks to the mediation of second nature.

The formal “I” that indexes the transcendental field is in one way anonymous, but in another way more individual, more intimate, and a much stronger unity than empirical “me”. Empirical “me” is subject to Humean flux, while formal “I” is prone to ecstatic identification. If, extending the Platonic metaphor, each of these names a kind of community or ecosystem — one of empirical psychic tendencies, and one of shareable Thoughts — the ecosystem of shareable Thoughts in the zone of interaction will normally be more coherent than the associated ecosystem of psychic tendencies.

A synthesis of shareable Thoughts also turns out to be far more unique than a synthesis of purely private experience. “I” as unity of apperception has much sharper focus than the “me” of putative immediate awareness. My commitments say much more about who “I” am than my private experience says about “me”. (See also Psyche, Subjectivity.)

Husserlian and Existential Phenomenology

Phenomenology in the tradition stemming from Husserl is a prime example of what Habermas called subject-centered philosophy. Though a much more serious philosopher than Descartes, Husserl explicitly adopted a Cartesian perspective, and on this basis wanted to trace all meaning back to a foundation in intentional acts of a transcendental Ego. Existential phenomenology tried to soften Husserl’s Cartesianism, and favored analysis of more concrete experience over Husserl’s foundational concerns (see Primacy of Perception?; Phenomenology of Will).

I’ve been developing a strong distinction of actual adverbial subjectivity from any posited unitary Subject standing behind it, while also sharply separating empirical “subjectivity” from transcendental Subjectivity. I’d like to recover some of the detailed insights of both Husserlian and existential phenomenology for a broadly semantic perspective that addresses subjectivity in a modular way, and hence has no use for a monolithic Subject, be it transcendental or existential. (As usual, by “semantic” I have in mind the combination of Aristotelian and Brandomian concerns developed here.) Then with respect to the matter of subjectivity, I’d like to achieve an Aristotelian mean between coherence and pluralism. Meaning is neither a single tree nor a collection of atoms, but mostly constituted at the level of intermediate structures that build coherence.

Unlike the Aristotelian/Brandomian approach favored here, the phenomenological tradition avowedly aims at a sort of hermeneutic genealogy of perceptual and other mental representations rather than of reasons. Nonetheless, any serious, in-depth tracing of layers and dependencies of meaning can be reconstructed in terms of reasons, and then combined with other materials directly derived from a genealogy of reasons.

Husserl aimed at a subjective discipline of direct observation of pure forms of appearance. Initially interested in the foundations of mathematics, in early work he developed a critique of psychologism in logic. He went on to recommend a radical “reduction” or suspension of ordinary assumptions, in two interdependent moments — epoché, a putting in brackets of putative existence behind appearances, and in general of what we ordinarily think we know or practically act as if we know; and the phenomenological reduction proper, which would be the recognition of everything that has been put in brackets as what Brandom would call a taking.

Husserl’s close collaborator Eugen Fink characterized the reduction as an extensive and rigorous meditative discipline that would take us back to an original astonishment characteristic of genuine knowing. According to Fink, when carried through rigorously, the reduction eventually shows itself as a “self-meditation” that would lay bare the transcendental Ego as the material ground of all science. What remains after the reduction is an “unhumanized” pure “reducing I”.

This bears some resemblance to the Kantian “I” as bare index of the unity of a unity of apperception, but unlike the Kantian “I”, the Husserlian Ego is not fully abstract. For one thing, it is supposed to be the agent performing the reduction, and it seems to be assumed that it is appropriate to speak of “the” agent in this role.

For another, Husserl stressed that the reduction should provide access to what he called pure essences, understood as pure forms of intentionality grounded in acts of the transcendental Ego. This makes it clear that Husserl’s transcendental Ego is supposed to be contentful, not purely formal like the Kantian “I”. Correlatively, Husserl’s essences, while nonpychological and free of empirical content and the presuppositions that go with it, are what they are by virtue of their complete and unilateral subordination to a foundational Subject that has supposedly been not merely posited, but discovered via the meditative process of the reduction. By contrast, the determination of content in a Kantian unity of apperception is purely a matter of coherence. (See also Transcendental Field; Error.)

In my youth, though already viewing the Ego as a reification, I was attracted to the idea of a meditative discipline and a focus on improving the knower by shedding presuppositions. While still seeing some value in this, I have come increasingly to think not only that such discipline is insufficient by itself, but that such a focus can easily be taken too far, implicitly reflecting an undesirable ascetic and effectively subjectivist turn away from serious open-ended inquiry about the larger world. A sole focus on improving the knower is too narrow. (Husserl did at one point have a motto “to the things themselves”, and certainly was far too serious to be subjectivist in the crude sense. His Ego would be purely transcendental. However, his “things themselves” seem to turn out to be intentional acts of the Ego.) Nonetheless, I remain fascinated by Husserl’s detailed descriptions of the stream of consciousness with all its passive syntheses, margins of awareness, implicit back sides of things, and so on. (See also Phenomenological Reduction?; Ricoeur on Husserl on Memory; Ricoeur on Husserl’s Ideas II.)

Psyche, Subjectivity

Things in general exhibit unity in a wide range of degrees. The kinds of unity that are possible for simple things are different from those that are possible for complex things.

Plato compared the human soul (psyche in Greek) to a city. This certainly implies more coherence than that of a mere collection, but it also implies somewhat less coherence than that of an organism.

The traditional folk psychology of many cultures distinguished layers or components of the psyche with nontrivial degrees of relative autonomy. Medieval Christian theology was somewhat unusual in emphasizing a very strong unity of the soul. For the theologians, a strong unity of the soul was at once a moral wish, an object of faith, and a discursive result of a vigorous tradition of introspective psychology that was also influenced by faith.

Through Descartes, this strong unity acquired a new destiny of a more secular sort, in new implicit claims that the empirical psyche naturally has the same very strong unity the theologians had wanted for the soul. Descartes effectively presented this as an immediate natural intuition, independent of faith and independent of discursive argument. Meanwhile, his account of psychology was very truncated and impoverished.

(Despite its iconic status, Cartesianism never held Western philosophy in a hegemonic grip. To mention but one example of an alternative, Locke — for whom I have little affinity, but whom I take quite a bit more seriously than Descartes — greatly developed the idea of immediate natural intuition Descartes had relied upon, but without making such strong claims about the unity of the empirical psyche. Locke’s notion of personal identity was based on actual concrete continuity of memory. While this might be criticized as reliant on a kind of immediacy, it is not the sort of sheer presumption or rabbit out of a hat that Descartes had on offer. Locke’s epistemology was also foundationalist, but in other ways it was more modest, and his psychology was much more richly detailed.)

At any rate, I now want to at least begin to make explicit what ought to follow about the sort or degree of unity of the empirical psyche from what I have been writing in these posts.

The empirical psyche would be the seat of what I have called feeling and of Aristotelian acquired character or emotional disposition, as well as of Kantian intuition, physical sensation, and general sentience; and of our acquired second nature as talking animals. It would be the common-sense referent of an empirical-factual “me”.

As sapient talking animals, our acquired second nature nominalizes the empirical psyche’s participation in a socially, historically, and linguistically constituted Kantian transcendental field that would be the home of values, ethics, Thought, Reason, unities of apperception, Aristotelian intellect, Hegelian Spirit, and Brandomian scorekeeping. Things of this sort are involved with time, but not in the same way as empirical things. Like empirical things, they evolve diachronically, but they also have much more extensive acquired synchronous structure. As the index of the unity of a unity of apperception, a philosophical “I” has this character. With respect to the sort of individuation conferred by empirical facts, this “I” is completely anonymous. It is nothing in itself, but metonymically identifiable with all things or, more precisely, with anything or everything in a unity of apperception it indexes. This philosophical “I” is the rational ground of the “I” of ecstatic poetic identification.

Nonmental, inferential-relationally constituted Essences or Forms or shareable Thoughts are the real bearers of normative Subjectivity. A philosophical “I” just nominalizes something like the ecosystem or community of shareable, interacting Thoughts in a unity of apperception or piece of Hegelian Spirit. The empirical psyche provides a kind of place where these things happen, and a kind of embodiment of that happening. The psyche is not a Subject, but a place where some precious Subjectivity may happen and get embodied. “I” am not that place, that “me”, but rather the transcendental “ecosystem” that lives in that “me”. Part of the same transcendental ecosystem — values and inspiration and Thoughts and spiritual love — that lives in “me” may also live in “you”. “We” are not mutually exclusive entities, and that is part of our social essence. (See also What Is “I”?)

Subject

While I have no objection to speaking of some subjectivity or subject-as-functional-role, a foundational Subject or subject-as-unexplained-explainer is an albatross with no philosophical benefit except to make possible intriguing but ultimately untenable discourses like those of Fichte or Husserl. It gets worse when something like foundational Subjecthood is attributed to empirical subjectivity. All sorts of errors follow.

The idea of a foundational Subject was happily unknown to Plato and Aristotle. It was not in fact a requirement for Kant, who famously dwells on subjectivity, but without giving it unexplained-explainer status or assuming strong unity. It was decisively deconstructed by Hegel as a delusion of Mastery. (For a Brandomian alternative, see Scorekeeping; Mutual Recognition.)

In the early middle ages, in a more theological context, something anticipating the concept of a Subject with strong unity began to emerge in writers like Augustine and Avicenna. This proto-Subject played an important role in Christian theological notions of persons divine and human, and appears in the Thomistic notion of the intellectual soul, which in this regard owes more to Augustinian mens (“mind”) and to Avicenna than it does to Aristotle. (See also Pseudo-Dionysius on the Soul; God and the Soul; Identity, Isomorphism.)

Centuries of intensive and thoughtful theological discourse about personhood and the soul’s knowledge prepared the way for the strongly unified, foundational Subject that Descartes presented as a natural intuition, and made the cornerstone of his system. The theologians were more nuanced and interesting on this than Descartes. They wanted a stronger unity of the soul than I could philosophically countenance, but the theological context mostly prevented it from being used as an unexplained explainer. Descartes made a wreck of both philosophy and theology. (See also What Is “I”?; Substance Also Subject; Individuation; Psyche, Subjectivity; Cogito; Influence.)

Archaeology of Knowledge

In the old days, my favorite text of Foucault was the beginning of the Archaeology of Knowledge (online here), revised from his “Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie”, published summer 1968 (o pregnant time!) in Cahiers pour L’Analyse, the original of which is separately translated in Essential Works vol. 1. There is a nice summary of the original and its historical context here.

At this time, Foucault and Althusser were both working toward what has been called a rationalist philosophy of the Concept related to the work of Jean Cavaillés and Georges Canguilhem, in contrast to then popular existential/phenomenological philosophies of the Subject. (See Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillés to Deleuze.)

The Epistemological Circle that Foucault was responding to was a group of Althusser’s students interested in the philosophy and history of science, as well as structural Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, who had asked Foucault a series of methodological questions. Althusser was something like the dean of France’s most prestigious university. He had actually written his dissertation (which I have still not seen) on the Concept in Hegel. By this time he was in high anti-Hegelian mode, as was Foucault.

Foucault himself acknowledged considerable debt to his Hegelian mentor Jean Hyppolite, who translated the Phenomenology to French. Hyppolite read Hegel as focused more on discourse than on subjectivity. His 1952 Language and Existence, referred to by Foucault as “one of the great books of our time”, argued strongly for the importance of language in Hegel. (It was also very favorably reviewed by the young Deleuze.) Foucault had written a thesis on “The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” under Hyppolite in 1949.

There is more good historical background in James Muldoon, “Foucault’s Forgotten Hegelianism”. While I don’t endorse, e.g., Muldoon’s remarks on Hegel and free will, his suggestion that an identification with certain specifics of Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel — particularly the attribution of a strong “totalizing” impulse — contributed significantly to the anti-Hegelian turn of Foucault and others is quite interesting.

Though I don’t recall this from his translated works, Hyppolite apparently both saw a strong element of totalization in Hegel and strongly rejected it, while continuing to identify as a Hegelian. (Previously, in absence of more specific evidence I had surmised it was mainly a reaction against Alexandre Kojève’s reading that drove the French anti-Hegelian turn. Muldoon also says Hyppolite’s reading was initially welcomed as a contrast to Jean Wahl’s more phenomenologically oriented 1929 book on the unhappy consciousness, which apparently also contributed to French perceptions of Hegel as subject-centered.)

In any case, the Hegel whom Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and others famously rejected in the 1960s was identified as the proponent of a totalizing historical teleology of the Subject. Each of the three components of this was independently strongly rejected — the subject-centeredness, the historical teleology, and the totalization. I still agree today that these are all serious errors that should be rejected.

However, Hegel read in a broadly Brandomian way is utterly untouched by this criticism. There is no historical teleology at all in what Brandom calls Hegelian genealogy (so a fortiori not a totalizing one), and there is no subject-centeredness in the analysis of conceptual content. Subjectivity is never invoked as an unexplained explainer. Brandom’s exposition of the Hegelian critique of Mastery offers us a Hegel utterly opposed to the kind of totalization attributed to him by Foucault, Althusser, and Deleuze.

Foucault presented a long list of forms of discontinuity that should be attended to in the history of ideas. Each of these could be analyzed in Brandomian/Hegelian terms as a determinate negation.

I agree with Foucault that it is very important not to take the simple continuity of a tradition for granted. In principle, such things need to be shown. However, I still think defeasible assertions about “traditions” and other such unities that should be questioned can play a useful role in historical discussion. (See also Ricoeur on Foucault; Structuralism; Structure, Potentiality; Difference; Identity, Isomorphism; Univocity; Historiography; Genealogy.)

What Is “I” ?

Empirical subjectivity is not really “I”, in the sense of the “I think” that is the pure unity of apperception in Kant and Hegel. We could informally call it “me” or “myself”. That is a concrete thing in the world of things and facts, to which we participants in reason have a special relation that is nonetheless not identity. Strictly speaking, “I” is a mobile index for the tendency toward unity in a unity of apperception, with no other characteristics of any kind.

What is called consciousness is not a medium or container, but a way of being. What gets called self-consciousness in Hegel is anything but immediate awareness of an object called “self”. It has more to do with an awareness of the limitations of empirical self.

There is a long ancient and even medieval prehistory or archaeology to the now ubiquitous conception of “subjectivity”, which was pioneered in its modern form by Kant and Hegel and has been varied and/or vulgarized in innumerable ways. We can recognize the bold innovations of Kant and Hegel in the modern context and still be intrigued and enriched by this prehistory.

When dealing with such retrospective reconstruction of a putative intellectual development, it is never a matter of the persistence or mere repetition of an identical conception. Rather, the first task is to recognize a larger space of variations and developments, and then, tentatively and subject to revision, to retrospectively reconstruct a stratified and multilinear but coherent development. In French, one might consult Alain de Libera’s massive ongoing L’Archeologie du Sujet.

In the middle ages Averroes, in his Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle, developed a nuanced distinction between what he called intellect, which transcends the individual psyche but operates in it where there is rational apprehension, and what he called the cogitative faculty of the soul, which in modern terms is the seat of empirical subjectivity. The potential aspect of intellect, according to Averroes, subsists in time and accumulates forms as an indirect result of human activity, but is not part of the soul. Rather, it is something shared by all rational animals insofar as they are rational, and it would not persist if there were no living rational animals. (See translation by Richard Taylor.) In modern terms, the cogitative faculty is psychological. The potential aspect of intellect is not psychological but social and historical, resembling what I have called the transcendental field. The active aspect can be reconstructed as ideal in something close to a Kantian/Hegelian sense.

Aristotle himself has provocative, minimalist language about intellect coming to the psyche from without, and about active intellect somehow being identical with its objects. The idea of intellect being identical with its objects was revived by Hegel, with explicit reference to Aristotle. This could never be true of an empirical subjectivity.

Nonetheless — and this is the interesting part — we concrete embodied beings can participate in a transcendental unity of apperception that is bigger than we are in some some delicate virtual sense, like Spirit in Hegel. A suggestion provocatively attributed to Kant and Hegel is that paradoxically it is by virtue of this participation — which insofar as it is active dissociates or decenters us from our empirical selves — that we can say “I” at all. Then because we can say “I”, we can confuse “I” with our empirical selves. (See also Subject; Psyche, Subjectivity; Brandom and Kant; Rational/Talking Animal; Intelligence from Outside; Alienation, Second Nature; Empirical-Transcendental Doublet; Nonempirical But Historical?)

Empirical-Transcendental Doublet?

Foucault, near the end of The Order of Things, with brilliant prose attacked what he called the empirical-transcendental doublet in Kant, by which Foucault meant a putative subject that is supposed to be simultaneously empirical and transcendental.

Kant is often criticized for his apparent dualisms, and with some justification. Foucault’s criticism has an opposite form. It presupposes that Kant’s distinction between empirical subjectivity and the transcendental does not really hold. If it did, there would be no confusion between the two. Here is a case where Kant’s so-called dualism is really helpful.

There is a subtlety here, because there must still be some interaction among these things that need to be distinguished. The transcendental is independent of experience, without being otherworldly. It helps shape experience, without violating that independence.

I think empirical subjectivity is grounded in our emotions and emotional constitution, which also form the main basis of common-sense personal identity. Kantian transcendental subjectivity, on the other hand, is grounded in our ethos.

What Foucault’s criticism legitimately applies to is a bad Kantianism that re-establishes Cartesian-Lockean mentalism by imbuing empirical subjects with transcendental powers, and implicitly uses the transcendental as a foundational guarantee for some alleged properties of empirical subjectivity. Wherever there is undifferentiated talk about “the” subject, this sort of thing is likely to be at work. Kant himself is not guilty of this.

I want to say that the transcendental is intimate to us without being immanent in us. (See also Archaeology of Knowledge; Ethos, Hexis; Soul, Self; Apperception, Identity; Self-Consciousness vs Identity.)