A Triangular Relation?

In the previous post, we saw a sharply binary model of signifier and signified being applied by Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus. At least in Bacon’s case, this goes hand in hand with a new kind of “direct” realism that aims to deal directly with things in the world, and repudiates the subtleties of the indirect account of knowledge and meaning by way of concepts and the passions of the soul that was broadly shared by Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius. But Scotus complicates the picture considerably by also promoting a triangular model that includes concepts understood in a certain way. Scotus also argues for a non-psychological approach to concepts.

“Does the sign signify the thing itself or the concept in the soul? — We have said that for Scotus, the great semantic controversy of the Middle Age, more fundamental than any other, is constituted by the following question: Is the vocal sound the sign of the thing or of the concept?” (Boulnois, L’Être et représentation, p. 35, my translation throughout).

“The line of the English Franciscans seems to have developed this theory long before him: for Roger Bacon, linguistic signs have been arbitrarily instituted by humans to directly indicate the things themselves. Words are not related to things by means of a conceptual interpretation. A new, radically non-Platonic way of thinking language arises: instrument of communication, it ‘takes the place of’ (supponit pro) the thing, and not the idea of the speaker. What is more, it exercises a representative function uniquely defined by its capacity to refer to present and existent things. For Roger Bacon, the name signifies solely the thing on which it has been imposed. It can only refer to things (even if it can signify connotata, by inference). But at the same time, there is a relation between the vox [vocal sound] and the species in the soul. The vocal sound is its proper presentification, but it makes the representation of a thing arise in the mind. It makes the thing be conceived, or makes it arise in the soul. Thus the sign in a single gesture refers to the thing and recalls a representation. The vox is not a concept, but a thing that signifies another; it signifies a singular thing in the present, without involving essence, and no longer passes by way of the intellectus to arrive at the res [thing]. There is a sort of collaterality of the sermo [spoken word] and the intellectus that both refer to the res” (ibid).

Scholastic accounts of language typically focus on proprieties of naming. Implicit in this approach is an account of meaning that begins from individual terms. Broadly speaking, this approach has an affinity to modern bottom-up theories of semantics, which aim to put together a picture of the world in a compositional way from individual terms taken as given.

In the early 20th century, Saussurean linguistics developed an alternative approach that treats the signifier in a relational way, such that each signifier is understood in the first instance as identified by its difference from other signifiers, independent of its nominal reference to a signified. This led to an incipient “deconstructive” analysis of individual terms in the broad current of 20th-century European (especially French) “structuralism”, which then came to be explicitly thematized in developments that Anglophone writers came to refer to as “post” structuralist.

From a completely different starting point in a pragmatist reading of analytic philosophy and German Idealism, in the late 20th century Brandom developed an “inferentialist” semantics that begins from whole sentences as the minimal unit of assertion, and focuses on explaining the “material” inferential properties of propositions in terms of normative assessments of proprieties of concrete assertion, rather than in terms of universal formal rules. Brandom understands the meaning of concepts inferentially, in terms of their use or functional role in assertions, and emphasizes the non-psychological character of meaning understood in this way. From this point of view, concepts are not to be identified with individual terms, and instead have a holistic character, such that each concept involves other concepts.

In sharp contrast to both of these as well as to Aristotle and Augustine, Scotus develops his triangular model of signification in a way that aims to be consistent with a primacy of individual things, and with a direct association of words to things.

“[I]n his first commentary on [Aristotle’s] treatise On Interpretation, [Scotus] maintains, like Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, that the vocal sound signifies the concept, which resembles the thing or ‘represents’ it. The vox immediately signifies the species, the representation of the thing in the intellect, but it mediately signifies that which it represents, which is to say the thing itself. But in the second commentary, closer to Bacon, he holds that the vocal sound directly signifies not the conceptions of the intellect, but the thing itself. When Aristotle and Boethius say that the name directly signifies the passions of the soul, it is necessary to understand by this not the concept, or the resemblance in the soul, but the thing that is conceived. This second version is evidently a radical revision of Scotist semantics. It is also the definitive position of the theological works” (pp. 36-37).

“Following Bacon and [Peter] Olivi, Duns Scotus breaks with the Boethian interpretation of signification, but he does so with a nuance, integrating the Aristotelian semantics; the verbal sign (verbum) is directly the sign of both the thing and the concept, but it is in the first instance the sign of the thing, and then the sign of the concept. The sign comes from a direct causality of the thing and signifies it directly. Nonetheless there is a logical anteriority of the concept, for it is on it that the linguistic sign depends. Scotus formulates his response in the vocabulary of his own theory of causality. The concept, the written sign, and the phoneme are all three ordered effects of the same cause: the thing itself…. Writing, the vocal sound, and the concept are signs, situated on the same plane, none of them exercising any causality over the others, and they signify the same signified” (p. 37).

If the sign is in the first instance the sign of the thing, it is difficult to see how the concept can be logically anterior to the relation of sign to thing. But Scotus apparently wants to assert both, and also that the concept is a kind of sign, and that the sign is a kind of thing.

“[T]he word, the concept, and the thing no longer form a series, but a triangle…. The play of natural causes, the weight of institution, and the semantic relation are articulated with one another, but remain autonomous…. The concept is the first, natural effect of the thing itself. It is it that is first of all a sign of the thing, and not the vocal sound or writing. It constitutes the object of logic, an anterior object, more fundamental than vocal sounds, and supposed by them…. If there is a science of things, metaphysics, and a science of words, grammar, logic occupies an intermediary and central place, as the science of concepts” (p. 39).

Scotus wants to give metaphysics a new status as a rational science, in a strong sense that is independent of Aristotle. Meanwhile, he also explicitly rejects Aristotle’s thesis that logic is a tool for clearly expressing meaning and not a science with its own subject matter, which Brandom has recently revived under the name of logical expressivism.

“Noetics studies the concept insofar as it constitutes an aspect of the mind (mens), where it is found as an accident in a subject. Logic, on the contrary, considers the concept as sign, insofar as it refers to a signified. This is the ambiguity of representation: we consider in it either the thing that represents, or the thing that it represents, the being of the representing or the being represented…. Logic is distinct from psychology…. The aim of thought is not reducible to its psychic reality” (pp. 39-40).

Boulnois does not point it out here, but Scotus’s assumption that the concept is in the mind “as an accident in a subject” is directly opposed to Augustine’s strong contention that the mind should not be seen as a subject in which knowledge and love inhere as accidents.

“In this triangle of word, concept, and thing, the concept is described as a sign, and reciprocally the cognitive act is itself a semiosis. Duns Scotus breaks with Augustine and Boethius, who reserve signification to vocal sounds and writing. He participates in what C. Panaccio has called a general movement of ‘semantization’ of thought. Logic, conceived as a rational science, a theory of signs or of ‘signifying reasoning’ (ratio significandi), is no longer a subalternate discipline, concerned with the expression of thought. Because thought is signifying, logic becomes a theory of thought itself. Nevertheless, it does not fall to it to resolve the problem of the place of thought. Concepts are natural signs, not conventional ones: they are combined in propositions according to logical rules, the structure of which subtends all possible oral or written propositions, even if they are not proffered. They constitute the elements of a universal mental language, of a general grammar and of a pure theory of communication. This language is for Duns Scotus a subjacent condition of all oral enunciations and effective writings” (pp. 40-41).

Thus apparently the treatment of concepts as a kind of sign is closely related to the non-Aristotelian idea that logic is a science with its own subject matter.

“But above all, this ideal possibility is real: it is accomplished par excellence in the domain of angelic communication. Angels communicate with the aid of intelligible signs, which is to say pure concepts, without phonetic or graphical support. Each angel directly causes a concept in another, by an immediate communication. It is on this occasion that Duns Scotus formulates a formal theory of pure thought” (p. 41).

If concepts are natural signs and signs are real things, then concepts are real things.

“The sign establishes a double relation. On the one hand, it is the image of the thing that caused it; on the other hand, what is more important, it signifies it: the concept is a real object, which has a natural existence, belonging to a causal chain; but it bears a resemblance to the object it represents. This resemblance is produced by the concurrent double causality of the thing itself and the intelligible species conserved in memory. — Is it necessary to say that the concept preserves the transparency of representation, while the conventional sign loses it? For a concept, does representare signify a ‘resemblance to’, or simply: ‘taking the place of the presence’ of an object, which was already the sense of the word in Peter of Spain? Does the representivity of the concept for the intellect come from its resemblance to real objects, or from its dependence on a cause?” (pp. 41-42).

Given Scotus’s insistence that the sign refers directly to the thing, it is surprising to read that “We cannot pass directly from the representation to the thing” (p. 43). But our act is different from the reference of the sign, so technically there is no contradiction.

“But even in maintaining that the relation of cause to effect is first, Scotus does not go to the point of abandoning resemblance: both are real aspects of intellection. Even if it supposes the causality of the object, semiosis is a complex process that is not reduced to it, since it supposes a play of resemblances. The sign is recognized more than it is produced” (ibid).

In a way, the play of resemblances resembles the mutual dependence of signifiers in the Saussurean tradition.

That the sign is recognized more than it is produced is a nice injection of good sense that stands in obvious tension with the foundation myth of signs as imposed and instituted “at will”. But the user of a sign is usually not its institutor.

“The phoneme homo no longer signifies the concept of the human: like the concept, it signifies the real human, even if it depends on the concept for this. The three forms of signification (formal sign, oral sign, written sign) are parallel, even if their terms are ordered according to a serial dependency. The signification of the concept is a natural relation between the intellect and things. The signified of phonemes and graphemes remains the thing itself, but it depends on a conventional relation.”

“In this Scotus directly opposes Aristotle, for whom the vox is a sound emitted by the mouth of a human being, accompanied by an imaginative representation. Words are not the tools of knowledge, but of communication” (p. 43).

I think that knowledge in Plato and Aristotle (and Hegel and Gadamer and Habermas and Brandom, among others) implicitly has a dialogical (and therefore in part communicative) character. Gadamer has highlighted the dialogical element in Plato and Aristotle. The “communicative reason” elaborated by Habermas involves a dialogical view of knowledge. It is only “monological” conceptions of knowledge that do not involve an element of communication.

“In itself, the written or oral sign is only an ensemble of sounds or letters, which causes nothing more than the knowledge of itself. The imposition of the sign describes the passage from concept to sign, and reciprocally interpretation allows a reascent from the sign to the intelligible concept that subtends it. The process of interpretation follows a trajectory inverse to that of imposition. It is thus a contingent process of association” (p. 45).

“In the moment of imposition, the imposer associates sense and intellect, in relating a perceived name to a conceived thing. In the moment of interpretation, the hearer recalls the relation between the name perceived in the present, and the past thing that she knew more or less distinctly” (p. 46).

I don’t think of interpretation as happening in a moment. It is not only dialogical, but also involves mediation, concepts, and an extension in time. In the same way, only in a very improper sense is jumping to a conclusion a kind of judgment. But Boulnois is summarizing Scotus here, not necessarily asserting this in his own name.

“Signification cannot take the place of knowledge. There is no transparency between the sign and thought” (ibid).

Knowledge implies a knower in a way that formal signification does not. But the dialogical expression and elaboration of knowledge is closely interwoven with the dialogical elaboration of signification and meaning.

“But what is it that is signified? The thing, yes, but in what sense of the word ‘thing’? According to [Scotus’s] Questions on On Interpretation, not the thing in its singularity and its existence, but the thing as quiddity [what Aristotle calls the “what it is”], indifferent to singularity and universality, to existence and nonexistence: the thing as it is seen by the mediation of a concept…. According to this semantic, signification is no longer an intelligible correlation between the signifying and the concept” (pp. 46-47).

Indeed, “thing” is said in many ways. Thing as quiddity and thing as object are almost mutually exclusive. I use “object” in a deflationary way as a relative term, as in “the object of”, not as naming something that is assumed to be a free-standing thing in its own right. I don’t actively use the term “quiddity”, but I think of it as a more static and self-contained projection of essence, which in its more proper usages is not something self-contained. Brandom says that a concept is not the kind of thing we could have just one of. I think of essence in a similar way. All articulation is inter-articulation, involving more than one term.

“From now on, signification can be thought independent of the scope of the concept.”

“Linguistic signs signify directly, without passing through the concept. They can signify a thing more precisely than intellect can conceive it. The circulus vini, a sign that indicates the presence of new wine in the inn, causes nothing new in the intellect of the one who perceives it. It is an arbitrary sign, constituted by a convention…. Convention is limited to establishing a relation of reason between two things, two physical realities: the sonorous matter of the phoneme (the vox) and the reality signified (the res). To be valid, this relation-convention supposes the knowledge of the two terms…. A weak and confused knowledge of the thing suffices for us to be able to use a sign, and to signify in a suitable way. We can signify in a way that is more precise than we conceive” (pp. 47-48).

Signification is a “formal” concept, in what seems to be Scotus’s distinctive sense of the term “formal”, which is neither Platonic nor Kantian, and also not to be understood in terms of modern logical or mathematical formalism. The formal status of signification is what allows it to be “more precise” than the knowledge we actually have. But as Hegel reminds us, formal precision (in any of these senses) is not always a virtue when applied to real things.

“Duns Scotus is inspired by the analyses of Olivi to establish a relation between semantic representation and juridical representation, the sign and the law.”

Peter Olivi was another important 13th-century Franciscan, and another strong voluntarist.

“A sign can be speculative or practical. The speculative sign leads to knowledge; it allows a concept of the signified to be formed in the intellect, but its characteristic tells us nothing of its real existence; for example, homo is the sign of a concept, and allows the knowledge of an essence, of a nature in general, whether or not a human exists. The practical sign implies the existence of its signified; it is the sign of an existence, and not of a simple possibility…. Since the practical sign signifies the advent of an effect, and this effect depends on the ordered power (that is to say on the free voluntary disposition) of someone who can cause it, only the author of this effect can give this practical sign certain being. It suffices that the institutor is disposed to regularly produce the signified of the sign she institutes…. Contracts, pacts, and promises are examples. The practical sign pertains to a juridical order instituted by humans. It depends on a law…. The sign belongs to the domain of the will of a free agent, who is self-determining in limiting herself to the order she institutes. This one, in proportion to her political power, can engage in rendering real what she has disposed in the order of signs” (pp. 48-49).

To me it seems preposterous to say that the sign belongs to the domain of the will of a free agent. A sign belongs to a field of reciprocal determination that is independent of anyone’s will. (See also Hegel on Willing.)

“The practical sign is an ordination of power. In this sense, it belongs to the theology of absolute power and ordained power. In Duns Scotus, these two concepts apply to every free agent: absolute power includes all that a free being can effectively do, de facto. Ordained power includes all she can do in conformity to a law, de jure. The institutor is an absolutely free agent, who self-determines freely in choosing this or that order” (p. 49).

An earlier book by Boulnois develops the history of the theology of absolute power and ordained power in detail. A later book treats the history of theological voluntarism in the Latin tradition.

For Scotus “It is will that founds the truth of the practical sign, and not the inverse” (p. 52).

But “there are signs of which we are not the institutors, and that we receive as fully established by an alien will…. We are under the law of signs, and they do not always depend on us” (ibid).

One, Many, Same, Different

Book Iota (X) of Aristotle’s Metaphysics extends the discussion in book Delta (V) of things said in many ways, going into detail on what makes things one, many, the same, or different. These are extremely important matters for any sound reasoning, though somewhat technical in nature. It also contains Aristotle’s sharp critique of the saying of Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things”.

“[T]here are four senses in which something is said to be one primarily and in its own right, rather than incidentally” (ch.1, p. 185).

As to the first, “oneness belongs to what is continuous, either simply or, especially, by nature, and not by contact or a binding cord (and of these that is more so one and is more primary of which the motion is more indivisible and simple)” (ibid).

Continuity in a material is the lowest degree of something being one in its own right. That which is materially united by contact or by any artificial means would not be one in its own right.

As to the second, “[oneness] belongs still more to what is whole and has some form and look, especially if something is of that sort by nature and not by force, as those things are that are so by means of glue or bolts or being tied with a cord, but rather has in itself that which is responsible for its being continuous. And something is of this sort if its motion is one and indivisible in place and time; and so it is clear that, if something that has a source of motion that moves it in the primary kind of the primary class of motions (by which I mean a circular type of change of place), this is one magnitude in the primary sense” (ibid).

Being a whole is a higher degree of unity than being materially continuous. The association of circular motion with a strong unity is relevant to the upcoming argument in book Lambda (XII) about the first cause.

“So some things are one in this way, insofar as they are continuous or whole, but others are one because the articulation of them is one, and of this sort are those things of which the thinking is one, and this in turn is of this sort if it is indivisible, and an act of thinking is indivisible if it is of something indivisible in form or in number” (ibid, emphasis added).

As to the third, “a particular thing is one by being indivisible in number” (ibid, emphasis added).

These would include all the independent and non-independent things that were extensively discussed in book Zeta (VII).

He continues, “but that which is one by means of intelligibility and knowledge is indivisible in form, so [fourth] what is responsible for the oneness of independent things would be one in the primary sense” (ibid, emphasis added).

I expect that this last kind will turn out to be the first cause.

“But it is necessary to notice that one must not take the sorts of things that are spoken of as one as being meant in the same way as what it is to be one, or what the articulation of it is” (p. 186).

This is analogous to the distinction between saying something about something in general, and saying what something is, also discussed in book Zeta. He illustrates this below, with the example of fire.

“The same thing would also be the case with ‘element’ and ’cause’, if one had to speak about them, distinguishing the things to which the words are applied, and giving a definition of the words. For there is a sense in which fire is an element… and a sense in which it is not; for being fire is not the same thing as being an element…. And it is that way also with ’cause’ and ‘one’ and all such things, and this is why being one is being indivisible, just exactly what it is to be a this, separate on its own in either place or form or thinking, or to be both whole and indivisible, but especially to be the primary measure of each class of things, and, in the most governing sense, of the class of things with quantity, for it has come from there to apply to other things” (ibid).

Being one in the third sense above (being a particular thing) is now said to be “just exactly what it is to be a this“. This foreshadows an extensive one-to-one mapping he will develop below, between all the ways of the saying of being he elaborates in book Delta (V), and the ways of the saying of oneness.

He goes on to speak at some length about measures, which we would call units of measurement.

The most important point is that “a measure is always the same kind of thing as what it measures, for the measure of magnitudes is a magnitude, and in particular, that of length is a length, of breadth a breadth, of spoken sounds a spoken sound, of weight a weight, and of numerical units a numerical unit” (p. 188, emphasis added).

The distinction he makes here tracks perfectly with the way that different types, dimensions, and variables are handled separately in the operations defined by modern mathematics.

“And we speak of knowledge or sense perception as a measure of things for the same reason, because we recognize something by means of them, although they are measured more than they measure” (ibid).

The simultaneously humorous and serious caveat that “they are measured more than they measure” means that knowledge and perception are constrained by reality. More precisely, they are involved in mutual dependencies with the realities of things that they at once measure and are measured by.

“And Protagoras says a human being is the measure of all things, as if he were saying that a knower or perceiver were the measure, and these because the one has knowledge and the other perception, which we say are the measures of their objects. So while saying nothing, these people appear to be saying something extraordinary” (ibid).

Aristotle, at the end of his discussion of measure (longer and more detailed than included here), refers to Protagoras’ famous saying, commonly quoted as “Man is the measure of all things”. With uncharacteristic sharpness, he calls this “saying nothing”. Why? This seems worthy of a short digression.

Protagoras was a prominent Sophist, who appears in Plato’s dialogue of the same name. He wrote a controversial treatise entitled Truth, which began with the sentence, “Of all things the measure is man: of those that are, that they are; and of those that are not, that they are not”. Plato and Aristotle both took Protagoras to be asserting a kind of individualist relativism. Reportedly, the skeptic Sextus Empiricus also read him this way. Plato took him to deny any objective reality. Aristotle in book Gamma (IV) shows rare outrage at his other reported claim that “it is not possible to contradict”. I didn’t mention him by name in my account, but Aristotle names him there as well.

Aristotle implies it is a bit more plausible to much more specifically say that knowledge and perception are measures of things, but even that only with the caveat that really “they are measured more than they measure”.

But why go on to add with such sharpness that Protagoras is “saying nothing”? I suspect the answer may lie with the other part of Aristotle’s interpretation: “as if he were saying that a knower or perceiver were the measure, and these because the one has knowledge and the other perception”.

I’m inclined to think Aristotle would regard it as outrageous to transfer what may (ambiguously) be said of specific knowledge and perception, to an unqualified saying about one who is said to possess knowledge and perception in general.

Aristotle has just given an account of what a measure is, that it must be of the same kind as the things that it measures. How could one thing (“man”) possibly be the measure of countless things that have no common measure? That does sound like nonsense. Any measure has to be of one kind or another. Modern mathematics agrees that kinds, dimensions, variables can only be collapsed together if very specific criteria are met.

What Aristotle emphasizes here about knowledge and perception — that they have a remarkable involvement with things that also measure them — seems very consistent with his general views. But the way Protagoras implicitly presents “man” as their possessor makes the possessor stand apart from the mutual involvement with things that Aristotle emphasizes, in which knowledge and perception and things measure one another. In splendid isolation from all constraints of real measure, the possessor seems to have arbitrary freedom to claim whatever she wishes.

I intuitively associate Protagoras with the attitude that what’s true for you is true for you, but what’s true for me is true for me, so don’t tell me I’m wrong, and I won’t tell you you’re wrong! Then and now, such sentiments had and have a superficial appeal, because they seem to express a live-and-let-live attitude, which seems to be a good thing. But the way it is expressed, in fact it completely undermines any possibility of meaningful dialogue, which undermines reason itself, which undermines the very thing that makes us human.

Back to the text, Aristotle turns to illustrating the one-to-one mapping I mentioned between sayings about being and sayings about oneness.

“[S]ince not even being itself is an independent thing as though it were some one thing capable of having being apart from the many beings (since it is common to them), other than solely as a thing attributed to them, it is clear that oneness is not a universal either” (ch. 2, p. 189).

For Aristotle, neither Being nor the One is an independent thing in its own right. He will nonetheless argue in book Lambda (XII) that there is a first cause for all things.

“What’s more, what is true about oneness must hold true in a similar way for all things; and being and oneness are meant in equally many ways” (ibid).

“And the same account applies also to the other classes of things, … and [if] in all instances it is the case both that the number is a number of something and that oneness is some particular one thing, and oneness itself is not the thinghood of it, then it must also be the same way with independent things” (p. 190).

“[S]o too in thinghood, one independent thing is oneness itself; and that oneness in a certain way means the same thing as being, is clear from the fact that it follows along equally through the ways being is attributed, and is not any one of them (for instance, it is not what anything is, nor of-what-sort anything is, but stands similarly toward them just as being does), and from the fact that no other thing is predicated in ‘one human being’ over and above what is predicated in ‘human being’ (just as being is not something over and above what and of-what-sort and how-much a thing is), or in ‘being one’ over and above being any particular thing” (ibid).

Saying something is one human being is the same as saying it is a human being. In book Zeta, he analogously said that “good” and “being good” are the same.

Things are often one in one respect, but many in another. The one and the many are “contraries, and not opposed as contradictories or as what are called relative terms” (ch. 3, p. 190). Next he turns to the meanings of same, other, and different.

“Since the same is meant in more than one way, in one way we sometimes speak of what is the same in number, but we say it in another sense if things are one in meaning as well as in number, as you are one with yourself in both form and material, and in another again if the articulation of the primary thinghood of things is one, for instance in the way equal straight lines are the same, … but in these equality is oneness” (p. 191).

In Fregean terms, things are what Aristotle calls one in number when they have the same reference. They are what Aristotle calls one in meaning when they have the same sense. Frege illustrates how they differ by saying that the morning star and the evening star have the same reference, but different sense.

“Things are alike if, not being simply the same, nor without difference in their composite thinghood, they are the same in form, just as a larger square is like a smaller one…. Other things are alike if they have the same form, and have it in them to be more and less, but are neither more nor less than one another. Other things, if they are the same attribute, and one in form, say white, more and less intensely, people say are alike because their form is one. Other things are alike if they have more things the same than different, either simply or superficially, as tin is like silver insofar as it is white, and gold is like fire insofar as it is yellow and fiery-red” (ibid).

“So it is clear also that other and unlike are meant in more than one way” (ibid).

“[B]ut difference is something other than otherness…. [W]hat is different from something is different in some particular respect, so it must necessarily be the same in some respect as that with which it differs” (p. 192).

For Aristotle, calling two things different presupposes that they can be meaningfully compared in the first place. This is not the case for things that are just “other” than one another. Black is different from white; they are both colors. But an apostrophe is just other than an aardvark.

This is followed by a ten-page discussion of technical details of contrariety, which I will mostly skip. Contrariety supports a definitive ruling out of some things based on other things. This has great importance for reasoning.

Incidentally, Aristotle explains why there is no essential difference between human beings with different colorings.

“And since one sort of thing is articulation while another is material, those contrarieties that are in the articulation make a difference in species, but those that are in what is conceived together with the material do not make such a difference. This is the reason that whiteness of a human being, and blackness, do not make such a difference…. For there is a difference between a white human being and a black horse, but that is not insofar as the one is white and the other is black” (ch. 9, pp. 201-202).

Finally, he argues that destructibility and indestructibility inhere in things by necessity. Whether a thing is destructible or not depends strictly on what genus of things its species belongs to.

“[A] destructible thing and an indestructible thing must be different in genus…. Therefore it is necessary that destructibility either be the thinghood or be present in the thinghood of each destructible thing; and the same argument also concerns the indestructible, since both are among things present by necessity” (ch. 10, p. 202).

Next in this series: Toward a First Cause

Form and Things

I use the word “thing” in a very general sense for anything at all — real, ideal, or imaginary; abstract or concrete; including properties, actions, processes, and adverbial characteristics.

Kant controversially wanted to assume that things of all sorts have definite ways that they objectively are “in themselves”, i.e., completely independent of our experience and knowledge of them. But for him, there is inevitably a gap between our knowledge and reality. Every attempt to ignore or overleap that gap he called dogmatism. This was his way of practicing what I have called epistemic modesty, or the ethical virtue of avoiding unfounded knowledge claims. When we don’t know, we go ahead and act based on the best beliefs we have, while in principle remaining open to the possibility that our belief may require revision.

Hegel and others have worried that there is something wrong with Kant’s way of expressing the situation — with this gap between knowledge and reality that is inevitable and even virtuous for Kant. Some of Kant’s remarks make it sound as if reality as it really is and our experience could be two entirely nonoverlapping realms. If this were true, Kant’s position could be seen as leading to skepticism, or the conclusion that genuine knowledge of reality is impossible.

Kant himself would have resisted this conclusion with all his might. He does believe we have genuine knowledge; he just wants us to be very careful about what we claim to know. For Kant, genuine knowledge does not require access to things in themselves; rather, it keeps within the bounds of possible experience. It minimally designates an objectivity toward experience, consisting in the absence of dogmatism and an unceasing effort toward unity of apperception.

Hegel agrees with Kant in opposing dogmatism and emphasizing the effort toward unity of apperception. His strongest opposition to Kant’s talk of things in themselves assumes that “in themselves” means “in isolation”, as it would under the Wolffian view (rejected by both Kant and Hegel) that all knowledge is analytical. Hegel emphasizes that unities of apperception are not just individual but also shared. At the same time, he revives the Aristotelian idea that thoughts should be distinguished as forms or meanings shareable in principle with any rational being, and that as such, they are whatever they are independent of subjective presentation. This makes it quite reasonable for Aristotle and Hegel to claim that the form or meaning that is properly being thought is the very same as the form or meaning that is being thought about.

An analogous identity certainly does not apply to experience or consciousness. To assert that would be dogmatism in Kant’s sense. The thought that Aristotle and Hegel identify with form or meaning is not a kind of consciousness. The most fundamental characteristic of consciousness for Hegel is the separation of subject and object, whereas in thought proper there is no such separation, only a succession of forms. In Hegel, the gap between consciousness and its objects takes the place of the gap between knowledge and reality in Kant, and similarly commends to us a practice of epistemic modesty in life.

Another dimension of epistemic modesty in Aristotle and Hegel has to do with the non-univocal character of form in Aristotle, and with Hegel’s repeated warnings about the “falsity” of all fixed representations. Form is said in several ways in Aristotle, e.g., sensible form, mathematical form, linguistic meaning, and the life or soul of a living being. Of these the first two are univocal, but the last two are not.

From the point of view of form, we take a deflationary view of “things”. Things — like the thing in itself in Kant — are in a strict sense indexes delimiting our ignorance rather than univocal “objects” of knowledge.

The fact that our ignorance is delimited means it is not total. We do have knowledge, but insofar as either proper knowledge or Hegelian spirit has “objects”, those objects lack univocal identity.

Capacity to Judge

I’ve previously referred several times to Beatrice Longuenesse’s superb Kant and the Capacity to Judge (French ed. 1993; English ed. 1998). Here I’d like to offer a few quotations from the summary in her conclusion.

“The transcendental unity of apperception was first introduced in the [deduction of the categories in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, referred to by scholars as the] A Deduction, in the exposition of the ‘synthesis of recognition in the concept’. There Kant argued that we could not recognize singular representations under common concepts unless they were taken up in one and the same act of combination and comparison, and unless we were (however dimly) conscious of the numerical identity of this act of combining our representations. This consciousness is what confers ‘logical form’ upon our representations. And it ‘presupposes’ or ‘includes’ a synthesis of imagination. In the [second edition] B Deduction, Kant specified that the ‘logical form’ thus given to our representations is that of judgment. The synthesis of imagination it presupposes is figurative synthesis (synthesis speciosa) or ‘affection of inner sense’ by the understanding. I argued that this meant affection of inner sense not by categorial understanding (i.e., understanding already equipped with categories as full-fledged concepts), but by understanding as the mere capacity to form judgments, Vermögen zu urteilen. Thus, the ‘I think’, or ‘transcendental unity of self-consciousness’, has no other meaning or status than that of being the unified activity of combination and reflection on the sensible given. There is no unity of self-consciousness or ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ apart from this effort, or conatus toward judgment, ceaselessly affirmed and ceaselessly threatened with dissolution in the ‘welter of appearances'” (p. 394).

“Kant’s view is rather that unity of consciousness is always both ‘my own’ and, insofar as it is ‘transcendental unity of self-consciousness’ whose form is that of judgment, so constituted that it is capable of transcending the point of view of ‘myself, in the present state of my perception’ to the point of view of ‘everybody, always’.”

“Kant further maintains that the conscious effort toward judgment, that is, transcendental unity of self-consciousness, is what makes possible consciousness of an objective temporal order. We have such consciousness only insofar as our perceptions are related to realities, to permanent or changing properties of singular things reciprocally determining each other’s location in space and time” (p. 395).

“The capacity to represent discursively (thought) and the capacity to locate things, ourselves included, in time are thus one and the same. The ‘unity of self-consciousness’ as the unity of the discursive conatus, and the unity of self-consciousness as the consciousness of an individuality located in time, are one and the same” (p. 396).

“For behind the deceptively rigid parallelism between logical forms of judgment and categories, what emerges is the cognitive effort of discursive beings confronting what is given to them in sensibility. This effort, conatus of the Vermögen zu urteilen, is according to Kant what essentially defines the kind of beings we are. It is also what generates the universal forms in which we think our world” (ibid).

“Kant argues that things (singular objects thought under concepts) are substitutional instances for ‘x’ in the logical form of categorical judgments only if they are also substitutional instances for ‘x’ in hypothetical judgments (whereby we are able to recognize their alterations)…. The ‘simple’ judgments (categorical judgments) by means of which we cognize things under concepts reflecting their essence, are thus possible only under the condition that we also generate ‘composite’ or ‘complex’ judgments (hypothetical or disjunctive judgments), by means of which we cognize a thing under its accidental marks, in universal correlation with all other things cognized in space and time” (p. 397).

“For Kant’s table of logical functions of judgment turns out to be, according to it author, an exposition of the minimal norms of discursive thinking necessary for us to be able to recognize and reidentify objects under concepts. And the infamous ‘transcendental synthesis of imagination’ turns out to be the complex web of perceptual combinations by means of which we take up sensible data into what we, in present times, have come to term ‘the space of reasons’” (p. 398).

On Being a Thing

The next few paragraphs of Hegel’s final chapter are concerned with the notions of “thing” and “object” in an apparently completely general way, from the point of view of what happens with them in “absolute” knowledge.

Immediately after the paragraph I quoted in the previous post, Hegel specifies that “The surmounting of the object of consciousness is not to be taken one-sidedly as meaning that the object showed itself returning into the self” (Baillie trans., p. 789). This once again rules out any subjectivism that would abolish objectivity altogether.

Hegel continues, “It has a more definite meaning: it means that the object as such presented itself to the self as a vanishing factor; and, furthermore, that the emptying of self-consciousness itself establishes thinghood, and that this externalization of self-consciousness has not merely negative, but positive significance, a significance not merely for us or per se, but for self-consciousness itself. The negative of the object, its cancelling its own existence, gets, for self-consciousness, a positive significance; or, self-consciousness knows this nothingness of the object because on the one hand self-consciousness itself externalizes itself; for in so doing it establishes itself as object, or, by reason of the indivisible unity characterizing its self-existence, sets up the object as its self. On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that self-consciousness has just as really cancelled this self-relinquishment and objectification, and has resumed them into itself, and is thus at home with itself in its otherness as such” (pp. 789-790).

The presentation of an object as a “vanishing factor” of which Hegel speaks — though it cannot be represented statically — is supposed to be something that really happens, so this is quite different and a great deal more subtle than simply saying the object is not really real. I think Hegel’s talk about the purely relational view “negating” the object qua object and other similarly strained uses of “negation” have not helped the understanding of his work, but as Hegel himself proceeds to remind us, this is only one moment of a larger movement, and it is the multifaceted whole and its transformations we ought to be concerned with. (In general I’ve found Brandom’s explanation of Hegelian negation in terms of material incompatibility very helpful, but it’s not clear to me there is a material incompatibility in this instance. In the bigger picture, though, Hegel seems to be saying that there is a sense in which every object is a reification, and another in which all its properties can be explained in relational terms.)

“Consciousness, at the same time, must have taken up a relation to the object in all its aspects and phases, and have grasped its meaning from the point of view of each of them. This totality of its determinate characteristics makes the object per se or inherently a spiritual reality; and it becomes so in truth for consciousness, when the latter apprehends every individual one of them as self, i.e. when it takes up towards them the spiritual relationship just spoken of” (p. 790).

The object is a spiritual reality in the sense that there is a purely relational account of its properties. Hegel here also has in mind his dictum that Reason is the certainty of being all reality. The object as reification is clearly separate from me, but as Aristotle might remind us, its objective relational form or essence is not distinct from the shareable intelligible thought of that form or essence.

“The object is, then, partly immediate existence, a thing in general — corresponding to immediate consciousness; partly an alteration of itself, its relatedness (or existence-for-another and existence-for-self), determinateness — corresponding to perception; partly essential being or in the form of a universal — corresponding to understanding. The object as a whole is the mediated result… or the passing of universality into individuality through specification, as also the reverse process from individual to universal through cancelled individuality or specific determination” (p. 790, brackets in original).

Even the most subtle and developed articulations far removed from what we might call immediate sensation have an aspect of immediacy analogous to what Hegel describes in Sense-Certainty, in that they recognize or assert certain discrete presented or represented “things” or their existence or their truth, taking “thing” in the broadest possible sense. But Hegel wants us to recognize that in real life we never stop at what he calls mere “certainty”. Nothing is ever just immediately there. Even in the most unphilosophical kind of practical life, distinctions are unavoidable. Then any distinction we make turns out to depend on other distinctions. Distinctions implicitly introduce universal “properties” of things that can be compared. This leads to the ramified world of Perception or “things with properties”, but Perception in general still holds fast to Sense-Certainty’s initial intuition of independent “things” as pre-given reference points in the sea of interdependent distinctions, and gets into logical difficulties as a result. Finally Understanding dissolves particular “things” into a purely universal field of constitutive relations with no pre-given terms, like what we find in mathematical physics or structural linguistics. We may experience all of the moments simultaneously in one experience of one thing. Of course, as we know, the Phenomenology is far from done at the end of Understanding and there are many other considerations to address, but these are the three basic moments of “consciousness” as that which takes an attitude toward things or objects.

I want to emphasize that this applies to all objects whatsoever, especially including those of ordinary life. Harris advocates the much narrower reading that Hegel’s main concern in this section is to implicitly suggest an application of these general notions to the preceding discussion of religion.

We have seen that what Hegel calls “absolute” knowledge does indeed have a close relation to the concerns of religion. In the Religion chapter, though I didn’t remark on it, Hegel had in passing explicitly applied the succession of Sense-Certainty, Perception, and Understanding to his schematic account of the history of religion. So, Harris’ reading between the lines here has some plausibility, but he seems for the moment to allow his interpolations continuing the focus on religion to eclipse the much more general apparent surface meaning of the text.

In Harris’ account, “it is the ‘object’ of Manifest Religion that has now to be turned over into the ‘Subject’ of ‘Absolute Knowing'” (Hegel’s Ladder II, p. 714). In general this seems reasonable, even though it is an interpolation in the present context.

“‘The object is in part immediate Being’. This is the ‘It is’ of Sense-Certainty; and all the modes of Natural Religion are subsumed under the ‘It is’…. For Natural Religion God is simply (and immediately) there. There is no distinction yet between His being-for-self and His being-for-another; and there cannot be any, because no ‘other’ has any independent essence of its own” (ibid).

Aside from Harris’ interpolation of religion into this discussion of the object, the last statement is historically anomalous, because the idea of a God before whom no other has independent essence belongs to traditions of strong monotheism that Hegel associates with the Unhappy Consciousness rather than with Sense-Certainty. However, if we abstract from actual history and just consider Hegel’s rather thin working notion of “natural” religion, it does seem accurate.

“Secondly the object is ‘partly an othering of itself, its relationship, or Being for Other and For-Self-Being, that corresponds to Perception’. This is how God is experienced in the Art-Religion; we make the Gods in our own image, while at the same time regarding ourselves as their servant, and envisaging our own free existence as a play for the Gods. God is thus an ambiguous relationship of Being for Other and For-Self-Being, just like the ‘thing and its properties’ in Perception” (ibid).

This interpolation seems relatively more historical, and consistent with what Hegel says elsewhere.

“Lastly, the object is ‘partly essence or as Universal, which corresponds to the Understanding’. This is how God is experienced in the Manifest Religion. Here He is the rational Force whose essence is to manifest itself” (ibid).

Hegel does seem to provocatively suggest that there is a parallel between the relation between Manifest Religion and its predecessors, on the one hand, and that between the purely relational view of mathematical physics and ordinary sensation and perception, on the other. It may seem surprising to see these categories from the phenomenology of religion reflected back into the elementary moments of “consciousness”, but this underscores how nonlinear Hegel’s overall development really is. As Harris points out, Hegel does also explicitly argue in the Religion chapter that the actual history of religion recapitulates the succession of moments he analyzed for object-oriented elementary “consciousness”. But to me, all this still seems a distraction from the new topic of “absolute” knowledge that Hegel is introducing here.

Hegel goes on to specify that the “knowledge” at issue now is not purely conceptual, but “is to be taken only in its development” (Baillie trans., p. 790). He notes that “the object does not yet, when present in consciousness as such, appear as the inner essence of Spirit in the way this has just been expressed” (ibid).

He recalls the recapitulation of Sense Certainty’s immediacy on a higher level in Observing Reason. “We saw, too, [Observing Reason’s] specific character take expression at its highest stage in the infinite judgement: ‘the being of the [Fichtean] ego is a thing’. And, further, the ego is an immediate thing of sense. When ego is called a soul, it is indeed represented also as a thing, but a thing in the sense of something invisible, impalpable, etc., i.e. in fact not as an immediate entity, and not as that which is generally understood by a thing. That judgment, then, ‘ego is a thing’, taken at first glance, has no spiritual content, or rather, is just the absence of spirituality. In its conception, however, it is the most luminous and illuminating judgment; and this, its inner significance, which is not yet made evident, is what the other two moments to be considered express” (p. 791).

Here again Hegel is considering two contrasting senses. The mere reification of a Fichtean ego as an empirical individual is rather banal; but to consider the universal Fichtean ego as an incarnated and concretely situated spiritual reality rather than in abstraction is a great advance.

“The trained and cultivated self-consciousness, which has traversed the region of spirit in self-alienation, has, by giving up itself, produced the thing as its self” (p. 792). This is a simple but vital point.

Hegel continues, “Or again — to give complete expression to the relationship, i.e. to what here alone constitutes the nature of the object — the thing stands for something that is self-existent; sense-certainty (sense experience) is announced as absolute truth; but this self-existence is itself declared to be a moment which merely disappears, and passes into its opposite, into a being at the mercy of an ‘other’.”

“But knowledge of the thing is not yet finished at this point. The thing must become known as self not merely in regard to the immediateness of its being and as regards its determinateness, but also in the sense of essence or inner reality. This is found in the case of Moral Self-Consciousness. This mode of experience knows its knowledge as the absolutely essential element, knows no other objective being than pure will or pure knowledge. It is nothing but merely this will and this knowledge. Any other possesses merely non-essential being, i.e. being that has no inherent nature per se, but only its empty husk. Insofar as the moral consciousness, in its view of the world, lets existence drop out of the self, it just as truly takes this existence back again into the self. In the form of conscience, finally, it is no longer this incessant alternation between the ‘placing’ and the ‘displacing’… of existence and self; it knows that its existence as such is this pure certainty of its own self; the objective element, into which qua acting it puts forth itself, is nothing other than pure knowledge of itself by itself” (pp. 792-793).

Here we have the ethical character of the path to the “Absolute”.

Harris comments, “So while, on the one hand, the moral consciousness ‘lets the natural world go free out of the Self’, to be whatever it contingently must be, it is equally true, on the other hand, that it takes that contingent natural order back into itself. In the unity of conscientious conviction, this contradiction is successfully sublated. But the community in which Conscience finds itself, and for which it claims to act, is in a state of moral anarchy, which is only overcome by the transition to the religious community of universal forgiveness. That community, having returned to itself as the shape of religious faith, has only to recognize itself in the ultimate community of finite Spirit, from which its religious journey began. That ultimate community of Spirit was able to make the religious journey because, in the final sublation of the standpoint of moral judgment, it is reconciled with humanity at all times, and in all places. It does not need to judge, but only to comprehend, i.e. to integrate the other as a member” (Hegel’s Ladder II, p. 719). I feel like we are back on track here.

He argues further that “In this final form, the ‘Manifest Religion’ ceases to be a revealed religion (in any but the historical sense) for it will comprehend that the whole range of religious ‘manifestation’ belongs to it in principle, because its God is just the intelligible force of Reason, whose very essence is to manifest itself. This concretely universal community of the human Spirit is ‘the Self’s pure knowledge of itself’. ‘Conscience’ is just its alienated, universally self-assertive shape” (ibid). Now the motivation for Harris’ interpolated argument about religion seems to make better Hegelian sense.

Harris adds, “We look over the course of the science and ask how ‘dead thinghood’ evolves logically. First we go from ‘singular thinghood for self’ to ‘universal thinghood for another’; and so to ‘the singular self that is lawgiver for the world of things’. And when we reach the third shape, we realize that we have not passed over to Kojève’s ‘anthropology’. In his world, the essential anarchy of Conscience takes us straight back to Hobbes” (pp. 719-720). (In the 20th century, Kojève promoted a subjectivist reading of Hegel that influenced Sartre and others. Hobbes famously described human society as a “war of all against all”.)

“[E]very judge must recognize the ‘sin’ of sundering knowing from doing. Absolutely pure knowing becomes possible only in and through the act of forgiving” (p. 720).

Next in this series: Circling Toward Absoluteness

Taking “Things” as True

The second standpoint examined by Hegel in the Phenomenology is Perception, or in the literal etymological sense of the German word for it, “true-taking”. This etymology has an intriguing but probably accidental resonance with the notion of taking things as thus-and-such that Brandom emphasizes in Kant. In Perception, emphasis is more on the things than on the taking.

Harris in his commentary associates Perception with the philosophy of healthy common sense. Even the peasant woman of the previous chapter “must follow the ‘leading’ of language at least one step beyond the naming of [things]. She identifies her cows not just by their names, but by their color-patterns; and she knows her apple trees from her plum trees or her neighbor’s peach, etc. Hers is a world not just of singular [things], but of perceptible types; but for her, the process of classification with its universal names is an instrumental shorthand for dealing with the ‘real things’ that can be identified and pointed to. She does not want to take the leading of language seriously, but only to get back to her life, and to get on with it” (Hegel’s Ladder I, p. 238).

Perception at least begins to take up the nuances of how things interrelate that are ignored by sense certainty. “Sense-Certainty is rich only in positive things to be certain of…. Only perception can say what is, because it names universal things that are perceived through the changing sequence and variety of their properties”(p. 239). “Perception is the being grasped together of the moments that unfold in perceiving as process…. The perceiving we are concerned with is a process in which the universal self takes itself to be a rational being, and the truth of its object to be a universal truth” (p. 238). By “universal self” he means an individual self taken as an instance of a rational self, not anything like a world soul.

Harris continues, “Our situation as philosophical observers is different in its ‘object’ from the perceiving consciousness. Our object has been logically determined for us, whereas the object of the perceiving consciousness simply ‘falls out of the world of Sense-Certainty’ for it… It knows that the object is a universal essence; but it does not know that ‘universality’ is an activity of the perceiving mind” (pp. 238-239).

“We know that the ‘thing’ is a result of this process…. Our perceiving is the process, of which the object is the result. Perception… is an interpretation of sense-certainty in which the knowing consciousness is no longer concerned about the truth of the copula ‘is’, but about what is…. Sense-Certainty was already implicitly perception in its examples” (p. 239).

He quotes Hegel saying “Being is a universal in virtue of having mediation or the negative in it” (p. 240). As Harris says a bit later, “There is no nameable property of anything that is not part of a range of alternative properties. Some variations of properties are consistent with the thing continuing to count as the ‘same thing’ — and some are not” (ibid).

“[T]he singular property of ‘being salt’ is known to us as immediate sensation only when we taste it (and that is when the salt itself is necessarily dissolved back into the flux of sense-immediacy). Thus, in the white cube that is the ‘thing’ I perceive, the character of being salt is a not-this; it is not immediately sensed, but it is stably preserved for the sensation whenever I want to sense it…. It is a potentiality for sensation…. As this potentiality, this ‘otherness’ than what it is (the cubical whiteness etc.), it is a universal” (pp. 240-241).

(I am delighted to see Harris stressing the importance of potentiality in this crucial transition out of immediacy in Hegel. I don’t recall Hegel using the word “potentiality” much, but thought he ought to have.)

“What is ‘truly taken’ is an essence that is the negative ‘property’ which determines and holds together all the positive ones. But it is also truly taken as the positive property of filling a certain space. All of the properties cohere together in the space that the thing occupies…. ‘Thinghood’ as directly given for perceiving is the persisting spatial togetherness of many independent qualities…. The ‘thing’ is not just a loose collection of properties inhering somehow in the same identifiable region of space at the given time. It is a thing because of what it excludes; and its exclusiveness is what particularizes each of its properties” (p. 241).

“I know that I do not passively perceive what is true, in the way that I seem to apprehend the fact that ‘this is Lisa, and this is Ursel’ passively. My reflective capacities are involved. Perceiving is an activity of consciousness” (p. 245). “But it ought to be consistent” (p. 246).

“The attempt to claim that the manifold of sensation is simply subjective ignores its interpersonal objectivity. Every identifiable property is an objective essence…. Not just the oneness of the thing is objectively real, but its ‘difference’ from everything else” (p. 247).

“The essence of being a thing is to be ‘for another'” (p. 249). “Everything is specified by its difference from others” (p. 250). “The determinacy which is the ‘essential’ or ‘absolute’ character of a thing on its own account is essentially a relation to others (which negates the thing’s independence)” (p. 251).

Here we begin to see the limits of Perception. “The standpoint of Perception presupposes an absolute community of ‘things’. But the definition of ‘thinghood’ that the perceptual consciousness set up for itself contains no necessary reference from one thing to another for its being. The independent being of the thing is what makes it the ‘object’ that can be ‘truly taken’…. We have now seen that in any consistent formulation of the perceptual standpoint, this is logically impossible. It is the independence that is a sham” (p. 252).

“What is ‘essential’ and what is not ‘essential’ is a function of our supposedly external observation” (p. 253).

“Hegel… aims to show us that the naive empiricism which wants to conceive of perception causally (as analogous to mirror-reflection) cannot succeed.”

“We have already seen how we could not stand still at the concept of the ‘one thing’ with ‘many properties’. We had to admit that the multiplicity was founded in the ‘thing’, and not simply generated by the perceiving mind; and on the other hand, the ‘unity’ was an actively negative exclusion, which could not be simply contributed by the mind as it sorted the perceived ‘properties’ into things” (p. 254).

The standpoint of perception treats logic and philosophy as mere “game[s] with verbal counters” (p. 256). Its mistake is “to assume that ‘cognition’ is an activity that supervenes on an object that is already there; but actually it is the construction of ‘the object’ in a process of interpretation” (p. 257).

Next in this series: Force and Understanding