What Is Essential?

Distinguishing the essential from the nonessential is one of the most fundamental kinds of interpretive judgment. It has to do with what we treat as important, which provides the justifying frame for all our more particular values.

Just what is essential is often regarded as necessary and as somehow pre-given. I think rather that judgments of essentiality are relative to the complete context in which they occur, and are always provisional based on our current understanding. They guide our interpretation of what is right and what is true. But on all concrete matters, the last word is never said.

Determinations of what is essential are neither crudely objective nor crudely subjective. They are not simply given to us, and neither are they subordinate to our arbitrary will (if indeed there were such a thing). They have to do with how things are interrelated.

I identify the essential with “meaning” or ethical substance, as contrasted with mere logistics. Logistics have to do with the arrangement of accidents.

We cannot live on essence alone. Some involvement with worldly logistical details is unavoidable, and whatever we do ought to be done well in a comprehensive sense. There is even a deep lesson from Hegel that from what begins as accidental, something essential may emerge.

Aristotelian Illocution

I’ve recently been writing about the use Habermas makes of Austin’s notion of illocution and illocutionary speech acts. Illocution refers to the various kinds of purely linguistic or “performative” doing — to acts or purposes that are accomplished entirely within the use of language.

Aristotle’s famous definition of what it is to be a human, which is traditionally rendered “rational animal”, is equally well translated as “talking animal”, or animal that uses language. He calls this distinctively human activity “saying”. Saying for Aristotle is never a mere event or occurrence. It always has what contemporary philosophers would call a normative sense. In fact, what mainly counts as a saying for Aristotle is precisely what Habermas would call an illocutionary act.

Although Wittgenstein famously claimed that “meaning is use”, pragmatics or inquiry specifically into language use generally received little attention in 20th-century philosophy of language, while it made great advances in the technical study of logical syntax and representational semantics. A pragmatist minority, however, urged an alternative “pragmatics first” or “use first” approach to language. This has been taken up most prominently in recent times by Habermas and Brandom.

The current topic takes me back to the original goals of this blog. The idea was to develop in an expanding spiral, starting from personal reflections and an extremely informal exploration of how Aristotle and Brandom could be inter-articulated. I wanted to show that this could be both interesting and serious, and that it was not the quixotic task it might sound like. Nowadays the scope is broader, and I more often start by commenting on some text or other, which helps provide focus. Anyway, with the current topic, it feels like I just completed another expanding lap. This time it is an unexpected strong connection between Aristotle and Habermas.

I want to seriously suggest that Aristotelian “saying”, in what Aristotle would call its proper sense, refers to what Habermas would call an illocutionary act. Conversely, a Habermasian illocutionary act can be identified with the proper or strong sense of Aristotelian saying.

Aristotelian saying and Habermasian illocution both refer to expressions or articulations of meaning, rather than to events of producing sounds or characters.

Nothing is more fundamental than inquiry into meaning. At the same time, there is more to meaning than representational semantics. Sociality, insofar as it is achieved, is founded on shared understanding that depends on articulation in language. Aristotelian saying and Habermasian illocution name the intrinsic normative dimension of natural language use. Unlike artificial formal languages, the understanding of natural languages is inseparable from the taking of positions on questions of normative interpretation and judgment.

Models of Action

My first significant issue with Habermas has to do with the reductive way in which he recurringly speaks about “teleological action” as, in effect, any old pursuit of an objective, and thus as to be understood in terms of modern instrumental reason. This puts the primary focus on immediate objectives, whereas for Aristotle, immediate objectives only minimally count as ends. The more proper ends for Aristotle are things sought “for themselves”, and not as part of any utilitarian calculation of means. Aristotelian teleology in its primary sense is not about the mere pursuit of objectives, but relates primarily to those ultimate values that are sought for themselves.

I think that in fact Habermas does not intend a serious reference to Aristotle here. This “Aristotle” resembles the same cardboard stereotype we see cited in discussions of early modern logic.

“Since Aristotle [sic], the concept of teleological action has been at the center of the philosophical theory of action. The actor attains an end or brings about the occurrence of a desired state by choosing means that have promise of being successful in the given situation and applying them in a suitable manner. The central concept is that of a decision among alternative courses of action, with a view to the realization of an end, guided by maxims, and based on an interpretation of the situation” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 85, emphasis in original).

(In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasizes on the contrary that choice is a consequence of deliberation, not an original or ultimately arbitrary decision. What Habermas says gives partial recognition to this. I call it partial because he still calls decision rather than deliberation the “central concept”, whereas Aristotle clearly gives more weight to the deliberation.)

“This model is often interpreted in utilitarian terms; the actor is supposed to choose and calculate means and ends from the standpoint of maximizing utility or expectations of utility. It is this model of action that lies behind decision-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches in economics, sociology, and social psychology” (ibid).

Clearly, this is very far removed from Aristotelian teleology. Habermas discusses “normative” and “dramaturgical” models of action along with this “teleological” kind that really corresponds to utilitarian calculation. The “normative” kind also has a rather reductive flavor. But all three of these models are really just stage-setting for a contrast with the communicative reason that Habermas wants to recommend, and treats as primary.

“For a theory of communicative action only those analytic theories of meaning are instructive that start from the structure of linguistic expressions rather than from speakers’ intentions” (p. 275, emphasis added).

In general, an expansive rather than narrow approach to the meaning of what is shareably said is more valuable and more relevant than speculation about subjective motivations.

“The organon model of Karl Bühler is representative of this communication-theoretic line of inquiry…. This meaning-theoretic line of development of the organon model leads us away from the objectivistic conception of processes of reaching understanding as information flows between senders and receivers and in the direction of the formal-pragmatic concept of interaction among speaking and acting subjects, interaction that is mediated through acts of reaching understanding” (p. 276).

So far I’ve been keeping aside how this talk about action should be related to a more Aristotelian notion of act, like that developed by Gwenaëlle Aubry. Without a doubt “acts of reaching understanding” come closer to this than any of the other action models Habermas discusses.

Habermas notes that the leading mid-20th century logical empiricist Rudolph Carnap, who approached representational semantics at the less atomistic level of propositions taken as true, almost entirely ignored the pragmatics of language, treating it as basically irrational.

“Starting from the pragmatist theory of signs introduced by Pierce and developed by Morris, Carnap made the symbolic complex … accessible to an internal analysis from syntactic and semantic points of view. The bearers of meaning are not isolated signs but elements of a language system…. With Carnap’s logical syntax and the basic assumptions of reference semantics, the way was opened to a formal analysis of the representational function of language. On the other hand, Carnap considered the appellative and expressive functions of language as pragmatic aspects that should be left to empirical analysis. On this view, the pragmatics of language is not determined by a general system of rules in such a way that it could be opened up to conceptual analysis like syntax and semantics” (ibid).

“The theory of meaning was finally established as a formal science only with the step from reference semantics to truth semantics. The semantics founded by Frege and developed through the early Wittgenstein to Davidson and Dummett gives center stage to the relation between sentence and state of affairs, between language and the world. With this ontological turn semantic theory disengaged itself from the view that the representational function can be clarified on the model of names that designate objects. The meaning of sentences, and the understanding of sentence meanings, cannot be separated from language’s inherent relation to the validity of statements” (ibid).

As usual, I prefer to be very modest about claims to “science”. What Habermas calls a formal science, I would call interpretive work. In the German tradition, Wissenschaft has a broader sense than common English usage of “science”. Habermas has himself written elsewhere about the centrality of a notion of interpretation.

“Speakers and hearers understand the meaning of a sentence when they know under what conditions it is true. Correspondingly, they understand the meaning of a word when they know what contribution it makes to the capacity for truth of a sentence formed with its help. Thus truth semantics developed the thesis that the meaning of a sentence is determined by its truth conditions” (pp. 276-277).

This still presupposes that what knowledge is and what truth is are unproblematic. It really only replaces simplistic word-representationalism with a much richer sentence-representationalism. Sentence-representationalism is just as referential as word-representationalism, just more abstract. Habermas’s use of “true” here strikes me as referential in the same way. It just is not naively referential.

“The limits of this approach become visible as soon as the different modes of using sentences are brought under formal consideration. Frege had already distinguished between the assertoric or interrogative force of assertions or questions and the structure of the propositional sentences employed in these utterances. Along the line from the later Wittgenstein through Austin and Searle, the formal semantics of sentences was extended to speech acts. It is no longer limited to the representational function of language but is open to an unbiased analysis of the multiplicity of illocutionary forces. The theory of speech acts marks the first step toward a formal pragmatics that extends to noncognitive modes of employment. At the same time, … it remains tied to the narrow ontological presuppositions of truth-conditional semantics” (p. 277).

This account of speech acts seems like a nice, careful, balanced judgment.

“The theory of meaning can attain the level of integration of the communication theory that Bühler advanced in a programmatic way only if it is able to provide a systematic grounding for the appellative and expressive functions of language (and perhaps also for the ‘poetic’ function related to the linguistic means themselves, as this was developed by Jakobson)” (ibid).

He doesn’t quite say it, but I think the kind of pragmatics developed by Habermas and Brandom provides a much better account of what meaning really is than standard representational semantics.

“Bühler’s theory of language functions could be connected with the methods and insights of the analytic theory of meaning and be made the centerpiece of a theory of communicative action oriented to reaching understanding if we could generalize the concept of validity beyond the truth of propositions and identify validity conditions no longer only on the semantic level of sentences but on the pragmatic level of utterances” (ibid, emphasis added).

I suspect that in some places where Habermas speaks of validity claims, Brandom would invoke normativity or commitments instead. Habermas seems to work with a narrow notion of normativity that mainly characterizes law and Kantian deontology, but he partly makes up for it by giving what I would call a “normative” aspect to his broad notion of validity. I deemphasize any differences between “ethics”, “morality”, and “normativity”, but Habermas thinks it is important to distinguish them.

“For this purpose the paradigm change in philosophy that was introduced by J. L. Austin [speech act theory] … must be radicalized in such a way that the break with the ‘logos characterization of language’, that is, with privileging its representational function also has consequences…. It is not merely a question of admitting other modes of language use on an equal footing with the assertoric; we have to establish validity claims and world-relations for them as was done for the assertoric mode. It is with this in mind that I have proposed that we do not set illocutionary role over against propositional content as an irrational force, but conceive of it as the component that specifies which validity claims a speaker is raising in his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what…. The corresponding validity claims of truth, rightness, and sincerity can the serve as guiding threads (pp. 277-278).

In Christian theology, logos is primarily representational, but I contend that this is not at all true of logos in Plato and Aristotle, where it always has connotations of reason, reasoning, or discourse. On the other hand, Habermas does not believe in “substantive” reason. He argues for an exclusively procedural communicative reason, in which the procedural aspect has strong affinities with modern procedural notions of justice. For my part, I cleave to a Platonic emphasis on mixed forms, and would like to undo any sharp distinction between substantive and procedural reason.

(And at a sort of halfway point between pure representation and discursive reasoning, Euclid uses logos for what we know as ratio in mathematics. It is historically interesting that logos and ratio have closely related meanings in two senses — representational and inferential — and not just one. Euclid’s theory of ratio and proportion is a historically important paradigm for exact reasoning that is effectively independent of Plato and Aristotle, though later. Compared to Plato and Aristotle, reason in Euclid is more formal and much less discursive. Hobbes and other early moderns looked to Euclid as a model.)

In Austin’s terminology, “locution” is what is said and meant, “illocution” is what is done in a speech act, and “perlocution” is what happens as a result. Like Brandom, Habermas treats saying as a kind of doing, and therefore stresses the illocutionary aspect. Habermas has just reminded us that empiricism treats illocution only as an irrational force, and not as something that could be rationally understood. This applies as well to the neo-Kantian sociology of Weber.

“Weber begins by introducing ‘meaning’ as a basic concept of action theory and with its help distinguishes actions from observable behavior…. Weber does not rely here on a theory of meaning but on a theory of consciousness. He does not elucidate ‘meaning’ in connection with the model of speech; he does not relate it to the linguistic medium of possible understanding, but to the beliefs and intentions of an acting subject, taken to begin in isolation. At this first switchpoint Weber parts company with a theory of communicative action. What counts as fundamental is not the interpersonal relation between at least two speaking and acting subjects — a relation that refers back to reaching understanding in language — but the purposive activity of a solitary acting subject” (p. 279).

Habermas is saying that even in Weber’s sociology, the neo-Kantian individual subject remains originally isolated, as in the “Cartesian” stereotype. It only acquires social significance after being individually constituted.

“Thus Weber starts from a teleological [sic] model of action, and specifies ‘subjective meaning’ as a (precommunicative) action intention…. Since Weber starts from a monologically conceived model of action, the concept of ‘social action’ cannot be introduced by way of explicating the concept of meaning…. On the other hand, … Weber stresses that the action orientations of participants have to be reciprocally related to one another” (p. 280).

But “Weber does not start from the social relationship. He regards as rationalizable only the means-ends relation of teleologically [sic] conceived, monological action. If one adopts this perspective, the only aspects of action open to objective appraisal are the effectiveness of a causal intervention into a existing situation and the truth of the empirical assumptions that underlie the maxim or the plan of action — that is, the subjective belief about a purposive-rational organization of means” (p. 281).

“I shall speak of communicative action whenever the actions of the agents involved are coordinated not through egocentric calculations of success but through acts of reaching understanding” (pp. 285-286).

“Processes of reaching understanding aim at an agreement that meets the conditions of rationally motivated assent [Zustimmung] to the content of an utterance. A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party…. Agreement can indeed be objectively obtained by force; but what comes to pass manifestly through outside influence or the use of violence cannot count subjectively as agreement” (p. 287).

“If we were not in a position to refer to the model of speech, we could not even begin to analyze what it means for two subjects to come to an understanding with each other. Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech” (ibid, emphasis added).

“Without doubt, there are countless cases [where] one subject inconspicuously harnesses another for his own purposes, that is, induces him to behave in a desired way by manipulatively employing linguistic means and thereby instrumentalizes him for his own success. Such examples of the use of language with an orientation to consequences seem to decrease the value of speech acts as the model for action oriented to reaching understanding” (p. 288).

“This will turn out not to be the case only if it can be shown that the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use, upon which indirect understanding, giving something to understand or letting something be understood, and the instrumental use of language in general, are parasitic. In my view, Austin’s distinction between illocutions and perlocutions accomplishes just that” (ibid).

Communicative reason is primary for Habermas in a way much analogous to the way Brandom says we really have “normativity all the way down”. Brandom recalls the figure of speech “turtles all the way down”. This was supposed to be the answer of some primitive to the question that if the world is on the back of a great turtle, what does the turtle stand on? The answer was, supposedly, “It’s turtles all the way down”, which humorously undermines the status of the purportedly foundational world-turtle.

“The self-sufficiency of the speech act is to be understood in the sense that the communicative intent of the speaker and the illocutionary aim he is pursuing follow from the manifest meaning of what is said. It is otherwise with teleological [sic] actions. We identify their meaning only in connection with the intentions their authors are pursuing and the ends [sic] they want to realize . As the meaning of what is said is constitutive for illocutionary acts, the intention of the agent is constitutive for teleological [sic] actions” (p. 289, emphasis in original).

In a situation where the meaning of what is said is constitutive, we have something like what Aristotle called an entelechy. This is the purest form of Aristotelian teleology, applicable to the values that are sought purely for themselves and not for any egocentric reason. Habermas in effect wants to say that communicative reason is closely related to entelechy, though he would not use that term. I would go further, and relate it to the pure entelechy and contemplation that Aristotle associates with the first cause and with the goal of human life.

Empathy and Psychology

The English term “empathy” is of recent origin; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was introduced only in 1909. But the idea is clearly present from ancient times, e.g., in Aristotle’s idea that a friend is for us like “another self”. At the end of the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel speaks of the softening of the hard heart of someone in the position of judging someone else, and more generally he proposes a sort of Kantian universalization of the Aristotelian ethical stance of friend toward friend, in his notion of mutual recognition.

Reflecting contemporary attitudes, the Wikipedia article on empathy is dominated by mentions of various psychological research. In general, I feel deep ambivalence about psychology as a discipline. It deals with matter of vital importance and sometimes affords valuable practical insights, but psychological theories often seem to me to afford narrow or partial insights into the complexity of human being that their proponents don’t recognize as narrow or partial. Psychology and psychiatry are dominated by an uneven mixture of empiricism and “common-sense” views of human subjectivity, only rarely leavened by engagement with philosophical approaches to the subject matter. What philosophy does get a hearing is most often a sort of popularized existential phenomenology, not the sort advocated here.

(Insofar as so-called anti-psychiatry advocates a more deeply philosophical approach to subjectivity, I am sympathetic, but here too the proponents often engage in unsound over-generalization. As many issues as there are with the medicalization of “mind”, therapy can still have real value for helping people, and research continues to uncover new and interesting results. We just have to be wary of overstated theoretical claims.)

I think about empathy mainly in an ethical rather than psychological way. Interactions between ethics and psychology (indeed, between ethics and empirical disciplines in general) are tricky. From an ethical standpoint, we need to take relevant empirical information into account, but in a thoughtful and practical way, without putting the results on a pedestal, and especially without over-generalizing.

Empathy is a very important value to me. In personal life, I tend to err in the direction of trusting too much and sharing too much. It is an important principle to me to give people the benefit of the doubt until they prove they don’t deserve it. I sometimes give too many chances, because I’d rather err in a kind-hearted way than in a hard-hearted way.

Much of the psychological literature on empathy treats it as a faculty or skill, and as part of a kind of social normalization. Unlike the standard caveat that normativity in ethics has nothing to do with mere social conformity, in the institutional context of psychology and psychiatry, “normality” is typically judged by empirical statistical criteria. What is “normal” in this sense is purely a matter of fact, which nothing to do with what is really good or best. But many people assume that what is empirically “normal” somehow has a normative status anyway.

It is likely that there are low-level neurological functions that may facilitate things like empathy, but that does not mean that empathy is reducible to these functions. So-called mirror neurons, initially discovered in monkeys, are specialized neurons that fire both when we do something and when we observe someone else doing the same thing. This could be seen as contributing to our partial tendency to spontaneously identify with others, but the initial finding only concerned externally observable motor functions, not deep feeling.

Again, from an ethical point of view, what is most important is not what the psychologists call “empathic accuracy”, but rather how much weight we give to empathy as a value in our lives. And from my more specific Aristotelian-Hegelian point of view, how much weight we give to empathy as a value is to be discerned primarily from our doings rather than from our self-reports. The “common sense” bias of empirical psychology shows up in the assumption that we can get accurate views of people’s character by simply scoring their responses to survey questions. People’s self-reporting does tell us something, but not the whole story.

How much weight people really give to empathy as a value also should not be judged by the incidental features of immediate social interaction. Someone may be a poor “mind reader” and socially somewhat clueless, yet care about others more deeply than those who are better mind readers, and manifest that in deeds when it really matters. But many people quickly judge others based on superficial aspects of immediate interaction. (See also “Mentalizing” vs Emotional Empathy.)

On the Good as a Cause

Having recently prototyped a modest textual commentary of my own on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, I feel in a somewhat better position to begin examining the more detailed arguments of Gwenaëlle Aubry on what exactly the Metaphysics aims to do. Her very important 2006 work Dieu sans la puissance: dunamis et energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin highlights Aristotle’s own neglected statements on what his most distinctive contributions in first philosophy were, and argues that they make Aristotle very relevant today.

This leads to a very distinctive reading of the intent of the Metaphysics, which differs greatly from both the “ontological” view of Avicenna and the Latin scholastic mainstream, and the “forgetting of Being”, “metaphysics of presence” view promoted by Heidegger in the 20th century. Here I’ll just provide a top-level introduction.

Aubry sees the Metaphysics primarily as a very innovative work of philosophical theology, centered on what I would call a kind of teleological meta-ethics.

Aristotle’s first cause is the highest good, which works by attraction and motivation, not by creating, or by directly intervening in events. (This makes what Kant calls internal teleology Aristotle’s most fundamental explanatory principle, as is also made especially clear in Aristotle’s biological works, but also even in the Physics.)

Aristotle’s first philosophy treats the world as most fundamentally governed by the values that are at work in it. The logistical working out of means and ends is also essential to how things play out in the world, but Aristotle insists that orienting values come first in the order of explanation. The highest good is a kind of ultimate moral compass for those values. (And from a Kantian standpoint, the resolution of empirical questions of fact depends on the resolution of normative, ultimately ethical or meta-ethical questions of interpretation.)

Nature, Ends, Normativity

From an Aristotelian point of view, the works of nature result from an ordering of ends. In modern terms, nature for Aristotle is not “value free”, and I take this to be a good thing. But from a strict Kantian point of view, we are the bearers of value, and the attribution of ends to nature independent of us is only a kind of beneficial heuristic projection. But if we radicalize the Kantian primacy of practical reason in the way that Brandom sees Hegel as doing, then all our theoretical accounts of nature, including those commonly regarded as value-free — and everything else we think, feel, and do — ultimately have a dependency on our inquiries into value and normativity.

From a Kantian point of view, our only access to objective nature is through our rational, discursive understanding. The very objectivity we attribute to nature depends on the objectivity of our understanding of it. Objectivity itself is a normative attitude. I think Kant and Aristotle ultimately agree in recognizing that we don’t have direct access to how things are in themselves, and that how things are in themselves is always a matter of discursive inference, in which the last word is never said.

Hegel emphasizes that the objectivity of understanding we achieve in this way is not a private possession, but something larger than us in which we participate. (See also Teleology After Kant.)

Spontaneity

Spontaneity has a technical meaning in Kant and Husserl that is at odds with common usage. In ordinary speech, we are said to do something “spontaneously” when we do it on the spur of the moment, without a previous plan. But Kant and Husserl call everything guided by reason “spontaneous”, even though reason is involved with conscious deliberation and thinking things through.

According to an older usage, things in nature were said by some to occur “spontaneously” when they had no discernible cause. In the scholastic tradition, others argued that “nothing comes from nothing”, and rejected the assumption that things with no discernible cause really happen without a cause, as was purported to occur in what was called “spontaneous generation”.

Leibniz embraced and codified the “nothing from nothing” argument as the principle of sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason does not itself imply the kind of particular providence associated with the popular expression “everything happens for a reason”. It just says that everything has some kind of reasonable explanation, not that what we subjectively perceive as cosmic injustice is part of a divine plan, even though Leibniz separately argued for that as well.

Of course, it matters a lot what kinds of causes or reasonable explanations we recognize. In Leibniz’s time, the notion of cause had already been greatly contracted by early modern writers, who further transformed the late scholastic notion of efficient cause in a mechanistic direction, while accentuating the late scholastic tendency to reduce all other causes to efficient causes. Leibniz himself recommended the use of only mechanistic explanations in natural science, but did not see natural science as all-encompassing, and defended the use of teleological explanation in broader philosophy. He compensated for the narrowness of mechanistic causality by speaking of sufficient reason rather than sufficient cause, and kept a place for form and ends as reasons.

Kant ultimately also defended a kind of teleology, especially in biology and in his account of beauty, but he was much more reserved about using it in general explanation than Leibniz, due to his scruples about grounding all “theoretical” explanation in experience. However, he assigned all ethical matters to a separate “practical” domain, which he wanted to exempt from the kind of narrow causal explanation that he considered the norm for physics, and he argued that for us humans, “practical” reason is more fundamental.

Human action for Kant belongs to the practical domain, which he famously argued is governed by “spontaneity” and “freedom”. I now think “spontaneous” and “free” for Kant simply mean not subject to mechanistic explanation. Thus insofar as we are positively motivated by moral imperatives or values, he would say we act spontaneously and freely. I think he also believed that all human thinking is ultimately motivated by ultimate ends, and therefore called it spontaneous and free.

Kant confused generations of scholars by borrowing voluntaristic rhetoric, which he did with the aim of emphasizing that human thought and action are not reducible to mechanistic physics. But freedom and spontaneity in Kant do not mean arbitrariness, as they effectively do for defenders of voluntarism. Rather, they are meant to allow room for positive motivation by moral imperatives or values.

Another confusing move Kant made was to argue for a special “causality of freedom” that he never explained adequately. Due to its contrast with physical causality, it sounded at times like a kind of supernatural break in the natural order he otherwise recognized. Many commentators thought Kant contradicted himself in arguing both that the natural order is self-contained and that there is a separate causality of freedom. I think these problems are ultimately explained by the narrowness of the mechanical concept of causality in nature. The “causality of freedom”, I want to say, simply means motivation by moral imperatives or values rather than by impulse. Kant considered impulse to be within the realm of natural-scientific causality, and therefore opposed it to spontaneity, whereas contemporary common usage associates “spontaneity” with acting on impulse.

(Aristotle, with his much broader notion of cause that essentially identifies causes with any kinds of “reasons why”, would treat values and moral imperatives as one kind of final causes, or what I have been calling “ends”.)

Husserl’s way of speaking about these matters is to contrast human motivation with causality. For him, “causality” is exclusively the causality of modern physical science, but human thought and action are to be explained by “motivation” rather than causality. Husserl’s use of “spontaneity” is related to that of Kant, and applies to everything that he explains in terms of motivation. (See also Kantian Freedom; Kantian Will; Allison on Kant on Freedom; Freedom Through Deliberation?.)

Whitehead: Process, Events

The originally British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was profoundly concerned with the inter-relatedness of things. His later “philosophy of organism” inspired a movement of so-called “process theology”.

Whitehead was one of the inventors of universal algebra, which extends algebraic principles to symbolic representations of things that are not numbers. He collaborated with Bertrand Russell on the famous Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913) , which sought to ground all of mathematics in the new mathematical logic, but was less attached than Russell to the goal of reducing math to logic.

He did work in electrodynamics and the theory of relativity, emphasizing a holistic approach and the nonlocal character of electromagnetic phenomena. Counter to the spirit of the time, he developed a philosophy of science that aimed to be faithful to our intuitions of the interconnectedness of nature. He characterized mathematics as the abstract study of patterns of connectedness. In Science and the Modern World (1926), rejecting the world views of Newton and Hume as understood by the logical empiricists, he developed alternatives to then-dominant atomistic causal reductionism and sensationalist empiricism. Eventually, he turned to what he and others called metaphysics.

His Process and Reality (1929) is a highly technical work that is full of interesting insights and remarks. It aims to present a logically coherent system that radicalizes the work of John Locke in particular, but also that of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. As with many systematic works, however, it doesn’t engage in depth with the work of other philosophers.

Whitehead’s radicalization involves, among other things, a systematic rejection of mind-body dualism; of representationalism; of metaphysical applications of the subject-predicate distinction; and of Locke’s distinction between “primary” (mathematical) and “secondary” (nonmathematical) qualities. Plato and Aristotle both get positive mention. Whitehead thoroughly repudiates the sensationalist direction in which Hume took Locke’s work; aims deliberately to be “pre-Kantian”; and seems to utterly ignore Hegel, though he gives positive mention to the “absolute idealist” F. H. Bradley.

He wants to promote a thoroughgoing causal realism and to avoid any subjectivism, while eventually taking subjective factors into account. He wants to reinterpret “stubborn fact” on a coherentist basis. He is impressed by the work of Bergson, and of the pragmatists William James and John Dewey.

For Whitehead, “experience” encompasses everything, but he gives this an unusual meaning. Experience need not involve consciousness, sensation, or thought. He stresses the realist side of Locke, and wants to apply some of Locke’s analysis of the combination of ideas to realities in general.

He says that the world consists fundamentally of “actual entities” or “actual occasions” or “concrescences”, which he compares to Descartes’ extended substances. However, he interprets Einstein’s theory of relativity as implying that substances mutually contain one another, a bit like the monads in Leibniz.

For Whitehead, every actual entity has a kind of self-determination, which is intended to explain both human freedom and quantum indeterminacy. On the other hand, he also says God is the source of novelty in the universe. Whitehead recognizes what he calls eternal objects, which he compares to Platonic ideas, and identifies with potentiality.

Compared to the Aristotelian notions of actuality and potentiality I have been developing here, his use of actuality and potentiality seems rather thin. Actuality is just factuality viewed in terms of the connections of things, and potentiality consisting in eternal objects amounts to a kind of abstract possibility. His notion of causality seems to be a relatively standard modern efficient causality, modified only by his emphasis on connections between things and his idea of the self-determination of actual entities. His philosophy of science aims to be value-free, although he allows a place for values in his metaphysics.

According to Whitehead, perception has two distinct modes — that of presentational immediacy, and that of causal efficacy. Humean sensationalism, as codified by early 20th century theories of “sense data”, tries to reduce everything to presentational immediacy, but it is our intuitions of causal efficacy that connect things together into the medium-sized wholes recognized by common sense. As far as it goes, I can only applaud this move away from presentational immediacy, though I have also tried to read Hume in a less reductionist way. (I also want to go further, beyond intuitions of efficient causality in the modern sense, to questions of the constitution of meaning and value that I think are more general.)

In his later works, he emphasizes a more comprehensive notion of feeling, which he sees as grounded in subjective valuations, glossed as having to do with how we take various eternal objects. Compared to the logical empiricism that dominated at the time, this is intriguing, but I want to take the more radically Aristotelian (and, I would argue, also Kantian) view that values or ends (which are themselves subjects of inquiry, not simply given) also ultimately drive the constitution of things we call objective. I also don’t see “metaphysics” as a separate domain that would support the consideration of values, over and above a “science” that would ostensibly be value-free.

Whitehead considered the scientific reductionism of his day to exemplify what he called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. What I think he wanted to question by this was the idea that scientific abstractions are more real or more true than common-sense apprehensions of concrete things. I would phrase it a bit differently, but the outcome is the same. Abstractions can have great interpretive value, but they are things entirely produced by us that have value because they help us understand concrete things that are more independent of us.

Attempting to take into account the idea from quantum mechanics that reality is not only relational but also granular, he made what is to me the peculiar statement that “the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism”. Whitehead is certainly not alone in this kind of usage; indeed, the standard modern physical notion of “atoms” allows them to have parts and internal structure. That concept is fine in itself, but “atom” is a terrible name for it, because “atom” literally means “without parts”. The word “atom” ought to denote something analogous to a point in geometry, lacking any internal features or properties whatsoever.

Be that as it may, Whitehead sees an analogy between the granularity of events in quantum mechanics and the “stream of consciousness” analyzed by William James. “Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all” (Process and Reality, p. 68). To me, this is an expression not of atomism but of a kind of irreducibility of medium-sized things.

Anyway, Whitehead’s “atomic” things are events. Larger events are composed of smaller events, but he wants to say there is such a thing as a minimal event, which still may have internal complexity, and to identify this with his notion of actual occasion or actual entity.

I like the identification of “entities” with occasions. For Whitehead, these are a sort of what I call “medium-sized” chunks of extension in space-time. Whitehead’s minimal events are nonpunctual.

Freed of its scholastic rigidifications, this is close to what the Aristotelian notion of “primary substance” was supposed to be. I think of the latter as a handle for a bundle of adverbial characterizations that has a kind of persistence — or better, resilience — in the face of change. Only as a bundle does it have this kind of resilience.

Although — consistent with the kind of grounding in scientific realism he is still aiming at — Whitehead emphasizes the extensional character of actual occasions, they implicitly incorporate a good deal of intensional (i.e., meaning-oriented, as distinguished from mathematical-physical) character as well. Following Brandom’s reading of Kant on the primacy of practical reason, I think it is better to explain extensional properties in terms of intensional ones, rather than vice versa. But I fully agree with Whitehead that “how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is” (p. 23, emphasis in original), and I think Aristotle and Hegel would, too.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Whitehead’s work was attractive to theologians especially because it offered an alternative to the traditional notion of an omnipotent God creating everything from nothing. Whitehead argued that the Christian Gospel emphasizes the “tenderness” of God, rather than dominion and power: “not… the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love” (p. 343). “The purpose of God is the attainment of value in the world” (Whitehead, Religion in the Making, p. 100). God for Whitehead is a gentle persuader, not a ruler.

(I would not put unmoved moving in anywhere near the same bucket as ruling omnipotence. Unmoved moving in Aristotle is attraction or inspiration by a pure end, where all the motion occurs in the moved thing. It is not some kind of ruling force that drives things.)

Ethical Practice

In Kant, practical means ethical. This initially seemed counter-intuitive to me. Like many, I used to think of the “practical” in technical and utilitarian terms, as how we realize desired results. I also used to think considerations of value needed to be guided by considerations of truth, and that pursuing the truth far enough and sincerely enough would spontaneously provide sufficient answers to ethical questions. I would no longer put it that way. I now think that the pursuit of truth, taken far enough, shows things to be “normative all the way down”, in Brandom’s phrase. Even the most narrowly technical considerations ultimately involve questions of value. Conversely, inquiry into values is the one kind of inquiry that need not presuppose any other.

Ethics are not a spontaneous byproduct of inquiry into the truth. In order to sincerely inquire into the truth, we need to deliberately focus on all the questions of value that come up along the way and affect our judgments. As a result, I now think of ethical practice as subsuming every other kind of practice.

Ethical inquiry is concerned with what we should do, which includes the details of how we do it. Every kind of doing is subject to this kind of consideration.

Engineering, to take one non-obvious example, is not just about coming up with designs that “work”, but about coming up with good designs. Various kinds of arguments that are relatively “value free” can be made about criteria for good design in specific contexts, but ultimately what matters most is that the design be “good” or better than the alternatives, however that is to be understood in the particular case.

An ethics-first view of philosophy puts ethics or “axiology” (inquiry into values) before epistemology, ontology, or formal logic in the order of explanation.

All doing has ethical implications of one sort or another, and all inquiry (also a kind of doing) ultimately involves questions of value.

Actuality, Existence

I have been using the English “actuality”, following old standard translations of Aristotle. As with any Aristotelian technical term, in interpreting its meaning I try to rely on what the Aristotelian texts say about it, and to avoid importing connotations associated with other uses of the English word used to translate it. Aristotle’s Greek term is energeia, a word he apparently invented himself from existing Greek roots. Joe Sachs translates it as “being at work”, which I think is good provided “being” is taken in the ordinary sense that we transitively say something “is” at work, rather than taking “being” as a noun. The word is formed from the noun ergon, which in its root sense means “work”; the prefix en, which corresponds to the preposition “in”; and the suffix eia, which makes the whole thing into a noun, like English “-ness” or “-ity”. So, in the most literal sense, energeia means something like “in-work-ness”.

Even the literal sense is a bit misleading, because Aristotle is very clear that the primary reference of energeia is not to a present state or a factual state of affairs, but to a primitive or ultimate end, understood as a kind of fullness or achievable perfection after its kind.

We are not used to thinking seriously about achievable perfection, but Aristotle’s fundamental intention regarding “perfection” is that it not be out of reach of finite beings. The “perfection” Aristotle has in mind is not a godlike attribute of unqualified or infinite perfection, but rather something like what modern ecology calls a “climax state” of an ecosystem (like the exceedingly rich environment of a rain forest).

Ecological succession involves a series of states that lead to other states, whereas a climax state leads back to itself, as in Aristotle’s other related coined word entelechy, which Sachs renders “being at work staying itself”, and is literally something like “in-end-having”. An ecosystem in a climax state is maximally resilient to perturbation; it is more able to recover its health when something throws it out of balance.

When Aristotle speaks of “substances” persisting through change, it is not a simple persistence of given properties that he has in mind, but rather something more like a stable (i.e., highly resilient, not unchanging) ecosystem. Stability in ecosystems and populations comes from biodiversity, which is a modern scientific analogue of Aristotelian “perfection”. Diversity provides a richer set of capabilities. With respect to human individuals, the analogue would be something like a “well-rounded” character. In ethics, we could speak of a well-rounded pursuit of ends, in contrast with a narrow or selfish one.

Thus the concept of “actuality” in Aristotle has to do with a kind of immanent teleology or interpretation of things based on ends and values, which for Aristotle takes the place of what later writers called “ontology”, as a supposed fundamental account of what exists.

Some contemporary analytic philosophers have spoken of “actualism” as an alternative to the possible worlds interpretation of modal logic. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in this context “actuality” is simply equated with factual existence. Instead of making confusing claims about the reality of non-actual possible worlds, this approach locates alternate possibilities within the actual world instead of somehow alongside it. As far as it goes, I have some sympathy for this. But I want to resist some of the conclusions with which it is commonly associated, which follow from the very non-Aristotelian identification of actuality with mere factuality. (See also Redding on Morals and Modality.)

I said above that actuality in Aristotle’s sense refers to processes and states of actualization relative to ends and values, not just to present existence or the current factual state of affairs. Readers of Aristotle as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Gwenaëlle Aubry are united in stressing the primacy of “in-act-ness” over mere factuality in the interpretation of “actuality”. Robert Pippin’s account of actuality in Hegel (see also here) in an ethical context spells out the consequences of this very nicely. I think Aristotle would endorse the views Pippin attributes to Hegel in this context.