Tag: Voluntarism

After Virtue?

Analytic philosopher Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1981) analyzes what he calls the failures of 20th century moral theory, and argues that the broadly Aristotelian tradition has more to offer in ethics than any contemporary alternative. He calls the Enlightenment a failed project. Much of his argument is historical, which is unusual in the analytic tradition. He says he wants to do what Hegel calls philosophical history, which he also connects with the work of the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood. Macintyre thinks that the dominance of methodological individualism and what I would call subjectivism in ethics has made genuine dialogue about ethical questions impossible in the modern world. But he regards this as a contingent historical situation that could be changed.

Macintyre argues that traditional societies were in this regard better off, in that they had locally shared standards of evaluation that they treated as objective. These were always particular, and reflected no aspiration to the kind of universality sought by the proponents of Enlightenment. He makes this argument more interesting by pointing out the wide prevalence of historical cases in which the simple traditional moral univocity of a “heroic” culture no longer directly governs moral discourse, but nonetheless remains a reference point and an object of nostalgia or idealization. He applies this description to both classical Greece and medieval Europe.

By contrast, he notes the ubiquity of people talking past each other in modern morals and politics.

“The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on — although they do — but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture” (3rd ed., p. 6).

“From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion. Hence perhaps the slightly shrill tone of so much moral debate” (p. 8).

He attributes this impasse to a widespread, partially subterranean prevalence of beliefs resembling the “emotivism” that was propounded by a number of early 20th century British analytic philosophers.

“Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character” (p. 12).

Macintyre is constructing a polar opposition between a good Aristotelianism and a bad emotivism. While I am sympathetic to a great deal of what he adduces in the course of the argument, I think the conclusion is ultimately too strong and too simplistic. But Macintyre deserves credit both for reviving a kind of broadly Aristotelian ethics, and also for making a place for historical arguments in what were then completely unhistorical discussions of ethics in analytic philosophy.

“In the eighteenth century Hume embodied emotivist elements in the large and complex fabric of his total moral theory; but it is only in this [20th] century that emotivism has flourished as a theory on its own. And it did so as a response to a set of theories which flourished, especially in England, between 1903 and 1939…. The theory in question borrowed from the early nineteenth century the name of ‘intuitionism’ and its immediate progenitor was G.E. Moore” (p. 14).

Moore was one of the founders of analytic philosophy. He aggressively propounded a philosophy of “common sense” that would combat “metaphysics”. Although he developed an influential critique of ethical naturalism, he effectively reduces all ethics to mere opinion.

“Propositions declaring this or that to be good are what Moore called ‘intuitions’; they are incapable of proof or disproof and indeed no evidence or reasoning whatever can be adduced in their favor or disfavor” (p. 15).

Macintyre sees Moore as promoting an extreme ethical subjectivism. He sees most modern moral discourse as inconsistently incorporating both elements of radical subjectivism and other beliefs that are incompatible with it. He recalls the somewhat tyrannical practices of intimidation employed by Moore and his followers.

“But, of course, as Keynes tells us, … ‘In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility’ and Keynes goes on to describe the effectiveness of Moore’s gasps of incredulity and head-shaking, of Strachey’s grim silences and of Lowes Dickinson’s shrugs…. Moore’s followers had behaved as if their disagreements over what is good were being settled by an appeal to an objective and impersonal criterion; but in fact the stronger and psychologically more adroit will was prevailing” (p. 17).

“Purported witches there may be, but real witches there cannot have been, for there are none. So emotivism holds that purported rational justifications there may be, but real rational justifications there cannot have been, for there are none” (p. 19).

It is a terribly impoverished notion of reason that is incapable of justification in this way. Moore claims there is no such thing as rational justification of an ethical attitude, and the advocates of emotivism followed him in this. This is basically to say that all ethical views are arbitrary.

Ethical “emotivism” is thus both a form of radical subjectivism and a form of radical voluntarism. Macintyre argues that this kind of deeply impoverished and despairing view of moral phenomena is implicitly given credence by many who would not explictly defend it.

“Analytical philosophers had defined the central task of philosophy as that of deciphering the meaning of key expressions in both everyday and scientific language; and since emotivism fails precisely as a theory of the meaning of moral expressions, analytical philosophers by and large rejected emotivism. Yet emotivism did not die and it is important to note how often in widely different modem philosophical contexts something very like emotivism’s attempted reduction of morality to personal preference continually recurs in the writings of those who do not think of themselves as emotivists” (p. 20).

“The terminus of justification is thus always, on this view, a not further to be justified choice, a choice unguided by criteria. Each individual implicitly or explicitly has to adopt his or her own first principles on the basis of such a choice. The utterance of any universal principle is in the end an expression of the preferences of an individual will” (ibid).

This is the conceit of a choice unguided by criteria, and a consequent reduction of everything to arbitrary will.

“What is the key to the social content of emotivism? It is the fact that emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations” (p. 23).

This obliteration of the distinction between manipulation and non-manipulation is also characteristic of the Sophists who were confronted by Socrates. It is the cynical perspective that everyone is manipulative, so manipulation cannot be condemned.

Then in the absence of rational criteria for judging what is right, the only path left for morals is the bad one of the authoritarian command/obedience model that was already explicitly criticized by Kant (and Spinoza). Macintyre recalls Kant’s critique of it.

“On Kant’s view it can never follow from the fact that God commands us to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such. In order for us to reach such a conclusion justifiably we would also have to know that we always ought to do what God commands. But this last we could not know unless we ourselves possessed a standard of moral judgment independent of God’s commandments by means of which we could judge God’s deeds and words and so find the latter morally worthy of obedience. But clearly if we possess such a standard, the commandments of God will be redundant” (pp. 44-45).

This argument is based on the nature of commands. The other issue with divine command theories is that is that they surreptitiously depend on human judgment about applicability to particular cases.

As I would put it, obedience as such is not a virtue, and is not particularly conducive to virtue, though it may have utility in some settings. But Macintyre notes later on that in the early modern period, virtue was often reduced to the single component of obedience to the law, both human and divine. He contrasts this with accounts grounded in something like Aristotelian potentiality and act and teleology.

The argument proceeds at a historical rather than a textual level. His concern is not with a reading of Aristotle, but rather with the social import of common characteristics of the various historical traditions of broadly “Aristotelian” ethics.

The positive object of his investigation is “the moral scheme which in a variety of diverse forms and with numerous rivals came for long periods to dominate the European Middle Ages from the twelfth century onwards, a scheme which included both classical and theistic elements. Its basic structure is that which Aristotle analyzed in the Nicomachean Ethics. Within that teleological scheme there is a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature. Ethics is the science [sic] which is to enable men to understand how they make the transition from the former state to the latter. Ethics therefore in this view presupposes some account of potentiality and act, some account of the essence of man as a rational animal and above all some account of the human telos. The precepts which enjoin the various virtues and prohibit the vices which are their counterparts instruct us how to move from potentiality to act, how to realize our true nature and to reach our true end. To defy them will be to be frustrated and incomplete” (p. 52).

Such generalities are of little help in making specific choices. Hedonism is lame that way. But Aristotle treats the good too in a polymorphous way. And Aristotelian phronesis or practical judgment is at home with such polymorphism, just as Hegel in the introduction to the Phenomenology develops a kind of interpretation that is to be at home in “otherness”.

The reference to the 12th century is pretty specific. The historical center of gravity of his argument is the middle ages, not the Greece of Aristotle’s time, though he does make some interesting observations about the classical period.

“This scheme is complicated and added to, but not essentially altered, when it is placed within a framework of theistic beliefs, whether Christian, as with Aquinas, or Jewish with Maimonides, or Islamic with Ibn Roschd. The precepts of ethics now have to be understood not only as teleological injunctions [sic], but also as expressions of a divinely ordained law. The table of virtues and vices has to be amended and added to and a concept of sin is added to the Aristotelian concept of error. The law of God requires a new kind of respect and awe. The true end of man can no longer be completely achieved in this world, but only in another” (p. 53).

It is significant that he refers to “a teleological scheme” in the singular. This is in accordance with his claim that the theistic context does not essentially alter Aristotle’s teleology. Though his approach is historical, Macintyre does not aim to reach the level of a history of the different Aristotelianisms. His focus is on a global contrast between modern and premodern ethics.

In the history of world religions, there have been many that were non-theistic. By non-theistic I simply mean not theistic. Contrary to what etymology suggests, theism is not the genus of which monotheism is a species, such that its only contrary would be atheism. Theism is a particular kind of theology that is only possible in a monotheistic context. It makes especially strong claims, and is to be distinguished from other kinds of monotheism that make weaker claims, such as Stoic theology and early modern deism.

“Most medieval proponents of this scheme did of course believe that it was itself part of God’s revelation, but also a discovery of reason and rationally defensible. This large area of agreement does not however survive when Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism — and their immediate late medieval predecessors — appear on the scene. For they embody a new conception of reason” (ibid).

This early modern “new conception of reason” effectively claims that there is no such thing as what I have called ethical reason. It holds that reason addresses only calculation and facts. It makes any real ethics solely dependent on revelation.

“Reason can supply, so these new theologies assert, no genuine comprehension of man’s true end; that power of reason was destroyed by the fall of man. ‘Si Adam integer stetisset’, on Calvin’s view, reason might have played the part that Aristotle assigned to it. But now reason is powerless to correct our passions (it is not unimportant that Hume’s views are those of one who was brought up a Calvinist). Nonetheless the contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos remains and the divine moral law is still a schoolmaster to remove us from the former state to the latter, even if only grace enables us to respond to and obey its precepts. The Jansenist Pascal stands at a peculiarly important point in the development of this history. For it is Pascal who recognizes that the Protestant-cum-Jansenist conception of reason is in important respects at one with the conception of reason at home in the most innovative seventeenth-century philosophy and science. Reason does not comprehend essences or transitions from potentiality to act; these concepts belong to the despised conceptual scheme of scholasticism. Hence anti-Aristotelian science sets strict boundaries to the powers of reason. Reason is calculative; it can assess truths of fact and mathematical relations but nothing more. In the realm of practice therefore it can speak only of means. About ends it must be silent” (pp. 53-54).

What is lost here is reason as interpretation, as distinct from reason as calculation. The connection to Pascal is interesting.

“Pascal’s striking anticipations of Hume — and since we know that Hume was familiar with Pascal’s writings, it is perhaps plausible to believe that here there is a direct influence — point to the way in which this concept of reason retained its power. Even Kant retains its negative characteristics; reason for him, as much as for Hume, discerns no essential natures and no teleological features in the objective universe available for study by physics. Thus their disagreements on human nature coexist with striking and important agreements and what is true of them is true also of Diderot, of Smith and of Kierkegaard. All reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end. But to understand this is to understand why their project of finding a basis for morality had to fail” (p. 54).

Again he is going very broad brush with a rather unrefined notion of teleology. The great criticisms of so-called teleology by Spinoza, for example, only address the “external” teleology that is said to be from God and providence. They do not even touch the kind of purely “internal” teleology that is distinctively Aristotelian. (And in fact Spinoza’s conatus plays a role not unlike that of internal teleology in Aristotle.)

I also think it is an error to treat a telos or an essence as something fixed that could be known once and for all. Open-endedness is built into Aristotelian teleology (at least in Aristotle himself) from the ground up. For example, hypothetical necessity says that the animal must eat in order to sustain itself as a well-living animal of its kind, but the details of what it will eat and when and how are all matters of accident that are not predetermined.

“From such factual premises as ‘This watch is grossly inaccurate and irregular in time-keeping’ and ‘This watch is too heavy to carry about comfortably’, the evaluative conclusion validly follows that This is a bad watch’. From such factual premises as ‘He gets a better yield for this crop per acre than any farmer in the district’, ‘He has the most effective programme of soil renewal yet known’ and ‘His dairy herd wins all the first prizes at the agricultural shows’, the evaluative conclusion validly follows that ‘He is a good farmer’.”
“Both of these arguments are valid because of the special character of the concepts of a watch and of a farmer. Such concepts are functional concepts; that is to say, we define both ‘watch’ and ‘farmer’ in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or a farmer are characteristically expected to serve. It follows that the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch nor the concept of a farmer independently of that of a good farmer; and that the criterion of something’s being a watch and the criterion of something’s being a good watch — and so also for ‘farmer’ and for all other functional concepts — are not independent of each other. Now clearly both sets of criteria — as is evidenced by the examples given in the last paragraph — are factual” (pp. 57-58).

While it is a valid conclusion that the watch as described is a bad watch, I would call such a conclusion a reasonable judgment, and not a fact.

It turns out that Macintyre wants to defend a kind of ethical naturalism. This is the claim that value judgments can be derived from facts. I do not associate this with Aristotle or Plato.

“Thus we may safely assume that, if some amended version of the ‘No “ought” conclusion from “is” premises’ principle is to hold good, it must exclude arguments involving functional concepts from its scope. But this suggests strongly that those who have insisted that all moral arguments fall within the scope of such a principle may have been doing so, because they took it for granted that no moral arguments involve functional concepts. Yet moral arguments within the classical, Aristotelian tradition — whether in its Greek or its medieval versions — involve at least one central functional concept, the concept of man understood as having an essential nature and an essential purpose or function; and it is when and only when the classical tradition in its integrity has been substantially rejected that moral arguments change their character so that they fall within the scope of some version of the ‘No “ought” conclusion from “is” premises’ principle. That is to say, ‘man’ stands to ‘good man’ as ‘watch’ stands to ‘good watch’ or ‘farmer’ to ‘good farmer’ within the classical tradition. Aristotle takes it as a starting-point for ethical enquiry that the relationship of ‘man’ to ‘living well’ is analogous to that of ‘harpist’ to ‘playing the harp well’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1095a 16). But the use of ‘man’ as a functional concept is far older than Aristotle and it does not initially derive from Aristotle’s metaphysical biology” (p. 58).

I want to defend the “no ought from is” principle. “Functional” is a modern notion that fits better in a utilitarian context than in a teleological normative one. “No ought from is” reflects the autonomy of ethical reason. What we do have a lot of in ordinary life, though, is the opposite direction of “is from ought”. Ethical reason and interpretive judgment are “bottomless” or non-foundationalist. As Brandom says, it is normative all the way down, so all ultimate justification has a normative character.

Macintyre refers several times, without explanation, to “Aristotle’s metaphysical biology” as something he wants to avoid. I do not think of Aristotle’s biology as metaphysical in any of the senses that word can have. Teleology and essence in Aristotle’s normative sense do not make his biology “metaphysical”. (See my longer discussion of the explanatory use of teleology.)

“It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that ‘man’ ceases to be a functional concept…. So the ‘No “ought” conclusion from “is” premises’ principle becomes an inescapable truth for philosophers whose culture possesses only the impoverished moral vocabulary which results from the episodes I have recounted. That it was taken to be a timeless logical truth was a sign of a deep lack of historical consciousness which then informed and even now infects too much of moral philosophy…. To call a particular action just or right is to say that it is what a good man would do in such a situation; hence this type of statement too is factual. Within this tradition moral and evaluative statements can be called true or false in precisely the way in which all other factual statements can be so called. But once the notion of essential human purposes or functions disappears from morality, it begins to appear implausible to treat moral judgments as factual statements” (p. 59).

I don’t think the issues of modernity come from a failure to treat moral judgments as factual. I do think he is right about the weakness of ethical individualism, and about its historical importance for understanding modernity. Hegel has much to say about this.

The “roles” here seem to orient his notion of “functional” concepts. But roles are a much older notion.

Macintyre makes an interesting connection between modern methodological individualism and the denial of teleology. But I would not call any judgment a factual statement. What a good person would do is not a fact either, but a judgment. Ultimately I do not think there is any “is” that is completely independent of normative judgment. But he is very right to focus on the issue of individualism.

“[M]oral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices. In that context moral judgments were at once hypothetical and categorical in form. They were hypothetical insofar as they expressed a judgment as to what conduct would be teleologically appropriate for a human being: ‘You ought to do so-and-so, if and since your telos is such-and-such’ or perhaps ‘You ought to do so-and-so, if you do not want your essential desires to be frustrated’. They were categorical insofar as they reported the contents of the universal law commanded by God” (p. 60).

He refers to a “theistic and teleological world order” (ibid). Not long after writing this book, Macintyre began to explicitly identify as a Thomist. Theistic revealed theology is far removed from Aristotle’s modest concern to better explain things by starting with questions of value. But that of course does not mean that theistic traditions could not incorporate significant Aristotelian elements. Manifestly they did. Latin scholasticism generally had high standards of argument, and minimized appeals to revelation.

He briefly refers to the rise of the early modern notion of the individual that is so omnipresent today.

“What was then invented was the individual and to the question of what that invention amounted to and its part in creating our own emotivist culture we must now turn” (p. 61, emphasis in original).

Here he only scratches the surface of the history of subjectivity. There is far more to be said.

I sympathize with his rejection of deontological (rule-based) ethics.

“If such rules cannot be found a new status which will make appeal to them rational, appeal to them will indeed appear as a mere instrument of individual desire and will. Hence there is a pressure to vindicate them either by devising some new teleology or by finding some new categorical status for them. The first project is what lends its importance to utilitarianism; the second to all those attempts to follow Kant in presenting the authority of the appeal to moral rules as grounded in the nature of practical reason” (p. 62).

The claim that utilitarianism’s calculating reasoning about ends and means offers a new kind of “teleology” makes it clear how different his use of this word is from Aristotle’s that for the sake of which. Macintyre goes on to highlight utilitarianism’s weaknesses.

“[D]ifferent pleasures and different happinesses are to a large degree incommensurable: there are no scales of quality or quantity on which to weigh them. Consequently appeal to the criteria of pleasure will not tell me whether to drink or swim and appeal to those of happiness cannot decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a soldier.”
“To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes” (p. 64).

“[I]t follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. Hence when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use. To say this is not of course to deny that many of its uses have been in the service of socially beneficial ideals” (ibid).

The idea of making morals a matter of calculation goes nowhere.

“It was a mark of the moral seriousness and strenuousness of the great nineteenth-century utilitarians that they felt a continuing obligation to scrutinize and rescrutinize their own positions, so that they might, if at all possible, not be deceived. The culminating achievement of that scrutiny was the moral philosophy of Sidgwick. And it is with Sidgwick that the failure to restore a teleological framework for ethics finally comes to be accepted” (pp. 64-65).

It is not from a lack of seriousness that utilitarianism fails. We come back to G. E. Moore again.

“It was of course from Sidgwick’s final positions that Moore was presently to borrow without acknowledgment, presenting his borrowings with his own penumbra of bad argument in Principia Ethica. The important differences between Principia Ethica and Sidgwick’s later writings are ones of tone rather than of substance. What Sidgwick portrays as failure Moore takes to be an enlightening and liberating discovery. And Moore’s readers, for whom, as I noticed earlier, the enlightenment and the liberation were paramount, saw themselves as rescued thereby from Sidgwick and any other utilitarianism as decisively as from Christianity. What they did not see of course was that they had also been deprived of any ground for claims to objectivity and that they had begun in their own lives and judgments to provide the evidence to which emotivism was soon to appeal so cogently” (p. 65).

“Utilitarianism advanced its most successful claims in the nineteenth century. Thereafter intuitionism followed by emotivism held sway in British philosophy, while in the United States pragmatism provided the same kind of praeparatio evangelica for emotivism that intuitionism provided in Britain. But for reasons that we have already noticed emotivism always seemed implausible to analytical philosophers primarily concerned with questions of meaning largely because it is evident that moral reasoning does take place, that moral conclusions can often be validly derived from sets of premises. Such analytical philosophers revived the Kantian project of demonstrating that the authority and objectivity of moral rules is precisely that authority and objectivity which belongs to the exercise of reason. Hence their central project was, indeed is, that of showing that any rational agent is logically committed to the rules of morality in virtue of his or her rationality” (pp. 65-66).

The way that Brandom and Habermas make use of pragmatism puts pragmatism on the rational side.

Macintyre is dismissive of Enlightenment notions of natural rights: “the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns” (p. 69).

“The eighteenth-century philosophical defenders of natural rights sometimes suggest that the assertions which state that men possess them are self-evident truths; but we know that there are no self-evident truths. Twentieth-century moral philosophers have sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions; but one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument” (ibid).

Self-evident truths and arguments from intuition are well criticized by Hegel. Macintyre speaks of rights as moral fictions.

“A central characteristic of moral fictions which comes clearly into view when we juxtapose the concept of utility to that of rights is now identifiable: they purport to provide us with an objective and impersonal criterion, but they do not. And for this reason alone there would have to be a gap between their purported meaning and the uses to which they are actually put. Moreover we can now understand a little better how the phenomenon of incommensurable premises in modem moral debate arises. The concept of rights was generated to serve one set of purposes as part of the social invention of the autonomous moral agent; the concept of utility was devised for quite another set of purposes” (p. 70).

Not only are there issues with the hypostasized notions of both utility and rights, they don’t work well together. He says the same about empiricism.

“The empiricist concept of experience was a cultural invention of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is at first sight paradoxical that it should have arisen in the same culture in which natural science arose. For it was invented as a panacea for the epistemological crises of the seventeenth century; it was intended as a device to close the gap between seems and is, between appearance and reality. It was to close this gap by making every experiencing subject a closed realm; there is to be nothing beyond my experience for me to compare my experience with, so that the contrast between seems to me and is in fact can never be formulated. This requires an even more radical kind of privacy for experience than is possessed by such genuinely private objects as after-images” (p. 80).

“By contrast the natural scientific concepts of observation and experiment were intended to enlarge the distance between seems and is” (ibid).

“The empiricist concept was intended to discriminate the basic elements from which our knowledge is constructed and on which it is founded; beliefs and theories are to be vindicated or not, depending on the verdict of the basic elements of experience. But the observations of the natural scientist are never in this sense basic” (pp. 80-81).

“There is indeed therefore something extraordinary in the coexistence of empiricism and natural science in the same culture, for they represent radically different and incompatible ways of approaching the world” (p. 81).

I agree; science is more rational than empirical.

“What [the early moderns] agreed in denying and excluding was in large part all those aspects of the classical view of the world which were Aristotelian. From the seventeenth century onwards it was a commonplace that whereas the scholastics had allowed themselves to be deceived about the character of the facts of the natural and social world by interposing an Aristotelian interpretation between themselves and experienced reality, we moderns — that is, we seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century moderns — had stripped away interpretation and theory and confronted fact and experience just as they are. It was precisely in virtue of this that those moderns proclaimed and named themselves the Enlightenment, and understood the medieval past by contrast as the Dark Ages. What Aristotle obscured, they see” (ibid).

It is unclear to me why he says classical when he means medieval. Perhaps it is because some consider the term “medieval” to be derogatory, as it often is. The need for interpretation and theory is unavoidable.

“Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics (together of course with the De Anima [On the Soul]) are as much treatises concerned with how human action is to be explained and understood as with what acts are to be done. Indeed within the Aristotelian framework the one task cannot be discharged without discharging the other” (p. 82).

This is very true. As of the early 19th century, Hegel deemed Aristotle’s work on the soul (psyche) to be unsurpassed by any modern psychology. Things are more complicated now, but the level of abstraction at which Aristotle works seems particularly well suited for ethical purposes.

“When in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Aristotelian understanding of nature was repudiated, at the same time as Aristotle’s influence had been expelled from both Protestant and Jansenist theology, the Aristotelian account of action was also rejected. ‘Man’ ceases, except within theology — and not always there — to be what I called earlier a functional concept” (ibid).

I had not thought about Jansenism in this connection before. This is an important historical detail.

He points out that generalizations in social science lack predictive power. Oddly, he blames modern bureaucracy on a “Weberian vision of the world”. Max Weber described the rise of bureaucracy and worried about it. He was not its advocate.

Macintyre uses Nietzsche as a kind of foil for the theistic Aristotelianism he is recommending, referring at one point to “Nietzsche and all his existentialist and emotivist successors” (p.118). I think Nietzsche is a more complicated case. Like Hume, Nietzsche thinks that we humans live mainly by our passions and not by our reason. But in spite of his rhetoric, he continues to make many evaluative judgments and to write philosophically.

“The role of Aristotelianism in my argument is not entirely due to its historical importance. In the ancient and medieval worlds it was always in conflict with other standpoints, and the various ways of life of which it took itself to be the best theoretical interpreter had other sophisticated theoretical protagonists. It is true that no doctrine vindicated itself in so wide a variety of contexts as did Aristotelianism: Greek, Islamic, Jewish and Christian; and that when modernity made its assaults on an older world its most perceptive exponents understood that it was Aristotelianism that had to be overthrown. But all these historical truths, crucial as they are, are unimportant compared with the fact that Aristotelianism is philosophically the most powerful of pre-modern modes of moral thought. If a premodern view of morals and politics is to be vindicated against modernity, it will be in something like Aristotelian terms or not at all” (ibid).

It is a fascinating historical fact that after being almost entirely eclipsed shortly after Aristotle’s death, Aristotle’s influence grew continuously in the early centuries CE, to the point where Islamic, Jewish, Christian, and possibly also Zoroastrian scholars all came to regard him as the greatest philosopher of antiquity. The succession of dominant philosophies from Stoicism in the early Hellenistic period, through neoplatonism, and finally to Aristotelianism seems to me like one of the more plausible cases of historical “progress”.

“What then the conjunction of philosophical and historical argument reveals is that either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place. There is no third alternative and more particularly there is no alternative provided by those thinkers at the heart of the contemporary conventional curriculum in moral philosophy, Hume, Kant and Mill. It is no wonder that the teaching of ethics is so often destructive and skeptical in its effects upon the minds of those taught” (ibid).

This polarity is overdrawn. Nietzsche’s critique of the hollowness of modern values can be radicalized or moderated. I have documented unexpected links between Aristotle, Plato, Kant, and Hegel, and it seems to me that this does represent a third way. Aristotle’s own distinctive notion of a teleological openness within things is “ethical”, and neither providential nor utilitarian.

“It is yet another of Nietzsche’s merits that he joins to his critique of Enlightenment moralities a sense of their failure to address adequately, let alone to answer the question: what sort of person am I to become? This is in a way an inescapable question in that an answer to it is given in practice in each human life. But for characteristically modern moralities it is a question to be approached only by indirection. The primary question from their standpoint has concerned rules: what rules ought we to follow? And why ought we to obey them? And that this has been the primary question is unsurprising when we recall the consequences of the expulsion of Aristotelian teleology from the moral world” (pp. 118-119).

Here he points out a more global issue with the rule-based character of deontological ethics: it has nothing to say about the human character that is all-important for ethics in an Aristotelian context. But in his campaign against emotivism, Macintyre wants to completely deny the kind of positive view of moral sentiment that is to be found for instance in Shaftesbury.

Human character for Aristotle is fundamentally shaped by emotional disposition. Without a “reasonable” emotional disposition, Aristotelian ethics cannot begin.

“The virtues are sentiments, that is, related families of dispositions and propensities regulated by a higher-order desire, in this case a desire to act from the corresponding moral principles’, asserts John Rawls, one of the latest moral philosophers of modernity … and elsewhere he defines ‘the fundamental moral virtues’ as ‘strong and normally effective desires to act on the basic principles of right…. Hence on the modern view the justification of the virtues depends upon some prior justification of rules and principles; and if the latter become radically problematic, as they have, so also must the former'” (p. 119).

He is quite right, of course, that most appeals to sentiment do not take the high ground shared by Aristotle and Shaftesbury.

He broadly counterposes virtue to rules.

“[S]uppose that we need to attend to virtues in the first place in order to understand the function and authority of rules; we ought then to begin the enquiry in the quite different way from that in which it is begun by Hume or Diderot or Kant or Mill. On this interestingly Nietzsche and Aristotle agree” (ibid).

This seems well said.

Illocution

Habermas wants to promote a notion of communicative rationality as “uncurtailed communication”, an orientation toward developing shared understanding. He even calls shared understanding the telos of human speech, in something close to an Aristotelian sense, although he generally uses “teleology” only in a negative way, as a mere utilitarian calculation of the means to realize empirical self-interest. But I find the ethical sense that he gives to communication to be very admirable.

“The positivization, legalization, and formalization of law mean that the validity of law can no longer feed off the taken-for-granted authority of moral traditions but requires an autonomous foundation, that is, a foundation that is not only relative to given ends. Moral consciousness can satisfy such a requirement only at the postconventional level. It is here that there first emerges the idea that legal norms are in principle open to criticism and in need of justification” (p. 260, emphasis in original).

He speaks here of the postconventional and posttraditional in law and ethics, as he elsewhere speaks of the postmetaphysical and the postsecular.

“These posttraditional basic concepts of law and morality are first developed and systematized in modern natural law theories. The model for justifying legal norms is an uncoerced agreement, arrived at by those affected, in the role of contractual partners who are in principle free and equal” (p. 261).

I really was not at all familiar with the early modern “natural law” tradition when I first encountered Brandom’s significant references to it. Here we reach another limitation that Habermas finds in Weber.

“Weber stresses precisely the structural properties connected with the formalism of a law that is systematized by specialists and with the positivity of norms that are enacted. He emphasizes the structural features I have elucidated as the positivity, legalism, and formality of law. But he neglects the moment of a need for rational justification; he excludes from the concept of modern law precisely the conceptions of rational justification that arose with modern theories of natural law in the seventeenth century…. It is in this way that Weber assimilates the law to an organizational means applied in a purposive-rational manner, detaches the rationalization of law from the moral-practical complex of rationality, and reduces it to a rationalization of means-ends relations” (p. 262).

This remark by Habermas seems to have large consequences. He points to an important principle of rational justification in the natural law tradition that goes beyond means-ends calculations, and criticizes Weber for deemphasizing it.

“Rational natural law, in its different versions from Hobbes and Locke through Rousseau and Kant to Hegel, … rests on a rational principle of justification and is, in terms of moral-practical rationalization, further advanced than the Protestant ethic, which is still founded on religion. Nevertheless, Weber does not hold it to be purely and simply an element of modern law. He wants to separate it carefully ‘from revealed, as well as from enacted and from traditional law’. Thus he constructs an antithesis between modern law in the strict sense, which rests only on the principle of enactment, and the not yet completely ‘formal’ law of modern natural law theories which rests upon principles of grounding (however rational). In his view, modern law is to be understood in a positivistic sense, as law that is enacted by decision and fully disconnected from rational agreement, from ideas of grounding in general, however formal they might be.” (p. 263, emphasis in original).

I did not realize that Weber had a decisionist theory of modern law. “Decisionist” views of law and politics, as Habermas points out, fundamentally appeal to authority rather than to meaning or reason. In my view, this means they ought to be shunned by anyone who cares about meaning or reasonableness.

“This argument is confusing because it combines, in an opaque manner, an immanent critique of the deficient radicalism of natural law conceptions of grounding that are not yet sufficiently formal with a transcendent critique of the need for principles of justification at all and clothes both in the guise of a criticism of the naturalistic fallacy. One might certainly raise the objection that the concept of natural rights still had strong metaphysical connotations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, with the model of a contract through which all legal associates, after rationally weighing their interests, regulate their common life as free and equal partners, modern natural law theorists were the first to meet the demand for a procedural grounding of law, that is, for a justification by principles whose validity could in turn be criticized. To this extent, ‘nature’ and ‘reason’ do not stand in this context for some metaphysical contents or other; rather, they circumscribe formal conditions which an agreement must satisfy if it is to have legitimating force, that is, if it is to be rational. Weber again confuses the formal properties of a postconventional level of justification with particular substantive values (p. 264).

“[A]ssuming that legitimacy is a necessary condition for the continued existence of every type of political domination, how can a legal domination whose legality is based on a law that is viewed in purely decisionistic terms (that is, a law that devalues all grounding in principle) be legitimated at all?” (pp. 264-265, emphasis in original).

Habermas has a marvelously sharp critique of attempts to separate law and politics from requirements for rational ethical justification. He distinguishes two very different kinds of “proceduralist” views of law. One is reductively empiricist and collapses the distinction between is and ought. At best it orients toward a kind of conformity or obedience. The other aims to ground “procedure” in rational ethics, conditions of dialogue, and what Habermas calls ideal speech situations.

“Legitimation through procedure does not mean here going back to formal conditions for the moral-practical justification of legal norms; it means rather keeping to procedural prescriptions in administering, applying, and enacting law. Legitimacy rests then on ‘belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands’. It remains unclear how the belief in legality is supposed to summon up the force of legitimation if legality means only conformity with an actually existing legal order, and if this order, as arbitrarily enacted law, is not in turn open to practical-moral justification. The belief in legality can produce legitimacy only if we already presuppose the legitimacy of the legal order that lays down what is legal. There is no way out of this circle…. The transitions between ‘agreed upon’ and ‘imposed’ order are fluid” (p. 265, emphasis added).

Empirical, factual conformity to law is no guarantee of moral rightness. The Nazi regime in Germany, for example, had a factual conformity to law, thanks in part to the apologetics of Carl Schmitt. This can hardly be taken to legitimate it.

“Notwithstanding these fluid transitions, the two sources of legitimacy on which the belief in legality depends can certainly be distinguished analytically: rationally motivated agreement versus the imposition of a powerful will” (p. 266).

Here he puts it very clearly. Legal/political “impositionism” is a kind of voluntarism. Like all voluntarism, it elevates arbitrary will above reason. This effectively destroys the space in which ethical reason could flourish, by eliminating the possibility of questioning whatever is imposed.

Habermas is very clear that there is a sharp opposition between any kind of authoritative “imposition” and agreement based on reasons. I find this highly commendable. Unlike Brandom, he does not get caught up in apologizing for the elements of impositionism that can also be found in the natural law tradition.

(Brandom even takes this so far as to retrospectively claim a historically progressive role for theological voluntarism. I think Brandom is a truly great philosopher overall, but on this particular issue Habermas seems to do much better. Brandom is quite right that the natural law theorists like Pufendorf introduced new ideas of holding authority to certain standards of reasonableness. But he takes the voluntarist element in Pufendorf to be an essential ingredient, rather than an unresolved inconsistency. Indeed everyone seems to call Pufendorf a political voluntarist. But my brief examination of Pufendorf did not find him emphasizing the justification of arbitrary actions, which is the sin qua non of voluntarism. Quite the contrary, his avowed emphasis seemed to be on reasonable standards. Pufendorf wrote during the age of absolute monarchies, when any advocate of limitations on the monarch’s prerogative had to write cautiously.)

“Belief in the legality of a procedure cannot per se — that is, in virtue of positive enactment — produce legitimacy” (ibid).

Legality is a mere fact. Rightness is an ideal.

“Weber confuses an appeal to the need to justify legal domination — that is, an attempt to go back to the legitimating foundation of rational agreement — with an appeal to particular values” (p. 267).

Habermas is saying that Weber treats criteria of reasonableness in law and politics as inevitably particularist. Habermas sharply rejects this conclusion, as do I.

“Weber forcefully works out the formal properties of modern law, on the basis of which it is suited as a means of organization for subsystems of purposive-rational action. But he restricts the concept of law positivistically to such an extent that he can neglect the moral-practical aspect of rationalization (the principle of justification) and take account only of its cognitive-instrumental aspect (the principle of enactment). Weber considers the advances of modern legal development exclusively from the standpoint of formal rationality, that is, of a value-neutral, means-ends, systematic shaping of spheres of action, which is tailored to the type of strategic action. The rationalization of law is then no longer measured against the inner logic of the moral-practical sphere of value, as is that of ethics and life-conduct; it is directly connected to the progress of knowledge in the cognitive-instrumental sphere of value” (p. 268).

This is to say that despite his commendable neo-Kantian scruples regarding the importance of values, Weber aims to completely withdraw questions of value from law and politics.

“The assumption — which sprang up with legal positivism and was adopted and overextended by social-scientific functionalism — that normative validity claims could be withdrawn, without any noteworthy consequences for the stability of the legal system in the consciousness of the system’s members, is empirically untenable” (p. 269).

I quite agree with Habermas that a policy that is disconnected from all values cannot and does not govern in real life. But it matters a lot whether we criticize the empiricist freedom from values from a point of view of inquiry into reasons, or from a traditionalist point of view that takes reasons for granted, and treats the questioning of authority as improper.

“This leads to a rather ironic consequence for Weber’s diagnosis of the times. He deplores the switch from ethical to purely utilitarian action orientations…. Thus he ought to welcome movements that are directed against parallel tendencies in the law…. [But] Weber regards as detracting from the formal qualities of law not only traditionalist attempts to reideologize it but also progressive efforts to reattach it to procedural requirements for grounding” (ibid).

Apparently, Weber regards the formal positivity of law (the principle of “enactment”) as having more to do with the rationalization of modern society — which he sees in terms of technique — than any substantive inquiry into reasons. Habermas traces this to defects in the way action is understood.

“It is not my intention to pursue a critique of ideology probing the roots of this inconsistency. I am concerned with the immanent reasons for Weber’s inability to carry through his theory of rationalization as it is set up…. First, I want to unearth certain bottlenecks in the concept formation of his action theory…. Second, I would like to show that the ambiguity in the rationalization of law cannot be grasped at all within the limits of a theory of action” (p. 270).

This is extremely important. Meaning is not adequately explainable by the mental intentions of nominal subjects. Along with Habermas, Paul Ricoeur and Alain de Libera have pointed out major blockages in the 20th-century “theory of action”. Gwenaëlle Aubry has developed an Aristotelian alternative that I rather like. Brandom has developed a new normative pragmatics and a new inferentialist semantics. He sees Kant as having developed a highly original alternative notion of intentionality that is based on shareable notions of responsibility and commitment, rather than on attributions of private subjective consciousness or belief.

“Intentionalist semantics is based on the counterintuitive idea that understanding the meaning of a symbolic expression X can be traced back to understanding the intention of speaker S…. 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” (pp. 274-275).

Linguistic expressions have a degree of objectivity, substantiality, or seriousness mainly because they are shareable. About the private intentions and mental states of speakers we can only speculate in the ordinary pejorative, non-Hegelian sense. With what is said on the other hand (at the level of understandable meaning and what Habermas calls validity claims, not that of putative bare fact or event), we can go much further.

“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, that is, sentences whose form is determined by syntactic rules and whose semantic content is determined by relations to designated objects or states of affairs. With Carnap’s logical syntax and the basic assumption of referential 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” (p. 276).

“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 Dummet 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. 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 of 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 mini-history of 20th-century philosophy of language is very close to that put forward by Brandom, who calls Habermas one of his heros. (Habermas in turn sympathetically cites Rorty.)

Habermas is enthusiastic about Austin and Searle’s work on speech acts, and points out that this belongs to the more generally neglected area of the pragmatics of language. I think this predates Brandom’s major original work on a normative pragmatics.

“The limits of this approach become visible as soon as the different modes of using sentences are brought under formal consideration…. Along the line from the later Wittgenstein through Austin to 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” (p. 277).

Here we touch on Habermas’s version of the critique of representationalism. In its place he suggests that we address a multiplicity of illocutionary forces (taking force in the Fregean linguistic sense, rather than the more common one). Habermas strongly ties Austin’s “illocution” — or the doing involved in speech acts — with conditions and practices for evaluation of what he calls validity claims, as distinct from claims of truth.

“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. 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).

One of the areas in which Habermas has been criticized has been his avowed commitment to a form of “cognitivism”. But once again, the vocabulary is ambiguous. Cognitivism could mean anything from the view that all judgment is exclusively of a calculating sort, to the view that value judgments depend on interpretation of meaning. Habermas rejects the former, and endorses the latter. He emphasizes that there are also “noncognitive” elements in speech acts.

“For this purpose the paradigm change in philosophy of language that was introduced by J. L. Austin … 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 for the choice of ontological presuppositions in the theory of language…. It is with this in mind that I have proposed that we do not set illocutionary force over against propositional content as an irrational force, but conceive of it as the component which specifies which validity claim a speaker is raising with his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what” (pp. 277-278).

Illocutionary force is “the component which specifies which validity claim a speaker is raising with his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what”. This seems like a nice alternative to subject-centered notions of intentionality.

“With the illocutionary force of an utterance a speaker can motivate a hearer to accept the offer contained in his speech act and thereby accede to a rationally motivated binding (or bonding, Bindung) force” (p. 278).

He criticizes the appeals that Weber and others make to consciousness, as if it were a source. We ought to look at shareable meaning instead. The only thing that makes anything binding is the so-called force of reasons.

“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” (p. 279).

“Weber does not start with 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 an existing situation and the truth of the empirical assertions that underlie the maxim or the plan of action — that is, the subjective belief about a purposive-rational organization of means” (p. 281).

Here he enumerates symptoms of what he calls a “monological” (opposite to dialogical) exclusive focus on what I would call a modern interpretation of efficient causality as a basis for explanation. He emphasizes the second-person, “I-Thou” communicative aspect of reason over the more common reduction of everything to first- and third-person (“subjective” and “objective”) points of view. He is arguing that the reason we ought to care about and cultivate has an I-Thou character, first and foremost.

“A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party, whether instrumentally through intervention in the situation directly or strategically through influencing the decisions of opponents. 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).

I want to cheer when I read things like this.

“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 one another. Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech…. The concepts of speech and understanding reciprocally interpret one another” (ibid, emphasis added).

I think Plato and Aristotle were very aware of this reciprocity between speech and understanding, but it got largely forgotten later on. Plato centrally stresses open dialogue and questioning as the way to truth. Aristotle develops a whole art of simultaneously addressing linguistic meaning, reality, and ultimate rightness in a balanced way that anticipates many points in Kant and Hegel.

“”[E]xamples 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.”

Here consequences are understood in a modern causal sense, and not a logical or inferential one. Consequences and truth conditions were the main concern of earlier analytic philosophy. There is an ethical view called “consequentialism” that judges deeds strictly by their outcome, and is closely related to utilitarianism.

“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” (p. 288, emphasis in original).

This is very important. Second-person communication is more primary than third-person representation. Habermas recalls Austin’s three-way distinction among speech acts.

“Through locutionary acts the speaker addresses states of affairs; he says something. Through illocutionary acts the speaker performs an action in saying something…. Finally, through perlocutionary acts the speaker produces an effect upon the hearer…. 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 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” (pp. 288-289).

The kind of meaning we should care most about links the “manifest” meaning of what is said with the pragmatics of justification. Representational and truth-conditional semantics are logistical tools that should be in service to a broader pragmatic inquiry. Brandom has developed an original inferential semantics, in close connection with a normative pragmatics that he considers ultimately to be more primary.

“What we mean by reaching understanding has to be clarified solely in connection with illocutionary acts” (p. 293).

This follows from his description of the three kinds of speech acts.

“I have called the type of interaction in which all participants harmonize their individual plans of action with one another and thus pursue their illocutionary aims without reservation ‘communicative action’ (p. 294, emphasis in original).

Now he says that the whole huge topic he has been addressing as distinctively communicative action revolves around illocution.

“Thus I count as communicative action those linguistically mediated interactions in which all participants pursue illocutionary aims, and only illocutionary aims” (p. 295, emphasis in original).

He glosses this in terms of the “acceptability” of speech acts.

“We understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable” (p. 297, emphasis in original).

“A speech act may be called ‘acceptable’ if it satisfies the conditions that are necessary in order that the hearer be allowed to take a ‘yes’ position on the claim raised by the speaker. These conditions cannot be satisfied one-sidedly, either relative to the speaker or to the hearer. They are conditions rather for the intersubjective recognition of a linguistic claim” (p. 298, emphasis in original).

“Registering a validity claim is not the expression of a contingent will; and responding affirmatively to a validity claim is not merely an empirically motivated decision…. Validity claims are internally connected with reasons and grounds” (p. 301, emphasis in original).

This is the beginning of wisdom.

“That a speaker means what he says can be made credible only in the consistency of what he does and not through providing grounds” (p. 303).

In an earlier post, we saw that Habermas carefully distinguishes between truth, validity, and sincerity.

“We have distinguished genuine imperatives, with which the speaker connects a claim to power, from speech acts with which the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim” (p. 304).

Claims of authority too are qualitatively different from claims of validity or general reasonableness. In discussions of validity, authority as such has no place. To bring claims of authority into a discussion of reasons, where claims of authority have no place, is a kind of cheating.

“We discover the incompleteness of the literal meaning of expressions only through a sort of problematizing that is not directly under our control. It emerges as a result of problems that appear objectively and have an unsettling effect on our natural worldview. The fundamental background knowledge that must tacitly supplement our knowledge of the acceptability conditions of linguistically standardized expressions if hearers are to be able to understand their literal meanings, has remarkable features: It is an implicit knowledge that cannot be represented in a finite number of propositions; it is a holistically structured knowledge, the basic elements of which intrinsically define one another; and it is a knowledge that does not stand at our disposition, inasmuch as we cannot make it conscious and place it in doubt as we please” (p. 336, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Second-Person Thinking?

Authority, Representation, Pragmatism

The controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty was a mentor and colleague of Robert Brandom. In the essay I will treat here, he presents himself as especially identifying with the pragmatism of John Dewey. 

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty’s 1967 edited collection The Linguistic Turn “did much to cement the idea of a linguistic turn… as a sea change in the history of philosophy”. He came to sharply criticize analytic philosophy as then practiced, as well as the prevailing self-perception of modern science, but did so from a modernist point of view.

Rorty is best known for his radical critique of modern representationalism — from Descartes to analytic philosophy — in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Like Brandom’s more constructive development of an “inferentialist” alternative approach to meaning in Making It Explicit (1994), that book takes as its point of departure Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the Myth of the Given in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, and W. V. O. Quine’s essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. 

Here, however, I will focus on Rorty’s very informal 1999 essay “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism”. For an initial sketch of my own views relevant to this, see Authority. This is all in preparation for upcoming coverage of recent lectures by Brandom that shed new light on Brandom’s extremely important work, by explicitly relating it to Rorty’s.

Rorty begins, “There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’ criticism of the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality and the Enlightenment’s criticism of the idea that morality is a matter of correspondence to the will of a Divine Being. The pragmatists’ anti-representationalist account of belief is, among other things, a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. Seeing anti-representationalism is a version of anti-authoritarianism permits one to appreciate an analogy which was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to accept the distinction between Reality and Appearance” (p. 7).

The parallelism he points out between two kinds of correspondence does seem significant. This is actually the main contribution of Rorty’s essay. However, the essay’s main body consists of Rorty’s historical storytelling about pragmatism, with a digression on Freud’s critique of religion.

The formulation about ceasing to accept the distinction between appearance and reality is too blunt. Their relation is very far from being a simple binary opposition, but they cannot simply be identical either. Explanation, understanding, and intelligibility depend on making distinctions of degrees of reality within appearance. This is part of what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

Epistemological foundationalism — typically associated with a correspondence theory of truth — is the claim that there is such a thing as noninferential knowledge. I say that whatever is claimed to be noninferential knowledge is not knowledge at all in the proper sense, but rather what Plato called opinion (doxa). And again, knowledge in Aristotle’s sense is an ability to explain itself. Explanation appeals to inference, not to a supposed registering of brute facts. Foundationalism is dogmatic in Kant’s sense. It puts ultimate principles beyond any possibility of explanation or understanding. This also makes it arbitrary.

Representationalist theories of knowledge are implicitly foundationalist, and commonly have recourse to a correspondence theory of truth. Pragmatism, meanwhile, is largely defined by its opposition to the correspondence theory. Pragmatists also tend to downplay the distinction between ontology and epistemology. It does seem that the correspondence theory of truth implies something like Rorty’s Reality with a capital R, that is what it is entirely independent of the knower. This ignores the essential role of interpretation and relating things together in understanding.

What Brandom calls the authority-obedience model of normativity is presented by Rorty, not unreasonably, as an insistence on simple correspondence or conformity to the presumed will of God. Simple obedience and simple correspondence have equally little use for reasons or reasoning. For them, everything is supposed to be a matter of sheer fact, with no thought required in its uptake. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic preceded the pragmatists in showing that purported facts alone (mere being or objects of immediate consciousness, in Hegel’s terms) do not provide an adequate basis for either understanding or ethical action.

Some of Rorty’s claims about Dewey have been disputed. Not knowing Dewey very well, I am unsure how close the part about ceasing to believe in Sin is to Dewey’s own ways of expressing himself. Rorty doesn’t say much here about what he means by the belief in Sin that he rejects, but I think his idea is that it stresses mere obedience over actual ethical goodness.

I would say that the kind of view that unequivocally puts divine will or command first, above any consideration of the good, is far from accurately typifying all religion. Such radical voluntarism or commandism is indeed horrible in its consequences, but it is certainly not good Thomism, to mention but one example. 

Much more common than radical voluntarism are views that equivocate in this area. Rorty seems to lump those who equivocate together with the unequivocal voluntarists. But Leibniz sought to convince equivocating mainstream theologians to actively side with him against radical voluntarism. I like this more optimistic point of view.

Pragmatists are generally recognized as having their own distinctive theories of truth — in one way or another emphasizing the roles it plays in human practices — in competition with the correspondence theory, which is closely tied to representationalism. The correspondence theory of truth, while formally distinct from any particular variety of philosophical realism, at the same time seems to suggest a kind of naive realism that is difficult to separate from the dogmatism that was criticized by Kant. I put Aristotle closer to the pragmatists here than to medieval or modern realists or representationalists.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved. As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans” (ibid).

Democracy and consensus were strong themes of Dewey’s. But even to my shallow acquaintance, the picture Rorty paints of Dewey’s views of religion is a bit one-sided. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey seems to aim to heal the rift between science and religion. He says in effect that the dogmatically religious and the dogmatically anti-religious both identify religion with belief in the supernatural. Dewey rejects that identification, as Hegel does. As a pragmatist, he is more concerned with what people actually do in their lives.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was quite willing to say of a vicious act that it was sinful, and of ‘2+2=5’ or ‘Elizabeth the First’s reign ended in 1623’ that these sentences were absolutely, unconditionally, eternally, false. But he was unwilling to gloss ‘sinful’ or ‘falsehood’ in authoritarian terms. He did not want to say that a power not ourselves had forbidden cruelty, nor that these false sentences fail to accurately represent the way Reality is in itself. He thought it much clearer that we should not be cruel than that there was a God who had forbidden us to be cruel, and much clearer that Elizabeth I died in 1603 than that there is any way things are ‘in themselves’. He viewed the theory that truth is correspondence to Reality, and the theory that moral goodness is correspondence to the Divine Will, as equally dispensable.”

“For Dewey, both theories add nothing to our ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling right from wrong, and truth from falsity. But their pointlessness is not the real problem. What Dewey most disliked about both traditional ‘realist’ epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something Inscrutable, something toward which we have duties, duties which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid pain and obtain pleasure” (pp. 8-9).

These two paragraphs seem pretty solid. He then gives a capsule history of pragmatism, seemingly intended as a sort of advertisement. In another part, he says one of the things he likes about Dewey is Dewey’s historical storytelling. Here Rorty practices such storytelling himself.

“Peirce kicked pragmatism off by starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action. Starting from this definition, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. This means getting rid of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes — and especially of the idea of intuitive self-knowledge, knowledge unmediated by signs” (p. 10).

Hegel was Pierce’s great predecessor in the critique of representation. This has not been adequately appreciated. And Dewey’s views on democracy in part reflect a continued serious engagement with broadly Hegelian themes.

“Peirce was anti-foundationalist, coherentist, and holist in his view of the nature of inquiry. But he did not, as most of Hegel’s anglophone followers did, think of God as an all-inclusive, atemporal experience which is identical with Reality. Rather, as a good Darwinian, Peirce thought of the universe as evolving. His God was a finite deity who is somehow identical with an evolutionary process” (ibid).

James and Dewey “focused on the profound anti-Cartesian implications of Peirce’s development of Bain’s initial anti-representationalist insight. They developed a non-representationalist theory of belief acquisition and testing” (ibid).

“Peirce thought of himself as a disciple of Kant, improving on Kant’s doctrine of categories and his conception of logic. A practicing mathematician and laboratory scientist, he was more interested in these areas of culture than were James or Dewey. James took neither Kant nor Hegel very seriously, but was far more interested in religion than either Peirce or Dewey. Dewey, deeply influenced by Hegel, was fiercely anti-Kantian. Education and politics, rather than science or religion, were at the center of his thought” (p. 11).

“James hoped to construct an alternative to the anti-religious, science worshipping, positivism of his day” (ibid).

“Dewey, in his early period, tried to bring Hegel together with evangelical Christianity” (ibid).

“The anti-positivist strain in classical pragmatism was at least as strong as its anti-metaphysical strain” (ibid).

“All of Dewey’s books are permeated by the typically nineteenth-century conviction that human history is the story of expanding human freedom” (p. 12).

“I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’ case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their Utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their ‘fit’ with the objects being described” (p. 14).

This idea of a plurality of noncompeting descriptions serving different purposes is no less important for being elementary. But for foundationalists and fundamentalists, everything has to reduce to black and white, and claims to truth are exclusive.

“If James’ watchword was tolerance, then Dewey’s was, as I have said, anti-authoritarianism. His revulsion from the sense of sinfulness which his religious upbringing had produced led Dewey to campaign, throughout his life, against the view that human beings needed to measure themselves against something non-human. Dewey used the term ‘democracy’ to mean something like what Habermas means by the term ‘communicative reason’: for him, the word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non human. This is why he grabbed hold of James’ pragmatic theory of truth” (ibid).

The connection he makes between Dewey and Habermas seems sound to me.

There is a multi-page digression on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I will skip. According to Rorty, Freud would have “seen worship of the bare Idea of Father as the origin of the conviction that it is knowledge, rather than love, which is the most distinctively human” (p. 18).

Here I must beg to differ. I see no polar opposition between knowledge and love. The twin pinnacles of Aristotle’s ethics are intellectual virtue, and friendship or love. Hegel stresses both as well. A principled rejection of epistemological foundationalism does not entail the rejection of knowledge — quite the contrary.

“This conviction of the importance of knowledge runs through the history of what Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’…. The quest for such a reassuring presence is, for all those who resonate to Aristotle’s claim that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, the proper way of life for the good child. To devote oneself to getting knowledge as opposed to opinion — to grasping unchanging structure as opposed to awareness of mutable and colorful content — one has to believe that one will be cleansed, purified of guilt and shame, by getting closer to something like Truth or Reality” (ibid).

The sharp Platonic opposition between knowledge and opinion is something I want to defend. I would completely dissociate it from bad or harmful concepts of authority and representation (still leaving aside the relation between these two). I would sooner associate bad or harmful concepts of authority with opinion that is claimed to take precedence over actual knowledge.

The story about Aristotle and presence is Heidegger’s, not Aristotle’s. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence really has nothing to do with Aristotle (his immediate target was actually Husserl). I agree that the metaphysics of presence — a variant of the privileging of immediacy that Hegel opposes — is a terrible idea. At least from the time of Plotinus and perhaps from that of the Stoics, the Western tradition has been affected by it. But to claim that the whole history of philosophy has been hegemonically dominated by it is a gross oversimplification.

Strangely, Rorty finishes, “[Dewey’s] anti-authoritarianism was a stage in the gradual replacement of a morality of obligation by a morality of love. This is the replacement which, in the West, is thought to have been initiated by certain passages in the New Testament” (p. 20).

I would say that the moment Socrates initiated the free ethical inquiry that was taken up and developed by Plato and Aristotle, the authority-obedience model no longer universally held sway. Plato and Aristotle are less beholden to it than the leading lights of the moderate Enlightenment. Even among the Latin scholastics, there was plenty of genuine inquiry.

Rorty never gets any further in explaining the relation between representationalism and authoritarianism that he began with. It seems this is just a provocative metaphor, with a conciliatory gesture at the end. But my real interest is in Brandom’s very different presentation, when he relates and contrasts his own work and Rorty’s.

The globally negative reference to obligation may also reflect Rorty’s very negative view of Kant. 

In a footnote, Rorty claims with winking anachronism that “eventually [Dewey’s] bete noir became the doctrine which [later writer Thomas] Nagel makes explicit: that something less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions which shape a human being’s moral identity is necessary if morality is not to be an illusion” (p. 16n).

This goes way beyond the scope of the rest of the essay. I have little appreciation for arguments that claim something else is necessary for morality to be possible, so I was hoping to find common ground. But now Rorty is objecting to anything “less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions”. To me, this sounds more like the positivism that the historic pragmatists opposed. 

The pragmatist tradition in general has an ambiguous relation to mainstream varieties of empiricism. Here Rorty sounds like an empiricist. 

Earlier in his career, he was known as a defender of eliminative materialism, the view that mental states simply do not exist. Coming from this kind of direction, he would scarcely have needed metaphorical talk about authoritarianism to arrive at a repudiation of representationalism. 

I’m very critical of the notion of mental states myself. But I don’t see this as a black-and-white question of whether or not something exists. It is rather a question of how we interpret things. Posing the question in terms of existence implies that there is nothing to interpret, that we already know what all the things in life are. This is an example of the attitude that Kant called dogmatic.

Authority

“Authority” is not one thing. Aristotle might remind us that it is said in many ways. Two of the most important have nearly opposite senses. One asserts an arbitrary power over others, or an entitlement to coerce others: “Do what you are told”. Why? “Because I said so”. The other is a kind of earned respect that is virtually identical with justification.

An important case is what is called argument from authority. There are practical situations in which very rapid response is required, and there is literally no time for debate. We don’t hesitate to simply grab a child who is in danger from an oncoming car, and we don’t consider this a violation of Kantian respect for others. We also tend to trust the judgment of those we judge to have good judgment. But in any situation in which what is good or what is true is disputed, argument from authority is basically cheating. 

“Because I said so” or “because someone in authority said so” is logically circular, and a circular argument does not establish anything. A particularly insidious version of this is appeals to the will of God, as if all by itself this were a criterion of what is right. 

What these conceal is the speaker’s unboundedly prideful implicit claim to personally know the will of God beyond any doubt, regardless of anyone else’s contrary view of what the will of God is. 

Plato in his dialogue Euthyphro portrays Socrates as asking whether we should say that a thing is holy because the gods love it, or on the contrary that the gods love a thing because it is holy. ”Because the gods love it” or “because it is God’s will” is logically equivalent to “because I said so”, because the speaker simply assumes it is beyond doubt that the speaker’s view is God’s view. 

Building on Plato, Leibniz asks whether a thing is good and just because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is good and just, and answers that it must be the latter, because to assert the former would make of God a tyrant rather than a being good and just. If on the other hand God is good and just, and therefore wills whatever is actually good and just in each situation, then we are responsible for understanding what is good and just in each case.

Claimed entitlements to coerce others should require substantial justification. We might be tempted to say that no one should ever coerce anyone else, but there are sociopaths and Nazis who do not respect others at all. The problem is that once an authority to coerce is instituted, it takes on a life of its own, and is prone to abuse. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But occasionally, coercion is the only way to avoid a greater evil. There are no easy answers here.

Primordial Choice?

Plotinus speaks of a primordial choice implicitly made by every human: to turn either toward the separated soul, or away from it. The idea is that such a choice comes first, and is not conditioned by anything. This is completely unlike Aristotle’s treatment of choice.

Aristotle discusses choice in the context of concrete ethical doings. A choice is the outcome of a deliberation, not something undertaken in a vacuum. Our freedom consists in many such choices, based on reasons. Our unfreedom consists in part in constraint by the cumulative consequences of all our previous choices.

(I call this particular kind of unfreedom superficial because because it is “unfree” mainly in the shallow sense that it is not completely unconditioned. A conditioning grounded in reasons that we assent to is very unlike a conditioning by relations of force. In a deeper sense, a grounding in reasons doesn’t at all make us less free; indeed, many philosophers have made a grounding in reasons the very criterion of freedom. Of course, our choices may also have unintended consequences, and we have to live with these as well. That is a less superficial unfreedom. And we may be swayed by passion or imagination, which is another kind. Or we may be constrained by relations of force.)

In modern times, various writers have abstracted the notion of unconditioned choice even further, so that in principle anything could be a matter of purely arbitrary decision. Completely unconditioned choice can only be arbitrary. Here lie the seeds of tyranny. (See also Desire of the Master.)

Free Will in Plotinus

“Can there be question as to whether the gods have voluntary action? Or are we to take it that while we may well inquire in the case of men with their combination of powerlessness and hesitating power, the gods must be declared omnipotent, not merely some things but all lying at their nod? Or is power entire, freedom of action in all things, to be reserved to one alone…?” (Plotinus, Enneads VI.8.1, MacKenna tr., p. 595).

Plotinus in his treatise “On Free Will and the Will of the One” makes arguments that are unprecedented in the previous history of Greek philosophy. The treatise seems to show some (perhaps indirect) influence from the voluntaristic theology of Philo of Alexandria, as well as from Stoic theories of assent and of the so-called hegemonikon, a sort of ruling master faculty in humans that begins to approximate modern notions of a strongly unitary “mind”. It is noteworthy that free will and omnipotence are mentioned together from the outset.

It is especially common for writings on this subject to go through many twists and turns, since there are obvious appearances pointing in conflicting directions. Plotinus ends up advocating a fairly extreme position on these matters, but he is a serious enough thinker to feel the need to deal with conflicting evidence.

“The very notion of power must be scrutinized lest in this ascription we be really setting up an antithesis of power (potency) and Act, and identifying power with Act not yet achieved” (ibid).

Here he is implicitly responding to Aristotle. Given that he in general both shifts the meaning of Aristotelian potentiality back in the direction of Platonic power and emphasizes the unlimited power of the One unconstrained by any actuality, it is interesting that he recognizes there is an issue with “identifying power with Act not yet achieved”.

“To begin with, what must be intended when we assert that something is in our power; what is the conception here?” (ibid).

Aristotle had implicitly introduced the consideration of what is “in our power” in discussing moral responsibility for “willing” and “unwillling” actions. This became the basis of a key distinction in Stoic ethics: Epictetus says that only what is in our power is good or evil.

Plotinus writes, “A cardinal question is where we are to place the freedom of action ascribed to us…. But if rage or desire implied freedom we must allow freedom to animals, infants, maniacs, the distraught, the victims of malpractice producing uncontrollable delusions. And if freedom turns on calculation with desire, does this include faulty calculation? Sound calculation, no doubt, and sound desire; but then comes the question whether the appetite stirs the calculation or the calculation stirs the appetite…. Further, every emotion is preceded by some meager reasoning; how then can a compelling imagination, an appetite drawing us where it will, be supposed to leave us masters in the ensuing act?” (VI.8.2, p. 596).

Here he clearly recognizes that meaningful freedom must be something more subtle than just arbitrarily doing what we want. No emotion is completely devoid of reason, but he recognizes that we are often driven mainly by imagination and appetite. This will not qualify as free.

“We may be reminded that the Living Form and the Soul know what they do. But if this knowledge is by perception it does not help us toward the freedom of the act; perception gives awareness, not mastery” (p. 597).

He uses the term “knowledge” loosely here, but recognizes that mere awareness is superficial.

“We have traced self-disposal to will, will to reasoning and, next step, to right reasoning; perhaps to right reasoning we must add knowledge, for however sound opinion and act may be, they do not yield true freedom when the adoption of the right course is the result of hazard or of some presentment from the fancy with no knowledge of the foundation of that rightness” (VI.8.3, p. 597).

Up to this point he has mentioned will, but not given an account of it. The account comes a bit later in the text. But it is clear that he sees will as intimately involved with reason and intellect, as well as being a free power to choose. There is implicit tension between these two aspects, which will affect many later thinkers as well.

“Self-disposal, to us, belongs to those who, through the activities of the Intellectual-Principle, live above the states of the body” (ibid).

Now we come to what seems to be the main point of his solution. Pure intellect and what he calls the separated soul are by definition exempt from the passions and imagination that sway us embodied humans this way and that. But he maintains that we have an intimate connection to the separated soul, and that through this connection, freedom can be ours as well.

“Effort is free once it is toward a fully recognized good; the involuntary is, precisely, motion away from a good and toward the enforced, towards something not recognized as a good” (VI.8.4, p. 598).

He remains close enough to Plato and Aristotle to want to also tie freedom to the good, which Plato says all beings desire.

“[B]ut an undivided Principle, a simplex Activity, where there can be no difference of potentiality and act, must be free; there can be no thought of ‘action according to nature’, in the sense of any distinction between the being and its efficiency, there where being and act are identical…. In a principle, act and essence must be free” (ibid).

Here he takes a more radical step, guided by abstract thinking about what “must” be true about Principles. This kind of approach is not completely absent in Plato and Aristotle, but plays a much more central role in Plotinus. He seems to be saying that when we orient ourselves by the separated soul, we are no longer governed by a nature at all.

“If freedom is to be allowed to the soul in its Act, it certainly cannot be allowed in regard to issue, for we are not master of events: if in regard to fine conduct and all inspired by the Intellectual-Principle, that may very well be freedom; but is the freedom ours?” (VI.8.5, p. 598).

If events do not turn out as we had wished, our effective action in the world will not count as having been “free”. He recognizes also that it does not follow automatically that because pure intellect is free, we are free.

“If thus virtue whose manifestation requires action becomes inevitably a collaborator under compulsion, how can it have untrammeled self-disposal? Should we, perhaps, distinguish between compulsion in the act and freedom in the preceding will and reasoning? But in setting freedom in these preceding functions, we imply that virtue has a freedom and self-disposal apart from all act; then we must state what is the reality of the self-disposal attributed to virtue as a state or disposition” (p. 599).

This is indeed the path that he will follow.

“Virtue does not follow upon occurrences as a saver of the imperilled; at its discretion it sacrifices a man; it may decree the jettison of life, means, children, country even; it looks to its own high aim and not to the self-regarding of anything lower. Thus our freedom of act, our self-disposal, must be referred not to the doing, not to the external thing but to the inner activity, to the Intellection, to virtue’s own vision” (VI.8.6, p. 599).

It sounds as though he thinks virtue inheres in the separated soul.

He seems to want to say that virtue is completely independent of any necessity — not only of external compulsion, but also of any constraint by universals. I think Kant sometimes goes too far with the analogy between a “should” and formal necessity; what Plotinus says here suggests he wants to go too far in the opposite direction, effectively denying any real substance to a “should”. Of course he would object to this latter conclusion, since he clearly wants to tie freedom to the good, but it seems to me that it follows anyway. His stance seems to imply that good is whatever a “good” will wills. This is opposite in spirit to Plato’s Euthyphro. Either it is circular, or it implies a kind of voluntarism.

“This makes it all the more evident that the unembodied is the free; to this our self-disposal is to be referred; herein lies our will which remains free and self-disposing in spite of any orders which it may necessarily utter to meet the external. All then that issues from will and is the effect of will is our free action, whether the will is directed outwards or remains unattached; all that will adopts and brings, unimpeded, into existence is in the highest degree at our free disposal.”

Now he has turned things around so that all willing is free. This depends on a new assumption that seems to locate the will in the separated soul, which does make sense if we accept what he has said. The claim seems to be that we can say that the will of the separated soul chooses which “orders” to give in unconditional freedom, in spite of the fact that the content of all particular orders is conditioned by external factors.

“The contemplating Intellect, the first or highest, has self-disposal to the point that its operation is utterly independent; it turns wholly upon itself; at rest in its good it is without need, complete, and may be said to live to its will; there the will is intellection: it is called will because it expresses the Intellectual-Principle in the willing phase and besides, what we know as will imitates this operation taking place within the Intellectual-Principle” (p. 600).

He goes on to argue at length that since pure intellect is free, the One must be so to an even higher degree. Many have seen a strong element of necessity in his view of the procession of everything else from the One. Plotinus seems elsewhere to say that if we look bottom-up, there appears to be necessity, but here he claims that from a top-down perspective, the One is absolutely free, and beings inherit a portion of that freedom through the operations of procession. By means of the separated soul, he claims that we participate in this.

Others might question whether we humans really have access to such a top-down perspective. Basically no one — even the later Greek neoplatonists — has fully embraced Plotinus’ notion of the separated soul. But many later monotheists found the sort of conclusions that he reached attractive nonetheless, and sought alternate grounds for embracing them. For example, although the scholastic “intellectual soul” is embodied rather than separated, like Plotinus’ separated soul it has many very “strong” attributes that do not come from Aristotle.

Is and Ought in Actuality

Aristotle regards the priority of actuality over potentiality to be one of his most important innovations. He regards it as a necessary condition for anything being intelligible. Along with the primacy of the good and that-for-the-sake-of-which in explanation, it is also central to his way of arguing for a first cause.

The Western tradition generally did not follow Aristotle on these points. Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin monotheisms have most often treated God as an absolute power, seeking to put unlimited omnipotence first in the order of explanation, before goodness. Christians were happy to criticize occasionalism in Islam, but theologians like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham defended an extreme sort of theological voluntarism, which was taken up again by Descartes. In the 19th century, Kierkegaard valorized Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as unconditional obedience to God, claiming that faith should take precedence over ethics generally. In the 20th century, Sartre defended unconditional free will for humans, while asserting a militant atheism and the absurdity of existence. His currently influential follower Alain Badiou goes even further. He bluntly says that concern for ethics is a waste of time, and that dialogue and democracy are a scam — not just in particular cases, but in general.

Mainstream views of religion have always insisted that the absolute power is also absolutely good, but have been unable to show why or how this is the case. This has opened the door to simplistic but unanswerable arguments that the facts of the world cannot be reconciled with claims that it is governed by a good absolute power.

Instead of sacrificing ethics and the good on either religious or secular grounds, we should put them first. Leibniz argues that an emphasis on the absolute power or arbitrary will of God is bad theology, and effectively makes God into the kind of tyrant that Plato denounced (see also Euthyphro; Arbitrariness, Inflation).

Aristotle’s first cause doesn’t govern the facts of the world. It is the world’s normative compass. It is the pure good and pure fulfillment that all things seek, according to their natures and insofar as they are capable. Or as Hegel might say, it is pure Idea.

The priority of actuality is a priority of the good and of normativity. For Aristotle, we shouldn’t call something “actual” just because it exists or is the case. Rather, something is actual when it is the case that it is fulfilling its potential, as it “ought” to do.

It is not a matter of pure moralism either though. Actuality does involve an element of being the case; it is just not reducible to that. What is true also matters quite a lot in the determination of what is right, even though it is not all that matters. Every particular good is interdependent with particular truth. That is why Aristotle seems to make the understanding of causes into one of the most important elements of virtue, while at the same time cautioning us that ethics is not a matter of exact knowledge.

We are looking for a kind of mean here. What is true matters for what is right, but what is right also matters for what is true. Truth is not reducible to a matter of neutral fact. There can be no truth without intelligibility, and there can be no intelligibility without taking normative considerations into account in interpretation.

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?.)

Formalist Existentialism?

The English translation of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event III: The Immance of Truths has just been published. There is not much in this book that I would recognize as philosophy; neither other philosophers nor questions of interpretation are discussed at any length. Badiou primarily wants to assert that actual infinity is established by classical set theory as an “absolute ontological referent”.

Badiou’s deepest influences are Sartrean existentialism and what at first appears to be a kind of extreme formalist view of mathematics. For Sartre, what distinguishes the human is an ability to make utterly arbitrary choices. Such views have historically been justified by appeals to human likeness to an omnipotent God that, while commonly raised by religious sectarians, actually diverge from more broadly accepted views of orthodoxy in religion, which temper appeals to raw infinite power by emphasizing that God is good and more reasonable than we are, and therefore does not act arbitrarily. Sartre and Badiou, however, are both militant atheists who aim to ground the argument for human arbitrariness in some other, nonreligious way.

I think what we need for ethics is to recognize that we are beings who partake of an active character. We do things, and along the way we make choices between alternatives, but real-world decisions — the only kind there are — are never made in a vacuum. I think activity necessarily involves purposefulness (seeking some good, i.e., something judged by someone to be good in some way, even if we would completely reject the judgment). Any kind of purpose at all is incompatible with complete arbitrariness. (See also Beings.) But Badiou would disqualify this whole line of thought, because he doesn’t believe in ethics or in purposes that are independent of arbitrary decision.

I call Badiou’s appeals to formalism in mathematics extreme because — utterly contrary to the spirit of the early 20th century program of David Hilbert, which is usually taken as the paradigm of mathematical formalism — Badiou claims that his formalist arguments directly apply to the real world. Even so-called mathematical Platonism only asserts the independence of mathematical objects, and nothing like the immediate relevance to politics claimed by Badiou. The whole point of Hilbert’s formalism is that it doesn’t care about the real world at all. For Hilbert, mathematics consisted in purely hypothetical elaboration of the consequences of arbitrary axioms and definitions. He likened this to a kind of game.

Badiou’s use of purely formal elaboration from arbitrary starting points is decidedly not hypothetical; it is combined with an extreme realism. According to Badiou, Paul Cohen’s theorems about generic subsets, for instance, are supposed to directly lead to political consequences that are supposed to be liberating. We are supposed to get some enlightenment from considering, e.g., immigrant workers as a generic subset, and this is supposed to represent a kind of unconditional or “absolute” truth that is nonetheless immanent to our concrete experience. But the treatment of arbitrary hypotheses as unconditional truths is utterly contrary to what Hegel meant by “absolute” knowledge, which I would argue is really supposed to involve the exact opposite of arbitrariness. Hegel’s “absolute” is about as far from Badiou’s “absolute ontological referent” as could be. (See also Hegelian Finitude.)

I am only a moderately well-informed mathematical layman and claim no deep understanding of Cohen’s results, but the basic idea of a generic set or subset seems to be that it is an arbitrary selection of elements from some pre-existing set. Being arbitrary, it has no definition or characteristic function (other than by sheer enumeration of its elements). But in classical set theories, new sets and subsets can be formed from an arbitrary set. Badiou relates this to Georg Cantor’s proof that any set has more subsets than elements. In itself, I find the latter unobjectionable. But Badiou likes classical set theory because it gives a putative mathematical respectability both to arbitrary beginnings and to actual infinity. (See also Categorical “Evil”; Infinity, Finitude.)

According to Badiou, belief in actual infinity is revolutionary and good, whereas disbelief in actual infinity is conservative and bad. Infinity is supposed to be revolutionary precisely because it is unbounded. This just means that it can be used as a putative license for arbitrariness. I want to insist on the contrary that there is nothing socially progressive about arbitrariness! Badiou’s recommended political models are the chaotic Maoist cultural revolution of the 1960s and the ephemeral May 1968 Paris uprising. I don’t see that the oppressed of the world gained any benefit from either.

Badiou explicitly endorses arguments of the notorious Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt that were used to justify a permanent “state of exception” in which absolute political power is asserted. This intellectual red-brown coalition is unfortunately being taken seriously by some academic leftists. The unifying theme is the claim that metaphysical support for arbitrariness is the key to achieving social justice. There are much better ways…

Spinoza on Teleology

“All the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end” (Spinoza, Collected Works vol. I, Curley trans., p. 439).

“[I]t follows, first, that men think themselves free, because they are conscious of their volitions and their appetite, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant of [those causes]. It follows, secondly, that men always act on account of an end, viz. on account of their advantage, which they want. Hence they seek to know only the final causes of what has been done, and when they have heard them, they are satisfied, because they have no reason to doubt further” (p. 440).

“Hence, they consider all natural things as means to their own advantage. And knowing that they had found these means, not provided them for themselves, they had reason to believe that there was someone else who had prepared those means for their use. For after they considered things as means, they could not believe that the things had made themselves; but from the means that they were accustomed to prepare for themselves, they had to infer that there was a ruler, or a number of rulers of nature, endowed with human freedom, who had taken care of all things for them, and had made all things for their use” (pp. 440-441).

The famous appendix to book 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics, from which the above is excerpted, is a sort of psychological exposé of the superstition-like attitude behind the kind of “external” teleology that sees everything in terms of ends, but treats all ends as resulting from the conscious aims or will of a supernatural being or beings, more or less on the model of what theologians have called “particular providence”.

But though he explicitly refers only to this kind of conscious providence that implies ongoing supernatural intervention in the ordinary workings of the world, he nonetheless in an unqualified way dismisses all explanation in terms of ends. At the same time, the notion of determination or causality that he does acknowledge as genuine is too narrow and rigid (too univocal). (See also Thoughts on Teleology.)

Most of the historic criticisms of Spinoza have been extremely unfair; this includes remarks by Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Spinoza rightly pointed out that we tend to overrate the role of conscious intentions in human affairs and the workings of the world. But Leibniz rightly pointed out that Spinoza’s exclusive emphasis on unconditional divine power or omnipotence (as contrasted with goodness) — which reduces everything to efficient causes — has undesirable consequences.