Contingency

While researching Duns Scotus for the recent series, I ran across an article claiming that Scotus provides an underpinning for what it called the modern view of contingency. Once again, Aristotle’s concern for things said in many ways is extremely relevant for making sense of this.

Ordinarily, contingency is only involved when one thing depends on another. When one thing depends on another, we say that it is conditional. That which is conditional is not in itself necessary. It is also called possible. But possibility itself is ambiguous. Many things that are logically possible are not practically or “really” possible.

Logical possibility includes anything that is not self-contradictory or “incompossible”, as Leibniz would say. This kind of possibility is a fundamental concept of modal logic, where analysis in terms of possible worlds has become dominant since the 1960s, due to the influence of the analytic philosopher Saul Kripke. The term “possible worlds” is inspired by Leibniz, who argued that creation should be rigorously understood as applying only to a whole “compossible” world.

The requirement of compossibility or realizable combination treats every possible world as a rational whole, in which things have real dependencies on other things. Even God will never actually do things that are not “possible together”.

This is not compatible with extremist claims that eternal or even logically necessary truths could be arbitrarily revoked at any time, or that there simply are no eternal or necessary truths.

It is easy to draw illegitimate, sophistical conclusions about what seem to be eternal or necessary truths. That does not mean that there are none, only that the way to clarity in these matters is difficult. But advocates of what are really extremist views take advantage of this, to draw illegitimate, sophistical conclusions of their own. What makes this easy is that it “only” requires ignoring aspects of the relevant context.

The classic early modern “metaphysical” view treats individual things in a kind of artificial isolation that never occurs in the real world. Needless to say, this kind of anticontextual metaphysics has nothing to do with Aristotle. Such a view has been attributed to Leibniz, based on a shallow interpretation of the Leibnizian monads. This fails to take into account either his general emphasis on whole worlds, or his explicit claim that the internal detail of each monad reprises the entire universe from a certain point of view. But it does seem that something like this was characteristic of the Wolffian school, which was the main concrete target of Kant’s criticism.

The contingency that that article on Scotus was celebrating was a form of radical “contingency” like that advocated by al-Ghazali, Ockham, and Sartre, among others. This occasionalism is the extremist view that nothing in or about the world is intrinsically firm or solid or substantial.

The essential point to understand about this is that radical contingency abolishes ordinary contingency.

Ordinary contingency is relational. We say that A is contingent on B. One thing (or action or status) either constrains another thing, or removes a constraint on another (in the sense that we speak of removing contingencies on a loan). Contingency in the ordinary sense by definition implies 1) some relevant context, and 2) some relevant constraint(s) that may or may not apply in that context.

One thing could never remove a constraint on another if there were really no such thing as constraint in the world. Similarly, a too-open view of possibility — one that posits an absolute freedom or absolute power — eliminates all meaningful modal analysis of possibility, because it eliminates any contrasting element of impossibility. To make no distinction — for example to claim that absolutely anything is possible — is effectively to say nothing. Claims of radical contingency eliminate the basis for ever saying “A is contingent on B“.

A defender of radical contingency might claim that there is something all A are contingent on — a will. But this is circular, because claims about the existence of a will over and above meaningful choice between alternatives are only introduced in order to putatively justify claims of radical contingency.

Seeming, Trying

In pursuing a pragmatist account of what meaning is, the young Brandom already anticipates a theme that will be very important in A Spirit of Trust: a thoroughgoing critique of claims to “mastery” in knowledge and action, illustrated here by the example of Descartes.

The main object of his 1976 dissertation is to show that from a starting point in what he calls social practices, pragmatism can go on to affirm that some things are nonetheless objectively real. This is in part an implicit criticism of his teacher and colleague Richard Rorty, who notoriously made ethical arguments against the very idea of objective reality. My last post treats the first chapter, which enlists Wittgenstein as a source of powerful arguments supporting the basic pragmatist emphasis on social practices as a sort of third way that avoids both subjectivism and objectivism. This post treats the second chapter.

Brandom distinguishes between two different legacies of Descartes, one concerning the special privileged status of the mental, which he strongly rejects, and one consisting of a very broadly specified epistemological project the core of which Brandom wants to uphold, while transposing it to different ground. From a highly abstracted perspective, he generously attributes philosophical worth to the very idea of a medium of thought and knowledge, and treats this as a Cartesian innovation. But for Descartes, this medium is something like consciousness that is supposed to be immediately and fully self-aware. The medium Brandom wants to uphold on the other hand is substantive language use and the inherently social practices that govern it.

“The challenge which [the second Cartesian] legacy presents to the pragmatist is this: if the use of a language, the application of expressions, consists of social practices which are whatever some community takes them to be, as Wittgenstein has argued, how is it that those practices enable the community to talk about objective things, which are independent of the community?…. According to the Cartesian tradition, all of our cognitive interaction with the objective world is by means of that medium with which alone we have direct, immediate commerce, namely the mind” (p. 42).

Compared to Brandom’s later much more fine-grained emphasis on the constitutive role of Hegelian mutual recognition, his undifferentiated Wittgensteinian appeal to the “takings” of empirical communities here is a blunt instrument. Community stands in contrast to the common modern notion of the individual as a sort of atom, but no community is a monolith, and no empirical community fully incarnates the ideal universal community of all rational animals. The “takings” of empirical communities are as much subject to error as the takings of individuals.

“This [second legacy] is a project with which the Cartesian tradition had only limited success. When the project failed, the result was a phenomenalism which concluded that because all cognition is by means of mental particulars, only mental particulars are knowable, that all knowledge is of mental particulars. There is a parallel danger for the pragmatist tradition. It is the danger that one might conclude from the fact that all cognition is by means of the social practices which make up our languages, that these practices are all that is knowable…. The prime project of this thesis is to show how knowledge which consists of social practices can be knowledge of objective states of affairs” (p. 43).

Brandom says the parallel danger for the pragmatist tradition is instrumentalism, which he characterizes as the view that social practices are all that is knowable. I have endorsed a kind of “instrumentalism” myself, but see it as applying more narrowly to practices of empirical science, not to all that is knowable.

Brandom treats the putative certainties of Descartes in light of Rorty’s account of “incorrigibility”. Like “certainty” in Hegel’s deflationary view of it, incorrigibility in this sense is a mere fact and not at all a foundation for knowledge. Things are about to become very interesting.

“There is an account of the social practices we use to talk about mental things … which may be extracted from Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and Rorty’s “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental”…. Thoughts and sensations became mental only when the noninferential reports of these entities which it turned out that people could make came to be taken to be incorrigible…. Rorty calls an utterance-type ‘incorrigible’ if within the community within which it is used there are no procedures for overruling it” (pp. 44-45).

Whether or not incorrigibility is the criterion for calling things “mental”, the implications of incorrigibility that Brandom is unfolding here offer a very important lesson.

“It will be useful … to consider an elaboration of this account of how practices of issuing reports on one’s inner states can become incorrigible. The elaboration is suggested by Sellars’ account of the ‘looks’ and ‘seems’ idiom…. [T]he practice of making seems-reports arises out of a situation in which there are sufficient regularities perceivable in the mistakes that users of the language make in their ordinary reports of their surroundings…. In such a case one makes the weaker claim ‘it seems to me that I see X’ which is understood to be noncommittal as to whether X in fact holds…. The ‘seems’ statements are so used that whenever a report is incorrect, the corresponding ‘seems’ statement is correct” (pp. 46-47).

I have always thought of “seems” phrasing as an acknowledgement that other perspectives may be possible. It honestly never occurred to me to think of it as a way of always being right. But the logic here is impeccable.

“Thus ‘seems’ is a non-iterable sentential operator — one cannot say ‘It seems to me that it seems to me that X’. Because of this feature of the ‘seems’ idiom, there are things, namely ‘seemings’… about which we cannot be overruled, and we are hence incorrigible. The social practices of using the expression are such that there is no way to overrule the statement ” (pp. 47-48).

With this argument about non-iterability, we have a case of linguistic analysis yielding an interesting and important conclusion that most likely could not have arisen by other means. It has long “seemed” to me that consciousness as such is a syntactic variant on appearance, rather than a kind of knowledge as Descartes and many others have taken it to be. But this link between non-iterability and incorrigibility is entirely new to me.

One thing that stands out about incorrigibility is that it is the very opposite of a condition for ethical dialogue abundantly illustrated by Plato, and more recently made explicit by Gadamer, Habermas, and Brandom. Real polar opposites are rare, but this is one of them. Incorrigibility has absolutely no place in what Habermas would call an ideal speech situation. All participants in genuine dialogue are corrigible. But Descartes and other bad authorities have tried to make incorrigibility a condition of knowledge. We ought to respect other people’s first-person reports. But that is a social grace, not a key to truth.

“Mental events are those which we report with expressions which fit into the same linguistic niche that seemings do. The notion of a linguistic niche is here to be taken as parallel to that of an environmental niche which an evolving organism can occupy. The particular property which I have in mind as specifying the linguistic niche which ‘seemings’ define for other mental events is the inappropriateness of embedding such things inside ‘seems’ operators. Thus ‘It seems to me that I am thinking of a red bear’ is a peculiar utterance in that ‘I am thinking of a red bear’ is already an incorrigible utterance. I am suggesting that the mark of incorrigibility is not being appropriately qualified by a ‘seems’ statement…. Thoughts and sensations are kinds of entities which are reported by expressions which cannot appear embedded in ‘seems’ statements” (pp. 48-49).

Next he explicitly draws the conclusion that incorrigibility has no place in inquiry about the nature of knowledge.

“[T]here is nothing epistemologically useful about incorrigibility in the account we have given of it. The ‘seems’ operator which creates the linguistic niche within which mental events and processes thrive must be added to a language which already has more basic sentences which can be embedded in ‘seems’ contexts. And we have seen that those more basic sentences cannot have the incorrigibility characteristic of ‘seems’ statements. The ‘seems’ idiom can be added only to a language that already has other sentences in use which are not incorrigible. Given ordinary, corrigible reports, the ‘seems’ idiom offers a way of producing trivially incorrigible reports from them. Sellars and Rorty have developed this line of thought in considerable detail, to show the error of traditional epistemological programs which seek to ground the authority of ordinary claims in the incorrigibility of these ‘seeming’ analogues. When once the priority of ordinary, corrigible utterances has been understood, there will be little desire to ‘justify’ them in terms of the incorrigible utterances that are derivative from them” (pp. 49-50, emphasis added).

“Seems” talk in effect syntactically adds a wrapper around simple assertion that must therefore already be understandable on its own if the “seems” talk that modifies it is to be understandable.

“Further, the line of thought we have just considered completes the pragmatist’s refutation of the Cartesian view of the mental as the medium of cognition, by showing that the specially criterioned realm of things which was Descartes’ first legacy will not support the sort of epistemological justification demanded by his second legacy. The incorrigibility of the mental is no ground on which to base claims about the correctness of ordinary corrigible claims” (p. 50, emphasis added).

The correctness of ordinary corrigible claims is what we ought to be concerned with. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom talks about “semantic descent” from the lofty abstraction of philosophical metaconcepts back to ordinary life. The idea is that their real meaning lies in their consequences for how we live our life. Klaus Vieweg’s outstanding new biography of Hegel suggests to me that Hegel himself would have appreciated this.

Brandom has already characterized “seems” talk as presupposing ordinary simple assertion. Earlier, he suggested that the whole project of modern epistemology — including pragmatist approaches to it — is historically shaped by what are essentially Cartesian questions. More specifically, he has suggested an analogy between the Cartesian problem of relating the mind to reality and the task he has set for himself of relating a pragmatist account of social practices to what we mean by “real” and “reality”.

Initially I wanted to resist this analogy. But Brandom suggests that the project of epistemology is itself specifically post-Cartesian, and there is a level of specificity at which this is undoubtedly true. I must acknowledge that Pierce’s account discussed further below, which I find attractive, does address recognizably Cartesian kinds of questions, even if his answers stand in opposition to those of Descartes.

Nonetheless the implicit contrast presupposed by seems-talk has been approached in other ways. The notion of appearance and something standing in contrast to it goes back at least to Plato, if not into the hazy prehistory of philosophy. In Plato we do not find hypostasized concepts of “the mind” and “the external world” confronting one another as they do in Descartes, but something more like a contrast between appearance and deeper truth. My own way of approaching such questions is broadly Platonic in this sense, and doesn’t owe much to modern notions of subject and object. Plato and Aristotle ask about “our” knowledge — meaning, for Aristotle at least, the knowledge available to rational animals — not about “the mind’s” knowledge. In medieval terms, knowledge belongs to the whole human being.

“In the rest of this section I will seek to show that the classical notion of the real serves the function of constraint of our fancy. This function requires an aspect of the Cartesian notion of the mind which we have not yet considered, that of the will. We will present a pragmatic reconstruction of that characteristic, parallel to the pragmatic reconstruction of incorrigibility we have derived from Rorty and Sellars” (p. 54).

This development of a parallelism between incorrigibility and Descartes’s voluntaristic notion of will is of great interest. The connection between the real and Cartesian will is initially not clear at all (especially to an anti-voluntarist such as myself), but Pierce’s remarks quoted by Brandom below implicitly suggest a relation through a double negative.

“So far, the notion of the real has been exhibited by means of a distinction between things which can be changed merely by the activity of ‘Thinking about X’ and those which cannot. What is it about thinking which makes a classification based on its capacity to alter things more significant than any other classification in terms of some human activity which differentiates the thing classified? Thus we can consider those things which I can alter merely by digging a hole with a spade, and those which I cannot so alter. In the former category would be holes, tunnels, graves, and so on, and in the latter would be the square root of seventeen, Plato’s Republic, and the interior of distant black holes. For what problem is the classification induced by thinking illuminating (and that induced by digging not)?” (p. 55).

The orientation through asking what problem is at issue is commendable. The comparison with digging a hole has a nice pragmatist flavor, but also would not be out of place in Plato or Aristotle. Now we get to Pierce’s point.

“I think the key may be found in some other passages of Pierce, echoed by Russell. Pierce says: ‘… the real is that which insists upon forcing its way to recognition as something other than the mind’s creation’. [Brandom continues] That the real is other than the mind’s creation is implied by the previous definition…. That this otherness is ‘forced’ upon us is an element we have not encountered, however” (ibid).

He quotes Pierce again, “…reality is insistency. That is what we mean by reality. It is the brute irrational insistency that forces us to acknowledge the reality of what we experience” (ibid).

He continues, “What is important here is … the constraint on our thinking which the real, external world exerts on our thoughts. Russell characterizes the realm of fact in terms of the same two elements: that facts don’t depend on what we think about them and that what we think is constrained by the facts…. This element of constraint of the mind, stubbornness to volitions, seems to me to be the key to understanding the role reality played in the classical philosophical tradition. The fact of being forced to think one thing rather than another suggests an answer to our question” (p. 56).

The conclusion to A Spirit of Trust memorably mentions the world’s “stubborn recalcitrance to mastery by knowledge and agency” (Spirit of Trust, p. 689). The “stubbornness to volitions” above is central to Pierce’s notion of reality, and the reference to volitions ties it back to Descartes.

“I think the picture which is being appealed to involves a distinction of two sorts of activities with respect to our control or dominion over them. On the side of fancy are things like imagining a red bear, or thinking of Vienna. These are activities in which we cannot be thwarted. We can simply do them. No effort is required, because there is no gap between trying and succeeding. Contrasted with this, we find activities like digging, which require the special circumstances (the presence of a shovel, sufficiently soft materials, etc.) for their performance, and over which we do not have total control. The point of defining as real a class of things which are in the relevant sense independent of what we think of them is that we do not have dominion over these things in the same sense in which we do over the creations of fancy. Reality is that in virtue of which there are activities like digging, in which we are constrained by circumstances beyond our immediate control. The role which the real is to play in our understanding of things is captured in the explanation it is to provide of why we cannot do whatever we want to do simply by wanting to do it” (pp. 56-57).

In the terminology Brandom will shortly introduce here, the real is that which constrains and resists our “trying”. He illustrates this by returning to the example of digging a hole.

In the terminology of A Spirit of Trust, we could say here that Descartes is overly impressed with our “mastery” over our fancy. The error of many is to treat this relation to our fancy as paradigmatic or programmatic for our relations in the world, when it is our relations in the world that come first. (I do not say “to” the world, because that does implicitly invoke a Cartesian parsing of everything into hypostasized categories of mind and world.)

“Once again, moving the arms and back in this way is something people can be trained to just do, but once again it can be asked ‘How do you move your arms and back in this fashion?’ At this point it is so far from being the case that one must know the answer to such a question in order to engage in the specified activity that we do not know what an answer should look like” (p. 57).

“Our inability thus to describe further what counts as trying to move a ‘voluntary’ muscle marks the end of possible explanations of such movement…. The fact that such explanations of activity… must stop at the attempt to produce ‘voluntary’ muscular activity is the basis for the classical doctrine of volitions. This is the doctrine that there are mental activities called volitions which are the first source of all human activity” (p. 58).

In this tradition, volition serves as the unexplained explainer of “voluntary” actions. By contrast, we have recently seen how Aristotle explains the difference between willing and unwilling actions without hypostasizing a separate faculty of will.

“We now seek a story about indefeasible dominion which will describe the function which the mind plays in Cartesian stories about acting. The mind has an active role here as the medium of activity. This means that anything which is not itself a mental activity is accomplished by means of the immediate mental activity of willing” (p. 59).

The Cartesian hypostases of mind and will have sovereignty and mastery over a hypostasized private domain of fancy. And just as we are incorrigible in our reports of “seeming”, we are the sovereign masters of our pure willing and “trying” . But as Brandom points out, in both cases this is true only in a trivial way. It is rather to ordinary activities that we should look as a paradigm.

“I want to claim that indefeasible domain over inner, mental activities is of the same trivial, stipulative nature and origin as we have seen the property of incorrigibility which characterizes our knowledge of inner, mental events to be…. Our approach is to account for dominion over the realm of fancy in terms of the ‘tries’ idiom in a way formally analogous to that in which we accounted for incorrigibility in terms of the ‘seems’ idiom” (p. 62).

“The basic point of the analogy is that just as the ‘seems’ operator forms a report such that there is nothing in the language which counts as sufficient evidence to contradict it, so the ‘trying’ operator forms a description of an action for which nothing counts as significant evidence that the action was not performed. The important formal point is that just as ‘seems’ operators cannot be iterated…, neither can ‘trying’ operators (‘I am trying to try to do X’)” (ibid).

“The second ‘trying’ is redundant…. We use the ‘trying’ operator in such a way that one can always succeed at trying to do X, whatever troubles one may have actually doing X” (p. 63).

“For ordinary activities like digging, one can actually say what the trying consisted of — e.g., certain movements of the back and arms — and why it failed, just as one can often say why it is that things seemed a certain way. The extension of these operators to cases in which no activity was successfully engaged in which can be described by the language without the operators of the mental expressions they epitomize is linguistically straightforward. So we can explain how we could come to talk about reports which are incorrigible and activities over which we have indefeasible dominion by starting off only talking about ordinary corrigible reports and activities in which we may be frustrated” (pp. 63-64).

“The reason for that non-iterability is the way the conditions under which it is appropriate to say ‘I am trying to do X’ relate to the conditions under which it is appropriate to say ‘I am doing X’. And this relation is to be understood by analogy to ‘seems’ ” (p. 64).

“For any activity which we can try to engage in and fail, such as signaling a bus, there must be some conditions of success which are not dependent merely on our tryings (else we could not try and fail” (p. 65).

“Now the important thing for Pierce, as for the empiricists and the Cartesian tradition in general, is that what we believe is constrained in this fashion. Within our framework, this is just to say that believing is not one of the things one can do simply by trying to” (ibid).

We do not “choose” to believe X. Others may have conflicting beliefs about the same thing, but that does not mean that belief is arbitrary. We believe things for reasons that are not simply plucked out of thin air.

“[T]he ‘trying’ operator must be introduced into a language which already talks about things which we can try to engage in and fail (such as signaling a bus). The primary and essential role of the ‘trying’ operator is to make this distinction between ‘doing X’ and ‘trying to do X’. It is a relatively trivial consequence of the performance of this role that the ‘trying’ operator is non-iterable” (p. 66).

“In sum, activities which can be done just by trying to do them are a by-product of activities which one can try to do and fail, not the other way around” (ibid, emphasis added).

“Once we have seen how ‘tries’ works, we can no longer maintain the Cartesian stance in which we take activities over which we have indefeasible dominion for granted and find others problematic, requiring a further notion of ‘the real’ to explain them…. Insofar as the notion of the real involves merely the idea that we are constrained, of course, it is as unobjectionable as it is unilluminating” (p. 67, emphasis added).

“It is interesting to note that in showing that the notion of a realm of unconstrained fancy over which the subject exercises an indefeasible dominion presupposes the existence of constrained activities (with respect to which alone the ‘trying’ operator can be sensibly introduced) we have provided a pragmatic version of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism in the Critique of Pure Reason…. For Kant may be understood as trying to show that the notion that we have of a faculty of spontaneity (the realm of our dominion) must be extracted from a notion of its function in concert with a faculty of receptivity (the source of constraint), and cannot be coherently described out of all connection with that receptive faculty” (ibid).

Next in this series: Pragmatics of Inquiry

Spirit of Trust

“At the very center of Hegel’s thought … is a radically new conception of the conceptual…. This way of understanding conceptual contentfulness is nonpsychological” (Brandom, A Spirit of Trust, p. 2).

“[W]hat confers conceptual content on acts, attitudes, and linguistic expressions is the role they play in the practices their subjects engage in…. [M]eaning is to be understood in terms of use” (p. 3).

“Hegel thinks that we cannot understand [the] conceptual structure of the objective world … except as part of a story that includes what we are doing when we practically take or treat the world [in a certain way]” (pp. 3-4). “[I]n knowing how (being able) to use ordinary concepts, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to grasp and apply the metaconcepts…. The categorial metaconcepts are the expressive organs of self-consciousness” (p. 5).

“In reading [Kant and Hegel] it is easy to lose sight entirely of ordinary empirical and practical concepts…. Yet I believe that the best way to understand what they are saying about their preferred topic of concepts operating in a pure, still stratosphere above the busy jostling and haggling of street-level judging and doing is precisely to focus on what these metaconcepts let us say about what is going on below…. If the point of the higher-level concepts is to articulate the use and content of lower-level ones, then the cash value of an account of categorial metaconcepts is what it has to teach us about ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts” (pp. 5-6).

“The process of experience is accordingly understood as being both the process of applying determinate conceptually contentful norms in judgment and intentional action and the process of instituting those determinate conceptually contentful norms. It is the gradual, progressive finding of what the content has been all along” (p. 6).

“So [Hegel] takes it that the only way to understand or convey the content of the metaconcepts that articulate various forms of self-consciousness … is by recollectively rehearsing a possible course of expressively progressive development that culminates in the content in question. And that is exactly what he does” (p. 7). “We can understand [the metaconcepts] in terms of what they make it possible for us to say and understand about the use and content of those ground-level determinate concepts” (p. 8).

“The second master idea of Kant’s that inspires Hegel’s story is his revolutionary appreciation of the essentially normative character of discursive intentionality. Kant understands judgments and intentional doings as differing from the responses of nondiscursive creatures in being performances that their subjects are in a distinctive sense responsible for. He sees them as exercising a special sort of authority: the authority that discursive subjects have to undertake commitments as to how things are or shall be. Sapient awareness, apperception, is seen as a normative phenomenon, the discursive realm as a normative realm” (p. 9).

“But concepts are now understood as ‘functions of judgments’. That is, they are understood in terms of their functional role in determining what one makes oneself responsible for or commits oneself to in judging. At the center of what one is responsible for is having reasons for judging or acting as one does. Concepts are rules that determine what counts as a reason for (or against) applying them, and what applying them counts as a reason for (or against)…. Discursive beings live and move and have their being in a normative space of reasons…. Where the Early Modern philosophical tradition had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant shifts attention to their grip on us” (ibid).

“That is to say that he understands representational purport, the way in which its acts show up to the subject as representings, as intentionally pointing beyond themselves to something represented by them, in thoroughly normative terms. Something is a representing insofar as it is responsible for its correctness to what thereby counts as represented by it” (p. 10).

“What one makes oneself responsible for doing in judging is rationally integrating the new commitment one undertakes with one’s prior commitments so as to yield a constellation of doxastic commitments that exhibits the sort of rational (‘synthetic’) unity distinctive of apperception. For concepts to play their functional role as rules for doing that, their contents must determine what would be reasons for or against each particular application of those concepts in judgment, and what those applications would be reasons for or against” (ibid).

“I have already gestured at Hegel’s nonpsychological conception of the conceptual as what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence…. Descartes understood the distinction between minded creatures and everything else in terms of a distinction of two kinds of stuff: mental and physical. Kant’s normative reconceiving of sapience replaces Descartes’s ontological distinction with a deontological one. Discursive creatures are distinguished by having rational obligations. They are subject to normative assessment of the extent to which what they think and do accords with their commitments or responsibilities” (p. 11).

“Kant’s insight into the normative character of judging and acting intentionally renders philosophically urgent the understanding of discursive normativity” (ibid).

“[Hegel’s] generic term for social-practical attitudes of taking or treating someone as the subject of normative statuses is ‘recognition’ [Anerkennung]. He takes it that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are instituted when recognitive attitudes have a distinctive social structure: when they take the form of mutual or reciprocal [gegenseitig] recognition” (p. 12).

“[N]orms or statuses must be intelligible as having a certain kind of independence from practitioners’ attitudes toward them if they are to be intelligible as serving as authoritative standards for normative assessment of the propriety or correctness of those attitudes” (p. 13).

“But however it is with Wittgenstein, Hegel’s invocation of the social character of discursive normativity, in the form of the claim that normative statuses are instituted only by reciprocal recognitive attitudes, works quite differently” (ibid). “In Hegel’s terms, what a self-consciousness is in itself (its normative statuses) depends on both what it is for itself and what it is for others” (p. 14).

“Which others matter for the institution of a subject’s normative statuses is determined by the subject’s own recognitive attitudes: who it recognizes, in the sense of granting (attributing to) them the authority to hold it responsible. But it is not determined by those attitudes alone. Communities do come into the picture. What Hegel calls social ‘substance’ is synthesized by mutual recognition…. But Hegelian communities are constellations of reciprocal-recognitive dyads. The recognitive attitudes of others, who hold one responsible, are equally as important as the normative attitude of one who acknowledges a commitment. Hegel’s version is second-personal, perspectival ‘I’-‘thou’ sociality, not first-personal, ‘I’-‘we’ sociality” (pp. 13-14).

” ‘Dependence’ and ‘independence’, when applied to knowing and acting subjects, are Hegel’s way of talking about normative statuses of responsibility and authority, respectively” (p. 14).

“But corresponding to the reciprocal dependence of normative statuses and attitudes on the side of pragmatics, Hegel envisages a reciprocal dependence of meaning and use, of the contents of concepts and the practices of applying them…. Hegel balances Kant’s insight that judging and acting presuppose the availability of determinately contentful norms to bind oneself by and hold others to, with the insight that our practical recognitive attitudes of acknowledging and attributing commitments are all there is to establish the association of determinate conceptual contents with those attitudes — and so all there is to fix determinate norms or normative statuses they are attitudes toward. The issue of how to make sense of normative attitudes as genuinely norm-governed once we understand the norms as instituted by such attitudes, and the issue of how to understand normative attitudes as instituting norms with determinate conceptual contents are two sides of one coin” (pp. 15-16).

“As the most common misunderstanding of the social dimension sees individuals as bound to accord with communal regularities, the most common misunderstanding of the historical dimension sees the present as answerable to an eventual ideal Piercean consensus. Both are caricatures of Hegel’s much more sophisticated account” (p. 16).

“Viewed prospectively, the process of experience is one of progressively determining conceptual contents in the sense of making those contents more determinate, by applying them or withholding their application in novel circumstances…. Viewed retrospectively, the process of experience is one of finding out more about the boundaries of concepts that show up as having implicitly all along already been fully determinate…. It is of the essence of construing things according to the metacategories of Vernunft that neither of these perspectives is intelligible apart from its relation to the other, and that the correctness of each does not exclude but rather entails the correctness of the other” (p. 17).

“Hegel explains what is implicit in terms of the process of expressing it: the process of making it explicit…. This account of expression in terms of recollection grounds an account of representation in terms of expression” (p. 18).

“Finally, the new kind of theoretical self-consciousness we gain from Hegel’s phenomenological recollection is envisaged as making possible a new form of practical normativity. The door is opened to the achievement of a new form of Geist when norm-instituting recognitive practices and practical attitudes take the form of norm-acknowledging recollective practices and practical attitudes. When recognition takes the magnanimous form of recollection, it is forgiveness, the attitude that institutes normativity as fully self-conscious trust” (p. 19).

“Along the way we can see Hegel using the discussion of the experience of error to introduce the basic outlines of the positive account of representation that he will recommend to replace the defective traditional ways of thinking about representation that lead to the knowledge-as-instrument and knowledge-as-medium models” (p. 21).

“It is widely appreciated that the origins of Wilfrid Sellars’s critique of what he calls the ‘Myth of the Given’ are to be found in Hegel’s Sense Certainty chapter. Sellars himself points to this by opening his essay with an explicit acknowledgement of the kinship between the line of argument he will pursue and that of ‘Hegel, that great foe of immediacy’. By this he means that Hegel, like Sellars, denies the intelligibility of any concept of knowledge that is purely immediate, that involves no appeal to inferential abilities or the consequential relations they acknowledge (Hegel’s ‘mediation’)” (pp. 21-22).

“One conclusion that emerges is that the incompatibility-and-consequence relations that articulate the contents of both theoretical and observational concepts must be understood to be subjunctively robust. By engaging in inferences tracking those relations, experiencing subjects practically confront not only facts, but the lawful relations of consequence and incompatibility that make those facts both determinate and cognitively accessible” (p. 23).

“What self-conscious individual normative subjects are ‘for themselves’ and ‘for others’ are understood as normative attitudes: attitudes of acknowledging responsibility or claiming authority oneself, and attitudes of attributing responsibility or authority to others, respectively…. According to the reciprocal recognition model, one subject’s attitude of acknowledging responsibility makes that subject responsible only if it is suitably socially complemented by the attributing of responsibility by another, to whom the first attributes the authority to do so. The attitudes of acknowledging and attributing are accordingly interdependent. Each is responsible to and authoritative over the other, because only when suitably complementing each other do those attitudes institute statuses” (p. 24).

“One of the principal lessons of the discussion of pure independence, in the allegory of Mastery, is that the normative statuses of responsibility and authority are two sides of one coin. The point is not the trivial one that if X has authority over Y then Y is responsible to X, and vice versa. It is that X’s authority always involves a correlative responsibility by X. Independence always involves a correlative moment of dependence, and dependence always involves a correlative moment of independence” (pp. 24-25).

“The argument for the metaphysical defectiveness of the idea of pure independence (that is, authority without responsibility) in the allegory of the Master and the Servant is, inter alia, Hegel’s argument against the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity. The crucial move in that argument is the claim that such a conception denies essential necessary conditions of the determinate contentfulness of the authority the Master claims” (p. 25).

“The recognitive community of all those who recognize and are recognized by each other in turn is a kind of universal order under which its members fall…. Self-consciousness in Hegel’s sense is practical awareness of oneself as such a recognitively constituted subject of normative statuses. It is accordingly a social achievement and a social status. Not only is it not the turning on of a Cartesian inner light; it is not even something that principally happens between the ears of the individual so constituted…. As such, it is an important point of reference wherever Hegel invokes the holistic structure of identities constituted by differences” (p. 26).

“The tradition Hegel inherited (endorsed by many philosophers since) understands agency in terms of a mental event of intending or willing causing a separate bodily movement, which in turn has various distinct causal consequences in the wider world. Hegel … thinks rather of doings as unitary things (processes …), which can be variously specified” (p. 27).

“Hegel understands those different kinds of description in normative terms of authority and responsibility…. Intentional specifications are those under which the agent in a distinctive sense acknowledges responsibility, while consequential specifications are those under which others, in a complementary sense, attribute responsibility and hold the agent responsible…. What the doing is in itself is the product of what it is for the agent and what it is for the others….Judging shows up as a limiting special case of practical doings understood in this way” (ibid).

“As the doing reverberates through the objective world, as its consequences roll on to the horizon, new specifications of it become available. Each of them provides a new perspective on the content of the doing, on what doing it is turning out to be. That the shooting was a killing, that the insulting was a decisive breaking off of relations, that the vote was a political turning point for the party are expressions of what was done that only become available retrospectively” (p. 28).

“A phenomenology is a recollected, retrospectively rationally reconstructed history that displays the emergence of what becomes visible as having been all along implicit in an expressively progressive sequence of its ever more adequate appearances (pp. 28-29).

“Hegel thinks that the most fundamental normative structure of our discursiveness underwent a revolutionary change, from its traditional form to a distinctively modern one. This vast sea change did not take place all at once, but over an extended period of time. The transition began with the ancient Greeks and proceeded at an accelerating pace. It was still incomplete in his time (and in ours), but with the main lineament of its full flowering just becoming visible. It is, he thought, the single biggest event in human history. ‘Geist’ is his term for the subject of that titanic transmogrification” (p. 29).

“The essence of the traditional form of normativity is practically treating norms as an objective feature of the world: as just there, as are stars, oceans, and rocks. [Normativity] is construed as having the asymmetric structure of relations of command and obedience that Hegel criticizes in his allegory of Mastery…. In any case, there are taken to be facts about how it is fitting to behave” (ibid).

“What is required to overcome alienation is practically and theoretically to balance the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with a reappropriation of the traditional insight into the status-dependence of normative attitudes. At the end of his Spirit chapters, Hegel tells us how he thinks that can and should be done. His account takes the form of a description of the final, fully adequate form of reciprocal recognition: the recollective recognitive structure of confession and forgiveness for which I appropriate his term ‘trust’ [Vertrauen]” (p. 30).

“It is, remarkably, a semantics with an edifying intent. The effect of theoretically understanding the nature of the conceptual contents we normatively bind ourselves by in our discursive activity is to be to educate and motivate us to be better people, who live and move and have our being in the normative space of Geist in the postmodern form of trust. For Hegel’s pragmatist, social-historical semantics makes explicit to us what becomes visible as our standing commitment to engage in the ideal recollective norm-instituting recognitive practices that are structured by trust — a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all” (p. 32).

Willingness, Deliberation, Choice

In Nicomachean Ethics book III, Aristotle with marvelous clarity, simplicity, and well-rounded good sense discusses what things we are and are not morally responsible for, without ever referring to or needing anything like the “free arbitration” (liberum arbitrium) that came to be widely assumed in the Latin tradition. I will continue to use Joe Sachs’s admirable translation.

“Now since virtue is concerned with feelings and actions, and praise and blame come about for willing actions, but for unwilling actions there is forgiveness and sometimes even pity, it is no doubt a necessary thing for those who inquire about virtue to distinguish what is a willing act and what is an unwilling act, and it is a useful thing for lawmakers as well, with a view to honors and punishments. Now it seems that unwilling acts are the ones that happen by force or through ignorance, a forced act being one of which the source is external, and an act is of this sort in which the person acting, or acted upon, contributes nothing, for instance if a wind carries one off somewhere, or people do who are in control. But with respect to those things that are done through fear of greater evils, or for the sake of something beautiful — for instance if a tyrant who was in control of one’s parents and children were to order one to do a shameful thing, and in the case of one’s doing it they would be saved but as a result of one’s not doing it they would be killed — there is some dispute whether they are willing or unwilling” (p. 36).

Aristotle’s positive regard for feeling and his early mention of it in this context are noteworthy, as is his explicit early mention of forgiveness. Equally important is the fact that from the very beginning, he focuses on the difficult cases in which we experience conflict or ambiguity between different values that we recognize. Characteristically, he does not aim to authoritatively lay down rules for every situation, but rather to encourage us to be thoughtful and understanding in our appraisals both of situations and of others’ responses to them.

“Something of this sort happens also in connection with things thrown overboard in a storm, for no one simply throws them away willingly, but all those who have any sense do so for their own safety and that of the rest of the people aboard. Such actions then are mixed, but they are more like willing acts, since at the time when they are done they are preferred, and the end for which an action takes place is in accordance with the occasion. So one has to say what is willing or unwilling at the time when someone does it; and one does things of this sort willingly, for the source of the moving of the parts that are instrumental in such actions is oneself, and anything of which the source is in oneself is also up to oneself either to do or not. So things of this sort are willing acts, though in an unqualified sense they would perhaps be unwilling acts, since no one would choose any such thing for itself” (pp. 36-37).

Even more than Plato, Aristotle addresses “mixed” cases and highlights their importance. Again characteristically, he qualifies what he says about the unqualified sense with a modest “perhaps”.

“Sometimes people are even praised for actions of this sort, when they endure something shameful or painful in return for things that are great and beautiful, and conversely they might be blamed, since enduring things that are exceedingly shameful for no beautiful object, or for one only moderately beautiful, belongs to a person of low moral stature. For some things, while no praise is forthcoming, there is forgiveness, when one does what one ought not to do on account of motives of this sort, when they strain human nature too far, and no one could endure them. Yet some things perhaps it is not possible to be forced to do, but one ought instead to die suffering the most terrible things, for the things that force the Alcmaeon of Euripides to kill his mother seem ridiculous. But it is difficult sometimes to distinguish what sort of thing should be chosen in return for what, and what should be endured for what, and still more difficult for those who have discerned it to abide by what they have chosen, since for the most part the things one anticipates are painful and the things they force one to do are shameful, which is why praise and blame come about according as people are or are not forced” (p. 37).

Again he mentions forgiveness. Again an otherwise more categorical-sounding statement is qualified by a “perhaps”. Again the focus is on difficult cases. A more general and abstract evaluation is called “difficult”. He notes that it is “still more difficult” to abide by what we have chosen.

Sachs’s glossary says for choice (proairesis): “Desire informed by deliberation, or thinking infused with desire, and hence an act of the whole human being, in which neither the rational nor the irrational part is superior. If desire predominates, one merely takes one thing in preference to others, as an animal or small child might, but deliberation allows one to take a course in the light of alternatives not immediately present and of long-term consequences not obvious at the moment…. [T]he only ‘rule’ that can make choice be right is the judgment of a person of good character, whose desires are neither excessive nor corrupted” (pp. 202-203).

This is very clearly not an arbitrary “choice”. It is the Latin tradition’s interpolation of a notion of arbitrary choice into the Aristotelian text that Boulnois rightly objects to.

Back to Aristotle, “So what sort of thing ought one to say is forced? In an unqualified sense, is it not what is done whenever the cause is in external things and the one acting contributes nothing? But with those things that are in themselves unwilling acts, but are chosen in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends, and their source is in the one acting, while they are unwilling acts in themselves, in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends they are willing acts. But they are more like willing acts, since actions are in the particulars, and with respect to these they are willing acts. But it is not easy to give an account of what sort of things one ought to choose in return for what sort of ends, since there are many differences among the particular circumstances” (p. 37).

Up to now, Aristotle has focused on examples that are somewhat extreme. Here he returns to the broader scope of all action.

“Actions are in the particulars”, which is why, once again, “it is not easy to give an account” of the more general case. In general, we cannot adequately say what the sense of an action is — or indeed what action it is — until we take its context appropriately into account.

In the very same way, there is no way we can adequately say, for example, what Kant’s categorical imperative would have us do in an unspecified particular situation x, based on the categorical imperative alone. Applying it only begins to have meaning as the situation begins to be specified.

Boulnois would have us avoid translating proairesis as “choice”, on the ground of the very real concern that the Latin tradition strongly identifies talk about choice with so-called free arbitration. But in the Aristotelian text we see a repeating pattern already, in which Aristotle focuses on difficult situations that require us to make tradeoffs between values that we genuinely accept, and which seem to require us to be unfaithful to one of them. These could hardly be construed as arbitrary choices. It is the sense given to the words rather than the bare words themselves that matters most.

Though Boulnois’s preferred translation of proairesis as “resolution” definitely has points in its favor, as at least possibly capturing the sense of its dependence on deliberation (which “choice” tends to obscure rather than highlight), the case is less compelling here, where the syntax doesn’t line up and it would be necessary to speak instead of a resolution of the tradeoff. We could still say we “resolved upon” one of the alternatives, but that still doesn’t capture the specific sense of making a judgment based on a comparative evaluation of definite alternatives.

As long as we are speaking of a comparison of definite alternatives rather than a decision that is allegedly made ex nihilo, the comparison basically defines the context, and we are clearly speaking of a normative judgment rather than an arbitrary choice.

It is arbitrary choice that has no applicability to the discernment of what would be a right action. Normative judgment (or for that matter, any kind of comparison between definite things), insofar as it has validity, is precisely not arbitrary, but rather — to a degree we can also assess — “right” for the situation.

Aristotle continues, “But if someone claims that things that are pleasant or beautiful are sources of compulsion (for they exert force even while being external), everything would be forced according to that person, since everyone does everything for the sake of these ends. Also, those who act by force and are unwilling act with pain, while those who act on account of what is pleasant and beautiful do so with pleasure. And it is ridiculous to blame external things but not oneself, for being easily caught by such things, and to take credit oneself for beautiful deeds but blame the pleasant things for one’s shameful deeds. So it appears that what is forced is that of which the source is from outside, while the one who is forced contributes nothing” (pp. 37-38).

For now I will skip to the summary of the immediately following part, which concerns unwillingness that is due to ignorance.

“So since ignorance is possible about all these circumstances in which the action takes place, the person who was ignorant of them seems to have acted unwillingly, and especially in the case of the most controlling circumstances; and the most controlling ones seem to be the things in which the action consists and for the sake of which it was done. And if an action is to be called unwilling as a result of this sort of ignorance, it is also necessary that it be painful to the one who does it and held in regret” (p. 39).

Then he summarizes the whole discussion of willingness and unwillingness. We are responsible for our “willing” acts, and are not responsible for unwilling acts.

“Since an unwilling act is one done by force or on account of ignorance, a willing act would seem to be one of which the source is in oneself, when one knows the particular circumstances in which the action takes place. For things done on account of spiritedness or desire are probably not rightly called unwilling acts. In the first place, none of the other animals would any longer do anything willingly, nor would children. And then, of the things that result from desire and spiritedness, do we do none of them willingly, or do we do the beautiful ones willingly and the shameful ones unwillingly? Or is this ridiculous when one thing is responsible for them? And perhaps it is absurd to call things toward which one ought to extend oneself unwilling, and one ought to get angry at some things and to desire some things, such as health and knowledge. And while unwilling acts seem to be painful, those that result from desire seem to be pleasant. Also, what difference does it make to whether things that are wrong are unwilling acts, that they result from reasoning or from spiritedness? Both kinds of error are to be avoided, and irrational feelings seem to be no less human than reasoning is, so that actions that come from spiritedness and desire belong to the human being too. So it is absurd to set those down as unwilling acts” (pp. 39-40, emphasis added).

Feeling and reason are equally human. Unlike the Stoics, Aristotle does not regard all feeling as an impediment, or as necessarily a source of unfreedom.

Next he turns to an explicit discussion of “choice”.

[Chapter 2.] “Now that willing and unwilling acts have been distinguished, it follows next to go through what concerns choice, for this seems to be what belongs most properly to virtue and to determine one’s character more than one’s actions do. A choice is obviously something willing, but they are not the same thing, as what is willing covers a wider range, since children and the other animals share in willing acts but not in choice, and we speak of things done on the spur of the moment as willing acts, but not as things done as a result of choice. Those who say that choice is desire, or spiritedness, or wishing, or some sort of opinion do not speak rightly. For choice is not shared by irrational beings, while desire and spiritedness are. And a person lacking self-control acts while desiring something but not choosing it, while a person with self-control conversely acts while choosing something but not desiring it. And while desire sets itself against choice, desire does not set itself against desire. And desire is for what is pleasant and painful, while choice is of something neither painful nor pleasant.”

“Still less is it spiritedness, for things done out of spiritedness seem to be the ones least in accord with choice. But surely it is not wishing either, even though that appears a close approximation to it, since there can be no choice of impossible things, and if anyone were to claim to choose something impossible, that person would seem to be foolish; but there is wishing even for impossible things, such as deathlessness. And there is also wishing for things that can in no way be done by oneself, such as for a certain actor to win an award, or for an athlete to win a contest, but no one chooses such things, but only those things one believes could come about by one’s own act. Also, wishing is rather for an end, while choice is of things that are related to the end; for example, we wish to be healthy, but we choose those things by means of which we will become healthy, and we wish to be happy and say so, while it would not fit the meaning to say we choose to be happy, since, universally, choice seems to be concerned with things that are up to us” (pp. 40-41).

Here he is saying not that choice is the efficient cause of action, as the Latin tradition would have it, but rather that it evaluates and compares possible efficient causes, with respect to how well they would serve as means to realize the ends we wish for.

“So it could not be opinion either, since there seems to be opinion about all things, and no less about things that are everlasting or things that are impossible than about things that are up to us; and opinion is divided into the false and the true, not into the bad and the good, while choice is divided into the latter two kinds. Now no doubt no one even claims that choice is the same as opinion as a whole, but it is not even the same as some particular opinion, for by choosing good or bad things we are certain kinds of people, but not by having opinions. And we choose to take or avoid something from among those alternatives, but we have an opinion about what it is or whom it benefits or in what way, while taking or avoiding is not at all what we have as an opinion. And choice is praised for being a choice of what it ought to be, more than for being rightly made, while opinion is praised for being as something truly is. And we choose what we most of all know to be good, but have opinions about things we do not know very well, and it seems not to be the same people who choose best who also have the best opinions, but rather some people seem to have better opinions but to choose what they ought not, on account of vice. And if an opinion comes before a choice or comes along with it, that makes no difference, for we are not considering this, but whether it is the same as any sort of opinion” (pp. 40-41).

Even though Aristotle does not follow Plato’s categorical devaluation of opinion, we can still hear echoes of Plato’s radical contrast between opinion and knowledge.

“What then is choice, or what sort of thing is it, since it is none of the things mentioned? It is obviously something willing, but not everything that is willing is something chosen. But might it just be the one that has been deliberated about first? For choice is involved with reason and thinking things through. And even its name [pro-airesis] seems to give a hint that it is something taken before [pro] other things”

In saying here that choice is involved with reason and thinking things through, and in suggesting that it “might just be” the outcome of deliberation, Aristotle anticipates what will be his eventual conclusion. Quite the opposite of being exercised in a vacuum, Aristotelian choice is the rational outcome of deliberation.

[Chapter 3.] “But do people deliberate about all things, and is everything a thing to be deliberated about, or about some things is deliberation not possible? Perhaps one ought to mean by a thing to be deliberated about, not what some fool or insane person might deliberate about, but those things that people with sense would deliberate about. Now no one deliberates about everlasting things, such as the cosmos, or about the diagonal and side of a square, that they are incommensurable; but neither does one deliberate about things that are in motion but always happen according to the same pattern, whether by necessity or else by nature or by means of some other cause, such as solstices and the risings of stars; nor about things that are sometimes one way and sometimes another such as drought and rain; nor about things that are by chance, such as finding a treasure; but not about all human things either, as no Spartan deliberates about how the Scythians should best be governed, for none of these things could happen through us. We deliberate about things that are up to us and are matters of action, and these are the ones that are left. For the causes responsible for things seem to be in nature, necessity, and chance, and also intelligence and everything that is due to a human being. And among human beings, each sort deliberates about the things to be done by its own acts.”

“And there is no deliberation about the precise and self-contained kinds of knowledge, such as about letters (for we are not in doubt about how something ought to be spelled), but as many things as come about by our act, but not always in the same way, about these we do deliberate, for example about the things done by medical skill or skill in business, and more so about piloting a ship than about gymnastic training, to the extent that the former is less precisely formulated, and similarly also about the rest of the skills but more about those that are arts than those that are kinds of knowledge, since we are more in doubt in connection with the former. Deliberating is present in things that happen in a certain way for the most part, but are unclear as to how they will turn out, and in which this is undetermined. And we take others as fellow deliberators for large issues, not trusting that we ourselves are adequate to decide them. We deliberate not about ends but about the things that are related to the ends, for a doctor does not deliberate about whether he will cure someone, nor a rhetorician about whether he will persuade, nor someone holding political office about whether he will produce good order, nor does anyone else deliberate about ends, but having set down the end, they consider in what way and by what means it would be the case.”

“When it appears that the end would come about by more than one means, people examine through which of them it will come about most easily and beautifully, but if the end will be accomplished by only one means, they examine how it will come to be through this means, and this in turn through some other, until they come to the first thing that will be responsible for the end, which is the last thing in the process of discovery” (pp. 40-42, emphasis added).

“What is deliberated about and what is chosen are the same thing, except that the thing chosen is already determined, since the thing chosen is what is decided out of the deliberation” (p. 43).

Aristotelian choice is the rational and feeling evaluative outcome of a well-rounded and multi-dimensional deliberation, not a power of arbitration or an arbitrary power that would allegedly be superior to reason and human feeling.

Free Will in Aristotle?

A recent large book by Olivier Boulnois, Généalogie de la liberté [Genealogy of Freedom] (2021), provides great detail on the emergence of the notion of free will (liberum arbitrium in Latin). I have previously mentioned his Être et représentation (1999), which gives fascinating documentation of the role of Duns Scotus in the formation of modern notions of representation, and metaphysics as ontology. Boulnois has written extensively on medieval philosophy. Like Alain de Libera, he turns a broadly Foucaultian “archaeological” method in the direction of showing the large and largely unknown role of medieval philosophy in the development of common Western philosophical concepts. This post will focus on a part of his discussion of how Aristotle stands largely apart from later views.

Early on in the present work, Boulnois cites the first sentence of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica:

“It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which its history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer” (quoted in Boulnois, p. 34).

Boulnois notes how Latin translations extensively transformed the meanings of Aristotelian concepts.

“Is free will proper to the human? All of medieval and modern reflection on action rests on this thesis…. The concept of proairesis is analyzed for the first time in book III of the Nicomachean Ethics” (Boulnois, p. 133, my translation throughout). “To begin with, must we follow the [12th century Latin] translation of Burgundio? Does proairesis really mean free will?” (p. 134).

“With the translation of proairesis by ‘choice’, the key concept of Aristotelian ethics is integrated into the semantic field of will. The Burgundian node, which connects Aristotle and [the Church Fathers] Nemesius and Damascene in the same bundle of translations, constitutes a second origin of proairesis as free will in the 12th century” (p. 137). “Aristotle defines proairesis as a kind of desire joined with deliberation (with discourse)” (p. 139). “With Aristotle, we are indeed far from the medieval and modern interpretation, which speaks of choice (electio)” (p. 141).

Until now I have followed Joe Sachs’s translation in using “choice” myself. Sachs uses the English word with the same root as the French that Boulnois is questioning, but he explains it in terms of Aristotle’s definition just mentioned. But as we will see in an upcoming post, the Latin tradition gave it a voluntaristic coloring that is foreign to Aristotle.

“The most rigorous translation seems to be ‘resolution’…. Resolution introduces logos and time” (p. 140). “The object of our resolution is first of all the object of our desire, insofar as this results from a deliberation” (pp. 140-141). “Our moral character depends not on our theoretical attitude but on the ensemble of our resolutions, the repetition of which constitutes our disposition to act, indeed our aptitude for beautiful actions” (p. 142).

This ensemble of our resolutions sounds like the commitments of which Brandom and other contemporary writers speak.

“Since Cicero, the boulesis of the Stoics has been translated to Latin by voluntas [will]. But the Stoics affirm that such a mastery of impulse is found only in the sage…. It is only later, with Augustine, that this prerogative of the sage becomes a faculty accessible to all. Our concept of will, as capacity to consent or not to our representations, carries all this history. But in Aristotle, boulesis always designates the desire that pertains to that part of the soul that is capable of speech. It is a form of desire that is enunciable, intelligible…. Boulesis indeed is a wish: a wish does not require the existence of a will; like all desire, it is moved by its object” (p. 143).

“Among our desires, resolution results from a deliberation, which deploys itself in language…. The true principle of our resolution is of the order of language and of thought. Like all living beings, the human is necessarily moved by what appears to her as desirable; but in distinction from the other living beings, it is through speech that the desirable appears to her…. Resolution bears on action that can be accomplished by us…. There is only a place for deliberation when several lines of action are possible…. We deliberate on that which no one can do in our place” (p. 145, emphasis in original).

Here the resolution of deliberation is explicitly grounded in language and thought, and not in an anachronistic non-Aristotelian notion of a faculty of will.

“It is necessary to underline: Aristotle does not exactly say that the resolution depends on us. What depends on us is the action that is the object of that resolution…. Aristotle does propose a theory of decision, or of resolution, but not a theory of freedom of choice, or of free will” (pp. 145-146, emphasis in original).

Unlike Boulnois here, some 20th century writers have used “decision” in the sense that Boulnois gives to “choice”.

“Such actions are ontologically contingent: they could [also] not be. The metaphysical tradition deduced from this the existence of a power of choice, of a will or a free will” (pp. 146-147).

The important point here is that this “metaphysical tradition” does not include Aristotle.

“Nothing obliges us to understand contingency in an absolute manner, and as subject to our power. Aristotle refers to the ensemble of actions that depend on us (eph’ hemin) in general (in the sense of a collectivity: the humans, the agents, the citizens), but not to those that depend on me (here and now)…. But Aristotle never claims that an agent has, other things being equal, at a given instant, the capacity to do one thing or its contrary, to act and not to act. ‘What depends on us’ is a generic capacity, proper to humankind, and not to some particular individual, here and now. Reciprocally, in insisting on the idea that deliberation is the cause of our resolution, Aristotle holds that at the interior of this bivalence, we more often see what the logos presents as desirable” (p. 147, emphasis in original).

“In this context, what is the principle of action?” (p. 150). He quotes Aristotle, “and the principle of resolution is desire and reason…. What affirmation and negation are in thought, pursuit and flight are to desire…. For resolution to be good, it is necessary at the same time that the discourse be true and the desire just” (p. 150).

Boulnois summarizes, “Thus the properly human principle of action is resolution, that is to say the conjunction of desire and of logos in the pursuit of an end” (p. 151).

He turns to the background that Aristotle is responding to.

“The sophists affirm that every desire is good; Plato, that we can only truly will the true or absolute good” (ibid). “While the sophists identify freedom with the capacity to do what we want, and Plato with sole adherence to the Good, Aristotle proposes a third way: ethical freedom is the art of deciding well, of arriving at the resolution the circumstances require…. The resolution taken by the serious human [substituting Sachs’s “serious” for spudaios in the homme de bien or man of the good in Boulnois] is indeed a point of coincidence between the apparent good (which all seek) and the true good (that she discerns). In leaving behind the confrontation between sophists and Platonists, Aristotle has recourse neither to a relativism of appearances nor to an objective norm; in the element of virtue (and of desire), he aims at a coincidence between the phenomenon of good and its truth” (p. 152).

This Aristotelian idea of a point of coincidence between appearance and truth was later taken up by Hegel.

“Is it necessary to say that resolution is free? Does it consist in a choice?… Aristotle never makes the concept of freedom intervene in relation to the question of choice, nor even that of willingness” (p. 153). “Nevertheless, Aristotle knows and uses a concept of freedom (eleutheria). But this pertains to politics and not to the theory of action” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The Latin translation not withstanding, [the adjective] ‘hekousion’ (willing) does not mean ‘voluntary’ (voluntarium); it is rather the mode of our action, except in cases of constraint or ignorance. Proairesis does not mean ‘free will’ (liberum arbitrium), but decision, resolution… Freedom is the ethical horizon of our action, and not the metaphysical attribute of a will that Aristotle did not envisage” (p. 154).

“It is indeed possible to analyze human action without postulating in the agent a central instance of arbitration, and without inscribing her in a physical determinism…. Ethics is indeed thinkable without a theory of will” (p. 155).

As I have noted many times, Plato and Aristotle founded ethics without the later notion of a faculty of will.

“Ethical action does not necessarily require a freedom of choice. It depends on a resolution (proairesis), which mainly refers to a dimension of anticipation, and does not always imply a choice. Ethics is indeed thinkable without the doctrine of free will” (ibid).

Here again the emphasis is on something like commitment.

“Resolution presupposes a process of deliberation in the agent: she at least implicitly evaluates the reasons to do x rather than nothing; that which she does is not imposed on her from the outset. That is to say that for her, there are a multitude of options and reasons to act” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Deliberation is concerned with the goodness of reasons.

“A stranger to the metaphysical problem of free will, freedom is ethical in essence; it consists in the ability to act well; it is only acquired at the completion of an education in virtue” (ibid).

“All thought about action situates itself in the horizon of the good, and freedom is nothing other than liberation from the bad” (p. 156).

“It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics.” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“On the plane of finite existence, no one knows if they have absolutely accomplished the best action. In the same way in their reflections on our moral lack of power, Aristotle and Ovid speak of that which is ‘better’ (comparative) and not of that which is ‘best’ (superlative)” (ibid).

Averroes vs Ghazali

The Persian al-Ghazali (1055–1111 CE), known to the Latins as Algazel, is regarded as the greatest theologian of the Ash‘arite school of Sunni Islam. According to Wikipedia, the Ash‘arites are one of several schools that advocate the use of reason in expounding the Islamic revelation. In this sense they are definitely to be distinguished from the literalists. The Ash‘arites nonetheless defend a radical version of omnipotence.

Ghazali wrote a work that circulated in the Latin world, which summarized the views of the Islamic philosophers accurately enough that the Latins mistakenly regarded him as one of them. “Philosophy” in this context principally refers to the thought of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna). But Ghazali is best known to historians of philosophy for his sharp attack The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which treated Ibn Sina as representative. Ghazali was a very strong creationist who insisted that creation must be understood as having occurred in time. Like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham a bit later in the West, he defended a radically voluntarist theology.

In a short work called the Decisive Treatise that was never translated to Latin, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) argues as an Islamic jurist that the Koran commands those capable of doing so to study philosophy. Though his philosophy had very little influence in the Islamic world, he was the leading Maliki jurist in al-Andalus and the Maghreb in his day. He wrote the authoritative textbook of Maliki jurisprudence. I learned that Maliki law is still practiced in many Islamic countries.

Ibn Rushd wrote a refutation of Ghazali called The Incoherence of the Incoherence, which interspersedly contains the full text of Ghazali’s work. It circulated in Latin under the title Destructio Destructionum (destruction of the destruction). I’ve transcribed some small excerpts of this historically fascinating book.

The dispute is basically about Aristotle versus creationism. The particular focus of the first part I have excerpted addresses this from the angle of views about the relation between what is eternal and what is in time. The other part I’ve excerpted has to do with Aristotle versus theological voluntarism.

[Ghazali] “The philosophers say: It is impossible that the temporal should proceed from the absolutely Eternal…. When the world begins in time, a new determinant either does or does not arise…. If it does not, the world will stay in the same state of pure possibility as before; if a new determinant does arise… either we shall have an infinite regress or we shall arrive at a principle determining eternally” (Averroes’ Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), tr. Van Den Bergh (1954), p. 1).

[Averroes] “This argument is in the highest degree dialectical and does not reach the pitch of demonstrative proof. For its premises are common notions, and common notions approach the equivocal, whereas demonstrative premises are concerned with things proper to the same genus” (ibid).

Averroes retains Farabi’s exaggerated emphasis on strict demonstration in the sense of the Prior Analytics in Aristotle. Reading Aristotle partly through a Farabian lens, Averroes does not recognize the large place and positive role that Aristotle implicitly gives to dialectic in the sense of the Topics throughout his works. Averroes sees “dialectic” as an intellectually loose approach that easily falls into sophistry.

[Averroes] “For the term ‘possible’ is used in an equivocal way of the possible that happens more often than not, of the possible that happens less often than not, and of the possible with equal chances of happening, and these three types of the possible do not seem to have the same need for a new determining principle” (ibid).

“All these are multifarious and difficult questions which need, each of them, a special examination, both in themselves and in regard to the opinions the ancients held about them. To treat what is in reality a plurality of questions as one problem is one of the well-known seven sophisms, and a mistake in one of these principles becomes a great error by the end of the examination of reality” (pp. 1-2).

[Ghazali] “[The world’s] existence was not willed before and therefore did not happen… at the exact moment it began it was willed by an eternal will and therefore began” (p. 3).

[Averroes] “The act of the agent necessarily implies a change and … each change has a principle which causes it…. [T]he Eternal cannot change in any way. But all this is difficult to prove” (ibid).

“[O]ur expressions ‘eternal will’ and ‘temporal will’ are equivocal, indeed contrary…. [W]hen one says: ‘There is a Willer who wills eternally one of two contraries in Himself’, the definition of the will is abandoned” (p. 4).

[Ghazali summarizing the philosophers] “The effect only takes place when a new event, i.e. entering the house or the arrival of tomorrow, has actually happened…. A delay in the object willed is imaginable only in decision, for decision is not sufficient for the existence of the act” (p. 5). “If, however, the eternal Will is analogous to our decision, it does not suffice to produce the thing decided upon, but the act of creation must be accompanied by a new act of volition, and this brings us again to the idea of a change” (ibid). “[W]ithout the realization of any new condition, this effect comes into existence and is produced. And this is absurd” (p. 6).

[Averroes] “[Ghazali’s] example of divorce based on convention seems to strengthen the argument of the philosophers, but in reality it weakens it. For it enables the Ash’arites to say: In the same way as the actual divorce is delayed after the formula of divorce till the moment when the condition of someone’s entering the house, or any other, is fulfilled, so the realization of the world can be delayed after God’s act of creation until the condition is fulfilled on which this realization depends, i.e. the moment when God willed it. But conventional things do not behave like rational” (ibid).

[Ghazali] “[T]he party which believes in the creation of the world in time through an eternal Will includes so many persons that no country can contain them and no number enumerate them, and they certainly do not contradict the logically minded out of obstinacy, while knowing better in their hearts” (p. 7).

[Averroes] “[T]his argument is mistaken, for it is not a condition of objective truth that it should be known to all” (ibid).

[Ghazali] “[T]o suppose the Creator of the world ignorant of His own work is necessarily absurd” (ibid).

[Averroes] “This assertion belongs to the class of assertions whose contrary is equally false. For there exists no proof which refutes anything that is evidently true, and universally acknowledged. Anything that can be refuted by a demonstrative proof is only supposed to be true, not really true…. Equally, if it is absolutely true that the effect of a cause cannot be delayed after the causation and the Ash’arites claim that they can advance a proof to deny it, then we can be absolutely sure that they cannot have such a proof. If there is a controversy about questions like this, the final criterion rests with the sound understanding which does not base itself on prejudice and passion, when it probes according to the signs and rules by which truth and mere opinion are logically distinguished” (p. 8).

[Ghazaili] “[E]ternity of the world is impossible, for it implies an infinite number and an infinity of unities for the spherical revolutions, although they can be divided by six, by four, and by two” (p. 9).

[Averroes] “This too is a sophistical argument. It amounts to saying: In the same way as you are unable to refute our demonstrative argument for the creation of the world in time, that if it were eternal, its revolutions would be neither even nor uneven, so we cannot refute your theory that the effect of an agent whose conditions to act are always fulfilled cannot be delayed. This argument aims only at creating and establishing a doubt, which is one of the sophist’s objectives…. But when the existence of an eternal prime mover had been proved, whose act cannot be posterior to his being, it followed that there could as little be a beginning for his act as for his being; otherwise his act would be possible, not necessary, and he would not be a first principle…. The agent who has no beginning either for his existence or for those acts of his which he performs without an instrument, has no first instrument either to perform those acts of his without beginning which by their nature need an instrument.”

“But since the theologians mistook the accidental for the essential, they denied this eternal agent” (pp. 10-11).

“It will be clear to you that neither the arguments of the theologians for the temporal creation of the world of which Ghazali speaks, nor the arguments of the philosophers which he includes and describes in his book, suffice to reach absolute evidence or afford stringent proof” (p. 12).

Like Aquinas, Averroes holds that arguments on neither side of the debate for and against creationism reach demonstrative certainty. Averroes defends a theory of eternal “creation” that is far removed from what creationists mean by creation. It has been argued that Albert the Great also had a notion of eternal creation.

[Averroes] “No motion possesses totality or forms an aggregate, i.e. is provided with a beginning or an end, except in so far as it is in the soul, as is the case with time. And it follows from the nature of circular movement that it is neither even nor uneven except as represented in the soul” (p. 13).

“[T]he impossibility of an actual infinite is an acknowledged axiom in philosophical theory, equally valid for material and immaterial things…. Perhaps Avicenna wanted only to satisfy the masses, telling them what they were accustomed to hear about the soul. But this theory is far from satisfactory” (p. 14).

[Ghazali] “We seek to show by all this that the philosophers cannot shake the conviction of their adversaries that the eternal Will is connected with temporal creation, except by claiming its absurdity by the necessity of thought, and that therefore they are in no way different from the theologians who make the same claim against the philosophical doctrines opposed to theirs. And out of this there is no issue” (p. 15).

“[W]e say that the soul of Zaid is either identical with the soul of Amr or different from it; but their identity would mean something absurd, for everyone is conscious of his own identity and knows that he is not another” (ibid).

[Averroes] ” ‘[D]ifferent’ is an equivocal term, and ‘identity’ too is predicated of a number of things which are also called ‘different’…. The souls of Zaid and Amr are one in one sense and many in another; we might say, one in relation to their form, many in relation to their substratum” (pp. 15-16).

“When someone denies a truth of which it is absolutely certain that it is such-and-such, there exists no argument by which we can come to an understanding with him; for every argument is based on known premises about which both adversaries agree. When each point advanced is denied by the adversary, discussion with him becomes impossible, but such people stand outside the pale of humanity and have to be educated” (p. 16, emphasis added).

In emphasizing argument from agreed-upon premises, Averroes treats something like Platonic dialogue as a norm.

[Ghazali] “God before the creation of the world was able to create it, say, one year or two years before He did, and there is no limit to His power; but He seemed to have patience and did not create. Then He created” (p. 17).

[Averroes] “[W]hat has no beginning does not finish or end.” (ibid).

[Ghazali for the philosophers] “[W]e philosophers know by the necessity of thought that one thing does not distinguish itself from a similar except by a differentiating principle…. [I]f you answer that the Will of God is the differentiating principle, then one has to inquire what differentiates the Will, i.e. the reason why it has been differentiated in such or such way (p. 18).”

[Ghazali] “[W]ill is a quality which has the faculty of differentiating one thing from another, and if it had not this faculty, power in itself would suffice…. And to ask why will differentiates one of two similars is like asking why knowledge must comprehend the knowable” (ibid).

[Averroes] “As the theologians were unable to give a satisfactory answer, they took refuge in the theory that the eternal Will is a quality the nature of which is to differentiate between two similar things, without there being for God a differentiating principle which inclines Him to one of two similar acts” (p. 20).

This is the originally Stoic idea of a “freedom of indifference”. The Ash‘arites defend both predestination and theological and anthropological voluntarism.

[Ghazali] “Everyone, therefore, who studies, in the human and the divine, the real working of the act of choice, must necessarily admit a quality the nature of which is to differentiate between two similar things…. Suppose two similar dates in front of a man who has a strong desire for them, but who is unable to take them both. Surely he will take one of them through a quality in him the nature of which is to differentiate between two similar things” (p. 21).

[Averroes] “[I]t is by no means a matter of distinguishing between two similar things when, in this condition, he takes one of the two dates. It is nothing but the admission of an equivalence of two similar things. His will attaches itself therefore merely to the distinction between the fact of taking one of them and the fact of leaving them altogether” (p. 23).

“A definite moment cannot be assigned for the creation of the world, for either time did not exist before it, or there was an infinite time” (p. 32).

“[T]he temporal proceeds from the First Eternal, not in so far as it is temporal but in so far as it is eternal, i.e. through being eternal generically, though temporal in its parts…. for its arising anew is not a new fact, but is an eternal act, i.e. an act without beginning or end. Therefore its agent must be an eternal agent, for an eternal act has an eternal agent, and a temporal act a temporal agent. Only through the eternal element in it can it be understood that movement has neither beginning nor end, and this is meant by its permanence, for movement itself is not permanent, but changing” (p. 36).

[Ghazali on the philosophers] “They assert that he who affirms that the world is posterior to God and God prior to the world cannot mean anything but that He is prior not temporally but essentially” (p. 37).

[Averroes] “[T]he posteriority of the world to the Creator, since He does not precede the world in time, can only be understood as the posteriority of effect to cause” (p. 39).

[Ghazali] “How will you refute the man who claims that creation and annihilation take place through the will of God: if God wills, He creates, and if He wills, He annihilates, and this is the meaning of His being absolutely powerful, and notwithstanding this He does not alter in Himself, but it is only His act that alters?” (p. 83). “[T]he agent must be willing, choosing, and knowing what he wills to be the agent of what he wills, but according to [the philosophers] God does not will, He has no attribute whatever, and what proceeds from Him proceeds by the compulsion of necessity” (p. 87).

[Averroes] “Ghazali’s words ‘The agent must be willing, choosing, and knowing what he wills to be the agent of what he wills’ are by no means self-evident and cannot be accepted as a definition of the maker of the world without a proof, unless one is justified in inferring from the empirical to the divine” (pp. 87-88).

“[H]e who chooses and wills lacks the things which he wills, and God cannot lack anything He wills. And he who chooses makes a choice for himself of the better of two things, but God is in no need of a better condition. Further, when the willer has reached his object, his will ceases and, generally speaking, will is a passive quality and a change, but God is exempt from passivity and change. God is still farther distant from natural action, for the act of the natural thing is a necessity in its substance, but is not a necessity in the substance of the willer and belongs to its entelechy. In addition, natural action does not proceed from knowledge: it has, however, been proved that God’s act does proceed from knowledge. The way in which God becomes an agent and a willer has not become clear in this place, since there is no counterpart to His will in the empirical world. How is it therefore possible to assert that an agent can only be understood as acting through deliberation and choice? For then this definition is indifferently applied to the empirical and the divine” (p. 88).

The argument that the One cannot lack anything is a good example of a neoplatonic argument that was widely adopted and applied to the monotheistic God in later theistic traditions. Although it is speculative in the pre-Hegelian sense, the logic seems unassailable.

Ghazali uses the Aristotelian term “deliberation”, but gives it a different sense. In Aristotle, deliberation determines choice, and there is no separate faculty of will. The idea of a faculty of will separate from reason is a later development that was designed to support the notion of a freedom of indifference. This has the disastrous effect of subordinating reason to arbitrariness.

Aristotle never says that the First cause deliberates, only that it contemplates. The idea of a freedom of indifference is Stoic and only emerged later. Aristotle would not have regarded his notion of deliberation as compatible with the alleged freedom of indifference, because deliberation is concerned with identification of differences or distinctions that have practical import.

[Ghazali] “We say: ‘Agent’ means someone from whom there proceeds an act with the will to act according to choice and with the knowledge of the object willed. But according to the philosophers the world stands in relation to God as the effect to the cause, in a necessary connexion which God cannot be imagined to sever, and which is like the connexion between the shadow and the man, light and the sun, but this is not an act at all” (p. 89).

[Averroes] “The agent is what causes some other thing to pass from potency to actuality and from nonexistence to existence; this actualization occurs sometimes from deliberation and choice, sometimes by nature, and the philosophers do not call a person who throws a shadow an agent, except metaphorically, because the shadow cannot be separated from the man” (ibid).

[Averroes] “His assertion that not every cause is called an agent is true, but his argument that the inanimate is not called an agent is false, for the denial that the inanimate exhibits acts excludes only the rational and voluntary act, not act absolutely, for we find that certain inanimate things have powers to actualize things like themselves; e.g. fire, which changes anything warm and dry into another fire like itself, through converting it from what it has in potency into actuality” (p. 92).

[Ghazali] “If the inanimate is called an agent, it is by metaphor, in the same way as it is spoken of metaphorically as tending and willing” (ibid).

[Averroes] “[W]hen by these expressions is meant that it actualizes another’s potency, it is really an agent in the full meaning of the word” (ibid).

[Ghazali] “This is wrong, because will necessarily implies knowledge, and likewise act necessarily implies will” (ibid).

[Averroes] “But in the definition of ‘act’ knowledge is not included, because actualization of another thing is possible without knowing it” (p. 93).

[Ghazali] “[T]here is as a matter of fact a contradiction when ‘natural act’ is taken in a real sense, only this contradiction is not at once evident to the understanding nor is the incompatibility of nature and act felt acutely, because this expression is employed metaphorically; for since nature is in a certain way a cause and the agent is also a cause, nature is called an agent metaphorically. The expression ‘voluntary act’ is as much redundant as the expression ‘he wills and knows what he wills’ ” (ibid).

[Averroes] “This statement is undoubtedly wrong, for what actualizes another thing, i.e. acts on it, is not called agent simply by a metaphor, but in reality, for the definition of ‘agent’ is appropriate to it. The division of ‘agent’ into ‘natural’ and ‘voluntary agent’ is not the division of an equivocal term, but the division of a genus” (ibid).

“But as a matter of fact the natural agent has an act much more stable than the voluntary agent, for the natural agent’s act is constant — which is not the case with the act of the voluntary agent” (p. 94).

[Ghazali] “[I]f a man were to throw another into a fire and kill him, it is the man who would be called his killer, not the fire…. This proves that the word ‘agent’ is used of one whose act proceeds from his will, and, behold, the philosophers do not regard God as endowed with will and choice” (p. 95).

[Averroes] “This is an answer of the wicked who heap fallacy on fallacy. Ghazali is above this, but perhaps the people of his time obliged him to write this book to safeguard himself against the suspicion of sharing the philosophers’ view. Certainly nobody attributes the act to its instrument, but only to its first mover. He who killed a man by fire is in the proper sense the agent and the fire is the instrument of the killing, but when a man is burned by a fire, without this fact’s depending on someone’s choice, nobody would say that the fire burned him metaphorically” (ibid).

[Ghazali] “Our aim is to show that such is not the meaning of ‘act’ and ‘work’. These words can mean only that which really proceeds from the will. But you reject the real meaning of ‘act’, although you use this word, which is honoured amongst Muslims. But one’s religion is not perfect when one uses words deprived of their sense” (p. 96).

[Averroes] “This would indeed be a correct conclusion against the philosophers, if they should really say what Ghazali makes them say…. He does not unmask their imposture by his words, but he himself deceives by ascribing to them theories which they do not hold” (ibid).

[Ghazali] ” ‘Act’ applies to temporal production, but for [the philosophers] the world is eternal and is not produced in time. The meaning of ‘act’ is ‘to convert from not-being into being by producing it’ and this cannot be imagined in the eternal, as what exists already cannot be brought into existence. Therefore ‘act’ implies a temporal product, but according to them the world is eternal; how then could it be God’s act?” (ibid).

[Averroes] “If the world were by itself eternal and existent (not in so far as it is moved, for each movement is composed of parts which are produced), then, indeed, the world would not have an agent at all. But if the meaning of ‘eternal’ is that it is in everlasting production and that this production has neither beginning nor end, certainly the term ‘production’ is more truly applied to him who brings about an everlasting production than to him who procures a limited production” (pp. 96-97).

“And therefore, just as the eternal existent is more truly existent than the temporal, similarly that which is eternally in becoming is more truly coming to be than that which comes to be only during a definite time” (p. 100).

[Ghazali] “We do not say that the simultaneity of agent and act is impossible, granted that the act is temporal…. It is only an eternal act that we consider impossible, for to call an act that which does not come into being out of not-being is pure metaphor and does not conform to reality…. Our answer is that our aim in this question is to show that you philosophers use those venerable names without justification, and that God according to you is not a true agent, nor the world truly His act, and that you apply this word metaphorically — not in its real sense. This has now been shown” (p. 102).

In Aristotle there is a very important distinction between ordinary “action” as understood by everyone and his own completely original notion of “act”, which, as Gwenaëlle Aubry has very thoroughly documented, is most properly said of entelechy as a self-referential, purely internal determination, and is therefore not an “action” in the ordinary sense at all. In particular, Aristotelian act in its proper sense has nothing to do with efficient causality, especially as that latter notion was transformed by Latin writers such as Aquinas and Suárez. Efficient cause in Aristotle is the instrumental means by which some end is achieved. As such, it is the least primary of Aristotle’s four causes, not the most primary as it is for Aquinas and Suárez. This is a really big difference between them and Aristotle.

[Averroes] “In this argument he supposes that the philosophers concede to him that they only mean by God’s agency that He is the cause of the world, and nothing else, and that cause and effect are simultaneous. But this would mean that the philosophers had abandoned their original statement, for the effect follows only from its cause, in so far as it is a formal or final cause, but does not necessarily follow from its efficient cause, for the efficient cause frequently exists without the effect’s existing” (p. 103).

“[T]he term ‘eternal becoming’ is more appropriate to the world than the term ‘eternity’ ” (p. 104).

“When, however, after a close examination, it was discovered that all things tend to one end, and this end is the order which exists in the world, as it exists in an army through its leader, and as it exists in cities through their government, they came to the conclusion that the world must have one highest principle…. They believed therefore, because of the good which is present in everything, that evil occurs only in an accidental way…. [F]or the existence of much good with a little evil is preferable to the non-existence of much good because of a little evil” (p. 106). “Nowadays, however, … that out of the one all things proceed by one first emanation, is generally accepted, and with our contemporaries we need discuss only this latter statement” (p. 107).

The military metaphor does briefly appear in book Lambda of the Metaphysics. To me though, it has always seemed incongruous with Aristotle’s main idea of the First cause as a pure entelechy.

[Averroes] “But when the philosophers of our religion, like Farabi and Avicenna, had once conceded to their opponents that the agent in the divine world is like the agent in the empirical, and that from the one agent there can arise but one object (and according to all the First was an absolutely simple unity), it became difficult for them to explain how plurality could arise from it” (ibid).

This notion of the First as an absolutely simple One sounds to me more like Plotinus than Aristotle. “According to all” in this context would presumably be a reference to the neoplatonizing Farabian tradition. Of all medieval philosophers, Averroes is probably the closest to being a pure Aristotelian, but that is a relative distinction, not an absolute one. The only completely pure Aristotelian I know of is Aristotle himself. (Though I try to distinguish a genuinely historical Aristotle from the many Aristotles of the commentary tradition, I am certainly no pure Aristotelian either.)

[Averroes] “[T]hey declared that from the First, who is a simple existent, the mover of the highest sphere proceeds, and from this mover, since he is of a composite nature, as he is both conscious of himself and conscious of the First, a duality, the highest sphere, and the mover of the second sphere, the sphere under the highest can arise. This, however, is a mistake, according to philosophical teaching, for thinker and thought are one identical thing in human intellect and this is still more true in the case of the abstract intellects. This does not affect Aristotle’s theory, for the individual agent in the empirical world, from which there can only proceed one single act, can only in an equivocal way be compared to the first agent…. And thereby Aristotle proves that the agent of the human intelligibles is an intellect free from matter, since this agent thinks all things, and in the same way he proves that the passive [sic] intellect is ingenerable and incorruptible, because this intellect also thinks all things” (p. 108).

“They” in this case is clearly a reference to the Farabian tradition. The translator’s choice of “passive” intellect above for the potential intellect reflects the near total absence of specific scholarship on the texts of Averroes that still prevailed in the mid-20th century. In Averroes, the difference between the potential or “material” intellect on the one hand, and the passive “intellect” or the soul’s faculty of cogitation on the other, is huge. (See Cogitation, Intention; Imagination, Cogitation).

[Averroes] “Aristotle connects sensible existence with intelligible, saying that the world is one and proceeds from one, and that this Monad is partly the cause of unity, partly the cause of plurality. And since Aristotle was the first to find this solution, and because of its difficulty, many of the later philosophers did not understand it, as we have shown” (pp. 108-109). “But what we said of this connexion of every existent with the One is something different from what is meant by ‘agent’ and ‘object’, ‘maker’ and ‘product’ in this sublunary world” (p. 112).

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.

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.

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.

Operativity?

Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (2013) by Giorgio Agamben is the sixth book of a nine- or ten-volume series growing out of his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). In the course of it, he propounds his own variant of Heidegger’s “history of (the forgetting of) Being”. Like Heidegger, he seems to partly blame Aristotle for later historical developments that he casts in a very negative light. He particularly claims that Aristotle’s distinction of potentiality and actuality and Aristotle’s thesis of the priority of actuality — both of which I find to be extremely valuable good things — are the ultimate root of various modern evils. I also could not endorse his negative remarks about Kant. But many of the details of his analysis are quite fascinating. This will be another longer post.

Agamben is an eminent Italian scholar whose major influences include Heidegger, Foucault, and Walter Benjamin. He has written in depth about the ethical consequences of the existence of concentration camps. He has analyzed the wider implications of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s grounding of claims for the absolute sovereignty of the modern state in a voluntaristic theology of omnipotence. (But lately, some people have thought he went off the deep end vociferously opposing Covid vaccination.)

He begins, “Only what is effective, and as such governable and efficacious, is real: this is the extent to which office, under the guise of the humble functionary or the glorious priest, has changed from top to bottom the rules of first philosophy as much as those of ethics” (preface). [For this I tried an online Kindle edition, which is not so good for citation. There is only one page number for each two pages of the printed book, and the preface has no page numbers.]

The rhetoric here is reminiscent of Foucault’s “archaeological” period, and indeed the fine grain of his analysis noticeably follows an “archaeological” method as well, bringing up many distinctions that are typically blurred together in more conventional historical writing that aims to produce a simple, unified narrative. I find it encouraging to see that others have picked up Foucault’s “archaeological” approach, while turning it toward the history of philosophy. Agamben here offers an archaeology of selected elements of Western (especially Catholic) religious practice that he thinks have philosophical and broader social importance.

Agamben summarizes Heidegger’s discussion of the way medieval Latin translations of various Aristotelian philosophical terms changed their meaning as focusing on how the meanings were changed to make them compatible with creationism. Aquinas’ sophisticated philosophical defense of creation from nothing seems to be a major implicit target of Heidegger’s critique, though he does not mention Aquinas by name. An important part of Heidegger’s critique has to do with the same medieval developments promoting the status of so-called efficient causality and changing its meaning that I have been pointing out (most recently, here).

A major thesis of Agamben’s book is that the “new” notion of efficient causality originated much earlier than Heidegger places it, among the early Christian church fathers and some Roman writers they read, like Quintillian (1st century CE) and Calcidius (4th century). (Of course, that it was a notion of “efficient causality” would not have been recognized by authors unfamiliar with Aristotle.)

Agamben argues that this was associated primarily with accounts of the efficacity of the mass rather than the doctrine of creation. He posits the officium (“office”) of the priest performing the sacraments as the original model for a new kind of efficient cause, and argues that it was applied originally in theological notions of “governance” and “economy”, even though it could also serve as a model for creation. He emphasizes that the officium of the priest completely separates the action of performing the mass from the subject who performs it, which is what allows the mass to be effective as the work of God even if the priest who performs it is sinful.

He is particularly examines Latin uses of the term effectus. He notes that Quintilian distinguishes between arts in actu or in agendo like dance, “which has its end in itself and does not leave behind any work once the act is ended” (p. 43), and arts in effectu like painting, “which reaches its end in a work” (ibid). An opus is the effectus of an operatio. This passage from Quintillian is cited by 4th century Church Father Ambrose.

Agamben writes, “in truth [Ambrose] is moving in an ontological dimension that has nothing to do with Aristotle. What is in question is not the mode of being and the permanence of a form and a substance (that is, of a being that, in Aristotelian terms ‘is what it was’) but a dislocation of being into the sphere of praxis, in which being is what it does, is its operativity itself…. The work, which was in Aristotle the paradigm of being, is here only the proof and the effect of a working…. The ontological status of the liturgical act, of the opus Dei, in which being and praxis, effectiveness and effect, operation and work, opus operatum and opus operans are inseparably intertwined, here has its obscure precursor…. What is decisive here is that it is a specifically artistic operation (theatrical or choral) that furnishes a new ontological-practical paradigm, that is to say, that what is in question is not an ethical paradigm, but a particular technical paradigm. While Aristotle in fact considered the work (ergon) as the telos of the artisan or artist’s poiesis, here, by means of the paradigm of performing arts like dance and theater, which are by definition without a work, the telos is no longer the work, but the artis effectio (execution of the art)” (p. 44).

Again, there is no indication that the authors in question were even aware of how Aristotle used the corresponding terms.

What someone (not me) might call the “dislocation of being into the sphere of praxis” is by my reckoning a major part of what Aristotle himself aimed to achieve in the texts that make up what is conventionally called the Metaphysics. (But praxis is not really one of my words in English; I don’t think of it as a dislocation; and I think this still puts too much emphasis on “being” at the expense of things that matter more to Aristotle.) On my view, Aristotle in the Metaphysics offers a deliberately deflationary account of being as such, while devoting his main attention to a kind of teleological meta-ethics that constitutes what could equally be called first philosophy or “wisdom” or a kind of philosophical “theology”.

The example from Quintillian also poses an interesting question as to what Aristotle would say about dance or theatrical performance. The Poetics is mainly concerned with written works such as the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and only very secondarily with performance on stage. The writing of the works in question would be a standard case of poieisis (making or productive doing; root of English “poetry”). I’m inclined to think that the performative aspect of music, dance, or theater is better understood as a corner case of the mainly ethical non-productive simple doing that Aristotle calls praxis in Greek (root of English “practice”).

I don’t think it’s accurate to claim that this focus on performative doing in itself necessarily reflects or results in an essentially “technical” paradigm, even though artistic technique is involved in the examples. In calling it “technical”, Agamben implicitly invokes Heidegger’s fulminations against the modern technological world. I find it stilted to speak of doing performative art as an “operation”.

I think Aristotle wants us to see being largely in terms of doing. I don’t at all see a dichotomy of being versus doing in Aristotle, though maybe there is such a dichotomy between doing and “Aristotelian being according to Heidegger”. The ostensibly Aristotelian baseline to which Agamben compares later developments seems to be more assumed than argued for, and what he assumes is Heidegger’s concoction of being as presence.

“It is from this semantic constellation that an ontological paradigm is progressively elaborated among the Christian authors in which the decisive characteristics of being are no longer energeia and entelecheia but effectiveness and effect. It is from this perspective that one must consider the appearance in the Fathers, around the middle of the third century, of the terms efficacia and efficiencia, closely linked to effectus and used in a technical sense to translate (and betray) the Greek energeia” (ibid).

This tells us that the terms used in the eventual medieval translations of Aristotle to Latin already had well-established theological usages, which could not help but color the way that Aristotle was read in Latin. That is very important to know.

On the other hand, I’m already starting to think it is too broad a brush to associate any and all appeals to any kind of efficacy or effectiveness with the same criticisms that apply to more specific medieval and early modern uses of “efficient cause”.

Agamben points out that in explaining efficacia and efficiencia, Rufinus (340-410) gives the example of “the work of the blacksmith or of the one who effectu operis agit, renders his work effective (literally, ‘acts with the effectiveness of the work, with its operativity’). The thing and the work, considered inseparably in their effectiveness and in their function: this is the new ontological dimension that is substituted for the Aristotelian energeia. And it is interesting to note that before finding its canonical translation as potentia–actualitas, the couple dynamis-energeia had been rendered by the Latin Fathers as possibilitas–efficacia (effectus)” (p. 46).

By analogy with the housebuilding example from the Physics, Aristotle would say that properly speaking, the “source of motion” of the blacksmith’s work is the art of blacksmithing. Clearly Rufinus is speaking of something different.

It seems that Agamben implicitly wants to oppose any reliance on a concept of function. This is again an extremely sweeping condemnation, going far beyond specific notions of efficient cause.

He mentions that that “in Paul (and in his Latin translators) energeia indicates not a mode of being but the effectuation of a potency, the operation through which it receives reality and produces determinate effects” (p. 47).

This is also very important to know. Again, we have a pre-existing usage (this time in New Testament Greek) that would have encouraged distinctly non-Aristotelian interpretation of a key Aristotelian term among early Christian readers. The word energeia — which Aristotle had coined as a technical term for the most important modality of being (of which the first cause is the pure instance) — has entered into general circulation and lost its original precise meaning. It is used for a kind of happening in Paul.

“It is in Augustine (De gratia Christi et peccato originalis 1.4.5) that we find confirmed with perfect awareness the pertinence of effectus in ontology” (p. 46). Agamben concentrates on Augustine’s restatement of an argument by Pelagius that I won’t repeat. He concludes, “What is decisive is no longer the work as a stable dwelling in presence but operativity, understood as a threshold in which being and acting, potential and act, working and work, efficacy and effect, Wirkung and Wirklichkeit enter into a reciprocal tension and tend to become undecidable. This tension and this undecidability define the liturgical mystery that the Church recognizes as its most proper and highest task” (p. 47).

The stable dwelling in presence is Heidegger again. I think Aristotelian entelechy is a more nuanced concept, involving a kind of higher-order consistency in the pursuit within becoming of a goal that may itself be open-ended. Simple presence (even “presencing”) just is not an Aristotelian concept.

“The place where the ontology of effectiveness finds its complete expression is the theory of the sacrament as sign, elaborated by the scholastics from Berengar of Tours and Hugh of St. Victor up to Aquinas. According to this theory, what defines the sacraments is their being at once a sign and the cause of that of which they are a sign” (ibid).

“The decisive characteristic of the new effective ontology is operativity, to which the coinage of the adjective operatorius [by Ambrose] and, even earlier, the enormous diffusion of the term operatio (extremely rare in classical Latin…) both testify” (p. 48).

This linguistic point is again significant. I recall that variants of operatio play an important role in surviving manuscripts of the 13th century arts master Siger of Brabant, who not only was not a theologian, but was considered radically secular by some. This anecdotally supports the “enormous diffusion” of operatio.

Discussing a passage from Marius Victorinus, the Latin translator of Plotinus, on the Trinity Agamben concludes that the author is saying “operativity itself is being and being is in itself operative” (p. 50).

“[T]he mystery [of the liturgy] is the effect; what is mysterious is effectiveness, insofar as in it being is resolved into praxis and praxis is substantiated into being” (p. 54). “The sacramental celebration only causes the divine economy to be commemorated and rendered each time newly effective” (ibid).

“To what extent this effective ontology, which has progressively taken the place of classical ontology, is the root of our conception of being — to what extent, that is to say, we do not have at our disposal any experience of being other than operativity — this is the hypothesis that all genealogical research on modernity will have to confront” (ibid).

Maybe. But as broadly as he has defined it, in spite of all my scruples about “efficient causality” and sympathy for his concerns about sovereignty, etc., I would most certainly by Agamben’s lights be a captive of operativity, too, just for taking seriously the interplay between being and doing.

This kind of massively global generalization (a “metaphysics of operativity” applicable to nearly everything) is a recipe for confusing apples with alligators, so to speak. Too many different things are all being thrown together, which seems ironic and very unfortunate after all the careful “archaeological” scholarship oriented toward making additional distinctions.

Just to be clear, Agamben is the one calling these theological views views an “ontology” or a “metaphysics”.

“In the paradigm of operativity, a process that was present from the very beginning of Western ontology, even if in a latent form, reaches its culmination: the tendency to resolve, or at least to indeterminate, being into acting. In this sense the potential-act distinction in Aristotle is certainly ontological (dynamis and energeia are ‘two ways in which being is said’): nevertheless, precisely because it introduces a division into being and afterwards affirms the primacy of energeia over dynamis, it implicitly contains an orientation of being toward operativity. This distinction constitutes the originary nucleus of the ontology of effectiveness, whose very terminology takes form, as we have seen, by means of a translation of the term energeia. Being is something that must be realized or brought-into-work: this is the decisive characteristic that Neoplatonism and Christian theology develop, starting from Aristotle, but in what is certainly a non-Aristotelian perspective” (p. 57).

Now he says the paradigm of operativity was “present from the beginning”, meaning in Aristotle. How could the potential-act distinction “introduce a division into being” for a thinker whose most indisputable and elementary view of being is that it is said in many ways? There is no hint that he recognizes either Aristotle’s explicit subordination of sources of motion to that-for-the-sake-of-which, or his far from immediately “operative” paradigm for so-called efficient causality in something like the art of building.

Where Agamben says “certainly ontological”, this seems to recall Heidegger’s idiosyncratic specification that ontology is supposed to be about Being and not about beings. Agamben equivocates on the word “being”, substituting an extravagant and unitary Heideggerian meaning for Aristotle’s deflationary and multiple one based on uses of the word “is” in speech. (I get the impression that Heidegger detests Aquinas, and thus find it ironic how much he in a way ended up imitating him, in raising Being to the lofty heights.)

“The place and the moment when classical ontology begins that transformation is the theory of the hypostases [the One, Intellect, and Soul] in Plotinus (which will exercise a decisive influence on Augustine’s trinitarian doctrine through Marius Victorinus)…. [O]ntology is conceived fundamentally as a realization and a hypostatic process of putting-to-work, in which the categories of classical ontology (being and praxis, potential and act) tend to be indeterminated and the concept of will, as we shall see, develops a central function” (ibid).

Now we are back to talking about a major transformation in the hands of Plotinus and the church fathers, rather than continuity from the beginning. This part seems relatively much more solid, though I have doubts whether there is such a thing as “classical ontology”. The Greek term for the persons of the Trinity was none other than that used by Plotinus for his three “hypostases”. Augustine regarded his reading of Plotinus as second only to his conversion to Christianity among the milestones of his life. Agamben correctly points out that there is a connection between the way Plotinus introduces something like a kind of dynamism into the eternal, on the one hand, and the subtle mutual relations of the persons of the Trinity in Augustine on the other.

He quotes from Heidegger’s 1941 course “Metaphysics as History of Being”, referring to the conceptual transformations that accompanied the latinization of Aristotle: “Now ergon becomes the opus of the operari, the factum of the facere, the actus of the agire. The ergon is no longer what is freed in the openness of presencing, but what is effected in working. The essence of the ‘work’ is no longer ‘workness’ in the sense of distinctive presencing in the open, but rather the ‘reality’ of a real thing which rules in working and is fitted into the procedure of working. Having progressed from the beginning essence of energeia, Being has become actualitas” (p. 58).

Here again we see Heidegger’s idiosyncratic claim about the centrality of “presencing”, but this is a distraction. His point about the connotations of the Latin terms, on the other hand, makes good sense. These terms do have a somewhat “operative” feel, and a kind of bite that does not seem to be there in the Greek.

“Putting the creationist paradigm at the center of his reconstruction of the history of being leads Heidegger to define the central trait of modern metaphysics as a working in the sense of a causing and producing…. And it is this conception of being as effectiveness that, according to Heidegger, renders possible the transformation of truth into certainty, in which the human being, whom faith in God renders certain of salvation, secures its unconditional dominion over the world by means of techniques” (p. 60).

Here he speaks of “causing” in the modern sense, rather than Aristotle’s very different one of various kinds of why. It is quite true though that Aristotle regards considerations of “production” or “making” as something secondary compared to what in modern terms might be called ethical doing. Ethical doing is “more beautiful” than useful making, even though we also need what is useful. For Aristotle, what is more beautiful is more appropriate to the divine.

“It is just as much and above all governance and oikonomia, which in the last analysis can even provisionally put causal production between parentheses in the name of a more refined and diffuse form of management of human beings and of things. And it is this peculiar practice whose characteristics we have sought to define through our analysis of liturgy” (ibid).

Here the mutual relations between persons in the Trinity meet late Foucault’s analysis of power as something that is distributed throughout a field, rather than concentrated in points of authority.

Aristotle had distinguished between doing (praxis) and making (poieisis). According to Agamben, the Roman scholar Varro (2nd-1st centuries BCE) added a third, “distinctively Roman” type of human action (p. 81). “Gerere, which originally meant ‘to carry’, means in political-juridical language ‘to govern, administer, carry out an office'” (ibid).

So now we also have a Roman political dimension of government interacting with these ecclesiastical concerns. Whereas Hegel in his analysis of Rome especially focuses on the negative aspects of the “only one is free” character of the Roman emperor’s personal absolute rule, Agamben dwells on the institution of a commandist bureaucracy.

“The nature of office and its gerere is strikingly illuminated if one puts it in relation to the sphere of command, that is, with the action proper to the imperator” (p. 83).

“Here one can see the proximity between the ontology of command and the ontology of office that we have sought to define…. The official — like the officiant — is what he has to do and has to do what he is: he is a being of command. The transformation of being into having-to-be, which defines the ethics as much as the ontology and politics of modernity, has its paradigm here” (p. 84).

Elsewhere in the text he dwells on Hannah Arendt’s protrayal of the Nazi bureaucrat Adolph Eichmann, who lived for his office in this sense, in a book subtitled The Banality of Evil. I detest nothing more than arbitrary power, or power exercised arbitrarily, so I thoroughly understand the desire to denounce an “ontology of command”, even if I do not really believe first philosophy calls for an “ontological” approach. But as we will see, this concept too turns out to be dangerously vague.

Agamben thinks there is something wrong with the Aristotelian notion of hexis (emotional constitution or “habit”), which serves as a kind of mediating bridge between potentiality and act in a human.

“Habit is… the mode in which a being (in specific, a human being) ‘has’ in potential a technique, a knowledge, or a faculty, ‘has’ a potential to know and to act. It is, that is to say, the point where being crosses into having. But it is precisely this that constitutes hexis as an aporetic concept…. The strategic meaning of the concept of habit is that, in it, potential and act are separated and nonetheless maintained in relation…. Having the hexis of a potential means being able not to exercise it” (p. 93). “As Aristotle never stops repeating against the Megarians, someone truly has a potential who can both put it and not put it into action” (p. 94).

Potentiality is not univocally determining. It always involves multiple alternatives. The absence of univocal determination does not in itself constitute an aporia. This is how Aristotle accounts for human freedom, without making extravagant assumptions about the power of a “will”.

Agamben’s use of “aporia” also seems excessively broad. He seems to mean anything that is not subject to a univocal interpretation, and he writes as though aporia is necessarily a bad thing. For Aristotle, that is not the case at all; aporias for Aristotle provide valuable insight.

Agamben doesn’t like the fact that Aristotelian virtue is measured against practice. Apparently this is too “operational”. But how else are we to make ethical judgments? Ethics is first and foremost about good doing.

He sees Aquinas as already anticipating a Kantian notion of duty. “In the concept of virtue whose sole object is a debitum, of a being that coincides totally with a having-to-be, virtue and officium coincide without remainder” (p. 101). I haven’t specifically studied Aquinas on this point, but for Aristotle there is simply no such thing as a virtue that corresponds only to an obligation. Virtue is always being good in some positive way.

He does cite the late scholastic Francisco Suárez as calling specifically religious duty an “infinite debt”, but I don’t see what this has to do with Aristotle or Kant. He doesn’t like the idea of an “infinite task” either, but doesn’t explain why.

“Here one clearly sees that the idea of a ‘duty-to-be’ is neither solely ethical nor solely ontological; rather, it aporetically binds being and praxis in the musical structure of a fugue” (p. 106).

(I would say rather that attempts to approach first philosophy as “ontology” reach a fundamental aporia. Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel already showed us a way out of this mess.)

“It is obvious that the paradigm of duty or office… finds its most extreme and aporetic formulation in Kantian ethics” (p. 110). “What in Kant reaches completion in the form of having-to-be is the ontology of operativity…. It is not possible, however, to understand the proper characteristics of the ontology of operativity if one does not understand that it is, from the very beginning and to the same extent, an ontology of command” (p. 117).

“From the very beginning” presumably means in Aristotle. But where on earth would anyone claim to find and “ontology of command” in Aristotle? Notions of command and obedience really have no place at all in Aristotelian ethics. Theological and political voluntarism imply what might reasonably be called an ontology of command. Neither Aristotle nor Kant have anything to do with this.

As with Aristotle, what is “aporetic” in Kantian ethics is actually a strength. Kant leaves an irreducible role for thoughtful judgment about how to best apply principles to particulars in each case. The “aporia” is that Kantian ethics doesn’t aim to give us ready-made answers on what we should positively do, and is not reducible to any schema of unconditional command and obedience.

“The imperative presupposes as its foundation and, at the same time, as its object not a being but a willing…. One understands, from this perspective, why juridical-religious formulas (of which the oath, the command, and the prayer are eminent examples) have a performative character: if the performative, by the simple fact of being uttered, actualizes its own meaning, this is because it does not refer to being but to having-to-be” (p. 118).

I generally share Agamben’s concerns about the imperative form in grammar, which tends to absolutize a “should” or leave it standing in the air, when in reality every “should” is just as strong as the balance of reasons favoring it, and no genuine “should” is a matter of arbitrary obedience. Kant’s categorical imperative, on the other hand, is of a form that cannot possibly be simply “obeyed”, because it is only a procedural guideline.

Agamben recalls Hannah Arendt’s meditations on the trial of the Nazi bureaucrat Eichmann, who claimed to have sincerely followed Kantian precepts of duty in carrying out his governmental responsibilities. But whatever duty to the state he may have believed he was following was obviously antithetical to the universalism of Kantian ethics, which puts respect for all human beings over all other considerations. But Agamben even represents respect as something bad.

“Kant represents the moment when the ontology of command and having-to-be reaches its most extreme elaboration” (p. 120). “Kant’s thought represents… the catastrophic reemergence of law and religion in the bosom of philosophy” (p. 121).

Agamben strenuously objects to Kant’s superficial but nonetheless very prominent emphasis on duty. Duty was a favorite theme of Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia in Kant’s time, and Kant as a university professor was a civil servant. Kant’s talk about duty — which I also don’t particularly care for — was close to, if not in fact, a civil obligation of his position. But the real substance of Kantian ethics has to do with free rational search and testing for appropriate maxims to guide action in different kinds of situations. I prefer to express this in a more Aristotelian form of deliberation and practical judgment, but the import is the same.

He cites Pufendorf’s opinion that ethics should be expressed in terms of duties rather than virtues. But unlike Aristotle or Kant, Pufendorf really is a political voluntarist who does put the will of the sovereign ahead of everything else.

Kant abstracts duty to the point where it does not dictate specific actions, only a kind of procedural best practices for making judgments. This is far removed from what Brandom calls the authority-obedience model. Calling Kantian ethics an “ontology” of “command” as Agamben does seems utterly inappropriate. Kant is anything but a defender of arbitrary authority.

Next Agamben turns to the origins of the ontology of command.

“With a gesture in which one can make out the birth of the modern metaphysics of the will, Plotinus ultimately identifies will with being itself…. It is precisely this ‘voluntarization’ of Greek metaphysics that, by transforming from within both the image of the world of the Timaeus and the Aristotelian unmoved mover, will render possible the Christian creationist paradigm” (p. 126).

He is onto something real here. Although most of his treatises do not mention it, Plotinus in at least one of them speaks very explicitly of a will, which Plato and Aristotle do not. Agamben quotes from Plotinus’ treatise “Free Will and the Will of the One”: “all therefore was will and in the One there was nothing unwilled or prior to will: he was above all will” (p. 126). And again, “will [boulesis] and substance [ousia] must in itself coincide necessarily with being in itself” (ibid).

(On the other hand, Michael Frede has convincingly argued that the notion of a distinct faculty of will — or of the possibility of arbitrary choice, as distinct from choice based on goodness of reasons — is Stoic rather than neoplatonic in origin. Agamben’s focus on the Christian tradition also leads him to ignore Philo of Alexandria’s earlier development of a radically voluntarist theology of omnipotence, in explicit opposition to the whole previous tradition of Greek philosophy.)

He concludes, “The problem of the coming philosophy is that of thinking an ontology beyond operativity and command and an ethics and a politics entirely liberated from the concepts of duty and will” (p. 128).

Ethics and philosophy do still need to be freed from all-too-common dogmas regarding the very existence of arbitrary will not grounded in reasons; the priority of efficient causality over other kinds of explanation; and certain specific non-Aristotelian concepts of efficient causality that emphasize either immediate production or force. But only some concepts of duty are objectionable, and “operativity” is just way too broad a notion to be subject to a uniform evaluation or account. Global condemnation of operativity throws out the baby with the bath water.