"Into all that becomes something inward for man, language has penetrated"

Hegel's Science of Logic, § 14:

The forms of thought are, in the first instance, displayed and stored as human language. Nowadays we cannot be too often reminded that it is thinking which distinguishes man from the beasts. Into all that becomes something inward for men, an image or conception as such, into all that he makes his own, language has penetrated, and everything that he has transformed into language and expresses in it contains a category-concealed, mixed with other forms or clearly determined as such, so much is Logic his natural element, indeed his own peculiar nature. If nature as such, as the physical world, is contrasted with the spiritual sphere, then logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct, and simply by so doing transforms it into something human, even though only formally human, into ideas and purposes.

I think it's easy to see what McDowell finds attractive in Hegel from passages like this; the only bit that looks a bit dated to me is the claim that categories are "concealed" in everyday language, and even that's still not a ridiculous way to talk. A good bit of this paragraph could've been taken straight from Mind and World.

I know Brandom makes a big deal about f this paragraph somewhere; I think it was his "Kantian Lessons about Mind, Meaning, and Reality" lecture. It is a very good paragraph. Good enough to warrant a post to highlight it, I think.

(I clipped the wonkier end parts of the paragraph, since it's a bit long. I actually had a page or so commenting on them, which I was going to use for another post, but I deleted it on accident. Oops.)

(a side note: I had not included Ben Wolfson's site in my blogroll. This was an oversight, and has been corrected. A lot of the time I have no idea what the hell he's talking about, but he's worth reading for the other times. The fact that he called me a "fine entity" recently is totally irrelevant; I had meant to add him before then. Really.)

An Excuse for a Joke

From page xiv of For they know not what they do:

The crucial point here is that Freud's famous ambivalence of libidinal states has nothing whatsoever to do with some biological or psychological-affective oscillation, but refers strictly to the radical gap between literal meaning and underlying intention. The minimal structure of this reflexivity is, of course, that of poetic repetition: if I say "window", it is just a simple designation; however the moment I say "window... window", a gap separates the word from itself, and it is in this gap that the poetic "depth" resonates. And the truth of the old cliche about the "poetic origins of speech" is that there is no single occurrence of a word: repetition always-already resonates in it. It is crucial to perceive the link between this self-reflexivity and failure: the reflexive turn towards self-awareness occurs when there is a "malfunction", when things no longer run smoothly.

A first reaction: Why isn't "Window" by itself already poetic? (Indeed, Zizek seems to say it is. Then what is the contrast between the "window" and the doubled "window"?)

I actually was not aware that "the poetic origins of speech" was commonly-repeated enough to count as a cliche, but I will take Zizek's word for it that it is. It occurs to me that the truth of the cliche is more likely to lie in the fact that "poetic" communication is possible without language; birds have sing-song, after all, and apes can hoot and howl in harmony. These are seen as a kind of music, and thus as at least a cousin of poetry; humans are then thought to have simply added something else to this hoot-and-howl base to get language. This strikes me as a reasonable chain of thought. Though of course it could be entirely wrong; biology is not an armchair discipline.

In a strong sense, "there is no single occurrence of a word" is clearly false. Novel vocabulary must begin somewhere, and wherever is first it will be singular (perhaps for a quite short time, but not for no time at all, at least not in all cases). In another sense it's clearly true -- a word can be repeated. A word which was only possible of being used once couldn't be used as a word at all. What this has to do with reflexivity or poetry, I haven't the foggiest. When a word is repeated, it's not talking about itself (as if it had to hunt down its previous instance and say "This is the word I am!"); it's doing what it did previously (to the extent that it does something else, it's not a repetition, but a new word -- perhaps a homonym).

Given that last bit I quoted, Zizek appears to be committed to the idea that (at least in principle) there might be language without self-consciousness (there is a "smooth" functioning of language before which there is no self-awareness). This strikes me as a very bad thing to commit oneself to.

This reminds of a joke Aleister Crowley was fond of telling: We are aware of our stomach only when it is upset and grumbling; we are aware of our lungs only when we are panting or wheezing; we are aware of our heartbeat only when it is going rapidly or running irregularly; in general, we are aware of our organs when they fail in their proper function. But we are always conscious of our own minds. What does this tell us about our mental health?

(Picking apart Crowley's joke will be left as an exercise to the reader. If you find yourself wanting to join the OTO, the you are taking the joke the way Crowley intended -- which means you are entirely in the wrong and should seek counsel immediately.)

Concerning a Surprise

The first sentence of Zizek's For they know not what they do contains a Brandom joke:

There are philosophical books, minor classics even, which are widely known and referred to, although practically no one has read them page by page (John Rawls's Theory of Justice, for example, or Robert Brandom's Making It Explicit) -- a nice example of interpassivity, where some figure of the Other is supposed to do the reading for us.

We are off to a good start, at least.

My copy of For they know not what they do arrived today. Sadly, looking at the index, Zizek doesn't appear to manhandle Davidson in the book; I know he's said some startlingly inaccurate things about the principle of charity before, and I was hoping I wouldn't have to do any real work to hunt them down. (Davidson is mentioned once in a footnote as a "recent analytic philosopher", but that's his sole appearance.) At least there are some decently-long Wittgenstein discussions in the book; one hopes to find some rough ground there.

I figure the worst case scenario is that I'll read for the jokes. Zizek's pretty good at delivering on such things.

McDowell on the Ideality of Space and Time

Reading "Hegel's Idealism as a Radicalization of Kant". For the most part, I like it.

I'm not sure how McDowell's argument that the Deduction fails is supposed to work. McDowell claims that sliding from "spatio-temporally-formed sensible intuitions" (which the Aesthetic is to have shown as being a condition on how objects can be given to us) to "sensible intuitions which are formed (in general)" is supposed to undercut Kant's claim for the objective validity of the categories. I'm not sure how this objection is supposed to work. As Kant presents it (in McDowell's interpretation), that our sensible intuitions have some form or other is a prerequisite for objects being presented to us. That the form our intuitions take is spatiotemporal is supposed to be a problem:

If we allow ourselves — as Kant encourages — to play with the idea of sensibilities formed otherwise than ours, we can suppose they would generate formal intuitions that reflect their specific ways of being formed as space and time reflect ours. And we can perhaps imagine that beings endowed with such sensibilities might construct their own transcendental deductions of the objective validity of categorial thinking, each exploiting — as Kant’s Deduction does — the thought that the unity of the mode in which empirical intuition is given in their sensibility is no other than that which the category prescribes to the manifold of a given intuition in general (compare B144-5). But such a fancy is no help in our task of vindicating the objective validity of categorial thinking for ourselves. What that requires is averting the threat that categorial requirements are merely subjectively imposed on objects as they are given to our senses. That was the threat that indeed seemed to be averted when Kant noted that the unity of the formal intuitions, space and time, is itself a case of the objective unity of apperception....

If there are conditions for it to be knowable by us how things are, it should be a truism that things are knowable by us only in so far as they conform to those conditions. And Kant wants it to look as if any hankering after an objectivity that goes beyond pertaining to things as they are given to our senses is a hankering after what could only be a mirage, a violation of that truism. But it is equally truistic that a condition for things to be knowable by us must be a condition for a possibility of our knowing how things are. And if some putative general form for cases of how things are is represented as a mere reflection of a fact about us, as the spatial and temporal organization of the world we experience is by transcendental idealism, that makes it impossible to see the relevant fact about us as grounding a condition for our knowing that things (really) are some way or other within that form. Transcendental idealism ensures that Kant cannot succeed in depicting the formedness of our sensibility as the source of a condition for things to be knowable by us.

I don't see how this objection is supposed to work at all. It seems to me that even if Kant does simply leave the spatio-temporal nature of the forms of our intuition as a "brute fact", this doesn't preclude those intuitions from reaching all the way out to the world; it merely limits the objects they can reach out to to those which are spatio-temporally extended. If there are non-spatio-temporal objects, or if the objects we know of have non-spatio-temporal properties, then these "can be nothing for us", but I don't see how this hurts the Deduction. That there are conditions under which alone we can know objects entails that these conditions must obtain in the case of any objects we know. I don't see why it should be a problem if there are (possibly) some objects which we don't know to which those conditions don't apply -- which we can't know, though they might be perfectly real for all that. If the Deduction goes through, then we can't apply any of the schematized categories to such (hypothetical) unknowable objects, so there is no interesting sense in which we can imagine them to be interacting with objects which we do know, or in which we can imagine them as they might be in themselves. It would mean that the spatio-temporal objects which we do know might have non-spatio-temporal properties which we cannot know, but I'm not seeing why this is an objectionable sort of ignorance. Beings with other forms of intuition than ours might (hypothetically) be able to notice some things about the objects we know which we are unable to know. But we can still notice plenty about those objects. (And indeed we do know plenty about them, as shown in the "Refutation of Idealism".) Kant spoils this by making space and time transcendentally ideal (along with all the objects in it, and our knowledge of them), but that doesn't seem to be quite where McDowell is lodging his complaint (at least in some parts of the paper).

My interpretation also strikes me as more likely to be one Kant held (or at least aspired to); Kant claims the reason we are unable to imagine a "noumenal" causation (such as freedom) is because we lack a schematized category of causation other than the spatio-temporal-sensible one we have, and a locus of freedom (such as the noumenal Will) cannot be spatio-temporal in nature (for to exist in space and time is to be subject to the analogies of experience, and thus to nature's laws, and a free will cannot (Kant thinks) be bound by laws it did not impose upon itself). Kant hypothesizes that the Deity might have an "intellectual intuition" (and so a form of intuition unlike our own spatio-temporal-sensible one) which might enable it to know (and so judge) the free will. As for us, we can only apply the logical form of relational judgement (the idea of one thing standing in some relation to another another in general) to non-spatio-temporal objects, and this gives us only problematic knowledge: Something analogous to causation might apply to noumenal objects. Kant holds that there are objects which we cannot know, because we cannot intuit them. McDowell seems to view this as a failure on Kant's part; I don't see how it wasn't something Kant positively intended to be a part of his system. Kant wanted an empirical realism, but not one that extended the conditions of our knowledge of objects to condition of the existence of objects in general -- not a realism sans term. "I denied reason to make room for faith" and all that.

I have a related quibble with this passage:

According to transcendental idealism, our capacities to know things reach only so far, and beyond that boundary there is something we cannot know — whether things themselves are really spatially and temporally organized. And the thought that we cannot know whether things themselves are really spatially and temporally organized undermines the possibility of recognizing as knowledge the supposed phenomenal knowledge, that things are spatially and temporally organized, that we are supposed to be able to achieve within the boundary.

I think that Kant does hold that we know whether "things themselves" are spatially and temporally organized: They are not. The Aesthetic is supposed to show that objects can only be given to us in space and time if we assume that space and time are transcendentally ideal, that they are forms imposed by the mind on matter given ab extra and do not adhere in the things themselves. (This is something Kant had held since at least the Inaugural Dissertation.) This is why Kant is only an empirical realist. Phenomenal knowledge is knowledge which does justice to our experience, both inner and outer, but not to objects as they would be outside of experience (as in a Divine cognition via "intellectual intuition").

I should probably reread the Aesthetic to make sure I'm not just in error here, but this is how I recall it working when I first read it, and it's how Kenneth Westphal reads it in Kant's Transcendental Proof of Realism. Which is mostly about Kant's (failed) proof of Transcendental Idealism, despite the title. It probably would have been asking too much to want McDowell to address both the B Deduction and the Aesthetic in one article, but I think he should have. He refers to the problem with the Deduction being "imported" from the Aesthetic and spreading from there to poison the whole stew, but I'm not sure I get how he's pinning down the problem in the Aesthetic. (Really, this is a minor quibble: If the problem with Kant is his doctrine of the transcendental ideality of space & time, then the precise sense in which this doctrine was understood isn't a huge deal, so long as we can agree that it is unsatisfying for reason X.)

Despite the above quibbles, I mainly like the article. McDowell comes close to isolating Kant's problem where I think it is, in the Aesthetic's arguments for the transcendental ideality of space and time, and he ends up at a position I find amenable. Everything McDowell says about Hegel I find entirely salutary. I think it was McDowell's discussion of Hegel in "Reading McDowell" that first lead me to read "the Concept" as "the conceptual", and this made Hegel much more comprehensible than he had been previously; McDowell makes the point explicit in this article, in a footnote, since Pippin appears to have read "the Concept" as "the Concepts". Which is just a weird error, and leads Pippin to make some utterly baffling comments ("table of notions"??). McDowell also does a nice job at bringing complaints Hegel makes against Kant closer to Kant himself; Hegel can occasionally seem to be arguing against a strawman-Kant, as when he merely gestures to criticisms by complaining about "formalism" in the Critical philosophy. I think McDowell makes a very plausible suggestion at the end: It's easier to just go from Kant to Hegel than to try to approach Hegel head-on. So we'd do better to look at Kant, look to Hegel for suggestions for how Kant goes wrong, and then use this amended Kantian understanding to try to work out how Hegel argues for his own positions.

There are also some nice smaller points. The suggestion that we should "make sense of the objective purport of intuitions and the objective purport of judgements together" is a good one. It can seem mysterious that what are merely our judgements can "reach out" to the world (rather than falling short of doing justice to what is given us), and it can seem mysterious that objects can be "given" to us (rather than our purported intuitions of objects being dumb & mute happenings). But when the objects which are "given" to us are taken to be already suitable candidates for inclusion in a judgement, then it is no longer mysterious how judgement can "reach out" to the world; and when an object being "given" to us is taken to be a suggestion about how to judge things to be, it is no longer mysterious how a purported event of "intuition" can be an intuition of an object. Both mysteries are dissolved by dissolving them both.

Back to complaints: I am not quite sure what McDowell takes Hegel to be rejecting in Kant. McDowell seems to say both that Hegel rejects Kant's transcendental idealism, which is true, and that Hegel rejects the idea that space and time are forms of our sensible intuition, which is not quite right. Hegel rejects the Kantian articulation of the idea that space and time are forms of our sensible intuition, but I think it's misleading to say he rejects it tout court. For Hegel, space and time are the forms of the objects given in intuition, and the forms in which those objects are given to us. I suppose this is a fairly minor quibble, since Hegel (unlike Kant) doesn't think other forms of intuition are possible; for Hegel extension in space and endurance in time are requirements for objects to have the sort of distinctiveness that is a requirement of their being possibly given in intuition at all, so the fact that the form of our intuition is spatio-temporal says nothing; all forms of intuition would be like that. Which is why Hegel doesn't talk about "forms of intuition" but just of "space" and "time". (In any case, the rejection that seems to be doing the heavy lifting in McDowell's picture of Hegel is the rejection of transcendental idealism. And that's the right move to make.)

Hegel's Idealism

I just finished reading Robert Stern's "Hegel's Idealism" (PDF). Very nice piece.

It's a response to an article of Karl Ameriks's from a while back. In it, he asked if there was any good reason to call Hegel an "idealist" -- Ameriks was skeptical. He does a fine job of showing that Hegel was not a "mentalist", or Berkeleyian, or anything of that sort, and ends up just saying that Hegel was using "idealism" to basically mean "systematic philosophy." Which is not how anyone would understand the term today. So Ameriks said that we should drop the "idealist" moniker when talking about Hegel. Despite the fact that Hegel emphatically embraced the term: "Every genuine philosophy is an idealism".

Stern responds by giving an excellent exposition of some of the main parts of Hegel's system, including Hegel's use of "idealism". Stern's paper is one of the best broad treatments of Hegel's thought I've ever read; I'll have to bump Stern's stuff up a bit in the stack. Already read his bit on the British Idealists too, "The Curious Case of the Concrete Universal"; I'm still not inclined to read any of the British Idealists (beyond Josiah Royce; I've liked what little of his I've read -- I suppose he's not British anyways), but the article does a nice job handling one of the ways in which Hegel handles the "universal". (I sometimes wonder how different 20th-century Anglo-American philosophy would've been if Russell & Moore hadn't been learned about the German Idealists through a bunch of British Idealists....)

Stern's paper inspired me to write up some Hegelian Meditations, so to speak. I figured I'd through it behind a "jump", since it's a bit long. And rambling. And entirely about Hegel. And it ends up discussing theology. You have been warned. Read at your own risk.

Click on Yuki to see the post.


(she's reading the Phenomenology of Spirit, incidentally. You can make out most of the title on the DVD version; haruhi.tv's SOS-Dan webpage listed "G.W.F. Hegeru's [Phenomenology of Spirit]" as one of Yuki's favorite books, along with some other books which are clearly visible during the series, so I went back and did some freeze-framing. It paid off: When Yuki refuses to leave the library in episode ten ("Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya IV"), she's reading Hegel. Made my day when I saw that.)

Before he gets to Ameriks, Stern offers some criticisms of Robert Pippin's version of Hegel, whom Pippin presents as a fundamentally Kantian thinker. Pippin presents Kant's "Copernican Revolution" as reframing traditional metaphysical pursuits by replacing inquiry into "how things are" with inquiry into "how things must be taken to be by any 'I'" -- how things must be thought to be. The objective validity of the categories, their necessary and licit use in application to all possible experience, is argued for by showing that this is a necesary precondition of self-consciousness; I can only be self-aware if I regard myself as existing in a world of enduring substances of various sorts engaged in causal relations according to sundry natural laws. Hegel is said to have agreed with Kant in this basic reorientation of metaphysics; Hegel's categories, too, are said to be validated by appeal to the requirements of self-conscious thought. The rejection of a phenomena-noumena dualism in Hegel's account of what is necessary for self-consciousness leads him to speak of this basically Kantian project in terms of "thought's self-determination" (since thought is not (as in Kant) "bound" by a ding an sich) but the form of Hegel's thought remains Kantian in structure: Start from self-consciousness and see what else you must have thought. Pippin notes that Hegel seems to be not terribly clear that this is how he's arguing, and also that he doesn't merely limit his claims to "what must be thought to be" but speaks of "what must be" full-stop. Pippin claims that both of these are "slips", and do not tell us anything of Hegel's true views.

Pippin seems to underestimate what Hegel's lack of a noumena-phenomena distinction leads to. For Kant, what had to be the case if self-conscious thought was to be possible was that various broad facts had to be the case for all phenomena -- there are spatio-temporal substances engaged in causal relations in recognizable ways, etc. Noumena were not held liable to any such constraints, as they were not (and could not be) subject to the categories. Hegel sees no need to hang on to the ding an sich, and so he doesn't have any need to distinguish phenomena from noumena. So where Kant's requirements for self-conscious thought could end up with the form "If self-conscious thought is to be possible, then things must be so for phenomena", Hegel's end up as "If self-conscious thought is to be possible, then things must be so." Thus Hegel speaks of how things must be, full-stop; for self-conscious thought is possible. Hegel does not end up limiting the demand to be subject to his categories to what is imposed by an 'I' on matter given ab extra, but has the demand applying generally: all must be subject to the categories if it is to be at all. The 'I' as a category thus plays no privileged role for Hegel; it is one category among many. There is no pressure to "ground" the other categories in the 'I' anymore than in any other category; they all flow from one another equally, the whole system of the Logic being presupposed if any of the categories is to have a use. Thus Hegel can begin his Logic with Being for purely aesthetic reasons, and has no need to start with self-consciousness, or with any category in particular; "The only genuinely necessary presupposition can be said to be the decision to consider thought at all, which can be taken to be arbitrary." (This is not to say that Hegel's system is "presuppositionless" in a sense in which it is sometimes made out to be; one sometimes is given the image of the entire Logic being convincing even to the most dedicated skeptic -- the standpoint of "Absolute Knowledge" is supposedly reachable even if one denies having all prior knowledge. Hegel's point is rather that any point of thought may serve as a starting-place; a mind which can think at all can come to see the validity of Hegel's system of categories, his Logic.)

Hegel's Logic begins with Being, since it seems like a nice vague, general notion, and Hegel wants to be sure to avoid any appearance of a "weighty" set of presuppositions in his logic. "Being" as such is seen to have no use in thought; if one tries to think solely of "Being", eschewing all other notions, one is put in the same place one would be if one was thinking of "Nothing" alone -- thinking of what isn't "Being". Both "Being" and "Nothing" have a use because they can both be used -- they are used to track shifts in "Becoming", in that which comes into being and receeds into nothingness. But shifts in "Becoming" as such cannot be tracked solely by means of "Being" and "Nothing", since the two are so far distinguished only in that they are different from one another; there must be variety in becomings if they are to be distinguished from one another, and thus their shiftings marked. Thus "Becoming" leads to "Determinate Being" -- that "Being" has a use in thinking thus requires that there are many beings which are distinguishable one from another. "Being" finds its usefulness in noting the presence of some qualities in certain beings; "Nothing" finds its usefulness in noting the absence of such qualities in other beings. This is (in compressed form) the manner in which Hegel develops his system of categories: the new categories prevent the earlier ones from proving useless for thinking with, and are themselves useful because of the use they make of the earlier categories. Hegel's system of categories eventually grows to include notions like "Objectivity", "Judgement", "Cause"; that these categories are licitly employed is shown by their being inextricably bound up with earlier categories. When a category would be used contrary to the role it plays in the logical system of categories, as when the category of mechanical causation is applied to the world as such rather than some particular determinate object, it can thus be seen to be misused: and this is what Hegel holds to be the way in which classical metaphysics operated. Take a concept like "cause", use it in ways it's not fit to be used, end up being deeply confused by the results. (In this case, using "mechanical causation" outside a context in which one is keeping track of various shifts in external relations between objects by means of recognizing measurable regularities in their interactions. Such is the case with the cosmological argument for the existence of God; one ends up with an "unmoved mover" because "every event must have a cause" is thought to hold outside of objects in recpirocal relations with one another, and so it is made to appear that the physical world as a whole must need a cause, too -- a transcendent one, so as to end the regress.)

Hegel's anti-Cartesianism comes from the fact that his system introduces categories like "representation" such that representations are treated as the way in which a subject comes in contact with the world, not "private" mental objects. Hegel's logic handles topics like "the world" and "reality" only insofar as they are useful for thinking, but this is not to restrict his claims any. "That we must think of things thus" just is to have to think of them in the terms we generally use to think of things: as holding of the world, reality, Being, etc -- which is to think of them in terms of the world, reality, Being, etc. If we must think of things thus, then things are thus for us, and so we hold: Things are thus. This is Hegel's "identity of thought and being": the ways in which we must think of things are the way things are.

This "identity of thought and being" is the rhetorically toned-down version of Hegel's claim that his Logic gives us "God Himself as He is in His Eternity, before the creation of a world and of a finite mind" -- what is "in eternity" is just the connections between the abstract categories. And since the categories can only be used for thought by a finite mind, a mind which is thinking in time and is in relations with various objects and with other minds, Hegel is able to speak of his "God as He is in His Eternity" as "becoming man" while remaining God (for the essence of man is to think, and to think is to employ the system of the categories, which are what is "eternal"), thus in finite thought "the eternal" is present in time. But a thought in a finite mind need not itself be finite; when (as in understanding a free action as free) we approach "Absolute Knowledge", the knowledge of the Idea as Idea, God Himself could have no deeper understanding: in Absolute Knowledge we think the thoughts of the Divine Mind. Thus once the standpoint of Absolute Knowledge is reached, God becomes self-conscious in a finite mind; a finite mind thinks eternal thoughts. This is Hegel's odd version of the ontological argument, which is explicitly trinitarian in nature: The God revealed by "the identity of thought and being" is a God who includes finitude as a moment in the Divine Life, a moment which is overcome by the raising of finitude into eternity-in-finitude -- the "true infinite" which is at home with itself in its other.

Hegel's ontological argument is clearly unsuitable for any sort of foundationalist purpose in religion; the human subject figures in Hegel's description of the trinitarian Life as merely an abstract bit of finitude. But religion involves subjective feelings, personal relationships, an individual's moral status, historical symbols, rituals, etc. This is not a failing on Hegel's part, but a positive feature: Hegel regards cultus as an ineliminable aspect of religion, and the heart of religion is picture-thinking -- the contemplation of symbols, to use terminology more in line with contemporary theology. The particular cultus one participates in, the particular symbols one comes to think religiously with, is a contingent matter. Whichever it is, it will be, qua religion, self-standing: there is no need for philosophy to "underwrite" religion. Nor could philosophy do the job if it wanted to; insofar as it involves comprehending the Absolute, Hegel says, philosophy takes its content from religion, and not vice-versa; philosophy comprehends the myriad features of life as a unified whole, and so life must already be a unified whole for thought to become philosophy. Hegel says that this comes, in part, only with religion; the subjective feeling brought about in the mythic religions played the part in Ancient Greece, and Hegel holds that (Protestant) Christianity plays the part in the modern world. Where religion worked with picture-thoughts, vorstellungen, philosophy thinks the self-development of the Concept, the Idea. Hegel's notion of "God" is frequently labeled "heretical" or "unorthodox" or flat-out claimed to be atheistic (or pantheistic); I don't think any such claim has merit. On the level of picture-thinking, of religion, Hegel was a Lutheran. He was reported to be not terribly devout, but he was a Lutheran confessionally; a lack of personal devotion simply fit with his personality. (His wife was pious to the point of enthusiasm.) He rebuts the charge of atheism (or pantheism) brilliantly in subsection 573 of the encyclopedia, where he is (purportedly) defending philosophy as such from the charge of "pantheism, or the All-One doctrine". As far as the matter of orthodoxy goes, Hegel's God is explicitly Triune and Incarnational; his picture of salvation is a matter of a subject coming to know itself as having always implicitly been God's actual presence in the world (and then coming to do God's actual work in the world) by means of recognition of a (singular) God-man. In a broad sense, Hegel's notion of religion, and so of God, is obviously Christian. And any more specific charge of heresy will be made in terms which are simply answerable by repeating Lutheran confessional language; there is nothing in Hegel's thought which would say one way or the other how many "natures" Christ should be said to have, and so he cannot be guilty of having been lead by philosophy into monophysitism; in general, the guiding notion behind orthodox Christology is that Christ is "wholly human and wholly divine", and this is entirely consistent with what Hegel's "revealed religion" claims for its God-man. The only perhaps-credible charge I have seen levied against Hegel's orthodoxy as a Christian philosopher is that Hegel does not allow "sufficient transcendence" for God; if any sense can be made of this charge, then there will certainly be problems for Hegel. Not because it will show he is unorthodox (though it would), but because it would show the entire System to be riddled with problems -- the notion that there is a transcendent "Beyond Thought" is just what Hegel has set out to dispel as a confusion in many places; if it is not a confusion, but a patent fact, Hegel's System is derelict.

In his treatment of religion, Hegel holds to his general method in philosophy: ""Philosophical thinking proceeds analytically in that it simply takes up its object, the Idea, and lets it go its own way, while it simply watches the movement and development of it, so to speak. To this extent philosophizing is something wholly passive. But philosophical thinking is equally synthetic as well, and it proves to be the activity of the Concept itself. But this requires the effort to beware of our own inventions and particular opinions which are forever wanting to push themselves forward." (ss238, Addition)

Audio Links

Currence has passed along some audio links (via e-mail). I am sharing the love.

Two interviews with Davidson -- one by Dummett, and one by McDowell. I am a bit anxious about finding out what Davidson sounds like; for some reason I always read him as speaking with a British accent. Ironically, I was surprised to find that McDowell does have a British accent, since I had never read him as having that sort of voice.

A few Quine panels. I notice that one is labeled as involving Burt Dreben; given that it's impossible (seriously) to find anything Dreben's written, I look forward to finding out if he's as attractive a figure as he's been rumored to be.

And a huge amount of Brandom material, not all of which is audio. I noticed that the Locke Lectures shawn linked to are part of this site; it didn't occur to me to check out what else was hosted in the neighborhood.

Hopefully this does not end up killing some poor fellow's bandwidth; it occurs to me that I've grabbed half a gig of material from his servers. That could add up rather quickly.

The Causal Nexus: a short note on McDowell and Bilgrami

In his reply to Bilgrami's essay in McDowell and His Critics, McDowell notes Bilgrami's suggestion that we should jettison the idea that intentional idioms are "part of the causal nexus that natural science investigates". McDowell says that he is sympathetic to the idea, but objects on the grounds that intentional idioms are (all parties are agreed) part of an explanatory nexus of some sort, and Davidson has made it eminently plausible to regard this sort of explanation as causal: "That we believe and desire what we do makes a difference to what we do" as McDowell puts it. (p. 67)

At this point I wanted to ask: Why should we hang on to the notion that the natural sciences investigate "the causal nexus"? Certainly natural science is often concerned with explaining relations of various sorts causally, and their being concerned with certain sorts of explanations seems to characterize the natural sciences as something distinctive from other varieties of human inquiry. (With the rise of modern science comes the view of nature as a "realm of law", as McDowell puts it in Mind and World, and this way of viewing things has been quite productive in expanding the ways in which we can comprehend and cope with various facets of the world.) But it simply seems false that what is distinctive about the natural sciences is that they are concerned with causal explanation as such, since our use of intentional idioms is not a part of any natural science, yet it is still (often) concerned with explaining various happenings causally. So why should we want to describe the object of the natural sciences as "the causal nexus"? It seems that some regions of "the nexus" are ones which the natural sciences don't devote attention to, but that this is not a failing on the part of the natural sciences. (That "belief that p" is not mentioned in physics, or in chemistry, or in biology, etc. does not indicate that these sciences are in need of revision.)

Then it occurs to me that I should keep reading, and McDowell makes much the same point: Intentional explanations belong to "a causal nexus in their own right" and we should jettison the idea that natural science gives us something we can regard as the causal nexus. (I do not quite like the talk of multiple nexuses; to my ear it suggests that a single nexus, such as those of our intentional idioms or that which natural science investigates, is itself a "complete nexus", yet there are other nexuses which one might be concerned with instead. I should think that this way of talking naturally leaves one susceptible to the worry that a single nexus would already be sufficient to determine "how things hang together", and so there is no room for another nexus to have any say in what follows from what. So if the natural-scientific causal nexus determines how my arms move (via my being an instance of various anatomical structures), then any other causal nexus (say, that of intentional idioms) which wanted to explain why I raise my arm will have to either be "in harmony" with the natural-scientific idiom (perhaps via a psychophysical parallelism, or via strong supervenience, or via the reduction of one type of explanation to the other), or will have to be explaining some other happenings than the ones treated by the natural-scientific causal nexus. But it is surely a confusion to think that the arm I raise when I raise it "because I wanted to stretch my shoulder" and the arm which can be studied by medicine are two different arms; it is because the arm which my doctor studies is the one which I use to satisfy my desires that I visit the doctor in the first place. And the other form of the worry is just the sorts of naturalism which Bilgrami and McDowell want to dissuade us from falling prey to. I think that these sorts of worries are not so forceful if we drop the plural from "nexuses"; then we are only left with the thought that a single happening might have multiple causes, which claim should not trouble anyone. "A causal nexus" appears to have a finality, a completeness, that "a cause" or "a type of cause" doesn't.)

I do not know why there should be a problem with talking about "the causal nexus" tout court. Talk of "all causal relations, in general" doesn't commit us to thinking that there is one sort of explanation which can, in principle, exhaustively treat of all causal relations. And sometimes we want to mention "causal relations" in an arbitrarily-large aggregate: "the causal nexus" seems to me a harmless locution for this purpose.

What counts as a (useful) explanation depends on what we are trying to do at a given moment, and there is no saying in advance what all we might want to do, and so no saying in advance what can count as an explanation or not. But if we cannot list ahead of time all possible explanations that might account for some event, then it would seem that we also can't say what all causal relations involve that event, since some of the explanations we don't think of (because we are not interested in doing anything which would make them useful explanations) might be ones which we would regard as causal if we thought of them at all.

An aside: I notice on page 70 that McDowell notes that his handling of normative talk in a discussion of what is special to free agents is something for which "there is no reason not to classify as metaphysical." This is contrasted to Bilgrami's expansion of Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment" as a way to avoid metaphysics. Given McDowell's oft-mentioned "quietism", this surprised me. I suppose I may have simply assumed that McDowell regarded "metaphysics" as a dirty word (like Wittgenstein did, or like Conant still does), with even his use of Kant and Hegel meaning to keep us from falling into "metaphysical confusions." If McDowell does not actually have any hostility to "metaphysics" as such, then this makes it a good bit easier to see how he might be handling Kant & Hegel's magisterial transcendental works for Wittgensteinian ends: A little metaphysics is called for to dissolve a great deal of befuddlement. A good metaphysical description of, say, perception, might leave us without the temptation to do the sort of metaphysics Wittgenstein condemned, the sort which follows from being bewitched by our own language. "Metaphysics" in the positive sense would then just be one more philosophical method for treating our conceptual maladies.

edit: Kenneth Westphal has an essay on Kant, Hegel, and McDowell that runs something like this: Westphal talks about Kant and Hegel for about ten or fifteen pages, summarizing some of the transcendental arguments Westphal holds them to be making in their major works, mentions McDowell's gestures to several of the things Kant and Hegel were on about, and then goes "McDowell thinks you can play around with these ideas and be a therapeutic quietist? Really? You really think you can adopt a Kantian/Hegelian notion of spontaneity without getting knee-deep in transcendental arguments? I have my doubts. Admit you are not a quietist, McDowell, and join me in my transcendental pleasure-dome!" (I summarize. Westphal does not mention pleasure-domes.)

Westphal's worries strike me as being pretty good ones. Someone needs to point out that "Hegel and Quietism" is an... odd... pairing. One doesn't usually think of "Wissenschaft der Logik" as being opposed to grandiose speculative metaphysical constructions. I think that Westphal's concerns can be answered, but it certainly does merit saying: "Therapeutic Hegelianism" is a pretty odd idea, on the face of it.

(I am inclined to say that one can make "Therapeutic Hegelianism" look perfectly correct either by getting a better view of Hegelianism, or by better appreciating what all can be necessary for philosophical therapy. But that can wait for a later post.)

On a meta-note: I have noticed this problem before: One often gets inspired to write something as a response to something one is reading when one is in the middle of reading it. But if one stops to begin composition immediately, one risks simply predicting how the rest of the work will fall out. But if one finishes reading before one begins composition, one risks losing the sense of inspiration that one had, one might simply no longer have a desire to write after doing the full sum of reading.

On a more minor point, virtus dormativa explanations are not always pointless. If I tell you that opium has made N sleepy because opium possesses a soporific power, then this lets you rule out some possible ideas for why opium made N sleepy: Say, that N has an allergy to opium, or that N's sleepiness and N's consumption of opium are merely coincidentally linked. (This point I take from Paul Raymont's excellent dissertation, (PDF) which I linked to the other day.)

A point which does not merit its own post: Dennett's near-manic focus on prediction has the advantage of making it practically impossible for him to find it plausible that our intentional states are causally inert. It is just the fact that they do have a great deal of sway in determining how things will be that makes them useful to note, on Dennett's picture of what is in view from the "intentional stance."