Christianity and the Terror, or: More Zizek-Bashing

Slowly moving through the preface to For they know not what they do. Continuing to be disappointed with how badly Zizek mishandles Hegel. From page xliv:

Hegel has nothing to do with such a pseudo-Hegelian vision (espoused by some conservative Hegelians like Bradley and McTaggart) of society as an organic harmonious Whole, within which each member asserts his or her "equality" with others through performing his or her particular duty, occupying his or her particular place, and thus contributing to the harmony of the Whole. For Hegel, on the contrary, the "transcendent world of formlessness" (in short: the Absolute) is at war with itself; this means that (self-)destructive formlessness (absolute, self-negating negativity) must appear as such in the realm of finite reality. The point of Hegel's notion of the revolutionary Terror [in the Phenomenology] is precisely that it is a necessary moment in the deployment of freedom.

We correct: Bradley (and the British Idealists generally) were not bad readers of Hegel when it came to political philosophy. (Robert Stern's paper on the British Idealists and the "concrete universal" is excellent, here.)

Ramblings hidden behind Caster, since they were getting a bit long.


Hegel was very much concerned, from his student days up through his mature System, with the possibility of life in a society as a harmonious existence, of being reconciled to the world and to one's life in it. Early-on, this takes the form of a Romantic idolization of Greek life as a sort of naturliche Harmonie; by the point of his Jena writings, Hegel had already become critical of this tendency in the thought of his contemporaries. (Holderlin, who had been Schelling & Hegel's roommate at the seminary in Tubingen, is a fine example of this tendency; the Greece of Holderlin's Griechenland is a heap of Romantic claptrap.) Hegel came to the conclusion that the sort of thoughtlessly harmonious existence the Greek citizen was held to have had with his city was impossible after the inward turn of Christianity, the rise of civil society, the dawn of the Enlightenment, republican ideas in politics, etc. -- natural harmony was incompatible with the idea that "man is and ought to be free".

If a modern man was to be reconciled to his world, then it could only be through a moralische Harmonie, a harmony which was not merely given but which was comprehended in thought; a man had to not merely be an harmonious part of his society, but had to recognize this harmony, had to comprehend his own existence (including what is most "inward" and private for him, such as his feelings & religious sentiments) as being integrated with the whole of life. The bulk of Hegel's criticisms of his contemporary society make the complaint that it does not make sufficient allowance for this reconciliation to become possible; the life of private individuals is too abstract from the affairs of the state (or the church, or various other social organizations), or else the state (or the church, or various other social organizations) does not make sufficient allowance for the free self-determination of individual actors to do as they judge best. Hegel does not think that moralische Harmonie is impossible; on the contrary, the possibility of this harmony is the highest achievement of modern civilization (and its philosophical handmaiden, Hegel's System, is directed towards helping this Harmonie come about more fully). This is the "end of History": with modernity Spirit knows its world as its own product, comprehends what is given to it as always already implicitly Spirit, as capable of being rationally comprehended, and the social world of "Objective Spirit" is a place where Spirit can feel "at home with itself in its other", where the individual peculiarities of a particular subject are recognized as determinations of the "universal" of society, and not something over and against it.

Zizek is one hundred eighty degrees wrong about Hegel's "the Absolute": it is not a nihil, a "transcendent world of formlessness", or any other ding-an-sich-like transcendence. Hegel's Absolute is not the Schellingian "night in which all cows are black"; the Absolute is the most contentful thing there is. The Absolute is a concrete universal; it has its being, its truth, only in the particular determinations ("moments") which make up Hegel's system -- those which make up the triad of Logic, Nature, and Spirit. The Absolute is not "at war with itself"; the Absolute particularizes itself in the asunderness of nature and returns to unity with itself in the reconciliation of asunderness with unity. To put it in religious terms, the Father begets the Son, and they are united in the Spirit of charity which proceeds from both; God creates a "fallen" world of disorder, enters into it in His only Son, and the world is reconciled to God through the life of the Spirit; the sinful individual, separated from God, becomes an adopted child of God in the community of the Spirit. The Absolute does not wage war in the divine comedy.

The "absolute, self-negating negativity" of the Terror is a moment of history, just as the Fall of Adam is a moment in the Christian story of salvation-history. For Hegel, the Terror is an exemplar of the "abstract universal": in "absolute freedom" one refuses to recognize any "given" content as adequate to the universal, to Reason, --thus the purely formal "Supreme Being" of the French Revolution, and its trumpeting of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" while the actual state was rank tyranny of the lowest sort. The "point" of Hegel's reference to the Terror is not "that it is a necessary moment in the deployment of freedom" (for this would apply to everything Hegel includes in his System), but that the Terror shows what happens when the drive for the Universal in human life takes a utopian form, trying to build everything up anew out of pure thought rather than recognizing and cultivating what is already rational in human life. The Terror of "absolute freedom" occurs in the Phenomenology at the close of the section on the Enlightenment, which is also the section on Pietism -- on faith and reason, so to speak. The Terror is just the flip-side of theocracy; in theocracy subjectivity has no voice because the only source of value is what is given from On High; in the Terror subjectivity has no voice because the only source of value is abstract "Reason". It was thus prescient of the French revolutionaries to build a temple to the idol of Reason, for this is what they viewed it as: a god to replace the unreasonable Christian one.

Hegel actually has a fairly straightforward explanation for why the revolution failed in France: France had never had a Reformation. Hegel has a very low view of the spiritual state of man under Roman Catholicism, but it's not so far-fetched in the case of France; the Catholic Church in France had long been a hotbed of corruption, and it took a ridiculous amount of time for even the modest reforms of the Council of Trent to be enacted -- even the continuing practice of simony was asserted as a "Gallican liberty" for some hundred years after the rest of Catholic Europe had begun to reform itself to curb such abuses.

In Protestant Christianity, for Hegel, women and men can recognize their own everyday lives as opportunities for divine service; the most mundane of occupations can be understood as a divinely-ordained Vocation. What is most holy is not some subset of human life, such as the priesthood or monastic life, but life itself lived in charity. Hegel even extends this opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism to the controversy over the Eucharist: In Catholicism Christ is united to something external to the believer, the bread and wine, and there replaces their ordinary substance -- all that remains of the bread and wine are mere accidents; the body of God is something fundamentally other to the everyday elements and to the believer. Although the believer can be joined with this Body in the act of consumption, this consumption is something extraneous: The Host would remain the body of Christ even if it were never consumed. On the Lutheran understanding of Communion, Christ's Body and Blood are united to the bread and wine without annulling the substance of the bread and wine -- the bread is bread, and also the Body of Christ. There is nothing in the everyday substance of the bread which precludes it also being joined with the indivisible Divine Substance of the Trinity, just as Christ's divinity did not detract from his humanity. Hegel also claims that in Protestant celebrations of Communion Christ is joined to the bread and wine at the act of consumption and not prior to it, so Lutherans do not have the constant fear of desecration that Catholics must live with. If one spills the wine, then one has spilled some wine; if one consumes the wine, then one is enjoying the blood of Christ which was poured out for our sins. In Catholicism, the Host is sanctified by the Spirit working through the officiating priest; in Lutheranism, the Host is sanctified by the Spirit present in the celebrating church-community. In general, for Hegel Catholicism is a realm of heteronomy, of slavishness and submission; Protestantism is a religion of freedom, of "the law which gives liberty" and of freedom from "the law which brings death". Thus in Catholic France, the populous was not equipped to govern their own state, for they did not even govern their own lives, but still remained in spiritual bondage. Thus when they gained political freedom it became "an opportunity for the flesh" -- subjective arbitrariness became the law of the land.

Hegel is not fair to Catholicism, but it does give him an easy counterpoint which he can contrast with the sort of Christianity he does want to affirm as rational, as being in harmony with freedom, indeed in being freedom, the Idea as Religion. It is this sort of Christianity which has made modern states possible, for Hegel; before people could be entrusted with the charge of a state, they had to learn to manage their own conduct. A free state demands free citizens, and only the universal religion freed men of their particular attachments to this or that contingent social arrangement; I think this is the real lesson to take away from Berkhof's "Christ and the Powers." (It is a crying shame that Hegel is not brought up more in contemporary discussions of "the principalities and powers"; Marx is frequently brought up in those conversations, and I think Hegel is flatly superior to Marx in this context. Marx is still too wed to various dualisms to be of much use. If I had continued with my theology studies, this would definitely be something I would have devoted some attention to; Berkhof needs to be freed from the shackles of Yoder's reading of him, and recognized as the Hegelian he really wants to be. This is assuming anyone actually cares about Berkhof, and doesn't just use him as a springboard to play at politics as a theologian. Which may be a problematic assumption. I really disliked Yoder's "Politics of Jesus".)

What was wrong with propositional content?

Currence, the lucky devil, got to attend another McDowell lecture this weekend. He's written up a short summary post and linked to the handout for the weekend's lectures. Supposedly, McDowell has found cause to revise his views. I have no idea what the cause is, or what is being revised. (Edit: I have received a full version of the paper since writing this post. Hopefully it will clear things up.) A few comments:

Remark 4 on the handout:

(ii) The content of an experience would need to include everything the experience enables its subject to know noninferentially.
4. Against assumption (ii): when an experience enables me to know something noninferentially in a way that depends on my having a recognitional capacity, the recognitional capacity need not enter into the content of the experience. Rather, the experience makes something present to me, which (over and above having it present to me) I recognize as belonging to a certain kind.

Why shouldn't we take facets of the world we recognize to be part of the content of an experience in which we recognize those facets? I'd been taking it that the "content" of an experience was just a variety of suggestions to the effect "that things are thus-and-so", and I don't see why this should exclude things which I need to exercise recognitional capacities to notice.

"The recognitional capacity need not enter into the content of the experience" -- well of course the capacity needn't be a content of the experience! If I recognize that a certain fruit is an apricot, then I should suppose that the content of the relevant experience is something like "That's an apricot", not "That's an apricot, and I have the ability to recognize apricots." But it seems that my capacity to recognize apricots does have to be already active in my experience of an apricot, if I am to experience the apricot as an apricot. The ability to recognize and discriminate between various types of fruit is a prerequisite for my being able to have any experience whose content includes something to the effect of "There's an apricot in front of me." Without my recognitional capacities being active within experience, I don't see how experience doesn't end up as "mute intuitions", bare presences which don't tie into my conceptual web at all.

Similarly, if my recognition that I'm looking at an apricot isn't inferential, then why should we say that my recognizing it is something "over and above having it present to me"? The "having it present" in this case is: there's an apricot. There's not a something-which-is-present-to-me which I then (as on the inferential model) go on to see as an apricot (upon reflecting that this is the sort of way in which apricots appear); what I see is the apricot, and I see it as it is. Being able to recognize apricots without inference lets me simply see apricots, when they are in my vicinity and I have a clear view etc. They are not visible in a way which is "over and above" being present to me; the way they are present to me is: Visibly.

Suffice to say, I don't have the foggiest idea what remark 4/assumption ii are going on about. I'm especially not sure what part of McDowell's older positions is under attack, here. If anything I'm saying in this post is something which McDowell has disavowed, then that's news to me.

Point 7 refers to "subsection 4" -- assuming that this is the '4' from above, point 7 makes a distinction between knowledge which makes use of my recognitional capacities and knowledge which is merely a case of adding the "I think" to some bit of the manifold given to me in intuition. But I don't know why attaching the "I think" to some bit of the intuitive manifold given to me shouldn't be regarded as involving recognitional capacities. I "re-cognize" that some bit of the manifold can be cognized in this way -- can be articulated in this way. (This is an Hegelian point, about the relationship between erkennung and anerkennung -- cognition and recognition. What I can recognize is what is there for me to recognize. And when I cognize rightly, when my judgement agrees with its object, then in my judgement I recognize how things are.)

This is the case even when I pick out a bit of the manifold by using a demonstrative. When I pick out this with a demonstrative (and an ostensive gesture or whatever) I mean this as opposed to that (the various things I'm not picking out, in this instance). I recognize that this is not that, I recognize that my demonstrative gesturing picks out one/some thing(s) and not others, I recognize that what is given to me is capable of being carved up in this way.

One possibility does occur to me: In "Mind and World" McDowell speaks of experience as having "propositional content"; in his post-M&W works, he frequently clarifies how he means this, since the presentation in M&W is a bit dense & hurried. Experience "contains claims", said Sellars; an experience gives a subject suggestions as to how to judge things to be. In veridical experience, when we take it as veridical, we take in how things are; the experience suggests to us that things are thus-and-so, and if we do not discount the experience, then we take it that things are thus-and-so. In this way, the world makes itself known to us in experience.

Now, if one stuck purely to "Mind and World", one might end up with a different view of things: Experience has "propositional content", and this means that what is given is (so to speak) sentence-shaped. "The World" is to "Experience" as a speaker is to his assertions -- experience is made out to be a series of interjections by The World that This. Is. So. and we subjects merely trust The World or don't, as we see fit. This is pretty clearly an insufficiently nuanced sort of view; experience isn't entirely like listening to a speaker making assertions, though both can be informative. Getting clearer on the difference by making a distinction between the way in which experiences have "content" and the way in which sentences have "content" seems to be a decent enough route to take. But then I have no idea what position McDowell is saying Travis has lead him to revise; a great deal of his post-M&W works has been devoted to clarifying how he sees the role of intuitions, but I've never gotten the impression that his views were actually changing; he was merely revising his presentation, making it clearer how he meant for things to be taken.

As a final WTF-type response to the notion that McDowell is revising his older views, here: Section 9 on the handout says that an advantage of McDowell's (new) view of experience as having intuitional content (as opposed to propositional content) is that it lets us steer a middle-route between Davidson's view of experience and the Myth of the Given. Surely that achievement was supposed to have been already achieved with "Mind and World." If the distinction between intuitional content and propositional content is supposed to be addressing a new problem, then it can't be that one; if it's supposed to be addressing an old problem, then this would indicate that McDowell is unsatisfied with his older views. But if he is unsatisfied with some of his previously-held opinions, then I don't know where or when he held them, or what they were.

How Not To Overcome the Thing-In-Itself

Zizek, For they know not what they do, page xxix:

And is not this shift [from religion to atheism] also the shift from Kant to Hegel? From tension between phenomena and Thing to an inconsistency/gap between phenomena themselves? The standard notion of reality is that of a hard kernel which resists the conceptual grasp; what Hegel does is simply to take this notion of reality more literally: non-conceptual reality is something which emerges when notional self-development gets caught in an inconsistency, and becomes non-transparent to itself. In short, the limit is transposed from exterior to interior: there is Reality because, and in so far as, the Notion is inconsistent, does not coincide with itself....[Zizek's elipses] In short, the multiple perspectival inconsistencies between phenomena are not an effect of the impact of the transcendent Thing -- on the contrary, the Thing is nothing but the ontologization of the inconsistency between phenomena.

A thesis: Zizek is J.G. Fichte. This is easy to miss; Zizek isn't Kant, but he looks kinda like Kant, so he must (by process of elimination) be Hegel. Except he's Fichte.

Does not the striving of Fichte's Ego begin because of the non-identity between the Ego and the Non-Ego (though both are posits of the Ego)? Is the Ego's striving not endless because of the "shock" (Anstoss) which is the occasion (not the cause!) for the Ego's self-positing both of itself and of its other? Is the "shock" not denied to be an object of any sort, either phenomenal or noumenal? Is not the very act of the double-positing of Ego and Non-Ego unintelligible without the "shock"? Would the Ego not cease to posit both Ego and Non-Ego if not for the "shock", and thus itself cease to exist? Is Fichte's idealism not explicitly engineered to avoid the problem of positing a "thing in itself" as the unknowable cause of the Ego's representations? Does Fichte not fail at this, in part because of his demand for endless striving to (impossibly) reconcile the empirical and transcendental Egos? Is Fichte not the definitive philosopher of the Twosome? Is Hegel not a trenchant critic of Fichte's residual "thing-in-itself", the shock?

Initially, the principle that thinking determines itself from within was established in a merely formal way in the Kantian philosophy; Kant did not demonstrate the manner and extent of this self-determination of thinking. On the contrary, it was Fichte who recognized this defect; and when he made his demand for a deduction of the categories, he also tried at the same time to furnish an actual deduction too. Fichte's philosophy makes the Ego the starting point for the development of philosophical thinking; and the categories are supposed to result from its activity. But the Ego does not genuinely appear as free, spontaneous activity here, since it is regarded as having been aroused only by a shock from outside; the Ego is then supposed to react to this shock, and to achieve consciousness of itself through this reaction.
On this view, the nature of the shock remains something outside of cognition, and the Ego is always something conditioned which is confronted by an other. So, in this way Fichte, too, comes to a halt at Kant's conclusion that there is cognition only of the finite, and the infinite transcends thinking. What Kant calls "the thing-in-itself" is for Fichte the shock from outside, this abstraction of something other than the Ego, which has no determination other than that it is negative; it is the Non-Ego in general. So the Ego is regarded as standing in relation to the Non-Ego. It is only the Non-Ego that arouses its self-determining activity, and it does this in such a way that the Ego is only the continuous activity of self-liberation from the shock. But it never achieves actual liberation, since the cessation of the shock would mean the cessation of the Ego, whose being is simply its activity. Moreover, the content that the activity of the Ego brings forth is nothing else but the usual content of experience, with the added proviso that this content is merely appearance. (Encyclopedia Logic, §60, Addition 2.)

And now I will stop with the rhetorical questions. Back to the passage in question. Zizek thinks Hegel sees a "gap" between phenomena themselves ("between a thing and its place"), and that this is analogous to Kant's ding-an-sich (and identical to Lacan's Real --"the Real is a grimace of reality"). This is not a bad way to characterize Fichte's position -- phenomenal objects are not "really" things in themselves, nor are they "grounded" in things in themselves; they appear to be, and are, representations. And yet just because they are representations they are always already transcendentally ideal; they are the Ego's posits, and a reminder that the Ego is not as it ought to be, has not realized its identity with the Non-Ego, has not rendered all reality as its autonomous product. Fichte's position is not Hegel's; Hegel repeatedly lambastes Kant and Fichte for their notion of an "endless striving" by which moral progress might be made (and yet is never made, for there is always endless striving remaining). Hegel himself has no truck with the notion; reconciliation is, for Hegel, something which is possible here-and-now, in the experience of forgiveness by and reconciliation into one's community. Hegel does not replace one conflict with another, but replaces a conflict with an atonement.

For Hegel, "non-conceptual reality" would be a square circle. Nature itself is a moment of the self-development of the Idea, as is Spirit, as is "God as He is in Eternity". Hegel does not maintain the idea of a "reality which escapes the Concept" in a queer fashion, but jettisons it entirely, as a confusion. The Thing-in-itself which would escape our concepts "is already something subjectively thought", and therefore Kant's restriction of knowledge to "appearances" as opposed to "things in themselves" was straightforwardly wrong. It was not a deep insight, nor does not find its proper fulfillment in Hegel's system; it was an error which Kant didn't catch, and Hegel abandons it to the rubbish bin. To maintain a role for a "Thing" is to fail to advance to an Hegelian position.

"In short, the multiple perspectival inconsistencies between phenomena are not an effect of the impact of the transcendent Thing -- on the contrary, the Thing is nothing but the ontologization of the inconsistency between phenomena." On the contrary, the in-itself is nothing but the phenomena themselves as they appear; the shining-forth of Essence in Appearance is the self-development of the Concept; the object of knowledge is the object as it is in its truth. The duckrabbit isn't something between the duck and the rabbit; the duckrabbit drawing is what appears as a duck, and it is also what appears as a rabbit. That one stays stuck fast on a contradiction, on an inconsistency, shows that one has not moved on from the standpoint of the Understanding; Reason knows the conflicts of the Understanding as aufgehoben.

And now to read the next 200 pages or so of the book. Or at least finish the introduction. Really, this post was an excuse to remind people that Fichte exists. He is easy to forget about! Zizek doesn't mention him at all in For they know not what they do, if the index is to be trusted. (Kant, Schelling, and Hegel all get repeated mentions. Poor Fichte! I thought "The Vocation of Man" was a fun read, at least. And short! God bless ye, Fichte, for being one of the few German Idealists who could write worth a fig.)

Brandom Again

Just finished off Brandom's fourth Locke Lecture. His interlocutors in the earlier lectures seem to have spoiled this one a bit; there had been questions asked about this lecture from the start. This gave the lecture itself the feel of a review.

Brandom's goal in this lecture is to offer a defense of modal talk (and so of the "modal revolution" -- the fact that no one is anxious about modal vocabulary anymore in the way that Quine et al used to be), but without recourse to the metaphysical bits of Kripke et al. The defense of modal language is tied to a defense of normative language, since Brandom's strategy for making modal language unobjectionable will also work for normative talk.

The claim is attributed to Sellars-Kant (and Brandom notes that he's often accused of not being able to distinguish between Sellars and Hegel) that non-modal, non-normative language is not an autonomous discursive practice; if you can use descriptive language, then you have mastered the skills needed to understand normative and modal talk. On Brandom's inferentialist picture, use of descriptive vocabulary requires acknowledging a difference between good and bad inferences. It is then argued that to be able to distinguish inferences in this way, one must be able to do things which are (in principle) sufficient to allow one to understand modal and normative vocabulary. The proof in the modal case is that revision of one's beliefs is only manageable if one's beliefs are regarded as having various degrees of counterfactual robustness -- otherwise one would face the task of not being able to tell ahead of time whether or not a belief would be likely to need revision in the light of some other belief. The proof in the normative case is that keeping track of inferential relations requires tracking commitments and entitlements, and these are both normative notions. Brandom offers this account as a fleshing-out of Sellars's claims that "the language of modality is a transposed language of norms."

Brandom's project here strikes me as congenial. No criticisms of it leap to mind, nor do I have anything to add by way of commentary. I generally liked the lecture; Brandom may be growing on me.

Huw Price's response, and Brandom's reply to Price's response, focuses mainly on an issue which has been hanging around since lecture one, the desirability of trying to keep the old analytical-metaphysical beast alive; Price regrets that he was reading from an already-prepared lecture in his response, or else he would have stolen McDowell's "Frankenstein" metaphor. Here Brandom makes a wonderful case for his own views, against Price/Rorty; much of the same ground was covered that Duck went over in his wonderful recent post on Truth.

One of the points Price tries to attack Brandom on is "wanting to cross the word-world divide" and go from saying "We can talk of norms and modalities and numbers" to "There really are norms and modalities and numbers." Brandom's reply is exactly to the point -- Price (and Rorty) seem to be arguing for a "subjectivism" in opposition to the older "objectivism", when what really needs doing is a dismantling of the old subject-object/word-world framework. Brandom notes that we should have learned from Frege to think of a fact as merely being a claimable which is true, and so to not be able to understand what it should mean to move from talking of "true claims" to talking of "objective facts" about "the way the world really is". Brandom's pragmatist bona fides are on clear display, here. Good stuff.

This reminds me of a point Duck brought up a while back. To the questions "Is there a world out there, and if so, do the differences and similarities we see in it come from it, from us, or both?" Duck thinks the answer is (trivially) "Yes, and both". I agree that the answer must be trivially "Yes" in the first case, but I don't think I even understand the second. What does "come from" mean, here? I am inclined to say that any similarities or differences we notice are facets of the world which were there before we noticed them*, but of course no one need have noticed them as similarities or differences before we had, and there's no reason to suspect that we immediately notice all distinctions which we might apprehend. I suspect that this is the sort of thing which would be said to quiet someone's urge to ask "Where do the similarities and distinctions we notice come from -- the world or us?", but I really am not sure I understand the temptation to ask this in the first place.

One sour note: During the Q&A Brandom has occasion to speak of Hegel, very briefly. I haven't the foggiest idea how Brandom is reading Hegel as saying what he thinks he's saying; McDowell seems to have the same problem, so I suspect I am confused for good reason. (McDowell's review of Brandom's"Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism" is utterly withering.)

*In most cases. When I notice that (say) I am suffering from a stomach-ache, there's no sense in saying that I was already suffering (silently) before anyone noticed. It can't be a proper stomach-ache if I never feel it.

"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.