"Purity" in Morals

Here is a claim I think is obviously true, but which I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone state clearly, and which in any case doesn't seem to be as significant to people as I think it should be: Decision theory is the pure doctrine of prudence, in Kant's sense: it is the parallel of what Kant does in the first two parts of the "Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals". This claim I mean strictly and rigorously; Kantian ethicists who mock decision theory are as misguided as utilitarians who denigrate the Moral Law itself.

Here is why I think people miss this obvious truth: Decision theory is not "pure", in Kant's sense, because it is not independent of psychology; it is not entirely unempirical, despite being largely mathematized. But Kant's own work is also not independent of psychology, as anyone who has taught Kant's own examples from the second section of the "Groundwork" is well aware: Kant helps himself to just a little bit of psychology, to the claim that (as Plato had already said in the second book of the "Republic") each human has many desires, and no one can satisfy these desires without assistance from others. Kant doesn't realize how much of a cheat this is, and so keeps up the artificial attempt to build ethics on this thin of an account of the human -- it is thus no accident that the full "Metaphysic of Morals" has so much rubbish in it, as Kant was building on sand. Hegel's ethics is free of this artificial limitation that Kant had laid down for ethics, but still shows all the limitations of Hegel's own parochialisms (sexism, racism, nostalgia for guilds and wariness of mass suffrage). So the obvious lack of "purity" in decision theory is not a barrier to granting it status parallel to Kant's own (hypothetical) derivation of the Moral Law in the first two sections of the "Groundwork": that work is itself not really pure, once it has been properly understood. By Kant's own standards, nothing is really "pure": and so what is reasonably called "pure" is not going to meet Kant's strictures.

That there is still something to the "pure"/"empirical" distinction I think is clearly shown by the case of decision theory: decision theory is not like the mass of information that is involved in making actual decisions; avoidance of dutch books in decision theory is clearly akin to crafting reductio proofs, as anyone who has played a little with both must realize. There's some sort of categorical difference between keeping a dutch book and simply making an unwise choice: this is what I think the "pure"/"empirical" distinction should aim to make clear. But even the terms used in labelling the distinction make this difficult. Hence much becomes muddled when thinking about practical philosophy.

Unrelated: I wrote a dissertation, you can find it open-access here.

See the Dancing Bear

http://www.xavier.edu/philosophy/Contemporary-Debates-in-German-Idealism-Conference.cfm

My poor blog; neglected for so long my imageshack links have all died. Alas!

Problems with scientia intuitiva and the Absolute Idea

I have mentioned a few times that I should write a post discussing Förster's examples from "The Methodology of the Intuitive Understanding", chapter 11 of "The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy".

First, it's probably best to look at what Spinoza tells us about scientia intuitiva, what he calls in his Ethics "the third kind of knowledge". There's surprisingly little telling us what this actually is in the Ethics; the only clear treatment of all three "kinds of knowledge" comes at EIIP40S2:

From all that has been said above it is clear, that we, in many cases, perceive and form our general notions:--(1.) From particular things represented to our intellect fragmentarily, confusedly, and without order through our senses (II. xxix. Coroll.); I have settled to call such perceptions by the name of knowledge from the mere suggestions of experience. (2.) From symbols, e.g., from the fact of having read or heard certain words we remember things and form certain ideas concerning them, similar to those through which we imagine things (II. xviii. note). I shall call both these ways of regarding things knowledge of the first kind, opinion, or imagination. (3.) From the fact that we have notions common to all men, and adequate ideas of the properties of things (II. xxxviii. Coroll., xxxix. and Coroll. and xl.); this I call reason and knowledge of the second kind. Besides these two kinds of knowledge, there is, as I will hereafter show, a third kind of knowledge, which we will call intuition [scientia intuitiva]. This kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of the absolute essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things. I will illustrate all three kinds of knowledge by a single example. Three numbers are given for finding a fourth, which shall be to the third as the second is to the first. Tradesmen without hesitation multiply the second by the third, and divide the product by the first; either because they have not forgotten the rule which they received from a master without any proof, or because they have often made trial of it with simple numbers, or by virtue of the proof of the nineteenth proposition of the seventh book of Euclid, namely, in virtue of the general property of proportionals.

But with very simple numbers there is no need of this. For instance, one, two, three, being given, everyone can see that the fourth proportional is six; and this is much clearer, because we infer the fourth number from an intuitive grasping of the ratio, which the first bears to the second.

Now, it is famously unclear how to understand this example, but as Spinoza exegesis is not Förster's concern, I can ignore those questions. One thing worth noting is that Spinoza also characterizes scientia intuitiva as proceeding from knowledge of the essence of a thing to knowledge of its properties; I am too lazy to look up that quote, but I believe it's in Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. But I am mainly interested here in Spinoza's example itself: We are given three numbers in a series, 1, 2, 3, and told to find the fourth. The answer Spinoza is looking for is '6', which is (3*2)/1, as 6/3=2/1.

I remember when I first read this passage, I didn't pay any attention to the math-talk and was surprised when the number after 1, 2, 3 was not '4'. This nicely illustrates an important point: being given a series of numbers does not always uniquely determine "what number comes next" in the series.

More strongly, the following is true: No finite series of numbers uniquely determines a function. Trivially, a finite series of numbers that fit a function will also fit an infinite number of piecewise functions which are defined for the given elements in the same way as that function, but in some other way for elements not given in the series. (I'm not sure if the same holds for infinite series, since my math skills are inadequate, but I only need the weaker claim for discussing Förster's examples).

A point related to this is one Leibniz spends some time discussing (somewhere): given a series of points, there is no line which uniquely fits those points. (I believe this is equivalent to proving the stronger claim I was hesitant about in the previous paragraph, since an infinite series of elements can be treated as a list of ordered pairs, which will equate to points on a graph, and if no line is determined by them then neither can they determine a function, since if they determined a function you could draw the line the function displayed and it would uniquely fit the points. Yes, I have now convinced myself of this. But again, I don't need that stronger claim.)

Now, here is Goethe, in "The Experiment as Mediator Between Object and Subject", quoted by Förster on page 256:

In the first two installments of my optical contributions I sought to conduct such a series of experiments which border on and immediately touch upon each other, and which indeed, once one has become thoroughly familiar with them and contemplates them as a whole, constitute but one single experience seen from the most various vantage points. -- An experience of this kind, consisting as it does in a series of experiments, is manifestly of a higher kind. It represents the formula in which countless individual problems of arithmetic are expressed. To work towards such experiences is, I believe, the highest duty of the natural scientist.

Förster then reminds the reader of the historical context: Goethe had believed that he could "see" the Idea of color by doing all possible experiments with the way light shines through a prism onto boundaries between light and dark surfaces, and then his "seeing" of this Idea would allow him to articulate a correct theory of color. Lichtenberg had pointed out that the theory of color Goethe put forward on this basis didn't explain why I see green dots if I stare at red dots and then turn quickly to look at a white surface. The moral Förster draws from this is general: Goethe believed that if he looked at enough individuals of a certain kind, he could grasp the Idea which manifested itself in these various individuals (the Idea of color which made all colors colors, the Urpflanze which made all of the various plants plants). But the (merely empirical) fact that his early theory of color fails to explain the empirical phenomena of "couleurs accidentelles" revealed a logical problem with his methodology: given what an Idea is supposed to be, one cannot grasp an Idea by simply seeing individuals which manifest it; some further logical element is needed.

Here it is probably helpful to remember the Kantian context for this problem: Goethe's strange efforts with colors and trying to see the "Idea of color" are akin to trying to see a cow as a cow. Kant believed that we cannot know whether there are genuine purposes in nature (such as organisms), and that the idea of such things was of only regulative use. Here is a passage from section 77 of the Critique of Judgement, AK 5:407:

Our understanding, namely, has the property that in its cognition, e.g., of the cause of a product, it must go from the analytical universal (of concepts) to the particular (of the given empirical intuition), in which it determines nothing with regard to the manifoldness of the latter, but must expect this determination for the power of judgement from the subsumption of the empirical intuition (when the object is a product of nature) under the concept. Now, however, we can also conceive of an understanding which, since it is not discursive like ours but is intuitive, goes from the synthetically universal (of the intuition of a whole as such) to the particular, i.e., from the whole to the parts, in which, therefore, and in whose representation of the whole, there is no contingency in the combination of the parts, in order to make possible a determinate form of the whole, which is needed by our understanding, which must progress from the parts, as universally conceived grounds, to the different possible forms, as consequences, that can be subsumed under it. In accordance with the construction of our understanding, by contrast, a real whole of nature is to be regarded only as the effect of the concurrent moving forces of the parts. Thus if we would not represent the possibility of the whole as depending upon the parts, as is appropriate for our discursive understanding, but would rather, after the model of the intuitive (archetypal) understanding, represent the possibility of the parts (as far as both their constitution and their combination is concerned) as depending upon the whole, then, given the very same special characteristic of our understanding, this cannot come about by the whole being the ground of the possibility of the connection of the parts (which would be a contradiction in the discursive kind of cognition), but only by the representation of a whole containing the ground of the possibility of its form and of the connection of parts that belong to that. But now since the whole would in that case be an effect (product) the representation of which would be regarded as the cause of its possibility, but the product of a cause whose determining ground is merely the representation of its effect is called an end, it follows that it is merely a consequence of the particular constitution of our understanding that we represent products of nature as possible only in accordance with another kind of causality than that of natural laws of matter, namely only in accordance with that of ends and final causes, and that this principle does not pertain to the possibility of things themselves (even considered as phenomena) in accordance with this sort of generation, but pertains only to the judging of them that is possible for our understanding.

This passage is where Goethe (and Förster) get the idea of an "intuitive intellect", of an intellect which can see "a whole as a whole" rather than having to see a whole only by seeing its parts (and then concluding that these are parts of a whole, in a separate act of the mind). Kant has earlier argued (to the satisfaction of all of the German idealists, and Goethe) that knowing a particular object in nature as an organism requires knowing it as a whole in which the parts are reciprocally the cause and effect of the whole: seeing a cow as a cow requires seeing its parts as being there because they are organs of a cow, and of seeing the cow as there because of the functioning of its organs. Now, Kant thinks that the peculiar nature of our "discursive" understanding prevents us from having this sort of knowledge. As he puts it in this passage, a discursive understanding has only "analytical universals" as concepts, it has concepts which do not determine any of the content which is given in intuition. In seeing a metal sphere lying on an incline, the concepts which I bring the intuition of that sphere under ("metal", "sphere", "substance", "solid") do not determine what will be given to me in intuition. If what is next given to me is this sphere rolling up the incline instead of down it, then this shows that I was wrong in bringing it under some of the concepts I brought it under (it must not be made of metal, or at least must not be solidly metal). However the sphere behaves, I require further intuition to know it: thus there is a contingency between my representation of the sphere as solid metal and its being given to me in future intuitions as behaving like I expect a solid metal sphere to behave. In contrast to this, suppose I see a cow as a cow: then in bringing it under the concept of "cow" I determine that it must have four legs, chew cud, give birth to calves after mating with bulls, etc. I do not require future intuitions to know that it does this: if it does not do these things, then it has failed as a cow, and I did not fail in bringing it under the concept "cow". Future intuitions of the cow living as a cow lives can only confirm what I already knew about it when I saw it as a cow, and are not required for me to know this. Thus there is not a contingency between my representing the cow as a cow and its being given to me in future intuitions as behaving in the way I expect a cow to behave. I also know that it must have a stomach with four components, a liver, kidneys, lungs, etc., for these are among the organs proper to a cow: if a particular cow lacks any of them, then it is deficient as a cow. And so I do not require future intuitions to know that the cow has them: I require new information to tell me ways in which an animal is unhealthy, not to tell me how it is healthy.

Because of Kant's overextension of a particular picture of how concept and intuition are united in cognition, he denies that we can have empirical knowledge of organisms. Goethe makes a modus tollens out of Kant's modus ponens: because we do have knowledge of organisms, we must have intuitive intellects (and not merely discursive ones).

So, Goethe's problem is this: How can it be possible to see "a whole as such", as opposed to only ever seeing a whole by progressing from the parts to the whole?

His initial, flawed, answer, is that we can see "a whole as such" by seeing individuals which are instances of that kind of whole. But I cannot learn what a cow is simply by seeing many cattle; for to know what a cow is, I need to know things about the ways a cow's organs interrelate with one another, and the way that various actions of a cow function in the life-cycle of a cow. But if I only ever look at particular cow organs on their own, and particular cow actions in isolation from one another, then I will never learn from this how these organs and these actions are organically united in the life of the cow.

Returning to Förster, and Goethe:

What is the problem here? Let us consider once again Goethe's characterization of what he calls an experience of a higher kind: It comprises a number of different experiences and "represents the formula in which countless individual problems of arithmetic are expressed." Like a mathematical formula, the experience of a higher kind is meant to provide a means for deriving the individual phenomena from it. Is this the case? If for example I have the formula y=2x+1, I can express it in countless instances: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11... This does not represent any problem. However, our task is still to discover the formula corresponding to the idea! Instead of generating the series on the basis of the formula, we have to derive the formula on the basis of the series. Thus to begin with all I have is (say) the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... What is the formula on which the series is based? What would be the next number, after 21?
And here we see: Just as little as the arithmetic series as such provides the formula that generates it, neither does the 'systematic variation of every single experiment' in a complete series reveal the underlying idea.... When assembling the materials that comprise an experience of a higher kind, we must also take care not to leave out a single step if the underlying regularity is to be determined. However, the mere fact of having discovered all the parts (properties) is not in itself equivalent to having derived them from a single origin (idea).
...Something crucial is still missing, but what is it? Goethe's own path, the one that in the end actually lead him to the solution of his problem, left hardly any traces in his writings. Even so, the mathematical example from above gives us a clue what to look for. What must I do in order to find the appropriate formula for the series 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21? Apparently I have to investigate the transitions between the numbers in order to see how one arises from the other and whether the intervals between them are based on some regularity. However I end up achieving this, there is no doubt that the path from the series to the formula lies in studying the transitions.[Footnote: An intellectual re-presentation of the transitions between 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21, is necessary in order to realize that, from the third element in the series onward, every number is the sum of the two preceding numbers; hence the next number must be 34, and we are dealing here with the formula for the Fibonacci series.] (ps.256-7)

So to put the case in parallel with Kant (and my example of the cow):

1. I am given a series of numbers/intuitions of parts of a cow.
2. I want to know the formula which produces the series/to intuit the cow as a whole.
3. I cannot proceed from the mere series to the formula/discursive intellection cannot provide me with an intuition of the cow as a whole.
-- but here there is a further parallel, which Förster gives too little time to --
4. I cannot know if there is a formula for the series/we cannot know that there exist organisms in nature by discursive intellection.

Now, consider the following sequence of numbers: 3, 12, 10, 7, 10, 19.... To know the formula behind this series, Förster says, I must "intellectually re-present" "the transitions" between them. Well, here is how that series was generated: I rolled a d20 several times, and recorded my rolls. The transitions between the items were my picking up the die and throwing it again. So even if there is a simple function that fits my rolls (as there would be if I had rolled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), this would tell you nothing about that series: the next element in the series will always be a random number between 1 and 20. There is a fact of the matter about what the next number in the series was (it was a 4), but no formula would have been able to tell you it. So if "the formula" being looked for is something that will both tell you what numbers are in the series and what future numbers will be added to the series, there simply is no such formula to be found: the relation between the present list of elements and any future elements in the series is contingent. This is how Kant thinks of our knowledge of (what we heuristically imagine to be) organisms: the "whole" imagined serves merely a regulative function in judgement, and doesn't allow us to know the object intuited. And there are areas where Kant's picture of our understanding is correct, just as there are serieses of numbers which are not determinations of a formula: sometimes there is no "whole" to be grasped, but a mere conglomeration of contingently related items. So there is a real possibility that the sort of "higher experience" Goethe wanted in a particular case will just not be available, because the items he is looking at are not manifestations of a (single) Idea. Even if Förster/Goethe are granted a great deal about "Ideas" and our cognitive capacities for apprehending them, it remains open that there simply will not be an Idea where one is looked for. It might be that the concept being sought after in the phenomena is simply discursive, and not an Idea at all.

But Förster/Goethe want to avoid Kant's skeptical result, and at least in some cases it is clearly right to resist it. So let us look again at the mathematical example and the cow in parallel, without Kant's skeptical item 4:
4a. If there is a formula for the series, it determines how to proceed from one element in the series to the next/If the cow is an organic whole, then its being an organism determines how the parts of the cow relate to one another.
5. If I can proceed from one element in the series to the next while knowing that this is what I am doing (and not merely by a prior knowledge of which numbers are in the series), then I have a practical knowledge of the formula (This is something like Spinoza's second kind of knowledge.)/If I can see the particular parts of the cow as working in such a way that they cannot work without one another, or the various actions of the cow as actions that could not be done by something which did not do all of those sorts of actions, then I have a practical recognition that the object I am apprehending is an organism.
6. If I can see the elements in the series as following from one another with necessity simply by following the series along, this is what Spinoza called scientia intuiva/If I can see the individual parts or actions of the cow in such a way that I could not see them without seeing them as done by a cow (here considered as an organism, a natural end), then I have an intuitive intellect and intuit by means of what Kant called a "synthetic universal": what I see is already determined by the concept, and does not depend on future intuitions to give me knowledge of its future states.

Förster identifies three elements in "the methodology of the intuitive understanding" he finds in Goethe: there is a series of elements, there are transitions between those elements, and there is the Idea which makes itself manifest in the elements. He argues that if we are given any two of these, we can infer the third: "if a whole consists of these three elements and two of them are given, then I can infer the third from them." (p.259)

He gives two examples to try to show we can go from Idea and elements to transitions and from Idea and transitions to elements; the movement from elements and transitions to Idea is then left as what Goethe and Hegel accomplished.

I think that neither of his examples shows what he wants to. But as this post is getting long (and feels already impossibly dense), I think I will again put off looking at those two; I have at least done all the ground-clearing for looking at them now. The bigger problem is one I believe I mentioned in my first post on Förster's book, but which I can now put with more clarity: Förster does not take seriously enough his own italicized "if".

Again, here is Förster: "if a whole consists of these three elements and two of them are given, then I can infer the third from them" (p.259) -- a few pages later, this is taken as haven been proved: "In summary, then, we can say that if an idea lies at the basis of a set of phenomena and is operative in all its parts, then that fact can only be recognized by the method described here. Whether or not an idea in this sense lies at the foundation of a set of phenomena can also only be determined in this way." (p.264) -- So, by Förster's own lights, whether or not an Idea lies at the basis of phenomena is a question that is not immediately answerable, but rather is answered only by "the methodology of intuitive understanding": knowing that there is an Idea underlying phenomena does not come before actually grasping that Idea, and seeing how it guides the transitions between the individuals in which it manifests itself.

Now, look at Förster's treatment of "the classical and continually recurring objection" to the claim "that Hegel's description of the path of philosophical consciousness to the standpoint of science is in principle correct" (p.372) as it has "sublated the subject-object dichotomy that previously constituted it, thereby giving birth to a new kind of thought distinct from the discursive thought which had been appropriate within the dichotomy that previously laid claim to (almost) exclusive validity" (p.371-2). (Another way he puts this central claim is that Hegel had succeeded at demonstrating "the actuality of the (absolute) idea" (p.367).) The objection to this claim is that "the steps in Hegel's argumentation are lacking in necessity; that the historical shapes that he discerns do not exhaust the alternatives; that, on the contrary, many new alternatives have emerged since Hegel's time in science, art, and so on." (p.376)

Förster's reply is as follows, in four parts:

(1) As we saw at the beginning of Chapter 13, Hegel is not concerned in the Phenomenology with 'historical shapes' -- these are ultimately no more than examples and could be replaced by equally serviceable 'alternatives'. Rather, Hegel is interested in the 'method of the passing over of one form into another and the emergence of the one form out of the other'. But then the question is not whether there are alternatives to Hegel's examples, to the historical shapes chosen by him, but whether there are alternatives to the transitions between them.

Förster is clearly right about this, and I'm always astonished when people can't recognize this. The idea that in the first few chapters of the Phenomenology Hegel is concerned with the transition from Russellian "knowledge by acquaintance" to Platonic forms to Newtonianism to the instiution of slavery to Stoicism/Skepticism/Roman Catholicism is simply wacky: how could that grab-bag assortment of historical phenomena, in their weird non-temporal order, be something that has a logical progression? [It is worth noting here that Förster is chiefly concerned with roughly the first half of the Phenomenology, up through the section on "Spirit"; he convincingly argues that this is what Hegel had originally planned to have as the "introduction" to the Science of Logic, and these sections do in fact seem to function as the "Positions of Thought" chapters in the opening of the Encyclopedia Logic do.]

(2) And here again, the question is not whether we today, with the conceptual means placed at our disposal by the current level of development, might be able to imagine different transitions, but whether a different transition would be possible for the observed consciousness on its level. What we can imagine is therefore irrelevant to answering this question.
(3) If this is conceded, then the objection ought rather to be formulated this way: it is not convincing that a specific transition is supposed to be necessary for consciousness at its given level. And such an objection may, in any given case, in fact be justified. Then the question becomes: Is the transition itself not necessary, or has its necessity simply not been convincingly presented? As long as we find that some of the other transitions are necessary, we can always be sure that the problem is one of presentation. That is the crucial point! **If** a whole makes its parts possible and gives them their shape, then it must be active in all the parts and in all their transitions, not only in some. If that activity (necessity) has been recognized in some of the transitions but not in others, all this implies is that the latter have not yet been adequately grasped and presented.
(4) Hegel's project could therefore only be said to have 'failed' if no necessity whatsoever was to be found in the 'science of the experience of consciousness' [the Phenomenology's original title, which corresponds to the parts through "Spirit"], and if instead the transitions between shapes were contingent and thus might have happened differently. But that assumption is unwarranted, as I hope to have shown in Chapter 13 despite the undeniable imperfections in my presentation.

Förster's (2) is unobjectionable, and I accept that he has in fact shown in his chapter 13 that at least some of the transitions between the "shapes of spirit" happen with necessity. But his (3) is problematic: he grants that many of Hegel's transitions, as written, are unconvincing. But he tries to argue that this can only be a problem of presentation, for all of these transitions must in fact be there to be described. (In this he follows Fichte's views of the "deductions" in the published version of the Wissenschaftslehre, which Förster argues Hegel took as a guide for his project in the Phenomenology; Fichte thought his published "deductions" were largely awful, but that this was always a flaw merely in the presentation and not in the Wissenschaftslehre itself.)

The problem is the "if" which I added emphasis on, and which Förster had (previously in the book) always italicized: it is a real question whether an Idea lies behind a group of phenomena. Some wholes are mere aggregates, and not organically structured: in that case the "if" fails, and the whole does not make the parts possible or give them shape, and is not active in them or their transitions. (Indeed, whether there are "transitions" between them seems doubtful; it appears there are only "transitions" between our apprehensions of them, as there is nothing uniting them beyond our having united them.) And given what I thought I understood about "the metholodogy of the intuitive intellect", we cannot know whether an Idea lies behind phenomena without knowing that all of this is true: so Förster here argues in a circle, asserting that there is an (absolute) Idea because of the transitions and that there are transitions because there is an (absolute) Idea.

This is related to a puzzling paragraph in the concluding chapter of the book. Förster notes that Goethe's Ideas are multiple and various, as the Idea of color and the Urpflanze are very different sorts of Ideas. This is in distinction from Hegel, who speaks of the Idea, the Absolute Idea, and not of various "Ideas" in the plural. But Förster thinks this reflects only a difference of attention, and that the two approaches complement one another:

Nor, of course, does a multiplicity of ideas contradict the fact of a single, unified reality. Just as a concept (the manifestation of the idea in the subject) is impossible in isolation from the broader conceptual network, and just as an isolated Urphaenomen is an impossibility, neither is it conceivable that there could be ideas existing apart from any connection with other ideas. They too must be moments of an internally differentiated whole; they must stand to each other in relations of greater or lesser affinity, mutually conditioning, facilitating, impeding, or excluding one another, and hence they must be hierarchically ordered and subordinated to a highest (absolute) idea constituting the internal nexus of the whole. Goethe remarks in this connection...(p.370)

and then he gives two Goethe quotations which are not arguments in support of these claims. I don't see what support he can give for them. I am well acquainted with arguments to the effect that concepts only come in groups, and an Urphaenomen that doesn't make itself manifest in individuals is clearly not doing the work of an Urphaenomen. But why do Ideas require other Ideas? And why do they have to stand in an orderly hierarchy with regards to one another? (That's not true of concepts, since not all concepts are "the manifestation of the idea in the subject": some are merely discursive representations. It was with good reason that Kant only urged as a task that our concepts should be organized in a single Porphyrian tree, and did not claim that they already are so organized.)

As far as I can see, the actuality of the absolute idea is left as an assumption in Förster's book. Which is rather problematic, since that's what the whole thing is trying to demonstrate.

A Link Post

Robert Stern was interviewed in 3:AM magazine; it is a good read.

In the wake of Förster's book, I have been reading more about Schelling and Goethe. Robert Richards's work has been very helpful here; "Did Goethe and Schelling Endorse Species Evolution?" (PDF) was particularly stimulating.

Richards gave a seminar on "The Origin of Species" while I was at Chicago; I only sat in on the first couple of classes at the time, since I was busy and it was being recorded for posting online. Sadly, the video and podcast links are dead now, but I had most of the podcasts downloaded. (For some reason I didn't download week 2's podcast; ironically, that is the one class I am sure I was present at. The slides for that week of the course are still posted (PDF), and are worth looking at just for the cartoon of Professor Icthyosaurus on page 13. (The context for that cartoon was a cyclical theory of evolution, where extinct species were supposed to arise again once catastrophic floods had changed the character of the Earth so that humans were no longer viable, but e.g. ichthyosaurs were again. I just really like the design on the whole thing.)

Edit: This is a great sentence: "This kind of metaphysics enticed Goethe the way several of his women friends did at this time: with great allure and seduction, with the poet giving way even while recognizing the impropriety of his indulgence." (Source, PDF)

Förster's "Twenty Five Years": an overview.

It seems worthwhile to outline the story of German Idealism, as Förster presents it in "The Twenty Five Years of Philosophy". I suspect my previous post on Förster's book is unreadable, and so unread.

Kant begins with the realization that philosophy before him has taken for granted that our thoughts can get things right or wrong -- that they have "objective validity", in his later terminology, or objective purport as McDowell says it -- and that metaphysics is building on sand so long as it is unsettled whether metaphysical thinking can so much as get things wrong. So in the first Critique, Kant tries to settle the question of how and when thinking can have objective purport. The answer he arrives at is that thinking has objective purport by standing in a relation to sensibility: the receptive aspect of our cognition provides us with a kind of cognition which is dependent on the objects it purports to be about, and so the question of objective purport does not arise for it; the other aspects of our cognition (the categories and the ideas) are explicated as structuring and guiding this receptive aspect of our cognition. As time and space are the forms of our sensibility, this means that thinking has objective purport only in relation to objects in time and space: as the traditional objects of metaphysics are extraspatiotemporal, traditional metaphysics thus shows itself as confused.

But a new sort of metaphysics stands primed to take its place: in establishing how it is that our (empirical, spatiotemporal) thinking can have objective purport, Kant has also established that certain principles govern such thinking. That they in fact do this is a condition on the possibility of thought, as thought must be (able to be made) self-conscious. It is the task of the new metaphysics to establish these principles, and lay out what follows from them.

Förster notes that Kant subtly changes the question he is answering after the A-edition of the first Critique: where before he was asking "How can thinking have objective purport?", starting with the Prolegomena he is asking "How are synthetic a priori judgements possible?" In the case of theoretical synthetic a priori judgements, this question is what the new metaphysics confronts and answers. This shift in Kant's question is both a narrowing of his original question, as he is no longer questioning how empirical judgements are possible as such (though this will in fact still be a topic he addresses in the B-edition of the first Critique), and a broadening of it: for there are judgements which do not depend on a relation to an object for their validity, but which are connected with synthetic a priori principles. These are practical judgements. In the first Critique, Kant had left moral questions underscrutinized, and he had explicitly denied that practical philosophy was connected with transcendental philosophy. But now practical and theoretical philosophy are both the concerns of the transcendental philosopher.

Förster thinks that Kant's attempt at his project fails at several points. For one, Kant's construction of matter in "Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science" is circular, as Kant and Schelling both notice; Förster notes that Kant was still working on this problem in the Opus Postumum, and that he still did not solve it there. Förster thinks that this is a significant problem, because he thinks the Metaphysical Foundations was trying to complete something the first Critique had accidentally ignored: a spatial schematism of the categories to parallel the temporal one given in the first Critique's Analytic. Whether Kant needed such a thing is controversial in the literature. (My judgement is that Kant didn't think he needed one, and that by his own standards he was right -- but that these standards were too low, and he in fact did need one if he wasn't to take the spatial form of our intuition as simply Given. I'm not sure that his failure to construct the concept of dense matter matters for this, though.)

This is related to a second place where Förster thinks Kant failed: he simply takes the fact that space and time are the forms of our receptivity as given, and he does the same with the table of general logical forms. Förster spends less time on this complaint, but I think it's the most important one he brings up.

Very shortly after the first Critique, Reinhold will try to present Kant's philosophy in a more systematic form than Kant had managed (following up on hints from Kant that such a system should be possible, that the transcendental unity of apperception really is the ground of all synthetic a priori judgements). The form this takes in Reinhold is an attempt to derive all of the Critical Philosophy from what he calls "the principle of consciousness": "In consciousness representation is distinguished though the subject from both object and subject and is related to both". Reinhold held this to be an analytic judgement, and from it tried to prove via a "short argument" that we can never know the thing-in-itself (because we know representations only, which are distinguished from the object) or the subject-in-itself (because we know representations only, which are distinguished from the subject), but that our representations have objective purport (because they are related through the subject to the object). (I know Reinhold only second-hand, through Karl Ameriks's "The Fate of Autonomy", but the prospects for his project strike me as dim.)

In "Aenesidemus" Schulze criticized Reinhold's attempt to found all of the Critical Philosophy on this one analytic principle. He claimed that Reinhold was tacitly appealing to many other principles in his derivations from it, for instance to the logical principle of noncontradiction, and so the appearance of systematicity was merely apparent. It was his reading of "Aenesidemus" that first startled Fichte out of his dogmatic attraction to Reinhold's philosophy; Schulze did not convince him that the whole project was hopeless, but rather spurred Fichte to try to fill the gaps and genuinely establish all of the Critical Philosophy on a single self-evident principle (from which he hoped to derive the "principle of consciousness", and therefrom use Reinhold's efforts to derive the bulk of Kant's philosophy).

Telling this part of the story occupies several chapter of Förster's book, and for my money this is the most interesting and successful part of the work. I found the accounts of how Fichte and (his very Fichtean) Hegel tried to systematize Kant's philosophy intriguing and energizing, even when I did not find them convincing as presented. The general idea is that Kant simply did not go far enough in trying to establish the conditions under which self-consciousness is possible, and that he mischaracterized the nature of self-consciousness. Where Kant still (sometimes) seems to think of self-consciousness as receptive, as relying on an "inner sense" which relates consciousness to a (noumenal) self which is not dependent on the thought of it, Fichte resolutely treats the self as nothing but its apperceptive unity. This residual empiricism in Kant's conception of the self has vanished in Fichte, and the results which are claimed as proved will be considerably more impressive, but the very general argumentative strategy of the Wissenschaftslehre is Kant's: What must be the case, given that I am aware of myself as a self?

There is a third area where Förster thinks Kant failed where I found his criticisms less clear, and the responses on the part of German Idealists seemed less on-point. This is the question of the unity of practical and theoretical reason hinted at in the third Critique, where the regulative principle of the purposiveness of nature is used to guide inquiry (as it already was in the appendix to the Dialectic of the first Critique), and also to somehow aid moral faith (by suggesting that since both the order demanded by the moral law and the order demanded by the purposiveness of nature are demands put by reason to nature, seeing one fulfilled (in scientific empirical inquiry and in beauty) is an aid to believing that the other is fulfilled, that the world is morally structured).

As I recall, Förster's complaint is largely focused on Kant's skepticism regarding whether we can know there to be purposes in the world. He presents Schelling as presenting as an empirical hypothesis that the world is so structured, and as taking contemporary developments in physics as confirming it. Förster is generally skeptical of Schelling's whole approach here (and he presents Hegel as likewise skeptical of it, after the break with Schelling in his Jena period). Förster's positive remedy to Kant's skepticism here comes from Goethe's botanical and optical writings: Goethe claimed that he could "see ideas", and Förster endorses this, and presents it as the way forward for philosophy.

Now, it is easy to see that Kant's skepticism has to be wrong somehow: we do know that there are purposes in nature, for we know that there are living things in nature, and living things are purposes. A horse does things for the sake of maintaining itself and reproducing its kind; it is not merely mechanically explicable, and in fact cannot be understood as a horse if approached mechanically. Human action is the action of a living being, and so likewise is purposive: so if we are not to be skeptical of whether there is human action in nature, of whether freedom is at work in the world, we must not be skeptical of whether we can know nature to have purposes in it.

But Schelling seems to want to prove more than this: not merely that there are purposes in the world, or that the world is purposive to the extent that morality requires (that virtue and happiness will coincide), but that nature as such is purposive. Schelling wants to derive the general structure of nature from what he calls an "intellectual intuition", but it is not at all clear how he can have such a thing. Kant used the term "intellectual intuition" to characterize how God knows the world (supposing he does): he knows it by creating it. Fichte follows Kant in this: the I knows itself in its act of self-positing, and in its act of self-positing knows itself. Schelling explicitly does *not* mean this: his "intellectual intuition" is not creating the world, for the world is already there before Schelling's Naturphilosophie. Fichte's intellectual intuition of the I was used to work out the Wissenschaftslehre, and it appears that this is the usage Schelling is following: his "intellectual intuition" is the foundational principle for his Naturphilosophie. It's unclear how he can establish it, and Förster seems to be of the view that he simply can't: Schelling built on sand.

Förster opposes Schelling and Goethe on this score. Where Schelling ultimately appeals to an intellectual intuition (which is hopeless), Goethe appeals to something else: an intuitive intellectual apprehension of an idea, which Förster also refers to by the Spinozan title scientia intuitiva. Goethean scientia intuitiva is supposed to establish what Schelling could not, and what Fichte left only as an incompletable task: that the world and the mind are both structured by the mind, that nature and reason are both rational, that the purposiveness demanded by freedom is the end of the world itself.

I said some things about why I don't think the scientia intuitiva stuff works in my previous post about Förster's book, but I think the real problems show up in his examples (the film, the book, etc.). Looking at those is probably something I need to devote a post to, because this one is already feeling too dense to be read. So I stop here.

tl;dr: Kant is insufficiently systematic; Fichte is sufficiently systematic, but does not establish all that he needs; Goethe establishes limited results about colors and plants; Hegel uses Goethe's methods to establish all that Fichte had not, to supplement what Fichte had genuinely established, and in this way brings Kant's program to a successful close. Schelling was an enthusiastic blind alley.

The future of philosophy, as I see Förster presenting it: Hegel's own post-Phenomenology work is doing a better job presenting what was already contained in nuce in his Jena-period work. Where there are problems in Hegel's system, they are to be resolved by doing Hegel's job better than he managed it himself -- but Hegel has effectively established what it is that should be done. The Absolute Idea was presented in Jena; what is left to us later philosophers is the seeing of subordinate ideas, such as Goethe saw in his optical and botanical works. (Presumably philosophers can also just do something else, not directly related to the history of metaphysics that Kant is working in: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche simply wrote books which are not trying to do what German Idealism is trying to do, and their work neither contributes to nor (directly) challenges what was going on in "the twenty five years of philosophy". But I suspect that people like Russell and Heidegger would figure as mere epigones to Fichte, on Förster's view.)

"The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy": some criticisms

As I mentioned in my previous post, I really like "The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy", which I have now finished. It gives the clearest accounts I've seen of big chunks of German Idealism, and I think Förster is especially good at laying out what the post-Kantians took to be the problems Kant had left them with. My high praise of those parts of the book remains. Where I think he's less successful is in showing that those problems do in fact get resolved by the post-Kantians. This post will be about those less successful parts.

To give an example: One of the clear issues in Kant that the post-Kantians tried to get past is Kant's conviction that out finite intellect is a special sort of finite intellect, and that others are possible (or at least thinkable); this aspect of Kant's thought means that when Kant proves that such-and-such is a condition on reality's being an object of cognition for us, we must not infer that such-and-such is a condition on the object's being an object of cognition as such. If our intellect was the only possible sort of intellect, then we could infer from "Such-and-such must be the case if reality is to be cognizable by us" to "Such-and-such must be the case if reality is to be cognizable" -- and then skepticism about such-and-such would refute itself, for it would cognize reality in trying to deny that such-and-such was true of the reality it cognized.

(If skepticism tried to back up and say that it merely wanted to say of reality as such that it might not be such-and-such, abstracting from whether or not we can cognize it that way, then skepticism can state a truth only at the cost of reducing itself to a tautology: apart from the conditions under which we can think of things/know things, we cannot think of things/know things. This is no real limitation on our knowledge, and so no real skepticism; this is the place to bring in Kant's discussion of the "noumenon in the negative sense".)

But, since Kant thinks that our intellect is of a special sort (finite as opposed to infinite, discursive as opposed to intellectual, sensibly intuitive as opposed to intellectually intuitive, spatiotemporal as opposed to having some other forms of intuition), it remains the case that anything Kant can show about the conditions for objects to be cognizable by us will leave open that there might be other sorts of intellects (even finite, discursive, sensible ones) that could cognize the objects which we can cognize only under those conditions outside of them: the objects of our cognition might not in themselves be as we (must) cognize them to be, and our forms of cognition might distort their objects. At this level, as opposed to an empirical level, Kant thinks that skepticism is true: things-in-themselves are not knowable by us, because of the distinctive form of our intellect. (Again, I think Förster is very good at explaining this stuff, though his account in the first two chapters of the book is admittedly compressed.)

Kant thinks we can entertain the (merely logical) possibility of other forms of finite discursive sensible intellects than our spatiotemporal one, and so the fact that he (takes himself to have) proved that our synthetic a priori knowledge is limited to spatiotemporal objects gives us transcendental idealism in its familiar form: we can know a priori only objects of possible experience, and this is not to know objects as things-in-themselves. Our understanding is not bound by the forms of our intuition, and so we can think objects in ways that we cannot cognize them; this is what makes transcendental idealism coherently formulatable, and simultaneously what makes transcendent metaphysics possible (it thinks erroneously of objects which are not given in space and time as being cognizable). Kant is explicit that we cannot know why we have the forms of intuition we have: "This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and only by such and so many, is as little capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other functions of judgement, or why space and time are the only forms of our possible intuition." (B146, section 21 of the B-Deduction). The earlier parts of the paragraph which this sentence closes makes clear that Kant is here calling "incapable of further explanation" the facts that our intellect is discursive, sensible, and has spatiotemporal forms of intuition.

Förster spends a good deal of time on the first two of these qualifications: he thinks that Fichte showed that our intellect is not (solely) sensible, but that the I knows itself via an intellectual intuition (it knows only its own act/product, and that is what the pure I is), and that Goethe showed that our intellect is not solely discursive, but that in scientia intuitiva (such as Förster and Goethe say was behind Goethe's theories of morphology and color) we know objects as a whole prior to knowing their parts. He also spends some time at least sketching how Fichte tried to address the issue of our having "such and so many" categories and "just these and no other functions of judgement", in chapter 8, "Fichte's "Complete Revolution of the Mode of Thought"". I didn't find this account satisfying, but it was clearly not meant to be fully rigorous or complete: Förster doesn't even try to tell us how Fichte derives the categories of Quantity or Modality, nor does he try to tell us how Fichte proceeds from his deductions of the logical laws of identity and non-contradiction to Kant's table of judgements.

But one major issue in Kant, the question of whether our spatiotemporal forms of intuition are the only ones possible (for a finite, discursive, sensitive intellect) is only addressed in a single footnote, number 13 on page 201. Förster partly excuses himself here by noting that Ficthe himself skimmed over this point in Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre: "Kant demonstrates the ideality of objects from the presupposed ideality of space and time: we, on the contrary, shall prove the ideality of space and time from the demonstrated ideality of objects. He required ideal objects to fill up space and time; we require space and time in order to locate the ideal objects." But Förster says that Fichte gives a "deduction of space and time" in Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre, and that "in strict terms such a deduction is indeed required at this point in order to explain how it is possible for the image and the thing to correspond or agree with each other." It would've been nice to see more discussion of this, but then one can only ask so much of a 400 page book.

But another issue in Kant, the discursive nature of our intellect, gets a great deal of treatment by Förster, and he clearly means for the reality of non-discursive knowledge to be one of the main results of his book. To quote the last sentences of the final chapter: "The path of scientia intuitiva [non-discursive knowledge] alone is still open". Chapter 11, "The Methodology of the Intuitive Understanding", is supposed to show how we can achieve scientia intuitiva of natural objects. (As a reminder, Spinoza's examples of scientia intuitiva in the Ethics are always mathematical; it is unclear how much he believed we could really have scientia intuitiva of non-mathematical finite objects, though the general thrust of part five of the Ethics suggests that acquiring this is in fact within our power, and also important for us to achieve.)

I think that a summary version of my complaint about Förster here can be put by looking at a conclusion Förster takes himself to have demonstrated in his methological discussion of Goethe's botanical studies: "In summary, then, we can say that if an idea lies at the basis of a set of phenomena and is operative in all its parts, then that fact can only be recognized by the method described here. Whether or not an idea in this sense lies at the foundation of a set of phenomena can also only be determined in this way." (p.264) -- By "idea" here Förster means something peculiar, and it's probably best to read the book yourself to get the details. But the gist of what an "idea" is here can, I think, be appreciated by looking at the example that Kant originally uses in section 77 of the Critique of the Power of Judgement, and that inspired Goethe et al: a plant. In thinking of a plant as a plant, we are thinking of it as a certain sort of organism. Thus, following Kant's account of organisms in the third Critique (which, as Förster notes in a footnote on p.138, is similar to Hume's in the Treatise), we are thinking of it as having parts which are both the cause and effect of its whole: a tree has roots and limbs and flowering buds because it is the sort of tree it is, and its having roots and limbs and flowering buds are how it is able to be that sort of tree.

Kant thinks that we are unable to know anything in nature in this way, because of the discursive nature of our intellect: "Our understanding, namely, has the property that in its cognition, e.g., of the cause of a product, it must go from the analytical universal (of concepts) to the particular (of the given empirical intuition), in which it determines nothing with regard to the manifoldness of the latter, but must expect this determination for the power of judgment from the subsumption of the empirical intuition (when the object is a product of nature) under the concept. Now, however, we can also conceive of an understanding which, since it is not discursive like ours but is intuitive, goes from the synthetically universal (of the intuition of a whole as such) to the particular, i.e., from the whole to the parts, in which, therefore, and in whose representation of the whole, there is no contingency in the combination of the parts, in order to make possible a determinate form of the whole, which is needed by our understanding, which must progress from the parts, as universally conceived grounds, to the different possible forms, as consequences, that can be subsumed under it. In accordance with the constitution of our understanding, by contrast, a real whole of nature is to be regarded only as the effect of the concurrent moving forces of the parts." (AK 5:407, section 77 of the third Critique) In other words: to know an organism as a product of nature, we would have to know it as having its parts produced by its whole (and vice-versa, in reciprocal fashion). But we can only know products of nature as having their parts produced by forces, and of all natural "wholes" as aggregates of such parts. For our thought is (thinks Kant) always discursive: we are first given particulars, and then bring those under universals; we are never given particulars as already "under" universals, such as would be the case in an organism whose particular parts are caused by the universal which is its whole.

This is a jarringly skeptical result: it certainly seems as if we can have knowledge of organisms in nature. So the post-Kantians unite in thinking that Kant has made an error in thinking that our understanding is (always) discursive, for they all agree that Kant has given a correct account of what would have to be the case if we could have knowledge of organisms, but reject his skepticism about knowledge of organisms: so our understanding must also be "intuitive", and sometimes proceed from cognition of wholes to cognition of parts. The sort of cognition of a whole involved here is what Goethe calls knowledge of an "idea", and identifies with scientia intuitiva: we know the "synthetic universal" or "idea" of a particular kind of tree, and so know its parts as being those sorts of parts because it is that sort of tree.

I think there's something to this line of thought, when we are dealing with living things: organisms do have a sort of whole, the knowledge of which is (in a sense) prior to the knowledge of their parts. You need to have some notion of an object in nature as having a whole of that sort to grasp it as an organism, because you need to have some notion of how its parts can be parts of an organic whole. And the account Förster gives of Goethe's methodology seems to me to have a plausible claim to being how we come to know organisms as the organisms they are: we have to recognize the ways in which each part functions to produce and maintain the whole, and the ways in which the whole is nothing but this activity of its parts. Only when we have grasped all of these "transitions" can we fully know an object in nature as an organism. As Förster says, "if an idea lies at the basis of a set of phenomena and is operative in all its parts, then this can only be recognized by the method described here." If this is false, then I think it is at least in the vicinity of the truth. But I'm not sure how to tell whether the antecedent of this conditional is satisfied. It looks like organisms satisfy it, if there are any, as Kant's analysis of what it is to think of something as an organic whole is. Apart from that, I don't see how to tell whether learning about a bunch of connections between natural happenings can constitute coming to know the moments of an idea or not: Förster needs for us to grasp ideas, to come to have scientia intuitiva, by observing transitions, but I don't see how he gets from observing a number of transitions which we take to be the moments of an idea to actually knowing that they are just the moments of an idea. Goethe thought that he had achieved knowledge of the idea of color, but Lichtenberg convinced him he was wrong (as Förster discusses). How are we supposed to tell whether or not we've really grasped an idea, then?

I think Förster's suggestion is that we can know we have an idea on our hands when we have a plurality of moments and all of the transitions between them: the idea is then the totality of those moments/transitions, and is "at the basis of the set of phenomena and operative in all its parts". But how do we know if we have all of the relevant moments? Do ideas have smaller ideas as the parts, which are at the basis of subsets of their moments, so that any plurality which has transitions between its moments will do? Where does Förster get his conviction that ideas are at the basis of all reality, as opposed to being what gives unity to organisms?

If I can find an answer to this, then I will also have an answer to my biggest complaint about the book, which is how Förster shows that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (or something very close to it) in fact brings an end to the twenty-five years of philosophy and resolves all of the problems Kant left for the post-Kantians. On the penultimate page of the epilogue, he considers the following objection to the claim that Hegel really did solve it all: "it is not convincing that a specific transition [between shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology] is supposed to be necessary for consciousness at its given level. And such an objection may, in any given case, be justified. Then the question becomes: Is the transition itself not necessary, or has its necessity simply not been convincingly presented? As long as we find that some of the other transitions are necessary, we can always be sure that the problem is one of presentation. That is the crucial point! If a whole makes its parts possible and gives them their shape, then it must be active in all the parts and in all their transitions, not only in some. If that activity (necessity) has been recognized in some of the transitions but not in others, all this implies is that the latter have not yet been adequately grasped and presented." (p.376, my bolding)

As a matter of fact, I find the transitions between the shapes of "Self-Consciousness" very convincing, and have ever since reading McDowell's "Towards a Heterodox Reading of Lordship and Bondage". I also find parts of the "Consciousness" chapters more or less clear. (I can see what is wrong with "Sense-Certainty", but what is going on in the "Perception" chapter always fades in and out of view for me, and "Force and the Understanding" is a very hard piece of Hegeling.) And most of the "Reason" chapter is pretty clear, for Hegel (it helps that the phrenology jokes are funny). So, if I know that these transitions are between moments of an idea (the Absolute Idea that Hegel tells us about in the Science of Logic, as it will happen), then I can be sure that Förster is right: the transitions which look to me to fail are just not convincingly presented. As they are parts of the Absolute Idea, there must be transitions between all of its moments which follow simply from the essence of those moments; this is analytic of what being moments of an idea comes to. But, as Förster presented it, the project of "The Science of the Experience of Consciousness" as originally conceived was just to demonstrate that there is in fact an Absolute Idea for a "Science of Logic" to lay out the moments of! And as this "Science of the Experience of Consciousness" is what became the Phenomenology of Spirit, I cannot simply grant to Hegel that there is in fact an Absoute Idea: this is what he needed to show me by presenting a total account of the plurality of the forms of knowledge-claims and the transitions between them. So Förster's defense of the result of the Phenomenology begs the question: I can be sure that the transitions between the shapes of "Self-Consciousness" are parts of a totality of transitions between moments of the Absolute Idea only if I already know that they are transitions between moments of an idea, which the Phenomenology was meant to show by exhibiting all of the moments of an idea. Förster has not shown that there are not problems with Hegel's approach in principle: that there might not be any idea for a "Science of Logic" to lay out for us, and that Kant's scattershot approach to our forms of thinking might not be where we have to rest, skeptical results and all.

"The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy"

This book is the best book on German Idealism I've ever read. Engaging, clear, and deep.

I'm usually really bad about starting books and then putting them down, but I haven't been tempted to read any other books since starting "The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy". (Watch "Game of Thrones" instead of read philosophy, yes. Read any other books, no.) I'm in the part about Schelling's Naturphilosophie now, and it's still remarkably clear. I've always wondered how Kantianism somehow lead to that stuff, and Förster is actually making that move seem intelligible. He's already made everything from Kant's first realization that there's a problem about how thought of objects which are not sensibly given can be possible to the Wissenschaftslehre clearer to me than they've ever been, and I am excited to get to the Hegel chapters (and find out what the weird swirly diagram on the cover is about).

I really have nothing to say about this book right now other than that I love it and you should read it immediately. I'm going to go back to reading it now.

Conference Announcement: "The Philosophical Relevance of Hegel's Subjective Logic"

Thought this might be of interest. It's certainly a topic that could use more discussion, especially with the use McDowell & Brandom have made of Hegel with regard to judgement.

SECOND ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

BONN UNIVERSITY, GERMANY

“The Philosophical Relevance of Hegel’s Subjective Logic”



I am pleased to announce that applications are now being accepted for the Second Annual International Summer School in German Philosophy, hosted by Bonn University, Germany, to be held July 4 - 15, 2011.



This year’s topic is “The Philosophical Relevance of Hegel’s Subjective Logic.” The course will be led by Markus Gabriel (Bonn University) with keynote addresses by Michael Forster (University of Chicago), Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Humboldt University, Berlin), and
 Axel Hutter (LMU, Munich). Course readings and discussions will be in English.



There are no registration or course fees for the summer school. A limited number of travel stipends are available for students coming from outside of Germany.



Application is open to graduate students and recent PhD recipients with backgrounds in philosophy. For a full course description, application instructions, and further information about the summer school, please visit our website:



http://www.idealism.uni-bonn.de/



The application deadline is MARCH 15, 2011. Application materials (CV and short letter of intent, plus a separate letter explaining financial needs if applying for a stipend) should be sent via email to idealism2011@gmail.com.

It turns out the new translation of "The Science of Logic" came out last year

I didn't notice when this happened, so I figure others probably missed it, too: di Giovanni's translation of "The Science of Logic" is out now. From what I've read of it so far, it's not radically different from Miller's translation, but the mere addition of some modern critical apparatuses is very welcome. Like, just having some more footnotes is a great addition. As is changing the font. The Miller is just an ugly book to look at. So even if this doesn't end up being a radical change, it's definitely welcome. (Now they just need to print it in paperback so I can own a copy of the thing legally.)

It looks like there are actually three volumes of the Cambridge Edition of Hegel's Works out now. I'd only heard about the Heidelberg Writings (which I haven't had time to think about looking at yet), and I just found out they were working on (and have already published) another translation of the Encyclopedia Logic earlier this evening. I'm not sure why they did this one, especially this early-on; the Hackett edition is from 1991, and strikes me as perfectly serviceable still. I would've thought that they were working mainly on unpublished or out-of-date materials, based on the fact that they started with the Heidelberg Writings volume. I suppose they might have been trying to get the major works out there (with Pinkard's translation of the Phenomenology presumably destined to come out in this series), but it still strikes me as odd. The other volumes of the Encyclopedia are badly in need of either new translations or a reprint of the Petry editions in a format that people other than major research libraries can get access to. (I've not seen them outside of reference collections, even there. Amusingly, Amazon offers the third volume of Petry for $2.30 as a Kindle edition, but this is actually just the version you can find online at places like Marxists.org, not even the Miller edition that has the Zusatze etc. So save your $2.30, nature-philosophers!)

Anyway, I'm reading di Giovanni's preface to "The Science of Logic" now. One bit that leaped out at me when I was reading:
"In this respect, since [The Phenomenology of Spirit] is governed throughout by the idea of spirit, it also constitutes the First Part of the System of Science, as Hegel surnamed it in 1807. This is a title which was dropped in the second edition of 1832, because it no longer corresponded to the subsequent publication history of the then planned System, and because Hegel later incorporated a much abbreviated version of the Phenomenology in the Encyclopedia as part of the Philosophy of Spirit."

I was very happy to see someone established say this; I've never actually seen it stated in print before (though I've said it on blogs). I have seen the opposed view (both in print and online), that the Phenomenology elevates its reader to the status of Absolute Knowledge and thus enables her to make sense of the System Of Science which begins with "The Science of Logic", which has always struck me as nuts.

Unrelated note: My handwritten McDowell notes gnaw at my soul like a beaver on soft wood. They demand to be typed up. I am not very good at blogging.

Making a Davidson Quote more Available, and a Hegel Paper

I've gestured at this quote before (in posts and in conversation), but Google shows that I've never actually typed it all up: it only showed up on Google Books and then in some guy's dissertation in Portuguese. I think it's revealing enough to deserve more prominence than that.

"I am deeply puzzled by McDowell's alternative account.... I do not see how the (propositional) content one takes in can be evidence for a belief, since it does not, in itself, have any subjective probability (if it did, it would be a belief). How can an attitude that assigns no probability to a proposition convey a probability (positive or negative) of, or provide positive evidence for, a belief?" ("Reply to Roger F. Gibson", p.135 in "Donald Davidson: Truth, meaning, and knowledge").

PS: I will finish recapping McDowell week after I get a draft knocked out for a paper I'm writing on Sebastian Roedl for a class on internalism & externalism. Sorry it's taken so long, been a busy couple of months.

Also, "Hegel on Reality as a Modal Notion" is one of the most stimulating things I've read in a while (and I heard Stekeler was a lot of fun in person). Here's some stuff I wrote on Facebook, which I shamelessly recycle to generate blog-content. The original context was my defending Stekeler's interestingness and intelligibility against a cultured critic; I would go back in and add citations to Hegel if I wasn't a hack, but it's all in the Logic chapters that are explicitly on modal topics ("Reality" in Stekeler's paper is Wirklichkeit, not Realitat -- which makes his title seem silly, since "actuality is a modal notion" is not news to anyone):

I thought he really did make Hegel's views on modality clearer. The role of contingency in Hegel's thought seems to me to be pretty much what Stekeler says on p. 21; or at least if this is Hegel's view, then this makes sense of how Hegel can both insist that there really is contingency (and that it would be foolish to try to reduce away all contingency as merely veiled necessity) while also often sounding like a necessitarian, even affirming some form of the principle of sufficient reason: it always makes sense to ask after the cause of any happening.

Answering this causal question takes the form of characterizing the happening as the result of some ground that it follows from in accord with some "generic law", some general claim that relates the sorts of things that the cause and the effect are such that the effect makes sense as being there, given that the cause is there. But no system of "generic laws" says what particular things there are, and to try to make "generic laws" imply the existence of particulars would be to fall into confusion about how causal explanations function (since they do their work by setting particulars in a broader framework, and using the fact that the relations in the framework are understood to make sense of the relations the particulars stand in; if the relations the particulars stood in needed to be understood to make use of the framework, then positioning them within the terms of the framework wouldn't be explanatory, but would merely bring back out what was already known). So it's foolish to try to pretend there's no contingency in nature, just because everything in nature has a causal explanation: Denial of "contingency" in the sense of things that happen for no reason at all, like the atomists' clinamen, doesn't mean that contingency has been shown to be an illusion or a result of our ignorance (which is how Spinoza thought of it - E1P29). Both of these views misunderstood contingency.

This also fits in with another of his criticisms of Spinoza in the "History of Philosophy" lectures: Spinoza has no way of getting attributes into the picture. He fudges that part: God has infinite attributes (by definition: E1D6), but "attribute" is something Spinoza characterizes only by reference to "what the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance" (E1D4 -- he needs to appeal to *us*, as intellects, to get attributes into play). He doesn't actually prove that God/Nature has any multiplicity to itself at all, from definitions; he merely seems to, because he's smuggled in our own viewpoint alongside the definitions. Thus Hegel's regarding Spinoza as an "acosmist", someone who has no place for a world at all. And as Spinoza is the paradigm denier of contingency in nature, it seems natural to connect these points in Hegel: denying contingency in nature happens when you've actually lost nature from the picture.

Before reading this paper, Hegel's stuff about contingency had confused me. Now it seems like good sense.

The Representation of Stereotypes

Adam Kotsko has an interesting post up at An und für sich about what stereotypes "are". Kotsko argues that we run into difficulties if we try to treat beliefs about stereotypes as being "in the head", and so we should instead treat them as being in the environmental conditions which give rise to their instances (or something along those lines -- his post is clearer than my one-sentence summary of it). I think that this moves a bit fast; a more "traditional" way of accounting for racist beliefs seems to me to work perfectly well: they are (often unconscious) beliefs about what blacks or asians (etc.) are like, and are not different qua belief from beliefs about whether milk builds strong bones or dogs return to their own vomit.

"Indeed, when pressed even people who seem to be hardened racists will most often admit that of course not all black people are like that, etc. — calling into question whether racists, as stereotype-believers par excellence, really “believe” in stereotypes in some straightforward way."

Here I think the problem isn't with the idea that racists believe racist things, but with how those racist contents are conceived. I think this is best handled by treating statements about stereotypical Xs as what Michael Thompson calls "Aristotelian Categoricals" in "The Representation of Life". (Paper available at his webspace.)

Aristotelian Categoricals are not universally quantified statements ("If anything is an X, then it is like this"), so the fact that any given racist will admit that not all Xs ɸ (for some given class X and some stereotypical behavior ɸ) does not mean that the racist doesn't really believe the stereotypical claim "Xs ɸ" is true. They don't even have to believe that (as a statistical matter) if you took a pole of all currently existing Xs, it would turn out that a majority of them ɸ. They just have to believe that the Xs which ɸ are more typical of Xs generally (albeit maybe not at the moment), or are more authentically X-ish, or something like that. The stereotype has normative force for how (stereotypically) black a given racist thinks a given black person is.

Aristotelian Categoricals strike me as very useful for thinking about this sort of thing. Nothing else seems to get the logical contours of the stereotype-claims quite right, as Thompson argues in the parallel case of claims like "Bobcats mate for life". Some bobcats never mate, or are impotent etc., but that doesn't contradict the Aristotelian Categorical claim (think of it as something you hear in a National Geographic documentary). Healthy bobcats in bobcat-friendly environments mate for life. (Thompson has further arguments for why we can't treat this as a disguised universally quantified statement about "healthy bobcats in bobcat-friendly environments", namely that making sense of things like "health" and "bobcat-friendliness" is dependent on making sense of the Aristotelian Categoricals, and not vice-versa.)

I also don't think that the fact that stereotypes can be incoherent (Kotsko's example being that Mexicans are lazy and yet desperate to work) is problematic; it just shows that racists have weird beliefs about Mexicans. They think that both sloth and being a hard worker make one a "really Mexican" Mexican. There's not even an incoherence in this example, if you treat the beliefs as Aristotelian categoricals rather than universally quantified statements. The two extremes could both be typical of Mexicans, whereas the middle-ground would not be. There's no commitment on the part of the racists to thinking that there are some Mexicans who are both lazy and desperate to work. (Compare to "Pecans grow into pecan trees" and "Pecans are baked into pecan pies", and contrast to "Pecans grow into pecan trees" and "Pecans grow into rose bushes").

Given this, I don't see any problem with treating stereotypical beliefs as being "in the head" (which of course doesn't conflict with their showing themselves in our practices, or with being unconscious some of the time; those are both normal for things "in the head" -- the outer is inner as inner, as Hegel said).

"[This] points toward the idea that black people just naturally enjoy cheaper food (not beef, but chicken; not fruit juice, but Kool-Aid) and therefore that the dominance of fast food outlets and convenience stores (rather than good restaurants and grocery stores) in black neighborhoods simply reflects the way black people are and is therefore “okay” — and so you don’t see the mayor of Chicago trying to get more grocery stores into black neighborhoods, for instance."

This strikes me as a paradigm case of unconscious stereotypical beliefs at work. The mayor of Chicago would surely deny that black people liked cheap food as such, if you asked him; he does not consciously believe that. But he probably does (at least unconsciously) believe that black people are poorer than non-blacks. And he probably believes (likely consciously) that poor people have less money to spend on food, and so prefer purchasing cheaper food. So it seems appropriate to the mayor that black neighborhoods mostly have cheap places to buy food, since black[/poor] people prefer shopping at those sorts of places. So it's easy to explain the mayor's behavior as issuing from a combination of conscious and unconscious beliefs on his part; there's no need to posit beliefs in city blocks or anything like that. Surely the fact that many black people are poor helps to reinforce the unconscious belief, but the belief isn't anywhere special.

Towards a Reading of McDowell on English in Hegel and Gay People

McDowell, from "Toward a Reading of Hegel on Action in the Reason Chapter of the Phenomenology". He's just invoked Wittgenstein's claim that "light dawns gradually over the whole" -- the capacity to think doesn't come piecemeal, but involves a metabasis eis allos genos, as Aristotle and Kierkegaard put it -- a leap into another kind.

Now suppose that light has dawned for one, in the specific way that consists in becoming a speaker of English. If there are other speakers of English around, they will recognize one as a speaker of English. That is not an empirical claim -- as if speakers of English just happen to be good at recognizing one another (like gay people, as some folk wisdom has it). Being a speaker of a language is not contingently connected with the ability to recognize one's fellow-speakers. It includes that ability. It makes no sense to suppose someone might be a speaker of English though people who recognize one another as speakers of English do not recognize her as one, or she does not recognize them as fellow-speakers. This is an a priori link between the status and the idea of recognition.

I think that speaking English is more like "gaydar" than McDowell sees. Consider the Jive-talking scene in Airplane!

I venture the following bold conjecture: The Jive-talkers here are speaking English. (If it please you, they are speaking a dialect of it, but I shan't suppose there is any other way to speak English than by speaking some dialect or other.) Further, I claim that the stewardess and the old lady who "speaks Jive" recognize one another as speakers of English.

Hence this scene serves as a counter-example to McDowell's claim: It not only makes sense to suppose that someone might speak English despite not being recognized by other English-speakers (who can recognize each other as English-speakers), but I find it hard to believe that such things don't actually happen. Some people have really thick accents, or speak with odd grammars (Ebonics comes to mind), or just have vocabularies which are unfamiliar to the point of not being immediately comprehensible. (Jargon.) Or to use one of Davidson's favorite examples: it is hard to buy that James Joyce wrote in something other than English, and it is easy to understand why someone would deny it. (There's more than one way to write "in English".)

A possible response: "Jive" really is not English. After all, the lady claims to "speak Jive" like one might claim to "speak Spanish". But the old lady's claim to "speak Jive" is of course a joke; Airplane! is a comedy. One can "speak Jive" only by speaking English.

I think this is even clearer in this parody from a terrible webcomic: "Does anyone here speak 1337?" The fellow who needs his pills is merely employing an odd typographical scheme (and some odd spellings), in one of the manners which constitutes the family of "13375|>34|<". One can't understand what "| n33d m4 p|11z" means without understanding what "I need my pills" means (or at least, that's not how it generally goes -- I suppose there's nothing stopping someone from learning 1337 as their primary English script). (We can imagine all of this happening in a chat room, to skirt the issue of how one can speak in a particular typographical scheme.) Here we have three monolingual English-speakers, two of whom can understand all three, and a third who can only understand one of the others. But everyone involved would select "English" when asked to select a language at the ATM.

Mutual recognition just isn't as closely linked to "speaking the same language" as McDowell claims it is; it's not transitive. Two English-speakers can recognize each other as such without it being the case that any English-speaker one of them can recognize as such could be recognized as such by the other. (The fellow in the fourth panel can recognize all parties involved as English-speakers-writers, even if the stewardess can't.)

Historical shifts work here, too; there's a diachronic as well as a synchronic sense in which "English" is not One Thing. As an empirical matter, I'm not at all sure that most of the people we can agree are English-speakers would be able to tell you that "And these few precepts in thy memory look thou character" is a sentence of English, as opposed to random English words in a string. A moment's inquiry has convinced me that I don't know what this sentence means, at least if I don't look at it in context. So, if I did manage to correctly guess that this is English, I would get its meaning wildly wrong, if I could even hazard a guess at it.

Now, all of this is pretty obvious. But overlooking the obvious is de riguer in philosophy. Especially if one tells oneself things like "Speaking English is a matter of being a member of the community of English speakers".

The upshot of all this is, I think, that McDowell's initial supposition doesn't make sense. There is no specific way of having "light dawn on one" that is "becoming a speaker of English". There are many such ways to become the many such things which fall under the vague umbrella-heading of "speaker of English".

Now, even if McDowell's universal claim fails, there's clearly a weaker claim that's right: Being an English-speaker requires there being some other English-speakers that recognize you as an English-speaker. (Here "there being" should be read broadly: they can all be dead, and none of the ones that would recognize you need to have ever recognized you as an English-speaker, since you could learn the language from audio tapes.) Stronger than that: There have to be some causal connections of the right kind connecting one English-speaker up to some other English-speakers -- it has to be possible to tell a story about why a particular speaker counts as an "English-speaker" rather than a speaker of some other kind. The stories could be convoluted, in particular instances. But some sort of story has to be capable of being told, in principle, even if no one actually knows all the details.

This weaker claim, though, is compatible with taking Davidson's line on "natural languages" like English: Speaking English is a matter of being able to understand other English-speakers, more or less, much of the time, for the most part, in many cases, etc.. It's not cleaner-cut than that. (We can draw firmer lines, if we like, for particular purposes. Maybe there's good reason to not teach Ebonics-friendly grammar in middle-school English courses. If we like, these could also be grounds to say that Ebonics "isn't English". Or we could simply say they're reasons not to teach that sort of grammar to students, and remain silent on whether or not Ebonics "is English".) There is no one thing that is "knowing how to speak English". Speaking English is a motley.

McDowell seems to be a bit unfair to Davidson, in addition to being wrong about English. In introducing the notion of a broadly Hegelian approach to practices such as "speaking a language", he notes that it's not a given that this is a viable approach. "Donald Davidson, for instance, argues that there is nothing essentially communal about the ability to make oneself understood by, say, doing what we call "speaking English.""

In one sense, this is right: There's no identifiable community that we can point to as the body which is capable of judging what is or is not "speaking English". There is no such "community", if communities are entities with identity. (The French pretend to have such a body, but I think that is all they do: pretend. People speak French as they please, and the official body tries to make them stop using English loan-words.) This is presumably how McDowell meant to be understood, in context. It strikes me as rash to think that there's anything un-Hegelian in this. (More on that in a moment.)

In another sense, this is just wrong: "speaking the same language" for Davidson is a matter of frequently converging on passing theories, and this can hold between many speakers all at once. Adam and Betty and Charles can all frequently converge on passing theories when speaking to one another, and this would mean they all "speak the same language". Davidson does focus on the minimal case of two speakers trying to communicate with each other, but the sort of communality which is in play here isn't limited to groups of two. In the sense in which "speaking English" is mentioned at all, it's a case of this wider communality. One has to frequently converge with many speakers, at least counterfactually, to be a speaker of something like "English". (It's important to not take Davidson's position as more radical than it is. He thinks we should take measures to preserve Basque, for instance. He sees no puzzle in the idea that there are speakers of Basque, or of German, or of French, or of English. It's just that many philosophers and linguists have made it impossible to get what that involves into view, because of prior commitments about what "languages" are.)

The sense in which McDowell is right about Davidson is that there is no notion of the community which can be appealed to to make sense of "speaking English". But there are many groupings which we appeal to to make sense of someone who "speaks English", and Davidson recognizes this. From the response to Pereda in the appendix to "Truth, Language, History": "Pereda has the sensible idea of trying to reconcile the Wittgensteinian and Tarskian modes by emphasizing the importance of a general background against which deviant verbal behavior is understood.... I see nothing wrong with Pereda's view, as long as it is taken as saying that members of a "speech community" share a host of overlapping, non-identical, habits of speech, and have corresponding expectations about what others in the community will mean by what they say (such a set of expectations is what is characterized by what I called a "prior theory"). It's worth noting that Davidson's treatment of metaphors also requires this sort of general background be in view: only if the literal meanings of words is settled can metaphors be employed.

In the context of McDowell's article (which is a response to Pippin's most recent views about Hegel on action), the remarks about Davidson are a preamble. But the reason the preamble exists is because McDowell claims that we have to assume that Davidson is wrong about language if we are to take a Hegelian view of action (such as saying that things are thus-and-so). This would be unfortunate, if true. (Certainly I have a fair bit invested in its being wrong.) But I don't think the conditional holds.

Here's how McDowell puts the upshot of the Phenomenology: "The point is to equip the consciousness that is the recipient of the education recapitulated in the Phenomenology with a satisfactory conception of what it is to be an autonomous inhabitant of the space of reasons at all.... What is needed is awareness that one is in touch with reasons only by virtue of one's formation in a Sittlichkeit, combined with a critical attitude to the conception of reasons one finds oneself with." I think this is entirely compatible with Davidson, given a certain reading of "formation in a Sittlichkeit".

It would certainly be Davidsonian to claim that one can be in touch with reasons only by having been made a member of the "community of minds", and that it is in dialogue that understanding is reached -- not only understanding of others, but also of oneself, and of our shared world. This gives us the two parts of the Hegelian requirement McDowell mentions: the critical attitude is that openness to the other that characterizes genuine dialogue, which Davidson tends to thematize as the "understanding of the possibility of error", and the "formation in a Sittlichkeit" is just that whereby one has been made capable of coming to be a dialogue-partner at all: membership in the community of minds.

(I hasten to add that dialogue can involve more than two parties, as is the norm in Plato's dialogues. To put the point in a way McDowell should like: dialogue is not simply a matter of "I-Thou" relations between speakers, but is a matter of speakers coming under the sway of the dialogue itself; that I am a participant in the dialogue is thus a salient "I-We" relation. I can be made sense of, even in my self-understanding, only with reference to the dialogue, which can involve an open-ended number of participants. Apart from such ongoing enterprises of inquiry, I could not be in touch with reasons at all. And contrariwise, for a period of time I can be the only participant in a dialogue, soliloquizing. I can do this only against the background of inquiry in common with others, who are also capable of passing judgement on the notions I produce in my temporary solitude.)

Now, it's reasonable to think that I've here pushed the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit to the breaking point: such fluid and open-ended communities as "wherever conversations happen" don't seem to be the sort of thing Hegel meant. Sittlichkeit is more closely tied to World-History and the State, in Hegel. Forms of Sittlichkeit are the sort of thing that can be conceived as elements in the World-Historical unfolding of the Idea (from the Orient to the Germanic nations by way of Greece and Rome). So, "formation in a Sittlichkeit" must be more-or-less "becoming a citizen in some state or other". But I think this betrays the bad orientation towards Sittlichkeit that Hegel identifies with Greek culture: one's Sittlichkeit is simply given and stands independent of one. The proper, modern orientation is rather to see one's Sittlichkeit as not independent of one's subjectivity, but partly constituted by it: I am a moment of it, in my free particularity. There is nothing freestanding that I could be related to that would do the job of a Sittlichkeit; I simply find myself in the midst of a mass of concerns, and this is being formed into a moment of Sittlichkeit. There's nothing in the notion of Sittlichkeit as such that demands more than this. It takes more work for Hegel to show that the notion of "lots of subjects interacting with one another" has more structure than this, that it is and ought to be laid out in the way states are. Such concerns, I think, carry us beyond the arena McDowell is concerned with. A more chaotic, Davidsonian conception of what Sittlichkeits are will do as well for the purpose of providing a context in which mindedness can come on the scene. The question whether or not the very idea of responsiveness to reasons as such has any necessary connection to any particular way of organizing ourselves can be set to the side.

This approach also seems to fit more nicely with the "modernist" Hegel that McDowell takes over from Pippin: "In reflecting about how to think and act, we cannot take on trust the deliverances of any received authority. We are entirely on our own." Who the relevant "we" is can't be "taken on trust" either, but is also up for reflecting on. I have to judge for myself who my dialogue-partners are, and what the dialogue is about, and if there's even anything like this at all.

A postscript about the reading of Hegel that forms the bulk of the article: It all looks right to me; McDowell's reading here seems as able as his reading in Heterodox Lordship and Bondage. His reading here is less radical, though, since his opponent is just Pippin, rather than the received view of the "master-slave dialectic". McDowell seems to me to ably put paid to Pippin's view, both in itself and as a reading of Hegel.