Tag: Return of Metaphysics

Spinoza versus humanism (The Return of Metaphysics)

Reading | Metaphysics

Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, PhD | 2023-05-14

A few years ago, I took part in a conference at Bochum University, and partly out of respect for the university which hosts the illustrious Hegel-Archiev, I decided to present a paper in which I argued that, not unlike Hegel’s Encyclopedie, one can profitably read Spinoza’s Ethics as a circular text which ends just where it begins. The Q&A session after my talk was lively and joyous, but one specific question still resonates with me. “This was an interesting talk. Still, if I may. What is the point of engaging again with Spinoza’s metaphysics? Has not Kant already proved that dogmatic metaphysic is obsolete?” asked one of the participants, a senior Kant scholar and philologist. Since the question was genuinely well-meant and fair, I asked the scholar whether he would mind repeating Kant’s proof, so that we could consider it jointly. At which point I was rewarded with a warm, generous, smile followed by a hand gesture which I interpreted as indicating certain desperateness or recognition that some ‘dogmatic’ philosophers are just incorrigible.

While few contemporary philosophers would be as blunt as this colleague and friend, one must admit that the underlying view that Kant killed off metaphysics dominated modern philosophy until very recently. This perception of Kant as the “all-crushing [Alleszermalmer]” destroyer of metaphysics, is not groundless.

Today, the main resistance to Spinoza’s return—but also the reason why it is urgent and necessary—is less the dismissal of metaphysics as dogma and more an attachment to a dogma of a different sort: humanism. To the extent that Anglo-American philosophy has opened itself to rigorous metaphysical thought, Spinoza has been well and truly rehabilitated—much of contemporary monist metaphysics is directly indebted to Spinoza. Overcoming the attachment of (not just analytic philosophy) to humanism—the belief that human beings occupy a uniquely prominent place in nature—has proved even harder than rehabilitating metaphysics. But given the crises that this ideology has given birth to, overcome we must, and Spinoza is the philosopher to help us do it.

As far as the return of Spinozist thought in metaphysics is concerned, the two centuries that followed Kant witnessed two major waves of attempts to rehabilitate metaphysics by overcoming Kant’s various bifurcations of reality: first, the German Idealism of the early nineteenth century, and then, toward the end of that century, British Idealism. The two movements were closely related and Spinoza’s metaphysical monism and systematicity were a major source of inspiration for both of them. Most of the key figures in both German and British Idealism presented themselves as either Spinozists or as attempting to provide an improved, or elevated, Spinozism.

As has been argued in previous installments of The Return of Metaphysics series, analytic philosophy began as a rebellion against what was seen as the metaphysical extravagance of the British Idealists. As a consequence, throughout most of the twentieth century, the shares of Spinoza’s philosophy plunged just as the entire discipline of metaphysics suffered from severe disrepute. Analytic philosophy had a lukewarm attitude toward Spinoza in spite of the fact that, from its very inception, analytic philosophy aspired to approximate the precision and clarity of mathematics, an aspiration that could hardly be better matched in any other major philosophical work than in Spinoza’s axiomatized Ethics.

It was just natural that the recent rehabilitation of metaphysics in the Anglo-American world over the past thirty or so years has been accompanied by a huge surge of engagement with Spinoza’s philosophy, first in North America, but more recently, also in all other quarters of Anglo-American philosophy. Apart from the re-emergence of metaphysics as a central discipline of philosophy in the Anglo-American world, one can also discern a few additional causes for this recent surge, not the least of which is the emergence of Spinoza as an icon in the French philosophical scene during the 1970s and 1980s. This latter event itself took place partly due the wide impact of the work of a few outstanding philosophers—most of all, Martial Gueroult (1891-1976), but also, Alexandre Matheron (1926-2020), and Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995)—and partly due to certain developments in the French left and the attempt to establish a Marxism free from humanistic illusions. While, traditionally, Marxism was built upon Hegelian conceptual foundations, the new French Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s attempted to offer a Marxism grounded in Spinozist metaphysics, and as such, free from the illusions of teleologically structured history, subjectivity, and humanism.

The impact of the work of a few outstanding philosophers was also crucial in the rise of Spinozism on the American shores of the Atlantic, and here, the works of Don Garrett and Michael Della Rocca had the most decisive role. Both figures showed that a careful and accurate reconstruction of Spinoza’s arguments reveals a metaphysical system which might well seem odd to us (at least at first sight), yet is still highly impressive in terms of its precision, ingenuity, boldness, and consistency.

It goes without saying that the development of various forms of monism in recent analytic philosophy—think, for example, of the works of Jonathan Schaffer and Galen Strawson, each of which could be considered as offering a certain kind of Spinozism (not Spinoza’s Spinozism, but Spinozism nonetheless)—provided auxiliary winds to the sails of the new Spinozist armada.

Overcoming the dogma that metaphysics must be dogmatic—i.e., inadequately motivated, and obscure—was one of the main challenges for the rehabilitation of Spinozism. To the extent that contemporary analytic metaphysics is open to philosophy that is precise yet bold, and to the extent that it is no longer captivated by blind obedience to common sense, Spinozism can and will flourish. But there is another dogma—one which is not unique to current Anglo-American philosophy—the overcoming of which is likely to result in an even more radical upheaval.

Humanism—in a nutshell, the view that humanity occupies a uniquely prominent place in nature (if it is part of nature at all), and that the human perspective should be justly considered as constituting the boundaries and structure of reality—has deep philosophical roots, going back as far as Protagoras’ dictum: “Man is the measure of all things: of those that are—that they are, and of the things that are not—that they are not.” Humanism dominated the mainstream of modern philosophy both before and after the advent of secularization. Figures as diverse as Pico Della Mirandola, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and Sartre pledged their allegiance to its tenets. In a sense, we are all humanists today: we believe in the miracle of free will (even if we do not believe in any other miracle), we adore human dignity as an innate determination of all humans (war criminals included), and we do our best to point out allegedly unique features of human beings—consciousness, self-consciousness, unity of the self, freedom, rationality, the ability to act morally, or whatever—features that may help us justify our attitude toward other animals, as mere things. Our default humanism functions as a genuine ideology: for the most part it is invisible, seamless, and taken for granted, and one needs to train herself in defamiliarization in order to recognize the arbitrariness of these deep-seated convictions.

Of all modern philosophers, Kant was the most sophisticated, most systematic, most resourceful, and most influential advocate of humanism. In the opening lines of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant writes: “The fact that the human being can have the ‘I’ in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person—i.e., through rank and dignity and entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes.” For Kant, one of the reasons humans “are entirely different beings” from other animals is due to the fact that humanity takes part in the noumenal realm, and, as such, is free and not constrained by the strict determinism that governs experience, or nature. Moreover, while Kant argued that we cannot have knowledge of God, he still emphatically maintained that it is rational to have faith both in a benevolent God and in the immortality of the human soul as moral postulates. In this sense, Kant expelled anthropomorphic religion from the main entrance, while inviting it back from the back door. It is thus not a surprise that for many (post-)Christians, Kant’s philosophy provided an easy soft-landing in the face of secularization, a soft-landing that allowed them to stick to notions such as evil, free-will, and even, life after death.

Humanism had its own detractors and critics from ancient Xenophanes, through (the late) Maimonides and Hume, to Nietzsche, but none was as bold and methodical as Spinoza.

Spinoza’s attack on anthropomorphic religion is well-known. His sharp criticism of most other aspects of humanism is less recognized (at least in the Anglo-American philosophical arena). Both in the Ethics and in his Political Treatise, Spinoza scolds those who uphold the common perception of humanity as a “dominion within a dominion,” i.e., as constituting an autonomous realm of beings that disturb rather than strictly follow the laws of nature by virtue of their alleged, unique endowment with free will. Whatever exclusive qualities the humanists claim bestow humanity with a unique status—elevated above the rest of nature—Spinoza would either argue that the belief that humans have this quality is a pleasant fairy-tale (as in the case of free will, a miraculously causeless event that obtains out of thin air), or he would deny that human beings are unique in having these qualities. Spinoza would equally reject the dogma that human subjectivity and reason can be better known than the world (since our knowledge of the causes of human subjectivity is still far less developed than our knowledge of the mechanics of billiard balls, and their like).

Next to Nietzsche and Luis Althusser, Hegel was one of the few readers who recognized the scale of Spinoza’s attack on humanism, but in spite of his appreciation, perhaps even attraction to Spinoza’s anti-humanism, Hegel still argued, pace Spinoza, that the “absolute must be a subject, not only a substance” (to which Spinoza would have responded by saying that if Hegel were a triangle, rather than a human being—i.e., “a subject”—he would have surely insisted “that the absolute must be triangular”).

The temptations of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism are obvious, and it is not a coincidence that so many philosophers (and theologians) conceived the ultimate being (God, the Absolute, etc.) in their own image. Equally clear is the motivation to conceive human beings as free agents: our notions of justice, reward, and the entire package of our bourgeois values, require it desperately. But if humanity ever sets its step beyond the safe boundaries of humanism, and begin doubting this cult of our last and most magnificent idol—Man—at that very day we should recognize our debt to Spinoza, “the all-crushing destroyer” of our ultimate idol (Spinoza himself, to be clear, is not at all a misanthrope: in fact, his entire Ethics is about charting the path toward a blessed human life, though one which is free from humanistic illusions).

Would that day ever shine? Having no access to crystal balls, I can only paraphrase the words of a sage (yes, the very same sage!): since human affairs are by nature contingent and changeable, I would believe that someday, given the right conditions, this may well happen.

Metaphysics without fantasy (The Return of Metaphysics)

Reading | Metaphysics

Hilary Lawson | 2023-02-19

For much of the twentieth century, metaphysics has been deeply out of fashion, derided as the unfounded beliefs and prejudices of a pre-scientific era. But metaphysics is back. Both in the writings of philosophers and implicitly in culture more generally. It is a phenomenon we should take seriously, but it is not one that we can casually endorse. To find a way forward, we need to rethink the very nature of metaphysics, and what it is to have an overall framework of belief.

We can perhaps account for the fall of metaphysics from its highpoint in the nineteenth century and its more recent return as indicative of a more general long term historical shift in our framework of belief. An avalanche of technological breakthroughs and the remarkable impact of science in the first half of the twentieth century—cars, planes, electricity, and, more darkly, atomic power—led to a consistent and accelerating decline in religious belief. As such, both intellectual and popular culture have come to look to science for the answers to almost all questions, be it the solution to Covid, a new anti-aging cream, the origin of the universe, or the nature of consciousness. In this sense, science is the philosophy of our time, the framework through which we see the world.

Yet, in recent decades there are clear signs that the tide is turning. While formal religious belief dwindles ever more rapidly, there is now also an increasing skepticism towards science and technology. Science is seen to have an agenda and not necessarily one that all wish to endorse. Perhaps the origin of this more recent skepticism can be attributed to the recognition of the importance of perspective, which has moved beyond academic life and has invaded culture as a whole. For whatever reason, we can perhaps already begin to catch sight of the passing of the highpoint of scientific belief. But where do we go from here, given that for many a retreat to religion or the dogmatic metaphysical philosophies of the past is not a desirable or attractive option?

If we are to find a way forward, we must first have a better sense of the motivations that led to the abandonment of nineteenth-century metaphysics, and why the central strategy of philosophy’s twentieth-century critiques proved unsuccessful.

 

The attempt to eradicate metaphysics

The attempt to eradicate metaphysics in the early decades of the twentieth century, initiated by Bertrand Russel and later extended and popularized by logical positivists like A. J. Ayer, aimed to replace Victorian metaphysical philosophy with science and logic. As a program, it had a lot going for it: sweeping away dusty prejudice in favor of a careful examination of evidence and a contemporary approach to the world.

But, from the outset, there was a problem. Although this new positivist philosophy seemingly cut away unsubstantiated, speculative claims, leaving us with facts and evidenced-based knowledge, the theory failed by its own standards, for it was not itself verifiable. Nor is this a mere technical problem affecting one particular theory: it applies more generally to any overall account of ourselves and the world that seeks to be based on facts alone. The issue is fundamental: we can give no account of facts independent of perspective. In which case a purely factually based language is seen to be impossible.

The deep challenge, therefore, for those who catch sight of this self-referential paradox is how to respond to a circumstance where the denial of metaphysics is itself metaphysical. Wittgenstein and Derrida, from their respective philosophical traditions, reflect this predicament and provide their own brilliant, but—I will argue—flawed responses, leaving us with the challenge of how to proceed. For if metaphysics is inescapable, and yet cannot be purely based on facts, how can a metaphysics be formulated that is not empty speculation?

 

Strategies to escape metaphysics

In his early work, Wittgenstein lays out a realist account of language, one that seeks to describe how language maps onto the world. He concludes, however, that the description of that relationship is not one that can be expressed in language, because it is not an observable fact in the world. The philosophical system that Wittgenstein outlines in the Tractatus [Editor’s note: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book, the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”] in 1921 cannot itself be a fact or collection of facts, because it purports to describe how facts themselves operate. So we can see Wittgenstein is forced to reject philosophical realism on the grounds that it unavoidably incorporates a metaphysical outlook that fatally undermines the theory itself. Initially abandoning philosophy in favor of being a gardener, his later work responds by avoiding putting forward any overall account of language or the world at all [Editor’s note: cf. Wittgenstein’s posthumously published book, “Philosophical Investigations,” 1953].

The problem with this avoidance strategy is that for us to understand the later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, we have to implicitly rely on an overall account of language that he explicitly tries to avoid. We can paraphrase this overall account as something along the lines of ‘we are always at play in a language game.’ Wittgenstein, of course, avoids making this seemingly straightforward claim because it falls to the same self-referential puzzle that he identified in the Tractatus. Namely, the claim cannot be made, for it would have to escape from all language games in order to tell us, from outside language, as it were, what is really going on; namely, that we as humans are at play in a framework of language that determines our world.

Like Wittgenstein, Derrida was well aware of the self-referential puzzle in seeking to deny metaphysics and an overall philosophical account of the world. While Wittgenstein’s strategy can be characterized as ‘avoidance,’ Derrida’s can be seen as ‘serial abandonment.’ Derrida sets out by identifying our inability to determine precise meaning—and, therefore, our inability to say how things are—in any ultimate sense, arguing that even in the experience of the momentary present there can be no definitive meaning, specific experience, or possible description of that moment. This was Derrida’s attack on the so-called metaphysics of presence, which he argued is embedded in the history of western thought. But his attack on the metaphysics of presence—and, more generally, on determinate meaning—has to necessarily set up its own discourse, its own vocabulary of ‘presence’ and ‘absence,’ ‘writing’ and ‘speech,’ ‘arche-writing’ and ‘differance,’ which has the appearance of an overall philosophical outlook or metaphysics. Derrida therefore has to deconstruct his own text, inventing new terminology and abandoning his previous form of discourse in favor of an alternative vocabulary: ‘trace’ and ‘supplement,’ and later ‘track’ and pathway’ [1]. In due course, these new vocabularies have also to be abandoned and for the same reason that, as they are formulated, so they begin to constitute an overall account or metaphysics which in some sense they are setting out to deny. In response, Derrida employs further strategies to avoid being seen to make any overall claim, including the process of erasure, where he crosses through a word as if to deny its assertion, and parody.

Despite the sophistication of Wittgenstein and Derrida’s attempts to escape metaphysics, neither of these strategies, of avoidance or serial abandonment, can be deemed successful or even potentially successful. In order to understand them, we have to explain them as taking an overall position, the very thing they are seeking to deny. In the case of Derrida, this ‘overall position’ will need to be modified as his terminology evolves, but we still have to formulate an account of what he is up to at any given point ,in order to at least temporarily make sense of the text.

Metaphysics, therefore, is not so easily jettisoned. If we are in a language game, or meaning is undecidable, or we are trapped in the ‘phallogocentrism’ [Editor’s note: a made-up word by Derrida, meant to indicate the masculine bias of Western attempts to construct meaning] of Western thought, as Derrida later contends, we have, after all, caught sight of the very nature of the human condition, something that these philosophers and much twentieth-century thought denied was possible. Insofar as philosophy is deemed possible at all, therefore, we have little alternative but to conclude that any philosophical claim must either explicitly or implicitly carry with it an overall—and therefore metaphysical—framework that we rely upon to make sense of the claim in the first place. There is, in Hilary Putnam’s phrase, ‘no God’s eye view.’ Or, to use Thomas Nagel’s vocabulary, there is no ‘view from nowhere.’

 

21st century metaphysics

Where, then, do we go from here? While metaphysics may not be avoidable, many are rightly nervous of a retreat from evidence-based science to speculative metaphysical philosophies of the past, or the inherent faith of religion.

Yet, given our inability to escape metaphysics, we have no choice but to recognize that our accounts of the world inevitably have elements that are not evidential and based on ‘facts.’ The Wittgensteinian and postmodern evasions and strategies to avoid saying anything explicit or decidable begin to look like bad faith and a failure to accept that we have to nail our colors to a metaphysical mast, because we will be forced to do so however much we seek to evade it.

A new twenty-first-century metaphysics cannot, however, be a return to the speculative fantasies of the past, and for two fundamental reasons. The first reason is that the motivations behind the early twentieth-century analytic attack on speculative metaphysics are ones most still wish to endorse: namely, the attempt to eradicate and remove beliefs based on prejudice and ungrounded claims, and the desire to avoid unsupported assertions and empty speculations. And the second reason is that we have no account of how any such a metaphysical theory could accurately describe the true nature of the world.

While we cannot avoid metaphysics, therefore, we cannot suppose that any given metaphysical theory might actually be a true description of reality, as if we could see—in Hawking’s phrase—into the ‘mind of God.’ As a result, the philosophical framework that I advocate, based around a vocabulary of openness and closure (terms employed somewhat differently by Derrida in his shifting lexicon) seeks to provide an account of the relationship between experience, language, and the world which helps explain the effectiveness of thought and language, but without committing us to the realist notion that thought or language accurately describe reality [2].

Metaphysics is certainly back on the agenda. No doubt in part because its denial is problematic for some of the reasons cited above. As a consequence, metaphysical frameworks, such as idealism and panpsychism, which were derided as baseless nonsense by the positivists of the past, are back in new forms. But such claims cannot be taken as a true description of an ultimate reality, for there is no credible realist theory of language that would make sense of such claims. Yet, it is not uncommon for proponents and commentators to appear to take these claims at face value. Similarly, metaphysical claims about alternative realities, multiverses, and possible worlds are widespread and often appear to propose that these claims are straight-forwardly descriptions of the ultimate character of reality.

To make any of these claims viable, we require a coherent theory about how these metaphysical stories might, in fact, be a true description of reality. And to date, no such realist account of language is available. To claim, for example, that ‘everything is conscious’ in a realist sense, or that ‘we are consciousness,’ makes little sense unless we can first give an account of how our particular language, and our particular vocabulary, and this particular theory of consciousness are capable of describing the world as it in fact is. The very same twentieth-century philosophical endeavor that sought to eradicate metaphysics was, for this very reason, also involved in the attempt to provide just such a realist account of language.

Nor is it accidental that the failure to eradicate metaphysics parallels the failure to provide an account of how language hooks onto the world. The two outcomes are, of course, intimately linked. Wittgenstein’s abandonment of metaphysics was directly a consequence of his having concluded in the Tractatus that a realist theory of language was not possible, because it falls to the self-referential paradox that it is unable to give an account of itself [3]. Some have thought the logician Alfred Tarski provided a solution in the form of his hierarchy of languages. But as I have argued elsewhere [4], and concur with Hilary Putnam, these solutions are illusory and the describe the relation between language and the world ‘a shambles’ [5, 6].

In the context of contemporary philosophy, therefore, we can see the dual failure of early analytic philosophy to describe the relation between language and the world and to eradicate metaphysics as encouraging a return to metaphysical claims. Yet, at the same time, this has the immediate consequence that the new metaphysics cannot itself be presented as a realist theory about the world; it cannot claim to be a true description of the ultimate character of reality.

More broadly, in culture as a whole, we can see the revival of metaphysics as in part a consequence of the undermining of our certainty in the truths of science and a growing awareness that science itself is one outlook amongst others. Yet, we still remain attached to the realist belief that there is a correct answer that can, in principle, be found. It is as if the linguistic turn encouraged philosophers and, in due course, culture as a whole to identify the importance of perspective—’the limits of my language are the limits of my world’—but we have not taken on board the consequences: namely, that there can be no final answers, no ultimate story to tell us where we are.

Perhaps we have arrived at this contemporary predicament because the Wittgensteinian and Derridian moves to avoid or evade metaphysics have not been successful. Postmodernism in particular, in its systematic attack on meaning and the encouragement of a plethora of alternative perspectives, left many either lost or critical of such an approach as a harbinger of chaos. But we cannot conclude from this that a simple return to metaphysical belief is a viable option. While we may wish to reject the materialist realism of science as a form of metaphysical prejudice, we cannot do so in favour of an alternative metaphysical framework that also claims to describe an ultimate reality, be it a new form of idealism, panpsychism, or some Hollywood influenced Matrix version of ‘we are living in a simulated reality’ without having a theory of language that explains how any of these realist claims are possible [Editor’s note: as a think tank that promotes idealism, Essentia Foundation’s own vision in this respect is that, insofar as we need a story in terms of which to relate to reality, we might as well choose the best story we can produce; the story that the best fulfills our own truth criteria—such as internal consistency, explanatory power, empirical adequacy, etc.—even if these are ultimately naive; we believe that what we need is a better account of reality, not an ultimately correct one; that we can and must correct our own self-evident mistakes in current mainstream metaphysics by adopting a more viable story, even though we recognize that such a story can never be the final one, due to limitations not only of our language, but our very cognitive apparatuses].

What we need instead are metaphysical frameworks that do not adopt a realist account of language. This will, of course, involve giving up the idea that we might have cracked the philosophical puzzle of how to describe ourselves and the world once and for all. But since no such theory in the last few thousand years has been able to plausibly make such a claim, this is less onerous a loss than some might first imagine.

Metaphysics is not to be abandoned or avoided. But we should also recognize that no metaphysics we put forward is capable of overcoming perspective, be it cultural, linguistic, or human. There is no true metaphysics in a realist sense; no correct story of ourselves and the universe. Some may feel this is at first sight a disturbing idea, as if we are lost adrift in an unknowable world. But if so, have we not always been lost? And instead it offers a world of potential, ways to see and intervene in the world enabling outcomes current unavailable to us.

The purpose of providing a metaphysics is not to describe the world once and for all, to catch sight of a God’s eye view of the world; it has a more important aim of making our thinking more effective and more powerful, and better able to deliver our desires and goals. So it is that the framework of openness and closure that I have put forward is not presented as an ultimate description of reality, but as a means to refine and improve our ability to intervene in the world and provide an account of how its claims, and the claims of language and science, can be understood and, in some cases, prove powerful even though they do not reference or describe reality. Any attempt to provide a new metaphysics must surely also provide a means to make sense of the claims of the theory itself and describe how those claims are to be understood; something that it seems to me, despite the plethora of contemporary metaphysical offerings, is in rather short supply.

 

Notes

[1] H.Lawson, Reflexivity, Chapter 4 ‘Derrida’, p.90.

[2] H.Lawson, Closure, Routledge, 2001.

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1961)  Sections 6.3- 6.7.

[4] Hilary Lawson, Closure, p. xxxiv – xxxvii.

[5] Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, (Harvard University Press, 1992), p.51.

[6] Hilary Putnam, Reason Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Chapter 3 and p.72-4.

Positivism and the failed attempt to bury metaphysics (The Return of Metaphysics)

Reading | Philosophy

Dr. Giuseppina D’Oro | 2022-11-20

It would seem fair to say that today metaphysics is thriving. In the philosophy of mind, panpsychists argue that the nature of reality is not quite how it is thought of by physicalists; in contemporary analytic metaphysics, debates concerning the nature of time are all the rage. This was not the case in the first half of the twentieth century, when logical positivism mounted one of the most scathing attacks on the very idea that the nature of reality could be known by reflection alone, a priori, from the so-called philosophical armchair. Logical positivism sought to put an end to what it regarded to be irresolvable metaphysical pseudo-disputes by arguing that genuine knowledge claims must be verifiable; that there must be, at least in principle, evidence that can be cited to determine whether a claim is true or false. Claims that cannot be found to be either true or false in this way—the argument goes—express meaningless propositions, and the treatises in which they are contained should be confined to the flames, just as Hume suggested.

Logical positivism, however, failed genuinely to leave metaphysics behind. Rather than doing away with the idea that knowledge of pure being is possible, it merely placed natural science in the privileged epistemic position once occupied by philosophical reflection as a presuppositionless form of knowledge capable of disclosing reality in itself. As Collingwood argued in An Essay on Metaphysics (1940)—a thinly disguised attack on Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic (1936)—the only way to go beyond the metaphysics that logical positivism critiqued is to acknowledge the presuppositions that govern our attempts to come to know reality in different domains of inquiry, and to make explicit the role that they play in giving rise to the kind of questions different forms of knowledge seek to answer. It is only once the role that presuppositions play in shaping the questions we ask (and seek answers to) in different forms of inquiry is acknowledged, that one can truly go beyond the uncritical dogmatic metaphysics that positivism tried—but arguably failed—to do away with.

A. J. Ayer (1934) illustrated the pointless nature of metaphysical debates by contrasting a dispute between two art critics discussing the authenticity of a canvas attributed to Goya to a dispute between an idealist and a realist metaphysician. There are, he claimed, facts of the matter that can be invoked to settle whether the canvas is or is not a genuine Goya: the nature and direction of the strokes could be compared to those of certified Goya paintings; the canvas could be carbon dated to establish whether the paint matches the relevant period of time, and historical records mentioning such and such commissioning the painting could be referred to. The issue may be difficult to solve, but it is resolvable at least in principle, because there is an understanding of what kind of facts could be adduced in evidence either for or against the claim that the canvas is a genuine Goya. This is not the case with metaphysical disputes, which are not just difficult to settle in practice, but unresolvable in principle.

Imagine—Ayer suggests—that the two art critics debating the attribution of the canvass belonged to two different metaphysical schools: idealism and realism, and that they started debating whether the paint on the canvas is real or ideal. The realist argues that the paint really exists, the idealist that it is an idea in the mind. There is no fact of the matter that could prove the realist to be right and the idealist to be wrong, or vice versa. While there are facts of the matter that can be consulted to establish whether the canvas is a genuine Goya or a fake, there is no fact of the matter that could be cited to establish whether the paint on the canvas is real or ideal. The paint would look exactly the same, whether it is real or ideal, as Berkeley pointed out to assuage fears that a commitment to an immaterialist metaphysics might require abandoning the belief in the existence of mountains and rivers (Berkeley: Principles §34). The dispute between the two art critics is like one between two persons debating whether or not it is raining outside; such a dispute can be settled by consulting the facts, but there are no facts that can be consulted to establish whether the rain is real or ideal, precisely because the rain—just as mountains and rivers for Berkeley—looks exactly the same, whether it is real, as the materialist argues, or ideal, as the immaterialist claims.

The demand that knowledge claims should be verifiable, that there must be evidence that can be provided to substantiate one’s views, seems to be reasonable enough; rejecting it would lead to a form of dogmatism. But what the logical positivists also assumed is that the criterion of verification that belongs to the empirical sciences is a universal criterion of meaning, not a domain-specific criterion that merely determines what does and does not count as a genuine scientific hypothesis. They uncritically extended the criterion of verification that governs empirical enquiry to all claims (bar tautologies), rather than acknowledging it as a heuristic principle of scientific enquiry. As a result, they also failed to satisfactorily address the question concerning the logical status of the verification principle that states, ‘propositions which are not empirically verifiable are meaningless, unless they are tautologies.’

Since the verification principle cannot easily be accommodated within the Humean fork [Editor’s note: a principle by 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume]—according to which all meaningful propositions must be either empirical propositions about matters of fact or analytic propositions concerning relations of ideas—it looks suspiciously like a foundational principle for a positivist metaphysics. Positivism, it seems, does not dispense with metaphysics; it merely proposes a different kind of (naturalist) metaphysics. Therefore, failure to reflect on the logical status of the verificationist principle—to acknowledge it as a heuristic principle that governs scientific knowledge of reality—not only encourages a form of methodological monism—one which denies the autonomy of other forms of knowing—it also betrays a commitment to an uncritical realism, which assumes the scientific method reveals the ultimate nature of reality and, in so doing, places science in the position once occupied by metaphysics as the science of pure being.

This is precisely the point that R. G. Collingwood makes in his An Essay on Metaphysics. Collingwood argued that the principles that govern the verification of knowledge claims in any form of inquiry have a different logical status from the propositions which are made possible through a commitment to those principles. The inductive principle, according to which nature is uniform and the future resembles the past, for example, does not have the same logical status as the empirical generalization “ice melts when the temperature rises above 0°C.” The claim about ice is a proposition that can be verified or found to be true or false. The inductive principle is a presupposition that is neither true nor false, but makes possible knowledge claims like the one about ice. The role of philosophy is to uncover those principles that govern the verification of knowledge in different domains of inquiry—what Collingwood calls “absolute presuppositions”—not to propound true propositions that provide factual knowledge from the philosophical armchair, as the kind of metaphysics that Ayer critiqued did. In treating the principle of verification as a true second-order philosophical proposition, rather than as a presupposition of scientific inquiry, positivism ends up advancing the very kind of synthetic a priori claim whose possibility it wants to deny.

The reason why Ayer is a metaphysician malgré lui, as Collingwood would argue, is that he failed to acknowledge the distinction between propositions and presuppositions, between the criteria for the verification of knowledge and the verifiable claims made possible by the endorsement of such criteria. Perhaps, in exempting tautologies from the requirement that they should be empirically verifiable on pain of being meaningless, positivism implicitly acknowledges that the verificationist principle is a local presupposition that is constitutive of a particular form of (empirical) inquiry; one that differs from the criterion of verification that is constitutive of the exact sciences, not a universal criterion of meaning. But in so far as the significance of making an exception for tautologies is not fleshed out, the verificationist principle plays, even if only by default, the role of a foundational principle for a different kind of (naturalist) metaphysics. Had the significance of making an exception for tautologies been fully appreciated, the verificationist principle may have been recognized as a constitutive principle or presupposition of natural science, rather than a true second-order philosophical proposition spelling out which propositions express genuine knowledge claims and which do not.

Some might conclude, from the inability of logical positivism to escape the very metaphysics it sought to oust, that metaphysics is unavoidable; that the choice is not between either being or not being a metaphysician, but between either the kind of rationalist metaphysics that logical positivism attacked or the kind of naturalist metaphysics to which Ayer and logical positivism are surreptitiously committed to. But the conclusion that one must choose between a rationalist or a naturalist metaphysics is a little hasty. To leave behind the kind of metaphysics that the logical positivists sought to overthrow without committing to a naturalist metaphysics requires doing precisely what the logical positivists, in their haste to dispose of rationalist metaphysics, failed to do: to recognize that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, rests on presuppositions and that the principle of verification is, in fact, a structuring principle of a certain form of knowledge, not a true proposition.

One should recognize, as Collingwood pointed out, that scientific knowledge is a form of knowing, with its own distinctive presuppositions; that it is a science, in the Latin sense of the term Scientia, meaning a body of knowledge with a specific method and subject matter, not the science or form of knowledge, in the sense in which the term “science” has come to be used—i.e., as slang for natural science, just as the term drink is being used as slang for alcoholic drink (Collingwood An Essay on Metaphysics: 4). Failure to acknowledge the role that presuppositions play in the pursuit of scientific knowledge grants natural science the epistemically privileged status of the science of pure being once enjoyed by rationalist metaphysics; it does not get rid of dogmatism, but merely replaces one kind of uncritical dogmatic realism with another.

 

References

Ayer, A.J. (1934), “Demonstration of the Impossibility of Metaphysics”, Mind 43 (171): 335-445.

Ayer, A. J. [1936] (1990), Language, Truth and Logic, London: Penguin Books.

Berkeley, G. [1710] (2020) “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge”, in Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues, Graphyco Editions.

Collingwood, R.G. (1940), An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, revised edition, with an introduction by Rex Martin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Metaphysics underpins all of our thinking (The Return of Metaphysics)

Reading | Metaphysics

Prof. Robert Stern, PhD | 2022-09-18

In slipping from the glory days of being treated as first philosophy, to the role of mere handmaid of science, to more recently being dismissed as meaningless verbiage, the once proud discipline of metaphysics might seem to be in terminal decline. While its aim is to tell us about the fundamental nature of reality, it is now commonly accused of relying on conceptions of the world and on methods of inquiry that have been surpassed, and that although once some confidence in it may have been warranted, this cannot be the case today. For example, we can no longer share the belief in a universe ordered by a rational and benevolent deity that may formerly have underpinned the kind of rationalist metaphysical theorizing of a Leibniz [Editor’s note: German philosopher, scientist and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz]. It may therefore seem inevitable that metaphysics is a part of philosophy that we must now give up.

Some, of course, choose to defend metaphysics by replying that it does not, in fact, rely on any such theistic underpinnings, and can be pursued intelligibly within a more contemporary view of the world. Indeed, metaphysics continues to have some distinguished proponents. But, in the spirit of Étienne Gilson’s famous aphorism that “philosophy always buries its undertakers,” I want to consider here a more radical option: namely, that there is something self-undermining or incoherent in the very attempt to dispense with metaphysics, with the result that it will always be able to outlive those who try to do away with it. I will consider two such arguments: the first is that to criticize metaphysics is itself inevitably to rely on certain metaphysical claims and indulge in various forms of metaphysical theorizing, thereby making metaphysics impervious; and the second is that metaphysical ideas underpin all our thinking, thereby making metaphysical reflection on those ideas indispensable.

 

If you’re objecting to metaphysics, you’re doing metaphysics

Critics of metaphysics typically adopt the perspective of some other discipline (usually the empirical sciences) to claim that the worldview on which metaphysics relies has been surpassed, making metaphysics redundant. Then one response is: whatever this discipline is, it is either claiming to present a picture of the world of sufficient scope that it then itself amounts to a metaphysics, or it is not, in which case it must still leave room for metaphysics, as its own view of the world remains too narrow to rule this out or act as a competitor. Thus, it is argued, only a scientific conception that itself involves some further extra-scientific, and hence metaphysical, commitments can in fact challenge the claims of metaphysicians. For example, if someone asserts that science disproves the existence of God, they are in fact going beyond science and venturing into metaphysics. Equally, if science is said to be silent on the issue, that means there remains a space for metaphysical theorizing. The idea, then, is that science can’t overturn metaphysics, because in attempting to do so, science ends up making claims with the kind of scope and theoretical abstraction that means it in effect becomes a form of metaphysics itself.

This defensive strategy certainly has its charms, and it may well be the case that some critics of metaphysics have gone beyond their brief and engaged in various forms of metaphysical theorizing themselves. However, this strategy rests on the assumption that the challenge to metaphysics must come in the form of direct critique, which is then said to involve metaphysical commitments. But the challenge could also take a different form, which does not involve any such commitments: namely, what might be called benign neglect. That is, the critic of metaphysics could simply eschew various forms of grand metaphysical theorizing, and stick to their own disciplinary boundaries; for example, by asking whether certain laws hold with empirical necessity in this world and others like it, and not asking whether they hold with metaphysical necessity in all possible worlds; or asking about the processes underpinning human life in this world, and not speculating about how life might be possible in the next one. Of course, in some sense, this still leaves metaphysics unrefuted; but, as a strategy, it could come to the same as a refutation, in just leaving metaphysics to wither on the vine.

The metaphysician’s response could then be that humans cannot help but be interested in these questions; overlooking them is not really an option and so metaphysical speculation will never go away. But here, the critic’s reply might be that the problem with these sorts of metaphysical inquiries, even if we find them irresistible, is that they do not seem to yield any results. Metaphysical speculation is just that, mere speculation, argues the critic; and we should therefore turn to more productive intellectual pursuits and forms of inquiry that can produce results. If some of us cannot help but keep speculating about metaphysical questions, the critic continues, that’s no evidence in favor of metaphysics, but rather evidence against the intellectual wisdom of those doing the speculating.

Thus, it seems, the argument from imperviousness can be side-stepped by the critic of metaphysics on the grounds that metaphysics is an optional indulgence that we may have to learn to do without, given its lack of progress. But can we really do without it? This is where the second argument I want to consider might come in, namely the argument from indispensability. I think this is an argument that can be found in the work of the 19th century American pragmatist C. S. Peirce, and before him in the philosophy of the German idealist G. W. F. Hegel.

 

You’re doing metaphysics, even if you don’t notice

Both Peirce and Hegel were fully aware of the critical case against metaphysics. For Peirce that case was best made by fellow pragmatists such as William James, and for Hegel by Immanuel Kant. But while both philosophers accepted the power of these critiques, meaning that metaphysics could not proceed as before, they nonetheless retained the conviction that metaphysics cannot be given up, and those who think it can are fooling themselves and committing a potentially dangerous mistake. For both Hegel and Peirce held that all our thinking, even of the most ordinary and banal kind, is shot through with various metaphysical assumptions, since all our thinking is grounded in various metaphysical concepts that shape how we think about the world: being, cause, substance, whole, essence and so on, are all such metaphysical categories. We take these fundamental categories for granted; but then the consequence of this unreflective stance can be deep puzzlement and errors, not only in philosophy but also in ordinary life. Because our fundamental categories can turn out to be inadequate in various ways, it is the vital task of the metaphysician to reflect on them more deeply, and perhaps change the way in which we conceive of these ideas.

On this account, then, there are two ways in which metaphysics is indispensable: firstly, we are intrinsically metaphysical creatures, in that we all have a fundamental scheme of thinking about the world, our ontology (to use the philosophical jargon), our conception of Being, of what is, and this is not something we can dispense with if we interact in a thinking way with the world at all. Secondly, we must engage in metaphysical inquiry, as we must continue to reflect on that conception, as if we do not, we will be unable to avoid the ways in which we are being led astray. Thus, given that we are metaphysical creatures, we cannot in good conscience give up doing metaphysics. Peirce puts this view quite clearly:

Find a scientific man who proposes to get along without any metaphysics—not by any means every man who holds the ordinary reasonings of metaphysicians to scorn—and you have found one whose doctrines are thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics with which they are packed. We must philosophize, said the great naturalist Aristotle—if only to avoid philosophizing. Every man of us has a metaphysics, and has to have one; and it will influence his life greatly. Far better, then, that that metaphysics should be criticized and not be allowed to run loose. A man may say ‘I will content myself with common sense.’ I, for one, am with him there, in the main. I shall show why I do not think that there can be any direct profit in going behind common sense—meaning by common sense those ideas and beliefs that man’s situation absolutely forces upon him. We shall later see more definitely what is meant. I agree, for example, that it is better to recognize that some things are red and some others blue, in the teeth of what optical philosophers say, that it is merely that some things are resonant to shorter ether waves and some to longer ones. But the difficulty is to determine what really is and what is not the authoritative decision of common sense and what is merely obiter dictum. In short, there is no escape from the need of a critical examination of ‘first principles.’ [1]

Peirce’s central claim is that there is no position—either in ‘common sense’ or in empirical science—that is free of metaphysical assumptions and commitments of various kinds, and while that can be perfectly harmless, it can also cause us problems unless we stand ready to critically examine those assumptions and commitments, and thus engage in metaphysics. Thus, Peirce warns: “Those who neglect philosophy have metaphysical theories as much as others—only they [have] rude, false, and wordy theories” [2].

Moreover, though Peirce does not refer to him explicitly in this context, a similar view is to be found in Hegel. As Hegel puts it:

[E]veryone possesses and uses the wholly abstract category of being. The sun is in the sky; these grapes are ripe, and so on ad infinitum. Or, in a higher sphere of education, we proceed to the relation of cause and effect, force and its manifestation, etc. All our knowledge and ideas are entwined with metaphysics like this and governed by it; it is the net which holds together all the concrete material which occupies us in our action and endeavour. But this net and its knots are sunk in our ordinary consciousness beneath numerous layers of stuff. This stuff comprises our known interests and the objects that are before our minds, while the universal threads of the net remain out of sight and are not explicitly made the subject of our reflection. [3]

On this account, every thought or claim we make about the world, from the most trivial (‘the sun is in the sky’) to the most significant (‘there is no such thing as society,’ ‘evolution makes teleological thinking redundant,’ ‘brain structure controls behavior’) is shot through with metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of individuals, causes, grounding, relations and so on. And if we don’t reflect on this, and make efforts to get our metaphysics right, then we risk the kind of scientific, social and ethical errors that Hegel catalogues at length in his Phenomenology of Spirit, and elsewhere. Like Peirce, Hegel is thus scornfully dismissive of attempts by contemporary empiricists to say that they don’t need to care about metaphysics, as they can avoid any of these assumptions: “It is true that Newton expressly warned physics to beware of metaphysics; but to his honour, let it be said that he did not conduct himself in accordance with this warning at all. Only the animals are true blue physicists by this standard, since they do not think; whereas humans, in contrast, are thinking beings, and born metaphysicians.” [4]

A clear advantage of this indispensability argument over the previous imperviousness argument is that on this account, metaphysics cannot be simply ignored in favor of some other approach, since metaphysics is bound up with any discipline. Moreover, it also leaves metaphysics less vulnerable to the worry about not making progress. For, if we understand that metaphysics is always operating in the background of any claim, we can be optimistic that thinking differently about certain key categories has led to views of the world that make better sense of things. For example, as Hegel argues, the category of person made it possible to treat human beings with an equality that was not possible before, or in a more recent case, new conceptions of causality have been required to make sense of quantum theory.

It might be said, nonetheless, that this endeavor is not really metaphysics proper, as it is merely the delineation of our own, human conceptual scheme; not any grand grappling with Being per se. P. F. Strawson famously called this more modest endeavor ‘descriptive metaphysics,’ as the attempt to ‘describe the actual structure of our thought about the world’ [5], but without thereby claiming to tell us anything fundamental about the world itself. Likewise, Kant characterized his project as replacing “the proud name of an Ontology” with “the modest title of a mere Analytic of pure understanding” [6]. This approach, however, neglects the critical element that Peirce and Hegel think is fundamental to our investigation of these concepts, and which therefore makes it revisionary rather than descriptive. For the aim is not merely to describe our metaphysical concepts, but to see what their shortcomings are, and, as a result, to improve them. If this process can be carried out, what reason have we got, other than a dogmatic, unmotivated skepticism, for thinking that the scheme we end up with is not true of reality itself?

Rumors about the demise of metaphysics thus turn out to be premature, and it will always outlive those who come to bury it [7].

 

References

[1] C. S. Peirce Collected Papers (Harvard University Press, 1931–58) 1.129.

[2] Peirce, Collected Papers 7.579.

[3] G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 27–8.

[4] Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, §98 Addition

[5] P. F. Strawson, Individuals (Methuen, 1959), p. 9.

[6] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A247/B303

[7] I am grateful to Luca Barlassina, Fraser MacBride and Adrian Moore for very helpful comments on previous versions of this article.

Metaphysics is inescapable: Even Wittgenstein was a metaphysician (The Return of Metaphysics)

Reading | Metaphysics

Prof. Adrian William Moore, PhD | 2022-08-21

It is well known that Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophical works are marked by various profound differences of style and content. Nevertheless, there are some equally profound and very significant continuities. Among these are his conception of philosophy itself and, relatedly, an apparent recoil from metaphysics. Let us look at these in turn.

Wittgenstein conceives of philosophy as an activity, rather than a body of doctrine. Its aim is to promote clarity of thought and understanding, not to discover and state truths about the nature of reality. Moreover, this aim is to be viewed in therapeutic terms. Philosophy is an antidote to unclear thinking, and specifically to the ill effects of our mishandling our own ways of making sense of things. For an example of such ill effects, consider someone interested in the privacy of sensations who asks the following question, and who struggles to find any satisfactory answer: ‘Why can nobody else know with the certainty I do whether I feel pain?’ On Wittgenstein’s view, if we attend to the way in which sentences like ‘I feel pain’ are actually used, then this will appear akin to someone grappling with the gibberish: ‘Why can nobody else know with the certainty I do whether ouch!?’ Philosophy can be used to show that there is no real problem here.

Or at least, this is true of good philosophy. Wittgenstein distinguishes between good philosophy, which is what we have just been talking about, and bad philosophy, which is the home of the very confusions against which good philosophy is pitted.

This brings us to the apparent recoil from metaphysics. For in both his earlier and his later work, the only clearly pertinent uses of the term ‘metaphysical’ indicate that Wittgenstein identifies metaphysics with bad philosophy. ‘What we do,’ he writes in Philosophical Investigations, ‘is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.’ That is, what ‘we’ do, qua good philosophers, is to rescue words from their abuse in the hands of bad philosophers (who no doubt, very often, include ‘us’).

The kind of metaphysics to which Wittgenstein is opposed is concerned with what we might call the Big Questions. Is there a God? What is the fundamental nature of reality? Does it consist ultimately of substances, and, if so, what are they? What is the fundamental nature of the self? Can it survive physical death? Do we have free will? And suchlike. But on a Wittgensteinian conception, trying to tackle these Big Questions involves wrenching ordinary ways of making sense of things from their ordinary contexts and producing nonsense as a result. For instance, there is no such Big Question as whether we have free will: there are just the various particular local questions that we ask in our everyday transactions with one another, such as whether the chairman issued his written apology of his own free will or was coerced into doing it. And we do not need metaphysics to know how to answer such questions.

Why, then, do I talk of Wittgenstein’s ‘apparent’ recoil from metaphysics? Given what I have said so far, surely there cannot be any doubt that he is firmly opposed to it—can there?

Well, to invoke that old philosophical cliché, it depends on what you mean by ‘metaphysics.’ On some conceptions of metaphysics, including that which Wittgenstein would identify as bad philosophy, no: there cannot be any doubt that he is firmly opposed to it. However, there is a conception of metaphysics that I myself have found useful, and which I think covers much of what self-styled metaphysicians in the past have been up to: metaphysics is simply the most general attempt to make sense of things. This leaves entirely open what kinds of questions metaphysicians ask, or what kinds of methods they adopt. And it means that there is a serious question to be addressed about whether Wittgenstein himself, in his efforts to promote clarity of thought and understanding at a suitably high level of generality, counts as a practicing metaphysician.

For instance, let us reconsider the privacy of sensations. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein draws an analogy between such privacy and the solo nature of the game of patience. He is reminding us that it is integral to the very meaning of the word ‘sensation’ that a sensation can never be said to be more than one person’s. This is part of his attempt to achieve a clearer understanding of the nature of the mind. It is also, in its own distinctive way, a contribution to the most general attempt to make sense of things.

Moreover, there is nothing in Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy to entail that the only way of practicing good philosophy is by nurturing or protecting the ordinary use of words, as opposed to introducing new purpose-specific legislation for their use. Thus consider one of the Big Questions that I flagged above: does reality consist ultimately of substances, and, if so, what are they? The great seventeenth-century thinkers Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz each believed that reality does consist ultimately of substances. But they disagreed about what they are. Descartes believed that reality consists of substances of three kinds: one Divine substance (God); one extended substance (matter); and many, maybe infinitely many, created thinking substances (minds). Spinoza believed that reality consists of only one substance (God), which is both extended and thinking. Leibniz believed that reality consists of infinitely many substances (God included), all of which are thinking but none of which is extended.

It is hard not to react to such disagreement with a degree of skepticism about what is even at issue. And indeed, in the following century Hume was prepared to deny that the word ‘substance,’ as these philosophers had been using it, has any meaning. We might as well expect Wittgenstein to agree with Hume. (In his earlier work, Wittgenstein himself made significant use of the word ‘substance’; but he also famously conceded that what he had written was nonsense.) However, even if Wittgenstein does agree with Hume, he need not see the situation as irremediable. If a philosopher is able to explain with due clarity how they are using the word ‘substance,’ and if they have some particular reason to use it in that way, so be it. ‘When philosophy is asked “What is … substance?”,’ Wittgenstein says, ‘the request is for a rule … which holds for the word “substance”.’ To provide such a rule is not to tackle one of the Big Questions; it is rather to put a well-defined question in its place. But on the broad conception of metaphysics that I have been advocating, it can also readily be seen as a methodological preliminary to engaging in the metaphysics of substance.

On that broad conception, then, not only can Wittgenstein be seen as friendly towards metaphysics; he can be seen as himself a practitioner.

But it goes deeper than that. Wittgenstein’s concern to combat bad philosophy with good philosophy is accompanied by a high degree of self-consciousness about the very nature of the exercise. He wants to understand what he is combating with what. This is because he is as interested in diagnosis as he is in cure. And this involves stepping back and asking, if not Big Questions, then at the very least some searching questions, about how we make sense of things.

To be sure, even when Wittgenstein is addressing these questions, he avoids the pitfalls of what, by his lights, counts as bad philosophy. A bad philosophical approach to these questions would involve subliming such notions as meaning, understanding, truth and reality, and trying to arrive at substantial theses about how such things are related. Wittgenstein is not interested in arriving at any substantial theses. In keeping with his conception of good philosophy, he wants to be clear about the various unambitious views concerning meaning, understanding, truth and reality that we already have. And he tries to do this through a creative use of hints, reminders and commonplaces.

But in his later work—and here perhaps we see one of the most significant differences between his later and earlier works—he also wants to draw our attention to the contingencies that underlie how we make sense of things. He wants to dispel any impression that how we make sense of things is ‘the’ way to make sense of them. Thus, he fastens on what he calls our ‘forms of life,’ something that he in turn describes as ‘what has to be accepted’ or as ‘the given.’ He is referring to the basic biological realities, the customs and practices, the complex of animal and cultural sensibilities, which enable us to make shared sense of things in the ways in which we do. Were it not for these, we would make quite different sense of things—if indeed we made sense of things at all.

Moreover, not only is Wittgenstein self-conscious about the contingency of our sense-making; he is also self-conscious about a problematical idealism that it seems to entail, where by ‘idealism’ is meant the view that what we make sense of is dependent on how we make sense of it [Editor’s note: this is not the objective idealism promoted by Essentia Foundation, which does entail the existence of states of affairs that are not contingent on human cognition]. The worry is this: by drawing attention to the way in which facts about us help to determine how we make sense of things, Wittgenstein is making it look as though—as he himself puts it—‘human agreement decides what is true and what is false.’

Now, in fact ,Wittgenstein manages to repress the idealism. He distinguishes between the claims that we make, whose truth or falsity does not depend on us, and the linguistic and conceptual resources that we use to make these claims, which do depend on us but whose dependence on us is harmless and does not betoken any kind of idealism. This is itself an example of his counteracting confusion and pitting good philosophy against bad philosophy.

But he is also undeniably probing some very large issues about how we stand in relation to reality. There seems to me to be ample evidence here to support my main contention: that when metaphysics is understood as the most general attempt to make sense of things, then what Wittgenstein is doing in much of his work, both when he is combating bad philosophy with good philosophy and when he is reflecting self-consciously on what this involves, is acting the metaphysician.

Can we live without searching for ultimate truths? (The Return of Metaphysics)

Reading | Metaphysics

Elin Danielsen Huckerby, PhD | 2022-07-03

Richard Rorty, one of the most influential and debated philosophers of the twentieth century, wanted us to leave metaphysics behind. Metaphysics asks questions about the Nature of Things, of how things ultimately hang together. It proceeds from the presumption that there are first-order philosophical problems, such as ‘what is true?’, or ‘what is right?’, ‘what is good?’. And thus, it hinges on the belief that we can answer such underlying questions: it posits that reason, or rationality, or the right understanding of language will let us develop descriptions that converge on reality itself, that will mirror it in language. Rorty does not think we can do this. Not because we cannot properly capture such fundamentals in language, but because there are, on his view, no essences to discover: there is nothing to converge on; at least not in the essentialist sense metaphysics supposes.

While Rorty encourages us to make and remake helpful, shared ways to talk to achieve aims, predict events, manage our environment, express what we desire, what we find joyful or sad, or to cause joy or sadness or any other affect, he wants us to give up the quest for Truth. This mindset, he suggests, is not just misguided, but bears bad fruits. It seeks closure, an ending. It upholds oppression: because metaphysics wants to converge on the right descriptions, it will inevitably have to reject all other descriptions as, if not wrong, then inferior. But despite his rejection of metaphysics, Rorty does not want us to stop practicing philosophy. Instead, he wants philosophy to be practiced in a different spirit, one where philosophers think of themselves as ‘poets’, engaged in a ‘literary’ kind of criticism. Not criticism intent on critiquing poems, plays or novels—although that could be part of the mix too—but intent on poetically making and continually remaking our vocabularies, and by this our understanding of our world.

 

Radical acceptance of contingency, radical rejection of constraints

Rorty’s influences were numerous, but he most strongly identified with the American pragmatist tradition. This school holds, as James expressively put it, that “the trail of the human serpent is… over everything.” It stresses that our ideas emerge from imperfect, embodied human beings as socially propagated tools for thinking and coping. Our notions are entirely incorporated within and shaped by our dealings, needs and desires. Importantly, pragmatism suggests that acknowledging the context-dependence, use-value and fallibility of our ideas is a helpful thing to do, as it centers our potential for doing better. Tools for thinking might work for us, or not, and thus be picked up or put down, tinkered with or replaced.

What Rorty does, is push pragmatism to its limits. He suggests that we not only think of ideas in this way but even of our very words as contingent, material “noises and marks” that can have specific effects. When Rorty began his career, analytic philosophy of language was thought to finally be making proper progress towards delimiting criteria for true knowledge. It was geared towards the natural sciences, logic and mathematics, and while it acknowledged its indebtedness to (Kantian) metaphysics, it thought itself engaged in something more sensible and down-to-earth, more scientific: by finding out how language mapped onto the world, how it represented, it wanted to uncover how we arrived at true propositions, and thus how we might accumulate a body of knowledge that was a mirror image of the world in language. This differs radically from Rorty’s suggestion that we think of our noises and marks as having effects, like, say, coordinating our behavior and doings (think undertaking the Moon-landing), sparking joy or affecting comfort.

The mirroring-ambition, and philosophy of language as the contemporary dwelling of metaphysics, was what Rorty powerfully assailed in his 1979 tome Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. I find, however, that a phrase in a lecture he gave the same year best helps us understand his stance. He says that to be a pragmatist is to accept that there are “no constraints on inquiry” apart from “conversational ones,” no “constraints derived from the nature of objects, or of mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers.” This focuses on the “fundamental choice”: to accept “the contingent character” of all “starting points,” or not. In other words, what is at stake is accepting or rejecting metaphysics. Siding with Rorty here is to say there are no essences, no things in themselves: there is the materiality of the world, and we and our various ways of expressing ourselves are always merely and richly elements of this corporality. And it is to hold that it is in material, human conversation that we work and rework shared conceptions, our narratives of how things can be said to hang together, and how to proceed in this world.

It is important to know that ‘contingent,’ in Rorty, should never be understood as ‘accidental,’ nor merely recall Darwin’s lessons. It should be read as meaning emerged, evolved, dependent, carrying traces, coming with a history. It should bring to mind the “red wheelbarrow” in William Carlos William’s poem, or Harold Bloom’s elucidations of those inevitable yet sometimes hidden trails that go from poem to poem. What full acceptance of contingency achieves is to free us from the compulsion that we must identify the right starting points to become capable of taking proper action, or that we have an obligation to dig down to an immutable bedrock of principles before we know how to proceed. It moves our attention forward and encourages us to be active agents by suggesting that all we can do, is to start where we are, do what we can, with what we have.

What Rorty urges us to do is to make a less cruel future. To this end, he suggests two key strategies. To sustain and progress democratic culture, we ought to cultivate an ability to hold our concepts “lightly,” while taking their consequences seriously. We should learn to “conversationally” amend our ways, as our needs and insights evolve. This is not to say that having conversations is enough—it is not. “Conversationally” here means a practice founded on turning towards each other to collectively work out how to talk, and what to do. We, moreover, ought to build society around the overarching, shared aim of lessening “cruelty.” The former ability Rorty sometimes calls “ironism,” the latter goal “liberalism” (although scholars of his work are currently arguing that his identification with liberalism obscures strong commitments to more left-leaning, interventionist politics). To hold our concepts “lightly,” or be an “ironist,” is another way of expressing pragmatist fallibilism: that we should remain open to the possibility that we could work out better (linguistic) practices. To bring about an intellectual culture where we would proceed with this kind of humbleness, while also recognizing that we are fully responsible for our practices (we cannot outsource responsibility to God, say), Rorty suggests we need a “poeticization” of culture. But why couch it in these terms, and why does such a poeticization entail leaving metaphysics behind?

 

Leaving Metaphysics behind

Western philosophy has, of course, defined itself as something else than literature since the ancient Greeks. In Plato’s Republic, poetry, or art more broadly, helps delimit philosophy by representing what philosophy is not. Poets are deceitful makers of untruths, as opposed to philosophers who seek what is true. Philosophers do not simply make things up, inspired by the muses, but dispassionately contemplate ideas. This view of philosophy as on a quest for truth, and its enabling belief—that human reason is capable of understanding the conditions and structure of existence—also saturated the theories of later philosophers, such as the rationalist metaphysics of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza. These philosophers might not have wanted to ban the poets, but held beauty, art and poetry as subjective productions of the imagination that could not be rationally grasped, and thus to be kept out of the domain of philosophy proper. This, then, is the kind of philosophy Rorty wished we’d stop doing: philosophy as metaphysics.

And metaphysics is, Rorty believed, coming to an end—or at least it potentially could if we worked at it. Its unravelling began with Immanuel Kant. This might seem counterintuitive, as Kant devised the most impressive metaphysical system philosophy has produced. While Kant rejected the view that human minds could comprehend the underlying structure of existence (how things are ‘in themselves’), he replaced this metaphysical project with another: the aim of understanding human reasoning as such, and by this come to understand how we arrive at true knowledge. But the pivotal role Kant plays in Rorty’s narrative has little to do with the details of Kantian philosophy, and everything to do with how Kant, by making what is a radically dismissive move, showed rising generations that it was possible to thoroughly redescribe philosophical presumptions and problems. By this, Kant paved the way for the Romanticist inversion of reason and feeling, and for the Nietzschean story, where the entire metaphysical endeavor since Plato is set aside as an attempt at formulating a secularized theology, a system for controlling human creativity and power by imposing rules on its expressions.

That metaphysics persists is, to Rorty, deeply problematic, because it diminishes our sense of agency and the fullness of our responsibility alike. It limits our ethical, critical and political imagination. So: in what way does metaphysics persist, why is that a problem, and what is Rorty’s alternative?

 

Metaphysics as a Problem for Philosophy

The belief that there are first-order philosophical problems lies at the heart of metaphysics as an enterprise (what, ultimately, exists, what is true, what is right, what is good?). If there are such problems, solving them requires that there are constraints on thought. Answering such questions depends on the possibility of uncovering ways of thinking and talking that converge on reality. If there are no limits imposable on thought and talk (set by God, the moral law within, Nature, Science) we end up—as Plato well knew and as every metaphysician has feared since—in the unbounded realm of imagination and poetry. Thus, as Rorty notes, it is not sufficient for the metaphysician to be constrained by social norms, nor the constraints of “the disciplines of our day”: the metaphysician wants to be constrained by the “ahistorical and nonhuman nature of reality itself.” When Rorty says there are only “conversational” constraints, he is thus both rejecting metaphysics and saying he is comfortable with thinking of himself as a poet, of his philosophy as a kind of poetry.

Rorty considers there to be two versions of metaphysics still at work today. There is the Platonic form, where objects are postulated for “treasured propositions to correspond to,” and the Kantian strategy of discovering those criteria that let us define “the essence of knowledge, or representation, or morality, or rationality.” He associates the former with continental philosophy, and the latter with analytic philosophy, but stresses that what they share is a “common urge to escape the vocabulary and practices of one’s own time and finding something ahistorical and necessary to cling to”: to answer questions by appeal to “something more than the ordinary, retail, detailed, concrete reasons which have brought one to one’s present view.” What metaphysics means and entails today is thus harder to grasp than the obviously universalizing systems of a Leibniz or a Kant, and thus the problems that such modes of operation are also more elusive and harder to overcome.

The problematic upshot of the requirement for constraints metaphysics imposes is, well, that it constrains, and that it does so by reference to criteria beyond the political, that is: beyond the ethico-social restraints that citizens of democratic societies negotiate and continually re-negotiate. That metaphysics is alive and well, and that its governing mindset impacts us all today, can be quickly demonstrated by asking, say, ‘what is a woman?’. To ask this as an ontological question, where the answer is supposed to tell us about what kind of essential characteristics a ‘proper’ woman has, or where the answer would lay down criteria by which we can identify her qua woman, is to pose a metaphysical question. And answering that question in the metaphysical spirit instantly rules out infinite ways in which our uses of the word ‘woman’ might be amended to better fit our way of life here and now, fit our visions of what a just world looks like and what it takes to allow all human beings to flourish. Think of how troublesome it is for some to accept that trans women are women.

Metaphysics thus conceived is not so much a philosophical problem as it is a problem for philosophy. Its imposition of limits stands in the way of imaginative experimentation and pragmatic, meliorative problem-solving. Moreover, metaphysics poses a democratic problem by placing a whole host of important matters of debate beyond the reach of ordinary human conversation and cooperative deliberation. Philosophy’s quest for stable grids is, in practice, if not always in intent, a move for mastery, and thus power, and in his later work, Rorty redescribed his pragmatist approach as “anti-authoritarianism” for such reasons.

What do we do if metaphysics is a problem for philosophy? Can we move beyond it? How difficult this is—and how easy it could be—is evident in Rorty’s discussion of why even the ardently anti-metaphysical theorist Jacques Derrida failed to do so. Rorty greatly admired Derrida and his efforts to topple the foundations of Western metaphysics. He wholly approved of Derrida’s attack on the “metaphysics of presence,” and incorporated Derridean insights about writing, materiality, attention to detail, effects, instability, process, poetry and play into his own work. Derrida himself declared his inability to move beyond metaphysics. Like Rorty, he knew he could never attain a clear, unbiased point of view outside the messiness and contiguity of human experience.

But whereas Derrida stressed that we, even as we argue against metaphysics, inevitably define our position in relation to it, and thus are trapped in a dance with its language and logic, Rorty does think there is a way out. We can decline to dance and walk away. Rorty suggests we stop theorizing, in this sense specific to philosophy and literary theory. Pragmatists are not against theory understood as writing that serves as a resource for deliberation or action. But Rorty wanted us to stop engaging in point-by-point refutation of arguments you’d rather see obsolete. Instead, he suggested we adopt a “literary” approach, where we mindfully get on with attending to material matters, playing “books against books,” and inventing different ways to talk in the hope that others will find it useful.

 

Philosophers should become ‘Literary’ Critics

What Rorty proposes is that we swap the quest for certainty with a practice of imaginatively making what we hope will be good, and adopt a relaxed attitude towards incommensurability, process and change. Because such a practice, intent on making a difference in the world, does not rely on there being extra-conversational constraints, it can be conceptualized as a poetic practice, or as ‘poetry.’ Thus, when Rorty talks about “poetry” he does not (always) mean it in a sense that indicates a distinctive use of stylistic markers, or use of words to evoke intensity of feeling or a sense of beauty. He often means originating from the human imagination and shaped, used, causing effects on, and being responded to, by us. But Rorty reserves talk of poets to those who are capable of “making it new,” a phrase he borrows from the modernist poet Ezra Pound: poets are capable of inventing new noises and marks and putting them to novel uses. Kant was, then, a poet in this sense. Anti-metaphysical philosophers such as Derrida and Rorty just have little use for Kant’s poems. Rorty demands less of the word ‘literature’ and for the last four decades of his life, he closely associated his pragmatist stance with a ‘literary’ kind of attitude.

‘Literature’ is here to be understood broadly, in a sense that goes well beyond novels and plays and poems. Rorty posits it as “a kind of writing” that attends to the material details of human experience, to the small and the multitudinous. It is also writing that is not Theory (Philosophy) with universalizing, metaphysical ambition. Rorty suggests literature is a richer resource for moral guidance than the religious or philosophical treatise, more helpful for enlarging our understanding of ourselves and the lives of others—not because it is intrinsically better in some way, but because literature, in its materiality and eschewal of the grand unifying abstractions, is a more useful resource for those who, like him, no longer hold on to the end-of-inquiry narrative. Such inquirers will be in search of resources that allow comparative evaluations of how things are versus how they could be, works that can help amend their specific aims and practices. Explications that purport to show how things ultimately hang together are at best less useful, and at worst function as conversation-stoppers, halting our meliorative efforts. For Rorty, ‘literature’—understood in a materialist, experience-attentive and expression-attentive sense where it includes “ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel,” as well as “the movie, and the TV program”—has proven itself vital for enriching our vocabularies and stock of narratives about who we are—and might become—and thus for working out how to progress from here. What practitioners working in this spirit want, is to become increasingly capable of amending and ‘redescribing’, of acting and talking in more useful ways. Literature serves this intention well.

Importantly, literature is also a kind of writing where we happily abandon representational constraints: we do not, for instance, require novels or poems to correspond to ‘reality’ in the way we traditionally expect the theories of science—or the grids of metaphysics—to do. Works of literature can be construed as ‘remarks’ in a conversation where we—despite not having universalizing ambitions or being constrained by Nature, or God, or eternal moral principles—nevertheless are working out how to live. Thus, I would argue that to grasp the significance of literature in Rorty, and particularly what he means when he talks about a ‘literary’ culture or philosophy as ‘literary’ criticism, it is imperative to see that in Rorty, this word ‘literary’ stands for the attitudinal antithesis to scientistic, metaphysical philosophy. Literary writing, in that broad sense as well as the narrow, emerges when one approaches the task of narrating ways things can be said to hang together from this anti-universalizing, anti-essentializing attitude.

The ‘literary’ attitude resists absolutes, totalizing grids, final solutions, the search for Truth. What Rorty wants to keep going is an intellectual and writerly practice mindfully uninterested in final solutions and absolute truths, and just as mindfully set on carrying on a conversation that is materially attentive and useful. This is what Rorty means by saying philosophers should become ‘literary’ critics.

 

Philosophy after Metaphysics

Rorty was a controversial figure, although less so now than before his death in 2007. Scholarly interest in his work is surging and efforts are made to put his work to use. It is not surprising, really, that it caused consternation to ask philosophers to take the side of the poets in “the ancient quarrel,” and thus to give up their governing ambition and adopt a radically different self-conception. But I would propose that Rorty’s effort to reconceptualize philosophy as a ‘literary’ kind of criticism is one of the most vital suggestions we can take from his work. We sorely need intellectuals that want to work in this spirit: who want to make a better future more than they want to get it right. And while provocative, Rorty’s narrative is a hopeful one, more hopeful than Nietzsche’s. For philosophy is assumed to be capable of reimagining itself as an open-ended, curious, imaginative, poetic kind of practice—one that sees our imagination as our greatest asset and centers the skill of poetically making and remaking vocabularies, and by this our understanding of our world.

Right now, unless we do remake our world, humanity and every form of life on this planet is in peril. We live in terrifying times, and yet we spend so much time and energy arguing about who is right in principle, and not enough energy on making matters right. Metaphysics wants to understand the Nature of Things. We should prioritize understanding what other people are saying and why. We need to negotiate shared ways to talk, to agree on knowledge equilibria and workable, mitigating practices, to enable us to collectively act. We need to pragmatically multi-solve our problems rather than ask ‘what is the answer?’. We would do well to think with Rorty of “objectivity as solidarity”—and well to suffuse everything we do with a desire to poetically remake who we are.

Falling for naive common-sense: Russell and physical realism (The Return of Metaphysics)

Reading | Philosophy

Prof. Fraser MacBride, PhD | 2022-05-15

In the late 1890s the Cambridge philosophers G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell made a remarkable and creative leap forward: their ‘discovery’, they declared, was of the principles underlying what they called their ‘New Philosophy.’ According to this philosophy, reality consists of a mind-independent plurality of separate, independently existing entities. They are entities that, when we perceive them, are given to us immediately or directly, so without relying upon our having any mediating ideas or internal representations of them, hence given to us without any conceptual trappings of our mental making.

Moore and Russell called their philosophy ‘new’ because they believed its discovery marked a decisive break in history; they envisaged their philosophy would sweep away all of its predecessors. Even though other philosophical traditions endured and indeed flourished later, their youthful confidence was far from being entirely misplaced. Their New Philosophy was destined to become one of the contributing streams—one of the most significant—that fed into what was to become that great intellectual river system, analytic philosophy. Nonetheless, a key idea from the Hegelian philosophy they were revolting against would continue to pose a challenge to their realist shift.

 

The resurgence and death of Hegelian philosophy?

To most bystanders watching at the end of the nineteenth century, it would hardly have seemed likely that the New Philosophy would turn into analytic philosophy, and analytic philosophy then become the dominant tradition in the United Kingdom. During the late nineteenth century, Hegelian idealists had become the dominating force in British philosophy, although it would still be an exaggeration to say that theirs was the only voice to be heard. But the British Hegelians had the ascendency and they were inspired by some of the most general features of Hegel’s worldview—even if they didn’t always embrace the specific details of Hegel’s philosophy or his dialectical method, whereby intellectual advance is to be achieved by overcoming the contradiction of thesis and antithesis to achieve a higher synthesis. What especially captivated the British idealists was Hegel’s belief that separateness is ultimately an illusion. The apparent separateness of things—their plurality—was, for Hegel, an illusion, because he held that what is ultimately real and intelligible is only the whole of reality; apparently separate things only have reality to some degree, depending upon the degree to which they contribute to the intelligibility of the whole. Hegel called the whole of reality ‘the Absolute’ and he conceived of the Absolute as spiritual [Editor’s note: it can be argued that ‘spiritual’ is a mistranslation of Hegel’s original ‘Geist,’ which also means ‘mind,’ in which case Hegel’s Absolute is mental, not spiritual.] Moore and Russell held just the opposite of this. According to the New Philosophy, separate things are perfectly intelligible independently of one another, or anything else, whilst the whole of reality isn’t spiritual.

What many of the British Hegelians found inspiring about Hegel’s worldview, at least since the publication in 1865 of J.H. Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel, was the promise it held out of a metaphysical backing for religion, religion having hitherto been threatened by the advance of materialism and the reception of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Scottish philosopher Edward Caird (1835-1908), who held a Chair of Philosophy in Glasgow before becoming the Master of Balliol College in Oxford, was a leading and influential advocate of this Hegel-inspired apologia for religion. In his Hegel, published in 1883, Caird maintained that religion and materialistic science aren’t really in conflict at all because neither make sense except when understood as a partial fragment of a higher, integrated unity.

The resurgence of interest in Hegel to be found in Britain—and, as it happens, around the same time, in the United States too—also ranks as a twist of philosophical fate that could hardly have been expected by many bystanders. That’s because Hegel’s philosophy had been largely buried and defunct in Germany by mid-century. The peculiarity of the historical situation wasn’t lost upon the American pragmatist William James (1842-1910). He wrote,

We are just now witnessing, a singular phenomenon in British and American philosophy. Hegelism, so entirely defunct on its native soil that I believe but a single young disciple of the school is to be counted among the privat-docents and younger professors of Germany, and whose older champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us so zealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really be reckoned one of the most potent influences of the time in the higher walks of thought.

What explained the decline of Hegel’s influence in Germany was a ‘back to Kant’ movement, a ‘neo-Kantianism’ that eschewed speculative metaphysics, such as Hegel had inspired, in favour of a respect for the natural sciences. The Marburg School of Neo-Kantians, in particular, had an especial interest in understanding, methodologically speaking, how the natural sciences functioned. It was a movement destined to be one amongst other sources of another of the most significant streams feeding into the river system of analytic philosophy: namely, the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle.

 

The realist challenge of science and common sense

The fact is that Moore and Russell, in the late 1890s, were more aligned with the prevailing currents of European thought than any of the British Hegelians. Nevertheless, they still considered the system of one British Hegelian, the Oxford philosopher F.H. Bradley (1846-1924), an important foil for their own philosophy. But why did they consider it worth engaging with the views of any British Hegelian? The answer was that Bradley stuck out from the rest. Like many British Hegelians, Bradley had been an admirer of Hegel without adhering to the details of Hegel’s philosophy. But Bradley was led by his arguments to a conclusion that went further from Hegel than other Hegelians were prepared to envisage. For this reason, Bradley came under fire just as much from them as from his other adversaries. Caird had argued in more or less general and speculative terms for a higher synthesis of science and religion to resolve the widely acknowledged clash between them. By contrast, Bradley argued with a forthrightness and dialectical acumen that emulated Parmenides and Zeno, albeit expressed with Victorian curlicues. Bradley aimed for the destructive conclusion that discursive thought per se is ultimately unintelligible, inevitably driven to its own ‘suicide’—and that included common-sense, scientific and religious thought. Since Moore and Russell held discursive thought to be the very vehicle of intelligibility, but found Bradley’s arguments demanding and difficult to dismiss, the philosophical stakes could not have been higher for them. They had no choice, intellectually speaking, but to engage with Bradley.

To think discursively is to reflect upon the connections between separate things, their interrelatedness. That means thinking, for example, about the resemblance of one thing to another, or reflecting upon the distance between them, or registering the fact that what happens to one is before what happens to the other. Bradley’s point was that the idea of one thing or event connected to another, whether in space or time or by relations of resemblance, makes no sense.

One of the arguments upon which he placed the greatest weight is now called ‘Bradley’s Regress.’ It takes the form of a dilemma. Suppose we take the connection between two things to be ‘something itself,’ so distinct from both of them. This means the connection is a third thing. But we cannot understand their connection this way. By construing their connection as a third thing that, so to speak, sits alongside them, we have only added to our labours because now we have to explain how these three things are connected. It won’t help to say that the connection with them is a fourth thing because their connection will be a fifth thing, and so on, ad nauseum. Alternatively, if the connection between two things isn’t ‘something itself,’ it is mysterious how the two are connected at all. Bradley summarized, “If you take the connection as a solid thing, you have got to show, and you cannot show, how the other solids are joined to it. And, if you take it as a kind of medium or unsubstantial atmosphere, it is a connection no longer.” Since discursive thought presupposes the intelligibility of connections and there’s no making sense of connections, Bradley concluded that discursive thought cannot be ultimately intelligible. This wasn’t the only argument Bradley gave for this conclusion, but it was the argument he prized the most.

The Archimedean point from which Russell chose to mount his defence of discursive thought against Bradley’s onslaught was the outlook of contemporary scientific culture. Russell’s strategic judgment was that “there is more likelihood of error” in Bradley’s argument “than in so patent a fact as the interrelatedness of the things in the world.” Russell felt entitled to this judgement of the relative likelihood of error in Bradley’s argument because, as a matter of fact, science presupposes that there are interrelated things. This presupposition has survived the test of time, paying dividends in terms of the scientific developments that depend upon it, but also the technological applications of science. Consider, for example, the kinetic theory of gases, which presupposes that a gas consists of a large number of particles in rapid motion, which are constantly colliding: what that means is a plurality of separate but interrelated things. Russell conceded that, if we were ancient Greeks, ignorant of subsequent scientific achievements, then we might follow Bradley’s argument where it leads. But we cannot wish away what we know now, as members of a scientific culture that has seen extravagant philosophical systems and philosophers’ iconoclastic arguments continually fall by the wayside whilst scientific knowledge, which presupposes the interrelatedness of separate things, has inexorably accumulated. Knowing what we know now, we cannot follow Bradley’s argument where it leads.

Moore shared Russell’s strategic judgement of the relative likelihood of error having crept into Bradley’s argument, but Moore’s Archimedean point was a different one. He had a common-sense outlook, a worldview whose successful track record outstrips even that of science—a track record, running back millennia rather than centuries, of enabling Homo sapiens to successfully navigate their environment. For Moore, the common-sense view is that there are many material objects, both animate and inanimate, which occupy space, and there are many events to which material objects contribute, which occur in time, and that besides having bodies, we have minds, and we know all this to be true because of our appreciation of concrete cases. Bradley had argued that neither space nor time can be real because space and time presuppose that there are spatial and temporal relations holding between separate things and separate events, the kind of interrelatedness that Bradley held to be unintelligible. Moore replied that his pen was sitting right next to his inkwell and he had definitely gone for a stroll after lunch. Moore put it to his audiences that we are each of us far more certain of such concrete truths than we are certain of the cogency of Bradley’s reasoning. So common sense, never mind the scientific outlook, tells us we’re not in a position to repudiate the reality of interrelatedness.

 

Russell’s ‘knowledge by acquaintance,’ the myth of Given, and the return of Hegel

Did this mean that the New Philosophy had won? Bradley didn’t think so, because he was prepared to deny the intelligibility of science and our common-sense outlook. But whilst few British Hegelians were prepared to follow Bradley in this regard, they had other criticisms to make of the New Philosophy. Russell argued that our having knowledge of the external world relies upon our having ‘acquaintance’ with objects that are immediately given to us, where to be acquainted with an object means being primitively aware of it without knowing anything else about it—so without the distorting filters of our conceptual scheme. This was akin to the kind of cognitive set-up that Hegel had called ‘sense-certainty’ and subjected to searching criticism. Hegel’s basic point was that we cannot claim to have cognitively targeted some particular thing, and kept track of it, unless we are able to say what distinguishing features it has. But this requires us to have more than knowledge of the pure particular.

G.F. Stout (1860-1944) was one British philosopher who was influenced by Hegel, if not a card-carrying Hegelian. Stout had supervised Moore and Russell as undergraduates in Cambridge during the 1890s, but spent most of his career at the University of St. Andrews. It was integral to Stout’s philosophy that we cannot have immediate acquaintance with an object without knowing any truths about it. So Stout’s criticism of Russell, that “mere existential presence is not knowledge at all,” echoed Hegel’s critique of sense-certainty. Mere existential presence cannot provide the basis for cognitively detaching an object from its environment, because, Stout wrote, “If we inquire what in mere acquaintance we are acquainted with, mere acquaintance itself, being blind and dumb, can supply no answer.” In this respect Stout anticipated later developments within analytic philosophy, specifically Wilfred Sellar’s (1912-89) famous critique of ‘the Myth of the Given.’ So even though Moore and Russell’s common-sense and scientific outlooks carried the day, whilst Hegelianism became as defunct in the United Kingdom as it already had in Germany, recognizably Hegelian ideas continued to pose a challenge to Russell’s and Moore’s realism.

The futile search for the non-mental: Derrida’s critique of metaphysics (The Return of Metaphysics)

Reading | Metaphysics

Peter Salmon | 2022-04-04

In January 1954, the philosopher Jacques Derrida, then 24 and just back from a summer in his Algerian home, visited the Husserl Archives in Louvain, Belgium. The archive had been founded in 1938, shortly after Husserl’s death, in order to protect his corpus from the Nazi authorities. Smuggled out by the Franciscan Father Herman Leo van Breda, the archive contains more than 45,000 shorthand pages, Husserl’s complete research library and 10,000 pages of typescripts.

But it was a small paper of no more than 30 pages, working title The Origin of Geometry, which was to spur a revolution in Derrida’s thinking. It would inform, with astonishing consistency, his work for the rest of his life, across a vast range of subjects – from traditional philosophical subjects such as meaning, language, ethics and religion, to issues such as gender, colonialism, film and hospitality. His first book was a translation of Husserl’s paper, its 30 pages ‘supplemented’ – to use a Derridean term – with an introduction of over 100 pages. In this introduction lay the seeds of all his later philosophy, and the terms forever associated with his name – deconstruction, différance, iteration and, crucially ‘the metaphysics of presence’ – Derrida’s vital contribution to the calling into question of the whole basis of Western metaphysics.

 

Husserl, phenomenology and the metaphysics of presence

How do we know stuff about the world? Husserl wrote in a letter to the mathematician Gottlob Frege that he was ‘tormented by those incredibly strange realms: the world of the purely logical and the world of actual consciousness… I had no idea how to unite them, and yet they had to interrelate and form an intrinsic unity.’ His first attempts had been via mathematics. By analyzing what a number is – something that ‘exists’ or something humans ‘create’ – he thought he would be able to establish a relationship between consciousness and the world. It was Frege’s criticism of this attempt due to its ‘psychologism’ – that is, its dependence on the internal mental states of the subject, rather than the logical relations at hand – which spurred Husserl to his subsequent investigations.

What if, Husserl argued, we put aside the question of ‘the world’ entirely, and look simply at consciousness? Whether something exists or not is both moot and distracting. Husserl introduced the concept of the ‘epoché’ – from the ancient Greek, meaning ‘suspension of judgement’. We ‘bracket’ the world; what is important is not whether this tree exists, but how we encounter it, how it affects us. The job of philosophy is to describe these affects and to build concepts from them, which we can later extend outwards.

Crucial here is the idea of ‘intentionality’: as Franz Brentano had pointed out, we don’t pace Descartes, or merely ‘think’; we ‘think about.’ All consciousness has a content, and in analyzing this content, Husserl wanted to unite the strange realms of thought and world. He called this method ‘phenomenology’ – the study of phenomena – and by the time Derrida arrived at Louvain it was one of the dominant strands of twentieth century philosophy, spurred on by students of Husserl such as Emmanuel Levinas and, crucially, Martin Heidegger.

The Origin of Geometry is a late unpublished work, but it grapples with the same problems as his early work. Geometrical objects are, for Husserl, the perfect example of ‘ideal’ objects: they are defined precisely by their non-spatiotemporal nature (there are no perfect circles in the world) and are thus purely ‘transcendental.’ How do we – humans – think them and use them? How do we – finite beings – create transcendental things? What is their origin? This is not a historical question – Husserl is not looking for the person to whom the first geometrical object occurred. It is a question of meaning.

While Derrida would always acknowledge his debt to Husserl – ‘Even in moments where I had to question certain presuppositions of Husserl, I tried to do so while keeping to phenomenological discipline’ – his critique of The Origin is wide-ranging and multi-stranded. One strand catches Husserl out for asserting that ideal objects require writing down in order to establish their existence – contrary to Husserl’s usual assertion, shared with most philosophers, that writing is a secondary activity compared to speech, indeed a parasitic derivation of it. This bias, which Derrida would later term ‘phonocentrism,’ would expand into his great work Of Grammatology.

Derrida also critiques the idea of the ahistorical, a strange state which contravenes, Derrida argues, all human experience. Derrida, in a method that would become familiar in his later works of deconstruction, seeks out moments in the text where history, as it were, sneaks back into Husserl’s analysis – slips of the pen which, like the example of writing, reveal aporias (irresolvable contradictions) in Husserl’s thinking, as surely as Freudian slips indicate the same in our thinking.

But his main focus is on the idea of origin, which – incorporating the two previous critiques – he uses as a lever to prise apart fundamental aspects of Husserl’s philosophy across his entire corpus, and from which he develops his critique of ‘the metaphysics of presence.’

Phenomenology, argues Derrida, posits a position from which we are able to study the affects of the world upon us, and from which we can investigate phenomena, including concepts. This position – the ‘now’ – is, somehow, pure, uncontaminated by anything that is not the now. And yet here, as in works such as The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Husserl had very deliberately assessed that whatever the ‘now’ is, it isn’t pure.

We exist, as Husserl memorably puts it, in a ‘flowing thisness,’ from which we posit ‘now’s.’ But these ‘now’s’ are not independent entities, which can be extracted and analyzed. Rather, we are to think of them like notes in a piece of music. A particular note gets its meaning from its position in the overall piece – our memory of what has come before, our anticipation of what follows. Otherwise, we would have the same experience of hearing a C note whether it was part of a Beethoven symphony or a piece of death metal (not Husserl’s example). It is, in temporal terms, contextual.

Husserl calls what has come before ‘retention’ and what follows ‘protention’ and each ‘contaminates’ the now as surely as the notes before and after that C note. What Derrida highlights in his critique of phenomenology here is that, despite retention and protention always being already part of the now, Husserl retains an unexamined faith that there is still – sort of – a now, which retention and protention contaminate. A pure ‘now’ is still, in some sense, posited, even as its impossibility is asserted. ‘Contamination’ supposes something to be contaminated.

This is not, as can be seen, a case where, with greater knowledge, with greater effort dedicated to the question, we could get to the pure now. The pure now is impossible. This ‘fixed point’ on which phenomenology bases its claims is always impossible, can never not be ‘contaminated.’ The concept of the pure now is a hope.

Derrida’s crucial insight is that this ‘hope’ is not an idiosyncrasy of phenomenology, nor only of its analysis of time. Rather, it is endemic to philosophy itself. We exist in a ‘flowing thisness’ and philosophy, again and again, posits ideal, timeless, pure forms, which life somehow contaminates – as though there were a something ‘before’ or ‘outside’ of life. This is the structure of most religious philosophies – the ideal being God, the contamination being humanity. Platonic forms are ‘ideal’ examples of things like circles, to which no actual circle could aspire. The critique of temporal purity is as valid when applied to the spatial dimension.

The history of metaphysics, then, is a history of our hopes for presence – for a pure, central, present object of enquiry, from which we can derive our knowledge – the self included. Derrida’s critique of speech and writing captures this – unlike writing, speech is seen as ‘pure’ language, and thus an expression of our ‘true’ being – the religious might call it the soul, the non-religious some other term that really means soul. In fact, Husserl at one point goes further, arguing that even speaking words is a form of contamination, as we may be misunderstood. It is only the speech in our own head that is the pure self – an argument Derrida fully critiques in his Speech and Phenomena, perhaps his most thoroughgoing analysis of the metaphysics of presence.

 

There is no going “beyond” metaphysics

As Derrida recognized, Heidegger had, both directly and indirectly, made a similar critique of Husserl and of Western metaphysics. Husserl had attempted to arrive at pure phenomena and describe beings independent of any presuppositions – ‘to the things themselves’ as Husserl famously put it. But, as we have seen, pure phenomena do not exist. This, for Heidegger, was one of the ways in which the ‘question of the meaning of Being’ has been lost. In its search for a fundamentum absolutum, of an indubitable grounding for metaphysics, the openness of Being, as the Greeks understood it, has been occluded. In addition, the distinction between essence and existence, and between the ideal and the real (‘whatness’ and ‘thatness’) are illusions; Being precedes both. The mistake lies as far back as Plato – the birth of Western philosophy, with its categories, its hierarchies and taxonomies, wherein the moment Being is forgotten.

For Derrida – whose ‘deconstruction’ is deliberately based on Heidegger’s ‘destruktion,’ a method of taking apart while leaving intact – Heidegger, despite himself, is unable to go beyond metaphysics as he explicitly attempts to do. But then, as Derrida himself is aware, neither does Derrida. Firstly, we have no language to do so that is not already informed by metaphysical propositions:

There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language – no syntax or lexicon – that is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition that has not already had to slip into the form, the logic and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.

Secondly, there is not ‘going beyond’ metaphysics, as this is to repeat the gesture about which he warns – to posit an ‘entity’ outside of (before, beyond) the mess of life. To take the example of the ‘now’ again: any analysis of the ‘now’ can only deal with the ‘now’ we have to deal with, impure as it is.

What Derrida does do, in recognizing this urge to posit the pure based on the impure, is to open up the possibility of a metaphysics that recognizes absence as fundamental to its structure. Derrida has some big gestures for this, such as his idea of hauntology, a near homonym of ontology, which studies ‘what there isn’t’ instead of ‘what there is’ (while recognizing the distinction is ultimately as contested, and revealing, as all dichotomies); thus histories that did not occur, beings that do not exist, futures and existents that never come to be – including pure democracy, the pure gift, pure hospitality. These limit cases, always beyond what can actually be, disclose knowledge about what there actually is, including concepts.

But his critique is also more intrinsic than that. Where there is ‘essence’ and ‘identity,’ Derrida posits ‘alterity’ and ‘difference.’ More, he posits ‘différance,’ a word he first uses in Speech and Phenomena. Pronounced exactly the same way as ‘difference’ (this is Derrida forcing the written word to be more decisive than the spoken) it is a complicated term, which incorporates the idea of differing and deferring. Western metaphysics has, in Derrida’s reading, always been a history of trying, as it were, to secure the meaning of words  – ‘truth is…’, ‘beauty is…’.

However, as anyone who has picked up a dictionary knows, every word is defined by another word, which is defined by another word – the meaning of word x is both deferred as we move along the chain, and is an effect of difference – we get its meaning in contrast to other words. There is no ur-word at the end of the dictionary, both sufficient to itself (it needs no other word to define it) and generative of everything else (thus producing meaning).

This is not accidental – ‘différance’ is built into language, as it is built into all concepts. It precedes meaning – for Derrida, fixing a meaning is a form of violence, and we should look not only at the act of doing so, but what it means that we attempt to. Deconstruction is a form of suspicion – Derrida sometimes described it as a parasitical method; anything is open to being deconstructed. But, as he pointed out, it is not imposed from without. Any text deconstructs itself the moment it attempts to fix meaning.

One could call Derrida’s work a metaphysics of absence as opposed to a metaphysics of presence, but it is the ways in which they intertwine that is of interest. And the effort metaphysics has expended on suppressing the absent – the gaps between ideas, the ghosts and specters that are called up within its thinking, the things that stand outside its purview in one era and why they are excluded. We are used to the Freudian concept that our words are not to be taken at face value – the unconscious, that exemplary sort of absence, is playing its part. Like a psychoanalyst of metaphysics, Derrida wants to know what is really being said.

If Western metaphysics is a search for fixed meanings, Derrida is not against this search. The search for the pure end term of religion – God – creates religion, the search for such things as Truth, consciousness and the self, generates philosophy. For Derrida, these searches are ‘tasks’ in the sense that we always already find ourselves – to use a Heideggerian term – ‘thrown’ into them. Part of our impulse is and will always be to seek an origin, or a culmination, or at least solid ground. At the moment we do so – given we can actually experience none of those things – we are performing a gesture, attempting to renounce the equivocal, expressing a hope, be it finding an origin of geometry or overcoming metaphysics.

Where Heidegger argued that we are reaching the end of metaphysics, Derrida argued that metaphysics – philosophy – always already works in the shadow of this death. It is a structural component of metaphysics to imagine its own completion, present and correct. Or, as Hegel put it in 1820:

Only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Western metaphysics will always search for the ideal, and believe itself to be edging forward towards it. Perhaps one day presence will triumph. But as Derrida noted, “The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.”

Idealism rediscovered (The Return of Metaphysics)

Reading | Philosophy

Prof. Paul Redding, PhD | 2022-03-06

In 2019, the American philosopher Robert Brandom published his long-awaited interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled, “A Spirit of Trust.” While many others have offered interpretations of this massively ambitious and daunting work from the early nineteenth century, none have elaborated its messages on the basis of a philosophical theory they themselves had forged in the context of highly technical debates at the heart of contemporary analytic philosophy. Brandom’s attraction to Hegel seems to have been from the start inextricably bound up with what had drawn him to heroes of analytic philosophy such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. V. O. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, and Donald Davidson—typical of the figures engaged with in his 1994 game-changing treatise in the philosophy of language, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Many would have scratched their heads: How could such apparently antithetical approaches as Hegel’s “absolute idealism” and contemporary analytic philosophy ever come to occupy the same intellectual space?

It is an oft-repeated story that the analytic approach to philosophy, which would come to dominate academic philosophy departments in the English-speaking world, had emerged around the turn of the twentieth century with the rebellion of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore against the British variant of Hegelianism then dominant at Cambridge. A crucial motivation for Russell in this attempt to drive Hegelianism from philosophy had been his attraction to the program of “logicism” developed by the German mathematician Gottlob Frege. But when Russel attempted to use Frege’s logic to secure the foundations not only of mathematics, but of the natural sciences, he run into trouble.

 

The new logic and its limits

The rapid growth of mathematics in the nineteenth century had led many to question the ultimate grounds of its increasingly abstract and counter-intuitive truths. Logicism was meant to address this need by demonstrating the “foundations” of mathematical knowledge in the a priori science of logic. However, the most recent logic available in England, an algebraic form of traditional Aristotelian logic introduced in the mid nineteenth century by George Boole, was regarded as inadequate to the task. In contrast, Frege had developed a revolutionary new “logical language”—in his original formulation, a “concept-script” (Begriffsschrift)—which radically broke with the Aristotelian form of logic that had endured for over two thousand years. Frege’s logic would be the starting point of the multi-volumed, Principia Mathematica on which Russell would work together with Alfred North Whitehead over the first decade of the new century.

Russell’s attitude towards Aristotelian logic in any of its forms was that it had provided a trojan horse for importing non-scientific assumptions into philosophy. Here he often portrayed Hegel’s philosophy, which he understood as based on Aristotle’s logic, as exemplifying the way a metaphysical house of cards could be constructed upon a faulty logical basis. As the new Frege-Russell approach to logic would soon be accepted as the way forward, it can be difficult to imagine there being a place for Hegel in the new intellectual environment, given the fact that Hegel had placed his logic at the centre of his philosophical system. Nevertheless, it would not take long for Russell’s vision for a new philosophy to start breaking down, and by the mid-century there had emerged paths along which a return of Hegel’s approach might be imagined.

Russell’s vision may have been born in the context of the felt need to supply a logical foundation for mathematics, but any philosophy, of course, must be capable of addressing a much wider range of issues. The obvious development for Russell was to extend the role of logic to the foundations of the natural sciences that were at that time undergoing revolutionary changes, but here the strains of the new approach would soon start to show. In contrast to pure mathematics, the natural sciences are crucially based on empirical experience, and Russell would soon attempt to marry the logicist project to a form of empiricism, with ideas of a “logical empiricism” or “logical positivism” developing especially among various influential groups in places such as Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s and 30s.

But such approaches faced the problem of how to conceive of the sensory “givens” of perception in relation to the entirely abstract conception of thoughts as envisioned by Frege. Traditional empiricism had pictured thoughts as made up of “ideas” or concepts that were derived from sensation, but Frege criticized any tendency to identify logical processes with psychological ones. Frege, in a rather Platonic fashion, conceived of laws of logic as dictating how rational beings ought to think; they were not generalizations of how humans actually think. This may not have been a problem when pondering the mind’s grasp of mathematical truths (so-called necessary truths, constrained by the very nature of mathematics), but could “thought” in this sense accommodate empirical, sense-derived content? In other words, could Frege’s logic account for contingent truths of experience upon which empiricists based the sciences of nature? It didn’t seem to.

In the algebraic version of Aristotelian logic introduced in the 1850s by Boole, there had been a place for simple object-centered judgments in which a predicate could be ascribed to a perceived object, as when one says of the sun that it shines. But Boole’s logic, seemingly restricted to such simple “one-placed” predicates, and unable to capture more complex judgments involving relations, was deemed useless by Frege and Russel for the project of grounding mathematical truths.

 

Sellars, the myth of the given and Hegel’s return

By the mid-50s, appeals to Hegel in relation to these sorts of problems were starting to appear. Two examples of these—both given as lectures in London—illustrate possible paths for Hegel’s return. In 1956, in a series of lectures delivered at the University of London under the title “The Myth of the Given,” the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars would refer to his response to the problems of logical empiricism as his “Méditations Hégéliennes,” and these lectures would be the taking-off point of Brandom’s later work. Three years later, in a now largely forgotten but forward-looking lecture on “The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel,” presented to a colloquium on “Contemporary British Philosophy,” the South African born peripatetic philosopher, John N. Findlay would discuss Hegel’s logic in relation to post-Principia developments in logic itself. Juxtaposed, the lectures might be regarded as directing a pincer-like attack on the empiricist and logicist flanks of Russell’s conception of philosophy.

At the core of Sellars’ criticism of the “myth” of the empiricist was the claim that empiricism conflated two distinct roles played by the mind’s alleged sensory states, conceived traditionally as “sensory ideas” or, more recently, as “sense-data.” On the one hand, they were meant to signal a causal role for the perceived object in the formation of perceptual knowledge. On the other, they were meant to play a justificatory role in relation to such knowledge claims—that is, to provide reasons, and not merely causes, for holding certain beliefs. If challenged, a person will typically cite other beliefs as reasons for holding a particular one—a situation that conforms with the idea that logical relations, as in the Fregean new paradigm, are conceived as holding primarily between the complete propositions expressed by asserted sentences, rather than between subjects and predicates of those sentences. But so-called “sense-data” were not supposed to have any logical form. Sense-data could only be seen to play the role of causes—the world’s brute impact on our senses—not reasons one could appeal to. How, then, could they play a role in justifying our knowledge claims?

Developing Sellars’ original ideas along a number of trajectories, Brandom would later suggest a way around the problem. One should forget about relations between individual statements and the world—statements and “facts”—and concentrate on relations among the statements used in talking about the world. One can exploit the logical links between asserted statements so as to develop a concept of their meanings. Thus, the meaning of a statement S could be thought of in terms of the range of other statements to which it was inferentially related. These include statements that could be inferred from it (what other statements a speaker was committed to in asserting S) and the statements from which the original statement could itself be inferred (the evidence the speaker might cite in support of S). It was this alternative approach that allowed earlier forms of idealism, like those of Kant and Hegel, back in.

In the first place, a “concept” was now no longer to be thought of as some sort of “faded” sensory idea, like the empiricists has thought. For Kant, a concept was a rule—a rule that, according to Brandom, governs the inferences that can be made among sentences expressing that concept. For example, my claim that this thing in front of me is a horse commits me to the further claim that it is an animal. The claim that it’s an animal commits me to the further claim that it is mortal, and so on. Next, while Kant, somewhat like the logical empiricists, conceived of thoughts as still in need of something “given” in experience (what he called “intuitions”), Hegel criticized this distinction between thought and experience. No aspect of experience remained unconceptualized.

Brandom also followed other suggestions in Sellars, such as the need for logic to capture modal claims about necessary and possible truths, a theme that brings us to Findlay’s lecture.

 

Findlay, Prior and the holism of logic

Findlay had just published a book on Hegel when he delivered his 1959 lecture, but important background to his comments there is to be found in yet another lecture series given in 1956—this time in Oxford rather than London. These were the “Locke Lectures” on “Time and Modality” that helped to open up not simply the area of modal logic but of a variety of logics now thought of under the general heading of “modal.” The series was given by the New Zealand logician, Arthur Prior, a former pupil of Findlay. Prior’s idea of the logics of time and modality, distinct from the type of logic introduced by Frege and Russell, drew upon earlier work of Findlay’s.

While not a logician himself, Findlay had long been interested in the subject and had introduced Prior to logic and its history when teaching in New Zealand in the 1930s. In the 1959 lecture, Findlay alluded to developments introduced by logicians in the decades after the appearance of Principia Mathematica, relating this history to the type of dialectical processes that had characterized Hegel’s logic. Principia, he pointed out, was not entirely made up of “clear-cut notions, fixed axioms and rigorous deductive chains.” In its “interstices” were ordinary English sentences in which Russell explained, interpreted and justified the way the symbols of the formal system functioned. After Principia, logicians had made the formal distinction between an “object language” that was talked about and the “meta-language” used to talk about it—a distinction, they claimed, that Russell had conflated. Hegel’s logic, Findlay contended, corresponded more to the logic of that “informal, non-formalizable passages of comment and discussion” found in the interstices of Russell’s text. This hierarchy challenged, Findlay thought, the very idea of some ultimate, unitary logical language and thereby the whole logicist project.

Findlay’s approach was more like that of late developers of the Boolean tradition such as the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce and the Cambridge logician W. E. Johnson, who had developed the Boolean from of logic so as to allow it to deal with the types of complex assertions treated by Frege and Russell. But for them, logic did not purport to be a complete language within which mathematical truths could be ultimately grounded. It was mathematical in virtue of providing formal models meant to illuminate the logical processes of reasoning in different types of contexts, including those specifically addressed by logic in the style of Frege and Russell.

By distancing ourselves from our own reasoning—by objectivizing our thought patterns in a foreign medium—such logical calculi can shed light on the nature of our rational capacities. But without interpretation, mathematical symbols are just squiggles on a page. Logical processes represented formally need to be interpreted within and assessed by a linguistically expressed rational capacity that is presupposed. Any attempts to fully explain the latter in terms of the formalism was condemned to circularity. This, thought Findlay, was at the heart of the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel’s dialectic shows us how natural creatures like ourselves are able to reflect upon and improve those finite reasoning processes which nature had originally supplied us with.

These lectures by both Sellars and Findlay would prove prophetic in many complementary ways. In the second half of the twentieth century, more holistic and historically sensitive approaches to knowledge, especially in the philosophy of science, would gain traction. Along with this, a plurality of modal logics as introduced by Prior’s “tense logic” would flourish, and especially find important places in emerging fields such as computer science, in which a basically Boolean approach to logic had been retained.

Habits and the myths that feed them, however, die hard. Many contemporary analytic philosophers still think of Hegel in terms of Russell’s early denunciations made on the basis of assumptions few would consciously hold today. In the longer run, history might well tell a different story to theirs about the fate of Hegel at the hands of Russell, and who ended up surviving that encounter.

Is intelligibility a pre-condition for existence? (The Return of Metaphysics)

Reading | Metaphysics

Prof. Robert Pippin, PhD | 2022-01-23

Philosophy is not an empirical enterprise. Its traditional claim is to be a form of knowledge about reality, even though it does not rely on observation about that reality. If there is philosophical knowledge, it is a priori knowledge, and if it is knowledge, it claims something true about reality not accessible to empirical observation or confirmation. Philosophy’s claims to a priori knowledge seems to lead us inevitably to what has always been, until the last two-hundred and fifty years or so, the center of philosophy, its inescapable ‘big’ question: metaphysics.

So, what happened two hundred and fifty years ago? Kant happened, in 1781. His The Critique of Pure Reason indicated, by its very title, bad news for the metaphysical tradition. There was no such power as an intuitive reason with access to any non-sensible realm of reality. Reason, thinking generally, was exclusively an activity, in no sense a perceptual power. Its main activity was inferring, deducing, systematizing, unifying, and was in no sense open to the world. The only such openness available for finite human beings was through our sensory powers and thinking’s task was the discriminating and unifying our experience. Assuming otherwise was the main reason philosophy had achieved no settled results in over two thousand years of speculation and had, instead, produced only unresolvable conflicts with equally good and equally paradoxical positions on either side of classical issues. Hegel, however, perhaps the most influential of the post-Kantian philosophers, took seriously Kant’s claim that, even if thought can’t know the world, it can know itself. That led him to a revival of the very enterprise Kant sought to eliminate: metaphysics, the study of the necessary features of existence.

 

What was metaphysics and Kant’s critique

Metaphysics claims to be knowledge of reality attained by pure reason alone, by ‘pure thinking’ unaided by empirical observation. This assumed, from the time of Plato and Aristotle until the great rationalist metaphysicians of the seventeenth century, that we possessed a capacity, a power of thinking, capable of doing so. The idea was that pure reason could determine “what the world could not but be,” in other words, what the conditions are for there to be a possible world at all. If there is metaphysical knowledge, it deals in necessity. The most famous instance of such a claim was and remains Plato’s theory of Ideas, but the medieval concept of realism, Descartes’s res cogitans and res extensa, Leibniz’s monads and Spinoza’s substance are obvious successors. This, in turn, assumed that there must be something like a “light of reason,” a capacity to grasp what could not be grasped in sensory experience. In Plato this meant “noesis,” in Aristotle the cooperation of the active and passive intellect, in Descartes, “clear and distinct ideas,” and so forth.

Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics was not welcome news, and not just to philosophers. It had been a matter of great importance in the Christian inheritance of the Greek metaphysical tradition that unaided human reason was indeed capable of establishing such claims as that there was a God, there was an immortal, immaterial soul, and that human beings were free and so morally accountable as individuals. Kant conceded that there may indeed be a realm of non-sensible reality, a “noumenal world,” but once we begin with a rigorous examination of our power to know, we had to conclude that we could know nothing about it.

But Kant did not completely deserve his reputation as the “all-destroyer.” He left pure reason one possible object: itself. Reason could establish the categorial elements of any thinking at all, elements without which no experience at all could be possible. We know only appearances, not things in themselves, but we could know something a priori about the objects of experience. We could at least have what one commentator called a “metaphysics of experience”: the necessary features of human experience. The philosophical labor needed to establish all of this amounted to a demonstration of such staggering brilliance and originality that it took many decades before its full power could be appreciated, but its immediate effect was devastating and changed the course of philosophy forever. It seemed to mean the death of metaphysics, pure reason’s attempt to know reality as it is in itself. And this left very unclear what there was left for philosophy to do.

 

Hegel’s resurrection of metaphysics

Despite Kant’s rejection of traditional metaphysics as impossible, it was essential to this enterprise that pure reason could know itself; pure thinking could determine what pure thinking must be such that determinate objects of thought were possible. But when pure thinking knows something about what pure thinking requires, what does it know? Does it know “how the human mind works, must work, in shaping the material of experience”? That would be a piece of substantive knowledge about… what exactly? A mental substance?

Enter the post-Kantian idealists, especially Hegel, and a certain sort of retrieval of metaphysics. Hegel’s basic claim had three components. The first is the claim that a priori knowledge of the world, the ordinary spatiotemporal world, is possible; knowledge about that world, but achieved independently of empirical experience. The second component is where all the interpretive controversies begin. It is the claim that this a priori knowledge, while in some sense ultimately about the world, consists in thinking’s or reason’s knowledge of itself; thinking’s understanding of thinking or, as Hegel designates, a “science of pure thinking.” This is what distinguishes classical rationalism from idealism, as Hegel (and Kant) understood it. The former holds that reason has access to its proper objects outside itself; the latter that the object of pure thinking is itself.  But there is clearly a question to be answered: how could we have a priori knowledge of reality, while the only object of our thinking is thought itself?

One long dominant interpretation of this apparent paradox holds that these two claims can be both assertable only if what there ‘really’ is, the ‘really real world,’ what is accessible only to pure reason alone, is itself thoughts, non-sensible objects;  something like the Absolute’s or God’s thinking itself, an inherent, evolving noetic structure, unfolding in time from the human perspective. Pure thought thinking itself is the manifestation of the noesis noeseos, God thinking himself, or it is the divine-like apprehension of the noetic reality that underlies experienced appearances. I cannot do so here, but I have argued for thirty years that that interpretation does not fit the text.

But apart from the interpretation issue, the most important critiques of idealism all hold that any such project is doomed from the start, that there is not and cannot be such a self-sufficient “pure thinking.” Such a broad counter claim is often summarized as a doctrine of “radical finitude.” This is an apt title since Hegel insists that, to use an Aristotelian formulation, “thinking thinking thinking” is not the thinking of any object (even “the subject’s forms”). Pure thinking’s object is itself but not as an object or event, rather its object is the thinking also interrogating thinking; a circle, not a dyadic relation; hence the provocative notion of “infinity,” without beginning or end.  The later anti-idealist criticism holds that thinking must always be understood as grounded on, or dependent on some sort of non-thinking ground, or materiality or contingency or the unconscious instinct or drive of the thinker.

In Hegel’s treatment, the topic of pure thinking is presented as having nothing to do with the existing human thinker, the subject, consciousness, the mind. The topic rather raises, as a problem, the possibility of the intelligibility of even whatever is being touted as pre-conscious source or hidden origin of the “subject,” the intelligibility of what is assumed in any such determinate identification as a knowledge claim. That source is either something available for some kind of apprehension or it is not. If it is, it must be subject to some regime of intelligibility for this determinacy to be accounted for. So, Hegel’s project is thought’s determination of what thought must be, its moments (Denkbestimmungen) in order to be a possible truth-bearer, a result that, for Hegel, immediately involves what could be the object of any truth claim.

In the face of this, if someone simply persists in asking what we were asking above: “But where is all this thinking and explaining happening?” all one can reply is “wherever there is thinking.” This is not to say that there is not always a thinker or subject of thought; it is to say that thought that can be truth-bearing is constituted by what is necessary for truth-bearing, by any being of whatever sort capable of objective (possibly true or false) judgment. Any such determination of a source or ground or subject-object, must still—so goes the case for the possible explication of absolute intelligibility—make sense within a general regime of sense-making, or nothing has been claimed by the putative claim for any such material ground or source. Any such criticism, in so far as it is a thinking, a judging, a claim to know, is always already a manifestation of a dependence on pure thinking and its conditions.

Pure thinking, as Hegel understands it, is neither dependent on, nor independent from, the empirical, or from materiality or the brain or whatever new “absolute” comes into fashion. That anti-Hegelian question already manifests (for the Hegelian) a misunderstanding of the question of pure thinking itself. This is not to deny that any reference to thinking presumes a thinker, indeed a living, purposive, finite, embodied rational thinker. It is, rather, to argue for the autonomy of the question of “any thinking at all,” whatever the existential status of the thinker. That is, it is to insist on the priority and autonomy of what he called “logic,” and that means for him its complete self-determination of its own “moments.”

Hegel’s enterprise takes as its topic the categories or “thought determinations” (Denkbestimmungen) necessary for thought to have determinate objective content, an enterprise that at the same time specifies the determinations inherent in the possible determinacy of being itself. That means it is a metaphysics, one based on the “identity,” in this sense, of “thinking and being.” This is not a knowledge of any non-sensible reality, it is a knowledge of any intelligible reality, the only kind there is. It is a revival of the great principle of classical philosophy: to be is to be intelligible. Thinking’s knowledge of itself is knowing what could be intelligible and therewith a knowledge of what could be.

Put a different way, the intelligibility of anything is just what it is to be that thing, to be determinately “this-such”(tode ti), the answer to the “what is it” (ti esti) question definitive of metaphysics since Aristotle. To be is to be intelligibly, determinately “what it is.” In knowing itself, thought knows of all things, what it is to be anything, a determinately intelligible anything. As for Aristotle, the task of metaphysics is not to say of any particular thing what it is; it is to determine what must be true of anything at all such that what it is in particular can be determined by the special sciences.

Hegel, and to some extent Leibniz, was the first major thinker in modernity to attempt such a revival of Aristotle (for all their differences) after the scorn heaped on him by the likes of Hobbes and Descartes, and what he accomplished remains a relatively unexplored option in the fate of metaphysics.