Anyway, I managed to record a video of the talk on my laptop (giving it a slightly weird angle), and I’ve uploaded it to youtube (see here). The talk takes up the first 30 minutes. This is followed by a 30 minute Q&A session with a respondent, and a further 50 minutes of less focused discussion.

As another point of interest. Ray Brassier’s most recent talk ‘How to Train an Animal that Makes Inferences: Sellars on Rules and Regularities’, is now available online courtesy of Lorenzo Chiesa (see here). It’s Ray at his best: clear exegesis of Sellars with wonderful and incisive commentary upon the consequences that must be drawn from it. It also contains a small exchange between Ray and Zizek, which fans of both/either may find interesting/entertaining.

Finally, I’ve just finished making the final edits to the submission draft of my thesis. It contains no substantial changes from the current available draft, other than the fixing of a few typos and the inclusion of an acknowledgements page. However, I feel bound to put it up here for the sake of completeness if nothing else. It’s available on the usual page, linked in the sidebar. Now I’m free to finish a paper I’ve been working on for a couple months now. I’m sure you’ll all be interested to read it once it arrives!

In other news, it appears that at the same time I was having my viva, I was being discussed in some small capacity in a paper given by Louis Morelle at the ENS (see here). I’m completely delighted by this, and I’d love to hear from anyone who was there (or from Louis himself, if he’s out there!) This was in the context of giving an overview of the philosophical divisions that have emerged in (or perhaps out of) Speculative Realism. On Morelle’s account, I stand allied to Ray Brassier’s naturalistic strand of SR, along with Martin Hagglund (who I’m afraid I haven’t read very much, which I must rectify). This is correct, as far as it goes. I’ve just recently laid out in brief the relationship between my work and Ray’s (here) and although there’s more to be said about it, it’s clear that he’s my closest philosophical ally. However, I didn’t say anything about my relation to SR there, and so I feel it appropriate to say something about it in light of this development.

I’ve said this before (in the comments here), but I’ll say it again: Speculative Realism doesn’t exist. I must insist that this isn’t meant as a slight to anyone (certainly not to Louis). There are people doing great work either directly under the heading of SR, or allied to it in more or less direct ways. The label has functioned to galvanise a lot of people, in a way that I think is broadly positive. Whatever we say about SR, even if it doesn’t exist as a genuine philosophical movement, the people who want it to exist as a genuine philosophical movement certainly do exist, and they’re not going away. There is a perfectly real social network here, with all the messy overlapping connections that indicates, and I like to count myself as part of it. I don’t count myself as a Speculative Realist though (“I don’t inhale”), because there simply isn’t enough to that label beyond rough social affiliations (and an interest in Meillassoux’s identification of correlationism) to make it worthwhile. For those who think this is a strange position to hold, I’d point out that it’s precisely the same reason I don’t count myself as an Analytic Philosopher, or as a Continental Philosopher. Yes, there are rough tendencies and points of reference that characterise each, but this simply isn’t good enough to make me want to identify myself with one social network I’m peripherally connected to over another. I’m an unorthodox Kantian, a heretical Platonist, a budding Sellarsian, a lapsed Deleuzian, a rogue Brandomian, a transcendental realist, and above all a Philosopher simpliciter. All these labels capture something useful about what I think and do. ‘Speculative Realist’ doesn’t, and I’m not sure it does for anyone else.

This is not supposed to discourage people. Keep doing what you’re doing, please! It’s profoundly good for philosophy. I just think we need to come up with some better identifiers. I have profound disagreements with the OOO crowd, but to their merit they seem to have a reasonably well defined set of commitments held in common (even if there are greater divisions between them than are often apparent (e.g., on the existence of non-material entities such as numbers (here))). This makes the ‘Object-Oriented’ label somewhat useful. I’m sure other useful labels will ultimately emerge, but this has to go hand in hand with the emergence of the variant positions that underlie them. We’ve got to be careful not to jump any guns (or sharks for that matter). We’re still swimming in a turbulent new philosophical milieu, traversed by all sorts of free floating ideas and influences. This is an environment in which distinctive new positions are bound to crystallise, and to some extent we’re already seeing the beginnings of this. Louis seems to have gone to some lengths in establishing a bestiary of these promethean forms, and I look forward to see how the taxonomies evolve as their subjects evolve in turn. Continentally inflected Sellarsianism (perhaps a better phrase than ‘continental scientism’) is a pretty new animal, and all its features aren’t entirely clear yet, but I hope there’ll be others willing to get involved in the process of determining them.

As a final note, for anyone who is in the Newcastle area, I’ll be giving a talk for the Newcastle Philosophy Society this Saturday (21st of Jan) at Barkollo, 22 Leazes Park Road, Newcastle NE1 4PG. People will apparently be having food from 1.30pm, but the talk starts at 2.00pm. The blurb for the talk is as follows:-

Only the Death of God Can Save Us

In keeping with the theme of God, this talk will aim to provide a definition of theism by first distinguishing between its metaphysical and ethical elements, and then examining the way these two sides relate to one another. The talk will then focus on the ethical dimension, trying to understand the relationship between the Divine and the Good. The principal focus of this will be the presentation of Plato’s argument in the Euthyphro, aiming to show that the Good must be independent of the Divine. The overall goal of the talk is to present the (controversial) position that not only is it possible to be ethical without being a theist, there is an important sense in which we must reject theism (and thus be a-theists) in order to fully embrace the ethical life.

Needless to say, I’m rather looking forward to it!

Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to address a few of the aspects of Dan’s post. I’m not going to cover everything, as it’s filled to the brim with interesting content. However, I do think that I can present my own point of view on several issues in a bit more detail, and provide some additional context for those who aren’t aware of the way mine and Ray’s Sellarsian projects have been developing of late. To this end, I’m going to carry on my recent practice of quoting from my own correspondence, and post a few snippets from my correspondence with Ray.

However, before I get down to this it’s useful to quickly summarise the central point of Dan’s post. His basic idea is that, although their rejection of the primacy of phenomenal givenness is highly laudable, both Badiou and Brandom end up going too far in minimising the role of experience, especially in their rejection of the role that sensation plays within it. Although the way this happens within each philosophical system differs, he takes it that they both seem to collapse back into something like Hegelian idealism, albeit from opposite directions. He sees myself and Ray as attempting to avoid this danger by championing the work of Sellars, ameliorating the Hegelian dangers of Brandom and Badiou by returning to a more Kantian approach to the relation between thought and Being. The aim here is to give experience its due, without collapsing back into the Myth of the Given, and thereby establish both the principled separation and effective connection between mind and world. However, Dan also suggests that Ray’s greater interest in Sellars’ account of sensation (and the associated notion of picturing) keeps him safer than my own more Brandomian proclivities. Needless to say, I’ve got a few points I’d like to make about this.

1. Brassier, Rationalism, and Me

Before I start addressing specific bits of Dan’s post, there’s an additional point I’d like to make about the relation between Ray’s work and my own. I cannot overstate Ray’s influence on my own thinking. He’s responsible for my increasing commitment to philosophical rationalism, and more recently for forcing me to return to the treasures of Plato’s work (which I’ll say more about below). We have some importantly different influences (Laruelle and Badiou on his side, and Deleuze and Heidegger on my own), and some equally importantly overlapping ones (Kant and Hegel). However, we came to Sellarsian philosophy independently and from different directions at about the same time. Ray has taken the more direct route by leaping headlong into Sellars’ own work (something which I’m lagging behind on), whereas I’ve taken the more indirect route, approaching it by way of Brandom’s eminently post-Sellarsian philosophy of language. This has lead to certain differences of expression and emphasis between us, but these only serve to strengthen our distinct lines of attack upon the conceptual citadel that is Sellars’ legacy. There are obviously disagreements between us, but even I’m not entirely sure we’re they all lie yet.

However, there is one helpful way of thinking about the difference in emphasis between our approaches, which reveals both how they differ and how they complement one another. Ray has famously spearheaded the charge to bring epistemology back into the fold of ‘continental philosophy’, with reasonable success, and I see myself as trying to lead a similar charge on a different front, namely, to bring semantics back into the fold. The systematic study of the content of thought is something that was central to the work of Hegel and Husserl, but the filtration of their legacy through Heidegger and Derrida (and even the later Wittgenstein) has left a philosophical landscape which is exceedingly hostile to the idea that there is a universal structure of thought, let alone that we can describe it in any level of detail. This hostility is one of the central props holding open the chasm between the analytic and continental traditions, and it must be conceptually demolished with as much pyrotechnic flair as we can muster. In this respect, the return of rationalists like Badiou and Meillassoux to the centre of mainstream continental discourse has been entirely positive. This also explains why some of the attempts to find common ground between the traditions by way of the legitimate parallels between Heidegger and Wittgenstein have been so unsuccessful, insofar as they try to use this prop as a bridge. Anyway, it’s important to see that my own and Ray’s charges are not opposed, but are part of a single rationalist campaign to return reason to its rightful place at the heart of philosophy. As Brandom is fond of saying: “semantics is the soft underbelly of epistemology”, and this makes my own concerns entirely congruent with Ray’s.

2. Perceptual Challenges

In order to keep this as brief as possible, I’m going to quote a bunch of passages from Dan’s post and then provide my own comments on them. I’m going to start by tackling the questions he raises about perception, sensation and metaphysics:-

Now, I think that Pete and Ray are prepared to agree in that Sellars’ own account of perception and his account of picturing are not obviously reconcilable with the minimalist account that Brandom provides. A discussion of these two positions merits a full scoped investigation which I intend to carry out in coming work. My impression is that the restriction of perceptual experience to judgments, with no intermediary states of the sort McDowell’s polemical reading argues for to play any part, creates problems for any claims to realism. Specifically, the flattening of perceptual judgments to the general capacity to have the appropriate RDRDs deflates sensible experience in the way that vitiates the way perception serves to anchor us in a causally autonomous world. For one of Sellars’ most important insights is that while perception is conceptual, the ontological constitution of sensation, while remaining epistemically mute, permits us to rehabilitate a notion of correspondence and a theory of picturing in which concepts and so perceptual judgments are causally knit to  physical objects, thus exceeding a purely semantic account of truth.

I’m afraid I disagree here. I think that Sellars’ account of picturing (and the post-Sellarsian accounts inspired by it, such as Ruth Millikan’s work) can be reconciled with Brandom’s minimalistic account of perception. The crucial Sellarsian point is that, in order to play the discursive role they do (i.e., language-entry moves), observation claims must be subject to a certain special kind of challenge on the basis of causal facts about the mechanisms that produce them. What Brandom does is to crystallise and condense this point. His minimalism consists in his insistence that these challenges, and the responses to them, need involve nothing like phenomenological descriptions of the content of the states our perceptual mechanisms are in during their production of observation claims. Put another way, there need be no deployment of my own special capacities to observe my own perceptual states, and a fortiori I need not even have such special capacities to count as perceiving something. This is not to say that the relevant arguments cannot involve such descriptions, or that we needn’t tell a story about creatures who do have the special capacities to produce them, just that none of this is required in order for the relevant epistemic features to be retained.

To see why, we must just apply the same strictures set in the example of the physicist to a different situation, of the sort proposed by McDowell: a man learns to reliably report that their neighbor is home when he sees that his car is parked in the driveway. For Brandom, assuming the man knows that he is reliable, this counts as observational knowledge and he sees that the neighbor is home. However, the difference between the direct knowledge that is involved in seeing that the neighbor is home by having the neighbor before his eyes, and the knowledge that would be obtained in seeing the same fact when seeing the car, is obscured thereby. Both instances would count as cases of direct observational knowledge, having the same underlying fact as their reported, propositional content, i.e. both report that ‘the neighbor is home’. And since they are both non-inferential states, one cannot appeal to the fact that the man ‘arrives’ at such knowledge by a prior consideration of the knowledge that the car is there, since then one must explain how this latter fact motivates the former in situ, which starts sounding a whole lot like inference again. Even if both cases could be construed as examples of non-inferential knowledge, it seems as if what Brassier describes above attests to a complicity between perception and sensible experience, i.e. natural linguistic objects are connected to physical events by the externalist requirement to be properly caused relation to environmental conditions. Picturing describes a non-semantic relation between perceptual states and the world which, while enveloped conceptually, retain autonomy.

The real issue here is what we mean by ‘non-inferential’ commitments. This has two dimensions: i) the normative sense in which entitlement to the commitment is not inferentially inherited from other commitments, and ii) the causal sense in which the commitment is not inferentially produced as the result of some process of reasoning. Both dimensions are important. On the one hand, if we are to stave off the Pyrrhonian skeptical regress, then we need to be able to tell a normative story about how at least some of our commitments can have non-inferential default entitlement. On the other, if we are to stave off challenges of idealism, then we need to be able to tell a causal story about how the world constrains us by directly disposing us to make certain claims about it. However, these dimensions don’t overlap seamlessly. One can become non-inferentially entitled to the same proposition by a number of different causal routes, and some of these causal routes can involve reasoning processes, even if not all of them can.

For example, I can tell that a glass of water is at room temperature by sticking my finger into it, or I can do so by sticking in an electronic thermometer. In each case, I gain a defeasible entitlement to the same claim, but the differences between the causal mechanisms through which the claim is produced mean there are different potential defeasors of the entitlement (e.g., my contracting leprosy, or the shoddy manufacture of the thermometer, respectively). This means that the way in which the observation claim could be challenged in each case is different, even if its consequences are strictly the same. Similarly, although it’s obvious that there is nothing like reasoning going on in the relatively immediate transmission of temperature stimuli from my finger to brain, the electronic thermometer has been designed to take one quantitative reading (e.g., mercury volume) and systematically translate it into another quantitative reading (e.g., degrees celsius). This is a very simple computation, but it is a kind of reasoning process. Modern science is built upon a panoply of much more complicated instruments that automate lengthy series of calculations which we previously would have had to wind our own inferential path through.

So, the normative issue of which observation claims we grant default entitlement to is essentially a matter of which inferential shortcuts we allow within the specific discursive context we’re in. This is why a physicist can count as non-inferentially observing a mu-meson flying through a bubble chamber, rather than inferring its presence from the vapour trail, regardless of whether the causal process that produces his commitment incorporates a quick little chain of reasoning or is merely reflex. It doesn’t matter which causal process is involved in taking the normative shortcut, what matters is whether the normative shortcut is permissible within that discursive context, i.e., in the context of trained physicists in a laboratory setting. This shortcut wouldn’t have been present when the bubble chamber was first invented, as the theories and practices upon which it was based would still be contentious enough to preclude such default entitlement. We can then even take the human element out of these shortcuts, and construct more elaborate observational devices on the basis of them. This is precisely what has happened in the development of increasingly sophisticated particle detectors over the last half-century or so.

Quickly parsing McDowell’s example then, yes, the man can ‘see’ that his neighbour is home by seeing that his car is in the drive, insofar as there is a reliable link between the two that has been transformed into an acceptable discursive shortcut. If asked by his wife whether his neighbour is home, he can simply look out the window and legitimately say ‘yes’, rather than ‘his car is in the drive, therefore he is home’. However, his claim is subject to challenges that the more reliable process of responding to the neighbour’s bodily presence is not, such as the assertion of the defeasor: ‘remember, honey, that he’s had car trouble of late, and has been biking to work a lot’. In conclusion, talking about picturing relations is fine, but this is a matter of understanding the ways that the functional structure of perceptual mechanisms underwrite challenges to the observation claims they produce, and this is something that extends beyond our own biological sensory systems to the experimental equipment we’ve built to augment them.

And Sellars’ supplementary account of picturing is not clearly reflected in Brandom, particularly since it is not clear that he would allow for the ontological role sensation plays within our understanding of perception.

Again, I think that an account of picturing can be slotted in to Brandom’s minimalist account. However, the real problem here is the idea of ‘ontological role’. The whole point of my approach is to derive the very idea of something like ‘ontological role’ from the structure of objective discourse itself, and particularly the way it necessarily involves perceptual constraint. This precludes me from using any ontological claims to describe the nature of perception. This is why I find Brandom’s rigorously non-metaphysical account so compelling. I thus think we have to be very careful in talking about the ontological or metaphysical valence of sensation not to put the metaphysical cart before the epistemological horse.

My own position on this matter is that Brandom’s strict inferentialism seems to reproduce the pragmatic conflation of thinking and being which already plagued Quine, and which ends up undermining materialism, not unlike Badiou, in lacking the sufficient resources to disambiguate between form and content. Content dissolves into propositional content, and what Pete calls a ‘thick’ sense of reality falls out the window. I think with Pete that a thick notion of reality is necessary, and that such a notion needs to be advanced without reintroducing the metaphysical dualism of thought and matter. Thus the key moment for Brassier remains the Kantian juncture between the non-metaphysical normative space of reasons and the ontological-natural-causal domain of natural scientific research, while for Pete’s more Brandomian, and by extension Hegelian, position (although I agree with Zizek in that Pittsburg Hegelianism is a misreading of Hegel) the primary task is to eviscerate the myth of phenomenological content in favor of the primacy of logical relation in a deflationary account of thought.

I’m pretty much behind this, but I take issue with being described as being more Hegelian because I am more Brandomian. I aim to stand with Ray in the Kantian juncture, I simply try to do it by cultivating the Kantian themes implicit within Brandom’s work against his own more Hegelian intuitions. There is sometimes a tension between Sellars/Kant and Rorty/Hegel in Brandom’s work (e.g., in his more recent work on modal semantics and empirical content), and here I try to push Brandom back towards the former in opposition to the latter.

3. The Value of Aesthetics

I’m now going to tackle what Dan has to say about aesthetics, perception and value. To begin:-

Here recent questions about aesthetics raised by Peter and Brassier become peculiarly interesting, since I think they can allow us to see how perception continues to play a role in the story in a way that illuminates the peculiarity of Sellars’ position. As I take it, Brassier endorses the modern severance of the beautiful from the sensible, thereby advocating the former’s allotment to the conceptual. Here I agree with Pete in that the intrication between the Beautiful, the Good, and Value brings Plato to the context of a rationalist epistemology with an inferentialist bent. The basic idea is that we can distinguish Beauty as a species of Value, with varying scales of Universality. Thus Pete distinguishes a broad sense of Beauty akin to that of Value-in-itself, or its pure form, which is independent of all rational interests, and a narrower sense in which different aesthetic values are pitted against each other within the conceptual norms of the sensus communis and which make possible the negotiation of aesthetic judgments.

What he’s discussing here are ideas that I’ve been developing in correspondence (principally with Ray) that I haven’t yet posted on the blog. I’m now going to post some of that correspondence in order to contextualise what he says. I’m principally going to quote myself, but I will include a small quote from Ray in order to make the best sense of what is said. I’m never quite sure of the ettiquette of quoting from emails on blogs, and I try to err on the side of caution, but I don’t think Ray would mind in this case. Here is the relevant part of the first email from me on the matter:-

I’ve had another idea that I think you might find interesting. I’ve told you about my attempt to provide an alternative categorical imperative before: the idea that one must preserve the institution of rationality itself above all things [see here]. This is of course part of a more complex structure of imperatives, but it provides the crucial link between the abstract transcendental norms of rationality (e.g., the obligation to divest oneself of incompatible commitments), and the concrete structural norms through which these are instituted within a rational community (e.g., the norms through which we individuate rational subjects and the acts through which they undertake commitments). It commits us to having to deal with the actual way in which rationality is instituted in the world, and thus forces us to engage in the kind of complex instrumental reasoning regarding our practices that Kant’s categorical imperative eschews. The big problem I’ve had so far is justifying this idea. I now think I may have found this justification in the most unlikely of places – Plato’s account of the Beautiful.

I’m starting to think that Plato’s claim that the Beautiful itself is what is most beautiful is correct. This is normally interpreted as a matter of some archetype of beauty, which is itself in some sense a beautiful thing. This obviously doesn’t work. However, if one instead interprets it as the claim that the very fact that there is beauty in the world is what is most beautiful, then it makes a lot more sense. This beauty is something which shines through in every beautiful thing, rather than something to be opposed to them as a further thing with which they could be compared. In addition to being valuable for its specific features, each beautiful thing is valuable insofar as it manifests beauty as such. I think this is a pretty interesting idea in itself, but it becomes far more interesting if we expand it to the genus of Value as such. This would mean that what is most valuable is that some things (be they objects such as artworks, or actions such as good works) are valuable. This is a kind of transcendental value that all valuable things manifest. Given this, we could categorically prioritise the value of anything that is a condition of the possibility of imbuing things with value. Given that the institution of rationality is the fundamental condition of this, we can thereby justify the categorical imperative I’ve proposed.

What’s even more fascinating is that this provides an interesting way of thinking about the various different species of Value, such as Beauty, Goodness and Truth. What is most good is that there is goodness (this prioritises the institution of an ethical community), and what is most true is that there are truths (this is a nice counter to relativism). Moreover, it lets us think about the relationships between them in interesting ways.

To begin with, Beauty is that which is supposed to be valuable in itself independently of any practical or instrumental worth. There are some tricky issues in working out this claim, such as how to make this independence compatible with the idea that it isn’t intrinsic (i.e., that it is imbued), and the distinct between Art and natural Beauty. I think the former question can be handled reasonably easily, insofar as we can explain Moore’s proof of intrinsic value (i.e., imagine two universes without people, but one has an artwork in it, which one is more deserving of existence?) in terms of the way hypothetical reasoning functions. The underlying phenomenon is essentially the same as Kripkean rigidity: the normative properties we ascribe to things in counterfactual situations are the same as those we ascribe to things in actual situations, with all this implies, unless stipulated otherwise. This should be sufficient to let us separate independence from intrinsicality. The latter question is a lot more tricky, and I need to think about it more. It’s exceptionally important given the connection between Art and the Foucauldian theories of Freedom and Justice I’ve been developing, in which the imperative is to construct ourselves (as individuals and as collectives, respectively) as works of Art, in accordance with the ideal of rational autonomy [see here]. I suspect there’s a strong connection here.

Following this, Goodness is that which is the condition for Beauty, insofar as it is the norm of acting in accordance with the categorical imperative of maintaining the institution of rationality, without which there could be no Beauty. There is thus a sense in which Beauty is a higher ideal than Goodness, insofar as it is not absolutely independent in the same way. However, this subordination also conceals a prioritisation, insofar as because Goodness is necessary for Beauty, we must follow the dictates of ethics over those of aesthetics. This means that the categorical imperative is truly categorical even though it derives its force from elsewhere. We must perpetuate the institution of rationality even when faced with the transitory destruction of Beauty. This can be true even when it is true that a universe containing an artwork is in some sense better than one without. I still need to connect all this to the principle of autonomy, and thus to the ethics of Freedom and the politics of Justice, but I think it can be done, and that it’s natural to see these as species of the Good.

Finally, I think we can place Truth within the same hierarchy as the Good and the Beautiful. This is because we can see that the fundamental norms of discourse which constitute the ideal of truth are conditions of the possibility of the institution of rationality. In a sense, they are the most fundamental layer of the transcendental cake. There can’t be any effective ascription or revision ethical claims, let alone aesthetic claims, without them. However, it seems to me that the Good still mediates the ideal of truth, insofar as we can imagine legitimate situations in which the quest for truth would be truncated in favour of ethical demands. The Good deals with the way in which the ideal of truth is instituted in practice, and thus retains its categorical status within the practical domain. This is something that requires working out in detail though. When we consider the relation to Beauty, we actually end up with the classic question of whether Truth is beautiful. This then gets broken down into a series of complex issues: Is the sheer fact that there are truths valuable in itself? (I’d suggest yes, but this needs working out); Is every specific truth valuable simply qua truth, or is there a further non-instrumental sense in which specific truths can be valuable? (again, I’d suggest yes in some but not all cases, such as some of the truth of mathematics, which may be profoundly beautiful); What is the hierarchical relation between the value of Truth/truths and Beauty/beautiful things? (this one is going to be especially complex, I’d suggest that (i) Truth is subordinated to Beauty in the same way as the Good is, but that it’s own Beauty puts it above all other specific Beautiful things/states of affairs, (ii) both Truth and Beauty rank above any particular truth or beauty, and (iii) that there is a free for all between specific truths and specific beautiful things.) Regardless, it’s fantastic to be able to resurrect this kind of question.

Needless to say, this is all pretty rough, but I really like the shape it’s taking. I never would have suspected I’d become a Platonist, but I suppose you’ve been a bad influence on me. I’m hoping to start a Plato reading group up here with the intention of reading through the collected works. I don’t know if it’ll come together, but it’d really give me the incentive to familiarise myself with it all. I’m also now convinced that I need to read Lotze, as I suspect this might not be too far away from his normative reading of Plato.

Ray responded to this by challenging my use of the notion of the Beautiful, and raising a number of really interesting questions in relation to it:-

Your thoughts below on Plato are fascinating, as always. I guess it’s the idea of the beautiful that is most problematic and most difficult to rehabilitate for me, since I take it it’s precisely the category of the aesthetic, in its alleged contradistinction to the conceptual, that artistic modernism necessarily subverted, and once the bond between beauty and sensation has been severed—as I think it must– then the distinction between the beautiful thing and the beautiful as such, or “unthinged beauty”, becomes more difficult to articulate than in the cases of truth or goodness, precisely insofar as the characteristic marks of the beautiful become wholly conceptual (as when mathematicians speak of a “beautiful proof”). Indeed, ironically enough, I note that for a long time now, my mistrust of the category of the beautiful as applied to art has been accompanied by a tendency to characterize abstract conceptual structures as beautiful in themselves: Sellars’ for instance! But must the obverse of learning to conceptualize feeling be the aestheticization of thinking? Is the aestheticization of the conceptual the unwitting complement to the de-aestheticization of sensation? Perhaps Hegel had already worked some of this out in his account of the death of art? Is the reified dualism of reason and feeling overcome when the beautiful is reconceived as the “self-showing” or “exhibition” of the concept? I’d be very keen to learn if is this is part of what Hegel meant, and I suspect it may be quite close, or at least pertinent, to what you are trying to work out with Plato.

This forced me to articulate some of my ideas in greater detail, particularly on aesthetics and the place of the notion of the Beautiful within it. It’s these comments that Dan was alluding to in his talk about the split between the two senses of Beauty above:-

I’m glad you found my thoughts interesting. You certainly raise some difficult questions in response. My own thinking on the nature of Beauty and Art has been undergoing a lot of interesting transformations of late. I’ve always been a big fan of both Kant’s aesthetics and Deleuze’s aesthetics (with Heidegger sitting somewhere in the middle), but I’ve had great difficulty in reconciling them, despite certain obvious affinities (e.g., in the account of the Sublime). I most certainly need to read Hegel, and see whether he can help me resolve some of these issues. What has always attracted me to Kant’s aesthetics (other than my obsession with his transcendental psychological analysis of the experience of the Sublime and the Beautiful) is his emphasis upon the subjective universality of aesthetic judgements and his insistence upon their disinterestedness, both of which capture important features of the structure of arguments about aesthetic value, in my opinion. These correspond to what I called in the last email non-intrinsicality and independence. By contrast, what has always attracted me to Deleuze’s aesthetics is his insistence that Art is not a matter of communication, but one of composition. It is not something principally concerned with the artist’s intentions, but with the artwork itself. I support this even in the face of Deleuze’s notorious hostility to conceptual art, insofar as I think it’s entirely possible to analyse conceptual art as using conceptual materials to compose affects that deploy our conceptual capacities, rather than our sensory capacities. The real problem with both Kant and Deleuze is accounting for the distinction between Nature and Art. Kant treats Art as for the most part a pale imitation of the Beauty of Nature, and Deleuze’s focus on the independence of the artwork prevents him from drawing the distinction from the other side, as it were.

My Platonic musings have opened up a possible path out of these difficulties. This is because I’ve been forced to consider Beauty as a species of Value independent of the nature of the aesthetic experience, which is something that both Kant and Deleuze are very focused upon. I still haven’t settled on fixed terminology here, but I’m tempted to distinguish between a broad and a narrow sense of ‘beauty’. The broad sense is precisely what I was trying to define in the last email: that value which is entirely unconditional, insofar as it is entirely independent of all interests. It is crucial that it is even independent of the formal interests of reason itself. It is the limit-case of Value: what is purely and simply valuable. In this it exemplifies both of the Kantian characteristics above: subjective universality and disinterestedness. However, it’s important to recognise that this simplicity does not completely isolate it from rational assessment, leaving it open only to revelation (becoming its degenerate theological form: [the holy]). It is perfectly licit for us to argue about why something is valuable in this sense, and whether something is more or less valuable than something else, in virtue of a variety of other qualities it possesses. However, I suspect that such discourses are to some extent free-floating, and can never become anchored in any sort of fundamental reason why any given thing is valuable in this way (in contrast to ethics). They will thus always be grounded in something like a Kantian sensus communis, which establishes the consensual premises from which aesthetic discourse can proceed. It is important that this need not be understood entirely in terms of common sensory capacities, but equally involves common conceptual capacities. It’s simply that these conceptual capacities play a role in the production of affective experience. It is at the level of these capacities and the way they constitute our sensus communis that we start requiring more specific aesthetic categories, and this is where the narrow concept of Beauty is to be found, describing one kind of aesthetic value as opposed to another (e.g., as opposed to the Sublime, which is also a species of the Beautiful broadly construed). There is plenty of room to integrate the insights of Deleuze’s aesthetics at this level.

The question is then how to distinguish Beauty in Art and Nature. It’s possible to think that this is a non-problem. Art is simply just Beauty that contingently happens to be composed by rational agents for rational agents, but this has no important baring upon the nature of its Beauty. I don’t think that this answer is satisfactory, and I suspect this is where Hegel will perhaps turn out to be helpful. The difficulty for me here is reconciling the seemingly intentional nature of Art with what I think is Deleuze’s correct assessment of its non-communicative character. I think that the secret is that Art must engage our communicative capacities, without thereby being a communication. Art is framed in such a way as to produce affective experiences that are dependent upon our communicative understanding, without thereby having anything like a determinate semantic content. This makes Art essentially conceptual in a way that natural Beauty is not, even in cases of Art that are principally dependent upon our sensory capacities. This might be the basis of something like Hegel’s hierarchy of arts, insofar as one might argue that the highest forms of art are those that exemplify this conceptuality, but I’m not sure I’d be willing to endorse this yet. At the very least though, it enables us to distinguish forms of man-made Beauty that do not count as Art insofar as they are not framed in such a way as to involve our communicative capacities. There may be some sense in which my house is painted beautifully, even though it is not Art in any sense. There is equally the possibility of the communicative framing of Nature, which feeds into the degenerate theological forms of aesthetic value discussed above.

Finally, this feeds into some of the themes of my Spinoza post [again, see here], insofar as I’ve been trying to present politics as the practice of constructing the state as a work of Art in accordance with the ideal of Justice, in much the way that Foucault presents ethics as the practice of constructing oneself as a work of Art in accordance with the ideal of Freedom. You’ll see more of the details of my account of Freedom and Justice in the post, but I think it’s interesting to add here the way in which the notion of Art functions to supplement both of them. The first point is that it unbinds the process of construction from desire, in such a way that desire itself is something that can be acted upon. The second point is that although it does not unbind us from Freedom and Justice, which place fundamental limitations upon the process of self-construction, it nonetheless exceeds them. In essence, we are to build ourselves in accordance with values that exceed both our own desires on the one hand, and the enabling structures of Freedom and Justice on the other. The third point is that this makes the construction of a sensus communis an important aspect of the process of construction itself. I haven’t thought through this in detail, but it is worth thinking about. I believe Arendt was interested in the potential of this as a political concept. The final point is that there is something interesting about the idea that Art involves a communicative framing, and that we relate to ourselves as works of Art. In what sense are we framing our relations to ourselves communicatively here? I’m particularly interested in the sense in which something like a state could be seen to be relating to itself in a communicative fashion, especially when there is the possibility that there is nothing outside it to get the message.

All of this work on value theory and aesthetics is still in a very early stage of development (though there is a precursor: here), but I think it looks very promising. I’m also having a great deal of fun with it, and I’m aiming to submit something to the Thinking the Absolute conference at Liverpool Hope that draws on some of these ideas (my provisional title is ‘Absolute Spirit as a Work of Art’). Dan has riffed on these ideas in a number of interesting ways. He’s taken up the concern with the link between perception and the rough account of aesthetics I’ve presented in more detail than I’ve done, and he’s tried to clarify my idea of Art as communicatively framed without being communicative by introducing the concept of semantic indeterminacy.

With regard to the former riff, he’s mentioned something that we’ve discussed privately in more detail, namely, the incompleteness of Sellars’ account of ‘looks’ talk. He says:-

The basic idea is to disambiguate a sense of looks-talk which is not merely emphasizing the epistemic withdrawal of endorsement before a proposition about the world, i.e. in which the function of ‘x looks y to S’ is not reducible to ‘x withdraws endorsement from x is y’. This can be exemplified by using predicates such as ‘looking fuzzy’, where it is clear that the role of ‘looking’ therein is to make a report about a fact concerning the functioning of our perceptual mechanisms, and not the epistemic withdrawal of endorsement. This means that we can accept that there is a role to be played for experientially specific judgments about perception which provide the anchoring on sensibilia without rehabilitating the valence of sense datum transparency, and which would thus be continuous with the conceptual envelopment of the aesthetic.

This is a connection I had not yet made, and I think there’s a lot of very interesting work to be done here connecting up this expanded form of ‘looks’ talk with the structure of aesthetic discourse more generally. This is somewhere where I can provide some more additional context from a much older bit of correspondence I’ve been meaning to clean up and post here for a while. This is from a discussion of Sellars’ theory of perception between Ray and myself that came out of his comments on my Essay on Transcendental Realism, which in turn arose out of conversations we had at the Transcendental Realism Workshop. It expands on some of the ideas mentioned in my comments on Dan’s remarks on perception:-

Getting on to your points about Sellars’ account of perception, I should initially say that you’re right that I went beyond the Sellarsian position in talking of getting rid of intuitions entirely (and not merely pure forms of intuition). I’ve since had to opportunity to read James O’Shea’s book on Sellars, which I very much enjoyed, and thus now have a slightly better frame of reference from which to judge my proximity to Sellars. Now, I agree with you entirely that we must be able to make a place for sensation which does not collapse it into conception, and that doing so is both paramount to completing the eradication of givenness and more difficult than it seems. However, this is the part of Sellars’ account of perception that I can’t yet bring myself to endorse. I pretty much endorse the account of [Reliable Differential Responsive Dispositions (RDRDs)] (as modified slightly by Brandom) and the account of looks talk [see here], but I am unmoved by the grain argument, which seems to provide most of the motivation for his account. Similarly, as much as I have process philosophical leanings, I simply don’t think that such concerns about the roll of sensation can mandate the adoption of a process philosophical approach. Indeed, the distinction between physical1 and physical2 that Sellars proposes strikes me as reminiscent of ad hoc emergentism. I must emphasise that this is all tentative, as I have not read much of Sellars himself, but these are my first impressions on the matter.

To go into a bit more detail, I’m of the opinion that we need to tell a story about the role of sensations within perception that is analogous to (and importantly related to) the story we tell about reliable [differential] responsive dispositions. This is to say that it must be a story that is sufficiently abstract to be independent of the empirical study of the particular perceptual mechanisms we possess, while also making space for such empirical study. To this end, although I think that we should indeed talk about ‘sensations’, I think we should be wary of talking about ‘sensory content’, insofar as this encourages us to treat sensation as analogous to the propositional/conceptual content of seeing that/as. To explain further, what justifies talking of content in either case is the notion of identity of content. There are propositional contents just insofar as two different utterances can express the same proposition, and similarly there are sensory contents just insofar as two people (or the same person at different times) can have the same sensation. On this basis, there are two different ways in which one could articulate a notion of sensory content, lets call them content1 and content2.

Content1 is general enough that we can talk of identity (along with similarity and difference) relations between sensations in a way that does not depend upon any functional specification of the perceptual mechanisms in which they’re involved. Content2, by contrast, is dependent upon such functional specifications, so that we can only say that two people have the same sensory content only in the same way that we can say that two video tapes have the same content. It’s important to note that such functional specifications don’t require that the content be stored in the same ‘format’ as it were. We can talk about a VHS and a Betamax tape having the same contents because there is a functional mapping between them, much as we can talk of two different file formats storing the same content on a computer. What is important is that anything like identity relations are dependent upon such functional mappings. This means that whether or not two creatures can share something like a sensory content2 is dependent upon facts about the causal structure of their perceptual mechanisms that are to be determined by empirical study. I don’t have any problem with the idea of ‘sensory content’ if we’re talking about content2, but if we’re talking about content1, which I think most people are, then I have issues.

The only way in which it is possible to tell this kind of generic story about sensory content independent of the specific functional systems involved (content1) is to make it parasitic upon propositional content, which is independent in precisely this way. This is exactly what happens when we take ‘looks’ and ‘seems’ talk to describe internal states, because such talk is itself parasitic upon ‘is’ talk (as Sellars has shown). This is what leads us to talking about sensations as having properties analogous to those we ascribe to the things that cause them, such as colour and shape. This is also what seems to lead Sellars to talking as if there is ‘something’ that is pink and cubic. However, if we abandon content1, then we can retain the idea that there are sensations while nonetheless denying that these sensations have properties like ‘pinkness’ and ‘cubicness’. We can equally deny that they have properties like ‘homogeneity’, and thereby reject the grain argument. We still have to show that content2 can do all the jobs that people want content1 to do, which involves providing a more nuanced story about how ‘looks’ talk allows us to describe our sensations, but I think this is possible.

Let’s start with ‘looks’ talk. Following Sellars, we know that it’s ordinary use is essentially to express dispositions to make certain claims whilst nonetheless withholding assent from those claims. The most simple way in which this happens is when we have some knowledge which acts as a defeasor, for example, when I say ‘the ball looks green’ because I know that ‘the lightbulb illuminating the scene is blue’. This is not a matter of any change within my perceptual mechanisms, but a matter of my understanding of how my perceptual mechanisms work under various circumstances. However, ‘looks’ talk can also be used to describe the content of my sensations, such as when I describe the pink elephant I’m currently hallucinating. In this case we have to treat ‘looks’ talk as using concepts which ordinarily ascribe occurrent properties to perceived entities to indirectly describe internal states of our perceptual mechanisms. The best way to do this is by introducing what we might call second-order reliable [differential] responsive dispositions to respond to internal states, analogous to those dispositions Sellars posits for responding to our own internal thought episodes. These second-order [RDRDs] develop out of first order [RDRDs], insofar as my ability to describe my sensations as ‘coloured’ and ‘shaped’ is dependent upon my ability to describe things in the world as coloured and shaped. However, this does not mean that my sensations are coloured or shaped. Rather, our second order observations (or introspections) tell us about specific features of our internal states that are dependent upon the particular constitution of our perceptual mechanisms, and they do so by feeding into theories about how our perceptual mechanisms are structured. It just so happens that the primitive functional categorisation of our perceptual mechanisms we start with is modelled on the things we perceive (much as Sellars says). This does not mean that this theory, and our second order [RDRDs] can’t develop so as to model and respond to these states in more nuanced ways. It is both possible for us to develop more complex theories which allow us to take our own and others’ ‘looks’ talk to indicate certain states (even when the others in question do not understand the theory) and to develop new [RDRDs] to respond to features of our sensations that are not easily modelled on the things we perceive (e.g., the many counter-intuitive aspects of our sensory apparatus that Dennett is so fond of). This is somewhat sketchy, but I think it’s along the right lines.

The other major thing that needs addressing is the common factor problem. I think the content2 approach is not only perfectly adequate to this, but that it allows for quite an interesting position that incorporates aspects of both highest common factor accounts of perception and disjunctivist ones, insofar as it allows for a whole spectrum of similarity in content2. On the one hand, we can follow disjunctivism in allowing for situations in which the sensory content of a hallucination is distinct from that of a veridical perception, while maintaining that we cannot tell the difference between the two (our second order [RDRDs] being insufficiently sensitive or otherwise impaired), and on the other hand follow the highest common factor view in allowing for situations in which the sensory content is functionally identical despite the absence of the object perceived (e.g., perfect simulation through stimulation of the optic nerves). The interesting thing is that the extent to which there is a common factor in perception is something delegated to empirical study of the perceptual mechanisms involved. So, on this view, our sensations are things we have unique, but not privileged access to. We can be wrong about the character of our experience, but we can equally be trained to introspect interesting aspects of it that are not readily apparent.

As a final point, I also think that insofar as this approach bequeaths the study of sensations to empirical science, it opens us up to understanding the nature of sensations in far more complex ways (as opposed to classical pictorial approaches). To illustrate why this is interesting, it’s important to remember that sensations are functional states bound up in the causal mechanisms in which first order [RDRDs] consist. This means that, despite our rejection of sensations as possessing anything resembling conceptual content, they must be in some sense proto-conceptual insofar as they are involved in the process of eliciting conceptually articulated responses. Sensations do not need to be understood as manifolds of raw sensory input, but include the functional features of the processing of this data (which ultimately results in those conceptually articulated responses). How complex this processing is, and thus how the second order [RDRDs] fit into it is a matter for empirical study, but it would be reasonable to surmise that introspection can be involved at different levels of this process, rather than being limited to one.

I must reiterate that this is all very tentative. A large part of this tentativeness stems from my general discomfort with the use of ‘functional’ vocabulary insofar as I take this to be a species of normative vocabulary (and thus broadly interpretational discourse on my characterisation). This ties back into the brief point I made earlier about my opinion that functional discourse should be understood along the regulative lines one finds in the 3rd critique. In order to properly square the account above with my other commitments I thus need to complete this analysis of functional discourse, and secure my entitlement to functional concepts. I think this can be done, precisely because the above account does not give sensations any special metaphysical status, but places them squarely within the domain of empirical science. I think this provides the necessary disconnect between the normative terms used to discuss sensations and those used to discuss concepts, insofar as the former are regulatively deployed within objective discourse and the latter are constitutively (?) deployed within interpretational discourse. This requires more work though.

There’s a lot to process here, but you should be able to see the way it fleshes out what I earlier called our ‘special capacities to observe our own perceptual states’, in terms of what I call second-order RDRDs. What’s interesting about Dan’s suggestion is that it makes the sort of empirical study of the relationships between first-order RDRDs, second-order RDRDs, and our conceptual capacities I discuss here into a valuable resource for aesthetics. It may be that we can wean aesthetics from it’s historical dependence upon introspective phenomenology in favour of a more complicated and potent extrospective phenomenology.

Dan sums a lot of this up when he says:-

The idea would then be that the semantic indeterminacy introduced in artistic creation would be the (dialectical) interplay in the production of new perceptual judgments and relations, and which include (albeit not exclusively) statements about how things produce affect as states relative to the functioning of our sensory organs, i.e. perceiver-relative facts.  These would constitute the specifiable content which relativizes aesthetic judgment to perceptual judgments, though not wholly, without losing grip on participation in the generation and negotiation of value. The trick here is to coordinate properly aesthetic judgments in art with perceptual judgments (whose content is determinate) to explain how the indeterminacy of artistic works themselves is to be understood relative to the articulation of conceptual norms within the sensus communis. The obvious question is whether this requires that we make aesthetic judgments in nature subject to the same sort of dialectics, and how the intentional stance ultimately weighs in.

I don’t have anything to add to this other than to say that I agree entirely.

Finally, Dan poses a couple additional quandaries for the account of Value and Art laid out above:-

 As a provisory note, I would remark that the notion that value is ‘independent’ becomes quite difficult to cash out. On the one hand, I think that the distinction between the projection of value (which is our prerogative), and its construction (which we don’t make) is opaque for the moment. It also doesn’t seem clear to me what natural value consists in, beyond the trivial assertion that nature is not made by or for us. If by projection we simply mean that we need to deploy concepts to make aesthetic judgments, then it is not clear how these judgments are proper to art because of its intentional inflection. Clearly, some sort of projection in that sense would be necessary for natural judgment. This is ultimately a tangential matter.

There are two different registers that are getting mixed here: the difference between independence and intrinsicality, and the difference between communicative and non-communicative forms of Beauty. The former concerns the nature of Value as such (including Beauty) and the latter deals with the difference between Beauty in Art and Nature.

The first idea is that whether something is valuable (and how valuable it is) can be independent of our attitudes about it, which is to say, there is some important sense in which our attitudes about value can be wrong, without this being grounded in some intrinsic value property possessed by the thing, analogous to its various empirically describable properties. The means that we can have genuine arguments about value, without thereby thinking that these arguments are resolvable by the same means as arguments in the natural sciences. The justification of this idea is twofold. On the one hand, we acknowledge that (in accordance with Brandom’s objectivity proofs, Moore’s thought experiments, and Kripke’s ideas about rigid designations) we can have meaningful arguments about the value of things in counterfactual conditions in which our attitudes are different (e.g., if I’d been brought up to hate Captain Beefheart’s music, he’d still be a fucking genius) or non-existent (e.g., if humans had never evolved, the sunset would still be beautiful). On the other, we acknowledge that the essence of value (and all normative statuses) is its role in rationally motivating action (see here). The normative force in which value consists is impossible without the conditions facilitating rational action that the institution of rationality provides. It is in this sense that value is projected upon the world by us: it makes no sense outside of the framework of practical reason.

The second idea is that what makes something Art is the fact that it is framed in such a way as to stimulate not only the capacities that we use for engaging with non-intentional features of the world (which as Kant understood are conceptual as well as intuitive: the experience of beauty involves the freeplay of the imagination and the understanding), but also our capacities for engaging with its intentional features, namely, other rational agents, their actions, and their dispositions. Not all use of concepts is communicative. It’s not deploying our ability to use concepts in causing affective experience that makes something Art, it’s deploying those same abilities as if they were being used to interpret intentional phenomena (such as straight up linguistic communication) that does it. In essence, Art is the contribution to the Beauty of the world that we make, or that we see ourselves in. This maybe a bit Hegelian, but I need to do more reading to be sure.

4. Conclusion: The Road Ahead

That’s all I have to add to Dan’s musings, but I’d like to finish with a further quote from him that sums up the task we are faced with in very concise and powerful terms:-

The idea is finally to defend a sense of objectivity as part of metaphysics, without for this reason endorsing a neo-Scholastic metaphysics of objects, and a suitable notion of objective knowledge and so an epistemology, without for this reason endorsing a metaphysical divide between transcendence and transcendent.  And all of this while describing the nature of experience as involving a conceptually circumscribed role for perception as that which anchors our relation to the external world.

Wonderful.

It should go without saying that my views on a whole host of topics have changed a lot over the past few years. I was much more Deleuzian and a lot less Kantian when I wrote all these, and it shows in places. They’re also pretty dense and convoluted in places, particularly the essay on Hegel’s Logic and the dissertation on Deleuze. If you read them, take everything they say with a pinch of salt.

Anyway, time to get back to preparing for my viva!

This post is another fairly long one (8,000 words or so), but it not only contains my thoughts on Spinoza, but also some thoughts on Kant, Foucault, Sellars, Hegel, and Plato, which it pulls together to provide the outline of a theory of Justice. That may sound a bit over the top, but I’m nothing if not ambitious. Anyway, on with the show…

1. A Spinozan Problem

The central thesis that Levi examines is the idea that as our understanding of nature increases, we can gradually replace the ethical prescriptions (or norms) we inherit from the social traditions we find ourselves in with causal claims about the effects that the prescribed (or prohibited) actions have. To quote Levi:-

Spinoza’s idea seems to be that the more causal knowledge we have about our bodies, our psychology, world, and how the social world functions the more we’ll be able to dispense with ethical commandments. Here it’s important to be clear. Spinoza’s thesis is not that the more causal knowledge of body, mind, world, and society we develop the more unethical we’ll become. Rather, Spinoza’s claim is that as we acquire knowledge of body, mind, world, and society our reasons for doing things will change.

The idea here is that improved causal knowledge enables us to explicate the reasons why we follow these norms, assess these reasons, and then potentially revise our norms in accordance with this assessment. On the face of it, this kind of dynamic ethics is a very good idea, and Levi contrasts it to what he takes to be a more static deontological approach:-

The advantage of norms or commandments is that they are able to motivate behavior in the absence of the person possessing causal knowledge. The person who lacks knowledge of shellfish and how it’s likely to interact with the body will, if they accept the authority of the person or deity issuing the commandment, avoid eating shellfish. The problem with deontological approaches to ethics is that in their structure as commandment they tend to foreclose any way of evaluating commandments to determine whether they are well founded. The prohibition against eating shellfish makes this point clear. If my reason for not eating shellfish lies in God’s command, then anything I might learn about the properties of how my body and shellfish interact is irrelevant to whether I ought to eat shellfish. The prohibition is absolute and there are no circumstances under which I should eat shellfish. However, if it turns out that moral commandments are really dimly perceived causal claims, then it follows that further knowledge of how my body and shellfish interact, coupled with the development of safe ways of preserving shellfish and of evaluating whether they’re safe to eat could lead the community that formulated this prohibition to abandon it. Something along these lines seems to have taken place in contemporary society surrounding prohibitions against premarital sex, sex outside of marriage, and sex for the sake of pleasure. In a society where there’s no reliable birth control, these prohibitions make good causal sense. However, with the development of reliable forms of birth control, they no longer make sense.

I think this sets up a false dichotomy between norms as commandments whose force resides in some special authority, and norms as shorthand forms of causal knowledge that can ultimately be eliminated in favour of detailed and explicit causal analyses of ourselves and our environment. Not only do I think it is possible to occupy a middle ground here, I also think it is necessary to do so, because neither alternative is tenable.

As I think Levi would agree, Socrates’ challenge in the Euthyphro holds good. What is pious/moral/good must be so because it is, not because it is said to be by anyone. This is what defines the specific normative force of ethical demands (e.g., the prohibition of murder), as opposed to the normative force of various social conventions (e.g., dinner party etiquette). This is also to some extent commensurate with Kant’s conception of autonomy: not even God himself should be able to bind me to a norm unless I consent to be so bound (in some fashion). Ethical norms are then those norms that we cannot but help be bound by, insofar as they are derived from the universal structure of binding itself (again, in some fashion). This should indicate that, at the very least, deontological approaches derived from Kant’s account of autonomy don’t interpret ethical norms as commandments in the way Levi takes them too. However, regardless of whether one accepts this transition from Socrates to Kant, we can all agree that the model of ethical norms as commandments is untenable.

Where Levi and I (possibly) disagree is on the possibility of eliminating talk of specific ethical norms in favour of causal knowledge. To see why, it’s necessary to further unpack Spinoza’s account of the basis of normativity. The core feature of this account is his attempt to replace the absolute distinction between good and evil with the relative distinction between what is good and bad for a given mode. Although this is often read as the wholesale annihilation of teleology, there’s an important sense in which it is actually the transition to an immanent teleology. Whereas Aristotle attached different purposes to things/modes on the basis of the types of things/modes they are (e.g., each human’s telos qua human is to flourish), in such a way that there must be a transcendent assignment of purposes by a privileged unmoved mover, Spinoza attaches the same purpose to each thing/mode qua thing/mode, namely, to maintain itself in accordance with its essence. This translates into a dual imperative to survive and to maximise one’s power (understood as capacity). Whether something is good or bad is then judged relative to the perspective of a particular mode in satisfying this dual imperative: shellfish may be bad for me (because I’m allergic to it), but not necessarily for others, and high taxes may be bad for me (because I’m an ‘entrepreneur’), but good for society considered as a whole. This means that all normative force is derived from a simple and ontologically egalitarian principle.

It’s important to see how this derivation works though. The reason it underwrites the elimination of independent ethical principles in favour of causal principles is that it essentially transforms all ethical reasoning into instrumental reasoning. This is to say that all ethical reasoning becomes a matter of determining appropriate (and inappropriate) means to achieve the ultimate end of maintaining oneself in accord with one’s essence. It’s the fact that instrumental reasoning deploys facts about the causal factors involved in achieving the end in question that underwrites the elimination of distinct norms (I’ve written more about how such practical reasoning works here). Prima facie, there are two dangers that this approach must avoid:-

i) It must avoid collapsing into a form of egoism, wherein everyone is justified in doing anything to survive and maximise their power.

ii) It must avoid suppressing the individual’s freedom to determine their own rational ends, by preventing individuals from choosing to subordinate their own lives (and/or their own empowerment) to the service of something greater.

Spinoza avoids both of these dangers, but only up to a point. He does this by recognising that human beings compose larger modes, such as cities and states, which operate at a higher scale. He uses this to curb the potentially egoistic implications of the individual’s imperative to preserve itself, by subordinating it to the imperative to preserve the larger mode of which they are a part. Although it is still important to do what is good and avoid what is bad for me, it is more important do what is good and avoid what is bad for the state. This might sound somewhat authoritarian, but it is not insofar as the freedom of the individual is not supposed to be completely dissolved in that of the state considered as an individual entity in its own right. It’s simply that the norms governing the individuals who are part of the state are supposed to be justified in accordance with the role they play in maintaining the state in accordance with its essence, and this essence need not be authoritarian in form. The norms are thus in some sense reducible to causal facts about the social structures that constitute the state as a mode in its own right. However, as I said, this only avoids the above dangers up to a point.

The first issue is one of choosing the correct perspective from which to judge what is good and bad. There are a whole host of different modes to choose from here: there’s what’s good for me qua biological organism,what’s good for me qua person whose extended presence outlives this organism (be it in the form of a mind uploaded into software, or the records and memory-traces we leave behind), what’s good for my familial line (i.e., as a loose alliance of selfish genes), what’s good for any one of the socio-cultural groups I belong to (e.g., class, intellectual school, corporation, etc.), what’s good for my society (e.g., city, region, state, etc.), what’s good for my race/species (e.g., caucasian, human, primate, etc.), what’s good for the biosphere I belong to, and so on all the way up. Although we can possibly see some of these as being nested, and thus as offering neat relations of subordination (e.g., organism < familial line < species, or person < class < society), there are plenty of conflicts that can’t easily be resolved simply by invoking scale (e.g., organism vs. person, or region vs. class). There’s also no natural ceiling at which subordination stops. There are many who would subordinate the survival of our species to the survival of our biosphere, but there are very few who would defend a similar subordination of the survival of our biosphere to the survival of our solar system, yet Spinoza’s minimalist teleology provides no good way to block this result. There is something really intuitive about Spinoza’s proposal, but it simply lacks the resources to adequately individuate which modes we’re determining the good in relation to.

The second issue is related to the first, but it combines the problem of perspective with the issue of rational self-determination (danger (ii) above). By articulating the subordination of what is good for one mode to another in mereological terms (i.e., the needs of the parts are subordinated to the needs of the whole), Spinoza does allow us to subordinate our own lives to something greater, but it’s ontological foundation excludes the role of free choice in determining the collectives we wish to be part of. It should be obvious that I don’t mean some weird ontologically circumscribed free will here. I’m not complaining about Spinoza’s determinism, as this is precisely what I think is most laudable about his thought. The point is that which higher scale modes I count as part of (and thus should subordinate my own survival/empowerment to) is entirely a matter of how causally enmeshed I am in them, and has nothing to do with which groups I choose to identify with. This is reminiscent of some rather crass arguments regularly thrown at anti-capitalists: you cannot morally disentangle yourself from capitalism until you have causally disentangled yourself from it (i.e., go live in a hut in the middle of nowhere, stop drinking coffee, and forget about using the internet, you lousy hippies…). Although causal facts about the way we are enmeshed within various socio-economic structures should certainly play a role in determining our responsibilities to and on behalf of the collectives we’re part of, they can’t be made the only factors without abandoning the crucial normative role of self-determination in justifying political change. We must have at least some autonomy in determining which responsibilities we are bound by.

I think this shows that, although Spinoza’s approach has some promise, it simply isn’t tenable as it stands. It’s important to point out here that this situation isn’t improved by Deleuze and Guattari’s transformation of Spinoza’s ethical project. What they do is to essentially eliminate the role that individual essences play in Spinoza’s account. Instead of surviving by maintaining (and empowering) ourselves within the fixed limits determined by my essence, they enjoin us to shed the limitations that our structure imposes upon us (deterritorialisation) not with the aim of dissolving ourselves into the whole, but with the aim of restructuring ourselves so as to be more adaptable. This is a kind of empowerment unbounded by the limits of any putatively pre-determined essence. However, simply changing the specific nature of the end that is immanently bound up in each entity does not do anything to overcome the problems posed above. Spinozism on its own is not enough. If it is to live up to its promise, it must be supplemented.

2. A Kantian Supplement

It’s no secret what I think this supplement is. I’ve explained my belief that the structure of rational agency forms the basis of ethics  in several places (see here, here and here). I’ve also explained my belief that this means granting ethics (and the normative as such) complete independence from metaphysics (see here and here). In both these respects I’m resolutely Kantian. However, I don’t endorse the specifics of Kant’s own ethical philosophy (I reject the categorical imperative as he formulates it). Although I’ve said the odd positive thing about my views on ethics and politics (see here, here and here), I’ve yet to present anything like a complete alternative to Kant’s own deontological approach. I won’t attempt to do so here, but I will take this opportunity to pull some of the ideas I’ve discussed before into a more coherent outline. The problems with Spinoza’s approach discussed above provide the perfect context for addressing some of the ideas I’ve been developing on this front.

The first thing to tackle is the transition from ontology to deontology. As we explained above, Spinoza’s reduction of the normative to the causal is based upon an immanent telos he locates in every mode qua mode. This makes everything, from my cells, my organs, my body, my family, my city, my country, to the earth as a whole into an ethical subject of some sort. The first move we make is to deny this, and to accept that only some things are ethical subjects. However, the distinction between things which are and things which aren’t ethical subjects is not an ontological distinction of any kind. It is not a matter of having a special mode of Being (e.g., Existenz), but rather about occupying a certain sort of normative status, which means playing a certain role within a norm governed social practice. This is being counted as a rational agent, which is to say, as something that can be treated as responsible for its beliefs and actions, insofar as it is able to provide reasons for at least some of them.

This means that being a rational agent (and thus an ethical subject) is less like belonging to the species homo sapiens, and more like qualifying as a legal adult in a particular society. It might be that in both cases the circumstances under which someone is so classified are completely objectively assessable (e.g., having a certain genetic characteristics, and being over 18 years of age, respectively), but this is not the case with the consequences classifying someone as a legal adult, which prescribe certain ways of acting on their part, and on the part of others in relation to them. It is not anything about the intrinsic features of 18+ year olds which grants them this normative role within our practices, but rather a decision on behalf of that society (though it is of course possible to tell a causal story about how these features were involved in the production of that decision).

However, there are some important differences between rational agency and legal adulthood. First, although there’s a good sense in which the status of legal adulthood is constitutive for the whole practice of instituting laws, the status of rational agency is constitutive for the practice of instituting any norms at all. Whereas the role of legal adults is something that we’ve instituted, the role of rational agents is a transcendental condition of instituting any roles whatsoever, and as such is not itself instituted. This means that the consequences of classifying someone as a rational agent aren’t exactly decided by us, even if they’re not exactly objectively assessable either. Second, the circumstances under which it is appropriate to count something as a rational agent are a lot more complicated. We cannot simply choose to classify the chair I am sitting on as a rational agent, and ascribe to it various rights and responsibilities on this basis. We can only classify things as rational agents which have certain specific capacities, namely, the capacities to track theoretical and practical commitments and the inferential connections between them necessary to play the game of giving and asking for reasons. This has something to do with the idea that ought implies can, but I won’t go into that debate here.

The difficulty here is that these capacities must be specifiable in abstract functional terms, much like the abstract description of computational capacities provided by Turing machines, recursive functions and lambda calculus. This is because they are essentially capacities for manipulating tokens (i.e., sentences) the material constitution of which is completely irrelevant. Just as one can instantiate a computer in pressed silicon wafers, intricate networks of neurons, or elaborate systems of cats, mice, gates, pullies, and bits of cheese, you can instantiate a rational agent in anything that can be assembled so as to display the correct functional relationships. The million dollar question is exactly what this functional description is. I’m not going to provide a complete account of it here, as I haven’t got one. This shouldn’t be too surprising, given that to do so would essentially be to solve the problem of true AI outright (though another way of describing it would be completing Kant’s project of transcendental psychology). Nonetheless, there are a few things we can say about what this description would look like.

A rational agent is abstractly characterisable as a causal system that deals with two kinds of inputs and outputs: sentential inputs/outputs (S) and non-sentential inputs/outputs (NS). We can thus decompose it into subsystems, which fall into four distinct types:-

i) Reasoning Systems: these are subsystems that take sentential inputs and produce sentential outputs (S -> S). These are the mechanisms that are involved in keeping track of our theoretical and practical commitments (or beliefs and intentions, if you prefer), and updating these commitments on the basis of the inferential relations of consequence and incompatibility that hold between them. It’s theoretically possible to model these in a whole bunch of different ways, using the same resources deployed by computing theory to describe symbol processing systems in general. There’s way more technical detail to work out than I could reasonably go into here.

ii) Perceptual Systems: these are subsystems that take non-sentential inputs and produce sentential outputs (NS -> S). This is obviously a way of looking at the Sellarsian account of perception in terms of Reliable Differential Responsive Dispositions (RDRDs), though it’s also obvious that Sellars’ account requires that such subsystems (or dispositions) tie into reasoning subsystems in order to count as perception, rather than mere differential response. They translate events (stimuli) into sentences that denote the agent’s theoretical commitments.

iii) Actional Systems: these are subsystems that take sentential inputs and produce non-sentential outputs (S -> NS). Again, this is obviously a way of cashing out Sellars’ account of action in terms of RDRDs, which equally requires them to be tied into a reasoning subsystem of some sort. They translate the sentences that denote the agent’s practical commitments into events (actions).

iv) Coping Systems: these are subsystems that take non-sentential inputs and produce non-sentential outputs (NS -> NS). These might seem to be unrelated, insofar as they don’t involve sentential inputs or outputs, but they’re incredibly important. It’s understanding the role that these subsystems play that lets us reincorporate Heidegger’s insights about the practical basis of intentionality, insofar as Heidegger’s practices for dealing with equipment are just these kinds of coping system in which we move directly from sensory input (stimulus) to motor output (action). However, not all coping systems are Heideggerian practices so defined. On the one hand, only some processes involve the possibility of what Heidegger calls circumspective interpretation, which is essentially adaptive feedback (e.g., dynamically adjusting the force applied to a tool), and fewer still involve adaptive feedback that can proceed via a reasoning subsystem (e.g., reconsidering the force applied on the basis of a quick calculation), which Heidegger would call non-circumspective interpretation. There’s a lot more to say here, but I’ll cut it short.

Interestingly, all of these systems can be judged in terms of their reliability. Reasoning systems can be more or less reliable in computing outputs from inputs. This kind of reliability is what enables us to make sense of the notion of heuristics. Perceptual systems can be more or less reliable, and this is what underwrites an agent’s observational expertise. Actional systems can be more or less reliable, and this is what underwrites an agent’s practical expertise, although there is a blurry line here between the reliability of actional systems and the reliability of coping systems. This is related to (though not necessarily the same as) the distinction between conscious and unconscious practical expertise. All of these kinds of reliability can be understood to be forms of practical expertise in a broad sense, if we distinguish between broad and narrow senses of ‘practical’ by talking about causal systems in general (with unspecified types of inputs and outputs) and those systems that specifically produce non-sentential outputs (actional and coping processes). This is how we cash out Brandom’s (and Heidegger’s) idea that theoretical understanding is based in practical understanding, because broadly theoretical understanding consists in the possession of abilities (reasoning systems and perceptual systems) that are instances of practical abilities in the broad sense.

For a system to be counted as rational, it must not only be capable of both taking and producing sentential and non-sentential inputs and outputs, but the ways in which it consumes and produces these inputs and outputs must be subject to assessments of all four kinds of reliability in appropriate ways. First and foremost, it must possess a Core Reasoning System (CRS), or a highest-level reasoning subsystem that is not itself a subsystem of another reasoning system. This reasoning system tracks its theoretical and practical commitments and entitlements, and corresponds to what Brandom (following Kant) would call the transcendental unity of apperception. The CRS must reliably track its commitments. This relates to some of what I’ve written elsewhere (here) about sandbox responsibility. We treat children (and some of the mentally incapacitated) as having a kind of privative rational status precisely insofar as they aren’t reliable in this respect.

The Sellarsian conditions that we place on top of this are that the system has a set of reliable perceptual and actional systems that are correctly connected to the CRS (the second condition is what differentiates us from Parrots with RDRDs to say words in response to perceptual inputs, and dogs with RDRDs to produce actional outputs in response to words). The Heideggerian conditions are then that we have reliable coping systems (practices for dealing with things in the world) that are connected up with the CRS in such a way that the practical understanding implicit in them can potentially be deployed in reasoning (both practical and theoretical). This is something I’ve discussed more elsewhere (in section 4 of this post). The issue of the connection of perceptual and coping systems to the CRS relates to Kant’s discussion of the difference between empirical and transcendental apperception, and the fact that for any representation to count as conscious there must be the possibility of us becoming self-conscious of it (i.e., of bringing it under the transcendental unity of apperception, or of it feeding through the CRS). This is the terrain on which Brandom and McDowell’s debate on the nature of perception, and the status of unendorsed yet conceptually articulated contents is to be fought (see Brandom’s most recent paper on the topic here).

I must reiterate that this is a very sketchy outline of a functional description of rational agency, but it should be enough to demonstrate how we should proceed in providing a more complete account. What is required is a sort of abstract diagram of the various subsystems (and the relations between them) necessary to provide the minimal capacities characterisic of a rational agent. This would give us the essential resources required to distinguish those things that count as ethical subjects from those things that do not.

3. A Hegelian Spirit

Now we’ve made the move from ontology to deontology, we can reconsider some of the Spinozistic themes discussed earlier. The first thing to ask is whether there is a deontological parallel to Spinoza’s ontologically egalitarian telos of survival and empowerment. I think there is. I’ve written a bit about my interpretation of Foucault’s ethics of self-construction before (here), and I think he presents us with this parallel, in the form of a strange blend of Kant, Nietzsche, and Greek virtue ethics. To quote myself:-

[Foucault's ethics] is a Kantian aesthetics of existence in which we explicitly take up individuation as a structural end of practical reason itself, engaging in a continuous process of self-construction with the only purpose being that we become more able to construct ourselves, thereby intensifying the causal dimension of autonomy, or positive Freedom. It is essentially a far more developed version of both Heidegger’s ethics of authenticity, and Nietzsche’s ethics of adaptability. It is thus the natural development of virtue ethics, except that it moves beyond the notion virtue and focuses on the rational core of the notion of agent-centred ethics.

The core idea here is that reason itself demands that we experiment upon ourselves, as if constructing ourselves as a work of art, but always with the aim of maintaining and increasing our freedom to do so. This is to say that we should, by default, make our choices in such a way that we maintain/increase our capacity to choose, both by maintaing/increasing our capacities for action (and thus what options are available to us), but more fundamentally by maintaining/increasing our capacities for reasoning (and thus our ability to effectively decide between these options). The latter are more important insofar as they provide the causal conditions of all choice, not just the particular choices that new kinds of practical ability facilitate. The parallel with Spinoza here should be obvious. However, instead of being obliged to empower themselves in accordance with some personal essence, each rational agent has an obligation to empower themselves in accordance with the impersonal essence of rational agency itself, i.e., to become more free by becoming better rational agents. In essence, reason demands of us that we unshackle it from the limitations of the form in which it is instantiated.

It’s important to note that, much as with Spinoza, this is not all there is to the ethical for Foucault. To complete my self-quotation:-

However, it should not for that matter be taken as an alternative to act-centred ethics. Foucault is not calling for the collapse of social norms (be they ‘ethical’ or otherwise) into the play of self-development. This is the import of Foucault’s distinction between ethics (norms of self-relation) and morality (norms of other-relation), and although he is certainly critical of the contemporary tendency to ignore the former in favour of the latter, this does not mean that he wishes to reverse this trend.

The problem is that Foucault never completed his account of how these two normative dimensions (self-relation and other-relation) are integrated. However, there are certainly suggestions that can be taken up from his work, the most clear of which seems to be that the ethics of self-relation are to be supplemented by a politics of other-relation. What Foucault calls morality, far from being eliminated, is to be transposed from the religious to the political sphere. The parallel with Spinoza is rather obvious here. The question that faces us is how precisely to carry out this transposition within the context of Foucault’s ethical innovations.

An interesting way of going about this is to see how we could translate Spinoza’s mereological solution to the problem into the Kantian framework we’ve been outlining. The important thing to recognise here is that Spinoza’s ontology contains no monads (or simples) but only composites. All modes are constituted by other modes, and this proceeds all the way down to infinity. Even if we’re sympathetic to this ontological position (which I am), the shift from ontology to deontology reintroduces a distinction between deontological monads and deontological composites. This is to say a distinction between individual rational agents, who are not composed of other rational agents (e.g., my heart, lungs, and liver cannot be functionally described as having the capacities necessary to count as rational agents), and properly collective rational agents, who are composed of other rational agents (e.g., the British government is composed of individuals who are themselves rational agents). To accept that there are such genuinely collective rational agents is to develop the Kantian account of subjectivity just outlined into a Hegelian account of spirit.

It’s worthwhile unpacking this idea in a bit more detail. It is crucial to remember the abstractness of the functional structure of rational agency discussed above. If it doesn’t matter what material this functional structure is instantiated in, it is entirely possible for it to be instantiated by a group of other rational agents, as long as they are related in the appropriate ways. For example, taking the schema of reasoning, perceiving, acting and coping presented above, we can understand a democratic state as being composed of a central political discourse (e.g., a parliament) that fills the role of the CRS, connected to various actional subsystems (e.g., military, police, etc.) via its executive (e.g., the government), receiving inputs from various scientific discourses and other data collection and processing mechanisms that play the role of perceptual subsystems (e.g., scientific advisory bodies, think tanks, etc.), all situated in the context of a plethora of institutions that carry out its ordinary functions, playing the role of coping subsystems (e.g., the civil service, the tax collection agency, local councils, etc.). It’s important to bare in mind that a state doesn’t have to be a very good rational agent in order to count as one. The functional nature of the structure of rational agency allows us to make normative assessments of how effectively any particular structure implements it, and so we can castigate democracy in the UK for being fundamentally unable to deploy the best scientific data it receives within its reasoning, unable to effectively work out contradictions in the various policy commitments it undertakes (practical commitments) and the rationales it provides for them (theoretical commitments), and being essentially akratic (i.e., weak-willed) in it’s ability to translate its commitments into action.

Nonetheless, it’s still important to insist that not every group of rational agents who form some kind of larger causal system thereby form a collective rational agent. A mob may have something like a causal unity wherein the actions of the various individual agents that compose it react upon one another to constitute emergent tendencies and capacities, but this doesn’t make it an agent in its own right. Foucault is famous for warning us of the dangerous temptation to interpret any kind of social structure as if it were a single agent, amenable to description in simplistic intentional terms. His account of Power is supposed to provide us with a set of tools for providing alternative functional descriptions of the sort of decentralised networks of social interactions that constitute the majority of the social field. These practical systems are not all collective agents, even if all collective agents are practical systems.

When we try to use this Hegelian view of deontological composition to reconstruct Spinoza’s mereological ethics, we encounter an interesting tension between the parts and the whole. Although it’s not possible for a group of rational agents to compose a collective agent without being configured in an appropriate way, its important to realise that this configuration need not have their consent. Precisely what does and does not constitute consent (and thus complicity) is a tricky issue, but we can nonetheless recognise that it is possible for individuals to play roles within systems of collective agency to which they have not committed themselves to in any reasonable fashion. Slavery is the most obvious example here, but there are plenty more banal examples of emergent systems of rational action to be found in the world of the modern workplace, wherein the parts are for the most part reluctantly involved. This demonstrates a tension between the freedom of the individual agent qua part and the freedom of the collective agent qua whole. If the collective rational agent is simply supposed to maximise its own positive freedom, then there is no reason for it not to do so at the expense of the freedom of its parts. Indeed, Taylorism advocates the limitation of the freedom of the parts as a means toward the maximisation of the freedom of the whole (see Zamyatin’s We as the classic thought experiment on this issue).

The problem here is that we have not yet uncovered anything like an essence of the state which would impose limitations upon its process of self-realisation. Without this, it is governed by precisely the same formal end as individual rational agents, namely, striving for individual autonomy. What is required is that this be substituted with some notion of collective autonomy, in which the freedom of the parts is not subsumed within the freedom of the whole. The best way to do this is to show that the latter is a means in relation to the former as an end, or that the power of the collective as a rational agent in its own right is an enabling condition of the power of the individual rational agents that compose it. There are two distinct dimensions to this: the role of the collective in providing capacities that its members would lack without it (e.g., the way a union makes possible collective bargaining, or the way that a state can make possible contractual relations that otherwise would be unenforceable), and the role of the collective in resolving conflicts between the freedoms of its members. We will call these the ampliative and integrative dimensions of collective agency, respectively. The subordination of collective freedom to individual freedom means that we are only justified in limiting the freedom of individuals in order to increase the freedom of the collective if this in turn increases individual freedom in another way. The collective essentially mediates the trading of different individual freedoms against one another.

What this does is to create a sort of scale invariant ideal regarding the relationship between the freedom of the parts and the freedom of the whole. Obviously, the freedom of the deontological monads is what underlies everything else. This isn’t necessarily to say that there isn’t any value to the freedom of the deontological composites apart from its ampliative and integrative function, but it is obviously subordinate to the value of monadic freedom. There can then be as many different mereological levels as you like (e.g., family, city, state, federation, etc.), and the relationship between the intermediate layers of deontological composites will be the same, forming a neat hierarchy: the freedom of the level above is subordinate to that of the level below, bottoming out in monadic freedom. I think that this ideal is what we would call Justice. It is the notion of collective autonomy in accordance with which we carry out the political process of constructing the state as a work of art, corresponding to the notion of individual autonomy in accordance with which we carry the ethical process of constructing ourselves as a work of art.

4. Conclusion: A Platonic Law

We now have the basis of an agent-centred politics that complements Foucault’s agent-centred ethics, though what is perhaps more interesting is the way it parallels the central idea of Plato’s Republic: Justice is the mental health of the state. The state considered as a collective rational agent is governed by the same functional norms as individual rational agents, even if these are supplemented by considerations regarding the balance of capacities between parts and wholes. We need not accept Plato’s picture of the mind, or his conviction that we can deduce a perfect state from this picture, in order to see the truth of this idea. Justice is not an archetype of the state, but an ideal that takes the form of a task: the task of experimentally constructing social relationships with the aim of achieving a state of increasingly harmonious freedom.

There are still a few issues that need addressing, one of which is appropriately Platonic in origin. We still have not properly dealt with the issue of consent, or the problem of self-determination we posed for Spinoza. This is demonstrated by the fact that Plato’s Republic would potentially be permissible on the account provided so far. What I mean by this is that it would be possible to construct a state wherein the freedom of political self-determination, or the right to involvement in the political process of some form, was traded off for increased freedoms of other kinds. Some might see no problem with such a benevolent dictatorship, but I think that it can (and should) be ruled out in principle. The crucial issue is the principle of autonomy mentioned earlier (also discussed here). This is the idea that we are only committed to things that we somehow commit ourselves to. The important word in the last sentence is ‘somehow’, because it isn’t necessarily the case that we have to understand precisely what we’re committing ourselves to in order to commit ourselves to it. The important thing is that if one is to be somehow bound by the norms that are constitutive for particular collective, then there needs to be a story explaining how one becomes so bound. This is to say a story about how one becomes a genuine member of that collective.

This is one more thing that I can’t provide a complete account of, as there are some rather tricky details to work out. The biggest difficulty is explaining how we become part of communities that we don’t choose to join, but are merely socialised into. This is particularly pressing insofar as membership in such a community is what binds us to the norms governing the process of undertaking commitments themselves. I’ve often talked of the transcendental norms of rationality, which are the universal ahistorical norms governing the game of giving and asking for reasons as such. I’ve also said that these present a sort of limit-case of autonomy, because we are committed to them insofar as we are committed to anything at all. However, there are what we might call institutional norms of rationality, which are particular historically instituted norms that instantiate the transcendental norms (I talked about these under the heading of ‘structural norms’ here). The point here is that there need to be specific norms governing our practices for individuating what counts as a rational agent, and what counts as an act which commits them to something (be it a theoretical or a practical commitment). These include the norms of the language we use (e.g., which sentences can be inferred from other sentences), as well as other basic norms of social interaction (e.g., how to query or challenge someone else’s commitments), and even norms governing the socialisation of new rational agents (e.g., how to treat children who are not yet fully fledged rational agents).

The relation between the transcendental norms and the institutional norms is analogous to that between a protocol and its implementation. No specific implementation of the protocol is strictly necessary, as it could always have been implemented in other ways, but it is necessary that there be some implementation of it. Similarly, no particular set of institutional norms is necessary, but it is necessary that there be some such norms. One is bound by these norms in virtue of one’s socialisation into the particular rational community these norms institute, though one can become bound by others insofar as one enters into rational discourse with another such community. These institutional norms are thus part of the limit-case of autonomy. We are committed to them insofar as we use them to commit ourselves to anything. We are thus a member of a rational community insofar as we engage within others rationally within some instituted context. This is the most fundamental (and minimal) form of rational collectivity on top of which everything else is built. One can then be socialised into, implicitly incorporated into, or explicitly commit oneself to, other more substantial communities, such as societies that are built on laws. However, these exist outside of the limit-case of autonomy, and thus require something beyond the mere act of committing oneself to something to be bound by them. This means that one must have a say in how one is bound, no matter how slight. I think this is what ultimately undermines the dictatorial state, no matter how benevolent it may be.

The crucial thing here is that the ideal of Justice confronts all of us with the same task, namely, constructing the rational communities we are part of along certain lines. This means we are confronted with the task of instituting norms that structure the community in such a way as to amplify and integrate the freedoms of all those who are involved. This is to say that we are confronted with the task of instituting Law. It is important to remember here that not all norms are laws. Dinner party etiquette, the rules of football, the fashions of high society clothing, all these are in no sense legal norms. It is only those norms which attempt to instantiate Justice that are properly called laws. It is equally important to remember that legal institutions can take many different forms. Case law, the separation of legislature and judiciary, and the trial system are all contingent particulars of the way Law is instituted. What is universal is the fact that we all face the Law as equals, not in the manner of Kant’s moral law, wherein we must be able to universalise our own actions, but in virtue of the fact that we all are confronted with the task of constructing a free community. We are equal in the eyes of the Law, not principally as those who are subject to it, but as those who create it. It is thus entirely possible to institute differing legal statuses that grant different rights and responsibilities to those who occupy them. It may be permissible for a policeman or soldier to perform actions that don’t pass Kant’s test (at least crudely understood), as long as the role he occupies is part of the design of a Just society. I take this to be the essential insight of Rawls’ original position.

The most important thing about Law is that it is always in tension with Justice. The laws we institute are our attempts to instantiate Justice, but they can be imperfect or be rendered invalid by changes in our social conditions. This means that Law is always subject to challenge in the name of Justice. The authority of laws is not a matter of fiat. They are not simply commandments that are past down from on high, but are rather subject to challenge, reinterpretation and revision on the basis of reasons. If legal institutions do not take this into account then they are fundamentally unjust and therefore not really legal institutions. The Law must incorporate the means for its own revision, and these means must in some sense be open to all. It is when these means are truncated, distorted, or otherwise removed that it becomes possible to break the Law in the name of Justice, in order to reinstitute Law on a different basis. This is what undermines the benevolent dictatorship: freedom without the possibility of involvement in the process of instantiating Justice can never itself be Just. This means that there will always be circumstances in which we are justified in breaking with the norms of any rational community we have been bound to, in the name of Justice.

This returns us to Spinoza, and the topic we started out from: the elimination of norms in favour of causal knowledge. I believe that the account I have just outlined incorporates the real promise of Spinozism, namely, the eminently rationalist demand that all of our ethical prescriptions be based on good reasons. At no point should questions of the form ‘why should we (not) do x?’ receive answers of the form ‘because Y says so’. Moreover, this has been done in a way that retains the appeal to causal knowledge through the use of specifically instrumental reasoning. However, this instrumental reasoning is reasoning regarding what laws we should institute, so as best to achieve the end of maximising our collective freedom. It thus can’t be represented as anything like an elimination of norms. It is instead the call for a maximal involvement of our causal understanding of ourselves (both as individuals and as collectives) in the process of legislating the principles we are to live under, with the aim of building of and for ourselves a Just society. If anything, this supplemented Spinozism demands of us a renewed concern with norms, and the practices through which we institute them.

To start with, here’s something I wrote in response to a really excellent question from Alex Williams on my understanding of the relation between politics and negativity. It doesn’t really talk about politics much, but rather tries to disambiguate various ways in which the concept of negativity can be deployed philosophically. Hope you enjoy.

——
I haven’t read Benjamin Noys book on the matter, which I suspect I should, but I’m generally very skeptical of the way ‘negativity’ and ‘positivity’ get used in much of mainstream continental philosophical discourse. It’s one of my pet peeves actually, because it often ends up running together logical and metaphysical issues with metaphorics of affectivity (‘we must be positive’ or ‘we must be negative’, etc.). That said, I’ll try and disentangle the bits I think something can be said about as best as I can.

There’s basically three different registers in which talk of negativity is relevant: philosophy of logic, philosophy of subjectivity, and metaphysics. These overlap insofar as subjects can be conceived as necessarily having the capacity for reasoning (which is made explicit using logical vocabulary) and insofar as there are questions about the subjects place within reality (and the relation between logical and metaphysical structure more broadly). To understand the relations between these different ways of talking about negativity I’d like to trace a few historical debates running through Spinoza, Hegel, Deleuze, Heidegger, Sartre and Brandom.

Beginning with Spinoza, there is the famous principle that omnis determinatio est negatio - all determinations are fundamentally matter of negation, i.e., one characterises what something is (be it an individual mode or a general quality) by determining what it is not. Deleuze famously reads Spinoza contrary to this principle, and tries to develop his own metaphysics of ‘pure positivity’. This is not empty rhetoric, as we will come to see. The best way to understand this is to see the way this idea develops in Hegel’s philosophy of logic, which Brandom has done a good job of reconstructing and developing further. He picks out the notion of incompatibility as what is central to Hegel’s approach (which he takes to be synonymous with ‘determinate negation’ though I think this is perhaps an overstatement). Incompatibility is a relation that both propositions and concepts can stand in amongst themselves  (e.g., ‘My brother is upstairs’ and ‘My brother is out walking’ are incompatible, and the predicate concepts ‘…is red’ and ‘…is green’ are incompatible). Brandom’s idea is that Hegel takes the content of propositions and concepts to consist solely in their incompatibilities. This means one grasps the concept ’…is red’ and the property of redness that it corresponds to by understanding what something being red excludes as a possibility.

Brandom elaborates this point by showing that one can derive inclusive differences between predicates from these exclusive differences. The property of being a car and the property of being red are distinct without being incompatible (i.e., it is possible for there to be red cars), which is an inclusive difference between them. Yet, this can be derived from the fact that they are incompatible with different things (e.g., there can be green cars, but not green and red things, at least, not in the same spatio-temporal areas). This means that the incompatibility relations between predicates let one produce complete Aristotelian hierarchies of genus and species, in which one has a series of distinct highest level genera containing mutually exclusive species. Brandom has also been trying to show how one can use these relations between concepts to generate incompatibility relations between propositions, which we can then use to derive inferential relations between them (e.g., ‘x is a dog’ implies ‘x is a mammal’, because everything that is incompatible with being a [mammal] is also incompatible with being a dog, but not vice versa). This is what Brandom takes Hegel’s discussion of ‘mediation’ to be about. Regardless, Brandom shows how Hegel provides a conception of determination, or difference, which is based on a specific form of negativity, namely, incompatibility (or opposition), from which he derives more ordinary forms of difference, namely, distinction (or diversity). Indeed, Brandom thinks that the logical role of negation (i.e., the ‘not’) is just to make explicit these forms of difference.

Now, Brandom has a notoriously non-metaphysical reading of Hegel, and I’m certainly opposed to this particular aspect of his reconstruction. Because of his strong conception of the identity of thought and Being, Hegel takes relations of incompatibility and inferential mediation to be genuinely constitutive of the structure of the world, to the extent that he thinks that the notion of contradiction (which is based on incompatibility) not only plays a motive role in the process of reasoning (e.g., by forcing us to revise our contradictory claims into synthetic unities), but also in the unfolding of nature (i.e., his infamous discussions of contradictions driving growth in living things and motion in bodies). Following Deleuze and others, I think that this is a very forced interpretation of the nature of change. However, we can still see in Hegel an important connection between this interpretation of the logic of difference and negation and the nature of subjectivity. Hegel’s conception of subjectivity is essentially rational (it is a development of Kant’s on this point), and thus must be able to navigate the relations of determinate negation and inferential mediation that structure the world. Thought involves negativity in a very crucial way for Hegel, which becomes even more crucial in dialectic as the highest form of thought. Contradiction plays a motive role in the process of reasoning insofar as it forces us to revise not only the propositions we take to be true but also the concepts which articulate their content. Dialectic is just the process wherein we allow the content of concepts to unfold by way of working out the contradictions of their simpler forms until they become more complex and determinate. Again, Hegel simply reads this into the structure of the world itself because of his commitment to the identity of Being and thought.

Heidegger’s contribution to the debate over negativity is his discussion of the Nothing, which then gets taken up by Sartre and Badiou amongst others. I’m currently writing a big bit of my conclusion on this and it’s relation to the philosophy of logic (in order to conclusively refute Carnap’s criticisms of Heidegger), but I’ll try not to go into too much detail. The important point to make is that although Hegel and Heidegger both hold that Being and Nothing are identical, what they mean by this is very different. For Hegel, the claim is what he calls a speculative proposition. It’s explicitly a transitional claim that will ultimately be superseded by others. This is obvious if one remembers that the Logic is just a matter of explicating the content of the concept of Being, reaching it’s culmination in the fully articulated Absolute Idea. Being thus turns out not to be empty of content after all, it’s simply that it initially appears to be devoid of content, and the claim that it is identical with Nothing makes this explicit, thereby beginning the dialectic of explication. For Heidegger, the claim is not transitional at all. Heidegger thinks that the concept of Being has a very determinate and specific content, and that this is identical with the very determinate and specific content of the Nothing. The definite article is very important here. Hegel’s notion of Nothing is a general concept (i.e., nothingness) that applies to a plurality of nothings, whereas Heidegger is talking about a unique Nothing. He’s talking about the structure of the world as distinct from it’s contents, which for him is the structure of Dasein’s temporal projection of a world, or what he calls Temporalitat in Basic Problems of Phenomenology.

Leaving aside the specifics of Heidegger’s account of Being and its relation to time, the important thing is to get clear about this relationship between nothingness and negation. Nothingness is a fundamentally quantificational notion. It’s about there being a specific number of something that functions as a limit-case in relation to all other numbers, namely, zero. It is a limit-case insofar as it can be opposed to all other numerical possibilities (i.e., to there being something). It is thus in a sense the negation of the fact that there is something. We have nothings when we have what I call empty states-of-affairs. There is no milk in the fridge, no money in my bank account, and no resistance to capital. These are all relatively empty states-of-affairs, as they are absences of specific things. Heidegger’s Nothing is unique insofar as it is the limit-case of limit-cases. It is the absolutely empty state-of-affairs, or an unqualified absence of things. I think Heidegger is onto something when he equates Being and Nothing, insofar as it provides a way of defining Being as the unified structure of entities as such and as a whole (or the structure of reality), which in principle excludes onto-theology, insofar as Being is not. This means that there is interesting work to be done here regarding the metaphysical status of the Nothing, Nothingness, and its relation to negation, and so that there is an interesting debate to be had with figures like Badiou, who interprets a lot of this by way of the empty set, which is both singular (the Nothing) and general (Nothingness) insofar as all specific nothings are identical to it due to the axiom of extensionality. However, such debates presuppose getting clear about the relationship between thought and Being, and thus the relationship between logic and metaphysics. It is in this space that the various permutations of these themes we see coming out of Hegel and Heidegger (e.g., Sartre, Badiou, Laruelle, Ray) come into play.

I’ve made my own views about the relation between thought and Being, and logic and metaphysics particularly, very clear elsewhere. My position can be usefully contrasted with some of these successor positions. Beginning with Sartre, I think that his appropriations of both Hegel and Heidegger are terribly shallow. He does not appreciate the importance of incompatibility for Hegel, nor the notion of inference, and so develops a rather trite phenomenology of negation in which we trace the distinctions, or inclusive differences, between the concrete particulars we experience, rather than the rich connections between the general concepts that describe them. He does not appreciate the importance of the Nothing in Heidegger, abandoning it in favour of a metaphysics of Nothingness that he derives from his uninspired phenomenology of contrasts. He thus rejects both the resources that Hegel provides for developing an interesting account of thought, and the resources Heidegger provides for developing an interesting account of Being, and on top of this completely fails to circumscribe the methodological issues surrounding the relationship between thought and Being. He simply treats thought as one mode of Being (the for-itself) in terms of which the other principle mode of Being (the in-itself) is to be understood. True, the early Heidegger did this too, but he at least tried to provide an interesting argument for it, rather than just stumbling straight into ‘phenomenological-ontology’. Moreover, he is less interesting than Heidegger insofar as he interprets this mode of Being as having a kind of causal efficacy disconnected from that of the in-itself. This is the vulgar Kantianism I described [elsewhere]. In order to make room for this metaphysically inflected notion of freedom he turns the subject into a Nothingness, a transcendence removed from the causal order of the in-itself. As you can tell, I think that this is one huge motherfucking step back in every respect.

I don’t really understand Badiou well enough on these points. I suspect that he doesn’t follow Hegel in grasping the importance of incompatibility, as his whole model of predication in terms of set-theory is purely extensional. This would ally him with Sartre on the question of negation. But his use of extensionality to combine Heidegger and Sartre’s notions of Nothing and Nothingness (in the empty set) is potentially more interesting. It certainly requires more attention on my part. Nonetheless, I still think that his whole approach vis-a-vis the relation of thought and Being, the situation of the subject within the natural order, and the connection to freedom and sufficient reason is way too Sartrean. Even if he has a conception of the subject which is less individualistic than the early Sartre (and maybe even more Hegelian and subtle than the later Sartre) he still conceives of it in terms of nothingnesses and supplements to the causal order.

Ray’s fusion of Laruelle and Badiou in Nihil Unbound is more subtle and interesting, precisely because it explicitly severs it from the Sartrean influence and its rejection of sufficient reason. This isn’t to say that it explicitly champions sufficient reason, although there is certainly an interesting relation between it and determination-in-the-last instance, but Ray is clear in his critique of the Badiouian account of the Event and in his support for the scientific process of comprehending nature. Indeed, his use of the Laruellian notion of unilateral duality as non-dialectical negativity and the Badiouian notion of the void as Being-Nothing can be seen as trying to produce a minimalist ontology that circumscribes the relation between thought as the scientific process through which nature is comprehended and Being as that both that which it comprehends and is. Unilateral duality is thoughts ability to think its own inability to assimilate the Real insofar as it is determined by it in the last instance, and Being-Nothing is the world as limit-case of scientific comprehension, the Real as evacuated of all content, or as what is common to all stages of the indefinite process through which scientific thought attempts to grasp it. It’s an interesting approach, though I think it ultimately can’t go anywhere, because it’s Laruellian elements are neither sufficiently detailed in their account of the transcendental structure of thought (decision is a weak schema of philosophical thought) nor able to support anything like the positive metaphysics of extinction Ray tries to develop at the end of the book. Nonetheless, it avoids vulgar Kantianism and tries to genuinely think through the relation between thought and Being.

My own position has a certain similarity to Ray’s use of unilateral duality, but it is much less hostile to transcendental philosophy in its authentic Kantian form. I’m happy to provide detailed analyses of the structure of thought, and use these to demonstrate the relationship between the structure of thought and the structure of Being (my transcendental realism). This leads to a conception of the relationship between thought and Being in which while it is true that subjective domain is distinct from the natural domain only from its own perspective (the difference between the normative and the natural is itself a (unilateral) normative difference), this does not foreclose either the possibility of adequately describing either domain, at least, not in the way Laruelle’s position does. I end up with a position in which we can describe the formal structure of thought, and this enables us to describe the formal structure of Being (e.g., to make explicit our pre-ontological understanding of it), even if its real structure is in excess of this. The question that I’ve left open is whether or not the Real can be completely grasped by the scientific cognition of the world. I tend to agree with Ray that it is an indefinite process, but I think that we need much better arguments to demonstrate this.

This is where I see Deleuze coming in, insofar as his critique of Hegel demonstrates that we must understand the way in which the Real is actually determined (or internally differentiated) cannot be understood in terms of negation, but must be understood in terms supplied by differential calculus. This is what underwrites Deleuze’s claim that a lack in the concept is an excess in the Idea. Hegel may have shown that the way reason (or what Deleuze simply calls representation) tracks the determinate structure of naturenecessarily involves a certain form of negativity, but this is perfectly compatible with the determinate (sub-representational) structure of nature being in excess of all such forms of negativity (and thus purely positive). This is not a trite appeal to something like Ereignis or Differance, which refuses to provide a positive metaphysics of the excess of reality, but is grounded in a detailed account of the nature of the sub-representational. To explain this more would require going into a great deal more detail though [(watch this space)].

Returning to the question of the relation between negativity and politics then, here’s my conclusion. Negativity has nothing to do with the proper metaphysical circumscription of the natural, including the manifestation of the cultural within nature. If it has any role, it’s in our understanding of the structure of thought itself, and thus if it has any political role it’s going to be in our understanding of the structure of political thought and action, or political reason. Leaving all appeals to affective negativity (e.g., the psychologically transformative power of depression, the aesthetically transformative power of black metal, etc) aside, which I think are reasonably spurious and certainly unrelated to the important issues at hand, the one issue to which an understanding of rational negativity can perhaps make a contribution is the nature of critique. I’ve written some basic things about my understanding of critique before, but I see it as a fairly broad phenomenon. I haven’t done much further work on it, but I’m increasingly coming to see that the sensible aspects of Hegel’s account of dialectic (and their relation to the classic socratic method of dialectic) is an aspect of the account of critique, and that here the role of negation (which is to be understood logically) is very important. The Hegelian idea that we can not only criticise concepts (as opposed to sets of propositions) but use this process of criticism to develop more positive and determinate positions that incorporate the insights of those we surpass, is a very powerful one. This needs to be analysed in more detail, but its clear that in order for this to work, the logical role of negativity here needs to be totally dissociated from any associations with aggressive or reactionary affective negativity. Critique is not about destroying one’s opponents, but playing off of their positions in the process of seeking truth.

This is the one and only

firmament; therefore

it is the absolute world.

There is no other world.

The circle is complete.

I am living in Eternity.

The ways of this world

are the ways of heaven.

Alan Ginsberg – ‘Metaphysics’

Hello again everyone. I’m back once more. It’s been a pretty turbulent year, but I have to apologise to my readers for dropping off the face of the earth for a few months. I owe deeper apologies to others who I’ve left hanging. If you know me and haven’t heard from me in a while, please do feel free to get in touch.

I have now submitted my thesis, albeit in a form I’m less than happy with. No doubt the viva will force me to revise some bits of it, and I will most likely revise even more of it when I’ve had a bit of break, but, for now, you can grab the full thing here.

The good thing about having finished (or at least submitted) is that I can now work on other projects without guilt. This means that I’m finally writing a couple of papers I’ve been intending to write for a long time. I’ve also just finished a joint paper (with my good friend Tim Franklin) for Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox’s Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy anthology with Open Court, trying to apply Kant’s aesthetics to the RPG experience. I don’t know whether this will ultimately mean more or less activity on the blog. I’m still trying to get the whole hang of paper writing, as it’s a different beast from blogging or thesis writing. We’ll see how it goes.

Catch you all next time I have a suitably coherent series of thoughts.

Update: Turns out I messed up a bunch of the links. They all now point in the right direction.

It has equally been suggested (in the posts I am addressing no less) that the kinds of questions I focus on are too ‘academic’ (or perhaps not ‘feral’ enough), given my penchant for focusing on ‘What is…?’ questions. There is more to be said about this in relation to the matter at hand, but I think it’s worth pointing out that this form of questioning has an eminent philosophical (or perhaps ‘philosophical’) lineage, stretching back to literally pre-academic times. It is the preferred question form of Socrates, that most feral of philosophers, and most engaged with the needs of his time. Following his inspiration, I’ve decided to frame my response by confronting the difficult question underlying the debate: What are Concepts?

Do I adopt this mode of expression because I have a noxious and priestly will to power? Because I wish to stand in judgment over the fates of others? Because I wish to police, dominate, and render others subservient to my philosophical vision (one which is fascistically terrifying)? Or simply because I am a pervert? Perhaps. Does it make a difference? Probably not. Let’s see.

1.  Concepts as Tools

The issue at hand is the nature of the conceptual, and specifically, the sense in which concepts can be understood to be like tools, and to what extent this conflicts with their role in representation. Levi has been pushing the idea that concepts are tools precisely in order to claim that they are not to be understood in representational terms. This then forms the basis for making several claims about the nature of philosophy, the notion of truth, and the relations between the two. Now, I myself have problems with some of the ways in which concepts have been understood in the history of philosophy, along with the ways in which the notions of representation and truth have been used. On the face of it, I can agree with Levi that not enough attention has been paid in the history to the use of concepts, or to the relation between the semantics of conceptual content and the corresponding pragmatics of reasoning. However, the way in which we approach conceptual pragmatism, and the conclusions we draw on the basis of it, are remarkably different. This is most evident in the way we approach the notions of representation and truth. I think we both object to the deployment of these notions in metaphysics, perhaps in part due to the shared influence of Deleuze (and perhaps also Heidegger). However, I take the more fundamental issue to be Brandom’s worry about the use of representation as an explanatory primitive. I’ll try to explain this briefly, in order to establish the contrast between our positions.

Brandom is famous for critiquing an approach in the philosophy of language (and thought) that he calls representationalism. This is the strategy that tries to explain inference in terms of representation. Without going into too much depth, it consists in understanding good inferences as those which preserve truth, understanding the contents of propositions (which stand in inferential relations) in terms of their truth-conditions, understanding these as the way the world is represented as being by the whole proposition, and understanding this in terms of what is represented by its parts (or the parts of the sentence which expresses it). There are a number of different ways in which concepts are understood to fit into this overall story, but it is always something to do with the last part, namely, with the way in which representations of individual objects (e.g., my sister) and the properties (e.g., the property of being in Newcastle) they are supposed to possess come to compose representations of complete states-of-affairs (e.g., that my sister is in Newcastle). A useful maxim is: concepts are to propositions as words are to sentences (different words can express the same concept, just as different sentences can express the same proposition).

Brandom’s alternative approach, which he calls inferentialism, takes the converse explanatory path, explaining representation in terms of inference. This approach understands the content of propositions in terms of the inferential relations they bare to one another (what they can be inferred from, and what can be inferred from them), and the content of concepts in terms of their contribution to the inferential roles of the propositions they compose. Moreover, this is to be understood in terms of the pragmatics of reasoning, insofar as Brandom takes making and tracking inferences to be something that we do (which Brandom calls deontic scorekeeping). This means that we must understand propositions and concepts in terms of the sentences and words that express them, i.e., in terms of the actual linguistic tokens that are used in this activity. Concepts are principally understood as norms for using words in reasoning and communication. The notions of truth and representation can then be explained in terms of this pragmatic framework. Instead of understanding inference as that which preserves truth, we understand truth as that which is preserved by inference. We understand truth qua truth in terms of the process of taking claims to be true, challenging them, and revising what we take to be true. Instead of understanding representation as something that our words just do in virtue of what they mean, we understand it as a feature of what we do in using our words to mean anything. We understand representation in terms of the process of negotiating our differing perspectives on which claims are true, what follows from them, and how these relate to our shared practices for responding to, acting within, and coping with our environment, and the things it contains.

There is an awful lot more to be said here, and I will talk more about some of the details later. For now, I think it’s important to have this broad overview of the project in mind, in order to understand precisely how Levi’s approach differs from it. Levi’s rejection of representation is much more radical than Brandom’s, insofar as he not only rejects giving it a privileged explanatory role, but seems to suggest that it need not have any explanatory role at all. Levi takes it that an understanding of the representational role of concepts is to be replaced within an account of them as tools. This approach is extended to the notion of truth, which he takes to be inapplicable to the conceptual, at least in its ordinary form. To quote a passage at length:-

Concepts are not representations, nor are they ideas in minds. Rather, they are lenses and tools. They are apparatuses, every bit as tangible and real as hammers. It makes as much sense to ask “is this concept true?” as it does to ask “is a hammer true?” Drawing a concept from Ryle, this question constitutes a category mistake. And it is a category mistake that constitutes some of the most tiresome and fascistically terrifying attitudes in all of philosophy. Everywhere with this question of whether a concept is true, whether it represents the world, we encounter the desire to police, dominate, subordinate, and render subservient. Like Kafka’s Court or Castle, these philosophical technologies everywhere seek to trap, ensnare, halt, and limit. They create the illusion of free movement and autonomy, while everywhere weaving a semantic web about engagement seeking to fix it. The question “is it true?” is the insecure and narcissitic fantasy of academic philosophy wishing to redeem itself by functioning as master discipline, legislator, and judge of all other disciplines, practices, and experiences. The artist, physicist, ethnographer, and activist get along just fine without this type of “philosopher” to examine their papers. The proper questions when encountering a hammer is not “is it true?”, but rather “what does it do?”, “what can I do with it?”, “is it put together well for these tasks?”, and so on.

There are various issues that are intertwined in this passage. Levi takes it that concepts are not something internal to the psychological states of individuals, but are concrete and tangible things to be used liked hammers. They are tools that we construct, rather than discover, and therefore need to be evaluated in the same terms that we evaluate other tools, namely, in terms of their effectiveness in doing what they do. He takes it that this assessment of effectiveness is entirely other than the assessment of correctness of representation, which in the case of the assertion of sentences involving the concepts would be the assessment of truth. He then characterises the ‘academic’ philosophical approach as that which makes the mistake of trying to assess concepts in the latter way, associating it with a number of (what he sees as) malignant psychological and sociological tendencies. He then contrasts this to his view of how concepts should be understood and evaluated, giving the example of the effectiveness of the concept of structural patriarchy. This relevant passage is the following:-

The Truth of the concept is not that our present is defined by structural patriarchy, but rather the egalitarian practices that emerge from this naming allowing another future to become available. There, before the concept, was yearning for something else and suffering, yet in inchoate form. With the concept, this yearning and suffering take on determinate form allowing for the emergence of practices and invention. Concepts are precious things and do not fall from the sky ready made. The only relevant question when they do appear is whether something can be done with them and whether the practices they invite are worthwhile.

What Levi espouses is a model of philosophy as the unbounded creation of concepts, in which the role of philosophers is not to pass judgment on how precisely concepts are used, but merely to invent new and more useful ones. The question is: useful for what? Obviously not for describing things as they are. The concept of structural patriarchy is not good because it lets us describe the world and the truth of our social situation, but rather because it lets us do something, or establish some worthwhile practice. This seems to risk conceptual instrumentalism, in which a concept is good as long as it’s useful for some purpose, be it the creation of an emancipatory feminist movement or disguising the systematic dismantling of public services (‘big society’ anyone?). If you can’t distinguish good concepts in terms of how they facilitate representation, you can’t distinguish bad ones in terms of how they facilitate misrepresentation. Why should we want students to think about the world in terms of structural patriarchy, and not in terms of natural gender hierarchy, or natural meritocracy? Because the latter are less useful? Not if you’re a televangelist entrepreneur. The only way to avoid this is to say that the latter is not a worthwhile practice, and this seems to make our theory of concepts dependent upon some distinctly ethical considerations, which seems to be putting the cart before the horse. It is also about as far as one can get from extricating the theory of concepts from the philosophy of normativity (which Levi seems to want to do).

Levi’s response to this sort of criticism is found in the following post, which I’ll again quote:-

The crux of the criticism seemed to revolve around my reference to concepts as tools. Somehow this got assimilated to many as the thesis that the status of a concept is to be defined in terms of its usefulness. Here it would be claimed that I am suggesting that we are to evaluate concepts in terms of whether or not they are useful. Yet clearly, for me, this won’t work because evaluation of concepts in terms of usefulness requires a pre-existent domain of uses, yet I reject the notion that there are pre-existent fields of ends, aims, or uses. Ends must be constructed and articulated. They don’t come ready made like some sort of Aristotlean telos that governs beings and that draws them to a particular end.

It seems that tools should be thought less in terms of what they are for than in terms of what they do.

I find this response pretty strange, as it’s unclear how the above problem depends upon anything like a domain of pre-established ends. Of course tools can be used as means towards a variety of different ends, often very different ends to the ones for which they were intended, precisely because they may be capable of more than we ever use them for. You can always use a hammer as a paper weight if you like. However, if you are going to evaluate how effective a tool is, i.e., how well it functions as a means, then you have to do this in relation to some specific end. We do indeed classify tools on the basis of their capacities, but we classify them on the basis of their capacities to do specific things. That these classifications are prone to change because of the way that capacities overlap (e.g., being good at hammering nails usually involves being about the right size and weight to be a functional paperweight) does nothing to undermine this. We can assess the hammer’s effectiveness qua hammer and qua paperweight separately, unless being able to function as a paperweight becomes an important part of what it is to be classified as a hammer.

If Levi is to avoid either making the assessment of concepts relative to arbitrary ends, or dependent upon some independently specified notion of what is ‘worthwhile’, then he needs an account of the capacities of concepts qua concepts, much as we understand the capacities of hammers qua hammers. This is to specify the general function of all concepts, but not how it is determined in the specific function of each concept. All hammers are for hammering, but different hammers are useful for hammering different things. In other words, Levi needs to specify precisely what kind of tool concepts are, not simply that they are tools. Concepts do indeed enable us to do a variety of different things, but there needs to be something in common either to what they enable us to do, or how they enable us to do it, that constitutes them as concepts. This is the litmus test for Levi’s account: can he give us a general account of what concepts do which has nothing to do with representation that supplies a general schema for assessing their effectiveness?

2. What Can a Concept Do?

Levi does provide us with a sketch of an account of the conceptual, but I think that it is insufficient to meet the test just outlined. The key point here is that two of the claims made in the first passage I quoted - that concepts are “apparatuses, every bit as tangible and real as hammers” and “lenses” – simply aren’t adequately elaborated. I will come back to this, but I should first go over what Levi does say about concepts and their use.

The first thing to note is that Levi qualifies what he means by a concept:-

In an interesting post over at Enemyindustry, David Roden gives the example of “jelly fish” (the idea, not the entities) as an example of a concept. While I’m readily inclined to agree that the idea of “jelly fish” is a representation, it doesn’t seem that ideas like “jelly fish” are concepts in the philosophical use of the term I’m trying to develop here. I hasten to add that I’m still trying to figure out just why I have this hesitation in categorizing ideas such as “jelly fish”, “cats”, trees”, etc., as concepts. Rather, it seems to me that concepts, in the philosophical sense, refer to things like “Justice”, “Being”, “Substance”, the “Other”, “Concept”, “Object”, “Process”, “Environment”, “Communism”, “Democracy”, “Subject”, etc. In other words, it seems to me that concepts, in the philosophical sense, never refer to a determinate class of entities such as “jelly fish”, but rather refer to something far more diffuse. Like I said, however, I’m still trying to work this out in my own thought.

This use of the term concept is fairly idiosyncratic, and I think it is derived from Deleuze and Guattari’s account of concepts in What Is Philosophy?, in which they seem to identify concepts as such with what we would more ordinarily call philosophical concepts. There is an exegetical debate to be had here about whether Deleuze and Guattari genuinely preclude there from being concepts such as jellyfish, as opposed to what they call scientific functions, especially given Deleuze’s more traditional use of the term in Difference and Repetition (usually to polemically oppose it to what he calls the Idea). I’m not going to have that debate here. What I want to point out instead is that regardless of what we call it, there is a common genus, indicated by quote marks, of which both “jelly fish” and “Environment” are instances, albeit of different species. Levi calls these loosely ‘ideas’, and he wishes to hold that ideas like “jelly fish” are representational, while those like “Environment” are non-representational. I think that it’s better to follow the tradition in using the term ‘concept’ for the genus, but the terminological dispute is not what is important here. (As an aside, that Levi is willing to say that the idea of “jelly fish” represents a concrete set of organisms, but the concept “structural patriarchy” doesn’t represent a concrete set of social phenomena, seems to sell the latter pretty short).

What is important is that this raises the question of precisely what these two species of ‘idea’ have in common. This is incredibly important, insofar as what is common to the species (‘concepts’) will be a modification of what is common to the genus (‘ideas’). Levi has no real account of this, and answering the question is somewhat awkward for him. This is because it seems that if they are to be part of a common genus, then both representational ideas and non-representational ideas must have similar capacities. They must both be tools in some sense, and the difference between ideas that represent and those that don’t must have something to do with their tool-character, i.e., with what we do with them. However, Levi’s argument has always been to oppose representations and tools as such. He claims that concepts are not representational because they are tools. He can’t hang on to this opposition and admit that there is a common genus here. Of course, he may simply wish to deny that there is a common genus, but this would essentially be to deny that there is any important structural relation between our thought and talk about “jelly fish” and our thought and talk about “Environment”, which seems unpalatably absurd. There must be some common activity in which ‘ideas’ are deployed, in which the different species play different roles. The more charitable reading of Levi’s position is that there is something specific about the way in which concepts are used that precludes us from understanding them in representational terms. The question is then what this is.

There are three more important features of Levi’s account of concepts to consider: that concepts are practices, that concepts come in three kinds (world-concepts, self-concepts, and society-concepts), and that concepts are aletheic. Taking these in order, the first is introduced as follows:-

In claiming that concepts should be understood in terms of what they do, I suppose I’m saying that concepts are incipient practices. That is, concepts ask us to do something with them.

There is a certain tension here with Levi’s earlier claim that concepts are apparatuses (“every bit as tangible as hammers”) which are to be understood purely in terms of whatever they can do, and the claim that they are practices that ask us to use them in a particular way. The distinction between apparatuses and practices should be understood in terms of the distinction between things that we may use to perform actions, and ways in which we perform actions (including ways we use things). For example, the difference between a knife and the cutting techniques required to use it effectively. What apparatuses are being used when we use concepts (the knife), and what is the way in which we are invited to use them (the technique)? Levi’s example of a practice we are invited into simply amplifies this problem:-

Take a concept like Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction” or epoche, or a concept like “intentionality”. These concepts call for me to describe the world and the entities of the world as they are given and precisely in terms of their givenness. Once I carry out the reduction I am to ask myself what is given in intentionality and how it is given. What is thus acted on through these concepts is experience. What is produced are the myriad descriptions we develop in phenomenology.

There is a marked contrast between the concepts of “phenomenological reduction” and “intentionality”, which makes this example problematic. This is because the former is the concept of a practice. It invites us into a practice only insofar as it names a practice, and because of this we can use the concept without thereby enacting this practice. Concepts like “morris dancing”, “ice hockey”, “parliamentary democracy”, etc., are ideas that refer to practices, so any sense in which their meanings are constituted by these practices is trivial. We don’t use the concept of “ice hockey” to act upon sticks and pucks (as the concept “phenomenological reduction” supposedly acts upon experience), because the acting upon sticks and pucks is ice hockey, not its concept. This isn’t to deny that such concepts can play a role in motivating and directing the activities they describe – we have to be able to understand and think about “ice hockey” to play it – only that this role must be distinguished from the activity itself. In short, we have not yet been told anything about what kind of practices concepts as such (including concepts that don’t name specific practices, such as ”Process”, “Environment”, and even “Justice”) might invite us into, and what kind of apparatuses these involve.

This is not all Levi says of course. He expands his rough account by appropriating Kant’s account of the transcendental Ideas of reason, modifying them into World, Self and Society (rather than God), and making them the divisions between types of concepts. The rough idea behind this is that concepts are in some sense problems, and that these categories present the basic types of problems we are faced with: comprehending the world as a whole, relating to ourselves so as to construct ourselves, and living together as a group. Levi takes it that concepts are used precisely insofar as they play a role within the overarching practical projects that correspond to these problems. Now, leaving aside the fact that this suggests that perhaps ‘Idea’ would have been a better term for Levi to use than ‘concept’ (Kant’s use of which is much closer to Brandom’s), I think we can see the problem with the previous example play itself out again within this framework. We’ll discuss the concepts of world when we consider Levi’s appeal to Heidegger’s notion of aletheia, but for the moment I’d like to focus on the concepts of society Levi talks about:-

The concepts of society propose ways of living together and relating. Communism is a concept of society. Democracy is a concept of society. Liberalism is a concept of society. Each of these concepts propose very different types of social world and all of them announce a work, a project, for producing a particular kind of work in producing that kind of social world.

It seems that these concepts: “Communism”, “Democracy”, and “Liberalism”, insofar as they announce a work, name a special kind of practice. But their use is not the practice they name, any more than the use of “ice hockey” is ice hockey. One does not need to be a communist in order to talk about communism. It’s true that the concept “Communism” and the variety of analytical concepts that are associated with it (e.g., “surplus value”, “class consciousness”, etc.) provide us with ways of talking and thinking about the social world and how to act within it, but even though the project of bringing about communism would involve this, it cannot be identified with what we do in using the concept in this way. The concept of communism proposes such a project only in the sense that it represents what is to be done (in a notorious and controversially incomplete fashion). Indeed, it seems sensible to say that one can get involved in the practices of one’s local communist party without thereby coming to understand what communism is properly (though what constitutes ‘proper’ communism is another matter of controversy). Although there is an interesting and subtle relation between thinking and doing, and we may even say that thinking is a kind of doing, thinking about something and doing it are not the same.

This conflation is repeated at the level of the concepts of self, to which Levi reduces the various ethical concepts of the philosophical tradition. He classes all of these concepts as “technologies of the self”, which is to say as practices of acting upon the self. This distorts the Foucauldian idea precisely insofar as it elides the distinction between self-understanding (Knowledge) and self-affection (Power). This is not to deny that there is an intimate relation between the two, but merely to point out that the relation can only be understood when its relata are distinguished (I’ve written about Foucault’s conception of ethics and subjectivity in detail recently). Again, using concepts to understand something (e.g., ourselves) might be a certain kind of practical ability, but it needs to be said what kind of practical ability it is, and is not to be confused with the further practical abilities this understanding facilitates (e.g., ways of acting upon ourselves).

This brings us to the concepts of world, and Levi’s appeal to Heidegger’s notion of truth as aletheia:-

Different systems of concepts bring the world into relief in different ways. This is to say, they bring different things forth that would otherwise remain in obscurity. The world brought into relief by Dennett’s concept of Evolution is different than the world brought into relief by Husserl’s lived intentionality. The debate between the object-oriented ontologists and the process-relationists is not a debate over which ontology truly represents the world, but over what ought to be brought into relief. Different things are attended to in each instance, while other things fall into darkness or obscurity. Along these lines, it would not be mistaken to claim that Heidegger’s concept of truth as aletheia is the concept of concepts. Concepts are not representational but alethetic. And aletheia, once it takes place, calls for a work in relating to the world.

This seems to be Levi’s attempt to expand on the earlier claim that concepts are ‘lenses’. There is a certain ambiguity here, insofar as despite indicating that all concepts are lenses, and saying that aletheia is the concept of concepts, he also seems to limit this aletheic function to concepts of world. I won’t push this ambiguity though. The more important issue is whether the idea of bringing the world into relief actually succeeds in cashing out the lense metaphor in a way that meets the test posed earlier, and I think it resolutely fails to do so.

This is clear if we look at the difference between the two examples Levi uses: the contrast between Dennett’s concept of Evolution and Husserl’s concept of lived intentionality, and the contrast between OOO and PR. To say that in each case what we have are differences in the way the relevant concepts bring the world into relief is to obscure an important difference between the two cases, namely, that Dennett and Husserl purport to talk about distinct subjects (in this case, though not when Dennett discusses consciousness), where as OOO and PR purport to talk about the same subject. Moreover, the suggestion is that in the latter case what we have is not a disagreement about the features of this same subject, but a mere difference in emphasis. The effect of this is that (at least in theoretical discourse) Levi makes both changing the subject and disagreeing indistinguishable from changing emphasis, where what is being emphasised are different features of the same fundamental subject – the world as a whole.

Now, this is consistent with Levi’s anti-representationalism, insofar as it abjures the two sides of discursive representation – reference and predication – or that we talk about different subjects (and so can change what we talk about) and ascribe different things to them (and so disagree about them). However, the distinction it elides are genuine distinctions in the pragmatics of discourse. This wouldn’t be so bad, if Levi provided us with an account of how we use concepts to ‘bring the world into relief’, within which he could reconstruct something like these pragmatic distinctions, but it seems like he has nothing resembling a pragmatics of concepts at all. The reference to Heidegger here does not serve to make anything clearer. Heidegger does have something resembling such a pragmatics, and although it contains some important insights, it’s ultimately a failure. I know this because I’ve spent a good deal of the last few years working out the details of Heidegger’s account of truth, and where precisely it goes wrong (if you’re interested check chapters 3 & 4 of my thesis). Yet, Levi doesn’t reference any of the details of Heidegger’s account. He has told us that concepts are tools that act like lenses by bringing the world into relief, but he hasn’t told us anything about what precisely this consists in. It may be a doing, but just what kind of doing is it?

If one is going to make a pragmatist appeal to concepts as tools, and draw sizeable philosophical conclusions about the status of representation and the nature of philosophy from this, then one has to be willing to tell us just what kind of tool they are. Conceptual pragmatism must be followed up by a conceptual pragmatics, lest it be an empty gesture. Levi’s sketch of an account of concepts does not really explain what concepts are, and because of this it gives us no way to evaluate their effectiveness. It’s therefore unable to underwrite Levi’s more extravagant claims about what constitutes good philosophy.

3. Brandomian Burdens

At this point, some people might object that it is all well and good to criticise the insufficiency of Levi’s account of concepts, but that this is mere negative sniping from afar (perhaps exemplifying the various malignant psychological traits of such ‘academic’ philosophers as myself). However, it’s precisely the fact that my own work is concerned with the nature of concepts, and the relation between their semantics and pragmatics, which motivates these criticisms. Although it is principally a development of Brandom’s work (and thus also that of Kant, Hegel, Sellars and Quine), I do have a positive story to tell about what concepts are, and how we evaluate them. I presented a rather brief version of this in my draft Essay on Transcendental Realism, which although it doesn’t explain certain crucial details, does discuss the issues in more depth than Levi’s recent foray into the topic. In particular, it provides the outlines of an account of the function of concepts in general, and uses this to explain the unique function of specifically metaphysical concepts. This goes some way to accounting for the above distinction between concepts like “jellyfish” and “Process” (though not “Justice”, which is a different kind of concept in my view), in terms of the distinct kinds of role they play within a common practice.

It’s also important to note that I’ve discussed more of the details of this story elsewhere, precisely insofar as I’ve written a number of posts explaining the features of Brandom’s account that I’m in broad agreement with (see here, here (though I’ve since changed my us of the word ‘practices’ somewhat) here, and especially here, for examples). I’ve never presented the whole of Brandom’s account (though I had a good go at presenting the second half of MIE in the last post just linked to), nor can I claim to have exposited those bits I have discussed in either the best order or the most consistent and comprehensive fashion. There’s a lot going on in his work, and there are many tricky details, so it’s difficult to summarise the whole thing. What I write is often best understood in conjunction with a reading some of Brandom’s own work, and I’m delighted that an increasing number of people are doing just that (see, for instance, Duncan Law and Reid Kotlas’ blogs). This delight is somewhat soured by the claims Levi has made about Brandom’s work in these posts, which not only oversimplify and misrepresent crucial aspects of Brandom’s position, but use these misrepresentations to make some fairly dodgy accusations.

Before trying to give an overview of the positive account of concepts I take from Brandom, I thus think it important to go over the comments Levi makes about him, so as to separate out the legitimate concerns that need addressing from the dodgier claims he makes. I’ll start with what he says in the body of his posts, and then move onto some of the claims he makes in response to others in the comments:-

Apart from the fact that Brandom gives us no account of the origin or genesis of norms (he says the “community” defines them; yikes!, think of the concrete social implications of that!), for Brandom reasoning is synonymous with discursive practices and discursive practices are synonymous with the linguistic. What takes place in material practices– the surprise a scientist experiences when getting an unexpected result in an experiment, for example, or Galileo seeing moons around other planets) when he looks through his telescope –are, for Brandom irrelevant to reasoning because they fall outside of language. The only doing for Brandom is conceptual doing where we infer other propositions from a particular proposition. The residue of the existent, the stubborn being of the world, the remainder, is eradicated. Everywhere we hear high school students cheering as they’ll no longer have to do biology, physics, and chemistry labs as it’s only language, not doing, that matters. One wonders where Brandom stands on the position of holocaust denialists because, as Lyotard observed, the victims of the holocaust are not here to articulate what they saw and experienced, while the denialists can certainly provide, in language, all sorts of inferentially “valid” relations among propositions to support their denial.

On the face of it, the core objection here seems to be something like the objection levelled at Brandom by many analytic philosophers, namely, that his attempt to reconstruct representation on the basis of inference detaches the subject from the world, in such a way that its linguistic practice is unconstrained by it, becoming a ‘frictionless spinning in the void’. However, Levi’s version of this objection isn’t motivated by the same concerns as Brandom’s peers. Their objection is generally some form of the claim that it is impossible to get purchase upon the world without some kind of primitive representation relations not derived from inference, which usually works only by setting the bar Brandom has to reach too high (i.e., if we don’t start out with it, we can never get it). By contrast, Levi’s objection is alarmingly simple: the sheer fact that he takes reasoning to be an essentially linguistic matter implies that he ignores all elements of practice that are not linguistic, precluding them from playing any role within eminently rational practices such as scientific and historical inquiry. Indeed, he seems to suggest that Brandom’s linguistic rationalism undermines the role of first-person experience entirely. This is crude to the point of preposterousness.

It simply ignores the fact that Brandom has an account of observation claims which account for their unique justificatory role (see chapter 2 of AR, chapter 4 of MIE, and chapter 6 of BSD). This account is derived from Sellars’ work on language-entry and language-exit moves (perception and action, respectively), which is supposed to explain how the language-language moves (inference) that constitute our navigation of the space of reasons are connected to the space of causes (or the world). Brandom has even discussed how the experimental apparatuses involved in scientific experiment are bound up in these judgements (most clearly in his response to the paper ‘Of Mu-Mesons and Oranges’ in the collection Robert Brandom: Analytic Pragmatist). Of course, whether this account works is open to challenge. For example, Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla have given some interesting reasons for thinking that the account of first-person experiential authority needs supplementing with some additional pragmatics. The important point is that it must actually be challenged. Levi’s objection amounts to the claim that Brandom doesn’t have such an account, and doesn’t even think he needs one, which is just plain false.

Regardless, Levi extends this line of reasoning further:-

Just as the rightwing “patriot” believes that the country is somehow literally being destroyed when a flag is burnt because he believes that the symbol is the country itself, Brandom seems to believe that reasoning can be reduced to the lingua-form without having reference to the “pre-discursive”. In this context, at least, given that he sees only language users as having an honorable place within the world of those that deserve normative dignity, we wonder why he doesn’t come out and suggest that people in comas or Helen Keller prior to entering the world of language shouldn’t be used for scientific experiments or food. Such is the place this linguicentric representationalism that refuses to mark the difference between concept or representation and thing leads us…

Given that Brandom argues that norms regulate reason, that these norms arise from community (though he refuses to give us an account of how, they just do), and that the reigning community standard in our particular historical moment is capitalism, Brandom is necessarily committed to the thesis that it’s entirely just to reduce persons to the abstract quantificational logic of capital or the money-form, refusing to grant them any dignity or being beyond their representation within that system. Yes, that’s “rigor”, phallocracy, ontotheology, or the logic of presence for you folks. If it can’t be articulated in a set of linguistic norms it’s inadmissable. Enjoy your roast Keller for dinner! After all, Keller, being outside the order of language, is no different than a cow!

There are a number of things mixed up together here. To begin with, Levi extends the claim that Brandom’s linguistic rationalism ignores non-linguistic practices into the claim that Brandom elides the distinction between representation and represented. This is how he sees the overall theme of the post – the elision of the non-conceptual remainder – played out in Brandom’s work. Once again, this just outright ignores the part of Brandom’s work that is supposed to deal with this issue, namely, his account of the social negotiation of different discursive perspective on the same objects, which is the essential element of his attempt to explain representation on the basis of inference (see chapter 6 of AR and chapter 8 of MIE). This explains how the practical abilities deployed in keeping track of the significance of the words we use to refer to objects (through tracking what he calls anaphoric chains), when combined with our practical abilities to keep track of one another’s commitments and their consequences (which use these words), enable us to make sense of representing the same object in different (and incompatible) ways, and thereby to make sense of the difference between the way each (and potentially all) of us represent it, and the way it is. Again, this account is open to challenge in a number of ways, but it actually needs to be challenged on the basis of what it says.

Next, Levi connects this to two distinct claims. First, he links it to the idea that Brandom only accords ethical status to those capable of language, and stresses that this licenses various kinds of cruelty to the languageless. There is an aspect of Brandom’s work which can raise this worry, namely, that he sees sapience rather than sentience as the source of ethical normativity. This is an important issue, which I’ve discussed before in response to similar worries from Jon Cogburn (here). However, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Brandom’s account of representation, even if it is flawed in the way Levi claims. Second, he links it to the idea that how we should understand persons, and also how we should treat them, is entirely reducible to the dominant form of understanding and treatment in the community at the time, which he takes to be the commodity form of contemporary capitalism. Though this may have similar consequences to those that he draws from Brandom’s prioritisation of sapience (e.g., a deaf-mute burger bar on every street corner), the reason for it is distinctly different. Levi is essentially claiming that Brandom precludes the possibility of norms that exceed both the opinions and actions of the majority of the community of rational agents (and thus language users).

Once more, I cannot stress how false this is. Throughout MIE, Brandom repeatedly states that his goal is to show how a community can institute norms whose content nonetheless transcends the attitudes of the entire community, such that we can all be wrong in applying them. He is particularly concerned to show that what genuinely follows from a commitment (be it theoretical or practical) can never be reduced to what we, or anyone takes to follow from it. He does this through the same account of social-perspectival negotiation mentioned above, replacing the I-We model of social constraint with an I-Thou model. Again, there may be problems with this account. Brandom certainly doesn’t address the case of ethical norms directly, and there is a lot of work to be done in developing a fully fledged meta-ethics within the framework he provides. However, when a philosopher dedicates the majority of their major treatise to solving a problem, it is terribly unfair to pretend that they are unconcerned with it. One must actually address the specifics of their attempt to deal with it. This is even more important if one intends to derive dire ethico-political consequences from their position. (Also, as an aside, are phallocracy, onto-theology, and the logic of presence really the same thing? Seriously? What precisely is onto-theological here? These terms become less useful if you run them together.)

Finally, we can also summarily dismiss a couple claims that Levi makes in the comments:-

Brandom’s model or reasoning is basically that of the AI project based on logic trees and complete encyclopedias that Clark soundly rejects in Being-There.

What you argue here is, in my view, one of the central shortcomings of Brandomians. In your defense of knowledge (what we can provide reasons for here and now) you degrade inquiry and learning. You want to reduce everything to a position that one can provide positions for here and now, rather than attending to the processes by which positions are produced.

Next you’ll be asking for educational rubrics and standardized testing like the “educational reformers” in the united States. This is the bureaucratic mentality of Bramdomians and what they’re essentially asking for in their discussions of normativity.

I haven’t read Clark’s book (though it’s on my list), but I’m pretty sure the first claim is false. Brandom is very well informed about AI, and has proposed the beginnings of an alternative AI paradigm in his Locke lectures (published as Between Saying and Doing). This is a paradigm quite explicitly focused upon the role of  practical abilities in constituting intelligence. Of particular interest is the distinction he draws between those abilities that can be algorithmically composed out of other abilities, and those that can only be produced by training. This leads him to an extended meditation on the nature of pedagogy and learning (the end of chapter 3), which I won’t endeavour to recreate here, as I doubt I could do it justice. However, it’s worth pointing out that it displays quite the opposite of the bureaucratic mentality Levi ascribes to us Brandomians.

So, what legitimate concerns can be distilled from these criticisms? I think that we can reformulate three reasonable queries regarding Brandom’s account of the conceptual: a) How does it relate to the non-linguistic ways we have of dealing with the world? and b) How does it account for the way concepts are created by the community while maintaining a distinction between the way the world is and the way we take it to be?

4. The Pragmatics of Concepts

I’m under no illusions that I can provide a comprehensive answer to either of these questions, especially given how long this post already is. I will however try to present another brief sketch of the Brandomian account of concepts that situates it in terms of the various issues just discussed, in order to show how it aims to answer them. The important thing will be to try and say something about the actual pragmatics of concept use.

I’m going to do this by examining a telling feature of the way Levi situates his sketch of an account of concepts to Kant’s account of reason:-

Following Kant’s understanding of reason in The Critique of Pure Reason, reason differs from the understanding in that understanding functions in a “piecemeal” fashion, taking things “entity by entity”, whereas reason is “problematic” in the precise sense that it seeks to unify the disparate in a system. Reason is “problematic” (problem posing) in the sense that it strives to comprehend how the disparate fits together. This is precisely what concepts pertaining to world do. In and through concepts we encounter the phenomena of the world as a “problem”. How does the disparate fit together?

Given that he has already connected his account to Kant’s Idea of World, it makes sense to say something about how this relates to Kant’s account of reason. The Idea of World does indeed present the subject with a problem that takes the form of a task, and this task does involve an attempt to unify the disparate products of understanding into a system. However, Levi avoids saying anything about what this task consists in for Kant: what precisely is being unified, and how it is being unified. He avoids identifying the essential nature of the procedure that Kant takes to be a condition of the possibility of experience, despite the fact that the clue is in the topic: reason.

What Kant thinks we are doing in enacting the procedure encoded in the Idea of World is integrating the judgements produced by the process of recognition into a complete and consistent set of theoretical commitments, with the world thought as the ideal limit that the procedure strives towards. For any judgement that we aim to endorse, and thus include in our set of commitments, we must also aim endorse its consequences (which vary depending upon what other judgements we already endorse) and to relinquish any other judgments that are incompatible with it (or relinquish it). This makes for a complex process of updating and revision, insofar as new judgements of recognition can force changes that cascade across our set of commitments. However, this is not all the procedure consists in. There are also principles governing the inferential relations of consequence and incompatibility between judgements, which thereby direct this process of integration. These constitute the content of the concepts deployed in making judgments, which are nothing but sets of such rules of inference tied to schemata, which are rules for synthesizing intuitions into discrete objects that can be reidentified and subjected to further perceptual and rational investigation.

The crucial thing to note here is that neither the hierarchy of concepts we deploy in making judgments, nor the principles that compose them are fixed. They are themselves updated and revised in accordance with the deliverances of experience. Moreover, this process is not distinct from the process of integrating judgments, but they are both aspects of the same procedure of rational rectification. This procedure aims not only at completeness and consistency of judgments, but also economy and systematicity of principles. This consists in having as few concepts as necessary to account for the various different phenomena we encounter, whilst striving to establish as many connections between these concepts as possible, which is to say principles governing the inferences that capture the lawlike relations between these phenomena (e.g., from ‘x is a dog‘ to ‘x is a mammal‘, from ‘x is water‘ to ‘x will freeze at zero degrees C’, etc.). In essence, we use relations between concepts to revise which judgements we endorse, and relations between the judgements we endorse to revise our concepts. This results in a constantly evolving picture of the world in which not only its particular law-governed elements hang together, but the general laws themselves hang together. This is the theoretical role of reason in constituting a unified account of nature. This is not all there is to Kant’s account of reason. There is at least also it’s practical role, but I won’t elaborate that here (though I have talked about the topic of practical reason in depth elsewhere: here and here).

Brandom’s theory of concepts is a direct descendent of Kant’s, and similarly tries to understand them in terms of their role in the process of rational rectification. There are a number of important ways in which Brandom develops Kant’s account, but the most important for our purposes is his rejection of the idea that our grasp of the inferential relations between propositions must consist in the espousal of explicit rules. Instead, he takes it that our grasp of the norms of inference can be implicit in our practices. Just as we can have the practical abilities to do what one must do to ride a bike, make a traditional English trifle, or estimate the trajectory of a thrown object without consciously following a set of instructions, or even being able to say precisely what it is we’re doing, so can we have the practical abilities to do what one must do in order to rationally rectify one’s commitments. It is the fact that these abilities consist not just in dispositions to behave in certain ways, but also to discriminate between correct and incorrect behaviour (on the part of others and ourselves), that makes their possession the practical grasp of a norm. However, the content of the norm that is thereby grasped is something that can exceed the individual’s grasp of it, such that it is not reducible to either their dispositions to act in accordance with it, or to assess the correctness of such actions. This is just to say that what it is to perform any of these activities correctly (or perhaps, to perform them well) need not be exhausted by the behaviour of any given performer, no matter how expert they may be, even though it is communities of such experts who have created these practices, and thereby instituted the norms implicit in them. It is in this sense that norms can transcend our attitudes.

This returns us to the brief sketch of Brandom’s project I gave at the beginning, insofar as Brandom takes these practices of rational rectification to be essentially linguistic. This is because, although the reasoning processes through which we keep track of our theoretical and practical commitments can play an important role in determining and guiding the other actions we perform, they must nonetheless be distinguished from these actions. If we are to agree with Heidegger that many (if not most) of our actions involve a kind of practical coping that is not assimilable to practical reasoning, we must recognise that practical reasoning is a distinct form of doing (which itself may be done skilfully). This means that although we can indirectly correct the way in which someone thinks about the features of the world they act upon by correcting the way in which they act upon them, we must also be able to correct the way in which they think directly. The practice in which reasoning and rational rectification consists must thus deploy publicly available tokens in keeping track of commitments and their relations. This is all it is to say that reasoning is essentially linguistic: it is a shared practice of asserting and inferring in which the commitments undertaken are open to challenge, justification, assessment, and revision, which is made possible by the fact that we have public tokens that are used to carry out these actions in common ways. Our grasp of concepts and propositions consists in our ability to use the words and sentences to express them within this game of giving and asking for reasons.

This goes some way towards explaining the sense in which we can understand concepts as tools. They are tools for reasoning. However, as tempting as it may be to say that the concept is the technique corresponding to the word as apparatus, this picture doesn’t quite work. In using a concept we draw upon a complex social apparatus of reason and action, much in the way that in using money we draw on complex social apparatus of contract and exchange. The process of rational rectification that I engage in as an individual is part of a larger socio-epistemic system, much as the process of working to maintain my lifestyle I engage in is part of a larger socio-economic system. So, just as in using money we are not just using pieces of paper, but also the general social mechanisms for using these pieces of paper, so in using concepts we are not just using words, but also the general social mechanisms for using these words. Our epistemic grasp of the specific reasons for endorsing given claims, and our semantic grasp of the general inferential roles that constitute their content, almost always depend upon our abilities to defer to others whose understanding exceeds our own. Such is the social division of linguistic labour.

We can thus see that the other important way in which Brandom develops Kant’s account of concepts is the inherent sociality it imbues them with. This is an advance he takes Hegel to have made upon Kant: the process of rational rectification through which we develop our concepts is an essentially collective endeavour. This does not mean that there is a single set of commitments that we all share, or a single grasp of the inferential norms governing their revision. Rather, each rational agent has their own perspective on the world, which is to say, their own set of commitments, their own dispositions to keep track of their consequences and incompatibilities, and their own networks of deference. However, the similarities in commitments, dispositions, and deferential relations provided by their common social background enable them to navigate one another’s perspectives in such a way that they can assess and correct one another’s practice, challenging any particular element of it, be it a particular commitment about how the world is, their own way of drawing its inferential relations, or those they choose to defer to. These dialogical interactions cause changes that cascade across the community, bringing about further changes as additional consequences and incompatibilities are uncovered by others. These interactions are what bind together individual processes of rational rectification into a collective process, albeit one that is far from homogeneous.

There is still the worry that this process of mutual correction might be entirely disconnected from the world, so that we are not so much spinning in the void as dancing in it together. This would be the case if concepts were nothing more than norms governing the use of sentences in inference (language-language transitions). However, as noted above, they also govern the use of sentences in perception (language-entry transitions) and action (language-exit transitions), our grasp of which is constituted by our dispositions to respond to perceptual circumstances by endorsing theoretical commitments, and our dispositions to respond to practical commitments we endorse by performing the consequent actions. Part of understanding the concept “jellyfish” is being able to observe that jellyfish are present when they are, and being able to act upon them in various ways one undertakes to. At this point some might maintain that a grasp of the inferential role of the word “jellyfish” is superfluous to understanding the concept, and that our various practices for perceptually classifying and practically coping with jellyfish are sufficient to constitute the concept. The idea here is essentially the representationalist one that our practices for perceptually classifying and practically coping with what the word refers to determine what the concept represents, and that this determines its inferential role, rather than the other way around. However, this doesn’t work if we consider the issue in more detail.

A blind person can have some grasp of the concept “red” in virtue of understanding its inferential role (e.g., that ‘x is red’ implies ‘x is coloured’, and is incompatible with ‘x is green’). It would be correctly argued that these inferential connections would not mean anything if there wasn’t someone whom the blind person could defer to who can perceptually classify things on the basis of colour, but it doesn’t really matter whether this classificatory ability is innate or not. No one has an innate ability to detect the spin value of sub-atomic particles, but we have experimental apparatuses that can detect it, and there is no in principle reason why colour concepts couldn’t function in the same way. Indeed, there’s a certain sense in which they already do, insofar as we’ve created colour standards that depend upon apparatuses for discriminating colours that are much more sensitive and reliable than any human. This is precisely the kind of socio-technological construction that Latour and Levi are so interested in (see here). What is important about it is that we are only able to use it because of the inferential role of the concepts it lets us apply. We can defer to these mechanisms because we have extrapolated a theory of colour from an understanding of the way our own perceptual capacities function, which lets us infer that the mechanism is more sensitive and reliable, and thus should be trusted over the sensory mechanisms on which it was originally based. Of course, we can incorporate such mechanisms into our practices in such a way that we cease to draw explicit inferences, such as the physicist who simply sees a mu-meson pass through the bubble chamber, rather than inferring its presence from the vapor trail, or the blind soldier who senses a nearby obstacle via a sensor attached to his tongue, rather than deducing it from the relevant signals, but this in no way undermines the point. We can’t limit empirical concepts to a single means of perceptual application in principle, and this means that their inferential role is essential, even if it is implicit within the specific perceptual dispositions to which they are initially indexed.

What about practical coping then? Isn’t a practical understanding of how to use a hammer within the context of a variety of activities sufficient to grasp the concept “hammer”? As with the blind person, it is entirely possible for someone who is unable to use a hammer (for whatever reason) to grasp the concept, and thus it clearly isn’t necessary. We can imagine a variety of different systems that could possess abilities to deploy hammers in practical problem solving without being able to engage in any kind of explicit practical reasoning, ranging from robots programmed with basic learning algorithms, to non-linguistic humans. These more or less complex problem solving abilities are potential candidates for concept possession. However, these abilities are always parochial to some extent. My body dynamically regulates its temperature in response to a variety of climates, but this practical responsiveness does not have the kind of generality required to constitute a conceptual grasp of temperature. Such abilities can only constitute the grasp of a concept if they are appropriately connected to our dispositions to manage our theoretical and practical commitments, so as to contribute to our general understanding of the world and the ways we can act within it. For instance, my ability to cope with hammers involves the ability to imagine the ways in which they will function in different contexts, and it is my ability to translate this imaginative output into counterfactual reasoning that disposes me to use the word “hammer” correctly in reasoning about it. The upshot of this is that I am able to reason about hammers and their uses beyond the limits of my practical understanding and its associated imaginative capacities (e.g., about their role in large or unusual practical projects), in a way that can be assessed and corrected by those with different capacities from my own. The dispositions which constitute my conceptual grasp of hammers thus have a different basis than those of the person who can talk about hammers but not use them, but this doesn’t prevent us from grasping the same concept.

This is just a brief sketch of what Brandom means when he says that the norms which constitute our concepts are implicit in thick practices, or practices that actually involve the objects that we use these concepts to represent. The causal features of the objects themselves act as constraints upon the development of our dispositions to respond to them in perception and action, and via them upon our dispositions to reason about them. That we share a stable set of reasonably similar dispositions, and thus constitute a common practice, is in large part due to this kind of causal constraint. Not all commonality is a result of systems of social correction, but some of it comes from what Wittgenstein would call a shared form-of-life. It is equally responsible for subtle changes in the way we reason, insofar as our practices gradually adapt and evolve in response to the challenges presented by our environment. If our grasp of concepts is in part constituted by informal practices of observing and coping with things, then more or less spontaneous improvements in the latter can lead to improvements in the former.

However, although this kind of brute conceptual revision is possible, it is far from the only, or even the most important form of revision. This can easily be seen the further away we get from tame concepts (e.g., “red”, “hammer”, “jellyfish”, etc.), and consider concepts that wear their theory-ladenness on their sleeves (e.g., “spin value”, “particle accelerator”, “ecosystem”, etc.). The challenges we face in the application of these concepts (e.g., conflicting measurements, experimental anomalies, engineering difficulties, etc.) cannot be overcome by tacit adaptation of our practices in all (or even most) cases, but must often proceed via revisions in the theories they are bound up with. This involves representing these problems so as to formulate the reasons they give us to change our practices for observing, reasoning about, and acting in the world. The most important revisions to our picture of the world are not external to the process of rational rectification through which we build that picture, but internal to it. Of course, it is our practices which are revised, and it is us who decide how to revise them, but this does not undermine the distinction between the way we take the world to be and the way it is, insofar as the process of revision constrains the decisions we make in the appropriate way. It is the fact that we can use some concepts in order to evaluate and ultimately revise others that maintains the distinction between concepts and what they represent.

To return to an example of Levi’s, the concept “evolution” lets us ‘bring the world into relief’ in that it improves our ability to reason about a variety of topics, including almost the whole of biology, and parts of the social sciences. This improvement is not a matter of directly enabling some new kind of practical activity, but rather of enabling new kinds of explanation and prediction that open up possibilities which can then be explored in practical reasoning and action. This is not to deny that the success (and failure) of actions motivated by reasoning deploying certain concepts contributes to the assessment of these concepts. It most certainly does. However, it contributes by providing us with reasons to reconsider and revise the content of these concepts as part of the overall process of rational rectification. The effectiveness of concepts is not something that can be assessed independently of their role in the process through which we represent the world as a whole.

5. Conclusion: Representation and Oppression

So, what are concepts? They are shared practices for using words that we can tap into to describe, explain, predict, and organise, which are all aspects of the practice of giving and asking for reasons through which intelligibility is articulated. There is a lot more to be said about each of these aspects, and about the pragmatics of reasoning more generally. I’ve provided nothing more than a loose sketch of an account here (though I have said more elsewhere). Particularly, there is a lot of work to be done providing a detailed account of the pragmatics of concepts revision, as it is a complex process that differs between forms of discourse (see the work of Imre Lakatos and Mark Wilson for a discussion of some of these details). However, I won’t go into this any further.

Instead, I’d like to return to the core theme of Levi’s post on Adorno:-

If object-oriented ontology is anything it is an attempt, I believe, to bear witness to, to tarry with, those remainders that elude the manic drive to identity embodied in conceptualization. If I itch, experiencing an almost allergic reaction whenever questions of representation, truth, and norms arise, then this is precisely because I encounter a sort of drive to identity, a reduction of alterity and heterogeneity, an eradication of queerness, nascent in all discourses that focus on these questions. The point is not that we don’t represent, make true and false claims about the world, etc., but rather that discourses focused on these things tend to erase the remainder, the different, the heterogeneous.

Levi takes the fact that Brandomian approaches focus upon truth and representation as indicative both of a drive not only to eliminate that which is different from the conceptual as such, but to eliminate difference per se. This seems to be the centre piece of the picture of dominating desires and sad passions that he takes to be implicit within them. Now, as I’ve tried to show, the portrayal of such approaches as being focused upon truth and representation is misleading insofar as neither of these notions is taken to be an explanatory primitive, and Levi’s admission that we do represent and make truth claims is hollow insofar as he fails to tell any story about how these fit into his picture at all. I’ve also tried to show how the fact that the conceptual is linguistic does not prevent it from representing the non-linguistic, and equally, how it is possible to retain a distinction between the way we represent the world, and the way it is. However, there is an additional side to this argument, which I think it is worth addressing in brief.

It seems to go something like this. Insisting that it is important to assess the truth of our philosophical/scientific/ethical claims and the concepts we use to make them means accepting the possibility of a final philosophical/scientific/ethical picture, and this is dangerous insofar as it encourages us to take our own opinions and prejudices as presenting this final truth. In short, it tends to undermine the idea that it is possible for us to be wrong, and this leads us to either ignore or suppress features of the world that do not fit into our picture of it (i.e., that are differ from it in some way), be they phenomena that contravene it (e.g., the church’s response to Galileo) or ethnic groups that cannot be integrated into it (e.g., the nazi’s response to the jewish people). The only response to this is to admit that no matter how we talk about truth and falsity in ordinary contexts, there is an important sense in which we are always wrong, and thus that the assessment of claims and concepts must made on other terms, perhaps in terms of how ‘interesting’ they are. Arguments for and against positions are okay in certain local contexts, but assessment of the overall picture requires something like an aesthetic eye.

I think that this is a terrible argument. This is not because dogmatic faith in one’s position cannot have oppressive consequences. It can and has. Rather, it is because in attempting to respect differences by transforming the possibility of error into the necessity of error, it undermines the process through which we identify and overcome specific errors in our positions. It is only by taking some claims to be true that we can identify that other claims are false, only by using some concepts that we can criticise others. To truly acknowledge the possibility of error is to recognise that one could be wrong about specific things, and to do this is to undertake a responsibility to justify the claims one makes, and to integrate them into a complete, consistent, economical and systematic picture of the world. One can’t abandon one’s commitment to the importance of seeking truth, without also abandoning the procedures by which we avoid falsity. This is because truth is an ideal implicit within those procedures. We need not even think of it as an achievable ideal, but simply as that which we aim at in the unending process of rational rectification (see Brandom’s Hegelian thoughts on this topic here). We may thus reject the implication that to avoid the danger of dogmatism we must abandon truth. Instead, we can insist (quite sensibly) that the best way to avoid dogmatism is to intensify the process through which we criticise and revise our commitments. The converse claim, that to avoid dogmatism we must abandon or at least truncate rational criticism, should strike us as thoroughly absurd.

Does it matter then whether the desires motivating my defence of reason are perverse? Well, I don’t think so. Such matters may prove useful information for reconstructing the details of my position, or the implicit presuppositions which underlie it, but this should only be seen as an means toward properly assessing it. To do otherwise is simply to engage in an elaborate ad hominem, or worse, to dodge justificatory responsibility by appealing to some personal aesthetics of philosophy (or philosophers). If there is one thing that consistently bores me in philosophy, it’s the line ‘I don’t have to address X because I find it uninteresting’. This isn’t because everyone should engage with everything. Far from it. We can’t engage with everything, and sometimes just need to make choices on the basis of what seems interesting to us. But this can’t be generalised into a criterion of good philosophy. To do so is not only lazy, but it threatens to collapse back into the correlationist relativism we’re supposed to be moving beyond. Call me a judge, an inquisitor, a policeman, or whatever you like, but give me some independent reasons why I’m wrong. Anything less is decidedly uninteresting.