Showing papers in "Review of Metaphysics in 2005"

Wrongs and Faults

Abstract: I THE ELEMENTARY MORAL DISTINCTION The ultimate objects of moral assessment are people and their lives I will call this the "elementary moral distinction" Many today seem to have lost sight of it How often are we told that we should show respect for other people, only to discover that what we are actually being asked to show respect for is how those other people live? (1) The equation of the two should be resisted We do not always respect a person by respecting how he lives Sometimes quite the reverse If someone is wasting his life but still deserves to be respected, the default way to show him the respect that he deserves is to do something that improves the way he is living--shake him out of it, block his path, change his incentives, shield him from further exploitation, and so forth Sometimes, of course, there is no action open to us that will yield any improvement in how he lives, while on other occasions the only things we can do are disproportionate In such cases we have to tolerate his continuing to live as badly he does But toleration is one thing, and respect is quite another Toleration is the moral virtue of those who appropriately curb their wish to eliminate what they do not respect One cannot respect the way someone is living and tolerate it at the same time (2) In philosophy, the contemporary neglect of the elementary moral distinction owes much to Kant I am not thinking here of Kant's much-advertised (and much-misrepresented) doctrine of respect for persons Insofar as Kant said anything of note about respect for persons, his views were consistent with those I just sketched (3) Rather, I am thinking of Kant's more distinctive doctrine that a morally perfect person cannot but lead a morally perfect life This doctrine is now often remembered, thanks to a famous exchange between Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, under the heading of "moral luck" Kant is cited by both Williams and Nagel as the philosopher who most sweepingly rejected the possibility of moral luck (4) But on closer inspection Kant did nothing of the kind He merely argued that morally perfect people cannot be morally unlucky in their lives (5) Thanks to the nature of morality, he said, they cannot live lives falling short of the morally perfect lives that they deserve to live But Kant never denied nor gave us any reason to doubt that morally imperfect people can live lives that are morally worse, or indeed morally better, than those that they deserve to live Nor, for that matter, did he deny or give us any reason to doubt that whether someone is a morally perfect or a morally imperfect person could itself be a matter of luck So Kant certainly did not attempt to abolish the elementary moral distinction But it is true that a decline of philosophical sensitivity to that distinction has been among Kant's most enduring philosophical legacies Kantian thinking, philosophical and popular, has simplified and radicalized Kant's own views on the subject of moral luck So much so that even a retreat to Kant's own more modest views is sometimes perceived as a bold anti-Kantian move Consider, for example, the group of contemporary moral philosophers who march, albeit not in an orderly fashion, under the banner of "virtue ethics" Claiming to revive a pre-Kantian tradition of ethics traceable back to Aristotle, many of them favor "virtuously" as an answer to the question, "How should one live?" (6) Ironically, this was precisely Kant's answer to the same question, and it was one that Aristotle explicitly rejected (7) One should of course be a morally virtuous person That much is analytically true and accepted by Aristotle and Kant alike But no amount of moral virtue, on Aristotle's view, ensures that one leads a morally perfect life The morally perfect life, rather, is the life that a morally perfect person would want to live Owing to bad luck, even a morally perfect person may live a morally imperfect life …

Politeia as Focal Reference in Aristotle's Taxonomy of Regimes

Abstract: THE NATURE OF POLITEIA AND ITS CANDIDACY FOR STATUS as the best regime in the doctrine of Aristotle remains a disputable question. Some scholars insist that whatever the best regime may be, it must be a kind of polity. (1) Others, however, firmly contend that the best must be a variety of aristocracy, with a significant number arguing that the best may be a monarchy should a suitable candidate be available. (2) Moreover, it has been argued that since the ancients did not desire the establishment of "polities" and hence pluralistic politics, but that this has been a concern of the moderns, one must conclude that an understanding of politeia as being a "mixed regime" would be "a contradiction in terms, because a regime proper cannot have several different authoritative opinions concerning what is just and what is not and still remain a workable political system." (3) Arguably, however, if one adverts to certain parallels in Aristotle's reasoning manifested in his considerations of method and his use of differentiae in biological analyses, his reflections on politeia are set into greater relief. After all, in Aristotle's purview, "ethics is dependent upon nature for the materials in which it has to work," even though nature imposes no predetermined law upon human nature, and so "the moral philosopher must have some theoretical knowledge of the soul, even more than the medical practitioner requires a certain amount of theoretical knowledge in regard to the body and its various organs." (4) Equally must the political philosopher be cognizant of the different kinds of materials that enter into making man the social and political animal that he is, since it is "because man is an animal with such and such characters, therefore is the process of his development necessarily such as it is; and therefore it is accomplished in such and such an order." (5) Thus, without a careful examination of what is presupposed as prior in generation and time to what is posterior and prior in the order of perfection, the polis is unintelligible, and afortiori that regime that at first glance remains so elusive in revealing its specific difference, politeia. (6) I It is often remarked that two fundamental hierarchical orders are encountered early in the first book of Aristotle's Politics, that of the soul in relation to body and that of the soul's powers in relation to one another. In the first, as is well known, soul commands body despotically ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]). (7) In contrast, within the second hierarchical order it is nous or intellect which, by possessing logos ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] ]), exercises "political and royal" rule over appetite ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]). (8) The focus is not incidental, since in all matters of magnitude "an error at the beginning, though quite small, bears the same ratio to the errors in the other parts." (9) The manifestation of each of these real relations within the proto-political society of the home is evidenced within the master/slave relation and that of husband/wife, with purely royal rule being exercised over offspring who are subjects of enculturation to act in conformity with reason. Thus, we have the inductive inference of the following ratios: soul : body :: master : slave = despotic measure; reason : appetites :: husband/wife = royal and political rule or measure; reason : potential reason :: father : child = regal rule. The first principally implies measure imposed upon what is lacking the capacity to exercise reason and virtue from within, the second, rule of reason through deliberative and coparticipative collaboration in seeking arete for a common good, and the third the instillation of virtue through gradual habituation. Hence, the first is benignly despotic in character, and the second is royal and political in terms of father to mother as ordered to the common good of the household but aristocratic in terms of the friendship that is its basis and finality. …

The Common Good

Abstract: NATURAL LAW ARGUMENTS CONCERNING the political order characteristically appeal, at some point or other, to the common good of the political community. To take the clearest example: Aquinas, perhaps the paradigmatic natural law theorist, appeals to the common good in his accounts of the definition of law, of the need for political authority, of the moral requirement to adhere to the dictates issued by political authority, and of the form political authority should take. But while united on the point that arguments for normative political conclusions must take the common good as a principle, natural law theorists have not been united in their understanding of the nature of the common good. The differences among natural law views on the character of the common good are not trivial: they concern such deep issues as whether the common good should be understood as an intrinsic or an instrumental good, and whether the common good should be understood in relation to the good of individuals of that community or solely in relation to the good of the community as a whole. If one aims to develop a natural law account of the political order, then, one cannot remain neutral with respect to the various natural law understandings of the common good, for these various understandings are almost certain to yield differing conclusions on the source, functions, and limits of political authority. I We can, I think, agree on some general formal considerations concerning the nature of the common good without presupposing a particular account of what the common good is; these formal considerations constrain the possible candidate conceptions and will help to determine which of the candidate conceptions is ultimately the most plausible. Not surprisingly, these considerations concern two features of the common good: its goodness and its commonness. The notion that the common good must be good is meant to stand in place of a couple of theses concerning the way that the concept of the common good functions in governing political deliberation and in underwriting allegiance to the outcomes of that deliberation. Ends advanced by citizens in political deliberation as appropriate aims of state action are in fact such only if they can be brought under the description "necessary or useful to promoting, protecting, or honoring the common good." Given that political action is appropriately regulated by the aim of the common good, it seems that if we are not to disconnect political deliberation from the grounds for adherence to the outcomes of that deliberation, we need to say that the common good is something to which agents have good reasons to adhere. That the common good is the end regulating political deliberation and the source of allegiance to the outcomes of correct political deliberation generates both an epistemological and a practical constraint on theories of the content of the common good. The epistemological constraint is that inasmuch as the common good serves as a starting point for political deliberation, it must be something to which we can have some sort of cognitive access. The practical constraint is that a conception of the common good should be something that the citizen has--I will put it as vaguely as possible here--very strong reasons to pursue and to promote. I will try to be loose about this, noting only that it would be an unfortunate theory of the content of the common good that did not support a view in which citizens should have allegiance to the common good thus understood. The other desideratum that a conception of the common good must satisfy is that it must be common. Put roughly, the idea is that the common good is common only if it is an end that is shared by reasonable agents within the political community. One might wonder whether this desideratum can serve in any way to differentiate the merits of competing conceptions of the common good: surely any barely plausible conception of the common good will meet this constraint. …

Phronesis as Poetic: Moral Creativity in Contemporary Aristotelianism

Abstract: IN BOOK 6 OF HIS NICOMACHEAN ETHICS, Aristotle distinguishes phronesis or "practical wisdom" from poiesis or "art," "production." Neither deals with the universals of pure science or theoretical wisdom but rather with "things which admit of being other than they are," "the realm of coming-to-be." But phronesis "is itself an end," namely "acting well" (eupraxia), whereas poiesis "has an end other than itself" (heteron to telos), namely a work of art or a product. (1) Phronesis is realized insofar as it is practiced well in itself, and it involves right deliberation about goods internal to human action such as courage and justice. Poiesis is realized insofar as it produces something good beyond itself, in the making of noninternal goods such as crafts or goods imitative of action such as stories. Aristotle is here modifying Plato's limitation of the role of the poets in his moral republic, but in a milder form that does not see the poets as actively distorting morality but rather performing a different kind of activity. Practical wisdom and poetics are both teleological practices--that is, practices aimed at some end--but the first finds its end within the practice itself, the second finally beyond it. Such a distinction between ethics and poetics has had an enormous influence over Western moral thought. Augustine's Confessions condemns rhetoric and public amusements as morally corrupting to the soul. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica repeats Aristotle's distinction almost word for word. Immanuel Kant's second and third critiques draw a sharp line between the objectivity of the moral law and the subjectivity of aesthetic taste. The Romantics and Friedrich Nietzsche turn the opposition on its head, contrasting the stultifying laws of morality with a more authentic inner creativity "beyond good and evil." (2) Today, Jurgen Habermas, for example, can uncontroversially divide moral intersubjective "normativity" from poetic inner-subjective "expression." (3) We hold artists, storytellers, craftspeople, and scientists accountable to moral criteria governing the uses of their creative products (as in limits on pornographic viewership or the employment of nuclear weapons); and artists may deal with moral subjects. But the activity itself of making or creating that defines "poetics" is generally assumed to be different in kind from the activity of living an ethically good life. This paper explores a range of contemporary Aristotelian perspectives on ethics to suggest new ways in which, beyond Aristotle himself, phronesis or practical wisdom does in fact involve a necessary element of poetics, making, or creativity. After examining ethics and poetics in the rather different appropriations of Aristotle made by Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum, I then go farther a field to the more innovative and postmodern use of Aristotle made by Paul Ricoeur. Each of these contemporary ethicists takes us a step deeper into the relation of moral phronesis and poetics. On these bases, I then challenge this ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the poets and argue that phronesis holds promise as a vital moral category today precisely insofar as it is conceived of as creative at its core. I Let us start by asking why the distinction between phronesis and poetics is important to Aristotle himself. It has been noted that the Nicomachean Ethics has two related but different definitions of phronesis. (4) The first definition concerns the human good or end. Phronesis here is "the capacity of deliberating well about what is good and advantageous for oneself." (5) It is the "intellectual virtue" specifically concerned with understanding the moral good. One deliberates through phronesis not just "in a partial sense" but regarding "what sort of thing contributes to the good life in general." Thus, the phronimos, or practically wise person, is good at grasping the nature of the good as such. He understands, for example, what it means to be courageous or just, and uses this understanding to act courageously or justly in actual situations. …

Husserl’s Argumentation for the Pre-Copernican View of the Earth

Abstract: Jjjdmund Husserl's NACHLASS includes a text enclosed in an enve lope on which is written: "Overthrow of the Copernican theory in usual interpretation of a world view. The original ark, earth, does not move."1 This text was chosen to be one of the first posthumous publi cations of Husserl. The editor, however, chose to use a less controver sial title: "Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature." The title nevertheless does not change the radicality of the text itself; it boldly claims that the earth does not move. Husserl knew that with such a statement he risked becoming a laughing stock. For the Western scientific community the Copernican view of the earth's movement is the symbol of the victory of science over common sense views and religion. The text on the earth is a hot potato for Husserl researchers. Should it be taken seriously? Or is Husserl just playing with names as he presents the unmoving Ur-earth although he must know that the earth moves?2 Sometimes commentators feel a need to explain that

The Essentialist Nominalism of John Burdian

Abstract: I TO MANY CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHERS, the phrase "essentialist nominalism" may appear to be an oxymoron. After all, essentialism is the doctrine that things come in natural kinds characterized by their essential properties, on account of some common nature or essence they share; while nominalism is precisely the denial of the existence, indeed, the very possibility of such shared essences. Nevertheless, despite the intuitions of such contemporary philosophers, (1) John Buridan was not only a thoroughgoing nominalist, as is well known, but also a staunch defender of a strong essentialist doctrine against certain skeptics of his time. So the question inevitably arises: could he consistently maintain such a doctrine? In the following discussion I will first examine Buridan's essentialism to show why he could reasonably think that he can both adhere to his nominalist metaphysics and endorse a version of essentialism that can serve as the foundation of genuine scientific knowledge in the strong Aristotelian sense. In the subsequent section I will argue that on the basis of his logical theory of essential predication Buridan is definitely able to maintain a version of essentialism that is sufficient to provide the required foundation of valid scientific generalizations and to refute skeptical doubts against the possibility of such a foundation. Next, I will examine the question whether Buridan's solution is consistent with the broader context of his logic and epistemology. In this section I will argue that although Buridan's logical theory is consistent with his nominalist essentialist position, his cognitive psychology is not. In particular, I will argue that Buridan's abstractionist account of how we acquire our simple substantial concepts is incompatible with his account of the semantic function of absolute terms subordinated to these concepts. Finally, I will draw some general conclusions from this discussion concerning the relationships between metaphysical essentialism and the philosophy of mind and language. II If we want to maintain that Buridan was both an essentialist and a nominalist, as we certainly should, then we have to do what we normally do when ascribe two apparently incompatible attributes to the same thing. We have to provide such explanations of the intended meanings of the attributes in question that show them to be in fact compatible, but, at the same time, we should also be able to show that these intended meanings are not just ad hoc, twisted interpretations, but are genuinely in line with common, proper usage. So what do we mean, precisely, when we say that Buridan was an essentialist? When we call someone an essentialist, we usually mean at least one of two things: (1) the person we call an essentialist is committed to attributing essential predicates to things, or (2) the person is committed to attributing some common, shared essences to things. Let me call the first version of essentialism "predicate essentialism," and the second "realist essentialism." Clearly, with this distinction at hand we should be able to provide a coherent interpretation of calling someone a "nominalist essentialist" in the sense that the person in question is a predicate essentialist, while not a realist essentialist, since his nominalism consists in the denial of there being shared essences, but not in the denial of there being essential predicates. However, obviously, this simple word magic can do the job only if we are able to show that predicate essentialism is compatible with the denial of realist essentialism. In any case, my first contention is that this is precisely what Buridan is trying to pull off: one of the basic aims of his philosophy of language and metaphysics is to show that he can be a staunch nominalist in denying real essences to things in the way realists conceive of them, (2) yet at the same time he can attribute scientifically knowable essential predicates to things. …

Gadamer on the subject´s participation in the game of truth

Abstract: The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. (1) THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THE HEIDEGGERIAN CRITIQUE of subjectivity has left a profound mark on the philosophy of the twentieth century. Anyone who has read Sartre, Lacan, Levinas, Foucault, or Derrida can attest to this. Paradoxically, this critique resulted less in a complete disappearance of the subject from the philosophical scene than in its preservation under the minimal form of what one could call "a subject without qualities." Like the Heideggerian Dasein before them, "consciousness" for Sartre, "the subject of the unconscious" for Lacan, or "the subject of ethical responsibility" as understood by Levinas can all be seen as representative figures of such a minimal subjectivity. In these various forms, the subject's unstable existence is dominated, respectively, by the questioning of an impromptu givenness, by a blind drive for negation, by the arbitrary facticity of a chain of signifiers, or by the appeal of the face of the other. The time has come to question the viability and compass of such a minimal subjectivity. Weren't Heidegger and his successors halted halfway because they feared a definitive repudiation of subjectivity would have had much too harmful consequences on the cultural and ethical acquisitions which the traditional conception of subjectivity had served to guarantee? Or, quite to the contrary, did they go too far in draining away all of the richness of the traditional conception of subjectivity, thereby only retaining the formal and abstract schema of an impersonal and uniform subjectivity? The hermeneutic philosophy of Gadamer indisputably takes its lead from the Heideggerian platform. The understanding (Verstehen) which forms, for Gadamer, the common woof of all the diverse existential comportments is a mode of life which a classical conception of the subject of knowledge can hardly account for. What occurs in the understanding, namely the event of a truth, can no longer be attributed to the activity of an autonomous, egological consciousness. What is understood is something completely different from a subsisting object, and someone who understands what befalls him can no longer be presented as a purely impartial spectator. Even while still deserving in a certain manner to be called a "subject without qualities," according to Gadamer, the subject of the understanding--instead of constituting meanings--is already determined in its own facticity by the historical meaning of the human world which envelops the totality of all meanings. Not only do such meanings truly exist only when they come to be understood by someone. Moreover, someone who understands truly exists only when understanding those meanings. This amounts to saying that the subject and the meanings it understands owe their appearing to one and the same event of a finite lightening of an infinite reservoir of meaning and truth. Precisely on account of their finitude and their insufficiency, every explicitly understood meaning and every subjective mode of the understanding stand out from the infinite richness of a pregiven cultural horizon. Before questioning an as yet obscure meaning, and before being concerned with its own identity, the subject is already possessed and challenged by the disclosure of a truth that infinitely surpasses it. It only participates in a succession of unforeseeable disclosures; it is a simple passenger whose itinerant identity is relative to the passage of events. Is that to say that the subject according to Gadamer is little else than this Dasein which, for Heidegger, is merely realizing a mission consigned to it by Being alone? Is the world of the historical tradition, such as Gadamer conceives it, only one of the various forms of the Ereignis of Sein? Does the subject who comes to understand more and more of the cultural heritage the human world has bequeathed to it have nothing that properly belongs to it? …

Visual Intelligence in Painting

Abstract: PHILOSOPHERS HAVE LONG AGREED that thinking is expressed in the use of language, that we "think in the medium of words." (1) It is also true, however, that we think in the medium of pictures, and it is likely that these two ways of thinking are interrelated; certainly, we could not think in pictures if we did not have words, and perhaps we could not use words, in principle, unless we were also engaged in some sort of picturing, at least in our imagination. An ideographic language like Chinese would give greater support to the latter possibility than would our phonetically based form of writing. Philosophically, words and pictures can be used to illuminate one another and to shed light on what it is to think. In both words and pictures, we deal with compositions, and in both cases the compositions are, to use a phrase of Michael Oakeshott, "exhibitions of intelligence." (2) There is a difference between the two that we notice immediately: spoken words are fleeting and pictures are durable; words and pictures differ in their temporality. They also differ in other ways that are philosophically important. Let us explore these differences. I Words and Their Structure. We begin with spoken words, and we ask what it means to think in the medium of speech. (3) When we speak, we present things as articulated into wholes and parts, and we do so for ourselves and for others. The paradigmatic form of speech is found in conversation, whether between two people or among many, whether in private or in public. The focus of speech is not the speech itself but the things that are spoken about. Thoughtful speech is like a magic wand that we wave over things. As we wave the wand, the parts and wholes of things become disclosed: their identity, their features, their relationships, their essentials and their accidentals, in a word, their intelligibility, all come to light, for ourselves and for our interlocutors. However, we do not articulate just the things that we present. While we explicate things, we also conjugate the words we speak. The speech that we declare is itself segmented into its own kinds of parts and wholes. We continually assemble and reassemble the wand itself as well as the things we wave it over. We display things by structuring our speech. Our listeners are intent on the things we talk about, but they must also be aware, marginally, of the words we speak. The eye is caught by the thing and the ear is caught by the sound, but the mind is shaped by both: we attend to what is seen as we listen to what is said. Speech is articulated on two levels. First, on the higher level, each sentence and each argument is made up of lexicon and grammar, of content and syntax. Second, on the lower level, each word is internally made up of phonemes, of vowels and consonants. The phonemic structure inside a word establishes each word as a word, and these words are conjoined in grammatical and lexical sequences. When all this happens on the side of speech, parts of the world come to light. The artful combinatorics in words and sentences lets the articulation of things take place, and such exhibition occurs whether we speak of things in their presence or their absence. Human reason can articulate on all these levels; it keeps all of these dimensions in mind, and all of them are significant: human intelligence composes words out of phonemes and statements out of words, and simultaneously it displays things in their parts and wholes. We charge our words with so much intelligence that things themselves begin to appear in the light that the words give off. The person who accomplishes this, furthermore, does so for himself and for others. All discourse is in principle a matter of conversational reciprocity. Thinking in the medium of words is inherently intersubjective, and so is human reason. The most conspicuous and most tangible feature of our verbal articulation is the way in which phrases are embedded into one another. …

The Concept of Progress in Wittgenstein's Thought

Abstract: AS A MOTTO FOR THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, Wittgenstein chose to quote a line from Johann Nepomuk Nestroy's play Der Schutzling (The Protege'): "Anyway, the thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it really is." (1) The structure and content of the rest of this paper reflect how I see the motto of the Investigations orienting the reader toward the remainder of that text, specifically prefiguring how the concept of progress is relevant for our grasping some of its central philosophical objectives. I see the motto as at once referring us to Wittgenstein's authorship and at the same time referring to the cultural context in which his work has been carried out. What I hope to accomplish, then, is to give an account of how I see the Philosophical Investigations engaging in a critique of a certain understanding of progress in a cultural sense of that term, against the background of the way in which I understand the book to amount to a kind of philosophical progress in Wittgenstein's thinking. (2) My aims here can perhaps be made a bit clearer by calling attention to an ambiguity in my title. "The Concept of Progress in Wittgenstein's Thought" can be understood to refer to certain features of the development of Wittgenstein's thought. But it could also be taken to refer to what Wittgenstein thought about the concept of progress, where "concept of progress" is connected to certain value judgments one makes when comparing different features of earlier and later historical periods. The main goal of this paper is to show how it broadens our perspective on the nature and significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy when we see that these two ways of thinking about the role of progress in his thought are actually woven together in his work. A further challenge follows from the way I try to reach this goal, since the paper draws on and brings together what to some may seem to be not only individually controversial, but also incompatible approaches to understanding Wittgenstein's thought as expressed in his texts. (3) Part 1 is a brief discussion of some textual and literary-critical questions that bear on the nature of the motto as well as on the use I make of material that not only falls outside of Philosophical Investigations, but outside of anything we might call Wittgenstein's "strictly philosophical" texts. In part 2, I note some assumptions I make regarding the relation between the Tractatus and the Investigations. Against the background of these assumptions, I show in Part III how the remarks on rule-following can be taken as an example of how the Philosophical Investigations attempts to lead the reader to a perspective on language that is directly relevant for a type of philosophical critique of culture. Last, part 4 addresses the question of whether the perspective on progress that I locate in the remarks on rule-following entail a kind of political conservatism, especially when taken together with some of Wittgenstein's stated views on modern civilization. I David Stem's paper, "Nestroy, Augustine, and the Opening of the Philosophical Investigations," contains a highly informative discussion of the very regrettable publication history and subsequent neglect by commentators of the motto for the Investigations. (4) As Stern notes, the motto has yet to be translated for any of the bilingual German-English editions of the book and is omitted altogether from English only translations. (5) Moreover, even though the motto itself appeared in earlier German editions, until Joachim Schulte's critical genetic edition from 2001 included the word "motto" in front of the line from Nestroy (as it appears in Wittgenstein's manuscript), readers were left to make an educated guess as to what the function of this line might be. (6) With such a history, it is perhaps not too surprising that the motto rarely figures significantly, if at all, in the numerous discussions devoted to the opening of the Investigations. …

Ethical Criticism in Heidegger's Early Freiburg Lectures

Abstract: I HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, CRITICISM. Philosophy has a history because human life is historical. This truism assumes a deeper, more puzzling, and unsettling significance in the programmatic section 6 of Sein und Zeit, which promises nothing less than a Destruktion of the history of philosophy centered on a few pivotal figures and guided by the problem of temporality as the horizon and transcendental condition of any understanding and explicit interpretation of the sense of being. If the Seinsfrage cannot be formulated, let alone answered, without this detour through the history of ontology, it is precisely because the philosophizing human being is its past, because the philosopher's past does not merely trail behind the present as a foregone conclusion but "always already advances ahead of it." (1) Every effort to free ourselves from tradition and to begin with a tabula rasa "is pervaded by traditional concepts and ... horizons and traditional angles of approach." (2) An understanding shaped and governed by the past plays its enabling role whether the individual recognizes and welcomes it or not, whether he makes the past an object of study and cultivates an interest in tradition or abandons history to the historian or philosopher. An individual or a people or an entire era can lack historical consciousness, philosophy of history, and historiography, and can remain indifferent to tradition only because the human being is historical "in the ground of its being." (3) But this indebtedness is as equivocal as it is obvious. If history were not at once obstacle and vital impetus, there would be no need to dismantle our intellectual and cultural inheritance: the very tradition that makes the Seinsfrage and any other philosophical question possible at the same time "uproots the historicity of Dasein" and inhibits the "productive appropriation" of the past. (4) Human life is both enabled by tradition and entangled in its obviousness, simultaneously nourished and dominated by the heritage it takes over or carelessly imbibes and takes for granted. This holds true even when the past has been explicitly interpreted and criticized in a substantial body of written and oral work undertaken from a variety of points of view and with different philosophical and ideological agendas. A culture rich in historical and philosophical self-interpretation and criticism runs the risk of losing itself in an empty and aimless proliferation of standpoints and opinions and has to struggle more vigilantly than its so-called naive counterpart against the seduction of words divorced from serious engagement with issues and, ultimately, with life. The responsible philosopher, attuned to his embeddedness in a tradition that envelops and sustains him but troubled by the facile familiarity of his interpreted world and the questionable variety of philosophical concepts and propositions that circulate freely in the conversations and works that surround him, cannot develop a more penetrating understanding of the basic problems of philosophy without critical scrutiny of the traditional prejudices that inform his gaze. The train of thought just sketched is almost too obvious, too much a part of how some of us think and live and what most of us take for granted to merit rehearsal. There is, it appears, little to quibble over and less to add to what has become a commonplace, with few exceptions and rare opposition, in the reception of Heidegger and, more generally, if without reference to or dependence upon Heidegger, in contemporary philosophy and the culture at large. That this train of thought sounds as plausible as it does and strikes us as unworthy of explicit comment and serious argument and debate should draw attention to philosophical problems concealed beneath the obviousness of unquestioned philosophical and cultural convictions circulating in the agora of public opinion. It is the easiness itself that arouses our initial suspicions. …

Esoteric versus Latent Teaching

Abstract: ONE OF THE IDEAS TO WHICH LEO STRAUSS drew the attention of many readers in the last century is that of a difference between exoteric and esoteric philosophical writing. These terms can refer to different kinds of philosophical teaching, one kind intended for a general and the other kind for a more restricted audience. Indeed, it seems to be the case historically that it was Aristotle who first used (perhaps coined) one of the terms in such a sense, as will be discussed below. Alternatively, the terms can also be used to describe a single text that incorporates both levels of communication--such a text would have the capacity to address simultaneously two different kinds of readers. In this alternative case, the presence of an esoteric aspect of the text, one intended for a more restricted readership, can be indicated by hints, the structure of the text, allusions, and so forth, that most readers will not pay attention to but which some readers will ponder and assemble into an interpretation, a perspective from which to read and understand the text. Of course any kind of text that is written with dimensions of meaning that are not immediately evident might be called "esoteric" in a broader sense, the term here suggesting that the reader does not readily see the connections, the implications of its assertions, even though the author did not intend to hide anything from most readers. I have this experience when I read some literary works: as I reread and ponder them, I come to see new implications in what the author has written. Think of reading Sophocles or Moby Dick. Some of what is being said in an undertone, so to speak, slowly becomes evident, as one makes connections. Of course a less apparent or "esoteric" meaning may also be intended by the writer or speaker to be discovered by as many readers as possible, so that its covert character is a kind of challenge to the reader. In a work attributed to the fourth-century Athenian orator, Demetrius, we read, not all possible points should be punctiliously and tediously elaborated, but some should be left to the comprehension and inference of the hearer, who when he perceives what you have left unsaid becomes not only your hearer but your witness.... For he thinks himself intelligent because you have afforded him the means of showing his intelligence. It seems like a slur on your hearer to tell him everything as though he were a simpleton. (1) Great works of literature commonly have a dimension of meaning that appears clearly only when one reflects on the text, connects up different loci, and "puts two and two together." But to call these last examples "esoteric" in the present context would be to muddle the sense of the term that we are trying to articulate. Strauss uses the term "esoteric" to refer primarily to a level of meaning that is intended by the philosophical author to remain inaccessible to all but a relatively small number of readers. (2) In this case of a text with these two levels of meaning intended for different audiences, we can say that for most readers the esoteric meaning is and remains unnoticed. Why would an author want to speak to two disparate audiences in this way? Well, that difference may depend (as Strauss believed) on two senses of the phrase "political philosophy." One is its common meaning, philosophizing about the political community, about its telos and its matter and form. The other sense of "political philosophy" refers to the "politic" self-presentation of philosophy and philosophers to the political community in which they live. Why do philosophers have to think about that, to be concerned with that? Because philosophy is the project, the undertaking, to replace opinions about all things and the whole with knowledge of all things and of the whole. As Socrates says in the Phaedrus when he is asked a question about what actions are pleasing to the gods, I can tell you what I've heard from our ancestors. …

The Perils of Self-Perception: Explanations of Apperception in the Greek Commentaries on Aristotle

Abstract: ARISTOTLE'S BRIEF CONSIDERATIONS concerning how we perceive that we perceive (1) led to a long and wide-ranging discussion of the problem by his commentators, one that extended over several centuries. From the second century to the sixth, Aristotle's ancient Greek commentators, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Pseudo-Simplicius, and Pseudo-Philoponus, offered various interpretations of apperception. (2) The discussion of the problem is historically revealing, for the commentators did not so much attempt to write historically accurate interpretations of the texts upon which they commented; rather, they used the text as an occasion for their own active philosophical reflection. (3) They sought to extract the truth from a revered text. Hence, their commentaries are very helpful in reconstructing the development of philosophical views representative of their own times. Their discussions of self-awareness in perception are of particular interest, because in them we can witness changes in the broader questions of the nature of the self and truth. (4) But in addition to their historical interest, their extended debate about the nature of self-awareness in perception raises questions about modern philosophical attempts to privilege self-awareness in discussions of the nature of consciousness and the mind. (5) The ancient commentators, serious and reflective philosophers, came to widely divergent conclusions about the nature of self-awareness found in perception. They had no direct or privileged notion concerning the nature of the self or of consciousness. They came to different conceptions of the self because each modeled his explanation of self-awareness in perception on a more basic understanding of the nature of knowledge in general. (6) Ultimately, their explanation of knowledge rested on their notion of what the core meaning of truth was. (7) Each argues in the following logical order from (1) as the ultimate premise to (3) as the conclusion regarding self-awareness in perception: (8) (1) They posit a core meaning of truth; (2) They determine the nature of the intellect that is able to apprehend such truth; (3) They compare the serf-awareness in sensation to the self-awareness in intellection. Each commentator's explanation of self-awareness in perception begins with a stand on what the truth is at the most abstract level. None of them has a transparent understanding of the nature of self-awareness. Self-awareness itself may be immediate, but to understand self-awareness, each mediates his explanations of consciousness through more basic notions of the nature of truth and of understanding in general. The attempts by so many serious and reflective ancient philosophers to understand self-awareness, and the diversity of their answers, should serve to dampen the hopes and pretensions of modem theorists to take self-awareness as a primitive, privileged, and unassailable basis for understanding the mind. It should also caution against dismissing the notion of truth as unattainable or insignificant, because it has such significant implications for so many other questions. Once the notion of the self is involved, many other epistemic, ethical, and political questions follow as well. One may wish to dismiss the ancient commentators as mistakenly trapped in an overly rationalistic viewpoint from which modern theorists have escaped, but such a summary dismissal neglects the premonitory lessons that their efforts provide. Any explanation of awareness and consciousness faces the same difficulties that the ancient commentators faced. Every explanation of consciousness must be mediated through notions of what qualifies as an adequate theory or explanation. To explain consciousness, a theorist must rely on some sort of prior standard for validity of explanations. He must have at least a tacit notion of what sort of explanation will count as valid before he can attempt to construct an explanation that can hope to succeed. …

Textuality, Reality, and the Limits of Knowledge *

Abstract: I HOW MUCH CAN A PERSON KNOW? A Leibnizian Perspective on Human Finitude. How much can someone possibly know? What could reasonably be viewed as an upper limit of an individual's knowledge--supposing that factually informative knowledge rather than performative how-to knowledge or subliminally tacit knowledge is to be at issue? In pursuing this question, let us suppose someone with perfect recall who devotes a long lifespan to the acquisition of information. For seventy years this individual spends 365 days per annum reading for twelve hours a day at the rate of sixty pages an hour (with 400 words per page). That yields a lifetime reading quota of some 7.4 x [10.sup.9] words. Optimistically supposing that, on average, a truth regarding some matter of fact or other takes only some seven words to state, this means a lifetime access to some [10.sup.9] truths, that is, around a billion of them. No doubt most of us are a great deal less well informed than this. But is seems pretty well acceptable as an upper limit to the information that a human individual could probably not reach and certainly not exceed. After all, with an average of 400 pages per book, the previously indicated lifetime reading quota would come to some 46,000 books. The world's largest libraries, the Library of Congress for example, nowadays have somewhere around 20 million books (book-length assemblages of pamphlets included), and it would take a very Hercules of reading to make his way through even one-quarter one of one percent of so vast a collection (= 50,000), which is roughly what our aforementioned reading prodigy manages. If mastery of Library of Congress-encompassed material is to be the measure, then few of us would be able to hold our heads up very high. (1) This means that while a given individual can read any book (so that there are no inherently unreadable books), the individual cannot possibly read every book (so that for anyone of us there are bound to be very many unread books indeed). All this, of course, still only addresses the question of how much knowledge a given person--one particular individual--can manage to acquire. There yet remains the question of how much is in principle knowable--that is, can be known. Here it is instructive to begin with the perspective of the great seventeenth-century polymath G. W. Leibniz. Leibniz took his inspiration from The Sand Reckoner of Archimedes, who in this study sought to establish the astronomically large number of sand grains that could be contained within the universe defined by the sphere of the fixed stars of Aristotelian cosmology--a number Archimedes effectively estimated at [10.sup.50]. Thus even as Archimedes addressed the issue of the scope of the physical universe, so Leibniz sought to address the issue of the scope of the universe of thought. (2) Leibniz pursued this project very much in the spirit of the preceding observations. He wrote: All items of human knowledge can be expressed by the letters of the alphabet ... so that it follows that one can calculate the number of truths of which humans are capable and thus compute the size of a work that would contain all possible human knowledge, and which would contain all that could ever be known, written, or invented, and more besides. For it would contain not only the truths, but also all the falsehoods that men can assert, and meaningless expressions as well. (3) Thus if one could set an upper limit to the volume of printed matter accessible to inquiring humans, then one could map out by combinatorial means the whole manifold of accessible verbal material--true, false, or gibberish--in just the manner that Leibniz contemplated. This is exactly what he proceeded to do in a fascinating 1693 tract, De l'horizon de la doctrine humaine. (4) Any alphabet devisable by man will have only a limited number of letters (Leibniz here supposes the Latin alphabet of twenty-four). …

Metaphysical Foundations of the History of Philosophy: Hegel's 1820 Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy

Abstract: HEGEL EXPLICATES HIS THEORY of the history of philosophic thinking in several introductions to the various cycles of Lectures on the History of Philosophy held in Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin. Only the introductions to the first cycle of Heidelberg lectures (1816) and to the second cycle of Berlin lectures (1820) survive in Hegel's own hand. (1) Since the earlier of these is an integral part of the latter, an analysis of the 1820 Introduction provides a reliable account of Hegel's theory. Hegel lectures on the history of philosophy mainly as a philosopher, not as a historian. "The history of philosophy must itself be philosophical," (2) he declares in the address delivered ahead of the 1820 Introduction. (3) Thus, he is not interested primarily in delivering a chronicle of philosophic ideas, propositions, claims, arguments, and counterarguments in the historical order of their formulation. He presupposes his audience's general acquaintance with historical facts and events pertaining to philosophic theories, as well as with major thinkers' general tenets. Hegel is rather concerned with showing, first, why these tenets were relevant and enjoyed recognition in their time; second, how and why they were subsequently transformed; and third, how a core meaning may be discerned in them throughout their transformations. A paradigmatic illustration of Hegel's procedure in interpreting fundamental principles of the philosophic tradition is provided by the following comment on "being person" in a Remark to his treatment of "property" in the 1821 Philosophy of Right: The notion that what spirit is according to its concept or in itself, it should be also in its Dasein and for-itself (thereby that it be person capable of property, having ethicality [and] religion)--this idea is itself spirit's concept (as causa sui, i.e. as free causation, spirit is such cuius natura non potest concipi nisi existens; Spinoza, Ethics I, Def. 1.) Precisely in this concept ... there lies the possibility of the opposition between what spirit is merely in itself and its being also for itself ... and thus the possibility of the alienation of personhood. (4) In other words: the late modern conception of personhood as subjectivity with rights (to property, to moral convictions, beliefs, and so forth) is explained by Hegel as realization of the core meaning of Spinoza's "god" (or, as in other passages, of Descartes's res cogitans, equally inconceivable unless as existent). The core meaning of "spirit" since its inception as nous is the idea of a being that determines itself into being what it is--one important expression of which is, for example, modern political philosophy's notion of an autonomous, self-determining subject. The first of the goals outlined in the address and Introduction to these Lectures (see above) implies a serious attempt to grasp and to convey the sense in which philosophic concepts and arguments are meant and understood at their inception. This is where the philological and historiographic skill of the historian of philosophy has its rightful and necessary place. The second and third goals presuppose a theory of philosophy as a particular kind of thinking with specific logical and epistemological features. Here is where the philosopher must deliver an interpretation of historically documented theories and their principles that includes but also goes beyond the meaning ostensibly intended by each of them. The philosopher lecturing on the history of philosophy has, then, two sets of criteria guiding the exposition: the theoretical order of philosophic concepts (dictated by the analysis of their meanings, which is for Hegel a logical and metaphysical task at once) and the chronological order of their expression in the history of philosophic systems. These two sets of criteria do not operate independently of one another. Hegel's explicit claim is actually stronger than this. …