Horkheimer, The Origins of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History
Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness
Marcuse, Hegel's Ontology and the Foundation of a Theory of Historicity
2. Unless you can tell me exactly which categories you are referring to, we certainly can’t go any further with my reasons to refuse to entertain post-modernist and feminist ideas in the context of this debate. But to try and make some progress on this topic, here are some examples I would give of categorial thought in the Western tradition: in his Categories, Aristotle proposes ten categories conventionally translated into English as substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection; in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant proposes space and time as well as four groups of three categories (categories (i) of quantity: unity, plurality, totality; (ii) of quality; reality, negation, limitation; (iii) of relation: inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, community; (iv) of modality: possibility–impossibility; existence–non-existence, necessity–contingency.
Now it is indeed difficult to think outside these categories. Indeed, if Aristotle and Kant are right, it is impossible. I defy anyone, wherever and whenever they find themselves, to think without presupposing some notion, for example, of relation. But what these categories have in common is a lack of content. The category of relation does not specify either the relata or the nature of their connection in even the vaguest terms. And it is in this sense, and no other, that I am interested in developing ‘politics’ as a category because, as I have pointed out, *some* conception of politics must be presupposed in order for you to be able to identify it at all, in China or anywhere else. That is not to say that one’s ideas will not be modified extensively in the course of investigation, as you point out.
Where it seems to me that the post-modernist and feminist critiques have some bite is within what I call the realm of value. Do not think that I am unaware of the history of colonialism or of gender relations. Insofar as (informal) colonialism or chauvinism persist into the present, I am as keen to see them disappear as anyone else; my ideal world is one in which no-one is arbitrarily subjected to the will of another without redress. So, insofar as post-modernism and feminism are highlighting continuing injustices, and demanding remedies, they most certainly have an important role to play in contemporary political debate. But as I have already said, that is not my game. I keep firmly separate the philosophical and the ethical spheres, whereas they tend to mix them up, persistently presenting as conclusions from philosophical arguments positions that do not really logically follow from them.
Thus, from the philosophical point of view, most of what the post-modernists and feminists have to say, however well-intentioned and valuable from a rhetorical or strategic point of view, appears to me as a series of non-sequiturs. From what you say of Chakrabarty, he would fall into this group of people who either deny or are unaware of the fact that there is a point of view from which one can bracket one’s value commitments, but since it is from that very point of view I wish to try and think through categorial issues (and seem to be managing to do so with some degree of success), I am going to hold to this position until I am convinced otherwise. That is not to deny that value commitments are real and important things, because they are; and if there is a piece by DP that you really think I should read, then by all means forward it to me, because the last thing I want to be accused of is being closed-minded.
3. On the issue of the logic of the sciences, one must be very careful to distinguish the logical and sociological-historical questions at issue. Sociologically, and historically, you are of course quite right about the traumatic nature of the export of the sciences which had their origin in Europe. But one cannot literally export a conceptual framework, because ideas are not in space, only time, and they are not material. What was exported were the books, the equipment, etc. So there are two different levels to this question. That said, at the logical level, I have no problem either with the idea that science changes over time; I am already a pluralist when it comes to the existence of types of truth (ethical, historical, scientific, aesthetic, formal, philosophical truths all have a place in my scheme), and the idea of shifts in scientific truth is one I view with equanimity, in the same way that historical and indeed all other forms of truth can be said to change.
In this, incidentally, I find myself in agreement with figures like Nietzsche and Derrida for whom truth is a functional metaphor. I am also, as it happens, something of an admirer of Kuhn, and indeed one way of describing what I am doing is extending his approach from the natural sciences to ‘science’ in general, or indeed, to ‘thought’ in general. It is integral to all the regions of thought I identify in this dialectical system that I am proposing that they undergo something like Kuhnian paradigm shifts as each strives to be more like itself. Without this provision there is no explanation of the reality of intellectual and ethical progress.
]]>I am happier now with your remarks about ‘the political’. I like ‘efficacious action taken to transform shared environments’, because so far as I can see it essentially acknowledges my points that (i) to do comparative politics at all, one needs *some* conception of politics that is independent of the things that are being compared, and that (ii) to avoid treating the Western concept of politics as a norm, one had therefore better have a conception of politics which is not based exclusively on Western examples.
‘Efficacious action taken to transform shared environments’ is sufficiently broad to cover not just Chinese examples of politics but ones in other cultures, without being a merely analytic construct. There is nothing in ‘efficacious action taken to transform shared environments’ of the agora, the Westminster parliament, or a declaration of rights, and that is quite in keeping what I am trying to achieve by way of an abstract notion of politics than can account for the phenomena. It also has the virtue of recognizing the conditional nature of political activity – because, for example, if people do not think it is possible to transform their shared environment owing to a background cosmology which presents the human world to them as fixed, they cannot generate anything they would recognize as such (though, de facto, there may still be some unacknowledged politicking alongside the governing).
Thus, my own conception of ‘politics’, in this broad sense, doesn’t look much like what the average student would understand by it either – I don’t know what that might be, assemblies, elections etc I suppose. My point, then, was only that you must have *some* such notion of politics at work, however thin and abstract, that can cross cultures – I will concede it can be simply shared rather than universal, if you don’t like the connotations of universality. But if this particular notion doesn’t work for all Chinese political thought, some other one will have be found for the other cases; on the understanding that there may, at certain times and places, be no or at least very little politics. Indeed, it is my firm conviction that for most of the time the human species has been in existence there was no politics. Power, and government in the loosest sense, are coeval with the species, but ‘efficacious action taken to transform shared environments’, at least as a self-conscious matter, is not. Politics is something that can appear, disappear, and re-appear.
No doubt you are correct that, once politics does begin to exist, the study is an iterative process; one may find politics where one did not initially expect to, and one may decide later that something that one initially had thought was political is not really political after all. But all these judgments must result, in the end, in a modification of one’s broader conception of political activity that is deficient insofar as it cannot be made explicit.
I cannot, however, see any other support for this notion of ‘efficacious action’ than the biological, anthropological, and phenomenological position I have been defending all along. And to this position, which tries to address human experience at large, I regard post-modernist and feminist critiques as irrelevant - though if you review what I have written, I don’t think you could really sustain the claim that I was unaware of them.
So I ask again, who am I dismissing, or oppressing? Or what does my view rule out? And what are the categories within which I am unknowingly gripped? Moreover, am I seriously supposed to entertain the idea that evolution is an irredeemably Western notion? That anthropology is the preserve of Europeans? Or that phenomenology cannot be practiced by anyone not from the Northern hemisphere? Surely this is not what you mean; but until you can show me exactly how I am continuing an undeniably real tradition of colonial and chauvinistic oppression in making such statements, I will continue to discount them, for reasons that are as follows.
Granted, all knowledge is embedded in some way or other – that is my starting point – but it is embedded in importantly different ways. The categories that structure it are neither undiscoverable nor changeless. And all the structures of thought with which I am concerned are, it seems to me, no-one’s possession; that a certain mode of thought arises first in one culture rather than another does not give that culture any permanent ownership of it. Nor does the fact something has been invented in one culture mean that it cannot be independently re-invented in another, as indeed I believe movable type was invented first in China and later in Europe.
In saying all this I would like to underline that it is intended as an attempt to accommodate the possibility of comparative political thought without dictating how it ought to be done. I have no ‘method’ in that sense; and I regard this is a philosophical, not a methodological, conversation.
]]>I would also like to know exactly where these alleged biases are lurking, given that in everything I have said I have been quite happy to welcome ideas from any tradition and in the work of any thinker. It is true, of course, that in the last two hundred years there have been repeated instances in European and American history of universal declarations of rights being found not to apply universally in practice, and so on; but that is not my game. I couldn't care less whether the ideas belong to someone who is male or female, black, white, brown, yellow, or any other colour you please; I only care about the ideas themselves, and I am not interested in giving with one hand only to take back with the other. I will not dismiss anyone on ad hominem grounds, nor does the fact that they might happen to disagree with me make them necessarily less interesting to me. I have, in other words, no interest in imposing anything on anyone.
What I am interested in, for purposes of this conversation at least, is getting an answer to a question I have yet to see you propose your own answer to - how a comparative study of politics is possible if there is not something universal as well as something particular in the notion of politics as an activity? That is, on what grounds are you able to identify what goes on or went on in China at any period as 'politics' at all , if you do not have a conception of the activity which is something other than merely local? Because, once you do identify it as 'politics', you are surely placing it in the same class as other activities which are not Chinese but also 'politics'. Put another way, if there is such a thing as 'Chinese political thought', it is surely not the Chinese-ness of it that makes it political - the adjective only particularizes - so I am curious as to what you think does? It is certainly not the 'Western-ness' of Western political thought that makes it 'political', after all. The Western-ness only makes it different, and at the level at which most political thought takes place, difference strikes the dominant note.
And yet one still needs a concept of logical self-identity, a=a, or one cannot have 'political thought' at all. So where is the source of the identity to be found? It is to be found partly in my contention that one can happily make meta-statements about a language in that language itself. The last sentence is indeed just such a statement. This seems to me clear evidence that thought possesses the reflexive resources required for a degree of self-consciousness sufficient for its own analysis. The very possibility of the act of writing that last sentence, and the fact that it can be meaningful, only underlines my point. Finding oneself engaged in an activity like politics, or observing it to be taking place at various times and places in the world, one can then meditate on its conditions in way that makes it clear it is more than a merely local and temporary happening.
Such a meditation has lead me to the evolutionary-anthropological-phenomenological solution that I have been proposing. But I have yet to see you offer your own way out of this logical dilemma. Just saying that one needs to learn the language, or to adopt the perspective of the tradition in question, the two substantive points you have offered thus far, isn't good enough; of course learning the language helps enormously when it comes to pinning down the differences, as I have repeatedly acknowledged, but as a theorist one simply can't use the same terms one is analysing. Imagine trying to construct a theory of democracy which was pro- or anti-democratic; such a theory would never have left the political arena to begin with, and would be useless for explanatory purposes. Which isn't to say, of course, that there many never begin to get past this error; or, indeed, that defending democracy isn't important. But if I wanted actually to defend democracy I would not waste time theorizing about it; I would pick up my megaphone, or my telephone.
Perhaps I should put it another way - insofar as I am part of the so-called Western tradition I find myself living amidst the rubble; the grand but rigid Platonic-Christian edifice which sustained things for two and a half-millennia has collapsed. But amongst the ruins there are plenty of materials for reconstruction that are made of more flexible stuff. The new foundations, indeed the only possible remaining foundations - and here is just where the metaphor goes wrong, in a way, because 'foundations' of the traditional sort are precisely what I would like to avoid - are radical contingency and historicity. Perhaps this is a castle in the air, but there is nowhere else left to build one, and build one there we must, since there is no longer any ground beneath our feet. It is exactly because one must always occupy some perspective that it is important to be self-conscious about what the range of possible perspectives can include, and I do flatter myself that I wear fewer blinkers than most, having made the study of blinkers, if anything, my profession,
]]>At the risk of some repetition, you clearly believe it possible (because you actually do it) to identify both Western and Chinese forms of activity that you regard as ‘politics’. I do not understand how to make sense of this statement unless these activities are instances of a class of some kind; a class that finds its unity not in a Platonic essence but in an historic response to a universally shared condition.
My view could thus be refuted on at least three grounds. If evolution were false, or if there are really no anthropological universals, then I can’t make the argument I want to. I assume you don’t want to say evolution is false, though I’m not sure about your position on anthropologically bounded cultural universals. Finally, if one disagrees that it is possible to conditionally abstract ‘thought’ from ‘language’ (not separate them absolutely), I can also be refuted. In other words, there are at least three possible refutations of my position – which as I said rested on a combination of biology, anthropology, and phenomenology – and so far as I am concerned, they all fail.
I would also like to insist on the distinction between government and politics. If you admit that the Chinese had government, tout court (however different in historic form from government elsewere), you have already accepted the bulk of my argument. But as for politics (which is not government – government need not be a political matter, for in principle it can be uncontested, whereas politics presupposes disagreement), of course it can be largely consumed by ethical questions. It can, in other words, take place in the guise of what might be called ‘ritual’, never the static category it is fond of representing itself to be.
One can never, I take it, entirely divorce the question of what is right from what one/we/they/you ought to do. This distinction is often fuzzy in practice in the West, never mind China. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that for much of the medieval period in the West, and for much of the history of the Islamic world, ‘politics’ is in practice mixed up an indissoluble way with religious and ethical concerns, just as you say it was in China, and that if we take our own Western understanding of ‘politics’ here and now to inform what was going on then, we go badly wrong.
But that is not what I want to do, and I am well aware that whatever kind of class of phenomena I am concerned with under the heading of ‘politics’, its borders had better be pretty elastic, or it won’t do what I want it to do. But you yourself are similarly unable to escape the logical dilemma of wanting to say that Chinese politics is utterly different, and yet at the same time wanting to call it ‘politics’. Because if you don’t call it politics, you are then forced to say that there was no politics in China before the modern era, a conclusion that it seems to me you would very much like to avoid. My position is intended to offer a way out of precisely this dilemma, by showing how it can be the case that there are phenomena in Chinese culture which are recognizably ‘political’ but which have no analogue elsewhere.
My view, in other words, is most emphatically not one that insists the West, Athens, California, or anywhere else in Europe or North America supplies the yardstick for what goes on elsewhere. So far as I can see, what is interesting is that the Chinese and the Greeks appear to have stumbled on ‘politics’ independently in answer to a common problem, when other societies did not; whereas ‘government’ in some sense is an inevitability in response to the problems of order, power, and persuasion, I do not see ‘politics’ as a necessary existence. But government and politics (as well as much else, including economics) do both belong to what I am calling the sphere of value, which is where cosmology becomes relevant.
I am all for learning languages, and admire what you have achieved in Chinese. To be able to think in it as well as one can do in the language one was brought up with certainly enhances one’s understanding enormously. But what one is doing is still ‘thinking’, whether one does it in Chinese, English, or some other language. Moreover, even if one knows two languages equally well, one also has to come and go between them, and one cannot know every language. So I don’t see how this offers more than a partial solution to the problem of translation. I take seriously here the idea of mathematics as a language as a proof of the possibility that thought can assume a universal form which is only implicit in natural languages. I would never claim that ‘thinking’ is something only Westerners can do, as in the absurd ‘can Asians think’ debate,
]]>"As I would put it, there is no essence to the self. At any point one has a certain amount of raw material as given - gender, height, strength, intelligence, language, ethnicity etc. - but this does not exist in abstraction from a contingent historic set of circumstances in which one finds oneself. Whether one 'really' is who and what one says one is (or thinks one is - these doubtless may not be the same thing) is perhaps therefore a question which has no final or unconditional answer.
That said, there are some tolerably reliable indicators. Perhaps the most important of these is whether one can persuade others to accept one's self-description of oneself as a dancer or indeed anything else. And an important issue here will be the question of performance; can one produce a performance of sufficient quality to win approval? Never, of course, unanimous approval, but at least that of a significant minority. Even that is not an absolute test - FN could not get himself accepted in his own lifetime as a philosopher, and Van Gogh only ever sold one painting. But they are extreme examples of visionary genius; for most of us the standards are more clear-cut, and the answer we receive will go a long way towards determining whether one becomes who and what one thinks one is
That is not to deny the importance of a settled disposition on one's own part. If one is perpetually wavering over whether one is or is not a dancer, assuming this self-doubt is not itself an expression of tortured genius, then all other things being equal, it is probably less likely that one 'really is' a dancer. One must play the role consistently. More importantly, one must, in the end, play some role, or more accurately, roles, in one's capacity as a member of a family, a friend, a lover, a worker of some kind, and so on. Failure to be able to play any of these roles effectively, at least most of the time, is ultimately one definition of madness. What constitutes effectiveness is of course itself a moving target as society changes; but the structure of the problem remains the same.
So, I agree - we are all indeed theatre people. It is in the nature of human action and the conditions of selfhood that it must be so. Personality, or better, personation, is inescapably a form of role-playing, and the only relevant questions are what one can bring to the part and how much of it one is capable of inventing for onself. I feel FN was right, in the end, that there are only masks. On your more specific analysis of the illusion on which theatre relies, the presentation of the whole within the part, I have no real comment to make; it seems plausible enough to me, and it even seems that it could be generalised to include all aesthetic forms if one so desired. But I would urge you, once again, to read Ch. XVI of Leviathan, 'Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated'; Hobbes is marvellously profound on this theme."
]]>"The essence of comparison is that two things must be in some respect similar, if only in respect of their being things. Otherwise comparison is impossible. If Chinese political thought were either utterly different, or completely identical, to its Western equivalent, presumably comparison would be impossible, on the one hand, and otiose, on the other. It is because there are both significant differences and relevant similarities that comparison between them is interesting and important.
Now it seems to me that you wish to emphasize the differences, presumably because you feel (rightly) that China has been viewed far too exclusively through the lens of Western concepts. I can only agree (and I found Black’s essay on ‘decolonization of concepts’ helpful here) that it is at best misleading and at worst downright false to e.g. see Chinese history in terms of Western periodisations such as medieval, feudal etc. If I wavered on this before, I don’t any longer. Far better, as a starting point, to make use of the native dynastic and imperial periodisations that history generated autonomously. At a more abstract level, I have no difficulty either with the idea that at least some Chinese events, experiences, terminological fields, and so on, don’t have any equivalent at all in Western experience and require considerable elucidation to be made intelligible, if indeed they can be – there is always a zone of untranslatability, as we remarked. There are indeed some things you just can’t fully get (humour is notorious) unless you know the language at least almost as well as a native speaker.
But – if taken to the extreme – an emphasis on pure difference becomes its own form of error, not least because it violates the logical conditions of comparison just noted. It is necessary to disarm the critic who wants to know then why one does not just spend all one’s time talking in Chinese about Chinese things, if all this is so hard for non-Chinese experts to understand. I certainly do not, myself, see any reason why Chinese scholars cannot attain a full mastery of Western history and ideas; I am quite sure, indeed, that many have. The interesting question is, how is this possible?
Any answer is complex and seems to me to have at least two elements. One is biological-anthropological, and says that from this point of view, the things that divide us as human beings are trivial compared to the things that unite us. There has been a major push back in anthropology in the last decade or two against the received C20 wisdom that everything is culture (I found Brown’s Human Universals very helpful in summing up these debates). The trend instead has been to emphasize that we are all members of the same species, and as such we share a common set of experiences – sleeping, eating, excreting, reproducing, ageing, illness, and finally death – to which we cannot avoid responding in various ways. Then there are the natural facts of differing gender, strength, intelligence, height, and so on, which ensures that ‘power’, in a naturalistic sense that includes but is not limited to an ability to exert pure force, is unequally distributed.
This means that in each community of any size there inevitably arises what one might call the problem of order. If e.g. members of a community are allowed to excrete where they will and reproduce with whom they please, deleterious consequences follow. Given the different material resources available to divergent communities, and given also the radical contingency of our imaginations in which one thought does not follow necessarily from another, different solutions are arrived at. But they are recognizable, at least, as different solutions to the same problem. So far we have not got anything that I would be inclined to call ‘politics’, but we have, in the form of a response to the problem of order, the rudiments of ‘government’ in even very simple communities. One does not, at the limits, even need language for ‘government’ of this kind – the human problem is in this respect very analogous to one that animals at large face. I would, then, be inclined to follow Aristotle on this point, and to make language a condition of politics.
And here is where the other, philosophical, element of an answer to the question of how someone embedded in one form of culture can master another begins to appear; language is both the source of much (though not all) of one’s situatedness and the key to an escape from it. But let me not get ahead of myself. What language permits, amongst much else, is a greater ability to deliberate over alternative outcomes and possible courses of action. Of course, this only makes sense as an enterprise in light of the biological-anthropological condition that we find ourselves in, which includes, I should now say, a temporal aspect. This is implicit in ageing and death. We are in the present, but we cannot avoid being confronted with the future. And what is relevant for a discussion of politics is that this confrontation with the future must be faced not merely by individuals, but as communities. This I take to be a kind of structural, phenomenological truth, and so one way of thinking of about ‘politics’ is that it is what occurs when the future of the community is being self-consciously debated by some or all of its members, whether formally or informally.
Now at some point in the experience of all communities the question arises of precisely who is to be allowed to participate in these debates and to take decisions. Indeed, this is something of a permanent problem; it may be settled for a certain period (sometimes for centuries, indeed), but the point about it is that it is always liable to re-emerge; there is no way to put it entirely beyond question in principle. One may get on for a very long time with only ‘government’, and ‘politics’ may be restricted to a very small circle; but as the only condition of ‘political’ speech is in the end the intention to deliberate and decide upon the shared direction of the community, it can only be suppressed, not eliminated. Similarly, there will always be a fact of matter about who in a community is in a position under normal conditions to reliably get their own way, whether the means involve money, violence, status, or some combination of such factors. That is – again based on naturalistic foundations – there is always a problem of ‘power’ that goes along with the need for ‘government’.
I must pause here for a second to address the Burma issue. Once we have language, one of its uses will inevitably be to provide some kind of account that legitimates power. At least, I know of no society in which this has not been the case. The details of such accounts may vary widely, but they will always be present. In fact, from what you say of the Burmese case, it strikes me as broadly analogous to the Chinese ‘mandate of heaven’, the Western notion of the ‘divine right of kings’, and the Islamic belief that the existence of a caliph or sultan who implements shari’a law surpasses all other considerations. All of these different cultures developed what we can call a ‘cosmological’ perspective which was widely shared throughout the culture in question and exploited by those who, as a matter of fact, had power, in order to maintain it. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is not in question here; but I take the phenomenon itself to be undeniable, and, yes, universal.
The details of such narratives may differ, and may lose their persuasiveness over time, requiring them to be supplemented or replaced by other accounts, particularly where they are dependent on a more general background of cosmological beliefs that ceases to be credible for other reasons; but some such account there must be, and where the reasons why the group that in fact holds power cease to be credible, retaining power becomes far harder and must in the end rely on brute force. So that, in this sense, the Burma regime is ‘popular’ is something I can easily accept – that does not change my claim that in Burma power – which can by its very nature never in any community be ‘absolute’ in any case – is in the hands of a few. Divine right monarchy was similarly ‘popular’ in C17 France; it did not prevent LXIV from remarking, quite truly, that ‘I am the state’, because it was a feature of the ‘popular’ belief in divine right that authoritative decisions could only come from him.
I hope that it is now becoming clearer in what sense I wish to defend the idea that there are some universal, ‘logical’, truths about the nature of politics. It is neither an essentialist nor ahistorical position that I take myself be occupying. Instead, it is anthropological, and, very much for want of a better word because I don’t like all of its associations, “phenomenological”; it aims to take fully into account the dynamic quality of reality and the contingent quality of all historical change. So when I say that power must always be distributed between one, few, or many members of a community, of course this is in a sense an analytic or necessary truth – but it is only so in the context of the phenomena that I have briefly tried to set out above. I should perhaps also say that this account of politics is only part of a much larger project which aims to give some kind of systematic account of the regions of thought and experience. Let me try and briefly elucidate this.
‘Politics’ I take to belong to the realm of ‘value’. The category of ‘value’ itself I think I can derive anthropologically, partly from the experience of pleasure and pain, and partly from a broader evolutionary imperative. We are naturally averse in the majority of cases to what might lead to our own destruction. ‘Value’ in this sense is not a moral category; that something is pleasurable or painful is not, as such, an argument for or against it (I am not a utilitarian, which is not to say I don’t think consequences matter). But value has the possibility to become a moral category; and the dialectic of the concept of value is such that it can be made to yield the triad of the good, the beautiful, and the true. This dialectic seems to me to work as follows. Value splits first into the practical-aesthetic moment. This logical shift takes place at a time we could call prehistoric. All early peoples we know of responded to the practical problem of order by producing a narrative of legitimation of some sort; but they also exploited the superfluity of form over function which is a similarly naturalistic fact to produce cave paintings, jade carvings, etc.
Now inherent in the practical-aesthetic is also a certain claim to truth. One’s myth is not only right, it is also how things are – it is not merely a story; and similarly, one’s notion of beauty is not simply ‘aesthetic’ but reflects what we are calling ‘cosmology’, which is again a conception of how things are. Truth, however, has a dialectic of its own, and it too becomes internally divided, being made to yield two further dyads, the historical-scientific and the formal-philosophical. The occasion of the emergence of the historical is the scrutiny of the practical narrative of legitimation, and of the scientific to the scrutiny of the cosmology as conceived independently of ourselves. But there is a reflexivity in this process which in turn leads to the examination of its own conditions – their formal statement, as in logic, and their exploration in a process of critical questioning, philosophy. In putting forward this dialectical solution I am aiming to avoid so-called ‘metaphysics’. Where e.g. Hegel (who admittedly provides a lot of inspiration for this way of thinking) went so badly wrong was in thinking that this was a necessary process. It may occur, or not, for reasons that are contingent. I say only that *when* it does occur, and *if* it is worked out to its conclusion, thought will take this form of a triad of dyads. It may always be frustrated in its development. This is much more modest than anything Hegel had in mind.
My own anthropological-phenomenological emphasis is thus intended to ensure a certain conceptual minimalism; I altogether avoid, for example, a speculative philosophy of history of the Hegelian or Marxist sort in which everything has been leading up to the triumph of the West, the final overthrow of the bourgeoisie, or any other such scheme. And while I do insist that forms of thought have a certain logic to them which is operative wherever they arise, that logic is only in terms of their presuppositions; it does not dictate their content. It is thus quite consistent for me to be able to hold that Chinese political thought contains some (plenty?) of unique concepts and that it is located within the practical realm of value, because that is where *all* political thought, Western, Chinese, Islamic, Martian, etc., *must* be located. But of course to say this tells you nothing about the content of Chinese (or any other kind of) political thought, whether it is good or bad, similar or different to other discourses of the same type, dull or interesting, successful or unsuccessful etc. etc.
And that is also why I described the perspective I am outlining as amoral. (My) philosophy recognizes the reality of value as something in the world, if only because people and their values are as much ‘world’ as anything else is (I will have nothing to do with the dichotomy of subject and object insofar as it becomes absolutized; I am not a dualist any more than I am a utilitarian) without engaging in evaluation, but only elucidation. Nor in saying this am I denying the possibility of bringing philosophically-informed reason to bear on practical questions of value, only that when one does this, one has begun to do something else other than philosophy. As for the status I want to claim for this triad of dyads, I want to say only two things.
One is that it is my own – while I have my inspirations, I know of no-one else, for better or worse, who has developed a dialectic that is exactly like this one – and the other is that it is sometimes helpful when one wants to understand what kind of intellectual position one is occupying; and I readily confess that to very many questions, including the ones that interest you, it may be utterly irrelevant and unimportant. Certainly, nothing follows from it that I can see with respect to e.g. how one ought to live, what one ought to think or study, and so on and so forth. It is happily indifferent in this regard, and quite designedly so. It also ultimately has very little to do with ‘politics’, an activity which, regardless of whatever culture it arises within, is ultimately only one local feature of a far more major region on what is in turn a much bigger overall map, so far as I am concerned.
I hope these remarks are clarificatory. At least, the argument that the forms, though not the contents, of various types of thinking are significantly independent of particular cultures - while remaining historic in their changing categorial foundations - is intended to show how we (you and I, specifically) can both have our cake and eat it, because the level of abstraction at which I am claiming this argument is true is quite different to the level at which at least the great majority of so-called ‘political thought’ of any kind takes place; at this practical and evaluative level there is indeed significant and irreconcilable diversity. As a codicil to that, I do *not* see it as the task of ‘political philosophy’ to resolve these practical contradictions, so that we all become Rawlsians, or whatever. Philosophy might have something to say about the logic of political concepts, but it is incapable of decisions of this kind. Reason cannot act, as Hume put it. In very different, Hegelian, terms, I would call the practical realm of value the ‘negative moment’ in which difference reigns supreme. It is a corollary of my view that arguments for the good must be made from within that realm itself, even if informed by the conclusions of thinking elsewhere. But mere difference and simple identity both generate their own contradictions; and with this we reach the point from which I began, that there must be sameness as well as difference for comparison to be possible at all.
As a footnote, I find considerable irony in the ‘subaltern’ desire to defend the mythical Indian account of the past as ‘history’ in the same way that either Greek, Chinese, or Islamic cultures came to know it. Their claim is that it is somehow an instance of intellectual colonialism or a failure of recognition to refuse to admit it to an equal status. And yet it was these Indian myths which were the foundation of a rigid and hierarchical caste system which condemned the lower orders of society to a condition of permanent inequality, and continues to do so. Quite apart from the failure to recognize a real qualitative difference between the critical and the mythical in thought, this strikes me as a piece of intellectual perversity with which I can have no sympathy"
]]>In fact, what is meant by extending the notion of violence to particular forms of government is unclear. That, as a matter of historical fact, colonialism and imperialism have been accompanied by a great deal of bloodshed is unquestionable. They have also been the occasion of large-scale expropriation of land, torture, forced migration, arbitrary justice, violations of customary ways of life and suppression of religious beliefs, destruction of property, and no doubt many other evils besides.
We may leave on one side the question of whether colonialism and imperialism are inherently or essentially violent; although the historical record suggests that in fact, they are not, and that there are many examples (the Roman Empire, ancient Alexandria, the Ottoman Empire, at least parts of the British Empire) where long periods of peaceful co-existence obtained. The question is, are all these different forms of mistreatment, most of which at any rate are unquestionably ills, best described as 'violence'?
In the same way, we may ask whether describing all the different ways in which it is possible for individuals to mistreat one another in private life as literal instances of violence is a helpful way of thinking about what is going on. A husband who repeatedly insults and belittles his wife even though he does not beat her is accused of violence of a certain sort. And no doubt, there is a metaphorical sense in which both public and private instances of such abusiveness can all be described as ‘violence’; one can even talk about doing violence to a text, in the sense of misreading it. But when one sets aside the literary value of such metaphors, and proceeds to examine the facts, there seems to be a distinction between violence in the strict sense (which we will define more carefully in a moment), and metaphorical usages of the term to describe other ways of doing harm that might be more appropriately described in other ways.
We might, in other words, be better served by regarding violence as one of a number of possible forms of harm or abuse with some very specific qualities of its own. One advantage of doing so would be to allow us to discriminate more carefully in our use of moral language (and perhaps also our search for appropriate legal remedies). But in order to make the particular advantages clear, we need to ask the question: What are the conditions of violence? It seems clear that the application of physical force by one human being to another cannot count, in itself, as violent.
We recognize, for example, that in some circumstances at least this can be a form of play. There are many popular sports (rugby is one example) in which one player is allowed to use force to bring another to the ground, within certain limits (so that, for example, one cannot tackle above the waist in order to minimise the risk of lasting injury). The fact that tackling and being tackled can be a painful experience, and that the risk of serious injury or even death cannot be entirely ruled out if one participates in playing games of this sort, does not strike most of us as a reason either to legally prohibit them or to regard them as forms of violence.
But equally, it is not obvious that without the application of physical force, directly or indirectly, by one human being to another, that there can be violence. In other words, physical force is a necessary though not a sufficient condition of violence. An additional factor is the intention of the agent. One must wish to cause bodily harm, and in fact not necessarily primarily bodily harm but the experience of pain in the object of violence. There would be little to be gained from attacking the body of a creature impervious to pain without also causing its death outright, which is by no means the usual object of violence as we know it. In fact, violence is more often employed as a means of securing a change in conduct. Violence which aims simply and solely to cause death is a special sub-category of its own, namely murder.
So, the conditions of violence include (i) bodily harm that is (ii) intentional and (iii) aims either to modify the conduct of its object or at the extreme, destroy it, while (iv) ignoring the wishes of the object of violence. This conception of violence, by the way, is also capable of capturing so-called ‘pointless violence’, for example the kind of instance in which a gang of thugs set upon an innocent passer-by in the street without the aim of robbing him but purely for the sake of amusement without actually intending to kill him. What is aimed at in this case is still a modification in the conduct of the other, in the sense of a fearful response. Their actions are expected to produce this to provide them with the pleasure of the exertion of power under conditions that are supposed to deny the other the privilege and opportunity of doing the same.
It is a corollary of (i) that violence must be quantifiable; it must be possible in principle to say exactly how much force has been used, in physical terms; to measure the impact of a blow or a bullet in pounds per square inch, or the explosive force of a detonation, or the voltage of an electric shock, and so on. Maintaining this position, however, has certain consequences. For instance, not all forms of torture will count as violence. Only those tortures which operate on the body will do so. It is necessary, in other words, to discriminate between psychological torture and physical torture.
The aim of torture (where it is not simply a form of judicial punishment) is to break a person's will in order to exact certain information, whether this is a confession or knowledge of certain plans, the location of particular items, etc. In what proportion actual force (ranging from restraint to blows), the threat of force, verbal interrogation, and psychological abuse are combined depends on circumstances including the skills and inclinations of the torturer, who may be more or less inclined to bodily sadism. Of course there are marginal cases; the use of constant noise to cause mental irritation can be measured in decibels, and there is a known threshold above which permanent damage to the hearing may result; the attendant sleep deprivation can itself be measured in hours, and over a certain duration madness or death will ensue, and so on.
But the important point is that for us to recognize torture in any form as evil clearly does not depend on identifying all these forms of torture as violent. Torture is an evil because it offends against the idea of persons as autonomous beings who are ends in themselves. Their status as such is violated if they are subjugated to another's will against their own wishes. It is not nonsense to say that one can have tortured someone without having done any violence to them; for they have no doubt suffered plenty of harm in other ways.
A consequence of (iv) is that the deliberate infliction of pain where the parties consent cannot be counted as violence, because it does not contravene their will. Sado-masochistic sexual situations are not violence but a form of play for reasons analogous to those given in connection with contact sports. They are by no means free of risk, but that is another matter. It is usual for participants in sexual games of this sort to have some agreed signal (a word or gesture) that will immediately end the game if it ceases to be enjoyable or begins to threaten permanent injury or death.
Of course, in the most extreme cases, death may be what is sought; one famous instance arose a few years ago in which a man with cannibalistic desires encountered another individual with a deep wish to be eaten. When the cannibal obliged his partner by severing his penis and preparing it for consumption, resulting in his death from loss of blood, on the view we are advancing, this was a forcible but not a violent act. Eating people and thus causing their death is wrong, but only if they would rather not be eaten and die as a result. (It would, then, be wrong to cause my death by eating part of me if I wished to be eaten but survive the experience).
It seems, therefore, that a restricted view of violence provides, amongst other things, grounds for a kind of libertarianism. One should not seek to prevent individuals from doing things which may involve risks to themselves, even the risk of death, so long as they are competent to assess those risks (whether they have in fact done so is another matter; one make seek legal security in the form of a waiver, as when for example one might have to sign a disclaimer before embarking on a particularly stressful fairground ride such as a roller-coaster which subjects the body to extreme gravitational forces). Equally, one should always seek to prevent individuals from physically interfering with one another whenever they do not wish to be interfered with.
Naturally, this does not mean that only that particular form of abuse we are calling violence which both impacts on the body in a measurable way and violates the will of the individual thus impacted should be prohibited. So far as possible we ought also to prohibit and prevent all forms of abuse which violate the wills of individuals, so far as their wills are consistent with peacefully pursuing their own purposes without malice aforethought, as the legal saying is. But by narrowing our conception of violence we can maximize the freedom of the individual. We can also bring into sharp focus the fact that violence has no place, properly speaking, in politics. The phrase ‘political violence’, that is, represents a certain kind of corruption of thought. Politics is an activity that takes place between persons as autonomous beings; it disregards, unless it is contingently relevant to the matter at hand, their embodiment. Perhaps more accurately, it takes it for granted, as it certainly does not deny the fact of it.
But it should not matter, as such, whether the participants in a political situation are male or female (or transsexual), black or white (or some other colour), young or old (or middle aged), homosexual or heterosexual (or bisexual), rich or poor (or just doing nicely), and so on. Of course, in any given situation, that one or more of the parties to the debate falls into one or more of these categories may inform the whole question under discussion. Nevertheless, that should not prejudice their equal right to be heard, or even be taken as prima facie evidence of partisanship. ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you’ is a classic piece of ad hominem argument that tends to foreclose any further conversation. And in any case, by no means all politics is ‘identity politics’.
The relevant point, however, is that one cannot at once seek to persuade someone by appealing to their reason and their passions, on the hand, and by physically interfering with their person, on the other. Violence, or the threat of violence (which is not itself violence but intimidation), can secure compliance through coercion, but not free consent. It is the exercise of power, but power without legitimacy. Terrorism is thus never ‘political’. Aside from the infantilism of believing that one’s discontent with the order of things provides a justification for killing at random, it is a denial of the necessity for persuasion inherent in all genuine politics. It is perhaps worth pointing out that one should by no means conclude from this that the presumption of right must always be on the side of established authority; it is incumbent on all parties in political life to ensure that they do not drive their interlocutors to violence through dogmatism and inflexibility and thus cause a partial or total breakdown of the ongoing political dialogue that is a necessity for all civilised societies. Nevertheless, where violence begins, politics ends.
This rules out the idea that war can be the continuation of politics by other means, unless of course we wish to defend the highly counter-intuitive view that not all forms of war constitute violence. Perhaps, however, this is not as counter-intuitive an idea as it first seems; if states are analogous to individuals in the sense of being corporate persons, and both parties wish to fight, there seem to be no grounds on which this ought to be prevented. War from this point of view would be analogous to a form of sport, or a game, as indeed it has often been described. But in fact the notion of states as corporate persons relies on a legal fiction, and it is very unlikely, to say the least, that all members of both states would wish to go to war, even if the governing classes on both sides have made up their minds to do so.
Perhaps a slightly more plausible case could be made for two armies facing one another on a battlefield, where all soldiers on both sides desire to fight one another to the death for motives such as personal honour and national glory. But even here it is unlikely that this condition could normally be fulfilled (though one might produce some examples from ancient or medieval history of at least small-scale engagements between committed bands of warriors which appear to meet it). If it were, then perhaps one might have to admit that war is a form of the use of lethal force between contending parties that is nevertheless not best understood as violence. In the vast majority of cases, however, war unquestionably involves violence, and many other evils besides, and ought therefore to be prohibited and prevented wherever possible.
This is not, however, to say that violence is always ‘wrong’, though it is always moral (unlike force, which is always purely physical). Self-defence may involve the use of violence quite legitimately, at least within certain limits; I must stop fighting when my attacker does and cannot retaliate to inflict my own punishment once I see that he has been deterred, and so on. But self-defence can equally mean just walking off, or talking my way out of the situation. As between groups or nations, where one is clearly the victim of violent aggression (a situation that is by no means usually as clear-cut as one would like), a resort to violence in return is sadly often the only option, presuming one wishes for one’s continued survival. But violence, in and of itself, as the application of force to the body or bodies of its object with the intention to cause pain and secure a change in conduct, is not in itself always morally wrong, though no doubt the occasion for its employment is always to be regretted. Civilized life depends in part on the existence of such a thing as the legitimate use of violence (and not simply the legitimate use of force, but specifically of violence, as force operates purely on the body and violence is aimed at both mind and body).
In this respect, ironically, it is the commitment to non-violence that turns out to be a form of moral extremism. To insist that one should never, under any circumstances, hit back, is to take up a position that lies clearly at one end of the spectrum of possible moral attitudes towards violence. This is not to deny that non-violence as a form of collective resistance to oppression cannot be a successful tactic, for there are clearly historical instances in which it has proved to be exactly that. Such action, and the motivation for the moral position itself, is doubtless admirable; but as a tactic it has depended on the presence of a charismatic figure able to exert such moral authority over his followers that they have been able to suppress the desire to retaliate or to defend themselves that many of them inevitably experienced as victims of violence, and as a motivation it suffers by definition the fate of all extremisms, of lacking an appeal to most of us.
Nevertheless, the desire to minimize, though not eliminate, the amount of violence in the world is based on sound reasons, and one step towards that minimization, arguably, is to restrict the number of things that we are prepared to regard as violence. The suggestion is not simply the naïve one that we get rid of violence by defining it away. It is rather that we insist on a strict understanding of violence as distinct from other forms of harm and abuse of which it is most unquestionably a species as a means of isolating it and grasping what is peculiar to it. When we do so, the fact that most forms of violence are illegitimate in character – in particular, the types of violence that have plagued the modern world in the form of war and terrorism – emerges in a stark fashion. At the same time, by separating physical force from violence we maximize the sphere of liberty within which individuals may use their bodies as they please, and by emphasizing that violence is aimed at the mind as well as the body we underline that it has no role to play in a free society.
]]>The first is of nature as essentially harmonious. Human beings are at home in the world, and there is a cosmic order that is not physical but ethical. Reality is divinized. This broad framework has been compatible with a number of different stages of historical development. It seems characteristic of pre-historic peoples, of early civilizations, and even (to some extent) of the medieval period in the West. It is possibly (as Donald Brown has remarked) part of a universal phenomenology of human consciousness; that is, it applies to all human groups in their first formation. Even societies like the Inca who perceived their gods as in some sense threatening and demanding of human sacrifice can be said to conform to the pattern - they have only inverted the valuation of being in the world that is involved.
The second phase is a reaction to this one. In it, human beings are no longer in harmony with nature or one another, but must struggle to survive. Existence is a competitive affair. Perhaps the origins of this view, so far as the West is concerned, are Hebraic - the idea of the Fall and the casting out of man from paradise; though the Greeks too thought in terms of a lost golden age. Christianity took up this idea of the fallen condition of humanity, which is why the medieval (and even the ancient) notion of man as in harmony with nature was always qualified. But it is from the seventeenth century onwards that this idea of the state of nature as competitive develops. Hobbes is a central figure here. In the nineteenth century Darwin arrives at the view that nature itself and not merely the human place in it has competition as its fundamental feature.
The third phase is the attempted abolition of nature as a concept altogether. Human 'nature' is conceived of as entirely plastic. To some extent this phase too overlaps with the second; it is also characteristic of the Renaissance, and is articulated by Mirandola, for example. But it remains overshadowed by the idea there being a fixed order of some kind as defined by both of the first two phases until the later nineteenth century. Marx represents it only ambiguously, as he retains the idea of an unalienated nature in the concept of 'species being'. It is found more clearly in anthropology and psychology, in which culture and mind are empty categories waiting to be filled. Locke, from this perspective, is caught between the second and third phases of this movement. But for most of the twentieth century it was thought that with a sufficient effort of will, people could be made in whatever image one desired; this is one important root, though by no means the only one, of the ideological experiments that caused so much destruction.
The fourth and final phase is only just beginning; it is a product of the late twentieth century. It is the reassertion of a concept of human nature, but on the basis of empirical and historical evidence. Human beings turn out, on inspection, to have a great deal in common with one another; at least as much as what divides them. The reassertion of the idea that there are human universals has been prompted partly by reflection, and partly by circumstances; Foucault and many others are correct in pointing out that our continued survival as a species is now intimately bound up with our choice of political strategies thanks both to the awesome destructiveness of our weapons and our continued economic exploitation of our environment. But a common human identity which transcends national divisions is politically essential if we are to ensure a peaceful and prosperous future for ourselves.
]]>Nancy recognizes explicitly that this notion of the creation of the world is in origin a theological one (p. 67). This is an important point, for much of the argument of the book turns on the notions of what is involved in ‘creation’, and what is meant by a ‘world’. Creation in the Christian tradition was an activity strictly reserved to God of which all human works could be only a pale imitation, and there was an absolute divorce between the Creator and His creation. Indeed, Nancy points out that in Western thought at large, in classical as well as Christian times, the world has always been contrasted with something else. In the case of Platonism, it was the timeless, changeless, perfect order of form; in Christianity with a heaven usually conceived of as sharing these characteristics.
What has changed in our own time is that the force of this contrast has collapsed. There is no longer anything for us to contrast the world with, and consequently (if one accepts this view) our very idea of what a world is – what this world is – has fallen into confusion. This, however, is not an inevitable state of affairs, if we appreciate the nature of ‘the world’ as a concept. Perhaps most importantly, we must understand that it is an ideal whole; that is to say, the world as such is not something we can encounter directly in experience. To be a world is just to be the ‘form of forms’, understood as the framework which makes meaningful experience possible (p. 52). A world is a ‘totality of meaning’ (p. 41), and meaning requires form.
Nancy deliberately makes use of Platonic language here, perhaps to indicate the extent to which he is both remaining within and modifying the older tradition of thinking about the idea of a world. He is continuous with the earlier tradition insofar as he retains the irrational element of Platonism, as evinced in his quotation of Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’ (p. 52). But the key difference between Nancy’s idea of a world and the earlier ideas that he identifies is that for him, this ‘form of forms’, however mysterious, is something artefactual. The ‘world’, in his sense, is a human creation through and through (‘the world’ is entirely distinct in this sense from the material reality of ‘the globe’), and taking responsibility for the framework of meaning it provides is what is involved in ‘creating’ it.
As Nancy himself recognizes, this is a descendant of Nietzsche’s view that God is dead (p. 69), and the second section ends on a decidedly existential note: ‘It is for us to decide for ourselves’ (p. 74). In the remarks on history and philosophy at the beginning of the third section it becomes obvious, if it was not clear enough already, why he is placing this emphasis on decision; he wants to get away from conceptions of the historical process, whether theological or teleological or both, that dictate a pre-ordained path (‘the absence of auto-completion’, p. 81) for historical events. The future is open, rather than closed. Traditional philosophy (‘metaphysics’, p. 81) was a sometimes covert and sometimes overt attempt to close off the future in one particular direction; philosophy today (‘deconstruction’, p. 83) has achieved a self-consciousness regarding its own historic character that renders any such enterprise illegitimate.
Nancy associates this shift with a similar transformation in the notion of ‘nature’. Already in Hegel we find the idea that human intelligence generates a ‘second nature’ for us. In our own time, thanks to technology (in its broadest sense, which includes things like writing and accounting) we have moved beyond ‘nature’ altogether, in the sense that for human beings, absolutely nothing is fixed. We live in a condition of ‘extreme instability and mutability’ (p. 87), a condition that is underlined by the list of ‘the succession of technologies’ on p. 89.
This account of the world has implications, in Nancy’s mind, for the place of politics within it. He borrows Badiou’s notion of politics as one of the four ‘conditions of philosophy’ (p. 85), but also makes it a ‘structure of the impossible’ and itself a ‘technology’ (p. 88). Each of these claims requires some explication. The most plausible way of construing the idea that politics is a condition of philosophy is perhaps to say that philosophy can only occur in a civil order; it is certainly true that in Athens, for example, this is how it began. By calling it a ‘structure of the impossible’ he may possibly mean that it sets forth human goals that are constantly in the process of transformation and hence are never finally achieved. And politics as a technology is presumably akin to all other technologies in that it contributes to the process of ‘denaturation, or…the infinitization of ends’ (p. 90).
This understanding of politics, however, seems to be somewhat at odds with the idea of justice outlined in the ‘Complements’, a section in which Rousseau is invoked and Nancy himself strikes a very Rousseauian note when he declares that ‘an unbearable injustice is unleashed everywhere: the earth trembles, the viruses infect, men are criminals, liars, and executioners’ (p. 111). The notion that ‘the world is to itself the supreme law of its justice’ seems to suggest an appeal to a suitably dynamicized notion of natural law that will conveniently result in a condemnation of all those things of which Nancy disapproves; in particular the way in which ‘sovereignty…as pure violence’ and the ‘violence of capital’ have allegedly captured the modern state (p. 105).
As a confessed Marxist sympathizer, it is disappointing rather than surprising that Nancy should end up apparently contradicting his initial Nietzschean commitment to an idea of the world as a playful Heraclitean flux and retreating into trite gnomic utterances (‘And what if sovereignty was the revolt of the people?’, p. 109). Typically for a French intellectual, a virtual contempt for the mundane complexities of politics runs throughout the work, and a large part of the reason for this is the excessive voluntarism it displays. It is simply not true to say that ‘A people are always their own invention’, for the same reason it is not true that
It is for us to decide for ourselves’.
A great deal of individual and collective identity, and a great deal of historical change for that matter, is entirely outside the sphere of invention and decision. At the personal level, one’s gender, ethnicity, health, height, strength, appearance, and so on are all (at least initially and for the most part) given, as are indeed social status and religious confession – and yet they are absolutely constitutive of identity. So far as historical movements affecting the fate of peoples go, a great deal of our current political problems result from the fact that the world’s population has doubled in the last fifty years or so (here, on the increasing importance of so-called ‘biopolitics’ in the modern world, no doubt Nancy and Foucault have a point). And human history as a whole has been profoundly determined by considerations of climate, demography, disease, distribution of natural resources, and so on, that were within no-one’s control; indeed, for much of history these were factors of which we were all profoundly ignorant.
Thus, to represent our existential and by extension our political situation as one of continuous Protean self-creation by fiat seems profoundly misleading. While Nancy’s reflections on the nature of worldhood are frequently insightful, (despite the portentous tone), in the last resort his treatment of politics appears naïve. Real politics means wrestling with complex problems under conditions of severe constraint where the most one can usually hope to achieve is a compromise that will inevitably fail to fully satisfy most of those concerned.
Dealing with globalization is not a choice between existential self-enactment and the final victory of finance capital but an attempt to address such mundane but unavoidable dilemmas as, how are we to divide the world’s water resources given that the developing world is moving towards a meat-eating diet that consumes on average fifteen times the amount of water as a vegetarian one? How are we to adjust institutions of international society (the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and so on) that still reflect the world as it was in 1945 and other countries (like China, India, and Brazil) are now far more prominent? How are we going to address climate change? Mitigate the inequalities of world trade? And so on.
Certainly, democratic politics must now be carried on the absence of the various illusions to which totalitarian ideologies, feudal monarchies, and dynastic empires were all subject in their different ways, but when one has said this, one has not really said very much. While it is in Nancy’s favour that he does recognize that power is necessarily part of politics (p. 106), he never really grasps what this means in concrete terms. The real problems of globalization require a mastery of detail, an acceptance of limitations, and a tolerance of imperfection for which (in common with Badiou and Latour) he seems to have little taste.
]]>The oppositions Latour detects are certainly visible, and the broad contentions that ‘modernity’ is the peculiar product of certain features of European history and that it is manifestly paradoxical are sound. Moreover, the position he wants to take up – which is critical of post-modernism (including deconstruction) as remaining within the modernist intellectual horizon, of Marxism as self-defeating, and of Heideggerianism as a form of anti-modernism than thus remains deeply implicated with it rather than simply side-stepping it like his own ‘non-modern’ position – is refreshing in a French intellectual.
However, there are some strange omissions, and some problematic notions. For someone so concerned with the relationship between science and politics (he regards the Hobbes-Boyle controversy as exemplary), it is odd that Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions receives no attention. Nor does he really give the work done on history of science in the Anglophone tradition enough credit for appreciating the socio-political context of scientific thought; what about Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science, for example, written as long ago as 1947?
Again, the Anglophone revival of rhetoric studies (well underway in the 1990s when the book was written) is simply passed over. A work like McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics makes the point that ‘science’ (whether natural, social, or historical) is inevitably rhetorical and persuasive but is nonetheless ‘true’ and ‘objective’ for all that. One would have thought that economics was a kind of paradigm case of the interaction of the human and non-human (people on the one hand and money, commodities, and raw materials on the other), but it is simply missing.
So too is the entire movement of historical thought from Vico in the eighteenth century onwards. The rise of historical thought in Germany in the nineteenth century is simply absent, and hermeneutics is treated far too briefly, as one in a series of perpetual failures to overcome the dichotomies set up in the early modern period. Dilthey in particular was capable of a degree of historical sensitivity that entirely transcends the crude divisions present in Latour’s ‘constitution’ of modernity. Nor does Latour seem to appreciate very clearly, in his championing of anthropology, that it, like sociology, is just one branch of the modern historical science (along with archaeology and history ‘proper’).
Worse, Latour’s reading of the history of philosophy at large is very contentious – Kant may have set up a division between the ideal world of things in themselves and the empirical world of appearances, but he also pioneered a new approach to categoriality which allowed him to specify the conditions of various forms of experience – practical, religious, aesthetic, and scientific – in a way which potentially supplies solutions to most if not all of the problems Latour addresses. Yet this side of the Critique of Pure Reason goes undiscussed. The treatment of Hegel is similarly superficial. Latour simply dismisses dialectics rather than appreciating the way in which Hegel’s rendering of Kant’s categories into dynamic forms in the Encyclopedia provides them with a historicity which both detects and evades the very problems Latour thinks he is being novel in identifying.
Then there are the concepts of ‘quasi-objects’ and ‘networks’ that carry most of the load. ‘Quasi-objects’ are supposed to bring together the non-human and the human in a way that modernity cannot explicitly account for. But in many respects we are quite right to keep them separate. Who has ever mistaken a tree, or for that matter a computer, for a human being? The notion of a quasi-object only appears problematic for Latour because he is loose in his use of words like science, technology, and nature.
While it is commendable that Latour avoids any Heideggerian hostility to technology, the very notion of technology – some portion of the material world transformed into an instrument for human use according to a rational design – suggests that it already combines the human and the non-human in its meaning. There was, of course, ‘technology’ long before there was ‘science’. But technology assisted by science (the machine gun) is really no more conceptually problematic than technology that is the product of exclusively practical experience (the flint arrow-head). Admittedly, one wants, in understanding both technological innovation and scientific thought, to look at all the circumstances of their production, and their filiations with ideas in other fields; but this is hardly revelatory.
Science-based technology has indeed become such a large part of our lives that our interactions with machines and with each other in ways that are both enabled and constrained by machines are interesting to study; but they are arguably far less problematic than Latour believes. No doubt one interesting fact about these interactions is that they appear transparent to the user who remains ignorant of the manifold conditions of their operation and indeed of all their potential consequences.
Nevertheless, what Latour calls ‘quasi-objects’ are only difficult to grasp conceptually (as distinct from the undeniably painstaking labour of investigating them empirically) if one persists in mixing up, as he does, (i) ‘science’ as an ideal form of inquiry distinguished by certain categorial presuppositions with ‘science’ as an activity requiring specific people and particular materials for its pursuit, and (ii) ‘nature’ as an exclusively physical concept, where homogeneity is indeed the rule, with ‘nature’ as it is experienced in diverse ways between cultures. (Cp. the remark on universal gravitation at p. 120)
As for the idea of a ‘network’, what is a ‘network’ but another term for a context? Latour only finds the nature of groups (with their local and global manifestations) as problematic as he does because he again ignores the work of any number of writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Ferdinand Tonnies in C19 Germany and Antony Black in our own day in particular spring to mind) who have engaged with the history and theory of associational life. Nor, perhaps, does he give Foucauldian ‘archeology’ the attention that it should receive in this context as one of his notable precursors.
So, there is plenty to criticize. But the desire to overcome the ‘modern’ sense of disconnectedness from the past, and of absolute difference from all other cultures, including earlier phases of its own, can only be applauded. Admirable too is the opposition to the idea that we are in the grip of impersonal forces, whether of nature or society, that we are forced to be simply victims of. Latour is also sophisticated enough to pay tribute to the contributions of both modern and post-modern thought, and not to simply repeat their mistake of trying to do the impossible in rejecting all that had gone before.
What one wonders is where it all ends up. The degraded environment, on the side of nature, and the impoverished masses who constitute the majority of the world’s human population, on the other, are consequences of modernism. One can only agree with Latour about this, though of course he is by no means unique in making the point. But his talk, in general terms, of ‘relocating the human’ and ‘amending the constitution’ of modernity does not amount to truly practical thought on how we are to deal with our present discontents.
Remarks like ‘A democracy extended to things themselves’ are neither perspicuous (will my mobile phone want to vote? Should I buy one for someone who doesn’t have one?) nor helpful. There is something awfully ‘modern’ and even complacent about Latour’s concluding declaration that ‘I have done my job as philosopher and constituent by gathering together the scattered themes of a comparative anthropology. Others will be able to convene the Parliament of Things’. Others, indeed, are trying – look at Monbiot’s Age of Consent, for example, which tries to envisage, in institutional and constitutional terms, what a world government might look like. But one wouldn’t learn this from Latour.
]]>In comparison with some other recent works, like those by Peter Watson or Richard Tarnas, he emphasizes ideas less, and things rather more. For all that he has little sympathy with Marxist ideology, it is material culture and socio-economic change - in areas such as agriculture, pathology, trade, and demography - that Aydon sees as the motors of history. And if one takes the long-term, bird's eye view, this must presumably be right. One cannot expect individuals to figure very heavily in such a survey, and politics and even war must appear as epiphenomenal a great deal of the time. Sometimes one feels this is perhaps a little overdone, but on the whole it is salutary for those who have been educated chiefly in modern European history in which the nation-state has played a central role.
Aydon also deserves credit for having written a history which is indeed genuinely global; he may be English, but one would never know it. Insofar as it is both possible and required by the story of human development as it has actually occurred, all continents and nations get equal weight. One feels sympathy, for example, when Australia is periodically revisited and the reader learns for the third or fourth time that nothing had happened in the interim, but in areas of the world like Australia that either lacked a literate culture or whose records were destroyed (as in parts of South America when Europeans arrived), there is simply nothing the historical writer can do. The occasional stylistic repetition, for example the increasingly irritating description of economic opportunities as 'mouth-watering' that a better editor would have removed, can easily be forgiven when one is presented with such a rich digest of material.
Aydon is also as comprehensive as he could reasonably have been; from early human origins (where he is particularly strong - some of the passages read like a modern reworking of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality), to ancient civilizations, through the medieval era (in which the backwardness of Europe relative to other parts of the world is rightly repeatedly emphasized), into the age of European discovery, which lead first to colonial conquest and then later to imperialism and slavery, the great movements of world history are all here.
Even those who have read similar works will benefit from being reminded by the large scale view on offer here that the political, economic, and technological dominance of Western culture over the Chinese and Muslim worlds arrived relatively late and is almost certainly itself just another historical moment. And in matters of detail, some of the facts will almost certainly be new to any reader; I naively imagined railways succeeded the invention of the steam-engine, whereas the first railways were in fact devised to carry horse-drawn loads.
Aydon does not attempt to gloss over the violence and brutality of much of human history, but he also misses no opportunity to draw attention to the lasting achievements of humanity, whether in civilization, science, art, or philosophy. He is commendably free from dogmatism of any kind, ideological or religious, and his concluding chapter on the likely future faced by humanity is somewhat grim but hardly alarmist; the potential for natural disaster, disease, man-made global warming, war, or some combination of all of these to destroy the human race is real, and must be added into any weighing up of the scales. And in the last analysis, the enormity of the potential threats is not allowed to mask the scale of the adventure so far, and to come. The Story of Man deserves to find a wide public, and is particularly suitable for the young; I definitely wish I had read something similar in my teens.
]]>Tucker provides a welcome and robust rejection of scepticism about historical knowledge, and is moreover correct in thinking that a well-founded concept of the nature of historical knowledge is part of a civilized politics. There are obvious empirical examples that can be cited in defence of the possibility of historical knowledge, such as the successes of historians in correctly predicting the existence of evidence [Giesebrecht], and Tucker assembles a good range of examples in this respect. But he wants to go further by putting forward a genuinely philosophical argument in defence of the scientific nature of historiography, which he calls the '[representation] of past events...that generates probable knowledge of the past' .(2)
This argument is based on the similarity between history and other sciences including linguistics and evolutionary biology, all of which study information flows. In effect, Tucker wants to show that history is a science by demonstrating that it shares the characteristics of these other disciplines which are already admitted to be sciences. Naturally, this involves some consideration of the nature of science itself. Tucker opposes the old positivist conception of science which was essentially Newtonian; modern philosophy recognizes science 'as stochastic, probabilistic, with limited powers of prediction, and irreducible to another science' (211).
If Tucker is read as claiming that there is more ground in common between the human and natural sciences than has often been thought, this is unobjectionable. Both branches of science are rational, critical, sceptical, evidential, and inferential in their approach to knowledge. Perhaps, as Tucker claims, too much has been made of the difference between explanatory natural science, in which an effect is supposed to be related to its cause or causes in terms of a general law or laws, and understanding in the human sciences which focusses on the reasons why this event in particular was the outcome of previous states of affairs.
Nevertheless, it is also possible to feel at certain points that Tucker has in fact shown what makes history scientific, rather than what makes it history; that is, he has focussed on the common factors (which undeniably exist, and no doubt do need to be highlighted) between history and various other sciences, natural and human, to the neglect of the factors that enable us to pick out history as a distinctive discipline in its own right. In doing so, he also sometimes seems to unconsciously avail himself of the positivist approach that in other respects he is rightly keen to leave behind.
A key problem lies in the use made of the notion of 'information'. Despite repeatedly insisting that there are no 'ready to eat facts' (2, 12, 14, 43, 93, 138, 178), 'information' is treating as a kind of scientific constant. 'Historiographic information-bearing signals are considerably slower and composed often of words, rather than of light as in science, but these properties do not distinguish epistemically between historiography and science. Scientists understand the transmission of light; historians analyze the fidelity of textual information' (94).
The problem is that this entirely neglects the nature of the information involved; its qualitative aspect, if you like. It would be foolish to object to talking of historical evidence as containing information for historians; but it would be equally foolish to imagine that we mean the same thing by it as scientific information. When a biologist extracts DNA, or a linguist studies a sound recording, they are entitled to presuppose that their 'information' is present before them in a quantifiable form that exists entirely independently of their own subjectivity, because they are dealing with the results of non-intelligent processes; but this is never the case with evidence that must literally be read before it can be used, as is the case in history.
Notice how Tucker falls back on the language of realism; the 'fidelity' of textual information. To what is such information faithful? It cannot, by Tucker's own admission, be 'the facts'; there are none, in advance of historical inquiry (even if we admit, as he rightly does, the received knowledge of the tradition of historical investigation as part of what we mean by historical knowledge, this too comes under the heading of material that must be read or heard to be useful to the historian; it does not supply the role of a DNA sample). It cannot, also, be faithful to 'the past'; we have, again by his own admission, no way of knowing whether or not this is the case, nor even of knowing whether there is an independently existing past. Information can only be faithful to the events; but these are precisely what we piece together on the basis of the evidence, in hermeneutic fashion.
Tucker, however, does not like the hermeneutic tradition of Verstehen which would have rescued him from his frequent but unacknowledged retreats into a realist position. He makes the point, which must be conceded, that in many cases its proponents (like Dilthey and Collingwood) emphasized rational, conscious, and voluntary action, which leads to an untenably truncated concept of historical understanding (201). Much action is not rational, and much of history is not limited to the study of action; historical movements take place over centuries, even millennia, and historical actors may be blithely unaware of them. Demographic and economic trends, for instance, may operate without anyone alive at the time being aware of them.
Tucker is also right to say that the classic hermeneutic situation of a 'reader, a text, [and] the relationship between them' does not apply to historiography. In history we are dealing with 'a community of interpreters, their theories, and sets of documents'. (259-60) This is entirely true. But in the very next sentence there seems to be a tacit accommodation with at least a moderate type of hermeneutic tradition, when he concedes that 'The world is not a text, but it can be interpreted as texts'. (260) This is all that any plausible hermeneutic theory would require to defend a theory of history as providing an understanding of the meaning of past events, where their meaning involves some grasp of the reasons for their occurring as they did.
However, Tucker neglects to bring out the connection between hermeneutic theory and the study of meaning, preferring to concentrate exclusively on the admitted defects of the hermeneutic approach. This means that he cannot accommodate the qualitative difference in the nature of the information dealt with by history. It is true that history must be able to study long term trends in population, economy, and so forth as well as individual actions and decisions; but the ultimate focus is always on the difference that such trends made to the people who were alive at the time. An individual or a society does not have to be aware of an economic or demographic trend to experience, however unwittingly, its effects, and to respond to them. The focus in history, in other words, is on the changed life-experience that such trends produce, and here there is ineliminable reference to subjectivity and reflexivity of a sort absent from biology and linguistics.
There is however a commendably powerful sense of the seamless nature of events in historical thinking. For Tucker, historical explanations can be either determined or underdetermined. A determined historical proposition is one that is fully warranted by the evidence; an underdetermined one is one for which evidence is partially lacking, so that there may be several (though not indefinitely many) equally plausible explanations for the evidence as it stands. This is one major source, Tucker claims, of historical disagreement and of the division of historians into identifiable schools. But it is clear from this distinction that there is no period in history about which statements would be inherently underdetermined simply because of the kind of events they were dealing with; all historical knowledge may be determined if we possess adequate evidence, on Tucker's view. 'Justification comes form the evidence and the theories that connect the explanatory structure with the evidence, a distinct deductive, inductive, or other justification is redundant' (187).
In history, there are no mysteries from necessity, only from lack of sources. And the sources are all that is required. Always allowing for genuine cases of ambiguity and incoherence within the evidence itself, and allowing too that no historical explanation is ever completely certain, the evidence is, ultimately, all that historians need; they do not need additional covering laws to work out the relationship between the events they describe, because the events they describe are related to one another in terms of other events of which ultimately only a handful of interpretations are possible, one of which will usually turn out to be the right one. Or at least, not obviously wrong like the others.
To claim otherwise, in the face of the achievements of modern historiography, is to resort to outright scepticism. Tucker does not make as much as he might of the fact that in the twentieth century humanity achieved for the first time a completely secular, critical, inferential perspective on its own history as a universal whole, definitively superseding the kind of overview of world history offered by, for example, Hegel in the early nineteenth century. This knowledge of human history was achieved without the use of covering laws, nor have any been derived from it.
Of course, in some contexts, this may not be relevant. If one wants to show what history has in common with all other sciences, it can perhaps be disregarded. But in understanding what makes history distinctive, it is crucial, and Tucker's neglect of the point shows in the tension between his tacitly positivistic conception of neutral information on the one hand, and on the other, his insistence that there are no ready made facts of the sort on which positivists traditionally insisted. His recognition that history cannot be made to fit the model of the natural sciences seems tinged with regret; 'For now, fully scientific historiography is science fiction' (253).
This is perhaps because of the belief that Tucker has in the 'undistorted' communication that he believes takes place in a scientific community (179). There is a related belief that the interpretation of meanings of historical events can be entirely divorced from the acquisition of historical knowledge which is surely false given Tucker's own belief there are no prefabricated facts (215). These two claims are rather analogous to the belief in neutral information mentioned above. Of course, insofar as scientists can communicate in entirely formal or mathematical terms, there is some sense to the notion of undistorted communication; pure mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and logicians really are freed from the inherent ambiguities of natural language.
But these activities form only a part of what we call science. In fact, Tucker quickly retreats from this position to the view that 'within a sociohistorical community of discourse a fairly undistorted and meaningful communication frequently takes place' (179). This is unexceptional, but it is as true of the community of historians as it is of any (other) group of scientists, and really states little more than the trivial truth that we normally succeed in understanding one another most of the time.
The area in which Tucker is most genuinely innovative is in showing how Bayesian probability can provide a model of historical reasoning. A particular strength of his argument is its ability to distinguish Bayesian probabilism from the kind of probabilism advanced by Hempel, which still relied on the covering law approach. There is some real philosophical value in being able to state in formal (not of course quantitative) terms the grounds on which historians distinguish between the relative likelihood of various explanations for given evidence; it is not to be confused with the attempt, shown to be futile by Goldstein, of formalising historical statements themselves. For clearly stating the logic of historical judgments of probability, he deserves recognition as a truly pioneering thinker in the philosophy of history.
Ultimately, this Bayesian approach involves Tucker in a major claim about the organization of the sciences; he asserts that 'The sciences are divided neither into human sciences and natural sciences according to their subject matters, nor into ideographic and nomothetic sciences according to the purpose of their inquiries, but between sciences that examine the similar effects of common tokens of causes that preserve information about their common causes, and sciences that examine the similar effects of shared types of causes' (260). This claim is deliberately intended to overturn what Tucker regards as two major traditions of thinking about the organization of the sciences, the positivist one noted above in which the human sciences were always the poor relations of their natural scientific cousins, and the neo-Kantian tradition of Rickert, Simmel, and Dilthey that tried to establish the autonomy of the human sciences, including history, and grant them equal status with the natural sciences in doing so.
However, what Tucker does not rule out is that the sciences are divided into human sciences and natural sciences, and that within each of these broader groups there are sciences that examine the similar effects of common tokens of causes that preserve information about their common causes, and sciences that examine the similar effects of shared types of causes. What he has highlighted, arguably, is an important additional means of classifying forms of thought rather than a classification which entirely overturns those used hitherto. Within the human sciences, for example, it would seem that history comes into the former class, of ' sciences that examine the similar effects of common tokens of causes that preserve information about their common causes', and sociology falls into the latter group of 'sciences that examine the similar effects of shared types of causes'.
His revisionist position allows Tucker to claim that he does not adhere straightforwardly to any version of either realist (positivist) or neo-Kantian (constructionist) philosophy of history (256), although he admits that 'It is impossible to refute determined constructionism. It fits determined historiography as evidence just as well as a realist interpretation. Yet, though construction is simpler than realism, it makes fewer assumptions, realism is a better explanation of the historiographic Rankean paradigm, why a uniquely heterogenous and uncoerced large group of historians has come to agree on the theories and methods that define the historiographic community' (257)
But this objection can be dealt with by raising a point similar to Tucker's own caution that one should not confuse 'historiographic phenomenology and ideology; what historians may think of their enterprise and how they like to present their enterprise, with actual historiographic practice' (193). Just because the realist assumption is highly efficacious does not mean it is right (or wrong, for that matter); it is actually a naïve importation into historical theory from the ordinary lanaguage of practical experience, which requires realist assumptions. Ordinary language, however, is not the language in which history is written, as Tucker himself admits (178).
Tucker's account of constructionism is also flawed in other ways. He claims (without providing a specific example other than Goldstein) that constructionism 'denies that historiography refers to history, to the past'. In fact, Goldstein, if read carefully, does not deny this, exactly. And nor does Oakeshott, who makes pastness a category of historical understanding while maintaining a radical constructionist position. What both argue is that any historical talk about the past cannot be treated in the same way as commonsensical talk about the past, and in fact Tucker entirely agrees with this; constructionism is a strategy for preventing confusion of what Tucker calls 'therapeutic, nonscientific' (262) accounts of the past being allowed to hold sway unchallenged and thus potentially abused by demagogues.
In another attempt to undermine the constructionist case, Tucker mentions that 'Dummet argued that sentences about the past are not assertoric, they do not assert anything, because there are no clear truth conditions that would allow or disallow us to assert them' (255). Dummet, however, was not discussing the nature of historical knowledge when he made this remark. By Tucker's own admission, historiographic knowledge is theoretic knowledge. But even if Dummet had been discussing historical truth, how damaging would this charge be, if we have already established that history is capable of providing 'the best explanation of historiographic evidence' (254), as Tucker puts it? Why fixate on the notion of truth?
What is important in the kind of context that Dummet is discussing - the context in which what Tucker calls 'ordinary folks' (191) assert things about the past - is that their claims are efficacious. If I say to myself 'I left my wallet in the bedroom', what matters to me at that moment is not that this is true, but whether my wallet is in the bedroom when I walk in there to look for it. Similarly, if the historian can explain evidence in a way that rules out other possible explanations of it, what is to be gained by claiming that this explanation is either true or false when it has done what was required of it?
In fact, constructionism neither wants nor needs to abandon truth claims in the way that Tucker suggests, though there are, as we have just seen, reasons for thinking that it would not be as problematic as he believes even if it did. Nevertheless, all constructionism needs to assert is that there is a qualitative difference between historical explanations and narratives of the past, and other statements about the past. And this is tacitly admitted by Tucker in the distinctions he makes between historiographic and therapeutic accounts of the past, and between historians and 'ordinary folks'.
It is strange, then, that Tucker should still write that 'We understand history backward' (p. 229). Of course, there is a sense in which historians do understand history backward, because they have some idea of the outcome of the series of events they investigate. But there is a serious ambiguity in the notion of understanding history backward that needs addressing. Where the past is seen as significant or relevant, it is really the therapeutic past which is under consideration; this, by definition, has to be a kind of past, or view of the past (we need not worry too much about the distinction) in which its importance is as the preamble to our present.
By contrast, the theoretic or historical view of the past is of the past in terms of its past; the explanation of an event in terms of its antecedent causes. We do not understand why the French revolution occurred in terms of what came after it; we grasp the reasons why it happened in terms of what lead up to it. And it we ask 'what were the consequences of the French revolution', we must distinguish between asking that question in relation to those who experienced them in the nineteenth century, for instance, and asking it in relation to ourselves.
It is a hallmark of all theoretical thinking that our practical concerns must be temporarily shelved. This is as true for readers of historical works as it is for writers of them, and it is a precondition of the engagement of the historical imagination, which is the real source of the civilizing value that Tucker correctly detects in history. This critical species of imagination is an integral element of the educated mind, and it is one of the things that allows individuals to resist being moved to potentially self-destructive action by specious rhetoric.
Ultimately, Tucker is not really entitled, given his own tacit concessions to the hermeneutic and constructionist positions coupled with his illegimate tacit resort to a positivist and realist concept of 'information', to talk about “our knowledge of the past”, when we cannot know that there is any such thing. An indication of where he has gone wrong comes in the claim that 'evaluating how contingent history is can only be done empirically' (226). Contingency is here being contrasted with necessity. But history, as Oakeshott observed, is totally contingent. Oakeshott did not mean to say that history is accidental, for none of it is, in the sense of being composed chance or random occurrences.
Nor did Oakeshott mean to say that no necessary natural processes (sunrise, death, etc.) are at work in history, or even that, as Tucker alleges, 'universal or general statements are inapplicable to historiography because historical events are unique' (242). Historians are perfectly able to generalize; but the kind of generalizations they put forward never have the status of universal laws of the type associated with positivism.
What Oakeshott wished to draw attention to was that all of the historical past could have been otherwise, even if what might have been different would in many cases have been very similar to what did in fact occur, as Tucker rightly stresses in his reflections on the plot of It's A Wonderful Life (238). And it could have been otherwise because we are always dealing with the responses of people to events, and these, while they may have certain structural limitations (not all things are possible for all people at all times and in all places), are never foreordained. All history is equally contingent; which is quite consistent with holding that some events in history were more likely than others. Their likelihood, however, at least by itself, tells us nothing about
The contrast between contingency and necessity only arises in the context of the very debates over the scientific nature of history that Tucker is rightly trying to leave behind. It presupposes a certain metaphysical viewpoint; namely, that we inhabit a natural (perhaps 'external') world in which certain (necessary) processes with an identity entirely independent of consciousness are going on, but into which subjectivity introduces an element of randomness (contingency). The scientific, historical, and practical attitudes are all caught up in this continuum. This metaphysical viewpoint however is something that we simply cannot know the truth of. The most that the scientist can do is to presuppose that this is the case. Such a presupposition is perfectly legitimate, but not to be turned into an unqualified truth about the nature of reality.
But Tucker in fact sees that 'The epistemic question whether or not scientific historiography is possible is independent of the ontology of history' (213). And indeed, he does not need to avail himself of the notion of the past to make good his account of history as a form of probabilistic inference to the best explanation. The irony is that a more careful consideration of the neo-Kantian constructionist position that he claims to repudiate might have revealed to him how much closer he stands to it than he thinks. His claim that 'All historiography is hypothetical, unobserved, and should be the best explanation of observable evidence' (149) is, at the very least, entirely consistent with the constructionism of Goldstein and Oakeshott. And constructionism also contains the key to resolve some of the outstanding difficulties with what, by any standards, is one of the most important contributions to philosophy of history of recent years.
]]>ii) Mapping. Reading and making maps.
iii) Classifying. Grouping objects together, involves exclusion.
iv) Perspectives. Having a point of view. Not being able to see everything at once, things looking different from different angles.
]]>Interestingly, a pluralistic understanding of forms of thought, which seems to be the most defensible philosophical account, is now being paralleled by developments in scientific disciplines. Since monism has been the Platonic and Christian norm for around two and a half millennia, this may turn out to be a seismic cultural shift of what I think would in general be a very positive sort.
The knowledge supplied by archaeology, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience about early humans and about how the brain and mind work can't be ignored by anyone interested in theories of modality. Such theories are basically classifications or sets, dealing with a very peculiar object, conscious experience.
It helps then to know what one has in mind by a set or classification; and it seems that we begin to classify the world long before we know that that is what we are doing, long before we explicitly try to do so, and even longer still before we start to reflect philosophically on the fact that this is what we are doing.
Without committing the genetic fallacy of making origins the most important thing, it is nevertheless vital to have some notion of how the different departments of thought first arose in the ancient world that is as empirically grounded as may be in order that one may be able to answer the question of what changed afterwards. What is needed is a work not of speculation but of synthesis.
]]>One is the embodied nature of the self; but it is not merely that the self is embodied, it is that the limits of the body are not absolute. The body is so much in and of the world that there is no absolute division between it and its surroundings, as VSR shows by some readily performable experiments (p. 59). This chimes very neatly with the philosophical account of being-in-the-world given by Heidegger, but also with such mundane experiences as playing racquet sports, or a musical instrument, or wielding a weapon of some kind; after some practice, one's feeling literally goes into the object so that it becomes an extension of oneself.
Also striking is the divorce between the intellectual and the sensible functions of the brain; patients with right-brain injuries due to strokes can end up neglecting the half of the world that is on their left hand side, but remain capable of conversations about abstract intellectual subjects including politics or chess (p. 126). It is as if their perceptions have been altered without their intellectual rationality being remotely impaired.
VSR draws on Kuhn's idea of a 'paradigm shift' to illustrate the idea that different regions of the brain are responsible for constructing different stories about reality. "The left hemisphere's job is to create a belief system or model and to fold new experiences into that belief system. If confronted with some new information that doesn't fit the model, it relies on Freudian defense mechanisms to deny, repress, or confabulate - anything to preserve the status quo. The right hemisphere's strategy...is to play "Devil's Advocate," to question the status quo and to look for global inconsistencies. When the anomalous information reaches a certain level...The right hemisphere thus forces a "Kuhnian paradigm shift"' (p. 136)
VSR emphasizes "an important principles about brain function [is] that all our perceptions - indeed, maybe all aspects of our minds - are governed by comparisons and not by absolute values...true whether you are talking about something as obvious as judging the brightness of print in a newspaper or something as subtle as detecting a blip in your internal emotional landscape" (p. 167). This extends to our sense of our own self, and the selves of others - as when patients suffer from the delusion that their loved ones are impostors, or that a photograph of themselves is really of a double. Interestingly, the roots of this disorder appear to stem from injury to a part of the brain concerned with emotion, suggesting that there is no such thing in ordinary experience as a perception or sensation that is free from value.
The upshot is that there is no absolute barrier between mind and brain, something that bears on the problem of qualia, or the private subjective character of perception. VSR writes "the problem of qualia is not necessarily a scientific problem...your scientific description is complete. It's just that your account is incomplete epistemologically because the actual experience of electric fields [for a fish] or redness [for a colourblind person] is something you will never know...there is no such barrier, no great vertical divide in nature between mind and matter, substance and spirit...this barrier is only apparent and...it arises as a result of language. This sort of obstacle emerges when there is any translation from one language to another" (p. 231)
VSR does not mention any of the other philosophers who have written on the nature of translation, but what he has to say seems at least relevant to the kinds of debates that someone like Donald Davidson was involved in. VRS argues that "we are dealing here with two mutually unintelligible languages. One is the language of nerve impulses - the spatial and temporal patterns of neuronal activity that allow us to see red, for example. The second language, the one that allows us to communicate what we are seeing to others, is a natural spoken tongue like English...Both are languages in the strict technical sense, that is, they are information-rich messages that are intended to convey meaning, across synapses between different brain parts in one case and across the air between two people in another" (p. 231).
One might object that in fact the idea of neuronal activity as a language rests ultimately on an analogy with natural language that breaks down if we push it too hard; it is difficult to see electrical impulses of any kind, including those that occur in the brain, as being intended to convey meaning. Nevertheless, if what VSR is saying is that what is occurring in the brain has its analogue in what is occurring in the mind, but that this is not a causal relationship even though the former is the condition of the latter, it seems hard to object.
VSR's work has also allowed him to suggest three conditions for consciousness which allow him to separate human consciousness off from that found in other creatures. These are (i) the possession of irrevocable qualia - I cannot merely choose what to perceive in the world in the same way that I can choose what to picture to myself in imagination (ii) the possibility of flexibility in response to these qualia - on seeing the guard dog, I can back away or stand my ground or climb a tree and (iii) possession of a short-term memory which ensures the stability of the world of qualia. Where any one of these is absent, there is no consciousness in the human sense. (pp. 238-40)
So, the bee that returns to the hive and does an elaborate dance to indicate where the pollen it has discovered is to be found is not conscious, because it has (i) and (iii) but not (ii); the dance it performs is not an instance of a flexible response, it is a pre-programmed pattern. In the same way, a sleepwalking person is not conscious, in the sense that we ordinarily use the term, because in this case (iii) is absent; sleepwalkers typically have no memory of their actions although they are clearly responding to their environment at some level.
VSR concludes that the self is at once embodied, passionate, executive, mnemonic, unified, vigilant, conceptual, and social (pp. 247-53); it is "imposing coherence on consciousness" (p. 251). "All of us make mental taxonomies or groupings of events and objects...Our brains set up...categories...even without formal education". We seem to naturally grasp the world according to what "cognitive psychologists and philosophers" call "tokens and types", so that "all our experiences can be classified into general categories or types (people or cars) versus specific exemplars or tokens (Joe or my car)...this distinction is not merely academic; it is embedded deep in the architecture of the brain" (p. 170).
At the same time 'our sense of having a private nonmaterial soul "watching the world" is really an illusion (as has long been emphasized by Eastern mystical traditions like Hinduism and Zen Buddhism)...you are in fact part of the eternal ebb and flow of events'. He is no doubt right to find this liberating and the source of 'a certain humility - the source of all authentic religious experience' (p. 257).
]]>Marxism-Leninism, which one presumes would have been the dominant event in the history of philosophy from the Soviet point of view, had been relegated to around a dozen pages out of several hundred. Otherwise, the canonical story, as one would expect to find it from the pre-Socratics to, at any rate Hegel, was identical in outline to what would be given in any respectable Western version of the story. There was perhaps more willingness to include Indian and Chinese thought from what one might call the classical eras of both cultures at the beginning, but otherwise, until at least the nineteenth century, there was nothing surprising.
The notable divergences began in the later part of the nineteenth century, when one might call the analytic part of the story, beginning with figures such as Meinong, Brentano, and Frege, continuing with Russell and Whitehead, and including the emergence of such groups as the Vienna Circle and the eminent Polish logicians of the twentieth century, either disappeared or seemed to be treated very cursorily in comparison to what the Anglophone world calls 'continental' philosophy; that Franco-German style that grew up in the shadow of Hegel and Marx. Thus, plenty of Heidegger and Derrida, but very little Ayer or Quine. One could be forgiven for thinking philosophy came to an end at Calais after 1900, though to be fair many authors in the Anglophone world have often seemed to assert that it only began west of Dover.
But the truly striking thing was the way in which 'Russian philosophy' suddenly emerged as something in its own right in the accounts given of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps this is not too surprising; Russia was after all a very closed society for the greater part of the twentieth century, and was forced to develop in isolation to a great extent. But when one looks at those included in the canon, although some of them have been translated and acquired a certain reputation in the west (such as Berdyaev, for example), most are almost unknown (the members of the so-called Eurasian movement, for example, have hardly begun to be studied here). Moreover, someone like Berdyaev would only be counted as a philosopher by most inhabitants of Anglophone philosophy departments (save perhaps by those recusant Franco-German sympathisers) in an extended literary sense of the term. They have certainly yet to be integrated in any way into the history of philosophy as it is told here.
Interestingly, since I wrote the original post it has come to my notice that Copleston's History of Philosophy has a separate volume on Russian philosophy, which rather underlines my original point.
]]>Of course, both Plato and Hobbes were quite correct in thinking that there really are differences between what we might call practical reason and the kind of thinking involved in mathematics and geometry, and that the latter are capable of affording greater precision and certainty. Nor is it clear that either Plato or Hobbes thought of the truths of geometrical reason as unconditionally certain, as both are well aware of the need for sound axioms and definitions on which all subsequent deductions have to rest. Hobbes is even critical of Plato for thinking that rulers ought to be made to study geometry itself (Lev. Ch. 31); all that is needed is to have 'sufficiently or probably proved all the theorems of moral doctrine for sovereignty to be able to 'convert this truth of speculation, into the utility of practice', i.e. reasoning in the geometrical style rather than geometry itself.
But where both Hobbes and Plato might be said to have gone wrong is in thinking that philosophical thought can ever imitate the precision and certainty of formal reasoning, and in thinking that if it could, beneficial practical consequences would be at least very likely to follow. While both of them were exposed to too much political turmoil in their own lifetimes to be unaware of the impact of events, neither of them is as willing to confront the importance of fortuna, or contingency, in human affairs as, say, Machiavelli. Aristotle is in this respect much to be preferred to Plato.
]]>"A theme that emerged from my work on Oakeshott was the identification of the different categories of thought and the relations between them. In contemporary society, the category of thought with which we identify a given statement is recognized to be a highly controversial issue; witness the use of the term 'category mistake' by the Archbishop of Canterbury to explain why adherents to Biblical creationism were mistaken in refusing to accept the Darwinian theory of evolution. The suggestion here is that science and religion represent different kinds of thinking that must not be confused on pain of irrelevance. Clearly, this is a consequential as well as a contested subject; it materially affects, among other things, how the state funds education.
Yet there is no history of the philosophical enterprise of distinguishing what Oakeshott called the various 'modes of experience'. His own classification of the fundamental divisions of thought (into scientific, practical, historical, philosophical, and aesthetic 'modes') was clearly indebted to Kant's attempt to identify the categories underlying the understanding and Hegel's division of logic, nature, and mind. However, it also became apparent that the classification of the various regions of thought has been a central task of Western philosophy since its beginnings, and has often had significant moral and political implications.
Whether one studies ancient, mediaeval, or modern philosophy, one discovers the persistent attempt to arrange the various forms of thought into a hierarchy, and identify one form which can be set above all others. Be it Platonic dialectic, scholastic theology, or natural science, philosophers have consistently sought such an intellectual trump card. At the same time, this dominant tradition has periodically met with sceptical and pluralistic opponents who have persistently exposed the shortcomings of this strategy. Arguably, in our own time, this has been the true meaning of post-modernism, often unclear to post-modernists themselves; figures such as Heidegger and Derrida are symptomatic of the final recognition in Western thought of an inescapable, though not indeterminate, intellectual pluralism.
Such recognition has been forced upon philosophy by an increasing awareness in the last two hundred years or so, not only of its own historicity, but of the historicity of all thought. This historicity of course extends to the discipline of history itself as well as to the natural sciences. Moral and political controversies like those alluded to at the outset are ultimately due to a refusal to countenance either the historicity of thought or its inherently pluralistic character (though neither of these positions license scepticism about the possibility of conditional truths). This, in brief outline, is the narrative I wish to explore in a major research monograph on the history of philosophy."
]]>Just about any misidentification or misdescription can of course be said, in a trivial sense, to be a category mistake ('not a dog, but a fox'), but this doesn't reflect the main usage to which either Ryle or the other examples put the phrase. The difference at stake can perhaps be said to be that between the categorial (sic, with no 'c') and the merely categorical. Ryle himself in fact distinguished 'theoretically interesting' and 'radical' category mistakes from other kinds, and perhaps this difference is implicit in his doing so.
Anyhow, the difference indicated is why I wouldn't really happy, for example, with the suggestion that 'the only reason one could complain about this is if one denied that the properties which things have (and thus the categories under which they fall) can be exhausted in our knowledge ofthem. But this seems like an extremely implausible skepticism.' In the case of common or garden miscategorisations, let's assume we can
indeed exhaustively tell what properties things have; we can reliably know blue from green, dogs from foxes, etc. Surely, however, the picture changes when we are required to tell historical thinking from moral reasoning, or scientific argument from religious belief, or from dramatic speech.
After all, it is by no means obvious that 'science' (for example), is a 'thing', and if it is, it is certainly not a 'thing' like an Oxford College or a military unit; it is not an object of sense-perception at all, and presumably therefore cannot have 'properties' in the same way either. Whether we choose to call science a mode of experience, a form of thought, or whatever, its properties or distinguishing features remain non-sensible.
So, if it is not a misnomer to describe a confusion between, say, science and religion or historical and moral thought as a confusion between categories, the notion of a 'category' does, when used in this sense, become problematic. We may have established that 'science' cannot be the same *kind* of category as a biological genus, or a colour pallet, but quite what kind of a category it is remains somewhat obscure. Ryle actually uses 'logical type' as a synonym for 'category', but the precise meaning of the adjective 'logical' is not obvious. That 'Science is a logical type' = 'science is a category' still leaves plenty of work to be done.
One possible answer to the problem is that 'science' is a particular kind of discourse, and it has certainly been suggested that the non-trivial sense of the term 'category mistake' being discussed here arose in association with the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations did so much to help bring about. Category mistakes, on this view, are semantic confusions des genres, muddlings up of different vocabularies, and so on. There's a lot to be said in favour of this view, but its not all there is to the matter.
This is because the problem exists 'avant la lettre'. Indeed, Ryle is effectively accusing Descartes himself of a category mistake, meaning that such errors were as possible in the
seventeenth century as they are now. Whether this is mere anachronism or a genuinely illuminating approach to the history of philosophy is perhaps not uncontroversial, but provisionally, let us say that Ryle is (historically) justified in taking this position. From notes elsewhere on this site it should appear that the problem in its modern form dates back at least to Kant, and his argument that there are a priori conditions for understanding, there is no obvious difficulty with extending it further back.
One might, indeed, even push the history of the problem all the way back to Aristotle, whose delineation of the various fields of thought really draws up the map of knowledge within which (very broadly) we are all still working (though the contours of individual features have, at least in some cases, changed out of all recognition since his time). In one of the examples quoted, Bernard Williams certainly seems to think it makes sense to talk in terms of category mistakes in Greek philosophy.
Although, then, it is true in one sense that the problem of telling a scientific theory from a religious belief is like telling that of telling a dog from a cat, in that it simply a problem of what set something belongs to, in another sense, it seems to be a qualitatively different issue, and describing both in terms of knowledge of things and their properties is unhelpful insofar as it obscures this difference.
Our own era is characterized by the increasing recognition that there is an irreducible but small and determinate plurality of forms or kinds of understanding, each of which has its unique conditions attached, and the challenge is to specify them while remaining alert to their historicity. Hence, ultimately, the interest of the idea of a category mistake, and the sense of its difficulties.
]]>'A category mistake, or category error is a semantic or ontological error by which a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. For example, the statement "the business of the book sleeps eternally" is syntactically correct, but it is meaningless or nonsense or, at the very most, metaphorical, because it incorrectly ascribes the property, sleeps eternally, to business, and incorrectly ascribes the property, business, to the token, the book.
The term "category mistake" was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind to remove what he argued to be a confusion over the nature of mind born from Cartesian metaphysics. It was alleged to be a mistake to treat the mind as an object made of an immaterial substance because predications of substance are not meaningful for a collection of dispositions and capacities.'
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake)
I uncovered this as one of the results of a Google search on 23.10.2006 for 'category mistake', which also threw up a number of other noteworthy items. One was:
http://categorymistake.com/blog/category-mistake/
While it was initially exciting to discover an entire website actually devoted to the concept, the number of entries turned out to be disappointingly few.
The privately maintained site at:
http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/c.htm
had some useful background definitions, though they didn't really shed any new light. It did, however, concur in attributing the idea of a category mistake to Ryle (as does this post http://www.philo.at/phlo/199806/msg00048.html which notes Mautner's Dictionary of Philosophy as a source for the attribution), and underlined that in order to give any real meaning to the notion of a 'category mistake', it is important to be able to say what is entailed in the notion of a category itself:
'category {Gk. katêgoria}
Predicate; hence, a fundamental class of things in our conceptual framework. In Aristotle's logic specifically, the categories are the ten general modes of being (substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, doing, and undergoing) by reference to which any individual thing may be described. Following the lead of stoic thought, medieval logicians commonly employed only the first four of these ten, but allowed for additional, syncategorematic terms that belonged to none of them. Kant employed a schematized table of a dozen categories as the basis for our understanding of the phenomenal realm. Gilbert Ryle used the term much more broadly, warning of the category mistakes that occur when we fail to respect the unique features of kinds of things.'
An important example of the use of the term in public discourse that should have been recorded here was that by the Archbishop of Canterbury on 21 March 2006, when he said:
"I think creationism is, in a sense, a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories.
"Whatever the biblical account of creation is, it's not a theory alongside theories. It's not as if the writer of Genesis or whatever sat down and said: 'Well, how am I going to explain all this... I know: in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth'.
"So if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there's just been a jarring of categories. It's not what it's about."
I was reminded of the A of C's remarks by a post on (http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2006/03/21/), so clearly I wasn't the only one who noticed.
This fits nicely with the comments in the last couple of entries.
But there is another example that is worth recording for its assertion of a distinction between historical and moral understandings of action and its claim that the confusion between them also amounts to a category mistake: see the note on 'Historical explanation and moral justification' by Gene Callahan which was inspired by the response to the attack on America in September 2001 (http://www.lewrockwell.com/callahan/callahan60.html)
It seems contemporary uses of the phrase 'category mistake' span a wide variety of fields indeed; science and religion, science and art, history and morals, thought and action. It is all a far cry from Ryle's original usage of it in relation to the Cartesian approach to the mind-body 'problem'.
]]>The moral philosopher Bernard Williams writes: 'Aristotle famously said (EN 1096b33-5) that if there were a separate and absolute Good, "it is obvious that it could not be achieved or possessed by man; but it is to something of that sort that our inquiry is directed." If Aristotle means by this (he may not) that Plato unfortunately overlooked this feature of the Form of the Good, that it is not achievable in action, he has missed the point: it would be a category mistake to suppose that it could be any such thing.' (The Sense of the Past Essays in the History of Philosophy, p. 128)
The question immediately arises of whether the term 'category mistake' is being used here in the same way as in the previous example. It appears that it is, insofar as both uses rely on the idea of irrelevance, hence William's use of the phrase 'missed the point'. Williams, however, uses it in a way that suggests it can apply not only to the difference between science and dramatic fiction, but to a broader distinction, which is not explicitly specified, but seems to be something like that between thought and action, or perhaps between the Platonic world of forms and the sensory world.
Moreover, where Poole selects for his examples a contemporary utterance and one drawn from sixteenth-century history, Williams is happy to make use of the idea in reference to ancient thought. This suggests that there is something universal, or at least transhistorical, about the idea of a category mistake; it is not something to which only we are are prone, but has been a form of error into which anyone, or at least anyone belonging to Western culture, has been liable for more than two millenia.
NB A search on amazon.co.uk on this date for 'category mistake' returned no results. However, a search for "categories" returned over 700 results, relating to a wide variety of subjects including algebra, psychology, language, and ontology (and other branches of philosophy). Notably, Aristotle (because of his work on Categories) and Peirce (for his theory of categories) seem to be the two philosophers (other of course than Kant) particularly associated with the concept.
]]>What is missing, and what Poole could hardly have been expected to have provided in such a short piece, is a positive argument about the nature of such mistakes. This would presumably be along the lines that the various forms of thought each carry their own implicit conditions of relevance, and that these (at least in the exemplary cases of science and drama that he mentions) are mutually exclusive.
As a counterweight to this idea, the naturalist philosophy of someone like Woodhouse, in which the metaphor of translation plays an important role, should also be included. Scientific thought can inspire artistic creativity, and presumably also vice versa, without their having to speak the same language.
In contemporary culture, the two areas in which the idea of a category mistake has the greatest potential for transforming public debate would seem to be science and religion. This is because the idea of a category mistake gives substance to the claim that these two subjects reflect qualitatively distinct manners of thinking, has the power to defeat the uncritical (and ulimately fatuous) view that the difference between them is simply a matter of choice.
Critical thinking, based on reasoned and evidential argument, compels the acceptance of a scientific world-view; it also compels us the conclusion that many of the statements one meets in religious texts, if taken literally as factual claims, are false. It is, however, by no means clear that this is the right way in which to approach religion; although it is very clear that those who are themselves religious do themselves absolutely no good in insisting on a literal interpretation of the statements their favoured texts contain - in defiance, and usually also ignorance, of a couple of centuries of critical historical study of them.
From a political point of view, however, there is a further level of complexity. It may be expedient, simply from the point of view of preserving the peace, to allow certain groups to talk as if their beliefs are indeed literally true, always provided that they are not interfering with activities vital to the existence of a civilized society, such as scientific research.
There are several problems here, however. One is that such groups, if not contradicted, will continue to try and impose their own values on the direction of society; consider, for example, the attitude of some evangelical Christian groups to stem-cell research which has the potential to cure all sorts of diseases.
Another is that it is by no means guaranteed that the members of the political class will appreciate the implications of the idea of a category mistake, or that they will act on it if they do. If they do, those committed to the literal truth of their texts will feel an enjoyable sense of outrage at the slur on their beliefs. It will take a strong politician to rebut charges of theological interference.
Such a politician will have two options. These are, either to say bluntly to religious believers that if they are going to insist on the truth of their beliefs then they are clearly wrong; or to take the Hobbesian-Machiavellian kind of line that the truth or falsity of what is believed is a matter of total public indifference, and all that counts is the likelihood of a disturbance of the peace resulting.
The latter is probably the wiser course, because it avoids the out and out contradiction that critical thought, simply taken by itself, seems to demand. It is unfortunately less emotionally satisfying to the sceptic, who would dearly love to see such immature and childish attachment to inappropriate literalness put firmly in its place, but if peace is the most important thing, such emotional satisfaction will have to be foregone.
There are, of course, many other implications of a non-literal view of religion which are simply too complex to go into here, though they include the non-existence of a divine being (in any other sense than as our own a posteriori imaginative creation) and the absence of any belief in personal immortality (in any other sense, again, than as a result of our own efforts to distinguish ourselves in this life).
It also seems worth noting that the constant search for category mistakes can actually inhibit genuine attempts to appreciate the other party's concerns; in rhetorical terms it becomes the ultimate trump card that allows one's opponent to be summarily dismissed, a kind of linguistic jumping up and down and nose-thumbing.
Category mistakes, after all, are formal or logical errors in reasoning, and such errors do not automatically entirely negate the substance of what is being said. Always to approach an argument exclusively in terms of its formal status neglects the testimony of experience, which suggests that how, why, when, where, and to whom something is said may be, depending on circumstances, just as important as or perhaps even more important than what is said itself.
]]>In between Descartes and Kant there are of course any number of important developments, but undeniably one of the most significant is the work of Newton; it is to Newton that Kant is referring when he says that the natural sciences have become by a single revolution what they now are. Nevertheless, he shared with Descartes the desire to place knowledge of nature on an absolutely certain footing; hence the perceived urgency of a response to Hume’s claim that the idea of a necessary causation was an illegitimate generalisation from experience.
Kant’s solution to the ‘problem of induction’, as it came to be known, has always been controversial, because it seemed to create as many problems as it solved. We can have knowledge of universal and necessary causality, Kant argues, because of the a priori categories which are the conditions of our experiences; but these experiences, precisely because they are categorially mediated, are never of things in themselves, or of reality, but only of appearances. If this amounts to certain knowledge of nature, it is not of the sort Descartes had imagined.
Another great change between Kant and Descartes is the increased awareness of the contribution that subjectivity makes to knowledge. Objects conform to our knowledge of them, and not the other way around. Nevertheless, Kant is still thinking very much in terms of a dichotomy between appearance and reality; our knowledge of objects is of appearances only. Note that Kant more or less identifies the apparent and the conditioned. In one sense it is the removal of this identification which allows the later, pluralistic view of knowledge to emerge. It is then possible to argue that we have knowledge which is of reality, not just of appearances, and yet conditional, in the sense that it is mediated by some set of presuppositions.
A major problem for Kant is that while he saw, on the one hand, the revolutionary importance of the recognition that subjectivity is in some sense constitutive of reality, he could see no alternative, if any kind of ethical order were to be maintained, to retaining the metaphysical absolutes of god, freedom, and immortality. In this sense, Kant still inhabits the same context as Descartes, though one that is clearly crumbling; whereas Descartes is confident about his proof of the existence of God, the absolute best Kant can do is to say that this is something about which we simply cannot pronounce one way or another. At the same time, Kant argues that although God is only an ideal resulting from ‘the merely speculative employment of pure reason’, it is ‘an ideal without a flaw…which completes and crowns the whole of human knowledge’ (A641, B669).
This position nicely exposes both the tension in his system and the extent to which Kant wished to remain within the orbit of traditional rationalist, even scholastic, thought. His position is summed up in his famous insistence that ‘the things of the world must be viewed as if they received their existence from the highest intelligence’ (A671, B699). There are in fact at least two reasons why Kant thought he needed to keep some notion of a divine being in his philosophy, one relating to the understanding of nature in theoretical philosophy, the other to the understanding of morality in practical philosophy. Just like Descartes, in other words, Kant needs divinity as a guarantee of both the knowledge of nature and of morality. For Hegel, however, the mediating term between body and spirit is not God, but logic, and this constitutes a significant difference.
We will discuss Hegel’s response to Kant further below. Here, note that despite the fact that Kant realized our consciousness in some way actively contributes to our knowledge of reality, he has no clearer conception of the self than Descartes. He realizes that the idea of the self as a simple substance (the way in which Descartes thought of the thinking ‘I’) is not one of which we can have knowledge, and in consequence he replaces it with an empirical psychology, the self as it appears when mediated by the system of categories. This view of the self, however, does not distinguish it in kind from external objects; as appearance, it is subject to the same laws of causal necessity. The self we cannot doubt the existence of, for Kant, is not the noumenal thing in itself which he regarded Descartes as concerned with; this at best we can only posit. The reality of myself which is immediately evident through consciousness is only a mediated appearance (B 55). We owe it to the inner form of intuition, time, which however is ultimately dependent on the outer form of space.
There is, however, a feature of this empirical self that would prove to be of great significance. For Kant, the precondition of our awareness of it is time, the inner form of intuition (space being the form of outer intuition). That temporality as well as subjectivity also has a constitutive role to play in identity is an insight that numerous later philosophers who are important for our purposes (Hegel, Dilthey, and Heidegger amongst them) took up and attempted to elaborate upon. It is the starting point from which it was possible to arrive at the distinction between temporality and historicity, which, however, does not yet exist in Kant. For him, time and space were not fundamental realities, one of the points with which Hegel took issue; rather, they were only forms of appearance.
To read Kant only with an eye to his impact on Hegel would of course be a task in itself, and here it is only possible to make some scattered observations. One such is that Hegel took Kant’s assertion that ‘everything in our knowledge which belongs to intuition…contains nothing but relations’, and applied it to knowledge simply as such (B 67). What Kant explicitly excluded as not being knowledge at all–such as feelings of pleasure and pain, and the will–are for Hegel just as much relations as anything else, and so to in Hegelian philosophy are sensation, perception, understanding, and rationality. Where Kant dismisses dialectic (or pure logical reasoning) as necessarily as source of illusions of which we cannot rid ourselves but must guard against, Hegel wishes to rehabilitate dialectic as a genuine path to knowledge.
Hegel’s triadic manner of reasoning also looks less peculiar when we notice that Kant argues ‘that in each class the number of the categories is always the same, namely, three’, and that ‘the third category in each class always arises from the combination of the second category with the first’. So, for example, in relation to the categories of quantity, Kant claims to derive the concept of totality from a combination of unity and plurality; similarly, ‘limitation is simply reality combined with negation; community is the causality of substances reciprocally determining one another’, and ‘necessity is just the existence which is given through possibility itself’ (B110).
For Hegel to begin his logic by deriving becoming from a combination of the categories of being and nothing ought then to appear thoroughly in keeping with this Kantian approach, particularly once one sees Kant providing a table of the ‘division of the concept of nothing’ (B348, A292). One may even wonder whether the tripartite arrangement of Hegel’s system into the moments of logic, nature, and mind owed something to Kant’s suggestion that ‘concepts of reason may make possible a transition from the concepts of nature to the practical concepts’ (B386); at any rate, Hegel conceived it as an important part of the task of his own philosophy to show how such transitions were possible’.
Note, though, that where the triadic critical system is still arranged in terms of the respective faculties of knowledge, namely understanding (crit. of pure reason), reason (crit. of practical reason), and judgment (crit. of judgment), just as Bacon’s division of the sciences had been (according in his case to memory, reason, and imagination), this system is abandoned by Hegel. The organizing principle which distinguishes between logic, nature, and mind is the type of subject-object relation involved in each case, not the particular faculty that the subject happens to be employing. This move is as revolutionary as Kant’s own recognition of the constitutive role of subjectivity itself, and with it one could say that we enter the era of philosophical thought which we still inhabit.
Despite this fundamental re-orientation, there are plenty of visible continuities between the critical and the Hegelian systems. For example, Kant argues that the ‘supreme concept’ in ‘transcendental philosophy’ is not ‘the division into the possible and the impossible’, ‘since all division presupposes a concept to be divided’, but rather ‘the concept of an object in general, taken problematically, without its having been decided whether it is something or nothing’ (B346, A290). Now, the very first concept in Hegel’s logic is just such a notion of being in general. One should also be aware that the use of the term ‘moment’ was employed by Kant before it ever entered Hegel’s vocabulary (A169, B211).
So too was the term ‘absolute’, by which Kant seems to have understood the completely unconditioned (B380–3). Their shared use of the term should not conceal the fact, however, that for Hegel the Absolute is the very reverse of what Kant took it to be mean; for Hegel it is the completely conditioned, a system of total mediation. Similarly, the discussion of the two different ideas of the Infinite which occurs in Kant’s consideration of the antinomies or contradictions to which he claims the dialectical character of pure reason naturally gives rise are an important context for Hegel’s discussion of the difference between the false or spurious and true conceptions of the Infinite (B455–462).
The concept of the Infinite is also important in the comparison between Kant and Hegel because it is related to the notion of the whole. The idea of a whole (‘omnitudo realitatis’) is for Kant part of the ‘transcendental substrate’ of reason, one of those ideas that we can only meaningfully employ in a purely regulatory fashion and about which we can say nothing in itself (A576, B604). Kant insists then that ‘the whole is not in itself already divided’, but this is precisely the nature of the Hegelian Absolute (A526, B554). For Kant, while space (because it is simply appearance) allows of infinite divisibility, the idea of ‘an organized whole…itself again so organized that, in the analysis of the parts to infinity, still other organized parts are always to be met with’ is not a ‘thinkable hypothesis’ outside the empirical world of appearance. But Hegel does not think that if the organization typical of this ‘false infinite’ cannot be applied to ‘things in themselves’ that therefore nothing else can. He is very much convinced that things in themselves are knowable, and that the Absolute has a discernible internal structure ‘in itself’.
Hegel also rejected Kant’s general conception of Idealism as ‘the theory which declares the existence of objects in space outside us either to be merely doubtful and indemonstrable or to be false and impossible’. Hegel believed neither of these things; his remarks on eating are intended to make this quite clear. In addition, Hegel wanted to challenge some of Kant’s specific claims about just how much we can know from experience. Things like ‘a special ultimate mental power of intuitively anticipating the future (and not merely inferring it), or…a power of standing in community of thought with other men, however distant they may be’ are possibilities which Kant dismisses as phenomena lying outside experience (B270, A223). Hegel, however, tries to find a place for these unusual powers in his philosophy of mind. Most people would of course find Kant’s view preferable; Hegel is addressing what is ordinarily considered to be the paranormal.
When in the CPR Kant talks about ‘historical’ knowledge (cognitio ex datis, A836, B864) he means by it exactly what Locke meant when he spoke of the ‘plain historical method’ in the Essay on Human Understanding, i.e. empirical knowledge gained through the senses, and he contrasts it with rational knowledge (cognitio ex principiis). Here is another distinction which had to be overcome before a satisfactory philosophical account of history as a discipline could emerge; it had to be possible to argue that while historical knowledge was in some ways dependent on the empirical, it could nevertheless claim to be rational (though not deductive).
Kant’s own work, it must be acknowledged, contained and often provided or at least hinted many of the concepts which later thinkers were to use in modifying his system; this is true not only of Hegel but of the neo-Kantians who raised the cry of ‘back to Kant’ in an attempt (which one could have predicted would turn out to be doomed) to break away from Hegel’s legacy. Indeed, it is remarkable how often he seems to have continued to set the philosophical agenda even throughout the twentieth century. It is hard to avoid being struck, for example, by the similarity of his approach with that of the later Wittgenstein, in the sense that Kant argues that the problems of metaphysics arise from the impulse to ask questions which strictly speaking have no answers, just as Wittgenstein thought it possible to ‘solve’ (or dissolve) a philosophical puzzle by showing that on closer inspection it turned out to be meaningless. ‘To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight’ (A 58, B 83).
But more generally, Kant’s insistence that ‘perhaps the greatest part of the business of our reason consists in analysis of the concepts which we already have of objects’ (A5, B9) could be held to contain in a nutshell the programme of modern analytic philosophy. It assigns to philosophy a fundamentally negative role, delimiting the legitimate forms of utterance and excluding anything which transgresses these limits. Indeed, the concept of a noumenon is itself described as ‘a merely limiting concept, the function of which is to curb the pretensions of sensibility’ (B311). Or as Kant puts it later on, ‘All true negations are nothing but limitations’ (A576, B604). In a striking spatial metaphor he describes Hume as one of the ‘geographers of human reason’, an enterprise which he implicitly claims as his own.
Furthermore, Kant’s focus on exploring the conditions of the possibility of various forms of knowledge proved capable of applications which he never considered for it; the question he was raising, of how synthetic a priori propositions were possible, were applied in the CPR only to pure mathematics and what he called the pure science of nature (B20). Nevertheless, had Kant not put the matter in these terms, saying that ‘Since these sciences actually exist, it is quite proper to ask how they are possible’, Dilthey could never have raised the issue of the need for a critique of historical reason, for instance. The general idea of the categories as ‘not in themselves knowledge, but…merely forms of thought for the making of knowledge from given intuitions’ proved flexible enough to allow for the idea of different groups or sets of categories to each of which a different form of knowledge was appropriate (B 288).
Here, therefore, we should also notice Kant’s argument that ‘the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience’ (B197, A158). For Kant, this was the source of the objective validity of synthetic a priori judgments, but his point was later extended to provide the basis of perspectivism. What we see will always be relative to how we look; and we always do see something. This perspectivist reading of Kant is licensed by other remarks; for example, in his discussion of the rational principles of ‘homogeneity, specification, and continuity of forms’, he says ‘Every concept may be regarded as a point which, as the station for an observer, has its own horizon, that is, a variety of things which can be represented, and, as it were, surveyed from that standpoint’ (A 658, B 686).
Also thanks to Kant, there is no need for such perspectivism to give up on the idea of truth, if we accept that, as the CPR has it, ‘the source of all truth (that is, of the agreement of our knowledge with objects)’ is the ‘rules of understanding’ themselves. In Kant himself, of course, the idea of a single all-embracing or total perspective remained very strong, as for example in the remark that ‘The sum of all the possible objects of our knowledge appears to us to be a plane, with an apparent horizon–that which in its sweep comprehends it all, and which has been entitled us by the idea of unconditioned totality’ (B787). Reason in other words is bounded; it ‘must..be compared to a sphere, the radius of which can be determined from the curvature of the arc of its surface’, i.e. from the synthetic a priori propositions (A762, B791).
The possibility opened up is that what counts as ‘agreement’ could differ according to the kind of knowledge involved, so that for each different group or set of categories there was an appropriate standard of truth. History, for example, can then acquire its own standards of validation. Of course, this would not have been acceptable to Kant himself, who believed that ‘thought takes no account whatever of the mode of intuition, whether it be sensible or intellectual’ (B429). Arguably, however, both Hegel and the later hermeneutic tradition preserved, at least in a broad sense, Kant’s conception of ‘human reason’ as ‘by nature architectonic’ because it ‘regards all our knowledge as belonging to a possible system’ (B502, A474).
Another Kantian term which had to be altered in order to make way of an account of history as a form of thought is the imagination. Kant describes imagination as ‘the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present’, and he distinguishes two forms of it. There is ‘productive’ imagination, which is capable of ‘spontaneity’, and is dealt with by his transcendental philosophy, and ‘reproductive’ imagination, ‘whose synthesis is entirely subject to empirical laws…of association’ (B152). Now, neither of these fitted with the concept of historical imagination, which is neither spontaneous–it is not simply inventing its objects–nor determined in the sense that it can only combine elements of what has already been experienced–because the events that historians study, at least in principle, do not have to been witnessed by them or even be within living memory.
Nor can we ignore the problems encountered by later thinkers interested in developing a philosophy of history as a result of Kant’s theory of action. When Kant writes ‘Causality leads to the concept of action, this in turn to the concept of force, and thereby to the concept of substance’ (B249, A204), he actually has in mind ‘action’ in the sense of ‘force’ (B250). Indeed, there is a sense in which Kant tends to think of human action as no different in kind from the operation of natural processes that are caused rather than willed. The human body is, from one point of view, simply another object, operating and being operated upon by things in the world. And the important thing is that for Kant this is how the body appears for both practical and scientific consciousness.
It is because of Kant’s conception of the body for practical consciousness that he believes morality will be impossible unless the ‘idea of a moral world has…objective reality’. And do to so, the moral world must be taken ‘as referring to the sensible world, viewed, however as being an object of pure reason in its practical employment, that is, as a corpus mysticum of the rational beings in it’ (A808, B836). ‘We…through experience know practical freedom to be one of the causes in nature, namely, to be a causality of reason in the determination of the will’, but the empirical recognition of practical freedom does not do anything by itself to secure the existence of morality for Kant.
Such practical freedom is the domain of empirical psychology, of appetites and desires that are conceived of as entirely belonging to (animal) nature. What is required for morality is ‘transcendental freedom…the independence of this reason–in respect of its causality, in beginning a series of appearances–from all determining causes of the sensible world’ (A803, B831). This idea seems to ‘contrary to the law of nature’, but like the existence of God, ‘transcendental freedom’ is one of those necessary fictions that lies beyond the possibility of proof or disproof. Man ‘is thus to himself, on the one hand phenomenon, and on the other hand, in respect of certain faculties the action of which cannot be ascribed to the receptivity of sensibility, a purely intelligible object’ (A546–7, B574–5).
One of the reasons transcendental freedom is seen by Kant as contrary to nature is that in nature all events participate in causal processes. Thanks to the possibility of synthetic a priori propositions, we can know what we could never know merely empirically, that any event must be the effect of some cause, and so ‘coming to be out of nothing…entitled creation…cannot be admitted as an event among appearances, since its mere possibility would destroy the unity of experience’ (B251). The contingency of events implies the category not of modality but of relation. That is, there is no suggestion in the case of ‘contingent existence’ that things could have been different, only that the outcome must have been dependent on a preceding chain of events. There is a sense, of course, in which a contingency is itself a difference, for Kant says that ‘when we are required to cite examples of contingent existence, we invariably have recourse to alterations…alteration is an event which is possible only through a cause’ (B 291). But it is the fact that it is a causally necessitated difference, not just a difference as such, which interests Kant. When he says ‘Experience teaches us what it is, but does not teach us that it could not be other than what it is’ (A734, B762), this is to the detriment of experience in his eyes. Yet it is only because experience does not teach us this that an historical mode of thinking is conceivable at all.
That things could have been otherwise on grounds of modality is in fact a basic assumption of historical thinking. No work of history sets out to show that it had to have been a certain way; the aim is not so high. The only goal is to show why it did in fact happen that way. But in Kant’s philosophy there is no room for such an approach. He argues that we must treat the will as if it is always bringing something to be out of nothing, in a way which literally defies the Understanding in Kantian terms. Here we see the survival of the kind of dualism Descartes had conceived of; there is no way of explaining how body and spirit (not strictly ‘mind’, as Kant conceives of mind in the same Newtonian and mechanical terms as body itself) are in any kind of communication with one another. Kant of course acknowledged himself a dualist, advocating on the one hand what he called ‘transcendental idealism’, and on the other hand ‘empirical realism’ (A370). His ‘solution’, if it is a solution, is that spirit and body are not separate substances, existing distinct from one another, but that body is merely appearance, and spirit only a useful fiction (A390 & ff.).
Again, however, the terms in which Kant puts the problem–the aim is ‘to reconcile nature and freedom’–are vastly important for understanding the subsequent debate (A537, B565). So to is his posing of the question ‘Is it a truly disjunctive proposition to say that every effect in the world must arise either from nature or from freedom; or must we not rather say that in one and the same event, in different relations, both can be found?’ It is almost not too much to say that all subsequent writing on the subject of the relationship between the various forms of thought has revolved around this question. At the extreme, every effect has been attributed to nature (scientific positivism); there are those who continue to defend some kind of dualism in which nature and freedom are two distinct levels of reality; and then there are the perspectivist answers at which Kant’s idea of nature and freedom as ‘different relations’ in the same event seems to hint. It is the precise nature of these relations which much of neo-Kantianism was concerned with.
The problems raised by historical events do not seem to stop here. Kant famously argues that ‘all existential propositions are synthetic’, and that ‘“Being” is not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing’. Here Kant is at once making a contribution to a very long-standing debate about the nature of existence, and setting out what in its turn proved to be agenda-setting stuff; ‘existence is not a predicate’ was a mantra of at least one school of twentieth-century logicians, and the meaning and usage of the word ‘is’ was one over which many twentieth-century philosophers (again including Wittgenstein) spilt their ink. To say that something exists, for Kant, is ‘merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations, as existing in themselves’ (A 598, B 626).
Kant gives the example, which Hegel picks up on numerous occasions, of a hundred real thalers and a hundred imaginary thalers and argues that in terms of their content these ideas do not differ (A599, B627). But it is hard to see how, in the case of historical events, their having taken place is not in some sense integral to them; or in quasi-Kantian terms, that some kind of suitably tensed existential quantifier is actually predicated of them. What did happen, in history, is not illuminated by understanding it as simply that outcome of a range of probabilities which happened in fact to be realised. If this is true at all, it is true of all historical events, and as such helps explain none; but it is arguably false, because probabilities in the quantitative, mathematical sense here involved could be held to have no place amongst the presuppositions of historical events.
The operation of the free human will in the world is conceived by Kant in terms analogous to God’s action on the world, or more accurately in terms analogous to how God’s action on the world has be postulated (in the usual unfalsifiable manner) as taking place. It is equally miraculous. The understanding has no place for the concepts of agency and contingency that would enable the historical process to be explained on its own terms. Ideas are only ‘operative causes’ of actions ‘in the moral sphere’ (B313), and therefore history, insofar as it is intelligible at all, is the field of operation of a priori moral laws which are to be known with the same certainty as the propositions of mathematics. It is to be viewed as if it were the unfolding of a necessary and rational process, which is indeed how Hegel and Marx were also inclined to see it. But, as with the since this will be true of any event whatever, it is of no help in explaining any individual historical event; to know that the American civil war, for example, was part of a necessary and rational process is really to say precisely nothing about the causes of it.
At the same time, it would be a misrepresentation of Kant if we failed to acknowledge that he regarded his work as standing directly in the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions, if only these were rightly understood. For instance, in his presentation of the ‘pure concepts of the understanding which apply a priori to objects of intuition in general’, he selects the term ‘categories’ in explicit recognition of Aristotle and declares that ‘our primary purpose is the same as his, though widely diverging from it in manner of execution’ (A80, B106). Aristotle had been mistaken, so Kant believed, in failing to eliminate the sensible and empirical from his list of categories, and including ones that were derivative rather than foundational, but his instinct to engage in the ‘search for…fundamental concepts’ of this sort had been entirely sound.
Similarly, ‘Plato very well realised that our faculty of knowledge feels a much higher need than merely to spell out appearances according to a synthetic unity, in order to be able to read them as experience’ (B371). His ‘Ideas’ are different to Kant’s; they are ‘archetypes of the things themselves, and not, in the manner of the categories, merely keys to possible experiences’. Put another way, for Kant, the Platonic ideas have ‘creative power’, whereas his own have only ‘practical power’ (as ‘regulative principles’) (A569, B597). In that sense, they are exactly the kind of notion he wants to rule out as capable of leading to any kind of empirical knowledge. On the other hand, however, ‘Plato found the chief instances of his ideas in the field of the practical, that is, in what rests upon freedom’, and Kant is quite in agreement with him that freedom and other moral ideas cannot be subject to change. To ‘make of virtue something which changes according to time and circumstance’ is ‘an ambiguous monstrosity not admitting of the formation of any rule’ (B372).
Kant, then, believes that he shares with Plato the idea of virtue as ‘only in our minds’. It performs a vital regulative role, allowing us to make a ‘judgment as to moral worth or its opposite’. He even reads the Republic in such a way as to bring it into line with his own post-Rousseauian vision of ‘A constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent with that of all others’. A consequence of this position is that all ‘actually existing hindrances’ of political life are seen as due to ‘a quite remediable cause, the neglect of the pure ideas in the making of the laws’. This is a good example of the rationalism that structures Kant’s view of the historical process as one of progress or melioration. It is the aim of history to bring ‘legislation and government…into harmony with [the pure ideas]’ so that punishment becomes rarer and rarer; ‘it is therefore quite rational to maintain, as Plato does, that in a perfect state no punishments whatsoever would be required’ (B373–4). Kant leaves open the question of whether this is a practical possibility, but he certainly doesn’t rule it out.
So far we have said nothing about Kant’s conception of mathematics, even though this is crucial to his own system because it seemed to him to support his belief in the possibility of propositions that are both synthetic and a priori. Mathematics for Kant ‘presents the most splendid example of the successful extension of pure reason, without the help of experience’ (A712, B740). Its success is one of the things that tempts philosophers into thinking their discipline can do likewise, but in doing so they ignore the difference between philosophy and mathematics. ‘Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts’, whereas ‘mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts’, where ‘to construct a concept means to exhibit a priori the intuition which corresponds to the concept’. Put another way, ‘philosophical knowledge considers the particular only in the universal, mathematical knowledge the universal in the particular’ (A713–4, B 741–2).
Kant’s theory of mathematics thus inaugurates what can be seen as a major sub-plot in the story of the history of philosophical accounts of the arrangement of the forms of knowledge; his ideas about mathematics were one of the objects of Frege’s criticisms, and helped to form the context of much of the twentieth-century philosophical debate about the nature of mathematics and logic. Much of this debate is highly technical, and remained within the confines of a specialist literature, but some of the notions involved–for example, the notion of possible worlds–came to be regarded as of more general philosophical interest. Here we can only note that philosophical dissatisfaction with Kant’s view of mathematics was one reason for the gradual decline of his influence; other reasons include the discovery of alternative geometries to the Euclidean which seemed to necessitate the abandonment of the Kantian view of space and time, and the Einsteinian revolution in which space and time were no longer conceived of as absolutes as they had been in Newtonian mechanics. Developments in mathematics (including algebra and geometry), logic, and natural science all seemed to require the revision or even abandonment of Kant’s system.
These developments in the natural sciences have notoriously raised their own problems in the history and philosophy of science; it now seems clear, at the least, that science has a historic component and can change both its form and content over time without thereby ceasing to be science. But this conclusion is new, and perhaps was only arrived at in the latter half of the twentieth century; it is probably not universally accepted even now. There was certainly very little sense of development in Kant’s handling of the problem of forms of knowledge. It is true that it is possible to find in the CPR some acknowledgment that sciences change and develop over time, as in the final section on the ‘Architectonic of Pure Reason’. There, Kant discusses the establishment of a science, and says that ‘in the working out of the science the schema, nay even the definition [of the science] is very seldom adequate…For this idea lies hidden in reason, like a germ in which the parts are still undeveloped’ (B862). But in general, this approach is not pursued. The ‘history of pure reason’ which completes the architechtonic barely accounts for more than three pages and could hardly be more perfunctory. Let us conclude by observing for a final time the contrast with Hegel, whose editors managed to fill three large volumes with his thoughts on the development of reason in the history of philosophy.
]]>In the first of the Discourses Descartes offers an extensive list of the disciplines he has studied, all of which had failed to provide him with the truth and certainty alleged to be found there. They include languages, fable, history, morals, theology, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and eloquence, as well as a number of ‘false sciences’ such as alchemy, astrology, and magic. As history will soon drop out of the picture, it is worth noting what he has to say about it in this initial section. It is a record of ‘memorable deeds’ that are designed to ‘elevate’ the mind and ‘aid in forming judgment’. It is, in other words, an entirely different kind of enterprise from academic history as we have it today, notwithstanding any contemporary notions about transferable skills. History here was still ‘philosophy teaching by examples’ in the best classical tradition, and Descartes was suspicious of it. Why? Well, ‘the most faithful histories, even if they do not wholly misrepresent matters, or exaggerate their importance to render the account of them more worthy of perusal, omit, at least, almost always the meanest and least striking of the attendant circumstances; hence it happens that the remainder do not represent the truth, and that such as regulate their conduct by examples drawn from this source, are apt to fall into the extravagances of the knights-errant of Romances’.
We would not consider academic history as a guide to conduct of any sort, but what about the idea that history cannot represent the truth because something is always left out? Granted, evidence is sometimes lacking to offer a conclusive historical judgment; but this is not what Descartes means. He is presupposing that a passage of historical events composes a totality in advance of the study of it, yet this is something that contemporary historical epistemology would explicitly deny. In order for historical judgments to be adequate, they do not need to encompass all that was going on at a particular point in space and time. Whether Caesar walked or rode across the Rubicon is surely irrelevant to the significance of his having crossed it at all.
More fundamentally, the very nature of Descartes’ enterprise made it unlikely in principle that he would be interested in the past as the subject of a particular form of enquiry. It is not only that the only sciences which struck him as of any worth were the mathematical ones of geometry and algebra, ‘on account of the certitude and evidence of their reasonings’. It was the universal character of his proposed method. Despite his dismissal of history, in the second Discourse Descartes makes analogical use of the difference between ‘those nations which, starting from a semi-barbarous state and advancing to civilization by slow degrees, have had their laws successively determined, and, as it were, forced upon them simply by experience’ and those communities which from their first foundation have followed the ‘appointments’ of a single wise legislator. Similarly, the Cartesian method should operate uniformly in all areas of life; there is no suggestion that it is to be restricted simply to what we would think of as theoretical science. Rather, it is quite explicitly held to be of application to practical problems, particularly those of medicine.
It is at the beginning of the fourth Discourse that in his search for something ‘wholly indubitable’ Descartes recounts his realisation that the one thing he could not doubt was that was that it was ‘I, who thus thought’. There is perhaps some irony in the fact that Descartes derived the model of the kind of knowledge he was looking for from his own subjectivity, but in doing so set up an ontological division between mind and body so absolute that neither he nor anyone else has ever been able to explain how to bridge it again. There is further, and even more profound, irony in the fact that, having taken his own subjectivity as the model of ‘all the things which we very clearly and distinctly conceive are true’, Descartes inquired into the nature of this selfhood no further, observing only that this sense of self-certainty must have ‘been placed in me by a Nature…more perfect than mine…God’.
Instead, Descartes focussed his attention entirely on those disciplines which held out promise of knowledge of the natural world. In the fifth Discourse he offers a lengthy digression on the structure of the heart and the circulation of the blood, in the course of which he acknowledged his indebtedness to William Harvey, with the aim of showing that the body can be explained on the analogy of ‘the motion of a clock from the power, the situation, and shape of its counter-weights and wheels’. The source of the ‘Reason’ or ‘universal instrument’ that is unique to humanity and ‘alike available on every occasion’ remains unexplained, beyond its status as a divine spark implanted in us. All that Descartes is interested in, as he makes plain in the sixth and final Discourse, is ‘in room of the Speculative Philosophy usually taught by the Schools, to discover a Practical, by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us…we might also apply them….to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature’.
In this, of course, Descartes and his successors succeeded spectacularly. The ‘practical philosophy’ which he had in mind we now call technology, and it has delivered to us the ability which he so desired ‘to enjoy without trouble the fruits of the earth’. But we should notice that by the end of the Discourse, all that remains as the field of the application of his method is the practically oriented knowledge of nature, and in particular medicine, the only means he saw ‘to render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto’. There is no question that in practice this emphasis has left us with an enormous amount to be grateful for. However, we should observe at the same time that if we consider the initial list of sciences with which Descartes began - languages, history, morals, philosophy, jurisprudence, and eloquence amongst them – the vast majority of them have dropped entirely out of view. The exclusive focus of scholasticism on theology has been replaced by something equally monistic, and in its own way, equally concerned ‘singly to find ground of assurance, and cast aside the loose earth and sand, that I might reach the rock and the clay’.
It is possible to overstate this point. The constructive scepticism Descartes practised, his refusal to accept ideas which were vague or incoherent, and his insistence that all arguments must be backed by empirical evidence, constitute principles which are valuable in any field of critical thinking whatsoever, whether we are dealing with the humanities or the natural sciences. Nevertheless, Descartes remains one of the figures in the history of philosophy who re-oriented the map of knowledge so that the natural sciences, and their practical technological analogues, came to occupy a dominant, even hegemonic, position. Further, while Descartes was well aware that the senses can deceive us (one of the reasons why he ultimately turned to God to provide him with the guarantee of certainty in knowledge which he sought), there is no indication in his thought of the constitutive role that subjectivity plays in the constitution of reality, even though it is his certainty of his own existence that provided him with the model of the kind of clear and distinct ideas he thought necessary for true knowledge. Indeed, this is not something we find until the advent of Kant's critical philosophy.
]]>In India during this period, it is instructive to notice both similarities and differences between the Greek and Christian traditions. Bihar in the fourth century BC was a major centre of intellectual activity, and to begin with the curriculum was organized around ‘grammar, politics, and caste law’. But at a slightly later period, this exclusively practical focus was modified by the introduction of ‘medicine, fine arts, logic and philosophy’ (p. 188). Though Indian thought is not as well known as Greek thought in the West, it would seem foolish to deny that there too, the revolutionary change in which a truly theoretic culture was generated took place. Additionally, the Indians discovered things which the West never knew in any form, or which at any rate were lost very early; ‘in the second century BC, Patanjali, a Sanskrit grammarian, compiled the standard text on yoga…defined as a cessation of mental states’ (p. 189).
It is no coincidence that the classical institution of the gymnasium finally died out in the late fourth century AD when Christianity finally triumphed in the old Roman empire (p. 225). Yet while it is easy to chastise Christianity for its denigration of the body and to wish that authors like St. Paul had not been so unforgiving of the flesh, it must also be acknowledged that it was from within the Christian intellectual tradition that theoretical thought eventually re-emerged. Theology, while not entirely rational, was at least literary, speculative, and to a degree, critical and argumentative. There is no question that elements within Christianity were overtly hostile to intellectual endeavours but it is not true to say that all of Christianity took this attitude. Moreover, it is not actually clear that the yogic tradition is any friendlier to intellectual speculation than Christianity, though it has a much more positive attitude to the body; it is just as possible to become devoted to yogic practice to the exclusion of critical thinking as it is to disappear into a life of prayer. And in the last analysis, it was in Europe, not in India or elsewhere, that critical thinking was reborn.
Why the great European revival should have occurred, when none of the great centres of civilisation (Alexandria, Cordoba) were in Catholic Europe remains a hotly debated subject. The thirteenth century appears as another pivotal period. First of all, the black death may have affected other areas more severely than it did Europe, even though in Europe around 1/3 of the population died from it. Second, Europe benefited from a shared intellectual heritage of Roman law which meant that the memory of the classical world was kept alive in a very practical way. We will return to this in more detail later.
We have hardly mentioned the Romans so far, but in this context there is actually very little for us to do say, except insofar as we are concerned with elements of practical thought such as law and politics. The genius of Rome lay entirely in this worldly direction, which of course deserves the greatest respect. Nevertheless, no-one will mistake the Institutes, written c. 150 AD, or the Code of Justinian (compiled in the sixth century) for works of philosophy, though they are full of ideas (p. 202); and no-one will argue that in the theoretical or indeed the aesthetic sphere the Romans managed anything other than successful imitations of what had gone before, whether we are concerned with history or rhetoric. This is of course no mean achievement, particularly since without them we would not know of the Greek originals which have often been lost.
What the Romans did was to bring their talent for order to intellectual matters: ‘the life of the mind, the world of ideas, was more widespread, and more organised, than ever before’ (p. 204). Unlike Athens, there were public libraries, and at least one book was produced in an edition of 1,000 copies (p. 209). The growth of the Empire meant the diffusion of Latin, an incalculable benefit to medieval Europe which was thus able to share, thanks to the adoption of Latin by the Church, a single language for critical thinking even when, in the fifth century and after, ‘the speech of ordinary peoples in Europe changed and diversified into the various “Roman vernaculars”’ (p. 207). The Bible itself was translated into Latin around the end of the fourth century.
As a language, Latin was ‘concrete, specific, avoiding abstractions’ (p. 206). But such comments should not be taken as ingratitude for the literature that the Romans left, or an underestimation of its subsequent historical significance. Romans like Cicero and Aurelius were great writers and remarkable characters, but in the main they simply imparted their own colour to ideas that were already to hand; this remains true even though over a thousand years later their works would inspire generations of Europeans and their legal system the idea of the modern republican constitution. While Cicero may be ‘the greatest ancestor of [the] liberal tradition in Western life’ and ‘widely regarded as second only to Aristotle among the contributors to the intellectual content of the Western cultural tradition’ (p. 213), the founder of a tradition of humanitas in which education was vital, we are not interested in the content of Roman thought, but its form. Of course, no distinction is ever absolute; we owe to Cicero such useful neologisms as qualitas and quantitas, coined as part of his effort to import Greek ideas into the Latin vocabulary (p. 213).
With regard to form, it is interesting to note that Roman education was not narrowly practical in any functionalist sense. Virgil’s Aeneid was the staple of adolescent Roman boys, who ‘read aloud from this and other works and developed their skills at criticism, commenting on grammar, figures of speech, and the writer’s use of mythology’. Nevertheless, this remains only ambiguously or intermittently concerned with aesthetic matters, as the purpose was to produce citizens who understood Rome’s history and could form part of its destiny. This was the production of a shared ‘myth’ or as we might say, national identity, in action. The epitome and the compendium, the province of the person seeking knowledge in a hurry, an abridgment, were the products of the declining phase of the Roman Empire when classical culture as a whole began to come under threat (p. 211).
This phase of Roman thought actually produced many of the works which impacted most closely on medieval thought and education. For example, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Mercurii, part of the Roman tradition of liberal arts first formalised by Varro in Nine Books of Disciplines. These nine arts, grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, musical theory, medicine, and architecture, were later revised to seven, medicine and architecture being admitted, and in this form were transmitted to medieval Europe as the trivium and quadrivium. Though early Christians ‘often paraded their ignorance and lack of education, associating independent philosophical thinking with the sin of pride’, a posture that is still encountered today (p. 220) this thankfully proved difficult, indeed impossible, to sustain on a collective long-term basis. In the medium term, however, it remained very influential; of the seven deadly sins, Watson points out, ‘the sins of the intellect were more serious than sins of the flesh’, pride being conceived as the worst of them all (p. 233).
The remarkable transformation of ‘a Jewish Messianic sect’ into ‘a universal salvation religion propagated in the Hellenistic world of the Mediterranean’ made such a transmission both necessary and desirable (p. 219). The injunctions of Jesus (‘love thy neighbour as thyself’) not only left plenty of scope for interpretation of their content, they were entirely non-specific as to the form of the institutions required for their implementation. Indeed, such institutions were not really even a consideration for the early Christians, who lived in apocalyptic expectation of the imminent end of all things. It was only when this cherished hope disappointingly failed to materialise that they were forced to turn their attention to more mundane questions of organisation, spurred on by the kind of increasing disagreements that provoked Paul’s letters. In the Roman empire, they found the perfect vehicle.
A vital unintended long-term consequence of the way in which Christianity moved in to fill the vacuum left by the crumbling Roman state was the separation of religious and political authority. In Rome, there had been no such divide; the state was both at once. But the Church was never, except faute de mieux, concerned with worldly things, even if it tried always to ensure temporal authority remained subject to it. Control of the body was always less important than control of the soul and of access to salvation. In the long term, this meant the secular state would acquire the ability to shelter the intellectual prepared to make utterances the Church found inconvenient. Constantine granted Christian priests the same privileges as pagan ones, including freedom from taxation and conscription, and one of his successors, Gratian (375–83), sanctioned a parallel structure of Church courts so far as civil (though not criminal) jurisdiction was concerned.
By the fifth century Christian bishops were ‘a privileged class: they were rich, they were firmly in charge of church doctrine, and they were very largely a law unto themselves’ (p. 226). For many hundreds of years thereafter, the life of free intellectual enquiry which had been able to flourish in cities like Athens and Alexandria was subordinate to the dogma of scripture and the concept of a holy book. One must not overstate this position; given the inevitable limits imposed by theology, Christian writers at their best were capable of remarkable philosophical feats, as Augustine, Aquinas, and many others can testify. The more astute amongst them were always painfully aware of the gap between ancient thought and Biblical dogma, and did their best to find ways to bridge it, even if it mean stretching their beliefs to breaking point.
A good early example is Origen (c.185–254), who suggested that ‘everything in the Bible has three meanings–the literal, the moral and the allegorical and that only the last of these is the revealed truth’, so that, for example, the virgin birth is really to be taken as representing ‘the birth of divine wisdom in the soul’ (p. 230). Moreover (taking a position that was effectively to be revived by Aquinas 1000 years later) Origen argued that God ‘was knowable in two ways–through nature, the rationally ordered universe, and through Christ, who was the full revelation of his mercy and wisdom’. There is a clear parallel here with the classical distinction of nomos and phusis in which a plurality of forms of knowledge is acknowledged, but this never became the norm in Christian thought. Origen’s level of sophistication, however, always remained out of reach of large numbers of the faithful, and the possibility of a conflict between scientific and religious thought increased after the fourth century as Paul’s influence rose (p. 231).
One consequence of Christianity that has often been pointed out is a change in the meaning of time, that is, in the way it was conceived for practical purposes. The change is usually summed up as from the cyclical to the progressive. Whereas the Greeks and Romans tended to think in terms of inevitable cycles of decline and rebirth, Christianity conceived of humanity as on a journey towards a final redemption, an ultimately progressive and optimistic conception. All would be well at last. It is this vision that gave rise to the secular belief in ‘progress’ of an increasingly material sort which is only now ending in the face of the environmental destruction wrought by the industrial and technological processes which since at least the sixteenth century it had been hoped would liberate us.
]]>One of the first questions Watson has to settle is of what, exactly, an idea is. He declares that broadly speaking he is going to follow the approach of Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish in The Western Intellectual Tradition in distinguishing three different intellectual "realms" (yet another spatial analogy) of truth, right, and taste (p. 6). It is possible to quibble about how these are arranged in detail - for example, in the realm of truth, "where, in an ideal world, agreement would be total and involuntary", the decision to include religion alongside science, philosophy, logic, and mathematics (and equally, the omission of the human sciences) could be questioned. Religion surely belongs in the realm of right, and perhaps to some degree that of taste, but not that of theory. But broadly, this distinction between theoretical, practical, and aesthetic activity seems uncontroversial and sound.
Of course, the overlap between the true, the right, and the tasteful, on the one hand, and the theoretical, the practical, and the aesthetic, on the other, is not perfect; in particular, the practical encompasses far more than just the right. But there is more than enough correspondence between them for this rewording of Watson's divisions to be viable.
Within this kind of scheme, of course, considerable further subdivisions are possible. So, for example, Watson remarks that for the Dictionary of the History of Ideas "nine core areas" were identified. These were, respectively, "ideas about the external order of nature; ideas about human nature; literature and aesthetics; ideas about history; economic, legal and political ideas and institutions; religion and philosophy; formal logical mathematical and linguistic ideas'. Note the ambiguity of several of these classifications; ideas about the external order of nature might conceivably be theoretical, practical, or aesthetic in character, and so might ideas about history and human nature. This is a problem we shall have occasion to raise again, as Watson does not fully disentangle it.
Watson sees clearly enough, though, that we cannot perceive ideas directly, at least not in the same way that we can perceive things in the world. Instead, we have to treat things in the world as evidence for ideas; for example, the first stone hand axes dating from 2.5 million years ago. Other ideas are less substantial; Watson is prepared to regard language itself as an idea, for example. He will even (citing Bacon and Voltaire as precedents) accept the notion of a mentalité or of the dominant spirit of the age as 'ideas' that can be investigated historically (p. 7).
Watson also recognizes (quoting Arthur Lovejoy, famous for his own work on the history of the idea of the "Great Chain of Being" and as the founder editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas) the history of thought is not "an exclusively logical process in which objective truth progressively unfolds itself in a rational order" (p. 9). Given the fundamental tripartite division in types of intellectual activity just proposed above, of course, one would hardly expect to find him endorsing a view of the history of thought as a unlinear process.
The chronlogical starting point for Watson's history is around 3.4-2.9 million years ago; we must go this far back to find "candidates for humankind's first idea" (p. 21). There are, he argues, two - bipedalism, and tool use. That standing upright can qualify as an idea might seem to be stretching the use of the word, but as he points out, here we are dealing with "Ideas Before Language". There is, apparently, much controversy over the reasons for the development of the characteristically human upright posture; though it was accepted for a long time that this was the result of climate change "which made rainforest scarcer and open savannah more common", so that "walking upright freed the arms and hands to transport food to the more widely scattered trees", it is now suggested that standing up "was a way to appear bigger and more threatening in contests with other animals, and in so doing avoid punishing conflicts and gain access to food" (pp. 22-3). In fact, these explanations are not mutually exclusive, although it is unlikely there will ever be a final resolution to this debate.
Even though Watson suggests that bipedalism 'had a large instinctive element, and for that reason can at best be called a proto-idea', that it can be called an idea at all is highly significant. It shows that ideas can not only be non-linguistic, they can, in a sense, be unconscious; what is quite certain is that none of our ancestors ever thought to themselves, "I think I will try standing upright today". Indeed, it shows that, at least in its most elementary form, an idea can express itself purely as action, and quite spontaneously. This is in fact a thoroughly familiar experience; the tennis player who adjusts their shot in respons