10/8/2013

Week 7 Notes

  1. H calls the holistic structure of interplaying forces governed by interdependent laws “infinity” because the notion of the finite is a matter of having limits or boundaries, a relation to what it is not, or what is outside it. And we are talking about a picture where what it is depends on what it is not, on what it merely differs from and what it excludes. As determinate it is at once finite and not finite, because what it is depends on what is beyond its limits or boundaries. That is why H thinks “infinite” is a good term for this structure. Having seen this on the alethic side at the end of Consciousness, we are now going to see the deontic normative version of it in Self-Consciousness.
  1. Thinking of concepts as having boundaries (fixed or dynamic, fully determined or partially indeterminate) is already buying into the object-up extensional order of explanation. For concepts are defined not just by their mere differences (applying to different sets of objects, as red and square do) by also by their exclusive differences: what they rule out or exclude. These define two different sorts of sboundarys.
  1. “Spirit...this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence...,”
  1. Life is the first image of the Concept as infinite, in the way in which an individual is related to his species (Gattung), which in one sense is nothing more than the individuals it comprises, and in another sense is something more. McDowell describes it as a “difference-dissolving genus.” The way in which it improves on the image at the end of FU is in the process by which individuals are what they are only in relation to the genus, and the genus is what it is only in relation to the individuals.
  1. What Hegel most generally denies (and diagnoses as at the core of Verstand) is the intelligibility of something’s being determinatepurely independently. This would be something that is what it determinately is in complete independence of its relations to anything else. One need only look to its “being-for-self”, and not its “being for others” to understand what it is in itself.

a)This is a determinate atom. So atomism is the enemy, and against it he will argue for a distinctive kind of holism.

b)On the objective side, none of properties, objects, facts, forces, or laws are like this. All of those categories of objective thing (in the broadest possible sense) are intelligible as things of that category only in relation to other things, of that same category, and of others.

c)On the subjective side, determinately contentful norms (normative statuses) are like this. Categorially, normative statuses are not independent of normative attitudes. This is the Enlightenment insight. It is the normative subjectivism, or subjectivism about norms of the Enlightenment (and so part of the fighting faith of modernity more generally). This is “subjectivism” only in a very broad sense: not specifically a Cartesian sense, and not even necessarily an individualistic sense, as social contract theories of political obligation make clear. It is “subjective” in the sense of being on the side of the subject, articulating the subjective pole of the intentional-practical nexus, as opposed to the objective side.

d)Also on the subjective side, normative statuses in general depend on other normative statuses, and normative attitudes depend on other normative attitudes. Compare: properties and objects, which are intelligible as such only in virtue of both intercategorial relations between properties and objects and intracategorial relations among properties and among objects.

e)The claim that there is a symmetric reciprocal sense-dependence relation between the objective and subjective manifestations of this concrete form of denial of the intelligibility of pure independence (atomism) is what I have called “objective idealism.”

In contemporary terms:

  1. One cannot make sense of the objective concept or ontological category of predicates apart from that of classifying or characterizing: using expressions in the core way in virtue of which they count as predicates.
  2. One cannot make sense of the objective concept or ontological category of objects apart from that of referring: using expressions in the core way in virtue of which they count as singular terms.
  3. One cannot make sense of the objective concept or ontological category of facts apart from that of asserting orstating (declaring): using expressions in the core way in virtue of which they count as declarative sentences.
  4. One cannot make sense of the objective concept or ontological category of laws apart from that of inferring: using expressions in the core way in virtue of which they count as reasons.

And vice versa.

And there is progressive presupposition relation that places these categories in a hierarchy in which the ones earlier on the list turn out to presuppose the ones later on the list (radicalizing the halfway move Kant made to taking judgment as the fundamental category on the subjective side).

f)The claim that at a deeper level the subjective processes or practices have a certain kind of asymmetric priority over the ontological categories they institute and articulate is what I have called “conceptual idealism.” This is an analogue, at a higher level of abstraction, to the Enlightenment subjectivism invoked in (c).

g)We looked at the objective side of this hierarchy, and arguments against atomism at every stage, in the Consciousness chapters. Now we begin to look at the subjective side in Self-Consciousness.

  1. Subordination and obedience:

a)Lordship and Bondage is H’s critique of the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity, in terms that, while acknowledging the progress represented by the Kant-Rousseau autonomy model (characteristic of modernity), moves decisively beyond it to recognitive equilibrium.

b)Astonishingly, Hegel is discerning a structure common both to the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity, and to Kant’s autonomy picture. This is a mastery: the conception of immediately instituting normative statuses by normative attitudes.

c) We have already seen that the subordination-obedience model is compatible with the Enlightenment insight about the normative statuses being not only sense-dependent, but also reference-dependent on normative attitudes.

d)The Kant-Rousseau criterion of demarcation of the normative by autonomy is that one is genuinely bound by norms (exhibit a normative status of being responsible) only for what one takes oneself to be bound by, only by norms one acknowledges. One’s normative attitude is a necessary condition of having the normative status. But it is also sufficient. One can make oneself responsible (only by, but merely by) taking oneself responsible. This is a distinctive kind of authority that K calls “freedom”. It is the authority to make oneself responsible.

e)It is at this point that Hegel sees the Kant-Rousseau criterion of demarcation of the normative, which is a way of working out the Enlightenment insight into the constitutive role normative attitudes play in instituting normative statuses, as still sharing a structure with the subordination-obedience model of normativity it seeks to supplant. Both see normative statuses as immediately instituted by normative attitudes.

f)The recognitive model seeks to keep the advance Kant had made, while moving beyond this shared residual structure.

a)In explaining why the Master can’t get what he wants or be who wants to be, it is important to consider both dimensions:

  1. the relation he takes himself to have and aspires to have to other subjects, and
  2. the relation he takes himself to have and aspires to have to objects.

b)Both need to be understood against the background of the corresponding relations at the level of desire.

c)In each case, his self-understanding is as having sovereignty of his attitudes over statuses. He sees his attitudes as immediately instituting statuses, independently, all on their own.

  1. Mastery is sovereignty. This is one essential thread in Cartesianism. The Cartesian subject is sovereign over his own willings: he cannot try and fail to will that things be thus-and-so. And he is sovereign over his own thoughts: if the thinks he is thinking that p, then he is thinking that p. If it seems to him that it seems to him that p, then it really does seem to that p. Now we have the Sellarsian analysis of both of these illusions. And what goes missing, according to the Sellarsian analysis? A: determinate contentfulness.

a)The Master wants to outsource the task of dealing with incompatible commitments, the friction between them in virtue of which they are determinately contentful. This is particularly clear in his relation to the recalcitrance of objects (11-ii).

b)But objectivity just is this recalcitrance: the alethic impossibilities and necessities in virtue of which our commitments collide, normatively obliging us to change some of those commitments. Cf. Huw Price: “Truth as Convenient Friction.”

c)Here one might think of Stalin’s response to the engineers who dared to tell him that some of the things he wanted were incompatible, because of laws of physics. They were “defeatists,” “wreckers,” ones for whom it was obviously not important enough to reconcile these incompatible demands. Contemporary ideologists often take the same attitude.

d)Where consciousness understanding itself as perceiving had tried out locating principles of unity in the objective thing and diversity in the perceiving subject (Shelley’s “many-colored dome of glass” refracting the “white radiance of eternity”) and vice versa (Kant’s unifying intellect), the division of roles between Master and Slave allegorically represents the disparity between the aspects of unity and diversity in self-concsiousness (indeed, already in Desire) by locating them in different subjects.

  1. Hegel’s positive account of the metaphysics of normativity is an attempt to satisfy the following constraints—which on the face of it look not to be jointly satisfiable:

a)Reject the subordination-obedience metaphysics of normativity, which is essentially intersubjective.

b)Accept the Enlightenment view that normative statuses are instituted by normative attitudes.

c)Accept Kant’s account of positive freedom as consisting in constraint by norms. Freedom consists in the authority to commit oneself, to make oneself responsible, by applying concepts (binding oneself by rules) in judgment and intentional action.

d)Reject an understanding of normative attitudes as immediately sovereign over and constitutive of normative statuses, whether intersubjectively, as in Enlightenment versions of the subordination-obedience picture or intrasubjectively as in the Kant-Rousseau autonomy criterion of demarcation of the normative, which says that any agent is genuinely normatively bound only by rules she acknowledges as binding on her.

His way of threading this complex needle is the model of normative statuses as intersubjectively instituted by reciprocal recognitive attitudes, which combine authority and responsibility on the part of both recognizer and recognized, as recognizing and recognized. One agent has the authority to petition others for recognition, i.e. to petition them to hold him responsible. He grants them that authority—i.e. they are responsible to him for having that authority. The authority of those who recognize him will in turn only be recognized by those who take it one has fulfilled one’s responsibility in recognizing him. Otherwise one will not have succeeded in holding him responsible.

Pride

39. Pride thus requires practical commitment to the ideal of oneself as a taker, and Hegel's account of what such practical commitment consists in for the original 'bootstrap' cases is identifying oneself with that desired ideal state in the sense of being willing to risk life for it. One must be for oneself a taker, and willing to risk one's life to become in oneself a taker. One must be both recognizer and recognized by oneself. The Slave-

to-be is anyone who won't risk her life for this self-recognition. The Master-to-be is anyone who will.

The Slave must repress desire. She pursues not her own desires and ideals, but those of her Master. This is why Desire becomes abstract and ideal for the Slave. The Slave's consciousness-as-Desire is not hers but her Master's. The Slave does not desire her own desiring enough to risk life for it. Things are to be for the Slave what they are for her Master, so only the Master takes himself to be a taker, and, by being willing to die for that taking, initially only the Master is one. Human history separates itself from the accidental and flickering self-feeling of merely desiring animals with the advent of Mastery as the first form of proud consciousness.[1]

Independence

40. Independence is the concept of consciousness that initially corresponds to Pride. Proud consciousness makes itself more than merely a desiring animal simply by taking itself to be more, in its practical willingness to risk its animal existence. The attitude that understands consciousness as independent generalizes this achievement to all possible objects of consciousness. For phenomenal (self-)consciousness to understand itself according to the conception of independence is for it to take consciousness as constitutive of its objects. Everything is taken by this concept of consciousness to be initself exactly what it is for consciousness. Thus, independent consciousness is consciousness that takes itself to be a sovereign,constituting consciousness, consciousness that makes things so by taking them so. As is apparent already from the discussion of the independence of the object of desire, no consciousness can be in itself independent in this sense. The independence consists rather in how consciousness takes itself to be, that is, how it is for itself.

41. The independent consciousness, then, insists on the sovereignty of its takings. Descartes formulated and developed an old tradition that finds the boundaries of the self by tracing the extent of cognitive and practical sovereignty. For him, the mind consists of that which we cannot mis-take. Cognitive mental activity (cognition) is that which is whatever it is for the mind i.e. whatever it seems or is taken to be. Practical mental activity (volition) is that over which we have total dominion, where no means are necessary to satisfy one's desires. As there is no gap between seeming and being in our cognitive sovereignty over our mental states (seemings or takings), there is no gap between trying and succeeding in our practical sovereignty over our volitions (minimal tryings). (We will see Hegel explicitly arguing against the practical part of this theory in his discussion of action in the Reason section.) In this context the independent consciousness can be seen as extending sovereignty over self to sovereignty over everything, to be expanding in its self-conception the boundaries of itself until they are all-inclusive: over objects as well as subjects, freeing itself from the constraint by objectivity that is implicit in desire.

It is important to realize that the "independence" of independent consciousness is not compatible with the existence of other beings that are independent in the same sense. The insistence on being a constitutive subject (a sovereign taker) precludes the recognition of others as being subjects in the sense one is oneself. This is imperial rather than pluralistic independence, where everything else must depend upon the sovereign subject. This ultimately unworkable demand follows inexorably from the self-concept by which independent consciousness understands and defines itself (unto death). If independent consciousness took itself to be just a taker rather than a constitutive taker, something things are for without the addition that things just are whatever they are for that taker, then that consciousness could be what it takes itself to be compatibly with others taking and correctly taking themselves to be subjects of the same kind, and with objects retaining some independence in the form of resistance to desire. But for independent consciousness as consciousness conceiving itself as constitutive this is not possible, for structural reasons rehearsed below.

42. Question:

Why does proudself-consciousness take the form of independent self-consciousness? Pride requires only that one be willing to risk death in preference to relinquishing one's concept of oneself as essentially a taker, someone for whom things are something. What is the origin of the additional and ultimately self-defeating condition of the sovereignty of the subject in those takings?

To put the question more pointedly: Consciousness understanding itself as sovereign is a particular content one’s self-conception can have. It is a conception according to which one’s own normative attitudes are fully authoritative with respect to normative statuses—not only one’s own, but also those of others. What I have called “proud” self-consciousness, by contrast is a way of holding a self-conception, a practical attitude towards one’s self-conception, whatever the content of that self-conception might be. To be proudly self-conscious in this sense is for what one is for oneself to be essential to what one is in oneself. One is proudly self-conscious insofar as one identifies with one’s self-conception. Identifying with one’s self-conception, with what one is for oneself, in turn, consists in being willing to risk and sacrifice what one is in oneself for what one is for oneself.

If we apply these concepts to Hegel’s concept of the Master, we see that he puts pure independence (authority without corresponding responsibility) or sovereignty forward as the content corresponding to the original form of proud self-consciousness—self-consciousness that is willing to stake its life on its self-conception. The question is why one might think that these two elements, one having to do with the force of a self-conception (one’s practical attitude towards it) and the other with its content, should go together in this way.

Here is my proposed answer to this question:

The process of pride by which humanity arises exhibits two important aspects. Independent consciousness fastens on one of them, and learns a mistaken lesson from its self-formative process. One can constitutively take oneself to be essentially a taker, by identifying with that self-conception, in the sense of being willing to risk and if need be sacrifice what one is in oneself in the service of being that for oneself: being willing to risk one's life for that self-conception. In this self-constitution, the self appears both as subject and as subject-as-object, the (constitutively) takingself and that which is taken to be that self. Independent consciousness (consciousness understanding itself as purely independent, a form of self-consciousness) fastens on the constitutiveness of itself as taking taker (in this special self-taking), and assumes that constitutiveness characterizes itself as taken taker. Since its taking of itself was constitutive of its being essentially conscious, it takes itself to be a constitutive taker.