Tag: Kant

27. What we Think About When we Think About Hegel

Hegel’s philosophical embrace of temporality took him to some fascinating places. Here is one.

On a Hegelian (and, later, a ”continental”) approach, nothing whatsoever can be understood without knowing something about where it came from; for if everything we deal with is in time, it is there replacing something else that didn’t work out. So to understand a current situation requires understanding the problems with the previous situation which it remedies.

Applying this principle to, for example, Kant’s distinctive account of moral agency as the capacity to act from a single universal principle, the “categorical imperative,” requires asking how such moral agency has come to be. This kind of  question usually has more than one answer. In the current case, one answer is that Kantian moral agency came to be from Kant: “moral agency” captures his understanding of a similarity holding for certain actions—those which we consider good, which all come into being in accordance with the categorical imperative. Kant has thus seized upon a similarity (or what he thinks is a similarity) among a number of events and has given it a name, making it publicly accessible (#3).

Thus, it is only fitting that Hegel’s account of Kantian moral agency finds a place in his broader discussion of Kant’s philosophy. But then Hegel asks a question which goes beyond Kant: how does one become a moral agent? Kant never answers this question: though his entire philosophy, at least as I understand it, is devoted to strengthening our capacity to act according to a universal principle, he never tells us how we acquire that capacity in the first place. Indeed, he explicitly refuses to do so:

But how this peculiar property of our Sensibility itself is possible, or that of our Understanding and of the apperception which is necessarily its basis and that of all thinking, cannot be further analyzed or answered, because it is of them that we are in need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects .

Kant, Prolegomena Akademie-Ausagabe IV 318f

As I have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy, Chapter One) this conflates an explanation of fact with one of validity. We cannot think without the Understanding, but we cannot think without our brains either: is Kant saying that brain research is impossible?

Hegel, however, does tackle the question, in the course of his Philosophy of Right. He begins with the notion of a human being who is not a moral agent—one who, then, is guided entirely by desires. Such guidance does not work out because desires are inconstant and inconsistent: desires for various things (or people) follow one another at random, all of them are never fulfilled, and someone who has no other spiritual resources is pushed around by the lack of fulfillment.

So much is standard philosophical fare from Plato on; but Hegel goes into much more detail than is usual about how a person moves from that pre-moral state to the universal concern for humanity implied in Kant’s categorical imperative to treat everyone as “ends in themselves.” His treatment has, I think, two distinctive features. One is an insistence that moral agency has an affective dimension—in order to treat all people as ends in themselves, you have to care about them. The other is the claim that we are brought to such universal care by the institutions of modern society.

Thus, marriage—which is grounded mainly in the urgent contingency of sexual desire—shapes that desire into a stable relationship of two hearts. In the family, the purely physical side of this eventually dies away, “extinguished in its own satisfaction.” But this also doesn’t work out, because families require sustenance. To get that, one must enter into civil society, the market-driven realm in which a person succeeds by providing others with goods and services that they require. This means taking into account, not merely the needs of one’s spouse, but those of a wider circle—one’s clients or customers, for one must figure out what they need in order to provide them with it. The market economy, in turn, requires state regulation. Eventually, erotic love turns into patriotism, and one’s physical desires are educated into a panoply of cultural and spiritual concerns. But states, too, are mortal, as we see at the end of the book. To be truly enduring, then, the emotion of patriotism must turn into concern for humanity at large.

Life in the modern state thus constructs the individuals who inhabit it:

The principle of modern states has this monstrous strength and profundity, to allow the principle of subjectivity to perfect itself into the self-sufficient extreme of personal diversity (Besonderheit) and simultaneously to lead it back to the substantial unity [of the state], and so to maintain that unity in the principle of subjectivity itself.

Hegel, Philosophy of Right §260

The modern state thus allows individuals to take shape in the most diverse ways—religiously, ethnically, professionally, and in whatever other “extreme” way is called for, while still providing channels for them to care, and care actively, about their fellows. This is the earliest explicit defense of human diversity I have found in Western philosophy, and still one of the most powerful for it claims that my being who I have to be enriches everyone. It is no accident that American thinkers as profound as W. E. B. Dubois and Martin Luther King were students of Hegel.

But all this, from Kant’s point of view,—and not only Kant’s—is misguided. For moral agency, on Hegel’s account, is historically conditioned, and so not, in Kant’s sense, “universal” at all. Before Kant, one could noconceive of such moral agency; and without the modern state, one cannot live it. On a Kantian approach—indeed, on the approach of all traditional philosophy, from Parmenides on—the capacity to act from a universal principle can only be either a state of affairs which obtains for reasons we cannot and need not fathom—or a mere ideal which cannot actually exist anywhere in our experience.

23. Kant’s Third Antinomy and the Metaphysical Barn

Kant’s Third Antinomy seems to be about the possibility of freedom. But his arguments apply much more widely; if he had never published anything else, the few pages of the Third Antinomy would have made Kant the most important philosopher since Aristotle.

An “antinomy,” according to Kant, is a pair of propositions which contradict each other, yet can both be proven. According to the Third Antinomy’s thesis, if there is no such thing as freedom, then everything that happens, happens according to causal laws, and so by modification of a previous state of affairs. So any event E must come from a previous event D, and must have done so according to a law of nature. But then that previous event D must have come from a still earlier event C, and so on—to infinity. The number of events which must have already occurred prior to any given event is therefore infinite; but infinity is precisely that which can never be reached in this way. Therefore, at some point, we must accept an event which springs from no prior events—a free act.

According to the antithesis, let us suppose that there are such free acts. Such an act must be produced by the will at a specific time. This means that there must be a change in the will itself, by which it begins to cause that act: in Kant’s parlance, the will must “determine itself to produce the act.” So we have one thing—the will—in two successive states: not-yet-determining itself to produce some given act, and actually determining itself. But these two states cannot be connected to each other by any law, for then the will’s producing of the act would be determined, not free. So the will’s “determination of itself” must be a wholly random change. But such randomness (in addition to being mere spontaneity, not true freedom) would reduce nature to, at bottom, a series of random, disconnected events.

These arguments are not very plausible, either in my short summaries or in Kant’s cumbersome German; whether they can be made plausible is a huge question. But I am after their structure, which is that of a reductio: each side of the contradiction is proved out of the other side. The thesis begins by assuming that no act is free and proves that some must be; the antithesis begins with the view that some acts are free and proves that none can be. P implies not-P, which implies P.

This has metaphysical implications far beyond issues of freedom. For the thesis is Platonic (#11): it argues that if you claim that everything has the principle of its being in a cause other that it, you must eventually, to avoid accepting a completed infinite series of causes, posit something that has no principle of being beyond itself: the free act plays a role akin to that of Plato’s Form of the Good.

Unsurprisingly, the antithesis is Aristotelian (also #11), positing that there are things which, like Aristotelian ousiai, have their principle of being within themselves; in free acts, the moral law plays a role akin to that of Aristotelian immanent forms. But any given form, for Aristotle, comes into its matter at a certain time and place—its beginning is an event, such as the arrival of a seed in a particular patch of soil—and this must be explained by something beyond that thing. But this in turn requires the existence of things like the sun warming the earth, the alternation of night and day, the change of seasons, and other features of the natural order.

And where does the natural order, the kosmos, come from? For Aristotle, it comes from the Prime Mover—pure Form, existing apart from matter. For Kant the natural order is the causal sequence of the entire universe, in which every event is caused by previous events.

Kant has thus revealed, for the first time, the structure of the Metaphysical Barn. He has shown, in about ten pages, how Platonists and Aristotelians have been chasing one another around that barn for 2000 years—and that neither approach provides a way out.

11. Dancing Around the Metaphysical Barn

Plato and Aristotle take opposed positions on the question of where the “principle” of a thing, that which makes it what it is, is located. For Plato, such a principle is a form separate from the thing, in which the thing “participates.” For Aristotle, the principle shapes and organizes the thing from within, as its essence.

So why, if they are so opposed, do Plato and Aristotle, when pushed, turn into one another?

For Plato, forms are things and so must have their principles outside them. Republic 509b tells us that the ultimate principle of all of them, which makes each form what it is, is the form of the good. And this form has no principle beyond itself: it is “sovereign” over the entire intelligible order. Plato finesses this conclusion by claiming that the form of the good has no determinate nature, and so needs no further determining principle, but the fact remains:  to understand the form of the good we must look to it, not beyond it; to that extent, Plato has become an Aristotelian.

For Aristotle, the principle of a thing is to be found within the thing; but what about the set of all material things, the cosmos itself? It is not only a thing, but an ordered thing, with earth at the center and the sphere of the fixed stars at the edge. Where does this unifying order come from?

It cannot come from anything within the cosmos, for everything within the cosmos contains matter, which means it can change. Anything which can change at all will eventually change, incrementally, into something else—at which time the thing it originally was will cease to exist. The world for Aristotle had no beginning in time; so if the principle of the cosmos were within it, like an essence, the cosmic order would have ceased to exist by now (see Phaedo 72b-d for a related argument).

So in Metaphysics XI, Aristotle concludes that the ordering principle of the cosmos is outside the cosmos: the immaterial, purely rational, and so consummately ordered, prime mover. The cosmos, we learn, “loves” the prime mover, but is unable to unite with it; so it imitates it by ordering itself. Whence this “love” (ἔρως), and what is it? We are not told; as Platonic did with participation (#8), Aristotle owes us a theory and gives us a word.

All of which was laid bare by Kant, most spectacularly in his “Third Antinomy.” The thesis of that antinomy states that everything has a cause; and since a cause for Kant at least partially precedes its effect in time, nothing can cause itself. The causes of a thing, the principles which make it what it is, are thus outside the thing, as with Plato.

The antithesis states, by contrast, that some things—free actions—are not caused by anything preceding them in time. To find the principle of a free act, you must look at the act itself, where you will find the atemporal moral law. So the antithesis is, broadly, Aristotelian .

Each of these two contradictory statements, Kant tells us, can be proven. What he doesn’t tell us is that his proofs are reductio’s: The proof of the thesis assumes the antithesis and demonstrates its falsity; the proof of the antithesis does the reverse.

So if you choose the (Platonic) thesis, you will eventually be forced into the (Aristotelian) antithesis, to avoid an infinite regress of causes according to which the form of the good would have a principle outside it, and that principle would also have a principle outside it, and so on…(This argument was known to Aristotle, who mysteriously called it the Third Man.)

If you choose the (Aristotelian) antithesis, you will be forced to adopt the (Platonic) thesis, on pain of locating the eternal order of the cosmos within the cosmos itself, where it cannot be because the cosmos contains matter. Matter brings change, and since anything which can change at all will eventually change into something else, the cosmic order would not be eternal.

These are not arguments (Kant’s “proofs” are notoriously bad) so much as ingrained tendencies. When we look at them that way, we see that Kant has sketched the structure of a metaphysical barn, around which Platonists and Aristotelians had been chasing each other for centuries—right up to the third antinomy itself, which abruptly stops the chase.

It does this by claiming that the thesis belongs, not to reality, but to one faculty of the mind (the understanding) while the antithesis belongs to another faculty, reason. Kant’s solution is not only abrupt, but more than a bit ad hoc (in spite of the hundreds of pages of argument intended to establish it). It also, as we will see, has other, and severe, problems—problems so severe as to impeach Kant’s entire “transcendental philosophy.”

But we also see, already, that if Kant had written nothing other than the “Third Antinomy,” he would have been the most important philosopher since Aristotle. Because it was he who uncovered, buried in the texts of the history of philosophy, an ancient and worrisome structure: the metaphysical barn.