38. Foucault’s Hidden Concern with Ousia

One of Foucault’s signal doctrines, flagged as such by Lynch (see #37), is that power is intrinsically unstable. It is the enactment of force, i.e. of that which puts a body into motion (Lynch p. 32), and force becomes actualized as power when it encounters obstacles (Lynch p. 49). Such actualization can be described as a set of clashes or events, and power is thus

The moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable.

Lynch p. 33

Beneath the institutions that constitute a society there thus roils an ever-changing ferment of power relations. But power can also be “institutionally crystallized” (Lynch pp. 31, 93) into a relatively stable site of hegemony or domination. So how does that happen? How do enduring structures arise from the multiple ferments of power relations?

Let us look at one Foucaldian example of such crystallization: the formation of a discipline. One condition for this, says Foucault, is “the constitution of a space, empty and closed, in the interior of which one is going to construct multiplicities” (Securié, Territoire, Population Paris 2004 18-19; my translation). Let us call that which encloses such a space a “wall.” Not all walls, in the case of a discipline, are physical. The psychological formulas which fix some people as “other” and thereby exclude them from a community are, on this reading, walls; but they are conceptual, not physical. So are the cultural differences which define some people as servants of others, even when they inhabit the same bounded space.

In addition to their exclusionary power, a wall ipso facto includes those to whom its structures will apply: to define some bodies as “other” is to define other bodies as “same.” Inclusion, like exclusion, has its evils: the Scots excluded from the Roman Empire by Hadrian’s Wall were freer than the people that wall included,who were subject to a multitude of disciplines exercised by the Roman army.

The construction of a specifically disciplinary wall, we may say, serves two functions with respect to what it includes:

  1. It entraps the bodies to be disciplined. Without the impediment to motion presented by a wall, those bodies could simply move away from the discipline, either from a conscious desire to escape or from some other motive. Without the installation of permanent psychological or social formulae of exclusion, the same could happen.
  2. Any social terrain, to be sure, is for Foucault traversed by a variety of force-relations (Lynch p. 33). In order for an enclosed space to serve as a terrain of domination, however, certain force-relations have to be privileged, so that they come to be exercised by a single, unified component of the whole—call it the “dominator.” Otherwise the force- relations within a given space would compete with each other, and domination would be impeached.

The crystallization of disciplinary power into an institution is thus the introduction of boundary and disposition, two of the three axes of ousiodic domination (# 8), into a field of human interaction. In disciplinary power, the dominator is a unified body of regulations and practices which governs the activities of people who are unable to traverse the wall.

Disciplinary power is not the only kind of power for Foucault, and the need for walls is present in other forms as well. In what Foucault calls “sovereign” power, for example, the dominator is usually a single person, and the wall-function is performed by the boundaries of the territory over which the sovereignty extends (STP 13-19, 94).

Biopower, or governmentality (Lynch pp. 123-126) is exercised, not over territory, but over a “population,” which is a multiplicity of individuals subject to a particular set of causal factors. These can be natural or artificial, and can range from climate and landscape to the layouts of population centers (STP 22-23). The territory on which a population lives is, then, looser and more porous than is the case with sovereign or disciplinary power. But it exists all the same, because the particular set of causal factors that defines a given population does not exist everywhere on earth: different populations are defined by the operation within them of a specific, indeed unique, set of causal factors. Governmental power is thus, like disciplinary and sovereign power, exercised over a limited spatial territory (or territories); and, like them, it crystallizes when a single unified agent—the government—assumes control over those multiple causal factors.

A final, attenuated form of territorial limit is found in pastoral power, which for Foucault is the ancestor of both disciplinary and governmental power. The shepherd’s flock, to be sure, does not occupy a fixed place—it is in movement (STP 146), and so the territory on which a flock finds itself at any given moment is a matter of indifference to the flock. But that does not mean that the flock itself has no boundaries at all. Keeping the flock together, i.e. policing its boundaries, is an important job which falls to a group of workers who are not mentioned by Foucault (or by the Christian texts he cites): sheepdogs. Any sheep who wanders off or falls behind is set upon by these tireless adjuncts, operating under the direction of the shepherd, and is nipped back to the rest of the herd.

In all four of these forms forms of Foucaldian power, then, we find boundaries of some sort, policed in different ways either by a single agent (a discipline or sovereign) or by a set of agents working in cooperation. This contrasts with Derrida, whose denial of boundary relegates his philosophy to textual matters (#36). Foucault, while he occasionally mentions boundaries, does not emphasize them. This prevents him, I suggest, from appreciating the value of his own thought as a series of contestations of social ousiai. Given the centrality of ousia to the history of Western philosophy, this means that Foucault also mistakes the relation of this thought to that history.

37. Foucault’s Post-Cold-War Paradigm

During the Cold War, which lasted for 40 years and has now been over for 30, Western political philosophy took a deeply abstract turn. Sartre attempted to ground radical freedom on the purely empty activity of “nihilation,” consciousness’ constant surpassing of its current situation. Habermas formulated his highly abstract “ideal speech situation.” In the US, Rawls articulated an “original position” defined by the ignorance of those in it of all the concrete facts of their lives.

This abstract turn, I suggest, was pushed by an aspiration to universalism, born of global struggle; it seemed urgent to find principles that everyone, East and West, should live by. But there was a still more urgent, and less philosophical, imperative: winning the Cold War. To that end, philosophers in the West, committed to and financed by their side of the global struggle, formulated a succession of “universal” truths that the Communist East could not accept. Thus, Stalinist societies could hardly accommodate the constant surpassing of present givens of Sartrean nihilation, or the unconstrained speech of Habermas’ ideal, or the centrality of rational choice presented in Rawls. Philosopically at least, they had to give in, refuted by philosophical argumentation. (In fact, of course, world events paid no attention to the philosophers. What refuted the East was not the West’s exemplification of universal truths, but its much higher standard of living and military prowess.)

“Cold War” philosophies, eager for universal validity yet rooted in partisan struggle, postulated a realm of thought unaffected by socio-political pressures—a realm styled a “space of reasons” or an “enclave of freedom.” Only in such an impartial arena could universal truth be won. But the philosophies that confronted each other in that arena all ran into the same problems.

First problem: the “space of reasons” doesn’t exist. We are not able to surpass all givens, or to occupy the Rawlsian original position for more than a few moments at a time. Habermas, perhaps anticipating this problem, insisted that ideal speech was, precisely, an “ideal;” it is not the space of reasons itself, but the idea of it, that grants us whatever objective knowledge and moral justification as we can obtain. But (as Kant would ask), what status can an admitted fiction have when it comes to determining moral behavior?

Second problem: committed to the fiction of an apolitical space of reasons, none of these approaches could reflect on its own origins in Cold War partisanship. The very existence of such origins, in fact, would make it path-dependent, and so call into question its claims to universality. That was why the “space of reasons” came to be postulated in the first place.

Third problem: universality must be purchased with abstraction, so these social philosophies had little to say about the concrete struggles of their time: matters of feminism, racial justice, the collapse of colonialism, and a long list of other struggles were met either with silence or with well-meaning common sense, for which we do not need philosophy. When the Cold War ended, and particular struggles like these replaced the one great global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union as the driving forces of history, universality claims became nostalgic, and the space of reasons which was meant to vindicate them became vestigial.

Fourth and Final Problem: the universalism, for all its abstractness, was imperialistic. In the universalistic realm of the space of reasons, gender, color, and class were all bracketed out. The result was regression to traditional defaults: the inhabitants of the “space of reasons” turned out in fact to be, not universal humans (because universals can’t reason or, in fact, do anything), but white guys of a certain age.

The time was ripe for a thinker who denied the common root of these problems—the apolitical space or reasons—and moved philosophy into the center of the new struggles. That thinker was Michel Foucault, who can thus be called the most important political philosopher of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

The contretemps between Foucault and mainstream philosophy was not a debate, but a paradigm shift. As with paradigm-shifts in general, misunderstandings abounded. Adherents of the space of reasons often saw Foucault’s rejection of it as a rejection of knowledge and morality themselves. Foucault’s claim that power is present in all social relations was transmuted into the claim that all social relations can be reduced to power relations. He was then saddled with the view that that resistance to power is impossible, overlooking the fact that he accepts the classical definition of power—that it is the ability to overcome obstacles. Power for Foucault cannot exist without resistance.

The time was ripe for someone to cut through these misunderstandings and to show, in careful detail, why rejecting the space of reasons as Foucault did does not put an end to morality. This was Richard Lynch, on whose Foucault’s Critical Ethics much of the next section will be based.

For the moment, let us learn the lesson of these thinkers and admit that the quest for universality is one of humnaity’s less productive enterprises. What we really want from philosophy is guidance in our lives. For that we need philosophy to deal not in abstract truths, but in individual experiences. Philosophy should, therefore, be more an art than a science.

36. Texts, Gentlemen’s Agreements, and Jacques Derrida

Heidegger’s concern with scripts, with step-by-step sequences of actions (#35), is ongoing. Long after Being and Time, he is tracing developments, in poems and philosophical texts, that have no context larger than themselves—that, in his parlance in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” his most crucial essay, “set up a world” (eine Welt aufstellen). His tracings take them step by step, paying close attention to the order of the words. He thus treats each of these cultural phenomena as a script, and one which is completely independent of all other scripts. He calls these step-by-step treatments Holzwege, after the forest paths cut by loggers which lead from likely tree to likely tree and so nowhere in particular—certainly not to home. On a Holzweg there is no telos, and no unifying and ordering form.

Derrida’s writings, too, can be viewed as a set of Holzwege. Like Heidegger’s, they meditate philosophical and other texts, but now with the “aim” of thickening them up and rendering them more interesting because more undecidable. This is the antithesis to the usual scholarly practice of skimming a text for a take-away, for a thesis it proves or a lesson it teaches. The conceptual moves Derrida makes in the course of this are often arbitrary or even forced, which would be fatal if Derrida were trying to prove something about the texts he treats. His treatments, however, tend to end, not with a triumphant thesis, but on the brink of about three unasked questions—far from any kind of “home.”

So what good are they? Philosophy, in a market economy, has to produce results, truths and lessons which others can use. Does Derrida consider himself exempt from the laws of the market?

Of course not! One important achievement of his writings lies in the fact that usual scholarly practice with texts takes those texts to have ousiodic structure: the dominating form is the thesis or lesson, which organizes the whole. Every sentence, indeed every word, should contribute to its establishment; extraneous considerations should be excluded. Derrida’s many writings contest this whole approach, and thus amount to a vast number of assaults on various textual realizations of ousia (see my Philosophy and Freedom, Chapters One and Two).

Another takeaway, I think, is to be found, not within Derrida’s writings themselves, but in the contrasts between them and more traditional exegeses. What he shows, over and over, is that the reader’s journey from sign to meaning is often accomplished with the aid of what are nothing more than gentlemen’s agreements. It is these agreements that enable us to speed past the undecidable phrases, disjointed arguments, unintentional rhymes, and so on that any text contains. Often without our knowing it, our usual reading techniques fill in the gaps, amend the fallacies, eliminate the digressions, and so on until we get where we wanted to go—which is to see those texts as realizations of ousiodic structure.

Gentlemen’s agreements of this kind are not innocent, and the textual moments that incite them are not innocent set of authorial flaws. Derrida demonstrates this by focusing, again and again, on one script we recurrently use to understand things. I call it the “binary script:”

  1. Isolate word-meaning w.
  2. Correlate w to ～ w
  3. Establish a preference-relation between w and ～w such that the former is preferred—or, as Derrida often puts it. “privileged.”

The third step can be achieved in many ways; just using a word can privilege it over its opposite. ～ w can also be excluded in other ways, or ordered into the disliked half of a binary; for example see any of Derrida’s texts, where he undoes the binary script over and over again. The point of these undoings is not to produce a better or fairer understanding of the original text, but to show that the binary script is indeed a script, something we bring to the texts but not written into their structure.

The binary structure, bi-partite with one side dominant, is also a partial realization of ousiodic structure, minus an explicit boundary; we may say that the dominant half, w, occupies the privileged traditional position of form, while ～ w is relegated to a status akin to that of ousiodic matter. The absence of boundary means, however, that the binary is totally open, nothing more than a link in a chain of signifiers—an openness that Derrida, early on, called “differance.”

This renders Derrida’s thought of only limited use when it comes to analyzing political or social case of oppression. When the oppressed being is a human, rather than a word or word-meaning, they can always run away—unless there is a wall to hold them in. Derrida’s undoings of the binary script thus contest ousiodic disposition and initiative (in traditional reading, the understanding of a text by its reader just as the writer intended), but not boundary, which is simply denied (“il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” a text has no outside).

Though the application of his (and Heidegger’s) insights beyond the uniquely unbounded way in which texts chain signifiers is problematic, Derrida shows us new and other possibilities of understanding philosophical texts, some of which are central to how we live. Thus, to read Derrida’s account of Geschlecht as telling us what sex “really” is would be sterile at best. To read his treatments of the gift as telling us what gifts “really” are is—poisonous (giftig). But to read them as forcing us beyond our ancient gentlemen’s agreements is liberating.

35. Heidegger’s Scripts Rescripted

Scripts, repeatable sequences of actions triggered by experienced events and aiming at a goal, were moved to the center of philosophy by Heidegger. But they long predate him, for they are basic to life itself. But where in fact do they come from? Where are they going?

There are different ways to take that question.

First, scripts are acquired by individuals, because they consist basically in bodily movements and bodies are individuated. How does an individual acquire a script? By learning (#34), but not only. Some are programmed into the human (or other animal) body: walking, eating, sex. Others  are learned in early childhood (bathroom procedures, dressing). Others do not pre-exist their acquisition, but ae improvised from an encounter with something radically new (works of art). Some scripts come from other scripts, which they either modify (as driving cars modifies guiding carriages) or into which they are inserted as subscripts (as careful washing of hands was inserted into the “return home from the supermarket” script during the coronavirus pandemic).

The Kantian question of the criteria for forming a name, raised in post # 20, gains a bit more clarity from Heidegger’s notion of a script: a new word either plays its role in an old script (often, in this context, called a “language-game”), or modifies it, or designates a new script; the criteria for new words thus coincide, at least in part, with those for introducing new scripts.

What makes a new script, or word,  a good one is in part how it relates to scripts already in existence. The relation may be additive, in that a new script enables socially coordinated action to achieve new goals, or more efficiently achieve old goals. A new script may also be revisionary, in that the new script makes changes in old scripts, often forcing them to cohere in a new and larger project. Hegel examines this sort of thing in his Philosophy of Right, which unites numerous social institutions and practices—scripts—into a new and a larger project of producing a sort of Kantian moral agents (see my Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant).

This kind of unification of scripts can eventually result in the structure Aristotle sets out in Nicomachean Ethics I.1 (and which, as I mentioned in #34, was Teutonified in Heidegger’s account of the worldhood of the world in Being and Time): all human pursuits have a single goal. For Aristotle that goal was ἐυδαιμονία, reason functioning as the ousiodic form of an individual life (often mistranslated as “happiness”). For Heidegger (as a good Teuton) it is death.

But this raises another question: in what sense is death the “goal” of life? Who seeks it?

No one; death seeks us. As have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy, Chapter Seven), the fact that I am going to die shapes my life, for it means that I cannot do everything: I cannot live everywhere, marry everyone, pursue every possible career. I cannot acquire all possible scripts, and must therefore allocate my time and energy by selecting and organizing the scripts I do acquire. In doing so I act, like a Homeric hero (#32), at the behest of my mortality, which forces me to put my life into a definite shape.

Death thus dominates our lives in a way oddly similar to Aristotle’s concept of deliberation (προαίρεσις). In deliberation we reason back from our concept of ἐυδαιμονία toour present situation, and decide what we can do now to most advance our “happiness.” This process, which is the rule of reason in an individual life, selects and organizes, from all the alternatives available to the deliberator, the single best one. In that way the process of deliberation shapes the life of the person deliberating; and since it is a rational process (Aristotle calls it a syllogism), deliberation constitutes the rule of reason in a human life. Deliberating well is thus ἐυδαιμονία itself (hence the infelicity of “happiness” as a translation). It is the full realization (ἐνεργεῖα) of the human essence.

Death for Heidegger provokes similar selections and organization; it bounds and disposes thr components of my life and so of my self. But this ousiodic dominance is, here, without content: unlike Aristotelian ἐυδαιμονία,death does not provide a concrete goal to work towards but merely forces me to determine that some scripts will be included and others excluded from my life, without telling me which. It is indeed my τέλος, but it is an empty τέλος: since its nature is unknown, its commands are empty, and it rests with me to fill them in.

We can now see Heidegger’s major innovation on traditional accounts of ousia: ousiodic form, the telos of a life, is for him indeterminate, for no one knows what death is. As such, it has no characteristics of its own and is defined only by what it puts a stop to, i.e. a human life. It is an utter darkness at the end of the tunnel. Moreover, your death and my death, being both utterly featureless, are indistinguishable and so constitute a single large extinction—a single Nothing.

Yet this nothingness is active, in that it shapes the very lives it ends: “The Nothing,” Heidegger says, “nothings.” Given philosophy’s ancient commitment to ousia, it is not surprising that Heidegger’s pithiest formulation of his alternative to ousia—“the Nothing nothings—” should have drawn so much ridicule from philosophers, especially those in the English-speaking world. Their laughter showed us who they are.

 Though ousiodic structure is endemic in the West, its three axes never been focused on, and the post-Aristotelian roles of ousia in structuring Western lives have never been seen clearly—which has only enhanced their dominance. In Being and Time, ousiodic structure finally receives a frontal philosophical assault; more will follow (see my Reshaping Reason, 2014).

34. Heidegger’s Scripts

Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. This can never be forgotten, any more than it can be forgotten that Jefferson owned and sired slaves, or that Nietzsche vilified women, or that Lindbergh was an anti-Semite. We need to redefine greatness: there is no such thing as a “great man” or “great woman,” only people—morally ambiguous beings who ocasionally do great things. The bad with the good, in philosophy as well as in philosophers: they were all mongers of ousia, but their mongering was often fascinating and now constitutes much of your intellectual spinal chord. The special problem with Heidegger is that his Nazism was, he claimed, a philosophical position—he himself joined his evil to his greatness. The joint is disturbing: what good is philosophy if it doesn’t teach you that Nazism is evil?

The connection is also suspect. Heidegger’s thought, which he himself clearly did not understand very well, is not unified enough for all aspects of it to be automatically classed as Nazi. Consider, in particular, Heidegger’s notion of the “totality-of-significance” (Bewandtnisganzheit), the context which enables the use of a tool. If the tool is a pen, its totality-of-signifieance includes physical things like paper and light source, social things like the technology of eventual publication or private delivery, cultural things such as the genre in which one writes, and personal things such as what one thinks one has to say. Totalities-of-significance concern practices of tool-using, and his emphasis on them joins Heidegger, not to Nazism, but to pragmatism.

It is testimony to the hold atemporality has on philosophical minds that so many readers of Heidegger think that a totality of significance must be all there at once, arrayed (if “non-thematically”) around the tool at the outset of its use. In fact, a moment’s reflection shows that even the most stable physical components of such a totality have to be encountered in a certain order. I need to secure paper and a light source before I pick up the pen, but I don’t yet have to know what I am going to say (and usually don’t, in any detail). Totalities of significance unfold step by step, which is why I call them “scripts.”

One important function of such scripts is to direct awareness: it is the script I am engaged in, and in executing which I have arrived as a certain point or “line,” that selects for me, from all the sensory messages that I am receiving at a given moment, the ones I attend to. This selection has the feel of something surging up before me, of its unwilled movement to the center of my awareness; and since it is governed by the script, it is a surging-up-as. The same thing (in physical terms) can surge up differently if I am engaged in a different script.

Scripts were for a while major concerns of artificial intelligence (see Shank and Abelson Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding, 1977). They dropped out of centrality because of the field’s obsession with getting computers to perform them. Heideggerean scripts are, more realistically, riddled with holes and ambiguities, which give them the flexibility to be performed on differing occasions. Computers, at least the ones available to Shank and Abelson, are not good with holes and ambiguities, and attempts to program even simple behaviors into computers recurrently collapsed under the weight of exceptions and spur-of-the-moment modifications. So much the worse for programing.

In human beings, the holes and ambiguities in scripts are mastered by their goal-directed character, and this helps explain why computers can’t run them. The person executing a script does so to achieve some goal, and any part of the script needs to be executed only well and completely enough to realize that goal. But deciding that requires a judgment-call which computers are, so far, unable to make. Their tendency is to execute each phase of a script perfectly, and this requires that it be written perfectly—something humans, so far, are unable to do. Hubert Dreyfus thus finds himself reversed[1]: in this case, getting computers to mimic human intelligence fails because of what humans, not computers, can’t do.

Because scripts guide behavior, philosophers have mostly ignored them; they have historically viewed the mind as a device for looking at things (“representational mind”), not acting. But pragmatism is not the only exception to this: Heidegger’s account of the worldhood of the world, which is built on the notion of scripts, is basically a Teutonification of Aristotle’s pragmatically-oriented Nicomachean Ethics I.1. And what are Kant’s categories but guides for encountering any object whatever?

Kant’s treatment reveals the limits of traditional philosophy, however, for he insisted that the validity of the categories’ operation extended to all experiences. This meant that the categories could not be acquired from experience, because then they would not apply to the experience of their acquisition. So they had to be a priori, independent of all experience, and that meant independent of the intuitive form of all experience, time—landing Kant back in traditional philosophy. Heidegger, by contrast, talks about relative a priori’s: contexts of significance acquired independently of my current experience, which they help to shape, but not of experience altogether: they are learned, i.e. come from previous experiences.

[1] Dreyfus What Computer Can’t Do, New York 1972

33 The Situation of Philosophy in the Early 20th Century

By the early 20th Century, the directive concept (or as I call it the parameter) of ousia was, like everything else, in a condition both objectively unstable and subjectively uncertain. For millennia, ousiodic structure had been both a philosophical obsession, reacquired and reinterpreted by every creative philosophical mind, and a practical guide, providing an intelligible justification for institutions and practices across the human world. Families, economies, fiefdoms, states, religions and even individual moral agents were structured as so many bounded domains, within each of which a single unitary part organized the rest and maintained internal order, while managing interactions with the outside world. Philosophy’s contribution had been to justify this structure as, in Aristotle’s words, basic to “all of nature:”

In all things which are composed out of several other things, and which come to be some single common thing, whether continuous or discrete, in all of them there turns out to be a distinction between that which rules, and that which is ruled; and this holds for all ensouled things by virtue of the whole of nature…

Politics I.4 1254a28-32)

The “rationalists” had extended ousia’s domination to the supersensible realm; but it entered modernity with a difference. In premodern times, the various levels of ousiodic structure mentioned above were comfortably internested: individuals within households, fathers within cities, cities within kingdoms, kingdoms eventually within Christendom, all of it bounded and disposed by a benevolent Creator.

The downfall of something so fundamental, multifarious, and far-reaching could not happen all at once. Different realizations of ousiodic structure were discovered, in different ways and at different times, to be inadequate. The result was not a sudden toppling or a gradual replacement, but a whole gamut of destabilizations of what had been an unquestioned principle; in the words of one important participant in those destabilizations, Karl Marx “all that is solid melts into air.”

An early case of this was the “eviction” of ousia from nature in the 16th Century, when Medieval substantial forms were replaced by Galilean mechanical bodies. Matter had traditionally been seen in terms of its capacity to bear form, and so exhibited qualitative distinctions (so that, for example, human matter, being appropriate to the human form, differed from animal matter and plant matter). Now it became homogenous: governed by the laws of mechanics, all matter for people like Galileo (and later Newton) is basically alike.

This intellectual development had practical consequences, because matter provided limits to form. For Aristotle, a given form required a certain type of matter, and could control only a certain amount of it; it could not expand its dominion indefinitely. Once matter had become homogenous, there were no such material limits to growth: a sovereign, convinced of his worth, could aspire to control the planet (it may have worked the other way too: the ambitions of sovereigns led to changes in metaphysics).

The result was an aggressive expansion of empires across the globe, and their inevitable competition with one another. The same thing happened on an individual level: once wealth was defined in terms of money, a homogeneous medium, an individual could aspire to possess all of it, which brought endless competition in what would come to be enshrined as the “free market.”

These two levels, each a giant theater of competition, also competed with each other: states could not tolerate unlimited personal acquisition, which might result in competing centers of power; while rich men resented government regulations. Each side found its theorists: the state in people like Hobbes and Spinoza, the individual in people like Locke and Smith.

In religion, what had at least since Aquinas been a benevolent diversity of local cults, each singing to God (#17), gave way, under pressures of papal corruption, to fundamentally different Christian traditions. The internested ousiodic structure of Catholicism, inherited from Roman forebears, was replaced with a plurality of contending mini-ousias, each following a local or regional leader (Calvin in Geneva, Henry VIII in England), and each with its own set of ultimate doctrines. Each religion aspired to solitary dominance in the world.

These new political and social formations, unbound by any larger cosmic order and each claiming ultimate validity within its genre, rose and fell chaotically, and often by accident. Instead of a human cosmos of stable ousiai, we find a ferment of ousiodic structures which come together and disperse, melting into air almost as quickly as they arise.

But there was another set of problems, even greater: ousia is inherently oppressive. Ousiodic metaphysics, the whole barn, in fact amounts to a general theory of exclusion, providing a rationale for denying whole groups of people access to resources, particularly to power—all of which was assigned to form. All you had to do was associate the members of some group to matter, which ipso facto made them deficiently rational and so less than human. This has been done to women from ancient days, and also to foreigners, who could not speak (your language) and so were not wholly rational—and so subject to enslavement. It was applied, with exuberant cruelty, to people of color. Philosophers, alas, shared in the exuberance, for the cruelty had long been underwritten by their ancient discipline (Africans can speak, said Hume; but so can parrots).

But by the 18th Century, the intellectual achievements of women and people of color became undeniable (except to people like Hume); members of both groups were producing important philosophical work, which strongly suggested that they were as rational as anyone else. So, some philosophers came to suspect, were people from the “lower classes” of society. Revolutionaries even proposed that all men (at least) are created equal.

By 1920, European political structures had invalidated themselves in the Great War of 1914-18. Free markets had self-immolated in recurrent depressions, and much religious dogma had been discredited by modern science (particularly Darwin). The oppressive nature of ousia came to be felt, if not clearly seen, by many. The time was ripe for a frontal attack on it.

Enter, for better or worse, Martin Heidegger. His attack would come from the future.

32. Homer, Nietzsche, and the Final Slamover

I called attention, in discussing Kant, to how tightly his solution to the problem of the causality or reason adhered to an Aristotelian model (# 24). Nietzsche, too, is more Aristotelian than he is often thought to be. I said (#8) that for Aristotle, form exercised a threefold domination over matter: it drew boundaries which separated one thing from others; disposed (ordered) whatever was within those boundaries; and took the initiative with regard to managing interactions with the outside world. Initiative and boundary are thus at odds for Aristotle, because once a boundary is in place, acting on the world outside transgresses it (see my Metaphysics and Oppression).

The heart of this problem is that boundary and disposition have priority over initiative: a thing without boundaries which separate it from other things does not exist at all, and a boundary within which no single component disposes the rest has—for the metaphysical tradition, anyway—no unity. Thus, for that tradition, something has to be fully existent, i.e. its form has to be in relatively full control of its matter, before it can cause changes in other things. Only an adult (male) can beget; only someone who has fully mastered a skill can teach it.

In Nietzsche’s inversion of metaphysics, initiative is basic: what is ontologically fundamental is not things but forces, which act on the world without themselves being rooted in a bounded subject or substratum. As Nietzsche puts it, “”there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought,—the doing is everything (Genealogy of Morality I.13). Nietzsche’s overall name for the totality of such forces is, famously, “will to power.”

When one force achieves dominance of another force (or forces), we get what I have called the “slamover.” This, I have suggested (#31), is Nietzsche’s appropriation of pre-Aristotelian (and indeed pre-Platonic) physics to furnish the stylistic form of his sentences and aphorisms. For much of their content, however, Nietzsche goes even farther back—to Homer. To understand Nietzsche even partially, then, we must understand a bit about the Homeric worldview.

There is such a thing, at least in the Iliad (for complexities in the Odyssey see its treatment in Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectics of Enlightenment). The social world of the Iliad is a simple place, centered on a series of hand-to-hand combats. In the Trojan War, groups of men never move together. Rather, each hero on the Plain of Troy selects an opponent from the other army and tries to kill him. If he fails, he dies. If he succeeds, he selects another opponent, ideally one slightly stronger then the first, and repeats his efforts. The whole Trojan War thus has the structure of a video game, in which each vanquished opponent only gives rise to a more formidable foe.

But this is no game. With one exception, every Achaean knows that if things go really well for him, he will eventually face Hector, the Trojan champion; and Hector will kill him. Every Trojan, without exception, knows that if things go really well for him, he will eventually have to face Achilles (if he returns to the battle); and Achilles will kill him. (Achilles himself, the exception, does not die in hand-to-hand combat, but from a poisoned arrow shot by Paris). Death, the ultimate slam-over, waits at the end of the hero’s path, and it is awful indeed: whether you have been good or bad, when you die you lose most of your life-force and spend eternity shrieking in Hades.

Most of the soldiers in this war do not want to play this game; they want to live and go home. Instead of fighting, they merely stand around and watch the heroes fight. Homer calls them ὄι κακοί, the ordinary ones; in classical Greek, as Nietzsche points out (Genealogy of Morals I.5) κακός will mean “bad.” But what about the heroes? What motivates them?

The utterly slim chance of salvaging something posthumous: the chance that your valor in battle will inspire a bard to sing about you, so that you gain ὃ κλἐος ἀθανατὀς, immortal fame. While you scream in Hades, your valor survives in the memories of your fellows.

The Greek hero, confronting his death with only his valor, quickness and strength, is a clear prototype of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. And Nietzsche describes the Achaean hero’s moment of glory, his ἀριστεῖα —the moment that shows him at his best, just after he has killed the last man he will kill, for—as he must suspect—his next opponent will kill him:

One experiences again and again one’s golden hour of victory—and then one stands forth as one was born, unbreakable, tensed, ready for new, even harder, remoter things…

Gen. Mor. I.12

After a victory, as one receives the plaudits of ὄι κακοί, our hero does not know if he is experiencing his ἀριστεῖα or not, for the future is radically uncertain, and the final slam-over awaits.

The Greek hero thus exhibits a metaphysical transgression. What makes his life worthwhile is not to be found in him, but in his effects on others—on those who will sing of him, and those who will hear the songs. The good life is not for Nietzsche a matter of the right organization of the soul, as both Plato and Aristotle thought, and certainly not one of following divine commandments, but of moving outward beyond one’s self to affect the world—one of the many meanings of Nietzsche’s famous concept of “self-overcoming.” Under the rubric of will to power, initiative, the last and most problematic of the tree axes of ousiodic domination, is posited as ontologically most basic.

31. Nietzsche and the Slamover

That time is a philosophical mystery has been obvious to philosophers since Heraclitus. That time is not merely one philosophical problem among others but a condition of philosophy itself, so that philosophy needs, in all its dimension, to respond to time was propounded by Hegel out of Hume’s success and Kant’s failure (# 24).  It was so radical a thought that its presence in Hegel’s writings was, and still is, missed entirely.

How philosophy should respond to time is obviously a function of what we take time to be. For Kant, it was the ordering of incompatibles: if x has both property φ and ～φ, our minds assign φ and ～φ  to different times, so that instead of a contradiction we have a process: φt implies ～φt±n. This follows from the nature of time itself: nothing comes-to-be from itself, because then it would not have come-to-be at all; it would have been there all along. Nor can it pass-away into itself, for then it would not pass away at all. So it must come-to-be from its opposite and pass-away into it, in the ancient sense in which the “opposite” of hot is not cold but not-hot. Kant’s account of time thus accommodates the ancient doctrine of antapodosis, that things come-to-be from their opposites (see Plato,  Phaedo 70e-71e).

But this account of changes is incomplete, for it focuses only on the terminal points of the process:～φ  from which it begins, and φ with which it ends (or vice-versa for passing-away). What about the process itself?

Nietzsche’s characteristic way of handling this begins by designating or evoking various intermediate stages of the process. Example: “the water is hot.” Since the hot water is in time, it must have come-to-be from something that is not hot water, either because it is not hot or because it is not even water. Let us take the previous case. English affords us several different ways of referring to water by its temperature, so we can say, first, that the water is cool; then that it is lukewarm; then that it is warm; then warmer; then really warm; and finally hot. We have now construed the coming-to-be of the hot water as a six-stage sequence ending in hot water. That final stage is different from the others in that it marks the end of our construal. The water may go on to boil, or it may cool down, but those possibilities do not interest us; for our purposes the process is over, and we now have, not a process of water getting progressively hotter but something quite different, namely a state of the water.

This, then, is a version of antapodosis, a general theory of coming-to-be formulated in Plato’s Phaedo. It is the last (indeed the only) theory of change advanced in the Phaedo before the Theory of Forms is introduced, so we can see how it would appeal to the materialist in Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s way of mimicking antapodosis is, often, to lead the reader in one direction, getting closer and closer to a final revelation—and then slamming-over, not to the revelation prepared for, but to something quite different: as if the sequence were cool—lukewarm—warm—warmer—really warm—ice. A quick and simple example is Nietzsche’s joke, “God’s only excuse is that He doesn’t exist.” The first part of the sentence prepares us, not merely for an assertion of God’s existence, but for an apologia for Him; the second part undoes the expectation. The two parts can only function together, but what is important is the slamover from seeming apologia for, to atheistic dismissal of, the Deity.

A deeper example, to be discussed shortly (#32), lies in the progression of the Homeric hero, who wins victory after victory—until he doesn’t, which means he is vanquished and dies in the ultimate slamover. Slamovers, then, are not merely philosophical tropes. They have general significance for knowledge and action:

As knowers, let us not be ungrateful towards such resolute reversals of familiar perspectives and valuations…to see differently, and to want to see differently to that degree, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future “objectivity—”the latter understood, not as contemplation [Anschauug] without interest but as having in our power our “pro’s” and “cons:” so as to be able to engage and disengage them so that we can use the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge.

Genealogy of Morality III.12

One of the cardinal rules of reading Nietzsche is, then, to wait for the slamover. A case in point is his treatment of the Übermensch. We hear so much about the Übermensch’s superiority to others, his awareness of that superiority and his salutary contempt for inferior creatures, that we are unprepared for—and so set up for—the slamover when Nietzsche says that the Übermenschis is often kind to others—as humans are often kind to kittens. In particular, using other people to assert one’s own superiority is about as un-Nietzschean as anything can be—a fact which escaped Nietzsche-readers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 failed to wait for the slamover and, entranced by the ruthlessness in early stages of Nietzsche’s portrayals of the Übermensch, killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago. They not only misunderstood Nietzsche but mutilated the rest of their lives: both of them went, fittingly, to the slammer.

30. Marx and the Market

Marx defined dialectics as thought which

includes, in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things…also the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because [such thought] regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and hence takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

Marx, Capital, Morse & Aveling 1906: 26

This is a far more useful definition than the standard three-step straw man of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that Stalin used to “prove” that the society he controlled was the wave of the future, and that Western philosophers and economists still prefer to knock down when they think about dialectics at all.

It is true that even Marx’s good definition conveys a misunderstanding, for it allows him to try and use dialectics to make predictions. In Hegelian terms, dialectics is a way of organizing social memory, not a predictive device (# 26). What Marx is trying to do in predicting the death of capitalism is a form of future-oriented dialectics: Marx sums up the premises of a contemporary capitalist economy, negates just one of them—individual ownership of the means of production (i.e. factories) —and draws the conclusions. But in fact, as Hegel would point out, there are many such premises, and just which one (or ones) will get negated is not for philosophers to predict. Nor can they tell how the negation will proceed: Marx thought the negation of individual ownership of the means of production would transfer the ownership to the workers, via the revolution; in fact, it was transferred to the investor class, via the stock market.

As to markets in general, as far as I can tell, Marx has little to say. He thinks they are chaotic, but we all know that. His main complaint about free markets, I think, is that they don’t stay free. The moment one participant gains even a temporary advantage over another, they will seek to convert it into a permanent one, and from there into a monopoly. Sometimes they do this by direct action against the competition; sometimes they use the state as a weapon, calling in government regulators to act in their favor (see Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal, Harvard 22019).

None of this is news to anyone (though Philippon’s revelations of the extent of it came as a surprise to me). What made Marx special is that he did not view market consolidation, the evolution of a market from freedom to monopoly, as a series of unfortunate accidents. It is what markets are: a free market is to a monopoly market as an acorn to an oak. This insight is part of his overall critique of political economy, the previous generation or two of economists (Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, etc.) who, in Marx’s view, tried to determine how the major components of the economy functioned without asking where they came from. Thus, they asked about how private property works, but not how there came to be such a thing as private property in the first place. They thereby eternalized it.

They, and their descendants. also failed to see needed distinctions. Private property for Marx originates in the appropriation of others’ labor. Nothing, then, could be further from Locke’s account of an individual enclosing and working on a given piece of land. Compared to Marx’s compelling and empirically-grounded account of the genesis of capitalism, Locke’s story seems like an idle thought-experiment; and yet things such as he presents have in fact happened, if only rarely. So there are two kinds of property: private property, which has immoral origins, and what we may call personal property, which does not.

Now suppose I go into a store and buy a toothbrush. I am buying something that was produced, let us say, by eight-year-olds working in a factory somewhere very far from the store I am shopping in. Their labor is being appropriated, but not by me; I have appropriated no one’s labor, and my toothbrush belongs to me as personal, not private, property. I benefit from the alienation of the childrens’ labor in that far-off factory, and this gives me certain moral obligations toward the people whose labor has benefitted my oral health, but it does not make me an exploiter or a capitalist; even in capitalist countries, socialists are allowed to buy toothbrushes.

The difference between private property and personal property lies in the path by which each come to be: they are path-dependent. Ignoring this led some defenders of capitalism to claim that Marx wanted to expropriate peoples’ toothbrushes, or clothes, or houses; but that is an idea he justly ridicules.

One thing that Locke and Marx have in common is the deployment of ousiodic structure in their accounts of private property. For Lock, one person enclosed a territory—gave it a boundary—and then, in laboring, ordered it so as to produce goods which he then controlled: ownership consisted in boundary, disposition, and initiative exercised by a unified agent over a limited space. For Marx the capitalist controls the boundary of his factory (or factories), determining who is allowed in (hiring) and who is expelled (firing). Within the enterprise, he sees that the individual jobs are done and allocates resources, ordering the whole, to that end; and he controls the output: boundary, disposition, and initiative are the three axes of private property.

The major difference is that for Locke, the ousiodic structure of individual ownership is a good thing; indeed, it provides the ontological framework for its justification. For Marx, such ousiodically-structured ownership is evil, and needs to be replaced by communal ownership—which I would argue, is not “ownership” at all. But that is a different story, a different path.

29. Marx and the Communists

Augustine, we saw, feared the “just now,” the modo (da me castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo, #16); Marx, as a “modern” philosopher, turns to it. The single property of the modo which provokes these opposite reactions is its position between the past and the future. For those who think the future will be like the past, the modo poses no special problem; but Augustine and Marx are too honest for such lazy platitudes. Augustine likes his playboy past, and fears a virtuous future; Marx deplores the past, which is nothing but a long history of class struggle, and sees the present moment, the modo, as the possibility of a different future.

At the moment in 1848 when Marx (along with Engels, to be sure) writes The Communist Manifesto, capitalism has cut through the kaleidoscopic disguises of feudal class oppression: instead of a motley of multiple authorities, religious and secular, and varying obligations to each, we now (modo) have just two groups in naked confrontation: factory workers and factory owners, proletarians and capitalists—or, in ancient words which still apply, matter and form.

Just those two, except for two groups of mind-workers. Non-owners who work with their minds—intellectuals—fall outside, yet victim to, the governing binary of owners and workers. Outside because they are neither proletarians (whose labor is primarily manual) nor owners; victims of it because they must align themselves with one of its two main groups. Either they become apologists for capitalism (in the tradition of the political economists of Marx’s day), or they set their allegiance to the workers and become—Communists.

So where does the Communist stand in Marx’s modo? At the center—for it is the Communist who will push the abject past into a better future. But a center is many things, and to get a grip on them we must turn to Hegel’s treatment of das Zentrum in his Logic. His dialectic is too complex to be followed out in detail here, but centers are basically classified by the kinds of agency they exhibit.

Any place where things come together can be called a “center;” on the simplest level, a center is merely a locus, such as a crossroads, and exercises no agency. Even this kind of passive center is fraught, however; for its lack of agency means an absence of exclusion, so one never knows what is going to show up. In certain versions of African-American lore, you may come across the devil himself at a crossroads.

But centers can also exercise various types of agency. The sun, through its gravitational pull, keeps the planets moving around it and serves as the center of the resulting celestial system, making it a “solar” system. Here the center exercises what we may call a “balancing” function among diverse forces (the various inertias of the planets), and so holds together that of which it is the center.

Finally, the center may also gain the power to exclude certain forces, rather than balancing all of them, as if the sun could somehow throw Neptune out of the solar system. At that point, it draws a boundary: its balancing of different forces becomes ousiodic disposition. The plenary center is an ousiodic form, which draws boundaries, controls whatever is within them, and manages interactions with the world outside.

Hegel presents these three kinds of centrality as stages of a dialectical process: to be a “center” is to be engaged in a development from mere locus to ousiodic form. A center which is going to maintain itself as a center must deal with forces converging on it which are too strong for it, and it must do this either by balancing such a force against the available countervailing forces, as the sun balances gravitational attraction against planetary inertia, or—when no countervailing force is present—by excluding a disruptive force altogether, as do ousiodic forms.

It is clear from the Manifesto that Marx took Communists to be central in the first, least active way. The Communist is the one who, not being a worker himself, is able to acquaint himself with the general characteristics of the class struggle at a particular moment in time (modo), which means knowing about the many isolated struggles that are going on just now in various factories across Europe and the world, informing each about the others. The Communist for Marx is thus a kind of teacher, like the Pullman porters who informed African-Americans in each town their train passed through about what was going on “down the line.” In this way they stitched together what eventually became one of the very few successful revolutions in human history.

Marx’s Communists inevitably had to do a certain amount of balancing, for an honest discussion of what was going on in some other town might well include the news, which in fact was a judgment, that that struggle was on the brink of success, while one’s local struggle was still unripe and should, instead of moving forward, hold off and support the others.

The balancing eventually required eliminating certain forces altogether, as unworthy of inclusion or as too dangerous for it. At first this exclusion was from the revolutionary center itself, as when the Communists excluded the social democrats (weak, unworthy) and, later, the Mensheviks (dangerous to the Revolution). Once the Bolsheviks were in control of the Russian state apparatus, exclusionary tendencies continued and were directed against the whole country: a national counter-system of prisons, gulags, and mental institutions became necessary conditions for the state, and—thus dependent on its internal enemies—it eventually, for many reasons, collapsed.

Marx, who was not good at predictions (he should have stayed with Hegel’s take on dialectics and restricted it to the past) failed to see that the Communists could not remain what he took them to be—teachers of the workers—and would have to assume, to great evil, a “leading role” in society. The Revolution could no more remain emancipatory than markets can stay free.

28. The Young Hegelians

It was only to be expected that the radicality of Hegel’s philosophy would be missed. Not missed entirely, for the Phenomenology’s central concern with temporality cannot be denied. But it was relegated to the first seven chapters of that work, with the final chapter viewed as climbing up and out of time itself, from history into traditional philosophy, with its claims to truth above time. I have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy pp. 39-42) that this is an utter misunderstanding of that chapter: when Hegel moves on to his System, he does not write a statement of anything permanent, let alone eternal, but constructs a wildly revisable fugue of definitions (see Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant, Chapter One).

But this went unrecognized at the time, and Hegel was divided into a youthful, radical Hegel, who wrote the Phenomenology (except the embarrassing Chapter Eight), and a traditional late Hegel (that chapter and the later “systematic” writings). Each Hegel attracted its own group of Hegelians. The older of these took the late Hegel as their master and expounded his philosophy as a giant proof that everything that existed was somehow a part of God, which made them very conservative. The Young Hegelians took the Phenomenology as their incitement, and operated as if everything they could talk about had beginnings and endings in time. Since the Old Hegelians had made Hegel’s supposedly divine Absolute the lynchpin of their conservatism, the Young Hegelians waged their war against them as a critique of religion.

The Young Hegelians won that war, but lost it as well. They won it by becoming much more influential than their older counterparts. Many people know of Ludwig Feuerbach, the early Zionist Moses Hess,  Karl Marx, and Max Stirner (the more brilliant avatar of Ayn Rand); who today but a specialist has heard of Leopold von Henning, Philip Marheineke or J. K. W. Vatke? But what they won philosophically, the Young Hegelians lost personally: their political and religious radicalism denied them university careers. Some of them lived off small inheritances (Hess, Stirner); others became journalists (Arnold Ruge, Marx) or were supported by wealthy friends (Marx again). Feuerbach apparently became a grifter, moving to a town, running up debts, and then moving again. It is one of the saddest stories in the history of philosophy. (For more on the Young Hegelians, see the “Introduction” to Lawrence S. Stepelevich (ed.), The Young Hegelians  Cambridge, 1983).

Their sad fates turned out to constitute an early phase of an enduring problem: philosophy, it seems, fits ill within the modern university. For the university is an institution, and institutions need financial support. This can only come from the upper reaches of society, from political and economic leaders, and upper reaches are never happy with radical critique—or even with radical questioning; Socrates was hardly the last to find this out (even teachings of Aquinas, later a saint, were condemned by the Catholic church in 1277). We will hear more of this; for the moment, it meant the exclusion of the best and brightest of a generation from German universities altogether.

But universities still had philosophy departments—needed to have them, for excluding such an ancient and prestigious domain would impugn their very reason for being, which was the impartial search for truth. And those departments needed, as the 19th Century wore on, to make hires. Whom did they hire? Those who were not the best and brightest: those who were not quite as sharp, those who were a little bit lazier, those who from an abundance of personal caution abjured the dangerous work of thinking for themselves. In short, German philosophy abandoned Hegel altogether, returned to a (bowdlerized) Kant,[1] and sank into an intellectual morass. Lewis White Beck describes it as follows:

….men entered and left the [Neo-Kantian] movement as if it were a church or political party; members of one school blocked the appointments and promotions of members of the others; eminent Kant scholars and philosophers who did not found their own schools or accommodate them­selves to one of the established schools tended to be neglected as outsiders and contemned as amateurs.

White Beck, “Neo-Kantianism” in Edwards, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy V. 428.

This situation continued for almost the entire 19th Century; it is no accident that Frege was in a mathematics department, or that Nietzsche was a classicist; neither could stand the theistic prattle of the philosophers. Not until the 1890’s did respectable philosophy re-emerge in German philosophy departments, and then it was in politically safe forms of Kantianism—the phenomenologists at Göttingen and later Freiburg, the Logical Positivists in Vienna and Berlin, and the neo-Kantians at Marburg—all avoiding the new, temporalized approach pioneered by Hegel, who, as today, was never read and little remembered.

[1] The bowdlerizing consisted mainly in systematic underplaying of the Third Critique, for which see ## 24 and25

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.

26 What We Think About Hegel

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is, as far as I know, the first book in western philosophy to abjure appeals to the atemporality of anything—for Hegel’s immediate predecessor in this regard was Heracleitus, who didn’t write books; he didn’t even know what they are.

This is hardly the standard account of Hegel, which is still a quasi-theological one. Nor is it the usual revisionary one, which is quasi-Kantian. But it is the only view of Hegel I know of that actually makes his philosophy work, for the others require gigantic and indefensible presuppositions (e.g. “not only does God exist, but here is what He thinks;” or “these, not Kant’s, are the necessary categories of human thought”). And, as I have argued in two books, it has textual support: look Hegel’s his use of “truth,” in the Phenomenology, to designate the outcome of a certain sort of process rather than the traditional notion that truth consists in the “correspondence” of something verbal or mental (a sentence, belief, etc.) to some fact or state of affairs.

Hegel’s usage here reminds us that truth as correspondence is an atemporal notion. For the two poles of a correspondence-relation, a sentence or belief on one side and a fact or state of affairs on the other, must exist simultaneously for the relation between them to hold: if I say the cat is on the mat,” then the cat either is, or is not, on the mat when I say it. If I say “the cat was on the mat last Tuesday,” then I am inferring to something I cannot now experience; what exists right now is whatever evidence I have that the cat was on the mat last Tuesday. Is it that of which the sentence is true?

Saying that a sentence “corresponds” to the evidence for it would evacuate correspondence of all meaning, so philosophers invented something called “facts,” to which sentences (etc.) correspond but which are atemporal: it is a fact right now that the cat was on the mat last Tuesday. Such a fact can serve as the complement for true statements about the past and future. But why postulate wholly atemporal  beings for this job, when you can follow Aristotle and say that our minds form images, φαντάσματα, of things, and locate some of those things in a similarly imagined past? “The cat was on the mat last Tuesday” is then true of my image of the cat on the mat, together with the temporal index “last Tuesday.” Philosophers don’t like mental images as a rule, and I sympathize—but how imaginary are facts? Have you ever seen one?

If I am right about Hegel, he thinks something like the Aristotelian account is the way our minds ordinarily work (he usually opts for Aristotle in such cases); but there is also the alternative of saying that “the cat is on the mat is true” has nothing to do with any state of affairs referred to, but simply conveys that a certain process has resulted in the localization of the cat on the mat. That is, roughly, what he does in the Phenomenology.

If to be true is to be the result of a certain kind of process, then everything true is path-dependent. What kind of path ends in truth? For the Phenomenology, it is one that resembles what is often called today the “hypothetico-deductive” model of scientific inquiry. It has four stages (forget the three-stage “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” stuff):

  1. an hypothesis is formed (Hegel calls it a “certainty”);
  2. it is tested against reality (“experience”);
  3. it fails, i.e. encounters significant anomalies (“contradictions”)
  4. the hypothesis is revised (“sublated”) to accommodate them.

The distinctive features of the Phenomenology, as opposed to scientific inquiry, are two: first, the hypothesis always fails and requires revision; and second, the testing carried out can be ethical in nature: an hypothesis promises the success of certain courses of action, and it is when these fail that the certainty needs revision. Since the revised hypothesis is the “truth” of the process, I will call the whole development a “truth-process

This characterization of the truth-process is formalistic, for in the Phenomenology it applies to a huge gamut of contents. The relation between the formalistic process and its content is therefore contingent; and, moreover, the relation between a particular case of the process and anything that ever actually happened is also contingent. History does not in fact exhibit truth-processes of this kind, except very rarely; the facts of history, Hegel tells us in the Preface to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, present us with a “slaughter bench,” a panoply of meaningless suffering. The question is not whether the available facts constitute a truth-process, but whether they can be reconstructed—or, better, reconstrued— or, better still, construed—as one.

Such construal requires, at minimum, omitting all kinds of random events and circumstances which, in reality, accompany the stages of the truth-process. These often include the intentions of the people engaged in a truth-process. Hegel justifies such omission of intentions as the “cunning of reason” (though it often amount to the “cunning of Hegel”). Though truth processes almost never actually happen, they are “rational” for Hegel when they are construable as testing just one part of a certainty at a time, via a series of minimal changes (“determinate negations”).

25. Kant’s Hidden Solution

But we are not quite finished with Kant—more accurately, he is not quite finished with us. We saw (# 24) that Kant’s problem is Aristotelian (and, in a sense, Platonic); his solution, too, is Aristotelian.

Kant’s formulation of the problem is bought at the price of restricting the entire issue to the human mind: we are not to ask how a divine, unchanging realm produces changes in the world we live in, as Aristotle (and Plato) did, but merely how the principles of different faculties of the mind relate to one another. But the solution to this quintessentially modern formulation must be bought at another price, one Kant is not willing to pay, because he wants us to remain with the timeless principles of transcendental philosophy, to go down with the transcendental ship he has invented. But in the first part of the Critique of Judgment, before entering its final debacle, Kant shows us a possible escape.

To be sure, he fights hard to disguise it.

Reflective judgment for Kant begins with a “summing-up” (Zusammen- fassung: CJ 287). What gets summed up must have been given originally not as a unit but as a series of sensory contents (“intuitions”), deliverances of our sensory organs which our mind has arranged in space and time. Judgment then must scan those sensory contents; when it achieves a ”summing up,” the scanning stops. This may be because of some characteristic of the contents themselves (e.g. a color which reaches an edge), in which case the object is judged to be beautiful; or it may result from some feature of the scanning apparatus itself, in which case the object “exceeds” the scanner in some way and is termed sublime.

In a judgment of beauty, there may be only one stopping-point or summing up, or (expanding on Kant) several. In the former case, the judgment is of one object; in the latter, of a plurality. In either case, that sensory contents can be summed up means that they are held within boundaries, within which all points have equal weight and nothing is more central than anything else. Kant calls this kind of arrangement “aesthetic form.”

Leaving Kant behind, we may suppose that an aesthetically-formed sensory unit, or “aesthetic unit,” is then associated with a sound, so that (as Plato puts it in the Phaedo) the sensation of either calls up the other. When the formed unit is a single object, the sound associated with it is its proper name. When it is a plurality, the sound is associated with a set of properties shared by the objects summed up; it is a common name.

Naming is traditionally viewed as a “baptism,” an association of a sound or mark with a being which pre-exists the act of naming. Viewed as a case of reflective judgment, the object named is not presupposed, but is co-created by the sensory contents, with their shared properties on the one hand and the mind which scans them and sums them up on the other.

Any two sensory contents resemble one another just in that both are sensually given. They may also resemble one another in an indeterminate number of further ways—in shape if they are colors, pitch if they are sounds, and so on. Any two sensory experiences which we would say resemble each other thus do so in more than one way; the resemblances we recognize as such are superadded to their shared, and normally unspoken, quality of being sensed at all. The association of a sound with a plurality of aesthetic units thus normally takes place via a selection among the shared properties of the aesthetic units. Just which resemblances get selected for often requires clarification, through repeated ostension, definitions or longer explanations.

Reflective judgment so understood forms names; and it does so via a process akin to that of Homeric simile: first, some similarity among a set of sensory givens is noticed and seized upon (in Kantian terms, “summed up”). Such similarities, being sensory contents, are private; associating them with a sound makes them public. To form a name is therefore to decide that a certain set of similarities among sensory contents should be a public matter. What are the criteria for such a decision?

Obviously they are many and various, because they concern what is usefully talked about by a group of people at a particular time and in particular circumstances; this is the obvious truth behind Franz Boas’ reputed claim that the Inuit have 50 words for snow. It is perhaps worthy of note, in this connection, that words can be embedded in practices shared across a society, to cue others as to what to do next: names are the pre-eminently human means of action-coordination.

The names we produce articulate only a small subset of the many ways in which things resemble one another. Which of those ways are selected to be named varies with time and place. Thus, when Kant, at the very outset of his philosophical trajectory, characterizes sensation as “receptivity” (Rezeptivität, KRV B33), we must ask where that word comes from. Did he examine a number of cases of affection by objects and see that they all had receptivity in common? Or did he have a “pure” cognition of receptivity apart from the many instances of it in his experience? Kant tacitly opts for the latter—and with this appeal to purity, vaults into timelessness and gives his whole game away: the debacle of the Critique of Judgment already awaits him. If the former, however, he must accept that other people, at other times and places, may not see those cases as coming under the heading of “receptivity” at all. The possibility which, in the Third Critique, haunts him most—the possibility that our very faculties are gifts of history, which history can take back—stands open.

It is not merely a possibility; it is an abyss.

Philosophy trembled on its brink.

24. A Problem With Kant

Kant resolves the contradiction in the Third Antinomy (#23) as he resolves the others, by throwing each side into a different mental box: the thesis, he says, is a principle of the Understanding, and the antithesis is a principle of Reason. But a deeper problem now arises.

Here again we see how tightly history of philosophy’s web is woven, for this new problem had also made trouble for Aristotle. His divine Prime Mover, being without matter, cannot change. But any action of a cause, Aristotle says, changes the cause: saws, for example, become dull. So how can something unchanging be a cause?

This was also a problem for Plato, but one he perhaps didn’t see clearly, for he never really explains how a form causes a thing to participate in it at a particular time: “participation,” Aristotle remarks, is a word and not a theory.

So Kant’s problem goes back to Plato; but his solution remains with Aristotle, who presents it in Metaph. Λ. There he asserts that there is one kind of cause which does act without changing, and that is the final cause. Love is an example: the person you love changes you, but your love does not necessarily change them; unreciprocated love is quite common. So the order of nature must be caused by the love of the cosmos for the Prime Mover, which acts ὥς ἐροῦμενον—as something loved. And love for Aristotle is a form of final causality: to love someone is to become more you in their proximity.

And Kant? On the one hand, he is going to say that we are not talking about objects, as Aristotle and Plato were; and we are also not talking about our experiences, as Hume thought. Nor, to be sure, are we talking about love. We are talking about fundamental, unalterable activities of the mind which proceed according to rules. The Understanding follows the thesis of the Third Antinomy, taking as its rule of operation that everything has a cause outside itself; the antithesis follows Reason, which takes as its rule the possibility of a free action, i.e. one without such a cause. So the Kantian question is: how can we view Reason as a cause without violating the rules of either faculty?

The First Critique, that of pure Reason, suggests that simply relocating the issue to the faculties solves the problem: our minds are set up to work with two contradictory rules, end of story. The Second Critique, that of practical Reason, maintains that Reason acts as a cause via a feeling, that of respect (Achtung) for the moral law—the only a priori feeling that we have. This solution is more than a bit ad hoc, and because it is restricted to a feeling it does not explain how it is even possible that an individual moral action can make the world a better place. So in the Third Critique, that of Judgment, Kant goes back to Aristotle, and invokes his solution to the problem.

It is not that an old bachelor like Kant makes ἐρῶς into a moral force. But Aristotle, recall, believes that ἐρῶς is a kind of final cause: I love someone because I become more myself in their vicinity. And this suggests a more general answer to the question of how something immutable can be a cause: if something else tends to imitate it. Kant argues that the faculty of Judgment takes it as its rule that the sensory world, structured by the Understanding according to external causes, seeks to become a world of Reason, structured by free actions. Or at least: Judgment has to view it that way.

The stakes here are sky high for Kant. If he is right, but only then, he has answered how the two contradictory rules of the Understanding and Reason can be united into a coherent human mind; and, moreover, he has explained what Plato and Aristotle—and everybody else running around in the ancient Metaphysical Barn—could not: how the immutable realm (Reason for Kant, forms for Plato, essences for Aristotle) relates to the changeable world we live in. The price of this, for Kant, is that we are talking not about objective reality, but about the way the rules of our mind make us see such reality.

Kant is willing to pay this price; but he cannot, for he does not do even the job his critically restricted philosophy requires. His “argument” that Judgment requires us to see nature as having Reason for its final cause (at Critique of Judgment §§ 82-85) is not even an argument, but a series of observations, digressions, stipulations, and the like.

So here is where things stand after the Critique of Judgment: Hume has shown that we can have no knowledge of immutable things outside our mind; Kant agrees with that, but then tries to establish such knowledge within the mind, in the form of the (knowable) rules of the faculties. He then cannot explain how the immutable truths of Reason can serves as causes in the ever-changing world we actually live in. His failure means that immutable truths cannot be known either inside or outside of the mind. Philosophy must dismiss them altogether

Hume’s success led him to billiards, and then to history. What happens after Kant’s failure?

The Critique of Judgment came out in 1790. Philosophy held its breath for 17 years.

Two Dollops of Meta

I hate people who do what I did: start blogs and then don’t finish them. This blog has along way to go–in spite of what they say, the history of philosophy is not finished even today, let alone in Kant’s time. But I plead for forgiveness on the grounds that I was trapped in Chicago by an evil virus. I flew there just before the 2020 elections, fearful of my reactions if the Bad Guy won. My plan was to return sometime after Thanksgiving. But then there arose such a fearful surge of COVID-19 that I stayed on, and on….until my resourceful daughter got my wife and me vaccinated and I could return to my workplace in Los Angeles. resuming these meanderings through the history of Western philosophy.

The word “meanderings” brings up another matter that troubles me. Shouldn’t I be publishing these in reverse order? When you open this blog, the last is the first: what confronts you is the most recent posting, and the ones that follow it down the list get earlier as you go along. So the story is being told backwards.

But then: isn’t that how we discover history? Something confronts us. it seems cloudy in places, confusing in others. So you ask where it came from, and usually some things get cleared up. But that explanatory factor has clouds of its own, so you ask where it came from, and so on down the line. And that’s the way you have to confront this blog, So I’ll leave it like this.

And with my Two Maxims Regarding History: Everything we see ordeal with is there replacing something else that didn’t work out; and, everything in history could have been different; that’s what “history” is.

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.

22. Static Twins II: Locke

Like Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, and other modern philosophers, Lock evicts ousia from nature, condemning from the outset “fruit­less inquiries after substantial forms, [which are] wholly unintelligible and where­of we have scarce so much as any obscure or confused conception in general” (Essay p. 14). But, also like the others, Locke hardly escapes ousiodic structure in the human realm. As Harold Noonan has put it,

Although Locke’s notions of substance and matter are so manifestly unaristotelian, something like Aristotle’s substantial form holds a prominent place in his thought, at least with respect to living creatures.[i]

The trifold structure of ousia in fact animates Locke’s account of the bedrock denizen of the human world, the property owning individual; and human communities exhibit the same structure, though in weakened forms.

The weakenings, to be sure, are manifold. In the earlier thinkers I have discussed, and in many others besides, power was legitimated from above–by the superior rationality of free citizens, for Aristotle; by God himself, for Aquinas and Spinoza. For Locke, by contrast, the authority of government comes famously from below, from the consent of the governed.

Moreover, the ordering or dispositive power of the commonwealth is restricted to negative rather than positive listing—it defines and punishes transgressions, rather than establishing and enforcing positive norms. And third, that power is dispersed, into distinct legislative, executive, and “federative” powers (T2 ¶¶ 143-145).

All very well. But in discussing the legislative itself, Locke breaks revealingly into ousiodic, indeed Aristotelian, terms:

…’tis in their Legislative, that the Members of a Commonwealth are united and combined together into one coherent living body. This is the Soul that gives Form, Life, and Unity to the Commonwealth…The Essence and Union of the Society consisting in having one will, the Legislative, when once established by the Majoritie, has the declaring and, as it were, the keeping of that will. The Constitution of the Legislative is the first and fundamental Act of Society…(T2 ¶ 212.; emphasis in original).

Soul, form. essence, act: once again we watch a modern philosopher succumbing to the categories of an Aristotle he claims to despise.

Further weakenings of legislative power follow. For one, the Legislative is merely intermittent: unlike a form, the activity of which provided the kernel of stability in a thing, the Legislative need not always be at work, i.e. in session (T2 ¶ 143). Its intermittence makes it porous, for it means that legislators spend part of their lives living as ordinary citizens. Third, legislative power is not a fully dispositive power to order tout court, but (in addition to being negative) is defined as a “limited fiduciary Power to act for certain ends” (T2 ¶ 149). It functions, in fact, according to the overall principle of salus populi suprema lex, the well-being of the people is the supreme law (T2 ¶ 150; Chapter XV passim). The salus populi, in turn, is centered on the preservation of property (T2 ¶¶135, 222.

The commonwealth thus exists for the sake of private property.

This brings us to Locke’s concept of ownership. Here, the weakenings in his account of the commonwealth suddenly vanish and ousiodic domination breaks out in full force. Thus in Chapter V of his Second Treatise, Locke writes that both reason and revelation tell us that nature has been given “to Mankind in common” (T2” ¶ 25). But God gave the world to humans in order that it be used “for the Support and Comfort of their being—” and the use of nature is individualistic. Consider Locke’s prime example, at T2. §26, of natural appropriation:

The Fruit, or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian…must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his Life (T2” ¶ 26).

Beyond its patronizing treatment of Native Americans, this example instates eating as the primary example of the use of nature: we use nature paradigmatically, it suggests, by incorporating it into our bodies. So prop­erty, for Locke, first comes about through the establishment of boundaries: na­ture that was origi­nally Ours is apportioned into Mine and Yours.

This boundary, we see from the above quote, is inviolable: if something is mine, others have no right to it at all, and it cannot be taken from me. In the example above, the inviolability is furnished by my body’s boundary: since what I ingest becomes part of me, what nour­ishes me can nourish no one else. The ground of private owner­ship is thus the indi­viduality of the user’s body.

It is not as if ownership consisted in the recognition by my fellows of my right to use an object (IT2” ¶¶ 28-30). Rather, it is conceived strictly as a binary relation between the owner and the owned. When we move beyond eating, this relation is established by labor: we gain title to something by laboring on it. As Locke puts it (taking as example acorns gathered by someone), it is

labour [that] put a distinction between them and common. That added something to them more than Nature, the common Mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right (T2” ¶ 28).

Similarly for land: the person who tills it “by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common.” Labor is thus a formative activity which results in the ex­­ten­sion of ownership from the bound­aries of my body to include everything which that body’s activity reshapes: the initiative of the working body, the way it affects nature outside it, becomes dispositive power once that nature is owned.

Just as the state broke forth for Hobbes with an unjustified absolutism, so does the individual ownership of property for Locke. The lack of justification follows from the absoluteness, as it usually does: absolutes are rarely, if ever, justifiable. The absoluteness, in turn, is what happens to a particular kind of ousia–state, individual–when it no longer countenances any other kind.

[i]Harold Noonan, “Locke on Personal Identity” Philosophy  53 (1978) pp. 343-351, p. 344.

21. The Static Twins I: Spinoza

It was a truth universally acknowledged until at least 1807 that while words and worlds may change, philosophical truths must not. When the unchanging substantial forms of the ancients and medieval were evicted from nature, nature lost its foothold on permanence and so could no longer be a source of philosophical truth. The last redoubt for unchanging truth was therefore the mind, which was (and, alas, still is) amenable to being construed as static, a domain of unchanging truths.

This, I think, was a trap; but it was one which philosophers were, and are, glad to be in. When you are caught in that trap not only is the mind static, but what comes into it from outside—experience—is also just so much static: static on the line. Experience is then a set of random vibrations which is too unstable to convey anything meaningful; its changes are worthy only of being ignored. Of all the philosophers who fell into this trap around this time, I will discuss two: the Static Twins, Locke and Spinoza.

Arriving at his own thought via a critical confrontation with Descartes, Spinoza pushes a characteristically vehement modern rejection of ousiodic forms: they are “clearly absurd”, “childish and frivolous.”[1] Which leaves him with the companion notion of substance, which is just an ousia with a boundary but without a disposing form (see Metaphysics and Oppression). And here Spinoza goes decisively beyond Descartes, for he claims that to be a substance, a thing must be wholly independent of everything else—even of God. Cartesian finite substances, dependent on God alone, therefore, cannot exist. Instead we have “modes,” which inhere in a single divine substance (Ethics Prop. 14). If the divine substance is unchanging and so static, the modes are static in the other sense: so fleeting that their changes can be ignored, leaving only their unchanging nature as “experience.”

The universe for Spinoza is of infinite extension, which does not keep him from saying that it, and all the things it contains, are “in” God as in another (Ethics I Prop. 15). Spinoza’s God has in fact the widest of boundaries, for they contain everything that is. They are therefore strictly inviolable, for there is nothing outside to violate them. What was implied in Descartes (#18) is manifest in Spinoza: the entire universe is included within the boundaries of a single giant ousia. And not merely the extended universe: for in denying finite substances, Spinoza is taking issue with Descartes’ view that individual minds are, though to a lesser degree than God, substantial in nature.

The extended and intellectual universes are thus ontologically parallel for Spinoza, and both show a radical absence of nesting. For Aristotle, individuals are nested in ousiodically structured households and households within ousiodically-structured poleis. For Spinoza, as for other moderns, no ousia is contained within another ousia. The absence of nesting is, apparently, a defining characteristic of modern philosophy (#18).

The inherence of modes in the divine substance is therefore total: the modes amount merely to its own parts, and nothing can act upon anything except as the divine power ordains. In this way the divine substance not only generates its modes but orders them, thus exercising perfect disposition over the entire universe. Ousiodic disposition thus finds its most thoroughoing form in Spinoza’s determinism, just as boundary found its widest conception in the infinitude of the physical universe.

The state, like the individuals it contains, is a mode and so has a divine right to exist and to act:

It is clear…that the right of the state or sovereign is nothing but the right of nature itself, and as such determined by power; not however by the power of a single individual, but by that of a people which is guided as if by one mind. In other words, it is clear that what is true of each man in the state of nature is true likewise of the body and mind of the whole state–it has as much right as it has power and strength. Hence the more the commonwealth exceeds a citizen or subject in power, the less right he has. ..and consequently a citizen does nothing and possesses nothing by right unless he can defend it by the common decree of the commonwealth. (Tractatus politicus III.2)

Might doesn’t make right; it is right. An individual, being much weaker than the state, cannot oppose it. The sovereign alone has the power/right to regulate the conduct of individual citizens, and to provide for the defense of the state from outside forces. But the state itself is a mere mode, and its actions, like all actions of modes, are ultimately caused by the divine substance. Thus relocated to the divine, supersensible level, ousia is in a position to structure the human world.

If only the divine substance can truly act, for example, only the divine substance can be truly free. As did Descartes, Spinoza has defined substance in terms of independence, and this means that substance for Spinoza is associated with freedom: to be free is to be able to act from one’s own nature alone (Ethics I  Def. 7).  Since only God is independent of all other things, only He acts in that way (Ethics I Prop. 17)

The final part of the Ethics, “Of Human Freedom,” is then devoted to showing how the human mind, in becoming free, assimilates itself to God’s. This turns out to mean, as the “Preface” to Part Four tells us, controlling the affects. Spinoza here has just told us that emotion is merely confused thought, and it is thought, not emotion, which is an attribute of God. We control our affects by converting them from emotions into thoughts: from confused ideas into clear and distinct, or even “adequate” ones (Ethics V Prop. 3). Adequacy, in turn, means seeing individual things, the objects of our ideas, in their full causal context, which is ultimately that of all creation. The vision of a thing in the context of all creation is, of course, God’s. As our finite mind gains ever more adequate cognition, it becomes more like God’s mind, approximating the inviolable boundaries and perfect disposition of the divine ousia–a name Spinoza never says.

[1] See Benedict Spinoza, Part I of  “Appendix Concerning Metaphysical Thoughts”, in Spinoza, Parts I and II of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, at Spinoza, Opera (C. Gebhard, ed.) Heidelberg: Winter, 4 vols. 1925, I 249; Spinoza, “Letter to Oldenburg of July  1663, IV 64;  the pagination is givn marginally in The Collected Works of Spinoza (Edwin Curley, ed.) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

20. Hobbes’ Hidden Aristotelianism

Was Thomas Hobbes a lousy speller or a good one, but only by the standards of his time?

And I belieeve that scarce any thing can be more absurdly said in naturall Philosophy, than that which is now called Aristotle’s Metaphysiques; nor more repugnant to Government, than much of what hee hath said in his Politiques; nor more ignorantly, than a great part of his Ethiques (Hobbes, Leviathan Cambridge 1991 p. 370).

Hobbes here condemns Aristotle’s thought as vigorously we condemn Hobbes’ spelling. The old Greek contributes absolutely nothing, it would appear, to Hobbes’s philosophy: not to his physics, his ethics, or his politics.

But old folks persist. The very sub­title to Leviathan: “the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Eccle­sias­ti­call and Ci­vill,” contains words which sound suspiciously like Aristotle’s account of ousia (#8). Could Hobbes, while thinking that he is rejecting Aristotle, only be reinstating his basic metaphysical structure—without, apparently, even knowing it?

Hobbes spells out (!) his argument thusly:

The only way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend [people] from the invasion of Forraigners, and the injuries of one another, and there­by to secure them in such sort, [that] they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will….By this Authoritie, given him by every particular man in the Com­mon-Wealth, [the sovereign] …is inabled to conforme the wills of them all, to Peace at home, and mutuall Ayd against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the Essence of the Common-Wealth (Lev. pp. 87f).

So a commonwealth must able to distinguish its inhabi­tants from “forraigners” and to fend off “invasion,” which for Hobbes is synonymous with causality itself, for causality is nothing but the “invasion” (incursus) of one body by another, i.e. the displacement of one body when another body intrudes into the place it oc­cupies (de Corp. VI. 6, VIII. 19, IX.5, pp. 23, 65, 72). So the commonwealth must have a determinate boundary.

Within that boundary a single authority, the sovereign, exer­cises a power so absolute as to be able to “conform” the wills of everyone else to peace (thus exercising what I call disposition over those wills), and to mutual aid in war (a case of what I call initiative). It is thus entirely in keeping with Aristotelian usage for Hobbes to call the sovereign the “essence” of the commonwealth; the sovereign plays the role of form in Aristotelian ontology (again, see #8).

 In keeping with an unsavory philosophical tradition, I will call the sovereign a “he.” But a sovereign, I will note, can for Hobbes be a he or a she, or a they—sovereignty is not tied to gender, and can be vested in any number of people as long as they act in a unified way

The extended discussion of sovereign power in Leviathan Chapter XVIII expands upon this reappropriation of Aristotle in a total of twelve points. According to the first two of these, the people cannot overthrow their sovereign and get a new one, nor can he relinquish his position—because he is their unity, and without him they are not “a people” but merely a “multitude.” Sovereign power can end only where the sovereign no longer has the power to fulfill his part of the covenant–and Hobbes phrases this requirement in terms of an analogy to the ousiodic structure of the human individual:

The Soveraignty is the Soule of the Common-Wealth; which once departed from the body, the members do no more receive their motion from it (Lev.  p. 114; emphasis added).

Boundary is further det­er­mined and consolidated in the third point, which asserts that anyone who pro­tests against an act of the sovereign is, literally, an out-law:

he must either submit to their decrees, or be left in the condition of warre he was in before; wherein he might without injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever (Lev.   p. 90).

In fact, the sovereign’s dispositive power goes far beyond what is required for preserving peace; it is a power to maintain social order in general. The sovereign has the right to de­cide what can be taught in society (#6) and sets up the regulations which govern the apportionment of property (#7), of offices (#10), of rewards and punishments (#11), and of honors (#12). He also decides the lawfulness of smaller groups which may form within the society (Lev. pp. 115-123)

The sovereign’s dispositive power over his subjects is so extensive that he cannot injure them: whatever he does to his subjects will not count as an “injury.” There are thus no standards for the right exercise of his power other than those he himself sets (## 4, 5). Sovereignty, in short, is “power unlimited” (Lev.   p. 115), and the relation of subjects to sovereign has a familiar air of ancient domesticity:

As in the presence of the Master, the Servants are equall, and without any honor at all; so are the Subjects, in the presence of the Soveraign (Lev.   p.93).

When we confine our gaze to Aristotle’s and Hobbes’s strictly political doctrines, the polis and the Commonwealth look very different. Curtis Johnson has summed their differences up as follows: for Aristotle, the state exists by nature, and humans are by nature political; the aim of the state is the good life. For Hobbes, the individual is by nature inimical to others; the state exists by convention, and its aim is security.[1] But when we look to the metaphysical bones which underlie these very different bodies politic, we find them both to be versions of ousiodic structure, exhibiting the three ancient traits of boundary, disposition, and initiative. The form of the Hob­besi­an commonwealth is the sovereign, exercising both dispositive and initiatory power. Its inhabi­tants are the matter.

Though Hobbes’s political structure thus has the classical features of an Aristotelian ou­sia, the justification for them is different indeed. It is not for Hobbes, as for Aris­totle, writ­ten in all of nature that for any community there must be a single archê.  Nor is it a metaphysical or rationalist truth about some ideal realm. Ousia has nei­ther natural nor supernatural warrant–and seems, in fact, to break out, in Chapter XVIII, with no warrant at all.

[1]Curtis Johnson, “The Hobbesian Conception of Sovereignty and Aristotle’s Politics” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985) pp. 327-347