Determinate Negation

In my scouring of the internet for help understanding Hegel, I found 3 video lectures by Robert Brandom from LMU Munich (in English, of course)*.

They provide an overview of his recent work reading Kant and Hegel and thinking about the problems of metaphysical and semantic realism and idealism.  The basic difficulty of providing a union of conceptual thinking (thinking in terms of objects, classes, entities, and rational relations between them) and reality as we experience it.

Kant set up a view of this that the reason came fitted with 'synthetic judgments' - prejudices that make us see causality in some constant conjunction of phenomena, that may help us survive in the world bnut which can't themselves be grounded in reason or perceived directly in experience (see Hume on Causality). Their rationality is 'transcendental', which I would describe (probably wrongly), as meaning that they are justified as the condition of the possibility of rationality.  Kant thought that perception grasped 'the object' for consciousness through an act of (synthetic) judgement, but that the object for itself remained ineffable, unknowable.

People said, well how do you know there's such a thing as the thing in itself then? But maybe they didn't say it to Kant, out of respect.**  Robert Brandom diagnoses this as a gap in the intelligibility of the world, and explains that Hegel's project was to attempt to give an account with no gap.

Hegel argues that the mode of definition of the object is by what he calls 'determinate negation.' An object is white (and NOT black, red or any other colour). The 'IS' is Kant's synthetic judgement, but in Hegel the appearance is the appearance of a super-sensible object which becomes understandable as more and more experiences mean you can perhaps synthesise a law (law is the truth of appearances in Hegel).

As Brandom explains it, objects define themselves by means of determinate negation, and consciousness of the object characterises the object by determinate negation, and consciousness is engaged continually in reconciling its conceptual contents by judgements with the goal of eliminating material incompatibility and fitting the right scheme of determinate negations over the understood world. Although its impossible for the objects to hold materially incompatible properties, a subject (person) can hold materially incompatible beliefs or positions.  But although they can, we hold that they shouldn't.  You can't be in two places at once, we say to the double booked person.  You must resolve that incompatibility.  If you see a straight stick appear bent under water, you have to come up with a theory of how water bends appearances, or sticks. You can't believe the same stick is both straight and bent.  Determinate negation implicitly (though minimally) puts concepts and objects into the kind of holistic structure Heidegger calls a world. Square is NOT round, triangular, pentagonal etc.

Brandom also draws out the parallel with Shannon information theory, in which the information provided by a bit depends on what it negates.  If a thousand possible worlds would have had it be zero, and it is one (and NOT zero), then it is very informative - but you measure it by that negation.

I've made this much less clear than I should. I don't understand it well enough to do a much better job even if I took my time.

Itunes:

Review of his latest book - Being Human


* There is no reason for them to be released as video - the image of a luxuriantly bearded Robert Brandom is itself a luxury in this world of scarcity.  Audio-only would have been fine, LMU.

** Did you know he first hypothesized the accretion disk formation of the solar system?

An Idiot Abroad

I've been enjoying 'An Idiot Abroad', Ricky Gervais and Stephen Marchant sending Karl Pilkington on adventures around the world. Karl is a talent, trenchant, observant , sweet through all his sourness. He is the sort of genuinely funny but entirely unassuming person who would never become a star. Ricky Gervais edited Extras with him (I think) and realised how comical he could be.

Hegel's Master and Servant analysis ends up being an analysis of how self-consciousness attunes itself to a reality of being one among many. The problem of other minds doesn't pose itself anywhere that other minds represent serious threats. Master and Servant shows how freedom is conserved inwardly bythe servant when the master expends his own limited store of freedom outwardly. The Servant is therefore enriched, being conscious of his own and the Master's point of view. The great thing about Karl Pilkington is how interesting his deliberately small world is. I'm sure he was joking when he talked about the moon as being 'like Tenerife' - everyone wanted to go there in the 60's and 70's, but then they realised it wasn't that great. You can make a man bungee jump, but it prompts no reflection. The bungee-jumper on the other hand, is a furious ball of anxious reflection, alive to everything he wants and everything the paymaster wants.

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Learning

My little son is 6 months old tomorrow.  He is on the way to sitting up - he can balance on his rump if he's holding my fingers or leaned against the back of the couch.  One of the interesting things watching him, is that he doesn't know what sitting is.  It isn't a specific thing he does.  When he tips over, there's no event - no change from doing one thing to doing something else.  All he really is consciously doing is seeing things and trying to grab them, and hopefully, put them in his mouth.  He can do that while on his side, and the whole time he's tipping over onto his side.

Heidegger aimed to give an account of our interaction with the world without intentional content, so that we would seamlessly or effortlessly deal with or cope with the world, except in breakdown cases. I think Heidegger is weak on learning: it's obviously necessary, but its necessarily a dynamic process which he wants to find a static structure underneath. And I think if he had thought more about learning, he might have had some trouble, because there is a time when a skill becomes a thing - it puts on a handle and becomes a group or a super-group, that can be called on by the for-the-sake-of-which, which is the ineffable purpose or project that is enough to make use of us and makes us us.  I guess I think there is a faculty of reflection which includes a rationality, and which is linked with our symbolic faculty.  The handling of a pattern of practices is like the inner world's equivalent experience to naming.

My son has no handle on sitting; the first sitting comes before the handle on it.

(I could go on and on:

• about his for-the-sake-of-which at this early stage which is what I think Hegel calls satisfaction in a very raw form.
• about the research I saw the other day about how anaesthetic works by interrupting the interaction between the rear of the brain (where the world is recognized and the body mobilized, controlled and maintained) and the front of the brain (where reasoning and symbolic processing are conducted) and consciousness collapses when you stop the relation (me) between the recognizing and acting parts (me) and the reasoning and symbolising parts (also me). (Kierkegaard reference.)
• enough.)

From 'Sickness Unto Death'

Penguin classics,  Translated by Alastair Hannay.

p74 - Kierkegaard's opinion of Hegel, after drawing so heavily on Christian theology, concluding that he drained it dry and disbelieving.

No, being in error is, quite un-Socratically, what people are least afraid of.  One sees amazing examples of this which illustrate it on a stupendous scale.  A thinker erects a huge building, a system, one that encompasses the whole of life and world-history, etc. - and if one turns one's attention to his personal life one discovers to one's astonishment the appalling and ludicrous fact that he himself does not live in this huge, high-vaulted palace, but in a store-house next-door, or a kennel, or at most in the janitor's quarters.  If one took it upon oneself to draw attention with but a single word to this contradiction, he would be insulted.  For so long as he can complete the system - with the help of his error - being in error is not what he is afraid of.

 p104 - Kierkegaard's describes yours truly with clarity and brutality:

We began [] with the lowest form of despair, which in despair did not want to be itself. The demonic despair is the most heightened form of the despair which in despair wants to be itself.  This latter despair does not even want to be itself in Stoic self-infatuation and self-exaltation, not even in that no doubt mendacious way, but one that in a certain sense conformed to its own ideal of perfection; no,  it wants to be itself in hatred towards existence, to be itself according to its misery; it does not even want defiantly to be itself, but to be itself in sheer spite; it does not even want to sever itself defiantly from the power which established it; it wants in sheer spite to press itself on that power, importune it, hang on to it out of malice. And that is understandable - a malicious objection must, of all things, take care to hang on to that to which it is an objection.  Rebelling against all existence, it thinks it has acquired evidence against existence, against its goodness.  The despairer thinks he himself is this evidence.  And it is this that he wants to be; this is the reason he wants to be himself, to be himself in his agony, so as to protest with this agony against all existence.

This is what I am constantly to repent of. To be is good.  Even if you are a silly person who can't forsake too many projects and has very little talent at any of them.

Hegelians of the world, unite!

In a talk today, the speaker referred to his marxist, protesting past in the seventies several times, and then said he was an old Hegelian. I thought 'Oo-Aah' or maybe a 'Go Bears!' would be in order in other circumstances - there should be something for Hegel fans too. Maybe if you recognise the other as your essence, a serious spoken 'You are!' would be appropriate.

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Hegel & Christianity

Listening to the next lecture, J. Bernstein was going into the way the loss of Kant's imperious Law was too much for many.  And then I recognised another way to understand what Hegel is doing.

He has set out to remove the 'dirensions', the divisions - self and other, mind and body, self and world, individual and society that seemed insuperably present in the best systematic philosophy.  The morality that he is advocating is the freedom of the Christian under grace.  The division between the Law, goodness and the person is erased through Christ, and realised in the Christian through faith.

Hegel is saying that the force of morality is in the situation, not in some abstract law.  The good in loving someone is loving them, not satisfying some remote Law or third party.  So then, if the moral force is in the particulars of the situation, it becomes possible to achieve creative, positive goodness, not just a jury-rigged approximation of the good which is actually bad.  Not merely possible, but continuously there in our work and life.  This is Christian. This vertigo of forgiveness and welcome into the creative universe of  being no longer under Law but under Grace.

It is odd that Luther figures in Hegel as a German, protestant, analogue of Descartes, of the upholding of conscience (conscious in Descartes) above external authority.  I think Luther was mostly about the end of the line of division between God and man, because that's what he found in Paul, who is all about Jesus being all about reconciliation.  Neither greek nor jew, slave nor free, male nor female.

Hegel & Community Conscience

Jay Bernstein began his lectures with a few remarks about the task Hegel (with much of continental philosophy) undertook: to translate what was good from the Christian world into the real world, to move from transcendant to entirely immanent, because (as he would say "spoiler alert") - 'there is no God'.  I have thought throughout that what Hegel is doing is more seriously informed by Christianity than our reading of him - much of what he says works as well as theology as in any of the fields he's addressing.

Today I have reached the lecture on morality, which is where he finds people often want to part ways with Hegel. Hegel's project has been to knit back together the things that were not understandable together: society and the individual; the individual's subjectivity and the world's apparent objectivity; reason and the rump of heart and passions and body.  In Kant's theory of morality there are some parallel problems: the reason of the individual is presumed to fully apprehend the situation and to be able to fully determine the morality of an act, although some good intentions have bad results. To Kant, the reason, locked away from the passions, and without access to things in themselves, can nevertheless reach toward a good will.  Hegel says that this is to take as a task an unachievable aim; and more that its unachievability is the condition of the possibility of this kind of morality.  This moral bar set impossibly high is, on Bernstein's reading, attractive solely for social control, and is not a real morality.  It's what parents invent about right and wrong to control their teenagers.  Adults wanting a moral realism find in Hegel that they are defined by the Other; that therefore they are to some extent constitutively committed to certain things (acting beneficially toward others); that in engagement with others they are always acting and defining themselves, but that their acts are subject to redefinition by the community.  So conscientiousness (having a conscience) is a social-historical stage of society.  It's not an infallible internal guide. It's 9/10ths in intersubjectivity, out there in society.

Now, I am probably misunderstanding something simple and key here, but it seems to me that communities are usually terrible repositories of morality.  I once sat in a meeting with business people, and we talked about our achievements.  One man had project managed a housing project which realised the highest prices per square foot for inner city units that the city had seen in years.  Another had turned a chain of petrol stations into major profit centers by extending the range of things you can buy, and turning the attendants into chocolate-offering robots*, fattening and impoverishing the weak of will.  The third was a woman who had used the power of a subsidised foreign supplier to put a major Australian foundry out of business.  All three achievements were, I thought, terrible. They made things worse. But the little community we were closed ranks and marvelled at how noteworthy and therefore good these people were.

The problem with this account of Hegel is that you lose from Kant the possibility of universal, true moral aim points.  You gain by losing the impossibility of totally moral life (with the infinite psychological burden and splitting it entails), but on Bernstein's reading the community is in fact a more than adequate resource. (His strongest argument would be that it is all we really have, anyway, and we're doing OK.  Hegel and Bernstein are somewhat conservative).  I think the breakdown case is (as usual) honor killing and female genital mutilation.  These are strong community values in their communities, but also wrong.  I think I am missing from Bernstein how Hegel's dictum that the particular is the universal, and how the exact situation is what has to determine the right and wrong of your action, apply in those cases. Are we to believe that honor killers don't act with a great sense of righteousness and a good conscience, and that if they understood truly they would feel different?  Maybe we are, but that's not coming through, and if it were I would take quite a lot of convincing.

I think the Christian, though, is in a rather nice position, because we are in community with Jesus. Hegel is probably more on-board with this than Bernstein acknowledges.  He (Jesus) becomes the church's Other, defining its existence and instituting it; and instituting all the individual Christians through conversion to Him. The judgment promises to be based on both intentions and actions/outcomes; and it promises to be full of forgiveness (which I haven't got up to in Hegel yet). The Christian gets the best of Kant (universality) and the best of Hegel (particularity).

* In the original sense of hapless drudges.