Changes of aspect

Ok. My last couple of posts typologised three very broad social-theoretic approaches, and the apparent challenges to normativity associated with those different approaches.  As I’ve been saying, what I want to do now on the blog is set up camp in the second of these approaches – the “intentional” or “goal-oriented” approach.  I’ve been arguing that Brandom (my philosophical hero) essentially skips merrily past this approach, focusing rather on the relationship between scientific naturalism (approach one) and normativity (approach three).  This strategy of omission is of a piece with Brandom’s general opposition to ‘psychologism’.  There are good philosophical reasons for this strategy, but I think it leads Brandom to misread Hegel’s critical analysis of a social-theoretic orientation that we would now call ‘genealogy’.  Brandom sees ‘genealogy’ as reducing reasons to causes.  I think this is the wrong way to think about genealogy.  What genealogy does is reduce norms to interests.  That is, genealogy (in a derogatory sense of the term related but not identical to Brandom’s) is a reduction of the normative dimension of human life to the intentional or goal-oriented dimension.  In the terminology I’ve been using, genealogy is ‘cynicism’.

A paradigmatic expression of this kind of genealogical critique is the following passage from Marx’s 18th Brumaire (much circulated on social media):

the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

This very funny line is characteristic of Marx, but it is also compatible with the ‘vulgar’ reading of Marx which sees him as ‘debunking’ alleged normative values in favour of analysing human action purely in terms of interests.  I don’t think this is, in general, what Marx is doing – but this is the spectre of genealogy as cynicism that I want to talk about.  Other versions of such ‘genealogical’ approaches would be: a Freudian reduction of norms to libidinal drives; a Foucauldian reduction of norms to power relations; a Nietzschean reduction of norms to the will to power; and so on.

We tend to be asymmetric about our ‘genealogies’.  My actions are carried out in response to high normative ideals; my beliefs are warranted by good reasons.  By contrast, your actions are driven by craven self-interest, and your beliefs are thoughtless adoption of prevailing sentiment.  So most of us don’t even aspire to ‘global’ genealogies – rather, we use genealogical critique to attack our enemies; our friends all inhabit the space of norms, reason, truth, and justice.

This kind of asymmetry is, in my view, undesirable.  It tends to cloud our vision of both our enemies and our friends.  Of course, some degree of asymmetry is structurally built into the concept of belief in general – we can’t but think that our own commitments are warranted in some sense, because if we seriously think they’re completely unwarranted we’re effectively giving up the commitment.  Nevertheless, there are levels of asymmetry that are undesirable.  The truth is (at least, I want to claim the truth is) we are all always doing both – following norms and following gratifications; acting according to reasons and acting according to interests.  I take this to be part of Hegel’s argument in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology – and it is strongly analogous to the argument about the relation between normative attitudes and normative statuses that Brandom develops at length in connection to practice (practice being the objective pole of the social-scientific reductionist project, where desire or interests are the subjective pole).  Where Kant had argued that when following norms we must follow the norm qua norm – the moral value of an action is evacuated if it is carried out for reasons other than duty – Hegel argues that we are always acting for reasons other than duty: the taint of interests and gratifications can never be escaped.  

Slightly more specifically, I take the Hegelian argument to be that acting according to duty is the same thing as acting according to interests, with three additional features: 1) the action must participate in the appropriate complex social system that can grant the action the status of duty-following, above and beyond its interest-dimension; 2) the action must conform to the social proprieties thereby instituted; and 3) the action must be seen under the appropriate stance – the ‘great-souled’ rather than ‘small-souled’ perspective.  It is not just a matter of shifting perspective, and it is not just a matter of instituting the appropriate social relations – both must be present, and then the action itself must conform to what the social system in question has adjudicated as rule-following.

That’s my overhasty reconstruction of the Hegelian argument.  But then, having understood norm-following in this Hegelian rather than Kantian way, we have the option of still adopting the ‘small-souled’ perspective on action.  We can shift aspects, as when viewing Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit picture, seeing the same action under the aspect of duty and under the aspect of interests.  Moreover, we can do this even for actions that we ourselves take to be proper.  Provided we keep hold of the capacity to ‘shift aspects’ in this way, we do not degrade the normativity of an action by understanding the interests and gratifications that motivate it.  Rather, those interests and gratifications are the ‘subjective material substance’ of the action that also has an aspect (in Hegelian terms) in the realm of spirit (in more secular Brandomian terms: in the space of reasons).  We can change aspect on our own actions, and on actions the normative dimension of which we endorse, just as we can on those we criticise.

This manoeuvre can then reduce the asymmetry of our analysis.  Instead of seeing our enemies as driven by base interests, and our friends as motivated by noble norms, we can see the interests at play in the constitution of our own norms, and vice versa.  We no longer see the norms and interests as two different categories of motive (for example, a categorical imperative and a hypothetical imperative, in the Kantian vocabulary).  Rather, we are all driven by gratifications and interests, and understanding this shouldn’t lead us to the ‘nihilism’ associated with ‘global cynicism’, but rather to a better understanding of our social and psychological worlds. Genealogy is not rebutted by this broader perspective – it is one of its moments, and an important one.

Three challenges to normativity

Ok.  With apologies, this post will be nothing more than a rehash of earlier posts. I’m trying to get my categories lined up, and I’m afraid the blog is where I do this kind of thing.

So.  I’ve said that there are three very broad orientations to the analysis of social phenomena:

1. Naturalistic or scientistic: analysing human social life as you would any natural phenomenon; no specific ‘empathetic’ or ‘interpretive’ dimension.
2. Intentional: analysing human social life in terms of goal-oriented or intentional action.
3. Moral or values-based: analysing the meanings or norms that structure and shape social life.

I’ve also said that there are three major challenges to normativity associated with ‘modernity’ – in an earlier post I called these nihilism, relativism, and cynicism.  I now want to say that these two sets of three categories line up with each other.

1. Naturalistic or scientistic approaches study social or human life as if it were a natural phenomenon.  Here we seem to risk a specifically scientistic form of the denial of normativity – evacuating human meaning from a world understood in coldly mechanistic terms.  This is the risk of ‘nihilism’.
2. Intentional or goal-oriented analysis can seem to risk ‘explaining’ meaning or norms in terms of gratifications or drives or utility-maximisation – that is, in purely instrumental terms, or in terms of desires or interests rather than values.  This may seem to miss what’s meaningful and valuable in human meaning and value.  This is the risk I’m calling ‘cynicism’.
3. Moral or values-based approaches don’t seem to risk evacuating morality or values – after all, these are the explicit object of analysis.  However, as a social-scientific perspective this is engaging in the comparative analysis of different value systems.  This may seem to risk ‘relativising’ those value systems – undermining what is truly valuable in value, and meaningful in meaning, by treating all values and meanings alike.  This is the risk of ‘relativism’.

So, at this very high level of abstraction we have three different approaches to the analysis of social phenomena, each of which exhibits a characteristic apparent threat to our value- or meaning-systems.  Of course there are many ways we can subdivide each of these categories.  Moreover, there are different ways these categories can interact.  There are characteristic ‘reductionist’ projects associated with the scientistic and intentional approaches, and there are characteristic ‘anti-reductionist’ projects associated with the intentional and values-based approaches.  Or we can try to bring multiple perspectives together, in some kind of grand synthesis.

Anyway, this is a very crude map to the space I’m trying to navigate – but (at least as of right now) it feels (at least to me) like a useful one.

Typologising social theory

How to think about the terrain of social theory?  This is another post flailing around in connection to a vast literature I largely haven’t read, making basic points that will no doubt still manage to be wrong in important ways – but still, I want to draw some distinctions.

Start with the distinction between the natural and social sciences (or, archaically, the moral sciences; or, more broadly and loosely, the humanities) – Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft.  The idea here is that there is some kind of fundamental difference between the appropriate method and stance to take towards the study of nature and the study of humanity.

The first distinction to draw within the social sciences, then, is the distinction between those who agree with this distinction and those who do not.  One ‘scientistic’ approach within the social sciences argues that the exact same methods that are appropriate to the natural sciences are also appropriate to the social sciences: humanity is a natural phenomenon like any other, and can be studied in the same basic way one studies planets and atoms and mountains and so on and so forth.  This scientistic approach disdains the idea that there is some special meaning-stuff that requires special analytic techniques, when dealing with the human or social world.

Then there are a broad range of social-theoretic approaches that reject such ‘scientism’.  These approaches believe there is something in human social life which cannot be captured by the tools used to study the natural world.

What does this ‘special human sauce’ consist in?  My thinking here is very crude – hopefully I will come back to this typology and greatly improve it, down the road.  For now, though, I’m going to draw a distinction between those who emphasise intentionality and those who emphasise values.  

Intentionality, in this sense, is goal-oriented activity.  The idea is that objects in the natural world obey laws, but we cannot reasonably ascribe intentions or goals to those objects.  Humans, by contrast, exhibit goal-oriented behaviour.

We can further subdivide this ‘intentionality’ category, by asking: how is intentionality understood?  Here, again, my categories are very crude, but I’m going to draw a distinction between two models of intentionality.  

On the one hand, there is the ‘instrumental rationality’ approach.  Here we have goals that are ‘given’ as desires, and then the exercise of instrumental reason to guide the social actor towards those goals.  The most developed form of this approach is decision theory, which is a dauntingly vast field full of extremely developed formal resources for understanding decision principles given preferences.

On the other hand, there is what I’m going to call the ‘drives’ approach.  Here, again, we’re dealing with desire, but instrumental reason is backgrounded.  In the ‘drives’ approach, desire and action are more bound together.  I don’t feel like I really have a handle on how to characterise this category, but obviously my paradigm here is the psychoanalytic model of the psyche.

This is all on the ‘intentionality’ side of the distinction between ‘intentionality’ and ‘values’.  Shifting over to the ‘values’ side, I feel like my categories are even vaguer.  But this is where ‘norms’ live.  Theorists concerned with values think that what characterises the human is not intentionality per se, but rather the fact that we participate in some kind of moral substance.  From this perspective (or at least a popular version of it), animals can exhibit intentionality – animals can engage in goal-oriented activity – but animals cannot participate in a world of norms and values.  The goal of Geisteswissenschaft, then, is to study this moral content of the human world.

Alright.  All this is humiliatingly crude.  But it does the work I want it to do, for now.  In the first instance, I have a three-component typology – three different perspectives which take a different kind of object as their proper domain.

• The scientistic or naturalistic perspective.  This perspective treats human action as just one other kind of natural phenomenon.  Behaviourism is an example of this approach.
• The goal-oriented or intentional perspective.  This perspective sees the characteristic feature of human life as intentional action.  Rational choice theory is an example of this approach.
• The values-centred or moral perspective.  This perspective sees the characteristic feature of human life as participation in a world of values.  Weberian sociology would be an example of this approach.

Ok.  Now.  There is obviously a great deal of controversy about the relation between these three broad kinds of approaches.  In particular, there are reductionist ambitions on the part of the scientistic approach, to explain both intentionality and values in terms of natural-scientific categories.  There are also reductionist ambitions on the part of the intentional approach, to explain norms or values in terms of (take your pick:) instrumental reason or psychological drives.  The values-centred or moral perspective, by contrast, tends to disdain the other two approaches precisely for their reductionism.

All well and good.  My simple point, for now, is that Brandom’s philosophy is basically interested in the relationship between the first of these categories (the scientistic approach) and the third (norms or values).  It’s not that Brandom has nothing to say about goal-oriented action.  But, as I’ve said in recent posts, Brandom’s strong anti-psychologising commitments tend to evacuate much of the substance of this second (intentionality) approach.  Brandom is no friend of instrumental reason; nor does he have anything to say about psychological drives and their vicissitudes.  To a useful first approximation, Brandom is interested in the relation between what he calls ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ Sellarsian theoretical approaches: scientific naturalism, and an analysis of normativity in terms of the space of reasons.

I’m interested in approach number two, though.  This is where I want to live, on the blog, for quite some time.  This is where psychoanalysis lives; it’s where rational choice theory lives; it’s also (as I keep saying) the space that Hegel is wrestling with in important sections of the Phenomenology. The claim I keep making and remaking in recent posts on the blog, is that in his treatment of the Phenomenology Brandom conflates the kind of reductionism associated with the scientistic perspective with the kind of reductionism associated with the intentionality perspective. I think this conflation badly distorts A Spirit of Trust’s analysis of the Spirit chapter. In any case, I want to start thinking about everything from this intentionality perspective – at the cost of significant crudity, no doubt, but with some gains too, I hope, eventually.

Moving on

Ok. I started blogging almost exactly 17 years ago.  The goal was then – as it still is – to get to grips with economics.  In one sense I’ve done OK at that goal – among other things, I managed to pick up a PhD in economics in that period.  But in a more accurate sense, progress has been painfully slow.  I’m not going to self-flagellate, but there’s a lot of very basic work still to do.

Why has progress been so slow?  A lot of the reason is that I’ve really been pursuing two parallel projects here, one in economics or political economy, the other in philosophy.  I don’t seem to be able to ‘just’ do economics – I seem to need to have some philosophical comprehension of the categories I’m using – and that impulse has taken me very, very far afield, over the years.

From my current vantage-point, it seems to me that I can periodise my philosophical progress on here into two long phases.  Phase one – which began before I started blogging – was deconstructionist.  When I started blogging I was a Derridean, for some value of the term ‘Derridean’.  I had reacted very negatively to an undergraduate education in philosophy, which seemed to me to be most dogmatic precisely when it took itself to be being most rational.  Since Derrida was the hated enemy of reason, for many of my professors, I read Derrida – and I found him to be incisive and scholarly, albeit also literary and provocative.  So – through most of my twenties I was some kind of Derridean.

I learned several things from Derrida.  I learned the importance and power of close reading.  I also learned a toolkit of analytic tricks.  The most central of those tricks was as follows: find some category that a theoretical system insists is self-contained, and which the system analyses in contrast to some lesser, incidental category; demonstrate (or, I suppose, at any rate, claim) that the lesser category is in fact constitutive of the ‘self-contained’ category.  I learned to be wary of a metaphysical desire for purity of essence.  Finally, Derrida’s arguments about a) the role of social context in determining conceptual content, and b) the openness of social context to an unknowable future, seemed important in pointing ‘beyond’ philosophy towards more social-theoretic resources.  This element of Derrida seemed (and still seems) to me to intersect productively with the more pragmatist and social-theoretic dimensions of the analytic tradition.

So – phase one of my philosophical approach on here was a pragmatist- and sociologically-inflected deconstructionism.  The problem with this approach is that deconstruction basically runs out of resources (and/or interest) when it gets to the more social-theoretic and pragmatist dimensions of its arguments.  My vague idea, when I started blogging, was that I could ‘deconstruct’ economics as I educated myself in the discipline.  But, as it turned out, deconstruction just didn’t have the right kind of social-theoretic resources for a very productive engagement with economics – or, arguably, with anything much beyond metaphysics.

Phase two of my philosophical approach on here was Brandom.  I read ‘Making It Explicit’ in 2010 – and really I’ve been working through Brandom’s apparatus ever since.  I still have more work to do in that regard.  But now – and especially since working through ‘A Spirit of Trust’ – I think I can fairly comfortably ‘embed’ the deconstructionist apparatus I started with, on the blog, within Brandom’s system.  Derrida’s key intellectual moves, as I now see it, are basically tweaks of Hegelian moves: the argument that an apparently ‘independent’ category is in reality constituted by disavowed content that the theorist aims to exclude from the independent category’s true essence now strikes me as a Hegelian ‘dialectical’ argument par excellence.  And Brandom has convincingly rendered these arguments in an analytic idiom that makes them, to my mind, much more tractable than they are in either Hegel or Derrida – easier to understand, and easier to integrate with other intellectual projects.

Anyway, I’ve spent a huge amount of time and effort trying to get to grips with Brandom.  In many important ways my understanding of Brandom is still inadequate – when it comes to his work in formal logic, for example, I barely know or understand the first thing.  But there’s a lot that I do follow.  I note with some dismay that even back in 2010 I was writing on the blog that “I’m interested in connecting the practice-theoretic foundation of Robert Brandom’s philosophical apparatus to the basic categories of Freud’s ‘discourse on desire’”.  Well – that’s still my interest.  And I think it’s fair to say that I’ve made… well, if not exactly zero progress on that project, certainly not 14 years’ worth of progress.  None of us really have enough life to work ~this~ slowly.

I do, however, think I now understand much better why I had such difficulty making progress on that project, over the years.  As I now see it, Brandom has systematically evacuated the ‘psychological’ from his philosophical system.  Brandom’s hugely impressive apparatus gives one very little purchase, if one tries to put it to ‘psychological’ use, and this is by design.  As Brandom quips, citing Stanley Cavell, Kant de-psychologised epistemology, Frege de-psychologised logic, and Wittgenstein de-psychologised psychology.  Brandom inhabits and extends this de- or anti-psychologising tradition.  He talks about “reliable differential responsive dispositions” rather than “experience” – cutting the Gordian knot of the Sellarsian ‘myth of the given’ by simply evacuating empiricist categories from his system altogether.  On the propositional side, he talks about “commitments” not “beliefs”.  And Brandom’s work is all about reasons for action – not motives, still less drives.

In a certain sense, then, I’ve spent the better part of fifteen years holding two dramatically incompatible sets of theoretical commitments.  On the one hand, there is a fundamentally and programmatically anti-psychologising philosophical framework.  On the other hand, there is a set of social-theoretic resources that are all about desire, gratification, utility, etc.  The two major social-theoretic traditions I am perhaps most interested in – psychoanalysis and political economy – have fundamentally subjectivist and psychologising theoretical roots.  Hardly surprising, then, that although I’ve frequently posted about my desire to reconcile these frameworks, I haven’t actually made much, if any, progress doing so.

Well, I don’t want to sound premature, still less triumphalist – as I say, my dominant affect is dismay, as I think about how slow things go on here, and just how much work I have still to do.  But it feels, affectively, as if I’ve finally cleared this hurdle.  The last set of posts on the blog – as well as the vague inchoate ideas at the back of my mind that I’ll hopefully eventually try to work through properly on here – seem to me to go a long way towards squaring this circle.  It feels to me, then, whether rightly or wrongly, that I’m now heading into a third long phase of philosophical work on the blog.  Just as the Brandomian apparatus could ‘incorporate’ most of the Derridean apparatus, so I have hopes for keeping ahold of all the hard-won pragmatist insights I’ve found in Brandom’s work, while breaking with the de-psychologising elements of Brandom’s project.  This feels to me like a big enough break with Brandom that it merits a new ‘phase’ of work on here – a phase that can finally, maybe, make proper contact with the psychological and – especially – political-economic approaches that were, after all, meant to be the point of the entire enterprise.

As ever, only time will tell whether this is all a mirage.  It’s hard not to feel that I’m simply moving too slowly on here to actually reach my destination within any reasonable human timespan.  But so it goes – one keeps moving on.