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.