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Monday, August 8, 2011
NDPR: Today's Reviews
NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEWS
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Volumes 1 and 2, Oxford University Press,
2011, 592 + 848pp., $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199265923.
Reviewed by Mark Schroeder, University of Southern California
It is finally here. Wrapped in a stunning jacket design featuring the author's
own photographs and embossed gold and black titling, the two massive
volumes of Derek Parfit's On What Matters will be the most beautiful
philosophy books on any shelf they grace -- a worthy start to living up to over
a decade of being "the most eagerly awaited book in philosophy", according to
Oxford University Press's promotion materials.
Read more: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25393-on-what-matters-volumes-1-and-
2/
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David Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness, Oxford University Press,
2010, 596pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780195311112.
Reviewed by Joseph Levine, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Since bursting onto the philosophical scene in the mid-nineties, David
Chalmers has established himself as a significant figure in philosophy of mind
and metaphysics.
Read more: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25394-the-character-of-consciousness/
Thursday, July 28, 2011
NDPR Naomi Scheman, Shifting Ground: Knowledge and Reality, Transgression and Trustworthiness
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2011-07-40 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews
Naomi Scheman, Shifting Ground: Knowledge and Reality, Transgression and Trustworthiness, Oxford University Press, 2011, 251pp., $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780195395105.
Reviewed by Pieranna Garavaso, University of Minnesota Morris
NDPR IS SWITCHING TO A NEW WEBSITE AND WILL NOT BE ABLE TO POST OR EMAIL ANY NEW REVIEWS UNTIL AUGUST 4.
FROM AUGUST 4TH ON, EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS WILL RECEIVE ONE MAILING FOR EACH DAY OF PUBLICATION, WITH LINKS TO EACH OF THE REVIEWS PUBLISHED THAT DAY.
The eleven essays of this volume -- all published between 1995 and 2008 - are grouped around three main subjects: four essays are devoted to Knowledge; three to Reality; and the last four to Transgression and Trustworthiness. The theoretical areas covered in the essays are unrelated, "possibly hostile to one another," (4) for each essay was written in response to a specific request and is directed to a specific audience. Short and interesting introductions to the different sections provide the history of individual essays and connect them with essays in other sections. These writings display a feature shared by much feminist philosophy and distinctive of Naomi Scheman's work: core philosophical issues such as objectivity, personal identity, and the nature of the ultimate reality are examined from marginalized perspectives or in connection with topics not commonly discussed within analytic philosophy, such as the identity of transsexuals and Jews, community based research, or teaching for social justice. Scheman's writing style is intriguing and never dull; there is much cleverness and insight in this body of work; some passages and one or two essays are denser than the others and may be better appreciated after slower or repeated reading. The footnotes provide a glimpse of the broad scholarship that nourishes Scheman's work and contain excellent suggestions for further reading.
Epistemology is at the center of Scheman's thinking as it dominates all sections, even the one devoted to ontology. She defends a form of practical, i.e., politically engaged, standpoint naturalized epistemology (10-11). This epistemology concerns the epistemic problems of real people; it recognizes the impossibility of giving abstract and absolute notions of objectivity and truth. Throughout the articles one can see the influence of Wittgenstein's thought as Scheman gives special attention to language in practice and to forms of life. Moreover, Scheman seems to share Wittgenstein's critical approach to mainstream philosophy, whether on the apprehension of language or on the existence of mind-independent meanings. She approaches philosophical questions from marginalized standpoints and repeatedly calls into question attempts to generalize any specific point of view. The question "Who do we mean by 'we'?" is often explicitly raised and at other times tacitly implied. Unlike Wittgenstein, though, Scheman stresses the political dimensions of any philosophical theorizing: "We have entered post-modernity characterized by a politics of difference" (6); this new phase arises from the demise of the ideals of modernity and liberalism. The main aim of the collection is to articulate "a 'postmodern' epistemology, which puts diversity and a politics of social justice in place of the universalistic abstract individualism that have [sic] framed the epistemology and politics of modernity" (12). Accordingly, in several articles Scheman attempts to give "robust, usable articulations" of the notion of objectivity. We will come back later to the question whether or not this interesting move is fully successful.
The section on Knowledge contains two essays focused on theoretical issues and two essays focused on identity as an epistemic stance. "Non-Negotiable Demands: Metaphysics, Politics, and the Discourse of Needs" centers on the demands at the origin of philosophical theories and argues that such demands cannot be met; furthermore, if these demands were met, they would not satisfy the needs from which they arise. Three traditional philosophical problems are discussed: realism versus idealism; universal moral standards; and privileged access. Here, we see Scheman performing a move which is repeated with regard to different issues in other parts of the volume, i.e., transposing century old and prima facie thoroughly abstract problems under the new guises of hotly political contemporary concerns, e.g., the reenactment of the debate between those who assert and those who deny the existence of a mind-independent reality as the question of which type of realism can best capture "the real needs of the marginalized or subordinated" (25), or which realism can be as rigorous about the knowing subjects as it is about the objects of knowledge.
The second chapter, "Feminist Epistemology," was presented during a 1994 APA panel exchange with Louise Antony. Antony's commentary and Scheman's reply to it, which are not reprinted here, appeared in print in Metaphilosophy the following year. Two main aims of the article are to argue that there should be a field called feminist epistemology and to give an idea of the work done in this area. The second part focuses on the development of a non-individualistic notion of the epistemic subject, on the epistemic relevance of uneven social and political power, and on the critique of objectivity as the goal of knowledge and of the reigning normative epistemic standards.
"On Waking Up One Morning and Discovering We Are Them" is the first of two autobiographical essays. It focuses on how to be a radical academic while teaching undergraduate and graduate students. Unlike many women philosophers who experienced discrimination and sexual harassment -- see for example the narratives collected by Linda Martín Alcoff in Singing in the Fire (2003) -- Scheman, by her own admission, represents a lucky exception (53). This thoughtful narrative refutes the stereotypes that appear in attacks to radical feminist academics such as those contained in some of Christina Hoff Sommers' articles.
The second autobiographical essay focuses on Jewish identity. A terminal moraine is the residue of rock fragments left by a receding glacier; in the essay that takes its title from it, the terminal moraine is a metaphor for the Jewish location: "To grow up on terminal moraine is to grow up on the unnarratable fragments of other people's stories. . . . The experience for which I am evoking the image of terminal moraine is that of having the ground under one's feet be that of other people's stories." (67-68)
The reality discussed in the essays in Part II is not so much the focus of traditional ontology, but rather a reality inspired by Wittgenstein's metaphor of the 'rough ground,' i.e., our practices and forms of life. In "Against Physicalism," Scheman rejects physicalism, defined as the view that explanations of human behaviors and mental life based on beliefs, intentions, emotions, desires, and attitudes refer to events, states, and processes identical to, or dependent on or determined by, events, states, or processes in the body of the person to whom the behavior or mental life are ascribed (84). Instead she claims that
beliefs, desires, emotions, and other phenomena of our mental lives are the particulars that they are because they are socially meaningful, and when they figure as those particulars in causal accounts, neither those accounts nor the phenomena that figure in them survive abstraction from social context (83-84).
At the beginning of this essay, Scheman characterizes "most" contemporary analytic philosophy as naturalized, i.e., as claiming that "the physical sciences are the lodestone both for epistemology and for ontology." (81) As much as I wish it were true, this seems to me inaccurate and refuted by the still ongoing debates about the normative but not descriptive role of philosophy (just as a recent example of non-naturalized analytic philosophy, see Christian Barth's Objectivity and the language-dependence of thought : a transcendental defence of universal lingualism (2011).
"Feeling Our Way toward Moral Objectivity" is an essay on the borderline between ethics and cognitive science. Scheman argues for two main theses. The first is the denial that emotions are states of individuals; their identity as complex entities is based on explanatory schemes that gain a meaning only after being interpreted within social contexts (98). The second thesis argues that, contrary to common opinion, emotions are not obstacles to, but instead facilitators for, the achievement of objectivity in moral judgments (104). Very much in agreement with Helen Longino's conception of scientific objectivity, Scheman regards objective moral judgments as those that have "come out and been subjected to the critical workings of a sufficiently democratic community" (107).
The starting point of "Queering the Center by Centering the Queer: Reflections on Transsexuals and Secular Jews" is the conflict between two goals for the marginalized: either to integrate with the privileged as much as possible or to disrupt the norm. In arguing for a better way out of this dichotomy, Scheman defends the role of relational notions of memory and narrativity in the creation of a self: "Narrativity per se may be humanly important, but we have no access to narrativity per se: What we have are culturally specific narratives, which facilitate the smooth telling of some lives and straitjacket, distort, or fracture others." (113) A comparison and contrast between Jewish identity and the identity of transsexuals leads to the finding of a certain unavoidable level of ambiguity in the identities of those who are marginalized: "the experiences of variously marginalized people provide alternative models of subjectivity, less seamless and transparent, less coherent and solid, than those of privilege" (144).
The focus of the third and last part of the collection is the future and how we may want to start the work of transformation of philosophy, which the previous sections have shown to be necessary, if we want to pay attention to the 'real needs' of those who discuss philosophical problems. "Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground" starts from the problem of finding a viable notion of objectivity without any commitment to the view that Wittgenstein rejected throughout his whole life, i.e., the idea that there is a mind-independent reality and that only some correspondence with such a reality can make a thesis true and objective or a practice objectively correct. Scheman points out, "where one can stand to obtain a perspective on a set of practices that is simultaneously informed and critical is a deep and central question for political theory," especially with regard to "multiculturalism" (150). Here is another example of Scheman's ability to connect philosophical perspectives not at the center of mainstream or analytical debate to core problems such as the opposition between objectivity and relativism.
The next two articles are markedly different from the others in this collection and their difference is a powerful testament to the seriousness with which Scheman takes the commitment of philosophers and epistemologists to produce engaged and practical knowledge. "The Trustworthiness of Research: The Paradigm of Community-Based Research" is coauthored with Catherine Jordan, a pediatric neuropsychologist, and Susan Gust, a community organizer. The authors argue for "a fundamental shift in the academic research culture, a shift that takes the ethos of community-based participatory research (CBPR) as the preferred approach to instilling trust in the research enterprise" (170). One interesting contrast is between the exclusive mutual trust shared by the scientists engaged in research governed by the Standard Norms of customary laboratory science and the trust between scientists and community arising from CBPR. After outlining and defending the main features of CBPR, this article provides a report on the results of an actual example of CBPR, i.e., a study to address the concerns regarding lead poisoning in the Phillips Community in Minneapolis and on the initiatives originating from this study. "Narrative, Complexity, and Context: Autonomy as an Epistemic Value" has also a connection with a real life example of CBPR, namely the usefulness of narratives in the acknowledgment and protection of the autonomy of patients in relationships with doctors and nurses. This paper discusses the epistemology of naturalized and narrative bioethics, i.e., bioethics grounded in the specificities of practice and in the stories told by the different participants in those practices. Scientists can do their work best, especially from an epistemic point of view, "only insofar as they think of themselves and the knowledge they create as framed by, and responsible to, the relationships in which, whether they recognize it or not, they are enmeshed." (206).
The last article, "Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness," provides a fit ending for the collection as it is characterized by both the epistemological focus dear to the author and by a tight link between Scheman's theoretical and political commitments. The paper was motivated by the "science wars" of the 1990s and was meant as a defense of that part of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science that is most friendly to the notion of objectivity against the critics who claimed that the feminist criticisms of traditional science methods together with the criticisms coming from postmodern cultural theorists destroy all notions of objectivity. Scheman strives to save objectivity and interprets the work of feminist philosophy of science as
developing accounts of objectivity that take seriously our need for it: If objectivity is an instrumental good, then it has actually to function so as to produce the good it promises: what we label 'objective' has actually to be worthy of our trust and the trust of a diverse range of others. (210)
Scheman proposes a type of objectivity that arises from a community of research when community members are included in the process and work on the project alongside scientists, when trust ensues between community and scientists.
This volume rewards its readers with the breadth of its topics and a writing style that captivates the readers' attention. From this body of work emerges a position that is as intriguing as it is problematic, for it strives to weave together two approaches to philosophy that seem prima facie antithetical. Scheman's epistemology is naturalized and yet she wants to incorporate also a Wittgensteinian appeal to practices and forms of life. However, Wittgenstein explicitly and repeatedly rejected a naturalistic approach to philosophical inquiry and many of his contemporary interpreters appeal to him exactly to bolster a non-naturalized philosophy, e.g., Avrum Stroll and Danièle Moyal-Sharrock. I am not raising the question whether Scheman is reading Wittgenstein correctly as she is clearly not interested in exegesis, but rather in letting Wittgenstein's insights guide her thinking. My question is rather how two perspectives, i.e., naturalism on one side and a Wittgensteinian appeal to the normativity of practices and forms of life on the other, can ever be successfully weaved together. Scheman seems to acknowledge at least one version of this conflict when she states, "Those who hold on to internalist conceptions of scientific objectivity do so in part because they believe that a naturalized account of science as a social practice is a wholly different endeavor from a normative account of it as truth producing" (231). The only regret I am left with after reading this book is that I wish I had found in it a more explicit discussion of how to accomplish this synthesis.
NDPR Michel Weber, Whitehead's Pancreativism: Jamesian Applications
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2011-07-38 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews
Michel Weber, Whitehead's Pancreativism: Jamesian Applications, Ontos, 2011, 286pp., $139.95 (hbk), ISBN 9783868381030.
Reviewed by Joseph A. Bracken, S.J., Xavier University
Michel Weber has worked hard to make the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead better known and appreciated. With Will Desmond, for example, he was the editor of Handbook of Process Thought (Ontos, 2008), which contained 113 entries by 101 scholars from around the globe. Likewise, in the academic series Process Thought, edited by Nicholas Rescher, Johanna Seibt and Weber, Weber published Whitehead's Pancreativism: The Basics in 2006 and now Whitehead's Pancreativism: Jamesian Applications in 2011. As the title indicates, he aims in this book to show the influence of James on Whitehead's intellectual formation and the pertinence of Whitehead's philosophy for understanding James' notion of "radical empiricism". There are some additional chapters setting forth his own thoughts on the value of "radical empiricism" for psychotherapy, economics and politics. In an opening chapter, he explores the specific points where the influence of James on Whitehead was most evident: the epochal theory of time or ontological atomism, the notion of feeling as the bond between successive moments of experience, the denial of the soul as a spiritual substance, and the prerequisite of solitude for religious experience (18-25). Then he contrasts James' celebrated distinction between rationality, irrationality and non-rationality (the priority of life over logic) with Whitehead's reformed subjectivist principle: philosophy starts and ends with experience so that the Universe is constituted by "the interweaving of experiencing subjects and experienced objects." (86). So, while the reflective consciousness found in classical metaphysics tends to be dualistic and substantialistic, radical empiricism is non-dualistic and processive.
In subsequent chapters Weber contrasts James' notion of "pure experience" as the mixture of subjectivity and objectivity with Whitehead's categories of actual entity and society. Actual entities are discontinuous but ordered to one another serially so that there is a flow of feeling from one actual entity to its successor(s) so as to produce a felt continuity (104-113). He likewise makes clear the affinity between James and Whitehead with regard to "first-hand" and "second-hand" religious experiences. First-hand religious experience is private and non-rational; second-hand religious experience is public and rational. First-hand religious experience has to do with spirituality; a feeling-level response to an all-embracing Other; second-hand religious experience has to do with institutional religion and one's participation in its various rituals and doctrinal beliefs. So, while Whitehead and James would agree that "religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness" (Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 16), Whitehead, as a more systematic thinker than James, also sees the value of "rational religion," a system of general truths which have the effect of transforming character when they are sincerely held and vividly apprehended" (Religion in the Making, 15). Weber also takes note of James' belief in a "continuum of cosmic consciousness" in which "subject and object, subject and subject, grow together and reciprocally (com-)prehend themselves" (172). Whitehead, in turn, specified that all actual entities are subject/superjects; thus all entities are both experiencing and experienced, observer and object observed.
In three concluding chapters of his book, Weber ranges farther afield in his espousal of radical empiricism. In the first, he compares the world views of Whitehead and the systemic psychotherapy of Paul Watzlawick. According to Watzlawick, classical psychoanalysis is "first and foremost, monadic, intrapsychic, in its essence: it deals with an isolated individual understood from the general perspective of a school (Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian . . . )" (189). The analyst tries to understand the deviant behavior of the client in terms of the understanding of the psyche already laid out by Freud, Jung, Lacan, etc. Normally, it takes a long time for the analyst to determine why the client exhibits deviant behavior and then to correct it by attacking its principle or source within the psyche of the client. What Watzlawick called "brief therapy" is "systemic, polyadic. It deals with an interconnected actor from his/her own particular point of view. . . What matters is the present complaint of the patient, and the rapid reform of the symptoms" (189). It deals with the "how" of a cure here and now rather than the "why" of a problem from a particular scientific perspective. There are thus two different ontologies at work here: "One emphasizes deterministic continuity amid change and linear causation; the other, free change amid continuity and retroactive causation [feedback causation]" (194).
In the next chapter Weber analyzes the relevance of Whitehead's radical empiricism and pragmatic attitude to life ("to live, to live well, to live better" from The Function of Reason). We do not live in a cosmos (a closed or fully determined world) but a chaosmos (an open, only partially ordered world). Yet human beings should still be able to set up a living civilization, grounded in persuasive rather than coercive power, which seeks harmony and relies on a strong sense of the individual-in-community rather than the isolated self-centered individual (214). But unhappily, contemporary Westerners live in a society strongly structured by opposite goals and values, a dystopia rather than a utopia (the dystopia of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World versus the utopia of his later novel Island). Likewise, Weber makes reference to R. D. Laing's The Politics of Experience, which argues for the acceptance of all experiences and only experiences so as not to prejudge the mental health of an individual or of society using a priori concepts. Weber concludes: first, that speculative philosophy like any other scientific discipline should start from experience, not abstract principles; secondly, that generalizations extracted from experience should function to deepen experience; thirdly, that "one should distinguish, but not bring into conflict, the objective and subjective dimensions of experience." (240).
In the final chapter Weber begins with a pair of questions: what is philosophy, and who are philosophers? The answer to the first question is that philosophy functions to naturalize religious myth: "Everything that exists is natural; human beings, the divine, the World form a unified world manifesting the same living power" (249). The answer to the second question is that there are three kinds of philosophers: the living philosopher, the philosopher-expert, and the critical philosopher (249-257). The living philosopher, with William James as the archetypal example, claims that philosophy should assist in living an authentic life. The philosopher-expert is the academic who seeks public recognition by his/her one-sided attack on rival positions. The critical philosopher, exemplified by Whitehead, seeks rational coherence within a philosophy to live by. The way to such a critical philosophy is to admit that, while all experiences have to be taken into account, the most significant do not occur within consciousness-zero or common sense experience. In pure experience, we first experience a felt Whole (Umwelt) and only later experience ourselves as subjects and experience the world as divided into different kinds of objects (267). A lived philosophy emphasizes the felt Whole; analytical philosophy seeks to distinguish between parts and then order them to one another. Radical empiricism demands that both be taken into account:
The philosopher defines for herself the horizon of her questioning, [realizing that] the wider the horizon the more inclusive the thought. But this shouldn't prevent however the philosopher to narrow the scope of his inquiry -- provided that the initial horizon is somehow kept in the background. (274)
An evaluation and critique of this book is not easy to write. On the one hand, while many historians of modern philosophy have tended to align James with Charles Sanders Peirce in terms of pragmatism and an approach to truth-claims in terms of foreseen consequences, Weber tries to explore the affinity of James and Whitehead in terms of radical empiricism with its emphasis on individuality and difference in subjective experience. Many valuable insights into the philosophies of James and Whitehead are thereby gained, but at the price of following a line of thought which is often highly convoluted and hard to follow. This problem is compounded by some obvious inconsistencies in grammar and sometimes an inept choice of words. English is, of course, not Weber's first language; but he or his editor could have engaged the services of a professional proof-reader whose first language is English before publishing the book. Finally, there is no index of topics covered at the end of the book. This is a serious drawback to the utility of an academic publication intended for further scholarly work.
My biggest misgivings with the philosophical conclusions of this book, however, lie elsewhere and may be disputed by Weber and other orthodox Whiteheadians as a misreading of the master's thought. Weber claims that human consciousness is distinguished by continuity amid discontinuity, but his emphasis is on discontinuity, the notion of drops of experience articulated first by James and later adopted by Whitehead, which allows for novelty and creativity. My own preoccupation would be with what is meant by continuity within an ever-changing world. In Whitehead's metaphysics, continuity is provided by the category of society, a succession of actual entities (drops of experience) linked by a flow of feeling (104-113) and a recurrence of pattern or structure in the succession of actual entities (180). For Weber this "contiguity" of feeling and objective pattern between successive actual entities is enough to account for the continuity of existence required by the notion of society; for me that supposition is not explanation enough.
Weber says, for example: "There is a trajectory of actualities-object crowned by an actuality-subject, soon to topple into objectivity and to be followed by a new concrescence" (111). What is this objectivity and where is it located? If one has in mind the consequent nature of God, the moment-by-moment unification of all the newly actualized actual entities in the cosmic process, one should remember that this is, properly speaking, the subjective experience of God as the necessary basis for new divine initial aims to the next generation of actual entities. It corresponds more to the way things should be rather than the way they in fact are. If one rather maintains that past actual entities are objectively present within the extensive continuum as "one relational complex in which all potential objectifications find their niche" (Whitehead, Process and Reality, 66), this begs the question of its place within Whitehead's metaphysical scheme. As something which "underlies the whole world, past, present and future" (Process and Reality, 66), the extensive continuum seems to be related to the divine primordial nature, "the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality" (Process and Reality, 345), but here too one has to ask whether this "relational complex" is part of God's subjective experience or something existing as an objective reality in its own right. Elsewhere in Process and Reality, to be sure, Whitehead refers to the actual world as "a community of entities which are settled actual, and already become" (65). But this statement is ambiguous, given Whitehead's other claim: "In the philosophy of organism it is not 'substance' which is permanent, but 'form.' Forms suffer changing relations; actual entities 'perpetually perish' subjectively, but are immortal objectively" (Process and Reality, 29). So forms survive presumably as the patterns of self-constitution of past actual entities, but once again where are they located: in the subjective experience of God and of newly concrescing finite actual entities, or in the world as an objective reality existing in its own right?
My own solution to this evident ambiguity in Whitehead's metaphysical scheme is to postulate that "societies" are enduring fields of activity or environments structured by the dynamic interrelation of their constituent actual entities from moment to moment. The prevailing structure of the field thereby conditions the concrescence or self-constitution of constituent actual entities from moment to moment, but successive generations of actual entities by their dynamic interrelation alter the structure of the field within which they emerge and to which they contribute their individual pattern of self-constitution before expiring as subjects of experience. So there is an objective reality apart from the subjectivity of God and finite actual entities: namely, the world as a hierarchy of fields within fields, the byproduct or result of the conjoint activity of God and finite actual entities from moment to moment. But, to be fair to Weber, my position is more neo-Whiteheadian than Whiteheadian. Given Whitehead's "reformed subjectivist principle" ("apart from the experience of subjects . . . there is bare nothingness" [Process and Reality, 167]) and his ontological principle formulated as "no actual entity, then no reason" (Process and Reality, 19), then Weber is a true Whiteheadian and as a result an advocate of radical empiricism, and I am not (at least not without further qualification).
NDPR Ryan Pevnick, Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Open Borders and Absolute Sovereignty
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2011-07-39 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews
Ryan Pevnick, Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Open Borders and Absolute Sovereignty, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 199pp., $82.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521768986.
Reviewed by James Hudson, Northern Illinois University
As suggested by his subtitle, Ryan Pevnick aims to offer a moderate view of the ethical constraints on immigration policy, a compromise between libertarianism and what he calls "statism" -- this latter being the view that a nation and its citizens have no responsibility at all to foreigners who wish to immigrate and so may freely exclude them. His position is thus comfortably non-extremist. In his view, countries such as the United States (which is his focus, though much of the discussion aims at greater generality) have some rather weighty responsibilities to admit very poor or victimized foreigners (to permanent residency and, eventually, to citizenship), but are not unjust or otherwise morally blameworthy for excluding most would-be immigrants.
In support of this position Pevnick offers his "associative ownership" theory -- not a general theory of sovereignty, but an account of an aspect of sovereignty that is especially relevant to immigration policy. On this theory the true citizens of a country are those who have helped to create or maintain its political institutions (and perhaps some of its non-political social institutions: the range of the relevant institutions is not made quite clear). These people have, as individuals and (I think we must add) as a collection, something very much like a property right in their nation. Strictly speaking, the property right is in the nation's institutions, but Pevnick claims that in practice these will be inextricably linked with a certain territory. This quasi-property-right gives them considerable latitude in preventing others from enjoying the benefits of living under those institutions and, therefore, in that territory. Considerable latitude, but not a completely free hand: they are, and their nation as a whole is, still bound by certain constraints of morality or justice in treating would-be immigrants.
Thus Pevnick rejects "statism" by (plausibly enough) upholding the moral requirement (which he considers a requirement of justice) of "rescue" -- a requirement to help others who are in dire need and whom one has the means to help without greatly sacrificing his own interests, a requirement that applies regardless of the nationality of the potential beneficiaries. But as a merely individualistic principle, applying just to the actions of individual people, this would not obviously serve Pevnick's purpose; my duty as an individual American to any particular needy foreigner seems intuitively to be quite slender. Implicitly Pevnick is giving the principle a collectivist extension, so that it binds the actions not only of individuals but also of such collective entities as nations. It is normally the nation as a whole, not any individual citizen, that determines its immigration policy; and clearly the sacrifice incurred by a nation in allowing any particular foreigner to immigrate is relatively small.
Now, the United States (in particular) does partially conform its actions to the rescue principle by admitting refugees from war and from persecution. But it does not acknowledge what Pevnick sees as its considerable obligation to allow entry to desperately poor foreigners who are unable to gain a decent living in their own countries. Here Pevnick makes his closest approach to a policy proposal that is in any way radical -- that is, not squarely within the mainstream of practical political discussion in the U.S.
Pevnick does not tell us at what point this collective obligation would lapse if there were so many extremely poor foreigners that admitting them all would be seriously harmful to the nation. Nor does he consider the suggestion that the responsibility to provide opportunities for these desperately poor people falls primarily upon other governments, not on that of the U.S. (I follow Pevnick in ignoring the distinction between a nation and its government.) Nor does he consider other measures the U.S. government might take to help the foreign desperately poor besides admitting them to the country as immigrants. These omissions prevent his support for an open-door policy toward "economic refugees" from being fully convincing.
By setting up statism as a fundamental principle of political morality, Pevnick easily finds intuitive grounds to reject it. But its advocates might better view it as a derivative, secondary rule, holding that under present international political circumstances it is generally best not to treat nations as being morally bound to look after the well-being of people not under their jurisdiction. The derivative-statist would maintain that world affairs are at present so structured that, in the long run, each nation had best concentrate on serving its own (enlightened) self-interest. Pevnick does not address this more modest version of statism, the evaluation of which would require a rather messy enquiry into empirical matters.
Pevnick follows the common practice of political philosophers by moralizing about collective actions, the agents of which are collective entities such as nations, more or less as if they were individual actions performed by individual people. But arguably he, and they, should give more attention to whether a collectivist morality modeled on the familiar individualist morality can simply be added to the latter without producing conflicts.
Obviously Pevnick's commitment to "associative ownership" is a sort of rejection not only of statism but also of the libertarian "open borders" view. I call it a "sort of" rejection, for in passing Pevnick often shows himself to be sympathetic to a very open immigration policy for the U.S. He writes: "Sidgwick argues that though open borders policies are not requirements of justice, they are nevertheless [usually] optimal. I do not wish to rule out this kind of argument in favor of open borders." (p. 80) But neither does he put forward such an argument himself, which would require -- besides much empirical material -- that he spell out his overall theoretical normative view, specifying (for example) how he thinks justice, optimality, and perhaps other considerations figure into the larger moral picture. Instead he contents himself with a rather vague intuitionism, in which potentially conflicting intuitions about rights, distributive justice, the production of utility, and whatnot are weighed against each other by a sort of meta-intuitive faculty, in a style made familiar by W. D. Ross. Given constraints of space under which he was operating, this may have been the most practical course.
Pevnick is at pains to distinguish his view from its close cousin, the culturally communitarian "shared identity" view (which he also calls "liberal nationalism"). On one version of "shared identity," "the possibility of a just society depends on citizens sharing a common public culture or national identity." (p. 14) But as Pevnick sees it, the important justification for excluding foreigners is not that they fail to participate in the citizens' cultural community and their consequent mutual cultural bond -- as he remarks, some foreigners may in fact be culturally similar to the average citizen -- but that, unlike the citizens, the foreigners have not earned a stake in the local political institutions. He brushes aside the shared-identity theorist's empirical claim about a necessary cultural precondition for the practical institution of justice, pressing instead his own argument about the direct requirements of justice in the abstract.
Pevnick's presentation of his associative ownership view is rather sketchy, leaving unanswered many important questions about citizenship. I doubt that he can give a satisfactory account of the extent of original citizenship in a newly founded nation, but let us put that aside. Even for the task of specifying what one must do to merit full membership in an already-existing nation his account is insufficiently detailed. As he would have it, present-day membership is a matter of somehow having contributed to the modification and the maintenance of the national institutions; but we are not told if these institutions are the purely political ones, or whether other social institutions -- linguistic, religious, esthetic, broadly "moral" (manners, customs, dress, etc.) -- might be relevant. There is also a (notably circular) rider -- aimed at undermining the claim of a long-time resident illegal alien -- that in order to qualify him for citizenship a person's contribution must be made with the consent of the other citizens. The extent of the contribution required for citizenship is not specified (nor is the anti-contribution -- the destructive or subversive activity -- that would forfeit citizenship); many other such questions are not addressed.
The idea of citizens as being, at least in the first instance, those who have earned a quasi-property-right in the national institutions has considerable appeal and may well figure in the popular view of immigration issues. Pevnick had done well to highlight it, and it merits a yet more detailed development than he has been able to give it here. But while its merits are evident in broad outline, a more detailed examination might well reveal insurmountable flaws.
A particularly noticeable omission from Pevnick's account concerns the possible alienability of the individual citizen's quasi-property-right: may he voluntarily transfer it to someone else, as bequest or gift, or in trade? Pevnick's appeal to Locke (Chapter 2, section III, et passim) suggests an affirmative answer, since Lockean property is transferable; but the rest of his discussion seems to assume a negative one.
Assuming inalienability, a citizen may not bequeath citizenship to even one of his or her children, and obviously babies have not contributed politically (or socially); yet many babies are treated as citizens (though others are excluded). It seems to me that Pevnick will have to view this recognition as a sort of arbitrary gift from the citizenry as a whole, thus treating the collectivist property right, unlike the individualist one, as including alienability.
Indeed, in the United States, though not in many other nations, not only do the children of citizens get citizenship by right of birth: non-citizens' children who are born in America are granted this privilege. What does Pevnick's theory imply about the propriety of this treatment of babies?
His explicit statement implies that even the American rule is, in a way, too restrictive: for he holds that all people, even children of illegal immigrants, who from fairly early childhood (not necessarily from birth) have grown up in the U.S., with little exposure to any other culture, deserve recognition as American citizens. On the other hand, his overall position seems not to require him to endorse birthright citizenship in general: a baby born in the U.S. but reared in some other country would have no principled claim to U.S. citizenship.
Though much of his treatise is quite general, Pevnick often focuses on the case of the present-day United States. In a somewhat tantalizing aside, he writes: "The considerations relevant to the United States are insufficient for considering the legitimacy, for example, of Israeli immigration policy." (p. 18) Yet he gives the case of Israel almost no consideration. Let me suggest that no general treatment of immigration can afford thus to ignore cases of the Israeli type.
As a coda to the main corpus of the book -- his general presentation of "associative ownership" and his criticism of statism and Open Borders -- Pevnick discusses and favorably evaluates the possibility of a guest-worker program for the present-day United States, suggesting improvements over the twentieth-century bracero program. One of his arguments for a (humane, generous, and quite large) guest-worker program is the impracticality of strictly enforcing a strongly exclusionary immigration policy. But this is a consideration that comports ill with the highly abstract considerations that dominated the rest of the book. He asserts that, while the U.S. has the right utterly to exclude non-distressed foreigners, enforcing such a ban would require draconian measures that would prevent the achievement of other more important goals. But might not some of these goals be morally required, in which case the U.S. would not, after all, have the right to exclude? After the highly abstract deontological theorizing (involving rights, justice, and the like) of the main body of the book, it is somewhat jarring to find considerations about the practicability of various rules thus brought in late: should they not have been raised earlier?
Pevnick does not mention any limitation on the duration of guest-worker status; for all he says, it might last until the worker's retirement or death, without earning him citizenship rights. But guest workers must be adults; where children are concerned, denial of citizenship is objectionable, because (normally) they will not have had the chance to develop ties to the culture of their parents' nation. Here, as throughout, Pevnick relies on a sharp distinction between adulthood and childhood, with his treatment of children fitting easily into the cultural communitarian framework that he rejects in application to adults. (He emphasizes the inability of foreign-born children raised in the U.S. to form ties to the foreign nation's culture, rather than their inability to make contributions to the foreign nation's political institutions.) But there is no sharp distinction between child and adult. This fact, I suggest, constitutes a theoretical difficulty for Pevnick's view; he should, at least, have discussed the borderline cases -- adolescents. Admittedly, most of the considerations that figure in his discussions throughout the book are matters of degree, which can be reflected only imperfectly in the inevitably crude categories of law and public policy.
Despite its flaws, most of which are omissions (I find myself making the common reviewer's complaint that the book is too short), Immigration and the Constraints of Justice is quite a competent performance, expressing a plausible overall view with many sensible and some penetrating observations. It is a welcome contribution to the current debate on immigration policy.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
NDPR Daniel O. Dahlstrom (ed.), Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2011-07-37 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews
Daniel O. Dahlstrom (ed.), Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 301pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521764940.
Reviewed by Theodore Kisiel, Northern Illinois University
Editor Dan Dahlstrom is quick to place this entire collection of "critical essays" under the Dilthey-Heideggerian preconception of the pan-hermeneutic character of human life: Das Leben selbst legt sich aus: "Life itself lays itself out, interprets itself, articulates itself." Aristotle's definition of humans as talking animals readily slips into our being "interpreting animals" irrevocably caught up in an interpretive process with "every move we make," thereby "elaborating, exposing, and shaping our self-understanding and, in the process, our relationships to ourselves, our world, and other things within the world." Moreover, having been thrown into this interpretive process of life willy-nilly, "our interpretations are not ours alone, but the often mindless yet time-tested iteration of a tradition of interpretations written into our most common practices and beliefs" (p. 1). The need for more thoughtful interpretations of this tradition of interpretations readily develops into some of the larger tasks assumed in the Heideggerian opus, like the need to interpret the entire history of Western thinking from its Greek beginnings to the present in order to come to terms with the "hermeneutic situation" of the revolutionary age in which we now find ourselves.
The essays are grouped into three divisions: I. Interpreting Heidegger's Philosophy; II. Interpreting Heidegger's Interpretations; III. Interpreting Heidegger's Critics.
I. Interpreting Heidegger's Philosophy
Holger Zaborowski extends the pan-hermeneutic of human life to all of Heidegger's philosophy and thought, from the hermeneutics of facticity indigenous to human life to the more transcendental hermeneutics of self-interpreting Dasein to the later hermeneutics of (and first from) the propriating event (Er-eignis) of be-ing, which is explicated by way of seynsgeschichtliches Denken, thinking in accord with the history of be-ing. Its hermeneutic finds its focus in being responsive to, listening to, hearing and saying the word/call of/from be-ing proper to its time.
Tom Sheehan takes a similar tack in his essay entitled "Facticity and Ereignis," except that his entire essay is placed under the hermeneutic-phenomenological reduction of being to meaning and its constituting source in the disclosure of meaning to human understanding. But what lets meaning come about at all? What is the constituting source of meaning as such? The answer: das Ereignis, the ever-latent 'event' of the appropriation of the human being to the meaning-giving process. "Appropriation, the thrown-together-ness of man and meaning, is the origin of intelligibility as such. It is the ultimate factum . . . what Heidegger calls facticity" (p. 54), behind which, as Dilthey put it, thought can go no further. Hardly a brute fact, in view of its being charged with meaning, but it does constitute a limit to our understanding. "Everything is understandable except the reason why everything is understandable" (58). The groundless facticity of the ever-latent Ereignis in its meaning-giving is thus the ultimate mystery of our be-ing.
Charles Guignon's essay on "Heidegger's Concept of Freedom, 1927-1930" picks up some of these hermeneutic strands (91f.) insofar as freedom is the leeway of free play (Spielraum) granted by the meaningful context of a historical world that opens up a range of possibilities from which a Dasein chooses and, by way of binding commitment, strives to develop in an effort to fulfill its own unique meaning of be-ing, its raison d'être. This also highlights the two temporal dimensions of meaning, namely, pregiven context and direction taken, that Heidegger himself distinguishes in his now 'classic' -- but typically mistranslated -- statement of the meaning of meaning: "Meaning (Sinn) is the toward-which (das Woraufhin), [pre]structured by prepossession, preview, and preconception, of the project on the basis of which something becomes understandable as something" (SZ 151).
Iain Thomson's essay on "Ontotheology," which is the later Heidegger's comprehensive characterization of any metaphysics, examines the onto-theo-logical structure of the "epochal constellations of intelligibility," especially in the early Greek beginnings of metaphysics and at its end or completion in Nietzsche. Each metaphysical epoch grasps reality at once ontologically (what things are, viewed from the inside-out, fundamentally) and theologically (how things are, viewed from the outside-in, ultimately). The early Greeks began ontologically with water as the one element from which all else is composed (Thales) and theologically with Anaximander's apeiron (the indefinite, infinite) as the source of all finite things. Nietzsche's ontology resides in the will to power of all things and his theology in the eternal recurrence of the same. But the attempt to extend this Nietzschean ontotheology of eternally recurring will-to-power to our present epoch of global technology is not completely satisfying, since it does not adequately account for this phenomenon issuing from the modern epoch in its entirety. Heidegger characterizes this constellation of intelligibility with the single hyphenated word Ge-Stell, which is best translated etymologically from its Greek and Latin roots as "syn-thetic com-posit[ion]ing," which presciently portends the internetted World Wide Web with its virtual infinity of websites, Global Positioning Systems, interlocking air traffic control grids, worldwide weather mapping, etc., all of which are structured by the complex programming based on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital logic generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and non-posit (0).
In a final essay included in this division, Simon Critchley explicates Heidegger's concept of ontological guilt as a debt or debit of existence rather than moral culpability, a lack or shortfall ever in need to be made up, of Dasein constantly lagging behind its possibilities, debit as an enduring way of be-ing. In sizing up its ultimately strange situation of be-ing, Dasein finds itself taut between two nothings, the nothing of being thrown into the world willy-nilly and the nothing of being projected into a life that inevitably ends in death. In the end, I owe it first to myself to own up to this double nullity inherent in human be-ing by becoming fully responsive to and responsible for this life that is most my own, ready to live it in its angst-full tension taut between the double shortfall of my birth and my ownmost death.
II. Interpreting Heidegger's Interpretations
Heidegger's interpretations of other thinkers and poets are notorious for their unorthodoxy and even violence. There are at least two reasons for this. First, in interpreting poets and other thinkers, Heidegger assumes that they partake at some level in the horizon of the originary hermeneutics of human life that is the starting point and goal of all of his interpretations. Second, his deconstructive interpretations of others' interpretations by and large tend to situate them within the history of the trend of interpretations of the Occidental tradition that he takes to be a Seynsgeschichte. Indeed, in the opening essay of this division, Dahlstrom illustrates how both of these dimensions come into play in Heidegger's interpretation of Heraclitus' conception of phusis. In an approach that was already announced early in Sein und Zeit,[1] Heidegger interprets Heraclitus' experience of phusis as ever-emerging self-concealment as a key to the meaning of be-ing at the beginning of Western thought. "Phusis is at once (diachronically) the emergence from hiddenness and (synchronically) the differentiation and interplay of unhiddenness and hiddenness" (144). Dahlstrom contends that Heidegger would be dismissive of the charge of anachronism, of projecting his own experience of be-ing back into the beginning of Western thought, of antedating some current event, since this presupposes a linear and so derivative conception of time, of a denumerable past that has passed away and is now long gone. Heidegger explicitly contends that his is a plausible interpretation of Heraclitus and that this sense of be-ing at the beginning of the history of Western thought, far from being past and gone, is the inception of an event so originary in its temporality that it continues to be ours as an originary past that comes to meet us from the future and allows us to think our way into another beginning (148f.).
Josh Michael Hayes examines how Heidegger existentializes the Aristotelian texts on the passions (pathei) of the soul in order to draw his own terms on how we find ourselves (sich befinden, i.e., Befindlichkeit) inescapably moved, affected, dis-posed, dis-placed by the world in moods that range from "being composed" (in tranquility, wonder, pleasure) to "being decomposed" (in fear, angst, pain), all of which define Heidegger's "pathology of truth."
Against the charge that Heidegger forced too much of his own thought onto Kant, Stephan Käufer demonstrates how "Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant" in his 'Kantbook' develops in tandem with the writing of Being and Time, which accordingly becomes a "deeply Kantian work." This is especially evident in the early chapters of Division II, where the phenomenology of Dasein as finitely situated ex-sistence merges with a transcendental argument about the temporal conditions of existence modeled after Kant's analysis (in the A-edition of the first Critique) of the threefold synthesis in the transcendental deduction. Heidegger thereby arrives at the originary temporality that defines the uniquely existing self, which is hardly the same as Kant's transcendental subject, which refers to any finite cognizer of objectively real representations.
Tracy Colony circumscribes an early phase in Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche where Nietzsche's thoughts stand in close proximity to his own task of thinking, before he eventually relegates Nietzsche to the reactive position of inverter of the entire tradition of metaphysics that marks its culmination and completion. The thoughts that Heidegger takes up as his own task are Nietzsche's witness to the death of God and to the need to prepare for the possibility of the recurrence of the divine, the need to create the conditions for a possible advent of new gods or, as it is put in the Beiträge, placing oneself at "the site of the passing of the last god."
The division concludes with Andrew Mitchell's "Heidegger's Poetics of Relationality," which examines Heidegger's postwar studies of the poetic speech of three poets in order to come to an understanding of the relation between being and language that such speech exposes. Rainer Maria Rilke's poetizing in the era of the completion of metaphysics, in particular Nietzsche's, whose language is therefore still contaminated with the logistics of the subject and object, provides a study in sharp contrast with the more poetic language of "song" that Rilke struggles to introduce. "Song does not represent something itself, it is that thing itself. Song is not a way of controlling the world, of manipulating it with tools (language). Instead, song is a way of receiving from the world . . . and letting things appear" (221). But metaphysics eventually wins out with Rilke's name for the field of relations, namely, "the Open," wherein things are understood to exist infinitely through poetic speech, i.e., to exist in full presence and in perfect belonging to the world (as represented by the figure of the Angel).
What is lacking in Rilke is accordingly a sense of human finitude, a sense of not belonging perfectly in the world and of presabsence, which will be provided by Georg Trakl. Trakl's figure of the wanderer immediately conveys a sense of being ever unsettled as well as being ever exposed to the limits of finitude, which exposure is always an opening onto a beyond. The limit occurs as a site of contact and relation between what is one's own and what lies beyond, opening a space of tension between the within and the beyond in a finite world of relations ever underway. "The human, the things, and language are all set in motion and stripped of any pretension to presence. This being underway is the only belonging we know" (226). An ultimate sense of finitude comes from Stefan George's poem "The Word": "And so sadly I learned the renunciation: No thing may be where the word fails." This humbling experience makes the poet beholden to the power of the word, which "first bestows presence, i.e., be-ing, wherein something appears as a being" (227). It is the word that first lets things be, the word itself is the wherein of a thing's appearance: "the word 'would be' itself that which holds and bears the thing as thing, would be as this bearing: the relationship itself" (229), indeed "the relationship of all relationships;" "the word lets the thing be because the word provides the medium through which its differentiating articulation can appear" (230). Since they only appear in the medium of a language, things themselves are from the start relational and contextual. Moreover, all that appears in this medium does so meaningfully. "Meaning occurs through the connections and relations made possible by the medium of language" (230). With the hitherto implicit dimension of language/speech as milieu of meaning now explicitly in place, we have finally come full circle in our explication of the hermeneutics of factic life experience.
III. Interpreting Heidegger's Critics
Lee Braver provides a history of analytic philosophy's reactions to Heidegger beginning with the young Gilbert Ryle's relatively positive review of Sein und Zeit in Mind in 1929. The most curious feature of this review is that Ryle criticizes Heidegger especially on a point that he himself will make central in his classic 1949 book, The Concept of Mind. This book, much like Being and Time, begins with a parodying attack on the Cartesian model of the mind as "an inner space housing ghostly thoughts" in order to give precedence to the tacit knowledge of know-how occurring in intelligent practical interactions independent of the more theoretical know-that knowledge. Rudolf Carnap's 1931 article, "The Elimination of Metaphysics by Logical Analysis of Language," which logically dismantles "meaningless" words like the substantified "Nothing" and "pseudo-statements" like "The Nothing nothings," set the standard for decades to come for analytic philosophy's dismissal of Heidegger. Richard Rorty's efforts to promote fruitful interchange between analytic and continental philosophy, largely by devising demystified versions of Heidegger's strategy of explicating the historical backgrounds out of which the problem situations of each have developed in tandem and partial convergence, met with little success. More success in promoting this interchange is achieved by Hubert Dreyfus' critique of cognitivist artificial intelligence seeking to replicate human intelligence by way of computer programs based on formal systems of physical symbols ('1' and '0') interacting according to an overt 'known-that' set of syntactical rules. Such programs have proven to be limited and ultimately doomed to failure because human intelligence is in fact more a tacit and holistic know-how operating out of meaningful contexts and practical webs of purposes and interests that enable even a four-year-old to sort out the relevant factors necessary to interpret properly one or another problematic situation.
Wayne Froman's confrontation of Heidegger with Emmanuel Lévinas reveals distinct but complementary critiques of the entire history of Western metaphysics: for Heidegger, its identification of Being with permanent presence, for Lévinas, its reduction of otherness to sameness. But further comparisons only expose fundamental disagreements. Even the most solicitous interactions with others occur for Heidegger in the basic relatedness of being-with, which for Lévinas is a mere co-existence, a being alongside that completely misses the incomparable otherness of the Other in its elevation and destitution. For Heidegger, beings are encountered in a world, for Lévinas, subordinating my relation to an Other to world compromises this relation's ethical character. Insisting on the priority of world over beings means remaining in the context of sameness or I-ness, which Lévinas calls the paganism of the native, who revels in nature's elementals of the wind, sea, light, earth, sky and their mythical divinizations to the absolute exclusion of any alien Other.
Françoise Dastur's superb essay on "Derrida's Reading of Heidegger" takes up Derrida's multifaceted critique of Heidegger from various directions, including that of Lévinas. But the crux of the critique is that Heidegger's thought itself never fully overcomes the long tradition of the metaphysics of persistent presence that he himself identified and historically traces to its completion. The problem in the Heideggerian text is its inability to think through the ontological difference between be-ing and beings in a way that escapes equating be-ing with presence. Dastur makes the following points: Be-ing is never immediately present, never immediately appears but, as the most inapparent of phenomena, belongs to whatever does appear such as to constitute its meaning and ground (SZ 35). Be-ing is never purely and fully present because of its aletheic character of concealing that always happens with the clearing of beings. With concealment having the last word, the focus is now clearly on the difference, named by the later Heidegger as Unter-schied and Enteignis (expropriation), where be-ing itself is thought to come from the difference. But Derrida still retains the edge in the dispelling of presence. With his word "différance," he becomes the thinker of the absence of presence, of a presence indefinitely deferred in the play of infinite substitutions of the world-play, whereas Heidegger remains the thinker of the presence of absence, of unconcealment arising from a concealment ever in withdrawal.
By and large, this is an excellent collection of masterly written essays all more or less tied to one of the most deeply seated threads coursing through all of Heidegger's thought, but, for that very reason, one that is quite often overlooked.
[1] "We understand this task [of the history of be-ing] to be one in which, by taking the question of be-ing as our guideline, we deconstruct the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at the original experiences in which the first and subsequently guiding determinations of be-ing were obtained" (SZ 22).
NDPR Dean Moyar, Hegel's Conscience
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2011-07-36 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews
Dean Moyar, Hegel's Conscience, Oxford University Press, 2011, 220pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780195391992.
Reviewed by Peter Thielke, Pomona College
Despite a growing interest in Hegel among Anglophone philosophers, there has been relatively little attention paid to the specific structure of Hegel's ethical views. Given this situation, it is gratifying to report not only that Dean Moyar's Hegel's Conscience seeks to fill this gap, but also that it does so in such an interesting and rewarding way. Far from being the paragon of impenetrability, Moyar's Hegel develops a theory of agency and ethical action that is both clear and cogent, as well as highly relevant to contemporary debates about these issues. The book is excellent and should be of interest not only to scholars of German Idealism but also to anyone seeking new options in currently ossified metaethical debates. It is not an exhaustive account of all aspects of Hegel's ethics, but it promises to lay the groundwork for what might well become a serious Hegelian alternative to more familiar models of moral agency.
The kernel of Moyar's argument concerns the central role of conscience in Hegel's ethics. At first glance, this might look like a rather unpromising place to start, since even Hegel himself castigates the ethics of conscience: if the moral worth of my actions is entirely dependent on whether I in good conscience perform them, then it seems that anything would be permitted, so long as I act with full conviction. As Moyar argues, however, such claims have misled commentators into thinking that Hegel is suspicious of all forms of conscience, when in fact his complaint is only with an ethics based on formal or abstract conscience alone. Rather, as Moyar claims, actual conscience for Hegel is the locus of practical reason; it "stands for a complex set of capacities that include judgment, inference, deliberation, belief, etc." (14). The agent of conscience acts on the subjective belief that her actions are right, but this is buttressed by the idea that objective reasons can be provided to support these beliefs. And, in one of the most interesting claims of the book, Moyar shows that, for Hegel, these reasons of conscience can only be understood in the context of a robust social practice -- Hegel's ethics is, in the end, based on a holistic account of inner and outer reasons that together form the complex web of individual agency within a larger society.
The book is organized into six chapters, beginning with an account of self-consciousness and agency, moving through a discussion of motivating and justifying reason, ethical holism, deliberation and justification, and mutual recognition, before culminating in an interpretation of what Hegel means by Ethical Life. Moyar draws primarily from the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right and is a careful and charitable reader; he is especially good at explicating Hegel's notoriously obscure texts and showing the consistent argument that runs through Hegel's discussions of ethical agency. He also does an excellent job of relating Hegel's views to contemporary positions, notably those of Richard Moran, Bernard Williams, Jonathan Dancy and Barbara Herman. This aspect of the book is most welcome, since it provides a clear path to the issues at the heart of Hegel's position while making them accessible to readers who might not be wholly at home in the Phenomenology or the Philosophy of Right.
Moyar's interpretation of Hegel is cast in terms of an ethical holism in which "an agent's motivating reasons stem from purposes that can be nested within broader purposes that provide the justifying reasons for the action" (74) -- what Moyar calls the 'Complex Reasons Identity Condition' (CRIC). The central idea -- one that is both novel and provocative -- is that an agent can behave ethically without needing always to act on the deliberate motive of duty, or even for the perceived general good. This might seem paradoxical, since the hallmark of ethical behavior is usually taken to depend on the subjective reasons or maxims that guide an action, and it is tempting to think that actions not directed by such an internal 'ought' would fail to live up to our ethical requirements. But as Moyar persuasively argues, Hegel rejects this view and has good reasons to do so. If morality rests on a set of absolute duties, or an abstract system of imperatives, Hegel claims, we can give no explanation of what would motivate an agent to act in such a way, unless she were already in possession of a particular internal motive to do so. Rather, by invoking Williams' notion of a standing purpose that reflects an agent's own interests, Moyar holds that for an ethical world to be rational, "it must be a system of objective purposes that are structured such that standing purposes of individuals can be nested within them" (76). This is essentially what Moyar takes Hegelian conscience to involve.
Such a view might threaten to devolve into a pernicious form of egoism, in which ethical duties are swallowed by self-interest, but Hegel's distinctive solution to this problem is one of the most interesting aspects of Moyar's project. What halts the slide into egoism is the nesting relationship between motives and justifications. Objective duties are not just side constraints on what bare egoism can pursue, but rather our self-interested reasons are at the same time justified by objective ethical structures manifested in social institutions: in Civil Society, "pursuing one's interest is one's duty" (70). This involves both a subjective and an objective element of agency. The latter is explicated by appeal to the notion of the transparency of self-consciousness in action, which Moyar draws from Moran: our motives are not simply brute psychological facts, but rather are reflections of those things for which we find good reasons. We act on beliefs about what we take to be our good because we rationally endorse them. These reasons, however, are not purely subjective, but are also informed by the objective moral facts and principles that govern social institutions, to which each particular motive must be answerable. In acting on my self-interest, I legitimately am also doing my duty, but only so long as my actions can also be justified in light of prevailing moral principles. According to CRIC, motives and justifications stand in a nested relationship, and actual conscience is just this complex activity of practical reason in acting according to CRIC.
This is a subtle position, and perhaps an example drawn from Moyar will help make it clearer. In helping my daughter with her homework, say, my motives are directed at her individual needs, and arise from my concern about her well-being; in this subjective sense, I am acting only on my and her interests. But my interest is also guided and justified by larger social -- and objective -- considerations: parents have a duty to their children, and there are certain legal and social obligations that have institutionalized these moral demands. These need not be my proximate motives in helping her, but they are part of my complex set of reasons for action, and my action only makes sense, according to Hegel, when this set is treated as a holistic unity. For Hegel, objective justifications do not impose alien external constraints on my actions, but are rather included in the complex internal motives that direct my behavior. The holism here is crucial: I would not be an ethical agent were my motivations solely self-interested, with no recognition of the objective demands that society places on me; but neither would I be a complete agent were I always to require that my motives be general moral duties abstracted from my particular interests. Were I to help my daughter only because I was motivated by a duty towards human welfare in general, I would be guilty, as Moyar puts it, borrowing a phrase from Williams, of 'one thought too many.'
Moral failure occurs when this holism is broken apart; taking a point from Dancy, Moyar argues that for Hegel we err when we detach one element from the complex whole and treat this as the only morally relevant feature of a situation. This detachment can take either a subjective or an objective form. In the former, I privilege abstract moral duties at the expense of particular interests or circumstances, in which case I open myself to the charge of hollow formalism, since I cannot specify how I should act in an actual situation without undermining the presumed priority of the abstract moral law. In the latter, I take my particular motives and interests as the only salient features of a moral situation and ignore the objective social element that provides external justification for my actions. In either case, the conditions on actual conscience that describe ethical agency are not met.
This account of moral holism and conscience occupies roughly the first half of Hegel's Conscience; the latter part is largely devoted to spelling out what the content of morality involves. Moral demands arise within social contexts and reflect the various institutional and cultural expectations that guide our actions. By appealing to Herman's distinction between judgment and deliberation, Moyar argues that Hegel too sees moral agency not in terms of constantly testing maxims of action but rather in a settled disposition to act according to the various social roles one adopts. These roles in turn provide the contents of our moral activity, which are captured in "rules of moral salience" (115). In acting as a father, for instance, I do not constantly need to be deliberating about the moral basis for what I am doing; I simply act in the way proper for parents. Of course, my behavior can be challenged, in which case I am called upon to give a reason for my actions or to deliberate about what I ought to do. Given CRIC, however, these reasons and deliberations are not external to my moral concerns, but rather are part of the more complex account of agency that explains my actions. On Moyar's reading, Hegel's notorious account of freedom as simply living under the right social system is recast in a far more plausible light, which reveals that actual freedom is found in the alignment of universal conditions and particular internal motives. For the agent of conscience, there is no gap between the freely endorsed intention and the 'accomplished action'; because such an agent "takes all circumstances into account in deliberation, he foresees both the consequences of the action and how others will relate to it" (155).
This holistic account of agency also has some interesting implications for the types of institutional structures that provide the objective or external content to moral conscience. Here, Moyar argues, the key for Hegel is mutual recognition, either in directly engaging with another agent, which "is the norm in case of challenges to an agent's action," or more indirectly, in respecting others' purposes within the larger social context (145). And, in an especially well done discussion, Moyar shows how various aspects of the state, such as marriage, legal procedures, and institutions designed to ensure overall welfare, dialectically emerge from this account of conscience.
Such a brief summary unfortunately leaves out many important details of Moyar's rich and rewarding work. There are also some questions that remain about the force of Hegel's position, especially concerning the status of CRIC. Is CRIC intended to be a description of what our reasons actually involve, or rather a normative standard that we might often fail to meet? Either of these alternatives might look problematic: if CRIC is descriptive, then Hegel seems hard-pressed to account for cases in which our various motives and reasons cannot be reconciled, such as when I violate the speed limit to save time, or do too much of my daughter's homework for her. Here I have reasons that I take to be compelling, but it's not clear that my rational justification is also one that will "aim at universality" (147). If cases like this are fairly frequent (and it seems like they are), then the conditions of ethical agency that CRIC lays out are not often satisfied, and the ground of Hegel's concrete Ethical Life could be called into question. This suggests that CRIC should instead be treated normatively, as a goal for ethical agency, but such a view might run afoul of Hegel's intention of finding "a 'totality' in which the ought is overcome" (140). Indeed, unless I have antecedent dispositions to try to meet the conditions of CRIC, it seems that Hegel's own criticisms of Kant and other 'moralists' would apply equally well to the normative reading of the principle. In any case, given its crucial role in Moyar's argument, the status of CRIC could be made clearer.
More broadly, Moyar sees Hegel as attempting to complete the Kantian system (11), but the emphasis on CRIC might instead be seen as moving Hegel further away from Kant. For Kant, creatures like us will always confront a tension in our practical agency, between the demands of the moral law and our inclination toward self-interest. Despite the wonder that the 'moral law within' inspires in Kant, he nonetheless holds that we are always tempted to let our particular advantage supersede the moral law. So long as our motive is our duty, then Kant would likely agree with CRIC, but his worries are that our motives frequently are not drawn from duty; this is what predisposes us to immorality. Hegel, however, seems -- at least on Moyar's account -- to have a far more optimistic view of humanity than does Kant; for Hegel, the possibility of reconciling our particular interest and our moral duty is a hallmark of Ethical Life, and he is critical of Kant for seeing morality and self-interest as often opposed to each other. But if Hegel's solution in fact rests on a reconception of human nature, it's not clear that he is solving Kant's problems, instead of just offering a competing vision of the human condition.
Finally, one of the great strengths of Hegel's Conscience is Moyar's ability to demystify Hegel's jargon and to connect his concerns to contemporary views in ethics. But this strategy also raises some questions about the force of Moyar's interpretation. These concerns are not directed at the general method of juxtaposing historical and contemporary issues -- in the Introduction, Moyar does an excellent job of defending the value of such an approach -- but rather with the specific details of how Hegel's overall view can be squared with the various contemporary accounts Moyar introduces. Moyar draws from parts of a number of contemporary views, but says little about whether they all -- Dancy's particularism, Williams' critique of the 'morality system,' Herman's Kantianism, and so on -- can be held together in a consistent system. The worry is that Moyar cherry picks features of positions whose foundations stand opposed to Hegel's broader views. Despite a shared holistic view of the ethical enterprise, for instance, it's not clear that Dancy's and Williams' broader accounts can be squared with Hegel's more rationalistic and systematic general position.
This is less a criticism than a call for further elaboration, for if indeed Hegel's ethical position were capable of reconciling all of these various positions, or -- perhaps better -- of combining attractive elements of each into a consistent whole, this would make the already strong position Moyar develops on Hegel's behalf even more interesting as a new contender in metaethical debates. As it stands, Hegel's Conscience provides both an admirably clear and accessible interpretation of Hegel's texts and a novel and provocative account of agency, one that will, in concert with other work emerging from the renewed interest in Hegel, likely form the basis for a distinctively Hegelian metaethical position.
NDPR Charlton Payne, Lucas Thorpe (eds.), Kant and the Concept of Community
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2011-07-35 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews
Charlton Payne and Lucas Thorpe (eds.), Kant and the Concept of Community, University of Rochester Press, 2011, 321pp., $34.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781580463874.
Reviewed by Justin Shaddock, Dominican University
Kant and the Concept of Community brings a necessary unity to the manifold of Kant studies. The courses we take as students and teach as professors, as well as the papers and books we read and write, often cover only a single area of Kant's philosophy. A few collections do treat all of Kant's works, yet the essays in even these collections often stand in isolation. This would be unfortunate in any field, but since Kant is such a systematic philosopher, we should expect especially revealing connections here.[1] Kant and the Concept of Community brings together some of today's most eminent Kant scholars to argue for the thesis that Kant's many conceptions of community in his theoretical, practical, aesthetic, religious, and political philosophy are all "modeled on the concept of community found in the table of categories and judgments." (2) In this review, I will assess this thesis by briefly examining the volume's thirteen essays. I will suggest in closing that there is another dimension of Kant's philosophy that ought to be unified. It is not across the various areas of his thought, but across the disparate doctrines he endorses over time.
Béatrice Longuenesse contributes an essay on Kant's derivation of the category of community from the disjunctive form of judgment in the first Critique. By the disjunctive form of judgment, she explains, "one divides a concept, say a, into mutually exclusive specifications of this concept, say b, c, d, e," and "consider[s] the assertion of any one of the specifications (b, c, d, or e) of the divided concept a, as a sufficient condition for negating the others, and conversely consider[s] the negation of all but one as a sufficient condition for asserting the remaining one." (21) Kant then derives the category of community, according to Longuenesse, by reasoning that
just as in a disjunctive judgment, the sphere of a concept . . . is divided into its subordinate spheres, so that these subordinate spheres are in a relation of mutual determination while at the same time excluding one another, so in a material whole, things mutually determine one another, or even in one material thing or body considered as a whole, the parts are in a relation of mutual attraction and repulsion. (24-25)
Kant's argument in the Third Analogy is that since our representations are always successive, our cognition of simultaneity presupposes our application of the category of community, and the upshot for Longuenesse is that "objects are . . . individuated in space and time by their reciprocal interaction, and concepts of objects thus individuated are concepts of relational properties." (31)
Many of these points are repeated and extended in Eric Watkins's essay on Kant's theoretical philosophy. He explains that the disjunctive form of judgment divides a logical space into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive spheres, that the category of community reciprocally coordinates substances and their states, that the schematized category of community "states that if two (empirically knowable) substances stand in mutual interaction, then their states (or determinations) must be simultaneous," (47) and that the Third Analogy specifies that this "mutual interaction must be understood in terms of substances jointly determining their states in such a way that the causal activity of the one depends on that of the other (and vice versa)." (52) Watkins then explains how the concept of community features in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, in Kant's theory of how matter fills space by exerting reciprocal repulsive forces and in his theory of the equality of action and reaction.
Lucas Thorpe promises to connect Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy, but his essay fails to fulfill this promise. Thorpe explains that Kant rejects his predecessors' theories of physical influx, occasionalism, and pre-established harmony, since none can account for the real interaction among essentially active substances. Kant's own theory, on Thorpe's interpretation, is that the substances in a community must be governed by laws legislated by those substances themselves and so "must be autonomous." (80) But one wonders how this can be right. Thorpe's interpretation would seem to contradict the first Critique's doctrine that the objects of our possible experience necessarily stand under the category of community, and in so doing it would also seem to negate any connection between the first and second Critiques.
Paul Guyer focuses on Kant's conceptions of community in his practical philosophy. He argues that the realm of ends is "the goal of our moral choice of maxims . . . enjoining us to treat all rational beings with whom we may interact as ends in themselves and to seek a systematic union of the particular ends freely chosen by all such rational beings," that the moral world is "the realization of the goal of the realm of ends," and that the highest good is "the condition that would result from the realization of the moral world . . . under ideal conditions, in which . . . the virtue of all would make all happy." (117-118) Guyer also traces a development in Kant's thinking. He argues that in the first Critique Kant incoherently postulates God's creation of nature as a condition of the possibility of the highest good in the afterlife, and that he equally incoherently postulates God's creation of nature in the second Critique in order to make our moral perfection in the afterlife possible. Guyer argues that Kant finally reaches a coherent view in his writings of the 1790's (including the third Critique, "On the Common Saying: 'That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,'" and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason), where he postulates God "as the condition of the possibility of the existence of the 'ethical community,' which is an earthly condition of cooperation that facilitates the development of . . . virtue" (108)
Allen Wood aims to elucidate Kant's definition of religion, given in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, as the subjective attitude toward our moral duties as commanded by God. Wood argues that for Kant radical evil is our propensity to prefer the satisfaction of our empirical desires to duty, and since its source is our social tendency to value ourselves over others, we can overcome it only by "adopting ends that . . . agree (or even coincide) with the ends of other human beings, and that they do so by directly fulfilling the idea of a 'realm' in which all ends form . . . a mutually supporting system." (130) On Wood's account, Kant defines religiousness as subjectively regarding our duties as God's commands, because such a mutually supporting system would constitute an ethical community, and its laws would have to be regarded by its members as God's legislation. One wonders, however, whether Guyer's and Wood's accounts of the Religion are compatible. While for Guyer Kant maintains that we must postulate God as an objective condition of the possibility of the existence of the ethical community, for Wood Kant holds only that we members of the ethical community must subjectively regard our duties as legislated by God.
The topic of Onora O'Neill's essay is Kant's distinction between public and private reason in "What is Enlightenment?" and "What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?" She explains that private reason derives its authority from some source other than reason (for example, a country's legal code, a religion's official teaching, or an economy's organizing principles), and so carries conviction only for those who also already acknowledge that other source. Public reason alone confers fundamental justifications, she explains, because it is governed by laws that hold for all in virtue of reason's self-legislation. O'Neill concludes that
the form of independence that counts for Kantian autonomy is not the independence of the individual 'legislator' but rather the independence of the principle 'legislated' from whatever desires, decisions, powers, or conventions may be current among one or another group. (147)
But here one wonders whether it is not equally important to emphasize the point that individual legislators must be independent of their particular practical identities (for example, as an American, a Christian, or a Capitalist), as it is to stress the point O'Neill rightly makes that legislated principles must be independent of the commitments of the group or groups to which they belong.
Jeffrey Edwards writes on Kant's theory of property in the Metaphysics of Morals. Edwards sets out two prima facie problems. The first is how "the achievement of empirical possession through first possession-taking" can be "consistent with the categorical prescriptions of right involved in the concept of universal will." (156) Kant's answer, on Edwards's account, is that "the original possession of an external object can only be possession in common." (157) But this leads Edwards to a second problem, "why should acquisition through unilateral occupation receive the favor of any law of right if it represents the type of control-seizing act that can generate a condition of universal conflict by virtue of the dynamical community of all possessive agents?" (167) Edwards's answer attributes to Kant a "principle of equality in distribution," according to which, "we may place upon all others an obligation to refrain from using certain objects . . . only insofar as this does not bind all others, in their use of objects, to refrain from more than we are reciprocally bound by all of them to refrain from using." (174) Edwards admits that this is not a principle Kant himself articulates, but he maintains that it is required by a charitable interpretation.
Michael Feola considers whether Kant's practical philosophy can be defended against the Hegelian criticism that it is overly individualistic. On Feola's interpretation, Kant is not crudely individualistic, but recognizes the ethical community's role in overcoming our social tendency to evil. Yet, for Feola, Kant nevertheless posits a unidirectional dependence of the ethical community on reason, and it is this unidirectionality that Hegel criticizes. On Feola's interpretation, "Kant posits a unilinear relationship of influence from a priori principles to the social world," (195) and Hegel counters that
our normative bonds do not follow from imposing an a priori principle upon a recalcitrant or wayward social domain. Rather, we are born into a world that already makes rational claims upon us through the traditions and practices that articulate the meaningful ends of human life, as particularized within this community (196).
While Feola offers a very clear picture of this Hegelian criticism, he goes further and endorses it, but unfortunately without any more than a sketch of an argument.
Another criticism of Kant's practical philosophy is raised in Ronald Beiner's essay. Beiner points out a tension between Kant's moral egalitarianism and his theory of citizenship. On one hand, Kant's moral egalitarianism is the view that all human subjects deserve equal respect on account of our free rational nature. Kant's view of citizenship, on the other hand, distinguishes between active and passive citizens. "Passive citizens," Beiner explains, "include women, children, and those who are economically dependent on a 'master." (211-212) The tension arises, according to Beiner, since for Kant citizenship is a moral category, in that "the state acknowledges our freedom as human beings and grants us equality as subjects" (219), and yet "independence, rather than being an entailment of citizenship as a properly moral status, instead becomes the condition of an experience of full citizenship that is available to some but not available to others." (218) There is no doubt that Beiner is correct in identifying this tension, but Kant's prejudice, while reprehensible, is hardly news.
Susan Shell challenges theorists who maintain that the European Union attains Kantian political ideals. She argues that for Kant rights and duties go hand in hand: "Citizenship implies not only a willingness to pay taxes or affective feelings of belonging but also, first and foremost, a reciprocal right and duty of mutual defense." (237) She argues, however, that "the European Union constitutional draft has much to say about the 'rights' of citizens, but little to say about their 'duties." (236) Shell's conclusion is that "if Europe cannot be a federal nation-state (along U.S. lines), it would be better off as a federation of nation-states along genuinely Kantian lines." (239)
The final three essays by Charlton Payne, Jane Kneller, and Jan Mieszkowski treat Kant's notion of the "sensus communis," but none connects the conceptions of community in Kant's first or second Critiques to this notion in his third. Payne assesses the extent to which the model of a "sensus communis" can be employed to understand political action, Kneller considers whether this model can be employed to understand judgments about communities other than our own, and Mieszkowski argues that it provides a model for a superior alternative to Habermas's communicative action theory. These are all interesting essays in their own right, but since none supports the volume's thesis that Kant employs one concept of community in the many areas of his thought, I will not consider them in more detail here.
Let me instead suggest that this volume might have traced the development of Kant's thinking about community across the various views he held over time. To be sure, Guyer traces a development in Kant's practical philosophy, and Thorpe lays out the options of Kant's predecessors in theoretical philosophy, including the theories of physical influx, occasionalism, and pre-established harmony. But in Kant's own 1770 Inaugural Dissertation, he espouses a thesis that he calls "generally established harmony," with which he aims to combine elements of pre-established harmony and physical influx.[2] Kant later rejects pre-established harmony in two important texts. First, in a 1772 letter to Marcus Herz, he rejects it for inviting the dogmatic stipulation that any and all of our non-empirically derived concepts might apply to objects.[3] Then in the 1787 B-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he rejects pre-established harmony again, but now for granting the skeptical wish that the categories might apply to objects just because of the a priori constitution of our subjectivity.[4]
In light of this, we should not interpret Kant's mature idealism as the thesis that the objects of our possible experience have a categorial structure just because of their dependence upon our subjectivity's a priori constitution. Kant would regard such an idealism as tantamount to skepticism. Of course, Kant does not espouse the transcendental realist conception of objectivity and subjectivity as wholly independent either. We should rather interpret his idealism as positing an interdependence, or reciprocity, between the objects of our possible experience and our finite cognitive subjectivity. Moreover, once this interpretation of Kantian idealism is in place, we should also give more weight to an interpretation of Kantian autonomy not as representing individuals as legislating the moral law into authority, but rather as involving a similar reciprocity between our finite agential subjectivity and the moral law's authority.
Of course, this impugns no particular essay in this collection, nor its overall thesis. It is surely revealing to examine the systematic interconnections in Kant's thought, and this collection provides a worthwhile study of Kant's concept of community. I have argued that it might have been even more illuminating, however, had it also examined the historical development of Kant's thinking about community in his theoretical philosophy. Understanding Kant's own reasons for rejecting his early views should give us insight into his mature positions.
[1] The single-authored work that gives the best treatment of this problem, to my mind, is Karl Ameriks's Interpreting Kant's Critiques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[2] Immanuel Kant, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World, in Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, trans. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2: 409.
[3] Immanuel Kant, "Letter to Marcus Herz, February 21, 1772," in Correspondence, trans. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10:131.
[4] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B167-168.
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