How Theology Shaped Twentieth - Century Philosophy

H O W TH E O L O G Y SH A P E D TW E N T I E T H -
CENTURY P HILOSOPHY
Medieval theology had an important influence on later philosophy

which is visible in the empiricisms of Russell, Carnap, and Quine.
Other thinkers, including McDowell, Kripke, and Dennett, show
how we can overcome the distorting effects of that theological eco-
system on our accounts of the nature of reality and our relationship to
it. In a different philosophical tradition, Hegel uses a secularized
version of Christianity to argue for a kind of human knowledge that
overcomes the influences of late-medieval voluntarism, and some
twentieth-century thinkers, including Benjamin and Derrida, instead
defend a Jewish-influenced notion of the religious sublime. Frank
B. Farrell analyzes and connects philosophers of different eras and
traditions to show that modern philosophy has developed its practices
on a terrain marked out by earlier theological and religious ideas, and
considers how different philosophers have both embraced, and tried
to escape from, those deep-seated patterns of thought.
frank b. farrell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Purchase

College, State University of New York. His publications include
Subjectivity, Realism, and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World
in Recent Philosophy (Cambridge, 1994) and Why Does Literature
Matter? (2004).
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HOW THEOLOGY SHAPED
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
PHILOSOPHY
FRANK B. FARRELL
Purchase College, SUNY
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CENTURY P HILOSOPHY


Matter? (2004).
HOW THEOLOGY SHAPED
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
PHILOSOPHY
FRANK B. FARRELL

www.cambridge.org
doi: 10.1017/9781108666817
isbn 978-1-108-49171-6 Hardback
CENTURY P HILOSOPHY


Matter? (2004).
HOW THEOLOGY SHAPED
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
PHILOSOPHY
FRANK B. FARRELL

www.cambridge.org
doi: 10.1017/9781108666817
isbn 978-1-108-49171-6 Hardback
To Kazuma Suzuki
remembered with gratitude and love
and to my splendid siblings, Margaret, Mary, Bob, Kathy,
and Stephen
Contents
Acknowledgments page viii
Introduction: The Thinning Out of the World 1

1 Empiricism and Theology 20
2 John McDowell: Rejecting the Defensive Move Inward 70
3 Aristotle Redivivus: On Saul Kripke 90
4 Hegel, Theology, and Pippin’s Reading of Hegel 115
5 Walter Benjamin: Incarnation or Radical Incommensurability? 142
6 Rolling Back the Protestant Reformation: Wittgenstein and
Dennett 165
7 McDowell (II): Active and Passive Faculties and the Theological
Framework 188
8 Derrida, the Religion of the Sublime, and the Messianic 210
9 Literature Today and the Sublime Absence of Aesthetic
Experience 228
10 Where Do We Go from Here? 246
Bibliography 253
Index 258
vii
Acknowledgments
I wish to express my gratitude first of all to Hilary Gaskin of Cambridge

University Press. It was her backing that turned an unsolicited proposal
into a book and the present volume is here because of her. Two anon-
ymous external readers for Cambridge offered me valuable suggestions
that I used in revising what I had written. I’m thankful to several others
who either work at the Press or have been working for it and who were
very helpful in preparing the book for publication: Sophie Taylor, Ruth
Boyes, Rebecca Collins, Varun Kumar Marimuthu, and Neil Wells, who
prepared the index. I would like to remember with gratitude the excellent
Terry Moore, who was the editor for my first book at Cambridge and
who died far too young. A narrative that uses medieval theology to look at
twentieth-century philosophy makes me recall my formative years as
a philosopher. As an undergraduate, I was in a seminary program at
Catholic University and took a number of courses in medieval philoso-
phy. John Wippel, Robert Sokolowski, and John Smolko showed me
how a training in medieval thought could be useful for looking at other
areas of philosophy. In my graduate program at Yale, I was fortunate in
my teachers. Ruth Marcus taught me courses in philosophical and modal
logic and ultimately directed my dissertation on Donald Davidson. She
could not have been more generous and supportive to me both then and
later, and I regret not thanking her more demonstratively before her
death. Scott Soames, in courses on semantics, made me spend hours
diagramming and analyzing arguments. He will believe that my mere
willingness to mention thinkers such as Hegel and Benjamin proves that
I did not learn everything from him that I ought to have. I was Jonathan
Lear’s teaching assistant for his philosophy of language course.
The practice of paying attention to his lectures in order to comment on
student papers taught me a great deal, both about philosophy and about
how to treat a teaching assistant as a respected colleague. Robert Foegelin
also treated me unusually well when I worked as his teaching assistant in
viii
Acknowledgments ix
logic and ethics. Karsten Harries offered a stimulating course on late
medieval and Renaissance philosophy. When I wrote a long essay for
him, he took me aside and said that with the themes I was developing
I really had to consult Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern
Age. Reading that book turned out to be formative for much of the way
that I now look at the history of philosophy. I took a course on the
philosophy of action with Harry Frankfurt and enjoyed the demanding
way he made students defend their arguments. I wonder, noting what he
himself has written, if he would find a couple of chapters in this book to
have wandered into the territory of philosophical b___ s___.
I have been fortunate in my colleagues at Purchase College of the State
University of New York. Morris Kaplan has been a long-time fellow
philosopher and friend who can speak equally persuasively about Plato as
about contemporary drama. Jenny Uleman forces me to see the power of
Kant’s notion of autonomy when I get too much in the habit of assigning
other thinkers to my students. Casey Haskins is an excellent interlocutor
on aesthetic theory. Ken Dove, now retired, engaged me again and again in
stimulating discussions of Hegel, and he also was generously behind all the
moves I made up the career ladder at the college. Marjorie Miller, also
retired, kept reminding me that with my very wide curiosity in philosophy,
I hadn’t given American pragmatism a fair look. My great interest in
literature, expressed in my last book, Why Does Literature Matter?, was
helped by discussions with Gari Laguardia on T. S. Eliot and modernism.
A recent hire on the literature faculty, Tony Domestico, has interests in the
relations of theology and literature that are close to my own and I keep
learning much from our meetings. Every conversation I have had with
Richard Eldridge of Swarthmore College has forced me to think more
clearly about claims I was making and I regret that there have not been
more of such talks. He is an important thinker for me because while
moving nimbly across the intellectual landscape, he seems to find many
of the same unexpected intersections that I do. So he makes me feel that
perhaps I am not a strange outlier in the diverse topics and authors that
I try to bring together. At different points in my career, Terry Pinkard,
Richard Rorty, Arthur Danto, Bob Gooding-Williams, and Joshua Landy
gave me important support for which I remain grateful.
One of my great good fortunes in life is to have five wonderful siblings:
Margaret, Mary, Bob, Kathy, and Stephen. They and their families remain
the backbone of my social world.
Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Kazuma Suzuki, who brought
great happiness to my life while he was alive.
introduction
The Thinning Out of the World
Theological beliefs forced late-medieval thinkers into an epistemically

precarious situation. These thinkers were investigating the consequences
of a certain philosophical position: that defined by an idea of the absolutely
unconditioned willing of an omnipotent God. Because of that focus on the
divine will instead of on God’s intellect, such a position is called theological
voluntarism. It seemed that if things in the world had an intrinsic meta-
physical character, then there would be a limit on the power of God’s free
will to make anything move in any way at all. The world had to be radically
thinned out, with a minimal degree of determinacy on its own, so that it
became the most appropriate site for the free play of God’s willing. God’s
ways are so superior to and incommensurable with ours that we can never
hope to understand the metaphysical design that he has placed in the
universe.
Humans might respond to this situation by resorting to prayer and by
surrendering their metaphysical and epistemic ambitions. A different
response is available as well, says Hans Blumenberg in studying this
period.1 We might give up, as we have to, the hope of understanding the
metaphysical design of the universe itself, for that would require under-
standing the working of God’s ineffable will. But we might then make
a strategic retreat inward along the chain leading from reality to our beliefs
about it. Here too we might encounter a problematic situation. God in his
absolute freedom, not through evil intent but perhaps through doing what
is necessary for an individual’s salvation, might make certain sensory
impressions appear to us even when there are no corresponding objects.
So we might be wildly wrong in what we suppose is the metaphysical reality
behind our experiences. Yet it turns out that epistemic modesty here can
purchase a kind of epistemic ambition. Suppose I focus just on the sensory
1
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Robert Wallace (trans.) (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1983). See especially 125–226. My presentation relies a good deal on this richly insightful book.
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108666817.001
2 How Theology Shaped Twentieth-Century Philosophy
appearings to me and use them as the basis for constructing a model of the
world. This model, properly adjusted over time, allows me to make
accurate predictions of future sensory impressions that come my way and
to intervene successfully in the world, but I make no claims that it captures
the metaphysics of how matters truly stand. I succeed merely in “saving the
appearances.” My strategy thus combines great modesty with a robust self-
assertion: reality, so far as I can be concerned with it, will be what I can
secure through my mental or linguistic constructions, as these work on
data already well inward from the world itself. I have a machinery for
handling and ordering the great pressure of stimulation upon my inner
world, but I do not claim that it mirrors features of how matters are truly
arranged, an achievement I cannot hope for in a world designed by God’s
free willing.
So there is excellent motivation in the late-medieval world for a radical
emptying out of reality, for assigning a minimal content to whatever
determinate character it may be said to have on its own. That project of
emptying out will be aimed, first of all, at the Aristotelian metaphysics of
Thomas Aquinas and of many other scholastics. If natural objects have an
Aristotelian nature or essence of their own, if they have necessary properties
and determine their own conditions of identity and sameness, then there
would be an unacceptable limitation on God’s free will, which might, for
all we know, make oak trees produce unicorns. God in creating a particular
individual cannot be limited by the confines of an already existing essence.
So, for William of Ockham and others, God creates only individuals;
sameness of kind is due not to shared essences but to our habits of applying
the same word to what we take to have useful similarities. Thus, we join
nominalism with voluntarism.
The turn inward will have further support. Augustine had made the
Christian religion a more dramatically interior activity where one speaks to
oneself in an immediate relation to God. One’s internal ideas might have
a certain autonomy in relation to the external world because they are
illuminated, and thus given a definite character, directly by God’s aware-
ness of them. A long history of monkish meditation as well as an emphasis
on a close examination of conscience to determine whether an act of
willing consent had occurred, and thus a sin, trained thinkers to find the
interior world a richly present one and to look there for the operations of
a faculty of free will. Very soon this tendency to turn inward, and thus to
find inner acts of willing or faith more real and important than external
communal experiences, would be intensified in the Protestant
Reformation with its theology of grace. God’s address is immediate to
the inner self, not arriving through worldly items or through mediating
institutions. So a religious support for innerness will join with the turn
inward in the face of the unconditioned power of God’s free will to make
metaphysical reality impenetrable by us. A set of inner objects will then
appear more reliably, independently, and describably present than any
world exterior to the mind.
My focus here will be almost exclusively on twentieth-century thinkers
and on how elements of the theological picture just described can still be
found in their work. I will not be offering a fine-grained analysis of the
subtleties of historical transmission. That would surely be a worthwhile
book but it is not what I have undertaken here. Yet I do find attractive
a broad narrative that makes it plausible to speak of the continuing inertial
effects of the intellectual terrain shaped by late-medieval philosophy and by
early-modern responses to it. I think of the work of Locke and the British
empiricists, of Kant, and, in a different manner, of Hegel, as serving as
something like a transmission belt. They are responding to the outcomes of
a theologically and religiously formed landscape and their work transmits
important features of that landscape into the twentieth century, even for
philosophers with no religious interests whatever. If we want to overcome
these long inertial effects, we have to understand them better.
If the details of historical transmission are not my theme here, I do want
to say something about the overall picture I have in mind. Locke is an
important bridge between the late-medieval intellectual world and more
recent empiricism, though peculiarities in his thinking make him differ
from both his predecessors and his successors. His distinction between real
essence and nominal essence is crucial but it can be difficult to articulate.
Four different things might be in play when Locke talks of essence.2
We might be referring to an earlier scholastic notion of that which in
things not only makes them what they are but also, through something like
a sharable substantial form, determines what kind they belong to. Locke
rejects that version of essence. Since we cannot know the ultimate motions
that God has designed into things, it is not impossible that God could have
created such essences, but from the evidence we have we must conclude
that there are only particular individuals in nature without any sharp
boundaries that determine kinds. For example, says Locke, we see
2
Some worthwhile discussions of Locke on real essence can be found in: Jean-Michel Vienne, “Locke
on Real Essence and Internal Constitution,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 93
(1993), 139–53; David Owen, “Locke on Real Essence,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2
(Apr. 1991), 105–18; and W. L. Uzgalis, “The Anti-Essential Locke and Natural Kinds,”
The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 152 (Jul. 1988), 330–9.
monsters, mermen, ape-men, and changelings, and these show that nat-
ure’s own boundaries are very fuzzy and porous. Then too there is in the
background Ockham’s idea that we show more respect for God’s creative
will when we assume that he creates each individual anew instead of
according to the same model used on others.
A second Lockean notion of essence is that of the real inner constitution
of something, the ultimate inner constituents and motions that produce its
effects. Locke is happy with this notion of essence provided it is seen as
belonging only to particulars (each thing has its inner principle or essence
that makes it behave as it does) and not to kinds that are taken to have an
essence that is sharable. Next for Locke is the nominal essence. This is
conventional, based on the way our mental ideas or words sort the world
into kinds to make scientifically useful classifications. Given our interests,
we might always arrange such classifications differently. Finally for Locke is
the real essence, though no longer in the sense of a shared substantial form
that things have simply on their own. Instead this is, as it were, a shadow
cast upon the world by a nominal essence that humans have shaped. That
nominal essence has picked out certain similarities that are most relevant to
our practice and understanding and we assume, as a regulatory idea, that
these similarities in our experiencing must be based on real similarities in
the deep constituents and inner motions of the items we take to be similar.
That similarity of inner constitution among different items may be called
a real essence, but we must note that it forms a kind only through being the
mirroring complement of what the nominal essence has shaped into a sort.
Nature on its own provides any number of different ways in which the
inner constitution of different items might count as similar, so it is the
human work of shaping the nominal essence that first makes it possible to
talk of such real essences in things that account for their similarities. There
is an analogy with artifacts. I might classify watches in several different
ways and depending on how I do so, there will be different internal
mechanisms that account for the similarities relevant to my classification.
In the case of the universe, humans simply cannot know how the divine
watchmaker designed the inner workings. While the real essence is the
metaphysical complement to what we have mentally shaped, we ourselves
do not have the power to penetrate into the basis in the things themselves
for the similarities at issue. So we do not know real essences, though God
may easily do so.
Locke’s epistemology is developed within a generally voluntarist frame-
work. Many aspects of how nature works are beyond our comprehension,
he says, and flow from the arbitrary will and good pleasure of God the
designer (An Essay on Human Understanding IV. iii. 29).3 How primary
qualities produce secondary qualities in our experiencing is mysterious to
us but is due to the arbitrary determination of the divine agent (Essay IV.
iii. 28). The real essence or the metaphysical foundation of our complex
idea of man is known certainly to God and perhaps to angels, who are not
burdened by our flesh, but not to us (Essay III. vi. 3). It is unclear how far
Locke wants to press this voluntarist aspect, with its emphasis on a level of
arbitrariness in what we are seeking to explain. (Would he accept Newton’s
speculation that God is the active force everywhere that accounts ulti-
mately for the motion and gravitational force of inert matter?) On the one
hand, the idea of an omnipotent God whose freedom is unconditioned
means that the universe with its laws might have been designed in many
different ways and our human minds cannot hope to penetrate into those
possibilities. So, there are many metaphysical questions for which the
proper answer is that God might have designed matters in one way or
another, and the ultimate design he chose works on such a complex and
microscopic level that only he can survey with knowledge how the whole
thing functions. On the other hand, Locke, unlike some radical voluntar-
ists of the late-medieval period, does not wish to emphasize God’s will
operating in nature such that the boundary between what is natural and
what is miraculous begins to break down. He wants to be a defender of
rational science properly done and wishes also to defend some notion of
natural law in his ethics and politics, though such a law is founded
ultimately, he says, on God’s will. Some of Locke’s interpreters press the
voluntarist aspect more than others do. Margaret Wilson and Rae Langton
both argue that for Locke, God’s free will may “superadd” certain ways of
operating onto the inner motions of matter in order to make the experience
of secondary qualities in humans possible.4 M. R. Ayers is more skeptical
about such a place for the activity of God’s willing in a mechanistic
process.5
Perhaps we can situate Locke at a point that Blumenberg describes for
the late medievals: where an intense epistemic modesty, in the face of
a universe designed by an omnipotent free will, is accompanied by a strong
3
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, rev. ed., Peter Nidditch (ed.) (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979).
4
Margaret Wilson, “Superadded Properties: The Limits of Mechanism in Locke,” American
Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 16 (Apr. 1979), 143–50; and Rae Langton, “Locke’s Relations and
God’s Good Pleasure,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 100 (2000), 75–91.
5
M. R. Ayers, “Mechanism, Superaddition, and the Proof of God’s Existence in Locke’s Essay,”
The Philosophical Review, Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr. 1981), 210–51.
stance of human self-assertion. If God’s omnipotence and will require us to
take the world as metaphysically thinned out, as having little ultimate
character of its own that we are able to take into consideration, we can turn
inward and use the appearings and ideas that emerge for us as resources for
shaping nominal essences that may then project a structure of kinds upon
the world. Locke seems intent on emphasizing both these points. He offers
an extreme humility about what humans are able to know about the
universe as designed by God, so that there is a radical contrast between
God’s knowledge and ours. Yet he also seems strongly insistent that it is our
human categories, the results of our workmanship, that ultimately set the
key outlines that we take the examined world to have. That insistence is
shown by his mention of changelings and mermen. We might easily hold
that there are natural kinds in nature, but that these allow for rare excep-
tions and borderline cases, instead of transferring the task of determining
kinds fully to the side of what subjectivity projects upon the world. But
Locke defends the latter position. He thus expresses what Blumenberg calls
the stance of self-assertion that emerges, along with epistemic modesty and
a radical thinning out of the world, as a response to the conception of
a universe designed by a voluntarist God, one whose workings are pro-
foundly impenetrable.
The Kant who proves a strong influence on twentieth-century philoso-
phy is often not Kant himself. When Rudolf Carnap and others are
described as linguistic Kantians, the point is a double one. They replace
Kant’s conceptual conditions of the possibility of experience with logical
and linguistic structures as conditions defining what can be a meaningful
world for us. And they use a certain reading of Kant’s anti-metaphysical
critique to argue that there are boundary lines that we must not cross in
attempting to say how matters stand on their own, independently of some
linguistic scheme or other. So empirical reality is constructed from the side
of subjectivity or language. Kant scholars argue that the linguistic Kantians
of the twentieth century tend to misrepresent the philosopher. The latter
use his overall pattern of thought to support a radical thinning out of the
world; statements about many things that humans have talked about
historically will turn out not to fall within the conditions that one’s
programmatical rules lay down for the meaningfulness of experience.
Kant for his part believed that he had defended the notion of a rich
empirical world of science and of ordinary life, one in which we are well
at home as knowers. A key distinction for him is between empirical
idealism and transcendental idealism. By the former we mean that what
we experience is the world of our mental happenings and we have to be
skeptical about whether there is an objective world beyond them. Kant
vehemently opposes idealism in this sense. He is convinced that we
experience an objectively real world that is independent of the mental
appearings in our subjective awareness. On the other hand, he also believes
that as we are aware of this world of empirical objects, our experience is
conditioned by the fact that we as humans take in the world through
a sensory apparatus and according to the forms of sensibility, of space and
time. If we are experiencers of this sort, then simply to have experience at
all, we must order it in accord with those forms of sensibility and, in
addition, in accord with a set of conceptual structures that are related to
various ways of ordering temporal experience (substance, causality, and the
like). It is a mistake to assume that these features, the ordering conditions
for having experience in the case of creatures like us, will apply to things as
they are in their ultimate metaphysical character. Thus, we have the
position of transcendental idealism.6
For some Kantians, the idea of things in themselves is meant only to
make the point that we cannot step aside from the empirical and con-
ceptual conditions that are deployed by us in bringing objects into view in
our experiencing of them. But there is one case where Kant would like to
offer a more robust story about things in themselves and what they must be
like: the case of human selves. Kant’s conditions of experiencing apply not
only to the way we take in objects that are external to us but also to our
inner experience of ourselves. So when I reflect on my activity of choosing
or willing or intending something, I must experience my mental life in
accord with the sensible and conceptual forms that are conditions for the
experience of creatures like us in the first place. My own mental activity,
therefore, comes off to me as a series of events succeeding one another in
time, with each one causally determined by the set of causal events
preceding it. Then there is no room, it appears, for human autonomy in
the fashion in which Kant values this feature. But what if that sense of my
being an aspect of a causally determined temporal sequence has to do only
with the conditions that make possible human experiencing? As I am in my
fundamental metaphysical nature I might not be an inhabitant of such
a spatiotemporal, causal, deterministic realm. Perhaps I autonomously
make a single, non-temporal act of willing that chooses my entire life all
at once and then as I experience that act of will through my sensory
apparatus, I experience it as spread out in time and in a causally determined
6
For a subtle discussion of Kant’s project, see Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
sequence. Perhaps there is a knower who could know me as such a willing
agent outside of time, provided there is an entity that could have knowl-
edge through a pure intellectual intuiting of what is known, that is, with-
out any sensory apparatus and without any experience that takes
a spatiotemporal form. God historically has been assigned this kind of
knowing. The God of Aquinas and of other thinkers directly knows
particular individuals, but does not do so through being given sensory
impressions of them in time, so his knowledge of me would not auto-
matically translate my autonomous act of willing into a set of causally
determined temporal events. So the possibility of real freedom is saved for
me by that idea, but unfortunately I can never have any experience of
myself that could offer evidence that I do indeed have that metaphysical
status.
Kant, it is true, does not follow the voluntarist program of the late
medievals, nor does he truly show the kind of effects of voluntarism that
Locke still does. For him we fail to comprehend certain contours of reality
not because God’s omnipotent free will introduces an unplumbable ele-
ment of arbitrariness and unpredictability into the metaphysical structure
of things but simply because of the conditions governing how an epistemic
apparatus like ours must work. The scheme of categories we apply in
experiencing the world is not a contingent, pragmatic model, one among
many that might save the appearances in a situation of epistemic precar-
iousness, but consists rather in necessary categories for any experiencer
with a faculty of sensibility like ours. And we do not retreat to a realm of
mental appearings that we arrange into constructions useful for prediction
and control; we are fully ensconced as knowers in the empirical world itself,
though we have to understand differently what it is to be so ensconced.
Still, several elements of the Kantian picture can reinforce features of the
late-medieval intellectual landscape. Human knowing contrasts itself with
a kind of knowing that is incommensurable with and inaccessible to its
own, such that only the latter kind has hopes of uncovering the ultimate
metaphysical layout of reality. In this situation we have to practice
a metaphysical parsimony, a radical thinning out, regarding features that
reality may be taken to have strictly on its own. There is a “Copernican”
turn: instead of the knowing apparatus having to adjust to the metaphy-
sical character of the objects, the objects of experience will have to adjust to
the conditions set out by the knowing apparatus. The extreme thinness
that we must take reality to have is compensated by the fact that important
features once thought to belong to things themselves, such as substance
and causality, are understood to be imposed on experience by what we do
to make it possible, to give it the kind of arrangements that we can make
sense of.
Perhaps Kant does not have to link his noumenal realm to a kind of
knowing that might be practiced by an omnipotent divine being. All he
really needs, he supposes, is the limiting idea of a noumenon, of the
correlate of a kind of knowing that does not involve sensibility. It might
be that all knowledge must begin with some sensory apparatus or other and
that there simply is no being that knows human persons as they are in
themselves. Or such persons might form a community of ends in them-
selves, of autonomous rational willers who, in one of their aspects, know
each other as free but who, in another of their aspects, must experience
each other as causally determined. But the history of theology provides the
richest example of the kind of knowing that might bypass time, space,
sensation, and causation in an all-at-once intellectual intuition of particu-
lars. In a broad sense, then, Kant contributes to what I will call in Chapter 1
the colonization of the metaphysical by the theological. Aristotle believed
that there were metaphysical features intrinsic to things themselves, such as
being a substance and having a certain form, that human reason could
properly comprehend. But in medieval philosophy many came to believe
that if there were such features, they could be knowable only to God. Any
robust metaphysical claim about what is there in things themselves involves
an attempt to trespass onto a territory that we in principle cannot inhabit.
So metaphysical features, thus fully colonized by the theological, must
vanish from the reality of our experience insofar as we can take it into
consideration, and must be replaced by structures that we impose on the
world. Kant can very easily be used by later thinkers to support a stance like
that one. He is so concerned that assigning such apparently metaphysical
features as substance and causality to things in themselves must lead to
a profound skepticism that he must find a new approach to ensure that we
can know these features. If they are the outcome of our constructive
activity as experiencers, then we can do so. Defeating skepticism seems
to require transferring as many central features as possible from reality’s
side to our own, so that we must take reality itself to be radically thinned
out. That habit of thought was part of Kant’s influential legacy.
The Kantianism that made it into the twentieth century, especially as an
influence on analytic philosophy, will typically leave behind distinctions
central to Kant himself. Instead of an empirical world that is emphatically
non-phenomenalist for Kant (in the sense that it is not about mental
appearings that might not reach out to the world), several logical positivists
would see us as arranging a realm of sensory impressions. Instead of a single
necessary conceptual structure that had to be in operation for experience to
be possible in the first place, we have a range of contingent linguistic
schemes that determine what objects are experienceable and what is mean-
ingful and that are chosen for pragmatic goals. But there are features crucial
to my narrative that are retained from that Kantian program. These
include the sense that we are forbidden to cross over into a metaphysical
realm that defines things as they truly are; a fervent metaphysical parsi-
mony regarding features we can take the world to have without reference to
our experiencing apparatus; and the self-assertion that what we once took
to be features fully independent of us are due to a conceptual scheme that
we impose as experiencers or speakers.
As we look across the twentieth century, we see important philosophical
work that continues features shaped by the late-medieval landscape,
though we also see philosophers working hard to overturn that picture.
In the first camp are such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, and
W. V. Quine. John McDowell, Saul Kripke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and
Daniel Dennett are in the second camp. Russell believed that physical
objects are logical fictions that individuals construct on the basis of their
sense data. To say that this is the same parrot as the one in the green cage
yesterday is to say nothing about what the parrot itself does to secure its
own sameness from one moment to the next. It is to report instead on
similarities in the pattern of appearances of one’s own sense data. So we
have the radically thinned-out world on its own that was described earlier.
Quine also seems to press toward such a metaphysical minimum. In his
familiar thought experiment in which he argues for the indeterminacy of
reference, he considers a native speaker using a certain verbal form when
rabbits are in the vicinity.7 An interpreter of the native’s speech, he claims,
cannot determine from the available evidence if the speaker is referring to
individual rabbits, to rabbit time-slices, to undetached rabbit parts, or to
a section of a rabbity mass that can be distributed across the landscape in
the way that water is. The ordinary person might assume that rabbits on
their own do rather a lot to individuate themselves. They have sophisti-
cated mechanisms for establishing, maintaining, and defending their
boundaries as individuals. They compete with other rabbits and other
animals for food and reproductive opportunities. They have distinctive
DNA and immunological systems. And so forth. If Quine holds that
7
W. V. Quine, “Ontological Relativity,” in Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1969), 26–68. Also see Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1960), Chapter 2.
reference is indeterminate from the side of what the native speaker is
contributing to the speaking occasion, then it seems we have an alternative:
let it be determined by the way the world itself already performs a good
deal, though not all, of the labor of distinguishing entities into individuals
and kinds. The world has not waited around for millions of years to have
humans come along and project the relevant articulations upon it.
Reference works, we might say, because thinking beings have emerged
from nature through being very good at registering the determinate char-
acter of already present features of the environment.
But Quine prefers to say that when reference cannot be secured by
means of features available from the side of the speaker, then the very
notion of reference must be surrendered. Much of my work here will go
toward showing why, historically speaking, a richer notion of reference
grounded in the actual contours of the world does not seem a plausible
option for him and for many other thinkers. Eventually it becomes
difficult within his outlook not only to make reference to entities deter-
minate. It is difficult even to make sense of the individuating distinctions
that Quine himself seems to take for granted in laying out his thought
experiment to begin with. (How can we even distinguish any more
between rabbits and rabbit time-slices, for example, in setting up the
experiment?) As we will see, even our notions of belief, intention, and
meaning appear to fall by the wayside in Quine’s work. A metaphysical
contraction and thinning of the world does not leave the rest of the
terrain as it was. What we thought remained in place, still with its
semantic content, may have lost, with that contraction, the ecological
conditions needed for itself not to become empty as well. Deprived of
their original theological or religious backing, certain patterns of
thought, under more recent pressures, begin to self-destruct.
A radical thinning out of the world, in terms of what character it can be
taken to have on its own, is such a dominant picture that philosophers who
wish to go against this picture may feel that they are fighting a powerful
tide. Saul Kripke, for example, is curious about the idea of necessity.8
A standard philosophical account is that necessity must be shown to be
something that we impose on a metaphysically minimal world, either
through Kantian conditions of the possibility of experience or through
the grammatical, logical, and semantic rules that make certain statements
necessarily true. Kripke argues (I will examine his argument) that neither
8
See Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of
Natural Language (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), 253–355.
epistemic nor linguistic necessity can account for a kind of necessity that is
present in things themselves, bringing about their necessary properties.
So we need, he claims, to have a metaphysically richer world than modern
philosophers have typically allowed for.
John McDowell must fight against a similar thinning of the world that he
takes to be the dominant story in philosophy.9 The model in favor, the one
he must struggle against, supposes that reality is a meaningless realm of items
obeying physical laws. This realm affects human minds in a brutely causal
manner that makes a stream of sensory impressions appear in the experi-
encer’s interior space. Our rational faculties then go to work on that already
inward material to construct a richer picture. But then we do not appear to
be engaged as thinkers and evidence-assessors with the layout of the world
itself. Our beliefs, in working on the inward material that has mysteriously
popped up in inner space, are not focused on the actual arrangements of
reality that can serve as justifiers for such beliefs. We need to reject, says
McDowell, the very impoverished reality that a certain view of science has
left us with. We need to understand how our rational capacities go all the
way out to a richly meaningful world whose own patterns can be seen, for
a viewer sophisticated enough to have entered the space of reasons, as
evidentiary, as the very kind of thing that supports claims of belief and
inference. On the account that he is arguing against, says McDowell, we
have exculpation instead of justification. We cannot be blamed for how we
handle the flotsam that just happens to pop up in our interior space, but our
beliefs are not justified by the way the world is. Worse than that, says
McDowell, those interior manipulations, thus cut off from a larger process
that could count as a rational response to the world and not just a causal one,
may seem not to have semantic content at all. McDowell claims that this
picture is due to a dualism of reason and nature that developed in the early-
modern era and that we need to rethink.10
By now it should be less of a surprise what has happened here. What
McDowell is describing as deeply problematic is very close to the landscape
that the late-medieval voluntarists, for good theological and epistemic
reasons, were forced to occupy. Unlike in Aristotle (and in Aquinas),
there is for these thinkers a radical gap between human reason and divine
reason. We cannot expect that the deployment of our rational powers can
extend in any way to the range of what God’s reason encompasses. God
9
His central argument, which I will spend two chapters analyzing and evaluating, is in
John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
10
McDowell, Mind and World, 66–86.
might make the deep order of reality change drastically and yet bring it
about that its appearings to us remain the same. So we have to make the
defensive move inward that disturbs McDowell. We cannot expect that
our rational activity can go all the way out to the world itself and be
sensitive to reasons that are there anyway in the fabric of the universe.
We have to turn to manipulating items much closer to the point where our
beliefs are formed. Our only option, therefore, is to settle for exculpation
rather than justification, in McDowell’s terms. So long as we restrict our
epistemic claims to what we need in order to make the inward appearances
more reliably predictable and to have successful practical interventions in
the world, we cannot be blamed for the beliefs we come up with, even if
they cannot truly be said to be justified by the way that the world itself is
arranged, which remains inaccessible. God, it is claimed, would not be
cruel enough to create us with an epistemic apparatus that leads us to
falsehood even when we are passively registering these internal appearings,
when we are merely accepting them as appearings. So in our move toward
epistemic modesty we discover a kind of certainty. It is only when our
active free will enters into our forming of judgments, especially judgments
about how things stand in the world itself, that we become blameworthy.
Otherwise we are not culpable. Just as in the picture McDowell dislikes,
that active free will, which represents our spontaneous rational powers,
engages only with material that is already well inward and not with the
layout of reality itself; it activates itself rather late along the epistemic line.
(I will look at this argument in greater detail.)
So what McDowell wishes to resist, as what he takes to be the dominant,
taken-for-granted model of so much of twentieth-century philosophy, can
be seen as the legacy of the late-medieval world, where it actually made
a good deal of sense. But today we no longer have the same motivation to
avoid intruding on a sphere that only God’s reason can articulate and know,
while we restrict the operations of human rationality to a more narrow, more
inward sphere. Nature’s arrangements can be described more substantially as
offering rational constraints on belief and not just as merely physical
arrangements that flood into human minds and impress them in various
ways. To see the contours of the world as rational justifiers of belief is to be
sensitive to patterns that the stuff of reality arranges itself into and that
emerge into view when we have a relevant level of description encouraging
that sensitivity. The omnipotence of God’s free willing made us commit
ourselves to a minimally determinate universe that would put the least
constraint on God’s activity. That turned out to be a mechanical and
mathematizable universe of basic physical stuff in motion. Hence the kind
of nature, and the allowable stance of human reason toward it, that must lead
to McDowell’s dualism of reason and nature.
Several twentieth-century thinkers challenge the legacy of the modern
response to the late-medieval situation by attacking the idea that we have
privileged knowledge of our inner states and can use these in our epistemi-
cally relevant constructions. Augustine’s notion of a divine illumination of
human innerness could be joined with the defensive turn inward in the face
of the power of God’s free will as determining metaphysical reality. But these
religious considerations do not apply in the twentieth century. Instead we
have good reasons to believe that our awareness of supposedly privileged
inner objects is problematic. (I will be looking especially at Wittgenstein and
Daniel Dennett in this regard.) Evolution would have designed us to be
quite good at registering items in the external environment, but learning to
describe and report on an internal stream of consciousness must have been
a much later and quite fallible cultural acquisition. Psychology lab experi-
ments show that we are constantly doing so much unconscious editing,
revising, and deleting even of our supposedly immediate conscious states
that there is no such thing as the immediately available contents of conscious
experience. Rather than being a ready skill open unproblematically to all, the
description of one’s sensory states may require very much training, as with
wine tasting or becoming an impressionist painter. And we are more aware
now of how much of subjective life is culturally constructed; what we think
of as reports on our immediate, private experiences are often a result of
memes circulating in the culture that may not accurately capture much that
is truly our own mental life. So a turn to an epistemic investment in a set of
interior objects, very well motivated for the late medievals, is not at all well
motivated for those in the twentieth century. Yet many thinkers continued
to work the familiar terrain of modern philosophy, which itself was partly
built on the layout of late-medieval thought.
It is important that I expand my narrative to include significant philoso-
phical work in twentieth-century continental Europe. There the key philo-
sophical influence in the background, as a thinker reacting to the late-
medieval situation, is Hegel rather than empiricism. Theological matters
remain important for Hegel because he needs to overcome the consequences
of the voluntarist God of the late medievals, though he does not present
himself explicitly as doing this, and because he uses Christian theology as
a model for his philosophical system. He distinguishes between the religion
of the sublime, which emphasizes the ineffability and incommensurability of
a divine being thoroughly beyond the human, and the religion of the
beautiful, which supposes that what we mean by the divine can be incarnated
in admirable worldly forms.11 Christianity for Hegel is supposed to synthe-
size those two approaches to religion, but the late-medieval period clearly
exalts the sublime, unconditioned, unrepresentable character of the divine.
Hegel’s response is to offer a secularized version of Christianity. The idea
humans have been trying to get at through their evolving notions of the
divine is that of free rational self-determination. Instead of this “divine”
activity being unrepresentable and incommensurable with the human order,
it must be seen ultimately as embodied in human individuals, institutions,
and practices. To the extent that the divine activity is properly understood, it
is for Hegel fully self-manifesting and self-realizing in history. Instead of
being radically external to the human order, the divine turns out to be a set of
self-unfolding logical patterns that we can observe in ever more sophisticated
incarnations. So we might call Hegel the great philosopher of the anti-
sublime, the opponent of the voluntarist God.
What may be surprising is that certain twentieth-century European
philosophers have tried to undermine Hegel’s narrative precisely by appeal-
ing once more to strong notions of a religious sublime. Walter Benjamin
and Jacques Derrida are the two thinkers I look at closely in this regard, but
there are others as well. Their attack on Hegel is mostly implicit rather than
direct, but we see how the patterns of these thinkers pop into place when
we arrange them as aspects of anti-Hegelianism. In their feud with Hegel,
they begin repeating some of the structural features of the late-medieval
world, as that world was marked out by the concerns of theological
voluntarism. They claim that the idea of a radically ineffable otherness
discredits all attempts to justify any human forms at all, whether semantic
or political, as incarnating anything like the self-determining activity that
Hegel’s idea of Geist or spirit supports and requires. Those Hegelian
solutions, and indeed any attempts to make meaning or truth have
a convincing form of presence, will come off for such thinkers as appealing
to false idols that have to be firmly resisted and devalued. We must then see
the world as radically emptied out, a site of ruins. A space is left open for
a thoroughly new, messianic eruption into the present; nothing useful will
come out of the self-unfolding of worldly patterns from within. I will also
look at one of the important late twentieth-century interpreters of Hegel:
Robert Pippin. On my narrative, Pippin’s reading of Hegel misses the
centrality and the structure of that philosopher’s at least implicit response
to late-medieval voluntarism. He turns him into a thinker for whom the
11
See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Peter C. Hodgson (ed.), R. F. Brown,
P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (trans.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 328–75.
relationship of a spontaneous self-knowing and self-determining activity of
thought to an objective reality opposed to it is still in question. That
activity is supposed to generate the standards for an objective order from
its own conceptions and from its dissatisfaction with earlier versions of
those conceptions. So Pippin’s Hegel retains certain aspects of a sublime,
godlike subjectivity whose autonomy cannot be contaminated, such that
its incarnation in the world, its applicability to actual reality, may be
unconvincing. I will oppose that aspect of his reading.
Here we may note an important contrast. A return to roughly Aristotelian
themes, and a rejecting of patterns inherited from the late-medieval theol-
ogy, has occurred in much recent work in the Anglo-American tradition of
analytic philosophy. A parallel move has not occurred in what is known as
Continental philosophy, at least as that philosophy was familiar in America.
Much European work in the twentieth century, as well as in the American
literary and cultural studies influenced by it, has attempted to restore some
version, often a heightened, intensified one, of the late-medieval sublime,
through holding open the thought of an order that is radically other than,
and irreconcilable with, the present human order. This style of thought
therefore attacks everything it sees as being derived from the tradition of
humanism, which appears to grant too central a role in philosophy to
individual humans and their capacities. As with the late medievals, the
emphasis on something sublimely theological, even if it is not for these
recent thinkers an actual deity, has to devalue the ordinary stances of
humans. My own narrative takes sides here. I think the Anglo-American
turn against the late-medieval legacy is convincing, while the Continental
reviving and intensifying of the late-medieval sublime, in their hostility to
Hegel, is far less so. So at least my arguments in this book will go. I believe we
are at a privileged point now to survey the long history of Western philoso-
phy over the last several centuries and to find revealing patterns, as well as
stubborn forms of inertia, within it. We can see what it means to have
worked through a range of shapes of thought determined by the powerful
theological and epistemic situation of the late-medieval period. The attempt
by some to intensify the sublime in various postmodern, literary, and
political forms is, I believe, a regression to a style of thought that we ought
to move beyond. That regression would dissolve notions of selfhood, indi-
viduation, and rationality that are crucial as we ask what kinds of worthwhile
lives remain possible for us today.
I should say something further about the assertion advanced by my title.
A reader might object that I make an overall causal claim (about religious
pictures shaping philosophical practices) but do not offer sufficient evidence
to show that causality, rather than a mere close resemblance between intel-
lectual schemes emerging in different eras, is what is at stake. I need then, to
be clearer about the modesty of what I am claiming. I am dealing with the
history of philosophy, not with the history of intellectual and scientific work
in general. As I am a pluralist by temperament, I suppose there were several
intellectual pictures, beyond those I am examining, that caused leading
thinkers to do what they did over the centuries. So I can accept that there
were successful practices that gradually shaped modern science and that were
not much based on any lingering deep structure of theological belief.
Yet especially in the case of philosophy, it does seem that certain thinkers
hold pivotal positions: Locke and the empiricists, Kant, and Hegel. We can
see how they adapted to and transformed the late-medieval legacy and then
how certain resulting features were transmitted into the twentieth century.
Because of the inertial power of those earlier landscapes, philosophers
tended to move naturally in certain directions and to find certain patterns
of thought satisfying, however little they might understand the role of
religion in the initial design of these terrains. What ought to have seemed
unappealing and unintuitive stances therefore appeared far more plausible
and attractive than they ought to have. The continuing influence of
empiricism and Kantianism on how we may conceive the experiencer-to-
world relationship made our ways of thinking about meaning, experience,
and reality fall into certain ready pathways on that landscape. When we put
pressure on those habits of thought, they begin to disintegrate when they
no longer have the metaphysical backing of the original religious structure.
(We will see this happening.) Whatever Kripke himself may have thought
he was doing, it is satisfying to see his work as reversing the inertial patterns
of an architecture that theological voluntarism made so powerfully avail-
able. McDowell may not have any religious patterns in mind but he shows
how the inner world of the subject “goes dark” when its content does not
count from the start as a bringing of the world into view but is granted
a considerable degree of autonomy. Like Wittgenstein, he is showing what
happens when the Protestant notion of a privileged interiority viewed
directly and immediately by God loses God’s backing. The autonomous
inner life, possibly divorced from the world, once made sense as an object
for divine viewing but now becomes empty and meaningless except
through a robust process of registering the contours of the world.
There is a weaker reading of my narrative that I could fall back on if
others are skeptical about the inertial power of earlier templates for laying
out a certain philosophical terrain. I could weaken the causal claim and
focus on the usefulness of pointing out interesting structural analogies
between the situation and responses of twentieth-century philosophers and
the situation and responses of those in the late-medieval and early-modern
contexts. Drawing out these analogies might make it clearer what
a satisfying response to today’s philosophical situation would look like.
The analogical comparison might bring certain moves in Kripke and
McDowell, for example, much more vividly into view. Why should we
be tempted in those different historical situations by the picture of
a thinned-out world that has its determinations projected upon it by an
activity external to it? Are there informative parallels even if we cannot
show direct causation of one era by the other? I think my enterprise would
still be useful and instructive if its claims had to be weakened in this
manner. There is an uncanny way in which the difficulties, pressures,
and solutions associated with the late-medieval theological model or the
Protestant model of interiority repeat themselves in certain twentieth-
century situations, and keeping those analogies in mind may help us
understand our own predicament better. Setting up the clear parallels
allows us to see that only something like an omnipotent divine being
could have held that earlier system together, while our contemporary
analogous one, without such a metaphysical principle as its support, begins
to disintegrate when we put philosophical pressure on it. But I will admit
to being rather attached to at least a weak version of the causal argument:
that the late-medieval religious terrain does not vanish and offer us merely
an education by analogy but, as with certain buildings in Rome, continues
to affect the layout of the thought-architecture built upon it later. I will be
disappointed if that story is not at least partly true. But I grant that the
phenomena I am treating come out of a rich and multiple causality.
What I have supposedly arrived at by the end of the book is something of a
Wittgensteinian move. I have argued that a picture held us captive, in this case
a picture based ultimately on theological and religious considerations. Once
we get rid of this picture that enslaved us, then in a good Wittgensteinian
manner we are free to find ourselves in a rich engagement with a metaphy-
sically robust world. Only the strange pressure of an inflated theological
picture kept us from accepting that satisfying intuitive response to our
experience. But I grant that there are other ways, from within science itself
even without any religious background, that we may arrive at a view of the
world as bleakly thinned out, as disenchanted and as deprived on its own of
any meaning or value or significant metaphysical character. Some will hold
that the dominance of physics pushes us in this direction even if there is no
influence whatever on us of earlier religious thinking. So even if we should get
rid of the religious pictures that I find distorting, we might still remain in the
position that I, through my book, am trying to rescue us from. So my rescue
operation will have been at least a partial failure.
I grant that the radical metaphysical impoverishment of the world on its
own, its radical disenchantment, may be motivated by other considerations
than those that were once theological. Still, there remains something impor-
tant in the Wittgensteinian “picture held us captive” narrative. Even if the
picture in question did not dominate all twentieth-century metaphysical
views, its influence on philosophy was strong enough that removing that
influence allows a more open weighing of the different ways we might
conceive of the relationship of human minds to the world. And drawing
out the parallel between the late-medieval situation and certain views in the
twentieth century may make it clearer, through the available comparison, that
there are weaknesses in our present motivation for the radically disenchanted
view. It is easy to see, as a contrast, just why the late medievals, in response to
a theological conception, had to produce so thorough an impoverishment of
the world taken on its own. But is there truly any comparable pressure today?
Why shouldn’t we see the world as quite wondrous in the ways it has
articulated and arranged itself over millions of years, quite apart from any
constructions that we may project upon it? The “impoverished” world of
physical stuff in motion generates on its own some rather spectacular arrange-
ments, including living things, thinking beings, and entire ecosystems, that
are worth marveling at, valuing, and protecting for the future. At different
levels of resolution, we can make out rich patterns that are there to be
discerned, once we adopt a way of viewing, a level of resolution, that brings
them out. Why should we ever prefer the thin account that reduces reality to
a metaphysical minimum and then has everything that matters be a result of
determinations imposed by thought or language? I will be examining one
important source of that implausible preference.12
12
For readers interested in the influence of theological voluntarism on modernity, I recommend
Michael Allen Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2008). Gillespie also begins with late-medieval voluntarism and nominalism. His interest is in
political theory and he works his way through material very different from the topics that interest me
here. He studies Petrarch, Erasmus, Luther, Hobbes, and Machiavelli, though he also goes forward
to Kant’s Third Antinomy and to Hegel. Ultimately, he supports a certain claim: that our modern
notions of individuality and of the scientific realm are built on theological origins that we do not
acknowledge, including the construction of human individuality in response to the voluntarist God.
He makes the interesting claim that if we acknowledge the role of religion in our modern secular
beliefs, we will have a better dialogue with contemporary Islam, instead of seeing ourselves as
representing only secular enlightenment.
chapter 1
Empiricism and Theology
According to my narrative, an intellectual space marked by extreme

metaphysical parsimony, by epistemic precariousness in a radically con-
tingent world, and by a defensive move inward to a realm of apparently
more dependable objects arose out of the late-medieval acceptance of the
unlimited range of God’s free willing. Early modern empiricism fit itself
neatly into that intellectual space. Kant, then, did so as well, with his own
adjustments. If we cannot know things as they are in themselves, as God
might know them, then there is a maximal space for a human demiurgic
constructing of an apparent world out of a flow of givenness that must be
taken to have only a minimal determinacy of its own.
My story holds further that the empiricists and Kant, so crucially
influential in shaping philosophy beyond their times, were like
a transmission belt that carried many aspects of the late-medieval intellec-
tual space into the twentieth century. If that is true, we should expect to
find evidence of that space in those twentieth-century thinkers who were
strongly influenced by empiricism and by the legacy of Kant. A good test
case for my narrative, then, will be Bertrand Russell and the logical
positivists. The former continues the history, in a somewhat new guise,
of British empiricism, while one might summarize the stance of the latter,
perhaps too briskly, as bringing together the empiricist account of sense
data, the Kantian constructivist account of the applying of conceptual
schemes to experience, and new findings in logic and in the analysis of
linguistic systems. As we look at a range of different themes, we keep
finding a common picture. The logical positivists were supposed to be
defenders of science and of the ways that scientists conducted their busi-
ness. But they seem again and again to adopt not the tolerant attitudes of
ordinary scientists but rather what appear to be expressions of an ideolo-
gical and iconoclastic stance. And that stance has multiple rich analogies
with the intellectual world of the late-medieval nominalists. Let us see how
this happens in particular cases.
20
Empiricism and Theology 21
(1) Scientists focus on the kinds of statements they can link up to good
empirical evidence. They want to know, all things considered, what are the
best explanations for the phenomena they are studying. It is natural to
suppose that the best explanations for the experiences they investigate are
that there are genes and tectonic plates and chemical compounds and
viruses that are there anyway, apart from our experiencing of them, and
that in the long run these cause our more or less accurate beliefs about
them. For many logical positivists, we have thereby taken a step too far and
have made a metaphysical assertion. In trying to say what the world is like
independently of us and in itself, we are assigning things a metaphysical
status that, quite generally, we could never have an experience of. We are
taking the metaphysical stance of a realist instead of learning to give up
metaphysics entirely as a meaningless endeavor, as a reach toward what our
words could not possibly succeed in encompassing.
Yet why should there be this fervent insistence that there are lines that
we must not, under any circumstances, trespass beyond? Ordinary practi-
cing scientists seem more relaxed and tolerant regarding the reach of their
claims, provided there are suitable connections to empirical evidence.
The sense of a dramatic line of demarcation beyond which we must not
go, like Ulysses going past the Pillars of Hercules, does not seem to follow
from the needs of science itself. On the other hand, such a line makes
perfect sense in the intellectual space of the late medievals. It is the line
between what humans can know and what God does, and that line is
absolute, not to be violated. To claim that we know what things are like
anyway, apart from our experiencing, is to claim that we have insight into
God’s free willing, and that is insight we cannot possibly have. So there is
the strictest possible reason against our trespassing into the area of making
metaphysical claims about how matters truly stand in the world. But taking
the same stance in the case of logical positivism is less motivated and
appears less plausible. Is there a basis for what seems an excessive fervency
in refusing to allow even modest metaphysical claims about how the world
is arranged on its own?
We might look at the way this issue emerges in the work of Rudolf
Carnap. In “The Rejection of Metaphysics” he emphasizes first of all that
the kind of philosophical positions he wishes to reject are typically
expressed in references to real essences or to things in themselves.1 These
two topics, it is worth noting, have a definite history. Locke distinguished
1
Rudolf Carnap, “The Rejection of Metaphysics,” in M. Weitz (ed.), 20th-Century Philosophy:
The Analytic Tradition (New York: Free Press, 1966), 209–12.
between the nominal essence, that which corresponds to our mental ideas
and our language, and the real essence, that which in things makes them
ultimately what they are. Empirical knowledge has access only to the
former. Kant for his part distinguished the world as it appears to us, who
must experience it through the forms of sensibility, from things as they are
in themselves, as they might be known by a being without our human
limitations of knowledge through sense experience and through the phe-
nomenal forms of space and time. Both of these conceptions attacked
specifically by Carnap have an implicitly theological background that owes
itself to the late-medieval period. We cannot know real essences because
they depend on God’s absolute free willing and omnipotence, and these are
thoroughly inaccessible to us. We cannot know things in themselves on the
Kantian scheme because these are what they are only to a kind of knowing
that is not like ours, that might be had by a divine being without our limits.
We might call this late-medieval legacy the radical colonization of the
metaphysical by the theological. Note that such a colonization is not inevi-
table. Aristotle, as well as his disciple Aquinas, believed that one could say
a great deal about the metaphysical makeup of things without infringing
on the prerogatives of God. But the inflating of the idea of God’s free will
among the later voluntarists, with God’s incomprehensible and arbitrary
power to make things behave in any manner and to create each individual
object anew, meant that any metaphysical features that individuals were
thought to possess on their own had to be removed. Whatever one counted
as metaphysical now became completely inaccessible to human knowers
and dependent on a theological determination. Or else everything one
thought of as metaphysical, whether substance, essences, causality, neces-
sity, and the like, had to be transferred to the side of subjectivity or
language, to what humans project onto experience in the having of it.
Without that thorough colonization of the metaphysical by the theolo-
gical, it would appear that a number of less drastic options are available.
We might offer modest metaphysical claims even within the framework of
what humans are able to experience. Saul Kripke will claim, for example,
that we can make sense of a notion of essential properties. (I will be looking
at his arguments in Chapter 3.) These properties are based on the core
structure of certain natural kinds such that if a sample of such a kind were
to lose that structure, it would no longer be of the same kind. Or we might
develop a modest notion of individual substance. Biological individuals do
a great deal of work to establish and to sustain their own self-identity
through change and in the face of severe external pressures. They do not
wait around for a cookie-cutter scheme applied by humans to mark them
off as individuals. Why cannot even such modest metaphysical claims be
allowed? One answer is the following: Carnap and other logical positivists
in their new enterprise are looking around for a powerful, radical way to
remove from the board most of the philosophies of the past, which they
regard as hindrances to scientific thinking. The two most appealing
schemes that appear for this purpose are the empiricism of such thinkers
as Hume and Ernst Mach and the Kantian program of transferring all
metaphysical pressure from the world to the side of subjectivity or lan-
guage. Both these programs, with their implicit background in medieval
theology, require that the world be drastically emptied of its determinate
metaphysical character. Both are shaped by what we called the colonization
of the metaphysical by the theological. Even quite modest metaphysical
claims about how the world is set up are then delegitimated in advance, so
that investigating them cannot be a plausible option. We end up with an
uncrossable line of demarcation that is just as strict as it was for the late
medievals. If metaphysics has become fully entangled in religiously deter-
mined conceptions, then if we wish to liberate philosophy from the
religious frameworks in which it has been embedded, we have to liberate
it from metaphysics itself. The entire sphere of the metaphysical will seem
inevitably interwoven with a space that must remain absolutely unfathom-
able for our human practices. If finding any metaphysical determinacy at
all is linked to theological considerations, then an empirically based
investigation, in eschewing the theological as non-empirical, must reject
metaphysics entirely. One is forced into a more radically iconoclastic
project than a desire to safeguard the empirical character of science
requires.
The irony is that in the very move that the logical positivists make to free
themselves of a theological background, they are entrapped within it. For
in their conception of the metaphysical, they continue to take for granted
the view of it that arose only through the colonizing of that sphere by
theological considerations. That is what governs their behavior. They
cannot imagine a more convincing liberation, one where the theologically
articulated space of the late-medieval period has been fully given up. If it
were given up, then a range of aspects of the metaphysical might become
legitimate again. We might then engage in a more open and less ideological
investigation that asks which features we suppose the world to have are due
more to the way the world is and which ones are due more to our human
modes of experiencing and projecting. We would not have to decide in
advance that only the latter are legitimate sources of ontological determi-
nacy. We might become relaxed neo-Aristotelians who, while rejecting
Aristotle’s final causes, still find some modest metaphysical accounts of the
world to be appropriate.
(2) It is an oddity that the logical positivists, the great modern defenders
of science, can end up resembling the late-medieval nominalists more than
the early-modern scientists who had to assert a world vision against the
power of the nominalist one. The theological voluntarism of the nomin-
alists had, as a key point, that while human systems of knowledge could
save the appearances and make our interventions and predictions come out
right, they could not claim to capture what is truly the case in reality. For
God is powerful enough to have produced in any number of ways the effect
to be explained. Even the predictive efficiency of one’s model was no proof
of its truth, for God is surely not limited by any need to produce effects in
the most efficient manner, since no act is of any difficulty for him and he
might intervene in any causal process whatever. So Church officials could
allow a surprisingly wide range of speculation about how nature works
provided writers acknowledged that they were just saving the appearances
and were not infringing on the territory of God’s free willing. A curiosity
that saw human minds as reaching to the farthest extent of what was
knowable in itself was discouraged; one had to stick to one’s properly
human capacities. The early-modern science of Copernicus, Kepler, and
Galileo refused to accept this stance.2 In the fight between humanists and
nominalists, Copernicus takes the side of the former, who are more
confident about our human powers. God has generously designed the
world, he claims, so that the human mind can participate to some extent
in the divine way of knowing it. So Copernicus is not just saving the
appearances and making predictions come out right in his astronomical
models. He is describing the truth of how things are, even if the preface
that Osiander added to his work rather fudged this matter.3 For Galileo,
mathematics is not just a helpful tool to make calculations but is the very
language of nature.
When we look to the logical positivists, they seem closer not to
Copernicus but to his nominalist opponents. Curiosity about the larger
metaphysical framework that brings about our phenomenal experience
seems disallowed by their severe allergy to any discourse that is even
vaguely metaphysical. Our schemes, then, can only save the appearances
by making our interventions and predictions come out right. There are
2
Just as he has treated the late-medieval period insightfully and in great detail in The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age, Hans Blumenberg treats the period of early modern science in his The Genesis of the
Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
3
Blumenberg, Genesis of the Copernican World, 290–315.
always alternative schemes that might explain the phenomenon in question
differently, just as God for the late medievals might have produced the
same effect differently. The response to these conditions is also analogous.
For both the late medievals and the logical positivists, we face the incapa-
city to make metaphysical claims by a strategic retreat to a more inward line
of defense. We can have knowledge of our inner experiences and out of
these we may construct useful models that guide technical interventions
into reality. This great metaphysical modesty can warrant great human
ambition. By reducing reality to a metaphysical minimum, we open a space
for the free operation of our human capacity to constitute a world of
objects by means of our linguistic schemes, provided we do not try to claim
too strong a metaphysical status for the objects thus delineated.
We may note, in this regard, Russell’s insistence that “wherever possible,
logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.”4 To infer
what reality is like by asking what causes might bring about a set of
appearances to us is to have an unjustified confidence in our epistemic
reach. To construct a world of objects out of those sensory appearances is to
be far more responsible. W. V. Quine, a student of Carnap, says that the
conceptual schemes of science are just tools to predict future experiences in
the light of past experiences. Physical objects, he adds, are cultural posits
that, in strict epistemic terms, are on the same footing as the Homeric
gods.5 It is just that the myth of physical objects is more efficacious for
making predictions than is the Homeric one. That position sounds rather
a lot like the late-medieval one instead of like that of early-modern
Copernican science.
(3) Nietzsche argues against the idea that there is, behind the apparent
world of our experience, a real world of higher metaphysical status. Then
he adds an important move. He says that once we get rid of that “real
world,” we have gotten rid of the apparent one as well.6 It functioned as
a world of mere appearances only in the context of that earlier contrast;
without that contrast in place, its own status is fundamentally changed.
It seems that the logical positivists might well take the same step that
Nietzsche does. They adopt a largely Kantian framework with two key
changes. The a priori structures that the Kantian subject must apply to
4
Bertrand Russell, “The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics,” in Weitz, 20th-Century Philosophy, 164.
5
W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in P. K. Moser and A. vander Nat (eds.), Human
Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Approaches (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),
266–7.
6
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990),
50–1.
make experience possible become structures of language. And Kant’s
noumenal world is supposed to drop out entirely as an unallowable
metaphysical leftover. But then, as with Nietzsche’s move, the world of
sensory appearances should change its status as well. With no Kantian
contrast any more between a realm knowable by God precisely as it is and
a realm of appearances to humans who must experience matters through
forms of sensibility, we should say that we experience the appearing, the
coming into view, of the world itself. The world manifests itself to us and
in experiencing how it appears we are experiencing that very world, not
a set of appearings that make up an additional realm that might continue
even if the world itself should vanish. If real objects do not have a special
noumenal character arising from theological considerations, then they are
what we know and experience, even if we may do so perspectivally. Yet
Russell and many logical positivists go on speaking as if the contrast in
question were still in place. Their world of appearings, as they describe
these, makes sense only in an intellectual space in which something like
a noumenal world is in the background, ghost-like, as a constituent of the
space, only it can never be mentioned in any way. That is why there is such
worry about a trespass into unallowable metaphysical territory, which is
thought of as still there in the background.
That stance is recognizable in Russell, a forerunner of these positi-
vists who was a strong influence on them. It is especially clear in his
work around the time of the First World War, when he was investi-
gating our knowledge of the external world.7 Russell, who changed his
positions fairly often over a long intellectual life, was at this time
a phenomenalist: the only things we experience directly are sensory
givens. He is happy to admit that there might be a larger, more
embracing metaphysical world as the context for these phenomenal
experiences. Perhaps there are tables and trees and stars beyond their
appearances to us, but we can never know this. So Russell offers the
picture of a world of appearings to us that is surrounded by the
I-know-not-what reality in which these appearings arise. There might
well be the universe as it appears to a God’s-eye view, but that stance
cannot in any way be made available to us. So, the Kantian noumenal
world, with its theological origins, remains as a ghost-like determiner
of the overall intellectual space of Russell’s empiricism.
7
Bertrand Russell, “What There Is,” in R. Ammerman (ed.), Classics of Analytic Philosophy
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), 25–34. This selection is taken from Russell’s 1918 “Lectures on
Logical Atomism.”
Carnap in “The Rejection of Metaphysics” recognizes that such
a stance violates his strictures against metaphysics. Even to talk of
appearings or sensory givens, as the phenomenalists do, is to assume
a larger metaphysical picture in which what is bringing about those
appearings remains mysterious. He therefore radicalizes his program in
order to get rid of even those ghost-like metaphysical spaces in the
background. Russell is wrong, he thinks, to promote phenomenalism
(we have knowledge only of sensory givens and what we can construct out
of them) over realism (we have knowledge of individuals and objects in
the physical world around us). For he is thus situating his experience
within an implicitly metaphysical stance. Instead, one should say that
both phenomenalism and realism as positions are meaningless.8
Statements to be meaningful must be linked to recipes for putting some-
one in place to have observations that demonstrate these statements to be
true, while also showing that statements opposed to them are false. But
what observations could realists describe as verifying their statements that
phenomenalists could not easily describe as verifying their own? Both
predict and make sense of the same observations, so there is no mean-
ingful difference between the two positions. The same goes, says Carnap,
for the dispute between the solipsist and the believer in other minds. Both
sides can account equally well for the same observational evidence, so
again there is no meaningful difference between the two positions. They
are unacceptably metaphysical, then, rather than being empirical. Carnap
goes further and skewers even the stances that the logical positivists have
been putting forward. One should not talk of positivism itself or of
sensory givens or of appearings to an observer. These imply a larger
metaphysical setting such as we found in Russell. To talk of what is
given to the experiencer is to imply that there is something mysterious
out there doing the giving, and that is already too much metaphysics for
Carnap. We can say meaningfully that there are aardvarks in Zambia or
that there is a park on the edge of the city, but we cannot meaningfully
give a metaphysical story about how the world is ultimately set up so as to
make such statements true or false. We cannot argue in a general way
about whether or not there is an external world or about whether or not
there are physical objects. We just monitor and are guided by our
observations without granting them any particular metaphysical status
at all. We do not thereby think of ourselves as falling short of some
knowledge that would be worth possessing.
8
Carnap, “The Rejection of Metaphysics,” 211–12.
There are clear analogies between Russell’s picture of our situation as
knowers and that of the late medievals. There is a mysterious unfathomable
otherness that I have no capacity to say anything about and then out of that
mysterious engineering certain sensory givens appear in my space of
experience. It is not worthwhile even to try to draw inferences about
what that space of otherness must be like, since these can only be arbitrary.
Instead I retreat to a more defensible inward position and see what I can
construct out of my sense data. I use these constructions as machineries to
predict future sensory experiences and to help me intervene successfully in
the world, but I do not pretend that they tell me what the world ultimately
is like. That picture of Russell’s is pretty much where the late medievals
ended up in the face of God’s freedom and power. There are thinkers, such
as Wittgenstein during a considerable part of his career, who might not be
unhappy with those analogies to a theological situation. We determine
with precision what is humanly sayable, he claims, precisely to point to
what is not sayable, to a mystically ineffable level that is the more
important.
Carnap does not, it appears, wish to endorse either Russell’s unintended
analogies with the medieval situation or a mystical pointing toward the
unsayable. His attack on metaphysics seems to have a focused target, one
that itself has theological implications. The reason we cannot espouse
either realism or phenomenalism is that in order to see the difference
between the two positions, we would have to stand outside of the human
experiencer’s mode of experiencing and watch it happen. We would, that
is, have to adopt a God’s-eye view and be able to note from that stance
whether certain kinds of external objects are or are not what are bringing
about the appearings that humans are limited to. The same goes for being
able to distinguish between solipsism and belief in other minds. To reject
the God’s-eye view is to reject a great many of the metaphysical distinctions
and stances that philosophers typically uphold. We are not in a situation, it
appears, in which we can even make these meaningful. Against Carnap,
many will find it unobjectionable to suppose that we make comparisons all
the time between what we say and believe and how matters stand in the
world. We believed that the moons of Jupiter had a certain composition
and then our space explorations allowed us to compare those beliefs with
the actual characteristics of those moons. But for Carnap and other
positivists we are not comparing beliefs with actual worldly conditions
but only with observation statements that emerge into our linguistic net-
works at their periphery. These thinkers come to resemble then the late
medievals, for whom the character of the world, because of God’s
unfathomable creative freedom, is radically inaccessible to our human
resources. Instead of enjoying an Aristotelian confidence that our knowing
faculties are suitable for comprehending reality, we have to make an
epistemic retreat inward. Carnap thus contracts the space of reality to
that defined by the perimeter fixed by our human faculties. So we are
supposedly not left with anything metaphysical or religious beyond that
perimeter, even if the entire landscape was originally laid out as
a theologically determined one.
Is Carnap persuasive here? One problem is that he seems to ignore more
modest ways in which humans, while not standing outside the human
experiential situation, arrive at better practices of understanding how the
world in itself, in the way it is there anyway, affects our experiencing of it.
We recognize that some things we experience in the world (DNA structure,
the forces that cause volcanoes) have more to do with what it is like, while
others (the deliciousness of chocolate) have more to do with what we are
like. We can emphasize the former until we substantially reduce the role of
our human perspective in what we observe, even while never eliminating it
fully. Over the long run we use our experience to come up with theories of
evolutionary biology that explain how our experiential mechanisms came
about and that also show that our mental states count as meaningful only
insofar as they are registering features of the world fairly accurately.
We may recognize along with Donald Davidson that experiencing the
world is a communal activity. We connect each other’s mental states and
language successfully to objects in the world because we assign content to
them in a manner that makes them automatically responsive to things as
they are.9 So there are modest ways of observing the relations of minds to
the world without having to take up a God’s-eye stance that can look at
human experiencing from a point fully outside of it. On the basis of these
we may arrive at reasons to be modest realists about physical objects and
about other people.
Carnap does not consider these more modest moves in his radical
rejection of all metaphysics. The reason seems to be that he links every
metaphysical conception and distinction to a God’s-eye stance, and then
he conceives the God’s-eye stance so that it is absolutely incommensurable
with anything that humans might do. But that view is itself implicitly
theological. Instead of adopting Aquinas’s position that there are real
analogies between how a divine being might see the world and how
9
See, for example, Donald Davidson, “Radical Interpretation,” in Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and
Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 125–39.
humans do, even if our capacities are far, far weaker, he adopts something
like the position of the late-medieval voluntarists. The God’s-eye view is
not allowed to us in any sense at all; we must reject any human attempt that
seems even vaguely and partially to achieve it. So we cannot in any manner
conceive how our sensory experiences are related to things in the world.
We cannot imagine the possibility that our experience of other persons as
such may be far more convincing to us than any claim about our power to
scan accurately our inner experiences. Carnap in being so radically anti-
metaphysical remains Kantian and thus implicitly theological. For he
conceives of the sharp limits on the epistemic and semantic reach of
humans as if those were still being contrasted with, and limited by, some-
thing like a God’s-eye view that is profoundly incommensurable with our
own. That is why he insists that we cannot make sense of the distinction
between realism and phenomenalism. He tries to remove the portion of
Russell’s epistemic landscape that seems still to allow for a transcendent
space beyond human experiencing. But the pared-down space he is left
with still seems fixed by its contrast, through negation, with a broader
stance that remains theologically conceived and, as such, absolutely
unfathomable to us. Instead of being fully liberated from the late-
medieval theological space (say, by becoming a modest Aristotelian), he
excises a problematic portion of that space but then behaves as if he is still
bound by the rules of the older terrain.
We might express this point in terms of the late-medieval situation
described earlier. A radical metaphysical deflation, due to God’s omnipo-
tence and freedom, was joined inextricably with a stance of human self-
assertion. The latter involved both a defensive move inward, a resisting of
any ambitious metaphysical claims, and a constructivist project of ordering
the world of appearances. The two sides, the metaphysical deflation and
the constructing of a world out of inner appearings, arose together. Once
we no longer accept the theology responsible for the former, the latter
should fall as well. But Carnap and others retain one-half of that overall
structure even when the other half that made it plausible has been given up.
He is not like the Nietzsche who says that when the “real world” is rejected,
the world of appearances must change its status as well.
There are further problems regarding whether Carnap’s anti-
metaphysical strategy has succeeded. He has rejected the positivists’ notion
of the given because it implies something metaphysical that is doing the
giving, that is yielding the appearances. Instead he will base his system of
knowledge on observation statements that are like the protocols or lab
reports of a scientist. When we look at these observation statements we see
that they are of the form ‘red here now’ or ‘blue over there.’ Why should
these have the special privilege they do? He tries to reduce that privilege to
a matter of syntax; they are constructed a certain way as bits of language,
and the language itself, through its rules of formation, assigns them that
special role. But their privilege obviously has a very different basis that
cannot be reduced to syntax. These statements are special because they
capture the point where the system of knowledge is open to the world,
where friction is felt with the way the world actually does things so that
one’s epistemic doings are not a spinning in a void. But to say that is to
admit that one needs a more robust picture of how minds operate in the
world in order to make possible such a thing as observation statements.
Without a more robust metaphysical picture than he allows himself,
Carnap’s observation statements are completely mysterious; God might
have placed them there. Carnap, in order to remain true to his anti-
metaphysical program, evades the matter of why observation statements
are so important to the machinery of knowledge. He cannot explain why
statements of this particular syntactic form matter so much.10
And why should we accept his thought that metaphysical distinctions
are meaningless if the positions distinguished cannot be made to issue in
any difference in observations? There are fundamentalist evangelicals who
believe that God created the world in 4004 BC, and that he made it so that
it would appear exactly such as it would if it had evolved in just the ways
that physicists and biologists say. There would be no observational differ-
ences between that hypothesis and that of the scientists. But a competition
between accounts is not just a matter of testing against differences at the
level of observational predictions. There are holistic considerations such as
the unnecessary extravagance of the evangelicals’ account and its parasitism
on the usual evolutionary account. We might say as well that a solipsist
phenomenalism is also extravagant and is parasitic on our ordinary realist
description of the world, so that we should favor the latter. The strangeness
of Carnap’s anti-metaphysical ideology shows itself most clearly in his
claim that the difference between solipsism and a belief in other minds is
a meaningless one, since we cannot discriminate between the two in terms
of testable observations. If you were kidnapped and your brain removed
and placed in a vat by scientists so advanced that they could make your
experiences seem as they did prior to your surgery, it would still make all
the difference to you whether you were in contact with a person you love
10
For additional commentary on this issue, see J. O. Urmson, “Logical Positivism and Analysis,” in
Weitz, 20th-Century Philosophy, 277–8.
deeply or with a simulation of that, even if you yourself could not tell the
difference. The distinction would be very far from meaningless.
(4) The logical positivists, instead of offering moderate and effective
ways of supporting the sciences, have something of the zealotry of an
ideological group with a strong program of radical iconoclasm. They can
fit rather neatly into a cultural world of other such programs existing
during this period in history. Marxists wished to wipe out all leftover traces
of earlier bourgeois, aristocratic, and religious forms of life, just as the
positivists wished to erase all earlier forms of metaphysics. Both groups
used manifestos, international conferences, common house organs, and
social networking to advance their goals. Modernism in architecture, allied
at first with ambitious programs of social, leftist reform (though later with
international business), also tried to dismiss earlier styles of architecture
and their supposedly useless ornamentation and to replace them with
a new language of formal construction. Radical modernist programs in
music tried to eliminate any preferences built into human listeners by their
biological auditory preferences and by centuries of associating music with
religious practices, courtly dance, and favored rhythms of bodily move-
ment. Again, the construction of twelve-tone patterns based on rules
defined by a precise musical grammar replaces the partial givenness, the
embeddedness in nature and in long historical traditions, of earlier musical
forms.
The logical positivists, then, do not just wish to offer moral and epistemic
support to practicing scientists, who are doing quite well on their own.
As Marxism must wipe the slate clean in order to form a new socialist
individual, so the positivists must wipe the metaphysical slate clean in
order to have their practices of logically constructing a world of objects
become the dominant way of defining the real. I noted earlier that two
intellectual resources, empiricism and the legacy of Kant, are useful for
enacting a radical iconoclasm regarding philosophical and social structures
that one might find regressive. The theological background of both of these
resources is significant. God is the superpotent agent who can erase all
Aristotelian determinacy in things by making them move and act in any
way whatever. God is the incommensurable being whose way of creating,
ordering, and knowing things is so different from our own that we must give
up any hope of limning the metaphysical contours of reality. God is the one
whose unlimited way of knowing, not bound by the sensory forms of space
and time nor by the character of sensory experience, can form a model of
knowing what things are like in themselves that is forever inaccessible to us.
God is the being who demands a thorough iconoclasm. If you want a radical
clearing out of the metaphysical terrain, in order to disqualify your oppo-
nents from the game, there is no better superpower to accomplish this task
than God, even if you are just taking advantage, for non-theological pur-
poses, of a landscape whose original making was shaped by theology. With
a cleaned-up landscape, you are then free to construct your new order, as in
Marxism or as in modernism in architecture and music. Clearing away
regressive religious elements, such as the positivists found in German idealist
philosophers, turns out to be itself a theologically shaped move.
For Marxists, humans have alienated their own human powers into the
world, whether in religious or intellectual frameworks or in economic
structures, such that these alienated powers have taken on an independent
life and have come to dominate humans from without. We must destroy all
those alienated frameworks, with their false sense of an independent
metaphysical status, and allow only those intellectual and social structures
that humans can readily recognize as the results of their own labor (with its
ultimately economic basis). In a similar manner the logical positivists desire
to get rid of all the intellectual frameworks of the past that were based on
a metaphysical givenness, that is, on a character of the world as such that
was thought to be there independently of human intendings, makings, and
experiencings. These frameworks had supposedly been generated by
humans but then had taken on a life of their own; they had become
alienated from our human productive activities. The solution is to radically
erase all such alienations of human powers into metaphysical forms, where
such alienated metaphysical structures are seen as having the same char-
acter as religious ones. They must be replaced by what can be generated by
transparent human constructions, so that all objects to be referred to are
clearly the products of our human thinking and speaking and of maneu-
vering within our logical and linguistic systems, rather than having any
alienated metaphysical givenness about them. All determinacy is an exter-
nalizing of our own labor and needs to be recognized as such. Thus, we
have the constructive labor at the basis of the logical positivist project. But
we also have a clear echo of the long-ago turn of the late-medieval
nominalists. They replaced a sensitivity to the metaphysical design of
reality with a demiurgic construction out of materials that humans could
control. It turns out that exalting an ineffable, incommensurable divine
being to the greatest degree has effects not all that dissimilar to atheism.
There is a related religious model available if the logical positivists wish
to indulge such iconoclastic wishes. The Protestant Reformation, espe-
cially in its more radical forms, is a continuation of late-medieval theolo-
gical voluntarism. The radical Protestant says that the only religious aspect
that matters is the direct connection between God and the interior life of
the individual soul. Whatever is not serving God’s immediate revelation as
such activity occurs through Scripture must be rejected. Catholic statues,
images, external ceremonies, ecclesiastical hierarchies, and the like must be
destroyed as expressions of a worship of idols or fetishes. Hegel says that for
the Protestant, whatever does not match the demands felt by the individual
in the inner life of the soul must be relinquished.11 So we have a second
force, beyond the voluntarist God, that is a powerful resource for emptying
the world of its metaphysical pretensions: the inner life constituted as
a privileged space. In the face of God’s absolute power to make external
matters occur in any way whatsoever, humans gradually consolidate
a realm of immanence, of a self-standing inner life, as the privileged
point of reality. All external forms become empty in comparison if they
cannot be determined by, or constructed out of, that inner life. For many
positivists, in turn, whatever does not meet the formation requirements
internal to one’s system of logical construction, especially insofar as that
construction is done on the basis of one’s inner phenomenal states, must be
rejected. Such an ideological stance of radical iconoclasm, by which
a massively high percentage of the statements of intellectual life are cast
aside as meaningless, can make good sense in its analogous religious setting.
All the accumulations of tradition and practice can seem to be an offense
to, and a limit upon, the immediate address of an omnipotent God to the
individual soul. But if someone simply wants to encourage the worthy
practice of science, then a tolerance for diverse sources of possible enlight-
enment seems a better strategy than a notion of innerness (to a scheme)
that dissolves all external determinacy.
(5) Many logical positivists are searching for a set of protocol statements
that can provide a secure epistemic foundation for building up a system of
knowledge. Statements about what is immediately given in sensory experi-
ence seem to be the best candidates. Yet if I am truly critical and skeptical,
I should acknowledge the serious possibility of error even regarding such
statements. The machinery that leads from things in the world to beliefs in
the individual can break down or become distorting at different levels in
the process. Perhaps something intervenes between the object itself and my
perception of it. But I may also go wrong even in articulating my immedi-
ate perceptions. Cognitive scientists today perform experiments to show
the great degree to which interpretation and massive editing are involved in
11
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2004),
459–64 and 486–96.
the description of our supposedly immediate sensory experiences. (I will be
developing this point when in Chapter 6 I consider claims by Daniel
Dennett about consciousness.) Accurately describing tastes and smells is
a learned skill that very many never acquire to any great degree and that we
may be clumsy at. Spacing out the world of colors into different segments
may have a cultural component to it that allows further room for error in
the operation of the machinery. Natural selection is likely to make us good
at perceiving ordinary objects in the world but not very good at the
sophisticated process of describing our own perceivings. So, if we are
inclined to be skeptical, we should be like the ancient Greco-Roman
skeptics. That is, we should refuse our epistemic commitment to all
statements, including statements about inner experiences.
Once again, a structure that is implausible and unconvincing in the
positivists makes good sense for the late medievals. There is an excellent
religious reason, as we have seen, for supposing that humans cannot
accurately describe objects as they exist in the world. There is, then,
a defensive move inward: one is dealing instead with a realm of properly
human objects interior to the mind. Why may I not be just as wrong in
describing these as I am in describing things as they are in themselves?
In a letter from Nicholas of Autrecourt to Bernard of Arezzo, the former
holds that it would follow from the latter’s skeptical position that one
could not be sure even of one’s own inner acts or perceptions. “. . . if you
were asked whether or not you believed some articles of the Faith, you
would have to say, ‘I do not know,’ because, according to your position,
you could not be certain of your own act of believing.”12 So why should we
have confidence at all in the character of our knowing faculties? But for
most late medievals it is too much to accept that the voluntarist power of an
omnipotent God should make matters doubtful and arbitrary all the way
in. We need to consolidate some inner space in which we can trust in our
own activity. As a first argument, we note that God comes off badly as
a creator if the design of our knowing faculties makes them seriously faulty
in their operations. Second, we note that God is all-powerful and all-good,
and so surely would not have made us such that our epistemic faculties
operate badly even when we use them modestly and do not try to make
them transcend their limited sphere of use. Augustine had earlier saved
God from being the cause of evil by assigning to humans the faculty of free
will. A similar move may occur here. God cannot be the cause of error in
12
Nicholas of Autrecourt, “First Letter to Bernard,” in H. Shapiro (ed.), Medieval Philosophy
(New York: Modern Library, 1964), 513–14.
how my knowing faculties operate. When I am passively registering the
contents of my inner experience, I must be correct. But when I put my free
will to work and make judgments of how matters actually stand in the
world, then the error that occurs is my own fault, not God’s. So I am
epistemically safe so long as I am merely registering and describing my
inner sensory experiences. As Blumenberg has it: “In the separation of the
passivity of sense perception, with which man is delivered up to the
external agencies acting on him, and the activity of judgment, with
which for the first time he runs the risk of error, the nominalists already
saw the narrow solid ground of self-assertion . . . Thus the Augustinian
model of theodicy, assigning to man the responsibility for the evil in the
world, is held to here also.”13 But that overall picture makes little sense if we
remove God from it as the guarantor that our epistemic faculties must
function well if we use them with proper modesty. Without that theolo-
gical structure, we do not have a good reason to give a strong epistemic
privilege to sense-data statements over other ones. The logical positivists
seem to work with the remains of a theological framework even after they
have gotten rid of God. In adopting the work of traditional empiricists,
they repeat the move of consolidating an inner space that promises an
epistemic confidence that our attempts to know how the world is in itself
do not allow for. But it is difficult to see how they are entitled to that
confidence without a divine guarantee for our faculties when they are
supposedly passively registering a sequence of inner objects.
(6) Earlier I described the antipathy of the positivists for anything like
the God’s-eye viewpoint and I wish to say more about this issue. To what
extent should our epistemic and metaphysical reach be limited to our
actual human resources? Bernard Williams maintains that humans, even
if we cannot attain something like a God’s-eye view of the universe, can
attain a stance that is to a maximal degree independent of the peculiarities
of our human perspective.14 In a kind of bootstrap process, we use our
human experiences to discover more about a world in which we see that
these experiences are biased and limited. We learn to overcome our biases
and narrowness and to develop methods that are not limited by the
peculiarities that evolution designed into our perceiving and knowing
systems. In the middle territory between the merely human stance granted
to us and an absolute God’s-eye one, we make real progress toward the
13
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1983), 193–4.
14
See his description of an “absolute conception” in Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 138–40.
latter, if never quite achieving it (or perhaps making sense of what achiev-
ing it would be).
The logical positivists, in contrast, seem skeptical about any such
account. Many of them assign great privilege, first of all, to the sensory
apparatus of humans and its deliverances. Then, too, great emphasis is
placed on the power of human conceptual frameworks to determine what
counts as the objectivity of the world. What objects we are committed to
will not be a response to individual items that are there anyway, apart from
our experience of them. Rather, human constructive frameworks are
imposed on a universe that must be seen as metaphysically indeterminate
to a radical degree. We do not seem to be taking steps toward overcoming
the peculiarities of our human ways of knowing. Just the opposite. We are
emphasizing how what we count as real is and must be limited by con-
tingent human circumstances. Carnap insists that while there might be
other intelligent beings besides humans who introduce new ideas to us,
those ideas, in order to count as meaningful at all, would have to be defined
in terms of our human capacities for verification.15 We cannot make sense
of what it would be for statements to be meaningful to these other beings
but not to us. Quine is not strictly a member of the positivist group but was
a student of Carnap and was deeply influenced by him. He is so willing to
give precedence to the human perspective that in his essay “Epistemology
Naturalized” he argues for reducing the discipline of epistemology to
psychological observations about how humans actually process evidence
and turn it into beliefs.16 Very many thinkers will suppose that built into
our notions of rationality and knowledge is an implicit propulsion toward
a more ideal version of our merely human activities. In learning more
rational procedures, humans have come to attach ourselves to a practice
that we know might be done better by beings superior to us and we might
still consider ourselves in communion with these beings. That is, we would
see ourselves as doing less well the same kind of thing that they are doing
better, and we would suppose that their better performance could be
a standard against which ours would fall short. After all, biological evolu-
tion might have gone somewhat differently, such that the human brain’s
capacities to enter into the realm of rational practices were considerably
inferior to our own present ones. But Quine on this issue allows no such
15
Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” in
A. J. Ayer (ed.) Logical Positivism (New York: Free Press, 1966), 72–3.
16
W. V. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 69–90.
implicit idealization. To ask how our knowing faculties ought to function
is simply to describe how humans actually form their beliefs.
This focus on our strictly human capacities seems an odd one. We are
highly contingent products of a biological evolution that selected for quite
specific engineering capacities in us, ones designed well for very particular
environments. Why should those engineering results ever count as the
measure of reality? It seems only too obvious that we should place our
abilities in a context in which they might be measured against much better
versions of themselves. And the direction of fit between our epistemic
machinery and the world ought to be from the former to the latter, not the
other way around. Yet, once again, we find a rationale for limiting ourselves
to our strictly human capacities in the late-medieval situation. Once we
acknowledge that the world as it was created and is continually secured by
God is absolutely inaccessible to us, then there is good reason to fall back
on our merely human abilities. An absolutely free and ineffable God who
might make things move in any way at all at any time has a perspective that
cannot be approached. We have no choice, at the risk of committing
something like blasphemy, but to stick to our merely human perspective.
We replace metaphysical knowledge of the world with human self-
assertion. Our constructed human models try to manage sensory appear-
ances and we have to restrict ourselves to these. But why should we
continue that late-medieval scheme of things in the twentieth century
when there is no similar reason for a focus on our strictly human capacities?
Aquinas’s philosophy, which the late medievals rejected, held that there
was an analogy of being between the human and the divine levels.
The same terms might apply to God and to humans, provided we do not
suppose that they apply univocally. So some degree of approach to
a God’s-eye perspective might be possible, as was the case for Aristotle,
who claimed that at the highest level of our intellectual practice we come to
share for a time in an activity that might truly be called divine. But over the
course of medieval history we find that an ever greater distance and
incommensurability was insisted on between God’s way of doing things
and the human one. Our human minds no longer have any natural, even if
imperfect, fit with the way God designed the universe or with ideas as they
exist in God’s mind. God’s activity will come arbitrarily out of the blue
from an ineffable realm we cannot begin to approach. Later radical
Protestants, following the medieval voluntarists, felt that Aquinas’s ana-
logy of being between God and man was the first step toward the Anti-
Christ and had to be fiercely opposed. An absolutely radical distance must
be maintained between the divine and the human, so that God’s entrance
into the life of an individual comes as a sudden flash from an incommen-
surable realm. The logical positivists, oddly, keep something of the same
distance between the human view and one’s fallible moves toward a more
idealized one, without the theological perspective that motivated, indeed
required, this distance.
(7) A. J. Ayer in “The Elimination of Metaphysics” states the following:
“Logical analysis shows that what makes the ‘appearances’ the ‘appear-
ances’ of the same thing is not their relationship to an entity other than
themselves, but their relationship to one another.”17 That statement ought
to appear strange to a scientist. Suppose we found in the Amazon a novel
plant that actually cured some cancers in the indigenous people. Even
before we studied it, we would assume there is a sameness of chemical
structure, one unknowable now to us perhaps, that is producing the
relevant results as well as producing the appearances of the plant to us.
If this discovery occurred after the scientific revolution but before
Europeans or anyone else had the means to analyze this sameness, one
would still believe that it was a sameness in the plant, and not just
similarities among one’s sense impressions, that accounted for its produ-
cing the same effects from one time to the next. Ayer’s statement shows the
extremely (one wants to say ideologically) thorough way in which the
logical positivists must eliminate anything even vaguely resembling
Aristotelian thought. Aristotle’s is a philosophy of individual substance.
Certain things on their own are able to determine identity and sameness in
several ways. They set and maintain boundaries against what is different
and they can take in what is external and transform it into an aspect of
themselves. They define and sustain themselves as the same over time in
spite of changes. And they determine that they are of the same kind as other
things. In so doing, they do not wait around for the cookie-cutter work of
human conceptual schemes to fix their boundaries and kinds. That
Aristotelian conception, without his metaphysical vocabulary, might be
maintained in the contemporary world. Daniel Dennett, for example,
describes a long process by which things in nature become progressively
more “selfy.”18 They set and defend their boundaries against threats of
invasion or dissolution. They maintain their identity as the things they are
through change. Dennett ends up, at the end of this process, with thinkers
who determine themselves freely and rationally. They are the most selfy
of all.
17
A. J. Ayer, “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” in Ammerman, Classics of Analytic Philosophy, 118.
18
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), 173–5.
The logical positivists, in contrast, are radically anti-Aristotelian. They
will not allow any sameness or identity to come from the objects them-
selves. As Ayer indicates, sameness must be projected onto the world on the
basis of similarities among sense data. One hears an echo of Ockham’s
nominalist claims, for theological reasons, from the late-medieval era. Kant
also seems clearly in the background here. His Copernican revolution
removed substance and causality from the world itself and placed them
on the side of the scheme we impose in making sense of the deliverances of
sensibility. We can note the strength of this anti-Aristotelian bias if we
examine how very hard the positivists work to give the weakest possible
metaphysical status to the objects they are committed to. Carnap talks of
internal versus external questions.19 Within a conceptual framework there
are formation rules that determine what objects can be talked about. But
when we try to step outside one of these frameworks and ask what is really
there, no answer is available. It is simply a pragmatic matter which
vocabulary, with the objects this vocabulary is committed to, we find
useful. There is no deeper reason to prefer a physical-object language to
a sense-data one and we cannot locate a language’s superiority in use by
saying that it does a better job of capturing the actual metaphysical layout
of the world. Reference to objects is thus an internal matter regarding what
moves the language game we have chosen to play allows us to make. Our
words, so it appears, are not going forth to objects that are independently
there. Rather, the game determined by the conceptual framework deter-
mines merely that there is something to say when we are asked what our
linguistic terms refer to. We can say things like “‘Apple’ refers to apples and
‘book’ refers to books.” But our commitment to objects is simply
a determination of what linguistic tokens can fill in certain places in
acceptable sentences. Carnap also, when facing what look to be metaphy-
sical questions, distinguishes between a formal mode of speaking and
a material mode. There are object statements, pseudo-object statements,
and syntactic statements. The first of these are statements such as ‘Hyenas
hunt in packs.’ But then I make the mistake of supposing that ‘Hyenas are
independent individual objects in the world’ is also an object statement.
In reality it is a disguised statement about the syntax of my language.
I really mean to say “‘Hyena’ is an object-word in the language I have
chosen to employ.” For the sake of convenience, we slip easily from the
formal-syntactic mode of talking into a material mode, as in my claim
19
Rudolf Carnap, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” in Moser and vander Nat, Human
Knowledge, 246–8.
about hyenas being objects in the world. We thus produce pseudo-object
statements.20 In this refusal to allow any metaphysical claims whatever and
in this transfer of the metaphysical to the linguistic, we seem to weaken
drastically the kind of objectivity that our commitment to objects may be
taken to imply. The demand for parsimony in terms of how we take the
world metaphysically to be has, in its thinning-out process, erased from the
world the characteristics that, on its side of things, strongly justify the
physical-object language rather than the sense-data one.
We can go forward briefly to Quine to see how the stance examined here
continues in a student of the positivists. When Quine asks about what
objects there are in the world, he says that an object is “the material content
of any portion of space-time, however irregular and discontinuous and
heterogeneous.”21 This makes the boundaries of objects absolutely arbi-
trary, so that we are able, like the late-medieval God, to demarcate objects
with an unlimited freedom, depending on our frameworks. There seems to
be little in reality itself that has done the work of self-articulation and self-
individuation. Quine’s criterion for objective existence is a linguistic one:
to be, he says, is to be the value of a bound variable. That is, what universal
domain are we committed to in handling quantification within the logical
language that expresses our best science? One reason we do not have to
worry about the reference of individual terms to objects in the world,
according to Quine, is that a theory faces the flow of evidence at the
sentence level or even more holistically. Evidence can contribute to making
sentences true or false, but the smaller units of the sentence do not have
referential links on their own. Ontological commitment is a precipitate of
a theory’s sentences, not a bringing into view of a relationship between
a word and an individual object. And there is no fact of the matter, says
Quine, about what objects a speaker’s theory is committed to, since the
entire set of the speaker’s behavior can be interpreted in different ways,
with different ontological commitments taken for granted by the
translation.22
Ontological commitment thus gives such an extraordinarily weak status
to objects that it cannot limit our sense that we face a radically thinned out
world. Altogether we have the weakest, most minimal sense of the char-
acter of the individuals or objects that are being brought into view through
20
For a discussion of how to translate philosophical issues into the formal mode of talking, see
Rudolf Carnap, “On the Character of Philosophical Problems,” in Richard Rorty (ed.),
The Linguistic Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 54–62.
21
W. V. Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 10.
22
W. V. Quine, “Ontological Relativity,” in Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 26–68.
language. They are ghostly reflections of the kinds of linguistic maneuvers
we find it useful to make, not robust substances that are doing any of the
work of determining sameness for themselves. Such a radical anti-
Aristotelian stance made good sense, once again, for the late medievals.
To put any metaphysical determinacy in things themselves is to cheat God
of his power and freedom. But why is there such an extreme version of this
anti-Aristotle position among the logical positivists? A far more plausible
account is that both the world and we contribute, in different proportions
in different cases, to bringing about the determinate character of the things
that our world view allows us to refer to. Sometimes nature on its own does
a great deal of work in determining sameness and identity, as individuals
sustain themselves against difficult conditions. The logical positivist pic-
ture, in contrast, has something of the zealotry of a religious ideology in its
destruction and elimination of everything Aristotelian, so that the world
must be radically emptied out of any boundary lines that it might be
thought to have on its own.
We might develop this issue by looking at a thinker whose work is, very
negatively, in the background for the logical positivists: Hegel. It is his
work and that of other German idealists that the positivists saw as best
exemplifying the meaningless forays of metaphysics. Yet Hegel, in spite of
his abstruse vocabulary, can be seen as an Aristotelian. Indeed, he resembles
Dennett more that most readers of the two of them would be prepared to
admit. For Hegel’s philosophy also is an examination of how things may
become progressively more selfy. The fundamental structure of his entire
logical system is the notion of that which is self-relating-in-relating-to-
what-is-other. Living things embody this notion better than a pile of sand
on the beach does. The latter is moved arbitrarily by external forces while
the former differentiate themselves from what is other by the ways they
determine and maintain themselves as such. The logical positivists, in
contrast, seem to treat everything in the world as if it were like the pile
of sand on the beach. Items in nature have no power to determine and
maintain themselves as the same against what is other but wait around to be
given their boundaries by the conceptual schemes that humans impose on
them. That contrast becomes especially interesting when we note the
quasi-theological structure into which Hegel places his account. He says
that what humans all along have been trying to understand by their
religious notions of God is the idea of free, self-determining rational
activity. The religious story of the Incarnation can then be understood as
the various ways in which nature, human individuals, and human institu-
tions can come to embody such a “divine” activity of being self-
determining in their relation to what is other. That things become more
self-determining on their own is a sign for Hegel that Reason or God or
Freedom is instantiating itself in the world. So if we want to resist Hegel’s
account of an incarnation of a divine rational activity, we will be forced, it
seems, to reject any notion that things are individuating and determining
themselves as what they are. The logical positivists seem by their positions
to be working against Hegel’s implicit theology. Yet they appear to remain
partly entrapped in it, for they still define the metaphysical in terms of it
and so must reject any instance of self-determination, of selfiness, in things
in the world. Sameness must come from the side of the experiencer or
speaker.
(8) Not all the logical positivists were foundationalists. Otto Neurath
introduced the metaphor, often cited by Quine, of a boat that can be
repaired only bit by bit while out at sea, not rebuilt from scratch, from the
bottom up. We can call any particular belief into question, provided we
take most of our other beliefs for granted while we examine it. But a more
typical positivist account, as with the early Carnap, is indeed foundation-
alist. We look for a ground level of protocol sentences, based on sense data
reports, that can serve as the basis for a large constructive enterprise of
building a system of knowledge. But why should we try for such founda-
tions? One answer is that the practice of science, without the strict
discipline provided by a rigorous, bottom-up procedure of construction,
may easily fall into systematic error. Yet the sciences around Carnap’s time
were thriving to a degree never before. A principal motivation for
a foundationalist program is a situation of great epistemic precariousness.
Our beliefs seem so poorly supported, so arbitrarily arrived at, that the
entire architecture may collapse at any moment. That situation was indeed
the case for the late medievals. The unlimited, unconstrained character of
God’s free willing, plus the radical human incapacity to penetrate the way
God’s creative mind had arranged matters, meant that we ought to have
very little confidence in the power of our beliefs to track the actual contours
of the world. Early modern philosophers such as René Descartes and John
Locke, facing the intellectual terrain left by the late medievals, may well feel
that they need to respond to the situation of radical epistemic precarious-
ness by designing constructivist programs meant to grant some security to
what humans can know. We may even intensify a sense of precariousness
regarding our epistemic reach toward the world in order to give more
power and sway to the human constructivist programs that we must
respond with. But the logical positivists are not in this situation. Their
typical constructions, however complicated, produce little in the way of
conviction in the reader and offer virtually no help to practicing scientists
who want to understand just what they are doing in carrying out the
programs of science. It seems that they take on the foundationalist task
of earlier thinkers who actually had good reasons for taking it on. Because
their iconoclasm means they do not look on the history of philosophy with
seriousness and subtlety, they end up working in an intellectual space
whose contours they do not properly appreciate.
(9) There is a further analogy worth exploring. From an Aristotelian
point of view, there is a natural fit between how our minds come to know
the world and the way things determine themselves in nature. That which
makes a thing what it is will be the metaphysical form inherent in it.
Thinking for Aristotle raises that very form to higher level of actuality in
the mind of the knower, so that a fit between mind and world is built in.
Aquinas tries to develop a mechanics of knowing that honors that sugges-
tion. But late-medieval nominalists will not allow such an easy fit of mind
to nature. That which makes a thing what it is will be so dependent on
God’s free willing that there might be an unpredictable arbitrariness in
how something behaves, unless God freely chooses to make its behavior
intelligible to us. And our own ideas about these objects, without any
natural fit with them, may be rather arbitrary constructions that merely
make predictions come out right. It is this feature of arbitrariness, whether
in the late-medieval setting or the contemporary one, that I want to
examine. Christianity might emphasize what seems the naturalness of the
Incarnation, that God should take on a human form in his entrance into
the world. But some voices who pressed harder the idea of theological
voluntarism might well object. God’s freedom should not be limited at all
by earthly conditions in regard to any appearance he might wish to make.
Why could he not appear in a different species entirely? Was not his
appearance in a human form a rather arbitrary outcome?23 A similar
thought will affect the idea of grace for later Protestants. Is God required
to be more likely to offer the grace of salvation to those who have behaved
well than to those who have behaved badly? But that would be a limit on
his infinite freedom. Grace should instead come arbitrarily to those in the
world without the slightest dependence on or responsiveness to their moral
states.
In the twentieth century, the radical metaphysical emptying out of the
world seems to yield an analogous arbitrariness. One might have used
evolutionary biology to argue for a natural Aristotelian fit between human
23
See Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 176–7.
minds and the world of nature they are directed toward. The long devel-
opment of the planet would have produced a world of robust individuals
and kinds with their well-articulated character. And then the trial-and-
error of human evolution would have allowed only those brains to thrive
and reproduce that were very good at registering the layout of that world.
But if we make the world radically indeterminate and contingent from
a metaphysical standpoint, then there is no basis for one thought-
constellation to be a more natural fit with the world than another, to
carve nature at the joints the way nature does it. With all the pressure
turned now to the side of subjectivity or language, that metaphysical
emptiness will produce as its counterpart an extravagant arbitrariness.
As we have seen, we might suppose that we are talking about physical
objects, says Carnap, or we might suppose that we are talking about sense
data. The world itself does not make one side of that arbitrary choice better
or worse. Quine says there is no fact of the matter as to whether a given
speaker is referring to whole rabbits or undetached rabbit parts or rabbity
time-stages. Our linguistic schemes seem utterly arbitrary impositions.
Suppose we have two terms, suggests Nelson Goodman, ‘green’ and
‘grue.’24 The first applies to green objects, the second to those that are
green up until tomorrow but blue from tomorrow on. One person claims
that all emeralds are green, another that all emeralds are grue. The odd
thing is that both claims have equal inductive backing from all evidence
available up to now. We want to say that the first claim is a more natural
projection forward of a sameness that is operative in the world. But some-
one might respond as follows. Since the logical positivists do not allow
there to be sameness in the world itself, apart from our constructions, then
there is no content to the idea that the world itself goes on in the same way.
Why cannot a thinker use ‘same’ such that for things to be grue is precisely
for them to go on in the same way as before, such that if emeralds were
green after tomorrow, this thinker would be shocked by the unexpected
result? Our concepts then seem to have a radically arbitrary relation to
nature. One might also look at Wittgenstein’s argument that introduces
what seems an arbitrary wildness in what it means to go on following a rule
in the same way as before. (Instead of exalting that arbitrariness, he
contains it through a turn to the character of human practices, rather
than trying to locate determinacy in an individual’s words or thoughts.
I will examine his argument later in Chapter 6.) Or one might turn to
24
Nelson Goodman, “The New Riddle of Induction,” in L. P. Pojman (ed.), The Theory of Knowledge:
Classical and Contemporary Readings (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1999), 506–10.
Thomas Kuhn. Different periods of science are so incommensurable for
him that each must come off as offering a rather arbitrary take on the real,
rather than as measurably better or worse accounts of the makeup of the
same world.
So arbitrariness seems an outcome of a radical metaphysical parsimony
that originally had a theological motivation. It is interesting that a thinker
in a very different tradition, Walter Benjamin, also makes much of the
association of a theology of the ineffable with arbitrariness in the human
sphere. German baroque allegory, he argues, starts out trying to find
adequate images or signs to embody spiritual notions. (I offer a detailed
account of Benjamin’s work in Chapter 5.) But these signs keep multi-
plying in such a way that their emptiness and arbitrariness become evident,
so that one has mostly a sense of the radical inadequacy of any image or
figure to represent the spiritual ideas in question. We recognize the
idolatrous failure of every such attempt. As above, an increasing sense of
the incommensurability of the divine and the human means that there can
be no natural fit between the two levels, no natural or preferable way of
representing the one in the other, so that the human order on its own
becomes ever more multiple, strained, and unconvincing in the represen-
tations it puts forward. The ontological impoverishment of the world leads
to an emptiness that might be filled up in nearly any way at all by our
failing attempts to make aesthetic or political situations embody higher
spiritual values. The framework of Benjamin’s narrative is implicitly theo-
logical. In later work he surprises by finding the same arbitrariness, with
what he calls the same allegorical structure, in the commodity system of
late capitalism. Perhaps I am pressing certain analogies too hard in remark-
ing on this idea of a natural fit that empties itself out and shows itself to be
ever more arbitrary. But there is a common theme here in a radical
metaphysical deflation that leaves too much pressure on other points of
the system, so that the structures put forward must appear as rather
arbitrary candidates for doing what they do.
(10) Scientists tend to be open and tolerant because they recognize that
they cannot be sure what fruitful new ideas will look like, especially those
that are quirky and undeveloped. Perhaps an innovative network of con-
cepts is in an early state of development and relations among them at first
are somewhat plastic and mobile, as we are trying to fix a novel conceptual
landscape in place and it takes a while to do this. For example, consider
Nietzsche’s claim about how human interior life is enriched through the
turning of one’s aggressive energies against the self, or his claim that one’s
intellectual or moral positions are often the expressions of underlying
unconscious drives that are very different from the intellectual output they
generate. Eventually psychologists may be able to formulate these claims so
that they have testable consequences that can be measured. But even well
before they are so formulated, they are hardly meaningless. They may be
fertile ways of guiding new psychological approaches. They may stimulate
new ways of making sense of our previous experiences. They may illumi-
nate passages in literature that we did not have the concepts for earlier. And
they may be able to do all these things precisely because of their somewhat
plastic, not quite fixed character as we try to relate them in a holistic
network of somewhat shifting concepts and experiences. But for a strict
logical positivist, for whom meaning is the method of verification, such
early-stage conceptual developments, in which a novel configuration is just
beginning to solidify and novel patterns are emerging that link previously
unconnected areas, must come off as literally meaningless. Claims are not
linked in a tight enough way to circumstances that would make them true
or false. Rather few of the kinds of things that are said in psychology,
sociology, and the humanities will pass muster, then, even if they have
a rough but genuine relation to evidence made available by empirical
observation. With the rigor of their iconoclasm, the positivists come off
once again as resembling an ideological religious or political cult.
Liquidating all rival claimants is the preferred strategy.
(11) On the one hand, few could be more supportive of the natural
sciences than were the logical positivists. On the other hand, their meth-
odological requirements follow Kant in transferring the metaphysical
determinacy of nature to the side of the schemes imposed by subjectivity
or language on what seems to be taken as an indeterminate substrate.
Seeing this point, we recall that late-medieval theological voluntarism
was an extreme intensifying of features that arose with the task of rendering
philosophical the transcendent Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. This divine
being created nature out of nothing and cannot be dependent on it in any
way. Whereas the Greek Olympic gods emerge from the sublimation and
elevation of the realm of the Titans, with their close links to natural forces,
the Hebraic God, at least as transformed later into a philosophical figure,
has turned around and made nature everything it is. No matter how much
value the logical positivists assign to the natural sciences, they seem to
empty out nature metaphysically in relation to the technical constructions
that we are able to impose on it. They thus seem to be repeating a certain
structural relation of God to the world.
(12) The late-medieval theological framework could be especially linked
to the growth of the science of physics in the early-modern period. That
framework required that we reduce reality to a metaphysical minimum that
would put the least constraint on God’s free willing. The answer was
a mathematizable world of basic matter in motion, and that conception
of the world was just what physics needed to thrive. The scientific interests
of the logical positivists were chiefly in the area of physics, so they could
easily take over the metaphysical-epistemic landscape formed by that
theologically shaped account of reality. It may seem, then, that individua-
tion cannot be a matter that things contribute to on their own. After all,
they are just chunks of space-time where atoms are interacting and where
boundaries, at the level of physicalist description, are extremely fluid. But
what happens if we take biology rather than physics as way of looking at the
world? Then we have a kind of lens, a level of resolution, that enables us to
see how all that physical stuff in motion produces, on the biological level,
individuals that do a great deal to determine themselves as such, to mark off
boundaries that matter. The logical positivists might have more easily
escaped the historical terrain influencing their positions, with its theologi-
cal backing, if they had been more serious about biology and had not given
physics such an ultimate privilege.
It should now be clear what the overall style of argument in these
reflections is. Again and again we have patterns of thought that repeat, to
a surprising degree, what we find in the late-medieval intellectual space.
That overall space makes such patterns easily plausible for the late medie-
vals themselves. But without the large ecosystem that religion once pro-
vided, the relevant moves seem implausible and unconvincing in their
twentieth-century versions. My hypothesis is that British empiricism and
Kant provided a kind of transmission belt that transmitted an intellectual
space once shaped by religion and theology into the thought of twentieth-
century thinkers. Those thinkers clearly formed by and responsive to the
empiricists and Kant show that influence more transparently. I wish to add
at this point some further thoughts on the positions of Bertrand Russell
and W. V. Quine. My purpose in treating them is twofold. First, I want to
continue my narrative that shows them operating in an intellectual terrain
still affected by the inertia of the late-medieval metaphysical and epistemic
situation. Second, we can note clearly in their work what happens when
elements of that intellectual terrain are put in play but the religious backing
for it has vanished. Without that support the entire architecture, left on its
own, appears to collapse.
Russell’s program, as he tries to determine what there is, will begin from
sense data as a foundation and will try to show that the other things we
wish to talk about can be treated as logical fictions constructed out of such
data.25 (I grant that Russell changed his positions considerably over time.
I naturally choose the Russellian views that most fit my narrative.) When
I say that the country of Portugal treated a particular economic problem
well or badly, I am, for economy’s sake, creating an entity that is a logical
fiction standing in for many thousands of activities of actual human
individuals. For Russell, to say that I see the same particular dog every
time I visit a friend’s place is to construct a logical fiction out of the visual,
auditory, olfactory, and touch sensations that impress themselves on me on
the various occasions. I construct the sameness of the dog out of the
similarities in that stream of my sensations rather than as a response to
a physical or biological sameness that I have recognized, on the basis of my
experience, as intrinsic to the dog. It is possible, he says, that there are
physical objects beyond the sphere of our knowing, but we should dismiss
any consideration of such entities since we can know only our own sense
data. So far as I can tell, the dog has the kind of fictive status that Portugal
does in the case above, only the constituents out of which it is constructed
are my own mental states.
Such a project will be suspect to many. Russell surely intends to support
the natural sciences, but this is a poor way to go about it. Science depends
on the replication by others of observations and experiments, and a private
stream of consciousness cannot be so replicated. Science expands our
stance on the world by showing that our personal experiences are extremely
small and fragile moments in a very large universe of objects that existed
from long before the first human experiencers ever appeared and that will
likely exist for a long time afterward if all humans should vanish. But
Russell’s brand of empiricism seems to expand the human world extra-
vagantly and to shrink the nonhuman one of nature into a set of logical
fictions created out of human mental materials. In response we might note,
as we did earlier, that evolution makes us quite good at registering the
contours and activities of items in the environment. Learning to describe
our inner experiences, in contrast, is likely a much later acquisition, a not
very reliable skill that is demanded of us by sophisticated cultural practices
and that involves so much editing and construction that it can hardly stand
as offering the character of immediacy. So why should Russell believe that
our scanning of inner sense data is a much sturdier basis for knowledge
than our describing the antics of ordinary objects in the world?
The problems go deeper. Is it convincing that other persons with their
intentions, beliefs, and desires can be treated, even for epistemic purposes,
25
Bertrand Russell, “What There Is,” 25–34.
as logical fictions constructed out of my sense-data experiences in the way
that Portugal is a logical fiction built out of its citizens, political systems,
geographical territory, and employees, and so forth? Portugal could not
exist without all those items and individuals that make it up. Can it even be
plausible that other people could not exist without my sense data existing?
Suppose Russell were to reply that this is only how he builds his framework
for representing the world and that he is not reducing persons to his ways of
representing them. That would be fine if he then went on to compare the
logical fictions he creates out of the materials at hand in his sensory
experience to some richer metaphysical status that persons can be taken
to have. But in disallowing any stronger metaphysical statements than his
sense-data statements can offer him, he cannot grant that richer status.
At least in my own case, I would insist that my belief that there are other
persons who will continue to exist if I and my sense data should be
annihilated tomorrow is more indubitable to me than any description
I might give of my stream of consciousness. What makes others the same
person from one occasion to the next has to do with something about them,
about how they sustain themselves physically and psychologically as con-
tinuous selves. My moral attitude toward them, it appears, depends on
recognition that identity in them is not a logical fiction built out of
similarities among my sense impressions.
Suppose I add that what gives the object metaphysical continuity is not
just my own stream of sensory data but the sensory data that would be
available to any possible experiencer who happened by. That still seems to
give an insufficient status to things and to the kinds of maneuvers they
undertake on their own. And what right do I have to talk about such other
experiencers here, since they are supposed to be logical fictions generated
out of my own sense data? They therefore do not have enough indepen-
dence from me to secure a world when I am not around. (That is why
Berkeley needed God to do the securing.) In Russell’s defense, we can
emphasize once again that in considering physical objects and other
persons to be logical fictions constructed out of his sense data he is not
making a metaphysical claim about them but is merely saying how one
must treat them, epistemically speaking, if one wants to honor the actual
evidence one is offered. In terms of my knowing capacities, Russell seems
to hold, I cannot tell the difference between a solipsistic world created out
of my own mental life and a world richly replete with other persons. Since
Russell makes the metaphysical character of things inaccessible and sub-
stitutes a set of constructions out of the items of one’s inner life, it turns out
that the latter is what I am actually talking about, so that the inhabitants of
my world of reference remain oddly dependent on my experience of them.
That seems entirely the wrong direction of fit, as if the world must be made
to match our mental machinery instead of that machinery being made to fit
the world. That issue of fit merely emphasizes how very odd it is to make
metaphysics the servant of a very local and fragile epistemology. Since
according to Russell I am supposed to replace inferences to entities with
constructions out of my sense data, stars and dinosaurs will be dependent
on my local experiencing instead of aspects of a universe that generated my
experiencing as a very, very late achievement.
The problem seems, once again, to be the anti-Aristotelian bias of
empiricism, which resembles the anti-Aristotelian emphasis of the late
medievals. Very sophisticated individual substances are the kind of things
that have beliefs, intentions, and desires. They differentiate themselves
from what is around them and try to maintain themselves in certain states.
They divide the world into things that are good for them and bad for them
and work to make the former more prominent, so that they have genuine
preferences and policies. But such individuals are not allowed under a strict
anti-metaphysical program of Russell’s sort, for he cannot allow that
sameness or self-identity derives from the side of such individual others.
Humans seem, under such a program, no more able to individuate them-
selves and to maintain self-identity than are Quine’s rabbits. But then what
happens to Russell himself as an experiencer? There is a stream of appear-
ings, but it would be a metaphysical leap to say that it belongs to the history
of a distinct individual who is trying to make some things happen in the
world and others not. Then it is hard to find any intention, belief, desire, or
meaning in that stream. If I myself might be metaphysically considered as
a logical fiction constructed out of my own sense data, rather than having
some deeper basis for identity in the biological body and acculturated brain
that I possess, then it is difficult to see that there is a self remaining that is
robust enough to care about how reality goes, and so as having determinate
inner states at all. One compelling response to the philosopher’s favorite
test case of the brain in the vat is not that there are interesting vat-
experiences going on but that there is no intentionality at all, no more
than there is in the case of the desktop computer.
These criticisms of Russell’s empiricist program are hardly new. I dwell
on them to make a point about the sheer implausibility of what seemed to
the highly intelligent Russell the most obvious way to go about one’s
philosophizing. Yet as we have seen, the elements of Russell’s project did
once have a far more plausible locus. We can list some of these elements.
There is a severe metaphysical parsimony, the desire to assign as little
metaphysical character to the universe as possible. There is a move inward
out of epistemic modesty, a granting that one cannot know the metaphy-
sical character of the world as it is but can discover a realm of inner objects
that are appropriately fitted to the human capacity for knowing. There is
a confidence that these inner objects can be illumined in such a way that
they have an autonomy and a semantic determinacy even apart from any
connection to a larger world. And there is a structure of demiurgic self-
assertion. A complement of one’s metaphysical parsimony and epistemic
modesty is that one can transform more and more of the entities one talks
about into products of human construction, through the mental and
linguistic operations that one performs on certain inner items.
These are the elements of the intellectual constellation that formed quite
plausibly in the late-medieval period in the face of the idea of theological
voluntarism. Russell’s highly implausible stance makes good sense only if
we think of him as occupying a landscape that has had remarkable staying
power, given what I am presenting as its origins many centuries ago. If we
cannot scan the world as God knows it, still we know, if we are working
within a theological background, that our inner states are appearings of the
larger order he has made, so that they do not lose their content in a void, as
they seem to do in Russell’s account once the theology goes missing. If the
inner life is intrinsically a site where God illumines my states and addresses
me, then a meaningful relationship with otherness is built in. If the inner
realm is a place where God relates to me as a creature he has made, then
I am determined as a particular individual with desires and intentions even
if the stream of sensory content is not enough on its own to support that
status or those mental states. Russell is creative and innovative in asking
how Gottlob Frege’s new logic might give a more solid basis for human
reasoning and knowing. But in his picture of the phenomenology of
individual experience, he retains the layout of a terrain formed well prior
to that and prominent for a long time in the British philosophy classroom.
As an atheist Russell does not have the religious or theological beliefs to
keep that structure intact, so we see it falling apart in his work. What
happens when we remove the larger religious ecosystem that supported
that sense of the self and its inner life? Without a metaphysically robust
world that it is engaged with, without a competence in registering that
world’s contours, without an external reality to stabilize its identifications,
without a world of things and conditions that matter to the individual,
without individuals themselves, it is difficult to see how the mental life of
the self could have any reliably identified and reidentified content at all,
once the religious context is gone. (I will be treating Wittgenstein’s
thought in Chapter 6, including his argument against the idea of a private
phenomenal language. He sees what happens when the inner life is no
longer supported by a religious metaphysics and he responds by linking
that life to the layout of the world itself and to communal practice.)
Among the most noted arguments of twentieth-century American phi-
losophy is that of W. V. Quine on the indeterminacy of translation.
Quine’s work is also an example of what happens when certain inertial
aspects of the legacy of late-medieval thought are pressed very hard, and yet
the theological and religious beliefs that once provided an essential ecosys-
tem supporting that legacy have vanished. So, we are able, reading Quine,
to observe this style of thought in the act of dissolving itself. At first
Quine’s thesis appears to be simply about the incapacity of an interpreter,
from all available evidence, to determine how a speaker’s words are divid-
ing up the world into units and kinds.26 Is a term referring to individual
rabbits that maintain their identities across time? Or is it referring to much
briefer time-slices of rabbit that appear one after another? Or to rabbit parts
that happen to be stuck together for the moment but do not make up an
integral individual? Or to a rabbity mass that inhabits the landscape in the
way that water does? In considering this argument, we are tempted to
suppose that we ourselves are standing securely in our own language. From
there we are making such referential distinctions that we then use to specify
precisely which referential distinctions the speaker in question may be
failing to offer evidence of making. But if Quine is right, the same
referential indeterminacy ought to apply to our own language. We have
no more resources for specifying reference, through behavior we could
exhibit to an interpreter, than that speaker does. The more we examine this
outcome, the more it appears that what we mean by the metaphysical order
of the world, by the semantic order of meaning and reference, and by the
psychological order of intentions and beliefs all seem to dismantle them-
selves. We saw already that when the world is radically thinned out relative
to our capacity to discern its deep metaphysical structure, but an omnipo-
tent God remains in place as the one securing the ultimate order of reality,
then the appearings of that order still make sense as appearings of a larger or
deeper reality. But if we remove that broader theological-metaphysical
context, then the appearings that we are arranging through our mental or
linguistic construction seem to become empty of content, to become
meaningless shapes. The model of humans constructing a compensatory
world out of certain appearings to consciousness, while we assume
26
Quine, “Ontological Relativity,” 30–5.
a metaphysically minimal world, arose within a particular (late-medieval)
ecosystem. Without at least substantial vestiges of it, the system, so it
appears, begins to come apart. Let us see how this happens.
Carnap held that while there is no fact of the matter about what there is
in reality, apart from our schemes for dividing it up, there is a determinate
fact of the matter about what our linguistic schemes say there is, about
what entities we are committed to in using a particular logical language.
Quine disputes even that level of determinacy.27 An interpreter has con-
siderable freedom in observing a speaker’s linguistic behavior amid the
happenings of the surrounding environment. This freedom is due to the
fact that interpretations face the world holistically rather than item by
item, such that different decisions at one point can be balanced by adjust-
ments at another. If you translate a native’s speech as about rabbit time-
slices instead of rabbits, then there will be differences as well in how you
translate what you take to be words meaning ‘same,’ counting words, and
so forth. So Quine disagrees with a key element of the late-medieval
outlook. In turning from a metaphysically characterized world to a more
inward manner of constructing a model of it that saves the appearances, we
do not end up with a new level of items that remain determinate on their
own (as was the case for the medievals). Take all of a speaker’s behaviors,
says Quine, and it will remain indeterminate what that speaker is talking
about as being present in the world. We have both ontological relativity
(there is no fact of the matter as to what there is in the world independently
of a scheme for describing it) and indeterminacy of reference (there is no
fact of the matter as to what a given speaker is talking about independently
of a scheme for translating that speaker’s utterances).
It seems at this point that Quine has not given sufficient attention to
another way of viewing matters. The side of subjectivity or language has
been shown by him to be insufficient on its own to stamp a particular
metaphysical order on an otherwise very thin universe. Quine is surely not
going to look to a resource that the late medievals had available. God for
them, as we saw, guarantees the determinacy of the items interior to the
human mind. He does this by his illumination of these in the light of the
divine ideas in his own mind or by his creating in human experiencers
sensory impressions that have no difference whatever from what they
would be if caused by objects in the world. So Quine, it would seem, has
only one way out: reject Russell’s and Carnap’s programs and allow an
27
George D. Romanos, Quine and Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), offers a helpful
contrast between Quine and Carnap.
enriched world itself to be the support of the needed determinacy. And
there seems to be no problem with that strategy from the point of view of
science. For rabbits, as I insisted earlier, do a very great deal on their own to
organize and to maintain themselves as individuals. They have many
biological resources for marking out the boundaries between themselves
and the rest of the world, for sustaining a continuity over time, for
engaging in strategies of competition with other rabbits and animals in
which their own interests and their own enduring are at stake. It is true that
there is a philosophical literature in which extravagant science-fiction
situations are devised to make us question our notions of the grounds of
identity over time. But the point is that these are indeed extravagant.
We have no trouble in very many situations determining identity and
continuity in accord with the best evidence. So Quine ought to say that it is
individual rabbits that the speaker is referring to, not rabbit time-slices or
undetached rabbit parts. Note that one cannot object here that perhaps the
speaker really means something different, for we are working within
Quine’s hypothesis that there is no fact of the matter, independently of
an interpretation, what a speaker is referring to.
But that move of returning to the world itself as a source of determinacy
is precisely what Quine refuses to consider. That is the intriguing stance in
his philosophy. Why can he not allow that possibility when he would not
be doing anything that the natural sciences, especially biology, could not
allow and support? Blumenberg shows how this radically reduced meta-
physics of nature can emerge for the late medievals. They asked what
account of nature puts the least possible constraint on God’s freedom.28
As we noted, one candidate for such a minimal universe is a world of the
most basic mechanical bodies in motion, considered as having no character
beyond being mathematizable. Quine seems to work within something like
that overall stance, in spite of its derivation from a picture of the world that
he need not be committed to. So he will not consider the strategy I have
suggested: turning back to a less impoverished world to ground the
semantic determinacy of human speech. It is true that one might come
up with the impoverished, minimal account of the world simply from one’s
preferred story about the natural sciences. But the expelling of reason and
meaning from nature, with only a metaphysically minimal natural world
allowed, is more drastic than the work of practicing scientists truly
requires. (I will develop this point when treating John McDowell’s work
28
On this issue, see Hans Blumenberg’s treatment of Nicolas of Autrecourt in The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age, 172–3.
in the next chapter.) It makes more sense as what is demanded by some-
thing like the late-medieval theological situation. In that situation you
cannot look upon the world as the source of the richer determinacy that is
needed to make up for what the inner realm has proved unable to do.
Let us return to the theme of my own stance as a speaker. At first it may
appear that the effects of the unleashing of radical indeterminacy can be
limited. The Quinean argument has it that I cannot determine just what
a speaker means and is referring to. I may hope that I can step back into my
own language and make the necessary referential distinctions (among
individual rabbits, rabbit time-slices, and so forth). But I have no magical
power to make my own language referentially determinate; an interpreter
of my language would discover the same indeterminacy there. So how is it
that I can specify just what it is that the speaker I am interpreting cannot
manage to be clear about? Can’t I at least show that I mean three different
things by ‘rabbit,’ ‘rabbit time slice,’ and ‘undetached rabbit parts’? Yet
perhaps interpreters of my linguistic activity, by making adjustments else-
where in their overall system of translation, may count these as three
phrases with the same reference. How, then, can I get a sufficient grip on
the notion that what I have in mind, as I attempt a translation, are three
alternate ways of articulating the world into units and sorts? So, from the
side of human language, mental life, and behavior, we cannot even be
confident of our capacity to parse what seem to be ontologically crucial
distinctions in the world. And there is no God’s-eye perspective for Quine
to achieve what we as speakers or interpreters cannot. It follows that either
there is no metaphysical difference between rabbits and rabbit time-slices
or the distinction somehow exists in a mysterious void that we have no
access to and cannot articulate. All we can do, says Quine, is to make
internal moves within a particular system of talking. I can say that ‘chat’ in
French refers to cats or even that ‘cat’ in English refers to cats, but I have
merely fixed that there is something to say if I am asked, not any more
determinate fact about reference. I have not thereby determined any actual
reference relationships with the world but merely rules for moving around
within a particular language game.
I can, says Quine, test sentences against circumstances in the world that
make them true or false, though even this testing will be part of a holistic
process that adjusts the theory as a whole to the world, not individual
sentences. But this move to the sentence level, while it may take some
pressure off the matter of reference to individual objects, cannot quite handle
the problem here. For there are certain sophisticated kinds of individuals,
namely those capable of having intentions, desires, and beliefs, that we wish
not only to form true sentences about but also to pick out as metaphysically
robust inhabitants of the world. On Quine’s program we cannot refer to
such individuals in a manner that is full-bodied enough to support the idea
of possessors of such intentional states. We might recall my reference above
to Dennett’s account of the ways by which things in the world become
progressively more selfy, with self-reflecting, self-determining individuals at
the summit of this process. Quine, it appears, will not allow that process of
becoming more selfy to get under way at all if we think of it as a self-
individuating activity that things engage in on their own. But then it is hard
to see how we end up with the kind of individuals who might have beliefs
and intentions and whose behavior might best be explained in terms of those
beliefs and intentions. Only selves who had advanced up Dennett’s “selfy”
ladder considerably could, it appears, have such states. The overall result is
that speakers’ sayings seem to be just vocal noises that they produce at certain
times, not an expression of belief, not a taking a stand on how matters are
arranged in the world. (These verbal noises are not produced in a void, it is
true. They help generate behaviors of intervening in the world and of
experiencing the consequences of those intervenings, as well as aiming one
toward future satisfying or unsatisfying responses from the world.) Even
I myself seem to be left as someone producing noises and motions within
what I must take to be, from all the linguistic resources I have available to
me, ineffable, even if I can engage in board games, as it were, in which I use
the vocabulary of reference in order to make acceptable moves in the game.
Yet can I even say that? How am I a self at all in these circumstances?
As happened in Russell’s case, we seem to have two severe failings in trying to
establish that there are intentional mental states. The world does not have
enough independent determinacy to help give a definite, identifiable content
to such states, so that they threaten to go blank, and, even worse, there are no
selves to have them. Perhaps pains, pleasures, and moods would survive, but
what would their character be without an individual that cares about how it
is situated relative to the world?
Quine himself admits that individuals on his account will have the
extremely weak status that I have just described. In “Speaking of
Objects” he suggests that “the individuative, object-oriented conceptual
scheme so natural to us could begin to evolve away . . . And some day,
correspondingly, something of our present individuative talk may in turn
end up, half vestigial and half adapted, within a new and yet unimagined
pattern beyond individuation.”29 If we are not thinking of our cultural
29
W. V. Quine, “Speaking of Objects,” in Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 24.
world in terms of human individuals who make it up, it seems that the
intentional states we now assign to such individuals will also fall by the
wayside. For Quine, then, our talk of human individuals is no more than
an arbitrary accident of how we happen to talk at the moment. It is not
based on something about such individuals that demands our recognition
of them. Followers of Quine may not realize how close that suggestion
comes to a claim made by Michel Foucault: that the period of under-
standing cultural life through the activities and states of human individuals
was a kind of “fold” in history that may soon enough come to an end.30
In Quine we see what happens when we, like Kant, transfer all resources for
metaphysical determinacy to the side of what subjects or linguistic schemes
impose on the world and do not compensate for that transfer, in the case of
human persons, by introducing something like Kant’s noumenal self with
its robust autonomy. He seems undisturbed if intentional states vanish at
the same time.
Scott Soames gives an especially rigorous examination of Quine’s argu-
ments on meaning and reference.31 He offers a quote from Quine himself
admitting that the outcome of his argument appears problematic: “Surely
this is absurd, for it would imply that there is no difference between the
rabbit and each of its parts or stages . . . Reference would seem now to
become nonsense not just in radical translation but at home.”32 Soames
carefully assembles the arguments that led to this conclusion and claims
that Quine’s only possible escape from what appears to be absurdity
regarding how objects stand in the world is to give up the notion of
reference entirely. “Quine must deny,” says Soames, “that any word ever
refers to anything.”33 Could testing sentences against their truth-conferring
circumstances still make sense once the notions of meaning and reference
for individual words have been given up? But Quine’s notion of truth is
itself radically deflationary and minimalist. Just as I can still produce
statements such as “‘Cat’ refers to cats” within the maneuvers of my
conceptual scheme even after the notion of reference has been given up,
I can produce statements such as “‘Cats are mammals’ is true if an only if
cats are mammals.” This disquotational practice is a move within the rules
of my conceptual framework, not a more robust account of what it means
30
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 386–7.
31
Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II: The Age of Meaning (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 259–86.
32
Quine, “Ontological Relativity,” 47–8.
33
Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II, 269–70.
to track the actual layout of the world or to encounter truth-conferring
circumstances.
Quine seems perfectly happy to take his eliminativist strategy further.
It is not only meaning and reference that must go, but also belief, assertion,
and intention. When considering the thesis of Franz Brentano that inten-
tional idioms (such as ‘believes that x’) are irreducible, Quine says: “One
may accept the Brentano thesis either as showing the indispensability of
intentional idioms and the importance of an autonomous science of
intention, or as showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the
emptiness of a science of intention. My attitude, unlike Brentano’s, is
the second.”34 Quine is so intent on what will fit into a truly scientific
account of the world that he is willing to give up the notions of belief and
intention along with those of meaning and reference. He ends up expres-
sing the belief that there is no such thing as having a belief. He thus shows
a rigorous acceptance of the consequences of accepting his metaphysically
minimal world. Without God to support and illuminate a richly interior
life with its intentions and beliefs, even apart from a more solid metaphy-
sical world that humans might be situated in, that inner realm begins to
dissolve. (The late medievals can put up with the radical ontological
impoverishment of the world because God remains in the background as
the ultimate metaphysical foundation; empiricists today do not have that
option available.) Without beliefs the whole idea of intentional actions
disappears. For I can have policies only if I have beliefs about the world and
reasons to want it to be different. With no intentions and beliefs, selfhood
vanishes. We are left with no world, no selves, and just empty vocalizations
that mysteriously appear in response to pressure from an unknowable
source, as in a Beckett play. (Everything follows here from the metaphysical
thinning out of the world. Once entities are not allowed to be, to a real
extent, self-individuating and self-determining, they cannot be
metaphysically substantial enough to have intentions, desires, and beliefs.)
Quine’s work is valuable because it shows what happens when the late-
medieval ecosystem is still producing certain effects after all these centuries
but the theological elements at the foundation of that ecosystem have been
given up. A good response at this stage is to return to something roughly
like the world of Aristotle that the late medievals so strongly wished to
annihilate. One should grant that the turn away from Aristotle had
excellent benefits. But if physics was the fruitful model then, biology can
be an especially fruitful model now. If we take the long history of evolution
34
W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 220–1.
and consider the emergence of thinking beings with complex mental states,
we see that these states count in the first place as mental only because they
are relatively reliable registerings of a rich and vigorous reality.
The complex workings of that reality for millions of years have eventually
yielded intelligent, big-brained creatures as one interesting strategy in the
process of adjusting successfully to the demands of the environment. And
when we do not restrict ourselves to the extremely austere world that
physics describes, we can find it fascinating to see how much work rabbits
have already done, before we come upon them, to mark themselves out as
well-bounded individuals sustaining themselves and pursuing their inter-
ests. To say that everything is built out of physical stuff in motion is not to
determine in advance which descriptive languages will render visible sig-
nificant patterns of activity that are not available from the viewpoint of
physics. These languages will be picking out configurations that are truly
there anyway, even if the stance of physics itself is not sensitive to such
configurations and does not have the resources to make them emerge into
view from the chaos of events and information. So, the patterns in question
should not be thought of as mere reflections of a human scheme that we are
imposing. It is just that we must be deploying the right level of description,
at the right level of resolution, in order for certain shapes and patterns to
pop out for us as evident. Once we recognize this point, we are freer to see
that allowing Aristotelian features into the order of the real, so that things
may count as self-individuating and self-determining substances, does not
violate the claim that everything in the world is made out of physical stuff
in motion. It is only when such a claim is accompanied by a demand for
radical metaphysical parsimony that we must strip the world of certain of
its Aristotelian features. (Of course, we are not going to restore his
teleological explanations.) And that demand may be linked to considera-
tions that are theological, perhaps mediated through the Kantian
“Copernican” response to the late-medieval situation. In the same way,
configurations of physical stuff that are there anyway but that the vocabu-
lary of physics does not make visible are the basis for our assignment of
beliefs and intentions to selves.
I should grant here that a general acquaintance with readings of
twentieth-century American philosophy shows that there are many
Quines. Perhaps I do not pay enough attention to Quine insofar as
he is perceived as belonging to the tradition of American pragma-
tism. My own Quine in this book most nearly resembles that of
Soames, whose two-volume history of twentieth-century analytic
philosophy has been called by some the best such treatment available.
Soames, an excellent analytic philosopher himself, goes more care-
fully into an assessment of Quine’s arguments about meaning and
reference than do most other commentators, even if he does not
attend to alternate overall ways of reading the philosopher. The great
value of Soames’s account for me is that it helps support an impor-
tant aspect of my narrative. I want to show that if you work within
certain philosophical models or templates that in the long run derive
from religious frameworks, and if you then remove any trace of God
or of God-substitutes from the picture, the system begins to self-
destruct. Quine is himself a rigorous enough thinker that he keeps
accepting the consequences of putting maximum pressure on the
model he starts out with, even as more and more that is necessary
to get a convincing mind–world relationship going vanishes from the
picture. I readily acknowledge that there are competing treatments of
the philosopher. For Quine the pragmatic realist, we should in the
end cede the field to working scientists and go with what works in
their ordinary practices. Just as we cannot say more about reference
than to make moves within a linguistic game (“‘cats’ refers to cats”),
so we let stand whatever practicing scientists end up saying, without
having any more robust account of how those utterances are mean-
ingful at all or end up capturing how matters actually stand. As in
the late-medieval situation, we manipulate linguistic tokens (though
not merely mental tokens) to make things happen reliably that we
wish to happen. But we do so after Quine’s own arguments have
been devastating for all semantic accounts and have made our onto-
logical commitments as hollow and insubstantial as possible. Our
belief in physical objects, we will recall, is for him of the same kind
epistemically as our belief in the Homeric gods. So we are left with
linguistic moves that our own story makes empty, mysteriously
successful gestures in a larger world we can give no account of except
to repeat the empty linguistic gestures, generating certain winning
patterns of sound that yield the responses from the world that we
favor. They seem to work, but it appears radically arbitrary why they
do so, since we cannot give an account of their meaning, reference,
or truth-tracking capacity. Like the late medievals, we make manip-
ulations, successful or not, within a universe we cannot even make
sense of comprehending. Like them, we are just trying to “save the
appearances.” To thoroughly impoverish the world and to put all
pressure on the side of subjectivity or language is to commit to
a machinery that must self-destruct, since neither of those two
resources, as Quine recognizes, can carry out the functions that God
once did. Such a machinery erodes the ecosystem it needs to make
sense of itself.
The implicit theological framework behind empiricism shows itself also in
a more recent version of that philosophical stance. Two British thinkers,
Crispin Wright and Michael Dummett, have put forward versions of anti-
realism that continue the project of empiricism in a new form.35
The traditional empiricist believes that our story of what there is must be
based on an account of what we are able to experience, and so must follow
from an analysis of our experiential machinery. Metaphysical claims must be
founded on the impressions made by the world on the minds of individual
experiencers and on the kinds of constructions that can be built from those
impressions. A key problem with this account, one I emphasized earlier, is
that the realm of private mental experiences seems a poor support for sciences
based on the replication of experiments. Then, too, there has been
Wittgenstein’s critique of notion of a private language of sensory experience.
So Wright and Dummett offer a form of empiricism that is more public.
Metaphysics and semantics must still be limited by our capacities for
experiencing and understanding, but these are now thought of as activities
whose features we can exhibit to others.36 I can best give an account of the
meaning of a statement, so these thinkers claim, by showing what it is for
someone to understand it. What evidentiary conditions would speakers
recognize as making the statement true? What do they think gives them the
right to assert the statement in a given situation? To show that I understand
the meaning of a term I do not appeal to privileged inner entities but rather
produce certain behaviors in the face of publicly available evidence.
The central point is that meaning and truth must be intimately related
to the kinds of things that humans do in making and handling sentences:
use, understanding, learning, justification, verification, manifestation of
competence, and so forth. If we take that overall point seriously, then
someone with a realist account of truth and meaning appears to be in
trouble. Such a realist, for Wright and Dummett, is committed to an idea
35
I have taken the arguments here especially from Crispin Wright’s account of them. See his Realism,
Meaning and Truth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). I have especially depended on the following
essays in that volume: “Introduction,” 1–44; “Realism, Truth-Value Links, Other Minds and the
Past,” 85–106; and “Anti-Realism, Timeless Truth and Nineteen Eighty-Four,” 176–203.
36
There is a very slight overlap here with some material I presented in my Subjectivity, Realism, and
Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994). While the present volume consists almost entirely of new arguments on new materials,
a few points of overlap with the earlier volume, such as the appeal to Hans Blumenberg’s account of
medieval philosophy, were needed to offer a convincing narrative for the present undertaking.
of objectivity that transcends what human speakers might be capable of
proving or detecting. For this realist, I am able to form sentences that states
of affairs in the world can make true or false even if we ourselves, with all
the practices at our disposal, could never determine them to be so. Our
language would make sentence-meaning sufficiently objective, that is, rigid
enough on its own, that it can go forth and separate itself from our actual
cognitive practices and capabilities, so as to make the assignment of truth
or falsity to the sentence possible, even as we ourselves may not be able to
recognize these truth-conferring conditions.
Why is such a realist in trouble? Either we make meaning something
that comes upon sentences quite mysteriously, or we show how someone
learning a language could acquire competence in understanding and
manipulating its meanings, and could make manifest that competence to
an observer.37 In that process of acquisition, one could only demonstrate
the meaning of a term by pointing to the kinds of evidence that would
make statements containing that term true. If I am being trained in the
meaning of the word ‘offside’ in soccer, I am shown situations whose
characteristics make it appropriate to apply this term and situations
whose characteristics make it inappropriate to do so. I will later manifest
my competence by using the term correctly when the evidence calls for it.
But there is one thing I cannot do. I cannot point to evidence-transcendent
truth conditions as conditions justifying my application of a term.
The point is a simple one. I cannot give evidence in the process of
language-learning for what is beyond my capacity to give evidence for it.
It follows that realists as defined above, with their position dependent on
that notion of evidence-transcendent truth conditions, are indeed in
trouble. They are supposing that I can acquire and manifest
a competence in something that will never be available in conditions of
learning and can never be demonstrated when I am asked what
I understand a certain meaning to be. Wright adds an additional thought
here. Truth is linked to the normative, to a standard I aim at satisfying in
being a speaker of a language. But how could I aim for a standard that
transcends my capacities for recognizing that I am meeting it or nearing it?
Meaning and truth must be more intimately embedded in our actual
human activities.
The realist does have a reply here. While a good deal of language will be
learned through a confrontation with truth-conferring conditions, that
does not mean that all of it must be. Suppose a rich network of meaningful
37
See Wright, Realism, Meaning and Truth, 13–29.
words has been built up, with their sideways links in conceptual webs and
inference networks, and with associated images, analogies, and practices of
comparison and contrast. With these resources I can situate a meaning
with considerable determinacy within such an established semantic field
even when my recognitional capacities regarding its application are lim-
ited. Consider a species resembling ours that builds up a notion of natural
kinds as based on a deep underlying physical structure that the members of
that species do not yet have access to. Unfortunately, through small deficits
and anomalies in their brain structures, thinkers within this species are
never able to understand the theories in physics that would enable them to
identify the basis for the natural kinds that they aim to be talking about.
The meaning of their terms, we might say, leaves a space open to be filled in
by the world itself, and it just may happen that they never have the capacity
to recognize how that filling in occurs so as to grant fuller determinacy to
their natural-kind terms. There is something of a promissory-note aspect to
their usage. An interpreter, in understanding the dense, holistic function-
ing of their language, might well assign meanings to their natural-kind
terms that transcend their own capacities for verification. Also, Wright and
Dummett make much of language-acquisition in their arguments. Yet we
must note how much of children’s learning involves evidence that trans-
cends their own experience. When parents talk about distant uncles and
aunts and dead grandparents and their own early lives and the details of
their work days, children are being recruited into language uses that far
exceed any kind of evidence that they themselves have available. They must
get competent very quickly at using their imagination to master sentences
with evidence-transcendent truth conditions, given their own very limited
abilities of detection and recognition. For example, they imagine them-
selves, having been shown pictures of the dead grandparents and of their
residence, walking into that house and seeing them eating at a table. Why
can they not eventually take that rather local notion of evidence-
transcendence and apply it on a much wider scale, so that even capacities
exceeding human ones might come into play in the way that the parents’
superior capacity to recognize truth conditions has come into play from the
start?
A difficulty for an antirealist of Wright’s sort is that the supposed defeat
of the realist may come at a heavy cost. The weapons deployed can turn
against such antirealists and force them into an uncomfortable position.
For if there is a problem with the very idea of evidence-transcendence when
it comes to the human acquisition of linguistic meaning, it seems that
meaning must be linked to the actual evidence available to speakers at the
time of utterance. Anything more than that will transcend the actual
conditions available as they acquire or manifest their semantic competence.
But then we have a very odd picture of human linguistic practice and of
reality itself. Wright acknowledges what that picture looks like, without
quite wishing to endorse it. He asks us to think of a train moving across
a landscape, with individual passengers looking out individual windows.
What counts as reality for viewers are what they can make truthful state-
ments about, and thus what they can have evidence for in the immediate
circumstances. So I have to suppose that as I look out the train window in
Wright’s picture, the landscape I have passed vanishes metaphysically as
well as visually. Wright also puts matters as follows: “The anti-realist would
have us think of the facts as, so the speak, filing past – with the difference
that they did not exist before they entered the room and cease to be as soon
as they leave.”38 If metaphysics on the empiricist model has been made
subordinate to epistemology, then we have a vast contraction here of what
we may count as real. Reality collapses into what I can now have evidence
for and so keeps changing its reach at every moment. Evidence keeps
rapidly altering, so truth and meaning, so closely linked to evidence by
the antirealist, become radically ephemeral. The meaning of a statement
becomes different from moment to moment and from individual experi-
encer to individual experiencer. No one else can be in the precise eviden-
tiary position I am now and thus mean what I do by my words. Language
becomes private and incommunicable, just as it does for the sense-data
theorists. How can I make statements about the past at all when I do not
have the capacity to set myself in circumstances of verification that would
make my statements true or false? There is a fairly typical pattern in the
stance of empiricism. First, we take it that certain epistemic emissaries or
intermediaries give us evidence about a much richer world beyond us.
Then the emphasis on what evidence is actually within our reach makes us
contract that world inward so that what we are really talking about and
have knowledge of are the emissaries themselves; what they were supposed
to connect us to fades into unreality. But when I talk about the past I am
not talking about the documentary evidence I have for it but rather about
the individuals and events that this is evidence of.
The strategy that is clearly needed at this point is one of idealization.
I have to consider meaning and truth conditions to be fixed by the
evidence-gathering and verification-recognizing capacities of rational
selves who may transcend the limitations of my spatial and temporal
38
Wright, Realism, Meaning and Truth, 193.
position and who may possess truth-assessing powers considerably superior
to my own. That idealizing expansion of the powers of the speaker would
save antirealism by, in effect, defeating it. For it allows reality, truth, and
meaning to have a robust objectivity with no special link to our actual
human limitations. Dummett and Wright see the possibility of this result.
That is why they opt for a far more modest idealization, one that remains
much closer to our actual abilities as humans and to our spatiotemporal
positions as weighers of evidence.39 They are opposed to any idealization of
our capacities that makes it somewhat mysterious, to us as actual users of
the language, how truth and falsity actually manage to settle upon our
statements. That response is problematic in that there is no principled way
to set a limit on the idealization in question once we allow it to affect what
we mean. But even more, that tactic of severely limiting any idealization of
our stance underestimates our human powers of imagination and analogy.
Consider the statement: ‘There is a planet at least one million light years
from earth such that on it, at least one million years ago, a volcano occurred
greater than any that has ever occurred on earth.’ We can quite easily use
our fertile imaginations to suppose that a planet not far from the one
referred to in that statement sent out a Star Trek-type mission at that long-
ago time and those on this mission observed such a volcano occurring. Our
own capacities to find evidence for that occurrence are not required for us
to connect the statement in question with aspects of use, acquisition,
evidence, justification, and so forth. Even in literature we see how easily
we can move to stances well beyond our own. At the end of Joyce’s
“The Dead,” the viewpoint offered moves from a very local Dublin dinner
party to a stance that takes in snow falling all over the city. This stance
keeps expanding its reach until one is watching snow falling on the graves
of western Ireland and on the waters of the Shannon River, and finally one
is watching the snow fall on the dark waters of the Atlantic and on all the
living and the dead. No human with only a modest idealizing of our
abilities could adopt that stance, and yet as readers we do so easily. Or
suppose we look around on earth and see nonhuman life forms with great
but limited abilities to process information about their surroundings.
We are analogy-making creatures. By analogy, we suppose that as we
stand to those limited creatures, some species with much greater intelli-
gence might stand to us. They would be able to understand the universe
well enough to determine that some of the statements that humans have
formed on the earth are true or false even if we have no capacity to bring
39
Wright, Realism, Meaning and Truth, 180–3.
ourselves into conditions that confer truth on these sentences. It is hard to
see that the realist would want anything more than that in a contest with
Dummett and Wright. I can master a notion of evidence-transcendence
without having a confrontation with what is recognizably evidence-
transcendent.
Dummett and Wright might reply by appealing to an argument of
Wittgenstein on rule-following.40 I will describe this argument in
Chapter 6, which is devoted to that philosopher. For now, the point of it
is that no matter how carefully humans attach truth conditions or applica-
tion conditions to a semantic unit, there will always be some “give” in what
will count as applying the term in the same way in the future. We cannot
magically attach an essence to such semantic units that will determine
sameness precisely for future cases. So the world itself cannot on its own
attach the values of true and false to statements that we ourselves never
verify. Only an actual practice of applying the term in the future can do so.
So we have to think of our practices now as vulnerable in some respects to
how the future practices of a ‘we’ that we can identify with happen to go.
Yet here too the realist has an answer. We just expand very generously what
we will count as forming that ‘we,’ including in it rational experiencers
with powers far greater than our own whom we might in principle come to
be causally connected with in the future. The world will not on its own
blindly make true or false our unverified sentences, as in Wright’s picture
of the realist position. But the hypothetical practices of such highly
advanced experiencers can be thought of as doing so in just the way that
most of us now allow many of our sentences to be made true or false by
scientists with skills far exceeding our own.
I am not persuaded by an antirealism of the sort articulated by Wright
and Dummett. What interests me instead is how their account seems to
reveal aspects of the implicit religious framework that was originally
behind the empiricist stance. The empiricist has to work against a strong
natural intuition that arises in humans as we experience our fragility and
limitations in an astonishingly extensive universe, one that has long been
developing before we arrived on the scene and that may massively trans-
cend our capabilities to scrutinize its ultimate contours. The intuition is
that our utterances are tentative, fragile reachings toward a reality that may
well exceed them. We are made by the world; the world is not made by us.
What would make us turn against that natural intuition? First, there is the
idea that the world has to be so metaphysically thinned out that it has no
40
Wright, Realism, Meaning and Truth, 148–51.
features on its own that can be taken to contribute to the semantic
determinacy of human utterances. Meaning then will be fully a matter of
what we ourselves can invest in our sentences through our capacities for
understanding, manifestation, acquisition, and verification. Given such
a metaphysically featureless universe, reality will be what we project it to
be. A second condition for turning against that natural intuition is that one
insists on a radical separation between a God’s-eye view of the universe and
the stance of the individual human experiencer or speaker. For the late
medievals this meant that we could not comprehend the universe as God
had designed it. For Wright and Dummett, this means that only an
extremely limited idealizing of our human capacities will be allowed in
determining what truth-relevant conditions define the meanings of our
utterances; one must not in any manner allow the God’s-eye view to come
into consideration. Now take these two conditions together: the collapsing
back of reality on what our practices take it to be and the restriction of our
semantic and epistemic reach to a very modest arena based on our capa-
cities to recognize truth-relevant evidence. We then have a great contrac-
tion of our metaphysical reach back into our evidentiary grasp, no matter
how limited that grasp might be. Real objects that last over time may then
vanish. The past may vanish. The two factors I have just articulated as
driving us to this conclusion were ultimately religious in origin, as we have
seen, though God remained to provide secure if unknowable metaphysical
backup. To remove God is to put more pressure on our actual human
experiential practices as they try, unsuccessfully, to hold secure a broader
world. Without the inertial power of a background framework roughly like
that medieval religious one, it becomes more difficult to see what could be
motivating the antirealist here to go against what I called our natural
intuition.
A third factor leading to Wright and Dummett’s position is what we
called, along with Hans Blumenberg, the stance of self-assertion. In the
late-medieval world, as the human hold on the larger metaphysical world
weakens in the face of God’s incomprehensible will, experiencers find
a kind of security and power by severely reducing their epistemic reach.
Instead of an extremely imperfect grasp of a universe that extends well
beyond us, we map out a space in which we can have a near-perfect grasp of
entities closer in to our epistemic machinery. We reduce our reach and
claim mastery over the reduced space; utterances mean simply what we
make them mean by our own labor. In Wright and Dummett’s position,
we limit truth and meaning to truth-conferring circumstances that we
ourselves can be fully in charge of assessing. One result, it is true, is that,
since evidence is so different for different speakers and for the same speaker
at different times, meaning threatens to become radically ephemeral,
immediate, and private.
There is an interesting result. The contraction inward is supposed to
leave us with phenomena we can still call meaning, truth, and evidence.
But as the wider world dissolves into something more local of our own
making, what right do we still have to call something evidence? It is not as if
the epistemic intermediaries can retain their semantic content after what
they were intermediaries for have vanished in a great metaphysical defla-
tion. They become empty. Antirealists in the manner of Wright haven’t
just engineered a metaphysical contraction. They haven’t left in place the
conditions necessary to prevent their thoughts and utterances from becom-
ing an empty spinning in a void. Without God as a guarantee, the
structural machinery that was set in play long ago hollows itself out.
chapter 2
John McDowell: Rejecting the Defensive Move

Inward
John McDowell’s Mind and World is one of the widely admired philoso-
phy books of the last few decades.1 He does not offer his work as an attempt
to overcome the inertial structure of the late-medieval response to theolo-
gical voluntarism. But he does present himself as trying to overcome
a model of human experiencing, of setting our mental lives in relation to
the world, that he sees as having been dominant since the time of early
modern philosophy and science. He is trying as well to resist a minimalist
account of nature that he also traces back to the scientific picture of the
early modern era. If we examine what he is opposed to in the light of my
narrative about the ongoing influence of the intellectual terrain set in place
by the late medievals, we find significant affinities.2
McDowell says his project is an attempt to resolve a certain oscillation in
the epistemic enterprises of philosophy.3 One side of that oscillation is the
strategy of founding a system of knowledge on a base level of experience
that is straightforwardly given. This involves a stream of sensory material
that simply happens to rise up within us, that is swept up into our minds by
processes that we do not have access to. Through being passive toward this
level of the given, we do not let our thinking introduce error into it, so it
can stand as an indubitable basis for the knowledge we build upon it.
The problem, says McDowell, is that if it is a system of belief and knowl-
edge that we are thus developing, this base level must already be in the form
of evidence that supports inferences and arguments. But the sensory given
in this model is not yet ordered in a manner that would let it fit properly
into a process of reasoning and justification. It seems to be just a brute
input that causally shapes certain happenings in us rather than linking
1
John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
2
In reading McDowell, the reader will likely find useful his replies to a set of essays, often critical,
about his work. See McDowell, “Responses,” in N. H. Smith (ed.), Reading McDowell: On Mind and
World (London: Routledge, 2002), 269–305.
3
70
John McDowell 71
them to a genuinely epistemic process. As McDowell puts it, we get
exculpation rather than justification; we cannot be blamed for what thus
happens in our belief-formation process, but our beliefs are not being
backed up by something that properly counts as evidence about how
matters stand in the world. And if the sensory given is already in the
form of evidence for belief, then it seems we have worked it over into
something no longer immediate. We no longer have the non-mediated
character and passive reception that offered an epistemic promise of certain
foundations and at the same time of linkage to an external world pressing
up against us.
With the failure of that Given to solve our epistemic worries, we might
try another strategy. Only certain kinds of furniture in the mind count as
the proper sort of justifiers for us: beliefs and, additionally, appearings that
purport to be from the world and that have been worked up into belief-like
entities by the operation of our inner rational machinery. Getting things
right then becomes a matter of coherence among these inner entities.
We just measure them against one another and try to make as many of
them as possible come out true. But on this model, we do not seem to have
a good grip on what it is for these inner objects to be about the world, to be
tracking its contours and taking a position on how matters stand, to be
subject to the friction that real engagement with the world ought to bring
about. We are not thinking about the world, it seems. We are just playing
a game where certain entities pop up in our inner space and we juggle them
with other game pieces already there.
McDowell’s answer is, so he says, taken from Kant. Concepts and
intuitions, spontaneity and receptivity, must work together inextricably
for there to be genuine experiences of the world.4 Sensory intuition must
be understood in a manner that demonstrates our openness to the way the
world is, our having a window on reality as opposed to our being in a black
box in which mysterious entities keep popping up. But this receptivity
must already, from the start, be guided by a conceptual repertoire which is
part of a system of reasoning. We come to exercise the Kantian virtue of
spontaneity when we begin to weigh and assess our beliefs according to
norms for what counts as a valid belief, when we are capable of changing
our beliefs not simply through causal pressure on them but in the light of
the reasons we have for holding them. Once we are capable of thus entering
into what McDowell calls the space of reasons or the realm of spontaneity,
then even our passive sensory experience of the world takes on a different
4
character. In viewing the world I am not just causally formed by it, in a way
that makes certain appearings wash up into my mind. In scanning reality
I become capable of noting reasons for belief that the world itself offers and
not just matter in motion that may produce certain effects in me.
So humans for McDowell are quite different from other animals.5
Animals are part of a causal realm where information is registered and
responded to. But they don’t see the world in the light of a project of
rationally adjusting beliefs to the way matters stand in reality.
McDowell insists, then, that we reject a common two-level account of
experience: “I said that when we enjoy experience conceptual capacities are
drawn on in receptivity, not exercised on some supposedly prior deliver-
ances of receptivity.”6 On the account he opposes, we would go through
one level of experience which is like that of the sensory experiences of
animals in that it concerns the causal impression of the world on certain
inner states. Then, farther up the chain, the human rational faculties would
go to work turning this material into something appropriate for reasoning.
McDowell has to suppose that at some point in our evolutionary history we
truly entered something like a different world. As the training offered by
developing human cultures made us sensitive to having reasons for what we
believed and did, often because of the demands that others made on us to
offer justifications, we saw the world around us quite differently. It became
for us, as it was not for other animals, a space where such reasons for belief
were being offered to us by the world itself if we could attune ourselves
properly to them. It was not that we later on imposed a rational structure
on deliverances that were mental effects of a minimally describable world
of scientific causality.
As McDowell puts it, the sphere of spontaneity, of adjusting beliefs in
the light of reasons for believing, goes all the way out to the contours of the
world itself.7 Yet experience also remains a site of receptivity, of being
formed by something external, because the conceptual, rational faculties
that are there in the background as part of the context of perceptual
engagement remain passive during our basic kinds of sensory experiences.
We simply take in that the chair is yellow and that the table is broken
without yet subjecting these appearings to rational assessment, even
though our very seeing of these things has already enrolled them in the
space of evidence and inference. McDowell, unlike many analytic
5
McDowell, Mind and World, 63–5. 6 McDowell, Mind and World, 10.
7
That is the claim made by McDowell in the lecture “The Unboundedness of the Conceptual,” in
Mind and World, 24–45.
John McDowell 73
philosophers, presents his work in a historical perspective. He mentions
how he is shaped by, and wants to respond to, the projects of Kant and
Hegel. But he does not set this work within the broader historical context
that I am concerned with and that goes back to the era of medieval
philosophy and theology. There is a particular move in McDowell that
I wish to pay closer attention to in the light of the thinking of that earlier
period. We have just seen that he is opposed to a certain model of
experiencing that he finds deeply influential: one where the experiencing,
believing, evidence-weighing self seems to begin its cognitive work at some
remove from the world itself, somewhere up the chain linking objects in
the world with the subject’s beliefs about them. But such a world-to-self
linkage becomes a truly epistemic one, then, only part way up the route.
The first part of the route is a blind causation that cannot make one count
as having the world itself rationally in view. How could we have ended up
with such a picture?
It can begin to make very good sense (once again) if we go back to the
late-medieval voluntarists. God’s omnipotent power and unconditioned
free willing, as we have been noting, are such that he might design the
universe in any way whatever. He might change its metaphysical character
radically at any time without there being any difference in its appearings to
us. He might make any representation at all appear in a human experi-
encer’s mind even when there is nothing in reality corresponding to it. So,
in that theologically-shaped universe, it is hopeless for us to make claims
about how reality is truly constituted and is truly behaving. Human reason
is not designed to bring into view the way the world itself is operating.
We have seen that we might, in response to this situation, make a defensive
move inward. Let us set up our epistemic fortifications, as it were, closer to
the interior mental life of the self. (Here is McDowell’s description of the
stance of Descartes: “Whatever such arguments show about knowledge of
external reality, we can retreat to the newly recognized inner reality, and
refute the claim that we know nothing, on the ground that at least we know
these newly recognized facts about subjective appearances.”8 We should
not underestimate the debt of Descartes to late scholasticism.) We will
simply take what appears there, the sensory impressions (what earlier
scholastics called the impressed sensible species), and learn to manipulate
them as well as we can to make our lives turn out well enough pragmati-
cally. By reducing the epistemic sway of our claims we do not underplay
8
McDowell, “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,” in McDowell, Meaning, Knowledge
and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 239.
God’s power to make anything move or appear in any way whatever.
On the other hand, we will put our own mental machinery to work in
constructing a usable world out of those inward materials. Since we cannot
know God’s mind and how he has arranged things, our best strategy is to
project only the most minimal metaphysical structure upon the world.
So a very high percentage of what we take the world to be will come not
from our openness to its determinate character but from what we construct
out of the basic material that we find in our sensory impressions, from what
we add to the world as its basic emissaries enter our mental space and get
worked up into something epistemically richer. Only after thus getting
worked up can this material count as evidence for truth-claims. So we end
up with just the situation, the retreat inward, that McDowell describes and
opposes. Our faculty of spontaneity or reason does not extend its reach
fully to the metaphysical character of the world itself. It simply cannot do
so on this theological picture. Instead it begins to work on material that is
already inward, that is already somewhere up the chain from world to
belief. We cannot be blamed for these epistemic limitations, given the
omnipotent and ineffable character of God’s free willing, and so we have
exculpation, as McDowell would call it. But we cannot say that our beliefs
are justified by the way that the world itself operates. We have no idea if our
cognitive faculties are bringing into view the actual contours of the world.
The late-medieval conditions generate something very close to the intel-
lectual space that McDowell describes.
He sees that defensive move inward, so characterized, as having a deep
flaw. The story has been told in such a way that one still keeps in mind an
overall picture of the self as engaged with the larger world in making its
internal constructions. So these seem easily to be about the world, even
with their limitations of reach. But given the picture as McDowell
describes it (the one he is resisting), why should I be able to claim that
these constructions possess the kind of content that enables them to have
any purchase on the world at all, to express a stance on how the world is?
They should seem rather like mysterious items that are just there and the
manipulation of which sometimes guides behavior that turns out well and
sometimes guides behavior that turns out badly. There is nothing about
them that makes us conceive of them as transparently bringing into view
the layout of the world. It is as if I am in a room with many buttons and
dials and I learn by pressing and turning them to make certain things
happen. I may assume that they are causally linked to a larger world, but
why should I even take them to be representations, accurate or not, of
worldly items? My model no longer allows me to think of there being such
John McDowell 75
a world except in the emptiest sense; the extent of my claims has shrunk
inward. My inward manipulations are taken to have the content they
supposedly do only because I still place them within the larger self-to-
world picture that I am no longer allowed, since I no longer have the means
to articulate its terrain at all. I would be like the brain in the vat that we
eventually count as speaking about vat-experiences, whatever those might
be, instead of about trees and mountains and houses. Or, more persua-
sively, I seem left with formal shapes and patterns whose very aboutness is
in jeopardy, so that it is questionable that I am left with intentional and
semantic content at all.
Here we have the situation that we found with Bertrand Russell.
The medievals had excellent reasons, theological ones, for their defensive
move inward. And they could still credit God with sufficient power to
make human inner happenings have semantic content; that would surely
lie within the realm of what he can do. His illumination can light up our
minds with meaningful content even if our connection to the world should
be in doubt or should be merely causal. But without that theological
background the structure in question becomes less plausible. If there is
not a robust world that is coming into view in our experiencing, that our
rational powers are lighting up as evidentiary, it is hard to show that our
mental states have an aboutness that is itself sufficiently robust. What
happens when we get rid of the unlimited power of the voluntarist God
to erode all possible metaphysical determinacy and to undermine any
epistemic achievement aimed at the world itself? Then the most attractive
position to take is that the mental machinery of humans has evolved in
intimate, necessary engagement with the world, that it functions as an
openness to the world, and that it must to a considerable degree be right in
what it takes that world to be. McDowell seems exasperated that this
structure of a compensatory move inward has such inertial power in
philosophy, but he does not trace that power back to the influence of late-
medieval theology on British empiricism and on Kant. Once we fully
liberate ourselves from that structure, then a more natural and convincing
conception of our knowing and experiencing is that the sphere of sponta-
neity, of assessing what we experience as evidence for belief, does indeed go
all the way out to the patterns of the world itself. Reality comes into view as
a space of evidence-granting for a rational self moving within it. We do not
suddenly come alive rationally when faced with objects that have myster-
iously arrived in an inner realm.
McDowell spends a considerable part of Mind and World in a critical
dialogue with another important philosopher who shares his dissatisfaction
with the traditional empiricist picture. That philosopher is Donald
Davidson, who is also combating the thought that the account we draw
of the world based on our manipulating of inner objects might be wildly
wrong about it.9 He does not trace this possibility of a wild wrongness back
to the late-medieval picture of theological voluntarism, but his response is
such as to assist in overthrowing that picture. We go wrong, he says, when
we suppose that the mental items relevant to belief, meaning, and reference
have the determinate character they do independently of any relation to the
world. There is nothing about the mind taken on its own that is capable of
fixing that determinacy. The mental language, simply as a set of tokens, of
brain firings, is not self-interpreting. It needs to be assigned a semantics.
For that assignment, we do not need to explore the interiority of the self
but to consider the stance of an interpreter who is watching an individual
interact richly with a complex world while producing various utterances.10
This interpreter will assign meanings and beliefs to the speaker in a manner
that takes the speaker’s mental life to have a generally successful take on the
world. If I found a thermometer in a foreign country with odd markings on
it in a strange language, I would likely interpret those markings by seeing
what temperatures in the world are supposed to be registered and by taking
the instrument to be generally accurate at doing this. In a similar manner
I interpret the language of others as expressing beliefs that make him them
pretty good registers of what is the case in the world. So the idea of an
isolated subjectivity that might be wildly wrong about how matters stand
in reality vanishes. It is not that I myself must struggle to get myself out of
a Cartesian interiority whose relationship to the world is questionable.
Rather, the very conditions for any interpreter to assign semantic content
to my mental states automatically take them to be in successful contact
with how the world is.
McDowell is happy with Davidson’s project of making us generally
successful at adjusting our beliefs to the way the world is. He favors those
thinkers who, concerned with the apparent distance of subjectivity from
the world, seek “to exorcize the feeling of distance rather than trying to
bridge the felt gap.”11 But he is less happy with two features of Davidson’s
account. Davidson’s position threatens to slip back into the undesirable
9
See especially the essay “Davidson in Context,” which is part of the Afterward material in Mind and
World and is found on 129–61. It was written in response to objections made to the original lecture
series on which this book is based.
10
I describe Davidson’s overall project in great detail in my Subjectivity, Realism, and Postmodernism:
The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy, 70–116.
11
McDowell, Mind and World, 147.
John McDowell 77
picture according to which the self as reasoner is attending to already
inward items instead of to the world itself. For Davidson still claims that
what we compare our beliefs to are other beliefs rather than to evidentiary
configurations in the world that we bring into view in our receptive having
of impressions. So it seems that we are manipulating inner entities with
coherence among them as our goal instead of directly inhabiting the world
itself as rational believers and assessors of evidence. And in Davidson’s
picture, it seems that it is not we ourselves who are making most of our
beliefs true through the intimacy of our rich engagement with the world.
It is rather that, to our good fortune, an interpreter from the outside assigns
a semantics to us that makes the whirring of our inner machinery do
a pretty good job of getting the world right. But that picture seems to
make us fall rather short of McDowell’s goal of showing how, in our
experiences, the realm of our spontaneity, of our free rational assessment
and adjustment of beliefs, goes all the way out to the world itself.
Davidson’s manner of making our beliefs mostly true seems not to honor
that character of spontaneity and its ambitious reach toward the eviden-
tiary layout of reality. So Davidson, while his thought goes in the right
direction, would be somewhat less successful than McDowell in over-
coming the inertia of the structures of late-medieval theology.
A fundamental motivation for the late-medieval view that our reasoning
powers do not have access to the world itself in its intrinsic patterns of
arrangement was an ever more radical distinction between divine reason
and human reason. That radical distinction had not been the case for
Aristotle. We noted earlier his belief that when human intellectual activity
is actualized at its highest level, it becomes temporarily identical with the
activity of divine reasoning. Aquinas and other thinkers of High
Scholasticism could maintain a level of analogy between God’s ways of
acting and human ways of acting. But the late medievals (like Karl Barth
and other radical Protestant thinkers in the twentieth century) emphasize
the absolute difference between the divine and the human, such that God’s
entries into the human sphere must be unmotivated by worldly facts and
must be inscrutable. Divine reason which sees into everything as it is must
be functioning very differently, with a different realm of operation, from
the way that human reason functions. We have no alternative but to
sharply reduce our epistemic claims and to grant our reason sovereignty
only over a very much reduced part of reality. So we end up with just the
picture that McDowell disparages. It is the incommensurability of divine
and human reason, as well as the dependence of the world upon the
former, that guarantees that our own reasoning powers cannot reach all
the way out to the actual metaphysical layout of the world. But today, with
the decline of religion, we no longer have to place human reason in such
a stark contrast with its divine counterpart. So there is no need for the
modesty of a retreat inward that, through acknowledging the contrast
between the world as God creates and knows it and the world as we
know it, would make us focus on more available inner objects and on
particularly human sorts of compensation. As Hegel argued, the Reason we
share in is at home in reality itself and finds there patterns appropriate for
its operations.
Since God’s potential creative power for the late-medieval voluntarists is
infinite and absolute, the actual world he creates is radically contingent.
There were any number of possible ways he might have carried out this task
and there is no criterion external to God’s free will that would determine
that one world created is better than another. So the actual world we reside
in is a thoroughly arbitrary choice out of that infinite number. Human
reason has no way of securing a place for its operations amid such infinite
possibilities of how things might actually be, insofar as God has willed
them to be one way rather than another. Leibniz in the letters he exchanged
with Samuel Clarke objected to this conception.12 He believed that
a rational God created the most rational world, so that we could expect
reality to have a rational character that makes it an appropriate fit for
human reason. For Clarke, in contrast, Newton’s laws reflect God’s free
arbitrary choice in creating this world and do not have to reflect a rationally
preferred scheme. Only a much thinner ontological commitment, that
reality is mathematizable, is allowed. Leibniz replies that a world created by
the arbitrary freedom of God is no different in the end from the blind,
thoughtless determinism of atomism. As Blumenberg shows, that was
indeed the conclusion of some of the medieval nominalists. It follows
that we cannot expect the world to have a rational structure that human
reason is designed to penetrate, even if we can produce mathematically
accurate models of it. Our faculty of rational spontaneity cannot expect to
extend out to the articulations of the world and to find, as aspects of nature
itself, reasons that this faculty can be sensitive to. Again we end up, for
theological considerations, with the view that McDowell opposes.
Aristotle’s account had supposed there was a natural fit between mind
and world. But that belief could not withstand the medieval developments.
As the theological voluntarists gave a Greek-influenced philosophical
account of the Biblical God, they acknowledged the principle that God’s
12
See Hans Blumenberg’s treatment of this topic in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 149–51.
John McDowell 79
perfection would be lessened if his actions are in any way at all a response to
something external to him. He is a spontaneous activity of self-knowing,
self-willing, and self-loving. So his creation of the world cannot be for the
sake of man but simply for his own glorification. In loving humans, he is
loving himself in one of the infinite ways in which his essence might be
participated in by creatures. Even his redeeming of man through the
Incarnation more and more begins to sound, in certain theological trea-
tises, like an arbitrary act for his own sake. So, again, nothing in the
universe is oriented toward man and his faculties.13 We cannot expect
that in thinking and experiencing, our reflective spontaneity is suitable to
bring out the contours of the world itself, as McDowell requires. It is
notable that medieval nominalists, in spite of having techniques of scien-
tific experiment, did not perform all that many scientific measurements,
the foundation of careful science. Blumenberg suggests that they took
seriously the claim in the Bible that God had laid out the world according
to his own measure and since that measure depended on the unknowable
character of God’s free choice, humans couldn’t expect to measure the
physical world accurately. There was less incentive, then, to gather rich sets
of measurements regarding the ordinary natural processes around them.
Again, there was no natural affinity between human rational powers and
the world’s arrangements, and one could not expect that our powers of
rational spontaneity could probe the most basic layout of the world.
The turn inward that McDowell objects to is perhaps not an inevitable
outcome of the thought of the late-medieval nominalists. Ockham, for
example, supposes that the experiencing mind is typically directed toward
individuals in the world. His main goal is to deny any philosophical
apparatus that tries to give a metaphysical basis, in common essences or
forms, for what we count as the same. On the other hand, the nominalists,
including Ockham, give us rich materials for understanding how easy it
will be to take up the position that McDowell opposes, where reason goes
to work on already inward items. Ockham argues, for example, that God in
his power might always produce an effect directly and immediately with-
out requiring that the usual route of causality is in operation.14 So God
might produce the sensory perception in us of a nonexistent object. While
normally that divine causality works through ordinary mundane objects,
God, says Ockham, can easily bypass the mediating entities and set the
sensory perception directly in the perceiver. That picture suggests a serious
13
Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 174–7.
14
Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 188–91.
problem. What if God’s causality colonizes the entire human mind in that
fashion, including our supposedly more active faculties? We are then just
passive vehicles of God’s activity, and there is nothing that we can call our
own, nothing that we are actively the authors of. God might control not
just the sensory perceptions that pop up in us but our cognitive responses
to them as well. But then the very idea of cognitive or moral achievement
on the part of humans falls by the wayside. Christianity cannot accept that
result. No matter how much God’s power and freedom is emphasized,
there must remain some space that is allotted to genuinely human action.
We noted earlier the idea that while God’s causality might well have
overridden every activity of the human mind, he has granted humans the
gift of free will so that we can count as authors of what we do. That
structure can be present in our cognitive as well as in our moral machinery.
Even if the sensory perceptions that come before me in my mind were
caused to be there by God, it is still up to me whether I freely assent to form
beliefs on their basis. One response to the maximizing of theological power
is the insistence on at least a minimum power of human immanence: on
what we do with a faculty of will that is furthest up the line from world to
belief. The mind’s faculties are thus strictly divided into passive and active
ones. God might well intervene immediately and affect those passive
faculties as if they were being affected by actual objects in the world. But
the active power to will and to assent remains under our own control; it is
not taken over by a divine causality that renders it null.
That late-medieval picture shows very clearly why the faculty of sponta-
neity has a limited range of operation and goes to work on entities already
swept up into the inner space of the mind, as in the account that McDowell
is so strongly resisting. Spontaneity comes on the scene late in the game,
after either the world or God has brought about certain inner impressions
within us. It has legitimate sway only over a last step of judgment that
God’s omnipotence is not allowed to undermine, though God might have
overridden all the steps up to that point. The picture that safeguards that
last step of the process for the human spontaneity of free reflection and
judgment also guarantees that such spontaneity does not go all the way out
to the world itself, as in the story McDowell would persuade us of.
Without much strain we can see how the views of Descartes, with his
deceiving God and his faculty of will, and of the British empiricists, with
sense impressions that might have been caused by God (Berkeley) and that
form the basis of our inner construction efforts, might emerge. McDowell
is significant because he is working aggressively against the inertia of
a mind-world picture that has held sway over very many philosophers for
John McDowell 81
several centuries. Once we understand that the conditions that brought
that picture into being are no longer present, we can emancipate ourselves
from the habits that they ingrained in that tradition. Without having to
consider ideas of theological omnipotence and freedom, we can find
ourselves fully at home in a rich and robust world that our faculties evolved
in great intimacy with. Our human cognitive faculties have a good fit with
the world because possible structures of mental engineering that were a bad
fit died off during the course of evolutionary selection. Our grasp is
imperfect, but it is a grasp of things as they are. Even if the universe is
contingent in its order, that is the order we have developed to interact with,
and there is no divine activity behind the scenes that can undermine that
order and can sidestep its operations in order to intervene with us directly.
There is no reason to introduce a faculty of free will that, at the end of an
epistemic chain whose processes we cannot grasp, finally allows human
spontaneity to enter the game.
Modern science found success in thinking of a metaphysically thin
universe governed by basic mechanical laws, so that a dualism arose, says
McDowell, between reason and nature.15 This is for him the most funda-
mental dogma of empiricism, more important than the dualism of scheme
and content or the distinction between analytically true statements and
synthetic ones. He wants to put reason back into nature, so that in being
sensitive to the way the world is we are sensitive to reasons for belief and
action, not just to rich causal inputs that do complex things to our brains.
We are not ready to accept this plausible picture, says McDowell, because
of the radically disenchanted account of nature that emerged with early
modern science. That way of looking at nature was indeed a useful one for
the development of the physical sciences. But we should not suppose, holds
McDowell, that this thinned-out account can exhaust all that we mean by
nature and the character it can properly be taken to have. If we cannot find
a place for reasons themselves in the reality of nature, then his account, by
his own description of it, will be in trouble. To support him, we need to
suppose both that this thinned-out universe is excellent for bringing out
the patterns that the discipline of physics is sensitive to and that
a metaphysically richer account of what reality consists in is justifiable.
We should note that, once again, the radical scientific disenchantment of
nature had behind it, as one contributor to shaping it, the metaphysical
hollowing out that theological voluntarism required. Only a minimal
15
universe, with nothing in it of reason or meaning, could satisfy the
resulting intellectual demands.
For comparison’s sake, we might begin by looking to other thinkers
who have tried to show that reason is at home in nature. The Stoics
thought that the unfolding of natural processes was also the expression of
the Logos or Reason or God or Providence. There was a divine order that
was immanent in those activities of nature so that whatever happened had
an inevitability and rightness about it. Aristotle for his part said that the
thinkable forms that we actualize in our epistemic experience are iden-
tical with the metaphysical forms that in things make them what they are.
So again thought or reason appears to have a close affinity with how
matters are determined in nature. Hegel seems to offer one of the more
outlandish pictures of this kind. It is a pillar of his philosophy that
Reason must show itself to be at home in nature and in history. When
we actually look to his account of how thought and nature are related,
some of the metaphysical extravagance of that overall claim disappears.
It turns out that redescription is what he is doing, not the imaginary
invention of a strange metaphysical landscape. He wishes to find a close
affinity between the logical notions we use in describing rational thought,
such as the concept, the judgment, and the syllogism, and natural
processes as they occur within the sphere of nature. As John Findlay
says: “Hegel does not hesitate, in fact, to make any and every object
syllogistic: any object whatever represents a Universal made Specific, and
descending into Individuality.”16 Insofar as individuals express
a universal character (Hegel is not a nominalist) they have, says Hegel,
a self-articulating, mediating quality, a way of holding particular and
universal together, that we find expressed in a more properly conceptual
manner in syllogistic reasoning. As in the syllogism, there is a triune
character to the individual’s own way of being determinate: the self
determines its identity in opposition to what is other but then, in
a higher mediation, it recognizes itself in various forms of otherness
and thus becomes more richly self-determining. Very few are likely to
follow Hegel here even after seeing that his metaphysical extravagance is
less than supposed, that he is finding structures of thought in the world
by rather artificially redescribing more ordinary situations in the terms of
his logic.
Where does McDowell fit in here? He intends his location of reason in
nature to be modest and uncontroversial. He considers a critic who says
16
John Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 239.
John McDowell 83
McDowell needs “a substantial metaphysical account of what a reason
is.”17 McDowell does not think this is so. All he is claiming, he replies, is
that in experience one is given the fact that things are thus and so. He adds:
“How could being given the fact that things are thus and so not equip one
with a warrant for believing that things are thus and so?” When he says that
reasons are there anyway, “it is a way of saying that, for instance, visible
smoke is a reason for believing that there is fire in the vicinity . . . Claims
about what is a reason for what are true or false independently of us, much
like claims about the spatial arrangements or chemical compositions of
things.”18
So his overall picture must be something like this. Even in the earliest
days of the planet there were reasons in nature, only there were no believers
with the right kind of lens, the right kind of intelligence and sensibility, to
be sensitive to them. That a particular region was an extremely arid desert
was a reason to believe it would be hostile to most life, even without any
believers around, just as the spatial arrangement of four trees being in
a straight line was a fact, even without any perceivers of it. Then a species
emerges whose members are capable of having beliefs and of weighing
them against evidence. Epistemically relevant patterns that have been there
anyway can emerge for these members from the surrounding world as they
could not for earlier inhabitants of the planet. It is an objective fact,
independently of them, whether a particular worldly configuration is
a reason for belief. It is not that they perceive something far more episte-
mically primitive and then, somewhere up the chain, work that material
into an evidentiary configuration. It seems true as well, though McDowell
does not emphasize this point, that humans introduce into the world new
patterns of activity that can then offer further reasons for belief that one
may be sensitive to. The soccer official’s perception that a player is offside is
a reason for her to hold out her flag, though such a reason did not exist
before there was such a thing as soccer. Conceptual content here clearly
goes all the way out to the things themselves, as McDowell insists, since the
concept of being offside has structured one’s immediate experience of what
is there in the surrounding world. In one sense the reason is there anyway
once we have organized a world of soccer playing, but without human
activity that reason did not exist in the world. And what we count as the
object of perception may differ depending on the competence of the
17
He is referring to the criticism offered by Charles Larmore, “Attending to Reasons,” in Smith,
Reading McDowell, 193–208.
18
McDowell, “Responses,” 295.
official. If very inexperienced individuals are recruited from the stands to
check offsides at a youth soccer game, they may have to laboriously reason
from what they actually perceive about the relative positions of players and
ball to an inferential conclusion. That a player is offside can be both
a configuration of the world and a judgeable content of sensory perception
only for someone for whom certain perceptual and other mental activities
have become automatic. Even with regard to nature, the trained geologist
will directly perceive reasons that are there in nature anyway, while those
without that training must more laboriously draw conclusions from less
sophisticated perceptions.
How might McDowell argue if pressed on this issue of what is there in
the world anyway? When asked to describe what the world is like that we
are engaged with, we may opt for different levels of resolution or levels of
description that we use in picking out relevant patterns. These choices
require filtering out vast amounts of information that are irrelevant at that
level of resolution. If I am interested in various economic relationships
around the globe, it will be foolish to choose the level of resolution offered
by the science of physics, since the actual physical properties of currencies
or the actual physical properties of computer systems and electronic
linkages underlying economic information and exchanges are mostly irre-
levant and would present me with a vast and useless information overload.
Seeing crucial patterns is a matter of choosing a level of resolution that edits
out such irrelevant aspects of what I am seeing. The economic relations
that I thus end up attending to are real-world patterns to be studied, not
simply features that I am projecting onto a much thinner universe.
In a similar manner, so McDowell might argue, even if everything in the
universe is composed of nothing more than atoms in motion, still that
physical universe might eventually assemble itself into complex patterns
that are not perceptible as such through the lens of physics itself. One
possible level of resolution, on his story, is that which makes us pick out
evidentiary patterns in the world that are seen from the start as the kinds of
arrangements that support or question beliefs. These are there indeed to be
perceived, claims McDowell, rather than being human mental impositions
on a thinner reality. So he stands firmly against the radical impoverishment
of the world that was a requirement of theological voluntarism and that
continued in different versions.
Such a move may not be so radical a one as McDowell at times makes it
appear. He tends to be quite negative about cognitive-science accounts of
the world, as he fears they are reductive. Yet Daniel Dennett offers a story
of how naturally evolved creatures gradually become sensitive to reasons
John McDowell 85
(McDowell’s very topic). He says that as living things get more “selfy,”
with procedures of self-individuation, self-maintenance and self-
development, the world becomes a place of reasons for and against various
behaviors. “As the creature thus comes to have interests, the world and its
events begin creating reasons for it, whether or not the creature can fully
recognize them.”19 These are not yet reasons for them. Humans will emerge
who come to be aware of such reasons as such, relative to their own
capacities for assessment of evidence and for changes made in the light of
those assessments. The point is that Dennett, a thoroughly modern mate-
rialist and evolutionist, has no trouble finding reasons as part of the fabric
of the universe that creatures come in the long run to be sensitive to. Like
McDowell, he does not divorce reason and nature but finds a sensitivity to
reasons as an outcome of a natural animal’s own self-development.
Dennett does hold that humans, being biological machines, can never
have their complex causal processes in the brain count as being fully open
to reasons, without any skewing by the mechanical factors of the system.
But why should we expect that any naturally evolved entity must pass
a higher bar than that? It is true that at one level of description, if we think
of the brain as operating with something like computer programs, it can be
seen as a syntactic engine. Symbols are related by formal rules that seem not
to take meaning into account. But it is evolutionary success that has helped
to design this syntactic engine in an intimate back-and-forth relation with
the contents of the world. So its operations are automatically semantic at
the same time. The person as a whole is open to the world. We do not,
then, have the isolated inner space that, for McDowell, “goes dark” and
cannot be a window on the world, an openness to what is. Even as a strict
materialist, Dennett assigns the universe a metaphysics that goes well
beyond a minimal order of basic items governed by physical law. He
discovers reasons in nature just as McDowell does.
Cognitive scientists such as Dennett tend to be wary of certain forms of
reductionism. Whatever theory comes to account well for relations among
beliefs, intentions, desires, and so forth, they believe, will hardly be
explained by going down to the level of physics. If you and I share
a certain pattern of such mental states and we both, on their basis, act in
a certain way, an explanation of our common behavior will hardly be
effective at a physicalist level of description. Given our different life
histories, there is virtually no chance that such shared aspects of our
intentional life will be instantiated in the same way in our brains, if we
19
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 174.
just look at brains as sets of physical events. Neither will we be the same at
a functionalist level of description that might try to describe each of us as
running some kind of software program. The crucial patterns emerge,
without the baggage of huge amounts of non-essential information, only
at the level of description that takes us to be intentional beings engaged
with the world and with one another, even if we are entirely made out of
physical stuff. The second consideration that makes reduction unlikely in
this case is indeed, as McDowell insists, that believers operate within the
space of reasons. Something’s counting as a valid argument can never be
explained by showing how certain mechanical processes happen to go.
(This was Frege’s point against Husserl’s early psychologism.) Consider
even something as simple as a mechanical calculator. You could not define
correctness of arithmetical operations in terms of how the mechanical
processes of the calculator happen to occur. For machines make errors
and break down, and you have to have to a standard, in the case of
mathematics, for what will be considered an error or a breakdown.
A description of the machine as simply an item within the realm of causal
law will never do. And that result will hold with rationality in general, so
that the standard by which our arguments count as valid cannot be
supplied by a description of how law-governed mechanical processes
happen to go. McDowell appeals to second nature or socialization as
opening our eyes to reasons we have for believing or acting.20 But that
story may not account ultimately for this element of a standard or norm
that must be met. There is a sharp difference between the rules for a game
of cards or of football and the rules for good reasoning. In the former case,
social practice does set the standard. But we can imagine a species evolving
over time and gradually entering the space of reason, so that the members
become more sensitive to genuine reasons (not just what they take to be
reasons) that they have for believing and acting. But then through bad
luck, say a parasite that infects the whole population and all descendants
and leads to poor brain performance, the species falls out of the space of
reason, we might say, while still managing to struggle along, on more
instinctive equipment, in their immediate environment. So the way mat-
ters happen actually to proceed in social history cannot itself provide
standards for rationality. I am not going to delve into this difficult issue
here. Some, in the face of this difficulty, head straight for Platonism, others
speak of some ideal outcome of our practice. My point is merely that
McDowell does not have to fear that the natural sciences will engulf and
20
McDowell, Mind and World, 78–84 and 123–6.
John McDowell 87
usurp the space in which we act as intentional and rational selves. Biologists
may be able to tell us what goes wrong in the brain when someone who
once reasoned well can now hardly reason at all, but they cannot account
for that which makes rationality itself what it is, and McDowell’s handing
of the baton to sociology is not likely to resolve matters either.
McDowell also raises the historical issue of where the idea originates of
a self-standing realm of inner objects that might remain identical as what
they are no matter how the world might vary around them, even if that
world should vanish: “ . . . the correlate of this picture of our access to the
inner is that subjectivity is confined to a tract of reality whose layout
would be exactly as it is however things stood outside it, and the
common-sense notion of a vantage point on the external world is now
fundamentally problematic.”21 He proposes that this picture comes about
because of a certain model of scientific explanation. We pick out an
independently describable set of objects and then another such set and
then we try to find causal relations between the two. But if I am right, the
self-standing inner realm has an earlier origin. On the one hand, it derives
from Augustine’s notion that what keeps the mind from going dark
(McDowell’s worry) is not its openness to, its being a window upon,
the surrounding world but rather its being a site lit up through a divine
illumination that makes certain higher-level ideas available for thought.
That Augustinian picture is then supplemented by the late-medieval
retreat inward in the face of the absolute power of the voluntarist God
to undermine the metaphysics of the world as the source for ideas in the
mind (as it was for Aristotle and Aquinas). We thus end up with a
self-standing inner realm whose items are well lit up and thus transparent
to the knowing self.
McDowell worries that Cartesian dualism can repeat itself in a different
form today. Descartes tried to relate the realm of law-governed bodies and
the realm of mind along the outside-to-inside chain of experience by
supposing a point of transition whereby the physical cause was somehow
transformed into a mental effect. McDowell is afraid that, today, thinkers
will try to relate the space of law and the space of reasons in a similar
manner. They will begin with Kant’s description of experience as involving
both receptivity and spontaneity. Then they will attempt to handle the
former with the natural sciences (for example, by showing how light effects
on the eye generate changes in certain brain areas) and handle the latter by
fitting it in somewhere more inward along the chain of experience, where
21
McDowell, “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,” 241.
information processing farther up will somehow be said to capture what
a sensitivity to reasons is. McDowell has argued that in such a two-stage
process, with spontaneity arriving on the scene somewhat later in the game,
our thinking cannot count as genuinely world-directed, as bringing reality
into view in its evidentiary character.
The comparison drawn here with Descartes seems awkward. The
Cartesian transition point along this outside-inside chain is so philosophi-
cally lame (the pineal gland and the extremely mysterious leap from
physical causality to mental causality) that Descartes, unlike Hobbes
with his theory of mental motions, can hardly be said to be bringing
mind into the realm of law. More generally, we need to return to the
point, above, where we spoke of levels of description that cannot replace or
reduce one another. Consider the entire chain from objects in the world to
individual beliefs. The relation of the space of law to the space of reasons
does not occur at some transition point along the outside-in axis but
through an upper-lower relation. That is, it is a relation between different
levels of description of the universe rather than a relation requiring a single
kind of plumbing that somehow works its way through both spaces and
that requires a mysterious transition. There is one level of description for
which that entire epistemic chain can be seen as involving the causal
interaction of law-governed physical processes (even if it would be too
complicated ever to specify a particular belief in terms strictly of the
physical processes that account for its instantiation). Then there is
a higher level of description that takes this same entire chain as going
from reasons for belief offered by the world itself to the beliefs of the person
who is capable of intentionality and rationality. Once we see that it is an
upper-lower relation among levels of description that is in question here,
rather than a search for a transition point along a single outside-in chain,
we can shed McDowell’s fear that any assigning of content inward along
the chain, of the functionalist kind perhaps, somehow threatens our
fundamental relation with the world, so that we might end up making
meaningless motions in a windowless space. Whatever happens at the level
of non-intentional descriptions will be independent of our determination,
at a higher level of description, that what is in play is, indeed, a genuinely
intentional relation to the world itself, a relation to reasons for belief that
are there in the world to be discerned.
McDowell may easily be wrong in supposing that regarding a faculty of
spontaneity and a faculty of receptivity, it is the latter that his opponents
will try to annex for the realm of causal law, while then hoping for an
eventual annexation of the former. In actuality, theories of consciousness
John McDowell 89
seem to have greater trouble accounting for sensations (receptivity) than
they do for reasoning (spontaneity). For a discussion of sensations raises
the difficult issue of the phenomenology of qualia, that is, of the qualitative
feel of how matters seem to us in experience. That is apparently the aspect
of Dennett’s book on consciousness that his own friends and colleagues, as
he admits, find most difficult to accept. With the development, on the
other hand, of machines that can engage in extremely complex evidence-
weighing and inference-drawing, it becomes unmysterious to see how
biological machines shaped by evolutionary pressures might become better
and better embodiments of rational activities. A machine whose world-
attunement had been built into it automatically by evolutionary pressures
over time, so that very clearly some things mattered to it and not others,
might well come to count as a reasoner sensitive to reasons. (We might
imagine computerized robots left for a long time to struggle for resources
on another planet.) There would have to be enough flexibility and sophis-
tication in its processes, unlike in the rigid information processing of birds
or bees, that it can count as assessing not only its reasons for acting in
a particular way now but also its own habits of reasoning. Evolutionary
biology plus cognitive science shows how reasoners can emerge out of
a world of physical stuff in motion. Some may worry that McDowell’s
appeal to second nature seems to hope that reason has been placed in nature
by a kind of word-play, by the fact that we happen to use ‘second nature’ to
speak of a very effective socialization. But McDowell is surely right that our
rational powers develop out of our position as animals within nature. And
he is right that our human sensitivity to reasons develops because as
communal beings we have to provide reasons to others in response to
their questions as they force us to be sensitive to evidence that was there
anyway, and that our achieved way of lighting up the world makes visible.
chapter 3
Aristotle Redivivus: On Saul Kripke
I wish to place Saul Kripke’s work in a large historical framework that he

himself does not offer us, though I do not see that he would be opposed to
it. On my narrative, Kripke reverses the moves of the theological volun-
tarists of the late-medieval period. They introduced forms of thinking that
had to be damaging to Aristotelian conceptions of the world. Kripke shows
how some aspects of those conceptions, if we are precise about what we
mean in being committed to them, can be defended. Kripke will not, of
course, defend an Aristotelian teleology, but he will support a notion of
essences or essential properties. He will make a case for that which in things
themselves, apart from our ways of describing them, gives them their self-
identity and determines what it is for them to be of the same kind as other
things.
Let us go over once more why the late-medieval account of matters was
so devastating to that notion of essential properties. The leading idea
behind nominalism and theological voluntarism is that God’s power and
free will are absolutely unconditioned by anything external to them.
Suppose there is such a thing as an essence or a universal form that is in
common to many individuals. Then God in creating the next individual
who shares that essence would be limited by the already present model, in
the way that Plato’s demiurgos is limited by the model of the Forms. God’s
freedom is such that we must suppose that he freely creates each individual
anew as he wishes to.1 Only individuals as such, each one created imme-
diately by God, are real. Humans may develop a single sign that refers to
many different individuals because of recognized similarities, but those
similarities are not grounded in anything metaphysically deeper. That is
roughly the worldview of William of Ockham and of the late-medieval
Franciscans. The late medievals insist on a universe that might, for all we
know, be radically contingent and arbitrary. Of the infinite number of
1
See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 153.
90
Aristotle Redivivus 91
possible universes that God might have made, none is inherently more
likely than any other, for there is no criterion external to God that limits his
freedom in what he chooses to create. So, the actual universe is just one
arbitrary possibility out of infinitely many that might have been realized.
And God’s omnipotence and unconditioned free will might make any
object move in any way at any time. There is no room in such a universe for
metaphysical necessity and there is no room for Aristotelian essences.
We must treat this universe as metaphysically minimal. There is no essence
in any object that reliably determines its behavior and that fixes how it is
related to other things that would have the same essence.
So the idea of metaphysical necessity is an affront to God. Is there still
a place for some other kind of necessity? Kant develops the idea of a kind of
necessity that is due not to the way the world ultimately is metaphysically
but to the structures that must be applied to experience by knowers who
experience reality through the sensible forms of space and time. Kant says,
when I say that every event fits into a network of causal relations, I am
saying something that is a priori true. That is, I know that this is true
without testing the claim against empirical evidence. I do not go around
looking for an uncaused event that would falsify the statement. Its neces-
sity, claims Kant, is epistemic; it has to do with how we know what we
know. It does not reflect a metaphysical fact about the universe, something
we do not have access to, just as the late medievals claimed. It is rather part
of the framework we must bring to bear in order to shape the sensory
material coming at us so that it will be knowable. Causality is an aspect of
the conceptual machinery that we apply to sensory experience and we do
not have any experience that does not involve that application. Hence its
a priori necessity that is not at the same time a metaphysical necessity.
Kant, we will recall, shares the late-medieval stance that Hans Blumenberg
calls a response of self-assertion to the overwhelming epistemic precarious-
ness of a world shaped by an omnipotent God’s free willing. We give up
any hope of making claims about what the world in itself must be like, so
we do not claim that we have knowledge of metaphysical essences. But
then, out of the materials presented in experience, we construct the order
of its appearances to us, an order that we know well because we have
made it.
With the linguistic turn of the twentieth century and with correspond-
ing developments in logic, the idea becomes especially appealing that the
only legitimate kind of necessity is a linguistic one. It has to do with the
linguistic or grammatical rules for constructing sentences or with meanings
that can be analyzed. The statement ‘If A or B and not A, then B’ has logical
necessity. It is true no matter what truth-conditions are assigned to A and
to B. The statement ‘If x is obese, then x is not thin’ has semantic necessity.
Again, I do not go around looking for empirical counterexamples of obese
people who are thin. To understand the language, its meanings, and its
rules of operation is to understand that the claim in question is necessarily
true. With more sophisticated logical languages available, linguistic rules
can be specified precisely and transparently, in a way that Kantian epis-
temic conditions and Aristotelian metaphysical features cannot. Necessity,
then, can become philosophically unproblematic through being reduced to
matters of language and logic.
We can thus picture a centuries-long process. The idea of metaphysical
necessity (except in the case of God) is called profoundly into question by
the late medievals for theological reasons, with the result that reality must
be treated as hollowed out of any essential character. Succeeding philoso-
phers tend to honor that prohibition against a necessity built into the
world, but they replace it with substitutes. Metaphysical necessity collapses
into epistemic or a priori necessity and then both of these collapse back
into linguistic or analytic necessity. Kripke is historically important
because he reverses that long process of collapse. He argues that metaphy-
sical necessity, epistemic necessity, and linguistic necessity are distinct
phenomena and cannot be explained in terms of one another. He thus,
so it turns out, brings back something rather like the Aristotelian notion of
essence that the late medievals had made illegitimate.2
For this work he focuses especially on natural-kind terms, as in statements
such as ‘Gold is the element with the atomic number 79’ and ‘Water is H2O.’
These statements express necessary truths; we not do expect to find samples of
water that are not H2O. A particular sample of gold might become shinier or
duller. It might find itself in France instead of in South Africa. But if its
atomic number somehow changes to 95 or 47, then it is no longer gold and
has become something else. Some properties are such that to lose them means
to stop being the kind of thing that one is. It is an essential property of mine
that I am human because if I stopped being such, I would stop being me.
I would have dropped out of existence and been replaced by something else.
Some readers, perhaps influenced by the idea of the late-medieval God, might
object at this point. Couldn’t an omnipotent divine being have the power to
make gold appear just as it does and to be good for just the uses it is good for
while having a different atomic number? Might we not wish to say in such
2
Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural
Language (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), 253–355.
circumstances that we are still dealing with gold? And might not believers in
reincarnation say that I could still be myself even if I were changed into a cow
or a frog? But Kripke is not persuaded by such imaginative examples.
The natural kind that something belongs to, he says, is determined ultimately
by its core structure, even if we start identifying samples of it long before we
know what that structure is. The core structure of gold defines it by
a particular atomic number. Even God cannot change that fact.
Just what determines the necessity in these cases? Is it linguistic? Have
we implicitly stipulated, by the rules of using our language, that ‘gold’ is
related to ‘being the element with the atomic number 79’ in the way that
‘being obese’ is related to ‘not being thin’? But the truth of that statement
about gold’s atomic number was a discovery in physics after long, long
years of labor and experiment. Being good at scanning the meanings of
words in the language would be no help whatever toward coming to
determine that the statement about this natural kind is true. It is not in
this case that we have been trained in the moves allowed by a certain
language game. Rather we bring to light over a long period that which in
things makes them what they are. Can it be said that we dealing here with
epistemic necessity? Is ‘Gold is the element with the atomic number 79’
known to be true independently of empirical investigation because of
something about the machinery by which we experience objects? Clearly
not. We are dealing instead with an empirical discovery at a certain time in
history. Knowing the conditions for having experience of objects might
show us that we need to have a category applying to items that continue as
the same over time. But that knowledge would not help us at all in
determining the atomic structure that distinguishes gold from other ele-
ments. So, we have a necessary truth that is a posteriori and that is not
based on an analysis of linguistic form or of meaning. That it is a posteriori
is crucial here for Kripke. To show that a statement expresses a kind of
necessity and to show that we cannot know its truth independently of
having empirical evidence for it shows that the metaphysical realm has
achieved (once again) a certain autonomy relative to the epistemic and the
linguistic. If the necessity in question could be reduced to a necessity
impressed on sentences by the conditions of our knowing, then the truth
of the sentence could be known a priori. The falsity of the consequent
shows the falsity of the antecedent.3 We should not be surprised that we are
3
I should acknowledge that my account here owes much to the lengthy, precise, and sympathetic
treatment of Kripke’s work in Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II:
The Age of Meaning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 333–456.
once again in Aristotelian territory. Gold has necessary properties because,
for a thinker who is at least modestly Aristotelian, it has a hidden structure
or essence that determines the kind it is and that manifests itself in its
typical appearances and behaviors. We no longer are committed to the
theological stance that required Ockham to say that only individuals are
real, not essences. We are closer to the Aristotelian Aquinas, who is
committed to essences that determine things to be the things that they are.
Kripke also tries to separate metaphysical from epistemic necessity by
arguing in a different direction. Not only might there be necessary
a posteriori truths. There might also be statements that are contingently
true but are known to be true a priori. On the Kantian model you could
not have this combination. A statement for Kant is true a priori because it
depends on an aspect of the conceptual machinery that we must apply to
experience. So necessity comes along with being a priori. But Kripke offers
us the following case. A certain rod in Paris is kept under conditions that
allow it to be the standard for what is exactly one meter. So I know without
doing any empirical research, and thus a priori, that the rod is one meter
long. But metaphysically speaking, it is not necessarily true that it is one
meter. Under different physical conditions it might be shorter or longer.
So there is an a priori truth that is contingent. (One might object here that
the claim in question is not an a priori truth. If the tenders of the
equipment get careless, the rod may change its length, and I can know
only by empirical investigation that the tenders are keeping the physical
conditions exactly as they are supposed to.)
So Kripke, against the flow of philosophy’s history since the late-
medieval period, reverses the process of collapsing metaphysical necessity
into epistemic necessity into linguistic necessity. It may appear that his
achievement is due mostly to the availability today of new logical tools, for
example, Kripke’s own work with possible-world semantics and his con-
cept of rigid designators.4 Some referential terms such as ‘the first president
of the independent nation of Ghana’ have a fixed referent in this world, but
different worlds might have been possible in which that referring expres-
sion picked out different individuals. On the other hand, a name such as
‘Abraham Lincoln’ picks out the same individual in any possible world in
which he exists. It is not as if I take a special kind of telescope and explore
such other worlds to find this out. Rather the name ‘Abraham Lincoln’
pins down a particular individual and I hold my pointed finger on that
4
For more on rigid designators, see Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II,
340–56.
individual, as it were, as I ask how his life might have gone differently,
whether he might have remained a local lawyer all his life or might have
taken off on a wagon train to Oregon. Unlike in the case of ‘the first
president of the independent nation of Ghana,’ the name ‘Abraham
Lincoln’ rigidly sticks to one particular individual as I revolve a set of
possible worlds around him. Kripke believes that natural-kind terms such
as ‘gold’ are rigid designators as well. When I use such a term, I use it to
refer to whatever in any possible world has the same core physical structure
as the substance I have before me now, even if science has not yet advanced
sufficiently to tell me what that substance is. (The “finger pointing” by
which I rigidly designate this particular substance so that I may spin
possible worlds around it, for example those in which it looks very different
from the way it does here, may be parasitic on other speakers who have
better contact with it than I do.) So ‘gold’ will refer to whatever is the
element of atomic number 79 in any possible world where such an element
exists. Therefore, it is necessarily true (there is no possible world in which it
is false) that gold has the property ‘being the element of atomic number
79.’ That property is what picks it out in any possible world and thus is an
essential one. We might imagine an objector here who doesn’t trust that
such a sophisticated conception is actually at work in our ordinary refer-
ences. For at least much of history, ‘gold’ might have meant something that
looked a certain way and behaved in certain ways. Isn’t it possible that
those more superficial characteristics were determining the referential
object for early speakers more than what science many centuries later
would discover, so that ‘gold’ changed its meaning with the discoveries
of the new physical sciences? Yet even if we say that the word ‘gold’ once
picked out a Lockean nominal essence and now picks out a real essence that
the modern natural sciences articulate, Kripke would still have shown the
existence of metaphysical necessity.
The appearance that Kripke’s position is a result of the availability of
new logical tools is, as I have said, misleading. It is not the possible-world
semantics nor the idea of rigid designation that is doing the heavy lifting
here. Rather they are excellent instruments for realizing independent
metaphysical intuitions. We can get hold of this thought if we look first
at a philosopher, W. V. Quine, who strongly rejects the notion of intrinsic
necessary properties.5 He says that bicyclists are necessarily two-footed and
that mathematicians are necessarily rational, but that being two-footed or
rational is not a necessary property of an individual. Thus, for Quine
5
W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 199.
necessity inheres not in the individual but rather in the relations among
different descriptions of the individual. That is why necessity for him can
be reduced to linguistic necessity. (There is a further complication in that
Quine is unsure whether the notion of analytic truth can be defended, but
that is a matter for another occasion.) We see in the disagreement between
Kripke and Quine the very large issue that is at stake here. What ultimately
divides the world into units and kinds? Quine follows a long tradition for
which that dividing up is something we do through thought or language.
We take the world to be an indeterminate substrate and then impress on it
boundaries determining where one individual ends and another begins,
where one kind ends and another begins. So, it is up to how we use words,
to our grammar and semantics, what will count as a continuing of the same
thing through possibly drastic changes and what will count as sameness
from one possible world to the next. It is then a linguistic convention,
rather than something deep in the structure of gold itself, that makes me
link ‘gold’ with ‘being an element of atomic number 79.’ Nothing stops my
language from including a differently numbered element within the same
kind, should its appearance and behavior be close enough to that of gold.
Nor does anything stop my language, for Quine, from dividing up the
world in rather arbitrary ways. For my own pragmatic purposes as
a speaker, I might decide to count something as still of the same natural
kind even if its atomic number should change. Then gold would not have
the necessary properties Kripke says it has and he would not have shown
that metaphysical necessity cannot be reduced to a necessity of the epis-
temic or linguistic sort.
What is at stake, then, is not something that possible-world semantics
solves but rather that it reflects. Do we as thinkers and speakers articulate
the world into individuals and kinds? Or does the world do a lot of that
dividing up on its own, such that what counts as the fully determinate
meaning of what we say is dependent on our contact with a metaphysically
rich world that has developed identity-fixing, boundary-setting, self-
sustaining features of its own without waiting around for humans to do
the job? Are the world’s identities mainly parasitic on the identities our
minds and languages take it to have or are these identities robust enough, at
least in many instances, to fix what we mean even when we do not have
sufficient knowledge to penetrate the source of that sameness? Which side
is doing the real work and letting the other come along for the ride? For
Kripke, to get matters right is to use our language to articulate certain sorts
of things in the way that nature does it. Humans for him are in the long run
attentive to the ways that gold and other elements make themselves the
kinds they are through their core structure. These kinds on their own,
through the way the physical universe has evolved, determine the necessary
conditions such that, should these conditions not be met, the element
stops being the element it is. We might design a fictional world in which
gold had an atomic number of 93, just as we might design a fictional world
in which Abraham Lincoln was turned permanently into a frog just prior to
his election. But these would not be legitimately possible worlds for
Kripke. Both gold and Abraham Lincoln would no longer exist in the
fictional worlds described.
Again, we may to return to the late-medieval universe to understand the
context for this debate. Since one cannot penetrate how God’s free will has
actually designed things, worldly objects must be taken to be too indivi-
dual, contingent, arbitrary, and capable of wild possibility ever to serve as
the stable metaphysical basis for the articulations of human thought and
language. As we saw, our only response in that situation must be to count
the universe as having just a minimal metaphysical givenness, with mini-
mally fixed boundaries, upon which we impose an order specifying units
and kinds. Our demiurgic activity of constructing an order that we then
impute to the world allows us to take a situation of epistemic modesty and
fragility and to reconfigure it as a situation of demiurgic power. By giving
up the capacity to penetrate into the ultimate metaphysical character of the
world, we gain the right to consider it as a thin substrate upon which we are
imposing an order. But in that case Kripke would be wrong and Quine
right. There would be no necessity inherent in things until we imposed the
structure by which thought or language divided up the world into units
and kinds. One might have supposed that with the waning power of
theology, the appeal of this entire constellation of thought, with its
inherent medieval background, would diminish. But over the years we
continue to find British empiricists, Kantians, and twentieth-century
analytic philosophers trying to explain metaphysical issues as matters of
what conceptual framework or linguistic grammar we find most useful to
impose upon the world.
Our task is to imagine what philosophy might be like if we resisted the
strong inertia of late-medieval philosophy, a pressure felt up to the
present day in those influenced by empiricism or by Kantianism. As we
consider the physical evolution and the biological evolution of the planet,
and as we note how humans have for only a very short period come upon
this long-developing reality and tried to register its features, we have to be
impressed that the world is already doing a great deal of the work of
individuating and sorting itself. We no longer think of our claims about
the metaphysical basis for sameness as being an affront to God. As we learn
to respect the self-ordering character of the world, we recognize that we do
not have the demiurgic power that some philosophers have assigned to us.
But we also understand that we are no longer in the situation of those for
whom absolute divine power had to empty out the universe of any
metaphysical character of its own. We give up a certain sublimity of the
divine, but we regain the world as what we are firmly and intimately in
touch with, even in regard to that which fundamentally makes it what it is.
With his defense of the idea of essential properties that are present in the
metaphysical structure of reality itself, Kripke gives metaphysics a new
primacy, as it had for Aristotle and as it kept on having over the centuries
for Catholic Thomists, even up to the twentieth-century Thomist figure
Jacques Maritain. We can note the possibly broad effect of Kripke’s work
on philosophical thinking if we see its effect on another significant topic.
The theology-influenced model of a thinned-out universe upon which we
may project various ordering machineries leads easily to the idea of alter-
nate conceptual schemes. In the well-known argument of Thomas Kuhn in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we cannot compare scientific views at
different periods of history because that would require saying that one does
a better job than another of describing the same world.6 The scientists at
these different periods are using different conceptual schemes that con-
struct different referential worlds of discourse. We cannot line them up and
say they are talking about the same world of objects, since what they are
talking about is relative to the conceptual scheme being employed. So these
schemes are incommensurable and to some degree arbitrary. We might
recall how those two qualities were associated with the stance of theological
voluntarism. The actual world is just an arbitrary choice made by God
among the infinite number he could have just as easily made, and the
human and divine ways of seeing the world are incommensurable.
On Kuhn’s picture we in some sense resemble God in that, in the face of
an inscrutable universe, we take the world to be a metaphysically minimal
one and impose our rather arbitrary schemes upon it. But see what happens
once we accept Kripke’s claim that a metaphysically robust world plays
a central role in determining what natural kinds we are talking about, even
when we ourselves do not know enough science to fix the conditions for
what makes a natural kind a natural kind. Once we take some of the
pressure of determining reference off the subject and her language and
place it on the world itself, as having determinate features of its own that
6
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
are being pointed to by speakers with epistemic inadequacies, then what we
count as reality is not a construction out of our conceptual schemes. Those
schemes rather can be incomplete and inadequate because of their parasit-
ism on the structure of the world itself. And that means that scientists at
different times, despite their different beliefs, can be speaking about the
same world after all, and that some ways of talking about it will be better
than others. Indeed, the very idea of genuinely alternate schemes goes by
the wayside. That idea seemed plausible only in the context of the late-
medieval picture, with its metaphysical thinness, radical contingency, and
imposition of artificial schemes to save the appearances.
So Kripke’s reorienting of the philosophical terrain will no longer allow
metaphysics to be a mere shadow of epistemology and the philosophy of
language. To figure out what are the essential features of an individual or
a kind requires a metaphysical analysis of what would make something no
longer the thing that it is. We cannot pass that analysis along to the study of
how we come to know things or of how we use our language. I think
Kripke is on the whole persuasive in this endeavor. His way of reorienting
the space of philosophy helps us to overcome the inertial power of the
intellectual landscape that emerged out of responses to the medievals’
theological voluntarism. Yet we might be overplaying that reorientation
if we accept his position too unthinkingly. It is true that we have to grant
a considerable degree of independence to the metaphysical order of reality
in regard to determining necessity and in regard to determining what
humans mean by their words. But to do that is not to radically devalue
the spheres of the epistemic, the psychological, and the linguistic. We just
need to look more subtly at the relevant interrelationships. Kripke is crucial
to my narrative because he reverses a certain unidirectional, inflationary
momentum. Once one starts in the direction that theological voluntarism
requires, then there seems to be no limit on the machinery that radically
empties out the world of any character of its own and that places all
determining power on the side of God (or, later, of subjectivity or language
or schemes of discourse-power). Kripke forcefully puts a halt to that
process and grants the world a more determining role in what we come
to count as thinking and meaning. But to say he reverses that momentum is
not to say that he successfully returns all determining power to the world
itself. He may appear to do so especially in the case of natural kinds and of
individuals picked out by a proper name. But how much of a capacity to fix
the articulations of the world remains on the side of the thinker or speaker?
In a contest between those who think it is the way the world does things
that makes our thoughts have the determinate character they do and those
who believe it is our thinking in certain ways that makes the world have the
character it does, I am somewhat more on the side of the former and I use
Kripke and others to speak in favor of this “Aristotelian” reversal. Yet an
objector might argue at this point that Kripke’s reversal, even when it is
strengthened by the other advocates of a metaphysically more robust
world, still leaves far too many questions open as to what this neo-
Aristotelian world would be like. Perhaps we can defend a notion of
a unique delineation of reality into natural kinds, with essential properties,
when it comes to chemical elements and compounds. But what are our
prospects for doing this when it comes to biological species? Are the lines of
delineation here both reliable and sturdy enough to support the notion of
essences that define natural kinds? It would seem that something is still left
up to us as classifiers. If we look back across evolutionary history it may be
difficult to decide at what point we should describe a new species as
emerging from an earlier one rather than the former one remaining with
a somewhat changed appearance. If we note a certain historical branching,
has one species continued on while a new one branched off from it or are
the changes so great that two new species have emerged and the older one
no longer exists? Genealogical information about lines of DNA descent
and mutations may not be enough for our decision here.
Biologists do, of course, favor genealogical history and interbreeding
capacity as key factors in species delineation. But how much should
morphology and function also play a role? Very small genetic changes
might produce new body structures that, under evolutionary pressure,
allow some animals to act very differently. If a group of reptiles turns
awning-like structures for heat regulation eventually into wings for flying,
wouldn’t that drastic new capacity influence our intuitions about species
differentiation even if the genetic changes involved were considerably less
than what goes on all the time within given species that we do not treat as
evolving into new ones? Perhaps the ecological niche will be important in
classification. Individual animals with very wide genetic variation, who
share a particular niche in a geographical area, may count as belonging to
the same species, while other animals who share the same genealogy and
who could perhaps interbreed if transported across the globe, have lived in
a geographically distant and isolated area for so long that they may be
treated as a separate species. It seems that a strong notion of essential
properties may be harder to establish here than in the case of chemical
compounds. We know that with plants, hybrids are created rather easily for
our human purposes. One might even conceive of a science-fiction future
in which genetic engineering had advanced to so great a degree, with
a mixing and matching of desirable genes across species, that it makes far
less sense to speak of how nature divides itself up into biological kinds. But
we remain at a point where nature’s contours still offer a biological world
with generally well-delineated boundaries, even if the kinds they establish
are weaker and leave something up to us. In establishing biological kinds
there is a very large contribution from the world, given its evolutionary
history, and some contribution as well from us, as we fix boundaries that
are somewhat more nebulous in nature. Scientists are investigating whether
bits of Neanderthal DNA have made it into the human genome. But
behind that investigation is the assumption that we can fairly straightfor-
wardly distinguish human and Neanderthal DNA. If we do not face
a world of strict essences, we also do not face a wild anarchy that can be
brought under control only through the imposition of our languages.
John Dupré considers these issues in The Disorder of Things.7 He wants
overall to deny that there is a unique way that nature divides itself up into
units and kinds and so to deny that there are, except in unusual cases,
candidates for being essences. The science he advocates will be pluralist,
relatively disunited, and non-reductive. But it is important to recognize
that his stance remains a realist one. He still thinks there are species and
natural kinds that do not simply emerge with language’s cookie-cutter
capacities. Perhaps, after reading Dupré, we can see scientists as resembling
orchestra conductors in that they try to make certain patterns emerge with
special vividness, even if there are other patterns in the music or in the
world that might have been elicited instead. But these are still patterns
belonging to a world that is metaphysically rich on its own precisely in
having diverse real patterns that might thus be elicited, rather than offering
a unique set of contours as the only measure of accuracy. So we are not in
the end projecting an order onto a thinned-out world, even if there is not
a unique way that the world requires us to bring into view its relevant
boundaries. Even when it comes to what is worth valuing, I do not think
that this is entirely a matter of human projection, though that factor must
be extremely important. As we abide on the planet we partly make value
and partly learn more about what on its own is worth valuing. So here
again the world is richer than the thin, meaningless one that some would
thrust upon us. I grant that much more needs to be said here. But
a philosophical account of precisely what is contributed by the world and
precisely what is contributed by us would be a different book altogether
from this one. My job is to show misleading ways of framing philosophical
7
John Dupré, The Disorder of Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 37–59.
issues and then, through a genealogical analysis of the origins of these
framing tendencies, to make them less appealing.
On this matter of how much determination comes from the world and
how much from speakers or thinkers, we might look further at Kripke’s
theory of reference. His key opponents are those who back a descriptivist
theory for proper names and for natural-kind terms. When they ask how
these names manage to link up with particular entities in the world, they
place all the burden on what individual speakers do to make this hookup
happen in a determinate manner. Speakers are said to associate the name or
the natural-kind term with a description or a cluster of descriptions that
provide the information needed to pick out the referent. Thus ‘Cicero’
might be associated by a speaker with ‘the Roman orator who denounced
Catiline.’ Kripke is effective at showing that this solution does not work.
The description cannot provide the meaning of ‘Cicero’ because Cicero
might have remained Cicero even if he had chosen not to denounce
Catiline. Being Cicero is a necessary property of being the man Cicero
while being the denouncer of Catiline is not. And that associated descrip-
tion might well not even fix reference (as opposed to providing the mean-
ing of the name). Suppose an ancient Roman manuscript dug up from an
archaeological site makes it clear that Cicero in his written account that has
lasted across the centuries stole the arguments of a different politician,
Maximus, who had actually denounced Catiline. We would not likely
suppose that we have been speaking about Maximus all along in using the
name ‘Cicero.’ We recognize that with very many names as we use them
our usage is parasitic on the social, historical character of language use.
We end up referring to a particular person because we are joined with so
many others across history in this project of reference. Through these
others as intermediaries we somehow go back and, by using the name
‘Cicero,’ we engage in a very long finger-pointing to a particular historical
individual who resided in ancient Rome. The semantics of referring is thus
contagious through our contact with others and may not be fixed by the
descriptions we might have in mind in using a name. This is hardly
a radical thought. As young children enter the language of their parents,
they will pick up many referring terms, such as those naming distant
cousins and aunts and local politicians, whose referents they may never
have seen and may have very little information about on their own. They
trust that these terms make it safely to their referential destinations because
others know more than they do. Perhaps in some instances so many of the
beliefs we associate with a name are false and the transmission of the name
across history has so much fraud and fiction in its wake that we conclude
that the name is non-referring now. But in the normal case the social-
historical nexus leading us back to a determinate individual does its job
pretty well, in spite of our own misinformation or other misinformation
picked up along the causal chain that leads from our utterances now back
to their referent. Similarly, with natural-kind terms, when such a term first
begins to be used, there is a kind of “baptism” ceremony. The term is used
in the presence of samples of the natural kind that can be pointed to and
there are accompanying descriptions such as ‘that shiny yellow metal.’ But
that description, as we have seen in Kripke’s account, is not what fixes the
reference of the term. It is rather the underlying physical structure of what
is thus pointed to, even if it will take centuries before humans have the
scientific capacity to specify what that structure is.
Kripke’s work may encourage a habit of devaluing and minimizing what
comes from the side of the speaker and of placing almost all the semantic
burden on the metaphysical side of things. For the larger picture, his
project (that which makes him of great importance to my overall narrative)
is about reversing the historical collapse of the metaphysical into the
epistemic and then of both of these into the linguistic. Yet matters get
complicated because the notion of meaning can serve rather different
functions in our analysis of the ways that humans are engaged with the
universe around them. In one aspect, meaning faces outward on the world
and draws its significance from the way words or thoughts register worldly
features: ‘aardvark’ is about aardvarks because those are the things that are
typically in view in the world as we learn and use the term. In a different
aspect, meaning is more closely aligned with belief and knowledge as we
locate beliefs in logical space and grasp their relations with other beliefs
within that space. Does someone who believes that the man who killed
a clerk in a convenience store robbery yesterday is evil also believe that her
own son is evil if the son is indeed that man but the mother does not know
it? Or (a third aspect) we are interested in how meaning and belief are
related to speakers’ psychological states and to their behavior, especially
which statements they will actually assent to and which assignments of
meaning to their utterances can predict their behavior most accurately.
In this case the meaning of speakers’ words may be taken to be much more
closely tied to what such speakers understand that meaning to be.
Otherwise we could not predict their behavior.
Here is one way that the semantic might be aligned more closely with
the metaphysical order than with a speaker’s mental states. One might
claim that the meaning of a proper name is not the information a speaker
associates with it but rather the very referent itself. This is considered
a Millian position, after John Stuart Mill; Kripke himself comes close to it
at times but does not seem to endorse it fully, though influential followers
of his such as Scott Soames appear to do so.8 The name is, as it were, an
informationless pointer whose sole aim is to attach itself to some entity in
the world. But then the particular pointer used in this undertaking should
not matter at all to the meaning of a proposition. It follows, then, that
‘Mary Ann Evans is identical with George Eliot’ expresses exactly the same
proposition as ‘George Eliot is identical with George Eliot.’ Both pick out
a particular referent and say that it is identical with itself. (Note that the
proposition ‘“Mary Ann Evans” and “George Eliot” name the same indi-
vidual’ does not have the same meaning.) That truth is a necessary truth
even if, from the point of view of belief and knowledge, a speaker may
know that one of these is true without knowing that the other one is true.
This is what may happen with a project that tries to link semantics very
closely with metaphysics while weakening its ties to psychology and
epistemology. If the semantics of a name faces outward toward what is
picked out in the universe rather than inward toward what beliefs a speaker
will accept, then speakers’ access to the semantic character of their state-
ments is only of psychological significance.
Yet the natural intuition of many speakers is that in the case just
mentioned we are not dealing with the same proposition expressed two
different ways. Semantics seems to bleed over into epistemology: what
a statement means cannot be fully separate from what a speaker under-
stands it to mean. We might imagine some ordinary readers in the nine-
teenth century who are neighbors of Evans and do not know that she is
Eliot. They accept as true the statement ‘Mary Ann Evans bought beef at
Harry the butcher’s today’ while not assenting to ‘George Eliot bought
beef at Harry the butcher’s today.’ To know the truth of the second
statement is to have different information about the world’s arrangements
from what one had in knowing the truth only of the first statement.
Shouldn’t that point be relevant to semantics? We might try to insulate
the semantic from the psychological by saying that if Adam believes that
Mary Ann Evans brought beef at Harry the butcher’s today, then he also
believes that George Eliot did this. Philosophers at this point distinguish
between a de re belief, a belief about a particular individual, and a de dictu
belief, an assent to a belief as it is stated in a certain manner. Thus, Adam
believes of George Eliot that she bought beef at Harry the butcher’s today
even while he does not assent to a sentence that typically expresses that
8
Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II, 395.
belief. We might put it this way. Just as I may recognize another individual
under some descriptions and not under other ones, so I may know
a proposition in one way that it is expressed but not in another such
way. There will be different circumstances affecting how I react to this
situation while describing another’s beliefs. I may focus on the proposition
itself and the information it carries about the world, without worrying all
that much about a speaker’s access to that proposition, that is, her under-
standing of some ways of expressing that proposition and not others. Or
I may be much more interested in what a speaker will do in conversation
and behavior. Then her access to some and not other ways the proposition
is expressed will matter greatly. When I take the first route, I am happy to
say that Adam believes that George Eliot bought beef at Harry the
butcher’s today, even if Adam does not recognize his belief under that
way of expressing it. Describing the belief that way might give very useful
evidence to a third party interested in where George Eliot was today. When
I take the second route, I conclude that Adam does not believe that George
Eliot bought beef at Harry the butcher’s. I am not thereby attributing any
contradiction to Adam. Nor am I raising any deep, mysterious issue in
logic. I am just commenting on the complicated ways in which our social
and linguistic interactions have learned to accommodate the subtle and
different purposes for which our discourse about meaning and belief has
arisen. A robot run by artificial intelligence would have to understand that
complication and subtlety in order to interact fruitfully with us.
There is an interesting consequence here for Kripke’s strategy of placing
the semantic closer to the metaphysical and farther from the epistemic and
the psychological. Soames is in general a strong defender of Kripke’s work
and of Kripke’s perhaps central claim, discussed above: the existence of
propositions that are necessarily true but that are also a posteriori. But he
makes a key distinction. He thinks that Kripke’s argument for this claim
works in the case of natural-kind terms but fails in the case of proper
names.9 He considers Kripke’s well-known example. The heavenly body
appearing early in the evening was called Hesperus. The one remaining
visible into early morning was called Phosphorus. It took a long time
before it was discovered that in fact the same heavenly body was being
referred to in the two cases. So, we have the proposition ‘Hesperus is
identical with Phosphorus.’ Now we add to this the intuition that links the
semantic to the metaphysical. The meaning of a name, on this intuition, is
simply the referent it picks out in the world; the information attached to
9
Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II, 393–5.
the name does not matter semantically, though it might matter psycholo-
gically. If a name is just an informationless pointer to a worldly entity
which gives its meaning, then all the names of the same object have the
same meaning. Then it follows that the proposition ‘Hesperus is identical
with Phosphorus’ has exactly the same meaning as the proposition
‘Hesperus is identical with Hesperus.’ That second proposition is
a necessary truth. Then ‘Hesperus is identical with Phosphorus’ must
also be a necessary truth. In every possible world ‘Hesperus’ picks out the
same object that ‘Phosphorus’ does.
But now comes the difficulty for Kripke, according to Soames. It is
crucial for Kripke’s argument that ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus,’ while
a necessary truth, is only known to be such through a weighing of scientific
evidence, and so is a posteriori. But ‘Hesperus is Hesperus’ is known
a priori to be a necessary truth, since we know in advance without testing
that A is identical with A. And we have just shown that it is exactly the same
proposition as ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus.’ The situation is like that above
where we assigned a belief about George Eliot to Adam even though he
himself did not have access to that belief under that description. In the
present case, if I know the truth of a proposition a priori, then I know it
a priori, even if I do not know all the ways in which that very proposition
might be expressed. Therefore, I know a priori that the proposition
expressed by ‘Hesperus is identical with Phosphorus’ is necessarily true.
Then Kripke is in trouble. For he has not shown the existence of the
necessary a posteriori, as he has strongly wished to. His argument to that
effect for proper names fails. Fortunately for his overall program, says
Soames, the case of natural-kind terms is different. The proposition
‘Water is H2O’ has on one side a natural-kind term that functions in the
manner of a name. But on the other side is not another name but
a description of a property. So we do not have two referring terms that
mean the same thing. The necessity involved is not that of the identity of
a thing with itself. It is rather the linkage between a name and an under-
lying physical structure which defines an essential property. If it should lose
that structure, it would stop being water. We do not have here a necessity
that could be known a priori. So Kripke’s overall claim about the necessary
a posteriori survives.
It is not clear that Kripke would accept the basis for Soames’s analysis,
whereby the meaning of a name is simply its referent, so that changing co-
referring names cannot change the meaning of a proposition. He himself is
worried about what happens in statements about someone’s beliefs, as in
our discussion above of whether Adam believes that George Eliot was at the
butcher’s. Kripke takes seriously the thought that a speaker may be
acquainted with a proposition under one way in which it appears to him
and not under another.10 He mentions Pierre, who, growing up in France,
sees videos and postcards of a city called Londres and forms a belief that he
expresses by ‘Londres est jolie.’ Later he visits a friend in an ugly section of
London and forms a belief that he expresses by ‘It is false that London is
pretty.’ As it happens, he has not figured out that ‘Londres’ and ‘London’
name the same city. It surely occurs very often that we believe a proposition
when it is presented to us in one manner and disbelieve it when it is
presented in a different aspect. The issue is how much this fact should
affect our account of the semantic. Kripke seems at least somewhat
attracted by the thought that the epistemology of belief formation and
the psychology of speakers’ behavior of assent and dissent to propositions
ought to have some effect on what we count as the meaning of a statement.
It is not that he is tempted to collapse the metaphysical into the epistemic,
for he admits that he himself has not always been clear in his descriptions.
Sometimes, in order to show the a posteriori character of certain statements
containing natural-kind terms, such as ‘Water is H2O’ and ‘Gold is the
element of atomic number 79,’ he has said that water might have turned
out not to be a compound of those specific elements and that gold might
have turned out not to have that atomic number. These claims are
misleading, he admits. If it is a necessary truth that ‘Water is H2O,’
since that internal structure in the referent defines its reference in all
possible worlds, then water could not have turned out to have a different
internal structure. Rather, the ‘could have turned out’ statements are about
the epistemic condition of speakers. Given all the evidence we had at
a certain time, gold might have turned out to be a chemical compound
rather than an element, even though, metaphysically speaking, it could not
have turned out to have a different internal structure from what it does
have. If you changed that internal structure, it would stop being gold.
So Kripke insists on a certain primacy and autonomy of the metaphysical
in relation to the epistemic and the linguistic.
Yet many thinkers will join him in wondering, as he does with his Pierre-
London example, whether the semantic does to a considerable extent bleed
over into the epistemic and the psychological. It can be difficult to see why
we should segregate the semantic level ruthlessly from what speakers know
and believe about what they are doing when they speak. Referential linkage
10
Saul Kripke, “A Puzzle about Belief,” in A. Margalit (ed.), Meaning and Use (Dordrecht: D. Reidel,
1979), 239–83.
to the world is not something that merely happens to speakers due to their
causal and social positioning. It is rather an aspect of their highly active
engagement with the world. Kripke himself, we have noted, does not claim
that what speakers suppose they are doing plays no role in defining what
they mean by their words. His opponent is only the descriptivist who holds
that the descriptions a speaker attaches to his names and natural-kind
terms are sufficient to specify their meanings or at least to fix their reference.
Yet many will still feel that the speaker’s role in determining meaning is
being underplayed through a strong focus on communal, causal factors
external to the speaker, as if we are being dragooned into a larger practice
we may or may not wish to be defined by. There may be “libertarians” in
philosophy who react to Kripke’s socialist-causal-historical account of
reference in the same way that a political libertarian might react to
government socialist programs. Thus, we find arguments in philosophy
between those who favor an individualist, localist, internalist account of
meaning and those who favor a socialist, globalist, externalist account.
Kripke seems to offer a good deal of ammunition for the second group.
(An internalist account emphasizes factors internal to the mental life of the
individual speaker. An externalist account emphasizes factors external to
the speaker, such as facts about the surrounding environment or about the
behavior of other speakers.) Donald Davidson is one thinker who is more
on the individualist, localist (though not the internalist) side of this debate.
For example, he believes that the proper theory of meaning to assign to
a speaker will capture the precise way that meaning and belief intersect for
that individual.11 Davidson’s entire account of meaning is based on what
semantic theory an interpreter would apply to an individual speaker in
order to make sense of her behavior, verbal and otherwise. So meaning will
be linked much more closely to the epistemic and the psychological, to
what beliefs a speaker actually assents to.
Others may object that Davidson has not sufficiently distinguished
between what a speaker means by a word and what the word means.
Suppose a speaker misunderstands what is meant by ‘bipolar illness.’ She
applies the expression to herself in order to pick out certain distinctive,
reidentifiable symptoms, even though well-trained medical professionals
say that this cluster of symptoms does not define bipolar illness. When she
reports to her therapist ‘My bipolar has returned this week,’ what belief is
11
I have given a lengthy description of Davidson’s account of meaning in Farrell, Subjectivity, Realism,
and Postmodernism, 70–116. Also see Donald Davidson, “Radical Interpretation,” in Davidson,
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 125–40.
she expressing? A sensitive therapist familiar with her will understand her
to express a belief defined by her own meaning for ‘bipolar’ instead of by
the common meaning in the language. But all we are saying here is that this
is what the speaker means in this context; it is not what the term means.
So our analysis of her claim is no longer a matter covered by semantic
theory. It is a topic for pragmatics, for the study of how words may actually
be used or misused by speakers, or for linguistic psychology. In that way we
can wall off the semantic from such effects based on the speaker’s own
understanding of what she means and believes. Davidson will not likely
accept this response. Semantic theory for him is itself about what an
individual speaker means, about a speaker’s behavior. We are trying to
give a semantic theory for her idiolect, including her use of ‘bipolar.’
Davidson is not unhappy with the conclusion that his model of semantic
theory makes speakers of English to be speaking overlapping idiolects
rather than a common language.12
There are other issues of this sort. Kripke is right that the causal-
collaborative account does capture the way we normally enter into our
language. We are trying to align our usage with already present ways in
which those in our community are linked by language to the surrounding
environment. The contribution of our individual intentions and beliefs is
therefore much less, except to the extent that it is indeed our intention to
use language as others do, taking over their referential terms even when we
have very little of the information needed to direct these terms precisely to
their referents. But that is not always our situation. There are times when
individual speakers may be far more active than this in letting their own
beliefs and intentions fix reference. Consider one of Kripke’s examples.
If ever a case might be made that reference is fixed by a description attached
to a name, it would seem to be the case of Gödel. Almost everyone who
actually knows the name associates it with the description ‘the one who
discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic.’ Kripke imagines a case, as
with our fraudulent Cicero above, where Gödel actually stole this achieve-
ment from another man named Schmidt and passed it off as his own. Have
all our references all along, then, guided by that description, been to
Schmidt? Very clearly not, Kripke claims. So we do not accept the descrip-
tivist account.
Yet one can think of the following continuation of that imagined case.
A group of mathematicians at a university are so attached to linking the
12
See his account in Donald Davidson, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in E. Lepore (ed.), Truth
and Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 433–46.
name Gödel with the discoverer of the incompleteness of arithmetic that
they decide, first as a small joke, to use that name among themselves to
refer to Schmidt, the true discoverer. They form a club to research lots of
details about Schmidt, whom they now always refer to by the name
‘Gödel.’ Their practice happens to catch on as something of an in-joke
with a larger scientific community. We would not deny their capacity to
act this way. It will be certain psychological states on the side of these
speakers that determine reference. They are not automatically dragooned
into a referential scheme that they have no control over.
Kripke’s account is most persuasive when it comes to the names of well-
known individuals across history. What of ordinary names in everyday life?
One might imagine someone in Dublin who knows four individuals named
Mary Murphy. On a radical anti-descriptivist account of proper names that
ignores the mental states of the speaker, the sounds ‘Mary Murphy’ as they
escape the speaker’s lips travel, as it were, on complex social-historical trolley
lines back to definite destinations, by routes that the speaker may not
understand at all or may be misinformed about. But which trolley line is
the correct one here in order for the use of the name ‘Mary Murphy’ to arrive
at its proper destination? It seems that even if speakers cannot attach
descriptions that make reference fully determinate for names, still the
descriptions in this case count for something. ‘The one that’s married to
my ex-teacher’s brother.’ ‘The one who was a constant companion to my
great grandmother.’ And so forth. Kripke has shown only that these descrip-
tions cannot be finally determinative in fixing reference. (It might turn out
that the Mary Murphy who lives with my ex-teacher’s brother is not actually
married to him.) But here they may play a role in fixing which trolley lines, as
it were, the name gets placed on in heading toward a particular destination.
As I suggested earlier, perhaps gold’s yellow shiny appearance is all that
matters to a group of pre-scientific speakers. If two different natural elements
both happened to have that appearance, then both would be included in the
reference of their term, no matter what might in the future be discovered
about the differences of these substances. Don’t we have at least some say-so
about what we mean, relative to our purposes and desires? Then the quality
‘being of the same kind’ that determines reference for one of our terms
would depend to some extent on our descriptions and purposes, even if it is
not fully fixed by them. Whether we are dealing with one kind or two would
still be to some extent up to us. Why should our well-developed Western
science be able to fix that Amazonian tribesmen are talking about atomic-
element-79-gold instead of about shiny-yellow-metal gold?
What of the case of reference to persons? What establishes finally what
counts as the same individual that is being referred to in different possible
worlds? There is a fundamental move in many of Kripke’s arguments; its
importance can be lost with all the attention that is given to the new
technical apparatus of possible worlds and rigid designators. Kripke’s
appeal to metaphysical rather than epistemic necessity rests on claims
about changes such that A has not simply moved into a different state
but has stopped being A. It is claims like this that establish the notion of
essential properties. Many philosophers have specialized in thought experi-
ments testing our intuitions about whether the same person has gone on
into the future or has been replaced by someone closely resembling her and
with considerable continuity with her.13 If exact clones are programmed
with our memories when our physical bodies decay badly, have we our-
selves gone on into the future? If we think of being an organic entity as an
essential property of being the present human self that one is, what
percentage of us could be replaced by non-organic parts and have us still
count as the same person? It is not worth going into these thought
experiments in detail. What is of interest is that at some point it seems to
become partly up to us what counts as an essential property such that if you
lose it, you have dropped out of existence and been replaced by another
entity. It seems there is no possible world in which Bill Clinton could
become a meercat and still remain the same individual, but is there one in
which he is an African female living in the twenty-second century? A key
for Kripke’s whole approach is that conceivability is not the same as
metaphysical possibility, which is narrower. A reason why there can be
necessary a posteriori truths is that it can be a discovery that what is
conceivable for us is not possible. It is conceivable that the two substances
before me, differently named at the moment, are both samples of the same
element. But an examination of their atomic structure shows not only that
they are not the same element but also that, given what defines their
identity, they could not be the same element in any possible world.
But this clean separation of conceivability and possibility seems dis-
turbed and muddied by our present considerations. In the nebulous cases
of personal identity, it seems that what counts as an essential property is
not simply fixed by the metaphysical arrangement of the universe but may
be due in part to how we come to see and describe matters, and thus to
what is conceivable by us. Take two planetary cultures. On one of them,
13
See, for example, Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986),
199–280.
identity is considered such that close continuation of your present physical
body is an essential property. A clone of you is then definitely not you but
more like your child. In the other planetary culture, the same individual
person is thought of as continuing her very existence in her clone. But then
our psychological propensities, priorities, and descriptions are playing
a role in defining essential properties and metaphysical identities.
A radical anti-descriptivist position seems overplayed.
There are also complications when we look at the causal-historical
chains that make reference work for Kripke. At some points along the
chain reference may change; speaker reference based on error may gradu-
ally transform itself into semantic reference that holds for the language.
Imagine that native inhabitants of an island have a word for a holy cave.
Explorers arrive and, hearing this word, intend to use it as the natives do
but mistakenly think it is the name of the whole island. Eventually even the
indigenous population is using the term as the name of the whole island.
So reference did not attach to the new explorers’ utterances simply by their
finding themselves as links in a long chain of social reference. Their
descriptions and beliefs played a role in changing the reference of the
term. Again, the speaker’s psychology and the metaphysics of reference
do not separate so easily.14
There is a further argument of Kripke’s that seems to show the impor-
tance of the layout of the world itself, and not just of a speaker’s associated
descriptions, in making reference successful. “Perhaps according to me the
truth should not be put in terms of saying that it is necessary that there
should be no unicorns, but just that we can’t say under what circumstances
there would have been unicorns.”15 Why? Because the use of the word
‘unicorn’ is unlike the use of the word ‘gold.’ In the latter case, in spite of
all the false beliefs referrers may have early on, there is an actual kind at the
other end of their fingerpointing that fixes what kind is being referred to and
what it is to be the same kind. The metaphysical state of the world does the
needed work. With ‘unicorn’ as used by the medievals, there was nothing
there to do such work, no natural kind individuated by nature at the end of
the fingerpointing. So it is unclear what would count in any possible world as
being of the same kind as what one now would pick out by using ‘unicorn.’
The term, then, does not have sufficient resources to be a rigid designator
14
Not all philosophers have been convinced by Kripke’s account. There are “neo-descriptivist”
attempts to link meaning and reference more closely to speakers’ representations. See
David Chalmers and Frank Jackson, “Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation,”
Philosophical Review 110 (2001): 315–60.
15
Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 24.
and does not truly refer. It seems that when it comes to natural kinds,
conceptual description of a possible referent cannot replace, on the matter of
whether genuine reference has occurred, the role of the universe’s own
metaphysical articulations in providing a definite object to be referred to.
If exploration a couple of centuries ago discovered horse-like creatures with
a single horn in Australia, there would be no way, based on how the world is
arranged, of determining that we are now referring to the same thing that the
medievals did in their use of the term ‘unicorn.’ A key issue for Kripke is that
if one were to discover today two different species both of which fit the
medieval description of a unicorn, there would be no way of telling which
one of these the medieval term had supposedly picked out (unlike in the case
where actual contact with an animal had linked usage to a genetic structure,
even if the namers then had no idea what this was). So, it would not be true
that what the medievals had referred to by ‘unicorn’ turned out actually to
exist, even if we should choose to use the same name for the new species.
That story demotes the value of the descriptions that might be attached
to natural-kind terms. These cannot do what our actual encounters in the
world with something with a distinctive internal structure can do to
determine sameness of kind. The case again shows Kripke’s commitment
to letting the contours of the world, rather than merely what humans
project upon it, help establish what we are talking about. Reality casts its
shadow on our language, instead of merely waiting around to be divided up
by the latter. Yet one might imagine Darwin, without yet having encoun-
tered a particular species of finch, defining, just by his mechanical analysis
of what is required to eat various foodstuffs, what kind of beak would likely
have evolved on a particular island. When explorers many years later on
that island actually discover a finch with a beak almost exactly as Darwin
had sketched it, they will likely say that they are talking about the same
natural kind that Darwin had picked out by his descriptions, and that what
he had talked about actually exists. The description is precise enough to fix
reference even without an original baptismal moment of actual contact
with this kind of finch. We seem to do something rather similar, just on the
basis of our scientific descriptions, with predicted subatomic particles
never before discovered. But what if two different species of finch were
later discovered, both of which had beaks that fit Darwin’s description?
Then perhaps we would say that his description had not successfully fixed
reference to a species yet to be discovered. But would that possibility
automatically make us withdraw our claim if it did actually turn out that
only one such species were discovered? (There are thought experiments on
personal identity that have it that if there is only one possible continuer of
me, then I go on. But if there are two possible continuers of me, with equal
claims to the title, then I do not go on.) Note that even if this Darwin finch
case might make us raise certain issues about reference, it would not
threaten Kripke’s account of natural kinds and essences, provided we
agree that it is not the description here by itself but rather the internal
genetic structure of the bird that in the end determines kinds. The issue,
brought out by Kripke’s unicorn argument, is just whether reference can be
made precise enough prior to actual causal contact.
The deep background for these discussions, as I have argued, is a narrative
based on an ultimately theological vision of the universe, a stance that almost
totally emptied out the metaphysical character of the world and, in the long
run, turned matters over to epistemology and philosophy of language. Once
the world is thus made metaphysically empty, then semantic determinacy
must come from structures projected on the world by subjectivity or
language. It follows that meaning must be fixed by the mental states or
linguistic descriptions of the speaker; the world is no longer robust enough to
play a role in bringing about semantic determinacy. Thus, we get the
descriptivist theories that Kripke argues against. To discredit that overall
view with its long inertia, one has to show only that a much richer notion of
the metaphysical is defensible and that this metaphysically richer world plays
a significant role in the determination of reference, of meaning, of essential
properties, of individuation, and of sorting into natural kinds. Kripke shows
just those things. He does not have to demonstrate further that the psycho-
logical, the epistemic, and the linguistic play only an extremely impoverished
role in determining such features. His work retains its great importance in
the overall narrative I am developing, even after we assign proper weight to
what speakers themselves understand about what they mean and do, as in the
considerations just outlined. The point that ultimately matters is that Kripke
overcomes the late-medieval thinning out of the ontological character of the
world, the dissolving of Aristotelian essences, and Ockham’s claim that we
have only individuals in relation to the God who creates them, that there is
no metaphysical basis for sameness of kinds. He undercuts the long-term
effects of theological voluntarism and brings Aristotle back onto the philo-
sophical stage, after his earlier dismissal by the radical theologians who
emphasized God’s freedom. He allows us to weigh more judiciously and
subtly the contributions that come from the world and the contributions
that come from us in the ways in which we are engaged with the reality
around us, rather than accepting an unlimited inflationary momentum, due
at its source to the special role of God, that must radically impoverish the
world.
chapter 4
Hegel, Theology, and Pippin’s Reading of Hegel
In my story about the influence of religious ideas on philosophical think-

ing, Hegel is the great mediator between medieval theological models and
the thought of so-called continental philosophy in the twentieth century,
especially in Germany and France. Though he may not have intended his
work under this description, he tries to rethink the idea of the divine in
a way that will remove from it all the ways that the sublimely unknowable
and incommensurable God of the late medievals shaped a precarious
epistemic and metaphysical situation for humans. Hegel argues instead
for a self-manifesting, self-incarnating divine activity that ultimately dis-
plays its forms in nature and in culture. Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism is
one of the most admired books on Hegel in recent decades.1 It is notable for
my study because this reading of Hegel in the late twentieth century sheds
light on the continuing influence of theological patterns of thought on
recent philosophical undertakings. Pippin curiously underplays the very
features of Hegel’s thought that would count as offering an answer to the
late-medieval situation. His interpretation sees Hegel as trying to define
a spontaneously self-articulating activity of thought that determines, sim-
ply from out of its own resources, what a notion of objectivity adequate to
itself would have to be. Like the sublime God of the ancient Hebrews, this
divine activity will have little to do with nature (Pippin comes close to
wishing that Hegel had never written a Philosophy of Nature) and like the
God of the late medievals, it will be unaffected by any external determina-
tion. But the entire force of Hegel’s philosophical enterprise is to show how
thought can remain self-determining even in its richest engagements with,
indeed even in its embodiments within, what comes across at first as alien
to thought. Pippin’s interpretation leaves us with the suspicion that the
spontaneous realm of concept generation he has outlined has no confident
1
Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
115
purchase on the natural world or on history, so that Hegel’s primary
purpose in writing would be unsatisfied.
Pippin’s principal claim is that Hegel should be seen as one who still
takes seriously Kant’s project of critical philosophy even as he gets rid of
ineffable things-in-themselves.2 That is, he wants to examine the categories
required for a thinker to make sense of an objective world of experience,
and he wants to show that these categories are not derived from empirical
interaction with real objects but are determined within the sphere of
subjectivity itself, of rational spontaneity, through a consideration of
how we must take the world to be for experience to be properly objective.
Once we understand that Hegel is continuing this Kantian program, even
as he challenges certain features of it, then certain popular readings of
Hegel, says Pippin, become much less plausible. Among them would be
those that make him committed to metaphysical entities that one takes to
be simply there in their own explanatory power, such as Cosmic Mind or
Geist understood as in some sense a metaphysical entity. In another direc-
tion Pippin is dissatisfied with readings of Hegel that see him involved
merely in category analysis, in articulating and showing the relations
among categories that belong to our particular language game, while
making no claims that these categories fit the objective order of the
world. Hegel, he says, is more ambitious than that: he wishes to justify
and give a grounding for our use of these categories rather than just
describing the interrelations among them as we happen to use them.
On the other hand, Pippin acknowledges that Hegel clearly differenti-
ates himself from Kant. Kant has a clear basis for developing his categories
and for showing how they apply to our experience. He starts from the fact
that all experience comes to us humans filtered through the forms of
sensibility: space and time. Kant then derives a set of conceptual structures
that arise from different ways in which time and space may be conceptually
determined. So, the concepts that emerge do not appear out of thin air.
One consequence, however, is that we can be sure only that these con-
ceptual structures apply to the experience of individuals who experience
the world through those sensory forms of space and time. We cannot tell
what the actual entities of the world are like in themselves. Hegel, says
Pippin, drastically revises Kant by getting rid of that emphasis on
a conceptual ordering of sensory experience that might at the same time
leave us alienated from the actual metaphysical character of things.
2
See the introduction to Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 3–15.
Hegel, Theology, and Pippin’s Reading of Hegel 117
But this move leaves Hegel in a difficult philosophical position. He very
much likes the Kantian idea that thought or subjectivity, like God for the
medievals, gives its fundamental categories to itself rather than being
determined in those categories by the pressure of the external world
upon the self. But without the limitations of a cognitive machinery that
is geared into the appropriation of sensory experience, we seem to have
wheels turning freely in conceptual space. Hegel insists that the activity of
concept-fixing that his investigation is directed toward must in the end be
self-affecting, self-determining, and self-unfolding, without determination
from without by what is other (or by what is simply factually true in the
world). Yet at the same time he insists that the concepts thus derived fully
apply to things as they are in themselves, so that he does not end up in
Kant’s quandary. What kind of activity could this possibly be?
There is a useful historical model, though one that Pippin himself does
not appeal to, and it will perhaps be little surprise that it is a theological
one. Medieval thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas were in a philosophically
difficult situation. On the one hand, God in order to have metaphysical
perfection must be a fully unconditioned act of self-knowing and self-
willing, a pure self-relating that is not dependent on anything other. Yet he
is also the Biblical-Christian God who knows and cares for his creatures.
It seems that God, in coming to know what one of these creatures has done,
is being affected by something external to him, is being moved into a more
fully actualized state by that external stimulus. So he has had some not yet
realized potential within him. But then he is not a perfect act of self-
relating and so is not God. The answer of Aquinas is that God in creating
others made each of their individual essences one of the infinitely possible
ways that his own essence could be participated in by imperfect beings. So,
in knowing us, Aquinas can claim, God is knowing himself. He can remain
a perfect unconditional activity of self-relating even as he enters in the
fullest and most robust manner into the workings of what is other to him,
into knowing and loving his creatures. One may not be persuaded that
Aquinas has thus resolved matters here, but it is a fine model of what Hegel
will see as an apparent dependence on others that turns out, when properly
understood, to be a kind of self-determining. Some may try to save the
unconditioned character of the divine by having a God who is fully
independent of any interaction with the world (and who therefore does
not know and love humans and others). Late-medieval voluntarists will
press the idea of God’s self-determination even further. They will see
Aquinas’s solution as still granting too much determinate metaphysical
character to creatures, so that, as we saw, the creaturely realm, on their
view, must be emptied out of its essences and made more fully amenable to
the immediacy of God’s free willing. But Aquinas’s solution has clear
analogies with Hegel’s case and I want to look at these. It is true that we
must be careful, in developing them, to emphasize one very clear disanal-
ogy. Pippin is right that we should not fall back on a precritical metaphy-
sical reading of Hegel. So we do not wish to be committed to any
theological entity in developing an Hegelian analogy with Aquinas.
Can such an analogy be a useful one? Hegel on Pippin’s account is
looking to define an activity of thinking that can be autonomous, sponta-
neous, self-relating, and self-affecting. It somehow presents a rich concep-
tual network to itself, using only its own resources and its internal
dissatisfactions with what it has generated so far, without being limited
by that network’s need (as in Kant) to be a conceptual determination of
spatiotemporal sensory intuitions received from the world. In giving itself
to itself, as it were, this activity of thinking sees to it that all relations are
determined internally rather than through a responsiveness to an external
givenness.3 The motivation to advance within this network of categories is
that each succeeding account of what an experience of an objective reality
might be like is inadequate, not through failure to correspond to the way
the world is but on its own terms: through its own internal inadequacy in
how it is attempting to portray a way of taking the world to have an
objective character.
At this point we need to make some distinctions, and Aquinas’s model
of God’s knowing of entities in the world as a self-knowing helps us to do
so, even as we discount, once again, for two important disanalogies: we are
not committing our account to the existence of any theological being and
what the structures of thought are relating to is not something they have
created out of nothing. We can usefully separate out two different
moments of self-relating in the Thomistic model under consideration.
God by himself is a perfect, unconditioned activity of self-knowing, self-
willing, and self-determining. As a creator, God knows the world and the
individuals he has created as something other than himself. But then,
because the essence of these creatures participates imperfectly in God’s
own essential nature, that relationship to what is other turns into a more
expansive activity of self-relating, more encompassing than the autono-
mous activity that was God simply by himself. We also have two such
moments in Hegel’s account. On the one hand, thinking in its own realm
presents a rich conceptual structure to itself regarding what a relationship
3
See Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 226–35.
to an objective world must consist in. Then that structure is set in relation
to another realm, natural and historical reality itself, that first appears as
alien: it seems either to escape the determinations that arose in thought or
to determine thought from the outside and so to spoil its spontaneous self-
affecting. But then comes the recognition that this relation to a robustly
alien otherness, when properly understood, is actually a more encompass-
ing form of self-relating (as when Aquinas’s God knows his creatures).
Here we come to my central objection to Pippin’s account. He puts the
stress of his account on that first moment of self-relating: on thought’s
determination from within its own realm of a rich conceptual structure
that fixes a necessary framework for reality’s being taken up into thought.
He seems to find the second, more encompassing moment of self-relating,
even if it is crucial to Hegel’s own presentation, philosophically proble-
matic. Pippin’s reading of Hegel emphasizes how earlier ways of under-
standing the objectivity of reality have failed to see the moment of
thought’s spontaneous self-determination that is the unacknowledged
condition for their own kinds of understanding. On the other hand, in
his final chapter he seems to distrust Hegel’s confidence that the system of
concepts his Logic has articulated actually captures the fundamental struc-
tures of reality itself. Hegel seems to have failed by the standard of Pippin’s
own account of what would have to be the case for thought’s determination
of itself; his arguments seem to depend too much, for Pippin’s taste, on
concepts that are given from without. “So many such concepts are clearly
as they are because the world is as it is, and cannot possibly be considered
categorial results of thought’s pure self-determination . . .”4 He is notably
distressed by Hegel’s claim, in the Encyclopedia Logic, that “Logic therefore
coincides with metaphysics . . . thoughts which are assumed to be able to
express the essentialities of things.”5 For Pippin, if Hegel has remained
truly a critical Kantian philosopher, then he definitely should never make
this claim about his logic actually articulating the essential metaphysical
order of reality. On Pippin’s story it can only be a huge error to say this and
one can almost picture him at Hegel’s shoulder advising him not to make
such a claim. Hegel has shown only the necessary conditions for a well-
achieved cognitive engagement with a world of objects, not the funda-
mental contours of reality itself, and so his logic cannot be, for Pippin, the
same as his metaphysics. (Hegel is thereby accused of a gross misunder-
standing of his own philosophical project.)
4 5
Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 258. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 177.
In a similar vein, Pippin has little interest in all of Hegel’s laborious work
that applies his “self-determining” logical system to real-world situations:
for example, his writing in his Philosophy of History and in his Philosophy of
Nature, even though Pippin agrees that subjectivity is necessarily historical.
Yet Hegel spent so much effort working on these applications that, what-
ever we may think of their success, they reveal what he believed his logical
undertaking had accomplished, and thus his view of his own overall
project. There is an important distinction here. The self-determining
sphere of thought that one examines may erode and thin out the meta-
physical character of what it sets itself in opposition to, and so find little
resistance to its categories. Or it may celebrate that sphere of otherness as
having a rich and robust character of its own, yet one that somehow does
not diminish at all the spontaneous self-relational character of thought’s
own activity in its fully engaged relation to that reality. The first of these
tends toward the model of the late-medieval voluntarists while the latter
picture is Hegel’s. When he is so dismissive of Hegel’s concrete studies of
nature and of history, Pippin suggests that he is more on the side of the
former model, which keeps the “divine” sphere of thought spontaneous
and unconditioned only by minimizing or thinning out the reality it relates
to and by making its own sphere appear questionably commensurate with
that reality. Here at least Pippin seems closer to the late medievals than to
Hegel.
There is a reason why Pippin might overplay one moment of Hegel’s
self-relating activity of thought and might underplay the other such
moment, namely the recognition that thought’s relation to a robust reality
is another form of its self-relational (and thus unconditioned) activity.
Crucial here is his determination to see Hegel as continuing Kant’s critical
program. Kant has given special emphasis to a particular kind of self-
relational activity: what he calls the transcendental unity of
apperception.6 In having an experience of an object, says Kant, I must be
able to relate those perceptions back to myself as having the experience.
Only that implicit relation to myself as having the experiences allows them
to be unified and ordered as experiences. Even non-Kantian philosophers
will say that in order to count as having a belief about x, I must be
implicitly aware of myself as one having beliefs, as one engaged in
a project of adjusting my judgments in response to evidence. (That is
again like McDowell’s account of spontaneity.) Being a good information
processor is not enough. The subtitle of Pippin’s book is crucial:
6
Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 16–24.
“The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness.” The experiencer’s self-
conscious, apperceptive awareness of itself as having experience of the
world will often be the focus of Pippin’s work. How does a reflective self-
consciousness about oneself as having experiences both shape and make
possible the character of those experiences? He will be less interested in the
more global self-relational activity that comes about when a relationship to
the alien, recalcitrant world of nature turns out, when properly under-
stood, to be a relation of thought to itself.
So we have a certain complex structure: the self relating to itself as it
relates to a world of objects. To follow Kant’s program, as Pippin has done,
is to emphasize that moment of self-relational apperception. In Kantian
experience there is an additional moment of self-relating beyond that
apperceptive one. In relating to such conceptual determinations of the
objective order as substance and causality, one is related to what one has
projected onto experience as a necessary condition for experience to have
an objective character. But Kant does not have Hegel’s ambitious move
that finds, even beyond the apperceptive self-awareness behind all think-
ing, a more encompassing self-relational activity in a cognitive encounter
with the most robust antics of reality itself. Pippin emphasizes, like Kant,
the moment of reflection, when the ‘I’ takes a step back from reality and
brings its own experiencing of reality into view. Hegel insists that this
moment of reflection must eventually be encompassed within a more
sophisticated account of having reality itself in view, that we cannot stop
with the stance of reflection, which proves self-undermining when left on
its own. But Pippin seems, in construing what Hegel is about, to remain
still within what Hegel saw as the limited moment of reflection. It seems
that we are still, in Pippin’s account of Hegel, relating to ‘objects’ and
‘reality’ as they are determined as such from within our reflective stance.
From that stance we construct an account of what ‘objectivity’ must be but
we are not engaged with objective reality itself.
Another influence on Pippin’s thought here is Fichte, to whom he
devotes a full chapter as a preparation for his reading of Hegel.7 Fichte
speaks of a self-positing of the self that can seem almost like an activity of
self-creation out of nothing, and of a positing of otherness merely as a field
of resistance to allow for the subject’s labor of self-knowing and self-
willing. So, the self-relational activity in question seems something of an
original constituting activity for which the external world comes across as
derivative and secondary, a projected field with just the bare minimal
7
Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 42–59.
determinacy needed to keep the subject’s own self-fashioning going.
(The overpowering dominance of a divine-like self-positing on one side
and the insubstantial character of what is at the other pole may again
remind one of the late-medieval God.) Fichte’s thought, then, as well as
Kant’s, may direct one to an autonomous, self-relating activity that occurs
within the field of thought and it may make Hegel’s more encompassing
self-relational activity, the cognitive encounter with the full richness of
reality itself, appear thin, secondary, and problematic. This must raise an
issue for Pippin. He does not wish, in articulating conditions of possible
experience of an objective world, to be making metaphysical commit-
ments. But even if we insist that our account is critical and transcendental,
rather than a description of happenings within a metaphysical entity, still
the matter of metaphysical commitments does come up. For example,
Kant’s critical theory of practical reason turns out to require, for the moral
law to be justified, that there is a rational, autonomous self-determining
that somehow is beyond the determinations of causality and time. When
we finish reading Pippin, we may wonder how the privileged self-relational
activity that is central to his account of Hegel could ever occur in ordinary
reality.
I want to give a reading of Hegel that avoids what I see as the flaws in
Pippin’s, and I want to show that we need not make extravagant meta-
physical commitments in doing so. On my reading, what we call the
autonomous, spontaneous, self-justifying activity of thought is not an
original, initiating activity but comes rather late in the game. Hegel’s well-
known saying that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk is a deep clue to
comprehending his philosophy. The self-relational activity that matters
most occurs not so much in a reflective sphere of subjectivity that holds the
world at a distance in order to be autonomous (in order not to be
determined by the givenness of the world). It occurs rather in a rich
interaction with the world that involves eventual redescriptions and large-
scale recognitions that occur only after very much has already been set in
place by the world’s operating in the manner that it does, so that at first it
appears that thought is a servant to what is external to it. The key Hegelian
recognition, relatively late in our human cultural activity, is that the reality
that has first appeared external, arbitrary, and alien to the life of the
subjectivity can be seen as having a fundamental configuration that mir-
rors, perhaps imperfectly, the structure of thought. So, the pattern of being
self-relating-in-relating-to-what-is-other turns out to have an overall more
encompassing self-relational structure that we come to recognize only after
a great deal of cultural labor over time. The relation to the other is at the
same time a self-relating in the way that Aquinas’s God recognizes his own
essence in knowing the otherness of creatures; it is not the self-creation
from the start of an autonomous divine being. The autonomy comes about
not through a virginal initiating activity but through the recognition that
what has appeared all along as a conditioning limit on thinking is actually
not so, that thought is fully at home with itself in being fully engaged with
what had seemed for a long time a severely limiting otherness.
Redescription and recognition replace what seemed, in other readings of
Hegel, closer to world-creation in one’s setting of conditions for reality.
Pippin’s reading, for example, seems to aim for an activity of pure self-
positing that sets conditions for what an experience of objectivity might be
but that may stop short of actual engagement with what is real.
But what could it mean for thought to recognize itself in the robust
otherness of the real world? To answer this question, we need to see what
Hegel is doing in his Science of Logic. Pippin, rather in the manner of Kant,
emphasizes the necessary conceptual machinery that a subject must lay out
in order to count as having a cognitive experience of an objective reality.
I think that Hegel is doing something a bit different. He is profoundly
moved by what he sees as a crucial insight: so many things that matter,
whether in the world or in thought or in history, can be shown to embody
some form of the structure of being self-relating-in-relating-to-what-is-
other. There is none of this structure in the pile of sand being shaped on the
beach by winds and waves. It is made to be what it is almost entirely by
external forces. There is nothing in the sand pile that makes it maintain
a certain shape or a certain internal ordering through changes. Living
things are clearly different. They do much more to make and maintain
themselves as what they are, to persist as the same through change, to
produce alterations of state that are self-actualizings from within rather
than determinations from without. Even chemical elements do more than
that pile of sand to maintain an internal structure over time. Once we move
to more sophisticated realms of culture, we see that certain powerful works
of art, for their part, may have an internal principle of self-ordering that
makes all their elements seem necessary contributors to the whole, so that
there is an aura of inevitability rather than of accidental accumulation in
the work. It is self-relating in ways that are not present at all in the pile of
sand or, indeed, in mediocre works of art. Hegel even extends this sort of
investigation to nations.8 China, he says, has a great power to maintain its
8
That is the point of G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, J. Sibree (trans.) (New York: Barnes and
Noble Books, 2004). See, for example, the section on China, 129–54.
identity across time as the same culture, but its self-relational sense of
identity is such that it has a difficult time accommodating difference,
otherness, and change. The nations of northwest Europe, he claims, will
eventually be able to form states that maintain their political and cultural
identity even while allowing much greater play to individual freedom and
differentiation than China historically could allow, so they embody a more
sophisticated version of the pattern of being self-relating in relating to
forms of difference and otherness. (Let us leave aside for now the serious
ethical problems with Hegel’s characterization of non-Western nations.)
Or take the matter of private property. Hegel in The Philosophy of Right
does not use a capitalist defense of its economic usefulness. Rather he sees it
as a step in the education of the self to become a self-knowing and self-
willing subject. In being engaged with something in the world that I have
made my own, I am relating to something other than myself, yet I am also
relating to myself as othered, as placed out there in the world. So overall we
have, with private property, a structure of a relating-to-other that is also
a self-relating.
We are beginning to see the master key of Hegel’s logic developing here
in that all these phenomena have an implicitly self-relational character in
the ways that they can assimilate what is other and can transform them-
selves in determinate ways while maintaining their self-identity. Aristotle,
it seems, would be Hegel’s favorite ancient-world philosopher and we can
see why he might be so in this regard. Explanations of change prior to
Aristotle made it appear accidental and somewhat random: things simply
became other than what they had been. Or the determining factor,
a Platonic form, was external to what changed. But Aristotle says that
individual things have an essence or nature or form. The tree in growing, in
becoming other, is actualizing a very particular potential as determined by
its form. Its becoming other, when I understand it properly, is a self-
actualizing, a becoming more fully itself. So there is a fairly complex
structure evident here of being self-relating-in-relating-to-otherness. Yet,
crucially for Hegel, that is also what the structure of thought is. Thinking
maintains a certain style of self-knowing and self-determining even as it
cognitively engages with the rich otherness of the world. Therefore, it is
coming to know a world that is not truly alien but that reflects its own deep
logical patterns of activity, the very patterns that Hegel’s logic has articu-
lated. Such a world cannot be obstinately other and brutely external in the
way that it first appears to be. To be in that world is to be, as a thinker, at
home with oneself, on the model of the more encompassing notion of self-
relational activity that we described earlier. Once we describe both mind
and world through using Hegel’s master key, his logic of being self-relating
in relating to what is other, we see how the patterns of that logic are realized
in many different forms both in mental activity and in non-mental activity
out there in the world itself. The two sides have a certain basic attunement
to one another in terms of how they are ultimately described.
The structure at issue here can be present for Hegel even in nonliving
things. He spends much time in the Logic and in the Phenomenology
describing the logic of essence. We can see this in paragraphs 112–59 of
the 1830 edition of Hegel’s The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in
Outline. The logic of essence has to do with a level of understanding that
accounts for things by positing an intrinsic relationship between
a metaphysical ground and what shows itself in experience, such as essence
and appearance or inner and outer. Each side is necessary for the other in
the relationship, but at first the relationship may appear to have some
externality or hiddenness or arbitrariness in it. Perhaps the essential ground
behind what appears will be like the late-medieval divine: it seems incom-
prehensible and has only an arbitrary relationship to any appearance. It is
typical of Hegel that such an account has to come off as imperfect and
undeveloped. He is at pains to show, as accounts of various degrees of
sophistication are reviewed, that the essence is just what manifests itself, is
indeed what necessarily manifests itself, rather than what remains hidden
and ineffable behind the scenes. In paragraph 140 he offers an analogy.
Unless the outer show of a person in his characteristic behavior is manifest-
ing his inner intentions and sentiments, both sides are hollow and empty.
What we see happening is that the relation to something external and other
that seemed a central feature of an appeal to an essence (we appeal to
a mysterious hidden essence behind the scenes to explain what appears) is
understood as more like a self-relating, a self-manifesting of what the thing
is. The appearance turns out not to be arbitrary; the world is not made up
of hidden essences but of things that manifest their inner character to those
with a sophisticated apparatus for being sensitive to it.
Here Hegel introduces the notion of actuality in what seems to be a clear
play on Aristotle’s philosophy. Aristotle, we saw, explained change as the
self-actualizing, the becoming more fully itself, of the individual entity.
The form that determines what a thing is will not be a hidden inner principle
but that which manifests itself in how the thing acts and changes. Hegel
works as well through notions of necessity, substance, causality, and reci-
procity. What happens in each case is that a relationship that seemed to have
a residue of mere externality, of being determined by something not itself, is
actually an exemplar of ever more sophisticated structures of a self-relational
activity. In a reciprocal relationship of mutual causality, for example, each
thing is what it is only through its other. In relating to that other, it is relating
to that which makes its own self what it is, and so being determined by that
other thing is a form of self-determination. At the end of the section on
essence, we finally come to a more sophisticated structure that certain real
activities or entities might achieve, one where the relationship to what is
other is recognized to be fully self-relating. That otherness is no longer an
arbitrary, external limit. The necessity that seemed imposed from without
turns out to be a free self-determination. We have thus moved to what Hegel
calls the logic of the concept, where that structure of being-self-relating-in-
relating-to-otherness is now more fully manifest. (We see here why he is
opposed to the late-medieval view of the sublimely incommensurable
divine.) I do not suppose that those whose philosophical intuitions and
habits make them hostile to Hegel will be convinced in the slightest by this
outline of his project. His vocabulary is too strange and his aims too over-
arching. But I do need to make the character of that project clearer in order
to set the stage for certain twentieth-century thinkers whom I will present as
reacting to Hegel’s narrative.
When Hegel looks at history he will find different degrees of the very
same structure, as we saw above in his mention of China. Of course, this
account involves him in what we now see as shamefully colonialist views.
Still his narrative does show what he means by his program of philosophy
and that is what we are interested in here. If China overemphasizes self-
identity, with an impoverished view of what differences can be accommo-
dated within it, India shows a strong polarization between a high-level
metaphysical understanding of self-identity and a riotous play of differ-
ences, with all its particular languages and religious practices and political
entities. But there is no political form of mediation of those two poles, says
Hegel, so we are left with an endless oscillation between abstract self-
identity and a wildly unruly otherness rather than any political develop-
ment of the idea of rational autonomy across history. Persia shows at least
a primitive degree of that needed sort of mediation. The unity of the
Persian Empire, like the Light of the Zoroastrian religion, extends its
identity into many other groups but lets them at the same time remain
themselves, in the way that light lets things appear as they are instead of
consuming them. So the Persian empire in its religious and political
structures shows some advance toward a more sophisticated version of
the Hegelian structure of being self-relating in a relating to what is other.9
9
See the sections on India and Persia in Hegel, Philosophy of History, 155–96.
Now we can see what Hegel’s project is in the Logic. He believes he has
uncovered a kind of Master Code. The crucial patterns we are looking for
come into view only when we redescribe the phenomena in question in
terms of that overall structure of self-in-relation-to-otherness. It is like
when we have masses of information to consider and cannot see any
pattern. But then we graph the information according to a certain visual
code and the patterns we were looking for just pop out. Hegel in his Logic
will provide the master code such that a redescription of phenomena in
terms of it will make the philosophically relevant patterns just pop out.
So the Logic wants to line up different possibilities, from the most primitive
to the most sophisticated, of what it would be to express that overall
structure. It is this task that guides the progressive movement of the
Hegelian text, not an attempt to make a kind of theological self-positing.
Different versions of the structure at issue may turn out to be too one-sided
(emphasizing self-identity or a radical otherness too much) or there may be
only an impoverished, inadequate mediation of the moment of identity
and the moment of otherness. So, we are pressed on to more adequate
versions that different sorts of things in the universe might come to
instantiate. Items in the real world will be more or less sophisticated to
the extent that they embody more or less sophisticated versions of the
Hegelian structure of being-self-relating-in-relating-to-otherness. That
project of articulating and applying his Master Code is Hegel’s chief
concern. Pippin’s Kantianism makes him turn away from this project
toward something much closer to Husserl’s phenomenology, with its
bracketing of real-world claims as it focuses on the self-generating of
a conceptual machinery on the side of subjectivity.
We are ready now to see what Hegel means by the self-grounding
autonomy of thought in its determination of the objective character of
the world. Again, a crucial point is that the understanding that knows its
conceptual machinery to be self-grounding and self-determining comes
very late in the game, under the aegis of the owl of Minerva. Take the
material of the Philosophy of Right. It treats the unfolding, Hegel says, of the
idea of rational freedom or autonomy. But those who over long periods of
history developed the ideas, practices, and institutions under study here
did not see themselves as aiming toward the unfolding of that overall idea.
They developed a rich world of practice and of reflection on it that wasn’t
susceptible for a long time to full philosophical understanding. Hegel is
thus hardly operating in a void, as if he were Fichte’s self-positing subject
that generates itself and also a world as a field of resistance. Rather he comes
upon a world that for centuries has already, without full self-consciousness,
generated an extremely complex web of notions and practices having to do
with law, ethics, politics, and economics. Hegel immerses himself in
numerous writings and thinkers that speak of these issues. At first, every-
thing seems to be a matter of the chance, contingent introduction in
history of rather arbitrary ideas, relations, and juxtapositions. But then
his great contribution enters the game: his master code. He will translate
the notions in question until they are all seen as versions of the structure of
being-self-relating-in-relating-to-otherness. So, property, he claims, is
about my self-recognition in something other. The act of exchanging
goods shows both that I can recognize myself in what is other and that
I can alienate this thing to a different person, since I recognize that it is not
essentially me, that I cannot be limited to being that. In morality I come to
recognize that what I am truly willing in willing any action is myself as an
autonomous self-determiner. Eventually I will understand that the highest
development of my free, self-relating autonomy comes when I recognize
the political and social institutions of the state as the most fully actualized
embodiment of my freedom. Once we have the translation into Hegel’s
master code, the patterns of development relating the different items in the
Philosophy of Right, no matter how arbitrary and confused they first
appeared, pop out for us and we see a progression to ever more sophisti-
cated versions of that logical structure, which is ultimately the structure of
rational autonomy. The history of the world has been a history of moving
from primitive and confused to more sophisticated versions of that struc-
ture, and eventually to an understanding of them in terms of that structure.
Hegel is similar as a philosopher of nature. He reads extensively in the
science textbooks of his time and notes the various concepts they deploy,
rather than attempting to weave a conceptual design solely out of the
demands and dissatisfactions of subjectivity, as Pippin’s reading would
suggest. At first the concepts in these science textbooks appear rather
weakly and arbitrarily related and juxtaposed. But then he applies his
master code. We have already seen how Aristotelian self-actualizing
biological individuals as well as self-manifesting essences, as in the case
of natural kinds, can have for Hegel the structure of being-self-relating-
in-relating-to-otherness. Hegel’s textbook readings, obviously limited by
the materials of his time, make him focus on such phenomena as gravity,
magnetism, electricity, and chemical interactions. While nature’s basic
notion is that of mere externality, so that it appears at its lowest level as
just contingent matter in motion, it begins to show certain primitive
forms of a self-relational character. His arguments here definitely seem
quaint and forced. In a magnet with north–south poles, the identity of
one side is determined not arbitrarily but only through its other.
A magnet repels something with the same magnetic charge, so that
identity becomes a form of othering or alienating, while magnets with
different charges attract, so that otherness collapses back into identity.
So something like a dialectic of identity and otherness, with each side
turning into the other, is at work here, and that dialectic will be present
as well, says Hegel, at certain lofty levels of thinking. In the transform-
ing of chemical elements into compounds and compounds into ele-
ments, we see difference transforming itself into unity and vice versa.
But unlike what will take place in more sophisticated, more “spiritual”
activities, these chemical transformations are externally and contingently
caused, rather than being activities of real self-determination.
In living things there is a richer structure: a self-differentiation into
organic parts that are aspects of a self-relating, self-unifying whole. But
living individuals are sacrificed to the universal life of the species. A more
sophisticated relation to the universal will be possible only when we turn
from living things to human cultures that can ultimately embody the
structures of thought and of freedom. I grant that we can very easily
make fun of such accounts of magnetism and chemistry; it is hardly my
point to defend them and we have to grant Hegel’s dependence on the
science of his time. (He also seemed to have a soft spot for the charlatan
spiritualism of the era.) But we do see evidence here of Hegel’s overall
project. There is the satisfying outcome that thought is at home in the
world not by projecting its structures, cookie-cutter like, on an inert,
indeterminate substrate but by recognizing that the logic of being-self-
relating-in-relating-to-otherness (or of sustaining identity in engaging
what is other) that is present in its most developed form in thinking is
already at work in a cruder, less developed way in things. So they cannot
ultimately be alien to thought. When humans engage with the world as
thinkers and implicitly engage with themselves in doing so, they are, on
Hegel’s account, bringing about a more sophisticated actualization of
a structure more generally active in the universe. Things in the objective
world are to a real though limited extent already self-relating, self-
determining, and self-actualizing on their own. Thought’s being at home
in reality comes not through domination of the real by a thought machin-
ery but through a redescription that acknowledges how things are securing
and defining themselves as what they are. (Recall their incapacity to do so
in Quine’s account of reference to rabbits.)
Pippin’s reading of Hegel tends instead to leave us with a machinery of
concepts constituted within the realm of subjectivity, without any
determination from the world, and then we wonder how they can be
projected in a convincing way upon a reality that remains recalcitrant:
That is, what Hegel must explain more concretely is simply what has
implicitly been transpiring in the SL so far, how it is that any subject,
relying, as such a subject must, on some minimal a priori concept of objects
(initially, being), would be unable to make determinate use of such a Notion
unless it was progressively developed in the ways the Logic describes. Clearly,
this idealized account of thought’s self-determining progression presup-
poses a purposiveness and potential resolution of ‘thought’s dissatisfaction
with itself’ that must be accounted for independently.10
It seems that for Pippin this idealized account of thought’s self-determining
progression must take place in an airless pure realm of subjectivity, not in
a cultural world where concepts have been developing in richly concrete
situations for millennia, where they have been used by others in an abun-
dantly available literature.
On my reading the self-grounding moment that shows a system of
thought to be autonomous and spontaneously self-affecting comes at the
end of a long development, as a result, where much of the ordinary givenness
of the world is still playing its crucial role. How is this possible? Pippin is
seriously disturbed by the fact that throughout his work Hegel seems to
depend on the historical givenness of many materials instead of generating
them out of a realm of transcendental subjectivity. But autonomy can be
something achieved at the end of a long, non-autonomous development
rather than something won through a spontaneous self-generation per-
formed without any dependence on worldly determinations.
The spontaneity of thought for Hegel emerges through a process that
begins (unapologetically for him though Pippin does not see this) with
a considerable degree of dependence on what is given. One might study
various available documents on law, property, contract, exchange, criminal
justice, morality, ethical life, civil society and citizenship in a state. At first
one finds rather a jumble of views with awkward, undeveloped linkages
among them. But as one studies them in terms of a translation into Hegel’s
master logic, one starts to see tighter patterns of relationship. Contingent
happenings in history still seem to be doing a good deal of the shaping, but
eventually these external determinants of linkage begin to weaken and the
internal relations of these ideas and notions with one another become more
dominant. They start to line up in a process of development from less
sophisticated to more sophisticated instantiations of the favored Hegelian
10
Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 235.
logical structure. We see how these very diverse cultural notions can all be
redefined as stages in the realization of the idea of free, rational self-
determination. At some point the external determinants vanish as no
longer required and one has an internal, self-developing, self-unfolding
system of concepts whose linkages all become determinate within the
system of notions itself. That achieved network of concepts may count as
having spontaneity and autonomy, as a self-affecting activity, because its
sources of determinacy are, in the end, within itself and not in another, not
because it is an original act of self-determination.
Certainly, many will find Hegel’s overall argument flawed. If I am truly
worried about being alienated from the world as a thinking self, will I be
relieved to learn that a certain quite abstract structure that can be said to
characterize thinking can be shown, with some strain, also to characterize
living things, essential kinds in the inanimate world, and so forth? (Yet we
might recall here Dennett’s narrative, mentioned earlier, in which he shows
how entities in nature become more “selfy.”11) I have no desire to defend
Hegel’s story here. It does, though, have elements I find appealing and
there is something attractive in the thought that we as thinkers are at home
in the world not because we construct its determinations from out of our
own thinking but precisely because we recognize that items in the world
have their own capacities for certain levels of self-determination.
There is a further issue that Pippin’s book brings out especially clearly.
His critical-transcendental, Kantian reading of Hegel is meant to avoid the
pitfall of making Hegel committed to a somewhat extravagant metaphy-
sics. There might seem to be a danger that on my reading he is so
committed. For Hegel seems to believe that there is a logical structure
that is very gradually manifesting itself in history. The idea of free rational
self-determination is developing from quite primitive forms of embodi-
ment to much more sophisticated ones, and that is what history is about.
Is there some kind of underlying causal power determining that cultural
evolution has to go this way? What could that teleological power possibly
be? Perhaps we can free Hegel from this highly questionable sort of
metaphysical commitment. An oak tree is supposed to grow in a certain
manner. We can say what it should look like if it becomes fully actualized
as a proper oak tree. But very many oak trees will not develop in this
manner. They may have disease or be invaded by pests or just have the bad
luck of being crashed into by a large truck. In a similar manner, Hegelians
might hold that they have not discovered some special metaphysical entity
11
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 171–226.
or privileged causal properties underlying history. They have rather picked
out what they find to be the most crucial and interesting aspects of
development on the planet, the kinds of increasing “selfiness” that
Dennett talks about, leading up to rational autonomy in humans. They
have tried to show what happens when these developments go well. But as
with the oak tree, nothing, no special process of destiny, guarantees that
they must go well. Through chance events the human population may
settle into forms of life that do not actualize reason and freedom very
adequately. History may regress in Hegel’s terms instead of going forward;
there is no underlying causal engine that guarantees the result. Such an
account may get Hegel off the hook in terms of a mysterious entity causing
these Hegelian structures to come about. But there clearly remain elements
of teleology in his idea that there is a deep philosophical privilege to this
particular direction of history. From the point of view of biological evolu-
tion, there is no reason to suppose that increases in Dennett’s “selfiness”
and ultimately in rational self-determination have a privileged role in the
timeline of the planet. Perhaps cockroaches are destined ultimately to
dominate the earth, their biological strategy ultimately a winning one.
I have focused here on how Hegel’s philosophy seems to be shaped by
theological models in the background, such as the medieval picture of
God’s knowing of others as a self-knowing. There is a further theological
structure that he appears to take quite seriously: the Christian ideas of the
Incarnation and the Trinity.12 A very strong reaction against his use of
these ideas will feature in the work of some important twentieth-century
philosophers, so it will be valuable to see what he says here. Religious
thinking for Hegel usually displays an inadequately developed philosophi-
cal thinking. In speaking of God the Father, of the incarnation of God in
his Son, and of the reconciling of the Father and the Son through the
activity of the Holy Spirit that is present in the church, Hegel thinks that
theologians were trying to get at the philosophical ideas that he himself
develops in a more secular form and with less “picture thinking.” Thus
God the Father can stand for Hegel’s Logic considered as developing its
self-relating, self-grounding structures simply in the realm of thought. But
those structures, if they unfold and develop properly, must manifest
themselves, says Hegel, in nature and in history. If what we call divinity
is free, self-determining rational activity, then that activity must become
12
For Hegel on these religious notions, see G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Peter
C. Hodgson (ed.), R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (trans.) (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), 452–89.
embodied in nature and in human individuals, institutions, and cultural
practices. And the tensions and oppositions between the ideal and the real,
between that spiritual activity thought of as divine and all its embodiments,
must be overcome through the reconciling work of Hegelian Geist or spirit.
Pippin’s Hegel, it would seem, would appear to rest content with the
“Logical” realm of God the Father, with a set of logically related ways of
taking reality to be such-and-such but with no assurance that the resulting
categories truly reach out to the world, are truly incarnated within it.
Pippin is analogous to the religious believer who cannot quite believe in
the incarnation of the divine in the human as real and effective, who is
worried that such an incarnation would damage and contaminate the pure
self-determination of the divine on its own. The thought structure Pippin
uncovers seems to apply to ‘reality’ or to ‘objects,’ as these notions are
constructed within subjectivity, rather than reaching out to underlie reality
itself in the manner that Jesus himself, for the Christian believer, truly is
embodied in human, natural form. In regard to medieval theology, Pippin,
it seems, would reject the picture of Aquinas: that God, without losing any
of his self-relating autonomy, can relate to the otherness of a world that is
robustly Aristotelian in its substantial metaphysical character. Instead he
would favor the late-medieval voluntarists, for whom preserving God’s
autonomy means emptying out the other of any character of its own, so
that the divine activity has no limits in establishing what objectivity
must be.
In his concluding chapter, Pippin expresses doubts about certain ways of
conceiving Hegel’s project, including, it appears, Hegel’s own way of
conceiving it. Pippin can at times remind one of the medieval philosophers
who worried that if God knows creatures in the world, then his perfection
and autonomy are spoiled by a determination from without. In Pippin’s
words once more, so many of the concepts of Hegel’s Logic “are clearly as
they are because the world is at it is, and cannot possibly be considered
categorial results of thought’s pure self-determination.”13 What becomes
clear is that what Pippin takes to be an unacceptable determination by
something alien to thought, Hegel takes easily in stride as an aspect of
a richer notion of autonomy, one achieved at a rather mature stage of
reflection. Pippin’s goal, it can appear, is to guard the “pure self-
determination” aspect of Hegel’s project and surrender the idea of
a robust world-relating. Unlike Hegel, he is strongly suspicious of anything
like the religious notion of incarnation of the divine as a model for the
13
relation between thought and reality, such that there is a reconciliation
between the ideal and the real, between spirit and nature, so that the
structures of thought are fully at home in the most solid reality of the
world. As Pippin describes his own picture: it “would mean, for example,
that a truly determinate reflection is not a resolution of the opposition
between positing and external reflection, but a continuation of such
a constantly unstable reflective enterprise in a suitably self-conscious . . .
way.”14 The determinate reflection in Hegel is one that recognizes that the
self-relating moment present in a distancing, self-regarding reflection can
be well reconciled with that against which this movement of reflection
activated itself. We can expand that activity of reflection until it is no
longer opposed to reality, as a critical measure of it, but includes a full-
bodied embrace of that reality (which itself is seen as having a self-reflective
aspect, as we have been noting). But instead of this Hegelian reconciliation
we have, on Pippin’s own description, an irresolvable tension back and
forth between unstable oppositions, toward a goal that is never reached,
that is in some sense incommensurable (once again, a suggestion of the
late-medieval structure). We have to guard against attaching ourselves to
features of the world as if they are, even partially, embodiments of a self-
determining activity. We have to remain self-consciously in an activity of
reflection that never quite resolves its distance and alienation from the
world.
Pippin thus stops Hegel’s project at a certain point of unresolved
tensions, in order to make that project more open to striving after unreach-
able ethical ideals. It is as if, in the end, he gives up what Hegel has meant
by his central notion, that of Geist, the activity of reconciling the highest
spiritual idea (rational autonomy) and the real order. There will be for
Pippin’s Hegel no ultimate mediation of reflective thought and the world
but the hope of a coming together that is endlessly delayed. Perhaps he
should be commended for making this move; a considerable danger in
Hegel’s thought is that one will rest content too early with the ethical and
political institutions one has, that one will accept a premature reconcilia-
tion of ideal and real. But it does not follow that Pippin is thus interpreting
Hegel accurately as he makes him closer to a philosopher of an unrealizable
sublime, of an ethical goal that remains in some sense ineffable. We would
surely be painting with far too broad a brush, but it is tempting to see, on
one side, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, and, in their own ways, Nietzsche and
Dennett. They do not see that assigning a robust, substantial character to
14
nature is a disturbing limit on a kind of self-determining, self-grounding
activity that is worth defending. On the other side are the late medievals,
the empiricists, Kant, Kierkegaard, the logical positivists, Quine, and
Pippin’s Kantian version of Hegel. They think that in order to safeguard
a realm where subjectivity or language or the divine presents its structures
to itself, reality in its own realm must be radically thinned out as certain
structures are imposed on it from one side. (Hegel’s secularizing of the
Christian notion of the incarnation will be the background against which
some of the great intellectual battles of the twentieth century will be
fought. We will see, for example, that Walter Benjamin’s philosophy can
be articulated as a fierce attack on virtually all of the theological and
religious models that seem at work in Hegel.)
Perhaps we get a clearer picture of what is problematic in Pippin’s
account if we look at his response to another philosopher treated in the
present book: John McDowell. The title of his essay on McDowell gives
the game away: “Leaving Nature behind: or Two Cheers for
‘Subjectivism’.”15 He applauds McDowell for trying to articulate a richer
notion of ‘the natural’ than the restrictive one offered by the natural
sciences. McDowell speaks of our self-actualization as natural animals
who, with the “second nature” that cultural training develops in us,
become sensitive to reasons for belief and for action. These cannot be
accounted for by any explanation that the natural sciences can come up
with but, still, they are what we master as natural human animals living in
cultural communities. Yet Pippin thinks that McDowell is still entrapped
in far too great an attachment to nature. He has not emancipated his idea
of subjectivity, of thought capable of determining its norms for itself, from
a dependence on forms of thinking that are still shaped by our natural
circumstances.
Pippin is upset by the possibility of any attraction at all to the accounts
in evolutionary biology and cognitive science that might try to offer us
lessons in ethics and politics by revealing somewhat fixed qualities of
human nature. He recommends, indeed, that we “leave nature behind.”
He says that our reasons are not responsive to nature, as, so Pippin believes,
they unfortunately continue to be in McDowell’s account. They are
responsive rather to other humans in a discursive community.
If McDowell wants our rational spontaneity to go all the way out to the
contours of the world itself, sensitive to its layout as offering patterns of
15
Pippin, “Leaving Nature Behind: or Two Cheers for ‘Subjectivism’,” in N. H. Smith (ed.), Reading
McDowell: On Mind and World (London: Routledge, 2002), 58–75.
evidence relevant to belief, Pippin wants that spontaneity to be focused on
the conditions of social dialogue. Reality itself virtually disappears then as
an independent pressure on thought and becomes something of
a projection of the results of that social interaction. McDowell wants
a modest re-enchantment of nature that would see the natural order not
simply as a realm of causal laws but also as a site where patterns of evidence
come into view that are suitable to form support for chains of inference
leading to beliefs, so that reason can be said to be at home in the world. He
emphasizes that it is as natural beings in Aristotle’s sense that we develop
the spontaneity that makes us sensitive to good reasons for belief and action
and not just products of nature’s causation. Pippin seems happy to have the
world be emptied out, to have nature virtually disappear, and to put all the
pressure of rationality on the realm of social intersubjectivity. He treats
McDowell’s project as an attempt to re-enchant nature by finding reason
embodied there. (McDowell would not disagree with this characteriza-
tion.) But such a strategy, says Pippin, after the success of the great
scientific disenchantment of nature, is unlikely to be persuasive.
We should leave nature behind and ask instead how there could be “a
common mindedness such that our reactions to conduct that is objection-
able have become so intimate and such a part of that fabric that the conduct
being the sort of conduct it is counts thereby as reason enough to condemn
it.”16 In other words, the reasons for action depend on social agreements so
firmly embedded in habitual practice over time that they can be taken as
given features of our ethical world instead of as matters up for review. This
position seems, on the face of it, somewhat at odds with Pippin’s insis-
tence, in his particular reading of Hegel, on the modern imperative for
genuine self-determination, since we would just be going along with the
traditions of our tribe.
In his reply to Pippin, McDowell says that his focus on our answerability
to each other in a social world cannot account for the crucial requirement
that thought must have objective purport: It is thought only insofar as it is
directed toward reality’s contours in a project of getting them right.
“Answerability to each other in discourse is not a self-standing foundation
on which we could construct a derivative account of how talk and thought
are directed toward reality.”17 To some degree, it may appear, the two
thinkers are not quite setting their positions in direct confrontation.
McDowell is concerned with any reasons at all for belief, including
16
Pippin, “Leaving Nature Behind,” 68.
17
John McDowell, “Responses,” in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, 275.
ordinary beliefs such as that one area of possible settlement has more water
easily available than does another. Such reasons he finds appropriately in
nature. Pippin is concerned more with reasons for ethical behavior, which
may rely more on the solidifying of social agreement, though McDowell
would likely not let them rely fully on that basis. (Could we have reasons
for action and not just for belief that are there independently of us?)
I should add that McDowell goes on to admit that “Hegel’s thought
tends ultimately toward leaving nature behind.”18 (My own reading of
Hegel makes the relationship to nature somewhat more substantial, but it
is true that his great interest is in the realm of Geist, of cultural history.)
This essay on McDowell recalls to mind just how vigorous Pippin is in
denying any importance in Hegel of an account of nature and of our
relation to it. He states that Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature can be dismissed
because it is a part of the Hegelian machinery that turns no wheels else-
where in his thought.19 And as we have seen, the idealism that Pippin
attributes to Hegel means that self-conscious thinking on its own, in its
own sphere, lays out the conditions for objectivity, the categorial scheme
that any experience of objects would have to abide by. He thinks he has
solved any difficulties by making subjectivity communal, so that respon-
siveness to one another can replace responsiveness to the world. But how
can responsiveness to others, even if we extend it to the end of inquiry,
count as fully justifying our beliefs? Ultimately, we need an account of why
those beliefs of others, when agreement is reached, should be trusted.
The only plausible answer is that these others have done their work of
belief-formation in the context of a rich interaction with the world that
counts as tracking its contours. It is ultimately that Saturn and Jupiter are
put together in certain ways that we come to have beliefs about them as
thus put together. Agreement is explained by the way the world is, not the
other way around.
It is difficult to look at Hegel’s work as a whole and accept Pippin’s
account of it. Hegel, for one thing, spent a good deal of time and effort on his
philosophy of nature. He hardly thinks that it is a wheel that turns nothing
else or that we should “leave nature behind,” as Pippin suggests to
McDowell. He works very hard to reconcile thought and nature, the
spiritual and the natural, by showing that one side is at home in the other.
We can miss this point because he sometimes speaks in theological terms
that he understands to be ultimately standing in for philosophical concepts.
Thus, he says: “But to the extent that thinking recognizes that nature is
18 19
McDowell, “Responses,” 277. Pippin, “Leaving Nature Behind,” 60.
created by God, that understanding and reason are within it, nature is
known by thinking human beings.”20 So nature for Hegel must be a place
that reason is at home in (as in McDowell’s account). And: “This reconcilia-
tion is philosophy. Philosophy is to this extent theology. It presents the
reconciliation of God with himself and with nature, showing that nature,
otherness, is implicitly divine.”21 From these quotes we can see that what he
means by the divine (the highest activity of self-relating-in-relating-to-
otherness) must be shown to be reconciled with nature itself, which itself
has different levels of “selfiness.” The idea of the incarnation and of the
reconciling work of spirit means just that the structure of our thinking must
find itself at home in the world, including in nature. Hegel could not be
clearer on this point. Pippin offers us something very different. His Hegel
shows how our conceptual ways of thinking about thinking can be recon-
ciled with our conceptual ways of thinking about objects, not with objective
reality itself, which has been left behind for Pippin along with nature.
In reading Pippin, we are reminded of Hegel’s description of the religion
of the sublime as articulating a lofty divine activity of thinking that has
liberated itself radically from any tie to, or determination by, the realm of
nature. The very success of that radical overcoming of any dependence on
nature means that even a more sophisticated structure of mediation with
nature is not possible. For the religion of the sublime, says Hegel, “the
natural or worldly is negated as unbefitting the subjective.”22 (That seems
exactly Pippin’s stance, yet Hegel believes we must move beyond the
religion of the sublime taken on its own.) Without the idea of the Son as
the higher-level reconciling of God and nature, we have an abstract think-
ing that operates autonomously within its own realm but does not become
real in the world itself. “Merely as the Father, God is not yet the truth (he is
known this way, without the Son, in the Jewish religion.)”23 In Pippin’s
Hegel, the structures of thought uncovered in Hegel’s Logic, which in
religious terms expresses the pure self-relating of God the Father, become
a constraint on thinking about reality; they do not become incarnate in the
world. (To say that Pippin is wrong in his reading of Hegel is not to say that
he is wrong in his skepticism regarding Hegel’s philosophical deployment
of the religious concept of incarnation.)
Pippin, it seems, would practice a kind of iconoclasm that would leave
natural structures behind as if they were false idols. Hegel, in contrast,
20
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 436.
21
22
23
retains earlier forms of nature-based experience, only now as belonging to
a larger achievement of subjective autonomy rather than to a continued
domination by nature. The sphere of subjective spirit opens for Hegel with
vague experiences and moods shaped by geography, climate, terrain, even
time of day, and he suggests that these experiences differ for different
peoples, so that a French “soul” will be different from a German one or an
Islamic one. He does not claim that this level of experience, grounded in
nature, is lost with advancing enlightenment and autonomy. The German
culture founded on its natural “soul” will remain somewhat different from
French culture, without an iconoclastic, universalizing demand that all
such earlier ties to nature be given up. The “self-feeling” I have where my
moods are somewhat porous to my natural surroundings does not vanish as
I become a free, rational thinker. Pippin recognizes that Hegel makes these
points but he is dismissive of their importance: “The plot for his narrative
concerns attempts by the human spirit to free itself from a self-
understanding tied to nature, and these anthropological elements are
understood as initial, very limited successes.”24 Hegel is indeed interested
in that emancipation from nature, as Pippin claims, but he does not
propose that we fully leave behind that which we are thus emancipating
ourselves from. Further evidence is offered in The Philosophy of Right.
There he talks of the “natural ethical spirit – the family.”25 The family is
an ethical institution whose several aspects show its continuing ties to
nature: membership of individuals in a natural kind, sexual drive and sex
differences, the emotional bonds that unite the family, and eventually
death. These natural factors require cultivation of the individual up to
a level of greater autonomy and self-direction, and individuals find their
fulfillment through citizenship in a non-natural “spiritual” institution, the
state. But that advance does not mean an erasure of the earlier, more
natural ties. Hegel assigns a continuing role in the working of Geist for
family bonds, for the natural self-interest that expresses itself in civil
society, and for the shaping of human life by sexuality and death. He
even has a special role (for us surely a problematic one) in the governing
parliament for the large landowners whose attachment to the natural factor
of the land is an aspect of their virtues.
The contrast with Marx is instructive. Marx’s idea of a new order is more
like that of the religion of the sublime with its radical iconoclasm.
24
Pippin, “Leaving Nature Behind,” 68–9.
25
Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Allen W. Wood (ed.), H. B. Nisbet (trans.) (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), section 157.
The natural bonds of family, the individual self-interest that expresses itself
in civil society, and aristocratic attachments to the land must be overcome in
the formation of a thoroughly new socialist individual. Even the way our
natural organs function will be transformed, the Marxist says, into new
socialist eyes and ears. Everything that has been called natural in humans
must be reinterpreted as a social construct that can be changed with a new
social order, and if one continues to appeal to the pressure of the natural, one
is said to be making the serious error of “naturalizing” a changeable social
condition. Much of literary theory over the last several decades has followed
a similar path, where again the naturalizing of socially constructed condi-
tions is the great evil. So has the realm of postmodern fiction, where the
author can freely construct fictive worlds that are concerned only with their
own conditions and their own self-generation and where there is no con-
straint to have situations and characters be consistent with the ways things
actually occur in reality, whether natural or psychological. Pippin’s reading
of Hegel, in its advice to “leave nature behind,” is then like Marxism or
recent literary theory more than like Hegel himself. Marx achieves autonomy
by liquidating the forms of the older world and creating a new one out of
a radical theory that is self-supporting. Hegel achieves autonomy through
taking up our richly natural selves into more sophisticated practices that can
use that naturalness in us in a larger work of self-determination. Pippin’s
conception of self-determining thought is like that of the voluntarist God
that must remove the Aristotelian essences in natural individuals as a limit on
his spontaneity. Hegel asks instead how a world of things with something
like Aristotelian essences can be comprehended in a manner that does not
require the dissolving of those essences but sees them as no longer an affront
to and a limit upon the spontaneity of thought.
Pippin, I claimed, appears perturbed by those who would try to natur-
alize subjectivity by using the findings of evolutionary biology and cogni-
tive science. My guess is that if Hegel were alive today he would be as
deeply curious about these scientific studies as he was about magnetism,
chemistry, electricity, and biology in his own time. He would wish to show
how what is thus offered as natural in us can be taken up into more
sophisticated human activity that finds that level of naturalness as
a supporting resource for our more autonomous development. And he
would be correct in doing so instead of practicing a radical iconoclasm. It is
surely true that some aspects of what has been built into human brains by
natural selection (for example, a tendency to emphasize gender differences
or a readiness to divide the world into us and them and to stigmatize the
other) need to be seriously modified by cultural training if we care about
social justice. But other aspects of our naturalness may still be useful: our
sense of shame, our sense of fairness and reciprocity, our readiness to isolate
cheaters in crucial practices of cooperation, the deep natural basis for our
erotic and social attachments, the way a complex emotive machinery
guides social interaction (though it can easily go wrong), the way
a sophisticated cognitive-emotive complex in us can attach us to a form
of life and make us find it meaningful, and so forth.
An iconoclastic Marxist, Kantian, or utilitarian moral theory that wishes
to erase these in favor of a newly constructed order would leave us not only
with impoverished lives but also with forms of life that can simply not
operate on their own. That is one sense we can give today to Hegel’s claim
that we must find reason to be reconciled with nature. Even as we make fun
of certain of Hegel’s examples of a “self-relating” activity in nature, there is
something right in his idea that we are most free as thinkers when we can
acknowledge the partly self-determining character of natural organisms,
kinds, and processes as no longer a limit on our own self-determining
activity. (Perhaps we may come to think of our activity as being much
enriched by our participation, as it were, in a grand orchestral work that
requires other members, including natural entities, to be contributing their
own self-determining activity to the overall orchestral music.) Just as in the
Phenomenology’s account of the master-slave relationship one achieves
greater self-conscious awareness of one’s own autonomy through granting
such autonomy an independent existence in the other, so we can recognize
that what Dennett calls the levels of “selfiness” in the nonhuman world are
not a limit on us. To recognize the ways that things and processes in nature
determine and sustain themselves in intricate fashion (as opposed to
Quine’s rabbits that need a linguistic machinery to go to work on an
indeterminate substrate before they exist as such) is to understand at the
same time the power of a mind that can lead not simply to the consuming
of what is other but to letting it be and appreciating its independence.
Marxist iconoclasm toward nature was likely to lead to the extreme
environmental degradation that one saw in so many communist nations
of Eastern Europe. Pippin’s “leaving nature behind” exalts an autonomous
activity of thinking that, while it develops a notion of what objective reality
ought to be as well as a rich notion of intersubjectivity, seems to have no
confident purchase on the ordinary world of natural happenings. Hegel’s
idea of the relationship of thought to nature is different. He seems to have
emancipated himself from late-medieval thought more than Pippin has
done.
chapter 5
Walter Benjamin: Incarnation or Radical

Incommensurability?
One can read Hegel, I have argued, as an attempt to counter the picture of
the world bequeathed to philosophy by late-medieval voluntarism. Instead
of an omnipotent, free self-willing whose doings human reason can never
hope to comprehend, as they are hidden and inscrutable, we have in Hegel
a divine activity that is essentially self-manifesting, that displays its meta-
physical character to a very limited degree in the world of nature and then
richly in that of culture. Instead of a radical gap between the human and
the divine, a gap that can be bridged only by the arbitrary address of God,
we have a reconciling of the two levels, a recognition that what we have
called divine can ultimately be embodied in the human sphere. Instead of
the actual world being only one arbitrary, radically contingent choice
among the infinite number of worlds God could have made, so that only
the most arbitrarily minimal part of his essence is expressed in that
universe, we have a world that can genuinely express the fullness of the
realm of spirit or Geist. Instead of an insubstantial, hollow world which is
all we can take it to be in relation to God’s voluntarist power, we have
a world that instantiates robust and sophisticated versions of a richly
unfolding activity of self-determination.
While he believes that the most adequate language of description is
philosophy, Hegel often uses the language of religion and theology to
articulate his account. It is significant that this account gives preference
to the Christian religion. The ancient Hebrews had developed the idea of
the divine as a truly spiritual activity, fully liberated from any determina-
tion by nature. But, says Hegel, we must learn to recognize that the free,
rational self-determining activity we have called divine must be realized in
human individuals, practices, and institutions. Christianity is the religion
that expresses that reconciliation of thought and reality, the spiritual and
the natural. “The essence of the Christian principle has been unfolded: it is
the principle of Mediation. Man realizes his spiritual essence only when he
conquers the Natural that attaches to him. This conquest is possible only
142
Walter Benjamin 143
on the supposition that the human and divine nature are essentially one,
and that Man, so far as he is Spirit, also possesses the essentiality and
substantiality that belongs to the idea of Deity. The condition of the
mediation in question is the consciousness of this unity, and the intuition
of this unity was given to man in Christ.”1 The idea of the Incarnation, of
God becoming man in Jesus, is for Hegel the expression in religious terms
of what can be expressed in a more secular, philosophical manner. Humans
at first cannot comprehend that their own essence is to be free, rational,
and self-determining. So they began articulating this idea as something
alien to them, as an external being that is a perfectly unconditioned activity
of self-knowing and self-willing. This phase of thought reaches a lofty
sublime level in the culture of the ancient Hebrews, for whom the divine
activity has transcended all determination by nature and its various entrap-
ments. But then the great work arises of seeing how that ideal of rational,
autonomous activity, externalized at first into a transcendent being, might
be made actual in individuals and in the social forms of human life.
The self-relating activity thought of as divine must become the very activity
by which we recognize ourselves in what we have called divine, so that the
relation to what is radically other becomes a self-relation. “The true Spirit
exists in man – is his Spirit; and the individual gives himself the certainty of
this identity with the Absolute . . .”2 The work of history is that of “bring-
ing the Reconciliation implicit [in Christianity] into objective and explicit
realization.”3 That means that humans discover themselves to be embody-
ing what they have all along thought of as divine. The political and social
order must become an ever better incarnation of the idea of rational
autonomy. The outcome is what Hegel calls the identity of the human
with the Absolute.
That narrative has to disadvantage Judaism. On Hegel’s account the
Jewish religion is structured in terms of a radical opposition between
a sublime, unrepresentable deity and, on the other side, the natural order
as well as the order of everyday life. If Christianity is the religion of
reconciling the divine and human orders, Judaism must resist any such
porousness between the two realms as idolatrous. It must resist any back-
sliding or regression by which the spiritual seems to be taking on more
natural forms, as in the old nature religions that Judaism has turned
strongly against. The spiritual realm may mysteriously address those in
1
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, J. Sibree (trans.) (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2004),
444–5.
2
Hegel, Philosophy of History, 449. 3 Hegel, Philosophy of History, 491.
the natural realm with commands as if out of nowhere, but humans cannot
take on any aspect of the divine. Separations are permanent, with no more
sophisticated reconciliation later on with what has been separated from.
Abraham leaves his homeland and never returns to it, says Hegel. When
Hegel claims that “the human and divine nature are essentially one,” and
that humans, as they develop their spiritual-cultural life possess the very
essence that belongs to the idea of God, that move must strike a believing
Jew as heretical, as indeed violating the key principle of Judaism: the
ultimate transcendence of the one ineffable God.
The principle of reconciliation of the divine and human orders is in
theology called the Holy Spirit and Hegel in his philosophical reading of
history continues to use the word Geist or Spirit. Judaism, despite its very
lofty notion of God the Father, possesses, says Hegel, neither the idea of the
incarnation of the divine in the human through the Son, nor that of Geist.
“Merely as the Father, God is not yet the truth (he is known in this way,
without the Son, in the Jewish religion).”4 A consequence, Hegel adds, is
that from a Jewish perspective one cannot locate in the natural or human
orders the self-animating, self-determining activity that we have called
divine. The world itself becomes flat and prosaic, mere material to be
determined by an agency external to it. The world is negated, as being
simply what is opposed to the spiritual level of the divine; it reveals itself to
be fundamentally inadequate to embody the divine in any fashion.5
The human cultural realm, then, has no unfolding life of its own, with
a certain autonomy of self-development, but adheres slavishly to rules that
arrive arbitrarily from an incomprehensible and alien realm. States, legal
systems, and institutions can therefore not emerge as the gradual self-
manifesting of the idea of freedom; there cannot be any true historical
development given the radical separation of divine and human in Judaism.
In his early theological writings, Hegel explains why Moses in the Bible is
unable to find expressions to persuade the people. Like the prosaic, flat,
lifeless materials of the world that remain when a transcendent divine takes
all determining power to itself, so Moses is like a bird that has warmed
rocks instead of eggs in the nest. When he takes them into the air, they have
no inner principle of activity that lets them fly on their own but instead
they fall heavily back to earth.6
4
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 426.
5
See Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 363–74.
6
G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, T. M. Knox (trans.) (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1971, paperback of original edition by University of Chicago Press, 1948), 199.
Walter Benjamin 145
We might note that Hegel’s description of Judaism makes it come close
in several respects to the outlook of the theological voluntarism of the late-
medieval period. We have once again a sublime divine activity that is
incommensurable with anything human as well as a devaluing, an empty-
ing out, of any metaphysical character the world could be thought to have
on its own. We have an incomprehensible divine realm whose interven-
tions in this one have to appear arbitrary and have to be such that any other
arbitrary entry will seem equally plausible and justifiable; we must submit
slavishly to the demands laid out by what we count as revelation from
above. Hegel has developed his own philosophy in order to overcome that
notion of the divine, so he has a reason to place Judaism in his narrative in
the way that he does. (There is an issue here for the history of religion.
The position of theological voluntarism, with its emphasis on God’s
unconditioned power to act immediately to produce any effect whatever,
might seem to threaten the very idea of the incarnation of Christ. If God
acts arbitrarily to save some and not others, with merit not a factor at all,
then why could he not accomplish this with any individual at any time,
without having a second person of the Trinity become man and sacrifice
himself for human sins? Does not a single divine person have the unlimited
power to forgive sin without any mediating entities? Radical Protestantism
might seem here to come closer to Judaism, and indeed many early
Protestant leaders grew beards like the Hebrew patriarchs and emphasized
their continuity with the Old Testament. One can read Kierkegaard’s Fear
and Trembling and wonder, with all the emphasis on the immediate
relationship of a single individual to God, in the manner of Abraham,
where Christ and the Holy Spirit are supposed to fit in.)
How might Jewish intellectuals respond to Hegel? One answer is to
point out that the actual Biblical narratives show that the divine being,
while unrepresentable in any idolatrous form, has a close ongoing relation-
ship with his people and is hardly the distant, unfathomable entity that
later theology might take him to be in order to safeguard his pure trans-
cendence. The world itself remains in Judaism a place to be enjoyed, not
a devalued realm without any traces of the spiritual. A second answer, in
the manner of the philosopher Hermann Cohen, is to play down any
notion of an incommensurable, ineffable sublime and to define Judaism,
through judicious use of the ancient Hebrew prophets, as the religion of
reason, of ethical ideals, and of liberalism. The deep essence of Judaism
turns out, then, to be that of German liberal Protestantism and the deep
essence of the latter turns out to make it eventually equivalent to Judaism.
The sudden entry from without of a messianic realm becomes instead the
asymptotic movement of human culture toward greater justice. Still a third
answer is offered by Solomon Formstecher and Samuel Hirsch, two
thinkers who responded to Hegel and to German idealism more
generally.7 They grant the rough truth of Hegel’s story of Geist and history,
but they say that this story is only about Christianity’s emergence from
paganism and natural religions, not about Judaism. There are two forms of
Geist: natural and ethical. The first one, characteristic of Christianity,
discovers itself only through a history-long project of engaging with, and
emancipating itself from, the natural order that has powerfully determined
it from the start. Hegel gives a good account of that story. Ethical Geist, in
contrast, was granted to the Jews early on through revelation. They could
enter into a proper ethical relationship with God without needing to work
through the long historical dialectic of having Geist separate itself from
pagan natural religions and of then entering a new kind of relationship
with the world. Formstecher is confident that Jewish ethical Geist and
Christian emerging-from-nature Geist, as in Hegel, will eventually come
together, while Hirsch thinks it unlikely that the Christian narrative can
advance that far; it will remain to some degree entrapped in nature as with
the old nature gods.
While these three responses to Hegel’s narrative are important, the
response I am interested in is a somewhat different one, though definitely
akin to that of Formstecher and Hirsch. The best exemplar of it is Walter
Benjamin. Instead of disputing Hegel’s story and his characterization of
the Jews, he accepts it but then performs a transvaluation of values. What
Hegel has found to be positive in Christianity turns out to be negative and
what he has found to be negative in Judaism turns out to be praiseworthy.
It is true that Benjamin does not mention Hegel often and his combat with
him is usually implicit. But the surest way to plot out his moves and to
assess their significance is to see him as working against Hegel’s account of
history. When his biographer compares an essay by Benjamin with Karl
Barth’s theological work in the 1920s, we will surely note that what is in
question is Barth’s strongly anti-Hegelian polemic.8 That theologian
argues against any account of the divine that turns it into a self-
unfolding principle immanent in human history. God’s grace must rather
come arbitrarily from without, in a manner not caused or motivated by any
happening in the ordinary historical world. And when Benjamin says that
7
An excellent treatment of Formstecher and Hirsch is in Julius Guttman, Philosophies of Judaism,
David W. Silverman (trans.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 349–65.
8
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge: Belknap
Press, 2014), 129–30.
Walter Benjamin 147
he objects to reconciliation in its various forms, we hear Hegel’s treatment
of Judaism and Christianity in the background, for Hegel has defined
Christianity against Judaism as the religion of reconciling stark metaphy-
sical oppositions. “Pessimism all along the line. Absolutely. Mistrust in the
fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of
European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between
classes, between nations, between individuals.”9 Benjamin says that while
he believes that religion and politics are ultimately the same, he does not
see that any mediation between them is possible, only a paradoxical reversal
of one into the other.10 Hegel, in contrast, would argue for precisely such
a mediation.
When we see what Benjamin praises, for example when he finds German
baroque drama superior to the drama of the Renaissance, it often turns out
to have characteristics rather close to what Hegel has criticized in Judaism.
(We will shortly see how this is so in the case of that German drama.)
If Hegel says the radical opposition between divine and human, with
a sublime God allocating all determining power to himself, means that
the world becomes prosaic, hollow, arbitrary, and flat, without any self-
animating life and without any participation in Geist, then Benjamin
celebrates precisely those qualities. A recognition of these, he claims, is
what opens us to the possibility of a radically different order that would
express his version of Jewish messianism. Instead of Geist or free rational
self-determination having become embodied in human individuals and
political institutions, history offers us only a set of abject failures to bring
about freedom and justice. The angel of history looking back, claims
Benjamin, finds only ruins piling up in a vale of suffering.11 Hegel’s story
of Geist makes us see the accidental and arbitrary features of history as if
they were natural and necessary. It makes us wrongly see determination by
arbitrary, accidental, unjust forces as a kind of human self-determination,
says Benjamin. But these Hegelian moves are just forms of idolatry, of
seeing what ought to be strictly divine as being incarnated in the human
order. Only by challenging these false idols, only by refusing to see any
aspects of Geist embodied in the world, will we be able to free ourselves
from illusory, inadequate attachments and be prepared for a new messianic
order. Otherwise we remain transient entities trapped in nature’s cycling
9
Quoted in Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 264.
10
Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 260.
11
That image is from Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected
Writings, Vol. IV, 1938–40, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Edmund Jephcott and
others (trans.) (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 389–400.
forces and determinations, as in mythical conceptions of human life and as
in natural religions. Benjamin rejects any notion of a progressive develop-
ment in the homogeneous time of ordinary history, as in Hegel.12 He is
looking for lightning-like flashes of significance that bring ordinary time to
a standstill, that rupture the continuum of history, that suggest messianic
possibilities that might redeem past injustice.13
Again, Benjamin’s stance, with its metaphysically emptied-out world of
ruins and its arbitrary, lightning-flash entrances from what seems an
unknowable elsewhere, will remind the reader of the context of medieval
theological voluntarism. He is rejecting what had appeared to be Hegel’s
successful response to that intellectual situation, while wishing to show the
importance of Judaism to European thought. He is also influenced in his
stance by his sympathetic reading of the early German romantics, a very
strong research interest in the first part of his scholarly career. If we are
looking for linkages between those romantics and the patterns of thought
of theological voluntarism, J. G. Hamann is a good place to look for them.
(In an early work on language, Benjamin quotes Hamann twice.14) It is as if
Hamann is repeating for a later century that particular medieval stance.15
He says that there can be no deep scientific structure to the universe
because God’s omnipotent, unfathomable will might make any object
move in any way at all. Nor can there be any deep logical pattern to
human arguments because God might make any statement follow from
any other one. So only individual cases in their particularity are valid and
generalizations necessarily falsify matters. (One is reminded of Ockham.)
The so-called progress of the Enlightenment is entirely an illusion, since
what the Enlightenment would leave out is the theological basis that
ultimately grounds all of reality. Fortunately, God has granted us his
revelation in the sacred texts of scripture. God’s creation of the universe
is like a linguistic act of naming and there is a pure paradisiacal language
that has fallen into the ordinary languages used by humans. By working
through the texts of his sacred revelation, especially in the mystical inter-
pretation of sacred symbols offered by the Kabbalah, we might approach
again to that higher, purer language. Benjamin was fascinated by the early
12
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395.
13
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 394–7.
14
See Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Benjamin,
Reflections, Peter Demetz (ed.), Edmund Jephcott (trans.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 321
and 326.
15
My treatment of Hamann here owes much to Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann
and the Origins of Irrationalism (London: John Murray, 1993).
Walter Benjamin 149
German romantics such as Hamann, for he saw them as favoring
a revolutionary transformation of the earth, one that would bring about
an entirely new world order instead of an Hegelian unfolding of what was
already implicit in earlier practices. He is disappointed that many of these
romantics turn in later life to a conservative Catholicism.
Benjamin reads the early German romantics in this manner at just the
time when he is also taking his Jewish heritage more seriously. That latter
move has to work against some of the identifications and emotive invest-
ments of his early youth. He was seriously involved with one branch of the
German youth movement and he wrote essays in which he claimed that it
was the special task of German youth “to serve Geist,” so that he could be
considered rather Hegelian at this point. And he and a close friend bonded
over the poetry of Stefan George, whose work has a hieratic, Catholic-
sacramental quality and who believed, in something of a Hellenic manner,
that an adolescent beloved of his who died young had been raised to divine
status.16 Those two tendencies, toward the Hegelian enterprise of Geist and
toward the Catholic and Hellenic character of George’s poetry, would both
be erased as Benjamin’s thought developed and as his commitment to his
own version of Judaism increased.
He shows his deeply anti-Hegelian tendencies in one of his most
revealing works: The Origin of German Tragic Drama.17 (Some scholars
would prefer to translate this work as The Origin of the German Mourning-
Play.) There he examines dramas of the German baroque era that have
traditionally been given little respect. Their characteristics tend to come off
poorly in comparison with those associated with Renaissance work. The art
of the Renaissance, like that of the ancient Greeks and ultimately like
Hegel’s own philosophy, aims at what Hegel calls the concrete symbol.
In such a symbol, which Greek sculpture is an example of, the spiritual idea
that one is trying to express seems to be captured in a convincing and
necessary manner, as if the idea in question shines forth compellingly from
the visible metaphorical object chosen. In contrast, German baroque
drama specializes in allegory.18 Benjamin links allegorical thinking with
the culture of the late Roman period, when writers could no longer believe
that the gods truly appeared in human forms and at human sites. These
sites could still be visited as places of absence, as offering the emptiness of
a world that once had given evidence of the presence of the divine. There
16
This period of Benjamin’s youth is well treated in Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 32–74.
17
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, John Osborne (trans.) (London: Verso,
1998).
18
See “Allegory and Trauerspiel” in Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 159–235.
was no more compelling presence, as in metaphor. The ancient gods and
goddesses, no longer able to be present in the same way, might then come
to stand for abstract ideas such as Love or Discord or Civic Peace.
Benjamin then develops a fruitful analogy. If the concrete symbols of
the Renaissance seem to make the ideas they express vividly and convin-
cingly evident, the German baroque playwright is dealing with a world in
which, as with the gods of the ancient world, the spiritual level one is
trying to comprehend no longer makes itself so vibrantly and concretely
present. It has become more distant and inscrutable, and its ways of
showing itself have become far more doubtful. He attributes this change
partially to German Protestantism and sees Hamlet, home in Denmark
from his student days at Luther’s Wittenberg, as someone caught in such
a world. (He is not, then, treating the baroque style of Catholic Europe.)
So the German baroque stage, unlike that of the Renaissance, will give us
a sense of an empty, hollow world where the meanings we are looking for
never arrive, never become vivid. As in the late-Roman era, characters
and objects in a play might stand allegorically for various abstract ideas,
such as Christian virtues or vices. But the linkage between a theatrical
figure and what it is supposed to stand for seems ever more arbitrary and
contingent in comparison with the concrete symbol of the Renaissance.
We see readily how a theatrical character might be linked with quite
different abstractions, while the ideas themselves might be symbolized in
many other ways. Lengthy books of interpretation emerge that define
which allegorical objects, for example in paintings, might stand for which
ideas. But as these books multiply, it becomes clearer that the allegorical
connection between the concrete level and a more spiritual one is arbi-
trary, multiple, and unconvincing. As more ingenuity goes into the
allegorical interpretations, there is a sense of desperate multiplication
and artificiality in these, as each seems only briefly convincing before it is
replaced by another just as arbitrary. We have materials, inert on their
own, that can be forced into different arrangements and interpretations
by the will of the writer. The spiritual life that is supposed to be made
present in art has disappeared like the ancient gods during the late-
Roman period.
While Renaissance art aims at crafting a whole that seems internally self-
animating and at presenting ideas that manifest themselves in a necessary
and inevitable form, German baroque drama seems to fill the stage with
accumulating sequences of lifeless fragments that might just as well have
been arranged differently. In Renaissance art there is a compelling self-
unfolding from within. “As a symbolic construct, the beautiful is supposed
Walter Benjamin 151
to merge with the divine in an unbroken whole.”19 For the German
baroque, says Benjamin, there is no such thing. The concatenation of
items appears a result of a somewhat haphazard compilation, as when
a scholarly collector gathers many references together without an over-
arching theme that arranges them. “That which lies here in ruins, the
highly significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact, the finest material in
baroque creation. For it is common practice in the literature of the baroque
to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal.”20 That
sense of a lifeless accumulation of ruined, arbitrarily thrown together
fragments suggests why so many baroque plays are not about life but
often involve torture and disembodiment and end up littering the stage
with corpses. For Benjamin, that violence is not simply an attempt to
interest a jaded audience. It is a feature of a space where death and broken
fragments rule because that which might bring self-animating life and
a robust presence has vanished into an ineffable realm whose entrances
into this one are unreliable and perhaps nonexistent or unrecognizable.
(There is no Hegelian Geist.) The beautiful does not merge with the divine
in an unbroken whole. The baroque thinker does not trust in the beautiful,
vital transfiguration of nature, as in Hellenic culture, but sees in nature
only decay and transience, since the life that matters is elsewhere. Never
does any transcendence come from within, as it does within Hegel’s
system.21 While the concrete symbol is “the very incarnation and embodi-
ment of the idea,” the world of baroque allegory presents a “petrified,
primordial landscape” of the “untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful.”22
The Hellenic world (and Nietzsche follows this position closely) aims at
the shaping and elevating of a still vital nature that raises itself into more
“divine” and spiritual forms. For the German baroque, natural objects have
lost all that inner vitality and have become passive materials to be manipu-
lated, as they wait for a meaning delivered from without. That is why the
rebus is a favored form. If in English I represent the word ‘believes’ with
a picture of a bee plus one of falling leaves, those two natural objects are no
longer part of living nature but have been transformed into writing or
script, as with hieroglyphics. The melancholy gaze of the baroque causes
life to flow out of objects in nature so that they become more like written
characters. The German baroque landscape is one of texts and libraries, not
one of nature as such.
19
Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 160.
20
21
Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 179–80.
22
Benjamin sees a clearly “Christian origin of the allegorical outlook.”23 He
mentions especially that the German baroque dramatists tended to be
Lutheran, and Luther for him brings about an important change.24
By denying the importance of works and by making salvation a matter of
God’s arbitrary offer of grace, he emphasized the futility of the world on its
own and the radical transience of creatures. Life itself is guilty because of
original sin and is subject to the law of natural life: that everything natural
quickly decays and dies. “Human actions were deprived of all value.
Something new arose: an empty world.”25 Human life is seen as a rubbish
heap of partial, inauthentic actions, so that the dominant emotions of the
German baroque are melancholy and mourning. But one notes as well that
the allegorical world as Benjamin presents it in some way resembles what
Hegel described as features of Jewish thought. The Hebrew emphasis on the
sublimity of God, with no dependence on or representation within nature,
means that nature on its own, says Hegel, must be flat and prosaic. It cannot
have any Geist-like aspect of divinity within it and so cannot have any inner
principle of self-unfolding or self-determination but must be inert and
empty.
So Benjamin can be seen as making a move against Hegel’s account of
Judaism, and in favor of Jewish thought, when he describes the allegorical
character of the German baroque drama and when he finds it superior to
the works of the Hellenic Renaissance. Only a stance that acknowledges
the emptiness of the world on its own, as well as its distance from the
divine, can be open to the radical, messianic transformation needed by the
human order. Benjamin’s description of the German baroque can apply
both to radical Protestantism and at least to his own version of Judaism
because he himself acknowledges real affinities with the more radical
aspects of Protestant thought that he finds in Kierkegaard and in the
German Protestant theology of the 1920s. It is Catholicism, first of all,
that Benjamin is rigorously against, with its notion that the divine makes
itself present through the Spirit in the actual earthly order of the Church:
in its priestly hierarchies, its sacramental ceremonies, and its close links
with the temporal political institutions around it. It is very likely that in
Benjamin’s view, Hegel himself falls back from the radical Protestant
understanding of God’s inscrutability into a stance that remains rather
Catholic and Hellenic. For he too makes the incarnation of the divine,
23
24
25
Walter Benjamin 153
spiritual order in the actual institutions of the world the center of his
philosophy. Benjamin’s version of Judaism, as well as his own radical
political stance, must reject any such notion, as well as all the mediating
functions of Spirit or Geist that would validate or justify the present order
in any manner. He can find something to admire in Karl Barth because
while Barth surely believes in the incarnation of Christ, that move for him
is a sudden entrance of eternity into the temporal order and is the model
for the offer of grace out of nowhere. Barth rejects Hegel’s philosophical
version of that event, where it is expressed in the richest possible array of
self-unfolding worldly practices, just as he rejects the Catholic belief that
divine incarnation extends to the multiple practices and teachings of the
visible Church.
There is a further reason why Benjamin can seem to link his Judaism with
certain more radical strains in Christianity. He was strongly influenced by
his close friend Gershom Scholem’s work on the sources of Jewish mysti-
cism, and can seem especially to have sympathies for the Kabbalists of the
sixteenth century such as Isaac Luria and even for the revolutionary and
eventual apostate of the seventeenth century, Sabbatai Zevi. Jewish mysti-
cism in the Kabbalah had been influenced by early Christian Gnostics.
The view of nature developed is not so much what comes from Genesis
and from rabbinical texts. Instead there is a divine principle that has with-
drawn itself from the world and the realm of material nature thus becomes
a site of brokenness, exile, evil, and the demonic. Benjamin himself says that
to understand nature is to understand it as a place of dread and horror,
a swampland, a cavern-like site with sad, hollow echoes. A few sparks of
divinity have fallen into this world and it is up to the mystics to be sensitive
to these and ultimately to repair this broken order so that it may return to the
divine. So, Benjamin’s description of the German baroque as a world of
ruins and fragments can allow for a considerable overlap with what he takes
Jewish mysticism to be about. (He will also look for sparks and flashes of
possibility in the ruined world.) At first the mystics of the Kabbalah focused
on the individual spiritual work of retracing, in the opposite direction, the
route of God’s creation of the world. But after the catastrophe of the
expulsion from Spain, there was strong interest in a more social, apocalyptic,
messianic focus.26 That catastrophe seemed to usher in the last times before
a radical messianic transformation. In Sabbatai Zevi and his disciple Nathan
of Gaza, that messianic spirit becomes revolutionary, antinomian, and
26
I am indebted here to the account of Jewish mysticism in Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish
Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 244–324.
nihilistic. We know that Benjamin, when he was discussing Scholem’s work
with Hannah Arendt in the late 1930s, focused on the story of Zevi and the
Sabbatian movement.27 The world around him in Europe seemed to con-
firm his long-time sense that the capitalist economic and political order was
a site of catastrophe and ruin, as if in some respects humans in the modern
capitalist order were like the exiled Jews after the destruction of their former
life in Spain, so that revolutionary, messianic hope was the proper response
to the European situation. He is most deeply anti-Hegelian in supposing
that nothing valuable whatever can come out of the self-unfolding develop-
ment of European history. A revolution must occur that completely deto-
nates all that stands for the continuity of history, that liquidates all the power
structures of the past, that interrupts the very flow of time. In associating
Benjamin’s description of the German baroque with his defense of Judaism
against Hegel’s account of it, we get further support from his treatment of
Kafka. He claims that the world of Kafka’s writings is that same primordial
world of dread, with chthonic, demonic forces that make ephemeral natural
items ultimately decay and with little hint that any messages from a higher-
spiritual order have actually arrived, so that one piles up allegorical possibi-
lities in a world of ruins. These become artificial and unconvincing, as in the
German baroque, with little sense of inner radiance or transcendence or of
the spiritualization of nature. Kafka, too, like the German baroque drama-
tists, can show a world of violence, torture, and fragmented bodies. His
characters are ashamed of their stark creatureliness, in a domain in which the
work of the Torah has been thwarted.28
We have noted an analogy between Benjamin’s description of
German baroque drama and Hegel’s account of Judaism, as well as
an analogy between the latter and the stance of theological voluntarism.
We should thus expect a further analogy between that stance of divine
voluntarism and the account of baroque drama, and we find this to be
so. Given God’s inexhaustible freedom to create the world in any way
whatever, the actual world, for this intellectual stance, has a radical
contingency and arbitrariness about it. Nothing that exists has anything
convincingly right to claim for itself, since any other of infinite possible
worlds might have been realized instead. The world may in some sense
manifest the divine, but only in the most arbitrary manner, where any
number of other possibilities are equally valid, and where given forms
could just as easily be replaced by other ones. But that is precisely the
nature of the allegories in Benjamin’s descriptions of German baroque
27 28
Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 659. Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 456.
Walter Benjamin 155
drama. Aquinas’s Catholic world, where individuals have Aristotelian
essences that participate in the divine essence and where the spiritual
may reveal itself through the beautiful, the true, and the good, retains
features of the Hellenic world view. In the later view of Ockham, of
theological voluntarists, and eventually of radical Protestants, that
world of Aquinas is transformed into a hollow site for the arbitrary
interventions of an inscrutable divine realm. That is, again, just the sort
of space that Benjamin assigns to the baroque allegorical stage.
So we have, on the one side, the Hellenic, Catholic, and Hegelian-
Christian incarnation of the spiritual in a convincing form that seems to be
a self-manifesting of the spiritual and to have a necessary, inner self-
development. On the other side, we have the Hebraic, theological-
voluntarist, and baroque-drama structure of a spiritual level that has
separated itself from the world and withdrawn to an ineffable, incommen-
surable space, such that any human representations of it appear as random,
lifeless, hollow failures. Instead of an inner self-unfolding, there is a piling
up of parts that have no way on their own of forming a whole or of
developing, but must wait to be granted their meaning from an external
point incomprehensible to them. While many in the field of art at various
times might favor the model of compelling incarnation and concrete
embodiment, Benjamin strongly endorses the opposing stance as superior.
It is, he believes, shaped by a loftier and more sublime notion of the
spiritual, precisely through its recognition that this notion has not been
realized in the world, that what we experience instead is a realm of failure.
Hegel’s secularized version of Christianity has to come off for him as
regressing back into pagan idolatrous practices of seeing the divine and
the human, the divine and the natural, in a porous relationship where one
side is transformed easily into the other and vice versa. That Hegelian
picture can work only if the conception of the divine has been diminished
and cheapened, so that it may appear to be commensurable with the
natural, human order. For Benjamin, if we are left with a prosaic, hollow
world that has no Geist of its own and where meaningless ruins pile up
across history without any self-unfolding life in progress, that picture
represents an adequate understanding of how matters truly stand in a pre-
messianic order. The world of nature is a space of overwhelming transi-
ence, where entities dissolve quickly and meaninglessly back into nature’s
processes. Our duty is to disenchant the pagan identifications and mythical
reconciliations offered by the Hegelians and to resist false messiahs who
pretend that the divine order of freedom and justice has been at least partly
incarnated in the present conditions of the world.
Benjamin’s anti-Hegelian stance here will of course affect his politics.
Hegel examines economic phenomena such as property, exchange, con-
tract, and civil society as stages in the actualizing of humans as self-
knowing and self-willing selves. He asks how the social, political, and
legal structures of the modern European state can be realizations of
human free rational self-determination such that we recognize them not
as alien impositions on us but as expressions of freedom in which we see
ourselves reflected. Benjamin will have none of this. He will see the
political institutions around him as containing nothing of the divine at
all, nothing of Geist, no incarnation at all of the principle of self-
determining reason or of the notions of freedom and justice. All
Hegelian mediation of social oppositions is wrong because it makes us
mythologize unjust institutions and prevents us from keeping a space open
for the truly novel, truly radical forms of life that we need; it is our task now
to intensify oppositions instead of resolving them. Benjamin offers not
even the slightest support at any time to the institutions and parties of the
Weimar Republic in 1920’s Germany. “In the idea of a classless society,
Marx secularized the idea of messianic time. And that was a good thing.
It was only when the Social Democrats elevated this idea to an ‘ideal’ that
the trouble began.”29 The Social Democrats, in other words, took up an
Hegelian attitude toward progress, with the goal of incremental improve-
ments for workers and citizens. Change for Benjamin needs to be much
more radical and unpredicted, and to come with “a messianic arrest of
happening,” not with any Hegelian unfolding toward a goal.30 He never
has anything good to say about the Social Democrats or about any similar
leftist party.
Benjamin presents himself as quite deliberately introducing a “theological”
element into political analysis. He offers us, for example, one of his more
arresting images; that of a puppet chess-player with a dwarf inside who is
really making all the moves. Historical materialism is the puppet, he says, and
theology is the hidden inside figure really generating what happens.31 With
that image in mind, the Marxism that he adopts, given the Marxist attach-
ment to historical materialism, will be of a special sort. It will seem that an
esoteric Hebraic messianism is the real driving force and that Marxism, like
the puppet, only appears to be making the chess moves of history. He uses the
term ‘theological’ frequently and seems to mean by it something with clear
29
Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected
Writings, Vol. IV, 401.
30
31
Walter Benjamin 157
affinities to three ideas: the Judaic notion of the divine that cannot allow any
representation in the world; the radical Protestant view of God’s grace as
coming out of nowhere without any relation to the actual qualities of the
receiver; and the theological voluntarist notion of a God whose ineffable
omnipotence entirely erodes the metaphysical character of anything opposed
to it. This usage can have strange effects. In an essay called “Critique of
Violence” Benjamin strongly criticizes what he calls political violence, that
which political parties and interest groups employ to influence the establish-
ing or alteration of political institutions.32 One example is the Social
Democrats’ use of labor unions in calling for a general strike in which possibly
violent actions can affect parliamentary laws. Benjamin fully condemns that
sort of violence and does not support such a general strike. In contrast with
political violence, he says, is theological or divine violence. It does not arise
out of any organizational structure of society but rather anarchically, and it
thoroughly wipes out, rather than reforming, all preceding political and
cultural forms. It can almost appear that he is describing something like
God’s destruction of the earth in the great flood. Quite surprisingly,
Benjamin says that such theological violence does not count as violence at
all. Somehow its coming unbidden out of nowhere, as in a spontaneous total
revolution, excuses it from counting as the kind of violence associated with
already present institutions and political negotiations. He readily associates
his theological politics with nihilism. “To strive after such passing, even for
those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world politics, whose
method must be called nihilism.”33 It seems, then, that what is natural in
man must be erased in a radical transformation. Again, that idea recalls the
conception of late-medieval theological voluntarism, for which God’s free-
dom is nihilist in eradicating all independent determinacy in the universe. He
states as well that political violence, unlike the theological sort, is mythical.
Perhaps he is thinking of something like the establishment of the Athenian
polis in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. There the gods, instead of being a point of
incommensurable arbitrary action, come down in incarnate form into the
human political sphere and there is a rational negotiation between the present
order and an earlier religious one still profoundly linked to nature. Such
a solution is not radically “theological” enough for Benjamin. It still partakes
of a naturalized mythical order where gods and humans interact as fellow
negotiators. For Benjamin, the mythical always means a level still compro-
mised by its entrapment in nature and its doings, as when gods are still
32
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Benjamin, Reflections, 277–300.
33
Walter Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” in Benjamin, Reflections, 313.
associated with natural forces. All the workings of the European political
parties still occur for him on this mythical level; they remain attached to
unconscious forms of life that are still bound to nature’s endless cycling
activity rather than to a radical idea of freedom. On one occasion Benjamin
visits Moscow and says there is something “theological” in the way that the
Communists are ordering society.34 Presumably he means that, as with the
voluntarist God, all aspects of society lose any independent character of their
own and are arranged so as to express everywhere the unconditioned will of
the party, its capacity, like the late-medieval God’s, to make anything move in
any way at all. Any earlier structures of society, like Aristotelian essences for
the late medievals, are being eradicated by this “theological” Communism.
Benjamin seems to be using that term as a compliment to the Russian
situation, even as he recognizes that the intellectual middle-class café life
that he himself values is being dissolved.
From that usage of ‘theological’ we can see how Benjamin might end up
combining a mystical Jewish messianism, which emphasizes the absolute
unrepresentability of God, with a radical Marxism. Unlike his brother,
who was imprisoned as a loyal, active member of the German Communist
party and who died in a concentration camp in 1942, he never committed
himself to any existing Marxist structure. Marxism for him had the form of
an unpredictable emergence, one not from within the normal flow of
history. In the manner of the messianic kingdom, it would erase all earlier
practices and could not count as a development of any aspect of the present
order, even including the Marxist parties. (Recall Hegel’s claim that with
the Jewish theological structure in place, one could not conceive of true
development in history.) Trying to describe the future Marxist order today
would be an act of idolatry, like supposing that a carving can represent the
divine. Thought of in a Jewish-messianic way, a future Marxism is now
indescribable. For Jews, Benjamin claims, are forbidden from inquiry into
the future, and every second is a small gateway through which the Messiah
might enter.35 He says that in the idea of a classless society Marx has
secularized the notion of the messianic. He apparently means that such
a classless society will be so different from everything we are familiar with
that we are capable of saying nothing about it now. Our job is just to
maintain an openness to such a radically different possibility for human life
and to refuse to attach ourselves to the false idols, political and social, that
others take to be at least partial incarnations of the divine.
34 35
Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 271. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 397.
Walter Benjamin 159
Benjamin’s combining of a radical Marxism with an esoteric Jewish
mysticism bothered his friends, in different directions. Gershom Scholem
was sure that the Marxism was interfering with what ought to be
Benjamin’s fertile interaction with Judaism, while Berthold Brecht seemed
to worry that the Jewish mysticism would take away from a properly
materialist, proletarian Marxism. The fact that Benjamin can find his
peculiar idea of messianism to be compatible with a radical Marxist
revolution means that he can hardly be a traditional theist, waiting for
the entry of a divine being into history. But he does seem to take theolo-
gical ideas and ideas of Jewish mysticism very seriously, whatever ‘theolo-
gical’ has come to mean for him. He says he wants to be sensitive to
a messianic force in history, a force that is virtually the opposite of Hegel’s
development of the structures of Geist. In the way that for the surrealists,
certain ordinary scenes or objects have a strange shimmer about them,
a dreamlike sense of offering a kind of illumination, Benjamin wants to
find moments of the past that, seen from our present standpoint, offer
dreamlike glimmers of human hopes for a very different form of life, for
a happiness and justice now unimaginable. He claims that his messianism
is not aimed toward the future, as when the Social Democrats try to make
a world that will be better for their grandchildren, but rather aims at
redeeming moments in the past associated with the forgotten and
downtrodden.36
Benjamin surprises perhaps by linking his Marxism as well as his analysis
of capitalism to his discussion of allegory in the German tragic drama.
Certain earlier forms of society were to some degree like Hellenic or
Renaissance art. Ancient Greece, for example, could incarnate its (limited)
understanding of the idea of rational self-determination in beautiful indivi-
duals, in ethically well-formed selves, in architecture and sculpture, and in
political forms of life. The culture’s style of existence seemed a convincing
and inevitable expression of that cultural self-understanding. Capitalism at
first may appear to be a way of reconciling an overall economic order with
the natural needs of individuals, so that it expresses our free self-
determination in a satisfying arrangement. But Benjamin will have nothing
to do with such a description. Advanced capitalism for him more and more
resembles the situation of baroque drama. There, as we noted, the spiritual
order had retreated to a greater distance and the allegories representing it
seemed ever more arbitrary, multiple, contingent, forced, and uncompelling.
We were left with an accumulation of lifeless fragments that never came
36
together in any self-unfolding, self-actualizing arrangement. The dramatist,
seeing the hollowness that was resulting, tried to defy it by extravagant scenes
and inflationary violence, by an almost frantic accumulation of ever more
instances.
Now that whole picture, believes Benjamin, defines very well what is
happening with advanced capitalism. Natural needs are replaced more and
more by those that are artificial and arbitrary. As in the lengthy books for
interpreting ever more arbitrary and multiple allegorical figures, the com-
modities we are led to enjoy quickly become empty and are replaced by
other equally arbitrary and unsatisfying ones. Social fashions accumulate
and go through rapid changes and they seem to be in the long run a piling
up of fragments without any inner principle of development. In the way
that the voluntarist God erodes all metaphysical determinations and iden-
tities opposed to it, the late-capitalist order makes the everyday world, as
well as the individual self, emptier and less substantial. We are promised
moments of vivid, convincing presence by the capitalist system, but instead
culture stages for us, as with baroque drama, a scene of lifeless, hollow
items that leave us unsatisfied. The pace at which fashions become debili-
tated, obsolescent, and empty keeps increasing. As John McCole puts it in
his book on Benjamin: “When read with an eye schooled in the forms of
baroque allegory, fashion and the commodity appeared as enthronements
of the transitory and thus allegories of death.”37 If the baroque stage
eventually piled up with dead bodies, the space of late capitalism piles up
with manufactured objects whose transience is like nature’s in that they
soon become lifeless. If baroque drama suggests to us, through its radical
absence, a more sublime and unrepresentable divine that finds no embodi-
ment of itself in the world, one wonders if advanced capitalism, in its very
failure to overcome the world’s hollowness, may point us toward a more
sublime, absent order whose notion makes every present experience empty.
So perhaps advanced capitalism is a necessary stage for us (as it is for the
Marxist). It can be like German baroque drama in that it makes the
emptiness of its commodities and signs, of its failure to successfully
embody anything of value, ever more evident, so that whoever can be
taught to understand the character of this emptiness is more open to the
possibility of a theological and messianic transformation. On the other
hand, Benjamin also sees late capitalism as attempting to regress to an
archaic, mythical order. It is as if the cycling and turnover of fashions tries
37
John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1993), 283.
Walter Benjamin 161
to imitate the repetitive cycling of the natural world as in ancient mythical
religions.
Can we have any hints at all of future messianic possibilities? Perhaps we
can, says Benjamin, in the way that the broken glass at a site of ruins may
reflect glintings of light from beyond the scene in question. He mentions
Proust’s image of a madeleine dipped in tea that only later crystallizes
around it, through involuntary memory, a constellation of attitudes, feel-
ings, and ideas that were not available with the original experience.
We need a social, communal equivalent of that psychological, individual
Proustian memory, he says.38 He offers us the analogy of a photographic
plate that may require a long time after the taking of the photo for the
image to appear.39 Choosing as his special area of investigation Parisian
culture in the mid-nineteenth century, he studies how shops were set up,
city planning schemes, commercial exhibitions, advertising, photography,
and so forth. Can we find there some analogue to Marcel’s experience with
the madeleine and tea, directed not toward the psychological past but
toward an impossible-to-articulate future, as if the people of Paris have
been engaged, through their commercial practices, in an unconscious,
almost surrealist dreaming? If the analogy works, then certain moments
will appear out of that Parisian period that today allow a constellation of
attitudes, sentiments, desires, hopes, and dreams to appear, one that was
not available to the inhabitants of Paris at that time, just as Marcel, at the
time of the original dipping of the madeleine, had little idea of the rich set
of associations that could form around it. That constellation, forming now
as on a photographic plate long after the photo was taken, may offer us
today a brief, faint, glinting possibility of a very different future, as in
a shimmering surrealist illumination. Even in the ordinary workings of
a past commodity culture, we might see hints of a reaching toward an
unnamable happiness that such a culture itself could never realize.
It is not easy to contend that Benjamin has given us compelling
examples of what such constellations might be, with their sudden and
nearly messianic entry into our thinking today. The actual materials of his
Arcades project about nineteenth-century Paris, while historically of con-
siderable interest, do not seem to carry such meanings convincingly. But
then his own account might well show why this would be so. He is setting
up juxtapositions that he hopes will give off glimmers, lightning-like
flashes, of links to a realm now unrepresentable to us. If that other order
38
Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’,” 403.
39
Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’,” 405.
is truly incommensurable, then, as in Kafka’s The Castle, it cannot be clear
whether some flash of connection is being made with it or whether that is
an illusion. This point comes into play when one looks at Theodor
Adorno’s criticism of his friend’s Parisian project.40 He tells Benjamin
that all he is offering in this project are suggestive juxtapositions of
economic and cultural facts as a mere sociologist might. He has not,
Adorno complains, shown a dialectical relationship between the economic
base and works of higher Parisian culture through the mediation of
a particular pattern of social organization, and that is what Marxism
demands. But Adorno, it seems clear, misunderstands his friend’s project
and the very sharp differences in intellectual style between the two of them.
Adorno remains in several respects an Hegelian. He believes that Hegel’s
story of an increasing autonomy in modernity can be extended to the
development of music, as compositions determine their own logic from
within instead of responding to the needs of external ceremonies, religion,
dance, and so forth. He follows Marx’s Hegelian stance of looking to
uncover in society a dialectical logic that sets social aspects in a robust
and distinctive opposition. Benjamin in the end has little interest in that
sort of explanation in the style of Hegel and Marx; he is more resolutely
anti-Hegelian. If Adorno accuses him of looking for juxtapositions that
give off lightning-like flashes between the present order and a sublime
absent one that we cannot know, that is precisely what Benjamin is about.
He is ultimately closer to Kafka than to Marx; whether we are getting
occasional glimpses of a higher order or are stuck in meaningless proce-
dures in an unredeemed order remains an open question. One might add,
concerning Adorno’s case, that in spite of the dependence of his Marxism
on Hegelian patterns of thinking, he is like Benjamin in rejecting Hegelian
reconciliations as justifying the way that things presently stand. If Hegel
ultimately wishes to see a higher-level identity in what has so far appeared
to be an intense social opposition, Adorno insists on emphasizing the strict
non-identity of the two sides in the present order, apart from what an
esoteric, now-unrepresentable messianic order might bring. A premature
reconciling of intense social oppositions, as in Hegel or as in the Social
Democratic parties of Europe, is for him, as for Benjamin, a political and
social failure. His pessimism about the capacities of present political and
social institutions, and his joining in something like Benjamin’s radical
40
Walter Benjamin, “Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire’,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. IV, 99–115.
Walter Benjamin 163
messianism, only increased with his experience of the horrors of the
Holocaust.
The theological aspect of Benjamin’s thought is shown as well in his
account of translation, a practice he engaged in seriously himself, complet-
ing with a friend the translation of two volumes of Proust’s novel into
German.41 Benjamin claims that translation is not about capturing accu-
rately the meanings of one language in another one. We have to see that
behind the languages we speak is a purer, loftier language that has fallen
into these everyday ones. The idea of this purer language is captured by the
scriptural story of God’s creation as a linguistic act of naming and by the
paradisiacal language of Adam and Eve in following God’s lead by naming
what was in the Garden. (We may note the influence of Hamann and of
the Kabbalah.) Mystical practices such as the Kabbalah try to return us
upward to that purer language. But even ordinary translation should try to
point to it. Translators have a privileged position because precisely in
working at the intersection of two languages rather than being fully
immersed in one of them, they are more receptive to the way that glimmers
of a higher language are there between the lines as it were. We are unlikely
to be persuaded by this aspect of Benjamin’s account, but it does show how
seriously religious and mystical themes are among the motifs in his work.
Benjamin’s combining of an emphasis on a theological sublime and an
esoteric Marxism reveals a way of shaping intellectual life that has to be
unfriendly to the stance of humanism. There is a pattern of thought in
humanist thinking, whether it displays itself in the ancient Hellenic idea of
the cultural shaping of the well-formed individual or in the Hegelian account
of a cultural Bildung that makes individuals embody the principle of rational
autonomy. In both of these examples we are dealing in some sense with
Hegel’s notion of an incarnation in the human individual of what we might
well call divine, a free self-determination that elevates what is given and
natural in us. That is a central meaning that humanism has taken on now,
even if initially the term meant an interest in certain classical texts. Those
influenced by Benjamin will, of course, not accept that apparent divinizing of
the human on the model of Hegelian Geist. They will also discredit human-
ism because of their Marxist stance. Humanism depends on the centrality of
individual self-formation through the habit-shaping ethical practices of the
culture, through the individual’s own self-shaping, and through exposure to
the arts and humanities. The Marxist may discredit such a project by radically
41
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. I,
1913–26, Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (eds.) (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996), 253–63.
decentering the self. Its self-shaping is said to be a surface effect of the
working of deep underlying machineries that the individual understands
hardly at all. Socioeconomic institutions and hidden distributions of power
are generating individuals of just the sort they need to fit into the capitalist
order. What individuals take to be their own autonomy is an illusion that
contributes to the behavior that the economic order needs. With advanced
capitalism, it is claimed, selves begin to lose whatever independent character
and self-shaping capacities they still possessed and become hollow sites for the
circulation of the items and information of a commodity culture. Regarding
the human individual, followers of Benjamin might see late capitalism as
“theological” in his sense of the term. It annihilates all the independently
determinate features of individuals and turns them into hollow material to be
given its form by the circulating power of the economic system, which may
express its arbitrary will in any way at all.
It might have been thought that the humanist ideas and practices so central
to the humanities for centuries would be able to survive an attack by the
seemingly implausible combination of radical messianism and esoteric
Marxism that one finds in Benjamin. Yet Benjamin has become something
of a hero in the academic area of cultural studies while ‘humanist’ has become
a powerfully negative epithet that appears to be almost universally successful
when used against one’s enemies in academia. In some respects, we are, oddly,
back in the time of theological voluntarism. An unnamable sublime realm
thoroughly erodes the metaphysically robust, self-determining character of
human individuals and their modes of experiencing. Humanism seems to
many of these academic practitioners today a kind of idolatry, an offense
against the ineffably other, that must be given up in favor of a sublime order
of language or of something else that now is unrepresentable. For them,
individual human experience has been so emptied out by late capitalism’s
circulation of items and words that it cannot be a site on which we place the
pressure of securing the admirable new order that we need.
chapter 6
Rolling Back the Protestant Reformation:

Wittgenstein and Dennett
Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations keeps asking

whether a special interior mental process, in addition to competent beha-
vior, is needed if we are to say that a person understands something or
means something or intends something. Suppose we teach a child the
practice of following a new procedure in mathematics. She then goes on to
give the correct response in case after case. When we say that she under-
stands this procedure, are we making a hypothesis about the presence in her
of a particular occurrent mental state that must accompany her practice if it
is to count as an expression of legitimate understanding? When she has an
‘aha’ moment and says she now knows how to go on, did a particular kind
of mental state, understanding x, begin in her at a definite time? Could we
achieve a highly competent performance in this matter without having
a special introspectible mental state that counts as understanding x? What
is lacking in a computer that makes us say it lacks understanding no matter
how many times it performs the mathematical operation successfully?
Imagine that I produce a sequence of sounds that are taken to mean
something. One hypothesis is that they have the meaning they do
because in addition to producing the utterance in an apparently com-
petent manner, I also have a distinctive mental state, meaning x, going
on at the same time, one that fixes what my words indeed mean.
If a third person somehow had access to my inner states, she could
tell what I meant by noting what mental process I had present in my
mind at the time of utterance, so that she might tell, for example, that
my performance in the world actually misrepresented what I meant. Or
perhaps she would be better off observing how what I said fit into
a larger context of other utterances and actions on my part. If you
criticize a statement of mine and I reply “That’s not what I meant,” am
I myself recalling and characterizing an introspectible mental state that
accompanied my utterance when I made it or am I trying to fit what
I said into a larger context of beliefs and attitudes, some more implicit
165
than others, that I am generally committed to? Perhaps there was no
precise act of meaning-endowment going on when I made my original
statement and what I am now experiencing, in my claim that your
interpretation is not what I meant, is a dissonance between what you
have taken me to mean and that background set of beliefs that I know
I adhere to with conviction.
These are the kinds of questions that Wittgenstein keeps raising in the
Investigations. It is curious that Hegel raises a somewhat similar set of
issues, from a rather different perspective, when he treats the Protestant
Reformation in his Philosophy of History.1 The problem with Catholicism,
he says, is that it focuses on external objects and external ritual acts,
without much worry about what is going on during these ceremonies in
the minds of the individual participants. The priest’s gestures and words
are supposed to engender a transubstantiation in a sensuous external
object, the host. That emphasis on external matters, Hegel says, is the
general attitude of the Church. Its practices often come down to
a veneration of images of Mary and the saints, of physical relics and of
privileged sacred places such as pilgrimage sites. Such an external matter as
purchasing a letter from the Pope’s representative can shorten the time that
you or perhaps the dead members of your family, will have to spend in
purgatory. Hegel compares French Catholics, who believe the necessary
thing is being done over there at the altar while what is going on in their
own minds does not matter much, to the German Protestant who finds
something missing if the external happening is not translated into an
intense inner experience.2
Hegel, as Lutheran himself, centers his account of the Reformation on
Luther. Instead of focusing on the priest’s ritual act of transforming bread
and wine, Luther, in Hegel’s picture, claims that the individual partici-
pant’s inner act of faith is a necessary condition for Christ to become
present in the communion service. While the Catholic nations of Spain
and Portugal went off to external sites to find geographically novel worlds,
Luther’s new world was that of the inner life of the individual. While the
Catholic popes sought an external object, the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem,
in the Crusades, Luther emphasized that the true vehicle of the divine was
not what could be found in Jerusalem but rather “infinite subjectivity,” the
self at home with itself and demanding that every external phenomenon is
1
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 459–64 and 486–96.
2
Hegel, Philosophy of History, 496.
Rolling Back the Protestant Reformation 167
valid only insofar as it answers to the most profound spiritual demands of
the self.3
Hegel’s Lutheranism, it is true, may restrict him from following more
radical Protestant movements in their attacks on external elements of the
Catholic Church. Luther believed that through the faith of the commu-
nicants, Christ did become truly present when the communion service
took place. Other Protestants were more critical and even scorned Luther’s
claim that Christ was in every spot in the world where the communion
service was being performed.4 How could he be everywhere in that man-
ner, they asked, when he had ascended to heaven? Calvin said that Christ
did not become present in the world through the communion rite, but that
this service was instrumental in raising the elect, not everyone present, into
communion with Christ in heaven. Zwingli said the communion did not
make Christ present but was like an oath of loyalty to God and
a remembrance of the Lord’s last supper. Others wished to be sure that
no limit was placed by such accounts on God’s direct power to bring about
whatever effects he wished, rather than having to respond to some action
performed by humans. So the communion service could not even count as
instrumental in making God’s action of grace occur and perhaps one
should forego such ceremonies entirely in favor of a straightforward read-
ing of scripture. Then God might freely choose, without being determined
to do so by any human act, whether or not to make his message be
experienced by individual readers or listeners who are focusing on his
words of scriptural revelation, which each might hear in her own manner.
Luther’s more moderate stance is shown in that for him, once the most
egregious image-worshipping practices and pilgrimage sites had been
wiped out, he was not opposed to images of Mary and the saints in
churches. More radical Protestants demanded that all such images be
removed as pagan leftovers, often in a great orgy of iconoclasm, and that
the focus be entirely on reading and teaching from scripture. Those called
Anabaptists pressed Luther’s idea that an inner act of faith on the indivi-
dual’s part was necessary, beyond the competent performance of
a ceremony, by arguing that only adults could produce such inner acts,
so that baptism of infants and young children had to be forbidden. When
followers of this line of thought took over the town of Münster, they made
a point of destroying the ornate baptismal font of the church.5 So Luther
3
Hegel, Philosophy of History, 489.
4
There is a useful treatment of different Reformation accounts of the communion service in
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Viking, 2003), 139–44, 220–2, 240–5.
5
MacCulloch, The Reformation, 201.
might easily be trumped in Hegel’s story of how the Protestant
Reformation transfers the pressure of religion from communal rituals
backed by tradition to interior states and processes by which the individual
is related more immediately to God. The Protestant devaluing of external
practices and the emphasis on the presence of privileged inner states will
remind one of the philosophical terrain that Wittgenstein is calling into
question.
We will also note analogies between the Protestant Reformation and
late-medieval theological voluntarism. In both there is a focus on the
unconditioned power and freedom of God to bring about, directly and
immediately, whatever effects he wills. While the Catholic Church made
Aquinas the Aristotelian its principal theologian for centuries, the radical
Protestant is the descendant of the voluntarist and nominalist idea that
God’s freedom cannot be limited in any way by a given metaphysical
character of the world or by the good or bad behavior of creaturely beings.
His offer of grace must come arbitrarily out of nowhere, with sinful
creatures just as likely to be chosen as morally admirable ones, so that
there is nothing whatever that one can do to bring about one’s salvation.
There is no need for, and no usefulness in, the entire mediating world of
sacraments, rituals, and the hierarchies of the Catholic Church. Since God
causes everything in the universe, he may make that causation as direct as
he wants at any time, just as he might immediately bring about in the
individual’s mind the sensory perception of a tree or a table when such
objects are not present. The theological voluntarist account left the world
emptied out, since we could not rely on objects performing in accord with
metaphysical essences or forms. The Protestant account might empty out
one’s communal, institutional relations with others, since God might
affect one immediately instead of through the ordinary works of the visible
Church.
The two points that have to bear the great overall pressure of the
Protestant system, therefore, will be God at one end and the inner life of
the self on the other. Everything between those two points may become less
substantial. A principal response to a metaphysical emptying out of the
world, we will recall, is a stance of self-assertion, a consolidation of an inner
space that in certain of its aspects will be unassailable. God’s possible
dominance of all causality will not go all the way in and take over my
innermost processes because God’s moral universe requires human respon-
sibility and thus a zone of free will, of human activities of assenting and
dissenting that have not been made meaningless by God’s overwhelming
power. No matter what sensory perceptions God might place in me
directly, there remains a mental space in which it is up to me to assent to
them. No matter how God might arrange the matters of the world for my
experience and no matter how he might allow the devil to tempt me,
I cannot sin except through my own act of willing. And no matter how
empty a substrate the world becomes for theological reasons, it is up to me
to construct, in my inner life, a hypothetical scheme that I impose upon the
world to make my interventions in it more successful. We thus secure in
this inner realm both a metaphysically stable space and what McDowell
calls the sphere of spontaneity.
It is true that there can be tensions with this strategy. One can emphasize
the fallen nature of humans so much, as Luther often did, that it becomes
difficult to see that any initiative whatever is left on the part of humans to
respond to an offer of grace. Even though Augustine had assigned humans
free will in order to fend off the claim, often brought forward by Gnostics,
that the God who created the world is responsible for the evil in it, one still
has to be sure that nothing humans do counts as a limit on God’s
omnipotent power. So God not only has to offer grace unbidden to the
individual; he has to causally support the individual’s very power to
respond to this offer. Without that intervention by God to support the
turning of the sinful individual toward God, none of us, as fallen sinners
subject to the original sin of Adam and Eve, would be able to make that
turning on our own. That is why Luther, with his perception of extreme
human weakness and fallenness, can be so grateful that God has saved him.
It is not a far jump to go from that account to another one that would even
more fully honor the unconditioned power of God. If nothing we do on
our own can make us more likely rather than less likely to be saved by God,
then why should we not sin extravagantly? For God to save such a sinner
through his grace would then be a greater demonstration of his power,
mercy, and freedom than for him to save the good person. Heresies
emerged that made that very claim. Problems may then arise for the
polar structure that tries to place all the pressure of religion on God at
one end and the inner life of the individual self on the other, with less
regard for the world itself or for communal practice. The divine pole can
threaten to swallow up any initiative and self-assertion at the other end.
But for the most part that outcome is resisted and the sphere of individual
responsibility is maintained. Even if I can be virtuous only because God has
saved me (and my being virtuous cannot cause me to be saved), still I show
my being saved by my way of taking individual responsibility for my life
and beliefs. My good actions and my acts of willing the good are not the
causes of God’s saving me but the results of his having done so.
Luther himself tried to keep a great deal of the communal, institutional
life of the Church, so that many of its objects and ceremonies were only
partly transformed.6 Still, there remains a momentum in the Reformation
that tends, when its logic is pressed, to end up with an intense focus on the
inner life and with an occupation of the space of late-medieval voluntarism.
Since God speaks to each individual directly through scripture, it is
important for Protestants to provide individuals with Bibles in their own
languages. Prophecy, revelation, and possession by the Spirit, including
speaking in tongues, might happen directly to anyone at all, rather than
through an institutional priesthood, so that congregations splinter easily
into ever newer factions and religious groups keep multiplying. As Hegel
says about the Reformation: “Each has to accomplish the work of reconci-
liation in his own soul.”7 The philosophy of empiricism might then seem
to emerge as something of an adjunct to the Protestant Reformation, as
well as being a response to the metaphysical and epistemic situation created
by late-medieval theology. One gives up the hope that one can penetrate
into the metaphysical character of the world itself, but one stakes out
a privileged sphere of innerness in which one’s awareness of certain inner
objects, as well as of the constructions one can undertake on their basis,
becomes capable of forming an abiding system of knowledge. There is an
inertia in Protestantism that might undermine a deep commitment to the
social and political institutions of the present age, since these are just more
mediating entities, like those of the Catholic Church, that can get in the
way of the direct relationship between God and the individual.
Kierkegaard, for example, will emphasize this line of thought, as he finds
an incommensurable self-to-God relationship that trumps the public
ethical practices of the times. In actual practice, on the other hand, many
Protestants could reconcile themselves rather easily with state institutions.
Predominantly Lutheran countries have tended to support a state religion
and few have been more confident than the Protestant Hegel that the state,
as well as a wide range of ethical institutions and practices, could be the
incarnation in the world of what we have meant all along by the divine.
Wittgenstein’s project in the Investigations is to argue that human
interiority cannot bear the pressure that has thus been placed upon it.
The occurrent mental states that supposedly stand behind our practices
in order to make them expressions of human intentionality, he claims,
cannot do the kind of work they have been assigned and it is ques-
tionable what role they play at all. Nor do an individual’s mental states
6 7
MacCulloch, The Reformation, 139–40. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 490.
have the kind of fixed character that would enable them to impose
a semantic order on utterances or actions, such that one could secure
what would count as a meaning or doing of the same thing in the
future. God as viewer or illuminator of the inner self might, for the late
medievals, have underwritten the metaphysical stability of such inner
states. But left on their own, human mental states, it turns out, do not
have the resources to secure themselves in a finally determinate man-
ner. If our inner machinery of experiencing does not have sufficient
determining power and if the surrounding metaphysical order is emp-
tied out, we have neither world nor self as effective resources when we
ask what can firmly underwrite the metaphysical, psychological, and
semantic realms. It would seem that two outcomes are likely then.
Either a wild arbitrariness must enter the system (we will see this
happening in Derrida) or the entire realm of subjectivity goes dark
and we can no longer make sense of such notions as meaning, intend-
ing, believing, and referring (as happens in Quine). Derrida and Quine
in their extremely different philosophical traditions show what happens
when you press the logic of the late-medieval theological space but
then are unable to compensate with a privileged realm of innerness.
Wittgenstein takes a very different direction. In showing how our prized
inner life can no longer stand on its own as the standard that measures all
relations with the world and with others, he brings us back to the impor-
tance, for determining what we mean and intend, of communal rituals and
habits. These do not have to be accompanied by privileged mental entities,
though of course some very complicated brain processes must be going on
when such rituals occur. And he brings us back also to the way our practices
are situated in a robust surrounding world (as opposed to the world as
conceived by the stance of a possible solipsism or by theological voluntar-
ism). Such a dependence on external factors and on communal rituals
seems just what Hegel was disturbed by in his comparison of the French
Catholic and the German Protestant. What if the “necessary thing” that
makes meaning work is being done over there in the ritual practices of the
community, rather than in some privileged inner states that accompany
such rituals? What if competent performance in a shared practice with
others turns out to be more important than any particular inner state when
it comes to grasping such activities as meaning, intending, and under-
standing? Then the defensive move inward that early modern philosophers
and Protestant religious thinkers made in response to the metaphysical
evacuation of the world under medieval voluntarism can be at least partly
reversed. Wittgenstein will not re-enchant the world, but he will show that
maneuvering within a solid world of objects against which our mental
states can be calibrated, as well as being part of a communal practice that
establishes what it means to do the same thing as others do, is necessary for
the assigning of meanings to an individual’s gestures and utterances.
In demoting the role of certain privileged inner states, one need not be
denying the role that McDowell assigns to spontaneity, that is, to our
capacity to reflect on our beliefs and the available support for them and to
adjust them in relation to how matters stand in the world. It is just that
spontaneity itself is manifested in the complex practices that we share with
others, such as making persuasive arguments and defending them against
those of our interlocutors. It is only the peculiar situation of late-medieval
voluntarism and the continuation of that intellectual space in the
Protestant Reformation that makes one try to find spontaneity in
a particular interior location. Behind that way of seeing things there is
the defensive retreat inward in the face of the omnipotent power of God.
There is the idea that somewhere at the inward endpoint of the outside-to-
inside epistemic chain we arrive at a faculty of free will that God would not
override, no matter how else his power might intervene in our interior
lives. And there is the idea that God’s address in grace, with a demand for
a free response from us, comes immediately to the most inner sphere of the
soul rather than through the Church’s public ceremonies. Put these three
ideas together and you have a particular location for the faculty of sponta-
neity. But Wittgenstein’s account rejects the influence of all of these.
Spontaneity permeates our human practices instead of residing at
a particular point on the inner epistemic chain leading to the individual’s
belief.
Let us turn then to his arguments. As we noted earlier, he is asking what
happens when I understand or mean something. Suppose I am taught
a skill by a teacher and I say: Now I understand how to go on by myself.8
Is it that some distinctive mental state has occurred in me such that its
presence or absence is what determines whether I understand? But suppose
that such an entity did occur within me and my future practice, because of
its very high level of inaccuracy, indicated that I had not indeed understood
the procedure being taught. Would the presence of some accompanying
mental state at the time I say I have understood matters overrule the
evidence of all the infelicities of my later practice? Did I truly have
8
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, revised fourth edition, P. M. S. Hacker and
Joachim Schulte (eds.), G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (trans.) (West
Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), sections 151–5.
understanding at that point and then this understanding deteriorated with
my future performance? It seems that the claim that another person under-
stands x is an endorsement of her overall practice rather than a reference to
a mental entity that the interpreter has no access to. Surely some mental
changes, many of them unconscious skills of pattern-recognition, must
have occurred in me as I moved from the state of not understanding to one
of understanding the procedure in question. Regular links must have been
built up between some of my mental states and other ones so that there is
something to guide my future behavior accurately. But is there an inner
entity I can have access to that accompanies my behavior and that gives me
a special privilege in determining whether I am performing my behavior in
an understanding manner? Wittgenstein tells us on this issue: “Just for
once, don’t think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all.”9
Or consider again the matter of what happens when I make a claim in an
argument and later on someone criticizes me. “That’s not what I meant,”
I say. How should we make sense of that statement? One reading is that at
the moment I uttered my original claim I accompanied it by a very
determinate activity: meaning x by my words. When someone later
makes a claim against me, I go back in memory to that particular mental
entity, scan it again, and recognize that what I meant then is different from
what that other person has taken me to mean. But how plausible is that
account? Suppose I have said that on the issue of social justice I am in favor
of equal treatment without regard to irrelevant individual characteristics.
Along with saying this, I have a vast network of overall beliefs and attitudes
in the background and the objector’s reading of my claim turns out to be in
great tension with some of these, even if I didn’t think of them at all at the
time of utterance. So I reply: that is not what I meant. I did not intend to
disturb these other beliefs and attitudes of mine in saying what I said, so
I assume that they set inferential limits on what I can properly be counted
as having meant to say. Or the other person takes a paradigmatic example
I mentioned in making my claim and supposes certain other cases to follow
from it, whereas I do not think of these cases as the same at all, even if at the
time I made my claim I did not divide the world into cases that followed
from my paradigmatic example and cases that did not. So how plausible is
it to suppose that the meaning of certain words as I utter them is defined by
an interior mental act of investing those words with a determinate mean-
ing, such that I can go back in memory and consult this mental activity to
see what I meant? Wittgenstein himself offers the case where I am
9
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 154.
interrupted in speaking and later I am asked to go on. I know exactly what
I was going to say, I may declare. “And yet,” says Wittgenstein, “I don’t
read it off from some other process which took place then and which
I remember.”10 The picture of someone consulting inner mental items in
order to report on beliefs and attitudes had a rather long run in empiricist
philosophy. But when we work through Wittgenstein’s thought experi-
ments, it is not convincing that this is what we are doing in making claims
such as “That’s not what I meant” or “That’s what I was going to say.”
These thoughts of Wittgenstein come together notably in his study of
what it means to understand how to follow a rule.11 In his now very familiar
case, two individuals are given a sequence of numbers that are supposedly
generated by following a rule, say 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. Both say they understand
the rule and both go on in the same manner until they reach 1000. Then
the second individual continues counting 1000, 1004, 1008, 1012, etc.
We want to know whether she grasped the correct rule from the start but
then became careless and started to misapply it, or whether she misunder-
stood it even at the beginning. Could we answer that question if we could
somehow consult, along with her, the mental activity she brought before
her mind in understanding the rule? The problem with that idea, says
Wittgenstein, is that it assumes that a mental state is self-interpreting, that
it carries a determinate interpretation along with it that goes forward, as it
were, and fixes for future cases what correct following of the rule must be.
The determination of sameness, one supposes, is built into such a mental
state, so that on its own it fixes what counts as going on in the future to do
the same thing. But there is no such self-interpreting entity, says
Wittgenstein. The items of a mental language do not have magical proper-
ties of self-definition that ordinary signs do not have; they are just more bits
of language that make sense only in a larger context of interpretation. I can
tell what some item of a language means by observing how it functions
within a set of human practices and within a complex surrounding uni-
verse. Since its own meaning depends on that setting, the mental sign
cannot itself determine meaning apart from it. So it cannot, on its own,
determine how communal practice is to go on in the future. It is itself
dependent on that very practice for at least part of its own determinacy. For
the actual communal practice I participate in that fixes over time how to go
on in the same way helps to fix as well what I meant by intending to go on
in a certain manner. (Recall the structure we looked at earlier, associated
10
11
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sections 185–217.
with the Reformation and with theological voluntarism, that tried to place
so much philosophical pressure on the inner states of individuals. We see
here again how these states cannot handle that pressure on their own.)
If I am simply given the information in the mental-language tokens that are
supposed to determine how I am to go on to follow the rule, says
Wittgenstein, there will always be multiple ways of determining what it
means to do the same thing as that information specifies. Even if sample
cases are annexed to the rule as teaching devices, there will be different ways
in principle in which those sample cases might be continued. Some of these
ways of going on, as in Wittgenstein’s example of the person who con-
tinues the sequence 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. with 1000, 1004, 1008 will seem odd to
us, he claims, because they do not fit with our own communal practices,
with our own intuitions of sameness. But one could define a mathematical
function that backed up the practice of the deviant rule-follower rather
than our own.
As we might put it, mental representations and samples of a practice do
not have essences; there is not a fixing of sameness that is built into them
and that determines which other instances will be instances of the same
thing. They have to be put to work in the larger machinery of language and
practice to have a distinctive meaning and their own sense is parasitic on
how that larger machinery happens to go. We have noted how late-
medieval voluntarism eradicated the Aristotelian essences in things in
order to have no limit set on how God might make them behave. Facing
God there could only be a world of individuals, with no intrinsic meta-
physical conditions that make certain of these of the same kind as other
individuals. Yet as that way of understanding matters went on in philoso-
phy’s history, human mental states might still be thought of as having
something analogous to Aristotelian essences, in that it was determinate
what counted as having the same state on different occasions or as meaning
the same thing on future occasions. It is as if the individual’s mental states
could have what Saul Kripke finds in natural kinds; a single sample will
have an essence that defines sameness of kind for all other occasions. If that
were true, then rule-following would be far more determinate than
Wittgenstein allows it to be. Part of Wittgenstein’s work is to remove
those essences thought to inhere in our interior life. If a key project of early
modern philosophy was to disenchant the world and at the same time, in
some sense, to divinize subjectivity, Wittgenstein thus contributes to the
disenchantment of subjectivity. Individual mental states cannot fix same-
ness of kind and so cannot determine what counts in the future as meaning
the same thing again. Take our deviant practitioner above who went on to
count 1004, 1008, 1012, etc. Does she still mean the same thing by the rule
she is following as when she began or has she slipped into meaning some-
thing different by it? According to Wittgenstein, there is no metaphysical
fact of the matter, available even from a God’s-eye point of view, that can
determine whether she means the same thing by the rule as she did before
or does not. Our decision in this case will always be a far more global one,
taking into account a much wider set of behaviors and attitudes of the rule-
follower as well as the social practices she takes herself to be fitting into.
This finding, that our mental states are less metaphysically determinate
than we thought, should not trouble us, believes Wittgenstein. Our
practices can go on unchanged and with confidence. What must change
is our conception of what is needed to ground our practice of going on.
Our problem is that we let our account of meaningful activity put all of its
weight-bearing pressure on inner mental states apart from anything else.
They are not equipped to bear that pressure, in spite of what a central
thread in the history of philosophy might suggest to us. Fortunately, we as
generators of meaningful speech and activity have a far richer set of
resources. We have natural propensities, because of body design and
unconscious brain design, to go on in some ways rather than others
when we are told to go on in the same way, even if that going on cannot
be fully determined by our representation of an abstract rule. And we have
the habits that long-term cultural training builds into us and that
acculturate us into practices shared with others, so that we tend to go on
like them when put into the same situations. And there is as well the world
itself with its complex contours that our rule-following activity is directed
towards and that constrains which of our practices may count as successful
or not. Altogether, we are not surprised, given all these resources, that we
end up agreeing so well with others in our practices. We have a shared form
of life within a shared world, not special mental items that by themselves
can fix how we are to go on in the same way. So, we are back, oddly enough,
with something of the Catholic culture that Hegel criticized in his praise of
Lutheran interiority. To understand and to mean are, for the later
Wittgenstein, to be able to engage competently in a practice, to have
shared habits with others of going on with the rituals of life.
Wittgenstein keeps nudging us to reconsider how we understand having
certain experiences. In section 174 he asks: “What is the experience of doing
something deliberately? Here a particular look, a gesture, at once occur to
you – and then you would like to say: ‘And it just is a particular inner
experience.’ (And by this, of course, you say nothing at all.)” In section 290
he says that describing my room and describing my state of mind are moves
in very different language-games, only the common word ‘describe’ makes
us think they are alike and that one can pick out features of one’s inner
experience as one picks out features of a room one is standing in.
Section 316 comments on what is going on when we use sentences such
as “I think that x.” We suppose that to understand what that sentence is
doing, we have to watch ourselves thinking. “But that’s just not how this
concept is used.” He compares the grammar of ‘think’ with that of
‘checkmate.’12 It would not help to understand the latter term merely by
very close observation of the last move of a game of chess. Many claims
about one’s mental life are likewise about moves in very complex language
games, not references to momentary events to be observed. It is not clear
what Wittgenstein would say if transported to an advanced lab where work
in artificial intelligence is being applied to complex robots. We are now
aware how astonishingly complex brain activity must be for the perfor-
mance of even rather simple intelligent tasks. Such attention to a certain
kind of inner activity might seem at odds with Wittgenstein’s behaviorist
orientation. On the other hand, it does seem that coming to count
a machine as acting deliberately will be, as he says, much more like making
sense of a late move in chess. Deliberation is what it is only within an
extremely rich context of other activity. We are not likely to be successful in
attributing deliberation to a robot if we think it is a matter of finding
whether a particular inner state has appeared or has not.
Wittgenstein’s work might be seen as consistent with an idea that Hegel,
among others, articulated. The latter claimed that we can consider the
ancient Egyptians as thinking in stone, as expressing ideas as yet poorly
understood in external forms that helped stabilize these ideas and carry
them forward across generations. Thus, the statue of the Sphinx, for Hegel,
with its partly human and partly animal form and with its immersion in
a ground it can only partly free itself from, shows a primitive understand-
ing of the emancipation of spiritual life from its imprisonment in natural
circumstances. Hellenic statues of beautiful youths show an emerging but
imperfect understanding of a harmonious metaphysical relation of form
and matter. Whatever one thinks of these specific examples, they display
a useful thought: that what we mean by mind and meaning should be
considered as including the external objects and cultural practices that
remain necessary extensions of our cognitive life, such that we ourselves
may not understand the meaning that is being expressed and stabilized for
cultural transmission. We might then be tempted by a story holding that
12
from the Protestant Reformation onward, we have learned to fully inter-
nalize the information carried and stored in these external forms.
Wittgenstein’s work suggests that this process of interiorization cannot
be fully completed, nor should it be. The locus of mind includes the public
practices that secure and carry forward certain aspects of our meaning-
making. (We can imagine a future in which very advanced digital devices
that we keep attached to us will be included in what we take to be the
vehicle of our mindedness.)
We should note a significant difference between the conclusions of
Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument and the skeptical conclusions of
David Hume. Both thinkers find that when we put certain pressure on our
inner states, they are not able to do what we had asked them to do. Hume
thinks that a successful account of the external world and of the self has to
be built up on the basis of one’s scanning of certain inner appearances.
When that project fails, he despairs of ever having the knowledge desired
and becomes a radical skeptic on many issues of importance to philoso-
phers. Fortunately, he says, we are not guided in life by the conclusions that
rational arguments provide for us, but rather by habit. So we can get along
perfectly well in our relations with the world and with others. It might
appear that Wittgenstein also falls back on human habits in the face of
what seem to be the skeptical conclusions of his rule-following arguments.
But unlike Hume, he disagrees with the premise that the way to build up
a system of knowledge is on the basis of privileged inner states. There is
something wrong with that philosophical project to begin with. We do not
end up for him with a sense that we have fallen short in what we needed to
back up our semantic practices and our everyday beliefs about the world.
Rather we give up the requirement that turning to certain determinate
inner states is the way to justify those beliefs and practices. If we under-
stand justification in the proper manner, then nothing is missing in
support for the ways we go on. We do not have to fall back into habits as
a second-best solution but come to understand how cultural practices
situated in the world in a certain manner carry meaning successfully.
(Some thinkers, including Kripke, have tried to bring Wittgenstein, on
the basis of his rule-following considerations, closer to Humean
skepticism.13 But I do not think Kripke is successful here. Wittgenstein is
trying to eliminate a gap that we thought we needed to cross.)
13
See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1982). On this issue see also G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Scepticism, Rules, and Language
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).
There has always been something odd, I have insisted, in the project of
many empiricists, that of grounding central philosophical matters in our
capacity to scan and to consult a realm of inner mental entities. Empiricism
was supposed to be an advocate for science, which advances by means of
claims that can be tested and corroborated by others. It is difficult to see
how one’s scanning of and reporting on one’s private mental items could
play a role in that process. Wittgenstein addresses this issue in his critique
of the idea of a private language. One suspects that he might have had
Rudolf Carnap in mind, whose early work as a member of the Vienna
Circle attempted to build up the languages of science out of statements
about private sense impressions. It turns out for Wittgenstein that sense
impressions just cannot do the work that Carnap needs them to do. He
claims that we cannot make sense of a private language of reidentifiable
inner items without a larger context of ordinary objects in the world and of
shared habits of identification that can stabilize what might otherwise turn
into an arbitrary naming, with no way to differentiate getting matters right
from getting them wrong.
We might look further at this critique of private language.14 It seems,
first of all, that there might well be something of the sort if all we mean is
that it is a language known to just a single individual. Imagine Robinson
Crusoe washed up on a large island uninhabited by intelligent beings but
rich in animals and plants that have never evolved elsewhere. He names
these new items and at least this part of his language would be an idiolect
spoken by him alone. But that language is not private in Wittgenstein’s
sense: one that refers to, and that requires for the determination of mean-
ing, private mental items that only the speaker could have access to.
On this newly discovered island the speaker’s usage could be calibrated
against the actual flora and fauna of the place, since correct usage will help
him get the tastes and smells that he is looking for as he seeks out
nourishment or the simple pleasures of experiencing. If years later several
survivors of a shipwreck arrived on the island, they could pick up Crusoe’s
idiolect through examining the stably articulated world that he applies his
words to and they could even be in a position to say, if Crusoe begins to
suffer a brain disorder, that he has begun misusing his own language. But
suppose that Crusoe decides to name introspectible inner sensations that
emerge within him at times. When he reidentifies a sensation as the same
one as before, the idea of what counts as the same sensation from one time
14
See, for example, Wittgenstein’s treatment of the idea of a language that names one’s private
sensations, in Philosophical Investigations, sections 243–75.
to the next seems to come down simply to his rather arbitrary choice to call
it by the same name each time; there is no further stabilizing or calibrating
factor, no testing against the world itself or the shared practices of others.
Without such constraints, says Wittgenstein, it is difficult to see how
Crusoe could ever be wrong in his reidentifications. He is like the uncon-
ditioned God and whatever he calls S automatically is S. And in that
incapacity to be wrong, says Wittgenstein, there are no norms in play
against which practice could be meaningful. And without any norms
governing practice, what we have is not a language at all.15
Must that be the case? Those who suffer from severe bipolar disorder
sometimes speak of new and very distinctive mental states that emerged
during adolescence. They may note themselves as falling into extremely
bleak moods that are so much worse than any earlier moods of theirs that
they are easily identifiable when they arrive. Let us imagine an adolescent
who never tells anyone else about such moods she is experiencing.
Cannot they be distinctive enough that she could reidentify them quite
successfully and even have a private name for them? (Some people may
give a pet name to a particular severely depressive mood that sometimes
comes upon them.) Because they are so distinctive and do not have blurry
boundaries with other moods, her application of her private term might
well be successful. Or take our isolated Robinson Crusoe. He starts
developing a brain cancer that produces a special kind of headache that
he has never had before. He has no trouble whatever reidentifying it when
it occurs and he develops a private name for it. In these two cases the
internal states seem to do enough work of individuating themselves to
serve as the basis for a private referential term, even without any shared
practice to establish a norm. But we are assuming in these two cases that
the individual’s achievement here is parasitic on a very rich language that
is already calibrated against the usage of others and against public objects
in the world. A private language that had to support meaning more
broadly and independently would have a far more difficult time getting
going. When Crusoe arrives on the island he is already a participant in
complex language games that define a well-determined territory in which
a new game piece might be introduced and make unprecedented moves.
Yet are we underestimating what natural selection of biological creatures
might do? As it happens, language has arisen among humans as a social
phenomenon, as opposed to the human eye, which operates automati-
cally on its own, with incredibly sophisticated information processing.
15
Could a very different biological history have emerged such that human
individuals developed ways of verbalizing about certain of their inner
states just for their own self-knowledge, not for communication with
others? (Built-in brain software, let us suppose, lets individuals develop
their own language and meanings never become sharable or communic-
able.) Would Wittgenstein’s account apply to such creatures, for whom
verbally identifying certain internal states happens as automatically and
instinctually as visual perception and is useful in preventing various kinds
of damage to the individual? But we are not such creatures and I will not
address that issue further. For my overall narrative, it is enough that
Wittgenstein attacks a notion of privileged inner states that has been
deeply influential in modern thought.
On my narrative, theological voluntarism and the Reformation both
placed great pressure on the two poles of God and the inner states of the
individual. In between those two poles the metaphysical character of the
world itself is eroded and so are one’s shared practices with others. In the case
of how human minds and languages actually work, Wittgenstein demon-
strates that if we wish to accommodate such achievements as meaning,
understanding, or intending something, we need to distribute that pressure
more widely. Other philosophers make a similar point. Hilary Putnam, for
example, argues in favor of what is called externalism regarding the identi-
fication of the contents of the mind.16 That is, conditions external to the
mind are essential to determining mental content. Imagine two situations in
which all mental experience feels the same to a speaker. In one world the
item she is encountering as she refers to a particular natural kind has a certain
underlying atomic structure, though she does not know what it is. In another
possible world, everything about this speaker remains the same, but the
natural kind she is actually engaged with as she uses her natural-kind term
has a different underlying atomic structure, though again she does not know
this. Putnam argues that the speaker means different things in the two cases
because of the role of the external world in fixing what she is referring to.
As I change the world around her, I change her inner mental contents,
including what she means, even though nothing she has access to internally
could make this difference available to her. So meaning cannot be fixed by
mental states taken on their own; the shadow of the external world on one’s
mental states determines how that entire interior world is to be properly
described. (It seems that this conclusion could hardly be surprising to an
16
See Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1981),
22–5.
evolutionary biologist, one who sees humans as developing a mental life
precisely through registering features of the world.)
In addition, because I am trained as a speaker in an already richly
evolved speaking community, I can depend on others to fix the mean-
ings of my words, even when my own knowledge falls woefully short of
the capacity to do this myself. In spite of inadequate and often false
information that I attach to these terms, I still refer successfully,
through my parasitism on others, to hyacinths and finches and ocelots.
Again, any inner entities I might bring before me in using these terms
are, quite fortunately for me, trumped in determining reference and
meaning by the knowledge that others in the community have. This
situation appears, again, rather like what Hegel disliked in Catholicism
when he wished to praise Luther: as long as I am connected with others
in a certain common ritual, as long as the necessary thing is being done
over there by others, then it matters considerably less what particular
inner states are going on within me. That overall structure of how
reference works might make one, recalling Hegel, have something like
the Protestant anxiety about the Catholic practice of indulgences.
The Church can grant a tremendous spiritual benefit to someone
who has done rather little because of the immense treasury of merit
built up by Jesus, Mary, and the saints and available for distribution by
the Church. In the present case of reference, there is an immense
treasury of referential and semantic power built up by the work of
many, many others in history and available to be distributed to
individual speakers who often do not seem to do a lot more than did
those in the medieval period who paid the Pope’s representative for an
indulgence.
An attack on the rich Protestant world of interiority comes from
a somewhat different direction through Daniel Dennett (and many others)
and the field of cognitive science. Many empiricists believed that our
scanning and identifying of inner mental items, as opposed to describing
objects in external reality, yields what we know best. But evolution has
designed human minds to be able to identify quite accurately a large range
of items in the surrounding world; these were the ones we had to deal with
in order to survive and reproduce. In contrast, we were not designed to give
reliable reports on a realm of introspectible entities. Here Dennett comes
rather close to Nietzsche, who states that as biological creatures guided
early on by instincts that do what they do automatically, humans are not at
all reliable reporters on the mental life within them. Of ourselves, he says,
we know the least. Self-consciousness, claims Nietzsche, comes along with
communication.17 We might think of matters in the following way.
We live in groups and others in the group may ask us at times to report
on what is going on within us, perhaps whether we are in a proper state for
hunting or for war. Because our biology does not give us reliable access to
these states, we repurpose other capacities to do what we were not intrin-
sically designed to do. We may then think in terms of metaphors based on
our dealing with real objects in the world, as if within us we had other
objects of that sort, only invisible to others (as when we talk of surveying or
grasping ideas). Or we watch what we end up doing and make guesses
about what our mental states must be like to produce such doings, in much
the way we act with other agents. We learn to take the all-at-once informa-
tion arriving in the brain from all over the body and edit and focus it so that
there seems to be a stream of inner events in time that we can report on.
In all these cases we are constructing at least as much as we are describing.
We are socially trained to report on ourselves in certain ways and that social
training is producing what it is reporting on as much as it is finding it there.
My report to others will not be due to my scanning of an inner entity but to
what I construct at a particular moment in response to pressure from
a range of unconscious programs and from the social world around me.
For Dennett we become richly engaged as group members in practices of
warning, advising, questioning, and criticizing others. Gradually we develop
the ability to short-circuit these practices so that we are performing them on
ourselves.18 We thus become self-warning, self-advising, self-questioning,
and self-criticizing creatures. At first, we may still do these things out loud,
as if we are doing them to someone else. Gradually we form the words
silently in the throat and eventually we can carry on without our vocal-
production faculties being involved. So we think there is a silent stream of
talking-to-oneself. Because we are not designed to perceive our inner states
we use metaphors such as that of an inner theater watched by a homunculus
to provide some kind of pictorial scaffolding to organize our ways of talking
about what is occurring within us. There is no such inner theater, but the use
of the metaphor over time as well as the activation of some aspects of our
visual system may make us report on matters as if we were watching such an
inner screen. Again, we are repurposing certain brain machineries for tasks
they were not designed for, and the particular conditions of our repurposing
may cause false pictures about what is actually happening in us.
17
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1974),
section 354.
18
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 193–9.
Even when we try to report on our most immediate experiences we are
unreliable, says Dennett. He describes a psychology experiment in which
an observer has her eyes fixed on a computer screen.19 Unbeknownst to her,
a camera in the computer is scanning her eye saccades or leaps and when
these occur the computer changes the text that has just immediately
appeared. Because the changes take place during the saccades, the subject
of the experiment does not notice them at all and edits out information
from the previous screen, which is discordant with the present one, in order
to make the sequence of her experiencing make sense. With all this editing,
erasure, and interpretation going on, it is hard to see how any conscious
experience can count as immediate or reliable on its own. Was the subject
of the saccades experiment truly conscious of the earlier screen and then
erased it or was it a possibility that might emerge in her edited conscious-
ness only if it fit into an interpretation in the right manner? Or does it just
not make sense to talk about what is “in” consciousness and what is not?
(Dennett favors the last of these answers.)
He is skeptical even about what has seemed to many the most certain
aspect of experience: our experience of qualia or the “how it feels” of seeing,
tasting, touching, smelling, and so forth.20 He emphasizes how much
editing and social construction go into even our simple sensation reports
about so-called qualia. I claim that I am having an inner sensation of
redness as I scan certain objects in the world. Then I wake up one day after
a minor brain injury and the objects in the world that used to appear red
now appear green.21 I report to others, whose sensations have not changed,
that I am having an inner sensation of green even when I encounter objects
that are clearly supposed to be red. Doesn’t this mean that qualia have
a fairly robust metaphysical basis? Dennett denies this result. He imagines
me going on into the future in that color-inversion case. Since so much of
my reporting on my “immediate” inner life has to do with editing, revising,
and social construction, I will gradually over time use those editing
capacities to make my practices start adjusting themselves to the practices
of others. Eventually I will handle the overall discrepancy with other
perceivers and speakers by starting to redescribe my inner experiences.
Soon enough it begins to seem to me that I am having sensations of red
when I encounter the objects that had been red all along. There was never
a determinate enough metaphysical entity in the first place, the inner quale
of redness, that would make this gradual adjustment difficult to make.
19 20
Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 361–2. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 369–411.
21
Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 389–98.
As in Wittgenstein’s account, there is no determinate inner state that I can
go back and compare my present experience to. For a while I go through
a period that seems very confusing to me, where I am at odds with others,
and eventually my brain lines things up for consistency and efficiency.
There simply is no fact of the matter as to just when I changed from letting
my sensations-as-of-something-green be evidence for red items in the
world to calling them sensations-as-of-something-red. So, the world of
introspectible inner items seems quite insubstantial on its own.
Dennett presses this mode of thought by claiming that consciousness is
a user illusion.22 This term is taken from computer science. The computer
screen uses many manipulable icons that show, for example, that one is
moving a file to a folder. But there is no such folder in the computer, only
thousands of lines of code. We have no idea how those lines of code do
their work, so we create usable interfaces that employ simple fictions to
guide successful interactions with the computer. In a similar manner,
claims Dennett, we create for ourselves simple fictions that guide our
interfacing with the complicated brain patterns inside us, which we under-
stand no better than we understand the thousands of lines of computer
code. We thus think of ourselves as having certain states of consciousness
such as qualia, particular objects that appear in an inner space. It seems to
me that I am having an internal sensation of red or of the smell of
cinnamon, but that is how humans have trained themselves over thousands
of generations to have a reporting shorthand for brain processes they have
no privileged access to. We have learned to make simple, imperfect stabs at
describing these brain processes to ourselves and to others. As an extremely
complex biological engineering detects cinnamon in the surrounding area,
I produce the simple fiction of odor-related qualia that I supposedly have
access to in an inner stream of consciousness, just as I seem to be moving
files and folders on the computer screen. These are far easier to specify than
the actual brain processes.
We might try to expand on Dennett’s use of the analogy of the folder in
a computer’s user interface. Yoga practitioners may become unusually
competent at being aware of internal bodily states and processes. Some
may claim that they are thus being aware of the flow of “chi” within them.
They sense when their “chi” is strong or weak, is flowing freely or is
blocked, is focused in one part of the body or another. Now scientists
22
Dennett has pressed this user-illusion view of some of our descriptions of inner states in several
works. He continues to do so in Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Mind
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).
measuring blood flow and pressures and brain states available to MRI scans
might discover some real correlations between the statements of the yoga
practitioners about “chi” and the scientific measurements, so that there are
some bodily states they are really experiencing when they talk about his
phenomenon. But there is no such thing as “chi”; it is a user fiction or
illusion that may serve to roughly guide certain interactions with compli-
cated processes of the body. Or take the case of ancient dancers whose
dancing improves dramatically when they are told to let the god Dionysus
inhabit their bodies. That descriptive scheme may actually guide useful
types of bodily awareness for the dancers. But the idea that the god
Dionysus is possessing them is a complete fiction. Yet the dancers may
sincerely report on precisely when they experience the god entering them
or leaving them. Dennett thinks that our first-person introspective report-
ing on our inner mental states is rather like these cases: not a direct
observation of some inner objects but a set of fictions that cultural training
over time has given some usefulness in our extremely complicated inter-
actions with physical processes within us that we do not comprehend.
If they are fictions, then philosophy does not have to come up with
a metaphysical account of them.
On the other hand, even if we are very poor describers of our inner states
and create fictional structures to hint at what they might be like, still we are
feeling something in these cases. Consciousness itself cannot quite be called
a user illusion even if our reports on our mental states misdescribe them
badly and refer to some items that are just useful fictions. Severe depression
feels very bad and so does being under torture. Dennett is most convincing
when he shows us that what we bring to discussions of consciousness are
models and expectations that have very little going for them, that do far
more to mislead than to enlighten. Still it is often the case that we are
inadequately describing real inner entities (some very real interior states are
going on in the dancer when she says that Dionysus has entered her) rather
than simply referring to fictional items. Perhaps Dennett can easily grant
this point even while getting rid of qualia. After all, in his model of user
illusions regarding interaction with computers, there still are actual com-
puter processes going on that the fiction of a folder being moved is a rough
attempt to refer to.
In conclusion, the Protestant Reformation’s intensifying of innerness or
of “infinite subjectivity,” as in Hegel’s narrative, is brought profoundly
into question if these twentieth-century thinkers are at all persuasive. In the
background as well, as we noted, was a retreat inward as a response to the
infinite power of God under the regime of theological voluntarism. One
retained an inner sphere of activity in which humans might still assert
themselves through free assent to what pops up in this internal realm and
through the hypothetical constructions that humans impose upon the
world. Without the very strong metaphysical and epistemic pressure that
comes with theological voluntarism, the thinking behind that way of
looking at the world must lose its appeal. No retreat inward is necessary.
We inhabit and engage with a world that is robustly what it is. With the
disenchantment of subjectivity comes a sense not of loss but rather of
regaining a reality that had become distant. On the other hand, we should
resist a dangerous sociological parallel to that philosophical disenchant-
ment of interiority: the sense that our inner states are thin and hollow, are
mere commodities circulated by the cultural machinery and can never be
our own.
chapter 7
McDowell (II): Active and Passive Faculties and the

Theological Framework
I spent an earlier chapter showing how John McDowell’s work goes a long
way toward reforming the philosophical terrain that has, with a powerful
inertia, continued to have broad effects on philosophical thinking since the
time of medieval theological voluntarism. A chief opponent for McDowell,
we noted there, is any thinker who believes that we must react to the failure
of empiricist stories of our contact with the world by turning to coherentist
accounts, whereby our epistemic responsiveness to reality is turned into
a sideways answerability to other speakers, other beliefs, and other linguis-
tic items. For these coherentists, the moment of worldly contact, of having
our belief systems impressed by the way things are, seems to reduce itself to
a myth of the given that we would do well to give up entirely. McDowell
refers to work by Richard Rorty when pointing to the kind of strategy that
substitutes a sideways agreement in the conceptual, linguistic, or social
realm for a moment of perceptual experience that is taken to bring the
world itself into view.1 His point can be usefully extended, though he does
not do this himself, to a great deal of work in the intellectual universe of
academia. For very much (nearly all?) of what has occurred in studies that
took their lead from so-called post-structuralism, whether in literary the-
ory, political science, or other fields, is of the sort he describes in his
consideration of Rorty. Our human capacities for referring to the world,
for representing it, for tracking its contours, and for having it in view in
order to form beliefs about it are supposedly “deconstructed” into sideways
movements within language or within forms of discourse/power.
McDowell does not seem to read such material, and the quality of argu-
mentation within it is typically poor. My point is that work in these areas
strongly backs up his view that recent thought tends to devalue perceptual
experience as an openness to the world necessary for making sense of
1
For John McDowell on Rorty, see McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1994), 146–56.
188
McDowell (II) 189
knowledge, intentionality, and meaning. It demotes the phenomenology
of perception in favor of something else taken to be more intrinsically
linguistic or social. It downplays the idea of belief as tracking the layout of
the world in favor of talk about social construction and about the circula-
tion of memes. And it tends to make mysterious how belief could be
rationally grounded in the way reality itself is arranged, so that our beliefs
are answerable to its ways of doing things.
If I have so far congratulated McDowell on resisting and reshaping the
aftereffects of the medieval intellectual ecosystem, I intend to show in the
present chapter how he is still in one respect a prisoner of it. Some of his
fears and anxieties, and the scenarios he wants most to prevent, are those
most at home in that earlier space rather than in the intellectual space we
may occupy if we give up that theological background. I should be clear
here before going on that McDowell, as my earlier chapter on him clearly
indicates, is one of the heroes of my narrative. He is definitely on the side of
those who make us rethink, in convincing ways, how we ought to conceive
of the relationship of mind and world. If in this chapter I pick out what
I take to be flaws in his account, I should be clear not to let a sense of
disproportion enter my presentation. What I am doing here resembles
picking out small engineering flaws in an overall architecture that I admire
and endorse. I will consider two issues: his insistence on a strict active-
passive distinction in accounting for how experience works and his great
anxiety about the powerful reach of Humean skepticism.
Consider the latter issue. He strongly criticizes Daniel Dennett and
others in cognitive science for their “pre-Humean epistemological opti-
mism,” since they do not see that their way of talking, with its notion of
internal machine states processing information from the world and passing
it along to more self-conscious states, reproduces just the empiricist situa-
tion that nourishes skepticism.2 That is, they see experience as the making
available to us of certain states somewhere inward along the outside-to-
inside chain from world to belief, after a mechanical process closer to the
external objects has caused those perceptual states to appear within us. But
then they ought to ask whether those very states might be made available to
them, indistinguishably, even in situations where the objects at the outer-
most end of that chain do not exist. Such cognitive science thinkers ought,
therefore, to be skeptics, but they are not sophisticated enough to recognize
the danger they are in. (That is: they are pre-Humean.) And this is not just
2
John McDowell, “The Content of Perceptual Experience,” in McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 344. See the entire essay, 341–58.
a matter of skepticism about knowledge. The internal states, lacking
a context in which they might count as a genuine openness onto things
as they arrange themselves in the world, must be seen as a processing of
merely syntactic shapes. Such machineries are syntactical engines, working
efficiently at transforming some sequences of syntactic shapes into other
ones. But then we shouldn’t think of them as having semantic content at all
or as offering evidentiary information about reality to the higher-up self-
conscious states. The interior goes dark, says McDowell, in a metaphor he
uses often. How can we say that there is any thinking going on at all,
anything meaningful at all, if certain syntactic shapes just appear in an
internal space and their evidentiary connection to the world is not a matter
that is, itself, in view for the supposed viewer? There is a two-stage process,
it appears. The first one is a mechanical, non-semantic one between the
external world and an internal machinery that processes syntactic shapes.
In the second stage, a higher-level intellectual activity is supposedly reflect-
ing on the output of that merely syntactic work. But that sort of splitting
up of the process of experiencing is, for McDowell, fatal. The epistemically
relevant work of experiencers begins only in the second stage; they never
actually count as having reality itself in view, as answering to what can
properly be considered evidence about the world’s layout. The internal
syntactic machinery yields merely causal inputs to higher-level reflection,
not epistemic or semantic ones.
Yet McDowell’s anxiety about skepticism seems inflated here. One sign
that something is amiss is that he treats perceptual illusions in a manner
very differently from the way that cognitive scientists treat them. He seems
to remain in the space of modern empiricism and supposes that if my eyes
sometimes give me error-ridden information, then this is a very bad thing
and massive skepticism looms. Cognitive scientists, in contrast, are
delighted to encounter perceptual illusions. For these give excellent evi-
dence about the evolution-guided engineering of our perceptual apparatus.
The extreme engineering difficulty in making human perception of the
world successful means that certain short cuts and certain leaps beyond the
evidence must be taken by the relevant engineering if there is to be
perception at all. There are simply too many interpretive possibilities to
process if one does not employ such educated guesses about what arrange-
ments in the world are more likely than other ones. Typical perceptual
illusions make these short cuts more transparent, through showing how
they fail in untypical or artificially constructed environments.
The perceptual illusions turn out to leave us amazed at the extraordinary
engineering difficulties evolution has actually solved, so that we have more
McDowell (II) 191
confidence in the overall apparatus, rather than being turned into radical
skeptics.3
It is important that thinkers such as Dennett do not consider cogni-
tive science in isolation from the taken-for-granted background of their
work: evolutionary biology. Natural selection weeds out failures so that
only beings quite finely sensitive in their perceptual capacities to the
surrounding world will make it in the long run. There is no such thing
as the special, self-standing interior space of Descartes and of the
empiricists, where some kind of internal objects are made available to
the self. Various firings in the brain count as meaningful only because
they have a sophisticated attunement to the goings-on in the world
around them, an attunement due first to evolutionary selection and
then to the ability of a plastic brain to wire itself in response to
happenings in the world. The problem is not that a lit-up, windowless
interior space might go dark; a long history of world-engagement on the
part of the species means that any such inner space is defined auto-
matically as transparent to what is happening around it. It is a good
thing for Dennett to be “pre-Humean” in this sense. (On my narrative,
Hume as an empiricist continues to work within the intellectual land-
scape defined originally by theological voluntarism. It is a wise move not
to situate one’s thinking in that terrain.) When we see how our mental
engineering evolves in the highest degree of intimacy with the world
around us, we should be able to see Dennett’s experiencer as sensitive to
the contours of the world itself, not as receiving information further
inward from lower-level machine states that themselves are causally
affected by the world. It is not the case that for Dennett subjectivity
and spontaneity begin only further up the chain of experiencing after
causal events meaningless on their own have formed the first part of the
chain. The mechanical-causal explanation works at one level of explana-
tion, at a certain degree of resolution. The explanation that sees the
experiencer as open to the world itself works on a different level that is
compatible with the mechanical one but is not to be explained in terms
of it because its level of resolution, the patterns it brings into view, is
different. It is a mistake to mix those two levels of explanation and to
suppose that there is a single chain from external object to belief, with
machine processing providing the first part of the chain and then
rational epistemic assessment the second part, so that this second part
3
This view is well expressed in Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997),
211–14.
never connects to the world. McDowell does work to overcome the
medieval defensive turn inward in the face of God’s omnipotent free-
dom. Yet he seems too ready to find evidence of that late-medieval
stance, with its constructions out of objects that mysteriously pop up in
one’s inner realm, in thinkers today who are no longer working within
such an overall architecture of epistemic space.
It is true, as McDowell would claim, that the artificial intelligence
machines that we use today to test our understanding of various mental
capacities are just syntactic engines. Nothing means anything to them
because the traveling around of electrical impulses in them has not
derived from the either-attune-yourself-to-the environment-or-die con-
text of evolution. On the other hand, we might imagine positioning on
another planet machines capable of self-reprogramming and of generat-
ing “offspring.” After competing with other machines and redesigning
themselves over centuries, we would be eventually convinced that events
and objects in the planetary environment mean something to them, that
they are responding as beings capable of belief to what the world offers
them. It is within such a larger story that we decide whether or not to
assign intentional states, not through analyzing the exact nature of the
outside-to-inside chain from world to beliefs. Therefore it will not be true
that if we analyze our own human brain activity in terms of stages of
information processing we are thereby trapped within a Humean epis-
temic space. Even if it is right and important to say that in perception we
are seeing the tree rather than some inner representation of the tree (it is
indeed important to say this), it is also crucial to understand that in
perception, the brain must figure out a three-dimensional world from
a binocular two-dimensional projection of it, where the same shape in
different lighting conditions, at different angles of view, and at different
distances, can appear very different. To talk of informational content at
that level is not to separate the perceiver from the world. We are not
introducing epistemic intermediaries between ourselves and reality but
are explaining how we manage to filter useful information about the
world from the flood of stimuli that it offers us. Perhaps scientists will
come to understand and treat a range of learning disabilities only if they
can talk of perception and other brain functions in terms of stages of
information processing. In doing so, they do nothing whatever to threa-
ten our conviction that what we are engaged with in perceiving are the
objects of the world itself. We are capable of looking at engineering issues
and at epistemic ones, without confusing the two. So we should not
worry, as McDowell does, if cognitive scientists sometimes slip into talk
McDowell (II) 193
about how information from low-level, unconscious, information-
processing results are presented to higher-level, more conscious states.
McDowell continues to have the empiricist anxiety that once we move
inward at all in our ascription of content, we are threatened with the loss of
the world. We might start to see ourselves as Cartesian conscious selves
scanning inner objects and worrying about what they tell us concerning the
world, as if we had to draw very risky hypotheses about the world from the
inner representations we have of it, instead of actually being engaged with
it. He especially dislikes this idea of knowing the world through hypothesis
rather than through direct experience of it. But he fails to make
a distinction. In one respect we do form something very like hypotheses
in figuring out the world. Steven Pinker is very good at showing how, given
the visual information our two eyes pick up, it is a processing matter of
near-impossible difficulty to determine how the environment around us is
arranged.4 So built into the operating system of the brain, by long millen-
nia of evolutionary labor, are assumptions and hypotheses that favor some
readings rather than others because of the typical environments humans
have found themselves in. So it happens that, automatically and effort-
lessly, just by the running of the machinery, intelligent labor of very great
difficulty is performed. Because the machinery runs so well and reliably
and unconsciously, we can rightly see ourselves as looking through the
machinery at the world, rather than at some state of the machine itself.
At the level at which we take stock of our overall interactions with reality,
the presence of the world is not at all a matter of hypothesis but of seeing.
That is a very different situation from what it would be if we consciously
scanned inner objects and then tried to make inferences about what the
world must be like.
Isn’t there some circularity here? Many, many human perceptions were
needed to lead up to the discovery of evolutionary theory, and then
evolutionary theory shows us that our perceptual apparatus, because of
the conditions that shaped and selected it, must generally be trustworthy.
But this is the virtuous circularity of good science, where we go back and
forth among observations, hypothesis-formation, and well-planned inter-
ventions into the world to make certain outcomes occur if our theories are
right. How could McDowell’s claims against his opponents, in what is
a highly technical discussion in philosophy, ever give an anxious perceiver
a better reason to accept the reliability of his perceptual apparatus than
evolutionary biology does? The difficulty is emphasized when, in one
4
Pinker, How the Mind Works, 211–98.
volume where McDowell directly confronts the criticisms of over a dozen
gifted philosophers, his typical claim is that each of them has, on some
central point, misunderstood him.5
Is skepticism dead then? Hardly. The reason is simple. We cannot step
outside ourselves enough to be certain where we might stand on
a hierarchy of possible intelligences. We see how easy it is for us, as we
study the sensory machineries of lower animals in the laboratory, to
arrange experiences that exploit rigidities and incapacities in them in
order to induce illusions. How can we be sure that there are not beings so
superior to us in intelligence that they could produce systematic illusions
in us through exploiting the rigidities and limits of our own sensory
powers? We cannot be, and so cannot reduce to zero the probability that
the skeptic is right. But how much time should we spend worried about
a global failure of belief in us? None at all. We haven’t the slightest reason
now to suppose that such superintelligent beings exist. We tend to
underestimate just how much intellectual and technological power
would have to go into generating systematic illusion in us. I think it an
argument against skepticism that I do not regard myself as important
enough that any superintelligent being would invest the time and energy
and technical power to produce such systematic illusions in me, though
I suppose the possibility of being a random pick for a lab experiment by
such higher intelligences still exists. It was a different case when the late
medievals needed to emphasize the omnipotent, unconditioned power of
God’s free will. Most people were certain of their belief in such a higher
all-powerful intelligence and it made excellent sense to worry that God,
perhaps for very good reasons in his concern for our salvation, might
make certain inner impressions appear in us even when there was nothing
corresponding to them in the world. McDowell, in his criticism of
cognitive science, seems to retain something of the inflated anxiety
about skepticism that would attach easily and properly to that late-
medieval picture, with its defensive turn inward in the face of despair
about comprehending the world as it is.
A consideration for the medieval philosopher was the tension, noted
earlier, between the Augustinian story of illumination in our coming to
have knowledge and the account offered by Aquinas. For the latter, the
agent intellect is personal in each of us (unlike for Ibn Rushd), and its
power of illumination is such as to make the Aristotelian form that is
5
See the essays, as well as McDowell’s responses to them, in N. H. Smith (ed.) Reading McDowell:
On Mind and World (London: Routledge, 2002).
McDowell (II) 195
inherent in the experienced object emerge cleanly from what began in us as
an impressed sensible species, or perhaps rather as a good number of these.
This process of lighting up, then, connects us automatically to the world,
to that which in the thing makes it what it is, rather than forming an
independent interior realm. Augustine, however, more influenced by
Plato, thought of knowing as requiring a divine illumination of the
human mind through the divine ideas, and as a dualist, he held that
nothing in the mind could be caused by the movements of physical bodies.
What counted as a sensory impression would then be a mental “noticing”
that was not itself a causal effect of bodily impact. Augustine and his
medieval followers never quite handled the obvious difficulties in this
view, but as we saw, he did bequeath a picture of mind as a self-standing
inner space, with its own interior lighting system and a set of mental
objects for viewing that seemed rather mysteriously connected to physical
events in the world. On that account subjectivity and rational assessment,
just as McDowell fears, do seem to come into the picture at a point quite
inward on the world-to-belief chain of experience. Augustine’s mental
“noticing” of sensory impacts gives us just the two-stage epistemic process
that McDowell is working so hard to defeat. But if we are atheists who
believe in evolutionary biology, then that picture no longer makes any
sense. There is no divine being to illuminate mental objects no matter how
they might be related, if at all, to what is around them. To accept fully the
consequences of evolutionary biology is to accept that mental activity is, by
its very character, finely and richly attuned to the world. What happened is
that the disenchantment of nature in modern philosophy still left subjec-
tivity very much enchanted, as a privileged space with its own lighting and
autonomy. Once we accomplish a double disenchantment, of both nature
and subjectivity, then we cannot even set into motion the styles of thinking
that McDowell is at times working so hard to defend against. In the
contrast I offered between Aquinas and Augustine, the former is closer to
McDowell: our thinking for the Aristotelian Aquinas is engaged with the
world itself, whatever may be the mechanics of sensible and intelligible
species, impressed and expressed. Augustine is closer to what McDowell
disagrees with: physical objects impress the human body and then, farther
up the line, there is a mental “noticing” of the effects of those bodies and
the active life of the mind’s processing of experience begins. Modern
philosophy often takes more from Augustine than from Aquinas, and so
McDowell’s worries about certain habits of philosophical thinking are
valid. But it is not useful to suppose that those habits dominate modern
cognitive science.
I want to look in detail at a crucial aspect of McDowell’s account: his
distinction between what is active and what is passive in our experience of
the world. My claim will be that this feature of his overall picture demon-
strates how he is still shaped in part by the late-medieval intellectual space.
Like Kant, McDowell supposes that as we come to know how matters
stand in reality, both a moment of receptivity and a moment of spontaneity
must be in play. The latter, as we saw earlier, is the element of rational
freedom, our capacity not only to conceptualize our experience but to place
it within a self-critical process of questioning our beliefs and habits of
thought. That critical stance is included in an overall project of coming to
believe what we have most reason to believe, given how matters stand in the
world. This background of spontaneity, grounded in rational freedom,
must be present, says McDowell, in any perceptual experience that counts
as genuine experience of the world (the sensory awareness of lower animals
and of human infants does not make the grade then). But such
a background of spontaneity, including our conceptual capacities, is pas-
sive in that in perceptual experience, we simply find ourselves saddled with
perceptual content, beyond our control. “It sounds off key in this connec-
tion to speak of exercising conceptual capacities at all. That would suit an
activity, whereas experience is passive. In experience one finds oneself
saddled with content . . . In fact it is precisely because experience is passive,
a case of receptivity in operation, that the conception of experience I am
recommending can satisfy the craving for a limit to freedom that underlies
the myth of the Given.”6 So, regarding the evidence that seeing brings into
view, we are aware of it as evidence, that is, as potentially fitting into the
chains of evidence and inference by which we form and test our beliefs
about the world. But our faculties of judging and assessing are not actively
in play as we passively take in, perceptually, some portion of the layout of
the world. It simply imposes itself on us, as the way of appearing of things,
and this passivity is good, as it guarantees that something external to us is
playing its role in the shaping of our beliefs. “In ‘outer experience’,
a subject is passively saddled with conceptual contents, drawing into
operation capacities seamlessly integrated into a conceptual repertoire
that she employs in the continuing activity of adjusting her world-view,
so as to enable it to pass a scrutiny of its rational credentials.”7
I will argue that McDowell’s way of making this distinction, between
what is active and what is passive in experience, is a rather doubtful one.
(He keeps emphasizing that distinction throughout Mind and World.) It is
6 7
McDowell, Mind and World, 10. McDowell, Mind and World, 31.
McDowell (II) 197
a mistake, I will claim, to think that a moment of passive receptivity to the
world is needed in order to guarantee that there is a proper friction between
our belief-systems and the layout of the world. There is, in contrast, a style
of thought, again a medieval one, in which this sort of active-passive
contrast finds a far more natural home. To set up my argument I need to
repeat very briefly a picture we examined earlier. If we place no limits on
God’s freedom, then it appears that he might well intervene in our
epistemic activities all the way up to determining our acts of judging and
assessing for us, so that these are not truly our own acts. But while God
might well place sensory impressions in us even when there are no corre-
sponding objects, his granting to us of free will is so important to him that
he leaves the realm of judgment, of belief-formation on the basis of such
impressions, up to us. The difference between what is passive in us and
what is active in us, as we form beliefs, then has a very deep and crucial
metaphysical, epistemic, and moral grounding, with an important theolo-
gical basis. The distinction between a passive faculty and an active faculty
must be safeguarded because it is needed to absolve God of responsibility
for error in the forming of human beliefs, while at the same time allowing
a space for human freedom in the world. The God-created perceptual
apparatus provides me correctly with a certain modest givenness, a realm of
appearances, and then my spontaneity, as expressed by my free will in
judging, goes to work and may introduce error. The later empiricists,
whose framework of thought depends far more on earlier scholasticism
than they understand or admit, continue something of that passive-active
structure. Just as God will not deceive us on the level of basic sensory
appearances, where our will is passive, and error only enters when our
faculty of judging is in play, so for many empiricists the level of sensory
impressions can serve as a self-authenticating ground for belief-formation,
while error enters with what the human mind actively does with those
impressions. (Again, this is the picture that McDowell is disturbed by: our
faculty of free, spontaneous assessment comes into play too far inward, at
a point already divorced from the world.) From a strictly engineering
standpoint, it would seem, error can just as easily enter into the functioning
of the so-called passive faculty. Cannot I go wrong even in describing how
things appear to me, since there is a possible slippage between the appear-
ance and my description of it? Would not any engineering account of how
knowing occurs admit that possibility? We can imagine a situation in
which a painter might say: I was very bad before at describing how things
seem to me, since I was influenced by habitual cultural vocabularies, and
now, after considerable practice, I’m a lot better at it. But by emphasizing
passivity, as the medievals had, the empiricists hoped to have a basis for
a foundationalist enterprise. If we still have something like the theological
model in mind, then we cannot go wrong at that level, in our passive
registering of appearances, but only when the sphere of spontaneity,
expressed in our capacity to make judgments, enters. (Note that to weaken
an epistemic claim from ‘I know that there is a red object out there’ to
‘It seems to me that there is a red object out there’ is not the same as to
claim that there are metaphysical entities, seemings, that can provide a sure
epistemic basis for knowledge.)
McDowell himself seems to play on different meanings of receptivity
when he claims that such a moment of receptivity is required in perceptual
experience. He means, first of all, that we are not free to form beliefs in
a free-spinning activity unconstrained by how matters stand in the world.
The second meaning of receptivity emphasizes that as we perceive, percep-
tual content just happens to us; we are saddled with it as it impresses itself
upon us. The first meaning is uncontroversial; all of us will agree with it.
But why should we accept the latter meaning’s emphasis on passivity, once
we no longer have the medieval framework of divine omnipotence and
human freedom or the empiricists’ framework, less well thought out and
less transparent to them than in the medieval case, of having a self-
authenticating base for a foundationalist enterprise?
Certainly, little can seem more active than the work of eye and brain in
making the world visible for us, as psychologists of perception study the
matter. As that work goes on in the perceiver, assumptions are being made
and then are perhaps outweighed by others. Multiple readings of the data
compete and are strengthened or weakened by newly incoming informa-
tion. The visual information is being measured against different hypoth-
eses about depth of field and lighting conditions. (Recall the experiment,
mentioned earlier, involving eye saccades at the computer screen, with all
the editing that goes into what seems to be an “immediate” experience.) All
this marvelous labor of editing and reconstructing is passive only in the
sense that evolution has designed us so that we do it rapidly, efficiently,
reliably, unconsciously, and by means of processes not much accessible to
our space of free, self-conscious, linguistically articulable judging. Nothing
stops these unconscious, automatic processes from involving complicated
inferences and evidence-weighing. Why make a key epistemic distinction
based on the contingent factors of what evolution and early cultural
training have made relatively automatic in us? Why should the automatic
nature of the processing be the key sign that we are being impressed as
believers by the world itself? It does not seem to be the passivity itself that is
McDowell (II) 199
doing the work here but rather the fact that it is the result of long millennia
of evolutionary testing. McDowell, in defending this notion of passivity,
grants in a footnote that one may decide where to place oneself and where
to turn one’s attention, “but it is not up to one what, having done all that,
one will experience.”8 Of course, it is not up to us in the sense that
evolution has not left certain processing up to our self-conscious choices
(very fortunately for us in our encounters with savage animals and other
threats out on the savanna). On the other hand, we do often enough
intervene very actively in making perceptual experience occur, as in reach-
ing over and putting on our eyeglasses, or in being trained to squint
a certain way in firing a rifle. Or we may learn actively to turn off certain
aspects of our normal visual processing in order to see colors and shapes as
an artist painting a canvas does, or we may train ourselves, as some people
can, not to see ordinary perceptual illusions. We are not just “saddled with”
experience, as McDowell says. We do a lot actively to make it happen in
some ways rather than other ones (adjusting telescopes, wearing infrared
glasses, moving our bifocal lenses up and down, and so forth).
It is not just one or two usages that might be in question here;
McDowell uses “passive” or “passivity” often in describing perceptual
experience, and the active/passive distinction is central to his scheme.
That there is something odd in his usage is shown in the way he employs
it when criticizing Davidson and other thinkers. These thinkers allow the
world to constrain belief, he says, but such constraint for them is merely
causal, not rational. In other words, bits of evidence simply appear for
them, at the end of some brutely causal process, in a windowless inner
space where content is just passively received, without question, and then is
made to fit as coherently as possible with other inner objects already there.
But what thinker would truly fit under such a description? The case would
have to be like the following scenario in order to support that attribution of
passivity. One is working in an inner room and some heavy jolt happens
(the brutely causal impression by the world) and one discovers that, on
something like a giant blackboard where beliefs held true or false are listed,
some new perceptual beliefs have mysteriously appeared and others already
present have changed their truth value. One does not, in this scenario,
suppose that one has been given evidence about a world external to that
room, evidence that itself needs to be questioned to the extent that one
wonders whether one’s machinery for taking in the world has malfunc-
tioned and needs to be repaired. One simply takes all the listed beliefs,
8
McDowell, Mind and World, 10n.
including the new and the changed ones, and plays a kind of game where
one tries to determine the fewest changes that need to be made elsewhere in
the system in order to preserve consistency and achieve as great a coherence
as possible. No wonder McDowell, having set in our imaginations
a situation like that one, concludes that what is going on there shouldn’t
be thought of as belief at all or as any kind of intentionality. The viewer in
question is regarding perception merely as input into a syntactic game.
There is in that situation, as in McDowell’s complaint, an empty spinning
in a void.
But if that picture, which is one way of working out McDowell’s notion
of passivity in perception, were accurate, then there would simply be blind
subservience on the purported viewer’s part to whatever the causal chain
happened to yield. On that description, Davidson would not even get
eyeglasses or a cataract operation as his vision began to fail him, for he
supposedly takes the deliverances of sensibility as mere, unquestionable
deliverances at the end of the causal chain, not as evidence from the world
that might be compromised or distorted as flaws and degrees of malfunc-
tioning occur in the perceptual machinery. So long as one is willing to
consider adjustments and improvements in the functioning of the causal
machinery all the way out to the world itself, in order to improve the quality
of one’s evidence for how the world is, then one is not taking one’s input as
merely causal, but is framing one’s experience in the context of a larger
project of getting the world right, as Davidson surely does. The apparent
but deceptive force of McDowell’s argument against Davidson comes from
his division of experience into active and passive faculties, and his making
of perceptual experience, for his opponents, far more passive than it truly
is. For him it is passive not only in its simple reception of the deliverances
of sensibility, but also in its failure to see the causal chain from world to
perceptual experience as itself something to be diligently questioned in
terms of how effective it is at bringing in evidence about how the world is
arranged. Again, that active/passive distinction made excellent sense in the
particular late-medieval framework, but today it offers far less. To require
both spontaneity and receptivity is simply to require that one is taking the
functioning of one’s perceptual machinery, however actively or passively,
as having its place within, and as subservient to, an overall project of
improving the way one’s beliefs are guided by reasons that the world itself
offers for belief. One is thus required to ask whether flaws have developed
in the perceptual machinery itself instead of taking its input for granted.
The distinction in modern philosophy between active and passive faculties
is by no means needed to cash out this notion of receptivity. We are
McDowell (II) 201
receptive in very actively taking in the world and being informed by it, in
tracking its contours in order to form beliefs on the basis of how matters
stand. Without outdated frameworks operating behind the scenes, passiv-
ity will not be a good measure that we have genuinely encountered the
world. What is crucial is our willingness to make adjustments anywhere
along the line from worldly objects to beliefs (including the purchase of
eyeglasses), in order to improve the entire system in its project of bringing
the world into view.
McDowell has the barest chance of getting us on his side here only
because, as we have noted, so much of what is active in perception is
done automatically, reliably, and unconsciously, simply through having
the machinery work. To see the point better, let us consider cases where
more active, effortful, self-conscious work is required to make percep-
tion successful. Imagine that we are getting information about Mars
from a rover we have sent to the planet that has several machines for
perceiving the environment. Unfortunately for the scientists, their engi-
neering has not been able to match the nearly effortless reliability that
evolution has programmed into our own perceptual apparatus. Let us
suppose that successful perception in this Mars case takes a lot of
difficult, reflective, highly self-conscious work of making adjustments
in the machinery, having various cameras move about, controlling for
newly discovered flaws in the programming, interpreting the perceptual
data through having groups of scientists work through it together, and
so forth. Few enterprises could be more active, more requiring of
McDowell’s spontaneity, in the enterprise of making perception happen.
Yet locating a high level of activity there, precisely at the level of
perceptual receptivity to the world, hardly brings it about that the
scientists’ beliefs are not constrained by how the world is. It would be
strange indeed if McDowell thought that passivity at this point, in the
attitude of the scientists toward a seeing of Mars through the rover
apparatus, would somehow be a guarantee that their beliefs were being
informed by the layout of the world itself. Their passivity, their simply
taking the deliverances of the rover’s perceptual apparatus as accurate,
would be a sign that they had failed to understand their overall task of
bringing the world into view. Our rational openness to the world is
shown, in that case, precisely by the very effortful, ongoing, self-revising,
self-conscious labor being put in to make basic perception happen.
Although I have endorsed McDowell’s overall account of the mind-to-
world relationship in its overcoming of earlier paradigms, I am focusing
here on the small ways he remains, as the empiricists were, a late scholastic.
His style of thought becomes clearer if we look at his frequent use, against
his opponents, of the notion of exculpation.9 Because perceivers, for these
opponents, simply take causal inputs to a windowless interior space and
arrange them as coherently as possible, they cannot be justified in their
beliefs by how the world is but at least they cannot be blamed, for they did
the best they could with the materials given them somewhat inward from
the world itself. Again, that is a very strange way to describe someone
whose framework of thought is evolutionary biology and who therefore
cannot even make sense of mental life except as richly and sophisticatedly
world-attuned (and attuned to the world itself, the very thing whose items
place the individual in danger or gratify it, rather than to some substitute
for it). But the notion of exculpation has a very easily understood place in
late-medieval thought and in the empiricist space dependent on it. Because
God’s freedom to make individual objects move as he wishes, indepen-
dently of Aristotelian forms, is so great, humans will then have to reduce
the reach of their claims about the world. We cannot expect to compre-
hend what really makes objects in nature move as they do, but we can
manipulate internal appearances to us, being very careful about our free
acts of judging, in such a way that we cannot properly be blamed for the
beliefs that result. So we get exculpation rather than true justification,
a fitting result given a human orientation toward a theologically created
space the mind of whose creator we cannot hope to comprehend.
In a similar manner, Locke says that we cannot comprehend the minuscule
bodies whose movements in things make them act as they act and therefore
we cannot understand real essences. But we cannot be blamed so long as we
admit that the essences we employ are nominal ones. But where is there
a genuine place for mere exculpation once we take our thoughts, unapo-
logetically, to be about the world itself instead of about something more
inward? McDowell’s criticism of many thinkers still takes them as working
within the late-medieval space.
We see the awkwardness of McDowell’s framework if we imagine
creatures in whom there is a rather different distribution of activity and
passivity along the world-to-belief or outside-to-inside axis. Suppose
a biological creature’s eyes and ears and other senses do not work with
the effortless and automatic reliability that evolution has generally left us
with. It is far more like the Mars rover described above, in that a very active
adjustment of complex controls is needed, as determined by highly self-
conscious logical reasoning articulable to others, in order to make the
9
McDowell, Mind and World, 8.
McDowell (II) 203
perceptual machinery work reasonably well. Obviously, such a creature
would not have survived the demands of evolution on earth, which
rewarded quickness of perception and response, but that fact only shows
that what McDowell calls passivity is just the automatic deployment of
very active processes, mechanically embodying highly intelligent proce-
dures, in a rapidly efficient unconscious machinery. Let us now imagine
a different creature, one in which the faculty of spontaneity, of belief
assessment, might, for its part, be much more passive, in the sense that it
might work effortlessly and unconsciously. (In McDowell’s terms, we
might be “saddled with” its results.) McDowell strongly links the power
of rational, free, self-assessing thinking (spontaneity) with the practice of
linguistic, social, self-conscious, transparently articulate argument. He is
surely correct that this practice has been key to the development of our own
human freedom to question and transform the power of our evolution-
designed systems and the inertia of firmly ingrained belief in us. Now
consider carefully a case in which exactly such sophisticated practices of
assessment are going on in a public forum or in an individual’s self-
conscious mental life. Then imagine a creature in whom those very same
processes are occurring, only they occur in this creature as automatically
and unconsciously and effortlessly as perception normally does for us.
It might appear odd to suppose that reflection and rational assessment
might be unconscious. But it should appear much less so now that we have
begun to understand the complexity of the information-processing that
must be going on in us in order for us merely to get around in the world.
I read a story (it is not important that it is historically accurate) in which
Turing and the Bletchley Park code breakers of World War II first
mechanized lower-level tasks and still had hundreds of humans as required
assessors of the resulting evidence at certain stages. But then the designers
learned how to mechanize and computerize more of that higher-level
assessment. Does human rational thinking automatically become less
rational in thus being mechanized? I do not see why that should be so.
I can imagine evolutionary competition gradually forming in humans
a machinery that was extremely good at doing, unconsciously, many of
the activities of criticism and belief-assessment that we praise and hope to
inculcate in classes on critical thinking.
It is not strange to suggest that at least some of the increase in human
brain size over that of the chimpanzee had to do with complex inferential
reasoning occurring in a “machine language” that our self-conscious reflec-
tion had no access to. We needed, after all, to reason about the motiva-
tions, desires, and intentions of other humans and to improve such
assessments through experiences of being fooled by others in that regard.
We are strangers to ourselves, Nietzsche thought, and this might well
mean not just our sexual and aggressive impulses, as in Freud, but the
complex inferential patterns that work to form very many of our beliefs.
I think that even many philosophers, unusually well-practiced at putting
their reasoning processes into words for others, will frequently have the
experience that the rapid thought connections they get a bare glimpse of
occurring in themselves are often inadequately represented by the essay
that results. What truly brought about the thinker’s conviction is thus
poorly represented in the linguistic presentation, with the result that
others’ arguments against the essay seem to leave the conviction undis-
turbed. Of course, philosophers may easily be fooling themselves, and the
unconscious reasoning processes, if they could be made self-consciously
articulate, might actually be of poor quality. Still, it might be the case that
a significant part of our reasoning involves capacities for pattern-
recognition and analogy-drawing based on processes rather different
from those of stringing linguistic items together, and that we have little
access to how the machineries in question actually work. So we are not
aware of key elements that rationally guide the adjustment of our beliefs
to the way the world is.
With these thoughts in mind I can imagine creatures (definitely not us)
who developed marvelous powers of reasoning and of self-critical assess-
ment very much beyond our own. With the effortless ease of today’s
computers, these creatures go through extremely sophisticated assessment
of their beliefs and through somewhat radical questioning of how they
might improve them. Only this process itself is unconscious and rapid,
even if it is of rather higher quality, as an assessment process, than our own
public, linguistic ones tend to be. They are just fortunate that they have
a good belief-assessment machinery designed in by the long history of
evolution. In one sense, they are more trapped in their biology than we are,
since they do not have our very useful public processes of defending beliefs
against the arguments of others, of being reminded by others of further
relevant evidence, of using written information recording the beliefs of
earlier others, and so forth. These creatures surely do not have, then, a fully
developed capacity of spontaneity. Yet they still do rather well, through
what has been built in, at a quite robust process of testing beliefs and
assessing even some aspects of their machinery of belief-acquisition. And
we should not suppose that we ourselves, in spite of all that culture does for
us, do not have mechanisms and rigidities in us that prevent full
spontaneity.
McDowell (II) 205
I believe that these beings I have described have advanced far enough to
count as, in McDowell’s terms, functioning in the space of reasons, even if
they do not do so by being part of a social group of reason-givers. Now let
us consider them alongside the earlier individuals who have to make
painstakingly self-conscious adjustments, perhaps subject to social correc-
tion, in order to have their perceptual machinery be informed by the world.
Here we have sophisticated, highly self-conscious, rationally sensitive,
adjusting-to-the-world activity occurring at the level of receptivity, of
perceptual experience. In the different case, we have a high-level exercise
of spontaneity that is, in the sense in which McDowell uses the term to
describe perception, passive, in that it happens automatically and uncon-
sciously and we are saddled with its results. What these cases show us is that
there is something wrong-headed about McDowell’s particular dividing up
of faculties into the active and the passive, the spontaneous and the
receptive. Spontaneity and receptivity can go all the way up and all the
way down the world-to-belief chain, rather than receptivity being
a particular faculty doing its work out at the boundary line. They come
as a package deal whose active and passive qualities might be distributed
somewhat unpredictably along that chain. It is best to think of receptivity
as a feature of the belief-forming system as a whole, and of spontaneity as
a function that might be actively in play anywhere along the chain from
world to belief.
It is typical of McDowell that for him it is a very deep and crucial matter,
involving important outcomes for accounts of knowledge and intention-
ality, whether our experience of the world should be classified as direct or
indirect. (My suggestion is that in doing so he is still working partly within
a medieval and empiricist space.) He is warily on the lookout for any
philosophical position whose account of experience can be interpreted,
even with some strain, as the indirect making available of a certain inner
content to consciousness. If the world might look the same to me from my
inside viewing area, even if it should become drastically changed, then my
beliefs, it seems, cannot be reliable. But consider an analogous case.
Imagine workers in an office in Kansas whose work for the entire day is
to control a drone over certain sites in Africa. Their efforts are part of
a program to monitor the effects of climate change. Let us suppose that
their technology has improved so much that their view of the African
countryside and of its towns is rich, detailed, close up, and in color.
The machine they control responds subtly and reliably to their movements
in Kansas and the visual images appear on their screen with hardly any
delay and with all necessary processing built into the computer so that, to
the human viewer, the scenes are made available as they are, with little
adjustment or special processing needed on the viewer’s part. My guess is
that as their taking in the African landscape becomes immediate, effortless,
and reliable, they will find it perfectly natural to say that what they are
having in view, in their perceptual experience, is the layout of Africa itself,
and not some representation of that continent on their computer screen.
They would look through all the machinery to the world itself that was
being made available, rather than supposing that their experience was
indirect.
Here we have the sort of case that, as with his criticisms of Dennett and
Davidson, would appear to bother McDowell. Experience here is the
having in view of a content, in this case on a computer screen, that is to
a considerable degree inward of the world itself that is supposed to be the
final justification for what is believed. The causal chain in this case could be
intervened in, and a hacker might send to the computer screen images that
are indistinguishable from those that came earlier, yet that have nothing to
do with what is taking place in Africa. But note the significant features of
this case. The distinction between having the world directly or indirectly in
view does not have the depth or significance that McDowell ascribes to it.
Perhaps for the first few months of working in the Kansas office, the
workers think of what they have directly in view as the computer screen,
and from this image they are indirectly able to gain knowledge of Africa.
But the more habitual their operation of the drone is, the more reliable and
effortless their handling of it, the more compelling the screen images, they
soon start to think of themselves as having Africa itself in view, as if they
were using binoculars instead of the very sophisticated machinery they are
actually employing. They have not crossed any crucial epistemic divide.
The situation is rather like a parliamentary coalition being able to outvote
another coalition it lost to earlier. Factors such as how automatic, immedi-
ate, and reliable the viewing machinery is, the very factors that evolution
has built into our own perceptual apparatus, will, all together, make the
weight fall on one side or the other, that is, in favor of a direct-viewing
account or an indirect one. When the machinery starts to malfunction, or
when one does not trust the individuals who control it, then one’s sense of
what one has in view might change. The Kansas workers might learn that
very often their supervisors send to the screen not the camera’s-eye view of
Africa, but earlier images, as a test to measure their ability to draw
scientifically relevant conclusions. Or perhaps they hear that computer
hackers have been successful at hacking into the Kansas computers and are
sending false images to the computer screens. Then the workers will find it
McDowell (II) 207
natural to say that what they have in view is the computer-screen repre-
sentation, not Africa. They have the latter in view only indirectly and their
judgments about it may be fragile.
But note that these findings need not lead, though they might, to
a skepticism among these Kansas controllers about all future viewings.
Enough might be done to restore their confidence, and they would take
African landscapes to be what are, again, what they have in view. It would
depend on their overall assessment of a large range of contextual factors,
including how much they trust the individuals they work for, how much
they trust their own abilities to discriminate even small differences between
real African input and the substitutions made by others, and so forth.
There would not be a deep metaphysical or epistemic issue at stake. And it
is not as if one will necessarily have greater confidence in cases where
perception of the world is direct. Someone might induce illusions in us not
only by intervening somewhere along the outside-to-inside chain leading
to belief but also by intervening at the world’s end of the chain. If there
were some group that cared enough about making illusions and if they
spent long enough developing the technology to do so, they might well
make objects themselves look very different from what they are.
To develop this point about direct-versus-indirect viewing, imagine
a creature that evolved across a long period of evolution and that actually
experienced the world through having something like a materialist
Cartesian inner theater. That is, information from the world is synthesized
and appears on an anatomically locatable inner screen, and then something
like a homunculus reads and interprets the information. (That is not how
humans are, to be sure, and I cannot imagine why evolution would have
created such a creature, but evolution, in its blind-chance throwing of the
dice, often creates strange engineering designs.) If I knew that this creature
had evolved over a long period to fit a certain environment, then I might
have confidence in supposing that in the typical case it was reliably
informed about the world it was in, in ways relevant to it, in spite of the
fact that its viewing of that world certainly had a strong element of
indirectness about it. Again, it is as if McDowell imagines himself too
successfully into the empiricist space of thought and then wants to give us
a recipe for escaping it. In spite of his insightful reconceiving of the relation
of mind and world, the intellectual space he works in retains some elements
shaped by ways of framing that mind-world relation that had their justi-
fication in medieval thought. Once we give up those theological ways of
conceiving, we do not need certain aspects of McDowell’s recipe for
escaping that space of entrapment.
Once we have established ourselves quite generally as beings who have
the world in view as part of our free, rational practice of adjusting our
beliefs to the way matters stand, then there is no danger in supposing that
some of our inner states are information-bearing in the ways that cognitive
scientists speak of. We might note that McDowell himself, elsewhere, does
not seem worried that a different sort of indirection might threaten to
make a creature be out of touch with the world. In discussing
P. F. Strawson on communication, he wants to argue that in communicat-
ing, one is not so much trying to get the other to attend to one’s beliefs as
trying to get the other, through oneself as a cognitive standin, to believe
something about the world. Even with birds, he says, a bird’s warning
squawks to other birds would be a “further mode of sensitivity to the
presence of predators, over and above the more direct kinds of
perceptions.”10 Presumably, evolution has designed the birds so that such
an indirect way of being informed, through an intermediary, still counts
straightforwardly as a sensitivity to the world. Why, then, does McDowell
keep up the empiricist inflation of the skeptical difficulties associated with
other sorts of possible indirection? Yes, the epistemic intermediary does
mean that the bird might be systematically misinformed about the world, if
the intermediary should fail. (A recording of the warning squawks might be
used by humans to keep the birds away from their farms.) But evolution
has designed the process, as a good engineer, to minimize failure.
One point that McDowell most strongly insists on is that I must, in
perceiving, take the layout of the world to be such as to be able to serve as
evidence for belief. I find much of McDowell’s account here compelling, but
I am not sure why, once we have entered the space of reasons, that
particular way of having perceptual experience must now become what,
more generally, will characterize all our perceptual interactions with the
world. As believers, we are potentially able to transform our perceptual
experience into something of the sort McDowell describes, for example,
when we are challenged by others after making a perceptual claim, or when
we are engaged in a particular kind of investigation (for instance, a police
detective who is scanning a room for evidence to solve a crime or someone
who is lost in a new neighborhood). But it can seem that for long stretches
of time we may let the perceptual machinery run rather more loosely, as if
we are, as thinkers, like a shop manager who feels he can take long breaks
because the factory runs pretty well on its own. In walking through the city
10
John McDowell, “Meaning, Communication, and Knowledge,” in McDowell, Meaning,
Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 40.
McDowell (II) 209
while thinking about an essay I am trying to write, I am vaguely aware of
the shape of a pile of garbage bags and perhaps can later, if asked, articulate
a perceptual belief regarding that shape. But in the experience itself, there
was nothing proposition-like, because I was merely using lower-level
perceptual processes to make sure I did not bump into things. I was not
looking for portions of the layout of reality that could play an evidentiary
role in the space of reason and inference. Much of our perceptual experi-
encing might retain quite strong affinities to what we did as hominids
before we became good at offering reasons to others. I worry about
a tendency that we might call linguistic colonialism. Once we see the
kind of structures that linguistic communication possesses, and once we
see the forms that rational communication and argument take among
humans, then there is a tendency to read back those structures into earlier
forms of experiencing. McDowell might reply here that even in my most
casual perceptual acquaintance with the world, I am aware of belief-like
perceptual content that I can bring into focus if necessary. Whether or not
that is true, McDowell is right that when I do thus bring the perceptual
world into focus, it is the world itself that is appearing in its evidentiary
character. It is not that I take non-conceptual content that resembles the
experience of lower-level animals and then, at some point inward, trans-
form it into something more suitable for rational assessment.
chapter 8
Derrida, the Religion of the Sublime, and the

Messianic
One might suppose that the religion of the sublime, insofar as its origin lies
in theological notions of a radically ineffable realm, would have little sway
in the university and literary culture of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. For religious beliefs seem more diffuse and less influential
among the intellectual elites. Yet over the last few decades it happens
that patterns of thought have developed among these elites that take
religion-shaped notions of the sublime, and even of the messianic, quite
seriously. This is not a matter of what we might call the natural sublime,
such as the sense one had of being overwhelmed and fragile and yet at the
same time elated with a feeling of power when one followed astronauts in
seeing the earth rise over the moon’s horizon in 1968. The sublime I am
concerned about here has a more clearly religious basis, with real affinities
to the stance of late-medieval theological voluntarism and its insistence on
a God who is absolutely other than human, profoundly ineffable, and
incommensurable with human doings.
A useful version of the thought-pattern I am curious about can be found
in the work of the French thinker Jacques Derrida. In this chapter I will
read rather closely what is his most autobiographical text and the one with
the most interesting theological references: Circumfession. First, I wish to
place his work more generally. He was for three decades a strong influence
on American literary study and on the field of political science. It is true
that the turn to cultural studies and identity politics perhaps favored
Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and European thinkers other than
Derrida, and his influence has waned. But he displays crucial features of the
discourse of the sublime that remain substantially present in contemporary
thought. As he goes about his writing, it is a virtual requirement of his
outlook that he be rigorously anti-Hegelian. For Hegel in one clear sense,
as we have seen, is the great philosopher of the anti-sublime. To the extent
that what we mean by the divine is still incommensurable with, and
unrepresentable within, the human order, that is a sign, claims Hegel,
210
Derrida, the Religion of the Sublime, and the Messianic 211
that our understanding is imperfect and incomplete. The religion of the
sublime may be, for Hegel, a necessary stage in coming to comprehend
what we mean by autonomy, by a self-determining activity fully emanci-
pated from the determinations of nature. But then one must understand
how such an activity can be made convincingly present in the everyday
world.
The overall narrative into which I am fitting Derrida goes like this.
Hegel may not have been thinking about medieval philosophy when he
wrote his works. But his conception of the divine, as well as of the relation
between the divine and the human, can persuasively be interpreted as
a response to the metaphysical-epistemic situation that emerged out of
the late-medieval period. In his early work he, in the manner of other
German philosophers following Kant, expressed dismay at the irreconcil-
able divisions that the empiricists and Kant had left them with. One was
separated from the fundamental contours that made reality what it is, and
human rational activity could not find itself at home in, and fit for, the
world itself. Human epistemic labors seemed radically separate from God’s
form of knowing. These worries about alienation from the world, we might
note, are close to those expressed by John McDowell today. They explain
why he says that his book Mind and World is a prolegomenon to the study
of Hegel. What Hegel is disturbed by and must respond to is
a metaphysical-religious picture that has been transported from an earlier
time through the philosophies he is then engaged with. We can see this
point more clearly if we note that just about the best way to understand
Hegel’s overall position is to acknowledge the role in it of his horror at
supporting anything like the picture of the late-medieval divine. Through
philosophy, he believes, we can comprehend fully what humans have
attempted all along to understand as the divine: the idea of an activity
that is, without qualification, freely and rationally self-determining.
We must come to understand that activity not as belonging to a separate,
inapproachable being but as what is gradually unfolding its structure and
realizing itself in an anticipatory way in nature and then fully and properly
in human history. There is no leftover of a radical otherness or absence that
can never be assimilated, that can never be made an aspect of humans’ own
practices of self-reflection and self-determination. Philosophy at its most
sophisticated level can fully give an account of this “divine” activity.
Indeed, in one of several Aristotelian strands in Hegel, philosophers
when they engage in the highest form of their activity in some sense
participate in the absolute structure of the divine. So the radical gap
between divine reason and human reason for the late medievals is erased.
Virtually everything in Hegel’s account is a denial of the central features of
theological voluntarism.
Derrida’s radical anti-Hegelianism, therefore, will come off as a return
to the late-medieval theological picture, whether or not he will describe
matters in that fashion. His “divine” becomes even more radically inef-
fable than that of the medieval voluntarists. While not expressing belief
in a divine being, he will speak of a relation to a nonhuman otherness that
remains incommensurable with our world and yet that undermines any
metaphysical or semantic stability we might try to base our lives on.
The omnipotence and unlimited free will of the voluntarist God pro-
duced a thorough disenchantment of reality, a thorough evacuation of
virtually all determinate character from the world. One was left with
a landscape that had to appear contingent, arbitrary, and metaphysically
indeterminate. Derrida proposes a similar and more radical disenchant-
ment that empties out our human psychological and cultural worlds in
relation to what is profoundly other than any meaningful system we try to
establish. He is especially concerned with the cultural products that
humans generate and that seem to be stable embodiments of meaning
and value. While these products may be social institutions or privileged
experiences mentioned by philosophers, Derrida is especially interested
in human texts in the widest sense of that term. His disenchanting
activity finds in such texts a situation that is ultimately like that of reality
relative to the voluntarist God. In the latter case, Aristotelian forms and
essences as well as any stabilizing metaphysical constitution had to be
discarded. In Derrida’s case, textual segments get emptied out of their
determinate meaning in a similar fashion. There is not a metaphysically
stable meaning that has been imposed upon these units by the activity of
a knowing subject. A textual segment is a sequence of material signifiers
and these, in circumstances we cannot control in advance, are so inde-
terminate on their own that they might come to take on arbitrarily
different meanings in different circumstances (just as things might be
moved in any fashion whatever by the voluntarist God). A famous essay
in literary studies by Stanley Fish emphasizes this outcome of Derrida’s
philosophy.1 He tells of entering a classroom in which the previous
professor had left on the board a list of names of scholarly authors
whose books were to be assigned. Fish informs his class that this is
a poem by an experimental poet and without much delay, the students
are able to find in the sounds of the names a wealth of possible
1
See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).
connections and interpretations. These readings have nothing whatever
to do with the intentions that the earlier professor may have thought he
had invested in the material signifiers he placed on the board.
Derrida’s account of textuality and interpretation appears to press this
idea even further. Once we grant that texts can always migrate into novel
interpretive contexts in which their interpretations are wildly unpredict-
able, it seems to follow that we can imagine leftover human texts, long
after all humans have vanished from our planet, being discovered and
given meanings by nonhuman aliens very different from us. (We may
well ask why the admission of this outlier possibility should affect our
confidence in all those ordinary situations of mutual interpretation, as in
Wittgenstein’s later accounts, that give us no trouble at all.) Or Derrida,
at the end of an essay on Hegel called “The Pit and the Pyramid,”
imagines a machine that might simply run on, producing symbol tokens
of its own in a manner that humans have no mastery over.2 The Hegelian
move of raising up such material tokens into the “living” spiritual realm
of human cultures would fail in such cases. Any verbal or written artifact
is thus vulnerable to a radical and unrepresentable elsewhere, a profound,
arbitrary, and unpredictable absence, in terms of the conditions that
might end up assigning it a meaning. Any expression might come
under the sway of random, alien circumstances that cannot be recovered
and determined by any project of self-reflection or self-recognition on the
part of the subject. Meaning might come upon a sequence of signifiers
from a place of ineffable otherness in the way that God’s address in grace
might come arbitrarily out of nowhere for the radical Protestant. Such
conditions sound virtually theological in their effects. Therefore, no
human text or mental event or institution can have any sort of
(Hegelian) self-determining presence on its own. Nothing can make itself
what it is at all, nor can we make meaning determinate by a structure we
attempt to impose on what we say or write.
In one respect Derrida’s position differs importantly from that of the late-
medieval voluntarists. For them, making the metaphysics of the world so
radically indeterminate went along, as we have seen, with a consolidation of
the experiencing and judging self in a sphere of innerness. A defensive turn
inward, says Blumenberg, yields an unassailable space of self-assertion. That
self might be wrong about how things are in the world but it has a robust self-
knowledge and determines itself through its acts of free judging. Derrida
2
Jacques Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology,” in Derrida,
Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 106–07.
resolutely refuses to employ that strategy. For him the power of a radically
absent otherness empties the subjective realm as well of any determinacy.
Our most inner thoughts are just more texts that might be given arbitrarily
diverse meanings in situations incomprehensible to us. We do not have any
power to invest a stable meaning in the material signifiers we produce in
some interior realm. Instead of being sites of self-determination and self-
unification, humans are, for Derrida, self-fragmenting, self-dispersing, self-
multiplying, and self-undermining. We are so permeated with an alien
aspect that must be ineffable to us that we are incapable of any convincing
form of self-possession or identity. We cannot achieve to any significant
degree the self-relating-in-relating-to-otherness that is the central feature of
Hegel’s philosophy. Neither can we attain the kind of self-appropriation,
a making matters our own, that even a radical thinker such as Nietzsche
would train us to pursue. Any notion of ‘ownness’ vanishes for Derrida.
The inner realm has become as empty and indeterminate on its own as the
realm of nature was against the incomprehensible power of the late-medieval
divinity. The medieval situation, with its radical iconoclasm toward the
external world but also a consolidation of a privileged innerness, led to
Protestantism. Derridean disenchantment empties not only the Hellenic
world of Aristotle but also the inner realm of the Protestant.
Derrida is much like Benjamin in his anti-Hegelianism. He sees the
closing of the gap between the human and the divine, whether this is
done by the ancient Greeks or by Hegel’s mediating of oppositions, as
dangerous. He is rigorous, like Benjamin, in denying all the supposed
reconciliations by which, on Hegel’s narrative, a relation to what is
different, arbitrary, or external is transformed into an achieved self-
relation, into an actualizing of the self in what is other or a self-
recognition in the other. That is the structure by which Hegel makes
an activity of divine self-determination become embodied in human
individuals and institutions. He will find such things as works of art
and modern states to embody the Hegelian structure of being freely self-
relating in accommodating the otherness of the world. Derrida, one
supposes, would find that move to be idolatrous. For him, one must
keep emphasizing differences that get intensified and that never are
reconciled. One must keep on guard against the seduction of any
Hegelian incarnations that supposedly take the sublimely other and
give it a convincing form of presence in our experiencing.
In his early work Derrida is already developing the overall stance I have
just summarized, with less attention to the quasi-theological references that
we find in his Circumfession. He puts forward, for example, a strong
criticism of Husserl’s account of meaning.3 On that account a mental act of
meaning-bestowal based on a mental self-presence invests itself clearly in
the material letter-shapes or sound-shapes of a word. These letter-shapes or
sound-shapes, simply as material bits, are seen as the incarnations in the
world of that mental act of meaning-bestowal. But once again Derrida will
be anti-incarnational. Those material bits, he claims, have the capacity to
go off on their own and to keep suggesting meanings that were not
intended in the supposed act of mental intending, even through such
basic linguistic mechanisms as unintended puns that suggest other mean-
ings entirely. And those mental acts themselves do not have a miraculous
capacity to go ahead and determine the meaning of those letter-shapes or
sound-shapes in future contexts. What a speaker means now, instead of
being an ideal content that masters its material expression in the world and
its future interpretations, is hostage to how the material expressions them-
selves go forward and take on further meanings in the actual course of
reality. So we cannot explain meaning on a Husserlian model of the
incarnation of an ideal mental activity in a material form or as the aliena-
tion into the world of a self-defining and self-present mental activity.
Derrida also criticizes Plato’s claim, in the Phaedrus, that direct oral
presentation of a philosophical argument to a student is superior to the
sending off of a written text to a more general public.4 The philosopher’s
ongoing presence, it is claimed, can shape the meaning more precisely in
response to the student’s questions, while the written text might go off and
take on uncontrolled meanings. Derrida responds that what Plato thus
fears about writing will apply to any communication whatever. Even the
most immediate saying of something to another person has the meaning it
does because of what turns out to count elsewhere as a saying of the same
thing. Repeatability is built into the very notion of having semantic
content at all. What comes to be determined as a saying of the same
thing that I am now saying, and thus what I mean now, depends on the
utterances and practices of others, both now and in the future, that
I cannot control. So in any situation of meaning or communicating
something, says Derrida, there is a relation to an indefinably alien aspect
that is not specifiable from one’s present standpoint. Determinate mean-
ing, then, never quite arrives but is always deferred to conditions that are
3
Reflections on Husserl are found in Jacques Derrida, “Speech and Phenomena,” in Derrida, Speech
and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, David B. Allison (trans.) (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973).
4
See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Derrida, Dissemination, Barbara Johnson (trans.)
(London: Athlone Press, 1981), 61–171.
inevitably elsewhere. The immediate presence of the philosopher to the
pupil does not avoid this outcome, and direct verbal interaction turns out,
therefore, to have just the same character as publishing written material
and sending it off on its own, without one’s constant tending to what it will
come to mean. So Hegel’s hopes of finding an ultimate reconciliation
between a moment that seems at first to be irreducibly other and a moment
of self-relating or self-determining, so that meaning is fixed in the end, are
dashed. There will always be a leftover element of indefinable otherness
that escapes and even mocks the attempted movement of appropriation or
self-possession. Appropriation, making some content one’s own, is out of
the question from the start. Writing with its quality of unmastered dis-
semination captures the character of all meaning-making everywhere, no
matter how immediate the presence of the speaker might be. Once we
acknowledge this point, we see that the privilege that Western philosophy
assigns to immediate presence, whether in this Platonic dialogue or in
Descartes or in empiricism, is illusory. Everything behaves like a written
text whose decipherment is ultimately indeterminate, undecidable, and
hostage to an always absent elsewhere. (Again, the follower of Wittgenstein
will say at this point that even without deep metaphysical foundations, and
even with the possibility of interpretation going wildly off, our ordinary
human practices stabilize meaning sufficiently for those practices them-
selves to work. Wittgenstein might stand as the anti-Derrida. He acknowl-
edges the same vanishing of rigid foundations, but then shows how one can
defend the ordinary stabilities of human practice instead of supposing that
wild indeterminacy, as well as a relation to a sublime otherness, must
result.)
Derrida therefore favors any systems that strongly resist closure, that
show that some items cannot be given a determinate value by them.5 He
likes and refers frequently to the notion of undecidability, whose core
idea comes from logic, mathematical theory, and computer science.
Multiplication is a decidable function because if I plug in certain
numbers, say 97 and 163, then I have a fixed procedure such that,
within a finite number of steps, I will get a unique value, 15,811. But
some functions are such that either I cannot know that within a finite
number of steps I will determine a unique value or I know that the
procedure will keep oscillating between two opposed values, without
5
Two texts relevant to these issues are: Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas, Michael Naas and
Pascalle-Anne Breault (trans.) (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999) and Jacques Derrida,
The Gift of Death, David Wills (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
resolution (as when systems rich enough to refer to their own statements
end up saying that if a particular statement is true, then it is false, and if
it is false, then it is true). Derrida very much expands that notion of
undecidability until he finds it everywhere. Legal decisions cannot be
made by a mechanical procedure that automatically interprets the law
correctly. There is no such procedure and a decision that is mechanical
in that fashion would be unjust to the particular case. It follows that
something novel, unpredictable, and performative is always added in the
procedure of decision-making. But adding something new, with an
element of arbitrariness not justified by the precise statement of the
law, also seems an act of injustice. The very move that makes one’s
activity just makes it unjust, and vice versa. Or consider the notion of
gift-giving. It cannot truly be a gift if any compensation, any recogni-
tion, any Hegelian mediation, is expected in return. So it would have to
come out of nowhere with no relation to the giving self, no recognition
by the other as to who has made the gift or even that a gift has been
made. It turns out then, claims Derrida, that the conditions of the
possibility of gift-giving are at the same time conditions of its impossi-
bility. We are caught again and again in such paradoxical situations and
must learn to live with this kind of undecidability. Someone skeptical
about Derrida’s work would suggest, regarding the legal decision case
and the gift-giving case, that he is just philosophically inflating the
ordinary difficulties that arise because of human psychological complex-
ity (we do not like to be indebted to someone) and the social complexity
of our institutions (such that no one believes that the application of
a law could ever be merely mechanical). Again and again Derrida tries to
turn ordinary human complication into sublime impossibility.
Deconstruction is the technique that keeps matters from settling into
some form of an apparently achieved presence, a substantial embodiment
of an idea or ideal. The practitioner of deconstruction puts pressure on
a supposedly stable structure, whether it is a text or a mental happening or
an institution, until elements of indeterminacy, undecidability, inconsis-
tency, and underlying fracture begin to appear, as when one finds that
there are great fissures and crashing tectonic plates beneath a natural
landscape that seems a peaceful, integral whole. It is like showing that
a supposed prophet or messiah is false, that one is dealing with an idol
rather than with an instantiation of the divine (if the divine is thought of in
a Hegelian manner as an activity that engenders a self-determining whole-
ness). All we can achieve is a piling up of disseminating fragments. There is
no metaphysical source of unity, wholeness, or closure behind them; to
find such features is to accept a fake, illusory appearance of the divine.
(One is definitely reminded here of Benjamin’s description of the allego-
rical character of German baroque drama.)
Derrida’s pointing to a radically inassimilable otherness and to profound
undecidability belongs to what we have been calling the religion of the
sublime. He can be seen as rejecting Hegel’s efforts to remove the incom-
mensurably sublime aspect from what Hegel offers as a Christian synthesis
of the Hebraic religion of the sublime and the Hellenic religion of the
beautiful. Derrida’s work openly exploits a messianic element. He says, for
example, that he wants to keep alive a notion of democracy to come, a more
perfect notion that is impossible for us at the moment and that is defined
by a sort of negative theology: it is what it is precisely in being foreign to
whatever pertains to our present political life and to our present intellectual
notions. So he will not, like a follower of Hegel, be examining how our
present-day institutions of liberal democracy, even with their serious flaws,
embody at least to some extent worthy notions of liberty, equality, and
justice. Nor will he, like Jürgen Habermas, for example, try to state just
what gradual improvements need to be made in these areas. He will keep
the messianic notion of a future ineffable justice in play as a way to
discredit the false messiahs that offer themselves as having already achieved
a worthwhile measure of justice. When there was a debate in France about
immigration after the September 2001 terrorist attack on New York, he
declared that he was in favor of an “unconditioned hospitality.” When
another writer, Sylviane Agacinski (his former mistress), wrote an article
indicating that such a stance was absurd as a practical option and so merely
rhetorical, he replied: “I have always, consistently and insistently, held
unconditional hospitality, as impossible, to be heterogeneous to the political,
the juridical, and even the ethical. But the impossible is not nothing. It is
even that which happens, which comes, by definition. I admit that this
remains difficult to think.”6 It is not clear how such a notion, which he
admits is fundamentally outside of, heterogeneous to, all political, legal,
and ethical debates, could play any role except as a sublime impossibility
that undermines any of the actual immigration solutions proposed by
others.
For Derrida, the structure of the messianic affects all of everyday life if
we are open to it. He takes the responsibility of decision-making as
seriously as does his hero Kierkegaard (and as does Kierkegaard’s hero,
6
This exchange is described in Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, Andrew Brown (trans.)
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 515.
Abraham). A true decision is a wild leap into what must now be for us
unrepresentable. It is the facing of a radical otherness that must remain
radically other. The decision cannot emerge through the self-unfolding of
one’s character or through any rational weighing of present circumstances,
but must be an arbitrary projection into the thoroughly unknowable, as if
one’s very self were being disrupted by a call whose form of address is
unrecognizable. The decision is heterogeneous, says Derrida, to anything
that has accumulated in one’s life, including knowledge and habits, and
cannot anticipate the future. In his Kierkegaardian anti-Hegelianism, he
says that the particular is incommensurable with any universal. The ethical
task is to resist attempts to assimilate what has appeared as radically
different into the procedures of the present order; reconciling mediations
of the Hegelian sort make matters worse instead of better. The unnamable
messianic entry from a radical elsewhere, then, is the horizon of everyday
life. (It is hard to see how this rhetorically inflated regime actually helps us
make any ethical or political decisions that we have to make. We are more
likely to respect someone who acts on the basis of an ethical character that
is the result of long training and habit formation. But Derrida will have
little to do with that Hellenic notion of virtue.) If Hegel responds to the
outcome of the late-medieval situation by making his divine activity self-
manifesting, self-incarnating, self-unfolding, and immanent, Derrida
returns to the incommensurable deity of the late medievals who must be
radically other-than-human and whose entry in grace has no connection at
all with anything that has gone on previously.
Strong evidence that Derrida is following the model of the religion of
the sublime can be found in his autobiographical book Circumfession.7
This is the work of his that I wish to spend the most time with and to quote
from thoroughly. He is writing in this volume about his mother’s final
illness and about his own meditations on Augustine and religion, and he is
wondering what version is still available to him today of Augustine’s
talking to God in his Confessions. He is not a traditional theist yet he
wishes to keep alive a sublime notion of the divine. Thus: “. . . this is why
I am addressing myself here to God, the only one I take as a witness,
without yet knowing what these sublime words mean . . .” (56) Also: “. . .
whence the other, nongrammatical syntax that remains to be invented to
speak of the name of God . . .” (119) And: “. . . like my religion about which
7
Jacques Derrida, Circumfession, published as part of Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida,
Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). I will
quote from this book often enough that it is easier to put page numbers in the body of my text. All
page numbers in parentheses in the body of the present chapter are references to Circumfession.
nobody understands anything . . . the constancy of God in my life is called
by other names . . . the omnipresence to me of what I call God in my
absolved, absolutely private language being neither that of an eyewitness
nor that of a voice doing anything other than talking to me without saying
anything, nor a transcendent law . . . but the secret I am excluded from . . .”
(154–5) In setting up rich parallels throughout this work to Augustine’s
Christian confessions to God, Derrida is insisting as well on a difference.
In his upbringing in Algeria and in his education in France, his Jewish
background, including the name given him at his circumcision, often
became almost invisible as he moved through French institutions that
still had something of a Catholic sense to them. His bar mitzvah was called
a confirmation and he at times felt like a Marrano, a Jewish convert putting
on the appearance of Christian forms. So the sublime, unnamable divine
Other he is addressing, regarding which we have no grammar whatever, is
the hidden Jewish God beyond the Christian, institutional one
of Augustine, Catholic France, Hegel, and the grammars of everyday
French life. Instead of a being witnessing his life or at the other end of
a constant address, as in Augustine, his divine is a secret he is always
excluded from, but present as that unnamable absence.
I have earlier emphasized how late-medieval theological voluntarism
tended to distribute all significant power to the two poles of the absolute
God and the innerness of the self. If the late medievals kept open an
interior space for human self-assertion (as with Kierkegaard’s emphasis
on the importance of the self and its taking on states of great anxiety and
responsibility for decision-making), Derrida will allot a very peculiar kind
of self-assertive activity to the individual: its capacity to evade any kind of
determination that others or the social order try to place on it. “. . . that’s
what they can’t stand, that I say nothing, never anything tenable or valid,
no thesis that could be refuted, neither true nor false, not even, not seen not
caught, it is not a strategy but the violence of the void through which God
goes to earth to death in me . . . the unforgettable power of my discourses
hangs on the fact they grind up everything including the mute ash whose
name alone one then retains, scarcely mine, all that turning around
nothing, a Nothing in which God reminds me of him . . .” (272–3).
Through the way that a radical otherness has always from the start shot
him through with an empty nothingness, he will not have sufficient
identity to be defined and thus captured by those around him. His
discourses will not say anything but will be self-destructing engines that
leave behind only the ash-traces of their destruction, as in mystical negative
theologies that immediately erase what they appear to have said. His name
will be like that which remains after the entire architecture of a discourse
has cremated itself. His own identity will not be a stable presence but will
be self-deconstructing, self-fragmenting, multiplying, disseminating. “. . .
from one sentence to the next, even within the same sentence, it would
never be the same I, whence the unreadability.” A dependence on the
determining power of what remains radically other and absent means that
he can have no determinate character of selfhood and must thus be
unreadable. (291) He is made up rather of counterexamples to what he is.
“. . . I gather my spirits, for there are more than one of them sharing my
body, only by multiplying in me the counterexamples and countertruths
that I am . . .” (254) Thus: “. . . my presence becomes the absence it always
was.” (182) He will be unreadable to others because he keeps producing
“undecidable” sentences: “the most undecidable of the sentences I’ve
made.” (34) If his discourses produce emptiness through the self-
immolating character of their own statements, that very emptiness is
what reminds him of the possibility of the unnamable divine. The failure
to make meaning appear, then, is more profound than any apparent
success at doing this. All these quotations are evidence of how strongly
Derrida is working within the structures of the religion of the sublime, so
that one is easily reminded of the inscrutable divine of late-medieval
theological voluntarism.
A desirable selfhood for Derrida, then, will not be like Hegel’s divine in
being a self-actualizing, self-integrating whole. It will not find its self-
identity affirmed and strengthened in its engagement with otherness.
It will be rather like worldly items for the medieval voluntarists in having
no inner stability about it at all, so that it might become arbitrarily different
in the face of external circumstances that are unrepresentable. As in
Kierkegaard, the relationship to a hidden divine power makes the indivi-
dual incommensurable with all others and untranslatable. Derrida appears
to feel that any version of the Hegelian features of Geist in the self is not an
achievement of individuality but an imposition by a social order alien to
the self. So long as he is himself a shifting play of meanings that cannot be
defined, he cannot be appropriated by the coercive social order
around him.
Derrida’s refusal to be determined by others takes on a peculiar form in
this work. For his Circumfession covers the bottom third of the pages of
a larger book, Jacques Derrida. In it the top two-thirds of the pages are
given over to an analysis of his work by his friend Geoffrey Bennington,
who calls his part of the work Derridabase. Derrida feels that it is his task to
resist any assimilation to this narrative above, to evade and escape what
positions it would seem to place him in. He speaks here of “the happenings
I oppose to G.’s absolute theologic program” (141) and of “the singular
events that can dismantle G.’s theologic program.” (305) There seems to be
a clear distinction between the unnamable God that Derrida is addressing
in Circumfession and this “absolute theologic” program that is working
itself out above him on the book’s pages. The latter, through Bennington’s
conceptual analyses, is as it were conceptualizing the divine and construct-
ing a systematic order into which Derrida’s positions are supposed to fit.
This “absolute theologic program,” then, is surely Hegel’s program of
Absolute Spirit, with its Christian understructure, or something much
like it in Derrida’s narrative. Its “divine” is self-manifesting and self-
incarnating, and it aims to express accurately what is meaningful in
Derrida’s work. Derrida’s strategy of evasion of that program, even though
it is constructed by an ally and friend, seems like a cross between aspects of
Kierkegaard and aspects of Jewish mysticism. Kierkegaard discredits ethical
individuality (as in Kant and Hegel) because it is universalizable.
The ethical, ecclesiastical, and political institutions of society place one
in a context of rituals and duties that can be repeated as the same by
innumerable others. But the relationship of the singular individual to an
incommensurable God does not allow generalization at all. Thus Derrida
speaks of trying to produce “singular” textual events that cannot be
assimilated into any larger program or understanding. He talks of the
“unanticipatible singularity of the event” that he will produce. (34) But
what can this possibly mean? Part of the answer is that we have already seen
him claim that his goal is to produce work that is unreadable, untransla-
table, and undecidable. Thus it cannot be accommodated into any ready
position in the language games of culture. As in Kierkegaard, it becomes
singular through its relation to a sublime otherness that can never take on
any present or universal form.
He seems to add more mystical elements to this picture. One might
suppose that his own philosophical account of language shows a clear link
between utterances and a repeatability that both makes meaning the same
and does not. Anything you say, Derrida has claimed, can always get taken
up elsewhere by others who are saying the same thing, yet in ways not
controllable by you as a speaker. So where in this overall structure of
repeatability is the place for the “singular events” that he talks about?
Derrida appears to be looking for textual moves that, in the manner of the
mystics, go beyond anything produced by the normal grammar of language.
That is why he speaks of seeking “the other, nongrammatical syntax that
remains to be invented to speak of the name of God” (119) and why he talks
of his work as a “negative theology,” a “play with the name of God.” (44) He
speaks also about “. . . what is done, outside language, without sentence, the
time of the proper name, the rest is literature.” (121) If his previous “gram-
matology” and deconstruction have gone about undermining the stability of
ordinary grammars, languages, and literatures, he now reaches for a realm
beyond all these that he associates with the “proper name,” which suppo-
sedly will not be susceptible to his own disenchanting practices because it is
somehow outside of language, beyond the grammatical structure of sen-
tences. One recalls that Benjamin made precisely the same reference to the
privilege of the proper name in his turn to Jewish mysticism. He seemed to
mean something like the Kabbalistic attempt to get back beyond “fallen”
human languages to a sacred paradisiacal one defined especially by God’s
creating of the world as like an act of naming and by Adam and Eve’s naming
of creatures in the Garden. The “proper name” outside of language and
grammar would be like the mystic’s attempt to ascend to the level of God’s
primeval naming of things. The proper name would be as well that which
makes Kierkegaard a singular individual through his being addressed directly
by God, as God called out to Abraham by his name in placing on him an
unsharable burden. Derrida seems to mean as well that his own proper
Hebrew name, Elie, given to him at birth and signifying his relationship to
the Hebrew divinity, has been lost as his French-Christian other name,
Jacques, which he seems to see as connecting him to a more universal and
grammatical order, replaced it. The proper name that Derrida is aiming for is
beyond grammar, beyond the repeatable structures of language, so that it can
point, like Kierkegaard’s Absolute, to the non-repeatable singularity of the
speaker’s words.
Of course, the messianic coming of a new order fits this picture because
it would be a singular, unprecedented event. It would not a move within
any constituted realm, with its own social-political grammar, that we now
have available. Derrida makes his mystical point clearer when he speaks of
a special Jewish mystical discourse that has four aspects: literal, allegorical,
homiletic, and kabbalistic. (110) It turns out that the first letters of the
Hebrew words for these four aspects are P, R D, and S. Derrida is quick to
point out that if we add vowels here, as Hebrew allows, we get Paradise,
and thus the paradisiacal language that Derrida is apparently presenting
himself as aiming at in his text. He will even speak of his Macintosh
computer as his Apple of PaRDeS. (312) If he cannot accomplish this
work on his own, he consoles himself that “it’s God . . . turning around
me, reappropriating my languages, dispersing their meaning in all direc-
tions.” (224) A radically other divine activity seems capable of settling
meanings on his words that he himself could not accomplish on his own.
One is reminded of Benjamin’s account of translation, where to get the
meaning right is not the goal but rather to point toward a purer language
beyond all ordinary languages. The radical deconstruction and disenchant-
ment that Derrida is known for thus seems to be aimed at the Hellenic,
Christian, and Hegelian structures and languages of Western thought,
with their implicit metaphysics of presence and incarnation. But a Jewish
mystical textuality might produce singular textual events that, in aiming
beyond grammar itself at an ineffable, non-theological “divine,” could
evade and transcend that entire program. He is, he says, working “toward
an idiom which in the end would be untranslatable in return into the
language of the beginnings . . .” (115–16) The untranslatability seems to
arise from a return beyond the Greco-Roman-Christian order to the most
preliminary Hebraic beginnings of the West, though at the same time he
does not believe in any myth of origins. (He is happy, however, to claim
that the meanings condensed in the German notion of Geist and the Greek
notion of pneuma have an earlier instance in the Hebrew word ruah.8)
It is curious how disturbed he seems to be that that his friend Bennington,
in giving a summary account of Derrida’s thought above Derrida’s own text,
never offers any direct quotations from his work. Derrida seems to believe
that only the singularity of the precise sequence of shapes that he put
together has a chance of capturing something more than the false stability
and communicability of ordinary meaning. (But then could Bennington
even translate Derrida’s French into English in giving a quotation?) It is as if
Derrida feels his texts are like scriptural ones. One might summarize themes
and events in the Bible, but for the mysteries of Biblical language, it is the
precise sequence of Hebrew letters that, meditated on (or even processed
through a computer program) reveals higher-level meanings that can only be
expressed obliquely through such textual vehicles. If God is addressing an
individual through the words of the Bible, then it has to be through those
very words, not through a summary of the meaning. Apparently Derrida
hopes that his own writing will be like this. So he is upset that Bennington’s
rough summaries of his thinking are entirely removed, in the manner of
Hegel’s conceptualized Christianity, from the absolutely singular events of
Derrida’s own textuality. Yet Derrida was also an intellectual entrepreneur
who did an astonishing amount of travel to conferences in his honor all
across the world and who was happy to see the popularity that resulted from
8
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby
(trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 99–102.
the translation of his work into many languages, so that he was fashionable
longer in English than in French.
I should grant that my own philosophical character (and at some point we
philosophize out of a deep reservoir of character and sensibility) does not tend
to make me sympathetic with an enterprise such as Derrida’s. I do not see that
notions of a mystical sublime, of an inconceivable messianic future, or of
a search for an esoteric textuality do much to enlighten us on such matters as
which features of our social and political formations are worth retaining, what
kinds of self-formation produce admirable selves, and what benefits we might
hope for from our aesthetic experiences. I often have a suspicion, shared by
many analytic philosophers, that such negative-theology appeals to an
unspeakable sublime are a tactic for inflating the rhetorical importance of
one’s position without having to produce ordinary arguments and precisely
rendered claims. But Derrida’s writing does implore us never to be satisfied
that any institution we have come up with is a satisfactory embodiment of the
justice we are aiming at. I describe aspects of his position in detail because
I wish to show the still powerful effects on intellectual work today of
theologically shaped notions of the sublime, not unlike those that developed
in the medieval era’s theological voluntarism. It is true that I focused on the
particular Derridean text in which religious references are most frequent. But
I believe that this text, which is so personal for him, written as it was during the
period of his mother’s final illness, allows us to see a background framework
that is there, but more faintly and implicitly, in his overall attitudes of thought.
This yearning for the sublime can take a political form, as we saw with
Benjamin. On locates justice not in a gradual improvement of present-day
institutions but in a coming messianic order about which we can, at the
moment, say nothing at all. The sublime taken in this sense will usually be
quite radically iconoclastic. It is not a matter of weighing how much good
there is in existing political, social, and religious forms. These must instead
be erased in the thoroughly new order to come. Benjamin indeed, as we saw,
speaks of a kind of divine nihilistic violence that will grant no value whatever
to the present order, as in the divine destruction of the world in a great flood.
There is an interesting thinker who would turn us away from that sort of
thinking in ethics and politics. Bernard Williams in his ethical investigations
is worried precisely about that strongly iconoclastic attitude toward earlier
forms.9 In having this worry, he is not considering Marxism or Benjamin’s
9
See Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For his
overall argument against the role of theory in ethics, see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
theological nihilism but rather the most dominant modern ethical theories:
Kantianism and utilitarianism. Each has a systematic theory of the good that
would found ethical life on a single principle: rational self-determination or
the relative ratio of pleasures to pains. In such a determination by a single
principle of the good, all earlier ethical ideas and forms of life are thought to
lose their value except insofar as portions of them can be incorporated within
the new dominant ethical theory. Williams is interested in what happens to
the ethical ideas of ancient Greece, especially those associated with the
stances of the Greek tragedians (and also to an extent with Aristotle).
A very complex world view arose then with an emphasis on shame, honor,
fate, necessity, agency, responsibility, happiness, the shaping of a well-
formed individuality over a whole life, and so forth. To the ideological
Kantian, this Hellenic set of virtues and ethical attitudes may come off as
morally primitive and can be easily devalued.
Williams’s argument is that if we try to isolate the Kantian moment of
moral autonomy as the only point of moral value, we are in trouble. For
advances in biology, sociology, and other fields keep shrinking that moment
until it threatens to vanish. Kant himself needed to ground such a moment
of autonomous moral agency, improbably, in a moral will that exists some-
how outside the conditions of time, space, and causality. Yet we can,
continues Williams, still find value in the Kantian notions of autonomy
and moral agency. The problem is that to give these notions any point of
engagement with real lives, we have to assume that a culture already has in
place, in the background, a rich set of institutions and practices that realize
the non-Kantian conditions that make Kantian moral reflection and agency
effective. Such practices are involved in shaping a reliable character in
individual selves, in encouraging their moral individuation and responsibil-
ity, in making them take the project of living an ethical human life seriously,
and in attaching them to an individual life such that they take actions as truly
their own, no matter what other causes may have been in play. But these are
the very shaping mechanisms and attitudes that the ancient Greek tragedians
were concerned with. It turns out that to be iconoclastic toward the earlier
ethical practices is to wipe out the very ecosystem that the later practices still
need to survive.
So Williams draws a lesson that is very much anti-iconoclastic. In trying to
live ethical lives in a complicated world, he says, we need more ethical
resources rather than fewer. We want to keep alive a range of conceptions
of what a well-lived human life will be like. One serious error, he adds, is that
philosophers have supposed that there is such a thing as a systematic ethical
theory, and that finding such a theory will determine which ethical ideas and
attitudes are to be supported and which ought to be erased. But we have no
reason at all, he argues, to suppose that ethics will be like the sciences in
aiming at such a theory. Perhaps we could add to his story by considering
matters as follows. Our position is rather like that of a large parliament
whose many parties have to negotiate coalitions, whether temporary or
permanent, that allow several different conceptions of the good to be at
least partly realized. A society may have many worthy goods which are not
fully compatible: equality, liberty, individual excellence, happiness, scientific
and artistic achievement, social justice, cultural energy, an emotive attach-
ment to a form of life, economic wealth, a strong sense of community, and so
forth. Learning the practical, back-and-forth, non-systematic negotiations
and coalition building that make such a society work is itself one of our
marvelous achievements. It is difficult in this context to see how a new
messianic order, with its radical iconoclasm and its impoverishment of
ethical life through erasing many earlier forms of it, could actually make
a desirable form of life.
And it is unclear why we should value the disseminating Derridean self
that is adept at resisting any determinate description, that always slips away
to an indescribable elsewhere. Having a predictably reliable ethical char-
acter is part of living a decent and admirable life, not a weakness that makes
one more easily coerced and appropriated by a dominant economic and
social system seeking to advance and replicate itself. Having a strong ethical
and intellectual character is the most promising way to resist the forms of
cultural determination that pass so easily through our cultural systems.
To be self-determining in the sense of pushing oneself to have the best
reasons for believing and acting is a strong defense against the pressures of
the social order. It is a dangerous thought to propose, as Theodor Adorno
does, that reason itself has become a coercive expression of late capitalism
and that all the resources available for our practices of self-shaping are
inevitably contaminated by a capitalist commodity culture. We would
thereby lose resources that are becoming more important today as points
of resistance to a digital, social-networking culture. Derrida’s notion of the
sublime allows a radical otherness, with theological connotations, to empty
out the self. All of its natural and social determinations become unstable
and hollow in relationship to a nongrammatical naming that must come, as
in a messianic arrival, from a different sphere. Such a self, it seems, is of the
sort that becomes most easily a mere conduit for the circulation of cultural
memes. But if we see little reason to adopt that theological framework, then
we are left with the rigorously shaped self of the Greeks (or of Nietzsche),
and that is not a bad thing to be left with.
chapter 9
Literature Today and the Sublime Absence of

Aesthetic Experience
It is of interest that Benjamin’s and Derrida’s appeals to a still theological

sublime, one with strong reminders of the late-medieval intellectual space,
are not outlier positions that have little effect on the rest of intellectual life
today. Instead we find writers who seem not only to invoke gestures toward
a sublime that has elements of religion in it, but also to have the thoughts of
Benjamin and Derrida in the background as they do this. I want to study
the role of the sublime in a recently popular writer, Ben Lerner, whose two
novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, are exemplary for my
discussion.1 I will look at these in considerable detail because in them the
role of the religious structures I am curious about is especially transparent.
The title of the first novel already sets it in a space of textual knowing-
ness, since it is also the title of a poem by John Ashbery. Adam, in Madrid
on a poetry fellowship, strongly admires Ashbery’s poetry for the way it
points to the possible shapes of experiences and meanings while seeming to
withdraw or postpone their actual availability. He will leave the Atocha
train station in Madrid for Granada, on a side trip with a girlfriend. While
reading Ashbery during the train ride, he is noticing the sound and rhythm
of the train wheels and how they mark the passage of time. The experience
is analogous, he thinks, to the way Ashbery’s poetry captures the gramma-
tical movements of language and the structures by which it confers mean-
ing without actually conferring that meaning. Adam believes that his own
task as a poet is to reflect, more honestly than others, on how aesthetic
experience and experience in general have been emptied out and now offer
only lack, absence, and failure. We are likely to hear an echo here of
Benjamin on baroque allegory. German baroque drama, claims
Benjamin, fills the stage with unconvincing, arbitrary, strained moments
that can only point, by their very emptiness and failure, to a level of
1
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2011), and Ben Lerner,
10:04 (New York: Faber and Faber, 2014).
228
The Sublime Absence of Aesthetic Experience 229
meaning they are never able to articulate. Adam seems in his account of
poetry to be in many ways a disciple of Benjamin.
In an opening scene Adam notices a man weeping in front of a painting
in the Prado and wonders if the man is having a profound experience of art.
Adam is incapable, with his strongly demystifying habits, of having such an
experience himself and he doubts very much that others actually do. He is
keenly aware of the disconnection between his own experience of artworks
and others’ claims about them, and admits that “the closest I’d come to
having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this
distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.”2 It seems
likely to him, then, that the weeping man may not be expressing genuine
emotion but may be a performance artist who does not feel the aesthetic
transports he performs but is calling attention to, and questioning, the
entire institutional structure of art and the roles it trains us to play.
As a poet on a writing grant, Adam is invited to read his work along with
a young Spanish poet. He sees the latter’s poems and his style of perfor-
mance as full of cheap linguistic, emotional, and gestural clichés and is
astonished at the serious attendance of the audience to these features. He
reflects that “if people felt the pressure to perform absorption in the face of
what they knew was an embarrassing placeholder for an art no longer
practicable for whatever reasons, a dead medium whose former power
could only be felt as a loss – these scenarios did for me involve a pathos
the actual poems did not, a pathos that in fact increased in proportion to
their failure, as the more abysmal the experience of the actual the greater
the implied heights of the virtual.” (38) For Adam, what once was an
absorption in a moving aesthetic experience can be, for those today, only
an unconvincing performance, an attentiveness to an empty space that
readers or listeners can, together, pretend is still worth something. At least
in that pretense toward a site of aesthetic failure, they hold open a space for
a very different aesthetic future. Adam’s strong feelings about art are of a
reflexive, second-order nature and are trained on the vacuum where
aesthetic experience is no longer possible but where the very emptiness
and absences, brought to one’s attention, point to virtual, impossible,
inexpressible spaces where something profound might indeed be at work.
The subject of his poetry, he says, is the incommensurability of language
and experience. Language cannot capture the way the world is or express
the inner life of the self, but can only keep on indicating its own failures to
2
Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station, 9. Since I quote from that novel in several places, I will place page
numbers to it in parentheses in the text.
do what it sets out to do. (Jean-François Lyotard says that “the postmodern
would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in
presentation itself . . . that which searches for new presentations, not in
order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the
unpresentable.”)3
One might note at this point that there is an alternative Adam fails to
consider. Holding open and glorifying a sublime arena of lack and absence
makes sense if one has retained an overall space of theological thought and
then noted that what is divine-like has disappeared from it, so that one
notices mostly the gap where something once was. Benjamin’s account of
baroque allegory, one recalls, is made deliberately analogous to the time in
the late Roman world when it was no longer believed that the ancient gods
made their appearances in human or animal forms and at natural sites, so
that they became allegories for abstract spiritual ideas. A more justifiable
response might be to shrink that space of theological expectation back
toward a more naturalized landscape defined by what it is for our human
faculties to function well in the kind of world in which we find ourselves.
Then the devaluing of the real in favor of the sublimely virtual and absent
will be less plausible. To try to make our experience more significant than it
is by devoting great energy to emphasizing its incommensurability,
unspeakability, and impossibility is to be caught up in, or perhaps to be
taking advantage of, an outdated theological stance. It is the distorting and
artificial stretching of the space of experience that makes certain zones
appear to have a mystical, unrepresentable character about them and that
makes ordinary experience seem to come up short, unable to fill up that
stretched-out space. As an alternative, we might give up the theological
geography from the start. At the aesthetic level this means not measuring
aesthetic experience against a sublime, now indescribable religious-like
experience but appreciating instead the satisfying virtues of what is on
offer here in the human realm, especially when our cultural achievements
have an unusual excellence about them. On the other hand, many will find
appealing Lerner’s sense that we are offered only hollowed-out experiences
in today’s socio-economic culture as well as his hope that poets can, by
emphasizing their failure, point toward a very different kind of experience
that is at the moment impossible to articulate.
Lerner cleverly exploits Adam’s position as a visitor to Madrid whose
Spanish is not yet fluent. Derrida may be one thinker in the background
3
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?,” in T. Docherty (ed.),
Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 46.
here, with his emphasis on an oscillation and blurring between what is
original and what is a citation or translation and with his claims for the
ubiquity of mistranslation and miscommunication as productive features.
Adam does not write from original poetic inspiration, which he not only
mistrusts but also finds shameful to believe in. (When he is tempted to take
poetic notes on a strong perceptual experience he has just had, he imme-
diately becomes skeptical and dismissive about his own response.) His
work is already involved in a space of translation, juxtaposing, and repur-
posing of fragments from elsewhere. His strategy for the poems he is
working on now is to open at random a book of English translations of
Lorca’s Spanish poetry, pick out some of the translated English lines, and
then alter them through verbal substitution, especially in the following
manner. He will replace an English word (sky) with what he takes to be its
Spanish equivalent (cielo) and then replace this with a similar-sounding
English word (cello). Then he will braid the results with prose fragments
from his journal. By arranging this space of fragments and gaps and
absorption-defeating arbitrariness, he hopes that “poems would constitute
screens on which readers would project their own desperate belief in the
possibility of poetic experience, whatever that might be, or afford them the
opportunity to mourn its impossibility.” (38) Only a poem that makes the
readers’ hoped-for aesthetic experience impossible will make them con-
scious about the character of the social and psychological space in which
they have this need, so that they will be forced to examine their own habits
of semantic and emotional projection. Adam comes upon a notebook of
his girlfriend’s poems in Spanish and claims that he is able to find the
poems lovely because there are many Spanish words he does not know and,
rather than looking them up in a dictionary, he fills in the gaps with words
of his own. Again, mistranslation and arbitrary substitution are the keys to
poetic success. The actual character of the original text (what the girlfriend
might have meant or felt in writing her lines of poetry) has almost no
determining value for Adam. All texts are simply material for decompos-
ing, recomposing, recycling, and repurposing, and the more semantic
absences, the better. One is reminded here of Benjamin’s “The Task of the
Translator.”4 For Benjamin, the translator is not trying for semantic
accuracy, but rather explodes the text being translated in order to release
shards of forgotten meaning that suggest a purity of language, of significa-
tion, beyond any particular expression or any semantic determinacy.
4
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.),
H. Zohn (trans.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
Perhaps Adam hopes that his translation exercises will suggest this special
Benjaminian experience.
Adam’s attitude toward poetry is also, for him, an attitude toward
experience more generally. When a young woman is telling Adam the
story of the tragic death of her brother in a car crash, his poor comprehen-
sion of spoken Spanish makes him miss the main point but allows what he
takes to be a greater pleasure: the ability to construct three ongoing
narratives, with quite different reference schemes, out of the parts of her
Spanish that he does grasp. Finding out what happened to the brother, and
what emotional reactions to this event might be at work in the young
woman, is less important than the opportunity for projecting meanings
onto linguistic puzzles that contain large gaps. Adam has no sensitivity to,
or empathy for, emotional worlds that are grounded in human biological
life. In this respect he is like Paul de Man, who claimed that the apparently
negative emotions in a poet’s work are really due to the projecting of
textual gaps and absences arising from the very machinery of language, so
that the sad emotions expressed by a poet are not a reflection of the poet’s
psychological states but of the failure of language to generate any fullness of
meaning.5 Adam thus is able to find in life itself, because of his role as
a displaced speaker, the situation that we often find in reading difficult
experimental poetry, where quite different semantic networks may be
projected onto a set of words that are poorly comprehensible as such.
The suggestion is that what appears as the special case of the mistranslation
is in fact the structure of experience in general. “And yet by refusing to
absorb me the poem held out the possibility of a higher form of absorption
of which I was unworthy, a profound experience unavailable from within
the damaged life, and so the poem became a figure for its outside . . . its
failure to move me moved me, at least a little.” (20) Again absence and
failure point to something more profound than a successful poem would.
If Adam’s poetry is deliberately anti-absorptive, then what he fails most to
be absorbed in is his own life. He is often presented as both moving through
Madrid and watching himself do so as if from a roof or a plane. He does not
trust his own emotional life, which he thinks can be little more than a tissue
of culturally manufactured commodities, so he cannot use any naturally
arising emotional investments in others and events as a guide. He is happier
when he is self-consciously performing for others emotions he does not feel,
as when he tells young women falsely that his mother has died and puts on
a show of being deeply moved by that fact. You are less likely to be a vehicle
5
See, for example, Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 20–56.
of, and be taken in by, culture’s circulation of shallow, fraudulent emotions
if you know you are faking them from the start. He has no sense of an
original voice when he writes, yet when a Spanish friend translates Adam’s
English poems into Spanish and recites them for an audience, Adam has an
inkling, though they have likely been poorly translated and the friend’s voice
is unlike his, of the shadow of a voice he can recognize as his own, though
only as such a shadowy absence. The authentic, in at least one sense of the
term, comes about as a result of mistranslation and lack. Through transla-
tions that have missed what he is saying he hears a grammatical ordering and
a structuring of meaning beyond any specific meanings; these appear to
capture something authentic about his experience, in the way that Ashbery’s
poems capture the shapes of meaning-conferral without offering us a more
determinate significance. What is Adam’s own comes only out of processes
that make things very much not his own, that remove the scene from
wherever he is. Absorption in one’s experience through the deep emotions
attached to it is the single move that, for those like Adam, must always
appear as a naïve, illusory one to be sneered at, a losing move in the game.
The young Spanish woman he is with does not draw out of him a registering
of her fine nuances of feeling but rather a set of ironic attitudes about the
impossibility of communication.
Adam’s poor Spanish, which he deliberately presents to the world as
more impoverished than it is, allows others to project significance onto
what he says. “Isabel assigned profound meaning, assigned a plurality of
possible profound meanings, to my fragmentary speech, intuiting from
those fragments depths of insight and latent eloquence, and because she
projected what she thought she discovered, she experienced, I liked to
think, an intense affinity for the workings of my mind.”(46) Recognizing
this, Adam is afraid that “our relationship largely depended upon my never
becoming fluent, on my having an excuse to speak in enigmatic fragments
or koans,” so that he wonders how long he could remain in Madrid
“without crossing whatever invisible threshold of proficiency would render
me devoid of interest.” (51) At the social level for Adam, absence and
mistranslation are aspects of strategy games that mystify the ordinary and
boring, that make it appear profound. If your own gaps and absences allow
others to project their meanings on you, then they will naturally feel an
affinity for what they find in you, for the you they encounter is their own
construction.
The danger is that this acknowledgment threatens to undermine not just
the character of Adam’s personal relations but also his favored strategies of
experimental literature as well. For these also employ omission, difficulty,
and the removal of familiar signposts to meaning in order to place the
reader in the position of Adam’s girlfriends, as one who must project a need
for poetic experience upon fragmentary, gappy, recalcitrant material. One
might see this question as a larger one about recent theory, where many
theorists, especially those from Europe and their American imitators, are
known for difficulty, paradox, and dense abstraction. Why should we not
conclude that they have found a strategy, like Adam’s, for appearing
profound to others by leaving large gaps in the text and by making
communication difficult? Will the entire structure of academic literary
and cultural theory over many decades come off as not much different from
Adam’s social-strategy games with Spanish women?
One notes how much of Adam’s thinking about his social life
involves second-order or third-order attributions instead of first-order
feelings. He is not attentive to what he feels for someone but to what, for
example, she believes about what he believes about what she believes.
Instead of being the place for an exchange of feeling, amatory life is
a chess game of metalevel moves and countermoves, with each trying to
defeat a temporary power position held by the other. A very similar thing
happens with art. Adam in visiting the Prado, we saw, is not moved by the
paintings but is interested in the viewer who seems to be performing
a profound response to a work of art and, even more, he is interested in
the museum guards who are unsure how to react to this viewer, as he may
be either an art lover or a crazy man about to damage a painting. It is the
sideways looking at another’s looking that matters, not any direct experi-
ence. In listening to someone singing and playing the Spanish guitar,
Adam does not attend to the music but is skeptically reading the absorp-
tion of others in the experience. A reader not fully sympathetic with Adam
might come to believe that theory-influenced writers are not so much
pressing, with very limited means, toward what is ineffable, but rather
have discovered that a mystifying of an emptied-out space is a second-order
move that makes one not come off as boring or uninteresting. They have
no special experience to offer but have become very good at reading and
playing with the aesthetic responses of others, so that this kind of game-
theory social interaction, with second-order and third-order moves, is what
art is now about. One is seeking strategies that undercut others’ ways of
experiencing or producing art, that play with the conventions and expecta-
tions that others bring to art, that look skeptically at anything that seems
profound or original in order to carve out an empty space that has
intimations of a strange otherness. If the experiencer is forced to project
meaning upon juxtaposed fragments with little obvious connection, then
this experiencer, finding herself mirrored in what she sees, will naturally,
like Adam’s girlfriends regarding Adam, have an affinity for the art in
question.
I am unsure what position to ascribe to Lerner regarding his character
Adam. He offers plenty of material for thinking of the novel as
a straightforward satire of individuals like Adam, with their Ivy League
semiotics and cultural studies education and their attempts to play the
game of being an artist. Adam is constantly looking at his own states and
thinks that the feelings he attributes to others will always be mere projected
and reflected versions of these states, so that no real understanding or
communication occurs. A close friend from Brown, who has clearly been
exposed to the same theoretical readings as an undergraduate, reports to
him regarding an awful experience while in Mexico. This friend and his
girlfriend directly experienced the drowning death of a young Mexican
woman, with an accompanying sense that they were faintly responsible for
it, and with Cyrus, Adam’s friend, trying to perform CPR on the already
dead woman. But Cyrus’s report to Adam seems to forget the Mexican
woman entirely. He has had a fight with the girlfriend because he thinks
that for her, the experience of the woman’s drowning was just the sort of
“real” experience she was looking for in coming to Mexico, as she inter-
preted such a “real” experience as material for a novel. There is no avoiding
the reality of death, the girlfriend says, and Cyrus remembers “laughing at
the phrase ‘reality of death’ to show I thought it was an embarrassing
cliché.” (77) Again, a first-order experience has been turned into a second-
order one, with the winning move the ability to see others’ reactions to
events, even to the sudden death of a young woman, as tired clichés. Cyrus
exposes his girlfriend’s naivety in supposing she could ever have “real”
experience by traveling to a developing nation, for there is no such thing as
that.
This attitude finds its strongest test for Adam when he is present in Madrid
for the Al Qaeda-inspired bombing of a commuter train as it pulled into the
Atocha station (a place already textualized by the title of Ashbery’s poem).
Over two hundred people are killed and Adam’s Spanish friends react strongly
to the experience. One expects that Lerner is going to have Adam show that he
now, finally, is having a direct experience of the real, that the Atocha Station
will come to stand not for the textual world of Ashbery’s poetry but for a tragic
and moving event in the actual world. Instead, Adam is content to comment
skeptically on his friends’ reactions. He goes to a demonstration with Spanish
friends in the rain, and when people start chanting that it isn’t raining, that
Madrid is crying, he sees the chant as artificial and finds he cannot participate
in it. He notes all the flaws, the ideological clichés, in his friends’ political
comments after the bombing. (Perhaps he later comes to a more complex
identification with these Spanish friends.)
There is, interestingly, a brief suggestion by Lerner that Adam’s favoring
of second-order skeptical attitudes may have an earlier cause. Adam men-
tions his terror at first being dropped off at kindergarten and being made to
say good-bye to his father and, later, his feeling of betrayal and loss at being
sent off to camp. In one poem that he reads to an audience, with all its
theory-aware cleverness and gaps, there is the phrase “child / Behind glass,
adult retreating.” (40) So perhaps Adam cannot handle first-order feeling
because he has never adequately handled earlier feelings of separation and
loss. His cleverness about and mystification of textual absence is
a compensation for an incapacity to deal with a kind of absence that is
earlier, more personal, and less susceptible to clever, self-conscious theoriz-
ing. It appears significant this one very brief section of the book is the only
one where the narration switches to third person from first. Not even
Adam’s disenchanting stance is enough to keep these emotions at an
acceptable distance if he remains in the first person. On this reading,
Lerner is presenting a case that Adam’s college training in deconstruction,
cultural studies, and Ashbery-like poetry has given him a psychologically
harmful addiction to a stance of metalevel sophistication, so that his fears
of appearing naïve make him unable to develop as a self. If all experiences
are seen as already fraudulent, then there is no reason to try to reorder one’s
stance toward the world and toward oneself through engaging with and
rechanneling one’s emotional life, especially when that life involves
wrenching earlier experiences of grief and of the separateness of selfhood.
The cleverness about seeing emotions as clichés is a way of evading those
emotions that go very deep, often into the nonlinguistic experience of
childhood, and that have to do with the fragility of the self in the face of
loss and of threats to its boundaries. To translate literature and art to
a space of second-order and third-order strategy moves in a clever game
with others is to miss out on what assistance these disciplines might be in
the task of leading a particular human life that takes on the full range of
what it is to be a self. Just as Adam cannot engage with the emotions of the
citizens of Madrid after the bombing, so he cannot engage with his own
challenging emotions. To reach toward a sublime, ineffable otherness that
makes the present moment as well as the self a space of emptiness and
failure is to remove one from the responsibility of handling one’s present,
hard-to-articulate emotions.
To what extent, then, is Lerner laying the groundwork for the reader to
be deeply skeptical about Adam’s various stances? Adam says that Ashbery
is the only one he can call a great poet non-ironically and Lerner himself
has written about Ashbery and can seem very close to the Adam who
describes the complex pleasures of reading that poet, as Ashbery’s language
gives us the shapes of thinking, as well as the “texture of et cetera itself.”
One guesses that Lerner actually shares some of Adam’s view of the world,
including the view that the profound experience of art is no longer
possible, and that poets must find strategies for dealing with what has
gone missing instead of continuing to pretend that it is occurring.
His second novel, 10.04, might be said to occupy a space between Walt
and Walter: Whitman and Benjamin. The narrator is a poet-novelist very
much like Lerner, though not quite identical to him. His story covers
roughly a year in Manhattan and Brooklyn (and in Marfa, Texas) framed
by Hurricane Irene and superstorm Sandy. His very close female friend,
though not romantic partner, wishes him to contribute sperm so that she
may have a child, and he discovers that he has a serious medical condition.
He also signs an author’s contract for a large amount of money, becomes
mentor to a young child who is an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, and
goes to Texas on a poetry fellowship. But plot is secondary here. A question
throughout is whether the narrator can ultimately take up a manner of
engagement with the world that is much like Whitman’s. In a closing scene
he and his woman friend are walking across the Brooklyn Bridge after
Sandy has flooded and darkened lower Manhattan and closed the subways
in the area. Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is transparently in
the background. That poem shows Whitman’s non-ironic confidence in
his power to celebrate the world immediately around him, to identify with
a collective activity that has something noble about it, and to address
a community a hundred or two hundred years in the future as still vividly
his own, with an assurance that the experience of his ‘I’ is communicable to
others across such a gap.
There is a real issue whether Lerner’s narrator can join Whitman in these
kinds of identification and emotional investment, whether poetry today
can ever possibly put itself within such a Whitmanian frame. Even with all
his acute metacritical awareness, this narrator seems to wish to make non-
ironic Whitmanian commitments to his woman friend who wants to have
a baby, to the community of the future that the resulting child will join, to
the educational advancement of the Salvadoran boy, and to a young male
arts intern who has a bad reaction to a drug and needs to be tended to in the
manner of Whitman’s tending to soldiers in the Civil War. He wants to
find an attachment to the surrounding community of New Yorkers for
whom the flooding and blackout of Sandy are a harbinger of future
ecological disaster, and to future crossers between New York and
Brooklyn whom the narrator can address with a Whitmanian ‘you.’
Yet the novel also provides resources for a reading that would ironize and
undermine the character of such commitments. The narrator’s new atti-
tude in the novel seems owed to the discovery of his serious heart condi-
tion, an aorta problem linked to Marfan’s syndrome. Yet as he travels to
Marfa, Texas on a poetry fellowship from a foundation there (where large
Donald Judd sculptures are displayed), his “Marfan” syndrome seems
a product of poetic wordplay about his status as a poet on a fellowship in
Marfa, so that the syndrome would actually be that of being a certain kind
of poet. One character describes a young woman he knew who faked
a diagnosis, as well as the symptoms, of cancer, and that story is joined
with other matters of fraudulence and counterfeit. It seems that we as
readers are being warned not only that there is something fictive in Lerner’s
description of the character who seems nearly identical to him, but also
that this fictional character’s own self-narration about disease may not be
reliable. It might be naïve to activate our sympathies (as we often do as
readers of fiction) for a character whose disease may be a product of
a sideways textuality and of a teasing strategy game with the reader more
than of any deep experience of human mortality. Yet it is also possible that
some real medical condition of the real author is behind all this.
The book’s title, 10:04, refers to the time registered in the movie Back to
the Future when lightning strikes a tower and sends the characters back to
the present. So it seems to stand for one’s finally arriving at the proper place
of one’s life after a displacement in time. Perhaps committing himself to
having a baby with his woman friend as they are crossing Brooklyn Bridge
in the dark shows that he has indeed arrived where he is supposed to be.
But the novel also presents an illustration of the Klee painting Angelus
Novus, once owned, deeply cherished, and written about by Benjamin. He
discussed this image precisely in terms of this angel’s having its “back to the
future” as it is swept by the torrent of time into that not-yet-arrived
dimension, while having its face turned to the massive building up of
rubble and ruin in the past, unable to change that devastation and sorrow.
So if the phrase ‘back to the future’ on one side makes us recall, through
a popular movie, a moment of coming to be at home in the present, it is
also, through the reference to Benjamin’s angel, a sign of the failure of any
notion of presence, of any reconciliation of the self with a surrounding
world of loss and absence. Until a new messianic order appears, one can
only contribute to the ruins piling up. So are the writer’s admirable actions
in the novel emptied out by this inclusion of that picture of the angel?
It is worth looking at these contrasting readings more closely.
The narrator is ready to follow Benjamin in gesturing toward an unrepre-
sentable sublime that is both vaguely theological and Marxist-messianic.
The everyday world must be seen, on this view, as thoroughly unredeemed,
as a place of emptiness, mortification, and ruin. In the broken, often
marginalized elements of the past and present, one may find faint glimmer-
ing reflections of a utopian future that is at the moment inconceivable.
Through slight tears and ruptures in our expected continuities, a brief
moment of lighting from another dimension may show through. And
Marxists, for their part, must accentuate the tensions and failures of
bourgeois society rather than partly alleviating them and thus reducing
the pressure for revolutionary change. From both the quasi-theology
perspective and from the Marxist-messianic one, experiencers must seek
out the most negative, failing aspects of the present situation, the sites
where meaning, communication, knowledge, and agency seem to collapse
rather than being affirmed. Otherwise they will be tricked into premature
identifications with the illusory appearance of fullness in the present, where
truth, justice, communal solidarity, individual integrity, communicable
meanings, and existential significance may appear to be at least partly
realized. In accepting those false idols they will not be open to weak
hints of the impossible, unrepresentable messianic world to come.
This very strong devaluing of the present world of experience (in its way
a Platonic devaluing that sees the everyday world as offering only shadows
of a realm that is elsewhere) is a feature of this theological and Marxist
sublime. It is also related to a postmodern hyperawareness of mediation.
For someone with that awareness, what we take to be our direct experience
of the reality immediately before us is shown, by Derrida especially, to be
conditioned by, and thus mediated through, countless other seeings and
sayings on the part of others. This process of mediation shades off into an
infinite textual-cultural universe that never quite brings the world into
view and never quite expresses the inner life of the self, but rather endlessly
defers such moments in the sideways momentum of a still further media-
tion. Even when we are not deliberately quoting others, and especially
when we think our speech is a sincere expression of our own inner life, we
are being spoken through by a pervasive social textuality, as if we were
puppets voiced by others. For someone with this stance, experience is
mediated as well by a global socio-economic order that turns our experi-
ences into commodities that are circulated like fast food and advertising
jingles. A sophisticated experiencer, in the grip of this pervasive system,
must undermine any enticing identification or reconciliation offered in
everyday life, any attempt to say that now we are in touch with reality as it
is or that we have found a gesture that makes us finally at home in the world
or that the communication of a stable meaning has successfully occurred
between ourselves and others. We should instead learn practices of dis-
identification and disenchantment that make us less victimized by illusion-
creating linguistic, cultural, and economic machineries.
Lerner’s narrator, in his expressed desire for a sublime collective form of
life completely beyond capitalism, or in his favoring of a poem that is
a space for the stark absence of what is now unrepresentable, actually finds
more that is useful in bad human collectivities than in successful ones, just
as he finds more in failing poems. Here is repeated Adam’s experience in
Madrid. A poem where beauty and meaning have manifestly failed to
embody themselves at least makes us, through its very failure, readier to
look for slight glimmers of what is impossible to represent. That situation
is analogous to the way that the utter failure of any natural object to
represent the divine being is a better indication of that being’s sublimity
than is a partly successful representation of this being in some icon or
other. Such a poem is itself a figure both of an unredeemed world and of its
possible, though inconceivable, redemption. It points to a virtual poem
that it has failed to be, and the best poets, for Lerner’s narrator, are
occupied with this virtual, unactualized space of poetry rather than with
what is successfully expressed. Some adherents of the Kabbalah, which
Benjamin was interested in along with his friend Gershom Scholem,
actually wished to precipitate world-catastrophe and contradiction, and
to worsen the condition of loss and exile, in order to ready a space for
a messianic appearance from a radical elsewhere. Benjamin considered his
own attitude toward the present a liquidationist one. For Lerner’s narrator,
bad collectivities (such as the tasteless jokes about Christa McAuliffe that
were shared rapidly among schoolchildren after the Challenger disaster or
the way a bed bug infestation in New York spreads human blood from one
host to another or a series of poems by young airmen whose borrowings are
so massive as to be obviously plagiarism) may suggest, precisely by being
based on such seriously flawed, ignoble means of community formation,
a future utopian community. They may suggest this more effectively than
the idealistic Brooklyn food co-op for which the narrator works. Or else
that attitude of pointing to a vague sublime is itself being made fun of here
and the food co-op is actually a decent representative of the more collective
spirit that we all need to develop for the future. There is usually a reading in
the novel that agrees with the narrator’s stance and another reading that
undercuts it. One suspects that Lerner has Derrida’s love of the notion of
undecidability. Where one reading of the novel seems to encourage a kind
of closure, as the narrator makes decisions that commit him to his
Brooklyn life, Lerner opens the novel to an undecidable oscillation
between that reading and one that negates it.
Lerner surely recognizes that from a larger global perspective, the
gestures of helping an arts intern through a bad drug reaction or helping
a fellow Brooklynite through donating sperm can appear somewhat feeble,
close to clichés of that particular young urban culture. The former pales
next to that of Whitman’s helping soldiers who were dying in the nation’s
great struggle for its identity, and the latter, while presented as a brave
response to an apocalyptic feeling caused by 9/11 and global warming, pales
next to the choice to have children after, say, the Rwandan genocide or
during the Syrian civil war (or during 99% of our existence as a species).
If Lerner’s narrator is strongly influenced by Benjamin, then he will be
suspicious that the actions he counts as finally breaking through his
illusions and connecting him convincingly with the world and with others
are only further expressions of the myths and rituals of an order too
omnipresent to be visible. Or else these are genuine gestures, even if
small, toward an enacting of the Hegelian structure of reconciliation
with the world and with others. One would end up then, at novel’s end,
not like Benjamin’s angel surveying a world of ruin with its back to the
future, but engaged in useful practices in a world that is very much worth
being engaged in.
In a novel that plays extensively with notions of plagiarism, counter-
feiting, lying, and fraudulence, it is even more unclear than is usually the
case what attitudes we should be ready to assign to Lerner as author. His
narrator presents a comparison between William Bronk and John Ashbery
as poet-inheritors of Wallace Stevens. The Bronk poem quoted in the text
seems a hymn to presence, saying that “we are here” and “the earth is
beautiful beyond all change.”6 Ashbery, in contrast, has been shown in
Leaving the Atocha Station to be a poet of absence, of a failure of meaning
that points to an unrepresentable otherness. Readers might suppose they
are getting something of Lerner’s own analysis as the two poets are
compared in terms of a lush or a stripped-down diction. And the narrator’s
choosing of Bronk poems to read to his mentor during the latter’s illness
may then appear to show a preference for art that makes us aware of our
6
Ben Lerner, 10:04, 40–1.
simple presence on a beautiful earth over art of the absent sublime. But the
book’s comparison of the two poets, instead of being a fresh insight that
may express the narrator’s real preference (and possibly Lerner’s), seems to
refer to a review of 1991 volumes by Bronk and Ashbery that was written by
Susan Schultz, in early 1992.7 As typically with Lerner, apparent immedi-
acy of expression turns into complex mediation, where materials are
repurposed instead of originally articulated. Are we thus being warned
against a naivety that would take the narrator’s self-to-world reconcilia-
tions too much at face value? Lerner, in interviews, appears to remain
strongly committed to poetry of Ashbery’s kind, to the postmodern sub-
lime, and to the messianic not-yet. Instead of agreeing that Atocha Station’s
narrator has pathologically failed to engage with others who need an honest
response from him, he seems to defend the narrator as honestly engaging
with the conditions of the world. Instead of regretting the failure of shared
meaning and communication and fully engaged interaction, he celebrates
our immediate experience of mediacy; his narrator has an especially intense
and immediate experience of being taken up into a Derridean machinery of
infinite deferral, citation, semantic failure, and semantic parasitism.
One of Lerner’s chief concerns is the boundary, porous and blurring as it
is, between life and art, between memoir and fiction. The narrator of 10:04
tells of having written an earlier book and of signing a contract for the
present one he is writing, and in both cases Lerner seems to be describing
his own life. Duchamp had transposed basic items from ordinary existence
into the realm of art simply by treating them as art, so that they remained
the same and yet also became different. For Lerner, his own life is a source
of such ready-mades and he is curious how readers react to his life-to-art
translations and how, again, everything is the same and yet different. He is
also interested in passages in the other direction. For example, an artist
friend of the narrator is curious about “totaled” art, where paintings
damaged beyond repair by fire, flood, or other causes are removed from
the marketplace as the insurance company pays the owner the full value.8
The narrator thinks of such items as glimmers of a messianic realm fully
removed from the power of capitalism, so that a thoroughly different
regime of value is suggested, however weakly, and the word ‘totaled’ itself
suggests to him a kind of utopian idea of an impossible wholeness. Even the
transpositions of life into art that make things “the same and yet different”
7
Susan Schultz, “Comparing Bronk and John Ashbery,” Postmodern Culture. Vol. 2, no. 2 (January
1992).
8
Lerner, 10:04, 129–35.
echo a reference by Benjamin, repeated in Lerner’s front matter, of
a Hasidic saying that in the coming messianic order everything will be
the same, yet different. Lerner seems to continue work that has been done
on the matter of a blurring of truth and simulation. The irony is that it is
the academically well-trained who can appear naïve here. This is due to the
employing of the model of the theological sublime. With an unrepresen-
table alterity set at one pole, everything set in opposition to it must lose
whatever integrity, presence, or autonomy it has on its own.
The postmodern theological sublime empties out all notions of truth and
verification, so that we are left with a field of mere simulations that collapse
into one another (with reality just one more simulation), as distinctions
regarding degrees of faithfulness to reality matter less and less.
If one wants individuals to remain open to an unrepresentable and
radically other utopian future, then one needs to discourage their readiness
to find fulfillment in present circumstances. One will thus discourage an
aesthetic absorption that helps strengthen identifications with various
features of the present-day world. Hegel praised the Greeks for reconciling
spirit and nature in the form of the beautiful individual. This was in
contrast to Egyptian art, where the failure to reconcile spirit and nature
was shown in figures of gods that were half human and half animal, as if
two incompatible orders were simply clumped together without any con-
vincing integrity. Lerner’s narrator would be on the side of the Egyptians
here. He admires a painting of Joan of Arc precisely because it is an
ungainly failure in its attempt to bring together a spiritualized image
with the ordinary physicalness of the human body. That failure shows
itself in the very awkward portrayal of certain bodily features, so that the
work expresses our incapacity to embody what is sublimely inexpressible.
The spiritual order does not become smoothly incarnated in the present
and only a painter’s awkwardness in trying to join the bodily form with the
signs of a more spiritual force, as in the case of Hegel’s Egyptians, can reveal
this.
The postmodern sublime requires taking pleasure in the self’s failures of
self-identity, continuity, integrity, and self-recognition. That is the neces-
sary outcome of the unlimited negating power of a radical alterity that
seems theological in its effects. The narrator of 10:04 has the frequent
experience of not feeling his body parts as his own, as if they are moving
independently and might belong to someone else. He feels deprived of the
proprioceptive sensory apparatus that locates one’s body in space. When
a woman tells him that she had identified very strongly with her Muslim
Lebanese father, only to find out after his death that her biological father
had been a Jewish scientist, he thinks she should be happy for this
experience of disidentification and disruption of the self. For it is this
kind of experience that makes us receptive to light from another dimension
passing through cracks and tears in what we took to be whole and
continuous.
How should we respond to Lerner here? On the one hand, this experi-
ence of self-disidentification is common and is commonly understood.
The intensely believing Catholic may become an atheist at thirty.
Individuals who identify themselves fully with military valor may find
themselves cowardly in battle. Looking back on scenes from earlier life,
we find a strangeness in the moods and attitudes the earlier self took for
granted. It is worthwhile to recognize that we are multiple, complex and
self-deceptive, that our self-conscious narratives may not be reliable guides
to who we are. Yet it is odd to hope for a disidentification more radical than
this. It is a despairing life to be unable to give any continuing shape to one’s
existence. It is an impoverished, dishonest life that does not identify with
earlier actions as one’s own and that has so little by way of reliable character
traits that there is nothing that it is to be oneself. Promising, loyalty, and
planning for the future would thereby no longer make sense. Perhaps
Lerner’s novels do offer resources for a critique of the postmodern sublime.
10:04 shows the narrator with a student, Calvin, who is clearly mentally ill
in his ranting and who needs immediate psychiatric attention. Yet, as
Lerner indicates, Calvin’s beliefs and attitudes are extremely close to
those of the narrator. Calvin speaks of a poetics of civilizational collapse,
of a radical eschatological horizon of revolutionary praxis, of how the
materiality of writing threatens to destroy its sense. The narrator himself
could easily have used these phrases. Calvin shares the narrator’s apocalyp-
tic paranoia and his expectations of massive government deceit. And else-
where the narrator presents his own self-aware views in a vocabulary (as
when he emphasizes his recognition of the ideological mechanisms at work
in what he is thinking and saying) that comes close to satire. He can appear
as a Brooklyn type who allows himself the pleasures of the world so long as
he makes a pronouncement of the global material conditions of their
production. Yet it does not seem possible for Lerner to ultimately betray
Benjamin, Derrida, and Ashbery, or his two narrators.
Another instance of the sublime in contemporary literature is found in
what is called the uncreative writing movement, one of whose practitioners
is Kenneth Goldsmith. He favors a form of conceptual writing that
resembles conceptual art in that often the idea behind the arranging of
the poetic assemblage is far more important than the content presented.
One acknowledges that the humanist ideology of aesthetic originality is
bankrupt by taking large chunks of banal material from legal briefs, news-
papers, websites, and the like. One’s methods involve plagiarism, repur-
posing, sampling, and identity theft. The digital internet even allows one
to appropriate material from other languages, without understanding what
is being said, in a copy-and-paste remixing of available materials, so that
the linkage between language and meaning has been broken. The result
stymies all of a reader’s normal methods of interpretation and in one’s sense
of being flooded over by empty, meaningless material there is the chance of
being struck by some profound and transcendent possibility of what
cannot now be said. Goldsmith believes that all writing today is a matter
of cut-and-paste borrowing from available cultural resources; his writing
just makes that process far more evident. He has recently offered a seminar
to writing students at the University of Pennsylvania on wasting time on
the internet. Students during class would be asked to find the dullest, most
banal blogs they could find and to keep on reading them. As one’s
structures of finding the world meaningful are frustrated, one may even-
tually have an experience of what Goldsmith calls the “stuplime.” This
occurs “when the stupid flips over into the sublime and you can’t pull the
two apart. Something is so stupidly sublime or sublimely stupid that it
becomes transcendent.”9 There is an odd echo here of Benjamin on
baroque allegory and thus an echo as well of late-medieval theology.
9
Goldsmith is here being quoted by Katy Waldman. See Waldman, “Frontiers of the Stuplime,” in
Slate, April 27 2015, as she reports on her experience in this seminar.
chapter 10
Where Do We Go from Here?
I have developed my theme, how the inertia of religious structures from

centuries back shaped twentieth-century philosophy, not simply as an
historical exposition but with a purpose in mind. That inertia may have
its effects even when we suppose that religion and theology have been left
behind in the formation of our philosophical stances. We are at a point
now where philosophical reflection can make the structures in question
more transparent in their ongoing influence, and so we can liberate
ourselves from them more thoroughly.
Over the last century there has been an important divergence in how
these issues have been addressed. In philosophy in the Anglo-American
tradition, we find a considerable dismantling of the ways that metaphysics,
epistemology, and philosophy of language were shaped by long-term
responses to the late-medieval theological situation. Kripke, McDowell,
Wittgenstein, Davidson, and other thinkers show us how we can restore
a metaphysically more robust world, one not made insubstantial by the
thinking activity of God or by various substitutes for that in later centuries.
That more robust world can then play a role in defining what we know and
mean, instead of being a mere projection of those mental activities. And we
can be confident that we are epistemically and semantically at home in this
world, instead of manipulating inner states that, for all we know, might
have little to do with the ultimate character of what is. On the other hand,
many thinkers who practice a more so-called Continental style of thinking
have been happy, as we have seen, to intensify the role of versions of the
theological sublime in their work. That work, with its implicitly or
explicitly religious shaping, has gone on to influence literary studies,
cultural studies, and fiction writing.
I am readier to endorse the Anglo-American dismantling of this theo-
logical tradition than to accept the turn to novel renderings of the religious
sublime in European thought and in the American academic practices
influenced by it. The situations, it is true, are not the same. In the case of
246
Where Do We Go from Here? 247
Anglo-American philosophy, the influence of theology shows itself in a set
of habits and preferences that make little sense in their philosophical
contexts except in terms of the inertial effects of frameworks we no longer
accept. A picture held us captive, we might say, and once we see good
reasons to give it up, we can move forward and do so. The European
situation, in contrast, is one where reactions to Hegel’s intermingling of
philosophy and religion become quite complex and where utilizing the idea
of the religious sublime is one way to be resolutely anti-Hegelian. One may
be upset at what is taken to be Hegel’s impoverishing reduction of the
ineffable otherness of religion to what can unfold itself within human
political and social institutions. Or one may wish to give messianic or
negative-theology readings to Marxism or to other intellectual forms of
thought.
I do not find those European deployments of the religion of the sublime
attractive because I find that such appeals to an unrepresentable sublime
flatten the important distinctions of ordinary life. Everything becomes
insubstantial and of little independent value in relation to the power of an
ineffable elsewhere to undermine all forms of enduring presence and value.
Then we do not learn to notice which political and aesthetic practices are
rather better than other ones, even if flawed. We do not learn to foster the
somewhat better at the expense of the not very good. We are ready to see
typical experiences of the world and of interaction with other humans as
eroded from the very start by an enveloping emptiness and arbitrariness, as
in Benjamin’s analogies between the strained allegories of the German
baroque and the “allegorical” commodity culture of late capitalism. And
there is something misguided in the notion of a messianic or utopian
transformation of society. We get to the notion of a utopian ideal by
imagining what it would be like for a very restricted set of moral principles
to realize themselves fully. But the kinds of societies that biological and
social beings such as we are thrive in, once cultures are well-developed, are
those in which there is an ongoing negotiation among various goods and
ideals that are not easily compatible. That kind of negotiation, with
compromises, tradeoffs, and changing coalitions over time, as now certain
goods move to the highest prominence and now other ones do, is what will
most likely mark out spaces favorable to human happiness and to the
satisfactions of excellence, not a messianic order that has to be coercive and
narrowing in its triumph. No better scheme has been arrived at yet than
a messy pluralism that allows for the strong weight we give to matters of
social justice and yet that is tolerant of a quirky individualism.
It is a factor also that a strong emphasis on an inexpressible sublime can
offer a metaphysical inflation of an absent realm to those who, after the
decline of religion, are unable to find value in the real virtues of an ordinary
human life. To be told that our activities are touched by what is ineffably,
incommensurably other is to be given spiritual uplift instead of being
directed to understand the subtle power of our intellectual achievements
and of our interactions with others. That sense of spiritual uplift, of
attachment to a mysteriously inflationary semantic regime, may be
a cover for our anxieties about confronting the deeply painful issues of
an individual human life: loss, separation, aloneness, and so forth. Or it
may be a sign of a cultural exhaustion that needs ever stronger intellectual
stimulants because one no longer has the healthy sensibility that makes one
content with the satisfactions of the kinds of lives it is possible for us to live.
The rhetoric of the sublime also makes us devalue and discredit the ways
that our biological nature works through us, supporting and enriching our
lives with emotions, attachments, and unconscious achievements whose
full contours we do not understand but that help make a form of life worth
living. Nietzsche might well be one guide here in overcoming the attrac-
tions of our present secular versions of the religious sublime, just as he had
to overcome in himself the romantic, Wagnerian version of it.
For some, one strength of the appeal of contemporary versions of the
religious sublime is that they prevent us from falling back into what is seen
as the problematic stance of humanism. That stance may use ancient
Hellenist notions of individual excellence along with Hegel’s account of
training in Geist to show how human individuals, often with the help of
literature and art as resources, may come to lead admirable lives. Both those
models, the Hellenist and the Hegelian ones, seem to allow considerable
porousness between the human side of things and features that in some
philosophical schemes have been thought of as divine. Theological volun-
tarism brought such a porousness of the human and the divine, the ready
transformation of one into the other, into serious question: human powers
could not encroach on or limit God’s in any manner. As that account of
God and man became more dominant in the late-medieval period, there
was an increasing sense of humans as fragile and as helpless on their own,
without divine intervention, to bring about any needed transformation of
themselves or of the world. We thus arrived at the theology of grace. It is
curious that twentieth-century views shaped by the theological sublime
aim to bring about the same radical devaluation of the powers of individual
humans that we note in the late-medieval period. It will be important for
these views, as in the rejection of idols and false messiahs in history, not to
let human individuals and human institutions be seen as incarnating
features that certain earlier philosophies treated as “divine.” These features
might include being able to achieve self-determination in different ways or
to sustain, in the face of various external pressures, a compelling and
distinctive style of appropriating our experiences. Instead structural, gram-
matical, and economic systems as well as constellations of discourse-power
are said to do the work once assigned to the subjective experience and
agency of the human individual, who is now decentered. The sublime of
the German and British Romantic writers still allowed, given their back-
ground in Protestantism, for a rich innerness of the self, but we have seen
how a sublime otherness in Derrida would disenchant that sphere of
selfhood as well. Human individuals are left as self-unraveling and self-
fragmenting in relation to an incommensurable absence that can at any
time help to define the character of what they are. If various twentieth-
century references to the sublime work very hard to undermine all possible
versions of humanism, we may still ask whether there is anything in the
humanist stance that is worth defending and that is also capable of defense.
Let us grant that economic and discursive systems do considerable
shaping of what it means to be an individual self, and that often what we
take to be our own doing can be seen, from a larger perspective, as the
working through us of cultural forms that circulate on a broad scale. Yet no
discourse or economic system has the divine-like power to create objects
and selves as if out of nothing. Biology builds a great deal into the human
individual in terms of qualities, preferences, psychological temperament,
capacities, and so forth. Social programming has to work with much that is
fixed in any particular individual. And we have some very real powers that
Hegel would have classified under the rubric of Geist. It is true that what we
take to be an act of self-determination may turn out to be a hidden form of
external coercion. But not everything we so take is illusory. We note in the
world how some are better than others at reflecting on and giving shape to
their lives. Even without a special faculty of free will, we can get better at
deliberating about what we ought to believe and do and at taking steps that
follow from these deliberations. We do not initiate these reflective activities
from scratch. Rather we are trained in them by belonging to a society that
values them. In other words, we can be determined by the social order to be
more self-determining, to make the selves we are more a matter of our own
responsibility, reflection, and labor.
Then, too, a project of self-cultivation, of the sort that Nietzsche for one
exemplifies, is, while very difficult, hardly a complete illusion. Nietzsche
examines his attitudes, emotions, and psychological tendencies and finds
that they have been formed too much by the influences of romanticism,
Wagnerianism, and his own Christian upbringing. So he engages in
a rigorous program of writing as a work of self-transformation, with careful
attention to his choices in reading, in music listening, and in the geography
and climate of his surroundings (Italy rather than Germany). The various
works of the later Nietzsche show in general how he was successful in that
transformation. This is never for him a matter of self-creation out of
nothing. One works to elevate, focus, and integrate the forces that are
part of one’s natural endowment, to spiritualize them rather than to leave
them behind. But the Nietzsche he ends up being can be considered
genuinely, if imperfectly, self-making. He forms a self that can sustain its
style of selfhood even in the face of strong external pressures that threaten
to dissolve it. Such a project is not only possible and worthwhile. It is
especially needed at a time when new forms of electronic media and social
networks make cultural pressures on any individual overwhelming.
Nietzsche shows how training in literature, music, and the arts can help
unleash resources in the unconscious that contribute to forming an indi-
viduation that matters. (At times he also says that from the broadest
perspective on the universe one must adopt a Dionysian stance that finds
human reality to be a comedy rather than a tragedy, with individuation
a surface phenomenon to be taken lightly.)
The objection is sometimes raised that whatever we count as success in
deliberating about what shape to give to a life is based on an optimistic view
of the powers of human rationality. But, so the objection goes, a social
institution such as late capitalism can so colonize and dominate every
aspect of society that rationality itself becomes just another of its products
rather than an effective resource for emancipating us from whatever forms
of givenness dominate us. But again that degree of colonization of reason
seems to follow from a model of the theological sublime. The late medie-
vals often asked whether rationality could be an external limit on God. Did
God have to be rational in creating the world? Could he violate the law of
non-contradiction? Theological voluntarists tended to conclude that rea-
son could not be a limit on God and was itself subject to his free willing.
That answer can be taken as a model for the response of, for example,
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer on this issue, where rationality is
absorbed into the arbitrary working of cultural systems that are themselves
given a godlike power to construct both selves and the reality they inhabit.
But why (still once more) should we be subservient to that theological
model? To be rational means to wish to have the best reasons one can for
believing and acting. If capitalism presses on us a view of reason as very
narrowly conceived and as simply instrumental in the service of capitalist
ends, then it is irrational for us to adopt such a notion of reason. Given
what we want from our lives, we have good reasons for rejecting that
narrow account of rationality. It may be effortful to do so, given the power
of culture to shape us, but we are capable of reflecting on the institutions of
late capitalism and of weighing their benefits and flaws. Where we stand as
rational weighers is not simply a product of that form of life, but a stance
with helpful exemplars across history and with a solid basis in our biology,
which offers useful materials that are not mere effects of the social climate.
So we are left overall with the resources for a modest but substantial
humanism. Even Dennett’s deconstructing of our ideas of consciousness is
compatible, on his own account, with robust notions of reflection, delib-
eration, agency, and individuation. We can give up both models of self-
hood that derive from the picture of theological voluntarism: the model of
the self as emptied out in relation to an ineffable otherness and the model
of a privileged interior self that forms in a self-assertive reaction to the
theological conditions. We can be closer, then, to Hellenic notions of
selfhood that theological voluntarism undermined. Of course the universe
was not designed for humans and we have no special destiny within it.
We are tiny specks on a tiny speck floating in the vastness of space. Our
ancestors chose a high-risk strategy in the game of evolution (building and
furnishing a big, complicated brain) and we are very lucky that the species
survived long enough to enjoy the benefits of this strategy. Just a small
change in the course of events and humans would have been wiped out. Yet
our insignificance in the universe does not erase the satisfactions of
a modest humanism. Given our beginnings as adaptors to a perilous
immediate environment, it is astonishing that we have been able to form
the cultures we have, with their arts, literature, architecture, science,
political institutions, and ethical ideals. It is as if we are in a great relay
race and the baton has been passed to us after countless generations of
human labor. In order to find that carrying this baton forward is signifi-
cant, we do not need a larger religious or theological story. We may still
value one version of the sublime that is consistent with the narrative of our
biological evolution. When ancient hunter-gatherers climbed a great hill
and were suddenly able to survey a much wider terrain for signs of
nourishment or of enemies, there must have been an intense reward built
into the brain’s activity. Still today in literature and philosophy there are
those nearly vertiginous moments when we move all at once from a very
local and confined stance to one where we seem to be viewing large
stretches of space and time. To use an example I mentioned earlier:
At the end of Joyce’s “The Dead,” we move suddenly from viewing
a dinner party in Dublin to a stance from which we observe an annihilating
snow falling on the rivers and graveyards of all of Ireland and then on the
cold waves of the Atlantic. That we can inhabit both of those stances at
once without the local one being extinguished in its significance by the
much greater one can seem one of the small miracles of literature. We have
remarkable powers to draw analogies and to shift up and down in our
gradations of scale as we move among perspectives on the reality we
encounter. For example, we can watch a parade gradually coming into
view along an avenue, passing by with a great vivid display, and then
disappearing in the distance, and we can see it as a metaphor for human life
coming into existence on the planet and eventually vanishing from it. Such
an experience of the sublime we still have with us, but it has little
dependence on a theological conception and can be enjoyed straightfor-
wardly by atheist humanists. Once we reject the centuries-old theological
ideas that helped to shape twentieth-century philosophy, we are free to find
ourselves reliably at home in a world whose metaphysical richness is surely
enough for us. Without the implicit theological framework that thinned
out reality, we can appreciate a world that is substantial and valuable on its
own and worthy of our conscientious care.
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Index
Abraham, 17, 219 Back to the Future, 238

Adorno, Theodor, 162, 227, 250 baroque drama, 230
Benjamin on, 162–3 capitalism and, 160–1
Hegelianism, 162 Barth, Karl, 77, 146, 153
aesthetics Benjamin, Walter, 15, 146, 228, 230,
emotion as performative, 229 247
Agacinski, Sylviane, 17, 218 Adorno on, 162–3
analytic (Anglo-American) philosophy, 16, 246–7 Arcades project, 161–2
animals, 100 Christian allegory, 152
antirealism on collective memory, 161
implicit religious framework, 67–8 on coming messianic order, 243
self-assertive stance, 68–9 Derrida and, 13, 214
Aquinas, Thomas, 8, 12, 22, 77, 87, 117, 155, on German baroque drama, 149–50, 228,
168, 194 230
analogy of being between human and on German romanticism, 148–9
divine, 38–9 on Hegel
epistemology, 44 anti-Hegelianism, 578.1, 155–6
God’s metaphysical perfection, 117–18 philosophy of history, 147–8
metaphysics, 2 political philosophy 156
perception and experience, 197 humanism and, 163–4
Arendt, Hannah, 154 Judaism and, 148, 152–4
Aristotle, 9, 12, 22, 77, 78, 87, Kabbalah and mysticism, 240
124, 226 on Kafka, 154
change as self-actualization, 124 on Klee’s Angelus Novus, 238–9
Hegel and, 124–5 on Marx, 156
metaphysics, 2. See also essence political philosophy
natural fit between epistemology and on capitalism, 160–1
nature, 44 Marxism, 158–60
substance, 39 on political violence, 156–9
art and aesthetics. See also drama; poetry theological character, 156–9
boundary with life and memoir, 242–3 theological thought, 163–4
stuplime, 245 translation by, 163–4, 231–2
“totaled” art objects, 242–3 Bennington, Geoffrey, 221
artificial intelligence, 192 Bernard of Arezzo, 35
Ashbery, John, 228, 237, 241 biological species, 100–1. See also evolutionary
Augustine of Hippo, 2, 14, 35, 87, 195, biology
196 bipolar disorder, 180
Derrida on, 18, 219 Blumenberg, Hans, 1, 5, 68
on perception, 195 Brecht, Berthold, 159
Ayer, A. J., 39 Brentano, Franz, 59
Ayers, M. R., 5 Bronk, William, 241
258
Index 259
capitalism, 160–1 sublime, 225–6, 227
baroque drama and, 160–1 religiosity as model, 219–20
rationality as product of, 250 textuality and interpretation, 11–12, 213
Carnap, Rudolf, 10, 21–2, 27, 179 undecidability, 15–16, 216–17
adjacency to Kantian position, 30 as sublime, 16–17, 218
implicit theological influence on position, verbal vs. written argumentation, 14–15, 215–16
29–30 voluntarism and, 220–1
impossibility of escaping human Derridabase, 221
perspective, 37 Descartes, Rene, 43, 73, 80
internal vs. external questions, 40 McDowell on dualism, 87–8
rejection of phenomenalism, 28–9 divine
Catholic Church, 168 Derrida on, 10–11, 212–13
indulgences, 182 drama, 149–50, 228, 230
China, 126 Duchamp, Marcel, 242
Christianity. See also Catholic Church; God; Dummett, Michael, 62–9
Protestantism Dupré, John, 101
Hegel’s preference for, 142–3
Circumfession, 221 empiricism, 23
Clarke, Samuel, 78 cognitive science reproducing errors of,
cognitive science, 182, 189–90. See also Dennett, 189–90
Daniel grounding in mental states, 179–80
evolutionary biology and, 191–2 implicit theological framework, 62–3
Cohen, Hermann, 145 Russell’s, 51–2
coherentism, 188 Wright and Dummett, 62–9
consciousness Enlightenment, 148
as user illusion, 185–6 epistemic modesty, 1
Continental philosophy, 16 essence/essential properties, 3, 22. See also natural
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 24 kinds
Aquinas on, 155
Davidson, Donald, 29, 76, 108, 246 Aristotelian
account of meaning, 108–9 relation to thought, 124–5
on perception, 200–1 as determining kind, 3
de Man, Paul, 232 Dupré on, 101–2
deconstruction, 16, 217–18 Kripkean, 90, 92–3, 111
Dennett, Daniel, 14, 35, 89, 131, 182, 183 as inner constitution, 4
consciousness as user illusion, 185–6 Lockean, 3
Hegel and, 42 nominal, 4, 22
qualia, 89, 184–5 real, 4, 22
selfiness, 39, 57, 84–5, 141 as impinging on God’s will, 22
self-reporting of mental states, 183–5, 191–2 voluntarist criticism, 90–1
Derrida, Jacques, 9, 15, 210, 221, 230, 239, 249 Wittgenstein and, 175–6
absolute theologic program, 222 evolutionary biology, 59, 191–2, 251. See also
anti-Hegelianism, 9, 10–11, 13, 210–11, biological species
212–13, 214 adjustment of mind and perception to world
on Augustine, 18, 219–20 through, 44, 89, 193, 203
capacity of self to evade external adjustment of perception to world, 2
determination, 220–1 exculpation, ix, 202
Circumfession, 18, 219
deconstruction, 16, 217–18 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 121–2, 127
democracy, 16–17, 218 Findlay, John, 82
on language, 222–3 Fish, Stanley, 11, 212
mysticism, 223–4 Formstecher, Solomon, 146
on Plato, 215–16 Foucault, Michel, 58
on the self, 227 Franciscans, 90
singular events, 222–3 free will, 172
260 Index
Frege, Gottlob, 52, 86 Kant’s critical philosophy and, 116, 120–1
Freud, Sigmund, 3, 204 Marx and, 139–40
materials as historical givens, 130–1
Galileo Galilei, 24 metaphysical commitments, 131–2
Geist, 134–5 natural philosophy, 128–9
as external imposition, 221 living things, 129
Holy Spirit and, 144 Pippin on, 15–16
George, Stefan, 149 application of system to real situations, 120
German baroque drama, 149–50, 228, 230 concepts constituted subjectively, 129–30
voluntarism and, 154–5 doubts about world-relation aspects of
German Romanticism, 148–9, 249 Hegel’s project, 133–4
Gnosticism, 169 Geist, 134–5
God. See also Trinity religion of the sublime, 138
analogy of being between human and, 38–9 similarity of reading to Marx or literary
Incarnation, 132, 138, 143 theory, 140
knowledge of real essence, 4 system of concepts, 119
perfection and self-knowing, 117–18 political philosophy, 156
reason distinct from human, 12–13, 77–8 position in intellectual history, 115–16
relation to human self, 2 reason
will, 1, 2. See also voluntarism at home in nature and history, 82
essence and, 90–1 reconciled with nature, 140–1
essence as encroachment on realm of, 22 relation of thought to world, 123
operating in nature, 5 religion and
power to change metaphysical character of conception of the divine, 211–12
universe, 73 God’s self-relating activity of thought,
Goldsmith, Kenneth, 244–5 119–20
Goodman, Nelson, 45 human notions of God, 42–3
Judaism, 143–4
Hamann, J.G., 148 Lutheranism and, 166–8
Hegel, G.W.F., 3, 15, 78 on Protestant Reformation, 166–8
actuality, 125–6 on Protestantism, 34
Adorno on, 162 use of religious language, 142–3
Aristotelianism, 42–3 Trinitarian doctrine and, 132–3
autonomy, 133–4 Hesperus-Phosphorus, 105–6
Benjamin on, 15, 146–7 Hirsch, Samuel, 146
philosophy of history, 147–8 Horkheimer, Max, 250
conception of the divine, 9–10 humanism, 16, 163–4
curiosity about science and nature, 140–1 Hume, David, 178
Dennett and, 42 skepticism contrasted with Wittgenstein, 178
Derrida and, 9, 15, 210–11 Husserl, Edmund, 13, 86, 127, 215
external reality mirrors structure of thought,
122–3 Ibn Rushd, 194
Geist, 134–5, 144, 249 identity. See also essence/essential properties
Derrida on, 221–2 Hegelian
Judaism and, 145–6 essentialism and, 125–6
of peoples, 138–9 historical self-identity, 126
training in, 248 living things, 123–4
on identity Quinean individual, 57–8
essentialism, 125–6 of self, 51
historical self-identity, 126 Incarnation, 132, 143
living things, 123–4
national, 123–4 Joyce, James, 66, 252
self-identity determining character of Judaism, 143–4, 220
world, 127–8 Benjamin on, 148
Kantian categories, 117 response to Hegel, 145–6
Index 261
Kabbalah, 163, 240 Lerner, Ben, 228
Kafka, Franz, 154, 162 Benjamin’s influence on narrator, 241
Kant, Immanuel, 3, 6, 22, 40, Calvin character, 244
196 narrator travels to Marfa, 238
categories, 116 synopsis, 237
critical theory of practical reason, 122 totaled art, 242–3
epistemology value in bad forms of human collectivity,
Carnap’s position as adjacent, 30 240–1
distinction between empirical and Whitman and, 237–8
transcendental idealism, 6–7 Adam’s distance from own life, 232–3
limits to empirical knowledge, 8–9 Leaving the Atocha Station, 228–37,
metaphysical skepticism, 6–7 240
noumenal realm, 7, 9, 26 Adam reads his poetry, 229–34
ethics, 225–7 Adam’s attitude to social life, 234–5
on experience, 87 Adam’s distanced attitude to experience,
influence on Hegel, 116, 120–1 232, 235–6
nature of self, 7–8 Adam’s literary approach, 233–4
necessity, 91 Adam’s status as non-native Spanish
self-relational apperception, 121 speaker, 230–2, 233
voluntarism and, 8–9 Cyrus and the dead Mexican woman,
Kierkegaard, Soren, 17, 170, 218, 235
221 Lerner’s attitude to Adam, 235–7
Klee, Paul, 238 Madrid train bombing, 235–6
Kripke, Saul, 17, 22, 90–1, man weeping at the Prado, 229, 234
246 postmodern sublime poetry and, 242
essential properties, 92–3, 111 thematic interest in boundary between life and
Hesperus-Phosphorus example, 106 fiction, 242–3
meaning, 103 literary theory, 140
natural-kind terms, 113–14 living things
as rigid designators, 95 Hegel on, 129
necessity, 11, 92 self-relational identity, 123–4
metaphysical, 111 Locke, John, 1, 3, 43, 202
metaphysical and epistemic, 94 epistemology, 4–6
separation of semantic from epistemic, on essence, 21
107–8 logical necessity, 91–2
Pierre-London argument, 107 logical positivism, 20, 32
primacy of metaphysics, 98 epistemological limits, 21
Quine and, 95–6 foundationalism, 43–4
reference, 94–5, 102–3 Hegel’s account of divine rational activity
causal historical chains for successful, and, 42–3
112–13 ideological ‘zealotry’, 32–3, 42
holy cave argument, 112 implicit noumenal world, 26–7
unicorn argument, 112–13 impossibility of escaping human
speaker’s beliefs fixing reference, 109 perspective, 37–8
theological background, 114 insistence on limitation of human perspective
Wittgenstein and, 178 to experience, 36–9
Kuhn, Thomas, 46, 98 linguistic reference, 40–1
metaphysical skepticism
Langton, Rae, 5 theological ancestry of, 23–4
language. See also meaning, reference; private nominalism and, 24–5
language ontological commitment, 40–2
antirealism, 64–5 protocol statements as epistemic
necessity in, 91–2 foundation, 34–6
Wright and Dummett, 62–3 rejection of Aristotelian substance, 40–1
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 78 Luther, Martin, 166–8
262 Index
Maritain, Jacques, 98 essence as determining, 3
Marxism, 33, 239 Kripkean account, 113–14
Benjamin on, 156 as rigid designators, 95
Hegel and, 139–40 natural science, 47–51
implicit theological content, 156–7 Russell and, 48–50
McCole, John, 160 natural selection, 191. See also evolutionary biology
McDowell, John, 12, 17, 70, 246 nature
on Cartesian dualism, 87–8 Hegel on, 128–9
Derrida and, 10, 211 necessity, 11
epistemology, 70–1 epistemic, 91
epistemic status of subjective mental states, Kripkean, 93–4
191–3 logical, 91–2
experience and perception metaphysical, 91
activity and passivity in experience, 195–8 Neurath, Otto, 43
directness, 4–6, 205–7 Newton, Isaac, 5
as evidence for belief, 7–8, 208–9 Nicholas of Autrecourt, 35
exculpation, ix, 202 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 46, 182
passivity, 1–2, 199–201, 202–3 mental inner life, 182–3
receptivity, 198–9 metaphysical realism, 25–6
on sensation, 89 on self-cultivation, 249–50
sensory intuition and experience, 71–2 self-knowledge, 204
spontaneity, 4, 72–3, 80–1, 205 sublime and, 248
language and belief, 75–6 nominalism, 79
mental states logical positivism and, 24–5
epistemic status, 191–3 rejection of likeness between mind and
on independent existence of inner nature, 44
objects, 87
insufficiency of social answerability for Ockham, William of, 2, 4, 40, 79–80,
objective status, 136–7 155
representation in cognitive science, 189–90 on essence, 90
Pippin on, 135–7 Osiander, 24
reason located in nature, 81–3
Rorty and, 188 Paris, 161
on Strawson, 7, 208 perception
voluntarism and, 73–5 automatic processes in, 1–2, 202–3
meaning, 56 evolutionary biology and, 44, 89, 193, 203
Davidson’s account, 108–9 McDowell on
Derrida on, 13–14, 214–15 receptivity in, 198–9
epistemological status, 104–5 sensation as basis for model of world, 1–2
Wittgenstein on, 165–6 Persia, 126
Wright and Dummett on, 62–3 phenomenalism, 26
mental states distinction from realism, 29–30
evolutionary biology attunes to world, physicalism, 60
112–13 physics, 47–8
private language, 180–2 Pinker, Steven, 193
self-reflective access to, 2–4, 203–4 Pippin, Robert, 15, 115
Augustine on, 158 doubts about world-relation aspects of Hegel’s
metaphor, 183 project, 133–4
Mill, John Stuart, 104 Fichte and, 121–2
modernism, 32 God’s self-relating, 119
Hegel and
Nathan of Gaza, 153 application of system to real situations, 120
natural kinds, 92, 95 concepts constituted subjectively, 129–30
biological species, 100–1 as continuing Kant’s program, 120–1
Dupré on, 101–2 Geist, 134–5
Index 263
religion of the sublime, 138 Quinean indeterminacy, 10–11, 53–4, 56–8
similarity of reading to Marx or literary Renaissance art, 150–1
theory, 140 Romanticism, 148–9, 249
system of concepts, 119 Rorty, Richard, 188
historical givenness of materials, 130–1 Russell, Bertrand, 10, 20, 75
leaving nature behind, 141 implicit noumenal world, 26–7
McDowell and, 135–7 on logical construction over inference, 25
plants, 100 physical objects as logical fictions, 48–51
Plato, 90, 195, 196 voluntarism and, 52–3
Derrida on, 14–15, 215–16
poetry sameness, 51
translation, 230–2 Scholem, Gershom, 153, 159, 240
postmodern fiction, 140 Schultz, Susan, 242
post-structuralism, 188 secondary qualities, 5
prayer, 1 self
primary qualities, 5 cultivation of, 249–50
private language, 179–80 Dennett’s selfiness scale, 39, 57, 141
private property, 124 Derrida on, 220–1
proper names, 103 identity of, 51
Derrida on, 223 Kant on, 7–8
ordinary individuals, 110 relation to God, 2
reference, 104, 110 skepticism, 194
properties Soames, Scott, 58, 104, 105
essential, 22 spontaneity, 72–3, 80–1, 196, 205
Protestantism, 2, 33, 38–9, 186 Stoicism, 82
Catholic indulgences, 182 Strawson, P.F., 7, 208
Hegel on, 166–8 stuplime, 245
voluntarism and, 168, 169–70 sublime, the, 8–9, 16, 138, 210
Proust, 161 in Continental philosophy, 246–7
Putnam, Hilary, 181 Derrida and, 225–6
Derrida on, 227
qualia, 89, 191–2 as distraction from value of human life, 248
Quine, W.V., 10, 25, 48 in Lerner, 239
epistemology as psychology, 37–8 Marxist new order and, 139–40
individual identity, 57–8 postmodern, 243–4
language substance. See also essence/essential properties
indeterminacy of reference, 10–11, Aristotelian, 39
53–4, 56–8 individual, 22
truth theory, 56–7, 58–9 superaddition, 5
necessary properties, 95–6
ontology, 41 theology of grace, 2
transcendental idealism
realism metaphysical thinning, 23
distinction from phenomenalism, 29–30 translation
reason poetry, 230–2
divine and human, 77–8 Trinity, 132, 138
gap between human and divine, 12–13 truth
reference a priori, 94
Kripke, 102–3 necessary a posteriori statements, 105–6
conditions for successful, 112–13 Quine on, 56–7, 58–9
proper names, 110 Turing, Alan, 2, 203
rigid designators, 94–5
to persons, 111 undecidability, 15–16, 216–17
positivist, 40–1 user illusion, 185–6
proper names, 104, 110 utilitarianism, 225–7
264 Index
voluntarism, 1, 4, 22 Williams, Bernard, 36, 225–7
baroque drama and, 154–5 Wilson, Margaret, 5
contingent nature of God’s creation, 78 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 14, 45, 165, 170–2, 246
Derrida and, 220–1 anti-essentialism, 175–6
essential properties and, 90–1 Hume and, 178
German romanticism and, 148–9 meaning, 171–3
God as self-determining, 117–18 metaphysical indeterminacy of mental
Incarnation doctrine and, 145 states, 176
Kant and, 8–9 private language argument, 179–80
Lutheranism and, 168 mental states and, 180–2
McDowell and, 73–5 on understanding, 165
nominalism, 24 understanding as non-mental process, 173–4
Protestantism as continuation, 33–4 Wright, Crispin, 62–9
Russell and, 52–3
separation of human and divine realms, 248–9 yoga, 186
Weimar Republic, 156 Zevi, Sabbatai, 153

Whitman, Walt, 237–8, 241 Zwingli, Huldrych, 167

How Theology Shaped Twentieth - Century Philosophy

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H O W TH E O L O G Y SH A P E D TW E N T I E T H -

Medieval theology had an important inﬂuence on later philosophy

frank b. farrell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Purchase

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Medieval theology had an important inﬂuence on later philosophy

frank b. farrell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Purchase

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Medieval theology had an important inﬂuence on later philosophy

frank b. farrell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Purchase

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Acknowledgments page viii

Introduction: The Thinning Out of the World 1

I wish to express my gratitude ﬁrst of all to Hilary Gaskin of Cambridge

The Thinning Out of the World

Theological beliefs forced late-medieval thinkers into an epistemically

Empiricism and Theology

According to my narrative, an intellectual space marked by extreme

John McDowell: Rejecting the Defensive Move

Aristotle Redivivus: On Saul Kripke

I wish to place Saul Kripke’s work in a large historical framework that he

Hegel, Theology, and Pippin’s Reading of Hegel

In my story about the inﬂuence of religious ideas on philosophical think-

Walter Benjamin: Incarnation or Radical

Rolling Back the Protestant Reformation:

Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations keeps asking

McDowell (II): Active and Passive Faculties and the

Derrida, the Religion of the Sublime, and the

Literature Today and the Sublime Absence of

It is of interest that Benjamin’s and Derrida’s appeals to a still theological

Where Do We Go from Here?

I have developed my theme, how the inertia of religious structures from

Allison, Henry. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.New Haven: Yale University Press,

Abraham, 17, 219 Back to the Future, 238

Weimar Republic, 156 Zevi, Sabbatai, 153

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