I hope I shall be forgiven when I begin by noting my disagreement with a supposition communicated by the title of this volume: ‘Hegel’s Metaphysics: Dead or Alive? On the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s metaphysics’. The title suggests that it is meaningful to ask whether Hegel’s metaphysics is dead or alive, and that that question is to be answered by exploring the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s metaphysics. More than a hundred years ago, Croce took it upon himself to distinguish what is alive and what is dead in Hegel’s philosophy. That this was a silly endeavour is evident from the fact that nobody now reads Croce, but multitudes all over the world read Hegel. Hegel’s philosophy is alive, Croce’s distinction of what is alive and what is dead in it, dead. This may remind us of what is obvious, namely, that our attempts to gauge the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s metaphysics will be dead very soon, while, by contrast, Hegel’s metaphysics will be alive as long as there is philosophy.
When the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s metaphysics is to reside, specifically, in its relevance to current analytic metaphysics, a deeper problem yet with the title of the volume emerges. Presumably, the title desires to be understood in such a way that the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s metaphysic is not to be something other than its relevance simpliciter, that is, its relevance to what it is, namely, metaphysics. However, it is unwise not to make this distinction. For, not only can the question be raised whether mainstream anglophone analytic metaphysics is relevant simpliciter, that is, relevant to what it presumes to be, metaphysics. But the answer to this question is anything but certain. An indication that the answer may well be ‘no’ is precisely that it is not unlikely that nothing of that literature will survive its author by more than five years. Indeed, that is not only not unlikely, but highly probable. For, if there were something that had it in itself to survive its author, we would know it. (Almost always in the history of philosophy, the works that were to hold out through the centuries were known as such works in their own time, and without doubt.) By contrast, the question whether Hegel’s metaphysics is relevant simpliciter, relevant to what it is, metaphysics, is silly because the answer is evident. It may be hard to bring out that relevance. But if one thinks, in advance, that this task is to be accomplished by bringing out a relevance to current mainstream analytic metaphysics, one runs the risk of doing the opposite of what one wants to do: one runs the risk of obscuring the relevance of Hegel’s metaphysics, its relevance simpliciter. It would be a less risky project to ask after the relevance of current analytic metaphysics and to pursue this question by asking whether current analytic metaphysics is relevant to the comprehension and articulation of Hegel’s metaphysics.
It is not sensible to try and say something general about present-day analytic metaphysics in the space of this essay. For the purposes of this introduction it suffices to note that this literature is defined by a marked and self-conscious contrast to a tradition of thought that springs from the roots of analytic philosophy. Here I mean the tradition originating in Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell and Carnap. I count among its protagonists Thomas Nagel and Barry Stroud, G. E. M. Anscombe and Philippa Foot, W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett and Robert Brandom, John McDowell and Christopher Peacocke. This tradition is in communication with the ancient metaphysical tradition and therefore is relevant to it.
The ancient tradition can be introduced as follows. It understands metaphysics to be the science of what is as such. Now, being is the formal object of thought; it is what is thought as such. Hence metaphysics, the science of being, is the self-clarification of thought. The original moment of metaphysics is Parmenides’ pronouncement that being and thinking are the same: ‘τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι’ (Diels and Kranz Reference Diels and Kranz1992: 18 B 3). The moment is recaptured when Hegel writes that, in the idea of being, thought embraces itself in its absolute abstraction (Hegel Reference Hegel1813: 45). So this is the concern of metaphysics: thinking and being.
That concern was central to the analytic tradition of philosophy mentioned above. Thus its books bear titles like Word and Object, Mind and World. A late book in this tradition is Peacocke’s The Primacy of Metaphysics. It opposes itself to McDowell’s Mind and World and to Dummett’s What Is a Theory of Meaning? In what follows I want to discuss that opposition. I shall do so in a way that, I hope, will show a reader of Hegel that it may be fruitful, in one’s attempts to think about thinking and being, to engage the said analytic tradition. In this qualified way, then, my contribution will bring today’s metaphysics into communication with Hegel’s philosophy, revealing, hopefully, the relevance of the former.
I. The space of positions, psychologism
Peacocke presents a series of three positions (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 7f.): metaphysics-first, no-priority, and meaning-first. They are distinguished by the answer they give to the question which of these, mind or world, thinking or being, meaning or reality, is prior to the other in the order of understanding. Meaning-first holds that we must first seek an account of what it is to think and speak, in general and in specific practices of speech and thought, so that, on this basis, we may understand the nature of that of which we think and speak, in general and in these practices. Metaphysics-first, by contrast, maintains that we must first provide an account of the nature of what is, in general and in specific domains, in order then to explain, on this basis, what it is to think and speak about what is, in general and in these domains. Finally, no-priority asserts that none of these accounts is prior to and provides the basis of the other; they mutually depend on each other. Thus the three positions are arranged on a line, no-priority being located in between metaphysics-first and meaning-first.
John McDowell’s ‘In Defence of Modesty’ (McDowell Reference McDowell1998) suggests a different structure of the space of positions. The suggested structure does not fit the image of a line, but rather that of a chasm, with accounts of thought and speech from outside content lying on one side, accounts from inside content on the other. Metaphysics-first and meaning-first are on the same side of the chasm, both opposing no-priority, or modesty.
McDowell denies that there is such a thing as an account of what it is to think or speak from outside content, as he puts it, appropriating a phrase of Dummett’s (McDowell Reference McDowell1998: passim). An account of content from outside content undertakes to say what it is for someone to think or say something without, in saying this, representing anything as thought or said. Such an account describes the capacity to use certain concepts, it says what it is for someone to possess them. It may use these very concepts as long as it does not use them to represent something as thought or said. It may use the relevant concepts straight, not obliquely, in oratio recta, not in oratio obliqua.
Dummett asks that we seek a theory of meaning that explains content from outside content (Dummett Reference Dummett1996). As Peacocke notes (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 9f.), Dummett conceives such a theory as giving a meaning-first account. Indeed, if it is to be meaning first, it must be from outside content. For suppose the theory rested its account on statements that represent something as saying that things are thus and so. In order to understand such statements, we would need to know what it is for things to be thus and so. Only if we know this do we know what is said in saying that they are. And then the theory of meaning could not be the basis on which we understand the nature of that to which the terms of the language refer, for the theory would already deploy, and thus depend on, this understanding. A theory of content that is metaphysics-first will equally be from outside content. Such a theory undertakes to explain how the nature of a given reality makes it possible to think that reality. If it were necessary, to this end, to represent that reality as thought, then the metaphysics of that reality would not be prior to the understanding of what it is to think it.
McDowell asserts that there is no account of content from outside content (McDowell Reference McDowell1998 and Reference McDowell1996: Lecture II and III). An account of what it is to think or speak always already traffics in content; whatever may contribute to understanding what it is to think or say something will be intelligible only through terms that introduce content as such. An account of meaning consonant with this assertion is, in Peacocke’s terms, no-priority. Indeed Peacocke identifies McDowell as holding a no-priority view (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 15f. and 19). However, McDowell does not place himself in the middle of a line on which meaning-first and metaphysics-first hold extremes. He rejects accounts of content from outside content, and metaphysics-first and meaning-first are both from outside content. Being from outside content, metaphysics-first and meaning-first both oppose the position McDowell advocates, namely, the idea that thought and speech is to be clarified from within. Understood through this opposition, meaning-first and metaphysics-first are variants of one position. In this way, as anticipated above, the image of the space of positions is not a line, but a terrain divided by a chasm separating two positions. On one side of this chasm, there are two variants. We are not concerned with that variation when our eyes are set on the division marked by the chasm.
The understanding of the structure of the space of positions is consequential for the understanding of the positions. All positions concern the way in which to understand mind and world, knowledge and reality, thinking and being. If they are located on a line, with no-priority between meaning-first and metaphysics-first, then all positions share an understanding of these terms; they differ with respect to where they place priority. The understanding of these terms, which meaning-first and metaphysics-first share and which is foisted upon no-priority as it is placed between these, is the following. Someone’s thinking something is a certain reality; it is a different reality from the reality she thinks. ‘Knowledge and reality’ has a local meaning: we distinguish a certain reality, for example, that snow is white, from the knowledge of that reality, the knowledge that snow is white. But we do not distinguish knowledge from reality. On the contrary. The knowledge that snow is white is a reality, alongside the reality that snow is white. When we leave the local and rise to the universal, there is no longer an opposition: the question of knowledge and reality is a question of one reality and another; the question of mind and world is a question of one element of the world and another; the question of thinking and being is the question of one bit of being and another.Footnote 1 The line of positions is one of views of the relation of these two realities. One position holds that the one is prior, another, the other; a third holds that none is prior.
As the positions all engage the concern of mind and world, they are representable in traditional terms relating to this concern. Metaphysics-first may be presented as embracing realism, meaning-first anti-realism or, perhaps, idealism, which here will be a linguistic idealism. Further, metaphysics-first represents the reality we know as a reality that is as it is anyway, whether or not it is known to be so. It thus reveals our knowledge to be objective. By contrast, meaning-first represents reality, with respect to its fundamental character, which is the object of metaphysics, as a reflection of our language games and their grammar or as a reflection of features of our cognitive faculties. As everything we may say and think is informed by that grammar or those features, our thought does not touch anything beyond our language or our minds; in this sense it is not objective. If no-priority is on a line in between these positions, it holds a middle position. It asserts that reality is not independent of the mind; there is no ready-made world. It equally asserts that the mind is not independent of the world; the specification of contents of thought and speech requires an appeal to factors outside the mind or brain.
If someone’s knowing something is a reality alongside the reality that she knows, then there is, alongside the science and the metaphysics of the reality that she knows a science and a metaphysics of the knowledge of it. There is a science and a metaphysics of the mind. This may be called psychologism, for psychology will be the relevant science. Metaphysics-first and meaning-first are forms of psychologism. When no-priority is placed on a line between them, then it, too, is a form of psychologism. By contrast, if no-priority stands opposed to metaphysics-first and meaning-first, which, being opposed to the same, are the same, then no-priority rejects psychologism, no matter whether it take the form of meaning-first or of metaphysics-first.Footnote 2
When metaphysics-first, no-priority and meaning-first are arranged on a line, then no-priority and meaning-first are both to the right of metaphysics-first. As metaphysics-first upholds the independence of the world from the mind, endorsing realism and safe-guarding the objectivity of knowledge, no-priority will, to a lesser degree than meaning-first, but still, compromise this independence. It will not fully vindicate realism and represent knowledge as not fully objective. Peacocke recognizes areas in which no-priority may be correct, for example, secondary qualities (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 19–25). He therewith indicates that knowledge in such areas is less objective than knowledge in areas for which metaphysics-first is correct, for example, primary qualities. By contrast, if the space of positions is structured as suggested by ‘Modesty’, then no-priority has no community with meaning-first. For it rejects psychologism: the idea that the question of knowledge and reality is the question of one reality and another. It thereby rejects the notion that metaphysics-first vindicates the objectivity of knowledge and that no-priority fails fully to vindicate that objectivity. Rather, it contends that metaphysics-first does not touch the question whether knowledge is objective. For that is not a question whether one reality is independent from another. If no-priority is placed in the structure of positions laid out in ‘Modesty’, then it is not possible to characterize it in terms that owe their meaning to psychologism. Specifically, it cannot be represented as realism or idealism if these terms represent an opposition of metaphysics-first and meaning-first. (This renders ‘no-priority’ an unhelpful label, as that label suggests a psychologistic understanding of it. ‘From inside content’ or ‘from inside thought and speech’ is preferable.)
II. Theory of content from outside content, the traditional thought rejecting it
‘Modesty’ gives no argument to show that there is no such thing as a theory of content from outside. But there is a traditional thought that motivates the rejection of this idea. We introduce it by first considering the general form of a theory of content from outside content.
The theory says what it is for someone to think, know, say, see X, for a range of values of X. We indicate this nexus, ‘what it is for that to be the case’, by four dots, ‘::’. And we indicate a verb of the kind that signifies the theme of such a theory by ‘phi’. Values of ‘phi’ introduce contents as such. So the theory proposes statements of the form ‘S phi X:: ___’. The variable ‘X’ will be replaced by terms that, in this context, to the left of the four dots, specify a content. The same terms may appear in the blank. In that context, to the right side of the four dots, they will be used to specify, not what S phis, but what is; they will be used straight, not obliquely.
Meaning-first and metaphysics-first differ with respect to the way in which they think the blank is to be filled. Dummett did not say much about this, but Brandom provides an idea of a meaning-first account (Brandom Reference Brandom1994). His theory describes consequential relations, obtaining in groups of animals, among normative attitudes toward forms of behavior; it ultimately describes these attitudes in terms of dispositions to sanction those forms of behavior. The consequential relations are then represented as inferential relations, which in turn constitute contents. When in this way it is understood what it is to phi X, for a suitable system of values of X, concepts of reference and representation are introduced in terms of an order of contents. The metaphysics-first account envisaged by Peacocke, by contrast, proposes that statements filling the blank specify conditions under which, as the theory asserts, something is the referent of values of X (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 4–6, 10–12, 35). Both meaning-first and metaphysics-first may use on the right-hand side of the four dots terms that on the left-hand side are used to specify contents. Metaphysics-first accounts use these terms because, being used straight, they identify the referent of the content specified by their oblique use, and an account that says what it is for something to be the referent must identify that referent. A meaning-first account like Brandom’s, as reference is not its first theme, but normative attitudes, may use the terms to describe the relevant dispositions to sanction.
The traditional thought that is to show that there can be no account of content from outside content, whether it be meaning-first or metaphysics-first, observes that there is a break in the form of comprehension, which makes it impossible to include thought, knowledge, perception within the sphere of what is governed by the natural causality of one thing acting upon another. Let me rehearse this thought in its application to sensory consciousness, specifically the feeling of heat.
The conception of a given natural reality includes an idea of its causality. The causality is understood through the very concept through which the reality in question is thought. We understand something hot to be able to heat something, something charged to be able to charge something, something moving to be able to move something. What is thought through the concept explains what thereby in turn is thought through that concept: heat comes from heat, charge from charge, motion from motion. The intelligibility we find in these transactions resides in the unity of the concept.
As long as we do not use the concept to specify something as thought or perceived, this is how we understand the efficacy of what we think through it. We understand that the hot stone heats the steak that someone has placed on it. In the same way we understand that the hot stone heats the hand that someone has placed on it. Now when a hand touches the hot stone, the stone is efficacious in a further way: the hot stone makes her whose hand it is feel the heat. We want to explain what it is to feel heat from outside content: the idea of heat we deploy in the account is not to involve the idea of feeling. This is to say that the causality of heat that is allowed to figure in the account is the one that we see in the stone’s acting on the steak and, indeed, on the hand, burning both. However, no amount of causal interaction of this form will ever introduce the idea of something felt. If this idea is not already internal to the idea of heat, then nothing we say about hot things and their efficacy will provide it. For example, we may consider the way in which the stone heating the hand further affects that hand and how this affection ramifies in the body of her whose hand it is. In the same manner, we may study the steak. In neither case will there be anything forthcoming that constitutes feeling anything. Hence, while someone feels heat because the stone that she touches is hot, this does not show that a metaphysics-first conception of feeling heat is intelligible. For it does not show that the ‘because’ in that sentence is comprehensible from outside the understanding of sensory consciousness as such. The idea of something felt may be internal to that ‘because’. If it is, then that sentence ‘someone feels heat because the stone that she touches is hot’ provides no entry into an account of feeling from outside content.
III. The account of perception of magnitudes, considered in the light of the traditional thought
Peacocke may not disagree. He thinks that heat is something with respect to which no-priority holds: the idea of something’s being hot involves the idea of its feeling hot. By contrast, he thinks a metaphysics-first account is right for magnitudes (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: Chap. 2). Let us consider whether his reflections show that the traditional thought, which we rehearsed in its application to the feeling of heat, is unsound when it is applied to magnitudes.
A magnitude is something for which an operation of addition is defined so that there are magnitude-ratios (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 44–46). Thus magnitudes are unlike heat in that their experience involves what Kant calls synthesis: perceiving magnitudes as such is perceiving magnitudes as sums of magnitudes, or perceiving magnitudes as having a ratio, for example, seeing something to be twice as large as something or hearing it to last half as long as something. An account of what it is to perceive a magnitude must explain how magnitudes are perceived to have a ratio (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 47–52).
As Peacocke states as his principle V (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 45), magnitudes may explain how things come to be, specifically how they come to have certain magnitudes. Let there be two sticks, each with a certain length. The sticks are impressed on a bed of wax. Now there are two impressions in the wax, each with a certain length. The ratio of the lengths of the sticks is the same as the ratio of the lengths of the impressions. Or the sticks are erected perpendicular to the ground, casting a shadow. The ratio of the lengths of the shadows is the same as the ratio of the lengths of the sticks. (This is not true if one of the sticks is erected at a different angle to the ground.) Or the sticks are arranged on a line, and a device moves at a constant velocity on a line parallel to the sticks, emitting light. When and as long as the light beam is broken by a stick, the device beeps. The ratio of the durations of the beeps is equal to the ratio of the lengths of the sticks. (This is not true if the device does not travel at a constant velocity.)
Guided by the traditional line of thought above, we ask whether this efficacy of magnitudes of things—their power to be reflected in magnitudes of other things upon the latter’s being affected by the former—can provide an account of what it is for someone to perceive magnitudes, and that is, to perceive ratios of magnitudes. When a thing with a magnitude—a stick with a length—affects an animal, its magnitude may be reflected in the magnitude of a part or mode of—generally speaking, the magnitude of some thing in—the animal. When a second thing with a magnitude—a second stick—affects the animal, its magnitude may be reflected in the magnitude of a second thing in the animal. Let us call the thing whose magnitude we presume reflects the magnitude of the first stick affecting the animal r1, the thing that reflects the magnitude of the second stick r2.Footnote 3 The magnitudes of r1 and r2 may be of the same type as the magnitudes of the sticks as in the case of the impressions, or of a different type as in the case of the beeps. We know that the ratio of the magnitudes of r1 and r2 is equal to ratio of the magnitudes of the sticks, seeing how the manner in which the sticks affect the animal ensures that.
The impressions and beeps of which we spoke above may be used to represent the magnitudes of the sticks. In order for someone so to use them, she must perceive the magnitudes of the impressions or beeps and she must know that their magnitudes reflect the magnitudes of the sticks. This will involve knowledge how the sticks figure in an explanation of the impressions or beeps, in such a way that their magnitudes determine the magnitudes of the latter. What holds of impressions and beeps holds of the things in an animal whose magnitudes, like those of the impressions and beeps, reflect the magnitudes of the sticks. They, too, can be used to represent the magnitudes of the sticks by someone who perceives their magnitudes and understands how they come from the magnitudes of the sticks.
The impressions in the wax and the beeps of the device do not constitute perceptions of magnitudes. The same holds of the rs in the animal. The observation that the ratio of magnitudes of rs is the same as the ratio of magnitudes of sticks that affect the animal makes no contact with the idea of the animal as a perceiver. It does so no more than the observation that the ratio of magnitudes of impressions in wax or beeps of a device equal the ratio of magnitudes of sticks introduces the idea of the wax or the device as a perceiver.
We may hope to avoid this verdict by noting that r1 and r2 are mental representations of the sticks and that these are states of the animal’s perceptual apparatus.Footnote 4 Now, there would be reason to call the thing in which we find the rs a perceptual apparatus if for someone to perceive sticks to have a length were for there to be suitable rs in such a thing. But we do not understand that to be so by calling the thing in which there are rs a perceptual apparatus. Perhaps we are to know independently that r1 and r2 are perceptions of sticks and on that basis identify that in which they are lodged as a perceptual apparatus. But this makes no sense because nothing is a perception of something spatially extended unless it is a perception of it as spatially extended. Therefore there can be no metaphysics-first account of perception on the basis of which we can understand r1 and r2 to be mental representations and states of a perceptual apparatus that is prior to, and thus suitable to provide a basis of, a subsequent account of the perception of magnitudes. We can rest nothing on the description of r1 and r2 as mental representations nor on their being assigned to a perceptual apparatus. These characterizations are proleptic at best: if the account succeeds, we can employ them with confidence that we understand what we say. They can carry no weight in the account.
Yet it seems that Peacocke wants to make something of the notion that the rs are mental representations and states of a perceptual apparatus. For he does not propose that the presence in an animal of two things the ratio of whose magnitudes equals the ratio of the lengths of two given sticks on its own constitutes a perception of magnitudes as such by that animal. He adds requirements that concern what he calls the perceptual apparatus: that apparatus is to be sensitive to the ratio of r1 and r2, and it is to be set up in such a way that the presence of r1 and r2 triggers a third r, which we are to understand, presumably on this basis, to be a representation of the ratio of the magnitudes of the sticks (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 50). Let us consider the motivation for these additions.
She who perceives the impressions in the wax and their magnitudes and who, knowing how the impressions have come from the sticks, understands their magnitudes to reflect the magnitudes of the sticks, can use the impressions to represent the magnitudes of the sticks. What holds of the impressions holds of the rs. Now it is absurd to propose that someone who perceives the lengths of sticks does so in virtue of perceiving magnitudes of things in herself. It is in any case not possible to explain what it is to perceive magnitudes by stating that to perceive magnitudes of some things is to perceive the magnitudes of certain other things. Yet unless there is awareness of the magnitudes of the rs, there can be no thought that their existence should have anything to do with the perception of magnitudes. This motivates Peacocke’s requirement that there be an awareness of, a sensitivity to, the ratio of the magnitudes of the rs.Footnote 5 As the subject of this sensitivity cannot be she who perceives, the animal, some thing in the animal is postulated, an apparatus, which, as it is less than and somehow underneath the animal who perceives, is sub-animal. This, too, however, does not suffice. She who is to use impressions to represent sticks must relate, with understanding, the impressions to the sticks. Understanding the impressions to have come from the sticks, she can infer, from the ratio of the magnitudes of the impressions, the magnitudes of the sticks; her knowledge of the former can be the basis of her knowledge of the latter. In the same way, a sensitivity, in the apparatus, to the magnitudes of the rs on its own does not relate anything, be it the animal or its apparatus, to the sticks. And this may lead one to require that the apparatus (the ‘perceptual apparatus’) not only is to be sensitive to the magnitudes of r1 and r2, but, on the basis of this sensitivity, to produce a third r, which is described as representing the magnitudes of the sticks to have a certain ratio.Footnote 6 This mimics the inference on the part of a person. What there is an inference—a judgment held in the consciousness of its grounds—here is a transition from states to states.
Presumably this is how ideas of a sensitivity of an apparatus and a pseudo-inference performed by this apparatus enter the discussion. Yet these ideas do nothing to address the difficulty raised by the traditional thought. That difficulty lay with seeing how the natural causality of things perceived provides an understanding of their perception. Their natural causality allows us to understand hot things to heat other things; it does not let us understand how hot things, by their heat, bring forth the feeling of heat. In the same way, the natural causality of sticks allows us to understand why the ratio of their magnitudes equals the ratio of magnitudes of impressions they produce in a bed of wax. It does not explain how the sticks and their magnitudes bring forth a perception of these magnitudes. Going sub-animal does not address this difficulty, for the difficulty did not reside in the choice of subject of the perception, awareness, sensitivity. Therefore it will reproduce itself without alteration for the sub-animal.
The perceptual apparatus is to be sensitive to (or, as Peacocke puts it, there is to be within the apparatus a sensitivity to) the ratio of the magnitudes of rs. Peacocke explains that ‘for an organism to be sensitive to a magnitude of a given type’ is for it ‘to be in states causally explained by some object or event having that magnitude’ (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 85). According to this explanation, an animal is sensitive to the magnitudes of sticks in virtue of there being, in the animal, states which are and whose magnitude in each case is explained by the sticks and their magnitudes. The rs are these states. In order to reveal the animal not only to be sensitive to the magnitudes, but to represent them, we postulate a further sensitivity, this time not to the magnitudes of the sticks and their ratio, but to the magnitudes of the rs and their ratio. However, if ‘for an organism to be sensitive to a magnitude of a given type […] is not yet for the organism to represent that magnitude as such’ (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 85), then what is missing cannot be a further sensitivity.
There is no ground to call rs mental representations, nor is there ground to call whatever it is in which they are lodged a perceptual apparatus. There would be such ground if the invocation of rs and their magnitudes and the invocation of a sensitivity in an apparatus to their magnitudes contributed to an account of the perception of magnitudes that is metaphysics-first and from outside content. Since they do not so contribute, these terms must have a different justification.
IV. Return to the structure of the space of positions, and the rejection of psychologism
We considered Peacocke’s account of the perception of magnitudes with a view to finding in it means to question the thought that rejects accounts of content from outside content. Peacocke suggests that his account will provide such means:
If a critic in philosophy says that a certain kind of account—in the present instance, the Primary Thesis—is impossible, there are at least two ways of proceeding. One is to try to show that the critic’s arguments are unsound. The other is to actually try to do what the critic claims is impossible. If it can be done, then the arguments that it cannot be done must be unsound. In Chapter 2, I am going to attempt to show that it can be done for one particular case, the ontology of physical magnitudes. (Peacocke Reference Peacocke2019: 37)
This may be read as announcing that chapter 2 will refute the traditional thought by the deed: by giving an account from outside content, an account that puts metaphysics first.
We did not find the chapter to give grounds to question the traditional thought. On the contrary, its treatment of the perception of magnitudes brought out the force of that thought. Therefore we may consider the chapter in a different light. Peacocke’s conception of the space of positions joins metaphysics-first to realism: a metaphysics-first account with respect to thought of a certain domain reflects realism with respect to that domain. For a metaphysics-first account is correct where thought is of a mind-independent reality. Hence, if we are confident that something is mind-independent, we must be equally confident that a metaphysics-first account of thought of it is there to be given. We need not produce such an account in order to vindicate metaphysics-first; it is vindicated by the recognition that the reality in question is mind-independent. Therefore we can confine ourselves to say things we surmise an account will mention. Perhaps the account will speak of a perceptual apparatus and identify mental representations and determine magnitudes of these. When read in this way, the chapter and the book rest on our notions of realism and idealism and our notions of what is mind-independent and what is not. For example, time may be mind-independent, color perhaps not, law perhaps not, spatial distance for sure.
Peacocke’s conception of the space of positions as arranged on a line whose extremes are held by metaphysics-first and meaning-first, no-priority being located in the middle, expresses psychologism: thought, knowledge, perception are a reality different from the reality of what is thought, known, perceived. The formula ‘mind and reality’ has a local meaning: we distinguish someone’s thinking that snow is white from snow’s being white. This is not a distinction of mind from reality. Someone’s thinking that snow is white is a reality, too, a different one from the reality of snow’s being white. It is a mental reality. The independence of reality from mind is an independence of one reality from another. When we speak not locally, but universally, not of a certain reality, but of reality, the distinction disappears.
When we embrace psychologism, then we can think of ourselves as possessing objective knowledge only if we think that there is a metaphysics-first account of such knowledge. Objective knowledge is knowledge of things being as they are anyway, whether or not they are known to be so. As Aristotle says (Metaphysics 9.1051b), it is not because it is true to say that you are white that you are white. Rather, it is because you are white that it is true to say that. Therefore, and further, a judgment’s truth is non-accidental if and only if the judgment derives from that in which its truth resides: I know that you are white as I think this because you are white. If we consider further that it cannot be accidental to thought that, in favorable cases, or when all goes well, it is knowledge, we must conclude that it is definitive of a thought that it be explained by that of which it is the thought. This may appear to provide us with the general formula of a metaphysics-first account of thought.
By the same token, it may appear to suffice to reject the traditional thought. That traditional thought maintains that the intelligibility proper to thought bears a different form from that of the natural reality of which, in central cases, it is the thought. It is therefore impossible to cross the line separating the mind from nature in an account that explains what it is for someone to think or say something in terms of the natural reality that her thought concerns and its natural causality. The mind or the mental is irreducible to a natural reality. Now it seems obvious that this cannot be right, not if there is such a thing as knowledge of nature. The traditional thought insulates, in explanation and comprehension, thought and speech from that which, in central cases, is thought and said. If thought is so insulated, then it is impossible to understand thought to be explained by what it thinks. And this means it is impossible to understand thought to be knowledge. Given the explanatory insulation of thought, the only manner of conceiving a non-accidental unity of thought and what it thinks would be to anchor both in a common cause, in the manner of a preformationism.
This is how the dialectic appears as long as we place, with Peacocke, metaphysics-first, no-priority and meaning-first on a line, that is, as long as we embrace psychologism. If the structure of the space of positions is a different one, if, as suggested by ‘Modesty’, metaphysics-first and meaning-first are identical as both stand opposed to no-priority, then the dialectic, too, is different. We noted that the ideas of realism and idealism, mind-independence and mind-dependence, that express the psychologism of the line are inapplicable to a position that opposes psychologism. These notions sustain the reflections in the preceding paragraphs. Hence these reflections belong with what no-priority, understood to be the rejection of psychologism, rejects.
‘Modesty’ presents the idea that content is comprehended only from inside in this way: whatever may be brought forward to explain what it is to think something already involves the representation of content as such. Conversely, an account of content from outside content renounces the representation of content as such. In a psychologistic milieu this will be heard to make a claim about a certain sphere of thought or discourse: thought or discourse whose object is thought. It will be heard to say that this sphere is sealed: nothing, no thought, no statement, can contribute to the comprehension of thought and speech that is not already inside that sphere. However, this is a form of psychologism, and ‘Modesty’ rejects psychologism. So this cannot be its meaning. That content is understood only from inside content does not mean that thought about a certain domain, thought about thought, is sealed. It means that thought is comprehended from inside itself. Thought is its own comprehension. Thus an account of thought is not a thought about thought. There is no thought about thought. There is no space for that. For a thought is already the thought of itself. Thus the space that thought about thought would want to fill is already taken by the thought about which it wants to be a thought.
A thought is the thought of itself; thinking something is thinking oneself to think it. Therefore the idea of an account of content from outside content makes no sense. Such an account is to refrain, in the statements that explain what it is to think something, from using concepts to represent a content as such. It is not that this requirement is too hard to meet. Then the rejoinder would be: try harder. Rather, the requirement is meaningless. Every use of a concept is an understanding of itself as such a use. So every use of a concept is its use to specify a content as such. The straight use of a concept, precisely as straight, is its use to think a content as such. This is the true, the non-psychologistic, meaning of no-priority.
As a thought is the thought of itself, nothing is thought in thinking what would be expressed by ‘I think p’ that is not thought in thinking ‘p’. ‘I think p’ does not introduce a content, it does not open up a topic, that is not already introduced, not already opened up, in what is expressed by ‘p’. Since thinking something is, in the fundamental case, taking oneself to know it, the same holds for knowledge. Knowing something is knowing oneself to know it. Nothing is known in ‘I know p’ which is not already known in knowing p. It follows that there is no science of knowledge and thought distinct from the science of what is thought and known. (There is no cognitive science.) Thinking and being, knowledge and reality, mind and world: these terms do not indicate two topics, two contents, two objects, each of which has its science.
It may be objected that, while it may be true that ‘I think p’ does not open up a topic that is not already opened up by ‘p’, this does not hold of ‘You think p’ or ‘Smith thinks p’. Surely, one will say—it is customary to introduce such statements with ‘surely’—Smith’s thinking p is a topic that I may think about, a topic distinct from and to be laid alongside the topic I think about thinking p. I cannot adequately discuss this here. But we may note that it makes no sense, for if it were true, I did not think anyone to think anything. If ‘I think’ does not specify a limited topic, next to the various topics that may be thought, and ‘Smith thinks’ specifies such a topic, then ‘Smith thinks’ does not say of Smith what ‘I think’ says of me. So I do not think of anyone what I think of me, thinking that I think. In truth, reflection shows that my ‘Smith thinks p’ does not introduce a content, it does not open up a topic, that is not already introduced, not already opened up, by what Smith says, saying to me ‘p’. This is the converse of the above: the oblique use of a concept, its use to represent something as thought or said, is, precisely as oblique, its use to say what is. This is the true, the non-psychologistic, meaning of no-priority.
Perhaps this is granted. Let us suppose it is granted. Still it may seem unclear how it can amount to a rejection of psychologism, given the austere way in which we have introduced it: as the idea that thinking and knowing are a certain reality, a mental or rational or even self-conscious reality. For even if thought is its own comprehension, what it comprehends remains a certain reality, namely it, thought, to be distinguished from other realities, for example, the reality which, in central cases, is what is thought. It may be remarkable that thought is its own comprehension, but this does not indicate that there is anything amiss with psychologism. However, what we generously supposed is granted—thought is its own comprehension—refutes psychologism in the austere sense. Self-comprehension is not comprehension of anything limited; self-knowledge is not knowledge of a circumscribed object. Rather, self-comprehension is comprehension of the illimitable whole, and self-knowledge is knowledge of the absolute.
Thinking something I understand myself to think it. I understand myself to think it, and I understand myself to think it. Understanding the latter I understand myself to think truly if and only if things are as I think. And thinking that they are so, I understand myself to think truly, and to think what I do because things are as I think. This understanding is the source of the formulae: mind and world, knowledge and reality, thinking and being. They do not spring from an observation that a certain reality bears certain relations to another reality. They do not reflect an interest in tracing the dependence of one thing, event, process, on another. These formulae speak the self-comprehension of thought. And therefore they concern the illimitable whole. There is no limiting the object of thought from inside thought. As thought and thus the object of thought are understood only from inside, thought and its object are illimitable. We said that thinking and being, knowledge and reality, mind and world, do not indicate two topics, each with its own science. We did not mean they indicate one topic. Rather, they do not indicate a topic. That is to say, they are the concern of no science, but the concern of metaphysics, or philosophy.
The formulae thinking and being, knowledge and reality, mind and world, signify a division, nay, an opposition. Psychologism contains this division within a larger whole: it conceives mind and world as two parts of the world, knowledge and reality as two bits of reality, thinking and being as two kinds of being. The opposed poles are under a higher unity, which is signified by ‘world’, ‘reality’, ‘being’. No idea is in opposition to the idea of world, reality, being, that is used when it is thought that the mind is a part of the world, knowledge a bit of reality, thinking a kind of being. There is no division, no opposition on the plane indicated by those terms; that plane embraces all opposition; it is not itself afflicted by opposition. When we think that unity, we think what is uncreated and indestructible, alone, complete, immovable and without end. Such is the metaphysics of the psychologist.
The terms ‘knowledge and reality’ speak the self-comprehension of knowledge. Knowing something is knowing myself to know it; hence it is knowing my knowledge to be explained by that and that alone which I know. This knowledge, the self-knowledge of knowledge, is not knowledge that one reality depends on another. If, per impossibile, knowing myself to know were knowing that one reality depends on another, there would be no such thing as knowing myself to know. For then my knowledge that my knowledge is explained by what it knows would have a content different from the knowledge it concerns. Hence it could not be the knowledge that it itself is knowledge. When we describe it as knowledge, we pretend to express further knowledge, which in turn can be so described only on the presumption that we have further knowledge, and so on. So this reduces to absurdity. In truth, the self-knowledge of knowledge is knowledge of the illimitable whole.
Psychologism is a philosophical idea, and thus an idea of philosophy, specifically of the way in which philosophy relates to science. Its rejection equally is a philosophical idea, and it is equally an idea of philosophy and of the way in which philosophy relates to science. Its idea of philosophy is this: philosophy is thinking. This is to say, philosophy is not thinking this or that. It is thinking. This is not nothing because thought is its own comprehension. Philosophy brings to language the self-comprehension of thought. Therefore philosophy has no topic. It is constituted by the concern for the whole. And the whole is not a topic. (Therefore philosophy encounters religion as an equal. For religion shares that concern. Philosophy as understood by psychologism is not an equal to religion.) Philosophy is not empty because the whole, as the whole, is opposition. The formulae of philosophy, mind and world, thinking and being, knowledge and reality, express this opposition, the opposition that is the whole.
Open access
