Consciousness is a surface. – NietzscheFootnote 1
I. Introduction
The latest results of the life sciences, especially neurophysiology, and their alleged implications for human freedom and autonomy are as exciting as they are controversial.Footnote 2 A certain common view of our freedom and autonomy is jeopardized by these findings. However, that view remains in key regards Cartesian, whereas a superior account of our freedom and autonomy was already developed by Hegel, drawing upon and augmenting Kant's. Here I characterize some central features of Hegel's account of our freedom and autonomy, in order to show that the life sciences can be expected to provide us further insights into the biological basis of our freedom and autonomy, though they will not explain them away. I begin by reviewing some basic features of Cartesian self-transparency (II), and three relevant findings of contemporary life sciences (III). These two sections show that the model of freedom challenged by contemporary life sciences is an altogether Cartesian, if also commonsense, model. (Common sense even today is often deeply Cartesian.) I next characterize some key features of Hegel's anti-Cartesianism (IV) and then pose the central issue about human freedom raised by contemporary biologism (V). I argue against this biologism on the basis of Hegel's analysis of freedom as autonomy (VI) and then comment briefly on biologism in moral theory (VII).Footnote 3 This essay is dedicated to Burkhard Tuschling in memoriam.
II. Cartesian Self-transparency
II.I
As Descartes established that he infallibly knew of his own existence whenever he so much as considered whether he did, he asked himself this question:
But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions. (Med. 2, AT 7:28)
Famously he held that, even when he dreams or even if he were utterly deceived by a powerful, cunning malign spirit,
… I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘sensing’ [lat.: ‘sentire’, fr.: ‘sentir’] is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking. (Med. 2, AT 7:29; tr. emended)
Accordingly, any- and everything of which I am aware is exactly what it appears to me to be, and is exactly as it appears to me. Accordingly our mind consists in explicit consciousness of ‘ideas’, including feelings, images and concepts, or their combinations. As thinking beings we command infallible self-knowledge of our own existence qua thinker and our own thoughts, in this broad, inclusive sense. I shall refer to this as our Cartesian ‘self-transparency’. According to this Cartesian self-transparency, consciousness and self-consciousness are identical, and as such self-conscious beings we are in principle not causally determined by nature nor by matter.
II.II
Our independence as thinking beings from all natural causality is also manifest in our complete freedom of will.Footnote 4 According to Descartes, our will consists in ‘freedom of decision’, which
… simply consists in our ability to do or not do something (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid); or rather, it consists simply in the fact that when the intellect puts something forward for affirmation or denial or for pursuit or avoidance, our inclinations are such that we do not feel we are determined by any external force. (Med. 4, AT 7:57)
Regarding either cognitive judgements or practical decisions, Descartes held that for any judgement,
… the perception of the intellect should always precede the determination of the will. (Med. 4, AT 7:60)
This policy is revealed to Descartes by the (presumed ultimately reliable) ‘natural light’ (ibid.). One can behave otherwise, though not without error and sin (Med. 4, AT 7:58). One might query what counts as ‘internal’ and ‘external’ here, and whether our own ‘inclinations’ may be determined internally rather than externally, but the context makes clear that in proper judgement we affirm or deny, pursue or avoid according to our intellectual grasp of what is true or false, good or bad, or otherwise suspend judgement.Footnote 5 Accordingly, any ‘external’ determinants must be external specifically to the intellect and to our attentive will in proper judgement, and not merely external to the composite person.
To this model of the will corresponds a familiar, executive Three Step Model of decision-making: First one considers the known, relevant circumstances, evidence, principles, inclinations or desires, etc.; then one exercises one's will by judging and resolving what do to; and finally one executes one's resolution by acting accordingly. On this model, decision-making consists in a strictly linear sequence, in which our freedom consists in a radically independent first instigation of an action, which Kant formulated in these terms:
… freedom … [is] a particular kind of causality, … namely a capacity absolutely to initiate a state of affairs, and thus also a series of its consequences …. (Kant, KdrV B473; my translationFootnote 6)
These basic features of Cartesianism remain commonplace today, including in contemporary philosophy. Cartesian self-transparency appears in contemporary philosophy of mind as the thesis of ‘mental content internalism’, according to which the contents of experiences, feelings or thoughts can be completely specified by reference solely to any relevant first-person and his or her awareness, without reference to that person's surroundings, non-conscious somatic states or physiology. Radical Cartesian freedom appears in contemporary ‘libertarianism’ or ‘indeterminism’ regarding freedom of the will, according to which free human decisions or acts are not causally determined, and our actions are only caused by our deciding so to act.
III. Three Findings of Contemporary Life Sciences
These basic features of Cartesianism are challenged by contemporary life sciences in at least three familiar ways.
III.I
For example, due to certain kinds of aphasia there are people who can respond quickly, skilfully and accurately to requests by a researcher to hand over an object lying within reach, who plainly perceive the test objects and promptly identify, deftly grasp and hand over the relevant object, although they are unaware of their own perception of and action upon that object. Such aphasics perceive their environment, though without being self-consciously aware of significant regions of their environment. Consequently, human perceptual consciousness is at least to a significant extent possible without corresponding self-conscious perception. Such consciousness, however, is not merely animalic, because these aphasic patients respond to verbal requests by understanding them and executing them with great perceptual-motor facility.
III.II
Neuro-psychological experiments by Benjamin Libet and others report that specific neurological antecedents of response decisions occur up to ten seconds prior to any self-conscious, experienced decision to respond. There is a similar, though briefer time lag in veto decisions (Graves, Maniscalco & Lau 2011: 113–5). Such time-lag purportedly shows that the self-conscious, experienced decision cannot be the actual decision made by the experimental subject, because the actual decision is already made pre-consciously and in advance. Some investigators conclude from these premises that we lack freedom of will (e.g., Wegner Reference Wegner2003; Cashmore Reference Cashmore2010; Caruso Reference Caruso2012).
III.III
In the moral domain, some philosophers have argued that evolutionary theory undermines, if not refutes moral realism, because there are insufficient reasons to presume that our capacity for moral experience, responses or actions would have evolved so as to respond reliably to moral truths, facts or circumstances; and indeed, that rather the reverse would appear to be the case (e.g., Joyce Reference Joyce2006, Reference Joyce2008; Street Reference Street2006, Reference Street2008). If this line of reasoning is cogent, it would pose equally fundamental problems for most contemporary forms of moral constructivism, which aim to identify or to ‘construct’ various moral principles or norms on the basis of our reactions to one another or to morally salient circumstances or events. How shall such a basis of constructed moral norms enable us to assess the moral status of the selected basic, morally salient responses? This kind of moral constructivism appears to confront a significant problem of vicious circularity, exacerbated by the evolutionary considerations just mentioned. The common appeal to ‘reflective equilibrium’ is little help, because reflective equilibrium is at most a conditio sine qua non of any tenable view, but it constitutes no justificatory method because it provides no indication, nor any basis, for determining how any such reflective equilibrium should be achieved (Westphal Reference Westphal2003: 101).
IV. Hegel's Anti-Cartesianism
Well before Hegel's day the basic features of Cartesianism summarized above (II) had already been challenged by naturalists and materialists such as Hobbes and Gassendi, although they lacked convincing accounts of the human brain, how it functions and how it evolved. Nevertheless it is worth considering two contemporaneous objections to Cartesianism.
IV.I
Even at its inception, mental content internalism can be shown to be the fundamental self-deception of Cartesianism, indeed within the second and sixth of Descartes's Meditations, where Descartes poses the proper question about his own independence, but answers mistakenly. In the second Meditation Descartes considers this prospect:
And yet may it not perhaps be the case that these very things which I am supposing to be nothing, because they are unknown to me, are in reality identical with the ‘I’ of which I am aware? I do not know, and for the moment I shall not argue the point, since I can make judgements only about things which are known to me. I know that I exist; the question is, what is this ‘I’ that I know? If the ‘I’ is understood strictly as we have been taking it, then it is quite certain that knowledge of it does not depend on things of whose existence I am as yet unaware. (Med. 2, AT 7:27–8)
Descartes’ clear and distinct conviction regarding his cognitive independence from whatever is unconscious or unknown to himself indicates Descartes’ commitment (in this case) to mental content internalism, as specified earlier (II.II). It also indicates his commitment to justificatory internalism, the thesis that any and all factors which bear upon the justificatory status of one's beliefs, claims or judgements are such that one is aware of them, or can readily become aware of them by self-conscious reflection.
Descartes’ judgement about his cognitive independence and his commitment to justificatory internalism do not at all count as knowledge because—on his own terms—Descartes erred about them. His error in this regard is most apparent in Meditation 6, where he argues as follows:
First, I know that everything which I clearly and distinctly understand is capable of being created by God so as to correspond exactly with my understanding of it. Hence the fact that I can clearly and distinctly understand one thing apart from another is enough to make me certain that the two things are distinct, since they are capable of being separated, at least by God. … Thus, simply by knowing that I exist and seeing at the same time that absolutely nothing else belongs to my nature or essence except that I am a thinking thing, I can infer correctly that my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing. … on the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am simply a thinking, non-extended thing; and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far as this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it. (Med. 6, AT 7:78)
Mind-body dualism does not follow validly from these premises (regardless of soundness). Granting that God ‘can’ create the human body and the human soul or mind as two entirely distinct, mutually independent substances, this does not imply that God did in fact so create them as entirely distinct, mutually independent substances; nor does it imply that God does make them distinct and mutually independent substances, only one of which—the extended body—is perishable and perishes when a person dies. The crucial modal term ‘can’ in the final clause of the quoted passage is equivocal between ‘can in principle’—though counter-factually—and ‘can in fact’. Descartes seeks to prove the latter, but at most he only argued for the former.
Also in the Principles of Philosophy (I §60) Descartes claims that if God can make two substances distinct and independent then they are really distinct, and not merely modally or conceptually distinct, even if they form a unity, such as, centrally, the mind and body of any one human being. Here, too, what God ‘can’ do is insufficient for specifying what he did or shall do (quite aside from Descartes's pronounced divine voluntarism); on this crucial point Descartes’ views are neither clear nor distinct. Indeed, Descartes's views about the essential distinction between mind and body and the unity of any human being as a person, both in the Meditations and in the Principles, are but a hair's breadth removed from Spinoza's modal distinction between the intellectual and the extended attributes of the one substance: At best, Descartes's analysis can distinguish between mental (thinking, non-extended) and physical (extended, non-thinking) attributes, though not between numerically distinct mental and physical substances. This is because Descartes's analysis suffices to distinguish between his concepts of ‘mind’ and of ‘body’, but not to distinguish between their objects, i.e., between any mental substance and any physical substance, in part because Descartes's analysis does not suffice to show that either of his concepts of mind or of body are adequate, that is, complete. That he conceives himself to be nothing but a thinking being (as quoted above) does not entail that he is nothing but a thinking being. In this paradigmatic instance, that is the fundamental self-deception of Descartes's purported self-transparency. (Great shades of Frege's distinction between sense and reference!) And even for complete a priori concepts, Descartes neglected the key questions raised by Kant—and pursued even more thoroughly by Hegel—of whether we are able to use such concepts in justifiable cognitive judgements, and if so, how so and within what domain(s)? Contemporary Cartesians, too, neglect these key questions.
I have revisited this familiar text once again, rather pointedly, to make clear that at the very outset of the Cartesian tradition, which persists into the present day within mainstream Anglophone philosophy, that mere conceptual analysis does not and cannot suffice for epistemology, for theory of action, nor for philosophy of mind. Carnap (Reference Carnap1950: 1–18) highlighted this insufficiency, and not only for semantics, with his distinction between conceptual analysis and conceptual explication; unfortunately, to little avail (Westphal Reference Westphal2010–11), despite Wick (Reference Wick1951) having drawn attention to it. Kant was the first philosopher to highlight the insufficiency of mere conceptual analysis for non-formal domains, by distinguishing his specifically transcendental logic from general logic. Kant's Critical philosophy develops a detailed and powerful Anti-Cartesianism, which in several regards is more considerable than contemporary forms of Anti-Cartesianism (Westphal Reference Westphal2007a). Hegel developed Kant's Anti-Cartesianism even further (cf. Westphal Reference Westphal2009, Reference Westphal2011).
IV.II
The second objection to Cartesianism concerns the identification of consciousness with self-consciousness, and self-consciousness with the ‘I’ or with one's ‘self’. The question is worth asking: Can Cartesians learn? Famously, Meno confronted Socrates with this paradox:
… how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not at all know? Of everything you do not know, what will you propose as the subject of your enquiry? And if you happen upon what you seek, how will you ever know that it is what you did not know? (Plato, Meno 80d; my translation)
If indeed we consist merely in Cartesian self-transparency, then this paradox holds. Only because we can understand something incompletely, partially, can we learn more new information about it. The phenomenon of partial understanding and its anti-Cartesian implications have been emphasized by Tyler Burge (Reference Burge1979), and previously by Michael Polanyi (Reference Polanyi1966), though they are already central to Hegel's analysis of the self-critical structure and capacity of our consciousness of objects in the Introduction to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.Footnote 7 Hegel's account cannot and need not be recounted here, but his point that there is more to each of us than our explicit self-conscious awareness (and whatever we are explicitly aware of) can be highlighted briefly. For example, when I consider, think through and solve a problem, I become aware of the solution as such only as I finally grasp it. However, whilst I ponder and think the problem through, although I may be expressly aware of many relevant considerations, much of my own solving of the problem remains unconscious. Nevertheless, I think the problem through and I solve it, even though only retrospectively can I recount—even to myself—how I solved it. In this regard I am no exception, and this example has parallels across the range of intelligent human activities.
Hegel discussed the Meno Paradox in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and mentions the Platonic mythology of recollection of what one once knew, but Hegel emphasized that our comprehension of any solution to a problem is our own cognitive achievement (Hegel, VGP, MM 18:466–7, 19:44–5). Likewise our self-knowledge is a cognitive achievement; we are not automatically self-transparent. The progress from the preconscious to nascent consciousness, and from nascent consciousness to the expressly known and comprehended, is repeated throughout Hegel's philosophy, and not only in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.Footnote 8 By itself this is sufficient reason not to identify ourselves with the self-transparent surface of our own self-consciousness.
We human beings are not automatically self-conscious. Like Leibniz and Kant, Hegel too distinguished between ‘perception’ as (mere) sensory awareness of our surroundings and ‘apperception’ as our self-conscious awareness of ourselves and of what we experience.Footnote 9 Like Kant, Hegel too stressed that we are only able to achieve self-consciousness insofar as we perceive our surroundings, and on that basis distinguish ourselves from that which we perceive around us (Westphal Reference Westphal2011). Kant and Hegel lacked information about the sorts of perceptual aphasia mentioned above (III.I). However, the empirical finding that people who suffer such aphasias can perceive their surroundings without self-conscious awareness of significant portions of their surroundings, is neatly accommodated by their views, though not at all by Cartesianism. In connection with freedom of the will—to which we return shortly (V)—it is important to recall that those who suffer such aphasias nevertheless respond effectively, skilfully and rationally to an investigator's requests for various items within that person's reach. Their actions are rational, even without full self-consciousness.
Whilst rejecting reductionism (Westphal Reference Westphal2008), Hegel nevertheless argued en detail that spirit is necessarily embodied, also in the case of each individual person (Wolff Reference Wolff1992: 118–55). According to Hegel's view, our consciousness and self-consciousness are based in our neurophysiology, which Hegel examined in detail under the heading ‘Anthropology’, in connection with relevant contemporaneous science.Footnote 10
I have highlighted the distinction between perception and apperception, and the anthropological basis of rational thought and action, in order to suggest the plausibility of Hegel's view that we are able to guide our own thought and action on the basis of implicit concepts and principles. To this point I return below (VI).
V. Biologism Today?
V.I
Even today the thesis of biologism—that human actions are altogether causally determined by our biology—is vigorously asserted. For example, the biologist Anthony R. Cashmore, member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), contends that:
… the simple but crucial point [is] that any action, as ‘free’ as it may appear, simply reflects the genetics of the organism and the environmental history, right up to some fraction of a microsecond before any action. […] there is a trinity of forces—genes, environment, and stochasticism (GES)—that governs all of biology including behavior, with the stochastic component referring to the inherent uncertainty of the physical properties of matter. (Cashmore Reference Cashmore2010: 4500)
This refined formulation of the thesis of biologism differs in only one regard from the deterministic thesis regarding human behaviour which Hegel criticized in 1807 in connection with the psychological explanation of individual actions. According to psychological determinism, any person's actions are completely explicable on the basis of his or her ‘several capacities, inclinations and passions’ (PhdG, GW 9:169.17/¶303), together with his or her circumstances, including his or her ‘situation, habits, customs, religion etc.’ (PhdG, GW 9:169.39/¶305). In this connection it is important to note that citing causes of individual actions does not suffice for their causally deterministic explanation; deterministic explanation requires providing a complete, sufficient and exclusively causal explanation of any individual action.Footnote 11 To such contentions Hegel quite rightly replied that, although the kinds of factors just mentioned are necessary (PhdG, GW 9:170.15–21/¶306), they are not sufficient to explain causally and deterministically any person or his or her actions. In a striking passage Hegel designates a representative person as an ‘individuality’ (Individualität) and argues thus:
However, this individuality just is this: equally well to be the universal and so in a calm, immediate way to blend into the established universalities, customs, habits, etc. and to accord with them, as also to set him- or herself against them and instead to invert them—or instead in his or her singularity to relate to them utterly indifferently, neither allowing them to affect him- or herself, nor to act against them. What shall have an influence on the individuality and which influence it shall have—which actually is redundant—thus depends solely upon the individuality him- or herself; in this way this individuality has become this particular individuality, which is to say, he or she has already become this individuality. (PhdG, GW 9:170.6–15/¶306; my translation)Footnote 12
Accordingly, any person determines—that is, decides—for him- or herself how to act in response to his or her present circumstances and considerations.
Like other determinists, Cashmore (Reference Cashmore2010: 4502) replies that neither freedom nor responsibility can consist in mere statistical contingency. Whilst true, this does not determine—i.e., specify—whether or to what extent human decisions reduce to merely stochastic series of events. According to the neurobiologist Björn Brembs, recent research on the behaviour of invertebrates (e.g., snails, worms and Drosophila) reveals:
… a general organization of brain function that incorporates flexible decision-making on the basis of complex computations negotiating internal and external processing. The adaptive value of such an organization consists of being unpredictable for competitors, prey or predators, as well as being able to explore the hidden resources deterministic automats would never find. At the same time, this organization allows all animals to respond efficiently with tried-and-tested behaviors to predictable and reliable stimuli. (Brembs Reference Brembs2011: 930)
The results examined by Brembs make evident forms of behaviour which cannot be reduced to merely stochastic sequences, because they reveal goal-directed processes of learning based upon the following principle of sensory reafference: Through sensory reafference an organism distinguishes those sensations which result from its own bodily motions from those sensations occasioned by the organism's surroundings (Brembs Reference Brembs2011: 936). This feedback loop of sensory reafference is also fundamental to human actions, because executing any action requires monitoring how the world responds to our actions (Brembs Reference Brembs2011: 936). Contra the simple linear Three Step Model of human decision and action mentioned above (II.II), it is important to stress that our corporeal actions are both temporally and spatially extended executions, which we guide by monitoring, and as needed modifying or halting them.
V.II
With these points in mind we may reconsider the Libet Experiments. We may accept—at least provisionally—the finding that the neurological antecedents of any pressing of a button, and likewise those of any decision about which button to press, precede in time any research subject's explicit awareness of his or her decision and action. However, neither this temporal precedence, nor the (purportedly) reliable prediction based upon those neurological antecedents of which button a research subject shall press, demonstrate that either the selection of which button to depress or the act of pressing that button occur without the experimental subject's intentions: Only due to information and instructions from the researcher does the research subject react at all to the illuminating of a lamp as an occasioning signal to depress one or another button. There is simply no experimental evidence which would neurologically explain away this basic intention, upon which the entire experimental inquiry depends. To the contrary, the neurological antecedents to any selection and depression of a designated button only occur on the basis of the research subject's prior, standing intention to cooperate by executing the researcher's instructions (Horgan Reference Horgan2011: 163–8).
In connection with these kinds of neurological investigations of human decision and action we can well expect a result similar to what occurred regarding presumed genetic determinism (Keller Reference Keller2002), namely, that the actual neurological processes which make possible our decisions and actions will prove to be much more complex and intricate than is consistent with deterministic claims. Once feedback loops enter into our understanding of decision and action (V.I), then the simple, linear Three Step Model of decision and execution (II.II), which is fundamental to determinist views of the will, must be rescinded, which is all to the better. Moreover, as noted above (IV.II), human thought does not consist simply in what we self-consciously think (apperceive). Like Descartes, Libet et al. simply assume that any free decision must be a completely self-conscious decision. In this regard, Descartes, Libet and rather too much Cartesian commonsense—or rather: common Cartesian nonsense—are fundamentally mistaken.
V.III
These remarks may appear rather distant from Hegel's philosophy, though they are not. Like others who take the practical syllogism seriously—above all, Aristotle and Kant—Hegel recognized that our actions are complex, insofar as we typically execute in one and the same action several intentions which differ in their generality or specificity, even though we often expressly attend only to one or a few of our several intentions. In particular, Hegel distinguished expressly between the purpose (Vorsatz) and the intention (Absicht) of an action (Rph §119): The purpose of an action is whatever is directly effected by acting; for example, grasping and moving my pen. The intention is the end one aims to achieve through executing that purpose; for example, signing a cheque. This action may involve several more, and more general intentions; for example: to pay my rent on time; by so doing, to support my family; to respect my landlord, with whom I am on good personal terms; to maintain my own credibility and integrity; to contribute my part to renovating my run-down neighbourhood; by so doing to support, indirectly, the political prospects of my local district representative, etc. All of these things I can do at once, and I can do them all intentionally, even though I may only expressly (self-consciously) think of a few of them whilst signing my cheque, which I know to be my rent payment. Hegel's distinction between the purpose and the intention(s) of any human action strongly indicates that our actions cannot be reduced simply to bodily behaviour. In this connection two important basic points regarding causal explanation and reductionism should be clearly noted.
V.IV
Obviously in everyday life we can identify various factors which in connection with human actions count as occasioning, or even contributing causes of a particular action, though in an informal, imprecise sense. Such commonsense psychology, however correct or faultless it may be within its everyday context, is not at all sufficient for causal-deterministic explanation of any human action, which occurs on the basis of many and various factors, most of which are simply neglected in everyday contexts. Any deterministic causal explanation requires (1) a causally closed system, together with (2) the identification of actual, occurrent efficient causes which are jointly sufficient to produce the event in question—which Modern philosophers designated the total sufficient cause of an event, and (3) a system which is relevantly insensitive to variations in its initial conditions.Footnote 13 Determinism about human behaviour presupposes a highly simplified mechanical model of causation which does not apply universally even within macro-scale physics. That is one fundamental self-deception of determinists regarding human action.
Any deterministic causal explanation requires precise appeal to the relevant causal laws and the causal characteristics of the relevant causal factors (contributing causes). In everyday contexts no one has this kind or extent of information about any human action, most of which would in everyday life be superfluous distractions. In everyday contexts, even if we do identify relevant occasioning causes of someone's action, we know far too little to rule out on causal grounds that the person in question freely resolved to act as she or he did. Commonsense psychology provides no basis for sufficient causal explanation of any human action; only sufficient causal explanations of actions—all human actions—suffices for causal determinism about human behaviour.
In this regard it is important to stress that causal description is insufficient for causal ascription—that is, for causal predication—and that causal ascription, in turn, does not suffice for causal knowledge, that is, for sufficiently justified causal ascription. Because causal descriptions are not merely formal, but rather are substantive claims—they are expressed by synthetic, not by analytic statements—causal ascription requires localising the putative, ascribed (attributed) causal factors (events or objects) within space and time. Only such spatio-temporal localisation suffices for predication, that is, for ascription or attribution, as contrasted with empty or ambiguous (non-referring or indefinite) expressions. That is a crucial finding of Kant's semantics of singular, specifically cognitive reference, which Hegel recognized and for which he argued—soundly, I submit—in ‘Sense Certainty’, independently of Kant's Transcendental Idealism, and which Hegel further used in just this connection regarding causal judgements and explanations in ‘Force and Understanding’ and in ‘Reason Observing Nature’ in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.Footnote 14 One consequence of their semantics of singular cognitive reference is that the causal principle, according to which any spatio-temporal event has a (set of) sufficient spatio-temporal cause(s), is a legitimate, necessary presupposition and leading (regulative) principle of any and every causal inquiry. However, causal knowledge we obtain only as a result of completed, successful causal explanation of any particular event. Only such explanations provide sufficient cognitive justification of causal ascriptions (that is, of specific, justified causal predications), which alone count as causal knowledge.Footnote 15
Accordingly, the causal principle, that any spatio-temporal event has a (set of) sufficient spatio-temporal cause(s), as such is not a cognitively justified causal law and does not itself count as causal knowledge. Accordingly, the causal principle cannot be assumed as a known major premiss in putative explanations of human behaviour, nor in the assertion that human behaviour ‘must be’ causally determined somehow or other. Empirical psychology, especially in regard to human behaviour, simply does not provide deterministic causal explanations. (This is an observation of a fact; it is not a criticism of empirical psychology.) Contemporary so-called ‘causal’ theories of the mind are far too vague to succeed even as causal descriptions of the relevant ‘mental’ phenomena, nor of their putative components or occasioning causal factors; they certainly do not suffice for causal ascription to any particular action or ‘mental’ event, nor to any of its alleged neurological basis or its component, contributing factors. Consequently, contemporary causal ‘theories’ of the mind do not count as, and do not suffice for, causal judgements, because neither their truth values nor their (putative) cognitive justifications can be determined (as contrasted to merely alleged), because not even their putative referents can be localized in any specific, determinate way so as to be identified and known to be contributing causes. In sum, contemporary ‘causal theories of the mind’, despite their wide-spread popularity amongst self-styled scientific philosophers, are altogether pseudo-scientific.
The view taken by Cashmore, cited above (V.I), is at best a preliminary, highly speculative claim about the sufficiency of a causal-explanatory natural science of human behaviour which has yet to be developed, which is supposed to demonstrate that each and every human action can be fully explained solely by citing causal factors in a person's environment, genetics and the stochastic characteristics of his or her material constitution.Footnote 16 To what extent human behaviour can be explained causally or deterministically we can learn only by carrying this research programme through. For now we should note that careful methodological assessment of the ‘Libet Experiments’ by Radder and Meynen (Reference Radder and Meynen2013) shows very clearly that these experimental results do not at all suffice to rule out, nor to explain away, free decisions on the part of any research subject.Footnote 17 For the following reasons, despite what some may say, we are in no position today to conceive any such putative, causally-deterministic science of behaviour.
V.V
To explain human behaviour causally requires either explaining or explaining away propositional contents. For good reason Descartes distinguished between the ‘formal’ reality and the ‘objective’ reality of any idea: ‘formally’ considered, an idea is some actual state of mind (whether occurrent or dispositional) which represents something. This representational character or capacity of any idea—what it represents and how it represents it to be, in sum, its content—is its ‘objective’ reality (Med. 3, AT 7:40). Although Descartes’ dualism of mental and physical substances is highly dubious, his aspectual dualism of the formal and the objective reality of ideas (or of mental content more generally) is crucial, also as regards semantic counters (inscriptions, sign designs, symbol strings). We still do not properly and fully understand how exactly the physical and the semantic characteristics of any sign or symbol are related; much less do we have any fully physical, causally sufficiently explanation of any semantic content, whether it be the content of a written text (e.g., an individual sentence, such as this series of marks which you are now—remarkably—reading and understanding) or a verbal expression or a neurological activation. Contemporary brain imaging techniques or neuro-surgical operations provide fascinating information about local brain activations, but altogether no information about how those activations are linked with any specific mental or semantic content(s). Even today's neuro-sciences, with all of their truly exciting advances and discoveries, provide at most correlations between neurological states formally regarded and thoughts or experiences objectively regarded, qua representings—which still today can only be regarded first-person by the research subject or patient him- or herself.
To be to the point, we still cannot sufficiently explain—causally or otherwise—exactly what distinguishes a mere spot like this: >·< from a logical conjunction, a mathematical symbol for multiplication, a punctuation mark, a typographical error or a mere printing blunder. These distinctions cannot be made without recourse to specific intelligent and intelligible uses of a spot, which themselves are only determinate—and specifiable—within specific contexts of usage, including their framework principles and linguistic rules. Causal covariance alone does not suffice for the constitution, nor for the determination (specification, interpretation, understanding) of semantic contents; causal covariance alone does not suffice to constitute any proper name. Contemporary empiricists still have not learnt this basic lesson, although it is corroborated, indeed demonstrated, through strictly internal critique of Book I of Hume's Treatise (Westphal Reference Westphal2013b).Footnote 18
In ‘Sense Certainty’ Hegel states a maximally extensional specification of a ‘universal’, which matches exactly Hume's account of ‘abstract idea’.Footnote 19 Through strictly internal critique of this account of universals Hegel demonstrates that our conceptions of ‘space’ and of ‘time’ are determinable quantitative conceptions, which we can determine (specify) arbitrarily, and which we determine (specify) intelligently—not merely according to a Humean habit or custom—when designating and comprehending any spatio-temporal individual we happen upon and identify. Hume's ‘copy theory’ of sensory impressions and ideas, together with his three (alleged) laws of psychological association, can at most account only for determinate, specific conceptions (classifications, intension), though not at all for merely determinable conceptions, such as ‘space’ and ‘time’.Footnote 20 Hume recognized, of course, that we do use determinable, linguistically mediated conceptions. Within Hume's philosophy of mind, only our human imagination can account for determinable conceptions (or for language). However, for this capacity and activity of our imagination Hume provides altogether no empiricist account; neither does he provide an empiricist account of how any sensory idea within any ‘bundle of perceptions’ which is a human mind can function as a word, as a linguistic tag. Hume's Copy Theory and his three stated laws of association are altogether too vague and imprecise to found, to constitute, to determine or to specify any semantic content or relation (Westphal Reference Westphal2013b). That even the simplest use of signs or symbols requires our intelligent capacity of imagination to comprehend the sign or symbol and whatever it designates or symbolizes is an important, basic point Hegel rightly and repeatedly stressed in his Anthropology (Enz. §§379–84, 457–60).Footnote 21
V.VI
In sum: Talk is cheap, and causal talk is especially cheap. Causal knowledge must be earned, and it can be earned only through causal explanation of any specific phenomenon. Causal determinism is even more demanding, for it can be earned only through complete, sufficient, exclusively causal explanation of a specific phenomenon. Yes, we have no ‘master argument’ to demonstrate that human freedom of thought and action are not ultimately undermined or explained away by natural causal determinism.Footnote 22 However, such an argument can only be devised and assessed, if at all, once we properly pose the problem to be addressed. Despite the confidence of legions of determinists, we still have no clear, specific formulation of the problem. The biological determinism discussed above (V.I) is an important research programme. However, we should never mistake a programme of research for established results. With these points in view, we may now consider freedom as our rational autonomy.
VI. Freedom as Autonomy
Properly understanding freedom as autonomy requires considering three closely related points.
VI.I
Exercising judgement is the exercise of one's own powers of judgement. First of all, rational judgement is autonomous insofar as we are each able to—and do—pass our own judgement, rather than simply adopting others’ judgements, recommendations, advice or commands.
VI.II
The exercise of judgement is normatively, and not merely causally, constituted. Secondly, the exercise of one's own judgement is autonomous insofar as it involves regulating one's own thought and judgement in identifying and considering the proper assessment of relevant methods, evidence and principles of reasoning and their justificatory use. This is literally auto-nomy: the self-regulation of one's own thinking and judging in view of grounds of evidence and grounds of proof, including methods, principles and grounds of rational justification.
This second aspect of autonomy shows that rational judgement is autonomous with regard to merely causal processes or events of our neuro-physio-psychology. That our capacity to judge and our exercise of our capacity to judge is based in and enabled by our neuro-physio-psychology Hegel does not deny. The point is that the normative conditions of rational judgement can be neither explicated nor explained merely causally. If we assume that judging, understood as a physiological or psychological process, is a causal process, this process counts as exercising judgement only insofar as it responds appropriately to normative considerations and criteria, and not simply to its causal antecedents as such. A judgement is a conclusion reached by assessing its justifying grounds and principles of inference or assessment; it is not merely an effect of whatever causes may correspond to those grounds or principles, or to their recognition by us as relevant justifying grounds or principles. Insofar as whatever processes enable or generate justification are causal processes, they count as justificatory processes, not because of their causal structure, but because they satisfy sufficient normative conditions which specify or constitute appropriate functioning, appropriate identification and assessment of justificatorily relevant considerations and appropriate drawing of conclusions, so as to support or to constitute rational justification (whether cognitive or practical).Footnote 23
VI.III
The exercise of judgement is required for responsible action. Acting responsibly, in contrast to merely behaving, is only possible through (actual or potential) exercise of judgement, because acting responsibly is based upon justificatory grounds, in contrast to mere excuses or exculpations. Acting responsibly involves autonomy of judgement in a way which highlights the spontaneity of rational judgement, which is expressed in genuine judgement in this way: We act responsibly only insofar as we rightly claim to have sufficient justifying grounds to act as we do. This holds too for those cases in which we act out of habit or inclination, though only insofar as we judge that, on the present occasion, acting on that habit or inclination is appropriate and permissible. This point likewise holds for those cases in which we act very rapidly, without time to reflect expressly about how best to act: our acting responsibly in such cases requires that we are able to exercise appropriate judgement about our actions, and would do so if circumstances permitted and required us to. Otherwise we relinquish rational considerations or deliberations and absent ourselves from what Sellars (Reference Sellars1963: 169) called ‘the space of reasons’. In such cases, as McDowell (Reference McDowell1994: 13) rightly notes, we can only fabricate for ourselves excuses or exculpations, though no justification of our behaviour.
This kind of analysis of freedom as the autonomy of our rational power of judgement is developed by Hegel in his explication of persons as ‘individualities’ (above, V.I) and also in the Introduction to his Philosophy of Law (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §§5–7), where he restates in his own fashion Kant's ‘Incorporation Thesis’, the view that no inclination becomes a motive in any human action, unless and until it is incorporated into an agent's judgement about how it is permissible and appropriate to act on that occasion.Footnote 24 This analysis of the autonomy of judgement corresponds to Hegel's fallibilist account of rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains of knowledge and action (including morals, both ethics and justice). Fallibilist accounts of rational justification, and especially Hegel's, centrally involve the feedback loop of one's own critical self-assessment, and also the feedback loop of our constructive mutual assessment of each other's judgements and actions (Westphal Reference Westphal2013c). Our freedom and autonomy centrally involve, indeed they centrally consist in, the self-regulation of our own thinking, judging and acting, including our self-regulation in these regards as we execute any action and, if need be, revise, modify or curtail our action. A relevantly similar model of freedom as action-control has been advocated recently by some cognitive psychologists.Footnote 25 In view of contemporary biological sciences, and especially medicine, it has been noted that to various extents and for various periods of time our autonomy can be limited by various kinds of illness. In these cases—including cases of psychiatric disorder—the autonomy of the patient remains nevertheless a crucial benchmark, or even a goal, of proper treatment.Footnote 26
VII. Is Morality undermined by Contemporary Darwinism?
As noted above (III.III), there is continuing discussion of whether, or the extent to which ethology or human evolution undermine morality. Moral realists have, of course, replied to Darwinian criticisms of moral theory.Footnote 27 The objections to moral realism based upon ethology or evolutionary theory address what amounts to a moral sense theory, according to which we have some more or less natural capacity to sense or to perceive moral facts or morally relevant circumstances. Such objections would appear equally to address contemporary forms of moral constructivism which are based upon various subjective responses to morally salient circumstances, or which link the identification or justification of moral principles to human motivation (whether individually or collectively). Comparative ethology has some rather frightening lessons regarding human motivation and affective responses, insofar as many of humanity's most inhumane episodes have vivid parallels in well-documented unsavoury chapters of chimpanzee behaviour, such as genocide (Diamond Reference Diamond2006; Mitani, Watts & Amsler Reference Mitani, Watts and Amsler2010). These findings are especially unwelcome news for moral theories which link the identification or the justification of moral precepts, principles or practices to our motivation, to our moral sensibilities or to our morally salient responses (or lack thereof).
However, the debates about motivation, about subjective responses and about moral realism and its contemporary anti-realist or irrealist alternatives are not the central issues, because the strict objectivity of fundamental moral norms and institutions can be justified without any appeal, whether pro or contra, to those debates. This is a central finding of the radical reinterpretation and reconstruction of natural law theory inaugurated by Hume and further developed by Rousseau, Kant and Hegel.Footnote 28 The key insight of this approach is Hume's observation that:
Though the rules of justice be artificial, they are not arbitrary. Nor is the expression improper to call them Laws of Nature, if by natural we understand … what is inseparable from the species. (Hume T 3.2.1.19/SBN 484)
Natural law purports that basic, legitimate (rationally justifiable) moral principles are independent of conventions, they are non-arbitrary and invariant. Basic moral principles are the sufficient minimum basic principles and institutions which we require—as the finite, mutually interdependent rational agents we are—in order to be able to act at all under conditions of relative regional population density and consequent relative scarcity of goods, whereby these principles and institutions are ones for which each of us can provide any and all others with sufficient justifying reasons.Footnote 29 This is a complex claim, central to an uncommon form of natural law constructivism, which cannot be detailed here. For present purposes it suffices to note that the basis of this subtle and illuminating form of moral constructivism lies neither in our subjective responses of whatever kind (as typifies most contemporary forms of moral constructivism), nor in any form of moral realism, nor in any account of human motivation, but rather in the basic conditions of our capacities to act, and our converse incapacities as finite, mutually interdependent rational agents, which Kant designated ‘practical anthropology’ (TL §45), and which Hegel detailed in his account of Sittlichkeit (‘ethical life’; Rph §§142–340). The basic facts about humanity, about society and about our finite though global context of action, required by and pertaining to this form of natural law constructivism, have long been sufficiently known to us, regardless of any implications of ethology or evolutionary theory for human morality.
VIII. Conclusion
We can well expect to hear further premature declarations of deterministic biologism. However, Hegel's analysis of our rational autonomy should encourage us instead to expect from the life sciences further insights into the biological basis of human freedom and action.Footnote 30 By all indications, we have much to look forward to.
